Great Barrington police overstepped with their determined quest to find a copy of "Gender Queer" at Du Bois Middle School. But the full story of what happened that day, and why, is more complicated.
I.
In the final pages of Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer,” a 2019 comic-style illustrated memoir of eir confusion around gender identity and sexual orientation, Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, grapples with a question: Whether to tell eir students in a comics-drawing workshop that e is nonbinary and asexual.
“The kids I teach are primarily A.F.A.B. [assigned female at birth] and they range in age from 11 to 14,” reads the text above one page of drawings. “Those were my first big years of gender confusion, but I doubt anyone would have guessed just by LOOKING AT ME.”
Underneath those words are drawings of Kobabe in sixth through ninth grades, with long hair and an appearance that e suggests would lead most to assume a female gender identity. “I wonder if any of these kids are trans or nonbinary, but don’t have words for it yet?” e ponders while teaching the class.
As the book concludes, drawings show Kobabe tidying an empty classroom while more thought bubbles continue the thread. “How many of them have never seen a nonbinary adult?” e asks in one frame. “Is my silence actually a disservice to all of them?”
More thoughts about coming out to eir students reflect both personal history and professional fears. “Having a nonbinary or trans teacher in junior high would have meant the world to me,” e writes, but then wonders about repercussions: “Could a parent complain and get me fired?”
II.
Last year, the twentieth of November fell on a cool, autumn Monday. As the sun set, temperatures slipped toward freezing and a light wind kicked up fallen leaves. Still too early for snow, a cold rain would fall the following evening.
Across southern Berkshire County, holiday-season excitement merged with local buzz about the imminent release of “Maestro,” the Leonard Bernstein biopic that chronicles the conductor’s career, his complex marriage to the actor Felicia Montealegre, and his intimate relationships with both men and women. (It was filmed in part at Tanglewood, in Lenox.)
In Great Barrington, youth-basketball leagues were a few weeks into the season. Local and traveling teams of third-to-eighth graders practiced most nights at the Housatonic Community Center, known as the Housy Dome, and in the gymnasiums at Muddy Brook Elementary and W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School, both located off Route 7 near the town’s northern border.
“When we’re not educating three hundred and fifty kids, we try to make the building available to a variety of different programs,” Miles Wheat, who became the Du Bois principal last year after seven years as assistant principal, told me during an interview in his office last month. That includes education-related after-school activities and community events like sports, adult English instruction, and yoga classes.
Most afternoons at Du Bois, a program for students called Community Learning & Enrichment Opportunities (CLEO) runs until the late bus pick-up at 5:15 p.m. But on this particular Monday, there was no CLEO programming, according to a posted schedule.
Still, there would be people and activity at Du Bois through the late afternoon and into the evening. Two basketball teams would practice in the school gym: Tom’s Toys Bantam, a dozen third- and fourth-grade boys and girls from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., and Wheeler & Taylor Senior, ten kids from seventh and eighth grade whose sneakers squeaked across the hardwood until 8:30 p.m., according to the league’s online schedule.
Modern school-security realities mean that access to Du Bois and other Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) buildings is tightly controlled during the school day. But once classes are over, after-school activities and events require opening some doors for public access. “On any given day after school, is it possible to show up and find the door unlocked? Yeah, it’s possible,” Wheat told me.
That evening, as free throws and layups were hitting backboard, rim, and net, someone was walking the hallways of the Du Bois school. At around 7:45 p.m. they entered an English-teacher’s classroom—one that also serves as the gathering place for the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA), an affinity club for seventh and eighth graders. It meets weekly for a 42-minute, combined-lunch-and-recess period that’s built around student-led activities and conversations.
