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Many teachers still feel it’s safest to teach from the closet.

Giovanni Blair McKenzie gave this speech about supporting LGBTQ youth of color and “interlocking forms of discrimination” at the 2015 Human Rights Campaign’s Time to THRIVE conference.

“I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet. Don't forget to be a good boy… .”Tennessee state lawmaker Harry Burn received that note from his mom in August 1920. And like a good son, he subsequently changed his vote from “nay” to “yea,” breaking a 48-48 deadlock in the state’s general assembly. “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow,” Burn commented afterward, while noting it wasn’t often that a man had a chance “to free 17 million women from political slavery.”

Students are dying. On Nov. 27, Josh Pacheco took his own life. He had come out as gay to his mother a couple months before his death. His parents learned recently that Josh had been bullied at school.

A Florida teenager finds school officials apathetic on sexual harassment.

Growing up, no one told me that people shouldn’t be gay. My parents didn’t tell me I shouldn’t talk to kids whose parents were lesbian. My neighbors didn’t rant against the horrors of gay rights. Instead, all the people in my life encouraged me to live openly, to take people’s personalities and see the beauty in them, to smile at the adorable young couple clutching each other’s hands, no matter their gender. Love was love. I lived in a world blissfully ignorant about the cruelties of the “real world.”

In Minnesota, yet another group is organizing backlash against equitable teaching practices. It's an all-too-common threat—and a reminder that educators need more support.