displacement of personal agenda? While men have frequently been designated as in-house disciplinar-ians by their female colleagues, it is also reason-able to expect that these same men may approach the ego displacement differently than their female colleagues. Primary males, gay and straight, may also be seen as having “reserve capital” in their masculine privilege. However, leaving male privi-lege in a patriarchal culture may be a tough and variable pestiture.

In the field of literary representation, Edelman (1994) argues that homosexuality is a text that must be read in terms of its femaleness. This does not suggest that inpidual men who self-identify as homosexual are female, feminine, or act like wom-en. Nor does Edelman’s argument preclude such a figuration. Rather, if the social texts that construct homosexuality are to be productively understood, using a frame of femaleness will help. This is in part because the texts were constructed in opposi-tion to what is male. And to some degree, these same female social texts are also available to gay men as they navigate the arguably female terrain of early education. Some gay men, who likely have experienced sexual identities and gender as perfor-mances, might be very productive models for young children. In fact, gender-based identity shifting is not different, really, than identity shifting that any inpidual might experience from a morning of church service to an evening of poker. Yet, for those whose lives are seen as mainstream, as inte-grated, there is not a location or sub-identity that accounts for and manages the subset of behaviors. For gay men, their very designation acts as a sig-nifier and a collection point. In this way, intending to be gay can be seen as strategic (King, 1999; Spivak, 1993). Therefore, in the performance of gender and its “appropriate” behaviors, gay men may recognize these scripts for their role-playing potential. A gay man’s performance of “male” can be understood as an act of fidelity. That is, to what degree can a parodic representation of “male disci-pline” be carried out? To what degree are these gay teachers willing to establish discipline, their control, and their own masculinities through a paro-dy of real men? In other words, gay male teachers who parody straight male teachers are constructing themselves through acts of disciplining children (in contrast with the almost unthinkable lap reading). In addition, gay teachers, perhaps already facile with performing “the feminine,” might also be able to parody female production of internalized self-control. That is, performing the female in a class-room might mean pulling back from the discipline in order to let students learn self-discipline. Each of these questions is continuously resolved in situ-ated acts of teaching.

Gay and Lesbian Teachers’Influences on Young Children

One powerful barrier to gay men working with children is couched in a desire to protect young children from the influences of homosexu-ality. This reasoning necessitates other entailed conditions. The first is that proximity to homosex-uals would influence the children’s sexuality in some way. Yet, by the time children reach school age, the contour of their sexual desire, and objects of affection, are well established. These children are not susceptible to the imagined influence of their teachers’ sexual orientations, gay or straight. Homosexual teachers’ imagined influence on the sexuality of their students has been glibly called the recruitment argument. Whatney (1991) argues that “homosexual promotion” may be critically re-cast as a fantasy that has been put into play by (some) heterosexuals; a fantasy that enables them to dwell on the images of children’s bodies as ob-jects of desire. In this reasoning desire is more generalized than sexual desire. Again, the ambigu-ity in desire is part of the issue.

Squirrel (1989) has also suggested that an un-derlying homophobic assumption in the culture is that gay teachers will recruit young boys into homosexu-al lifestyles. There are serious costs to be paid in living with the recruitment argument. For example, gay teachers may purposefully call on girls more of-ten than boys to avoid showing favoritism. Gay males may not play with boys at recess. In these examples, because the teacher fears recruitment accusations, their students are offered a differentiated experience. The resulting social context is probably not different from conscious or subconscious decisions made by teach-ers relative to students’ races, socioeconomic status, or ability levels. In this case the differentiating factor is the teachers’ sexual orientation.