The History Exists: How & When Do We Teach Queer Narratives?
"What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?” - Jim Mattis
Some stories are like scaffolding. They are not the whole building, but without them, nothing sturdy ever gets off the ground. The art of teaching LGBTQ+ history to children is less about “all the facts now” and more about building that scaffolding in age-appropriate layers that can hold more truth every year a student grows. When we do this well, we are not just filling in historical gaps; we are showing every student that people like them have always existed, contributed, and mattered, which quietly rewires what they believe is possible for their own lives. By threading Queer stories into the larger human story, we are not only giving LGBTQ+ students a mirror, we are teaching all students that dignity, courage, and complexity are not “special topics,” but the basic materials of history itself.
If we treat Queer history the way we already treat topics like war, slavery, or colonialism, the path becomes clearer. You start with names, faces, courage, creativity, and service. Later you add the complexities of identity, discrimination, resistance, and joy. The destination is honesty. The journey is carefully staged.
Teaching the person first, the identity later
Think about how we already talk to elementary students about George Washington. They meet the general, the first president, the leader who helped create a country. Only later do they discover that the cherry-tree story is made up and that his world was soaked in slavery and conflict. The early version is not a lie in itself. It is a simplified slice of the truth, meant to be expanded, corrected, and complicated over time.
You can use this same pattern to teach Queer history. For younger students, you spotlight the achievement, the courage, the service to others, the doors opened. In middle and high school, you begin to layer in how gender identity, sexuality, and social prejudice shaped those same lives. The key is intentional omission at first, followed by intentional addition later. You are not hiding the full story. You are staging it.
A practical rule of thumb for K–5 classrooms is this: if you can explain why a person matters without referencing romantic or sexual relationships at all, you can introduce that person to young students right away. For later grades, you revisit those same figures and add the missing pieces around gender and sexuality, discrimination and resilience, community and culture. By the time students graduate, they have heard the same names multiple times, each time with more context, nuance, and honesty.
Dr. Margaret “Mom” Chung: building from “first doctor” to Queer trailblazer
In the early grades, Dr Margaret “Mom” Chung can be introduced in simple, vivid terms. She was the first known American-born Chinese woman physician, growing up in California at a time when it was extremely hard for Chinese Americans and women to become doctors at all. She opened one of the first Western-style clinics in San Francisco’s Chinatown and treated families who often had nowhere else to go for medical care.
You can tell younger children that she became “Mom” to thousands of American servicemen during World War II, many of whom she informally “adopted” as her sons. She helped them feel cared for, wrote to them, fed them, and celebrated them when they came home. She also helped support efforts like Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services, which opened more space for women to participate in the Navy and paved the way for women’s broader integration into the armed forces.
In middle and high school, you circle back. Now students are ready for questions like: What did it mean to be a Chinese American woman in medicine when racism and sexism were embedded in law and daily life. How did Dr Chung’s gender expression and close relationships with women and men challenge norms of her day. Older students can examine how later historians and community members have read her life through Queer lenses, including how her presentation blended masculine and feminine traits and how she moved through social spaces that were often hostile to both Asian Americans and LGBTQ+ people.
The person you first met in elementary school as a caring doctor becomes, in later grades, a case study in intersectionality, identity, and resistance. The name stays the same. The story deepens.
Baron von Steuben: from “military coach” to Queer icon
For younger learners, Baron Friedrich von Steuben can be presented as the brilliant military trainer who helped turn a struggling group of Revolutionary War soldiers at Valley Forge into a disciplined army. You can describe him as the person who wrote one of the first drill manuals for the United States and helped shape what eventually became the modern American military.
This version emphasizes leadership, teaching, and problem-solving. He arrives in a desperate situation, studies what is not working, and designs clear training that everyone can follow. He becomes a model for “the coach who changed the game.” There is no need to mention sexual orientation to a seven-year-old in order for this to be meaningful.
In high school, the story grows up alongside the students. Now you can invite them to consider his life as a Queer man in the eighteenth century. Modern historians widely accept that von Steuben would be understood as a gay man today, pointing to accusations about his relationships with men and his close male companions who lived and worked with him. You can connect this to questions of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the ongoing debates about LGBTQ+ people serving openly in the military.
When students have already met von Steuben as a key architect of the American armed forces, learning that he was likely Queer reframes everything. Instead of “an extra controversial detail,” his sexuality becomes part of a bigger conversation about who has always been defending and building the country, even when the country refused to fully accept them. Once again, the same name reappears across the years. The story starts as courage and ends as complexity.
One-Eyed Charley: from daring driver to trans possibility
Charley Parkhurst, known as “One-Eyed Charley,” fits perfectly into the pantheon of adventurous Old West figures that elementary students already love. You can tell younger grades that Charley was a legendary stagecoach driver in the 1800s, famous for bravery, skill, and the ability to navigate dangerous routes full of robbers, wild terrain, and harsh weather.
Children can picture a one-eyed driver racing across dusty roads, handling horses in storms, and delivering mail and passengers safely through real danger. That image alone invites discussions about grit, responsibility, and what it means to be trusted with other people’s lives.
Later, in high school, students can learn that when Charley died in 1879, people discovered Charley had been assigned female at birth and had likely given birth to a child. Newspapers were shocked. Friends refused to believe what the coroner reported. Now Charley’s life can be examined in the context of trans and gender-nonconforming history, where living and working as a man created opportunities and safety that would not have been possible for a woman in that time and place. Students can wrestle with questions about whether Charley should be understood as a trans man, how we speak about people who did not have modern language for their identities, and how Queer people have always been present in the “myths” that define national imagination.
The same story that thrills a ten-year-old becomes, later, a serious conversation about gender, survival, and historical erasure.
How to build this scaffold in real classrooms
All of this can be more than theory. Teachers and school leaders can create a practical ladder for Queer history that respects both developmental readiness and the right to truth. Here is one workable structure.
In early elementary, focus on contribution and humanity. Introduce Dr Chung as a caring doctor and community leader, von Steuben as a brilliant teacher-soldier, Hall as someone caught in strange clothing rules, Parkhurst as a daring driver, and Wakeman as a determined young soldier. Let students see that history includes Chinese American women, immigrants, people of many backgrounds, and lives that do not all look the same. Keep the emphasis on bravery, problem-solving, and service.
In upper elementary and middle school, begin to name unfairness and difference more clearly. Talk about racism, sexism, and the way people who “broke the rules” about gender or behavior were often punished. With careful language, you can start to hint at the fact that some people’s families, friendships, or ways of being in their bodies did not match what society expected. You can use words like “different,” “not accepted,” “treated unfairly,” and “living in a way that felt true to them.”
By high school, bring the full vocabulary. Talk explicitly about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and gender-expansive identities. Invite primary sources, letters, court records, and modern scholarship into the conversation. Ask students to analyze how historians make sense of limited or biased records, especially for people whose identities were misunderstood or criminalized in their own time. At this stage, Queer history is no longer an optional sidebar. It is part of how you teach about war, medicine, migration, law, and culture.
Throughout, involve parents and caregivers transparently. Share with them that the early-years focus is on diverse heroes and human dignity, not on explicit sexual content, and that the more detailed conversations in later grades are age-appropriate, evidence-based, and rooted in respect. Invite their questions. Let them see the scaffolding, not just the final floor.
When we do this well, we are not just filling in historical gaps; we are showing every student that people like them have always existed, contributed, and mattered, which quietly rewires what they believe is possible for their own lives. By threading Queer stories into the larger human story, we teach that dignity, courage, and complexity are not “special topics,” but the basic materials of history itself.
Coming Out of the Footnotes
In the end, the question is not whether education is “ready” to include Queer history. The history is already here, written into every era by people who loved, led, and risked everything while remaining invisible in the official story. The real question is whether we are willing to stop handing the next generation a half-empty past and start giving them the whole, complicated, beautiful truth.
So let this be a turning point, not a footnote. Choose one figure you already know and reintroduce them with a Queer lens to your students, your colleagues, your community, or your own kids this year. Do not wait for perfect conditions. Take one bold, specific step that makes the past more honest and the future more possible, and let that be the moment when the story they inherit finally starts to match the world they deserve to build.
References
National Park Service. “Dr. Margaret ‘Mom’ Chung.” U.S. National Park Service, updated February 19, 2025.
Wikipedia. “Margaret Chung.”
Columbus Medical Association. “Women’s History Month: Margaret Chung.” March 10, 2021.
Addus HomeCare. “Dr. Margaret Chung: The First American-Born Chinese Woman Physician.” April 30, 2024.
Museum of Flight. “Doctor Mom Chung.” Flight Deck blog, October 30, 2023.
Windy City Times. “Baron von Steuben, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Franklin to Washington.” September 30, 2013.
YouTube. “The Untold Story of General Baron von Steuben – New Day NW.” September 24, 2023.
EqualityMaine. “Trans History.”
EqualityMaine. “Thomas/Thomasine Hall – 1600s Gender Fluidity in Colonial America.”
OutHistory. “The Fearless Character of One Eyed Charley.”
Reddit. “4 Interesting Trans Men from Throughout History.” r/ftm, September 15, 2021.
History of American Women. “Sarah Rosetta Wakeman.”
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ABOUT THE ROLE This is an unclassified vacancy in the Fulton County Library System, located at the Central Library. The purpose of this classification is to perform duties related to administering archival services for the Library. Responsibilities include managing assigned staff and indexing, storing, and preserving archives, manuscripts, and other historically valuable records and documents. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Supervise, direct, and evaluate assigned staff, including hiring recommendations, scheduling, performance appraisals, counseling, and training. - Organize, prioritize, and assign work activities to meet objectives, monitoring progress and providing technical expertise. - Manage collections by overseeing the processing, accessing, arranging, describing, preserving, classifying, and referencing of archival materials. - Administer the cultivation of potential donors of personal papers, historical documents, and artifacts to build a comprehensive archival collection. - Administer a descriptive inventory of historical records in accordance with professionally accepted standards and coordinate technology use for information retrieval. - Develop and monitor the assigned program budget, reviewing expenditures, determining needs, and ensuring budget compliance. - Manage facilities and contents, monitoring equipment, administering maintenance projects, and coordinating with Security personnel. - Provide research assistance to scholars and the general public through finding aids, research guides, and one-on-one assistance. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS - Education: Master's Degree in history, humanities, library science, or a related field. - Experience: Three (3) years of archival experience in a library, museum, or related setting. - Supervisory Experience: Two (2) years of supervisory experience. - Ability to demonstrate proficiency in the performance of essential functions and apply all county or departmental policies, practices, and procedures. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS - May be required to possess and maintain a valid Georgia Driver's License. - Professional certification as an Archivist issued through the Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA) is required. - Veterans' Preference: Qualifying veterans will receive a guaranteed invitation to interview if minimum qualifications are met. This preference applies to initial appointment only. SELECTION PROCESS - The examination consists of an evaluation of education and experience through analysis of the application. - The application must clearly document that the applicant possesses the minimum knowledge, skills, education, and experience to be rated as qualified. - If selected, an official, accredited college transcript is required at the time of employment for all degrees or coursework used to qualify for this position. HOW TO APPLY - All applications must be completed in full before submission. - Review all applications for accuracy and make corrections before submitting, as errors can result in not meeting minimum qualifications. - Additional information will not be accepted after applications are received by the Personnel Department. EMPLOYMENT DETAILS - Employer: Fulton County - Department: Library (Fulton County Library System) - Job Type: Library - Pay Grade: 23 - Location: Central Library, Library System, GA (Employer Address: 141 Pryor Street, Suite 3030, Atlanta, Georgia, 30303) - Opening Date: 08/17/2026 - Closing Date: 9/17/2026 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada) - Equal Employment Opportunity: Fulton County provides equal opportunity for every citizen, employee, and applicant based upon merit without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, genetics, disability, or sexual orientation.
ABOUT THE ROLE The San Francisco Adult Probation Department (SFAPD) seeks a Pretrial Linkage Coordinator to support program operations addressing socioeconomic barriers affecting clients in the pretrial process. This role coordinates, develops, monitors, and evaluates housing, public benefits, employment, and stabilization services. The position works collaboratively with SFAPD staff, City departments, community-based organizations, and other partners to reduce barriers to stability, successful pretrial participation, and compliance with court requirements, promoting public safety, accountability, and positive client outcomes. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Coordinate housing, benefits, employment, and stabilization services for clients. - Assess client needs and barriers affecting court appearances, release conditions, or overall stability. - Provide referrals, service navigation, warm handoffs, and transportation to City departments and community organizations. - Assess service gaps, fill them, and support grant management duties. - Develop and maintain partnerships and service pathways for timely access to resources. - Assist clients with public benefits (e.g., Medi-Cal, CalFresh) and essential documents. - Connect clients to employment, job readiness, vocational training, and workforce development. - Collaborate with staff, clinicians, and service providers on complex or high-need cases. - Track and analyze referrals, service engagement, barriers, and outcomes to improve service delivery. - Develop and maintain referral protocols, resource directories, workflows, and performance measures. - Support grants, contracts, procurement, and provider monitoring. - Represent SFAPD in meetings and collaborative initiatives, and prepare reports or presentations. - May supervise staff and perform related duties as assigned. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS 1. Baccalaureate degree AND three (3) years of administrative/professional experience in community development, housing, workforce development, public benefits, finance, education, social work, human services, or criminal justice; OR 2. Baccalaureate degree with a major in public/business administration, urban planning, government, social work, education, finance, human services, public policy, or criminal justice AND two (2) years of related experience; OR 3. Master's degree in public policy, planning, social work, public administration, finance, education, criminal justice, human services, or business administration AND one (1) year of related experience; OR 4. Juris Doctor degree AND one (1) year of related experience. Substitution: Verifiable administrative/professional experience in the listed fields may substitute for the educational requirement in option 1 on a year-for-year basis. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS - Desirable experience working with justice-involved, pretrial, reentry, homeless, or high-need populations. - Knowledge of San Francisco housing, homelessness-response, workforce development, and public-benefit systems. - Experience coordinating housing placement, benefits enrollment, or client stabilization activities. - Strong client-engagement, problem-solving, and service-navigation skills. - Experience collecting, analyzing, tracking, and presenting program and client-outcome data. - Contract monitoring, grant administration, or program evaluation experience. - Ability to work effectively across multiple systems while maintaining confidentiality and professionalism. SELECTION PROCESS The hiring process follows City and County of San Francisco guidelines, which includes application review, evaluation of minimum qualifications, conviction history review, and adherence to Equal Employment Opportunity and ADA Accommodation policies. Applicants may be contacted via email for further steps in the recruitment process. HOW TO APPLY 1. Applications are only accepted online via SmartRecruiters at https://careers.sf.gov/. 2. Select the "Apply Now" button and follow the on-screen instructions. 3. Ensure your registered email address is accurate and does not block emails from CCSF domains (e.g., @sfgov.org, @smartrecruiters.com). 4. Retain the confirmation email received after submitting your application as proof of submission. 5. For questions regarding the recruitment or application process, contact Janet MacEachern, Sr. HR Analyst, at janet.maceachern@sfgov.org. EMPLOYMENT DETAILS - Department: Adult Probation - Role Type: Permanent Exempt - Hours: Full-time - Union Representation: Service Employees International Union Local 1021 - Benefits: Robust health, retirement, and other benefits (see https://sfdhr.org/benefits-overview) - Additional Status: Disaster Service Worker - The City and County of San Francisco is an Equal Opportunity Employer and encourages applications from women, minorities, and persons with disabilities.
ABOUT THE ROLE Based in the Storm Water Services Land Development Section, this senior-level engineering position is primarily responsible for reviewing and approving construction plans for compliance with City Storm Water regulations and development standards. It requires expert knowledge in land development regulations and civil engineering principles to help improve surface waters and convey rainwater safely through well-maintained storm drainage systems. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Provide professional and technical instruction and guidance to consultants, contractors, engineers, City officials, and the public regarding design and regulatory issues. - Review construction and engineering plans, designs, and specifications for land development projects and make recommendations on design strategies or plan approval. - Oversee compliance and enforcement of land development activities with respect to local ordinances governing stormwater management. - Work closely with staff on the implementation, interpretation, and administration of the Charlotte Post-Construction Stormwater Ordinance. - Serve as a resource to other groups within the Development Center pertaining to improvements in the permitting process. - Serve as a subject matter expert for other City ordinances pertaining to stormwater and development. - Review rezoning petitions for stormwater impacts as part of the City's rezoning process. - Ensure a proper balance of regulatory authority and customer advocacy. - Perform other duties as assigned. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS - Bachelor's Degree in Civil Engineering and five (5) years of related experience. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS - Preferred qualifications include knowledge and experience in storm water management, engineering principles, and land development permitting practices. - Registration as a Professional Engineer (PE) is preferred. - High level of technical competence in engineering, stormwater principles, and permitting processes. - Proficiency in applying hydraulic and hydrologic modeling principles and methods. - Ability to plan, prioritize, and complete assignments with minimal supervision in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment. - Strong verbal and written communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences. - Ability to apply conflict resolution techniques and positive solution development. SELECTION PROCESS - Final candidates are subject to a comprehensive background check, including reference checks, social security verification, education verification, criminal conviction record check, and potentially credit history, sex offender registry, and motor vehicle records checks. - Final candidates must pass a pre-employment drug-screening test and physical examination. - Candidates may be asked to take a skills test and/or participate in other assessments during the selection process. HOW TO APPLY - Apply online via the City of Charlotte careers portal. - Self-service application kiosks are available at the Human Resources Department lobby: 700 East 4th Street, Suite 200, Charlotte, NC 28202 (Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. EST, excluding official City holidays). - For questions about the application or hiring process, email Careers@ci.charlotte.nc.us. - Reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities are available upon request. EMPLOYMENT DETAILS - Department: Storm Water Services Department - Work Location: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, Charlotte, NC - Job Type: Full time - Job Requisition ID: JR100605 - Application End Date: September 11, 2026 - Equal Opportunity: The City of Charlotte is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, national origin, marital status, age, disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or gender identity/expression. - Workplace Policy: The City of Charlotte is a drug and alcohol-free workplace.