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While black queer educators could conceivably play a critical role in disrupting black queer marginality in educational settings, relatively little is known about their experiences. Drawing upon findings from a broader qualitative study on black male teachers in an urban school district in the United States, this article explores how five black queer male educators negotiated pressures to keep their queerness 'in the closet.' Although remaining in the closet left these men vulnerable to homophobic surveillance, it also enabled them to demonstrate racially mediated forms of agency within school settings. By complicating constructions of the closet as an abject social positionality for queer educators, this article considers the possible affordances of the closet for black queer teachers while also underscoring the need for institutionally sanctioned interventions against homophobia in urban educational settings. IntroductionAs with other derogated forms of social and cultural difference in Western societies, schools have played a notable role in reproducing the marginality of black queerness. Accounts of the criminalization, harassment, and ostracism of black students in middle and high schools in the United States who identify or are labeled as queer (Davis 2001;Diaz and Kosciw 2009;McCready 2010; Snyder 2004), analyses of the challenges facing black queer youths' racial and sexual identity development within school contexts in the United States (Edwards 1996;McCready 2010;Sears 1995), descriptions of black queer marginality in Canadian school settings (Rau 2008), and examinations of racism and homophobia in the schooling experiences of black queer youth in Britain (Mac an Ghaill 1994) point to the precarious place of black queer difference across these educational spaces. While the marginalization of black queerness creates potentially hostile school environments for black queer students, little is known about the predicaments of black queer educators, whose presence and experiences, as discussed later in this article, have been unacknowledged in research literature on black teachers and under-examined in scholarly works on queer teachers. The absence of black queers from the research literatures on black teachers and queer teachers leaves important questions unanswered regarding their participation in the teaching

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Calls for the recruitment and retention of more Black male teachers have unfolded amid popular depictions of Black men as patriarchal disciplinarians. Against that backdrop, this article investigates how 11 Black male teachers were positioned as disciplinary agents in a predominantly Black urban school district on the east coast of the United States. As they described the discipline-related expectations they encountered in their jobs, study participants critiqued and complicated prevailing perceptions of Black male teachers as authoritarian disciplinarians for Black students. Through careful analyses of participants' narratives, this article offers new insights into how Black male teachers negotiate their roles as disciplinarians, and it raises several questions that could drive future efforts to understand and support Black male teachers' disciplinary practices in today's urban schools.

For nearly 2 decades, lawsuits filed on behalf of students who have endured antiqueer bias in schools have resulted in favorable verdicts and settlements for the plaintiffs, thus spurring an increasing number of school districts across the United States to establish antidiscrimination policies and other initiatives to protect students from homophobic harassment. While these legal victories mark an important turn toward creating safe schooling environments for all students, they also reveal an inattention to the intersections of multiple identities and oppressions that can mediate the harassment experienced by queer students. Drawing upon critical scholarship on queers of color, or a queer of color critique, this article interrogates the absence of race in legal discourses on the rights of queer students in California. Through its focus on the intersections of race and sexual orientation, this article considers new forms of knowledge on queer youth of color that not only may inform legal protections on their behalf, but also may shape the efforts of school districts and community stakeholders to improve the educational experiences of queer students of color.