After being openly gay for several years, Willie Carter Jr. never thought about going back into the closet once he started teaching. But during his first week as a high school English teacher in Montgomery, Kentucky, a small town 40 miles east of Lexington, a school administrator had other plans for him.
“He said ‘You will be crucified,’” Carter, 37, recalled. “‘No one will protect you, including me.’”
Twelve years later — and shortly after winning his state’s Teacher of the Year award — Carter announced last week that he would be leaving the profession.
Carter said that after changes in his school’s administration, he was eventually able to teach openly as a gay man. However, he spent years witnessing school administrators attempt to stifle LGBTQ identities — or what he described as “death by a thousand cuts” — he said.
Among many instances of what he described as LGBTQ prejudice, Carter said that his employer ordered teachers to remove books written by LGBTQ authors from the school’s curriculum, defended students who were accused of tearing down rainbow Pride posters from school walls and shut down a student-led poll that aimed to gather insight on the school’s climate for LGBTQ inclusion.
The “straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said, was when the school administration failed to address repeated harassment against him and LGBTQ students.
In March, a group of community members started to show up to school board meetings, and repeatedly accused Carter and LGBTQ students of being “groomers,” he said. The word “grooming” has long been associated with mischaracterizing LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and transgender women, as child sex abusers.
In recent months, conservative lawmakers, television pundits and other public figures have accused opponents of a newly enacted Florida education law — which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law — of trying to “groom” or “indoctrinate” children. Advocates have been urging public officials against using the charged rhetoric, warning that it could cause verbal and physical harassment directed at LGBTQ Americans.
Carter said verbal attacks against him continued online, with one member of the group posting images of Carter and LGBTQ students on social media coupled with homophobic comments and slurs. In response, school officials told Carter that they couldn’t respond every time a community was upset with something happening at the school, he said. They didn’t approach the LGBTQ students harassed to address their concerns either, Carter added.
In an email to NBC News, the superintendent of Montgomery County Schools, Matt Thompson, refused to answer specific questions about Carter’s allegations but said Carter is a “wonderful” teacher.
“I have put up with these problems over the years because the benefits outweighed the cons,” Carter said, citing a need for rural students to have LGBTQ role models. “But I’ve now reached a stage where I’m starting to see that the toll on mental health is going to be such that my students are not going to be seeing a successful LGBTQ person in front of them. They’re seeing someone who is stressed out and unhappy.”