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Out of the Closet and on to the Stage: LGBTQ+ Youth as Playwrights and Performers

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Title: Out of the Closet and on to the Stage: LGBTQ+ Youth as Playwrights and Performers
Language: English
Authors: Marisa Segel (ORCID 0000-0002-7983-4264)
Source: Reading Research Quarterly. 2026 61(2).
Availability: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 18
Publication Date: 2026
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Education Level: Junior High Schools
Middle Schools
Secondary Education
Descriptors: LGBTQ People, Middle School Students, Censorship, Social Bias, Drama, Catholic Schools, Language Arts, Playwriting, Resistance (Psychology)
DOI: 10.1002/rrq.70111
ISSN: 0034-0553
1936-2722
Abstract: This comparative case study traces how two queer, middle school youth resisted local and national censorship efforts through bold and boisterous dramatic performances within a historic Catholic school in the northeastern United States. Drawing on Butler's Performative Theory of Assembly and critical literacy perspectives, I illustrate how the focal youth engaged in playwriting and performance in their ELA classroom not only as a mechanism for personal healing but also as a way to speak back to the layers of the social, political, and institutional contexts of their schooling. Centering the scripts that youth wrote and adapted for the stage in my analysis, I submit that these literacy activities opened up possibilities for celebration and connection. This study highlights the transformative potential of humanizing classrooms, where educators make space for youth to explore identity and discuss LGBTQ+ lives and communities in middle school.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2026
Accession Number: EJ1503973
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0193225977;[nrnu]02apr.26;2026Apr27.05:00;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0193225977-1">Out of the Closet and on to the Stage: LGBTQ+ Youth as Playwrights and Performers </title> <p>This comparative case study traces how two queer, middle school youth resisted local and national censorship efforts through bold and boisterous dramatic performances within a historic Catholic school in the northeastern United States. Drawing on Butler's Performative Theory of Assembly and critical literacy perspectives, I illustrate how the focal youth engaged in playwriting and performance in their ELA classroom not only as a mechanism for personal healing but also as a way to speak back to the layers of the social, political, and institutional contexts of their schooling. Centering the scripts that youth wrote and adapted for the stage in my analysis, I submit that these literacy activities opened up possibilities for celebration and connection. This study highlights the transformative potential of humanizing classrooms, where educators make space for youth to explore identity and discuss LGBTQ+ lives and communities in middle school.</p> <p>This comparative case study traces how two queer, middle school youth resisted censorship through dramatic performance in their U.S. Catholic school. Drawing on Butler's theory of performative assembly and critical literacy perspectives, I show how playwriting and performance in ELA enabled personal healing, peer connection, and resistance to the sociopolitical forces shaping their schooling. The study underscores the transformative potential of humanizing classrooms where educators support identity exploration and affirm LGBTQ+ lives.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70111-toc-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70111-toc-0001.jpg" title="." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225977-3">Introduction</hd> <p>Hazel squared her shoulders to face her classmates as they erupted in cheers at the end of her play. Waving her arms wildly, she shouted, "Wait—I'm not done yet!" The room hushed. As the playwright, Hazel insisted on clarifying why she had ended the performance at its most searing moment, when her lead character finally came out to his transphobic mother. This was the scene the audience had been waiting for—the confrontation, the mother's response. Hazel, an 11‐year‐old who declared herself a lesbian 2 years earlier, explained, "It's more about Alex being strong enough to stand up to his mother, like...I don't really care what <emph>you</emph> think because I know I got people around me who support me." Here, in this paper, I take Hazel's assertion forward and examine the ways two LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and all other sexual and gender identities beyond the heterosexual and cisgender) youth live, love, and build kinship through their compositions in the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom.</p> <p>Over the course of this 3‐month case study, during which I observed Hazel and her peers engaging in dialog in response to frequently banned literature, this snapshot of Hazel's play resonated with me. Rather than focusing on the controversy that might have ensued between a trans child and his mother, Hazel foregrounded trans affirmation and empowerment at the play's peak moment of tension. Her decision was especially bold, as it challenged established curricular norms within the faith‐based environment of St. Xavier's Catholic School.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>]</p> <p>Nested in the heart of a northeastern U.S. city, St. Xavier's prided itself on its commitment to academic excellence and Catholic education. Yet the school was grappling with ideological shifts among its student body, as contemporary perspectives on gender and sexuality increasingly diverged from its Catholic traditions (Killen and Silk [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref2">36</reflink>]). As a doctoral student from a local university who had provided professional development at St. Xavier's for nearly 2 years, I observed how these cultural changes created both opportunities for growth and underlying tensions. For instance, teachers recounted homophobic incidents, such as when seventh graders graffitied the word <emph>fag</emph> on the bathroom walls—an act that was addressed as vandalism rather than as hate speech. They also reported that some of the middle school students on the playground played a dodgeball‐like game in which being hit by the ball signified "becoming gay." Against this backdrop, Hazel's play emerged as a courageous act, centering queer and trans identities in a public setting where such expressions were rare and risky.</p> <p>In its century‐long history, no teacher at St. Xavier's had ever introduced an LGBTQ+‐themed unit into the formal ELA curriculum. Undeterred, Hazel's sixth‐grade novice teacher, Ms. Quinn, committed to challenging the persistent marginalization of queer topics at the school. With the support of her principal, she implemented an LGBTQ+‐themed unit anchored by Maulik Pancholy's <emph>The Best at It</emph> ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref3">48</reflink>])—a semi‐autobiographical coming‐of‐age novel about an Indian American boy grappling with his sexuality and race. For their final assignment, students were asked to create a multimodal composition rooted in activism, and many, like Hazel, chose to write and perform plays. I became particularly interested in how LGBTQ+ students used drama to express their identities and confront the everyday homophobia and transphobia they encountered in their communities.</p> <p>While the culture at St. Xavier's might appear unique given the Catholic Church's reputation for queer and trans intolerance, the school in many ways mirrored broader national patterns of homophobia and cisheterosexism (Schey and Shelton [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref4">63</reflink>]). With white Christian nationalist rhetoric on the rise, many public school teachers and school boards encounter similar ideologies around gender and sexuality (Hadley et al. [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref5">25</reflink>]; Juzwik et al. [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref6">35</reflink>]). For ELA teachers, these beliefs often manifest in efforts to ban books addressing LGBTQ+ topics (Prins et al. [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref7">52</reflink>]). In the spring of 2022, during the time of this study, news coverage of Florida's new "Don't Say Gay Bill" swept across the country, intensifying national debates. Amid these tensions, Ms. Quinn and her sixth graders pressed forward with their unit, even as <emph>The Best at It</emph> faced bans in school districts nationwide (PEN America [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref8">49</reflink>]). Although St. Xavier, as a private institution, was not subject to legislative censorship, it was nonetheless constrained by its local enactment of Catholicism, which had long positioned queerness as incompatible with Church doctrine. This study, then, offers insight into what Catholic and U.S. schooling is and what it could become in light of contemporary curricular controversies and national politics (Miller and Burke [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref9">42</reflink>]).</p> <p>Seeking to join the scholarship that examines how youth mobilize literacies to design more just futures for themselves and their communities (e.g., Blackburn [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref10">4</reflink>]; Blackburn and Schey [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref11">6</reflink>]; Schey [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref12">59</reflink>]; Wargo [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref13">73</reflink>]), this case study zeroed in on queer composition as a form of healing and resistance. Drawing on Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref14">11</reflink>]) Performative Theory of Assembly and critical literacy perspectives, I explore how two LGBTQ+ youths engaged in literacies not only as a mechanism for personal and collective identity work, but as a way to speak back to layers of the social, political, and institutional contexts of their schooling. In particular, I focus on their playwriting and performance. Placing the scripts that participants write for the stage at the center of my analysis, alongside their theatrical production and reception, I submit that these narratives create visibility and foster belonging for queer youth (Halverson [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref15">27</reflink>]). The literacy activities presented here—from script writing to performing—open up possibilities for educators to understand how youth see themselves in the world. More specifically, this study asks:</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-4">RQ1</hd> <p> <emph>How do two LGBTQ+ youths perform narratives of protest and possibility on a classroom stage?</emph> </p> <hd id="AN0193225977-5">RQ2</hd> <p> <emph>In what ways, if any, does dramatic performance create a space for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies to build community in the ELA classroom?</emph> </p> <hd id="AN0193225977-6">Researcher</hd> <p>I came to this project through my commitment to queer and trans educational activism and a desire to help classrooms become humanizing spaces—not just where LGBTQ+ youth feel included—but where they can flourish. Importantly, I am a white, cisgender, heterosexual, and Jewish woman. While I am not Catholic, I was raised surrounded by Irish Catholic communities and later lived and studied throughout Latin America for several years, where I became deeply immersed in Catholic traditions. I subsequently pursued doctoral study at a Catholic university and currently teach at another Catholic university. These experiences position me as both an outsider to Catholicism and a scholar familiar with its institutional contexts, shaping my interest in the ways Catholicism elasticizes across social and cultural settings (Oliveira et al. [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref16">46</reflink>]).</p> <p>Previously, I was a middle grade and secondary ELA teacher, instructional coach, and curriculum director for a decade in an urban school district. My interest in LGBTQ+ rights and advocacy began early on as I witnessed my younger sister navigate high school as a queer youth in the nineties without mentors or guidance. Years later, as an ELA teacher, I sought to introduce conversations about LGBTQ+ communities despite a lack of professional development or administrative support around these topics. I often feared saying the wrong thing, yet felt that remaining silent was even more harmful. These tensions led me to enroll in a doctoral program and ultimately to the research presented here.</p> <p>I recognize that the opportunity to do queer literacy research in a Catholic school reflects my privilege as a white, cishet woman, an undertaking that queer—and non‐binary—identified researchers have noted is challenging (Ryan and Hermann–Wilmarth [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref17">58</reflink>]; Slovin [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref18">66</reflink>]). I am also aware that I cannot know what it means to live as an LGBTQ+ adolescent attending a Catholic School. I try to respect this insight through consulting with and immersing myself in the work of LGBTQ+ literacy and education scholars (Blackburn [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref19">4</reflink>]; Coleman [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref20">12</reflink>]; Pritchard [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref21">53</reflink>]; Johnson [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref22">34</reflink>]; Wargo [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref23">73</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref24">74</reflink>]). I approach this work with humility and a commitment to listening, values that guide my research and relationships throughout the study.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-7">Theoretical Perspectives</hd> <p>Following studies of queer and trans literacies in upper elementary and adolescent contexts (Hermann‐Wilmarth et al. [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref25">31</reflink>]; Johnson [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref26">34</reflink>]; Wargo [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref27">73</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref28">74</reflink>]), I draw on critical perspectives of literacy, which involve naming and renaming the world, recognizing its complexities, and developing the capacity to reshape it (Luke [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref29">38</reflink>]). I further braid Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref30">10</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref31">11</reflink>]) theories of (dramatic) performativity and the performative theory of assembly, which emphasize how identities and meanings are constituted through repeated acts and collective presence to ground this study.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-8">Critical Literacy</hd> <p>Critical literacy is a theoretical and pedagogical stance committed to the goals of critique and transformation—questioning and challenging assumptions and conflicts in texts (Damico et al. [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref32">13</reflink>]; Janks and Vasquez [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref33">32</reflink>]). As Freire and Macedo ([<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref34">20</reflink>]) contend, reading the word is simultaneously a project of reading the world. Our understanding of any text, therefore, is mediated by our prior histories of participation, identities, and relations to power. Cultivating critical literacy with adolescents involves examining how power shapes identities, practices, and the broader communities in which young people live, to transform both self and society.</p> <p>This work is particularly visible in scholarship on LGBTQ+ youth literacies, which traces how young people draw on diverse compositional forms and cultural resources to disrupt normative understandings of gender and sexuality (Schey [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref35">59</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref36">60</reflink>]; Wallace and Alexander [<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref37">71</reflink>]; Wargo [<reflink idref="bib75" id="ref38">75</reflink>]). Through these practices, youth create alternative narratives of queer life that open possibilities for more expansive ways of understanding identity and belonging. As an example, Coleman ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref39">12</reflink>]) traced the ways LGBTQ+ individuals wrote against hegemonic tropes, specifically "unhappy endings," that flattened their identities by solely centering controversy and tragedy. In doing so, they resisted dominant narratives of queer life that, as Ahmed ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref40">1</reflink>]) notes, are often reduced to stories of pain, death, and dying with unhappy endings (e.g., homophobia, bullying, the AIDS crisis, suicide). To this end, I join the literature by examining how focal youth challenged queer and trans narrative tropes of tragedy and loss to represent both their own experiences and those of their communities on a stage.</p> <p>Additionally, Wargo ([<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref41">74</reflink>]) traces how three youth remediated their identities by composing, curating, and sharing content on Tumblr, an online platform where queer youth can present themselves in ways unavailable in offline spaces. While existing scholarship has examined critical literacy practices across various media, this study focuses on scriptwriting and performance on an analog, makeshift stage in a classroom, demonstrating how two queer youth used creative expression to represent and reimagine their own experiences and communities. To understand my focal participants' critical literacy practices, I analyzed their data alongside two dimensions—shaping identity and resisting dominant narratives—both of which were resources that focal participants employed to assert their visibility, make sense of their experiences, and build community on stage.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-9">Performance as Collective Action in the Classroom</hd> <p>Given this paper's focus on two LGBTQ+ youth who use drama as a form of embodied critical literacy, I turn to Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref42">10</reflink>]) theorization of performativity, particularly as it relates to theatrical acting. Importantly, Butler distinguishes performance, a deliberate, stylized act, from performativity, an ongoing process by which society shapes and maintains identities over time. While performances dramatize identity, performativity operates continuously, often without conscious choice, shaping what counts as a recognizable identity (e.g., how a "man" or a "woman" talk, dress, or behave) in a cultural context. Butler asserts that theatrical production exposes the performative nature of gender, in that a man, for instance, can adopt gestures, dress, and speech to become a woman on stage. In this way, actors reveal that identity and gender expression—whether on or off stage—can be learned and stylized through repeated acts rather than being naturally tied to the body.</p> <p>While Butler ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref43">10</reflink>]) does not explicitly use the term "critical literacy" per se, her reflections on the power of performance align closely with its core principles. Significantly, she explains how theatrical conventions serve to protect individuals by demarcating the performance as distinct from real life. A stage, for example, provides a socially sanctioned space for youth to perform new identities in school, free from the punitive and regulatory constraints of non‐theatrical contexts such as a cafeteria or school bus. In this way, drama becomes both a narrative and performative space for playing with identity, allowing youth to embody new characters and rehearse actions and responses that prepare them for real‐world engagement.</p> <p>Extending this notion beyond the traditional stage, Butler's performative theory of assembly (2015) emphasizes that gatherings—protests, vigils, strikes—are performative spaces in which social and political realities are produced. When bodies come together as they do to express their "plural existence" in public, they are making demands to be recognized and valued (p. 26). In doing so, they claim their rights to the basic conditions of a livable life, often within spaces not originally intended for them (e.g., Tahrir Square or Occupy Wall Street). Inevitably, as Butler explains, when bodies come together in an assembly, they also become more vulnerable to judgment or even violence. Yet this very vulnerability is shared, generating a sense of interdependence. The collective force of an assembly rests on each person's embodied participation, as performativity here is relational. Thus, identities and political claims are constituted through mutual presence and coordinated action rather than any single individual's conscious performance. Theatrical elements—gestures, chants, or coordinated movements—make the assembly's claims visible, but it is the repetition, coordination, and relational embodiment that ultimately bring the political reality into being. In this sense, a classroom play, like an assembly in public space, is both performative and theatrical, as the collective acts of gathering, speaking, and moving call for recognition while fostering social connections. In essence, Butler's theory draws attention to how identities and political claims emerge not through individual performances but through bodies acting together in relational spaces, a premise that forms the theoretical underpinning of this study.</p> <p>Taken together, critical literacy perspectives and Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref44">10</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref45">11</reflink>]) theories of performativity and assembly offer a lens for understanding how individuals and groups rewrite dominant narratives while engaging in self‐exploration and community building. These perspectives position drama—a central focus of inquiry here—as an embodied form of literacy, where composition, performance, and assembly converge to transform classrooms into arenas of social and political possibility.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-10">Literature Review</hd> <p>In recent years, there has been an increase in the educational scholarship attending to the literacies of LGBTQ+ youth and the representation of LGBTQ+‐themes in texts. Within this scholarship, I focus on that featuring queer and trans adolescents, looking specifically at their writing practices. I'm particularly interested in collaborative compositions of LGBTQ+ youth with a focus on scriptwriting and dramatic performance. My interest is further defined by collaborative practices between the audience and the performers. So, in reviewing the scholarship, I focus on educational scholars who have empirically investigated LGBTQ+‐themed adolescent composition and asked questions about composer and audience interactions. Later in the section, I review scholarship on Catholicism, LGBTQ+ curricular inclusion, and schooling, further situating this study within these scholarly conversations.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-11">LGBTQ+ Youth as Playwrights and Performers</hd> <p>One body of scholarship traces the power of drama for LGBTQ+ youth to explore their identities through scriptwriting and performance in spaces outside of school (E. R. Halverson [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref46">27</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref47">26</reflink>]; Thompson and Santiago‐Jirau [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref48">69</reflink>]). Halverson ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref49">27</reflink>]) shows how queer youth who wrote and performed the roles of peers, family members, and authority figures could engage in low‐stakes identity exploration, trying on possible selves without facing the consequences of fully adopting these roles in the outside world. In a later study, she (2010) details how youth adapted personal stories into collective scripts, negotiating queer character representations that reflected both individual and cultural narratives. Similarly, Thompson and Santiago‐Jirau ([<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref50">69</reflink>]) facilitated a Theater of the Oppressed (Boal [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref51">7</reflink>]) group for six queer adolescents, finding that participation in hostile confrontation scenes allowed youth to take some control over their oppression and make its expression visible and validated. Using Boal's concept of the "spect‐actor," they noted that audiences and performers engaged in a reciprocal process to envision possibilities for liberation. Together, these studies illustrate how LGBTQ+ adolescents negotiate and present complex identities through composition and performance in queer‐affirming out‐of‐school spaces, yet they do not capture experiences within ELA classrooms. My research extends this work by examining LGBTQ+ youth as playwrights and performers in an ELA classroom intentionally designed to be queer‐friendly within a Catholic school.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-12">LGBTQ+ Youth as Composers in ELA Classrooms</hd> <p>Few studies examine how LGBTQ+ adolescents read, write, and respond to LGBTQ+‐themed texts within a formal, teacher‐sanctioned ELA curriculum. Most scholarship focuses on students engaging with traditional print texts, such as novels or expository journals (Blackburn [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref52">4</reflink>]; Blackburn and Schey [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref53">6</reflink>]; Gonzales [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref54">23</reflink>]; Helmer [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref55">30</reflink>]). As an exception, Michell ([<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref56">39</reflink>]) studied a small group collaborating on multimedia presentations—including role‐playing, images, and videos—about gay refugees. Gonzales ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref57">23</reflink>]) and Helmer ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref58">30</reflink>]) document individual student compositions presented to classmates, such as Gonzales's case of a multimedia adaptation of <emph>Romeo and Juliet</emph> featuring same‐gender couples, highlighting the social risks of critical inquiry. Blackburn and Schey ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref59">6</reflink>]) explored collaborative book reviews in an elective LGBTQ+‐themed literature course, emphasizing vulnerability in interrogating oppressive values. Schey ([<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref60">59</reflink>]) traced students writing and performing raps or preparing for Socratic seminars on queer topics, only to face anti‐queer responses. Despite this, he showed how queer youth patched narratives together through "citationality," or references to past texts and ideas, fostering belonging through shared symbols and language. Collectively, these studies show that literature response and composition can allow youth to resist cisheteronormative expectations, reclaim narratives, and build understanding across differences, though some studies noted a lack of attention to intersectionality, Eurocentrism, and religiosity (Blackburn and Schey [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref61">6</reflink>]; Schey [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref62">59</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref63">61</reflink>]). Moreover, most studies analyze the content of compositions rather than classroom relationships and allyship during composing, and they focus primarily on high school contexts. This study addresses these gaps by showcasing how LGBTQ+ middle schoolers use composition to create classroom spaces where they can play with identity and build connection with peers.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-13">Catholic Schooling, Curriculum, and LGBTQ+ Inclusion</hd> <p>Catholic schools, the largest private school sector in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics NCES [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref64">43</reflink>]), have been closing rapidly due in part to revelations of sexual abuse, institutional corruption, and demographic shifts within communities (Ospino [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref65">47</reflink>]; O'Keefe and Goldschmidt [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref66">45</reflink>]). With regard to curriculum, Catholic schools, unlike public schools, retain flexibility to shape content according to their ideological commitments. In some contexts, this flexibility positions Catholic schools to be especially responsive to the needs, concerns, and pressures of the families they serve (Giunco [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref67">22</reflink>]). However, in other contexts, this curricular freedom is constrained by internal tensions among social justice commitments, conservative ideologies, and historical legacies that shape practice (Wargo, Giunco, and Smith [<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref68">76</reflink>]). Although Catholic education traditionally emphasizes values such as equity, service, and community formation (Storz and Nestor [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref69">68</reflink>]), it has at times limited recognition and inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities, producing conflict between mission and practice (Wargo et al. [<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref70">72</reflink>]). These tensions are further complicated by decentralized governance, where authority is dispersed among church leadership, administrators, and local communities, resulting in ambiguity and disagreement over curricular approaches to gender and sexuality (Miller et al. [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref71">41</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref72">40</reflink>]). Adding another layer of complexity, declining enrollment and reliance on tuition require administrators to balance commitments to social justice teaching with paying families' priorities, intensifying ideological negotiations around queer inclusion (Fleming [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref73">19</reflink>]; Giunco [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref74">22</reflink>]). Taken together, this scholarship illuminates how Catholic schooling simultaneously offers possibilities for critical engagement and imposes boundaries on the recognition, representation, and affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities. Grasping these tensions is essential for situating Ms. Quinn's unit and the students' final performances within the entangled relationships between Catholic doctrine, community norms, and lived identities at St. Xavier's.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-14">Methodology: Comparative Case Design</hd> <p>This study draws on data from a broader 3‐month qualitative case study (Stake [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref75">67</reflink>]) in which I explored how one teacher and her 33 sixth graders read, wrote, and discussed race, sexuality, and gender diversity while engaging with frequently banned literature. In the overarching study, I collected data through daily classroom observations (79 h), two individual interviews with each of the 34 participants, and fieldnotes that situated classroom events within their broader cultural and institutional contexts. I also triangulated observations, interviews, and student work to capture both participants' perspectives and the social practices shaping them.</p> <p>My nearly 2 years of professional development work with ELA teachers at the school, both before and after this study, allowed me to develop a deep understanding of how participants' scripts were influenced by the school's values and meaning‐making practices. This extended engagement also helped me build trust, gain access to insider perspectives, and continually cross‐check my interpretations with Ms. Quinn during and after fieldwork to avoid misunderstandings or surface‐level conclusions (Green et al. [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref76">24</reflink>]).</p> <p>For this paper, I focus on Ben and Hazel during a 6‐week book unit on <emph>The Best at It</emph>, as their experiences illustrate the literacy possibilities that emerge when queer youth engage with queer‐themed texts in a school context that has historically silenced LGBTQ+ identities. In the sections that follow, I describe the study context and the methods of data generation and analysis.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-15">School Context</hd> <p>At the time of the study, 408 PreK‐8th grade students were enrolled at St. Xavier's Catholic school. The students and staff alike were predominantly white, and approximately 15% of students received free or reduced‐price lunch, a statistic commonly used as an indicator of economically disadvantaged students. The focal classroom of this study was not representative of the school as a whole, with a higher proportion of students from racially diverse backgrounds and more than half identifying openly as queer—an observation that surprised both Ms. Quinn and me. Students were not asked to self‐identify in class or during interviews regarding their gender or sexuality, yet many voluntarily shared that they were part of the LGBTQ+ community. We theorized that this openness may reflect the fact that it was the students' first opportunity to discuss sexuality, as the school did not address this topic in any way, not even in a health or sex education class. It is possible that students felt sufficiently safe to disclose sexual preferences during this unit despite the prevailing assumption of cisheterosexuality they had previously experienced.</p> <p>St. Xavier's reflected a cultural tension, combining some tolerance of queer identities with persistent cisheterosexist norms. As Burke ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref77">9</reflink>]) explains, Catholic theology draws heavily on the concept of "Natural Law," the belief that gender is a meaningful, God‐given structure embedded in the created order. Within this framework, sexual acts are considered moral only when they align with the "natural" purposes of the body and the procreative function of sex. In some Catholic contexts, this reasoning is used to suggest that queer sexualities and trans identities are unnatural and morally wrong because they are understood to violate God's created order. I detail this harmful uptake of Natural Law as it pertains to gender, sex, and sexuality to illuminate the religious context that formed the backdrop to Ms. Quinn's engagement with a historical taboo in a Catholic setting. That said, the principal approved Ms. Quinn's request to teach the book, explaining in a letter home to families that the unit supported "self‐reflection" and "empathy building" both of which were "fundamental to [their] Gospel values" at the school (email, Jan. 18, 2022). She may also have been receptive because she knew I was supporting this new teacher, and my affiliation with a locally respected Catholic university lent additional credibility to the effort. The principal allowed LGBTQ+ flags to be displayed in classroom windows but simultaneously shut down the after‐school Gender and Sexuality Alliance. Ms. Quinn suspected this decision was influenced by pressure from the Archdiocese, particularly since the principal, like Ms. Quinn, was only in her second year at the school and navigating scrutiny as an outsider in a tightly knit community. These contradictory actions served to maintain silence around gender and sexuality at St. Xavier's, as LGBTQ+ topics remained contentious.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-16">Participants</hd> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225977-17">Cara Quinn (Teacher)</hd> <p>Cara Quinn was a white, Irish immigrant, 26‐year‐old cisgender woman in her second year of teaching at the time of the study. I first met her while working as a research assistant with a team from a local university engaged in a multi‐year research–practice partnership with the school focused on anti‐bias and antiracist professional development. Through this partnership, I developed relationships with the school's principal and several justice‐oriented teachers, including Ms. Quinn. Although I was attending a Catholic university, I did not have prior professional ties to this particular school. My access emerged through the ongoing professional development initiative. As Ms. Quinn and I continued conversations about literacy instruction and social justice, we began collaborating on two book units, work that eventually laid the foundation for this study.</p> <p>Cara selected two novels for their compelling plots and lexile levels—<emph>Ghost Boys</emph> by Rhodes ([<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref78">55</reflink>]) and <emph>The Best at it</emph> by Pancholy ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref79">48</reflink>])—which served as anchor texts that guided conversations throughout the units. Cara saw her work with me as mutually beneficial. As a novice teacher who lacked mentorship, she saw an opportunity in me as a former ELA teacher, instructional coach, and doctoral student for professional growth. Thus, she agreed to grant me access to her classroom for my research on the condition that I provide daily instructional feedback. Throughout the two book units, I provided Cara with feedback aimed at strengthening her pedagogical skills, including facilitating discussions, giving instructions, and assessing student comprehension. In our weekly meetings, we collaboratively mapped out and adjusted the scope and sequence of each unit, with Ms. Quinn using me as a sounding board for daily lesson planning and final assignment design. This reciprocal arrangement not only supported my inquiry but also fostered a dynamic researcher‐practitioner partnership that enriched both the study and her instructional practice.</p> <p>Notably, Cara herself was bisexual, but she did not dare tell her students in fear of losing her job (Interview, April 12, 2022). Her employee contract itself forbade her to talk about her sexuality with her students, a mandate for all teachers within the Archdiocese. Regardless, Cara had a reputation for welcoming LGBTQ+ youth. Her classroom became a space where students adorned the walls and windowsills with LGBTQ+ flags and triangles to show off their pride and allyship to the surrounding community.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-18">Students</hd> <p>Through purposeful sampling (Stake [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref80">67</reflink>]), I selected two focal students—Ben and Hazel—because their performances and interviews most clearly illustrated how the sixth graders engaged critically with the text while negotiating their identities within the constraints of their schooling. I decided to narrow my focus to two students because of my aim to represent queer youth with nuance. While I considered focusing on other students, Ben and Hazel had the most salient performances for cross‐case analysis. Through a careful interview process, Ben and Hazel stood out as ideal candidates who were openly queer, talked about relationships with their families, and elected drama as their final project. I paint a fuller picture of Ben and Hazel below.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-19">Ben</hd> <p>Ben (he, him), a Latino 12 year old, was beloved for his open vulnerability and warmth. Ben thought he might be gay, and identified as queer with his friends, but was not totally sure yet. He was also best friends with Hazel who had shielded him from bullying on several occasions in the fourth grade. In his interview, Ben recounted a stressful time during the mandated lockdown of COVID when he felt alone with his family while questioning his gender. Although he finally decided that he was "just a boy who liked girl stuff," he talked candidly about silencing his gender curiosity because he did not want to disappoint his Ecuadoran mother and white father (Interview, February 15, 2022). I quickly became interested in the ways Ben used his performance on the stage as a space to try on different identities and reimagine tensions at home.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-20">Hazel</hd> <p>Hazel (she, her), a white 11 year old, had a school‐wide reputation for being a bully. In an interview, Hazel explained that she wanted to be a mortician when she grew up because she did not want to hear boring people talk all day long. Regardless, she carried a lot of sway among her peers who followed her around during recess. In her interview, Hazel also explained that she had come out of the closet in fourth grade as a lesbian to her friends and family after reading about LGBTQ+ youth online. During the time of the study, she identified as pansexual. She was passionate about LGBTQ+ topics, and was one of the most vocal participants in <emph>The Best at it</emph> unit. I was drawn by Hazel's final composition because it detailed a trans child coming out to his parents. As such, I became curious about how her drama reflected the challenges she experienced in her own community.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-21">Data Generation and Procedures</hd> <p>In this article, I employ a comparative case design, with each focal student's theatrical performance—specifically their script and dramatic production—serving as an individual case (Stake [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref81">67</reflink>]). This design is well suited to capture how the two youth engaged in literacy within their classroom. It also allowed me to draw on qualitative data that offered rich, context‐specific insights and deepened my understanding of each case by highlighting the personal, contextual, and relational dimensions of literacy practices.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-22">Theatrical Performances</hd> <p>One key data source was the culminating theatrical performance that each focal student wrote and directed. As part of the unit, Ms. Quinn offered three options designed to help students develop activist voices by using their knowledge of LGBTQ+ lives and communities to advocate for change in school and national cultures that often erase queer identities: (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref82">1</reflink>) write and direct a play, (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref83">2</reflink>) write an advocacy letter to a local politician, or (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref84">3</reflink>) design a series of activist social media posts. Ben and Hazel chose the first option, creating scripts and directing plays in response to the themes of <emph>The Best at It</emph>.</p> <p>In preparation, Ms. Quinn shared her grading rubric as students drafted scripts by hand and then typed final versions. They had two class periods (100 min total) to recruit classmates and rehearse. On the day of the performances, Ms. Quinn arranged chairs and desks in a semi‐circle to form a makeshift stage.</p> <p>The plays were a popular choice among the sixth graders for the final assignment, possibly because they allowed students to collaborate with peers, whereas other assignments were completed individually. While students had not formally studied plays in their ELA curriculum, they were familiar with performing texts through schoolwide activities such as the "Living Stations of the Cross," in which students lead the school community into Holy Week. Given this context, the script and performance aspects of the plays serve as case studies both because Hazel and Ben chose that approach and because of the ways the plays drew on collective youth practices and choices.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-23">The Script</hd> <p>I examined the final dramatic scripts of the two focal students consisting of 18 pages—Ben (11 pages) and Hazel (7 pages). Using these scripts, I analyzed the content and structure of their stories, especially in contrast to how they were actually performed, to understand the kinds of identity‐related issues they tackled through their writing.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-24">The Performance</hd> <p>Another data source consisted of video recordings of the focal participants' final theatrical performances, with particular emphasis on the staging and interactions among the student playwright/director, actors, and audience. Ben's play lasted 18 min, and Hazel's play lasted 10 min.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-25">Participant Observations</hd> <p>For this study, I draw on 40 h of classroom observations during their book unit on <emph>The Best at It</emph>. During observations, I took detailed notes and photographs to capture classroom experiences and interactions as accurately as possible, including overheard conversations and observed activities (Emerson et al. [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref85">16</reflink>]). After each day in the field, I transformed these jottings into audio‐recorded narrative accounts of classroom events which I later transcribed (Braun and Clarke [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref86">8</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-26">Interviews</hd> <p>I interviewed Ben and Hazel separately on two occasions using semi‐structured, open‐ended questions designed to invite participants to narrate their experiences in their own words (Weiss [<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref87">78</reflink>]). These interviews lasted approximately 15 to 45 min in length. Additionally, as a matter of triangulation, I interviewed Ms. Quinn once at the end of the two book units, and it lasted 2 h. The interviews were video recorded and transcribed. Lastly, I conducted a 30‐min phone interview with Maulik Pancholy, author of <emph>The Best at It</emph>, to gain his insights on Ben and Hazel's productions inspired by his semi‐autobiographical novel.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-27">Data Analysis</hd> <p>Data analysis was an iterative and ongoing process (Emerson et al. [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref88">16</reflink>]), based on cross case analysis of the two focal participants and their theatrical performances. Comparing the cases by identifying the patterns and uniqueness allowed for deeper insight into how queer youth engaged in literacy during an LGBTQ+‐themed unit of study (Stake [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref89">67</reflink>]).</p> <p>Within‐case analyses identified salient deductive themes that shaped each case narrative. Each case drew on references to lived experiences and efforts to make connections with audience members as they occurred in (a) the script, (b) the performance, and (c) interviews. This within‐case work helped contextualize the students' final productions. After identifying these case‐specific elements, I then examined how each of the two participants' experiences compared, looking for recurring themes across the data while still attending to their distinct contributions.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-28">Coding</hd> <p>As a first step, I read through the two student scripts, transcripts from two performances, and four interviews (two per focal student). I identified "theoretically rich episodes" (Dyson and Genishi [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref90">15</reflink>])—moments that illuminated important aspects of language and literacy. These episodes were initially coded using a priori concepts from existing scholarship: referencing lived experiences, showing vulnerability, interrogating oppressive values, connecting with the audience, challenging dominant narratives of queer pain, reimagining audience‐performer relationships, citing popular culture, using body to express identity. When coding the data, I drew not only on my 3 months of deep immersion in Ms. Quinn's class, but also on my 2 years of close engagement with the school community and culture. This prolonged proximity allowed me to contextualize acts of resistance to school norms (e.g., <emph>interrogating oppressive values</emph>) and to recognize the significance of students publicly discussing queer experiences on a stage (e.g., <emph>showing vulnerability</emph>) within a school environment that erased such identities in both its curriculum and culture. From Ben and Hazel's data, I identified 27 script episodes, 42 performance episodes, and 17 interview episodes.</p> <p>Through iterative coding, memo writing, and consultation with Ms. Quinn and colleagues, I condensed the codes and refined the themes (Ragan and Amoroso [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref91">54</reflink>]). For example, overlapping codes about connecting with audiences both "in" and "out" of character were collapsed into the broader code of "breaking the fourth wall." After several rounds of analysis, five stable codes emerged: chameleon acting, breaking the fourth wall, citing queer and trans popular culture, challenging queer tropes of pain, and casting characters.</p> <p>To synthesize these findings, I organized the codes into three overarching themes: composing with the participant, composing identity, and composing collectively. These themes provide the organizing framework for the findings, highlighting both the particularities of individual codes and the broader patterns they represent. See Table 1.</p> <p>1 TABLE Themes, definitions, and codes.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left">Theme</th><th align="center">Definition</th><th align="center">Code</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">Composing with participant</td><td align="center">Synthesis of the youths' scripts based on the anchor text.</td><td align="left"><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Drawing on characters and themes from The Best at It</p></list-item></list></td></tr><tr><td align="left">Composing identity</td><td align="center">Youth assert agency by composing and performing identities and challenge dominant narratives about themselves and queer communities.</td><td align="left"><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Chameleon acting</p></list-item><list-item><p>Celebratory endings, Challenging tropes of pain</p></list-item></list></td></tr><tr><td align="left">Composing collectively</td><td align="center">Youth work with audiences to co‐construct meaning, expand interpretive possibilities, and build community through performance.</td><td align="left"><list list-type="Bullet"><list-item><p>Breaking the fourth wall</p></list-item><list-item><p>Citing queer and trans popular culture</p></list-item><list-item><p>Casting characters</p></list-item></list></td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0193225977-29">Findings</hd> <p>Drawing from this exploration of two youths' performances in Ms. Quinn's classroom, here I illuminate the ways in which Ben and Hazel's reading and writing of words and worlds served to reframe experiences of homophobia and cisheterosexism and cultivate belonging in a school sanctioned space.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-30">The Case of Ben</hd> <p>The first case begins with Ben, who reimagined himself into the characters from <emph>The Best at it</emph>. His dramatic narrative, as I read it, explores a possible conversation with his father.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-31">Composing With Ben</hd> <p>For Ben's final play, he transposed the characters from <emph>The Best at it</emph> into a context that felt familiar to him, a shopping mall. At the start of the play, Rahul—the 12 year old protagonist in <emph>The Best at it—complains</emph> to his best friend, Chelsea, that Brent was bullying him once again at school. Determined to prove his self‐worth, Rahul asks Chelsea to accompany him to the mall where he would surely find some hobby in which he could prove to be the "best at it." After some time, the two friends, exhausted from shopping, plop down in a booth and order sodas at their favorite mall restaurant. Suddenly, Rahul gasps when he catches sight of Brent with his little sister a few tables over. In a humorous scene, Chelsea and Rahul escape surreptitiously, trying to blend into the wall and tiptoe their way out, only to both trip over a potted plant. Now, lying flat on the floor, they see Brent towering above them. He immediately begins to tease Rahul by picking at the contents of his shopping bag. Holding up Rahul's new T‐shirt featuring Lady Gaga with the lyrics of "Born this way," Brent barks, "What kind of man do you think you are with this?" At this point, Chelsea rises from the floor to position herself face to face with Brent. See Figure 1. Waving a hand in his face, Chelsea scolds Brent and calls him "a disappointing piece of filth." In a closing monolog, Rahul stands alone on stage and tells the audience that he is finally content and confident.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70111-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70111-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 Ben shifting his body from the character of Chelsea to the character of Rahul." /> </p> <p></p> <hd id="AN0193225977-33">Composing Identity</hd> <p>As I analyzed the play from a critical literacy perspective, Ben selected and performed the characters from the novel whose identities more closely mirrored people in his own life. At first glance, Ben's play may seem mundane, a narrative set in a shopping mall about two best friends who overcome a bully, but by shedding light on Ben's personal journey, it became clearer how his drama was shaped by painful experiences. Consider Ben's first interview:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Ben: But with my dad, it's like, "I wish you were more manly, I wish you were not like that." And I'm a bit mad at him with that, but I know he still loves me.</item> <p></p> <item> Segel: It sounds really stressful.</item> <p></p> <item> Ben: I don't think he knows how stressful it is because I'm thinking about this every day, every day, every day. Whenever I'm walking around, I have to think about my actions and what I have to do. And then I can't open up to him about that, but I feel like I should...so I should just keep quiet...I think I will really soon...He's probably the person out there who is really mad that I'm like this. And he's like, "Other people are going to hate you for acting like that. They're going to be like, 'You're not a man. You're dumb and stupid.'" (Interview, February 15, 2022)</item> </ulist> <p>Ben's interview excerpt highlights how he vacillated between confronting his father or "keep(ing) quiet" about the pressure he experienced to be "manly" ("every day, every day, every day"). In other parts of the interview, he reported feeling so unsettled about his gender that he was not sure what he would even say to his father if given the chance. Later, he added that he also feels "awkward" around his peers because he was still uncertain about his identity. Ben's reflection aligns with Thompson and Santiago‐Jirau's ([<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref92">69</reflink>]) findings, which highlight the immense pressure queer questioning youth face to reach definitive conclusions about their identities. Unlike their peers, they are often denied the space to navigate uncertainty—a fundamental aspect of adolescent self‐exploration.</p> <p>A decontextualized interpretation of Ben's performance would fail to convey the affliction Ben vocalized when originally sharing about his family and peer dynamics. From a critical literacy lens, Ben's theatrical performance allowed him to write and act his inner torment into existence, and more specifically, to publicly embody and experiment with the perspectives he was negotiating internally. Along these lines, the make‐shift stage of the classroom provided Ben the opportunity to try on different aspects of his identity, without having to censor his gestures, speech patterns, dress, and behaviors like he did at home around his father who scolded him for performing his gender "wrong" (Butler [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref93">10</reflink>], 528).</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-34">Chameleon Acting</hd> <p>One way Ben positioned himself within the narrative was through what I term "chameleon acting," a concept informed by O'Dell's ([<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref94">44</reflink>]) exploration of acting techniques and Heddon's ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref95">29</reflink>]) theorization of solo performance. This practice involves an actor adopting multiple roles on stage to construct layered narratives, particularly in autobiographical works (O'Dell [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref96">44</reflink>]). In his final performance, Ben adopted all five roles of his play—Rahul, Chelsea, Brent, Brent's little sister, and the narrator. It was an undertaking that made him breathless and sweaty as he toggled quickly between five characters across four scenes in an 18 min play. For instance, by sweeping his long bangs to the left or right of his forehead, Ben signaled to the audience that he was playing either Chelsea or Rahul. To embody Rahul, specifically, Ben hunched over, covered his face, or laid flat on the floor. See Figure 1. Conversely, to embody Brent, Ben stood up tall and flung a black fleece around his shoulders. To play the role of Brent's little sister, he crouched down, glanced up to indicate a shorter height, and raised the pitch of his voice. There were no elaborate costumes or props to distinguish between the characters. While switching between different personalities, physicalities, and voices was no easy feat, Ben's deliberate choice to chameleon act offered his audience a thrilling dance of identity and a reminder that one person can seamlessly perform many personas on a stage (Butler [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref97">10</reflink>]).</p> <p>While multiple interpretations of Ben's choice to cast himself in all five roles are possible, I read Ben's choice to chameleon act as an opportunity to try on different facets of his identity through roleplaying, and simultaneously, to understand the limits of his audience as he tried on new personas. In a sense, Ben's embodiment of Chelsea provided him an opportunity to imagine himself with her confidence and wit, while his performance of Rahul allowed him to represent his raw feelings of stress and helplessness within the metaphorical mask of a character and the protection of a fictional world. Through the character of Brent, who ridiculed Rahul's masculinity for his new Lady Gaga T‐shirt, Ben seemed to embody his father's nagging criticism about the legitimacy of his masculinity. Along these same lines, it is possible, then, that in the climactic scene with Chelsea's confrontation with Brent, that Ben allowed himself to rehearse for a future conversation about his gender and sexual identity with his own father. Yagelski ([<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref98">79</reflink>]) notes, "The writing does not create us, but in the act of writing we are; by writing we reaffirm and proclaim our being in the here and now" (p. 17). E. Halverson ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref99">26</reflink>]) also argues that through the process of writing a character into existence in a script and then becoming a character on a stage, students prepare to test out actions in the real world. She describes how standing up to a homophobic character in a drama can empower students to confront homophobia in their everyday lives by first allowing them to rehearse their responses in the lower‐stakes space of a script and stage. Thus, through chameleon acting on a stage, Ben agentively uses what Butler ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref100">10</reflink>]) referred to as "corporeal acts" to play with different aspects of his identity (Enriquez et al. [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref101">17</reflink>]), imagine possible selves (Halverson [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref102">27</reflink>]), and promote a narrative with queer hope and healing (Coleman [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref103">12</reflink>]; Wargo [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref104">73</reflink>]).</p> <p>Indeed, it is possible to interpret Ben's chameleon acting as neither a critical nor transformative performance as he reproduced the more hegemonic gender identities by his corporeal enactment of masculine and feminine characters that were deeply entrenched in "sedimented expectations of gender existence" (Butler [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref105">10</reflink>], 524). However, I argue that Ben uses chameleon acting not to resist gender constructs but to explore the boundaries of gender expression through embodied performances of the people in Rahul's life that paralleled his own.</p> <p>Absent from Ben's performance, however, is the intersectional identity of Rahul from <emph>The Best at it</emph> who was targeted by Brent for his sexuality <emph>and</emph> his ethnicity. Throughout the play, Ben made no citation to Rahul's Indian heritage, despite that it was an underlying component of the novel's plot and Ms. Quinn's book unit. By erasing this aspect of Rahul's identity, Ben constructed Rahul's marginalization as one dimensional existing solely with regards to his sexual orientation (Pritchard [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref106">53</reflink>]; Schey and Blackburn [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref107">62</reflink>]). Consequently, Ben—who identified as Latino and sometimes gay—and his audience members did not have an opportunity to consider how different layers of identities mattered in different contexts. Notwithstanding this missed opportunity to play with intersectionality, Ben's written script allowed him to write his turmoil with his father into existence, while his actual performance on stage allowed him to rehearse different identities with other LGBTQ+ youth and classroom allies in the audience, as I will illustrate more in this next section.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-35">Composing Collectively</hd> <p>Although Ben single handedly acted out all five roles on stage, his theatrical performance was far from an individual production. Instead, I read Ben's performance as collective action with his audience or in Boalian terms, his "spect‐actors," whom he solicited for input on textual and visual components of the drama during the actual performance. Below, I describe how Ben uses his performance to construct a brave space by breaking the fourth wall and citing queer and trans youth popular culture to foment allyship among his classmates.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-36">Breaking the Fourth Wall</hd> <p>Throughout his performance, Ben invites participation from his "spectactors" by "breaking the fourth wall," a metatheatrical device in which actors or characters address the audience directly, thereby breaking the invisible, imaginary wall that separates the actors in their fictional world from the audience (Bell [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref108">3</reflink>]). On six occasions, Ben broke the fourth wall and went "off" script, not as an actor or the narrator, but as Ben, the student playwright and director, himself. In each of these improvisational moments, Ben composed <emph>with</emph> the audience by asking a question, requiring participation in a scene, or giving a compliment. On one occasion, Ben asked the audience to take a sip of the imaginary soda. Thrilled, audience members held pretend sodas in their hands and shouted out words like "delicious" and "love this flavor." On two occasions, Ben paused, looking for a word in one instance, and then trying to create a name for Brent's little sister's character in a different instance. The audience quickly provided him with name suggestions, which he took up and integrated back into his performance. At another point, he said to his audience, "But plot twist, guess who else is there?" The audience, overwhelmed with suspense, peppered him with predictions. In other moments, Ben flattered the audience, "Oh, I knew you guys could. You guys are the best audience." Each time, when Ben addressed the audience directly, his classmates eagerly participated, laughed, sighed, and cheered. The joy in the room was palpable. With each playwright‐actor‐audience interaction, the fourth wall became progressively porous, and Ben modulated his performance, increasing his volume, aggrandizing his gestures around their collective responses, signaling to his audience that their input, their reactions were valued. As Ben reached out to the audience for support on the stage, the original script that he wrote was transformed through this collaborative back and forth between Ben and his audience. These moments did not create solidarity anew but built on an existing classroom culture of allyship, extending and deepening those connections to make the breaches of the fourth wall more empowering. Taken together, these interactions exemplified a collective practice akin to Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref109">11</reflink>]) notion of an assembly, through which participants sought to claim visibility and strengthen their bonds as a community.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-37">Citing (Queer and Trans) Popular Culture</hd> <p>Another aspect of Ben's collective composing that created intimacy among the group was Ben's use of linguistic and cultural citations in the script. For instance, Ben employed language typically reserved for social media on several occasions. In his opening scene, he commented, "This is not canon," another way to underscore his efforts to alter the storyline from Pancholy's original work. At another moment, his character, Brent, declared, "L bozo ratio plus shut up plus you're stupid"—a phrase that colloquially dismisses an opponent by labeling them a "loser" ("L") and "bozo" (stupid), while "ratio" implies that those who support the opposing viewpoint are similarly fools. In my analysis, I researched that this cultural lexicon was most commonly found on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram as a means to connect with or bully people. In response, Ben's audience laughed presumably because of the absurdity of hearing a digital and informal discourse in a school‐sanctioned space. I analyzed Ben's use of colloquial language as particularly noteworthy given that he deliberately incorporated these expressions into a final assignment that constituted a significant portion of his ELA grade for the quarter. His intentional deployment of linguistic citations from social media suggests that he was primarily addressing his peers rather than his teacher, who was less likely to recognize such language. In doing so, Ben signaled his alignment with his classmates, demonstrating a willingness to risk his academic evaluation to nurture relationships with his peers with whom he usually felt "awkward" as he stated in his interview. Through this act, Ben engaged in literacy as a performative act—manipulating digital language in an offline context—to seek affirmation and strengthen connections with his peers in a school context where his queer identity was typically silenced (Underwood and Faris [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref110">70</reflink>]; Wargo [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref111">74</reflink>]).</p> <p>Similarly, Ben cited the singer and activist, Lady Gaga, and her song, "Born this Way," to connect with his predominantly queer classmates over a popular artist and LGBTQ+ icon. His citations prompted several students to cheer in response, indicating their recognition and approval of his symbolic gestures. By mobilizing language and symbols from queer and trans popular culture, Ben's use of citationality, as I saw it as a participant observer, functioned as a pathway for intimacy and allyship in his classroom as they connected over shared symbols while collaboratively resisting Brent's rigid construction of masculinity and, more broadly, challenging cisheteronormativity (Schey [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref112">59</reflink>]). As Ben invited his audience members into his play, he created a welcoming space in his classroom (Gee and Hayes [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref113">21</reflink>]) for audience members "to communicate and circulate their ideas" (Jenkins et al. [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref114">33</reflink>], 7) and publicly resist dominant narratives.</p> <p>Building on Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref115">11</reflink>]) concept of plural performativity, these actions operate on multiple scales. In the classroom, Ben and his peers were copresent, engaging in real‐time performative acts that shaped each other's responses. At the same time, by drawing on shared cultural references from TikTok, YouTube, and queer and trans popular culture, his performances resonated beyond the immediate classroom. In this way, Ben's collective composing practices illustrate plural performativity, linking peer interactions with broader cultural contexts and showing how literacy and identity unfold across temporal and spatial scales.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-38">The Case of Hazel</hd> <p>Whereas Ben incorporated characters from <emph>The Best at It</emph> into his script, Hazel instead explored the novel's themes through a cast of her own imagined characters. As I analyzed it in the data, Hazel drew on her own life in her drama to depict tensions at home and school, and to capture her hope for a brighter future.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-39">Composing With Hazel</hd> <p>For Hazel's final assignment, she wrote and directed a play entitled "Freak" with characters of her own creation. In her first scene, Alex (formerly Alexa) announces to his three best girlfriends that he is trans and now identifies as a boy. At first, his friends laugh it off and demand that he remove his wig and brother's clothing. By the end of the scene, the girlfriends storm away and refuse to take part in Alex's pretend "play," leaving Alex alone and crying. The subsequent scene features Alex's parents heatedly discussing their child's trans identity at home. Michael, the father, who is marked as an ally from the start with his careful use of he/him pronouns, beams with pride that his son confided in them. Brie, the mother, conversely, insists on using she/her pronouns and attributes Alex's new identity to a passing "tomboy" phase. When Alex returns home from school, Brie asks, "Is this really how you feel, Lexi?" In a fit of tears, Alex pleads with his mother to stop calling him by his "dead name." At this point, Michael, the father, swoops in, wraps his arms around his son, and apologizes for his wife. In the subsequent scenes, Alex begins a romantic relationship with a boy named Robin, and they attend a GSA meeting where they finally feel accepted. In the final scene, Alex invites Robin over to his home to introduce him to his parents. Grasping Robin's hand tightly, Alex nervously faces his mother and says, "Mom, I'd like you to meet Robin, my boyfriend." And the play ends (rather abruptly). Alex's words and body language are neither assertive nor heroic, making the play feel anticlimactic and leaving the audience desperate to know how the mother will respond.</p> <p>After a few seconds, realizing that the play had ended, the audience jumps wildly out of their seats, bursting into cheers and dancing across the room. But, as I describe in the introduction, Hazel was not done. She leapt to the front of the stage, faced the audience, and bellowed over the noise, "Wait, I am not done yet." The teacher rang her bell feverishly, and the class finally mellowed. See Figure 2. With friends huddled around her and touching her back, Hazel explained her cliffhanger of an ending,</p> <p>Everybody, I have the director's note. I know the ending seems like it should have been like the mom's reaction, but the whole point is that like, you know, it doesn't matter the mom's reaction because she's homophobic and transphobic anyways, so we already know that. Like, it was more like about Alex being strong enough to stand up to his mother being like, you know, "I'm gay and trans and I don't really care what <emph>you</emph> think because I know I got people around me who support me." You know? (Observation, April 8, 2022)</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70111-fig-0002.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70111-fig-0002.jpg" title="2 Hazel's director's note at the end of her play (Observation, April 8, 2022)." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Here, Hazel directed her audience's focus toward the protagonist's declaration of his LGBTQ+ identity at the play's conclusion, rather than the potential trauma that might have followed had the scene continued. By the end of her director's note, the class once again exploded into cheers.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-41">Composing Identity</hd> <p>Like Ben, Hazel read and wrote her characters as reflections of the homophobic and transphobic patterns she encountered herself and knew other queer youth also faced at home. In her interview, Hazel compared herself to Rahul from <emph>The Best at it</emph>. She said, "I mean, obviously, I went through this too. I didn't know that I was gay or whatever, just like Rahul didn't, and then he found someone that he liked, and he was like, <emph>Oh, my God</emph>. And then I went on the internet and I found out what it meant." Here, Hazel jumps between Rahul's experiences and her own, switching off between "he" and "I" pronouns in her response, and showing her personal connection to the text. She later underscored her frustration with her parents' dismissal of her "coming out," refusal to use the appropriate pronouns with her nonbinary friends, and general apathy about the LGBTQ+ movement. She reflected,</p> <p>So my parents, they're not homophobic...They don't care that I'm pan, but it's not like they're talking about it. [...] I mean, it's not like they're flaunting it... that their daughter is pan. [...] I don't know if they [believe me] because I'm also not going to tell them I have a crush on a girl...because, I don't know, I just don't feel comfortable with that. (Interview, March 21, 2022)</p> <p>Here, Hazel lamented over her parents' inattention to her queer identity. She insisted that they were not homophobic, but that they did not take her coming out in earnest. In an interview with Hazel's close friend, Ava reported that Hazel's parents forbid her to hang the pan flag in her room. It was not surprising, then, that Hazel took great efforts to adorn her spaces outside of home with pansexual flags. Not only did she decorate Ms. Quinn's classroom windows with PRIDE symbols, but also she frequently accessorized her body and materials (clothing, backpack, hockey bag, and classwork) with pins and stickers of the pan flag. Although Hazel's intent is not explicitly stated, elements of her play suggest that she may have been drawing on personal experiences. In particular, the character of Alex—a trans teen whose mother dismisses his coming out, labels his gender identity as a "tomboy" phase, and refuses to use his pronouns—bears notable parallels to Hazel's own accounts of homophobia at home. While I cannot claim direct correspondence, my analysis suggests that Hazel used composition as a creative space to grapple with and combat familiar homophobic conventions through her characters and plotlines.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-42">A Celebratory Ending, Beyond Tropes of Pain</hd> <p>Hazel's script, entitled "Freak," challenged the trope of a queer tragic ending typically attached to realist genres (Coleman [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref116">12</reflink>]). In my analysis, I saw Hazel's refusal to give her audience the trauma of homophobia and transphobia in her conclusion as an effort to push the audience to question why they needed that friction to imagine this scenario as a reality. In so doing, she aimed to raise her audiences' consciousness by naming the imagined reality that shaped the ending to her drama and, although using a director's note rather than weaving a celebratory ending into the fictional world of the play itself, she faced her audience to rewrite and challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings as the default depiction of queer life. In real time, Hazel rooted her discussion in narratives of "imagined queer futures" (Coleman [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref117">12</reflink>]) of people who found happiness and community apart from their family with her concluding commentary, "It was more like about Alex being strong enough to stand up to his mother...being like I got people around me..." And just as her protagonist Alex experienced with Robin and his newfound GSA community, Hazel experienced the warmth and backing of her community, in that very moment of her explaining her director's note to the class, as her actors and audience encircled her with cheers and embrace. In this way, the makeshift stage became a site for eliciting affirmation from peers and claiming legitimacy within what Butler ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref118">11</reflink>]) describes as the creation of new space—a "between" of bodies that reclaims an already established space permeated by power (p. 85). Through proximity and celebration, these students transformed their classroom into a space that challenged the silencing of queer and trans lives and claimed recognition where it had not previously been granted.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-43">Composing Collectively</hd> <p>Hazel also constructed a collaborative space in the classroom in which the narrative belonged not just to Hazel, the playwright and director, but to the collective. This marked a notable shift for Hazel, who typically refused to participate in class and generally disliked group work, but who felt a moral obligation to speak out during this unit—recognizing it as a rare opportunity to engage her classmates on a personally significant topic. She reports, "[This unit] is the most I've ever talked in my life, ever...because it felt like it was my place to say things about the topic, stand up for myself (Interview, March, 21, 2022)." As the first student in her grade to come out, she positioned herself as an expert in classroom discussions on LGBTQ+ topics and understood her dramatic piece as a critical platform for education and solidarity. At a different point in her interview, she reflected on her leadership role during <emph>The Best at It Unit</emph>, "I have very strong opinions on the LGBTQ community because I'm in it, so I'm very educated on it. People here ask me a lot of more questions. Like they know now that they can ask me things which is kinda cool." Beyond the classroom, Hazel extended this role to the school environment more broadly, actively monitoring the playground and intervening when homophobic or transphobic slurs were used. She commented,</p> <p>With boys trying to be cool or whatever, like, "You're gay." They say it to each other. Like, "You're gay if you miss the net," when they're playing soccer. Obviously, they don't mean it, but then there's that hint of homophobia... My friends don't do it anymore because I slap them in the face if they do that...Because I love them so much that I can slap them in the face. (Interview, March, 21, 2022)</p> <p>During my time at St. Xavier's, Hazel had received several detentions and suspensions for using physical violence toward children at recess. Her parents were frequently called into the school to meet with administrators about her "bullying." The school, however, neglected to address the underlying homophobic and transphobic slurs underlying Hazel's violent reactions. Experiencing the silence around queer and trans topics at St. Xavier's and believing that her friends were ignorant, and not hateful ("obviously, they don't mean it" and "I love them so much"), Hazel took on the responsibility of educating her classmates, sometimes by force, about queer and trans topics. By writing and directing the play, Hazel extended her self‐appointed role as an educator, transforming the stage into a space where she could advocate for LGBTQ+ issues, and invite her classmates into a process of collective learning. She built this space intentionally through three strategies: carefully casting her characters, breaking the fourth wall, and citing queer and trans youth popular culture. Thus, I argue that Hazel's decision to engage the themes of <emph>The Best at It</emph> collectively was not merely an artistic choice, but a pedagogical one—she intentionally used the collaborative structure of the play to deepen her peers' understanding of LGBTQ+ identities and to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility and allyship within the classroom.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-44">Casting Characters</hd> <p>Hazel cast 10 of her 15 classmates to act in her drama. Hazel cast herself as the narrator and remained on the stage throughout the performance, in plain view of the audience. She cast her two closest friends—Ben and Jahir—as the stars, Alex and Robin, respectively. Hazel cast Mateo as her protagonist Alex's father, the lead ally in the script. This was an important choice given that Hazel had recently assaulted Mateo for using homophobic slurs during recess. In a poignant scene, the protagonist, Alex (played by Ben), glanced up tearfully at his father (played by Mateo) and asked, "Do you think I'm a freak, Dad?" Quietly, the father wrapped his arms around his trans son, assuring him that he was not and that he would love him "no matter what." See Figure 3.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70111-fig-0003.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70111-fig-0003.jpg" title="3 "Do you think I am freak, Dad?" Father (Mateo) embracing son (Ben)." /> </p> <p></p> <p>Hazel's decision to cast Mateo as the supportive father of a trans character in her play can be read as an extension of her self‐designated role as an educator and advocate within her school community. From this perspective, casting Mateo in a redemptive role—one in which he embraces and affirms a trans child—may have served a pedagogical purpose. By embodying a compassionate and accepting parent, Mateo was positioned to model allyship not only within the fictional world of the father‐son dynamics in the play but also in real life, as he embraced Ben, an openly queer classmate, in a powerful gesture of solidarity. In front of their peers, this moment demonstrated that Mateo could hug, touch, and interact with Ben just as he would with any other friend. While I cannot claim certainty about Hazel's intentions, her composition may have offered a carefully constructed opportunity for her classmates to rehearse more supportive behaviors on a stage buffered from real‐world consequences (Butler [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref119">10</reflink>]). In this sense, the stage functioned as a "brave space" where Hazel could guide others toward more empathetic ways of relating to queer and trans youth.</p> <p>Missing from Hazel's performance, however, is the mention of intersectionality despite it being an important aspect of Ms. Quinn's unit. In casting Jahir (Black), Sophia (black/white), Ben (Latino), and Mateo (Latino) in leading roles, she had ample opportunity to present race as a dimension in her plot. In this way, Hazel, like Ben, invisibilizes intersectionality as a theme in her play, and thus ignores the complexity of cisheterosexism as existing amid other dimensions of oppression (Pritchard [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref120">53</reflink>]). While I do not have sufficient data to fully examine why intersectionality was not more directly taken up in the students' work, I speculate that it may not have been the primary lens through which they connected to the novel's protagonist and themes. Given their excitement about finally discussing LGBTQ+ topics—after years of feeling erased from the classroom curriculum—it's possible they chose to center this single issue as a way to explore their identities and build a coalition. As a result, intersectionality did not emerge organically in their creative responses.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-46">Breaking the Fourth Wall</hd> <p>As two thirds of the class were involved in Hazel's production, the students flowed between their roles as actors and then audience members. Just as Ben repeatedly broke the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly, the actors in "Freak" slipped in and out of their roles, moving through the imaginary divide between the stage and the audience swiftly and seamlessly. At times, the actors broke the fourth wall spontaneously in the reverse direction, reading the narration aloud from an audience's seated position, alongside Hazel who remained on the stage. For instance, at the start of scene five, Hazel and her audience members narrated the line "Meeting the parents" in near perfect unison, a moment that caused an otherwise serious Hazel to chuckle in pleasant surprise at how eager her "spect‐actors" were to participate in the culminating scene. Perhaps moved by the rare smile across Hazel's face, one actor, turned audience member, shouted, "This is sooooo good, guys" right as the actors were about to begin. At other times, the audience members helped Hazel to direct the actors on the stage. For example, Mateo shouted from the audience to the actors on stage "Get in a circle. Get in a circle. Sit. Sit." At another point, Laila conveyed the importance that the actors transitioned between scenes faster, calling out from the audience, "Come on guys you only have two minutes." In the case of Ben's performance, he explicitly asked the audience to participate by breaking character and addressing the audience directly. However, in Hazel's play, many of the actors <emph>were</emph> the audience, and they participated in co‐constructing the performance by acting in the play itself, and then motivating, cheering, and directing, from the audience's seated position. Between the porous nature of the stage and the collaborative directing and narrating of the script itself, Hazel's performance paved a path for her classmates to demonstrate solidarity around the character of Alex, a trans middle schooler who bravely "came out" to his family and friends.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-47">Citing (Queer and Trans) Popular Culture</hd> <p>Hazel also composed collaboratively with her actors through the written script itself by making popular culture citations. Embedded in the opening scene when Alex's best friends rejected him at school was an image from Waters et al.'s ([<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref121">77</reflink>]) movie, <emph>Mean Girls</emph>, a visual citation intended to explain how the actors needed to abandon Alex on stage. See Figure 4. I read Hazel's citation to <emph>Mean Girls</emph> as a rhetorical strategy to appeal to her classmates by explicitly referencing an iconic LGBTQ+‐themed text, and thus drawing on shared symbols with her peers. Although <emph>Mean Girls</emph> was released 7 years prior to Hazel's birth, the film continued to represent a cult classic that captured the damaging effects of social cliques and school bullying. In my analysis, Hazel drew on this citation to assist her actors in their performance but also to foster solidarity in her community using a language, like insider information, that only her friends would understand. Similar to how Ben incorporated language from social media and Lady Gaga in his performance, I read Hazel's citationality of popular culture as an opportunity to cement membership in their community of LGBTQ+ students and allies.</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/NRNU/02apr26/rrq70111-fig-0004.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMMvl7ESepq84yOvsOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="rrq70111-fig-0004.jpg" title="4 "Whatever, you can play pretend all you want."" /> </p> <p></p> <p>To further situate my interpretation of Hazel's citationality, I draw on her interview, in which she revealed her strong aversion to school. Understanding her sense of responsibility during this unit—'It felt like it was my place to say things about the topic, stand up for myself'—I interpret her reference to <emph>Mean Girls</emph> as a deliberate rhetorical strategy. Aware that her play offered a rare opportunity to educate and rally her classmates around LGBTQ+ justice, Hazel leveraged a familiar cultural touchstone to appeal to her audience, speak their language, and reinforce her message. In this way, her actions reflect Butler's ([<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref122">11</reflink>]) conception of assemblies as performative spaces: by invoking shared cultural symbols, Hazel brought her peers into relational engagement, fostering collective recognition and solidarity within the classroom. Her citation of <emph>Mean Girls</emph> thus functions not only as a pedagogical tool but also as a performative act connecting the immediate classroom interaction to broader social and cultural narratives, enacting belonging, identity, and social claims in a school that overlooked LGBTQ+ identities.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-49">Discussion</hd> <p>This study explored how two LGBTQ+ youths used classroom drama to perform protest, imagine possibilities, and build community among queer youth and allies. The findings I presented here are my interpretation of how and why two queer sixth graders mobilized literacy in their classroom. As Anzaldúa ([<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref123">2</reflink>]) explains, "The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing, I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it" (p. 319). Below, I explain how the focal youth used playwriting and performance to 'put order' in their world by enacting identities and challenging cisgender normativity.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-50">Performing Protest and Possibility</hd> <p>Through a Butlerian (2015) lens, just as the category of the performance expands to include assemblies, so too can Ben and Hazel's play‐based literacies be understood as a shared experience and collective action rather than an individually oriented act. Ben and Hazel's performances were more than mere exercises in self‐exploration or community building. They were a practice in jointly imagining what could be and in resisting default heterosexual ideologies and narratives of pain (Coleman [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref124">12</reflink>]). The very depiction of queer and trans everyday lives in Ben and Hazel's performances was an act of resistance against heterosexual ideologies that circulated within their school community. That is, when heterosexual people typically think about LGBTQ+ people, they think immediately about sex and desire, rather than relationships and communities (Blackburn and Clark [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref125">5</reflink>]; Ryan and Hermann‐Wilmarth [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref126">57</reflink>]). At the start of <emph>The Best at it</emph> unit, one non‐focal student confessed to Hazel that he was homophobic himself, in the literal sense of the word, meaning he was, in fact, <emph>afraid</emph> of queer people, having never really "seen them" before. He even looked away, repulsed, during one activity when Ms. Quinn included an image of two men slow dancing at their wedding in a classroom gallery walk. Surprisingly (to me), Hazel shrugged it off as she felt neither compelled to defend herself nor slap him as she had done with Mateo. For students like this, Ben and Hazel's performances provided humanizing glimpses into the lives and communities of queer and trans youth. Their plays captured their relationships with family and friends, braiding the tears and hope of what it felt like to disclose oneself ("coming out") while continually having to manage a stigmatized identity (Ryan and Futterman [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref127">56</reflink>]; Halverson [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref128">27</reflink>]). Mobilizing literary and theatrical devices like breaking the fourth wall, chameleon acting, and citing queer and trans popular culture to subvert and overwrite LGBTQ+ representations focused solely on tragedy, the focal youth composed new stories with and for their classmates, bending the world to look more like the one they live in and imagine. In this way, Ben and Hazel's performances contributed to what Coleman ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref129">12</reflink>]) dubbed, "a collective reservoir of dreams" through which others may resist the trope of queer unhappy endings held within the imagination (p. 533). As Coleman ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref130">12</reflink>]) asserts, once queer metanarratives are reimagined, it can incite a process of healing both for self and the community.</p> <p>This study offers an example of what can happen when educators provide a platform for youth to talk about LGBTQ+ lives and communities, without only focusing on the political controversies and pain. As neither Ben nor Hazel were able to express themselves at home, their cases highlight how damaging it can be when queer youth cannot find spaces for expression at school, an institution where they spend most of their time. Within the supportive environment of Ms. Quinn's classroom, Ben and Hazel were able to reflect on themselves, repair relationships, and resist dominant narratives about queer and trans youth through writing and roleplay. Therefore, I submit that an ongoing commitment to LGBTQ+ middle school youth in the ELA classroom involves fostering brave spaces for students to perform protest and possibility.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-51">Conclusion and Implications</hd> <p>Certainly, these snapshots provide rich moments of queer youth's agency and resistance, but these examples were not representative of the larger lingua franca of this school nor of the larger country. In fact, in the following 2022–2023 school year, and outside of the scope of this study, Ms. Quinn did not teach <emph>The Best at it</emph>, as she believed it was too controversial and felt she did not have enough administrative or university support to navigate potential criticism. Despite the success of the unit, Ms. Quinn found that her school began mandating certain texts the following year, reinforcing an ELA curriculum steeped in cisheteronormativity. This decision to forgo teaching an LGBTQ+ themed book the following year underscored the escalating pressures within and beyond her school to regulate both what students learned and how she taught. Feeling uncertain and isolated in her efforts, she decided it was not worth the potential risk to her job or the exhaustion of continually resisting. Although her principal had initially been supportive, she was less involved in day‐to‐day matters, leaving Ms. Quinn to fear confronting parents alone—or, worse, being outed as bisexual in the close‐knit community. When I relayed these details in an interview with Maulik Pancholy, the author of <emph>The Best at it</emph>, he responded,</p> <p>One of the questions people ask me all the time in the context of such widespread book banning is what happens if kids <emph>don't</emph> read my book. What impact would that have? And I think about this study and this one group of sixth graders who read it and then produced their own plays. They made these incredible connections with themselves and their classmates, and I wonder what opportunities the next group of sixth graders missed out on. (Personal communication, December 22, 2023)</p> <p>To Pancholy's point, when students do not have spaces to build connections personally and communally around LGBTQ+‐themed texts in the classroom, they miss out on opportunities to build identity, empathy, and awareness about issues of difference that they will encounter in their lives.</p> <p>Over the past 4 years, since Ben and Hazel performed on a makeshift classroom stage while Florida passed into law the "Don't Say Gay" bill that same month, legislative attacks on education about gender identity and sexual orientation have accelerated nationwide (Hambacher et al. [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref131">28</reflink>]; Schey and Shelton [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref132">63</reflink>]). In 2023 alone, state lawmakers introduced 42 bills across 22 U.S. states restricting discussion of and access to books pertaining to LGBTQ+ identities and same‐sex families (Pendharkar [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref133">50</reflink>]). In 2025, the Supreme Court's decision in <emph>Mahmoud v. Taylor</emph> granted parents the right to opt their children out of lessons pertaining to LGBTQ+ topics on the grounds of religious freedom. Together, such legislation and judicial decisions have produced a "chilling effect" on teachers committed to LGBTQ+ justice, even in schools not directly governed by these policies, such as St. Xavier's (Hambacher et al. [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref134">28</reflink>]). In this context, Ms. Quinn's unit would now be nearly impossible—if not illegal—to implement in many middle schools across the nation.</p> <p>Ms. Quinn's trepidation at the prospect of teaching this unit again amid sociopolitical tensions warrants careful attention. Teachers committed to LGBTQ+ justice must find agentic pathways forward by understanding the legal landscape and identifying opportunities to celebrate queer and trans communities within required texts (Dobbs et al. [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref135">14</reflink>]; Shelton [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref136">64</reflink>]). However, no ELA teacher can shoulder alone the far‐reaching consequences of tightly regulated approaches to reading and writing—whether through book censorship or mandated curricula—that make teaching texts like <emph>The Best at It</emph> difficult. Administrators play a critical role in protecting teachers from scrutiny while helping them build alliances with caregivers and community members (Pollock et al. [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref137">51</reflink>]; Kleinrock [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref138">37</reflink>]). Additionally, administrators and teacher educators can guide teachers to connect with professional communities, even virtual ones, where they can explore alternative strategies that support LGBTQ+‐affirming practices (Dobbs et al. [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref139">14</reflink>]; Falter and Mackenzie [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref140">18</reflink>]; Shelton [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref141">64</reflink>]). Building support networks beyond one's school, district, or Archdiocese is crucial to sustaining commitment to this work. By leveraging these communal ties, teachers can turn isolation into collective resilience, creating classrooms where LGBTQ+ youth can navigate hurt and build connection.</p> <p>Indeed, it is a precarious time to be an LGBTQ+ youth, and neither playwriting nor performing on stage will serve as a panacea to mollify the frictions or provide more freedoms to queer and trans students in school. Ben and Hazel's performances, however, invite teachers, school leaders, and researchers alike to channel their collective love and rage to "mutate" pedagogies in regenerative ways and "shield" teachers, like Ms. Quinn, doing critical work from pushback so LGBTQ+ youth can flourish in the face of an aggressively shifting political landscape (Shelton and Guyotte [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref142">65</reflink>]; Pollock et al. [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref143">51</reflink>]). Ben and Hazel's performances account for the inventive ways in which young people use literacy to heal, unite, and imagine new realities in an intensely polarized political climate.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-52">Acknowledgments</hd> <p>I am grateful to the teachers and students who participated in this study.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-53">Funding</hd> <p>The author has nothing to report.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-54">Ethics Statement</hd> <p>Data collected for this project is in compliance and granted approval by the Boston College Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects (IRB #22.152.01).</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-55">Consent</hd> <p>Informed consent was obtained from all participants and, when applicable, their guardians.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-56">Conflicts of Interest</hd> <p>The author declares no conflicts of interest.</p> <hd id="AN0193225977-57">Data Availability Statement</hd> <p>The data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available due to confidentiality restrictions.</p> <ref id="AN0193225977-58"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> All names of participants and institutions are pseudonyms.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0193225977-59"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> Ahmed, S.2010. 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  Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
– Name: PeerReviewed
  Label: Peer Reviewed
  Group: SrcInfo
  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 18
– Name: DatePubCY
  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2026
– Name: TypeDocument
  Label: Document Type
  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
– Name: Audience
  Label: Education Level
  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Junior+High+Schools%22">Junior High Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Middle+Schools%22">Middle Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Secondary+Education%22">Secondary Education</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22LGBTQ+People%22">LGBTQ People</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Middle+School+Students%22">Middle School Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Censorship%22">Censorship</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Social+Bias%22">Social Bias</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Drama%22">Drama</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Catholic+Schools%22">Catholic Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Language+Arts%22">Language Arts</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Playwriting%22">Playwriting</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Resistance+%28Psychology%29%22">Resistance (Psychology)</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1002/rrq.70111
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0034-0553<br />1936-2722
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: This comparative case study traces how two queer, middle school youth resisted local and national censorship efforts through bold and boisterous dramatic performances within a historic Catholic school in the northeastern United States. Drawing on Butler's Performative Theory of Assembly and critical literacy perspectives, I illustrate how the focal youth engaged in playwriting and performance in their ELA classroom not only as a mechanism for personal healing but also as a way to speak back to the layers of the social, political, and institutional contexts of their schooling. Centering the scripts that youth wrote and adapted for the stage in my analysis, I submit that these literacy activities opened up possibilities for celebration and connection. This study highlights the transformative potential of humanizing classrooms, where educators make space for youth to explore identity and discuss LGBTQ+ lives and communities in middle school.
– Name: AbstractInfo
  Label: Abstractor
  Group: Ab
  Data: As Provided
– Name: DateEntry
  Label: Entry Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2026
– Name: AN
  Label: Accession Number
  Group: ID
  Data: EJ1503973
PLink https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1503973
RecordInfo BibRecord:
  BibEntity:
    Identifiers:
      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1002/rrq.70111
    Languages:
      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 18
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: LGBTQ People
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Middle School Students
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Censorship
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Social Bias
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Drama
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Catholic Schools
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Language Arts
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Playwriting
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Resistance (Psychology)
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: Out of the Closet and on to the Stage: LGBTQ+ Youth as Playwrights and Performers
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Marisa Segel
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 04
              Type: published
              Y: 2026
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 0034-0553
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 1936-2722
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 61
            – Type: issue
              Value: 2
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Reading Research Quarterly
              Type: main
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