By Shaun Levin
When your pupils say to you, as they always do: 'Are you married?' Say: 'No.' 'Have you got a girlfriend?' Say: 'No.' 'Okay,' one of them will say, giggling. 'A boyfriend?' Say: 'Yes.'
When you're sitting in a cafe on Church Street with your boyfriend - Simon, Anup, Nikolai, Jean-Marie - and your pupil's father walks in, say to him: 'This is Nik, my boyfriend.' And when he laughs, nervously, or turns away from you, smile, put your hand on your lover's knee, because at the table behind you, or sitting on your lap at story-time, or on the seat opposite you on the train, is a young boy watching you, eager to learn how to be a gay man in this world.
When you're on the bus, sitting upstairs reading, on your way to the opera, the sauna, the National Gallery, the Heath, and two of your pupils, now in high school, get on – the boy with the lovely sideburns, the girl with such pretty breasts – and say to you: 'What are you reading?' Say: 'It's a collection of gay love poems.' And if they say 'let's see,' read them one, the one about the lesbians in the garden, and tell them you bought it at Waterstone's just last week.
Hold your boyfriend's hand.
When you're teaching sonnets to year 9 pupils and one boy calls the other a pouf, ask him to explain what he means. Have a discussion in the class about what it means to be a pouf, a queer, a gay man. There might be a gay boy in your class, and he might be terrified of being discovered. So when one of them asks: 'Are you gay?' Say: 'Yes.'
A five year old says to you: 'What's a pouf?' Say: 'It's a swear word for gay.' And when he says: 'What's gay?' Say: 'That's when two men love each other.' Then he might say: 'My daddy says it's wrong.' Say: 'My daddy thought it was fine, and my mommy, too, and both Samuel's mummies think so, too.' And then say: 'Some people might think it's wrong because they don't know that being gay is about love.'
When you and your boyfriend, your lover, the man you've just picked up on the Heath bump into your pupil's mother on the tube, introduce him to her, and keep your hand on his shoulder for a few extra seconds, or minutes, or forever, while you talk to both of them about the weather, the war, last's night's episode of Big Brother, and say to your lover: 'Her son's in my class.'
Take him to their weddings, their bar mitzvahs, their christenings, their funerals. And if you turn up on your own, and they say: 'Where's your girlfriend?' Say, because it's true: 'Michael had to work late, James went to New York on holiday, Frank stayed late at the office.'
When you fall in love after a long time of thinking you'll never meet anyone ever again, call the school's secretary and tell her you won't be in that day. And then turn up anyway. With a big bunch of lilies to put in a white vase on your desk. Sing.
Shaun Levin has published a novella, Seven Sweet Things, and short stories in anthologies as diverse as the Best Gay Erotica series and Modern South African Stories. He lives in England, but he can be found at www.shaunlevin.com .