Margaret A. Nash and Karen L. Graves, Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers' Rights

This wonderfully complex book, Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers' Rights, examines the ripple effects of Marjorie Rowland's attempt to gain recognition for the discrimination she faced as a bisexual teacher in 1974.Nash and Graves wind together Rowland's personal experiences with the burgeoning legal theories that initiated LGBTQ-related employment equity claims and provide intricate analysis of the multiple ways that such claims have been refused, sidestepped, and otherwise resisted by courts and employers, even when legislative progress has been seemingly made.This apparently ever-timely examination of the challenges facing recognition of LGBTQ rights is an important reminder that progress all too often is not linear.Further, the authors remind us that anti-LGBTQ backlash is also all too often directed at education and educators (and students as well).As Nash and Graves point out, while gay rights began to make progress in the 1970s, conservatives focused their energies on removing gay and lesbian teachers from schools.Graves' And They Were Wonderful Teachers provides an excellent account of teacher purges in Florida.Rowland undertook a series of court challenges when she was fired from her school counselling job for telling another employee she was bisexual and eventually tried appealing to the Supreme Court.When Supreme Court Justice William Brennan dissented from the court's determination to not hear Rowland's case, he pointed out the historical and contemporary discriminations facing gay people and the public concern of Rowland's words, two aspects of her case that the Supreme Court and other courts had denied.His dissent had an impact well beyond her case: it helped bolster LGBTQ-related employment discrimination cases that followed, including those of other educators as well as those serving in the military.Like Rowland's unsuccessful bid to have her freedom of speech protected as a bisexual woman, Brennan's dissent, while unable to directly help Rowland, went on to open the cracks in legal unwillingness to recognize LGBTQ people.Nash and Graves carefully note the shifts in legal strategy from early cases like Rowland's that relied on freedom of speech to the more recent trend of using due process and dignity.(The latter two strategies were recently called into question by Justice Thomas's concurrent decision in Dobbs.)While showing these theoretical complications, this book also shows how LGBTQ equality has been built and the sacrifices of those LGBTQ people, like Rowland, whose livelihoods and careers were upended but who kept going.Nash and Graves caution, too, that even if legal strategies work and laws are reformed to include LGBTQ people under non-discrimination policies, school administrators and districts find ways to fire LGBTQ educators using trumped up excuses.As local practices, policies and, in too many cases, state laws continue to obstruct LGBTQ rights, the lessons in this book are important reminders of the continuity of

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