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Proclivity
Bea Troxel
A few years ago I taped a blue post-it note over my desk. It read: Proclivity: a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing. When I first put it on the wall, I had tacked it there with washi tape, fresh and clean, clustered around notes from friends, photographs from childhood, a found black and white photo of a man sliding headfirst down a waterslide in a tiny speedo. There’s a note from my friend Megan that says, “silly is the holiest of all states.” I had it there for four years—the same blue note on the same blue wall. By the end, it hovered tapeless, almost falling, dust collecting along the top of it.
When read without context, the definition of proclivity seems ordinary enough. It is synonymous with a habit or pattern, and yet proclivity often sounds more sinister than that. This pattern is dangerous! This decision you are making over and over again may not be good for you! it seems to say. Usually, the word is used in the context of more harmful habits of the mind and body, and it is usually used about people rather than by people. If you search for it on The Atlantic’s website, you will find it in reference to people with a proclivity for dressing up in Nazi uniforms, Lindsey Lohan’s proclivity towards trouble, or even the British newspapers’ proclivity toward phone hacking. There’s always a hint of obsession, not rightness to the word.
A proclivity hinges upon who uses the word. A proclivity to one person will be a mere preference to another. A routine to one person is a constriction to another. Love to one person is a sin to another.
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In August of 2018, I started a job at my alma mater, Christ Presbyterian Academy (CPA), as a long-term sub for the high school librarian. I understood this school on a deep level. In high school I had messy brown hair that I wore with a side-part so far that my long hair looked like bangs pressed over my forehead. I wanted to look like the indie musicians I saw walking around Nashville. We wore uniforms: purple plaid skirts with white oxford button-downs tucked into our skirts. The dress code stated that we needed to wear leather loafers, and I spent most of my freshman year strolling down the hallway in fabric Toms, getting in trouble, and finally buying ratty leather loafers at the goodwill to appease our administrator. I loathed the rules that didn’t make sense to me. During lunch I escaped to the tiny chapel with a piano where I’d sit and play music with a friend. Or during my senior year, I ate every lunch with either my senior literature teacher or college counselor.
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I gently pushed back against the rules: I’d sit and read during chapel if I disagreed with the speaker or wrote letters during our senior year bible class because the teacher bored me. The administrators and some of the teachers bothered me with their strict rules, but there were a handful of teachers who thought critically about the world, wanted to sit and ask big questions with me. Maria was my senior English teacher, from whom I took two literature classes at the same time, analyzed films, created photo essays, and compared songs to the novels we were reading. Her brain seemed expansive, and she was much more interested in asking how what we were reading connected to the broader world rather than asking how it connected to the Bible. And then there was my college counselor, Catherine. I’d sit in her office, talking to her husband on the phone or learning to crochet. I had a special jar of trail mix in her office so that I didn’t keep eating her starbursts. One day I got so comfortable as to lob a sugar cube into her office, but it somehow went past her glasses and hit her in the eye. She kicked me out of the room and made me talk to her husband on the phone. He said, “Bea, she’ll cool down eventually. Just give her a minute.”
Finally there was Ben, my Latin teacher who lent me books to read: The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, French dictionaries, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He’d ask me about what music I listened to. In college, when I studied abroad, he mailed me a copy of Isaak Dinesen’s short stories, and when I went back to visit him he’d ask about my dating life and say, “Oh, Bea, I’m so excited for you to meet someone who makes you more Bea.” We kept in touch until he passed away from cancer in 2016.
When I look back, I see that I was far more beloved than I ever thought. I was voted best all around by my classmates, elected the senior chaplain, organizing our chapel speakers throughout the year. I brought in a speaker who pushed back on our very white, very privileged version of Christianity at the school. He talked about faith as a beautiful choice towards nuance, a way of working towards good in the world rather than a set of rules to stick to. He did not view the world as an enemy, as CPA often did. But in that same semester I brought in a speaker who spoke against same-sex attraction and a speaker who talked to the girls about the dangers of STI’s as a way to spook us into chastity. While I have changed and outgrown a lot of my beliefs since graduating, during my time at CPA I wanted to believe in God, wanted to walk in faith, even if I was often full of doubt. That meant I inflicted harms of my own, bringing in speakers I would later disagree with, not seeing my own privilege in the world.
CPA is a part of the Presbyterian Church of America, founded in December 1973. It split from the other branch of the Presbyterian Church based on the beliefs that women cannot lead in the church and that the scriptures are fixed and immutable. This just means that only men can become pastors or leaders in the church and that this interpretation of scripture (as interpreted by the men in leadership) is set in stone. The Bible must be read literally in this tradition, and this also means that they do not affirm anyone in the LGBTQ+ community as a leader in their church. Most recently in December 2021, they decided that even celibate gay men cannot lead because they are still following a pattern of proclivity to sin.
When I moved back to Nashville a few years after college, Maria asked to mentor me as a teacher. I did not hesitate. She taught me to love literature, to see through symbols and archetypes, to unpack the world around me. She helped me start to believe that my brain’s way of understanding the world was worth sharing. So I returned to the same school in a new building. The tiny red bricks had been painted white and turned into a middle school. The new high school building was large and covered in glass. For a semester we taught Oedipus and The Things They Carried together, and towards the end of the semester the position for the high school librarian popped up. She convinced me to take it, telling me that we could continue to collaborate all the time.
A year before my decision to take the librarian position, I had discovered my own queerness. Because of my internalized homophobia, I had no inkling about this part of myself until I fell into it. I met a playwright while living in Harrisburg, PA. The first time we hung out, she told me she thought we were on a date, but when she saw the shock on my face after she mentioned she was gay, she realized that there was no date. I kept finding myself wanting to spend hours with her in restaurants, write her long, endless emails. A few months later I said, “I think that I maybe, just might have a crush on you.” This was the staggered and messy beginning of our relationship and of my own queerness. We broke up a few months later when I moved back to Nashville; I returned single and confused and searching.
Because I was shedding the layers of my own internalized homophobia, I still spent time in spaces that did not support my sexuality, and I preferred the familiarity of these older spaces, ones where I had previously felt known. Since the job would only be for a semester, I felt that I might not be dating for the duration of the job, and therefore I would not have to contend with that aspect of my identity in terms of the school (How little I knew of how much we unknowingly embody). So I took the job: four months at CPA as a librarian.
But of course, in the two weeks leading up to the job, I met someone. Cyd was a writer with a sharp sense of humor: charismatic and intense. And when I first saw her home, it was full of soft lights and plants and photographs pasted to the wall, a gentleness not evident upon first meeting her. We started dating, and I went into this job with more to hide than I had planned.
Here is what I will tell you about the students: they were special. I had a group of ninth-grade girls who would stand around my desk and gossip and chat before school started. One of them would ask for book recommendations and then never read them. They left me notes “ms. b is the bae.” Some would recommend songs. One student would sit and play Billie Eilish covers with me after school while the other students quietly did work in the library. I once watched a freshman boy run around the library dancing to Shakira when only one other student was in the room, glancing at me every few seconds as if challenging me to stop this wild behavior. But I never did. Needless to say, I loved these kids. They were silly and smart and goofy and shy. I posted a new poem each week on my desk, which only one student ever read. I ordered covertly secular novels into the library and I snuck out two titles (Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and I Kissed Dating Goodbye). There were a handful of students who would walk into the room and say things such as, “I don't think there’s anything wrong with being gay,” or “My friend is gay and I don’t think that’s a problem,” while walking past my desk. They must have had some sense that I was queer.
Every Friday during lunch the female faculty converted the library into a Bible study room. Bibles and notebooks fluttered throughout the room as women chatted and discussed the radical role of women in the Bible. During those lunches, I would develop these intense headaches. Old thoughts that I used to have in high school began to pop up, ones in which I would doubt my view of the world because I thought I should feel God’s presence. The way they talked about God at CPA made me think that if I just lived a little purer, if I just tried a little bit harder, then I might feel God’s presence. I spent so much time in high school not feeling connected to God or the Bible, and so I had learned to trust others’ perceptions over my own.
When you learn to trust others over yourself from a young age, it takes a long time to learn what your own thoughts are. I found this sensation returning when I became a teacher at CPA; I found myself looking to others for what to do and what to believe. It happened when the Bible teacher would come up to my desk, ask where I went to church, and then when he heard I was Anglican, he’d invite me to his Baptist church. Once a week he’d let me know what time his service started on Sundays. It took all of my people-pleasing body to politely say that I’d think about it (which meant no) and not fear that he had some divine knowledge that I did not. It happened when teachers spoke to me of their fears for the students going into the real world. It happened whenever we had our weekly chapels, filing into the giant sanctuary with dim lighting and a conservative speaker. The worldview that the school held created a space where I doubted myself because I never felt that connection to God or that understanding of divinity that everyone else talked about. Rather than trusting that absence, I doubted it.
Even though the whole issue of religion and life is filled with subtlety, I do not want spiritual abuse to go unnoticed here. My friend, an old mentor and local activist, David Dark, also worked at CPA when I was still in high school there. He now writes often of the topic often, and he says this:
I think plain old abuse becomes spiritual abuse the moment I speak or act as if I’m an authority in someone else’s experience. It’s subtle but sometimes not at all subtle. It’s a refusal to honor another person’s boundaries because I believe (or wish to imply) that I’m closer to God or more intimately familiar with God’s purposes than someone else.
My mom often told me that I seemed to have more of a connection with God than anyone she knew. I always protested because I felt so much doubt, but I still did not want to let down the people in my life who saw something bigger than me. I think she implied I had a connection to the sacred things in the world, but this was again a moment of seeing something in me that I could not understand for myself. Others seeing God in me where I did not continued to separate me from my body, my perception of self, and I longed for praise from others about virtues I felt I could not control.
While I was working at CPA, during walks with my girlfriend, Cyd, through my neighborhood, I would get nervous about students seeing us and outing me to the school. In my first week as librarian I went to a show with her at a small venue in town. We were holding hands in the back, pressed up against each other, while we listened to a blonde-haired Nashville musician. The next day at school one of the literature teachers came into the library. He was known for teaching the AP language class with a strong social justice lens. But he walked in and said, “Hey, I saw you at the show last night.” We both paused and looked at each other, a flicker of fear ran through me, and then he said, “I’m so glad you are here.” I looked at him, paused, and then he left the library. I felt comforted, seen. What I thought he meant and what he later confirmed was that he was glad someone like me, someone queer, was in a place like this, a PCA school. Within the school, I had support: a handful of teachers I could talk to, who affirmed me, who met my partner. This was the secret web of love and support that I found at the school.
In October, the principal of the high school, a salt and pepper Princeton graduate, came up to me and asked whether I would be interested in teaching Latin the next semester. I showed some hesitation and he responded, “Just think about it.” I told him I would, but I felt quite certain that I needed to leave the school at the end of the semester. Then the next day he sidled up to me and scribbled some numbers onto a post-it. He slid it to me across the desk with the pay of what I would make if I started teaching written on it. It was at least twice as much as I was making then. In spite of the headaches, I loved the school—with all of its flaws. I loved my students. I loved my coworkers. I loved being a part of that place. I was curious about that job, and I felt that the next step for me was to see whether I could work here while visibly being queer. And that meant talking to the administration.
My high school principal, Nate, had become the head of school during my years away. I babysat his children while in high school. A friend and I went to his office our junior year to propose our plan for creating a schoolwide composting system. We were quickly shot down. And when we graduated, it was a year of the cicada infestation, so as each of us crossed the stage and shook his hand, every student handed Nate a dead cicada husk. He had to keep discretely putting them in his pockets and onto the podium. He was young when he started the job, twenty-seven. And when he started the job, all of the upper-classmen and moms talked about how hot he was. My teaching mentor, Maria, told me that she would go to the meeting with me; so on a cold, autumn day, we walked together to the school offices.
Before the meeting I thought a lot about whether I was going to his office to see if my presence at CPA could be possible in a way that supported me or whether I was asking for permission to exist as a queer person. One of the other literature teachers, a short and fiery woman, told me that I did not need to tell them—they never asked anyone else who they were dating. But as she spit these words out, in a vengeance not for me but at the school, I felt deeply that I needed to know with clarity and certainty whether this space could hold me as I was. It was not about asking them whether I could stay, but pushing them to a direct honesty.
As I have talked about this situation with many people over the years, the definition of safety has come up and what that means. Within this context, I mean emotionally safe, which means affirmed or welcomed. I mean that I can be in a space where I do not need to fear that people are convincing me my way of life is sinful. I mean being in a place where my perspective of myself and life is not questioned by those around me. It means being in a place where no one can make snide comments about being gay. There was always the possibility of emotional harm at CPA.
So much can get veiled in sweet kindnesses. Even now when I walk into CPA, everyone is nice, everyone is kind, everyone would say they love me to my face. And yet, I wanted to push past all of that. I wanted to know how a school reacts to someone they love—and reader, I was loved—when their beliefs no longer aligned. I had lived too long in this strange in-between.
In order to get to the administrative section of CPA, Maria and I had to leave the high school, walk along the stark white bricks of the breezeway, and enter the elementary school through heavy double doors. The admin offices were painted that HGTV gray color flanked by black vases holding fake white flowers. We sat on a stiff couch until Nate brought us in.
“I see you’ve brought in the big guns,” Nate said, gesturing to Maria. He did not know the purpose of the meeting. “So what brings you here?” He asked. I paused, feeling a little nervous.
“Parker has offered me another position for the spring as a Latin teacher,” I paused. “I’m interested in it, but… I’m queer, and I have a girlfriend, and I want to know whether I’d be supported.” I said slowly with sweaty palms and face turning red. I still couldn’t say queer without it sounding like a confession. I continued, “I love working here, but in order to stay, I need to know if I’d be safe.”
“Okay, I have a question. But,” he paused. “Well, first of all, I just want you to know that I love you, care for you, and accept you,” he said in a deep, kind voice. I started crying. And then he continued, “When I was growing up, queer was a slur. I just want to get it straight what you mean when you say that, because I feel like I’m not supposed to use that word.” The room was so dark, just one lamp lit up the charcoal gray walls. I explained that for me it was a freedom, a way to describe my sexuality in a way that allowed me to explore. For me, homosexual and gay and lesbian all had a strange connotation because those were the words churches had used when discussing the sinfulness of homosexuality, but they also seemed very narrow in their labels.
I grabbed tissue from the box on the table and wiped my nose. I had started crying while he said he loved me, and I had continued crying as he talked about his experience with the word queer. “What’s making you cry right now?” he asked me. I whimpered that this just felt very emotional to talk about.
He nodded and then seemed to turn to syrup on a pancake, wandering each path, spreading out over the situation, smothering the conversation, unable to find any sort of path or line. He first thought maybe I could stay short term, for a semester, if I was not dating. After wandering through many scenarios of how I could stay at the school, he finally decided he would need to talk to the pastor of the school’s connecting church—and he thought I probably would not be able to stay. He talked about how someone with my “proclivities” could work there, but only someone who was celibate. I sat, quiet, listening, nodding, walking through each scenario with Nate. My memory is hazy on what he said and what I asked. I do remember asking him what the school would do if a student came out. They didn’t have the luxury of leaving, and I wanted to know how that kid might be supported. He said they’d most likely suggest that the school was not a good place for them.
After the meeting I went back to the library and found an email from my students. They had been waiting for me in the library because they needed a book, but instead they decided to steal it and would check it out the next day. I felt sad to have missed them after school.
The next day I walked into the library, and a group of girls said they would physically die if I left school in the spring.
Two weeks went by after the meeting—they felt excruciating because it seemed as though the students increased their kindness, their compliments, their weirdness. More of them kept asking me how long I’d be at the school, if I was coming back the next year. They would whine at my desk saying that I was not allowed to leave. It felt painful to imagine losing that community of students. Finally a little email showed up in my inbox. Nate had heard from the pastor and could meet with Maria and me.
On the morning that Nate came back to tell me about what the pastor said, my girlfriend left a bouquet of flowers on the windshield of my car with a note. The note read, “Do not forget that you are enough. Sending tenderness and love your way, feeling very confident that whatever the outcome, you will thrive. Yours, C.”
In our second meeting the tone shifted. The looseness and wandering that Nate had in the first meeting, his desire for me to stay and feel welcomed and try to make it work, clicked into a sterile clarity. In this second meeting he used very specific language, and he mainly centered it around the school contract. He said that by signing the contract I was stating that I lived in accordance with the principles of the PCA, which defines marriage as taking place between a man and a woman. It would be dishonest, and he could not ask me to sign the contract in good faith. The conversation felt less painful in the moment because it felt less personal. As Maria and I left she said, “They’re making a huge mistake.” We walked into the dimming light of sunset, the air growing cold and the sky darkening.
I went home and cried—had dinner with my mom, talked to Cyd briefly, sat at home as my roommate brought me tea and ice cream. I took an Adrienne Rich poem Sophia sent me and glued it to a piece of paper, decorating it with ginkgo leaves and mod podge: “Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live/I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.” I began to see there were layers of grief to this decision. There was the initial grief of hearing I could not work at CPA. I could not work in this place where I grew up, had my prom, ran around singing Coldplay during cross country at the top of my lungs. But even more so was the loss of all the specific people I loved there: Maria, the gaggle of ninth grade girls, my former college counselor. It felt as if I lost swathes of color in my life. And ultimately, there was the structural loss. I had learned, finally, that this religious community could no longer be a space for me to belong.
Even though it would seem easy to leave a place that does not affirm you, it’s not. Because life is composed of fragments, and communities are made of people, various shades of people, and even if the whole of this community hurt me, there were parts that made me feel alive, more myself. And it felt painful to let go because I was not just letting go of hurt. I was letting go of walking into Maria’s classroom every day to talk about the book I just ordered or to ask a question about her unit on Impressionism. I was letting go of talking to my old college counselor in the hallways, letting go of the candy jar in her office and her crass, blunt speaking. I was letting go of my advisory playing bananagrams during lunch, the three nerdy boys playing chess for hours in the library, the girls spilling tea at my desk each morning. When we leave a place, there is loss, no matter the gain. And I think this is why it has been so hard to leave all of these spaces where I no longer belong. Because I am not just leaving the pain, I am leaving deep love, the molds that formed me. But as I find bigger molds, new places to form myself, new places to receive help from others, I am knit in new ways.
At the school where I currently teach, my students are every shade of gay you could imagine. If they’re not gay, they’re bending some norm. I work with people who never assume gender. My students wear rainbow hats, and I give thanks that I get to love these people, and that I can be loved by them.
Why did I choose love in a place that chose to see proclivity? Why did I want to remember it? I have long since taken down the post-it, shoved it away in a little box. Now I have notes from my current students, notes about what seeing an openly queer teacher and musician means to them.
In writing this, I am confronted with twin truths: the truth that this sort of discrimination by an institution is cruel, painful, and privileged, and also the truth that I put myself in that school. I stayed when I could have left, and sometimes we must grieve what we’ve done to our bodies while knowing that it’s not all our fault. The space where I am othered and not affirmed is not a space where I want to be; and my heart does hurt for all of the students who are there without a choice, who must go there as minors without autonomy. I hurt for the students who are trans and hiding, who are queer and hiding, who are queer and cannot hide, whose identity is writ across them, who witness a slow erasure every single day.
I recently received a letter from a camper I taught in the summer before I worked at CPA, before any of this rejection. I was only six months into my queer self-knowledge, and I worked at an Alaskan arts camp. I played one of my songs at the talent show. The whole summer was wonderful and beautiful, and I felt blessed and affirmed by the students I taught there. This student, Max, told me in the letter that I gave them an example of what an outwardly queer adult could do as an artist. And this gives me hope—even before my time at CPA I was living a truth. We can almost never live all of the truths at once, but we can live some of the truth, and I was lucky enough to send one quiet courage to another person who needed it.
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