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Harvard Educational Review Vol. 88 No. 2 Summer 2018
Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Intimate Possibilities: The Beyond
Bullying Project and Stories of
LGBTQ Sexuality and Gender in
US Schools
JEN GILBERT
York University
JESSICA FIELDS
LAURA MAMO
San Francisco State University
NANCY LESKO
Teachers College, Columbia University
In this article, Jen Gilbert, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko explore
the Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia, storytelling project that invited students,
teachers, and community members in three US high schools to enter a private booth
and share stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) sexuality and
gender. While recent policy making and educational research have focused on links
between LGBTQ sexuality and gender, bullying, and other risks to educational and
social achievement, Beyond Bullying aimed to identify the ordinary stories of LGBTQ
sexuality and gender that circulate in schools and that an interventionist framing
may obscure. After offering an overview of the method in Beyond Bullying, this arti-
cle connects narratives of LGBTQ desire, family, and school life to the intimate pos-
sibilities—who students and teachers are, who they want to be, and the social worlds
they want to build—available to them in schools.
Keywords: adolescence, gender, sexuality, high school, narrative research, LGBTQ
studies
In 2014, soon after the Beyond Bullying Project set up a storytelling booth in
the courtyard of West High School in San Francisco, our research team met