Being a teacher is hard. From the median pay to working long hours even when the students leave to dealing with a tough administration, teachers go through a lot. Being a teacher is hard because sometimes you can’t control what gets thrown at you on the job.
But imagine how hard it is to be an openly gay teacher? The truth is, many parents aren’t OK with it. According to a 2018 survey by GLAAD and the Harris Poll: “32 percent of non-LGBTQ Americans said they would be ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ uncomfortable if their child had an LGBTQ teacher,” Education Week reported.
Tell Williams, a gay pre-K teacher in Pennsylvania who’s gone viral for his hilarious and activist TikToks, is living that truth every day.
“I had a parent that was incredibly racist and homophobic,” Williams recalls to CafeMom.
“It was so bad that I no longer did home visits with the parent, and an administrator would sit in during our parent-teacher conferences,” he adds.
It’s not as if Williams, aka Mr. Williams on TikTok, and other openly gay teachers like him are just combating their own discrimination. They are navigating identity issues in their classrooms as well.
“We had an incident where the parent was upset that his daughter had to sit next to a child of color on the bus,” he remembers. “It was too much,” he adds, saying that he “felt like a failure as a teacher” because the parents' daughter then went on to tell another little girl sitting next to her that she “couldn’t be a princess” because she was Hispanic.
But Tell refused to let a lesson go unlearned.
“I was like, ‘No, we're not doing this!’ I put this mural on the wall and it had every Disney princess and prince I could think of,” he says, adding that the mural read "Anyone can be a Princess.”
Sadly, the lesson doesn’t always make it to the parents.
“Then one day the parent of the child came in for a parent-teacher conference, looked at the mural, and then turned away from it,” he said, laughing in disbelief over the parents' actions.
These are just a few of the scenarios that Williams deals with on the regular. Williams has become a viral sensation — with more than 1 million followers on TikTok — for his teacher videos that highlight life in the classroom as a gay educator.
Williams, who is originally from northern Indiana, said his community was very conservative.
Williams' parents are Puerto Rican traditional Catholics, which made it hard for him to share the truth about his sexuality — or so he thought.
He says that one day, while on a grocery run, his mother actually helped him come out, asking him blatantly: “Are you gay?"
“I was dumbfounded," he remembers. "I had no idea what to say. It was an awkward conversation, but we weren’t angry with each other,” Williams recounts. “She wasn’t mean. She just said me being gay wasn’t a part of her dreams for me,” he says, adding that later his mother came around to fully embracing him. (She has since died.)
That same day, Williams went to his father’s house.
He was with his boyfriend (who he told everyone was his friend), and his dad’s sudden response was heartwarming.
“I’ve always known,” Williams recalls his dad saying, adding his father was sensitive and gentle. “My dad just started laughing hysterically. He was like, ‘are you going to tell me this is your boyfriend or your friend?'”
Once finding out the boy was, in fact, Williams’ then-boyfriend, his father hilariously added, “He can’t stay the night anymore!”
Overall, Williams is thankful for the positivity surrounding his coming-out story, saying that it was so “well-received” by his immediate family and friends.
“I had no idea it would go as well as it did," he adds. "It’s difficult for me to talk about my coming out process, especially when people ask me, ‘How did you do it?’ and ‘What is your advice?’ Coming from a very conservative space, I’m so fortunate that it was so well-received.”
Surprisingly enough, Williams says decision to become a teacher was arbitrary — his dream was “never to be a teacher.”
He studied interpersonal communications in college. After a painful breakup with his then-fiancé, Williams' mom told him to get off his butt and substitute for the Head Start teaching program in Indiana.
“I subbed there, and I liked it,” he says.
After a Head Start teacher suddenly quit, Williams subbed for a pre-K class for one month, and eventually, that school asked him to stay permanently. He applied for an Indiana emergency teacher's license, teaching pre-K Monday through Thursdays and going to school for his license on Fridays.
“I’m glad that things worked out the way they did, so I could see that it was a passion of mine to teach, but also to advocate for children,” he tells us. “I think that as teachers, we are advocates, and that's really what we do in the classroom.”
William’s belief is that teaching isn’t just a 9-5 job, and he and his colleagues' roles in their students' lives are far more important. “It’s nothing parents should feel bad about. But when you partner with us as best as you can in the classroom and have this level of empathy with us, it all works out.”
It’s likely what makes being an openly gay teacher slightly harder to manage.
Advocating for young, impressionable children is only part of Williams' job as a teacher.
The other part of his job is dealing with the adults in the education industry, including the children's parents, some of whom are blatantly discriminatory. As a Puerto Rican, gay male teacher, Williams said he had many fears going into this profession.
“I was worried that all of those intersectionalities would be difficult. It was a very conservative area, but since coming out in my senior year of high school, I refuse to go back ‘in the closet,’” Williams proclaims.
He says thanks to South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, he couldn’t get fired for his sexuality when working in that city. At the time, Buttigieg wrote an anti-discriminatory clause for employers in South Bend, making it illegal for them to fire someone based on their sexual orientation. (Buttigieg is now the US secretary of transportation.)
But Williams said the looming fear of what would happen if he disclosed his sexuality stayed with him, especially when he would travel to schools outside of South Bend, such as Elkhart, Indiana.
“If I hang up a picture of my husband at my desk and me, what would happen? I was very much worried,” he explains, speaking about his now-husband of three years, Jason, who he met on the dating app OkCupid.
As an openly gay teacher (who keeps clean, polished fingernails to show support for other children who may want to do the same) from Indiana who now teaches at a school in the Philadelphia suburbs, William has had his fair share of negative encounters with parents and administrators.
Williams saw stark differences in the way parents reacted to his sexuality when comparing teaching in conservative Indiana to teaching in more liberal Philadelphia. Surprsingly, parents in Philadelphia are more blatantly homophobic than parents in Indiana, who were more hidden with their homophobia and showed that belief by reinforcing gender stereotypes onto their children.
“The strange thing was in Indiana I feel like I experienced it less than I do here in Philadelphia,” Williams says, explaining that those experiences taught him that liberal doesn't necessarily mean more inclusive.
“In Indiana, it wasn’t so much my sexuality. It was OK that I was gay to those parents, but did I have to let the boys play with dolls, crowns, and heels? Did I have to teach the kids about transgender children?" William shared, adding that it was “really bothersome.”
While teaching at a private school in Pennsylvania, Williams says one of his students' parents called corporate on him in reference to a recent Buzzfeed piece published about him and his TikTok videos. The parent allegedly said he was drinking in the classroom while filming the videos.
“In the videos I talked about being gay, and being Puerto Rican. They called corporate and said ‘I think Mr. Williams is drinking in the classroom.’ I was like what?!” Williams recalls, deeply offended by the wild accusations.
“I got called into the office at my school and they were like ‘You have to be more careful with what you post!’ I was like I hate to use this, but I’m the only male and queer teacher here, I think this is kind of homophobiacally driven!” he says, stating that he always films his TikTok videos at home and would never drink in the classroom.
But not everyone in the Pennsylvania school where Williams taught was homophobic. Most parents and educators were welcoming of Williams' sexuality.
“The parents probably went to their little country clubs and said, “Our kid’s teacher is GAY!”’ he says with a laugh, noting that in some ways, he feels like “a pet” or the token “gay BFF” teacher.
Williams says his TikTok career started from a family group chat.
“After my mom died, my siblings and I started a group chat to share memes and make each other laugh. We're a very tight-knit family, so it was a really difficult time for us,” he says, adding that some of the videos his siblings shared were from TikTok.
Williams tells us he shared a lot about his unique encounters as a teacher with his friends, and they pushed him to make a TikTok video.
“My brother-in-law was like ‘Tell, you need to do this, you would be good at this,” he says, adding that he was hesitant at first because he felt like he was only funny in person.
Williams made his first TikTok video in October of 2020. He posted the vid, titled “Conversations I’ve actually had as a PreK teacher,” on October 13, and it hilariously outlined the frustrating act of a teacher calling a parent to talk about their child. In it, Williams acted out calling a parent whose child dropped the f-bomb in class and is annoyed when the parent doesn’t want to talk about reprimanding his child, “Caroline,” (a fake name) for her actions.
“I was like, let's bite the bullet, let's see what happens,” Williams shares, reflecting on the fact that he wasn’t exactly technologically savvy with his first video on the platform. “I just filmed it all in one take. I didn’t even know you could trim the video. I knew NOTHING!”
He says the next day is when his whole life changed. “I woke up the next morning, and my brother-in-law was like, ‘Your video has 500,000 views!’”
Despite all the ups and downs of being a gay male teacher who is also a social media influencer, Williams says he doesn’t regret a thing because he knows he’s making a difference in these young children’s lives.
“If I can be a queer male teacher for them when they first start out, so they know it’s OK, that’s more important to me than being worried about being fired or parents looking me up and down for wearing nail polish,” he tells CafeMom.
Reflecting on his own time as a student in school, Williams says he had a hunch that some of his teachers were gay, but they never publically stepped forward to confirm their sexuality openly.
“My senior year of high school was a rough year for me, and only a couple of my teachers stepped forward for me,” he recalls. “I know it was probably difficult to be out, and they were probably worried about their jobs at the time, but I thought, ‘I need you.'”
William’s goal on TikTok is to amplify LGBTQ voices.
"I’m figuring out how to use my voice better and to own that I have this platform and not be embarrassed or downplay that," he says.
"Some people should have this platform that don’t,” Williams says, adding that his job as a TikTok star is to “pass the mic and talk” about topics relating to the LGBTQ community.
Williams now is back in school pursuing a degree in psychology to become a therapist for teachers. “My goal is to continue teaching but also to advocate for teachers in a way that isn’t confrontational with administrators and directors."
