Learning and speaking gay

From "Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy is a Pretty Queer Thing" by Susanne Luhmann (1998), discussing Rosello's essay "'Get out of here!' Modern Queer Language in the 1990's" (1994).

Mireille Rosello's equation of studying lesbian and gay material with learning a foreign language gets at some of the issues at stake for a pedagogy that is curious about the conditions of learning and how such learning might incite the proliferation of new identifications. [...] Language instruction, Rosello argues, must assume rather than condemn the students' ignorance. [...]
The language analogy might be further productive in disengaging teaching and learning queer studies from the notion of identity, deconstructing both the normalcy and its difference without disavowing moments of identification. The process of language acquisition acknowledges that all languages are acquires, that there is no 'natural' language, that a straight person can learn a gay idiom, and that gays speaking straight are bilingual, who, like "bilingual children of immigrants...can be both alienated and empowered by their double origin" (Rosello, 1994, p.160). By the same token, the analogy does not dismiss altogether hierarchical and political struggles over language and language instruction. Although languages are habitually taught by native speakers or by those with a native-like fluency, even native speakers are never a unified homogenous group. How a language is spoken varies greatly according to regional and geographically varying dialects.
According to Rosello, language instruction, much like teaching lesbian and gay material, has its most dangerous and powerful moment in the recognition of ignorance, or the students' refusal to see anything else but a superfluous language and an unimportant skill. Rosello's analogy of speaking and teaching gay avoids a judge-like mentality full of indignation about the students' ignorance. Instead, it offers a new set of questions: Why do some students acquire near-native fluency whereas others never identify the value of learning another language? How does learning, speaking and listening to a new language affect how one relates to one's mother tongue, one's own culture? Who do I become through listening and speaking another language? How is this process a form of risking one's self, for example in the moment when I am neither understood nor understand what is being said? How does the self respond to this breakdown of mastery of self? What kind of defense mechanisms are elaborated? What does this other language foreclose, or open up? What is at stake in not understanding? Who can I become through speaking and listening to another language?

I don't know if it's because of my own position as bilingual/having learned a language to near-fluency, but I find this parallel really helpful and insightful in a lot of ways. It does a really good job at challenging the idea that binaries are necessary for us to understand the world and asking questions.