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This article focuses on the ways in which a small group consisting mostly of Black queer youth makes sense of their use of language to assert agency in a world that is often heterosexist, homophobic, ageist, and racist. The author draws from the work of Gee and Anzaldúa to identify what youth call “Gaybonics,” as a Borderland Discourse that is intertwined with Ebonics. The author and youth worked together in a youth-run center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth to analyze the ways that these youth engaged in Gaybonics to elicit pleasure and subvert oppression, and, when their borders were violated, they shifted from this discourse to another to retaliate against hatred. When youth analyzed their use of Borderland Discourses, they came to understand the ways that they engage in such discourses to position themselves as agents and the power they can (and cannot) access by engaging in various discourses. The author asserts that youth need opportunities to explore such access to power through language, particularly in the margins, as conceptualized by hooks. Finally, the author calls for work with youth that not only supports their assertion of agency but also their efforts at activism.

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The authors argue for teaching queer‐inclusive English language arts (ELA). They report on a study that surveyed high school personnel across the United States, revealing that very few people in charge of ELA curricula value such inclusion. In response to these findings, the authors offer “images of the possible” in which texts and methods that could be used in queer‐inclusive ELA curricula are suggested. They advocate for teaching ELA that represents diverse people, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning, in a range of positionalities, as both insiders and outsiders in various texts. Such a curriculum is one way for all high school students to experience themselves amid “otherness,” or to experience the “other” in their midst. It is the vehicle for, and the echo of, a varied and varying society—a thesis‐antithesis dialectic that eschews synthesis. In order to accomplish this, teachers must educate students to examine and experience the multiple and mutable constituents of identity and culture, of which sexuality is a critical, but hardly constant, constituent.

Earlier research positioned queer students as victims, and more recent scholarship positions them as agents. This study works to recognize and learn from the multiple subject positions of these youth by documenting subtleties regarding the experiences and negotiations of gender rules and regulations. When youth claim multiple subject positions, they are better able to identify, name, and work against oppression. Educators need to strive to make schools spaces where all students can engage in story lines that position them, and in which they position themselves, in multiple and variable ways so that they are more able to work for social change.