MASON FUNK:

So just let me know when you're recording. Okay. Alrighty. Thank you. So Shana and I guess your name rhymes ... I read somewhere along the way that it rhymes with bananas. So it's Shanna Peeples.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. So do me a favor and start off by stating and spelling your first and last names.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

My name is Shanna Peeples, S-H-A-N-N-A P-E-E-P-L-E-S.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And please provide us with your date of birth and where you were born.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

It's 4/16/65 and I was born 50 miles North of here, Borger, Texas.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. And spell Borger for us, just for the record.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

B O R G E R.

MASON FUNK:

Alrighty. That means you just have the birthday a few days ago.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I did. I did. Yes. the first COVID free birthday. With the kids, since 2019, all of us together, in person. So yeah, it was really great.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. That must've felt good.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

It did.

MASON FUNK:

Where do your kids live? Just out of curiosity.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Actually, our son is not far from you. He's in Los Feliz, and 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

he is working on his second novel and then our other daughter is a social worker in Denton, which is outside of Dallas. And our youngest splits time between two different medical clinics. She's working towards her nurse practitionership. She's almost the one that went rogue, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

so to speak, of all of us, because she is in very definite healthcare world.

MASON FUNK:

You know, it's funny you mentioned that you have your kids, because in addition to being married to a therapist, my therapist's mom is a lesbian. Yeah, my husband's mom. Not my therapist's mom, I don't know if his mom is a lesbian or not, but my husband's mom also came out after being married, having a couple of kids and she's actually in the book of pride.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Cool.

MASON FUNK:

You can read about her, her name is Jan Edwards and she was an educator for decades.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

That's amazing.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. Yeah. She's 83 now. Very much like yourself, she has a little refrigerator magnet, I think it says, it's never too late to be who you want to be or who you were meant to be.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Exactly.

MASON FUNK:

So tell us about Borger and growing up. Give us a little flavor for what Borger, Texas is like, and what it was like growing up there?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Well, it's an interesting place.

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, sorry, just to interrupt. When you start, as opposed to saying, 'it'. Just pretend that we don't hear my question. Start with like, 'Borger, Texas'.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Gotcha. Borger, Texas is a refinery town in the middle of the Texas panhandle. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And for its time, it was an interesting place being a refinery town meant that it was one of the few places in the Texas panhandle, in rural communities, that attracted anyone that you might consider different, because of the petrochemical industry. So I went to school with people of all different ethnicities, identities 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and I'm very grateful for that. My father was in the oil and gas business, but not any part of the business that made us any money, really. It was definitely, it's BoomTown sense of self, it had a very checkered past, in that it had the first, and to my knowledge, only opium den in Texas that was busted up by the US Marshals in the 1920s.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

So it kind of kept that flavor of being an outlaw type of place to be while at the same time being hyper conservative. I always have remembered, one of my earliest memories is a billboard on the entrance to town that was from the John Birch society. And I did not know what that was for a long time, but I remember the words, it was like, get the US out of the godless UN. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

That was on one end of town. On the other end of town was a bait shop where you could buy guns and beer and bait and that sort of frames the ethos of Borger. But for me, I very much got the idea that even though there were differences that were tolerated in people, it was a very white space. It was a very male dominated space 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

with very rigid gender roles and expectations, like many places in Texas. I quickly realized that having any sort of like a tomboyish demeanor, which I had, was kind of looked down on. I was constantly being prodded to be more like a lady. Also knew from a couple of friends who later grew up to be gay men 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

that stepping out of any, sort of, gender role for yourself made you a target? So always I seem to seek out those types of folks for friends, and in high school, many of my friends were the gay boys, and they were a lifesaver for me. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Helping me look beyond what Borger, Texas was, and beyond like a job in the refinery. We would lip sync to Bette Midler's albums together. And I thought, someday, somehow we're all gonna get out of here and do something cool.

MASON FUNK:

You mentioned in your conversation with Tom, the story of this black boy, young black boy who gave you a present. Could you tell us that story?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

One of the defining stories for me, for many, many reasons, and probably why I do the work that I do now is, in first grade, Borger was having an uneasy time with integration. My first grade class was one of the first classes to be integrated. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

We had a Christmas party in my first grade classroom where everybody drew names, and Clarence drew my name. And I remember like this package that he brought for me and put under the little class Christmas tree that was this gorgeous copper paper. I thought that's gotta be something just amazing whatever's inside of it. And I was so excited to open it up and find that yes, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Clarence had given me like the most wished for thing that I knew I probably wouldn't get at home, which was a real makeup set. I was like, this is so cool. I, like, smiled at him. He smiled at me.  It was like this boy knows me so well. So I rushed home and tell my parents about this. And they are immediately angry. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

They said, "Who gave that to you?" I told them, and they said, "Oh, you can't accept gifts from black boys. They'll get ideas." There's a lot in those two sentences, but what I realized is that, A, I was not going to give it back, so I hid it under my bed and never told them, and B, it sort of let me know that 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

there were certain things I couldn't trust my parents with. And that is the people who I chose as friends. I think it was my first sense of really understanding that there was a line that I was crossing, and being okay with that. But it set me on this path of really seeing myself in opposition to my parents in the norms and everything that had been set out for me. Now, of course, I wouldn't have said that 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

when I was in first grade and seven years old, but as I look back, it's like, you know, it's a deep story for me.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. It sounds incredibly deep, and so interesting that even though you are going to go quite far in your life before you took the ultimate stand and came out as lesbian, you knew at some level that you had the capacity to rebel and to be who you were, 

MASON FUNK:

to choose your own friends, to determine your own actions, even at that age. Can you say a bit more, because I feel like that is so potentially inspiring to young people who are in, somehow, a similar space to what you were in. Can you just talk a bit more about what it felt like to know yourself on some level, even at that early age, even knowing that this was going to bring you into opposition with the dominant community around you?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

That's okay. What that felt like, for me, I think it's any instance of like boundary crossing. There is this sort of equal parts thrill and this equal parts fear, and it's like learning to walk that line. I think it was my first experience of learning how to walk that line. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

In a sense, understanding that if I was going to break with my parents, who for me, were Godlike, my parents seemed like everybody. I put their faces on everybody. And to do that meant that I was going to have to somehow be my own parent in a way. And so I sort of internalized 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

this sense of self that gave me permission. I don't know what other way to class it, except that a lot of it came out in writing. I started writing very early and a lot of the things that I wrote were these like validating messages to myself. Now that I look back at it, writing my name and writing what I was going to do and be was my way of writing myself into another life.

MASON FUNK:

That's cool. We're going to get to the literature in a little bit here. I also want to reference and pay tribute to another teacher we interviewed, named Betsy Parsons, in Maine, who was an English teacher and has since passed, very sadly. We interviewed her in that first summer of 2016, and the power of literature, and we're gonna circle back to that. We could talk for hours. I was an English major, so ...

MASON FUNK:

Well, let me look back at my questions. So your parents divorced and as you described, it was operatic and your grandparents became a safe haven, but also like an even more tradition-bound version of what was acceptable, what was unacceptable? 

MASON FUNK:

Can you just kind of walk us through the divorce, and your grandparents, and kind of where that brought you in your life in terms of your horizons shrinking. Safety, but shrunk horizons.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

My parents' divorce was operatic and operatic, and the fact that this is a small town and everybody knows everybody's business. And everyone certainly did know our business to the point 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

that I have distinct memories of being in the grocery store and over hearing people talk about my mother. And then later on hearing my mother be very upset with the fact that my dad passed out in the front yard and everybody would be able to see it and know it, and what a shame it had brought on the family. I internalized the sense of being watched and sort of policed in a way from them 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

that really became exacerbated when I went to live with my grandparents, because my grandparents have this ... Well, my grandmother -- who was very deeply religious in a fundamentalist Baptist church and made sure we were in that church every time the doors were open -- sort of took that to a whole other level with this phrase that she would say to me all the time, I may not see what you're doing, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

but God does. And so this sort of sense of, like, spy all the time, that there was constant surveillance. I think I really internalized that, and that was really difficult for me to deal with. So it was great for me to have on one hand, this sense of, okay, here's this self apart from like everybody else and what everybody wants for me, but at the same time, like really internalizing that story 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and that narrative about someone who's looking at everything you're doing and disapproving and disappointed for everything that you do. So my grandparents were really rigid on, like, we ate at a certain time and you were expected to dress a certain way. And there were certain chores that had to be done. So while there was stability and certainty with my grandparents, there was almost a kind of 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

monastic type of existence with them that really communicated to me that sameness was safety and to the amount that you could fit in, and say the right words and look the right way, so to speak, was the level that you could be safe. So this whole idea of starting to be very conscious of how I looked and making sure that I passed 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

as what I was supposed to be and looked like a tiny Republican wife was what I really internalized.

MASON FUNK:

In your high school, I don't know how big, it was probably pretty small, like, everybody probably knows everybody. So who were you? Like, how would kids have described you in that social milieu? 

MASON FUNK:

Were you the popular girl? Were you the, you know, whatever version, the class clown, whatever those kinds of stereotypical archetypes are. Who were you as you walked across the quad, so to speak?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I like to describe those two years as too religious for the odd and too odd for the religious. That was me.

MASON FUNK:

Can you start over and say it exactly, but just say, I like to describe my high school years.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Okay. I like to describe my high school years as too odd for the religious and two religious for the odd. Not really fitting in with any sort of box, which, in some ways, was kind of cool because it meant that I could pretty much get along with most people. I was the co-editor of my school paper, so I was always sort of seen as 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

somebody who would find their way into different places and ask a lot of questions about what was going on and write something about it later. And I was also the person that people asked to help them with their essays. And then later I realized that people would pay me to write love poems for them, that they could then give whoever they were crushing on. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I would never reveal that I was like the ghost writer of this poem. I made gas money doing that. That's the kind of person I was in high school. I was somebody who really did try to find all of the artsy kids to hang out with, certainly. But I tried to make myself comfortable with everybody 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because, you know, maybe there were potential customers for love poetry, but also, I think, I mean, it served my purposes as a writer myself and as a journalist at that time, a baby journalist.

MASON FUNK:

I love that story. [inaudible] That's really, that is so brilliant. I want to make a feature film about that one story. 

MASON FUNK:

You, at a small town Texas high school, writing love poetry, your classmates. Did you write them on behalf of both girls and boys, or just --?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Absolutely. If I think about where were my first inklings that I might be gay, it was in those poems. I found that it was so much easier for me to write for boys who wanted to give a poem to girls. I could so easily write these like very gushing

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 love poems about girls and how beautiful they were. And I always noticed, why is this so easy for me to do? It really did start to help me give words to or a name for what I felt for these same girls that they loved. I did too.

MASON FUNK:

That's genius. That's wonderful. It reminds me of another thing that you mentioned to Tom, that you somehow, and this is shocking, 

MASON FUNK:

you managed not to internalize any shame about your sexuality, whatever you knew about it, then as you figured it out, as it became clear, you discovered you hadn't turned your sexuality into something like a dirty sin that God was watching and shrieking in horror. Can you talk about that? I mute myself too quickly. Sorry. Explore like, 

MASON FUNK:

who knows how that happened? How you avoided that type of shame.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

As I think about how was I able to resist, like internalizing shame around my sexuality, I think back to that story of hiding that Christmas present under my bed like, this is the one thing that's mine and realizing that there was a lot of things that I had to give up to be okay or seen as okay. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And then there were some things I was not willing to give up. And in a sense, I had been made to feel a lot of shame around my parents' divorce because they were one of the first people in our small town to be divorced, and hearing all of those things about my parents and my dad was developing really severe alcohol problem. There was a lot of shame that came with that as well. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Then all of the religious shame that, sort of, is heaped on you for just existing, and in the fundamentalist conception of God. I thought, this is the one thing that like, I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to give this part of myself up. I think because I knew and loved gay boys, and knew there was nothing wrong with them. On some level, I think they helped me to own that in myself too. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

This is our small, like good thing that we're not gonna let anybody take from us. They can take everything else, but they're not gonna take that.

MASON FUNK:

I love it. I just love that story. Especially if you kind of magnetically being attracted to the gay boys, finding them and hanging out with them. Are you still in touch with any of those friends from that time?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Sadly, one of those boys, and we were each other's dates often, he died of AIDS. I remember it was really depressing. That was at the time when it was so laden with secrecy and silence and shame, and so, he was not even mourned properly. But I've sort of carried him with me always. As far as some of the other ones, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

we've lost touch. When I went back to my last high school reunion, which I think was the 30th one, we were able to just immediately pick up where we had left off. That was really great. It's like the community that we had formed so long ago really wasn't time bound or place bound. That was really a cool thing. But I really haven't kept in touch with those guys.

MASON FUNK:

Okay, great. All right, let me see where ... Okay. You mentioned a novel that I've never heard of, called The Price of Salt. I definitely have heard of the author, Patricia Highsmith, I guess, wrote it under a pseudonym. But tell us, because this gets into the role of the importance of books. Tell us about that book, when you discovered it, what it meant to you. And maybe from there, you can kind of just talk about just how impactful it was just as a piece of literature.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Patricia Highsmith's book, The Price of Salt is as a book I stumbled on by being in the library, in the school library, a lot, because I was a reader and somebody who really loved books and found that the only mirrors for myself to use Rudine Bishop's term of windows 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and mirrors were in books. And that book was the first time I had ever seen this experience that I was having, falling in love with another girl, a girl falling in love with another girl, and the fact that it was written at a time before me made me feel very normal, like, okay, there is a place and a time 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

where people did this, so this is not unusual, for me to be this way. It was very much what Herman Melville calls the shock of recognition. I really have held onto that as a teacher and in any other work I've done, trying so hard to put those stories forward, even when I worked for the newspaper. How can I make other people have that shock of recognition? 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

See their own experiences reflected in words, because in many ways, at that time, the culture did not show us any gay people, except gay people as psychopaths or gay people as hopeless cases or gay people as suicides. It didn't show us anyone who was just living their life or doing great things. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

So seeing that, just a simple love story in a novel was really empowering.

MASON FUNK:

It brings to mind, I was a reader as well, and I subscribed to book of the month club and you got the catalog and you got to choose. I was born in '58,

MASON FUNK:

so I'm older than you are. And once upon a time, there was a book called Consenting Adults, and it was a novel written by a woman. I think it might've been a mom whose son, in fact, had come out as gay, because it was told from a mom's point of view about her son -- kind of told from both their points of view. I don't think there's any great work of fiction, but hearing your story about The Price of Salt, because it was huge to me, it was huge. It ended up under my bed, I could not let ... 

MASON FUNK:

My mom later revealed that she found it, but she didn't know what to do with that information, so she never said anything. But it was similarly impactful for me. I'm curious now, like I need to get on Amazon and see if I can find a copy. Certain scenes in that novel still are in my memory.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah. It makes me want to see it too. I'm also thinking about one of the only time that I saw a movie that had two women 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and it was a movie that my mother loved, which is the children's hour Shirley McClain and Audrey Hepburn. I mean, who couldn't fall in love with Audrey Hepburn? So the deck was a little bit stacked there. But I just remember Shirley McClain, the way that she just fell apart at the end. And the message that came through loud and clear is this is the worst thing you can be.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 It makes me always wonder if my mother sort of had some sense of who I was and was showing me this in the same way that my grandmother talked about God being able to see me all the time and hellfire and damnation and all of that, if this was my mother's version of that too. It's like, yeah, your grandmother is going to give you this religious viewpoint, here's the secular viewpoint. The culture is telling you that this is the worst thing that you can be.

MASON FUNK:

You haven't mentioned any siblings. Do you have other kids in your family?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I am the oldest of four, and I fit every one of those oldest child stereotypes and tropes. I can have some compassion for my parents in some ways because I was the trainer model. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

My experience was a lot different than my siblings. And in some ways I was the only one of us to have had parents that were together. They experienced a completely different way of being and because our home was so chaotic and because my parents were so dysfunctional, a lot of how they relate to me is as a parental figure. So in many ways they almost don't feel like siblings to me, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and it's weird to say because there's five years between us, they feel like children. Because I very much felt responsible for them being okay. They had had a pretty rough time as well, as I think about how we grew up. And then later how it was hard for them 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

when I did finally come out. It was really difficult for my brother who was deeply religious. But it was my sister who was the first one to sort of come back around and be very accepting and open, and now is extremely supportive. They both are, but it took him quite a bit longer. There was a period of time when they, my entire family, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

did not speak to me. And that was after I first came out. They did not speak to me for five years.

MASON FUNK:

We're jumping forward, but when was that? We'll get there again, but when did this happen, this kind of coming out where your family knew, virtually everybody knew? How old were you when that happened?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I was 30 when I first came out and it was not that I came out by saying, "Oh, I'm gay to anyone." It was something that my mother discovered and was horrified by. She came home early, I was staying with her because I had just gotten a divorce from my husband

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and was staying with her as I was finishing up my associates degree here, and just trying to find my footing. Had found a girlfriend at college, and my mother came home early and realized, Oh my God, that's not your friend. I just remember her saying, "Oh my God, you're in love with her." 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And the look on her face was like that it was the worst thing that she could have ever seen. It was such a mix of disgust and contempt and revulsion and rejection. I mean, it cut super deep on me. And from that she broadcast it. Like, this is the worst thing, everybody needs to know that she's doing this, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

so everybody can bring the full weight of the family's moral judgment on this, to bear on her and make her stop, make her be normal again. From that, that's where all of that distance came. In and among that was the other really awful thing. That girlfriend that I was with at that time,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 it's because of her that I was able to break away from a really dysfunctional relationship with my mother. So, in some ways, that was a gift. The second thing was she was the one who encouraged me to go to the doctor when I was not feeling very well and came to find out that I had cervical cancer. And my mother worked in healthcare. So she worked at this hospital that I had to go and get treatment in. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

She came into my room right after I got out of surgery and said, "God did this to you because you're queer and he wants you to stop." And I just remember thinking, where is bottom for you, that you won't stop saying these terrible things? 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And the only thing that helped me get through that, besides the fact that I had brilliant, fantastic coworkers and friends, at the newspaper, was that one of those brilliant coworkers and friends had also been diagnosed with cancer at the same time that I had, only, he was straight and we were the same age and he was an elder in his Baptist church. His kids were the same ages as my kids, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and he was getting sicker and I was getting better. Terry died and I lived, and I had a lot of guilt from that. But I was able to ask my mother, if this is your argument, then I would think that God would take me not Terry. So, that was a really severe and painful break with a lot of things, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

for me, that marked this sort of boundaries that I think about, of when I think back to what are the sort of the bookends of my experience of being an out person. That's one of them, for sure.

MASON FUNK:

Another thing we share in common is I also came, even here in Los Angeles, from very religious ... Well, I had a high school conversion experience, 

MASON FUNK:

so that's a whole different ball of wax. But subsequently ended up having these conversations with my younger brother when I came out, or when push came to shove, you know, just God loves me, just Jesus loves me. And I've had those arguments and it's just so frustrating, because you have a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of God, the nature of Jesus, who Jesus was in the world. It's amazing how two people can see the same figure, 

MASON FUNK:

Jesus, and see a totally different person, depending on their own agenda, so to speak. Anyway, been there, done that a little bit. I'm curious, what did your mom say when you said, "Mom, I'm getting better and Terry is dying or has passed. I don't imagine that probably changed her mind.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

My mother didn't change her mind from anything. Nothing convinced her even all these years later, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

she loves my partner, my spouse who's now my legal wife, she loves her. But she still sort of views it as this, we're friends who live together or, I mean, it's very hard. She said to my partner, it was very hurtful to my partner. So in this process, the teacher of the year process is a long drawn out series of interviews 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and essays, and these sort of like contests where you are the person that's chosen from a certain field. My children call it the hunger games. It felt a lot like that. My mother was at the one for the region here, it's all the 26 counties of the Texas panhandle, and my partner turned to my mother and said, "One day she's going to be brave enough

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because of this experience to totally be who she is as a teacher and as a woman and as a mother and as a partner." She said, "One of these days, she'll be able to say my name from the stage, like all of these other teachers are doing." My mother turned to her and said, "She'll never do that." She said, "She will never, ever acknowledge that." And my partner said,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 "I don't think you know your daughter very well." And she said, "Well, they'll never legalize that. That will never happen." And of course, it was like, the very next year, it was legalized. So yeah, that's kind of where that broke, any sort of semblance of us ever being seen at least by my mother as a valid couple.

MASON FUNK:

Well, it sounds amazingly, I mean, just devastating, for the record. I'm glad you were able to supersede that in the sense that you can tell the story. I'm sure it does not cause you pain, but you have your partner. But it's painful. There's just no two ways. So, I'm keeping an eye on the time, 

MASON FUNK:

I want to do a little bit of storytelling around just how you made your way into journalism. And then spend a little time, because I know you had an amazing group of colleagues at the newspaper. Make sure to mention what the name of the newspaper was and how you decided at some point to become a teacher, because even with Tom, you didn't really go through that choice.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah. Happy to do that. How and why I chose journalism 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

is, my high school experience made me enjoy stories. I was never a very ... I wouldn't say I was a good reporter. I was an okay reporter. I was much more of a story finder and a storyteller. I loved finding people's stories and really working with people long enough to find that experience of theirs that maybe they had even discounted. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I had a bunch of different jobs, trying to figure out exactly where I fit and journalism felt like it fits. So when I came back to that role, after doing other jobs, like being a disc jockey. When I was married to my husband, he was in the Navy in LA and I was a pet babysitter for rich people in Beverly Hills. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I tried all of these different things. I came back. When we came back to Texas, I got the job at the Amarillo Globe News and became this feature writer. And my big claim to fame on that is Oprah Winfrey sued a huge cattle producer here for ... Or he sued her for defamation of the beef industry. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Rather than settle, she said, I'm going to move my entire operation from Chicago to Amarillo and I'll see you in court. And so she was here in Amarillo doing the Oprah Winfrey show for three months, and I was assigned to follow her. That was just basically my assignment, find all of these weird little stories that had to do with Oprah comes to town. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

At the end of this time, I had done every way I could to suck up to her personal assistant to try to, you know, I knew when the time come I was going to like, please let me interview her. We got to the end of it, and they were like, Oh, she's giving no interviews whatsoever. I dramatically said, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

"Then fine, I will get an interview with the guy that sued her and that'll be on the front page of the Texas associated press wire. And that's fine." Like so dramatic, and stormed out of the newsroom. My colleagues were able to find me later, because like 10 minutes after I did that, the assistant called back and said, Oprah says, she'll talk to Shanna, and they had to come and find me, like, throw my children out of the backseat of my car

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 and send me on my way to interview Oprah. Which was incredible. I got to walk past all of the satellite trucks and everything. And she talked to nobody except me. And then she left Amarillo and a week later, talked to Diane Sawyer. Our interview ran and it was really cool. My time at the paper was a really fun and exciting time of getting to do big stories like that. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

But then getting to do really small amazing stories about, like a couple who'd been married 75 years, and the wife was in the Alzheimer's unit, and very beautiful, touching stories. I loved that, and I loved the fact that I could go into schools and find these cool stories with students. Unfortunately, because I was good at telling stories, they often sent me when they wanted to do these really depressing stories.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 I was the person that was sent when, for example, we had a horrible tragedy here where a woman lost her husband and three sons, right before Christmas, on the Lake. They'd gone duck hunting on the Lake, and she lost all of them. And they wanted me to get an interview with her and it felt extremely ghoulish and awful. And at the same time, there was another well-known case in North Amarillo where a child had gone missing.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 And all of that sort of like coalesced for me into, I did not want to write stories about people in that way. I wanted to somehow affect those stories at a different level, and so to speak, like, turnover authorship to young people, of their own lives. And now that I reflect on it, I think I was trying to do for them what I had found for myself, which was to read and write my way into a different life. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I went from the newsroom to the classroom, with no student teaching, which is not something I would ever, ever tell anybody to do, but because I was on an emergency teaching certificate and went to a school that was hard to staff, I was able to get a job without student teaching. So that's how I became a teacher.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. There's lots of stories within that story. 

MASON FUNK:

I don't want to leave the newspaper and I have to check my notes here because I want to just ... There's somewhere in my notes about the colleagues you had at the newspaper. I'm not quite sure where this is in relation to your coming out, but I don't want to lose that piece, even though we don't have to spend or should have spent a ton of time on it, 

MASON FUNK:

but I want to tip the hat to your colleagues and to your coming out process, at the newspapers.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah. Thank you for that, Mason. Yes. One of the things about the newspaper, beyond the fact that it gave me these experiences, is it gave me out colleagues.

MASON FUNK:

Sorry, give us the name of the newspaper [inaudible].

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I worked at the Amarillo Globe News, and that the 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

folks at the Amarillo Globe News became my chosen family. When I had a surprise birthday party shortly after coming out, it was my chosen family at the newspaper that threw that party for me. And they were my role models of people who were just living their lives as gay people. For whom it was not a tragedy or a trauma or 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

anything other than this is the way to be. My editor, Vivian Salazar, was one of the first out people that I ever knew, and knew that we had some sort of correspondences in that she came from a very traditional Mexican family, and so she was very much the boundary crosser too, to be a lesbian Latina. She was a great mentor, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

is still a great mentor and friend to me. She reflected over and over and over, like, there's nothing wrong with who you are. You are exactly who you're supposed to be and I'm proud of you. If your mother can't see how great you are, I see how great you are. She's the one who came up to the hospital, I called her in tears when my mother told me that terrible, like, you got this because God hates you. I called Vivian, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and she's the one that came up there and sat in my hospital room, like a little guard dog. Like, if your mom comes back, she's going to have to deal with me and she's not going to like dealing with me. So my colleagues there were very, very protective of me and very supportive of me. Even our publisher, who my mother knew, was friends with the publisher's wife. She was always talking to him saying, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

"I can't believe you have her there." "I can't believe you let people essentially be openly gay at the newspaper." And he would just laugh and say, "I don't really care. I just care that she files her stories on time. That's a personal problem that you have, not a problem I have." And so I very much found the courage and the support 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

to really be who I was because of the folks at the newspaper.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Vivian Salazar, I've noted her name. We're going to circle back about some of the names, including the other two people. Because there may be some potential interviews for us there. So I'm always [inaudible]. 

MASON FUNK:

Maybe now's a good time to say, Hey, do you want to stretch? Do you want to take a mini break? Because then I want to talk about your teaching, all the teacher of the year and so on. I'm very curious, you didn't cover this topic, who these people were that you were teaching and why they made your teacher of the year. So do you want to take a little break now or?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah, let's see. Let's do a real quick, we'll do a break. Want to do like a 5 minutes.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, let's just do five and be back here at, literally, top of the hour. Kristie, you can cut the recording and we'll be back here in five.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Great. Thank you.

MASON FUNK:

Okay. Thank you.

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MASON FUNK:

Alrighty. Well, welcome back, Shanna, and we should resume. Kristie, let us know when you're speeding. Speeding is such an old school. Speeding digitally. Welcome back. I think I want to start with, there was an important story of when you started teaching. I had that as 2002, and you were told by your coworkers and your education professor

MASON FUNK:

that if you were out as a teacher, you'd be fired, you would never work. Can you talk us through that? This is kind of your entry into the profession.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yes. So it was quite a bit different going from sort of the loving embrace of the newsroom to the realities of being in public schools in Texas, certainly, but I think just in the wider public education world at that time. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

In 2002, it still was not an acceptable thing to be an out teacher. I was told in no uncertain terms by my education law professor, when I'd gone back to get my teacher certification, he said, "Look, you may have been out as a reporter and they may have thought that was okay, but that is not going to be seen as okay wherever you teach, in Texas.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And so I'm telling you, you better never let anybody think that you're gay." And he goes, "You're lucky, you were divorced. So you can just keep saying you're divorced and everything. They don't need to know any different." He was like, "And you don't look gay, so you're fine. Just don't ever put your girlfriend's picture out. Don't ever mention it. If kids ever ask you, deny it. Because they'll fire you for it. They'll say it's for something else, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

but they'll fire you because you came out." And I received that message very loud and clear. I thought, okay, I can't mention the person I love if I want to do the work that I love. It became very much of a balancing between how I, sort of, authentically own that identity, but keeping it a closeted identity 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

to do this work that I felt was the center of my heart, and in like a true vocation. Even when I began teaching and had kind of like asked, in a sort of sideways way about like, Oh, do they hate gay people or something like that? And was told, "Oh yeah, this district does not like gay people at all." In fact, in the nineties, they had done 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

a literal purge of gay teachers, I was told by my colleagues. They said, yeah, so nobody ever ... I mean, we're pretty sure there are gay teachers, but nobody knows who they are. And so that is the atmosphere that I taught in. And I taught in all Title 1 schools, which means these are schools with high poverty and typically high homeless population,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

transients, just kids who move around a lot. Whether those are migrant students or whether they're just students who, because of poverty, they move addresses a lot. So that was the type of atmosphere that I taught in. On the one hand, feeling this very deep need for education, for positive education experiences 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and role models. And on the one hand, this fear of like, can't feed my kids, can't pay the mortgage if I don't have a job,

MASON FUNK:

Couple of follow-up questions. One is with that education law professor, how did you come to have that conversation with him? Is it because you asked him or how else did it come about?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I'm trying to think of the exact way that my education law professor was able to communicate that to me. I may have just asked and said, "Look, I am in a long-term relationship with another woman" ... I may have asked something about healthcare, and said, "Do you think I'll be able to get health care like I was able to at the newspaper?" And that opened this whole, like, no, never say anything.

MASON FUNK:

The partner at that time, is this your current partner?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

No, it wasn't. But did I see any difference between, I mean Diane, my partner now, and I have been together since 2006, so it wasn't very long into teaching.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

She's only ever known me as a teacher. I mean, so much of that still held true. And even in some senses for her as a therapist. She faced some similar sort of pressure to not let people in this very conservative area know that because it might affect the therapeutic relationship. So she had some similar messaging, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

but nothing as bright and bold as I received as a teacher.

MASON FUNK:

That reminded me that we didn't talk about your marriage and your divorce, and specifically the threat that was levied against you, that you would never see your children, they would be taken from you. That's such an important story that women have experienced all through the decades.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah. I have had not much thought about what lesbians of my era, my demographic cohort have gone through until I sat inside Tim McCarthy's class at Harvard Kennedy school. He had his very first class called Queer Nation, and I was, I think, the oldest, because I think I'm older than Tim, but not by much. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I was the oldest person in the class and I can remember we read this historical evidence of how lesbians had their children taken from them simply because they were lesbians. And these younger students in there were like, that's crazy, I can't believe that. And I was like, well, you should believe it because I was threatened with that, but my partner literally had her child taken from her because of that, that was the only reason that she lost custody. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And it was extremely traumatic for her and for her son. And for me, I can remember some of the last conversations I had with my then husband, I told him that I didn't care who he wanted to be with, he could go and be with whomever, and we could somehow try to be amicable about this. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I did not cite the fact that I felt that my identity as a lesbian was going to keep me from being married, that's not why we got a divorce. It was for many other reasons. And so I never brought that up. I never said that to him or anything, but he said, "I'll tell you one thing, if you take up with some woman after you leave me, you can say goodbye to kids, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because you're not going to ever have those kids and be with some woman. I'm not going to have some wife of mine be a lesbian." I was like, first of all, I wouldn't be that wife of yours. I would no longer be your wife. But it was so threatening to him to even think, that he automatically made that threat. Of course, he did not follow through with it. Even though my in-laws really didn't like it, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and communicated that to my daughters over and over and over again, they could see, sort of, the reality of being with me and knew that that was just the fact that they probably weren't happy with me because we got a divorce in general. So yeah, that was a very scary time where everything felt very precarious because there were no protections for that. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

There were no protections for you if somebody took issue with me being an openly gay teacher, I could easily lose my job. There were no protections for me if my husband would have, at that time, decided to sue me for custody. Strictly for that, I could have lost my children. I definitely lost my family for a while, and in a sense, lost my church. So it was a lot of loss to contend with, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

even as it felt like you've received, sort of, the gift of your true identity and knowing who you really are, and you do build and find a beautiful chosen family from that, but man, those initial losses, they were hard. They were very tough.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Well, thank you for taking us through that period. So you get into the classroom, as you say, you transitioned from the Newsroom to the classroom -- love that phrase -- and you start doing something that is very impactful, clearly, because otherwise we wouldn't be talking to you. Before we get to the process of becoming teacher of the year, what were you doing 

MASON FUNK:

that was making an impact on young people's lives? What made you different? What gave you joy? What did you witness and experience in the class?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

When I think about starting my teaching career in a school, that frankly scared me. It was the school I knew about from being a reporter. That scared me, because it was the "bad school". 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

When I decided to go apply to be a teacher, I remember going to human resources and applying and him saying, "Well, before we tell you what jobs we have open, we'd like to know where you see yourself." And I said, "Well, I see myself as a 12th grade, AP literature teacher. I think I could, maybe, do that job. I don't think I could go lower than that." And he laughed and said, "Well, I hope you see yourself as a seventh grade writing teacher at the 'bad school',

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because that's the only opening we have." I just remember like, this sinking feeling like, "Oh my God, that's the school that scares me." It was a hard first week of teaching. I almost grabbed the phone to call my editor to get my job back, Like numerous times, thinking, I've made a terrible mistake. What the hell was I thinking? I'm not a teacher. And there was a lot of this distance 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

between me and them. I came with what I thought was the teacher that was supposed to show up, like wore like these, sort of, off the rack, like ill-fitting Dillard suits, business suits. It was terrible. All it did was create much more distance between me and my students. Then I thought, well, I'll quit at Christmas. That'll be a graceful exit. They'll find somebody, they'll have two weeks away from me, it won't be a thing. But at Christmas, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I really just couldn't let this thought go. I read this story by a Texas writer named Sandra Cisneros, and she wrote this story called Eleven. She, in this story has this fantastic image where she says, "Were all the ages we've ever been like rings inside a tree trunk." And I loved that phrase. She said, so the part of you that's hurting might be like the five-year-old part of you. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Or the part that's crying might be the three-year-old part of you. And I thought, I wonder if that's a lot of the awkwardness that I'm feeling because I'm working with 12-year-olds. And so when I counted back in my little rings, so to speak, I remember what it was like to be 12. I remembered that my life was awful at that time, and it was painful and traumatic, and that what I was seeing in my students was what I had lived in some ways.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Of course, I could never have lived what they did, because many of them were black and Brown students. So they had an added trauma on top of traumas we shared. I remember thinking, that's why I'm so distant from them. I have taught them as if I am better than them or superior to them, I have not taught them out of the 12 year old traumatized kid that survived that.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

When I came back, I determined to teach much more authentically, and to try to remember that. That changed a lot of the relationship between me and students in general. And it became very much a sense of me learning to love the students in a way that I wanted somebody to love me. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Like my own Seventh grade teacher, Ruth Belton, had shown me. Where she could look past what I came to the classroom as and into who I might be. And she, sort of, spoke life into me and taught me this thing that I've never forgotten. And it's the deepest lesson, which is, you have to love somebody before you can teach them because it's such a vulnerable process to be in a school,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 in a class, because you have to like, not know things, but it's also a vulnerable position to be a teacher and to love someone who can hurt you. If I think back to, okay, well, then why me? What was the thing? I'm not sure because I know many people do the kinds of things I did and do it better than I did. I think it was just a willingness for me 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

to share that and to try to amplify my students' experience. So many of my students were seen as not the ideal student. I worked with a lot of students with learning disabilities. And then when I went on to the same high school where it fed into, I taught refugee students. I've taught students who were transitioning out of jail. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I taught adults who came back trying to get their diploma, in our night school program. I taught students, many of whom had failed their test like seven or more times, and were not seen as like the kind of kid that you want in your class because they don't make you look good. You will always and forever be branded a failure by your scores because these are not kids that make you look good, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

so to speak. And I helped my students see all the things that were right with them, all the things that were good about them. Not all the things that were wrong and the problems and all of that. I also wanted them to see themselves as people who could affect their communities. One of the things I wrote, because what you have to do for teacher of the year is write a bunch of essays.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 I wrote about a group of my students who decided that they wanted, through this whole long process and things we did in class, to create a bilingual healthcare workshop for people who did not speak English and who had never been connected with medical care. And none of them were interested in my class. I only helped take what they were interested in and used, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

sort of, the protocols of an English language classroom to help them do this work. But they were able to connect women who'd never been seen by a doctor to get mammography, and those services, diagnostic services. And we know that there's at least one woman who they found in malignancy and were able to connect her to treatment. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

That, to me, was the potential in my students. And I was so proud to showcase that and foreground that, and say, "These students are amazing and they should never be discounted because of where they live or what language they speak or what their citizenship status is or their documentation status is, or their country of origin." 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

See them for the amazing people that they are in the incredible ability that they carry with them to even survive what they've survived.

MASON FUNK:

It's so interesting, as an organization, at OUTWORDS, we're going through a training process right now for what I'm calling a trauma-informed interviewing techniques. We did one two-hour session about two weeks ago, 

MASON FUNK:

we're doing the second two-hour session tomorrow. And the trainer is a personal friend. She talks about seeing people as repositories of trauma or seeing them as examples of resilience. And what we reflect back to people will help them shape their own sense of themselves. So you can focus on the trauma and sort of stay there, or, as you did, you can focus on their resilience and their strengths and use that as a way of empowering them. So that's really, really, really interesting 

MASON FUNK:

for the record. I want to make sure we namecheck these schools, if it's okay to. You mentioned the middle-school and you mentioned the high school. Are those the main schools where you taught them? Just give us a little overview. Like, I taught at this school, for this many years, and then we moved on to that school for X many years.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yes. I think that's a beautiful thing that you're doing with the trauma-informed. I just have to just reflect to you one last thing. So when my seniors at Palo Duro high school 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

would leave me, one of the last things that I did was I read them two books. One was The Lorax and one was Hansel and Gretel. The reason I read Hansel and Gretel is because it's sort of like my deep story. It is the diamond that I hold because that story foregrounds the ability of children to take their own initiative and their own agency 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and for children to be their own heroes and fight their own monsters. And I would give that to them and say, this is the story I want to sort of tuck inside your backpack as you leave me. So you'll always remember, you can face the monster, you can defeat the monster and you can find your way out of the forest. You can do this, you have the tools to do it. And I started that story when I began teaching middle school at Horace Mann middle school, where I taught for six years 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and then transitioned with my students that year up to the high school that it fed into which is Palo Duro high school. That's the school that got the attention for me being there for teacher of the year and everything,

MASON FUNK:

Just for the record, could you spell that? The name of the high school

SHANNA PEEPLES:

It's Palo Duro. So it's P-A-L-O D-U-R-O high school.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Okay. Well, thank you for that. That's paints a brilliant image and portrait of you and your classroom. I love the idea of you transitioning older. So that means you kind of followed one group of kids all the way through, or accompanied them. Give us, if you wouldn't mind, just an overview of the succession of events that led to you being named, if I'm not mistaken, you were named national teacher.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yes.

MASON FUNK:

So just give us like, the bullet points of what happened from the first time that you ever heard that your own district might nominate you until the pinnacle when you were like going for coffee with President Obama.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

So the series of hoops that you jumped through as teacher of the year, it's basically this recurring process of interviews

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 that you do with panels of different stakeholders in education, which even starts at the district level and you write essays, answering various prompts about, tell us about a great lesson, what's your message to the world about teaching and learning and, you know, really easy things like that. You go through this whole process of that, at the campus level, at the district level, at the regional level, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and Texas has 20 regions. Each region sends two teachers to the state competition, so there's 40 people there. Which is still teeny, when you consider that Texas has 350,000 teachers. So to find out that I was Texas teacher of the year was stunning to me. A, because hardly anybody from my part of Texas were an afterthought to most of Texas in the panhandle,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

had ever been at that level. And also when I thought about just the sheer numbers and thought about Houston and Dallas and San Antonio and all of that, it was incredible and I loved it. And everyone that is their state teacher, and even if they're a territory like the Virgin Islands or Guam, or the Northern Mariana Islands, they all put a teacher of the year forward. Every year, there's a cohort. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

You might have 55 different people in the running, and from those 55, the same sort of process happens. And they pick four people as finalists. When they called me and let me know, I was a finalist, I was actually working in the night school and I couldn't really process it. And I remember like putting the phone down and coming back over and working with my students and they were like, what's wrong with your face? And I was like, what do you mean? They're like,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

there's something wrong with your face. You look weird. I thought, Oh wow. I just said, "Oh, there may be a teacher thing coming up beyond Texas." And they're like, huh. And it was my students who first were like, we want to cheer for you, but we're cheering that you're going to leave us. While we're so proud of you and we want you to win 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because you're one of us, we don't want to cheer you going away. And so that was hard. I was a finalist and know that typically it is very hard to come back to the same place where you started from. Once the national process, and it was quite the interview process. They called me and said, you are the one 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

that we chose as national teacher, but you can't tell anybody about it because we have to keep it secret because we have to coordinate with the White House and all this other stuff. And it felt like them saying, okay, here's this helium balloon. We want you to swallow it and act like you don't have a helium balloon inside you. So I knew that I had been chosen, but I couldn't tell anybody for six weeks and that's quite the secret to hold. But in the meantime they get all of this stuff ready. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And there's all these contracts and things that have to be worked out and all of this. And it culminates in this big reveal on national television, which it was CBS their morning show that I actually was revealed to be that. And then the next day was the Rose Garden where you go to see the president. The president's done this since the 1950s,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and Texas had never had a national teacher of its own. We had a teacher, one year. But it was the one year in 1957, they couldn't make up their mind, they had two teachers that had to share. So this was the first time since 1957, that somebody from Texas had been there. So it was really cool. They planted blue bonnets in the Rose garden and which is the state flower of Texas. So it was really nice. It's this gorgeous spring day,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 and I was able to bring my partner and our three kids, and one of my former students who was able to leave college and be there. Just amazing. They talked to me, right before I went up and did this speech that you're supposed to do with the president where, "Oh, by the way, no pressure, everything you say goes into the national archives." They said, "Before you get up there and do that,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 the president would like to take you to tea, if that's alright." And I remember thinking, if that's alright? I mean, that's crazy, of course, like whatever. I was like, sure thinking, that's probably not going to happen. And they said, "Well, we don't know if the secret service, not happy with it, but it might happen, so just be prepared." That's exactly what happened. After this little ceremony, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

they said, "We're going to go ahead and do it. Sit here and he'll come and get you." And out comes President Obama, he has his little shirt sleeves rolled up and everything, and we go for this walk to go get tea. I remember thinking when we stepped out on the East lawn, I thought, wow, there are a lot of people, there are tons of press.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

There are tons of secret service agents. I became aware of the fact, as we're walking and talking, that there's a black SUV in front of us, with the guy walking backwards with the earpiece. And I thought, none of this is for me. Because if somebody takes a shot at anyone and they hit me, that will be a service I will have done for my country. I'm not going to be thrown in that black SUV and raced to the hospital.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 I just remember thinking, this is really real. This is incredible. And here is this man that I admire so much, who has made history, talking to me like we're old friends. And he is the most focused individual I have ever met in my life. Because anytime he was interrupted by press or people yelling at him, he would come back to the exact spot in whatever we were talking about, to where we left off.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

His focus was so intense that I didn't feel scared, and I didn't feel like there was anybody around either one of us. The thing that I have held dear to me, for many reasons, not only the fact that he was so incredibly kind and welcoming to my family who got to come to the oval office to meet him, was that most presidents don't do personal writing, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

they use the autopen. They gave me, as I was leaving the White House, an envelope, and they said, here's a copy of your remarks. And I thought, I don't care about that because I have a million copies of it. And they were like, just trust us, you just go ahead and hang onto that. And later when I opened the envelope and looked at it, he had written across the top in black felt tip pen, "Shanna, I'm so proud of you, Barack Obama."

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Needless to say, that's in like a fireproof safe right now, until we figure out how to fireproof frame it. But those words, those words mean a lot. For somebody to say that, I'm so proud, like I see you and I know your backstory and I'm so proud of you. Yeah, he's an incredible person. I felt like 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

just what he did with me also reflected out to who shares any identity point with me and beyond.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. That's a great story. That's a [inaudible] I got just all excited hearing [inaudible] that story. That's wonderful. I can imagine, for you also, if it all bumbles back to the surface.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Oh, it is such an ever-present story. And I'll tell you, you can look at it on YouTube, and I sometimes have looked at it with people who are like, you didn't really do that. And I'm like, okay, sure. Why would I lie about that? But, okay. It's like, just go to YouTube and put my name in. And I see that person who looks like me and sounds like me and I still can't believe it's me. I am just sitting there going in,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

 how could that have ever happened? The other thing about teacher of the year, the national teacher of the year, process is where I first felt like, okay, I can be out, because they can't fire me now, that would look bad after I've been named national teacher. You don't want to fire your national teacher. It could be embarrassing. And it was really the only time I felt safe. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I had not been out, at all, as a teacher, until I was told by the director, you've been chosen. He asked me like, what are the things you're worried about? What questions do you have about the process? Yada yada, what's on your mind? And I said, I don't know how to be an out teacher. I just don't know how to do that. I've never been one, and I don't know how to be one. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, I'm afraid that I'm gonna, like, upset people or something bad is going to happen because of it." And he said, "Has anyone ever threatened you or made you feel scared about that?" And I said, "Besides my mother, no." And I realized it was true. I realized that I had put her face on everybody. And because of that, I hadn't even seen the allies I did have, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and the support I did have, because I had so internalized her rejection, that I just thought, well, everybody's going to do that. Then the process of that was then, what is the thing to do with that? Because he said, "I'm pretty sure that you're the only openly gay national teacher." He said, of course, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

you know, I can I ever speak to the people from the 50s on up, some of them could have had a queer identity, but they weren't open. You're the first open one. And he said, because of that, it's going to be a thing. And so it's up to you to decide what you want to do with that, because each national teacher has a platform because you only get the microphone for one year. And I worked very closely with the communications team for the organization, the council of chief state school officers.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I said, "The only thing that people in Texas would hate more than a Texas lesbian winning national teacher is a teacher of refugee Muslim students from East Africa." And I was like, "I have the rest of my life to do advocacy for any kind of LGBTQ issue, and will. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I have one year to put a spotlight on kids who are extremely marginalized. I'll never deny it if somebody asks me, but I will try very hard to focus on the platform of refugee students, trauma, informed teaching, culturally responsive teaching. And because I never lied about it or anything, when my hometown paper did 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

this big color spread of the white house, there is my wife and I in our formals to go to the gala that they have for that. One of my friends was working, still, at the newspaper, and he said, "How do you want me to identify Diane?" I said, "Let's put partner. Let's just be accurate." And he goes, "Okay." People would reflect to me later, they would say, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

"This was what it was like to read about you in the paper." Everybody's like, "Oh, look at that. Isn't that so nice? That teacher ... Oh, I didn't know she was gay." And so that's how I came out to Amarillo.

MASON FUNK:

Wow. I admire that so much. I think that's so fascinating that you had a choice. What was your message effectively going to be? 

MASON FUNK:

What were you going to represent, first openly gay teacher or ally defender supporter of your students? Which is a brilliant and inspiring choice. What was your platform? What did you use that opportunity to tell the world and the United States about your students?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

My platform was really a threefold platform. It was about seeing asset-based lens on children in poverty 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

rather than deficits. Seeing an asset-based lens on students from trauma, including students who have come from active war zones, to see that as a gift, to see students who come with multiple languages to your classroom as a gift, not as a problem. And to really think about 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

how we find the brilliance in each of our students, because while standardized tests can tell us some things about kids, it can't tell us what they can create. It can't tell us about their dreams. It can't tell us what only they can bring to the classroom. That was sort of my threefold platform, let's think about assets-based culturally responsive teaching, valuing who our students are and where they come from, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and let's really, sort of, deemphasize standardized testing.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. It's so amazing. The synchronicity between that message and this training that we're doing, that we're doing with Kim Cookson. It's so interesting. We interviewed Brett Bigham literally a week ago, and when your name came up, he's like, Oh, Shanna, 

MASON FUNK:

you know. He said you actually consulted with him, because he was a year ahead of you, if I'm not mistaken, around this question of how out to be. And by the way, of course, he was fired. He wasn't national teacher of the year, but he was state teacher of the year. But I wonder, why did I bring Brett up? Oh, shoot, well, it'll come back if I had a particular reason, I think the reason I brought it up was because he told us a couple of just specific anecdotes 

MASON FUNK:

about the students living with disabilities, whose lives he was able to affect, and I wonder if there's one or two students that just come to mind for you, like, just as emblematic of what you experienced that has made your journey in the classroom that has helped you to know that you're actually positively impacting some student's lives.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Well, there's two that are very special and very close to my heart. And one of whom couldn't be ...

MASON FUNK:

I missed the first part. You were briefly frozen. Can you just start over?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yes. There are two students who are at the, sort of, center of my heart and representative of all of the students that I've taught. And they sort of came with me in the process. They were parts of my application, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and we have stayed in contact for all these years later. One is a student who I had in seventh grade and she was one of the most brilliant students that I had ever seen. Her name is Kayla Storrs. I worked with her at the high school level later on to help her become a Gates millennium scholar. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I'm so proud of her. She went on to the university of Oklahoma and then the university of Kentucky, and now does her own sort of diversity, equity and inclusion work, to recruit kids just like her into higher ed, but she's somebody that I saw early on as this girl is amazing. So gifted, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and just told her all the time, like you're incredible, you're astounding. If nobody else sees that, I see it, and I'm always here for you. I will always be your teacher, no matter where. Call me and I'll do whatever I can. The other one is Viet Tran who was the first student from Paletero High School to ever go to Harvard. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

His story is incredible because he started out, when he was five years old, some of his earliest memories are when he took a shower with just a milk carton as water, in the jungle. Came over, not knowing any English or anything like that, and wound up being this fantastic, brilliant young man 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

who graduated from Harvard and now works in California and in the tech industry. He and I are very connected, still. He couldn't be at the Rose garden because his mean teacher, chemistry teacher at Harvard wouldn't let him delay a final to come to the White House, I guess that wasn't a good enough excuse. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

But he's definitely somebody that I've stayed in contact with. And both of them always remind me of the types of students I've been privileged to get to work with. They are students who have had to overcome a bunch and who are brave and beautiful and brilliant.

MASON FUNK:

Those are wonderful stories. Thank you. Thank you for that. We're heading towards the conclusion. So I'm having to make choices about questions. We're not going to spend a lot of time [inaudible], frankly, because it's an amazing chapter in your life. I'm more interested, honestly, in why you came back to Amarillo. That was just ringing in my ears. When you were talking about the choice to come back to Neptune and Mars -- metaphor -- I'm like so why did you come back? 

MASON FUNK:

So why are you back in Amarillo now after effectively escaping the panhandle, you the world's your oyster and so on and so forth?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah. I ask myself often, why did I come back? I came back in many ways because

MASON FUNK:

Do me a favor, I'm sorry. Start the same way, but just include why did I come back to Amarillo or Texas.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Why did I come back to Texas? And why did I come back to Amarillo? Especially after being so grand to people saying, I'll tell you where I'm not going to go, Texas. Any place else. And that was in many ways my plan, but my partner stayed here while I was in grad school and has such a deep practice here. She stayed here, I went away, and we really did think, we'll go away after I graduate. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

But COVID changed a lot of that, just like it changed a lot of things for everybody. A lot of the places where I thought might be possibilities for me did not present themselves. Actually, like doors closed quite literally on places, because of funding and all of that, my alma mater reached out to me and said, we have this position.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

And I just thought, this is the craziest thing, that I would come back to the school that I graduated from and be a professor, and work with these very communities that I had felt so constricted by. I remember talking to my mentor professor about it, and he said look, we'd love to have you here. We'd love to have you on the East coast, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

but frankly, everybody already thinks like this. Everybody already knows this stuff. You'd just be one more. He goes, go there where it's hard and it's worthy. The challenge is worthy of everything that you've done to get here. Go there, where they need you and where change matters. I have to remind myself of that 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because in many ways it is like leaving Mars where, you know, Mars makes its trip around the sun every 88 days, Neptune takes the same path over 165 years. I feel like I've left Mars for Neptune, and I have to constantly remind myself that Neptune will get there. It's just Neptune is going to go a little slower. We're going to go a little slower. It's going to call on a bunch of different skills from me,

SHANNA PEEPLES:

it's going to call on every experience that I've ever had, to be where I'm at. But it's my way of hopefully finding this for my students, other people's students in these rural areas. Texas is 60% rural, so there's a lot of opportunity for that. And this is where I've put up or shut up about, will my work going forward be

SHANNA PEEPLES:

to increase belonging in every space that I'm in? Now's the time for me to do that. Specifically around queer folks in general, whether they're young middle-aged or older.

MASON FUNK:

Well, thank you for that. I appreciate you going back. I think that was a brilliant piece of advice and I'm glad you followed it, or were able to and willing to follow it. And who knows, of course,

MASON FUNK:

 the future, things may change. You never know. One of my favorite sentences was you said somewhere along the way you realized you're going to have to disappoint people that are ready to [inaudible]. And I don't know [inaudible] apropos of what you said that, but I want you just to kind of repeat that idea and tell us what that means to you, what that has meant to you over the course of your journey.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

When I was in grad school, one of the most impactful pieces of work that I read, or practitioners is Ron Heifetz and his concept of adaptive leadership. From him, I learned this idea of leadership, the work of leadership, not being a position and not being necessarily power or any of the traditional ways we think about it. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

But that leadership is an ability to get people to change and to understand that when you're trying to get people to change, that you've got to learn to disappoint them at a rate that they can absorb. And I've held that. Like, if I were the type of person to tattoo words on my arm, that would be tattooed on my arm because I think it really gets at when we think about how do we bring people forward? 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

How do we create more compassionate and just communities? It means we're asking folks to lose some things that have felt very familiar to them, and very certain in times of incredible technological upheaval and uncertainty. Like, we want to revert to these cultural touchstones that feel like, at least, those feel solid. So to ask folks to change around how they feel about race 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

and identity, it's scary. And it means they're going to be disappointed. And it means I've got to figure out how to pace that work, if I want that work to live. It can't be centered in like something that Shanna Peeples does or whatever. It can't even be connected to me. It needs to be centered into the people, into the community. That's how I sort of conceive of this work going forward, is I take everything that I've learned from being a teacher, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

because I think that's served me well. I think you never leave high school in a sense. Life just keeps being a bigger high school, a bigger high school arena, but the work of change, the work of sort of those micro politics, where you meet people where they're at and try to find some sort of bridge where you can both build something together that's a little bit better. That's how I'm counting success now.

MASON FUNK:

I love that. I love that. I love that "I would tattoo that if I were that kind of person." I would tattoo that as well. Because it strikes me, I mean, I'm in a married relationship as well. We disappoint our spouses all the time. FYI universe. There's a lot of disappointment, it's like, Oh, shit! You were great 99% of the time,

MASON FUNK:

but that 1% of the time you sucked. And so it's a good message. It's a really relevant message. I think for many different reasons, we have four final questions that we ask all of our subjects and these, of course, are intended to be relatively short. You're a great storyteller anyway, so I'm not worried about you rambling on for 15 minutes, but here they are. The first one is if you, Shanna Peeples, could tell 15 year old Shanna Peeples anything, what would it be?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

If I could tell 15 year old Shanna anything, I would tell her what makes you different is what makes you great. Hold on to that.

MASON FUNK:

That's great. That's one of the most concise answers we've gotten. Very, very relevant. We, sometimes,

MASON FUNK:

 at OUTWORDS and in my own life, in fact it was an interview subject who even gave me the notion of this phrase. She talked about a queer superpower. Something that all people who transgress, whether it's, the people you're supposed to be attracted to, or the gender norms, anything in that space, she had decided there's something that we all carry, like a little piece of shiny coal, inside of ourselves, 

MASON FUNK:

that is like our super power. Do you ascribe to that notion in any way? And if so, what would you identify as our so-called queer superpower?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I do resonate with this concept of a queer superpower. I think for myself, it's the queer part of me that's made me who I am. It's the queer part of me that allowed me to connect with whatever senses of myself 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

felt rejected with those of other people. And to really bring home for me, this concept of belonging. This concept of being accepted and celebrated for who you are, rather than its opposites. And so, I would say that the queer super power, for me, is 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

that ability to create a community. I try to flex that super power wherever I can.

MASON FUNK:

Great. Perfect. Thank you. Having told your story many, many times -- we interview people who have never told their story, and then we interview people like yourself who have told your story many times -- why is it important to you? 

MASON FUNK:

Why did, for example, you agree to tell your story in this forum, or why is it important to you to tell your story?

SHANNA PEEPLES:

I think it's important to tell my story for the same reason that I'm grateful for the people who told theirs. Always that, somehow, I found those people who were like their stories were messages in a bottle for me, that washed up at just the right time, when I was feeling the most abandoned or the most rejected. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

They were the people that let me know there's somebody else, there's another human being on the other side of that message in the bottle. And of course, I want to be that for somebody else. But it's sort of a basic form of resistance too, of saying do not buy into the hype that surrounds you about who other people want you to be. The deepest and best work is to work on finding 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

who you are and what you're supposed to say and what you're supposed to do. And I think about that, during my year, people who sent me direct messages from all over the place, and especially from places where it's still not safe to be out, and certainly not safe to be out as a teacher, and they sent me very heartfelt messages saying, just seeing you on Instagram 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

with your family, with your wife makes me know that someday, somehow that could be me.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah. And as you well know, we've heard a lot of this happened all over the place, but Oregon, 1993, what was called Ballot Measure Nine, and in California, way back in 1978, that Briggs Initiative, very, very specifically targeting gay teachers.

MASON FUNK:

Like, the worst thing that could possibly happen is exposed. And I look back to my high school years, and two of my most, in fact, probably my two most impactful teachers I now know were both gay, my French teacher and my English teacher. But that was an era when, this was the mid-seventies, they weren't writing on it. So, yeah, I think that's amazing the idea of inspiring teachers, especially where that's just absolutely anathema, 

MASON FUNK:

like not to be considered. Last question, this project being called OUTWORDS is an archive, and we sometimes use the phrase, just like you said, telling your story as a form of resistance, we like the phrase, archiving as a form of activism. What do you see as the value? We're capturing stories like yours all over the country, as diverse as possible, as many different sub communities that we can reach into, as possible, 

MASON FUNK:

and this is obviously a little bit of a shout out to OUTWORDS. What do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS? And if you could mention OUTWORDS in your answer, that would be great.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Oh, wow. OUTWORDS as a project, as an archive, as an entity is so deeply validating, I think, to anyone who owns any form of a queer identity. 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

It's a way of saying there is a literal, like tapestry of folks to find the person who could be maybe a mentor to you that you never thought about or to see. That all of these sort of, if you want to think about it like looking up at a night sky and thinking about all the nighttime stars, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

like every one of those shines down with this possibility of you're going to be okay, there is a hope and a future for you. And that's huge in a time where we are just hungry for hope. We are hungry for knowing that eventually we're going to be okay, and things are going to work out. Eventually, to come back around to Hansel and Gretel, like we will find our way out, and we're not alone. You're not alone. I'm not alone.

MASON FUNK:

That reminds me. I was talking to, several months ago, a couple of guys, two straight men who're friends with me and my husband, about the project. They're business partners and they've been supportive a little bit. I was telling them about OUTWORDS, and this phrase from the Bible, growing up as a church kid, I had memorized Bible verses, and in Hebrews 11,

MASON FUNK:

he talks about the cloud of witnesses. We have this cloud of witnesses. And I love that phrase as a kind of a description of what OUTWORDS is. And the whole, I love that whole, I think it's Hebrews Chapter 12, when Paul says, by faith, Abraham did this, and by faith, this person did. They all did it by faith, and we have this cloud of witnesses. Because that's what we did. We started off just not knowing. We let go of one shore, we didn't know where the next shore was.

MASON FUNK:

So yeah, I like that phrase. And I like what you said as well. That's really, really powerful. Just kind of the stars, in a way, are the witnesses saying, you're on the right track.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah. And there are people who made a way out of no way, to use like an African-American frame on it, these are the people who made a way out of no way, and you can too.

MASON FUNK:

That's interesting. Say more about that, I've never heard that phrase.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah, I have known it from the African-American spiritual tradition of saying, God made a way out of no way. Particularly, in the civil rights era. And I've always loved that and held onto it. It almost touches a Buddhist idea of, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

we make the path by walking it. Or to use a Christian frame, you step out on faith, as you said. It's all this sense of knowing there are people who've gone before you, you may not see your own path. It may not be clear, but know that there are all of these people who found a way out of no way who made a path by walking it who stepped out on faith and here they all are, pick any of these folks.

MASON FUNK:

Yeah. I've done that. Making a way out of no way, and making a path by walking it. Those are both great, amazing images. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I'm also so excited that you're going to participate in our panel event for Microsoft, focusing on educators. You and Brett,

MASON FUNK:

 as well as an amazing educator in St. Louis. It was our first Missouri interview, Elaine Brune, who was a gender nonconforming person. I didn't conduct Elaine's interview, but an extraordinary person, as well. I think Microsoft is going to be just thrilled. And since they support OUTWORDS, we want them to be thrilled. Tom, as you know, is ... I forget the date. I think we have set a date. And I so appreciate you. I know you're busy, 

MASON FUNK:

so I am so appreciative of you being able to make space for us to do that. And it'll happen on Microsoft's platform. They use teams, but we'll be giving you lots of information ahead of time.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Yeah, no, that's awesome. Teams, I don't get to use it very often, but I actually like teams. At least I won't be a rank beginner on it. But, no, I'm happy to. I mean, you do me the honor of inviting me, 

SHANNA PEEPLES:

so I am there. Again, you're just helping me live into the promise and help me keep that, that I said I was gonna do. So thank you, Mason.

MASON FUNK:

Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Kristie's going to stay on, to do some housekeeping, and I'm going to jump off, but thank you again. I look forward to talking with you further when we do the educator panel.

SHANNA PEEPLES:

Absolutely.