Before Michael Mueller became a Spanish teacher, he was a teen searching for self-acceptance as he came to understand his sexuality.
Mueller grew up in the Central Valley town of Manteca, attending Manteca High School. “I was just kind of doing my own thing,” he said. “Definitely don’t get me wrong, I had a wonderful group of friends. We kind of couldn’t find our interest, our passion in high school, but we had each other, and we always had a great time.”
Despite not being drawn to sports or club activities, some of Mueller’s favorite high school memories were attending the small-town football games with friends. “I didn’t really pay attention to the game, but I knew a few of the players, and if they scored, we would feel proud to cheer for them,” he said. “We always liked the parties that happened after.”
As Mueller grew up, he increasingly felt a stigma around expressing himself authentically. “I couldn’t help myself, but it was just my personality, my way of carrying myself, that was what more conservative people would describe as effeminate,” Mueller said. “That behavior, that mindset, that way of speaking, that way of moving my hands, that way of dressing, was not 100% acceptable, especially in the early ’90s. From certain groups, I would get a lot of crap that I did not like.”
Through these struggles, Mueller had supportive friends, some of whom had even come out as LGBTQ+. “Originally, I started hanging out with similar, like-minded people without intentionally searching them out—we just kind of naturally came together,” he said.
It took Mueller a year or two to feel comfortable identifying as gay and sharing his truth with friends. “Eventually, I found the courage and the trust in them to share with them, ‘Hey, I think I might be like you guys.’ And so it gave me a chance to share thoughts and feelings and compare those to other people and realize, ‘Hey, I’m okay. There’s nothing wrong with me. I am a little bit like these guys. We’re all a little different, but we’ve got some stuff in common,’” Mueller said.
Grounded in this support, Mueller gained more confidence in his adult years and eventually met his husband, Alberto. He had traveled out a few days early to organize a Spanish immersion trip for his students at the time, and he went to a bar after preparations were finalized.
“He was dressed in the most handsome looking Armani suit with a tie that had the colors of Spain’s flag in it, but it wasn’t made to look like a Spanish flag. They were diagonal, equal sized lines, and kind of like Gryffindor,” Mueller said. “And I thought that was the most handsome man I had ever seen in my life, and I wanted to chat with him, so we started talking, and we haven’t stopped talking since.”
Still, his journey was not without significant road bumps. Mueller’s parents took 10 years to accept him after he came out, and even then, he was encouraged not to share his sexuality with extended family. As a teacher in the early 2000s, he was petrified of not being accepted. He remarked that the administration at his old school would acknowledge that they had a gay employee, but subtly messaged him to tone it down and not express himself so much. “How do you censor the way you speak, the way you move your head? It’s just–it’s so hard,” Mueller said.
Mueller is blown away by the progress for gay rights since his childhood. “Part of the reason I eventually chose to be a teacher was to be a beacon of hope for other students who were like me, but the joke’s on me, because the world changes and it evolves. And by the time I became a teacher, I realized that students in my first years of teaching in the early 2000s had it so much better than me,” he said. “I wish I was a teenager in the 2020s. I would have felt so accepted, so much more safe, so much more a part of my high school community.”
He feels comfortable coming out to people now, hoping to show that the world is full of all kinds of people. “I hope to make other people feel they have just as much of a space here as everybody else, if not more,” he said.
To students struggling with expressing themselves publicly, Mueller encourages self-acceptance and esteem. “Be brave. Be bold. Don’t be afraid of what anyone may or may not think, because that doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is how you feel about yourself, and if you feel better about yourself walking out of the house with a fabulous, awesome shirt that sparkles and glitters instead of something black and drab that blends into the background, that’s what you need to do.”
To students facing hardships sharing their authentic selves at home, Mueller advises: “Try to be honest, but understand that sometimes being honest may not get you the result that you’re hoping for. And you have to be okay with that too, because eventually they’ll come around if it’s meant to be.”
