As a gay male who went to a predominately white high school in the 1970s, I was deeply immersed in and contributed to entangled curricular discourses. These included an official curriculum that privileged heterosexual white males and attempted to erase and silence all others, a hidden curriculum echoing the official curriculum, an present-absent curriculum of both guilt and resistance, and a counter-curriculum offering critique and a possible reimagining of the dominant discourses. To examine this entanglement dialogically and reflexively, I use aesthetic currere framed by queer theory to re/member and shift the peripheral-center relationship of the counter-and-official curricula. To surface, explore, and move discursive meanings in these entangled locations, I examine old school artifacts: first, my high school yearbook as a representation and proxy of my school’s dominant traditional curriculum and second my own photography as an expression of counter-narratives and cultural change also taking place. As I look back at my youth from an adult vantage point, I know this inquiry is about the present as much as the past. By my not interrogating my relationship to the official school curriculum and its ongoing hegemonic supremacy, I remain complicit to it and allow curricular entanglements to mutate and reproduce.
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