Upper School History Department Chair Donna Gilbert came out as a lesbian in two stages, nine years apart. While her first attempt was, in her opinion, unsuccessful due to a lack of support, her second attempt, occurring nine years later at the age of 28, was spurred on in particular by the “Lesbian Avengers.”

“They pierced everything and had all this ripped clothing and they had that sort of activist sentiment,” Gilbert said. “They literally walked down the halls wearing shirts that said ‘I am a lesbian’ in 1991, and nobody did that. They got harassed, but not a lot, and I remember looking at them and going home and feeling ashamed that these kids were 17, and I was 28 and still in the closet. That’s when I came out to the school community.”

At the time, Gilbert, who was teaching History at Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, Massachusetts. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Trinity College and her Master’s Degree in Classical Archaeology at Tufts University. She noted that the lack of LGBT representation in the media limited hers and many others’ perceptions of what was and wasn’t possible within the realm of romance for LGBT people.

“The media is sort of the way we figure out what’s safe and what’s not safe in the culture out there, and so when I was growing up there were no real images of lesbians [in media],” she said. “The entertainment industry assumes that the general population doesn’t want to see images and movies and television of LGBT people. Although they’re becoming more common now in television and in movies, they tend to be fringe characters, and limited and cliched in how they act. Even though we’re making progress, the sense that LGBT people are complex and don’t fit into these clichéd stereotypes is not being portrayed very well, and that’s still played to a heterosexual audience.”