Academia can be overwhelmingly foreign and hostile to those who have poor or working-class backgrounds. For people who are from the working class and also queer, the obstacles to earning a graduate degree may prove insurmountable. Frequently discouraged from attending college in the first place, these students often struggle to pay for their education while they simultaneously battle prejudice and discrimination because of their sexual orientation and blue-collar backgrounds. Resilience offers inspiring personal stories of those who made it: thirteen professors and administrators provide their moving accounts of struggle, marginalization, and triumph in the accomplishments that their parents, guidance counselors, and sometimes even they themselves would have thought out of reach. These scholars write in a manner that will enable readers to reconsider their own assumptions and to empathize with the oppression that accompanies being defined as "other."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. Introduction
Kenneth Wendell Oldfield and Richard Greggory Johnson III

2. Class, Sexuality, and Academia
Andrea R. Lehrermeier

3. Middle-Class Drag
Renny Christopher

4. From the Altar Boy’s Robes to the Professor’s Cap and Gown: The Journey of a Gay, Working-Class Academic
Timothy J. Quain

5. One in Ten: Teaching Tolerance for Class Difference, Ambiguity, and Queerness in the Culture Classroom
Denis M. Provencher

6. Flying the Coop: Liberation through Learning
Nancy Ciucevich Story

7. No More Rented Rooms
Bonnie R. Strickland

8. Escape from the Bronx: The Making of an Unlikely Leader
Richard Greggory Johnson III

9. My First Closet Was the Class Closet
Felice Yeskel

10. One Bad Lecture Away from Guarding a Bank: Identity as a Process
Michallene McDaniel

11. Becoming (Almost) One of Those “Damn, New York, Pinko Intellectuals”
Donald C. Barrett

12. Weaving the Self with Gender: Uniting Race, Sexual Orientation, and Social Class
Terell P. Lasane

13. Possibilities
Angelia R. Wilson

14. Hate Is Not a Family Value
Susan E. Borrego

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX