Julie at School of Blog has a great post about homophobia and gay bashing in our classrooms.  It shows up not just in language, but in how kids physically relate to each other and to images that they might see in class.  I taught in a tech school where about 90 percent of the students were boys.  Homophobia was a constant issue, in the halls, in the cafeterias and in the lunch rooms.  My kids got racism, and they got anti-Semitism--which also popped up once in while.  But trying to teach them that homophobia and their treatment of those who they suspected of being gay was wrong was really a tough thing to do. Tim Hardaway tough. 

Oddly, it worked better in the context of my very small special ed classes, but not at all well in the larger, regular classroom setting. For those students in whom homophobia was most deeply ingrained, the fact that I even took the issue on in the classroom caused me to lose some of my teaching capital (i.e. my credibility, my authority, however you want to term it).  It affected my ability to keep the class moving through the curriculum--and this was pre-NCLB.  I do wonder the extent to which narrowing of the curriculum is also leading to narrower minds or harder hearts.