Sinful Sunday: "English Teacher" and the Art of Being the Villain of One's Own Story
The new FX series showcases a queer English teacher who excels at being his own worst enemy, and we are here for it.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
Like a lot of other people, I’ve found myself growing quite fond of the new FX series English Teacher, created by Brian Jordan Alvarez and starring himself as Evan Marquez, the titular English teacher. It’s no exaggeration to say that Evan is a bit high-strung–he is a high school teacher, after all–and this often leads him into some treacherous territory. In just the second episode he invites a drag queen friend of his to teach the football team how to do drag (in honor of the school's celebration of powderpuff football, only for said drag queen to steal school property. The fact that all of this plays out in the state of Texas–hardly a bastion of queer rights or acceptance–is both hilarious and also heightens the stakes of Evan’s story and his various struggles as an only gay teacher.
One of the most striking things about Evan is the extent to which he is one of those people who seems determined to sabotage his own well-being. Take, for example, his love life. When the series begins he has been broken up with his boyfriend for some amount of time. However, the two remain friends and, as the first few episodes make clear, much more than that. Indeed, they can’t keep their hands off each other, and they engage in quite a few erotic dalliances. On some level Evan recognizes that this probably isn’t the smartest thing he could possibly do, as he makes clear when he keeps trying to bat away Malcolm’s attempts to get him to agree to being boyfriends again. At the same time, this doesn’t even come close to stopping, and we in the audience can’t help but shake our heads at his folly.
Obviously Evan isn’t the first queer person to engage in this kind of behavior. Who among us, after all, hasn’t found ourselves drawn back into an ex’s orbit, despite all of our attempts to escape? Then again, I suspect (or perhaps hope) that there are fewer people who ended up getting fired from their jobs because they made out with their teachers in front of a class. As so often when it comes to Evan, he seems drawn to exactly those kinds of behaviors, both inside and outside of the classroom, that make his life ever more difficult.
Furthermore, it’s not as if there aren’t other men showing an interest in Evan, including and especially the very dishy Harry (played by the gorgeous Langston Kerman). As with so many of the other elements of Evan’s life, however, even this comes with mammoth complications, starting with the fact that the guy in question is already married. While the two are in an open relationship, one can hardly blame Evan for not being willing to jump right into this, for all that he is clearly very interested in the other man and his…endowments. More pressingly, he has already been banned from dating any other faculty due to his wildly inappropriate actions with Malcolm in the classroom. Even if Harry wasn’t married, it would be foolhardy for Evan to pursue anything with him but, then again, this is Evan we’re talking about, and he’s never met a bad decision that he didn’t decide to take.
And it’s not just his personal life that Evan manages to mess up. He’s one of those people who often lets his own sense of moral indignation lead him into trouble, whether that’s by allowing an unvetted person engage with students (and, to reiterate, steal school supplies) or try to sabotage one of his colleague’s efforts to form a gun safety club by manipulating his students into expressing their darkest desires in writing. This latter effort is, in addition to being quite fucked up–especially given the fact that one of his students expresses a desire to shoot up the school–also a failure, as it ultimately just leads to Evan and the rest of the faculty having to complete their firearms safety course (because: Texas). Evan might end up being a great shot, but that doesn’t change the fact that none of this would be happening if he hadn’t been so caught up in his own sanctimoniousness.
For all that he crosses boundaries of all types with abandon, the series also makes it clear that his heart really is in the right place. He does genuinely seem to care about his students and their well-being, particularly his queer ones. It’s just that, well, he can’t always seem to figure out how to serve their interests without being a jackass. He’s not dissimilar to our beloved Janine from Abbott Elementary, and this is arguably the most notable similarity between the two series, other than the fact that they both happen to be set at a school. Like Janine, it’s Evan’s own sense of superiority that gets him into trouble, though I do think that he’s a bit less of a straight-up do-gooder than she is.
I personally find it refreshing the extent to which English Teacher makes it very clear that Evan is his own worst enemy. Perhaps it’s taking this conceit a bit far, but I would go so far as to say that he’s the villain of his own story. This is, I think, precisely what makes him both so fascinating and frustrating. We as viewers can see how his decisions are going to negatively impact his life and his emotional well-being–as well as those of almost everyone around him–but we also kind of want to see how things are going to work out, or whether they will at all.
Moreover, I’m glad that we’ve come to that point in queer representation where we’re allowed to be as messy as our straight counterparts. English Teacher achieves a fine balance between making Evan insufferable and also quite humorous (much of the humor, it must be said, comes at his expense). Despite how utterly ridiculous he can be at times, we’re also encouraged to love him and I know that I, for one, can’t wait to see more of what the series has in store for the queer English teacher that I always wished I had.