Teacher here. It's made-up-nonsense. I don't give a shit what gender or sexual orientation a kid is and im CERTAINLY not going to try to convince anyone to change anything about themselves.

That said, I'm going to acknowledge that gay/trans people exist in authorship and literature as it arises. You can't read someone like Whitman (Leaves of Grass, arguably America's greatest poet) and not come across references to sexuality either implicit or explicit. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45472/i-sing-the-body-electric

It becomes relevant in passages like this:

5
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

----------------------------------
Maybe a conversation like:

"'Love flesh swelling' like he's in love with some woman and they...he...?"

"Probably not, he didn't have any serious female relationships as far as I am aware."

"But the title is 'The female form'"

"Well, it's possible, but it's not likely the case that he was talking about himself being in love with a woman. This poem is in the text but he wrote many other pieces about he-himself falling into and out of love with various men and we have letters documenting those relationships with his male significant others. Although, I'm not sure what to call them because gay marriage would have been illegal at the time. He's likely writing the poem in a way where he appreciates the female form and sees men who are drawn to it like the way I appreciate watching bees act obsessively driven to the middle of flowers. I like watching Bees in action, but that doesn't mean I'm going all pollen crazy, still I appreciate it for what it is."
-------------------

This is an example of how discussion of sexuality would come up in my classroom as I imagine it. Note how I'm not trying to convince the kid I'm talking to to turn gay like it's a big game of rainbow-red-rover or something. Nevertheless, knowing the author's sexual preference in this instance informs our understanding of the piece.


My own personal theory?
The people railing against things like this are the same shitheads that can't be bothered to read ANYTHING and instead giggle and guffaw at "hurhurhurhur he hadd'a boner" where I get to live an early stage of Idocracy.

Also, I agree that the "funky stuff" shouldn't be just avoided altogether. For goodness sake, just let teachers have the difficult conversation that everyone is avoiding. Reminds me of when Peggy Hill was struggling to say "Penis" when she was assigned sex ed.

I think I may need to forgive that bee that stung me during my formative years.

Thanks....poor dog.
I sympathize, I was stung on the eyebrow Saturday, and I'm allergic. My eye swole shut for days.

I got the first dose of Pfizer. The tetanus vaccine I had 20 days earlier was a total bitch. My arm felt like I'd been shot there. It was so bad, I couldn't sleep.

The Pfizer Covid vaccine, on the other hand, made my arm a little tender for a day, and that was it. In fact, the initial shot stung a little more than other shots I've had, but was unremarkable other than that.

Jon Stewart passing the baton to Trevor Noah, that was a great move all around. As we also got Colbert & Bee their well established shows that are great in their own right. But Bee especially might have felt stung by not getting the TDS chair as she's definitely the most deserved among the senior correspondents at the show IMO. But that one extra win-wins for the audience.

Your video, STUNG by a GIANT HORNET!, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I was trying to remove some nettles from the garden with a stick and secateurs and with all the care in the world managed to get stung. This is why I will never handle a venomous snake!

One gets the feeling he edited this video this way because the wasps built their nest around an Acacia tree, and he got stung a couple thousand times.

Wow. That's unlucky. I get those all the time, I probably pull down 15-20 nests a year around my house and garage, and I've never been stung by them.....yet. Granted, I do it at night or early in the morning so they're asleep/cold and can't react, and often just use a hose to spray them down from the overhangs, but they have seemed to be far less aggressive than even my bees, and almost domesticated compared to hornets.

PS: Is it possible your hippy neighbor gets upset not because of what you're poisoning, but because you're poisoning, period? Maybe he would be happy if you just squashed them or hosed the nests down? Many people are hyper sensitive to poisons, some for medical reasons, some for philosophical or ecological reasons. I grow a lot of my own produce at home, so I would be pretty upset if my neighbor started spraying poison on the fence line, because it would get all over my crops, and most insect poisons that cause instant death are not designed to wash off or be human safe. Just a thought.

I have paper wasps that look an awful lot like bees ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Wasp_May_2008-11.jpg )

I get dirty looks from my hippy neighbor when I'm spraying for them b/c he's retarded. Know the difference, paper wasps do pollinate, but they are fucking dangerous. I got stung once removing a nest (on accident, i was sawing a low hanging branch and didn't see the nest at all) and got stung on the top of my head. That fucking sting felt like a hot nail being driven into my skin by a hammer. And it felt like every few minutes someone hit the hammer again.

That was fun...makes me want to watch Deadpool again.

You look like an avocado had sex with an older uglier avocado...hate sex.

Ohh fucking sensodyne...I'm hooked on the Sensodyne.
That stung.

This is super awesome!
Reminds me of a dream I had where I tatooed frozen Tigers with Matt Damon. It got really weird once I accidentally stung myself with a tranquilizer dart, got high and watched the movie of that while I was in it. Matt was super nice, though.

I'm disappointed in him.
Bees are in trouble. We're in trouble without bees. Don't go killing bee hives because they're a minor inconvenience to you, please.

He saw there was a hive in the tree before he cut it, no way around that, the bees were flying in and out right in his face. I can't figure out why he didn't -1)put on a bee suit 2) use some smoke to calm them 3) wait for a cooler time of day when they're calm to do the cutting and/or 4) (best idea) call a local bee keeper to come remove them. You can almost always get one to come for free if it's really bees and not wasps or hornets, most extermination companies will know at least one.

Also, it seemed he cut right through the hive without any effort to keep it intact. That was a guarantee of an angry swarm (how would you react to a chain saw cutting your home in half?) and a likely hood that the entire colony will die. He really should have knocked on it to find the hollow part and made the cut lower and used rope to lower the entire hive.

My first bee hive was just such a hive that someone properly cut out of their tree in one piece, and it lasted me years before the chunk of wood rotted and they swarmed. I didn't even have a suit when I got it, so I just went at sunrise to collect it, and hardly lost a bee and didn't get stung moving it about 40 miles!

This hive could have been saved with minimal effort and way fewer stings, so in a way I'm glad he got the instant karma for destroying it, but I'm still sad that saving the bees is apparently not on most people's minds, not even arborists.

DON'T KILL BEES PEOPLE. Without them we'll starve.

A jelly fish sting feels like a bee sting, except you cant touch the spot you got stung, because if you rub it, it smears the stingers all down your arm or leg or wherever you were stung creating a whole area of stings - And trust me, it's so hard to just stand there and let it sting without grabbing that spot...

I could understand wanting to express that it struck a nerve especially if asked about it. But it seems that if it is really something you didn't want to dissuade people from doing based on your principles, profession, or in the name of comedy...then why the talks about pop culture and women and hiding? Wouldn't you just say "yeah those were some zingers that stung, but that is comedy and I love comedy too much to hate on this form of it" and leave it at that?

Instead it seems like the follow up discussion is a way of saying "making fun of women's ages can be a sort of oppression and it's sad...I mean I'm not saying don't do it cause I would NEVER say that, I just think it's a shame pop culture does that." Which is essentially speaking out against it without having to actually make a stand against it?

btw I have nothing against SS and if these jokes weren't about another comedian I totally get it, but when it comes to comedians and comedy I've come to expect them to have an "all's fair and we should embrace that" kind of attitude about comedy...otherwise who gets to decide which shades of grey are allowed within the profession?