School leadership programmes reinforce heteronormative expectations, and this rigidity extends into bk12 schools where risk heteronorms around professionalism become tools of oppression against LGBTQIA+ students and teachers. The article uses a queer autoethnographic approach to examine the relationship between one professor and his educational leadership student and begin to conceptualize what a pedagogy of coming out might look like. This modelling of vulnerability and marginalization provides implications for coming out as a pedagogy of hope in both school leadership programmes and bk12 classrooms.