I know that there are more important things going on in the world, news-wise, but I have to confess that I was pretty broken-up by yesterday's news of the abrupt closure of the Washington Blade, among other gay papers owned by the same publishing company. The rest of the gay press has of course been mournfully sympathetic in its eulogies for one of the most important pieces of gay media history, but one of the best write-ups, I was pleasantly surprised to see, came from the Post, whose treatment of LGBT issues over the years has not been precisely sympathetic:
"It's a shock. I'm almost speechless, really," said Lou Chibbaro Jr., a Blade reporter who has written for the newspaper since 1976, covering the full arc of the country's gay-rights movement, from early marches through the rise of AIDS and on to the latest battles over legalizing same-sex marriage.
The Blade, born in an era when most gays lived in the closet, grew in size and stature as Washington's gay population blossomed and became more politically active and influential. Chibbaro, who wrote his first front-page story for the Blade under a pseudonym at a time when publicly stating one's sexual orientation could be dangerous, felt the change in dramatic fashion this year, when, while covering a presidential news conference on health-care policy, he was directed to a seat in the front row.
The Blade's closing comes at a moment of extraordinary optimism for many gays in Washington. The big story Chibbaro and the paper's other writers have been covering is the bill supported by nearly all of the D.C. Council's members that would legalize same-sex marriage in the city.
"Here we are, on the verge of having marriage equality, and it would be real shame if the Blade wasn't there to cover the victory," said Deacon Maccubbin, owner of Lambda Rising, the gay-oriented Dupont Circle bookstore, which had been advertising in the paper since the shop's 1974 opening.
[...]
A small troupe of activists founded the Blade in 1969, a few months after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, igniting riots and launching the gay rights movement. In its infancy, the paper was known as the Gay Blade and consisted of a single, letter-size sheet of paper that its editor, Nancy Tucker, mimeographed and distributed herself, scooting around town in a Volkswagen to drop off stacks at gay-friendly bars. The paper's mission was to unite an eclectic array of gay groups, including drag queens and government workers, literary buffs and motorcycle enthusiasts; inform readers of gay-related services; and warn them about blackmailers and other scammers.
In the ensuing decades, the Blade's editors became more ambitious, switching to newsprint and dispatching reporters to write about discrimination against gays in the federal government, hate crimes such as the killing of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, and political and health issues generated by the AIDS epidemic.
The article even quotes Frank Kameny as saying that the Blade "have become the voice of record for the gay community."
Believe it or not, the Post really gets it right: the gay press is part and parcel of gay history (I'm using the word "gay" intentionally here, for obvious historical reasons). If we are to date the modern gay rights movement back to before Stonewall, we would likely want to begin at the founding of One Magazine in 1952. It was the first gay publication founded by the first gay rights ("homophile") organization, and it was seminal in establishing the idea that gay identity constituted not some private, internal psychopathology, but a community with a culture. One and its successors helped to spread and coalesce this idea that there was a group of people with shared goals and interests which were worth working to attain. They enabled the parallels between gay struggles and the struggles of other civil rights and social justice movements, and this in turn enabled Stonewall, the first Pride and gay rights parades, and the veritable phalanx of post-Stonewall gay papers. These included, of course, the Blade, but also half a dozen publications in New York and one for just about every other major city. These papers advertised the events of a marginalized and still largely closeted community. They printed the personal ads that couldn't get printed in other publications. They, of course, reported on the news of hate crimes and police brutality that the mainstream media ignored. Come the 1980s, they were an essential venue of mobilization and organization and dissemination of information surrounding the outbreak of the AIDS crisis. The Blade in particular, by virtue of being based in Washington, was the paper of record of LGBT legislative struggles, reporting on the issues that still impact the community today—from the (eventual) federal response to AIDS through to the recently-passed landmark hate crimes legislation. These papers have recorded LGBT history, and they also are LGBT history.
Probably anyone reading this blog can recite a litany of the reasons the newspaper industry is dying. There are blogs and online editions of papers and myriad ways to access information without paying for it. Instead of paying to put ads and classifieds and personals in papers, people post to Craigslist or dating websites or place ads on websites. Newspapers are losing their revenue—and all these patterns impact what has become the LGBT community doubly. This is a community that is increasingly less ghettoized and more assimilated; what need has it for a particular venue for its ads and its news, when dating websites accept all sorts of advertisements (and dedicated gay dating websites also exist), or when the Post and the Times will cover the issues they once ignored? We no longer live in the era of the NYT's notoriously poor AIDS coverage. Times have changed. And the Blade, tragically, has locked its offices and fired its staffers.
So maybe Bilerico and Pam's House Blend and Towleroad—in collaboration, indeed, with the Times and the Post and, heaven help us, the Wall Street Journal—can fill in the hole left by the demise of the Blade and its peers. But how alienating it feels to know that we're leaving the era when a marginalized community used its print media to band together and organize and share in its solidarity?
As I noted yesterday, the New York State Senate will be voting on marriage equality literally any minute now. Accordingly, our old friends (and my neighbors) at the National Organization for Marriage have said that they will fund primary challenges against any Republican senators who vote for marriage equality:
Following up on its successful campaign to defeat Dede Scozzafava in NY-23, The National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) Executive Director Brian Brown announced plans to build a $500,000 war chest to fund a primary challenge to any Republican senator who votes for gay marriage – regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s vote in the State Senate.
"There is no Republican Senate district in New York where the majority of people support gay marriage. Maine has made that very clear,” said Brian Brown. "The GOP should learn from Dede Scozzafava's experience: voting for gay marriage does not pay."
50 percent of voters who abandoned Dede Scozzafava to vote for Doug Hoffman said that Dede's vote for gay marriage was a significant factor, according to a NOM poll of voters in NY-23 released on Election Day.
First of all, NOM, we call women politicians by their last names. I know they're just women, but you guys are supposed to be good at media; you could at least format a press release correctly. More seriously, though, what is to be learned from the NY-23 election is that when national far-right conservatives support a primary challenge against a more moderate conservative candidate, it's the progressive who wins! I know NOM doesn't live in a reality-based universe, but surely they must at least realize that their side lost the NY-23 election last week.
Keep your eyes on the news this afternoon, folks. This is an important vote, and no one seems to have any idea which way it will go.
UPDATE 3:20 PM: The vote has been delayed indefinitely, due in part to the need to focus on the state's budget deficit. If there really aren't the votes to pass the bill now, that's unquestionably the best plan for the moment.
From yesterday's New York Times comes the news that the NY State Senate has dubious chances of passing a marriage equality bill in a vote on Tuesday:
Advocates on both sides of the issue lobbied senators over the weekend, but it was still unclear on Sunday whether the measure could attract the 32 votes needed in the State Senate for approval. (The Assembly has already passed the bill.)
[...]
In New York, Democrats hold a shaky 32-to-30 majority in the Senate, and some senators oppose allowing the legislation to come to the floor for a vote.
Those who favor the bill say they realize they are risking another significant defeat but are determined to get legislators on record on the issue. They also say that now may be the best time to push lawmakers to take up the bill, given that next year all 212 members of the Legislature will face re-election.
Estimates vary, but supporters of the bill believe they can count on about 25 votes for the legislation at this time.
Though I admire Gov. Paterson's dedication to making this a top legislative priority, his timing is really awful. The recent defeat for marriage equality in Maine will make legislators much more confident in voting against marriage in NY, and defeat on the bill now will make it difficult to reintroduce in a later legislative session.
But there's another important issue that makes this vote even more complicated, and that's the issue of New Jersey. Now that Chris Christie will be replacing Gov. Corzine in January, NJ Democrats have ramped up efforts to pass a marriage equality bill before Christie comes into office—he's said he would veto such a bill, while Corzine has said he would sign it. Therefore, there will be a vote on marriage equality in NJ sometime after NY's vote and sometime before January, and it could be powerfully affected by how the NY vote turns out on Tuesday.
There are huge quantities of people crossing the NY-NJ state line every day, particularly those who live in NJ and work in NY. There's a lot of logistical interest in keeping laws about something like marriage consistent between the two states (imagine if your employer in NY is giving you spousal benefits that your health care provider in NJ won't accept); but more importantly, the NJ legislature will care what the NY legislature does. If the NY Senate votes down marriage equality tomorrow, it could be a much more powerful indicator of anti-marriage momentum in NJ than the vote in Maine or LGBT-related action on the federal level.
The good news for New Jersey, though, is twofold: firstly, its ballot-question laws are such that it's effectively impossible for New Jerseyans to vote on their fellow New Jerseyans' rights the way that people have in California and Maine. Secondly, Garden State Equality is taking this battle seriously, putting together an organized lobbying game and releasing new television commercials, which you can watch here.
All marriage equality-related eyes will be on NY and NJ in the next couple months. With the possible exception of the District of Columbia, they will unquestionably be the next states to come close to and possibly succeed in passing marriage equality legislation. And then what of my favorite neighborly hate group, the National Organization for Marriage? Despite various reports that they've moved to Philadelphia or DC, their website is still listing a Princeton, NJ address and phone number, and I think this post indicates why. NOM was the largest donor to Prop. 8 and to Question 1 in Maine, and I imagine they're well aware that the next big fight is in their own state (and mine!).
Stay tuned, folks. This is all going to have dramatic implications for the fate of marriage equality in this country.
Questions about the largest contributor [to the anti-marriage equality campaign in Maine] have sparked an investigation by the state ethics commission and a court battle. The National Organization for Marriage, or NOM, has contributed $1.6 million to Stand for Marriage Maine but has declined to reveal its own contributors, despite a federal district court decision last week that it must do so under Maine law.
Some groups for gays say the organization is a stalking horse for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons, which dominated fundraising in the California campaign. Many of the actors in a nationally televised ad produced by NOM, called "Gathering Storm," turned out to be Mormon activists.
Weekend calls to the New Jersey-based organization and its attorney were not returned. But Fish said that after the backlash in California against the Mormon Church, its leadership decided not to become directly involved in Maine.
I'm surprised to see the Post pulling this, especially after running that rather silly and much-criticized article about Brian Brown, NOM's executive director, over the summer. If there is any religious background to which NOM's leaders subscribe, it's Catholicism: Brown, President Maggie Gallagher, and Chairman of the Board Robert George all profess devout Catholicism. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the only Mormon in a leadership role at NOM is science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card, a recent addition to the Board of Directors who is probably not entirely sane. Making it out to seem as if marriage-equality proponents think NOM is a Mormon conspiracy isn't entirely fair of the Post, because I think most of us know that's not true. If we know anything, it's that NOM is deeply embedded in the Catholic right, and that such is the tradition its leaders come from.
Moreover, I wish some mainstream news organization would get in touch with NOM and determine once and for all where they're located. First the Post reports that NOM moved out of Princeton, to Philadelphia and then to DC, and now they're telling us that NOM is still NJ-based. The website still lists a Nassau St. mailing address and a (609) phone number (that's the Princeton area code), but even during business hours that phone number only ever goes to voicemail. What's Brian Brown doing in his new H St. offices? How do we contact him there? No one—not even the Post—seems to know.
If the Post has contacts at NOM (and they must do, to have run that profile in August), they have the ability to do much more than make unsourced claims about what "some groups for gays" think. They could actually unravel the tangled web that is the Catholic right and figure out what the hell is going on here. I guess, seeing as this is the Post, that would be too much to ask, but at the very least the paper could stop sowing conspiracy theories about Mormons that I, as an LGBT activist, have never heard espoused by the people I work with.
Readers may know that I occasionally "do" journalism, and have received a certain amount of education and job experience about how to be a writer, reporter, journalist, thing. I'm used to being the interviewer, and so it's been awfully interesting to find myself in the middle of the media coverage of Princeton's new gender-neutral housing option and be the one answering student reporters' questions.
Yesterday I spoke to a reporter who, among other things, asked me about the tenor of other students' reactions. Had I heard any negative feedback? I explained that I hadn't from individuals, just read anonymous Daily Princetonian comments, which are about as reliable a source as YouTube comments. The reporter confessed to difficulty finding anyone with a negative reaction, and really kept pushing that. I cautioned her against the old Prince trick of just getting a statement from the Anscombe Society, who is against everything cultural-values-related that the majority of the campus is for, and then hinted that maybe, if she couldn't find reliable negative reactions, maybe that's just because there aren't any.
A number of people have pointed out both in person and on the Internet that they can't really see what all the fuss is about—for them, gender-neutral housing is a total non-issue, and they can't imagine why the fact that Princeton has taken this long to implement it should be getting any attention. And as much as I'm pretty proud of the fact that we did this, I can't blame them: I've said from the beginning that what Princeton would be doing by implementing gender-neutral housing would only be bringing the university into sync with the heterosociality of the real world, and that preserving gender-segregated living is totally artificial and totally outdated.
But when you write a story, you need a quote from the opposition. At least, that's common wisdom, something ingrained into every journalism student's head at some point. Of course, though, what that means is that you give the opposition the same weight as the majority view, even if that's very far from being the case. When the Prince does it, they render the views of the two dozen members of Anscombe equally important as those of the 4,500-odd undergraduates not in Anscombe. And when the national media do it, they render the views of the minority who believe that health care reform would institute "death panels" equally important as those of the majority of Americans who don't believe that, and who would actually rather like some health care reform, now, if at all possible. It's tricky, dangerous territory.
To all those folks who wondered "What's the point?", I'd say that this story is still a story, even if it's not controversial. The story is, in fact, that gender-neutral housing at Princeton is not controversial—that four decades after there was a serious and fully two-sided debate around whether to admit women to this university, it has finally become in touch with reality. As far as I'm concerned, that's really exciting.
I've never legit gotten to break a story before, but I just found out that some news I've known for 24 hours is now public: Princeton will have a gender-neutral housing option starting in this spring's housing lottery for the 2010-11 school year.
The proposal, authored by student members of the Undergraduate Life Committee, with the help of yours truly, was approved by the ULC two weeks ago and then got a necessary second endorsement from the Council of Masters (of the six residential colleges) yesterday. It's a pilot program which designates Spelman Hall, an apartment-style housing option for upperclass students (in which, significantly, every student gets their own bedroom), as gender-neutral. Instead of having to draw in groups of four students of the same gender, there will be no gender requirement on groups entering the Spelman draw. The ULC, the USG, the Housing office, and anyone else with a stake in the issue will be watching pretty closely to see how this plays out next year. Depending on interest, they may choose to expand gender-neutral housing to other upperclass dorms, or to keep it restricted to Spelman.
This is a big step forward for Princeton, which, until the ULC undertook this proposal, was the only university among the Ivy League and a set of other R1 universities that had never actively considered a gender-neutral housing proposal. While this pilot program may go on to affect relatively few people next year—particularly since it's only an option for students eligible for the Spelman draw anyway—it's a major change in university policy that brings Princeton quite dramatically and unequivocally into the 21st century. I can't help gloating that it puts us ahead of Yale (which withdrew its pilot program last year to considerable undergraduate ire), and the fact that it happened with relatively little fanfare speaks very, very well for this university and its administration.
I'm extraordinarily proud that I can say I had a part in making this happen, however small. We all have to do what we can to make our communities places we can be proud of, and create circumstances that will be better for the next generation. Now we have to turn our attention to making sure the pilot program goes well next year, but I can't resist taking at least a few days to bask in the warmth of having made real, discernible change to the policy of this place.
I have marched on the San Diego Hall of Justice and City Hall in Manhattan. I've protested in Princeton and at Scripps Ranch High School. Today, I marched on Washington. Today, like my mother before me and in the footsteps of a proud tradition of activists and organizers, I got in a van at 6:30am and drove down to Washington.
I marched. I chanted and shouted and cheered (I lost my voice). I cried, especially at the rally when Dan Choi spoke, when Staceyann Chin performed, and when Cleve Jones spoke. I cried most of all when the cast of Hair, who canceled a show to come to the march, sang "Let the Sunshine In." Readers will perhaps be aware that no song is dearer to my heart than "Let the Sunshine In." It represents all that is wonderful and all that is left unfulfilled with regard to the American promise. There was no way I could have heard it sung live on the steps of the US Capitol with rainbow flags flying everywhere and not have started to sob. I caught a couple minutes of video of the song, but all you can hear is my tired voice cracking as I try not to cry.
There is nothing so incredible when it comes to exercising your freedom of speech as marching past the White House, past federal buildings of all kinds, right up to the steps of the Capitol. There is nothing so incredible as marching in solidarity with your friends and your classmates, but also all the marchers around you. There is nothing so incredible as being able to get 70 people—many of them first-time marchers—from Point A to Point B, and realize that they, too, have loved every minute of it (thanks to EVERYONE, particularly the first-timers, for coming with us today!). There is nothing so incredible as someone coming up to your Princeton contingent to say "I graduated in '05, and we would never have gotten together a group like this then." Even in four years, things change. Just think where we'll be only a few years from now.
Some of the speakers at the rally referred to the activist legacy that brought us to the steps of the Capitol today. They referenced the civil rights March on Washington in 1963, and countless gay/LGBT rights marches. The invocation which began the rally called out not to God, but to the spirits of activists like Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Harry Hay, Frank Kameny, Harvey Milk, and many others. None of those people, in the time that they began their activism, could have brought 100,000 people to the steps of the Capitol to fight for LGBT civil rights. And yet without their struggles, that couldn't have happened today.
I came home tonight to two things: a tweet from a colleague-friend who proposed different means to the same or similar ends (in other words, Maine before marching), and a flyer from Princeton's Anscombe Society, advertising their proposal for an Abstinence and Chastity Center on campus. In utterly different ways, both things questioned how I chose to spend my Sunday (and the past few weeks in planning for this Sunday). To my colleague-friend, I say that the fight for equality is not a zero-sum game; I've donated my time and my money to Maine even as I remain focused on making sure a contentious election in my own state works out. But doing so did not preclude me from marching today. As they say whenever we do these kind of things, we march for those who can't—and so I marched today for second-class citizens not just in Maine, but all over America and all over the world. I marched for the people who are unable to come out or unable to travel; I marched—as one speaker at the rally said—for all the people who would have marched today had they not been lost to AIDS or to anti-LGBT brutality. As to Anscombe: I laughed when I saw the flyer that had fallen under my door; I wished I'd been able to tell the kid who dropped it so that I could tell him what a waste of a flyer it was. I wished I'd been able to make sure he knew how 70 kids at his university spent their Sunday.
Tomorrow is National Coming Out Day, and my name will appear along with 600 others in an ad in the day's honor in the Daily Princetonian. There is actually probably nothing more important in this struggle than coming out, and being brave enough to sign your name to something like this. But the old chant does go "Out of the closet and into the streets!" and I think the second clause is nearly as important as the first.
So I went for publicity over dignity and pitched an op-ed to the Daily Princetonian. To my pleasant surprise, they liked my pitch, the editing process was actually quite congenial, and I'm reasonably proud of the result. The article is about why the National Equality March happening in Washington on October 11 is a good thing for LGBT rights and a good thing for college students specifically:
Thanks to civil rights activists working long before any current Princeton undergraduate was born, it is possible for queer youth to live out and proud lives to an extent that it wasn’t 30 years ago. But as long as being LGBT means second-class citizenship, more progress must be made. Some change can be enacted through laws and policy proposals, but broader societal support for those laws and policy proposals is essential if they’re to be effective. And sometimes getting that support really does necessitate marching in the streets.
On Oct. 11, thousands of people who believe in civil rights for all will converge on Washington, D.C. They’re participants in a National Equality March, which will wind its way through downtown Washington and culminate in a rally at the Capitol. The march has one demand — “Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states, now” — with which it aims to transcend disagreements about which particular aspect of LGBT equality should be the first priority.
And then come to the march! There's a group of us at Princeton getting together a bus to go down to DC, and if we can do it, you can too.
In 1965, a group of Princeton students under the auspices of a campus SDS chapter participated in the national anti-Vietnam March on Washington. They carried a banner that read "Even Princeton." I love this story, because it reminds me that however frustrating this campus climate may seem at times, there's nothing to stop you from marching for justice and equality and freedom and civil liberties in the name of its students and in the name of students—and all people—everywhere. I'm going to make a sign to carry at the National Equality March that says "Even Princeton," and I'm going to be proud to represent my community in DC.
In a sentiment that is hardly unusual, some New York Times readers express surprise that their children and other teenagers they know could possibly have any knowledge of their sexual orientation at such a young age:
My question is about the Q (Questioning) subgroup of L.G.B.T.Q. Youth.
Surely most teens will be in this group at least until they experience a “full” sexual relationship with another person?
[...]
Teen years are so full of doubt and confusion about self and identity. Teens are suggestible, peer pull is strong as is the desire to forge an interesting and individual social identity for themselves.
My concern is for all those teenagers experiencing doubt and sometimes a lot of hidden angst and silent but very real suffering in a world which is incredibly difficult to navigate at their age.
“Don’t worry, they will know if they are gay” is a standard answer. This may be true for adults who have had some experience, but is it really true for many teenagers? It seems too simplistic and inadequate. Any guidance and thoughts would be much appreciated.
I've heard this before, of course—I came out for the first time at 14, and over the past few years I've heard this many times. I mean, now I'm old enough and enough of a professional queer that folks don't question the labels I assign myself or allow to be assigned to myself perhaps even as much as they should. But back in early high school, I heard things like this a lot. "You're too young to know." "Most teenagers go through a phase of same-sex attraction." "You've never had a relationship." Well, yes, the last two things were true. But facts B and C do not imply fact A. I don't see, given the structure of our society, how you can possibly be too young to know.
Our society is very, very clear on what constitutes a normal or normative sexuality. I'm not too long out of high school, and I have friends and a sibling who are still there. I know that when teenagers ask each other "So... who do you like?" they expect you to answer with an opposite-sex name. I know that it is not easy to ask, and then take, a same-sex date to the school dance. I know that there is pressure after pressure, be they from students or parents or teachers or general cultural forces, to define heterosexuality as normal and all other sexualities as abnormal.
And so when you're different, you know. Believe me. You see it if there is something powerfully and fundamentally (if amorphously) different about the way you interact with people both of the gender to whom you're supposed to be interacted and the one to whom you're not. You see it if there is something different about the way you understand and express your own gender. To teenagers, that line is very clear. You know if you're not like your peers, just like you know when you don't have the same stuff they do or talk the same way they do or have the same cultural values they do. The lines of difference are very strong in adolescent culture, as are the undercurrents of sexuality. If anything, it is more obvious that your understanding of sexuality is different from your peers, than any other contrast.
Literature shows us this, of course. I've read many memoirs—from men, mostly, because that's what I read, but also because of how adolescent male sexuality is less repressed than and also homoerotic in a different way from female sexuality—in which the writers all say that they knew their queerness from the instant puberty set in. And even if they didn't know any gay people, or if they were growing up before "gay" became a thing that you could be, they knew there was something different, something strange that made them not like their peers. It's an undeniable fact of this entire genre, that you start in adolescence with this vague sense of not-belonging and go from there.
I've tried on many labels in the past five years. I've gone through bisexual and gay and queer and asexual and I don't know what else. But it's always been "different" and "other." And sure, I envy anyone who can make it through adolescence without squirming in desperate confusion when yet another crowd at a lunch table or a birthday party asks, "So... who do you like?" But when you don't know how to answer that question, or you fear to answer it honestly, you at least know, as I did. And you begin to construct an identity based on that knowledge, however old you are and however much sexual experience you've had.
(The 300-word constraints of CP's "Under Review" feature meant I didn't get to say nearly as much as I wanted to about the experience of reading Twilight this week. What follows are some further thoughts.)
I may have mentioned to you by now, dear reader, that my English professor lectured this morning on Stephenie Meyer's novel Twilight, and that our discussion section in the afternoon also dealt in large part with that book. I read it (okay, most of it) earlier this week, after spending the past few years trying to avoid doing just that. As I read the reviews of Twilight, its sequels, and the ensuing movie, I remained profoundly troubled by something amorphous about the way the series portrays its protagonist's relationship to sexuality and to other non-sexual interpersonal reactions. When talking to others, I repeated the reviews' sentiments: Bella (said protagonist) is not a real character; she's just a conduit for desire. The books push pretty hard some themes about chastity, traditional notions of feminine motherhood, male chivalry, and other aspects of a conservative construction of gender, sexuality, and family. I said again and again, particularly when thinking of girls I know who are in the books' target age range: is this the sort of universe, with the sort of values, that we want to encourage our girls and young women to take pleasure in?
Being asked to take the books seriously for class this week, and to consider them as a work of literature and a social statement, did revise how I thought about them. Actually reading them did, too. My impression of Bella is not entirely that she is a conduit for male desire: in fact, her identity as a shy know-it-all, who becomes obsessed with not just Edward's charm, but a smartness and quickness that can match her own, came perilously close to echoing my own adolescent experience. In fact, I became profoundly uncomfortable with just how much I could recognize my own teenage fetishization of that one kid in my classes whose maturity, exoticism, eccentricity, and wit would always stand out to me. The knowledge that I might have been like that, like the Bella the reviews demonized, was enough to make me stop reading at points.
By contrast, when my professor lectured this morning, I hung onto every word (she is such a brilliant woman). She had some interesting things to say about how race and class are represented in Twilight, but what really grabbed me (of course) was her discussion of sexuality. She dwelt on the way that bodily fluids and bloodletting play out in this novel about vampires: Twilight dwells on childbirth, but there is no mention of menstruation (which you would think would be a pertinent issue in a universe where blood is something of a sexual stimulant). My professor discussed moments of defloration, comparing Bella's impregnation to the point at which she is turned into a vampire. She brought up a very interesting and kind of disconcerting point about what Bella's "change" into a vampire could be saying about menopause and the loss of fertility. And, she said, Twilight is oddly hygienic, for a universe that should revolve around blood. There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Twilight—a fact that stuck out to me for the reasons this blog probably demonstrates. There is no threat of AIDS.
My professor went on to talk about the polymorphous perversity (best phrase EVAR) of vampiric sexuality, its infantile nature, the inherent necrophilia in loving a vampire (which Meyer describes as "a walking corpse"), the oral sadism of the vampire's bite. But, of course, there is no homosexuality in Twilight. Despite the obvious ambiguity of Edward's sexual appeal, there are no gay couples in Forks, WA. There are no explicitly gay vampires. Bella herself doesn't experience same-sex attraction. My professor suggested (and I thought this was really interesting) that closeting a standard social construction of homosexuality and gayness in the Twilight world allows Meyer to be freer with the polymorphous perversity, and with the other transgressive aspects of vampiric sexuality.
But I still feel as if the degree to which key aspects of sexuality are omitted from Twilight problematizes the aspects which are left in. And that's consoling, in a way, because it means I don't have to fear relating entirely to Bella and her experience of sexual awakening. Bella has no crisis of sexual identity. Neither do her vampire friends and lovers (but maybe that's just because they've had hundreds of years to construct an identity). There are no labels in Twilight. There are no communities of sexuality. And when my class was discussing this series of books, and some folks in my class were talking about how much they could identify with Bella, I didn't—entirely—feel as if I could contribute. For all that it confuses clear-cut sexualities; for all that it builds upon and complicates our traditional notion of the innocent love story, it is still profoundly and aggressively heteronormative. It excludes those who acknowledge anti-heteronormativity, and only includes those for whom transgressive sexuality unravels along with the thread of Meyer's plot by the time the fourth book comes along.
Some of my fears about what this book says about our culture were allayed by reading it. I think I might moderate my ranting against it from here on out. But in other ways, I'm still very confused and somewhat disconcerted by what aspects of human sexuality Stephenie Meyer has chosen to put in, and what she has chosen to leave out.
Jason Mattera (of kicking your faithful correspondent out of the Young America's Foundation conference fame) didn't limit his comments about his political opponents' physical appearance to the Campus Progress editorial intern with a relative lack of power or social capital who wanted to cover his conference this past summer. He also thinks he's going to win back conservatism's power by making remarks about the appearance of one of the most popular news hosts on TV, as Sarah Posner reported on Monday:
But targeting Millennials through pro-life appeals mixes sexuality with chastity. During the panel, Mattera took the David and Goliath metaphor another perverse step: If conservatives (David) smite liberals (Goliath), they will be rewarded with the hot conservative women, just like King Saul promised his daughter to the warrior who slew the evil giant. “You know his daughter must have been beautiful because there’s no guy whose gonna die for an ugly girl,” Mattera chortled. “Our women are hot. We have Michelle Malkin. Who does the left have, Rachel Maddow? Sorry, I prefer that my women not look like dudes.”
Mattera, who doesn't seem to see the inherent problem with criticizing women's appearances instead of their ideas, responded on his blog:
Okay, okay. I’ll admit it: Not all lib women look like dudes. I’m sure there are some who don’t. Maybe. But folks, can we at least agree on Rachel Maddow? Some bipartisanship, people?
Posner refers to the college activism panel that I participated in at Family Research Council’s conference over the weekend. What did hot women have to do with my talk? Not much, actually, despite Posner making it the basis of her piece. It was just a casual reference—me noting that even if I weren’t an activist, I’d probably still wander to the conservative camp because our women don't look like the picture [of Maddow] above.
Rachel Maddow is an extraordinarily talented and successful woman, and it's not too often that I get to be in the same category as her, so I'm sort of perversely excited that Mattera thinks I'm as worth calling a guy as Maddow. Seriously guys, I'm milking this for all it's worth.
But what I find interesting and puzzling about folks' reaction as I've told them about this is how eager they've been to assure me that Ms. Maddow is incredibly attractive, or that conservative women aren't attractive, or to insinuate that the fact that Mattera put me in the same category as Maddow says something good about my physical appearance. I'm interested and puzzled because I would have thought the answer to this would be to challenge Mattera's (and the conservative movement's) sexism. This conversation shouldn't be about which side of the aisle has the nicer-looking women. This has nothing to do with "Newsflash! Dykes can be hot too!" This has to do with the fact that we all—Maddow, Mattera, myself, Michelle Malkin, and everyone—should be judged on the basis of our ideas, not our appearances.
I think there are plenty of interesting things to be said about how confused the conservative movement (as represented by Mattera) seems to be about engaging with women on an intellectual level. Mattera seems rather challenged by the notion that women could contribute more than their appearances to the political sphere, and doesn't even address the ideas of the women on his own side. It's as if we're mascots in his universe, and that speaks volumes about what his universe consists of and how he interacts with it. That's a social phenomenon we could analyze at great length if we wanted to.
But I really have too many other papers to write to bother with unpacking that one, and I think maybe our time could be better served in the long run by not letting Mattera make this a discussion about physical attributes. Yes, it can sometimes be challenging to sit there and watch someone make sexist and implicitly homophobic comments about you, without challenging him on his premise. But if we don't void the premise entirely, we're not going to get anywhere. I think I'm going to focus on hoping that one day Rachel Maddow and I will have something in common that isn't the length of our haircuts.
UPDATE: Ironically, Maddow has one of the best summing-ups of this whole "conservative movement" thing.
I'm doing my first reading for my first class to really examine the Great Thinkers of Western Civilization, which, because the class is about political theory, happens to be Rousseau's Discourse Concerning Inequality. The reading list consists of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and I'm struck as I read Rousseau how contingent developing any type of theory about the nature of human existence is contingent on having a really broad general intellectual knowledge. This was particularly true in the 18th century, when "natural philosophy" hadn't yet wholly split off into the natural sciences and philosophy, and these two branches hadn't yet split into the present sorts of disciplines you can major in at your average American research university. I'm sitting here thinking that my political theory reading could easily be relevant to my anthropology class on human evolution as well, and while it's awesome when it's not just my departmentals that inform upon each other, but my other random classes as well, it's probably more interesting to consider what this brings to bear upon the Era of the Academic Hyperspecialization.
The education press is full, of course, of discussion of the fact that academia these days is highly specialized. It's common to see folks complaining at Inside Higher Ed that newly-minted PhDs come out of grad school so much trained to think solely about a postcolonial reading of the work of an obscure Jamaican author or the role of a single gene on the X chromosome that they're ill-prepared to teach undergraduate survey courses for which there's the highest need, like 20th Century American Literature or Intro to Evolutionary Biology. This is particularly a concern in an era in which more and more newly-minted PhDs will not get jobs at places like Princeton which are looking for theorists with an expertise in Caribbean literature or high-powered researchers who can benefit from well-funded lab facilities. Those kinds of jobs simply don't exist, and instead what the profession is looking for are people who can take on a 6/6 load of intro-level courses and teach them all well. But we know all this. And what, exactly, does it have to do with Rousseau, who never had to adjunct a semester in his life?
There's probably very little relationship behind the kind of generalist Rousseau (or, to pick a more modern-day example for the sake of demonstrating diversity, Foucault) was and the kind of generalist a community-college job posting expects you to be. One is an essentially elite category (according to society's measure of these things), and the other isn't. One can often seem entirely devoted to appearing completely incomprehensible, and one is entirely devoted to making academic subject matter comprehensible—frequently to an audience not used to deciphering incomprehensible things. But the intellectual development of our culture wouldn't get very far without people who are capable of synthesizing all its disparate aspects—whether that be a Rousseau drawing on what we would term the disciplines of history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, biology, sociology, and maybe something like cultural studies to advance a complex diagramming of the nature of human interaction; or a skilled teachers who can make American literature relevant to the stay-at-home mom taking a night class and biology accessible to the business major who needs to pass a science requirement, neither of whom has any particular humanistic background or inclination. A generalist who can understand why and how Rousseau can impact the life and worldview of a student who sees no point in politics or philosophy or cultural and social theory is as necessary to our intellectual culture as the transdisciplinary vision of Rousseau himself.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have no business locking ourselves in the ivory tower if we can't poke our heads out every once in a while to inform the discourse of reality as well.
Celebrities die seemingly every day, but I was enough of a nerd that those who do didn't have a formative enough influence in my life that I'm really affected by their death. Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary is a different matter. She died today, the AP says, and I feel bereft, because she's been a reassuring presence over the past few years. She and Peter and Paul would play a concert at Carnegie Hall, or occasionally even put out a new album, just to let us know that they were there, that they still cared, that they were there making their slow way through the Bush years just as we were. I have their 2003 album In These Times, whose title alone says enough about the sociopolitical context in which it was released. And it can't have been too hard for Peter, Paul, and Mary to reopen the floodgates of song, as experienced as they were with performing to audiences marching against Vietnam. But when there is an anger and a sadness and a fighting spirit to their music, there is also innocence and whimsy and play—we learned and sang some of their songs in my Montessori preschool class. One of their albums, a cassette that we often played in the car when I was little, contained both the sweet, childlike "The Garden Song" and Woody Guthrie's migrant workers' anthem, "Pastures of Plenty." They sang songs by Tom Paxton, by Guthrie and Seeger, by John Denver. They quietly incorporated progressive Christian themes into some of their music, particularly later in their career, but it would have been impossible for our atheist household to find fault with their themes of unity and friendship and love.
I always thought it was Mary who got the best parts in the group's three part arrangements. She sang melody more often than harmony, and when the three would take turns singing the verses, she always got the best ones. She sings lead on "Pastures of Plenty" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane." Her verse of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is my favorite: "Mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don't criticize what you can't understand..." She often gets a verse later in the song, I think, the one at the critical juncture of the lyrics' plot. In "Puff the Magic Dragon," she sings the verse when Puff realizes Jacky is gone forever. It's arguably the most important verse in the children's song that is so much more than a children's song, which says so much about the loss of innocence that was the second half of the 20th century.
If you're listing "Peter, Paul, and Mary," Mary comes last. It was never "Mary, Peter, and Paul." But her voice stands among those of Joan Baez and Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell as belonging to one of the strong women of conscience who popularized the antiwar songs and union songs and above all songs of a mass cultural movement written by less accessible folk artists. Mary Travers' voice is instantly recognizable, and even though it's a mellifluous alto, it always rises above those of her male colleagues. It's strident. It's beautiful. It believes in something.
I'm part of a group at school that gets together once a week to sing together: folk, country, blues, that sort of thing—anything that's found in this book. We sing more than a few songs Peter, Paul, and Mary popularized—some of our favorites are "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Marvelous Toy." We're not a very political group, and most people didn't grow up singing left-wing political music like I did. My attempts to teach the union songs and peace songs Peter, Paul, and Mary sing haven't always gone over well. But I guess it's just as well, then, that Peter, Paul, and Mary have had songs for every occasion, every mood, every political moment.
Here's one of my favorite songs in the whole world, "If I Had a Hammer." Now I'll shut up, and you'll watch that video. And listen to that Mary Travers' voice. And see how much she believes what she's singing—as may we all.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), as brought to my attention by Steve Benen:
Well, we just heard last week that the Federal Government now under the Obama administration is calling for a re-ordering of America's food supply. What is that going to mean? Now will the White House decide how many calories we consume or what types of food we consume?
If the next speech Bachmann makes on the House floor invokes the words "precious bodily fluids," I will not be the least bit surprised.
The latest target of the right-wing media isn't a community organizer. He hasn't signed any controversial petitions. He's not even a minority. He's Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, Obama's recently-confirmed head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The weird thing is that, as David Frum notes (h/t Yglesias), he's actually kind of exactly the sort of person a conservative might like to see in charge of an Obama OIRA:
Every legal conservative who cares about the issues of regulation and deregulation agrees that Cass Sunstein is the very best choice for the OIRA job to be hoped from a Democratic president. Had conservative opposition somehow derailed the Sunstein nomination, President Obama’s next appointment would almost certainly have been worse – very possibly, a lot worse.
In terms of regulatory policy, Sunstein is a proponent of cost-benefit analysis—a regulatory philosophy championed by OIRA under Reagan and both Bushes that has been used in some cases to justify the scaling back of the "social regulation" managed by agencies like the EPA and OSHA. Cost-benefit analysis became increasingly popular throughout the 1970s and then particularly in the Reagan period, its popularity fueled by the efforts of such conservative think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage. While there are certainly more conservative and more moderate ways to practice cost-benefit analysis, as the Wonk Room pointed out back in January, its history is as an essentially conservative philosophy.
And so it remains all the more irritating that right-wing media figures like Glenn Beck are targeting Sunstein for issues that have nothing to do with his official duties at OIRA. Of course, we know by now that radical conservatives are more interested in seeing Obama fail than in actually advancing any agenda, whether progressive or conservative. But if they attack not only Obama's progressive nominees, like Van Jones, but his more center-right ones as well, they're only going to push what Washington calls "moderate" further to the right than it already is. The conservative dominance in Washington since the 1970s has served to push the center to an increasingly more conservative position on the political spectrum. It appears as if—thanks to the factual inaccuracies people like Glenn Beck are fond of inventing—the Obama administration is going to have a very hard time fighting that trend.
In the theme I appear to have been developing recently (see here and here) of "Let's take something I read on the intertubes and use it as an excuse to have an entirely different conversation," Bilerico pointed out a statistic that, sadly, does not surprise me at all: "While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46% of those discharged under DADT in 2007 were women."
The saga of Caster Semenya tells us that women who do not behave in "womanly" ways—e.g. by displaying leadership, athletic prowess, skill in combat, fearlessness, or being good at things—wind up having their femininity and their sexuality questioned. In a world that frequently equates gender identity and expression with sex and/or sexual orientation, that questioning could take the form of suspicion about sexual orientation (and subsequently being fired for it), or suspicion about sex and gender (and subsequently having your name, reputation, and career dragged through the mud for it).
I don't know whether our society will ever come to adopt a model of gender that doesn't depend on two essentialist categories that have associated with them not only additional expectations with regard to sexual orientation and behavior, but also the notion that one essentialist category represents a higher moral good than the other. It seems impossible that Western society (and many of the societies by which it's been more recently influenced), which has operated on this model for so long, should change now. But until and unless it does, our headlines will be wracked with these kinds of accusations. Caster Semenya is not really a woman! That Army officer is not really a woman!—but for entirely different reasons that have more to do with how our culture views sexual orientation than with how it views sex. The problem, though, is that over the past few decades it's proven remarkably difficult to unravel the public's perceptions of gender and sexuality and all these other forms of identification from one very muddled-up ball of yarn.
For the sake of being able to say "I told you so," I predicted that Semenya's battery of tests would result in an intersex diagnosis from the start. But whatever that may mean for Semenya and her sense of identity, identifying as a "girl" or a "woman" is her sole right, something completely apart from whichever internal organs she may or may not have. So is it anyone's right to identify themselves with whatever sexual orientation labels they wish—only you know who you are. No one else should be able to make that decision for you.
That decision becomes a non-decision when it means being faced with exile from a community of international athletics predicated on a rigid gender binary. And as readers of this blog should well know, it becomes a non-decision when, particularly if you serve in the U.S. armed forces, your career and family life may depend on what you say or what you allow other people to say about you.
Can we force our culture to grant us the right to call ourselves what we please—or, more radical yet, to call ourselves nothing at all?
One of the great tragedies of the past half century or so, is how patriotism has been coopted by people who claim the Confederate flag, while black leaders, from King to Obama, are dismissed as communists/socialists and now Hitlerite. These are people whose heroes routinely flouted the federal government and assaulted black troops carrying the Union flag.
The Princeton Review regularly is criticized for its ranking system, which is based on surveys of students -- a system that critics find unscientific even by the standards of college rankings. At the same time, the Princeton Review is popular with students in part for providing analyses of many unofficial issues, such as which institution is the top "party school." On Thursday, the Princeton Review was attacked by a gay rights group, Campus Pride, for using its regular surveys (which on many campuses may be filled out largely by straight people) to rate colleges on how gay-friendly they are. “This list is an erroneous, misleading indicator of acceptance for LGBT youth and their safety on campus,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride (which does its own "index" on colleges for gay students, based more on policies or programs than a broad student survey). Robert Franek, senior vice president and publisher of the Princeton Review, noted in an interview that many gay groups have praised his publication for making gay inclusiveness a measure of college quality. Franek also said that his publication believes students "are the experts" and so he sees no reason to change the methodology.
I was particularly interested to see this because I wasn't impressed to begin with by Princeton Review's treatment of LGBT students' college experience—the fact that they used the phrase "gay-friendly" instead of "LGBT-friendly" and titled the list of the least welcoming schools with the phrase "alternative lifestyles" says a lot about how much they sought to get a sense of the LGBT communities on the campuses they surveyed (the survey question, "Is there very little discrimination against homosexuals?" sounds as if it hasn't been revised since the 1960s). And as Campus Pride (an awesome organization, by the way) said in a press release:
Their rankings were based off one single question asked to 122,000 students at the 371 top colleges -- whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “Students, faculty, and administrators treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”
“This list is an erroneous, misleading indicator of acceptance for LGBT youth and their safety on campus,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride and the author of The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, the first-ever guide profiling the 100 Best LGBT-Friendly Colleges, released in 2006 by Alyson Books. “The majority of students responding to such a question – irrespective of response – will be straight. Their perceptions of equality are likely quite different from those of LGBT students.”
To me, this makes perfect sense.
Campus Pride uses its own methodology to rate—instead of rank—colleges on a variety of criteria including availability of gender-neutral housing/restrooms, LGBT-related course offerings, student organizations, staff diversity training, and that sort of thing (interestingly enough, Princeton gets five stars out of five—which makes sense, as its institutional community really is one of the very best—it's the organic, noninstitutional community that could use some work). Looking at Campus Pride's list is an interesting counterpart to some of the weirdness of the Princeton Review list—such as the suggestion that Stanford is more LGBT-friendly than Reed or Simon's Rock—or indeed Berkeley, which doesn't appear at all on Princeton Review's list, but which offered the first undergraduate queer studies course in the country, as early as 1970.
Rankings are so pointless that it's pointless to discuss how pointless they are, and so it seems worthwhile, I think, to draw a contrast between using criteria to grade an entity on how well it accomplishes something and trying to put the entity in a list that compares apples and oranges—Princeton Review puts liberal arts colleges and research universities, religious schools and military academies, all together, and that's just not sensible.
Oh yeah, and I have one final question for Princeton Review. Why, in their "Alternative Lifestyles Not an Alternative" list, are the five military academies (which actively discriminate against LGBT students under Don't Ask Don't Tell) not at the very top? That alone should be enough to call Princeton Review's rankings into question.
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