Coded Language

As I read more and more about what it meant to be a gay man in any decade of the 20th century, I become immersed in a language. Sometimes that means just picking up enough in context, or inferring enough from the slang of our own era, to know what someone means when he talks to another man in a bar, using words the undercover cops wouldn’t know. Sometimes I see someone give me a funny look in conversation, and I realize I’ve used a turn of phrase natural in the 1950s but completely anachronistic—and perhaps offensive—in our time. And sometimes—as happened just yesterday—it’s not so much basic comprehension that I gain, but a sense of what greater significance simple words had to someone living in a different time and place and social context.

I’ve read, or listened to a recording of, Ginsberg’s “Howl” more times than I can count. My iTunes says I’ve listened to my favorite recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl” (yes, I have more than one) 19 times, but I’m sure that’s not accurate. It doesn’t count the number of times I’ve listened to just Part I, my favorite part, and stopped before I reached the end of the track. It doesn’t count the times I listened to one of the other versions instead, for a change (though I find the other versions jarring, because I’m so used to Ginsberg’s cadences in the first version). And it doesn’t count the times that I’ve opened one edition or another and stared at the pages, passing my eyes over words obscene and sublime, or perhaps sublimely obscene; the times I’ve typed those words out on an electric typewriter, or quoted them in conversation, or added them as epigrams at the start or finish of my essays as they happen to take on temporarily a significance that informs what I’m trying to get across.

Last night I was listening to Part I of “Howl” again, trying to fall asleep, as I do at least a few nights a week. I tune out a bit, usually, when I do this—sometimes I murmur along with my favorite parts, but usually I just let Ginsberg’s voice lull me. I tuned back in for this part:

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning and the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

This passage is preceded by a section about young political radicals, and alludes to their naïveté without condemning it; it is followed by a hymn to the heterosexual essence of Neal Cassady, Ginsberg’s great unrequited love. And in looking for details about the political movements or characters that made up the Beat Generation, I’ve never really paid much attention to that above passage. Despite its prurient nature, it never struck me as particularly interesting.

But all it takes is some conversance in stereotypes of gay culture (not to put a negative connotation on “stereotype”; it’s just what they are), and you realize how exciting it is that Ginsberg is including all these things. He puts a humorous, light-hearted, camp spin on being arrested in a police raid. He applies the same sense of joie de vivre to bikers and sailors, and to sex in parks and bathhouses—marred only by that sob in the “Turkish Bath.” And then, of course, the poem turns to the essentially pathetic (in the sense of pathos, though maybe I’m not using that word correctly) underbelly of this whole situation; it invokes loss and traitorousness and all that other stuff Ginsberg must be feeling as he goes on to sing to “N. C., secret hero of these poems.” This was 1956. Ginsberg hadn’t yet morphed into the Great Icon of Homosexuality he would become. His journals from both the period in which he was writing and the period he was writing about reek of that tortured self-psychoanalysis that characterizes how a lot of gay men in the ’40s and ’50s tried to make sense of their lives. But still. Still there is this sense of what fun, what larks, what silliness can be had if you giggle your way through the maneuverings of your tortured soul. And still he was not afraid—even in 1956—to share that bubbling of joy.

On the live recording I have, there’s a ripple of laughter in the background when Ginsberg, then in his mid-60s, solemnly intones lines like “scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,” and in the past when I heard that laughter I thought they were giggling because he said “semen.” I thought they were behaving the way most people do when a prurient subject is raised. But knowing what I know now, being conversant in some tropes, I’m not so sure of that. This time the laughter sounded entirely different: it sounded relieved, this outburst of held-in breath that is thrilled this sagacious, bearded man proposes to “scream with joy” when engaging in a bout of anal sex; that in 1975 (whence the recording dates), it is finally possible to publicly agree on delight in bikers and sailors. It’s almost as if they’re screaming with joy with him.

I read books where anonymous interviewees talk about holding papers over their faces in police raids of New York bars. I read accounts of gay life at mid-century written in the 1990s, where the participants are still afraid to reveal themselves. I watch old movies filled with references so coded they got through the Hollywood censors; I read the letters and diaries of famous figures, some of whom were closeted until they died and those letters and diaries were revealed. And I follow the news religiously and sometimes despair that America will ever change, that gay public figures will ever have any civil rights, much less be able to admit that they have sex lives like straight public figures do.

But 52 years ago, when he published “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg launched himself onto the national scene with an obscenity trial about what continued for the rest of his life, and long after, to be his most famous work. He stood in a witness box and defended his right to “scream with joy.” He read “Howl” again and again, and in my recording he reads for a group of students, decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in this country. And yet he asserted his right to “scream with joy” and the students laughed—not at him, as I’d once thought, but perhaps with him.

That, to this cynical blogger and proto-historian, is incredible. It’s been nearly three years now, my relationship with Ginsberg and with “Howl,” and I’m so glad that after all that time the tools that I gather, and the codes that I learn, continue to dig up more things inside the head and the life of that wonderful man.

Labo(u)r Day

I unfortunately haven’t been able to tear myself away from installing kitchen cabinets long enough to write a proper Labor Day essay, but it would be remiss of me not to observe the holiday of a movement (and its music!) so emotionally significant to me and my childhood and my intellectual development. So by way of soundtrack, let’s have my favorite song in the IWW’s “Little Red Songbook”:

Once you’ve taught yourself the chorus (it’s dead easy), I’ll leave you in the safe and brilliant hands of Chris Hayes, whose essay “In Search of Solidarity” is a must-read.

Labor Day often seems like just another federal holiday, as silly as Columbus Day or Flag Day. But if there is any holiday whose original purpose is worth contemplating on that day, it’s this one. Remember the thousands of men and women who have stood on picket lines, who have walked out of factories, who have sometimes died in the name of higher wages and better working conditions and fair treatment. To quote Woody Guthrie:

Oh you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union
Oh you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union
I’m sticking to the union till the day I die.

QOTD (2009-09-04)

I bet former UChicago dean of admissions Ted O’Neill thinks the culture of college rankings is stupid:

[Colleges] are all different: We all have our own strengths and our own cultures. Test scores tell us next to nothing about who a student is, how he/she thinks, what they care about…. We want to know how a student will behave around a seminar table at the University of Chicago.

I don’t know whether there’s any truth to the rumor that O’Neill resigned in protest at UChicago moving to the Common Application, but I do know that, when I applied in O’Neill’s last admissions season, the UChic application was my favorite one to complete. I also felt the most certain that the folks there weren’t judging me on the basis of my SAT scores or some artificial resume or my family history—they were assessing whether I would actually flourish at their school.

I’ve since had conversations with a number of people at Princeton that have convinced me that Princeton admissions cares about more than just test scores, too. But it certainly wasn’t something I believed at the time, and I wish other admissions deans who do follow the whole student approach could be as blatant as Ted O’Neill in breaking away from the rankings culture.

QOTD (2009-09-04)

And it’s a depressing one, folks. Steve Benen on right-wing lunacy:

Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh. Bachmann, Inhofe, DeMint, King, and Broun. A scorched-earth campaign intended to tear the country apart, questioning the legitimacy of the president, the government, and the rule of law. It’s all very scary.

Josh Marshall recently noted, “It’s always important for us to remember what the last eight years have again taught us, which is that America has a very strong civic fabric, one that can withstand, absorb and conquer all manner of ugly behavior. It can take in stride a lot of angry rhetoric, townhall fisticuffs and more. But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading.”

[Time‘s Joe] Klein’s not the only one with a sinking feeling

The crazies have a political party, a cable news network, and a loud, activist base. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take their medications anymore.

As the weeks of August have gone by, I’ve gotten progressively more concerned as well. Our country has obviously survived many a period of hysteria before, but I keep thinking back to the anti-communist lunacy of the Cold War, and everything that happened in that period. Obviously, that particular hysteria dissipated when the USSR dissolved, but it seems as if that void has been filled by other ways to prey on the public’s fears—certainly, the role of “communist” as chief political slur didn’t end in 1989. In my role as a research assistant, I’ve been reading Congressional debates about deregulation from the mid-1970s, and the discourse wasn’t precisely sane, then. Has American political discourse ever been sane? What on earth is sane, anyway? And when do you just throw up your hands and move to Canada?

Doing My Part

I did very little conventional work on the California No on 8 campaign last year. It was partly that I was in New Jersey for most of the campaign season and so it was difficult to do any volunteer work that involved a physical presence, but I was also, I must confess, lazy and complacent. I didn’t think it was worth donating to the campaign, I thought Prop. 8 would probably fail, and I also didn’t (and still don’t) believe marriage to be the most important LGBT issue worth fighting for. But when Prop. 8 passed, I felt pretty damn guilty. There’s no question I should have done more, that outreach to my Facebook friends wasn’t enough. The one-on-one conversations are a great tactic (if you haven’t talked to your friends and family about LGBT rights, get the hell on that!), but they still need to be coupled with traditional methods of political action for political campaigns to succeed.

And so I won’t be making that mistake again. I’ve decided to make a small donation—what I can afford—to the Maine No on 1 campaign, which is in a similar position to that of California’s No on 8 a year ago. I doubt that what I can afford to give will make a great deal of difference to what Stand for Marriage Maine is able to achieve, but it’s a symbolic gesture, and a wedge I can use when I encourage other people to take action, to volunteer or to donate what time or money they have.

But I also don’t want to get too sidetracked by distant battles: in New Jersey sometime between November (the gubernatorial election) and January (when the winner will be sworn in), marriage equality is going to come to a vote in the state legislature. Gov. Corzine has said that he will sign a bill—now the legislature needs to pass it. And you can bet I’ll be calling and writing my representatives; you can bet I’ll be doing what I can from my position on campus to support getting that vote through the legislature—and if it involves fighting NOM, so much the better! I know we can win.

I still have a lot of regret that marriage became the flashpoint issue for LGBT equality in this country, and that the culture war battle has come to center on assimilation, not something more radical. If there was going to be a fight anyway, I wish my predecessors had decided to go for broke. But they didn’t, and we have these state-by-state marriage battles now. That means we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. We’ve got to engage this issue head-on. We’ve got to use marriage as a jumping-off point to teach acceptance of all people, all relationships, all families, all children, all kinds of love. We’ve got to take advantage of this conversation, and from there move on to safe schools, hate crimes, employment discrimination, tax code, immigration, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and oh my god so many other things. When we let measures like Prop. 8 or Maine’s Measure 1 pass, we’re robbing ourselves of the ability to control those conversations about everything else. Even if some of us are not so crazy about the whole marriage thing, it’s a symbol to a large percentage of this country of something very meaningful. And if it will help get things done, I’m okay with rolling with that.

I’m so totally primed for battle. Let’s do this shit.

In Which I Get Defensive About Princeton

The higher ed blogosphere has said most of what needs to be said about the latest take on the college-rankings phenomenon, GQ‘s “America’s Douchiest Colleges” list. But something I think hasn’t been mentioned is that this list, like most of the other rankings out there, probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for pre-existing stereotypes that get reinforced year-in, year-out about America’s most name-recognizable colleges.

While I’m aware that going where I’m about to go may only serve to undermine my entire argument, the only way I know how to discuss this is by speaking to my experience. So.

Take, for example, my college. I go to Princeton, which has a high level of name recognition. It’s been around for a while, and it’s got a reputation among most constituencies you ask about it. Among people who write college rankings, and people who pay attention to them, Princeton is hard to get into (you have to be smart, and have high test scores, among other things), and its alumni get access to high-paying careers on the basis of that aforementioned name recognition. These are things some college applicants want out of a university (the prestige of selectivity, a financial return on the tuition investment), and this popular perception influences why Princeton continues to score highly on metrics like those used by US News and Forbes, and why other universities will rate Princeton well in the all-important US News peer surveys.

Many other people who perceive this exclusivity and elitism see it as a bad thing. They criticize Princeton for being “preppy,” for privileging further the already privileged, and for reinforcing a culture that’s desperately out of sync with “real” America. Some of these people who are critical do have an accurate picture of things that could be improved upon to further diversify Princeton, or to change the ways its admissions and financial aid policies operate to make things more equitable. There are huge improvements to be made in this regard: for example, one recent survey of students’ backgrounds and attitudes showed that those who come from financially well-off backgrounds are much more likely to join eating clubs, which are a central aspect of mainstream Princeton social life. That’s a problem—and, it should be noted, the university administration is working to fix it by offering financial aid that makes it no more costly to join an eating club than to opt for a university dining contract. (For the record, though I disapprove of the eating clubs that choose their members by a selective, competitive process, I don’t see a problem with the ones that use a nonselective process. However, I don’t plan to join one—nothing on them, they’re just not my scene.)

But some of those who are critical of Princeton’s privileged reputation aren’t citing statistics. Some of them, like GQ, are making lame jokes about Princeton’s supposed “douchiness.” I have no idea if I spelled that word right, but it’s an accusation that tends to put me on the defensive, because that perception is not in keeping with the Princeton I know. The Princeton I know—the Princeton I chose to attend only after I realized what it’s really like—is led by the mind-bogglingly progressive administration of Shirley Tilghman, the university’s first woman president, who has done more to take Princeton away from its 1940s and ’50s-era reputation as a Southern gentlemen’s club than anyone else in Princeton’s history. Since women were first admitted in 1969 (40 years this fall!) Princeton has been steadily changing for the better and the more progressive, and now in particular its official positions certainly cannot be said to be problematic. If there are “douchey” elements of the Princeton student culture (and there are), they are no more representative of the student body than birthers, deathers, and tenthers are of the American political spectrum. Certainly, Princeton’s douche factor is no more extreme than are those of other well-regarded private research universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or the University of Chicago.

There is no reason that I should feel more embarrassed by the name of my university than my friends who go to other famous universities should. And there is no reason that I should be stopped (as I have been time and time again) after I tell someone where I go to school so that they can say to me, “You don’t seem like the Princeton type.” My own nerdy intellectual bent and investment in my coursework above all else, my passion for writing and verbal expression, my commitment to causes outside the university walls, and my investment in making Princeton a better and more progressive place are reflected in the policy decisions of the Tilghman administration and in my classmates, friends, and professors. I have to conclude that I am someone who belongs at Princeton. And by acknowledging that, I’m not implying a negative assessment of my character, either.

“Conventional wisdom” is a popular trap for this country’s discourse to slip into, particularly in the mainstream media, which perpetuate quite successfully a lot of myths that, when they don’t involve stupid things Republicans have done recently, do occasionally involve colleges with well-known names. It’s hard for me to counter these myths, when saying the name of my college and speaking from my personal experience automatically renders me an unreliable witness. People prefer narratives that criticize these institutions, so that they may be validated in their previously-held opinions that these institutions aren’t worth the hype. But I’m holding out hope that, as Princeton continues to lead its peer institutions in setting policies that make an unrivaled undergraduate education accessible to anyone who’s qualified, the university name will cease to be a source of shame, or an indication that its bearer is somehow undeserving.

NOM, With Added WashPo and Waugh

The LGBT blogosphere is so used to calling out homophobia and transphobia that it can often seem a bit knee-jerk and hysterical, but to my mind, last Friday’s outburst over a Washington Post profile of National Organization for Marriage executive director Brian Brown was entirely justified. As I said in a response at Campus Progress:

What is most disappointing—and disturbing—about the Post’s profile of Brown is the degree to which the writer, Monica Hesse, fell hook, line, and sinker for NOM’s marketing in its entirety. Hesse positively fawns over Brown, saying that in contrast to “the people who specialize in whipping crowds into frothy frenzies, who say things like ‘Katrina was caused by the gays,’” Brown speaks to a “country [that] is not made up of people in the far wings, right or left, [but] is made up of a movable middle, reasonable people looking for reasonable arguments to assure them that their feelings have a rational basis.” Hesse seems to have missed that fighting against same-sex marriage becomes a more and more unreasonable position as the public warms to it. The idea that Brown’s cause is rational is just a tactic: it’s exactly what he and other social conservatives want the public to think.[…]

Brown believes that because Western civilization has historically not recognized same-sex marriages, they shouldn’t have a place in our modern legal system. (As Stephanie Coontz writes, what’s actually most common in Western civilization’s history of marriage is polygyny, not monogamous heterosexual marriages.) The comparison means little when you factor in differences among regions, time periods, and cultures. But Hesse rolls with this flawed understanding of the glorified tax status that is marriage in the 21st-century United States, developing in its modern form fairly recently.

The Post’s profile does not hide the fact that Brown is a devout Catholic (like many of the crusading conservatives, he converted as a young man while studying at Oxford). In doing so, it gives away the tried-and-true tactic Brown is using—placing a dummy wall between his Catholicism and his “family values,” which he tries to defend on other-than-religious grounds. The modern social conservative movement uses supposed “logic” and “reason” to advance arguments which have traditionally been presented on religious grounds. Princeton Professor Robert George, chair of NOM’s board of directors, does the same thing with his arguments, using his distinguished academic pedigree and his debate skills to distance his social conservatism from his ardent Catholic faith.

Read the rest—and I mean it; I don’t usually self-promote unless I actually like what I’ve written.

A lot of stuff was going through my head as I sorted out why I actually do feel outraged by the way the Post treated this profile of a man who is far from moderate or reasonable. It wasn’t just that Brown, who dropped out of a UCLA history PhD program, was claiming that this background gave him license to pronounce authoritatively upon the legacy of Western civilization, and I felt offended on behalf of proto-historians everywhere. It wasn’t just that I felt offended on behalf of queerfolk everywhere. It wasn’t just that I continue to feel that the existence of NOM besmirches the name of Princeton, NJ.

I read, and watched the Granada television adaptation of, Brideshead Revisited this summer, and liked it so much that I’ve had it on the brain since. I find myself coming back to it when I think about the ways in which Brown and the other NOMites either call attention to or try not to call attention to their religion—often, specifically, their Catholicism. In Brideshead, Catholicism is for the Flytes (the aristocratic family central to the plot) at times a piece of social positioning, a networking tool that means being friends with monseigneurs and curates and other English Catholics; and at times it is an intensely private and deeply-held conviction that seems irrational to those who don’t subscribe to it, but is the natural order of things for the believers. And I can’t resist reading the novel as suggesting that, whatever homosexuality meant in the English 1920s and ’30s, it’s part of what Sebastian Flyte is struggling with within his tortured guilty Catholic conscience, part of what drives him away from his family and which propels his uneasy relationship with his religion.

In Brideshead, the family’s religious beliefs are the plot wedge, but it could conceivably be something else—and in 2000s America for people like Brian Brown, being Catholic is not the same as it would have been in inter-World Wars England. For one thing, being Catholic is just not as markedly incredible here and now as it was there and then. But I am struck in both cases by how dogged trust in a faith doctrine persists, even in the face of what seems to those who don’t have that faith as the most unassailable evidence that, for example, prejudice just isn’t in anymore, whatever Leviticus or your own personal brand of non-Biblical logic may have to say about it.

Okay, yeah, the Brideshead thing was a totally tenuous connection, and I’m not quite sure why I drew it in—except to say that this kind of fervor (whether it’s religiously driven or not) remains to me, as it does to the non-Catholic characters in Brideshead, a deeply incomprehensible thing. I find myself continuing to wonder in all these cases to what extent it’s actual devotion, and to what extent it’s a cultivated social pose.