Self-Promotion, and a Confession

This morning I blogged at Campus Progress about the new movement in D.C. on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, why you should care, and why, if you find yourself on the far-left, queer-radical side of things, you should really be ignoring the issue of DADT because you object to the military-industrial complex instead of complaining that this new compromise doesn’t go far enough:

The New York Times reported yesterday afternoon that the new deal on a repeal timeline would give the Pentagon until December to “[complete] a review of its readiness to deal with the changes,” which the White House would also have to sign off on; before even this can happen, the House and the Senate must find the votes to add a DADT repeal measure as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill. There’s reason to be cautiously optimistic about those votes, but they’re not in the bag yet, and it seems as if some of the moderate Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee will need to be convinced—though, Steve Benen predicts, Congress might vote on the amendment as early as Thursday. If it makes its way into the defense reauthorization act, the Pentagon and the White House will then be able to conduct their respective reviews; if these conclude satisfactorily, DADT will be history.

If you’re curious about how this complicated new process might or might not work, the rest of my post I think lays it out pretty clearly—or as clearly as it is possible to lay out the web of D.C. LGBT politics. Even when I was in D.C. last summer, going to some of the hearings and press conferences, it was hard to keep track, and now I feel more distanced than ever from how things get done in Washington.

I was reminded of how much my life has changed in this past academic year today, because after sending in that DADT post, I went to grab some lunch. Walking past my mailbox on the way to the student-center cafeteria, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker, which was waiting for me, and I sat down to my seriously lackluster roast beef and iced coffee (hey, I’m not really complaining—it was dirt cheap) while reading a totally fascinating review of a new biography of Somerset Maugham. I knew nothing about Maugham before reading this article—except that he was the author of Of Human Bondage, which is a fact I memorized back when I memorized authors and titles for my quizbowl team, and which came in useful in one memorable home match when I was a sophomore, one of the first times I played on the varsity team. I had no idea, however, that Maugham was gay (or its early-20th-century equivalent); I suppose I should probably have surmised as much, but it took reading this article for me to add him to my mental roster of queer writers whose biographies I read and by whose cultural contexts I am fascinated. It was a funny realization because it took me oh-so-very out of the context of glaringly polarized D.C. LGBT politics into a more amorphous world of biographical and historicist literary criticism, and a world of long-dead men and women whose sexualities are not, unlike Dan Choi’s, the stuff of headlines. Maugham reminded me that I work in a different context now, one where nothing is black-and-white (or blue-and-red) polarized, and one where nuance is everything, where even the people we’re so certain are one thing or another aren’t, really.

My RSS reader has been changing, over the past year; I’ve pared down my number of political blogs and upped my intake of the likes of the New Yorker, the NYRB, the TLS, and the higher ed press. I’m reading book reviews instead of Politico, and I’m grateful for it. We all do what we have to do in order to stay sane, and to seek beauty; I am thankful that I know now that I am suited less to explaining Washington than I am to explaining the long-dead writers whose identities are so far removed from our own present cultural context. I look forward to seeing what this summer will bring, and whether I can find in every part of it as much joy as I found last summer in the elusive moments when I could escape from politics to the National Gallery or to the Dupont bookstores.

Summer Reading; or, The Time a Young Woman’s Fancy Turns to BOOKS!

This is it: my belongings are all packed in boxes and sent off to storage; I’ll be moving out of my dorm room—my home for the past nine months—tomorrow afternoon. This means it’s summer, the time of weather worth sitting outside for, of long rides on trains and airplanes, of parks and beaches and unscheduled blocks of time. It’s time for summer reading, and so I thought I’d share with you the books which I am hoping to read this summer. It’s a long list, comprising some books which I am reading for pleasure, some which I am reading for thesis research, and some which I am reading for a sort of academic club of which I’m a member. I’m sure I won’t get to all of them—the summer, after all, is a time for not stressing overmuch about deadlines—but I will certainly be reading voraciously and constantly. The list, in alphabetical order:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography
Arthur Rimbaud, ed. and trans. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, Selected Poems and Letters
Douglas Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture*
Edmund White, everything I haven’t read yet (I’m currently reading The Married Man)
Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Feel free to read along with me, to offer your own recommendations, and in general to join me in enjoying the wonders of SUMMER!

[* The reviewers agree that Shand-Tucci’s approach is not a historically rigorous nor necessarily accurate one, but I’m reading the book for background information and direction more than for facts. I’m hoping it will give me names, anecdotes, etc. that I can pursue and fact-check and therefore an understanding of what was distinctively American about a university that thought itself the U.S. equivalent of Oxbridge.]

Summer; or, The Time a Young Woman’s Fancy Turns to Unstructured Intellectual Pursuits; or, Half of College Gone and All I Got Were Many, Many T-Shirts

Well, here we go. This is it. I’m timing this post to go up right as I turn in the last assignment of my sophomore year of college, a final exam in children’s literature. When you read this, I really will be halfway done, and I really will be able to turn my attentions to the days ahead: to summer, to plans for next fall and spring, to my independent work, which is increasingly becoming my driving preoccupation. I have begun to take very seriously this sense that my time as an aimless liberal-arts student is beginning to draw to a close; I feel myself to be taking the first steps towards the specialization that will only increase in the second half of college and then in graduate school. And, of course, I am as anxious as ever about whether I am ready. I am as anxious as ever about the dwindling amount of time I have to spend with my friends before I go to England and they graduate.

And yet I write this, now, in my window seat here over my archway, enjoying my last week of rosy sunset light on the faux-Gothic stone and copper trim of the building behind me, all my windows thrown open to catch the springtime air. I am drinking tea and listening to Bach and rejoicing in the nearly-summerness of it, the time when the air is clear and everything is bright and the damp heat of New Jersey hasn’t actually happened yet. It’s hard not to get excited about this summer, and not to pre-empt it (even though, as I write, I haven’t finished studying children’s literature), because this summer I’m having everything I want out of a summer. I’m visiting some friends, I’m doing some traveling, I’m spending some time with my family, I’m doing some community service, and most of all I’m reading. I have no job nor internship, no sublet in a strange city, no deadlines nor assignments (aside from my usual commitments to Campus Progress). This summer I intend to take slowly and deliberately, and I intend to read some books I haven’t read, to gain the cultural education of traveling to new places, to get the ball rolling on my independent work, to—in short—play at being scholar. And I am grateful, oh so grateful, that I am not seeking to gain entrance to a line of work that requires some method of professional preparation other than monastic intellectual contemplation. I am so grateful that I’ve found a calling which will, some years hence, reward a reading summer.

I do believe it is selfish and elitist to spend four months seeking to serve only oneself, and that’s why I will continue some of my part-time volunteer and paid journalistic endeavors this summer. It’s also why I will be volunteering at the San Diego LGBT Community Center, a wonderful resource which has a concrete and local impact on residents of my hometown. I remain dubious about the degree to which your average public-sector college-student internship usually makes the world a better place; by contrast, I feel as if the Center, which uses mostly volunteer labor, is having a profound impact on the lives of people very far from a locus of state or federal government. And so, as I sit in my beloved window seat for one of the last times, I think of the fact that I will probably be working with LGBT teenagers at the Center, and the fact that we all owe some kind of duty to the next generation, and that we all have the capacity to educate, no matter where our disciplinary interests lie.

Of course, we will not be effective teachers if we are not first effective learners; we must learn to develop not just our stores of knowledge but our capacities for sympathy and empathy—and those of us whose talents lie in the verbal must practice our writing through reading and our speaking through listening. Reading Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde—which is what I did today, outside in the glorious sun—is thus, in some sense, a prerequisite to supervising a queer youth group. Not because of who Wilde was, and who my charges will be, necessarily; but rather because intellectual engagement of any kind is worth something, and perhaps because Wilde is himself a sympathetic character (Ellman, at least, would have us believe so), and if you haven’t got sympathy, well, what have you got? And as I read the Ellman biography, I think that when I am in Paris this summer I will have to visit the Père Lachaise cemetery, because you don’t need to be a gay man to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of Oscar Wilde.

I have been torn for many years between anachronisms on both ends of the time scale, between pretending that Princeton is a romanticized 19th-century Arcadia and immersing myself 24/7 in the digital realm. I don’t know whether it’s the promise of Oxford next year or my own intellectual maturation or something else entirely, but I think that, more and more, the former is winning out. Yes, I know, I am still writing on this blog—but I am believing again something I haven’t believed since elementary school (and certainly couldn’t have articulated then): it is books, and not the Internet, which have the power to make me into a better person. It is books which actually have the power to make me happy, and which can quiet my demons of self-loathing. And, thankfully, I am not the only person who believes this in the ivory tower.

I am not going to post my address publicly on the Internet, but I hope that you will send me yours, or ask me for mine: I would like to write discursive longhand letters and post them across the globe (though I must warn you that I don’t have a good track record for getting mail to China), just as historical figures and fictional characters alike will be doing in the many, many books I’ll read.

QOTD (2010-05-15), “Whitman Is Not a Gay Poet” Edition

From Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples:

Whitman was not suggesting that all men were repressing a supposedly shameful tendency; rather, he was celebrating the seeds of a politically powerful democratic affection that existed within every person and that only needed encouragement to blossom. Whitman’s poems of adhesiveness were intended not to set a few men apart but to bring all Americans together.

It is this inclusiveness that has made arguments about Whitman’s sexuality so intense. When Oscar Wilde said, years after his visit to the United States, that the kiss of Walt Whitman was still on his lips, he was claiming an artistic consecration, a mark of special favor. Symonds and Carpenter used Whitman to defend the rights of a persecuted minority, to suggest that same-sex passion was natural and innate in a certain portion of the population. But Walt Whitman refused to consider himself as special or different. He was not a minority but a kosmos. In depicting himself he was depicting you, any reader, every reader—the erms of adhesive love are in all people. It is a message that remains more radical and unsettling than any that Symonds, Carpenter, or Wilde—for all their transgressive courage—ever offered.

Ahistorical determination to claim Whitman for the cause of homosexuality usually tends to ignore the fairly obvious contextual point that no one aside from a few German sexologists and their British acolytes was really developing a framework in which to understand men’s sexual attraction to men (in contrast to a more romantic “manly love of comrades”). It goes without saying that American contemporaries of Whitman’s would not have read the “Calamus” poems as homosexual or even precisely homoerotic, simply because of the cultural context in which they all existed; this is in part why Whitman so enthusiastically rebuffed Symonds’ and Carpenter’s attempts to read “Calamus” love as “Uranian.” Homoerotic relationships and men who engaged in them as a distinct social category did not exist for Whitman or in his America. As Robertson points out earlier in this chapter, an allusion to (female) prostitution elsewhere in Whitman’s oeuvre generated the cultural concern—and censorship&mdash that the “Calamus” poems never did.

But I think it is worth noting that in this passage, Robertson seems to be suggesting that even if a cultural construction of homosexuality had existed in Whitman’s America, he wouldn’t have considered himself part of it. Sexual orientation is ever a question of self-identification, and Whitman would neither have understood himself to be writing on gay themes nor would have understood himself to be gay. Indeed, identity politics and the ensuing cultural divisiveness were exactly what concerned Whitman: remember that so much of his poetry comes directly out of the Civil War; remember the degree of patriotic concern with which he mourned the death of Lincoln and worried about what it would mean to the Union. I don’t understand the amative-adhesive dialectic nearly as well as I should, and it is possible that it has more in common with Carpenter’s gender-transgressive utopian vision than we might expect. But recent attempts to call upon Whitman in the name of an identity politics do a disservice to the poet’s own, I believe more complex, cosmology.

At the entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro station in Washington, DC, there is a Whitman quote inscribed into the stone: it reads, “Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,/Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;/The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,/I sit by the restless all dark night – some are so young;/Some suffer so much – I recall the experience sweet and sad…” So, I assume, was Whitman’s experience as a Civil War nurse adopted for the cause of an AIDS memorial, and so, once again, was Whitman’s cultural status as the bard of homoeroticism brought to bear on this particular memory of a virus which claimed a generation of gay men. I like, however, to think that Whitman—despite his own rejection of the Uranian association, and despite the ahistoricity of labelling him with an identity which did not exist in his cultural context—would not have hesitated to minister to dying AIDS patients in the virus’s first couple decades, nor as it continues to ravage indiscriminately today. At risk of lapsing into my own particular brand of ahistoricity, I can only believe that Whitman would treat the young gay man of the 1980s, wasting away in a hospital bed before his time, with the same reverence which he did the young soldier of the 1860s dying a not-entirely-different, equally-undeserved death. Adhesive and amative love, after all, are not needlessly squeamish about whom they touch.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead; or, The First of What Will No Doubt Become Many Posts In Which I Note That I Am Halfway Through College

Tonight, I took a break from writing my final papers (all five of them) in order to play the guitar. I found a couple websites with chords for some of the songs that were most important to me when I was 12 and 13, a lifetime ago: Child ballads, sea shanties, the liberation-themed drinking songs of the Jacobite rebellions. I know these songs well enough that I’m not just limited to strumming rhythmically—I can sing the complicated alto and tenor melodies in tune and audibly, and sing them I did, alone in my room to myself. Visions flashed before my eyes: listening to Silly Wizard sing Jacobite songs on my old CD player that skipped in time to the bumps in the road when I sat in the very back of the school bus the year I lived in Massachusetts. Buying the two-disc Pentangle album Light Flight in a department store in London, then the lengths my mom went to in ordering a replacement from overseas when our car was broken into and the first copy was stolen. The sea shanties I sang as my sister and I spun and danced through the grass in my grandparents’ backyard in Canada. The fictional characters whose lives sprang out of these songs like holograms out of a projector, and who became more real to me and more constant companions in my life than any of the kids my age into whose social lives I had such difficulty integrating. Those were the days when I read for pleasure—trashy Celtic romance novels and Robert Louis Stevenson. Those were the days when I wrote fiction. Those were the days when my teachers gave up correcting my stubbornly British spellings; the days when I’d wear a dress one day and a doublet and knee-breeches the next. And dear god, how I miss those days, when the dress code was strictly 18th-century and I didn’t have to worry about sex or love or how to pay the bills. When I helped my classmates with their Latin translations or their math homework and didn’t have to worry whether I was good enough for grad school. When, if I ever needed a way out, there was a book or a song or a costume drama to provide it.

The last time I was in England it was 2003, right at the peak of this faraway long-lost Anglophilic child’s paradise, and so naturally as I begin to make my plans for next academic year—when I’ll be spending six or seven months in the mother country—I find my thoughts turning there again. Now a cynical 20-year-old with one ear turned towards politics and another towards cultural history, I feel as if I have a more realistic sense of what England means now than I did seven years ago, when I imagined it as a land of Sassenachs somewhere between the Child ballads and Monty Python. And yet the more I learn about Oxford, and about what it will be like to be a student there for six months, the more I find myself invested in a fantasy of Oxford that I not only can’t wait to find in England, I seek to create wherever I am. Oxford means monastic scholarship, and having all the time in the world to do the work you need to do; it means lingering over dining-hall meals; it means long walks in the sunshine and punting on the river; it means beer in dimly-lit pubs. Aside from the constraints of the U.S. drinking age, springtime in Princeton is always, I believe, a chance to make it become fantasy-Oxford: I sprawl on the grass and read in the sunshine; I keep reasonable hours and make steady progress writing essays in the library; I linger at the dinner table, in my friends’ rooms, in my professors’ offices, in the hopes (usually fulfilled) that someone will say something interesting. And I try to put away my fears of the future—whether that’s how the hell I’m going to manage the logistics of putting my life in boxes for the summer, or how I’m going to find a direction in which to take my thesis research, or what I will do with my life in two years with a bachelor’s degree behind me. These are the ugly things—and I have no intention of letting them intrude on my Part-I-of-Brideshead-Revisited idyll. Come a week from Monday, I will have only two years left of university—and if your university career doesn’t look like Arcadia, I mean, what’s the point?

I jest, of course. But Anglophilia past, present, and future reminds me how uneasy I have always been with living entirely in the real world, and how comforting and inner-light-bringing I find my fantasy lives to be when I am far away from the people and the places I call home. When I was little, I wrote my imaginary friends into the routines of my life; so, too, when I bounce from coast to coast and country to country this summer, and move to another country for half of next year, will I imagine that my biological and Princeton families are there with me.

Two decades, half a college education, and still I am so frighteningly far from either understanding myself or being the person I want to be. Still I come away from those conversations where I linger and curse myself for my ignorance or my rhetorical clumsiness, wondering why anyone wants to spend time with a dork like me. And I suppose it is—and always will be, as it always has been—in the life that blossoms alone, late at night in some bedroom I call home, that all that insecurity matters naught, that my imaginary friends reassure me that I have the panache I crave, and that I can still be a scholar—even if on the inside I never grow out of being a dorky mixed-up 12-year-old.

QOTD (2010-05-03), Pete Seeger’s Birthday Edition

Bruce Springsteen at Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday Concert, at Madison Square Garden one year ago:

As Pete and I traveled to Washington for President Obama’s Inaugural Celebration, he told me the entire story of “We Shall Overcome”. How it moved from a labor movement song and with Pete’s inspiration had been adapted by the civil rights movement. That day as we sang “This Land Is Your Land” I looked at Pete, the first black president of the United States was seated to his right, and I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. My own growing up in the sixties in towns scarred by race rioting made that moment nearly unbelievable and Pete had thirty extra years of struggle and real activism on his belt. He was ao happy that day, it was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man!…It was so nice. At rehearsals the day before, it was freezing, like fifteen degrees and Pete was there; he had his flannel shirt on. I said, man, you better wear something besides that flannel shirt! He says, yeah, I got my longjohns on under this thing.

And I asked him how he wanted to approach “This Land Is Your Land”. It would be near the end of the show and all he said was, “Well, I know I want to sing all the verses, I want to sing all the ones that Woody wrote, especially the two that get left out, about private property and the relief office.” I thought, of course, that’s what Pete’s done his whole life. He sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people. At some point Pete Seeger decided he’d be a walking, singing reminder of all of America’s history. He’d be a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people, and despite Pete’s somewhat benign, grandfatherly appearance, he is a creature of a stubborn, defiant, and nasty optimism. Inside him he carries a steely toughness that belies that grandfatherly facade and it won’t let him take a step back from the things he believes in. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures as well as shining a light toward our better angels and the horizon where the country we’ve imagined and hold dear we hope awaits us.

Pete Seeger turns 91 years old today, and he’s still alive and well and singing up in Beacon, NY. I am shy of superlatives, but he is at least one of the greatest living Americans today. He is also one of the most patriotic, with a love for an idea(l) of America that surely transcends any “Country First” shouting or Tea Party mania. Pete Seeger taught me that it is possible to be a left-wing American and not be permanently ashamed to call this country home—because he has taught me that there are things like the First Amendment that we can still have faith in as sacred text, even when much else is disillusioning and dispiriting and depressing and disastrous. Pete Seeger got me through a summer in Washington; he gets me through every day in Princeton.

Now I must return to writing about Gothic literature in French and about the historiography of the Salem witch trials in English, because I don’t have as much time as I once did to write on this blog about my heroes. But if you know a Pete Seeger song, sing it today; if you think you don’t, you probably do. (You might find some in a little book called Rise Up Singing.) I’ll leave you with one of my recently-rediscovered favorite Seeger songs, “Tomorrow Is a Highway“:

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair,
And we are the many who’ll travel there.
Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair,
And we are the workers who’ll build it there;
And we will build it there!

Come, let us build a way for all mankind,
A way to leave this evil year behind,
To travel onward to a better year
Where love is, and there will be no fear,
Where love is and no fear!

Now is the shadowed year when evil men,
When men of evil thunder war again.
Shall tyrants once again be free to tread,
Above our most brave and honored dead?
Our brave and honored dead!

O, comrades, come and travel on with me,
We’ll go to our new year of liberty.
Come, walk upright, along the people’s way,
From darkness, unto the people’s day;
From dark, to sunlit day!

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair
And hate and greed shall never travel there
But only they who’ve learned the peaceful way
Of brotherhood, to greet the coming day;
We hail the coming day!

QOTD (2010-04-23)

Whoa new WordPress Dashboard layout. And now, from “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad:

“You must be a good swimmer.”

“Yes. I’ve been in the water practically since nine o’clock. The question for me now is whether I am to let go this ladder and go on swimming till I sink from exhaustion, or—to come on board here.”

I felt this was no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real alternative in the view of a strong soul. I should have gathered from this that he was young; indeed, it is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues.

The paragraph continues, but I’m so very struck by this statement. “[I]t is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues”—as one of “the young,” myself, it leads me to wonder if I really think in binaries that extreme, and whether to me dilemmas are so unremittingly black-and-white.

QOTD (2010-04-21)

Not that I have a one-track mind or anything, but non-western representations of sexual deviance are very interesting. The following is from a translation of the travel narrative of a 10th-century Arab missionary named Ibn Fadlan:

The Turks count the custom of pederasty as a terrible sin. There once came a man of the inhabitants of Khwarazm to stay with the clan of the Kudarkin, the viceroy of the Turkish king. He stayed with his host for a time to buy sheep. The Turk had a beardless on, and the Khwarazmian sought unceasingly to lead him astray until he got him to consent to his will. In the meantime the Turk came in and caught them in flagrante delicto. Then the Turk brought up the matter before the Kudarkin and said to him: “Assemble the Turks.” The Kudarkin assembled them; once they had gathered he said to the Turk: “Does thou wish that I pass a just or unjust sentence?” The Turk said: “According to justice.” He said: “Bring thy son here.” He brought him. He said: “The verdict is he and the merchant should be killed together.” The Turk was appalled because of this and said: “I will not ive up my son.” Thereupon the Kudarkin said: “Then the merchant may ransom himself.” He did it and paid the Turk for what he had done to his son with sheep and presented the Kudarkin with 400 sheep because he had saved him, and left the land of the Turks.

I don’t know whether I’m reading too much into this anecdote, but it seems interesting that Ibn Fadlan starts it by specifying that the Turks regard pederasty as a sin. It seems to suggest that the practice is not regarded as harshly in the Arab world, which is interesting. I mean, decadent Ottoman Empire, yes, but 10th-century Iraq is rather a different world. It would be interesting to know more about Ibn Fadlan’s society and to what exactly he’s comparing the Turkish value system.

The Queer Activist: A Brief Observation

Over at Princeton’s new queer-community blog, my colleague Ryan has written a great, thoughtful post about making a career in queer activism work:

I feel extremely conflicted towards the LGBT movement establishment and question whether I want to make a career out of LGBT advocacy.

Before coming to Princeton, I was Director of Louisiana’s statewide LGBT advocacy organization, the Forum For Equality. It was an amazing and challenging experience — as one might expect, there are a unique set of priorities and obstacles for the movement in the American South. I am incredibly proud of my work at the Forum, and it seems natural for me to return to this type of work upon graduation.

But when I think of returning to work for LGBT issues, I wonder what is motivating me. Is it a sense of guilt or obligation? Should smart young gay people who are interested in politics feel as if they “must” work for LGBT rights? The LGBT community is a small minority, and those with elite educations are an even smaller minority. Who am I to turn my back on the movement that has allowed me to be who I am?

Ryan continues, asking (very saliently, I think) whether the developing world would be a better use of his talents, and implicitly noting how exhausting political advocacy work can be. But he didn’t note something else I think is important, which is that there is more than one way to be an activist. Deciding against a career in LGBT advocacy and policy, or advocacy and policy at all, does not mean turning your back on queer issues and being an advocate for queer visibility, acceptance, and civil rights. I consider myself a queer activist through my work at learning to be a historian and an educator, because someday I intend to make a career out of telling the stories of queer lives long ended, out of developing critical frameworks through which to examine the sexualities and identities and cultural movements of the past, and out of passing all this information on to a new generation of young folks whose lives were changed by learning about Harvey Milk or Stonewall and who are ready to learn so much more. Long after marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are decided in America, all around the world we will have a need for people to tell stories like the ones I am learning to tell—and, if necessary, perhaps to tell their own stories of their own lives too. Staying well-informed enough and staying accessible enough that when someone has a question about queer issues you can take a half-hour to answer it is a form of activism. Being out is a form of activism. And if all these things weren’t true, I wouldn’t be able to reconcile the life I want to lead with the principles I believe in.

And teaching—about queer stuff or not—is the greatest way that there is to make the world you believe in and dream of for the next generation.

Addendum: I see that a lot of people are coming to this blog from a College Confidential thread about the atmosphere for LGBT students at Princeton. If you’re a prospective Princeton student seeking information about LGBT life on campus, please feel free to contact me, and I will absolutely answer any questions you have.

QOTD (2010-04-12)

From The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Flemish ambassador to Istanbul in the 16th century. Busbecq is writing here about the public baths of Istanbul:

The great mass of women use the public baths for females, and assemble there in large numbers. Among them are found many girls of exquisite beauty, who have been brought together from different quarters of the globe by various chances of fortune; so cases occur of women falling in love with one another at these baths, in much the same fasion as young men fall in love with maidens in our own country. Thus you see a Turk’s precautions are sometimes of no avail, and when he has succeeded in keeping his wives from a male lover, he is still in danger from a female rival! The women become deeply attached to each other, and the baths supply them with opportunities of meeting. Some therefore keep their women away from them as much as possible, but they cannot do so altogether, as the law allows them to go there. This evil affects only the common people; the richer classes bathe at home, as I mentioned.

It happened that in a gathering of this kind, an elderly woman fell in love with a girl, the daughter of an inhabitant of Constantinople, a man of small means. When her courtship and flatteries were not attended with the success her mad passion demanded, she ventured on a course, which to our notions appears almost incredible. Changing her dress, she pretended she was a man, and hired a house near where the girl’s father lived, representing herself as one of the slaves of the Sultan, belonging to the class of cavasses; and it was not long before she took advantage of her position as a neighbour, cultivated the father’s acquaintance, and asked for his daughter in marriage. Need I say more? The proposal appearing to be satisfactory, the father readily consents, and promises a dowry proportionate to his means. The wedding-day was fixed, and then this charming bridegroom enters the chamber of the bride, takes off her veil, and begins to chat with her. She recognises at once her old acquaintance, screams out, and calls back her father and mother, who discover that they have given their daughter in marriage to a woman instead of a man. The next day they bring her before the Aga of the Janissaries, who was governing the city in the Sultan’s absence. He tells her that an old woman like her ought to know better than to attempt so mad a freak, and asks, if she is not ashamed of herself? She replies, ‘Tush! you know not the might of love, and God grant that you may never experience its power.’ At this the Aga could not restrain his laguther; and ordered her to be carried off at once, and drowned in the sea. Thus the strange passion of this old woman brought her to a bad end.

The Turks do not inquire very closely into secret vices, that they may not give an opportunity for false charges, but they punish severely open profligacy and crimes that are detected.

Firstly, poor old woman; secondly, I’m thrilled for obvious reasons that this story turned up by chance in my reading for my Islamic history class. There are obvious references to male homosexual activity everywhere in the standard Western discussion of travels in the East, which subsequently get lots of attention in late 19th- and 20th-century gay cultures, but I feel like it’s rare that we get a good look at female same-sex eroticism like this. It’s fascinating, and there’s a lot I don’t have time to pick apart here, but it’s firstly interesting that it’s pretty clear that the old woman only dresses up as a man as a ruse—it’s not that the social narrative entails a sort of Shakespearean gender inversion in which she must be disguised as a man in order to pay suit to another woman. She falls in love while dressed as a woman, and she reveals herself to be one as soon as she logistically can. Indeed, given that Busbecq is a rough contemporary of Shakespeare, this is particularly interesting: take the concern in Twelfth Night, for instance, about what Viola is wearing that leads the “wrong” people fall in love with her, and compare it to this situation. And finally, that last sentence in the passage above is so fascinating: the implication here is that “secret vices” are going on all the time, which makes sense given what we get from other Western sources with which I’m more familiar about the differing sexual mores of the Middle East, but I like what that says about the performance of female modesty in Ottoman Islamic culture, and of course the promise that there’s more where this came from.