A Quick Note on the Census

I am so excited about the 2010 Census, which is going to be hitting the mailbox of every single person in America in the next couple weeks. The Census is critically important: it only happens once every ten years, and it documents what America looks like in that decade. It allocates funding to the communities which need it most, it determines Congressional representation, and it’s a repository of demographic data. It tells us that our country is racially and ethnically and economically diverse. And for many undergraduate and graduate students, and other young adults, it’s our first Census! Those of us who spend most of the year away from our permanent addresses are counted as separate households and must file our Census forms individually—even if we’re considered our parents’ dependents in the eyes of the IRS and other agencies. So get ready!

Another reason to get excited about the 2010 Census is that this is the first Census in which LGBT couples in same-sex relationships will be counted. Box Turtle Bulletin has just posted a very clear and comprehensive FAQ about how members of the LGBT community should confront the Census; the most exciting and salient point is that married same-sex couples can indicate that they are married, regardless of the jurisdiction in which they were married and regardless of whether same-sex marriage is legal in the state in which they reside. If you’re living with but not married to your partner, you can indicate that too, which I think is wonderful. The 2010 Census is based entirely on self-identification, and it’s not going to unmarry you the way that the IRS does. This is very good news indeed, and part of why the Census is so, so important this time around: unlike most other aspects of the federal bureaucracy, the Census will hopefully provide an accurate count of how many LGBT Americans are in same-sex marriages, civil unions/domestic partnerships, or committed relationships, which is obviously very relevant data in the fight for marriage equality and other forms of legal recognition. This is information we really want the government to have if we want to stop being second-class citizens in the eyes of the state.

What’s less good news is that there are still only two boxes on the “sex” line. Box Turtle Bulletin reports that “Transgender respondents should select the sex with which they identify,” I presume regardless of whether that’s the sex on your legal documents—but that still leaves out plenty of people who identify as neither male nor female, which is frustrating and problematic and won’t provide an accurate count of anything. I hope that by the 2020 Census, the bureaucracy will be well-educated enough to allow individuals to self-identify on sex/gender the way that we can on other parts of the form.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is running a campaign called Queer the Census, which is pushing for the recognition of queer people in the Census. The Task Force is distributing stickers for people to put on their Census envelopes with the following text:

Attn: U.S. Census Bureau
It’s Time To Count Everyone!

Are you (check all that apply):
_ Lesbian
_ Gay
_ Bisexual
_ Transgender
_ A Straight Ally

Everyone deserves to be counted. It’s time to QueertheCensus.org

Now, some of my Princeton colleagues are participating in the campaign, and I support their efforts. But I nevertheless have very mixed feelings about this language, and about the idea in general. In the first place, many queer people do not identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, and only including this set of boxes (no fill-in, unlike the Census’s own race question) does not allow people to self-identify. This is not in the spirit of the Census. In the second place, if the aim is to encourage a count of queer Americans, why is there a “straight ally” box? I love straight allies. Some of my best friends are straight allies. And I very strongly believe that queer activists need not alienate their straight allies, who may be some of the most active and influential members of their movement. But the option’s presence on this list is confusing, and makes me wonder what the Task Force is actually trying to do. Are they advocating the accurate collection of data, which is the purpose of the Census? Or are they advocating a more general statement of support for queer Americans? If so, perhaps that statement of support would be more effective somewhere else.

This leads me to my biggest question: is the Census the right place for “we’re here, we’re queer”? It’s a sentiment that has become one of the guiding principles of my life, whether advocating for activist causes or working to write the narratives of queer people’s and queer cultures’ contributions to our common history. But if there’s anything I’m learning in working towards writing those narratives, it’s that identity is fluid and mutable and hard to classify. I think we could come up with a more accurate, fairer, and more inclusive sex/gender question on the Census. But could we ever design language that accurately records what sorts of people a person is sexually attracted to? And would we want to do that? Is it really in accordance with the aims of queer activism to classify and pigeonhole American sexualities? Is whom you sleep with a data point that belongs on a government form? Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe sexual orientation is a demographic more analogous to race—that it’s something we would want to know about our country, that when people self-identify, it can produce accurate data, and that it’s possible to put enough options down on the form that we can gain a close-to-accurate understanding of the demographic composition of this country. But to me, “we’re here, we’re queer” is not about demographics, it’s about political and cultural identity—something that’s hard to sum up in volumes upon volumes of academic literature, much less in a single question on a government form, and something which a significant number of LGBT people don’t even believe exists.

I think that if we are going to record sex in the Census, we need to count trans people accurately. I think that if we are going to record marital status in the Census, we need to count same-sex couples, married or unmarried, accurately. But no one has yet made a good case to me why I should make my sexual identity (which is as political and cultural as it is personal, and which is to me so much more fluid and incomprehensible and unclassifiable than my race and ethnicity, my marital status, or my biological sex) fit easily into a box on a form. No one has made a good case to me why the government needs to know whom I want to sleep with. Yes, I know that they need to know we exist if we expect them to stop discriminating against us, and I certainly invite you all to explain why a sexual orientation question on the Census is a better idea than I think it is. But I can’t help thinking that a question about sexual orientation like the one the Task Force proposes is going to lead to some pretty damn inaccurate data.

(cross-posted)

QOTD (2010-03-13)

From the first issue (1920) of a magazine called The Brownies’ Book, the first American children’s magazine targeted to an African-American audience, and edited by W.E.B. DuBois:

There is no doubt about it, we Children have just got to take hold of this world. The Grown-ups have made an awful mess of it. First and worst, they have forgotten how to Laugh. Now let me say right here: The nicest thing in the world is Laughter—good, big, loud laughs. And next is Smiles, the sort that come before and after. Laughter clears away rubbish and gets things started. Fancy forgetting how to laugh! How could they? But they did and then, naturally, they fought. Fighting is mostly wrong and silly. Of course, if you’re just set upon by a bully and you can’t laugh it off, why just punch him hard, and then make up. See? Make up! Don’t try and be mad forever, or for a day. Make up, and try a game of ball. Let him bat if he wants to. He’ll probably strike out, and then you’ll have your innings.

Of course, we Children know this is easy; but Grown-ups don’t. They’re awfully dull at times, and if we don’t take hold of things and help, I don’t know where this old world is going to land. It’s a mighty nice world, too. The best ever if you just treat it square. But if you mess it up with blood and hate and meanness, why it’s awful. If the Grown-ups keep on, we Children will just have to crowd them right off the edge and take charge of things. Gee! But what a jolly place: marbles, and tag, and funny stories, and pennies, and dolls, and tops, and—oh! everything that really counts.

So look out, Grown-ups, we’ve got our eye on you, and “Don’t let us have to speak to you again,”—as Father says.

Amen.

15 Minutes of Self-Promotion

The New Yorker books blog has a feature called “The Subconscious Shelf,” wherein readers send in pictures of their bookshelves and the editor of the blog, Macy Halford, comments on their taste in books. Egomaniac that I am, I succumbed. Not to toot my own horn too much, but this is what she said about me and my books:

Emily, what can I say. I find this shelf inspiring, all the more so because this collection represents those precious few books you wouldn’t live without for even a semester (granted some are probably coursebooks, but I’m guessing that most—even if they began that way—now hold personal value). I see many essential reads—Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet,” Butler’s “Gender Trouble,” Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” Whitman, Wilde, Waugh, Freud, Nietzsche, James (William), Ed White. There’s also Peter Manso’s “PTown” and “The Group Singing Songbook.” To state the obvious, this is a gay bookshelf, which isn’t, in itself, anything to get excited about. What I like about it is its range: if you are concerned with a particular topic, it’s smart to read widely and with purpose. I’d wager that you’re interested in activism (or are already active), and have educated yourself appropriately. It’s inspiring because it is all too easy to be both very concerned with something and too lazy to do the work of becoming truly informed. Your books suggest to me that you are serious, smart, and un-lazy.

More, and pictures of my shelves, at The Book Bench. To Halford, I would like to point out that I am currently taking a class in children’s literature, hence the Harry Potter; and that all the McPhee on my shelf comes from the august New Yorker staff writer himself, whose amazing and unparalleled creative non-fiction class I took in spring 2009.

QOTD (2010-03-10)

I am fascinated by how Eisenhower—the all-American, general, Cold War president—ended a September 24, 1957 speech from the Oval Office, concerning the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis:

Thus will be restored the image of America and of all its parts as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Good night, and thank you very much.

Now it is impossible for a president to end a speech—any speech—without saying “God bless America.” And yet Eisenhower, the president whom we usually credit with inserting “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance (in 1954, three years before this speech), and with generally using Christianity as a way to shore up American values in contrast to those of the godless communists, isn’t going there in this speech. I think it’s a reminder, dare I say it, of how much the new post-Reagan Republican party has done to make us think that the new normal has always been the normal. Even in my life time it has become increasingly easier to be un-American—maybe not as easy as it was at the height of the McCarthy witchhunts, but pretty damn easy.

QOTD (2010-03-05)

Because I have read this poem so very many times, and because every time I read it I feel as if I understand it just a little bit less:

Bishop, “One Art”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

QOTD (2010-03-04)

Tonight I gathered with friends and heard a great deal of poetry I’d never heard before. Then I came home and, a propos de rien, realized that this is my very favorite Whitman poem:

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

Seek beauty.

Admissions (Out)reach; or, Policy Which Lends Itself to Ridiculous Puns

My interests in LGBT issues and higher ed policy dovetailed recently (and yielded what I think is a great pun in the title of this post!) with the announcement that Penn will use applicants’ references to LGBT-related causes, activities, and identification to do outreach to queer students, much as college and university admissions frequently do for other minority groups, from students of color to women in science to scholar-athletes. And the awkward and silly thing about being involved in however small a capacity in institutional policy at an Ivy League school is that when you read about one Ivy League school changing a policy, you immediately wonder whether it’s something you could and should implement at your own school. (Well, I feel this way, anyway.) And so I feel moved to pose a question, dear reader: should Princeton follow Penn’s lead in tracking and doing outreach to LGBT applicants, and how should it do this?

Now, I’d argue that in my anecdotal experience Princeton is already helping LGBT applicants along with the other populations of “non-traditional” applicants which it helps. Half the reason I am now wondering what Princeton should be doing in this regard is because in April 2008, when I was a prospective student visiting Princeton for the weekend, my host brought me to an event at the LGBT Center. I may not have identified as gay then, or been as explicitly and consistently involved in LGBT community as I am now, but knowing that there was an LGBT Center at Princeton and that my host (who is not gay herself) wasn’t shy about going there or inviting me to come made me feel like I could be comfortable here. It was the entire reason I made my decision to come here—and I feel like there might have been some intent behind the hosting program pairing me with the host that they did. Similarly, now that I’m on the other side of the hosting process, I write in to tell the program that I’m interested in hosting LGBT students or anyone else apprehensive of coming to Princeton for social-politics-related reasons. Sometimes they go to Yale (not that I blame them), but sometimes they come here—and I think the fact that I’m the one who hosts them is far from coincidental, given the willingness that I express to host those kids.

And so when there are preferences expressed, the administration tends to heed them—because it’s in their best interests, and in accordance with their stated institutional policy to diversify undergraduate culture, to do so. And maybe this could be done to a greater extent—I don’t know to what extent undergrad admissions does specific outreach to members of other minority groups during the admissions office, so it would be hard for me to say whether they should adjust their policies to include LGBT students too. However, Negative Nancy that I am, I am more concerned about who will be left out by such a policy than who will be brought into the fold by it.

As most of my readers are probably aware, more and more teenagers are coming out in high school—or when they’re even younger! Some of my readers, I believe, are out high schoolers themselves, or were; some of my readers are straight allies involved in their schools’ GSAs or LGBT community life in the cities and towns where they live. LGBT youth culture is now a constituent part of LGBT culture as a whole, a recent and exciting development in the variegated experience of being queer in America. And yet for all that many teenagers are out, I’d go so far as to suggest that most aren’t. Most of the kids I know from high school who are now out in college didn’t go to GSA meetings or go to citywide queer-community events—hell, I certainly didn’t! Back in high school, I thought your sexual orientation wasn’t something you put on a college application. I thought it was something you talked about in furtive late-night AIM conversations, or knew in the back of your mind when you saw how uncannily you could relate to the characters in books you read. I’m not sure, when I was applying to colleges, if I would have answered an optional sexual orientation identification question, and if I had I probably would have hovered over the radio buttons such a question would no doubt require you to choose between. When I came to college, I starting identifying myself to others as “gay” instead of as “bisexual,” with intermittent spurts of asexuality in between. When I was 17, would I have been able to choose a radio button? Or would I have declined to, unsure which letter in “LGBT” best described me? Would I have declined to, unsure whether selecting any of them would have made me seem too “unprofessional” for a college application?

And this is me we’re talking about! Two years later, I’m the gayest of the gay at this college where I wound up, making a life out of nonchalantly throwing around the word “sodomy” at the dinner table. What about the others? How does the admissions office reach out to a kid who hasn’t come out to him- or her- or hirself, a kid who after two years in college still lives in fear of being found out? How does the admissions office reach out to the queer kids who are out, but who are so desperate not to make their outness a defining point of their identity that they would run away from such overtures of community? It’s a tricky line to navigate, that’s for sure—as tricky as are any of the lines we deal with when we create or don’t create queer community at Princeton.

I am reminded, once again, of the big gulf between knowing you’re different and knowing you’re queer, particularly when you’re sixteen or seventeen and being different is such an all-consuming torture that it’s hard to understand it as anything else or anything more sharply-defined. I am reminded, once again, of the time Before, the time when I was still trying to get a seat at the popular kids’ table—I hadn’t yet realized that it was possible to go start a table of my own. And I truly am not sure what I would have done, then, if Princeton had asked me to select a sexual orientation.

Well. With that, I’m off to talk about Mary Wollstonecraft’s attitude towards homoeroticism. High school, after all, was a full universe ago.

QOTD (2010-02-21)

Quote, in fact, of basically all days, because a little meander through the Internet led me to the following fabulous entry in the OED:

Princeton, n. orig. and chiefly U.S.

attrib. Designating a form of male homosexual activity in which the penis is rubbed against the thighs or stomach of a partner.

1965 S. FRIEDMAN Totempole 265, I should have known..it would be the Princeton rub or nothing. 1969 W. H. AUDEN in N.Y. Rev. Bks. 27 Mar. 3/4 My guess is that at the back of his mind, lay a daydream of an innocent Eden where children play ‘Doctor’, so that the acts he really preferred were the most ‘brotherly’, Plain-Sewing and Princeton-First-Year. 1972 B. RODGERS Queens’ Vernacular 154 Princeton style,..fucking the thighs. 1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 21 Mar. 324/5 ‘Princeton-First-Year’ is a more condescending version of the term ‘Princeton Rub’; that is, coitus contra ventrem. 2004 D. BERGMAN Violet Hour iii. 105 He arrives there still a virgin, without even the benefit of the ‘Princeton rub’.

Hey, Yale, you think you can beat that?

Addendum: It’s interesting that the first citation is 1965. I would be very surprised if the expression weren’t in common usage long before that—see, for example, this fin-de-siècle gem dug up by Press Clubber David Walter.

Memory, Time, and Woeful Insecurities; or, Blogging for Dummies

Those of you who are Princeton students are no doubt aware of a certain Master of Rockefeller College given to holding forth to a large Facebook audience on life and literature and a combination of the two. A fan of his notes since I first became a member of his college 18 months ago, I’ve had particular reason in the past several weeks to slowly wade my way through his backlog. I’m just getting now to the ones he was writing my first few weeks here, and it’s quite strange to be reading these again in quite a different frame of mind. I remember, then, not understanding why I couldn’t understand what he was writing, why its meaning wasn’t immediately apparent to me. I remember feeling lost, as lost as I felt in my French class, when I didn’t understand the teacher; in meetings for the student publication I briefly wrote for, when I wasn’t as charismatic or articulate as the other writers; and out at Terrace on Saturday nights, when I sat alone in a corner and played with my iPod. I loathed myself: for being so stupid, for failing to integrate seamlessly into a foreign culture so far removed from my California public high school. I phoned my parents in tears and begged to come home for fall break.

But now it’s the second time around, the second read. I quit the publication; I stopped going to Terrace. I never stopped feeling stupider than all my classmates, and sometimes it still drives me to tears—but it’s all redeemed when I get good feedback from a professor, as occasionally I do. I have friends, good ones. And far from sitting in a corner in a well of shyness and discomfort and fear, I’ve discovered that what I do best is talk. I talk in precept, I talk on this blog and on Facebook, I talk in committee meetings, I talk at parties and study breaks, I talk when I’m at home—in the Rocky dining hall, that is. I talk about eating clubs, about how it seems like everyone at this university is in the closet, about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, about why the American political system is going to hell in a handbasket. And I’ve found out that when you talk enough, people expect you to do things. I’ve been asked to help start organizations and publications, to make things happen, to change the world.

When I talk on this blog, more often than not, it comes back to haunt me. I am not democratically (little-d!) impartial; I do not withhold my political views about my community or about the United States. I get pushback for being one of them legacies, for example, and a post I wrote back in September about dominant Princeton culture has gotten a disconcertingly large amount of mileage. I have tried, as a result, to write less about my life, to bitch a little less, to engage more intellectually with my world. I have tried to make myself think and to make other people think—and if I am going to bitch, I try to bring a method to my bitchiness. As I have learned to write about history, I have blogged about history. As I have learned to write about literature, I have blogged about literature. And as I have learned to engage with the world as an adult, I have blogged about that process too.

Sometimes I think that to an outside reader, my posts must seem as impenetrable as a certain college master’s did to me 18 months ago—except that mine are not impenetrable in a way that makes the reader want to learn how to read them properly! And sometimes I wonder whether the ethics of my blogging are appropriate, whether I do the right thing to mix the academic so inextricably with the personal, whether I do the right thing to be so forthcoming about the private angst that dogs my days. Does the world need to know that I am still, after 18 months, resolutely tortured by insecurity and guilt and shame at my failure to perform to academic heights? Does the world care how terrified I am that it seems as if my entire life hangs in the balance of one single professional goal which has become near-impossible to achieve?

Reader, I think all this angst must serve some instrumental purpose. It has to. It has to because writing is the road through angst, and has always been—but it also is a declaration that the rhythm of weekends (Thursday night drinking, Friday morning hangover, Saturday night drinking, Sunday morning hangover, Sunday night spent catching up on the weekend’s work) is meaningless to those who have spent their whole weekends in the library. It is a reminder that if seeking validation and self-worth in a dominant social culture that alienates you isn’t working out, you can after all these years of insecurity and self-loathing find a reason for being in books and in words, in writing and in talking. Of course, there are perils in this approach, the foremost being that now if you feel as if you’ve turned in sub-par written work, or if you gave a strange professor a first impression of stupidity and inanity, you’re disconsolate for days. Now you risk being formed only by what you have done, and thus it is imperative that you do Enough, and it is never possible to do Enough. And no matter how well the life of the mind works out, that much time spent tracing the same path between bedroom, dining hall, library, and coffeeshop, and pacing back and forth across 120 square feet of life above an early-20th-century Gothic-revival archway, can get just a little claustrophobic.

But do you know why it’s okay? It’s because you’re just twenty years old and you know that you’ve already discovered your reason for being. You read and read and talk and talk and slowly the secrets of great texts are unlocked; slowly you permeate the surface of those once impermeable Facebook notes. You read. And you talk. And most days you go to bed exhausted, depressed, dissatisfied with yourself. But some days, when the sun shines just right through the windows of your mostly-subterranean library refuge, and you’re listening to Tchaikovsky and drinking your coffee and suddenly the blank verse you’re reading makes so much sense that you have to scramble for pen and paper to note it down—then you remember why you’re doing this, why the greatest and lasting joy is to be found in what you do, what you were—in some sense—fated to do. What you’ve known since you were thirteen that you would do. It’s then, in those single, singular moments, that you know beyond any reasonable doubt that you’ve sold your soul to the ivory tower—and that you never, ever want to leave.

QOTD (2010-02-20)

Journalist Edwin Balmer writing in October 1904 about the media coverage of the Chicago meatpacking strike of that year:

A newspaper is merely a dealer in news. It buys the special styles, sizes and qualities of news which it thinks it can sell to its patrons. It is business, and as with all other business concerns, the business policy varies with the classes of buyers to which the newspapers, as the department stores, can best appeal. It is business which puts cheap, gaudy and shoddy goods in one department store which has an immense patronage; it is business which puts reliable “all wool and a yard wide fabric” in another department store which may have an equally large number of patrons. It is also business which suplies one newspaper with sensational, unfounded “fake” stories, exaggerations and imaginations displayed in large showy type and it is also business which makes it good policy for another paper to by [sic] wholesale, for retail purposes, calm, moderate, reliable accounts and reports at least prefering the truth,—other things being equal.

[…]

What paper has not nobly and enthusiastically offered the full strength of its editorial staff to settle the strike? How many newspapers have had, or even endeavored to have had, published unbiased, unexaggerated news—the calm, moderate statement of conditions and issues instead of the exaggerated sensationalism which helps to sell papers but also contributes to the widening of the breach between the two classes which are and must be necessary to each other?

Plus ça change…