Author: Sam

Rationalizations and Reality Checks

Last night, I was sitting on my window seat, blaring public radio and refreshing half a dozen websites; making phone calls; covering the New Jersey elections—and, to a lesser extent, Maine and NY-23—as if it’s my job. (In fact, it sort of is; I’ll have a piece up at Campus Progress later today about NJ.) I went to bed last night full of depression and malaise, not even fully angry at the voters who elected an incompetent Republican governor in my state, nor at those who voted to take away the rights of LGBT Mainers. No, I was just sad. Sad and frustrated and wondering what the point is of letting my schoolwork suffer while I care about politics. I put on a 50-year-old comedy radio show that had nothing to do with politics, and I fell asleep consumed by guilty that I wasn’t listening to a cable news show instead. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to do enough, because it’s never enough. It seems as if the forces of good and equality and righteousness are up against so much.

This afternoon, after I’d turned in my copy and gotten an H1N1 vaccine (all the while grumbling, “If we had public health care, I wouldn’t have had to pay $15 out-of-pocket for this”), I went to get lunch and wound up chatting with one of the dining hall workers, who is from Haiti. He was telling me that his cousin is running for office in Haiti, and that he was going to go back to Haiti to vote for his cousin. We talked about how we’re both from warm places, and how much colder it is here in New Jersey. We didn’t, of course, talk about the American election.

And that’s because there are people to whom American politics is simply not the center of the universe—not just those who live in privilege and so don’t want to work to get everyone health care and equal rights, but those whose universe is focused differently. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Corzine vs. Christie, or marriage in Maine, aren’t questions that make a whole lot of difference to someone whom one of the richest universities in the world can barely manage to pay a living wage. And we all should remember that. Those of us who wake up the next morning election after election, full of elation or remorse and the will to organize and to vote again, should remember that American electoral politics are not the be-all and end-all of reality.

I’m telling that to myself as much as to anyone else, because here I am, now, sitting in Princeton and eating my eggs and drinking my coffee, wondering what to do next. I am left winded by this election, suffering post-2008 disillusionment the way a lot of us are. I feel exhausted by politics, by reading hundreds of blog posts per day, by writing and talking and posting shit on Facebook. I feel lost after phonebanking and campaigning for Corzine, donating to Maine, and being left with the notion that the progressive grassroots is powerless in the face of far more entrenched and well-funded lobbyists.

I would like nothing more than to put politics in a box for the next ten years, and train to be the best historian that I can possibly be. I would like to be able to tell myself that devoting the next two and a half years to telling the story of Princeton’s gay alumni is as worthwhile an endeavor as devoting the next two and a half years to fighting for marriage equality in New Jersey. I would like to believe that going to grad school and fighting for one of those rapidly-disappearing tenure-track jobs is as morally conscionable a career path as getting paid subsistence wages to organize for another pie-in-the-sky progressive cause. I want to believe that telling the untold stories of Americans dead for thirty or forty or fifty or a hundred years is as important as telling the untold stories of Americans suffering today.

I want someone to tell me that it’s okay if I can’t do everything, and that furthermore it’s okay to choose my schoolwork over campaigning. I want someone to tell me that historiography can be a fight for social justice too. But the fact that I want so desperately to hear those glad tidings makes me think that it can’t possibly be true. It makes me believe that this is just rationalization to explain away the fact that I spent the weeks before the election writing my midterm papers and not out in the streets. It makes me believe this is just an attempt to justify my privileged access to elite higher education and a cushy academic job after.

But all the same. All the same I think that ten or fifteen years hence, if I do keep doing this, it will be worth it. The organizers will organize and my god, I wish them well. But how will we know if the arc of history bends towards justice unless there are historians to interpret and understand it?

Oh, Washington Post, Do Please Try Harder

From this morning’s Post:

Questions about the largest contributor [to the anti-marriage equality campaign in Maine] have sparked an investigation by the state ethics commission and a court battle. The National Organization for Marriage, or NOM, has contributed $1.6 million to Stand for Marriage Maine but has declined to reveal its own contributors, despite a federal district court decision last week that it must do so under Maine law.

Some groups for gays say the organization is a stalking horse for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons, which dominated fundraising in the California campaign. Many of the actors in a nationally televised ad produced by NOM, called “Gathering Storm,” turned out to be Mormon activists.

Weekend calls to the New Jersey-based organization and its attorney were not returned. But Fish said that after the backlash in California against the Mormon Church, its leadership decided not to become directly involved in Maine.

I’m surprised to see the Post pulling this, especially after running that rather silly and much-criticized article about Brian Brown, NOM’s executive director, over the summer. If there is any religious background to which NOM’s leaders subscribe, it’s Catholicism: Brown, President Maggie Gallagher, and Chairman of the Board Robert George all profess devout Catholicism. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the only Mormon in a leadership role at NOM is science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card, a recent addition to the Board of Directors who is probably not entirely sane. Making it out to seem as if marriage-equality proponents think NOM is a Mormon conspiracy isn’t entirely fair of the Post, because I think most of us know that’s not true. If we know anything, it’s that NOM is deeply embedded in the Catholic right, and that such is the tradition its leaders come from.

Moreover, I wish some mainstream news organization would get in touch with NOM and determine once and for all where they’re located. First the Post reports that NOM moved out of Princeton, to Philadelphia and then to DC, and now they’re telling us that NOM is still NJ-based. The website still lists a Nassau St. mailing address and a (609) phone number (that’s the Princeton area code), but even during business hours that phone number only ever goes to voicemail. What’s Brian Brown doing in his new H St. offices? How do we contact him there? No one—not even the Post—seems to know.

If the Post has contacts at NOM (and they must do, to have run that profile in August), they have the ability to do much more than make unsourced claims about what “some groups for gays” think. They could actually unravel the tangled web that is the Catholic right and figure out what the hell is going on here. I guess, seeing as this is the Post, that would be too much to ask, but at the very least the paper could stop sowing conspiracy theories about Mormons that I, as an LGBT activist, have never heard espoused by the people I work with.

(cross-posted)

Through the Rabbit-Hole; or, On Anglophilia, Fantasy, and Autobiography

This morning (or, if we’re going to get technical about it, this afternoon), after I woke up and wasted 45 minutes on the computer and showered and did all those morning-type things, I firmly told myself that just because it’s Sunday of midterm break, I shouldn’t allow my standard of dress to lapse. I’ve realized this semester that making an effort to dress not just in clothes that are clean, but clothes that match and look nice, has a positive psychological effect on my work ethic and my self-image—mindful of this and of the necessity of being productive over break, I put on halfway decent trousers, a reasonably stylish sweater, my favorite corduroy blazer, and even (gasp!) socks that match the rest of my clothes. Becoming preoccupied with how much sweater sleeve extends beyond jacket sleeve is a great way to avoid thinking about actually relevant things, like the paper I need to write this week, and so it was with this in mind that I grabbed a book and a notebook to write things about the book in, and strode through the Holder cloister to lunch. When I wear my corduroy jacket, and a reasonably stylish sweater and halfway decent trousers, I stride. I don’t trudge. It’s great.

I suppose it only hit me about 20 minutes later, sitting in the dining hall eating my scrambled eggs with a fork and knife as I peered at a book about Alice in Wonderland in the context of Lewis Carroll’s Oxford (it’s for a paper), how ridiculous I am. Most of the undergrads who stay on campus over break are athletes, and it was they, in their muscle shirts and sweatpants, whose loud chatter filtered through the hall to my seat at the last table. They were banging their fists on the tables and laughing with abandon; I was learning about the debates over the liberalization of Christ Church under the Deanship of Henry Liddell and fiddling self-consciously with my sweater sleeves. I do this a fair amount, in the dining hall; I think I must be in perfect keeping with the self-conscious Anglophilia (and, specifically, Oxoniphilia, to coin a word) that pervades much of Princeton’s architecture and early history. The Ivy League is all about trying to attain some idealized, romanticized vision of what British elite higher education is like or ought to be like—and, I’m beginning to think, this is particularly true at Princeton, which, although it was founded in 1746, didn’t come into its own until the late 19th century, when Oxford and Cambridge were both developing their modern institutional culture and when, in my reductive understanding, romanticized versions of cultural institutions seemed to proliferate on both sides of the Atlantic. As ridiculous as it may be, and as out-of-sync with any modern conception of elite higher education anywhere (boisterous athletes or no boisterous athletes), it’s not entirely inappropriate to spend a lunchtime sitting at one of those long wooden tables in a self-consciously constructed college dining hall, reading about Victorian Oxford and fiddling with sweater sleeves. It’s not Princeton today, but it was certainly at least one aspect of Princeton 100 years ago.

It’s easy, therefore, to be an Anglophile at Princeton, but I’ve admittedly been one all my life. In fact, I’ve probably been an Oxoniphile all my life, or at least for as long as I’ve known about Oxford—why else would I construct a Princeton that is totally out-of-keeping with reality? Why else am I keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll get to study abroad at Oxford—not just in England, but at Oxford—next year? It’s a strange coincidence that is maybe not entirely coincidental that, when I chose to write about Lewis Carroll for my seminar on biography because I thought the Alice books might bear on my final project about my own childhood, I found myself rather unwittingly coming back to the politics and institutional culture of Oxford. Because it seems, ever-increasingly, that I always do.

The last time I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass must have been before I was nine, because I can’t remember reading it at all after my family moved from Georgia to California. But I do have powerful memories of being dwarfed by the rows upon rows of shelves in the university library where I went with my dad to check out an edition that contained both books with the Tenniel illustrations. It might, even, have been the same edition I found in the stacks of a university library yesterday, as I started to read for this paper. I couldn’t believe the things that came back to me about the text that I hadn’t thought about in ten or so years, like the “Pig and Pepper” chapter or the part of the trial scene where the guinea pigs are suppressed. I can remember sitting in my old bedroom, reading that trial scene, thinking that probably stuffing rodents in a bag and sitting on them is probably not really how disruptions are suppressed in a courtroom, but giggling at the image all the same. And now I step outside of myself to see myself, ten years and a seeming lifetime later, drinking coffee, wearing corduroy blazers instead of dresses, and devouring a satirical subtext about the politics of a developing modern Oxford that I would never have understood, much less discovered, ten years ago.

Carroll’s children’s books have been subject to enough critical study that I’m sure I have nothing new to say about them, but I’m nevertheless tempted to read the Alice books as a view of Oxford through a child’s eyes, the way that a child would write her life, where she is the center of her own story and her Dean of Christ Church father is the King of Hearts in a pack of cards (as one of the secondary sources I’m reading suggests). It makes me wonder what it means for a child to write her life, or for a somewhat childlike adult (as Carroll was, another secondary source posits) to write her life for her. A child’s life is writ small, a child’s world limited. And so Alice dreams that a chess set comes to life in a looking-glass world, and nine-year-old me creates a proliferation of universes and characters to inhabit them alongside myself. Whether it’s Alice telling her story to her cat, or me telling mine to my dolls and stuffed animals, children write themselves the heroes of their own lives, of adventures where the fairies at the bottoms of gardens are real. It’s what we do, and it’s why kids are still reading Alice.

As far as Lewis Carroll was concerned, Wonderland appeared to cease to exist when his child-friends grew up. Other Victorian children’s authors seem to agree; I’m reminded of that preoccupation with “growing up” in Peter Pan. But I’m not so sure. It’s three months till I’ll have completed my second decade (check out that future perfect construction!) and I’m still chasing an English and Oxonian fantasy universe, superimposing it upon reality when I get close enough to snatch at it and hang onto it. I laugh at myself, here at university in America: what remains of my proper, pre-teenage childhood has long since been relegated to boxes in my family’s garage, and yet I’m still longing for a rabbit-hole and a shortcut to Wonderland.

Marriage and Motherhood; Patriotism and Progressivism

I’ll confess I haven’t read the article on the Obamas’ marriage in this week’s NYT Magazine, but Kate Harding’s response at Jezebel resonated very much with me. Harding says:

I voted for Clinton in large part because I regarded her as long-overdue proof that a little girl from the Chicago suburbs could grow up to be president, and it still irritates me to see her held up primarily as a symbol of the establishment, rather than a swift kick in the establishment’s shriveled white nuts. (I think she and Obama are both about 50/50 there.) But it’s also because the false equivalence continues to go unquestioned, just as it did in the campaign — we’re meant to accept that becoming First Lady is basically just as momentous for a woman as becoming president would be. Which… you remember that Hillary Clinton is one of the people in this equation, right? And seriously, every time I heard that shit about a little girl from the South Side growing up to be First Lady, all I could think was, “What little girl dreams of being married to the most powerful person on the planet?” I don’t know, maybe some still do in the twenty-first century, but I certainly didn’t in the late twentieth. I was heartbroken when I learned in elementary school that being born in Canada makes me ineligible for the presidency; it took many more years before it fully sunk in that my vagina does, too. And sadder still is the fact that little African-American girls are faced with even less evidence to suggest they could ever scale those heights. Michelle may have Bill’s charisma, Hillary’s toughness and Barack’s brains, but with racism and sexism both working against her, she couldn’t have made it as far as any of them if she’d wanted to.

I hope things aren’t as bad as all this; I would like to think that an African-American woman would have a viable chance at the presidency in my lifetime. But I find myself sharing Harding’s concern about this sense that being the First Lady is equivalent to being the President. It’s just not. The First Family is an idealization of the modern American nuclear family, a reflection of the conception that’s persisted since the end of World War II that a father who works and a mother who keeps house and takes care of the children are the most American way to envision a family.

I’ve just started watching season 1 of Mad Men this week (I know, I’m a little behind the times), and to me the way we’re applauding en masse the Obama marriage is not entirely different from the way traditional gender roles are made to seem sexy and exciting in Mad Men. I know that the TV show means to critique and expose as flawed those roles, but my sense from having seen half of the first season is that it doesn’t do so nearly as effectively as it could. Mad Men is TV—its depiction of history is going to be inherently romanticized, and not a balanced historical analysis of the way gender and power relationships function(ed) in middle-class, white, urban and suburban America. Likewise, the First Family has its cult (or not-so-cult) following; the Obamas are not only celebrities, but representations of America by virtue of the President’s office as head of state. Even in 2009, being a full-time wife and mother and making it your career to further your husband’s is a patriotic good.

Don’t get me wrong on any count: I believe there is nothing wrong with choosing to make spousehood and motherhood your career. And I admire Michelle Obama deeply; she’s a smart and savvy woman whose history with and views about my university resonate particularly with me. But the way our media and our culture are celebrating her wife-and-motherhood and the moral good of her marriage to her husband just don’t sit right with me. I know this is a contentious statement to make, but I don’t believe that the Obamas’ marriage—as happy and fulfilled as it may make them—represents a higher moral good. I don’t know that we should be celebrating their marriage—and Michelle O.’s wife-and-motherhood—more than the lives and careers of people who do not have spouses and/or children.

When I say “we,” I’m talking about the left, the progressive community. I perceived a tendency over the past year-plus for progressives to valorize the Obamas’ marriage despite professing disagreement with cultural conservatives’ pronouncements about “family values” and gender essentialism. I think that we have a tendency to assume that because the Obamas themselves are progressive, because the implication is that both husband and wife made the choices to assume the roles they did, that it’s okay, and that therefore we can celebrate the degree to which Barack and Michelle reflect a somewhat updated but nevertheless (to my mind) Mad Men-esque hyper-American patriotic ideal of the nuclear family. Reader, this makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

Marriage is for some people and not others. Getting married is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, particularly if you have children, or one of you is from a different country, or for whatever reason you want access to however many thousand benefits it is that marriage gives you. But marriage should be a choice, not a patriotic duty, especially where 21st-century progressivism is concerned.

When I sit down and think about it, I don’t see myself as a particularly radical person—farther to the left than average, certainly, and probably farther to the left than the average Democrat. For instance, I do vote Democratic. I am willing to make concessions to the political mainstream to accomplish things. I believe in the greater good of certain cultural institutions, particularly those enshrined in the Constitution. I am an intensely patriotic person. I kind of want to feel as if my country likes me back, as if the political ideologies with which I ally myself are willing to be inclusive about my life choices. In our cultural moment surrounding the life of the 44th President and his family, I don’t see that happening, and it leaves me profoundly ill-at-ease.

QOTD (2009-10-28)

For my QOTD feature, I usually post words which I like, which resonate with me. Today, I am posting words that I hate, because I think that everyone needs to know what a certain tenured professor with an endowed chair at my university thinks about my community and the rights we’re fighting for. An interviewer is asking Prof. George what the fight for same-sex marriage is about, and he responds:

It’s about sex. Those seeking to redefine marriage began by insisting that what they were fundamentally interested in was gaining needed benefits for same-sex domestic partners. Legal recognition of same-sex partnerships was necessary, they said, so that partners could visit each other in hospitals, extend employer-provided health insurance and other benefits to each other, and so forth. Some people who said this were, I’m sure, being sincere. Most, however, were not telling the truth. Their goal was to win official approbation for sodomy and other forms of sexual conduct that historically have been condemned as immoral and discouraged or even banned as a matter of law and public policy. The clear evidence for this is the refusal of most same-sex “marriage” activists to accept civil unions and domestic partnership programs under which the benefits of marriage are extended, but which do not use the label “marriage” or (and this is very important) predicate these benefits on the existence or presumption of a sexual relationship between the partners. So, it is not really about benefits. It is about sex. The idea that is antithetical to those who are seeking to redefine marriage is that there is something uniquely good and morally upright about the chaste sexual union of husband and wife—something that is absent in sodomitical acts and in other forms sexual behavior that have been traditionally—and in my view correctly—regarded as intrinsically non-marital and, as such, immoral.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, dear reader, about the many, many LGBT Americans who have died alone in hospital because their partners were not admitted to see them. Dear reader, if marriage rights are about anything, they’re not sex. They’re about parenting and immigration and being able to be with the person you love in his or her last moments.

Prof. George says this about the generational shift in support for marriage equality:

The support of so many young people for regarding same-sex partnerships as marriages isn’t surprising, given the cultural power of the movement for sexual liberalism; but I seriously doubt that it makes the redefinition of marriage inevitable. Young people grow up. Most will marry and have children. They will perceive the ways in which moms and dads complement each other, especially (though not exclusively) in child rearing, and the ways their children benefit from paternal and maternal complementarity. Their vision of marriage and sexuality as having everything to do with feelings and romance will fade. They will learn something about love as an act of the will, and not merely a species of affection; and their understanding of what marriage actually is and why it exists will, in many cases, be deeply enriched. I do not claim that the experience of growing up, marrying, and bringing up children will lead all young people or even most who today say they favor the redefinition of marriage to change their minds; obviously, lots of married grown-ups with children today hold liberal views about sex. But I suspect that it will have a significant impact.

Dear reader, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the large quantities of adults who are fighting for marriage equality, especially those who would like very much to get married themselves. Every time I go to Pride or a protest, I see people my age, but also people of all generations. Just look at Frank Kameny: the folks who built this movement may have gotten older, but they haven’t stopped fighting for the causes they believe in.

Finally, Prof. George says this about the aftermath of Prop. 8:

Anyone who contributed money to the Prop 8 effort or played any identifiable role in supporting it was targeted for intimidation. They were depicted as agents of intolerance and enemies of equality. Pressure was put on their employers to fire or discipline them. (I speak from personal experience here: the president of Princeton University, where I am a member of the faculty, was deluged with letters demanding action against me.)

Regular readers may recall that I helped to organize a dance party outside the erstwhile headquarters of the largest single donor to Yes on 8—and that while I have sent President Tilghman many emails, I have never sent her one expressing my objection to Prof. George’s political advocacy. I believe that the solution to speech I find hateful and prejudicial is to speak up in turn in favor of equality and justice, and to do so louder and stronger and in a manner which attracts good media attention.

But if I were a Californian whose state citizenship had just been reduced once more to second-class, and I’d heard that one of the individuals directly implicated in this was a tenured professor with an endowed chair at one of the best undergraduate universities in the country, then yes, I might write to the office of its president to express my disapproval. It is very hard to look at these words, written so starkly on the page, and think that they come from the mouth of someone who is a part of my university, someone whom I have seen in the library or in the dining hall or at public lectures. It is very difficult to acknowledge that there is someone who holds a profession which I particularly exalt (who, indeed, professes) who holds some of the views which I consider to be the most vile and morally indefensible of all views.

Over the years, I have tried very hard to understand Prof. George, and ardent stalwarts of the conservative movement like him. The amount of potted psychoanalysis to which I’ve mentally subjected my political theory professor’s colleague could probably fill a rather large book, possibly even in a multivolume edition. But sometimes, like now, all the objective distancing and black humor falls down around my ears, and I am simply overcome with hatred for this man.

So, I May Have Mentioned I’m from California….

I met a girl in the dining hall a couple days ago who asked me where I’m from. “California,” I said, which led me to field the usual set of questions. Where in California? San Diego? Is that… northern? southern? Oh, it’s in the south, near the Mexican border? What’s the weather like? I guess everyone’s really liberal, right? (No, I say forcefully, not in San Diego, which is a military town and also has large populations of religious groups like Mormons and right-wing evangelical Christians, and whose urban area is far eclipsed by its suburban area.) After we talked a little about California geography and culture, this girl told me I didn’t look Californian. “You look very east-coast,” she said.

I laughed politely, but really, I can’t say I’m surprised. Shortly after coming to college, and realizing it was actually quite a lot better than high school, I disowned California with enthusiasm. Even out west, I’d faithfully read the local sections of the NYT and (most of) the New Yorker; through Facebook, I remained connected to the friends I’d made when my family spent a year in Massachusetts. As a dual citizen, I’ve always looked to Canada to welcome me when my home state in the US didn’t seem to. And so it was an easy transition to being a New Jersey resident, to buying sweaters and taking trains and finally, this past summer, switching my voter registration. I tell people on airplanes I’m from New Jersey now. I live here.

I suppose this isn’t really fair to poor California, which was my home for nearly 10 years before I came east. California’s tried its best, with its warm weather and San Francisco, and the wildfires and Prop. 8 and Arnold Schwarzenegger weren’t really its fault. And I know this is more about how soul-crushing high school was than it is about the biggest and most diverse state in America. I’m sure some people with similar mindsets to mine are perfectly happy even in SoCal. I’m sure many people even get through 10 years in the suburbs without considering dropping out of high school, and I’m sure on the other hand that quite a lot of teenagers have gone through a phase where they came home from school every day and lay on their bedroom floors listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall over and over again.

I know, too, that I’m not being entirely fair to New Jersey. Extolling the virtues of the whole state when I only have the experience of living in an affluent college town is incredibly unfair to the cities in New Jersey struggling with poverty and violence which need attention and help. This state has its own problems, whether they be budgetary or race- and class-related or political-cultural, just like California. And yet, here I am, represented by the smartest Representative in Congress. Here I am in a world which looks to New York and Philadelphia, not the beach and the Bible, as arbiters of style and strictly-interpreted moral values. Here I am on the east coast. It’s going better than SoCal did, anyway.

A wonderful thing about (North) America is that so few of us are deeply rooted anywhere. I am a third-generation American on one side of my family tree and a third-generation Canadian on the other. My parents have lived all over this country and all over the world; I have lived enough different places that folks in San Diego (military town, remember) would ask if I’m a military brat. (No, I’m an academic brat, I’d say, and get blank stares.) I have no more reason to call the place I went to high school home any more than I do to call the place I was born home, but what is wonderful about (North) America is that I get to choose. If I am living somewhere I love, then it’s home, it’s “where I’m from,” simple as that.

So. Maybe I’m from New Jersey. Maybe I’m from Canada. I’m not sure. But now, every time I tell someone at school I’m from California, it feels increasingly like a lie.

On Centers for Abstinence and Chastity; or, In Which I Have a Lifestyle Choice

If you’d been paying attention to Princeton politics over the past couple weeks, you’d really think there was some serious repression going on. First, a small group of people started flipping out, rather loudly and ostentatiously, because we have gender-neutral housing now, which is obviously going to cause sexual activity on this campus to skyrocket (hint: it’s actually not, and whether it would is sort of a moot point anyway). Then, another small group of people who, I’d hazard a guess, probably has some significant overlap with the first group, decided what this school really needs is a Center for Abstinence and Chastity. Their proposal has since been categorically denied by our fabulous university president, but it hasn’t stopped quite a lot of the campus from talking about why or why not we ought to have this center.

I walked into one of these conversations the other night, in which the argument for such a center was largely that students who choose to be abstinent are a discriminated-against minority who therefore need the support of institutional resources. The argument against such a center was twofold: a) being in a minority is not the same thing as being discriminated against; b) choosing not to have sex is not precisely equivalent to being, say, African-American, or gay, two groups of people conventionally defined by a particular immutable characteristic who have a long history of being and still are discriminated against in this country (no, I’m not equating the two histories. I’m just saying that both involve discrimination). Basically, I think, the majority of students I’ve spoken with agree that students who aren’t having sex are probably not nearly as small a population as they may think, and the university resources are more than adequate to address their needs.

But I’ve been thinking, over the past few days. I’ve been saying through this entire abstinence-center episode that what we need is a test case to lean on the Anscombe crowd’s assertion that this center wouldn’t itself discriminate. What would they say if a gay student who was comfortable with being gay, but also felt pressure to have sex and wanted support for remaining abstinent, came to this center? And then it hit me: who needs a test case? I’m talking about myself here.

I’m not saying that the hookup culture agenda is recruiting me, because in my experience, if there is a “hookup culture” at all, it’s an opt-in scenario. My social scene isn’t one that features a lot of hooking up, or any expectation that it’s something people will do on a given Saturday night—but nor does it put any stain of moral disapproval on doing so. As long as folks are using protection, I personally don’t care what they do on their own time and in the privacy of their own homes (or eating club cloakrooms), because it really has no effect on my life.

But there’s something far more insidious that does directly impact my life, and about which I do experience a lot of untoward pressure, and that’s serial monogamy. People in our culture—men, women; straight, queer—are expected to date. They are expected to identify people whom they are interested in dating, and pursue them. They are expected to court, and to receive courtship, and eventually to form partnerships. They are expected to end those partnerships at some point, unless they become permanent, in which case marriage or its moral equivalent tends to result. And reader, I wish this didn’t happen. Because I don’t want to “date” anyone. I don’t want to be set up by my friends with eligible types. I don’t want to be asked if I’ve met any cute, bright young things. I am not interested in playing this game. And then, frankly, I tire of hearing the trite stories of the people who do, the young people who live in cities and go to bars and be someone else for a night in order to attract the nicest and nicest-looking people there. And who expect this encounter in a bar not, in fact, to turn into a hookup, but into a monogamous episode. (I know it sounds like a sitcom, but I heard a lot of this during my summer in DC.) It’s overpoweringly absurd—and yet it’s overpowering. And no, for the umpteenth time, I have not met any cute girls (or boys depending on who’s doing the asking), and even if I had, I wouldn’t be trying to pursue them and enter monogamous relationships with them (serially, obviously; if I entered relationships with them all at once that wouldn’t be very monogamous).

Of course, I suppose the chastity center would tell me, after they finished lecturing me on how my lifestyle leads to disunitive sex, and therefore our civilization will perish, that you can date someone without having sex with them. That’s sort of the whole point of the chastity thing. I get it. But I really haven’t talked to anyone (particularly any men) who aren’t part of a conservative group like Anscombe and still don’t believe that there’s going to be sex at the end of the line. The payoff for all this pursuing is sex, it’s just that our culture would prefer that you work harder for it than getting drunk and coming on to someone you dance with at an eating club (hmm, I guess that could be “coming on to” or “coming onto,” when you think about it. Errr… sorry).

If the chastity center crew is feeling pressured to have anonymous quick sex, well then, I’m feeling pressured to have sex with the same person for months on end after playing a delicate dating game. Dude, it really sucks being in the cultural minority here. Can I please have a center too? Or at least get to use your center? No?

Oh well. Guess I’ll just have to go get wasted and hit on a lot of people at Terrace instead.

Okay. Time for Me to Weigh In on the Kevin Jennings Saga.

Those of you who are tuned into either the queer press or the right-wing press might be aware of the right wing’s smear campaign against Obama’s nominee to be head of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, Kevin Jennings. To summarize briefly: Jennings is gay, he used to be head of GLSEN (which is a pro-safe schools, pro-GSA organization), and he’s written various things about the need to make public education more friendly to queer kids and to kids with queer parents—most famously, by now, the foreword to a book called Queering Elementary Education.

You know what this means, right? Yep, I bet you’re smart enough to put two and two together in right-wing-land: you can’t have the words “gay” and “school” in the same paragraph without invoking the specter of pedophilia. In their attacks against Jennings, the right-wing media have drawn absurdly untrue connections between Jennings and NAMBLA. They have criticized him for listening supportively to a closeted student who told Jennings that he’d had sex with a man he picked up in a bus station bathroom (the student was over the age of consent). Now, apparently, they’re criticizing him because he was involved in ACT-UP. And reader, that’s the last straw.

I know we’re not supposed to feed right-wing nonsense by reporting on it, and I know that I don’t need to tell you folks that Kevin Jennings is far better qualified to make our schools safer than any Bush administration appointee. I don’t need to tell you how nice it would have been to have an out gay teacher in high school, or the importance of students being able to confide in teachers, even if it’s about hooking up in bus stations. But when the right-wing press thinks they can get away with distorting the history I study so that they can erase queerfolk from public education, I’m sorry: I have to rant about it.

The Washington Times ran an editorial on Thursday (I’m not giving them the privilege of a link) which says, in the first paragraph, that Kevin Jennings is an inappropriate person to nominate to public office because he was a member of “the extremist homosexual organization ACT-UP.” It suggests that Jennings is too radical for the gay mainstream because he was in ACT-UP (which, as Alex at Bilerico points out, is just really stupid. ACT-UP was a dominant part of the gay community in the ’80s and early ’90s, and how could it not be? People were dying, and no one was paying attention). The editorial also draws a bizarre association between ACT-UP and NAMBLA, that surefire way to convince folks that all gay men are pedophiles. But this particular excerpt jumped out at me:

ACT UP fanatics invaded the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour studio in 1991 and chained themselves to Robert MacNeil’s desk during a live broadcast. Protesters carried signs declaring, “The AIDS Crisis is Not Over.”

Well, yeah. Because that’s true. It wasn’t over in 1991 and it’s not over now. And every time folks like the Washington Times pull something like this, it increases the burden on the rest of us to bear witness to the thousands of gay men who have died in the face of politicians and media figures trying desperately to use AIDS as proof of the immorality of homosexuality, getting some sort of high of self-righteousness out of human suffering. I want to say that I can’t believe that something which calls itself a news organization would have the temerity to criticize a political appointee for his work in the ’80s to stop people from dying, but frankly I’m not surprised. I’ve read enough about the ’80s themselves, and the reasons that ACT-UP formed in the first place, to know better.

The right-wing commentators have a habit of doing this, of distorting the righteous into something evil. It makes me so angry, and I find it very frustrating, because it draws attention away from what I should be doing as someone active in LGBT communities. It’s easy and satisfying to write a blog post like this one, or to bitch about Anscombe, or to get angry about the latest stupid thing Prof. George has said in the national political discourse (with regard to Kevin Jennings, he said, “Children don’t need to be learning about homosexual practices in elementary school.” And they gave this man tenure WHY? Evidence of reasoned thought this is not). But in the meantime, kids are still killing themselves because their school and home environments are so hostile and unsafe. In the meantime, you can be fired for being gay in thirty states; for being trans, in thirty-nine.

And, in the meantime, the Washington Times still think that pointing out that an Obama nominee was involved with ACT-UP is enough to scuttle the nomination. So let’s change hearts and minds, folks. Let’s educate and be here and queer so that America says to itself, “You know what? I’m proud of my president that he nominated someone who was involved with ACT-UP. I hope that, and the rest of Jennings’ past, means that he’ll be an unwavering advocate for queer children and the children of queer parents.” I mean, in a broad sense, that’s what ACT-UP was fighting for, right? The right to recognition and to legitimacy and to care.

I’m not sure how related this is, but this week, the president of the Anscombe Society was quoted in the Princeton alumni magazine as saying, rather hysterically, that advocates for gender-neutral housing want “to eliminate any gender-based considerations whatsoever, and legal embracing of all sexual lifestyles. It’s a piecemeal process, taking each bite out of traditional gender norms.”

Well, yeah. That’s the idea. Call me a radical, but I say, act up! Fight back! Civil rights—and recognition—now!