Gay Culture; or, In Which a Nerd Tries to Talk About Lady Gaga

While I don’t really know anything about or take the least bit of interest in Lady Gaga, I was interested by something she said in an interview with OUT Magazine:

That’s another clause in the Gagaland constitution: Gay culture shall gush undiluted into the rapids of society. It shall not be co-opted, fancified, dolled up, or Uncle Tommed. “I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream,” she says, “It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.”

I have had some awfully strange conversations in my time about whether there is in fact such a thing as gay culture, but let’s for a second accept that there is, since it’s my main research interest (if I may be so presumptuous as a college sophomore as to have a “research interest”). In any case, as much as I admire this liberationist sense of bringing gay culture to the masses and therefore making a space for it in a hostile world (and I do think it’s interesting that what we’re talking about here is gay culture, in its historical, pre-liberation, campy sense, not LGBT culture), I don’t think that’s going to work. Gay culture has always been a subculture, an underground culture, a counterculture. So many of the hallmarks of this culture—its language, its celebrated heroes, its sense of fashion, its codes of behavior—are based in the need to remain visible to people in the life (to appropriate an early 20th century term) but invisible to those outside it. The construction of a heterosexual identity may have come in response to the construction of a homosexual identity; the straight state may have emerged in response to gender and sexuality nonconformity, but gay culture has always been in the position of subverting the mainstream, undermining it, reacting to it, questioning it, parodying it, etc.

An easy example is the phrase “coming out,” which long preceded the metaphor of the “closet”: it was appropriated from upper-class socialite lingo, where it meant a young woman’s introduction to high society, such as in the form of a debutante ball. It was only one of many ways in which early urban American gay culture parodied high society and its social functions, and thus it subverted the expectations of gender roles, marriage, and domesticity that pervaded how that culture regarded young people, particularly young women. While some of this is wrapped up in the way that homosexuality was sometimes interpreted as an issue of gender identity rather than sexual object choice, and involved a lot of men whom we would now regard as gay identifying with an explicitly feminine-centric image for that reason, it is as clear an indication as any of how gay culture has an identity that is inherently anti-mainstream.

Lady Gaga certainly isn’t the first person to seek to bring gay culture into the mainstream public eye, and it’s undeniable that young urban culture in particular has appropriated a number of pieces of culture that were once exclusively gay. But as much as I believe that what we call “gay culture” is and has always been about so much more (as someone once tried to tell me) than anonymous sex in bathhouses, and therefore ended with AIDS, I do think that it will cease to be unique if it becomes sufficiently mainstream that it no longer has a different culture to react against.

However, what I do see happening already, and which I think will continue as homosexuality becomes less stigmatized and more incorporated into western democracies’ legal frameworks, is the separation of “gay culture” from exclusive identification of “men who have sex with men.” There is a whole trend of straight men who have an affinity for gay culture tropes, and of course (all that “gay best friend” talk aside), a lot of women who are increasingly taking part in a culture that has had a tendency towards quite a lot of sexism. Gay culture is also more welcoming to transfolk these days, and while I’m hesitant to make broad cultural declarations based on limited personal experience, I know a few transmen who, whatever their sexual orientation, have a strong relationship to pieces of gay culture and gay aesthetic. And as gay culture becomes about something more, or something different, or something that is anti-mainstream but not underground (an important distinction, I think), it becomes a radically different mode of identification from that which typifies the gay cultures of, say, the 1920s and ’30s. The gay New York of George Chauncey’s book would, I think, seem very foreign to today’s gay New Yorkers.

So is that what Lady Gaga intends to do? To make gay culture something accessible and identifiable to people who aren’t homosexual men? (I hope you see why I’m using the word “homosexual” here, even if it’s not the preferred term.) It’s understandable given what little I know of her career and her cultural aesthetic, but it means that we may have to start considering to what extent gay culture ever really was about sex—and what purpose it serves if it is no longer an identity for the outcast, the marginalized, and the underprivileged.

Fitting In Academically

My heart goes out to a 19-year-old Northwestern Law student, whose story appeared in the Orange County Register. Kate McLaughlin graduated from UC San Diego at the age of 17, and apparently is wicked smart but has difficulty relating to other people her age. This is the most telling bit, I think, which maybe won’t seem as heartbreaking to other readers of the Orange County Register:

But to say McLaughlin’s life has been easy – or that her parents haven’t struggled to raise a child who was constantly bored with school and couldn’t relate to her peers – would be to dismiss the painstaking, lonely path that McLaughlin has chartered.

She has been burdened all her life with finding a place that would fulfill her insatiable quest for knowledge, a learning environment where she wouldn’t feel like an intellectual oddity.

The Register lists McLaughlin’s academic indices—her LSAT score, her UCSD GPA, her IQ—just as you’d expect. I’m a middle-class SoCal-er from a neighborhood not unlike a lot of Orange County. This fetishization of scores is familiar to me. So is the idea that someone would compare an English major who’s an avid reader and writes a webcomic, and is headed to law school because of a passion for social justice, to Doogie Howser. But what is even more familiar to me are those two sentences I quoted above: the sense that a “painstaking, lonely path” where you “feel like an intellectual oddity” are less significant than the grades and scores and how quickly you move through a prescribed curriculum and move on to law school. It sounds like McLaughlin didn’t find a way to fit in at UCSD, and she didn’t find the work challenging/stimulating enough. I know a little about UCSD, and that doesn’t necessarily surprise me. I hope she’ll find a better environment at Northwestern, but at the risk of stereotyping about law school, I worry that it would be just as lonely-making.

Now, I’m no genius. And McLaughlin is clearly very intellectually gifted. I know it’s not necessarily appropriate to compare my educational trajectory to hers, or feel as if I can relate to her situation. But as someone who was lonely and depressed and bored with school before I got to college, and as someone with an “insatiable quest for knowledge,” I hope it occurs to someone who reads the Register article, or the NYT blog post that links it, to consider what our culture does to smart kids by emphasizing their numerically-based achievements over their intellectual and emotional fulfillment.

Hair and Hippies and Gender Panic; or, Today’s Nibble of Rambling Cultural Criticism

This morning I’ve been mulling over the cultural significance of the huge cultural controversy that hair length engendered in the late 1960s. I’m sure this has been commented on many times before, but on personal blogs that have about 30 daily pageviews, you’re allowed to reinvent the wheel.

Anyway, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, as fashions started by the hippies entered the mainstream and major events like Woodstock, the Newport Folk Festival (which turned 50 this week), and the anti-Vietnam protests brought the countercultural aesthetic into the public eye, they caused a furor among many older and more conservative people who didn’t know how to react to styles that favored jeans over suits and ties for men and dresses for women; young men who wore their hair long and young women who wore their hair short. One of the most frequent tropes that comes up in conversations about the ’60s kids is a shouted question, either from an older person or a little kid: “Hey! Are you a boy or a girl?”

This, of course, is part of the thematic content of the “American tribal love-rock musical” Hair, whose title song is spurred by naïve inquiries from an older woman, who initially mistakes one of the more effeminate male characters for a woman. In the ensuing song, the whole cast revels in the idea of long hair and the sense of liberation from society’s conformity it suggests—and since the musical is named after that celebration of a fashion statement, it makes it seem as if it’s the hair length that’s driving the show’s hymns to sex, drugs, and peace as well. But what’s interesting is how the whole hair issue is inextricably entwined with a gender dynamic—it’s pretty clear that many people objected to the long-hair-for-men trend because it did blur the distinctions between gender roles and create a situation that made it more difficult to gender individuals. Gerome Ragni and James Rado (the writers of Hair) recognized this in an interesting way: the woman who is confused by the androgynous male character and sets off the title song is really a man in drag, who throws open his fur coat at the end of the song to reveal that he’s just wearing shorts underneath. (It makes me, anyway, wonder what sorts of insecurities someone might have that they would be so obsessed with trying to discern someone’s gender and be made so anxious when that’s more difficult.)

It’s weird that a movement and culture which was, in point of fact, relatively gender-normative and even at times misogynistic (look at the sexual objectification of women by SDS members, or the gendered factionalization of the gay liberation movement, or the fact that it took until the late ’70s for second-wave feminism to really take hold) should have spurred so much cultural anxiety about the blurring of gender definitions, but I think that is as indicative as anything else of the omnipresence of gender issues in our society: if we are going to have a cultural panic about something, it might as well be gender and we might as well assume that the root of a generation’s cultural shift is gender, even when it isn’t.

However, Hair the musical subliminally introduces an important point here: in some ways, I think, the ambiguous gendering introduced by the hair problem provides an excuse for the homoeroticism evident in the relationship of the two main characters, Berger and Claude. And so it is they who can be transgressive and dance sexually even as they treat cavalierly the women in their life—one of whom is pregnant, but they don’t know by whom, and one of whom gets cruelly cast aside by Berger like the yellow shirt which gets used as a symbol of their relationship. While this rambling probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to someone who isn’t familiar with Hair (though you should be! Read the book, or go see it if you’re able! The Broadway revival is awesome), it does demonstrate how androcentric the so-called “sexual revolution,” and all the questions of gender of this period, were. The crisis of masculinity caused by the draft and those who dodged it, male-centered gay liberation, the way that women were used by people like the men in SDS… all this evidences the advances made in the freedom of masculine sexuality seemingly almost at the expense of feminine sexuality.

Which, I suppose, goes a long way towards explaining why the virgin-whore dichotomy is still so dominant in our culture.

Princeton History Department Pride

Yes, the pun on “pride” was sort of intended, because the reason I’m so excited is that I just read Steven Epstein’s laudatory review in The Nation of Margot Canaday’s new book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. I took Prof. Canaday’s class spring semester, and what we learned about “Gender and Sexuality in Modern America” turned my world upside-down. I think it was partly because I realized for the first time that the inclusion of LGBT narratives and experiences and cultures in the world of academe was legitimate. I know that seems self-evident and a rather silly realization for a queer kid to come to, but it was inspiring to me. Now I find myself in the position of putting the gears in motion to study LGBT history in the Princeton history department. I may not be so much interested in the legal/legislative/federal issues that she addresses, but when I finally settle on a thesis topic, I’ll have part of Prof. Canaday’s thesis—that homosexuality and the state are inextricably linked—to thank. Without her class, I don’t think that I would have come to the conclusion that the study of American history and culture necessarily incorporates the study of sexuality.

Piece of Cultural History Hilarity of the Day

Wow, we’re really capitalizing on this “of the day” meme, aren’t we?

From the blog of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library:

This is the binding on a recently acquired copy the Scholar’s Arithmetic, or, Federal Accountant, a textbook published in 1814 at Keene, N.H. by John Prentiss “proprietor of the copy right.”… The book is still in its original binding as issued. In this case the decorative paper is marbled paper, whose color and pattern results from laying the paper over oil pigments floating on water. Again, wear and age allow us to see what was once hidden by blue pigment. There are blocks of print separated by wide margins, signaling this sheet to be several pages of text imposed for book printing. There are 31 lines per page with a page number centered in brackets over the middle of line one. Layout is the same on both front and back covers.

What is this text? Closely reading one portion reveals a surprise.

[18]

[service] under these good people; and after
[supper] being showed to bed, Miss Phoebe,
[who ob]served a kind of reluctance in me to
[strip and go] to bed, in my shift before her, now
[the maid] was withdrawn, came up to me, and
[beginnin]g with unpinning my handkerchief
[and gow]n, soon encouraged me to go on with
[undressi]ng myself; and, still blushing at now see
[ing mys]elf naked to my shift, I hurried to get
[under th]e bed-cloaths out of sight. Phoebe
[laugh’d] and was not long before she placed

Racy stuff, indeed. One library describes books with comparable decorative papers as “Bound in boards covered with a marbled sheet from a suppressed edition of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. [Boston?, ca. 1810]”

I checked a text of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (more popularly known as Fanny Hill), and yep, that selection is from the same hilariously tacky 1749 pornographic novel. It was involved in a huge obscenity to-do at the time of its publication and an unexpurgated version wasn’t published until after the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, which overturned British obscenity law. It was first published in the US in 1821 (though not unexpurgated until a 1963 landmark Supreme Court case), so I’d be really interested to know the story of the paper used to bind the textbook the library blog is talking about. How did an underground edition come to be produced, I wonder?

If you don’t read any of the various blogs maintained by the Princeton University Library, I highly recommend you check them out. The librarians aren’t always the most adept at writing in a snappy blog style, but they put up great pictures and facts about items in the collection. I’ve met a few of the librarians in Rare Books and Graphic Arts, and they’re wonderful people—I’m so glad that they’re reaching out to the wider community with their blogs.

Rearranging Journal Entries

Allen Ginsberg wrote a great many of his poems simply by arranging the thoughts he recorded in his journal into poetic lines. “First thought, best thought,” was the mantra he learned from his guru, and so he essentially wrote down things as they entered his head.

Well, I think this only works out well for Allen Ginsberg. If I tried it, this is what would happen:

A man ran down the street in one direction; he’s now come back in the other
Riding a bicycle.
Is he training for a triathlon?
I half expect him to come back again
Swimming, except for the obvious point:
There is no water on the street.

Um yeah. I don’t think so.

Allen Ginsberg and AIDS

Or, the sorts of nerdy obsessions that keep me up at 1 in the morning.

In all of the published poetry Allen Ginsberg wrote between 1978 and 1990, he mentions AIDS only twice. His poetry is weirdly free of the constant allusions to the disease that appear in the work of any gay male writer living in New York in the ’80s, as Ginsberg did. In addition, if his poetry (which is invariably autobiographical) and his journals are any indication, he remained sexually active throughout the period, which boggles the mind somewhat. How did he manage not to die of AIDS (he died of liver cancer in 1997), much less ignore the phenomenon as his friends and fellow writers and neighbors in the East Village died around him?

The first time Ginsberg mentions AIDS, it is in a poem called “Sphincter,” dated March 15, 1986 (very much after the disease’s initial terrifying outbreak). Here, the reference is an entirely self-serving one; Ginsberg stresses that his “good old asshole” must now, due to AIDS, only admit “the condom’d orgasmic friend.” Usually a faithful commentator on current events, here he has managed to go seven years without a peep about the thousands of deaths in his microcosm and now his only remark is that AIDS necessitates that he practice safe sex? This isn’t the poet I’m used to.

The second reference to the syndrome in question comes two years later (February 13, 1988), and the poem is called “Grandma Earth’s Song.” Ginsberg talks about how he encounters a crazy homeless woman who then chants in rhyming couplets a crazy homeless chant about what an awful state the world is in. Many of the observations “Grandma Earth” makes are the ones we’re used to hearing about the Reagan years—the chant references the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and violence in the Middle East in general, the state of the economy, quite a lot about the state of the environment, and—in one little offhand reference—AIDS. It’s an interesting commentary on the world of 1988, and the gay literary/cultural world in particular. What little exposure I’ve had to the gay literature and popular culture of the period suggests that the gay male community was completely traumatized by AIDS, shut down to the point that it couldn’t think of anything else. And yet Ginsberg, in his treatment of AIDS, chooses to put the concern expressed in a lot of very high-minded literary endeavors into a crazy woman’s ravings—the sentiment couldn’t be farther removed from that of, for example, Angels in America. And yet, if Ginsberg’s intention is to suggest how paranoid all such fears seem—fears about violence and war, money, even the ozone layer and an epidemic—the attitude towards AIDS does make sense, albeit seem a bit of a strange way of confronting such a huge and omnipresent issue in Ginsberg’s world.

I suppose that Ginsberg was never so much a figure of gay liberation; he never placed himself within a thoroughly gay world, the way a great many other 20th-century gay writers did. Perhaps this was a result of his early repression and self-loathing, perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the men he lusted after and fell in love with were invariably heterosexual (Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and even to an arguable degree Peter Orlovsky), or perhaps it was more to do with the fact that Ginsberg’s Buddhist sensibilities suggested the bridging of subcultural boundaries and the oneness of humanity, just as they did two decades before when he was an avenue of communication between Berkeley student protestors and the adults trying to combat them. And so it seems reasonable that he wouldn’t have seen himself as a spokesperson for the gay trauma in a way that many of his contemporaries did, and that his struggles would have been more cerebral or spiritual and not a question of the daily fight for survival that seems to have characterized much of the rest of the gay community in the ’80s.

There is a poem from March 1990, “Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to Be Executed),” in which Ginsberg does a sort of by-the-numbers of problems in the world: things like “100,000 alcohol deaths yearly,” “$100,000,000,000 to 200,000,000,000 estimate nuclear weapons complex cleanup costs,” “3,000 citizens disappeared in Government custody Peru 1972-1979.” But whereas my reading suggests that any number of gay writers would have placed (and still place) the thousands of gay men lost to AIDS quite prominently in that list, there is no mention of these deaths in the catalog of what is wrong with the world.

On some level I believe that the always-self-centered poet really just wasn’t interested in the personal struggles of other people; AIDS lacks the high-minded idealism of the radical student movements or even the nascence of the Beat Generation, and I imagine there was less to interest Ginsberg there, particularly in his later years, when he seemed primarily occupied in summoning up the spirits of the friends of his youth or of his poetic influences (usually Blake and Whitman, his particular favorites). Practically, it’s incredible that Ginsberg didn’t contract AIDS himself, and wildly implausible that he wouldn’t have had at least one lover or close friend who died of it—even if he had stayed at Naropa in Boulder or abroad for all of the ’80s, which is not at all the case, as I know that was living in the East Village for at least some of that time, he couldn’t have avoided the reach of AIDS.

But I suppose that, here, Ginsberg provides some much-needed perspective. After immersing myself for quite a while in writers to whom AIDS is critical and life-changing and traumatizing and galvanizing, it’s a reality check to note that it was not quite so central to every literary figure in America, or indeed every gay literary figure. And perhaps that was the point; Ginsberg always stood out, and perhaps he wanted to be the one gay poet in the ’80s who wasn’t writing about AIDS. I guess that if that were the case, I couldn’t really blame him.

Bringing History to the Masses

Last Saturday, finding myself at loose ends, I decided on a whim to go to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. I adore museums and I adore American history, so I thought it would be a good combination—and I was also interested to see how the museum would present America’s story to the incredibly diverse public that presumably passes through the Smithsonian’s museums. As the National Museum of American History, this place has something of the responsibility of defining how America sees itself, if that makes any sense. It’s how America perceives its own story. I was interested to see how a museum could reduce aspects of American history that—my first year of college has taught me—are incredibly nuanced and sometimes controversial down to a series of visually enticing displays. And, wow. It was an interesting experience.

By and large, I was pleasantly surprised by the degree to which the museum represented a diverse set of American experiences and a balanced view of politically controversial time periods such as the Cold War and Vietnam. I was expecting something along the lines of the elementary-school version of history where everything has a happy ending, and so it was refreshing not just to see the museum own up to issues such as how the government’s treatment of African-Americans cast its ideals of freedom and democracy into question for hundreds of years, how Native Americans were forcibly relocated from their homelands, or how women were systematically disenfranchised or relegated to housewife/”helper” roles. Of course, most of these concepts were presented in ways which ended in the eventual triumph of freedom and democracy and the presumption that the same issues of race, class and gender that have always plagued America do not persist. However, the overall historical narrative didn’t by any means gloss over those issues, and even incorporated some interesting stories that traditional sequences of events gloss over: the litany of Civil War battles I learned in 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade US history didn’t mention the role of women as spies for the Confederacy, or the role of male nurses in addition to their female counterparts like Clara Barton—but the museum’s Civil War section certainly did. I saw echoes of the classes I took last semester in displays on Cold War culture in the Nuclear Age or on the advent of the Pill and its role in the sexual revolution. I would never have dreamed, somehow, that I would see an entire wall of birth control pills in a national museum, alongside a copy of the Hair libretto—but there they were. At every stage in the museum, I deeply regretted having neglected to bring my camera.

But, because of the nature of this blog, and the nature of me, and the nature of my single-issue political focus, I have to say that the most incredible thing I saw at the museum was its Archives Center’s display—which commemorated Stonewall and Pride Month in general. One case contained some pictures from Stonewall and some issues of One magazine (considered to be the first pro-gay magazine, founded by members of the Mattachine Society, and the subject of a landmark 1958 obscenity case), which were particularly cool. Another case contained some documents from a particular researcher’s AIDS oral history project. It was wonderful and incredibly validating from my perspective to see that such an august institution saw LGBT history as part of America’s history, and I didn’t even let the disgusted comments of a couple standing behind me as I pored over the exhibit (“Why are they showing this stuff? This is ridiculous”) irritate me, just because I was so glad that the museum saw fit to feature this aspect of our country’s history, this group of its citizens.

But, on the other hand, I had my substantial share of issues with the military history exhibit—which came down overwhelmingly on the side of those who had thought all the wars were a good idea. This is natural when you’re talking about the Revolution or the Civil War or World War II, the so-called “morally justified” wars, but somehow the logic of a one-sided approach seems harder to justify in light of the others. I skimmed through the wars of expansion section in my desire to reach the 20th century, but I was a little bit surprised that the (admittedly brief) World War I display said nothing about that war’s large conscientious objector movement; I was also surprised by the lack of criticism of anti-communist hysteria. There was a picture of McCarthy but little explanation of it; one blurb said that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and tried in the course of a “legitimate search for spies.” That struck me as bizarre: while I know that many historians these days are saying that at least Julius was likely guilty, it seemed strange to ignore the degree to which the Rosenbergs’ trial—and, indeed, the use of the death penalty—was motivated by the absolute craziness that characterized much of the politicking during that period. The Vietnam exhibit did a good job juxtaposing the actual land war of military strategy with the social war going on at home, but while it addressed criticisms of actions such as the killing of protesters at Kent State, it didn’t really explain why people might have opposed the war, or even so much as caption the litany of iconic images of peace signs and Woodstock and dead and dying Vietnamese people that covered a wall. Yes, the vast majority of people to come through the museum probably have some familiarity with the events of Vietnam—statistically speaking, a good number of people to come through were probably alive in the ’60s and ’70s and aware of the events as they happened. But someone my age—or one of the great many younger children in tour groups whom I saw that day—doesn’t know these narratives, and may not even have a preconceived notion of who was on what side or what the social discourse was like during the Vietnam period. If this museum is telling the American story, it has a duty to explain.

On the other hand, though, things just felt progressively weirder to me when I entered the next section of the exhibit, about the post-Vietnam wars. There was a display from the first Gulf War, with uniforms of desert camo, that threw around jargon like “liberate,” “coalition forces,” and “Support the Troops” that were eerily reminiscent of our present war. And then, in an adjacent display, a thick girder of twisted and rusted steel hung suspended from the ceiling—it was a piece of the World Trade Center. Schoolchildren and adults alike crowded around it, all telling each other (for the umpteenth time, no doubt) where they were on 9/11. One girl was clamoring for attention so that she could tell her family how her teacher had known someone who had died in the WTC, and it was just so mind-boggling bizarre to see the style of historical distance imposed by the exhibit juxtaposed with the living memory of a 16-year-old. The other display cases in the room enshrined photographs and military memorabilia from Afghanistan and Iraq, and I was reminded again of a question I thought about all last semester: how do you historicize events that exist within recent memory, that in fact are still developing? We still don’t know everything surrounding the Bush administration’s strategy, reasoning, and operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we likely won’t for several years. When I looked at one display of a collection of anti-Bush political buttons and recognized some that I have in my reasonably vast collection, I had a brief sense of how my parents must feel about endless documentaries and nostalgia and exhibits about the period of their youth. But I’m still in my youth, and these wars are still going on, and it felt somehow unreasonable to place them in the context of an exhibit that told the stories of all the major wars in our nation’s history. Yes, on the one hand, there is no received narrative, like there is for the Revolution or the Civil War—the museum has the privilege of being able to truly tell the story anew as it thinks it should be told. But political tensions still run high; we certainly still do not know all the facts. The labels on the artifacts were necessarily brief, the captions depoliticized. But how much information does that truly offer, when the scholars who wrote the text of the exhibit don’t have the freedom to present any complete sense of the facts?

I truly believe that anyone who studies history has something like a solemn duty to educate the public—particularly if the historian in question is studying the history of the society/culture in which he or she lives. It is critical to remind the public of past mistakes, so that they are not repeated; it is critical, particularly in our modern period in which minority and underprivileged histories are emphasized in scholarship, to make sure that everyone’s stories are heard. It does us no good, for reductive example’s sake, for something like LGBT history to be an emerging hot new subfield in academia if no one outside the discipline has heard of Harvey Milk or Stonewall—and that’s why I was so excited to see the Pride Month/Stonewall anniversary display, and to note the care and respect and detail with which the exhibits described the history of minorities, women, immigrants, and working-class people that runs counter to the history of the privileged who serve in government and wrote the histories for hundreds of years. But while some of my preconceptions were dispelled by my day at the museum, others were not—and at times I felt myself very much back in the black-and-white world of grade-school social studies, frustrated by what was left unsaid. Yes, it is difficult to be all things to all people, but to tell all stories, to represent all sides, and to showcase dissent—even if it is, say, anti-military—is truly the most patriotic course of action for America’s museum to take.

QOTD (2009-06-12)

A letter from Charles L. Schultze (LBJ’s Director of the Bureau of the Budget and later Carter’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers) to Senator John McClellan (D-AK), as quoted in the Congressional Record, 16 August 1974:

The evidence emphatically refutes the popularly held view that government deficits and profligate government spending are the chief causes of recent inflation: and (2) under current conditions a substantial cut in federal spending would add to unemployment and virtually guarantee a serious recession, without significantly reducing the rate of inflation in the next year.

Budget Director Roy Ash has been quoted (New York Times, June 27, 1974) as estimating that a $5 billion reduction in federal spending would reduce the inflation rate by only one-tenth of one percent. Such a reduction, however, could be expected over the course of a year, to add perhaps 200,000 people to the ranks of the unemployed. A larger budget cut might reduce the rate of inflation by another fraction, but it could well tip the scales of an already precarious economic situation into a new recession and swell the unemployment rolls by a much greater number.

I love it when history is relevant to current events. I’m not going to be a political or economic historian, most likely, but finding things like this—or, for example, turning on C-SPAN or MSNBC and seeing the regulation debates of the ’70s and ’80s echoed in today’s discussions about the auto industry or the banks—makes me feel like I’m doing something valuable by intending to study history.

In Which Technological Aptitude Becomes Relevant Again

In high school, I was pretty computer-literate, and proud of it. I invested a great deal of time and money restoring the old computers sitting around my family’s house, getting them running various flavors of Linux or FreeBSD or sometimes even an old version of Windows. I became competent, if not expert, at both the DOS and *nix command lines, and could easily use a system without a GUI for everyday tasks. I was taking AP computer science in school my last year of high school, which wasn’t much—just some Java programming—but I learned the basics of the concepts and language and structure of programming, and branched off from the Java to teach myself some C. I also became well-versed in ways to use up bandwidth, trawling the Internet for applications and movies and music to torrent—sometimes legally, sometimes illegally—and always trying out the latest open-source apps. There was even a brief period of time when I was knowledgeable enough that I was answering people’s questions on the Ubuntu Linux help forums.

That state of affairs changed considerably when I started college. Fall semester, I took a very basic computer science course for non-majors—it was fun, but it didn’t teach me anything new or challenge me, and I started to forget a lot of what I’d taught myself that I wasn’t using in class. Java and C aren’t too useful when the most taxing assignment is designing a basic HTML webpage that can run a Javascript number-guessing program. Second semester, my classes were all humanities-based, and I just didn’t have time anymore to take on side projects that weren’t directly related to my classes and my work and my writing; more so, my interests and priorities were shifting. The one completely frivolous project I undertook all school year was an attempt to teach myself Old English over intercession, which at least historically speaking was as far removed from programming as it gets. These days, I just use my MacBook for the same day-to-day stuff most people do, I think: checking email and Facebook and Twitter and the newspapers/blogs, keeping in touch with friends, writing papers, watching movies, keeping my life together in iCal. That sort of thing. The shortcut to the Mac command line sits in my Dock, but I can’t think when the last time I clicked on it was.

And so it’s rather odd to think that the past week has called upon more of my technological know-how than I’ve had to summon in months. In the first place, my job research-assisting a Princeton professor as he writes about American government (de)regulation has required me to exchange large (we’re talking multi-gigabyte) files with said professor online, and figuring out the best ways to do that these past couple days has made me aware of how rusty I am at solving computer-related problems. The kid who once had feet upon feet of CAT6 cables snaking around her room in order to connect three ten- or fifteen-year-old boxes to the Internet had to be reminded by said professor about the existence of the .rar archive as a way to split up large files for easy up-/downloading. That was a little embarrassing.

And then, today, my friend and I ran into technical difficulties trying to play Age of Empires against each other online (yeah, I know, we’re hopelessly nerdy), and as I chased around the Internet trying to figure out how to get multiplayer to work without the game DVD in my drive (a problem that still remains unsolved), I was reminded of how little I retained from my computer-nerd days. Asking for help from a high-school friend who programs for a living and has a good deal of knowledge of how to make things like this work, I listened to him give me advice I felt as if I would have been able to think of independently a year ago. I tried his suggestions and thanked him for his help, wondering what had ever possessed me to consider (however briefly) majoring in computer science in college. It was like how I feel when I don’t take a French class or speak the language for a while, then jump back into immersion. I know I should understand what’s being said, or be able to form sentences of my own, but the words are slow to come and I just can’t force myself to remember the vocabulary and the concepts.

That doesn’t happen to me as long as I’m working in English, though, and it doesn’t happen as long as I stick to the humanities—I think my analytical/critical thinking/reading and writing skills are much more innate than anything I may have memorized through picking up French or computer science, and so I’m probably picking the right major after all. But it does remind me, again, how little any of these disciplines exist in a vacuum unto themselves. Just as my close-reading abilities inform my study of historical documents, or my interpretation of a given historical narrative informs my interpretation of a given piece of writing, so too does the comp sci I was capable of a year ago come back to haunt me when doing research or having fun with a friend. Well, hey. I knew there was a reason I was getting a liberal arts education.