Giving the Westboro Baptist Church the Time of Day

I know it’s stupid to give any attention to these anti-gay nutters so far outside the mainstream that they make the religious right look like Marxists. But I give you the latest from the Harvard Crimson:

Waving rainbow banners, American flags, and signs that displayed messages such as “God Strongly Dislikes Hate” and “We’re Staying Gay, Sorry,” approximately 400 counter-protestors waited for the arrival of the Westboro Baptist Church at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School last Friday morning.

At 11:24 a.m., six members of the anti-gay religious organization—including a 15-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy—finally appeared, entering the area the Cambridge Police had designated for their protest. From the other side, separated by two fences and a neutral zone, the counter-protestors began chanting loudly, drowning out the church group’s words and songs.

Last month, the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, whose nationwide picketing activities against homosexuality have earned them a “hate group” designation, announced their plans to protest the high school’s gay-straight alliance, Project10East. Since then, the school had worked with the mayor’s office and the police department to determine an appropriate response.

When the day finally arrived on March 13, the protests engendered an ironic consequence: although they propounded a divisive message, their effect on the community was decidedly uniting.

Good for Cambridge—one of the country’s greatest towns, I think—but I do think it’s worth calling out these nutters on the obvious unconscionable nature of attacking high-school kids. There are a lot of people who hold homophobic views that I find disgusting and repugnant, but they have the right to express their opinions. I’m left wondering, though, whether it’s acceptable to express one’s right to free speech by harassing high-school GSAs. I don’t know. There’s something deeply nauseating about the whole thing.

But yeah. Good for Cambridge for being awesome.

Things I Notice About Being Home

I’m in my room in my family’s home right now, on spring break. There’s a sense of comfort to this room, because it contains all the clutter of my childhood: my ten-year-old Dell notebook, still chugging along fine on Linux; my electric typewriter; my hundreds of books, not just the few I was able to bring to Princeton; my viola; some of the weird clothes I used to wear to school, many years ago; my big, soft bed that’s low to the ground and perfect for lying on, on my stomach, with a computer—or a book.

Because this time, when I come home, things are different. I feel adjusted to college now. I love college. And that’s not like it was my first two breaks, when I sat in my room all day on the computer, caught in this weird limbo between high school and college, not really happy with either situation. Before I decided I had to explain how I was feeling, I was sprawled on my bed reading (reading Norman Mailer for class, but still), something I hadn’t done in a long time. And before that, I was downstairs, sitting on the couch, something I used to very rarely do. It’s true, my cousins are visiting, and I wanted to socialize with them, but I find myself craving the community space regardless. Sitting at my kitchen table with my computer and idly checking Facebook, but in reality watching the action around me, is not too different from doing the same thing in the dining hall during my two-hour lunches.

And, you know, there was a time—a time not too long ago, maybe just a few weeks or a few months ago—when I would have regretted deeply that I wasn’t doing anything more interesting on Saturday night than lying on the couch babbling at my mom and my cousins about nothing. There was a time when I would have been deeply depressed that Saturday night meant time to sit and stare at Facebook and YouTube in the company of my family. But I don’t think that’s valid anymore. Maybe it is at school, a bit, when I wonder about how lame I am, but I don’t know. I think things are changing in me and around me.

This morning, I went to Target with my mom. We drove through my neighborhood, and the place where I’ve lived since 1999 looked so alien to me. I couldn’t believe that the sterile suburban streets with the identical houses and the Southern California chaparral were real, almost. I expect to see collegiate Gothic pretension, and lots of grass, and deciduous trees. I expect to see lots of college kids, not families with young children in minivans. It was weird. It was another planet. It was culture shock. And there’s so much you could say about that, about what a privileged monster I’m becoming that the stone edifices of the north end of Princeton’s campus are normal, but hey. That’s how it goes, man.

The world I live in now is so different from high school. I can’t begin to emphasize that enough. In the world I live in now, I am autonomous—and so it’s culture shock when my mom asks me to set the table. But in the world I live in now, I also spend a lot of time eating bad food by myself—and so it was one of the most wonderful experiences imaginable to sit down to our dining table with my parents, my sister, and my cousins, and eat Syrian food that my mom and cousin had cooked. It’s great to have family in-jokes. It’s great that, a while after dinner, my cousins and I sat laughing hysterically at The Muppet Show on YouTube. And it’s great that it’s ten minutes to midnight, it’s Saturday, and I’m not somewhere getting drunk. I don’t really care if people do that. I mean, I guess it’s a fine idea in theory. But it’s not me. It never was. Instead, I’m looking forward to watching my high school play quizbowl on Thursday. I’m excited about the cool shirt I got from the Target little boys’ dress clothes. I’m worrying about all the schoolwork and job-work I need to do. And I’m both enjoying the time spent with my family and looking to get back to my little fantasyland of stone towers and hardwood floors, long dining tables and famous professors, and the constant busyness and stress of doing fulfilling and engaging and stimulating work. I know I’ve been banging on a lot about this lately, but I’ve been trying to find a social circle and a way of life for quite a few years now, and I’ve never felt so fulfilled as I do right now. I haven’t been to the Street (Princetonese: Prospect Street, where the eating clubs are) in weeks, the longest breaks I take from working are for food, and yet I am so, so happy. Of course I’m glad for the break. Of course I’m glad for a real bed, real food, and the company of my family. Of course I’m glad for sleep and a slightly slower pace of life. But going to college has been the greatest thing that’s happened to me so far in my life, and it’s weird to see myself change because of it. It’s going to take a lot of getting used to, and I’m already worrying about the people I’m alienating because of it. But what can I do? Welcome to the rest of my life.

Grade Inflation

There’s a fascinating article at Inside Higher Ed today about grade inflation, in which all sorts of disturbing trends are bandied about: at Brown, for example, the majority of undergraduate grades were As. That’s just not right. Princeton gets a shoutout in the article (yay!) for its grade deflation policy, which has encouraged professors and departments to be conscious of using a wider portion of the grading scale, and suggests that departments should shoot for a long-term average of awarding As to 35% of students. But 35%? Even that’s not enough.

I’m a hard-liner about grading. I believe something that, in my experience, is rarely practiced in universities: I believe that As should be really fucking hard to come by. Granted, despite the highly inflated grades of my high school career, I’m not really getting As now—I’m more of an A-/B+ kind of gal. But that’s beside the point. We should not be living in a world where the majority of students at an Ivy League institution (Brown, I’m looking at you) are getting As. Not only is that not sending a very good educational message to students about how well they’re doing, it just furthers this stereotype about how elitist, how entitled, how privileged, Ivy-League students are. To bring this all back to myself in a totally privileged way, this is one reason why I’m embarrassed, sometimes, to tell people I go to Princeton. It conjures up images of these lazy entitled kids sitting around doing nothing and just profiting off their privilege.

And there’s maybe a little bit of substance to that stereotype in this case. Because you know who isn’t being affected by the grade inflation trend? Community colleges. The study that led to all the data about four-year universities also found that, if anything, community-college professors have become tougher graders in recent years—and interviews with community-college professors seem to suggest that their students prefer such a system. It’s a far cry from my anecdotal evidence at Princeton, where virtually every student I’ve talked to hates the grade deflation policy. It’s all about them, and how their As are not only their right, but a necessity for law school or business school or med school or the job market.

But I have no sympathy for this perspective. Sitting right now in a cafe on-campus, drinking my $1.50 cup of coffee and typing on my MacBook, I think that the very least I can do is try to work as hard as I can, to somehow be deserving of all this privilege bestowed upon me, and to become educated and intelligent enough that I can somehow give back to the system that’s giving me this. I’m an academic brat. I’ve grown up in this system and it’s my home, and I still want it to mean something. I would like to know that three-and-a-bit years from now, the piece of paper Princeton gives me actually has some significance, and isn’t just a receipt for $200,000.

On a related note, I was just talking online to a friend who’s studying nuclear engineering at another university. He was showing me a graph he’d produced for his schoolwork that I certainly didn’t understand, but I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty about my liberal-arts education. “I love how your schoolwork matters in the real world,” I said. And as long as my B.A. isn’t going to be contributing anything to resolving the energy crisis, well, I might as well at least get grades that are appropriately evaluative of the intellectual masturbation that I do. You know?

My mommy sends me better care packages than your mommy

There are a number of things I’ve wanted to blog and have no time to—I’m in the midst of midterms and I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off the past several days, seemingly subsisting solely on caffeine. I have so much to talk about, but since I probably won’t get to it till Friday, when I leave Princeton to spend spring break at home with my family, you will have to be satisfied with my telling you how awesome my mom is. To wit: yes, she sent me cookies and gummy worms, like any normal parent would. But she also sent me Twinings and Nutella, AND smoked oysters and stuffed grape leaves. I tell you, what other mother would send their child smoked oysters and stuffed grape leaves? Brilliant.

I was at a conference (well, an “unconference,” actually) in New York on Sunday called Kink For All New York City, which put simply was a meeting and discussion venue for a lot of different sexuality-related communities in New York. I gave a presentation (the proto-academic in me insists on calling it a “talk”) about “The Politicization of the Closet.” While I’m going to talk about this more in a future post when I’m not running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I did want to just share a picture of me presenting at the event:

I’m very proud of the act of giving the presentation, and also the attitude I took on while doing so. I’m sharing this picture because it was one of the rare times in my life when I thought, “I could do this—talking about social issues in terms of academic abstractions, that is—for a living.” That sounds rather silly, but it was and is very important to me.

And with that, I’m off to recaffeinate and flip out about midterms.

Time for a Little John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

I’m not an actor—my roles onstage in children’s theater were all non-speaking parts—but my high-school English teachers loved to have us read plays aloud in class. I was always the only one who volunteered, so I got to play some of my dream parts: Feste in Twelfth Night, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, the Stage Manager in Our Town, and Vivian Bearing in Wit.

Wit is a play about an professor who is in a hospital being treated for cancer. Much of the play’s dark humor is of a distinctly academic nature. I don’t mean any offense to my English class, but I think some lines didn’t mean quite so much to them as they did to me, even then, before college. Vivian is a professor of English: she loves words. She obsesses over them. She close-reads her doctors’ diagnoses. And much of the overarching theme of the play hinges on her life’s work, the interpretation of the final line of “Death be not proud.” It’s one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and Vivian’s deal (if I remember correctly—I don’t have the text of the play) is that in one manuscript that semicolon is a comma, and whether the punctuation is a semicolon or a comma changes the entire interpretation of the poem. When I played Vivian—my English teacher telling me that I captured the essence of the character very well, I might add—I couldn’t really imagine ever finding a single punctuation mark that important.

I’m in a university class on English literature now, my first one ever. We’re reading Renaissance poetry, too, and “Death be not proud”—what I could remember of it, anyway—came to my mind yesterday. I’m learning how to fixate on words the way that Vivian (“Professor Bearing,” my well-trained mind insists) does, and how a choice so small can have such great meaning in a text. Vivian tries to apply these concepts to her real life, struggling to cope with her mortality in a not entirely dissimilar way from Donne in the Holy Sonnets, if I haven’t totally misunderstood the Holy Sonnets, which is quite possible. I’m trying to do so as well, as all my classes and indeed my life emphasize so much to me this importance on the smallest word or punctuation mark, the smallest choice. But I wonder whether there is a limit to how much academia can intercede in real life. I think that Vivian’s quest to confront her mortality through Donne is ultimately futile. Donne, after all, had God. But what does that say about the importance of texts to our lives? Texts obviously have something to teach us, or we wouldn’t be reading them. And as an English professor, I’m sure Vivian is fully cognizant of this fact.

I guess my point is that Vivian was my favorite role because I knew her—whether through department parties and family time spent reading Paradise Lost aloud, or through some inkling of self-knowledge. That self-knowledge has been brought to the fore, now, as I make the first stumbling steps towards doing, cognitively and professionally, what Vivian does. I’m not sure what that means for me—will I spend my last days alone and embittered in a hospital ward?—but I think these posts demonstrate as well as anything the direction in which I’m headed.

I think people tend to see Vivian as a pathetic character, but you know what? As for me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am sick and tired of second-class citizenship

This afternoon, I had my discussion section (Princeton, you might recall from previous posts, calls them “preceptorials,” or “precepts”) for my gender and sexuality class. We were talking about one of the earliest gay rights movements, the “homophile” movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Fifty years ago, organizations such as the Mattachine Society reached out to gay and lesbian Americans—particularly in California and New York, but all over the country as well—and preached a gospel of equal rights. Different activists and different organizations disagreed as to what the best strategy was to achieve this end, but the homophile community was focused on fighting back against discriminatory government policies that drove gay people out of jobs and society and denied them any legal recognition.

Well, times haven’t changed all that much. Even as my precept was discussing the Senate report on “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” the California Supreme Court was hearing arguments in the suit against California’s Proposition 8. Civil rights lawyers argued that the ballot initiative, which amended the state constitution to declare same-sex marriage illegal, was an unconstitutional amendment, and thus should be invalidated. The other side, led by Pepperdine Law School dean Kenneth Starr, argued that the “will of the people” in passing Prop. 8 cannot be questioned. Also up for discussion is whether same-sex marriages that took place between May 15, when marriage was legalized, and November 5, when Prop. 8 passed, will remain valid. The lives of all the couples who were married in that window are now in legal limbo. We will have to wait 90 days to see what the court decides about both Prop. 8 as a whole and the associated issue of the already-married, and it’s presently quite unclear how the court will rule.

What maddens me about all of this is that things have not changed that much. LGBT rights advocates are still trying to persuade federal and state governments that LGBT Americans are entitled to the same rights as straight Americans. Government seems to either not understand the nature of homosexuality—as it clearly didn’t in the ’50s—or to simply be unwilling to accept that gays are people too. I don’t know what it is. I can’t understand them. To be perfectly honest, I simply can’t view folks who want to deny LGBT people civil rights with any sort of reasoned fairness anymore. I just want to bang my head against the wall in frustration.

While things are certainly better for the LGBT community than they were 50 years ago, the ramifications of the institutionalized hatred for the queer population that was de rigeur then still pervade our society. LGBT folks can’t serve in the military. Gay men can’t give blood. There is no federal law protecting folks from being fired on the basis of sexual orientation. Most strikingly to most Americans, same-sex marriage is illegal in 48 states and the District of Columbia, and on a federal basis as well—and with that comes the loss to LGBT couples of all the social and economic benefits that marriage brings. And the problems extend farther than the legal sphere. Queer teens are at a far higher risk for suicide than their straight peers, and homophobic bullying and slurs are commonplace in the public school system. It is challenging on both a legal and a social basis for LGBT parents to raise their children. Transgender and gender-variant folks most often can’t get the support they need to live as who they are. I could go on and on and on.

Some folks argue that Americans are more comfortable with the idea of homosexuality than they were back in the day, thanks to Will and Grace, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rachel Maddow. Some queer folks look around them and say, “I’m not being harrassed; I have a job; I have friends and a community; I’m not living a double life. Things aren’t that bad.” Well, they kind of are. As far as the state is concerned, LGBT people do not exist. And you know what? That’s a problem. Even if focusing on marriage rights isn’t your thing, you have to admit that there are a lot of things shitty about being an LGBT person in America today. There are a lot of things that must be changed. The slowness with which the gay rights movement has progressed in 50 years is a sad thing, and so now we need to get out there and shake things up.

Folks who read this blog might well wonder why I’m so single-minded about LGBT issues. I guess I’m as self-interested as anyone else. As an LGBT American, I am sick and tired of being a second-class citizen. I want my kids to have the knowledge that their mom and their family are treated just the same as any other American family. And I fully intend to do what I can to make that happen.

Sometimes Princeton shocks me speechless

I overheard the following during my daily two-hour stint in my residential college’s dining hall:

A girl is saying that she’s thinking about med school, and her male friend says:
Male friend: The medical profession is very attractive to women because you can work a nine-to-three.
Male friend #2: So you can pick the kids up from school?
Male friend #1: Yeah, I mean, somebody‘s got to raise the kids.

To her credit, the girl in question replied that both her parents worked, and she thought she turned out okay. But honestly! I’m sure that if questioned, the guy who said that shit would deny that he was being sexist, that he was just telling it like it is, that a lot of women really do prefer a work schedule that accommodates their children’s schedules. Statistically, that may be true. But I know that all the female doctors I’ve had have been strong, intelligent career women, and I’m willing to bet that their circumstances allow them balance their careers and their families to a degree that doesn’t mean sacrificing one or the other. I’m willing to bet that they have spouses who are willing to allow that men are capable of caring for children. I bet they’re not stuck in the way outdated notion that women need to sacrifice everything in order to be there to pick the kids up from school.

Yes, okay, I’m waxing hyperbolic. But I am so angered by the terribly blinded people around me who persist in this outdated gender-roles paradigm. Personally, I do want to have (well, adopt) children when I grow up. I am very invested in the notion of helping to raise the next generation. But I’m not willing to do it at the expense of all the other things I want from my life, at the expense of my desires, my ambitions, or my passions. I know that I can balance all those things with a family—or, at least, I’m not going to have one if I can’t. It infuriates me that some people still seem to believe that women’s only appropriate role is to raise children. Raising children is, of course, a critical aspect of keeping our society going—but so is equal rights.

Oh, and the kids who had that conversation? Now uninformedly trashing Moby Dick.

Reading QOTD (2009-03-04)

This excerpt from a few paragraphs on “The English Experience” is in The Challenge and Progress of Homosexual Law Reform, a document written by “the homophile organizations of San Francisco” in 1968:

In the early 1950s England was shocked by allegations, repeated by the British Medical Association, (1) that “practicing homosexuals” are found “in the Church, Parliament, the Civil Service, the Forces, the Press, the Radio, the Stage and other institutions,” (2) that homosexuals tend “to place loyalty to one another above loyalty to the institution or government they serve,” and (3) that they give “preferential treatment” to other homosexuals and “require homosexual seduction as expedient for promotion.”

I’m not sure, always, whether to laugh or to be shocked and appalled at prejudicial attitudes from earlier in the 20th century. I have concluded that this is one of the times where it is appropriate to laugh. Because, I mean, what else are you going to do? Better to get angry about the present, where you can actually make change. (Besides, in the case of this particular QOTD, there are all the English public-school jokes I’m trying desperately to refrain from making.)

Campus Dailywatch (2009-03-02) – Economic Crisis Edition

I don’t have time to say a lot, so I’ll let the headlines speak for themselves—from the Yale Daily News:

Up to 300 will be fired
Departments to cut costs

Anthony Grafton’s column in the Daily Princetonian, headlined Graduate school in a New Ice Age:

Now the floor beneath us has collapsed again. Endowments have turned south; state revenues have withered; families struggling with lost jobs and foreclosed homes cannot spend as much on tuition as they have in the past. It has taken colleges and universities only a few months to go from prosperity to austerity. In the humanities, 15 to 20 percent of the jobs originally advertised for this year have been cancelled. And as university after university announces budget cuts and staff layoffs, it seems certain that next year will be even worse.

It’s time to think hard about our graduate programs and their relation to these new realities. Should we cut numbers even further? Emphasize professionalization even more? Can we contrive to give students something of the freedom and possibilities for wide-ranging exploration that their predecessors enjoyed before our permanent crisis took shape? Can we be frank about the professional situation that students face without inspiring despair?

These questions have no simple answers. But if we fail to pose and discuss them publicly, we will see another generation’s relationship with the university ruined by our refusal to face and discuss facts.

I just feel so hopeful about my future….

Poignance

The Washington Post has a new column called “Stopped Presses,” announcing the papers that have closed. Topping the list, of course, is the Rocky Mountain News, whose front page, graced with a picture of the empty newsroom, makes me feel a little choked up. I mourn the sickness of journalism, not just because I fear I won’t have a job if I decide to go that route. It’s hard to confront the death of cultural institutions. And I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the WaPo has to add itself to its own list.