New York City Dyke March: A Curious Anachronism

My good friend Elizabeth Cooper has a great post up at Princeton’s feminist blog, Equal Writes, about last weekend’s Dyke March in New York City. Elizabeth compares the Dyke March (which styled itself as a protest, not as a parade, unlike the general Pride parade) to last October’s National Equality March in Washington (full disclosure: I helped Elizabeth organize a delegation of 80 Princeton students to attend the NEM). She found herself much less invested in the Dyke March than she had been in the NEM:

The Dyke March, on the other hand, did not feel transformative, at least for me. Although I wanted it to be a protest, it didn’t feel like such for a few reasons. Most importantly, I hadn’t been invested in the organization of the march, and therefore hadn’t really thought about what the march meant to me – it was happening, and I felt like since I was in the city partially for Pride and consider myself an activist in some respects, I should go. Amongst the people I marched with, I felt we shared this sense of not exactly knowing why we were marching. A couple of people thought we were going to be watching a parade, rather than participating in a protest. Once they realized the nature of the march, namely that it was a protest rather than a parade, they asked what we were protesting. I ventured a vague answer about protesting homophobia, but even the question made me insecure about not being more informed about what the march was about, as a whole, and for me personally.

As I was thinking about what I was marching for the day before, I had identified what meant and means the most to me personally right now – acceptance of LGBT children by their parents and family. I thought writing a slogan encapsulating that on a shirt would be cool both during the march and as a keepsake. I am happy and proud that I took the time to invest in my idea. However, at the march, it didn’t prove as valuable for making me feel engaged. People didn’t seem to read it like they would read and interact with a sign.

Elizabeth ends on the important note that visibility of any kind is important, and I absolutely agree with her that “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” is still, in 2010, a valuable slogan. I think it’s absolutely worth underscoring that visibility is in itself a form of queer protest, and that actively and aggressively pushing queerness into the lives of straight people is more or less as radical as it comes. However, the moderate version of this idea (“Everyone knows someone who’s gay!” and coming out to your friends) and the more radical version (using the appearance of queerness to unsettle and challenge people, e.g. a public kiss-in or indeed a Dyke March) can work together very productively. It is not irrelevant that one of the slogans at Stonewall was “gay is good!”—that attitude of simple affirmation persists in the activities which commemorate Stonewall’s anniversary.

That said, I see in Elizabeth’s ambivalence about the Dyke March-as-protest a certain divorce of last weekend’s event from the history of gay activism. It seems as if something like a Dyke March sits rather uneasily in the context of the more mainstream civil rights movement that is LGBT activism today. Elizabeth asked what the march was protesting, and I think that was a good question. An easy example of the problems inherent in answering that question would be that, to judge from its name, a “Dyke March” would be protesting the patriarchal institution of marriage in favor of the beauty of wymynhood, or something from the ’80s like that; while moderate LGBT activism today supports marriage wholeheartedly as an institution same-sex couples should be able to buy into. I do think, though, that Elizabeth made a good choice with the issue she decided to promote on her t-shirt: it straddles this moderate-radical divide in a way that makes sense for 2010.

But a Dyke March still seems, sadly, like an anachronism to me, in contrast to the much more sign-of-the-times National Equality March, which listed clear objectives linked to headlining civil rights issues like marriage equality and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It makes sense that NEM would have been more energizing to Elizabeth for that reason, and not just for her personal investment as an organizer: its messaging contained much more to relate to for queerfolk of our generation, while a Dyke March seems as if it would speak largely to second-wave feminists and historians.

(cross-posted at Campus Progress)

QOTD (2010-06-12)

Richard Ellmann, on the last page of his biography of Oscar Wilde:

His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.

I have been a month in slowly making my way through this book, and all through it I have been torn between love for the words and the glamor of one of the western canon’s greatest figures, and irritation at the partiality and romanticism with which Ellmann treats his subject. Ellmann has crafted Wilde’s life into such a narrative, and you can see quite transparently how much the biographer has invested in the climax (the “two loves” speech in the witness box at the second trial) and how tragic the next 200 pages of decline and fall must therefore be. I read all 200 today, nevertheless, unable to tear myself away, the dramatist’s life itself a drama.

It is ahistorical, I think, to write anyone into history as a martyr, and yet that doesn’t eliminate the haunting despair that visits me whenever I read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” I am angry at Douglas for what he made Wilde endure, and I am angry at Wilde for enduring it, and I am angry at them both for what they put Constance through. Having read the story to its close, I am as invested in it as—perhaps, for deliberate comparison—those Americans waiting for the steamer with the mail from England were in the ending of The Old Curiosity Shop. (It changed a lot of things I thought I knew to learn from Ellmann that Wilde made his famous remark about laughing at the death of Little Nell when he was on bail awaiting his own inevitable prison sentence.) Yes: try as I might to rationally divorce my admiration of the man’s writing from his existence as a deeply flawed human being, I cannot help thinking, all the same, that he was most notoriously—most tragically—wronged (and I think the Malvolio quote not inapt here!).

It is of course Pride Month, LGBT History Month, or whatever you call that month when we celebrate the anniversary of a riot at a bar on Christopher Street in 1969. The past couple weeks (you might say, since this month’s inception) I’ve been reading Wilde almost exclusively, with only a brief two-day digression into Virginia Woolf. I wonder as always what good and what ill we do by loving these fallen heroes so much that they become martyrs to our cause, a cause that stands so very much outside their own historical moment. I only hope that we wrong Wilde no more notoriously than he has already been, because I can certainly attest that it is very difficult to stop.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Self-Promotion, and a Confession

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples:

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

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

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

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

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

The Queer Activist: A Brief Observation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Quick Note on the Census

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(cross-posted)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anglo-Catholicism, Reason, and the Artificiality of Natural Law; or, Andrew Sullivan Comes to Princeton

When I decided to shirk my duty as a Professional Gay(TM) and to back out of attending IvyQ, a pan-Ivy League undergraduate queer issues/politics conference, I was mostly just worried about getting my schoolwork done this weekend—but I then was met with the unexpected pleasure of being able to go see Andrew Sullivan speak instead. Sullivan, who was Princeton’s guest as part of its public lecture series, was without question the perfect person to speak to the political climate which characterizes and divides Princeton’s discourse around LGBT issues. Much as the current national political discourse coalesces around a radical fringe right and everyone else—liberal or conservative—who disagrees with them (and must therefore do so in a moderately conservative sense), Princeton’s LGBT-politics climate consists of a radical fringe right, as represented in the Anscombe Society and its allies in the faculty; and of Everyone Else. All these people, whatever disparate political and policy-oriented outcomes they may desire for the status of LGBT people at Princeton and for the status of LGBT people in America, find themselves united in the fight to dismiss Anscombe on principle. And it took Sullivan to stand on the stage in McCosh 50 and start on the new natural lawyers’ own turf before unravelling their arguments, to come from an intensely Catholic perspective before repudiating rhetorical opponents who come from an equally intensely Catholic perspective, to cite Gerard Manley Hopkins and Cardinal Newman, Aquinas and Aristotle and Foucault, and infuse a coldly pro forma debate with intellectualism and emotion.

Now: don’t get me wrong. I disagree with wide swathes of what Andrew Sullivan believes, about queer politics in particular (though also no less importantly about certain generalizations and assertions which could read as racist and sexist, though those, while no less reprehensible, are perhaps less interesting to pick apart). He spent a good portion of his talk critiquing the “queer liberationist” position, one with which I to a certain extent identify (emotionally, if not pragmatically in 2010). I disagree very sharply first with Sullivan’s reading of Foucault to support the idea that queer liberationists do not believe there is something immutable about sexual orientation—why can there not be immutability at some biological level, but also the constructed and created structures of society which imbue that immutability with very different significances over time, and why can we not distinguish biological sexual orientation from the social constructs of gay or queer culture? Sullivan’s argument overall, as no doubt many of you, dear readers, know, is essentially an assimilationist one (I put no negative connotation on “assimilationist”) and mine is, while not entirely separatist, certainly an argument which critiques assimilationism from the left. That said, however, thank any god or none for someone standing on a Princeton stage and presenting a viewpoint with which I can disagree rationally, which is not motivated at its core by homophobia! What a breath of fresh air!

Someday, I am going to puzzle out the complex sociality of Princeton LGBT culture enough to understand truly what the significance was of Sullivan’s talk to Princeton; someday, too, I will have read enough 19th-century intellectual history to be able to do more than just vaguely nod at allusions to the homoeroticism of Anglo-Catholicism, a sort of cultural-history principle that could be said to have underlain much of what Sullivan had to say. Both these things are certainly on my agenda for the months and years ahead.

But far from my expectation that I would be irritated by a position with which I, as a liberal and a queer liberal at that, fundamentally disagree, I was both intrigued and thankful. Princeton, no matter what policies its administration may or may not espouse, is at its heart a conservative institution, much like any other old Anglo or Anglo-inspired university very much rooted in a notion of tradition or nostalgia. An English conservative who nevertheless prizes intellect and reason is just who it needs to access the still-closed minds who hamper a more productive dialogue on this campus. And now, as I go back to reading history, to writing history, and to having the conversations and writing the essays, articles, and blog posts I need to in order to change hearts and minds on this campus, I only hope that the rest of tonight’s audience was as intrigued by what Andrew Sullivan had to say as I was.

Being a Dispatch from Your Friendly Neighborhood LGBT Task Force

With the help of other members of the Princeton LGBT Task Force (a faculty-staff-student committee which addresses LGBT policy on campus), I wrote an op-ed that appears in today’s Daily Princetonian. It argues that we don’t need marriage equality to lessen homophobia and transphobia here in our own community:

You may wonder why members of the Princeton community have to worry. Don’t lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people on campus have community resources, such as an LGBT Center? Aren’t many students, faculty and staff out of the closet? Yes — but to mistake this for evidence of a safe, fulfilling and welcoming environment is to mistake tolerance for acceptance. Those of us who are LGBT at Princeton have the benefit of some institutional support; threats of physical violence against our community are no longer the predictable routine they were 30 years ago. But Princeton is far from an accepting climate in which to be queer, and many members of the University community remain closeted. Marriage would help matters. It would give same-sex relationships the legal and symbolic status of opposite-sex ones, and, practically speaking, it would make less complicated the lives of Princeton employees who live in New York, which recognizes same-sex marriages (but not civil unions). With that option now off the table, however, it’s time for us at Princeton to look inward. There’s much that we can do in our own community to change policies and attitudes, make it easier for students, faculty and staff to come out of the closet and move from relative tolerance to full acceptance of LGBT members of our community.

Go and read the whole thing, please, and for once I’m not just saying that because I wrote it. I don’t know what they did with my bio—did they confuse me with the editors of Equal Writes?—but that doesn’t diminish the value of the column.

In Which the NYT Makes a Hell of a Lot of Sense

The Times had an article today on same-sex couples who have open marriages (i.e. are married, civil-unioned, or otherwise committed partners, but have an agreement about dating and/or having sex with people other than the spouse/partner). Completely blowing my mind about what the NYT will cover sanely, I think this article brings to light a point I’ve been trying to negotiate for several months now: namely, the short-term need of same-sex couples to secure partner benefits in what often wind up being life-and-death situations, but with the long-term (and admittedly more radical) question of whether our society needs to be built on monogamous two-person unions hovering in the background. Nut graf:

None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

Right, right, right. Those of us who take a historical approach are aware there was a time when same-sex marriage was a laughable political goal—that just wasn’t the cultural standard by which the gay community (yes, particularly the gay male community) negotiated its sexual and romantic relationships. Of course, there have been groups calling for same-sex marriage since the 1950s, but the movement didn’t become mainstream until the Clinton era and the DOMA fracas and the tidal wave that Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in Massachusetts unleashed. And now, look at how quickly things have changed: I’m as skeptical about marriage as the next professional gay, and yet when it comes down to it, I’ll report on marriage for my job and attend (and plan!) marriage-equality rallies and work on marriage-equality political campaigns. I’ll get into marriage tug-of-wars just like anyone else does. And I’ll admit that I felt a frisson of nervousness reading this headline and then the article, wondering whether it will be used as ammunition to prove that LGBT people are less capable of family values than our straight allies—similar to the so-called evidence of poor “lifestyle choices” used to damn queer people at the onset of the AIDS crisis.

But thank you, NYT, for reminding us that marriage doesn’t just mean replacing “one man, one woman” with “two people,” and that there are so many more ways to have stable committed relationships. I would have liked this article to acknowledge that straight people, too, can have open relationships, and that there isn’t this dichotomy between traditional relationship choices on the part of straight people and exotic ones on the part of queer people. But hey: the more matter-of-fact dealings we can have with non-monogamous relationship patterns, the better off I think we’ll all be.