Gay-Friendly Campuses–and the Princeton Review

From Inside Higher Ed:

The Princeton Review regularly is criticized for its ranking system, which is based on surveys of students — a system that critics find unscientific even by the standards of college rankings. At the same time, the Princeton Review is popular with students in part for providing analyses of many unofficial issues, such as which institution is the top “party school.” On Thursday, the Princeton Review was attacked by a gay rights group, Campus Pride, for using its regular surveys (which on many campuses may be filled out largely by straight people) to rate colleges on how gay-friendly they are. “This list is an erroneous, misleading indicator of acceptance for LGBT youth and their safety on campus,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride (which does its own “index” on colleges for gay students, based more on policies or programs than a broad student survey). Robert Franek, senior vice president and publisher of the Princeton Review, noted in an interview that many gay groups have praised his publication for making gay inclusiveness a measure of college quality. Franek also said that his publication believes students “are the experts” and so he sees no reason to change the methodology.

I was particularly interested to see this because I wasn’t impressed to begin with by Princeton Review’s treatment of LGBT students’ college experience—the fact that they used the phrase “gay-friendly” instead of “LGBT-friendly” and titled the list of the least welcoming schools with the phrase “alternative lifestyles” says a lot about how much they sought to get a sense of the LGBT communities on the campuses they surveyed (the survey question, “Is there very little discrimination against homosexuals?” sounds as if it hasn’t been revised since the 1960s). And as Campus Pride (an awesome organization, by the way) said in a press release:

Their rankings were based off one single question asked to 122,000 students at the 371 top colleges — whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “Students, faculty, and administrators treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”

“This list is an erroneous, misleading indicator of acceptance for LGBT youth and their safety on campus,” said Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride and the author of The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, the first-ever guide profiling the 100 Best LGBT-Friendly Colleges, released in 2006 by Alyson Books. “The majority of students responding to such a question – irrespective of response – will be straight. Their perceptions of equality are likely quite different from those of LGBT students.”

To me, this makes perfect sense.

Campus Pride uses its own methodology to rate—instead of rank—colleges on a variety of criteria including availability of gender-neutral housing/restrooms, LGBT-related course offerings, student organizations, staff diversity training, and that sort of thing (interestingly enough, Princeton gets five stars out of five—which makes sense, as its institutional community really is one of the very best—it’s the organic, noninstitutional community that could use some work). Looking at Campus Pride’s list is an interesting counterpart to some of the weirdness of the Princeton Review list—such as the suggestion that Stanford is more LGBT-friendly than Reed or Simon’s Rock—or indeed Berkeley, which doesn’t appear at all on Princeton Review’s list, but which offered the first undergraduate queer studies course in the country, as early as 1970.

Rankings are so pointless that it’s pointless to discuss how pointless they are, and so it seems worthwhile, I think, to draw a contrast between using criteria to grade an entity on how well it accomplishes something and trying to put the entity in a list that compares apples and oranges—Princeton Review puts liberal arts colleges and research universities, religious schools and military academies, all together, and that’s just not sensible.

Oh yeah, and I have one final question for Princeton Review. Why, in their “Alternative Lifestyles Not an Alternative” list, are the five military academies (which actively discriminate against LGBT students under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell) not at the very top? That alone should be enough to call Princeton Review’s rankings into question.

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.

Americans and Objective Truths

I do not understand the American obsession with ranking things. (It does seem to be a quite American thing, doesn’t it?) I thought of this because I was just looking at Newsweek‘s Top 100 Books list, and the “most important books EVAR” thing is certainly a trope, but there’s also the series of college rankings from a variety of different publications and companies (I thought Princeton Review‘s were so ridiculous that I wrote a rare humor piece mocking them). It’s a cultural phenomenon, this conviction that there’s an objective truth of what is Best, which some nameless experts have evaluated using some sort of scientific metric, and that it’s possible to make this kind of evaluation regardless of any arguments that the merits of individual works of literature might be an objective thing, or that different colleges might suit students’ needs differently.

I had an American history teacher in high school who was very enthusiastic about rankings of the best American presidents, and took a great deal of interest in what the rankings said and whether they were accurate. It’s true that these types of lists can be mildly diverting as polling data—I remember that there was a certain amount of interest a few months ago in how far down George W. Bush would fall on the presidential rankings when he left office. But that’s all they are, and a list with 43 slots isn’t going to convey the incredible nuance you get when you take four or eight years of daily policy decisions and try to make a determination about how effectively someone ran the country. Those sorts of opinions are also going to vary in accordance with political ideologies and differing historical frameworks. There isn’t an absolute right answer.

And if there isn’t an absolute right answer with presidents, how can there be one with books, or with colleges? I don’t see how it’s possible to arrive at the conclusion that War and Peace is an objectively “better” book than 1984 (as Newsweek does), when they were written at different time periods in different countries by different authors exploring different themes. I’m sure someone could write a very interesting paper comparing War and Peace and 1984, but those kinds of papers don’t attempt to rank the works of literature they compare. I’m sure many critics have written many different reviews of Tolstoy’s and Orwell’s writing, but that kind of qualitative assessment is very different from assigning a hard numerical evaluation to each book. Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Other Poems changed my life, but am I upset it didn’t make it onto this list? No, because it’s a volume that’s personally significant to me. I don’t expect anyone else to find the same beauty in Ginsberg’s language that I do, and in fact many people think I’m hopelessly gauche for liking him. The thing that matters is that his writing is personally significant to me and my life experience, and that’s what writing is supposed to do. I would no more esteem writers simply for being on this list than I would wish that I were attending Harvard because it surpassed Princeton on the US News college rankings. I’m happy I go to Princeton because it’s the right school for me, not because it’s ranked highly. These rankings are largely irrelevant to our personal lives, and it puzzles me why Americans seem to set such great store by them.

But what is even more puzzling to me is how many Americans seem to desire the imposition of concrete data upon wishy-washy cultural phenomena, but are very keen to disregard it when it comes to health care reform, or Obama’s American citizenship, or what it is the organization I work for does, exactly. I’m not equating listmania with extreme right-wing nutcases, but it strikes me that whereas Americans often like to use lists to simplify things they don’t know a lot about, like historical analysis or literary criticism or educational philosophy, there are certain instances when being uninformed is perfectly acceptable, and it is practically mainstream to compare moderate reformist policy with the Holocaust, or even to suggest something as ridiculous as that Stephen Hawking is not British, or indeed that Barack Obama is not American. Whither has this obsession with objective truth gone when we actually are confronted with verifiable facts?

My Member of Congress Is Better Than Your Member of Congress

Unless you live and vote in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional district, that is, in which case your member of Congress is the highly intelligent and articulate, C.P. Snow-quoting, Ph.D.-holding, science-championing, youth activism-praising Rush Holt. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to interview Holt for Campus Progress. Here’s my favorite part, after I asked Holt about the many colleges and universities in his district:

I came of age in the 1960s, and so I have long believed in the power of students. I watched students bring down a president and begin to change a war. Ultimately, it didn’t quite happen—bringing Vietnam to a sane and a rapid end—but nevertheless I have seen the power of students. I have always believed in it. Sometimes, I have longed for it to come back, and in spurts it has. I think Campus Progress is very promising; it’s knowledge-based activism. It’s not just activism for activism’s sake, flailing out about everything, but it’s combining good policy analysis with activism. So I hope that it achieves its potential, and I am encouraged by promising signs in recent years of student activism. At colleges and universities, I think, students should be sharpening their values, because much of the rest of life is designed to wear away at those values, to round the corners, to blur the sharp distinctions, to really weaken one’s principles. And so you want to be as sharp as possible when you’re in an environment where you’re able to do that. Traditionally, going back over the centuries, that’s what a university was supposed to be. It was not a trade school—it was an environment for a moral education, a policy education, as well as a so-called “classical” education. Too often, I think, the non-trade-school part of the university education is lost, and so I hope Campus Progress helps fill that dimension.

Unlike some members of Congress I could name, he even got the organization’s name right.

But seriously: I decided to switch my voter registration to New Jersey because I was tired of getting form letters from Duncan Hunters pere and fils of the CA-52 (the son succeeded the father in the last election) gently suggesting that we agree to disagree about reproductive rights, immigration, same-sex marriage, the stimulus, and a variety of other issues. There is little point, I think, in being represented in Congress by a representative who doesn’t represent you. Most of what I knew about Holt before I registered in NJ was that he was a Democrat and a physicist, which was good enough for me. But the more I read about him—particularly after doing this interview with him—the more I’m proud to be represented in Congress by someone so intelligent, and who so much stands for the governing—and societal—values that I believe in.

Progressive Blogosphere-style Post of the Day

(Could that be abbreviated “PBsPotD”? Anyway…)

Ta-Nehisi Coates very frequently makes good points, and I particularly like this one, from a post responding to a letter sent in by one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers:

I’ve often wondered how much of Andrew’s conservatism, and really the politics of the “serious” left (TNR, Slate, Washington Monthly, a chunk of the Atlantic) is rooted in an utter disdain for the late 60s–the riots, free love, the drugs the Panthers etc. It’s understandable, but obviously very weird for me.

I’ve wondered this too, and don’t know what to make of it personally. I came to American cultural history from my idealistic and naïve passion for Woodstock, banned books, the Beats, Berkeley and Columbia protesters, that sort of thing. And all that I’ve read about this attitude towards the political establishment informs my own politics, too, even in a more pragmatic and cynical and “within-the-system” age. To me, both student radicalism and African-American civil rights activism (whether it be Dr. King or the Panthers) are a reminder that it is worth entirely reimagining the status quo, and that we don’t have to settle for what we have. Radical anti-war activism helped to turn the tide against Vietnam; obviously the civil rights movement had a profound effect on real political outcomes.

I’m sure that the smart bloggers/writers I read and work with acknowledge this; most of them have a better understanding of American sociopolitical history than I do. But I think, as Coates suggests, there is a tendency now for those analysts whose lenses are narrowly focused on Washington to think themselves and their politics above these movements that turned 1960s and ’70s society, culture, and politics upside-down. And I always feel a little ridiculous, a little stupid, a little childish in comparison, because I think there was a certain beauty in those movements’ investment in the creation of a better world.

Vietnam was huge. The generation gap because of it was huge. The civil rights movement was huge. But that is not to say that there are not still questionable and unjustified interventionist wars, that there are not still vast generation gaps, that there are not still civil rights battles to be fought. When we do so, it is perhaps worth looking backwards to groups of people in a particular era who firmly believed in the promise of a better world. We can debate how much of an effect these groups had on discrete political decisions (the civil rights movement’s was certainly pivotal; the antiwar and countercultural groups’ were somewhat more varied); but their immense cultural impact is surely worth something.

UPDATE: A truly wonderful article by Maurice Isserman from the Chronicle of Higher Education Review about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is relevant (subscription required). Some selected paragraphs:

Blight has argued that the purpose and spirit of Civil War commemorations underwent a significant shift in the decades following the 1860s. At first such gatherings served as a reminder of the issues and passions that had driven North and South into their conflict. But by the time veterans of the Blue and Gray met at Gettysburg, 50 years later, the anniversaries had come instead to symbolize the end of sectional division and the eclipse of the issues (including, unfortunately, any national commitment to black equality) that had loomed large during the war and in its immediate aftermath. Woodstock nostalgia and commemorations, on the contrary, have tended to be about reconciliation, with an emphasis on the values that unite Americans across generational and partisan lines. Woodstock’s enduring mythic legacy—a dream of innocence, redemption, self-reliance, and self-invention that owes so much to the traditional American narrative—began to define the event in popular and historical memory even before Jimi Hendrix brought the concert to an end on Monday morning, August 18, 1969, with his inspired retooling of the national anthem. […]

Woodstock would go down in history as a moment of reconciliation rather than confrontation largely because, in the end, nobody wound up beating up or shooting or cursing at anyone else. Police officers, hippies, and Bethel’s residents were on their best behavior, and a great sigh of relief was heard across the news-media landscape. So Woodstock became, on the one hand, the quintessential “60s” event, the culmination of a decade of challenge and change, but was also thought to stand apart from the decade’s darker impulses, as a moment of restored innocence and good feeling in a time of turmoil and discord. Wadleigh’s documentary, Woodstock, opens with a view of Yasgur’s fields in the days leading up to the festival, with two hippie guys riding by on horseback, their blond, flower-child girlfriends clinging behind, while Crosby, Stills and Nash can be heard on the soundtrack singing, “It’s been a long time coming.” Cut to the cows. Cut to the tractors. Cut to the Woodstock stage under construction. Welcome to the American Eden. […]

Woodstock was not a protest, and many of those attending never had attended, and never would, a political demonstration. (That applies to a couple of the friends with whom I attended the concert.) But without the political insurgencies that preceded it, without the vision of the possibility of change and self-definition that began with the civil-rights movement and was taken up by more and more Americans (students, women, and, earlier in that summer of 1969, gay people), Woodstock would never have happened. Richie Havens, in opening the festival, extemporized a song around one word: “I start strumming my guitar and the word ‘freedom’ comes out of my mouth as ‘FREE-dom, FREE-dom’ with a rhythm of its own,” he would later recall. “This was the same feeling I’d been experiencing all along. The feeling that Bethel was such a special place, a moment when we all felt we were at the exact center of true freedom.” No one listening to Havens’s ode to freedom in 1969 could hear it without being reminded of Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s martyrdom in 1968. Lang describes the Movement City that Abbie Hoffman and other New York-based activists set up on the hillside, which came equipped with the usual movement paraphernalia: radical newspapers, leaflets, a mimeograph machine. All that proved unnecessary. As the days rolled by, Lang writes, “I noticed fewer and fewer people manning the Movement City booths set up by the various political organizations. The entire gathering had become Movement City.”

The generational upheaval, of which Woodstock was one expression, had yet to reach its crest. A few months after the festival, in October and November 1969, many Woodstock veterans, and many others inspired by what they had heard about the gathering, would take part in the huge Moratorium and Mobilization demonstrations against the Vietnam War. And the following spring, in May 1970, they would be among the hundreds of thousands taking part in the national student strike following the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State University and Jackson State University.

The Movement City part of the Woodstock legacy tended to be forgotten in the years since, if not necessarily by the veterans, the musicians, or the organizers, than by Woodstock acolytes among succeeding generations. Certainly there was little of that legacy in evidence at the Woodstock commemorative concerts of 1994 and (especially) 1999. Woodstock is reduced in popular memory to a weekend of blissful abandon, a chance to dress up in flower-child trappings, a brief excursion to nirvana and back. Maybe on this 40th anniversary, at a moment when the country faces challenges and decisions every bit as important —and divisive—as in 1969, we can remember Woodstock as a more complicated, less “innocent” phenomenon. It was Eden, but it was also Gettysburg (or Agincourt, as The Times would have it). And, thinking back, I still stand a-tiptoe at the memory.

o hai conservative movement

Jason Mattera, spokesperson for the Young America’s Foundation, thinks I “whine[d] like a little girl,” and writes about it. I disagree:

Looks like Jason Mattera can’t handle a little criticism. After I wrote this piece about how he and his organization denied me entrance to the YAF conference after previously accepting my application, he responded on the YAF blog. In the process of calling me “this girl” who “has quite the imagination,” he misstated or distorted so many facts that it would be pointless to correct them all. After all, while I am an ethical journalist who would never dream of fabricating quotes or making anything up, no one recorded our conversation at the YAF registration desk, and at this point it’s my word against his. But regardless of who said what, Mattera’s tone in his post demonstrates that he‘s the one who’s crying like a baby, even as he attempts to demonstrate his power and authority over a younger, female adversary.

Well, at the risk of disappointing Mattera, that’s not how this works. I don’t cry. And, as I told Mattera in person on Tuesday, and subsequently wrote in the above post, if the conservative movement thinks it’s going to regain its power by trying to publicly silence and intimidate a single progressive intern, it is most gravely mistaken.

I look forward to seeing what happens next. I do so enjoy being a part of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

Oh Young Conservatives.

I was registered to attend parts of the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference, but when I got to the venue this afternoon, their spokesperson wouldn’t let me in because I work for part of a progressive think tank. I don’t know whether to be irritated or highly amused. This is what happened:

I had barely told the people working registration my name when Jason Mattera, YAF’s spokesperson, came running up.

“Who are you with?” he asked me.

After some miscommunication, we established that he was asking where I’m an intern, and I replied that I’m an intern here at Campus Progress. There was an awkward pause.

“Sorry,” Mattera said.

“What do you mean, ‘sorry’?” I asked. “I received an email confirmation that said I was registered. I don’t see what the problem is.”

Mattera explained that the problem was that I’m a Campus Progress intern, and that since I’ve been liveblogging the conference all morning, I wouldn’t be allowed in, since blogging isn’t allowed at YAF’s conference (despite the fact that attendees have been tweeting about the conference all day). I told Mattera that struck me as bizarre, and a little bit like censorship. He suggested that I tell this to my “friends in the White House, and maybe they’ll pass a law to make us let you in.” Mattara is, apparently, unaware of the fact that it is Congress, not the White House that passes laws. Politely deciding not to embarrass him further, I instead pointed out that Campus Progress’s National Conference welcomed attendees of all different viewpoints and encouraged them to blog and tweet about the conference—some did.

Mattera told me this was “comparing apples to oranges … this is a conference for conservative students.” In fact, the two situations are kind of the same thing, and it’s YAF that looks bad. Campus Progress sponsors a conference with progressive themes, and yet it includes students who hold a wide range of views, and it certainly doesn’t turn students away on ideological grounds after previously confirming their registration.

I asked Mattera why his organization was so desperate to keep students with different viewpoints out (okay, I used the word “censorship”), and his response was that I could watch the livestream online. It seems strange that Mattera is willing to broadcast the event to the whole Internet but won’t let registered interns in to the event.

“Well, if this is what the conservative movement is doing to attract young people, I’m not sanguine about its future,” I said.

Mattera laughed at me, and then replied, “Goodbye—oh wait, here, have an Obama fist bump.” I refused his proffered fist, and he added, “Why don’t you move to Canada?” He seemed to think this suggestion was hilarious. (The fantastic thing about Mattera’s parting shot is that I do, in fact, have dual citizenship with Canada, have lived there, and will actually be going there in just under three weeks.) I turned and walked back into the elevator.

If there are young conservatives reading this, I really hope Jason Mattera doesn’t represent how you address your political ideology.

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.

The Importance of Things That Are Not Politics

I had two conversations today about, basically, why I’m not interested in making a career in politics or political journalism or Washington, and because of the way my social life looks today I suspect that I might have more of this type of conversation later on. So I figured some of this bore rehashing and explaining, because here in Washington I feel sometimes as if it’s very difficult to justify an interest in anything other than politics and policy and government. What follows may seem unbearably personal and navel-gazing, but I do believe it’s relevant and something that deserves to be unpacked, so please bear with me.

In short, it comes down to preference. I’m interested in history, in things that aren’t happening right now. I try to keep up with the events that happen every day, but I find it exhausting, and I don’t think it always gives me the perspective I’d like to observe longer-term trends and patterns. I think I can help inform what’s going on every day by providing the historical context, and that’s something I want to do as a professional historian when I grow up. Somewhat secondarily, I’m interested in doing cultural history, and while I find political history interesting (I’m currently a research assistant on a really cool project that has much more to do with politics and Washington, and that’s fun), it’s not my main research interest. It’s not what I want to write my senior thesis on, for example, or eventually my dissertation. And mostly I think that’s okay—I think it’s okay to agree to disagree on what is most interesting; we do that on a daily basis. I also don’t follow sports or television, and I don’t have a lot of qualms over the fact that I don’t find those things very interesting.

But here in Washington, where I work (albeit in a very small insignificant capacity) in progressive political journalism, I am inclined to feel that the stuff I write about in this space, in particular, is quite uninteresting, quite insignificant, and quite irrelevant. I see this break down along a line I can almost gender: I feel as if the world which values an understanding of policy and political science and academic political theory is concrete, physical, quantitative, precise, aggressive—masculine. And I feel as if the world I inhabit of queer theory and social history and literature and countercultures is wishy-washy, abstract, irrelevant, and sort of “soft”—feminine. I know what sexist territory I’m running into by breaking things down that way, but I’m doing so because I think it goes a long way towards explaining why I get the sense that educated Washington society values one and not the other. It’s no secret that “masculine” things are valued more highly over “feminine” things in our society, which is a perfect example of why our society is sexist and that’s something anyone who does gender studies could tell you (though of course gender studies falls into that “insignificant” realm that I feel my stuff falls into). So it doesn’t seem like that illegitimate of a claim to make. But it sucks.

Of course, if I feel insignificant, it’s because I am, but not for systemic reasons. For example, if I don’t want to make a career in political writing, my friends in progressive political journalism don’t want to make a career in academic history and cultural studies. Why should they read my blog? Why should they link to it on their blogs? It doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sexism or with politics or with how the rest of the world perceives academia. It’s just that what I do doesn’t really pertain to what they do. And that’s okay too.

Or is it? Because what I came away thinking after the two conversations I had today is that political journalism and academic history/cultural studies have more to teach each other than we might otherwise think. Both professions live in worlds which are at risk of being dreadfully out of touch with the real one, and I think we’re all aware of that. But that means we have a moral imperative (I believe) to try to engage with the larger population of the country, to write things that will be relevant and meaningful and comprehensible to people outside our immediate communities, to try to address the issues that other people are facing and not just the ones that we face. I very much want to go into academia, for example, but if I can’t find a way to make whatever I choose to focus my academic career on relevant and interesting to a wider audience, I’m going to have to find another line of work. Likewise, I believe that if a political blogger’s blog is incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t have the same depth of knowledge of current events that the blogger does, that person is doing something wrong.

And as much as we have to engage the outside world, I think that we specifically have to engage each other. The connections between politics and history are very strong even when you’re not studying political history, because a knowledge of the development of the country’s social landscape is necessary to assessing the motivations of political factions and the impact of policy upon the world outside of Washington. “Continuity and change” is the mantra of history, and for someone like me who’s interested in modern history, that arc of flux and stability runs right up to the present, where a map of the cultural and ideological layout of the country is an imperative.

So, in short, I don’t think I’m wrong to do what I do, and I don’t believe it’s less legitimate than what my friends do. I’m glad that I have friends who do different things, because it means we can have interdisciplinary communication. I hope that all us college kids with our different career tracks don’t grow up and bury ourselves so far in our towers (ivory for me, digital for my political blogger buddies) that we cease to acknowledge each other’s relevance and importance.

Princeton and LGBT Community

Last Thursday night, I was talking with another Princeton student whom I’d recently met. We were agreeing that we didn’t really fit into the institutional/established Princeton LGBT community (Pride Alliance, LGBT Center, and all the events and discussion groups that surround them). We were coming, I think, from quite different places personally and in terms of our relationships to labels of queer identity, but nonetheless neither of us felt like those groups are really the right social place for us. This is hardly the first time I’d had that conversation: a couple weeks ago, I had it with a person who isn’t out, and so their relationship to the institutional LGBT structure is necessarily complicated. Frequently, I have it with friends who are out, and whose relationship to queer identity is, I suspect, as overtly uncomplicated and yet internally complicated as my own. And so I sit down to dinner at a dining-hall table made up entirely of queer folks, none of whom are involved with the institutionalized community; I organize protests with networks of straight allies who don’t participate in LGBT campus life; I know far too many students who even in college, in New Jersey, in 2009 are in the closet. And I would very much like to do something to change this, to create a more cohesive community for all these people—and myself. But I’m not sure what should be done.

I’ve been learning a lot, recently, about the struggles in the ’70s to firmly establish a Gay Alliance of Princeton, and the vandalism and harsh words and hostile atmosphere met by the students who bravely did so. An oft-consulted source of mine who was at Princeton in the ’70s and ’80s has been telling me stories about what she knew of the place of GAP on campus, and I learned that there are three boxes on GAP and its successor organizations in the University Archives—it’s interesting stuff, and I’m thinking of doing some aspect of my independent work about it. But what confuses me, I think, is how we got from a small and much-fought-against organization struggling to be a place for gay students on campus in the days of gay liberation to an unquestioned LGBT Center, administration support for LGBT students, a freshman orientation program that emphasizes diversity and acceptance, and finally the first inklings of progress on gender-neutral housing—and yet still leave so many students out. The fact of closeted Princeton is a powerful reminder, I think, that we still have so far to come, farther perhaps than many other universities do. When a university finally has an LGBT Center, I shouldn’t hear its students telling me that they are afraid their friends will see them going into it.

On the other hand, what bothers me sometimes about the institutional community is that it doesn’t agitate enough. It’s not “out there” enough. I understand that an organ of the university administration such as the LGBT Center can’t do any political advocacy or anything like that; that’s totally fine. So maybe what we lack is a group that is less institutionalized, which can be an alternative to the institutionalized community while still supporting the good work that it does. Like good sociopolitical movements everywhere (she says with tongue in cheek), maybe we just need to factionalize.

I am at Princeton in part because my pre-frosh host took me to a lunchtime event at the LGBT Center and I saw that there was an LGBT Center, and I felt like there was a place for me at Princeton, when everything I’d heard about the place was to the contrary. But I want to make it possible for every student to encounter queer Princeton without going to the second floor of Frist, or enrolling in queer theory or history or politics or theater, or showing up to an event, or even having a gay friend (yes, some kids don’t, or don’t know that they do). The person I was talking to on Thursday disagreed with me about the need for everyone to come out, the need to be confrontational; this person said that was a device that worked for Harvey Milk, but that it’s no longer 1978. To which I say that, yes, it’s been a long time since students vandalized the room of the president of the Gay Alliance of Princeton, but I’m not sure that the current state of affairs is truly helping to build a university community where everyone may be at peace with and confident about themselves.

And so I was thinking about what I can do, about what it takes to come out, and about what those of us who are out can do to help and support our classmates and friends and students and neighbors and fellow Princetonians. I’m turning over the idea of an LGBT-oriented student publication, which as far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong) would be a first for Princeton. If there’s anything I can do to help it is to write and to edit and to organize the doing of it. These blog posts are imported into Facebook, where I am quite sure this particular one will cause a shitstorm from all sides—which is great and wonderful and dialogue is awesome. But if you comment on this post, I would dearly like to hear your opinion about this particular question. Would an LGBT-oriented student publication (all able-bodied contributors, LGBT or not, welcome of course) help matters? Is it worth doing? Would you contribute, or be on the staff, or otherwise help out? And, of course, what form would such a publication take; what sort of content would it include?

I applaud the good work that has been done to change Princeton, from the founding of GAP to the present. But I also want to emphasize that it still isn’t enough, and so all of us have to do our part. It is quite possible that I have been reading way too many essays published in liberation days recently, but as far as I’m concerned, until so many people are out that the need to come out is erased for everyone (and that includes trans and genderqueer and gender-nonconforming folks, by the way), we’re not finished and we can’t be complacent and we all have to do our parts, even in our tiny university community.