Category: Politics/Current Affairs

Esoteric Academic Study of the Day

The newspapers are always full of this-or-that scientist or social scientist doing this-or-that study and finding out this-or-that weird fact that could just as easily be invalidated by another study in a year’s time, but which provides fodder for the current events comedy shows like Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me and The Now Show in the meantime. But I’m more interested than usual by one particular study on which the UK Telegraph is reporting:

Those with degrees are almost twice as likely to drink daily, and they are also more likely to admit to having a drinking problem.

A similar link between educational attainment and alcohol consumption is seen among men, but the correlation is less strong.

The findings come from a comprehensive study carried out at the London School of Economics in which researchers tracked the lives of thousands of 39-year-old women and men, all born in the UK during the same week in 1970.
The report concludes: “The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns.

“The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”
Women’s alcohol consumption can even be predicted from their scores in school tests taken when they are as as young as five.

Women who achieved “medium” or “high” test marks as schoolgirls are up to 2.1 times more likely to drink daily as adults.

The researchers cite a variety of plausible reasons for these results, including specifically middle-class cultural values, the social lives of working professionals who postpone having families/children, and—and I think this is key—these better-testing or better-educated women often “work in male-dominated workplaces with a drinking culture.” The Telegraph article doesn’t really return to this point, instead dwelling on the class element, but I’d argue, if only anecdotally, that “male-dominated workplaces” is the crux of the whole thing.

As a woman who frequently feels anxious about needing to prove herself in masculine cultures, and as a woman in professional circles where until very recently there were no women at all (journalism, academia) I can attest that drinking is a large part of the sometimes internal, sometimes external need to measure up. This was quite clear in my brief experience in DC journalism-land last summer: I extricated myself from the pressure by virtue of being underage, but I saw a lot of macho bravado in the ways my over-21 colleagues held their beer bottles or how they ordered drinks or even in the ways they interacted with each other while drunk at parties. I know that if I hadn’t had an excuse, I would have felt pretty damn pressured to measure up—as I do in so many other ways when I’m the lone female.

I had a funny conversation at lunch today, in which I found myself desperately insisting that I don’t care about clothes, and knowing even as I insisted it that I didn’t know why I was insisting it, because I knew quite well it wasn’t true. For a good six or eight years I’ve had my eyes glued to the people around me, gauging how they dress, trying desperately to approximate their fashions, and cursing my body when it would mean that the clothes my male friends wear wouldn’t fit me properly. I’ve spent so much time and energy trying and failing to assimilate myself into being “one of the guys,” that it’s laughable to think that I don’t care about clothes. I just bungle them most of the time out of that desperate desire to be part of a gang that still, now that I’ve entered the realm of those “in our twenties,” still feels weirdly homosocial.

I am thankful that I no longer want to be a professional journalist, because I know that homosocial drinking pressure still exists in the profession—and I know that if I were out of college and working in Washington, I would feel under the gun to keep up.

QOTD (2010-03-27)

Today’s Quote of the Day is doing double duty as the Lesson from History of the Day, because it comes from a November 7, 1958 article in the Arkansas Gazette, about the Little Rock school integration conflict:

A prize-winning Negro reporter said Thursday the election defeat of Representative Brooks Hays (Dem., Ark.) was an indication of “the tragic extent to which racial passions and frustrations of Little Rock white citizens have been whipped.”

Hays, a moderate in the integration dispute, lost his congressional seat from Arkansas’s Fifth District Tuesday to Dr. Dale Alford, a Little Rock physician and outspoken segregationist member of the Little Rock School Board.

The reporter, Carl T. Rowan of the Minneapolis Tribune, made his remarks in an interview before addressing the Arkansas Teachers Association, a Negro group.

Rowan said:

“I regard it not only as a tragedy that Arkansas will lose the leadership and prestige of a man like Brooks Hays in Washington. But it is really an even greater tragedy that an already distraught people have seen fit to plunge even deeper into a pit of defiance that can only lead to chaos and ultimate loss for all peoples of the state and nation.”

He added:

“Perhaps there may be one blessing in disguise: That men like Brooks Hays will now realize that the White Citizens Councils and Ku Klux Klansmen know no compromise and have no substantial regard for the larger welfare of the people or the nation.”

I really believe that there are more patterns in American history than there are deviations from the patterns, and that’s particularly true where the cultural conflict of North versus South is concerned. In this one episode, there are not only echoes of the antebellum period, there are echoes of today’s racial and otherwise prejudicial violence from the extreme right in the wake of the health care vote. Earlier this week, watching Rachel Maddow on death threats sent to members of Congress from the same extreme right, I found my heart rate accelerating, thinking the country had finally gone off the deep end. But the fact is that the country is no crazier now than it was during the McCarthy hearings, or during this Little Rock crisis I’m learning about in my historiography class, or during the whole long upheaval of the mid-19th century. Of course, we don’t want to have another Civil War on our hands, but I don’t think there is any measure by which our discourse is as insane now as it was then—and that, at least, is a calming thought. The fact that inviting comparison to the Civil War period allows us to reject that comparison immediately is in some sense a relief.

This is not to say that there are not differences between our century and previous ones. The Internet, for example, has completely changed the way that extremist screeds can be circulated, meaning that—as we’ve seen in recent weeks—an extremist in one state can incite extremists in other states to break the windows of Congressional district offices or to shout “nigger” at African-American Congressmen or any number of other very scary things. Perhaps I’m wrong in believing that it is easier for national networks of extremists to spring up now than it was before the Internet—perhaps, now, their communications are simply more accessible to the rest of us—but it is nevertheless a wrinkle that gives me pause.

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.

QOTD (2010-01-24); or, The Bloom of Youth and “all the joy, hope, and glamour of life”

Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford:

With this realization [that the “nonphysical eroticism of the Platonic doctrine of eros” was, basically, insufficient], Symonds comes to a bitter new assessment of his old teacher Jowett, as though Jowett’s Socratic “corruption” had somehow consisted in tempting suggestible young men down the delusive path to spiritual procreancy rather than fleshly excess. Writing from Davos in 1889, Symonds confronts his old tutor across a crevass of ancient and mutual misunderstanding into which the bitter sufferings of thirty years now pour. When young men in whom the homoerotic passion is innate come into contact with the writings of Plato, as Symonds now tells Jowett, “they discover that what they had been blindly groping after was once an admitted possibility—not in a mean hole or corner—but that the race whose literature forms the basis of their higher culture, lived in that way, aspired in that way…. derived courage, drew intellectual illumination, took their first step in the path which led to great achievements and the arduous pursuit of truth” (Letters 3:346). Symonds is making explicit here his sense of the cruel pedagogical contradiction within Oxford Hellenism which had harried him for so many years—his instruction in Platonic thought by the same teachers of Hellenism who denounced erotic relations between men as “unnatural”: “those very men who condemn him, have placed the most electrical literature of the world in his hands, pregnant with the stuff that damns him” (3:347).

And I mean, dude. Can you imagine being Symonds and discovering this? Well, maybe you can—maybe you, dear reader, have had realizations which are not dissimilar. But I am so, so very interested in this keen desire to, and profound experience of, discovering oneself in the classics—and then the notion that discovering oneself in the classics legitimates oneself. It could also work the other way around, though, as it did when Symonds and Edward Carpenter, among others, were just so eager to get Whitman to confess his own homosexuality (or whatever they would have called it)—knowing something about themselves, they were desperate to get some legitimation from respected authorities, regardless of whether the authorities themselves were likely to actually give it.

But, in the end, what I am most interested by is what an entirely different cultural moment we live in, because it is no longer a shock that idealized Platonic paiderastia should have a conceptual link to sexual practices, as it was (or so I understand) to some of those 19th-century intellectuals. In fact, in our time, it seems nearly impossible to unwind the two strands, and the only people who seem interested in doing so are those for whom the thought of “posing as a somdomite” is so terrifying that they work as desperately as they can to remove somdomy [sic for deliberate comic effect and the sake of allusion, obvs] from the picture. In our time, putting somdomy away in a proverbial closet such that it becomes mentally safe to conform to the Platonic ideal is something that comes from surely just as much a place of fear as that with which the young Symonds confronted his own sense of self reflected back at him from the pages of the “Greats”—only now the fear is called “homophobia,” and it’s a hard fear to pity when it acts to make some of our lives that much more difficult.

These are, of course, only absent thoughts, an entry in the 21st-century incarnation of a commonplace book, which is a segue into mentioning that I was glancing through Oscar Wilde’s own university commonplace book today, struck by how much more he knew and had read when he was just about my age. Never has the need to make room in my course schedule for Greek, for instance, seemed more pressing. At the end of an evening’s intentionally oxymoronic frenetic meander through the world of Victorian cultural history, and just a week before my twentieth birthday, what I am truly struck by is how young university-educated adults generation after generation, alumni class after alumni class, go through so many of the same thought processes, discoveries, adoptions and rejections of ideals, on the road to intellectual maturity. Some of us braid intellectual-cultural threads together, some of us undo the strands, and some of us step back and watch what happens. And all of us, I think, like the naïve young adults we are, are always surprised by the patterns that occur.

Hope for the Human Race; or, Seek Beauty

Friends, let me thank you for coming to this wonderful old auditorium, and I hope we’re going to get some good harmony tonight. No, really! If there’s hope for the human race to learn to live in the machine age… it’s gonna be when people learn to balance things so that they can do something on their own, without a machine, something creative, no matter what it is. Of course, I love music. I wish every family could make music, and I often think the best time to start is when you’re just as young as possible. If you know someone with a baby, try singing to them.
—Pete Seeger playing Sanders Theater at Harvard, 1980

This afternoon I walked across my little town to Princeton High School, where Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) was doing a children’s concert as a benefit for the Princeton Public Library. I sat in the second-to-last row of the high-school auditorium and listened to one of my favorite singers sing some of my favorite songs: “Day Is Done,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Marvelous Toy,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” all the songs I have on cassettes in a drawer in my old bedroom because we used to play them over and over again when I was little, when cars all had tape decks. Now I have all these songs in iTunes on my computer, and I also have them in my head and in my heart, and in the songbook I use when I get together with friends every week to sing folk music, because that’s the sort of thing you can do in college.

Peter, I’m sure, embraces the precepts of the other Peter I quoted above. He had children up on stage left and right—singing along, turning the pages of picture books, and making us older people laugh. He sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and dedicated it to Mary Travers (who died last September) in such a touching speech. He sang a song called “Don’t Laugh At Me,” and prefaced it with a story about a program he’s working on in Israel, trying to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together to be children together and to end the cycle of hate and violence their parents can’t. To be sure, he made parents’ jokes too—like suggesting that the sound effects in “Marvelous Toy” were what he thought of the US Senate, or saying of “Day Is Done,” “unlike ‘Puff,’ this song has only one meaning.” But above all this was a concert for the children, and I was glad of it, because it meant the concert could be about joy and innocence, not explicitly about stopping war and hate. One of the little children Peter invited onstage was a three-year-old girl with a pink tiara. Peter complimented her on her crown, and asked where she got it. Her answer was, “I have two, so that when I have a friend over we can both be queen. Isn’t that cool?”

Yes. Oh yes, it’s so very cool, because that’s what activism through this kind of music is all about. More than a piece of legislation or a policy proposal, it represents the longing for a world where we can all be queen, where there are enough pink foam crowns to go around. As Pete Seeger said in 1980, we must learn to live in the machine age—and thirty years later, we’re still learning. It’s because we grow up and we see how much awfulness exists in the world, and we either become cynical or we compartmentalize or we get subsumed by machines and become them. We become alienated from our species-life. We forget the words to “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

But keep seeking beauty and peace, love, and understanding, and keep hoping for a happy ending. Put your trust in the children and give them a world they won’t be ashamed to inherit. Teach them the words to “Puff.” Teach them an old union song. And someday, by the grace of any god or none, we may all have our own pink crowns; we’ll all be queen. Wouldn’t that be cool?