Princeton History Department Pride

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

Piece of Cultural History Hilarity of the Day

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

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

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

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

[18]

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[the maid] was withdrawn, came up to me, and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

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

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

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

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.

Princeton Theses

The awesome thing about Princeton requiring a senior thesis of all its students is not just that I’m really, really excited about the opportunity to write one. What’s even cooler, in a way, is that there’s a database hosted by the Mudd Manuscript Library (the library that houses Princeton’s archives) where you can look up the thesis of any Princeton alum. My colleague and I wasted some time today looking up some of the interesting ones, and here are some theses we discovered, many of which are quite entertaining:

Samuel Alito ’72: “An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court”
Hilary Bok ’81: “Action and Moral Courage”
Joshua Bolten ’76: “Judicial Selection in Virginia”
Ethan Coen ’79: “Two Views of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”
Jonathan Safran Foer ’99: “Before Reading The Book of Anticedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author”
Sally Frank ’80: “Strategies and Tactics Used by the Women’s Movement to Create Radical and Reformist Change”
Peter Hessler ’92: “Dead Man’s Shoes and Other Stories”
Katrina vanden Heuvel ’81: “American Victims: A Study of the Anti-Communist Crusade”
Elena Kagan ’81: “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”
Josh Marshall ’91: “Virginia during the Nullification Crisis”
John McPhee ’53: “Skimmer Burns”
Ralph Nader ’55: “Lebanese Agriculture”
Jared Polis ’96: “Paradigm Shift: Politics in the Information Age”
David Remnick ’81: “The Sympathetic Thread: ‘Leaves of Grass’ 1855-1865”
Anthony Romero ’87: “Colombian Migration and Political Participation in the United States”
Donald Rumsfled ’54: “The Steel Seizure Case of 1952 and Its Effects on Presidential Powers”
Eric Schlosser ’81: “Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era: Anti-Communism, Conformity and Princeton”
Brooke Shields ’87: “The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, ‘Pretty Baby’ and ‘Lacombe Lucien'”
Eliot Spitzer ’81: “Revolutions in Post-Stalin Eastern Europe: A Study of Soviet Reactions”
Paul Volcker ’49: “The Problems of Federal Reserve Policy since World War II”
Meg Whitman ’77: “The Marketing of American Consumer Products in Western Europe”

My personal favorite? Nader. What on earth inspired him to write on Lebanese agriculture?

I do think it’s interesting, though, that many of these people stuck with their thesis topic for their entire careers. I wonder whether the same will happen to me—though that certainly makes picking a topic all that much more stressful.

(UPDATE: Now that my parents, my high school teachers, and a world-famous blogger have all reminded me of Nader’s Lebanese heritage, I feel obliged to concede that his interest in Lebanese agriculture was entirely rational and justified.)

Dispatch From Our Nation’s Capital

This is my fifth night in Washington, DC, where I’m spending the next 10 weeks and three days. It’s been seemingly as major a move for me as the move to college back in September was; at least, then, I had my mother to help me move in the first two days, and a built-in support structure to help me and the other 1,250 members of my class in our first few weeks. And yet the first half of fall semester was still depressing and scary and lonely and all those things that a radical change in environment is, for me. Needless to say, these past few days have been a period of rough adjustment for me. I miss Princeton—my friends, the campus, the daily routine—almost every minute. I miss it when working 9-6 every day means that places where I need to run errands are closed by the time I get off work. I miss it when I come home in the evening and immediately grab my computer and set off again to the Georgetown University library (three blocks away), because I don’t have Internet access in my apartment. I went to CVS and bought a cheap little AM/FM radio so that when I am in the apartment, I can keep NPR on nice and loud. My roommate hasn’t arrived yet, and it’s lonely there without other voices.

I like my neighborhood, were it not for the Internet issue. Georgetown is disturbingly like Princeton, with its upscale commercial drags, its large university, its student ghetto filled now with toolish interns who are probably not too different from the people who inhabit it during term-time. I even, in some cruel twist of fate, live on a street called Prospect. But I have precious little time to enjoy it: by the time I get home in the evening, after battling rush hour on a bus, it’s usually starting to get dark, and the streets are filled not with strolling shoppers or people walking their dogs, but with drunk interns. It’s a little like the other Prospect Street I know, and just like Princeton, it makes me feel out of place in a location I love in theory.

This is all redeemed by my day job, though. The whole reason I’m in DC is that I’m an editorial intern at Campus Progress, and I’m reasonably certain that a better internship does not exist. One of my guilty pleasures in the past week or so has quickly become the DC Interns blog, and the ridiculous stories posted thereon make me realize how good I have it. Hill interns answer phones and stuff envelopes and run errands and give tours. I write and report, and spend a lot of time reading blogs and newspapers trying to piece together what I’m going to write and report about. Today, I called Sacramento to interview someone whose name isn’t well-known, but who is reasonably important in the context of the article I’m working on about the California budget crisis. I got a little rush saying “Hi, this is Emily Rutherford from Campus Progress….” Most interns don’t get to do that; most interns don’t get to do things that are fairly similar to what a real person working in their field would do. It’s a pretty sweet gig.

But at the same time, doing it has made me realize that, by shifting my focus away from journalism, I’m making the right choice. I couldn’t live in this world full-time. The 20-something professional world seems so very different from the 20-something grad school world I’ve gotten to know at Princeton, and each of these worlds leads to a radically different career track. I know which track I want to be on, and it’s definitely the one where you get your own office, and where you don’t ever have to leave university campuses. I realize that one of the things I’m homesick for is not just my friends, but the idea of university, the irregular working hours one can and does keep, the rhythms of the semester instead of the work week, and just some indefinable cultural ethos that means I unquestionably fit in. I really feel, on campus, as if it’s my world. I don’t feel like I own Washington, DC.

I don’t regret this summer, and I think I will come through it having enjoyed it. I think that, after a couple weeks, I will get in a rhythm, and maybe I’ll think about Princeton a little less constantly. But as of now, all I can think is that it’s 93 days until I’m back on campus, where the nerds like me belong.

Suck it, NOM!

The National Organization for Marriage was one of the largest single donors to California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in November. Its offices are across the street from my university, at 20 Nassau St.—that’s here:

So some of us Princeton students had a protest today, to protest NOM and its close connections with Princeton: the president of NOM’s board is a Princeton politics professor, Robert George. We made masks with his face on them to make light of the fact that his connections are actually leading folks like Frank Rich to draw an implicit connection between Princeton and NOM:

We also made signs that mock NOM’s bigoted rhetoric:

And some that were just entertaining:

Here I am with a sign:

Basically, we had a dance party—with many renditions of “It’s Raining Men”!:

(Thanks to Rocky R. for the photos! We also received coverage in the Daily Princetonian.)

———————————–

As the ACLU might say, the solution to speech is more speech. NOM has the constitutional right to take up residence right across the street from where I live and tell me I shouldn’t have the right to marry whomever I want. I mean that seriously—I don’t for an instant want to silence their speech. But that doesn’t mean the rest of Princeton can let their hateful beliefs pass unremarked, so we went out to Nassau Street on a nice day dressed in funny costumes and masks and had a dance party with sarcastic signs. We had fun, and we spoke out for something we believe in deeply.

God I love this country.

May Day

At the risk of flogging the so-dead-it’s-rotting horse that is Bitching About Princeton, today was the first night of Houseparties, a three-day affair of dinners and bands and general festivity occurring at Princeton’s eating clubs at the end of the year. Tonight is formals night, and when I left my room to make a trip to CVS shortly before dinnertime, I saw dozens of folks getting ready for formals: guys in tuxedos carrying bouquets, going to pick up their dates; gaggles of girls in beautiful and expensive-looking dresses standing under Blair Arch (out of the rain) taking group pictures. It’s not a particularly unusual idea, having a series of parties at the end of spring semester. What is Princetonian about these parties is that they are eating clubs-centric, and you have to be a member of a club to attend its Houseparties, and if you’re the guest of a member you have to pay a fairly hefty price to attend. It’s all a bit silly, and I nursed my moral righteousness over dinner in the dining hall in shorts and a t-shirt.

But what particularly underscored the extravagance of Houseparties is that today is May 1, May Day. Of course, the US changed its workers’ holiday to the first Monday in September back in the ’50s, to avoid any communist associations, and of course, that holiday doesn’t really celebrate the workers anyway; it’s more about barbecues at the tail end of summer. But today is May Day in Europe and Central and South America and really most places aside from the United States (and Canada, which has Labour Day at the same time as the States does). Earlier, seizing a moment of solitude in my room, I played Billy Bragg’s version of “The Internationale” and sang along to myself. But I wish there were a better way here to celebrate the world’s most anti-capitalist holiday than by allowing Houseparties to indulge wealth and capitalism in all its glory. I know that’s too much to expect from basically any institution in this country that isn’t the American Socialist Party, and I also know there are far more important things to worry about. But as I hear formally-dressed girls’ heels click on the pavement outside, I’m a little sad still for what we could be celebrating.

What I Have Done Today, and Why I Love College

1. Woke up.
2. Futzed around on the Internet.
3. Showered, dressed, went to lunch; read a chapter of George Chauncey’s Gay New York.
4. Went to Small World and bought an iced coffee; checked out the Labyrinth sale tables.
5. Futzed around on the Internet.
6. Finally got off my ass and trekked (OMG, SO FAR) to the library, where there is air conditioning (I should point out that it’s almost 90 degrees out).
7. Ensconced myself on a third-floor windowsill, looking south.
8. Read two pages about post-9/11 immigration policy.
9. Futzed around on the Internet/wrote this blog post.

Yeah, I’m not the world’s most productive student. There’s a lot of Internet-futzing involved. But what could be more wonderful than sitting in the window on a beautiful day in a Disneyland of grass and trees and old buildings, reading? Sometimes I feel like a dork because I don’t do more traditional undergraduate things, like partying and having a social life. But, well, an environment that does accord me the opportunity to lead a nerdy life? That’s paradise too. I have my doubts about Princeton all the time, especially when I read the latest news about NOM or can’t work in my room on Saturday night because of the noise. But I’m dreading the end of the semester all the same, because it means leaving collegiate paradise, leaving my safe, tiny town; Sundays of Rocky dining hall, Nassau St. and Firestone. An Ivy League education is insular and isolating and it means you have to try very hard not to be put out of touch with reality. But I love it all the same, in part for reasons I can’t even describe. Days like this make me want to stay in the ivory tower forever.

Ginsberg: who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes, hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war… Relevant maybe?

The quote of the day today doesn’t come from my schoolwork.

Today it is from a NYT blog post, called “Two Little Boys.” It is about Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, two 11-year-old boys who killed themselves in the past two weeks because of the homophobic bullying they were subject to at school:

We, as a society, should be ashamed. The bodies of these children lay at our feet. The toxic intolerance of homophobic adults has spilled over into the minds of pre-sexual children, placing undue pressure on the frailest of shoulders. This pressure is particularly acute among young boys who are forced to conform to a perilously narrow concept of masculinity. Or else.

Do you hear that, Brandon McGinley, Daily Princetonian columnist? Do you hear that, NOM? Do you hear that, Anscombe? We adults can shrug our shoulders, and brush off silly ads that tell us the storm is coming. We can make our communities that don’t offer admittance to those who tell us we are second-class citizens. But we still can’t stop; we can’t live in our bubble. We need to make the world safe for all the little kids of the future. It’s our duty to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

I spent a couple months this semester trying to understand people like the members of the Anscombe Society. I’ve tried to get inside their heads, see their points of view, talk to them about who they are and why they are that way. But I’ve given up, and now I’ve decided I’m going to fight. There’s no time to try to understand a point of view that wants to deny civil rights to people who are different, when little kids are dying because society is telling 11-year-olds that it’s okay to make fun of people by calling them “gay” or “fag” or “queer” or “dyke” or “homo.”

I know that it’s sometimes considered short-sighted or naïve to develop a political worldview based on a single issue. I know that I’m driving myself crazy, coming to lunch every day filled with anger at something homophobic that I’ve read in the news or that’s happened on campus. But if there’s anything I can do, and that we all can do, it’s to stand up, speak out, and fight back. I don’t want to let a single homophobic comment stand without offering up something in opposition. I don’t want any prospective Princeton students to read the Prince and think this is not a safe place to be queer, and I certainly don’t want another 11-year-old boy to kill himself because the pressure of his peers’ homophobic taunts is too great.

This is something we all can do together. We need to make change. Before another kid is robbed of a future.

A Correction

To the Princeton Community,

I wrote an article for the April 24th edition of The Nassau Weekly, in which I criticized the degree of involvement that Princeton Professor Robert George has with conservative student groups on campus. The article was published in the Nass as planned, but with substantial edits that I believe significantly distorted the messages I was trying to convey. I do not stand behind the version of the article that appears in the Nass, and I wish that the byline did not bear my name.

I asked my editors to run my original version of the article on the newspaper’s website, and they have agreed to do so. I will link to that version when it is online, and until then, I am posting it here. Please read this version instead of the one that appears in the Nass, and encourage others to do the same.

Thank you,

Emily Rutherford