QOTD II (2009-06-30)

Apologies for the just completely gratuitously gay second QOTD (the last one at least had literary merit), but I’ve been YouTube-ing Rachel Maddow because… well… because I was, and she has a great aphorism in an appearance on Conan O’Brien last year. She’s talking about how she sometimes receives hate mail saying “you’re gay”:

That is the single best thing about coming out of the closet, that no one can insult you by telling you what you’ve just told them.

Come out come out wherever you are! Rachel Maddow said so!

QOTD (2009-06-30)

I am finally reading Wilde’s De Profundis for the first time, just now, and it is truly wonderful. There’s no question that he knew how to use language—and, of course, the context only heightens the words’ poignancy:

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Of course, I am reminded, too, of the last stanza of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which I read in 10th grade English and which can perhaps be given the credit for spurring my obsession with all things Gay Male Lit. Quoting from memory, so apologies for errors:

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

Tragic.

QOTD (2009-06-29)

President Obama, speaking today to important LGBT people at a White House reception to honor Pride Month:

Now, 40 years ago, in the heart of New York City at a place called the Stonewall Inn, a group of citizens, including a few who are here today, as I said, defied an unjust policy and awakened a nascent movement.

It was the middle of the night. The police stormed the bar, which was known for being one of the few spots where it was safe to be gay in New York. Now, raids like this were entirely ordinary. Because it was considered obscene and illegal to be gay, no establishments for gays and lesbians could get licenses to operate. The nature of these businesses, combined with the vulnerability of the gay community itself, meant places like Stonewall, and the patrons inside, were often the victims of corruption and blackmail.

Now, ordinarily, the raid would come and the customers would disperse. But on this night, something was different. There are many accounts of what happened, and much has been lost to history, but what we do know is this: People didn’t leave. They stood their ground. And over the course of several nights they declared that they had seen enough injustice in their time. This was an outpouring against not just what they experienced that night, but what they had experienced their whole lives. And as with so many movements, it was also something more: It was at this defining moment that these folks who had been marginalized rose up to challenge not just how the world saw them, but also how they saw themselves.

As we’ve seen so many times in history, once that spirit takes hold there is little that can stand in its way. (Applause.) And the riots at Stonewall gave way to protests, and protests gave way to a movement, and the movement gave way to a transformation that continues to this day. It continues when a partner fights for her right to sit at the hospital bedside of a woman she loves. It continues when a teenager is called a name for being different and says, “So what if I am?” It continues in your work and in your activism, in your fight to freely live your lives to the fullest.

In one year after the protests, a few hundred gays and lesbians and their supporters gathered at the Stonewall Inn to lead a historic march for equality. But when they reached Central Park, the few hundred that began the march had swelled to 5,000. Something had changed, and it would never change back.

The truth is when these folks protested at Stonewall 40 years ago no one could have imagined that you — or, for that matter, I — (laughter) — would be standing here today. (Applause.) So we are all witnesses to monumental changes in this country. That should give us hope, but we cannot rest. We must continue to do our part to make progress — step by step, law by law, mind by changing mind. And I want you to know that in this task I will not only be your friend, I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a President who fights with you and for you.

It’s obviously much too soon to say how Obama will wind up on gay rights; I look forward to being able to reflect after four or eight years on what his administration has accomplished. Today, I was left very ambivalent about Obama’s commitment to LGBT issues (my Twitter feed today probably speaks to that), but there’s nothing like Obama soaring rhetoric to make you feel good of an afternoon.

QOTD (2009-06-28), and other matters

From David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, one of the too-many books I bought today:

At bottom, [Whitman’s] distaste for pornography was linked to his hostility to prissiness and sexual repression. The scabrous and the repressed, he thought, were two sides of the same cultural coin. Both reflected skewed versions of womanhood and manhood.

That quote was basically the point at which I stopped skimming and said, “This book is too interesting not to bring home.”

Today was one of the best days I can recall in some weeks, possibly since I left Princeton. I slept late, had coffee and a sandwich at my neighborhood coffeeshop; wrote an essay that is not particularly PC, but with which I’m quite pleased; discovered a canal with a very pleasant accompanying towpath; bought and ate a very expensive but very delicious cupcake; bought and began to read some awesome books from my thus-far favorite DC bookstore; and even put in a good three hours’ worth of work-I-get-paid-for. For the first time in quite a while, I sat and read 100 pages at a stretch—one of the books I bought. I assuaged my guilt at having spent the money, and at the fact that it is yet another gay male book, with the thought that at least I was reading for pleasure. I don’t do that nearly enough.

I realize that this is the sense of perfect life I’d built for myself by the time I left Princeton in May, revolving around the Bent Spoon and Labyrinth and walks down to Lake Carnegie and afternoons and evenings spent in the library. All that is absent now, in DC, is meals in the Rocky dining hall with my friends whom I miss daily. It’s a very weird experience to go from seeing a set of people every day to not seeing them at all for months, and I suppose that’s what happens to normal, well-adjusted people with social lives every summer—I remember my first summer after I began to have a social life in my sophomore year of high school, and how desperately I missed my friends then; how I, too shy to phone them, begged them to call me while my family was on vacation in Canada. I have built up more independence and self-sufficiency since then, and I congratulate myself on my ability to move to Washington and live on my own; I look forward to the isolation that our yearly family vacation in Canada imposes. I’m excited, after all, about all the books I’ll have time to read.

Not wanting to eclipse the issue to which I most want to draw attention, I should mention that today, too, I celebrated Stonewall by not feeling guilty about how many gay books I bought, how many gay issues I wrote about, or how many gay links I posted on Facebook. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re going to post silly things about our personal lives anytime we damn well please.

QOTD (2009-06-24)

Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO), speaking to me in an interview yesterday:

You know, the more Congress can look like our country, in general: we need more women around here, we need more minorities, we need more gays and lesbians. Congress can function best when it reflects the broad diversity of our country.

That whole interview will be up at Campus Progress tomorrow, and I’ve been doing plenty of other reporting these past couple days. Expect something early next week-ish on topics related to this afternoon’s Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) press conference, where I got to ask Barney Frank a question! (That’s still the most exciting thing that’s happened in my life recently.)

Also something on health care and university adjunct faculty. Because hey, I need to write about something that isn’t gay.

QOTD (2009-06-22)

Just one sentence from an article in Inside Higher Ed:

As a student, I immediately felt college was where I belonged, and I simply didn’t want to leave.

It’s only 11:45am, but so far today this is the sentence to which I can relate the most. The rest of the article, an ode to the passionate specialists of this world, is interesting, too—for all you academia nerds out there, anyway.

QOTD (2009-06-19)

This entire essay by Christopher Hayes of The Nation fame, titled “In Search of Solidarity.” It’s all so wonderfully written that I almost can’t bear to select an excerpt, but I’ll settle for the bit that resonated most with me personally:

In the mid-19th century, solidarité crossed both the English Channel and the Atlantic. Sven-Eric Liedman, a professor of intellectual history at Sweden’s Göteborg University, writes that Americans were skeptical of the French import: In 1844, one American complained of “the uncouth French word, solidarité, now coming in such use.” While the word never quite gained the same cachet it had (and continues to have) in Europe, the American left quickly adopted it. Solidarity was the name of an early anarchist journal. Eugene Debs said solidarity was “a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper.” And, in 1915, Ralph Chaplin of the Industrial Workers of the World wrote the labor anthem “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Solidarity in the political vocabulary of the American left became class solidarity, workers’ solidarity, the banding together of laborers against bosses. But it possessed more than rhetorical resonance, it was also the foundation of the labor movement’s most potent tool: the strike. Only if workers stuck together under incredible pressures–violent intimidation from Pinkerton thugs and national guardsmen with rifles–could a strike be successful. In the 1880s and 1890s, as members of the Knights of Labor struck across the country for an eight-hour day, its motto was: “An injury to one is the concern of all.”

Years later, the United Auto Workers, born of a series of dramatic sit-down strikes in the 1930s, named its headquarters Solidarity House, its publication Solidarity; at its 1970 convention Walter Reuther told the delegates: “We have taken on the most powerful corporations in the world and despite their power and their great wealth, we have always prevailed, because … there is no power in the world that can stop the forward march of free men and women when they are joined in the solidarity of human brotherhood.”

“Solidarity Forever” is one of the songs that remains most important in my life. Hayes’ whole essay is wonderful, speaking to a key part of American history that doesn’t often get highlighted in the conventional narratives, but when I first read the piece this morning, I saw the words “Solidarity Forever” leap out at me and it was incredible just to have the flash of realization that I am not the only person who imbues labor lore with incredible significance.

I can’t speak for Hayes, but it’s this sort of (wonderfully-written) slice of America and its history that makes me feel most connected to the country where I’ve spent my life. But even if you’re not American, even if labor isn’t your thing, go read the essay. It’s brilliant.

QOTD (2009-06-16)

From a post at The Bilerico Project:

In just the past two days, our nation’s capital has went from RuPaul, Martha Wash and Capital Pride to a smackdown on LGBTQ issues. From the D.C. Board of Elections just saying NO to a proposed voter referendum suspending recognition of same-sex marriages performed elsewhere to the allegations that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he does not have ANY senator willing to sponsor the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – this town is hitting the ceiling on the perceived betrayal of the Democratically-controlled executive and legislative branches of government.

And I’ve been right here in the middle of it, covering Pride and starting some research on DOMA for Campus Progress, reading all the blogs, spending day after day right in the middle of the discussions over LGBT rights that are going down in this town. I know that my schedule next week is going to put me even more in the middle of things. And it’s so bizarre to think that I actually am doing what I read about. In however small and insignificant a capacity, I work in Washington, covering the things I know and am passionate about.

I keep apologizing to my editor for covering too much LGBT stuff, keep promising her I’ll branch out. But at the same time, I like being able to be an expert on something, and I like staying in the middle of things. DC Pride was one of the coolest events I’ve ever attended, and I’m glad that it feeds back into my work and that my work in turn feeds into the most up-to-date conversations about important public issues that matter to me. I’m a very, very lucky person indeed.

(For frivolity’s sake, here’s a picture of RuPaul from Pride):
RuPaul

QOTD (2009-06-12)

A letter from Charles L. Schultze (LBJ’s Director of the Bureau of the Budget and later Carter’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers) to Senator John McClellan (D-AK), as quoted in the Congressional Record, 16 August 1974:

The evidence emphatically refutes the popularly held view that government deficits and profligate government spending are the chief causes of recent inflation: and (2) under current conditions a substantial cut in federal spending would add to unemployment and virtually guarantee a serious recession, without significantly reducing the rate of inflation in the next year.

Budget Director Roy Ash has been quoted (New York Times, June 27, 1974) as estimating that a $5 billion reduction in federal spending would reduce the inflation rate by only one-tenth of one percent. Such a reduction, however, could be expected over the course of a year, to add perhaps 200,000 people to the ranks of the unemployed. A larger budget cut might reduce the rate of inflation by another fraction, but it could well tip the scales of an already precarious economic situation into a new recession and swell the unemployment rolls by a much greater number.

I love it when history is relevant to current events. I’m not going to be a political or economic historian, most likely, but finding things like this—or, for example, turning on C-SPAN or MSNBC and seeing the regulation debates of the ’70s and ’80s echoed in today’s discussions about the auto industry or the banks—makes me feel like I’m doing something valuable by intending to study history.

QOTD (2009-05-31)

I think some of my favorites of Whitman’s poems are not always the longest, the “greatest” in size and scope and scale. I wouldn’t dream of asserting that “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric” are anything other than incredible, but I like the simplicity of things like this, from a 1940 edition of Leaves of Grass (poems selected by an editor, not based off one of the original Whitman editions):

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

I like the parenthetical especially, and I like that it’s in a parenthetical. I don’t know enough about poetry to say why this is so particularly arresting, but well. I like it.

There are more of these brief isolated stanzas in the Calamus poems, but I don’t have them in this edition because it’s just selections, and so the editor’s gone and picked all these Civil War things over the beauty of masculine affection. And Ginsberg will always have a special place in my heart, but in his entire oeuvre he doesn’t have brief encapsulations of beauty like this. His greatest works are all fantastic, but they’re either mid-sized, or they’re epic.

That said, though, I miss my collected Ginsberg desperately. It’s only in a box that I’ll see again when I move to Washington, DC for the summer next weekend, but its absence is noticeable. I know all these poems are available on the internet, but that’s a very poor substitute indeed for volumes that I’ve read over and over and over again.