Reading QOTD (2009-03-04)

This excerpt from a few paragraphs on “The English Experience” is in The Challenge and Progress of Homosexual Law Reform, a document written by “the homophile organizations of San Francisco” in 1968:

In the early 1950s England was shocked by allegations, repeated by the British Medical Association, (1) that “practicing homosexuals” are found “in the Church, Parliament, the Civil Service, the Forces, the Press, the Radio, the Stage and other institutions,” (2) that homosexuals tend “to place loyalty to one another above loyalty to the institution or government they serve,” and (3) that they give “preferential treatment” to other homosexuals and “require homosexual seduction as expedient for promotion.”

I’m not sure, always, whether to laugh or to be shocked and appalled at prejudicial attitudes from earlier in the 20th century. I have concluded that this is one of the times where it is appropriate to laugh. Because, I mean, what else are you going to do? Better to get angry about the present, where you can actually make change. (Besides, in the case of this particular QOTD, there are all the English public-school jokes I’m trying desperately to refrain from making.)

Reading QOTD (2009-02-28)

K.A. Cuordileone, “Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity,” in the Journal of American History, discussing Schlesinger’s The Vital Center:

… [T]he totalitarian masses appear not just soft or emasculated, but downright sexually perverse in their “totalitarian psychosis,” their desire for “violent gratification,” their “losing of self in masochism or sadism,” their “masochistic delight in accepting correction.” “No one should be surprised,” Schlesinger insisted, “at the eagerness for personal humiliation,” for “the whole thrust of totalitarian indoctrination… is to destroy the boundaries of individual personality.” Quotidian totalitarian man assumes the feminine, submissive role in The Vital Center, yielding repeatedly to the “thrust” of totalitarianism, its “deep and driving faith,” its “half-concealed exercises in penetration and manipulation.” [emphasis mine] … If the reader has yet to grasp the essential point about Communism: it “perverts politics into something secret, sweaty and furtive like nothing so much… as homosexuality in a boys’ school; many practicing it, but all those caught to be caned by the headmaster.”

I think Arthur Schlesinger has some deep and unabiding desires he’s not telling us about.

Reading QOTD (2009-02-25)

From the annotations to Spenser’s Faerie Queene (does one italicize “Faerie Queene,” or put it in quotes? or inverted commas? which are the same thing? why did I end the preceding phrase with a question mark?) in the Norton Anthology of English Literature:

That Spenser contemplated (as he proceeds to indicate) a poem four times as long as the six books we now have rather staggers the imagination.

I was already feeling slightly pretentious for slogging through Spenser over tea. That, one of the most rarefied annotations I’ve ever read in a modern edition of something, totally just upped the ante.

Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-22)

I found it in my school reading (Marian Mollin, Radical Pacifism in Modern America), but I think it’s of more importance than that. The quote is “Speak truth to power,” and it’s a Quaker thing: it came from 18th-century Quakers, but was adopted as the title of a 1955 pamphlet produced by the American Friends Service Committee. According to my reading, it “made both ‘a pointed indictment of military power’ and a social scientific argument for pacifism while emphasizing the power of individual action to effect change.”

How cool is that? Not just the nonviolence stuff, and not just the fact that it’s historically interesting to see the origins of the ’60s and ’70s anti-war movement in the mid-’50s. Those four words, “Speak truth to power,” are incredibly potent. They embody, I think, so much of what it means to be a voice against the established wisdom of the day, especially a voice for peace when the “power” wants to use its military might to control everything as far as the eye can see. It’s also a phrase I’d invoke today, when urging the current presidential administration to investigate the crimes of the last one, or when speaking up for a minority group to assure those who make the decisions that our voices do matter. These are four words of immense visual significance, which to me invoke all the greatest images of nonviolent demonstration of the past century. They bring to mind seas of strong, silent individuals who are gathered as one, holding signs and singing and standing up against all odds for what is right.

If you haven’t heard, NYU had some excitement last week. You should click on those links for more information, but basically a group called “Take Back NYU!” barricaded themselves inside the third floor of NYU’s student center, filled with shouting and demands, asking their university powers to do everything from freeze tuition to establish a socially responsible investment policy to give aid to war-torn Gaza. It was a mixed-up set of demands, and an ill-thought-out protest. It was disbanded after 36 hours; some students were disciplined and some will lose their college housing.

A lot of left-leaning college folks criticized this protest. I don’t blame them. It was a bit naïve and juvenile, really. It looked like a cheap knock-off of The New School’s December protest. I have some similar views, and I’m worried about the future of collegiate direct action, now that TBNYU has made it seem so risible and has incurred snark from exactly the people who I wish would support something like this. But I can’t find it in me to fault those kids. I can’t find it in me to belittle them, or laugh at them, or say they were wrong to do what they did. Maybe they didn’t exactly think things through. But I think I understand how it must be to feel so disenfranchised, and so angry, that you have to scream and you have to take action. There have been many times in my life, in high school and in college, when if I hadn’t been the only person who felt that way and if I had been something more of a natural leader, I would have taken similar action. I have to admire the bravery of kids who didn’t back down in the face of disciplinary reprisal, who were willing to risk arrest or injury for what they believed in, however muddled that belief may have been.

I was raised by pinko commie parents; I was indoctrinated to believe in the beauty and power of nonviolent action. I grew up thinking that you can get something done by gathering in large numbers and speaking out for it. I grew up thinking that there is an inherent good in speaking truth to power. So yeah, I’m biased. I’m way biased. But it seems to me that the TBNYU kids set out with the goal of speaking truth to power, and in my mind that all fuses with decades of marches on Washington and marches in New York and San Francisco; it’s one of those movie montages that stretches from the Bonus Marchers to the Prop. 8 protest I went to in New York in November. It’s “Peace now, freedom now!” “We shall overcome!” “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “Solidarity forever!” Last November, for me, it was “Marriage is a civil right!” It all streams together with kids—they’re just kids—turning down the food they were offered when they locked themselves in a building at NYU because it wasn’t vegan. And it becomes one long saga of speaking to power that brings very impressed tears to my eyes.

Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-17)

I was going to call this a “fun fact,” and then I realized it wasn’t that fun. From Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 GI Bill”:

Much less commonly remarked upon [when considering GI benefits] is a 1945 Veterans Administration ruling that denied G.I. Bill benefits to any soldier with an undesirable discharge “issued because of homosexual acts or tendencies.” The G.I. Bill deserves consideration by historians because it was the first federal policy that explicitly excluded gays and lesbians from the economic benefits of the welfare state.

WOW. From a history of sexuality perspective (a subdiscipline I’m growing ever more passionate about), that’s an incredibly interesting fact.

One of the main themes we’re learning about in the class I did that reading for (Gender and Sexuality in Modern America) is the idea of “institutionalized heterosexuality.” This refers to the trend, as the American state got ever larger in the 20th century, to enshrine the traditional nuclear family in law and exclude LGBT folks from the benefits given to the traditional nuclear family. This can include more obvious things, like marriage law, but also things like how postwar social security benefits were initially distributed in a way that favored a family where the husband was the breadwinner and the wife was dependent on him. This is something that it would never have occurred to me to consider in a million years… which is why, I suppose, I’m going to college and am strongly considering studying history.

Okay. I’ve got about 80 more pages of reading to go.

Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-15)

I find myself reading 100+ pages a day for my classes, far more even than my investment of time in our country’s college dailies, so I expect my reading is deserving of its own semi-regular feature on this blog as well.

From Roger Rinke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990:

Indeed, how could demographers, and especially their graduate students, fail to notice a whole shelf of books of religious statistics located alongside the regular census volumes? [emphasis mine]

Oh, those pesky grad students, never doing their advisors’ work for them well enough.