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(07/25/02 8:23pm)
I was pleased to learn the CommUNITY Education Program has been sponsoring discussions on religion and spirituality, such as the recent meeting Tuesday in Teter Quad. I hope people will continue talking. You can't sum up one religion or worldview in one hour or evening; any such discussion can only be a beginning. And it seems to be difficult to get such discussion to continue, especially informed discussion.\nI was less pleased to find references to those discussions as "safe space." Granted, the term "safe space" has been stretched until it has hardly any meaning, but I think it was originally used in a therapeutic context. I think it was a term for people who've been abused emotionally and physically and who need to be assured they won't be abused further. I don't object to such "safe spaces," but it's not a term that ought ever to apply to discussion in an academic environment. Least of all should it be applied to religion, whose adherents routinely demand a hands-off attitude to their beliefs but rarely extend it to others' values. \nRebecca Jimenez, campus minister of the Center for University Ministry, claimed religion "is often disdained, and those who are serious about their faith are denigrated and suspected of ignorance or naivete." This appears to be a slam at atheists, but usually it is believers who disdain other believers, and who indeed believe it their religious duty to do so. Within the Christian Bible alone, Jesus' attacks on his fellow Jews, and Paul and John's attacks on their fellow Christians show that "disdain" is too mild a word for believers' behavior to "those who are serious about their faith."\nPresent-day Christians have learned these great teachers' lesson well. It won't be news that conservative evangelicals (commonly known as "fundamentalists") are hostile not only to "secular humanists" but to non-evangelical Christians. It's less often recognized that non-evangelicals fully return the hostility. \nEpiscopal Bishop John Shelby Spong implies evangelicals have kidnapped the Bible and are holding it prisoner, in the title of his book, "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." Neo-conservative gay Episcopalian Bruce Bawer explicitly said evangelicals "worship evil" in his book, "Stealing Jesus." \nIn Bloomington, I've heard one liberal minister tell a classroom audience he didn't like to think of conservative Christians as Christians at all. Well, they feel the same way about him, I believe. (Ironically, this same minister says he prefers a "more inclusive" definition of Christianity.)\nDeclaring a "safe space" in these circumstances not only is contrary to the spirit of a university, it smothers discussion in its cradle. Those participants who are most intolerant, or most manipulative, will be able to keep dialogue from straying beyond the most innocuous areas, and important issues will be off-limits because someone's feelings might be hurt. (What would such people have done in the first Christian centuries, when the risk of hurt didn't stop with feelings, when declaring belief could put one's life on the line?)\nThe standard tactic is to say something offensive; then, when confronted, to deny that one said it; and when pinned down, to declare that the offensive statement was a matter of faith and so exempt from discussion or "persecution;" repeat as needed. It isn't only believers who use this approach, of course, but they're more likely to get away with it.\nBelievers are likely to protest at this point that their spiritual beliefs are very important to them, central to their identities and it hurts them when those beliefs are criticized. Of course; but if you don't want your beliefs to be criticized or disagreed with, you had better not talk about them at all, except among your own sect. Even there you won't be safe -- you might say something heretical. And again, a university-sponsored discussion should not be a place where such risks are not taken. Where, then, will real discussion take place?\nAs an atheist, I've had to develop a thick skin, because atheists are generally considered fair game to be "denigrated and suspected of ignorance or naivete." Truly, this doesn't bother me; I'm willing to take responsibility for my beliefs (or lack of them) and defend them in the face of challenge. I expect religious believers to do the same, and this they generally aren't willing to do. Dialogue doesn't end with the expression of strong disagreement -- rather, that's where it begins.
(07/25/02 8:23pm)
A few years ago, OUT (IU's Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender People's Union) used to sponsor kiss-ins on campus once a year. They were usually in front of Ballantine Hall at high noon, not far from the outdoor evangelists. Gay men, lesbians and bisexuals would pair off appropriately and kiss each other, encouraged by cheers and chants from supporters of all sexual orientations. \nIt was controversial. And, as usual, the point got missed, including at times by the organizers. So here's the point:\nThere are countries where heterosexual kissing can't be shown in movies or on TV, where deep kissing is considered dirty -- but the United States of America isn't one of them. In the United States, movie and TV audiences apparently think nothing of watching a man and a woman lock lips in extreme close-up and suck face for a long, long time. This is known as a "love scene."\nPassing the big screen TV in the Commons in the Indiana Memorial Union, I see soap opera characters going at it. Although not everyone might be watching the slurping with utter rapture, I never notice anyone complaining loudly that this was gross and disgusting. Nor, when I see a heterosexual movie in the theater, and the hero and heroine are making the beast with two tongues, does anyone squirm or groan or yell "SICK!" (Not even me: I'm a very tolerant guy.)\nAh, but let two men kiss on the screen, even for a moment, and there will be squirming and loud expressions of disgust, usually from males. (This is less true in relatively liberal viewings such as a Ryder film, but I will never forget a Ryder audience that froze like a deer in headlights on seeing River Phoenix confess his love and climb into Keanu Reeves' sleeping bag in "My Own Private Idaho.") Homophobes love to dwell on the "dirtiness, sickness and unnaturalness" of anal sex when trying to explain why they object to homosexuality, but kissing or even hand-holding between males enrages such people just as much.\nThis has a lot to do with why Hollywood approaches projects involving gay men with such fear and trembling. A recent case in point: The movie "54" was about the famous New York City disco that, in real life, was very popular among gay men, and numerous gay men were prominently involved in its history. As originally filmed, "54" was more faithful to this aspect of history. But advance audiences were so infuriated by the boy-on-boy love scenes that the movie was re-edited to eliminate the offending material. It still didn't do all that well, but the studios figured it probably would have done much worse if they hadn't changed it.\nSo … what has this to do with kiss-ins? I think the kiss-ins were fabulously successful and effective. For years after the last one took place, straight people would ask me what I thought about the kiss-ins, and didn't I agree that they "hurt the cause" by offending so many people? After all, they argued, you don't see heterosexuals acting like that in public. Even some gay people (who clearly didn't get out much) would agree, getting pretty overwrought about the distastefulness of public displays of affection, whether heterosexual or homosexual.\nAfter I stopped laughing at the idea that heterosexuals never kiss passionately in public, I would tell my interlocutors that I thought the kiss-ins were a great idea, since homophobes were still fretting about them years later. A kiss-in doesn't make "the cause" look bad -- it's the people who are offended who look bad. Kiss-ins reveal just how much homophobia still simmers beneath the surface of polite acceptance of "diversity" and "equality," and how such polite acceptance of "diversity" and "equality" is conditioned on our invisibility.\nSome gay journalists are now arguing that the war has been won, that we're basically accepted in American society. I won't agree until a movie that shows two men kissing can play in multiplexes without clearing the auditorium, or two men can kiss each other on campus without a bodyguard of supporters. The fact that OUT stopped doing kiss-ins is one sign that we still have a long way to go.
(07/25/02 8:23pm)
Dr." Laura Schlessinger's television show has ceased production, to the jubilation of many gay people. I'm not going to go into the free speech issues involved in the "Stop Dr. Laura" campaign, nor the misogyny in so many gay men's hostility to her. \nBut I notice that many of the same gay men who railed against Schlessinger are now discovering that Marshall "Eminem" Mathers' antigay rhymes are really brilliant satire and are invoking the First Amendment to attack anti-defamation groups for criticizing him. I guess it's the rough-trade factor: a dirty-talking tough boy makes many gay men go all trembly. But I digress.)\nWhat I want to address is the severe selectivity with which Schlessinger's gay critics poked fun at her use of the Bible to prop up her bigotry. A widely-circulated bit of netlore, "A Letter to Dr. Laura," sarcastically asked Schlessinger's advice on application of certain Torah passages to matters such as animal sacrifice, slavery, sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman, the eating of shellfish and so on -- familiar topics from gay Christian theology. I suspect that the writer of this "letter" is a Christian, not a Jew; but even if I'm wrong, this sort of polemic, when circulated among Christians, has overtones that are absent when one Jew disputes with another.\nGay Christians generally attack either Judaism (identified with the Torah) or the Apostle Paul, a wicked Pharisee who supposedly sold out Jesus' simple and beautiful teachings by making Christianity conform to Judaism. They treat Jesus either as if he were not a Jew at all, or at least completely emancipated from supposed Jewish legalism and superstition. They stress that Jesus never directly spoke about homosexuality (true, in a narrow literal sense), and that he taught "love" -- unlike his fellow Jews, who presumably thought hatred was a good thing. Evidently they're unaware that when Jesus said to love one's neighbor, he was quoting the Torah in the book of Leviticus.\nGay Christians often say they follow Jesus' teachings rather than those of Paul or "the Old Testament." Fair enough. I submit here my own letter to gay Christians, asking for their help in following some of Jesus' commandments.\nHow, for example, am I to obey Jesus' command (Matthew 5:29) to pluck out my eye if it leads me to sin? Am I allowed to use anesthetics? What sort of tool should I use? And what if my remaining eye leads me to sin?\nSimilar questions arise from his order to lop off one's hand (Matthew 5:30) or his endorsement of those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:12). Ouch. But what shall it profit a man if he keep his testicles, yet lose his soul?\nAccording to Mark, Jesus refused to meet his mother and brothers, saying that his followers and disciples were his mother and brothers. Jesus forbade one of his disciples to return home for his father's funeral, ordering him to leave the dead to bury the dead (Matthew 8:22). He declared that he had come to cause strife among family members (Matthew 10:35-36); that anyone who came to him but did not hate his family could not be his disciple (Luke 14:26). Isn't this the sort of cultlike teaching that got the Moonies in trouble? \nOn several occasions Jesus said unkind things about the rich (Luke 6:24): that it is virtually impossible for them to go to heaven (Mark 10:25) and that, to become his disciple, they must sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor (Mark 10:21). He told his disciples not to bother providing for their futures (Luke 12:32): what they would eat, where they would sleep and so on. I don't see too many Christians obeying these commands. At most they let a few religious professionals live simple lives, but this has no basis I can find in Jesus' teachings. So, gay Christians, how about it? \nFinally, Jesus taught that marriage was forever -- or at least, for a lifetime. A divorced person who remarried, he said, committed adultery against his or her former spouse (Mark 10:11-12). I haven't heard gay Christians say much about this in their quest for same-sex marriage: Are they ready to renounce divorce?\nSome will protest that I'm taking these verses out of context. Perhaps, but so did the author of "A Letter to Dr. Laura," which many gay Christians considered a devastating and hilarious rebuttal. Or perhaps I'm taking these passages too literally? Dear gay Christians, I'm not taking them any way. I'm challenging you to live up to all of Jesus' teachings, as you challenged Laura Schlessinger to live up to the Torah.
(07/25/02 8:23pm)
A protester was killed by police during demonstrations at the G-8 conference in Genoa last Friday. Will I sound too cynical or defeatist if I say that it didn't surprise me, that it was only a matter of time? Will I surprise you if I add that its predictability doesn't make it any less outrageous. \nSpeaking only of my own country, the U.S. government has made it clear that it will respond to peaceful demonstrations against its policies with police violence. (Yes, I know: some of the demonstrators have not been peaceful. But the overwhelming majority have not been violent, and have been met with the same violence.) From the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle to both party conventions of 2000, with the counter-inaugural demonstrations of last January a partial exception, tear gas and broken heads have been the rule. You may remember Washington Post publisher Ben Bradlee, complaining on "Larry King Live" that he "wasn't impressed" by the counter-inaugural because there were only seven arrests. I trust that Bradlee was more impressed by Genoa.\nCarlo Giulani's death was met by lofty evasions that will be familiar to anyone who remembers past movements for social justice: because the protesters are unruly (meaning: they refuse to stay home and watch ESPN, as God intended), and some are even violent, they have discredited their cause and need not be taken seriously. If they were not unruly, that would be taken as a sign that there is no discontentment. Of course, those who dismiss the protesters would never consider that the State is discredited by its violence.\nBut, as usual, those who justify the status quo don't care if their arguments make any sense. What matters is that they've shown their allegiance to the owners, the bosses, the powerful, who cannot be discredited no matter what they do. The important thing is that there must be no public input on matters of international trade.\nThis has been the fundamental bipartisan principle behind NAFTA, GATT, and MAI; Bush continues Clinton's demands for "fast track" negotiating powers, which will take economic policy still farther from democratic scrutiny.\nThe G-8 leaders issued a protest of their own.\n"It is vitally important," they declared, "that democratically elected leaders legitimately representing millions of people can meet to discuss areas of common concern." George W. Bush, for one, was not democratically elected, and Putin doesn't look much better. But there are millions of people whom the G-8 leaders do not represent at all, whether legitimately or illegitimately -- namely, the people in the poorer countries on whom they are trying to unleash their "free trade" policies. These people didn't elect the leaders of G-8, or the leaders of their own countries, and couldn't afford to travel to Genoa to let their voices be heard directly.\nBush supplied boilerplate hot air: "I respect the right to peaceful expression, but make no mistake -- those who protest free trade are no friends of the poor. Those who protest free trade seek to deny them their best hope for escaping poverty." Even if this were true -- it isn't -- Bush wouldn't know. Thousands of people in Bloomington, for instance, know how much "free trade" has helped them, by depriving them of jobs.\nA prime example of Bush's "free trade" in action is China, which is rightly under attack for its dreadful human rights record.\nRemember with what indecent haste Bush's father tried to return trade privileges to China after Tiananmen, which was only the tip of the iceberg of human rights abuse; and China doesn't stand alone. The purpose of "free trade" is to give big corporations free access to cheap raw materials and labor unmediated by unions, health and safety regulations, or other constraints.\nThe United States became rich and powerful, not through "free trade" but through protectionism, right down through the Reagan-Clinton eras. (Clinton suspended NAFTA in the interests of Florida tomato growers against Mexican imports. Not the workers, mind you: the growers.) And the American people escaped poverty -- to the extent that they did -- because American business was not allowed total freedom of exploitation, because American workers rebelled.\nThe international movement that met in Genoa must not be stopped, or surprised, by the death of Carlo Giulani. But at the same time, it must not view its members as renewable resources, to be used up in the struggle for economic justice. That would be sinking to the level of its opponents. This is a crucial time to evaluate tactics.
(08/02/01 2:00am)
There's a tradition in journalism, going back at least to Mark Twain, of crusty men of blue-collar extraction like Pete Hamill or the late Mike Royko who, for a fee, will let you know what The Common Man (i.e., them) thinks about the issues of the day.\nThese days the prime exemplar is probably Michael Moore, the writer, filmmaker and TV troublemaker, scion of an auto working family from Flint, Mich. There's a scene in Moore's useful documentary The Big One where he jeers at his apparently yuppie audience for buying Third World folk art, handmade handbags from Guatemala and whatnot. They laugh, but uneasily, as if they're just realizing that he's making fun of them, not Jesse Helms or Bill Gates. Moore has suggested in print that middle-class folks who want to make contact with the American working class should go line dancing.\nI thought yuppies had already discovered line dancing! The gentry have gone slumming among the peons for centuries; it might improve interclass relations, but it has no effect on class systems. Marie Antoinette and her court ladies dressed up as milkmaids now and then, but it didn't improve their social consciences.\nI'm beginning to suspect that I might have given a wrong impression when I addressed the topics of Class and Buttcrack two weeks ago. I received more positive responses on that column than on anything else I've written, often from people who were at pains to inform me that they didn't much like anything else I'd written. Ah well, it wouldn't be the first time I've expressed myself badly.\nOne old friend, a retired university professor, pointed out in e-mail that he could "out-hick" me easily. I wasn't trying to out-hick anyone; on the contrary, I was trying to stress that I am under-hicked. But touting the superior virtues of Joe Sixpack the Noble Savage is such a widespread pastime that I can understand why people might have thought I was doing it too. Not only liberals do it: William F. Buckley famously quipped that he'd rather be ruled by the first 500 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Yale University.\nHe didn't mean it, of course -- just kidding, guys! -- but Buckley's witticism is noteworthy: he's hardly an egalitarian, but once in a while he'll play one on TV. I've noticed that many academic partisans in the culture wars of the 1990s, who most of the time waved the banner of elitism, would sometimes present themselves as ordinary Joes whose common sense was baffled by the elitist jargon of French theorists and their American minions. Aw shucks, folks.\nNope, that wasn't what I was trying to do. I don't find wisdom in any class of people as a class, including intellectuals. (Certainly not in myself.) I find wisdom in individuals, and it seems to me that the smartest people I've encountered tend to be painfully aware of their own stupidities -- the errors that stared them in their faces for years, without their noticing. If they're merciless about the mistakes of their peers, it's because they're just as merciless with themselves.\nIf I must at times defend working-class people against the jeers of those who want to see us as subhuman, at other times I have to defend intellectuals against those who think they're better than we are because they don't think. Such people are found not only in the trailer parks of America, but in its ivory towers; not only on Rush Limbaugh's telephone lines, but in Harvard and on PBS. What counts is not who you are, who your parents or first cousins are, where you live or how many degrees you have, but how well you think. And just as the greatest athletes have their off-days, so do the greatest thinkers, let alone those who aren't so great.\nLast time I quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein on the importance of thinking clearly even when it's unpleasant; this time I'll quote his near contemporary, the classical scholar A. E. Housman: "Three minutes' thought would have avoided this error; but thought is difficult, and three minutes is a long time"
(07/19/01 12:31am)
My earliest memories are of living in a trailer park in Plymouth, Ind., in 1953. The following year my parents moved to a rented house until, a few years later, they were able to buy one. But my trailer-trash roots are firm.\nNeither of my parents went to college. Both from large families impoverished by the Great Depression, they could only try to realize their dreams of higher education through their children. Education was important to my parents, and they encouraged my interest in reading while tolerating my lack of interest in sports. My mother especially always told me I'd be around nicer people if I went to college.\nMy father was a construction foreman and later worked in his brother's scrap metal business. My mother was a housewife, later a factory worker. I've begun but never completed a college degree; I'm a janitor and dishwasher, which keeps me working-class, but you know, my mom was right: I do meet nice people around a university food service, including my co-workers. My life's not quite what my parents had in mind, but that's how it goes.\nI'm not pretending to be a typical working-class person, whatever that might be. I believe I'm more typical of the person who's the first in his or her family to go to college. One common trait of such people is our alienation both from our working-class background and from the middle-class or professional academic environment into which we've moved. Alienation of that kind is a good thing.\nI'd never heard of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt before he died at Daytona earlier this year; I don't pay attention to auto racing, or any other sport. I did start paying attention rather quickly to some reactions I saw to the outpouring of grief and media attention his death inspired. On a local Usenet newsgroup, for example, the response of several members of the IU community to Earnhardt's death was to jeer that it was of interest only to inbred Kentuckians who show butt crack. "Trailer parks around the nation have lowered their flags to half staff, that's certain," wrote one. "Wow, Nascar fans can read?" queried another.\nObviously some of this stuff was meant as humor, which shows how much higher education enhances wit. But it was expressive of an attitude that I've seen all too often: that working people without university education are an inferior breed, fit only to marry their first cousins and appear on tabloid TV shows. "Low-class" is very commonly used to derogate behavior or opinions that someone dislikes, such as racism or other prejudices. Professionals with graduate degrees, by contrast, are paragons of enlightenment. Right?\nWell, no. Education too often teaches people to find reasons to do things they shouldn't. The war in Vietnam was started and escalated by educated men of good family, not by illiterate West Virginians married to their cousins. It was educated medical men who castrated and sterilized the "unfit" in these United States, in the early twentieth century. Indiana was a leader in this eugenic practice, which inspired German science and politics later on. Ivy League colleges like Yale had quotas to limit the number of Jews they admitted -- and elaborate pseudo-scientific rationales to keep women out altogether.\nOr consider Rush Limbaugh, son of a corporate lawyer, scion of a well-to-do Republican family. The average dittohead (according to a marketing survey done at the peak of Limbaugh's popularity) has at least a bachelor's degree, an annual income of $53,000 and no more than one Mercedes up on blocks in the front yard.\nI am not romanticizing working people: I know very well, from experience, that we can be as narrow and bigoted as university-educated professionals. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote to his student Norman Malcolm: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important problems of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious. ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty', 'probability', 'perception', etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important."\nI don't believe these words apply only to philosophy; I'd say they apply to education in general. Or rather, they should, but too often they don't.
(07/12/01 12:51am)
The Vision of Christ that thou does see Is my Visions Greatest Enemy.
(07/05/01 1:01am)
The news that unprecedented numbers of same-sex couples declared their presence in the 2000 U.S. Census drew a fair amount of attention in the heterosexual media. This was a good opportunity to educate straight folks, but alas, who will educate their media?\nOne local gay man told The Herald-Times, "I think gay men are more interested in being in couples than they used to be ... I think, deep down, most gay men are romantics and living happily ever after is a goal for us as much as for anybody."\nThis quotation neatly expresses a widespread belief among many gay men today: that gay men did not form couples during the swinging 1970s, preferring an endless string of casual encounters to mature monogamy. AIDS sobered us and made us settle down, like lesbians (who in this myth are paragons of everlasting domesticity). What this has to do with "romance," I don't know. It sounds more like sadomasochism, where suffering purifies and uplifts the penitent, and it's an odd way to advertise the rewards of monogamy. But it just isn't true. (Luckily, other gay men quoted in the article knew better.)\nStephen O. Murray, a gay scholar, wrote in his book "American Gay;" "I remember hearing the word 'husband-hunting,' and -- along with the more common propositions -- I received a number of proposals of marriage during the clone era of San Francisco. Indeed, I accepted one!"\nThis fits with my own experience. And one of the most heart-rending aspects of the AIDS epidemic has been men with AIDS nursing their own dying lovers, or bereft men being thrown out of shared homes by vindictive families of their dead partners. If gay men hadn't formed couples, such things would not have happened.\nSo much for the first part of the myth, that gay men didn't form couples before AIDS. The second part, that gay men are now "romantic" and "living happily ever after" in couples modeled after 1950s TV sitcoms, is equally unfounded. (Please note: TV sitcoms are not an accurate depiction of heterosexual marriage.) It's impossible to say whether gay men are more likely to be or stay coupled now than we were thirty years ago. Murray cited studies which indicate the opposite, but declared them inconclusive. Are same-sex couples more numerous, or just more visible, more likely to declare themselves on government forms?\nThe conservative gay men who make these claims are often too young to remember the decadent days they stereotype. That's one advantage to being conservative and respectable: you don't have to know what you're talking about. Indeed, knowing too much can discredit you. Being respectable, by contrast, provides a cover for all sorts of disreputable activities. A good example is the gay Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan, beloved by the "New York Times" for his scorn of gay men's sexual culture, who was recently found advertising on the Web for unprotected sex. He was indignant at being found out; apparently he thought his preaching counted, not his practice.\nI agree that most gay men are romantics, but we always have been. I've been out for thirty years now, and I don't remember a time when most gay men I knew didn't speak wistfully of finding a lover, or lament the difficulty of making relationships last. I'm presently reading gay writer Christopher Isherwood's memoir of the years 1945-1951, which reveals how even in those repressed, pre-liberation days, gay men routinely formed couples. And nowadays, just as in the past, coupling is perfectly compatible with sleeping around, between partnerships or during them.\nThe real trouble is that marriage isn't romantic -- courtship is. Romantic tales, if they end happily, "end" with marriage. This isn't a count against marriage, because romance isn't real and marriage is. It's been suggested that one reason for the high rate of divorce among conservative Protestants might be unrealistic expectations about marriage, that it means "living happily ever after." I suspect that gay men's romanticism interferes with our ability to manage relationships.\nBut not too much. Despite fantasies based on Hollywood romances, despite the destructive pressure of anti-gay bigotry, gay men have managed to sustain relationships remarkably well. We deserve credit for that.
(06/28/01 1:14am)
Thirty-two years ago tonight, June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots began. What should have been a routine shakedown of a rather sleazy gay bar by the New York City police suddenly turned into a rout.\nPelted first by pennies and then by bricks, the raiders had to barricade themselves inside the bar, calling for reinforcements when the rioters tried to firebomb it. For three nights gays and police skirmished in the streets.\nAs American riots go, in terms of damage to property and human beings they weren't so much. Gay people had fought back against the police at least once before, in California. Nor did Stonewall mark the beginning of a gay movement, even in the United States. So why did what one gay neo-conservative derided as a mere "bar fight" become what another gay neocon derided as a "sacred event that lies beyond the reach of objective discourse"?\nI'm not a big believer in impersonal historical forces, but something like them was at work. If you wanted to choose a good time to found an American radical movement, the late '60s would be it.\nThe Mattachine Society, founded in 1948 in California by ex-Communist Harry Hay, began with a radical vision, but by the early 1950s Hay had been expelled and Mattachine turned rightward. When gay women founded the Daughters of Bilitis soon after, it was solely as a social group, not as an activist organization.\nBy the 1960s, though, even timid Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis had altered the gay American landscape. There were Mattachine chapters in several cities, some of them exhibiting increasing militance. Frank Kameny, a gay astronomer fired from his government job, was fighting the Federal government in the courts in Washington D.C. Dick Leitsch led Mattachine New York in civil disobedience against discriminatory liquor laws. The Ladder, DOB's magazine, had become more explicitly feminist, and many lesbian activists joined or supported the growing resurgence of the women's movement. \nStarting in 1965 there was an annual picket for gay equality outside the White House - which meant a level of visibility by activists that would have been unthinkable 15 years earlier.\nSome activists acquired experience elsewhere, though: in the civil rights and anti-war movements. By 1969, the right of the mainstream to define the limits of thought was no longer accepted by many Americans.\nFor me, one powerfully symbolic moment was an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee by admitted heterosexual Tom Hayden, then associated with Students for a Democratic Society: instead of abasing himself before the abusive patriarchs of the HUAC, Hayden attacked the legitimacy of the committee itself, refusing to acknowledge its authority.\nImmediately after the Stonewall riots, a few activists announced the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. The name paid homage to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, conjuring up a very different conception of resistance than Mattachine or Daughters of Bilitis. Many of the people who flocked to GLF meetings in New York City, or who founded such groups elsewhere in the country, had little interest in larger radical politics, but such ideas had moved closer to most Americans' angle of vision than they were a few years earlier. \nGay organizations proliferated explosively across the country, but the very idea that homosexuals might organize to improve the conditions of their lives had never been so widespread before.\nWithin a few months, new positions were marked out between Gay Liberation Front's utopian-left vanguard and Mattachine\'s much more cautious mainstreaming. Impatient with GLF, some New Yorkers split away and founded Gay Activists Alliance, whose mission was not world revolution but fiercely practical direct action on gay issues.\nBefore long, the National Gay Task Force was organized with a similar anti-ideological focus. (Ironically, it is still considered too "leftist" by many gays, who prefer the rightist Human Rights Campaign.)\nSo why all this ancient history? The anniversary of Stonewall has become merely Gay Pride Day, an opportunity to dress up and party.\nMany GLBT people -- let alone heterosexuals -- have forgotten, if they ever knew, what started our holiday. "Gay liberation" has been confused with gay consumerism, and whatever you think of the consumer lifestyle, liberation it ain't. In honor of those who made gay-themed TV commercials possible, then, I submit this brief history lesson.
(06/21/01 2:38am)
One question that often comes up in discussions of gay people's lives is "Don't you want to have children?" -- the assumption being that to be gay or lesbian is to be forever bereft of the patter of little feet.\nIt was never a safe assumption. If only because many gay men and lesbians explore the heterosexual lifestyle rather extensively before coming out, a good many of us have always wanted to become parents. More recently, many of us have chosen to become parents after escaping heterosexuality, whether through adoption or other means too varied to detail here. Memoirs such as Jesse Green's "The Velveteen Father" and Phyllis Burke's "Family Values" are good introductions for the curious.\nBut it seems we're damned if we don't and damned if we do. If we don't have children, we're objects of pity; if we do, we're accused of being bad for them. We will supposedly deprive them of suitable sex-role models, which by remarkable coincidence must be heterosexual; worse still, we will influence or even pressure our children to be gay too. Courts acting on these principles can and have children forcibly removed from their gay and lesbian parents, natural or adoptive, so it's not surprising that gay and lesbian parents have claimed defensively that their children grow up just like everyone else: heterosexual, and sex-role conformist.\nNot all have said so, of course. I was very impressed by a lesbian mother who told an interviewer around 1980 that all the influence she might exert on her daughter would be countered overwhelmingly by the heterosexual society in which they lived; naturally she would make sure her daughter knew that there are viable alternatives to heterosexuality. In 1986 lawyer Nancy Polikoff wrote, "As a lesbian, a feminist, and a mother with a vision of an entirely different way of raising our children, ... I am not pleased to discover that my lesbian sisters pose no threat to the perpetuation of patriarchal childrearing."\nAnd now, two sociologists from the University of Southern California have published a survey of research on children of gay and lesbian parents, which suggests that such children might not be quite like the children of straight parents. According to an Associated Press story, Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz found that children of gay and lesbian parents "show more empathy for social diversity, are less confined by gender stereotypes and are probably more likely to explore homosexual activity themselves."\nThese are tentative findings, like all findings in the social sciences. The AP story, in an all-too-typical display of "journalistic balance", quoted a "policy analyst" with the Christian-Right group Focus on the Family who called the report "alarming" and declared, "Kids do best when they have a married mother and a married father."\nWhen you think about it, Stacey and Biblarz' findings aren't such a shock. Would it be "alarming" if it were discovered that the children of Jewish parents were more likely to become Jews rather than Christians, were more empathetic with the problems of minorities and more open-minded on religious questions? Would news stories quote Christian extremists to the effect that kids do best when they have a Christian mother and a Christian father?\nSome students in a class I was talking to once asked if the majority doesn't have the right to impose its standards on parents. I asked rhetorically what they would think if (for example) a predominantly Episcopalian community decided that it wasn't good for children to be raised by Evangelical Christians, and took such children from their parents for their own good. This analogy threw the class into a tizzy. The same kids (evidently religious "conservatives") who didn't mind forcing gay parents to be childless were angry at me for following their logic to its conclusion. Even the instructor complained I was being combative.\nWell, that much is true. Too many Americans believe it's OK to be different as long as we're all the same. (That includes many GLBT people; we are, after all, Americans.) Even if it turned out to be true that children of married heterosexual parents had it the easiest -- which, given the realities of majorities, is probably true -- that wouldn't mean that gay people should not become parents; it would even be an argument for legalizing same-sex marriage. In a decent society people who care about children would be asking how to make things better for minority children, instead of penalizing them for the choices of their parents.
(06/14/01 12:54am)
Now that Timothy McVeigh has been executed, it's moot whether the death penalty should be applied in his case. I was struck, though, by one local columnist's comment that "McVeigh was not a good poster child for people opposed to the death penalty. ... If anyone deserved to die, that was the guy."\nThis comment misses the point of opposition to capital punishment. I suppose the best "poster child" would be an innocent person, someone falsely convicted of a capital crime; it takes very little soul-searching to agree that such a person should not be executed.\nNext would be someone properly convicted but repentant, who can appeal to Christian values of forgiveness and personal renewal. But, as that writer's remarks suggest, it's quite possible to be moved by such people while still holding that there are people who deserve to die.\nSomeone who really opposes the death penalty will oppose it even to dispose of a remorseless criminal like McVeigh. In that sense, McVeigh is an ideal "poster child" -- not because he's appealing, but because he isn't.\nThe core question is this: what can justify killing anyone? Tim McVeigh believed that while the deaths of 168 men, women and children in Oklahoma City were regrettable, they were also necessary. This is not, unfortunately, as unusual a belief as I wish it were. It echoes -- deliberately, I suspect -- the infamous claim of a military spokesman in Vietnam that it was necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.\nMcVeigh was a military man, a Gulf War veteran, indoctrinated in a system which treats human lives as tokens to be used up in the pursuit of military and political goals. The U.S. killed far more than 168 civilians in the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, in World War II and in any number of smaller actions around the world. More than 168 civilians were killed in Panama during George Bush\'s invasion of Panama in 1989, even by official U.S. estimates; human rights groups claim a death toll in the thousands. Of course, these deaths were regrettable, but we are assured they were necessary, not only by our government but by ordinary citizens who support its actions.\nBut again, who gets to decide this? American troops under orders have killed unarmed American civilians on American soil numerous times since the Civil War. The Bonus Army of 1932 (two World War I veterans and one baby), Kent State (four students) and Jackson State (two students) Universities in 1970 are among the more famous. These deaths too were regrettable but necessary, and since they were official killings no one was executed for carrying them out.\nMcVeigh, by contrast, decided on his own which lives were expendable, without orders from above. If he had exploded his bomb in Iraq, or in Waco, Texas, as part of an official military or paramilitary action, his life would not have been forfeited.\nHow many people are needed to validate the taking of human life? One lone bomber, apparently, is not enough. Two? Three? A dozen jurors? The President, the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The 535 members of Congress? At what point, and for what reason, does taking a life, or 168 lives, or 168,000, stop being a crime and become regrettable but necessary in the eyes of most citizens?\nPlease understand that I'm NOT saying that McVeigh didn't commit a terrible crime. I'm saying that bringing him to justice is only a beginning. If Americans really believe that McVeigh deserved to die for his crime, we should also bring to trial other American criminals whose hands are far bloodier than McVeigh's: the men who gave the orders which killed millions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. If the lives of mere foreigners don't count, these men's victims included thousands of Americans as well -- 55,000 in Vietnam, for instance. Will supporters of the death penalty call for the execution of (among others) Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Oliver North and Bill Clinton?
(06/07/01 1:26am)
Does it seem odd to anyone else that, in discussing a species famous for its relative "lack" of genetic programming and its ability to "learn" instead of relying on instinct, no one seems interested in how we learn to be sexual? Instead we get more recycled scientific racism, the exact same sort of pseudoscience that "proves" people of African descent to be stupider than people of European descent, and "proves" that girls naturally can't throw a ball or master calculus.\nAnd every time last year's cutting-edge research is discredited (as it always is, with monotonous regularity), instead of considering the possibility that researchers might be barking up the wrong tree, we just get another highly publicized study, showing that gay people have longer fingers or different brain waves or whatever.\nPeople still refer to the 1992 twin study by Richard Pillard and J. Michael Bailey, pointing out that identical twins had a higher concordance rate for homosexuality than fraternal twins; and so they did.\nFraternal twins, however, had a higher concordance rate than ordinary siblings, though genetically speaking, fraternal twins are ordinary siblings. This indicates some sort of environmental influence, and that is a scientifically interesting question, since so many gay people are so sure that their environment could not have had any influence at all on their sexuality. But in a learning species like Homo sapiens, you'd think environment would be the first place to look, a mother lode of research topics just begging to be mined.\nIn the late 1990s Bailey did more research on homosexuality in twins, using a vast Australian twin registry. The concordance rate dropped by half: to 20 percent for male identical twins, 24 percent for females.\nConsidering that Bailey used a mailed-out questionnaire (with all the sampling problems those entail), that he relied on his subjects to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale (like asking them to guess their own IQs subjectively) and that he counted everyone who isn't exclusively heterosexual as "gay", I'd say the concordance rate is dropping to chance levels: that identical twins are as likely to share the same sexual orientation as you'd find in the general population.\nEven on the most optimistic reading of his data, environment plays a huge role in the development of sexuality.\nThese dropping concordance rates got much less publicity than the original, more "optimistic" study. When the newer study "is" covered, the data get a more optimistic spin than they deserve. A feature on the biology of homosexuality in the Los Angeles Times last month simply conflated the two studies, saying that a twin's "probability of being homosexual lies between 20 percent and 50 percent" -- but even 20 percent is probably too high. Bailey incautiously told the LA Times writer, "The data definitely are not as strong as for other traits such as intelligence or schizophrenia." But the data isn't particularly strong for intelligence or schizophrenia either.\nThe case of intelligence is especially controversial. What evidence could Bailey have had in mind? Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's tract "The Bell Curve" is the most notable recent attempt to put the genes in charge of variations in human intelligence, and it failed. Not very good company for Bailey's research.\nThere's another factor to remember. Ernest P. Noble, a researcher seeking an "alcoholism gene," said frankly: "The environment is a tremendously powerful agent in producing alcoholism. But genes are easier to study." Studying genes lends itself more easily to a familiar model of "science": making inert bits of matter go through hoops, and counting them. Learning is a lot harder to pin down.\nSo, as I've pointed out many times before: the scientific (to put it generously) evidence just doesn't point to a determining role for genes in the origins of homosexuality. I haven't even addressed the crude and thoughtless conceptions of homosexuality and gender used by the researchers, which come from 19th-century medicine at best. Human beings are a creative, learning species, and human sexuality is a creative, learned response to our environment. It's time someone tried to study that.
(05/31/01 12:46am)
Hollywood's latest blockbuster, "Pearl Harbor," is doing boffo box office. So far I haven't seen it, and I hope I won't: the theatrical preview I saw seemed to last for three hours all by itself. I don't need a movie to remind me about World War II, since I grew up in a period (the Fifties) obsessed with it, and rightly so: the war was the defining experience of my parents' generation. So let me stress: I'm not talking here about the movie. I'm interested in what people are saying about it, both critics and the public, who've been flocking to the Internet to make their voices heard.\nThere has been complaint about "Pearl Harbor's" historical accuracy or lack of it, but much of what I've seen so far is for its failure to demonize the Japanese enough. If I never hear the words "sneak attack" again, it'll be too soon. Since when do attacking forces send a messenger in livery to announce their intent? "You are cordially invited to a battle at the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor in the early morning hours of December 7, 1941; anti-aircraft fire optional." Did the U.S. warn Japan of its intent to bomb Hiroshima?\nAs usual with Hollywood\'s pseudo-historical epics, fans of "Pearl Harbor" alternate between brushing aside historical questions (hey, it's just a movie, just lie back and enjoy it) and ignoring any inaccuracies (besides, it really happened that way, even if it didn't). But many people are complaining because the movie is "too" accurate. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, is indignant because the script mentions that the United States cut off oil supplies to Japan in August 1941 -- what, he fumes, about Japan's "imperialist designs?" Yes, Japan had imperialist designs in Asia; so did the United States, which kept thousands of marines in China to protect our interests there. And there's no need to wonder what the U.S. would do if another country merely threatened our access to oil supplies, let alone actually cut off that access; the historical record is pretty consistent on the point.\nQuite a few people claim, probably correctly, that the filmmakers developed their portrayal of the Japanese with an eye to foreign grosses, not wanting to offend potential ticket-buyers in Asia. Those interested in history should be aware that self-censorship is as old as the movies. In the years just before World War II, according to movie historian James Curtis, Hollywood often bowed to economic pressure from Germany and other countries in its choice of projects. Hollywood is a business first and last, and you don't stay in business if you alienate customers. Besides, it's only a movie, don't be so serious, chill out!\n"Pearl Harbor" fans' favorite theme is the movie's supposed value as an educational tool. Since "Schindler's List" (1993) and "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line" (both 1998) came out, Americans apparently have forgotten World War II again, and we need a cinematic extravaganza to refresh our notoriously short memories. Or today's kids need to know what it was like to live then, but I'm not sure a movie can tell them that, especially not a Hollywood product built on movie conventions and special effects, not history. And it's clear from the complaints I've mentioned that many people don't want history -- they want propaganda, accuracy be damned.\nI'm most sympathetic to the argument that veterans and others who lived through the war need to see their experience depicted on the screen. Just about every movie made about the Vietnam War, for instance, was welcomed by Vietnam vets who were hungry for accounts of what they went through: even leaden, pretentious junk like Oliver Stone's "Platoon" was praised by veterans for its realism.\nThere's no shortage of media about World War II, however, especially not recently. The 50th anniversaries of D-Day and the Allied victories during the mid-1990s generated a flood of reminiscence. Whenever someone detects a media silence on a topic on which there's actually media saturation, I get suspicious. "Accurate" information about history is in short supply in the American media, but "Pearl Harbor" isn't going to change that, and from people's reactions to the movie, no one believes it will.
(05/24/01 1:13am)
Help! I'm trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, between having to believe a government agency on one hand and a major American political party on the other. It isn't pretty.\nIn this corner we have the General Services Administration, or GSA. The GSA said last week that when the Clinton Administration vacated the White House and associated office space, "the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." Similarly, in February officials at Andrews Air Force Base denied reports of damage ("looting" was apparently claimed) to Air Force One, the Presidential airplane.\nIn the other corner we have certain high-profile leaders of the Republican party, such as Bob Barr, and their friends in the liberal media, who claimed that outgoing Clinton-Gore staffers "stripped" Air Force One and "trashed" the White House. Radio host Oliver North (impersonating longtime Clinton flack James Carville) put it like this: "We should expect from white trash what they did at the White House." Others, like Paula Zahn of FoxNews, took a more upscale tack: "All right, but this is the White House, for God's sakes. We're not talking about people living in a fraternity." Tom Schatz, of Citizens Against Government Waste, spelled it out: "They turned it into Animal House." Will members of university Greek systems protest these slurs on their lifestyle?\nYou see my dilemma: there's no one I can really believe. Of course I'm more likely to believe the GSA than Bob Barr or Oliver North. It's clear enough that the Republican Right is up to its old tricks again, familiar from the days that led to Clinton's impeachment. The tactic is simple. Remember how the Republicans would leak some damaging rumor -- say, that the videotape of Clinton's testimony before a grand jury would show him losing his temper, cursing and stamping out of the courtroom. The liberal media would obligingly report these rumors, even embroidering and enhancing it. When the videotape was shown, it bore no resemblance to the rumor. Oops! Our mistake, the media would blush -- and then run to the next Republican crying wolf.\nYou'd think that having taken back the White House would have satisfied them. But it seems they will never get over having lost it in 1992, or having failed to eject Clinton before his terms ended.\nThe Republicans had their own dilemma: Clinton certainly did a lot of bad things, including illegal ones, but the Republicans approved of most of them: the abolition of welfare, the bombing of Baghdad, the degradation of the environment, "free trade" agreements that are really protectionism for the biggest corporations. To those of us with functional memories, their complaints of Clinton's lies and corruption are ironic. When did the Republicans get religion? They'd never minded Reagan's lies and corruption, which set a standard Clinton never quite managed to equal, though heaven knows he tried. (I'm still trying to make sense of a local right-winger's remark I once overheard, that he had liked Reagan before he sold out to big business. When was this? Reagan has been a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of American corporate interests ever since General Electric acquired him in the 1950s.)\nWorst of all, the Gingrich disciples who tried to shut down the Federal government in 1995 failed. They were only able to enact those parts of their program that Clinton supported, and that wasn't enough for them, or soon enough. For the rest, they were never able to muster public support, which they blamed on Clinton but should have blamed on themselves. The impeachment debacle made it even clearer: most Americans sided with Clinton against his enemies. I can't help wondering if the accusations that Clinton's people "vandalized" the White House were mainly projection: the radical\nRepublicans tried to vandalize the entire United States. Now Bush's people are pushing through as much as they can, as fast as they can, filling up government posts with their relatives and cronies. The accusations of vandalism, having been refuted, can be abandoned, albeit with poor grace, as the Republicans and their Democratic collaborators gear up to turn this country into a nuclear waste dump.
(05/10/01 2:07am)
Netlore is fascinating. You know, those strange or funny messages passed on from person to person to person, warning of nonexistent computer viruses or tugging your heart with tales of dying children whose last wish is to receive a million postcards? Or containing a bogus quatrain by the seer Nostradamus, foretelling the ascension of the "village idiot" to leadership "in the home of greatest power" in the year 2000? That's netlore.\n The other day, my sister-in-law passed a bit of nostalgic netlore along to me. It was one of those heartwarming lists of things we ought to remember from the good old days, like "hide and seek at dusk," "eating Kool-Aid powder," "being tired from playing ... remember that?" (Hey, I still get tired from playing.)\nBut then an agenda began to emerge. Remember, urged the writer, "When nearly everyone's mom was at home when the kids got there." "When they threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed ... and did!" "'Race issue' meant arguing about who ran the fastest." "The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was cooties." "Basically, we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc." \nThere was some strange wobbling going on. Sometimes "when" referred simply to childhood; sometimes it referred to the good old days, the '50s as depicted on television, when schools were tough and moms stayed home and there were no drive-by shootings.\nThe trouble is, those good old days are imaginary. Only a person who grew up in an all-white community, and suffers from selective amnesia to boot, could suppose that "race" wasn't an issue in the 1950s, including for children. Being a child didn't (and doesn't) insulate or protect non-white children from the humiliations, large and small, that a racist society was (and is) all too ready to visit on them.\nIt requires equal memory control to believe that gangs and street violence weren't big stories and fears in the Fifties. Even outside the cities where the dangers were immediate (and had been since the 1800s), people feared that Marlon Brando would roar into town with his motorcycle gang and do unspeakable things. Syphilis and gonorrhea were less threatening than they were before the invention of antibiotics, but "the worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex" was a baby; even a young child might wonder why Big Sister had to go away for six months to recover from a mysterious and secret "fever", and be treated as a pariah on her return.\nThe anonymous author of this piece remembers "Walking to school, no matter what the weather"; I remember school buses -- not everyone lived in Anytown, U.S.A., back then. "War was a card game" -- but we had air raid drills at school, hiding under our desks for protection against the nuclear fallout that might arrive any day. (For children so unlucky as not to live in the United States, war could be much more than a card game.)\nI know: I'm a humorless old prune who needs to take a chill pill. When I expressed some of these reservations to a friend, she chided me not to be such a pessimist. But, I told her, I'm not the pessimist here. I'm not the one who thinks that American society was a soft-focus utopia in the 1950s, which went rapidly downhill ever since. Yes, we have bad problems now -- but we had bad problems then. I don't believe that any good is done by falsifying the past. It encourages kids who are growing up now to believe that they were born too late for happiness or the excitement of discovery.\nI've often talked to students who believed that, having missed the '60s with its radical politics and counterculture, they had nothing but yuppiedom to look forward to. I've had to remind them that there was activism in the '80s (the Nuclear Freeze movement, the movement for solidarity with people in the police states of Central America, to name only two), the '90s (antiwar movements, the movements against U.S. sanctions in Iraq), and now. There's a vast counterculture that dwarfs its '60s ancestor, with alternative media that didn't exist when I was young.\nReally, the 1950s were a dreary time, especially for adults: a time of deadening conformity (but also rising Civil Rights activism, the Beat movement and early rock and roll), fear of nuclear war, fear of "juvenile delinquency" (gangs and drugs, that is). Children had hula hoops and Silly Putty, but we could smell the fear in the air. And even today children have their joys, and a new world to explore. We need to make it safer for them, not dwell uselessly on a past that never was.
(04/27/01 3:36am)
A friend of mine made me angry the other night. The details aren't important here, nor the reason why it wasn't appropriate to blow up in his face at the time.\nAt work the next day, I vented to my hapless co-workers and friends, telling the story and complaining. Partly I needed to let off steam, but I also needed the reality check: Did I really have something to gripe about? They listened patiently, bless them, and assured me that I wasn't crazy (at least not about this matter). By the next day, I'd settled down a bit and could think of constructive ways to try to fix things.\nStereotypically, men aren't supposed to talk about their emotions, or to want to. We are, or so I'm assured by the experts, "instrumental" in our relations with others, preferring to bond by playing video games together in silence except for grunts and farts. Women, stereotypically, are expressive: They want to chew over and digest everything that happens.\nI find that even people who are critical of sex-role stereotypes fall back on these. Maverick feminist Wendy Kaminer, for instance, likes to express her disdain for chatty women; why can't they be strong silent types, like men? (And keel over prematurely from heart attacks, as strong silent types too often do.) Jock sociologist Michael A. Messner, in his book "Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity," warns repeatedly against forcing men into a "feminine model" by expecting them to talk about their feelings; but he admits, "I found that when they were given the opportunity, most of the men I interviewed were very open about their feelings." (These were athletes, remember, not Sensitive New Age Guys.) "I wish I could sit down with my wife and say the things to her that I have said here," one man told Messner wistfully.\nMaybe instead of forcing anyone, male or female, into a "masculine model" of emotional repression, we should respect individual differences, and even more, recognize that different cases call for different handling. Maybe some men (and some women) really aren't interested in nattering on about their feelings; fine. But some men (and some women) really find it useful to talk things out. Nor is this mere armchair Freudianism, an artifact of our hyper-individualistic talk-show society. One of William Blake's "Songs of Experience," "The Poison Tree," begins, "I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / And I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow." That was published in 1794, when Oprah wasn't a gleam in anyone's eye.\nEveryone already knows this on some level, I believe. Nobody really thinks that women never lose their tempers, or that men never talk about their feelings. I'm not sure that we look so different from outside, because women commonly talk while they're working together, just as men do. If men don't speak freely about their feelings in front of other men, it may be partly from lack of practice, and partly because they have to test the waters for a while to make sure no one's going to yell "faggot!" at them for showing their hurts and tenderness.\nAs a gay man, I have both options available: I can explode into rage like a Manly Man, or process my emotions all the livelong day. Somewhere in my growing up, I got the idea that getting angry was in itself dangerous, destructive and violent. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, which produces men who can only express their anger explosively, or women who let it slip out through acts of passive-aggression, denying it all the while. I still feel a little twinge of relief when I find that my anger hasn't blown up the world.\nIn this case, talking out my anger was a good idea. I sorted out why I was upset, why my friend's behavior hurt me and what I wanted to do about it. There was a great feeling of relief when I felt that I'd emerged on the other side of the anger, so to speak: like walking onto cool grass after crossing a bed of hot coals. I'm not saying it would be the same for everyone -- that's the point. But it worked, this time, for me.
(04/13/01 3:57am)
What is the purpose of a university?\n A surprising number of students and alumni seem to think the purpose is to support athletic programs. This way, students will have something to cheer for, to set random fires for, to smash windows for and to tear the dolphins out of Showalter Fountain for. It's even better, apparently, if the university also provides a haven for aging, angry white men, whose flamboyant public tantrums will teach America's youth the true meaning of sportsmanship.\n I'm not going to lay down my own opinion of what a university is "really" for, since I don't have one. Rather, I believe the university has many missions, with room for a variety of motives and goals in the people who teach and attend. I'm more interested, first, in pointing out that for many people the educational mission of a university is at best secondary to the noble task of winning NCAA championships; and second, in asking whether the various missions urged on the university can be reconciled, because like it or not, none of them is likely to go away.\nProfessor Murray Sperber has argued forcefully, and I think convincingly, in his books "College Sports Inc." and "Beer and Circus" that the emphasis on intercollegiate athletics is harmful to the educational mission of universities. (It's a safe bet, from what I've seen, that few people discussing these issues have read Sperber's books. Ignorance is bliss.) Sperber's critics tend to waffle between declaring, against all the evidence, that sports bring in more money than they cost; or if not, they're as valid an educational program as philosophy, literature or mathematics, which should be audited to make sure they bring in enough money, too.\nIf I understand him correctly, Sperber would like universities to focus as exclusively as possible on what used to be called "the life of the mind," and now is often called "the production of knowledge." He is, I believe, vague on how to pay for this. Unfortunately, Sperber has also shown, no less convincingly, that universities need the tuition money students will pay for the privilege of attending a university they can cheer for. State legislatures just aren't interested in supporting higher education anymore, and the money has to come from somewhere.\nThose who want something to cheer, on the other hand, mostly seem willing to let a few eggheads analyze DNA, stellar spectra and Shakespeare as long as they don't interfere with beer consumption and watching ESPN. They're vaguely aware not only that the university has something to do with all that intellectual stuff, but that it wouldn't exist without it.\nOr could it? I wonder sometimes. Take a look at "Academic Keywords" by professors Stephen Watt and Cary Nelson, which on pages four and five describe something called the University of Phoenix, a purely commercial institution of higher learning with 59 "campuses." Watt and Nelson quote a Columbia University administrator who said students at such a school want "the kind of relationship with a college that they had with their bank, their supermarket and their gas company. They say 'I want terrific service, I want convenience, I want quality control. Give me classes 24 hours a day, and give me in-class parking.'" Add a Division I athletic program, woo Bob Knight away from Texas Tech and you'd have a winner.\nI'm one to talk, right? I who, after all, never finished a degree. But I've stayed around IU for its intellectual and, dare I say, spiritual qualities: the atmosphere of a place with room for people engaged in the production of knowledge, people from all over the world, working in a variety of fields for a variety of reasons. Having the libraries, the museums, the international student groups and the people here makes Bloomington a very different kind of place than the small northern Indiana town where I grew up. I'm not at all interested in college sports (incorporated), but then lots of people are not at all interested in literature, science or critical theory. \nIs there room for all of us here?\nThe question, then, is whether and how a university so constituted can survive. As long as the money rolls in from somewhere, no doubt it can. Let's have no illusions, though, about purity, pretending that universities exist on some higher plane free of tawdry economic and other material concerns. Those who live the life of the mind, at least, should be able to comprehend the whole picture -- the production of knowledge and beer and circus -- and think about what it means.
(03/30/01 2:49am)
Just before this year's Oscars ceremony, a writer named Norah Vincent published an impassioned article in the Los Angeles Times, urging gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Hollywood actors and actresses to come out publicly. \nDoing so, she declared, would provide good role models for gay youth, whom she depicted as piteous suicide candidates. In fact, she began her essay by asking the reader to imagine a gay boy preparing the noose he would use to hang himself, a young lesbian inhaling auto exhaust in a sealed garage.\nI wholeheartedly support people coming out, even non-celebrities, but this article disturbed me on two counts. First, it joined the chorus glamorizing suicide among gay youth, treating it as a reasonable response to the discovery that one is a victim of the love that still dare not speak its name.\nSecond, celebrities are not role models. By their very nature they are "Not Like You": they are richer, more talented, more beautiful -- or, failing these, at least more famous. If anything, show business folk have traditionally been anti-role models, notorious for sexual and other "immorality."\nHollywood tried to counter this stigma early, developing a publicity machine to lie about its stars' private lives -- though they really had no private lives, having signed those away to Mr. Mayer or Mr. Warner's publicity departments. \nPart of a star's job was to perform for his or her fans the role of loving husband, devoted wife, doting parent, fervent patriot. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Rock Hudson, Greta Garbo and many others paid a heavy price for letting that machine define and control their lives to provide role models for America.\nNow we have gay people demanding that some Hollywood stars play the public role of happy, well-adjusted homosexuals -- preferably, I suspect, monogamously partnered, drug and disease-free, no fats, no fems, no freaks. (I'm using the language of personal ads here with malice aforethought.) Vincent wrote that celebrities "know all too well that being a public figure makes everything about them everyone's business," which "seems a fair, if Faustian, bargain." To her, maybe.\nThis raises the crucial question: Who will be empowered to decide what is a positive role model for our tender, suicidal gay teens? After all, if you come out but present a negative image, teenagers around the world will start connecting hoses to the exhaust of dad's Lexus, and it will be all your fault. Consider the fiercely independent singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, many of whose lesbian fans trashed her when she married a man. Does that make her a positive role model or a negative one, and for whom? As far as I know, DiFranco had always made it clear that there had been both women and men in her life, and she refused to let anyone restrict her, even her fans. I got the impression that they were trying to live vicariously, through her, the life they weren't brave enough to live for themselves, but that violated everything DiFranco stands for.\nThink I'm exaggerating? Maybe, but I'm not exaggerating the moral blackmail being attempted by those who tie the absence of celebrity role models to teen suicide. Numerous celebrity GLBT role models are available, from Chastity Bono to k. d. lang, from Wilson Cruz to RuPaul; for gerontophiles, Sir Ian McKellen and Lily Tomlin. How many do we need, exactly? How will it help a kid who's being beaten up every day at school if Ricky Martin comes out as a Log Cabin Republican? (A 2001 study of teen suicide by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health concluded that gay students who attempted suicide were apt to do so because of "victimization by their peers," not because of the selfishness of closeted celebrities.)\nI think Vincent greatly overestimated the power of stars to influence public opinion, perhaps because she's a journalist herself and likes to believe that the public are passive bread dough, to be kneaded and manipulated by compassionate media professionals. As DiFranco could tell you, that's an oversimplification. The fans have minds of their own, and as many stars could tell you, the publicity machine doesn't know what's best for their fans -- or for them.
(03/02/01 4:55am)
ABC News Anchor Cokie Roberts told aspiring IU journalists the other day that George W. Bush's current "honeymoon" with the press is because he's busy pushing his campaign promises through Congress. Bill Clinton enjoyed no such indulgence during his first 100 days because he got embroiled in the controversial issue of gays in the military.\nIn actuality, the media's fawning over Bush started with the election coverage and continues through the first months of his presidency.\nRoberts' statement is what we pointy-headed intellectuals call a false antithesis -- that is, an attempt to draw a distinction that isn't there. And you don't even need access to alternative media to dismantle it; all you need is a working memory.\nOn the Clinton side, it's true he made some controversial moves, from his half-hearted attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military to his proposed national health care plan (or more accurately, his proposed federal subsidy for HMOs), but those were also campaign promises he was trying to fulfill.\nOn the Bush side, he has done things that could have been controversial, and in the real world have been so: reinstating the gag rule on abortion in federally funded clinics abroad, appointing a highly controversial attorney general, advocating "charitable choice" (now under attack even from Christian-Right pontiff Pat Robertson) and bombing Iraq, to name just a few, all within a month of taking the oath of office. Roberts' false antithesis, then, doesn't explain why Bush gets so much lovin' from the national media while Clinton did not.\n(Parenthetically, I hate being in a position of seeming to defend Clinton. He was vile in so many ways, but mostly in ways his enemies in the media preferred to see as "moving toward the center," such as welfare reform and bombing Baghdad. Mostly the media hated him, as far as I can tell, for being pudgy, for having an intelligent wife and for successfully defying their best efforts to help the Republicans destroy him.)\nAll this leaves aside the minor matter that Bush himself is a controversial president, whose legitimacy even to occupy the office is viewed with -- what was Roberts' term? -- "healthy disrespect" by a good number of Americans.\nLed by Bush's unbiased cousin John Ellis, the national (I won't say "corporate" because it upsets liberals) media declared Bush the Lord's New Anointed with unseemly haste, and repeatedly declared their impatience that the Florida vote be resolved -- or better, ignored -- so that the healing process could begin. An interesting concept: elections wound us, the media heal us. This, despite polls that showed pretty clearly that many Americans were willing to wait for an accurate count. \nBush's inauguration was greeted with the largest counter-inaugural demonstrations since Richard Nixon took office, but again, the wise heads in the newsrooms knew best and preferred to concentrate on the glitz, the glamour and the 10-gallon hats.\nAnd the soft ride Bush has been getting from the press didn't begin with his inauguration. Even before the honeymoon, there was a hot flirtation and much heavy petting between the press corps and the Republican candidate. The media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has documented, for example, that far more attention was paid to Gore's lies than to Bush's, and quoted Cokie Roberts to the effect that the press considered Bush too dumb to be a "serial exaggerator" (Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2000).\nBack at IU, Roberts evaded questions about bias by playfully admitting she believes that "Congress should exist" and that "the founders of our country had the right idea." Cute; so she wants to keep the Electoral College? I'm more interested in Robert's declaration Monday night that she thought Clinton would never leave Washington, just hover over the strange bedfellows Bush and the Democratic Party like the Ghost of Christmas Past.\nIt would be nice if the press corps' coziness with the Bush administration were to lay to rest the long-standing myth about "liberal media." Mark Hertsgaard's book On Bended Knee, which showed how thoroughly the media fawned over Reagan, should have done the job.\nWhat truth that myth contains has more to do with the media occupying the leftward pole of a political spectrum that keeps moving to the right (so that George Bush is more "liberal" than, say, Benito Mussolini) than with any actual liberal content or bias.\nThe more a journalist is a toady to power, the more he or she likes to think of him or herself as a bold, independent voice. For some time now I've preferred to speak of "the near right" (with the Clintons and Dole scurrying toward the right end of that zone) and "the far right" (Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh).\nYou don't like the left? Fine; just don't confuse us with Hillary Clinton -- a nice woman perhaps, but not a leftist, or even a liberal.
(02/23/01 4:43am)
Almost everybody complains about the mass media, but who does anything about them? Most people I've known who say they despise television still watch a lot of it. (I watch less than an hour per week.) People who are complacently cynical about Hollywood rarely watch anything Blockbuster doesn't stock in multiple copies. They do a little better, perhaps, with books, but it's hard to be sure around a university: whenever I see someone reading something interesting, it almost always turns out to be for a class.\nI get the impression what many people want is better service from the media. Audiences want the news, for example, to tell the truth they want to hear, about those things that interest them, with a bias that matches theirs so closely that they won't notice it as bias. The Internet has been marketed as a mass medium that can do this. If that is true, it still leaves us consumers of a mass-produced bias others have decided to feed us. \nMaybe what people want is parity of bias. Many liberals have expressed the wish for a sort of liberal Rush Limbaugh, someone who will think for them as Limbaugh professes to think for dittoheads. I think many gay people would welcome a pro-gay version of "Dr." Laura Schlessinger, who would field calls from homophobes and put them firmly, brutally, in their place.\nWell, fine, I suppose there's a market niche for something like that. Or for a gay version of "Friends" -- if Showtime's "Queer As Folk" (which might better be titled "Twinks in Heat") isn't providing that already. The pressure works in the other direction, too: the brilliant lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel does a remarkable job of coping with demands from her fans that she depict the entire range of lesbian life. But why should she have to do so? Why shouldn't someone else do a comic strip about (say) Republican, Southern Baptist lesbians who are into bondage and sex toys? We need more voices, not one voice forced to speak for everyone.\nPersonally, I see no reason why the mass media necessarily should cater to me: a left-wing, working-class, anti-religious gay man. The only reason they might want to is their corporate imperative to reach everyone, so that every knee shall bow to them, every mouth confess their dominion and every hand purchase the products of their advertisers.\nI don't mind watching Hollywood movies sometimes, since there are things Hollywood does well. I've even been known to read best-sellers, and to listen to music from major labels. Being low-class is a good reason to indulge in mass culture: it inspires such fury in would-be elitoids: they have strokes when they see you reading a Danielle Steele novel, and that makes the world a better place. But I also choose to support alternative media when I can, because my world would be poorer without them.\nI think it's in everyone's interest to limit their intake of commercial mass media as much as possible. For instance, as the media commercialize beauty, they standardize it so that only a very few people can be considered attractive at all. (It might be only a coincidence the mass media will largely own the rights to those few attractive people.) If watching TV makes you dissatisfied with the real people around you, turn off the TV.\nAlso, the more you watch, the less you know. Whether it's the dulled-down Disney version of Greek myths and Chinese legends, or CNN's version of the bombing of Baghdad by whichever American warlord is currently in office, the commercial media are not about informing you accurately. They are propaganda for corporations, government, or both -- and as the great maverick journalist I.F. Stone pointed out, all governments lie.\nThe opinion page is full of bias -- the columnists are expected to express their biases for the enjoyment or chagrin of our readers. But bias does not just extend to the opinion page -- the news pages aren't free of bias; it's just expressed in different ways, through what is not said instead of what is said. It's impossible to eliminate bias altogether. Your only defense is to examine a wider range of positions than you're likely to find in mainstream media -- which, returning to my original point, is something you must learn to do for yourself.