Mr. DeMille, He's Ready For His Close-Up: Vito Russo And Gay Liberation

Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist:  The Life and Times Of Vito Russo (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).  361 pp. Index, illustrations.  $29.95 hardback.

It is June, otherwise known by Presidential proclamation as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, a time when major cities and resort towns around the country have parades and sell beer.  What we are celebrating, other than the success of GLBT entrepeneurship, is the Stonewall Riots.  An iconic event, it began on June 28 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York, following a raid on the Stonewall Inn, and continued on for days as roving groups of queers provoked, and resisted, the police.  This, it is said, was the birth of gay liberation, which is technically true.  Activists subsequently formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that made a definitive break with homophile politics.  For those of you who don't know this history, homophile groups were accomodationist in their strategies, trying to persuade straights and the state that gays and lesbians, except for their sexuality, were just like everyone else:  unfortunately, in this day and age of gay marriage, gay babies and gay war, this is increasingly the case.

Homophile groups like Mattachine, ONE and Daughters of Bilitis were not, however, conservative, a charge made by the GLF at the time that scholars like Martin Meeker, Marcia Gallo and David Johnson have effectively refuted.  They laid a critical foundation for community building and formal legal action that would produce a gay rights movement of the 1970s that would seek to extend basic civil rights to people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender status.  GLF, on the other hand, adopted the confrontational stance that had become characteristic of the black power, anti-war and radical feminist groups with whom many of their members were, or had been, associated. GLF was to the homophiles as the Black Panthers were to the Urban League. 

We are long overdue for more books that look at this historical moment at the level of the individual life, as Michael Schiavi, associate professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, does in Celluloid Activist.  Vito Russo was one of the gay men who came to Greenwich Village as a young gay man to embed himself in its queer counterculture, and he quickly became involved in radical activism after Stonewall.  But Russo is even more famous for his path-breaking book, The Celluloid Closet:  Homosexuality in the Movies, originally published in 1981 and re-published in a revised edition in 1987.  Born in 1946, this founder of gay cultural criticism should be signing up at the social security office this year, but like many men of his generation he contracted AIDS and died in 1990.

Schiavi's is an authorized biography, which may account for its emphasis on Russo's achievements (which were many) and its less sure touch about the complexities of his personality.  Schiavi has a keen sense of Russo's place in the gay men's culture that flourished in the 1970s, organized around uninhibited sexuality, and known colloquially as "the party." Schiavi's difficult task of situating Russo in his social world, and interpreting him through it is largely successful, and caused me to wonder whether, for certain figures, group biographies are almost necessary.

Russo had a network of deeply devoted friends, who were attracted to his evanescent personality and sharp intelligence, friends whose patience he often tried.  Russo's love life is a particular minefield: he seemed to be both a little bit of (what we used to call back in the day) a star f**cker, and he very much enjoyed being the object of star f**king.  While relationships were not the strong suit of many queer folk in those years, in part because relationships were either not the point or they were wide open, Russo seemed to have a particular penchant for falling in love with beautiful, helpless, unemployed boys; pledging undying devotion to them; moving them into into his apartment; and then getting really, really sick of them and kicking them out.  It didn't make me not like him, but it did make me think that there was some deeper insight that Schiavi was avoiding here, perhaps out of tact and deference to the family.

Russo's work on the Celluloid Closet (which was made into a documentary after his death) came from a public lecture he put together over the years, in which he demonstrated, through film clips and analysis, how unnamed but very obvious "gayness" in films produced, and shored up, the idea of "heterosexuality."  This is such a basic tenet of queer studies now that it is hard to recall what a stunning insight this was in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly since there were not so many gay or lesbian books.  Russo came to this analysis from his formal academic training in film and a lifetime of fandom.  Like many gay kids, Vito seem to have been born a movie queen and a fan of the great divas:  Stanwyck, Crawford, Davis.  He was one of those guys weeping in the front row as Judy Garland, in her late years, stumbled drunkenly over her lyrics mid-set.  He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of classic Hollywood film making and acquired a rather large collection of movies (Schiavi suggests that some of these may have been stolen) prior to the days when such things were available on VCR, and delighted in showing them to friends.

Vito maintained a rather tenuous economic existence, even though he worked constantly as a journalist and operated on the edge of show business, a world he clearly adored (one of his great thrills after his AIDS diagnosis was an introduction to Elizabeth Taylor.)  He was friends with Bette Midler during the Divine Miss M's Continental Baths days, and then not so much when he insisted that she identify with queer activism after her mainstream success, something she clearly viewed as exploitation and he viewed as her selling out the people who had made her career in the first place.  (I think they were both right, although it isn't clear what Schiavi thinks.) Vito's relationships with other celebrities endured, however, particularly his friendship with Lily Tomlin.  One of the interesting parts of the book which should push another scholar to get going on her, is Tomlin's development of comic characters that were clearly queer, her struggles over coming out, and her regret, voiced at the end of the book, that she did not do so earlier.

Vito Russo was in the first great wave of men to be diagnosed in the portion of the AIDS epidemic that swallowed communities of urban gay men in the 1980s.  One of the triumphs of this book is that it articulates what it felt like to be at Ground Zero in downtown New York, as one's friends died slowly of horrible diseases that could just barely be treated.  I found these chapters enormously difficult to read, as the lists of men who had peopled the early chapters of the book were diagnosed and died.  Schiavi also depicted, quite accurately in my view, how those years felt. I recall sick men taking care of sick men; the halls at NYU hospital where deathly ill people waited for a bed for days; parents unable to comprehend the cataclysmic, sudden death of a child; scattering ashes in favorite vacation spots.  People behaved far better than you might ever have imagined they could, and they behaved indescribably badly.  I recall watching an age peer wander around the room incontinent and unable to find the bathroom, the rest of us not knowing that his brain was being eaten by toxoplasmosis because his lover (who was also infected but didn't want anyone to know) insisted that our friend had been tested (he hadn't) and didn't have AIDS.  All of this is in the book, and Schiavi describes it with a sure narrative touch.

One reason to read, or to teach, this book, is that it links lots of different things in the life of one person:  gay community, activism, the emergence of a gay intellectual sensibility, the party, and the party's end.  Because of this, when it comes out in paper, you could easily use it as a text for a post-1945 GLBT history course.  But honestly?  It's also a good read -- not always an easy one, but a good one -- and you might want to have it on your bedside table when you are done with Gay Pride and ready to return to gay life.

A Brief Exchange From My Dream Life Where I Address Some Confusion On The Political Right

Rush Limbaugh (hysterically):  "The decision not to defend Roe v. Wade by a corrupt attorney general is another instance of a criminal administration!  What if Obama decided to stop defending Roe v. Wade?  How would the liberals like that?"

Tenured Radical (with unnerving calm):  "Supreme Court decisions and litigation are two entirely different things, Fat Stuff.  Under the constitution, the President and the Department of Justice don't defend Supreme Court decisions, only laws that are defensible under the Constitution. No one  outside the Court, except radio personalities and issue-based non-profits, actually 'defends' Supreme Court decisions, and those defenses are either purely rhetorical or based in fund-raising appeals and organizing.  Instead, precedents are upheld, or not upheld by the court in response to new litigation, based on dissents and concurrences articulated and written by members of the Court.  You f&#king nitwit."



Hat tip.

To Those Who Tell Us Not To Celebrate The Repeal Of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell:" Ask Yourself Why People In Your Workplace Can't Come Out, and What You Plan To Do About It

You might also want to take a little vacation from critique and let the rest of us enjoy the elimination of a law that went out its way to make life even more difficult for queer people, all in the name of progress. As for the killjoys who say that this won't prevent gay and lesbian soldiers from being harassed in the military, I say: true.  BUT: why don't you tell me a place where we actually are safe?  School perhaps?  The streets? At home?

Whether you believe in the military or not, and whether this is only part of the pie rather than the whole pie, shrinking the circle of legal stigma is a baby step to making this country a little more livable for everyone.

Photo credit.

Hoo-rah!

This Is My Weapon, This Is My Gun: A Gay Primer For Worried Straights In The Military

"Simply because you're near me, I'm in the mood for love!" Credit.

This is my rifle, this is my gun;
One is for fighting, one is for fun.
-- The Rifleman's Creed, 1941

Want to know whether repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is good policy?  Why listen to the generals or the Secretary of Defense?  Go ask an expert -- an 18 year-old boy in South Carolina.

In today's Grey Lady, James Dao goes to Jacksonville, South Carolina to do just that.  Although a few young soldiers offered indifferent or positive responses to the question, "Would you want to share a foxhole with one?" (another version of, "Would you want your daughter to marry one?") others are worried.  Among the memorable quotes are:

From an 18 year-old soldier who says he is socially comfortable with gays: “They won’t hold up well in combat."

From a 22 year-old soldier who has served a tour in Afghanistan: "Coming from a combat unit, I know that in Afghanistan we’re packed in a sardine can....There’s no doubt in my mind that openly gay Marines can serve, it’s just different in a combat unit. Maybe they should just take the same route they take with females and stick them [in] noncombat units.”

From a 19 year-old soldier who is happy to serve in combat with gay men: “Showers will be awkward.”

From an 18 year-old soldier: “Being gay means you are kind of girly. The Marines are, you know, macho.”  Ain't that the truth, Ruth:  especially macho are the Marines who are already playing Seven Minutes in Heaven with each other at off-base parties.  That's what makes it so sexy.

Part of what I find amusing about this, and perversely cute, is the absolute certainty of many young men that they are infinitely and universally attractive; and that they spark desires in others that cannot be reined in.  In this scenario, gay male soldiers are simply an addition to the already substantial female population that thinks they are hot, hot, hot.

Anyone who is a college teacher knows that there is a substantial population of athletes (and guys who look like athletes but are too lazy to go out for a team) who, once the weather warms up, spend hours in prominent campus locations, stripped to the waist, six packs a-rippling, playing wiffle ball or some other pseudo-sport.  Why?  Because they know they look so good and they are dying to share it.  Oh yeah, this has a dark side too, but at its most benign, it is a core feature of a certain kind of masculinity.

And don't you think it's interesting that Dao  interviewed no women for this article?  What do you think that was about?  Enquiring minds want to know.

Interviewing worried straight people is not, however, a good data set to base a transition to the post-DADT military on.  So here are some positive steps I would like to forward to Secretary Gates.

In each service, pick out an all-gay platoon, an all-straight platoon, and a mixed gay/straight platoon.  Send them all to Ranger School and see how many in each platoon come back with Ranger tabs.  The platoon that comes back with the most soldiers in tabs wins.  I'm putting my money on the gays:  we are incredible overachievers. 

Put lesbians in combat.  If gay men are girly, it is another well-known fact that lesbians are mannish, right?  I'm thinking while we are waiting for the gay guys to man up in non-combat related jobs, we can fill in the gaps with lesbians who are definitely not going to sexually abuse men in those tight little foxholes.  Think Joan of Arc.  Furthermore, after a tour with some super-star dykes, I guarantee some of these straight men will be combing the ranks for gay soldiers who won't be kicking their a$$es nonstop.

Gently break it to the straight boys that it seems to be them who are "looking" in the shower.  I mean, how do they know that anyone is looking in the shower, or become experts about what is behind the look?  I rest my case.  Boys will be boys.  They always look at each other, when they are not looking at themselves.

Gay men are not women.  I'm just saying.  And by the way-- what if they were? Lose the sexism before some female Marine comes along to kick your a$$.

Young men are in a constant state of arousal no matter what.  This is simply a fact.  If you see a guy walking past you with an erection, don't take it personally.  Look to your own short arm and make sure it's in its holster. 

Any erection that arrives while the body attached to it is under fire, or about to be under fire, is likely to be a source of mirth rather than a threat to the sexual safety of others.  I mean, seriously. 

Homosex and heterosex are not actual differences.   It is a fiction that straights and gays are actually different kinds of people.  Furthermore, there is no difference between what men and men; men and women; and women and women do in bed, and there is no difference between homosexual and heterosexual desire that wasn't invented by some doctor, psychiatrist or cleric.  It's all sex, there are appropriate and inappropriate venues for having sex, and people agree and disagree about what they are regardless of whether they are bent homo or bent hetero. 

Military people are overwhelmingly religious.  Make a list of the crazy $hit that folks say about GLBT people, hand it out to all the chaplains, and get them to work with homophobic soldiers on it.  While you are at it, get the chaplains to stop saying crazy $hit about gay and lesbian people as if it were actually coming straight from God.  Jesus would serve happily with a gay man.  I am absolutely certain of this (and come to think of it, Jesus looks a little girly in most pictures.)  But on a more practical note, since one of my closest kindred spirits is a Christian conservative straight woman (whose son is on the brink of deploying) I would say that one of the finest features of our friendship is that although we have differences on some core issues, we don't say the kind of crazy $hit to each other that is the lingua franca of our different constituencies.  This, in turn, I would like to think, promotes genuine tolerance (as opposed to the fake-y hypocritical tolerance) in both of us towards the attitudes represented by other.  This form of tolerance then becomes a bridge to sympathetic understanding, transformation, respect and deep friendship.

And now, to reinforce distinctions that are already well-known to any grunt who has gone through basic training, a performance of the Rifleman's Creed from Full Metal Jacket (1987).

Why Ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell Is Important, And What Remains To Be Done

Make love, not war?  Photo credit.

I am one of those lefty queers who is both anti-war and desired the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  Noxious as war is, it is also my view that allowing forms of discrimination to be written into the law is neither a gift ("Yay, I am radically free from compulsory marriage!") or a way to distance from the American war machine ("Yay! I'm not implicated in the American war machine, even though my consumer habits, my pension and the university that employs me depends on it!")

In regard to this latter point:  think Bayard Rustin.  True, Bayard was not out as a gay man until very late in life, but he was very black, and he went to jail during World War II as a conscientious objector as a member of both the civil rights and anti-war movements.  I mention this both because he might have evaded service by announcing his homosexuality (although this would have complicated his life on the homophobic left earlier than it eventually did) and because going to jail was not a move that a black man made lightly in the 1940s, as he was more than likely to come out in a box.*

While watching the signing ceremony is not going to make me teary (as I was, for example, back in 1987, when Barney Frank came out; and again in 1990, when the first openly gay person was permitted to address the Democratic convention) I consider this to be an important step -- not necessarily towards equality, but towards a basis by which we might imagine an inclusive human rights agenda in the United States and a recognition of the ways in which certain groups are confined by the law and other groups are freed by it.  Repealing DADT is an imperfect way of getting there, as is marriage equality, but they are both necessary moves even if you, personally, find marriage and the military noxious and retrograde.

Myself, I find hypocrisy to be the source of most social and political toxicity.  From that perspective,  these institutions are merely the effect of a broader American commitment to hypocrisy and a reproductive mechanism for it, not the actual problems.

I say this because a great many queer intellectuals and activists will not be popping the cork on this one.  In "Don't Enlist, Don't Serve", Troy Williams writes:  "There are many things worse than discrimination. Being hit by a mortar blast, losing a limb, living with post-traumatic stress disorder or killing another human all come to mind."  Arguing that DADT has "saved an uncounted number of queer lives," he also points to the high levels of violence perpetrated by soldiers against each other.  "The culture of the military encourages hazing, misogyny and homophobia;" that "war fucks people up;" and that veterans are often neglected and abused following their service by a political machine and a society that refuses to commit to sane social welfare policies.

Kathryn Franke notes the ways in which increased visibility of lesbians has the potential to enhance institutionalized brutality towards women in the military.  In "It Gets Worse:  What Repeal of DADT May Mean For Sexual Violence In The Military," she argues that like the marriage equality movement, military service is a "curious" location "for the elaboration of a free-self."  By this she means, in fact, wrong-headed, since both institutions are forms of state regulation that emphasize disciplining the self to a set of rules that are intended to control and confine us.

Franke goes on to remind us that, within this highly disciplined institution, there are already appalling rates of sexual violence against women in the military, and that "open military service for lesbians may hold greater, or at least different, peril for lesbians than it does for gay men."  She continues:

Surely gay men who will serve openly will be vulnerable to hazing, harassment and even violence from other service members who do not welcome their presence in the U.S. military. Even in countries that have allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly for some time find their gay soldiers brutally harassed from time to time. (See e.g. here)


But lesbians will face harassment on account of their sexual orientation in a way that compounds the kind of harassment and violence all women in the military suffer as a routine matter. A routine matter about which the military already knows and does very little to combat.

Interestingly, at one point in his testimony last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates linked the issue of violence against women in the military to the potential for violence against out queer soldiers, the only time I have ever heard a military official bring this subject up voluntarily.  So another possibility here (sigh) is that DADT has caused new scrutiny of systemic sexual violence in the military because we can now acknowledge that men are candidates for rape.
 
Together, the posts by Williams and Franke point to a yawning absence on the queer, policy-oriented left that the vital new directions in queer scholarship have yet to make a serious dent in:  what a queer anti-violence politics that was not entirely situational would look like.  This, in turn, would require a new interrogation of cultures of male violence that were the object of violent disagreement on the feminist left in the 1980s; that were never fully resolved; and that are imbricated in the queer intellectual perspectives articulated above.  We need a better theory of the institutional conditions that produce homophobic and sexist violence, as well as high levels of compliance by those who do not perpetrate violence with those who do, and a theory that does not entirely rely on disappearing the institution itself.

DADT has moved to yesterday's Senate vote, for example, I have thought constantly about a straight male acquaintance who joined an elite branch of the armed forces, and was, at every stage of his training and deployment, forced to endure rituals of violence and humiliation that were not specifically homophobic.  They included such useful military skills as spending a day doing his work with a filthy toilet seat around his neck, standing in formation in the middle of the night nude except for the women's underpants on his head (yes, what happened at Abu Ghraib happens all the time in the U.S. military), staying up all night cleaning a latrine with his toothbrush and then being ordered to use it in his mouth, and being repeatedly beaten up by other soldiers for imagined failures of deference.

What strikes me as a particularly graphic example for the need of a more embracing theoretical perspective is the failure to make a practical connection between what currently counts for an anti-violence politics on the queer left -- homophobic and sexist bullying among high school students -- to a realistic sense of the ways the military (but also marriage and the family) perpetuate and institutionalize violence.  These issues are, in fact, inseparable, as a political history of school and of the the military are also inseparable.  Each institution relies heavily on invisible systems of self-rule to maintain governance and subservience.  In each case, self-rule is based on forms of brutality that could not possibly be legitimated by the state, but which serve as discipline by proxy.

So yes, sign that bill President Obama, so we can get started on the real work of ending violence.
________________________

*You can read about it Rustin's heroism in John D'Emilio's excellent biography, Lost Prophet:  The Life And Times Of Bayard Rustin.

Department of Archives: GLAD Papers Go To Yale, Mitch McConnell Comes Out

Ssssh!  Don't let John Boehner know!

That's Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, queer history fans.  And Mitch McConnell didn't really come out, but doesn't the action figure at right look a lot like Mitch McConnell in a dress?  And wouldn't it be cool if he did come out, and then helped to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

OK, dream on.  And when I dream, I dream of archives. In case you don't know why the GLAD archive is important, read on from this press release received on the Radical desk top today:

GLAD is the New England litigation organization whose precedent-setting legal victories include bringing marriage equality to Massachusetts in 2004 and Connecticut in 2008.

Covering all the major social changes and legal developments in contemporary LGBT history – from the HIV epidemic to marriage equality, from transgender rights to the “gayby boom,” GLAD’s records include correspondence, legal documents, research materials, photographs, meeting minutes, reports, publications, press releases, and financial records. The materials reveal the fascinating “backstory” to many of GLAD’s groundbreaking lawsuits – including early litigation that secured the right of a gay Rhode Island high school student to bring his boyfriend to the prom, the Supreme Court victory holding that people with HIV are protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the suit that led to Vermont’s historic civil union law, and the marriage equality wins in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The materials will be available in Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library in New Haven.  The Yale University Library has one of the country’s most important research collections in LGBT history and the history of sexuality, including the records of Love Makes A Family; nineteenth-century diaries documenting same-sex intimacy; the papers of Harvey Fierstein, Gertrude Stein, Glenway Westcott, Larry Kramer, David Mixner, and numerous other lesbian and gay writers, artists, and activists; and one of the largest collections in the world of homosexual periodicals published before the gay liberation era of the 1970s.

“As an organization that has brought about significant shifts in the way LGBT people are treated under the law, by the government and by society as a whole, GLAD’s records will be an invaluable source for scholars, historians, civil rights advocates and students,” said Christine Weideman, Sterling Memorial Library’s Director of Manuscripts and Archives. “We’re grateful to be entrusted with preserving this vital part of history.”

“GLAD was founded in response to a series of anti-gay government actions in Boston in 1977-1978, including a police sting operation at the Boston Public Library.  That our records will now be archived at Yale’s world-renowned research library is a marker of how far the LGBT community has progressed over the last three decades,” said Lee Swislow, GLAD’s Executive Director. “We are honored to have played a part in that progress just as we are honored that Yale will ensure that the record of our work is preserved for the benefit of future generations.”

“These papers will be of immense value to historians and other scholars,” said George Chauncey, Professor of History and co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. “GLAD’s litigation has played a leading role in mitigating the widespread discrimination faced by LGBT people, and their remarkable records will give scholars and the public a much better understanding of both the extent of that discrimination and the legal and political strategies that have challenged it.”

Records designated by GLAD as open to research will be available in early 2011.

I can just hear your mother now.  "First I had to stop using the word 'gay,' and now I have to stop....."

Keep Your Hands Off My Junk! And Other Happy Thanksgiving Travel Wishes

Lesbo TSA fantasy time.  Reuters photo.

It appears that our new national crisis is the danger of being irradiated, or the indignity of being aggressively patted down,  at the airport.  In response to one outraged male victim spontaneously telling a Transportation Safety Authority employee to "Keep your hands off my junk!" people on the right and the left seem to have united in the belief that the government is going too far by making sure that airline passengers are not rigged as boobs -- er, I mean, bombs.

You can even buy a tee shirt to let the TSA know how you feel about it.

Now, I don't mean to be unfeeling.  I heard the interview with the man who was publicly drenched in his own urine during a clumsy search. I have read about the flight attendant whose prosthetic breast was examined to see if it contained plastic explosives.  I saw the shivering child, whose shirt was removed by his father when he set off the alarm, having his tiny elastic waistband inspected by a TSA employee.  I sympathize with the fears of transpeople that they will be publicly exposed in hostile environments. It seems likely that people who harbor objects on their bodies made of silicone, rubber and plastic -- people who are vulnerable anyway -- will be targeted in ways that may make difficult lives more difficult.

There's something for everyone to hate here, particularly those of us who feel we get enough radiation year after year at the dentist and by just living in a thoroughly irradiated world that is saturated with the residue of nuclear testing.

But has anyone but me noticed the high degree of homophobia in the air, as people on the right and the left describe what is terrible about body searches that virtually no one has to go through if they would just agree to walk through the scanners and allow a complete stranger to look at the outlines of their naked body for seven seconds? Few critics see this as an official erosion of privacy, a concern voiced by  the ACLU.  Americans to the end, it is sex everyone is concerned about.  A man on the news a couple nights ago described his increasing discomfort as a male TSA official slid a hand up his thigh with a thumb fully extended towards his anus. Jane Hamsher, of the progressive Firedoglake (who has dubbed the full-body visual screening devices "the porno scanners") described the enhanced pat-down in a horrified post earlier today:  200 Capitol Hill staffers watched as a female TSA worker stroked another TSA workers breasts and butt.  Afterwards, an onlooker said that "it made people so uncomfortable to watch, that people were averting their eyes."

Why pull your punches, Jane?  What's bothering most people is that they are forced to be "gay" for the minute or so it takes to complete the security procedure.  In a rant where he orders the state to "Get your hands off my teabag,"  Rush Limbaugh reveals to us that the federal government, under the Obama administration, has become gay. "Obama-led government agents are acting like perverts in some places....and make no mistake, it is the government fondling us."  Obama could say "the fondling stops here.  All Obama would have to do is call a little press conference, a little speech.  All he would have to say is the fondling stops here....We have the Miranda warning.  Well, now we have the Obama warning.  You have the right to remain silent while we fondle you.  Anything you say while we fondle you can and will be used against you."

See what I mean?  What is interesting to me is that this appears to be an entirely non-partisan issue:  the federal government is being sexual with everyone, and it makes it even worse that it is same gender!  Imagine the outcry if the TSA hired children to do enhanced body searches of children.  How pornographic would that be?

Go here to read the myths and facts on the TSA blog ("OMG! They aren't just gay, they blog too?!?")  But in the meantime, here are five things I like less than the idea being patted down by a hot young TSA employee and having her wonder whether I was born into the world with that "junk" or not:

• Being blown up in-flight;
• Having my Middle Eastern, South Asian and black friends being racially profiled;
• Being blown up on the runway;
• Being taken hostage and flown into a building;
• Being morally responsible for the estimated 500 civilians in Pakistan who have been killed in unmanned drone strikes by the Obama administration.  For every two terrorists that are killed, one civilian is killed, which is a lot higher number than the estimated 3% of American travelers who are body searched in airports on any given day.  In addition, it should be noted that most people survive a body search, whereas surviving a drone strike is a tougher proposition.

As travelers flounder about in their homophobic panic and American narcissism, has it occurred to them that we have brought this foolishness on ourselves by fighting a prolonged war that has produced an escalated counterinsurgency, metastasizing Al-Qaeda to more countries than it ever had bases in prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq?

I doubt it.

Planet University: Episode 2, "Last Month In Office Hours"

For the pilot episode of "Planet University"  go to our sister website at Xtranormal.com.  Afternoon update:  a big welcome to readers of the National Review Online:  it's been awhile, but I'm glad to see you back again.



Disclaimer:  this cartoon and its characters are fictional.  "Planet University" does not depict actual events, people or conversations.

Bro's Before Ho's and Fraternity Hazing Lows

"Spank him hard, but after each spanking make
 sure to caress his tender cheeks." Photo Credit.

By doing things like forcing your pledges/rooks to eat human shit or do an elephant walk you are basically saying, “Hey, by learning what your fellow bros’ shit tastes like you will be better bros,” and I have to say - I really respect that....Everytime I say, “I’m going to make your fucking life a living hell,” I still get a half-chub. Bros fucking love power. You know who else loves power? Slam pieces. By hazing the shit out of pledges/rooks in front of slam pieces, 9 times out of 10 they will go down on you immediately. The other time they will give it up doggy.  Bros Like This Site, July 23 2009.


Two days ago, residents of Oligarch University's historic quad, where all first year students are housed, were interrupted in their evening activities by a line of young men chanting. As the Oldest College Daily (OCD) reported,

At their pledge initiation....DKE members shouted phrases such as “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f--- dead women.” Some of the students were blindfolded and being led in a line with their hands on each others’ shoulders.


Perhaps even more stunning than the fact that any young man thinks that declaring himself a rapist is a reasonable prerequisite for joining a campus organization, was a senior DKE brother claiming in Thursday's story that the pledges, and only the pledges, were responsible for this incident.  Saner heads prevailed, or someone from the national and/or the university administration called with a stern warning.  As of today, the president of DKE has apologized for the chants.

The good news is that the Oligarch Women's Center went into action almost immediately.  The bad news is that, with the exception of SAE which has had a steep learning curve on hazing and sexual violence since an incident in 2008, the other fraternities still don't have a grip on what is wrong here.  According to the OCD,

When William Bradley ’12, president of SAE, heard of the event Wednesday night, he contacted the Women’s Center and the Pi Beta Phi sorority to express his regrets about the incident and apologize on behalf of SAE.  But Bradley referred to the pledge’s chanting of “SAE” during their initiation as part of the good-natured rivalry between the two frats and “friendly banter.” President of Sigma Nu Matt Chesky ’12 said he thought despite the campus reaction, DKE did not intend to offend anyone.  James Berry ’12, president of SigEp, said he did not see the issues of sexism and sexual violence as limited to Greek life at Yale, but rather as a larger issue that is not talked about enough.  Harry McNamara ’11, president of Sigma Chi, and Bill Toth ’11, president of Alpha Epsilon Pi, declined to comment on the incident.

Some confusion in the ranks, isn't there? Wouldn't want to screw up pledging by deferring to a bunch of feminazis and their pu$$y-whipped male counterparts.  OK, let's get to the takeaways.

First, all fraternity members are always responsible for anything that happens in any initiation ritual.  Always.  Any fraternity chapter that does not understand this should have its charter lifted immediately. A hallmark of hazing, and a reason why it is against the law many places, is that it is a lot like rape.  Hazing depends on inspiring fear and humiliation by making people do dangerous, physically intrusive things against their will.  Because of this, unless tightly controlled by sober people who understand the elements of physical safety involved and the limits of consent, hazing becomes more and more extreme depending on both the tolerance/fear of the pledges and the new normals that are set as the hazing process escalates.  This is true whether you are talking about scavenger hunts, forced drinking or pranks (check out this one, where an SAE pledge at the University of Kentucky was set on fire, or this one in which a Sig Ep at Florida Atlantic was kidnapped, bound with duct tape, verbally abused and forced to drink until he vomited repeatedly and passed out.)

Second, a strong women's center, staffed by professionals, is essential to any campus that cares about preventing sexual violence against women or men.  The quick response, and prior organizing efforts, of Oligarch's women's center was important to initiating a positive and firm institutional response to this incident rather than the de-centered rage and tension that can sometimes obscure the issues at stake around sexual violence.  What is more important is that the university can only punish the individuals involved.  But a community informed by institutionalized feminism can do the kind of consciousness raising necessary to address the fraternity's underlying assumption that sexual violence can be "just" a joke, or worse, is necessary to men creating intimate bonds with other men and therefore isn't anyone's business but theirs. In fact, it is the cloistered quality of frat hazing, and its homoerotic content, that makes initiation violence so dangerous to the campus community as well as to individual pledges.  Consider the following suggestion for effective hazing rituals over at Frat Beat:

Inserting objects into a Little Brother's rectum is a tradition that stems all the way back to Prostatus Engorgum and his Unity of Anal Fixation. Keys, whisks, squash racquet handles, boots, bottles, whatever. It may pain him, but it will teach an important lesson: sometimes life hurts. Indeed, the Little Brother might even cry while learning this. He might fight the handcuffs and bleed, but you can diffuse his misery quite easily. Masturbate afterwards and this will show him how proud you are. Upon completion of your self-pleasure, mark him as your territory and he will surely squeal with delight. The two of you have a bond that can never be broken. So crack a beer and hit the sororities, dude!

Other suggestions include nipple torture, urine play and group-humping a water melon.

Frat rituals that turn young men into "bitches" are so powerful because of the pre-existing assumption that women and gay men are already "bitches" to proper men.  Even when hazings do not simulate S/M sexual practices that should only be attempted by highly knowledgeable and consenting adults, fraternity initiations are always, in some degree, sexually abusive to men.  Hazing  temporarily makes men into "women" and "queers;" it then recuperates them back to proper masculinity from what the ritual itself has articulated as a despicable and lowly socio-sexual position.  Until college and university administrations address the role male eroticism and sexualized violence have in fraternity and team hazings, they will not be able to come to grips with sexual violence and homophobia on campus either.

Straight People, Listen! Part II: The Homophobia News Of The Week In Review

Carl Paladino campaigning in New Paltz, NY after
his ill-chosen homophobic words.  Photo credit.

There is a lot going on in the gay world nowadays.

Following the suicide of Tyler Clementi at Rutgers, the straight world has discovered institutionalized homophobia and is "shocked, shocked!" that gay youth are not only routinely bullied in school, but that teachers, principles and coaches stand around and watch while it happens.  They are even more shocked that to be the recipient of repeated homophobic bullying is so isolating and devastating to a young person's self esteem that death seems like a good option.

Before you decide to hang from the highest tree those Rutgers students who posted to the Internet a video of Clementi kissing a boy (the event that precipitated his suicide leap from the George Washington Bridge) or make your own "It Gets Better" video, consider this.  What if Clementi was relentlessly bullied and ostracized in grade school, middle school and high school, and every adult who should have helped him instead told him that things would "get better" in college? He may have been enduring some hell-hole of an adolescence with this hope, and instead college turned out to be exactly the same.  That could really push you over the edge, couldn't it?


It's the accumulated weight of homophobia -- or sexism, or racism, or the massive weight of all three -- that gets you in the end, not any one incident.  So one of the questions that we have to answer for kids subjected to homophobic bullying:  When?  When is it going to get better?  And how? In that vein, one of my commenters, of the heterosexualist persuasion, sent me a copy of a letter she sent to her kid's school principal asking him what he is doing about homophobic bullying.  Until straight people start organizing and taking the initiative like this, you know what?  It isn't going to get better.

This is not to say that Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, collected on a YouTube channel, isn't great.  It is, and those of you who haven't browsed around it yet should do so (you can skip the queer child of celebrities, who may have had one of the most gruesome tabloid coming out stories ever, saying over and over for three minutes, "It's going to get better....really.  It will.  Get better.  I mean it.  It does. Get better.  Really.")  Here's a link to a particularly moving message from Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire; and my all time favorite for parents, by Ann Pellegrini at NYU, which should be burned to a CD-ROM and sent home from the hospital with every baby.

Now, the question is, even though it has gotten better for some of us, why isn't it better, all these years later?

Let's turn to our other gay news then, New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who launched an anti-gay rant last Sunday in front of a gaggle of Orthodox Jewish leaders in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said (watch the whole video here.)  One question New Yorkers might ask themselves prior to entering the voting booth is if they should have a governor who can't pronounce the word "pervert" correctly.  We at Tenured Radical are not sure why Mr. Paladino omitted a line in the original text --“There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual” -- but we think it might have been because the word "dysfunctional" had too many syllables.

Paladino's campaign manager says that the candidate is not homophobic, he's just Catholic.  As the Gray Lady reported:

Mr. Paladino declined a request to be interviewed after his appearance. His campaign manager, Michael R. Caputo, denied assertions that Mr. Paladino was antigay, and noted that he employed a gay man on his campaign staff.


“Carl Paladino is simply expressing the views that he holds in his heart as a Catholic,” Mr. Caputo said in a telephone interview. “Carl Paladino is not homophobic, and neither is the Catholic Church.”


“The majority of New Yorkers agree with him,” Mr. Caputo added. He said the campaign had done its own polling.


During his appearance at the synagogue, with reporters in attendance, Mr. Paladino said: “Don’t misquote me as wanting to hurt homosexual people in any way. That would be a dastardly lie.”


Just dastardly.


No matter how much pride we gay people have amassed over the years, in how many parades, when we are publicly called dysfunctional perverts we know that someone has put a big target on our backs.  Paladino has apologized, has said his words were "poorly chosen," and that what he meant to say was that if elected, he would "fight for all gay New Yorkers' rights."  Which is funny, because if you watch the whole video, by no stretch of the imagination is he saying that.  He would have had to choose entirely different words, and a different topic.

Fool.  Because, of course, this is exactly the kind of thing that hurts homosexual people, and if you don't know that you don't deserve to be governor of anybody.  Carl Paladino doesn't have to be running around with his very own baseball bat to make the world more dangerous, and "less better," for queer folks.

For  the first installment of Straight People Listen!  click on this link.

Straight People, Listen! The Pervasiveness of Cruelty In Mass Culture

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.


"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

                                          Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (1948)

Last weekend the Radical household went to see The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010), otherwise known as "The Facebook movie."  Starring the eerily enigmatic Jessie Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, it is a must-see, a fast-paced drama about the birth of the social networking site that any fool can use, and any fool does.  I left the theater feeling slightly soiled, in part because scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin leaves enough of the story line unresolved that at the end of the movie I was unsure about exactly how treacherous Zuckerberg was and why.  That he is brilliant is clear; that he is on the Asberger's spectrum is certainly implied; but whether he betrayed everyone he knew (including his soul-mate, Napster founder Sean Parker, played brilliantly by Justin Timberlake) and everyone who was ever kind to him, is a question the film also never answers.  One of the most highly interpretable lines in the film is when Eduardo, Zuckerberg's partner and CFO, says accusingly in response to being forced out of Facebook just prior to it becoming a Big Deal:  "I was your only friend."  Which is true -- and yet we, the audience, have seen breathtakingly cruel moments in which Zuckerberg has expressed a bitterness towards Eduardo that no normal person would express to a friend, moments that Eduardo himself has overlooked.

Needless to say, the urge to run home and open your Facebook is overwhelming, in part to see if it feels like Switzerland.  You know what I mean:  kind and pretty on the surface, and relying on a lot of confiscated wealth from depositors (who "mysteriously" never returned to get their money) to maintain its lovely appearance.  I've always thought that Facebook features like Farmville were creepy, but now it's hard to rid myself of the feeling that the whole thing is creepy.  I'm staying on it, but it's creepy.

Facebook also feels creepy because recently, at Zenith and at Rutgers, it has been the preferred method for a young person to leave a suicide note.  The Rutgers tragedy has underlined the capacity the internet creates to enhance everyday cruelties that people visit on each other.  As multiple reports describe it, fellow students Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei taped freshman Tyler Clementi making out with a new boyfriend and posted it to the internet.  Clementi, overcome with shame, jumped off the George Washington bridge.  Hence, the internet itself is both the beginning of the Clementi story and the end, the medium and the message

Coincidentally, "The Social Network" also begins with bullying.  The narcissistic Zuckerberg unrolls his plans for fame and fortune at Harvard to a girlfriend, who (sensibly) breaks up with him.  Zuckerberg's response is to go home and, shall we say, "unfriend," the woman through a vitriolic post on his blog.  Hence, a movie that shows the historical process by which "friend" will become a verb begins by demonstrating the power of the internet to destroy and to give virtual life to the most vicious of human emotions.  The movie that follows is punctuated by lightly coded moments of everyday brutality  in which Zuckerberg sees his status as an outsider graphically demonstrated by others who casually take their own superiority for granted. What you don't know until much later is that behind his enigmatic, expressionless face, this code-writing genius is also hatching elaborate plots for revenge.

And yet, is it really technology that has created new possibilities for social cruelty?  As our friends at Roxie's World noted last Sunday, in their post mourning Tyler Clementi, "Technology hasn't made humans less kind than they were in some non-existent machine-free past. It has only amplified the sound and accelerated the speed at which our unkindnesses circulate. We shouldn't disparage any act of kindness or any effort to foster greater kindness in the world. Instead, we should commit ourselves to creating a world in which kindness travels as quickly and gets as much attention as its opposite."

I agree.  I also think that, when older generations criticize the young for how horrible they are to each other, it is worth remembering that teenagers didn't invent homophobia, and they didn't invent the cultural fascination for shaming that traditional media are currently using to keep their tottering financial ships afloat.  From the magazines that inform us about every detail of Ashton Kutcher's betrayal of his (older) wife, to the endless commentary about why Shiloh Jolie-Pitt insists on wearing boy's clothes (and why Brad and Angelina permit it, thus driving a two by four into the gender system with their awesome social power), to Jerry Springer's endless "transsexual surprises" (in which apparently "heterosexual" couples are brought out on stage for a "confession" that is invariably followed by a transphobic brawl), to prime-time reality shows in which people agree to be shamed on public television for having bad pets, being fat, depressed, unclean, hoarders and/or single, we are a nation of criticism and wagging fingers.   In fact, much like our forebears, who thought that a day in the public stocks would set things back on track, we seem compelled to separate the few sheep from the mass of unlovely goats.  Shaming is the first step in setting our national house in order.

Cyberbullying is an old phenomenon with a new set of tools available, tools that are only sometimes employed by the young.  And of course, as Shirley Jackson pointed out in 1948, when somebody else is chosen, the rest of us are often impatient to "finish quickly" and move on, shaking our heads sorrowfully about the unpleasant excesses expressed by a few deviant souls who made the mistake of hitting "post" when other, more civilized folk, were just sniggering behind the victim's back.

Straight people, listen!  Why it is that otherwise "normal" teenagers are so profoundly insecure as to look for ways to lord it over their peers, and what kind of behavior has been modeled to them that makes them think it is ok? Why do they choose gay kids? Are they expressing the homophobia that you have come to take for granted?

Straight people, listen.

"Not All Girls Are Raving Bloody Lesbians, You Know:" Getting You In The Mood For Part II Of The Terry Castle Conversation, Now Up at Historiann

Susannah York, who plays the up and coming actress and lover to the older, fading telly star Beryl Reid in Robert Aldrich's classic The Killing of Sister George (1969), delivers this fabulous set-up line as she tries to deflect her lover's (accurate) suspicion she is having an affair.

"That is a misfortune that I am perfectly well aware of," Beryl Reid replies tartly. For your viewing pleasure, I provide the whole clip from this classic lesbian psychodrama below:

You can actually get the whole film at YouTube, if you are patient enough to find all the pieces. I now command you to go to Part II of the Terry Castle discussion, "Humiliation and Longing," and if you haven't been there yet, to our partner in crime Comrade Physioprof, who delivers a review of the book that is focused on the humor of "The Professor and Other Writings."

Day 1, The Professor: A Conversation With Historiann About Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings

Several weeks ago we at Tenured Radical received an email from Historiann, who was reading Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings (HarperCollins, 2010.) She notified us that this book -- a combination of memoir and cultural criticism -- was right up our alley. Several days later, when this slim volume by a Stanford English professor I have long admired had arrived by three-day shipping (and all household activities had been put on hold indefinitely as we went on a binge of reading and downloading Art Pepper albums), Tenured Radical and Historiann agreed that a blog-to-blog conversation was in order.

This is the first of three posts taken from that conversation, which was conducted over email and then edited down. Day 2 will appear tomorrow at Historiann, and then you will want to return to here for the final post on Day 3 (Thursday, July 22). Stay tuned to Comrade PhysioProf, who also got hooked by this collection and will be chiming in with his own essay during our three-day special event.

Readers may also wish to check out interviews with Castle at largehearted boy and Salon; reviews at the Book and Harper's; and Castle's own blog, Fevered Brain Productions, where she posts her art.

Tenured Radical: OK, Historiann, here goes. Much as I want to cut straight to the essay about The Professor Herself, I think we owe our readers a little introduction to Terry Castle. I have been a fan since one of her articles, "The Marie Antoinette Obsession" (Representations 38, Spring 1992) showed up in a pile of submissions for the Berkshire Conference article prize. For people who haven't read it, the article is both historical and literary, and concerns a fin de siecle phenomenon in which Victorian women wrote vivid accounts about imagined relationships with Marie Antoinette's spirit. One woman had a fantasy about having been the doomed Queen's lover in a past life; another pair of women "encountered" her while they were touring Le Petit Trianon. The stories, which overlapped with the emergence of homosexuality and the definition of lesbianism as a female sexual category, became a recurring phenomenon in a very narrow time frame when sexology had emerged but was not yet dominant. In other words, Marie Antoinette encounters were occurring at an intellectual/cultural moment that followed the Oscar Wilde trial in which the idea of "homosexuality"carried legal and social stigma but the idea of sex between women did not, nor was lesbianism more generally understood as a scientific description for women who loved each other. Since it was widely rumored that Marie Antoinette had had affairs with women (it was one of the charges at her trial, along with the accusation she had committed incest with the Dauphin), she became a tragic figure into which late nineteenth century women inserted fantasies about "who they were." I remember thinking that this was one of the most intelligent and imaginative articles I read that year, and I wondered, who is this person?

But I never bothered to find out until you suggested I read this new book, The Professor and Other Writings, a collection of essays that are pleassantly un-academic, but equally imaginative, intelligent, creative and quirky. And of course, you were exactly right when you said that Terry Castle is a blogger manque. Who knew the Stanford English Department harbored someone like us?

Historiann: Who, indeed. At first, her essays seemed rather discursive and not terribly argument driven, which is what made me think that they were written in more of a bloggy fashion than in traditional essay form. But, as on blogs that mix the personal and the quotidian with the professional and the profound, it works for her. For example, in "My Heroin Christmas," she explores her fascination with jazz musician Art Pepper by listening compulsively to his recordings on a DVD walkman and reading his semi-pornographic 1979 autobiography, Straight Life while visiting her mother over the holidays. (She calls Straight Life "the greatest book I've ever read. . . It knocked my former pick, Clarissa, right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just thinking about it," 42. That was a pretty clever bit of foreshadowing there--pay attention!)

Towards the beginning of the essay, she notes that she's staying in a room in her mother's house that used to belong to "Jeff." Jeff? When I first read that, I thought, "how odd--or even sloppy--to mention a character who hasn't yet been introduced to us." But over the course of the essay in which she explores Pepper's outrageous, reckless life, Castle makes it clear why she is thinking and writing about Jeff and his role in her troubled family life. At the end of the essay, it makes sense that she riffs off of Pepper's music and autobiography in exploring the family life she lived as the child of divorce whose parents both remarried and introduced stepchildren into the family.

I also really enjoyed "Sicily Diary," a hilarious description of a holiday with her girlfriend in 2004 in which she memorably sees the Capuchin catacombs full of mummified corpses, picks up a stomach bug, and feels conspicuously middle-aged and Anglophone. Here's a sample: "Like a fool I kept trying to eat that night: had some tortellini with Maalox for supper, washed down by a large bicchierri of orange flavored Metamucil, the healthful fiber supplement B. [her girlfriend] had brought with us from California. Tottering around Lipari town that evening--everyone else in thongs and mini-shorts and see-through beach wraps--we looked pale and Victorian and ridiculously out of place. Lady Hester Stanhope and her Special Friend. Why hadn't we gone to Lesbos instead?" Another memorably funny passage inspired by her new dachshund pup, Wally: "Though only eight months old, Wally is as slutty and insouciant as Private Lyndie England. All she needs is a dangling cigarette and a tiny pair of four-legged camouflage pants," 84.

"Desperately Seeking Susan" is one of the two essays that has received the most attention in this collection, and anybody over the age of 35 will probably flip to this one first, because it recounts Castle's sort-of friendship with Susan Sontag, a public intellectual of great interest to many girls or young women who ever dreamed of living in New York and having people listen to them and take them very, very seriously. Castle got acquainted with Sontag when Sontag sent Castle a fan letter (really!) and then had a stint as a writer-in-residence at Stanford. But, being friends with Susan Sontag sounds like a lot of work and a lot of self-repression, because like a lot of smarty-pants people (regardless of celebrity, but magnified by it undoubtedly), Sontag sounds like she was mostly a condescending pain-in-the-a$$. Castle tells several stories of how she's reminded clearly and in no uncertain terms that she's not in with the kool kidz in New York: "I was never quite sure what she wanted. And besides, whatever that was, after a while she stopped wanting it. I visited her several times in New York City and even got invited to the London Terrace penthouse to see the famous book collection. (Of course, Terry, mine is the greatest library in private hands in the world.)," 98.

Who talks like that? Have you ever had a friend who repeatedly called you by your first name like that? I have, and I find it terribly condescending, as though I might forget my own name or my place (subordinate, always!) in the relationship.

Tenured Radical: Not exactly. But I do think it is a not uncommon experience for popular, non-academic writers to cling to academics with a combination of lust and loathing. And really famous people can be dramatically insecure - often all those dinner parties, fans and bombast are about bolstering their own egos. The public intellectual and the academic can be a perfect combination made in hell, if you think about it. They don’t have the credentials, and we do; we don’t have the audience we crave and they do. So it’s this nasty little circle of envy and dependence, where we are pretty much always the supplicants – except, as in the Sontag case, where the playing field was initially leveled because Sontag was out of her element during the Stanford fellowship and it triggered all her insecurities. I’m guessing that glomming onto Castle was her way of reassuring her self that she was still "Susan Sontag." She needed someone to perform in front of who also knew the ropes and customs of academia.

Historiann: Great point. There’s a similar kind of envy and loathing that characterizes the relationship between scholars and journalists in particular. They hate it that we have tenure, but we don’t have the audience that they do. (At least off-blog!)

(To Be Continued Tomorrow at Historiann.)

City of Cambridge to Gates: "The Whole Thing Was Your -- Uh -- A Big Misunderstanding"

Chauncey DeVega, over at We Are Respectable Negroes, has a few comments on the report issued by the City of Cambridge about the July 16 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Give it a look and think about what it must be like to be Skip Gates and suck this one up. Or, hypothetically, what it would be like to be you and suck this one up.

Gates, as you may recall, was arrested in his own house after having presented his Harvard identification and, subsequently, losing his temper with Sergeant James Crowley. The conclusion reached by the panel of investigators? Both men were responsible for the incident. They feared each other, the report reasons, and acted accordingly. Gates shouted, Crowley locked him up. Because of their mutual fear, the commissioners reason, the two men shared responsibility for the incident because each might have taken a step back at a crucial moment. (Note to historians: this could be a real methodological breakthrough, as we sift through the evidence of a variety of people whose oppression and genocide might have been avoided if only they had kept their mouths shut and not frightened their colonizers so badly.)

My esteemed colleague DeVega rightly points to the report's implication that Gates' main error was to be in unlawful possession of negritude of the uppity variety. Charles Ogletree, a Harvard colleague and Gates' attorney, noted that while "the report is important and timely" and will help move the community forward, the notion that "both Gates and Crowley had an equal opportunity to deescalate the situation is just breathtaking and unbelievable." See? This is the difference between lawyers and English professors. English professors start yelling; lawyers say something nice to get your attention, and when you are listening, say that the other side is full of $hit.

As Ogletree points out, only Crowley had the power to make an arrest: Gates did not, nor was it within his power to compel the officer to leave his house or to require an explanation for why Crowley invaded it in the first place. At the time of Gates' arrest, opinions abounded about his role in this confrontation: that he had lived so long in the university bubble that he had lost touch with the deference to police authority required of all African-American people; that all people, black or white, who express anger at our friends the police deserve what they get; and that Gates ought to have been grateful that Crowley was there to protect his property, even though he was arrested as a result. Even President Obama, by calling the "beer summit," where all three of them sat down in the spirit of shared masculinity (underlining graphically that "racism is over" because the least socially privileged ma at the table was Crowley, the White Guy) tried to divert us from the real issue here.

And what was that issue? Why the valorization of state power, of course, and the pervasive propaganda that nothing in post-civil rights Amerika is racist anymore. What looks like racism is just collateral damage accidentally inflicted on people of color as the police state keeps the rest of "us" safe from -- whatever.

That's right. If, for example, of the 8,000 people on the "no fly list" there are some who are there by mistake and cannot return to the United States, that's too bad, but wouldn't you rather have one or two or 1000 people falsely imprisoned, tortured and exiled to prevent another 9/11? Sure you would. Particularly when it isn't you.

It's why we all stand there passively while TSA people treat us rudely, shout at us when we move too close to a bag that they are searching, and grab their coworkers to point and giggle at the private items we have in our luggage. Similarly, our current desire to yield all moral authority to the state has many Americans' fully persuaded that Arizona's new anti-immigrant law is aimed only at people without legal residence documents, not Latino/as -- even though Canadians, Irish and Russians don't seem to be rushing to the the Sunshine State to take below minimum wage jobs. If you are arrested and deported because you look Latino/a and have no documents handy, well then stupid you, because you had the power to choose to carry documents. If you die while being deported, it isn't racism; just a misunderstanding you could have avoided by not coming to the United States in the first place or by carrying documents that prove your family lived in Arizona in 1848.

The point that is occluded by our national zeal to be endlessly cooperative with law enforcement is that the law, even when written as a neutral instrument, inflicts itself unevenly because police spend their time actively looking for criminals, not doing good deeds. White people tend not to appreciate this fully because they (and their family members) are usually not the ones dressed in the Sing-Sing bracelets, being tasered to death at the Mexican border or trying to find a place to stay in Cairo for the indefinite future. More importantly, however, policemen are the instrument of the law, not citizens, and it was Officer Crowley alone who was responsible for acting correctly during the course of a "misunderstanding" about whether that elderly black man needed to be taught a good lesson about respecting authority.

But there is a second point about racism and the law that the Cambridge report misses. While racism in the application of the law is an important way to discuss state power, in a few decades Americans seem to have forgotten a lot of history: racism became so powerful in the United States because of the law and because the military and the police have historically enforced racism even when no laws are broken. In other words, had racism simply been a matter of personal ignorance and social attitudes -- as people choose to believe nowadays -- it would have had less impact on history than it had. The law was frequently enforced informally by whites who exercised various forms of violence on people of color, but when said whites were challenged as to their right to control or exclude people of color, they could always point to the laws that ratified the racial order.

Theoretically, of course, the law is race neutral. But you can see, by the following analogy, how discrimination written into the law produces aggrieved attitudes among those who the laws privileges. According to the New York Times, when repeatedly questioned about her initial attempt to bar military recruiters from Harvard's career counseling center (Harvard's nondiscrimination policy includes GLBTQ people, and is therefore in conflict with the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy),

Ms. Kagan repeated that she found the ban “unwise and unjust,” and told the committee that she had been trying to reconcile Harvard’s own antidiscrimination policy with a provision known as the Solomon Amendment, which requires universities that receive federal financing to give full access to the military. Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, helped write the amendment, and made clear his displeasure with Ms. Kagan.

“You were punishing the military,” Mr. Sessions said at one point. Later, outside the hearing room, he came close to accusing Ms. Kagan of lying, calling her “not rigorously accurate” in her explanation.

Two things seem immediately obvious to me here. In a truly interesting hearing, someone might have asked Kagan the legal question: are there not two federal laws in conflict here (e.g., that institutions that accept federal funds must allow military recruiters on campus and that institutions, legally, must enforce their own rules as they are written, including those barring discrimination) and how would she rule if such a case came before her?

The second -- to come back to Mr. Gates -- is this: under what conditions does the Dean of the Harvard Law School have the power to punish the military, even if s/he wanted to? Is withholding space on the Harvard campus tantamount to banning military employment for Harvard graduates, or even an actual humiliation to the federal government? Even if it were, would such a "punishment" be in any way similar to the power the government has to damage research at Harvard by withdrawing grant and scholarship money? Or humiliate GLBTQ soldiers by drumming them out of the armed services?

And is not the government's insistence that institutions defer to them and abandon their own principles an act of far greater, and utterly needless, vanity?

Sunday Radical Roundup: Gay Supreme Court Pride Edition

After our busy, busy week here at Tenured Radical, we think it is time for a calm and genteel set of items to keep you busy this Sunday. To wit:

Kagan Hearings Kick Off On Monday: Thanks to Prawfs Blawg, a group blog maintained by a bunch of guys teaching in law schools around the United States, we have the witness list for the Elena Kagan hearings that start tomorrow at 12:30 (hat tip.). While they will begin with the senators going on record at tedious length ("life begins at conception, yack, yack, yack") as if we and their constituents did not already know what they thought, testimonies to tune in for might be Lily Ledbetter, the litigant in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire (2007), called by the majority; and Stephen Presser, legal historian from Northwestern, called by the minority. Presser, who mostly writes about corporate law, can also be expected to speculate on how Kagan's confirmation to the court would affect the future of Roe and the rulings associated with it. The rest of the witnesses are pretty boilerplate, if you ask me, although the large number of military and ex-military called by the Republicans suggest they plan to bring up the scrap about military recruiters at Harvard Law School, probably as an attempt to grandstand a little about the impending repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Go here for the official web cast.

We know that Kagan will be confirmed, and resistance will only be token: she may go down in history as the SCOTUS nominee no one on the right or the left really got excited about. Kagan's own opening statement would be spiced up if she uses the lesbian drama around her nomination to take a stance on ending discrimination against queer people more generally; and since Perry v. Schwarzenegger will be boarding the train to the Supreme Court there could be interesting moments around that. But I doubt that either of these things will happen. The Republicans seem to be hinting by their silence that this one is a slam dunk. I follow Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah) Twitter feed and even he has not rattled his sword about the nomination lately.

So if you want to skip the whole thing and watch Wimbledon and the World Cup, go right ahead. Blame me if you miss the historic moment where Hatch changes his mind on school prayer, affirmative action and a woman's right to choose; or if the Committee announces that they are canceling the hearings and making a range of top-flight legal minds compete on a new reality show called "America's Got Law" instead.

Gay Pride March in NYC Kicks Off at 12:00 P.M. Today: For those of you who just think you know what you are doing, the route is shorter this year, beginning at 36th street. Interestingly, this also takes St.Patrick's Cathedral, where it is traditional that anti-gay trogladytes stand with signs telling queers they are going to hell, and queer marchers shout "Sham! Shame! Shame!"off the line of march. Interesting, no?

As the past couple of posts have revealed, celebrating gay pride is not a radical political act by any means, and in some quarters is perceived as reactionary. However, if you are just coming out it can feel pretty cool anyway. However, don't look for instructions about what to do during or after the march on the Heritage of Pride website. This organization of businesspeople that has turned the celebration of the Stonewall Riots into a megabucks event needs to hire a few tech people because their website is melting down this morning. But if you go, have fun, hydrate frequently, and pick up after yourselves please: the last time I was in the Village after the march I had never seen such a disgusting mess.

My favorite gay pride moment bar none? Years ago, I gathered with a whole bunch of friends to march, and one of us was having a clandestine affair with a closeted corporate attorney who ran legal for a large media conglomerate. It was closets within closets, baby. Anyway, hormones being what they were -- and people who live in the closet being what they are -- this lesbian was very nervous about participating, but was ultimately persuaded that of the hundreds of thousands of people marching she would never, ever in a trillion years be spotted by anyone she knew from the network or by her equally closeted, but far better disciplined, girlfriend. So off we go, milling about, chanting and having a great time, and around 25th street or so I hear someone yelling, and it turns out to be a New York Times photographer who was going out with my dissertation advisor at Potemkin University. All the Potemkin graduate students waved and hollered, and we marched on by.

You are already guessing what happened, dear reader. The next day the telephone rang at around 7:30, and it was the Mother of the Radical (MOTheR) calling to say that my picture was in the New York Times! Right on the front of Metro section! I rushed into the hall to get the paper and yup, there we were, with Closety Custard right in the middle.