Archive for October, 2004

Thursday short poem: Wright’s Envoi

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 21, 2004
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

I first discovered Charles Wright in the late 1990s, after he won a Pulitzer Prize. I confess I find him a difficult and challenging poet - but this one of his I love, for all my usual reasons for loving poems. Once again, the poet finds comfort, of a kind, in the natural world, while still embracing the human burden:

Envoi

What we once liked, we no longer like.
What we used to delight in settles like fine ash on our tongues.
What we once embraced embraces us.

Things have destinies, of course,
on-lines and downloads mysterious as the language of clouds.
My life has become like that,

Half uninterpretable, half new geography,
Landscapes stilled and adumbrated, memory unratcheting,
Its voice-over not my own.

Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams,
The dogs lie around like rugs,
Birds nitpick their pinfeathers, insects slick down their shells.

No horizon-honing here, no angst in the anthill.
What happens is what happens,
And what happened to happen never existed to start with.

Still, who wants a life like that,
No next and no before, no yesterday, no today,
Tomorrow a moment no one will ever live in?

As for me, I’ll take whatever wanes,
The loosening traffic on the straightaway, the dark and such,
The wandering stars, wherever they come from now, wherever
they go.

I’ll take whatever breaks down beneath its own sad weight-
The paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, for instance,
Language, the weather, the word of God.

I’ll take as icon and testament
The daytime metaphysics of the natural world,
Sun on tie post, rock on rock.

I like the whole thing, but this bit is my favorite:

My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography…

In a way I can’t fully articulate, I know what he means…

Abstinence, gay marriage, and the loving consistency of both

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 20, 2004
in Christianity, GLBTQ, Marriage, Sexuality and Youth
. 63 Comments

One of the brightest young minds in my women’s studies class is a woman who, for the sake of anonymity, I will call Louisa. Louisa is, among other things, active in her Catholic parish, and recently came to see me to tell me that she had been asked by the youth director at her church to develop and teach an “abstinence” program for high school students. She was thrilled. But when I got back from Austin, I found this email from her. With her permission, I’m posting an edited version:

Dear Hugo,

I can’t do the abstinence program…i just can’t. and it’s not because I have little faith in myself. I literally can’t do the abstinence program anymore. I had talked to C (our youth director) about it last thursday, and I said “yes.” Of course, he was extremely esctatic, and so was I. i couldn’t wait to get started — I had all of these ideas and plans for the organization. he told me all I needed was to prepare an outline of exactly what I would be teaching, he’ll present it to the priests, and I should have the program running by next week….

But on Sunday, something happened… I was talking to some people from my choir about it, and a lot of them thought it was so great that I would be starting this. One of the girls my age, S, even offered to help me out with a couple of things. But then after mass, she approached me, and told me about this rally she wanted me to go to at CSU Fullerton, against homosexuals. I interrupted, and said, “wait, S —I’m not teaching the kids about homosexuality, why do we have to go to this rally?” S said: “But you must! You’re going to be talking about love and marriage, and you need to tell these kids how important it is that we ban these gay marriages.” Well…my mouth got me into a lot of trouble, because, I didn’t know that I was talking to a future nun. and I exclaimed, “well, I’m not against gay marriages!” sequoia looked at me as if I were the devil. She asked, “How can you call yourself a catholic, if you believe in gay marriages?”

I would call myself a pretty devoted Catholic. So of course, when S asked me this, I was hurt, angry and shocked that she would question my faith.

By this time, our youth director had overheard the conversation. We were in still in the church, and i guess we were pretty loud. I was getting extremely frustrated. So he approached us, and before I could even get a word out of my mouth, S starts accusing me of being incapable of teaching this course, because I believe this, and I believe that! He asked me if it was true-and what could I say? iI didn’t want to lie. The youth director and I talked, and he feels (for the church’s safety), that I should really reconsider taking this position.

I guess I’m too liberal for catholicism. I’m not saying I’m leaving my religion-I would never do that. My religion is one of the most important things in my life. But (though I believe in abstinence until marriage), I can’t escape the fact that i’m pro-gay marriage, and pro-contraception (after marriage).

So I’ve been thinking a lot, since it happened…and I’ve decided to hand the reins over to somebody else. I guess I was so excited about this being my first teaching experience, that I pushed the obstacles I knew I would face, out of the way… Ihope that the abstinence program will still happen, though. Maybe I could even convince C to make me a teacher’s aide, and then we can find another teacher, who would be willing to do this…

The bold emphasis is Hugo’s.

(Louisa’s letter reminds me of why I left the Catholic Church, of course, and why, despite occasional pangs of affection for Rome, I’m much happier with Canterbury!)

Because I know that Louisa will see this post, I’d ask folks to direct their criticisms towards me and away from her. The reason I wanted to post about this is because I think that Louisa’s views on sexuality are representative of a remarkable number of young people. I also don’t think that folks like her get acknowledged as often as they should. How often do we hear from the pro-abstinence, pro-gay marriage crowd in the media? It’s easy to dismiss young people like Louisa as being poorly informed theologically, but that would be profoundly inaccurate and unfair. Rather, Louisa’s thoughtful position represents a marvelous balancing of fidelity and Christian love.

I have many problems with most abstinence programs myself. It’s not that I think abstinence is always unrealistic (I have friends who did “wait” until marriage, and I honor their sacrifice and their faithfulness), it’s that abstinence programs frequently build up post-marital sex to undue proportions. The message seems to be “the less experienced both partners are on their wedding night, the better married sex will be”. I have a number of friends who waited until marriage, and the results, to put it mildly, are mixed. Some say they have ecstatic sex lives — but others report the same frustrations and difficulties that those who chose more secular sexual lifestyles struggle with. Virginity until marriage is not a panacea, nor is it a guarantee of marital bliss. Obviously, it prevents a variety of problems — and to the extent that a young person wishes to avoid those problems, I think abstinence is a valid and commendable option.

But Louisa’s commitment to abstinence is rooted in a valuing of herself and a valuing of other young people’s bodies and lives. For her and others like her, abstinence is not just rigid adherence to church teaching — it is a loving, self-and God-honoring act. Indeed, one could make a feminist case for abstinence: in a society where the bodies of young women are highly sexualized commodities for male “consumption”, remaining chaste is radically counter-cultural and perhaps even subversive. Being proudly and publicly abstinent is a way of demanding attention for one’s mind rather than for one’s potential sexual favors. In that sense, abstinence can be seen as a tool for building young women’s intellectual, emotional and physical autonomy — all worthy goals for the feminist movement.

In order to be compelling, however, an abstinence message must be rooted as much in a desire to honor the self as in obedience to church teaching. And here is where it is intellectually consistent to teach abstinence and support gay marriage. If one believes, as Louisa seems to and as I certainly do, that same-sex attraction is usually a core part of our very identity, then it is sensible to long for those folks to find the fulfillment that they too are seeking. Gay marriage is an important civil rights issue because the desire to bond publicly and eternally with one other person is deeply ingrained in most of us. Though it may not always be so, one’s sexual desire is usually a fine indicator of one’s identity. (Oh, I know the theological conservatives will have conniptions with that one.) And it makes sense to want to honor the desires of those around us who are longing for lasting, monogamous, fulfillment. Waiting until marriage is right for Louisa because it is what Louisa wants, not merely what her family or her church wants for her. In this context, an “ethics of desire” can support both gay marriage and abstinence education.

In our discussions about abstinence, Louisa has made it clear that she does not condemn those who do not choose to wait. Rather, she wants to reach young teens with a counter-cultural message that offers them a true choice as to when and how and where they first become sexual with another human being. She wants to offer real options. Knowing her and knowing youth groups, I can sense she would have done a terrific job with the kids in her church community. I honor Louisa’s commitment to God, to herself, and to justice. Prayerfully and thoughtfully, she has found a way to hold obedience, love, and justice in tension. I am proud of her and others like her.

Christian college kids and apologizing Anglicans

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 19, 2004
in Christianity, Family and Feminism
. 14 Comments

First off, Jenell Paris has yet another moving post up in her corner of our blogosphere. Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

…it was my 10-year college reunion last weekend. I could have attended, seeing as I work at the college and live 5 minutes away, but I didn’t. I’m not comfortable seeing relative strangers and talking about my life- I’d just sweat and cry and leave early. Yesterday I received the ‘memory book’, about 100 pages of people writing about their lives on a form that asks for name/address/are you married/do you have kids/where do you work/what do you remember from college. It was so frustrating that I ranted to my night class (freshmen) about it.

There is a powerful cultural norm at Bethel that is unspoken by professors or administrators, yet it is carried on year by year by the student culture and the broader evangelical culture. The ideal life path, judging by these entries, is to graduate from college, marry a person of the same race before you are 24, man works in ministry or a corporation, woman works in nursing, education or music ministry, have kids before age 27, woman works part-time or stay-at-home, be church members, live in Minnesota or Colorado, and have the woman fill out forms that need to be mailed in. Women seem to feel ambivalent about the stay-at-home part, though. One wrote “I’m a teacher, but I’m on a five year ‘leave of absence’ while my kids are young.” Another wrote “Job: Mommy”, Workplace: “The Harris Household.”

Notably, only 100 out of about 500 class members sent the form in. Only three single women contributed, and one wrote a long message about how she has become Gods’ bride, so really, she is sort of married. One single man wrote in. A few divorced people wrote in, but obscured that fact on their form (I knew it from other lines of gossip). I received the form in June or July, and wrote on it, “My Bethel education and my Christian faith have not made my life work out great. My three babies died this year, and my life is really hard right now. I hope God is present with you, too, in your struggles.”

This is what I said to my class last night. “Class, this is my memory book from 1994. The only people I remember from college are my friends, men I dated, and men I hoped to date. I don’t remember any of these other people in the slightest. What that means for you is that you need to get a good education while you’re here and be assertive about asking questions and learning in class. Don’t be pressured into stupidity by your classmates, and don’t care what anyone thinks of you. Just live your life and do what you want to do, keeping in mind that all these people who seem so important to you right now won’t be in a few years.”

I also said that they should feel free to live however they want, even if they don’t end up with a minister-pianist power-marriage for Jesus, or with three kids named Dakota, Madison, and Cody. There’s not much point in even saying that, tho, because my voice is just a cry in the wilderness compared to the pressure toward getting married and having three conventionally-named children. There’s such pressure for women to be passive and silent in class, and apparently there’s pressure for men to sit in the back row, wear baseball caps, and tell jokes to each other. It’s wrong to pay $25,000 a year to experience anti-educational peer pressure. It’s wrong to pay a Christian college $100,000 just to reinforce Christian cultural norms that you could have learned for free at church. Demand more!

The cage isn’t real, and as we become ourselves, we’re sometimes surprised to find that the freedom was there all along.

The Churches disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by refusing to think and following along like a lemming. Let the churches tremble at a student revolution. The students have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Students of all Christian colleges, unite!

I would have loved it even without the hat-tip to Karl in the final paragraph. When I was first becoming a believer, I often wondered if there were any “cool Christians.” I don’t mean cool in the slick, pop culture sense — I mean Christians who don’t think a relationship with Christ precludes rage and discomfort and sensual delight. Jenell is the epitome — nay, the zenith — of Christian coolness in my book.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading the Windsor Report some more. Father Jake has a nice summary from the progressive point of view here.

I’m disappointed that the Report calls on American Episcopalians to, as Father Jake puts it, declare the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, the lovely Gene Robinson, an “untouchable”:

We accept and respect the position taken up by the Archbishop of Canterbury in relation to the current incumbent of the See of New Hampshire In view of the widespread unacceptability of his ministry in other provinces of the Communion, we urge the proposed Council of Advice to keep the matter of his acceptability under close review. We also urge the Archbishop, unless and until the Council of Advice (or, if the Council should not come into being, the Primates’ Meeting) indicate to the contrary, to exercise very considerable caution in inviting or admitting him to the councils of the Communion.

Well, we’ll have him back at All Saints soon enough. If Lambeth doesn’t want him, Pasadena does.

On the other hand, a nice slap at traditionalist bishops who are interfering in places like the Los Angeles Diocese:

We call upon those bishops who believe it is their conscientious duty to intervene in provinces, dioceses and parishes other than their own:
* to express regret for the consequences of their actions
* to affirm their desire to remain in the Communion, and
* to effect a moratorium on any further interventions.
We also call upon these archbishops and bishops to seek an accommodation with the bishops of the dioceses whose parishes they have taken into their own care.
We further call upon those diocesan bishops of the Episcopal Church (USA) who have refused to countenance the proposals set out by their House of Bishops to reconsider their own stance on this matter. If they refuse to do so, in our view, they will be making a profoundly dismissive statement about their adherence to the polity of their own church

Rounding up reaction, it seems that the liberals are a bit miffed, but the right wing is apopletic. I liked this bit from the comments section here, written by a self-styled repentant liberal:

This is the most shameful sell out since Munich.I agree that we appear to have nothing. Express regret my foot! The committee should express regret for wasting everyones time. Take a good look, you just saw a small bunch of immature twits destroy a church over 400 years old. Poof- it is gone up in smoke.

I’ll be the first to admit it: in the world of Anglican blogging, I often only know whether something is “good news” or not based upon the responses of the cyber-savvy traditionalists. If they are unhappy, then there must be reason to rejoice. I don’t mean that nastily, mind you! I simply have found that in most cases, the American Anglican Council is a lot like Focus on the Family: knowing what they oppose allows me to be clear on what I support. In this age of information overload, it’s really rather helpful.

Seriously, though, I like any report that calls folks back from the brink of schism. More than anything else, what I read here is a rebuke to self-righteous certainty, whether that hubris appears from the right or from the left. I like that.

101.58 miles

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 19, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness and Traveling
. 3 Comments

We are home safely from Austin.

First, the ride:

I bought my first real bicycle less than three months ago (July 23, to be precise). It took more than a month for me to learn how to ride it, change gears and cranks, and learn how to use those darned clip-in pedals. So, you can say I’m very much still a novice.

In training for this year’s “Ride for the Roses” in Austin, my fiancee and I did not do any rides farther than 35 miles. The “Ride for the Roses” offers several distances; bikers can go 6, 25, 40, 75, or 100 miles. We had signed up for the 40-mile ride, well within our training. (It should be noted that my beloved is an experienced biker and triathlete.)

But then, Saturday night in Austin, we heard Lance Armstrong speak to several thousand fans at the convention center. It was, as one might expect, deeply moving. (It occurs to me, parenthetically, that Lance Armstrong is one of only two men younger than myself whom I deeply admire — the other is my brother.) By the time we left his talk, which included a fine Q&A session with many cancer survivors, my fiancee and I had made a typically impulsive decision: we were going to ride the full 100 mile distance the following day.

And that is what we did. According to most folks, the route we took was actually over 100 miles — 101.58 seemed to be the consensus of those with accurate computers on their bikes. The ride was made tougher by hot and humid conditions, and by a terrible headwind that we battled for most of the last forty miles. (The sort that is so powerful that it forces one to pedal downhill). I made it tougher on myself by refusing to ride in any “pacelines”. I get scared when others are too close to me, so I battled the winds all by my lonesome most of the way. (I can see this is a fear I need to get over quickly). Many riders dropped out due to the heat and the wind, and many more of us were infuriated by the fact that two of the aid stations ran out of water — in the middle of Texas Hill Country, miles from any store.

My body held up remarkably well. I can report that riding 100 miles is very similar to running a marathon, except that one recovers much faster from the former than the latter. At the end, there is that same sense of exhaustion, agony, and frustration; the final miles seem to take so very, very long to complete. As soon as I finished the ride, I laid the bike in the grass and curled up in the fetal position next to it, dry-heaving away. (Many solicitous types gave me water and bananas, and soon, all was well.)

Still, to be able to finish a 100-miler in relative comfort (save for tiredness and foot cramps, of all things) is a sign that my fitness level is reasonable. It was almost three times as far as my longest previous ride, and was much more than I expected to do just eleven weeks after buying my first bicycle and seven weeks after first learning to use pedal clips. I’m quite pleased, especially with the fact that I have no soreness today.

Now, on Texas:

Austin was magnificent. I know I have several readers who are Austinites (or is it Austinians). (Amanda, Michelle, Elizabeth — I hope I’m not leaving anyone out!) Y’all have a beautiful, friendly, humid city! It was our first-ever visit to Texas, and my fiancee thinks we ought to start looking for places to live out there. (I’m not quite so swept.) The highlights of our trip were watching the bats fly out from the Congress Street bridge, and having a wonderful, post-ride romantic dinner at the superb Mansion on Judges Hill. I recommend both experiences.

The rural country through which we rode was also impressive. (I noted we visited, at various times, the following counties during the ride: Travis, Bastrop, Milam, Lee, and Williamson — the very names conjure up all sorts of cowboy images.) I saw political signs everywhere, but very few referring to the presidential race (which is likely not much of a contest in rural Texas). Instead, folks in these small counties seemed very interested indeed in elections for judges, commissioners, and constables — signs with the names of candidates for those offices were ubiquitous, even on small back roads. I found that heartening — I like a place where local races are seen as more vital than national ones!

With two weeks out to the national election, there is much else about which to blog. I’m swamped with work, but hope to weigh in with a few thoughts on the Windsor Commission Report and the crisis in the Episcopal Church soon. My initial reaction as a liberal is one of cautious relief, but I need to read more.

Off to Texas

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 14, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness and Traveling
. 4 Comments

It has been the sort of week that makes me happy and proud to be a teacher and a youth leader; I’ve had some great experiences in and out of the classroom. Let’s see if I can have that same spirit a week from now, when midterms roll in!

No blogging until Tuesday. Tomorrow morning, my fiancee and I are off for Austin, Texas, to (among other things) participate in the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s Peloton Project. We’re not sure how many miles we’re going to ride yet. I’m just over five weeks out from my next marathon, and this will be a nice break in my training. It’s our first-ever visit to Texas.

It will be also be our anniversary weekend — two years together!

And may I say, the process of dismantling a bike and preparing it for airplane travel is more work than I had anticipated! Fortunately, “Timmy” (the name I’ve bestowed on my new Trek 5000) is at last safely stowed in his massive hard plastic case, ready for his first plane ride tomorrow.

Wishing a weekend of civil discussion of politics to all…

Debates, youth groups, and bridging the gap

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 14, 2004
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity, Politics, Youth and Youth ministry
. 21 Comments

Last night at youth group, the kids and the leaders watched the last thirty minutes of the presidential debate together. Happily, this was not something that the two adult leaders (myself and a co-volunteer) imposed upon them — it was the choice of the youth, and one we were pleased to honor. (Tangentially, I notice a much higher level of political engagement among both my high school and college kids election than in 2000. That ought to be encouraging for everyone, regardless of party.)

There were about 20 kids in group last night, and almost all of them were commenting irrepressibly throughout the debate. (Lots of ineffective “shushing” from me.) Not surprisingly, the comments were entirely pro-Kerry and decidedly anti-Bush. All Saints Pasadena is indeed a liberal community, and while we are racially, economically, and sexually diverse, we are politically almost monochrome. Only one child admitted to having even one parent who was voting to re-elect the president, and he hastened to say that he agreed more with his other parent, who was voting for Kerry.

After the debate was over, we turned off the TV and opened things up for discussion. Though I share my kids’ basic political views (and I thought Kerry was a clear and convincing winner of at least the final third of the debate), I admit to being troubled by their intolerance of conservatives. I asked them how many of them had gotten into arguments with friends or family members over the election, and just over half of them raised their hands. We then launched into a serious, thoughtful, and very productive discussion of how to handle “disagreeing in love.” We talked at length about the importance of seeing other people’s opinions as valid, even when we find those opinions offensive. It’s critical that the kids see that true liberalism involves a constant receptivity to others, and that progressive Christianity (a phrase often bandied about at our church) has tolerance of others — even conservatives — as one of its core principles. I asked them “how do you think Jesus would want you to talk to people with whom you disagree?”; I got some terrific responses.

A few years ago, I regularly attended services at Pasadena’s largest non-denominational evangelical church, Lake Avenue. (This was while I was on the Vestry at All Saints, actually.) I got to know one of the many pastors there, and he and I had some preliminary discussions about a goal of mine: getting the high school youth from one very conservative and one very liberal church together to work on a service project. The idea would not be to have debates over homosexuality and salvation — the idea would be to put Christian love into action with folks that we are accustomed to thinking of as “the enemy.” We talked about various volunteer works that we could do as a team, and we had some brief exchanges on what we hoped our “kids” would get out of it. But we both lost touch, and not long thereafter I went on my two-year sojourn into the Mennonite Church.

Last night, I approached the All Saints youth with the idea. Somewhat disappointingly, most of them were — initially — flatly opposed. “Conservative kids hate us”, one said. “They don’t think we’re real Christians, and that makes me so angry” said another. “They think we’re all gay!”, said a third. “They’ll tell us we’re going to hell”, said a fourth. “It’ll never work — we’re too different”, offered still another. But I persevered, trying (somewhat manipulatively) to get them to see that their fear and their intolerance contradicted their professed values of love, outreach, and inclusion. Again, I snuck Jesus into it: “Would Jesus want you to hang out with the kids from a conservative church, or would he tell you to avoid them?” The kids were trapped!

The issues are charged. Three of the kids in youth group have at least one openly gay parent; one is being raised by two fathers. It is imperative that these children be emotionally protected from bigotry. They deal with enough at school, and I’ll be darned if I want to expose them to more through the church. But I feel — and many on the staff feel — that some of the most valuable outreach work that liberal Episcopalian kids can do is with their counterparts in the evangelical world.

The temptation for both sides to see the other group as a “mission field” will be tremendous. Ground rules would have to be established to ensure a basic level of civility and respect. But I think I’ve got my kids excited at the prospect, even as they are also a bit scared too. I want to make sure they are emotionally and psychologically protected — but I also want to make sure that they are spiritually challenged. That’s a fine line to walk, but I am optimistic we can do it.

I’ll be in touch with my Lake Avenue contacts soon. But if any of my readers are associated with conservative churches and youth groups in the Los Angeles area, and think they might know of some kids who might be similarly interested, have them drop me a line. Perhaps a day of feeding the homeless in downtown LA? An ongoing tutoring program with elementary schools?

We are a bitterly divided nation. We are also, as Christians, living in a divided body. Many of us on the Christian left find we have more in common with secular liberals than with our own fellow Christians on the right. Many right-wing Christians feel more in cultural solidarity with conservative non-believers or practitioners of other faiths than they do with us. While that is understandable, I think it reflects badly on all of us.

I am a liberal Democrat on (almost) every issue. I’m an Episcopalian with pacifist anabaptist leanings. I teach gender and gay history. I went to Berkeley. But for all that, my life is made both richer and more challenging by my friendships with folks with whom I disagree about almost everything. (One of the men I love best in the world is a true Five Point Calvinist, bless his misled heart!) I thank God for my friends who are gun-ownin’, traditional marriage defendin’, inerrant scripture believin’, red-meat eatin’, Fox News watchin’, George Bush votin’ conservatives. I’m a better man for knowing them and being loved by them. They have not changed my core beliefs. But they have softened my heart and tempered my self-righteousness — and those are good things indeed.

Thursday short poem: Levertov’s Sojourns in the Parallel World

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 14, 2004
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

It was my mother who introduced me to England’s Denise Levertov. She’s not my favorite poet, but she has some gems, and this is one of them:

Sojourns in the Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension–though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal–then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
–but we have changed, a little.

It makes me think of long solitary hikes on my family’s ranch in Northern California, or on trail runs through the Angeles Forest. I just love the image of a little donkey breaking free. I often feel donkey-like.

On pondering backsides

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 13, 2004
in GLBTQ and Teaching
. 30 Comments

This arrived today in my email:

Hello Hugo,

I am a former student and read your page from time to time, and I finally thought I would write you after seeing your post on Men. It had been a while since I read your page and tonight I stumbled across your old post back in June. What struck me most about your post was that you grew up around women most of the time and that you said, ”Until I was in my 30s, I had very few close male friends”. Sitting in your classes as a male I use to think you were gay as did many students I was in class with. In addition, former students I have run into on campus that had you in the past as a professor or were currently taking you thought you were gay. One day, upon getting to class early, I heard a student in the front row talking with a male student and a female student about how he had been trying to do Internet research to find out if you were gay and a student in the back of the class said ”I think he’s gay, he has to be, he looks like it”. I kept quiet on the matter and did not comment on my thoughts that you were gay. I found after just mentioning your name and nothing else to other students outside of class that many would say back to me ‘he’s ‘gay” or ”I think he’s gay”. I found it odd at first that so many students thought like me and had you for not just one semester but two, It was also odd that having received their grades that there was still a strong perception you were gay. Every student that would mention to me you were gay or had the suspicion you were was going straight off your looks. I had many say, ”he’s thin, has really short hair, tattoos, and looks gay”; a few guys told me ”he use to look right at me in class like he was checking me out’! I, myself, would search your name on the Internet to see if I could read info on you and that’s how I found your page, which is interesting to read and gave me insight on you. I came to realize you were not gay, but comments like, ”We get excellent views of one another’s backsides, but that is not generally considered a source of excitement” perpetuate the thinking you are gay to students. I like running and have run with other guys, but never thought about looking at their backsides. When reading your post on men it was funny to me that for so long I thought you were gay and that so many also thought the same as me. Also, it made me question, how many students does he have now that think he’s gay? Does he know students even ponder his sexuality? I knew before writing you could care less what students think of your sexuality because it’s none of their buiness, and you are a confident man on where your sexuality stands. However, I thought after reading your post that it might be a good thing for your to know what some students ponder about you, and about how open they are to talk about your sexuality just upon hearing your name mentioned.

Take care,

Former Student

Sometimes, you gotta wonder. I could issue a ringing defense of my own heterosexuality, but I won’t. And this is the bit that perplexed me:

It was also odd that having received their grades that there was still a strong perception you were gay.

How do gays and lesbians grade?

And then this:

…comments like, ”We get excellent views of one another’s backsides, but that is not generally considered a source of excitement” perpetuate the thinking you are gay to students.

My goodness, I just announced that other men’s rears DON’T turn me on, and now the mere mention of said rumps raises another set of suspicions.

So here’s my new slogan: If you’re homophobic, consider me a gay man. Ponder that for a while.

Off to youth group.

Women, men, coaching — UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 13, 2004
in Feminism and Sports
. 9 Comments

Before the main post of the day, note to those planning on getting a chinchilla: plan on huge air-conditioning bills. Pasadena Water & Power charged us almost $500 for keeping Matilde cool these past two months. She’s worth every penny, of course, but unlike most pets, energy costs are the primary expense.

Oh, and I’m not a furry rodent anymore! I’ve been upgraded in the blogosphere:

Anyhow: The Seattle Storm won the Women’s National Basketball Association title last night. What made the win particularly noteworthy was that it was the first time in the history of American professional sports that a team with a woman as head coach had won any sort of championship. (All of the previous WNBA titles had been won by teams coached by men.) The winning coach, Anne Donovan, said:

“Yeah, it’s something that we’ve been striving for. I think there are a lot of great women coaches out there. In order to get to the next level of respect, we have to win championships.”

One long-standing controversy at the high school and the college level has been the role of male coaches in women’s athletics. Though women have won championships as coaches in these amateur levels, the greatest success in recent years has been by men. The marquee sport of women’s college athletics is surely basketball; the three-time defending champions are the Connecticut Huskies, coached by Geno Auriemma. The head coach of the 2004 gold medal winning women’s softball team (made up of former college stars) was Mike Candrea, head coach at Arizona. And by far the most successful coach in the history of women’s soccer is the controversial Anson Dorrance, who coaches the North Carolina Tar Heel squad. (Controversial due to widely documented evidence of a pattern of “consensual” romantic relationships with certain of his players.)

To be sure, there are highly successful female coaches in women’s sports as well. In addition to Donovan, Tennessee’s remarkable Pat Summitt and UCLA’s own Sue Enquist have had great success in basketball and softball, respectively; one could name many others. But there are no women serving as head coaches of men’s teams at any major university or in the professional ranks. This raises a question for feminists: should the sex of the head coach matter in women’s athletics?

Though it is difficult to prove, it seems clear that at least some young women are “more comfortable” being coached by a man. This may be a matter of acculturation, or perhaps some sort of internalized misogyny. It can also be homophobia: the fear of lesbianism is widespread, particularly among conservative families looking to send their daughters off to college to play sports. (One of the reason why the most successful women’s coaches, like Summitt of Tennessee, bend over backwards to project a “feminine” and “heterosexual” image). In a world where women are so infrequently seen in positions of authority, a male coach may be seen as intellectually and athletically superior. For some, male coaches may add undeserved legitimacy: “we know it’s a serious sport because a man coaches it!” (This reminds me of the students who tell me they took women’s studies with me because they thought I would be “less biased” than a woman. Talk about unwarranted male privilege!)

Of course, the motives and skills of male coaches are regularly questioned. Men who choose to coach women’s basketball, for example, are presumed to have “tried and failed” to coach men’s teams — and are only choosing women’s sports as a consolation prize. On the other hand, occasional reports of sexual harrassment of female athletes by male coaches leads others to assume that men who coach women often have a predatory motive. (The ambiguous, border-line behavior of legendary figures like Anson Dorrance doesn’t help). But despite all this, there can be little doubt that men have had great success coaching women in recent years.

The most controversial suggestion is to insist that athletes be coached by members of their own sex. Some have asked that the NCAA encourage that member institutions hire only women to coach women’s teams. Think of it as a particularly aggressive form of gender-based affirmative action. Given that women coaches clearly have the talent to lead, and given the enduring cultural obstacles that keep them from leadership, isn’t it time to demand that if only men are coaching men, only women should be coaching women? Isn’t this the best and quickest way to increase the number of female coaches?

Obviously, I don’t like that idea. (What would it mean for my work as a women’s history teacher?) Still, I’m immensely sympathetic to the overall goal. The answer, I think, is to encourage more women to coach their daughters’ soccer teams in elementary schools. When I look at kids playing sports in parks, I see more fathers than mothers barking instructions and running up and down. These girls are being taught that leadership comes from a man; mom may drive them to soccer practice, but dad coaches the team. Any lasting changes will have to come on a very early level. We must teach our girls that women can lead and coach. We must do everything possible to get more women into coaching at the elementary and secondary levels, and then I think we will see far greater success for women in the colleges and the professional ranks.

The Women’s Sports Foundation issued this statement a few years ago on the subject. It does a nice job of analyzing the myths and obstacles that surround the issue of women in coaching; it’s short, so have a look.

So congrats to Anne Donovan, congrats to the Seattle Storm. And while you’re thinking about it, go and find out who’s coaching the women’s teams at your local high school, college, or alma mater.

UPDATE: I’ve been given false information. The Times said this morning (scroll to the bottom for the quote): Not only is Seattle’s Anne Donovan the first woman to coach a WNBA champion, she’s the first to win a title in any U.S. women’s pro league. But Julie at No Fancy Name corrects both me and the paper here:

Anne Donovan wasn’t the first female head coach of a professional championship team, because Marcia McDermott coached the 2002 WUSA champions, the Carolina Courage. Hey, it was a professional league, they had tons of money (that they spent inappropriately), so it should count. I didn’t check other leagues’ history, so I’m not saying that McDermott was the first, just that Donovan wasn’t…

I stand corrected. Shall I email the LA Times?

Further Update: the Seattle Times makes the same mistake: Last night, Anne Donovan became the first woman to coach a team to a professional sports championship in the United States, as she intellectually and emotionally directed the Storm to an overwhelming 74-60 victory over the Connecticut Sun last night at KeyArena.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word — and rampant lesbianism!

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 12, 2004
in Feminism, GLBTQ and Politics
. 50 Comments

Jonathan Dresner sent me this short piece from gender expert Deborah Tannen that appeared in today’s NY Times.

Referring to President Bush’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that he might have made any errors as president, Tannen opines

Perhaps it was not by chance that it was a woman who asked the president, at the town hall debate last Friday, to list three instances in which he had made wrong decisions since taking office. If women react to Mr. Bush’s made-no-mistake tactic the way they react to it when it is used by men in their lives, a majority may well be more angered than reassured. That’s because it drives many women nuts when men won’t say they made a mistake and apologize if they do something wrong. I’m reminded of a woman who was angry at her husband because she had given him an important letter to mail and he’d assured her he’d mail it, then told her the next day, “I forgot to mail your letter,” and stopped there. She waited in vain for the sentence to continue, “I’m sorry.” In the end, she was angry not about the letter but about the missing apology.

Many men learn, from the time they’re children, to avoid apologizing, because it entails admitting fault, and that’s risky for them. Boys have to be on their guard against appearing weak - either literally, by losing fights, or figuratively, in the way they speak - because if they act or talk in ways that show weakness, other boys will take advantage and push them around.

But refusing to apologize infuriates women because that makes it seem as if the guy doesn’t care that he let her down, and if he doesn’t care, there’s no reason to think he won’t do it again. This is the negative effect - the collateral damage - that Mr. Bush’s “certainty” is certain to have on many women: if he won’t admit he made a mistake in his handling of Iraq, it seems he doesn’t care about the American soldiers killed and maimed, the civilians beheaded, about the Iraqi children blown up by insurgents’ bombs.

The easy conservative response of my Republican sisters is not hard to anticipate: President Bush has nothing to apologize for. But for those of us who do think he has made serious errors, his refusal to apologize is especially galling.

Still, it’s a good article, and I recommend reading the whole thing. Tannen gets a lot of stuff right.

For the record, I’ve never regarded certainty as a virtue. My unofficial family motto is “Often in error, never in doubt.” My own variation on that has been “Often in error, constantly in doubt.” As a result, I’m partial to politicians who are willing to embrace subtlety, nuance, and flexibility. And I’m very fond of folks who are candid about their mistakes.

Speaking of folks who need to apologize, lots of folks are taking Oklahoma’s Republican candidate for senate, Tom Coburn, to task for these now-infamous words:

“You know, Josh Burkeen is our rep down here in the southeast area. . . . He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?”

The quote is found at the bottom of this Post story.

Amanda gets it right in her commentary which touches on homophobia, the fear of female sexuality, and other things.

And for the record, Coburn made his hilarious remark in… Hugo, Oklahoma.

Black men, women, athletics, success

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 12, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Class, Ethnicity, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sports
. 3 Comments

Col Steve, commenting on my football post below, wrote:

Football (and basketball) has allowed a percentage, albeit small, of young people (skewed to minorities) to move quickly into the upper income levels - along with their predominantly white coaches. It has also allowed a larger percentage to obtain a college education - and as you note, some take more advantage of that opportunity than others. On the flip side, there is also a percentage of athletes allowed to fall back into society without much of a safety net when they can no longer contribute to the institution.

I agree, except I would replace the word “people” with “men”. (Yes, there is a WNBA for women, but it is tiny and struggling. And there is no NFL for women.) And the word “minorities” here generally means “black.” (Yao Ming and Tony Gonzalez notwithstanding). It’s entirely understandable that whites are anxious about speaking to an issue so charged with potential racial tension. Still, I don’t have a habit of shying away from touchy issues. If I can claim to be a pro-life feminist male with insight into adolescent women’s psyches, I might as well tackle the African-American athlete.

The City of Pasadena is 15% black. Yet only 6% of Pasadena City College students are African-American. Asians and Latinos are represented in numbers at or above their overall population. And of our African-American students, over 60% are women in a total student pool that is 56% female.

Speaking anecdotally, I would estimate that 50% of the few black men I have had as students have been members of either the football or the basketball team. A couple have been adequate students, one or two have been exceptional. Most have been positively dismal. Their poor performance contrasts sharply with that of their sisters! I have had many, many superb black women students. Indeed, two out of the past three years, my single best student in all my classes was an African-American woman! Many of these women are products of the same failed public high schools that their brothers attended — yet somehow, these gals arrived at the community college with their ambition, common sense, and work ethic firmly in place. The same cannot be said for most black men (again, I note there have been a couple of magnificent exceptions).

An article in the USC Trojan a while back summarized the discrepancy:

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education’s spring issue noted that women earned 67 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks. Women earned 69 percent of master’s degrees and 66 percent of doctoral degrees awarded to blacks. They earned 58 percent of all professional degrees awarded to blacks, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Research Council.

Another article can be found here.

None of the black male athletes I have taught has succeeded as a pro athlete. PCC has had a few over the years (Michael Cooper, the 1980s-era Laker star among the most recent), but it is clear that the vast majority of our African-American players will not rise from poverty through sports. And yet they are recruited (yes, community colleges recruit) with promises of four-year scholarships and potentially lucrative professional careers. Their coaches — many of whom are white — encourage them to take easy classes that can fit around their practice schedule. (I note that while female athletes also need to take courses around their practice schedules, they show no signs, as a group, of dodging more difficult and challenging classes).

It would be absurd and unfair to place the blame for all this solely on the shoulders of young black men. We live in a culture where most folks are desperately afraid of young black males. We live in a culture where the only successful black men on television are athletes and entertainers. (Newsflash: most black men don’t instantly identify with Colin Powell, whose very “blackness” is somewhat suspect.) Many young black males in the public school system are “tracked” into vocational, special ed, and PE programs, largely because of the perception that they will be serious discipline problems if they remain in the general population. And most disturbingly of all, among many young black males there is a virulent anti-intellectualism (again, not shared by their sisters) that suggests that academic success is evidence of “selling out” one’s authenticity and one’s heritage.

The best black male student I ever had was openly gay. He explained that his sexuality — for which he had been shamed and rejected by his peers — was his liberation. (The same was true, of course, for James Baldwin.) His gayness meant that despite the humiliations he endured, he was free to pursue his first love — writing. Because he was gay, no one expected him to be an athlete (stereotypes being what they are.) Because he was gay — and quite openly so — he was less likely to be viewed as a potential criminal. (As he put it “white women ran away until they found out I was gay.”) He went on to a fine career at UCLA, and is in grad school as I write.

I’ll be the first to admit the obvious: I have a hard time reaching black male students. All of the “tricks of the trade” that one learns doing work on masculinity don’t seem to help much. I am happy to report that I have many younger black boys (relax, folks, it’s okay to use “boy” when referring to adolescents) in my youth group at All Saints. There, sheltered from the most pernicious influences of the culture, African-American young men seem to blossom. I have warm and close relationships with a number of them. But the All Saints boys are mostly from the relatively small black middle-class — and they are headed straight off to four-year schools. They are quite different from the fellows who come to my classes.

I’m unhappy with this post — I’m not offering much of a solution, just expressing frustration, as much in myself as in the system.

Congrats all aroundl

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 11, 2004
in Blogging and Having children
. 0 Comments

Two very different bloggers have become fathers in the past few days: XRLQ and Rudy. Send them your regards.

The disaster with the tree has been cleared up. The downstairs window pane has been replaced. Matilde the chinchilla, who has had an exhausting day, is finally sleeping. I’ve missed my office hours, but will be back on campus for night class tonight.

Trees and football

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 11, 2004
in Aggression and violence, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Sports and Teaching
. 7 Comments

I was forced to skip my morning run today. At about 5:30AM, a tree came crashing into the side of our townhouse, shattering the window in the livingroom and sending us flying out of bed. (Our first thought, naturally, was for our little chinchilla.) Matilde was fine, but the window wasn’t. The rest of the morning, until it was time to leave for school, was spent dealing with calling around to find tree trimmers and glass repair people. All will be well.

My mother had a happy visit, and we had lots of opportunity to talk politics and family news.

I’ve been thinking about football today. My beloved California Golden Bears fell just short in their game against USC on Saturday. Though Cal dominated the game statistically, ‘SC won where it counts — on the scoreboard. I don’t place much stock in moral victories, though I am proud of my alma mater and excited about our prospects for the remainder of the year.

It’s impossible to be simultaneously a gender studies professor and a football fan without periodically reflecting on this most violent and American of games. As a child, I was fond of watching pro football; I only became a real fan of the college game after going off to Berkeley in 1985. My freshman year, I had a student pass to all the home games, and went and cheered with wild enthusiasm.

Cal’s 1986 season coincided with my sudden and ardent interest in women’s studies. For the first time, I encountered folks who had serious, principled objections to this brutal game I loved so much. I began to ask questions about the colossal expense of college football programs, about the poor academic record of many of our recruits, and most importantly, about the link between football and violence against women.

An on-campus incident at the start of the academic year affected me deeply. After the first home game of the ‘86 campaign, four members of the football team were charged with raping a female student in a dorm room. (She had apparently consented to sex with one of them, and then he invited in his friends.) The incident was the talk of the campus. There was outrage when the coach refused to suspend the players unless they were charged criminally, which they never were. (The district attorney found insufficient evidence — 1986 was apparently “pre-DNA” for all practical purposes.) As a “new feminist”, I saw the case through new lenses; I was among those who marched and demanded that the four (three defensive players and a running back) be suspended immediately. I had become convinced that college football programs fostered a sense of entitlement among athletes, a sense that included the right of unrestricted access to young women’s bodies. Though I was angry at the individual players (one of whom I had met briefly my frosh year), I also believed strongly that 18 and 19 year-old men who were recruited for their aggression and size and taught daily to “hit hard” were not entirely to blame when they had difficulty distinguishing defenseless human beings from their on-field opponents. Upshot? Hugo did not go to any games during the dismal 1986 football season until the “Big Game” with Stanford. Cal upset the overwhelmingly favored Cardinal, 17-11. My delight at having been present for the thrilling win brought to an end my boycott of the game.

My doubts about football remained. When I came to grad school at UCLA, I found that many grad students made extra money by serving as athletic department tutors. The pay was excellent: $15-20 an hour, which was outstanding compensation in 1991. In some cases, it was more than what we were making as teaching assistants! I spent two quarters during the early 1990s working for the UCLA athletic department. I had friends who worked for the department for much, much longer.

One term, I was assigned one specific task: to help UCLA’s dimwitted placekicker pass a famously easy course. I won’t name the kicker, though anyone who has access to old Bruin media guides could probably find out who the fellow was. The course was Introduction to Russian Culture, taught by a Professor Vroon. I was paid for the following services: three days a week (the class was MWF), I met “my kicker” outside the lecture hall before the class and then sat with him during the lecture. Though he was to be encouraged to take notes, I took notes as well. We met weekly to review the notes and prepare for tests. He had no interest in school, but it had been impressed upon him that if he did not earn at least a “C”, he would not be kicking the following season (which was to be his last year). I spent countless hours with him. He was bored by school, bored by the class, bored by me. I wanted him to pass very badly, largely because I knew I would get rehired and get still more money if I could prove to the athletic department that I could “get the job done.”

My kicker passed the class. I made him write the first draft of his term paper by himself, and then I “cleaned up” all the grammar and made him the gift of a thesis. I was never told directly to write papers for him. Publicly, the athletic department insisted that the grad students like me were just “tutors”, and all the real work was done by the players themselves. That may well have been true for some. But my placekicker would not have survived Professor Vroon’s course had it not been for my “extra help”. And I can assure you that privately, the director of the athletic tutoring program had made it clear to me that I was to do what was necessary to get that young man a C. I did as I was asked, and was paid handsomely. I made over $1200 for that passing grade, and as a poor grad student, was grateful for the opportunity. Had I not been given the editorship of UCLA’s journal for Medieval and Renaissance Studies the following year, I might well have continued to work for the athletic program.

To be fair, I also met some football players at Cal and UCLA who were bright, hard-working, and motivated. Some of these knew they would never make a living at pro football, and were grateful for the chance to get a free university education. Some did quite well. But in my limited experience, they were the exception rather than the rule. As a teaching assistant at UCLA, I had athletes from other programs in my classes, including a whole bevy of softball players. I found that there were no discernible differences between non-football playing athletes and other students (though I heard anecdotally that the men’s basketball team had some real academic duds). The women athletes in particular often did better than their non-athlete fellow female students. The problem seemed to lie primarily in the football program. (Yes, there was and is a racial dimension to all of this, one that I am uncomfortable addressing.)

I still love college football. I have no particular love for UCLA, though they paid me well. My love is for Cal, even as I suspect that conditions in Cal’s “tutoring program” are probably not all that different than at UCLA. I question the tremendous expense, and above all, I am troubled by the apparent link between football and violence against women.

But for now, at least, I’m still cheering. Go Bears!

I’ll be away…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 7, 2004
in Blogging
. 13 Comments

…from the computer for a few days. The home computer is still broken, and I won’t be back in the office until Monday. My mother is coming into town this weekend, and tomorrow night, we are planning to break in our new fondue set and watch the second presidential debate together.

And on Saturday, we will be hoping and pulling for a Cal victory over USC. In the meantime, I’ll consider what color scheme to go with next here on the blog…

Loving the bookish and the cool

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 7, 2004
in Memories, Men and Masculinity and Youth
. 5 Comments

I’ve been thinking about some of the comments on my post on real manhood, especially one from Charles that I’m going to quote at length:

I totally agree that it might have been helpful to me to have had a male role model who could have told me clearly, “No, look, what they tell you a man is, is a very limited thing. If you make yourself into a man by their instrucitons, you will hurt yourself badly, and you will spend decades trying to find your way back out to be a full human being. The only thing that makes you a man is your body. What makes you a human being is both your body and your mind.” And of course, it would have been better if he could simply have modelled that.

On the other hand, it was women who told me that most clearly, and if they could have been clearer, I probably would have listened in the first place. Nobody was very clear about explaining this sort of thing to children and teens in the late seventies and eighties, at least not where I lived, but at least I was lucky enough to encounter it at all.

If that is what you are doing, if that is what you are advocating, then all my wishes and hopes go with you in your work. But if that is what you are doing, then I don’t understand why you care if women are different than men. Men are different enough from men. Surely that difference (what I am comfortable being, what you are comfortable being, what Amp is comfortable being) is the important one in working with men, whether you are trying to get people to find their comfort or to break out of their comfort. Isn’t it infinitely more important to say “Some men are this, others are this,” than to say “Men are this, women are this other?”

Do you mentor only aggressive, hyper-masculinized teens? Or do you need to mentor introverted, bookish teens as well?

Let me begin an answer to those excellent questions with an autobiographical note: I was an introverted, clumsy, bookish, unathletic, slightly chubby teen boy. I was teased and harassed throughout my elementary and junior high school years. I found solace in two places: books and the theater. I spent years working with a community theater group as a kid, and it was in drama that I first found “folks like me” who felt like misfits. Most of my good friends were girls — and boys who were on their way out of the closet! I was not remotely good-looking. I had unrequited crushes on several of my female friends, who thought I was “nice, but…” I had only one straight male friend in high school, and even that was often a tense and ambivalent relationship. So, Charles, I think my bona fides as a certifiable geek are in place!

By the way, it was the theater that turned me into an extrovert (enough that I went from an INFP to an ENFJ on Myers-Briggs tests over the years).

I spent years loathing the available models of masculinity. Indeed, one of the reasons I first went into gender work was to find something different! I wanted to know how to be a different kind of man than the men I saw around me. It was women’s studies work that led me to men and masculinity workshops and led me to want to re-define and reclaim authentic (I won’t use the word “real” anymore, it is too easily misunderstood) masculinity.

When I first started working with teenagers, I was scared to work with the boys! The girls came easily to me. I found it much more easy to offer aid and comfort and support to young women than to young men. Over time, that reality began to gnaw at me. Why was I so scared of reaching out to boys half my age? Was I afraid that I would be found wanting in their eyes too? Was I afraid that they would reject me the way I had been rejected by so many of my male peers in high school? Eventually, a dear friend of mine pointed out to me that by not reaching out to the boys out of my own fear, I was missing a vital opportunity to both heal some of my own wounds and to nurture young men in a way that they were not usually nurtured. It was time for me to grow up and get to work loving boys.

When I’m in youth group with the kids, I make sure to pay equal attention to the boys and girls. But I really enjoy those times when the boys and I get some time just to talk amongst ourselves. No, we don’t beat our chests or beat on drums or beat on anything. We talk. The shy, bookish, clumsy ones who look like Hugo at 15 talk. The graceful, proud, “alpha male cool boys” talk. The black boys talk. The white boys talk. The Peruvian boy talks. There are moments of rough humor, but I never use objectification of women to try and create a bond with these guys. (Nothing could be more counter-productive.) We talk about girls, and we talk about parents, and we talk about the pressure to “be a man”. And I don’t deliver stirring lectures about self-control and responsibility. Mostly, I shut up and listen. And I ask questions. And I always, always, always try and suggest that they think of manhood in terms different from those that our culture uses to define the term. It isn’t easy work, but it’s good work.

Oh, and yes, all the boys in my youth group hug. Squirrelly, chest-bumping boy hugs to be sure, but hugs nonetheless.

What can I offer my boys that a female youth leader can’t? Not much, except for one crucial thing: Most of these boys have been loved on and cared for by women all of their lives. They are accustomed to getting whatever validation and acceptance they do get primarily (if not in some cases, exclusively) from women. That validation and love and affirmation is terrific — but as a young man, I longed for older men to approve of me (hence my hero worship of my graduate advisers). To say that sex makes no difference is to ignore the longing that I know was in my heart and which is clearly in the hearts of so many of these boys whom I love so damn much.

And for the record, I’m still bookish. I’m still a geek. If my posts have created the impression that I am some sort of “hail fellow, well met” bouncing ball of testosterone, I am sorry.