It’s Friday afternoon, and I don’t have much time to post. My fiancee and I were up in Northern California last night for a family high school graduation; tomorrow, we head down to San Diego for Sunday’s Rock n’ Roll Marathon. Lots of time on planes and in cars. Not much computer time.
In response to queries about my reading list for the Lesbian and Gay American History class I’ll be teaching , here’s the tentative list:
A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America, Leila Rupp. Short is right, but it works.
To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America, Lilian Faderman.
Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, Dudley Clendinen, Adam Nagourskey.
I’ll be using excerpts from other texts as well, such as Rictor Norton’s over-the-top but fascinating The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity and Jonathan Katz’s marvelous Invention of Heterosexuality.
I’ll also try and bring in guest speakers again. Last time I taught the course, I brought in two men I’m proud to call friends: Richard Godbeer of Miami (Florida), formerly of UC Riverside, who wrote the important Sexual Revolution in Early America and pastor Jerrell Walls of Christ Chapel of the Valley, a leading figure in the gay Pentecostal movement. I’ll hunt up some other good folks as well.
Four years ago, I tried to get a speaker in from the secular reparative therapy movement. Most of my students were very interested in hearing from the “other side,” and I talked to a couple of folks affiliated with NARTH (which is headquartered not far from here, in Encino). Despite my promise that they would be treated fairly, they declined to come into what they felt would inevitably be a hostile environment. Perhaps this time, I’ll be able to convince them to come in.
Then again, perhaps I ought not to try. Sometimes, I wonder, if inviting someone from the reparative therapy movement to my course isn’t a bit like inviting a Klansman to speak in an African-American History class! As a straight man who teaches this course, I owe it to my queer students to be scrupulous about protecting them from those who would attack them in the classroom. At the same time, they deserve to hear — in a safe and civil setting — a thoughtful, reasonable explanation of what reparative therapy is. It surely is not irrelevant to the curriculum! Ultimately, I’m going to let my students in the fall of 2005 “make the call” for me. In 2001, the vast majority of my students (many of whom were GLBTQ) wanted NARTH to send a representative; if my next batch is equally willing, perhaps I’ll press the invitation again. I’ll make sure that those students who are uncomfortable attending will be given an alternative assignment so that they won’t be penalized if they aren’t willing to sit through a NARTH presentation.
For those who are curious, by the way, this will be my fourth time teaching the course. Though I never asked my students to publicly disclose their sexual identities in class, a great many did choose to do so. In rough terms, I’d say that 60% of the students who took the class were female, 40% male. About a third openly identified as GLBT, another third eventually identified as “straight”, and still another third chose to keep their identity to themselves. I certainly had more “out” lesbians than gay men, and I’m not sure to what to attribute that. Frankly, I had expected the opposite, but given that Pasadena City College is about 56% female, it shouldn’t have been surprising to me.
I think nowadays it’s easier for lesbians to come out younger. Anxious masculinity is the zeitgeist, which works strongly against gay men.
I really encourage you to get some dissenting views (like reparative therapy) in the classroom. Students will encounter such views in their lives beyond college, if they haven’t already. The classroom is a great place for exposure, with adequate space for processing and care. I have found reparative therapy types to be mostly compassionate and not mean - the anti-gay legal activists and religious extremists (from small, unaffiliated churches whose main mission is to be against gays) to be more difficult and not necessarily worth engaging in a classroom.
Jenell, that’s been my experience as well. On the other hand, I have had some gay friends use the “Klansmen in an African-American Studies” analogy, and I’m not entirely sure they’re wrong.
I guess my personal bias is towards using historical sources in history courses. What about looking at the debate in the American Psychological Association about whether homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder?
Sally, we do do plenty of that! But since this is the only course on gay and lesbian studies anywhere in the entire area code, I feel an obligation to talk about contemporary issues as well.
I’ve got a documentary, somewhere, with footage from those early 1970s debates about homosexuality at the APA. I’ve got a lot of reviewing to do this summer, let me tell you!
Ah, that makes sense.
Probably not the kind of thing you’d assign but have you heard this episode of This American Life, in which the reporter talks about her grandfather , who was president-elect of the APA and a closeted gay man, and the controversy?
On the other hand, I have had some gay friends use the “Klansmen in an African-American Studies” analogy, and I’m not entirely sure they’re wrong.
They’re not. Nobody would suggest that, if you were teaching a class on Judaism, that you bring in a ‘dissenting viewpoint’ of somebody who believes Jews are all going to hell and ought to be converted to Christianity, even if that somebody is “compassionate”. Nobody would suggest that a course on the history of Christianity need include a visit from a “compassionate” member of a rabid atheists’ group, who would lecture the students on how they were deluded and needed de-programming.
Of course students in your gay, lesbian and bisexual studies class should know about reparative therapy.
This sounds like a great course, Hugo, and it’s clear that you approach it with compassion. Viva.
Agree with Jenell here, sort of - the reparative view ‘could’ be useful (scare quotes intended). Depends on what they mean by reparative. In discussions with friends and relations the consensus seems to be that being gay is not an all or nothing response for everyone. For the confused human, maybe ‘reparative’ meaning nothing more than encouraging a person to become comfortable with not just who they are but what orientation they might wish to pursue, since (betting here), most would have a choice. But not all by any means. A guy who I’m very close to reckons that he’s known he was gay from the age of 8. If reparative means nothing more than supportive counselling, well and good. On the other hand, apart from the rabid right, there’s another mob that have pushed for reparative measures to save their children from a supposedly difficult life. This is historical but have you looked at the UCLA Feminine Boys Project? http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/4298/GenShock2.html
A pretty good example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
FWIW, I think letting your students make the call is exactly right.
Glad to see you use Katz. What a marvelous book.
Nobody would suggest that, if you were teaching a class on Judaism, that you bring in a ‘dissenting viewpoint’ of somebody who believes Jews are all going to hell and ought to be converted to Christianity, even if that somebody is “compassionate”.
I would. So much of the Jewish experience for the last couple thousand years has been shaped by Christian anti-Semitism that it would be interesting and useful to get some perspective on the internal workings of what Jews have been up against. The thing is to frame it as understanding the social context of the people whose history is the focus of the class, not as the “other side” of a he-said-she-said debate.
I think it would be a terrible mistake to bring in an anti-semite and use that person as an example of what Jews have been up against for thousands of years. It’s profoundly ahistorical. It ignores how the content of anti-semitism has changed over the past couple of thousand years, and it ignores how the social context has changed, too. (There are people today who believe that Jews have certain racial personality traits, but it’s not something you’re supposed to say in polite company. In 1910, that was the mainstream view.)
A much better tactic is to learn about the history of anti-semitism by examinging primary sources.
I understand Hugo’s point about needing to focus on contemporary stuff. But I don’t think that would be a appropriate in a Jewish history class, both because it’s ahistorical and because it would exaggerate the importance of anti-semitism in contemporary Jewish experience.
Sally put it better than I could.
It’s also less ‘interesting and useful’ to have these people in a classroom when you’re their direct target. We in the US think of anti-Semitism as quaint and, organizationally, harmless; Jews for Jesus is not kidnapping children and it doesn’t have much political influence. “Reparative therapy” is something that’s alive and well in the US, and to which teenagers can be subjected involuntarily.
Sally’s point about the differing historical circumstances of anti-Semitism and reparative therapy is well-taken.
Mythago’s point, though, seems to potentially weigh in favor of bringing in the reparative therapist. If students are likely to encounter these people eventually — out on the street, or under manipulative pressure by family or friends — it seems like it could be useful to encounter them first in the classroom environment. The presence of supportive classmates, a competent moderator, and ground rules emphasizing discussion and banning recruitment/conversion seems to be the best environment for getting a handle on how reparative therapy works and thus being able to figure out how to handle it.
What might be more pertinent than getting some current reparative therapist to come, without context, would be to review the section on “medicalization and medical diagnosis and treatment of homosexuality” from Katz’ Gay American History sourcebook. Then present the history of reparative therapy in past few years (Katz’ book is from the mid-1970s) and the lack of peer-reviewed publications of properly designed studies of reparative therapy. Then, if you like, bring in a reparative therapy advocate. This might also work for a history of medicine, history of psychotherapy course. Why do people persist in seeking unproven therapies (aka “quack medicine”), why do practitioners continue to believe in unproven therapies (if they actually believe their own press and are not merely milking patients for money), why do they shy away from testing their hypotheses that are the basis for the therapy, what causes a profession to reevaluate “received wisdom”? Many practitioners of reparative therapy have been censured for quackery or unethical practices. What causes professional associations to police these particular practices, when they had ignored the same practices earlier?