Archive for May, 2008

Flying with Senator Scott, and a call for stories about the Pill

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 30, 2008
in Birth control and contraception, Books and Traveling
. 0 Comments

I’m home from a very quick trip up to Yuba City for our niece’s graduation last night. On the flight down from Sacramento to Burbank this morning, I got a chance to chat with the former Pasadena City College president, Jack Scott. Jack’s now a state senator and soon to be the chancellor of the California community college system; a fellow historian, he was very kind to me when I was first hired. I worked on his 1996 and 1998 assembly campaigns, and have always admired him for the decent, thoughtful way in which he blends his passionate faith (he’s an ordained Baptist minister) with strong progressive politics. When you fly on a Friday between Sacramento and Burbank, you’re guaranteed to have at least one state legislator on board; I’m glad that today it was my own state senator and former campus president.

But the point of this post is to pass along an announcement, sent to me by Courtney Martin.

Elaine May, who teaches history at Minnesota, is writing a book about the Pill. Here’s the announcement she sends out:

Dear Friends (and friends of friends…),

The Pill is often considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century. As I investigate this claim for a new book—set for release on the 50th anniversary of the Pill’s FDA approval (Basic Books, 2010)—I’m looking to include the voices and stories of real people. I hope yours will be one of them. I’m eager to hear from men as well as women, of all ages and backgrounds.

· Have you or any of your partners taken the Pill? Why or why not? How did it work for you—physically, emotionally, and ethically? How has it compared with other contraceptive methods you or your partners have used?

· What has been the impact of the Pill on your sex life, relationships, political or social attitudes, and beliefs about the medical or pharmaceutical establishments?

· Do you have opinions about public policies related to access, availability, approval or limitations on the development and distribution of the Pill and related contraceptive products (the patch, the “morning after pill,” long-term injections, etc.).

· Anything else you think I should know?

Send me your most richly detailed answers to any and all of these questions (and don’t forget to include your age, gender, where you live, occupation, ethnic/religious/racial background, sexual orientation, marital status, political party affiliation, or any other biographical info you think is important). If you would like to participate in my study but would prefer to respond to a questionnaire, please let me know and I will happily send you one.
I’m interested in hearing from men and women who have used the Pill and those who have not, those who used it briefly or a long time ago, or who use it now. I am also eager to hear from people who work in fields that relate to the use and availability of the Pill (such as medicine, public health, social work, education, etc.). You will remain anonymous. I will use your contact information only to respond to you directly and to let you know when the book will be available for purchase (at a discount to contributors!).

And just one more thing. I not only want to hear your voice, but the voices of those you love, teach, preach to, learn from, and work with. Please pass this request on! The more responses I receive, and the greater the diversity of respondents, the more the book will reflect the wide range of experiences and attitudes that have shaped the Pill’s history over the last half century.

I hope to hear from you. Please write to me at elainetylermay@gmail.com.

I’ll be blogging my own answers soon enough.

Five books meme

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 29, 2008
in Blogging and Books
. 8 Comments

I’ve got some serious posts in the mental hopper, but they will have to wait. I’ve got two lectures this morning, followed by a flight up to Northern California; my wife’s niece is graduating from high school up in Sutter County this afternoon, so we’re on the road yet again. (The current plan, however, is to spend every single night of the month of June in the same bed — something that by my calculation, I haven’t done since last October.)

So today’s post is a meme: name five works of fiction (no, Shakespeare doesn’t count, nor does the Bible for those of you who call it “fiction”) that have changed you and how you see the world. What five novels, plays, or short stories (no films, no poetry) have impacted your world view, perhaps altering how you live and how you think? Here are mine, in no particular order:

1. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee. I read this novel in 2000, some two years after getting sober and forswearing, at last, my habit of seducing students. There are few characters in literature with whom I identified more than the narcissistic, self-destructive middle-aged protagonist of Coetzee’s Nobel prize-securing masterwork. And as a story about what I didn’t want to become, but might, and as a story about the necessity of humiliation before redemption, it was immensely impacting. I still re-read it every year. Continue reading ‘Five books meme’

Thursday Short Poem: Rukeyser’s “St. Roach”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 29, 2008
in Poetry
. 1 Comment

Part of being a vegan is having love and compassion for the less adorable creatures. It’s easy to love rabbits and dogs; harder to love rattlesnakes and vultures. Muriel Rukeyser’s poem this week challenges us to make that push to embrace the worth and dignity of all that lives.

And of course, this poem is about much more than roaches.

St. Roach.

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.

Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter that the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.

Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange, and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

“Our presence is evidence we’ve all screwed up”: defending the community colleges against Professor X

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 24 Comments

Via Lauren, this stunningly depressing article by Professor X about life in the basement of the ivory tower. X adjuncts a night class at a community college — which is what I did for one year (1993-94) before I had the great good fortune to get a tenure-track job at the tender age of 26. X teaches English, and he or she is grim about it:

Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest.

Okay, right off the bat, that describes only half of my students at Pasadena City College. Professor X doesn’t get in his night classes the students I’ve been getting in mine for fifteen years — which include not only the academically indifferent but those of exceptional potential whose family circumstances prevent them from attending a four-year college right away. I transfer students to Berkeley, UCLA, Occidental, and USC every year, students who have figured out that taking two years at $20 a unit makes good sense.

The thing about the community college is that I get such an astonishingly wide range of students. In a typical night class of nearly fifty, I will have a few very bright high school kids of perhaps 16 or 17 years of age. I will also have retirees in their 60s and 70s, 30-ish single moms returning to school, and quite a few students between the standard ages of 18-24. Some are very bright, with the skills but not the financial wherewithal to do well at competitive universities; others struggle with learning disabilities or barely average intellectual ability. That breadth of ability is a challenge, but it is also a joy — and anyone who doesn’t find it such should be elsewhere. Continue reading ‘“Our presence is evidence we’ve all screwed up”: defending the community colleges against Professor X’

Of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2008
in Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Myth of Male Weakness and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 27 Comments

Amber Rhea gets the hat tip for this article in New York Magazine: The Affairs of Men: The trouble with sex and marriage. That’s the title in the magazine, anyway, but when you click on the link, the title that comes up is What Makes Married Men Want to Have Affairs?, which is a very different sort of question. Asking why men want what they want is never, ever, the same question as why men do what they do.

The author, Phillip Weiss, gets us off to a depressing start:

When the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke in March, I had only sympathy for him: another middle-aged married guy tormented by his sexual needs. I’m 52 and have always struggled with the desire for sexual variety. Everyone gets an issue, and that’s mine; it’s given me pleasure and pain, and jolted my marriage. I’d only talked about my issue with any honesty over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and a therapist, they are all men.

So the conversation had a conspiratorial male character. When people at dinner parties cried out, “What was Spitzer thinking?” I whispered to a friend that I knew damn well what he was thinking: He wanted some “strange,” to quote the old Kris Kristofferson line. Or we passed around JPEGS of Spitzer’s date, Ashley Dupre, and commented on her luscious body. The governor’s plight had the effect of outing me. When I told one married friend about my torment, he cut me off. “Everyone in our situation has had one or two episodes. Straying, wandering eye, a blowup. If you have a pulse.”

What situation is that, I wonder? The situation of the middle-aged married male, caught between his promises and his urges? Apparently. Here’s Weiss’ stunner:

An article of faith among the men with whom I discussed these issues (and an idea ignored, if not contested, by most of the women I know) was that the hunger for sexual variety was a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse. “I haven’t ever seen anyone who doesn’t deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don’t,” says a forward-thinking friend. “There is no more unnatural principle of social organization than sexual exclusivity.” But like other of my male sources, he didn’t want me to use his name. “Don’t get me divorced!” was the refrain. All of these guys nursed a fantasy, as quaintly surreal as an old tinted postcard, of a perfectible world in which we might have sex outside our primary relationships and say that it doesn’t mean anything.

Yikes. Let’s just say, the piece goes down hill from there. The bold emphasis above is mine; it illustrates the classic fallacy of what I call the “myth of male weakness”. Here’s how the fallacy works:

1. Men naturally desire sexual variety.
2. That desire for sexual variety is very strong.
3. That desire is, in fact, so strong that it can never be resisted, and in the end, will always trump the will. It’s only a matter of time. Continue reading ‘Of “everlasting novelty”, male weakness, and the ecstatic satisfaction of virtue’

After 25, it’s in bad taste to blame your parents for anything: some thoughts on Rebecca and Alice Walker, feminism, and the rage of the neglected child

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2008
in Family, Feminism and Parenting
. 31 Comments

Much discussion today of Rebecca Walker’s piece in the Daily Mail: How My Mother’s Fanatical Feminist Views Tore us Apart. Rebecca, daughter of Alice Walker (of the “Color Purple” and many other important feminist works) excoriates her mother in the Mail interview, done to promote (of course) her new book.

…my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa - offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

The publishing industry regularly proves right Freud’s theory about children’s murderous desires towards their parents. We have ooodles and ooodles of “tell-all” books written by the kids of the famous, in which they invariably “shatter the illusion” of the (usually same-sex) parent’s marvelous public persona. Folks never tire of buying the latest in the “Everyone-thought-Mum-was-God-but-to-me-and-my-pet-rabbit-she-was-Satan” genre, and Rebecca Walker offers us her version this spring. The hook, of course, is that Rebecca doesn’t just blame Alice — she blames feminism. Continue reading ‘After 25, it’s in bad taste to blame your parents for anything: some thoughts on Rebecca and Alice Walker, feminism, and the rage of the neglected child’

“Enter through the narrow gate”: culture, tradition, and the Christian paradox of other-centered individualism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2008
in Christianity, Faith and Favorite Posts 2008
. 3 Comments

At the end of a long post about changing her views on abortion, Mermade asks:

…sometimes I do worry about whether or not I am indeed deviating from the narrow path (see Matthew 7:13), but no longer view the “narrow path” as being politically conservative in a secular culture. I am still trying to figure out what Jesus meant when he said to enter through the narrow path. Any interpretations you guys have of that are very much welcome.

Well, lots of folks can give interesting lectures about the various gates into the city of Jerusalem that existed in Jesus’ time. The number of treatises and dissertations that have been written about the physical location and theological significance of those entryways is mind-boggling. But since we tend to use the idea of the “narrow” and “wide” gates metaphorically in contemporary Christian culture, I’ll roll with that, and offer a reflection that doesn’t cling too narrowly to traditional interpretation.

“Wide” gates are those that many people can fit through at once. “Narrow” gates are those that, perhaps, only one person can get through at a time. A simple and reasonable reading of the passage is that Jesus is doing what he does throughout Matthew: turning conventional wisdom on its head and suggesting a radically different interpretation of what it means to live a righteous life. Matthew, of all the Gospels, is the one most concerned with reaching the Jewish listener. Jesus challenges the parochialism and ethnocentrism (these are not anachronistic terms to use here) of his followers, suggesting throughout Matthew that active commitment to loving the entire world (rather than just one “people”) is the central component of his message. Continue reading ‘“Enter through the narrow gate”: culture, tradition, and the Christian paradox of other-centered individualism’

Friday Random Ten: songs for my 42nd lap ’round the sun

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 23, 2008
in Friday Random Ten
. 1 Comment

I’m off to Northern California again for the holiday weekend; posting resumes Tuesday. Like 8 gazilion other folks, I fell in love with #8 after hearing it used in the MacAir ad; the lyrics are remarkably, well, kabbalistic. #3 is my favorite Elton John song, #7 a sparkling cover, and the bonus track from one of those artists I found while listening to Sirius satellite radio.

1. “Non je ne regrette rien”, Edith Piaf
2. “Far Away Eyes”, Rolling Stones
3. “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”, Elton John
4. “My Shirt Looks Good on You”, Catie Curtis
5. “When the Angels Call My Name”, Lonesome Sisters with Rayna Gellert
6. “Small”, Kendall Payne
7. “Love’s Gonna Live Here”, Dwight Yoakam
8. “New Soul”, Yael Naim
9. “Without Love”, Meat Purveyors
10. “Please Read the Letter”, Allison Krauss and Robert Plant

Bonus Track: “If They Could Only See Me Now”, Robbie Fulks

Oprah, veganism, and the real inconvenient truth

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 22, 2008
in Environmentalism, Food and Veganism
. 15 Comments

It’s been a happy birthday so far. I admit I really appreciate Facebook, which I didn’t have for my last birthday — all the kind notes showing up on my “wall” make me very happy.

The vegan world has been abuzz with the news that Oprah Winfrey is on a 21-day cleanse, using only plant-based foods. The queen of all media is blogging about her experience here. I love what she says in her first entry:

Wow, wow, wow! I never imagined meatless meals could be so satisfying. I had been focused on what I had to give up—sugar, gluten, alcohol, meat, chicken, fish, eggs, cheese. “What’s left?” I thought. Apparently a lot. I can honestly say every meal was a surprise and a delight, beginning with breakfast—strawberry rhubarb wheat-free crepes.

Now, most vegans don’t go as far as Oprah’s going. I eat wheat and sugar everyday, and my wife likes a nice glass of wine quite regularly. Those of us in the animal rights community respect Oprah’s enormous cultural power; we know what she can do for books and presidential candidates. We also know that she’s been very candid about her many years of struggle with body image issues; the world has watched her weight fluctuate for two decades. Though veganism is much more than a weight-loss regimen (and indeed, there are plenty of plump vegans), I’m confident Oprah will be amazed by how much energy and “bounce” she has over the next seventeen days or so. Continue reading ‘Oprah, veganism, and the real inconvenient truth’

Reprint: A longish entry on male insecurity and anti-feminist backlash

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 22, 2008
in Reprints
. 2 Comments

This post first appeared in September 2004. I know I’ve been doing a lot of reprints lately, but gosh almighty, I’ve been busy. And relatively few of my current readers will have read this one.

REPRINT: I want to follow up a bit on my post below that touched on issues of male body insecurity.

First off, let me say that I am always wary of what I’ve heard called the “suffering Olympics”: the competition among groups to prove that they are somehow more oppressed, more mistreated, more misunderstood than anyone else. Whether it’s Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Turks, Cal fans and Cub fans, men and women, I’m not interested in the tiresome squabbling to prove whose pain is greater. I’m especially displeased by men’s rights organizations that focus on the myriad ways in which they imagine that men are victimized in contemporary culture! (Trish blogs a lot about these fellows, invariably accurately). I’ve never had much time for the men’s rights movement as a whole. I’ve met a lot of these guys, and I’ve never encountered so many so determined to hold on to their own self-righteous anger. I struggle a lot with self-righteousness — but I’ve got the good sense to see it as a character flaw rather than something to be celebrated. Continue reading ‘Reprint: A longish entry on male insecurity and anti-feminist backlash’

Birthday memories

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 22, 2008
in Age and Memories
. 3 Comments

Today, newly forty-one, I’m not nearly as reflective as I was a year ago. Forty is a milestone, and for me, ’twas a happy one to reach. Forty-one has less epic resonance, though I do note that today marks the 20th anniversary of my first legal drinking experience. And soon I will mark the tenth anniversary since my last drink.

I’m thinking this morning not about my age, but about past birthdays. Here are a few that stick in my mind:

1970 (age 3); The first birthday I remember, and one of my very first memories. I attended the “Humpty-Dumpty Nursery School” in Santa Barbara, and I had a very fine cake.

1975 (age 8): My birthday fell on a weekend, and my mother arranged a party on Carmel River State Beach. The theme was “pirates”, and we barbecued hot dogs and flew a pirate flag. We had invited most of my class, but only a small handful of boys came. It was momentarily disappointing, but as I recall, one of those who did come was Brett, perhaps the most popular boy in school. He had never paid me much attention before, but he spent a few hours with me that afternoon, playing in the sand. I was very happy. Continue reading ‘Birthday memories’

Thursday Short Poem: Leithauser’s “Old Globe:

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 22, 2008
in Poetry
. 3 Comments

Today is my forty-first birthday. There are some fine poems about turning forty (and I quote Donald Justice’s all the time). The only one I know about being forty-one is this haunting one from Sharon Olds, and I can’t bring myself to make that my birthday poem. So I’m going with another poem about ageing, one by Brad Leithauser that I found in this week’s New York Review of Books. The world has changed less in my lifetime than it has in that of the woman who is the subject of this poem, yet I am old enough to remember not only the Soviet Union, but also Upper Volta. It’s a lovely piece.

Old Globe

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

*

Her eye fell at random. “Formosa,” she read.
“Now that’s pretty. Is it there today?”
A pause. “It is,” my brother said,

“though now it’s called Taiwan.”
She looked apologetic. “I sometimes forget…”
“Like Sri Lanka,” I added. “Which was Ceylon.”

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay…

*

She was in a middle place—
her fifties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overheard a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today—
the globe she’d so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

*

Finally, there’s cake: nine candles in a ring.
…Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, “Now make a wish before
you blow them out.” She says, “I don’t see—”

stops. Then mildly protests: “But they look so nice.”
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

GLBTQ fall syllabus reading list

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 21, 2008
in Books and GLBTQ
. 0 Comments

The books I’ll be using this fall in my Gay and Lesbian American History class:

Transgender History, Susan Stryker

Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, Marcia Gallo

A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America, Leila Rupp

The Invention of Heterosexuality, Jonathan Katz

And lots and lots of suggested, optional readings.

Girl-coddling feminists peeing in the pool of male privilege chased all the boys away: the nonsense of Kathleen Parker

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 21, 2008
in Books and Men and Masculinity
. 50 Comments

My former student Dolly sends me a link to this short Marie-Claire piece by Kathleen Parker, author of the forthcoming Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care.

It’s hard to tell how Parker’s new book will differ from the standard anti-feminist bromides of everyone from Warren Farrell to Christina Hoff Sommers (two writers whose livelihood seems tied to propagating the notion that our country is somehow at war with men and boys). Then again, misogyny sells — especially, as Sommers and the likes of Ann Coulter have shown, it is being sold by a woman.

In the Marie-Claire piece, Parker writes:

“Boys hear how awful they are day in and day out,” she says. “We seem to understand that girls need high self-esteem to perform in school and society, but we pretend that boys don’t.” Teachers need to dial back their girl-coddling, she says, and society needs to better balance boys’ needs with girls’.

Say what? First off, the “boys are in trouble” industry is a decade old, Kathleen; you’re only the 435th person to get a book deal making the case that we’re overlooking our sons. More to the point, what evidence is there that we’re “coddling” girls? Jeepers, the right-wing can’t make up it’s mind! Half the time they’re whining that we are coddling girls, and the next minute they’re complaining that we push girls and women too hard to be “unnaturally” competitive (witness the recent hysteria about knee injuries for female athletes). In my experience as a youth leader and college professor, I see a lot of young women who are exhausted and anxious and stressed. They’re hardly being coddled; it’s their brothers, too often addicted to the unholy trifecta of pot, porn, and video games, who are being given a free pass by parents and teachers.

Parker continues:

IT’S RAINING ON MEN:

30 to 40% of all American children sleep in a home separate from their fathers.

60% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in this country in 2012 will go to women.

The fact that a great many American men have abandoned their children out of an unwillingness to be burdened with responsibility is, apparently, the fault of the women with whom they conceived the child. Or better yet, it’s the fault of feminism, for daring to suggest that real love between men and women required equality and inter-dependence rather than subjection and need.

As for the 60% of bachelor’s degrees going to women, that’s hardly feminism’s fault. Think about it: young men are much more likely to be locked up in prison or in the military than their sisters, thus reducing the number of males available for college. Blame the war or the prison-industrial complex; blame video games and pot and porn; blame an absence of strong male role models, but for the love of Pete, stop blaming girls and women for their brothers’ collective lack of success.

If there is a “boy crisis”, its roots lie in the decision of a generation of older men to walk away from their responsibility to care for, inspire, and mentor. These men were not pushed away by women, not forced away by the courts, they left of their own free will, abandoning their sons. We are reaping that consequence now. Parker misdiagnoses the cause of the male malaise, and her remedy is radically, disastrously wrong.

From ‘78 to ‘08, California leads the way: on same-sex marriage, changing voter demographics, and why we will win this November

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2008
in GLBTQ and Politics
. 3 Comments

This fall, for the first time in nearly three years, I’ll be teaching my History 24F: Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History. (For those interested, it’ll be Monday and Wednesday afternoons from 1:35-3:10PM).

This same fall, Californians will almost certainly be voting again on a ban on gay marriage. As virtually everyone knows, last Thursday the California Supreme Court invalidated the prior ban on same-sex marriages, clearing the way for marriage licenses to be issued to gay and lesbian couples within a matter of weeks. A stay may yet be forthcoming, pending the outcome of the November vote. It is widely assumed that opponents of same-sex marriage have enough signatures to get an initiative onto the November ballot. Presuming they do, it will be an exciting and nerve-wracking battle.

2008 marks the 30th anniversary of the defeat of the Briggs Initiative. A California State Senator, John Briggs, got a measure on the November 1978 ballot that would have barred gay and lesbian folks from serving as classroom teachers. Gays and lesbians had never won a statewide ballot fight anywhere in the country before, and pre-election polls predicted doom. Thousands of jobs would have been at stake. But gay and lesbian activists, led by San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, rallied a diverse coalition to oppose what became known as “Proposition 6.” Of all people, former governor Ronald Reagan came out against Briggs. To the surprise of many, the initiative went down to defeat. For the first time ever, gay and lesbian folks had won a statewide battle in America. Three weeks later, Harvey Milk was assassinated, and passed into legend. Continue reading ‘From ‘78 to ‘08, California leads the way: on same-sex marriage, changing voter demographics, and why we will win this November’