Archive for the 'GLBTQ' Category

GLBTQ History Spring 2010 reading list

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 23, 2009
in Books and GLBTQ
. 6 Comments

I’ve finished putting together my reading list for History 24F, my survey course in American Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered history. Given the expense of books (and the problems we have putting together readers on campus), there’s no such thing as a perfect syllabus — but here are the four texts I’ll be asking my students to buy. It’s a fairly significant change from when I taught the course a year ago – but it’s good to experiment about.

Gay L. A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians, Lillian Faderman.

Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

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

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel

I read Stone Butch Blues years ago, but only thanks to recent suggestions have I decided to include it in next year’s syllabus. The Bechdel book was suggested by several folks last week — I picked up a copy, and read it over the weekend. It’s pitch-perfect. Many thanks to all who recommended it to me!

Call for book suggestions

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 16, 2009
in Books and GLBTQ
. 6 Comments

I’m revising my syllabus for my GLBTQ American history course in the spring. If anyone has any cool books on the various subjects contained within that vast category they’d like to suggest (that would work for a college audience) I’d be grateful. Can’t keep up with all that’s out there.

Flaming coals amidst the ashes: more reasons for optimism in the aftermath of Maine

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 05, 2009
in GLBTQ
. 7 Comments

I’ve taught gay and lesbian American history at Pasadena City College since 2001. When I started offering the course, the big issue on campus was winning domestic partnership benefits for faculty and staff; marriage equality was seen as something decades off. By 2005, California had awarded those benefits to all public employees, and what we had seen as our most vital local struggle had been won.

I mention this because it’s so important, in the aftermath of the Great Disappointment of Maine’s vote to repeal a same-sex marriage law this past Tuesday, to reflect on how far we have come. Barely ten years ago, the Maine legislature passed an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians. In November 2000, the Christian right in Maine successfully led a “people’s veto” drive to repeal those protections. This November, just nine years on, the Christian conservatives who won the fight to keep a limited vision of marriage emphasized that they weren’t opposed to civil unions or to anti-discrimination ordinances. If you look at the campaign literature this fall of the anti-equality folks in Maine, you see that they’ve completely reversed themselves in less than a decade. Indeed, they now recognize that support for civil unions was critical to winning the fight to keep marriage itself exclusively heterosexual.

That means, obviously, that we in the movement for justice have “moved the ball” well down the field. Those who want a discriminatory marriage franchise are struggling to win a small majority of voters; measures like those in Maine or California’s Prop 8 are being decided by five or six percentage points, not more. And in order to get those slim majorities, the religious right have been forced to take the tactical position of support for every right short of marriage itself. Those who want gays and lesbians to have no rights at all have gone from a clear majority a decade ago to a (thankfully) dwindling minority in most states. The victory Tuesday for Referendum 71, a Washington state initiative that granted gay and lesbian citizens every right save the label “marriage” itself, drives home the point that only one thing is holding back progress for queer folks in this country: a sentimental attachment on the part of a narrow majority of Americans to the heterosexual marriage idea. Exit polls show that those most attached to that traditional ideal are, not surpisingly, the oldest of voters — while those most interested in expanding the franchise are the youngest. Even if we were to sit on our hands (which we won’t), the Grim Reaper will win the fight for us within a decade; to paraphrase Dan Savage, we’ll outlast, outlove, and outlive those who want stand in the way.

This is cold comfort for those who want and deserve equality now. Justice delayed is, as everyone knows, justice denied. But at times like these, it is the job of the progressive historian to temper the lamentations at a temporary setback by pointing to the progress made. We ain’t in the Promised Land, but the view from the mountaintop is getting clearer, the fog is lifting, and despite their bravado, our enemies are in retreat. We’ll be crossing that final river soon.

All age-disparate love affairs are not the same: why I prefer “cougars” to “silver foxes”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 14, 2009
in GLBTQ, Older Men & Younger Women and Older women and younger men
. 14 Comments

I’ve written quite a bit about the older man/younger woman dynamic on this blog. (See archives on that topic and on the somewhat related topic of student crushes.) I’ve generally taken a dim view of age-disparate heterosexual relationships in which the male partner is substantially older than the female one, and in which the woman is still quite young (say, under 25 or so). Put simply, the potential problems in older men/younger women relationships seem to diminish based less upon the actual number of years in between the partners and more upon the age of the gal involved. I’m more concerned about an eighteen year-old woman and a thirty year-old man than I am about a thirty year-old woman and a fifty-five year-old man, even though the latter relationship has twice the number of years in between the partners. Read through the archives for more explanation of my position.

I’ve written virtually nothing about age-disparate relationships between same-sex partners, of course, and very little about the increasingly celebrated older woman/younger man pairing. A superficial concern with consistency would suggest that my feelings about all older/younger relationships ought to be the same, regardless of the sex or the sexual orientation of the partners involved. But I think a compelling case can be made that older women/younger men relationships are much less problematic than their reverse, and that the same is true of same-sex age-disparate couplings.

We don’t fall in love, or fall into bed, in a vacuum. Our desires are heavily shaped by the culture, as is our sense of how power is negotiated in sexual relationships. Patriarchal rules about gender roles show a surprising and depressing resilience; ask many young feminists of both sexes who, despite their deep ideological commitment to egalitarianism, struggle to resist social pressure to conform to traditional ideas about what a man and a woman should do in heterosexual relationships.

The older man/younger woman dynamic reinforces patriarchal conventions; the older woman/younger man dynamic subverts them. This doesn’t mean that traditional roles can’t emerge in older women/younger men relationships. I did write once about the notion of older woman as teacher and initiator, and the exasperation many women feel at being asked to “mother” men. Several folks pointed out that plenty of women are forced to take on mothering roles to male partners their own age or older. That tendency towards a kind of uxorious helplessness that afflicts so many men in their romantic relationships with wives and girlfriends can emerge, it seems, at any age and with any woman. The key is that far fewer women than men generally want to take on the “teaching” role. Women may eroticize youth and vigor in younger men, but they rarely are turned on by displays of ignorance or uncertainty; high-brow Western literature and low-brow pornography are filled with countless examples of men being aroused by much younger women who either “play dumb” — or are the genuine article.

Please understand, I’m not saying that every older woman/younger man relationship is inherently progressive while every older man/younger woman coupling is oppressive and reactionary. A great many young women do exercise great agency in relationships with older men. But there’s no escaping the reality that the potential for abuse and exploitation is likely to be much higher in an age-disparate relationship where it is the man who is the elder of the lovers. We must note, too, that we live in a world where men are seen as growing both more “visible” and more powerful as they age — while women, past a certain age, are either desexualized or mocked. “Cougar” was not coined as a compliment; “silver fox” was.

Same-sex relationships can replicate unhealthy dynamics from the dominant culture. But by their very nature, same-sex relationships “subvert the dominant paradigm” in a very healthy and important way. A romantic relationship between two men and two women reminds us that biology alone isn’t destiny, and that while a certain degree of complementarity is surely present in any enduring relationship, that complementarity doesn’t require radically different genitalia. The age-disparate relationship, while certainly quite common in gay and lesbian communities, doesn’t reinforce an unhealthy norm. Even a wealthy older man with a beautiful young (but broke) “boy toy” is a fundamentally distinct phenomenon from that of a wealthy older man with his hot young girlfriend. The latter relationship reminds us all of women’s relative powerlessness — and of older women’s disposability — in a unique and infinitely more damaging way.

Critics on this blog frequently accuse me of double standards, and of being harder on men. By noting that, all things considered, older men/younger women relationships are more problematic than any combination of partners of a different age, I open myself up to that familiar charge. Yet it’s simply absurd to pretend that we have, even now, achieved full equality for gays and lesbians; it is equally untrue that women, despite the tremendous advances of the past half-century, don’t still get the short end of the stick in virtually ever area of human activity. No matter how well-intentioned the parties involved, every older man/younger woman sexual connection sends a clear and visible signal to the outside world that the patriarchal norms are left untouched; every older woman/younger man bond sends the exact opposite signal. This doesn’t mean a good feminist can’t be involved with an older man, or a pro-feminist man with a younger woman. But it does mean that they will have to work twice as hard as anyone else to keep unhealthy cultural discourses out of their relationship.

No “one true path”: against “straight”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 12, 2009
in GLBTQ
. 13 Comments

It’s been a big weekend for the GLBTQ movement; on Saturday night, President Obama promised an end (though the timetable was missing) for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and for the Defense of Marriage Act. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of marchers took to the streets of Washington DC to call for equality. And Governor Schwarzenegger signed two key gay rights bills, one requiring California to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and the other making Harvey Milk’s birthday (the same as mine, May 22) a state holiday. Good news.

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and many folks on Facebook (where I spend what may be an inordinate amount of time) took the opportunity to do just that. In a couple of different threads, discussions arose about the use of the word “straight”, a term I abhor for a variety of reasons.

The word “straight” has many meanings in the demotic. When I was a child, “straight” was less often used as the opposite of gay and more often to refer to someone who didn’t use drugs and alcohol. In seventh grade, Jenny Nix asked me if I was straight, and when I gave her a blank look, explained that she was asking if I wanted to “smoke out” after class. (My middle school was, at least in the late 1970s, notorious for its drug use.) To be “straight” meant to be sober, a meaning that survives in the popular teen subculture of “Straight Edge”.

In college, long after I knew of the sexual meaning of straight, I began to hear another, urban use of the term, one recently brought into the national discourse when the president employed it. My African-American roommate sophomore year, Terry, once said to me after we had had a particularly convivial discussion, “Hugo, we straight.” Rather than an affirmation of mutual heterosexuality, Terry explained to my quizzical self that he was affirming we had an understanding; “we straight” meant that we were on the same page, as it were.

And of course, it was also in college where, as I studied Christian history, I reflected on the term “orthodox”, which is the Greek for “straight path.” I noted the moderate curiosity that the opposite of orthodox is heterodox, which sets “straight” and “hetero” in opposition — whereas in sexual nomenclature, they are synonyms. Language is funny. Continue reading ‘No “one true path”: against “straight”’

No more civil marriages at All Saints

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 05, 2009
in All Saints Pasadena and GLBTQ
. 1 Comment

I’ve had my differences with my former Episcopal parish, All Saints Pasadena. I served briefly on its vestry in 2001-2002, and was a volunteer youth minister and confirmation class teacher there from 2000-2007. My third wife and I were married in 2001 by an All Saints priest (now dean of the cathedral in San Diego), the dear Scott Richardson. The place has alternately inspired and exasperated me, as the many posts in the All Saints archive reveal.

But there is much to love about the church, and much to admire about its rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon. And this week, Ed and the Vestry to which I once belonged have made me very proud. This week, the Vestry passed a resolution making it clear that effective immediately, priests of the church will no longer sign marriage certificates. Same-sex and other-sex couples can continue to have their weddings celebrated; the priests will continue to join two willing people in matrimony. But since marriage certificates are now, thanks to Proposition 8, only issued to other-sexed couples, the church has decided to withhold its imprimatur on any civil marriages until justice and equality are restored. Here’s an excerpt from the resolution (PDF file linked):

WHEREAS, the institution of civil marriage in the State of California is, as a result of
Proposition 8 and the Court’s decision, a constitutionally-mandated instrument of
discrimination, which furthers injustice and denies same-sex couples the fundamental
dignities to which each human being is entitled…

WHEREAS, our active participation in the discriminatory system of civil marriage is
inconsistent with Jesus’ call to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect
the dignity of every human being; and

WHEREAS, All Saints Church is called to make the sacrament of marriage equally
available to all couples, regardless of their sexual orientation;

NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Rector, Wardens and Vestry do declare
that the sacramental right of marriage is available to all couples, but that the clergy of All
Saints Church will not sign civil marriage certificates so long as the right to marry is
denied to same-sex couples.

Were I still on the Vestry, I’d have happily voted for it. Good on All Saints.

Harvey Milk in WEHO

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 30, 2009
in GLBTQ
. 0 Comments

If you live in Southern California and have the free time, do consider attending The Legacy of Harvey Milk in West Hollywood next Saturday, June 6. Click the link for details. (Alas, I’m booked, but look forward to reports from others.) Sponsored by PEN USA and the City of West Hollywood, the story behind the man who inspired a movement and a movie and many other things deserves ever more study and celebration.

Despair on the right: of depressed social conservatives, a lost culture war, and the misogynistic underbelly of the “marriage movement”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 01, 2009
in Christianity, Feminism, GLBTQ, Marriage and Politics
. 85 Comments

This is not an April Fool’s post.

The first three months of 2009 have been among the very happiest of my life. My wife and I have had our first human child, a splendid baby girl, and we are both over-the-moon with joy and excitement (and a fair amount of exhaustion, too, but let that pass.) As befits a new father, my focus has at least temporarily gone inward, towards my family; I have paid less attention to the state of the world than I might normally. But as silly as it might seem, I can’t help but connect Obama’s ascent to the presidency with Heloise Cerys’ birth. This doesn’t mean that both events stir equal excitement, or are of equal global import. But they both mark radical departures with the past, and each has left me suffused with new optimism. Forgive the jaw-dropping parental hubris: the world will be a better place because my daughter is in it, and because of what it is she will grow up to do. And somewhat less jaw-dropping: the world will be a safer, healthier, better place because Barack Obama is president, and George W. Bush and John McCain aren’t.

I’m an optimist by nature, even if that requires taking very long views. I don’t know how long I’ll be on the planet, but I expect the planet to be here for a very, very long time. My God is a very big God, and He works — so all those who know tell me — on geologic time. Though no one knows the time or the hour, my suspicion is Jesus will continue to tarry on his return; contrary to the fervent hopes of many of the depressed and the downtrodden and the downright mean, we are not living, I suspect, in the End Times. There is more to come, much more to come, which is why (among other reasons) I want to see environmnental policies adopted which protect the earth not merely for my daughter’s generation, but for the creatures and ecosystems which will flourish here ten millenia from now.

I want government policies that in time will lead to fewer humans on the earth, living more just and sustainable lifestyles — two of many reasons why family planning and environmentalism are the two top issues on my agenda. And those causes are nearer to President Obama’s heart than any of his recent predecessors — hence, my mild optimism.

But I have friends — mostly conservatives, including social conservatives — who have grown grimly anxious about the state of the world. While the budgetary and environmental proposals of the new Administration are a source of encouragement (and, given Mr. Obama’s predecessor, sheer wonder) to folks like me, my friends on the right seem glum. This gloom is particularly strong among those who fight on the opposite side of the culture wars; those who oppose embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, and what might generally be called “sexual freedom” are a confounded lot these days. Most social conservatives are deeply religious, and have the excellent consolation of prayer, but that doesn’t serve to soothe all of their growing fears and frustrations.

Despite temporary victories for social conservatives like the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the polling indicates a gradually growing consensus in favor of the freedom to marry, particularly among the youngest Americans. Legislative efforts to advance an anti-abortion cause continue to make tiny bits of progress, but much of their work has been undone both by the strongly pro-choice Obama Administration and by a series of disheartening defeats at the ballot box. Younger conservatives may still be anti-abortion, but despite the shrill cries of their elders, they are increasingly likely to see the “life” issue one among many; many young evangelicals are increasingly liberal in their views on fighting poverty and global warming, with many more inclined (rightly so, from a Scriptural perspective) to see the morality of the pocketbook as of more concern to Christ than the morality of the pelvis. And heck, as the headlines have told us just this past month, Americans are less religious than ever before, more likely to have babies out of wedlock than ever before.

Politics works in cycles; the GOP will come back eventually, and conservatives will come to power again. But culture doesn’t work in the same cyclical way. The genie of women’s liberation and cultural emancipation has been hard for the right to put back in the bottle, despite their most furious efforts for forty years. The Pill isn’t going away. Americans as a whole are not showing any signs of a renewed willingness to marry young and stay married to one spouse of the opposite sex for the rest of their lives. Oh, there are a few microtrends here and there that might gladden a reactionary heart — but for the most part, the narrative of American history holds true: rights once granted are hard to take away; freedoms once tasted are hard to give up. And that will be true if Obama is re-elected and it will be just as true if, heavens forfend, a Palin-Jindal ticket sweeps into office in a 2012 landslide.

I think social cons know that even when they win an occasional battle, they’re losing the larger war. This has led some to take some whoppingly extreme positions. Maggie Gallagher, one of the noisiest (and, to be fair, most hard-working) advocates of the limited marriage franchise, has been putting up a series of posts on the National Review’s main blog. This one from Monday is a stunner: The Amazing Power of the Culture (Part 9). Gallagher, who seems the poster child for the increased franticness of the right, is well aware that it’s possible for conservatives to win elections and lose the culture war; she suggests, rightly, that that is what has been happening for generations (but of course, particularly since that great bugaboo of all reactionaries, the 1960s). And in the past few weeks, the previously even-tempered Gallagher has begun to pull off the proverbial gloves, and in doing so has revealed some of the ugly underpinnings of the social conservative Weltanschauung. An excerpt from her latest:

“Marriage is about the love of adults for each other; it’s about caretaking intimacy, passion, not necessarily about children.” When I hear people claiming they are marriage supporters and saying these things about marriage, I cringe. They do not know what they are talking about.

A marriage culture means married men who fall passionately in love with their secretaries or their junior law partners saying, “My marriage comes before my happiness; my family comes first.” It means women watching Oprah and feeling underappreciated, like they are “settling” for less than they deserve, stepping back to say, “It’s not humiliating to accept less than I ‘deserve;’ it’s grown-up. It’s motherly. It’s what women have done for all of human history and it is good.”

And then stepping back and saying: “His mother can love him; if he were my son I would love him, there’s got to be a way for me to love him well and truly even though right this second I’m feeling humiliated and angry with how I’m being treated.” No marriage culture can survive unless adults are actively encouraged to surmount this kind of ordinary temptation…

Bold emphasis mine. Repost it widely, folks. Gallagher wants a world where wives baby husbands like mothers baby sons (she uses the mothering image too often for it to be careless). Her contempt for women and men is staggering; for Gallagher, a man is apparently an eternal child and every woman is called, perhaps like Mary, to be long-suffering, maternal, and self-abnegating. (Since when did the Jesus-Mary relationship become the model for good marriages? That’s a perverse twisting of Ephesians 5 indeed, more perverse than even Freud could imagine!) For Gallagher, humiliation and degradation are feelings to be suppressed, denied, and overcome, while happiness itself — especially for women — is a “dangerous temptation.”

Those who want to limit marriage to a man and a woman have rarely been so honest about the misogyny that undergirds their position. Here’s the shorthand: “marriage is about obligation and reproduction, not about desire. If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, it will symbolize that marriage has become about love and feeling rather than solemn duty and reproduction. Heterosexual couples will look at gay couples and conclude that they are only expected to remain in a marriage as long as that marriage is fulfilling, because the non-reproductive nature of gay and lesbian relationships indicates that emotional fulfillment, sans reproductivity, is sufficient grounds to wed someone. And thus emboldened to choose happiness over duty, the divorce rate will spike, children will suffer, and the baby Jesus will cry.”

Good luck marketing this one, Maggie Gallagher. And you wonder why you’re losing the culture war?

I think the Maggie Gallaghers of the world are wrong. I think they’re wrong sociologically, wrong theologically, wrong psychologically. I’m not sorry that the tide has turned perceptibly against them, and and I’m absolutely not sorry that the sense continues to grow that though they might win an occasional ballot-box skirmish, the long-term demographic and cultural trend is likely against them. But because I’ve lived and worked among people like these, my schadenfreude is tempered with compassion. As an environmentalist, I know what it is to look at a world which seems to be heading ever faster towards self-destruction. As a vegan, I have a clear understanding of at least one meaning — not the right’s meaning — of what it means to witness a “culture of death” in action. I know what it is to despair of the choices my fellow citizens make, to despair of the seemingly willful ignorance of the majority, to worry deeply about the world in which my great-grandchildren will grow up.

Despair is not a pleasant feeling. It leads some to revolution, some to misanthropy, some to apocalyptic millenarianism, some to Zoloft, and some to unhinged postings at the National Review. As the evidence begins to grow that the battle to drag America and the Western World back to Calvin’s Geneva or Savonarola’s Florence is really and truly irrevocably lost, some essentially decent but misguided folks are struggling with despair. Watch with glee or empathy, but watch — because as they try and hold off despair, their rhetoric grows more honest. And that candor will hasten, I suspect, the irrelevance of the cultural right, as it reveals once and for all the deep-seated misogyny concealed beneath the lofty language of the “culture of life.”

Two more cents on Rick Warren

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 29, 2008
in Christianity, GLBTQ, Movies and Politics
. 6 Comments

The New Year is almost upon us, but there is yet time for a post or two in 2008. My wife and I have had a busy but happy Christmas season so far. We’re starting to make progress on our movie-going; basing our decisions on major award nominations, we see three-quarters of the films we will see all year in the period between Christmas day and the Super Bowl. I’ve already praised “Milk” here on the blog, and offer now enthusiastic endorsements for “Slumdog Millionaire” and the breathtaking, heartbreaking “The Wrestler.”

Almost everyone else has weighed in on Barack Obama’s decision to invite Rick Warren to give the invocation at the January 20 inauguration. I have little to add to the many voices that have spoken on the subject, save to say that I remain both frustrated and bemused by the mutual incomprehension that emerges at moments like this between secular progressives and more conservative elements in the country. It’s a gulf that Obama himself has promised, over and over again, to bridge. Bridge-builders will invariably arouse animosity from those who derive satisfaction from staying on their side of the fixed chasm that exists between the two sides in the culture wars. The wisdom of the Warren selection, from Obama’s perspective, may be that it serves to demonstrate his Solomonic remove from partisanship. The left is infuriated by Warren’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage; many on the right are infuriated by the imprimatur that his invocation will give to Obama’s presidential agenda.

It is axiomatic that religious conservatives often have trouble grasping the various distinctions that divide the left. The right-winger who rails against “feminists” doesn’t know a “Marxist feminist” from a “liberal feminist” from a “radical feminist”, and probably isn’t clear on which “wave” women of Hillary Clinton’s generation belong to. It is also axiomatic that most progressives tend to see the religious right as monolithic. Theological divides (such as the famous one between Pentecostals and Southern Baptists which exploded in the PTL scandal two decades ago) often seem arcane and insignificant to those who don’t come from Christian backgrounds. As a result, both sides — if we can speak of there being only two — in the culture war caricature and misunderstand each other. (And my goodness, we don’t help ourselves with the shop talk. With feet in both camps, I may be reasonably comfortable talking about both “perfomative heteronormativity” and “supralapsarianism”, but really, it all gets a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated!)

Many folks on the left may not fully understand the degree to which Rick Warren is viewed with suspicion by the religious right. Indeed, as many commenters have pointed out, it’s not accurate to call Warren “right-wing” at all. He has, time and again, explicitly rejected the adversarial politics of an older generation of Christian conservatives (represented by the late Jerry Falwell and Jim Dobson). While remaining in the right-wing camp on issues such as abortion and marriage, Warren has consciously de-centered the purely sexual issues from his message. He has been willing to talk about AIDS, poverty and environmental degradation, making clear that his vision of Christian involvement in public life involves more than an obsession with pelvic morality. Many of the older generation of conservative American evangelicals, the sort who see the fight against abortion and gay marriage as “first among equals” in the struggle to remake America, are exasperated, even enraged by what they see as Warren’s willingness to grant moral equivalence to other issues.

It is also axiomatic that partisans are invariably disappointed by the presidents whom they successfully elect. Read old issues of National Review and Human Events from the 1980s; far from being a constant conservative darling, Ronald Reagan regularly aroused ire from the hard right during his administration. Similarly, the left will be frustrated by Obama time and again, chiefly because the gap between the promise and the possible always widens after inauguration day. But one particular way in which the left will be frustrated is by Obama’s dead serious commitment to healing rather than exacerbating the cultural divide that has so occupied this country. Choosing the immensely popular and affable Rick Warren, who is as close to a genuine centrist* as the evangelical movement has these days, is a signal of this eagerness to build consensus rather than increase division.

The GLBTQ movement is right to be frustrated by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and to have a progressive president select a supporter of that initiative to give an inaugural invocation stings. Like it or not, we can assume that Obama meant it when he said he believed marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples; it was wishful thinking that led some in the movement to assume that his words to that effect were only political posturing. As a result, the movement needs to push forward on the marriage issue at the state and judicial levels, and look to the Obama Administration for leadership on other issues. And there are other issues, ranging from protection against discrimination to greater funding for AIDS treatment to revisiting the unworkable and outdated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Marriage equality will happen, but the nation’s 44th president has made clear that on this issue, he will be a follower rather than a leader.

*If the (white) evangelical right includes the like of Dobson, Richard Land, and John Macarthur, and the (white) evangelical left includes the like of Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo, then it’s safe to say that Rick Warren represents a middle ground on a wide variety of theological and political issues.

Seeing Milk, teaching Milk, celebrating Milk

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 18, 2008
in GLBTQ, Movies and Teaching
. 11 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, I gave my last exam of the year; my History 24F (Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History) class drew the lucky (or unlucky) slot of being my “final final”. After the test was done, I went with those students who were able to join us for an early evening showing of “Milk” at a nearby theater. They’ve been a particularly wonderful group this term, and I wanted to take in this important film as a class. (Thanks are due to Laemmle theaters, for selling me discount group tickets, and to Stephanie and Taylor, two of my students who work there.)

If I hadn’t wanted to see it for the first time with my GLBTQ class, I would surely have gone to see “Milk” as soon as I could have; I waited impatiently for last night, knowing that it would be so much better to take it in in the company of so many young people whom I love and admire. I was not disappointed.

Much has already been written about the film, and about Sean Penn’s magnificent portrayal of Harvey Milk. The supporting cast — especially Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and James Brolin — is superb, with nearly every actor bearing an uncanny resemblance to his or her real-life counterpart. And though I had shuddered when I heard that Gus Van Sant was directing this film, as I normally don’t enjoy his style, I loved this movie. Just as another director I don’t like much, Spike Lee, was able to get out of his own way and produce the brilliant and near-perfect “X”, so too Van Sant never gave us the sense that we were supposed to sit back and watch his genius at work. He gave us a wonderful, deeply moving, timely and immensely inspiring film.

Let me say, of course, that everyone who has not seen “The Times of Harvey Milk”, the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary about Harvey, ought to see that. Van Sant clearly drew inspiration from that film (and some archival footage as well), and it helped strengthen the picture. I’ve shown “The Times of Harvey Milk” to many classes over the years, and could probably recite most of the film by heart. (Now that I think about it, there are perhaps no other films ever made — documentary or otherwise — I’ve seen as often!)

Like a great many people, I feel as if I have a personal stake in the story of Harvey Milk. I was eleven years old, and in the sixth grade at Carmel Middle School, when he and George Moscone were assassinated. I had heard of Moscone; my family, living on the Monterey Peninsula, had many connections to what all my life we have called simply “the City.” I only vaguely knew who Harvey was; I was an unusually politically aware eleven year-old, however, and had done some precinct walking against Proposition 6. (As the movie shows, Prop. 6 was the measure that was defeated in November 1978 that would have banned gays and lesbians from serving as teachers). Harvey had led the fight against Prop 6, and as a result, I knew his name, but somehow hadn’t grasped that he was a San Francisco Supervisor. Continue reading ‘Seeing Milk, teaching Milk, celebrating Milk’

Rejecting the narrative of male sexual indispensability

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 16, 2008
in GLBTQ, Sexuality, Youth and Youth ministry
. 24 Comments

One of my former youth group kids came to talk to me last week after reading last week’s post about sexual identity. Louisa, 19 years old, has been “out” as a lesbian since she was in ninth grade, and has been with her girlfriend for two years now.

Louisa is in love with her gal. But lately, she finds herself questioning her self-identification as a lesbian. Though she describes having always hated the label “bisexual” for what she saw as its “wishy-washiness”, she talked about her growing curiosity about what it would be like to be (sexually, if not romantically) with a man. Louisa has never done more than simple kissing with a guy, and she finds herself wondering whether she ought to “try something” with a man just to find out what it’s like. She admits she’s been driving her girlfriend crazy with this hemming and hawing about having an experience with a fellow. But her curiosity, more so than her libido (though she’s savvy enough to know that those two are often enmeshed) is causing her to be, in her words, “mildly obsessed” with knowing what it’s like to be sexual with a man.

Louisa has taken my gay and lesbian studies class. She has read her Adrienne Rich; she knows about the reality (not just the theory) of growing up in a culture of “compulsory heterosexuality.” And she knows very well that if she were with a man, she might feel far less psychological pressure to experiment with a woman. “We don’t make straight women prove their straightness by having sex with girls”, Louisa said, “so why do I feel so compelled to ‘prove’ I’m lesbian by trying something with a guy? It’s like I feel I have to earn my queer credentials.”

Louisa, who has known me since she was 13, wanted one thing from our conversation last week, and it’s something I don’t know if I was able to give to her. She wanted help discerning whether this fascination with trying “it” (specifically, losing her heterosexual virginity) was something rooted in her own psyche or whether it was a response to the dominant cultural narrative. I pointed out the obvious — that for most of those, those two things (“natural” or “inherent” longings on the one hand and the socially-conditioned ones on the other) are incredibly difficult to separate. A lot of us spend a great deal of time working through this process of discernment; it’s one of the toughest tasks of young adulthood, and not a task everyone succeeds in completing. But the fact that it’s difficult doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Clearly, most of us believe that our internal “bundle of desires” has innate and cultural-constructed elements. For example, we might say that for someone like Louisa, an attraction to women is largely innate while her attraction to partners who have dark eyes and like anime is largely conditioned. Continue reading ‘Rejecting the narrative of male sexual indispensability’

Of labels and candor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 09, 2008
in Bisexuality, Favorite Posts 2008, GLBTQ, Memories and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 23 Comments

We wrapped up my History 24F class (intro to Lesbian and Gay American History) yesterday. As I usually do in such a class, I asked the students what they would be taking away from the course now that the semester was over. Many expressed excitement at finally learning that “We have a history too”, and some who used the first-person plural of Queerness to describe themselves yesterday did so for the very first time publicly. More so than in past semesters of 24F, I’ve had a high number of students who openly identify as “bi” or “questioning”; a couple mentioned that while they had gained no particular new insight into their own identities and desires, they did feel more comfortable after the class living without a specific label. I’m always happy to hear that.

And of course, the students also asked me to talk about two things: why I teach this class, and how I identify sexually. I’ve answered the first, and part of the second question in writing in this post. I wrote two months ago:

I don’t always identify as straight. I’ve never liked the word much: I’m too conscious, in an evangelical Christian sense, of my own places of brokenness to feel comfortable calling myself “straight.” And calling myself “heterosexual” seems to imply a continued openness to other women in my life. I jokingly call myself “Eira-sexual”, using my wife’s name. It captures the essence of one basic goal of my private journey today, to direct as much of my sexual energy as possible into one relationship. But there’s no point in denying that from adolescence on, my desire has always been primarily directed towards women. That has given me a set of experiences that set me apart from most of my queer brothers and sisters, no matter how often homophobic slurs and threats have been sent my way. I know better than to presume that I can always put myself in the shoes of those whose identity and desires are at odds with what the dominant culture decrees right.

Of course I stand by that. But my use of adverbs is often problematic, and it was in that paragraph. Continue reading ‘Of labels and candor’

Ed Feser on abortion and gay marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 02, 2008
in Abortion, GLBTQ and Pasadena City College
. 12 Comments

I teach in the same department as Edward Feser, who among other things, was a graduate student of my late father at UCSB. Unlike my dear Dad, Ed is a very conservative Catholic (something I had not realized until recently). He’s also recently published a book which I’ve just ordered. (Evangelical Richard Mouw was also my Dad’s graduate student. What gives? My dear, sweet, gently atheist and — even more gently, socialist — father ends up having all of these famous conservatives Christians among his former proteges. Of course, my father was close to Karl Popper for many years, but rejected that mentor’s views almost entirely. And so it goes. Cripes, I’m such a name-dropper.)

Anyhow, thanks to Jonah Goldberg, of all people, I just learned I am not the only blogger in the Social Sciences Division at Pasadena City College! How ignorant I have been! Here’s Ed’s blog.

Ed, writing from a very right-wing perspective, offers his answer to the question (independently) I posed several weeks ago: why did so many Americans vote to protect abortion rights, while simultaneously voting to deny marriage equality to gays and lesbians? (Here in California, Proposition 4, which would have required parental notification for abortion, failed by almost the same margin that Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, passed.)

Ed, who is an absolutely delightful colleague with absolutely appalling views, offers three possibilities, the last of which is this:

Some heterosexuals who have at least a grudging respect for traditional sexual morality are more keen to see it respected by others than to practice it themselves. (Think e.g. of the secularized Beltway conservative think-tank or journalist type who heartily endorses pragmatic Burkean arguments for the social utility of stigmas against fornication and the like, but who nevertheless lives with his girlfriend.) Hence, while it costs such people little or nothing personally to vote against “same-sex marriage,” limitations on abortion might put a crimp on their own lifestyle should their less-than-conservative personal sexual behavior “punish them with a baby.”

Ed may be right. We both lament the inconsistency of the electorate, but we do so from two radically different perspectives.

Perhaps an intra-departmental debate is in order.

Prop 8, boycotts, and villains who aren’t villains

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 13, 2008
in Faith, GLBTQ and Politics
. 75 Comments

Nine days after the election, the reaction to the narrow passage of Proposition 8 — eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry in California — continues to build. Major demonstrations are planned at city halls across the state this Saturday, and a series of grassroots organizations have sprung up to work to overturn this decision. Some advocate a complex appeal to the state Supreme Court, arguing that the voters overreached. (The explanation of how that might work is here). Others talk of another initiative in 2010, accompanied by far better outreach to minority communities and other groups who were neglected by the campaign against Proposition 8. My students are galvanized and excited; when the happy day arrives that gay marriage is restored in California, this time for good, we may well come to see this defeat as a “blessing in disguise.” But it’s far too early for that sort of reflection; the pain now is real and the work is great.

Many of my students and colleagues are involved in organizing boycotts of those companies which supported Proposition 8. Others, such as Roseanne, are urging a broader boycott of every organization which has large numbers of Mormons on its executive payroll. (The Mormon church gave heavily to the “Yes on 8″ campaign). I cannot support that effort.

I make a clear distinction between boycotting a company that takes a public stand in favor of marriage inequality and boycotting a company which may have certain employees or executives who have given privately to support Proposition 8. It would be hard to think of many large companies that don’t have social conservatives on their payroll somewhere, including folks who use some of their pay to contribute to political causes that I regard as discriminatory. Google and Apple both gave major donations to the anti Prop. 8 campaign, and their CEOs (Page, Brin, Jobs) are all staunch supporters of marriage equality. But it’s likely that somewhere, even in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, these major companies have well-compensated employees whose views and donations are diametrically opposed to those of their bosses.

Boycotts have their place; one need think only of Montgomery, Alabama, to be reminded that the conscious decision to withhold financial support for public or private entities is a powerful tool in the arsenal of justice-building. But indiscriminate boycotts have their limits, and I am sure I was not the only progressive pained by the story of Scott Eckern.

Scott Eckern, artistic director for the California Musical Theatre, resigned Wednesday as a growing number of artists threatened to boycott the organization because of his $1,000 donation to the campaign to ban gay marriage in California.

“I understand my supporting of Proposition 8 has been the cause of many hurt feelings, maybe even betrayal,” Eckern said in a written statement. “I chose to act upon my belief that the traditional definition of marriage should be preserved.”

On the one hand, I understand the outrage. It’s one thing to work closely with someone whose views on the capital gains tax are different from your own. It’s another thing to ask a gay or lesbian person to give time and energy to an organization led by a man who believes, deep in his heart and in his wallet, that your relationship is not deserving of the same fundamental awe, reverence, and societal approbation as his own. When it comes to mounting a stage production, it is perhaps deeply unreasonable to ask a gay or lesbian artist or actor to devote time and energy to working in the close, intimate proximity of the theater world with someone whose time and money goes to causes so fundamentally hostile to one’s very identity. It’s all very well for heterosexuals to protest that a belief in traditional marriage ought not to be misinterpreted as private animus to gays and lesbians — but the reality is that intent is at best only half of the truth. Perception is the other half, and it is not an unreasonable perception that those who voted “Yes” on Proposition 8 are unwilling to embrace gay and lesbian relationships as fundamentally equal. It’s also not unreasonable to expect gay and lesbian artists to be unwilling to devote time, talent, and treasure to supporting a theater whose artistic director — no matter how kind, hardworking, and talented he may be — uses his salary (derived in no small part from gay and lesbian labor) to support a cause so fundamentally inimical to their most basic human interests.
 Continue reading ‘Prop 8, boycotts, and villains who aren’t villains’

Gay sports update again

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 12, 2008
in GLBTQ and Sports
. 6 Comments

Folks know my theory that legalizing gay marriage is good for winning championships. One of many small disappointments contained within the Great Disappointment which was the narrow defeat for marriage equality in California is what it will mean for California-based sports teams in the year to come. The USC Trojans will not end up playing for the national title in football, and my beloved Cal Golden Bears women’s basketball team will likely not win the NCAA crown. If the California Supreme Court rules Prop 8 unconstitutional, however, there’s still time to reverse these inevitable setbacks.

But hey, Connecticut just legalized gay marriage, and the first weddings were performed today. And guess who has the number #1 team in women’s hoops? Yup, UConn, led by coach Geno Auriemma and super soph Maya Moore. They haven’t won a title in a few years, but I suspect that they’ll collect a sixth in April. They can thank their state supreme court if they do.