Monthly Archives: October 2008

Rights, obligations, and the long arc of struggle: some thoughts on gay marriage, the election, and priorities

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In my Intro to Lesbian and Gay American History class, we talked a bit about gay marriage yesterday. The course is structured chronologically, and as we approach the middle of the term, we’re just now getting to the 20th century. (I’ve been lecturing on the likes of Karl Ulrichs, Karl Benkert, and the great Magnus Hirschfeld.)

But a rigid attachment to chronologies is a dangerous quality in a history teacher. And though the outline of the class dictates we shouldn’t be talking about gay marriage until the final two weeks of class, the upcoming vote here in California on Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex unions, is a good reason to fiddle with the time-table for my lectures.

We don’t get into much discussion in class about our own sexual identities. Some of my students are “out” to me, others aren’t, and others are presumably heterosexual. But almost to a man or a woman, they’ve followed with deep interest the current struggle to protect marriage equality in California. I see “No on 8″ buttons and bumperstickers on notebooks and bags and shirts. When I brought up the subject of the election yesterday, the sense of excitement and anxiety was palpable.

I didn’t turn the lecture into a political sermon. Instead, I asked a question that a great many folks in the gay and lesbian community once asked — but ask more rarely now: Why marriage?

I asked my students what other major pressing issues faced the LGBTQ community besides marriage equality. Even my students who are out and proud and actively involved in campus organizing looked blank. For young gay and lesbian activists, lately it’s been “all marriage, all the time.” An entire movement has poured virtually all of its financial resources and political energies into winning one particular issue. And I suggested, gently but firmly, that there is a cost to such singlemindedness.

One bright young man asked: “But what other issue is there?” I get why he asks. Visit the webpage of the Human Rights Campaign, the best-known and best-funded gay and lesbian rights organization in America. On the front page, what other issue appears? If you click on the issues button, other topics (health care, ageing, the military) pop up — but you’ve got to do a bit of hunting about to find anything beyond “marriage, marriage, marriage.”

I teach women’s history classes too. Every semester, inexorably, the number of young women in that class who say that they never want to get married, or imagine that it is likely that they will never marry, increases. Demographers tell us that record numbers of Americans are turning 30, and 40, without being wed. And as countless radical activists in the GLBTQ community have pointed out, it’s more than a little odd that same-sex marriage has become the be-all and end-all of contemporary gay activism. Just as heterosexual Americans, perhaps particularly young women, become increasingly cynical about marriage as an essential component of future happiness, gay and lesbian Americans are told that winning “marriage equality” is more important than fighting workplace discrimination, getting better health services, immigration and tax issues, and so forth.

My students, of course, are not all eager to marry. But like most idealistic young people, they worship at the altar of “freedom of choice.” They say things like, “It’s not that everyone needs to get married, it’s that everyone should have a choice.” What inflames them about opposition to gay marriage is a sense of inequality — and many of the most inflamed are often those who say that they “can’t ever imagine” getting married themselves. Continue reading →

The sadness of voles, the madness of humans

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I’ve made my opposition to animal research clear many times. And given that my posts on the subject have tended to alienate the very sort of people I am eager to win over to the cause of justice for our fellow creatures, I’m keeping this one short.

This morning’s paper featured this story.

Scientists have confirmed what poets have long known: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Working with mouse-like rodents called prairie voles, scientists have found that close monogamous relationships alter the chemistry of the brain, fostering the release of a compound that builds loyalty but also plays a role in depression during times of separation.

The scientists found that after four days away from their mates, male voles experienced changes in the emotional center of their brains, causing them to become unresponsive and lethargic. When given a drug that blocked the changes, however, lonely voles emerged from their funk.

I am not a perverse sentimentalist who weeps more for lonely voles than for starving children in Somalia. But I teared up this morning thinking about the sheer wastefulness and the utter absence of empathy that is shot through this experiment. Any ethologist (someone who studies animal behavior without interfering in their lives) could have told you that many pair-bonded species grieve and mope when separated from a mate. Natural death of old age or predation offers plenty of examples; to allow two voles to bond and then deliberately separate them for the purpose of killing one so that his brain chemistry can be studied — this is jaw-droppingly, heartbreakingly immoral. So often, animal suffering is justified in the name of providing “life-saving” treatment for humans. But there is no pressing urgency that can justify the emotional torture of what the study reveals are intelligent creatures. Humans, as the article points out, rarely experience death as a result of being separated from a partner. They do suffer, as voles suffer.

After separating nine male voles from their partners, Young and colleagues from Emory and the University of Regensburg in Germany tested the animals’ ability to cope with stress.

When placed in a pool of water, the voles passively floated instead of trying to swim. In a second test, the animals failed to struggle when suspended by their tails.

The animals displayed “depressive behaviors,” Young said. “They become more passive, more likely to give up.”

When researchers killed the voles and looked inside their brains, they found elevated levels of CRF, which is known to have a role in depression.

Bold emphasis mine.

Cutting off funding for this sort of animal experimentation is critical. While threatening the lives of researchers and their family is unacceptable and inconsistent with justice-centered values, doing everything possible to expose monstrosities like this — often funded with tax-payer dollars — is vital.

Our need to understand the world is real. But real understanding, real knowledge, and real science must be built on a foundation of respect for life and wonder for creation. Goya remarked el sueno de la razon produce monstruos : the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

And as my paper tells me this morning, some of those monsters work for Emory and Regensburg universities.

Thursday Short Poem: Levertov’s “Wedding-Ring”

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I’m rarely without my wedding ring, a beautiful David Yurman piece which my wife gave to me as an engagement gift; when we were wed in 2005, I simply switched it to a different hand.

Of course, I’m on my fourth and final marriage. I’ve had three divorces, and hence three wedding rings left over. The ring from the first marriage lay in a little box, and that box was “accidentally” thrown away by my second wife. My second wife and I separated while I was living in a recovery home, and one of my fellow addicts stole the ring from that marriage, not that I had any reason to miss it. (One hopes it bought a nice high.) And the third ring? The third ring was thrown into the sea, by me, quite deliberately.

But I know many divorced folks who still have the rings from prior marriages. This Denise Levertov poem is a fine reflection on the subject of what might, or might not, be done with a gold or platinum band which symbolizes, if not a promise broken, a shared journey ended.

Wedding-Ring

My wedding-ring lies in a basket
as if at the bottom of a well.
Nothing will come to fish it back up
and onto my finger again.

It lies
among keys to abandoned houses,
nails waiting to be needed and hammered
into some wall,
telephone numbers with no names attached,
idle paperclips.

It can’t be given away
for fear of bringing ill-luck.

It can’t be sold
for the marriage was good in its own
time, though that time is gone.

Could some artificer
beat into it bright stones, transform it
into a dazzling circlet no one could take
for solemn betrothal or to make promises
living will not let them keep? Change it
into a simple gift I could give in friendship?

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Of boys and hand-washing

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One of my many early morning rituals is to log on to BBC News. And this was the first story I saw today: Millions Mark UN Hand-Washing Day. 2008 is, I learned, the International Year of Sanitation. I’m delighted to see this simple education campaign underway, and eager to see more governments and donor agencies get involved in improving sanitary conditions in poor countries. Since I no longer support Heifer Project and other aid programs that involve the mistreatment of animals, I’ve gotten very interested in Oxfam’s Build a Bog program. (I’m a fan of clean toilets; if anyone is wondering what to give me for Christmas or my birthday, trust that I already have more than I need. But buying someone a nice place to poop in my name would make me deliriously happy.)

Reading about “world hand-washing day” made me think about men, cleanliness, and self-care. I’ve become, in my old age, a very good and loyal hand-washer. It was not always so, and I confess it was a former girlfriend, Ali, who turned things around for me many years ago. We had just moved in together, and on one lazy afternoon, I got up to use the bathroom while my gal stayed on the couch. When I returned, Ali looked at me suspiciously: “I didn’t hear the sink”, she said. I must have flushed red, saying nothing. “Did you wash your hands?” I sheepishly admitted that I had not. This woman had a drug and alcohol addiction at least as well advanced as my own, but when sober, she had a tremendous commitment to good hygiene. “Well, Hugo, if you ever want to touch me again, you damn well better wash your hands with soap and hot water every time you ‘go’.” Indeed, even when we were both under the influence, headed for bed, Ali would drunkenly push me towards the bathroom, insisting that whatever else I did, I had to make sure my hands were scrubbed clean. The relationship came to a messy hand, but my post-toilet ablutions have remained relatively devoted ever since.

I use the faculty men’s restroom located right across the hall from my little office. My colleagues and I are often in there together. I’ve worked with most of these lads for many years, and I know well who the “good handwashers” are. Some use soap and hot water and rub their hands thoroughly. Others practice what I often did in my younger days, the “wetting the fingertips with cold water for a period of not more than five seconds” strategy. And some — I will name no names, no matter how hard I am pushed on the matter — emerge from stalls or step back from urinals and do not even glance at the sink before heading out to meet and mingle with their students. I never say anything. I already have a reputation for “policing” the sexist language of some of my male colleagues, and I’m not sure I’m ready to start parenting men in many cases considerably older than myself. (Sometimes, I do confess, I use a paper towel to open the restroom door on my way out.)

The larger problem, of course, is the cultural feminization of cleanliness. It’s axiomatic that we raise boys in our culture with expectations of dirt; it is equally axiomatic that most parents are much better at communicating lessons about cleanliness to their daughters. It’s not that many parents tell their sons not to wash their hands, of course — it’s that we have diminished expectations for what boys can remember. Popular theories, generally unanchored in anything approaching scientific research, suggest that girls “have a keener sense of smell, and thus are better about remembering to be clean” or that “boys are just naturally dirtier, and can’t be expected to wash all the time.” And of course, the old nursery rhyme about “sugar and spice” for girls and “snips and snails” for boys is rooted, not in immutable physiological truth, but in socially-constructed myths about childhood. Above all, we live in a culture that sees dirt on boys as evidence of healthy masculinity, and in which male fastidiousness is associated with queerness and effeminacy. Continue reading →

Open Salon

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I’ve been invited to start posting a bit at “Open Salon”, and have put up a few recent and older pieces from this blog over at that site. So far, I’m four-for-four on making “editor’s choice”, which may or may not be a huge honor, but is nice nonetheless. My section is here. I’ve discovered quite a few other wonderful bloggers there as well.

As far as I know, you don’t need an invite to start a blog at Open Salon — and you might get picked up and moved to the front page. Check it out.

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Parental pride, parental anxiety: on ever-earlier adolescence and the ever-present double standard

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Comments should be open.

As I’ve written before, each semester in my women’s history course we spend some time looking at Joan Brumberg’s wonderful Body Project. Brumberg talks about the four to five year drop in the onset of puberty between the late nineteenth century and the present. The best medical evidence we have from 1900 put the average age of menarche at 16; today, it is just over 11. And of course, with earlier menarche comes earlier development of other secondary sex characteristics. The same is true with boys, though males lack the single defining demarcation line of the onset of menstruation to mark an entry into adolescence.

It’s a women’s studies class, so we spend much more time focusing on the impact of earlier puberty on girls than on boys. We refute some of the common myths (like the long-standing notion that the Virgin Mary was fourteen, and thus menarche must have happened for her before she was to be wed). We talk about the role of changing diet, particularly meat consumption, in driving adolescent growth. I quote from PCRM’s summary of a Harvard study:

Some studies suggest that the growth of vegetarian children is more gradual than that of non-vegetarians—in other words, vegetarian children grow a bit more slowly at first, but they catch up later on. Final heights and weights for vegetarian children are comparable to those of meat-eating children. Interestingly, breast-fed babies also grow more slowly than bottle-fed babies. Somewhat less rapid growth during the early years is thought to decrease disease risk later in life.

On the other hand, diets rich in animal protein, found in meat, eggs, and dairy products, appear to reduce the age of puberty, as shown in a 2000 study from the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that girls who consumed higher levels of animal protein compared to vegetable protein between 3 and 8 years of age went through menarche earlier. Nature may well have designed the human body to grow up more gradually, to reach puberty later, and to last longer than most people raised on omnivorous diets experience.

Bold mine. The full study is here. I never hide the fact that I’m a vegan, and so I’m quite clear about my bias: if future parents want to make sure that their children “don’t grow up too fast”, raising them with a minimum meat intake (or as vegans) is the best way to go. Take Harvard’s word for it — there’s a lot to be said for delaying physical puberty by 24-36 months, to give the mind time to keep pace with the body developmentally. MTV can’t make your daughter menstruate earlier than you did; McDonalds can.

But please believe that I don’t just use the palpable anxiety my students feel about the “vanishing of physical childhood” to push my vegan agenda. Yeah, I do that – but there’s more as well. We also spend a great deal of time exploring the historical, psychological, and cultural implications of a much earlier adolescence. Those students who are comfortable doing so are invited to open up dialogue with older female relatives (this is not required); many in my classes, filled as they are with first-generation Americans, have grandmothers who are a foot shorter than they are — and who report “starting” substantially later.

In journal assignments, many of my students write about their own worries about their younger sisters or daughters. (I have many single parents, mostly moms, in my courses). A great many talk about rethinking the diets that they will offer their future children. But interestingly, none of them express any anxiety about early puberty in boys. When the subject comes up — which it has — in my men and masculinity courses, I never hear a student say “Gosh, I want to make sure I raise my son vegetarian so he can stay in a boy’s body longer.” In my women’s history courses, I constantly hear “I want to do everything I can to delay my daughter’s development”. Continue reading →

Fighting the “quiet civil war”, and fighting it civilly: some reflections on striving to be a kind culture warrior

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I make no secret of my left-wing leanings, but I am a fairly frequent reader of some conservative websites, including the National Review. This comment from the often funny, often pompous (pot, meet kettle) Mark Steyn intrigued me: A cold civil war? Steyn quotes author William Gibson, and right-wing blogger Hyacinth Girl, who writes:

Every generation says that the politics of the current generation is more contentious than in “their day,” and though we’ve been through a lot as a country–a civil war, two world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and a vicious attack on our homeland–I’ve never before seen such a willingness by one side to tear this country down. A willingness to lie, cheat, and steal this election, reprehensible actions that are absolved by the high priests of modern liberalism, as they are done in the service of the “greater good.” I find myself continually taken aback by how many people claim to be disgusted with this country, desiring that it be remade in the image of a dying Europe.

This country is now, as Steyn has said numerous times, a “50/50 nation.” We are increasingly divided, in a way that is reminiscent of the country my parents inhabited in the late ’60′s, which I’m sure is no coincidence, given the work “educators” like Bill Ayers have been doing for the past several years. I’m not convinced we’ll see a return to the civil unrest of the ’60′s, but I can’t see this country coming together again on much of anything. If 9/11 failed to unite us–it divided us sharply along previously unobtrusive fault lines, surprising many, myself included–then I’m not sure what would. Throughout this election, I’ve expressed my enthusiasm for smaller government and fewer taxes, and I couldn’t comprehend how this did not appeal to everyone. I’m becoming increasingly aware of a growing attitude amongst my countrymen for a more intrusive government, a populace willing to pay higher taxes so long as they don’t have to take care of themselves. Apparently, roughly half of this country feels this way. And I can’t see how that side will “come over” to the side of self-reliance (though I’m not so sure that “we’re” for that anymore either).

So are we witnessing the beginning of a cultural and political standoff? A “cold civil war,” as is has so eloquently been phrased? If so, what the hell are we going to do about it?

I’m not going to get into an argument over the absurdity of Hyacinth Girl’s charges about “stealing” the election. If Obama wins, I do suspect that many on the right will begin to sound very much like the late great Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, intimating that the election was indeed “stolen.” That will give us three consecutive elections in which many on the side that lost the presidency came away convinced that they were “done in” by thievery and not the weaknesses of their own particular candidate. It’s a depressing thought.

What I’m interested in is the notion of a “quiet” or a “cold” civil war. I think Steyn and Hyacinth are on to something, even if I quibble with the latter’s implication that it has “never been this bad.” As a historian by training and profession, I tend to think that knowledge of Clio’s secrets is inversely proportional to how unique one imagines the current situation to be. Those who claim “things have never, ever been this bad” are almost invariably revealing their own ignorance.

On the other hand, it’s hard to dispute that we’re in one — of many — periods of cultural strife. On hot-button social issues (abortion, guns, gay marriage); on military affairs (Iraq); and on the question of America’s role in the world (uniquely elect or called to humility in a community of equals), we are obviously a divided people if not a divided nation. Those divisions seem stronger, of course, because of how close that division is, demographically speaking. Most of us whose memory goes back more than a few decades remember landslide elections rather than the nailbiting affairs of this new century. The country was “divided” in 1964, 1972, and 1984 as well, over many issues — but that didn’t translate into close elections. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan had their vociferous detractors, but in various ways they were able to assemble massive coalitions to carry them to easy victories. By the standards of the last few years, even Bill Clinton’s relatively small wins in 1992 and ’96 over George HW Bush and Bob Dole seem easy and foreordained.

I think Barack Obama will probably (not certainly, but probably) pull out this election. It will not be a landslide, either in the popular vote or in the electoral college. And if trends hold, he will take office immensely distrusted (and perhaps hated) by at least 40% of the American public. But given the conditions under which the likes of, say, Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the presidency, I still don’t see the need to claim that we are more divided than at any other time in our history. For most of us, however, we are more divided than at any time in living memory — and while that’s obviously a very different thing, it’s still understandably troubling. Continue reading →

“Perfomative Ambiguity” and heterosexual privilege: on being a straight man teaching Queer History

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I’ve posted before on the advantages, disadvantages, and “unearned privileges” of being a man who teaches women’s studies. See here, here here , and here. Those four posts cover most of my feelings and experiences as a man who has taught women’s history for a decade and a half.

I’m thinking today about a somewhat related topic: the role of a heterosexual man teaching gay and lesbian history. (I first taught my “Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History” course in 2001, and am offering it for the sixth or seventh time this fall.) My maleness is obvious, of course. But sexual orientation is not always as easily definable as gender identity (depending on the person, of course). And though I doubt anyone thinks I’m biologically female, I know that quite a few of my students over the years have “wondered” about my sexuality — particularly because of the various gender studies courses I teach. The stereotype that “only a gay man” would teach women’s history (much less gay and lesbian history!) is an entrenched one, perhaps particularly so among the sort of first-generation college students who make up a majority of the students on the Pasadena City College campus.

I generally don’t tell my students my reasons for teaching my gender studies courses at the beginning of the semester. It’s usually towards the end of the term, after we have (one hopes) developed a good classroom rapport, that I share with the folks in the course my reasons for teaching this particular subject. Because I’d love to raise up future gender studies professors, I share with them a bit of my own academic and personal narrative, and talk to them about the special challenges that those who choose to do gender/sexuality work will face. (Starting with questions from parents about one’s sexual orientation, and segueing quickly to worries about how the heck a living can be scratched out with a Gender Studies major!) And at some point in my gay and lesbian history courses, I talk about what it was like to grow up surrounded by a great many lesbians and gay men who played nurturing and important roles in my youth. (See this post.)

My students know I’m married (I occasionally mention my wife, and I am never without my wedding ring.) I sometimes make self-deprecating remarks about my previous divorces, though I do so less often than I used to. But I’m aware the possibility hangs in the air that my sexuality might still be more unclear than my married status would suggest. I wear more jewelry (necklaces and bracelets) than your average WASP, and my fondness for pink shirts does not go unnoticed. And though I am of course never flirtatious with students of either sex, seeking always to project a clear and unmistakable aura of professionalism and unavailability, I also am aware that some of my body language and mannerisms are direct violations of the rigid expectations of American masculine culture. Call it “perfomative ambiguity”, if you will. It’s not an act, because I come by what the media calls “metrosexuality” honestly. But I am not unaware that it does raise questions in the minds of those students who are inclined to contemplate the sexual habits of their gender studies professors. Continue reading →

Friday Random Ten: music for contemplating the markets

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I don’t know about any of you all, but my 403(b) retirement account is down 40% this year. In that spirit, music for cheering us up.

There are a few songs so well-loved that I have at least five different versions on my Ipod. #3 is one of those, joining tracks like “Pancho and Lefty” and “Sin City” as alt.country classics of which it’s almost impossible to produce a bad cover. And Richard Shindell, who does many wonderful covers (check out his “Born in the USA”) nails “Willin’”.

1. “When I Drink I Cheat”, The Way-Goners
2. “Reasons to Be Beautiful”, Hole
3. “Willin’”, Richard Shindell
4. “Paradise”, John Prine
5. “Gillian”, The Waifs
6. “It’s Alright”, Dar Williams
7. “Might as Well Dance”, Patty Larkin
8. “Stupid Nouth Shut”, Hem
9. “Step on my Old Size Nines”, Stereophonics
10. “Short Work”, Kris Delmhorst