N–ture

The Boston Globe Magazine Sunday ran a detailed article by Niel Swidey on some of the research on What Makes People Gay. I haven't seen most of the research — I'm suspicious of much of it, but more as a knee-jerk reaction than for real reasons — and so refer you to the relatively reasoned article. I did want to point out that the media these days has come to consensus: "gay" is the preferred term for "non-straight", in spite of the male bias. This is disappointing, as it reinforces a male norm and obscures queer womens' experiences. That said, Swidey's article does a good job of pointing out differences and similarities between male and female sexual orientation identification, and that there has been extremely little research on female non-heterosexuality.

I have, in fact, only one complaint about the article, and it's more a complaint about language in general than about this specific article. I wish that people would continue to use the phrase "sexual orientation identity" rather than "sexual orientation". It's slightly clunkier, but "sexual orientation" already fails marvelously to roll off the tongue. No, I want to preserve the word "identity" to remind people that these categories may change over time, both for individuals and for society. It is currently the case, says Swidey, that how (American) men identify has a lot to do with their sexual arousal patterns, whereas women's identities don't seem to correlate with arousal, since most women tend to be aroused by women and men. I would like to remind people that this is at least as much a function of how society has chosen to define the terms with which people self-identify as it is a function of individual biology and socialization.

Let me repeat myself: I have no doubt that prenatal biology, genetics, etc. have profound impacts on how people behave. But how people identify is an interaction between their actual behavior and the categories as defined by their specific society. There may be a gay gene, in the sense that there may be a cluster of genes that predispose someone towards identifying as queer in this society. But if the category weren't there....

And it is in our interest as activists to change the categories' definitions so that everyone can be queer. So that the default is non-heteronormativity.

Two LGBT Times articles

The cover story this week in The New York Times Magazine is about the "culture war" over gay marriage, and specifically on the religious conservatives who are fueling the battle. It's an interesting article, and I suggest you read it. It might remind you that the front-line anti-gay-marriage activists are real, thoughtful, intelligent people, who are doing what they think is right. It might give you moral, philosophical, and political questions on which to chew — the article reminds me that my agenda, actively encouraging gender liberation and non-heterosexuality, is exactly what most scares these conservatives, and as a moral non-relativist, I find interesting that conservatives are sure that only they believe there to be absolute truths: "Once you start this, you could have a 45-year-old man wanting to marry a 9-year-old boy. That could be O.K. in 20 years. That's what you get with relative moral truth. Whereas with absolute moral truth, what was O.K. 50 years ago will still be O.K. 20 years from now."

The stated thesis of the article is to display the extreme homophobia among anti-gay-marriage activists. Those who follow gay marriage battles know about this homophobia already, and understand that any rhetoric of the form "I don't mind homosexuality, I just think marriage should be between a man and a woman" disguises a terrible agenda. Although the article is not newsworthy in the conventional sense, I am glad that Times Magazine decided to run it, because I think that most people do not support the homophobia of the anti-gay-marriage crusaders.

Read the whole article, because the last two paragraphs are especially powerful. In case you don't have time (or perhaps you are not registered with the Times), I quote it here:

That means changing hearts. How difficult that will be was illustrated by a single vignette. When I met Polyak, she told me how, when she first testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage activist, a woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why she was ''doing this'' to the woman's children and grandchildren. Polyak said the encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat in Evalena Gray's Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a story of how during the same testimony she approached a blond lesbian and talked to her about the effect that gay marriage would have on her grandchildren. ''Then I hugged her neck,'' she said, ''and I said, 'We love you.' I was kind of consoling her to some extent, out of compassion.''

I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That's a hard gap to bridge.

Another Times article, also from Sunday, interested me. In the Fashion & Style section, the article, Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell, discusses changes in men's fashion that have made gaydar less effective. In particular, at least in urban environments like New York, both gay and straight men are dressing with more, according to the Times, ambiguity: there's less stigma attached to being gay, so straight men are becoming more comfortable remaining ambiguous, and it is no longer as important to "affirm your identity" if you're gay.

Ian Ayres over at Balkinization has written extensively about the benifits of ambiguation, especially arguing that heterosexuals can actively advance LGBT causes by ambiguating. (He and his partner, Jennifer Brown, both professors at Yale Law School, have just published a new book, Straightforward, in which they propose a number of ways that heterosexuals can be successful allies.) I don't doubt that any move towards "gay-vague" styles, as the Times calls them, is a positive development — assimilation, since it goes both ways, will mean a healthier culture for gay and straight men, and hopefully eventually we will move to a culture where not only sexual orientation but gender too is not a culturally significant dimension. (I was about to say that gender will not be a good quantum number, that eigenstates will have higher degeneracy, but I think that only some of my readers will find such a description transparent.)

What interested me most in the article was a brief discussion at the top of the second page about who in society act as fashion and style innovators:

For years gay men were the ones to first adopt a style trend - flat-front pants, motorcycle jackets, crew cuts - and straight men would pick up on it more or less as gay men tired of it. Now gays and straights are embracing new styles almost simultaneously.

I remember remarking to a friend of mine at school that you don't see the stereotypical "limp wrist" worn by as many gay guys any more — now it's primarily a marker of "metrosexuals". (I put "metrosexual" in quotes because I see it as a passing fad, and one I'm not as fond of, because I understand it as too affected and two tied to an urban cigarette-and-martini lifestyle.)

Compare the gay-innovation-straight-appropriation model with the older dynamics between men and women. Clothing, activities, and even names shift primarily from men to women — Morgan and Meredith, for instance, were boys' names in the 16th Century, and skirts and frocks have fallen out of fashion for male dress — because women can adopt masculine attributes and move towards the more-valued masculinity (think of the favored "tom-boy"), whereas men who adopt feminine attributes risk censure (my heart goes out to all the "sissies" who were bullied and beaten as kids). Femininity has always, in the West, been of lower status overall than masculinity, and so masculine women are much more socially acceptable than feminine men. Straight men tend to be less threatened by lesbianism than by male homosexuality, for instance, and it's easier for a woman to hold a job than for a man to stay home with the kids. Names show a recurring "contamination" pattern: as more girls adopt a name traditionally used by boys, it becomes harder for parents to give it to their male infants.

If the standard model, in which cultural trade is understood as the borrowing by less powerful groups of the cultural norms of more powerful groups, held universally, then queer men and women would continue to borrow fashion and style ideas from their straight counterparts. But, says the Times, this has not traditionally been the relationship between straight and gay urban males. (Of course, extremely closeted gays are renowned for their adeptness at adopting the dress and mannerisms of the most traditionally masculine, homophobic parts of society.) And so society must be more interesting and complicated. Whites in America have always looked to Black musical innovation, and white young men have identified Black and Hispanic gang-born styles as the most macho. And being gay, or at least gay-vague, will soon be just as "in" for men as being bi is for women.

What ever happened in Darfur?

The Onion asks exactly that in a recent editorial: Well, I Guess That Genocide In Sudan Must've Worked Itself Out On Its Own

Some of my friends continue to work to end the Darfur genocide, although I, sadly, have not been actively supporting them, since, as The Onion points out, there is not political momentum. They continue to call for Stanford to divest from Sudan — this is part of a larger program for investment disclosure, since currently the hedge fund that manages the Stanford endowment does not release any information about where the money is invested — and they have organized phone campaigns to call Representatives in Congress and lobby for the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act (H.R. 1424). But this bill seems to be getting nowhere, and it's hard to call for more troop deployment (which Samantha Power, in the amazing America and the Age of Genocide, argues is really the only effective means to stop such violence) given the current military overextension. Jared Diamond in Collapse suggests that genocide is a symptom of poverty, itself brought on by environmental mismanagement. Is divestment the right thing? Are sanctions really effective? I don't know. I hope so, but I have my doubts.

What we really need is massive humanitarian relief for refugees. That can't be more expensive than waging war, can it? Imagine if we could draft people into the Peace Corps. But the powers that be would prefer to kill people and run a sexist military machine, only contributing to problems of rape, homophobia, death, poverty, and violence.

Testing

Supposedly I can now post entries here from my Dashboard (that wonderful device in Mac OS X.4). I wonder what this entry will look like.

I — I don't know what to say.

We're concerned about the effort [within the public schools] to capture youth through indoctrination into the homosexual lifestyle. Students are a captive audience, and they are being targeted by groups with that as an agenda.

Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of the conservative advocacy group Liberty Counsel, quoted in a 9 June article in The New York Times.

Younger and wiser

My eleven-year-old sister not too long ago was listening to a discussion between my mom and me about a certain genderqueer college student back home who had received hate mail from a conservative group on campus. She asked why they would do that. I gave her an honest but a little flip answer, and she pressed the issue. She was not asking a rhetorical question. She seriously wanted to understand why anyone would be bothered by someone who was not a boy and not a girl. I ended up providing a fairly long discussion of privilege, power, and threatening the status quo, and I think she started to intellectually understand. But this kind of ... not homophobia exactly, nor classical sexism or misogyny ... bigotry just didn't really make sense.

My sister also continues to find baffling the idea that anyone would be bothered by the idea of two men or two women being married. This bafflement, also, is not rhetoric: the idea simply doesn't make sense to her.

Her middle school includes in its curriculum a number of books about what it was like to be Black in the South under Jim Crow. I think she sort of understands institutional racism, and she was reading one of these emotionally challenging books around the time that she asked about this genderqueer college student. In our discussion we compared that racism to modern institutional homophobia and sexism, and that bigotry to modern bigotry. I do feel like it's important for her to know and understand these things, and yes, she's fully capable to doing so as a precocious eleven-year-old, but it's almost a shame to introduce such issues to her. Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone shared her innocent bafflement?

To her credit, my sister is bothered by immediate things, and understands that they're problematic. She has often complained about a certain response from many of her friends: "Yes I support same-sex marriage," these eleven- and twelve-year-old girls say, "but it's not like it matters to any of us." My sister doesn't quite articulate the problem with this attitude yet, but she recognizes that there's a problem, and I've tried to suggest both a way to understand it and a way to counter it.

My sister, as I said, doesn't seem to mind that there is college student who is neither a boy nor a girl. It seems that in my sister's world-view there are a number of distinct genders, including:

• boys. Boys are weird, annoying, and sometimes have cooties.
• girls who are older than my sister. Girls who are older than my sister are cool.
• girls who are younger than my sister. Girls who are younger than my sister can be fun to play with, especially when my sister can pretend that she has a younger sister, but sometimes they get annoying.
• big brothers. Big brothers are boys, my sister reluctantly admits, but they aren't as bad as _boys_, and only very rarely have cooties.
• friends. My sister's friends are all smart, all come from upper-middle-class families with educated parents, and all play basketball. And some of them are starting to notice my sixteen-year-old brother (who is objectively cute, a star debater, sings, and has a steady girlfriend).
• grownups. It's not clear whether grownups are actually real people or if, like teachers and her friends' parents, grownups are just there to make snacks and discuss homework.
• Daddy.
• Mommy.

In the abstract there are "boys and men", "girls and women", and "people who aren't either boys or girls", and in the abstract most grownups fit into the first two categories. But in practice they are all in the third category, and even the definitions of "Mommy" and "Daddy" have more to do with the actual people and less to do with their genders.

There used to be other categories. "People with beards," if my memory is correct, was one of them, and "babies!" might still be another. My sister knows that girls and boys can't play in the same sports leagues because boys are weird and annoying. My sister is also fully aware of other gender-based segregation or specific integration, and generally approves of the affirmative-action kind and disapproves of the classical sexism kind. We live in a pretty white town, one with a not-entirely-positive record on institutional racism, but I think the only role that race plays in my sister's actual life (almost all her classmates are white) is that they have some sort of Native American cultural appreciation programming each year in school.

I wish gender and race played less of a role in my life. Instead, I regularly enjoy laughing with my Indian and Latino friends about spicy food, and Jewish jokes are not uncommon around here (gay jokes are even more common). I often make comments about how "boys are weird", and even though my gender distinctions are accompanied by informed feminist commentary, I wonder whether they need to be made.

I would rather be proactive, intentionally finding male friends to dance with to remind everyone that social dance need not be gendered, or intentionally supporting female friends who want to be math or CS majors. We still need to be sensitive to race, to whether and how it correlates with other social and economic dimensions. But it's been years since I've attended an anti-racism, or even an anti-sexism, workshop, and I'm feeling behind. And there's something very attractive about a romanticized eleven-year-old outlook: race doesn't exist, boys have cooties, girls are either cool or little-sister material, and no one else has a gender.

Or maybe I just like the part where grownups' only job is to provide for kids.

Entries to write

So much political bullshit recently, so much to explain why it's bad. But I still have a week or two more of term, so such essays will have to wait. Hold me to writing on some of this, though:

• Benevolent sexism and the military: Restricting what jobs women may hold in the military should be illegal, not required by law (women, like gays and rich kids, are already restricted from certain posts; Congress wants to restrict them further).
• Democrats should not have caved on the judicial nominee fight. As argued over at Balkinization, the Right is trying to effect a radical shift in Constitutional law, and they're doing it in the most effective way: by packing the courts. Democrats need to take a hard line. We've allowed too many conservative justices already, and should not have compromised on Justice Owen. We could have simply halted Parliament Congress for the rest of Bush's term. And the Left needs to find some judges of our own and start pushing back.
• All the many dumb anti-gay things that various republicans are doing. Today, for instance, Wisconsin decided against providing domestic partner benefits to university employees
• I have a lot to say about the sorry state of the current general American gay male community. Much of it is summed up in the a article about crystal meth and AIDS in The New Yorker.
• Lastly, I will sometime soon talk about child abuse, Hamlet, and social ills.