Life Continues at Forty

GayProf’s ol’ odometer rolled over yet again this past June. At some point I expect that I will be due for a tire rotation. For those keeping tack, I have now entered the forties. Growing up, my mother had a plaque hanging in her bathroom with the phrase “Life begins at forty.” The optimistic assessment appeared juxtaposed to a lesser-known Rockwell painting showing a bored middle-aged woman sipping coffee with an inattentive husband buried in the newspaper. Less ironic than cruel it seemed to me.

Such pervasive messages about aging can really warp us. Even I, my dear and loyal readers, succumb to doubts. Then I think about where other people happen to have been in their lives at 40. It turns out that for many people life really did begin at forty. Well, except for the ones who were already dead. Their lives were never quite the same. . .

Whatever the case, as we all know, I use my birthday as a time to take stock of my life by making comparisons to others’ life journeys, real or imagined, at the same age. It is a little ritual that we have at CoG. Just play along and it will be fine.

If I were Oscar Wilde at age 40, I would write both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest this year.

If I were Zebulon Pike at age 40, I would be dead. It would have been nine years since I published my journals about being captured by Spanish authorities in New Mexico. It would have been six years since I was blown to bits in the War of 1812 at the Battle of York.

If I were Rosalind Russell, I would make the film Mourning Becomes Electra this year. It would be another ten years before I would play Auntie Mame on Broadway.

Should I have been born George Blanda, I would play professional football another eight years before retiring.

If I were Malcom X, I would have died last year.

Had I been Billie Holiday at age 40, I would be working with ghostwriter William Dufty on my autobiography Lady Sings the Blues.

If I were Paul Walker at age 40, I would die unexpectedly in a fiery car crash.

Mae West, at age 40, made her first two major movies She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel this year, both with Carey Grant.




If I were Carey Grant at age 40, I would be starring in Arsenic and Old Lace.

If I were Miguel A. Otero, I would be governor of New Mexico.

If I were Will Rogers, I would be in the midst of a three-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. It would be another three years before my syndicated column started appearing in The New York Times.

If I were The New York Times, my headlines would include a public feud between Rear Admiral Bancroft Gerardi and Acting Rear Admiral John G. Walker in the U.S. Navy.

If I were Pearl Bailey, I would release my album Gems by Pearl Bailey this year.




If I were Cabeza de Vaca, I would land at Tampa Bay, Florida with the doomed Narváez expedition. Only three others of the original 600 would survive with me.

If I were Tecumseh, this is the year that I would establish Prophetstown, My charismatic leadership would make this town into an early base for a confederation of tribes committed to challenging U.S. incursions into the Great Lakes region.




If I were Stella Payne, this is the year that I would get my groove back.

If I were Lorraine Hansberry, I would be dead.

If I were the nation of Mexico, Queen Isabella II, Queen Victoria, and Napoleon III would all have signed an agreement to force me to resume my loan payments. This would start the time in my life that we would later refer to as the Second Mexican Empire.

If I were George Eliot, I would publish my first novel, Adam Bede, this year.

If I were Myrna Loy, this is the year that I would film The Thin Man Goes Home.

If I were either Nick or Nora Charles, I should seriously be considering joining Alcoholics Anonymous.




If I were Frances Drake, I would reach Sierra Leone this year.

If I were Captain James Cook, I would be making my first voyage across the Pacific Ocean.

If I were James T. Kirk, I would be the youngest admiral in Starfleet and the Chief of Starfleet Operations. Apparently, though, that just wouldn't be good enough for me. This is also the year that I would use the V’Ger incident as an excuse to displace William Decker as Captain of the Enterprise in a futile effort to reclaim my youth.



If I were Elton John, I would win my libel case against The Sun for publishing stories about me paying young men for sex.

If I were Eusebio Kino, I would abandon the Misión San Bruno in Baja California and return to Mexico City. Many indigenous people likely spent the year hosting parties as a result.

If I were Freddie Mercury, this is the year that I would play my final live performance with Queen in Knebworth Park.

If I were Popé, it would be five years before I would be one of 47 religious leaders arrested by Spanish authorities for “witchcraft.” It would be another ten years before I became a key leader in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

If I were Huey Long, I would break with FDR and oppose the National Recovery Act on the grounds that it catered too much to business interests.

If I were Álvaro Obregón, this is the year that I would become president of Mexico.




If I were Ellen DeGeneres, my sitcom would be cancelled this year.

If I were Emiliano Zapata, I would be dead.

Were I to have been Mark Twain at age 40, then I would publish The Adventures of Tom Sawyer this year.

If I were Muhammad, I would be visited by Gabriel and receive my first divine revelation.

If I were Divine, I would be starring in Lust in the Dust this year.




If I were Colonel Sanders, this is the year that I would start preparing fried chicken for folks who stopped at my service station in Corbin, Kentucky. It would be another few years before I perfected my herb-to-spice ratio. *cough*MSG*cough*

At age 40, I would decide to visit my brethren, the Israelites, if I were Moses.

If I were Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas would shoot me.

If I were Stan Lee, this is the year that I would create Spiderman.

If I were Jame Michener, this is the year that I would publish Tales of the South Pacific which would inspire the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

If I were Captain Jean-Luc Picard, I would be in command of the USS Stargazer. It would be another nineteen years before I took command of the Enterprise.

If I were William T. Riker, nobody would care what I was doing at age 40. Poor Riker.




If I were Noël Coward, I would write This Happy Breed and Present Laughter this year.

If I were Pontiac, it would be another three years before I would attack Fort Detroit and start my eponymous war.

If I were Mary Richards, I would have been fired from WJM-TV three years ago.

If I were Walter Raleigh, this is the year that Elizabeth I would imprison me at the Tower of London.

If I were Mary Tyler Moore, I would win my fifth Emmy award this year for playing Mary Richards (and the third Emmy for that role).




If I were Harvey Milk, this is the year that I would be fired from my job as a financial analyst after protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

If I were either Jamey Carroll or Derek Jeter at 40, I would still be playing professional baseball.

If I were Meriwether Lewis at age 40, I would be dead. It would have been five years since I shot myself in the head . . . twice. Or somebody shot me in the head twice. We aren’t really sure what happened. My personal guess is that he suffered from an unrequited and totally gay love of Thomas Jefferson. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

If I were fashionista, Alexander McQueen, I would die this year.

If I were GayProf, I would be starting a year sabbatical after two years of intense departmental service.

If I were Steve Carell, I would be appearing in Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s single-seasoned sitcom Watching Ellie. It would be another three years before I would make The 40-Year Old Virgin.

If I were astrophysicist Donald Clayton at age forty, this is the year that I would propose that the isotopic effects of condensed anomalous dust within supernovae could be found in meteorites. – Or something – I was never good at science.

If I were Vivian Leigh, I would suffer a major breakdown while filming Elephant Walk. I would be replaced by Elizabeth Taylor.

If I were James Baldwin, I would join marchers in Selma, Alabama demanding justice.




If I were Tennessee Williams, this is the year my play The Rose Tattoo would appear on Broadway.

If I were Marlo Thomas, I would star in It Happened One Christmas, a remake of It’s a Wonderful Life. I would make a subtle political statement by taking over the Jimmy Stewart role with Cloris Leachman taking up the task of being my guardian angel.

If I were Katherine Hepburn, I would make my fourth film with Spencer Tracey, the forgettable The Sea of Grass.

If I were either of my parents at age 40, I would have three children. The oldest, now twenty, would have moved out of the house. The youngest would be thirteen.

If I were Jaclyn Smith, I would star in the film Deja Vu.

If I were Dolly Parton, this is the year that I would purchase the obscure theme park Silver Dollar City and rename it Dollywood.



If I were William Clark, this is the year that I would complete my comprehensive map of the West. It would become the standard reference for a quarter century as trappers, traders, scientists, and other U.S. citizens became increasing interlopers on other people’s lands.

If I were Jesus, I would have been dead for seven years.

If I were Farrah Fawcett, I would star in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story.

If I were Paul Lynde, this is the year I would first appear as the prankster warlock Uncle Arthur on Bewitched.

If I were Cher at age 40, this is the year that I would stun viewers of the Academy Awards with my Bob Mackie original. It would be another two years before I would win an Oscar for Moonstruck.




If I were Kate Jackson, I would star in the quickly cancelled sitcom Baby Boom this year.

If I were Jonathan Swift, I would be in London advocating for the government to provide the same subsidy to Church of Ireland clerics as it did for the Church of England. It would be another fifteen years before I would pen Gulliver’s Travels.

If I were Wonder Woman, I would age another 2,451 years before joining Patriarch’s world to fight crime.

Poor Life Choices

Lately I have been thinking about graduate education in the humanities. Perhaps it would be a bit extreme to say that I have been having a moral crisis. Like St. Thomas, though, I sometimes have my doubts.

It’s not that I give credence to right-wing attacks on humanities research. Nothing drives me up the wall more than to switch on some local news story about an illiterate state legislator claiming that the humanities are irrelevant and a waste of tax payer money. I have written here and elsewhere about how critical an engagement with the humanities is for an informed and responsible citizenry, mostly to keep them from electing illiterate state legislators. Ethnic studies research also has a critical role to play as the nation’s demographics continue to shift. Ironically (in an Alanis Morrisette sorta way) it is at the very moment that companies and government agencies are desperate for individuals who can intelligently engage with minority communities, especially Latinos, that many universities are slashing their ethnic studies programs. I am looking at you, University of Texas system.



My concerns about graduate studies in the humanities are a bit more pragmatic. I have wondered about the wisdom of churning out armies of Ph.D.’s when the opportunity to land a traditional tenure–track position is becoming more and more remote. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" or something . . .

Do we have any ethical obligation to resist the temptation to admit graduate students when we know this to be the case? How do we balance that obligation with an equal investment in insuring that new research on critical topics like race, gender, sexuality, class, disability studies and other fields moves forward?

Sadly, I have no answers to these questions. Instead, I can only think about the type of advice that I would give to newly admitted Ph.D. students in the Social Sciences or the Humanities. Hopefully you already received some clear-cut guidance before you applied to these programs. If not, here are some things to consider as you start a new program. It might be harsh, but it’s only because I love you.

1. Do not expect to get an academic job. Surely I can’t be the first person to mention that the academic job market is beyond miserable. A few very lucky folks land a coveted tenure-track position, but then a few lucky folks also win the lottery. Many others are placed into some mighty abysmal working arrangements as part of the adjunct machine. Universities and colleges, regrettably, know that they can acquire cheap labor and offer no guarantees because there is a surplus of Ph.D.’s on the market. Only you can decide if you want to work those long hours for minimal pay (and probably do without health benefits). It seems wiser, though, to prepare yourself to walk away from the t-t market. Consider obtaining an advanced degree as the opportunity itself. You have six years (or so) to really delve into topics that interest you. That is a luxury that can be enjoyed on its own.

2. Learn to combat feelings of being an intellectual imposter. If you find yourself feeling like everybody around you is a bit smarter or has read more, don’t worry. They are all thinking the exact same thing. I won’t deny that admissions to a graduate program depends upon a range of subjective criteria. Nonetheless, you would be surprised by the level of consensus that usually forms around candidates during admissions. This means that you should rest assured that you are just as bright and capable as any other student in the program.



3. Learn to combat feelings of being an intellectual superior. This is the flip side of number two. Indeed, many students vacillate between these two extremes. Graduate school can turn you downright bipolar. You have talents, to be sure, but they do not surpass those around you. It has seemed to me that once graduate students go down the path of hyper-ego their minds close faster than a vegan restaurant in Texas.

4. Use the gentle cycle on the washing machine. Have you looked at your stipend recently? You better make your existing wardrobe last because there are no trips to the mall in your future. It’s either that or join a nudist colony by your fifth year.



5. Remember that being a graduate student is a remarkably privileged position. This might seem hard to imagine given the brutal hours that you spend toiling away in the library. Nonetheless, you are now part of a tiny educated elite in this country whatever your economic or social class prior to admission. Estimates suggest that only 3 percent of the nation’s population holds a Ph.D. There are many mighty smart people who would have jumped at the chance to continue their education, but circumstances prevented it. This isn’t to say that the stress you feel is not real or that institutions can’t do better. Still, remember that you aren’t exactly shoveling coal for a living either.

6. Avoid having sex with faculty members in your department/immediate field. In my time, I have been propositioned by faculty who outranked me and also by graduate students. I don’t mention this to make claims about my innate hotness (Although . . .), rather it is to suggest that such things are a common turn of events in the academic world. It seems to me if you are a woman or a gay man, your chances of fielding unexpected/unwanted advances are pretty high. For some gay men, it’s how they say hello.



It might also be the case that you are occasionally dazzled by a faculty member who really pushes your buttons. Never, though, does it seem like a particularly good idea when there is such an obvious difference in power. Coming up with polite ways to decline is your best option.

Feel free to have sex with faculty members in departments far removed from your own. If you are in the humanities, there is no reason not to take a tumble with somebody in civil engineering should the mood and opportunity appear. I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

7. Learn the metric system. Okay, this doesn't really have much to do with your success in the program. Still, it's embarrassing that the U.S. is far behind on converting to metric.

8. Summers are not vacations. Take a poll of your department’s junior faculty and find out how they spent their summer months. Chances are you will hear things like “researching,” “writing,” “visiting archives,” or “field work.” If you hear the word “vacation,” generally it means they have dragged their significant other along with them in a simple attempt to appease them. “Yeah, I really needed to spend some serious time at the Iowa State Archive,” one might say, “so I took my husband and we made a vacation out of it! I don’t care what they say, Des Moines has lots of summer surprises.” By “vacation,” they really mean that their spouse got to spend time with them late at night and on the weekends when the archives closed. The spouse’s “surprise” was that they found themselves being a dedicated xerox operator the rest of the time.

This is a window into the life of an academic, especially one who is early in hir career. The demands of the regular academic year generally permit only scattered time to focus on a research agenda. Summers become precious opportunities to really bare down and work. If you plan to spend the four months lounging around a pool without cracking an academic journal or book, save yourself some heartache and drop out of graduate school now.



9. Tend to your personal life. Sacrifices will inevitably have to be made, but try not to let grad school take complete control of your life. Have plans to get married? No reason not to do so. I mean, you’ll still end up divorced eventually, so why not get the clock running now? At least this way you’ll still be relatively young when your first marriage goes south. Want children? Go for it (Although, as always, I would suggest that one think carefully about the larger environmental implications of producing another weapon of massive consumption). Don’t have a family plan? Rather frequent bathhouses? As long as you have an endless supply of condoms, I say make it a weekly ritual if that’s your thing. In other words, there is really not a reason to delay doing other things simply for graduate school. This doesn’t mean that you don’t still need to do the actual work, but I haven’t seen any reward come to those who put off their personal life.



10. Keep an eye on the liquor consumption. It’s hardly an original story when one turns to gin when feeling a bit stressed out. I am not a teetotaler (trust me), but it is always well worth thinking about how much liquor you consume. Avoid the binges or drinking every day. Besides, it’s an expensive habit and that money could go to other extravagances – like protein. An ideal scholar ends up with a classroom building named after hir; a less than ideal scholar ends up with the boardroom at Tanqueray named after hir.



11. Come to terms with the fact that you will not likely live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, or another of the nation’s great cities. Back in the nineteenth century, when most of this nation’s universities started, popular thinking associated cities with vice, pollution, and unhealthy living. To insure that young adults remained morally and physically in shape, the logic went, universities needed to be as far away from urban areas as possible. Better that they hang out with the cows. That was before the nation faced the epidemic of bovine gangs. Personally, I blame the alfalfa black-market.



Now we reap the legacy of nineteenth-century discourse as most of us in the academic world live in small towns rather than metropolises. This, I think, is one of the hardest things that we have to come to terms with for this job, especially if you’re gay (where the number of other gay people is necessarily going to be quite small). I have no solution to offer, which is probably why Tanqueray named that boardroom after me.

12. Learn how to communicate your ideas to a wide audience. There are good reasons to delve deeply into a particular subfield or methodology. Nonetheless, you’ll be taking your dissertation on a road tour before you know it. If you find yourself at conferences getting asked questions about your main argument (or, worse, not getting asked any questions at all), it’s not the audience’s problem. You have to know how to pitch things in a way that is approachable from a wider range of disciplines.

Keep your chin up. In the end, graduate school is mostly about sticking through it.

Aging Gracefully

Greetings from the hot and steamy Midwestern Funky Town. With all the humidity, the town’s nickname might need to be modified as Midwestern Funk Town. We have had an unusually difficult summer already – Tornado warnings, violent storms, and unpleasant heat. I tell you, I did not move to a place where the state flower is an icicle just so that I could swelter in the summer.

The official start of summer also means that my birthday is upon us. Those of you who are old enough probably remember the day thirty-six years ago when the earth shook with goodness. As is always the case, I like to take time to consider where others were in their lifepaths at age 36.

If I were Mary Richards at age thirty-six, I would have moved to Minneapolis six years ago. Love would be all around for another year.



If I were Elvis Presley, I would be given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award this year.

If I were Murphy Brown, I would enter rehab four years from now.

If I were Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, I would have left the White House three years ago. It would be another three years before I married Aristotle Onassis.

If I were Jesus at age thirty-six, I would have risen from the dead three years ago.

If I were Cher, this would be the year that I starred in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean on Broadway. My acting career would skyrocket after that.



If I were Marlo Thomas, this would be the year that I teamed up with Gloria Steinem to create the "Ms. Foundation for Women".

If I were Bob Marley, I would be dead.

If I were Oscar de la Hoya, this would be the year that I retired from boxing.

If I were Oscar Wilde, this would be the year that I published The Picture of Dorian Gray. Is it a coincidence that at age 36 Wilde was fantasizing about the possibility of never aging? I think not.

If I were James Dean, I would have been dead for twelve years.

If I were Pancho Villa at age thirty six, I would be at the height of my power in northern Mexico and still serving as provisional governor of Chihuahua in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Things would start to fall apart for me next year.

If I were Elizabeth Montgomery, I would have been starring in Bewitched for five years. I wouldn’t give my last twitch for another three years.



If I were Harvey Milk, it would be another 11 years before I became the first openly gay elected official in a major U.S. city.

If I were a bottle of wine, somebody would pay a lot of money to drink me.

If I were Saint Anthony of Padua, I would be dead.

If I were James Baldwin, this is the year that I would publish Nobody Knows My Name.

If I were Frida Kahlo, this would be the year that I painted “Roots.”



If I were Diego Rivera, this would be the year that I painted my first mural “Creation” at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City at the expense of the Mexican federal government.

If I were Anthony Perkins, I would star in the forgettable Pretty Poison. It would have been eight years since I originated the character of Norman Bates.



If I were Franklin D. Roosevelt, I would be serving as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. This would also be the year that I would first meet Winston Churchill. It would be another 14 years before I would be elected President of the United States.

If I were Princess Diana, I would be dead.

If I were Kate Jackson, this would be the year that I started filming Scarecrow and Mrs. King.



If I were Farrah Fawcett, this is the year that I would win critical acclaim for my off-Broadway performance in the play Extremities.

If I were Jaclyn Smith, this is the year that I would star in Sidney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels, thus starting my reign as the Queen of the Made-for-T.V.- Movie.

If I were either of my parents, I would already have three children. The youngest would be eight years old.

If I were Dolly Parton, I would star in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas this year. It would include my performance of “I Will Always Love You.”



If I were Dorthea Lange, this would be the year that I accompanied my husband to Taos, New Mexico. It would be another four years before I broke out of the crushing boredom of domestic life to become one of the most famous photographers of the Depression era.

If I were Nina Otero-Warren, this would be the year that I became the superintendent of public schools in Santa Fe County.

If I were Barack Obama, I would be serving my first term in the Illinois Senate.

If I were Paul Lynde, I would be filming Bye Bye Birdie.

If I were Marilyn Monroe, I would be dead.

If I were Pearl Bailey, this would be the year that I starred in the Broadway musical House of Flowers.

If I were Manuel Armijo, I would serve as mayor of Albuquerque while enjoying my wealth from sheep trading.

If I were Walt Whitman, I would publish the first edition of Leaves of Grass this year.

If I were Cleopatra VII, this would be the year that Octavian launched a Roman invasion against my kingdom in Egypt.



If I were Betty White, I would be filming the sit-com Date with the Angels. It would be another 15 years before I appeared as Suann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Twenty seven years would pass before I would play Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. It would be 52 years before I would star in Hot in Cleveland.



If I were Miguel Otero, Junior, I would be serving as the Probate Clerk of San Miguel County, New Mexico. It would be another two years before I became the first Mexican American governor in the United States.

If I were Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, I would be remarkably unkind.

If I were Captain Kirk, this would be my last year commanding the U.S.S. Enterprise on its five year mission “to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations.” Unless I was the Captain Kirk from the poorly written recent film, in which case I would have skipped over all the hard work of earning that rank eleven years ago.



If I were William Shatner, I would have been playing Captain Kirk for one year.

If I were Captain Picard, I would be serving as first officer of the U.S.S. Stargazer. It would be another 23 years before I took command of the Enterprise.

If I were Patrick Stewart, I would have been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for ten years. It would be another eleven before I accepted the role of Captain Picard.


If I were Popé, it would be another nine years before Spain’s religious authorities would arrest me for practicing “sorcery.”

If I were Truman Capote, it would be another five years before I published In Cold Blood.

If I were Octaviano Larrazolo, this would be the year that I moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico. It would be another 33 years before I became the first Mexican American elected to the U.S. Senate for the state of New Mexico.

If I were GayProf, it would have been three years since I moved to Midwestern Funky Town. My blog, The Center of Gravitas, would be five years old.



If I were Reies López Tijerina, this would be the year that I devised the Alianza Federal de Mercedes while living in Albuquerque.

If I were Wonder Woman, I would age another 2,455 years before joining Patriarch’s world to fight crime.

It's More Than a Living

Tenured Radical tagged me to write about the reasons that I love teaching history (or something to that effect). Articulating our reasons for teaching, she reasons, will be a modest attempt to break apart the notion that universities provide a mere commodity for eager cogs in the capitalist machine (or something to that effect). I figured it would also be a good balance to my previous post. GayProf doesn't spend all of his time complaining about students.

Here are the reasons that I enjoy teaching history:

1. I can facilitate students discovering that they actually do enjoy learning about the past. Until college, most students’ education worked to crush their interest in learning about the past. Social Studies (which many people confuse with “history”) most often required them to memorize names and dates until they were ready to puke. How could anybody come to like history as an academic discipline if their only exposure required them to mindlessly spill out things like the exact date of the Treaty of Paris? Does knowing that it was signed on September 3, 1783 really do much for our understanding of the nation? What does that date even mean without any sense of context about what else was happening in the rest of the world in 1783? Most students, after dutiful memorizing such things, promptly forget them twenty-four hours after their high school exam. All-night cramming leaves a bad taste in their mouth. No wonder they are often filled with dread when they see that their university will require that they take six hours of history credit.

Yet, I have found that most people are quite curious about the past outside of academic environments. That curiosity might run the gambit. Some people might wonder how certain individuals became president or why we don’t remember other presidents (*cough* William Henry Harrison *cough*). Others might wonder how our modern assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality appeared. Still others might be more interested in questions about day-to-day life in the past. Some might ask, how and where did people take a shit in New York in 1833? I am thinking of you, Torn.

All of these questions have answers if we know where to look. If I can free students from the date/name phobia, they actually start to realize that learning about the past is – gasp – interesting.

2. Teaching history encourages students to develop skills in critical thinking. This is related to number one, but so important it deserves separate mention.

Memorizing all those names and dates? It does nothing for students to acquire actual abilities to think on their own. Now that we have entered into the “No Child Left Behind” era, things look even more grim. Apparently the marker of being educated is no longer being able to reason or form arguments. Nope, the marker of an education is the ability to play Trivia Pursuit: Scantron Edition.



Teaching history at the university level offers students the opportunity to think about the ways that others have created stories about the past. They learn that there is never one true history. Instead, there are always multiple and competing narratives about the past. This requires all of us to think critically about sources, perspectives, and context as we piece together the meaning of the past.

3. It beats shoveling coal. Teaching history also doesn’t require a lot of heavy lifting.

4. Teaching history can help students feel less lonely. The contemporary U.S. can be a grim place: unwinnable wars, a looming economic depression (don’t kid yourself – It’s nearly upon us. Cutting taxes again will only exacerbate the problem and continue to push the nation into debt), racism, sexism, and homophobia.

By studying the past, we learn that other people have dealt with similar (or worse) problems and survived. Individuals who identify as racial or sexual minorities, in particular, can find people in the past who weren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. Knowing such people existed can make one feel not so isolated. Because school boards mostly refuse to consider that history isn’t only about dead, white, straight men, the university classroom is often the first place that people even learn about the existence of different perspectives about the past.

5. I get to provide students with numerous anecdotes for their future cocktail parties. As I mentioned in number one, people are usually interested in the past (even if they are scarred off from the actual discipline). Interesting vignettes from history make excellent small talk for parties. Taking my class with undoubtedly improve students’ future social standing.

Did you know, for instance, that the nineteenth-century inventor of the Graham Cracker, Sylvester Graham, was obsessed with ending masturbation in young boys? Graham believed that one’s carnal desires were directly related to the food one consumed. Indeed, his cracker was imagined as part of a homeopathic system to “cure” all sorts of sexual vice. Think of that next time you make s’mores.



6. I learn a lot from students. Because history depends so much on discussion and trying out new interpretations, the classroom is not just a one-way venue where knowledge is imparted from behind the podium. I also take away new ideas.

Do I learn something from every student enrolled? Well, no. Still, there have been several students who arrived in my classroom with a different set of life experiences and/or a different intellectual trajectory that challenged and enhanced my own presumptions about the past.

7. Teaching history provides a means to buy sweet, sweet liquor. Hey, I might have noble sentiments about teaching, but it is also a paycheck. That paycheck permits me to eat, have shelter, and keep my bar quasi-stocked. Besides, with students like those mentioned in the previous entry, teaching history sometimes becomes a reason to buy sweet, sweet liquor.



8. Teaching is easier than trying to have a career in stand-up comedy. Both stand-up comedy and teaching require a lone individual to talk for an hour in front of an audience. Students, however, are usually so grateful that I make any attempt at humor in lecture that they will laugh at my corny jokes. In a night club, I would be booed off stage and possibly burned with cigarettes. Moreover, my students don't show up drunk -- most of the time.

9. By teaching history, I can provide an antidote to contemporary misuses of of the past. We would be in a sorry world if our only interpretation of the nation’s past came from politicians, CNN, Fox, or the National Treasure movies.



Teaching history gives students access to histories that were written based on, you know, evidence. Because it also provides students with critical thinking skills (see number 2), students are better prepared to identify when people are interpreting the past for their own political ends (whether it be the left or the right). Knowing that an argument is ahistorical is as important as knowing a reasonable historical argument.

Besides, any job where I can trash Nicolas Cage is well worth my time.

Come Play With Me

Mattel’s recent decision to recall their Easy-Bake Oven got me to thinking about toys. I love toys. No, I am not crazy and spending my days playing with toys in my office – Uh, for the most part. Still, toys always fascinated me.

My childhood lacked many things (e.g. a sense of security) but toys was not one of them. Those who have been with CoG since the beginning, or those who diligently read the archives (which I am sure includes all of you), know the story of my Mego Wonder Woman doll. After her, though, I became a small baron with Kenner Star Wars toys.

Tie Fighter? Oh, yeah. Millennium Falcon? Who didn’t have one? X-Wing? Small potatoes. I had Darth Vadar’s Star Destroyer (with his special meditation chamber), the Imperial Shuttle, and the Hoth Battle Set. Let me tell you, I had some serious toys.

An Easy-Bake Oven, however, didn’t make the list. Actually, I don’t really remember wanting one nor did my sisters have one (or seemingly want one either). Probably my interest in that particular toy never piqued because the friends that I knew who did have one only succeeded in making chocolate flavored rocks.

Being a greedy bitch, I was never satisfied with what I had. So, instead of talking about the many, many, many great toys that I did have, let me mention some of those fabulous seventies/early eighties toys that I never quite got, but always wanted.

Lite-Brite

While I had an Etch-A-Sketch, I never had my own Lite-Brite. The cheerful box, lightbulb, and non-toxic colored pegs alluded me. Come to think of it, given how hot the bulb got, I am not sure there was much difference between a Lite-Brite and an Easy-Bake Oven except the lack of a door to put cakes through.

Anyway, my second grade classroom had a Lite-Brite. Which does make me wonder, are these things educational? It seems like the teacher dragged it out whenever she got bored with us. Eh – Probably they develop hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. At least that seems to be what we say for toys that don’t appear to have any other redeeming educational value. It’s always about the “hand-eye coordination” and “fine motor skills.”



Sharing a Lite-Brite with my fellow students, however, just wasn’t satisfying. First off, all of the templates had been used so many times that you couldn’t tell what picture you were trying to make. Plus, the students who had not yet developed their fine motor skills simply shoved pegs wherever they wanted. They didn’t even pay attention to which color they were using. Animals. They didn’t please my budding aesthetic eye.

Barbie’s Bubbling Spa Set

Now, let me say up-front that I have no trouble telling you that I played with dolls (and liked it!) as a little boy. Once again, I point to Mego Wonder Woman (I think I am going to be buried with that doll). Moreover, I often would sneak into my sisters’ room and play with their Charlie’s Angels dolls. We also haven't even gotten into my Sea Wee.

So you will know that I am being fairly honest when I say that Barbie-brand dolls never quite captured my imagination. Barbie was just a lot of blonde coming at me. For whatever reason, I had an early preference for people with dark hair. Come to think of it, I am not sure that I even knew any blonde people as a child.



Yet, Saturday morning television presented the ultimate Barbie accessory that just felt so right to my young mind: The Barbie Bubbling Spa.

It was a SPA for a doll! Genius! My sister’s Charlie’s Angels dolls, for instance, could be deployed to reenact the episode where Kris got naked to question that suspect in the hot-tub. In retrospect, why were my parents letting me watch that show?

Anyway, the Barbie Spa came with a little airpump that made the water “bubble.” Probably this broke instantly, but I didn’t care. It was a SPA for a DOLL!

I imagined many, many hours of fun with the Barbie Bubbling Spa. If I only I had this toy as child, maybe bathhouses wouldn’t seem so interesting to me today.

Jiffy-Pop Popcorn

Okay, so this wasn’t technically a toy. Still, Jiffy-Pop felt like a hell-of-a-lot more fun than my parents’ method of making popcorn. They dragged out a heavy cast-iron pan, which weighed more than I did, sloshed in some corn oil, and waited until the corn stopped popping. That wasn’t fun – That was cooking.

Later they got one of those air-poppers that was as quiet as 757 in a wind-tunnel. Since it eliminated the oil, the popcorn had no fat – and no flavor.

Jiffy-Pop looked more like a science experiment than a means to obtain a snack. The expanding cone of tinfoil promised unknown surprises.



Given that I don’t have a microwave (it’s a long story (short version: Liar Ex (Who Told Many Lies) is a greedy, self-centered asshole)), I now buy the jiffy-pop as an adult. You know what? It’s still just cooking.

Mego Star Trek Bridge Gift Set

Mego really produced the best seventies toys. Why did that company go bankrupt? Not only did they make Wonder Woman, but I had many of their other Superhero dolls as well: Captain America, Spiderman, Batman, Evel Knievel. Actually, that last one wasn’t really a superhero. Come to think of it, that doll might have been made by Ideal, not Mego. Anyway, you get my point.

I was just a few years too young, though, to feel the full affects of Mego's Star Trek blitz. By the time I got interested in Star Trek, I only obtained a Captain Kirk Mego doll. Legends abounded, though, that just a few years earlier there had been a whole model of the entire Enterprise bridge, which came with the entire crew!



It turns out, the Mego Bridge set was really just a plastic doll case with a couple of bar stools and some cardboard cutouts. Mego did try to make a “transporter,” but it was only a cone with a spinning geometric pattern. Huh – No wonder that company went bankrupt.

Play-Doh Fuzzy-Pumper Barber Shop

If only my parents had indulged me maybe I could have been a hair-stylist to the stars. Or maybe that’s why they resisted the idea. Whatever the case, I never got the Play-Doh Fuzzy-Pumper Barber shop. Instead, I got the Play-Doh Fast-Food Restaurant. Hmmm – Maybe my parents just had low expectations of me.



If you don’t remember the Play-Doh Fuzzy-Pumper Barber Shop toy, basically it involved a "chair" that shoved pumped play-doh out of the heads of some plastic people. You were then supposed to cut and style it. Come to think of it, that is a pretty queer notion for a toy clearly marketed to boys.

Big Jim and the Big Jim Camper

The seventies were a time of war and war protest. Conscientious parents decided that they didn’t want to raise a generation of children geared toward violence. As a result, G.I. Joe fell out of favor.

As an alternative, Mattell launched the Big Jim line. Jim, you see, didn’t carry guns or fight in unwinnable wars in former French colonies. No, no. Jim spent his days working his muscles at, I can only assume, the Y.M.C.A. and trying on different colors of short-shorts.

Every Jim figure had a button on his back that, when pressed, allowed him to flex his arm and show off his bulging muscles to his friends, like Big Josh.

The most coveted item in the Big-Jim line was the Big-Jim Adventure Camper. Yes, with the Camper, Big Jim and Big Josh could get out in the wild together – just the two of them.



While in the woods, where they went together – alone, they could do all sorts of manly activities. Big Jim could go fishing, for instance. After he brought a couple of trout back to camp, Big Josh could cook a nice meal for the two of them. They could talk about nature while they ate, without their shirts on.

Afterwards, they could go swimming together. Heck – Given that there weren’t any girls around (actually, there weren't any women in the entire Big Jim universe), Big Jim and Big Josh wouldn’t need to wear swimming trunks. It was just a couple of guys – you know, doing guy things together – alone – in the woods – and naked.

Well, you get the general idea why I wanted the Big Jim Camper. Sigh – So young, yet so pervvy.