Cursed Cursive

Several years ago I briefly dated a man with young children. Anybody who knows me can well imagine why that relationship did not last more than a few weeks. I feel about children the way Republicans feel about taxes. They might be necessary for the continuation of society, but whatever. That, though, is not the point of this post. What did stick with me from that dating experience was that he once mentioned that his daughter was not learning cursive writing in school. After all, he argued, they do everything on the computer now anyway. Why would they need such an antiquated skill? Living in the shadow of Decaying Midwestern Urban Center, I figured that this astounding news was just another local failing in an already pretty dismal school system. The antipathy that the rest of the nation feels for this region had now cost students the very ability to communicate on paper! Not only do we not deserve jobs or a well-maintained infrastructure, but it appeared that we also shouldn’t be able to jot down a grocery list with speed! It always feels good to have righteous indignation about the nation’s uncaring attitude toward the industrial Midwest.

The past year of teaching, however, revealed that this was no local anomaly. You see I taught the U.S. History survey for the first time in many years. Consider it the jury duty of the history professorate. Since I do my best to give even freshman students an idea of what professionals historians actual do, I often assign some significant amount of writing. I began to notice that students took an unusually long time to complete even the most basic in-class essay. Even a paragraph took what seemed like a century. Then I observed that each of them always submitted about a page of neatly block-printed prose. Each letter of each word seemed like it had been crafted with more attention than John Hancock’s signature on a forged ship’s manifesto. Well, if John Hancock had never learned cursive writing. It brought me back to what the former boyfriend had mentioned about his own children. Had we reached the point where students no longer even knew how to write cursive? Little did I know it was deeper than that.



It really did not cross my mind again for another several weeks. In the meantime, I had assigned a document reader of historical sources entitled American History Firsthand: Working with Primary Sources. This choice proved imperfect to be sure. After all, this careful collection of materials lacked a single document from any Latina/o – ever. Apparently the editors imagined that no such people existed in this country despite the fact that they are now the largest minority population. But I digress.

I selected this particular reader, despite its implicit anti-Latino bias, because of what it did do: mixing popular culture, visual, and political documents in one binding. It also reproduced those documents as closely as they might have appeared in an actual archive. This, I thought, simulated the work of actual historians without having to march all my students to an actual archive. After all, the idea of 170 students descending on a manuscript collection would make any archivist sweat more than Rick Santorum in a gay sauna.



The students in this class performed quite well and showed that they had smart and savvy skills. One day, though, when it came time to discuss a series of letters in the reader, they became oddly silent. After using up the usual bag of tricks to try and promote conversation, I asked them what was the deal? With some hemming and hawing, a lone brave student admitted that he couldn’t read the documents because they were in cursive. The rest of the students, happy that he had released the shameful truth, all agreed that the letters were unfathomable. This blew my mind. I mean, it was one thing to have never mastered writing cursive, but reading it was now out of the question? To be clear, too, I did not assign colonial-era documents written with the fluff and frills of old English. That mess could screw anybody up with all those "f's" that are really "s's". No, no. These were something written in the twentieth century with a clear and simple penmanship. I became curious and asked if they learned any cursive at all. They acknowledged that they spent a few days or so on it back in grade school. It was enough to learn a signature, but otherwise, why bother? They could type whatever they needed.



I suppose that there is a logic in the demise of cursive. When was the last time any of us wrote an actual letter to somebody? Anything longer than a sticky note is generally done on a computer. Yet, I can’t explain my unease that cursive is leaving the world.

It is peculiar that I should think such a thing since I have actually always struggled with my penmanship. In grade school I had only one Achilles heel to an otherwise spotless academic record. After all, I played well with others, never ran with scissors, and only occasionally ate library paste. Yet, my report card always listed a “carrottop” for handwriting. For those who did not attend Albuquerque Public Schools, a carrottop was this symbol: ^. It basically meant a “D”, but apparently educational theory in the 1980s suggested letter grades would be too demeaning to a third grader. A carrottop must have sounded so much more pleasant. It’s something you would give Peter Rabbit on his report card. Well, if Peter Rabbit’s future education hung precariously by a thread because he appeared functionally illiterate.

Forever after that point teachers would usually have only one complaint about my school work: “The boy’s handwriting is so messy and small that I almost went blind trying to read it.” It would not be until my freshman year in college that my handwriting improved dramatically. Oddly enough, it was a semester of Russian that turned things around quite a bit. While I can do nothing in that language other than ask directions to the Bolshoi theater, attempting to learn Russian had an odd side effect of transforming my penmanship. Having to learn an entirely new script meant that I also indirectly relearned how to write in cursive in English. This is not to say that I now write in calligraphy (I still field many complaints about my writing), but it is a vast improvement.



This peculiar knowledge about writing cursive puts an odd generational divide between my students and me. For instance, I will have to remember when I grade their papers to block print my comments. Oh, look at me, thinking they would actually read my comments on their papers! Silly, optimistic, GayProf. Nonetheless, it feels quite weird to have such a big gap between them and me. I am not that much older.

True, there are many other things that I do that would seem totally anachronistic to them as well. I proudly drive a car with a manual transmission – Anything else really isn’t really driving. I grill only with charcoal – Anything else isn’t barbequing, it’s just cooking outside. I still pay almost all my bills with actual checks – Anything else seems like a one-way path to identity theft. I therefore long ago accepted that I fell far behind in the social/technological world of my students. I would know if I was tweeting, right?

So it makes me a bit sad to think cursive is at as great a risk as Lindsay Lohan is for a relapse. If you remember this blog then you already know that I am more than a bit inclined to nostalgia. This morning’s coffee has already become a treasured bittersweet memory of something now gone.



The loss of cursive, though, really leaves me blue. It only speeds us even faster to becoming a cyborg nation. As much as I struggled with cursive, I do remember that learning it felt like a rite of passage on the way to adulthood. My mother always had to translate the notes or birthday cards that my grandparents sent in the mysterious scroll. Learning to write (even feebly) in the same manner felt the same as breaking the code of the Rosetta Stone to my nine-year old self. Now it appears that later generations will find the code forever locked to them.

The Detective

Some evenings ago, I had finished with a hard day of accomplishing nothing on NERPoD: The Sequel (Which reminds me, have you ordered your copy of the original NERPoD from your favorite on-line bookseller? All the really cool bloggers have already read it. Why haven’t you?). This meant that I needed some form of entertainment to distract me. My mindless channel surfing stopped at the start of The Detective (1968). Now here was a film that would allow a lot of self-justification for watching the idiot box. I knew of this film from Vito Russo’s classic Celluloid Closet (and the later HBO documentary of the same name), but had never watched it in its entirety. Parking on the couch to watch this wasn’t me blowing off the evening. Rather, I was assessing a critical primary source that would shed light on past notions of sexual difference. Hey, it’s tough work, but somebody has to do it.

For those who have never heard of The Detective (and I’m going to guess most people have not), it was one of the first explicit representations of gay men at the local picture palaces. The year 1968 had brought significant changes and challenges to the nation. The Civil Rights movement was dealt a serious blow by the death of Martin Luther King, Jr; LBJ served his last year in office; Pierre Trudeau became Canada’s Prime Minister; Andy Warhol got in the way of radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ bullets; and Hawaii Five-O premiered on television (for the first time). That last one alone sent many people into an existential crisis from which they never recovered.

The year 1968 also brought an end to the draconian censorship of the Movie Production Code. Moviegoers demanded that films start reflecting the bleak and turbulent times. In place of the censorship Code, which sought to keep everything squeaky clean for all audiences, films started having a letter rating (G, PG, R, and X) that parents could totally ignore when considering which films were appropriate for their families.

Twentieth Century Fox rode that new rating train all the way to the bank with their highest grossing picture that year, The Detective. None other than Frank Sinatra occupied the titular role. The movie, based on a novel by Roger Thorpe (the man who later brought you Die Hard (more or less)), included topics like marital infidelity, corruption, civil rights movements, anonymous sex, and, of course, homosexuality. They probably couldn’t have included any more salacious story lines unless they made it a flat-out porno.



The start of the film lets us know that this ain’t no Doris Day flick. New York Detective Joe Leland (ol’ blue eyes) arrives at a crime scene. Upon entering the upscale apartment, he casually observes that the victim was a “male Caucasian, nude laying on the floor. Penis cut off, laying on the floor of the living room.” Leland’s partner, a novice African-American policeman, nearly hurls his cookies onto the floor. In contrast, Leland has seen it all and casually asks Quincy, or, er, Jack Klugman to wrap up the penis in newspaper to keep people from accidentally kicking it around the floor.



The audience is left asking, who could have perpetuated such a gruesome crime? Well, it was a number of years too early for people to imagine that Bobbit story.

We start to get clues about what might have transpired as Leland tours the deceased’s apartment: Nude, greco-roman male statutes in every corner? Check. Unknown drugs in the medicine cabinet? Check. Semen stained sheets? Check. A pile of barbells and a half-gallon jug of mineral oil? Check and check! Even Scooby-Doo could have pieced together that this man was as queer as Fred’s ascot. The Detective is that subtle.

But this was post code! No longer did movie makers need to hint broadly about the sexual identity of its dead characters through objets d`art. The Detective spelled it out plain and cold: “Junior over there was a homosexual” remarks the medical examiner. Just how the doctor determined this posthumously is never revealed, but he assures Leland such an end is typical for men of his persuasion. When asked about the cause of death, he glibly replies “Lover’s quarrel, that’s how they settle it.. . . Twenty years and they still disturb the hell out of me.” Who can blame him? Most of my man dates usually follow the trajectory of drinks; then dinner; then a movie; then sex (possibly slathered in mineral oil); and then a bloody death match on the livingroom floor. If I come out alive and with my member intact, I hope he calls me again.



One doesn’t need an extra eye to see the homophobia dripping out of the film. It is for this reason that The Detective has been rightly disparaged by generations of queer scholars and moviegoers. The film makers promised, and delivered, the first celluloid glimpse at “gay” life. Following the chairman-of-the-board through his investigation gave a voyeuristic glimpse at all the joints that gay men apparently inhabited: gyms, boarding houses, the docks, and orgies in semi-trucks. Or, as I think of it, Tuesday. Each time they encounter a gay person, an ancillary character comments on how “sickening” it is to normal men like him.

To make a long, convoluted story shorter, Nancy Sinatra's father thinks that he finds his man, Felix Tesla, at a sketchy boarding house. The suspect fits with what sixties mainstream society imagined for gay men. In other words, he was totally drugged out . . . or nuts . . . or both. It didn’t really matter. Listening to his contorted speech patterns, it’s hard to believe this man was lucid enough to ride a city bus much less have an extended relationship with a prominent millionaire. But, whatev’s.

Tesla arrives at the police station for intensive interrogation, which does result in some of my favorite campy movie dialog ever. When questioned about life with the victim, Tesla proclaims, “He was a bitch!” Oh, honey, I’ve been there. The rest of the scene played out more peculiarly as Frank Sinatra more-or-less seduces his suspect. A gentle touch here, an oblique reference to a gay bar there, questions about the victim’s body (“soft, like a girl’s” btw). Before you can say “police coercion” Leland has his suspect singing like Billie Holiday. You can guess what happens next. Yep, the gay man goes immediately to the electric chair and fries faster than a bucket of chicken. All the cops and politicians are delighted. The detective wins a big promotion and everybody enjoys some stiff brown drinks. A happy ending in heteroville. Well, except . . .

Turns out maybe Tesla wasn’t so guilty after all. Through an unrelated investigation, the detective discovers that another man has jumped to his death at a local race track. The newly deceased? A closeted gay man who had been involved in some mighty shady deals in the city. Apparently the director couldn’t let a full twenty minutes of celluloid lapse without having a gay man facing some type of peril: dismembered, strangled, beaten up, threatened with a gun, threatened with imprisonment, electrocuted, or just clumsy on a ledge. Like all gay men, The Detective lets us know that the most recently departed deserved his fate. He helped a crew of politicians and real estate brokers embezzle millions of dollars, all at the expense of the poor. Yet, this was not what set him over the edge, literally. He just couldn’t handle his deep, deep desire for some man love. I mean, committing outrageous acts of fraud and theft are one thing, but kissing another man? Somebody has to die.

Leland uncovers a taped confession that outlines the closeted man’s torment. Oh, you know the type. He had “experimented” in college, but since then had become 100 percent heterosexual. Think an accountant version of Ted Haggard. To prove his new found straightness, he even married the glamorous Jacqueline Bisset. Hey, if you’re going to get a beard, go top of the line is what I say. Trouble was that sometimes he just needed somebody in bed who was, shall we say, a bit more hairy. He turned up at a local gay bar and went home with the millionaire. And, as we were told early on, the inevitable happened when two gay men connect: murder. Sinatra emotes some remorse over turning Tesla into a human flambé, but not enough so that he can’t end with a sanctimonious speech about city corruption.



All in all, the movie leaves you with the impression that gay men are self-hating, drug addled, murderous embezzlers who keep the mineral oil industry afloat. Yet, in watching the film I was surprised to see that it also contained a (very modest) counter vision of gay men. The police contemptuously questioned the victim’s beard, or er, occasional “date” to parties. She defended the victim. “I knew he was gay," she said without apology, "but he was civilized and he a bit of wit, which is more than I can say for most people.” Though most of the police rough up the gay men whom they encounter at the docks, Leland reminds them to “take it easy. These people aren’t murderers.” Of course, that line would have been more convincing if the film hadn’t already presented gay men as only murderers. Later in the film, he tells Tesla “I believe in live and let live.” Of course, that line would have been more convincing if he didn’t later send Tesla to die in the electric chair.

Perhaps The Detective can be understood as exploiting the contradictory attitudes about sex and sexuality swirling around during the 1960s. On one hand, the film didn’t shy away from pointing out that gay men actually existed and were out having a good time. Well, at least until they died in some gruesome way. When they did die, it was usually their own fault or at each other’s hands. Those depictions of gay men, though, have to be placed into the larger context of the way the film presents other forms of sexual behavior. The Detective didn’t just delve into gay men as the only symbol of sixties sexual corruption. In an ancillary plot, Leland's own marriage falls apart when it’s revealed that his wife likes to have anonymous sex with strangers whom she meets at bars (Don’t ask). The increased sexual freedom of the era costs Leland personally and left him disillusioned.



Leland thereby comes off less as a crusader for social justice than as a libertarian who has himself been victimized by the sexual revolution. The film reassured audiences that good straight white men, like Leland, always fight for the less fortunate and provide stability in a world run amok. His mild defense of gay men served to make him appear more generous and “by-the-book,” unlike the crooked cops who surrounded him. He was a hetero patriarch that audiences were supposed to embrace. It ignored that such straight cops were often the ones harassing anybody who dared to break the social mores.

Historiann and GayProf Teach It All, Part I

My blogging buddy Historiann recently invited me to join her in a discussion about teaching the U.S. history survey. In particular, she wanted to tackle new ways of framing this familiar freshman class that were more inclusive. Talking about this class seemed like an ideal way to squeeze out some content on this blog to tackle this very serious issue facing our profession.

Join us here, at CoG, and at her place over the next three days to read our ideas. It's sorta a blog slumber party. You'll laugh. You'll cry. They are the feel good posts of the year!

Historiann (Text in Blue): A few months ago, GayProf published a thought-provoking post on the exclusion of "the nation’s largest minority" from graduate education in his department, and the implications this has for the teaching of history into the near future. Because I thought that post raised some important questions about history curricula and how our imagination of the past shapes our present politics, GayProf and I thought we'd continue the conversation and invite the rest of you to join in!



Back in December, GayProf wrote:

"Latino/as’ long presence in this nation means they should appear in both halves of the traditional U.S. history survey. For most U.S. historians, though, Latinos (much less Latinas) remain an “and also” topic rather than being construed as fundamental to the history of the nation. If they make it onto a syllabus at all, Latinos are most likely to be found in the “Suggested Reading” section rather than in the “required” list.

"Part of this is a problem much larger than academia. For the past 160 years, the United States has been in collective denial about Latino populations north of Mexico. The mass media periodically expresses “shock (SHOCK!)” that Latino/as account for a large slice of the nation every twenty years or so. Even in those moments, you can depend on the fact that Latino/as will be figured as “foreign” or “recent arrivals” rather than as communities with a century-and-a-half of history that informs their experiences in this nation.

"But where would the media learn such things? Given my recent conversations with grad students, it turns out that even the best history departments can't be relied upon to teach that history."




GayProf, your point about the erasure of Latino/as from American history and the political implications of portraying Latino/a people always as "recent arrivals" to the U.S. really struck me, both as an early Americanist and as a transplant to Colorado, where the Latino/a population has grown dramatically in the past few decades (along with the population of white immigrants from California and Texas).

GayProf (GP): I think that the entire country just doesn’t want to acknowledge how much the nation’s demographics have changed. Latino/as are the nation’s largest minority and the fastest growing population. Those changes are harder to ignore in a place like Colorado. Still, politicians and the media are pretending that they can simply wish away Latinos.



From my perspective the demographic changes should be prompting everybody to ask questions about the historic role of Latino/as in the U.S. That doesn’t seem to be happening, though.

The other evening I was at a dinner party with non-academics. One of the guests asked what type of history that I teach. When I told hir, “Latinos in the U.S.,” Ze responded, “Oh, I thought that you were a history professor. Didn’t Latinos arrive, like, just a few days ago?”



That isn’t just the case with the general public, either. I have been in several meetings where colleagues have bemoaned that the department doesn’t have enough people in nineteenth-century U.S. history. Somehow my work, despite being dead center in the nineteenth century, only registers as “modern U.S.”

Historiann: Wow. As if Latino/a = post-1945, or post-1980!

GP: Or post 2000! Shouldn’t I really just be a sociologist? But maybe my wardrobe is too good for sociology. . .

Historiann: In 2004, our former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar's campaign capitalized on his identity as a Latino, but also couched it carefully by repeatedly claiming that "his family has lived on land it has farmed for nearly 400 years," so as to reassure the white majority that "he's not from a family of illegals! He's a native Coloradoan with deep roots!"

GP: I was sad to learn that there has been a significant amount of conflict between “recent” Mexican migrants and established Latino communities in my home state of Paradise Island. Or, er, I mean New Mexico. Salazar’s campaign wasn’t just strategic; it is also part of a larger (and often unexplored) disavowal that many Mexican Americans make of more recent Mexican migrants.

Historiann: It seems like my field could very easily incorporate Latino/a history in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries because the important issues and topics are the same: Conquistadors, La Malinche, The Virgin of Guadalupe, and The Pueblo Revolt are just other ways of talking about power, slavery, religious syncretism, and Native resistance. And yet it seems like my field is the most resistant to said incorporation because (perhaps) of the reluctance you noted in recognizing that Latino/a history is one of the longue durée.



GP: I don’t know if Colonial/Early U.S.(CEUS) is more resistant than the other fields. Recently I attended two public talks at Big Midwestern University that focused on race in “modern” U.S. history. In both cases, it was clear that the speaker had never once thought that Latino/as might be important to hir research on race. Quite shockingly, most scholars still can’t wrap their mind around a vision of history that is not the white/black binary.

It does seem (from the outside), though, that CEUS has gone through a period of retrenchment. When I was in graduate school (which wasn’t even that long ago (GayProf is so very, very young, after all)), the colonial historians often talked about the importance of knowing the overlapping histories of contact (France, England, Netherlands, Spain, plus the multiple indigenous groups). They even seemed to take it is a point of pride that CEUS required a more “global” approach than slouchy, lazy modern U.S. scholars. This isn’t to say that they all actually did that, but there was at least talk of it as an ideal.

Today, though, CEUS has really fallen back to its old bad habits. If it didn’t involve people with buckles on their hats, they aren’t interested.

Historiann: This may have to do with the digitization of some published primary and archival sources (for example, Early American Imprints, otherwise known as the Evans Series), and the lack of availability of travel funds and other support for graduate students and junior scholars. (I have spoken and written about this before—at the OAH and the Omohundro Institute conferences in 2009, for example.) When people rely on published sources for their research, they’re relying for the most part on the thoughts and opinions of a tiny slice of elite, Euro-American men. The really interesting sources about and by the majority of colonial Americans are in the archives.



GP: Right – It is a self-fulfilling archive. The archives that are digitized and/or printed are the ones that are imagined to be “most important,” which, of course, people assume are the ones written by Euro American men.

Grad students use of this material is probably also tied to the rush to finish their degrees. Not only don’t they have funding to travel, but they don’t have the time if they are supposed to be out the door in five years.

The Past is a Footnote

Over the past few weeks I have been hearing from a variety of graduate students in my academic programs about their frustrations with the current curriculum. Normally I don’t pay much heed to the whining. A complaining graduate student is about as rare as a Popeye Pez dispenser. Disappointingly, they don’t jettison delicious candy from their throat, either. Trust me.

In these cases, though, the graduate-student concerns reflect a much more serious problem with History and American Studies as fields beyond Big Midwestern University. Many of these students arrived at BMU with the explicit intent of studying Chicano/Latino/a Studies. Yet, in their required courses on the U.S., they have read zero (0) books on Latino/as in the U.S.

I am concerned about these revelations less for the students already interested in Latino/a Studies. After all, they will do what similar scholars have always had to do. They will fulfill the expectations for their classes while simultaneously building reading lists on Latino/a Studies that they will complete on their own time. Despite their intellectual isolation, they will nonetheless persevere because they are committed to Latino/a communities.



Rather, I am worried about the students who are not explicitly interested in Latina/o Studies in those classes. These are students who will (if they have some luck) obtain jobs teaching U.S. history at other universities across the nation. They will do so having received the implicit message that it is acceptable to ignore the nation’s largest minority entirely. It will, in other words, replicate a disciplinary ignorance that has been in place since the nineteenth century.

Curriculum, of course, is a touchy subject. It is hard to bring up these issues without sounding like I am wagging my finger and clucking in disapproval. That’s probably because I bring these issues up while I am wagging my finger and clucking in disapproval.

Still, these classes are taught by colleagues whom I deeply respect. They are some mighty smart people whose own research is impeccable. We aren’t talking about secret members of the Klan in other words. I can guarantee they aren’t pushing a covert white supremacist agenda. Hey, that might not sound like such a ringing endorsement, but it’s not a guarantee that I could have made about some of my former colleagues in Texas. At Big Midwestern University, though, these are faculty who are fiercely interested in social justice issues.



So if these colleagues aren’t disciples of Lou “Immigrants are Hiding Under My Bed” Dobbs, just what is going on? Why is there a disconnect between their politics and their course content?

Latino/as’ long presence in this nation means they should appear in both halves of the traditional U.S. history survey. For most U.S. historians, though, Latinos (much less Latinas) remain an “and also” topic rather than being construed as fundamental to the history of the nation. If they make it onto a syllabus at all, Latinos are most likely to be found in the “Suggested Reading” section rather than in the “required” list.




Part of this is a problem much larger than academia. For the past 160 years, the United States has been in collective denial about Latino populations north of Mexico. The mass media periodically expresses “shock (SHOCK!)” that Latino/as account for a large slice of the nation every twenty years or so. Even in those moments, you can depend on the fact that Latino/as will be figured as “foreign” or “recent arrivals” rather than as communities with a century-and-a-half of history that informs their experiences in this nation.

But where would the media learn such things? Given my recent conversations with grad students, it turns out that even the best history departments can't be relied upon to teach that history.

This year, 2009, marks the fortieth anniversary of El Plan de Santa Barbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. Back in 1969, Chicano/a college students were mighty pissed. Universities failed to acknowledge the contributions, struggles, and perspectives of Chicanos and Chicanas (and Latino/as more broadly) within the United States. These students turned their frustration into direct action. Most universities responded by creating subunits focused on Latino/a Studies. After four decades of activism, scholarship, and teaching within those units, it seems that Latino Studies has failed to convince other historians of their importance. And guess what? Latino/a students are still pissed.

It is to historians’ peril that they continue to bury their head in the sand around Latino/a issues. Today, twenty percent of the nation’s schoolchildren currently identify as Latina/o. The Census Bureau further predicts that Latino/as will constitute 28 percent of the nation’s population by 2050. Latino/as will profoundly change the face (literally) of higher education in the next decade.

What will the poorly trained historians we are producing tell those future students? That the nation’s history isn’t relevant for Latino/as? That a quarter of the nation's population isn't relevant for its history? That they would have learned more about Latinos in grad school, but it just didn’t seem that important? That salsa is delicious?

This is not to say that I think every U.S. historian must devote themselves to studying the experiences of Latino/as exclusively. I am saying, however, that it is inexcusable that we have graduate students earning Ph.D.’s who have little or no knowledge of this history. Savvy departments who are currently searching in any field in U.S. history would be wise to ask a new assistant professor how they will address the surging Latino/a Student body in their course content.



The knowledge and research that we conduct about the past means that historians have an unusual ability to speak about political and social issues in the present. By refusing to understand how much the nation’s population has actually changed, however, historians forfeit their intellectual authority.

Thanks for the Bad Memories

President George W. Bush delivered his farewell address. I had imagined that he might use that time to offer some apologies for breaking the country or for his general assholeishnes. Or, even better, he could have used the speech as a confessional for the many crimes he committed over the past eight years. Instead, he spent fifteen minutes trying to convince people that his two terms in office weren't the total disaster that they appear to have been.

Bush decided to give his farewell address a little early, five days before he actually steps down from office. He would have done it the night before, but he decided to take the rest of his time in office as vacation days at Camp David. That is the story of this man’s administration. He has literally spent more than 450 days on vacation in his two terms in office. Wouldn’t that be nice to have a job where they gave you 1.5 years of paid vacation for every six years that you work?

Still, nobody looked happier than George W. Bush when Barack Obama won the election. “Finally,” he seemingly thought, “I can go and play baseball, which is all I really wanted to do.”



With all these farewell addresses and news agencies running retrospectives, it got met to thinking that CoG should do one as well. Here are some of the classic moments of Bush’s nightmare presidency that you won’t hear about from other sources:

2000: Bush comes to power through a coup. Until the day I die, I will never understand why this nation accepted the completely illegal installation of Bush. He did not win the popular vote. He did not win the vote in Florida (though the news buried that tidbit months later when a statewide recount was finally completed).


Uniquely Special Moment: The media made those of us who objected to the illegitimate seizing of power feel like we were nuts for expecting the person who won the election to actually take office.


2001: Bush's first nominee for Secretary of Labor, Linda "English-Only" Chávez, is quickly forced to withdraw her nomination. Chávez's neighbor revealed that she once helped an undocumented worker by giving her cash and a place to stay (though not employing her).




Uniquely Special Moment: Latinos across the nation, who best knew Chávez for her draconian visions of assimilation and anti-Spanish rants, were shocked to find out that she once did a nice thing for another Latina.


2001: September 11 is one of the darkest moments in the U.S.’s history – Bush tries to make a run for Canada. Republicans cynically made September 11 one of the cornerstones of Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004, but nobody seemed to remember his abysmal lack of leadership on that day. Only later did some point out that Bush sat dumbfounded and watched the clock tick away while reading The Pet Goat. Though, to be fair, The Pet Goat was probably beyond his assessed reading level.



When he finally did get off his ass, he ran away and hid. Rather than returning to Washington, D. C., Bush first ordered (or, more likely, somebody else ordered) Air Force One to fly in big circles. Then he started to zig-zag across the country from air force bases in Louisiana to Nebraska.


Uniquely Special Moment: The White House was later caught making up stories that security around Air Force One had been compromised to explain Bush’s basic lack of character, leadership, and courage.


2002: Homeland security, under pressure to show that it was doing something, announces the entirely laughable color-coded “Threat Advisory System” for the nation’s airports. This same agency would also respond in knee-jerk fashion to any threat, thus leaving passengers having to more-or-less disrobe before entering a gate and, of course, keeping liquids to under three ounces in a one-quart baggie. 'Cuz obviously a group of terrorists wouldn’t think to bring on board multiple baggies of three-ounce explosives as a group.


Uniquely Special Moment: With all the fanfare associated with the color coded system, I have never seen it budge from “Orange” level. Apparently the risk of terrorist attack is always “High,” much like the person who came up with this color-coded system.




2002: Radical-Christian Extremist John Ashcroft, Bush's first Attorney General, spends $8,000 on fancy drapes to cover up art deco statues titled “Spirit of Justice” and "The Majesty of Law" at the Justice Department. Ashcroft disliked that the statues were seminudes. We can only assume they gave him impure thoughts.


Uniquely Special Moment: Having millions of Americans claiming that they couldn't find justice at the Justice Department wasn't enough for Ashcroft. He need to make sure that they literally couldn't find the spirit of justice as well.




2003: More young people report that they get their news from the comedy program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart than any other source.


Uniquely Special Moment: Sadly, the fake-news program actually provided better coverage of the issues than the twenty-four news networks.


2004: The Bush administration prompts the return of the protest-song genre. Green Day’s “American Idiot,” P!nk’s “Dear Mr. President,” Eminem’s “Mosh,” and whatever the Dixie Chicks sing all expressed disdain towards Bush. Protest songs hadn’t been this popular since LBJ was yanking beagles around by their ears.




Uniquely Special Moment: The phrase “Fuck Bush” sounds even better when put to music.


2004: Bush wins reelection (barely) through a four-point campaign based on fear, war, greed, and homophobia.

Having little to show for his four years in office other than a tragic terrorists attack, a collapsing economy (Yes, problems were already evident), and unwinnable wars, Bush and the overly-praised Karl Rove masterminded a campaign that drew on voters’ worst impulses.


Uniquely Special Moment: Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of Dick Cheney, is surprised that other gay folk find it distasteful that she campaigned for an administration that sought to harm people like herself.



2004: Warner Brothers releases the film Catwoman starring Halle Berry. I haven’t figured out how exactly, but I am certain that the Bush administration was responsible for this piece of celluloid detritus.




Uniquely Special Moment: The New York Times and other newspapers go to town with bad cat jokes in their reviews of the film (e.g. “Catwoman coughs up a hairball.”)


2005: Bush nominates a groupie, Harriet Miers, to be on the Supreme Court despite her total lack of qualifications.





Uniquely Special Moment: Miers claims that she only wanted to be on the Supreme Court because she lost the role of Catwoman to Halle Berry.


2005: Bush reveals that he believed himself to be on a religious mission delivered directly by God to invade Iraq.


Uniquely Special Moment: God files a libel suit, demanding that Bush not besmirch Her good name through false claims.


2005: Rumors emerge that war-hawk (and perpetually "single") Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a lesbian when a Fox reporter encourages her to get "friendly" with pianist Lauren Green.


Uniquely Special Moment: Upon learning that Rice might be sexually attracted to women, millions of lesbians across the nation throw up a little in their mouth.




2005: As Katrina is about to hit New Orleans, Bush hosts a barbeque for his sycophant press corps (while on vacation at his ranch – ahem). In one swoop, the depraved indifference of both the press and the president is revealed as 60,000 people are trapped in the drowning city of New Orleans.


Uniquely Special Moment: Oh, gosh, too many to count – In a supposed show of interest, Bush ordered Air Force One to circle above the city so he could look out the window (Hey, at least he didn't hide in a bunker this time). After countless incidents of mismanagement, Bush praised Michael D. Brown, head of FEMA, by stating, “Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.” Totally unaware of the magnitude of problems that faced average Americans, Bush mourned the loss of the multi-million dollar mansion of Senator Trent Lott.




2006: Bush provides a graphic lesson in what constitutes a workplace “bad touch” when he gives an uninvited massage to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.


Uniquely Special Moment. Upon learning of the massage, millions of Germans throw up a little in their mouth.




2007: People embrace the new Battlestar Galactica because it uses science fiction as a vehicle to question the current state of affairs and U.S. policies.


Uniquely Special Moment: Many viewers saw a dystopia where heartless robots attempt to slaughter the last surviving members of the human race as more hopeful than contemporary life under the Bush regime.


2006: A dedicated blogger uncovers the horrible truth that Donald Rumsfeld isn't really a man at all. He is actually one of the evil taking trees from The Wizard of Oz.


Uniquely Special Moment: The press really should have suspected something when he threw apples at anybody who asked questions about looting in Iraq.






2007: Alberto Gonzalez, after either committing perjury before Congress or having a case of amnesia heretofore only experienced by soap-opera characters, resigns in disgrace as Attorney General.


Uniquely Special Moment: Gonzalez, the first Mexican-American to hold the position of Attorney General, was given a statue of the Texas Rangers as his parting gift. It was only fitting that a man who had undermined the rights of people like himself should be given an object commemorating a group that historically terrorized people like himself.


2008: Bush tours the Middle East after promising a democratic Iraq and a “road map to peace” between Israel and Palestinians. It turns out that he really should have invested in a G.P.S. for peace.


Uniquely Special Moment: The people of Iraq are so overjoyed with Bush’s role in their nation that they offer him the shoes right off their feet.


2009: Against medical odds, Dick Cheney lives through the entire administration and has spare time to shoot friends in the face.




Uniquely Special Moment: It proves that good can't live through a stiff breeze, but evil lives on and on forever.

GayProf Loses His Zen

The semester is rapidly coming to an end. The one good thing about returning to work so early in January is that I had my last final April 17. Now it is just the grading.

Of course, the end also means that I have been (even more) crazy busy over the past few weeks. If I have to attend one more meeting, I might be sentenced to Arkham Asylum. Seriously, if you see GayProf in unflattering clown makeup, head in the other direction.

I think that I underestimated my frazzled nerves until I lost my shit late last week. Normally it takes a great deal for me to lose my temper. Most times I construe anger as a waste of emotion. Trying to cross the street, however, sent me over the edge.

You see, Big Midwestern University merges entirely with Midwestern Funky Town. Major streets bisect the campus. At least one of these roads clearly has too much pedestrian traffic competing with motor traffic. In my mind, it should be closed to cars altogether.

Nobody, alas, has decided to make me a city planner. As a result, I have to play full-scale Frogger to get to my office in the morning. Students drive too fast and refuse to stop at crosswalks (though motorists are legally required to yield to pedestrians or face a $130 fine (I looked it up)).

Most of the time I am merely frustrated by drivers’ lack of civility. Last week went beyond the pale. Some student, driving an oversized gas-guzzler, literally refused to stop at the cross walk that was filled with people. He forced all of us who were already in the middle of the road to get out of his way or be run over. Then he had the nerve to flip us off for being in his way. I might have responded with a less than scholarly vocabulary or intonation.




Being prone to hyperbole, I immediately concluded that he represented everything that was wrong with the United States. Our selfish emphasis on the “individual” encourages Americans to think that they are right all the time, even when they are clearly wrong. Both as individuals and as a nation, we are loathe to consider that our particular needs might not be the most important.

This doesn’t just come out through incidents of near vehicular manslaughter. Take, for example, the tempest that surrounded an Absolut Vodka advertisement. To peddle their booze, the company capitalized on a utopian vision of the world where U.S. imperialism had been checked in the nineteenth century. Though the ad never circulated in the U.S., Absolut was flooded with irate mail from U.S. citizens. One angry writer noted that he had poured all his vodka down the drain (N.B. to protesters: Companies don’t suffer if you dispose of a product after you already paid for it. Whether or not you actually consume your purchase is fairly immaterial to them as long as they got their money in the first place).



Angry letter writers couldn’t entertain the idea that the U.S. might have been wrong to wage war on a neighboring republic for no other reason than an ambition for territory. They were also clearly unprepared to consider that there is a residual anger and resentment towards the United States for that war (which deprived Mexico of half of its territory, left it bankrupt, and opened the door for future invasions from other nations).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not endorsing the ad per se. After all, Absolut created it as a crass capitalistic attempt to profit from Mexico's legitimate frustration with U.S. imperialism. Rather, I am concerned that many (most?) people in this nation are unable or unwilling to admit that the nation’s history is filled with immoral decisions that we should regret. The fact that an ad for a mid-tier vodka can call the nation out on its hubris should concern us.

It is much the same thinking that resulted in the criticism of Barack Obama last weekend. He only spoke the truth (however imperfectly that he delivered it). The white working class has been voting against their own economic interests since the 1980s. Republicans have depended upon messages of fear (You need guns, and lots of them) and hatred (Gays will destroy civilization as we know it. Mexicans are our enemy.). Obama probably didn’t realize that it was a secret that the Republican party had been using the religious right to satisfy their own agendas.

Much of the response to Obama’s comments have centered around his supposed audacity to suggest that these voters were wrong and had the wrong priorities. Indeed, both Clinton and McCain suggested that Obama was “out of touch.”

To my mind, it is the U.S. voters who have been out of touch. From human rights, economics, and environmentalism, the U.S. has been on the wrong side of every issue for the past seven years. This isn’t just the fault of the Bush administration, either. Though only 5 percent of the world’s population, we consume 25 percent of its natural resources. How has the U.S. population responded in the face of both an economic and environmental melt down? Shockingly, U.S. citizens have decided that we should have a baby boom. It was something that I had suspected based on first-hand anecdotes, but was confirmed this past fall with statistics. Yes, the U.S. is totally out of step with every other industrial nation. Just how selfish are we? How depraved have we become that we think nothing of compounding the world's overpopulation? Is there any discussion about population control (beyond this blog)? Is anybody willing to entertain the notion that having more than one child is an immoral and selfish decision?



The election of either Obama or Clinton will not magically solve the problems facing this nation. The best that we could hope for from either is that they will not actively impede the reshaping of our society.

Instead of celebrating the cult of personality around these two figures, we need to alter the conversation in this nation. Rather than a nation driven by self-centered individualism, we need to start thinking as a community. We need to take seriously the responsibilities of citizenship, not just the rights of citizenship. We also have to be willing to acknowledge that just because we made a decision doesn't mean that it was the right one. Don’t run me over, man.

No Thanks

Today, the U.S. celebrates “Thanksgiving Day.” Much about this holiday always left me feeling ambivalent, even as a child. On the one hand, I obviously loved the food. Who couldn’t like a holiday where gluttony is celebrated?

Moreover, Thanksgiving was one of two times per year that we got to see my mother’s family during my childhood. My extended family on my father’s side was a constant fixture in our lives since they also lived in New Mexico. The other side of the family, however, lived a thousand miles away and we usually only saw them on Thanksgiving and during the summer.

Still, I also remember being in grade school and not particularly feeling an attraction to the mythology that surrounded this holiday. It was always presented (ahistorically) as the first vignette in a teleological narrative than ended triumphantly with the foundation of the U.S. The national “we” presented in this narrative didn’t feel like it encompassed me at all. This is not to say, of course, that I had a precocious suspicion of the U.S. as a child. On the contrary, I adopted and accepted the propaganda about the U.S.’s uniqueness eagerly as a child. All the same, something about Thanksgiving Day never really sat well with me.

In retrospect, it’s easy to consider the reasons for my apprehension which I would not have been able to articulate at age nine. My father’s family was of Mexican descent, which meant that their stories were never reflected in any of the reading that we did for U.S. history – ever (despite the fact that my elementary school was named Oñate and we resided in, you know, New Mexico).

My mother’s side, which was Irish-American, received a bit more coverage in our Social Studies textbooks. Yet, their nineteenth-century arrival hardly seemed connected to an obscure (and not all that successful) colony two centuries earlier. Moreover, given that both sides of my family were deeply Catholic (and, in all truth, fairly suspicious of Protestants), the Pilgrims’ link to “religious freedom” seemed kinda dubious.

Despite the inclusive national language that surrounded the holiday, I always felt like that stories of happy white Pilgrims and generous (but nameless) Indians was not really about me. Looking back as an adult, I also had the shock of realization that I was always assigned the role of “Indian” in the ritual classroom reenactments of the event by my Euro-American teachers. Seemingly, they didn’t see me as part of the Pilgrim story either.

All of this makes me feel a bit contrarian about such a holiday (Not that I won’t use the opportunity to gorge myself). Because of my ambivalence, it seems only appropriate to make it into an anti-holiday. Here is a list of things for which I am not at all thankful:

* U.S. Imperialism

* The Ugg Boot craze

* The dusting of snow that greeted me this morning when I woke up.

* Scooping out Cat’s litter-box

* Gas-guzzling SUV’s

* Unquestioned patriotism

* Men-Who-Lack-Balls (I am sure that Women-Who-Lack-Ovaries suck, too. They have just had a less immediate impact on my personal life).

* My seeming attraction to Men-Who-Lack-Balls

* The Catholic Church

* Puritanism

* The ways that a racial “Indian” identity obscured tribal affiliations and unique histories of diverse groups.

* Black hats with buckles

* The collapse of the U.S. dollar in the world market

* The way that I almost always over think sex, regardless of locale.

* The fact that I spent two full work days in the library reading nineteenth-century microfilm; spent thirty dollars on copies; and used another workday tabulating information from those copies. All of that work resulted in only two sentences of text and one footnote in the Never Ending Research Project of Doom

* The total lack of quasi-passable Mexican food in Midwestern Funky Town

* The way that Mexican food is denigrated as not “serious cuisine”

* Sports of any type

* Sexism

* Homophobia

* Transphobia

* Racism

* Simplistic Histories

* Media coverage of Brittany Spears and/or any ancillary figure in her life

* Poorly Mixed Cocktails and/or cheap liquor

* The “Milkshake” Song

* Blog Trolls

* Not having a gas range

* Holiday themed blog posts

Let's Get This Fiesta Started

It’s hard to believe that a full year has passed since I last discussed Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States. As you might recall, I have ambivalent feelings about these racialized “months.” I appreciate the intent to at least try to give attention to the history of racial minorities in the U.S. I also think, though, that such months give the wrong impression that the history of racial groups is somehow distinct from the history of the U.S. African-American history is the history of the U.S. Latino History is the history of the U.S. These aren’t “add-ons” or footnotes. Rather, it has been the very core of this nation’s development.

Such were the things that I was thinking (again) in one of my classes. We had reached the U.S.-Mexican War in our chronology. That particular day, I inadvertently left behind half of my lecture notes in my office. Much to my surprise, it turns out that I can basically give that lecture without any notes. I could even remember details down to certain statistics about casualties (The U.S. bombardment of Veracruz, for instance, resulted in civilian causalities outnumbering military casualties 2:1). Yes, my lectures are well on their way to being just that stale and route. Good news for my future students!

Having knowledge of that war so deeply ingrained in my psyche makes me quite unique in this nation. Thanks to the ways that the U.S. structures its educational curriculum, most Americans have a hard time even identifying the right decade (and century) of the U.S.-Mexican War. Indeed, they most often confuse the Spanish-American War (1898 (think Puerto Rico)) with the U.S.-Mexican War (1846 (think Texas, NM, AZ, and CA)). It’s an easy mistake. They were both started to satisfy the U.S.’s imperial ambitions. They both also ended with a huge number of Latinos involuntarily being incorporated into the U.S.

None of that history, though, is really discussed in our nation’s public schools. The U.S.-Mexican War, when it is taught at all, is usually presented as a noble fight by brave [Anglo] Texans against a tyrannical government. Or it is (ahistorically) taught as a prelude to the U.S. Civil War. Whichever the case, the complex history of the Mexicans who got pulled into the U.S. thanks to that war are basically ignored. Indeed, so little is known about Latinos in the U.S. that the mainstream media is often befuddled when it is forced to grapple with them.



The other evening I happened to catch The Daily Show showing clips from Alberto Gonzales’ farewell party at the Department of Justice. Gonzales was such an abysmal failure and so entirely incompetent as Attorney General, it is horrific to me to even acknowledge that he was the highest ranking Latino government official to date. Regardless, The Daily Show made their usual fun of the situation and Gonzales’ exit. What they missed, though, was that the Department of Justice presented Gonzales a statue of four nineteenth-century Texas Rangers as a parting gift. That gesture alone shows just how little the Mexican perspective is taken into consideration in this nation.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Texas Rangers maintained Euro-American racial dominance over Mexicans through a campaign of harassment, terrorism, and murder. The Rangers' “heroic” reputation hinged on their ability to execute Mexicans and Native Americans, especially those who dared to challenge the racial status quo in Texas. Indeed, the Rangers were frequently implicated in the lynchings of many innocent Mexicans along the border. They were then often rewarded by the state government which gave the Ranger the dead Mexicans’ possessions.

To therefore present Mexican-American Alberto Gonzales a statue of “brave” Texas Rangers would be the same as presenting an African American with a statute of "daring" Bull Connor. Or a Jewish American a statue of "thoughtful" Adolf Eichmann (Truth in Advertising: I might be mingling my own personal issues with this incident. One of the last things that Liar Ex (Who Told Many Lies) ever gave to me was a “Texas Rangers” badge with my name imprinted on it as a “joke.” He just didn’t understand why I was horrified and repulsed. Instead, he dismissed me by saying “I made too big a deal out of it -- as usual.” In reality, he exposed (once again) just how little he respected the history that I cared about very deeply. Actually, screw respect, he didn't even try to learn that history. In our eight years together, I don't think that he ever bothered to crack a single book on Chicano history/Mexican history/the history of the U.S.-Mexican border/ or the history of race in the U.S. He was such a loser, self-centered fuckwad. -- Huh, clearly some unresolved issues there! Funny how they sometimes appear out of nowhere. Annnnnnyway . . .). The fact is that Mexicans’ abuse and death at the hands of the Texas Rangers has not reached the consciousness of most Americans, including The Daily Show (which has zero (o) on-air Latino correspondents).

After 150 years, the U.S. still pretends that people of Latin-American descent are “new” to this nation. Even the gay-oriented Logo network fell into this presumption. In recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month, Logo’s news division (a subsidiary of CBS) produced a documentary on gay Latina/os. I appreciate the effort, especially given that most gay media basically ignores Latina/os entirely. Still, Logo decided to given the documentary the unfortunate title “Los Otros” (literally “The Others”). The title reenforces the presumption of Latinos’ perpetual foreignness by literally naming them racial “Others” and by the intentional use of a Spanish title in an English-language program.


Such decisions obscure how deeply intertwined the United States and Mexico actually are (and have been). As much as Canada is often ignored or presumed to be an undifferentiated extension of the U.S. (because of its perceived status as a “white” nation (ignoring the Canada’s own immigration history)), Mexico (much less the rest of Latin America) is imagined as entirely foreign and irreconcilable to U.S. institutions (and perceived as non-white/sometimes white/white, but not really white).

The Mexican border’s “forbidden” status has created an image in U.S. popular culture that makes it a site of sexual intrigue and danger for Euro Americans. In the U.S., Mexican women have frequently been presented as the sexually available, but dangerous, “hot tamales.” Take, for example, a slew of songs that were popular during the middle of the twentieth century. Using tropes that had existed for over a century, these songs depicted lusty and untrustworthy Mexican women leading Euro-American men to their doom (often at the hands of cruel and evil Mexican men). Jay and the Americans recorded “Come a Little Bit Closer” in 1964. Set in a “little café just the other side of the border,” the song tells of a [Euro] American man being lured by an unscrupulous Mexican woman to “come a little bit closer.” At the end of the song, the American must flee for his life from the bar, for “she belonged to that bad man Jose.”



Similarly, Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” (a song, by the way, that I grew up listening to totally uncritically) centers on “wicked Felina,” a Mexican woman who dances for money at Rose’s Cantina. The song doesn’t mince words about Felina, telling us, “blacker than night were the eyes of Felina, wicked and evil while casting their spell.” This time around, the wanton ways of Mexican women resulted in the tragic death of not one, but two Euro-American men. Though Robbins would later write a sequel (and much less popular) song that told Felina’s side of the story, the original “El Paso” epitomized the U.S. perception of Mexicans as sexually deviant and dangerous to good, honest Americans. There is an unspoken fear that Mexicans and Euro Americans can’t possibly coexist in this nation without one group being destroyed.

We could see this most visibly in the immigration reform debacle this past summer. A creaky bipartisan bill that, among other things, would have granted undocumented workers a pathway to U.S. citizenship died from equally bipartisan opposition. Conservative Republicans argued that it wrongly provided “amnesty” to those who had broken the law. In a common contrivance, Republicans suggested that crossing the border without proper authorization was probably the lesser of many crimes that Mexicans commit in the U.S. Senator John Cronyn, one of the two Republican Senators from Texas, explained that he opposed the reform partly because “criminals might slip” through the process. Those on the political left also took issue with bill. Tom Harkin, a Democratic Senator from Iowa declared that the immigration bill would have driven down wages for Americans “on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.”




Rather than acknowledging the complicated history of Latino/as (both U.S. citizens and Latin-American nationals) who have lived for generations in this country, the most common image of Latinos in the mainstream U.S. is that of an undocumented and unskilled worker who threatens the economy, social services, and even the very foundation of the nation! Let’s discuss that for the next month.

Return of the Evil Queens

A few days ago, Torn posted a video of an old "education" film from the early sixties. Like many others that appeared at the time, it was created to warn young men about the alleged dangers of “homosexuals.” With a title like Boys Beware, you knew that it was only going to go down hill pretty fast. The film authoritatively told its audience that homosexuals spend their days lurking about in dark sunglasses, telling dirty jokes, and murdering teenagers. Why? Because homosexuals are both sick and evil!

Since the video is forty years old, it’s fairly easy to dismiss it as a bygone piece of history. After all, we no longer hear dire warnings about the threat of creepy homosexual men who hang out in restrooms looking to exploit the innocent. Well, unless you happen to reside in Fort Lauderdale where Mayor Jim Naugle wants to install $250,000 toilets because he imagines gay men are using the current ones as the new Studio 54.



But that’s just some crazy mayor who still thinks it's 1959, right? Well, maybe not. Simply watch any of the three-thousand hours of coverage on Senator Larry Craig.

I avoided mentioning the Craig story because I was suspicious that it was “uncovered” at a convenient time for Republicans. It drew media attention away from the many White House resignations, including Alberto Gonzales’. The GOP seemingly felt it was better to eat one of their own than risk actual investigation into the ineptness that has marked the Justice Department for the past six years.

While I am happy to have Craig exposed (no pun intended) as a hypocrite, the media has rarely focused on that bit of the story. Instead, tearoom scandals like Craig’s are another means through which all same-sex sex can be lumped together as sad, anonymous, and even threatening.

To be candid, I really don’t care that much about bathroom sex. It’s certainly not my scene. It also seems like most of the men involved are unable to come to terms with their sexual desires. They would probably be happier if they could find other venues for sexual exploration. All in all, though, it just isn’t that big a deal.

CNN disagreed. Along with other networks, they spent entire segments obsessing about gay toilet sex. They brought in psychological experts to help explain why men (sick, sick men!) would do such a (sick, sick!) thing. In one memorable segment, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage valiantly tried to point out the role that the closet and homophobia plays in many tearoom participants’ lives. For them, sexual release can only be obtained in restrooms because they have internalized so much of society’s hatred of gays.

The interviewer, though, was not really interested in that type of assessment. Instead, he asked, “Aren’t these guys... just plain wrong and it has nothing to do with the culture leading them to do this stuff? I mean, after all, going into a bathroom to have anonymous sex with somebody you don’t even know is just . . . creepy.”

That is the bit where I start to get leery. One wonders what type of circumstances would the media endorse as “not creepy” for same-sex sex? Is it the anonymous bit that made Craig creepy? So, a couple who had one dinner together is not creepy? Is it the bathroom bit? No to toilets, but yes to pool tables?



I suspect it is really the gay bit. The focus on tearoom sex reenforces presumptions that all same-sex sex is ruthless, anonymous, and self-centered. David recently pointed out that the New York Post attempted to coin a new epithet by referring to all gay men as “toe tappers.” The leap from creepy Larry Craig tapping his foot to have sex in a restroom to naming all gay men as “creepy anonymous toilet-sex junkies” was an easy one for the paper to make.

There is a serious double standard when it comes to presenting same-sex sex and opposite-sex sex in the media. It is doubtful to me that a heterosexual couple who met randomly at a public rest stop, for instance, would have been construed as “creepy.” Granted, they might be considered “lusty, slutty, impulsive,” and maybe even “sinful.” I just don’t think, though, that the media would call it “creepy.”

Certainly, the media would never consider it “creepy” if a heterosexual couple hooked up at a local bar without even knowing each other’s names. That’s just “Friday night.”

Along the same lines, heterosexuals who have sex in public are often (not always, but often) construed as “adventurous” and sexual risk takers. In many instances, heterosexual couples who sneak in a bit of sex in a public place are imagined as more in touch with their erotic sensibilities. They are just being delightfully naughty and enjoying a provocative thrill! Gay men who have sex in public need medical treatment.



Some might suggest that the distaste had to do with the location of a bathroom. Once again, I am not as convinced. After all, I have heard many people tell stories of heterosexuals sneaking (or trying to sneak) into airplane lavatories to earn their mile-high wings. These stories, even when told by a third-party observer, are often presented with a wink and nod.

The media, of course, doesn’t need a sex scandal to present gay men as psychologically unstable. On the heels of the Craig affair, comedians and even major news outlets seized on an obscure “internet personality's” YouTube video. I won’t delve into the revolting level of hatred that bubbled up around the clearly distressed young person's pleas for the press to “leave Brittany alone.” Kenneth Hill already has an excellent piece on homophobia and the ridicule that follows men who refuse to conform to gender expectations (even within the gay community). It is enough to point out one of the most disturbing responses to the video which appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show. In it, the supposed father of the young man cried about his son not being manly enough. He ended with a chilling proclamation of “He’s not a human being. He’s not a human being.”


That, I think, is the media’s real conclusion about Craig, Crocker, and all gay men. We are still not considered fully human. Instead, we are all walking on the edge of showing ourselves to be creepy, crazy, or evil monsters.

Even allegedly “positive” images of gay men prop up these stereotypes in fictional programing. Queer people are grossly under-represented in prime time. The most visible and consisten gay figures to circulate right now appear on Ugly Betty. Yet, I am left wondering about both Marc and Justin.

Marc is the traditional “evil queen” that has been recycled just too many times by television and films. He mostly follows the orders of a conveying African-American jezebel (a stereotype in the show that also desperately needs to be unpacked). That, though, is for another day). In every way, Marc is shown to be both shallow and vindictive. He tortures and humiliates the central character all for his good fun.

To redeem the show, many queer folk therefore point to Justin, Betty's adolescent nephew. On the good side, it is great to see a young person presented on television who resists gender conventions (Justin’s actual sexuality has never been discussed on the show – It is only through that gender nonconformity that he can be read by many as “gay”). I am not entirely sure that the presentation of Justin really makes him into a hero. Much of his behavior is shown as part of the show’s humor. We are intended to laugh at the awkward discomfort that Justin creates among those who surround him.

Justin also exists to reveal the hidden magnanimity of the other characters who tolerate and defend him. He doesn't really fight for himself. Instead, he has most often been defended by straight men. Those scenes have been less about Justin and more about showing the "good heart" and redemption of heterosexuals.

More importantly, the show has frequently suggested that Justin has a questionable sense of morality. Like Marc, he often denigrates others with “bitchy” comments about their clothes. At the end of the last season, it was further suggested that Justin intentionally poisoned one of his fellow students to get the lead role in a musical (!). Even the baby queers, it seems, are willing to murder to get what they want.

I don’t dispute that things have improved for gays since Boys Beware appeared forty years ago. Look! I am not in jail! Still, it is too soon to claim that the media no longer construes of queers as sick and maybe a bit evil. It has just become more subtle in its approach. If Ugly Betty allegedly represents the best portrayals of gay men in the mainstream media and Larry Craig the worst, we are still in a bad place.