The White Peril 白禍

Michael is right: this is why-didn't-I-think-of-that? hilarious. Love the sinner and hate the sin, I say. And you have to read the FAQ.

I've been summoned to the role of gay big brother more than usual these last few weeks. I'm glad to do it--お互い様でしょう？--but it's made me more jealous of my time alone and less likely (if you haven't noticed) to feel like posting.

I've been reading enough to notice that class is one of the topics of the day, though. Virginia Postrel's advice for one of the people profiled in the final installment in the NYT series on class, who is making plans to go back to college and become a schoolteacher, is good:

Blevins sounds like a fine man, the kind of person who makes communities--and supermarkets--work. Too bad the Times won't honor him for his real accomplishments, including finding a demanding career he's good at. (Most of his buyer colleagues have college degrees.) Instead, he's portrayed as a victim and the "happy ending" is that he's going back to college so he can get a job he's totally unsuited for. A guy who hates school this much doesn't belong anywhere near a classroom, least of all in front of one.

She's right, but it's interesting how the article raised and then didn't follow through on one of the more interesting angles here. A lot of working-class people see college as a trade school with more books and more job security waiting when you finish. Merely going to college no longer makes you plummy, given how the economy has evolved; but still, feeling engaged by school is, in many ways, not encouraged.

My father read to my brother and me from the Bible every night before bed until I was, probably, 15 or so. The church to which we belonged published two monthly magazines with a lot of writing about world affairs (it was big on prophecy), and they were always lying around. Or Mom would be reading one of them while the television was on. Additionally, my Catholic mother and Anglican father married and then converted to an extremely tiny fundamentalist sect; without disrespecting the dead, I think I can say that this sequence of events was met with something less than enthusiasm by key family elders.

So I was brought up by parents who read when they didn't have to (if that makes sense) and who were sympathetic to the idea that your parents' expectations may not be what's really best for you. They made an effort to become friendly with my teachers and, without being neurotic, kept after me if I got lazy. We also happened to live in a school district in which there was a critical mass of well-off families. The people I was in classes with were talking about MIT and Bucknell and Penn State main campus and Columbia from junior high school on. So were the teachers and guidance counselors.

By the time I got to college, my experiences had made me much more like the people I was surrounded by than like the people I'd actually grown up with. I don't mean "experiences" in the sense of having summered on Mackinac or watching Dad casually write a check for $15,000 for that semester's tuition--those I obviously didn't have. I mean feeling like part of the progression from high school to competitive college to choice of major to a good job in a major city; I was in on the dance and knew the steps. Barring a financial emergency, it would never have occurred to me to drop out temporarily. You might have a semester when you were bored by most of your classes and feeling hiply disaffected, but you kept going and maybe drank a little more.

What we're talking about is an entire vision of the world and where you fit into it. It's not surprising at all that well-meant preschool initiatives (as the Kay Hymowitz article linked above discusses) and increased attempts by big-guns institutions such as UVA to recruit in poor districts don't succeed in getting more low-income students to leave college with a degree. If you're focused solely on the prospect of getting a job and think of learning as nothing but the means to the end, it's easy to be tempted away by an offer of solid, full-time work that makes you feel you're doing something. And because Mom and Dad's constant worrying about money is almost certain to have colored your upbringing a lot, the impulse to start saving now and figure you can come back to college after you have a safe amount stored away is also probably strong.

Virginia Postrel's comments reminded me of an article I read last week-ish that made me so angry I nearly started hurling my saucily-patterned throw pillows around. It was by one Cameron Scott, whose unfathomable non-argument in this opinion piece was apparently sufficient to get it into the SF Gate (via Gay News), but who exhibits all the sociological insight of a two-slice toaster and the coherence of my utility drawer.

The main topic is, actually, an interesting one: why is it that the public presence of gay culture is so weighted toward us boys? Scott points out that lesbians in general earn less than gay men and are, therefore, a less attractive market for investors who want the bars and events they fund to turn a profit. Fair enough.

Next she asks whether this is the result (1) of choices made by lesbians or (2) of forces beyond their control. The answer is, uh, yes:

Charity work, bohemianism, working-class culture: These enduring affinities reveal that out lesbianism has long been at odds with middle-class values and income.

The mutual exclusivity of lesbians and the middle class does not mean that there are no lesbians who get by in the middle-class world. It means that lesbians can become part of public culture only to the extent that they turn away from their own culture. Lesbians as lesbians have virtually no role in public culture.

Dyke culture's long-standing opposition to middle-class values is one of its most vital and empowering aspects. But the impossibility of middle-class existence for dykes means that we still have to deal with some aspects of homophobia that have been ameliorated for gay men.

Economic disempowerment leaves people more open to the blows of discrimination. Middle-class jobs do not tolerate lesbian attitudes or attire because they suggest that the prospective employee is not already a member of the middle class — a sin greater even than private perversion.

Yes, it's a good thing the working class exists--otherwise, where would slumming lesbians go for empowerment? (Or maybe I mean disempowerment--am I imagining things, or did she not describe it as both, almost in the same breath?)

I've known plenty of lesbians with formidable management skills who flourish in corporate environments like fish in water, but everyone has her own set of strengths. If someone who was brought up in middle-class surroundings decides she'd rather work with her hands than play the often soul-destroying career game of office politics, great, I say.

But if you opt for working-class life, you're going to get the whole thing: money is tight and you worry about it a lot, you come home from work physically worn out, and you have little direct input into the shaping of images in popular culture. You don't get a pass just because you fancy that your little épater le bourgeois dress-up game of Hard Hat Barbie is a noble gesture of non-conformism. Bitching along the lines of "Can't I wear the comfy clothes to work and have a job with no staff meetings and make enough money to vacation at a dedicated hotel in South Beach and be a creative consultant on a soon-to-be hit show?" is asinine.

If you want access to the money and connections that allow your group to raise its issues and work its agenda, you have to demonstrate a basic willingness to do business. That does, indeed, mean dressing up and being nice and putting the project at hand ahead of sexual frankness sometimes when you don't feel like it.

Everyone born into this world is limited to a degree by the circumstances of his genes and upbringing. In America, unlike almost everywhere else, decisions about how to build on that foundation are left up to the individual rather than the group. That's a great and wonderful thing, but it doesn't mean that trade-offs are unnecessary. Andy Blevins's views of education may be misguided, but at least he's taking the right approach: asking how he can improve himself and considering the possibility that he may need to do things he doesn't like. He's a far more sympathetic character than Scott, who seems to believe that her coterie's problems stem from the fact that neither the middle nor the working class sees how cool they are.

Almost alone among my American friends, I'm not Jewish. It's probably just as well, because if I were, I'd be spelling doom for the race (via Gay News):

In addition to AIDS, Weiss [who owns a Jewish community newspaper that rejected an ad about the Buffalo Gay Men's Chorus] said, she is also concerned about "the perpetuation of the Jewish people" in the face of demographic trends, including young Jews who stay in the gay lifestyle.

"They can't produce children," she said. "And you can't build a people with adoption."

Weiss said Jews everywhere are concerned about assimilation and the demographic numbers that show a decline in the growth of the Jewish community outside Israel.

"All of the Jewish organizations are concerned," she said, "because we're going to need support in the future for all of the needs of our aging population. There are so many ramifications - there won't be support for old people or for our institutions or for the State of Israel.

I always find these sorts of arguments interesting. There have been plenty of childless people since time immemorial. In affluent societies, I daresay a greater proportion of adults have children than probably did at many other points in history, since medical advances cut down on the incidence of barrenness and childhood diseases, and a more complex set of status accoutrements can be used to attract a mate. As wealth rises, though, birthrates fall because the average couple has fewer children. Part of it is that people are busy with other things, part of it is that they marry later, and part of it is that it's easier to pass on the psychological equipment needed for adulthood in a free society to three children than to 20.

I'm not at all in favor of coercing the majority of straight people to have more children, but if we were really worried about keeping the birth rate at replacement levels, that's what we would have to think about. The idea that the 3 or so percent of the population that's gay is playing some major role in declining birth rates that must be contained immediately is just bizarre.

Speaking of tin-eared PR, what's the best way to smooth over tensions between gays and straights or Arabs and Israelis? Why, have an interracial homo threesome. On display in an art gallery. With a bed as the focal point. No, I'm not kidding:

But, don't expect a sex show if you visit the Jack the Pelican Gallery. Quite the contrary.

The gallery literature says the performance art is rather more innocent than that.

"A spectacle of casual sex this is not - Gil & Moti want to fall in love," it says.

...

In 2003, Gil & Moti decided to fall in love with an Arab. They staged their life-performance "Dating Gil & Moti" at the Haifa Museum. - to consternation and applause.

Decided to fall in love with an Arab? Like, as a New Year's resolution? That's a great way to get out the people-are-people message. Sheesh.

Speaking of olfaction, a reader kindly sent me the link to this study, and I thanked him by...uh, waiting until everyone else posted about it and then figuring there was no point in my mentioning it.

There's no better way to get long blog discussions going than to mention homosexuality, though. Regarding the study, Eric doesn't entirely agree with Rosemary's take on it. I agree, though I think there's at least a partial answer to his comments about the choice element. (Virginia Postrel wrote an article several years ago that was along the same lines, by the way.) Eric writes:

No "rule" is right all the time. I've known gay men who I'm sure were born that way, but I've known others who've simply enjoyed homosexual acts because they've wanted to. The element of choice and the word "choice" are so over-invoked that I almost hesitate to use the word, but I'd like to ask a rather cynical question along the "what if" line.

There are several reasons that a lot of us bristle at the pat "homosexuality is a choice" formulation, even if we don't adhere to the opposite extreme of "homosexuality is genetic." For one thing, many of us spent years working overtime to avoid even considering the possibility that we might be gay. I had my problems with the super-conservative Christian sect in which I was brought up in terms of administration, but I really believed the doctrines (up until I became an atheist, that is) and tried hard to make any seeming interest in a girl germinate. It didn't work.

I realize that at this point, I'm setting myself up for responses on the order of, "Well, okay, but you could have talked to your pastor and asked for more prayers, or you could have sought reparative therapy on the off chance that you're one of the low percentage of subjects it appears to work for, or you could have chosen a life of noble celibacy."

Fine, fine, fine. My point is not that my homosexuality is some kind of mind-control beam. I know I'm responsible for the actions I take based on it. My point is that people who say that homosexuality is a choice present it as if, you know, you figured out you're gay by waking up one morning in college and thinking, Uh, let's see: breakfast. Cold pizza, or vodka and Apple Jacks? The blue shirt or the red shirt? Oh, and, I guess today I could start dealing with my lack of interest in women by trying to figure out whether it represents some kind of deeper issue or something. But women are kind of scary. And anyway, guys are interested in getting off all the time, just like me! Okay, so that takes care of that. Where's my econ book?... For most gays, coming out is the product of brutal self-knowledge and hard decisions. It's the way the world and our place in it makes sense to us.

In Rosemary's comments, the Artist Formerly Known as Wince takes down the idea that no one would choose to be an outcast. He's right, but what I think most gay people are trying to get at when they use such formulations is that we're not gay for the purposes of getting a rise out of our families or pissing off the larger society. (Of course, there are cases of people with identity issues doing so. There are people who convert to Buddhism out of a desire to be funky, too.) Striking out on your own as an adult, living the best life you can based on your knowledge of your own talents and bents and the needs of others, involves the possibility that you're going to alienate some people. You can acknowledge that without relishing the prospect.

This whole thing about the Mayor of Spokane just keeps getting weirder. The Washington Blade points to this article that says West has now stated that he is, in fact, gay. West's emotionalism makes him, on the surface, more sympathetic than that smarmy smoothie James McGreevey. But then you get to parts like this:

The mayor also referred to a story in Saturday's paper in which a man named "Scott" said he was sexually molested by [West crony] Hahn and reported the conduct to West during a 50-mile Boy Scout hike around Mount Rainier in 1980.

Smith said West "couldn't remember the kid. He doesn't recall the incident."

West said another adult on the trip, whom he didn't identify, "told him not to worry about it, that we didn't know about sexual abuse in 1980," Smith said in relating the mayor's comments.

But West also said, "It may be possible that the kid said something, maybe about being fondled, and maybe I just didn't recognize how important that might have been."

We didn't know about sexual abuse in 1980? WTF? It's certainly true that people weren't parading allegations on Oprah in 1980. I was only eight then, but I'm pretty sure that it was generally recognized that it was a bad thing for a Boy Scout leader to be fondling his troop members. Of course, it's always possible that Hahn was just showing the kid how to hold the bow properly during archery practice. There's no way of knowing. But West's dismissive, hand-washing obtuseness doesn't sit well.

The allegations of sexual abuse and sexual harassment* against West himself are graver, though it's possible that he is, in fact, innocent of all of them. What's clear is that he was trying to play both ends against the middle:

It was that young man's story about allegedly meeting the mayor in the online chat room that led the newspaper to hire a forensic computer expert to verify the teenager's claims that the man he met online was West - a process that took six months to complete and involved creating a fictional teenager known as "Moto-Brock."

On April 9, West sent his photo and City Hall Web site biography to Moto-Brock, asking him to keep the secret. "Please don't tell anyone at all," the 54-year-old mayor told Moto-Brock, who he thought was a gay teenager. "It's a part of my life I don't share at all," he said.

"Someday I may run for governor and this would be bad, if you know what I mean," West told the teenager.

We do now, honey. More even than the ethical concerns here, which are bad enough, the idiocy is breathtaking. I don't think West comes off as necessarily anti-gay in terms of his policy positions--it would be fine for him to say that his conservatism makes him come down against special protections. But come on. If you're going to play close to the edge--keeping your sexuality a secret to get ahead in politics and pursuing barely-legal hotties on the Internet and using the alpha-male impressiveness of your real-life job and identity to reel 'em in--what kind of numbskull do you have to be, in 2005, not to think it's going to blow up in your face eventually?

This is just what we need (via Gay Orbit):

This morning's Newark Star-Ledger reports on a new Zogby poll the paper headlines as a "shock": it shows that nearly half the residents of the Garden State would consider voting again for former N.J. Gov. Jim McGreevey for some other office, like Congress or the legislature (and 30% of those saying so were Republicans).

Still wonder why the rest of the Mid-Atlantic looks down on New Jersey? Anyway, it's important to note that this poll was of NJ residents, not just gay voters; I wonder whether they liked McGreevey's policy platform despite his corruption? Or maybe standards for politicians are low in this post-Lautenberg world?

Whatever the case, Doug Ireland and Michael are right: even if you're the most amorally opportunistic gay advocate imaginable, sheer pragmatism should tell you that making McGreevey into a hero is a monumentally bad idea. Of course, it's hard not to sympathize in gut terms with someone who's been closeted for decades--even Jonathan Rauch couldn't resist half-playing the pity card (though I think this guy takes the cigar band). But life tests everyone's character; it's not as if gays were the only Americans who had ever experienced hardship. It's beyond comprehension why every gay man and woman who's made a practice of living honestly isn't mad as a hornet at McGreevey's manipulativeness.

One final note about Ireland's post: I'm not sure that someone who tacks on a story about a woman's execution as a parenthetical in the title and a by-the-by add-on in the body is really in the position to be getting all uptight about whether other people are treating Afghan women's rights with sufficient gravity. I don't think anyone had any delusions that bringing the rule of law to every last ravine of Afghanistan was going to be easy. With the new constitution, civil rights as we see them in the West are at least partially codified; the task of changing minds in the hinterlands--even Bibi Amena's parents said she deserved death for being in the company of an unrelated man--will take longer than writing a document in the capital. In a world in which we can't prevent every injustice, it's the direction of change that has to matter.

GayPatriot has a post up about a response to a column by Elaine Donnelly, the head of the Center for Military Readiness; Donnelly is, of course, defending the ban on gays' serving in the military.

The column is basically a cut and paste version of things that are already posted on the Center for Military Readiness website. It speaks in airy hypotheticals about the need for unit discipline and cohesion, with no specifics about how gays would fatally interfere with them, except for this passage:

It also respects the normal human desire for sexual modesty. Servicemen and women should not have to expose themselves to persons who might be sexually attracted to them. It would be unfair to force the homosexual agenda on young people whose lives are difficult enough.

Now we're catering to "normal human desires" in the armed forces? Okay. I have a normal human desire not to have my workplace superiors burst into my bedchamber and inspect my personal effects. But there are things you give up in order to be in the military, and one of them is the boundaries that govern civilian life. That includes the ability to shower in privacy.

You could say, of course, that throwing sexual energy into the mix makes things all primal and combustible and stuff; and that's plausible in theoretical terms. But "Don't ask, don't tell" has been policy for around a decade. It strains credulity to imagine that if allowing gays to serve were going to cause systemic problems in reality, we wouldn't be seeing them, and the Center for Military Readiness wouldn't be collecting them to give concrete support to its arguments. Such problems as exist appear to stem less from some sexual-disturbance force field emanating from specific gays than from garden-variety prejudice. (Donnelly also refers to the integration policy "imposed on Britain by a European court," doubtless giving anti-EU conservative readers shivers; unmentioned is Israel. Check out this 5-year-old article by Joanne Jacobs, too.)

This story about Cape May, NJ, which has just repealed its ban on immodest bathing suits on men, would be amusing rather than poignant were it not for this passage:

Maggie Creighton, 19, who works in a downtown lingerie store, agreed. "The people you want to see in the Speedos, you don't," she said.

You'll find as you enter your third decade on this Earth, my dear, how much of life is like that.