Harvard University Press Blog

Speaking with SpeakOut Boston

We continue our celebration of Pride Month by talking with some of the speakers who volunteer with SpeakOUT Boston. They share their stories with a variety of audiences to foster a better understanding of the LGBTQ+ community, so we thought we’d ask them some questions of our own.

What does Pride mean to you?

My very first Pride celebration was in 2016. I had just come out (at almost 60 years old) and seeing thousands of others celebrating and living their truth was simply the most amazing feeling I had ever known. I was fortunate enough to march in three more Boston Pride Parades plus two in Portland, Maine. Seeing the streets filled with allies gave me hope that things are (even though slowly) getting better, but with a long way to go.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

I have a few authors or reads that stand out to me. Amy Hoffman is a local author who lives in my neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. She features queer women and her stories make you feel you know these women. Her latest novel, Dot & Ralfie, features partners facing the fears of aging. I also loved Sarah McBride’s Tomorrow Will Be Different, her memoir. Though vastly different from my own story in areas like aging, it made me recall so many of my own feelings of growing up, coming out, and transitioning.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

I joined SpeakOUT in 2017, encouraged by a friend. I was afraid (ok, terrified) of public speaking but needed to do it. Getting up to share honestly about who I was, and to hopefully answer questions to help others to understand who we are. Becoming a trainer and helping others to do the same is incredibly rewarding.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

I often run into people who have attended an engagement where we spoke. They will share how much one of our engagements helped open their eyes about not just LGBTQIA people, but other marginalized communities.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

People who hear us speak and see us answer difficult questions often become great allies, but they also pay it forward and help others learn as well. My biggest surprise was learning so much more about myself.

Gabrielle “Gabi” Morgan (she/her) is a transgender woman who came out later in life and a Boston native from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, where she now once again resides. Gabi hid her true gender identity and was totally closeted until finally revealing her authentic self in 2016, at almost 60 years old. She immediately became active in the transgender community, volunteering with SpeakOUT, among others. She recently joined The Fenway Institute’s LGBTQIA+ Aging Project as a transgender engagement specialist, where she continues her personal journey while working to improve conditions for older transgender and gender diverse persons.

What does Pride mean to you?

Pride to me is about recognizing, developing, and celebrating my own identity as well as celebrating other people’s identities. It’s important to recognize the whole person, not just their sexual and gender identities.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

I appreciate the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose work in the arts brings modern characters to life in his plays and films. He was a co-writer of the film Moonlight, among other works.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

I joined SpeakOUT in 2012 when I attended a SpeakOUT speaker training workshop. I was motivated to participate in the training because I was in pursuit of further developing my speaking skills when I saw an intersectional opportunity between my public speaking skills and nurturing my sexual identity.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

My most positive experience working with SpeakOUT is being a trainer in our speaker trainings. After each and every opportunity I have to attend a SpeakOUT training, I experience positivity from the day.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

Recognizing and protecting everyone’s identities. It’s important to know that some of us have suffered and continue to suffer because of the ignorance and abuse of those who refuse to recognize and protect certain identities.

Michael Bookman (he/him) is a transplant from South Carolina who has settled into Boston over the years. He has been involved with SpeakOUT for ten years and is a past board president and long-time training team member. He is currently a member of the SpeakOUT in Color affinity group for speakers of color in the organization.

What does Pride mean to you?

Show up as you are, and just be Proud.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

I greatly admire the work of Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle, who describe their own evolution as women-loving women in their own stories, irrespective of any label. I have come to believe that if we’re paying attention and listening to that still small voice inside ourselves that we will shift and change and grow again and again and again throughout our lifetimes. Perhaps we are more a kaleidoscope than a rainbow, letting the light shine through all the mosaic moments of our lives. To this day I feel more comfortable describing myself as the “+” in LGBTQ+, a fluid femme who continues to ebb and flow in my own personal journey.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

I joined SpeakOUT in 2017 to help illustrate that while there are plenty of people that might look incredibly different from you or me in our beautiful rainbow community, there are also plenty that might look just like you and me but actually walk a very different path altogether. And I believe it is equally important that we accept and embrace our similarities as we do our differences.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

I have always loved speaking at high schools with SpeakOUT. One incredibly memorable experience was when a female student approached me and told me that she was gay and was terrified to go home for break, as her parents did not accept her (she was staying with another family close to the school). By sharing my story, I gave this student a safe place to share hers, and we created a plan of self-care for her to follow through her most challenging times. Being able to help LGBTQ+ youth in this way is a true honor.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

As a feminine-presenting woman, the assumptions about me are endless. I must be straight, the ring on my finger must have been given to me by my husband, I must have carried our children. I “pass” so if I wanted to I could let the opportunity to educate pass on by just the same, but, for me, that has always felt like a disservice to the LGBTQ+ community. Because the truth is, while I might look like “most girls,” I am not straight. I am married to my dream wife, and together we have adopted and are raising our children as part of our blended family. I believe it’s critical that we challenge the views of what constitutes family norms and what configurations are acceptable and celebrated.

Dr. Jennelle Kariotis-Rice (she/her) is a psychologist by training and a relationship advisor and justice of the peace to the LGBTQ+ community by trade, as well as a part-time Psychology Professor at Bridgewater State University. Jennelle specializes in working with women who were previously in relationships with men and are now (or would like to be) in relationships with women and hosts a podcast and virtual community known as the Big Change of Heart. She lives in Pembroke with her wife and four children.

What does Pride mean to you?

Pride Month and many Pride events are opportunities for celebration, for finding and supporting all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, for honoring history and protecting the future, and for educating and including all types of people while keeping the focus on queer people and our lives. Pride is about survival, humor, creativity, strength, sadness, sexual and relational human rights, and speaking and being heard.

Which writers (including novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets)—working today do you admire most?

Alison Bechdel, Charles M. Blow, John Paul Brammer, Roxane Gay, Kieron Gillen, Edgar Gomez, Christopher Gonzalez, Tony Kushner, Alice Oseman, and Brandon Taylor.

When and why did you decide to join SpeakOUT?

Though I had been out as a bisexual/queer man to a small number of people since the mid-1990s, I didn’t come out to the rest of my family, nor widely and publicly, until May and June of 2014, when I marched in (and attended!) my first Boston Pride event. Having learned about SpeakOUT through Ellyn Ruthstrom and the Bisexual Resource Center, I attended my first board meeting in July that year and quickly became both a volunteer speaker and board member. I joined because I wanted to “make up for lost time” of having been mostly silent, realizing what a positive difference more stories from out bisexual men and other queer people would have made in my earlier life.

What has been your most positive experience working with SpeakOUT?

The reciprocal flow of strength and compassion between myself and audience members. SpeakOUT helped me find and take pride in my story, my voice, my history and identity—and I have heard from so many of our listeners that our stories have done so for them. It’s an amazingly energizing and uplifting dynamic.

What’s one thing from your talks that you wish was more widely known?

I do think we all have a lot of work to do on increasing bisexual and pansexual visibility, particularly for bi and pan men, who continue to face misunderstanding and discrimination both outside of and even within the LGBTQIA+ community.

George Grattan (he/him) has worked as a teacher, writer, editor, and marketing and communications expert in a wide range of settings, focusing on the higher education and sustainability sectors. He joined the board of SpeakOUT in 2014, and served as board chair for three years. A proud bisexual/queer man, he lives with his wife, Mary, in Gloucester, MA, where he advises the nonprofit Seaside Sustainability—and tries to swim at least nine months of the year.

50 Years of Sharing LGBTQ+ Stories

As we celebrate Pride Month, we decided to take the opportunity to invite a local LGBTQ+ organization to tell us about the important work they do. Ellyn Ruthstrom is the Executive Director of SpeakOUT Boston and has been involved with LGBTQ+ activism for thirty years. As a former president of the Bisexual Resource Center, Ruthstrom co-organized the first White House Roundtable on Bisexual Issues in 2013 during the Obama Administration.

On the oppressive summer night of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Rebellion started in New York City. Drag queens, trans women and men, gay and bisexual people all stood up together and said “No more!” when the police yet again raided the Stonewall Inn that night. Those first few days of the rebellion didn’t start the LGBTQ+ movement, but it did ignite the sparks that had already been smoldering, and it galvanized activists to organize in a more cohesive way to demand change and to fight the discrimination and stigma that the queer community experienced on a daily basis. The bravery of Stonewall inspires the LGBTQ+ community to march, protest, and celebrate every June for Pride Month.

And just three years after Stonewall, members of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Homophile Union of Boston (some of the earliest gay rights organizations) joined forces to create the Gay Speakers Bureau in Boston. Believing in the power of personal storytelling, the Gay Speakers Bureau trained its members to tell authentic, personal stories that debunked the harmful stereotypes of the “lavender menace.” The organization added other identities to its name as the movement expanded, but eventually we left behind the old name to instead emphasize the importance of what we do: speak out.

SpeakOUT is a community of speakers working to create a world free of homo-bi-transphobia and other prejudice by telling the truths of LGBTQ+ lives. Sharing our stories and fostering a dialogue with a wide range of audiences—schools, colleges, businesses, faith communities, libraries—has always been at the core of SpeakOUT’s mission and work. After 50 years, you can imagine the thousands of stories we have shared! And now we are able to conduct our engagements in both in-person and online formats, reaching beyond the Greater Boston area.

SpeakOUT speakers shared their stories during the AIDS epidemic, the fight for marriage equality, the campaign against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and during the more recent fight for transgender civil rights. We will continue to speak out against the current backlash of laws that are targeting our schools, transgender youth, reproductive rights, and even marriage rights.

Forty or fifty years ago our members encountered a lot more hostility and resistance to what they shared with their audiences than we do now. At that time, audience members felt much more comfortable expressing anti-gay sentiments and our speakers were trained in how to defuse a situation, how to keep the discourse focused on personal experience, and how to use those points of conflict as teachable moments. Our training still includes those skills, even though it is much less likely now for our speakers to encounter extreme viewpoints. Not impossible, but less likely.

The biggest change from what was the Gay Speakers Bureau is the diverse range of identities that we represent. LGBTQ+ may seem like an unwieldy acronym, but it points to the complexity of both sexual orientation and gender identity. I have personally seen a huge change in our client’s willingness to discuss gender identity in just the last eight years when I came on as Executive Director. At that time there were still some clients that explicitly requested us not to send transgender speakers. Now, the majority of clients insist on having a transgender or nonbinary speaker on a panel and are eager to educate their constituencies about trans and nonbinary issues.

As part of our 50^th anniversary this year, we have just updated our logo to include the Progressive Pride flag colors, reflecting the organization’s commitment to the BIPOC and transgender communities. An affinity group called SpeakOUT in Color formed within the last two years to provide a social and support space for speakers of color. This group sparked more discussions within the organization to initiate a board-driven DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) committee that is centering racial diversity within our organization and will be a major focus for the organization going forward.

SpeakOUT’s personal storytelling continues to make a difference. I think of the year or so leading up to the anti-trans referendum in 2018 as being an example of when our format really helped to educate a lot of people out in the community to the importance of trans civil rights. I give props to our trans speakers who tirelessly spoke to faith communities, public forums at libraries, a lot of businesses, so many places. It took a statewide effort by many organizations and individuals and I’m very proud of the work that SpeakOUT did to help ensure the continued protections for our transgender citizens. A lot of our work goes under the radar—we don’t grab the headlines—but I believe the personal connections between our speakers and audience members makes for a meaningful change of attitudes that is an important part of larger social change.

Celebrating Pride Month, Part III

Rounding out our blog posts for Pride Month is an excerpt from Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, which looks at the cost of gay assimilation into mainstream culture and makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear.

Queers face a strange choice: is it better to move on toward a brighter future or to hang back and cling to the past? Such divided allegiances result in contradictory feelings: pride and shame, anticipation and regret, hope and despair. Contemporary queers find ourselves in the odd situation of “looking forward” while we are “feeling backward.”

A particularly jarring version of this disjunction appears in Without You I’m Nothing, John Boskovich’s 1989 film of Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show. In one sequence, Bernhard takes on the persona of a homophobic straight man whose friend takes him to a gay bar. The scene is the 1970s, the height of both sexual liberation and the gay liberation movement. Bernhard’s character begins his monologue looking forward to a night on the town with his best bud and hoping to meet some Playboy bunnies; soon after climbing into his friend’s Camaro, he ends up in an unfamiliar part of town, following his friend into a bar with no girls—or not “his kind of girls” anyway. He notes a “couple dancing together in the corner with flannel shirts and jeans, with big fat asses.” Initially frightened and disgusted by this scene, Bernhard’s character warms up quickly; within a few moments he is doing poppers and mixing with the locals. The story takes a sudden turn as Bernhard begins to play the tambourine, and three black leathermen magically appear at her side, back-up singers for her rendition of the Sylvester anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” The conversion is complete a few moments later: Bernhard’s character gives himself sexually to a drag queen and likes it. In this absurdly sped-up sequence, racial fantasies of overpowering desire and authentic being effect a turn from hatred and shame to joy and self-revelation. The sad and lonely patrons of a backstreet bar are transformed into luminous creatures “here to take you higher!”

This moment is absurd, and yet what is absurd about it is not its content but its pacing. The story is, after all, a familiar one: the movement from abjection to glorious community is the underlying structure of the story of coming out of the closet, and it informs both personal and collective histories of liberation. The origin story of gay liberation describes how on one particular night an underground bar turned into the front line of a struggle for freedom and civil rights. Early work in lesbian and gay studies was marked by the legacy of Stonewall and by the sudden turn of this moment of reverse discourse; the emergent field’s powerful utopianism, affirmation of gay identity, and hope for the future resonated with the seemingly magical power of this new movement to transmute shame into pride, secrecy into visibility, social exclusion into outsider glamour.

I do not think we can or should forego the strategy of reverse discourse, and I would not deny the power of queer alchemy. Our very dependence on this strategy demands, however, that we recognize how tenuous it is. We can turn shame into pride, but we cannot do so once and for all: shame lives on in pride, and pride can easily turn back into shame. We need to take as our starting point the reversibility of reverse discourse and to keep our gaze directed toward the past, toward the bad old days before Stonewall.

Although we cannot do away with the notion of progress, I want to attend more closely to what remains unthought in the turn toward the future. The commitment to affirmation should not shut down the possibility of the kind of radical intellectual experiments that gave birth to queer theory in the first place: Foucault’s challenge to the ideology of liberation; Cherríe Moraga’s attention to betrayal and sexual exposure in Loving in the War Years; Leo Bersani’s critique of the “culture of redemption”; Judith Butler’s gender trouble, which I take to mean not only acting up but also feeling bad.

These interventions are, I would argue, what has made queer studies “queer,” but the vibrations they set off are what is hardest to keep alive in queer studies as it ages. In 1993 Judith Butler wondered if the term “queer” would ever “overcome its constitutive history of injury.” It has not entirely, although its regular appearances in both college classrooms and on popular television shows suggest that it is moving in that direction.…What counts as political in the contemporary context is, however, out of touch with the longer history of queer experience. Rather than disavowing the history of marginalization and abjection, I suggest that we embrace it, exploring the ways it continues to structure queer experience in the present. Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present.

Celebrating Pride Month, Part II

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. This second excerpt comes from How To Be Gay, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, in which David M. Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. 

The official line of the post-Stonewall gay movement in the United States has gone something like this: “We are not freaks or monsters. We are the same as you: we are ordinary, decent people. In fact, we are just like heterosexuals except for what we do in bed (which is nobody’s business but our own—and, anyway, the less said about it, the better).”

For a short time, around the birth of the “queer” movement at the turn of the 1990s, it became fashionable to claim the opposite. Those who embraced a queer identity (or non-identity) used to take a line that exactly reversed the official post-Stonewall one: “We queers are totally unlike anyone else; we do not resemble you at all. We are completely different from heterosexuals—except for what we do in bed (which is more or less what everyone does in bed, with some minor, insignificant variations).”

But that queer fashion didn’t last long, and a lot of lesbians and gay men in the United States…have now gone back to claiming that gay people are defined, if at all, only by a non-standard sexual preference which in and of itself does not strictly correlate with any other feature of the personality. In all other aspects of their lives, gay people are the same as everyone else. (That tendency may actually reflect a recent development of international scope, what Rogers Brubaker has called “the return of assimilation.”) In American popular usage nowadays, to be sure, the word “gay” may mean “stereotypically gay” or “culturally gay,” while men who are defined by their sexuality, by the sex they have with men, are more likely to be termed “homosexual.” But in the official language of the gay movement, “gay” remains an identity marker attached to sexual preference. To be gay, according to this latter outlook, is to have a sexuality, a sexual orientation; it is not to have a distinctive culture or psychology or social practice or inner life, or anything else that is different from the norm. Especially if—in the case of gay men—that difference implies any identification with women or femininity. Merely to question this doctrine is to risk conjuring up the dread specter of sexual inversion, opening the door to a return of Victorian psychiatry, with all its ancient prejudices about the congenital abnormality and psychopathology and gender deviance of gay men.

But so long as we cling to the notion that gayness is reducible to same-sex sexual object-choice, that it has nothing to do with how we live or what we like, that our homosexuality is completely formed prior to and independent of any exposure to gay culture—and so long as we hold to that belief as to a kind of dogma—then the persistence of gay culture will remain a perpetual embarrassment, as well as an insoluble analytic puzzle.

Celebrating Pride Month

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. Nathaniel Frank’s Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America tells the dramatic story of the struggle for same-sex couples to legally marry, something that is now taken for granted. Below, he describes the beginnings of the gay rights movement.

For homophiles of the 1950s, identifying as gay was almost always a risky and radical act, even if their ensuing demands were “merely” to be treated like everyone else. The first gay Americans to picket the White House without hiding were bluntly challenging the status quo even if their suits and dresses marked them as conventional, as did their engagement with traditional centers of political power. Defying views of gay people as sick, immoral, criminal, and disloyal was revelatory, but it could be undertaken with the goal of replacing such views with approval by churches, doctors, politicians, and the law. Conventional tactics do not always mean limited goals, and vice versa, since an activist can adopt an incremental approach as a strategy with the ultimate goal being radical change. Liberating Americans from traditional constraints on sex and other roles had the potential not just to be transgressive, disruptive, and destabilizing but also to serve as a safety valve for social pressures, thus spurring reform instead of revolution. There was a fine line between self-respect and respectability, and the process of throwing off internalized shame was often helped along by winning the imprimatur of others. And legalizing marriage for same-sex couples, some early advocates recognized, could be transformative, even as it also reaffirmed the role of the state in both governing private relationships and neglecting the needs of single people.

Such ideological and strategic tensions help explain the context for what happened on the hot summer night of Friday, June 27, 1969. A motley bunch of 200 drag queens, cross- dressing lesbians, hustlers, students, tony gay men, and what one admirer called “flaming faggot types” had gathered, as they often did, at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City’s West Village. That afternoon and into the night, 20,000 fans and well-wishers had lined up outside the Frank Campbell funeral home uptown to say goodbye to Judy Garland, the gay icon whose life had ended with a barbiturate overdose in London the previous week. Some at the Stonewall Inn may have been toasting her memory (more than one had used “Judy Garland” as a nom de plume when signing in at the door, a practice required because the bar branded itself a private “bottle club” instead of a public establishment that would need a liquor license) when, just after midnight, a group of police officers filed in to raid the place. Normally the authorities gave the owners, who were associated with the Mafia, a warning before their raids, but for whatever reason, that night’s intrusion was a surprise. And for whatever reason—the cumulative weight of decades of derision and persecution, the inspiration of a new generation of youthful protestors, the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, the collective sadness and anger over Judy Garland’s death—this time the patrons fought back.

As the police began hauling off a few employees and drag queens in paddy wagons—wearing gender-atypical clothing was still illegal in New York—the crowd spontaneously erupted. The city during this period was not the well-kempt model of urban luxury it later became, and the small park across the street was littered with bottles and other debris that the throng gleefully converted into weapons. They hurled whatever they could get their hands on—including a parking meter they yanked from its socket—shattering windows and driving many of the raiding police inside for cover. When other officers turned a fire hose on the demonstrators, someone cried, “Grab it, grab his cock!” while others yelled, “Gay power!” The protestors taunted the raiders with references to the regular payoffs the corrupt police took from the mob bosses who owned the bars. Early on, a cross-dressing, biracial lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, struck a police officer in retaliation, she said, for being hit. By the end of the night, four officers had been injured and many others had been terrorized. “There was never any time that I felt more scared than then,” recalled one of the leading police officials, who said their guns had been trained on the door from inside. “You have no idea how close we came to killing somebody.”

No one died, but a movement was born—or reached its rebellious adolescence. It was no doubt indebted and deeply connected to the rudimentary efforts of Mattachine [Society] and Daughters of Bilitis during the previous decade, but it was newly emboldened in palpable and ultimately enduring ways. The unrest continued for several nights that summer, as hundreds of additional gay and non-gay participants and curiosity-seekers, including press, made their way to Christopher Street. One was the gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who noticed right away a change in gay men’s bearing and poise. “The guys there were so beautiful,” he said. “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.” Other gay observers echoed the sentiment, calling the event a “homosexual revolution” that young activists should study and carry forward into the anti-gay churches, psychiatric offices, “councils of the U.S. Government,” and city and state legislatures that “make our manner of love-making a crime.” Many saw Stonewall, even then, as part of something bigger, “a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society” that carried the promise of upending long-standing forms of repression and prejudice.

Why the Supreme Court's Marriage Decision Won’t Be the Next Roe v. Wade

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, many have looked to the Roe v. Wade ruling in an effort to forecast the cultural and political impact of federally sanctioned same-sex marriage. But as Mary Ziegler shows in After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, the narrative that now surrounds that decision and its effects overly simplifies what was a very fluid situation, projecting today’s polarities further back in time than the history supports. Below, Ziegler outlines the folly in declaring Obergefell the next Roe when we still have such trouble understanding the first.

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Critics of the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, have predicted that it will be the next Roe v. Wade. Indeed, comparison of Obergefell and Roe has become almost mandatory for Republican presidential candidates and conservative activists.

Some use the analogy to criticize the Court for short-circuiting political debate about marriage in the states. Others clearly want the Court to worry about the consequences of striking down marriage bans in so many states. Politicians turn to these arguments because they might appeal to voters otherwise supportive of marriage equality. If Obergefell is indeed the next Roe, the Court may have once again escalated the culture wars, making it harder for Americans to agree on issues of sexuality or gender, much less on same-sex marriage itself.

Are the Court’s critics right? At first blush, the comparison between Roe and Obergefell seems unconvincing. While the nation remains divided about abortion, polls have shown increasing support for marriage equality, particularly among younger Americans. For many, the moral issues also seem easily distinguishable. Pro-life Americans argue that a woman’s decision to choose abortion harms a person not included in the decision. Longstanding agreements about fetal personhood aside, the argument that abortion is not a purely self-regarding act is much easier to make than any related claim about marriage equality.

Gay Marriage and Gay Culture

“Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.” So writes David Halperin in How To Be Gay, expressing the contentious notion behind his controversial University of Michigan course of the same name. “‘Gay,’” he continues, “refers not just to something you are, but also to something you do... Gayness, then, is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.” American gay male life, he argues, is reflective of “a common culture” and “shared sense of self” that must be acquired, a “characteristic relation to mainstream culture” that must be “discovered” by gay male subjects who “resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways.”

To Halperin, gay culture is something of value, able to enhance or enrich the perspective of people of any sexual orientation. But for Halperin, as for others, the gay rights movement seemed to have prioritized “normality” in ways that both denied and jeopardized gay culture, perhaps nowhere more so than in the effort to legalize gay marriage. With the U.S. Supreme Court having deemed same-sex marriage a right, we look to Halperin’s take on what “gay marriage” might mean for “gay culture.”

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When gay people are deprived of a common, communal existence, of a social world of their own, the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation—that is, accommodation to the mainstream, the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole. It’s all about the need to fit in, to adapt yourself to the locality in which you already happen to be living and working. Issues like gay military service or marriage equality, which had formerly been about access to benefits, distributive justice, and the removal of discriminatory barriers, now become struggles over the symbolism of social belonging. They are reframed to center around social recognition, the definition of citizenship, the meaning of patriotism, the practice of religious worship, the idea of family. There are still important material demands behind such struggles for inclusion, but they tend to be subordinated, at least in the rhetoric of the movement, to the goals of assimilation and conformity.

In such a context, gay culture seems an increasingly bizarre, insubstantial, intangible, nebulous, irrelevant notion. It is the sign of a failure (or refusal) to assimilate. What would gay people want nowadays with a separate culture anyway? Such a thing might have made sense in the Bad Old Days of social oppression and exclusion. Now it is simply a barrier to progress. It impedes the achievement of assimilation. No wonder we keep asking, with barely suppressed impatience, why gay culture doesn’t simply disappear. Surely social acceptance and integration will spell the end of gay culture. Since gay people are no longer so oppressed, there is little reason for them to band together in separate social groups, let alone to form distinct cultural communities. The assimilation of gay people into straight society has put an end to all that. Gay culture is a vestige from an earlier time. It is archaic, obsolete. Gay culture has no future.

These predictions, I believe, overlook a crucial consideration. Social acceptance, the decriminalization of gay sex, the legalization of homosexual social and sexual institutions, the removal of barriers to same-sex marriage, to military service, to the priesthood and psychoanalysis, along with other previously off-limits professions, should not be confused with the end of sexual normativity, let alone the collapse of heterosexual dominance.

What Is Rape?

As publishers, with our list forever in mind, there’s an involuntary reflex to filter all the day’s news through the books we’ve worked on. Sometimes that’s welcome; it’s nice to see it validated that the Press’s books are relevant to events in the world. Other times, as with Estelle Freedman’s Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, not so much. From Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape,” to congressional Republicans debating rape’s definition while attempting to tighten requirements for federal funding of abortions, to Dr. Phil’s noxious Twitter poll on the meaning of consent, to the dismissal of countless survivors and acts that don’t satisfy the classic definition of rape, one need barely be attuned to notice the ongoing cultural and political battles over the answer to what may seem a simple question: what is rape?

As Freedman shows, the question is hardly new. Today’s debates about sexual assault, and the role of race and class within these debates, have a long prehistory in the US. The definition of rape, Freedman demonstrates, has been central to sustaining gender and racial injustice—and contesting its definition has been central to activists’ pursuit of greater equality.

Beginning her story in the 18th century, when many women, especially enslaved and non-elite women, had little or no legal recourse when sexually assaulted, Freedman traces the work of suffragists, black activists, and their allies to redefine rape. By expanding the definition of sexual assault to include women of color and non-elite and sexually experienced women, by raising the age of consent, by combating street harassment, by agitating for the prosecution of coercive sex, and by fighting lynching, activists sought to achieve civic equality for women and for people of color.

As Freedman explains in the video below, across our whole national history of debating its definition, the politics of rape have always been bound to questions of power and justice.

 

Catharine MacKinnon on Lovelace

The pornographic film Deep Throat, released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of the film.

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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.

Q. This film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at which Marchiano testified, as documented in In Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech” of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do, the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First Amendment law. The ordinances could still be passed and found constitutional today.

Practical Ways to Beat the Sexting Impulse

When news broke this week of former Congressman and current NYC mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s further indiscretions, we were put in mind of a forthcoming book, David Lewis’s Impulse: Why We Do What We Do Without Knowing Why We Do It.

Informed by the latest research in neuropsychology, the book explores all the mystifying things people do (and do again) despite knowing better, from blurting out indiscretions to falling for totally incompatible romantic partners. Seems an apropos book for a man in Weiner’s position.

On closer consultation, though, the book was found not to speak directly to the issue of impulsive sexting. It does, however, offer practical ways to beat the overeating impulse, some of which we’ve adapted below.

1. Eat Sext from smaller plates and bowls phones. Because we eat sext with our eyes as much as with our mouth hands, using smaller plates and bowls phones is a quick and easy way to reduce the number of calories consumed sexts sent. In a study I conducted in London as part of a Channel 4 television documentary entitled Secret Eaters Sexters, we found that volunteers who served themselves ice cream into a sexted with a large bowl phone took sexted 44 per cent more than those with a smaller bowl phone.

2. Eating Sexting with chopsticks without autocorrect, rather than a knife and fork with autocorrect, obliges you to take smaller mouthfuls use shorter words and eat sext more slowly. Eating Sexting more slowly allows time for the digestion process to work effectively. It also gives you a better chance of recognising when you have eaten sexted sufficient food sexts.

3. Put ice in your drink sext. Because the body has to use energy to heat up the beverage sext, around 1 calorie per ounce word of fluid sext is consumed. If you drink sext the recommended not recommended eight 8-ounce glasses of water sexts a day with ice cubes you will burn up between 60 and 70 extra calories each day.

4. We eat sext significantly more when dining sexting in company than eating sexting alone. For Secret Eaters Sexters, I asked diners sexters to have lunch sext alone, as a couple or at a table of six friends. The group consumed sent some 600 more calories sexts than the solitary diner sexter and over 80 more than the couple. What happens is that we tend to pace ourselves on the fastest eater sexter in a group. Also, distracted by conversation and banter we fail to notice how much we are eating sexting and are more susceptible to offers of second helpings sextings. Be aware of this risk the next time you eat sext with a group of friends or colleagues. Refuse second helpings sextings. Pace yourself to the slowest eater sexter at the table. Try to be the last person to start eating sexting.

5. When dining sexting out in an upmarket restaurant be aware of the effects of soft lights and classical music. Both encourage you to linger longer and so eat or drink sext considerably more than you realise.

6. When snacking on popcorn sexting in the cinema, use your other hand. That is, if you normally hold the popcorn container in sext with your right hand and pick don’t sext with your left, then swap around. By making this small change in your eating sexting habits you force yourself to think more about what you are doing and are, therefore, likely to eat sext less. During a study to test the effects of this tactic in a London cinema, I provided half the audience with an oven glove worn on the normal popcorn picking sexting hand. Their consumption sexting fell by a quarter compared to their non-handicapped companions.

Okay, that’s six solid tips. Maybe take them under advisement? Food Sext Food for thought, at least.