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Reconstructing Homophobia in the Bible Belt;
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Introductory Note:This essay was presented at the 1997 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Toronto as part of a session on faculty experiences of teaching about sexuality in various academic institutions. The session was attended by 100 conference participants. Other session presenters were Professors Ed Madden, Margot Backus, and Edward Ingebretsen; Professor Sam Gladden (a Texas A&M Ph.D.) moderated.I am posting this essay in October 2001 and that 1997 MLA session — at which the panel members were harassed by a member of the ultra-conservative organization Truth in Academe — seems worlds away. Yet, however we survive the crises that have befallen us since September 11, the condition of peoples who are neglected and oppressed, whether they be women, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered, or whether they are members of ethnic or religious or economic minorities, are part of the struggle for lives of full social participation that I describe here. | ||
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| At Texas A&M University, home of the George Bush Presidential Library and other monuments to conservative social values, especially misogyny and homophobia, and where reactionary traditions and annual rituals affirming these values are sacrosanct, it has been no easy task for gay people to assimilate themselves openly into a mainstream whose values and attitudes many of us may want to reject, or at least to modify. This will be an inside narrative, in the Melvillean sense, a tale of the ambiguously seamless assimilation of yours truly and of "English 333 Gay and Lesbian Literature: The Tradition in English" into this unlikely community. But let me begin at the beginning, with an account of the institutional context. Texas A&M (the letters originally stood for Agricultural and Mechanical) College was established in 1876 as Texas's land-grant institution. It was an all-male military college, most of whose students went on to serve in the armed forces. A&M has always been proud of the fact that the Corps of Cadets sends more individuals into the services than any other institutions except West Point and VMI. Eventually, rumor has it, A&M College developed a reputation for certain erotic activities that were besmirching the school's reputation among the good people of Texas; the solution was naturally the admission of women for the purpose of engaging the leisure-time interests of male students. Women were admitted as full-time students in 1967 and a few female faculty were recruited within about 5 years after that. The first women to come were, as might be expected, intrepid adventuresses into the realms of male educational privilege: these were strong-willed and energetic individuals, a number of whom were lesbians. Texas A&M was, and is, a university on the make, which means that its enrollment--like the population of Texas itself--has grown exponentially; A&M's 42,000 students are now mostly from Texas's urban centers with their multi-ethnic and out-of-state populations, rather than from previously isolated rural regions. As the campus population has grown, the population of the Corps of Cadets has remained stable at about 2,000 students, but its ideological influence on the general ("non-reg") student population has been sustained out of all proportion to its numbers, probably as a result of the powerful community mystique of the school that is manifested through the Association of Former Students, the tendency of families to maintain a tradition of attendance at A&M, the elaborate Corps-connected rituals associated with football and other sports, and an emphasis on camaraderie and fellowship that persists through generations of students and promotes lifetime commitments to school spirit. As A&M admitted increasing numbers of women and its population became increasingly diverse (A&M was now a full-service University that included fairly new Colleges of Education and Liberal Arts), the stresses and strains of growth began to make themselves felt through a number of important social battles that took place on campus and in the courts between about 1976 and the early 1990s. These battles included the entry of female cadets into the Corps and their efforts to eliminate the abuse frequently visited on them by a Corps and a campus habituated to misogynistic thinking and behavior. Their battle to obtain equal treatment, including entry into the Parsons Mounted Cavalry and Ross Volunteers, the elite companies reserved for men, is an ongoing one. Because the administration is loathe to respond with sanctions unless forced to do so, aggrieved women and their families have on occasion sought publicity and/or legal redress. The other important battles have of course been the ones centering on gay students and issues. In the late 70's and early 80's, a group of students sought to establish a Gay Student Services organization. The University of course refused recognition, fearful of the financial retaliation that would result on the part of the members of the Association of Former Students. Despite the occasional antagonism between gay men and lesbians within the student organization (lesbians were far outnumbered and gay men, reflecting the external social mores, clearly disliked sharing organizational power and responsibility with women, a situation that has now changed), it was primarily lesbians who testified when the case was finally heard in Houston. The University was willing to spend the money to appeal this case to the United States Supreme Court rather than settle it amicably. The case was resolved only when the Supreme Court refused to hear it, thus allowing to stand the ruling of the 5th District Court that Texas A&M must recognize Gay Student Services (now Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Aggies/GLBA). The larger context of this case, and the crutch used by the University to support its arguments, is the antiquated Texas State sodomy law (21.06) that gay organizations throughout the state continue to struggle unsuccessfully to expunge from our legal statutes. The loss of the court case to the student organization did not, as we might expect, create a better climate for gay and lesbian people on campus. In fact, in the short term, it may have done the reverse since open discussion reaffirmed the hostility of most members of the community to sexual irregularities and what are seen as transgressions against the tenets of fundamentalist religious orthodoxies. In this climate, administrators felt free to rescind job offers to prospective faculty on discovering that they were gay. One remarkable case in point was the Dean of Liberal Arts who, in the late '80s, rescinded an offer to a department's choice for Head because, he said, while a faculty member might be gay or lesbian, we couldn't have department heads who were known to be gay for fear of financial retaliation by donors against the College. The long-term chilling effect of this action on the department in question, on the College, and on the student/faculty community in general, cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, the rejected prospective department head did not sue. And despite the then-dean's attempts at damage control, rumors circulated. The prevailing tenor with regard to all things gay, lesbian, or bi continued to be fear, very much in keeping with the climate maintained by the traditional "don't ask, don't tell" policy that had been in place since the days of the all-male military college when numerous gay men cloaked their activities behind powerful institutional positions and heterosexual marriages. The most recent installment in this narrative--and the immediate context in which I was able finally to establish a permanent course in gay and lesbian literature in the English Department--begins in 1992 or thereabouts. Somehow, and very quietly, which is how oppositional gestures have succeeded in this environment, a sexual orientation clause had appeared in the student handbook's non-discrimination section. As sometimes happens, this inclusion had gone unnoticed and unremarked until a certain member of the Faculty Senate, during a review of the University's Policies and Procedures Manual, moved to include a sexual orientation clause in that all-encompassing legal document on the grounds that it was already a de facto item in the student handbook. A very public and sometimes very heated public discussion ensued. The Administration did not want the language included in its official documentation for the usual reason: the reactionary big bucks donors to the University who have an extraordinarily powerful lobby in the Association of Former Students. But of course, the legal reason given by the President for his response was different: the University's lawyers claimed that if gay and lesbian faculty were to be included in the official non-discrimination language of the University (the students, you see, as a paying constituency rather than paid labor are a different class, differently treated from faculty and staff), "fat people"--this was the example consistently used--would soon be asking for the same rights, and we couldn't have that kind of ridiculous request, now, could we? This was the extent of the Administration's counterargument. There were public hearings at which several faculty (including myself) testified (and came out publicly). The small cadre of faculty leading this drive for inclusion--there were only three of us willing to speak out, a gay man, a lesbian, and a bisexual woman--also managed to solicit adverse media publicity in all of Texas's major metropolitan areas (Houston, Dallas & Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio) and this put considerable pressure on the Administration. While Former Students were calling the President about his inability to keep queers in line, the urban populations of Texas were tut-tutting about the persistent backwardness of A&M. We proved our case of sexual discrimination and harrassment in the court of public opinion. On campus, and following some heated internal debates, the Faculty Senate voted 2/3 in our favor and 1/3 against the inclusion of the non-discrimination language in the Policy and Procedures Manual. The President then, not unexpectedly, and following the wishes of the Board of Regents, ignored the Faculty Senate's vote and refused the proposal, thus maintaining the legal and official status quo. But--and this is crucial--the President's refusal to accept the Senate's vote earned many friends for gay people across the campus. So, even though we did not win that particular battle, we were able to pressure the President into pressing charges against harassers on campus, into supporting gay and lesbian students as active participants in the educational enterprise of this community, and into helping foster more positive attitudes through educational programs in dorms and in classes. The most important outcome of this difficult and exhilarating time was a more open, if not always civil, public conversation about diverse sexualities at all levels of the community and between its various constituencies. This paved the way for the relatively easy passage of our first, and so far only, permanent (that is, listed in the catalogue) course in gay and lesbian studies. I introduced our gay and lesbian literature course in Fall 1992 under the rubric of a rotating topics course regularly offered by the English Department. The descriptive title "Gay and Lesbian Literature: The Tradition in English" appeared after "English 394: Studies in Genre" in the course schedule each of the four times it was taught in 1992, 1993, 1995, and 1996. Every student on campus had access to the course schedule listings and, consequently, to the gay/lesbian course. There was never a complaint and there was never any negative publicity about the course. On the contrary, one year, a student who had taken the course wrote a very positive and fairly lengthy editorial in the student paper stating that this course was a powerful educational tool. Not coincidentally, we never mentioned it in our discussions with the Administration. When I wanted to put the course through the process to make it into a permanent offering, that is to run it up the chain of committee approvals from the department through the college to the university committees, to get it into the University catalogue with its own number, title and description, I was thwarted by the fears of our dean and department head who, at that time in 1995, were attempting to get approval from the Board of Regents for a Humanities Center that was (and still is) being viewed as the forum of left-wing revisionists in the College of Liberal Arts. They didn't want to "introduce an issue that might confuse their main goal." In other words, they were afraid of being accused of being queer-lovers. But the Regents have viewed the College that way in any event, without benefit of the course request. In a meeting with the Dean, I agreed to postpone going forward for approval until the Regents had met, but I also pointed out that this course would make no difference in their already jaundiced perspective. I was vindicated when the Regents turned down the Humanities Center proposal and the Dean told me "You were right." Once I did go ahead with the course, there was little anyone could do to stop it because we had covered all bureaucratic bases: there were no technicalities that could be used to block it. By the summer of 1996 when the course reached the Faculty Senate for final approval, it had already been taught four times with a solid enrollment that demonstrated student interest in the topic. The course as proposed is an elective and not part of any required curriculum, so it cannot be objected to as an attempt to be politically coercive. In this case, having followed a policy of "don't ask, don't tell" in the initial development of the course worked very much in favor of the success of my efforts. The course was approved that summer by the Faculty Senate with one dissenting vote, was taught again as a 394 rotating topics course in 1997, appeared in University catalogue number 120 this past spring as English/Women's Studies 333, and is being offered for the first time under that number this semester, Spring 1998. The circumstances of the course's passage through the Faculty Senate were rather more interestingly complex than this skeletal narrative has suggested, and they raise some important questions. The committees through which the course passed on its way to the Senate could not raise any objections, even if they had wanted to, because all bureaucratic p's and q's had been minded in the prior teaching and current presentation of the course for approval. Once in the Faculty Senate, however, the course was fair game for public discussion. Several important aspects of our campus climate came into play at this point. The first was that attitudes toward gay and lesbian people had been irrevocably changed by the public discussions about official anti-discrimination language, with the result that the huge majority of faculty (and for that matter students as well) are reluctant to appear to be rabid homophobes, whatever their personal feelings. Second, the considerable tension between the Faculty Senate and the Administration, and the rancor felt by the Senate and other faculty because of the Administration's apparent contempt for faculty opinions and wishes, worked very much in favor of this course, which became an item in the larger agenda of the Senate's desire to flex its muscles. Last, but not least, was the agenda of liberal straight men to make visible and aggressive common cause against the right wing on campus and among the Former Students; especially active were straight males in the English Department and in the College of Liberal Arts who had been fighting the Eagle Forum's campaigns to take over local school districts and to control school curricula. The linchpin of my strategy in getting this course moved through an aggressively homophobic bureaucracy was to utilize the energies and political clout of the numerous liberal faculty who themselves feel increasingly embattled in a conservative environment. Although some of these "liberals" may themselves be interpersonally homophobic, appeals to their liberal-democratic ideologies impelled them to use the issues raised by this course to advance their own agendas with the administration and their conservative colleagues. For these liberal males, my course was a gift: to use a male metaphor, they picked up the ball and ran, with glee, straight over anyone foolish enough to raise objections. In the staff room, they grunted and huffed and puffed in preparation for the ensuing battles. In fact, there were a few rabid right-wing fundamentalist types who attempted to derail approval of the course, but they made little headway against a generally common sense attitude. The single sticking point in their discussion (because they couldn't find any other points to make) was that Shakespeare appeared on the syllabus. This gave a colleague the opportunity for overkill at the meeting of the Senate: he presented the assembled senators with a list of over 75 scholarly articles and books on Shakespeare and homoeroticism. My colleagues were so delighted to have a small grenade to lob at the opposition that I had to make a concerted effort to make certain that I spoke for the course and made it known that I was its originator. Somehow, I had begun to feel that it had become the property of straight white liberal males. This is not to say that I didn't welcome their support. I most emphatically did and was very grateful to them for their considerable efforts. But I did begin to wonder where support ended and where what we used to call cooptation begins. At what point are oppositional gestures appropriated and reformulated by the leveling forces of institutional politics and by other manipulative forces that absorb opposition by offering small palliative rewards? This process, then, raised some perhaps troubling questions for me, and they are some of the same questions I had when I was establishing our women's studies program. As our society becomes increasingly comfortable with gay people and with variant sexualities, and as we are mainstreamed, increasingly included within the circle of "normality" and "respectable" consumerism, to what extent do we lose our own voices as we become part of others' agendas? I don't have an answer for this question, or others that it raises, but it troubles me increasingly as I note that now my class is evenly balanced between gay/lesbian and straight people, and as my impression is that gays and lesbians now seem rather less interested than are straight people (especially straight women) in learning their history and in struggling with the complex issues that inform our understanding of sexual orientation. It seems to me that there is a chasm in our public discourse between, on the one hand, the gay media's seeking of mainstream access as an unequivocal good and, on the other hand, the dense scholarship on the history of sexuality being produced by gay academics. Is there a space between these extremes for enlightened discussion of the myriad implications and possible ramifications of our success? | ||
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© Harriette Andreadis 2001 | ||
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