Race and Sexuality as systems of domination

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Monday December 22, 2008 · 5:37 PM PST

2008/12/22 · 17:37

I'm tired. I'm tired of the "gay is the new black" nonsense. I'm tired of "you can hide your sexuality." I'm just fucking tired.

I'm a gay man. I'm a sociologist one of whose teaching specializations is Race, but who also teaches Sexuality and Gender. One of the things I'm proudest of is that I'm a white man whose Race and Ethnicity classes students of color compete to get into and who is asked to speak to student-of-color organizations. That's a level of trust and legitimacy that doesn't come easy and that I've had to work hard to gain. And I'm proud of it. That's why some of the conversations that have occurred since election day have been so depressing and painful.

MAJeff

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Friday December 19, 2008 · 7:24 PM PST

2008/12/19 · 19:24

Yesterday morning, I gave my last final of the semester. It was my Sex and Gender class, and walking into the final, one of my students stopped to chat with me. A week earlier, we had been discussing HIV/AIDS. As a sociologist, I deal with this as a social phenomenon, and one of the things I try to impart on my students is the historical context. I mentioned that in a summer class I teach on mass media and lesbian and gay communities and social movements, I have students watch Philadelphia and Silverlake LIfe: The View From Here in the same week as a way of looking at how AIDS was presented in film, and the difference between straight and gay points of view in producing AIDS narratives. The "realness" the sense from the initial viewing of the Hanks/Washington/Demme production gets blown out of the water when the watch the autobiographical documentary of the death of Tom Joslin. I hate Phliadelphia, absolutely despise it, as I'll get to.

MAJeff

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Wednesday December 10, 2008 · 5:20 AM PST

2008/12/10 · 05:20

Today, on the 60th Anniversary of the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the General Assembly will vote on aresolution calling on member states to remove laws that criminalize homosexuality.

The US government is one of the only Western democratic nations that has declined to support a United Nations Declaration calling for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality.

The Declaration will be put before the UN General Assembly this Wednesday, 10 December, which is Human Rights Day and the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"It will be the first time in its history that the UN General Assembly has ever considered the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) human rights," noted British gay human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell of the London-based LGBT rights group OutRage!

Surprise! Surprise! The United States of America doesn't support allowing queer people to live free from the threat of state violence.

MAJeff

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Tuesday December 09, 2008 · 5:50 PM PST

2008/12/09 · 17:50

There is a great line in the recent film Milk. The original quote-"this isn't an issue, it's our lives"--comes at a moment when Dan White is confronting Harvey Milk, giving him a backhanded compliment on his success. He's not successful because of skill or being right or anything else. He's successful because he has "an issue" to pursue, something that voters on board with. White does what far too many people do when it comes to the politics of gay life: they reduce our lives to a political issue.

This phenomenon has been quite pronounced with regard to the politics of marriage. After all, they say, wanting to "protect marriage" doesn't indicate any hostility to gay people. It's just a "personal opinion" on a "political issue." Sure, it's a political issue that determines how secure people's lives will be. And, yes, what marriage is being protected from is our presence. Some people are actually crazy enough to think that actively working to make our lives less secure and to keep us from "polluting" a valued social institution isn't the least bit anti-gay. They are delusional enough think they can value gay people while devaluing our lives. They can't.

MAJeff

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Thursday September 15, 2005 · 8:16 AM PDT

2005/09/15 · 08:16

As it's simple IF you ignore the complexity noted, the Massachusetts General Court, convened in Constitutional Convention, yesterday defeated a proposed constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage and creat Civil Unions by a vote of 157-39. So, marriage equality in Masachusetts is safe....for the time being.

The defeat of this amendment was caused by four interrelated factors. The first is electoral politics. In the general election last fall, every single marriage equality supporter who ran won re-election, while a couple of marriage equality opponents lost. Additionally, our supporters have won a few special elections since the general. Not only did we pick up votes via elections, but those elections also showed people who were closet supporters of marriage equality that a backlash for such a vote was unlikely. The legislature itself is different than it was during the 2004 ConCon:
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Help Save Marriage Equality in MA

MAJeff

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Wednesday August 24, 2005 · 1:14 PM PDT

2005/08/24 · 13:14

Well, we finally have a date for the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention to vote again on whether or not to do away with marriage equality in Massachusetts. It's September 14. Here's some background.

Late in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court handed down its ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. They ruled that the Bay State's exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage violated the Commonwealth's constitution.

Last spring, the General Court met as a Constitutional Convention to debate an amendment to the Constitution that would bar marriage equality. After four days of maneuvering, debating, and voting, stretched out over a couple of months, the General Court passed an amendment that would ban marriage equality but create civil unions by a vote of 105-101. We lost, but the most odious amendments were all defeated.
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My Aunts Got Married Today

MAJeff

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Sunday August 07, 2005 · 1:18 PM PDT

2005/08/07 · 13:18

[Note: I'm posting this upon my arrival home in Somerville, but I wrote it last night in the Vancouver airport. I'm not changing the tense of the piece because I want to retain the immediacy of what I was feeling last night.]

I'm not the type of person who usually cries at weddings. (I often avoid weddings altogether.) Today, tears were rolling down my face. Part of that was, of course, happiness for my aunts. They had had a rough couple of weeks. A friend of theirs died recently after a long and difficult struggle with cancer. Additionally, prior to leaving for this trip, they had to put their dog to sleep. Her own nine-year struggle with heart problems--Sweetie wasn't supposed to live more than a few months when they got her--along with breathing problems had finally become too much for her to bear.

Today, though, was a day for celebration.
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What's it like to be straight?

MAJeff

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Sunday July 03, 2005 · 1:31 PM PDT

2005/07/03 · 13:31

I just finished reading Foucault's History of Sexuality (yes, all three volumes). Aside from feeling a little like stabbing myself in the forehead, I also find myself wondering how sexual desire was experienced--how it felt--during the 600 or so years Foucault was describing. It's all well and good to describe the moral reflection that went on surrounding the role of sexual activity, but that still seems inadequate. We can look at the moral reflection of an ear, the institutional arrangements, the first-hand accounts in diaries or letters, but we'll always, to some degree or another, be filtering those things through our own subjectivities. What I want, and know is impossible, is to get inside the consciousness of people living in those social positions other than my own, a pure intersubjectivity. (Sometimes I want this; there are things I don't want to know...how someone like Jeffrey Dahmer experienced desire, for instance.)

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Dating and the Class Divide

MAJeff

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Wednesday June 29, 2005 · 4:30 AM PDT

2005/06/29 · 04:30

I have a date tonight, first one in about eight months. I'm a little nervous, for both the regular reasons (Will I like him? Will he like me? Will we both sit there suffering in silence?) and another reason that feels even more prominent at the moment. He owns a business that has experienced tremendous growth in the past year. I'm a temp who beat the poverty-care line by $20 for an emergency room visit this winter (I did have insurance, though). There's a bit of a class difference here, and that's incredibly discomforting for me.

In part, that discomfort comes from what we can't do. To be honest, at this moment in life, I can't even afford to go out for a decent dinner, something I really, really enjoy. Right from the start, I have to place limits on what we're able to do. Read More

Canada's House of Commons Passes Marriage Equality

MAJeff

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Tuesday June 28, 2005 · 7:44 PM PDT

2005/06/28 · 19:44

[Crossposted at CultureKitchen]

As I write this, I'm watching the Canadian House of Commons' final debate on bill C-38: The Civil Marriage Act, a law to extend marriage equality to all Canadians (currently, eight of ten provinces and one of three territories have established equal marriage rights). This bill's path to tonight's final reading has been a bumpy one, from the Liberal's surviving a no-confidence vote, to a bold strategy that caught the Tories off guard and passed the budget (keeping the Government from falling), to cutting off debate last night. Cabinet member Joe Camuzzo resigned his cabinet position rather than follow Prime Minister Martin's order for all members of the Cabinet to vote for C-38.

The passage of C-38 is not in doubt tonight, nor is passage in the Senate. The votes exist for marriage equality. Read More

More tales of the Felinist conspiracy

MAJeff

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Sunday June 19, 2005 · 3:27 PM PDT

2005/06/19 · 15:27

In a previous installment, The Dictatorship of the Purrletariat, I tried to warn you of the impending Felinist assault on our American way of life. Apparently, some of you haven't taken my warnings seriously, so I am forced to write again of the nefarious plotting I have uncovered.

Below, you will read the harrowing tale of an underground network, of the fighting skills they're developing, of the incendiary things they say about us humans. Be afraid...the hairballs left in your shoes are just the preliminary phase. Read More

No wonder my gaydar's off

MAJeff

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Sunday June 19, 2005 · 10:32 AM PDT

2005/06/19 · 10:32

It's not metrosexuals. No, they're last year's "trend." This year, it's because non-metrosexual straights are adopting gay styles, and some of us homos are giving up on clubwear clothing and gym scuplture:

"The codes have broken down completely," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "The other night I was at a dinner sitting next to someone who was talking about how he couldn't tell anymore, that he just didn't have any gaydar. And it was so funny. I couldn't tell if he was gay or straight."

If a straight woman directing a fashion institute has lost her gaydar, what chance to I, a lowly academic working mostly among heteros, have?

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Race and Sexuality as systems of domination

Queer Anger

The United States is an anti-gay nation

Prop 8 isn't about restricting marriage, but destroying gay life.

Marriage Equality in Massachusetts: Safe FOR NOW but Looking Ahead

Help Save Marriage Equality in MA

My Aunts Got Married Today

What's it like to be straight?

Dating and the Class Divide

Canada's House of Commons Passes Marriage Equality

More tales of the Felinist conspiracy

No wonder my gaydar's off