on love, fiction and art; or, why some things are worth the hard work.

My friends know my aversion to twitter all too well.  I have taken one of my famous 'principled stances' against the social networking platform; I have said "anything that's worth saying is worth taking more than 140 characters".  That quote, by the way is 69 characters.  This, of course, is a simplification and some things can be perfectly said in few words.  I am fascinated by the six-word memoir project that was turned into a book back in 2008, when twitter was ONLY doing 100 million tweets per quarter.  Getting a spirit, idea, feeling across in only a few words is a magical talent.  

And to be entirely honest, my biggest problem in the written (and spoken) word is using too many characters to say what I have to say.  I am honestly jealous of writers who can pack meaning into few words, who can write concise sentences that cut like a knife, that don't require semi-colons and comma splices to translate thoughts from their psyche onto paper.   

Yet the fact remains: almost all of my favorite works of fiction are incredibly long.  Infinite Jest, of course, takes the cake but Absalom isn't much thinner, and I'm pretty sure Just Above My Head is the best James Baldwin novel, but it is definitely the longest, as well.  

I know that with works of fiction, longer, of course, isn't always better.  Works should be perfectly realized, exactly as long as they need to be to inhabit a place, embody human characters.  "As I lay dying" doesn't need to be, indeed shouldn't be, longer than it is.  "L'amant" is sparse and short and shocking; it screams with its silences.  Length isn't, I know, a marker for quality (looking at you, Proust).  

But an advantage of a long work of fiction, as a reader, is that you are forced to inhabit other human beings for weeks, months.  You sit inside of these other people, and they sit inside of you.  You have to work at them, and they work at you.  Long pieces of fiction are not generally easy; our attention may wane.  But, when they are good, they give us an experience that is nearly impossible to replicate.  We wouldn't be willing to watch a movie, on and off, for a month or more.  Books sit with us, they chip away at us even when not open and in our laps.  The time they we spend with them, the weeks or more, the work required of us to strip off our own identity (if briefly, for moments, if imperfectly, if incompletely) and to sit in some one else's truth or place or being, this is the transformative power of fiction.  

It was Zadie Smith (whose novels are not particularly long) who once said in a talk that fiction is the only work of art that convinces us that we are not the only real human being alive, that others think, feel, exist just as deeply.  The idea is, of course, not hers, but she expressed it as clearly as anyone I had ever read/heard at the naive age of 22.  Fiction, and art, teach empathy; they show us that others are real.  For me, being forced to sit with a single work for weeks or longer makes me exist outside of myself in ways that nothing else ever has.  It is a profoundly troubling experience, and with Infinite Jest literally made me feel as though I was losing my bearings on my own construction of myself and my world.  It is a profoundly important experience, and has done more to change my view of the world, of others, of personhood and place, than nearly anything else.  

In Absalom, absalom we hear the same narrative over and over, from different people at different times.  These myths are created right before our very eyes, and they change with every telling.  Faulkner is often cited as THE american post-modern writer and this novel embodies why.  You literally watch narrative being created, and shifting, and the truth becomes subjective.  Infinite Jest creates a world, a near future, terrifying and familiar.  Characters come and go, are depressed, addicted (to drugs, entertainment, violence), and you are forced to inhabit each of their identities in turn.  And many of them fit uncomfortably.  Time shifts and turns on itself, the world makes no sense.  Just above my head starts with grief that can only be explained by the love of a brother, and best friend.  At first the grief is disorienting and makes no sense.  But after you live inside the relationship,  felt over decades, over relationships made and lost, through shifts in history and geography and politics, the grief becomes real, and personal.  None of these transformative experiences, for me as a reader, would have been possible without literally living inside these books for weeks.  

There is something to be said for putting in work, for trying to tackle big things, for sticking with something or some one even when things are difficult.  It is almost cliche at this point to decry the ways in which our interactions (with each others, with art) have become more superficial thanks to technology.  And yet, it feels to me that interactions have become increasingly replaceable, and therefore it is often easier to discard a person, a thing, a relationship, a work or art or fiction, when the going gets tough.  

There are certain rewards that can come only from interactions that require you to give your time, your energy, your attention, your love.  And not for 140 characters, but for a day, a week, a month, a year.  It's not easy.  But it is essential.  It is art, and fiction, and love.  And, in my mind, it is worth the work.  

I'm gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie

This post is not going to be political, at least overtly so (what, after all, isn't political?) nor is it going to be sweeping social commentary.  It is not going to be a rant about whiteness or soapboxing about some queer shit.  It's going to be… personal.  Which, frankly, is terrifying. 

Most of you out there in the interwebs likely know, if you know me, that I have recently finished graduate school.  I have always found endings more bitter than sweet; while moments like graduations are celebratory and markers of important milestones, they are also goodbyes.  When I graduated from college, I felt the personal goodbyes very dearly.  It was as though, in one day, I had to say goodbye to most of the important people in my life.  With graduate school, it felt like saying goodbye to a life/lifestyle.  I wasn't leaving New York and my peoples there.  Rather, it was a moving on, a growing up.  I would not longer be able to call myself, technically, a student.  And being a grad student at Rockefeller shields one from a lot of fairly horrific things about adult life.  For example: I lived in New York for 6 years and had never had to look for an apartment.  Or pay market price for one.  I lived in a building with my colleagues and friends.  I had no commute.  Literally, none.  

Those of you who know me likely also know that I, shortly after I defended my thesis, took a visiting assistant professor job at Vassar College.  I had, through the fall and winter, been applying for every job under the sun, from the traditional post-docs* through to tenure track teaching positions.  While the post-doc job search went well, clearly tenure track jobs weren't willing to take a chance on a 28-year old without a PhD or any papers out in the last 5 years.  

One school did take a chance on me, and that was Vassar College.  I have a fond place in my heart for Vassar both because I also went to a small liberal-arts college (about which I actually have quite mixed feelings) and because Vassar is incredibly 1) gay and 2) present in NYC.  I can't tell you how many Vassar alums I've met at sex parties and in bathroom stalls (just kidding mom).  And Vassar is located close enough to New York that many of the professors actually do the commute daily.  

The commute.  It's a 90 minute train ride from 125th street in Harlem to downtown Poughkeepsie, roughly 3 miles from Vassar.  This is coming from some one who's previous commute was exactly 0.5 city blocks.  Also, not being a morning person, the notion of being on a train at something like 6:19am in order to be in class by 9am was simply not an option.  I decided that I would only take a job at Vassar if keeping a small apartment in Poughkeepsie (to minimize commute horrors) and Harlem (to ensure that I wouldn't want to jump off a cliff for the lack of an engaging and not undergrad-centered social life) would be financially feasible.  Happily, Vassar keeps apartments on and near campus at below-market rates for professors.  

I took one.  I'm sitting in it now.  

Those of you out there who know me (I'm going to assume that most of you do, because, you know, why else would you have waded this deep into some random millings arounds and personal reflections of someone you didn't know or care about) also know that the last few months have brought all sorts of changes, both for the good and bad.  I will spare the details here, and I am going to try to avoid the all-to-tpyical blog-post self-aggrandization that I find so very infuriating**.  However, I have kind of needed one in the win column for some time now.

Today was a beautiful, late-summer-early-fall feeling day in New York.  I bought some new digs for my teaching.  On the train ride up I had my work spinning in front of me, Frank Ocean (!!!) in my ears.  I've always found trains calming, and the metro north may appear to be my own personal productivity bubble.  There just aren't any distractions.  There is just a nose and a grindstone.

The bike ride from the train was a beautiful summer night and filled with darkness (which I grew up with, and don't see in the city) and country noises (crickets like a mother fucker).  

And now I'm sitting here in my second home.  My country house.  I'm going to take you all on a tour and show you around.  Suffice it to say that I feel at home here, in this place I barely know.  Turns out that a friend of a friend who is a faculty member at Vassar lived in this apartment before me.  I had coffee with him the other day and my time with him made me feel like I would actually be able to build some really meaningful (and political) relationships on campus.  Maybe its this spirit that is permeating the space for me.  Maybe it's all the weird little quirks so typical of houses that were built half a century ago and haven't been generically renovated.  Perhaps it's the ability to have space, and quite.  Perhaps it's the notion that I've been trying to cultivate in my mind that it might just be possible, if only for the year that I am here, to be both a city and country boy, both an academic and a ratchet hot mess, an educator AND a scientist (a rarer combination than you might think), a scientists and a radical; to find spaces, geographical, rhetorical, spiritual and intellectual, for all of my various identities.  

A photographical journey of my new (second) home:

The MetroNorth branch of the Osmundson Lab

The MetroNorth branch of the Osmundson Desk

My Front door 

Yoshi's new home 

The empty kitchen.  My table won't make it in the door with it's legs.  I'll be performing surgery on her tomorrow (with any luck) and will be able to cook and eat soon thereafter.

Living room! 

"Bed room" (view from the living room)

Kitchen (with boxes) 

These lighting fixtures clearly date to the 1950s.  And I wouldn't change a thing about them. 

 Ceiling fan!  It's all happening!!

FOOTNOTES

*Please excuse this political interlude, after I explicitly promised an apolitical blog entry.  I just cannot resist.  For those of you who are not scientists or academics, first, good job.  You've made some solid life decisions at some point.  Second, turns out that, in the sciences, a PhD is no longer sufficient training for a tenure track position.  After completing a PhD, one must enter yet another apprenticeship, working long (really) hours for incredibly little compensation (the national minimum, which is actually paid by many institutions INCLUDING universities in large cities such as New York and San Francisco with v high costs of living, is around 38,000 this year.  People do it, but being a single parent or HOH on 38,000 a year is, well, tough).  Turns out there is a labor market in science (who would have guessed).  And that market is flooded.  While we constantly hear talking points about how our students are being undereducated in STEM subjects, such as biology, we are consistently turning out more scientists than there are long-term, well-paying research positions.  This means that 10 PhDs are educated for every 3 tenure-track professor jobs (all this has been well documented in a series of articles in Time and the Washington Post, amongst others).  Also, turns out research is expensive to do and takes a long time and a lot of labor.  And having a low-cost labor base is an incredibly cost effective way to get that labor done.  Having some one toil away for 5 to 10 years AFTER completing their PhD with absolutely no job security (post-doc contracts are typically renewed yearly) may be a good way to get a lot of science done for not a terrible amount of money.  But it turns out that it doesn't lead to a great morale in a lot of research labs; it's not an exaggeration to say that hopelessness and despair are both fairly common in academic research settings.  

**"SIPPING A COCKTAIL ON THE PORCH, LIFE IS GOOD!" 

   "I LOVE MY BOYFRIEND, IM THE LUCKIEST GURL IN THE WORLD"

   "SEE, THINGS ALWAYS WORK OUT IN THE END!!"

   pukes on self

Some thoughts on hipsterism, and constructive vs deconstructive forces; or the queer art of reconstruction

I just finished David Foster Wallace's excellent essay 'E Unibus Pluram', a meditation on entertainment (well, TV), culture and literature.  I don't really want to write tonight about TV or literature, per se, but I do have some thing to say about irony, hipsterism and queerness.  Hopefully you'll understand what I mean by the end of this post.

Wallace basically claims that TV has appropriated post-modern aesthetics in order to sell shit.  Specifically, TV has become almost fully ironic, allowing the watcher to feel in on the joke, and therefore special.  This has all sorts of ramifications, but I want to focus on Wallace's feelings on irony.  This essay is, essentially, a take down of hipsterism written in 1993, before our current hipsters had stopped wetting their beds.  Wallace writes:

'Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their own cage.' This is because irony, as entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow... oppressed.

That is, irony is a deconstructive force.  Irony allows us to take things apart, to question paradigms.  It allows us to ridicule.  As Wallace claims, it exposes hypocrisy.  Irony, therefore, can be an incredibly potent tool when it comes to exposing terrible things we often live with without thinking too hard about it.  Irony does not, as Wallace points out, necessarily provide alternative modes of living.  

This is my problem with 'hipsterism': hipsters are too cool for school in an exclusive and terrible way.  They deconstruct everything they see.  They live, as others have pointed out, an extended adolescence, balking at the idea of a wife/husband/kids/white-picket-fence/suburban life.  I fuck with hipsters on this last point.  I think the nuclear family and the societal norms saying that everyone should be in a monogamous relationship and on the path to home ownership are entirely janked.   What hipsterism doesn't offer is an alternative, unless you consider listening to loud music that no one has ever heard of and drinking terrible beer ad infinitum a viable life-style.

I have been going on some first dates lately (yes).  Inevitably, on first dates, the conversation about expectations and long-term future potential comes up.  The reason I have been going on first dates (don't ask) also started me thinking about constructive versus deconstructive forces.  See, for all my queer theory bullshit, turns out a lot of what I want in life is fairly traditional.  I might or might not require/want a monogamous relationship, but I definitely want a partner, and I want to live with this person and think about having kids some time in a near-ish future.  And although I want to live in the same building as all my best friends so my future child can have about 6 co-parents (I believe these used to be called things like Aunties and Uncles), the things I DO want might look a lot like some fun-house mirror version of what most people I went to high school with want.  

And this is the thing.  Queerness isn't just a deconstructive force.  As post-modernists (?), queer folks have been spectacular at pointing out all the flaws in the system.  We can pick heteronormativity apart like hyenas feasting on a fresh kill.  Given our relationship to (and oppression by) heternormative forces, this is in our blood.  But the thing about actually BEING queer as opposed to being a queer THEORIST is that we have to live within the confines of the world we make for ourselves.  

That is, queerness is also a constructive force.  Tearing down walls of bullshit heteronormitivity isn't enough.  We have to construct a queer house in which to live.  We have to try as hard as we can to understand all the forces that socialized us into believing relationships have to look a certain way, and decide how we want our relationships to ACTUALLY look.  Sometimes, some people will make intentional, thoughtful, and queer decisions that lead them towards lives that might look normative, from the outside.  Sometimes, some people will make intentional, thoughtful, and queer decisions that lead them to have several partners, or none.  But all of these decisions, because they are intentional and thoughtful and queer, are constructive.  We are providing an alternative, if only for ourselves.  As weary and cynical as we might be (and as I certainly am at this present moment), we do believe in brighter, better alternatives, and I, for one, am willing to risk my future on the fact that I can build a queer alternative within whose walls I, personally, can live.  

A response to 'Mother who stole son's education gets 12 years in prison'

This story has been in the news for some time, but the verdict came down and the mother responsible is going to see prison time.  And not just a little bit.  What, precisely, did this woman do?  Well, after losing her housing, this woman used a friend's/babysitter's address to enroll her son in a public school in a neighboring district, not where she held her last known address.  

The very notion of stealing a public education is wholly preposterous.  It is at the very heart of structural violence.  Based upon your address, and your zip code, your child will be enrolled in a school.  Districts are often funded by local taxes; therefore the more wealthy the district, the more resources it can allocate to its public schools.  Those who live in less wealthy zip codes don't have access to the high-quality public education that middle and high income communities enjoy.  There is a fundamental link between income and the quality of your education, and there are laws reinforcing this inequality.  If we view quality education as a human right, then laws restricting access to quality education (such as the Jim Crow laws) are inherently violent, and that violence is ingrained in systems of power and law (tax law, educational policy, etc).  

I know all too well how this feels on a personal level.  And I am not alone.

If you know me well at all, you probably know where I come from.  I grew up in a rural community with a struggling and underfunded public school system.  Already, when I compared myself to public school students in Seattle, a mere 45 minutes away, I knew that I was years behind.  Due to years of sustained population growth to the entire region, the historically underfunded public schools were busting at the seams.  The community could no longer deny the absolute necessity for new school buildings.  

My parents moved to this community from an even further removed, even smaller town up in the foothills of the cascades.  They moved, in part, because they believed their children would have access to higher quality public schools.  The ability to move, to displace their entire family, to give their children a better chance was already an immense privilege not available to every family.  And then they watched as the public schools in this new town became more and more crowded, the class size larger and larger.

And then they built a new elementary school.  

I was going into 5th grade when the new school was to open.  I remember that my mom dragged me to the PTA meeting where they were announcing which students got to go to the new school (with the better teachers, the better equipment) and which students would remain in President's Elementary.  I remember my mother's anxiety as she stepped up to the map that related one's geography, one's address, to one's educational opportunity.  

I remember the look in my mother's face when she saw the map.  All the new developments, the shiny new McMansions that were bought up by folks commuting from down South, were on the part of the map that got to go to the new school.  My house, on the side of town with the farms and the folks who had been around for a while, the folks who's property tax was significantly less, was on the side of the map that was stuck in the school that was built in the 1950s.  The economics of the situation were not veiled.  

And I remembered my mother's anger at the unfairness of the situation.  Her child, for whom she had moved her family, was faced with a barrier to getting his best possible education.  If my mother could have lied to get me into the better school, she would have.  

Wanting the best for your child, and his or her future, and being willing to fight for that future should be a positive attribute.  We hear all too often that poor parents don't care about their children's education.  They don't ask their children to study, or teach them about the ethics of hard work.  These are kids who watch TV and play video games, but don't read or study.  But stories like this rub uncomfortably against this myth.  Here is a mother willing to go to jail, quite literally, to give her child a better future.  She cares, obviously, with all her life.  And what do we, as a society give her?  Do we fight for better schools in all communities?  Do we try to break down the economic barriers between high-performing and low-performing schools?  Do we remove the false boundaries that divide communities and schools?  Do we give parents more flexibility to keep their children in the same schools even after their economics (ie losing a job) may force a change in their address or zip code?  

No.  We send them to jail.  Because they didn't play by the rules.

But the rules are structural violence.  Keeping children from their best possible education is not to be lauded.  And fighting against that violence should not be criminalized.  

the end times

May 21st, 7:20 pm seems a rather unremarkable time on a rather unremarkable Saturday evening.  The day was calm, but an hour ago the heavens opened up and rain poured down.  The city gets quiet at times like this, the sounds of cars dampened by the water all around.  But there wasn't even a single clap of thunder, not to mention a tremble of the ground.  You see at 6pm tonight, a little more than an hour ago, just as the sky was opening up to rain, the world was supposed to end.

For the past several months, a small but loyal group has traveled around the country professing that the end times are near.  They have had a heavy presence in New York, and personally handed me their literature.  Between the wars and famines, tornadoes and floods, global warming and tsunamis and exploding nuclear reactors and birds falling from the sky, they might not be wholly wrong.  But predicting that the God laid forth a date written in code in the bible seems a little risky.  The same group got it wrong once already, in 1994. 

There have been a series of articles in the last few weeks about those who believe with unwavering faith that today will be judgment day.  People have sold and given away all their worldly belongings, given up jobs and time with family, all because they believed with absolute certainty in the coming of the end times. 

This type of faith has always fascinated me; I have a hard time believing this absolutely in much of anything at all.  The one thing I do understand is the sense of desperation and impending doom that drives one to join a cult or a commune or believe in the second coming.  I feel that desperation and I know the pressing weight of doom.  The world can be a terrifying place where little is certain except loss and change.  Although it is cliche to talk about the tough economic times, but I have felt their weight since long before the recession.  Entire towns have lost their livelihoods as manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas.  A lot of working communities have had an identity crisis, and I can guarantee that the May 21st movement doesn't include a lot of Wall Street bankers, but it does contain a lot of disenfranchised white people, people so desperate for something in which to have faith. 

I have thought for a few weeks about the rapture and end times, predicted to be so near.  The image that I have been unable to shake is actually of the day after.  Tomorrow morning when the world has kept on turning, when no earthquakes have come, when no heathens are left behind, and no one has ascended to heaven, a man is going to have to walk back into an empty apartment, having given away everything he owns.  The one thing this man has believed in with all his soul, energy, and will was, in the end, false.  The world did not end.  And now he must rebuild his life, and wait, I suppose, for something else in which to believe, for the next rapture to come. 

I just finished reading Zadie Smith's brilliant essay on the facebook generation, aka us.  

Before I even finished reading the article, I had emailed it to two people; I had also posted it to my facebook wall.  

The thing is that I agree, almost completely, with Zadie's critique of facebook.  But beyond that, I agree with her take on what it is doing to us as people, and what it is doing to our relationships.

Facebook, as Zadie argues, reduces us to a shadowy and incomplete version of ourselves.  Our likes and dislikes are well organized, our relationship status clearly defined, along with our religious and political beliefs.  Our photos are posted, our hundreds of 'friends' continuously comment.  Our interactions with our peers are superficial at best.  

But we are so much more than the accumulation of photos and beliefs and books and tv shows and 'friends'.  We are not reducable to our online presence, from which we increasinly refuse to disconnect.  

In my arguments against facebook, and especially my "principled" stance against twitter, I usually make exactly this point:

"The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would."

Facebook (and twitter) help us keep in contact with people who we wouldn't necessarily through other, slightly more time consuming, technological tools.  It makes me wonder, if I am unwilling to write a 10 minute email to update some one, personally, on my life, are they really important enough to keep in touch with?

And yet, I do not delete my facebook account.

My morning typically look like this:

9:16 Alarm rings, snooze

9:25 Alarm rings, snooze

9:31 Alarm rings, roll out of bed

walk, in underwear (hopefully roommates have left the apartment) to the coffee machine, fill with water, turn on

sit on couch (still in underwear).  Check email.  Worry that work will infringe upon my morning.  Delete 17 emails from various list serves, read anything from real people.

still on couch, click from the gmail tab to the facebook tab (neither is ever closed).  click refresh.  click most recent.  scroll.  scroll.  scroll.  scroll.

If facebook is a world in which I am so uncomfortable, why do I stay?  Why is it one of the first activities of my day, everyday?  Am I addicted?  Do I really think it will keep me connected to those I care about?  Do I really think it will help me stay informed, and on top of whatever issue may be going on that day?  Do I think it will help me stay connected to my various communities (queer, radical, scientific, literary) and up-to-date on what I should be reading?  

I don't know why I stay, to be honest.  I may delude myself into almost believing enough of these reasons to make Facebook seem worthwhile.  Maybe I am afraid of being disconnected.  Maybe I never got over being a loser as a kid, and maybe facebook makes me feel, if virtually, popular.  Maybe it does connect me to communities and information.  

And maybe I have just grown incredibly used to living in worlds that don't quite fit.  Worlds that bristle.  I am a queer man, and the world is certainly heteronormative.  I am a socialist, the world is decidedly and violently capitalist.  The world from which I came, of loggers and farmers, of tea partiers and disaffected white people, is not a home.  Nor is the world of white liberal academia.  I tend to surround myself with queer people of color these days, but I obviously am not a perfect fit in this world either.  I certainly stick out.  And get looks.  And get called a chocolate queen.  

Perhaps this shifting between many worlds, none of which are completely comfortable, allows me to accept facebook for the little good that it does, and put up with the discomfort it causes.  

Or perhaps I am just not, like any addict, ready to quit.  Perhaps I live in a carefully guarded self-dillusion where I look down on people for always being on their smart phones, for updating their twitter accounts about their bowel movements, for reducing their lives to 140 characters, or to a tag on a facebook page, but where I am unwilling to give up or even admit my own dependence on the very same technologies.  Perhaps I am striving for an impossible ballance between technology and reality.  

A tough week in the struggle

It has been a tough week in the struggle.

First we had a rash of blame-the-victim mentality in the Eddie Long scandal.  Innocent until proven guilty, yes, but this man is clearly guilty of one thing: being a raging and unashamed homophobe.  He has called for gay people to die.  Like be put to death.  Like not joking.  I don't care if he sucks dick or likes men.  I do care that he has spent so many years preaching hate towards homos and claiming that women should play subservient roles.  

Raymond Chase

We have a state official in Michigan literally stalking and harassing a college student who happens to be 1) the president of the student council and 2) openly gay.  The state assistant attorney general, Andrew Shrivell, maintains a blog where the Chris Armstrong, the student in question, is, among other things, shown covered with rainbow flags and swastikas.  Shrivell claims that Armstrong is pursuing a 'radical gay agenda', but when asked specifics he can only cite gender neutral housing (for transgenered students).  Quel horreur!

We have 50cent tweeting "If you a man and your over 25 and you don't eat pu**y just kill your self damn it. The world will be a better place. Lol."   I argue that this may not necessarily be homophobic as it were; I'm not sure gay people always register to 50.  It's entirely possible that he's simply prodding straight men to go down on their partners.  Which is lovely, really.  However, assuming that ALL men are straight, as his tweet does, is certainly exceptionally heteronormative.  And what with the news of late, I think suggesting that those of us who might not conform to gender norms commit suicide, well that's just fucking stupid.  Fucking.  Stupid.

And that brings me to the last, and really the biggest reason that I am sitting here ranting and eating my own weight in junk food.  In the past 3 weeks, we've lost 5 queer youth to suicide, many of them with obvious ties to bullying of one type or another.  And these are just the examples that we know of.

Tyler Clementi

Let's be honest: LGBTQ youth have a long documented high suicide rate.  Bullying of LGBTQ youth is nothing new, and it is no secret.  What IS new is that, with the internet, we have a somewhat trackable record of bullying and we can connect it more directly to its aftereffects.  

I'm not the first to say this today, but with two college students dead in the last week, this is a wake up call.  

And now I get to stand up and say that I am a part of the radical gay agenda.  

I want gender neutral housing for anyone who wants it, in college or otherwise.

I want marriage equality.

As much as it pains me to say it, we got to get rid of Don't Ask Don't Tell.  I don't think we should be fighting for access to what is a historically problematic institution that is currently engaged in two imperialist wars, but the time has come where we simply cannot afford to let bigotry stand.  

You see, these things are connected.  Bullying doesn't come from thin air, it comes from a society where people are not treated equally.  It comes from having our government argue that gay marriage is not as worthy as normative marriage.  It comes from knowing that gay men and women cannot do all of the same things that straight men and women can.  

Culture certainly is bottom up, and we have a long way to go to erase bigotry from our society.  But culture is also top down, and the government denying rights and insisting on separate-but-equal institutions creates a culture of dehumanization of queer people.  We are, not only culturally but also institutionally, the Other.  

So I said before that, in the light of these suicides, we should focus not on marriage but instead on creating safety for our community.  But I think now that this is a fallacy.  We must do both, we must do everything and all at once.  The issues are one, really and that issue is equality.  As long as inequality exists, bullying will exist, homophobia will exist.  

Queers and allies it is time for an offensive.  If we are being accused of having a radical gay agenda, let us at least craft one.  Let our radical agenda be one of love and equality, let us constantly question the value of gender norms in our society, let us build meaningful communities for us and the ones we love.  

Let us not stand for bigotry on any level.

The time has come to fight back.