Q Winter 2013

Standard Deviance In November, Q conducted a survey of Yalies’ porn-watching habits. Find the full breakdown on page 18.

Porn Survey Results

ELDER PANACHE YA L E ’ S L G B T Q M A G A Z I N E

One Yale student’s journey from Mormon missionary to fierce drag queen

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VIRAL MEMORY qmagazineatyale.com

RECENT GRADUATES ARE LAUNCHING YALE’S FIRST AIDS MEMORIAL – ONLINE

13 Efforts to end school bullying in Connecticut 21 ‘Drop Me a Q’ explores open relationships and the world of Grindr 22 Debunking the myth of the consistently perfect male orgasm 24 Reviews of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Diamond Rings’ Free Dimensional 26 Frank Ocean and the queering of hip-hop 30 Artist Spotlight: The paintings of Doron Langberg 36 Christopher Phillips and queer activism at Yale 1

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Winter 2013

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Think the male orgasm is always satisfying? Think again.

Ending bullying in Connecticut schools

By Marcus Moretti

By Rachel Lipstein and Devin Race

By Eric Baudry

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ME

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By Ryan Mendías

By Rachel Lipstein

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DIAMOND RINGS

Viral Memory

By Gabe DeLeon and Travis Trew

FROM THE ARCHIVES

BEING FRANK

Out in the Lede

With Frank Ocean’s admission of love for another man, is hip-hop ready to accept its first queer superstar?

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The papers of Christopher Phillips, one of Yale’s first openly gay activists

By Emma Schindler

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Q Magazine

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Yale’s LGBTQ Publication

With the Yale AIDS Memorial Project, recent alumni are paying tribute to the students, faculty and staff lost to the virus

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DROP

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Standard Deviance

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“I looked like Edyn, a fiery woman with verve and a chip on her shoulder. But I felt undeniably like myself.”

Managing Editor Rachel Lipstein

One student’s journey from Mormon missionary to fierce drag queen

Q Magazine at Yale is published once each semester of the academic year. It is edited by Yale College students. Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Two thousand copies of each issue are distributed to the Yale University Campus. Subscriptions are available upon request.

ELDER PANACHE

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Publishers Jonathan Setiabrata

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Associate Editors Edward Oo Erin Vanderhoof

Volume 3 / Issue 1

Editor-in-Chief Travis Trew

Winter 2013

We kindly thank the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee and the Yale History department for their generous support. This magazine was also made possible with the support of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, online at CampusProgress.org.

Artist Spotlight

age my flamboyant performance, though retrospectively I understand they were likely giggling from the awkward discomfort of witnessing their boy’s eight-year-old hips wiggle in sparkles. I begged my mom to take a picture. Reluctantly, she did.

ELDER

PANACHE On the white sands of Miami Beach two years ago, I was instructed to not act gay. I was touring Florida with my a cappella group, composed of my dearest friends with whom I have always felt safe, accepted and secure. Yet as we walked to a private gig at an upscale waterfront country club, the non-straight among us were told: “The owner of this place is kind of a homophobe, so tone down the gay.”

That night I was slotted to solo on a playful pop song written by a colorful gay artist. Someone cracked a joke about my inevitable inability to perform the song “straight.” I was appalled. “You can choose for me not to sing,” I eventually told my musical director. “But I’m not changing my performance.”

F RO M MORMON M I S S I O N A RY TO D R AG QUEEN BY M c K AY NIELD

Nobody in my singing group is a bigot, and nobody meant to hurt my feelings. Yet I never forgot the sting of this well-intended suggestion that I “tone down” who I am in order to accommodate a homophobe. I spent the greater part of two decades desperately hiding a slight lisp and a flimsy wrist in order to accommodate homophobes. But now? As an adult? After fighting to accept myself in spite of naysayers like this Miami man? No. Absolutely not. In college I edit papers, not my “gay” mannerisms.

By measurement of problematic stereotypes, I have always been gay. While I learned as a child to conceal my “gay” inclinations amongst my peers, going to great lengths to keep top secret my affinity for Barbies, paper dolls and boy bands, I occasionally opened up more at home. Once in my grandparents’ basement, I found a massive box of costumes. Ecstatic, I waltzed upstairs for family dinner in prepubescent drag. Imitating a boisterous and glamorous woman, I twirled into the room in a glittery mintgreen gown with a bedazzled headband and turquoise feather boa. My Mormon family giggled in a way that seemed to encour4

It was one of the only photographs of me spared when four years later, at age 12, I angrily took a pair of scissors to a family photo album. By then I had hit puberty a few years ahead of my male peers. I was glaringly aware of homosexuality and its opposition to my small Idaho community and orthodox Mormon faith.

I staunchly believed that I was ugly, undesirable and fundamentally deficient. I cut myself from family portraits because I didn’t feel worthy of existing in them. Yet I clung to the one of me in the mint dress. The image didn’t look like me, but it felt like me. I loved it. Performing in that costume provided me an escape from the other roles I felt obligated to play: boy, Mormon boy, Mormon Boy Scout Boy, Mormon Boy Scout Boy Who Likes Girls, Mormon Boy Scout Boy Who Likes Girls and Hates Barbies.

At age 19, almost a decade after slicing myself from photographs, I left Yale as a mostly-closeted sophomore to live in Argentina.

I was to serve a full-time, two-year proselytizing mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. My duties as a missionary were outlined in something I called the Little White Bible—a white pocket-sized booklet with an extensive list of mission rules. No computers. No iPods. No social life. No newspapers. No phones. And, crucially, no casual clothing. Our daily costume was prescribed for us in the booklet: a neatly pressed white shirt, a dark suit and a “conservative tie.” We were required to keep our hair trimmed short in a manner that would not “call attention to itself.” The booklet left little room for confusion about who I was to be. In Argentina, I was to operate strictly within the neat boundaries of a carefully constructed, squeakyclean missionary aesthetic.

Yet performance within the mission was not limited to clothing choices. We were instructed to work each day in a manner that was chipper, charismatic and inviting. We were taught to be careful listeners, to elicit strangers’ interest in our religious message and to access internal energy and strength on days in which we felt down or defeated. We learned how to hold our heads high in the face of rejection and to communicate pride in our message.

Most importantly, we learned how to share our own religious narratives in a way that was bold and rooted in personal experience.

Stepping out of my apartment door each morning was like stepping onto a stage, one starkly different from my life behind closed doors. Onstage I was an unashamed follower of Jesus Christ eagerly knocking on doors to convert people. Offstage, I was maneuvering through a massive crisis of faith. I knew that some of my core beliefs did not align neatly with the church I was representing. I knew I could not pull off being happily homosexual and actively Mormon. But I did not know how to imagine myself outside of the church’s loving community and rich promise of eternal happiness. I loved the church. I clung to it.

Amidst overwhelming doubt, putting on my missionary costume became a way of accessing my Mormon convictions. I put on a nametag each morning to signify: I’m a believer. In my suit and Winter 2013

Makeup by Timmy Pham

tie, I spoke with confidence. I preached the Book of Mormon. I shared the faith that shaped me. I wept in front of strangers while sharing stories of ancient scripture. I baptized. And I loved it.

But no matter what energies I poured into the role, one part of my missionary costume still didn’t love me—the heterosexual part.

To appear appropriately straight, I spoke Spanish in a voice much lower than my own. I stayed silent during meetings that lambasted gay marriage laws. I let people believe my life’s greatest goal was to marry a woman in a Mormon temple. Unsurprisingly, I grew exhausted. I went to bed each night feeling like a fraud. By August 2010, my mission abruptly ended when I turned in my nametag a year early to head home. Beautiful or not, the Mormon suit didn’t empower me like the mint green dress once did.

Two years later, back at Yale, I settled into a new self—one who, on a warm autumn night, walked into a New Haven bar in a sleek black frock, hot pink bra and heels. I spent two hours on my makeup that night, one for each year I had spent healing from life as a missionary. I arrived as Edyn Panache, a young and tenacious drag queen about to perform her first professional drag show. Conservative haircut far behind me, I toted a bag of outrageous wigs—a funky pink bob, a two-foot blonde fro, an androgynous black mohawk.

I kept a pair of charA Reading from the Book of Panache acter glasses in my bag, in case I craved something absurd and a stick of lipliner to MY MORMON MISSION HAD PREPARED keep my face fresh.

ME WELL FOR WHAT I WAS ABOUT My Mormon mission had prepared me well TO DO—HOW TO ENGAGE A CROWD for what I was about CHARISMATICALLY, TO WEAR A COSTUME to do—how to engage a crowd charismatiIN PUBLIC, TO BE PROUD OF A MESSAGE, cally, to wear a cosTO BE REJECTED, TO BE BOLD. tume in public, to be proud of a message, to be rejected, to be bold.

A few drinks later, I was center stage commanding a crowd of cheering partygoers with a P!nk party ballad. Beneath thick layers of stage makeup, I grinned. I sweated. I shouted. I crushed a shot glass in my bare hand. Like a Mormon missionary preaching his religion, I stood unafraid and full of conviction. But this time I didn’t feel like a fraud. Amidst a party of smoke and mirrors, I felt vulnerable and honest. Into some shining space of party lights and techno-pop, I felt myself saying: Nevermind you, mission. You have no power here, Church. And

by God, fuck you Miami man.

A Portrait of Panache as a Young Man qmagazineatyale.com

I looked like Edyn, a fiery woman with verve and a chip on her shoulder. But I felt undeniably like myself. Like the childhood game of dress-up immortalized in my favorite photograph, this was a performance crafted in my colors, on my terms. And to the Mormon Boy Scout Who Likes Girls and Hates Barbies, I begged: love yourself, dammit, love yourself.

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VIRAL M E M O RY

RECENT GRADUATES ARE LAUNCHING YALE’S FIRST AIDS MEMORIAL – ONLINE

BY RACHEL LIPSTEIN 6

Winter 2013

JOHN WALLACE ‘82

Eight pictures of eight dead men nestle in the innermost leaves of the Journal. There are other pictures inside, and words of biography and reminiscence, but these centerfolds are reserved for the toothiest grins, the softest eyes, the most intimate looks— the close-up. The boyish John Wallace ‘82 emerges on the scale of the Talking Heads poster that might have hung in his college dorm, eight years before his death from “AIDS-related complications.” That phrase runs like a rather uncomplicated bright, red

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line through the heart of the Journal, which contains profiles of eight of the estimated 500 Yale alumni, faculty and staff who died of the AIDS virus. The Journal is an important but preliminary piece of the Yale AIDS Memorial Project. Eventually, the memorial will be online, a digital memorial for a digital age.

The Yale AIDS Memorial Project (YAMP), founded in 2010

by Christopher Glazek ‘07, is operated by a lean staff of six— four gay males—and all 25-years-old or younger. All but one are

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recent Yale graduates. The staff compiles profiles of the dead, writing biographies, collecting photos and curating reminiscences from friends, roommates and lovers. No list records the names of the dead: many passed through Yale anonymously, dying five or ten or twenty years later of AIDS censored as heart failure. What drives these young profilers, then, investigating people who died before many of them were born? Glazek conceived of the idea for the memorial after learning that so many Yalies, entire groups of friends, coupled professors, from a certain generation had simply vanished. AIDS went from a historical event and abstract global health crisis to a personal tragedy when he realized, “I would likely have died of AIDS, too, had I been born 25 years earlier.”

Through collecting these profiles, YAMP’s members are not only preserving the memory of those who died of AIDS, but reconnecting to an older queer community and, in the process, perhaps creating their own.

The Journal’s progress to New Haven begins in a café in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in March 2010. Glazek sat down for a coffee with George Chauncey ‘77, ‘89 PhD, renowned LGBT historian and Yale professor, and proposed his idea for the memorial. His mission was to create a localized, narrative-based AIDS memorial that would serve as a template for other institutions—universities, theater companies, churches, unions—to write their own chapters. With donations from the Yale Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association (GALA) and private benefactors, Glazek began building a nonprofit incorporated as AIDS Memorial Project, Inc.—intentionally leaving Yale out of the name in order to allow for later expansion.

Two-and-a-half years later, on October 6, 2012, Richard Espinosa ‘10 presented the Journal to a group of 20 students, crowded into a brightly painted room a few blocks from Yale’s campus. The YAMP staff was distinguishable from current students only by an air of buoyancy and the confidence that accompanies graduation and a move to Brooklyn. Espinosa, soft-spoken with a septum piercing and close-cropped hair already speckled with gray, took over the position of YAMP’s director from Glazek in June 2012. Alternating between addressing the circle of faces and his intertwined fingers, he explained that YAMP’s product would be the first of its kind.

No monument currently stands at Yale to recognize the loss of AIDS. “It seems especially egregious that on Yale’s campus, which is a landscape of commemoration in many ways, that there’s no memorial, or even a gesture,” says YAMP staffer Max Walden ‘11, PhD ‘17. He is not sure that a website will be able to create the visceral shock elicited by Beinecke Plaza’s hundredfoot-high WWI colonnade or the circle of nine-foot-tall marble soldiers in bas-relief and togas, names reaching up to the Memorial Rotunda’s domed ceiling.

However, a digital memorial conveys benefits that a cenotaph or even a printed journal cannot. The website will allow for the inclusion of slideshows, audio and video interviews—perhaps a home movie or a graduation speech. The challenge will be allowing visitors to get lost in the individuals but not in the interface, to zoom out and let the magnitude of the monument reflect the magnitude of the loss. The YAMP site will be a paradox in this

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respect: the size of the memorial may at once contain enough text to inscribe the Vietnam Memorial stone twice over and yet be no larger than a 15-inch screen or even—should the app come through—an iPhone.

The site will take the form of what is called a hypertext weave, in which a column of text—the main profile—is hyperlinked to related profiles, a timeline, a map, a list of alumni from a certain year, a list of other English majors or Spizzwinks(?). If you wrote for the Yale Daily News, you might be able to find ex-staffers. If

WALLACE PICTURED IN THE JOURNAL

you lived in Bingham Hall as a freshman, you might be able to find former occupants. Espinosa says that they are trying to create a website that will “allow you to find ways that your interests and your experience overlap with those who were affected by this virus.”

The form is also notable for its implied audience: young people, who have grown up in a world of interactive profiles and digital interconnectedness. And it is, in part, the need to educate young people about AIDS that drives this project. In his introductory essay to the Journal, Chauncey writes, “It took me a long time to comprehend just how little the students in my Yale lecture course on U.S. Lesbian and Gay History knew about AIDS. Most undergraduates today were born in the early nineties. Most

Winter 2013

have heard that AIDS is a dangerous but manageable syndrome, a problem in Africa, not the U.S. Few Yale students today know anyone infected with HIV or living with AIDS. Almost none has seen a friend wither away and die.”

In that same lecture course, Chauncey gives his mythic, moving AIDS lecture, famous among students for bringing an auditorium of hundreds to tears. It is the singular experience that made AIDS personal for me and so many others—including three of the YAMP staff. I recall sitting in the auditorium, which went pindrop silent as Chauncey flashed slide after slide of young men he or other alumni knew at school. For both beloved mentors and strangers, he delivered a bite-sized anecdote—a fixture at the huge Co-Op dances, a Motown devotee who followed his diva Diana Ross— before intoning, without preamble, of the man in that photograph, that photograph, that photograph, “And then he died.” I had been promised that I would cry, and I did cry.

Glazek never took Chauncey’s class as an undergraduate, but he has, perhaps unintentionally, framed his understanding of the memorial in the same way—around Yale. As he tells me over Skype one morning, leaning against a pillow in a white undershirt, “Institutions are the vectors of memory.” While his relationship to Yale is complicated, he believes that universities are the right way to focus the projects, attract reminiscers, and lend continuity to lives that may share nothing else. “The networks are extremely important—the way people interact, the way people identify, the way they remember,” he says, though he himself regrets that they are so important. “I mean, I hated Yale. There are things I like about it, but I get panic attacks when I get to campus,” he laughs. “Richard and Charles and Nick, et cetera, have a lot more affection.”

Even for the next cohort of YAMP leaders, Espinosa, Charles Gariepy ‘09, and Nick Robbins ‘10, none felt a particular sense of attachment to Yale or its history in a monolithic sense. Each of them lived off-campus and bore strains of anti-institutionalism found in their artistic and literary circles. While they did not hate Yale in the way Glazek did, they never particularly identified with it, nor did they identify with any of the stereotypically “gay organizations,” such as the LGBT Co-op, a capella groups, or the rugby team. Queerness was so backgrounded among their friends, dissolved into the ether of tolerance, that it was easy to view their sexuality as incidental. Gariepy’s gay community at Yale, he jokes, was his boyfriend. They did not all know each other at Yale, and none of them knew Glazek. Profilers have expanded to include friends in New York City, students in New Haven, people across the country, both Yale-affiliated and not, male, female, gay and straight. These few now meet consistently—and communicate with the others—to work on a project that is the most explicitly queer organizing force in their lives.

Glazek found closer queer bonds after graduating Yale—bonds that would, somewhat ironically, lead him back to Yale. When Glazek settled in New York City in 2009, eventually to work as a senior editor at n+1, he dwelt more in the artistic world than the literary one because it is “gayer, by far,” he says. He attended a Christmas party at the home of Mark Beard, a gay artist who has been throwing huge Christmas parties since the early ‘80s. The

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THE MEMORIAL M A Y AT O N C E C O N TA I N ENOUGH TEXT TO INSCRIBE THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL STONE TWICE OVER AND YET BE NO LARGER THAN A 15-INCH SCREEN OR EVEN— SHOULD THE APP COME THROUGH— AN IPHONE.

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literal and figurative centerpiece of the party was an enormous tree, bedecked on every branch with ornaments that ranged from the ordinary to the outré. Every guest was supposed to bring one.

The tree towered over Glazek while Beard, friends with many prominent artists, proudly showed off the collection—he was trying to sell it to the Museum of Modern Art. Then, matter-of-factly,

Glazek quickly began to educate himself. At Yale, he had studied collective memory, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. In that case, 20 years of silence were followed by “an explosion of interest—a memory boom,” and now he was encountering a situation where collective memory had failed. “The more I plunged into the history of the epidemic, the more I was shocked, and the more

GARIEPY, WALDEN, ESPINOSA AND ROBBINS

he told Glazek, “Of course, half the people who made these are dead now.” Glazek—stupidly, he says—asked why. Beard replied softly, “AIDS, dear.”

The tree now half naked before his eyes, Glazek says the losses of AIDS were suddenly visible. “I felt a strange sensation of belatedness, that I had missed something crucial and formative, like the generation of Brits who were too young to have served in World War One.” He had missed the war, and worse, he hadn’t really understood there’d been one.

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I became shocked at my own shock,” he says. “How did I grow up in the United States as a gay man with only a dim awareness that my direct predecessors endured a plague so pervasive that it bears comparison—in its decapitation of an entire culture—to the Holocaust? How did I know so little about ACT UP, the activist group—founded in part by Yalies—that did so much to make sure that my generation wouldn’t have to suffer the same tragedy?”

In answer to his second question, he could identify Yale, in part, as responsible for failing to pass on an important part of

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its institutional history to the next generation. In answer to his first question, he had no one to blame, besides perhaps himself.

“Some people have been surprised at how inattentive I could have been to AIDS as an undergraduate.” He interrupts himself, as he is wont to do. “Which actually isn’t true. I was actually quite attentive to AIDS issues.” But his relationship to AIDS in college, he says, “was more like a straight person’s relationship to AIDS,” focusing on global epidemic management while editing a public health journal.

Glazek, for most of his time at Yale, had a straight person’s relationship to most everything. He did not come out until his senior year, which he attributes in part to a surprisingly unsupportive progressive family, a libido-suppressing course of antidepressants, and a therapist who insisted his feelings of same-sex attraction were excuses not to date women. “But it—but it is true that my AIDS epiphany came fairly soon after my homosexual epiphany,” he says. His tone becomes disparaging, disdainful, fending off accusations I hadn’t made and didn’t yet understand.

“It wasn’t like I’d spent six years as an out gay man and had never thought about AIDS and all of a sudden it occurred to me.”

Glazek implies that an ignorance of the AIDS epidemic, particularly for a gay person, is to ignore a plague that ravaged one’s “direct predecessors,” as he says—one’s own people.

For the young gay people involved in the project, AIDS became personal in two ways: when they realized that the squares on a quilt or ashes scattered over the White House lawn relate somehow to them and when they realized that, had they been born a decade or two earlier, they too might have been those squares or those ashes. This moment of recognition, it seems, is not generally guaranteed; there is no cultural or institutional mechanism to educate gay youth the way children of Jewish parents grow up with an embedded consciousness of the Holocaust. Instead, each must, without the bind of genealogy or geography, embrace a community—past generations of strangers—as his or her own.

In a reminiscence adapted from a speech he gave at Yale, Bill Rubinstein ‘82, writes, “Ours is a uniquely tragic diaspora: even as one generation makes it home, the next is invariably born dispersed, doomed to repeat the hejira, the pattern of solitary selfdiscovery and frenzied flight… Our young people will, therefore, again and again and again, wash up orphans on Yale’s shores.”

On a Saturday night two weeks after the first YAMP meeting in New Haven, I sat with the group in the Spartan bedroom of a Brooklyn apartment belonging to Robbins. We were in Crown Heights, a mostly black and Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on the so-called frontier of gentrification. Like the generation of young, gay men before them, these twenty-something college graduates have also moved to gentrifying or bohemian artistic neighborhoods in New York City, following the same narrative of diaspora and community creation. However, they took remarkably different paths on the way to finding and embracing this sense of community.

Espinosa was “really active in terms of gayness at Yale,” with many boyfriends and gay friends. However, he grew up in a small New Jersey suburb near Philadelphia in a religious Catholic family. “I thought I was damned and diseased and, for a long time in

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“HOW DID I GROW UP IN THE UNITED S T AT E S A S A G AY M A N W I T H O N LY A D I M A WA R E N E S S T H AT M Y D I R E C T PREDECESSORS ENDURED A PLAGUE SO P E R VA S I V E T H AT I T B E A R S C O M PA R I S O N — IN ITS D E C A P I T AT I O N OF AN ENTIRE C U LT U R E — TO THE HOLOCAUST?” CHRISTOPHER GLAZEK

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my life, if I was…given the option to take this pill and become a heterosexual man, I would gladly have taken it.” He cites a trajectory familiar to so many of us who come to Yale from the suburbs or small towns and enter similar circles at Yale. We find a space so unquestioningly queer and accepting that the loneliness of coming out in our small high schools, to surprisingly unaccepting parents, becomes a distant memory. But the idea of that

EACH PROFILE REQUIRES THE AUTHOR TO GAIN AN UNPRECEDENTED LEVEL OF INTIMACY INTO A LIFE. HE MUST ASK STRANGERS TO OPEN UP TO HIM ABOUT THEIR LOVED ONE DYING—AND NOT JUST DYING, BUT D Y I N G P A I N F U L L Y, YOUNG AND O F A S T I G M AT I Z E D DISEASE.

pill, the reflex that tells us that being gay might still be somehow worse—somehow harder—doesn’t fade until we find a sense of allegiance to our queerness, not just a tolerance of it.

For Espinosa, that came with an understanding of gay and lesbian history. He began to write himself into a narrative that so many of us have learned about in Chauncey’s class, piecing together a lineage of activists and ordinary people who, as he says, “have fought and continue to fight for visibility and fairness, and to be treated like humans”— a lineage that led to him.

When he learned about people just like him—who would have

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been him but for their date of birth—and how hard they had fought, taking that pill seemed not only laughable, but a betrayal.

Robbins, slight with a puckishly upturned nose, has found the project valuable specifically because he had never had the kind of struggle that Espinosa describes, and which Glazek and Gariepy also faced, in varying degrees. Robbins grew up in New York City, attended the Trinity School, a prep school in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and now works at the Whitney Museum as an assistant curator. “In a way, it was too easy,” he admits. Sitting on his own unadorned mattress on the floor, Robbins describes how tapping into the experience of this older generation has forced him to do the accounting for his sexuality he had never done. “I didn’t reach any stumbling block in the mind to make me figure out, ‘Where do I stand? What’s my history?’”

So for Robbins, connecting to a history of struggle, oppression, government neglect, institutional abandonment and devastating illness has been galvanizing. The intimate process of assembling a profile gives him a personal tie to a previous generation, forcing him to conceive the inconceivable. “I would doubt whether or not I would have been holding hands in the barricades at City Hall in 1998,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know if I would have been there. But I hope to not just accept the privilege of being queer now.”

It’s no wonder that the process of assembling profiles has proven so powerfully personal for Robbins. Each profile requires the author to gain an unprecedented level of intimacy into a life.

He must ask strangers to open up to him about their loved one dying—and not just dying, but dying painfully, young and of a stigmatized disease.

Robbins tears up while talking about a profile he has been doing of Jim Brudner ‘83, after whom the Brudner Prize, which recognizes lifetime scholarly contribution to LGBT Studies, is named. Jim’s twin brother, Eric, died of AIDS four years after they graduated college, after which Jim joined ACT UP and continued to fight for 11 years before his own death.

Robbins had just interviewed Jim’s father, who lost his only children to AIDS. Serena Fu UCLA ‘09—the current staff’s only non-Yalie and, until this year, only female—asked him almost tenderly, “Did you have a crying lunch?”

“Not when I was with him,” Robbins replied. “But afterwards?

Absolutely. Absolutely.”

Parents are often the most difficult reminiscences to get, perhaps because they are uncomfortable confronting their child’s homosexuality, perhaps because they have long ago put him to rest. Many cannot transcend rote, eulogy-style reflection. Even with the most accepting parent, such as one who would endow a prize for LGBT scholarship, the conversation can be incredibly daunting.

During his lunch with Jim Brudner’s father, Robbins couldn’t stop thinking about what the distinguished older gentleman must have been thinking: “Who is this 24 -year-old person who is suddenly so curious about my son, who never knew him?” But that is, in a way, the point: it is up to the next generation to preserve the memories of the past, at once uncomfortable and rewarding.

It is up to the next generation, in some ways, to initiate the intergenerational discourse.

Winter 2013

WARREN SMITH ‘74

Professor Chauncey and Joe Gordon, the Dean of Undergraduate Education, both YAMP board members, each admit to being first surprised and then deeply moved by the fact that their apocalyptic moment will not be forgotten by youth, especially gay youth. It is the reason, Chauncey says, that he teaches his course. Gordon tells me, in a wood-paneled office easily twice the size of Robbins’s bedroom, that intergenerational discourse is the purpose of higher education itself.

“YAMP was in no way my idea, or the idea of anyone in my generation,” he says. “And that’s what is so compelling to me.

It’s an attempt by these people in their twenties to, not recapture the past, but discover the past.”

According to Richard, the project faces two main criticisms. The first, perhaps more intuitive, is that a memorial implies the end of an epidemic that is far from over. In an effort to acknowledge that the fight against AIDS is ongoing, Glazek wrote an essay for the Journal that traces the disease’s history in New Haven through the

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present, including current campus activism advocating for global AIDS funding. Richard says they are attempting to highlight Yale’s current relationship to AIDS “not only to respond to the criticism, but because that criticism is valid.” The second criticism is the charge of elitism that seems to inevitably follow a project tied to an institution like Yale. People ask, “Why Yale? Why not New Haven?” Glazek notes the role institutions serve in preserving and fostering memory. Robbins says it plainly: “We aren’t benefiting from cash from the institution, but we have benefited from visibility.”

Perhaps in part because of the whiff of elitism associated with the Yale name, the group is particularly conscious of the need to give each life equal weight. But the democracy of an online memorial is exciting to all of the members. “This is a political statement in a way, to put the potential dining hall worker that we profile alongside the most illustrious National Book Award-winning writer,” says Espinosa. “Even within this small community, I think you can see how transversal this epidemic was. It wasn’t just affecting young gay people. It wasn’t just affecting minorities. It was affecting all walks of society.”

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However noble the staff’s intentions, however, those dining hall workers are all still “potential.” 80 percent of AIDS cases in 1980s New Haven were intravenous drug users, but even conceived as the Yale AIDS Memorial Project, not the New Haven AIDS Memorial Project, YAMP is still plagued with representational issues. The profiles in the Journal and the website are so far all gay men—and all either faculty or students—none staff.

Though the group made a concerted effort to include two African American Yalies in the Journal, the first batch of eight represents “the low-hanging fruit,” as Espinosa puts it. Among those profiled are National Book Award winner Paul Monette, prominent Classics historian Jack Winkler and financier Michael Palm, whose family trust recently donated $50,000 to YAMP through the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association. Reminiscers include Cornel West and Larry Kramer. Those who lived long enough and had the resources to amass a paper trail are, for the most part, white male students and professors. “We really want a woman,” he says. “We really want an intravenous drug user. We have a lead on a hemophiliac.” It is perhaps impossible to avoid the charge of tokenism when working against the informational gradient, a charge Espinosa regards as necessary to bear in order to include a diverse range of experiences.

There is a general consensus among the project’s members that now is the time for a comprehensive AIDS memorial. As sources who experienced the AIDS epidemic first-hand begin to age and die, it is urgent to preserve their memories as soon as possible.

Many of these names are un-Googleable, as Gariepy puts it, and the staff has primarily relied on the available networks of older gay men. “An AIDS memory boom is inevitable,” Glazek says.

“It’s already happening.” He points to the three acclaimed AIDS documentaries released in 2012 alone, two about the activist group ACT UP, How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, and one about the life of activist Vito Russo.

Both ACT UP documentaries focus on the fight, the anger, of the activist organization. Personal stories of illness and death are more muted in a narrative intended to be “heroic,” says How to Survive a Plague director David France. YAMP’s part in the memory boom seems to be piecing together the stories of the epidemic, no matter how tragic. Though YAMP does not employ ACT UP’s confrontational tactics, the project itself, says Glazek, is a means of activism. Destroying victim-blaming myths about AIDS and unveiling lost stories may be the next best step, after marriage equality, to reducing teen suicide rates, especially given the resonance of shame and silence for those currently in the closet. Glazek says, “It’s important to start grappling with the past, not only for its own sake, but also for the sake of the present.”

The present includes the fact that gay and bisexual men aged 13-25 represent the largest number of new HIV infections and the fastest growing rate of infection, according to the Center for Disease Control. It is not just important to start grappling with this history— it is vital.

Part of YAMP’s mission will be to show these young people who died, to jilt them out of a post-protease inhibitor mode of complacency. The group in Brooklyn talks about a political

14

vitality that existed in that period, a sense of cohesion, “a time when the discourse was angrier,” says Espinosa. More radical.

More coalition-focused. These were gay people who dressed up in suits, snuck into George H.W. Bush’s talk at the Waldorf Astoria and drenched themselves in fake blood; who shouted down a priest in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and were carried out on stretchers by police; who bore the open coffin of their friend down Fifth Avenue.

Espinosa recognizes some of the irony here: “It’s romanticizing a past that’s horrible. It’s a time of plague and death and anger but—” He falters. “It’s a kind of identifying with these figures, feeling like I’m angry too.” During Espinosa’s senior project for the art major, a response to the posters of AIDS art collective the Gran Fury, Chauncey cautioned him against any sense of nostalgia. Espinosa recalls, “From what I was saying, he was interpolating probably rightfully so—well, definitely rightfully so—this sense of almost longing.”

We long, Glazek says, because the current battles do not seem heroic. He articulates a sense of dissatisfaction with the tenor of the marriage debate, laughing, “I use this word and people hop on it—but it does not seem glamorous in the way ACT UP always was.” Defending himself, he adds, “Glamour was a really important part of ACT UP’s success at the time, widely perceived as being sexy and glamorous and an example of a community that really did something.”

However, as Chauncey points out, the community did something because it was dying—not merely dying in an abstract sense, but dying literally one by one. Friends, ex-lovers, mentors died. And then those they were “survived by” died too.

His voice is gentle, a departure from the clipped, chirping tone he uses when he lectures in front of hundreds. “One of the reasons it was so cohesive was because of the hostility people faced,” he says. “And that’s not something to be nostalgic about.”

The longing for a narrative of oppression that they, as young gay people, were denied is a controversial one. But the attraction to that history and those people, the sense of identity it provides, may be the rallying point around which the next queer generation coalesces. That night in Brooklyn, after the sun set behind Grand Army Plaza, the YAMP staff went to a party brimming with Yale alums living in NYC. Some were queer, and many were not. As I spoke with a 2010 alumnus that night, I discovered that she was working on a profile—and so were others, scattered around the room. A community, interweaving queer and Yale, was mapped across an apartment in Brooklyn, across New York and New Haven, distinct but in a sense parallel to the interconnectedness that the website would create among the dead.

For young people on the brink of full-fledged adult lives, relating to others—and finding they had so much to relate to—had become the tool to creating a community in the absence of an oppressive force. Connecting with a queer generation they never knew through an institution they never identified with became the perfect recipe for finding both, a few years after graduation. For the members of the Yale AIDS Memorial Project, the past is just a link away from the present.

Winter 2013

By Eric Baudry

Putting An End To Bullying In Connecticut Schools For members of Fierce Advocates, Yale’s only undergraduate LGBTQ political activist group, November 10, 2012 marked the most important Saturday of the year: it was the third annual Generation Equality conference. 75 students and educators arrived on Yale’s campus for a day of queer-themed speakers, performances and workshops. For one day, William L. Harkness Hall would be transformed from a classroom building into a queer sanctuary.

Why do queer youth travel from across the state to spend one day in a nondescript Gothic building at Yale? I asked Sophie Szymkowiak, a TD sophomore and the current Fierce Advocates coordinator, what Generation Equality hopes to provide for those who participate. “As much as we would like the day to have an educational component,” she said, “our primary goal is to create a safe space for these students.”

The safe space seems to be key. As Leif Mitchell, the director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in Connecticut, puts it, “If students feel safe, they will be more apt to not put themselves at risk from a public health perspective.

They’ll have higher self-esteem, better grades—everything.”

But in most Connecticut high schools, LGBTQ students don’t feel safe. Data from the 2009 Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) School Climate Report (the latest that provides a state-by-state analysis) shows that nine in ten of Connecticut’s LGBTQ youth were the target of verbal harassment because of their sexual identity. 38 percent of queer youth were physically harassed and 18 percent were physically assaulted.

That’s worth reading again: in 2009, one in five LGBTQ youth in Connecticut were punched, kicked or injured with a weapon on the sole basis of their real or perceived sexuality.

qmagazineatyale.com

Sarah, a Yale senior whose name has been changed at her request, remembers the devastating effects that bullying had on her in a small Catholic high school: “There was a lot of sexual harassment. There was a lot of physical harassment. There was a lot of name calling.” The teachers did nothing to stop the abuse; they were often perpetrators themselves. “I felt like I didn’t have value as a person.” Sarah developed depression, followed soon after by serious eating problems.

Sarah made it to college, but many students like her never graduate from high school. The American Association of Suicidology estimates that every year in the United States, between 4,000 and 5,000 teenagers kill themselves, making it the third leading cause of death for 15 to 24 year olds. A 2011 study by the Center for Disease Control found that lesbian, gay and bisexual teens were four times more likely than their straight counterparts to attempt suicide. For transgender and gender non-conforming students, that number is even higher: a full 25 percent have attempted suicide, and half have thought about it.

It is against this violent backdrop that the anti-bullying movement emerged. During the fall of 2010, national news erupted with the stories of at least ten teenagers who chose to take their lives after being bullied for their perceived sexuality. The headlines read like names in a role-call: Billy Lucas, Tyler Clementi, Corey Barker, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Raymond Chase, Zach Harrington, Aiyisha Hassan, Justin Aaberg, Felix Sacco, Caleb Nolt. Experts called it a crisis. Some newspapers spoke of a bullying epidemic. The deaths were tragic and unnecessary, almost always preventable and, ultimately, a call to action.

To the delight of anti-bullying and queer activists, the Obamas

15

heard that call. In November 2010, the President and First Lady hosted the first ever White House anti-bullying summit.

“Bullying has been shown to lead to absences and decreased performance in the classroom,” Obama announced. “No child should be afraid to go to school.” The federal government launched stopbullying. gov, a comprehensive resource for schools and educators. Obama committed $132 million of federal money to address bullying in schools. In a rare example of bipartisan cooperation, Democratic Senator Bob Casey and Republican Senator Mark Kirk introduced the Safe Schools Improvement Act, which would require school districts to adopt anti-bullying policies in order to receive federal funding.

Anti-bullying efforts were in. They were mainstream. As Amalia Horan Skilton, a Yale senior who founded Fierce Advocates her freshman year, puts it, “They were sexy.”

The new federal focus spawned antibullying efforts at every level. Some state policy makers tried to tackle the issue of bullying head-on: after President Obama’s proclamation against bullying, Connecticut legislators worked to pass a new, comprehensive bullying prevention system requiring all public schools to do four things: first, develop a clear anti-bullying policy; second, train all staff members— from bus drivers to principals—in bullying prevention; third, establish immediateresponse procedures to bullying incidents; and fourth, begin collecting data on bullying over time. On July 21, 2011, Connecticut Public Act 11-232 became law.

Within the broader debate on bullying, organizations like GLSEN help ensure that queer students get the attention they need in the broader debate on bullying.

As Maria Trumpler, the director of Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources, points out, “Sexual orientation is at the top of all of

the different categories of bullying. If you’re going to try to deal with bullying and harassment, you need to work on the issue of sexual orientation.” GLSEN’s role in the process, explains Leif Mitchell, is to promote policy changes on a broad level that will help create safer school communities for LGBTQ students while simultaneously providing schools and school administrators with the resources and education needed to enact those changes successfully.

According to Mitchell, Connecticut is “definitely farther ahead than the other states” with respect to protecting queer students legislatively. While 16 states, including Connecticut, have enumerated anti-bullying laws that prohibit bullying based on sexual orientation or gender identity, eight states have what are called “no promo homo” laws—laws that, according to GLSEN’s website, “forbid teachers from discussing gay or transgender issues in a positive light, if it all. Some laws even require that teachers actively portray LGBT people in a negative or inaccurate way.”

Last September, as part of GLSEN’s efforts in Connecticut, Mitchell helped mail out a “safe space kit” to every middle and high school throughout the state. The kit includes a 42-page guide on how to be an effective ally to LGBTQ students, along with ten “Safe Space” stickers and two posters to demarcate LGBTQ-friendly areas within each school.

GLSEN also runs the Think Before You Speak campaign, aimed at making homophobic language “uncool.” Their bright yellow posters directly challenge students’ use of such language: “How many fags does it take to screw in a light bulb?” one online ad banner asks, providing checkable boxes for answers of “two,” “four,” “six“ and “more than six.” Click on any of them, and you’re directed to a page informing you that “it’s no joke: 44.1 per-

If, in fact, bullying stems from misconceptions about gender and sexuality, it will take more to solve the problem than administrative directives and Twitter posts.

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cent of LGBT high school students reported being physically harassed at school.”

In light of those statistics, Yale students have taken action. Yale’s Community Health Educators (CHEs) teach a Sexual Orientation and Intimacy workshop to students at 15 middle schools in the New Haven Area. The workshop’s goal is to clear up myths that students have about LGBTQ individuals. According to Michael Solotke, a Yale senior and CHE who developed the workshop his freshman year, these misconceptions run deep. “Students think that all gay men are feminine, all lesbians are butch and that people choose to be gay.” A CHE facilitates a discussion between students, during which they critically examine those myths. In 2011, 33 percent of students answered “yes” to the question “Do all gay men act girly?” before the workshop. After the workshop, only 12 percent did.

Groups like Fierce Advocates seek to create safe spaces like Generation Equality for queer students to interact outside of their schools. Fierce Advocates hosts a Pride Prom in the spring, with the goal of providing queer students with an LGBTQfriendly prom experience. “Prom is one of the most intimidating spaces for queer students,” Skilton explains. Insecurities surrounding who to bring and what to wear can lead many queer students not to go at all. Feedback from the last event is inspirational: “I’ve never felt so safe in my life,” reads one student comment. Another says, “I’ve never been able to dance with my boyfriend in public.”

For Skilton, letting the students meet each other is the most important part of the Generation Equality conference; she argues that it “gives them a sense of perspective and affirms that their problems are within the normal scope of human experience.” Trumpler agrees: a widespread sense of isolation, she says, is the largest problem queer youth face today.

“In most high schools, you have one, two, maybe three openly gay kids,” she said.

Conferences like Generation Equality help to break that sense of isolation. But the conference also places an emphasis on education, and on providing students with the knowledge they might not learn elsewhere. As Skilton puts it, “No GSA is going to teach you how to turn a condom Winter 2013

into a dental dam.” tastic work is being done on all levels, Students who make it to Generation from an annual statewide conference for Equality participate in a series of three queer students, their parents and eduworkshops sessions. They have the free- cators at the University of Connecticut dom to design their own schedule, choos- to a Guilford High School Unity Day, ing between workshops ranging from which brings students of all grade levels “Trans 101” to “Religion and Sexuality.” together for a frank discussion on bullySolotke led a workshop on LGBTQ Sex- ing. The Unity Day includes a film with ual Health and Relationships. The discus- interviews of real students that represent sion focused on what sex means and what common demographic targets of bullying. the risks of sexual Afterwards, students behavior are. First, find out the queer stuthough, the group dent—whom Trumneeded to define pler described to me some terms. To some as charming and emstudents, a “hook-up” pathetic—commitjust meant “connectted suicide between ing sexually.” But the interview and the not everyone agreed. film’s release.

For one student, a “That’s so real,” hook-up implied a Trumpler said, “and one-night stand after high school students which the two people get real.” never see each other again. One student insisted that a sexual encounter is only a The presence of such hook-up if it happens a wide array of antiin the stall of a public bullying efforts is exbathroom. The lesciting, but the quesson, Solotke says, is tion remains: are they that “sex means difeffective? ferent things to difIt’s hard to tell.

Michael Solotke ferent people, and GLSEN’s 2011 Nait’s always important tional School Climate to communicate.” As Survey reports that the students were filing out, a girl with during the 2011 school year, eight out of rainbow earrings turned back. “Thank ten LGTBQ youth reported experiencing you,” she said, “I had been trying to find some form of harassment at school. That this all on the Internet.” Another student number, while high, does represent a small agreed: “I’ve never had anybody teach me improvement over the previous year. this before.”

Experts rely largely on anecdotal eviBad Romantics, Yale’s only queer caba- dence to assess the situation in state and ret and drag-performance group, offered local communities. Connecticut’s unusual another novel experience to many stu- procedure for education reform makes it dents. After a lunchtime show, the group particularly difficult to evaluate school ran a “Drag Performance Workshop.” Ac- climate statewide. The State Department cording to Szymkowiak, “Everyone went of Education makes recommendations on there, and they came out wearing fake school policy, but it’s up to each of the mustaches with stubble drawn in, or eye 169 independent school districts to impleshadow and lipstick. For many of them, it ment the official changes. Leif Mitchell was the first time they had been allowed to explains, “We don’t know what’s really play with gender.” happening on a day-to-day level.”

These policies, campaigns and workTake New Haven, for instance. Accordshops are just a slice of the creative and ing to Mitchell, most of the schools have diverse efforts that educators and policy- a GSA, but some, like Hillhouse High makers have launched to mitigate the School, don’t. Szymkowiak remembers harmful effects of anti-queer bullying attending a local GSA’s first meeting. The in schools. Trumpler points out that fan- students were hesitant, unsure of what qmagazineatyale.com

they wanted their program to be, unsure of what it could be. “My main message to them was to exist,” Szymkowiak said.

“Existing as a GSA is a really powerful thing. The most important thing is that students have a safe space.”

I went into Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School in downtown New Haven to talk with members of their GSA. The four students I interviewed all agreed that Co-op was a safe environment. In her four years at Co-op, Gina, a senior, hasn’t “seen any bullying at all.” The students shared stories of male students coming to school in leggings and female students wearing tuxedos. Crystal, a freshman, commented, “There’s so much racial and sexual diversity that people are free to be themselves.” One student came dressed as the Mad Hatter, and “people thought it was cool.” She had a picture taken with the Mad Hatter, which she excitedly showed me on her phone.

Unfortunately, for many students, the safe space Co-op offers ends when they leave its walls. Julia, a freshman, told me, “There’s a lot of hatred towards homosexuals in New Haven.” Veronica, a sophomore, said that students at other high schools refer to Co-op as “the gay school.”

The other students readily agreed. At other schools, they all said, “Gay students are outcasts.”

Schools like Co-op can provide a temporary haven for its students, while events like Generation Equality can create a brief respite from the bullying and harassment that LGBTQ students face at many other schools. But are these efforts merely addressing the manifestations of a broader societal issue? Trumpler identifies the more pervasive problem in two words: “Our culture.” The pervasiveness of traditional gender norms in our society, she said, makes anyone who transgresses them an easy target.

Ignoring the culture has pernicious consequences for anti-bullying policy. Skilton argues that we can’t “treat bullying as just being bullying. But that’s exactly what’s happening, at the expense of acknowledging the realities underlying bullying. The root of bullying towards LGBTQ students is bias against non-normative ideas of gender and sexuality.”

Mitchell identifies issues surrounding transgender students, perhaps the most unfamiliar letter in the LGBT acronym, as the most prevalent challenges schools en17

Photo by Paul Doyle

New Haven’s Co-op High School 18

Winter 2013

counter today. “There’s been more information over the years about the L, the G and the B,” he says, “but there hasn’t been as much information about the T students, which is ironic, because the research data actually shows that it’s students who transgress gender norms who are being bullied and put down and harassed the most.” A 2010 National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce Survey found that more than half of transgender and gender non-conforming people who were bullied, harassed, or assaulted in school have attempted suicide.

Yale’s LGBTQ Co-op President Hilary O’Connell argues that most of the antiqueer bullying that happens in schools results from assumptions people make regarding the intersection of sexuality and gender. “When a young man is called a fairy or a fag, the implication is not so much you want to kiss other boys and that’s disgusting,” she says. “The implication is you’re like a girl and that’s disgusting. You’re feminine—you’re feminized by your desire for other men.”

But, as O’Connell points out, “Gay doesn’t mean feminine. It’s a false equation.”

In a similar vein, our heteronormative culture makes the idea that women could exist without men preposterous and frightening. Masculine women are harassed for gender non-conformity. They’re seen as “too butch and too assertive,” Skilton says.

“They don’t spend enough time deferring to men.” Some of the sexual harassment queer female students experience, Skilton argues, is corrective.

This conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity has deep historical roots. Students in Professor Chauncey’s U.S. Lesbian and Gay History course learn that for centuries, the two were in fact seen as the same thing: gay “fairies,” as they were called, were considered to be part of a “third sex”: male-bodied people with female spirits. Butch lesbians were characterized by their manly love for other women. It was not until a sexual paradigm shift in the 1920s, as gay and lesbian culture became more visible, that people began to see gender presentation and sexual orientation as distinct elements of a person’s identity. But as Solotke learned in his Sexual Orientation and Intimacy workshop, many students today still don’t see the difference.

For Trumpler, the solution to bullying comes back to her identity as a feminist. qmagazineatyale.com

“If men fundamentally respect women as equal and valuable, to say a man is like a woman is no big deal,” Trumpler says.

“Bullying like that only hurts because being like a woman is so much less. To be sissy or to be effeminate is something that no man would ever want to be.”

Skilton thinks that to address the root problem, we need a broader strategy. If, in fact, bullying stems from misconceptions about gender and sexuality, it will take more to solve the problem than administrative directives and Twitter posts. “We can’t address it by saying ‘no more bullying’ or ‘hashtag stopbullying,’” Skilton says. Changing societal gender norms is a daunting task, but until we tackle the larger issue, we’ll continue treating the symptoms of bullying without looking for a cure.

When we broaden our focus, we see that the harmful tendrils of bullying and harassment reach far beyond middle and high schools, even to places we might consider safe—places like Yale. To many, Yale is the land of “one in four, maybe more,” a veritable bastion of liberal homosexuals and their liberal allies, the ultimate safe space.

Yale’s queer community is both vibrant and vocal, but as Ryan Mendías, a Branford senior and former coordinator of the LGBTQ Co-op, argues, “The visibility of the LGBTQ community is something of a double-edged sword. Many people see the presence of a large queer community as evidence that homophobia is mostly absent from Yale’s campus, but the reality is that most queer people at Yale could probably recount at least one episode of homophobia or transphobia they’ve experienced here.”

One doesn’t necessarily have to look far. According to Trumpler, “Someone finds a homophobic word in an entryway about once a month.” I was Skyping with my editor to talk about this article when a group of laughing men walked past her open window. The only words we caught were “that fucking queer,” followed by a chorus of laughter. Safe spaces, indeed.

The return of the Reserve Officers Training Corps to Yale provides an excellent example of the hostility transgender students face. ROTC openly bans transgender individuals from participating—violating Yale’s very own anti-discrimination policies.

Katie Chockley, a junior in Silliman and member of the women’s rugby team, spoke about the heteronormativity that persists in athlete culture at Yale. “On male sports teams, gay men are seen as weak. On some of the aggressive women’s sports teams, players are really aggressively feminine—they wear skirts and bows in their hair to push back against the classification of their sport as a ‘lesbian sport.’”

Both Chockley and Trumpler agree that things are getting better in the athlete community, but Trumpler actually declined to submit Yale’s athletic information for inclusion in a list of the Top-25 LGBTQfriendly colleges, saying, “We’re just not there yet.”

O’Connell points to harassment that occurs within the queer community itself.

She’s heard friends tease, “Oh my God, this dude is so closeted,” or, “Why doesn’t he come out already?” While those statements are certainly less hostile than those being thrown about in high school halls, they, too, make judgments about someone’s sexuality on the sole basis of their gender presentation. O’Connell chides Yale’s queer community for its hypocrisy, however well-intentioned: “If there’s one thing that we need to be better at, it’s remembering that just like we don’t want other people to make assumptions about our sexuality, we shouldn’t make them about each other—even if it’s just wishful thinking.”

It’s praiseworthy that Yale students can, and do, provide queer Connecticut youth with a safe space, but we cannot forgot that many Yale students currently need the same. The transformation of William Harkness Hall may provide an unforgettable day, but its transience should serve to remind us that even as we create safe spaces, we must work to eliminate hostile ones.

At the end of the 2012 Generation Equality conference, Szymkowiak delivered a closing address. She thanked students for spending their day at Yale, and reminded them that Fierce Fridays, informal meetings on Yale’s campus for queer high school students, would start right after Thanksgiving Break. In the meantime, the students would go home to their families. On Monday, they would return to their schools. They wiped off their fake mustaches and headed back into the cold November weather.

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Standard Deviance This past December, Q asked Yale undergraduates to participate in a survey about their use of pornography.

1,152 students complied. We asked them mostly multiple choice questions, but also asked for prose replies. Hundreds carefully articulated passionate and divergent opinions on porn, while others took the opportunity to admit to acorn or amputee fetishes. In many cases we couldn’t tell if a student was joking. (“Little people”?) By contrast, “yes/no” questions provide little room for humor, so we accepted those bubbled-in answers on face.

As may be expected, Yalies get their porn from the same place the rest of the world does: free online aggregators. Roughly the same percentage of students who said they usually consume porn online (96%) said they have never paid for it (94%). Porn aggregators today are behemoth and growing. At peak traffic times, the top aggregator, Xvideos, transmits 1,000 gigabytes of video every second. Such libraries of sexual congress are instant and free and accessible everywhere but subways. This is why porn’s American audience is now estimated to be 125 million strong.

Our generation is exposed to an unprecedented amount of sexual imagery. As Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam point out in their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, “With a visit to an adult video site like PornHub, you can see more naked bodies in a single minute than the most promiscuous Victorian would have seen in an entire lifetime.”

Porn’s influence is even more significant when you consider how often people our age view, and for how long they have been viewing, these images. Over half of Yale’s undergrad population watches porn several times a month or more, says our data. A third do it at least a few times a week. According to Gail Dines, author of Pornland, the average boy begins watching (continued on page 20) 20

The Results of Q’s Pornography Survey

Multiple times a day 5% Once a day 8%

“It’s not a personal statement, it’s a way to get off. The degrading way women are treated isn’t really how I want to be treated by my partner, but in the heat of the moment, it’s what I will reach for sometimes. I don’t think that watching porn makes me less of a feminist or less concerned with women’s rights.

It’s just a thing for every so often.”

Never 25%

Several times/week 26%

Several times/year 17%

Several times/month 19%

HOW OFTEN DO YOU ACCESS PORN?

Porn Access by Gender FEMALE 45% Never 24% Several Times/Year 18% Several Times/Month 9% Several Times/Week 2% Once A Day 1.5% Multiple Times A Day MALE 7% Never 10% Several Times/Year 20% Several Times/Month 43% Several Times/Week 13% Once A Day 6% Multiple Times A Day

Accord with Personal Beliefs by Gender and Sexuality QUEER MALE 24% Yes 60% No 16% Unsure/Ambiv.

STRAIGHT MALE 20% Yes 60% No 20% Unsure/Ambiv.

QUEER FEMALE

STRAIGHT FEMALE

25% Yes 48% No 27% Unsure/Ambiv.

24% Yes 54% No 22% Unsure/Ambiv.

Unsure/ Ambivalent 20%

Yes 23%

No 57%

“Sometimes minority characters are presented in a way that’s marginalizing and extremely problematic. I don’t tend to seek this out, but it certainly crops up occasionally, and is always upsetting.”

37% of men feel that they spend too much time watching porn.

MOST POPULAR TYPES OF PORN

“I simply think that pornography is a waste and is terrible for the human condition. Beyond religious beliefs, porn destroys advancement in society.”

DOES THE PORN YOU ACCESS EVER VIOLATE YOUR PERSONAL BELIEFS AND/OR POLITICS? 94% of respondents have never paid for porn.

1. AMATEUR 2. TEEN 3. AUTHORITY FIGURE 4. GROUP 5. BONDAGE/BDSM

Over 1 hr.

5% 30 min.–1 hr.

8%

Less than 5 min.

10%

DOES THE PORN YOU TYPICALLY ACCESS ALIGN WITH YOUR REAL-LIFE PREFERENCES? “I am mostly a lesbian, but like gay male porn.”

“I sometimes watch lesbian porn though I’m not a lesbian.”

“I’m bisexual but watch more gay porn than straight porn.”

“I watch anal porn but would never engage in it.”

“I identify as a straight male, but often watch gay male porn.”

6% of respondents have paid money to access porn.

“I am a female who has only ever been sexually involved/ in relationships with males, but I enjoy watching videos of women getting each other off. This could be due, in part, to real-life curiosity about being sexually involved with another female (which is true for me), but I think it comes also from an impression that female-female sexual stimulation in porn appears somehow to reflect more genuine pleasure than portrayals of men pleasuring women in porn. Displays of female sexual pleasure in heterosexual porn often seem to me as a female too dramatic, staged, or unbelievable –i.e., clearly engineered for a male audience.”

5–10 min.

18%

20–30 min.

21%

10–20 min.

38%

WHEN YOU ACCESS PORN, HOW LONG DO YOU NORMALLY SPEND?

67% of men often or always look at porn when they masturbate. 22% of women often or always view porn when they masturbate.

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“There are some things that turn me on in porn that I would NEVER want to do in real life. It’s more of a fantasy/turn-on but if I ever fulfilled it, I would feel disgusted.

And it probably wouldn’t turn me on in real life. Like sex with older men.”

67% (continued from page 18) porn at age 11. Because of this, she and other feminists have argued that “porn is actually being encoded into a boy’s sexual identity,” that porn may literally change our brains. Defenders, such as former adult star Sasha Grey, argue that porn at best empowers women by demonstrating their sexual equality to men. At worst, she and others argue, porn is harmless.

Yale students are having the same debate, albeit less vocally. Our survey shows that students are divided by porn, chiefly by the health of viewing it and the morality of its mass production. While a clear majority said they are not concerned about the quantity of porn they consume (74%), a much narrower majority felt that the porn met their morals. 44% either disapprove of or are unsure about the types of sex they seek out.

How does the time we spend in Pornland affect ourselves in reality? What happens to the minds and bodies of people (13%) who watch porn as a part of their daily routine? A significant swathe of Yalies are asking themselves these questions, though many are not moved by them. It is one to which we’ve come up with radically different answers. “I know I’m sinning and being lustful.” “As long as everything is consensual, sexual standards can be different than real-life standards.” “Any form of porn degrades and objectifies people.”

There’s a lot to sort out. Take this spread as a starting point.

– Marcus Moretti

MALE FEMALE 40%

31%

19% 14%

YES

“q is annoying”

“I prefer some hair on the mons pubis, not a jungle but a trimmed hedgerow.”

METHODOLOGICAL NOTE Commenters pointed out that after we allowed the option of “never” to the question about accessing porn, we did not give “N/A” answers to the other questions. The average total respondents for the next questions that probed the quality of porn consumption was 909, whereas for the initial access question, it was 1,140. This implies that most (80%) of the 287 “never” respondents simply didn’t answer the questions about porn habits. Thus, subsequent questions regarding porn consumption reflect variations in the population of primarily porn consumers, not the total respondents.

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NO

UNSURE

DOES THE PORN YOU TYPICALLY ACCESS ALIGN WITH YOUR REAL-LIFE PREFERENCES?

Most Commonly Preferred Body Types/Features in Porn

Asian Shaved White Athletic

29%

BUSTED 25 respondents preferred big breasts, 4 preferred small breasts, and 5 preferred “natural” breasts. One preferred “BIG BOOB, BUT ONLY ONE BOOB.”

Other popular write-ins

Redhead “I prefer natural looking women Twink and attractive men, as opposed Hispanic to the usual surgeried women Black with perfect Blond bodies and ugly with big Large Penis mendicks.”

Hairy Winter 2013

DROP ME A

By Ryan Mendías

accepted Grindr as a normal part of our romantic lives, but we aren’t quite ready to own up to that fact. Perhaps it isn’t weird that he messaged you because, hey, that’s what Grindr’s for. So, if you’re interested in him, send him a message back. And if Grindr is too awkward of a medium, be upfront about it and ask him out to coffee.

Who knows? This could be the start of something great—after all, it’s only a matter of time until the Grindr hook up story is replaced by the Grindr love story.

“I’ve been with my girlfriend for a long time. I love her, but I feel like we’re in a rut. We don’t have bad sex, but I do find myself thinking about other girls a lot. I feel like hooking up with other people would be good for both of us, but I wouldn’t even know how to bring it up. What should I do?”

Relationships, from casual hook-ups to long-term dating, are a lot like sweaters. There’s the sweater we pull on when we can’t find something better to wear or we don’t have time to look—perhaps at Toad’s or Spring Salvage. There’s that ugly one we regret buying. Then there’s the sweater we’ve had for years, the one we love because we can snuggle up in it and watch The Kids Are All Right. Basically: That cashmere blend (mostly blend) sweater you love so much can really start to itch and even smother. Some “There’s this cute guy in my section, and we’ve talked a days, a girl just wants to wear her crop top. couple of times but nothing serious. Then he messaged It’s natural to feel restless. Relationships aren’t binding legal me on Grindr. Is that weird? I don’t know how to contracts. They’re organic, unstable, frenetic living organisms. respond, and it just feels kind of awkward now.”

They grow and change and get sick, and sometimes they die. That said, it’s clear that you still love your girlsweater, and that fact is Grindr’s about as popular with gay male Yalies as 168 York drink the most important thing to keep in mind as you navigate the ups specials and the sales rack at Urban Outfitters. But while the and downs of an open relationship. There’s no easy answer here. number of Yale men on Grindr has exploded, the complexities Monogamy is messy enough, and adding the emotions and bodily of proper cruising etiquette have yet to catch up. Amid all the fluids of other people can stir in a lot of angst. sexting, there’s a profound uncertainty about how to talk to other Before you bring it up with your girlfriend, you should make people in this bizarre, wonderful, sexy and seriously confusing sure you know what you want. Think long-term: Do you want to space. We’ve all been there: You send someone an innocuous be in an open relationship forever? Where would you like to be “Hey,” and he doesn’t respond. No big deal, until you unexpectin six months? If you’re aware of your own feelings, it will make edly bump into him in the Pierson dining hall. explaining them to your girlfriend a lot easier. Make sure she sees Then there are the moments when you’re talking to someone— that you still love her. Explain why you think hooking up with or rather, to a selfie of a rippling torso—only to realize midother people will help and how it will make your relationship conversation that you know this person. What then? Especially if stronger. you’re not into this dude in real life, it’s tempting to go straight Know that you might get an answer you don’t want. Even if for the “block” button and try desperately to avoid him for the you do, be prepared to have long, potentially fraught conversarest of your undergraduate career. tions as you work out the details and specifics. What are either Grindr-induced angst is normal. The infamous app is the stuff of you comfortable doing with another person? Can you hook up social anxiety is made of. When you compress all the excitement, with another person more than once? Do you want to know about fear, and nervousness of a sexual encounter into perhaps one of each other’s liaisons? It’s challenging, but being on the same page the most ambiguous forms of communication (i.e., a text mesas your girlfriend will make things infinitely smoother down the sage), something’s got to give. But when faced with that social road. anxiety, perhaps the best thing we can do is, well, act like normal I’ve given a lot of caveats, but there’s always the chance she’ll people. be totally on board. At its best, an open relationship helps you I’ll answer your question with one of my own: What’s so learn just what makes you two work so well together. And while awkward about what he did? You seemed to have at least the thought of having lots of sex with other people may seem somewhat of a rapport, and if you’ve flirted once or twice in appealing now, it is very possible that you’ll eventually realize section, he’s probably just trying to bring that same energy out that you’re much happier with just one patchy, blended sweater. of the classroom. Gay men are stuck in a weird place—we’ve Perhaps it really does—as people say—match your eyes.

Q

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By Rachel Lipstein & Devin Race

ANTICLIMAX

Unhappy Couple in Bedroom by Igor Mojzes ©DepositPhotos

Debunking the myth of the consistently perfect male orgasm The lurid sexology of Dr. Laura Berman, Oprah radio show host and director of an institute devoted to sex therapy, presents a popular idea: “While the man can be satisfied with direct stimulation or the sight of his partner in the buff, she might need something more, such as foreplay, romance, or perhaps even a bit of fantasy.” The female orgasm is mysterious, lyrical, nigh-unattainable.

The male orgasm is the inevitable, consistent result of friction ending in simple but intense pleasure.

That story is a myth. Ejaculating doesn’t always feel spectacular, and simply because a man has ejaculated does not mean he

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has had a good time. One author of this piece reports ejaculating both with and without partners and has had the experience range from “mysterious and lyrical” to “watching House M.D. would’ve been slightly better.” This author’s range of experiences seems obvious to the point of being unremarkable. But nearly every time he says to a female friend that ejaculating often doesn’t feel that great, she’s surprised or shocked. Why? We know what male orgasm looks like—ejaculation (there are some rare cases where either ejaculation or orgasm occurs without the other, but we shall just consider the majority of cases

Winter 2013

here). And it’s usually not difficult for a man to ejaculate. The lauded University of Chicago-published survey The Social Organization of Sexuality demonstrated that a whopping 75% of men in relationships “always” have orgasms with a longterm partner. Only 29% of women do.

That number decreases substantially for women in hookup scenarios.

Females have a harder time reaching orgasm than males. Yet we are led to believe that women are rewarded for their effort by a consistently intense level of pleasure when they do get there. Popular discourse—shaped by everything from Sex and the City to the annual TIME exposé on how the orgasm improves lifespan, complexion and eyelash thickness—seems to agree that the female orgasm ranges from pretty wonderful to truly transcendent.

While we are certain that some females have disappointing orgasms, it seems that, in general, this particular myth clears the gate: Studies give physiological differences between male and female orgasms, and female orgasms appear to be better.

According to Brown University Health Education, female orgasms boast six to ten orgasmic contractions—while males only get four to six—and last up to twice as long. The female orgasm is often a full-body experience—sending shudders from the pelvic floor out to the extremities—while male orgasm is usually more localized.

In our climax-obsessed culture (think Superbowl Halftime show and corresponding fireworks), we couple orgasm and peak sexual experience. This leads us to the erroneous assumption that because men are having more orgasms, they’re having more great sex than women. This assumption has incriminating tracks all over stereotypes of male/male and female/ female couplings. Recall popular images of the orgiastic glory in 1970s gay male bathhouses and banana-hammock’d float dancers at Pride. Compare images of females in overalls and lawn chairs at Michigan Womyn’s Folk Festival, many people’s confusion over how two women actually have sex, and the phrase “Lesbian Bed Death.” This is, in part, a reflection of the belief that women have a harder time having good sex than men.

This is the crux of the misconception.

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“Ask yourself: Do you want sexual pleasure to be yet another tier that men have privileged access to but women must struggle for?”

Men have just as spotty and intermittent good sex, even though they orgasm more often, simply because the male orgasm is also variable and sometimes a yawn. One author recalls orgasms that weren’t worth the effort it took to get them, in which ejaculating was just the embarrassing peak of a truly underwhelming time. We recognize that female sexual experience ranges from bad to excellent. We should recognize that male sexual experience also ranges from bad to excellent. The first step is realizing that the only thing guaranteed by ejaculation is ejaculate. Let us welcome the male orgasm into the community of mediocre sexual experiences.

One factor contributing to the poor understanding of bad male sex is that men underreport it. The state of the popular discourse is proof. Bad male sex gets screen time only in the form of erectile dysfunction and impotence. Neither are popular subjects of conversation among men, lest they jeopardize their tenuous grip on masculinity. Erectile dysfunction is something for old men and weaklings—and even America’s premier public weakling, the most vocally neurotic of all petite Jewish hypochondriacs, Woody Allen, won’t admit to any sexual problem. He somehow convinces us that the skirts he’s always chasing must truly be the meaning of life he’s chasing slightly less aggressively.

This is a myth. Woody Allen doesn’t have consistently mind-blowing sex. And neither do you.

On the other hand, it has become hip and cool and celebrated as female empowerment for women to talk about their bad sex. There are abundant examples: the complaints from the bathtub monologues on Girls, the admirably vapid voiceover evaluations of Carrie’s latest unfulfilling fling on Sex and the City, and Maria Yagoda’s 2012 Yale Daily News op-ed jabbing an outraged finger of blame for women’s bad sex deep into the Yale male chest.

An example of college bros or eight-pack packing vampires reveling in their painful, degrading, awkward or simply boring trysts? Doubtful. Deeply encoded gender roles and media representations have created a comfortable, tiled and well-lit space for women to open up about their bad sex,

shutting men out on the patio of bravado and unmet expectations.

These representations of women and men are untrue and unhelpful. Ask yourself: Do you want sexual pleasure to be yet another tier that men have privileged access to but women must struggle for? The popular view of women is that they must be coaxed into releasing the convoluted latches on the box holding their sexual pleasure. This idea sloughs off the old Victorian notion that women are passionless but doesn’t abandon the idea that they’re passive. This fake story –combined with the myth of the male easy-gasm and great sex—has most pronounced implications in heterosexual couplings. It gives teeth to the idea of men profiting, dog-like, from women’s bodies while women are dependent upon their partner for pleasure. And, unless their partner is a considerate virtuoso, they usually receive nothing. Witness Kim, via interlude on Outkast’s legendary Stankonia: “Dick so short! Came quick! He got his, I ain’t get mines. I’m like fuck!”

Kim is wrong; more likely, neither she nor her short-dicked man got theirs, if getting “it” means great sex. Kick men out of this domain of privilege, and call upon them to admit their bad sex. Explicit honesty about bad male sex would be more empowering to both men and women than bemoaning the fact that men have an easier time achieving orgasm. Women suffer by thinking men have a biological advantage, and men suffer from blind faith in the orgasm and the silence surrounding their bad sex. They then fail to evaluate and improve their sex practices. The fact that ejaculation and orgasm can be disappointing means that men need to thoughtfully explore the world available outside their well-trodden path to ejaculation.

Men must challenge themselves to attempt more experiential, less goal-driven sex.

Men: say goodbye to locker-room boasts and say hello to the bathtub soapbox. It’s time to come clean about the male anticlimax, and start working toward the great sex everyone says you’ve been having.

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REVIEWS When you haven’t been to a cinema house in a while, it’s hard to find yourself engorged again with movie trailers, crunching like popcorn the cloying (read: effective) pills of filmedit-induced mood enhancers. It’s harder still to see something like The Perks of Being a Wallflower alone without feeling like you’re enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy or waving a white flag. It’s harder most to sit in the might-as-well-be-empty theater with just one other older couple clearly there on a once-a-month bargain treat, wearing your queerness like a popped thought balloon (“so this is what I do at noon the day after Halloween…”).

And then, post-production, you find yourself gagging. Gagging not only because you find out the movie is based on a popular 1999 MTV-published teen novel; not only because you saw no people of color (yet again) represented in a “1990s Pittsburgh;” but gagging also because somehow, yet again, you fell momentarily in love with the mythic white middleclass high school resolutions you grew up falling in love with. “I feel infinite,” says Charlie the protagonist (Logan Lermon), twice, like ringing the tagline bell, both times speeding through an anonymous tunnel in an anonymous pick-up truck, with, as self-proclaimed early in their introduction, “the slut and the falcon” (Emma Watson and Ezra Miller). And “I feel infinite”ly simplified by how infinitely boyish I get around films like this.

Films where moments of transgression or tragedy sprout prematurely - dandelions of child abuse and gay bash, of cheating, and of freshman year acid

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THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER Reviewed by Gabe DeLeon

trips – as if representing teenage life as some haphazard garden of mistake and memory would be fruitful enough to show that, hey world, high school is hard. Let’s complain about SATs when they were still out of 1600 points!!

The premise, of course, is that the eponymous “perks of being a wallflower” are the creeping footprints of maturity. Whatever. I wasn’t out in high school; I didn’t hook-up in secret with my school’s non-existent football team captain; I can’t drive. I was (am?) a wallflower and see my life in less wide shots.

But in the theater: I still sipped on that wallnectar like it was my job.

I wouldn’t be as bittersweet if I hadn’t just seen the same job done better in films like Pariah or Gun Hill Road, films that, because of films like Wallflower, are more fulfilling just by sketching their groundbreaking queer stories despite the trite narrative ground of bildungsroman after bildungsroman (emphasis on the dung). Yet, what this film at least accomplishes - despite ultimately tokenizing traumatic events - is adding weight to the influx of queer representations on screen. Ezra Miller plays the adorable queen in this case, at one point flirting around as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a brief film to stage to film rendition of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Who can complain for long with all that white boy twerk? In my personal ranking system: one and a half rainbows out of four.

Winter 2013

On the cover of his 2010 debut, Special Affections, John O’Regan—who performs under the moniker Diamond Rings—is shown against a wood-panel background, wearing a nondescript leather jacket and airbrushed t-shirt. The only striking thing about O’Regan’s appearance is the band of rainbow face paint running across his eyes. It’s a simple photograph, but it cannily captures the feel of that album. O’Regan began performing as Diamond Rings after a stint in Toronto post-punk group The D’Urbervilles, and Special Affections bore the influence of these alternative rock leanings, even as O’Regan pushed his songwriting in new directions.

He presented himself as a kind of motley pop star, combining the earnestness of indie rock with melodies drawn from dance and bubblegum pop.

One need only glance at the cover of Diamond Rings’ new album, Free Dimensional, to deduce that O’Regan has ditched the patchwork approach and fully embraced his pop music leanings. On the cover, he flaunts giant, reflective sunglasses and an angular New Wave android outfit seemingly inspired by Klaus Nomi. Where his first album cover was cheeky and informal, this one is splashy and highly produced in a manner that also pretty much sums up the music itself. From the first, ominous synths of opener “Everything Speaks,” Free Dimensional announces itself as an unabashed, straightforward pop record, and the rest of the album is a master class in flamboyant ‘80s production.

The problem is that while O’Regan’s popstar ambitions have grown, his approach to songwriting remains essentially unchanged. At its core, this is another solid collection of affable pop-rock–catchy at best, forgettable at worst, and rarely more or less than pleasant. This time, O’Regan relies on production to do the heavy lifting, and the songs tend to shrink under the weight of the added bells and whistles. Free Dimensional is at its best when O’Regan’s songs have room to breathe. Album highlight “Runaway Love” is a simple, guitar-driven track that manages to be catchy and enjoyable without drowning in synths. Unfortunately, most of the other tracks on the album suffer from the misguided notion that bigger is always better.

The move from intimacy to broad pop appeal also shows in O’Regan’s lyrics, which involve more universal themes of freedom and self-affirmation.

Lead single “I’m Just Me,” in particular, feels like an attempt at a “Born This Way”-esque positive self-image anthem. These lyrics usually end up sounding contrived rather than meaningful, and there’s an uncomfortable dissonance at times between the earnestness of the words and the bombastic music.

Closing track “Day & Night” is the only truly glaring misfire and the most telling example of where Free Dimensional goes wrong. It starts out as a cloying indie rock approximation of schoolyard hip-hop, with lyrics about the hardships of life on the road (“I don’t even know what state I’m in / Could be Illinois or Michigan”) and an even more grating nursery rhyme chorus (“One, two, let me love you / Three, four, love you more”). Eventually O’Regan actually starts rapping. The result ends up sounding like an ironic in-joke rather than a real song. Given that Diamond Rings has traditionally been about embracing the fun and positivity of pop music without sacrificing depth and sincerity, I can only assume that this and most of the other tracks on Free Dimensional represent a kind of miscommunication. O’Regan has talent and a unique artistic voice, but by relying too heavily on sonic and lyrical clichés in an effort to realize his pop music aspirations, he loses much of the offbeat charm that distinguished his work in the first place.

DIAMOND RINGS Reviewed by Travis Trew qmagazineatyale.com

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By Andrew Wagner

BEING FRANK How one Tumblr post made Frank Ocean the queer community’s unlikely new idol “ Whoever you are. Wherever you are…I’m starting to think we’re a lot alike.” So begins Frank Ocean’s now iconic July 4 Tumblr post, an excerpt from his album Channel Orange’s liner notes in which Ocean reveals that his first love was a man. The post is an eloquent and tragically beautiful piece of writing.

In it, Ocean sincerely describes his unrequited romance, achieving a poetic universality: “By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping. No negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love, it changed my life.” It is little wonder that the post has been reblogged or liked some 76,000 times.

What is perhaps surprising about the post is that Ocean doesn’t use the word “gay” once. Nor “bisexual.” In our gossip-obsessed world, where

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blogs are constantly speculating as to whether some celebrity is gay or not, Ocean’s post is refreshing.

He refuses to label himself, and his post recognizes the fact that sexuality is a fluid, ever-changing spectrum and not necessarily something that can be named.

As could be expected, the days that followed saw the Internet aflutter with buzz and gossip about Ocean’s post. Nearly every news site wrote about Ocean’s coming out, while celebrities tweeted words of encouragement and congratulations. On his website, “Life+Times,” Jay-Z posted an open letter to Ocean thanking him for his decision. “Your relieving yourself of your ‘secret’ is as much about wanting to honestly connect as it is about exhibition. We are all made better by your decision to share publicly,” Jay-Z wrote. Given Ocean’s growing prominence in

Winter 2013

From Ocean’s July 4 Tumblr post: “4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. Everyday almost.

And on the days we were together, time would glide. Most of the day I’d see him, and his smile. I’d hear his conversation and his silence.. until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with him. By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping, no negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love, it changed my life.”

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the hip-hop world, the media granted his coming out a special significance.

It is well known that homophobia is quite prevalent in hip-hop culture. For instance, the now well known slur “no homo” found its origins in hip-hop music, and was popularized by rapper Lil Wayne on his album, Tha Carter III. Likewise, the slur “faggot” also often makes its way into hip-hop lyrics, perhaps most controversially used by Eminem in songs such as “Marshall Mathers.”

Despite changing attitudes towards gays in the industry (Lil B titled his recent album I’m Gay as a show of support; Russell Simmons released a statement hoping Ocean’s actions will “uplift our consciousness”), hip-hop still lacks any major gay male stars. By coming out, Ocean, who has previously worked with Kanye West and Tyler, the Creator, becomes the first prominent, mainstream queer hip-hop star. Though the post inspired a flurry of homophobic tweets, Ocean has otherwise met with little opposition. Perhaps most tellingly, the success of Channel Orange—debuting at number two on the Billboard charts—has shown that hip-hop stars can be queer and still retain a sizeable audience. Ocean’s coming out overturns the belief that honesty is rewarded with ostracism and appears to be a turning point in hip-hop.

Yet, for a variety of reasons, Ocean’s coming out may not necessarily be as radical as the media portrayed it. Ocean is far from the first (or only) queer rapper. Indeed, for at least a year before Ocean came out, an inter-related group of underground queer male New York rappers (such as Mykki Blanco, Le1f and duo Haus of Ladosha) have been producing music while open about their sexualities. But there have been more

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It’s good to be Frank.

mainstream rappers, who, besides Ocean, have been open about their queerness.

Azealia Banks has been openly bisexual her entire career. Her 2011 song “212” makes explicit mention of queer sex: “Now she wanna lick my plum in the evening/And fit that ton-tongue d-deep in/I guess that cunt getting eaten.”

Banks, then, is in stark contrast to Ocean, who has almost entirely eschewed any mentions of queerness in his music. The only song on Channel Orange that comes close to explicitly discussing same-sex love is “Forrest,” on which Ocean sings, “Forrest Gump, you run my mind, boy.”

But even here, Ocean avoids explicitly singing about a male lover, instead

leaving it ambiguous as to whether the song’s point-of-view is that of Ocean or of Jenny Curran.

Ocean’s coming out was treated as a watershed moment for hip-hop, while little has been made of Banks’s queerness. This suggests differing attitudes in hip-hop towards male and female sexualities. In the hip-hop world, it may be more permissible for women to be queer than it is for men; indeed, Nicki Minaj, in an interview with Rolling Stone, stated that she had lied early on in her career about being bisexual in order to garner attention. It may, in part, be due to associations of female queerness with the “masculine,” while male queerness gets

Winter 2013

socially connoted as being “feminine.”

It also may have to do with the straight male fetishization of queer female sexuality. This, in turn, could explain why Banks is able to be so explicitly queer in her music; Ocean has to deliver his queerness in a more tempered way if he hopes to maintain a sizeable audience.

Even so, Banks has yet to achieve the same massive appeal that Ocean has; her music, at least in the United States, has yet to chart—and one wonders whether that has to do with Ocean’s avoidance of explicitly queer subject matter.

There is also the matter of the timing of Ocean’s coming out: three weeks before Channel Orange was to be released and five days before a performance on Jimmy Fallon. And soon after his Tumblr post, Ocean bumped up Channel Orange’s digital release by a full week. It may be

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cynical to chalk Ocean’s coming out up to a publicity stunt, and I do not mean to question the sincerity or bravery of Ocean’s move—but surely, Ocean had some sense of the sort of buzz Channel Orange would get after his coming out and of the leagues of gay men (and other queer-identified individuals) who might now express interest his music for the first time.

Even if Ocean’s intentions in coming out may not have been the purest, his decision was still incredibly brave, and one which will further hip-hop’s growing acceptance of homosexuality.

Ocean’s coming out, however, may be most important because he did it before establishing a large fan base. Though Ocean had previously released an album, when he came out he still had yet to develop the massive audience that other queer celebrities, such as Anderson Cooper, wait to cultivate before opening up about their sexuality. Much has been made of Ocean’s sexuality as particularly unique in the hip-hop world, but it should be noted that most musical genres lack more than a token openly queer celebrity—especially celebrities who were out before reaching their level of success. As such, Ocean’s coming out is a sign that queer musicians can reach stardom while remaining open about their sexuality, something which would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Ocean’s openness about his same-sex love hopefully will lead others to realize that queerness is no longer an obstacle to success.

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Artist Spotlight

Doron Langberg Doron Langberg’s paintings would be perverse if they weren’t so romantic, and romantic if they weren’t so perverse. It’s this tension that stimulates his work, rendering his subjects undeniably desirable and yet strange, curious, queer. Recently graduated from Yale’s MFA program and now working in Queens, NY, he sees his depictions of queer sexuality as a means of expanding viewers’ notions of beauty and desirability. “I want the form, materiality and image of my paintings to serve as a common ground between the viewer and me, where my desire becomes theirs,” Langberg explains. His paintings initially affront.

But they simultaneously attract, as in “Asshole,” where a pair of ravenous, muddied hands expose the pink and practically glowing focal point. And while Langberg also paints David Hockney-like images of young men asleep on beds or staring longingly at the viewer, these are often complicated by their rank color palettes and curdled textures. Langberg recognizes that our sexual and aesthetic desires take pleasure in the strange, and he deftly merges these two realms of desire in paintings that run on the odd allure of putrid greens and congealed paint, of assholes and morning breath.

– Paul Doyle

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Winter 2013

Asshole 2012 Oil on linen 46" Ă— 34"

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Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 70" Ă— 48"

Shower 2012 Oil on linen 59" Ă— 48"

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Winter 2013

On All Fours 2012 Oil on linen 44" Ă— 68"

“Depicting experiences that almost always relate to, emerge from or represent queer relationships in a compelling way turns the focus away from queerness as a divisive category, and towards an inclusiveness that can speak to shared concepts of love, intimacy and sex. So in that regard the purpose of the work is not to separate the audience into gay or straight but to try to relate to the viewer on a more basic, personal level.�

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Lovers 2012 Oil on linen 46" × 34"

“I think that my work and how I perceive my sexuality continuously inform each other. Since I only come to understand the meaning of each painting as I’m making it, there is never a definite idea about what I want to say from the beginning. Usually my process starts from an intuition about what I want to paint. I often ‘run into’ painting ideas, usually coming from an experience I’ve had, something I’ve seen, textures, objects or other paintings. Through the process of painting–making decisions about the mood, light and attitude of a piece–I articulate to myself why I was compelled to pursue this specific idea to begin with, and what its importance is to me.”

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Winter 2013

Tehura 2012 Oil on linen 48" Ă— 70"

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From the Archives

By Emma Schindler

OUT IN THE LEDE Christopher Phillips and the birth of Yale’s public queer community

Christopher Phillips, ’72, never read the Yale Daily News. But on October 30, 1969, when he stopped by a friend’s room in Ezra Stiles College on his way to lunch, a copy of that day’s issue lay open on the bed. One headline caught Phillips’s eye: “Sexuality Discussion Tonight.” The first paragraph announced, “The Rev. Stephen Wolf, former Lutheran chaplain at Yale, will lead the first of a series of weekly discussions on homosexuality at Yale in the Dwight Hall Common room tonight at 8.”

In the Christopher Phillips Papers, compiled by Phillips and housed in Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, Phillips has outlined the front-page blurb in red crayon and noted in the margin, “1st meeting! This was the day that everything changed for me.” Phillips attended the meeting that night, and the consequences were monumental: “Had that not happened,” he recently told me over the phone, “I probably still wouldn’t be out today. Not because I didn’t want to be, but because I didn’t know how to be.”

Born in 1950 to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Manhattan, Phillips attended elite prep schools in New York City and England before coming to Yale in the fall of 1968— less than a year before the Stonewall riots erupted that summer, the same summer that Phillips first started speaking to people about his sexuality. “I was 18 in the summer of 1969, when the Stonewall riots gave birth to the modern gay movement,” Phillips writes in the collection’s introduction. “There is no way to exaggerate the importance of this event for me 38

personally: I owe my freedom and happiness to it.”

Philips insists that he was ready to come out at age seven but didn’t know how or where to do it. “Having said that, other people found ways,” he says. “So that says a lot, either about me or the very starchy circumstances that I grew up in.”

But the Stonewall riots threw into relief a whole population of gays he hadn’t known existed. A few months later, on October 30, 1969, the first meeting of the Homosexuality Discussion Group revealed another gay world to him—right here at Yale.

Through letters, magazine clippings, and other ephemera, the Christopher Phillips papers piece together a portrait of one gay life. Here also, in scrapbook form, is the story of the first formal LGBT organization on campus through the eyes of one student, who went from being a closeted freshman to a highly visible member of Yale’s fledgling, public gay community. He illustrates what the Homosexuality Discussion Group might have meant to many gay men and women on this campus, forging the outline of today’s vibrant queer social and political space—both organized and not.

Phillips, now an editor at The New York Times and a homeopathy practitioner in New York City, described the first meeting of the Homosexuality Discussion Group as “very relaxed.” “It was amazing to me, because there were all these people who looked just like me,” he said. “I’d never seen gay people who were like me…it was a total revelation.” A student quoted anonymously in the October 30 YDN piece told the reporter that the meetings were not to provide therapy Winter 2013

nor a place for sexual activity. The anonymous student’s careful statement about what the meeting was not provides some insight into the public’s perception of homosexuality at the time.

In 1969, homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association; meanwhile, the sexual revolution that was underway among both heterosexuals and homosexuals injected into America’s terrified collective imagination images of sex-crazed, orgy-seeking gays.

This group, the student explained, offered an opportunity for people to “sit down and meet each other as people”—which, up until then, had eluded Phillips and presumably many other students. For all of his freshman year, Phillips did not know of a single other gay person at Yale. “There was no way to find people,” he explained. “There was no information.”

Phillips attributes some of this lack of information to the fact that homosexuality at Yale was, he says, largely tolerated. “Had this been some Bible college, people would have said, ‘There’s a gay bar at 1st and May; we have to close it down,’ or, ‘Can you believe those homos I saw hanging around on State Street?’ And that would have been great, because you would have gotten some information from it. But there was no information because everyone was so damn nice and liberal and polite.”

The Homosexuality Discussion Group, later renamed the Gay Alliance at Yale (G.A.Y.), brought visibility to the gay community. For Phillips, it created one, providing a network of friends and potential sexual partners that had seemed so impossible as a freshman. The group helped to create a gay social scene, hosting frequent dances that drew crowds and advertising them in the YDN. Still, Phillips seems to have been more comfortable with visibility than most. One day in September 1970, he slipped a letter under the door of every student living on Yale’s campus, describing the Homosexuality Discussion Group and inviting students to come to a meeting. The letter, a full page long, is signed, “Christopher Phillips, ’72, Chairman.”

In his papers, Phillips notes, “Since I signed it, I figure that marks the first time anyone had publicly declared his gayness in the history of Yale. There was no bad reaction to it. The dean of my college…shook my hand in the middle of the dining hall… the day it hit the doorsteps. He said he was glad we had this group because people had been coming to him for help on this topic for years and he didn’t know what to tell them.”

Not all gay students seem to have been quite so ready to identify themselves to the entire campus. In a February 8, 1972, frontpage article in the YDN titled “Gay Activists Seeking More Freedom,” one leader of G.A.Y. declined to be identified. Phillips, also cited as a leader in the group, was quoted extensively by name. “You can be gay and not a radical person, or you can be a radical person and not be gay: we all pick our own way,” he told the reporter. “At Yale, the people will accept you the way you present yourself. Personally, I am very open about being gay.”

The piece noted that Phillips was “both radical and gay, a rarity among Yale students.”

However radical Phillips himself might have been, his open commitment to the group was not rooted in an agenda to push others to take a similar stance. It was rooted in a passion to get out the word, based on his personal knowledge of the tremendous— and particular—difficulties gay students faced in finding others like them. “I wasn’t involved in who came and who didn’t, or qmagazineatyale.com qmagazineatyale.com

A logo for G.A.Y.

whether people were going to come out,” Phillips explains now.

“The thing I wanted to do was just tell people where to come if they wanted to, which was all I had needed.” Phillips says he meets classmates today (“gay folks”) who didn’t come to the meetings but who say that the fact of their existence alone was meaningful to them.

The letter Phillips slipped under students’ doors stated that the group was intended to serve two types of people: “the man or woman who has accepted or is discovering within himself tendencies toward homosexuality” and the “heterosexuals who are genuinely interested in the homosexual as a person and in the homosexual group as a very real facet of society in 1970.” But did straight members of the community actually come? “I don’t think so,” Phillips told me. “I think I did that to give people an excuse to come out at all. What I really should have said was, ‘This is a place where gay people can meet each other and have lots of great, wild sex,’—but that was not the kind of thing that anyone said.”

Along with a whole generation of young gays, Phillips was working to create a gay consciousness—to define their sexuality and their lives not by the terms given to them by psychiatrists, the so-called experts, but rather by terms set by themselves. After he left Yale, Phillips continued to advocate for gay rights and self-definition, through organizing, volunteer work and active involvement in the Gay Liberation Front in cities across the world.

But those stories, and whatever conclusions we might draw from them, are all, in a sense, dependent on that one day in October 1969, when Christopher Phillips stopped by a friend’s room on the way to the dining hall and saw a headline in the Yale Daily News.

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YALE’S SECOND LGBT REUNION REMEMBERING OUR PAST, SHAPING OUR FUTURE For more information, visit www.yalegala.org/reunion or email reunion@yalegala.org

FEB. 7-10, 2013

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