Yale Daily News Magazine | February 2020

ABUSE AND FEAR AT THE YESHIVA OF NEW HAVEN

BY OLIVIA TUCKER

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE VOL. XLVII ISSUE 4 FEBRUARY 2020

table of contents feature DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

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MAGAZINE EDITORS IN CHIEF Jever Mariwala Marisa Peryer

GOD AND THE GAY IVY

BY ISA ZOU

MANAGING EDITORS Aidan Campbell Zoe Nuechterlein SENIOR EDITORS Jack Kyono TC Martin ASSOCIATE EDITORS Lorenzo Arvanitis Ko Lyn Cheang Elena DeBre Ashley Fan Claire Lee Isaac Scobey-Thal Macrina Wang Isa Zou DESIGN EDITOR Laura Nicholas

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PHOTOGRAPHY EDITORS Logan Howard James Larson Eric Wang Daniel Zhao David Zheng

IN PURSUIT OF JUSTICE

BY MACRINA WANG

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITORS Susanna Liu Claire Mutchnik COPY Mary Chen Joshua Gonzalez Queenie Huang Christopher Sung PUBLISHER Yeama Ho EDITOR IN CHIEF & PRESIDENT Sammy Westfall Cover photo by Marisa Peryer ASSISTANT DESIGN EDITORS Crystal Cheung Will Wang Christie Yu Zully Arias Megan Graham Isabella Huang Ellen Qian

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ABUSE AND FEAR AT THE YESHIVA OF NEW HAVEN

BY OLIVIA TUCKER

profile

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JOHN GINNETTI

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LOVE ON TRIAL

BY AIDAN CAMPBELL

BY KATHERINE HU

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WHAT RORY GILMORE TEACHES US ABOUT YALE

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ON VALENTINE’S DAY AT YALE

BY CLAIRE LEE

BY SERENA LIN

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ON CLICHES ROLLED IN GLITTER

BY NICOLE DIRKS

poetry

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LIGHTLY

BY ELIANA SWERDLOW

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ON VALENTINE’S DAY AT YALE Beyond the love for capitalism

BY CLAIRE LEE During the last week of winter break, shoulder to shoulder with a good friend from home, I strolled into Target, unsuspecting of the decorative hit we would receive when we walked through the doors. Replacing the Christmas decor that had filled the entire store just last week were streamers speckled pink and white. Cards with small hearts and cherubs lined the store’s front row, awaiting customers to purchase them for their loved ones for Valentine’s Day. We were chronic Target shoppers, devoted customers, but we couldn’t help but comment on the decorations. Weren’t these a season too early? Returning home, I rid my family’s yellow Christmas lights from our roof and packed for my spring semester at Yale, and as daylight faded to dark on the shuttle from JFK airport to Phelps Gate in January, Valentine’s Day was the last thing on my mind.

But when February arrived, it was impossible to ignore Valentine’s Day. Falling on a Friday this year, Valentine’s Day, like other holidays at Yale, transformed into a multi-day

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marathon, inspiring study breaks, fundraisers, a cappella shows, formals and parties leading up to the big day. I quickly lost track of the number of Valentine’s Day-themed events on Facebook. Emails from Datamatch popped into my inbox asking, “Want double-legacy children, but need another Yalie?” Did I want double-legacy children? Only time would tell. Or Datamatch.

Dunkin Donuts offered special Valentine’s Day red velvet lattes, windows on Broadway displayed Valentine’s Day deals and collections. At this rate, I was turning corners and seeing red and white on the most innocuous objects: flyers, book covers, the Donut Crazy sign.

In these days, I could not scroll through Instagram without seeing a mention of Valentine’s Day. Posts celebrating relationships were followed by a wave of posts celebrating Galentine’s Day and another wave of posts on the more gender-inclusive companion, Palentine’s Day. I have never been one to oppose decoration, festivities or love, but observing the festivities and decor for Val-

ILLUSTRATION BY ANASTHASIA SHILOV

entine’s Day at Yale this year, I could not help but wonder what the hype was around. Valentine’s Day had not garnered this much excitement last year.

But despite the overwhelming number of Valentine’s Day festivities on campus, the holiday retained its significance to many on campus, regardless of their relationship status. Earlier in the week, one of my suitemates, Aliesa, in describing her plans for the holiday had remarked, “It’s a good way to celebrate a different kind of love than that is typically expected. You can celebrate your love for people in your life like your friends, not just your romantic partner.”

This was true — evidenced by the growing number of posts celebrating Galentine’s and Palentine’s Day on social media. Inspired by the pub-

lic showcases of affection for friends and significant others, I attended Franklin’s Valentines & Ice Cream Sundaes event with a friend the evening before Valentine’s Day. As we made cards and ate hefty amounts of red velvet cake and candy hearts, he told me he places more sentimental meaning on Valentine’s Day. When he was young, he celebrated Valentine’s Day with his family, going on a day trip out of Los Angeles, his hometown or to the beach. His mother viewed Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate familial love as well as romantic love. As he grew older, he said the memories he has made on this day deepened his appreciation for the holiday. For Valentine’s Day last year, his partner visited from New York and the two celebrated the day by eating cake

ics and professional goals. And when pressure really builds, they can push away their loved ones to prioritize exams, papers and interviews. I am not immune — despite my love for the people in my life, I have felt myself drifting away in times of stress, greeting people with customary “hellos” and “how are yous” and — exhausted from the nonstop thread of work — not even truly grasping them when they respond with enthusiasm. Over winter break, I had showed my friend from home Yale memes on Facebook that displayed captions such as, “‘Let’s get a meal sometime’ - from a Yalie you won’t see in six months.”

We had both laughed, forgetting that these jokes come from a more truthful place than we may want to admit. Perhaps that is Yale’s biggest Catch-22, the most universal conundrum of college — campus walls blurring the lines

between social, academic and professional spaces, we fall victim simultaneously to the limitations of our own time and desire for perfection, adopting a work-first mindset and losing sight of the people who are truly important in our lives.

So maybe the holiday dedicated to love is the holiday we most needed at Yale. No other holiday in the academic year celebrates love for one another, creates awareness of our personal relationships, the time we are investing in them. And maybe what has traditionally been dedicated for couples, then a reason for the many festivities on campus this year, can take on another meaning at Yale, encouraging us to devote more time to the ones we love, through more than just passerby words and pset help. Perhaps it is time we start showing our love for the people around us.

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and ice skating. He attributes that day as a turning point in their relationship, and said it was “nice to see that someone cared about me that much.”

Though Valentine’s Day has inspired a number of fun festivities this year, the holiday also highlights bigger questions of relationships and intimacy on campus and gives us pause to reflect on our own personal relationships at Yale. “At Yale, everyone wants their relationship to be perfect — we try to achieve perfection in so many aspects of our lives,” one Franklin senior had said that night while we made cards. “And unfortunately I think many times people commit to things other than each other. But that’s the reality of being in a high-stress environment.”

Over their four years at Yale, many students struggle to balance personal relationships, academ-

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WHAT RORY GILMORE TEACHES US ABOUT YALE

BY SERENA LIN

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have always had a nagging suspicion that I am a fraud. But this was never truly confirmed until I arrived at Yale, where I found myself surrounded by sweeping Gothic architecture, a staunch air of self-proclaimed intellectual excellence and approximately one million fast-talking, coffee-addicted, book-obsessed derivatives of Rory Gilmore. In 2008, the News published an opinion column titled “Are you the ‘Roriest’ of all at Yale?” in which the author opines about how many other girls at Yale shared her “ambition of being Rory Gilmore’s real-life counterpart.” You can walk into a campus library or nearby cafe and find a dozen telltale laptop stickers in the shape of a coffee cup that say “Luke’s” — a reference to Rory’s neighborhood diner.

Better yet, head down to the Yale Daily News building to see budding Rorys-in-themaking scrambling to meet production deadline.

Rory Gilmore is the sun around which the television show “Gilmore Girls” revolves. When the series opens, we find Rory, too brilliant for her public high school, resolved to attend Chilton Preparatory School, some Phillips Exeter standin. Rory’s equally talkative and caffeinated single mother, Lorelai, cannot afford the

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tuition and must reach out to her fabulously wealthy but overbearing parents for help. The series ran for seven seasons, from 2000 to 2007.

Yet despite the sprawling length of the show, there really are no important characters except Rory Gilmore.

The rest of the cast is simply there to affirm how singular she is. Even the other titular Gilmore Girl, Lorelai, derives much of her identity from her uniquely unmaternal friendship with her daughter. The entire town of Stars Hollow — sleepy, pastoral and white — revolves around Rory, cheering her on as she carries on her fateful path from prep school to Yale to becoming the editor in chief of the News. Finally, the original series sends Rory off to the Obama presidential campaign as a reporter.

With Rory, quiet girls everywhere finally have a heroine who is studious and introverted, someone whose appeal is not tied to being cool enough to be invited to high school parties. And despite her aggressive bookishness, Rory still catches boys’ attention, doe-like in her prettiness and naiveté. She reigns as this special creature, supreme in both academics and boyfriends.

In middle school, I worshipped “Gilmore Girls.”

Rory Gilmore was how I talked, dressed and thought.

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BY ISABELLE LIN

When my parents brought up moving to a different school district so I could attend a better high school, I suggested boarding schools. I picked out ones in New England with photos on their website that featured fall foliage and students caught mid-laugh.

I imagined myself walking on cobblestone paths with a plaid skirt cutting across my thighs, arms full of Keats and Steinbeck, on my way to crew practice.

And of course, it escaped my attention that I didn’t look much like pale and blue-eyed Rory. The character I did most closely physically resemble was Rory’s hapless best friend Lane, who is first shackled by her oppressive Korean mother and then shackled by an unplanned pregnancy in her early 20s that puts an end to her dreams of fronting a rock band. Rewatching “Gilmore Girls” now, it is im-

possible not to see Lane as the butt of every joke, to not be hurt by her mother’s comically broken English.

But at 14, I had my blinders on. I ended up at a small Quaker high school in the next town over, the closest my parents would let me get to Phillips Exeter. I assimilated Rory Gilmore into my consciousness. If you asked me why I wanted to go to private school so badly, why I refused to entertain the possibility of moving to a better school district, I would have given you some half-truth about a better community and more supportive teachers. But really, I have been chasing the idea of Rory Gilmore for a long time. In high school, I was perpetually dissatisfied with how my classes were too easy, classmates too complacent and school paper perpetually understaffed. At the end of my first year, I tried again to transfer to a boarding

school. I felt strongly that I deserved better. This was a feeling I managed to eventually dispel, but it was difficult to totally extricate the ideal of “Gilmore Girls” from my mindset.

I know it’s ridiculous to say that I was this influenced by a television show. But I am not the only one. Yale might as well be the headquarters of the Rory Gilmore Fan Club, where the most militant of her devotees have clawed their way to the ultimate Rory Gilmore accomplishment: attending this school. But outside of campus too, she is the messiah of writers, journalists and other people who act like reading is a personality trait. Sadie Trombetta, a freelance writer, wrote about how Rory Gilmore influenced her to start her high school newspaper and set her on her career path. Trombetta says that when her writing hasn’t gone well, she asks herself (apparently unironically) “What would Rory do?”

The most alluring thing about Rory Gilmore is how she seems predestined for it all — Chilton, Yale, the editorship. But this is also what makes the Rory Gilmore dream ultimately unattainable and deceptive, even beyond the fact that she is the brainchild of network executives, marketing professionals and a room of television writers. The show

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makes a big deal of how Rory is different from her wealthy classmates because her single mother works at the front desk of a local inn. We are shown many a charming montage of her mother hemming an oversized, secondhand school uniform for Rory.

But Rory’s high school and college education are completely funded, at full ticket price, by her grandparents, who are both graduates of Yale. Her grandfather is familiar enough with the college dean to arrange for Rory to have a one-on-one meeting with him. She skates through her classes and ascends the News’ ranks helped by family connections and free of any financial pressure. Rory’s success is predicated on her privilege, but both she and the show act like it is not. Her single, working class mother helps offset the inherent privilege of her attendance of boarding school and Yale. Without this fact, Rory would simply be another one of her shallow, rich classmates.

The masking of Rory’s lineage of Yale nobility is emblematic of an insidious and ongoing practice of hiding wealth. There’s a Yale Daily News opinion column that cuttingly points out that many Yalies, seemingly regardless of income, call themselves middle class. There’s also a trend on campus of shunning less tasteful, more ostentatious displays of wealth. Replace Louis Vuitton handbags with Longchamp totes.

Replace Louboutins with Golden Goose sneakers — $500 artfully tattered tennis shoes. It’s hilarious to call this modesty, but it operates as an equivalency.

This performance of middle class — or what rich people imagine the middle class to be — is in part due to social pressure. We saw what happens when the public turns against the wealthy: During the college admissions scandal, students

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accused of unfairly gaining admission to college were ostracized from their campuses and harangued on social media. One of most recognizable among them was Olivia Jade Giannulli, daughter of “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin and a social media influencer with millions of followers. Giannulli experienced such a backlash on her social media accounts after her fudged University of Southern California admission was revealed that she retreated from her social media platforms. Even now, users are limited from commenting on her videos and Instagram posts. In the wake of the scandal, the internet scoured through her online presence and recirculated old, but newly amusing, videos of her claiming to be disinterested in school. The figurehead for fallibility of the rich and famous, Giannull unintentionally tapped into some visceral part of the public’s psyche. Because there is now an overwhelming demand for admission to elite colleges, it is important that those who are allowed in seem deserving. Accordingly, powerful people often downplay their wealth in hopes of seeming more hard working and deserving. Public figures ranging from Kylie Jenner to Donald Trump have tried to pass themselves off as self-made, a phrase coined in the early 19th century by Henry Clay. The American imagination is saturated with this idea of a rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps man. In a society that emphasizes the alleged possibility of upward social mobility, we are obsessed with stories of celebrities and business moguls who once struggled to make ends meet.

While Jenner and Trump are trying to sell this concept to their consumers and voters, respectively, wealthy college students are trying to sell this concept to themselves. It’s im-

portant to us to feel like we deserve what we have. Wealthy students, like everyone else, want to believe that it was their hard work and talent that got them into Yale.

The game is rigged, and it always has been

It’s hard to come to terms with your own privilege. When I came to Yale, I finally came to the realization that the Rory Gilmore refrain is hollow and flawed. She is the product of familial wealth and connections, and so am I. My acceptance to Yale has been made possible by factors beyond my control. I was able to spend my time overcommitting to extracurriculars rather than working to support my family. I was able to hire SAT tutors, piano teachers and tennis coaches. It would be misleading to say that it was simply my hard work and perseverance that got me here. Of course I worked hard — stayed up late writing papers, ran for student government, joined a half-dozen clubs — but that’s not the point. The point is that I had more opportunities than others. The game is rigged, and it always has been. In America, parental wealth is the best predictor of future success. We need to stop subscribing to narratives that pretend like privilege isn’t a factor in our achievements. Stories are powerful. They have a way of tunneling themselves deep into our lives and presenting themselves as truth.

That’s why “Gilmore Girls” has such an ardent following, why so many people hold Rory Gilmore close to their heart.

Rory Gilmore, my old friend, I think it’s time we parted ways.

GOD AND THE GAY IVY What is it like to be queer and Christian at Yale?

BY ISA ZOU

PHOTO BY ADRIAN KULESZA

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n a cool afternoon in September, hundreds of rainbow-clothed people marched down Chapel Street. As they approached the New Haven Green, counterprotesters handed them coins printed with the Ten Commandments. They shouted Bible verses through megaphones: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” The Pride marchers responded by chanting,

“Love, love, love is love,” until the voices of the counterprotesters were drowned out. Ten of these marchers were Yale students wearing matching rainbow buttons.

They were attending as members of Yale Progressive Christian Students, or YPCS. Abby Langford ’22 is one of the group’s leaders. When she first arrived at Yale, Langford had set out to find a progressive Christian community. Growing up, her dad was a pastor in a conservative

Methodist church, and she was taught the “non-affirming” view of queerness — that is, queerness goes against God’s intention for marriage, and acting on queer impulses is sinning against God, so God wants queer Christians to choose celibacy. As Langford started questioning her own sexuality in high school, she felt suffocated by her parents’ and church’s expectations. At Yale, she wanted to find a space where she could “question funda-

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mental theological problems.”

After trying several traditional campus ministries, she said she had difficulty finding one that made her comfortable. Then she found a church near campus that holds the “affirming” view, which sees no contradiction between following God and fully expressing one’s queerness. There, she met a pastor, the Rev. Vicki Flippin, and several students who were interested in starting a new campus ministry that adheres to progressive values like queer affirmation and feminism.

YPCS entered a religious landscape at Yale that already included at least 21 Christian groups, representing a range of doctrines, purposes and gathering styles. To Langford and Flippin, YPCS filled a need as an explicitly progressively oriented Christian ministry, open to all students exploring faith.

They said a Christian group like this felt especially necessary at the socalled “Gay Ivy,” a campus where more than a quarter of undergraduates identify as LGBTQ per annual surveys conducted by the News.

This figure is far greater than the 4.5 percent of adults in the U.S. who identify as queer according to a 2017 Gallup poll.

Yale has several groups for students who identify as both religious and queer or questioning.

Among them, Ichthys — named for the fish-like symbol first used by early Christians evading Roman persecution — was founded by Yale students five years ago as a space for queer Christians to work through challenges particular to their sexuality and faith. Kelsey Evans ’21, this year’s president, said that members share the basic view that queerness is compatible with the Christian faith. They discuss everything from premarital sex to navigating difficult family interactions. “Rather than just saying, ‘Oh, you can have both [identities],’ we discuss in a practical way, ‘Here’s how you can have both together,’” Evans said.

Timothy White ’20, who led the group before Evans, said the group provides a space for queer people to process their

traumatic experiences with the church — which he said are so common and complex that they could “fill libraries.” For instance, White said that when one member came out to her religious leader, “he compared her identity as a gay person with a pubescent fixation on inanimate household objects, saying both were just a phase.” Ichthys helped her confirm how absurd that comparison was, affirming her identity both in Christ and as a gay person. Discussions with Ichthys members, he said, made him feel safe in a context where “people can understand in a precise way what other people are going through. It’s been a deeply hopeful space.”

Both groups hope to engage with the community to represent queer affirmation and promote how it can be reconciled with Christianity. Langford emphasized that most of the counterprotesters at Pride were “doing it from the basis of being Christian.” She recalled the incident in early November on Yale’s campus when a street preacher shouted homophobic slurs and condemned passersby to hell under the pretense of Christianity. Langford pointed out how easy it would be for non-Christians, especially those in the LGBTQ community, to associate Christianity with hatred against queer people. “Being [at Pride] as a progressive Christian space changes the narrative of what Christianity is, not only to people outside the parade but also to people in the parade itself,” Langford said.

Leading YPCS has given her the opportunity to instigate conversations with friends as well as the community. “In my residential college, I can tell people, ‘I’m part of a progressive Christian student group, and today we talked about being queer,’” she said. “And that changes things for people who might have a very limited view of what Christianity is. Not all Christians are anti-gay.”

‘HOW BLESSED AM I?’ When I met Mario Andrade ’19, he arrived at Blue State on York Street one minute late and

apologized repeatedly — he said a friend had been at his apartment to pray about his struggle to maintain and justify his celibacy. His round, stubbled face radiated a weary warmth. He explained that throughout his time at Yale and since graduation, he has tried and tried to find “loopholes” in the Bible, but he hasn’t been able to substantiate the affirming view.

Andrade was in third grade when he first liked a boy. He kept his feelings to himself, thinking, “This is not what’s supposed to happen.” As he grew up, he continued ignoring his attraction to men.

“The love I see in other people and in the world is how I experience God” Andrade and his best friend Justin — described under a pseudonym for anonymity — converted to Christianity at a summer church retreat after 10th grade. They cornered the speaker for an hourslong conversation. More than any theological answers he gave, Andrade was struck by the intensity of his love for these students he barely knew. “He hugged each of us at the end, with tears in his eyes, and there was just something in that hug, this power and this love,” he said. “Why does he care this much?

It’s gotta be because there’s something else.” Andrade decided to commit to Christianity, and Justin followed suit.

In junior year, Justin came out to Andrade as gay. And in what was his first time confiding his sexuality to anyone, Andrade told him, “I know exactly how you feel.” He confessed something else too: He was attracted to his best friend.

At first, they decided not to

date out of fear of ostracization by their classmates — neither of them sensed a conflict between their Christianity and their sexuality.

But as Andrade studied the Bible through the rest of high school, he began to reconsider. He eventually came to the difficult conclusion — the Bible is clear: “God’s ideals for marriage were already set up at the beginning,” he said, as a union between a man and a woman.

Even as he came to accept that view, he could find nothing in the Bible that explained why God would create people like him. Why would God define marriage and sex narrowly as between a man and a woman, then create so many people who could never enjoy intimacy?

He wanted to explore these questions, but he did not join Ichthys. Most, if not all members, he said, believed in the affirming view, which he didn’t want to adopt without giving it enough thought.

In addition, he was afraid of being ostracized for being skeptical of the affirming view before he could work through his concerns.

“I would probably be branded as someone who was against my own kind,” he said. Instead, Andrade joined Beta Upsilon Chi, Yale’s Christian fraternity, as well as Yale Students for Christ, which holds weekly Bible studies.

For two years, as he became closer to the brothers, he tried to muster the courage to come out to them. He knew it could ruin his friendships. What if hugs became off-limits? These guys were his closest friends at Yale, and he couldn’t lose them.

One night in the fall of his junior year, he and his BYX big brother went out for pizza. As they sat on the curb outside afterwards, he struggled in silence, then finally squeaked out the words. For two minutes, his big brother was silent.

“I think I just shot our friendship,” Andrade remembered thinking.

Then, he said his big brother gently asked, “How can I support you?”

Andrade eventually came out to the rest of the fraternity, and from then on, the long, sleepless nights ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE PAVILONIS

grappling with his non-affirming stance and questioning God were no longer spent in solitude. His brothers’ friendship anchored him as he cried to God: “Why is this the case? Why don’t you give a better answer? This doesn’t make any sense. This seems so arbitrary.”

He felt comforted that his anger at God was shared. Many of the brothers had at one point felt deeply angered or betrayed by God. So had Jesus. “The person who had the most disappointment with God was Jesus,” he said. “He asked God to take the cross away from him, and heaven was silent.” While this didn’t alleviate Andrade’s pain or make it disappear, it reminded him that “it’s OK to be like, yeah this sucks, and just cry, and sit there.”

His long nights of wrestling and mourning have persisted. “Once you’ve accepted the non-affirming view, then you’re left with the reality of it,” he said. “I will likely never be fully sexually fulfilled in the way I would like to be.”

In asking God why and reaching no clear answers, Andrade has “learned a lot of humility,” he said.

“All of my questions are those ethereal ones that go straight to the core of humanity, and I will have no way to answer them until I see God face to face.”

Meanwhile, he said that in avoiding intimacy, the biggest lesson he’s learned is that “love hurts.”

It hurts deeply to “open yourself up enough to let someone in,” then counteract your own attraction on a daily basis. But his friendship with the man he’s in love with right now means the world to him. “Regardless of how hard it is every day to see him, overall, how blessed am I?” he said. “I’m so thankful to have a friend that I love so much that it hurts.”

‘A NEED FOR CLARITY’ Although Ichthys came to be an instrumental part of his life, when Timothy White ’20 first arrived at Yale, he wasn’t interested in specialized groups like it. Rather, he was eager to find a general Christian ministry that believed in radical inclusion. He first joined

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the now-defunct InterVarsity ministry, where students came from a variety of theological backgrounds. They welcomed him, sexuality and all, and he felt like he had found a home. After a year, he said, he wanted to serve the group and God by taking a leadership position. He approached a staff member about it. “[He] graciously told me that InterVarsity’s theology was strictly non-affirming, but said that it could still work for me to be a leader,” he wrote in a 2019 blog post. “Confused, and wanting to make sure I understood exactly what that meant, I asked him what would happen if I started to date a boy while being a leader for InterVarsity. He paused for a moment, and then said, ‘Well, that probably wouldn’t work.’”

White left the ministry feeling blindsided. He joined Ichthys soon after. Since then, White has advocated for clarity — for Christian groups to be clear about their policies regarding queer people. He was inspired by a crowdsourced website called Church Clarity, which at the time of publication has rated 3,631 churches across the country on whether they hire, ordain and marry queer people. It also gives them a “clear” or “unclear” rating for how accessible this information is from their websites. He wants Christian ministries at Yale to be transparent about whether they allow queer, non-celibate people in student leadership and on staff. This not only prevents students from being blindsided like he was at InterVarsity, but also opens the way for conversations about sexuality.

“I can connect with someone with a different theological stance from me if we both agree on a need for clarity,” he said.

The Episcopal Church at Yale, the Luther House, and United Church on the Green have policy statements on LGBT inclusion on their websites, as does Yale Progressive Christian Students.

Christian Union’s website clearly states its position that homosexuality is a form of sexual immorality, although it lacks a statement on any ensuing policy. But none of the other Christian groups listed on the Chaplain’s Office website offer any

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concrete position at all. Those like St. Thomas More and Chi Alpha lack a policy statement on queer student leaders, and neither responded to requests for comment.

Yale Students for Christ’s website also lacks a statement — Sang Yung, its leader and a Chaplain’s Office affiliate, wrote in correspondence with the News that his approach is “intentionally non-policy driven on this and would want to walk with individuals sensitively and lovingly, wherever they’re coming from.”

White said he has discussed the need for clarity with leaders of these campus ministries, and said they have been thoughtful in considering it. But he senses “a fear that with increased clarity will come increased criticism, especially at a campus as progressive as Yale.”

NAVIGATING IDENTITY AT THE “GAY IVY” Yale’s culture tends to celebrate queerness and mock Christianity, putting queer Christians in a difficult place. “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with friends, acquaintances, people who are perplexed at the idea that I can be gay and Christian,” White said.

White said he has felt comfortable being gay at Yale, enjoying its “thriving scene and sheer number of queer people.” At the same time, he said, “There’s this weird distance between the general campus culture and queer inclusion and jokes about the Gay Ivy, and an understanding of the diversity of Christian life at Yale,” he said.

Alex Opsahl ’22, who identifies as bisexual, feels the same way.

“I feel more comfortable being out and queer in Christian spaces than I do being open about my Christianity in very queer spaces,” she said. Her queer peers don’t explicitly condemn her faith, but they sometimes make offhand comments. Last semester, she overheard someone say, “I saw someone praying in the dining hall, and I felt worried for my rights.”

“It saddens me when people who have never experienced or known anything about Christianity just assume that the faith is in-

herently hateful, and that my Christianity must be a source of trauma for me and my queerness,” she said. “I think it’s true of a lot of people. But it’s not true for me.”

For Andrade, the strength of the queer presence at Yale was a constant reminder of the trauma in his decision to be celibate. “You don’t have to look very far to see two guys holding hands, and for me it was like, that’s what I want,” he said. “It was always there, I was always reminded of it.”

At the same time, he offered a critique of Yale culture that seems to represent a crucial difference between the affirming and non-affirming views. “I think that Yale is a place where queerness is elevated to a point of being your entire identity,” he said. “For someone like me who says, no, Christ is my identity, not what I necessarily feel — that was really really hard.”

For Andrade, the ability to say, “I am a beloved child of God, and also, I have same-sex attraction,” helps him not act on his sexuality since he sees it as not fundamental to who he is. On the flip side, queer Christians with the affirming view consider their queerness a part of their identities, which is then affirmed by God — “I, fundamentally a queer person, am a beloved child of God.” To them, queerness intrinsically includes the full expression of queer love, and it even intensifies connection to God. “For me, romantic intimacy with women is imaginative,” Opsahl said.

“You can act in a more true expression of love, and it’s a very spiritually moving, godly experience.”

These personal decisions about stance and identity have concrete consequences for others. Counter-

protesters heckle Pride marchers (“I hate that,” Andrade said), and at the extreme, the Westboro Baptist Church vitriolically protests weddings. Conversations between non-affirming Christians and their queer friends insinuate that they consider their friends’ behavior (and therefore, in the queer friends’ eyes, identity) to be evil. Protests in 2011 surrounding the Yale campus visit of Christopher Yuan, a non-affirming gay minister, threatened the ability of Christians with the non-affirming stance — including queer Christians — to discuss their theological views.

But when I asked both Andrade and White about the implications of their views for others, they fell silent for a minute, then said they felt deeply uncomfortable asking others to change.

“I never want to prescribe a particular way of living life onto another queer Christian,” White said. “I just want everyone to feel loved.”

LOVE IS — Langford said that through YPCS, she’s come to resonate with the idea that God is love. “The love I see in other people and in the world is how I experience God,” she said.

Similarly, White said his friends and family’s support has communicated God’s love to him, and “the spring of 2015 when I came out was among the times in my life when I’ve felt most connected to God.” For Opsahl, romantic intimacy has taught her that “loving another person is a way of loving God’s whole creation,” she said. “Rather than just one line between two people, it’s a web of love.”

Andrade said that his friends’

love for him, shown through their presence and encouragement, have provided what he considers “the most tangible proof that God exists.”

Two weeks before we met at Blue State, Andrade had a long phone call with Justin and caught up. Since they became Christian together and came out to each other years ago, they have taken different paths. Justin holds the affirming view and has a boyfriend. Andrade doesn’t. He told his friend about just how hard it still was, how he was constantly struggling. “It would be so much easier to just give up,” he said. To walk away from the faith entirely, to date, to love with his body.

As they talked, Andrade thought about their eight years of friendship, and how different they are. Andrade is emotional, Justin is not; Andrade sits with and struggles with things, Justin can move on from things quickly. And yet, feeling the weight of Justin’s love in his voice, Andrade saw that “his love for me stemmed from something far greater than even himself.”

“Maybe this is God,” he thought. “When I’m just crying out in the darkness, maybe him just being there is God’s way of comforting me.”

His friends’ abundant love for him anchor him during his happiest and his hardest times, Andrade said.

“Through them, I’ve seen glimpses of [Jesus’] love for me — this love that I crave. And Christ’s love is supposed to be even better than these glimpses.”

His face softened into longing.

“It’s like, wow. Whoa. What’s that going to feel like? Because this feels so good.”

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

LOVE ON TRIAL In prison, who deserves higher education?

BY KATHERINE HU

T

he heavy metal door swings open, revealing white brick walls dipped in murals of butterflies and enough inspirational quotes to fill a scrapbook. Malcolm X reminds me that “education is our passport to the future” while a moon wearing a nightcap commands me to “shoot for the stars.” It’s as if I’m standing in the quintessential American elementary school instead of a maximum-security prison.

The students trickle in, a sea of beige uniforms dotted with their bright smiles and firm handshakes.

For them, this room is a college campus. Gone are the manicured green lawns, larger-than-necessary buildings and laptop computers. Instead, there is a skate park mural, made to seem collegiate through the college-level courses taught around it, ranging from “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” to “Beginning Latin.”

I recognize the course listings from my Yale College course catalog because that’s exactly where they’re from; “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” was one of the first classes I took at Yale. Getting these courses into prison classrooms, however, is the work of the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall, or YPEI. For the past two summers, they have offered for-credit Yale courses to incarcerated individuals at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, the largest correctional facility in New England. Yale’s program is one of a handful of higher education programs offered in prisons across the United States.

ILLUSTRATION BY IVI FUNG

14 | February 2020

for two pilot summers, Yale is putting on the brakes as it figures out its verdict on her labor of love. At stake is the question of whether Yale will formally support YPEI and allow it to continue issuing Yale College credit — a question that strikes at the heart of the program.

— It’s Wednesday evening, which means it’s art studio night at MacDougall-Walker. After hauling new watercolors and paintbrushes in from the car amidst chilly September winds, I drag a set of pink chairs to the side of the classroom for “office hours.” Love is my last guest — we begin by chatting about his oped ideas before transitioning into a Jimmy Fallon-esque segment (awkwardness and all) where I interview him about his life story. He hunches over slightly in the too-small chair, as if trying to prevent his words from straying too far.

I ask Love to start from the beginning. “The beginning of my time here?” he asks, suggesting that the story is already over. “No…” I hesitate. “Your life before this place, the real beginning.”

Within minutes, we’ve broken free from court hearings and beige jumpsuits and white brick walls.

Love rewinds to his childhood in New Haven, where he was born and raised by a mother who struggled with substance abuse. “My childhood was spent chasing my mother’s addiction. Wherever that took her, I was at,” he explains matter-of-factly. “It was a lot of homelessness, a lot of motels.”

While he had gained the nickname “Ruthie’s son” early on, adulthood meant the ability to make a new name for himself on the streets. “I had a habit of showing love to people,” he reminisces. “If a lady didn’t get her food stamps, or kids needed sneakers, I’d always try to do right. That’s what they said in the projects. He is Love.”

But love wasn’t always enough.

The streets could be unkind, and Love didn’t always make the best choices. When I ask about the tattoos that run the length of his arms, he looks down as if he’s truly seeing them for the first time. Hesitantly, he explains that one of them is the name of the projects he used to live in, before rolling up his right

sleeve to reveal a memorial to his daughter Egypt, who passed away from sudden infant death syndrome. Love’s face softens with a misty, faraway look as he describes her chubby, darkskinned, “‘bout my complexion” baby face.

His face clouds over; the moment passes. The broken home, drugs on the street, even the arrest — “It’s the story you expected to hear,” he says, turning towards me.

Love breaks the silence, glancing down at his tattoos once more. “They’re a reminder of where I was at one point.

This,” he says, cocking his head towards the YPEI classroom, “is a reminder of where I want to be.”

— Being around Zelda makes everything feel utterly in control and out of control all at once. One moment, she’s frantically keeping YPEI afloat. The next, she’s chuckling at a video of Phoebe WallerBridge hosting Saturday Night Live.

“This is just what I needed today,” she sighs contentedly, asking me if I’ve seen “Fleabag” yet.

I glance down at her coffee table, which is smothered in YPEI pamphlets. When I ask her about how she got into all this, I can tell that she’s ready to deliver a wellworn spiel. A friend of hers was working with the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan University, which needed extra tutors.

She visited once, and that was it.

When Zelda wasn’t wrapping up her history of art doctorate, she was spending all of her free time in prison.

The students she worked with at Cheshire Correctional Institution encouraged her to start a program at Yale. While prison education programs such as adult basic education and GED courses have become more common, few prisons have been able to offer postsecondary educational programs due to barriers such as funding and the difficulty of offering college credit off-site.

Zelda consulted various programs across the country — Cornell and Princeton, the Prison University Project — before modeling

feature

This evening, I’m helping guide an op-ed writing workshop at MacDougall-Walker. Even though Yale has only given YPEI permission to run for-credit courses during the summer, Zelda Roland ’08 GRD ’16, who founded YPEI as a doctoral student in 2016, cobbles together not-for-credit seminars with faculty lectures and workshops during the school year. As she introduces me to the room, explaining that I’m a Yale Daily News opinion editor, I note how this slight woman with wild black curls and a piercing gaze commands a room. She’s young enough to pass for a fellow undergraduate.

YPEI challenges the idea of who “deserves” a Yale-quality education. While higher education trains students on how to be heard — how to make arguments, how to present them, how to access networks of power — higher education behind bars recognizes that it is also about the ability to hear. When you can’t decipher academic jargon or legal arguments, it becomes easier for society to siphon away what little power it gave you in the first place.

Over the course of the next week, as handwritten op-eds trickle in, I begin to fully grasp how the education system has neglected YPEI students. They write about afternoons spent selling candy on Yale’s sidewalks while being denied a quality education mere miles away; they discuss how YPEI has helped them grasp the larger forces of injustice working against them.

While they can’t escape these walls, maybe their words can.

One student, however, has taken his desire for freedom a step further. Love, an incarcerated student who prefers to go by his enigmatic nickname, wants more than to hear or be heard; he wants to be seen. Since 2007, Love has been challenging his 45-year sentence, arguing that his original trial lawyer mounted an incompetent defense and failed to call crucial witnesses.

The tools he’s learned in class have helped him fight his conviction. If his words can leave these walls, then maybe he can too.

But Love isn’t the only one on trial — so too, is YPEI. After allowing Zelda to run for-credit classes

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YPEI after the Bard Prison Initiative, which enrolls 300 students in six New York prisons and offers both associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. This made sense — Bard’s program, also known as BPI, is the poster child of prison education.

Even those who have never heard of higher education in prison remember headlines about BPI’s debate team defeating the Harvard College Debating Union in 2015. It’s a story that I remember skimming on my smartphone long before I stepped foot in MacDougall-Walker.

— Love’s desire to fight his conviction began with what seemed to be a frivolous hope: the practically mythical habeas corpus petition. At cell block tables with older inmates, he learned about the obstacle course they had tried and often failed to navigate, where you challenge the legal basis of your imprisonment through a written petition to the court. When Love began writing his first petition, he spent hours at the prison library. “I didn’t even know how to use the library,” Love tells me, shaking his head. “I learned how to read the books, how to use the [court] transcripts.”

Two years later, Love filed his first habeas corpus petition. He argued that his trial lawyer was deficient enough in her performance to establish constitutional prejudice, jotting out a long legal laundry list: her failure to conduct a proper investigation, call six witnesses that he had recommended and raise a third-party culpability defense questioning whether he was even

16 | February 2020

guilty of the crime at hand.

His first two habeas petitions did not get their day in court. Love pulled both of them before they came before a judge — he was not able to gather all of his new witnesses in time, and knew that he only had one chance to get this right.

It would take 11 years before Love’s third and final petition would finally be heard; he was assigned a defense lawyer named Arthur Ledford to argue his case. I ask Love to describe Ledford, to which he responds by creating two small circles with his hands, placing them over his eyes in a playful manner. “He’s got these Santa Claus glasses.” We both chuckle.

Arthur is one of Love’s closest friends to this day. Above all else, he simply knows that Arthur cares about him. Love breaks out in a grin.

“I saw [Arthur] five days ago, and he said to me, ‘When this is all over, can I pick you up? I want to pick you up to get pancakes.’”

Throughout November of 2018, Arthur checked his P.O. box regularly, awaiting the habeas court’s decision. One chilly morning, around 9:30 a.m., it finally arrived. Arthur read down to the last word to ensure he wasn’t mistaken before driving straight from Hamden to MacDougall-Walker, letter in hand, so that he could tell Love in person. The court had granted his habeas petition, vacating 40 years of his 45-year sentence.

“He was absolutely just floored,” Arthur recalls. “You could see he was not the per-

son in the case anymore, not even close. You could just see that he had hope... it was like he was getting an opportunity to actually have a life.”

I ask Arthur how common it is for those who are incarcerated to file habeas petitions. He responds without missing a beat. “To get to the step of writing a habeas corpus?

It happens all the time. To winning one? It almost never happens.”

— The odds of creating change at a centuries-old institution like Yale, while not quite as low as the odds of winning a habeas corpus, can feel equally impossible. As we discuss details in her office, Zelda shakes her head, running her hands through her hair in frustration.

“Everyone says, this is great, let’s do this. We just have 29 hoops for you to jump through.”

In 2016, she found a solution: Yale Summer Session, a for-credit program that Yale offers every summer to Yale students, students from other universities, and rising high school seniors. In more Zelda-relevant terms, it’s a program that offers Yale courses to non-matriculated, non-degree students, but still counts for Yale College credit issued on fancy

Yale transcripts.

She took the idea to Dean of Yale Summer Session Jeanne Follansbee and then-Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway, pointing out that they could easily operate YPEI through Yale Summer Session’s existing infrastructure. They were so thrilled that Holloway even secured permission from then-Provost Ben Polak to waive tuition for YPEI students for a limited initial pilot.

It would take two more summers, however, before YPEI could offer its first for-credit courses. The summer of 2016 was too rushed; the summer of 2017 was out of the question as well, as Holloway was transitioning out of his role as Yale College dean.

In the summer of 2018, after two years of fighting and fundraising, everything clicked into place. “Basic Drawing,” “Painting Basics,” “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” and “Readings in American Literature” were unveiled as the first slate of for-credit Yale College courses ever to be offered in a prison.

“Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” alone would draw 600 applicants.

— When I ask Love about his favorite class, he pauses before throwing me a wry smile.

“Foundations of Modern Social Theory,” he says confidently. It isn’t that Love reveres Hobbes or Locke or Weber. Rather, he was able to challenge the reverence that others, such as sociology professor Todd Madigan, hold for them.

Madigan taught the course in the summer of 2019. For an intense six weeks, he and his 12 students met on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. While a typical Yale class spans an hour or two at most, this one took four-and-a-half hours. It was a new experience for Madigan — reorienting to a classroom without technology, forgoing PowerPoint slides and reading essays where word counts were done entirely by hand.

“The intensity with which they read the material and then engaged with it was something I’m prepared to never experience again.

This is the sort of thing that fledgling professors dream about, this sort of student that we can only ever hope to encounter.

But what disoriented him most was the students.

“The intensity with which they read the material and then engaged with it, was something that I’m prepared to never experience again,” he tells me. “This is the sort of thing that fledgling professors dream about, this sort of student that we can only ever hope to encounter.”

The students made it easy to fill up four-and-a-half hours.

Part of that is because they were responsible for roughly 130 pages of reading each day, Tuesdays and Thursdays included.

But that wasn’t enough. If John Locke mentioned an author, they requested that reading as well.

They didn’t just want to understand Locke; they wanted to understand as Locke understood.

From the beginning, Love was skeptical — of Locke, and even of Madigan. “The texts that we were reading were the foundations of slavery,” he explains.

“They were talking about how those people are different.” When they read Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Love balked at Weber’s suggestion that rationality in the West could be hereditary.

Love outlined the racial implications of Weber’s argument to Madigan. “I am the product of the stuff that you’re studying,” Love explained. By the end of the summer, both of them had learned from one another — Madigan told Love that he would never teach his social theory course the same way again.

Last September, Madigan became an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; one of his fall semester classes covered the civil rights movement. But now, Madigan does more than dwell on the classic civil rights movement of high school textbook lore. Instead, he dives past the surface, into the nuances of black nationalism and the Black Panthers. It’s a new literacy — the kind Love taught him.

Post-Madigan, Love continues to learn through courses like “Writing Revolution” and books like “The Black Jacobins.” Win-

ning his habeas petition, after all, was not enough. The state is challenging the decision of the habeas court, arguing that the judge was wrong in ordering a new trial for Love’s original case and vacating 40 years of his 45-year sentence.

Even if his appellate lawyer, Daniel Krisch, succeeds in arguing that the judge should’ve ordered a new trial, there will need to be, well, a new trial. Until then, Love is being held in MacDougall-Walker on $450,000 bond and attempting to raise money via GoFundMe. His inability to pay is the only reason he isn’t free at the moment; it’s an amount that he can only afford to pay with his time.

As I sit in on a three-hour session of “Writing Revolution,” I glance over at Love sitting silently in the back of class, hunched over in his seat. It would make sense that he’s not focused on “The Black Jacobins”; his mind is probably preoccupied with the trial phase of his habeas petition.

Classes like these helped him cut through dense theoretical arguments and understand the language of those who are debating over the terms of his life — but it feels like every small step towards redemption for Love is met by yet another barrier. This time, it’s $450,000. In the world beyond MacDougall, would a Yale transcript be enough for an employer to look past his time in prison?

Even if it isn’t, it feels like his best chance at being seen in all of his complexity. “I could not critically read legal writing and understand arguments on both sides until YPEI,” he tells me, referencing his habeas petition. I wonder, silently, if that will be enough.

— Zelda stands in front of a room that feels almost like a jury, filled with people from across the University. It’s the day of the “College Behind Bars” preview, which she has been bidding to hold at Yale for months. Lynn Novick ’83, a Yale alumna and director, is here to unveil a sneak peek of her new PBS documentary on the Bard Prison Initiative.

It’s certainly good timing for such an event. Just a month prior

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in September, Yale’s administration formed a faculty committee to deliberate on YPEI’s future. “I’ve been waiting for this faculty committee for four years,” Zelda says.

The committee’s charge is to explore models of prison education that might work at Yale for credit, Deputy Dean and Dean of Strategic Initiatives Pamela Schirmeister tells me. While the Yale College Dean’s Office is supportive of prison education, she tells me, it is hesitant about giving Yale College credit to YPEI sans tuition, as opposed to other programs. The University, she explains, believes that there needs to be a principle in place around who can and should receive free Yale College credit. Regardless of what happens, Schirmeister tells me, “This is the end of the pilot ... we are not going to do [it] again.”

The five-person committee has been meeting since the fall of 2019.

The hope is that by the end of this semester, they will deliver a verdict in the form of a report; a faculty member vote will take place if needed. It is entirely likely, Dean Schirmeister explains, that YPEI will be asked to partner with a community college to issue cheaper-than-Yale college credit through them. But nothing is certain yet. Until then, Zelda is pulling out all the stops, this event included.

As the event draws to a close, Zelda seizes the microphone with both hands. “I just want to say a quick thing. If you were moved by anything you saw today … this is actually our semester to fight.” Her voice is laced with urgency. “It’s important, the time has come, Yale should be in this. It should be in this right now, and it should’ve been in this 20 years ago when BPI started, but today is just as good.”

The optimism of the audience is electric; it feels like the end of a successful stand-up comedy show on a Saturday night. “That’s it. I’ll be here. Thank you.” Zelda beams, channeling her inner Phoebe-Waller Bridge. This time, she has pulled it off.

— “She doesn’t know this, but I tell her all the time,” Love says, gesturing towards Zelda. “What we

learn here, we teach other inmates.”

He details how books change hands, cycling throughout the prison to those who YPEI cannot yet accommodate. Here, education is an antidote to idle days and depression, transforming a place where “this is jail, not Yale” used to be a common retort from prison guards. Now, rather, it is Yale in jail.

The question is whether it will remain there. “They finally read me the charge, in full, last week,” Zelda tells me over the phone in early February, updating me on the committee’s progress. This is usually the time of year that she begins fundraising and planning out summer courses, given that YPEI runs entirely on private grants and donations. But now, everything is in a bit of standstill, effectively putting the program on hold.

“It has never been our hope that this program is limited to a summer program,” Zelda reminds me. If things go well, YPEI could offer for-credit courses year-round, following in the footsteps of programs like Bard and eventually offering associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. If things go south, then Zelda’s first concern is the students.

“They’re my first

concern,” she explains. “The first thing for me to think about is … how to ensure that they’re able to continue to take college classes through an arrangement with another institution or a partnership.”

For a moment, I think back to that cold night in September when I first met Love. As class came to a close, I turned to Love and asked him what would be the first thing he’d do if everything worked out, if he could walk free from MacDougall-Walker. “Aside from the pancakes with Arthur,” I caveated. He laughed, wagging his finger at me.

“I would want to go see Zelda at Dwight Hall,” Love declared proudly. “I want to go sit in one of those classes, in one of those big lecture halls. I want to be a student at Yale, to know what that feels like.”

ILLUSTRATION BY SAMMY WESTFALL

18 | February 2020

‘WE WERE SO YOUNG’: ABUSE AND FEAR AT THE YESHIVA OF NEW HAVEN

BY OLIVIA TUCKER

Rabbi Daniel Greer LAW ’64 was once a venerated leader for New Haven’s Orthodox Jews. Now, he’s serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually abusing a student at the Yeshiva of New Haven — a case that stunned the community and laid bare the culture of abuse at his religious schools.

Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of sexual misconduct.

I

graphic

n 1977, the future was auspicious for Rabbi Daniel Greer LAW ’64.

He’d recently returned to New Haven after several years living in Israel with his wife, Sarah, and their newborn son, Dov. He would go on to forge a close relationship with Mayor Ben DiLieto; his resume boasted a stint as the New York City deputy commissioner of ports and terminals; he held degrees from Princeton University and Yale Law School. He was ready to lead New Haven’s Orthodox Jewish community as a bastion of change.

“People would talk about him almost with reverence,” said Columbia School of Journalism professor Ari L. Goldman, who grew up 10 years Greer’s junior in the same Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York City. “His accomplishments [seemed] so unattainable to a young man in the yeshiva world.”

That year, the Greers established the Gan School, the first of three schools in the Edgewood neighborhood, which claimed to offer rigorous schooling to students from across the country who would otherwise forgo a premier Jewish education.

Nearly 40 years later, three former students publicly accused Greer of sexually abusing them while they were students at the Yeshiva of New Haven, where he served as dean. One such allegation saddled him with over $20 million in damages and a 20-year prison sentence.

In May 2016, New Jersey retirement home manager Eliyahu Mirlis, 31, filed a lawsuit against Greer, 79, alleging that the rabbi had sexually abused him dozens of times between 2002 and 2005, while he was a student at the yeshiva. A civil jury found the rabbi liable in 2017, ordering him to pay $21.7 million in punitive and compensatory damages, as well as legal fees. After a weeklong criminal trial in September 2019, Greer was found guilty of four counts of risk of injury to a minor and sentenced to 20 years in prison — though he can seek parole after 12 years. Today, he is serving time at a state prison in Cheshire, Connecticut, with a recently filed appeal pending review.

Rabbi Aviad Hack ’97, a yeshiva alumnus and eventual administrator, along with another former student — who testified anonymously as R.S.A. during the criminal trial — have both accused Greer of sexually abusing them, which Greer denies.

Over the past four years, the Orthodox Jewish com-

Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

munity in New Haven has been rocked by accusations of sexual misconduct against Greer — a man prominent in the Elm City not only for his role as a religious leader but also for his work revitalizing the Edgewood neighborhood through real estate development. For more than 30 years, Greer ran a trio of small Jewish schools: the Gan School, serving elementary-aged students; the Tikvah High School for Girls; and the Yeshiva of New Haven.

The schools have all ceased operation since allegations against the rabbi first surfaced.

Conversations with former students, parents and New Haven residents paint a disturbing picture of life at Greer’s schools.

While academically rigorous, the yeshiva operated under a strict set of rules imposed under Greer’s and Hack’s often-unforgiving hands. Students recount disproportionate consequences for minor transgressions and Greer’s and Hack’s frequent touching of select boys. Students and state prosecutors both described Greer’s treatment of vulnerable students as fitting into a pattern of grooming. Many students only attended for a year, either choosing to withdraw or facing expulsion.

“The more you saw, the

20 | February 2020

more you saw the weird stuff,” said Lawrence Dressler, a parent of a former yeshiva student.

Central to the school’s culture was the personality of Greer, the founder, dean and ultimate downfall of the yeshiva.

In an interview with the News, New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass ’82 described Greer as a “cult figure” — a man who commanded absolute respect in his insular community and inspired fear in students. He doled out harsh and unusual punishments and chose favorite — and least favorite — pupils. He hosted students in his home often and served them alcohol.

Attorneys representing Greer and Hack did not respond to requests for comment.

As dean, Greer was subject to virtually no oversight, sources say. He created an environment in which manipulation and secrecy were normal, where emotional and sexual abuse went unchecked for decades, largely undetected by outside adults.

By conducting interviews with over a dozen of Greer’s colleagues, students and survivors, and reviewing nearly 100 pages of testimony and other court records, it becomes possible to piece together the story of a man who once represented the future

of Orthodox Judaism and now spends his days behind bars. He leaves in his wake a community grappling with a fallen leader and childhoods marked by his abuse.

‘SOMETHING OF A CELEBRITY’ As a young man, Greer heralded a dynamic new form of Orthodox Judaism for many in his tight-knit community. He grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1940s and 50s, raised by two Modern Orthodox Jews. He attended high school at Manhattan Talmudical Academy and graduated in 1956.

In August 2019, after the state of New York passed a new iteration of the Child Victims Act, sexual abuse lawsuits rained down on the school. Thirty-eight former students made claims of abuse at the hands of school rabbis spanning four decades and dating back to the 50s, when Greer was a student.

After attending Princeton and Yale Law, Greer married school teacher Sarah Bergman in 1971. In 1972, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination for Upper West Side district representative in the New York state assembly.

Goldman grew up in Greer’s neighborhood and worked as

his campaign manager. Though they lost, Goldman described the campaign team as being “totally enamored of and devoted to” Greer. “He was something of a celebrity in the neighborhood,” he said.

Goldman described the Orthodox Jewish community he was raised in as “very provincial” and having “limited horizons.” He said that Greer’s academic and professional endeavors broke the mold, inspiring Goldman himself to pursue experiences beyond their neighborhood.

In the decades that followed, Greer’s religious beliefs shifted to the right.

He and Sarah founded the Gan School in 1977 with the help of Harold Hack GRD ’75 and Adelle Hack GRD ’72, parents of alleged survivor Aviad Hack.

Though Greer maintained a law office in the school’s early years, his role as a religious and educational leader gradually became his primary one, the transition running parallel to his ideological evolution.

Greer’s daughter, Batsheva ’00, was the lead plaintiff in the “Yale Five” case of the late 1990s, in which a group of Jewish undergraduates sued the University. The students alleged

PHOTOS BY MARISA PERYER

claimed, Greer’s associates removed bundles of newspapers from distribution sites around the Elm City. Today, few copies remain.

‘THEY WOULD BREAK YOU DOWN’ Little is definitive about the history of the Greer schools. Their online presence is thin and widely scattered.

Several websites — hosted on platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr — once promoted the yeshiva, but none appear maintained today. In interviews, former students and parents provided differing years of operation for all three schools.

Many recalled that only a handful of students populated each grade, often dwindling to six or seven pupils by the year’s end due to expulsions and withdrawals.

In some years, they said, the only students in any given class were Greer’s grandchildren.

Most sources suggest that the Gan School was founded as a coed elementary school and gradually evolved into the Yeshiva of New Haven as its male students reached high school age. Its counterpart, the Tikvah High School for Girls, was founded in 1988. Both high schools housed students — many from outside of Connecticut — in dormitories converted from homes owned by Greer’s network of nonprofits.

The yeshiva was located at 765 Elm St. in the former Roger Sherman School building. It looms over all the other houses on the block, leaves of ivy curling around the window frames and up the

red brick walls. Over the decades, Greer acquired over four dozen surrounding homes in the neighborhood, using several for student housing but renovating and renting out the rest.

For students, daily life at the yeshiva was dictated by an intense schedule and high expectations.

“There was no room for error,” said one former student, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “If you were one minute late for prayers, and showed up at 7:01 instead of 7:00 … Five minutes at breakfast, that’s the point at which … you’d miss breakfast altogether.

You wouldn’t eat.”

Jake Dressler, who attended the yeshiva between 2007 and 2008, described the “very strict regimen”: After rising early for morning prayer, students ate breakfast together and attended a full day of classes, alternating between secular and religious coursework, often without a break until 9:00 p.m., when they would return to the dorms to study.

The yeshiva was academically rigorous and also atypical. According to one parent, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, the school did not hold parent-teacher conferences. The parent said that there was virtually no communication between school administrators and guardians. “They wanted to do it their way and not be challenged by parents along the way,” they said.

Many former students described living in fear of Greer, saying his personality seemed to largely dictate

cover

that Yale’s housing policy requiring unmarried first years and sophomores to live in coed dormitories discriminated against Orthodox Jewish students. A federal appeals court ruled in Yale’s favor in December 2000.

Columbia journalism professor Samuel Freedman interviewed both father and daughter for his 1998 New York Times Magazine piece about the case.

“He was a purist,” Freedman said. “He thought [there was] no compromise on this issue, and he was clear that he was the one driving [the case].”

The rabbi worked hard to control his public image. In 1998, Bass published a story in the now-defunct New Haven Advocate entitled “Fortress Greer.” In the wide-ranging article, Bass explored the real estate empire Greer had built in the Edgewood neighborhood and the many tax-credit programs and federal block grants he used to fund the enterprise.

New Haven residents whom Bass interviewed for the article said much about Greer, from his rigidity as a landlord to the 8-feet-tall fences he erected around his properties. But you never hear from the rabbi himself — in an interview with the News, Bass recalled multiple fruitless efforts to convince Greer to provide comment, including visits to the yeshiva. “He pushed me down the stairs,” Bass told the News of one such encounter, an incident he also mentioned in the 1998 story.

After the article’s publication, Bass

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school culture.

One alumnus who requested anonymity for fear of retribution described a man capable of switching between “a very sweet, caring side” and unchecked anger at a moment’s notice. He intimidated adults and adolescents alike.

Still, Greer and his colleagues made a compelling appeal to prospective students and families.

Students often came to New Haven from out of state because their hometowns lacked strong Jewish high schools, and he pitched his schools as paragons of adolescent Jewish education. Once they arrived, however, many soon realized that little was typical about the Greer schools.

Several alumni from both the yeshiva and Tikvah stated that they felt school administrators had deliberately recruited students from households characterized by instability. In an interview, R.S.A. — who testified in Greer’s criminal trial and attended the yeshiva in the mid2000s — said that growing up, he had endured “emotional, physical [and] mental abuse” at home.

“I only agreed to go to a school like [that] so far away from home because I was trying to run away … I was willing to go anywhere,” he said. “Everybody in that school had something they were running away from.”

At the yeshiva, minor infractions were met with time on the green chairs. Teachers sent students to the chairs — located in the lobby of the first floor of the 765 Elm St. building, outside the front office — for the slightest mistakes, so the experience became commonplace. For bigger transgressions, Jake Dressler said, administrators turned to the “Sabbath apartment.” Misbehaving students were forced to spend entire weekends in the Greer-owned apartment, with other students delivering their meals.

School administrators kept a tight grip on their students’ personal lives. They were not allowed to

22 | February 2020

leave campus without permission.

They could never walk around New Haven alone. “Secular” possessions, such as radios, were not allowed in the dorms. Former Tikvah student Naomi Klein said that personal belongings frequently went missing from their rooms following random searches conducted by dorm counselors — staff who lived in the dorms.

Students received little respite, only permitted to return home a handful of times each year. Former Tikvah student Sara Rosenberg recounted a situation in which another student requested permission to go home for the high Jewish holidays to support her parents during their impending divorce.

“They told her, ‘If you leave and your parents come get you, you will not be able to come back.’ And she left and was not able to come back,” Rosenberg said.

In some instances, school administrators’ decisions about discipline — or lack thereof — had life-threatening implications for students. During Hack’s July 2016 deposition, prosecutors questioned him about an incident where a yeshiva student was allegedly transported to Yale New Haven Hospital after consuming too much alcohol at Hack’s home. “[Greer] is known for serving alcohol to people who are under age,” Hack said in the deposition.

Rosenberg described another situation in which a classmate went into anaphylactic shock, and Tikvah dorm counselors refused to help her. When the girls took it upon themselves to call 911, they asked the ambulance operators to silence their sirens and dim their lights, but school administrators found out anyway. The next day, the sick student was expelled. Administrators told the Tikvah girls not to tell their parents and removed all phones from the dorms.

“I mean, you’re 14,” Rosenberg said. “[So] it’s a little bit scary that you’re told not to tell your parents

stuff that you know happened at school.”

In interviews, former students wrestled with the complicated question of their net experience at the Greer schools. One source said that she got an “amazing education” from Tikvah, a sentiment echoed by several other students.

Still, nearly every student interviewed characterized the school culture as abusive.

“It’s pretty sick and twisted, honestly,” R.S.A. said. “[They would] break you down mentally and emotionally and then they [would] fill the void.”

GREER’S SURVIVORS Jake Dressler and other students recalled taking weekly trips to the swimming pool in Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium during his year at the yeshiva. In the locker room, Jake said, Hack, the chaperone, changed clothes with his students. He said that he “didn’t know adults were allowed to get naked in front of children.”

The behavior fit into a disconcerting pattern of Greer and Hack acting inappropriately with students. Lawrence Dressler, Jake’s father, said that both administrators always “had [their] hands all over” certain boys — an assertion several former students corroborated.

Once, Lawrence said, Hack nibbled on Jake’s ear in a classroom, a statement Jake corroborated and Hack confirmed in a deposition.

The younger Dressler said he pulled away from Hack so quickly that the teacher’s teeth left a scratch on his ear.

“We were so young, we were like 13, 14,” Jake said. “It didn’t even cross our minds to tell an adult.”

Moments like these, though,

belied a much more alarming trend of sexual abuse of male students, allegedly spanning nearly two decades, traversing state lines and shattering a small but tight-knit community.

To date, three former yeshiva students have publicly accused Greer of sexually abusing them while they were at the school. While only one, Mirlis, has sought legal remedy, both Hack and R.S.A. testified to their abuse at the rabbi’s hands during the civil and criminal proceedings. R.S.A. also described his experience in an interview with the News last year.

In a 2016 deposition taken prior to the civil trial, Hack told attorneys that his relationship with Greer became sexual in the spring of 1991 or 1992, after Greer first inappropriately touched Hack — who was then 16 or 17 — in the basement of a house he owned.

Hack grew up in a house just down the street from the rabbi’s. His parents helped the Greers found the Gan School, and his father, Harold, would serve on the board of directors for the yeshiva for decades. As a boy, Hack said, he had “tremendous respect, reverence, awe” for Greer.

Later in the relationship, the rabbi would allegedly tell Hack that it had been difficult

for him to avoid touching his student before his 16th birthday — the age of consent in Connecticut.

Hack told attorneys that sexual encounters between the two took place in Greer-owned properties in the Edgewood neighborhood and in hotels and motels around Connecticut and in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Missouri. Greer often checked into hotels under the name Daniel Green, he said, and paid in cash, wearing a hat to conceal his identity. “[Over] time it became part of the way life was,” Hack said in a deposition. “You know, I got up in the morning, the sun has this habit, it rises in the east every single day. And [I had] a meeting with Daniel Greer every single week.”

The only weeks without meetings, Hack said, were between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and also during the Nine Days, when some observant Jews refrain from bathing.

Their relationship allegedly remained sexual for over a dozen years, until Hack married his wife in 2004.

Occasionally, he told prosecutors, he tried to voice his unhappiness to Greer. He described one sexual encounter during which the rabbi asked

Hack why he was upset. Hack told him that from a modern-day perspective, students of history understood that World War II had ended in 1945. “But when a person was in the concentration camp in 1943, they didn’t know that the war was going to end in 1945,” Hack said he told the rabbi. “From their perspective, they might have to endure this hell forever. I said I [felt] like that.”

He remembered Greer growing angry. “You compared me to a Nazi.”

“It’s pretty sick and twisted, honestly,” R.S.A. said. “[They would] break you down mentally and emotionally and then they [would] fill the void.”

Hack said fear deterred him from cutting off the relationship as a student or young adult — fear of Greer’s anger, of the repercussions of his perceived disloyalty.

He said he feared “losing [his] specialness” and the potentially negative impact on his family if he fell out of favor with the esteemed rabbi.

“In the grand scheme of things, is it really worth taking everything down, destroying everything over this?” Hack said he asked himself.

By the time his own relationship with Greer ended, Hack said in his deposition, he had been aware of a sexual relationship between the rabbi and Mirlis — then a junior in high school — for at least a year, beginning in the fall of 2003, during his third year working as an administrator at the yeshiva. He said that he “saw all the signs,” that Greer was taking “too much of an interest” in the student.

Still, Hack maintained in his deposition that he wasn’t aware of mandatory reporter laws — which in Connecticut require professionals in contact with children through their line of work to report any suspicion of imminent or ongoing child abuse or neglect — until “a number of years later.”

In the September 2019 criminal trial, prosecutors estimated that Mirlis endured at least 106 instances of abuse between the fall of 2002 and the summer of 2006, when they had a final sexual encounter the year

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after his graduation.

“That’s what I do with my kids,” prosecutors said Greer told Mirlis after their first encounter at his Elm Street home, during which the rabbi fed Mirlis nuts and wine, kissing him and groping his crotch. “It’s fine. Don’t

worry about it.”

Greer’s relationship with Mirlis was well documented by the New Haven Independent, which followed both court cases closely between 2016 and 2019.

Witness testimony painted a picture of a dynamic discomfitingly similar to the one allegedly between Greer and Hack — a relationship characterized by psychological manipulation and untold emotional damage wrought on the survivor.

During Greer’s December 2019 sentencing, Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Maxine Wilensky read a statement in court written by Mirlis. Mirlis

24 | February 2020

wrote that he still struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and will never recover from the abuse Greer inflicted upon him.

He wrote that he would happily return the financial settlement if it meant he could “turn back the clock and relive [his] childhood.”

The last instance of sexual abuse Greer has been publicly accused of occurred in 2008.

R.S.A. was a 12-year-old freshman at the yeshiva at the time.

“Plausible deniability,” R.S.A. said. “That’s what it started off as.”

He described small instances of touching that could be chalked up to innocent mistakes — an easily denied, accidental brush of the backside, for example.

One evening, he said that Greer invited him to celebrate a minor academic success by taking a walk in Edgewood Park together. He said the rabbi asked

his 12-year-old student what he liked to drink: whiskey, vodka, tequila or wine?

Wine, R.S.A. supposed.

The pair sat together on a bench in a moment similar to Mirlis’ first encounter with Greer. Greer fed R.S.A. nuts and wine, and then he attempted to kiss him, R.S.A. alleged.

“It’s kind of shitty when the first kiss you get is an old dude trying to stick his tongue down your throat while you have a mouthful of peanuts,” R.S.A. said.

He said that he did not tell anybody about that night for over two years. The societal norms he grew up with still dictated that it was “the worst thing in the world” to be gay, and he was embarrassed about what had happened. Prior to the incident, Greer had made him feel like he was his favorite student.

Like he was special.

JUSTICE SERVED? On Elm Street, the red brick building stands vacant, leaves of ivy crawling up the walls. It isn’t outwardly obvious that the property ever housed a yeshiva — the building’s edifice still reads “Roger Sherman School” in bold capital letters. Still, if you peer through the window of the locked front door, you can see “Yeshiva of New Haven” etched into an interior entrance.

Today, Greer sits in the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a state prison for men 30 minutes from the yeshiva. He is carrying out a 20-year sentence, to be suspended after serving 12. A federal jury in Hartford ordered Greer in May 2017 to pay $21.7 million following Mirlis’ lawsuit against him. According to Mirlis, he has yet to collect the $15 million in compensatory damages his abuser owes him.

Greer initially faced eight charges in the September 2019 criminal trial: four counts of second-degree sexual assault and four counts of risk of injury to a minor. On the last full day of the trial, however, Superior Court Judge Jon Alandar dropped the

sexual assault charges after the defense moved to acquit because they exceeded Connecticut’s five-year statute of limitations.

Two days later, after roughly seven hours of deliberations, a six-person jury returned their verdict: guilty on all counts.

Some of Greer’s staunchest supporters maintained his innocence even after closing arguments. Rabbi Avrohom Notis, who used to run his yeshiva out of Greer’s Elm City facility, told the News during the September trial that it would be a “travesty of justice” for Greer to be convicted.

Still, others familiar with the case expressed relief at the rabbi’s sentence.

“I’m glad that motherfucker’s in jail,” Jake Dressler said.

Now, many are left to reckon with the aftermath of a case that stunned New Haven’s Orthodox Jewish community.

Among many questions that have yet to be answered is whether other adults in the yeshiva’s administration were aware of Greer’s behavior.

Dressler said that he was confident the “secular teachers” — part-time instructors who taught English or math — had no idea about the abuse, sexual or emotional, taking place behind the scenes.

A parent of a former yeshiva student said that many in the community feel betrayed by the rabbi, to whom they entrusted their children’s education and well-being. A former student said that the community Greer worked so hard to build has “all [come] tumbling down” with the scandal.

“It was still shocking, it was sad,” Goldman said. “You know, [he] was a golden boy who had so much potential and so much promise.”

In an interview with the News, Mirlis said that he viewed the guilty verdict as a “monumental step” towards finding closure. “[The] goal is for other victims to have the courage to come forward and to hopefully get their day of justice.”

JOHN GINNETTI The art and academia of cocktail-making

BY AIDAN CAMPBELL PHOTOS BY LUKAS FLIPPO

J

ohn Ginnetti sits on a barstool, a drink in hand, his face illuminated by the glowing onyx bar. He is reading, reviewing the chapters for his class, “Cocktail Culture,” a residential college seminar in Benjamin Franklin College, dedicated to the history of the drink. It is early on a Tuesday evening, and I’ve come from the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library to the techno music of 116 Crown. Most of my conversations with professors take place in small offices with books spilling over the shelves, not the leather-tiled lounge of a cocktail bar. I’ve never met a professor at a bar before, but then again, John Ginnetti, 42, owner of 116 Crown, is not your average Yale academic.

In no other course could you find Benjamin Franklin’s “The Drinker’s Dictionary,” with 228 phrases to describe drunkenness, on the syllabus. Nor would you be assigned an article on the once-common practice of drinking champagne out of women’s shoes (actually referred to as the “shoey” in Australia). The rule against alcohol consumption in class has done little to deter the 130 students who apply to the seminar each spring.

As a reporter rather than a student, I consider myself exempt from the drinking policy. Part of the job, I decide, is to try a cocktail myself.

The class readings, however, haven’t prepared me for the real question: my order

(vodka cranberry wouldn’t do here). Sensing my hesitation, Ginnetti turns to the bartender, points to the top of the menu, and orders an Outré. “On the rocks,” he adds.

When I ask what’s in it, Ginnetti doesn’t even glance at the menu before listing off the ingredients and pointing to each — toki Japanese whisky, grenadine, roku gin, egg white, agave syrup, lemon juice and basil and hibiscus crystals. He gestures to the gin and grenadine on the back bar, a painted fiberglass shelf stacked with 180 spirits.

Sitting in the small lounge, Ginnetti leans back against the cushions, his hands in his pockets and his long hair falling just over his shoulders. He wears jeans and a flannel, an outfit which reminds me more of the crew at the axe-throwing bar down the street than the chic crowd of 116 Crown.

The cocktail world can have a reputation for pretentiousness. But Ginnetti does not fit the stereotype. “John is understated about how good he is at what he does,” said Lenny Jenkins ’20, a student in Ginnetti’s course, “but he’s an artist.”

A moment later, my drink arrives. The Outré looks like it belongs in a museum — not just in a glass, but behind glass. It tastes like a whiskey sour, full-throated and frothy, topped with a cloud of cottony egg whites with a single large ice cube. I remind myself

to sip slowly. “Any good?” Ginnetti asks. “If not, I’ll have to get behind the bar myself.”

Ginnetti was trained as a bartender.

His first job was working at BAR New Haven — the dance club, brewery and pizza place — where his then-wife and current business partner Danielle Ginnetti was a manager. Bar was known for its beer rather than its cocktails, but even back then Ginnetti was drawn to the spirits. Anyone could pour a beer, but mixing a drink was alchemy.

During his first week of training at BAR New Haven, his co-worker made him buy the book “Mr. Boston: Official Bartender’s Guide.” Ginnetti read it cover to cover and committed each of the recipes to memory, from a classic gin and tonic to the Tom Collins. A week later, on a busy night, his co-worker was suddenly called away and, for the first time, Ginnetti was alone at the bar. The first order he got was for a Tom Collins, the spryly sweet cocktail with gin, lemon juice, soda and simple syrup. The only problem — they didn’t have lemon juice and there was no simple syrup. Thinking quickly, Ginnetti took the lemons used for garnish and, as the crowd of customers watched, began squeezing them, one by one, into a cup, making his own fresh lemon juice. In another small bowl, he sprinkled sugar and slowly stirred in hot water for simple syrup.

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The mix was almost complete by the time his co-worker returned, took one look at the line by the bar, and hip-checked Ginnetti out of the way.

Taking over, his co-worker grabbed vodka and sour mix, poured them into a glass, and handed it to the customer.

Then, he turned to Ginnetti and gave him a piece of advice. “He told me, ‘No one drinks gin, so use vodka. And sour mix is just as good as lemon juice, but no one wants something that sour anyway, so just use 7-Up.’” Ginnetti turned to me, shook his head and laughed. “Well, that drink just isn’t as good.”

There’s a certain kind of reverence in Ginnetti’s description of a drink. He talks about the Tom Collins like a philosophy professor rhapsodizing about the Platonic forms. “There was potential in the bones, but the expression wasn’t true to the recipe.”

He leans in, animated. “The Tom Collins is supposed to be something that when you sip it, you think of sitting on a porch swing in the summer. When you drink something that has sour mix in it, it feels like you walked out of the hospital.”

For Ginnetti, the goal is to engage the imagination as much as the senses. Instead of writing down recipes, he writes down concepts. He keeps them on his phone with a running list of titles: “A Meditation on Bitter,” “An Expression of Place,” “Make Everything Personal.” From there, he starts building the idea out, sourcing the ingredients and then testing each one. And it’s not just the ingredients he’s assessing. He’s attuned to the age of the spirit, the proportions, the

26 | February 2020

distillation process, even the type of resting wood. It’s only when he takes his first sip and imagines the porch swing in summer that his work is complete.

These were the cocktails that Ginnetti wanted to make — not knockoffs with sour syrup and cheap substitutes. At BAR New Haven, he was already trying his hand at different recipes and researching online, reading antique cocktail collections and combing through old recipes like a biblical scholar.

In 2007, he finally got his break. A friend had bought the property of the old National Hotel on Crown, by then a shell of a building, and was planning to turn it into condominiums. Ginnetti convinced the friend to rent him the ground floor with the idea of opening a bar.

Ginnetti spent the next year preparing. He turned the galley kitchen into a workshop and tested cocktails on anyone who was willing to sample them, from family members to friends and neighbors down the road. On one occasion, he even harvested lavender from his aunt’s flower garden, snipping off the stems and perfecting a lavender-infused simple syrup that made the whole house smell like herbes de Provence.

At the same time, the cocktail renaissance was quietly making its way through the bars of New York, from the back-alley saloon of Milk & Honey on up. The word was spreading. Martinis and Manhattans were back in fashion again, and orders for juleps, cobblers and sours slipped off the tongue like syrup.

But Ginnetti wasn’t interested in opening a bar in New York. He wanted to bring cocktail culture to New Haven, where he had roots and a community. “You could feel it on the wind,” said Ginnetti. “I’d [make cocktails] at home and it felt new and I remember running it by some people I respected and I was like, ‘This is good, right?

Have you ever had anything like this?’

And they’re like, “No, I don’t know what the hell this is, but this is great.’”

At the time, few people in New Haven even knew what a real cocktail tasted like. There was no competition, precisely because no one knew the niche existed.

Jessica Spector, co-lecturer of “Cocktail Culture” and a former New Haven resident, remembers that time well. “Back in 2007, there were very few cocktail bars anywhere. It was still the early days of the renaissance,” Spector recalls.

The beginning, Ginnetti admits, was rough. It was 2007. Facebook was still in its infancy. Twitter and Instagram didn’t even exist. Instead, Ginnetti and his business partner Danielle walked door to door like canvassers, hand-delivering invitations to their opening. They spammed stores and sent invites across town. But the invitations worked. People showed up.

“I walked in, and I was blown away,” said Spector. “I’ve been around the cocktail and whiskey industry for 25 years, so anytime there was a new cocktail place, I liked to check it out.

John’s drinks were just on another level.”

From the start, 116 Crown’s menu was different from most. There was

no “well drink,” a cheap staple, like the vodka cranberry. Each item was listed as labeled, from Aalborg Akvavit to Green Chartreuse. For certain customers, the brand names didn’t matter. Few could distinguish between the Booker’s Bourbon and Maker’s Mark Bourbon.

But it was a part of Ginnetti’s larger commitment to total transparency. Everything happened above board, from selecting the spirit on the shelf to the pinch of cayenne pepper from the cordial glasses lined up on the bar. “It was a bit of education, but we wanted people to feel as though they had gotten a proper value,” Ginnetti said. “A lot of times you see bars and restaurants cutting corners to satisfy the demand for price and we just weren’t willing to do that.”

The culture was changing too. 116 Crown opened in 2007, the same year the iPhone was released. Suddenly, customers had Google at their fingertips.

Not only could they observe the process, now they could look up the label, the price and the brand of the spirit within seconds. Quality mattered more than ever.

The rise of Instagram only added to the appeal. 116 Crown was known for making good, strong drinks. But it didn’t hurt that their cocktails were camera-ready too. The drinks were immediately “Instagrammable,” from the sparkling glitterati to the deep ash blue of the margarita noir, rimmed with a dusting of charcoal. These drinks were meant to be idled over, even admired. They weren’t just libations. They were accessories.

Instagram and its exhibition culture brought a new pretentiousness to the production, a quality Ginnetti had consciously tried to avoid. The photos could capture the aesthetic appeal, but what they missed, in Ginnetti’s eyes, was the authenticity of the experience.

“Cocktails don’t have to be ‘fancy.’ But they should be special, and they should be presented as special,” said Ginnetti. “Cocktails should be unique; they should be creative; they should be original; they should be innovative; they should be quality. And, above all, they should be authentic.”

Either way, people noticed. They kept coming back, even after the initial buzz faded. The bar, known to host birthdays and formal events, was a hotspot for students, particularly Yalies.

It also caught the eye of a Yale administrator who, after visiting, asked Ginnetti to help with the mixology course as part

of Yale’s bartender training program (offered through the Alcohol and Other Drugs Harm Reduction Initiative).

During one of the sessions, Ginnetti was teaching students about the properties of gin and mentioned its use as an antimalarial during British colonialism. “I offhandedly remarked, ‘You could teach a whole class on colonialism through cocktails,’” Ginnetti recalled.

The next day he got a text from Kevin Bendesky ’19, a Yale student and acquaintance of his, whose suitemate had been in the mixology class. Along with the message was a link to Yale’s residential college seminar program.

Ginnetti was interested. But he wasn’t sure about teaching the class alone. He posed the idea to a friend of his, Jessica Spector, an instructor with the Academy Drinks and holder of a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Spector had taught philosophy at Hartford’s Trinity College, but left in 2003 to focus full time on writing.

The two had met more than a decade earlier around the time 116 Crown first opened. She and Ginnetti had collaborated on writing projects before, including a book on cocktails. Spector hadn’t intended to return to academia, but when Ginnetti pitched the idea of a class on cocktails, she was sold.

“I had the academic historical background, whereas John had worked hands-on in the industry,” said Spector.

“A lot of times academics suffer from talking about something rather than doing it, but John had actually been doing it for 20 years.”

The idea was to model polite discourse, bringing their debates on theory and history from the barstools of 116 Crown to the classroom of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. Tara Campbell, a senior in the seminar, described the dynamic through Ginnetti and Spector’s different approaches to defining a cocktail.

“John’s like, ‘It’s a quality liquor, there’s a sweet ingredient, there’s a bitter ingredient and then sometimes a fourth ingredient. But usually liquor, bitter, sweet.’ And Jessica’s like, ‘Think about it like a date night for your favorite spirit.

Or think about the cocktail like a beautiful frame for your favorite photo.’”

Since his early days sourcing cocktail recipes from old books and archives, Ginnetti has always had an interest in the literature of different drinks. In class, he draws on that knowledge, not only describing the ingredients of the drink,

but the liquor’s evolution from the decks of pirate ships to mojitos on the dock.

Often, he begins simply by setting the scene. For example, Campbell said that Ginnetti will tell them, “‘Imagine you’re on a boat and you’ve got a cold glass in your hand. What do you feel?’ And we’re all sitting there thinking, ‘What are you trying to get at?’ He asks us, ‘Don’t you think this cocktail exudes X, Y, Z?’ He tries to put us in the shoes of the people from the time period we are talking about.”

On a basic level, the Old-Fashioned is nothing more than whiskey, bitters, sugar and ice. But Ginnetti pushes his students to see the greater picture: how a well-crafted drink can transport people to the dark, wood-paneled room of a speakeasy, beside the bearded men at the bar wishing for the good old days of straight whiskey.

In many ways, “Cocktail Culture” is a class about taste. But the actual tasting takes place outside the seminar. After two hours talking about the history of Manhattans, margaritas, and Old-Fashioneds, most of the students are dreaming of what they’ll drink that night. “It’s like describing music,” said Jenkins. “Someone tells you all about these songs you’ve never heard and the first thing you want to do when you stop learning is go and listen to them. It’s the same with cocktails.”

Campbell has the same restless feeling when she leaves class. “It’s funny because the class is at 1:30 p.m. and we get out at 3:20 p.m. After that we think, ‘G&T sounds really good right now,’ but then we remember, ‘It’s 3 p.m.! Why are we feeling this way?’”

The doors of 116 Crown are always open to Ginnetti’s students, where they can find him in his element.

In the lounge of 116 Crown, I can hear the rattle of the bartender shaking drinks in the background. He’s making a martini. Of all the drinks on the menu, the martini is Ginnetti’s personal favorite. It’s one of the simplest drinks.

“In [the martini], the only improvisation you have is proportion and brands. So any mistake in there and it’s toast,” says Ginnetti. “It’s exacting, but when it all comes together — the ice, stirring versus shaking, twisting the lemon over an ice-cold glass — it’s just alchemy.”

Nothing more than gin, dry vermouth and a twist of lemon. But, for Ginnetti, the beauty is the simplicity.

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Light ly

BY ELIANA SWERDLOW I dreamed I was lying in the garden (its location, I do not know) on a ragged yellow towel with my eyes closed. The sun was too strong for me to have been so careless (so exposed) in my light pink (almost white) dress, but I was determined to feel its warmth.

Had this version of myself up until this point only lived inside? I remember neither what I was thinking (maybe nothing) nor for how long I lay there (maybe hours).

I remember when a strange coolness filled the garden— I opened my eyes to see the Buddha standing over me (quietly saying nothing), his head blocking the sun’s full circle but its rays fanning out from behind him.

In his smile (only a thin line) I felt a calmness I’ve never felt before. He opened his eyes, and I closed mine. I had many questions for the Buddha, but I asked only one. How? I was ashamed of my vagueness.

But he answered (in his gentle voice): “lightly.”

This is how the Buddha walks into the garden. (I tell myself). Lightly.

When I reached for the gold jewelry (warm from hanging around his neck), the Buddha stopped me.

He shook his head (but kept his smile), and I watched his long ears swing.

It was as if the he knew I had imagined a romance (no—an attachment) I could not have.

He let the thousands of roses (reds, pinks, and whites) fall from his arms to blanket my (almost) still body. Under their weight, I crumbled into my smaller units.

I was only particles as I sank (with my rose petals) into the ground, each blade of grass a quiet spear in my body. When the Buddha left (and I was no longer real), only the echoes of my question lingered in the garden I have since been unable to return.

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ILLLUSTRATION BY ANNIE YAN

IN PURSUIT OF JUSTICE Sexual misconduct and disbelief at Yale-NUS

BY MACRINA WANG

Editor’s Note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual misconduct. One student, Sya, requested to be referred to by her first name to protect her privacy.

S

ya YNC ’20 did not know who she was going to live with once she returned to Yale-NUS. She reported her assault in September 2017, a year after it had happened. But now that she was returning to campus after a semester studying abroad at Yale, she realized she might have more trouble finding suitemates to live with than her perpetrator did coming back. Two separate suites told her they didn’t want her to live with them because her presence might make her rapist feel unwelcome in the suite.

During the fall semester of her first year at college, Sya went out with a group of friends, one of whom was her assailant. The next morning, she woke up undressed and in pain, unsure of where she was and how she had gotten there.

Her case was the first reported incident of sexual misconduct at Yale-NUS. The college had only been established six years prior. In accordance with university protocol, a disciplinary hearing was held. A panel, consisting of Yale-NUS staff and faculty members, ruled in Sya’s favor. Her assailant decided to appeal the decision; the appeal was rejected. The trial and appeal processes collectively lasted for five months — but finally, in January 2018, a decision was reached. Her assailant was found responsible for sexual misconduct, and was suspended from the college for two semesters.

The entire process took much longer than Sya expected, but she had anticipated administrative hiccups.

What Sya could not foresee was the fraught campus community she would face in the wake of the trial. Word seemed to have traveled quickly about what had happened to her. Although the appropriate college channels found her assailant guilty, the Yale-NUS community seemed conflicted, apathetic and sometimes even openly hostile at news of the verdict. But Sya’s encounter with a conflicted campus community is not exclusive to YaleNUS. The issue of sexual misconduct has been proliferating on university campuses all over the island.

In an interview, Sya told the News that many students doubted her story. Despite hearing about what had happened to her, her suitemates would still invite her rap-

PHOTOS BY ROBBIE SHORT

Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

feature

ist over to their suite. Others, she said, spread rumors that the assault had actually been a hookup — that Sya had regretted an innocent encounter and used the case as a cover for cheating on her boyfriend. She said that one person commented on her situation by saying, “If you were my close female friend, I’d be furious [about what happened to you]. But I just don’t know you that well.”

At times, she said she felt threatened on campus.

One day, she returned to her suite and found an envelope addressed to her. Every suite in her residential college had a mailbox, and students were encouraged to drop mail into each other’s boxes.

“It’s supposed to be a really cute thing,” she said. But she turned the envelope over and found scrawled on the back: “It’s not our fault you’re a whore.” Inside the envelope were several razor blades: a

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clear threat, but also a cruel reminder. “Penetration with a razor” was one of the many violations Sya’s rapist committed against her while she was unconscious that August evening.

After word of her case came out, she felt “isolated and disbelieved.” For a while, she entertained thoughts of dropping out.

‘TO SO MANY GIRLS ALL OVER THE ISLAND’ Since Sya filed her report in 2017, the number of cases reported since remains unknown. Yale-NUS Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs Joanne Roberts wrote in a statement to the News that she cannot publicly share statistics around sexual misconduct cases reported to Yale-NUS. She wrote that the college does not disclose such details to “maintain the confidentiality of reporting parties and

reduce barriers to reporting.”

While U.S. Title IX law mandates the disclosure of institutions’ sexual misconduct statistics, no such law compels Singaporean institutions to do so. College-sanctioned surveys, however, reveal some information on the sexual climate at Yale-NUS: Last March, 50 percent of student respondents reported hearing sexual comments or jokes that made them uncomfortable on campus, and only 37.8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that students who commit misconduct on campus are held accountable for their actions. Among respondents who reported entering the sexual misconduct disciplinary process — both reporting and responding parties — only 22.2 percent agreed that the outcome was fair.

Yale-NUS made national headlines for a case of sexual misconduct last

October. Brandon Lee Bing Xiang YNC ’20, former student body president, was charged in court in Singapore for taking up-skirt videos of women and filming women showering on campus. He was given an interim indefinite suspension by YaleNUS pending the outcome of a police investigation and disciplinary process.

The problem of sexual misconduct on college campuses has increasingly entered Singapore’s national consciousness as well. In November 2018, student Nicholas Lim Jun Kai at the National University of Singapore — a separate but affiliated institution to Yale-NUS — filmed another student, Monica Baey, without her knowledge or consent while she was using a dorm shower. Shortly after, Baey reported the misconduct to the university and to police, who only gave Lim a 12-month

conditional warning — which meant he did not face charges and would not as long as he did not reoffend in those 12 months. The university suspended him for one semester, banned him from the dorms and made him undergo counseling and write an apology letter to Baey. But Baey thought these measures were still inadequate and felt they did little to deter future offenders. In April 2019, she uploaded a series of Instagram stories detailing the harassment and criticizing Yale-NUS officials for their handling of her case.

“The point of this all is I want some real change in NUS,” she wrote in a post to her Instagram story. In another, she wrote, “Not like this is the first fucking filming incident in NUS ... it has happened So many fucking times to so many girls all over the fucking island ... People keep fucking re-committing because they KEEP GETTING away with it.”

Baey’s story quickly gained traction online, attracting support and derision alike from the general public. In response to the influx of scrutiny, NUS officials introduced a “second strike and you’re out” policy for sexual misconduct cases: Students found guilty of a sexual misconduct charge for a second time would be expelled. And in the Singaporean Parliament, the issue sparked further debate over the manner in which Singapore’s six autonomous universities — government-funded institutions granted an elite status and administrative flexibility — handle sexual misconduct. Between 2015 and 2017, these universities adjudicated 56 cases; during a lengthy parliamentary debate on May 6, 2019, Minister for Education Ong Ye Kung called for these universities to review their disciplinary frameworks, saying current penalties were “manifestly inadequate.”

POLITICS OF SMALLNESS Yale-NUS is an autonomous college within NUS, which means that while it can utilize NUS’ facilities and resources, policies around sexual misconduct at Yale-NUS are independent of NUS’ procedures.

This autonomy is crucial as YaleNUS navigates a unique set of challenges around its sexual climate — one of which is the university’s size.

The university’s relatively small student body of 1,000 students affects how survivors and perpetrators are viewed on campus. Belinda Cheng YNC ’21, who studied abroad at Yale last semester, emphasized how “everyone literally knows everyone else.” Because of this sense of familiarity, campus attitudes toward survivors can be fraught.

Cheng experienced the complexity of such a situation when the case of Brandon Lee Bing Xiang first garnered attention. She had known him — he had lived across the hall from her in her sophomore year.

“When the news came out about him, I experienced this cognitive dissonance, where I hesitated, do I even judge people correctly?”

Cheng said.

“The statistics saying that sexual violence happens with people you know especially rings true with people in this community,” said Nirali Desai YNC ’20, a co-founder of Intercultural Engagement — a program at Yale-NUS that facilitates diversity and inclusion on campus as well as provides support for survivors of sexual assault. “You think, ‘Oh, it couldn’t be this person.

They’re in my class, they’re so kind, so wonderful.’ There’s this silencing and disbelief, which is another form of violence in itself.”

The size of the college can also complicate protections for survivors. “Our school is so small that it results in unclear or blurred boundaries in a no-contact order given to a perpetrator,” said Desai. “What then happens is a survivor is going out of their way to make accommodations for their own safety.”

A Yale-NUS junior, A., who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said the size of the campus community sometimes interferes with the college’s fact-finding process after a case has been reported.

A. had to grapple with the issue firsthand when they were serving in a leadership role of a club. When they learned that one of their club members had been accused of sexual misconduct in a case that had not been reported to the administration, A. felt conflicted. They lacked basic knowledge of what had occurred and did not even know the identity of the survivor, but did that mean

the accused individual should not be expelled from the club?

“Things spread so quickly there. The problem is the moment you hear ‘sexual misconduct,’ you get an emotional response without actual evidence,” A. said. “I want to believe anyone who’s brave enough to tell me, but I also worry about the general tendency for people to

emotionally respond without any evidence.”

As of now, the accused person remains in the group. “It was emotionally and morally conflicting for me,” A. said. “That kind of thing shouldn’t be handled by the students. It should be handled by the administration.”

The size of Yale-NUS also impacted the larger community’s response to Sya’s assault. She told the News that her perpetrator was well known on campus for the

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parties he threw. Since many students were friends with him, she felt her account was often dismissed. In an oped published two years after the assault, Sya described in the Yale-NUS campus paper how she felt alienated by a community that favored neutrality and their relationships with her assailant over supporting her and other survivors like her. In the

Campus Culture, the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center and the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. In August 2018, the policy was updated to lower barriers to reporting and better facilitate the justice process.

Yale-NUS also has multiple mechanisms in place to support survivors. Some

“You think, ‘Oh, it couldn’t be this person. They’re in my class, they’re so kind, so wonderful.’ There’s this silencing and disbelief, which is another form of violence in itself.” article, she called upon other students to confront their entrenched biases.

“Just because you love someone, it does not make them incapable of rape,” she wrote. “I was raped because someone you love and respect chose to rape me.”

WHAT DOES JUSTICE LOOK LIKE? Administratively, Sya believes school officials handled her case well. “Because mine was the first one, everything took a bit longer to happen, but the school was very apologetic for how long it took,” Sya said.

The current sexual misconduct policy at Yale-NUS was established in 2015 after a study involving external experts — authorities familiar with sexual misconduct in Singapore and the U.S. — was conducted. The college consulted local experts, such as the gender equality nonprofit Association of Women for Action & Research (AWARE) and law enforcement officers within the Singapore Police Force. It also conferred with counterparts at Yale, including the Office of Gender and

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of these resources include a student support team, an on-campus counseling network and the AWARE Sexual Assault Care Centre. The college also supports sexual misconduct prevention by integrating mandatory sessions about sexual consent into the first-year orientation program and sponsoring a student group called the Kingfishers for Consent — peer educators devoted to education and outreach around sexual misconduct.

Desai, the Intercultural Engagement co-founder, said that current campus efforts involving survivor support and sexual misconduct awareness have been a result of “ground-up organizing.”

In March 2018, around 30 students participated in a sit-in to condemn the administration’s response to a variety of issues, including sexual misconduct policies.

The protest resulted in the establishment of monthly town hall meetings to foster discussion between students and university officials. The students also proposed a Survivor Solidarity Walk, an initiative where survivors are

invited to share their stories, which occurred last October.

But is any of this enough? When something as traumatizing as a sexual assault occurs, what does justice even look like? What should it look like? Yale-NUS student president, Rachel Juay YNC ’20, wrote in an email to the News that the college “practices a system of restorative justice rather than retributive justice, which focuses on survivor support & holding perpetrators accountable rather than solely on punitive measures (i.e. suspensions, expulsions, etc).” She wrote that Yale-NUS can further aid the rehabilitation process for survivors by better facilitating the way survivors receive learning accommodations.

Survivors who might require extra time to complete assignments should not have to assume the burden of speaking to their professors and reliving the traumas they had experienced, she stated.

Juay also wrote that she thinks Yale-NUS can “do better in rehabilitating [perpetrators] back into YaleNUS,” which she acknowledged may be a controversial thought. “Making sure that they have fully reflected on their actions and are ready to navigate this community upon return is really important,” she wrote. “Teach them to be allies. Help perps navigate tough conversations about accountability without deflecting responsibility for their actions. Teach them to be mindful of the spaces they take up. Teach students to engage in these conversations on accountability should they want to take up the challenge.”

But in Sya’s experience, the Yale-NUS community has been more focused on guaranteeing her rapist’s comfort than ensuring hers.

Sya believes the community needs to do much

more to support survivors: to shed neutrality and begin with belief rather than concerted doubt. But she does not believe in punitive justice. “Systems can’t address violence with a system that’s also built on violence,” she said. Therefore she has struggled tremendously with reconciling her moral views on how sexual misconduct should be handled with her emotional responses. She said she found it difficult seeing her rapist on campus, especially when she thinks that nobody is inherently a bad person and nobody does bad things on purpose.

This semester, Sya has returned to Yale-NUS. In some ways, circumstances have improved exponentially. She found a wonderful suite to live in. One of the girls who told her that her presence would make people uncomfortable if she lived in her suite apologized. And yet the overall current on campus remains determinedly static. Classmates may recognize that real accountability around sexual misconduct cases has not occurred yet, but they aren’t sure how to proceed from there. In conversations about sexual misconduct and justice, Sya hears the phrase “put in the work” a lot, but no one really knows how to answer when she asks: “What work?”

Sya still remembers the baggage that, for a long time, was knotted to her presence.

She remembers the enduring support for her rapist, even when her rapist himself did not deny her allegations. She remembers the people who didn’t want her to live on their floor because of what she represented. She is still confused about the people who didn’t experience dissonance between their morals and a persisting disbelief in her story. All of this makes her a little less sad to graduate this spring.

ON CLICHES R0LLED IN GLITTER

BY NICOLE DIRKS

ILLUSTRATION BY IVI FUNG

W

hen I am sad, I simply tell myself: Stop. Breathe. Believe. Don’t hesitate, meditate. Live well. Be well. Live. Laugh. Love. Eat. Pray. Love.

Be. In. Love. With. Life. These maxims are written in gold calligraphy on posters that hang in my pastel bedroom. Without them, I could not keep calm and carry on from my sadness. Each morning, the cover of my bullet journal reminds me of my other beliefs: “BE A BOSS. Laugh. Love always. Speak up. DREAM BIG. MAKE MAGIC. Hustle. RISE AND SHINE. Take risks. STAY FREE. DARE TO BEING. GIVE BACK. Stand tall. SLAY YOUR DAY.” Now, whenever I wake up, meditate, and pack up my metal straws before yoga, I have all the information I need to slay my day, every day.

Disclaimer: I hate cliches.

I hate myself even more for acciden-

tally using them all the time. They ruffle my feathers in the same way that nails on a chalkboard get under my skin. But they are so ubiquitous that avoiding them requires a self-awareness I simply do not have. Cliches are an easy-peasy-lemonsqueezy way for me to communicate some meaning without the effort of authenticity, so why stop using them? Why not combine motivational cliches for supreme inspiration? Why not purchase a journal with the cliche medley, providing essential, profound life lessons I can only remember through a written reminder?

— Wellness-themed mantras now overpopulate merchandise in a growing section of the Western retail world. Even in The Yale Bookstore, the journal and home sections are dominated by uniform stacks of rosy, bronze-laced planners and signs

plastered with instructions to inspire.

They remind their owners on the daily that “every day is a beautiful day,” to “believe there are no limits in the sky,” and, naturally, “something wonderful is about to happen” (I was a little disappointed by the last one when I un-wonderfully tripped walking up the stairs while exiting the bookstore). Online, the combined 23.4 million Instagram posts tagged with “#mantra” and “#inspirationalquotes” dispatch similar messages. For a regular audience, these products champion and varnish cliches in the spirit of wellness to the point of depriving the mantras of an already wavering meaning.

For most of us, the presentation of these mantras hyper-feminizes wellness in a way that can be alienating if we aren’t gushing with saccharine sorority girl self-confidence. A number of man-

Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

tras blatantly use “she” and “her” to address this female market, like one holographic cursive poster in The Yale Bookstore with an inscription that reads: “SHE TURNS HER CAN’TS INTO CANS AND HER DREAMS INTO PLANS.” Conventionally girly packaging of the mantras, often dominated by pastels and pink watercolor prints, limits the group of targeted consumers. One might presume that only a niche cohort is buying into these mantras online and in store: women with personalities that self-righteously glitter and scream like jewel-encrusted chalices, or women who think that wellness requires aroma diffusers, horoscopes, coconut oil and crystals.

Why do these products and posts exist? Is their audience as restricted in size and shallow in character as it seems? One notebook tells me, “It’s the thought that counts,” but does the “thought” that these mantras stand for — inspiration and wellness — do anything at all?

— Mantras originated in the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Traditionally, they manifest in many forms, including monosyllabic sounds, such as the now ubiquitous “om,” as well as complex hymns. Mantras, primarily the wordy, multisyllabic kind, have entered the mainstream through Western co-opting of Hindu and Buddhist practices, most notably in meditation, yoga and psychiatric treatment practices. But our use of mantras is not solely derived from Indian culture; we seek them out in secular literature as well. We clarify our beliefs when we velcro our worldview against the sticky strip that is

34 | February 2020

a well-crafted sentence.

On Amazon, there are more than 100,000 products based on Gandhi’s “be the change” maxim.

Inevitably, many people who sustain this massive market know little about Gandhi’s life. These products exist partly because Gandhi’s words, from 1906, are in the public domain. Gandhi, of course, merits his authority, but even unsubstantiated authors gain credibility simply by being published. Scott Sobel, a media psychology expert, told the magazine Fast Company that “leaders and their words – inspirational quotes – affect us on a primal level” because humans tend to follow what their role models say. Often, readers instinctively respect published works, treating them like scripture and their authors like gods. Quotability begets believability, even when a phrase only needs to exist to warrant quoting. Thus, the choice to purchase a “be the change” PopSocket phone grip reflects not only a desire for the image of inspiration, but also an assumption of an author’s expertise.

Well-known quotes have even more authority. Their messages seem even more objective because they are part of public knowledge. Further, these quotes allow for uncomplicated transactions of meaning — understood by the listener and requiring little on the part of the speaker.

Throwing an “ignorance is bliss” or a “grass is greener” into a conversation echoes the creativity and authority of some distant poet, even if unknown to the parties involved, while curbing misinterpretation.

Similarly, commercialized cliched quotes convey the weight of an author without the pretentiousness of literary context. The quotes do not try to summarize an author’s idea from a text; by standing alone, isolated from context, the quotes suggest more about the choices of a user than an author. The cover of a journal suggests that its contents will reflect a similar tone. Mantra Instagram posts suggest consistency with the contents of the user’s character –– or at least the user’s self-image.

Anonymous quotes are even more attractive than authored ones if the goal of consumers is to reflect their identities while still preserving some external authority. Markedly 21st century mantras with little author credibility (think: slay your day) can appeal to us through not only our common colloquialisms (slay), but also an uncomplicated lightheartedness of message that matches our intentions for the journal. Using a cliche is a piece of cake, and that can be good.

— Last year, my closest friend was hospitalized for eight months because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder. When she returned to school, mantras were foaming from her belongings. In her clear phone case, she kept a triangular piece of paper inscribed with the triad of “ME. FAMILY. FRIENDS.” to remind her of her priorities. In her bedroom, a daily flip calendar revealed a new mantra every day. Scattered on her walls, neon pieces of paper with happiness quotes strewed flecks of positivity. I had trouble distinguishing the papers from fragments of light filtering through her lace curtains.

Construction paper postings in one corner included handwritten original mantras she had made to manage her OCD. She kept a journal with a mantra on its cover that praised the spirit of adventure.

If my motivation were scarce, it’s conceivable that I would need a daily reminder to Slay my Day. A positive mantra would be comforting as something familiar and simple to grasp. Despite mantras’ common pseudo-scientific presentation, they are, in fact, valid tools when used intentionally. Mantras are a form of self-talk with therapeutic uses to improve mental health. Thus, mantra products can provide, at the very least, surprisingly powerful reminders for certain individuals who struggle to return to a state of positive self-perception.

— During my research of cliched mantras used in Pinterest posts, I rediscovered my personal account

from sixth grade. Its bio: “Beauty isn’t about having a pretty face. It’s about having a pretty mind, pretty heart and pretty soul.” Seeing this, I recoiled and wanted to command-quit the browser immediately. However, in the name of research, I pressed on: The button that says “I choose joy.” Apparently, that was the title of an entire Pinterest board I had dedicated to quotes. The memories of my curation process returned. At the time, I had relied on a few key criteria: 1) above all, the mantra must speak to me; 2) it must be in an appealing font; and 3) its design must fit with the aesthetic of the rest of my board.

Mantras were a means for me to feel like I was grasping significance through literature. The quotes helped me ponder Oscar Wilde’s “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all” without getting lost reading “The Soul of the Man Under Socialism” at age 12. Plus, the Pinterest posts were pretty (backdropped by miscellaneous mountains, zodiac signs and girls holding flowers), and I didn’t have to create them myself. Posting mantras made me feel creative and literary and mindless all at once. If only temporarily, I was using my computer time to reach for the power of words over Club Penguin dominance.

Like 12-year-old me, most preteens can find value in cliches before, to them, they become cliches. Not yet saturated

with platitudes, youth can benefit from the messaging with meaning that, to us, has been stifled by repetition. Quotes rolled in glitter on journals are an appropriate vehicle to transition from toys to books. While the targeted market in The Yale Bookstore is college students, young teenagers are the beneficiaries of products and online content centered on mantras.

Childish activities have always, in some form, had allure to young adults and adults. Today, it manifests with drones, escape rooms and virtual reality technology. For previous generations, there was laser tag, paintball, bowling and board game cafes. However, the popularity amongst adults of the teenage tool that is inspirational stationery reflects a desire to merge reflective time with playtime. We inject our childhood naïveté into the burdensome task of thinking about how to navigate our problems and day-to-day stresses.

Thus, not only do we excise quotes from context, but we furnish them as toys.

The reason we combine recreation with contemplation is not because we have issues that are more pressing than prior generations’. It’s because that’s what our notions of wellness tell us to do.

Come to think of it, no. Adult toybook hybrids are used because it’s what the wellness industry tells us to do. Our notions of wellness are shaped by the items linked to them due to the wellness

industry’s commercialization of selfcare. Clever opportunism of businesses has turned self-care into a playful — and thus material and profitable — endeavour.

— On my first day of college, I entered my dorm room expecting to find a bare space. That’s what I got, except for a single item: a framed black-and-white poster with Amatic, all-caps lettering hung above the mantle. The poster glared at me with the text: BE KIND. WORK HARD. STAY HUMBLE. SMILE OFTEN. BE HONEST. TRAVEL WHEN POSSIBLE. NEVER STOP LEARNING. BE THANKFUL. AND LOVE ALWAYS. Independently, my three suitemates and I had the same reaction of offense by its excess, followed by: How can it be removed immediately? There we were, ripe target consumers: female, relatively health-conscious, eager. We even hoped to do some of the things dictated by the nine-in-one mantra. Yet we were all relieved to hide it in the back of my closet, facing the wall to limit accidental run-ins.

We didn’t throw it out, though.

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IN PURSUIT OF JUSTICE BY MACRINA WANG PAGE 29