The Republic of T.

Like any parents, we want the best possible future for our children, and we’re doing all we can to prepare them to attain it as our parents did for us. Being the grandson of sharecroppers and the son of 1st generation Polish immigrants, to us that means getting an education, being able to land a “good job” with the possibility of moving up the economic ladder. But the current rate of long-term joblessness, and Washington’s apparent lack of political will to remedy it make me wonder if our elected officials see long-term unemployment as a crisis to be averted or “the new normal” — a “correction” that must simply be accepted.

(more…)

One of the teachers who influenced me the most was Mr. Harrison, my high school English teacher. He taught me that the purpose of education was not to teach me what to think, but how to think — how to examine and question what I was told; to not merely “know” what I thought, but to understand why I thought or believed as I did; to be be able to support my own views with fact and reason, but willing to listen to another’s arguments, question my own assumptions and discard them if they didn’t stand up under scrutiny.

I haven’t thought of Mr. Harrison for a while. But the recent uproar over President Obama’s speech to school children, brought Mr. Harrison — and something he said to us before we graduated — back to mind.

(more…)

I was going to add this to a daily digest post. But I don’t know that many people read those, and I don’t want people to miss this

School will soon start again, and countless LGBT youth will return to classrooms all over the country. Some will return to schools where they find support and protection from harassment — where administrators and teachers work together to ensure a safe learning environment to all students.

Some won’t.
(more…)

There is one person in particular I hope got to hear President Obama’s recent speech on education. There was a teachable moment in that speech applicable to all of the challenges we’re facing and essential for Americans to understand if we’re to meet them.

I don’t know his name or who he is. But prior to the election I often saw him — a man probably of retirement age, sitting behind a table gathering signatures to put a property tax cut on the ballot for upcoming county elections. Every weekend, I wondered, as we walked by him with our grocery cart, if he had children. If he did, they were probably grown. I wondered if, now that they are grown and done with formal education, he was protesting having to “pay for other people’s kids” — mine included — to attend our area’s public schools, or if it occurred to him how many people he relied on who were publicly educated at some point. I thought of him again because there was a moment in Obama’s speech that spelled out why education — and more — matters to and for all of us.

(more…)

I read about an attack on a lesbian student at Wayland Union High School, near Grand Rapids, MI, via Ed’s blog.

Police in Wayland, Mich., are investigating an attack by two 14-year-old girls on a third girl in Wayland Union High School. The victim was identified as a supporter of gay rights. The June 10 attack was purposely recorded on a cell phone video by another female, police say.

Wayland is located south of Grand Rapids and according to the city’s Web site has a population of 3,939 people.

Police told Grand Rapids-based WOOD-TV 8, the NBC affiliate, the two girls attacked the victim because she was a “gay rights advocate.”

Chief Dan Miller of the Wayland Police told the Kalamazoo Gazette the 14-year-old victim identified herself as a lesbian.

“I guess some say she’s pretty outspoken, and the other two girls didn’t like that,” he said in the Gazette. “We were told by the two suspects it was over the sex-orientation issue that they don’t believe in.

It was around the same time that I was researching the murders of Simmie Williams and Lawrence King, both of whom were harassed in school. I guess it interested me because of that, and because I was harassed in school. But I was fortunate never to experience something like this.

(more…)

I’m going a bit light on blogging over the holiday, since we’re spending Thanksgiving with my family in Georgia, and introducing Dylan to the rest of the family.

But I couldn’t resist this shocking bit about a display of  ‘live homosexual acts’ that shocked students at a Kentucky college recently.

On Friday, members of the Murray State Alliance performed live homosexual acts on campus in the Free Speech Zone. Many students were shocked, but not necessarily as the name the event implies.

Students performed acts such as reading, studying and hanging out to raise awareness about the lifestyle of gay members of the Murray State campus.

Chris Morehead, junior from Paducah, Ky., checked out Friday’s event after hearing about it through a Facebook message. He said the event was sort of ironic because the name of the event is shocking, but the activities are normal.

Too funny. I remember one Saturday night in college, that I spent with a couple of friends from the gay student group. We basically ended up sitting around at one student’s house, playing Monopoly, and one my friends said with a touch of sarcasm. “Gee, if only our parents could see this wild, hedonistic “gay lifestyle” we’re living. Just partying our way from one orgasm to another.

The game broke up into peals of laughter for about 10 minutes before we calmed down.

[Via Box Turtle Bulletin.]

*Sigh*

It’s almost too easy, but it’s hard to pass up the hypocrisy in John McCain’s latest statement.

Continuing with his attempt to convince American voters that Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is little more than a celebrity, Republican opponent John McCain suggested today that flying off to attend a benefit concert headlined by Barbra Streisand is at odds with the man of the people style campaign Obama has been running.

According to Jonathan Martin’s Politico blog, McCain chided Obama during an appearance before a blue collar crowd in Youngstown, Ohio, using the opportunity to drive a wedge between the Illinois senator and the working class.

“He talks about siding with the people just before he flew off for a fundraiser in Hollywood with Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends,” McCain said of his political rival. “Let me tell you, my friends, there’s no place I’d rather be than right here with the working men and women of Ohio.”

Said the presidential candidate married to a beer heiress, before he hopped on her private jet — because it’s really the only way to get around in Arizona — and flew of to one of their seven homes, so Cindy could change into another $300,000 dress, and John could change into a fresh pair of $520 loafers.

Right. Real “man of the people,” that one.

“Well, I’ll get some sticks and stones, and I’ll break your bones, and the name that hurts you will be Esther!”

~ LaWanda Page as Aunt Esther on “Sanford and Son”

I knew it. Every kid who’s been picked on or bullied knows it. Anyone who’s every been called “nigger,” “faggot,” “bitch,” “kike,” “hebe,” “yid,” “Polack,” “Wetback,” “Guido,” “Spic,” “Chink,” “Gimp,” etc. knows it. I don’t care how many times we were told, “Ignore it. It’s just names and names can’t hurt you,” we all knew then and know now that — contrary to the old adage — names can and do hurt.

The old adage “sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you”, simply is not true, according to researchers.

Psychologists found memories of painful emotional experiences linger far longer than those involving physical pain.

They quizzed volunteers about painful events over the previous five years.

…The volunteers, all students, were asked to write about painful experiences, both physical and emotional, then given a difficult mental test shortly afterwards.

The principle was that the more painful the recalled experience, the less well the person would perform in the tests.

Test scores were consistently higher in those recalling physical rather than “social” pain.

Psychological scoring tests revealed that memories of emotional pain were far more vivid.

So, that brings me to this; some advice for parents about helping your child cope with bullying.

(more…)

We needed a study to tell us this?

In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in math in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.

Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls, who grew up believing it, wound up avoiding harder math classes.

“It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology,” Hyde said.

That’s changing, albeit slowly. Women are now earning 48 percent of undergraduate college degrees in math; they still lag far behind in physics and engineering.

But in primary and secondary school, girls have caught up, with researchers attributing that advance to increasing numbers of girls taking advanced math classes such as calculus.

I’ve known this all my life. Like I’ve said before, I suck at math. I did well enough to graduate from college.

Then there was college. At my university, the math department had a reputation when it came to algebra. People failed all the time. I did. Actually, I dropped before I failed. People transferred to other universities for a semester in order to take and pass algebra elsewhere, and then returned. I did. I went back to the local college in my hometown, where I took and failed algebra. I went back to my university and worked around it, taking and passing statistics and logic (also known as “math for poets” at my university). All the while, I was struggling with undiagnosed, untreated ADD, and as a result could only handle a partial class load after I hit the wall during my sophomore year.

At the time, there was a loophole when it came to statistics. If I took it and passed it, I would be exempt from taking algebra even though it was a prerequisite for statistics. So, I did. It wasn’t until a semester before I was scheduled to graduate (after taking six years to finish, by going part-time) that I found out different. My graduation advisor made a funny face when she looked over my records, and then informed that the loophole had closed, just before I took statistics. So, I wasn’t exempt. I would have to take algebra and pass it if I wanted to graduate.

I suppose I could have dropped off my books and walked awa. But then, she made another face. There was another loophole. The semester after I was scheduled to graduate, the algebra requirement was going to be dropped from my degree. I thought moment, and told her to move my graduation deadline back a semester. I would take one more elective and wait for the algebra requirement to be dropped. That’s what I did, and I graduated from college withouthaving to take algebra.

And I’ve always, always known girls who could run rings around me in math. (No major feat. By the time he gets to middle school, I’ve no doubt Parker will run rings around me in math. He’s a bright kid.) In fact, the people I knew in school who did best in math were mostly girls.

It’s not a matter of boys being better at math than girls, or vice versa. It’s a matter of some people being better at or more talented or gifted at math than other people. It doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t learn math. I can learn to paint, but no teacher can turn me into a Picasso or a Van Gough. Y’know?

It’s the kind of thing that’s easily written off as a photo opportunity: a presidential candidate sitting down with a worried student and a financial aid administrator, working out a plan to help the student pay for her education. But, not if the candidate is one who understands the importance of education, and the difficulty of paying for it. So, when I read about Barrack Obama helping a college student with her tuition concerns, I nodded with recognition.

A tearful Wayne County Community College student got advice and encouragement from Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday, as he touted his plan to improve financial aid and tax credits to college students.

Marilyn Pace is about $1,500 short of paying for tuition and supplies for her dental hygiene studies, she told Obama at a meeting arranged by his aides. After she described the costs of supplies and exams, gas to get to and from classes and her father’s disability, which keeps him from working, a financial aid counselor told her and Obama that private loans should be able to close her financial gap — prompting tears from her and encouraging words from the candidate.

(more…)

As I write this, there there’s a stack of books on the floor, beside my desk. It’s my “to read” pile; books that I’ve bought because I know I want to read them at some point in the no-so-distant future, depending on my mood or what interests me next. (Sometimes it’s unpredictable. For example, after Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary popped up in my Netflix queue, I was so intrigued that I ended up watching Downfall next. I was so intrigued that I ended getting a copy of The Bunker via link Bookmooch, and may end up reading more.)

Aside from my “to read” pile, I also have “to read” list, kept in various places, of books I (a) want to read someday or (b) feel I really should have read by now. Yet, despite being an English lit. major, I have a rather extreme aversion to canonical lists of books one absolutely must read. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t help but notice what (and whom) most of those canonical lists left out. (In college, I avoided taking the required “pre-1800″ classes until my advisor sat me down and told me I had to.) Still, I was intrigued when I came across this list of the 110 “best books” at The Best Article Every Day.

(more…)

When it comes to blogging these days, when I come across something I want blog about days — even weeks or months — go by before I get around to actually blogging about it. Half the time, I let it go because it’s not news anymore, and I can just imagine people asking, “Why’s he blogging about that? It’s so, like, last week.” (As a result, I have tons of half-written draft posts sitting in queue, most of which will never see the light of day.)

The up side is that almost everything comes around again, and when it does I’ve got something partially written, and maybe even a few links already in hand. So, when I read Billy Wolfe’s story in The New York Times, and how he and his parents finally dealt with bullying, I knew exactly what wanted to say; even though I’m still a couple of days late in saying it.

(more…)

Like some middle class kids in my generation, education was a high priority. In my house it was emphasized as the doorway to upward mobility. (The idea of learning for learning’s sake was something I discovered later.) If I wanted a "good job," I’d better — at least — get an undergraduate degree. It wasn’t a question of if I’d go to college, but where, as far as my parents were concerned.

"Where you’ll go," I recall my dad saying, "I don’t know. But you’re going to somebody’s university." My dad’s desire for me to go to college was probably due in part to his never having been. The son of sharecroppers, he left the far via the draft, and never looked back. Despite his lack of a college degree (he did earn technical school degree, as I recall), my dad managed to find a "good job" and make a "good living" to provide for his family. He believed getting a college education would help me do the same and do better.

My dad did well despite not going to college, and I believe I’ve benefited immensely because of the college education he helped me get. I doubt I’d be doing the kind of work I’m doing without it. But in the current economy, stories like my dad’s and mine may be fewer and far between.

(more…)

It’s an old cliché, but nonetheless true: even a broken watch is right twice a day. The same can be said for even the most bigoted organizations of the religious right. (Maybe it’s just that if you keep moving to the right, you eventually meet up with the left?) The American Family Association is that broken watch right about now.

I don’t remember the last time I thought the AFA was right about anything, and I don’t ever remember saying the AFA was right about anything. Ninety-nine and nine tenths of the time, they’re not. But their response to the Day of Silence this year, actually had me nodding my head and thinking they might have gotten a couple of things right this time.

(more…)

Let’s leave politics aside for the moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve written about things that really matter, and asked really important questions like “When did you know you were heterosexual?”, “What made you fall in love?”, and “What turns you on?” Too long, in fact.

So, allow me to make up for it now with an equally important question. Do you like to kiss? Before you answer, though, you might want to take a look at the latest research on kissing, and see if it matches your experience.

Here’s a hint, apparently as with the questions above, men and women tend to give different answers. And after reading the Washington Post article I find myself once again having to read between the lines when science doesn’t include or acknowledge another experience. Which is a shame. Because gay people kiss, and gay people have brainsÑwhich is apparently where the real action takes place anyway.

Fisher believes kissing is all about choosing the right mate.

“There’s so much information exchanged when you kiss someone that I just thought it must play a vital role in mate choice, and this paper is elegantly showing that,” Fisher said.

A disproportionate amount of the brain, she noted, is geared toward interpreting signals from the mouth.

“When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue,” she said. “Very little of the brain is built to pick up what happens to, say, your back. There have been case reports of people being stabbed in the back without even knowing it. But even the lightest brush of a feather on your lips and you feel it intensely.”

This isn’t exactly breaking news. According to a press release, the research was done and the report published last year. I haven’t read the full report (available in PDF format) yet, but what’s in the WaPo article holds true for me, at least for the most part.

For example, I can relate to the three hypotheses that were pretty much confirmed by the research: that kissing is a way to assess a potential mate, promote bonding, and a way of inducing sexual arousal. Those all make sense to me, but at some points in the article it felt like I was looking at the world from the other side of a looking glass. If men and women kiss differently, and for different reasons, then I have to admit: I kiss like a girl.

Sort of.

But let me back up and answer the initial question: Do you like to kiss?

Oh. My. Good. Good-ness. If by “like” you mean that I can be perfectly happy doing that and nothing but that for hours at a time, with the right person, then my answer is yes.

It wasn’t always that way, though. See, I’ve kissed girls before. Yes, it’s true. It was just a few times when I was fooling around, just before I came out around the age of 12 or 13. I tried it, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the big hairy deal was that made it such a popular pass time with so many people.

Then I went off to college and kissed a guy for the first time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of a sudden, there it was. Big. Hairy. Deal. My brain exploded, something that never happened the times I kissed girls (during which I was thinking I must not be doing something right). In fact, an awful lot of time passed before I even thought about the fact that there was even more stuff we could do.

And I think part of what turned me on about that kiss is part of what seems to turn heterosexual women on; something I’ve written about before.

I have a confession to make. I love how men, some of them anyway, smell. Not a big surprise, I guess. After all, IÕm gay. ItÕs not unusual for me to take a deep breath, when a good looking guy happens to pass by me, stand in my general vicinity, or sit next to me on the train. In fact, itÕs almost instinctive, and Ñ depending on the guy Ñ could make me a little lightheaded and more than a little interested. The last time it happened on the train, an attractive young (20-something) got on the train Ñ hot and sweaty, fresh from an evening jog Ñ and ended up standing right next to me. If it hadnÕt been for the pole I was holding on to, I would have swooned. When I hold my husband, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

ItÕs something that goes back at least as far as middle school, around the time puberty hit. (Which, incidentally, was around the time I came out.) It was also around the my male classmates got an extra ingredient added to their sweat. Something that drove the girls wild. And me too, of course, though I had to be a quieter about it then.

It’s similar to the way heterosexual women respond to male pheromones, and more than a little related to their motivation for kissing, too.

Women place more emphasis on the taste and smell of the person they kiss than men do, the researchers found.

“That clues us in that females may be using it more to make mate assessments than men,” she said.

Women were also more likely to refuse to have sex with a partner unless they kissed first. More than half of the men said they would have sex without kissing first, but fewer than 15 percent of the women said the same.

That’s also where I dismissed any doubts that the study was limited to heterosexuals.

As a single gay man, kissing was a part of sex for me, in part because it gave me some important information. There’s a whole category of men who have sex with men but identify as heterosexual, and kissing is one thing they don’t do in situations with other men. (Actually, there’s a whole list of things they don’t do, in order to protect their apparently precarious position as “straight” men.)

So, a guy who said “I don’t do kissing,” was likely to get “Then I don’t do you,” as a response. That’s partly because some of those guys have a nasty habit of panicking after having sex with another man who does identify as gay, and the gay guys end up dead. (See the “panic room” posts from the LGBT Hate Crimes Project here, here, and here for more.) And it’s partly because half the time those guys have girlfriends, wives, and even children—none of whom know what they’re up to. That’s something I just wouldn’t do.

But my real question is this. Why does research into why human beings kiss seem to miss entirely the reality that some human beings are same-sex oriented and kiss members of their own gender for a lot of the same reasons? I don’t know, but I’m willing to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t actively seek to exclude same-sex couples. Maybe they just couldn’t find any who were willing to participate. (Though I doubt that, because in most  college towns you’ll find at least a small gay community.)

But I do which researchers would think about this and take some actions to include gays & lesbians in this kind of research. Maybe they can’t go out and recruit gays specifically, because it would undermine the credibility of the research because the sample wasn’t entirely random. Still, something important is being missed when this aspect of human experience is left out.

There have been scientific studies suggesting that gay men respond similarly to heterosexual women and lesbians respond similarly to heterosexual men where pheromones are concerned. What would have been discovered if same-sex couples had been included in this research? What might have been discovered about why lesbians kiss? What might have been discovered about why gay men kiss (or why heterosexual men who have sex with men don’t kiss men)?

Nothing in the article suggests that such inclusion was the case, and that’s a damn shame, because we might have learned a lot more; like a kiss ain’t just a kiss most of the time, no matter who’s locking lips.

This Friday, I had something anyone who’s ever lived through the first few months of parenting a newborn will understand is something to be treasured: a day off. The rest of the family left the house in the morning, and I went back to bed. But, of course, we never take a day off from being parents. Not that I want to, mind you, but those few extra hours of sleep Friday morning (I went back to bed. Surprised?) were sweet.

I’d taken the day off, because Parker’s pre-school was having a special performance, and of course we were going to be there to see it. Parker had been talking about it for the past month. At first he decided he was going to dance, and after he picked a song I burned it to CD so that he could take it to school with him and practice. But I know my son. He’s very stage shy. At home, with us as an audience, he sings, dances and puts on quite a show. But he generally prefers not to be in the spotlight and not to be the center a big audience’s attention.

So I wasn’t surprised when he announced that he’d volunteered (with one other child) for the job of handing out tickets. (Pieces of construction paper colored by Parkers class served as “tickets.”) I told him, “That’s a very important job. If nobody handed out tickets, there’d be no audience to see the show,” and that Daddy and Papa would be there so he could give us our tickets. And he did, as well as handing tickets to other parents as they arrived. He even helped with some of the props for the other students performances.

We were very proud and we told him so.
(more…)

Deval Patrick, a black governor who supports marriage equality, just stepped onto the stage. It’s the only issue not likely to be debated tonight, since it appears nowhere in the Covenant with Black America, and I suppose that’s a small blessing all things considered. It probably would not be pretty. And Democratic candidates are not leading on the issue anyway, and at a time when even Republicans are trending more progressive in gay issues.

On the other hand, the first question out of the box is one about whether racism is still a problem. So, here, at a forum where the civil rights movement will be invoked over and over again, and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision has already been invoked, we can talk about one prejudice that almost no one would say is no longer a problem, but we cannot talk about another prejudice that is almost certainly a problem for black gays and lesbians.

Dodd just brought up discrimination. Well.

Edwards brought up healthcare, and there are black gay & lesbian couples who cannot get health benefits because they can’t get married. Economic disparities are worse, too.

As Gravel just asked, “When will we learn? When will we learn?” (Albeit concerning a different issue.)

Technorati Tags: 2008 election, blogs, current events, media, politics, race, television

After writing one particularly long post about the Virginia Tech shootings, followed by a three part series, I thought I’d gotten everything I had to say out of my system. But when we attended the Rainbow Families DC conference a couple of weekends ago, we made it a point to attend the discussion groups on dealing with elementary and middle school as same-sex parents. It was the second one, which asked us to “dream big” and envision what an inclusive curriculum would look like.

When I imagined it, I immediately thought about one aspect of the sex-ed curriculum launched in Montgomery county, Maryland — and fought tooth and nail by PFOX — that I posted about earlier. In particular, I was reminded of a particular aspect of the curriculum that I posted about back in November, entitled “Respect for Differences,” which seemed to inspire (aside from the unit on condoms) the most or the strongest objections from the right. And as I sat there trying to wrap my brain about what a gay-inclusive curriculum would look like, one word kept popping into my head.

Empathy. Defined as (and this is my favorite definition among the ones I found) “feeling of concern and understanding for another’s situation or feelings.”

It sounds simplistic and naive. It probably is. But stay with me here. I promise I’m going somewhere with this.

Technorati Tags: bullying, bush, culture, current events, education, gay rights, politics

(more…)

As I read, and wrote, all of the above, I kept going back to an essay by Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia.” So I wasn’t surprised to see Kimmel quoted in an old Washington Blade article, “‘Boy Code’ a factor in fatal school shootings?”. Kimmel’s focus is perhaps too specific, as masculinity is just one of many factors in these stories, but his remarks resonate with every story above.

The perpetrators of random school shootings since 1982, all boys, were “overconformists” to the popular notion that being a “real man” means aggressively defending your manhood when it is challenged, such as through prolonged bullying, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

And no weapon is more emasculating, or brandished more frequently on schoolyards across the country, than the homophobic rhetoric used to describe anything that makes a young man different from his male peers, Kimmel wrote in a June 2003 article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist.

“We found a striking pattern [while analyzing news] stories about the boys who committed the violence: nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beat up, and ‘gay-baited,’” Kimmel wrote.

“And most strikingly, it was not because they were gay — at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay — but because they were different from the other boys: shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish,’ or weird,” he continued.

Instead of the standard review of “what went wrong” with individual school shooters, the media, government researchers and society at-large must understand the roles standards of masculinity play in facilitating violent outbreaks by young men, Kimmel said in an interview for this article.

Of course, the stories of boys like Harris, Klebold, and Woodham, get a lot more attention than a story like what happened to Josh Belluardo.

(more…)