Roomies. Gay college students are demanding that opposite-sex students be allowed to share dorm rooms, according to an article by Tamar Lewin in last Saturday's New York Times.
"The policy here is less about sex than about sexual politics -- and the increasingly powerful presence of gay and lesbian groups on campus," writes Lewin. "At Swarthmore, where coeducational rooming began in a few housing units last fall, and nearby Haverford College, where it started the previous year, the push came not from dating couples wanting to live together, but from gay groups that said it was "heterosexist" to require roommates to be of the same sex."
Although the article says that the new policy is being used
mostly by heterosexual students who, allegedly, are not engaging in
hanky panky, there may in fact reasons why gay students (all guys,
apparently) would favor this option. Lewin notes that some gay
males, for instance, don't want to deal with the "sexual tension"
of having a gay same-sex roommate, and are also against sharing
quarters a heterosexual male. She reports:
"Straight men who live together often have a kind of locker-room mentality, with a lot of discussion about dating girls, having sex with girls, saying which girls are attractive," said Josh Andrix, a 2000 Haverford graduate who started the campaign for coeducational housing there. "Introducing a homosexual into that environment is uncomfortable. When I looked for housing, all the people it made sense for me to live with were women."
One is tempted to say, "Get over it; this is the world and you"d better learn to handle the straight guys, "cause there are a whole lot of "em out there." Or, alternatively, it's time to discover that there are gay men with whom you won't have any desire to have sex (there are a whole lot of those guys out there, too).
Be that as it may, there could be Will & Grace situations that make sense for gay youth ensconced in our institutions of higher learning. What rankles is the language, the knee-jerk denunciation of "heterosexism" as if the argument for such arrangements is only legitimate if it can be premised on an "ism" to be condemned. This, sadly, is the level of discourse that our elite colleges have bequeathed to the up and coming generation, straight and gay.
Couldn't You Guess. Alas, the Wall Street Journal's May 13 opinionjournal.com picked up on Lewin's New York Times report. Referencing, in particular, the blockquote presented above, the Journal comments: "This seems reasonable. It also seems like a pretty good argument against homosexuals in the military." Unfair, of course, because gay men who want to serve in the military are a far cry from the Ivy Leaguers who blanch at "locker room talk" about dating gals. But you can see how the nature of the activists" argument gave the anti-gay right an opening.
Condemnation, Yes! Debate, No! The Log Cabin
Republicans have come under fire from the mainstream (read:
Democratic) gay movement types for raising concerns about ENDA --
the proposed Employee Non-Discrimination Act to prohibit private
business from discriminating against gays in hiring and promotion
-- or at least suggesting that there be an open dialog about
legislative priorities. The Washington Blade ran a
scathing article and editorial taking aim at the group. In
response, LCR leader Rich Tafel asserts on the lcr.org website
that:
"Challenging the status quo and questioning strategy are crucial to the success of any movement. Our community needs more, not less discussion and questioning of our strategies and goals. The Liberty Education Forum (LCR's nonprofit arm) hosts such a discussion every year, and held one again in April here in Washington. Elizabeth Birch of [the Human Rights Campaign] and Chris Crain [the editor] of the Blade were both invited to it. HRC refused to participate. Crain never responded until hours before the event. Despite this, it was a diverse and fascinating discussion, including a variety of different voices and topics from the left, right and center, including about the purpose of civil rights laws. The transcript of this discussion is available online at http://www.libertyeducationforum.org.
"So I'll try again. I'd like to invite Elizabeth Birch and Chris Crain join me and other community leaders in a town hall meeting to discuss our community's priorities. ... Not a stage show or a 'gotcha' fest, but a real give and take."
Sounds like a good idea, considering that many on the left also have taken pot shots an ENDA (whose sin, in their eyes, is its failure to include workplace protections for transsexuals).
Speaking for myself, I agree with those who argue that private-sector discrimination is not the number one priority for gay people. The ability to marry, and to achieve both the legitimacy and legal benefits of that institution, is far more relevant. The right to serve in the military would end the most widespread case of employment discrimination gay people face. Short of marriage, lobbying for workplace domestic partner benefits (which ENDA would not provide) is high on the list of what we need. Ending sodomy laws and the legal discrimination they foster against (one example) gay parents seeking custody, trumps ENDA. And, yes, police stings, especially those in private commercial sex establishments such as adult bookstore arcades, have caused much more suffering among far more gay men than the small number of private-sector discrimination cases that activists have managed to find and publicize.
I"d add that ENDA is currently being promoted not in a good faith effort to secure passage, but as a political tool to mobilize gay Democrats for the fall elections.
But to date, as Tafel notes, the gay establishment goes bonkers at the very thought of re-examining whether ENDA makes sense as the number one movement goal. That alone should indicate that their position, frozen in time for the last decade, is now deeply problematic.