THIS IS SO GAY.

'How to be Gay' course draws fire at Michigan (George Archibald, The Washington Times, 8/18/03)

A course called "How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation," scheduled this fall, has reignited a culture war at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. . . .

The professor says critics misunderstand the 'How to be Gay' class.

'It does not teach students to be homosexual,' Mr. Halperin says in an interview. 'Rather, it examines critically the odd notion that there are right and wrong ways to be gay, that homosexuality is not just a sexual practice or desire but a set of specific tastes in music, movies, and other cultural forms — a notion which is shared by straight and gay people alike.

'The reason these courses exist is not that homosexual teachers have hijacked the university for their own purposes; they exist because they convey the results of research which sheds genuinely new light on history, culture, society and thought.'

However, in a course description on the university's Web site, Mr. Halperin says: 'Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one. Gay men do some of that learning on their own, but often we learn how to be gay from others.'

Taking the Professor's description at face value, this sounds like a fascinating and useful course. Some minority groups in the US adopt self-images that are helpful to their success and assimilation, others fall into destructive self-images. Blacks have to constantly fight against a self-image that says that studying hard, working towards a goal and upward-mobility are essentially "white" traits. Gay men could have been wiped out by a culture that prided itself on anonymous promiscuity. A course that studies how these self-images form, how they are influenced and how they can be changed is interesting and important.

It would also require the making of moral judgments, and so I doubt that the actual Michigan class much resembles the ideal class I would like to see.

I also find it interesting that Professor Halperin and the University see no danger to themselves from playing a fairly obvious and successful game of épater le bourgeois. For myself, I have always found tweaking those who pay the bills to be satisfying in the short term but disastrous in the long term. Posted by David Cohen at August 18, 2003 10:05 AM