In response to Sean Phillips’ column “Spectrum misses point” (Oct. 22), I would like to recount one of the proudest days of my life.
The scene: Spectrum Alliance’s Big Gay Picnic. About 50 members of WU’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, and ally (GLBTQA) community gather around phallic, sexually suggestive foods such as pickles, cherries and a cake that said “Big Gay Picnic.”
We were proud to be there, celebrating the open attitudes towards sex and sexuality that most schools of WU’s caliber encourage. The Big Gay Picnic allows the GLBTQA community to socialize. It is also a time to pretend that we attend a school, like Brown, Yale, Vassar, Smith, Wesleyan, Emory, Hampshire, and others, whose whole campus supports its gay students.
Yes, as Sean suggests, we did stand in a circle and toss “a large piece of salami.” So sue us! What is this, 1880? It’s high time for this society-and certainly its institutions of higher learning-to shed its Victorian attitudes towards sex. The gay rights movement, whose opponents seem to share a fear towards exploration of sexuality and of sex itself, is in a great position to change such attitudes. But whenever we try, we bump into people like Sean, who want the GLBTQA movement to pander to “non-GLBTs” by showing that “gays are not what stereotypes have them be.”
Suggestion noted, Sean. At the next Big Gay Picnic, women will be required to wear lacey dresses and men will sport business suits. We will congregate in an office cubicle to represent our ability to assimilate into mainstream, middle class American society. We will eat McDonald’s hamburgers to symbolize our non-vegetarianism (we’re normal) and our submissive acceptance of corporate America and its norms. We will stand in a circle and clasp hands-in a man, woman, man, woman pattern to avoid appearing stereotypically “gay”-and repeat, “I promise from this day forth to be normal in all my endeavors.”
Sean also missed the facts on a lot of what went down that day.
Here is our version of the events:
When a group of high school debaters swarmed the quad, we did not hand out GLBTQA awareness buttons (e.g., “fight homophobia”) “without the kids asking.” A few courageous students from a central Missouri school that they described as “very conservative” approached us. They came over to the picnic and asked about Spectrum. They thought it was cool that WU has a group to support its GLBTQA community.
Fueled by the support of these lovely students, several Spectrum members went into the crowd to hand out buttons. Some of students were happy to get the buttons; some said “no thank you” that dripped with irony. Our intentions were never to “harass” them.
Hence my shock when a debate coach turned to us and said sharply, “Why don’t you leave my kids alone?” We laughed nervously (I’ll admit it; I was terrified he was going to shoot us with a rifle) and loped back to our picnic. We told the picnickers what had happened. Their unanimous suggestion was to report the coach to the registration people-Spectrum reserved this quad, and no one has the right to ask us to leave it just because we handed out buttons.
So we returned. Here, in Sean’s version of the story, is where things got ugly. Sean, a debate volunteer, “saw the Spectrum co-presidents making a beeline for [his] registration table.” I guess there was a visual illusion at work-perhaps someone planted an Andrew Ross hologram next to the registration table-because I approached the table with David Langer and Les Rubenstein, not my co-president Andrew. Les fearlessly led us over, and David eloquently asserted our rights to free speech while I “squawked” about how we had reserved the quad.
After that, I wanted to go back to the non-scary confines of the picnic. But David, in a feat of action hero-like bravery, insisted we keep handing out buttons. In this uncomfortable situation, David just marched on.
He addressed clumps of high school students confidently and politely, saying, “Hi. We’re handing out buttons to promote tolerance and end hate. Would you like some?” If this perpetuates a “stereotype” about the GLBTQA community, then I’m proud to associate myself with that stereotype.
Sean reports that, when the picnic was over, high school students continued “to use common anti-gay slurs, and used the buttons as a reason to launch into further anti-gay rants.” Well, duh. We didn’t hand out the buttons to stop all homophobic sentiment. We did it to show the dozen or so gay students in that crowd that some day, when they get to college, things won’t be so bad.
Thanks to people such as Sean, I’m still trying to believe that myself.