Yarrrgh! *facepalm*

Being the day in the life of a straight, conservative, evangelical fledgling LGBT activist... who screws up.

Okay, so it's no real surprise that I absolutely hate pointless bureaucracy, especially in academia because sometimes we over-think things way too much and bury even simple little matters under a flood of paperwork.  But the power relations and power politics that go with those positions really pisses me off now and then, especially when they involve me.

So, there is an extremely important administrative process I need to get through for my grad work, and I've had an extremely hard time getting all that done before I run out of the state next week (because I am behind this summer, for a variety of reasons).  There's an administrator in a small but very important section of cubicle-land on my campus who has to review that paperwork and give her seal of approval for my department.  I was in her office last week getting some final clarification and turn in the last of my paperwork before I leave for three weeks and miss the deadline. 

So, this woman and I are chatting about my research, and eventually it turns to my research interest in The Laramie Project.  She seemed genuinely interested, so I told her about the plays and what they were about, and how in particular the GLBT community was affected by Matt's death.  At one point in the conversation, however, she pursed her lips at me disdainfully.

"Well, you know, they do bring a lot of that on themselves, you know," she said as she fiddled with the edges of my application on her desk.  I felt my eyes slit at her instinctively.
"Um, what do you mean?" I asked, a little too carefully.  Some serious outrage was welling up and I was trying to swallow it. 
"You know, by forcing it on us the way they do," she continued as she fiddled with my application.  "They just make things harder on themselves by causing trouble.  If they'd just lived their lives in quiet and didn't force it on the rest of us, then nobody would ever bother them." 

 Okay, I thought to myself, What does she seriously mean by that-- that gays and lesbians shouldn't be politically active?!  I had this overwhelming urge to start arguing with her, to explain to her how outrageously closed-minded that was.  How the hell do you justify blaming the victims of injustice for speaking up?  Would she blame the victims of the civil rights movement for picking up a placard and marching with MLK after Bull Connor sicked the dogs on them?! Besides, it's not true.  There are a lot of hate crimes that occur just because some jerk decides s/he wants to roll somebody, and the gay kid ends up being the target.   

In the end, I didn't say any of those things; I just squirmed in my seat like a beetle pinned to a card and felt completely powerless.  My paperwork was literally in her hands-- and if I pissed her off or suggested that she was perhaps that her perspective was a bit too narrow, my application might take even longer to get approval-- or never get approved at all.  So, instead, I just smiled blandly, and nodded, and suggested that perhaps it was a very hard decision for a person to have to choose between being open about who you are or being safe.  She didn't even bat an eye at me, and my pathetic little attempt to argue with her went unnoticed.  And I left her office feeling like a sellout.

So, I learned a few things this week.  First of all, just because you work in a Carnegie Research I institution doesn't make you an enlightened human being like intellectuals often think it does.  And, just because you have a moral conviction on something doesn't mean that you'll always have the spine to stand up for it when you're in a socially powerless situation.  I have friends that have lost jobs because of their moral convictions, and, hell-- I can't even be bothered to get caught up in a bureaucratic shuffle?!  Pah.

Man, I hate academia sometimes.  Almost as much as I hate myself right now.