An open letter to Alan Chambers

In case you hadn't heard, the head of the nation's largest "ex-gay" ministry, Exodus International, announced that they would be closing its doors and offered an apology to the LGBT community for the damage they caused. You can watch the video below if you haven't seen it. 

For those of you who don't know, a friend of mine committed suicide after six months in a ministry affiliated with Exodus.  After mulling it over for two days, I felt the need to speak. I originally wrote this for an acquaintance, and now I am passing it on here.

~~Jackrabbit

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Dear Mr. Chambers:

 Last night I read your apology after Exodus International shut its doors, and I was surprised at my ambivalence. For almost seven years I wanted to have this conversation with you. I have screamed at you in my mind in church. I have sparred with your shadow in my prayers and fought with you in my sleep. In the face of all the things I thought I would have wanted to say in this moment, I find that my anger is gone. The Lord, ever the reconciler, has long since settled the cold war between you and I; you are no longer the bogeyman I made you in my mind, and that has left me confused.

Instead of all the things I once wanted to say, I feel I have to tell you about James-- lean, lonely James, with the ice blue eyes and Jude Law good looks. His nervous, ecstatic energy, an infectious smile and irresistible charm. Manic as hell. An addictive personality that clung to things like static, cracked blue sparks at a touch. Like everything else in James' life, he craved God in ways only drowning victims comprehend: the cold, burning logic that says fill your lungs, swallow in the breath of Life or die. He was something to behold.

My Six Whole Seconds As a Lesbian

Okay, so over the last weekend I was at a conference in Atlanta to participate in a panel about my friend's dissertation project (because I was one of her data sources) and catch some panels on social justice and the composition classroom.  Last Thursday, as two of my buddies and myself pulled into town, I was a weary, exhausted, nervous wreck.  And I hadn't eaten since 11 AM.  By the time I had checked in to our massive, creepy-looking hotel (I felt like I was standing inside a giant pink ribcage like in the end of Pinocchio) and actually found my room, I had missed every dinner invitation and was starving.  Actually, I had low blood sugar and was about to become a dizzy pile of goo. 

I didn't have a clue about where to find food, but as I was stumbling out the door to find something, anything to eat, I ran into my friend "Althea."  She was just getting back from one of the dinner invites I had missed.  She saw my glazed eyes and took over.  "We have to get you some food fast," she said, and she grabbed me by the arm and marched me out the door.

Now, there's something you should know about both myself and "Althea."  I grew up as an incurable tomboy and to this day don't really like dressing up "femmy," so to speak.  My hair is currently an inch and a half long.  Even on a day I dress up I can run the risk of "slipping under the gaydar," so to speak. On that night I was in travel clothes: blue jeans, hoodie, and my old, comfy Doc Marten's combat boots.   "Althea," in contrast, is old Southern society and was raised to be a debutante.  She was dressed in a sun dress and her "rhetorical pearls," as she likes to call them, and she'd had one mimosa too many at dinner.  On our way into the nearest takeout place-- a pub, as it turned out-- Althea clung to my arm, just a little tipsy, and chatted amicably nonstop.  I didn't think a darn thing about it, honestly.  This is just who Althea is.

We ordered my food and walked out of the bar again, but this time I was getting really woozy from lack of food, so Althea grabbed my arm again to keep me upright.  She put her head on my arm for a second.  At that moment, I looked up at one of the patrons sitting at the bar.  He was watching us.  Then he gave me "the look."  He glared at us like we weren't human.

At that exactly that same moment, Althea giggled and blurted out, "I love you, Jackrabbit!"  That look on his face intensified to something like pure hate.  Even though I was a bit dizzy, I immediately decided to "own" it.  I gave him a nasty smile and tromped out the door with my "girlfriend" on my arm.  I don't really know if Althea had noticed, and I sure wasn't going to tell her.  Pearls or no pearls, she would have seriously gotten in his face for doing that.

I didn't have time to think about it until I had some food in my stomach and could finally think straight.  On the one hand, it's not like people haven't "wondered" about the girl who likes to wear boots and pick up frogs before.  I'm used to speculation, and I never cared; I know who I am, and I'm comfortable being the butch-y straight girl.  What was different was the value judgment that came attached this time.  That look was a complete rejection of me as a human being.  It made me feel a little naked and totally pissed off.  Nobody, nobody has the right to judge like that, I fumed. 

And then I wondered what it would be like to feel that feeling for every single day of your life as an LGBT person. My mind was a little blown.  It's one thing to know something mentally and something else entirely to feel it. And, in a weird way, I was kind of thankful that, for my six seconds, I had just a tiny taste of what it's like so I could better understand what my friends are facing. 

A day later, I was slouched on a couch next to the pool with my frind "Pam," and I told her this same story while Althea was soaking her feet in the shallow end.  "How on earth do you respond to something like that?" I asked her.  "Pam," who's married and ex-roller derby, also knew what I was talking about; she got a wicked grin on her face.

"There's only way to respond, Jackrabbit," she told me.  "You answer, back, 'I love you too, babe.'  Then you waltz out the door." I cackled at the mental image. 

Ya know what?  She was right.  I don't think it could have been any more appropriate than that. 

And Much Study is Wearisome to the Flesh...

I came across a little gem in a 1960's study guide on Milton that I just had to share.  Do you ever get the feeling you're living in a completely different world in the 21st century?

Adam's sin, according to Milton, is "uxoriousness,' the excessive love of one's spouse...Most twentieth-century readers would not agree with Milton's condemnation of passion, but almost everyone should be able to see with Milton that one can love one's spouse too much.  For instance, if the husband of a communist spy loves his wife so much that he becomes a spy, too, even though he doesn't believe in communism, most of us would think that he loved too much... 

Look out, Adam, that chick is a communist!  

Sorry, between the chauvinism in that statement and the Cold War, I just found this hysterical.
Back to studying for me...

Remember to always drink responsibly, boys and girls...

Most of the time, I really love living in the South-- well, at least this part of the South.  But every once in a while I see something that just sets my rage a-flaming.  You know, like this:

So I go to pick up my prescriptions this afternoon, and this is what I run into-- a freaking drugstore serving forties and ping pong balls together in the same cooler.  It wasn't like it was just the one spot, either-- every other door had a hanging display of em'.  Nothing says encouraging responsible alcohol use on my party campus and the high school three blocks down the street quite like one-stop shopping for all your beer pong needs.

You can't blame this on just this CVS, however.  The drugstore three blocks down the road is a Wallgreen's, and they do the same thing.  Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to say that this is the reason for the alcohol abuse culture I see with my students...  but it sure ain't helping.

Confessions of a conservative expatriate

I have a confession to make: I find myself perversely fascinated by the whole Park51 debate.  I often teach my freshmen about framing narratives in my 101 course, and the story frames surrounding this erstwhile "community center" for reasoned Islamic outreach turned "9/11 victory mosque," and the public flap which erupted with the change of story, is a perfect example of that. It just  goes to prove that it's not really events or circumstances that we often react to, but rather how we are told the story.  Although the article at Salon.com doesn't quite put it in those terms, Justin Elliot does a great job of showing the change in public opinion based on how the information was preached. It's interesting how nobody cared about people praying in that building for two years until someone connected it to 9/11 and went on a rant-fest. 

So anyhow, since I was at a protest a couple of weeks ago, I've been looking at the way the protest has progressed on Flickr just to compare notes.  In one picture, I saw this picture of a couple of little kids supporting the Park51 center with American flags in hand, and I smiled.  Then I saw a picture of a man across the street in a military T-shirt holding a crude drawing of the prophet Muhammad as a pig.  It had the word "pedophile" written across the top.  Then I really wanted to throw up.

Certainly, the whole Manhattan mosque debate isn't the only reason for my recent political ambivalence, but it sure crystallizes a lot of issues I've had with my moral place in the political universe recently.  You see, I have come to realize over the last few weeks that, while I still feel like I still have a lot to offer a conservative political philosophy, I look around at our rapidly-approaching mainstream Tea Party movement and the wackos who cling to its sides like remoras, only to discover that it has absolutely nothing to offer me.   I see hate and intolerance, violation of freedom out of fear, decisions gauged by reflex instead of reason...  what the hell just happened?  Where's the voice of reason in all this madness? If she's calling out, I can't hear it through all the static I'm getting from the hate-mongers. 

Certainly my dis-ease has been brewing for a while, but what has finally pushed me over the edge has been the response to the immigration and Islam debates.  There are no ideals backing up these ideas anymore.  It's entirely about fear.  We're terrified of the threat of the "other" so we try to force them into hiding with a noisy show of force. We make them out as less than human, and this entrenched fear, ironically, scares me.  For the sake of my own sanity and the people I am trying to help, I realized that I couldn't stay here any more, and I am now essentially a woman without a country.  It's time for me to pack my philosophical bags, move into exile, and pine for the loss of my homeland. I am no longer a conservative; I'm a refugee. 

Don't get me wrong: my identity as a "conservative" has always been an uneasy fit.  (Heck, I stopped being a "Republican" years ago.)  It's not always easy for a rabidly pro-gay justice freak who doesn't support the death penalty and supports affirmative action (though I would prefer that it be governed by socio-economic issues instead of race) to fit in even in the big-tent ideology of the conservative movement.  I still like the idea of fiscal responsibility.  I still think you can get things done better on the state rather than the federal level.  I'm still convinced that a tightly regulated capitalism is the best way to improve the lot of all people in the world (although that stance requires a lot of explanation, I know.) I see immigration reform as a necessity because it's a huge human rights issue; you can't turn a blind eye to people being shipped about and slaughtered like animals in the desert by coyotes just to make them second-class citizens without legal protections in the US.  And I truly feel that the Constitution is our best judge of how to protect the rights of both the greatest and least in our society.  We just have to let it do what it does best-- protect freedoms and limit interference of persons and institutions against the inalienable rights of the individual. 

But it's that last issue, the Constitution, that's been the last straw for me. I think what finally pushed me over the edge was all this talk about changing the Constitution on the one hand and ignoring what it says on the other.  There are mainstream conservatives-- some whom I have respected even when I haven't entirely agreed with them-- who have seriously considered looking into changing citizenship requirements listed in the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to people born on American soil.  And when Americans start protesting the right of other Americans to peacefully practice their faith-- and offering state land to a religious group to make everyone happy-- I really start to fret.  On the one hand, that interference in Park51's right to exist under the rule of New York law is a violation of the separation of church and state.  On the other hand, so is an elected official offering to give state land to a religious entity to incentivise the move, and both of these should have bothered true conservatives deeply.  But they're the ones promoting it. 

I have yet to hear anyone patrolling the border or arguing against amnesty talk about the plight of those immigrants-- they're a "cancer" or a "drain."  Real American citizens are "anchor babies."  When asked where she'd like the Cordoba Initiative to move their Islamic center to if she didn't like it at Ground Zero, one woman said "they ought to move it to the Middle East."  When asked what injury or injustice building a moderate-leaning mosque would cause two blocks away from the WTC, the only response I've seen from opponents like these guys is that it's "offensive" or that their feelings are hurt.  The last time I checked, getting your feelings hurt wasn't a violation of your civil rights.  Preventing the free exercise of one's faith, however, in a privately owned building set aside for that purpose is. Besides-- let's take the whole WTC fiasco out of the equation entirely and look closer to home.  If that's the only reason this mosque is an issue, then why are two similar projects in my home state in Appalachia getting this same kind of resistance, with protesters in one nearby town bringing their dogs just to offend the Muslims? 

I wish that I could blame this on just a few crazies in the conservative movement, but I can't.  Conservative politicians whom I used to respect have weighed in on the mosque conflict, asking for it to be moved; Franklin Graham, whose charities I had previously supported, not only viciously opposes the Park51 mosque but recently called Obama a "Muslim," and he's extremely influential in my circles.  That makes him part of a too large minority in the conservative movement who seem to be calling the shots more and more.  Add that to the entire state of Arizona, several other states considering similar statutes, and the score of mainline conservative leaders seriously considering changing the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to native-born people based on the crimes of their parents, and I'm absolutely flummoxed.  I feel like I woke up on another planet.     

I can no longer consider myself a member of an ideology whose fear has made them do violence to the First Amendment and seriously consider dismantling the Fourteenth.  With the exception of Prohibition (which was rightly fixed), basically all of the additions to the Bill of Rights have been to extend freedoms to the people, not to limit them.  And the proposed change to citizenship standards, as well as for a proposed Constitutional amendment preventing gay marriage, do the opposite.

I certainly hold no ill feelings towards those who, unlike me, have the fortitude to stay behind and fight this out on the front lines in the conservative movement; rather, I wish them well, for I know that if I were to stay it would wear me down.  All I know is that I can find no leadership who represents me, and I don't really know how to stay behind among them without tacitly supporting the same civil cancers I'm fighting against.  As such, I feel it's time for me-- at least for a little while-- to leave this homeland behind, not to reject it, but to kneel here at the waters of my American Babylon and lament its descent into madness. Welcome to exile, Jackrabbit. 

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PHOTO CREDIT:
1)  Two young girls protesting on behalf of Park51, from david_shankbone's Flickr photostream. 
2)  NYC protesters against the Park51 mosque, from david_shankbone's Flickr photostream. 
3)  NYC protesters against the Park51 mosque, from asterix611's Flickr photostream.

Uncivil unions: my five questions on gay marriage

Okay, so it was eventually going to happen that I would have to tackle this issue. When I go to church every Sunday in my evangelical Presbyterian church and go to LGBTA meetings every Monday, the whiplash was going to catch up to me eventually. The issue I'm really struggling with right now is what to do as a Christian, and as a social justice freak who loves the LGBT community, with the arguments swirling around about the topic of gay marriage.

So, four years ago I had no problem per se with limiting marriage as long as it was handled on the state level and it was done constitutionally.  I was a Christian, after all; at the time, I had a tough time delineating between following Christ and Christian culture, which meant that I didn't question what I had been taught about the morality of same-sex desire.  So when my home state in Appalachia put a marriage definition referendum on the ballot, the (Baptist) church I went to at the time pushed it pretty hard.  I was pretty ambivalent, honestly.  It seemed fishy, but who was I to argue?

When the time came to actually vote, I stared at that question on the ballot for a good five minutes, held my breath, and clicked the "Yes" button.  Then I spent the next six months feeling like an absolute jerk for doing it.  I just didn't think I could challenge the rest of the church on that issue, and I let the pressure push me into voting in a direction I didn't really have any conviction in.  I really regret that now. I should have realized that, if my church was pushing me to vote against my conviction, that maybe that's because something was wrong with the whole situation. 

Things have changed a lot in the last four years.  For one, I feel like I can stand up against the pressure from my church to start looking at the issue more critically.   My problem with limiting marriage now is that the only legitimate arguments I can come up with that hold any water are completely Biblical.  I can make the argument work for within the body of Christ if I actually want to, but I can't find a clear, logical argument for extending that outside into the larger social sphere.  If I can't come up with a clear, obvious reason to apply a law or rule to those outside of the Christian body, I become very reticent to force it upon a larger society who doesn't share my religious conviction.  I'm not a fan of Sabbath laws or liquor sales restrictions for that same reason. 

Next, the Manhattan Declaration keeps telling me about all the vast social ills that will invariably follow from allowing same-sex couples to marry, and I just don't buy it.  The argumentation just isn't there to support it.  So far, no single country has seen a rise in any of the "social ills" they're afraid of because they were already there; and if South Africa suddenly collapses in the next decade or so, it's certainly not going to be because they let gay people get married. It will be from a much larger complex of social problems which the government is trying to address but seems unable to resolve. 

As far as I can tell, the only thing wider society will lose with the adoption of gay marriage is an easy, clean definition they've always made between what we have deemed licit and illicit sex.  All of a sudden, we can't just push people to get married and make their sexual situation "okay" because now marriage can make sex between couples that we don't like "okay" as well.   Gay marriage, if anything, threatens the moral high ground of sexual conservatives by creating a category crisis.  First, we can no longer deny legal recognition of couples we don't really approve of to keep the "us" separate from "them."  That's the same reason miscegenation laws were so popular in the US for a long time too, you know, and those have been completely (and rightly) dismantled.  Secondly, it blurs the social distinction between the two.  When gays and lesbians suddenly become as domestic, sedentary, and monogamous as the rest of us...  how much harder is it to argue that they're immoral and disgusting? (And that's exactly the point, conservatives.  They're not.)

So, in short, this erstwhile conservative evangelical is having an extremely hard time justifying definition of marriage statutes in the United States, and right now, few people in the Christian community are helping me out.  I just keep hearing the same old flawed arguments about the collapse of society and the slippery slope.  And, strangely, I've discovered that I'm not the only evangelical to feel this way.  I keep running into scores of other people with the same problems with the Christian right's approach to gay marriage and civil unions, but right now we can't find anybody from our own community who can allay our concerns and convince us that defining marriage to exclude same-sex couples is right.  So my only recourse at this point is to conclude otherwise.

So, here are my five questions for the Manhattan Declaration crowd that need answered if you're going to get me to reconsider my opposition to definition-of-marriage statues and preference for full marriage benefits for all.  If you think you can actually answer these in a thoughtful, reasoned way with good logic and evidence, I would be very interested to hear what you have to say.

And if you're on the other side of this issue and can provide good arguments for gay marriage from within a Biblical framework, I would be very interested to hear from you, too.

All right, so my five problems are as follows:

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.

Sometimes a Fruit is Not Just a Fruit

It seems that my campus has been having some race-related issues recently, which came to a head last week when somebody chucked a banana at a group of visiting African American students and their parents.  I am absolutely steamed.  I found out about it from an e-mail sent out by our university chancellor a couple days ago.  Here's what I read in the Chancellor's own words:

We have had an increase in the number of reported incidents of actions and language that reflect bias on our campus. These actions include derogatory and racist language found in our dormitories. We also had an incident where someone threw a banana at visiting African American students, their parents and guidance counselors. This incident was witnessed by some of our own UT ambassadors.

I am saddened and outraged by this behavior because it does not reflect our campus values or the mission of this great university. We will not tolerate disrespect, racism or bias on our campus.

I have to admit, the more I think about this, the more outraged I get. 
Okay, so it's a college campus full of undergrads, and it is in fact a huge land-grant university in the American South; things can get crazy here. I know that.  I've seen things get crazy here before.  They'd get equally crazy at home, too.  I mean, I've had fruit thrown at me by stupid, hulking boys running on Wild Turkey, testosterone and instinct, too.  Heck, somebody even left a butchered elk leg on the Honors house's front lawn once.  But there's a huge difference in this case.  When a couple PKA frat boys threw that orange at me and the other honors students in Laramie, it was just an orange.  It was rotten and smelly, but just an orange.  When that jerk tossed that banana at a group of black students visiting the campus, it was a symbol-- and in this case, the symbol hit a lot harder than the object itself.   That symbol said, you are one step lower than a human.  It said, you don't belong here with rational creatures. GTFO. 

Right now, I just absolutely burn with shame for those kids and their parents, mostly because a sacred, long-standing illusion about college just got ripped away from them: they can't think of the campus as a safe haven anymore.  I went to high school in Wyoming, and when surrounded by the stupidity, racism, sexism and intolerance typical of your average group of sixteen year-olds, I'd say to myself, only two more years and I can get out.  I had seen friends harassed or pushed into fights, and I'd count down the months: just 18 more months to college...  then I went to college and somebody bludgeoned a gay student to death with a pistol two months later.  I never again had a feeling of having a safe haven at college.  Laramie was a battleground instead, and it wore me out.  Everyone has the right to a space where they can feel safe, don't they? 

I was talking about this incident with a co-worker, an undergraduate, the morning after the letter went out, and his frustration was palpable.  For him, that act shattered the illusion of safety for him, too. "Look," he told me, "I was one of, like, three black kids in my entire high school.  I always kept telling myself that things would be better once I got out of town, and I got to college.  You know, that not every place was like my high school."   He said that he wasn't angry so much as deeply disappointed.

Maybe we don't get to pretend this kind of ugliness in the world doesn't exist when we're on a college campus; maybe we don't get to be that naive, to live in our nice, cushy ivory tower and be more enlightened than everyone else.  But in the words of my co-worker, if you don't get to open up and feel free from that kind of humiliation and bigotry at a university... is any place safe?  Where can people just be ourselves? 

So, I would just like to say to the jerk who threw that banana: if I find you, I'm going to throw something at you, too, but it isn't going to be a piece of fruit.  It's going to be a copy of the student Honor Code.  Oh, and it's going to be wrapped around a dead skunk.  Read into the symbolism of that all you want, you bastard. 

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PHOTO CREDIT:

"it is not a banana," by/from -eko-'s Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekosystem/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

"Keep the Dream Alive," by Drew Myers:

Angstademic Discourse

[Hello all! As of today, the Jackrabbit will be spending most of her weekend furiously typing on her first round of PhD field exams in medieval literature. So while I'm collapsing into a nervous wreck over Boethius, Beowulf, The Pearl poet and/or Chaucer, please enjoy the melodious tones of this silent scream into the Bloggosphere...]

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 So, the good news is this: I found out last week that I am going to be talking about The Laramie Project at an interdisciplinary academic conference focusing on "memory and trauma" as their theme.  I'll present the paper in March as part of a panel on issues of narrative trauma, representation and recursive storytelling (this would take a lot of time to explain.)  Anyhow, my personal experience with The Laramie Project and questions regarding trauma and memory are going to be placed alongside narratives of natural disasters and displacement, civil war, and victims of seemingly motiveless violence.  And among all this, I'm supposed to come up with something theoretical and pithy about The Laramie Project that will make the collective cogs in the audience members' heads hum pleasantly, a good performance of academic gymnastics.  And at the moment, the prospect of this makes me think just one thing: Ugh.      

So, at first I was thrilled to finally talk about all this in an academic forum.  Then a couple days later I started to experience a little bit of doubt, and that doubt has turned into some outright panic about having to discuss this in person to academics.  I'm worried: is anything I'm doing here actually worthy of being considered academic?  Or, on the flip side, is anything I'm doing here actually worthy of being considered authentic writing?  What's going to happen if I pull whatever-the-hell-this-is into the academic sphere where it can be theorized to death? 

A bigger question might be this:  what the hell IS this thing I'm writing?  Can I even remotely call this a foray into an academic discussion? And, should I?

I Cannot BELIEVE What I'm Looking At...

Governor of Wyoming, originally uploaded by micdsphotos.

Okay, so I've spent a lot of time prowling Flickr over the last few weeks looking at theater shoots of TLP and TLP: 10 Years Later just to look at things like staging and whatnot. For the most part, I've been rather impressed at what I've seen, and it's ranged from full-scale professional productions to shoestring budget high school productions. And then I ran into this and just about gagged.  I now know how bad a bad production of The Laramie Project can actually get. 

The cultural travesty you're looking at above is from a St. Louis production of The Laramie Project in 2008 put on by the Mary Institute and St. Louis Day School (yes, I'm calling them out). You can view the entire set here if you like (and hilarity will ensue).   If I can believe the caption, that's supposed to be the former Governer of Wyoming, Jim Geringer, pictured above. What.  The.  Heck. 

First of all, what the hell is this guy wearing? Even the Brushpopper shirts that got really popular about fifteen years ago, which can be pretty darn loud, aren't usually this extreme.   I haven't seen anybody wear a shirt that ugly outside of a rodeo ring or southwestern Texas (I mean, the embroidery and cut do have a traditional Tejano flair to them, no?).  And then there's the snaps.  It's a freaking snap shirt.  Anymore, snap shirts are mostly for old people with sore fingers like my father or fratboy Kid Rock wannabes who like to pretend they're all cowboy in their beat-up straw hats and ostrich skin boots.  And then the hat....  it's got to be at least one full size too big for his head.  Besides, usually those enormous ten-gallon affairs only show up on Texans; if you wear a sail that big that on your head in the Wyoming wind, you're just asking to lose it.  And a bolo tie?  With a concho on it?  If you dress like that in Wyoming and you're under a certain age, it's usually because you're trying to play it up.  You know, at a rodeo or a livestock auction.  It's just not a part of the everyday wardrobe anymore. 

Second of all, where the hell did he dredge up those glasses? I mean, seriously? Highway patrolman reflective aviator's glasses? With that sneer on his face, he looks like Cartman off of South Park taking about people "disrespectin' his authoritah."  (Although I have to admit, I thought I saw a picture of Doc Connor wearing a pair of those once.)  It's like that scene in Back to the Future 3 where Doc dresses Marty up like a rhinestone cowboy in a fringed lamé shirt to go back in time and Doc reassures him with something like, "Of course this is accurate.  I based this outfit on painstaking research."  (Please tell me somebody else remembers that movie...)

Okay, so I know that this is a (big budget) high school production, so I shouldn't get too wrapped around the axle about this.  But there was an adult directing this thing, right?  You know, one that knows the difference between an insulting, culturally insensitive parody of Wyoming and an insulting, culturally insensitive parody of Texas?

Anyhow, I had better shut up. But just to add to the jocularity, here's a picture of the REAL former Governer of Wyoming, Jim Geringer, with no bolo, no sunglasses, and no cowboy hat.  No kidding:

Keynote Speaker, Geringer, originally uploaded by WyGISC. (via Flickr.)

This rant has been provided for your reading enjoyment by a very indignant Wyoming Jackrabbit.   Thankyouverymuch.  

Football coach quits, pandemonium reigns... wait, what?

Mob Action on campus, 01/12/10, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

Not to give too much away about my location, but this was the scene at my campus last night a couple of hours after the announcement that my college's football coach was high-tailing it out of the South to take a cushy job at his old college and he was taking his entire staff (and probably most of their recruits) with him. Wait, what?

The bad news is that several hundred undergraduates took to the streets to burn their football T-shirts, some dorm furniture and a really smelly mattress. All told, I think a couple thousand students were involved at some point or another. And one girl got whacked upside the head with a thrown traffic cone-- one of the really big, heavy ones, so I'm pretty sure she has a concussion.

The good news is that apparently the kids on my campus don't really have the meanness in them (or the liquor, not sure which) to foment a full-fledged riot; mostly they just meandered around campus in flash-rave style, knocking down traffic cones and yelling football slogans. The only actual damage I saw on campus this morning was a cockeyed bus kiosk, and that's pretty fixable.

But, seriously-- I take loyalty and dedication as seriously as the next person, but what the hell are people doing initiating a full-fledged police emergency response over a guy quitting his job early and weaseling out of his contract? He sure as heck doesn't care about our college enough to stick around, so I'm pretty sure that all this didn't bother him any.

Maybe it's because I came from a state that, until recently, had one of the worst NCAA football teams in the nation so I don't understand getting that riled up about sports. But these are my students, for crying out loud-- and seeing them do something like this firsthand is just a wee bit disturbing, to be honest. I recognized a few faces in this crowd as students I have worked with as freshmen.

Yeeowch. Would somebody please give me a shot of common sense and reason? Or is that asking too much of American football fans?

Walking in My Own Footsteps and Finding they Don't Fit

So, after three and a half weeks back home in Wyoming with family, I boarded a plane in Casper, Wyoming to fly back to my home in Appalachia last Friday night.   The weather, unfortunately, prevented me from making the five-hour trek to Laramie through the Shirley Basin, so I never got to visit the campus again like I hoped.  That was the same cold weather snap (one night plunged to -25 degrees Farenheit) which wreaked havoc on our airplane the day of our departure, and between the cold in Casper and the storms in Atlanta, I spent about nine extra hours sitting on uncomfortable vinyl chairs in various airport terminals trying to think.  For some reason, this visit was a lot harder than on previous years; certainly the lack of my grandmother's presence was a huge factor, but something else about this visit was on my mind as well.

When our plane finally departed from DIA and rocketed its way into the sunset, I snapped a picture of the view on our way out.  This was my last sight of the American West for a long time to come: an endless patchwork swath of snow-dusted farmland, fields, and prairie stretching off into the distance, Laramie and Cheyenne somewhere north of our plane's wingtip.  As I looked out the window and craned my neck backwards for a last glimpse of the Rockies, it suddenly occurred to me what the problem was: I didn't really feel like my life fit here anymore.  In a sense, I was getting utterly homesick for a place that, in a real sense, wasn't even my home anymore.  I've lived in the South for eight and a half years now, which is six months longer than I had ever lived in Wyoming.  I've been in college now for eleven years, in an intellectual environment that has almost nothing to do with my family's lived experience.  How on earth do I reconcile these two halves of my life-- my Western self, my internal wilderness and land-centeredness, and my Humanities self, the one that lives in a middle-class land of intellection and abstraction?  How can I retrace my own footsteps every year back to the land I call home and make that journey make sense?

Why So Elitist, Academia?

Forgive me please for going off on a tangent on an unrelated rant, but there's something that really burned me the other day and I need to vent. You see, sometimes I feel like I've spent most of my adult life caught in the middle of a domestic squabble between my academic career in the humanities and my Western, rural upbringing. On the one hand, when I embarked on my career as an academic in Laramie eleven years ago, my father gave me a hug and a piece of advice: "Don't let 'em turn you into a commie liberal, okay?"  On the other hand, every time I pull a Leatherman out of my backpack to fix the stapler or the door knob in the graduate office, my fellow grad students look at me like I'm a weapon-toting lunatic.  So I'm a little bit over-sensitive to class issues, I suppose. 

So with that said, a couple of days ago I was at attending a humanities reception.  It was your typical academic affair: a lot of people in dull suits chatting in bored tones while lean-cheeked graduate students cruise the food table multiple times to inhale all the goodies.  There's a bit of a hierarchy among the grad students even: the students in well-funded departments (like mine) can afford to pick lazily at the food.  The poorer ones, the underfunded, famished History students, for example, often wear cargo pants to social events and some have been known to carry Tupperware in their backpacks.

But, to get to the point: I was chatting with one of the professors in another department when a colleague came over to talk, and the conversation turned to his upcoming move...