I won’t keep saying this, but I thought it would be good to recite it once: When we don’t like your posts we tell you, but when we like your posts we tell everyone else.

At Swarthmore College, all moral and intellectual authority stems from an assertion of victim status. As such, the tolerant nature of the campus is a constant source of frustration for groups like SQU. As CMarko said, they feel they need to push the community until they finally push back. Then they cry “HOMOPHOBIA!”, and it’s all good for another year. All is disingenuous and offensive to those who have experienced real (not simulated) oppression… but at least it sustains the ego of a handful of narcissists for a week or so.

I find it particularly interesting that their manifesto claims there is no political or activist purpose to Coming Out Week, but that it is instead meant to simply celebrate sexuality.

I understand it to some degree—heterosexual sexuality is fairly prominent throughout American media, and there aren’t that many venues through which alternative sexualities are made public—but it seems as if there is a *huge* disconnect between what SQU/NOTA/etc. think they are trying to do and what the rest of the students at Swat think they are trying to do.

At this point, the entire discussion seems to have deteriorated a bit too far to be at all constructive (“Shut the fuck up” is written between Parrish and Sharples) and is amazingly similar to a forum-flame-war. I’m just waiting for someone to post 50 Hitler pictures around as a way to end the debate…

My theory at the moment is that the people responsible for the chalkings are trying to increase their own relevance. At the moment, the Swarthmore Queer Union serves very little purpose beyond being a social organization. SQU pursues very few political goals outside of Swarthmore, and there’s almost nothing to accomplish within Swarthmore itself, where virtually everyone is supportive (and the few who aren’t are silent rather than confrontational). Without minimizing the discrimination that GLBT people face in most of the world, it’s safe to say that at Swarthmore, gays are not an oppressed minority; it’s about as easy to be gay as to be straight on this campus. By chalking explicit messages on the pavement, SQU members incite controversy. They can attribute the controversy to the community’s latent homophobia, thereby reassuring themselves that there’s still work for them to do, and then pat themselves on the back for “challenging” their classmates.

I don’t feel challenged so much as manipulated. I feel like I’m being pulled into someone else’s public sexual game, which I did not consent to. In fact, I’m fairly certain that the chalkings violate federal sexual harassment law by creating a hostile workplace environment. (I looked up the guidelines and this seems to fit.) I’m not an employee, so I’m in no position to sue, nor would I even if I could, but I do think it would behoove the chalkers to consider that they might be violating the rights of others.

I should mention to Joey Headset above that I don’t frame this as Diverse vs. non-Diverse people, nor do I think that’s the issue at stake; I think this is about appropriate vs. inappropriate public behavior. (As my friends and I discussed last night, it would be no better to have all-hetero orgies underfoot.) I’d be perfectly happy with the situation if the SQU crowd kept the most explicit messages indoors somewhere. Preferably not in my hallway, though.

Though one aspect of referring to it as a ritual is misleading, and what is happening is in some sense more intriguing and complex than that. A ritual is something that people rehearse, and know in advance what parts they are to play. I don’t know that this is what is happening in this case. If the students are more or less spontaneously recreating the same conflicts from year to year, then as a historian, that makes me wonder at what the persistent drivers underlying their action are. If it is in fact a ritual of sorts, it makes me wonder at what kinds of off-stage cues are coordinating its performance, and from whom they are originating.

Why is the annual “Coming Out Day” discussion any more ritualistic or empty than the annual Shakespeare 101 discussion of whether Hamlet was nuts, or the seasonal World History I discussion of Hammurabbi’s code, or the Calc I tradition of someone asking over and over how to do second order derivatives?

We live with annual cycles, and we profess education, which we do over and over again. No, I wouldn’t want to sit through semester after semester of Accounting; nobody does, and yet semester after semester someone is teaching it and someone is learning it. It’s always new, to someone.

One of the more infuriating aspects of all this is that the same people who argue that “anything that sparks dialogue is a good thing” also use the “shut up, you ignorant homophobe” defense against those who object. One may conclude, then, that anything that sparks dialogue is GOOD, but it’s BAD when people actually take your bait and engage you in dialogue. Unless, of course, we switch our conception of “dialogue” to the version favored by most Official Multiculturalists: the one where Diverse People level endless abuse at Non-Diverse People, while the latter group nods and tries to look sufficiently ashamed.