Refusing Abandonment
In the fall of 2023 I had the chance to revive and redesign my discipline’s course on LGBTQ literature. I was excited and nervous. I knew it was a course that could matter immensely to students at St. Norbert College, and I knew it was going to require a lot of skill and effort to make it work for everyone.
My hunch about demand proved correct: the class was the first in English to fill that semester, and our group included a range of majors, from English to Fine Art to Education, Biology, History, Sociology, Religion, and Pre-Nursing. I tried to make the range of course texts similarly broad. We started by thinking about queer history and historiography with Moisés Kaufman’s docudrama Gross Indecency, and we ended with Indigenous and Black speculative futures in Chelsea Vowel’s “Maggie-Sue” and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. Along the way, students fell in love with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Noah Baldino’s “Passing”; I cried talking about Félix González-Torres’ “Untitled (Perfect Lovers)”; and a student made me feel impossibly cool by telling me she’d been playing Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” on repeat.
I got to hear about students’ reactions to these texts through one of the class’s ongoing assignments, which was a collaborative Recommended Reading List. I presented this project to students as one way we could respond to the recent wave of attempts to restrict access to books by and about queer and trans people. Each week students chose a text, song, movie, TV show, or piece of visual art to recommend to their peers, and they included both a citation (a line, image, scene, or sound that illustrated something crucial to them) and an explanation of what they thought their citation conveyed and why they thought it was important. While students were required to focus most of their posts on texts from the syllabus, they could also choose a certain number of texts off the syllabus to recommend (and I learned about some great new work this way).
In class discussions, we talked about difficult questions, like what “good representation” means, what’s at stake in “going mainstream,” what identity categories do to us or for us, and how you achieve political change when the people in power don’t believe they’re accountable to you. Some of those conversations were tense, as can happen when students are approaching the material with very different levels of prior experience – not only with literary analysis, but also with reflecting critically on how sexuality and gender condition our experiences of ourselves and the world. In those moments, I did my best to remind us all what a hard, important thing we were doing and to applaud their efforts to engage each other with respect and curiosity. And I began each class session from the assumption that all students had the right to access every tool for critique and resource for flourishing that queer and trans artists, writers, and theorists have worked to make available.
One of the resources I particularly wanted to share was a deeper sense of historical context for our own moment. I asked the class to think about the picture that emerged across the works we studied: from the queer urban communities opened up by military mobilization during the World Wars to the backlash of the Purple Scare; from the liberatory resistance to policing that manifested at Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and Milkwaukee’s Black Nite Club to the homophobic panic and organized abandonment during the AIDS crisis. I hoped, in part, to offer an alternative to a simple progress narrative, where everything is getting better all the time. I also wanted to draw attention to the examples provided by queer and trans people in the past – as ancestors and models of resistance – who fought for each other through periods of revanchement, retaliation, and reactionary violence. Highlighting those examples was important to me because I was very afraid my students were living through such a period themselves.
Unfortunately, I could now create an even longer list of reasons to believe that’s true. Spaces for centering queer and trans experience in higher education are shrinking rapidly. Sometimes in response to state laws banning public money from funding DEI programming, and sometimes in anticipation of legal or extra-legal pressure, LGBTQ resource offices have been closed at a lengthening list of schools, including University of Houston, University of North Florida, University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and University of Utah, where they have often been shuttered alongside offices and organizations for women and students of color. At Texas A&M, a minor in LGBTQ studies was targeted for closure – along with others defined as “low performing” – without an opportunity for faculty input. At University of North Texas, not only was the DEI office closed, but faculty were told they would have to adjust their classroom instruction and course titles, and that they may not receive funds to present research at conferences that deal with race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
At St. Norbert College, where I met with my queer literature students last fall, the parish quietly closed the OUTLoud ministry started by my colleague, Dr. Craig Ford. And SNC’s new president Dr. Laurie Joyner, its new VPAA Valerie Martin Conley, and Rev. Matthew Dougherty, Special Assistant to the President for Mission Integration, announced to faculty, staff, and students that the College would be updating its policies, enrollment applications, official forms, campus signage, and the website to “align…with Church teachings on gender identity and expression.” These teachings, they clarified, referred to the Catholic Church’s Dignitas Infinita, which they read as recognizing two sexes. The SNC Progressive Student Union posted a response to this announcement on their Instagram page on September 19: “Let us be clear: as a group and as students, we are disgusted. The removal of inclusive language is a step backwards. As an organization dedicated to promoting progressive policies, this decision from the college administration could not be more misaligned with our ideals and the Norbertine values of radical hospitality."
When the results of the recent U.S. elections were announced, I didn’t have any classes to meet with. I have to hope that, for students who are reeling from the outcome, the time we spent together – thinking about how many people have struggled for liberation through times that felt interminably bleak – provided them with some courage and some company in their grief. And I have to hope that, however many of us get to continue that struggle, we’ll keep fighting like hell to make higher education a place where people can access those tools. I know it matters, because I was lucky enough to have students who told me it did.
Many people are worried about the survival of our institutions. Some may argue – publicly or privately, in the deals they strike with their own consciences – that survival requires ceding some ground in an attempt to weather our current moment’s wave of reactionary hostility. But any version of our institutions worth fighting to preserve would be a version that served its most vulnerable members. The fight may be long, but if we stop making that demand, we’ve already lost. That’s one of the lessons queer history can teach us.