DAY OF SILENCE REMARKS – RALLY ON UWEC CAMPUS MALL, W 4/21/04

    Silence.   Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people know a lot about silence.   I want briefly to share some of my thoughts on this silence.


    When I think of silence I think of how many times, as a gay person, throughout most of my life, I have kept silent or remained silent about significant parts of whom I am, how I’ve felt, what I’ve thought, what I’ve experienced, and where I come from because it did not seem like I would be heard, let alone understood, if I were to speak.  I think of how many times I have felt that this community, this society, this world does not belong to me, and I do not belong to it, because it does not recognize me, let alone accept me, except in a guise which I do not recognize, which does not represent me as whom I am.  


    I think of the silence of past lovers afraid to mention on the job or with family or friends or in all kinds of situations and circumstances that they were gay, that they were involved with me, and that our relationship deeply mattered to them, often remaining silent, for that matter, in the face of continually recurrent kinds of hateful comments directed against gay people.  And this silence only made them feel much worse about themselves, and about what they shared with me.  Too many gay people I’ve known have been “scared straight,” at least for considerable, painful, torturous periods of their lives.


    I think of the silence of past friends afraid to report harassment and abuse to authorities, because they perceived they would only be further misunderstood and even further harassed and abused if they were to do so.  


    I think of the silence of many I have known who say nothing when gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are mocked and ridiculed, because it’s too hard to speak up, at least it seems so, and because many of these people don’t want to be known as or thought to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.


    I think of the silence of many I have known who won’t conceive of the idea that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender lives, and not lifestyles, truly do matter to us all, that they interconnect with and interdetermine the course of whom we all are and can be, that they enrichen our collective diversity, but who instead at least tactitly endorse the idea that these are trivial, fringe issues that only concern a bunch of sinful, immoral, sick, degenerate, criminal, and deficient freaks.   


    I think of the silence of many I have known who believe it is possible, even desirable, to remain neutral in discussions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues, or to tacitly endorse the idea that God and the Bible may well condemn us, and regard what we are and do to be among the worst offenses imaginable, yet that does not mean they cannot still love us while hating our sin.  I won’t get into debates about what God and the Bible actually have to say versus us here this evening, but all I will add is that I cannot imagine an all-powerful, all-knowing, and ultimately overwhelmingly benevolent, loving, and forgiving God condemning gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people for what we truly are and what we truly do.  Such a God would know better and would know how wrong are all the cruel stereotypes and vicious lies about us, and about what our so-called “lifestyles” actually happen to contain.  Whenever I ask a person who believes that God condemns us to tell me why, on what basis, other than merely reiterating his or her understanding of select Biblical passages, the answer usually comes out with characterizations of what we are supposedly all about that in no way matches my knowledge and experience of what gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender in essence truly mean.


    I think of the silence of many, because it seems politically expedient at the moment, who endorse anti-glbt laws and constitutional amendments, while claiming they maintain no malice against us, scapegoating a population of people that has all-too-often been scapegoated, throughout history, again and again.  We’re easy targets, but does not that make it right?  I say no.    


    I think of silence when I think of the 25% increase in anti-glbt violence in this country over the past year, and the refusal of those who have mounted a campaign to condemn our struggle for equal rights as a threat to the foundations of civilized society to recognize their complicity in what is happening.  I’ve lived through waves of anti-glbt violence before and these are indeed deeply disturbing and frightening, and it is chilling indeed to see how many whom you might think never would become involved or simply dismiss this violence as unimportant, in fact end up doing so.


    I think of silence when I think of what happens when we break the silence, when we choose to be open and honest about whom we are, and to represent our lives, our communities, our histories, our cultures, our systems of values openly, and to take time and expend effort to explain why we do so, why we must do so, and what this means, and does not mean, for everyone else.  Breaking the silence can be personally liberating, and yes silence indeed can equal death, in more ways that one.  I think of men and women tearfully revealing at support group meetings that they spent 50 to 60 years of their lives living in silence about whom they were, and feeling like they’ve lost their lives to this silence.  Yet breaking the silence is not without risks.   Many want to pretend otherwise, but anti-glbt prejudice continues to run deep and wide on this campus, as well as on many, many others.   


    In traveling recently to present at a session on “queer pedagogy: issues and experiences” at a national conference on cinema and media studies, I was struck by how relatively closeted the rest of my panel colleagues, who taught in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Baltimore, and Boston, among other places, all appeared to be in their teaching.  Most of these people found it too difficult, too distracting, too painful, and too readily productive of overwhelmingly negative student evaluations to be open about whom they were with their lower level classes, and even to offer classes more than very rarely focused directly on glbt issues.  And these were leading glbtq scholars.  In talking about what we have done and how we have approached these issues in our teaching at our respective institutions, I was amazed at how much more, and how much more boldly, on the whole, I have been in teaching as an openly gay man, teaching glbt issues, and from a queer perspective, here in the relatively considerably smaller and more conservative community of UW-Eau Claire.  Yet this doesn’t make me happy; it makes me sad.   It reminds me of what a former lesbian colleague, who has left this university, showed me several years ago: that a just-published, carefully controlled scientifically credible and verified study had shown that Midwestern college and university students tend, on average, to rate openly gay faculty members only 1/3 as positively as openly straight faculty members even if they teach the exact same content, in the exact same form and style, at the exact same level and kind of course, and even as the exact same person (now representing themselves as openly straight).  It’s amazing that I have managed as well as I have here, and it puts a certain amount of otherwise bizarre-seeming opposition into helpfully clarifying perspective.  Still, I am probably one of the few faculty here in recent memory who has been directly targeted, by a group of conservative students, parents, family members, friends, and community members for monitoring and subversion, leading toward these people trying to develop a case for my prospective ouster from the University.  And they don’t like that I’m openly Marxist and socialist and actively involved as a progressive activist either.  This kind of opposition doesn’t and won’t faze me, but it should not just be my concern.  Why do we remain silent about these kinds of things?


    To conclude, however, I am indeed considerably relatively very fortunate in my life.  So many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people around the world have lived, and continue to live, lives of brutal subjection and repression, and what’s often even much worse, extensive self-loathing.  And they all-too-often suffer in silence.  I am deeply concerned that we are moving from “a culture of fear” to “a culture of cruelty” in this nation, and all of those who occupy marginal positions will face the brunt of this increasing cruelty, especially as we move in a steadily more theocratic as well as fascistic direction.  We cannot remain silent, yet we cannot break the silence effectively if we remain isolated and disunited.  Let’s work together, come together, struggle to build a community, a society, and a world in which love will truly prevail, will truly characterize actual material and spiritual relations among all human beings, and where we as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people need not remain silent any longer.