SPEECH, NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY RALLY, UWEC, OCTOBER 11, 2004
UWEC CAMPUS MALL
BOB NOWLAN
Thank you to the lgbtsa for inviting me to speak
briefly with you today–and thank all of you for coming here
today–lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight. Our
support for each other makes us strong and enables us not only to
appreciate who and what we are but to show courage in fighting past the
obstacles that we still all-too-often must confront, as glbt people and
as straight allies.
Over the course of the past nearly twenty years now
I have participated–and spoken–at many events like this one. We
face difficult challenges today (with the prospective anti-marriage
amendment to the Wisconsin state constitution merely one of the most
prominent of these), but we have faced difficult challenges throughout
all the time I have been out and active (as well, of course, long, long
before that). Yet we have always nonetheless persisted in
struggling for freedom, justice, and equality–no matter how exorbitant
the short-term cost, and no matter how devastating the short-term
loss. We participate in an ongoing movement that supercedes the
expanse and duration of our own individual existences, a movement that
does, from time to time, slow down, grind to a halt, fall back, and
even dissipate and temporarily disappear. But we always regather,
come back, and press forward again–because we need to do so; in order
to realize who we are and what we are about, we must struggle for our
freedom, for justice, and for equality. I am optimistic we
will continue to struggle onward as long as it takes to completely
eradicate all forms of the legal, civil, and material privileging of
straight over gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.
I believe we should never rest content with the
position that claims it’s simply OK to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or
transgender–that our sexuality and our gender doesn’t really mean all
that much to us, and that straight people need not fear us because we
don’t cause any real trouble and we cannot possibly cause any real
harm. And I certainly believe we should never rest content with
the position that we ‘simply can’t help’ being what and who we are,
that we therefore deserve to be pitied for ‘ending up’ gay, lesbian,
bisexual, or transgender. On the contrary, I firmly believe that
gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism represent
essentially positive modes of social being. Gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender people enormously enrich the world in which
we live–and long have done so.
When I introduce myself to my students as an openly,
and proudly, gay man on the first day of class in all of the courses I
teach, I proceed to indicate that I do so because gayness represents a
very significant part of who I am and where I am coming from; that, for
me, gayness is not simply reducible to a mere homosexual orientation;
and that, as I see it, unlike homosexuality, gayness is a public social
identity, not a private sexual practice. From this vantage
point gayness is, therefore, as I tell my classes, a particular way of
being and relating in all forms of social relations: my gayness in
other words shapes how I look at and engage with the world around me–it
shapes my foremost values, principles, ideals, and commitments, and not
simply with whom I choose to have sex. I well recognize that this
statement can undoubtedly seem, initially at least, quite puzzling to
many, because it seems, according to prevailing commonsense,
counter-intuitive (even to those who identify as ‘gay-friendly’, and
even as well, at times, to those who identify as ‘gay’). Isn’t
being gay really just a small, ultimately private matter and doesn’t my
conception of what gayness means risk producing an exaggeration of the
significance of sexuality–and gender–parallel (albeit counter) to that
of those who the most staunchly denounce and oppose glbt people, and,
in particular, who denounce and oppose our struggles for freedom,
justice, and equality?
I am confident in my position, nonetheless, and my
ability to argue–and account–for it because of my experience not simply
from participating in formative movements of protest, struggle,
advocacy, and action over the course of the past twenty plus years, but
rather, and more germane to my point here, from studying and learning
gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer history, politics,
culture, and theory. I worry that today, even as glbt people
become steadily more widely ‘tolerated’ and even ‘accepted’ in many
areas of our society that we run the risk of losing touch with what
most distinguishes us, and with what represents our potentially
greatest gift to everyone, straight as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender. Do we accept a reductive, trivial commercial
cooptation and commodification of what it means to be gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender as the only ‘tolerable’ and ‘acceptable’
version of gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism–as the
only way we will be ‘tolerated’ and ‘accepted’ within the ‘straight’,
the heteronormative, mainstream? We may in fact do so without
fully recognizing or adequately understanding this is what we are
doing, if we are cut off from, or simply give up on, our distinctive
contributions to history, politics, culture, and theory. At the
same time, straight people lose out as well–because we offer them
little capable of enriching, expanding, and stretching their own lives,
their own modes of being and relating in the world–little to challenge
and enrich who they are and what they are about, as well as who and
what they can be, can do, can see, can hear, and can feel. We in
fact show them little about their own inescapably intrinsic
interrelations with us, about their own positioning, that is, on
complex, dynamic, interlinked continua of, for instance, male-female,
man-woman, masculine-feminine, heterosocial-heteroerotic-heterosexual,
homosocial-homoerotic-homosexual, and straight-gay.
Despite much progress on this campus since I first
came here over seven years ago now, we still therefore need more and
better opportunities to teach, and to learn about, gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, and queer texts and topics, including in classes
and courses focused directly, explicitly on these issues.
Ignorance of what work in glbtq studies can and does offer us remains
widespread on this campus. Just to take one example, how often do
we respond to religious-based opposition beyond insisting on separation
of church and state or beyond arguing the Bible is more ambiguous than
our critics claim–and in fact equally condemns many other practices
that they downplay or ignore while denigrating us? How
often, in short, do we respond to religious-based opposition by arguing
from the vantage point of a distinctly, positively, confidently, and
proudly gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer mode of ethics,
morality, spirtuality, and yes, indeed, even religiosity?
Our university officially commits itself toward
respecting and supporting us. Yet today I challenge this
university to make this a yet far more substantial commitment by
working, deliberately and conscientiously, to foster the regular and
extensive teaching and learning of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
and queer history, politics, culture, and theory across the university
curriculum, across departments and programs, across schools and
colleges–and to do so by drawing upon the most advanced, rigorous,
far-reaching, and innovative work in gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, and queer studies. We should offer courses, and
sections of courses, regularly in glbtq studies, and we should explore
the prospect of eventually opening up minor, and even potentially
major, concentrations in glbtq studies. Yet we should also work
to find ways to bring this knowledge, and this vast array of cultural
production, to bear in many classes and courses that already exist here
at UWEC, and to help both students and teachers learn more and better
whenever they do confront glbt texts and topics. Steadily more
and more colleges and universities across this nation and beyond are
coming out in support of the routine, institutionalized teaching and
learning of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies; I
see no reason why we at UWEC cannot do so as well.
I’ve been struck many times in traveling to
professional academic conferences, and talking with people at these
events, how much more, and more boldly, I have in fact proceeded in
representing myself here at UWEC as a gay, and queer, teacher, scholar,
citizen, and activist than in fact many colleagues have done, and
continue to do, at seemingly ‘easier’ places–large, urban metropolitan
public universities as well as elite, small, private liberal
universities in nearby suburban and exurban locations, both of which
are generally regarded to be, supposedly, considerably more ‘liberal’
than Eau Claire. I’ve succeeded here not through any remarkable
talent of my own, but rather from what we have been able to do
together, and because I continued, despite periods of doubt and
uncertainty, to believe that the struggle to so succeed was worthwhile
and that I might indeed make it if I just kept trying. So, I
believe that we need not hesitate in pursuing the goal I challenge us
to take up today out of a sense of skepticism that ‘it’s just too
difficult to do this’ ‘at a place like UWEC’ unlike others places where
the obstacles, seemingly, are far fewer and the chances for success are
far easier. Throughout my life people have told me many times
that I could not accomplish many things I’ve went on to do, and they’ve
certainly told me, as well as many, many other glbt people, that we
could never succeed at much we have (at least not if we insist upon
being ‘out’ about ourselves and who we are). Many people told me
I’d never get a job as a professor as an openly gay man, I’d never get
a job as one openly concentrating in
gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender-and-queer studies, I’d never be able
openly to teach a course in this area at a place like UWEC, and I’d
never earn tenure and promotion at a place like UWEC if I persisted in
being openly myself, and staying openly true to what I am about, but
all of this has happened. So, again, I believe we can and we will
make education in glbtq studies a significant part of what this
university offers–to us, and to the greater communities it
serves. We need to work on it, we need to struggle to make
it happen, but we can succeed.
In closing, my final words to each and every one of
you is very much the same: believe in yourselves, in your value, in
your capability, in what you can be and can do. Coming out, even
as a straight ally, continues to take courage; in doing this, you show
me, and I hope you do show yourselves as well, not only what you can do
but also that you can do yet much more. I find that students at
UWEC often make amazing changes, and amazing progress, in
self-development and self-growth over the course of their years here,
yet, unfortunately, all too often doubt themselves, or downplay what
they have achieved and what they are capable of; I want to urge you not
to do so, and, in this respect at least, to take yourselves
seriously. You do make a difference, you can make a difference,
and I sincerely hope you will make a difference. Thank you for
all that you have done for me, for the difference you have made in my
life. I wish you all the best.
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Last Update: October 11, 2004