Part 2
Once the course was officially on the books, the university’s Jesuit president sought from the chairs of the English and history departments a response to a letter he had received from a parent whose child was considering applying to SCU. This parent had been appalled to find gay and lesbian subject matter in the course catalog and clearly envisioned my course not as social history but as something along the lines of “Great Gays in American History,” which would feature lots of lectures beginning with, “Did you know that [insert famous name here] was gay?” My response to the president spells out the course’s actual themes and objectives:
The author [of the complaint letter] states the belief that “when individual authors or historical figures are identified by their orientation and their contributions ‘celebrated,’ there is the implication of support for their lifestyle.” I would like to reassure this person that no history course at Santa Clara University seeks “celebration” as its goal. The discipline of history seeks to understand the past and, in so doing, develop the crucial skills of critical thinking, particularly the ability to prepare and communicate well supported arguments and interpretations. A course on the Holocaust, for example, would not be offered to celebrate genocide, but to understand why and how such unspeakable acts could be carried out against fellow human beings.
. . . for the past several decades, the history of a number of groups and movements previously overlooked has been a major emphasis. Courses on labor, racial minorities, women, and gender have proliferated across the nation. More recently environmental history and historical geography have been added to the mix. The combined result of all these new courses is not a series of isolated studies, but a much more complete picture of the many complex issues and interactions that make up American history. History is a tool of understanding rather than celebration. The gay and lesbian course does not seek to defend or denounce homosexuality any more than the women’s courses defend or denounce women, or historical geography courses defend or denounce physical geography.
The university’s president thanked me for my “thoughtful, thorough” response, and that was the end of any opposition I have encountered at SCU as a result of offering the course.[4]
My only other negative encounter came at a local community college when I gave a guest lecture on lesbians in the nineteenth century. Because I was at a public rather than religious institution, I anticipated that I would encounter no resistance. What I had not counted on was the presence of a fundamentalist Christian who quoted Bible verses as I began my lecture. That experience made me appreciate anew my own religious institution’s emphasis on social justice.
“Gays/Lesbians in U.S. History,” an upper-division course (History 177), was first offered at Santa Clara University in the spring of 2002. I gave it that title for two reasons.
First, I did not want there to be any confusion about the course’s content. Even with a title such as “Diverse Sexualities in American History,” students might still expect a class focused primarily on heterosexual themes.
Secondly, although the course touches on queer, transgendered, and bisexual issues (to provide appropriate context, I begin with a brief section on queer theory), I wanted it to be clear that the course had a straight (that is, exclusive) gay and lesbian emphasis.
Having settled on the title, I fretted about it. Roughly half of SCU’s students are Catholic, a few are Muslim. Would they sign up for this course? Even if they were interested, would they want the words “gay” and “lesbian” on their college transcripts? SCU is an expensive private school, and, although many students work part time, most are partially or fully funded by their parents. Would parents pay to have “those words” on their children’s official record?
The course satisfied the college’s U.S. core requirement as well as the women’s and gender/ethnic studies requirement (a double dipper!), but I was still nervous about attracting sufficient enrollments to justify not just this initial offering but subsequent sections. For the first time in my career, I advertised a class, posting flyers throughout the history and women’s and gender studies departments.
The course quickly reached its cap of twenty-five students. An equal number were on the waiting list, a pattern that has been repeated in subsequent offerings (the course is offered every year). In that first offering, as in subsequent years, the students were primarily juniors and seniors, with men and women represented in equal numbers. I do not inquire as to my students’ sexualities, but their personal histories are sometimes revealed during discussions. Of the students who make their sexual identification known, the majority identify as straight. Some of them are drawn to the class because of a gay or lesbian parent or sibling, but most enroll because they are interested in the subject matter (and in fulfilling two core requirements). The others who self-identify are gay or lesbian in roughly equal numbers. Only a few identify as bisexual, with only one (so far) identifying as “gender outlaw.”
As part of a phenomenon described by Stephanie Fairyington in the Gay and Lesbian Review as “The New Post-Straight” (concerning straight academics who teach queer studies), I never explicitly discuss my own sexuality, but I wear makeup, dresses, and a wedding ring. Straight women hardly have a monopoly on those accoutrements, but I expect that most of my students assume, correctly, that I place on the heterosexual side of the Kinsey scale. As such, I am never bothered by issues of “authenticity” in teaching the course. After all, as a scholar trained in the study of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, I authored a biography of Robert M. La Follette and never once worried that my lack of authenticity (I am not a powerful politician nor am I male or dead) disqualified me from writing that book or from teaching about lots of other dead men once in political power.
What is important to me and to my students in all the courses I teach is not whether I am like or unlike the people we study, but whether I have the scholarly expertise to teach the class to the highest standards. The fact that it was a contingent of gay and lesbian students who originally urged me to offer my lesbian and gay history course fostered my belief that my sexual identity does not hinder my credibility with my students. Gay and lesbian students have told me that my being straight adds to their sense of the course’s credibility.
I urge them to consider, however, what it might mean to them to have someone such as our university’s only openly lesbian professor (the renowned lgbtq [lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered/queer] scholar Linda Garber, associate professor of English and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program) teaching gay and lesbian history as a respected faculty member on our Jesuit campus. They agree that having openly homosexual professors provides important role models, but by no means do they think that professors must be what they teach.[5]
The dynamics for the class are established on the first day. I begin by explaining that the course will focus primarily on the history of American lesbians and gay men, and I suggest that we start by defining our terms. I ask the class what makes a woman a lesbian.
A few tentative definitions are proposed, but other students find them too broad or too narrow. Debates quickly ensue, setting the tone for the thoughtful, wide-ranging discussions I strongly encourage. I throw out a few questions to stir the pot. Is it only desire that “counts,” or do actions matter as well? What if a woman’s heartfelt sexual attraction is to other women, but she never acts on it? If such a woman marries a man, bears children, and never has a sexual relationship with another woman, is she a lesbian? What about a “political lesbian,” a woman who desires men sexually, chooses to remain celibate, yet identifies as a lesbian because she believes it impossible for a woman to have a truly egalitarian relationship with a man? What if that same woman does have sexual relations exclusively with women? What about a woman who has satisfying sexual relationships exclusively with men, but who enjoys fantasies about other women?
This complicated and often volatile effort to answer the “simple” question of what makes a woman a lesbian sets the stage for the first reading, an excerpt from Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory. In their end-of-term evaluations, most students list this as the most difficult of all the readings. A few, however, love to grapple with issues of theory, appreciate the opportunity to contextualize the course, and throw themselves into the discussion with gusto. Others save their enthusiasm for discussions of the more fact-based readings on homosexuality in American history.