In an Anti-Gay Climate Teaching About Discrimination Is Personal

[Bonnie J. Morris is an adjunct assistant professor of women's studies at George Washington University.]

Last fall I was deeply moved when one student took the time to offer me her condolences. No, I had not experienced a death in my family or been turned down for tenure. The student was responding to the fact that 11 states had passed new laws forbidding gay marriage or legal recognition of same-sex unions.

"I'm from Oklahoma -- I tried to speak out against it," she told me, and I assured her that I didn't hold her responsible for her state's new homophobic legislation. None of my 175-plus other students, all of whom know I'm gay, had spoken to me about how the new laws and election results might affect me or my family members. That young woman was the only one to reach out and ask how it feels to be the target of state and federal discrimination in a nation now deeply divided over gay rights.

Because I regularly lecture on the history of segregation and intermarriage laws in our country, the student was able to see the irony of my position. One can be an authority on historical statutes of discrimination and also be subject to contemporary versions. The university where I teach is mere blocks away from the White House.

Without question, many of us are white-knuckling it through the first months of the second term of the Bush administration, which has promised to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage and whose new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, demanded that PBS cancel an episode of the children's show "Postcards From Buster" because it portrayed a gay family. Across the nation, faculty members who enjoy secure academic appointments, work with caring colleagues, and reside in university towns that seem to be islands of liberalism are nonetheless subject to new state laws banning gays from adopting children or serving as foster parents, and denying their domestic partnerships any legal status. Despite more than 40 years of activism and education, gay and lesbian Americans are suddenly a vilified, separate class again, thanks to the new laws and a powerful network of religious organizations that rail against the so-called gay agenda.

For historians, the parallel to early anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany is a terrifying comparison we'd really rather not make. It's a cliché, yet the lessons of history demand that we invoke such reminders of past governments' rallying their supporters around hatred of some Other. The arguments of conservative think tanks against full civil rights for gay Americans -- that homosexuality is a behavior, not a biological orientation; and that gays can change their identities, as African-Americans, say, cannot -- reproduce traditional grievances against Jews, who, vilified as Christ-deniers, can always change identity by converting. The challenge for academic historians who are gay -- and Jewish, in my case -- is handling the responsibility to point out historical trends without unprofessionally presenting our own sense of vulnerability.

Consider the contradictions of our daily routines as we earn our bread and butter teaching history. One day not long ago I walked to work past newsstands announcing sweeping anti-gay laws just proposed in the state of Virginia; when I got to my desk, I discovered that a mass anti-gay e-mail message attacking "feminist professors" had somehow slipped through my spam filter.

My first lecture that day happened to cover a range of topics in American race history, including segregation in public facilities; organizations that refused to admit Jews as members, and colleges that refused to admit them as students; and laws banning racial intermarriage. I explained that intermarriage was a felony in Virginia until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a state law in 1967, and I added that Alabama and South Carolina had laws against intermarriage until the 1990s, although neither state was then enforcing its law.

One shocked student protested, "That's so gay!" -- his generation's slang for "wrong."

None of my students drew a historical connection between past Virginia law and that day's headlines, though half-read newspapers littered the classroom floor. I wondered if it would be too pushy to bend down, pick up the day's paper, and point out a current version of state-mandated prejudice. I was aware that there were several gay students in that classroom; some had come out to me, but few were out to their classmates in that group, and all were silent. In choosing to mention the present assault on gay Americans, I would be articulating their legal limbo -- and my own....