I’ve sometimes wondered if I should have agreed to appear in “Sexuality 101,” the 60 Minutes segment on lesbian and gay studies broadcast this spring. It clearly was a risk, given the media’s hostility to the academy in general and its skepticism about scholarship on gender and sexuality in particular. In the end, I let 60 Minutes film my gay-history class at the University of Chicago and flew to New York for an interview with Mike Wallace, because it seemed to be a good opportunity to make the case for the importance of the field to a large, national audience.
Along the way I learned a bit about how such television shows work. I discovered, for example, that many 60 Minutes interviews are filmed in the same room, touched up to make it appear to belong to the person being interviewed, with the lone bookcase filled with scholarly tomes, knickknacks, or basketballs, as appropriate. (When I arrived, they were debating what a professor would have on his wall; abstract art won.)
More disturbing was finding out that when the screen shifts from the interviewee to the reporter, it’s usually not so much to give the viewer a reaction shot as to camouflage the editing of the conversation. Although on screen I appeared to be making a single, continuous statement, lines had been edited out at several points.
I also learned how difficult it is to “manage” your appearance on such a show. 60 Minutes filmed a 70-minute interview with me and put about 70 seconds of it on the air: an abridged version of my widely misunderstood use of Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with another man to illustrate 19th-century romantic friendships. None of my sound bites about why gay studies is a worthwhile field made it onto the air. In retrospect, I understand why: The drive for high ratings (60 Minutes ranked sixth in the nation the week “Sexuality 101" aired) puts enormous pressure on even well-meaning producers and reporters to sensationalize their subject to attract viewers.
Yet to avoid alienating viewers, producers also need to appear “balanced.” The 60 Minutes piece on sexuality studies achieved that appearance by giving both sides a chance to speak. It opened with a debate between a critic of last fall’s conference at the State University of New York at New Paltz on “Revolting Behavior” and the president of the university (though not the organizers of the conference), and it closed with a debate between the queer theorist Michael Warner and Roger Kimball, a conservative critic of higher education. The producers tried to balance the representation of the field by positioning two gay historians (including me) as serious scholars and putting “at the other end of the spectrum” humanities teachers whose scholarship was, according to Wallace, “more debatable.”
The trouble is that sensationalism won out -- and in particularly distressing ways. “Sexuality 101" began with Mike Wallace’s now-infamous “parental warning” that “some of what you’re about to see, indeed, some of what is being taught on college campuses today, is for mature audiences only.” The segment continued with a passionate denunciation of the “Revolting Behavior” conference by Candace de Russy, a conservative SUNY trustee.
Although 60 Minutes gave the other side its turn, de Russy’s irresponsible charge that the conference represented “the degeneration of an academic forum into a platform for lesbian sex, for public sadomasochism, for anal sex, bisexuality, and masturbation” (read: was seducing our young into these “degenerate” practices) set the terms and the tone for the entire segment.
The media’s recent trial of gay studies began with the New Paltz conference. In November, Roger Kimball denounced it in The Wall Street Journal (under the headline “A Syllabus for Sickos”) as evidence that “festivals of politicized sexual libertinage are now everyday occurrences in many educational and cultural institutions.” His article alerted the rest of the news media to the conference and set the terms for their depiction of gay studies. The article led The New York Times to cover the conference and then to run a long, front-page article on the emergence of sexuality studies, which, in turn, alerted the producers of 60 Minutes.
The furor over college-level courses that teach the critical study of sexuality may seem surprising. There’s little reason to think 20-year-olds will be traumatized by references in the classroom to sex when the President’s alleged sex acts are graphically described on the nightly news. Indeed, our culture is so saturated with erotic images and talk about sexuality -- in the movies, in advertising, on talk shows, and on network news -- that one might expect more people to recognize the need for the serious study of the representation of sexuality and its place in our culture.
The study of homosexuality, in particular, seems especially urgent, given the deep polarization of our nation over gay issues -- from gays in the military and the clergy to same-sex marriages and domestic-partnership benefits. The debates on those major moral and public-policy issues are often based on faulty information and deliberate misrepresentation of facts. It is therefore incumbent on scholars -- in fields ranging from history and sociology to literature and psychology -- to bring the insights of their research to bear.
At its best, scholarship in gay studies has illuminated fundamental questions that have been central to Western thought from Plato and Augustine to Locke, Rousseau, and Freud -- questions about, for example, the malleability of the self and the construction of social categories, the place of sexual regulation in creating social order, and the relationship between a person’s private morality and fitness for public responsibilities.
So why does gay studies generate so much heat -- even from the media, which trumpet their tolerance of homosexuality on shows such as Ellen and Spin City? Misrepresentation of gay studies results in part from misunderstanding how universities work. Both The New York Times and CBS conflated sex-education classes with gay-history and gay-literature classes, academic conferences with required courses, and safe-sex workshops organized by students with scholarly lectures. The Times’s article on sexuality studies made the construction of Play-Doh genitalia in a sex-education class at the University of Virginia seem like a typical assignment in a gay-studies course.
Recent media caricatures of sexuality studies also reflect reporters’ general disdain for the opaque language and dense theory of much recent scholarship. Although their jeremiads sometimes represent fair criticism of poor writing, which should and easily could be made more comprehensible, they just as often reflect hostility toward any theory that requires deep or sustained thought or that scrutinizes accepted dogma.
Academics are used to such attacks, and most don’t take them very seriously. All academics probably should worry more about being portrayed as seducing their students with alien ideas and an alien way of life (though, in a sense, that should be the goal of any teacher trying to encourage students to think independently and critically about their world). But such portrayals are particularly troubling to faculty members in gay studies, because they reinforce the half-century-old demonization of homosexuals as child molesters. Ever since Anita Bryant’s successful campaign to “Save Our Children” by overturning Miami’s gay-rights ordinance, in 1977, opponents of gay rights have manipulated parents’ anxieties about the threats allegedly posed to their children by homosexuals. The most volatile gay-rights issues today involve children and young people, from adoption and child custody to the recognition of same-sex marriages and gay-student organizations.
That is why many gay-studies scholars, no matter how disengaged from the “real world” their work is, were upset by the 60 Minutes segment. The field has recently secured a foothold in the academy. For example, the University of Chicago’s Lesbian and Gay Studies Project has received generous start-up funds from the administration to organize conferences and seminars and to provide grants for dissertation research. The pioneering conferences and fellowship programs of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York have garnered national attention. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the University of Iowa, and several campuses of the University of California, among other institutions, have established certificate programs or minors in sexuality studies or lesbian and gay studies.
But gay-studies courses -- and teachers in any field who happen to be gay -- are regularly attacked by the right wing for “fostering” homosexuality. Earlier this year, one house of the Oklahoma legislature passed a bill banning homosexuals from teaching in the state’s schools, and Kansas legislators instructed administrators of state colleges to send them lists of courses that included material on homosexuality or bisexuality.
The antigay referenda put on ballots in dozens of states and cities since the early 1990s have often threatened to prohibit public schools from doing anything that would “legitimize” homosexuality. Some of those referenda would have prohibited state colleges from hiring faculty members in gay studies, offering courses that included the study of homosexuality, bringing gay scholars to campus, or even keeping books in the library that could be construed as “pro-homosexual” (would that include works by Plato? Whitman? Proust? Stein? Cather?) -- all in the name of protecting children from seduction into the homosexual way of life.
However unwittingly, the 60 Minutes segment provided yet another forum for conservative critics who don’t understand lesbian and gay studies and who infantilize college students by portraying them as ignorant of sexual matters and incapable of thinking critically. As depictions of gay studies and the academy go, the 60 Minutes segment was balanced in form, if not in substance. But it reminded those of us in the field of how insecure gay studies still is as a discipline, despite the remarkable gains of the last decade. It reminded us, too, of how easy it is for our scholarship to be misrepresented and ridiculed, and how easily gay studies can become the focus of a general campaign against critical engagement with the Western tradition and contemporary culture. And it reminded me, at least, of why it’s crucial for us nonetheless to risk making the case for the importance of such inquiry.
George Chauncey is a professor of history and chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994).
