Gay Course Penetrates U-M Curriculum
By Matthew S. Schwartz

One would think that noted gay-studies scholar and University professor David Halperin would have nothing good to say about the American Family Association (AFA). After all, the national conservative group – which claims to exist for people who are “tired of cursing the darkness and who are ready to light a candle” – has pulled no punches in its drive to cancel Halperin’s Fall 2000 English course on gay identity. From the moment AFA’s Michigan director Gary Glenn spotted the course description reported on the National Review’s web site, he began lobbying state and University officials for its removal.

Yet Halperin is quite pleased with the attention the AFA has garnered for the class. “I owe a great debt of gratitude to the American Family Association for so effectively recruiting students to take my course,” he said in an e-mail interview. “Before the AFA got into the act, no one at the University of Michigan showed any interest in the course. Now, it seems, everyone wants to take it.”

To be fair, with its ostentatious title and attention-grabbing description, the course would have generated a buzz even without Glenn’s media campaign. Just days after a U-M conservative newspaper tipped off a National Review reporter, the wheels of dissemination were in motion. Word of the class trickled down through conservative circles, and the story was well on its way to mainstream media before the AFA got into the act.

Still, the AFA definitely expedited the process. Since Glenn’s involvement, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, numerous radio programs, Internet news sites, and student newspapers have reported on the class.

According to the description, Halperin’s course, entitled “How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation,” states that “Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn’t mean that you don’t have to learn how to become one. … This course will examine the general topic of the role that initiation plays in the formation of gay identity. We will approach it from three angles: (1) as a sub-cultural practice - subtle, complex, and difficult to theorize - which a small but significant body of work in queer studies has begun to explore; (2) as a theme in gay male writing; (3) as a class project, since the course itself will constitute an experiment in the very process of initiation that it hopes to understand.”

In a press release, Glenn said the class is “a source of embarrassment to Michigan, its citizens, and our university system. U-M actually wants to force Michigan taxpayers to pay for a class to openly recruit and teach teenagers how to engage in a lifestyle of high-risk behavior that is not only illegal but many believe immoral, behavior that further increases the burden on taxpayers to pay for its public health consequences.”

Glenn feels that Halperin should “tell students the truth” about the consequences of the homosexual lifestyle, namely that it leads to a higher risk of disease. “U-M may as well force taxpayers to pay for teaching students how to play Russian Roulette,” he said.

The AFA writes on its web site that it does not hate homosexuals, for “the same Holy Bible that calls us to reject sin, calls us to love our neighbor. It is that love that motivates us to expose the misrepresentation of the radical homosexual agenda and stop its spread through our culture.”

However, the English Department’s director of undergraduate studies, John Whittier-Ferguson, has expressed his unwavering support for the class. “I place this course in a fairly long line of distinguished courses, offered at colleges and universities around the country, that have focused on matters of culture and identity over the past 30 years,” he stated. “We would be remiss as an institution that hopes to produce reflective and socially responsible graduates if we were not, at a number of different points in our curriculum, considering issues of sexual orientation.”

But Glenn and other critics believe that Halperin’s intent is not just to teach students about the “gay lifestyle,” but to initiate students into said lifestyle. The course description “openly admits its purpose is to recruit and ‘initiate’ teenagers into the homosexual lifestyle,” he said.

Whittier-Ferguson finds it “profoundly disrespectful of our students to imagine that their own identities and their own minds are so poorly formed and so much at the whim of a professor’s intervention that an upper-level English course could affect something as fundamental as a person’s sexual orientation,” he said.

He believes that the AFA has misinterpreted the meaning of the word “initiation.” “Professor Halperin refers to the phenomenon whereby an individual comes to feel him or herself part of a group, a collective, rather than simply an individual. … Professor Halperin plans to study the forms of initiation associated with male homosexuality.”

Halperin says he has no plans to “convert” straight students into homosexuals. “It’s absurd to suppose that I’m possessed of superhuman powers to make human beings act against their wills,” he said.

Glenn feels that Halperin is trying to change the meaning of what he originally said. “It should not be surprising that, under the glare of the public spotlight, he now denies what he initially admitted in plain English in the course description, when he obviously didn’t expect to be held accountable to the taxpayers he expects to foot the bill for his propaganda,” he said.

“When an English professor starts parsing the meaning of the words he himself used in the course description, it begs comparison to that pathetically lame claim that the truth depends on what the definition of the word ‘is’ is.”

Yet Halperin says that Glenn has never even contacted him to find out what his course will focus on, and is basing all his criticism off the description. “My impression is that the AFA is not interested in what I’m planning to teach, despite their opposition to my teaching it,” he said.

Halperin explained that is teaching a course dealing with gay lifestyle because he finds it “remarkable” that much of gay culture - for example, interior design and Hollywood movies - consists of works “created by straight people for straight people, which gay people have appropriated and reinterpreted for their own purposes.”

“The emergence of an open, uncensored, unencoded gay culture in the last thirty years has not diminished the gay appeal of these appropriated straight works,” he said. “I find this an interesting and somewhat puzzling phenomenon, and that’s why I’ve decided to teach a course about it, in the hope of understanding it better.”

His course has nothing to do with the question of what determines sexual orientation, he said.

Critics point out that in teaching a course that plans to examine a number of “gay” cultural artifacts - which the course description lists as “Hollywood movies, grand opera, Broadway musicals, and other works of classical and popular music, as well as camp, diva-worship, drag, muscle culture, style, fashion, and interior design” - Halperin is promoting stereotypes that paint a very one-dimensional picture of gays.

In addition, some question why this course is taught in the English department, when it might be better suited to the Sociology department, or even Cultural Anthropology. Halperin explains that, in addition to his appointment being in the English department - so that is where he must teach the course - “the topic is designed to serve as a point of departure for the reading and analysis of a range of literary works, literary criticism, and cultural theory.”

University Provost Nancy Cantor, in a written statement, said that “We are completely in support of Professor Halperin’s course and of his freedom to teach this course as he constructed it.”

However, two regents, Daniel Horning (R - Grand Haven) and David Brandon (R - Ann Arbor) have both expressed their disapproval of the course. “This course crosses the line,” said Horning. “I bear fiscal responsibility to the people of Michigan for the university’s expenditure of their tax dollars, and I consider it fiscally irresponsible for a public entity to spend tax dollars on such subject matter.”

When asked what he would tell someone who feels that homosexuality is an immoral lifestyle, and a public university has no place in teaching this type of course, Halperin responded that he would “urge that person to make the most strenuous and intellectually compelling arguments that he or she is capable of making, in order to persuade me and my colleagues, who have the responsibility for determining the curriculum, that we are mistaken in offering this type of course.”

Glenn responds that the AFA rejects forcing taxpayers to fund a class “whose stated purpose is to legitimize, encourage, even initiate students into a lifestyle of homosexual behavior that is (1) illegal under state criminal law, (2) immoral according to the spiritual convictions of many of those forced to pay the bill, and (3) a serious threat to the health and lives of homosexuals, which further burdens taxpayers with the costs of addressing the public health consequences.”

Halperin says he will gladly engage in “reasoned argument” with anyone who wishes to discuss Halperin’s reasons for teaching the course.