Gay History: It's A Start
Walter Russell Mead reports that California is the first state to require textbooks have significant portions devoted to gay history. And he thinks this might be a good thing:
I know, I know. California is plain out of money. The entire educational system from preschool to the University of California is falling apart. The Supreme Court may force the prisons to release thousands of inmates. The state’s budget is a laughingstock and its constitution an international joke. Debt is out of control. Businesses are fleeing the state so fast that California’s neighbors are growing fat on the spoils. Surely whatever the merits of mandatory gay history lessons there might be a few higher priority items on the state’s to-do list.
But think of it this way: it’s a start. Who knows, next the state might require students to know something about American constitutional history, government finance, even some basic math. These days in California any serious effort to teach anybody anything deserves some respect.
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Re: Gay History: It's A Start
I generally love WRM, but that's some flawed logic. For a few years, I've interviewed high school seniors who apply to Dartmouth. The students are generally bright, and most are from private schools, but I've discovered that the few that hail from public schools really don't know much at all about history. Oh, they've heard about Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and FDR. And now presumably they'll learn about gay figures in history. But to assume that because the state is comfortable teaching items from its leftist agenda, they'll all of a sudden start teaching items of actual importance is silly.
Jun '11
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Well........I hope this means that they will make them learn Ancient Greek and study the culture of a a bunch of brilliant guys who were.......kinda homesexual.
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
It didn't occur to me that he might be serious! I just thought he was joking about the horrible state of education.
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Is it "gays in history" or "the history of gays?" Either way, it's a waste of education time.
Mar '11
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Humor or no, there is no silver lining to this cloud. Our long national suicide continues apace.
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
I'm sure it's the latter.
On another note, ever since the topic of gay history was brought up, I recalled learning about one gay figure in my European History class in high school, who I think was significant in the Boer War. I can't think of his name and it's really bothering me. Anyone have any idea who this would be?
Oct '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Presumably Kitchener. I could ask why the Boer War was in your European History class, and wonder why they would waste time on Kitchener's sexuality. But I won't.
May '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
The Left understands the importance of dominating public education in this country. Like Andrew Breitbart's and Ben Shapiro's crusade against the Left's dominance in popular culture, we need to take note of the Left's indoctrination attempts in public education. Teaching gay history does not strike me, prima facie, as a bad thing. However, we all know at the end of the day this is going to be a course on Christian persecution of homosexuality.
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
genferei
Presumably Kitchener. I could ask why the Boer War was in your European History class, and wonder why they would waste time on Kitchener's sexuality. But I won't. · Jul 15 at 9:33am
Oh, it was Cecil Rhodes I was thinking of! Apologies to Mollie for that tangent.
Jul '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Diane Ellis, Ed.
genferei
Presumably Kitchener. I could ask why the Boer War was in your European History class, and wonder why they would waste time on Kitchener's sexuality. But I won't. · Jul 15 at 9:33am
Oh, it was Cecil Rhodes I was thinking of! Apologies to Mollie for that tangent. · Jul 15 at 9:40am
Cecil Rhodes was gay? Mind = blown.
Aug '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
In principle I think there's nothing wrong with studying gay history, especially at the university level. I was actually shocked when a foreign friend who had written a serious book on gay history told me it would have been out of the question in his country to submit it as a dissertation. In my mind I don't see why not, as long as it's rigorous.
My problem with the California thing is that curricular affirmative action is usually not rigorous or candid. The curricular message is always to be positive, not warts and all.
A state-approved history textbook will begin with attempts to claim historical heroes like Lincoln on extremely dubious evidence. It will not talk about the now politically incorrect but historically critical distinction between tops and bottoms and the related dimensions of age and power. Nor will it devote attention to the role that rampant promiscuity played in the spread of AIDS and the opposition of many gay activists to public health efforts. Rather it's just going to be the familiar narrative of a group being stigmatized and mobilizing in protest marches and street theater to demand respect from society.Yawn.
Jul '11
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Anyone fighting this law will receive a trial similar to the one in "Breaker Morant". I mention this just to tie in two themes high up in my priorities lately.
The Colonial interests vs Boer autonomy and gay indoctrination of my children through the state.
May '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Wow, am I glad I teach in a private school. And talk about your bass-ackward priorities...NOW many be can teach constitutional history? What...which founders were gay?
Sheesh.
Am I teaching gay history in Sunday School when I cover Sodom and Gomorrah?
Jul '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Precisely. At least we have front row seats to our own cultural demise.
May '11
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Daniel Moynihan's article in American Spectator in 1993 established the proper term for this educational iniative. Defining Deviancy Down.
Aug '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
ps, on the dubious claims to historical heroes front, I'm predicting that there will also be rather simplistic attempts to describe David, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great as "gay" on the basis that they had intense friendships that were rumored to have been homosexual love affairs (David with Jonathan, Caesar with King Nicomedes IV, Alexander with Hephaestion) while overlooking that there is ironclad evidence that all three of these guys were prodigious womanizers and thus even if they dabbled with men it wouldn't have been enough to qualify them for a gay softball team.
Jul '11
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
anon_academic
History has been rewritten in our schools and this will not only be an indoctrination but severely revisionist. "Four score and seven years ago....Hey Ulysses was that a wink? Oh I'm sorry, I thought we had a moment.....Our Founding Fathers set forth"
You are absolutely correct that rampant bathhouse immorality will be ignored as the major exponential rise in HIV. Nor will history show the efforts of the gay lobby to give this the first disease with rights.
Oddly enough, back in the early 90's in the hospitals when some people refused being tested yet were severely sick and taking up time....we ordered CD4 counts to establish the diagnosis since only the HIV test had endless reams of lawyer advised forms.
Aug '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
DocJay:
You are absolutely correct that rampant bathhouse immorality will be ignored as the major exponential rise in HIV. Nor will history show the efforts of the gay lobby to give this the first disease with rights.
Totally agree. My research has some deep theoretical affinities with epidemiology and so I was recently reading through some of the literature on AIDS and came across several historians and the softer sort of sociologists claiming that bath houses had nothing to do with AIDS. Technically what they were doing was picking up on a lack of definitive proof in the public health literature and blowing that up into a denial but it still shocked me that anyone could seriously claim that anonymous sex clubs had nothing to do with the spread of an STD.
ps, for what it's worth, my aforementioned friend who wrote the gay history book (and is himself a gay activist) has no patience whatsoever for this kind of nonsense and devoted a fair amount of his book to criticizing it.
Edited on Jul 15, 2011 at 10:10amDec '10
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
Yeah...but they weren't really into the whole "consenting adults" thing, if you know what I mean.
Jul '11
Re: Gay History: It's A Start
I have to agree with Tommy. I can think of nothing less relevant to a conversation about the history of the world than the sexual orientation of it's major figures. I can't even begin to explain how much things like this bother me, what a waste of MY MONEY!
Look, I may be biased on this being from the suspect class in question, but do we really need another "Insert Minority Here" History Month added to our calendar? What about Greek History Month instead? Roman History Month? Common Law History Month?
Edited on Jul 15, 2011 at 10:16am