Q Magazine at Yale Spring 2011 by Q

CONTENTS 40

Q Magazine at Yale | Spring 2011

SPOTLIGHT Katie Koti, ART ’12

STILL IN FORMATION The lives of gay and lesbian cadets at the United States Service academies by Eric Randall and Ilana Seager

BODY OF WORK The artistic merits of BDSM by Adriel Saporta

also 5 CRITICALLY QUEER: Queercore and

punk feminism

38 CULTURE: Adele’s 21, Britney’s Femme

Fatale; Gay TV Teens

42 ESSAYS: Chika Ota on androgyny,

“Passage” Katie Koti 2009

Joshua Penny on reparative therapy, Jordan Rogers to the strange, older gaze

47 FROM THE ARCHIVES: Bill Dobbs

and Sex-Positive Activism at Yale

THE LOWDOWN Anna North and Edgar DiazMachado take on tops and bottoms in gay relationships

DAMIANA LAROUX: QUEEN OF BASS LIBRARY An interview with a drag queen

from the editor

P E O P L E . PA S S I O N . R E S U LT S .

“I tell you,” Martha Shelley wrote in 1970, “the function of a homosexual is to make you uneasy.”

Editor in chief Jake Conway Managing Editor Mara Dauphin Associate Editors Anna North Nicholle Lamartina Carmen Chambers

Publishers Alice Song Kevin Hu Associate Publishers Ryan Arnold Jonathan Setiabrata Jason Toups Art Director Joanne Zhang

Assistant Editors Jason La Lia Dun Antonio Sanchez Photography Eva Galvan Ric Hernandez McKay Nield

Creative Director Chika Ota Design Associates Paul Doyle Nicholas Leingang Grey de Grissom

We kindly thank our sponsors: Office of LGBTQ Resources Bruce L. Cohen ’83 Fund Yale Gay and Lesbian Alumni Intercultural Affairs Council Joseph Slifka Center Council of Masters Creative and Performing Arts Award Yale University Department of History Pierson College Q Magazine at Yale is published once each semester of the academic year. It is edited by Yale College students. Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Two thousand copies of each issue are distributed to the Yale University campus. Subscriptions are available upon request. For subscription or advertising inquiries email business@qmagazineatyale.com. For letters to the editor email editor@qmagazineatyale.com or mail to Q Editor, PO Box 201689, New Haven, CT 06520. Q is printed by Lane Press, Inc., South Burlington, VT 05403. Q Magazine at Yale Spring 2011 Volume I, Issue II www.qmagazineatyale.com Twitter@yaleqmag Cover photo: Ric Hernandez Portrait: Jonathan Weinberg, Jacob Conway, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12”

This publication was made possible with the support of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, online at CampusProgress.org.

A mere few months before these words, police raided the Stonewall Inn and, in response, Shelley helped found the radical, anti-assimilationist Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Shelley’s was a more urgent time. Like many other emerging radical gay organizations, the GLF dovetailed with the politics of the New Left. Gay Liberation, activists believed, required a broader-based and more immediate challenge to institutions of power, one that encompassed concerns of class, racism and, most importantly, sexism. We have come a long way since then. The direct action politics, or zaps, of early gay radicals against homophobia on television and film have given way to positive portrayals of gay and lesbian life in the media on shows like “Glee” and “Modern Family.” Rather than threaten separation, as many GLF activists did, most gay people today recognize the benefits of integrating into urban life. Thanks to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” gays and lesbians can now serve openly and proudly in the United States armed services. For the first time in history, as a poll by ABC News and the Washington Post this past March has shown, a majority of Americans support marriage equality. Given these successes, such a visceral premise might not seem to capture the sentiments of the gay and lesbian community as it once did. But before we dismiss Shelley’s original challenge as a hollow appeal to shock, or merely an anachronism, we must remember those of us in the queer community still fighting for social recognition and legitimacy with her sort of urgency. The purpose of the cover photo of this second issue of Q, like Shelley’s words before it, is to make you uneasy. The photo is a drag queen who works here on campus. The photo might seem, strangely, both repulsive and enticing. In the genderfuck it portrays (a bearded man in makeup), it challenges common assumptions about gender. This is not to suggest drag is inherently subversive. While drag may call the naturalness and originality of heterosexuality into question through its parody of gender norms, it may also serve to reinforce the hegemony of these norms through hyperbole. Judith Butler makes just this point in her reflections on “Paris is Burning,” Jennie Livingston’s ’83 1990 documentary of Black and Latino gay and transgender Harlem drag balls, when she argues drag is an “ambivalent performance.” Surely, we can see this ambivalence in the photo: it is at once pitiful and fierce. The photo, then, merely reflects the “regimes of power” that implicate him. Gender looms over us with the highest authority. Gender-power is the doctor’s declaration at birth. It is the airport bathroom. It is the clothes we put on in the morning, the pronouns we use, the sexual roles we assume. Gender-power is connected to the state, the family, our most intimate relationships, our social position, health care and reproduction, to name just a few. It does not derive from a universal anatomical law; it is multiple, piecemeal and local. It is everywhere. Gender categories are so ingrained in our every social understanding we all too often fail to see that gender is not a fait accompli, not necessarily a function of biology, but a construction of cultural and social norms. It is something performed, a “kind of imitation,” to use Butler’s formulation, “for which there is no original.” Gender norms hold such sway over us that our greatest fear is failing to meet their arbitrary expectations. Our discomfort with gender is testament to how much we idealize a male-female binary. Take the DKE incident of last semester, for example. The fraternity’s misogyny reflected not an empowered masculinity, but a threatened one; undue criticism of members of the Women’s Center as radical, aggressive and gender-obsessed issued from a fear of assertive femininity. We are remiss in ignoring the ways in which our oppression as queers is linked to the oppression of women. If the recent Title IX claims against the University are any indication, sexism has become an accepted part of campus life. While it might go without saying lesbians are targets of straight male patriarchy, perhaps less immediately apparent is how the oppression of women implicates gay men. The greatest well of stigma of gay men issues from the presumption of gay male effeminacy. Despite all this, the queer community has still not fully embraced gender non-conformity. The abandonment of the transgender community by some mainstream gay and lesbian rights organizations — the greatest failure of the gay movement of our time — is only one example of this aversion and further proof of gender’s terrifying hold over our everyday lives. So, as this issue sets out to do, when going out into the world, make a little gender trouble. Indeed, your liberation depends on it.

Jake Conway

You can watch history in the making, or you can be it.

Success is a team sport. There are those who play, and those who change the way the game is played. At Bain & Company we don't just pay lip service to supporting the GLBT community. We take concrete action to ensure GLBT employees throughout our family are embraced and can prosper. That’s why the Human Rights Campaign awards us a perfect score on their Corporate Equality Index, year after year. In 2010, Bain & Company became the first global consulting firm and one of only a handful of businesses to reimburse GLBT employees for federal taxes levied on same sex domestic partner benefits. We will continue to change the rules of the game.

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Punk rock has always existed more as a cultural artifact than a living, breathing music scene for me. I’m well-versed in its history and subgenres up to the mid-90s, at which point the truly transgressive core of the early punk I’ve listened to and studied with the care of an archivist gives way to disappointing lived experience. The punk I knew and interacted with in middle and high school was whiny and watered-down (think Green Day, NOFX, or anyone you might have seen at Warped Tour between 2002 and 2006), and so I retreated into its first and second waves. Among my favorite of the early bands was 1970s punk mainstay X-Ray Spex. In March of this year, Poly Styrene, former front woman and one of the genre’s earliest feminists, released Generation Indigo, her first attempt at a solo record. The news prompted me to look back over punk’s history to try to reconcile the early genre I’d learned through websites and compilation disks with its more contemporary iterations. In my search, I found writer and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, at once a founding father and prodigal son. Together with friend G.B. Jones, LaBruce wrote and published J.D.s, the foundational fanzine of the early queercore movement, a subculture that defined itself in opposition to the increasingly misogynistic and homophobic punk scene of its day. Though musically diverse, queercore bands and their fans rallied around their shared alienation from both contemporary punk and existing LGBT communi-

ties, which they rejected as restrictive and exclusionary. This frustration was vented onstage and off, with self-published zines functioning as a central forum for carrying queercore out of the concert venue and into the larger punk community. In 1989, LaBruce and Jones published an unofficial manifesto in the influential zine Maximumrocknroll titled “Don’t Be Gay; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Fuck Punk Up the Ass.” The essay’s great discovery was the ways misogyny, homophobia and mainstream LGBT identity politics have colluded in the oppression of women and queers alike. For LaBruce and Jones, feminism and queer activism were aimed at the same target. The authors revealed heterosexism and gender bias to be symptoms of the same problem: “As a movement, [punk] begins to imitate a repressive society, one that abhors homosexuality and insists on heterosexual coupling, an entrenched institution, as it exists, that empowers the male as hypermasculine aggressor while debilitating the female as victim.” In the narrow and prescriptive punk scene of the late 1980s, women and queers converged at the margins, both finding themselves subject to the same inequity and asking the same questions about the people and systems behind it. Both wore the wrong clothes and spoke the wrong language; both had (or sought out) the wrong kind of relationships and the wrong kind of sex. In the pages of J.D.s, LaBruce and Jones followed nude male centerfolds and lesbian erotic cartoons with essays, song lyrics and calls to action that reached beyond the immediate punk scene to decry the larger repressive society it had begun to resemble far too closely. Though it catered mainly to queer punks, J.D.s advocated a much more inclusive and

ambitious politics — in issue five, the publishers (collectively known as The New Lavender Panthers) insisted: “Homosexuals, old people, disillusioned radicals, and unloved children: that’s who J.D.s is made for.” Intolerance was so routine in punk that for a woman or queer to retreat silently into the woodwork was itself an act of resistance. It wasn’t until LaBruce, a gay man, and Jones, a woman, acknowledged the silent resistance of the other that they found a common voice. As queercore coalesced into a distinct scene with its own culture and values, it revived the radical openness and nonconformity — the fundamental queerness — that had so excitingly defined punk’s first wave. At the same time third-wave feminists were struggling to reconceptualize gender and queer theorists were fighting their way into academia. LaBruce and Jones challenged their readers’ assumptions of what sexuality and gender identity looked like and how they should function socially. By calling queer punks’ attention to their own marginalization and casting the enemy as that which held power at the expense of those who could not meet its demands, the writers of J.D.s got to the core of contemporary queer experience. The range of feminist and queer thought may be broad and contradictory, but still, 20 years later, it lives in the margins. We may never reach consensus on what tools are being used against us (and I’m glad of it, because consensus too often breeds or is born of complacency), but by now we can agree on where they’re coming from and who’s wielding them. The musician in me misses that first wave of queercore, while the activist — the feminist, the queer — hopes we can retain its revolutionary intersectional promise. QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

still in formation

United states Air Force Academy cadet Chapel Colorado Springs, Colorado

The Lives of Gay and Lesbian Cadets at the United States Service Academies Eric Randall and Ilana Seager 6

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This past year, Ben, a cadet at the Air Force Academy, began seeing more of his classmate Tania. About three months ago, the two were chatting in Tania’s dorm room, and Ben made an admission. “Hey, I really like you,” Ben said. As a woman at a school with an overwhelmingly male student body, Tania had likely encountered this situation before. But she quickly replied to Ben with a confession of her own. “It’ll never work out between us,” she told him, “I’m a lesbian.” At a U.S. Service academy where “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) is law, Tania made a shocking and risky move. (Because this article will go to press before the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” goes into effect, names of cadets have been changed to protect them.) Since 1994, when President Clinton lost his fight to repeal a WWII-era law banning gay, lesbian and bisexual citizens from serving in the military, his compromise — “don’t ask, don’t tell” — has required them to remain silent about their sexual orientation. Since the policy’s introduction, the military has discharged over 13,000 troops for violating it, 261 of them in 2010 alone. In coming out, Tania took a leap of faith Ben would keep her secret. In fact, Tania’s trust gave Ben the confidence to reveal something he’d never told any of his fellow cadets: he has sex with men. The United States Military Academy Though Ben was comfortable West Point, New York The student body, or Corps with this side of his identity, he of Cadets, of West Point never brought it with him to school. numbers 4,400

Now Tania was able to introduce him to a small network of gay classmates who had confided in each other after arriving at the academy. Ben and Tania form by no means the first or the only community of gay cadets at a United States Service academy, and their luck in finding one another should not discount the larger culture of repression bred under the policy dictating their conduct at school. But the many quiet friendships between gay peers and their allies that have formed in recent years indicate a growing tolerance among members of our generation enrolled in military schools. While gay, lesbian and bisexual* cadets said they do not expect the upcoming repeal of the policy to create an immediate culture of openness and tolerance, they predict much of the military’s next generation will be ready to accept queer service members. Ben wanted to go to the Air Force Academy long before he started questioning his sexuality. He grew up in the Philippines for 11 years, but when his mother passed away, his father, a U.S. Air Force veteran, moved him to America. He toured the Air Force Academy campus in his sophomore year of high school and knew it felt right. In his senior year, he moved out of the Catholic school system into a public high school in Colorado, where he began questioning his sexuality. One day while he was working at his school library, a classmate invited him to join the men’s swim team. After practice one afternoon, the friend offered him a ride home but instead drove to his own house. Parked in the driveway, the friend confessed his attraction to him. That was the first time Ben had sex with a guy. Ben continued experimenting with men throughout that year, but he was determined not to let this stop him from joining the military. Ben wasn’t the only high school student who weighed family tradition and a sense of patriotic duty more heavily than sexual orientation when choosing a school. Samantha, now a second-year cadet at the Coast Guard Academy, was president of her high school’s gay-straight alliance and went into the college application process without any doubt she was interested in women. When her parents told her she would have to pay for her own college education if she wanted to “live that way,” she started to consider the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., which, like all service academies, fully funds its cadets. “I really like the mission of the Coast Guard Academy,” Samantha said by phone from New London this *Transgender individuals are still excluded from the military on the basis of a separate medical law.

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February. “I always wanted to do something that helps people every day.” Eleanor, 19, now a second-year cadet at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., was set on the military even earlier. Her father, an Air Force veteran, raised her to put others before herself — a quality that prepared her for military service. “I wanted to make a difference,” she said. “If I had to sacrifice some of my personal freedom, then I was okay with it.” She came out to a few friends in her junior year of high school and later took heart in the fall of her senior year when Barack Obama won the presidency that he would repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But by the time Eleanor, Ben, Tania and Samantha reported for basic training, no repeal had come. In President Obama’s first year in office, LGBT issues, including the repeal he had promised during his campaign, fell by the wayside as health care took center stage. When she reported for duty at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Katie Miller ’12 found hiding her earlier life as an openly gay high school student more difficult than she anticipated. She assumed the DADT policy would provide her with privacy and her classmates would not ask her about her romantic life. “Naturally, people just inquired about whether I left someone at home. And that’s when I started making up lies. At first I said, ‘No, I’m not seeing anyone,’ but that was the absolutely wrong decision to try to avoid inquiries and romantic approaches from male cadets. And then later on I would say I was in a relationship with a boyfriend named Chris — I was dating a girl named Kristen, so I played the gender pronoun game. And then it started becoming an active portrayal of someone I wasn’t. It wasn’t just a ‘live and let be’ sort of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ I needed to actively lie to protect myself.” Chase, 19, now in his second year at the Air Force Academy, noted he had an easier time keeping his sexuality private in his first few months. Basic training kept him so busy and physically exhausted he often didn’t think about the situation he’d put himself in until he lay in bed. When his new classmates shared sentiments about their significant others, he felt powerless to participate, despite having left his boyfriend at home when he came to the academy. Through freshman year, the pressure grew greater. Chase listened to his peers discuss the national debate over DADT and heard some classmates express vehement opposition to the policy’s repeal. While out on a run with a close female friend in his squadron, he broke down crying and came out to her. “She was really supportive,” he said. “We talked about how I could find people to talk to when I needed to that weren’t in my chain of command.” At Coast Guard, Samantha also looked for safe people to talk to about the stress she was feeling during her first year at the academy. During boot camp, she was ready to quit the academy altogether. She came out to the chaplain who, she was surprised to find, rather than turn her in, helped her cope with her anxiety

West Point Cadets at attention Many cadets are skeptical of calls for immediate reform now that DADT has been repealed given the military’s culture of conformity

and convinced her to stay. The chaplain was the first of several allies and gay peers Samantha would eventually find at the academy. Her meeting with the chaplain marked the beginning of her growing understanding that even in the repressive environment of military service, an underground of gay cadets and their supporters provided a safe space. “It’s an underground movement. There’s not a designated area to eat or team to join,” she said of the Coast Guard Academy culture. “Certain people know about each other, but the pockets aren’t fused together.” “I got lucky, and met a good group of people,” she added. Many lesbian cadets reported that they came together on sports teams. Because sports teams often travel to meet other teams, gay team members have used them to reach out to surrounding colleges for social activities and support, a number of cadets said. With romantic relationships between cadets at different academies, ties have strengthened, making gay life at the academies, particularly for women, centered around but not restricted to sports teams. Some teams even have reputations among the student body for attracting gay students. At Air Force, Eleanor went to a meeting for the rugby team. Within a couple of weeks, some teammates asked her directly if she was gay, and when she told them yes, they immediately took her under their wing. Katie said the West Point rugby team has become a safe space for lesbian cadets as well. During basic training, Katie’s “gaydar” alerted her to a fellow female cadet in her company she immediately knew was queer. Though the tightly scheduled life of the academy left little time to talk to friends, Katie found a quiet hour one Sunday to ask the cadet about her sexuality. “It was really risky, but it worked out okay,” she said. From there, the girls’ friendship developed. They both ended up joining the women’s rugby team, and while members of the team initially weren’t comfortable talking about sexuality, Katie and her friend eventually forged a comfortable community for themselves there. QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

The Internet is another mutual support network queer cadets use to connect with one another, though this avenue is sometimes barred. Eleanor said at the Air Force Academy she cannot access any LGBT-related websites. As a result, Facebook has become one of the strongest forms of communication LGBT cadets have, and undergraduate groups of gay cadets have formed on the site. OutServe, an underground network of actively serving LGBT service members created by an Airforce officer, went public in July 2010 and has since grown to include about 3,000 members, over 60 of whom are cadets from the Coast Guard Academy, Air Force Academy, Naval Academy and West Point. Within the organization, there is a chapter dedicated to the service academies that allows cadets to discuss issues such as the repeal of DADT. The chapter gives cadets a way to meet other LGBT cadets and servicemembers — and realize they are not alone anymore. Eleanor emphasized she had been lucky to stumble upon a group of friends that could support her at the Air Force Academy. Students who have yet to find other gay cadets would likely portray their experiences at the academy differently. Aside from these small wells of support, the more predictable culture of a military academy still reigns supreme. While most of the cadets interviewed said that many peers are as liberal on gay issues as our generation at large is, there are still a lot of cadets with strong anti-gay feelings. “Every single time I had to put up with a derogatory comment,” Katie said, “I could feel my teeth clenching. It became

LONDON - JUNE 25: A pride parade June 25, 2008 in London, UK. The British lifted the ban against gay and lesbian servicemembers in the armed forces on January 12, 2000.

Across the Pond and Into the Future As queer cadets in U.S. Service academies look forward to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” they might look to the United Kingdom as a model for the near future. Queer service members in Britain have just finished celebrating the tenth anniversary of open employment in the military.

The United Kingdom decriminalized male homosexuality in British civil law in 1967 but maintained it as a criminal offence in military law. It was only in 1994 that homosexuality finally ceased to be a criminal offence in the military, and even then investigations into soldiers’ private lives still continued and gay service members were still discharged from the army. The ban was finally lifted on January 12, 2000, when the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Germany ruled the policy violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The British Ministry of Defense argued that the negative attitudes that existed towards homosexuals among service members meant excluding lesbian, gay and bisexual people from serving openly was necessary for morale and cohesion (sound familiar?), but the ban was overturned, replaced by a new code of conduct that prohibited discrimination and harassment. Lieutenant Commander Mandy McBain of the Royal Navy, who established the first support network for LGBT personnel in the Naval Service, was a service member at the time of the repeal. While policies such as the mandatory annual Equality and Diversity training for all soldiers changed swiftly to include homosexual examples, the cultural shift after the ban was lifted was more gradual. “The ban was lifted and I don’t think many really noticed a change,” she said. “After all, the LGB people in the Navy had always been there. They were now just able to dedicate all of their efforts to their job, without worrying about being dismissed.”

One of the reasons little has changed after the repeal is the reluctance of lesbian, gay and bisexual service members like Mandy to come out. Many struggled to deal with the years of dishonesty the ban forced upon them and feared what might happen if they revealed their true identities to their peers. “I had to wrestle with my own conscience, knowing that I had lied to close friends and bosses I respected and worrying just how my deceit would be accepted,” Mandy said. “It sometimes felt like a risk that I was not willing to take.” Prior to the repeal, Mandy had told only a few of her colleagues about her sexuality because of an invasive policy that required service members to report anyone who they knew or suspected to be gay. Somewhat akin to a harsher version of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” commanding officers were strongly encouraged to “ask” and to follow up on any rumours of homosexuality by using heavily criticized investigation techniques that included hours of interrogation. Troops who confessed to being gay were usually discharged from the military. Mandy herself was interrogated by her commanding officer on suspicion of homosexuality, an experience she described as uncomfortable, especially given the two had worked together for years up until then. But, in the words of Dan Savage, it got better. After the ban was overturned, it became illegal to pressure a service member to come out and to discriminate against officers on the basis of their sexual orientation. When civil partnerships passed into law in 2004, the military immediately recognized the rights of samesex civil partners in military service to the same allowances and benefits as their married colleagues. In 2006, Royal Navy personnel marched in the London Pride Parade, and in 2009, the front cover of Soldier, the British Army’s monthly magazine, featured an openly gay soldier for the first time. The example of the U.K. military sheds light on what the United States can achieve now that “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been repealed and lends queer cadets at the academies hope for a more equal future. Now, to fully implement that repeal... Hattie Jones, editor of the University of Cambridge LGBT magazine [no definition], contributed reporting.

DADT is repealed

path to repeal >> 1950 President Harry S. Truman signs the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which allows for the stricter regulation of sexual behavior of service members and establishes discharge rules for homosexuals.

1982 President Ronald Reagan issues a defense directive stating homosexuality is incompatible with military service. The directive leads to the discharge of soldiers who engage in homosexual acts or state that they are homosexual or bisexual.

1989 Colonel Grethe Cammermeyer, Chief Nurse of the Washington State National Guard, reveals she is a lesbian during an interview. She is discharged shortly afterwards.

Source: Washington PostAT - Nov. 30, 2010 10 The Q MAGAZINE YALE spring 2011

1992 During his presidential campaign, Bill Clinton promises to allow all citizens to serve in the military regardless of sexual orientation.

1993 Adopted as a compromise between conservatives and the Clinton Administration, “don’t ask, don’t tell” is introduced. The policy stipulates service members cannot be asked about their sexual orientation but prohibits homosexual conduct.

1994 Colonel Grethe Cammermeyer wins job discrimination suit against the Army after being dismissed for acknowledging her homosexuality. She is reinstated in the National Guard in June of 1994, resuming her previous position as Chief Nurse.

1999 Twenty-one-yearold Private Barry L. Winchell of Kansas City, Mo., is killed after a barracks fight by fellow soldiers because he is gay. In response, First Lady Hillary Clinton publicly ackowledges the failure of the DADT policy and demands its repeal.

2006 Harvard and Yale lawyers file briefs challenging the Solomon Amendment, a 1996 federal law allowing the government to deny funding to universities that ban ROTC or military recruitment in opposition to DADT. The Supreme Court upholds the law in Rumsfeld v. FAIR.

2007 During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promises to end DADT in a Democratic presidential primary debate.

2010 July 22 Lieutenant Dan Choi, an Iraqi war veteran from Orange County, California is discharged from the New York Army a year after coming out on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Oct 12 Federal Judge Virginia Philips declares DADT unconstitutional and issues an injunction forbidding the military from enforcing it. The U.S. Department of Justice is given 60 days to appeal.

Oct 19 Lieutenant Dan Choi goes to a Times Square military recruitment center in New York City to reenlist, tweeting, “This is what makes America worth defending.”

Nov 30 Pentagon study concludes gays are a low risk to the ability and effectiveness of armed forces. Sixty-nine percent of 115,000 service members surveyed say they have already served with someone they believe to be gay.

Dec 18 Senate votes 65-31 to repeal DADT, putting an end to the seventeen-year ban on gays serving openly in the military.

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a struggle to be silent. I care very much about the military, but I realized that this was so wrong and that I wasn’t okay with it. I didn’t think I was going to be able to stomach this kind of cognitive dissonance that was emerging.” Katie, of course, famously decided to come out publicly via the “Rachel Maddow Show” in August 2010. Since then she has accepted a discharge from West Point, transferred to Yale and helped lead a national campaign for DADT’s repeal. Katie’s arrival at Yale coincided with a larger push for repeal among Democrats and activists. Despite Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) protests that not enough was known about the impact of the policy’s repeal on military morale and general function, a report published by the Pentagon in late November 2010 found overturning DADT had a very low risk of disrupting service. Though passage of a repeal looked unlikely heading into the November midterm elections, the lame duck Congress mustered enough bi5:25:44 PM partisan support to pass the repeal, which President Obama later signed into law on December 22, 2010. Though the repeal will not take effect for several months, gay cadets greeted it with understandable joy. (Because of a provision in the new law, the repeal cannot actually go into effect until the President, Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff attest in writing to the consistency of its implementation strategy with standards of military readiness and effectiveness.) Most of them were home on leave for winter break. Remembering the day she found out that the repeal had passed, Eleanor said she had to duck out of a family meal in order to respond with enthusiasm to a text message from a friend telling her the news. (Eleanor is not out to her family.) “I always felt like I was hiding,” she said. “Now it’s not open, but it’s less scary. The reality is definitely starting to strike us now.” Since the policy’s repeal, academies have sent out a rush of information to help students understand the changes they will face. At the Air Force Academy, students received an email listing the top

ten things Air Force cadets need to know about the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The list establishes that commanders should not ask students about their sexual orientation, and that students face no repercussions should a commanding officer find out they are involved with someone of the same sex. The list also confirms that gay, lesbian and bisexual Airmen and -women have equal opportunity for service and protects them from harassment. While gay cadets welcome the repeal, many of them say they will still be cautious about coming out to others at the academy. Certainly, a cultural shift toward total acceptance will take longer than a few months. “Most people are not going to jump out of the closet,” Eleanor predicted. “People will feel the waters out a bit. There are some people at this school who don’t know they know gay people.” Ben and Katie both mentioned that commanding officers might still exercise subtle discrimination when considering service members for promotions. “I’ve talked about this with my gay friends,” he said. “Not knowing how it’d affect our career, it’d be best not to make it obvious, but as far as our personal lives it would get rid of that anxiety and fear of being found out.” Katie said ultimately it is the bravery of gay cadets that will change the attitudes of their colleagues and their commanding officers. Despite the communities of peers and culture of tolerance Eleanor, Ben, Chase, Tania and Samantha have found — even with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” behind them — it doesn’t seem likely they will be charging down the halls of the academies with rainbow flags. “The military is a culture of conformity, at its essence,” Katie said. “I don’t know if [the older generation will] ever change their minds toward gays. But the younger generation I think will be much more conducive.” As students at military academies learn in the coming years that they have been serving alongside gay peers, hopefully they will help eliminate discrimination in the U.S. military for good.

CT S LEGENDARY DANCE PARTY ALWAYS 18+ ~ ALWAYS OPEN TIL 4 A.M. OR LATER CORNER OF CHURCH AND CROWN STREETS NEW HAVEN, CT 203.498.CITI Gotham Citi Cafe VISIT US ONLINE: www.gothamciticafe.com PART OF THE TITAN ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

DAMIANA LAROUX An interview with the QUEEN

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OF BASS LIBRARY

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From six to two in the morning, Sunday through Thursday, Damiana LaRoux reigns supreme over Bass Library with sex appeal and fierce wit. She’s both brash and demure, playful and serious, George, Damiana — just a regular guy in a dress. Underneath it all, Damiana shows us what it really means to be honest. In this exclusive interview, Q gets up-close with her highness, himself. INTERVIEW BY JAKE CONWAY PHOTOGRAPHS BY RIC HERNANDEZ

JC: Yalies may not know they are in the midst of royalty when they check out of the library. Can you introduce yourself to us? Damiana: Hi. I’m Damiana. George. I’m 42. I was born in New Haven at St. Raphael’s Hospital. I lived with my mom and brothers on Saltonstall Avenue in Fair Haven. Now I live in East Haven right over the bridge. I work as a security officer in Bass and Sterling. I’m the guy you see most of the time late into the wee hours. I’ve been here almost four years full-time. JC: When did you start performing drag? Damiana: I really don’t know. I started doing drag when I was underage. I’d sneak into bars when I was nineteen. The only shows I would do were once in a while. I’d jump up when they had open mikes. I thought I was kick-ass. I didn’t bring wigs because I had long hair. So I foofed my hair, had little button earrings and old lady dresses with a spaghetti strap belt. I thought I looked great. It was horrible. I started professionally in 2000. That’s when I became Damiana full-time. JC: Can you tell us about Damiana? What kind of drag does she do? Damiana: A lot of queens are bigger than life, and I’m bigger 16

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than that. If you’re going to be loud, I’m going to be just a little bit louder. If you’re going to be rude, I’ll be a little ruder. I can do anything you can do better. Damiana’s brash and gaudy. She’s campy, dirty, funny, a stupid drag whore, really. Pretty much anything for a dollar. Anything legal for a dollar. I don’t do ballads. Very rarely do Top 40. And if I do, I make it silly. A lot of other queens don’t do that. They come out, do their Celine Dion and pound their chest once and then get off stage. My tackiness works for me. JC: Why? Damiana: It’s the easiest to pull off. I don’t have to worry about being super pretty. I don’t have to worry ‘Oh my god, are my boobs showing?’ because if they show, then I just pull them out, pat the sweat on my forehead with them and stick them back in. JC: Where do you perform? How often do you have shows? Damiana: All over the state. At 168 York Street Cafe, Robin Banks has a show; we do that every second Saturday of the month, but with the Imperial Court we go all over the state to raise money for different charities all year long. With the Court, there are usually 12 or 13 shows a year, not counting coronation. JC: Are you paid to perform? How do you make money? Damiana: In the Imperial Court, we don’t get paid. All the money raised goes to charity. With the Robin Banks show, it depends on a head count and how many girls are there that night performing.

Sometimes there’s three, sometimes there’s four. It varies. JC: What is the Imperial Court? Damiana: It’s an international fundraising organization of drag queens. I think there are around 62 different chapters. Coronation every February is our biggest event of the year. We usually get $10,000 out of it. We just did a huge thing that was five chapters together for the Harvey Milk Foundation in Rhode Island. We often give to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and Mid Fairfield AIDS project. My year as Empress, we raised $27,000, the most a Connecticut Court has ever raised. JC: You were Empress of the Court? When was that? Damiana: In 2009 I was elected Empress. It was kind of a shock because I’m the one they’re always scolding, “Be more ladylike,” “Don’t burp,” “Keep your legs closed,” “Don’t wear things that show your snooch.” I’m a 300-pound man in a dress. That’s my shtick. And they always thought I’d do something to embarrass the Court. And I didn’t. I’m with the Court to do what the Court

needs to get done: to raise money. I just don’t have a stick up my ass. I wasn’t in it for the crown. A lot of people are. JC: Why did they choose you? Damiana: I don’t know. I really don’t. I was running against a sure fix model drag queen: thin, perfect hair all the time. She plays the game properly, and I break rules. I don’t wear nails, which is actually in our bylaws. You have to either wear nails or gloves. And I got crowned with no nails and no gloves, and now it set precedent and nobody else can get yelled at for it. JC: It seems like a nice community. Damiana: Oh, it is. It’s great. I think it’s because everybody is in it for the same reason: to help other people. You know, most of us had some kind of trauma in our childhoods. JC: What were you like growing up? Damiana: In high school, I was the art fag weirdo. JC: When did you come out? Damiana: In ’86 or ’87, and I didn’t want to. Who the hell wants QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

ATION M R O F S N THE TRA

to come out? Especially, you know, in the mid-80s. It wasn’t a cool thing to do. Now it’s more acceptable, but back then you got beat down. My parents found love letters I was writing and they wanted to send me to a shrink because I was “broken.” “There’s something wrong with you. You have to go get fixed.” Like, you’re gonna send me to the vet and neuter me, really? JC: Did you have relationships with men in high school? Damiana: No. I fooled around a little bit in high school with some older guys, like the custodian and stuff, but I dated girls. They weren’t girly girls. They were usually the ones that got teased, didn’t put makeup on or were tomboys. JC: Are you seeing anyone now? Damiana: No. My last relationship was with a female-to-male transgender that did not have bottom surgery. That was over a year, and that was good. But then our jobs made it too hard to take time off so we broke up. We’re still good friends. I’m 18

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single now. JC: What did you look like in high school? Damiana: I looked like this, but I had long shaggy hair. And then later I had a mohawk with barbie dolls slid into it. Every color of the rainbow you could possibly guess. Everything you can do to yourself except a real tattoo. Fake piercings, face tattoos, spandex, anything to look different to really piss off my mom. I was trying to piss everybody off. It was like my… JC: ...like your little rebellion? Damiana: Yeah. Having people look at you and pick on you because of stuff you specifically do is a lot better than just having them do it for no reason at all. I was sick of them just picking on me because they felt like it. I wanted to give them shit to pick on. JC: Were you ever bullied? Damiana: Horribly. Slammed into lockers. Stuffed into lockers. Duct taped. Beat up. Really anything you see on TV. The whole head-in-thetoilet thing really happens. Then there was a gang rape at 14. It was seven seniors from high school. You know when someone hates you and all of a sudden they’re nice to you and you’re like, “Maybe they finally came around and want to be my friend?” No, they just want to beat the shit out of you. JC: You mentioned the rape led you to consider taking your life. Was that in high school? Damiana: Yes. I was 14. I jumped out the window, second story, right onto my driveway and nothing happened. Not even a good cut. And I was pissed. So I said, alright, I’m not jumping anymore. It’s not going to work. Then I ate a big Clorox tablet from our swimming pool and I just got some blisters and a stomachache. That was about it. Didn’t even have to go to the emergency room. JC: I’m sorry.

Damiana: It’s fine now. I’m over it. It’s done. It’s helped me be who I am now. I don’t take shit from anybody now. And I’m assuming that’s why I started dressing funny. It was something I used to fight back. JC: Did you go to college? Damiana: No. I went for a year of art school and then flunked out. I’m still paying student loans on that crap. JC: You didn’t graduate from art school, but you’re a very skillful tailor. Damiana: I sew really well, actually. Almost everything I wear I make. All my stage gowns. It’s too hard for a big girl to find clothing that is runway or stage ready. Everything is like street rag. Or church wear. JC: Which costumes are you proudest of? Damiana: My pirate costume. Or my Wonder Woman costume. JC: Where do you get your materials? Damiana: All over the place. There is a place in Rocky Hill that sells fabric for $1.99 a yard. It’s amazing stuff from cheap crappy cotton calicoes to burn-out velvets. It just depends on what they get when they get it. JC: And what about makeup? Damiana: Cheap. My foundation is Celebre. It works like MAC, but it’s only $7. MAC is $40. And you get about half of what you get from Celebre. JC: Do you like to be photographed? Damiana: Yeah. Not as a boy though. I almost never come out looking good as a boy. Damiana’s shaped differently. She’s got huge hair. The bigger the hair, the bigger the boobs, the smaller the waist. I wear a waist cincher that bridges the gap between my top and my bottom piece. JC: It must be really hot when you have everything on. Damiana: Most of the time. But it’s actually really comfortable. I don’t wear anything tight. You know, nothing is so tight I can’t breathe or have a problem inhaling. It’s just literally there to keep my boobs in place. JC: Where did you get your boobs? Damiana: Ebay. JC: How much did you pay for them? Damiana: This pair I paid $80 for. My last pair I paid $50 for.

They’re silicone mastectomy forms for women who have had their breasts taken off for cancer. They’re like three-and-a-half pounds, which is nothing because a real boob can weigh up to 16 pounds, but they feel and look right. They jiggle and even have nipples. JC: What inspires your looks? Damiana: Nothing in particular. I do whatever pops into my head. I like exciting colors. Sometimes too much color. I like my face to be pretty and the rest of me can go a little crazy. Some people go glamazon. Some people go strict camp. I don’t know if I have a set style. JC: You must have had some sort of female icons when you were younger? Damiana: No. Really, no. I hate the Wizard of Oz. I hate Judy Garland. I hate Liza Minelli. Bad faggot, I know. I can’t stand them. Really can’t. I have nothing like that in my life. RuPaul would be the only one, and he is a more recent inspiration. JC: Is he your drag idol? Damiana: How could she not be? She’s stunning. Went from literally a poor black boy to a rich white woman. He’s completely in control of himself at all times. He has no fear of anything. What fun is going through life afraid of something? JC: Do you have any fears? Damiana: I don’t know that I have one. I really don’t. Because I’ve hit everything. JC: Do you think having a drag persona is strange? Damiana: Oh, yeah. It’s not street normal. For the gay community it’s not even completely normal. Many of them don’t like it. It’s an affront to their masculinity. When guys find out I’m a drag queen, that’s it. They want nothing else to do with me. As Damiana I get a lot more love. A lot more attention. Men who walk away from me in bars will walk right up to Damiana, kiss her on the cheek, love love. Same people. Same situation. Just I’m in a dress, I’m not in a dress. Obviously, though, I mean this in the context of a show or a bar; walking down the street as Damiana would probably be something completely different, which I’ve done. JC: What is that like? Damiana: It’s a lot of attention. Not always negative. I’ve had QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

LIFE N A H T R ING O E BIGGE R G A E S ’R N U E QUE . IF YO A LOT OF GER THAN THAT UST BIG TO BE J G N AND I’M I O G UD, I’M O L E B O T ER. D U O L T I B A LITTLE

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some weird looks and some, “What the fucks?” but nobody has ever accosted me. I’ve even gone to this straight country bar in Bristol in drag a couple of times, not on Halloween, and the men dance with me. JC: Do you ever think of yourself as a parody? Damiana: Oh, yeah! I don’t want to be a woman. I don’t even really want to be a drag queen. I want to be a caricature of a stereotypical woman. JC: What about that caricature appeals to you? Damiana: The freedom it allows. I get to be brash. I get to say almost anything I want to say without repercussions. I can get away with things. I get to raise money for a good cause. And be pretty doing it — well, as pretty as I can be. JC: Can you tell us a little bit about what it’s like to transform? What are you going through in your head? Damiana: It’s a getting rid of George. JC: What do you mean? Damiana: I generally don’t like me as much as I should. I mean, I’m happy with me…I’m not crazy about my weight anymore. I’ve come to terms with who I am as a boy. Damiana gives me a chance to become a better version of me. JC: Do you think of yourself as Damiana or George? Who do you identify with more? How do you parse the difference between the two? Damiana: George doesn’t get paid to put a dress on. Damiana does. Really, that’s it. Anything I think, I think as both of us. I answer to either name. Doesn’t really matter where I am or what I’m wearing. It’s a costume. It’s something I literally have to put on to be that character. So it’s me but better. You know, it’s me at fuller potential. JC: Are there any stereotypes about drag queens you wish to correct? Damiana: Yeah, we don’t all want to be women. Anybody who really thinks I’m a woman has something seriously wrong with them. Most of us can’t wait to get out of costume when the show is over. JC: Can drag queens recognize one another in street clothes? Is there some sort of unspoken visual code — “drag-dar,” like gaydar? Damiana: Yeah, you can tell if somebody is a drag queen. Their skin is overly pink because they moisturize and they shave. And when you shave for drag, you have to shave in like five different directions to really get it off. And that chaps your skin so you have to moisturize. Especially if you’re a club girl where performing two, three times a week is part of your job, you’re constantly shaving. Drag queens also have boyband eyebrows, too highly arched, too thin on the downturn or they just have the little tops and everything else is shaved off. JC: Do your colleagues know that you perform drag? What do they think? Damiana: Yes. Cookie has come to a performance. She’s completely different out of work. Let me tell you, a couple of drinks in her, and she was dancing with some lesbian. It was funny. Melissa came to a show too. Other than that, everybody is pretty

good with it. Even the big supervisor. JC: Do you like your job? Damiana: Oh, I love my job. Really all I have to do at work when I’m sitting at the desk is check your bags, check the dates on your books and make sure nothing you have shouldn’t be leaving the library. I walk around the building. Make sure there are no leaks, no cracks, no smoking, no eating. No eating. And occasionally no sex. I never know what you guys are going to do from one day to the next. I mean, I see the same bunch of kids every single night, and sometimes they’re grumpy, sometimes they’re sick, but they’re always nice to me. And they ask me personal questions. They actually come to me like I’m a counselor or something. I’m just a security officer! A lot of them think of me as an actual friend, and I like that. I’m very protective of them. JC: Does it ever stress you out when students are stressed out in the library? Damiana: It really does. Because I’m like, you came in looking really good and now your eyes are two inches lower than they should be, and they’re bloodshot. Really, go home for two hours! Like, you’re gonna pass out. Stop taking 5-Hour Energy drink. Take a nap and then come back. We’re open until two. Only some of them take my advice. JC: Have you ever run into hook-ups in the stacks? How many times would you say that’s happened? Damiana: To me, four. Two were in my very first month. What’s the deal with that? Do you get points for it or something? Why wouldn’t you do it someplace that locks that I can’t get into? I don’t know what’s supposed to happen, but I just kind of turn around, say, “Put your clothes back on, now!” and then I have the girl go one way and I have the guy wait until she’s down the elevator and then I have him go a different way. JC: You work in the library mostly at night. What do you do during the day? Damiana: I sleep. I fix things at home. I sew, I paint and I’ve been writing a book on the art of drag. It kind of stalled out though because “RuPaul’s Drag Race” came out and now everybody can physically see what to do on TV. I think I may do it anyway. JC: Do you see yourself doing drag forever? Is there a death of the drag queen? Damiana: When it stops being fun. Really. If I get into drag and I’m not having fun and I’m just going through the motions, it’s not worth it for me. JC: To be completely honest with you George, I found out you were a drag queen because someone showed me your website in jest and I was concerned. Damiana: People make fun of me and they don’t make fun of me. They love me. They hate me. At least now they hate me for who I am, instead of who they presume me to be. It’s something that I physically put out there and I knowingly do. I accept whatever happens. JC: It’s been an honor, Damiana. Thanks so much for speaking with us. Do you have anything you want to tell our readers before you leave? Damiana: Don’t eat in my library! QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

Tops & Bottoms

Anna North and Edgar Diaz-Machado photographs by: McKay Nield models: Kristina Marie Tremonti, Becky Poplowski, Grey de Grissom, Kirk Warner

The Lowdown:

QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

GUYS “So…which one of you is the man and which one of you is the woman?” I hate this question so much, I invariably want to snap back with something catty: “We’re both men, so…?” The former question has dogged us gay boys since Liberation. For those out there unfamiliar with the intricacies of gay male sexuality, especially when it comes to anal sex, it is easy to boil down our roles in bed to something more familiar. However, mapping the male-female binary onto the differences between gay tops and bottoms is problematic. First of all, we’re not men and women, males and females. We’re always both men who like men — that’s why we’re gay! The assumption that pairings of lovers must mirror the heteronormative ideal of a man and woman supports the idea that vaginal intercourse is the only way for people to have sex. It also supports the unfair assumption that maleness and masculinity are necessarily dominant in relationships. Let’s run through the vocabulary used when we talk about gay men’s sex. A “top” is the penetrative partner and the “bottom” is the receptive partner. Like other aspects of gender and sexuality, many gay men fall all over this spectrum — these are the “versatile” guys. There are some men, so-called “strict tops” and “power bottoms,” who are very much happy on either end of the spectrum. But it’s dangerous to assume there are only two types of gay men. That assumption reflects a politics of power equating penetration with masculinity and dominance. It is not uncommon to hear gay men hurl insults at each other based on their bottoming proclivities. Calling someone a “power bottom” or a “bossy bottom” as a slur implies bottoms are somehow less-than. No one’s ever offended when they’re called “such a top.” The fear of being “treated like a woman” is what fuels hatred of what gay men do. It’s as if being “treated like a woman” is the worst thing imaginable. Underpinning this top-bottom hierarchy is the reality that gay men’s sex lives are much too informed by heterosexual norms. Take, for example, thoughts around the idea of virginity. A bottom, like a woman, “loses” his virginity, while a top “takes” it. (And given our “promiscuity,” surely straight society would never think of a gay man who never bottoms as a model of chastity.) Heteronormative discourse has tainted how gay men talk about themselves and their sex lives. By borrowing a model of heterosexual relationships that upholds the man as the dominant, penetrative partner, we’re simply recycling tools that have held down women for centuries. It is as if for some gay men the ideal man is not gay at all, but a straight man who happens to fuck them. The internalized homophobia around this reflects a society that stigmatizes our effeminacy. Like it or not, in upholding the masculine, “straight-acting” strict top as an ideal of what it means to be a real man and who is attractive, we set ourselves up against a model of masculinity that has oppressed us for generations. Centuries of gender policing have held us down even when we’re pressed up against another naked man. This thinking needs to end. Why should heteronormative ideas of who has the power in bed or what constitutes a “real” man govern our sex lives? I challenge my fellow gay men 24

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to rethink sex. Rethink if you only want to top or bottom. Explore new ways of attaining pleasure through roles. Never topped? Try it, my friend. Never bottomed? Hop on — it’s a radical, beautiful thing.

GIRLS When asked about tops and bottoms in relationships between two women, the majority of students around campus replied with confused statements like, “So she’s the boy and you’re the girl?” Usually “top” means the dominant, penetrative partner to the submissive, receptive “bottom.” Of course, these definitions get a bit more complicated for woman-woman relationships, which don’t depend on one exclusively penetrative partner. Roles in relationships between women don’t necessarily rely on a butch-femme dynamic. In fact, such a distinction only serves to affirm maleness as the penetrative, and therefore dominant, ideal. Women can and should define their relationships independent of men. Some of us forego the desire for roles altogether, claiming they limit the flexibility and scope of queer. Rather than a self-affirming identification, labels can become prescriptive. And the lack of specificity is precisely queer’s appeal: queer emphasizes individual desire over sexand gender-specific descriptions. But it is equally close-minded to suggest all of us are totally versatile, when so many of us happily recognize the preferences in our play. Many girls do identify with roles in relationships — maybe, the “big spoon” or the one with the arm around her shoulder — which help us understand ourselves in different situations without assigning ourselves to fixed categories. But, when we talk about our sex lives, those who say simply, “I’m a top” or “I’m a bottom” are in the minority. You’re much more likely to hear, “I’m a power bottom,” “I’m a soft top,” or “It really depends on the partner.” Perhaps this is truer for us than for anyone. For us there is not necessarily a penetrative partner — unless one of us straps it on — so we are free to define top and bottom in any way we please. While most people assume “tops” and “bottoms” signal distinct roles, in reality the terms reflect a personality in bed more than an essential identity. We don’t have sex thinking, “This is what I’m supposed to do, and this is what she’s supposed to do” or “This is who I am.” We do what feels good in the moment. Sex roles are merely one way we navigate pleasure and power in our relationships. Pleasure is having another girl’s tongue between your legs, licking you until you come. It’s tasting another girl, getting turned on as you turn her on. Power is controlling her body, pinning her down and sensing her respond to your every touch. It is directing her to go down on you, knowing she wants you. Pleasure is having control — and the will to lose it completely. The roles, “top” and “bottom,” merely explain this dynamism in our sex lives. They don’t reflect our core. They change depending on the partner, our levels of experience, even the night. We don’t need a penis or a hard definition to know what someone means when they describe a hook-up as “super toppy.” But that doesn’t make her a dude either. QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

Ten tips for better oral sex 1. Do it like you mean it Enthusiasm is more important than technique. Let your partner know you’re thrilled to be eating them out. Use your words and actions to communicate you aren’t just doing them a favor. You are into it!

tops & bottoms by the numbers* Sexual Orientation (n = 91): Lesbian 8% gay 50%

2. Mix it up Licking, sucking, blowing, maybe even a gentle touch of teeth. Try getting as much in your mouth as you can and then switch to teasing licks with the tip of your tongue. Once they are close to orgasm, and you’re in a groove, stick with what’s working.

Exercise your right to pleasure.

Bisexual 20% Straight 12% queer 10%

3. Build the intensity

Starting out too strong can overwhelm the recipient so take a minute to warm ’em up. A warm hand is a friendly hello, then start gently with your mouth. As you both get more into it you can suck harder, lick more firmly and move faster.

4. Use more than your mouth Get your whole body involved. Use your hands to cup his balls or reach around a woman’s hips to press the area above the pubic bone. That’ll help expose her clit to your tongue-lashings. Fingers plus cunnilingus is amazing. Reaching up to squeeze a nipple or to slip a pinkie into a willing butt is also a great complement to oral and suits all genders.

Stay Sexy.

In a relationship, do you consider yourself to be (n = 54):

Top 20%

versatile 63%

Bottom 17%

5. Communicate “Does that feel good?” is straightforward. “Do you like the sucking or the licking better?” makes the receiver give some info. “What can I do for you?” if delivered right has a nice ring of willingness to it. Non-verbal cues like moans, thrusts, flushing and toes clenching are all signs you’re on the right track.

6. Breathe If you need to adjust positions or pause for breath, go ahead. It may break the flow for a moment, but it’s worth it to keep both of you feeling good. Building up to orgasm and then backing off and building up again leads to more intense O’s.

7. Have fun with flavors Flavored lubes can enhance the experience but avoid getting any sugary substances in the vag or using anything oily in combo with latex barriers.

8. Know your barrier basics

Top 16%

In bed, do you consider yourself to be (n = 92):

Enjoy 10% off with student ID.* *Va l i d i n s t ore s a n d on l i n e . C ou p on c od e : 4 0 4 1 1 E x p i re s : 7 .3 1 .2 0 1 1

versatile 64%

Bottom 20%

Check out our stimulating workshops and events! www. babel an d. com /even ts

Oral sex can be risky; the best protection is plastic wrap or latex dental dams on female-bodied people and condoms for males.

9. Kink it up Get fancy, add a finger vibe. It can add buzz in all the right places on anyone’s body.

10. Be receptive The person you’re with is working their little heart (and tongue) out, so let ’em know if they’re doing it right. Say it, scream it, buck it with your hips, but give that feedback!

Have you ever (n = 79):

Things to eat that may make you taste better: pineapple, parsley, celery, water. Things to avoid: asparagus!

Let Partner Top You 94%

Topped Partner 89% Had sex with more than one person at once 25% switched roles during sex 68%

Rachel Venning is the co-founder of Babeland and co-author of Moregasm: Babeland’s Guide to Mind-Blowing Sex

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*survey data based on 100 responses from undergraduates at Yale University

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Sex toys for a passionate world. BROOKLYN • 462 Bergen St, 718.638.3820 LES • 94 Rivington St, 212.375.1701 SOHO • 43 Mercer St, 212.966.2120 QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

BODY OF WORK

THE ARTISTIC MERITS OF BDSM

Ad r i

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illustratio

ns by A n d rew Sotiri

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“M

She is referring to the series of welts on Slavid’s backside Mistress Collette is creating with a single-tailed bullwhip. Slavid is leaning over a black sawhorse in the basement dungeon of La Domaine with his underpants around his ankles. His 60-year-old rump is bright red, having been hit for the past 10 minutes by a variety of different instruments: white paddle, whips, bare hand — all of which have been carefully selected by Mistress Collette. “Slavid is the type of sub who likes to be beaten bloody,” Master R explains to me, as the marks Mistress Collette’s flogging has left behind begin to rise. On my right, Master R and Blunt are seated next to me on a couch. His hand rests lightly on her crotch, and the two giggle together. Meanwhile, Mistress Collette runs her right hand gently over the canvas of Slavid’s buttocks. “See how they change over time?” Mistress Collette asks me. “Would you like to feel?” I politely decline. Back upstairs, seated around a dinner table, Mistress Collette tells me, “When you apply marks to someone, it’s done in an artistic way. There’s an aesthetic and sensibility.” She once bullwhipped a man 50 strokes. The slave later commented his back looked like the “delicate grass” from a Monet painting. “I never broke the skin,” Mistress Collette says proudly. “Each mark, skin reacts differently, and it’s beautiful to see them flush and change. At first it will be a flat red mark, then dark purple, then it will raise, and the bruise evolves: it changes from red, to purple, to yellow, to green.” La Domaine Esemar, founded 17 years ago, is “The World’s Oldest SM Training Chateau,” according to its website. It is a school and professional dungeon for Bondage, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism (BDSM), run by Head Master R and Head Mistress Collette. Masters, Mistresses, and slaves are hosted and trained to the highest standard at La Domaine (considering the weapons and psychological humiliation implicated in BDSM, it’s not unreasonable to consider the importance of proper training) and the establishment is one of the most prestigious dungeons in the business. La Domaine is tucked away in upstate New York, about halfway between the Berkshires and Albany. Driving into Stephentown is like stepping into a Walker Evans photograph. Among its shops and houses something endures — at once patriotic and 30

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istress is making a painting for you,” Blunt leans over to tell me.

Mistress Collette of La Domaine Esemar

melancholy. I pass by the Retreat of Pease Farm and Berry Patch, complete with horses, barn and silo; tractors in the backyard of a “gospel-loving church”; Ralph’s Auction House and Red Barn Antiques; a few funeral homes and a gun shop. Make a left at the Stephentown Community Church, and you’ll find yourself on a dirt path, along which runs a bubbling creek, leading you straight to La Domaine. After reading a draft of a paper entitled “Will the Real Dominatrix Please Stand Up: Artistic Purity and Professionalism in the S&M Dungeon” that my professor, Danielle Lindemann, wrote for publication in Sociological Forum, I became interested in the case for BDSM as an art form. I got in touch with several pro-dommes, one of whom had just finished her doctorate at Yale, and she suggested I speak with “the folks up at La Domaine.” Next thing I knew, I was driving north along I-91.

rom the outside, the La Domaine “château” is fairly understated: a worn cottage thickly surrounded by woods. The natural environment and the isolation it provides are important aspects of the training experience (they are often visited by black bears and cranes). The evening of my visit they serve rabbit and fresh trout caught in the nearby stream. When I arrive, I come upon a crooked old man with flowing white hair in the front yard. “Harry was superb today,” Master R tells us later. Blunt agrees: “He’s really grown a lot.” Harry helps Master R and Mistress Collette around the house in exchange for sessions in the dungeon. In his hair, a yellow flower is neatly tucked. He is shirtless, and a large belly button protrudes from his potbelly. Mistress Collette escorts me inside a dark yet homey space that serves as both a living and dining room. I meet Blunt, a Mistress in Training, hardly 20 years old. She’s a fresh-faced girl with a head full of luscious, maroon-colored curls. As long as she is in training and until she graduates a Mistress in her own right, she is referred to as “slave” by Master R and Mistress Collette. Her relationship with them is remarkably familial. “Should we show her the dungeon?” Master R asks. Master R’s long brown hair, turning grey and balding a bit on top, is pulled back into a low ponytail. He wears skintight black lamé leggings and a black long-sleeved shirt with the La Domaine logo printed on it. On the bridge of his nose rests a pair of large-framed, metal-rimmed prescription glasses. His face is kind and warm. Mistress Collette lets out a chilling soft laugh. Draped over the sawhorse is Slavid, a friend of Master R and Mistress Collette and La Domaine’s resident lawyer of sorts. Mistress Collete glides gracefully over to her wall of weapons where she contemplates her next flogging tool. She chooses two whips and returns to Slavid. She circles her arms rhythmically in front of her body, twirling the whips as a bandleader would batons, striking Slavid’s rear on each upswing. She steps back to look at the damage done to Slavid — perhaps as Pollock might have inspected a canvas after going

at it with splattering paint. Cocking her head to the side, pacing, she seems to be contemplating what type of hit she would like to try next, which cheek needs more work, which instrument hasn’t been used in a while. As she decides, she lays her left hand gently on Slavid’s back and slaps each butt cheek alternately with her right bare hand. She then leans over to whisper in Slavid’s ear. Although the specifics of the conversation cannot be heard, the two seem to be sharing a loving exchange of words. Slavid turns his head and smiles; Mistress Collette chuckles softly. She straightens, steps back, and continues her flogging. Meanwhile, Master R is staring at Mistress Collette with a mixture of pride and awe: “You’re looking at one of the top five dommes that I have ever seen.” Master R, over the course of his lifetime in the business, has seen, firsthand, the world’s best dominants. Mistress Collette is a beautiful woman, who looks much younger than the forty-three years she has behind her. Her thin, skeletal frame only emphasizes her striking features and angular face. She wears a red faux-snakeskin leather halter-top, cropped above her belly button, and a matching red pencil skirt, which ends right below the knee. Her eyeshadow is lavender and her brown hair is pinned up in a plastic alligator clip. As we speak, she ices her right wrist, which is incredibly sore from too much one-handed spanking the day before. She tells me that much of what appeals to her about being a pro-domme is finding herself, finally, on an equal level of power as the men she dominates: “Way before we had male patriarchy, we had female dominance.” Mistress Collette doesn’t consider herself a feminist. “Because I don’t like ‘isms,’ ” she explains. “Except for ‘jism,’ ” Blunt reminds her. Much of La Domaine’s ideology is based on the destruction of gender dichotomies. There is an immense amount of respect exchanged between dominant and submissive. “We don’t think subs are less than doms,” Master R tells me. “There’s an unstated equalization process there. I wouldn’t want to dominate someone who’s not my equal. And everyone’s equally entitled to use sex as sex, and use sex as metaphor. And metaphor has a huge amount to do with democratizing the world.” In fact, as Blunt adds, slaves “can dom most Mistresses and Masters from a submissive side. If you’re good enough.” Master R says some new clients will ask, “Are you bisexual? Pansexual?” “To us,” he tells me, “we do so many things that are beyond gender that those barriers break down. Gender fluid and role fluid. Some people come in saying ‘I’d never allow myself to be touched by a man,’ and then they change. We say: ‘It’s not the shape of the genitalia but the quality of the domination and submission.’ ” Mistress Collette tells me how she struggled often with her husband’s double standard toward sacrifices made for their relationship. He was an experienced submissive who agreed to be her slave for a number of years. They fell in love. But navigating a relationship can be difficult for a sex worker. As a lawyer trying to make partner at a firm, he kept his QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

BDSM life fairly quiet. Before she knew it, she was a Long Island housewife. It was difficult to make it into the city; she felt alone. “I just started to shut down, get really like, ‘Well, is this it? Is this all there is?’” Mistress Collette tells me. “I started to feel really dead.” “My home life was very oppressive and very abusive,” she confesses. She remembers promising herself that she would never let anybody hit her. “I just felt very, very clearly from the earliest age on that I was to be worshipped. I grappled with feeling like a victim, but at the same time I was very, very certain that I was a dominant person.” Mistress Collette’s husband took on a pro bono case (Barbara Nitke and NCSF v. Alberto Gonzales) against the Communications Decency Act of 1996, meant to regulate all things pornographic on the Internet. Barbara Nitke, a world-famous photographer, was cherry-picked for the case and argued she couldn’t upload her most extreme S&M photos for fear of prosecution. Mistress Collette’s husband lost the case in 2006. During the court proceedings, Mistress Collette’s husband needed to raise sufficient funds (the transcript cost alone was over $20,000). Stir-crazy at home in Long Island, Mistress Collette decided to throw a fundraiser, a silent auction in which works artists were afraid to publish, including pieces concerning couples of mixed race, different ages and even bestiality, were put up for sale. There, Master R first met Mistress Collette. He remembers she wore a stunning red dress and was surrounded by men. He could tell she was a dominant. He invited her and her husband to a gathering at La Domaine, where Mistress Collette tried cock-and-ball bondage. The next day Master R told her she had outshone all of the other dommes: “I had seen it and was transfixed.” Although her bondage technique was impressive, more memorable was the way in which she communicated so instinctively with her slaves. Mistress Collette was awestruck when Master R told her she should do professional domination.

orms of BDSM have been around for thousands of years. “At one time,” Master R notes, “there were temple priestesses, and they had huge sexual powers.” Women would bring their sons to these priestesses to initiate them into their sexualities. The priestesses would also see warriors recently returned from battle to restore them to health before sending 32

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them back to their wives. Master R talks to me about his theory on the origins of BDSM: “We all come from thousands of years of being pharaohs and slaves, all over the world. This is the basic nature of how we’ve been made up. We’re aggressive and submissive. It’s deeply imprinted on our genes and cultural patterns. There’s a deep psychological ten thousand years at play here.” BDSM goes far beyond a sexual fetish. As a slave and as a dominant, it’s possible to understand further what you are and are not capable of; what you do and do not want to tolerate. You understand, more thoroughly, the intricacies of your emotional state of being, and the delicate relationship between mind and body. The practice of BDSM requires an immense amount of psychological awareness and emotional delicacy — only truly attainable by professionals. Much of what separates a well-trained dominant from one who is untrained is the former’s capacity as a therapist of sorts. The relationship between dominant and submissive should be one of release. Mistress Collette explains: “The intent is that you’re going to open yourself up and trust someone, and they’ll cherish that and revel in your openness, and you’re going to allow yourself to be taken. It’s not this denigration that happens, but you get a glimpse of all that you are and what you could be. People say things to me that they don’t say to anyone else on the planet. I’m privy to complex psychological insight that people rarely have.” “People gain so much self-confidence, and you might not expect that.” Slavid is speaking from experience. “I love when you tell slaves, ‘You don’t let anyone else abuse you except for us!’” Blunt tells Mistress Collette. “That’s one of the huge values of being a slave,” Mistress Collette explains to me. “You understand where you can have control in being victimized in the outer world.” A minister who spent his entire career training others to be successful counselors once told Mistress Collette she was one of two people he had met in his life who had such genuine care and concern. She tells me about a firefighter she saw at a strip club in Albany who had been horribly disfigured in 9/11: “It was easy to see he was shunned by probably his wife. No one wanted to touch him. Religion doesn’t pick up the slack with these people. Their families can’t handle them. They feel like they’re going out of their mind. Who can serve them? Who has the courage?” Any form of art must imply a certain amount of compassion, otherwise it lacks impact, and it is exactly this that makes Mistress Collette’s work so compelling. While she was flogging Slavid — even when I spoke with her over the phone for the first time — Mistress Collette demonstrated an astonishing gentleness considering the activity. One cannot help but feel comfortable around her almost immediately. Slavid, who works with Mistress Collette frequently, can attest to her sensitivity and warmth: “Collette is so good. She really gives people that reassurance and compassion, and puts people at ease initially. And when people come here for the first time, they’re nervous and feel like something is wrong with them.”

After every session, Mistress Collette hugs and caresses her slaves — something I see her do with both Blunt and Slavid. “I find that many people have not been touched in a very long time,” she says sadly. “Don’t be misled,” Slavid promises me, however. “Collette can be wonderfully sadistic.”

hklovsky, one of the leading advocates of Russian Formalism, writes in his Art as Technique that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. [T]he process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.” Master R and Mistress Collette discuss repeatedly the importance of a heightened awareness between dominant and slave. “We stress here that we’re all beasts,” he said. “We’ve been isolated from our senses. But if you don’t use all your senses fully, then your intellect has nothing to ground it. We tell people all the time here to sniff. When in a session, you should be able to tell me what that slave is feeling by the sniff. We should be able to tell, but we can’t, because we’re cut off from it. In New York, the dommes blare music, but here we want to hear the softest breath. The intellect should feed on the senses, but society now has it the other way. Art succeeds, BDSM succeeds, when your senses take a primary importance to our intellect.” Master R continues, “We see people locked so much in their bodies that when you touch their skin, they don’t even feel your touch.” Shklovsky would agree with Master R’s criticism of this habituation of the senses. Shklovsky writes, “If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with

us. And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception.” Mistress Collette’s explanation echoes Shklovsky’s: “Artists are trained in ultra-perception and they translate that in ways that can be digested by others to help bring them to that place of greater perception. When someone, a lawyer, the Rolex, the three-piece suit, are in front of me, they’re naked, and I see them as a being. There’s something greater than their job. There’s so much more.” “I think one of the things an artist does is practice the art of transformation,” Mistress Collette continues. “So, it’s all about completely inducing a whole other mood, state of consciousness, another level of awareness. Art opens up new doors.” Like BDSM, the importance of art to our everyday lives is its ability to repair our senses. All forms of art maximize perception, but the public’s attitude changes once the canvas involves the human body. Even method acting is criticized for this very reason. Mistress Collette explains that a welltrained dominant should be able to use all of her senses to judge the emotional and psychological state of her slave.

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The sex dungeon at La Domaine Esemar has over 2,000 feet of rope for bondage, among other kinky delights

As a result of this standard for La Domaine’s Mistresses and Masters, they do not use “safe words.” A dominant should know when to stop. No dominant ever wants to take a slave farther than he or she wishes to go. It’s the worst feeling in the world, Mistress Collette tells me — a fact I readily believe. She describes the process in which she first gets to know a slave: “The first thing I’ll do is put someone in slave posture. I’ll teach them posture and how they should address me. I go through that, and I note how they respond, their slave energy. Does it get them aroused? Are they very connected? The tone of their voice, is it distant or dripping with lust? These are all the mental notes that I make.” Other comparisons can be made between certain aspects of BDSM and other artistic mediums. Master R referred to “the physical grace that resembles ballet” — which Mistress Collette demonstrated in the elaborate spinning of her arms while flogging Slavid. Certainly the instruments used in BDSM are as varied as those used in any other form of art. A strong association can be made between the role-playing involved in BDSM and the theater. “We play with archetypes,” Mistress Collette tells me. “I’m calling up every archetype resonating between me and the other person. Because that’s what’s coming up in them. I understand that I stand in as a primal archetype in their DNA.” As Blunt puts it, “It’s theater without acting.” A performance takes place in the dungeon, but all of the gestures are bred in the bone. For Mistress Collette, the medium of the human body in the context of the dungeon is more truthful: “In paintings, I feel it’s very furtively danced around. People look at a Poussin orgy and no one recognizes it for what it is. No, let’s name it! Let me take your cock and transform it into the ‘canon’!” Even music is created in the dungeon. “I love the sound of 34

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the implements, the sound of the smack on the ass,” Mistress Collette passionately confesses. Master R tells me about a time when a composer friend came over to La Domaine. Mistress Collette had just bought some new handmade bamboo canes, which Master R took out for me to take a look at myself. They were certainly beautiful specimens that, because of how they were cured, flexed easily, whistling as they swung through the air. As the composer tested the canes, Master R, in the corner with his guitar, noticed that one cane whistled a D note. They tried the others and found that they were F-sharp and A: all three notes came together to make a perfect D major chord. Master R was amazed: “The canes were perfectly in tune, as if some cosmic tuning fork!”

he door that opens to the steps leading down to the basement dungeon was right off of the living room. Throughout our conversation, Master R and Blunt excuse themselves to the dungeon to take care of something or other, and occasionally leave the door seductively open a crack, so all that escapes is an emanating warm, red glow from below. When Slavid finally suggests I take a look myself, Master R lets me lead the way. Warm air, carrying the soothing scent of cedar, hits my face. I climb further into the depths, anxious to see the extent of the hidden playground. Before I can enter the space, Master R asks me to lean against the cross that stands at the bottom of the stairs with my arms out to my side. I look up the stairs I have just come down and notice an erotic photograph on the inside of the door. Like a slave might have, I feel exposed, but ready for what lies ahead. I walk into the large golden space of infinite possibility: layer upon layer of games and instruments, beds and mirrors; it

is a great obstacle course with different stations! There is The Evil Gym: a Bowflex-type exercise machine. Floor-to-ceiling shelves span an entire wall filled with various sex toys: every variety of whip or size of mace, spiked gloves and a medieval knight helmet. I wonder where such quality tools are bought, or how Master R and Mistress Collette decide what to use on whom with such a wealth of options. Mistress Collette points me to William Sin-oma, an entire shelf devoted to kitchen utensils used as instruments for punishment. Various erotic pieces are scattered across the room, and black garbage bags line the walls of the basement to cover the brick behind. A drag post is set up for the humiliation of male subjects, complete with wigs, eyelashes and pounds of makeup. In one corner stands a cushioned table on which hot wax is poured on slaves. Master R points me to a doorway leading to another room. This room is more intimate than the last, with a heater placed right in the center. It is clear this room witnesses the more severe practices. To my right, Master R introduces me to Vlad the Impaler, a stool in the center of which a hole is cut out and a mechanized dildo moves up and down. In front of that is the sawhorse over which Slavid and Blunt were earlier whipped by Mistress Collette. On the other side of the room is a Saint Andrew’s Cross (also known as a saltire cross) on the frame of which a slave is tied. This cross is supported in its middle, so that the slave can be upended. As the cross seesaws from side to side, the chains holding the structure together crank menacingly. “That’s my favorite sound in the dungeon,” Master R confides in me. Mistress Collette proudly shows me her collection of whips, all dangling in a line from the ceiling. Hidden behind them is another, darker alcove where a bondage bed is surrounded by dozens of candles and above which a mirror is suspended. Towards the center of the room sits a large plush couch. Above sways a black wooden box into whose bottom a neck hole has been carved, where a slave’s head may be encased. Master R tells Mistress Collette to show me her favorite part of the dungeon: the doctor’s office. Behind some curtains is a fully equipped dentist’s chair with all sorts of medical supplies. They have a generous doctor friend, they tell me. Mistress Collette enjoys performing piercings on her clients, dressed as a nurse. What horrifies most people about the concept of BDSM is, of course, the pain involved. But as Mistress Collette aptly points out, there are many different tribes that utilize pain to attain heightened levels of spiritual awareness. In some cultures, putting hooks in one’s flesh or tattooing is perceived as beautiful. Even in Western culture, monks and nuns would perform self-flagellation to achieve transcendence. Slavid tries to articulate his pleasure in pain, speaking of a “real connection between two people in

an S&M relationship. You actually feel that energy and connection with the other person. It can be a very special experience.” Mistress Collette adds, “There are times when you actually feel that your two bodies are melded together. As a dominant, there are many precious times when I feel what I’m doing to someone in myself.” As I watch Mistress Collette whip Slavid in the dungeon, even I recognize the love and humanity shared between the two — it is a bond palpable even for an unversed onlooker. I ask Master R and Mistress Collette if they harbor any hope the public will one day recognize BDSM as a form of art. Master R insists that “it is recognized — by the advertising industry.” The theme of dominance and submission is often utilized for commercial purposes, “throw[ing] something intellectual at you without emotive understanding.” “I won’t hold my breath,” Mistress Collette says. “But that’s not my purpose. I touch the people that come here. The great people that I have met who are in the high echelon of this world are the most multifaceted, intellectual people.” Master R admits more disappointment than Mistress Collette: “We take our training seriously, but we often feel we’re not making a dent.” It’s a fact of life, though, that Master R has come to terms with: “The depths of devotion that are possible and the depths of respect that we can grow with each other — that’s what keeps me here. That’s what this is all about.” Adriel Saporta is the editor in chief of Broad Recognition, A Feminist Magazine at Yale. A version of this article appeared online at www. broadrecognition.com on December 14, 2010.

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PROVINCETOWN Like Nowhere Else! Best Gay Resort Town —PlanetOut

Top Five Gay-Friendly Destinations —Travel Industry Association of America

Best Summer Vacation Destination —Lavender Magazine

Best Gay Resort Town —Out Traveler

Top Five Gay Resort Towns —Out and About Travel Awards

Favorite Resort Town —Gay.com

ProvincetownTourismOffice.org 36

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ocated 120 miles from Boston along the National Seashore on the outer most tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown is a year-round destination with fascinating history and extraordinary offerings. With incredible beaches, boundless natural beauty, an eclectic arts and culture scene, and worldclass dining and shopping, Provincetown offers something for each of the diverse visitors it hosts throughout the year. Provincetown has always been a welcome space for people of all walks of life. Artists and bohemians were among Provincetown’s early visitors and the town quickly developed a reputation as an artist colony, attracting the likes of such celebrated American painters as Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, and writers John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Today, Provincetown is still a home for artists and has become a haven for the GLBT community. Provincetown was named Best Gay Resort Town by PlanetOut in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 and consistently ranks among the best vacation spots for GLBT travelers. The town’s reputation as a summer destination owes much to its stunning natural beauty. Provincetown lays claim to miles of gorgeous coastline and some of America’s best beaches. Surrounded on three sides by water, Provincetown is a natural destination for outdoor enthusiasts, and boasts incredible kayaking, sailing and whale-watching opportunities. The recently renovated National Seashore Bike Trails provide unparalleled coastal vistas and opportunities for adventure. Dune tours on foot or by car are also a great way to explore Provincetown’s natural surroundings and can be easily arranged from the center of town. Provincetown is a flourishing cultural hub, sporting some of New England’s best museums and galleries and during the summer months features numerous theatrical productions, musical performances and film festivals. In the heart of Provincetown, Commercial Street brims with over 200 shops, restaurants, art galleries, street performers and night clubs. Every Friday night from June to August, the galleries open their doors for Gallery Strolls, allowing art enthusiasts to browse and meet local and visiting artists and gallery owners. In the middle of August, Provincetown hosts Carnival Week, an extravaganza of music, theater and drag that attracts more than 50,000 visitors every year. The theme of the 2011 Carnival (August 14th-19th) is “Can’t Stop The Music” and promises a phenomenal lineup of performers and a party to remember for a lifetime. After a long day or night, Provincetown boutique hotels or bed and breakfasts offer relaxing accommodations at all price points. Provincetown restaurants

are world-class and serve up the finest steaks, most authentic Italian, and, of course, unbeatably fresh New England seafood. With unparalleled natural beauty, cultural life and luxurious amenities, Provincetown shines like a beacon to vacationers eager for a summer weekend getaway. Even at the farthest reaches of Cape Cod, you’ll find that in Provincetown you are right at home. Traveling to Provincetown: The scenic drive to Provincetown from Boston can be made in under three hours. Luxury cruise and bus lines offer moderately-priced, hassle-free alternatives. Boston Harbor Cruises (bostonharborcruises.com) and Bay State Cruises (baystatecruisecompany.com) offer an express 90-minute ferry line to Provincetown, complete with concierge and satellite TV. For the budget-conscious, Plymouth & Brockton St. Railway Co. (p-b.com) offers rail transit to Provincetown from Boston’s South Station for under $30. Air travel is slightly more expensive than ground transportation but cuts travel time down to a mere twenty minutes from Logan International Airport. Flights are available from two to twelve times a day during the summer months [Boston (flycapeair.com) or New York (flyfleet.com)] from Boston and New York and prices generally range from $130 to $400 per person.

[Pop IQ] Adele, Britney drop albums, make serious claims for gay-iconic status. Travis Trew

soul formula with spectacular results. Adele is still given to inanely opaque choruses (what does it mean to “roll in the deep?”), and the album is not totally free of filler; her cover of The Cure’s “Lovesong” seriously lacks subtlety. But these are minor complaints. Overall, 21 is consistent and varied enough to reward repeat listens. If Adele continues to improve incrementally every two years, 29 should be an absolute masterpiece.

21 Adele has called her new song “Set Fire to the Rain” a gay anthem. 2011 (Columbia) None of the lyrics actually deal specifically with gay issues, placing it closer to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” than Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” on the spectrum of gay anthemhood. Like “I Will Survive,” “Set Fire” finds Adele playing the part of a jilted lover: expressing her righteous fury by belting in an enthusiastic, triumphant manner. Or maybe she’s just condoning arson. It’s open to interpretation. But let’s get real here. This lady could be singing about waiting in line at the DMV and the gays would still flock to her. Studies have shown we love big, sassy female soul singers. Having a one-word stage name is also a plus. Adele possesses a rare blend of jaw-dropping talent and girl-next-door approachability. And, among the recent British blue-eyed soul singers, she’s probably the one least likely to burn you with her crack pipe (I’m looking at you, Amy). She rose to fame with her debut album 19 and its Grammy-winning single “Chasing Pavements” — a pop confection that managed to convey a sense of optimism even as its lyrics explored themes of heartbreak, doubt and, well, sidewalks. Fittingly, 21 shows a greater sense of maturity. Her music is darker, a bit more urgent and far more experimental. “Rolling in the Deep,” for example, audaciously adds elements of gospel and disco to Adele’s proven retro38

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Femme Fatale For all her millions sold, Britney Spears 2011 (Jive) has never been known for making great albums. She rode to stardom on the back of a few dynamite singles, so let’s not forget the same album that produced “...Baby One More Time” also contained the ballad “E-Mail My Heart.” Ironically, her most cohesive album, 2007’s Blackout, was also her least successful, and with 2008’s Circus, Britney was back to her usual formula: blonde extensions, a couple killer singles and an album rounded out by fluff. Happily, Femme Fatale is cohesive without sacrificing standout singles. It is Britney’s strongest album to date. None of the tracks are classics along the lines of “Toxic,” but there aren’t any outright embarrassments either, which is an accomplishment. Britney’s production team has realized nobody actually wants to hear her bleating mediocre ballads and, as a result, Femme Fatale feels like it was designed specifically to pack dance floors. First singles “Hold It Against Me” and “Till the World Ends” are obvious highlights, but there are mindless pleasures to be found throughout. Not even an appearance by the loathsome will.i.am on “Big Fat Bass” can derail this boogie train. I could pick on Britney for her thin voice, which has frankly been so auto-tuned as to no longer sound even

remotely human — the chorus of “Till the World Ends” contains more digitally manipulated variations on the word “oh” than vocally possible. I could also point out nearly every song on the album deals with themes of dancing, sex — or dancing as a thinly veiled metaphor for sex. But really, this is criticism Britney has been fielding for over a decade. She never possessed Christina’s chops and never claimed to be writing all her own songs. If this album feels even more unabashedly vapid than her previous efforts, then let that be a testament to the wisdom of her management. Femme Fatale turns Britney’s lack of depth into an asset. And in a musical landscape cluttered with pop tartlets straining to assert their individuality and dubious artistic integrity, there’s something irresistible about a hot cyborg who just wants to make you dance.

A prime time for gay teens By Heather Hogan In the battle for equality, one of the queer community’s most important allies is television. And, like so many before it, this revolution is being ushered in by teenagers. Not long ago, most teen LGBT characters were treated as sidekicks or after-school specials at best, objects of sweeps week titillation at worst. (It’s a reality as old as Nielsen itself some show is going to use girl-on-girl action as a ratings stunt). But recently — thanks to shows like “90210,” “Glee,” “Pretty Little Liars,” “Skins” and “Degrassi: The Boiling Point” — queer adoles-

cents have made the leap to meaningful characters. Year after year in their Network Responsibility Index and Where We Are on TV Reports, The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has shown mainstream acceptance of LGBT people goes hand-in-hand with positive portrayals of LGBT characters. In fact, in their 2010 Pulse of Equality Survey, GLAAD reported “among the 19% [of Americans] who reported that their feelings toward gay and lesbian people have become more favorable over the past 5 years, 34% cited ‘seeing gay or lesbian characters on television’ as a contributing factor.” In the last year, a time in which “don’t ask, don’t tell” was overturned and for the first time in history, the majority of Americans surveyed in a Washington Post-ABC News poll said they supported marriage equality, nine of the eighteen lead LGBT characters on broadcast and cable television were teenagers. If television helps steer public opinion, and public opinion drives political policy, why is it important over half of queer television teens aren’t even old enough to vote? For one thing, coming of age stories are universally resonant. A middle-aged, middle-class, middle American might not identify with the plight of Cam and Mitchell on “Modern Family” (adopting a child from Asia, balancing straight parent play dates with gay pal nights out), but nearly everyone identifies with the plight of Kurt Hummell on “Glee” (fitting in, finding first love, searching for parental approval). For another thing, current LGBT characters don’t merely pop up once a season for requisite public service announcements. Consider Emily Fields from “Pretty Little Liars,” ABC Family’s breakout hit about four teenage girls trying to solve the murder of their best friend. Sure, the audience traveled over some queer-specific terrain with her in the show’s first season. She came out to her friends and her parents and she experienced homophobic bullying. But

the audience also watched Emily traverse the more familiar territory of searching for meaningful friendships and pursuing excellence in her hobbies. In years past, Emily would have been a one-dimensional character — the gay one. On “Pretty Little Liars,” Emily is the gay one, but the show never labels her as such. Instead, she’s called “the nice one,” “the athletic one,” or “the one with the perfect hair.” It wouldn’t be fair to attribute the turning tide in the gay rights movement to this generation of gay TV teens alone. If anything, these teens owe their success to pioneers like Willow Rosenberg on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Rickie Vasquez on “My So-Called Life.” The increasing appearance of openly gay and lesbian characters on prime-time suggests queer teen characters represent much more than reassuring models for queer viewers, or opinion-shapers for straight viewers. Queer TV teens are money-makers. “Pretty Little Liars” boasted four lesbian characters during its inaugural season and is the highest-rated ABC Family program in its history. Canada’s “Degrassi: The Boiling Point” features a gay male character and a transgender character and has achieved huge ratings success in Nick Teen’s drama lineup. And “Glee,” a show with two gay male and two bisexual female characters, is consistently one of the most watched shows all over the world. (“Glee” also sells millions of singles on iTunes. Kurt and Blaine’s rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — a song Chris Colfer called “by far the gayest thing that has ever been on TV, period” — was the most downloaded song from their 2010 Christmas album.) Stories may drive sentiment, but profits drive networks. And if the current trend is any indication, it’s as good for business as for the equality battle to keep the quality gay characters coming. Heather Hogan is a writer for OneMoreLesbian.com — THE Lesbian Media Site. OML curates the world’s best lesbian film, television and video content on one site.

“Make of your life a bell that rings or a furrow in which the glowing trees of ideas flow and bear fruit.” - Nicholas Guillen, Afro-Cuban Poet

283 Crown St. New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 498 - CUBA www.souldecuba.com

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SPOTLIGHT:

KATIE KOTI, ART ’12

Articles of cloth hang loosely on a cable in crisp contrast to a partially nude woman resting over her knees out of focus in “Rags” (left), a work from Katie Koti’s latest project “Asunder” (2008 to present). The photo interrogates the cultural construction of the self: without clothing, the literal material of selfpresentation, the figure is indistinct to our view. This is only one example of Koti’s larger exploration into the social impression of gender on the body. By placing her primarily transgendered subjects in natural settings, Koti makes plain the social and structural constraints imposed on gender by the material world. In “Cover,” (page 45) two nude figures wrapped in mesh are blurred indeterminate (perhaps even suffocated lifeless) by its multiple infolds. The seductive landscapes these figures inhabit suggest gender, like desire, is contextual. In “Passage” (page 42-3), a woman stands over an irrigation ditch in work clothes as muddy as her mop of hair and tuft of a beard. The straddling of binaries is firmly planted in the earth. Gender, at its roots, is as fluid and murky as a rivulet running through soil — an outgrowth, perhaps, as natural as a tussock of grass in a marsh. Katie Koti is a member of the Yale MFA Photography Class of 2012. She earned a BFA in Photography and Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010. Before attending RISD, Koti graduated with Honors from Greenfield Community College, Mass., where she studied Liberal and Media Arts. Koti shoots with an Ebony 4x5 field camera.

“Rags” Katie Koti 2008 40

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on androgyny

to the strange, older gaze

The day after parent’s weekend freshman year, I stood in our bathroom on the ninth floor of Bingham, carefully unfolded sheets of newspaper over the floor and cut off my hair. In my first two months in New Haven, I’d grown to hate the looks and calls I’d get from older men as I walked to class on Chapel Street. I grew up in a city and was used to unwelcome interactions but had never before felt so objectified. I felt dirty for being female, for feeling like these men called me sexy and pretty not because I was particularly beautiful but simply because I was a woman. When I was asked to write about being queer at Yale, I wondered at first if I had any right to share my viewpoint. I’ve never had to come out to my parents, never had friends shun me for my sexual orientation, never been targeted at school for daring to kiss a girl. At Yale, I haven’t been involved with any LGBT organizations. Instead, most of my queer exploration has been personal, in between unspoken heteronormative assumptions and my ambiguously gendered self-presentation. My desire for a less female body arose in part from a heightened awareness of the fashion world and its convoluted ideals of female beauty. And there was a boy, of course. He was a senior who seemed nothing short of my idea of aesthetic perfection. I liked how his skinny jeans fit his thin, hip-less frame, how the line of his striped button-down was uninterrupted by the curve of breasts. I began to wonder if I wanted to be with him — or be him. Inhabiting a female identity, with all the baggage that accompanied it, felt wrong to me: I’d hear my straight male friends lamenting the overemotionality of their latest hook-up, the annoying neediness of their girlfriends. Instead of choosing to subvert that stereotype by proving, as a female, that not all women embodied this cliche, I chose to abandon that aspect of my identity altogether and began identifying as a (gay) male. This had its own share of challenges, however. With men who liked my boyish cropped hair, my James Dean-esque sartorial choices, my decided unfemininity, there was always the awkward conversation about gender identity. More often than not, I was surprised at how willing these men were to embrace or at least humor my self-questioning. But sometimes the threat of my masculinity proved to be too great. One ex-boyfriend was visibly uncomfortable when I proudly showed him photographs from an art project in which I fully styled myself in various social stereotypes, which ranged from hipster bro to Japanese schoolgirl to football captain. We skirted briefly around the topic of gender identity and he seemed fine with it at the time, but I later learned he broke up with me because of it. As one of my friends put it, he would rather be dating a girl in a pretty dress. These days, I don’t identify as male, but I don’t actively embrace my femaleness, either. My Facebook page’s “Sex” option remains delightfully empty. I’ve moved back into an ambiguously gendered space. Problematic, lazy, easy? Maybe. But I’d rather spend time getting to know new people than limit myself to a label and all the associations that come with it.

You look at me like a piece of tenderly cut meat. I sense instability. Your shiftiness puts me on jagged edge. I know you are sniffing around. Your out-of-focus eyes inch closer. Youthful, well shaped, male bodies — I’m not interested. I’m just hanging with friends. Didn’t I say no? If you won’t take no for an answer, then we’re going to have a problem — you haven’t thought through anything before approaching; it just happened I was there, and you saw me. It is a fact: you like it young. You leave your wife for other women, younger and more fun. You leave your boys for other men, younger and more muscular. Your attraction to youth is not a gay/straight thing; it’s a man thing. I’m no longer surprised when you, twice my age, approach me when I go out. As bothersome as this might be, the fact of the matter is it’s rather commonplace in queer social spaces. When I was nineteen, you followed me around a shopping mall in Germany. Despite my efforts to distance myself from you, you did not want to accept that it wasn’t acceptable to trail behind me. When you made a quip about seeing me undressed in the pants section of the department store, it became clear I had to leave before you would stop. If that wasn’t strange enough, when I told you I had to catch a train, you were visibly upset — and had no right to be. This is not a love story for the youngest among us; this situation is too much, too soon. Most of us college-aged students haven’t even declared majors — indeed, we are just beginning to discover life for ourselves — when we come out of the closet. You, in your forties, fifties, sixties, and up, take notice of that fact. There is intrigue at the tender age of barely legal. The more guys you approach, the better your chances are. For the price of a drink in a gay club, you think your fantasy of a lifetime will finally come true. It sure is better than a magazine in your hand and much better than telling your wife the truth. The doting doesn’t obscure your clearest intentions. For in the silent world of dark and lonely bedrooms, there is little else you offer beyond a greedy how big are you? A possible sexual encounter with a young black man carries a mystique — a sinister adventure of the mind. You see, when I decline your drink offers, I am also declining to take part in your sexual imaginations. For you, youth is long gone. Now, it’s what you see on billboards advertising underwear, the mere stuff of fantasy. It will always be true when older white men like you engage in something — anything — with people like me, you do it with a disgusting sort of psycho-sexual gratification in mind. In further othering the already-othered bodies, you are a different kind of other: you are the strange older white man. Your clumsy, futile advances show, and your cloying persistence speaks to the thing you really want with my colored flesh. And you expect it just like porn. But porn is nothing more than self-indulgence: your body’s reaction to fetishized images on a computer screen. Remember, I am not an animal. No, I am no bigdicked beast — and to think of me as such is a strange, twisted way to think.

Q MAGAZINE AT YALE

By Jordan Rogers

spring 2011

“Passage,” Katie Koti (2009)

By Chika Ota

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on reparative therapy By Joshua Penny

“Lowland,” Katie Koti (2009)

“Sometimes, I don’t answer your phone calls because I don’t know what to say to you,” my dad told me softly during a conversation we had this past winter break. These words weren’t surprising, nor were they intended to hurt my feelings. My father was finally conveying the frustrations that had gone unsaid for the year I had been away at school. While I appreciated his honesty, I hated its implications. At that particular moment, my relationship with my father seemed even more fragile than when he first found out I was gay. My parents hadn’t always placed faith first. In fact, it was my

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little brother who begged my parents to take us to a church near our suburban Atlanta home when I was in middle school. We visited one Sunday and my parents quickly fell in love with the church community. From that point on, faith became increasingly important to my parents and my family’s involvement intensified. The pews of the church were a difficult place to reconcile my same-sex attractions and my own relationship with God. Throughout high school, I prayed for God to take the uncontrollable feelings away, but as time passed they only increased. I was terrified my parents would find out. One late night junior year, my parents overheard a phone conversation I was having with a friend and confronted me, asking bluntly if I was gay. I gathered up every ounce of courage I had and expressed that I knew I was. The time in between my answer and my parents’ reaction stretched on forever and, for a second, I was hopeful that things might carry on as usual. My mom began to cry. They were devastated. I couldn’t help but feel that my family was now broken and it was my fault. A few days later, my parents approached me about counseling. They didn’t force me to go, but I was afraid a “no” might make things worse, so I agreed. The therapist, named Pat, had left her first husband to pursue a lesbian relationship, which ended shortly after it began. Pat sought comfort and refuge in the church, where she underwent reparative therapy. I learned Pat remarried and her current husband had formerly identified as gay. I asked her if she was attracted to men and she replied she had a unique attraction to her husband. If anyone could help me tame my same-sex desires it would be Pat. The dark green couch I sat on during these counseling sessions was a mental operating table. Pat probed my past in search of experiences that were responsible for my attraction to men. She quickly honed in on my relationship with my dad. According to Pat, my confusion resulted from the lack of opportunities in my childhood to connect emotionally with my father, which led me to search for these

“Cover,” Katie Koti (2008)

opportunities with other men. My dad had always been a loving, kind-hearted man and I never felt disconnected from him — that is, until he found out I was gay. Despite the absurdity of Pat’s conclusions, I began to rethink my relationship with my father. My dad agreed with Pat, and blamed himself for my struggle. I couldn’t stand to watch so I made it clear to my family and Pat I wanted to change. A change in my family’s financial situation forced me to discontinue my reparative therapy sessions, but the sincere desire to change that had been cultivated during them continued. I spent the rest of my senior year in high school dating girls and making amends in my relationship with my family. My desire to suppress my same-sex attractions remained with me even when I arrived at Yale. If I dated at all while I was here, I thought, I’d date women. But when I got here, I found an LGBTQ-friendly environment, and I began to toil with serious questions about my identity. Did I actually want to change? Was change even possible? If change wasn’t possible, what did that say about my relationship with God? The more I considered these questions, the more I felt like there was nothing wrong with me. My friends reaffirmed this,

encouraging me to live my life openly. The only obstacle that remained was my family. In the fall of my freshman year, I received my first care package from home: an ink cartridge, some candy, and a book titled You Don’t Have to Be Gay by Jeff Konrad, which my mom had concealed with a cloth book cover. I didn’t read it. That spring I met a guy named Shawn at a party who later became my boyfriend, and my relationship with him propelled me past the fears and insecurities I had. Shawn became such a big part of my life that I couldn’t talk about my sexuality without talking about him. The more comfortable I became with him, the more comfortable I became with myself. My parents were troubled by the fact I was dating a guy, which they deduced from my phone records. After that, my mother told me I wouldn’t be allowed to come home for spring break. I didn’t talk to her again for weeks. Despite the continued strain in my relationship with my parents, I am confident for the first time in my life I am doing the right thing for me, and I hope my parents will fully accept the man I’ve become. I do have to be gay and nothing about me needs repair. Surely God knows that. QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

[From the Archives]

By Mara Dauphin As students headed to brunch on October 28, 1989, they may have noticed a few more cocks on Old Campus than usual. Only a day

before, Yale Law School Professor Ruth Wedgwood notified the Yale police of a man posting pictures of “genitalia” around campus. She assumed the posters were a result of the “gay nonsense” occurring over the weekend. The “nonsense” was the third annual conference of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale (LGSCY). Organized by the esteemed Yale medievalist and LGSCY chair John Boswell, the conference welcomed scholars, students on campus and activists from the surrounding area, including representatives from the then two-year-old New York City chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the organization leading the charge for more radical politics within the gay movement. 46

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During the opening lecture by film historian and co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Vito Russo, Yale Police dragged one participant, a young New York City lawyer who came as an ACT UP representative, Bill Dobbs, out of the lecture hall and arrested him in front of other conference attendees for breach of peace. When Dobbs asked the arresting officers what the charges against him were, one officer allegedly responded: “Obscenity.” The crowd pushed back against the police and began to chant: “What is obscene? What is obscene?” QMAGAZINEATYALE.COM

The ensuing ruckus led to the arrests of eight more men and sparked a passionate debate about the place of free speech on campus and in gay activism. The charges struck many of the conference-goers as offensive and a serious violation of free speech. “There is a ‘certain poetry’ to this weekend’s events,” Dobbs told the Yale Daily News on October 30. “Anyone in a law school community who is troubled by the [posting] of this literature lacks an understanding of freedom of expression...There is a direct conflict between the right to freedom of expression and the state law’s definition of the charge ‘breach of peace,’ which includes posting obscene material.” While Yale’s President Benno C. Schmidt emphasized his commitment to free expression and the protection of a diversity of opinion, his administration’s hesitance to come down firmly on the side of Dobbs and against police action earned him a 300-person strong march on the police department, as well as a mob outside of his office in Woodbridge Hall dancing to Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” Agitators sensed that the demonization of the posters was rooted in homophobia, (the police proceedings occurred, after all, during the Lesbian and Gay Studies conference) so they felt an especially strong sense of urgency in defending them from accusations of obscenity. Bill Dobbs explained to a Yale Daily News reporter why gay and lesbian imagery was an important expression of the right to free speech. “Historically, gay and lesbian imagery has been destroyed whenever it has been represented,” Dobbs said. “The depiction of something is part of its ability to flourish.” The posters at the conference, in fact, were images taken from the “Just Sex” campaign of a San Francisco-based art collective named Boy With Arms Akimbo and displayed a range of erotic imagery, from line drawings of nude men to photographs of women masturbating to diagrams of the reproductive system. The “Just Sex” campaign strove to provoke debate on why society deems certain things “obscene,” but not others. In the 1973 case Miller v. California, the Supreme Court created a formal legal distinction between obscenity and art, defining obscenity as that which was “patently offensive” or “lack[ing] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” In response to the 1989 proposal by the right-wing North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, art collectives like Boy With Arms Akimbo encouraged their members to post provocative homoerotic imagery in as many places as possible to challenge arbitrary notions of propriety established by the Miller test. And while the group claimed to be unaware the posters would make an appearance at the Yale conference, an anonymous spokesperson for the Boy With Arms Akimbo told the Yale Daily News on October 30 the group was pleased at the furor the incident caused. “The brouhaha means that in effect, the campaign is working,” the member proclaimed. The Boy With Arms Akimbo posters reminded viewers sex was an aspect of life everyone shared, regardless of how they practiced it or with whom they had it. Reaffirming stances towards gay male sex were arguably 48

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even more necessary at the height of the AIDS epidemic, widely perceived in 1989 at the time of the Bill Dobbs incident as a “gay disease.” Many conservative gay writers and activists, as well as various traditional religious organizations, supported the notion that the AIDS epidemic was the gay community’s punishment for the sexual freedom of the 1970s. To combat this attitude, radical activist organizations like ACT UP and Boy With Arms Akimbo turned to sex-positive tactics, like the distribution of explicitly sexual material, to affirm the right to free and public sexual expression. While the University stipulated that every person on campus, and especially administrative officials, had a “special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it not [be] obstructed” in its 1974 Woodbridge Report, Bill Dobbs’ arrest in October 1989 shows the protection offered by the administration was circumstantial at best. Concern about the University’s protection of free speech still reverberates today. In February 2011, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) ranked Yale among the 12 worst colleges for free speech in the nation, citing the censorship of a 2009 Yale-Harvard game shirt and the 2010 refusal to print cartoons of Mohammad in Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, as more recent examples of the University’s contradiction of their own stated policies. Still, to view the incident as a simple matter of First Amendment rights violations would be to gloss over all but the most easily defendable part of the protestors’ argument. What really seems to have fueled the ire of the protestors, however unacknowledged this issue was by the University administration, was the implication in the charges that what was obscene was queer sex. Activists like the Boy With Arms Akimbo collective urged American society to push past their initial discomfort and accept queer sex as universal and natural. Sex-positive activism enabled a discussion of safer sexual practices. It also provided a fundamental defense of homosexuality in the face of institutional opposition. The legacy of such sex-positive activism can be seen with little effort on campus today — in condoms in Old Campus entryways, in the Yale Peer Health Educators, in Q and, most obviously, in Sex Week. Our generation is charged, as Bill Dobbs’ was before us, to shake up misbegotten preconceptions of sex and homosexuality and encourage queer youth to challenge popular notions of propriety and obscenity in the fight for our art, history and community.

SOURCES: Wilgoren, Jodi. “Suspects, Witnesses Question Charges, Behavior” and “Dobbs Denies Wrongdoing.” Yale Daily News, October 30, 1989. Peltz, Jennifer L. “The Group Behind the Posters.” Yale Daily News, October 30, 1989. Crimp, Douglas. “The Boys in My Bedroom” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin. (Psychology Press, 1993). “Just Sex” Posters from Boy With Arms Akimbo in Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, Yale University, Exhibit and Research Materials from The Pink and The Blue, Box 2, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.