Loving Day, Once Again

by Joyce Clapp

Today is Loving Day, the anniversary of June 12, 1967, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that interracial marriage had to be performed and recognized in all 50 states (Loving v. Virginia). It is also a day by which we may or may not know how the Supreme Court is going to rule on a similar issue: Same-sex marriage (as of this writing, we don’t know yet). I’ve spent the last week Googling “SCOTUS” every couple of hours, knowing full well that if they didn’t announce on Monday that they weren’t likely to announce for the rest of week, and also knowing full well that when they did announce, it would hit Facebook and Twitter within minutes. And yet…I kept checking.

It is odd, waiting for SCOTUS to decide if you’re married. Well, if you’re legally married. Well, if you’re legally married in all 50 states, since you are already legally married in 36 states and may very well stay married in some of those states regardless of what the Supreme Court does. And thankfully, your mother says you’re married, no matter what SCOTUS does. I spend a lot of time lately feeling faintly queasy. I can only imagine how those of our friends that have children with their same-sex spouses feel, considering the implications there.

I can only begin to imagine what Richard and Mildred Loving felt like, around this time in 1967. Interracial couples were not nearly as common as they are now, and the U.S. was living through a really hard time. It’s not that we aren’t living through a time of gaping inequality and racial tensions now (let’s not kid ourselves), but it was worse in 1967. Brown v. Board of Education was just a touch over 15 years old and most schools were still in some state of segregation (the more things change, right?). Malcolm X had been assassinated only two years previously. The 1960s were a decade when we saw church bombings, the Civil Rights marches in the South, and the Freedom Riders doing their work because interstate busses were still segregated. This wasn’t an easy time to be an interracial couple.

“Tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.” (Richard Loving)

So I can’t imagine sitting in my home in Washington D.C. with my children, waiting to see if I was going to be allowed to move home with my family to a state where not ten years previously, sheriff’s deputies had stormed my home, barged into my bedroom, arrested myself and my spouse, and said of the marriage certificate on my wall, “That’s no good here.”

My wife and I are fortunate to be married in a different United States. We are on the side of history. We went out recently for a ghost tour of Greensboro and we weren’t the only interracial couple on the tour. At my wife’s brother’s wedding recently, we were 1 of 5 interracial couples present, including two guys showing off recent engagement rings and grinning like mad. We held hands through visiting the zoo and only garnered a couple of dirty looks. The lesbian character in Pitch Perfect 2, which we saw recently, volunteers that she’s moving to Maine and getting hitched, and it’s a non-event (other than a lot of happy squeals). My non-straight students wander in to my office to talk about wedding plans and ask relationship advice just like anyone else, because they are just like anyone else. My straight students ask me how spring break with my wife was, just like we’re anyone else, because we are just like anyone else (and then they ask me relationship advice and what they should do about that Spanish class).

And in the meantime, we wait nervously to see if SCOTUS is going to catch up with history and society, whether the story is going to be ‘we didn’t want redefine marriage’ (an institution that I’m glad has been ‘redefined’ over the years – who wants to be their husband’s property?), or whether the justices are going to look at the words from 1967 and do their job:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State. (Chief Justice Warren)

The obligatory rings picture, taken on on our legal anniversary.

I felt like I was going to have something long and impassioned and sociological to say when I signed up for posting for Loving Day, one of those nice chewy posts that make good reading and discussion. But that’s not the case today. It’s simple. I love my wife, I’m lucky I can live with her in this time and place, and I’m lucky that in North Carolina right now, she inherits if I die, and I can call the Veterans Administration for her, and we can make medical decisions for each other without gobs of very expensive, possibly legally shaky paperwork. I hope that in the eyes of the law, we remain legally married after the Supreme Court makes its decision.

When Two Chicks Get Married…

by Joyce Clapp

This Saturday it’s October 11 again, so it’s National Coming Out Day again.
Last year I rhapsodized about how much I love working for UNCG. And I still do. However, this year my brain isn’t as much on sexuality as it is on gender, gender roles, and being gender non-conforming.

Currently, I’m teaching a face-to-face course on race, gender, and social class inequalities. These last couple of weeks in particular, we’ve been talking a lot about gender roles and sexuality, and how these two separate concepts are so intertwined in society. We live in a heteronormative society that takes its cues on how you’re supposed to act in relationships from our gender roles. When you don’t fit into either the gender or sexuality mold that society expects, you’re left without a cultural scaffolding to guide your interactions with other people and in relationships. Additionally, sometimes other folks don’t quite know what to say to you.

“So, who proposed?”
“I did, but she knew it was coming.”

This past December, I had the great pleasure of asking my now wife to marry me. She knew I was going to ask—in my world, you don’t ask questions like that if you don’t know the answer—but nonetheless, the evening of the proposal came and we were both incredibly nervous. I was proposing on campus (after all, it’s gorgeous, my work at UNCG is a huge part of my life, and it seemed way nicer than in my living room with the dog and the roommate trying not to pay attention to what we were doing). Originally, I’d intended to ask her in front of Minerva, but my wife guessed that, so I fell back on my second favorite spot on campus: the round pavilion on the side of the School of Music Building.

She’s currently living several states away while finishing her degree, so I’d promised her a bit of a campus tour. However, every time I stopped to tell her about something, she started getting more nervous (thinking that it was time), so we finally just wandered back to the School of Music. I’d had this great speech planned that zoomed out of my head as soon as it was time, and instead I just said “Lee, will you marry me?”

She said yes. We both sniffled. And then I asked her to ask me, and she did. And yes, I said yes.

(We both wore engagement rings. There was never any question.)

“I know, I know I shouldn’t ask this… but when two women are out on a date, who pays?”
“Did you really just ask me that?”

So, after the proposal and traipsing around campus in the dark, we took our dressed-up selves out to an amazing seafood dinner (I paid, her being the “broke college kid” that she is), and all was right with the world. Which brings me to this: When you’re out to eat, pay attention to the dynamics of the check drop. The check usually gets dropped in front of my (male) roommate; my card with my picture on it has gotten dropped in front of him, as well (and he has several inches more hair than I do). On the other hand, when my wife and I are out together, waitstaff approach the table, and then pause for a moment before carefully placing the check in the middle of the table.

“So, who cooks?”
“I do. I have a gluten intolerance and she’s worried about poisoning me. And I like to cook. She does the dishes though.”

This is not news to anyone who’s in a same-sex relationship, but since folks don’t know what to say sometimes, you get a lot of questions. Sometimes you get a lot of nosy questions. Sometimes folks are just curious. But all of the questions get back to gender roles; often folks have real trouble considering how you might structure a relationship with two women, two men, or two genderqueer folks. The woman cooks and the man sits in the living room with a beer, right? Feedback that I get from students in class lets me know that many students are being raised in homes with non-traditional gender roles; however, I’ve also heard really heartbreaking stories from female students about being expected to do all the heavy lifting in households where fathers and brothers were not doing their share. We may try to assert that we live in a post-racial society these days, but no one even tries to make that assertion about gender. We know better.

“So…who…you know…who’s the guy?”
“Are you really asking this?”
“Yea, I guess I am.”

I’m gonna let Mae Martin take this one for me…

See, there is no “guy” in the relationship; we’re both just us. I cook. She does the dishes. Unless she needs to study, and then I do them. She mostly takes out the trash and recycling. Neither of us works on cars; we both have a little knowledge (her more so than me), but we don’t like to do it and we’re happy to pay other folks to do it.

She wears men’s clothes all the time but is way more particular about her looks and painting her toenails than I am. I keep my hair short most of the time (I grew it out for the wedding, but right now it’s high and tight), and wildly vary shaving my legs and painting my nails. There are mornings when my room resembles the clothing scene from The Great Gatsby, because nothing feels right—not men’s clothes and not women’s clothes, and while UNCG may be pretty laid back, I still can’t go teach class in my pajamas.

She can drive anything on wheels (having driven trucks through Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom), but she prefers automatics because of a bum shoulder. I prefer to drive a stick. I kill the spiders (she’s terrified of them), and she reaches the stuff on high shelves (being nearly a foot taller than I am). We’re still working out a lot of this (see also: long distance marriage), but whenever we do work out something, it’s because it’s the solution that makes sense, not because society tells us that one of us is supposed to take out the trash or fold the clothes (answer: she’s a lot better at that than I). Opposite sex couples have this process of negotiation to go through as well and often go for the “makes sense” solution, but they also have a lifetime of socialization and culture behind them as well (for better or worse).

Gender is in everything we do; our society eats and breaths gender in a way that we don’t notice when we’re in the middle of it. We still have terrible levels of inequality in our society (we’re still discussing women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s, for example). And when we get down to people’s lived experiences, the differences can become even more stark: ask Ben Barres, who was infamously told that his “sister’s” work wasn’t as good as his. (And we’re not even getting into issues of violence or job discrimination against trans* people, or that some days, there just isn’t a box for you on forms, because I don’t have those emotional cycles today.)

“What did y’all do about last names?”
“Well, we had the same options any couple has, right? One person takes the other name, you hyphenate, you both keep your name…”
“Yea, I guess so. Huh.”

The takeaway is that living sexuality and gender is sometimes super messy, but a lot of times it just is what it is; mostly we’re just a normal old couple doing boring old couple things like work and walking the dog. As I’m fond of telling my students, no matter who is in the relationship, someone has to buy milk and someone has to walk the dog and someone has to grade papers. I’m just glad that I found my person that I want to buy milk with for the rest of my life.

A few resources:

UNCG Pride on Facebook

UNCG Safe Zone

National Coming Out Day page at Human Rights Campaign

Macklemore, My Girlfriend, and Me

by Joyce Clapp

My girlfriend¹ and I got into our first fight this week, over Macklemore.

I know, it sounds silly. But hear me out.

Macklemore on stage.

You know who Macklemore is; at this point, you’d likely have to be living under a rock not to know who he is. Macklemore has managed to get the issue of marriage equality on radio stations everywhere; I can’t turn on a pop/rock station around here in Greensboro and not hear “Same Love” playing at least once a day, if not more. The song has apparently become an anthem for the marriage equality fight, and I won’t lie; I went to the Macklemore show in Raleigh last fall (I am a fan, for sure). Hearing a stadium full of people singing along to “Same Love” (in a state that voted in Amendment One last year by a 61%-to-39% margin, with a 34% voter turnout, not that this is hardly the “overwhelming majority” many folks wanted to portray it as) had me sniffling as I sang too.

So, the issue of marriage equality is out in front of the entire country in a big way. In fact, in such a big way that same-sex couples² were married on the Grammys recently. In addition, Macklemore seems to be a genuinely nice guy who cares about the issue of same-sex marriage. This is awesome, right? When even the straight white guy is making hip-hop music about how same-sex marriage should be legal, then it should be legal, right?

And therein lies the difficulty.

It is a sociological fact that minority groups need majority allies. Allies, after all, make laws; the very definition of a minority group is one that doesn’t have power in a society. If enough men hadn’t become convinced that women should be able to vote, we still wouldn’t be able to. If seven white men hadn’t looked at Loving v. Virginia and said…

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

…then we’d still live in a country that outlawed interracial marriage (and my girlfriend and I would be out of luck twice over).

The United States Supreme Court, 1967.

However, when a society only starts to pay attention to an issue when allies are the ones taking notice and pushing for social change, then we have a problem as minorities and as a society. When James Zwerg was beaten because of his participation in the Freedom Rides, people sat up and started paying attention—in other words, when a white guy got beaten up over racial civil rights. This is not to diminish the huge contributions that Zwerg and other white allies made to the Civil Rights Movement—but it does raise some problematic questions about power in society and why issues only seem “real” in society when majority group members join in. What does this do to the process of social change in a society? It can create a feeling of alienation among the very minorities the social movements are intended to help.

James Zwerg in Alabama.

Which brings us back to Macklemore, my girlfriend, and me. My reaction to the Grammy event was, “Wow, that was sweet, and look, there’s same sex couples on TV. That’s pretty awesome. Maybe this is getting normalized, and where there’s normalcy, there’s social change” (I am, after all, first and foremost a sociology professor). Her reaction was, “Wow, what a publicity stunt designed to make CBS look good, and oh hey, who is this white straight dude making money off of same-sex marriage. I don’t want to be ‘normalized,’ I just want to get married.” My reaction to that was, “Yes, but until it’s legal everywhere, we don’t get to just get married, and who cares how this is getting done, as long as it’s getting done?” And we were off to the races.

Process versus product is a problem for any social movement. It’s easy for me to say, “by any means necessary”—in the end, I just want to be able marry my girlfriend, peacefully and legally. It is harder for her to say “by any means necessary” about a society that works to systematically marginalize her because of the groups she belongs to. Sociologists talk about intersectionality—the idea that all of our social identities interact to affect how society interacts with us, how we interact with society, and what kinds of inequalities we run into. In other words, it’s not just your race or gender orientation or sexual orientation that matter—all of these things matter when it comes to how we view the world, how it views us, and what hurdles we encounter. My race and social class and other identities added up to me going “Why does the process matter here, as long as it gets done and we get to get married in the end?”³

But process does matter. As social movements normalize and become more mainstream, those that are already marginalized in minority groups become even more marginalized. For example, Disney is releasing its first show featuring a same sex couple. Awesome, right?

Susan and Cheryl on Disney’s Good Luck Charlie.

Sure, there are blonde skinny white women who love women out there—and sometimes, they even hook up with each other, and they are as queer as anyone else; to say that white skinny blonde women can’t be queer would be missing the point.

But the more mainstream GLBTQIA2 issues get, the more the butch women and nelly queens and drag queens and trans* folks and genderqueer folks get marginalized (and forget people of color who are also queer—once you’re a minority within a minority within a minority, your voice gets drowned out). The more mainstream social change becomes, the more alienated the people at the edges of that change feel and are. After all, people who look straight aren’t as threatening to society, and it’s frustrating (at the least) to think that civil rights might be predicated on not appearing threatening. Nonetheless, that is how social change goes—after all, we don’t celebrate Malcolm X day. We do celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day. One gentleman was seen as threatening, and the other, not so much (at least, the parts of Dr. King’s vision that we talk about; we talk about the “I have a dream” MLK, but not the anti-Vietnam MLK).

This post doesn’t have a nice neat ending. Social change never does. I was wrong to say that process doesn’t matter. This process is rapidly marginalizing many of the same people it was meant to help, and that does matter. It also matters that in talking about marriage, we’re ignoring other issues—trans* health care, the 40% of homeless youth in the U.S. that are GLBTQIA2, violence against trans* folks, or the fact that sexuality is not a federally protected employment class. We cannot marginalize large sections of our community in the quest for one (very important, but) issue. Process matters, and how we get to social changes matter. I was wrong to say that it didn’t, and in doing so, I pushed my future wife’s voice to the sideline.

We need allies. Allies are important to social change; they have power in society, and some of our allies care deeply and passionately about their minority friends, family, and loved ones (no matter what the issue in question is). However, we need to not have social movements where allies become the only faces on those social movements. We need a society where our culture encourages marginalized voices on the edges of marginalized communities to have a voice. How do we make that cultural change happen? I don’t know.

———

1. Sigh. Titles, when you’re queer, can get annoying. We’re engaged, and planning an August wedding. However, when I say “fiancé,” that erases the fact that we’re both women. Wife, on the other hand, will not have that issue. So right now, I still tend to refer to her as my girlfriend (even though, when we’re past the age of 35, that title also starts to feel silly).

2. Dear news media: we’re not all gay. Can we please stop referring to “gay couples”?

3. And we kind of can right now—we’ll be legally married in Maryland. That is both awesome and bittersweet.

Come On Out! It’s National Coming Out Day

by Joyce Clapp

Banners at Elliot University Center

I took this picture outside of the Elliot University Center last week, and posted it to my Facebook, along with the caption “I do so love working here”, and it’s true. I’m truly lucky in where I work, and I’m lucky that I can be out at UNCG.

“UNCG is proud to celebrate LGBTQ History Month”

I’m a professor in the Sociology department in addition to working with the BLS Program, and one thing that we social scientists talk about a lot is privilege. Being out carries privilege and is a privilege, even if we don’t always think of it that way. Being out requires supportive coworkers, family, friends, and communities. Being out involves hoping that you’re not at risk by virtue of being out. At risk can mean many things—being at risk physically or at risk for being fired (sexuality is not a nationally protected EEOC class, and is not protected in North Carolina). We worry about the risk of losing friends or family. We worry about being the target of bullying.

However, being out is also important, for those of us who live and work in places where it is safe to be so. Being out normalizes not being straight and having a non-standard gender presentation. The more we’re out, the more it’s safe to be out—until, hopefully, it will be safe for everyone. Until then, those of us who can be out should be out, and shouldn’t criticize those who can’t in the circumstances they’re in.

National Coming Out Day logo by Keith Haring (1988)

So, in honor of National Coming Out Day, I just want to say that my name is Joyce. I’m genderqueer, a masculine-leaning woman, or just a woman depending on the day and how I’m contrary I’m feeling that day. (“Why do I need to qualify as ‘masculine-leaning woman’?  Can’t ‘woman’ just look like this? Why do we have to attach adjectives to it?”) I’m sapiosexual, pansexual, or bisexual depending on the audience and how much explaining I feel like doing. I also teach sociology, read too many books when I have time, love to cook, and live with the cutest dog on the planet (who is very lucky that he is so cute).

UNCG is not perfect on these issues—no institution is. But UNCG is good. I feel so lucky to work in a place where I can post something like this on a school blog, or mention my sexuality in class (in context, of course—we were discussing minority and majority relations) and have it not be a big deal. I’m sure someone has thought something about it at one point or the other, but I have never had one person criticize my sexuality or gender presentation in going on seven years at UNCG, and that’s an amazing thing. Our society has changed so much in the last few years, and I would never have dreamed many years ago when I first came out, that I’d be able to live in the society we do and write something like this. Here’s to things continuing to get better, for all of us—no matter who we love or how.

So, happy GLBTQIA2 history month, and happy National Coming Out Day!

—

A few resources:

Link to UNCG Pride on Facebook

LGBTQ Community at the Office of Multicultural Affairs

UNCG Safe Zone

National Coming Out Day page at Human Rights Campaign