Manners Mask Campus Homophobia

There has been much theatrical hand-wringing and histrionic exclamation following the so-called "homophobic incidents" in Mather, Adams and Winthrop Houses. It seems that everyone within the confines of Harvard, House masters and students alike, has scrambled to express their shock that such a thing could happen here, at our campus-on-a-hill.

Such shock is, at best, disingenuous. We are perfectly aware that homophobia thrives at Harvard--one need only look to the ROTC debates of last spring for an official and officious example--yet it offends our delicate sensibilities to admit it. It is better to denounce these events as aberrations in an otherwise flawless surface and discuss them as if they were unpalatable only insofar as they are breaches of good manners, mere exercises in poor taste.

This failure to acknowledge the everyday fact of homophobia, instead embracing a discourse of anomaly, of "homophobic incidents", is subtle rhetorical savagery. "Homophobia" gives a name to a problem, while "isolated incidents" perpetuates the myth that no such problem exists.

The entirely antic belief that bigotry is something that happens in other places, to other people, is dependent upon a notion of Harvard as somehow detached, exempt from what occurs outside of its consoling walls. Harvard becomes an airless alter-environment in which intolerance is impolitesse. It is part of what keeps the closeted in their tombs of stifled denial.

This may, at first, seem counter-intuitive, in an atmosphere of ostensible apathy, why not come out? This pretense of indifference--which is solely a pretense--pacifies lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students into a mannerly silence. The closeted convince themselves that being out is not a necessity or a vital political act and that overt homosexuality, like homophobia, is simply a failure of good breeding. If it is common courtesy that keeps students from homophobic violence, it is also what keeps them from queer expression. To be openly queer, and thus offensively queer, is to call into question the heterosexual noblesse oblige of which Harvard is so bafflingly proud.

By drawing uncharitable distinctions between straight and queer, between the sanctioned and the oppressed, out queer students are seen as rending asunder what was comfortably whole. The display of "common courtesy" is itself a privilege, ostentatiously exhibited by those who would preserve the fantasy of conciliatory homogeneity--the wide-eyed protest that "we're all just people here."

The expressions of homophobia are especially significant in that they occurred within the context of Harvard's randomized Houses, which are themselves organized around the notion of a placid diversity. This diversity is one that is in fact all about sameness through the controlled introduction of difference with the express purpose of assimilation. The phantasmatic nature of that equivalence-through-admixture is borne out by the recent homophobic actions of those who would entirely reject any affinity (real or imagined) with queers. Proximity is not dialogue.

These acts should therefore function as paradoxical blessings to the queer community. They are an occasion for epiphany. Through them we may apprehend the meaning of coming out and staying out. We can understand that coming out is always a political act, always a political and ethical necessity. The craven rationalizations that keep the closeted entombed--the conviction that being out makes no difference--are as groundless as they are deadly. They cripple queer movements at their seminal moment (the avowal of queer identity) even as they strengthen heterosexual privilege by disappearing within it.

Harvard's queer community must protest this silence which is, at least in part, self-imposed. It is our responsibility to speak as queer students for those who are still closeted, those still hiding behind a mask of counterfeit heterosexuality and sincere, if disinterested, concern.

It is our responsibility to challenge and push the limits of what has heretofore been held as "acceptable," "courteous" behavior, and to thereby expose that courtesy for the garrote that it is. In short, we must come together in protest, under a threat that is perhaps more immediate and closer to home than we had heretofore been willing to admit.

Coming out is the first, indeed, the most critical step in a vital project of resistance to those who would coerce us into silence and invisibility, a soul-killing courteousness.

Nicole Carbellano '02 is a literature concentrator living off-campus. She is an active member of the BGLTSA.