July-August 2006

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Difficult Silences

Encouraging dialogue about sexuality issues on Virginia’s campuses can be tricky business.

By Janet Winston

In December 2005, the Ford Foundation awarded Hollins University and the American Association of University Professors $10,000 to participate in the foundation’s Difficult Dialogues initiative. The project supported by this grant brings together a consortium of academics, including me, from three separate institutions in Virginia and the AAUP.1 What led me to help form this consortium? What challenges do we face in carrying out this initiative? What have I learned so far? In what follows, I will briefly sketch answers to these questions as a bid toward broadening the dialogue.

Having been born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area, whose progressive gay politics are well known, I accepted with apprehension an academic position at Virginia Commonwealth University, a state institution located in the capital city of Richmond. After signing my contract in February 1999, I promptly called Mary Gay Hutcherson, an ambassador of sorts to Richmond’s lesbian community. What I remember most clearly from that conversation was her caveat that, although there was a thriving local lesbian and gay community (actually several communities, I would soon learn, divided by race and class and, to a lesser extent, age and sex), one was expected to be discreet. Discreet. What exactly would that entail, I wondered. And what happens to those who are indiscreet?

Several weeks later, I caught a partial glimpse. The Village Voice featured an article in April 1999 on Henry Edward Northington, a homeless gay man living in Richmond who had been murdered in a public park. He had been decapitated, his head carried half a mile and then prominently displayed on a footbridge leading to an area known for gay cruising. Apparently, he had not been discreet enough. “Eddie,” who had been known to address people using sexual and racial epithets, and who, coincidentally, audited classes at my soon-to-be academic home, was not especially beloved. No one from the local gay community mobilized around the incident. (In September 2000, however, after a man shot seven people, killing one, in a Roanoke, Virginia, gay bar, the local, state, and national gay communities mobilized to end hate crimes targeting those perceived to be gay.)

Flash forward several years to a packed auditorium at my university. I am one of six panelists addressing the question, Can science or religion define what is natural or normal for sexual behavior and orientation? The evening is one event in “a four-part series of presentations and conversations with local experts,” according to the announcement of its sponsor, the Life Sciences and Religion Community Forum of Central Virginia. The forum’s advisory committee, of which I am a member, is made up of university and community leaders.

Local queers came out in force for the event. Judging from the panelists present and the audience’s response, most folks in the room held fairly liberal views on the subject of homosexuality. Seated next to me, a local minister and adjunct faculty member was the lone social conservative on the panel. During his scholarly exegesis, he explained why early Christians, like their present-day followers, consider sex between men a sinful behavior. The atmosphere in the room became tense. Perhaps it was because of our close physical proximity or our shared status as professors explaining the history of ideas, but I felt empathic toward him. He finished talking and was bombarded with questions. According to your beliefs, one woman asked, is it also sinful for a woman in love with another woman to write her a love letter? The crowd erupted in applause.

Later that evening, a gay community activist and practicing Christian (a young white man) asked me about my cool-headedness during the minister’s remarks. “You sat right next to him,” he said. “How did you keep your composure?” Being an atheist helps, I thought to myself (I may be “out” as a lesbian in Virginia but not as a nonbeliever). Then, thinking about his observation, I recalled the words of another speaker that evening, a graduate seminary student at Virginia Union University, a historically black, Baptist-affiliated institution in Richmond, who shared her moving story of spiritual wounding as an African American lesbian of faith. Given the ethos of white supremacy in this country, not to mention in Richmond (the former “Capital of the Confederacy”), being white and middle class also helps. After all, a scant thirty-six years before the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to state sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, it reluctantly decriminalized interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. (Many states still had their antimiscegenation laws years later, however.)

I begin with these vignettes because they illustrate some salient characteristics of the discursive terrain in Virginia on the subject of homosexuality as well as what is at stake—life, liberty, and faith. Any initiative to create dialogue in Virginia on issues of sexuality and gender expression must take into account the reality of violence in the state, the centrality of religion, and the history of race.

These incidents also show that the climate in Virginia, although repressive, is not monolithically so. The community forum at which I spoke represents some progress at initiating a conversation across differences. I contend, however, that in order to see the whole picture, we must address the silences as carefully as we do the dialogues themselves.2

Polarized Atmosphere

For people residing in large urban centers with sizeable gay enclaves or in small college towns in so-called blue states, Virginia may appear to be a perilous place to address those silences, whether by teaching queer studies, by publicly supporting those of us who do, or simply by refusing to be closeted. The state is widely considered to be one of the most homophobic in the nation. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, rendering Virginia’s 214-year-old sodomy law unconstitutional, the state’s “crimes against nature” statute remains on the books, making oral and anal sex between consenting adults a felony. This law has been cited as the basis on which to outlaw or attempt to outlaw a host of other activities, including gay-straight alliances in high schools; inclusion of gay people, and those perceived as gay, as a protected class in hate-crimes legislation; and provision of insurance by private companies to the same-sex partners of gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees. Virginia currently has two laws invalidating any form of legal recognition for same-sex partnerships and is currently poised to amend its state constitution over the issue.3

Virginia made national headlines in the 1990s for two incidents involving lesbians. One was the 1996 Shenandoah National Park slayings of hikers Julianne Williams and Lolie Winans, whose throats were slit, federal prosecutors originally alleged, by a man who later told prosecutors that they “deserved to die because they were lesbian whores.” In the other case, Sharon Bottoms lost custody of her biological daughter largely because, according to the judge’s interpretation of Virginia law, her lesbianism was “illegal” and “immoral,” and it made her an “unfit parent.” In the judge’s eyes, the fact that she was a working-class lesbian only made things worse.

Aware of this climate and wanting to reduce homophobia and genderphobia on Virginia’s college campuses, several academics from across the state came together in spring 2005, with the help of representatives from the national office of the American Association of University Professors, to form a consortium in response to the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues initiative. In our initial proposal, we described the situation at Virginia’s universities and our objectives for seeking funding:

Virginia’s college campuses have been in the news as places where issues of sexuality and religion are polarized. Among the many occurrences are (a) the removal of the phrase “sexual orientation” from Virginia Tech University’s nondiscrimination policy (subsequently restored due to student protest); (b) [Virginia] Tech’s Board of Visitors’ revoking a female professor’s signed contract for permanent employment after it learned she was the partner of a newly hired woman dean (she is now tenured at Virginia Tech following campus protests); (c) arrest threats when members of Soul Force, a Virginia-based religious activist group, attempted to donate gay-themed books to the library at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University; (d) picketing by Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps’s followers at formerly Baptist-affiliated Averett University in Danville Against its new gay-straight student alliance.

State-sanctioned anti-gay initiatives, coupled with fundamentalist Christian views on homosexuality as “sinful behavior” and “an abomination,” have contributed to a campus climate hostile toward gays and lesbians and have rendered sexuality in general an unacceptable topic of discussion.4

How can we move beyond this polarized atmosphere to initiate respectful dialogue on our college campuses about sexual identity and gender expression? How do we broaden the conversation to include a range of religious and secular scholarly perspectives on sexuality and gender that takes into consideration the wide spectrum of people’s experiences and cultural traditions, disciplinary differences that govern one’s approach to truth-seeking and evidence gathering, and the complexities of personal and communal ethics? How can civil and rational conversation improve the climate for gays and lesbians on Virginia’s college campuses?

Thanks to the Ford Foundation grant, we are organizing a statewide conference aimed at building a network of people at Virginia’s colleges and universities to promote civil and rational dialogue on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-related campus issues.

Long before we secured this funding, however, I and my fellow project leaders had realized that the process we needed to go through to seek funding had become the difficult dialogue itself. What happened was this. When we sought institutional sponsorship from our home universities, they expressed support for the project’s ideas but then declined to participate. Fearing backlash for being seen to endorse a politically sensitive topic in conservative Virginia, these state-funded institutions would not authorize their names to be attached to our proposal as written. As Roger Bowen, the AAUP’s general secretary, wrote in the cover letter accompanying our initial proposal:

Sexuality is such a volatile issue in Virginia that even the relatively liberal administrations of the consortium institutions, both of which support the concept of the proposal, have refused to serve as lead agency for a project with sexuality as a main focus. Ironically, the refusal of Virginia administrations to deal frankly with questions of sexuality underscores the very need for the project proposed. Only a national organization like the AAUP working with a network of faculty at the local level can provide the insulation from political pressure needed to allow dialogue to occur.

Overcoming Fear

Our closed-door discussions with university administrators over the Difficult Dialogues initiative are too involved to elaborate on here. Their importance, however, lies in the fact that they were dialogues, they were difficult, and there was pressure to leave much unsaid. In other words, we learned that the silences that occurred during these conversations, both what we were advised to omit from our proposal and what we ourselves were afraid to say, spoke more forcefully than the speech itself. For example, one high-level university administrator, a strong ally of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues on his campus, worried about offending his boss’s sensibilities and the potential backlash from state legislators, who control the institution’s public funding. Before he would put our proposal forward for consideration, he asked us to delete specific mention of homophobic incidents on Virginia’s campuses and a reference to the state’s history of “massive resistance” to school desegregation. For a day or two, we uneasily agreed. Soon, however, it became clear that even this concession—a difficult silence to be sure—could not rally firm institutional support for our proposal.

In the end, we sought and eventually found institutional legitimacy from a private secular institution, Hollins University in Roanoke. Yet the memory of those conversations and the insights illuminated by them—that to anticipate others’ fear is to succumb to one’s own, that our responsibility to address antigay hatred must not be severed from our responsibility to address racial hatred—remain with us today. As poet and essayist Audre Lorde wrote in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” published in Sister Outsider in 1984, “Your silence will not protect you. . . . For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

To initiate campus dialogue on the subject of homophobia in Virginia (and, possibly, in the majority of U.S. states), one need not bring together individuals holding polarized positions. Although a debate between, on one side, antigay religious activists Jerry Falwell (Liberty University) and Pat Robertson (Regent University) and, on the other, gay community activists Mel White (Soul Force) and Dyana Mason (Equality Virginia) would generate sparks, it is not the only available path, nor, I believe, the most intellectually honest one. The difficult dialogue I want to have will tease out the complexities of the issues and acknowledge and begin to address the difficult silences that are bound to unfold. On Virginia’s college campuses, it is a dialogue already begun.5

Notes

1. I am a co-leader of the project “A Civil Voice: Difficult Dialogues on Sexuality, Gender Expression, and Homophobia on Virginia’s College Campuses.” The other co-leaders are Jen Boyle (Hollins University), Leeray Costa (Hollins University), Elizabeth Cramer (Virginia Commonwealth University), Charles Ford (Norfolk State University), Darla Schumm (Hollins University), and Martin Snyder (AAUP). We are organizing a statewide conference titled “NetworkVA: Building LGBTQ Coalitions for Change on Campus,” to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 3, 2007. For details, visit the conference Web site at http://www1.hollins.edu/depts/ford. Back to text.

2. As evidence of both the long and impressive history of Virginia student activism on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues and the significance of addressing silence, the national Day of Silence, which just celebrated its ten-year anniversary, was instigated by students at the University of Virginia. (It is now sponsored nationwide by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.) During the Day of Silence, held in April, students, faculty, and staff from around the country voluntarily stop speaking for one day to punctuate the silencing that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, and queer people experience on a daily basis due to homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. Back to text.

3. For a complete description of the Affirmation of Marriage Act, as well as details about other recent and pending legislation affecting the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community, see Equality Virginia’s Web site at www.EqualityVirginia.org. See also Virginia—Hostile Climate, a report published by People for the American Way (www.pfaw.org). Back to text.

4. Receiving considerably less attention are the quotidian strains lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students, faculty, and staff face. For example, at my own university, students have been subjected to everything from antigay diatribes to physical violence—two students suffered head trauma in September 2002 when they were attacked after attending a meeting sponsored by the Sexual Minority Student Alliance, one of the campus’s two lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer student groups. In 2005, the athletics department abruptly canceled a dance competition scheduled to occur during men’s basketball games when students from Queer Action, the activist student group, and concerned faculty and staff asked to meet with the department to discuss why only co-ed couples were invited to participate. Back to text.

5. For their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this essay, I want to thank Liz Canfield, Elizabeth  Cramer, Jeremy Kidd, Patricia Perry, and especially Mary Jane Smith. Back to text.

Winston is assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is project co-leader of the Difficult Dialogues initiative she writes about in Academe. The project’s Web site is http://www1.hollins.edu/depts/ford. For an annotated version of her article, write to Winston at jmwinsto@vcu.edu.

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