Thursday I drove a couple of hours to the University of South Carolina Upcountry in Spartanburg to attend their 6th annual Bodies of Knowledge symposium.  This year’s symposium had LGBT issues as a theme.  While these are issues that I care very much about personally as well as professionally, I had no intentions of attending the symposium. The semester is ending, with all the madness that comes with that, I had calendared events to attend, and it simply wasn’t in my day.  

But sometimes you have a plan and life takes over. A few weeks before a friend who had taught in the SC system sent me a link to an article about the SC legislature taking money away from programs at a SC college after they assigned an LGBT novel by Alison Bechdel, saying it promoted a “gay lifestyle,” whatever that is (there is no lifestyle….it’s just a life).  

I was really upset about it for two reasons: (1) with me being female and my longest relationship (15 years) having been with a female and knowing that landscape in a personal way, I know the negative hype about LGBT issues is absolute and utter nonsense, and 2) as a professor whose classes delve deeply into workplace discrimination issues as defined by our laws, I understand that professors need to be free to assign things that may make some uncomfortable. But if it allows students to explore, it transmits knowledge, enlightens, and takes students to a new understanding based on knowledge rather than whatever other garbage is in their head, then it is a good thing.  In fact, it is more than just a good thing, it is what education is about.  

One of the mottos of my university is “to inquire into the nature of things.”  You can’t do that with your hands tied about what you can assign to accomplish that.  That is, in part, what academic freedom is about.  I understand a legislature, in part, ultimately provides funding for public institutions, but they must not allow their personal issues to get in the way of the search for understanding and enlightenment that is the very basis of education in the first place.  Education does not only seek to enlighten only about what we may like or agree with.  

So, I was pretty upset that the SC legislature had intruded so heavily into the space of education.  If it happened to them, it could happen to us.  I immediately forwarded the email to our president as a heads up.

Then a couple of weeks later I received an email saying that the SC state legislature was so upset about the Bodies of Knowledge seminar that it had become a news event.  The director of Women & Gender Studies, Lisa Johnson, had been receiving vicious hate mail and was really feeling targeted.  I immediately emailed Lisa, who I did not know, words of support.  She was very grateful and told me she was feeling very vulnerable and threatened.

The more I thought about it and the more I thought about how I would feel in a similar situation, the more I realized I needed to do more.  I let our director of our LGBT center know that I was willing to pay the registration fee of up to ten students if he knew of any who were planning to go. It was clearly not to entice students to go, but only to support them if they had planned to do so. I knew that with only a couple of weeks left in the semester, they might be able to put it in their schedule, but the gesture was important to send the message of the importance of fighting oppression and injustice wherever it arises.  

And I decided that I myself would go.  Nothing says support more than simply being there.  The school was only a couple of hours drive and the registration fee was only $25 rather than the usual hundreds, so everything in me was saying I needed to do this.  Having been to much larger resistance situations including marches and sits ins on civil rights, issues including race, gender and LGBT, I figured that showing up to learn more at an academic forum the state legislature found threatening to the future of its population was the least I could do.

So, I cleared my schedule and made the drive.  As I was at the registration table, a woman who heard me give my name approached and asked if I was the one who had emailed.  I said yes.  It was Lisa, and she immediately moved to shake my hand.  I said, “A handshake?  This deserves at least a hug!”  She said she didn’t want to presume, I told her it was an expectation, so we had a warm hug and chatted about her recent travails and the importance of my coming.  She was so, so glad I did.

The presentations that day and the next were top rate.  They were excellent academic vehicles to explore various aspects of the LGBT experience and try to bring understanding and enlightenment.  Dr. Jane Ward (“Not Gay: Straight White Men, Homosexual Sex, ad the Making of Heterosexuality”), Thomas McBee (“Born in the Right Body”), Dr. Bernadette Barton (“The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays”) were mind-blowing, well done and exhaustively researched forays into new areas of exploration even for those of us familiar with this territory.  Paper presentations by student panelists were top grade: Panel I: Queer Moods, Moody Queers included “Undoing ‘Normal’ After ‘Born This Way'” by Masters candidate Jennifer MacLatchy, “Our Beloved Qranks” by Ph.D. student Gary Lee Pelletier, “Wake Me Up When September Ends: LGBT Suicides, Empowerment Music and the Anti-Bullying Movement,” by Shana Hirsch.  Even the students who introduced speakers had great, great comments which led me to worry a tiny bit less and appreciate even more, the power of education in SC: Chase Moery, Ariana Sanchez and Stacey Gullion.  

It was my daughter’s birthday, so I had to leave the symposium in the early afternoon in order to attend her birthday dinner in Atlanta, so I was unable to stay for the second panel.  But, it included such damning, world-ending topics (I am being sarcastic here, in a tip of the hat to the SC legislature—I have to say that because they have shown they are unable to tell the difference between reality and sarcasm–see below)  Ph.D. Nicholas A. Guittar’s “I’m Not the Stereotypical Lesbian: Gender (Non) Conformity and Coming Out,” Ethan Johnstone’s “How To Build Your Own Community,” Dr. Heather Talley’s “Queering the New Normal: Harm Reduction in an Age of Gay Progress,” and  Ph.D. student Amy Stewart’s, “Passages of Apprearing: Arendt and the Existential Politics of Transgender Liminality.”(take that to your Lesbian Hootenanny!–see below)  I also missed the last speaker, David Halperin, on “What is Sex For.”    

The opening performance the first day was to be by Leigh Hendrix, a comedian who was to perform “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less.”  Unfortunately, her performance was yanked by the powers that be because the SC legislature looked at the title and decided it was intended to recruit innocent young women into the “lesbian lifestyle.”  One legislator commented on a local newscast that he did not know what the presentation would be about, whether it was an academic presentation or a “lesbian hootenanny,” but it should not be permitted.

“Lesbian hootenanny“?  Did we really need to sink to that level of discourse, or even thought process in this day and age?  

Failing to see any satirical value (or not having enough knowledge, even in this day and time, to realize the possibility of satire rather than reality), Hendrix’s performance was cancelled.  Thank goodness she later spoke on the issue of what it was like to have her work, previously performed in several venues, banned in SC.  We gave her a roaring reception, I’m sure, born of our emotion at the ridiculousness of having her performance banned by a body that was responsible for creating laws for an entire state’s population but was clearly willing to kick some of its members to the curb.

Lisa is to be given major kudos for her courage in putting on the event despite the backlash, and for delivering such a magnanimously gracious, insightful, and urbane set of opening remarks both days and for bringing together such an extraordinarily knowledgeable group of presenters for the symposium.  She truly demonstrated that she is willing to perform her task as an educator of facilitating “inquiring into the nature of things.”

Even though I had to clear my calendar, pay for it on my own, and even walked out of the house without picking up off the bed my outfit for the next day (yikes!), it was worth every minute I spent at the event.  

Lisa needed to know she wasn’t alone, that others knew of her plight and supported her efforts to stand up in the face of flagrant oppression of an unprotected group by those in power and the encroachment on academic freedom by the Goliath of the legislature.  I was glad to be able to lend that support. 

Sometimes, you just need to show up and take a stand.