Spate of New Legal protections in California

I previously blogged on the introduction of the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act in California but KPBS notes it's just one of a range of new laws that are coming into force in California and potentially transforming the lives of LGBT citizens.   These include:

California Gay Bullying Law or "Seth's Law," named after 13-year-old Seth Walsh, from central California, who killed himself in 2010 after years of bullying. The law forces schools to address bullying through mandatory policies.

The "Gay Divorce Law," which allows a gay couple married in California, but living in a state that won't grant them a divorce, the right to divorce in California.

The LGBT Equality and Equal Access to Higher Education Law, which is an anti-harassment law that applies to state universities and colleges.

The Transgender Non-Discrimination Law. It protects transgender Californians from discrimination with regard to employment, education and housing.

Exciting times.  Read more here.

Follow Friday: Ian Rivers

My special Follow Friday mention this week goes to Professor Ian Rivers.  Ian has devoted almost two decades to studying bullying in schools.  His 2011 text on homophobic bullying instantly re-enforced Ian's position as an expert on bullying, and set against a backdrop of a series of teen suicides, established Ian as a key advisor on homophobic bullying in the United States.  Based at Brunel University, in the UK, Ian occasionally blogs here, but can be found on Twitter here.  Get following him.

Suicide, Slow Death and the View From the the Ivory Tower

Thanks to Jeron for flagging this rather interesting piece by Jasbir Puar. Puar is a Prof of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in the US and this piece was pitched as a keynote lecture delivered at Rutgers. As you might expect from someone of Puar's standing, it makes a number of valid points but it's a little bit too pretentious for my taste.

Puar's racial privilege analysis has been previously stated and remains engaging but she does little to develop it here. Her attempt to offer a perspective on the recent US teen suicides is welcome but I'm not a fan of this overly dense style of writing/speaking and I'm not convinced by her "slow death" argument (or rather its application to the Clementi case) . All of the facts of the Clementi case remain unknown or uncertain - a point Puar neglects to mention. We will never truly know what was going on in Clementi's head (despite the trawl of Internet postings he made prior to his death) and this may have been as much about embarrassment - the social construction of the sexual act - as it was about 'sexuality', the outing of self as a sexual category.

If I were to indulge in this academic conjecture, this is more about public vs private constructions of sexual(ity). For example (and I was talking about this in a class this week), the celebration of the heterosexual pregnancy is to to avoid the sexual. At the heart of pregnancy is the penetrative sexual act - or in IVF cases - a man wanking into a jar. The 'dirty' act of sex is forgotten in place of the 'respectable' status of pregnancy. So too have homosexual legal advances been about forgetting sex - they are about 'rights' for an 'identity' and sex is removed from that discourse.

Thus, the exposure of a sexual act in this 'public' way via a webcam was to reveal the private sexual self (regardless of 'sexuality') and that may have been the trauma, as much as the revelation of a homosexual self. DIY porn in contrast is about producing a performance of self - the moving of a camera, the editing, the knowing look into a camera. It is an illusion of the private. Thus, with regard to Clementi, I think the "slow death" argument advanced by Puar is to get stuck in the wrong groove.

That said, this argument of "slow death" may have wider applicability - and may indeed be an appropriate analysis of other scenarios but we ought to look at each teen suicide as an individual tragedy and try to avoid seeking to homogenise them into one simple academic analysis.

More generally, a number of minor errors bug me in the Puar piece. We have 'Grinder' instead of 'Grindr'. We get FaceBook' instead of 'Facebook'. It feels like an academic aware of technology and what technology is supposed to be doing, but they are experiences being viewed from an ivory tower. When Puar mentions DIY porn, it is like an ancient anthropologist describing the savagery of a distant land. I may of course being horribly unfair - Puar may simply have lousy dictation software.

Check out the full piece here.

It Gets Better (but...)

The Guardian carried a really interesting piece earlier in the week on schools attempts to tackle homophobic bullying through schooling. The brilliant Brit scholar Ian Rivers has done some wonderful work in this area and also blog on it here. Be sure to take a look. This story comes in the wake of a series of suicides in the US and the It Gets Better Project which is seeking to get ordinary people involved and explaining how they are leading happy lives. The project pages can be viewed here. Even Barack Obama got involved although the cynic in me thinks that might have more to do with the mid-terms next week and the predictions that the Democrats are about to get a serious kicking.

So here's Obama lending his support to the It gets Better Project:



Obama also popped up on The Daily Show this week and at one point found himself uttering "Yes we can, but". It was a historic moment and his advisers must have had their heads in their hands at that moment. The subject of gay rights is a good example of the "yes we can but" syndrome. Yes, there has been some progress - not least in terms of the benefits for federal employees and the number of openly gay people appointed to government jobs but there's been little by way of 'big-ticket' substance. Check out the second half of the Daily Show for the clip:

Homophobic Bullying

PinkNews is reporting that the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has argued children should be taught about gay equality in a bid to curb homophobic bullying in schools. According to the story, he said: "While the UK's education system ought to be in the vanguard of the fight against homophobic discrimination, all too often it is in fact part of the problem.

"Whereas our schools and colleges have done much to counter racism and sexism, the same cannot be said when it comes to tackling homophobia. Despite some notable exceptions, too many educational establishments are breeding grounds for the worst kind of casual prejudice."

The TUC also point to the Stonewall report - The School Report published last year which found that over two-thirds of young LGBT pupils have experienced homophobic bullying.

I've posted my first poll on the right hand side for readers to register your opinion. As ever, feel free to also add a comment on this post.