What Will LGBT Scholarship Look Like Over the Next Decade?
Tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the June 28, 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn bar in NYC’s Greenwich Village. On that day the drag queens, teenagers and street kids fought back in what is now generally considered to be the birth of the modern gay rights movement.
Writing in Inside Higher Education, Scott McLemee asked scholars what they think (or hope) will have changed in LGBT scholarship by the 50th anniversary. His first scholar respondent, Doug Ireland (a journalist more than a scholar really), observes:
Sad to say, much of what comes out of university gay studies programs these days is altogether too precious, artificial and written in an academic jargon that is indigestible to most LGBT people.
Sad to say, the rest go on to prove his point. Boiled down, their answer is we need more transgender study, more international study and activism, and a broadening of our understanding in the U.S. of the lgbt rights movement beyond and before Stonewall.
RELATED: Fred Sargeant, now a retired lieutenant from the Stamford, Conn., police department, was Craig Rodwell‘s lover. In 1969 Rodwell owned the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first literary gay bookstore, on Mercer Street in NYC. Rodwell is now deceased; Sargeant recalls their weekend of the Stonewall riots in a NYTimes OpEd today.
Lucian K. Truscott IV coverrd the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. Truscott had “blundered straight into” the first moments of the police raid when “at approximately 2 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, the gay men decided they weren’t going to take it anymore.” His is a myth-busting OpEd, also in today’s NYTimes.
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2 Responses to “What Will LGBT Scholarship Look Like Over the Next Decade?”
“Scholarship” (?) or “movement”?
I read the Scott McLemee link, and my reaction is “Geez, do we pay people for this?”
I would hope in ten years' time we've retired these departments catering to LGBT…'s “special needs” and that the material topics they cover have become mainstream. Students in epidemiology might study the rise of AIDS, and those in sociology might study gay cultural history, should any aspect of that remain unshrieked.
At the very least, I would hope the LGBT scholars could pool their grant money to buy a vowel, because that's the only thing they have any business pooling. Lesbians and gays have very little in common beyond their foxhole friendship of the past few decades, and transsexuals…well, I can't tell you a thing about them other than transexuality is quite different from homosexuality.