"Anecdote" Is Not the Singular of "Data" ...

... but anecdotes can still be significant, and at the very least interesting. Here's an anecdote.

I went to the public library today to get out of the house, do some work, see some friends. I set up my laptop on a table, near another table where a neatly dressed older (mid-60s, I guess) white man was working with his laptop and a scanner. He got my attention because his cell phone kept going off, quite loudly. The first time that happens it's understandable, because maybe you've forgotten to turn the ringer down or off when you came in; so you turn it down before it rings again. But he didn't. Maybe he didn't know how -- he had to ask the library staff for some very basic help with his computer. He would walk off to a chair a dozen feet away to have his phone conversations, though there were other people nearby who could have listened in if they wanted to. Then he'd come back and work some more until his phone went off again.

Anyway, just before he left he had one final conversation without leaving his work table. Here are the two sentences that jumped out at me.

The fucking media is doing the same fucking thing to Ron Paul they did to Wallace! All they talk about is the 'three candidates': Perry, Romney, and Nigger Cain.

I shit you not.

I don't have any qualms about posting these statements here, because he was talking in a public place, with other people besides me nearby. I don't think he cared if anyone heard him; he wasn't yelling but neither was he trying to keep his voice down. Besides, I don't know his name (and wouldn't post it if I knew), and I don't think he could be identified anyway from what I've written here.

I'm not going to generalize from this racist shitbag to all Ron Paul supporters, of course, nor to all old white men in southern Indiana; I was just fascinated to hear such quaint rhetoric, spoken so openly, in this day and age. I know there are there are plenty of Americans who'd say Amen to his complaints. (It's not only right-wing swine who have criticized the corporate media's neglect of Ron Paul, either, just as a matter of principle.) And despite Herman Cain's strong numbers just now, I suspect the right-wing Republican base must be feeling some cognitive dissonance about him. Is the Republican Party ready for an African-American Presidential candidate who sounds a lot more like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright than Barack Obama, even if he as ignorant and batshit crazy as Michele Bachmann? I don't believe so.

Are You Or Have You Ever Been a Negro, Dr. King?

This (via) is fascinating. Thanks to FAIR for posting it on their blog.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The full program is divided up into segments, so if you can, click on the second one where there is some very intelligent discussion. What particularly struck me about the excerpts from Meet the Press in 1960 and 1965 is that in a just world they'd put an end to certain liberals' yammering about the bygone days when the media spoke truth to power, and were adversary, dammit! They were objective instead of putting their opinions into everything! As you can see, Meet the Press was adversary in those days, all right -- but not to the powerful.

The Guy in Blue

I considered writing about this yesterday, but I'm glad I waited until today.

Yesterday Salon.com ran this photo that was making the rounds.

It was accompanied by an article by Justin Elliott on "Occupy Wall Street's struggle for nonviolence." Apparently the right-wing media had jumped on the photo as proof of OWS's violent tendencies. Numerous commenters on Elliott's article pointed out how unclear the picture was, especially since it had been taken on the fly and the photographer didn't see it until afterward, when he looked over the images he had. But what is going on here? Was the guy in the blue shirt actually attacking the policeman, or had he been shoved from behind or simply lost his balance -- not hard to do in a big, agitated crowd -- and was simply falling forward, trying to brace himself against the person he'd been thrown onto? No one seemed to know anything, not even what had happened in the immediate sequel. Had the demonstrator been arrested?

The reason I'm glad I didn't write about it yesterday is that we know a little more today. Turns out the man in blue didn't just fall, he was throwing himself at the policemen. But someone who was present has spoken up.

The “tackling” photo appears to have been taken just moments after protester Felix Rivera-Pitre was punched in the face by NYPD Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona. A couple of videos of the punching have gone viral on YouTube (see below for one).

Rivera-Pitre tells me that the unidentified man in the blue shirt in the “tackling” photo merely entered the melee to come to Rivera-Pitre’s aid.

“He was just trying to help. The cops were pretty violent. They were the ones actually elbowing people,” Rivera-Pitre says. “The reason I didn’t get arrested was this guy [from the photo] was one of the guys around me. I think he was the one who started screaming, ‘Save him! Save him!’”

Naturally, the police deny it. (Which, according to Duncan's Law of Official Denials, means that it's true.) They say Rivera-Pitre tried to elbow Cardona, and got punched in return. It's hard to tell from the video Salon links to, but we have to remember who we're dealing with: a lawless police force that has been caught initiating violence against peaceful protesters many times already. And whatever the guy in the blue shirt did, he didn't use pepper spray, or a truncheon, or a horse against Cardona. The police violence at OWS and elsewhere is indubitable, amply documented, and far outstrips anything the protesters have plausibly been accused of.

I'm glad the Occupation is committed to nonviolence, simply on practical grounds. As Noam Chomsky wrote during the antiwar movement of the 1960s:

It is quite easy to design tactics that will help to consolidate the latent forces of a potential American fascism. To mention just one obvious example, verbal and physical abuse of the police, however great the provocation, can have only this effect. Such tactics may seem "radical" and, in a narrow sense, justified by the magnitude of the infamy and evil that they seek to overcome. They are not.

(in American Politics and the New Mandarins [Pantheon, 1969], 398)

Besides, the police outgun the protesters and are trained in the use of violence. If the Occupiers renounce nonviolence they will lose the high ground they now occupy, and will lose anyway in any real fight.

I'm not saying that peaceful protesters should be abandoned to police violence. Lots of pressure can, and I hope will, be put on the government to rein in and punish police; this won't be easy, of course, since the police are acting on government orders -- they are not "out of control." Notice that the officers in the photo are wearing white shirts, which means they are supervisors, like most of the police who've been documented assaulting protesters. They're not rogues, they're leading the attack on freedom of assembly. This is all the more reason to raise an outcry against police thuggery, instead of wringing one's hands because the protesters may have hit back once or twice.

Once again I have to ask why the story is being framed solely in terms of the Occupiers' "commitment to nonviolence"? Why not the state? That may seem a somewhat ingenuous question, since everyone knows that states claim the monopoly on violence. What I'm asking is why so many people, especially toward the left end of the political spectrum, don't see state violence as discrediting the state, and can still regard violent states as moral agents in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, and become so indignant when citizens fight back against the violence of the state, no matter how ineffectually and mildly.

(As I've noticed before, not all violent protests are created equal. If they speak for the government's interests, like anti-Japanese protests in South Korea a few years ago, they're acceptable and even laudable. If they are right-wing thugs attacking peaceful demonstrators, probably incited by the government, that's okay too.)

If the police want the OWS protests to be nonviolent, all they have to do is renounce violence themselves, because the violence that does occur is almost all theirs. The rest of us must remember that.

Why Do They Hate Our Freedoms?

One of my right-wing classmates on Facebook posted a link to this article from the American Spectator, a charming little rag whose main function appears to be to make the National Review look moderate. My friend commented on the link:

If we are so upset with our Government ... Why do 80 % of incumbents win re-election. ...... Read the article below "Breaking the Ruling Class"

The link came via a Facebook page belonging to the American Majority, a right-wing organization that evidently chose its name on the same principle as the Bolsheviks did, though with less basis in reality. (And goodness gracious! The article was written by the "founder and President" of the American Majority, one Ned Ryun.) their link included the comment:

At re-election rates of over 80%, we do indeed have a ruling class. How can we stop this?

... illustrated by a picture of Charlie Rangel. I guess the idea is that since so many in Congress serve multiple terms, they constitute a "class." Tied to this is a call for the highly anti-democratic quick fix of term limits. The American Majority's wall photos include images of scary Negroes and many of politicians, but only one is of a Republican, Chris Christie.

The article itself misses a few things:

During the American Revolution, roughly a third of all colonists supported King George III, and, for the most part, Parliament. Though completely surrounded by the wildfire of political rebellion, these Tories continued to support the status quo. Thankfully, our founders did not, no more than the Tea Party accepts today's status quo. ...

Of course, "our founders" -- certainly the iconic ones -- were the ruling class of their day, and they didn't want to shake things up too much. They were very concerned to protect the wealthy elites against the envious rabble. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry -- all were gentry. (I just looked up Henry and noticed that after failing more than once in business he became a lawyer. That would qualify him for political office today, wouldn't it?) But hey, only Communists study history; Real Americans can just make it up.

I don't mean to oversimplify; the Founders made some appeal to radical ideas to gain support from the bulk of the population, including those of Thomas Paine. At least some of them had some personal and political integrity. But they were still the Ruling Class. I thought that the historical chapters of Roger D. Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope (HarperCollins, 2010) cast some interesting light on the crony capitalism of the late 1700s; if you want an introduction to the problem, check it out. (Look up the Panic of 1792, especially.)

In 2009, a full 76 percent of people polled said that elected officials put their own interests ahead of those of the American people. Yet despite such numbers, in 2010, during one of the most dramatic political shifts in decades, more than 80 percent of incumbents at all levels won reelection, largely preserving the political status quo.

Funny, that. Leftists have been pointing it out for some time. But I think that the 2010 elections can only be linked to "one of the most dramatic political shifts in decades" if you relate them to the 2008 elections, which were a much more dramatic rejection of the status quo. It's interesting what short (or well-trained) memories the Right have; 2008 isn't that long ago, yet they forget that American voters delivered a stinging defeat to the Republican party. (But then, no wonder they prefer to forget that.)

At first glance, it doesn't make sense: a highly unpopular Congress (and president, for that matter), governing over an economy and country careening out of control, yet some eight out of 10 members of Congress can expect to be re-elected. Many have served for years and have brought this country to its current predicament. Yet they keep winning re-election to continue their tenures of failure: If current spending levels hold, the United States' public debt will eclipse 300 percent of our economy before midcentury. And when confronted with massive debt, our leaders, lacking the political courage to undertake fundamental change, shave infinitesimal amounts here and there, exfoliating the elephant of debt while it keeps plowing ahead toward the inevitable cliff.

Again, what a short memory you have, Grandma! True, Congress is unpopular, but the Republicans are even less popular. Obama's approval numbers are dropping, but the last I heard they hadn't reached George W. Bush levels yet. Most Americans still remember Bush and what he and his cronies did to this country; it's only the Republican fringe who have scrubbed their minds of such inconvenient facts.

Ryun is also carefully vague about the context of Congressional corruption: he has Congress floating there in mid-air, full of motiveless malignity, security in its incumbency. He uses the Ruling Class to refer only to Congress and the Executive Branch; the Corporate Branch doesn't enter the picture at all. You'd think that Congress and Obama (who in the right-wing imagination must have taken office in 2001; Bush's effect on the economy is simply forgotten) were getting the country into debt purely for their own personal enrichment; that they do so in the service of the financial and corporate sectors is conspicuous by its absence from the, erm, discussion.

Which brings me to the most entertaining aspect of the article and my friend's recommendation: it's a call for Class Warfare, the great bugbear of the Right, the epithet they hurl at Occupy Wall Street, Obama, the Democrats -- but not at the Tea Party, who doesn't like Wall Street any better than the rest of the 99 percent do. I guess that's Tea Party Exceptionalism: it's only bad when their enemies do it, not when they do it.

Inappropriately Touched by E.T.

Someone shared this image on Facebook today, with the header "Seriously !! Still believe we are alone ?"

It looks like you can see it, and the comments, without being logged into Facebook, which is handy. (It was posted by Milky Way Scientists, apparently affiliated with NASA, who also posted this smokin' beefcake photo of Albert Einstein. Maybe they should put out a calendar along those lines?)

I'm not exactly surprised, since I know that NASA has always had a high concentration of religious nuts; see David F. Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997). It's a useful reminder that certain New Atheists' assurance that the advance of science will inevitably consign religion to the dustbin of history isn't just bogus, it's a statement of faith.

These are pretty pictures, and I've loved looking at photographs of deep space objects since I was a kid. But they have no bearing at all on the question of extraterrestrial life. Even though I recognize that a leap of faith is involved, I can't see how to get from point A to point B here. Judging from arguments I've encountered in the past, I think that the idea is that in a universe so full of galaxies and stars, there must be some other people out there somewhere! I understand the intuitive appeal of that argument, but there's this little thing called the Fermi Paradox ...

What first caught my attention was the cartoon image below the photos of the Mocker and Scoffer, who believeth not what Science hath shown him so abundantly. I was reminded immediately of a co-worker of mine, who after driving through the desert in the American Southwest was convinced by the beauty of the natural formations that there must be a "higher power." (I asked if her if she felt the same way about soil erosion in her garden, which is also God's work. I don't remember what she answered; probably she did feel the same way about it.)

Some of the comments on the image are revealing.

it would be so stupid if we were alone .....

C'mon i thought this fact makes sense to all of us! Why do u still ignore it?

Hope so. Can't wait for something to come and have a VERY stern word with you, Mankind. And I hope they are A LOT bigger that you are. Although they probably won't be as NASTY as you are.

We are not alone anymore

Well, if anyone is out there watching what is going on down here, they'll just shake their heads, leave us alone and continue searching for intelligent life.

That last one has three "like" flags so far.

These are declarations of faith, not of rationality. And while it could be argued that the comments are just stupid laymen, the tone was set by the scientists who posted the image to begin with. "Still believe we are alone?" Personally I don't have an opinion one way or the other, because no one has shown me any evidence, any reason to believe that there is life on other planets or in other star systems; but at the same time there's no clear evidence that there isn't life on other planets. It's reminiscent of the popular claim that you can't prove or disprove the existence of God, but on the subject of extraterrestrial life, many atheists are ready to make assertions they can't prove. I consider it a great occasion for agnosticism, the admission that we don't know something rather than jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Recently I saw a quotation from Richard Dawkins to the effect that the trouble with religion is that it encourages children to be comfortable with ambiguous conclusions, rather than giving them certain knowledge. (Sorry, I can't find the source; I thought I had it bookmarked.) I'd have thought it was the other way around myself, but I'm not an Oxford man.

The use of the emotionally-laden word "alone" is revealing too. I don't know about you, but I'm not alone: there are billions of other people on this planet. The Christian apologist Blaise Pascal famously wrote, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." It's been argued that he wasn't speaking in his own voice there, but ventriloquizing an imagined atheist; I can't tell, and I don't think it matters because clearly many people, atheists as well as religious believers, are frightened by the vastness of the universe, and want to shrink it to a cozier size by populating it with guardian angels or kindly ETs. (Notice the automatic -- that is, irrational -- assumption that people on other worlds will be smarter and more "civilized" than we are, though contemptuous of terrestrial humans' stupidity and violence. When you assume ... ) It's tempting for me to guess that Milky Way Scientists are cynically selling comfort to (what they perceive as) the ignorant masses by promising to find them playmates or idealized benign teachers elsewhere in the universe; but from what I've seen, I think they believe it will work on the proles because it works on them.

Don't Have a Cow, Jane

There's a very strange article about Gertrude Stein on the BBC site by one Jane O'Brien, who announces at the outset that she started out not knowing who Stein was. Which isn't a crime, though maybe writing an article (and presumably getting paid for it) about someone of whom you're completely ignorant ought to be.

But hey, maybe you don't know who Stein was either. Okay: born in Pennsylvania in 1874, died in Neuilly-en-Seine, France, in 1946. She grew up in Oakland, California and attended Radclyffe College and Johns Hopkins, but in 1903 she moved with her brother Leo to Paris, where she settled. In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas, and the two women lived together until Stein's death; Toklas died in 1970. On Saturday evenings the Stein-Toklases held salons which were attended by the famous and the obscure alike. As a result she became something of a celebrity. At the same time she became a notoriously difficult (yet quotable) avant-garde writer. Toklas typed Stein's manuscripts and managed the household.

What got O'Brien her assignment is two major exhibits related to Stein in Washington DC. Though not herself an artist, Stein befriended and patronized artists: many of them did her portrait. Her personal collection of modern art, originally begun with Leo, became famous too. She also mentored and influenced many younger writers, including Ernest Hemingway; when I read his posthumous gender-bender novel The Garden of Eden I saw the Stein connection immediately. One exhibit, at the National Portrait Gallery, demonstrates her ubiquitous presence in modern art during the first third of the twentieth century. The other, at the Stanford in Washington Gallery, is called "Insight in Identity" and features "artists who've studied Stein for years" and "find Stein appealing and such a rich source of inspiration precisely because her writing is so obscure and incomprehensible - rather like contemporary art itself."

Okay, much of Stein's work is difficult, no dispute there. But she could also write accessibly when she wanted to, and I can't understand why no one told O'Brien about The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which Stein wrote in Toklas's voice. (Much later, after Stein's death, Toklas wrote her own memoir, What Is Remembered.) It became a best-seller after its publication in 1932, which led to a triumphant tour of the US by Stein and Toklas. She also wrote the librettos for a couple of operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All (about the 19th century feminist Susan B. Anthony). She wasn't just the power behind the throne of twentieth-century modernism, she was a power in her own right -- not bad for a big butch dyke who wrote incomprehensible prose.

After Stein's death her unpublished writing was issued. Among these works were Q.E.D., a pretty straightforward autobiographical novel written in 1903 about Stein's struggle to come to terms with her love of women in college, and a series of volumes published by Yale included some barely coded erotic poems to or about Toklas, like "Lifting Belly."

Kiss my lips.
She did.
Kiss my lips again she did.
Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.
I have feathers.
Gentle fishes.

O'Brien refers to "Stein's sexuality and her openly gay relationship with Alice," but that's not quite right. Women of Stein's generation could and often did live together openly without being "openly gay"; those who were lovers generally relied on the cover provided by this convention. As far as I know, neither Stein nor Toklas ever acknowledged publicly (i.e., "openly") that they were Sapphists, and they never really had to deny it publicly either because in those days it simply wasn't done to expose the private life of respectable women, even a blatantly butch-femme couple like Stein and Toklas. When gay and lesbian scholars in the 1970s began saying aloud what had previously been an open secret, several Stein biographers reacted furiously. Friends and I chuckled over one writer's claim that they couldn't have been lesbians, because they didn't have the "sordid arguments" that real lesbians have. (That must have been also a reaction to Hemingway's hatchet job on the couple in his own posthumous A Moveable Feast.)

(I'm relieved to be able to report that this didn't happen in Washington, by the way.)

But hell, the 1970s are ancient history now too. Still, O'Brien's piece is disturbingly shoddy. What was the Beeb thinking, putting out such stuff?

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

What I was looking for when I found that previous story was the latest Dan Savage column (which I first read at the Onion AV Club). It contained a letter from a scared, gay college freshman:

I'm still unable to admit my sexuality to my friends, teammates, classmates, and hallmates. I have thought about joining the LGBT organizations, but those guys are too "out" for me. Not that there's any problem with that. I just don't think that being gay is anyone else's business unless I want them to know. The hardest part is seeing other freshmen go out to parties, hook up, and date when I don't have the opportunity to do so. I've resorted to going on Craigslist, but my encounters have been weird. What should I do?

Closeted Undergrad

I've heard versions of this story many times over the past forty years, so I was curious to see what Dan Savage would have to say about it.

He begins adequately, by lecturing him gently on the psychic cost of the closet, inviting him to imagine his straight friends in the same boat:

What would the straight guys on your team have to do in order to hide their straightness from you? They could never mention their girlfriends, go out on dates, or hook up with someone they met at a party. They would have to hide their porn and be careful not to check out girls in public. They could never get engaged, get married, or have kids. They might be able to have furtive, secretive, and shame-driven sexual encounters with other closeted heterosexuals they met online or in places where closeted straight people gathered to have anonymous sex, but finding love—true and lasting love—would be extremely difficult.

"Team"? Closeted Undergrad didn't mention a team; or maybe he did but Savage edited down the letter and forgot what he'd cut out. No matter, really. So far so good. [P.S. How did I miss the word "teammates" in the first sentence I quoted from CU's letter? Senility is icumen in.]

It wouldn't be impossible—some gay people managed to find lasting love back in the bad old days—but it would be difficult. And the sneaking around and hiding and lying would ultimately warp their psyches and their lives.

Not so good. I think Savage is trying to scare the boy with old folklore. In fact, from what I've read and the older gay people I've known, a lot more than "some" managed to find "lasting love," though we'll never know exactly how many. We don't know how many do so now. Contrariwise, a lot of out gay people never find "lasting love." Some don't want to. Some want to but can't make a relationship last. The same is true of straight people.

... once you're out, you don't have to hang out with gay people with whom you don't click, and you don't have to be gay the way, say, the LGBT groupers on your campus are gay. Remember: Gay men who are out at your age (18?) tend to be a bit gayer than the average gay dude. They're out in part because they can't be in. And God bless 'em and more power to 'em and the gay rights/liberation movement would never have gotten off the ground without 'em. But since you can pass, CU, you've had the option of waiting.

Again, not so good. Rather worse, in fact. Neither Savage nor I know how "gay" the people in this kid's campus LGBT group are. What the kid complained about was how "out" they were, which is something else again, but many people think of being out as being flamboyantly, flamingly "stereotypical." But a deeply closeted kid like Closeted Undergrad might simply be frightened by the fact that the "groupers" aren't closeted: their straight friends know they're gay, they participate in public action like writing letters or columns in the student newspaper, and so on. That in itself is enough to terrify the closeted. I speak from experience.

Some years ago, the campus LGBT group here at IU met in a room at the top of the Student Activities Tower in the student Union building. The room was one floor higher than the elevator would go, so there was a landing below the stairway you took to get to the meeting. Often people going to meetings would notice other people pacing around on that landing. Later on some of them finally climbed the stairs, and some of them told us how hard it had been for them to do it, how afraid they were of walking through the door and entering a gay space. I could (and still can) sympathize with them, because I had a similar experience myself.

Occasionally someone would tell us that the group should change its name (OUT) to something less ... obvious. A lot of people were afraid to come to meetings, they told us, because they couldn't tell their straight friends where they were going without giving themselves away. They also thought the meetings were in too public a place. Meanie that I am, I suggested that an additional group be started for such people: call it "Almost Out." The date, time, contact information, and location of its meetings would be kept secret. Someone asked me, "So, when's the next meeting?"

"I'm sorry," I said innocently, "I can't tell you that."

But maybe Closeted Undergrad does consider the members of his campus LGBT group to be, like, too gay. I've heard that one before too. A guy once complained to me that when he attended an OUT meeting, it was full of screaming queens. I remembered that meeting, and it was nothing of the kind: true, there were some big queens and dykes there, but there were more people who weren't. I told him this. I did not tell him that he was not nearly as butch himself as he evidently liked to think, though that was true. Nor was he unique in this attitude. Unlike Dan Savage, I wouldn't assume that Closeted Undergrad is passing. Maybe he only thinks he is; he won't know until he comes out to his straight friends and they tell him, "Finally! What took you so long?" I'd bet that six months after he comes out, CU will be performing in amateur drag nights. (As I recall from Dan Savage's own It Gets Better video, he was no John Wayne at that age himself, and got picked on because he "couldn't be in." Why is he talking about such people as "they" instead of "we"?)

Not that it matters. I've also met people who complained that OUT was just a "meatrack" (they all used the same word, interestingly), that everybody there was just looking for sex, and the complainers complained that they never got laid. Some cognitive dissonance there, no? I've talked to people who complained after attending one or two meetings that they hadn't met the love of their life, so there was no point in going to another. ("I know that you hate me for going back into the closet," one of them told me. How they do love to project onto others! I didn't hate him; I thought he was probably right, he wasn't ready to come out yet.) People do "hook up" at campus LGBT groups, but they are better sites for making friends and learning something of the range of gay people's experience. If you go looking for love, without taking any other kind of interest in the people you meet there, you will probably be disappointed. As Dan told CU, he doesn't have to hang out with gay people with whom he doesn't click -- but he won't be able to find people he clicks with unless he gets out a little.

On the other hand, Closeted Undergrad doesn't have to start with the community we call gay. Lots of gay people told their straight friends first, and only later went looking for other gay people, especially when we found out that we were still going to have to watch our straight friends go to parties, "hook up", and date while we tended the music or the keg by ourselves. ("Hook up" is a term that confuses me. Usually it seems to mean "find a one-night sexual partner", sometimes it seems to mean "make the acquaintance of someone who might become a sexual or romantic partner in the indefinite future.") But Closeted Undergrad needs to get it through his rather thick skull that he can't expect every gay person he meets to be a potential sex partner or even friend -- anymore than straights can expect the same of each other. Some of them he may not even like, and vice versa. It looks to me like CU is just looking for what used to be called "tricks", or today "hookups." Which is his privilege, but in that case he should stick with Craigslist or the local adult bookstore -- whatever. It also sounds as if he's surprised to find that hookups aren't particularly fulfilling and don't lead to true love; but the same can be said of most dates.

So it might be just as well if Closeted Undergrad waits a while before he comes out; that he went to personal ads on Craigslist (which I am bound to say seems to me to show a somewhat impatient nature) supports this. So does the remark "I just don't think that being gay is anyone else's business unless I want them to know." Evidently he feels that way even about his sexual partners. Unlike Dan, I don't think he's ready to come out yet. It won't kill him to wait another year or two; many people have waited longer. (I was 20 when I came out, and I've known people who were older, often much older.) His penis won't fall off nor will his heart shrivel if he waits until he's ready to stop playing games with himself and with other people.

It's not like he's trapped in some podunk town with no resources but the Internet and the nearest highway rest stop; if his college has a campus LGBT group, it also must have other social possibilities as well: parties, friendship circles, maybe a gay Christian group if he's kinky that way. He's not interested in people: I suspect that what he wants, or fantasizes, is a hot stud being left anonymously at his door, wrapped in cellophane for his protection, to be disposed of when he tires of him. This kind of self-absorption isn't evil; it's merely adolescent. But then, he is only eighteen.

Even his letter is a game: he presents Dan with an impossible problem -- how to "hook up" without letting anyone else know he's gay. I've known many people over the years with the same attitude, and Dan Savage has surely received even more letters from such people. Usually he doesn't go all moist about them. It's good to be gentle with the young, but not to overindulge them; that's not Dan Savage's style at all.