My Attempts at LGBT Advocacy & Research: A Brief Retrospective

Over the years, I have been asked occasionally about the origins of my interest in advocacy and research related to LGBT issues since it seems so different than my work on classical Greek rhetoric.  This question has reemerged given my public presentations in recent years on a topic I call "The Transgender Exigency"--which is also the title to a forthcoming book.

To tell this story I need to go back to my high school days. Without question, most influential part of my high school and college education was my experience as a competitive debater, reinforced by my work as a debate coach in graduate school and my first job. Debate taught me how to think critically, research topics thoroughly, and to organize and present my thoughts persuasively. It taught me a love of clear, well-constructed, smartly argued, and well-researched arguments, and a genuine distain for bad ones. It also ignited a life-long interest in how we understand and argue about definitions.

I also credit my involvement with debate for an early introduction into feminism. Surrounded by smart, capable young women on the debate team and, I should add, as part of the writing staff of our high school newspaper, it frankly never occurred to me not to be a feminist, even if I had a fledgling understanding of feminism at the time.  Of course discrimination based on sex (as we defined it at the time) was wrong, and of course the Equal Rights Amendment (passed by Congress during my senior year) should be passed and of course Title IX made sense (it was implemented the summer after I graduated from high school).

I was a graduate student at Northwestern when Phil Wander's essay, "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism," was published in the 1980s and I was convinced that scholars could and should do politically meaningful work. I did not always follow that path, as my doctoral dissertation was about Protagoras and the origins of Greek rhetorical theory. My first foray into explicitly political scholarship was "The Rhetoric of Nukespeak" (1989), which was a critique of nuclear language as advanced by the Reagan administration.  

By fall 1990, I was an assistant professor at Purdue University and my primary research program still focused on classical rhetoric and philosophy. I was involved with the women's studies program at Purdue, and taught about feminist theory and methods in my classes, but had yet to publish a work that I would call explicitly feminist.

Purdue is in West Lafayette, and it is next to Lafayette, where I happened to live in the fall of 1992. A member of the Lafayette City Council had a son who came out as gay, and that city council member made a motion that, as part of the City's updating its Human Rights Ordinance, they include sexual orientation as a category to be protected against discrimination.

As straightforward and sensible as the idea seems now, it was quite controversial at the time. The Supreme Court had ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick a few years earlier that the government could criminalize "homosexual sodomy" (though Indiana did not), and the succession of Supreme Court victories for gay rights were still on the horizon. The United States was soon to move from being a nation in which homosexual acts could be criminalized to one in which homosexuals could not be singled out as a group by discriminatory laws (Romer v. Evans 1996), could not be prosecuted for homosexual conduct (Lawrence v. Texas 2003, overturning Bowers), to having a constitutionally protected right to marry (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015), and be protected from job discrimination (Bostock v. Clayton County 2020).

But we were not there yet, and there was a great deal of opposition to the proposed amendment. Much of that opposition was fueled by what I thought were profoundly bad arguments. "Bad" in the sense of there being no evidence to support them (such as the claim that gay people were often pedophiles) or were weak justification for public policy (such as the claim that the Bible condemns homosexuality), or were constitutionally problematic (such as the assumption that religious grounds alone could justify a secular law). Reading such arguments in the local newspaper genuinely bugged me, so my partner and I attended a city council meeting in which the proposed amendment (now being called a gay rights ordinance) was going to be discussed. I was annoyed by the bad arguments being made against the ordinance, and so I got in line and took my turn speaking to the council to say just that.

That is how we ended up getting involved and playing a modest role in getting the ordinance passed. My efforts involved a combination of applied research and direct advocacy. I was first author of a white paper shared with members of the Lafayette and West Lafayette City Councils that drew on scholarly research to debunk myths about homosexuality, and I coauthored a guest editorial in the local paper. I led a team of faculty and graduate students to do a random-sample survey of area residents on the gay rights ordinance to compare to the lop-sided (nonrandom) results of a phone-in poll conducted by the local newspaper (Staff Report 1992). I spoke at City Council meetings and various panel discussions on and off campus.  

Later, when Purdue was considering whether to add “sexual orientation” as a protected category against discrimination and opponents expressed concerns about legal liability, I did a survey of all Big Ten universities to report on their experiences, which provided counter-evidence about the legitimacy of those concerns. 

I am fully aware that my efforts were quite modest in the larger scheme of things. I was a weekend warrior (activist-scholar) at best. I was experiencing significant career success thanks to my work in contemporary and classical rhetorical theory, and my classical work in particular can be credited for earning me tenure, various scholarly awards, and, a few years later, promotion to Professor in 1999. 

Meanwhile, my interest and research into definitional disputes generated a series of articles that culminated in a book in 2003, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning. Though that book was concerned primarily with making a series of theoretical interventions to advance what I called a pragmatic approach to definitions, my personal values and interests--that is, my political leanings--were increasingly apparent in my discussion of the case studies of definitional disputes involving "rape," "wetlands," and "person" (in the context of Roe v. Wade). 

Though the political implications of my work became more pronounced in the 2000s, prior to that time I was content with a status as full-time ally, but part-time activist- or politically-engaged scholar. I rationalized this in part because I became increasingly involved in administration--first as a Director of Graduate Studies (Purdue & Minnesota) and later as a Department Chair/Head (Minnesota & MIT) and it became difficult to pursue new research projects. I would also say that, as most senior scholars would agree, it is easier to write an invited book chapter or essay in an area where your work is already known and respected than to make a significant mid-career pivot. 

A career pivot is what I tried to do in the early 2000s, again motivated in part by what I considered to be bad arguments. The TV show "Will & Grace" was breaking ground with two leading characters who were gay men, but I was reading scholarly articles talking about how the show was "really" promoting heteronormativity. I wasn't buying those arguments and felt those scholars were missing an important contribution the show was playing in changing perceptions and attitudes, and my colleagues Peter B. Gregg and Dean E. Hewes set out to explore the issue through a series of empirical audience studies.

The result was a theory we called the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis, and our work was the first to establish empirically that positive media representations of sexual minorities can reduce prejudice among viewers (2005, 2006, 2008). Our work was embraced by organizations like GLAAD and used by subsequent scholars researching a wide variety of minority groups' representation, including several who work on transgender media representation. It is now regularly included in various academic and industry discussions of Social Impact Entertainment. I immodestly note that in 2016, Peter, Dean, and I were honored by the National Communication Association with the Woolbert Award for the Parasocial Contact Hypothesis as it "has stood the test of time and has become a stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena."

I returned to my study of argumentation to analyze competing definitional arguments about same-sex marriage in public and legal arguments in six different states (2012a, 2012b). I concluded my case study analysis with the admonition that such debates provided an important opportunity for argument scholars to educate our students and the public about the marked difference between constitutional and political/religious arguments, and to teach those who would listen about the potent power of visual persuasion. I tried to practice what I preached in various media interviews and public forums.

I stepped down as Department Head at MIT in 2019 and felt it was time to add the "T" to three decades of intermittent research and advocacy on LGB issues. Over the next two years I worked on a new project that brings together my long-time interest in definitions and the political work of categories with an ongoing commitment to social justice. The resultant book is titled The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex/Gender in the 21st Century. I hope to write more about the book in future blog but what I can say here is that it has been a team effort: Throughout the writing of the book I have read and consulted with many trans people, including scholars, activists, and artists. And the book would not have been possible without the assistance of a diverse group of student research assistants from Wellesley College and MIT. 

It has been 6 years since my last blog post. I promise the next one will come far sooner!