News
Award-winning writer Jewelle Gomez, one of the founding members of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, railed at men and the stifling of sexuality by conservatives during a Monday afternoon speech "Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll and Revolution."
Gomez began her remarks by sharing her key secret.
"If you put sex in the title, people will come," Gomez said among repeated laughter from the crowd, which numbered some 75 members of the Dartmouth community.
From there, her words focused on female sexuality, describing today's culture as one "constructed to pave over female sexuality." Gomez referred to her own upbringing as one that taught her to embrace sexuality as a significant part of life and something not to be "demonized."
Gomez said rock and roll and blues music brought an "end to western civilization as we know it," in that the music of the 1960s was revolutionary in addressing questions of sexuality to a younger generation.
Gomez also described the irony of what she called today's "homo-societal" culture, which is marked by activities like fraternities, sororities, football, baseball and basketball, and countered by America's widespread trouble with homosexual behavior.
She argued that part of the reason for this is "erotophobia" manifested in a country "founded by religious purists."
Gomez said she believes homosexuality is threatening to so many because it circumvents typical definitions of sexual relations.
"Men are raised to believe that they deserve sex, especially if they are paying the rent," Gomez said as she extolled females to resist being objectified while at the same time asserting their rights to sexual activity.
Explaining why female sexuality is particularly threatening, Gomez said it constitutes a "disruption of patriarchal capitalist culture."
Women who represent independent breadwinners and decision makers, Gomez said, are threatening to most men.
In response to this fear, the gay rights activist said that society has characterized lesbians as hating men, when in actuality "straight women hate men more" for insisting on their domestic roles.
Gomez, a litigant in an American Civil Liberties Union suit attempting to legalize same-sex unions in California, ended her remarks on the subject of gay marriage.
Although Gomez said she believes the institution of marriage has fundamental flaws, Gomez still supports the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Gomez currently lives in San Francisco, where she most recently served as the executive director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University.
Religion department chair Susan Ackerman introduced Gomez's speech.
Ackerman is also a member of the women and gender studies program and the chair of the curriculum committee on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies.
The lecture, the fifth annual Stonewall Fund lecture in gay studies, was part of the College's ongoing celebration of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
The choice of Dorothy Allison, a white lesbian activist and writer, to give the keynote speech on Martin Luther King, Jr.
