Prop. 8's Long and Intrusive Reach to Texas: Part 2

by: Elides

Sun Jan 25, 2009 at 05:07 PM CST

This is part two of my series on how the failure to defeat Prop. 8 has affected the gay couples in my Texas university town.  In this installment, I follow the relationship of two young men through their initial meeting as undergraduates, engagement, commitment ceremony--and finally, ten years after they met, their marriage on the steps of San Francisco's city hall.

Then the narrative goes back in time, to their birth in the 1970s, and charts the progress of gay and lesbian rights at the university they would choose to attend:  ultraconservative Texas A&M in College Station.  For ten years, TAMU officials fought a protracted legal legal battle against certifying an official gay and lesbian student group.  The issue was decided by in favor of the gay students by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, but only after the Texas Attorney General declined to fund A&M's final appeal--so definitively had the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans spoken in favor of the students.

By contrast, LGBT Aggies today enjoy an active student group and an array of university-funded support activities.  A network of 600 Aggie Allies--gay and gay-friendly professors, staff, and graduate students attend training, and then make themselves available to counsel and mentor students who seek their help.  A GLBT Professional Network helps queer Aggies at all stages of their careers, a speakers bureau dispels prejudice, and the university even offers counseling services to the parents of students who come out.

As no good story exists without it villains, this essay then take on Aggie homophobes past and present, from a VP of Student Services who was intent on crushing the burgeoning GLBT movement on campus to a couple of large donors to Yes on 8, one a distinguished professor of business and the other a nondescript lab assistant--who gave thousands to make it impossible for their gay students to marry legally.

From Recognition Litigation of the 70s to Gay Marriage Battles of Today; Proposition 8's Long and Intrusive Reach to Texas A&M, Part 2 can be found on my blog, The Aggie Insurgency, at:

http://theaggieinsurgency.word...

Investigating Prop. 8's Texas Donors, One Community at a Time -- Starting in Aggieland

by: Elides

Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 11:59 PM CST

Nov. 4 was bittersweet.  Gay couples are some of my closest friends.  At least two from my Aggieland UCC church had taken advantage of the five-month window of opportunity to be married in California, and now they fear their nuptial rights would be nullified.

Postmortem consensus identified the need to make converts, one person at a time, as gay rights in California had fallen -- albeit by a small margin -- to the plague of ignorance.  But before that could take place, one other admonition seemed preeminent:  Sun Tsu's advice to "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."  There's a hazard in building up an army if you don't know the insurgents in your midst.

Using the San Francisco Chronicle's convenient search engine, I entered "Bryan" and "College Station." The results for anti-Prop. 8 contributors were predictable:  a few scattered donors who gave modest amounts.

But I was in for a shock when I selected the option to see who in Aggieland had donated in favor of taking marriage rights away from my LGBT friends.  Two Texas A&M academics gave thousands of dollars, hardly a response I had expected from the intellectual community.  

Here's my response, detailed on my own personal political blog, in a post entitled:  Aggies Do Not Lie, Cheat nor Steal, but Breaking Up Other Aggies' Marriages is Apparently an Honorable Endeavor: Prop. 8's Long and Intrusive Reach to Texas A&M

Here's the link:  http://theaggieinsurgency.word...

I hope this will inspire other progressive Texans to do their own amateur investigative reporting in their own community.  Root out the agents of intolerance near you, expose them, and then we can start working -- one neighbor at a time -- to lighten the darkness.