talking points 3 carlson

Carlson, Dennis                                                                                      Jared Cormier

 Gayness, Multicultural Education and Community 

1.     “…english textbook publishers avoid gayness like the plague. English literature anthologies go out of their way to avoid acknowledging that certain famous writers are gay…” (236)

-This I found appalling. It goes on to mention Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and one of my favorite writers, Walt Whitman. I’ve always liked Whitman because he has a way of capturing the human and American spirit in print and I’ve never even paid any mind to any references to gay culture. To deny students the exposure of Whitman’s works, would be to deny them of an important part of our literary history and cultural observance.

2.     “To the extent that gayness is recognized in the curriculum, it is likely to be in the health curriculum, where it is associated with disease.” (237)

-Though I’ve always been aware of gayness being taught in health class, I’ve never made the connection with disease. Teaching about gayness in that environment almost encourages students to make false assumptions that it’s mostly gay people who spread STD’s. There was a time when AIDS was first discovered and that assumption was recognized but culturally I believe we’ve come a long way although our educational practices do not reflect that.

3. “…gay bar culture is grounded in the commercialization of gayness, which means that its primary motivation is to make money through the selling of a particular way of being gay that is relatively apolitical in its implications.”

-I worked at a bar for a man who owned mostly gay bars up and down the east coast. He was not very tolerant of the gay community but saw the value of owning gay bars and has taken advantage of the gay culture.

            One thing I would like to mention about this article is that it was very wordy. I don’t exactly use a variety of vocabulary in my everyday life but I found it hard to follow many of Mr. Carlson’s thought patterns. I feel the whole article could have been presented as effectively using half of the words he used. While the material in the article was very eye-opening and informative, I found the arrangement and presentation to be rather pretentious.