It’s said that with gay rights — much like any civil rights movement — politics lags behind culture.
On Wednesday, the same day that the New York Senate rejected a same-sex marriage bill that many thought had mustered enough support to narrowly pass, high schoolers bounded and skipped across the TV screen in “Glee,” the hit musical-comedy that, in addition to attracting droves of young — many of them college-aged — viewers, has drawn praise for its positive, often casual depiction of homosexuality.
Among a multitude of other cultural signals, the popularity of “Glee” underscores the generational divide that has come to shape the modern debate on gay rights. Polls have consistently shown that support for gay marriage among Americans under the age of 40 stands at about 60 percent, but for those over 40, hovers around 30 percent. In universities across the nation, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals have built havens for themselves in which their sexualities have often come to inform their character only incidentally.
What, then, to make of recent student-led decisions on college campuses that have more closely resembled defeats the GLBT community has suffered politically within the past year?
Two weeks ago, the University of North Texas student body voted against allowing gay couples to run for its homecoming court. The measure, which had been similarly defeated in a student senate vote in October, attracted a record number of votes — 13.5 percent, or 4,895, of the 36,206 students at UNT — and was defeated decisively, 58 percent to 42 percent. A week later, the Southern Methodist University student senate shot down a resolution to add an GLBT representative seat to its student government, which already offers minority senate seats to the school’s African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American and international communities.
These small blows to GLBT rights at the campus level might not speak to a slowdown in support for gay rights among young people, but they do reveal that even on college campuses — those meccas of the same culture that is said to lead politics — politics is
playing catch-up.
The motivations behind the two outcomes are unclear. According to the Dallas Voice, debate at SMU before the vote seemed to center more on the merits of representation than judgment of a community. But both rejected bids, especially the UNT vote, suggest that GLBT campus communities still face struggles defining themselves — especially in a modern, more tolerant world in which blending in is not only desired, but often easy.
Even on the UT campus, this struggle emerges as a GLBT community attempts to assert itself while pushing for the extension of benefits for partners of UT employees. Students in the community can easily view the tolerant spaces they’ve found for themselves as signs of a changed world, but to effect real change, they must realize that the world around them — even the college campuses around them — must feel their presence.
“Glee” may serve as a barometer for young, modern takes on gay rights, but the real singing and dancing won’t come until those around us take the fight for equal rights seriously.
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