Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Conor Friedersdorf

Many thanks for all the submissions.

One day, I got email from a coworker I didn't know who had read my posts to the company "social issues" bulletin board about being gay and Christian. He said that he had been raised a conservative Evangelical, was in the process of coming out, and was trying to figure out how to reconcile his faith and his sexuality.

I asked him out to lunch and we talked, and he accompanied me to my church that Sunday. He had to fly back to Texas right after the service (he worked in the Dallas field office, and had only been at the home office for a visit). We started exchanging email, Long email messages. And then talking on the phone. Every night.

We arranged to spend a weekend in San Antonio, where my brother and his wife were working. He stopped by my brother's house on Friday night, and I made some excuse to take him into the bedroom and kissed him for the first time. It was far from my first kiss, but it was the first time he had ever kissed a man. He was rigid with tension and it was awkward, but the kisses when we got to the hotel were much, much better.

We've been together seventeen and a half years.

* *  *

My first kiss happened at midnight on New Year's Eve in 2001. I was seventeen and shy. My boyfriend was a guy with a sports car who bought me a gold necklace and told me he loved me two weeks into our relationship. I liked him because he was a boy and he was interested, and I kissed him because I'd never kissed anybody and I thought it was probably time I did.
 
Over the next four years I grew increasingly frightened of him. When I tried to break it off, he'd get angry and tell me I couldn't. He hated that I was going to university and warned me I'd never make anything of myself. He flew into rages when I told him about a good grade or a project I'd enjoyed. Sex was painful and terrifying. I closed myself off from family and friends, ashamed that I'd let myself get so stuck.
 
One night when I was twenty and in my second year of university, we went for a drive. He talked about the apartment we'd get as soon as I graduated and I realized, suddenly, that one day I might run out of chances to leave him. We broke up over the phone the next day. Despite a nine o'clock exam the next morning, my roommate sat up with me late into the night. I don't remember ever crying so hard.
 
I had nightmares about him for two years, but I went on to study Shakespeare in grad school, to live on my own in Toronto, to other kisses. Now I start law school in September. He'd have been livid.
 
I think about him now whenever I worry about my future. Ten years ago I could never have imagined my life being what it is today, but I got here because I was strong enough to start making choices for myself. I'm proud of that.

* * *

It was about 1982 and was 14 years old, attending a music camp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  At that point I had no experience at all.  Back home in my rural Wisconsin middle school I was considered pretty weird and a "brain" (at age 15 I would cut off all my fluffy Farrah Fawcett hair, start building a Cyndi Lauper-type wardrobe and become a punk rocker as well as a "radical feminist").  Music camp was a place where I could embrace my brains as well as spend lots of time with people who didn't
think I was weird.

I met the guy, whose name I no longer remember – Dave? – in my Basic Keyboard class.  He was a couple of years older and played drums in one of the rock bands that always formed during camp.  (They played a
cover of Sweet Home Alabama at the camp talent show.  Not punk rock, but still a good song, and it certainly got me interested in boys with drums and guitars.)  On July 4 I met him at the campus Memorial Union terrace right on Lake Mendota to watch the fireworks.  The place was packed with people — you could hardly walk.  Somehow, though, after the first kiss we started making out and ended up rolling around on the ground for what seemed like hours.  I don't remember the moment of the first kiss at all, but I do remember how blown away I felt at how unbelievably fabulous making out was.  I'm sure we didn't go very far — he might have put his hand up my shirt or something but that was probably it.  We were right out in public after all.

But I do remember what I was wearing (a green and red striped polo shirt! eeugh) and how fluffy my hair was.  And boy, do I remember going back to my dorm afterwards, so totally high on the utterly new
and totally overwhelming avalanche all those brain chemicals associated with having crushes and being turned on, that I was in an altered state, unable to do anything but babble incoherently to my
dormmates (some of whom had seen me rolling around on the ground with this guy), who just laughed at how completely goofy and delirious and happy I'd become.

Naturally, alas, "Dave" never spoke to me again after that, so my euphoria was almost immediately followed by having my heart crushed. On the other hand, every time I hear Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio I
remember him and how euphoric I was at how fantastic this new activity felt.  Since then I've had my share of miserable kisses and other things, but I have also had quite a good time with a number of sweet,
sexy, brainy, funny men (I am now in my 40s).  I may be a feminist, but I am definitely not a man-hater…

* * *

As a socially awkward, painfully closeted (to myself, as much as anyone else) yet marginally musically gifted high school senior, I wound up being cast as the Prince in my high school’s production of Cinderella, opposite a girl with whom I had a lovely friendship. I didn’t know it at the time, but her friendship has turned out to be the loveliest and most enduring of my entire life. But my first lip contact of any kind came in a rehearsal for the musical, with the physics teacher/musical director looking on amusedly from ten paces. My dear friend has told me that I didn’t do too badly, but she has always been the generous type.

My second first kiss came the following year at college. I was still painfully closeted, but I found myself the object of a senior girl’s affection. After a few weeks of her swanning around me, and me impersonating a deer in headlights, she caught me behind my first year residence hall and planted one on me. It was horrible; all I remember is feeling like I was attempting to kiss a goldfish, and knowing that I had to extract myself from the situation as graciously as possible. Technique was sorely lacking on both sides.

Finally, in the fall of my senior year of college a cute guy walked up, jimmied the lock on my painful closet door, and gave me the first kiss that fired on all cylinders. Oddly, even though I was so new to the party that I hadn’t even removed my coat, I knew that I was using him. Sure, he was in the right place at the right time, but I somehow had enough perspective to know that I was in no way prepared for a relationship; it would be several more years before I caught up to all the folks who had lapped me back in middle and high school. Still, it was a good kiss, and I wish him well, wherever he is.

I think it’s obvious that my favorite of the three is the absolute first – passionless, but very symbolic in the context of that lifelong friendship.

* * *

I think I was 16 when I first kissed a girl, that was after spending some years when the hormones were high kissing the corner of a wall to get the angle right. There was a girl at school that I was infatuated with and one day I just walked over there and knocked. She was home, her father was home, it was late morning.  He went somewhere, it was just the two of us. We sat at the kitchen table and had a fun conversation for a couple of hours and then it was time to leave. We embraced and then all of a sudden our lips were locked.  It was a deep, long, and seemingly endless French kiss. We broke the clinch and she said something about dates, but I couldn't keep that agenda, no car, no money. We had no classes together and I had no privacy to call.  At any rate, nothing ever came of it.
 
As you may recall, kissing someone new causes a massive chemical high. I went home and listened to the "play of the waves" in Debussy's _La Mer_. That's the feeling, right there.  Making out with someone new is the greatest of highs, in my book. Even more pleasurable than sex, if that makes any sense. 

* * *

It was a dull job, made bearable by an unlimited supply of cream soda in the office fridge and occasional perusing of the finished reports on the superiority of Hubba-Bubba to Bubblicous bubble gum and they like (they did a lot of consumer focus groups). I was an oversexed budding gay boy with an eye for older men.  But no experience, yet.
 
I started in September and had met most of the staff by Thanksgiving.  One Vice President was on a long sabbatical but his return was worth the wait.  He was thirty-seven, short but trim, with a powerful runner's physique, a chiseled face, strawberry blond hair and beard and piercing green eyes (or were they hazel?).  My lust must have been palpable because his initial handshake lingered.  He was brilliant, a PhD with a slight southern drawl, affable and cultured.  Loved the opera, loved the outdoors.  And apparently he liked me.
 
We danced around each other until Christmas week. At the small office holiday party he surprised me with an invite to his townhouse.  His garage needed some straightening up. Would I help him out the Saturday after Christmas?
 
I never saw the garage. We never made it past his living room with its '70s shag carpet and orange velvet sectional. A little awkward small talk, him  expressing admiration for my Timex watch, his strong fingers running up my arm over my flannel shirt, and then a kiss.  My first kiss from a man.  My first kiss, period.  It was delicious. Like eating ice-cream on a hot summer day. Just delicious, that feeling of being possessed, conquered, desired  He'd eaten a breath mint before hand, so his mouth tasted sweet, slightly sticky, but masculine underneath.There was a driving power in his kiss.  Everything I thought kissing a man would be about.
 
***

It was the spring of my 7th grade year (1984) and Doug was beautiful.  He had been my boyfriend since the second week of school at Joseph George Middle School in San Jose, California.  We spent every lunch period together and met at each other's locker whenever we had the chance.  When we were not at school we spent endless hours talking on the phone.  I loved the feel of the spiral cord wrapped around my finger as we talked about our friends or our hopes and dreams.

A couple of older kids, 8th graders, decided that Doug and I had been together long enough that it was time for a kiss.  During lunch we were led to this small wall that was called the backstop.  It was in between the school buildings and the track and it was a great place to hide from teachers or lunch staff.

So there Doug and I stood. Convinced we were madly in love and that we were destined for one another.  I started to close my eyes and wait for what I thought was going to be my first kiss.  Just as he approached with eyes closed I opened my eyes and found that Doug (who had never kissed before either) was moving his tongue side to side rapidly.  It caught me off guard and I laughed. out loud.  The look of horror that washed over his face is one that I have never forgotten.  I did not intend to be cruel but I was un-mistakenly cruel.  I did not have my first kiss with Doug.

I had it shortly after that, with a mean boy, during a relationship that lasted a week.  Doug and I got back together for the remainder of that year and during the summer we moved.  We did not kiss but I have regretted that laugh for my entire life thus far.

by Patrick Appel

Weigel isn't seeing it:

The new Siena Poll finds that New Yorkers (everyone in the state) oppose the mosque by a 63-27 margin; they defend the constitutional right to build it by a 64-28 margin. At the same time, Lazio trails Cuomo by 34 points. He's down 2 points — within the margin of error, but not what you'd expect if the Great Mosque Debate of 2010 was hitting home.

A reader writes:

I am an academic on tenure track, and I want to raise an important point about tenure that I don’t think has been addressed in these conversations yet. Measured on an individual level, I am not sure what the effects of tenure are. Like the historian in a prior post, my own and other junior faculty work is often critical of established stuff. I don’t fear being blackballed on that basis. Really, things aren’t like that (as long as one is intellectually rigorous). Academics themselves are generally interested in shaking things up, and challenges, and so forth (after all, a good challenge to one’s own position represents an opportunity to publish refutations).

The more important role of tenure is protection from vagaries of non-academic opinion. That is, protection of the academic process. There is lots of research that is a nice, fat juicy target for politics, and lots of research that threatens important interests. Consider: embryonic stem cell research, climate science, genetically engineered foods, public health research on tobacco, trans fats, sugar, etc.  Is there any question after “climategate” that people would like to go after climate scientists’ livelihoods?  Tenure means that firings must be for cause – fraud, criminal conduct, harassment, etc.  Not for drummed up reasons in the service of politics.

Attacks can come for all manner political reasons, and the scholar’s field can be anything.

Animal rights folks go after primate researchers (and other animal researchers), extreme pro-lifers can go after stem cell researchers, climate change deniers (or people with vested interests in fossil fuels) can go after climate scientists, feminists can go after Larry Summers (note that one thing that was NOT threatened was his livelihood – administrative positions aren’t protected, only the faculty aspect of one’s position). John Yoo. Elizabeth Warren. Robert Bork. Remember the PC wars in the '90s? Complaints and public excoriation for insensitivity (real or imagined) is one thing; potential loss of livelihood is another.

Note that these kind of attacks on scholarship are MORE likely to come against tenured people because senior faculty have actually had the time to develop powerful research streams and put together programs that are robust enough to be compelling and threatening.

Here’s my best guess: the academic working on projects early in her career probably isn’t too worried about generating enough controversy to get her fired. She pursues interesting and important questions. Controversial papers get published because they are fun to read, and controversy (i.e., academic disagreement, not scandal) gets one’s name out there. But down the road, answers to interesting and important questions (or further, deeper interesting and important questions) piss people off. And we don’t know who they will piss off, and what kind of controversy will be set in motion. That’s the worry: good researchers will get timid because the course of their lifelong research starts to piss people off.

I’ll note, too, that I do not believe that an academic is free to do anything at any time. We can legislate restrictions on stem cells or primates, and grants can dry up or bloom in different places according to our political priorities. Those things can make academics’ careers less fulfilling and fruitful and more stressful, but they don’t threaten researchers’ livelihoods in the same way that absence of tenure does. Such a drastic threat can wreak havoc on the integrity of research, and on the research process as a whole

by Patrick Appel

Peter Feaver begs the nation to focus on the floods in Pakistan:

The stakes in Pakistan are exceptionally high and the international response thus far has been inadequate. The United States has done better than most, but we could do more. The most successful things the Bush administration ever did in the war of ideas were the rapid and substantial responses to the Asian tsunami of 2004/2005 and the Pakistan earthquake of 2005. More than anything, our actions confounded critics in the Muslim world (and elsewhere) and thwarted al Qaeda's goal of fostering a war between Islam and the West.

The current Pakistan crisis dwarfs both of those prior disasters, but the international response, beginning with ours, has not yet been commensurate. There are many reasons for that, but maybe one of those reasons is our national preoccupation with the mosque debate.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Andy McCarthy's latest asserts that "intolerance is not just part of al-Qaeda, it is part of Islam." It's a piece that gets right to the point:

Non-Muslims are barred from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina — not merely barred from building synagogues or churches, but barred, period, because their infidel feet are deemed unfit to touch the ground. This is not an al-Qaeda principle. Nor is it an “Islamist” principle. It is Islam, pure and simple.

Of course, non-Mormons are banned from LDS temples, and non-Catholics aren't allowed to partake in the Eucharist. And I'm sure there are many more exclusionary religious practices engaged in by non-Muslims, but 9/11 9/11 9/11, so Mr. McCarthy holds Muslims to a higher standard, and waxes darkly about the intolerance of Islam.

The rest of his piece largely consists of the dubious conflation of true Islam with modern day Saudi Arabia, as if the globe and history aren't replete with very different incarnations of Islamic society, and cherry-picking passages from the Koran in order to assert that its least defensible words define the true nature of Islam. 

One reason it's good that I don't work at National Review is that I'd be tempted to get a fake Koran made with Leviticus inserted into it, and provoke Mr. McCarthy into citing all sorts of Bible passages as evidence that the religion they're part of is inherently intolerant. (In case it isn't clear, I do not think Christianity is intolerant.) In the end, my mischievous antics probably wouldn't do much good, so I'm glad that among the magazine's many talented staffers is Reihan Salam, whose admirable capacity for respectful engagement often exceeds my own.

The passage I'm about to excerpt isn't directed at Mr. McCarthy, but it's nevertheless apt:

I think it’s important for people to understand that there really are conflicts within what we call Islam. It is not a single thing. Rather, it is a lot of different things. Some of these things — militaristic, xenophobic, misogynistic Islamism, to name but one example — are by any objective standard noxious forces, and the driver of lethal attacks on Americans and also Israelis, Bengalis, Malays, and many other people. We can all agree on that. 

Islamism, however, is not identical to Islam. Within Islam, there are many other traditions and tendencies, some of which are more compatible with modernity than others.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on with this new set of controversies over Islam and the role of American Muslims in our public life. I wouldn’t say I’m a very religiously observant person, but the observant Muslims I know best are my parents. Both of my parents have lived in New York city for over thirty years. Both of them worked in the World Trade Center in the 1980s, when I was a kid. Some of my fondest memories of growing up involve visiting them at work, and watching the 4th of July fireworks display from my dad’s office window. They were born in a country (Bangladesh) where Islamist terrorists have killed a large number of people in bomb attacks and acid attacks, and they lived through a savage and mostly forgotten war in which over 1 million Bengali Muslims were tortured and killed in part because they were accused of being “polytheists,” etc. That is, armed cadres of proto-Islamists were killing Muslims who had a different way of seeing the world and practicing their religion.

So that’s part of where I’m coming from: the idea that Islam is one thing or that all Muslims are the same strikes me as highly unlikely.

All Mr. McCarthy can muster is the admission that there are Muslims who are interested in reforming Islam, a true statement, but one he makes as if there weren't peaceful, devout, moderate communities of Muslims already living in many countries throughout the world.

by Chris Bodenner

Thomas Sugrue, guesting over at TNC's place, complements the Dish reader discussion by putting heat on Obama:

Since the '70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists–namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased. 

But, hey, we have a president who supports integration, don't we? Unfortunately, so far, his support also seems to be mostly rhetorical.

Obama has emphasized education, but his administration is walking down the same rutted path as his predecessors. More funding for charter schools. More teaching to the test in a warmed-over version of No Child Left Behind. And Obama–always optimistic about the power of well-turned words–serves up bromides about "self-discipline" and "hard work," believing somehow that he will fire up little Johnny or Jamal and that miraculously, they will make it in a school system where the deck is stacked against them.

One fundamental problem (and there are many more that I can't list here) with the Obama administration's policies is that they take for granted that segregation by race and class is unchangeable. They take for granted that disadvantaged students will remain concentrated together. And they accept as a given the reality of ghettos of wealth in privileged school districts.

Sugrue's solution?

States–even those led by Republicans running against Obama–have jumped into the fray to compete for federal "Race to the Top" funds. They invariably follow the money–and that is right into unproven charter schools and programs to teach to the test that leave racial isolation untouched. Why not add an incentive: set aside funds for districts and states that come up with plans to diversify their student bodies. It's happened on a small scale in metropolitan Boston, where METCO has opened spots (not enough) for city students in some of the region's best-funded and excellent public schools.

by Patrick Appel

A reader takes the thread in another direction:

I'm finding this an interesting conversation that we really need to have as a country. I've thought so ever since I first learned the roots of class theory and what the origins of the term "Middle Class" are. Living as we do in a country that did away with aristocracy (in the pure sense) at its founding, I've often felt that we miss the point in most international socio-political conversations about class. Rather than defining class by social access and privilege, we're left with a rather sloppy and arbitrary distinction of annual income, which often generates misunderstanding about class struggle and revolution (and never seems to experience inflation). Most Americans, even educated ones, fail to understand that, historically speaking, the Middle Class was a wealthy class that often out-earned the aristocracy. What they didn't have was direct access to the tools of political power. That's why they were willing to topple the Ancien Regime, but merely shrugged under Napoleon and again in 1848.

What we are witnessing in today's widening income gap is a collapse of this deliberately elastic definition Middle Class, which can stretch and contract as is convenient. As a white male who grew up in Connecticut and went to a Midwestern private 4-year-college, I've generally considered myself to be lower-middle class, even after earning a doctorate. Never mind that my hometown is one of the poorest in the state, that neither of my parents went to college or earned more than $70k/year collectively. But venture 25 miles west, across the CT River and you could think you have entered a whole new country with a different concept of Middle Class. And of course, *NO ONE* admits to being upper class. In fact, I think the title of this discussion is itself off the mark. It should really be, "How Is Nobody Upper Class?"

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias has kicked off a debate about professional licensing. Adam Ozimek delves into the literature:

Another problem with occupational licensing as a regulatory tool is that there is a lot of evidence that it does nothing to increase quality. One strain of research shows that malpractice insurance premiums aren’t lower in states with occupational licensing, which you would expect if licensing was increasing service quality. Other evidence comes from research into the effectiveness of nurses in providing primary care services, which has shown they do no worse than doctors. Still other research shows that licensing and certification for teachers does not increase outcomes. While the set of occupations which are licensed is broad, and the evidence for many jobs limited, the balance of the literature on licensing suggests it does not increases quality. Part of this is probably because, as discussed above, in areas where there is no licensing other mechanisms arise or be mandated to ensure quality can be monitored.

by Conor Friedersdorf

After noting that North Korea is now on Twitter, Rob Long wonders if you can be the last insane despot on earth and be Tweeting:

It's entirely in Korean, which is the only reason I'm not following them.  That, and because I already know that rice production has been stellar this year, Kim Jong Il won the British Open, and workers around the world despise the reactionary American hegemon.

The handle is @uriminzok. And when the inevitable Twitter fight with Andrew Breitbart comes I'll be on the conservative publisher's side for once.