Would you care to elaborate? Why do you think a course like that is bullshit?
I think the University of Michigan is harder to get into today than at any time in its history. They are not hurting for attendance.
My guess is that you haven’t even actually read this thread, right?
I fail to see the big deal here. There is, inarguably, a gay culture. Why not a college course to examine it?
Well, die in a different Forum.
Feel free to mock the content or presentation of the posts, but you are wandering a bit too close to personal observations that could become insults, here.
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I’m glad they added the second part otherwise I would have been all :eek: .
So they actually mean “cottages” this time do they? :dubious: 
The University of Michigan is my Alma Mater, and I feel the need to defend it here, having taken some classes with comparable descriptions. From the description and my own experience as a student and knowledge of the treatment of LGBT issues here, it is clear to me that the course is less about pigeonholing homosexuals but more about examining the stereotypes associated with homosexuality and the role that these stereotypes have in the lives of gays coming to terms with their own identity.
The course is not going to assert, ‘‘This is what it means to be gay.’’ It is going to ask, ''What DOES it mean to be gay? Why is singer X and opera Y and dance club Z associated so strongly with gay culture? Is there any truth to the stereotype and is it helpful or harmful to individuals struggling to come to terms with their identity?"
There are no answers to these questions; they are meant to be discussed. There will be much discussion, endless round-table discussion. Students will talk about their experiences coming to terms with gay identity and how these icons or stereotypes factored into their experiences. There may be a heated debate or two. Thesis papers will be written. And in the end, young adults will learn how to think critically rather than regurgitate some banal set of ‘‘facts’’ about what it means to be homosexual.
These are valid questions to ask. I grew up with a ton of homosexual friends in high school (though I myself am straight), and one of the first things that they gravitated toward, in coming terms with their homosexuality, was ‘‘gay’’ pop culture. I was forced to watch Rocky Horror until my eyes bled. And in the generation before mine I had a family friend who could perform all of Slam’s moves in Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. It wasn’t that he was gay and he happened to be obsessed with Madonna… it was that Madonna, as a previously existing gay icon, helped him come to terms with his own identity as a gay male.
Why Madonna is considered a part of gay culture and what relevance she has is a very good question, and apparently what the course seeks to address. It is not uncommon for subcultures of people, or groups who are oppressed based on some factor they all share in common, to have cultural icons that they strongly identify with. So all in all, it seems like a perfectly valid course to me. In fact, I would take the course myself. It would be interesting to dissect such a deeply rooted phenomenon and submit such a cherished cultural foundation to rigorous critical scrutiny.
I think it has more to with the fact that heterosexuals (and anyone overly influenced by mainstream society and culture) get certain interests trained out of them. Gay culture has many sub genres with different focuses, the only commonality which would seem to be that they go more of an extreme with a particular theme than mainstream culture. Once one can overcome one’s fear of the disapproval of mainstream society of homosexuality and accept oneself for that, it becomes much easier to ignore all the other things society disapproves up and make up one’s mind to enjoy whatever the hell you have a predilection for, limited only by one’s own moral compass and not any external influence.
That’s possible. I was actually prepared to contradict you when I opened this post box, but thinking about it, you may be right. The contradiction I was thinking of is something that a lot of people forget: up until this generation, pretty much every gay man was raised as a straight man, so we also have those thing trained out of us in the course of growing up. But then I realized that you are half-right, at least. A lot of gay men who do engage in “gay culture” come to it at adulthood, and it’s a rapid-learning course.
On the other hand, the current generation is entering their teen years with a large portion of its future gay men already having made peace with their orientation, something that happened fairly rarely even as recently as my generation, growing up in the 80s. There is a TON of information on the internet about gay culture that just wasn’t THERE when I was growing up. I knew very little that I didn’t hear fourth-hand in shocked whispers or mockingly in television and movies. The differences are just astounding, and I find myself sometimes regretting that I was born when I was.
If there are no answers isn’t the course kind of pointless? Wouldn’t a better use the professor’s time be to actually research these questions? Or conduct a seminar were subject will actually research these questions? Otherwise it seems like this course will just be navel gazing better suited to a coffee shop (or internet message board) than a college classroom.
Totally agree. It sort of irks me how ‘gay’ or even ‘homosexual’ is often used to mean ‘gay male’ in discussion, including on this message board. I’ve always found the lesbian porn-watching-homophobic an especially interesting specimen.
How do you know the professor hasn’t already researched these questions? A class like this can be pointless navel-gazing, or it can be incisive cultural analysis, depending on how its taught. It seems kind of silly to criticize it for being the former when you have absolutely no idea what’s actually going on in the classroom.
To people looking for “answers,” all cultural analysis is navel-gazing.
By that logic, colleges should drop any course that isn’t hard science. There aren’t any “answers,” in the objective sense, to a philosophy course. Or a literature course. Or an art course. The purpose of a great number of college classes isn’t to teach the student the “right” answer, but to teach him how to think about the subject.
Exactly. It’s not about the subject matter, per se, but about learning how to think.
Yep things are changing, but you can see the greater acceptance of outside the mainstream leading to things like metrosexuals and greater prominence of heterosexual subcultures like the S&M scene, swingers, polyamory, etc.
Dan Savage has often argued that the gay rights movement is just the front line of a broader social struggle for greater sexual freedom for everyone. The folks who are most vocally opposed to gay rights tend to also be opposed to things like sexual education, easily available contraception, and the HPV vaccine, just to name a few. All issues that are just as important to straights as they are to gays.