For many years I have wanted to know where it is written in granite that if you are a homosexual (or let's just say you have engaged in homosexual acts), you have to be a socialist. Or, to put it bluntly, if you are a male and you happen to have had oral sex with another male, why must you now love Barbara Streisand?

A University of Michigan professor named David M. Halperin may just have the answer. He teaches a course called "How to be gay." (From the Corner via a link from Instapundit.)

Here's a glimpse into the mind of that tenured academician:

"Let there be no mistake about it: lesbian and gay studies, as it is currently practiced in the U.S., expresses an uncompromising political militancy."

For starters, Halperin wants to make that founding purveyor of deconstructionist gobbledygook, Michel Foucault, a saint.

What I cannot understand is how Halperin, who concedes that homosexuality is a recent cultural invention, is so hell-bent on perpetuating an ongoing fraud.

I guess that's his job. Lest anyone misunderstand, Halperin claims he is being misunderstood:

"It does not teach students to be homosexual," Halperin told The Washington Times. "Rather, it examines critically the odd notion that there are right and wrong ways to be gay, that homosexuality is not just a sexual practice or desire but a set of specific tastes in music, movies and other cultural forms — a notion which is shared by straight and gay people alike."

No one can tell me. I guess I should return to school to find out.

But frankly, I think I would fall asleep. Here is what Halperin has to say about an allegedly "gay" postage stamp:

As if by magic, each person who views the stamp -- no matter what his or her social location -- instantly and unreflectively reconfigures the image, constructing the pair of lovebirds not only as male and female but as a heterosexual and, presumably, monogamous couple (the stamp is not taken to depict a one-night stand). The viewer may also perform a number of other, subsidiary operations on this visual text, such as installing the "male" bird on the right-hand side of the field and even magnifying "his" size in relation to that of "his" mate, so as to motivate as well as to justify a heterosexist reading. But nothing in the text itself . . . provides the slightest impetus for such collective hallucinations. Rather, the apparently universal and unconquerable urge to read off gendered, heterosexualized meanings from the innocent surface of this unoffending text springs -- as the text's source in the figural repertory of European-American folk art implies -- from the traditional codes or conventions for "representing" love in European-American culture. These codes, which also govern the culture's visual rhetoric, restrict the use of erotic symbols, such as the valentine-shaped heart, to heterosexual contexts and employ exemplary animals, such as lovebirds, to typify and thereby to naturalize contemporary human social and sexual arrangements, such as monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Common to all those rhetorical practices is a discursive strategy whose effect is to (re)produce "love" as an exclusively heterosexual institution and to convert, under the sign of "love," all pairs of ungendered, identically figured bodies into heterosexual couples. . . .

WAIT A MINUTE!

Just when I thought I had exhausted myself silly with this nonsensical tedium, Brian Stephens (a very articulate Michigan student blogger) came to my rescue, by supplying a description of Halperin's course:

Here is the original course guide description of Prof. David Haleprin's "How to be Gay" class. He sanitized last year, but i guess a lot of these stereotypes were still there.

I don't think he could have packed any more post-modernist bull shit and stereotypes into the paragraph. One question, what exactly are the sentimental, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of gay identity?

Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn't mean that you don't have to learn how to become one. Gay men do some of that learning on their own, but often we learn how to be gay from others, either because we look to them for instruction or because they simply tell us what they think we need to know, whether we ask for their advice or not. This course will examine the general topic of the role that initiation plays in the formation of gay identity. We will approach it from three angles: (1) as a sub-cultural practice – subtle, complex, and difficult to theorize – which a small but significant body of work in queer studies has begun to explore; (2) as a theme in gay male writing; (3) as a class project, since the course itself will constitute an experiment in the very process of initiation that it hopes to understand. In particular, we'll examine a number of cultural artefacts and activities that seem to play a prominent role in learning how to be gay: Hollywood movies, grand opera, Broadway musicals, and other works of classical and popular music, as well as camp, diva-worship, drag, muscle culture, style, fashion, and interior design. Are there a number of classically "gay" works such that, despite changing tastes and generations, ALL gay men, of whatever class, race, or ethnicity, need to know them, in order to be gay? What roles do such works play in learning how to be gay? What is there about these works that makes them essential parts of a gay male curriculum? Conversely, what is there about gay identity that explains the gay appropriation of these works? One aim of exploring these questions is to approach gay identity from the perspective of social practices and cultural identifications rather than from the perspective of gay sexuality itself. What can such an approach tell us about the sentimental, affective, or aesthetic dimensions of gay identity, including gay sexuality, that an exclusive focus on gay sexuality cannot? At the core of gay experience there is not only identification but disidentification. Almost as soon as I learn how to be gay, or perhaps even before, I also learn how not to be gay. I say to myself, "Well, I may be gay, but at least I'm not like THAT!" Rather than attempting to promote one version of gay identity at the expense of others, this course will investigate the stakes in gay identifications and disidentifications, seeking ultimately to create the basis for a wider acceptance of the plurality of ways in which people determine how to be gay. Work for the class will include short essays, projects, and a mandatory weekly three-hour screening (or other cultural workshop) on Thursday evenings.

Of course, when I was a kid, I took a class called "Sex and Crime" (offered appropriately by UC Berkeley's Department of Criminology) -- taught by the distinguished Dr. Joel Fort. I performed independent field research into male prostitution, and I learned a lot. Without getting into too much detail, I'm pleased to report that I got an "A+" in the course.

So, I try to keep an open mind, and I recognize that many issues can be academic.

But brainwashing and fraud are not.