Loraine Hutchins, Ph.D.

Mother’s China

Loraine Hutchins — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:41:13 +0000

After my mother, Adele Hutchins, died in mid-December I made a photograph of her china the wallpaper on my cell phone. The fluted silver platter and two ivory tea cups with gold rims and roses appealed to my sense of beauty. So now they haunt me.
Why? They are the level of comfortable living I was told was my birthright, the prize of being a suburban housewife to which Betty Freidan said we all aspired, the measure which, since I never comfortably achieved it, probably now never will, given my age, approaching Medicare’s gate this May. This silver plate, these delicate tea cups, represent the concepts “dining room” and “china cabinet,” neither of which have been in my personal property vocabulary for many years.
It is fashionable this week to remember Freidan’s Feminine Mystique, marking the 50 year anniversary since its release. Freidan spoke to those women of my mother’s post-WWII 50’s generation, women who married and got the china cabinets, the silver plates and gold-rimmed tea cups, from their middle-class inheritance and husbands’ good blue collar and white collar jobs.
Though she lived until she was 88 and lived the last decade of her life alone, I don’t think my mother ever understood what it was for me to grow up single, independent, un-partnered for most of my life. It was a way of life she’d never encountered first hand until she was a widow, and by then the rest of her life-span was planned out and protected, provided for by privileges her marriage, her class status and society at the time provided for women of her race and class.
So no one taught me how to save money, how to manage investments (like grandmother’s house, when I had it, a great big house with dining room and even some left-over china, after the cousins had grazed through). I held onto that house for 12 years but eventually traded it back to the bank to pay down some of my grad school debt and move in with Andrew, what a mess that was. Still recovering from it, in some ways. But at the time it seemed a sensible next step. Ever since the beginning of this new century I have been off-loading property; managing, negotiating, juggling furniture, roofs, walls and infrastructure repairs and making homes for people to live in, communally. I’m really tired of it, too. Nan and I both here, holed up here in the cold winter together with our elderly cats, in Takoma Park, in a rental property I’m currently in custody of, a place with no room for mother’s china cabinet, which got shipped off to a cousin’s girlchild during the recent emptying of mom’s apartment after her death.
It’s ridiculous I have this big flashy purple-and-black, zebra-striped comforter I haven’t spread out on the bed since I bought it in October. It’s February now and I shiver in bed sometimes, but it’s so beautiful I don’t want to get cat hair on it. Am I waiting for my elderly cat to die? Well, he’s loyal, in his own twisted way, and I’ve lived with him longer than anyone else so I return his loyalty in my own grudging way.
My mother and grandmother and aunt (forget the men for now) brought me up to expect to live in a house with a dining room and china cabinet, a home with linen closets and cedar chests, fire places and bathrooms with genuine guest towels, all of that. Instead I live camped out in someone else’s home, in a basement storage area wrapped around a furnace room. Not as bad as it sounds, it’s actually a big one-and-a-half room suite w/office, bedroom and bath. Certainly no room for big furniture or tiny china tea cups to be properly displayed though.
I know we Tauruses are supposedly really rooted in and into the material world. And I love treasuring things as much as the next person; especially bright colors and contrasting textures and shapes, smells, sounds. I just can’t deal with how easily they accumulate and take over, I feel a commensurate need to keep them at bay in my life, lest they weigh me down. Perhaps my life is more guerilla, more gypsy than I was bred for.
This troubles me. And yet it just is, a stark function of my expectations that we face more societal upheavals in the near future, must be prepared for changes at a moment’s notice. Personal treasures and possessions seem to be perhaps some of the least important things we will keep track of or care about. Community, fellowship and companionship with others is what we all thrive with, long for, and, if we’re lucky, can create as we go along. And while I’m embarrassed that I often spend weekends depressed and withdrawn, humoring myself back into humanness so I can function enough to hold onto this sanctuary space I retreat in, yet I’m also grateful, simply, to have the freedom to weather this angst, to still have this place of peace amongst increasing uncertainties. In the meantime, any vessel is my tea cup, every plate my silver platter.

Ah, spirit and sex

Loraine Hutchins — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:44:20 +0000

We live at a time in postmodernity in which the themes of past eras have found their way back into our collective consciousness. Viral epidemics and pandemics such as HIV, swine flu, and bird flu have replaced bacterial plagues. Inverted totalitarianism has replaced imperialism. Multi/transnational corporations have replaced empires. Wars on Islamic extremism have replaced the Crusades. The impact of these forces upon our collective consciousness is to force dichotomous, binary thinking. We are pressured to believe in right and wrong, good people and bad people. We are encouraged to be suspicious of nuance, complexity, ambiguity, and the diunital, i.e., the union of opposites. Spirituality and religion, like sexuality, can be sites of contestation or compliance. They can broaden and expand our ability to embrace the liminal or embolden hostility toward liminality .
These may seem like lofty ideas, so theoretical as to be meaningless to the average person. Ask the bisexual-identified Muslim who wishes to enter the United States with a dildo about how theoretical these issues are. Ask the pansexual hotel worker who is using a prayer to the Orishas to remain healthy because s/he has no health care or job security if these issues are too removed from what is happening in everyday people’s lives. Ask the machinist with two lovers, recently laid off and now dependent upon the food bank of the church, who is being told by a right wing media pundit that the Chinese or Mexicans are to blame for unemployment if these issues don’t have tangible material consequences. Ask the bi academic, shuttling between assignments to several different classes at several different colleges trying to scrape together a living wage and still maintain her/his connection to grace as a part of the large pool of contingent faculty in higher education, if these issues are too academic. We live in a time when we are being pressured to contract inward upon ourselves and see queerness—sexual, spiritual, political, or social—as too radically inconvenient for the moment.
Even movements that intend to exact more freedoms have contributed to the denial of same. The way in which the gay liberation movement has engaged heterosexism has contributed to popular culture narratives of categorical sexualities with straight and gay as fixed, infallible, and totalizing forms of sexual identity. Same-sex marriage advocacy has been practiced in ways that are antagonistic to marriage equality. Authentic marriage equality would have to include polyamorous relationships between more than two partners and genderqueer relationships that embrace gender expressions beyond the binary of male and female.
We, therefore, have to take care to be critically self-reflective as we move in the world, particularly if we intend our actions to have socially just and ecologically sound consequences. How we frame our loves, sexual and sacred, can play an important part in critical self-reflexivity. We see this special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality on bisexualities and spiritualities as a contribution to that framing. In this introduction, we offer you our summary of what’s inside, the highlights and gaps, what we found interesting and what we still long to read about, areas where we feel the intersecting fields of bisexualities and spiritualities still have glaring present absences and absent presences. We chose to look at spirituality in the context of bisexuality or through a bi/pan/polysexual framework because of the opportunity the framework offers to disrupt the dichotomous and offer the liminal and diunital in considering spirituality. We also wanted to see if there were spaces within theology and spirituality that had not been excavated, or could not be excavated, by a heterosexist or homosexual-centric framework.
This special issue began as the spiritchild of Loraine Hutchins. Loraine, one of the founders of the modern bisexual movement in the U.S., is known for instigating conversations about how bisexual-, pansexual-, and polysexual-identified persons experience, conceptualize, and practice spirituality and religiosity from the uniqueness of their lived erotic experiences. This interest stems from her previous work on the sacred and the sexual (Hutchins, 2007, 2002, 2001). In seeking a collection of work that was inclusive of various traditions and cultural contexts, she sought out writers who could contribute to the desired diversity of voices. H. Sharif Williams (Herukhuti), a sex radical shaman of the Hip Hop generation, saw the original call for papers for the special issue and sought out Loraine. Through conversation, we discovered our common threads. Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé served on both of our doctoral dissertation committees. We were colleagues of M. Paz Galupo—for Loraine as coworkers at Towson University and for Herukhuti as a contributor to a special issue of the journal guest edited by Paz (Williams, 2007). We also discovered how much we were each called to explore the sacred and the sexual.
We decided to partner on the special issue as guest co-editors. Our collaboration demonstrated a bridging across cities, generations, genders, ethnicities, and spiritual traditions. We hoped to be the nuance, complexity, ambiguity, and diunital that we want to see in the world. As we performed the editorial tasks associated with a journal issue such as drafting and distributing the call for papers, soliciting manuscript submissions, identifying peer reviewers, etc., we shared our work and her/histories with each other. We chose to make the relationship nuanced, complex, and deep. We learned about each other’s loves, sexual and sacred. We rejected the option to have a disembodied and desacralized academic process. The space we created allowed us to engage in critical self-reflection and critical feedback with each other.
We share these various aspects of our process with you to provide context for this special spirit issue, and to contribute to the project of dismantling the depersonalized, disembodied academic. To open the discussion of where we have come from and where we are going in these pages, we offer this prayer/invocation to our readers:
May you find joy
May you create love
May you experience grace
May you know peace
May you give birth
May you inspire lust
May you apply wisdom
May you offer honor
May you share ecstasy.

Excerpted from Our Hearts Still Hold These Intimate Connections:
An Introduction to the Spiritualities Special Issue of the Journal of Bisexuality, which later became Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Pansexual and Polysexual Perspective, Routledge, 2012, co-editors, Loraine Hutchins & H. Sharif Williams, Goddard College

Ancestors & Archives

Loraine Hutchins — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 01:36:07 +0000

I knew Miss Smith intimately the last thirteen years of her life. [...] Life was serious, real, to her. She walked with her feet on terra firma, not in the clouds. She was a woman of high sentiment, but not sentimental. She never uttered diatribes against married life, but she always commended it; yet she was content to remain unmarried, fully persuaded that was the life God meant for her.

John M. Greene, “An Address at the Centennial of the Birth of Sophia Smith,” 27 May 1896, p. 17f.

Sophia Smith

I began keeping a diary in 1963, the same year my mom took me downtown to hear Martin Luther King’s magnificent speech. A natural historian, I love to document events and cherish others who do so. Part of my original motivation that summer was wanting to chronicle what was happening around me. I was also motivated by the sheer idiocy of the local news media which had described the upcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as a lawless dangerous occurrence, liable to “cause unrest and riot among the Negros and imperil the windows of downtown storefronts.” No violence occurred at that march, the newspaper pundits were proven wrong. In fact it ended up being a hugely positive turning point, ushering in the Voting Rights Act and much more social progress, until King’s brutal murder in 1968.Now someone will save my journals, and collected papers, for posterity, and I’m thrilled. I just signed an agreement with Smith College to house my papers – collected articles, correspondence, and other filed documents, which represent my 40+ years of activism in a wide span of social justice (housing, peace, Latin American solidarity, environmental, LGBT, women’s, civil rights) movements. Some of my articles from the 70s are already deposited at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, founded by one of my long-time heroines and literary inspirations, Joan Nestle. But I’m not a lesbian nor is my life’s work only focused on lesbians so while I’m proud my papers from the early 1980s about the Seneca Women’s Peace Camp are there, it didn’t make sense to ask them to take any more of my collection. Then I thought about donating the papers to one of several bisexual history archives (east or west coast) but there are more than bisexual papers in my collection. I also thought of donating them somewhere in my hometown, Washington, DC. But the Rainbow History Archives does’t currently have the capacity Smith does, and it felt great to be among so much women’s history, nestled in those mountains of Western Massachusetts among all those women’s schools.

It wasn’t easy getting to this place. In fact it took over three years of agony, dealing with a storage unit several miles from my house filled with file cabinets, bookcases and boxes that I poured through month after month, with the assistance of several valiant college interns. We weeded and winnowed, saying goodbye to precious photographs and one-of-a-kind rare ‘zines, etc. Finally, at the end of this past August, I successfully shipped 29 boxes up to Smith and the next stage of my life, sans boxes and storage unit began. Hurrah, hurrah ! The folks at White Oak Storage Plus, Zack and Gloria and their assistant Sarita, were grand. They held my hand through the whole process, even helped me avoid scheduling the boxes shipping date so it didn’t coincide with one of their famous auctions (see Storage Wars, a reality tv special on this strange American phenomena of what happens when hoarding meets death, bankruptcy and the consequent blind bidding on other peoples’ “stuff”).

Thanks to Nan Mandelkorn, Dave Hawkins and Jose (my moving crew, last day),

as well as Katie Meixner (intern extraordinaire) and Claudia Ramos (earlier intern who helped with the first stages several years ago), to Heather Harts’horn who inspired this whole project to begin with, and to Joan Biren, my long-time neighbor, colleague, and friend, whose earlier relationship with Smith’s collection originally inspired me to send my papers there.

Sometime soon I hope to have a fun citation on Smith’s special collections website like Joan Biren’s link , after the wonderful Sophia Smith Archives staff unpack my boxes and figure out how to describe what’s in them for future researchers to harvest. The collection will house my writings and research files, and eventually hold my 50+ years of journals, after I’m gone. I confess I do fantasize about young researchers finding treasurable nuggets in a way distant future, after I’ve long ago joined the ranks of the ancestors and my legacy is complete.

For those of you wanting to see more of this marvelous collection, check out these links: http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/video.html

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/about.html

Frank Ocean’s Fluidities

Loraine Hutchins — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:25:38 +0000

News of the the recent media splash made by musical artist Frank Ocean’s disclosure about his attraction to more than one gender came to me by way of my friend and co-editor, Herukhuti. In an article for BiMagazine.org, Herukhuti wrote,

“In 2012, some folks find it more provocative that a black man has loved another man than if he had done violence against one.”

Dr. H. Sharif Williams or Herukhuti.

Herukhuti also noted that in a recent journal entry, “…Ocean eloquently explores his experience of love toward/with/for an undisclosed man…Media sources have alleged that the self-disclosure was precipitated by a music reviewer noting instances in Ocean’s forthcoming debut studio album in which the singer/songwriter uses male pronouns in expressing love and Eros toward someone.”

It takes a lot of courage for a man to be so honest, but it’s especially impressive that Ocean chose to go public about his fluidity when his debut album, Channel Orange, was just released.

Women’s Studies Changes Lives

Loraine Hutchins — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 02:22:31 +0000

I’ve been teaching Introduction to Women’s Studies for a few years, both face-to-face and online. Most students find this course engaging and enriching. Recently, one student who enrolled in my online class at the last minute found the material so enlightening it helped determine her academic goals.

Desiree Jamerson earned her Associate’s Degree at Montgomery College this spring, and she plans to continue her education in Women’s Studies and to eventually acquire a Ph.D. and to teach.

As an educator, I love it when one of my classes opens doors in a student’s mind and changes her or his life so dramatically for the good. View the video to hear her story!

Bisexuals in the (White) House…?!

Loraine Hutchins — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 16:20:35 +0000

As he’s done since 2009, President Obama hosted an LGBT Pride Month reception at the White House. No matter how impressive the crowd or upscale the venue, five hundred sweaty, fancy-dressed people standing around in uncomfortable shoes is just not my cuppa tea. But that doesn’t interfere with my vicarious joy of watching friends and colleagues relish the ceremonial high drama of this special event. Being invited to the White House is a very big deal, whether for a state dinner, a reception or a meeting, and this year’s reception included the largest bisexual contingent ever.

L-R: Regina Reinhardt, Morgan Goode, Emily Drennen, LindaSusan Ulrich holding RJ, Lauren Beach, Chiquita Violette, Estraven, Denise Penn

At the 2012 White House Pride reception, bisexuals were represented by a married couple, Emily Drennen and LindaSusan Ulrich, from San Francisco with their eight-week-old foster son; two current BiNet USA board members, Chiquita Violette and Morgan Goode; Midwestern bi organizer, Lauren Beach; Westchester County NY bi discussion group leader, Estraven; and two longtime southern California bi activists from the board of the American Institute of Bisexuality; Denise Penn and Regina Reinhardt. You can read more about this great group of bi activists in Amy Andre’s Huffington Post piece, “Bi Activists in the White House.”

Bi the odds …

President Obama and his administration deserve much credit for making us welcome and included, but how long have bisexuals been in the White House, in various capacities, and what cultural and political meanings do we make of this, or not? Or more importantly, how long have bisexuals been welcome there as out bi people? Is this the first administration to welcome bis to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave? If, by ‘bisexual’ we simply mean people who have desired and/or made love with more than one gender, then there have undoubtedly, just by the odds, been bisexuals in the White House since forever. As for those openly identifying as bi, one of the key organizers of the very first national march on Washington for lesbian/gay rights, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin (see us 33 years older on my ‘About’ page) visited the Carter White House in 1979 as part of the first ever African-American LGB delegation to meet with White House staff.

: LindaSusan Ulrich and her wife, Emily Drennen, and baby RJ pose under Eleanor Roosevelt’s portrait.

And back in the 1940s some people thought First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt loved women as well as men. There was a White House guest room reserved for Lorena Hickok, Mrs. Roosevelt’s close friend, and some say, her lover. And as for Abraham Lincoln, and others whose multiply-gendered affections have been speculated about, I’ll leave that to your own research.

Bis Suffer Disproportionately

But you wouldn’t know any of this from the demographic studies that supposedly map sexual orientation percentages in the general population. In fact, bisexuals are often more hidden and uncounted than gays; especially since we are often read as “gay” when involved with one of our own, and as “heterosexual” if paired with a partner of another gender. Our relationships do not define us, but they do get used as part of the way we are made invisible.

According to the recent Bisexual Invisibility Report, “self-identified bisexuals make up the largest single population within the LGBT community in the United States.” Yet as the report’s title asserts, we are an invisible majority. LindaSusan Ulrich wrote this magnificent report last year and it’s already been translated into Spanish and served as a model for human rights commissions in other cities around the world. According to the report, “Bisexuals experience high rates of being ignored, discriminated against and demonized or rendered invisible by both the heterosexual world and the lesbian and gay communities.” Even more alarming, we have higher rates of suicidality, alcoholism and drug addiction, depression, and poverty, compared to both straights and gays. (Yes, really. See the report’s citations if you don’t believe me.)

Celebrate!

Having L, G and B and T people welcome at the White House is a major turning point in history, and we would do well to recognize its significance. It is particularly heart-warming and soul-satisfying for bisexual people who are often, as the report documents, feared, misunderstood, discounted and despised. So let the celebrations continue! May they be matched, however, by concrete changes that institutionalize equality at every level of our society and government. I’m a dubious but ever hopeful DC native who’s spent over 50 years “marching on Washington” and opened my home to others coming here for mobilizations on social justice and human rights.

: Morgan Goode and Chiquita Violette are among the next generation of Bi activists in the U.S.

As Obama said during his first campaign, he needs us to hold him accountable to fulfill his promises for our dreams of equality. If last week’s event does that, or helps even in a tiny way, then it will have been worth it. As for how many bisexuals, visible or not, have been welcome in the White House over time—I leave that up to future historians to document and for us all to contemplate. I have a feeling our stories are only beginning to be discovered and told.

Staying Alive

Loraine Hutchins — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 23:03:04 +0000

“It gets better,” we say, pleading with LGBTQ youth to not kill themselves and to reject the silencing, shaming and bullying. What we are really saying is—simply and fiercely—we want you to stay alive. But in this time of extreme global instability, staying alive is sometimes a tremendous feat to accomplish, day in and day out. What inspires me to stay alive and to keep on keeping on, weary or not, are people like:

Dr. DeRionne Pollard, the new President of Montgomery College, who has the courage and vision to be herself, and encourage others to do the same;
Starhawk, the Neo-Pagan, eco-feminist activist, who teaches us to “tell a different story” about being alive in the world; and
Victor Jara, the martyred Chilean folk artist, who demonstrated defiance in the face of hopelessness and rage and was memorialized in Holly Near’s lyrics:

The junta cut the fingers from Victor Jara’s hands
and said to the gentle poet ‘Play your guitar now if you can.’
But Victor kept on singing ‘til they shot his body down.
You can kill a man but not his song when it’s sung the whole world round.

Our moral imperative is to tell our own stories, to create different realities, to stay alive in this difficult time. As I’ve toured campuses around the country these past 20 years, speaking out for LGBTQ rights and liberation, I’ve loved watching the LGBTQ student movement grow. I’ve had the privilege of working with students, staff, and faculty on many campuses and participated in a variety of conference trainings, keynote addresses, and workshop facilitations on LGBT issues, sexuality, and spirituality. But during most of that time, I never expected to have my own classroom or to teach.

My first real job after college in 1971 was working as a youth advocate with a community program designed to keep runaway teenagers out of the juvenile justice system and help them gain independent living skills, as well as reconcile with their parents. I went on to help organize a national network of youth counselors who worked with this population. But that was in the 70s. When I earned my doctorate in 2001 a classroom of my own was not in my plans.

In 2004 when I first started teaching a class in Women’s Health at Montgomery College (MC), I had no idea whether I’d like it or what the students and faculty and campus culture would be like. I stepped in at the last minute to help a friend whose class was starting the same week she’d been offered a new job. I quickly fell in love with teaching, especially because of the eager and passionate undergraduates from all over the world who are busy staying alive on MC’s Takoma Park-Silver Spring campus on the MD/DC line. After that first class, I started teaching other classes and getting more involved with the life of the college

In early September 2010, the TP/SS campus women’s studies coordinator asked if I’d do a special event speech for LGBT History Month, the first time something like this had been proposed on our campus, as far as I know. I was scared, terrified even. I burst into tears and sat shaking, alone in my office for a long time after I accepted her invitation. I was an adjunct instructor with no job security. I didn’t even know any full-time faculty who were fully out. Why me? But the words of Victor Jara and Starhawk compelled me to agree to take a public stand.

Then something tragic happened right before my speech. Rutgers college student Tyler Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge, and there was a sudden storm of media attention that increased public awareness about the problem of gay youth suicides, not just Clementi’s, but many more. On October 4, the night of my speech, the room in the Commons was packed with people sprawling all over the floor space and spilling out into the hall. My talk was in part a memorial-wail for the all young people whose lives were cruelly cut short, a report on the Campus Pride research, and a call for our own mobilization as a college community, which helped form:

MC Pride and Allies started a Facebook group for staff, faculty, and allies;
The first LGBT student group on the TP/SS campus; and
The creation of MC’s anti-bullying statement and many other MC Pride initiatives.

Our MC Pride group began visualizing and implementing projects from that day forward, working to make our college a safer, more vital and supportive place for all students, particularly the LGBTQ ones. Dr. Pollard has inspired me to be bold and to dare to think outside the box in supporting LGBTQ students. She was there from the start, commenting on a student blog, helping shepherd our anti-bullying statement through the Board of Trustees approval process, and speaking from her heart in the “It Gets Better” video (Watch it on my homepage!) about how much the love of a wonderful woman has meant in her own life.

This June, we celebrate LGBT Pride across the United States. At MC, we began with a fascinating Colloquium on teaching gender across the disciplines. We have two more events scheduled. An initiative from the President’s office, “Portraits of Life: Stories of Being,” is a photographic exhibit that honors people in Montgomery County, including yours truly, who’ve helped advance the rights of LGBT people over the years. The other event, organized by MC Pride, an all-day Consortium on LGBTQ Advocacy , is an opportunity for faculty, staff and students to share best practices for working with LGBTQ students on campuses.

As Starhawk, my eco-feminist mentor, asserted during the public panic around 9/11, keeping our path on a positive course always involves “telling a different story.” That’s what blogging is all about—telling our stories. This is an excerpt of my story from the “Portraits of Life” program:

My family refused to participate in the white flight to the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s, so I learned about civil rights, misunderstanding, racism, ignorance, and prejudice. At 15, I was aware of McCarthy’s persecutions. My mother took me to the 1963 March, and I heard “I Have a Dream” in person.

I am an activist for feminism, civil rights, and social justice and, as a bisexual, am especially trying to help those who are persecuted for their sexual identity. Every semester, students come to me who have been raped, survived genital cutting in Africa, or who are struggling with pregnancy or sexual orientation issues. I try to give them hope, to help them trust themselves and find people who can help them feel safer being who they are.

For me, teaching is about helping myself and others to stay alive and to do it fabulously. We are linked; our fates affect each other and we cannot afford to lose anyone. So take care of yourself and each other.

Welcome to my new blog and thanks for listening to my stories.

It Gets Better: Montgomery College

Loraine Hutchins — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:27:23 +0000

This is an excellent video we created…