"I desperately want to go to the Peace Corps with my partner. I can think of nothing better than doing a tour in sub-Saharan Africa for two and a half years with someone I love. And the reality is, I’m never going to get to do that because you need a marriage license to do the Peace Corps with your partner. And that hurts and that sucks. I don’t know any other way to say it, but I want to be married. I want to be married very, very, very badly, and I want to have babies very badly. And I never thought I would be at this point, and maybe it’s because I’m twenty-one, getting ready to graduate, but for lots of us, this is the paramount issue. I can think of nothing else. Lots of us are scared we’re not going to get it. We’re not living in some magical haze where we think, "Oh, wow, it’s going to happen next year." I think a lot of us are just scared shitless that it’s never gonna happen."
A conversation with Swaziland RPCV Anna McCrerey, President of the Queer Student Union at University of Virginia
blushing no more the second in a two-part conversation with the presidents of the queer student union by Andrew Pratt
A Few weeks ago, the Dec sat down with Luke Ward and Anna McCrerey, the presidents of the Queer Student Union. The first half of that long conversation ran in the previous issue (#2). Below is the second half, where the student leaders get to the heart of some of the most difficult and controversial issues facing queer students.
The Declaration: On that same topic of co-sponsorships, what is the QSU’s relation to other groups, specifically ones that represent minorities? Can you talk about your membership in and work with the Minority Rights Coalition?
Anna McCrerey: I think what is so fascinating and what gets lost is the fact that QSU embodies all of the other groups. The other groups are ethnic minorities or cultural minorities, and on our exec, we have an Asian man, a black woman, a black man, and four white students. I think that’s really critical, and what’s also important is that sometimes these students feel that they are not necessarily as welcome in these other organizations. Are you going to have to be a singular identity through your sexuality or your ethnicity or can they be bridged? And I feel like the Coalition has really done a huge service to try to end that conflict of identity. I think it’s also been a huge service to us because for a long time . . . the gay organization at U.Va. was white men. We need to recognize that other people besides white men are gay and other organizations like the ASU, the LSU and the BSA need to recognize that not all their members are straight.
Luke Ward: And that when there are forums by the Coalition, that we’re included and acknowledged as being a minority is an important political statement on its own. Not that we have the same minority experience as ethic minorities or women do, but it can be compared and we can learn from having those experiences and form people who experience several of them.
Dec: Where does the QSU stand in relation to questions of reproductive rights? That’s something that I would guess is not as much a focal point as it is for NOW [National Organization for Women], but you mentioned the connection forming between lesbian groups and larger women’s groups. Is that something that the QSU takes a stand on?
McCrerey: I think the QSU is very interested in a lot of human rights and as a subset of that, a lot of women’s rights. Reproductive rights generally are not on the radar screen—good or bad—simply because very few lesbians are going to contend with that issue. They’re either going to go through channels of adoption or there will be no accidental pregnancies. You’re going to want a child if you’re going to go through that process. We have made a concerted effort to make QSU apolitical in terms of non-gay rights. We will take a stand on gay rights because that’s affecting all our members, but we’ve purposefully been apolitical because we’ve had a Green president, a Republican president, a Democratic president—
Ward: In the past three years. Now if you’re just talking sexual health issues in general, I think we can make a strong case for saying that abstinence-only education is not a good policy because we’re totally excluded from that conversation. If you’re telling a class full of sixteen-year-olds to wait until marriage to have sex, you’re not even acknowledging the possibility that a segment of those children are gay and lesbian and that information that they’re getting is not relevant and that waiting until marriage doesn’t mean anything when you’re denying them the right to get married in the first place. And they’re not being allowed to talk about protecting yourself in a same-sex context.
McCrerey: QSU’s main mission is to make a comfortable, safe, welcoming environment for students who identify as L, G, B or T [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgendered]. And to that end, we don’t ever want to make somebody feel unwelcome because their politics do not line up with the crazy radical feminist president.
Ward: And I think also sometimes people don’t identify as LGBT because they don’t agree with the other politics that go along with that. They’re conservative so they can’t be LGBT; they don’t want to identify as LGBT. I don’t want to make that more of a problem.
Dec: What is the QSU talking about in terms of ever getting the University to recognize Domestic Partner (DP) benefits? What is the state of that?
photo courtesy of QSU
Ward: The state of it is that the state isn’t going to let the University do it anytime soon. The fact that the state officially asked the US Congress today [January 22nd] to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment means that the state is nowhere near that. For Anna and I, our short-term goal was to get people talking about it and get people to realize that out of the top twenty-five schools, only U.Va. and two Catholic schools—Notre Dame and Georgetown—still deny Domestic Partner benefits to queer employees. I think people need to be there, asking that question constantly. I don’t think that’s realistically going to happen anytime soon, but people need to realize what’s going on.
McCrerey: I wish that straight students would know that the value of their education is going to go down. One, they’re going to lose professors. Gay professors are not going to come if they can go to another top twenty-five school and get health care for their partner. I think over a period of ten years, if you’re not having any new gay professors come and you’re losing your gay professors, you’re going to see lots of gay students—we were talking about coming out earlier in high school—who have phenomenal SAT scores, phenomenal academic records, phenomenal extracurriculars, who have gotten into Harvard, Princeton, Berekley, Yale and U.Va. —and these are aspects of our identity, and just as a black student would never go to a school where there isn’t a single black professor, gay students will not go a university where there are no role models. And domestic partnership benefits are really healthcare and insurance and these big things, but they’re also using the AFC, having childcare available—things that U.Va. does not need permission from the State Assembly to do.
Ward: And it’s not the fact that that hasn’t been brought up. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution in 1993 that U.Va. should start acknowledging same-sex couples. Eleven years later, where are we? The administration doesn’t take this seriously. But it will when these culture wars start to escalate and it becomes clear that this is part of the country where the University is going to have to step in a do something to get queer people to come here and have queer scholarship going on.
Dec: What kinds of discussions go on within the QSU about the ever-in-the-headlines topic of gay marriage? Within the public debate, most of what is being said is very uneducated.
McCrerey: I have yet to meet a single gay person in my age group—anybody over high school age—who doesn’t want marriage.
Ward: Not personally, but legally.
McCrerey: Gay marriage didn’t affect me until three years ago because it wasn’t really on the media; I was never going to get married—straight, gay, bi, trans—just not going to get married. But that was three years ago, and I think lots of us—especially in my group of friends who are getting ready to graduate, going to find jobs, looking ahead, maybe wanting babies—[are having the typical thoughts] that go through your mind when you’re twenty-one years old. Marriage hits it; marriage is up there, for me, and it’s something I think about a lot. And coinciding with that is watching Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign [gay rights organization] director on Meet the Press, seeing newspaper articles, watching The Washington Post online. At least six times there have been top headlines in the last three months about it and that is so exciting for me but it’s also really made me think about it.
Ward: It’s scary and it takes a personal toll on us.
McCrerey: You have to remember that Luke and I are fourth years; it’s very different than when you’re coming into college at eighteen. For lots of us, because it never crossed our radar screen because we were eighteen and doing eighteen-year-old things, it’s scary to have it on the newspaper all the time because the reality is we might not get it, and so I think for the thirty to forty year old age bracket, it’s a little different because they’ve been thinking about it for twenty years. It’s very scary to have the news hit at the same age where we’re thinking about these things. I’m not going to get married next year, but I’m certainly thinking about it. I desperately want to go to the Peace Corps with my partner. I can think of nothing better than doing a tour in sub-Saharan Africa for two and a half years with someone I love. And the reality is, I’m never going to get to do that because you need a marriage license to do the Peace Corps with your partner. And that hurts and that sucks. I don’t know any other way to say it, but I want to be married. I want to be married very, very, very badly, and I want to have babies very badly. And I never thought I would be at this point, and maybe it’s because I’m twenty-one, getting ready to graduate, but for lots of us, this is the paramount issue. I can think of nothing else. Lots of us are scared we’re not going to get it. We’re not living in some magical haze where we think, "Oh, wow, it’s going to happen next year." I think a lot of us are just scared shitless that it’s never gonna happen.
Ward: I’ve never even considered getting married because I’ve been raised not even thinking it was possible. I feel almost like society has shaped me not to ask for that. So I don’t know if I would want to get married if gay marriage were available, if it had been available through my whole psycho-social development. For me, it’s personal to open up the newspaper everyday and have people debating your fundamental rights on the front page. And whether or not people agree on your right to do this or your right to do that. Seeing that there is a large group of people who see you as a threat to the country or that the President thinks that you’re a threat to the country and thinks that you’re right up there with Iraq as a threat to the country. It’s insulting, and it’s weird.
McCrerey: Gay marriage, more than anything else, defines my minority status. It’s what for me is going to make my life different from every other one of my female friends, and that’s really, really hard. I want babies, and also, I want to live where it’s warm. I don’t want to live in Vermont or Massachusetts. I want to live in the South and I want to have babies. And I don’t think [that for] any straight person that it would cross their mind that they have to pick where they live to have their babies. For a lot of females who identify as lesbian, gay or queer, we just sort of assume that if we want to have babies, we can. And what is very, very scary is that I know very few twenty-one-year-olds who know whether or not their reproductive organs can have babies. But for straight women, if you can’t get pregnant, there are options. It is very, very scary to rely on your physical organs as the only way that you are going to have babies, because in certain states, you can’t adopt them.
Ward: It’s also scary that there are gay families who are directly under fire because of all these politics. The current precedent in Virginia is 1988 Bottoms v. Bottoms, when they took away a lesbian’s daughter because she was unfit to be a parent precisely because she was a lesbian. So that’s the state of it right now: that those kids can be taken away at a moment’s notice. It’s a special favor of the state that they’re allowed to exist as a family. That’s scary to think about.
McCrerey: I don’t want to say, "I’m so scared, I’m never going to have babies" [without acknowledging] that there are many, many gay families out there already, and it’s crazy when we hear these dialogues or discussions on whether or not we should be allowed to. Well, we skipped a step, because they already have the kids. Let’s protect the kids.
Ward: It would be like if we were having a debate right now about whether interracial couples should be allowed to adopt or not in Virginia. How would interracial couples who already have children feel about that?
Anna McCrerey is a fourth-year religious studies and SWAG major who tried to be apolitical once . . . and failed.
Luke Ward is a fourth-year music and biochemistry major who finds the President insulting and weird. Not personally, but legally.
Andrew Pratt is a third-year English and American Studies major who is allowed to exist by a special favor of the state. And that’s scary to think about.
