The pornography that once characterized Times Square in Manhattan and 14th Street, NW, in Washington, D. C. has virtually disappeared from those neighborhoods and moved to college campuses, sometimes literally.
“Beginning with the Stonewall riots in 1969 and going through the first reported cases of AIDS, the gay community in New York City, as depicted in Joseph Lovett’s documentary, ‘Gay Sex in the 70s,’ lived in a world where there were no deadly consequences to ‘free love,’” writes Alexandria Shealy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Lovett’s documentary was shown free to the public at 8:00 PM Wednesday in Carroll Hall,” Shealy wrote in The Daily Tar Heel on March 9th.
“The screening was as part of Celebration Week, sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender-Straight Alliance. In attendance were professors from UNC-Chapel Hill and N. C. State and Duke Universities.”
These are the same colleges and universities where administrators and faculty have apoplexy whenever conservative author and activist David Horowitz visits the Research Triangle. “It posed a lot of questions for me like, which came first, the gay sexual carnivore, or the backlash against sexual persecution,” one reviewer wrote of Lovett’s film on the Internet Movie Database. “At a screening, an audience member wished they had been old enough to have enjoyed in the decadent madness that seemed to be pervasive by the movie’s context [sic].”
According to Shealy, Lovett rushed the documentary into production “to allow the gays of the 1970s—a populations [sic] quickly disappearing from AIDS—a chance to remember the era of their liberated youth.”
On March 5, the group Three 6 Mafia rocked the world of the Academy Awards audience with the ditty, “It’s hard out here for a pimp.” These beleaguered entrepreneurs might have an easier time of it in the Ivy Leagues.
Yale invited a former hustler to participate in its Sex Week festivities. Tariq “King Flex” Nasheed penned an article for SWAY magazine entitled “Play or be played,” which is also the title of one of his books. He also agreed to give a lecture entitled “The Art of Mackin’,” the title of another of his tomes.
Bucking this politically correct trend is the Kennel Club at Gonzaga. It has taken to showing its school spirit by chanting “Brokeback Mountain” at basketball games whenever the opposing team misses a shot against the Gonzaga Bulldogs.
The Kennel Club’s creativity has professors at the Jesuit university in a dither. “Many faculty members have brought up the discussion in their classes,” Philosophy professor Mark Alfino told the Associated Press. “They find none of the students have been comfortable with the chant, and that’s a good sign.”
Otherwise, other colleges and universities, like UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke and NC State might look down on Gonzaga.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.