Kids Today...

In the wake of the horrific news from UCLA, one of my facebook folks started a thread about how everyone on campus should have had guns, which several other folks replied to commenting on how much safer it would be if everyone had guns, and so on.  And then my friend started a sub-thread about how kids today are spoiled, whiny, etc etc. 


So, I responded not once, but twice.  First, to the guns on campus thread, where I said that I dreaded the idea of returning exams (or any assignment) where some students hadn't done well to a group of 30+ students, all armed.


I well remember having fantasies, running around the local schoolyard with friends and cousins, waving finger guns, playing I, Spy, and Man from UNCLE, that one or two of us with a gun could easily take out bad guys, keep the good guys alive, and be heroes.  At some point, certainly by the time I was in high school, I'd outgrown that fantasy.  Most adults do.  But the ones who haven't, seriously, need to go play laser tag or something (where I lost totally, and where even our winner was hit more than a few times).  Imagine a campus full of armed people, all hearing a gun shot, drawing, looking around, and seeing everyone armed, ready to shoot.  It's not like the old WWII movies where you knew who was on your side by the uniforms (though friendly fire accidents probably happened), and where everyone manages to shoot accurately in the heat of the moment (which, I've read, doesn't actually usually happen in combat).


But the kids today thing really pissed me off.  So I posted about my students, mostly good folks, mostly hard working, mostly dealing with a lot more responsibility and work than I had in college. This is a generation that's spent their coming of age years, since 2008, rocked by a crappy economy.  Remember reading about all those people who lost jobs, homes, livelihoods?  Those adults, some of them had kids, and those kids are college-aged now.  Sure, some haven't been hit at all by the recession and grew up pretty privileged.  And some of those are brats, no doubt.  The same way some of the previous generations were spoiled brats.


We (my generation, the folks in our 40s and 50s now) haven't done well by the next generation.  And the Baby Boomers, because they have more political clout, have perhaps done worse.  We thought college was expensive then, but now, it's way, way more expensive for a public education.  And our schools aren't getting the funding they did when the government was all worried about Sputnik.


So, kids today.... are pretty much like kids in any day.  Some have it easy, but most don't.  Some are wonderful, a few aren't.  Some work really hard, and some are still growing up.


After I responded with my defense on my facebook friend's post, he responded that he didn't actually know or work with any young adults, but had just gone on what the media says.  WTF?  It's like deciding you hate Blacks because the media report on Black men in prison, isn't it?


Let's recognize that the news out of UCLA has told us about the victim, but (from what I've seen so far) nothing about the murderer/suicide victim.  For all I know, that person might be a non-traditional student in his 50s (I think I read male pronouns being used, but I'm not sure even of that).  The student might have had mental health issues.  (I think you'd pretty much have to have something very bad going on to plan and commit murder, no?)  Ages 18-25 are tough in a lot of ways, not least in that if someone's going to have mental health issues, they often surface then, when a lot of people have (or feel they have) little access to support systems.

Grading on a Curve

I was chatting with a HS student the other day, and they told me that they'd been learning about normal curves in math, and the math teacher had told them to be prepared because in college their work would be graded on a curve.  The student was really worried about the idea of being graded on a curve, so they asked me if I grade on a curve.

I don't.  I doubt many humanities types do.

And, to be honest, I think there's been a change in approach, and not many of my colleagues at NWU do, not in the sciences, social sciences, or business areas grade on a curve, either.

I'm pretty sure folks at super elite schools never graded on a curve in the sciences.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't imagine chem profs at Harvard thinking that half their students should get Cs or below, not in recent history, anyway.

When I was an undergrad, my big science and math sorts of courses were graded on a curve, or at least we were told they were.  I remember a chem test where the median score was 86/100, and that was a C.  And I was terrified and horrified.

The attitude at my undergrad school (a then smallish public R1 known for ag/science) seemed to be that first and second year chem, calc, physics, and bio type courses were "weeders," and were supposed to make students who weren't going to get into vet or med school rethink their career goals earlier rather than later, and change majors to something else.

And that's one place where I think professorial attitudes have changed.  I think now, my science colleagues think that it's their job to help their students succeed rather than to weed them out.  The courses are still tough, and students fail, but my colleagues don't talk about weeding students, but rather figuring out how to help students.

The other place I'd say attitudes are different here (but I don't know if they've changed), is that we worry a whole lot about retention and graduation rates.  Did my undergrad institution worry about retention back then?  I don't know.  But we do here.

We do lose students who decide they aren't getting into our nursing program, especially, since we can serve way fewer students than wish to be nursing majors; they go elsewhere to study nursing, often.  (If we could afford to hire more nursing faculty, we could easily double the major with no real difference in student quality; the entry is that tough.)

What about you?  Do you folks grade on a curve? 

What are attitudes at your school about grading on a curve?

Changed Times

I started reading a book for fun last night, something that's rarer than you might thing. 

For some reason yesterday, I wanted to try rereading a comic novel I'd read back in grad school, so I got it out of the library. 

It's set in 1969, and begins with one of the main characters, a male, on a charter airplane from the US to London, wishing he were allowed to smoke his cigar, and realizing that all the other passengers are women.

The main character immediately knows why.  Do you?

***

I didn't remember this detail, which makes me think I didn't find it striking when I first read the book, but now I find it striking (along with the characters smoking cigarettes on the airplane).

If I were setting a comic novel in 1969, this isn't the detail I'd think to put in, if you know what I mean.

***

The Tour has a rest day today, and I'm hoping one of you will suggest a more modern comic novel for my reading pleasure.  I'll let this rest a bit, and then eventually talk about the detail in the comments, and tell you the novel.

Reading Religion

I taught a couple of Donne's Holy Sonnets this week, and the students had a short writing assignment about one of them:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Most of the students did a fine job, looking carefully at the sonnet and thinking well about the imagery and word choices.

Some of them didn't do quite as well, and their difficulties reminded me of the difficulty one of my students had way back when doing a short assignment which asked her to look at the imagery used for Jesus in "The Dream of the Rood."  The difficulty is that they've been taught and strongly adopted one set of imagery for Jesus, and they're unwilling or unable to grasp other imagery for Jesus by themselves, without someone pointing out in an explicit way that they're accustomed to one sort of imagery, but that there's other imagery being used in this piece of literature.  Usually, the imagery they've been taught is a Jesus as pastor imagery, with a totally merciful, kindly diety.

The student who reads like this, for example, writes that this poem is talking about how much Donne (or the speaker, if they're a bit more sophisticated) loves God and knows that he will be saved, of course.

That's not the imagery that Donne uses and it's not the God he imagines.  His God is fearsome and aweful, and Donne's speaker expresses real doubt about their relationship.

In teaching early modern lit, I often teach texts that demonstrate a variety of imagery for the Christian diety, but students don't seem to ever misrecognize the pastoral, lamb of God sort of imagery for a more violent or doubtful imagery the way some students misrecognize violent or doubtful imagery as pastoral.  Is that because students who've experienced more violent or doubtful imagery have also experienced the more pastoral imagery?  Or have they been taught to approach religious imagery differently?

That said, I think some of the students who are reading Paradise Lost this semester are getting a lot out of thinking hard about the justification part.  Do I get points for inspiring existential crises?

Again with the "Kids These Days" Things

I've seen this article a couple times in my eff bee feed.  It's "Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy," and basically sets up an argument (that's generous, perhaps) that back in the good old days, young adults worked really hard and were very serious, and then finally they made good, and their grass was green (seriously, it's like a lawn care metaphor).  But kids these days, the "Generation Y Yuppies" the article calls them, are unhappy because they think they're special, and they aren't willing to work hard, and they look around and think everyone else has longer, greener grass with flowers and unicorns and such.

It does this narrative about a character called "Lucy," apparently a middle or upper middle class woman.  (I think the character is female for a reason, which I'll get to.)  Her parents, the narrative says,

were born in the '50s -- they're Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II

And then it goes on to tell us that,

They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.

And fortunately, so the narrative says "after graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy's parents embarked on their careers."


Even putting aside the "everyone's white and middle or upper middle class" sort of narrative, this bit took me by surprise because I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and by the time I could read, watch the news and TV, and listen to the older generation, I heard a whole lot of complaining about how the boomer generation were lazy no-good, spoiled, unwilling to work, entitled, privileged, and you can add your own adjectives.  I heard it for years.  It wasn't the sort of narrative I heard once and then everyone thought it went away.

If this narrative thinks that generation "graduated from being insufferable hippies," it should also recognize that young folks these days will likely "graduate" from their self-involvement, also known as "being young adults in relatively well-off circumstances," and turn into adults who muddle through being happy and unhappy just like their parents and grandparents.


So let's think back.  And let's start with the idealized WWII generation, post war, raising kids.  You remember them, the generation where white women were lamented for taking tons and tons of tranquilizers and anti-depressants, where books like Valley of the Dolls satirized middle class white women's lives, and The Stepford Wives expressed fears of patriarchal control of women?  Happy times, right?

And remember those same women looking around and holding consciousness raising sessions because they were so damned unhappy with their middle-class white lives?  Of course they were mocked by the patriarchal media, but they were out there.


What this narrative's Lucy needs, I'd say, is some time (which she'll get if she's lucky).  In all likelihood, she and her generation will grow up, be more or less happy, more or less unhappy, and then at some point, write narratives about how their generation went through a short, rocky period, and the current generation of young people are lazy no-good, spoiled, unwilling to work, entitled, privileged, and you can add your own adjectives.

For better or worse, I probably won't be around to be irritated by that particular iteration.

And really, really, I'd like to see someone in the mainstream press think about narratives that aren't about middle and upper middle class white folks.  I bet that narrative about the wonderfulness of the 50s would change a heck of a lot when told by African Americans or Asian Americans. 

For what it's worth, my observations of my students lead me to believe: this generation is tied to their phones in much the same way teens were tied to phones in 50s and 60s TV shows, except they can carry their phones with them.  This generation has people who are hard working and who are lazy, and a lot do both at times.  It has people who are entitled, and people who are humble, people who are self-involved, and people who are actively committed to stuff, people who are apathetic, and people who are on fire to do something important.  Same as the old days.

XKCD Project: Time

Animated, here: XKCD Time

Here's a bit on it at Boing Boing.


(Hat tip to While Looking for Something Else)


(And now, look!  There's a site dedicated to deciphering the language in *Time*!)

Chasing Pop Culture

I'm reading more Brummett for the intro to our major class, and thinking about how frustrating the study of more or less current pop culture must be.  There's this constant chase after the newest, coolest (heck, that's probably just another sign of my outdatedness), whateverest pop culture phenomenon, but then, by the time the book's out, and used for a year or two, whatever was new then seems hopelessly outdated, even to me.

And five years, when you're working with an audience of 18-25 year olds, is a long time.   So whatever was cool when this book was published (2011), probably isn't cool now, and certainly won't be in three more years.  Is Lady Gaga still a thing?

In contrast, really old stuff never loses whatever appeal it has/had, because it's hopelessly old anyway.  So students may like it or not, but that liking level doesn't seem to change radically from year to year.

What the hell is with the whole "Sharknado" thing?  Did anyone actually see the movie, or is this just so out there that people pick up on it to laugh at?  (Chaucer doth tweet has it down, naturally.)

And vampires and zombies.  Bored.  Didn't we do vampires endlessly in the '70s?  (And zombies in the '50s?)


I have a colleague who tried to tell me, now some years ago, that rap was so wonderful and blah blah.  And while I certainly enjoy some rap, most of what I heard at that point was misogynistic and violent, and aimed a lot of violence at women.  So I said that, and then my colleague countered that I shouldn't listen to mainstream rap, but to these other artists.  But I don't want to have to go digging through a pile of misogyny to try to find something that's not endorsing violence against women.  Life's too short.

And for some reason, Shakespeare's misogyny bothers me less.  (And here "Shakespeare" stands for all of early modern and medieval lit and culture that I might teach.)  I suppose it's because I think we're more comfortable talking about the misogyny as misogyny?  We're more at ease being critical of that, while finding pleasures in the text(s) as well?


I'm going to have a birthday soon, and I think it's not too early to say I've turned into a fogey.  Now, you kids, get offa my lawn!

Reading a Rhetoric Text

I'm reading the newest edition of Brummett's Rhetoric in Popular Culture, a text my department has pretty much used in one edition or another for our gateway to the major  class.  I haven't taught the class since about 2004, so I'm prepping with the newer edition we have in our rental system.

There's good stuff, and it explains things well.  And then it gets to this:

It probably used to be the case, many centuries ago, that any given person lived within one large, overarching culture.  Such a culture may have been complex, but it was not multiple.  If you had lived in Britain during the Dark Ages, for instance (say, around 900 C.E.), everything around you, everything you encountered during the day, probably everything you knew about, was part of the same system, the same group identification, and thus the same culture.  You saw and spoke only to others of your own group.  Different aspects of life, such as work, religion, or government, were all closely interrelated; they all manifested the same overarching culture to you.  The same situation may still be found in some tribal cultures around the world, where people are primarily enveloped in a small, single group of people and surrounded by the artifacts that represent that single group.  (24)

So, where to begin?

I'll let you at it.

Meeting Fail

I was in a sort of important meeting today, and just when it was most inappropriate to interrupt someone, I got a loud case of the hiccups.

I did have a cup of very hot drink with me, but it was too hot to drink right away, so I sipped and burned my tongue, but that wasn't enough to get rid of the hiccups.

Yeah, that made a good impression.

Mythical Inspiration

I have a student who's missed a number of classes and assignments, and even though it's fairly early in the semester, I wrote hir a short note of warning, and so zie came to chat.

Zie tells me zie is lacking motivation, likes to sleep in, and watches a lot of TV.  But zie also tells me zie is above average at the class material, and just needs to be inspired to actually do work.

I hate the myth that someone needs inspiration to do work.  Yeah, maybe it would be nice to be filled with the spirit, but if you're not already standing in front of the congregation when it happens, then you're going to be preaching to your pillow, you know?

I'd love to feel totally inspired every time I teach.  And every so often, I feel pretty inspired.  But mostly, I prep for class, gird my intellectual loins, and do my job.  And mostly, I do it reasonably well (I hope).  But if I depended on inspiration to be able to do my job, then I'd never have been inspired well or long enough to finish a bachelor's degree, much less a phud.

I hope this student comes to realize that most jobs are just that, jobs.  They're work.  And you can hope that you're doing something more beneficial than not, and try to do it well, but it's still work, and you get up and do it because you like to eat, have shelter, wear clothing, and maybe do some other stuff.

I mean, we're all special snowflakes, but in a blizzard of snowflakes, we're still falling to the ground to eventually melt and run off, either into a sewer or, if we're maybe luckier, into a stream.

And now, I need to prep so that even if I don't feel marvelously inspired, I can do a good job at my job.

Blogkeeping

That blogroll down the side is how I read my daily blog fix around here.

But there are problems.  For one, I can never get Ferule and Fescue's link to pick up her latest posts.  (Has someone figured this out?  I think I did the same thing for her link that I did for all the others, but it doesn't seem to pick up her posts.)

And then there are blogs that go quiet or private.  Do I keep them, or clean them off?  And if I clean them off, then how long do I wait?  There are some really good blogs that go quiet for a couple months, and then the person posts, and I'm all hopeful.  I don't want to miss their returns.

What do you think?

Every so often, too, I add new blogs I've run across.  If you're a blogger, doing something related to academics, birding, biking, or something cool and want me to link you, please post your link in the comments and I'll take a look.  Please note that I'm uninterested in linking to most commercial sites.  (I do link to a couple on line commercial biking sites because they're really good.  I've been reading them a long time, though.)

And if you know some really cool blog you think I'd be interested to read, please put that in the comments, too! 

Spread the Word, Please!

A short while ago, I posted about this cool oboe project, and here it is, in full swing, Oboe for Everyone.  The idea is that the Oboist is working to connect specialist oboe teachers from around the world with students who want to learn oboe, also from around the world. 

If you know any oboists or wanna be oboists, please let them know.  And if you can spread the word a bit further, please do that, too.

The world needs more oboists!

(And if you can drop a comment here for the oboist mentioning that you've spread the word, that would be way friendly, too, and much appreciated, I'm sure!)

Plagiarize Much?

Interesting juxtaposition of the Harvard cheating scandal and a plagiarism scandal, one among many, it seems, in Europe.  Debora Weber-Wulff writes in the BBC Viewpoint series about "The Spectre of Plagiarism Haunting Europe."  The piece comes on the heels of the German Minister of Education and Science resigning (or being asked to resign) in the wake of his dissertation being found to include a lot of plagiarism.  Evidently, it's fairly common for European politicians, say up and coming in ministries or departments of this and that, to do doctorates along the way.  Or if not common, at least not shockingly uncommon.

Weber-Wulff points out that

Just looking at the CVs of some of the authors who have been exposed as plagiarists, one wonders how it would be possible for them to do research, hang out at libraries, wait forever for inter-library loans, and get everything written up, as a mere sideline to their already very demanding lives as active politicians.

That is to say, these aren't folks like most PhD candidates, who are working towards a PhD near the beginnings of a hoped for career; they're more mid-career, using the PhD as a sort of stepping stone. 

I have to say, something about this smells fishy.

I have to say, I haven't looked at the dissertations in question, or done the research, but from what Weber-Wulff writes, it sounds like this is far more than just a few missed quotation marks, and more substantial parts of arguments being lifted.

I think about my field, about my dissertation, and I imagine that if I'd try to lift a substantial chunk of someone's published argument without acknowledging it appropriately, my dissertation director and first reader would have seen it easily, and I would have heard about it in no uncertain terms.  (Assuming that it was an early draft, maybe they would have just corrected me and chided me and such, but I can't imagine them not taking it seriously.)  They certainly wouldn't have signed the paper that says that I could have a PhD, too. 

But somehow, the dissertation directors of these politicians did sign those papers.  (Well, I'm assuming they sign papers there, too.)  Did they not notice significant plagiarism?  (Are they not up on the other stuff written about their area of study?  Did they not actually bother reading the dissertations?)  Or did they just not care?


If these are mid-career politicians, then they're people with connections, and not, like most PhD candidates in this country at least (and I think Europe's way different, more on that later), who are pretty much full time working towards their degree (most often with some kind of part time or fellowship sort of work on the side to pay rent and eat and such).

That leads me to wonder about graduate programs accepting these folks.  It's not a big leap for me to imagine that a political functionary, with connections in some party or whatever, deciding to pick up a grad degree would be welcome at a lot of grad programs.  If there's money changing hands, then the political functionary is probably paying rather than being paid; and if there's no money, well then at least there's the potential benefit of having a political functionary with some connection to a school or department.  So I can see where a university might welcome a political functionary, and might easily make that welcome known to its faculty.

What I'm wondering, then, is if in addition to looking carefully at the politicians, someone should be looking at the degree-granting institutions and at the dissertation directors/readers.

What's the payoff for them to have signed off or granted degrees to plagiarists?
 

(My vague understanding is that graduate work in most European countries is much more research based than in the US, that PhD students don't take classes, but start in PhD programs already pretty much focused in and ready to research because their bachelors' degrees are more focused on their subject area and include far less general education and such.)

Deep Breath

I just finished a big committee responsibility, and it's probably done for real now.  Fortunately, the other committee members were excellent, and good to work with, and we accomplished our responsibility well.

I feel like I can breath a bit again.

I have one huge stack of papers to grade.  (But I just got them, so they're not late or anything.)
I have three classes to prep for tomorrow.
I have an observation  to do tomorrow, and then to write up.
I have a small bunch of stuff to grade.

And I feel like I can breath again.  I felt this weight lift the minute I finished part of the committee responsibility, even though there was more to do in our final meeting.


And an aside.  You know how you meet people at cocktail parties or whatever?  (In my case, more whatever than cocktail party, but the idea is the same.  It's a non-work thing, social, friendly.)

So there are a couple of people chatting, and one says that hir spouse does X, so zie basically knows all about X.  Now imagine X is nanotube science.  Yeah, being married to someone who does nanotube science does not make you an expert on nanotube science.  Nope.  It doesn't.

Or law.  Nope, being married to someone who's a lawyer doesn't give you a deep understanding of the law.  Further, if your spouse is talking to you about confidential case stuff, I'm doubly unimpressed: that your spouse broke the confidentiality, and that you think you should blab it at this [not a cocktail party] gathering.


I feel strongly that confidential stuff should stay confidential.  However, the number of times someone not at a confidential meeting has stopped me to talk with inside knowledge about what happened in that confidential meeting leads me to believe that my ethical belief here is not as widely shared as I might wish.  (That said, I hope I haven't broken confidentialities on the blog.  I don't think I have, but I sure hope I haven't.)

Thoughts on the Oscars

Let me admit right up front that I watched a program on Fats Domino rather than the Oscars last night, but I did look at the list of things that had already been awarded before I went to bed. And I had two questions.

I noticed that Slumdog Millionaire was nominated in all sorts of categories, though none of the acting categories. It won the best picture award (I learned this morning) without a single performance "worthy" of a nomination? I wonder how often that happens? (And I bet a movie buff could tell us within minutes.)

It makes me wonder if there wasn't a subtle (or not so subtle, but probably not really conscious) racism in play among the nominating voters. Racism doesn't always take a big systemic organization; sometimes it's the result of lots of little racist decisions, many of which aren't even consciously racist.

Then I noticed that among there was little overlap in the best picture and best actress/best supporting actress nomination fields. I think Kate Winslett/The Reader was the only overlap I saw.

I'm guessing there's not at all subtle sexism at work throughout the industry that makes fewer good roles for women because what "counts" as a good film is very masculinist and tells male stories. What sells isn't necessarily a great female actor, but male-centered films which often valorize violence and patriarchal values.

I wonder what sorts of roles Katherine Hepburn or Myrna Loy would find these days? I don't mean to be nostalgic, because it's not like Hollywood was ever a hotbed of feminism, but it seems ever more masculinist. We need more female producers, directors, and writers, don't we? (Though, to be honest, there would also have to be more women controlling disposable income spent on going to films, and I'm guessing most adult women have less time to go to films than most 13 year old boys. And do we really want to spend that much of our disposable income at films when there are bikes to be ridden, snow to be skied on, and books to be read?)

A Night at the Movies: Milk

I went with some friends to see Milk last night. And as much as I get frustrated by the conservatism here, I must say that I was impressed to see how many people were seeing Milk last night. And they laughed at the jokes, and looked somber at the end.

The first thing I want to say about the movie is that I'm really glad it got made. And boy oh boy is Sean Penn superb.

Really, it's a good movie. It brings back some of the feel of the late 70s without being all in your face about doing techy stuff. The old images of folks like Carter and Jerry Brown worked well with the modern film stuff; they didn't clash like they do with some film because the colors feel really different or something.

So go see it.

I do have a couple of issues. The film momentarily noticed the sexism (especially against Lesbians) and racism of the gay movement in the 70s (at least as it played out in the Bay Area), but didn't critique those in a meaningful way. And they both deserve critique and examination. I get that doing lots with a critique would take away from the time devoted to something else, but I think it's important.

Tied to that was the representation of Jack. He was played in a really over-the-top way, and that representation fits all too tightly in with the ways white culture portrays Latino males as overly emotional, needy, and so forth. So that left my crowd wondering if the movie was just being orientalist, or if it was trying to make a point (was that supposed to be sort of how Jack looked to the "good boy" white males), or if a historical Jack really fit the stereotypes so bizarrely.

And where the heck was Diane Feinstein? Seriously. I mean, they showed her from afar once, and we heard her voice from offscreen, but you wouldn't know that she was coming up in party and as a supervisor.

Seeing Milk made me think about some "what ifs." I'm guessing, within the "what ifs" that Diane Feinstein wouldn't be a senator now if she hadn't become mayor after Moscone's assassination.

Seeing a representation of the gay male community in the late 70s made me think about HIV/AIDS. How much further would we be if we hadn't had to spend so much energy and time, and if we hadn't lost so many people to HIV/AIDS? It's rather horrifying to think, especially since California Prop 8 passed last November.

On the other hand, the lesbian reaction to HIV/AIDS had a lot to do with the gay male community's increasing acceptance. Without HIV/AIDS and Lesbians coming out to support and care for men, would we have found common ground? (If you think about it, there's no "natural" common ground, given that a lot of homophobia is scared of male penetration and that makes men a bigger target, while lesbians have less economic power, less political power, and face different challenges. We used to come together over fewer issues, with lesbians being secondary. Has that really changed that much?)

Within the film, there's one lesbian character, Milk's campaign manager, who is accepted grudgingly by Milk's close followers (at least at first).

It's as if lesbians can only be accepted so long as we're serving men and taking care of them, both in the film and historically. I don't think that's changed a whole lot in the past 30 years, but it needs to change, and we'd better not have to wait 30 more years.