As I walked to class the other morning, I passed a young woman wearing a shirt in the USC colors of cardinal and gold that said "UCLGAY." In case you do not know. the University of California Los Angeles, or UCLA, is our major crosstown rival. The competition between the two schools ranges from the healthy and fun to the sick and extreme.

This shirt is an example of the sick and extreme manifestation of that rivalry because it implies that the two worst things in the world are UCLA and gay people. I was absolutely outraged. My heart started to pound. I felt like I was going to explode. Because I went to UCLA? Nah, I got over that years ago when I started teaching at USC. Now, in fact, I root for the Trojans, deeply and with my considerable passion.

But as I made clear in my editorial last Spring I do not co-sign the hateful sexist bullshit that all-too-often goes along with the playing of sports at this university. I want this world to be a place where women of all ethnicities, men of color, and folks with non-normative sexual and gender constructions walk just as freely as privileged straight white males. We have fought long and hard for this to happen, and there's been real progress in areas like getting the vote, but there's still much work to do, as this shirt signifies.

Gay people love each other. What could be more beautiful? And just as I am allowed to freely express my love for my heterosexual partners, celebrating this love in every way imaginable including forming legal families with them (though only one at a time), homosexuals need to have these same freedoms, and we are nowhere near, nowhere near, accomplishing that goal.

I hear hateful bashing of gays every day. And bashing of gays generally means bashing of gay men, which actually stems from our hatred of women. Yes, homophobic ideology associates gay men with females and then reviles them for it. So this issue manages to hit two of the areas I care the most about in the world, freedom for all people to feel dignity in spite of who they are attracted to, and freedom for women to feel dignity in spite of not being men.

So, insted of passing this person by, letting her hate speech go uncontested, I said "You have GOT to be kidding me!" She giggled nervously. I added in my most sarcastic sneer, "that's real nice, real nice." In class I shared with my wonderful students the frustration and disappointment I felt over seeing such an open expression of hatred for gays on our campus. We were reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a beautiful homoerotic text which the author denied was about same-sex love. In whole or part this denial has to be because of the nineteenth-century climate he lived in, where homosexuality was illegal, unthinkable. I had been wondering what Whitman would be able to create and do in our modern tolerant world, that is until I saw the shirt.

Well, to my surprise a number of students informed me that when "gay" is used as a term designating something as horrible, it does not refer to homosexuality. This kind of (il)logic makes my brain hurt. The argument seems to rest on the notion that "gay" has become a dead metaphor, one in which we no longer see the origins, that the term has become entirely divorced from its original context. "Language is fluid," said one person defending the use of UCLGAY.

Language is fluid, yes, but it ain't flowed away from the current meaning of "gay" yet. Gay marriage, gay rights, gay identity, gay people, every one of these terms holds a stable meaning in our culture at this time. And not only do they hold a stable meaning, with "gay" as an adjective meaning some version of erotic attraction to/genital contact with people of the same biological sex, but this term connects to a highly-charged political and social debate about whether folks who self-identify under this term should be allowed to have civil liberties equal to those of heterosexuals. I'd seen a blurb on a "gay" issue that very morning on television, and the reporter did not have to explain to us viewers what gay means. The report showed same-sex couples who went to the courthouse on Valentine's Day to request marriage licenses. They were turned away. Because of hate. And I am not going to stand by and let heterosexual privilege embed that hate even deeper by using "gay" as a pejorative and then turning around and denying that saying gay=bad is predicated on hatred of homosexuals.

Yes. It. Is.