Edgar Allan Poe Explains Title IX

Robert Oscar Lopez

[…] for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even

absurd, amid the thunder of the abyss.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Descent into the Maelström”

On Tuesday, May 12, 2015, a feminist student whom I’ll call by the pseudonym

Faya Bugworm walked into the Equity and Diversity office of the university

where I teach. In her hand she held an elaborate complaint accusing me of

discrimination against her based on gender and sexual orientation. She is a

heterosexual female (“self-disclosed,” as I was later told) and I am a bisexual

male.

She also brought with her a copy of the syllabus for my fall 2014 course on

early American literature, a document she’d been given 260 days before, on

Monday, August 25, 2014. She’d taken that course with me and received an A,

but she had disliked one of the research assignments. She was also dissatisfied

that I didn’t nominate her paper on Herman Melville for a department award.

But most importantly, she had a profound distaste for me as a person, which

she’d expressed quite openly on more than one occasion. These quibbles

combined with something else to create a perfect storm in Faya’s head, and my

effigy was stuck in the eye of her hurricane. As early as November 2014, my

department colleague, whom I’ll call Archie Peel, told me she spent much of the

fall 2014 semester stalking my publications in First Things, Federalist, and

elsewhere, then pumping him for information. Archie would send me texts like,

“your student came by again, and showed me the First Things article. Are you

okay? What’s going on?” Some of what motivated Faya is mysterious, but I can

gather that she hated me for being bisexual yet married to a woman, and it

disgusted her that I was Republican yet somehow employed in her home state of

California.

She felt that California should dismiss me. This was a sensible measure in

Faya’s mind. She had told me, after all, in front of 35 of her classmates, that

people who thought like me had no right to exist. Because she’s the tolerant one.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore

Poe’s “Dream within a Dream”

I wasn’t there for this historic May 12 event, this veritable nailing of 95

theses from such a ferocious social justice warrior. Faya probably considered

herself similar to Elizabeth Eckford marching bravely against growling white

racists on her way into Little Rock High School in 1957. In May I had no idea

about what was going on or the abyss into which this Ms. Bugworm was bound

to drag me. I was innocently living my life, thinking that after a decade of

constant stress in the academy over my conservative political views, I had finally

reached a stage of equipoise and even peace.

I knew that there’d been some controversy about an interdisciplinary

conference on family bonds, which I’d organized on October 3, 2014, at the

Ronald Reagan library in Simi Valley (this is the same location where, not too
long ago, CNN hosted its GOP presidential primary debate and broke its own

ratings record.) I’d given my students what I consider a golden opportunity.

They were overwhelmingly working-class kids from LA, a smattering of ethnic

minority groups, often first-generation college students, mostly majoring in the

humanities because they dreamed of creative careers, filled with ambition and

hope to make a better life for themselves. My own scholarship had focused

increasingly on the importance of including humanities-based interdisciplinary

research on important topics like adoption, rather than trusting in the dry

statistics typically furnished by sociologists.

After years of raising funds to do it, I’d succeeded in giving them an all-

expenses-paid option to present research at that conference for credit in lieu of

the usual weekly reading responses. (A lot of them presented on Edgar Allan

Poe, who was an orphan later taken up by a foster father.) Many students,

including Faya, had signed up to request a seat at the event. Later she decided

that she didn’t really want to go.

Faya’s own words to me at the time contradicted the later notion that a

lasting wound had to be closed by getting lawyers and high-powered

administrators involved. In an email a few days after the conference, Faya

Bugworm had stated to me in writing that she never wanted to bring the

conference up again. Here is a clipping from the voluminous document record

that has proliferated since the investigation was opened:

She said this again during her exit interview on Monday, December 8.

At the end of the fall 2014 semester (December 8-9), moreover, I’d

conducted exit interviews with all 110 of my students who’d attended the

Reagan library conference, and each student had said the semester had gone

okay. One might suggest they were just worried about their grades, but even

after grades were submitted, silence followed for six months. I’d met with the

provost at the time, Harry Hellenbrand, twice about the controversy—on

October 6 and December 17, 2014—and I’d asked him point-blank if I were under

any kind of investigation. He had told me no. The official deadline for any

complaints about the Reagan library event, pursuant to the timeframes set in

California State University Chancellor’s Executive Order 1097, had passed on

January 21, 2015. When Faya Bugworm marched into the diversity office to

deliver her manifesto, the conference had become ancient history.

The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable

longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in

defiance of all consequences) is indulged.

Poe, “Imp of the Perverse”

 Faya lies. Any sane and perceptive investigator would have noticed this.

In her complaint, Faya alleged that she’d gone to the October 3 conference at the

Reagan library because I had “coerced” her and tricked her about what the

subject matter would be. Faya objected that I never posted a trigger warning

about the possibility that women or gays might be emotionally harmed by

unforeseen exposure to conservatives. She claimed that what she heard there was

so traumatizing that she broke down in “in tears crying.” Later, in recounting

how “hurt” Faya looked recollecting her Via Dolorosa, the Title IX Coordinator,

Susan Hua, would say it was like being forced to sit through a KKK meeting.

According to Faya, the presenters at the conference--“Bonds that Matter”

(referring to the bond between children and their mothers and fathers)--said

things like, “all women who use sperm banks are evil” and “it is our position

that gay people cannot be good parents.” Susan Hua assured me that she’d

witnessed Faya break down and weep uncontrollably when recalling these

events.

That sounds awful, doesn’t it? Sounds like a real misogynistic, anti-gay,

and let’s-just-add racist event, organized by a Latino bisexual professor who was

raised by a lesbian mother, demented enough to force his innocent college

students into KKK meetings at the Ronald Reagan library.

But wait. The event took place off campus—actually some 40 minutes from

campus, in another county—during a time outside of the regular class meeting.

Aside from the supposed hatefulness of saying things like “all women who use

sperm banks are evil” (which nobody said, but I’ll get to that in a moment), how

exactly can a professor magically force a student to drive forty minutes away

from campus, up a winding desert driveway into the recessed and hard-to-find
Reagan library during a day of no classes? Did the fact that Faya’s own syllabus

listed this event as “Option B” and there was an “Option A” on the same

syllabus not signal to someone in the diversity office that Ms. Bugworm’s story

was, to say the least, ripe for doubt?

To refute a reasonable claim is far easier than to counter a claim grounded

in unreason. This is why unreason has become the premier tactic of social

warfare. Piles of paper would soon be spawned from Faya’s perverted reading of

reality. In my “defense” memo submitted to Susan Hua on June 17, I included

the summary below about the illogical nature of Faya Bugworm’s complaint, to

no avail:

Even without the above details, the initial claim about being “coerced” and

“tricked” and unaware that there might be conservatives at a landmark named

for Ronald Reagan would seem, to most people, so fatuous that the whole mess

ought to have been thrown into the trash or framed as absurdist satire. Instead,

the farce went on, sustained in part by melodramatic performances by Faya

Bugworm and several of her friends who also went into Susan Hua’s office and

had nervous breakdowns, “in tears, crying,” as they related the horrors of being

trapped in the Reagan Presidential Learning Center, drinking free coffee and
sitting next to Republicans. To the complainants and to the Title IX coordinator,

the conference was an unspeakable trauma that might damage them

permanently and spark future flashbacks.

There is a long history here involving me, an ongoing battle with the

LGBT community in which I grew up, the academic-queer-theory industrial

complex, and the overgrowth of aggressive LGBT lobbying groups. The latter

keep attacking me by pressuring my employer. Consider, for example, this

screen shot from a comments section my friend captured from a few months ago:

Or this:
Scott Rose and GEST are imps of the perverse to make Poe proud. While Faya is

in all likelihood a despicable human being, chances are that she was recruited

and coached by big league trolls.

Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to

comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility.

Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum”

In pleading with Susan Hua to investigate me for anti-gay discrimination,

Faya had no evidence that any anti-gay statements were made at the conference,

other than a single brochure from the Ruth Institute, entitled “Are You a

Survivor of the Sexual Revolution?” While the Ruth Institute was a co-sponsor of

the October 3 conference, this brochure bore no insignia or markings that would

tie it to me, the Bonds that Matter conference, or the American literature class.

In the pamphlet lay a tale. Apparently this brochure had been dropped off

at the equity and diversity office by two other students, friends of Ms. Bugworm

– whom I will call Brunhilda Proog and Rhonda Molenest -- some time around

October 6, 2014, not by Faya herself. According to the investigator, Brunhilda

and Rhonda filed an “informal complaint” (a fancy way of saying they came,

talked to someone, and left without writing anything down) but nothing came of

it. They and the diversity office didn’t pursue it and nobody told me about their

unhappiness with the conference until June 10, 2015. The brochure was stashed

away as evidence somewhere in the bowels of the university’s sexual-equality

catacombs, then dusted off and resurrected in Faya’s file. At my interrogation on

June 10, Susan Hua pulled this one and another brochure out, which I’d truly
never seen before, and she said, “there are things in here that could really pose a

serious problem for you, these students say that these were being passed out at

your event.” I could not even remember whether it was given out at the Reagan

library conference. It had little to do with fertility, divorce, or adoption, the topics

of the actual presentations. Here is the presentation schedule:

Are you missing the “God Hates Fags” sermon or the KKK rally? Nothing of the

sort took place. The controversial line in the Ruth Institute brochure was

innocuous anyway. There were twelve examples of survivors of the sexual

revolution in “Are You a Survivor of the Sexual Revolution?” See this portion:
The one line about people wanting to stop living a gay and lesbian lifestyle isn’t

really anti-gay. It is just acknowledging that some people are in that situation.

The brochure doesn’t promote conversion therapy or say that everyone gay is a

refugee from the lifestyle. We do know that some adults do not like the gay

lifestyle after they try it out. Is acknowledging their existence homophobic?

Another problem is that the pamphlet wasn’t part of any of the

presentations given at the conference (i.e, the green schedule above), but seems

to have been gathered from the Ruth Institute’s informational table, which was

set up independently from the 83 exhibit locations devoted to research projects.

As I discovered in the ensuing investigation, a student from UCLA and a student

from UC Santa Barbara walked some of these brochures to individual tables

between 1 and 2 pm, but this had nothing to do with me, the institute I lead, CSU

Northridge, or the class. Yet another problem is that I am not part of the Ruth

Institute, didn’t write the brochure, didn’t approve the brochure, didn’t

distribute the brochure, and didn’t encourage anyone to read it. I have no

memory of the moment when the two students walked around with the

brochures. Faya’s complaint did not even try to claim that I had any connection

to it. So what does this brochure have to do with a discrimination charge against

me, or the price of tea in China?

 One cannot resist the inference that some of my students, coached by a

Scott Rose type or one of the pseudonymous Internet harassers like Straight

Grandmother unveiled above, signed up for the conference for the purpose of

collecting materials so they could file a complaint. They harvested this brochure

from the multitude of business cards, flyers, and information sheets at the

conference center, and then tried to make it seem as though the whole event was

a six-hour hate-fest.

There is a scene in the 1985 film Official Story, about a literature teacher

struggling to stay alive during Argentina’s military dictatorship. At one point,

she fumbles to hide newspaper clippings that a student gave her, as she rides in a

car next to a government official. We’re there already, folks—welcome to the

LGBT equality abyss.

Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of

analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements.

Poe, “Imp of the Perverse”

The abyss follows its own complex structures of unreason. Faya connected

her trauma over this one line in a brochure to my crimes against sexual

orthodoxy, because she knew me as a bisexual married to a woman. The

existence of something as disgusting to Faya as a “lifestyle refugee” was so

horror-inducing that anybody, especially her teacher, who might be complicit or

tainted by such people in any way, ought to be reported to authorities, brought

up on charges, and given a harsh punishment. Call her the J. Edgar Hoover of
binary sexual orientations, collecting dossiers on subversives to be shamed and

hounded out of public life.

Faya was over 100 days late in bringing in her complaint, with both the

semester in question and the subsequent semester already over. Susan Hua justified

this waiver by claiming that she found “plausible” Faya’s claim that she feared

retaliation, even though she received an A in my class and didn’t take any classes

with me in spring 2015.

There is a provision in the Title IX order for CSU Northridge allowing the

university to waive the timeliness requirement, but that was designed for rape

and assault victims who had PTSD, not for someone who didn’t like a brochure.

The man who was provost when the event took place – Dr. Harry Hellenbrand—

had resigned, and a new provost, Dr. Yi Li, had assumed leadership, moving to

Los Angeles from Ohio and possessing, obviously, zero knowledge of this case at

all.

Once you place a faculty member under investigation, the gears are in

motion for a hellish inquest, involving gag orders, document productions,

interrogations, and ruinous anxiety because the professor has no idea what’s

going to happen. On June 4, 2015, the day I received email notification that I was

under investigation, I called the Title IX officer to ask if dismissal and loss of my

tenure were a possible outcome. She said it was possible. Over this nebulous and

disjointed complaint based on nothing, I was facing revocation of tenure, firing,

and the surefire demolition of my whole scholarly career.

Madness is the only way to remain sane when it is thus. The entire

situation requires hysterical paranoia as the only way to survive. The most fatal

flaw, when one is under this kind of covert mob attack, is naïveté or being caught
off guard. Much of the actual process is a fishing expedition, in which the

“investigation” status enables the Title IX coordinator to call random people and

ask impertinent questions.

Billable hours go through the roof as the documents pile up. By August,

communiqués were no longer being issued by CSU Northridge, but rather by the

chancellor’s office and the general counsel of the whole CSU, the largest

university system in the world. The escalation was rapid, incredibly expensive,

and mostly inscrutable to me in the middle of the whole thing. I have no idea

how many outside lawyers may have gotten involved on the university’s side,

but I can reveal that the number of lawyers on my side rose to the double digits,

and quickly. Because higher education is like no other organizational realm and

academic freedom is at the frontier of jurisprudence, more and more outside

opinions have to be consulted on how the documents fit into the language of

opaque discrimination codes. The outcome doesn’t come until months down the

line.

More insane decisions turned folly into tragedy. Though the complaint

was filed in early May, Susan Hua did not notify me until June 4, 2015, twenty-

three days after Faya’s visit to the office, and more importantly, 244 days after

the conference. Events had to be reconstructed with fragments from the vaults of

fading memories. This was Foucault’s Discipline and Punish crossed with

Archaeology of Knowledge, but with a dash of Chairman Mao.

Rather than suggest some kind of informal resolution, Hua chose to

charge me with “discrimination,” one of the most serious violations and one of

the few that can lead to revocation of tenure and dismissal. In some ways, this

charge is more serious than something like sexual assault because, if true, it
would imply that in my official duties I was systematically harming “protected

classes,” women and gays. A rapist might be guilty of a momentary act of

passion mixed with alcohol or drugs; a bigot, by contrast, is corrupt by nature

and guilty of a terrible crime at all hours of the day, every day, by virtue of

merely refusing to disappear from professional society.

Hua held off on alerting me to the investigation until well after Faya

graduated from CSU Northridge on May 22, 2015. By the time I was brought in

and interrogated for two and a half hours, Faya wasn’t a student and the

university had no way of enforcing its student code of honor on her—meaning

that if she was defaming me and furnishing false information about me to

university officials, I had no recourse. Whoever masterminded this case had

stretched due process to create the perfect trap.

I was not able to get an appointment with Hua until Wednesday, June 10,

2015. Prior to that date, I did not know what the charges against me were or who

brought them. Susan Hua may or may not have perused the syllabus that Faya

brought in with her when she filed the complaint. The syllabus actually stated

very clearly the following points, which gave the university the easy option to

throw out the whole affair—something that clearly somebody very high up in

the CSU hierarchy did not want to do:

a. The students would only attend the conference at the Reagan library if

they chose to. There were two options to fulfill the 20% of the class

dealing with “thematic engagement.” Option A was to write weekly

journal responses to the reading. Option B was to create an exhibit

about family bonds in early American literature, attend an all-day

 event at the Reagan library, and write a response linking the lectures to

the students’ research into the American family.

b. On the syllabus the students were given the names of the five

presenters who would be lecturing at the conference: Alana Newman,

Jennifer Lahl, Jennifer Roback-Morse, Cathi Swett, and Claudia

Corrigan D’Arcy. (A sixth presenter, Jennifer Johnson, never presented

because she was ill that day.) These people are easy to find on Google

and their work is fairly self-evident online.

c. All the presenters were women. Only two of them are explicit

opponents of gay marriage.

d. I did not present anything at the conference, so my personal views on

same-sex parenting were irrelevant to this entire complaint. (On June

10, when I asked Susan Hua if I had been accused of saying anything

derogatory about women or gays, she said no.)

e. The lectures would be about “third-party reproduction, divorce, and

adoption” and how those modern trends affected the legally

recognized bond between children and their mother and father.

To proceed with the investigation, Susan Hua must have believed that despite

what Faya’s syllabus stated, she was “coerced” and didn’t have a choice but to

take a day off from work and drive to the Reagan library with an exhibit, which

took hours to create. She must have also believed that despite all of this detail

provided to her in her syllabus, Faya could not infer that at the Reagan library

conference, she might encounter conservative opinions about family.

Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our

own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea.

Poe, “MS Found in a Bottle”

I was never given a copy or a written summary of the charges against me,

so I worked from notes I scribbled on June 10, when I was being grilled and

baited by Susan Hua. For the first 45 minutes, Susan Hua asked me about my

professional connections, where I got funding for conferences, whether the

speakers were paid, who booked them—in other words, stuff that had nothing to

do with the complaint and was undoubtedly a pretext to find dirt on me for later

ethics charges.

About an hour into the meeting, Susan Hua started repeating her view

that my conference at the Reagan library was similar to a meeting of the Ku Klux

Klan, and that what I’d done was the same as tricking students into going to a

white supremacist anti-black rally. I struggled to stay calm. Each time my lawyer

and I asked what the “adverse action” was (this is the language of the actual

Executive Order 1097), Susan Hua changed the topic and started asking more

questions about how I organized the conference and what my social connections

to the presenters were. She would later send follow-up questions about my

funding and demanding a copy of the grant proposal. At one point, she told me,

“Actually, I agree with them,” referring to Faya, Rhonda, and Brunhilda. So

much for a neutral investigator.

Faya Bugworm’s complaint had explicitly included her outrage over the

fact that I revealed my bisexuality and my upbringing with a lesbian. Susan Hua

stabbed me with questions: “Why did you bring these things up?” I asked her
whether it was a violation of the university regulations for me to mention the fact

that I was bisexual but married to a woman, or the fact that my mother was a

lesbian. She said I was entitled to state such things but it would not be a legally

permissible statement for me to express these facts in relation to positions such as

“children have a right to be raised by their mother and father.” When I said I felt

the latter position was a defensible position, Susan Hua said, “no, it’s not. That’s

discrimination.”

We cannot entirely blame Faya, though she does appear a uniquely

insidious kind of young totalitarian, which we’ve seen before: the student spying

on her subversive instructors in the name of protecting the homeland from

political heresy, and crawling through the back chambers of the nomenklatura. It

is worthwhile to remind ourselves that Meletus, the main accuser of Socrates,

was actually a young man goading the state to execute an older man.

Faya has the added disadvantage of living in a Facebook and Twitter age,

where icons and clickable avatars represent the most substantive links between

people and concepts. Faya assumed that because I am bisexual and married to a

woman, I must be behind any brochure hinting at ex-gay identity, something I

have never claimed for myself. So she blatantly discriminated against me based

on gender and sexual orientation. Nonetheless, I’m the bad guy even under laws

designed to protect people like me against people like Faya. As Sovietologist

Stella Morabito explained to me in a recent podcast, a hallmark of Stalinist Russia

was the “rule by whim,” the blatant disregard for due process, and a willfully

arrogant tendency to apply a “vast bureaucracy” of inscrutably complex laws

against dissidents while the nomenklatura brushes aside the simplest rules.
 In the meeting of Faya Bugworm and Susan Hua, we have a fusion of

different nomenklatura archetypes: the passive-aggressive and nosy busybody

with a corner office and a staff of spies, the young apparatchik aspiring for the

approval of the all-powerful Politburo that wields the power of life and death.

Self-righteous smugness unites them across lines of age and class.

He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of

each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural.

Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Interrogatory tactics become increasingly devoid of any ethics if they take

place beyond the pale of any real law. Called into the grilling by Susan Hua in

June, I was suddenly introduced to a new complainant whose name I couldn’t

recognize, a gay student whom I’ll call Sylvester Trinkett. Hua told me he was

registered in my Greek and Roman mythology class, went to the conference, but

was so overwhelmed by the antigay content that he couldn’t deal with it, as he

was struggling to accept his own sexuality. Hence he was in good standing until

2/3 of the course was completed, then stopped coming and received an F. This

was, of course, the clincher in the university’s case against me—at last there was

a gay individual who had a claim that my views on marriage had severely

harmed his career. In all likelihood, if Sylvester Trinkett was vindicated by Cal

State, he could go on to sue me in civil court later for much steeper damages.

Struck speechless, I fumbled. I looked to my lawyer. I didn’t know who

Sylvester Trinkett was. I had brought a stack of papers with me to the meeting,

because I’d tried to guess what the charges were about, but nothing had
Trinkett’s name on it, even the end-of-semester lists with all the students’ grades

for all four of my fall 2014 classes. The office was growing stuffy and time was

running out. Susan Hua became more aggressive, asking what I had to say about

poor Sylvester’s failing of my mythology class. I stalled and said I would have to

get back to her in writing.

As it turned out, I was right to stall and not say anything, because the

Sylvester Trinkett case was a complete fraud. None of the student complaints

about the October 3 conference came from the Greek and Roman mythology

students. Sylvester was not in my Greek and Roman mythology class! He turned up

on my attendance sheets for five out of the ten class meetings prior to the October 3

conference, in Faya’s American Novels section. So he had already maintained a

failing attendance pattern before the event even took place.

On September 3, he had signed a sheet requesting a seat at the Reagan

library conference, but then he virtually vanished. He was absent, never

submitted a proposal for an exhibit topic, never claimed any of the exhibits that

were photographed and catalogued, never proposed or wrote either of the

research papers, and was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost in the machine.

Below is a snippet from the document production I gave to Susan Hua on June

17, 2015:

Searching through all my emails I found no sign that he ever contacted me about

trying to avoid an F in the course.

 Had I been thrown off guard in the interrogation chamber and jumped

forward to give Susan Hua loads of information about my Greek and Roman

mythology class, I would have opened a whole new phase of surveillance. The

mythology class was in a different department and had 60 students, the

equivalent of two of my American literature classes. Imagine how each little

piece of paper, each little email, each little factoid, could be a bread crumb

entitling Susan Hua and Faya Bugworm to request more, more, more of

everything – more extensions, more deadline waivers, more document requests,

more interrogation meetings, more memoranda and legal procedures.

In the equality abyss, “protected groups” are protected from the basic

requirements of good faith and honesty, the standards that bind their hapless

targets of accusation and derision. Who on earth was Sylvester Trinkett? Who

attends five sessions of a course at the beginning of a semester, signs up for a

conference, then vanishes without a trace, only to return months after the fact to

claim an antigay professor failed him out of homophobia?

A quick search on the internet provided me with some clues: Prominently

and boldly, Trinkett is listed as an officer of the LGBTQ association, several years

earlier. He is quoted as giving advice to young college students struggling with

coming out. Struggling to accept himself? Hardly. He was recruited, coached,

and planted in my class by one of the many trolling organizations hell-bent on

shutting down my same-sex parenting research and driving me out of the

academy. In the abyss, you have to chase after phantoms while phantoms chase

after you. How he ended up annotated in Susan Hua’s files as a student in Greco-

Roman mythology remains a mystery. Did he lie to her about that or did she lie

to me? Such a mistake is simply too far off to have been made haphazardly; there
was someone inside the catacombs who decided to throw the Greek and Roman

class into the mix, because they wanted me to be thrown off guard and reveal

something. I have made peace with not knowing what or why.

In my June 17 document production, I added a note to Susan Hua

explaining that I could not confirm anything about Sylvester Trinkett, including

whether he even attended the controversial conference. I had no record of his

proposing an exhibit topic or any sign-in from him claiming any of the exhibits

that were on display that day. I had no memory of his being in the Reagan

Library and he was in none of the photographs I took there.

But Sylvester’s ghost would reappear. In late August, Susan Hua would

email me that she had tracked down Sylvester and had brought him to her office

for questioning. The plot thickened. He had a photograph of an exhibit about

John and Abigail Adams; this demonstrated, to Susan Hua, that there was some

shred of legitimacy to his original claim that he was a Greco-Roman mythology

student, struggling with his sexuality, who’d gotten an F because an anti-gay

conference wrecked him emotionally.

Why did he create an exhibit on John and Abigail Adams, if indeed he

did, when he never proposed that exhibit to me, and I’d never approved it? If he

had worked for hours on an Adams exhibit, how did he remain confused as to

whether this was for an American literature class or a Greek and Roman

mythology class? Did he not know that John and Abigail Adams wrote letters to

each other over 1,000 years after the fall of Rome? Why did he put hours of work

into a beautiful exhibit, then do no other work for the entire semester? Why did

he come to only five classes out of ten before the conference, and none of the

remaining fifteen meetings? Where did he get the idea that he was in a Greek
and Roman mythology class and what on earth about John and Abigail Adams

was so traumatic to his identity as a gay college student that he went into

meltdown?

Other phantoms haunted the investigation. In the complaint Faya claimed

that I introduced her to someone who upset her in a private conversation at the

conference, something I have no recollection about. I believe that here she is

referring to Katy Faust, editor of Ask the Bigot, famous for appearing on a highly

controversial talk show with Brendan O’Neill in Australia. I called Ms. Faust to

ask her what she recalled. Katy remembered talking to Faya and wrote a blog

alluding to an intolerant leftist woman without naming her. But the price of tea

in China ends up rearing its ugly head—what does Faya’s possible clash with a

Seattle blogger have to do with me and a discrimination charge?

In the complaint Faya assured Susan Hua that I had sent her an email

telling her I “wasn’t going to change [my] views” and telling her to drop my

class—but Faya claimed that she had conveniently lost that email and couldn’t

provide a copy. (Lo and behold, I had a copy, and it didn’t say that!) Faya also

claimed that during the conference, Alana Newman, one of the speakers, had

made offensive anti-gay comments and that I’d come on stage to say that gay

people shouldn’t adopt children.

I actually do believe gay couples shouldn’t adopt children, and I have

some personal authority on that matter given that my lesbian mother’s lifelong

partner never adopted me and I was glad she didn’t. But that’s not what I said on

October 3, because I’m not a moron. I know that there’s a difference between

what you can say as a citizen engaging public debates and what you should say

in the context of academic coursework.

 In a real “a-ha” moment, I had to reveal to Susan Hua that I had video! Yes,

on the day of the conference, a cameraman had a gigantic camera set up in the

back of the room, recording the whole day’s events, including the question &

answer session, and including the five minutes during which Faya pestered

Alana to take a detour into gay issues when that wasn’t the topic at hand. I

provided a transcript to Susan Hua, basically demonstrating that Faya’s

summary of the comments she claimed she heard was completely at odds with

what she truly heard (and said). Here is a portion of it:

When I provided the transcript to Susan Hua, she demanded that I provide the

video itself. I drove into town on a day off and got the cameraman to dub a copy
for Susan Hua, which I dropped off that afternoon. Another email followed,

telling me Hua was not yet inclined to honor the video; I had to overcome Hua’s

doubts as to whether Faya had a reasonable expectation that she was being

videotaped. The visible presence of a giant camera filming her and the

notification given in class that she was going to be videotaped were not enough

to ensure that Faya knew she might be recorded. After some little exchanges

among the lawyers about the video, I never heard about it again.

The rules of unreason make the search for evidence maddening. These

cases are supposed to function on a “preponderance of evidence.” I had

videotape, reams of papers, sign-up sheets and emails to and from Faya showing

she had plentiful advance notice of the conference’s content and ample chances

to do the other Thematic Engagement option, as well as official syllabi clearly

stating what the conference was about, who the speakers were, and the fact that

students didn’t have to attend the event. Most importantly, I had copious records

of what the content of the conference was—four hours of video, over 80

photographs of the research exhibits, and multiple articles written about the

event by journalists such as Stella Morabito and Matthew Dugandzic for

Federalist and First Things—and there was nothing remotely anti-gay. An

infinitesimal fraction of the day’s discourse addressed homosexuality, mostly

positively. Below is a snippet from the documents I provided to Susan Hua on

June 17, 2015:

The investigation could only proceed if one accepted the premise that the Ronald

Reagan library itself was so symbolic of anti-gay hatred and indifference to

AIDS, that merely being there in proximity to people who didn’t spit on Reagan’s

memory was devastating enough to cause hysterical weeping, emotional

collapse, and self-harming ideations in the feminist and gay students.

Against all my evidence, Faya had a brochure with one line about “gay

and lesbian lifestyle refugees,” which I could prove had nothing to do with any

of the lectures or research exhibits at the Reagan library conference, and which I

could prove had nothing to do with me. And she had her own emotional

distress, her tears, her insistence that she didn’t read the syllabus or understand

what it implied, as well as her perception of Ronald Reagan’s values as

intolerably homophobic. She had proven herself inaccurate when she tried to

summarize what presenters like Alana Newman and Jennifer Lahl actually said,

but her evidence was what Faya Bugworm heard in her head, not what Newman or

Lahl intended to say or did say.

Conservatives like to say sometimes that liberals don’t like facts; this is a

case where it’s crystal-clear. Against all the documentation I had, Faya had her

own various flavors of unreason. The university attorney, Susan Hua, was

indicating that she was leaning toward Faya’s side. This was the status of the

case by June 17, 2015, when I dropped off, in compliance with Susan Hua’s
request, “any and all documents” to defend myself against charges that nobody

had summarized, from a complaint, filed over 100 days late, which I was not

allowed to see. And all of this was being done under California State University’s

Title IX umbrella, which was supposed to deal with female sports teams and

sexual assault, not (I presume) purple brochures that students find lying around

somewhere at academic events they choose to attend.

Rather than close up the investigation and send everyone home for the

summer, Susan Hua wrote back, saying that she disagreed with my summary of

Faya’s charges against me—which I had to summarize, so I could contextualize

the documents that Susan Hua told me I had to produce within seven days. There

would seem to be an easy solution here—show me the complaint! That way, I

wouldn’t have to summarize the charges from memory and then write them

down myself. But instead, Susan Hua sent a nasty email: as a result of my

summary, I would have to report to more meetings, this time with a witness

appointed by Hua to make sure I didn’t misrepresent what she would say. Soon,

too, as a result of what she called the significant variance between her memory of

the meeting and mine, she invoked her right to extend the investigation another

thirty working days, to its maximum limit of September 18, 2015.

Now it was late June. A new provost was transitioning, everyone

including the union was gone for the summer, and I didn’t have money to keep

bringing in attorneys for more and more billable hours. She was giving me no

firm date for filing the investigative report and still no summary of the charges

against me. While the first email to me stated that I was charged with

discrimination, now there were references to harassment and retaliation.

 By this point I started reaching out wherever I could, in search of anyone

who could help. My attorney was very good but she didn’t have any experience

in higher education, so people who worked in academic freedom law referred

me to FIRE. After weeks of interviews and investigations, FIRE sent a 27-page

memo to the president of Northridge, the provost, my dean, and Susan Hua.

Everything about the investigation, FIRE explained, was wildly unconstitutional

and conflicted with both established law and the general guidelines of the

Executive Order being cited by the university against me. Even Title IX, with all

its horrendous overreach, could in no way be stretched and parsed to justify the

pursuit of Faya Bugworm’s complaint.

On August 17, Gale Baker, the general counsel of CSU, replied directly to

FIRE with a note stating that the university had no choice but to investigate the

complaint. Then, not a word from the chancellor’s office. Susan Hua set a series

of deadlines after which I was promised an investigation report. The deadlines

passed and nothing materialized. Eventually nobody was responding to the

attorney’s emails asking for a status update. Finally, in the end, Susan Hua was

not responding to me either. I received an email from someone new, supposedly

just hired, who at last revealed one detail to me: May 12, 2015, was the date of the

“intake interview,” so the absolutely last legally defensible date for submission

of their findings was September 18, 2015. Midnight passed on that date, and I

received no word—by campus mail, domestic mail, email, or phone.

And I was going back into the morass, when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I

turned and looked again upon the rock, and upon the characters;—and the characters

were DESOLATION.
 Edgar Allan Poe, “Silence-A Fable”

At the now infamous conference of October 3, 2014, one hundred and ten of my

students built 83 stunning exhibits. There were two pavilions—one honoring

American writers, and the other honoring Greek and Roman mythology. An

exhibit on the mother/daughter relationship in the Persephone myth won the

“Best Exhibit” vote. There were exhibits on African American history, the role of

motherhood in arguing against slavery, father/son relationships in Walt

Whitman’s poetry, Anne Bradstreet’s ode to childbirth, Hawthorne’s conflicted

feelings on legacy and heritage, and so many powerful myths that gave us the

lasting archetypes of father, mother, son, and daughter: Daedalus, Oedipus,

Medea, Creusa, and dozens more. And of course, there was a lot of Poe: the

orphan, the abandoned child, mourning dead mother figures and warring with

father figures.

The event was more than a simple tribute, however. It was real

scholarship: a massive, trans-historic examination of what parent-child bonds

have meant, and what we mean when we say “father,” “mother,” “son,” and

“daughter.” Alana Newman lectured about sperm banking, Jennifer Lahl about

surrogacy, Jennifer Roback Morse about divorce, and Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy

and Cathi Swett about adoption. I felt moved and overwhelmed by the beauty

and enormity of human experience as I walked the gallery and photographed the

work. This was the profundity that I’d found wanting in so many discussions of

marriage and parenting. We are talking about the very nature of humanity when

we discuss family policy, and yet we—postmodern citizens of the twenty-first

century—are so small, even petty, from our arrogant vantage point of statistics
and peer-reviewed studies, thinking we can reinvent what humanity means,

imagining that we can tell children to transform their parental love to less

intuitive love for people unrelated to them, without any friction or

complications.

Looking back at the year of this terrible ordeal, I understand why Faya

Bugworm, Susan Hua, and all the rest of the feminist-LGBT radicals responded

with such undue violence to my conference. “Bonds that Matter” showed exactly

what these postmodern movements hoped to hide: the bonds that matter, the

truth steeped in thousands of years of culture that we will never be able to excise

from our being. They have “won” the debate on same-sex marriage because they

never had to fight against Bonds that Matter: they fought against flimsy statistics,

puerile talking-points, facile memes, and Facebook posts. They could have never

won against the collective voice of humanity.

So they sought, through me, to kill the transcendentals: they had to

eradicate beauty, truth, and the good. Or at least, they tried. And that is what

happened here; nothing else.