{"id":13,"date":"2006-03-07T15:24:48","date_gmt":"2006-03-07T23:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/2006\/03\/07\/is-this-news-is-it-the-right-news\/"},"modified":"2006-03-07T15:24:48","modified_gmt":"2006-03-07T23:24:48","slug":"is-this-news-is-it-the-right-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"Is this news? Is it the right news?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rock on and congratulations to Jennifer Jones, the lesbian at Maryland&#8217;s Hood College that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2006\/US\/03\/07\/lesbian.homecoming.ap\/index.html\">was voted in as Homecoming King<\/a>. But I have to take note that CNN thought this was newsworthy. I mean, this isn&#8217;t the first case of a GLBT student running for Prom\/Homecoming\/whatever Court on a cross-gender ballot. She&#8217;s probably not the first GLBT person to win, either. It&#8217;s very cool, but&#8230; is it news?<\/p>\n<p>At first, it seems like it is; if Hood is any indication, liberal arts students support GLBT efforts to stake out a place for themselves in the straight world. This projects into a future where we can imagine more and more people being a-ok for us queer folk. That&#8217;s cool. It&#8217;s a sociological indicator of where the nation is headed, yeah? Right?<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Sort of? What I found more interesting was the stats they gave: Jones won 64 out of 169 votes for Homecoming King. That&#8217;s not terribly overwhelming as a win. And from Hood&#8217;s website, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hood.edu\/welcome_to_hood\/index.cfm?pid=_glance.htm\">there were 2,121 students enrolled at Hood in the fall of 2005<\/a>.  169  total votes out of a student body of 2,121; that&#8217;s about 8% voter turnout for the King ballot. The real news here is that <em>liberal arts students don&#8217;t give a fuck about Homecoming.<\/em> And when you crunch a couple other numbers, it says <em>3% of students actively wanted a lesbian Homecoming King.<\/em> That&#8217;s not much of a reason to celebrate.<\/p>\n<p>If we want news to make us feel good about the future of GLBTs in this country, how about something more concrete? I want to see headlines like <strong>Gay man totally beats the shit out of his would-be gay-basher<\/strong>, or <strong>Rad lesbian does her thing in rural Alabama<\/strong>, or <strong>She&#8217;s brilliant, she&#8217;s post-op, she&#8217;s the Senator.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jones deserves a better headline. <strong>She&#8217;s the homecoming king<\/strong> isn&#8217;t cool. A better one would be <strong>Young lesbian figures out early on how to game the system, is prepared for a richer life because of it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>(<a href=\"http:\/\/jaschu.wordpress.com\/2006\/03\/07\/is-this-news-is-it-the-right-news\/\">Cross-posted<\/a> since it fit in both places.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rock on and congratulations to Jennifer Jones, the lesbian at Maryland&#8217;s Hood College that was voted in as Homecoming King. But I have to take note that CNN thought this was newsworthy. I mean, this isn&#8217;t the first case of a GLBT student running for Prom\/Homecoming\/whatever Court on a cross-gender ballot. She&#8217;s probably not the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,31,32,40,51,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cnn","category-homecoming","category-hood-college","category-lesbian","category-news","category-queer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaschu.7au.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}