"I’m sad to report that three or four decades ago, many gay-assertive people (myself included) looked at some of those who identified as bisexual with suspicion..."

"... if not scorn. It wasn’t because we didn’t believe that many were telling the truth about their experience. It was because so many people that I, for one, knew actually identified as gay had been exploiting the 'bi' term as a sexual caveat to avoid the risks of coming out completely. Or, at the very least, they were taking the term on loan as a baby step in that direction.... When celebrities whom everyone knew to be gay—but who hadn’t affirmed it in the media—were asked about such things, they tended to deliver exactly the kinds of statements we hear from some LGBTQ people today. They’d say, 'I don’t want to be labeled,' or 'I’m just sexual,' or 'I’m open.' Today, those descriptions signal broad-mindedness. Back then, they felt like a betrayal, a hedging that pushed the movement back a step, making those of us who had come out feel more isolated and vulnerable at a time when being out had far greater consequence.... If nearly any progressively minded person can find some way to identify as queer, what, exactly, does the term even mean? When I hear about fluidity in that context, it sounds like something made to wash away gay history—my history—drowning it in inclusiveness to broaden its clout."

From "Categorically Gay/For queer people who grew up in an era when rigid identities were essential, today’s fluidity can feel like their history is washing out with the tide" by Jim Farber (in Slate).

Drowning it in inclusiveness to broaden its clout — an interesting phrase. The metaphor is a little overambitious. You've got the water of "fluidity" and it's "washing away" and "drowning," but it's also designed to have "clout." A "clout" is something done with a fist or a hard object. "Fluidity" doesn't deliver "clout."

I'm just talking about whether the metaphor is good, not saying I can't puzzle out the meaning. Bear with me a little longer.

In the phrase, what's getting washed away and drowned is gay history, but the clout has a different target. The clout is to — what? — all the forces of heteronormativity (or something like that). There's too much going on there.

But I can see what he means. Broadening is weakening. Inclusiveness is diluting.

"One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process."

Writes Justice Ginsburg for the majority this morning in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, a racial gerrymandering case that the court below decided against the state of Virginia.

The majority consists of the refreshing assemblage of Ginsburg, Thomas, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Gorsuch. Alito writes a dissenting opinion joined by Roberts, Breyer, and Kavanaugh.

After the 3-judge district court decided the case against the Virginia State Board of Elections, the state Attorney General said that the state would not appeal. (The appeal would be directly to the Supreme Court under the jurisdiction statute.) "Virginia has thus chosen to speak as a sovereign entity with a single voice," and the House of Delegates had no standing to continue the litigation. That's the majority's take.

The dissent stresses the 3-part "injury-in-fact" test for standing, finds that the House has the needed "concrete and particularized injury," and declares it "revealing that the Court never asserts that the effect of the court-ordered plan at issue would not cause the House 'concrete' harm." You can articulate an injury the House faces, and Alito does:

The Supreme Court rules that the cable company's public access channel is not a state actor.

Here's Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, released moments ago. It's 5-4, written by Justice Kavanaugh, and the split is where you'll guess without looking.

From SCOTUSblog:

This was a case in which the public-access channel was sued after it suspended two people who produced a film that was critical of the channel from access to the channel's facilities and services.

Justice Kavanaugh emphasizes that the First Amendment's prohibitions apply only to state (governmental) actors and concludes that the threshold requirement of state action is missing here.

"lunch (n.) 'mid-day repast, small meal between breakfast and dinner,' 1786, a shortened form of luncheon...

"... which is of uncertain origin; it appears to be identical with an older word meaning 'thick piece, hunk' (1570s), which perhaps evolved from lump (n.) [OED]. There also was a contemporary nuncheon 'light mid-day meal,' from noon + Middle English schench 'drink.' Old English had nonmete 'afternoon meal,' literally 'noon-meat.'... As late as 1817 the only definition of lunch (n.) in Webster's is 'a large piece of food,' but this is now obsolete or provincial."

From Etymology Online, which I'm reading after having a conversation based on the discussion in the previous post of the Trump quote "I’m not a breakfast guy at all, fortunately. I like the lunches but the dinners is what I really like."

So the original use of "lunch" is like this (from the OED):

1600 R. Surflet tr. C. Estienne & J. Liébault Maison Rustique vii. xxv. 850 He shall take breade and cut it into little lunches [Fr. loppins] into a pan with cheese.

And the oldest in-print use of "lunch" to mean the meal is:

1829 H. D. Best Personal & Lit. Mem. 307 The word lunch is adopted in that ‘glass of fashion’, Almacks, and luncheon is avoided as unsuitable to the polished society there exhibited.

Somehow, people decided it was low class to say "luncheon."  In the 1600s, people were saying "luncheon" to refer to a meal, and it was originally a snack between breakfast and the midday meal (called "dinner"):

a1652 R. Brome Madd Couple Well Matcht v. i, in Wks. (1873) I. 92 Noonings, and intermealiary Lunchings.

4 words, and 3 of them are new to me: l. noonings, 2. intermealiary, 3. lunchings.

"Nooning" (as a synonym for "lunch") appears in Mark Twain's "Tramp Abroad" (1880): "A German gentleman and his two young lady daughters had been taking their nooning at the inn."

Trump talks about FDR's wheelchair ramp and Obama's preference in paintings.

There are things in the unedited transcripts of Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos that were not used in the prime-time ABC show that aired last night.

I've noticed a few (and I've speculated about why these things were cut when there was so much repetition of Stephanopoulos badgering Trump about the use of the word "collusion"). There's this, which perhaps was cut because it conflicts with the narrative that Trump only cares about Trump. The 2 men are walking through the colonnade at the White House:

TRUMP: It’s an incredible part of the White House, it is and you see it all of your life and you know you see president's walking back and forth with others. This is an incredible place. And you have a ramp over there, and the ramp you can see was put in and it actually doesn’t qualify under… because it’s supposed to be more gradual--

STEPHANOPOULOS: For ADA?

TRUMP: But that was put in for FDR. He didn’t want anybody lifting him with the wheelchair. So you have ramps throughout certain areas of the White House. But, uh this one over here was, uh, it’s pretty tough to walk down it, actually. I’m always a little bit careful walking down that ramp, it’s steep.

The TV version cut all of the discussion of the ramp.

And, later, in the Oval Office:

STEPHANOPOULOS: What’s the biggest personal touch you’ve put on the office?

TRUMP: I put a lot of them. The flags. You didn’t have flags to any great degree. You had an American flag, but for the most part you didn’t have flags. Uh, it’s quite a bit different than President Obama. Uh he had some fairly modern paintings, a couple. We didn’t want that. We brought it back to Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, George Washington, very famous picture of George Washington and I like that.

The part about the flags was left in, but not the discussion of the paintings.

I liked the personal things, the things devoid of politics. I especially liked this (spoken as he walks to his office in the morning):

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you a big breakfast guy?

TRUMP: Uh I’m not a breakfast guy at all, fortunately. I like the lunches but the dinners is what I really like.

He likes dinners. How about you? Are dinners your big meal? Do you end big or are you a big breakfast person? Put the meals of the day in the order that you're big on them....

Did Trump say that Obama was behind a group of people who were trying to steal the election using the fake dossier?

From the unedited transcripts of Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos (which aired in edited form on ABC last night). I'll boldface the crucial language:

TRUMP: [T]hey could not get the fake dossier printed prior to the election... But had that been printed before the election, that could have changed the whole election. And that's what they wanted to do: steal. And Comey and all these lowlives, they wanted to have that fake dossier, which was all phony stuff. They wanted it to go out before the election, George. And you know what? Had that gone out before the election, I-- I don't think I could've-- I don't think I would've had enough time to defend myself--

STEPHANOPOULOS: You clearly believe there was-- a group of people working against you. Do you think President Obama was behind it?

TRUMP: I would say that he certainly must have known about it because it went very high up in the chain. But you're going to find that out. I'm not going to make-- that statement quite yet. But I would say that President Obama had to know about it....

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you believe that President Obama spied on your campaign--

TRUMP: I don't know. But hopefully we're going to find out.

He ends with that "I don't know," but I think he revealed that he did know. Why would he say "I'm not going to make that statement quite yet" if he didn't already have a plan to make the statement in the future? To say "you're going to find that out" suggests that he has already found out.

Notice that Stephanopoulos asks his question 2 ways and gets different answers. When asked whether Obama was "behind" what was "a group of people working against" him, Trump says he's not ready to talk about that "quite yet," while indicating, I believe, that he himself already know. The follow up question has Obama directly involved in a specific activity — Did Obama spy? As to that, Trump says he doesn't know but hopes to find out.

At the Sunday Night Café...

... you're on your own.

"In 2016, the people on the campaign like to say that they were building the airplane while it was in flight. This time, he will have a campaign that is befitting of an incumbent president of the United States."

Said Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for the 2020 Trump campaign, quoted in "Trump campaign makes a radical break from 2016/The president’s 2020 campaign is flipping the script from its ham-fisted approach the first time Trump sought elected office" (Politico).

Indeed, one official involved in Trump’s first presidential campaign likened the experience to a slow-motion plane crash: “We were strapped in on a sloppily assembled machine that was gradually spiraling out of control.”

"Death will come soon to hush us along/Sweeter than honey and bitter as gall..."

Goodbye to Franco Zeffirelli, hushed along at age 96.

Here's the NYT obituary, "Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With Taste for Excess, Dies at 96."

His interest in Shakespeare was awakened by an older British woman, Mary O’Neill, who tutored him in English as a child and imbued him with ethical values that foiled the Fascist curriculum served up at school.

“She kept injecting in me the cult of freedom of democracy that remained in my DNA for the rest of my life,” Mr. Zeffirelli told Opera News....

He went on to study architecture at the University of Florence, until the onset of World War II interrupted his education. He joined Communist partisan forces, first fighting Mussolini’s Fascists and then the occupying Nazis. Captured by the Fascists, he was saved from the firing squad when his interrogator miraculously turned out to be a half brother whom he had never known. The half brother arranged his release....

In the late 1940s, the director Luchino Visconti spotted Mr. Zeffirelli, blond and blue-eyed, working as a stagehand in Florence.... A smitten Mr. Visconti gave him his big break in 1949, making him his personal assistant and set designer .... The two became romantically involved and lived together for three years. In his autobiography, published in 2006, Mr. Zeffirelli wrote that he considered himself “homosexual,” disliking the term “gay” as inelegant....

"Romeo and Juliet" is the 1968 movie in my "imaginary film project." What an impact that had on me when I was 17! My high school "outing club" "arts society" took the bus into Manhattan to see it.

The lyrics quoted in the post title are from the song "What Is a Youth" that you hear in the beautiful film clip embedded above. The words do not appear in the text of "Romeo and Juliet." The song lyrics were gathered (by Eugene Walter) "from songs in other Shakespearean plays, particularly Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice." The composer is the great Nino Rota.

On Friday, I complained that the NYT published only "thin, undigested AP material" on the Oberlin punitive damages verdict.

Here.

But later that day, the Times published a full-scale article — "Oberlin Helped Students Defame a Bakery, a Jury Says. The Punishment: $33 Million" by Anemona Hartocollis — and it's a little obscure but, reading it carefully, I understood Oberlin's argument for the first time. I had thought that Oberlin just got the facts wrong when it accused the bakery of racism. I now see that the argument is that even if the bakery stopped blatant shoplifters, the accusation of racism stands.

Let me show you how this argument emerges from the text:

Gibson’s bakery, a local establishment known for its whole wheat doughnuts and chocolate-covered grapes, became the target of a boycott by students who accused it of racially profiling a black student.... Oberlin maintained that college officials had gotten involved only to keep the peace, and that it was supporting its students, not their claims that Gibson’s was racist. But the jury found that Oberlin had clearly chosen sides without first examining the facts....

Oberlin tried to distance itself from the protesters in court papers, saying it should not be held responsible for their actions. It blamed the store for bringing its problems on itself.

“Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests,” the college said. “The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.”

Got that? It's irrelevant that the suspected shoplifters were real shoplifters. What the students called racist was the "chase-and-detain policy."

The store clerk seems to have suspected shoplifting not because of the person's race but because he could see 2 wine bottles hidden under his coat, but he "chased the student out onto the street and tackled him," and that's what's racist (in this view). If the chase-and-detain approach is racist, even when the shopkeeper is right about the theft, then it's not false to accuse the shopkeeper of racism.

Allyn Gibson, the 32-year-old store clerk, was trained in martial arts, according to Oberlin’s court papers, and his decision to chase down and tackle a student “beyond the borders of their store and into full public view of their customer base” opened him and the store up to public criticism....

Neither the college nor the dean ever said or wrote anything defamatory about the plaintiffs, the college said. In fact, it added, there was a split in opinion within the college community as to whether the Gibsons were racist or not, and it was their constitutional right to express their opinions on that score....

“Part of the narrative that has been built up is that Oberlin’s administration weaponized students against Gibson’s out of malice,” [Kameron Dunbar, who just graduated from Oberlin]. “I find that concept to be pretty insulting. We’re autonomous.”

The larger question — barely gestured at in the article — is what is racism? It may be a good idea to consider each human individual "autonomous," but the school is part of the culture that shapes the concept of racism, and racism can be understood broadly, perhaps broadly enough to include a chase-and-detain policy, broadly enough to make the policy racist without regard to guilt or innocence.

When can you express the opinion that someone is racist? The term is thrown around a lot these days. Is it defamation to use "racist" in the broad sense? There are a lot of people these days who think anyone who supports Trump is a racist. If some shop loses business because people know the owner voted for Trump and that's their idea of racism and they go around telling each other not to shop in the store because it's owned by a racist, can the shop owner sue them all and win damages?

How does free speech work if we can't call each other racist for any damned thing we choose to imagine is racist?

"So while in the past it might have been applauded and seen as almost an honor to have... your culture absorbed by some rarefied French fashion house..."

"... I think today people - you know, they don't see that as an honor. They see that as insult. They see it as, how dare you? Like, I own this. You don't."

Said Robin Givhan, quoted in "Mexico Calls Out Carolina Herrera For Appropriating Indigenous Groups' Patterns" (NPR).

No pictures there. (It's "radio.") Here are some pictures of the offending clothes at The Daily Beast. The fabrics will look very familiar. Herrera isn't the first designer to appropriate them. It's more like she's reappropriating the stuff of decades of hippiewear.

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LATIN HOLIDAY Sunrise in Tulum The light of Lima Strolls in Mexico City The waves of José Ignacio Dancing in Buenos Aires The colors of Cartagena The Carolina Herrera Resort 2020 collection takes on the playful and colorful mood of a Latin holiday. Inspired by the House spirit of alegria de vivir that is synonymous with the resort season, this collection is about visceral reactions of delight—eclectic patterns, unexpected silhouettes, pulsating energy. This is my favorite collection that I have ever been a part of and I am so grateful to my amazing design team and the brilliant patternmakers and seamstresses who tirelessly brought it to life. And an especially huge thank you to the genius that is @tabithasimmons. These are just a few of the gorgeous images by @dariocatellani. Go to vogue.com to see the rest ❤️💙💚🧡💛

A post shared by Ｗ Ｅ Ｓ Ｇ Ｏ Ｒ Ｄ Ｏ Ｎ (@wesgordon) on Jun 6, 2019 at 8:35pm PDT

Vanessa Friedman at the NYT validates cultural appropriation (but not completely):