The trailer sat in an RV park fifty minutes from town. Between 1973 and 1990, a woman and her female partner spent nearly every weekend there with the woman's youngest son. The two women kept separate houses during the week. The weekends belonged to the trailer. The boy grew up understanding that the arrangement was private, that the neighbors back in town did not know, and that whatever made his home different from other homes was a thing you did not explain.
The boy was Robert Oscar Lopez (b. 1971). He would grow up to attend Yale, earn a doctorate in English, publish a scholarly monograph on American literature and the classics, win tenure at a California state university, and then, in August 2012, publish a short autobiographical essay that ended his conventional academic career and made him one of the most contested minor figures in the American culture war. By 2019 he had lost two faculty positions, one at a secular public university that considered him a bigot and one at a Southern Baptist seminary that considered him a problem. The two institutions agreed on almost nothing except that they could not keep him.
What happens to a person whose testimony fits no coalition's needs. The gay rights movement did not want a bisexual son of lesbian mothers who described his childhood as a deprivation. The conservative movement wanted his testimony but grew uneasy with the man attached to it. The universities wanted neither. Lopez kept talking anyway, at escalating volume and escalating cost.
Lopez is of Puerto Rican descent and has described himself as a descendant of African slaves. His mother, whom later reporting described as bisexual, raised him with her female partner from roughly his second year of life. His father was absent from his daily childhood; his older siblings had known the household before the separation, and Lopez alone experienced childhood without the father present. After the partner's own children left for college, she moved into the family home in town. Lopez lived with both women for a short period before his mother died at fifty-three. He was nineteen.
His account of those years, written decades later, resists the standard atrocity narrative. He loved his mother. He described her as beloved. He got excellent grades. Adults saw a high-functioning child and no cause for concern. His complaint concerned something harder to index: the social knowledge children absorb by watching men and women deal with each other across a kitchen table. Courtship, quarrel, division of labor, the body language of sexual difference. Children of divorce, he argued, still saw male and female models somewhere. He saw none he could use. He wrote that he had few recognizable social cues to offer potential friends of either sex, that he came across as both nervous and blunt, and that he later seemed strange even to gay and bisexual adults who had little patience for someone like him.
The secrecy compounded the strangeness. Because the household was hidden, hostile neighbors could not explain his sense of difference, and neither could he. He was a social outcast without a visible cause.
Two things follow from this testimony. First, at least one child of a same-sex household experienced it as a lasting loss, felt forbidden to say so, and grew into an adult with standing to say it. Second, one man's childhood cannot establish how common that experience is or which element of the household produced which later difficulty. The absent father, the dead mother, the secrecy required by the 1970s and 1980s, and Lopez's own adult choices all sit in the causal chain, and no autobiography can separate them. At his best, Lopez insisted on the first point against a political culture that denied it. At his worst, he treated his life as sufficient evidence for claims about millions of households he had never seen.
He got out through school. Yale, class of 1993, a bachelor's degree in political science. Then graduate work at the State University of New York at Buffalo: a doctorate in English and a master's in classics, with training in Latin, Greek, and the American literary canon. Along the way he served in the Army, an experience he later credited with teaching him that courage means acting despite fear. In his twenties he moved through what he called the gay underworld, the world of Bronx drag queens and underground leather, at what he described as great personal cost. Around 1996 he shopped a piece of autobiographical fiction about growing up with two lesbian mothers. A prominent gay writer read it and told him the story was “radioactive.” The Defense of Marriage Act was moving through Congress that year, and a story confirming conservative warnings about gay parenting could do damage in the wrong hands. Lopez put the story away. It stayed away for sixteen years.
The academic career proceeded on schedule. He taught at Rutgers-Camden in the mid-2000s. A 2005 essay in a social theory journal, written well before any national controversy, already worked his lifelong theme: the difficulty of holding Christian belief and brown skin inside an academy that assumed minority status implied left politics. In 2008 he joined the English department at California State University, Northridge, a commuter campus of forty thousand in the San Fernando Valley. He taught American literature, ethnic literature, and classical mythology. Tenure came in 2013.
His personal life had already turned. He married the literary scholar Mijeong Park in 2001; they have two children. Late in his twenties, during a period of illness and upheaval, he reconciled with his father, and the recovered relationship fed his growing conviction that biological parenthood is neither interchangeable nor incidental. Around 2008 he was baptized in a Chinese Baptist church and began describing himself as born-again. He continued to acknowledge attraction to men. What he rejected was the claim that the attraction constituted an identity. This put him at odds with progressives, with the ex-gay movement's cruder versions, and eventually with celibate gay Christians of the Revoice type, who retain “gay” as a descriptive identity while affirming traditional sexual ethics. Lopez objected to the identity category. He held that a Christian should seek transformation, and that organizing a life around a sexual-attraction label preserved an allegiance the faith called him to leave. Supporters heard a doctrine of hope. Critics heard a man legislating his own biography for everyone else.
In 2011, University Press of America published The Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman, the culmination of a decade of scholarship. The book reads differently now than it did then, because it shows what Lopez might have become.
The argument runs through five American writers: Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), William Wells Brown (c. 1814-1884), and Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Each carried on a conversation with Greek and Roman antiquity, and each occupied a social position that modern criticism assigns automatically to the left: an enslaved African poet, an escaped slave turned novelist, a poet of male desire. Lopez argued the assignment fails. Wheatley wrote as an evangelical Christian in dialogue with Horace and built her poetry on something other than grievance. Brown performed multiple versions of Cato. Whitman transformed erotic attachment between men into comradeship and national loyalty rather than into a proto-identity. Beyond left and right, Lopez proposed four poles: the Left, the conformist Burkeans, the anarchist-nihilist-libertarians, and the colorful conservatives, his name for writers whose racial mixture, unconventional desire, or marginality coexisted with patriotism, restraint, and continuity with the ancients. He contended that the tensions of the 1850s never resolved and that Americans still live inside the literary framework of the nineteenth century.
The project had a political point beneath the scholarship. Conservatism possessed a lineage of statesmen, economists, and theologians but had ceded poetry and fiction, and with them nearly every writer marked by race or sexual irregularity, to the academic left. Lopez wanted a right roomy enough that people with complicated biographies did not have to surrender their experience as an entry fee. The book was, among other things, a home he was building for himself. Whether American conservatism would occupy it was another question.
On July 17, 2012, the sociologist Mark Regnerus (b. 1971) sent Lopez an email. Regnerus had just published a study of adult children of parents who had same-sex relationships, and the study had detonated: its unfavorable findings drew a campaign of methodological criticism, much of it deserved on sampling grounds, and an ethics complaint at his university. Regnerus had noticed a comment Lopez left on a website and wrote to thank him. Lopez later said that in forty-one years, this was the first time anyone had asked him to speak honestly about the gay threads of his own life.
Three weeks later, on August 6, 2012, Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, published “Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children's View.” The essay ran about seventeen hundred words. It told the story of the trailer, the two women, the missing father, the social confusion, and it defended Regnerus on a single narrow ground: his study had at least asked grown children rather than treating them as extensions of the adults who raised them.
The timing gave the essay its force. The essay appeared during the decisive phase of the same-sex marriage campaign, when the movement's strongest exhibit was the happy child of gay parents. Lopez reversed the exhibit. He argued that such children faced a structural silencing: reporting pain looked like betrayal of parents they loved and handed ammunition to people they had no wish to arm. Positive testimony got amplified as authentic. Negative testimony got explained away as bigotry, religious damage, or personal pathology. He was living proof that a man could love his lesbian mother and still believe her household had cost him something.
The response validated the thesis with a speed he could not have engineered. GLAAD added him to its Commentator Accountability Project, a database profiling opponents of the movement. Human Rights Campaign materials treated him as an extremist. Invitations dried up; he began speaking abroad, in France and elsewhere, more often than at American universities. Lopez pointed out the recursion: an essay about the silencing of inconvenient children was answered with an organized effort to silence its author. His critics answered that the profiles quoted his own published words with links, and that cataloguing a man's statements is criticism, the thing he claimed to want. Both descriptions were accurate, which is why the episode persuaded no one of anything they did not already believe.
The scholarly objection was more durable. Mainstream professional bodies held then, and hold now, that children's outcomes track parenting quality and stability more than parental orientation, and that the Regnerus study largely measured family instability rather than same-sex parenting. One man's account, however honest, cannot adjudicate averages. Lopez's reply had a logic worth stating in full: averages cannot adjudicate individuals either. A finding of no average harm does not license telling a grieving adult that his grief is false consciousness. Social science asks what generally happens. Lopez asked whether a man is permitted to describe his own childhood. The two questions passed each other for a decade, each side answering the one the other had not asked.
What followed was a pivot from witness to movement. Lopez founded the International Children’s Rights Institute in 2014 and ran a blog called English Manif, named for La Manif pour Tous, the French mass movement against same-sex marriage whose demonstrations had filled Paris in 2013 and whose intellectual style, arguing from the child's rights rather than from Scripture, matched what Lopez wanted for America. He testified against same-sex marriage in Minnesota. He joined amicus briefs in Bostic v. Schaefer and then in Obergefell v. Hodges, presenting the Supreme Court with testimony from adult children of gay parents who dissented from the arrangements that produced them.
His framework linked practices usually debated separately: same-sex parenting, anonymous sperm and egg donation, commercial surrogacy, and birth certificates that record legal fictions in place of biological facts. In each, he saw adults using law and technology to sever a child from one or both biological parents and calling the severance a right. His three principles, repeated on any platform that would have him: every child has the right to be born free rather than bought or sold, the right to a mother and a father, and the right to know his origins. The formulation earned him allies beyond the church, including some feminists opposed to surrogacy and donor-conceived adults with no religion at all.
In 2015 he and Rivka Edelman edited Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties in the War for Family “Equality”, followed by Jephthah’s Children. The title carried the argument. In Judges, Jephthah vows that if God grants him victory he will sacrifice whatever first comes out of his door, and what comes out is his daughter. Adults make the vows. Children pay them. The anthologies collected testimony from same-sex households, donor conception, surrogacy, and adoption, including accounts of abuse. They preserved voices that had no other outlet, and they had the limits of any testimonial collection: contributors selected because they suffered can establish that suffering exists, and nothing about its frequency.
By this period his rhetoric was escalating past the children's-rights frame. He wrote and spoke with increasing frequency about pederasty, predation, and concealment within gay culture, claims that moved him outside the respectable social conservatism of the think tanks and toward the movement's hard edge. The escalation cost him twice. It handed critics grounds to dismiss the defensible core of his argument, and it began to unsettle allies who had signed up for the child's right to a father and found themselves adjacent to something harsher.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library sits on a hilltop in Simi Valley, chaparral falling away on every side, a retired Air Force One parked under glass in its pavilion. In October 2014, Lopez held a conference there called Bonds That Matter. Five women spoke, conservatives and feminists among them, on divorce, adoption, surrogacy, and children's rights. Students in four of Lopez's CSUN courses, in American literature and classical mythology, had been offered a choice: answer ten questions on the course readings, or prepare a presentation connected to the conference. About 110 of his 160 students chose the conference.
What happened next depends on whose account you read, and the accounts deserve to sit side by side.
A student complainant told university investigators that Lopez had described the event as a women's and children's rights conference without disclosing the speakers' orientation, and that the written alternative was heavy enough to make attendance feel compulsory. Students across different sections described the pressure similarly. Lopez said he had deliberately designed the program to avoid gay marriage and anything students might read as anti-gay, that he warned attendees the event would discuss adoption, and that he was surprised so many students chose the trip. The provost, Yi Li, eventually issued the letter that settled the official record: insufficient evidence that Lopez discriminated against students on the basis of sex or orientation; sufficient evidence that he attempted to intimidate students or discourage them from complaining, including urging a student to resolve matters with him before invoking formal procedures and linking a student's conduct to an award recommendation. The letter also found the conference sufficiently related to his courses to draw some protection from academic freedom policy.
The finding satisfied nobody, which suggests it got something right. Lopez was not found guilty of holding his views; he was found to have handled complaining students badly, which he denied, attributing the accusations to coordination by activists. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education raised the academic freedom alarm, and some scholars who found his politics repellent still objected to a public university investigating a tenured professor over an optional assignment. A petition by Jennifer Roback Morse (b. 1953) and the Ruth Institute cast him as a polyglot man of color hounded for ideology. The campus left cast the conference as indoctrination on the taxpayer's dime. Between the two portraits sat a duller institutional truth: a professor had run his activism through his course syllabi at a public university, students had noticed, and the machinery that engaged had no setting for handling it well.
Lopez resigned from CSUN in June 2016. He said years of petitions, investigations, and public attacks had made it impossible to remain and stay faithful to his convictions. He gave up tenure to do it, which even his enemies should register: tenure at a California state university is a lifetime annuity, and he walked away from it at forty-five with two children at home.
He landed at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, appointed professor of humanities in Scarborough College, the seminary's undergraduate program, effective August 2016. The hire made sense to everyone at the time. Southwestern's president, Paige Patterson (b. 1942), was an architect of the conservative resurgence that had taken over the Southern Baptist Convention a generation earlier, and he collected trophy conversions and combative talent. Lopez was both. The seminary confessed everything Lopez believed about marriage. He would teach literature among people who did not consider his convictions a scandal. He had found, it appeared, the confessional refuge the secular academy denied him.
The refuge lasted three years and collapsed from the inside. In May 2018, trustees removed Patterson over his handling of abuse and domestic-violence counseling, a firing that split the convention. Adam Greenway (b. 1978) arrived as president in February 2019 and restructured, cutting faculty in waves; Lopez wrote that a new president had fired twenty-six professors in twenty-four hours and that the survivors understood themselves to be replaceable. Meanwhile Lopez did what Lopez does. He submitted resolutions to the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meetings in 2018 and 2019, on overcoming homosexuality and on protecting whistleblowers; neither escaped committee. He preached that Christ could change homosexuals. He kept writing about same-sex abuse and about evangelical institutions he saw retreating into safe statements. He clashed with the convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He had three meetings with the provost, Randy Stinson, and four with his dean, and by his own account was ordered in September 2019 to stop discussing homosexuality and sex abuse while employed there. He refused, saying the demand would force him to disobey God.
On November 29, 2019, the day after Thanksgiving, Lopez received written notice that his position was eliminated. He went public on December 3. The seminary answered the next day with a statement remarkable for a personnel matter. Stinson wrote that no faculty member had been or would be told he could not discuss homosexuality, that the position was cut for changing program needs, and that the decision was undergirded by Lopez's failure to comply with administrative policies, regular complaints from students and colleagues, and, at the end, his refusal to attend meetings with supervisors. The seminary reaffirmed its doctrine against homosexual conduct in the same breath it denied firing a man for preaching against homosexual conduct.
The full record is sealed in personnel files, and the two stories cannot both be entirely true. What can be said is this. A conservative seminary under budget pressure and new management shed a non-tenured professor who generated conflict, and the professor's conflicts and his convictions were the same conflicts, so any account that separates “his views” from “his conduct” cleanly is describing a simpler man than Lopez. The arc closed with a symmetry no novelist would risk. He left a secular university because it could not tolerate his Christianity. He lost his place at a Christian seminary that shared his doctrine and could not tolerate him.
Since 2019, Lopez has worked outside institutions. He leads the Texas chapter of MassResistance, an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-LGBTQ hate group and that describes itself as a pro-family activist network. He spoke at its conferences in Killeen, Texas, held in a Black church whose pastor co-hosted; YouTube removed the video of one of his talks. In 2021, CPAC banned MassResistance from sponsoring a table, and Lopez toured conservative media to protest the exclusion, a small event that measured his distance from the movement's respectable center: he was now too hot for the people who had once been too hot for the universities. He wrote steadily for American Thinker on education, the Southern Baptist Convention, race, immigration, and national politics, with his archive running through August 2024, and published earlier polemics including Wackos, Thugs & Perverts: Clintonian Decadence in Academia (2017) and The New Normal: The Transgender Agenda. He podcasts and self-publishes. A 2020 essay in Inside Higher Ed distilled his late theme: victims of same-sex abuse fall between two silences, because LGBT organizations fear their testimony will stigmatize homosexuality and churches fear scandal and liability, so nobody's incentives favor hearing them. Critics read the essay as one more attempt to bind homosexuality to predation. Lopez read the criticism as one more demonstration of the thesis.
No public record through mid-2026 shows a return to a faculty post, and no second scholarly monograph followed the first. The scholar who wrote about Wheatley's Horace is, at fifty-five, a movement activist with a doctorate.
Four ideas organize his work, and stating them separately clarifies where the work holds and where it breaks.
The first idea is that modern politics converts adult desires into rights and hides the invoice, which is delivered to children. This links his positions on same-sex parenting, donor anonymity, surrogacy, and falsified birth records into one argument rather than four prejudices. Adults have money, courts, technology, and a vocabulary of equality. Children enter arrangements they never chose and are later asked to bless them. The argument does not depend on Scripture, which is why donor-conceived atheists and anti-surrogacy feminists have made versions of it. It is the strongest thing Lopez ever built.
The second idea is the refusal of identity conscription. Lopez would not accept that Puerto Rican ancestry assigned him progressive politics, that bisexual experience assigned him to the LGBT coalition, or that a lesbian household assigned him approval of lesbian households. The Colorful Conservative generalized the refusal into literary history. His life was the argument that experience does not dictate ideology, and the argument survives every criticism of him, because the criticisms mostly amount to demands that it should.
The third idea is that institutions filter testimony by political usefulness. His career supplied evidence: the gay writer who called his story radioactive in 1996, the advocacy databases, the provost's letter, the seminary's Friday-after-Thanksgiving envelope. The idea decayed into a solvent. Once every institutional objection reads as capture, no feedback can reach you, and Lopez stopped distinguishing institutions that rejected his beliefs from institutions that had tired of his methods. Southwestern shared his beliefs. Something else exhausted it, and his framework had no category for that possibility.
The fourth is the slide from witness to theory. “This happened to me” became “this is what such households do,” and then, past the edge of his evidence, claims about predation as a feature of a population. Each extension traded credibility for reach. The man whose whole standing rested on the right to testify about his own life spent it making claims about lives that were not his.
The assessment, then, resists both available verdicts. He was a scholar with an original project, and he is the author of some of provocative generalizations in the family-structure debate. He identified a cruelty, the requirement that children of political causes produce happy testimony, and he answered it by becoming a producer of unhappy testimony on an industrial scale. He sacrificed a tenured position, then a second career, then his standing with his own side, rather than modulate, and whether that sequence shows integrity or an inability to be governed depends on a judgment about him that the sealed files and the man's own contradictions do not permit anyone to make with confidence. What the record does show is a man who refused, at every station, to say the convenient thing, and paid the posted price each time, and kept walking.
Notes
The 2012 essay itself: Robert Oscar Lopez’s essay in Public Discourse (contains the trailer detail, the 1973-1990 dates, the mother’s death at 53, the “nervous and blunt” and “social outcast” language, and the Regnerus email date). His 1996 “radioactive” account is in his open letter published by Karen Ocamb: “Prof. Robert Oscar Lopez Explains Support for Regnerus Study”. His own narrative of the GLAAD/HRC campaign: “A Tale of Targeting” in First Things.
CSUN: the Inside Higher Ed report with the provost letter details, the 110-of-160 attendance figure, and the student complaints. The Washington Times report. The Ruth Institute petition framing: “Robert Lopez Grew Up with Two Moms, but He’s Not a Hater”.
Southwestern: the seminary’s own statement (Stinson’s “changing program needs,” the complaints, the refused meetings). Lopez’s side (the seven meetings, the September order, the SBC resolutions): Baptist Standard and Biblical Recorder. The Greenway restructuring and “why tenure matters” frame: Inside Higher Ed. His “26 professors in 24 hours” line: “Evidence SWBTS’ Randy Stinson Lied About Termination of Robert Lopez”.
Post-2019: MassResistance Texas, the Killeen conferences, and the YouTube removal. The CPAC ban and current activity: Right Wing Watch’s Robert Oscar Lopez profile. The book: The Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman (publisher description confirms the four-poles schema, the five authors, and the Army Infantry School training in the author bio).
Extrapolations without direct citation, all self-evident or low-risk: the Reagan Library’s physical setting (hilltop, Simi Valley, Air Force One pavilion — verifiable from any visit), CSUN as a commuter campus of roughly 40,000.
Exit, Voice, and Robert Oscar Lopez
Twice a year the Southern Baptist Convention lets any messenger submit a resolution. The resolutions go to a committee. The committee meets before the annual gathering, sorts the submissions, and decides which ones reach the floor. In 2018, and again in 2019, a humanities professor from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary submitted resolutions, one on overcoming homosexuality through Christ, one on protecting Southern Baptist whistleblowers and their freedom of conscience. Both died in committee. No debate, no vote, no record of who decided or why. The professor kept his badge, walked the convention floor, and went home to Fort Worth, where within eighteen months his employer would eliminate his position in a letter delivered the day after Thanksgiving.
Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) built the tool for reading this career: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). begins from a simple observation: organizations decline, and their members have exactly two ways to respond. They can leave, or they can complain. Exit is the economist’s device, clean, anonymous, and final; a customer who stops buying says nothing and everything at once. Voice is the political device, messy, personal, and graduated; the member stays and argues, petitions, agitates, resolves. Hirschman’s book is about the interplay between the two, and its darkest insight is the one that maps Robert Oscar Lopez’s life: the members whose voice an organization most needs are the members it can most easily afford to lose, and often the ones it works hardest to expel.
Hirschman knew the subject from inside. He exited Germany in 1933 at seventeen, fought for the Spanish Republic and then for France, and spent 1940 in Marseille helping Varian Fry (1907-1967) smuggle refugees over the Pyrenees before exiting himself. He understood that exit can be survival and that voice can get you killed, and he built an analytical framework unsentimental about both. The framework asks of any member and any organization three questions. What does exit cost, and to whom? What does voice cost, and who sets the price? And what does loyalty do, since loyalty, in Hirschman’s scheme, has one function: it delays exit long enough for voice to work.
Run Lopez through the questions and the career stops looking like a series of misfortunes. It becomes one experiment repeated under varying conditions, with the same result each time.
Begin in 1996, before any of the famous episodes. Lopez, twenty-five, shops a piece of autobiographical fiction about growing up with two lesbian mothers. A prominent gay writer reads it and tells him the story is “radioactive,” that in the year of the Defense of Marriage Act it could do serious damage in the wrong hands. Lopez puts the story away for sixteen years.
In Hirschman’s terms, the gay movement of the 1990s had set the price of internal voice at a level Lopez declined to pay, and he responded with the option Hirschman says members choose when both exit and voice cost too much: silence. He could not exit the category, since the movement claimed him by biography, as the bisexual son of lesbian mothers. He could not speak inside it, since his testimony armed the enemy in wartime. What looks in retrospect like sixteen years of peace was sixteen years of suppressed voice held in place by a kind of loyalty, the wish not to injure people he loved and a community he had lived in.
Hirschman would direct attention to what the movement bought with that suppression. An organization that taxes internal criticism does not eliminate the information the criticism carries; it defers the information and lets it compound. When Lopez finally spoke in August 2012, the deferred payload arrived at the worst possible moment for the movement, during the endgame of the marriage campaign, and it arrived from a man who could no longer be answered, only expelled. The expulsion was thorough. The databases, the blacklisting, the pressure on his university were the actions of an organization treating a dissenting member as a traitor. Hirschman notes that organizations exacting the highest penalties for exit, the ones that call leaving treason or apostasy, tend to be the ones whose leadership feels safest ignoring voice, since members have nowhere to go. The marriage-era movement combined both features. It offered Lopez no channel for voice and punished his exit as betrayal. The combination guarantees that the only dissent such an organization ever hears will be the loudest and most hostile kind, delivered from outside by former members with nothing left to lose. The movement manufactured the Lopez of 2014 out of the Lopez of 1996, who had wanted to publish a short story.
California State University, Northridge, presents the second condition of the experiment: what happens when the member’s exit is expensive to force. Tenure, in Hirschman’s vocabulary, is a device that deliberately raises the cost of expelling voice. Universities adopted it on the theory that the institution’s product improves when its most awkward members cannot be priced out of speaking. Lopez, tenured in 2013, held the strongest voice position of his life. He used it at maximum volume: the essays, the amicus briefs, the Reagan Library conference run through his own syllabi.
The institution could not exit him for his views, and the 2015 investigation confirmed as much, finding insufficient evidence of discrimination. What the machinery could do was reprice his voice. Complaints, petitions, an investigation, a provost’s letter, the possibility of suspension: each raised the daily cost of staying while leaving the formal protection intact. Hirschman’s framework predicts the outcome. When management cannot impose exit, it can make voice so expensive that the member imposes exit on himself. In June 2016 Lopez resigned, and the university received for free the departure it could not have purchased.
Hirschman would add a colder observation about what Lopez surrendered. Exit forfeits voice. The moment he resigned, every future criticism he made of the secular academy converted from the report of an insider to the complaint of an ex-member, a genre that institutions have no reason to hear and long practice ignoring. The tenured critic of the university is a problem; the resigned critic is a testimonial to the critic’s own temperament. Lopez traded the one asset that made him expensive to dismiss for the satisfaction of a clean conscience, and Hirschman, who admired conscience but counted leverage, would have marked the trade as ruinous. The rational play, on the book’s logic, was to stay and let them carry the cost of his presence indefinitely. That he could not stay says something about the limits of Hirschman’s rational member, and the essay will return to it.
There is a wider Hirschman point in the CSUN exit, drawn from his most famous example. When quality-conscious parents abandon a declining public school for private schools, the school loses exactly the families whose complaints might have arrested the decline, and the exit that feels like a solution to each family accelerates the problem for everyone remaining. The steady exit of conservatives from the American academy in these decades, into think tanks, seminaries, and media, is the public-school case at civilizational scale. Each departure was individually rational and collectively disastrous for the thing departed, since every exit lowered the internal price of the next orthodoxy. Lopez in 2016 joined the exit stream, and the university he left became, by one professor’s worth, easier to homogenize. He would have endorsed this analysis of everyone else’s departure while insisting his own was forced, and both claims can be true, which is Hirschman’s trap: forced and chosen exits drain the reservoir at the same rate.
Southwestern was the control condition. Every variable that had explained the first two failures was removed. The institution confessed his doctrine. The president who hired him prized his combativeness. No progressive coalition set the price of his voice. If ideological hostility had been the cause of his troubles, the seminary years should have been quiet.
They were the loudest of all, and Hirschman explains why. Voice responds to perceived decline, and Lopez perceived decline everywhere he looked in the Southern Baptist world after 2016: retreat on sexuality, silence on abuse, a new president cutting faculty in batches. His doctrinal agreement with the institution was beside the point, since his criticism concerned conduct, the gap between the confession and the practice. And at Southwestern he held the weakest exit position of his life. No tenure. A restructuring administration that had, by his count, dismissed twenty-six professors in twenty-four hours and shown every survivor his replaceability. In Hirschman’s terms, management’s cost of exiting him had fallen to the price of a letter.
The sequence then ran exactly as the book predicts. Seven meetings with the provost and dean. An instruction, by his account, to stop discussing homosexuality and sex abuse, which is to say a posted price for continued membership: total silence on the subjects that constituted his voice. He refused the price and refused to resign, declining voluntary exit and voluntary silence in the same breath. So the institution exercised the option his lack of tenure gave it. Position eliminated, changing program needs, undergirded, in the provost’s public statement, by administrative noncompliance, complaints, and refused meetings. Whatever the sealed files contain, the structure is legible: an organization removed its highest-volume internal critic at the moment removal became cheap, while publicly reaffirming every doctrine the critic preached. The seminary did not disagree with Lopez. It was done listening to him, and it had the means.
Hirschman kept a special category for such organizations. His examples were the lazy monopolies, the Nigerian railways whose most demanding customers defected to trucking, which relieved the railways of their most useful pressure and let management relax into decline. The insight is that exit only disciplines an organization that suffers from it. The Southern Baptist Convention’s seminaries answer to trustee boards and a denominational funding stream; a professor’s departure costs them nothing a news cycle won’t cure. Lopez’s exit disciplined nobody. It relieved. And here the resolutions committee earns its place at the head of this essay, because the committee is the purest artifact in the whole record: a formal voice channel whose actual function is absorption. It receives dissent, processes it out of existence without debate or fingerprints, and returns the dissenter to the floor with his participation acknowledged and his content deleted. Hirschman warned that institutionalized voice can become a substitute for responsiveness rather than an instrument of it. Two resolutions, two years, two committee deaths, zero recorded reasons: the whole book in one procedural drawer.
Which leaves loyalty, the term Hirschman added to rescue the model from a puzzle. If exit is available and voice is expensive, why does anyone stay and fight? His answer: loyalty, the attachment that makes a member delay exit past the point of individual rationality, is functional because it buys time for voice, and it is powerful in exact proportion to the credibility of the exit it postpones. The member with maximum influence is the one the organization values, who threatens to leave, and who might. Loyalty without a credible, costly exit behind it is sentiment; the organization pockets it.
Lopez’s loyalty was of the pocketed kind, every time. He was loyal to a gay community that experienced his existence as a liability. He was loyal to a university system that was relieved to see him go. He was loyal to Paige Patterson and the Patterson wing of the SBC after the trustees had removed Patterson, which meant his loyalty attached him to the losing faction of an internal war just as the winning faction gained the personnel files. In every case he gave the attachment and never held the leverage, because in every case the organization had already concluded that his absence was worth more than his presence. Hirschman’s grim arithmetic: a member’s voice weighs what his exit would cost the organization, and Lopez’s exits cost the organizations nothing. His resolutions could die in committee because nothing backed them. His refusal to resign from Southwestern carried no threat, since the seminary held the cheaper unilateral option. He spent his career performing the behaviors of a loyalist, staying, arguing, submitting through channels, inside institutions that had repriced him to zero, and the performance read to each institution as a nuisance rather than a warning.
The deeper Hirschman question is whether Lopez ever understood the arithmetic and declined it, or never saw it. His pattern suggests refusal rather than blindness. The model’s rational member modulates voice to preserve membership, husbands leverage, times his threats. Lopez modulated nothing, ever, for anyone, and each institution in sequence discovered that the standard levers, the repricing, the channels, the committee, the quiet word from the provost, moved him not at all. An organization can manage a member who wants something from it. Lopez wanted only to keep saying what he was saying, which made him unmanageable and therefore, wherever exit was cheap, removable. Hirschman’s framework classifies members by their price. It has no stable category for the member without one, and the institutions that met Lopez had no category either, so each reached the same solution by its own route: the discreet channel, then the raised cost, then the door.
After November 2019 Lopez occupied the position Hirschman’s model rates weakest: voice after exit, the ex-member’s protest, addressed to organizations that no longer had any reason to price his opinion. The public statements, the petitions for reinstatement, the media tour were shouting through a door that had closed with him on the wrong side of the leverage. His subsequent course, running a MassResistance chapter, self-publishing, podcasting from the movement’s outer ring after even CPAC declined the association, is voice with no membership anywhere, which is to say noise, in the model’s cold accounting, however true its content.
But Hirschman left one door open, and Lopez walked through it. When exit and voice both fail, members can found. The defector from a declining organization can become the entrepreneur of a competing one, and the new supplier does what the deserted incumbent would not. Lopez’s International Children’s Rights Institute, his anthologies, his blog were attempts to build an organization for a constituency the existing organizations had priced out, and the constituency he chose returns this essay to its subject’s beginning, because it is the constituency with the worst Hirschman position of any group in the model. Children cannot exit the households adults construct for them. A child cannot resign a family, cannot take his custom elsewhere, cannot found a competitor. And the child’s voice, as Lopez testified from the trailer outward, is taxed by love itself, since complaint injures the only people he has. No exit, and voice priced in loyalty, the dearest currency there is. Every debate about family structure, donor conception, and surrogacy is a debate about members who hold neither of Hirschman’s options, conducted entirely by the adults who hold both. Lopez’s activism, whatever else it became, began as an attempt to supply voice to the one class of members the market for voice never serves. That he ended with no institution willing to carry the supply is the finding of the experiment. The organizations most in need of the criticism were, at every station and on both political sides, the ones best equipped to make it leave.
Spoiled Identity: Robert Oscar Lopez Through Goffman’s Stigma
Consider the logistics. Two women who are partners keep separate houses in town. Their life together happens on weekends, in a trailer parked in an RV park fifty minutes away, tucked, in the son’s later word, discreetly. The town gets one version of the family. The trailer holds the other. Fifty minutes is far enough that no neighbor, teacher, or grocery clerk from the first audience will ever wander into the second. For seventeen years, the arrangement held.
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) had a name for this: audience segregation, the elementary technique by which people who carry concealable discrediting information keep the knowing and the unknowing apart. His 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity distinguishes the discredited, whose failing shows on contact, from the discreditable, whose failing could be known but is not, and whose life therefore becomes a problem in information control. The discreditable person does not simply have a secret. He runs an operation: deciding who is told, managing the physical evidence, editing his biography by audience, maintaining what Goffman calls a double life, with all the overhead that implies. The household in the trailer was a discreditable unit, and the boy who grew up inside it received, before any other education, an apprenticeship in the operation.
Goffman’s framework, applied across the whole career, does something the political readings of Robert Oscar Lopez cannot. It explains the man’s trajectory, his strangeness, the 2012 rupture, the fury it drew from his former side, the collapse of his refuge on the other side, and the shape of his activism, with one set of concepts, and it does so without taking a position on whether he is right about anything. Stigma, in Goffman’s definition, is a relationship between an attribute and an audience, and Lopez spent five decades moving through audiences that priced the same attributes differently. His career is what happens when a man trained from infancy in information management decides, at forty-one, to stop managing.
Start with the childhood. Lopez attributes his early social confusion to missing gender models: no father, no visible pattern of men and women dealing with each other, so nothing to imitate. Goffman supplies a rival account. The child of a concealed household carries what Stigma calls courtesy stigma, the spoilage that spreads to those connected to the stigmatized, and the child of concealers must himself conceal. Every school day required him to field ordinary questions, what did you do this weekend, what does your dad do, with answers vetted in real time against the family secret. Goffman’s passers live with a permanent interactional overhead: monitoring what the other person knows, might know, could infer; steering talk away from certain regions; producing a self that must be internally consistent across audiences that must never meet. The passer’s manner shows the strain. He is watchful where others are loose, calculated where others are spontaneous, and oddly abrupt where the managed material runs close to the surface. Lopez’s description of his young self, nervous and yet blunt, offering few recognizable social cues, strange even to the gay and bisexual adults he later met, is a portrait Goffman drew in general form: the person at home in no audience because every audience receives a production. The missing-father theory and the information-control theory are compatible, and the second has the advantage of explaining the detail the first cannot, which is why he read as strange to gay adults too. Gender models were not the scarce resource in that room. Unmanaged interaction was.
The secrecy had a further Goffman property. Because the household was hidden, the boy’s difference had no public name. Goffman notes that the discreditable person is denied even the rough comfort of the discredited, whose stigma at least organizes his treatment into a known pattern. Lopez grew up as a social outcast, his word, with no visible cause, which is the discreditable child’s exact predicament: all of the differentness, none of the category.
The adult Lopez multiplied the operation. By his mid-twenties he was managing at least four audiences with incompatible information requirements. The academy received a promising Puerto Rican literary scholar. The Army, in the don’t-ask-don’t-tell years, received a soldier under a passing regime so standard the government had codified it. The gay world of the Bronx, the drag and leather circuit he later described, received a bisexual man whose family history stayed radioactive even there. And whatever remained of the town audience received whatever it had always received. Goffman observes that the accomplished passer’s worlds proliferate, each one requiring maintenance, each new intimacy raising the disclosure question afresh, and the whole structure standing hostage to a single leak.
Then comes 1996, and the scene that the political readings treat as a grievance and Goffman would treat as a specimen. Lopez, wanting out of the operation, writes autobiographical fiction about the trailer and shops it. A prominent gay writer reads it and tells him the story is “radioactive,” that in the year of the Defense of Marriage Act it could do serious damage in the wrong hands. Lopez shelves it for sixteen years.
Stigma has a category for the writer’s intervention. Goffman calls the stigmatized person’s fellow members the own, and among the services the own provide is instruction in information management: what to disclose, when, to whom, and on whose behalf. The instruction Lopez received was standard in form and collective in logic. A stigmatized group under political siege holds its public information as common property; one member’s candor is everyone’s exposure; therefore the group polices disclosure, and the policing arrives as friendly advice from a senior member of the own. What Lopez experienced as censorship, Goffman would identify as the ordinary discipline of a passing collective, no different in structure from what any concealed minority imposes on its members in dangerous seasons. The gay movement of 1996 was itself discreditable in Goffman’s sense, mid-transition from concealment to open presence, its normalization campaign exquisitely sensitive to what information circulated. Lopez’s story was true, which was exactly the problem. Passing regimes are threatened by truth alone; lies they can survive.
Notice what the instruction conscripted. The movement’s public case increasingly ran through its children: happy, high-functioning, indistinguishable from anyone’s children. In Goffman’s vocabulary the children served as disidentifiers, living evidence displayed to break the stereotype. A disidentifier that talks back is a catastrophe. So the children of gay households inherited a second courtesy-stigma assignment: having spent childhood concealing their parents from a hostile world, they were now asked to curate their testimony for a movement that needed them content. Lopez’s entire later argument about silenced children, whatever its empirical reach, describes this structure, and Goffman named the structure thirty years before Lopez met it.
Goffman writes of the moral career of the stigmatized person, the sequence of phases through which he learns his condition, learns to manage it, and, sometimes, in a final phase, voluntarily discloses it, trading the anxieties of the double life for the fixed status of the discredited. The disclosure ends the operation. It also ends the option of ever reopening it.
On August 6, 2012, Lopez executed the phase in its maximal form. A print disclosure, under his own name, in a national forum, of the family secret, the bisexuality, and the underworld years, all at once, at forty-one. Goffman notes that voluntary disclosure can be a relief so profound that the discreditable person seeks it against all prudence, and Lopez’s own account of the Regnerus email, the first time in forty-one years anyone had asked him to speak honestly about his life, records the pressure of four decades of managed information finding its outlet. From that morning he was discredited, in Goffman’s technical and soon enough in the ordinary sense, and the interesting question is what the audiences did with the conversion.
The movement’s response is the part the frame explains that nothing else quite does. The databases, the extremist designation, the organized effort to keep him off platforms carried a heat that exceeded his actual arguments, which were, in 2012, modest: one man’s sad childhood and a defense of one study’s right to ask questions. Goffman locates the heat. The person who abandons passing endangers every member still passing, and endangers most the collective front itself. Lopez’s disclosure attacked the movement at its point of maximum investment, the presentation of its families as unremarkable, and it attacked from a position no outside bigot could occupy, since he was the evidence speaking. The own punish defection from information discipline more severely than they punish enemies, because enemies were priced in and defectors were the price. And there is a second Goffman layer beneath the first: the movement of 2012 was no longer merely a passing collective. It had become, in its institutional organs, an administrator of stigma, equipped with classification systems, watchlists, and the power to spoil identities in its turn. The formerly discreditable had acquired the discrediting apparatus, and Lopez became one of its case files. By the end of the decade the transfer completed itself: the organization he joined carries a formal hate-group designation, and the son of the concealed household finished his public career as a classified man, discredited by certification, his identity spoiled on the letterhead of the very sort of registry his mother’s generation had feared.
Before 2012, it should be added, Lopez had been performing the role Goffman describes with the coldest irony in the book: the well-adjusted stigmatized person. Good adjustment, Goffman writes, means the stigmatized individual cheerfully accepts himself while sparing normals any test of their tolerance, presenting a self that never presses. The reward is phantom acceptance underwriting phantom normalcy. Lopez’s high grades, his functioning, the absence of complaint that let the adults around the trailer household conclude all was well, was good adjustment as a child’s full-time job. The 2012 essay was, among other things, his resignation from the job, and the audiences’ outrage was in part the outrage of parties to a bargain who discover the other side never signed.
The Christian years extend the analysis.
Lopez’s conversion offered, in Goffman’s terms, something stronger than management: the abolition of the identity. His refusal of gay or even celibate-gay-Christian identity, his insistence that the attribute need never constitute the person, is a claim Goffman’s framework partly underwrites, since Stigma insists the stigma resides in the relationship between attribute and audience rather than in the attribute. Where Lopez went further was in believing an audience existed that would honor the abolition. The seminary appeared to be that audience. It received him as churches receive such men, as a trophy of grace, and here Goffman’s attention to disclosure etiquette turns the last key. The convert’s stigma story is welcome in the church on strict formal terms: past tense, closed narrative, wonder-working power, applause. Testimony is managed information, as curated in its way as passing ever was, the same operation with the polarity reversed. Lopez would not supply the format. He kept the material in the present tense, ongoing abuse, current institutional complicity, resolutions naming the denomination’s living failures, and a professor discussing sexual sin as a present institutional fact is performing exposé, a genre with no liturgical slot. The seminary, discovering it had hired an information source it could not schedule, did what the movement had done: it moved to manage the man’s information, by his account instructing him to stop discussing the subjects entirely, and when management failed, it withdrew the platform. Two audiences, opposed on every doctrine, identical in their requirement: tell it our way or carry it elsewhere.
That identity is the one Goffman reserved for the stigmatized person who makes his condition his occupation: the professional, the representative of his category, whose stigma becomes his career and who can therefore never again be anything else, since his platform and his spoilage are the same object. Lopez professionalized the untellable story of the trailer, and the profession consumed the professor, the scholar of Wheatley and Whitman, until the classified activist was all that remained in public view. Goffman remarks that the professional stigmatized person ends up presenting his category to normals whether or not the category consents to the representation, and Lopez’s standing war with the movement’s official spokesmen was exactly a war over representation: two rival managements, each claiming authority over the public information of the same population, the children of gay households, one management displaying their happiness, the other displaying their grief, and the population itself, as populations of the managed usually are, mostly silent while others administered its file.
The child in the trailer learned that his family’s survival required controlling what others knew. The man spent thirty years under one management or another, the family’s, the movement’s, the academy’s, the church’s, each with its own required version of him. Everything after forty-one was the attempt to become the sole manager of his own information, and the record shows what that costs: every audience he had, in the end, preferred the file.
Private Truths, Public Testimony: Robert Oscar Lopez Through Kuran
On the night of October 9, 1989, seventy thousand people marched through Leipzig, and East Germany’s forty-year silence broke in a matter of weeks. No intelligence service predicted it. No dissident predicted it. The marchers themselves, interviewed later, said they had not known until they were in the street that the street would be full. Timur Kuran (b. 1954) built a theory to explain why such ruptures surprise everyone, including their participants. Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995) begins from a mundane observation: people misrepresent what they want and believe when honesty carries a social price. Each person’s public preference is a purchase, bought with an eye on three accounts, the intrinsic value of the outcome he favors, the reputational value of the position he displays, and the expressive value of saying what he means. When reputation dominates, publics fill with falsified preferences, and a society can maintain, for decades, a public consensus that few of its members privately hold. The consensus looks eternal until some small event drops one person’s cost of candor below his threshold, his defection drops the next person’s, and the hidden distribution empties into the open all at once. Or it looks eternal and is, because the hidden distribution was small, and the theory’s hardest teaching is that no one can tell the two cases apart from the outside. Private preferences leave no public trace. That is what makes them private.
Kuran wrote about communism, caste, and American racial discourse. His model fits any population whose candor is priced, and there is a population, small, scattered, and claimed by everyone, that it fits with unusual exactness: the adult children of gay and lesbian households in the decades when their families became the central exhibit of a political revolution. Robert Oscar Lopez belongs to that population, and his career, read through Kuran, is a controlled demonstration of nearly every moving part in the model: the falsification, the enforcement, the defection, the sanction that follows defection, and the cascade that never came.
Consider the price schedule facing such a person in, say, 1996. The children of gay parents confronted two enforcers, layered, with no gap between them to speak through.
The first was intimate. Their assessments of their childhoods, whatever those assessments were, ran through the people they loved. A child who said in public that his household had cost him something indicted his own mother at her kitchen table. Kuran’s reputational account usually involves strangers, employers, and mobs; here the reputational stake was the face of a parent, which prices candor beyond most people’s willingness to pay and does so through affection, the one enforcer no one resents. The second was political. By the 1990s the movement for gay equality had organized its public case around its families, and the testimony of the children carried evidentiary weight in courtrooms and legislatures. A child’s public preference was no longer his own; it was ammunition, and both armies knew it. Contentment would be amplified by one side. Grief would be weaponized by the other and then traced back to its author, who would spend the rest of his life as a citation in a war against his own family.
Under that schedule, Kuran’s model predicts a uniform public surface, happy testimony wall to wall, regardless of what the private distribution contains. The model is agnostic about the distribution. The surface would look identical whether the children were privately content, privately grieving, or privately mixed, because the surface is purchased, and everyone faces the same prices.
Lopez’s contribution to the historical record is that he documented the price schedule from inside. In 1996 he tried to sell a story about his childhood and a senior figure of his own community told him the story was “radioactive,” that in the season of the Defense of Marriage Act it could wreck the cause in the wrong hands. The instruction was not a threat. It was a price quote, delivered as a courtesy, and Lopez, checking the quote against his accounts, declined to buy candor at that price for the next sixteen years. Kuran’s falsifier is not a coward; he is a customer, and in 1996 the reputational account swamped the expressive one. A man with a mother’s memory to protect, a career beginning, and no audience anywhere that would receive his testimony as anything other than a weapon made the purchase nearly everyone makes. He said nothing, which in a priced environment is itself a public preference, and the public record of the children of gay households stayed unanimous by one more voice.
Kuran’s ruptures begin with a threshold event, some small shift that drops one individual’s cost of candor below his tolerance for falsification. Lopez can date his to the day. On July 17, 2012, a sociologist under national attack for a study of such children emailed him about a website comment, and Lopez later said it was the first time in forty-one years anyone had asked him to speak honestly about his own life. Read as Kuran would read it, the email changed the arithmetic on both sides of the ledger. It revealed the existence of an audience that would receive his testimony, which cut the reputational loss, and it framed silence, for the first time, as complicity in the punishment of the man who had asked, which raised the expressive cost of continuing to falsify. Three weeks later he published, and the defection was total: the household, the bisexuality, the grief, in a national forum, under his name.
What happened next is the model’s centerpiece, and it explains the feature of the Lopez affair that puzzles every reader who encounters it fresh: the disproportion. The 2012 essay made modest claims. One man’s sad childhood; a defense of one study’s right to exist. The response, the databases, the extremist designation, the pressure on his employer, the decade of organized hostility, was scaled to something much larger than the argument, and Kuran identifies what. A falsification equilibrium is maintained by the visible price of defection. The first defector’s punishment is the message to every threshold behind his; it is purchased for the audience, priced to the size of the hidden population it is meant to keep hidden, whatever that size is. The enforcers were not answering Lopez’s seventeen hundred words. They were resetting the quote for every child of a gay household watching what saying such things costs, which is why the response had to be conspicuous, durable, and attached to his name wherever it traveled. Kuran’s regimes behave identically toward their first street marcher, and for the same reason: the individual is nothing; the cascade is everything.
The cascade never came. Lopez and his allies built the receiving apparatus, the institute, the anthologies, the amicus briefs, and a population of defectors materialized in the dozens. Not the hundreds, not the thousands. The bandwagon that emptied Leipzig into the street stayed in the garage. And here Kuran permits exactly two inferences and forbids the third. Permitted: hidden preferences exist in this population, because the price of candor is documented, by the radioactive quote, by the enforcement campaign, by the mechanics of loving one’s mother, and wherever candor is priced, some falsification follows. Permitted: the size of the hidden population is unknown. Forbidden: any conclusion about its size from the public surface, in either direction. The movement’s reading, that the absence of mass defection proves the children’s contentment, treats a priced surface as a free one, which is the exact error the book was written to kill. Lopez’s reading, that his mailbag and his anthology contributors index a silenced multitude, samples on defection, and defectors reveal that hidden preferences exist while revealing nothing about their distribution. His career is the receipt for the price. It is not a census of the payers, and the honest statement of his evidentiary position is one sentence long: he proved the silence was purchased; he never proved how many were buying.
The same discipline cuts, more gently, at the social science. Outcome measures, graduation, employment, health, escape Kuran’s problem, since they are not expressions. Self-report measures by members of a priced population do not fully escape it; the respondent to a well-being survey faces a milder version of the same schedule the essayist faces, and to whatever extent the reassuring literature rests on self-description, a Kuranian reserves a margin of doubt in both directions. The margin is not a refutation of anything. It is the tax that priced speech levies on every dataset drawn from it.
Kuran’s second concept then explains why the question degrades over time rather than resolving. Knowledge falsification, the misrepresentation of what one knows, corrupts the public discourse from which everyone, including researchers, draws their sense of the possible. The Regnerus affair functioned as an enforcement event inside the academy: whatever the study’s genuine methodological failures, and they were genuine, the audit, the ethics complaint, and the professional shunning posted a price on producing certain findings, and every graduate student choosing a dissertation topic read the posting. Kuran’s long-run prediction is his bleakest: questions that cannot be safely asked stop being asked, then stop being privately entertained, and the unthinkable becomes the unthought. A generation later, the question of what such children privately assess is not so much answered as unaskable in the venues equipped to answer it, which is the equilibrium in its mature form, self-maintaining, no enforcement required.
And the enforcement, it turns out, is symmetric across the trench. When Lopez carried his candor into the Southern Baptist world, he found a second falsification regime facing the other way: pastors who, by his account, privately shared his assessments of the denomination’s failures on abuse and sexuality and publicly said nothing, their candor priced by their own coalition’s needs. His two convention resolutions died in committee without a vote, and a Kuranian notices what a committee death accomplishes that a floor defeat would not: a vote is a measurement of the private distribution, and killing the question before the tally keeps the distribution unmeasured, which keeps the equilibrium deniable. Both of Lopez’s worlds, the one he defected from and the one he defected to, ran on purchased surfaces, and both, when he refused to purchase, reached the same solution.
Which raises the model’s last question, the one Kuran’s framework asks about the man rather than the system. Why did he keep paying?
The theory’s standard agent falsifies whenever reputation outweighs expression, and by that standard Lopez is mispriced. He paid the movement’s sanction, then the university’s, then the seminary’s, each time with the previous receipt in hand, knowing the schedule. Kuran’s model accommodates him in a category it treats with a certain wonder: the person whose expressive account is weighted so heavily that no reputational price clears it, the type of Havel’s greengrocer refusing the sign in the window, the type regimes cannot deter because deterrence works on people with something left to protect. Such people are the necessary first movers of every cascade in the book. They are also, the book is careful to say, not sufficient. A first mover anchors a bandwagon only when the hidden distribution is large and the thresholds behind him are close, and whether those conditions held in his population is exactly what no one, including him, could know. He marched, and the street stayed empty, and the model offers its cold comfort: an empty street is what a small hidden population looks like, and it is also what a well-enforced large one looks like, and the enforcement his defection triggered was calibrated, by people who understood this, to make sure no one would ever find out which.
That is the state in which the question rests. Two coalitions hold custody of a population’s public testimony, one displaying its happiness, one displaying its grief, both enforcing their displays, and the private distribution, the only fact that would settle anything, remains where priced speech always leaves it. Lopez spent his life insisting the surface was purchased, and he was right, and the purchase continues, and the ledger stays sealed, and the model that explains his whole career explains, in its final courtesy, why his central question can never be answered by the means available to answer it.
‘Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View’ (Aug. 12, 2012)
Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s biological children, I was the only child who experienced childhood without my father being around.
After my mother’s partner’s children had left for college, she moved into our house in town. I lived with both of them for the brief time before my mother died at the age of 53. I was 19. In other words, I was the only child who experienced life under “gay parenting” as that term is understood today.
Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.
Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast.
My peers learned all the unwritten rules of decorum and body language in their homes; they understood what was appropriate to say in certain settings and what wasn’t; they learned both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine social mechanisms.
Even if my peers’ parents were divorced, and many of them were, they still grew up seeing male and female social models. They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive from female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom’s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays.
I had no male figure at all to follow, and my mother and her partner were both unlike traditional fathers or traditional mothers. As a result, I had very few recognizable social cues to offer potential male or female friends, since I was neither confident nor sensitive to others. Thus I befriended people rarely and alienated others easily. Gay people who grew up in straight parents’ households may have struggled with their sexual orientation; but when it came to the vast social universe of adaptations not dealing with sexuality—how to act, how to speak, how to behave—they had the advantage of learning at home. Many gays don’t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home.
My home life was not traditional nor conventional. I suffered because of it, in ways that are difficult for sociologists to index. Both nervous and yet blunt, I would later seem strange even in the eyes of gay and bisexual adults who had little patience for someone like me. I was just as odd to them as I was to straight people.
Life is hard when you are strange. Even now, I have very few friends and often feel as though I do not understand people because of the unspoken gender cues that everyone around me, even gays raised in traditional homes, takes for granted. Though I am hard-working and a quick learner, I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.
In terms of sexuality, gays who grew up in traditional households benefited from at least seeing some kind of functional courtship rituals around them. I had no clue how to make myself attractive to girls. When I stepped outside of my mothers’ trailer, I was immediately tagged as an outcast because of my girlish mannerisms, funny clothes, lisp, and outlandishness. Not surprisingly, I left high school as a virgin, never having had a girlfriend, instead having gone to four proms as a wisecracking sidekick to girls who just wanted someone to chip in for a limousine.
When I got to college, I set off everyone’s “gaydar” and the campus LGBT group quickly descended upon me to tell me it was 100-percent certain I must be a homosexual. When I came out as bisexual, they told everyone I was lying and just wasn’t ready to come out of the closet as gay yet. Frightened and traumatized by my mother’s death, I dropped out of college in 1990 and fell in with what can only be called the gay underworld. Terrible things happened to me there.
It was not until I was twenty-eight that I suddenly found myself in a relationship with a woman, through coincidences that shocked everyone who knew me and surprised even myself. I call myself bisexual because it would take several novels to explain how I ended up “straight” after almost thirty years as a gay man. I don’t feel like dealing with gay activists skewering me the way they go on search-and-destroy missions against ex-gays, “closet cases,” or “homocons.”
Though I have a biography particularly relevant to gay issues, the first person who contacted me to thank me for sharing my perspective on LGBT issues was Mark Regnerus, in an email dated July 17, 2012. I was not part of his massive survey, but he noticed a comment I’d left on a website about it and took the initiative to begin an email correspondence.
Forty-one years I’d lived, and nobody—least of all gay activists—had wanted me to speak honestly about the complicated gay threads of my life. If for no other reason than this, Mark Regnerus deserves tremendous credit—and the gay community ought to be crediting him rather than trying to silence him.
Regnerus’s study identified 248 adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships. Offered a chance to provide frank responses with the hindsight of adulthood, they gave reports unfavorable to the gay marriage equality agenda. Yet the results are backed up by an important thing in life called common sense: Growing up different from other people is difficult and the difficulties raise the risk that children will develop maladjustments or self-medicate with alcohol and other dangerous behaviors. Each of those 248 is a human story, no doubt with many complexities.
Like my story, these 248 people’s stories deserve to be told. The gay movement is doing everything it can to make sure that nobody hears them. But I care more about the stories than the numbers (especially as an English professor), and Regnerus stumbled unwittingly on a narrative treasure chest.
So why the code of silence from LGBT leaders? I can only speculate from where I’m sitting. I cherish my mother’s memory, but I don’t mince words when talking about how hard it was to grow up in a gay household. Earlier studies examined children still living with their gay parents, so the kids were not at liberty to speak, governed as all children are by filial piety, guilt, and fear of losing their allowances. For trying to speak honestly, I’ve been squelched, literally, for decades.
The latest attempt at trying to silence stories (and data) such as mine comes from Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, who gave an interview to Tom Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he said—and I quote—that Mark Regnerus’s study was “bullshit.” Bartlett’s article continues:
Among the problems Sherkat identified is the paper’s definition of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers”—an aspect that has been the focus of much of the public criticism. A woman could be identified as a “lesbian mother” in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple.
Sherkat said that fact alone in the paper should have “disqualified it immediately” from being considered for publication.
The problem with Sherkat’s disqualification of Regnerus’s work is a manifold chicken-and-egg conundrum. Though Sherkat uses the term “LGBT” in the same interview with Bartlett, he privileges that L and G and discriminates severely against the B, bisexuals.
Where do children of LGBT parents come from? If the parents are 100-percent gay or lesbian, then the chances are that the children were conceived through surrogacy or insemination, or else adopted. Those cases are such a tiny percentage of LGBT parents, however, that it would be virtually impossible to find more than a half-dozen in a random sampling of tens of thousands of adults.
Most LGBT parents are, like me, and technically like my mother, “bisexual”—the forgotten B. We conceived our children because we engaged in heterosexual intercourse. Social complications naturally arise if you conceive a child with the opposite sex but still have attractions to the same sex. Sherkat calls these complications disqualifiable, as they are corrupting the purity of a homosexual model of parenting.
I would posit that children raised by same-sex couples are naturally going to be more curious about and experimental with homosexuality without necessarily being pure of any attraction to the opposite sex. Hence they will more likely fall into the bisexual category, as did I—meaning that the children of LGBT parents, once they are young adults, are likely to be the first ones disqualified by the social scientists who now claim to advocate for their parents.
Those who are 100-percent gay may view bisexuals with a mix of disgust and envy. Bisexual parents threaten the core of the LGBT parenting narrative—we do have a choice to live as gay or straight, and we do have to decide the gender configuration of the household in which our children will grow up. While some gays see bisexuality as an easier position, the fact is that bisexual parents bear a more painful weight on their shoulders. Unlike homosexuals, we cannot write off our decisions as things forced on us by nature. We have no choice but to take responsibility for what we do as parents, and live with the guilt, regret, and self-criticism forever.
Our children do not arrive with clean legal immunity. As a man, though I am bisexual, I do not get to throw away the mother of my child as if she is a used incubator. I had to help my wife through the difficulties of pregnancy and postpartum depression. When she is struggling with discrimination against mothers or women at a sexist workplace, I have to be patient and listen. I must attend to her sexual needs. Once I was a father, I put aside my own homosexual past and vowed never to divorce my wife or take up with another person, male or female, before I died. I chose that commitment in order to protect my children from dealing with harmful drama, even as they grow up to be adults. When you are a parent, ethical questions revolve around your children and you put away your self-interest . . . forever.
Sherkat’s assessment of Regnerus’s work shows a total disregard for the emotional and sexual labor that bisexual parents contribute to their children. Bisexual parents must wrestle with their duties as parents while still contending with the temptations to enter into same-sex relationships. The turbulence documented in Mark Regnerus’s study is a testament to how hard that is. Rather than threatening, it is a reminder of the burden I carry and a goad to concern myself first and foremost with my children’s needs, not my sexual desires.
The other chicken-and-egg problem of Sherkat’s dismissal deals with conservative ideology. Many have dismissed my story with four simple words: “But you are conservative.” Yes, I am. How did I get that way? I moved to the right wing because I lived in precisely the kind of anti-normative, marginalized, and oppressed identity environment that the left celebrates: I am a bisexual Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult. I’m perceptive enough to notice that liberal social policies don’t actually help people in those conditions. Especially damning is the liberal attitude that we shouldn’t be judgmental about sex. In the Bronx gay world, I cleaned out enough apartments of men who’d died of AIDS to understand that resistance to sexual temptation is central to any kind of humane society. Sex can be hurtful not only because of infectious diseases but also because it leaves us vulnerable and more likely to cling to people who don’t love us, mourn those who leave us, and not know how to escape those who need us but whom we don’t love. The left understands none of that. That’s why I am conservative.
So yes, I am conservative and support Regnerus’s findings. Or is it that Regnerus’s findings revisit the things that made me conservative in the first place? Sherkat must figure that one out.
Having lived for forty-one years as a strange man, I see it as tragically fitting that the first instinct of experts and gay activists is to exclude my life profile as unfit for any “data sample,” or as Dr. Sherkat calls it, “bullshit.” So the game has gone for at least twenty-five years. For all the talk about LGBT alliances, bisexuality falls by the wayside, thanks to scholars such as Sherkat. For all the chatter about a “queer” movement, queer activists are just as likely to restrict their social circles to professionalized, normal people who know how to throw charming parties, make small talk, and blend in with the Art Deco furniture.
I thank Mark Regnerus. Far from being “bullshit,” his work is affirming to me, because it acknowledges what the gay activist movement has sought laboriously to erase, or at least ignore. Whether homosexuality is chosen or inbred, whether gay marriage gets legalized or not, being strange is hard; it takes a mental toll, makes it harder to find friends, interferes with professional growth, and sometimes leads one down a sodden path to self-medication in the form of alcoholism, drugs, gambling, antisocial behavior, and irresponsible sex. The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange. We owe them, at the least, a dose of honesty. Thank you, Mark Regnerus, for taking the time to listen.
‘A Tale of Targeting’ (Oct. 20, 2014)
I am a professor of English and Classics at Cal State-Northridge, where I began teaching in 2008 after earning my doctorate in English and MA in Classics from SUNY. I specialize in American literature and published a scholarly study of American writers and conservatism in 2011.
On August 6, 2012, I published an essay in Public Discourse, entitled “Growing Up with Two Moms.” It described my life growing up with a lesbian mother and her partner. Discussion of same-sex parenting until that point generally treated the children of gay parents as extensions of gay adults. Whatever was good for gay adults was presumed to benefit children they raised. No serious consideration was given to divergence between the children’s interests and the interests of gay adults who wanted and loved them. My point was this:
Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.
Inside, however, I was confused.
There were loving things about my childhood, but it was hard. That is all I wanted to say. I didn’t argue anything about gay marriage or even gay adoption. Eventually I did come to voice support for traditional marriage laws, but here I only spoke out of my own experience.
The same day, I received an email from someone named Scott “Rose” Rosenzweig, the first of more than a dozen. His message went to my Cal State account and was copied to colleagues and administrators, saying among other things,
Recently, CSUN’s Lopez published a gay-bashing essay about the Regnerus study, on the website of the Witherspoon Institute, which funded the Regnerus study; for reference, Lopez’s politicized gay-bashing is here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065
Because Lopez very substantially misrepresents what the published Regnerus study says, it is especially disturbing that he was in communication with Regnerus—who did not follow American Sociological Association Code of Ethics guidelines for communicating with the public about sociology. It is especially disturbing to note that as per Lopez’s admission, Regnerus ***first*** contacted Lopez, having seen some of his gay-bashing comments online.
Note how this distorts my essay from personal reminiscence to “gay-bashing,” an inflammatory charge on a college campus, the first in a relentless twenty-six months of harassment.
Though he was then working with the New Civil Rights Movement, Rosenzweig provided links to a webpage featuring work from other LGBT activists linked to GLAAD, particularly Jeremy Hooper.
Journalist Jeremy Hooper investigated Robert Oscar Lopez, and found that he has built up a history of “tweets” very severely defamatory of gay people. You can see some of the record of Lopez’s gay-bashing tweets here: http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2012/08/about…
Why is Lopez so obsessed with LGBTers and so determined to make baseless attacks against them?
Soon I was getting hit by writers all across the web. A piece on August 9, 2012, in Frontiers LA affixed my photograph and began with the line, “Perhaps you know Cal State Northridge bisexual professor Robert Oscar Lopez—and hence might understand why he wants to cozy up to the antigay National Organization for Marriage.”
At that time I had no connection to the National Organization for Marriage, yet as late as September 2014, the Human Rights Campaign would still claim that I spoke at NOM “March for Marriage” rallies. All of this would be jarring news for NOM, since I support gay civil unions and foster care eligibility for gay couples.
Against these charges, I tried to explain myself, even writing a three-thousand-word rebuttal in Frontiers LA, but the misrepresentations continued.
On August 14, 2012, the campaign reached my workplace in a whole new way when my dean informed me that I would have to turn over all emails from January 2009 onward that had anything to do with Mark Regnerus and his research team, Witherspoon Institute, Bradley Foundation, NOM, U.S. elected officials, the Romney campaign, Republican National Committee, and University of Texas officials.
A team of IT workers and student employees were allowed to access emails and turn them over to my off-campus accusers.
For a year, the provost’s office, dean’s office, and president’s office at Northridge were barraged with angry emails denouncing me and demanding that the university take action.
In August 2012, I spoke to the woman who was then the Associate Vice Provost, to explain my concerns about the fact that a student registered in my American Literature class was interning at the public relations office at California State University-Northridge, and thereby privy to all the hateful emails to university officials. I communicated with my chair about my concern that colleagues who were going to be reviewing me for tenure were receiving these emails as well. I spoke to campus police and asked for help.
My provost, dean, and chair did, in fact, protect me from the severest repercussions from such off-campus provocations, and I thank them for respecting academic freedom. But it was hard for me to see the good work they were doing as I dealt with daily enfilades from people at and outside the university.
In the American Literature class, friends of the bisexual female student who was working for public affairs filed a complaint against me with the Equity and Diversity Office, claiming I was a homophobe. They even alleged I had erections while teaching. The accusations were thrown out, but not before I had to hire a lawyer for an investigative hearing with the university attorneys.
A colleague who had received emails told me that he believed in the Freedom of Information Act and sided with my accusers; he ended up serving on my tenure review panel and interrogating me about my “personal revelations.”
The grants officer of the College of Humanities tried to block me from accessing grant money that had been given to me by outside donors. The Associate Vice Provost tried to block me from bringing Mickey Rooney to campus. In one phone call the following March, after receiving an email forwarded to her by a secretary who happens to be a lesbian mother, she ranted at me for my alleged unscrupulousness and dishonesty.
After I visited the European Union in Brussels with leaders of the French family movement, Manif pour Tous, the organizers of a gender studies conference at Lille University I was to attend told me the university administration did not want me on campus. More disinvitations followed. Three other universities had invited me to speak, but canceled over the concerns of administrators over hate speech.
GLAAD placed me on their “Commentator Accountability Project.” The Human Rights Campaign classified me as an “exporter of hate.” Days after GLAAD added me to their CAP list, my brother was approached at a dinner party and heckled over my status as a gay-hater.
After a year of my being banned from speaking on college campuses, courageous students at Notre Dame and Stanford succeeded in bringing me to campus over the objections of LGBT student groups. The police had to patrol the April 3 event at Notre Dame, while the Stanford event on April 5 transpired in a firestorm of controversy. Both groups that brought me to campus were banished from the student activities boards after I left.
The HRC’s “Exporters of Hate” report in September 2014 included a one-minute video and a “Wanted” poster with a caption saying I was being placed “on notice.” The YouTube page included my work location, email, and phone number. Though my friends and I have flagged and reported this comment as harassment, YouTube has still not taken it down.
The HRC then sent an email from Ty Cobb to all the group’s members on October 5-6, claiming that I delivered anti-gay comments at a World Congress of Families event. I do not belong to the World Congress of Families, have never attended a World Congress of Families event, and the quotation they attributed to me had nothing to do with my job at CSU Northridge (it came, actually, from my blog, and was mangled by Cobb.)
On the morning of October 6, I was greeted with a flurry of angry emails calling me a “bigot” and a “right-wing asshole,” plus voice mail messages calling me a “bag of shit” and telling me to perform a sexual act on myself. These emails were sent to the president, provost, and chair. I spent two days in meetings with the provost, the campus police, and my students to explain what was going on. Finally I had to resort to legal measures and had my lawyer send a letter to Chad Griffin, head of the HRC.
I doubt if anything will come of my efforts to make it stop. My appeal to the American Association of University Professors on grounds of academic freedom was dismissed with a curt note. My letter to the Modern Language Association was never acknowledged.
