Advice and More

the perfect daughter

i am the perfect daughter through and through

i am meek

i am demure 

i am quiet

my words are soft

 and

   fall 

     to the floor

before they even reach their target

much like the goals and dreams

i’ve allowed to wither and die 

because they are

“unbecoming” 

of a girl. 

when i was born

i was a mere clump of clay

soft to the touch and easily moldable

each person that came into my life

shaped me to their idea of perfection 

so sometimes, i would curse and blame god for all my problems

other times i would be crass and jump head first into trouble

or i would simply sit still and look pretty

allowing others to admire and critique me 

like a prized painting hanging 

on the wall of the world’s greatest tragedies

“potential” would be the name of my painting

because that is all i am 

i have the potential to be a saint 

to be the greatest scientist, doctor, or lawyer 

i have the potential to be the best daughter, sister, wife, and mother 

but instead

i’m wasted potential

drowning in a pool of regrets and damning insecurities

the water has turned a dark murky black 

as the devil on my shoulder beats the angel into a mere husk 

of what used to be

positivity and goodness

yet, when I escape into a new world,

i am not wasted potential

i am invincible. 

• diya

While there are several events that could be argued to be the catalyst for the pride movement, it’s important to understand that it began in response to police brutality and was catalyzed by minorities within the LGBTQ community. 

The start of the Stonewall riot is one of the questions left unanswered, even today. The question of “who threw the first brick” is equally a genuine question and a sarcastic quip. There are conflicting stories as to whose action began the chaos, with one of the main beliefs being that the first brick was thrown by trans activist Marsha P. Johnson. Despite being a key figure in the NYC queer commuity, she was in fact NOT present for the beginning of the riots. In a podcast, she points out that while the rioting was happening downtown, she was uptown at a party. To this day, we still don’t know who had the courage to throw that first brick. 

Despite the details being blurry, one thing is clear about Stonewall: it was the first instance of queer people refusing their oppression and taking a stand for themselves. Without this moment, without Stonewall, one can only imagine what the state of queer rights would be today.

The AIDS Epidemic and Lesbians

Keira McDonough, EIC

The AIDS crisis was an epidemic of devastation that ravaged the queer community, specifically in the 80s and 90s. We all know the score by now: people died, Ronald Reagan did nothing, et cetera et cetera. But did you know that more people died of AIDS in a couple of years than all the American soldiers in the Vietnam War? Government archives attribute the American death toll in Vietnam to 58,220. According to the CDC, 202,520 people died of AIDS in the United States between 1988 and 1992. It ravaged the queer communities, especially in New York City. Tom Viola, executive director of the foundation Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, described that life for Playbill.com: "You would go into a rehearsal period, and before you could get to previews, people would have disappeared. People would've gotten sick and landed in the hospital, possibly to come out, possibly not" (Viola). Normally, the government would get involved in a disease of such massive scale. We all tracked government responses to COVID-19, even when case numbers were still in the thousands. However, the government itself admits that "[t]he federal response to AIDS [was] uncoordinated, insufficient and inadequate in particular with respect to the support of public health education and the financing of health care for AIDS patients" (Lee, Arno). AIDS was first discovered in 1981. Reagan did not publically address it until 1987, when over 50,000 had already died. Initially called "the gay cancer", the government allowed hundreds of thousands of healthy young men to die with no organized effort for a vaccine, or any awareness at all, based on the victims' sexualities.

Pauli Murray

Ella Stern, EIC

Note about Pauli Murray’s pronouns: Pauli Murray was born female and publicly identified as a woman. Many of the struggles they went through and work they did throughout their life were because of the sexism they experienced due to identifying as a woman. However, their writing often mentions questioning their gender and feeling like “a man in a woman’s body”, a “boy girl”, or something in between a man and a woman. Out of respect for their relationship with gender, the fact that they never figured out their identity, and their lack of terminology to correctly express themself, the podcast I listened to for research (History is Gay) referred to Murray with they/them pronouns, and I will do the same. 

Pauli Murray should be a household name. They pioneered the idea of intersectionality, wrote the logic that helped win Brown v. Board of Education, and were the reason that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment extends to discrimination based on sex. It's no wonder that historian Susan Ware said that “it may be that when historians look back on 20th century America, all roads will lead to Pauli Murray.” Despite this incredible list of accomplishments, I hadn’t heard of Pauli Murray until a few weeks ago, and they aren't even mentioned in many college classes about political science, civil rights, and law. Pauli Murray has been virtually erased from history because of their many queer identities, and it's time that everyone knows how many of their rights they owe to this incredible person. 

After Murray’s years at Hunter College and before they studied at Howard University, they engaged in a lot of civil disobedience. For instance, Murray started to become friends with Eleanor Roosevelt because they were the only one not to stand up when she walked in the room. Their friendship only grew as Murray developed a habit of writing strongly-worded letters to Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Then, right around the time that the Supreme Court decided that graduate programs had to accept Black students if there was no equivalent Black-only program, Murray was denied from UNC because of their race. They wrote to everyone from the president of the university to the president of the United States, and released their responses to the media in order to embarrass them into action. 

In 1941, over a decade before Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of the bus started the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Murray did the same thing. They hated segregation on buses the most out of all the types of segregation because it allowed white people to see Black people’s humiliation in close quarters. As such, when the seats in the back of a bus they were on were broken, Murray sat in the front and refused to move, and was subsequently jailed. The NAACP was interested in their case, but never took it up, possibly because they wanted the perfect figurehead for their movement, and Murray, between their relationships with women and their complicated relationship with gender, was not that. 

Later that year, Murray enrolled in Howard University with a letter of recommendation from none other than Thurgood Marshall. Upon entering, their sole intention was to abolish Jim Crow. At Howard, the entire faculty and their entire class was male, so Murray became a top student to prove that women deserved to go to law school. 

While at Howard, they coined the term “Jane Crow”, which is one of the first times a name was given to the all-important concept of intersectionality. “Jane Crow” refers to the fact that Black men and Black women experienced Jim Crow laws differently, that Black women were a minority within a minority, and that Black women could not separate their sex from their race.

Murray’s commitment to intersectionality extended further: they publicly criticized sexism within the civil rights movement. For instance, they called out A. Philip Randolph, who organized the March on Washington (along with Bayard Rustin, another queer person erased from the history of the civil rights movement), for the lack of female speakers at the March. Subsequently, Murray advocated for a March on Washington and a NAACP specifically for women. This caught the attention of prominent feminist Betty Freidan, who ended up working with Murray to found the National Organization for Women (NOW). However, Murray ended up distancing themself from NOW when it began to focus its efforts too much on white women.

Pauli Murray’s impact on civil rights law didn’t end there: they're the reason that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment applies to sex. In a continuation of their work, the part of the Equal Protection Clause that they established has been used ever since to expand rights for women, and, later, LGBTQ+ people. For example, Murray was such an influence for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg that she recognized Murray as a coauthor in Reed v. Reed (1971), which held that an Idaho law discriminating against women in the naming of administrators of estates violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Recently, Murray’s logic has been extended to include gender discrimination, which made it illegal for trans and nonbinary people to be fired for their identities. 

Murray also helped ensure that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included protection against discrimination based on sex. Opponents of this idea argued that the bill should focus on Black people because including women would make the bill less successful. Murray countered by circling back to their ideas of “Jane Crow” and intersectionality, saying that the bill could not protect only half of the Black population. 

Another peak of Murray’s career, which some consider to be their big break, was being asked to write a summary of state segregation laws in order to expose loopholes that Black people could work around. The people that commissioned this writing expected a pamphlet, but Murray produced an almost 800-page book. This book ended up being used in most civil rights arguments, and Thurgood Marshall referred to it as the Bible of the civil rights movement. 

While these were Murray’s most impactful moments, their education and career expanded further. They went to no fewer than four colleges: Hunter College, Howard University, UC Berkeley, and Yale. In fact, in 1965, they were the first Black person to get a doctor of jurisprudence degree from Yale Law School. Very few people in general get this high of a law degree. Murray also studied to become an Episcopal priest at the General Theological Seminary in 1973, and became part of an early generation of “female” priests. In addition to all the colleges they did get into, Murray was routinely rejected from colleges for their race or sex, which added to their concept of intersectional discrimination. 

With this extensive resume and far-reaching influences on civil rights law and the human rights that so many Americans hold, Pauli Murray should not only be mentioned in school and everyday conversation, there should be entire classes on their life and legacy. There should be, but they were queer, so they slipped through the cracks of history. To counter the injustice of their erasure, we must learn their story, including their queerness. 

In 1930, Murray was married to a man, William “Billy” Flynn—for two days. Murray broke off the marriage on their honeymoon. Their resistance to relationships with men didn’t extend only to Flynn: Murray once remarked, “Why is it when men try to make love to me, something in me fights?”

Despite their relationships with women, Pauli Murray never self-described as a lesbian. This choice may have stemmed in part from societal stigma, including stigma within their Black community (yet another example of intersectional oppression in Murray’s life), but it was likely also due to their complex gender identity. 

Murray’s writings and actions make it clear that they never felt like a woman. They have described themself as “a man in a woman’s body” and “a boy girl”, and explained that they “prefer experimentation on the male side instead of attempted adjustment as a normal woman”. They also sometimes described themself in a less binary way, saying that “maybe two got fused into one with parts of each sex: male head and brain, female-ish body, mixed emotional characteristics.” Even at a young age, Murray never went by their given name, Anna Pauline. Instead, they tried out the masculine nicknames Paul, Pete, and Dude before finally settling on Pauli. Murray enjoyed using the men’s room and being mistaken for a man. Wearing their clerical collar and viewing a collection of pictures in which they look androgynous or masculine gave them what we might now call gender euphoria.

However, their gender often made Murray’s life feel, in their own words, “unbearable”. Especially without the language and visibility we have today, Murray was endlessly frustrated about their inability to feel like a woman. They didn’t want to think something was wrong with them as a person, so they sought medical explanation for feeling masculine and being attracted to women. Not only did Murray collect newspaper clippings about experiments with hormones, they asked doctors to inspect them for signs of male genitalia and abnormally high testosterone. They were devastated when neither of these were found. They even attempted to receive gender-affirming treatment, such as hormone therapy, but were unfortunately unsuccessful.  

A fairly clear sign that Murray was not straight or cisgender was the fact that, while they were dying of pancreatic cancer, they chose to donate their personal writing to Harvard. These papers included extensive documentation of their struggles with gender and sexuality. Murray’s decision to make their queerness part of their legacy was incredibly brave and powerful. However, in a cruel twist of irony, their attempts at forming a legacy have contributed to their erasure. 

Pauli Murray has done so much for this country. They not only popularized the idea of intersectionality, they made invaluable strides in the marginalized communities they were a part of. Without their legal work, countless Americans—Black people, women, gay people, trans and nonbinary people, and more—would not be able to claim what rights they have today. We must listen to what Pauli Murray told us about intersectionality by actively fighting the erasure they face due to their identity. Schools, including Natick High School, must work towards this by teaching about Pauli Murray and other individuals erased from history. 

Pauli Murray should be a household name.  

SCOTUS Cases Advancing LGBTQ Rights This Past Decade

Jia Kumar

This last decade, there have been many Supreme Court cases regarding LGBTQ rights. I have explained three of them that have had a great impact in advancing LGBTQ rights. It is important to note that these cases have built upon one another.

The Defense of Marriage Act was a federal act which established the term “marriage” as between one man and one woman, and “spouse” as the person of the opposite sex with whom one is in a legal union. Due to this act, the marriage between Windsor and Spyer was not recognized under the federal law, so Windsor needed to pay taxes that she would not have had to pay had she been married to someone of the opposite sex.

Windsor challenged the Defense of Marriage Act, looking for it to be declared unconstitutional. Initially, the government took a stance that it would protect the act. A group in the House of Representatives petitioned for a dismissal of the case in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, but it was denied by the district court. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Windsor with a 5-4 majority, effectively overturning the Defense of Marriage Act.

Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)

Before this ruling, it was up to the states to legalize same-sex marriage. Many same-sex couples had filed lawsuits against their own states in order to legalize it. James Obergefell and John Arthur James were legally married in Maryland in 2013. Shortly after, James died, and the state refused to indicate that Obergefell was his spouse on his death certificate. (They were in Ohio, where same-sex marriage was still illegal). This was similar to United States v. Windsor (2013) in the sense that it was based upon an individual who was denied the traditional rights of a widow or widower after their spouse of the same sex died.

The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution entitles all Americans to equal protection and due process under the law. Marriage was covered under the Equal Protection Clause, which is part of the Fourteenth Amendment. This clause was used to legalize interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967) with the argument that the right to marriage cannot be denied based on race.

Bostock v. Clayton County (2019)

Gerald Bostock is a gay man who had worked for Clayton County, Georgia since 2003. After around ten years of working there, Bostock joined a gay softball league. However, he faced backlash from many others in his workplace, and was fired shortly after for “conduct unbecoming of its employees”.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on many identity factors, such as race, religion, and sex.

Bostock filed a lawsuit against Clayton County in 2016 under the argument that Clayton County had violated Title VII by discriminating against him for being gay. According to his interpretation, Title VII was supposed to protect Bostock from workplace discrimination based upon his sexual orientation. This case was dismissed by the district court because sexual orientation was not covered in Title VII. However, Bostock appealed, and his case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor 6-3. Ultimately, this lead to Title VII including the protection of both gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.