Pariah's plight: Past and present

American culture is notoriously vindictive. Society persecutes pariahs and uses scapegoats to feed the bonfires.

Thomas Lawrence Long has an interesting thesis, however: our society's relationship to the outcast is a strangely symbiotic one - and perhaps, in some ways, the pariahs can find power in their plight.

Long advanced this thesis before a rapt audience in the Rainbow Center on Wednesday, in his lecture "Plague of Pariahs: AIDS, Queer Identity and the Rhetoric of Transgression."

With a quiet, measured energy and an airy sense of humor, Long charted the course of Western society's treatment of the homosexual pariah, from its roots in Christian doctrine to the sudden influx of cultural capital brought on by "Rent" and similar films.

Human society has always marked the outcast, Long said, putting a star on his forehead. He then proceeded to move about the room, placing a similar sticker on the brows of the audience.

"The star by itself is natural," explained Long. "It doesn't really mean anything. It's just a mark. But if I were to say: 'Everyone who bears this mark is important and special,' then the people with the mark become people of status.

"In contrast, if I said everyone with the mark should be hated and reviled - then the mark becomes a stigma."

Thanks to some interpretations of the Bible, said Long, homosexuals have long faced such a stigma.

He described the evolution of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah from an indeterminate, vague evil to a cultural indictment of homosexuality.

"[The story] was a blank slate," Long said. "And what do you do with a blank slate? You project on it - you project what is horrible... The things inside yourself that cause anxiety."

But, he went on to explain, gays, lesbians and other sexual outcasts have developed a complicated relationship with their invisible mark.

"What if I say 'I'm going to make myself a pariah'?" Long asked. "Say I'm going to do everything in my power to embrace this stigma. I revel in it, I embrace it."

In this way, suggested Long, the stigma can be a source of cultural power, allowing the outcast to capture the attention of society.

And, as Long followed this stigma, from its origins to the present day, he wore four of the stars on his head - capturing the audience's attention himself.

"I loved the [star] sticker analogy," said Charles Berdan, a 4th-semester biological sciences major. "He touched on topics that I'd always known were there, but never put into thought."

Central to Long's thesis was this capturing of attention, the power of the outcast to appear in mainstream cultural media. Long highlighted recent mainstream movies and publications - "Rent" among them - that have placed the pariah in the public eye.

In comparison, Long described gays' and lesbians' attempts to define their identity themselves - through small-scale "'zines" and underground art movements.

"I feel like the idea of people trying to take back their identities, and really embracing the status of pariah - it's very compelling," said Victoria Flagg, a 4th-semester women's studies major. "[The lecture] was very insightful."

Long's lecture struck a fruitful vein - an omnipresent, but unnoticed, strand of history that runs from the past to the present.

And, as Berdan noted, it's a strand that we can't ignore in the present, not with the enormous amount of cultural power the media carries in our lives.

"I was impressed by the depth of his topic," Berdan said. "By how far back into history it went, and by how relevant it was to much of what happens today."