In the Spring of 2001, Danne Polk began teaching a course called “Constructing and Deconstructing Homosexuality” at Villanova University, a conservative Catholic college located in Philadelphia.

As a philosophy teacher, Polk had spent years at the university instructing students in ethics courses, and had taught some politically charged marginal subjects like environmental ethics and eco-feminism, as well as traditional “Intro to Ethics” and “Classic American Philosophy” courses.

But this was the first time that the college had allowed him – or anyone – to present a course solely on a GLBT topic.

“It was a really amazing course,” says Polk, explaining that female teachers from the Theology and Biology departments joined him for a team-taught exploration of homosexuality in culture. “We worked really hard to get this course through, and we got it approved … which really surprised everybody.”

That a university – even a Catholic one – would offer such a course was not surprising in itself. Since the 1970s, when groups of women, Latino, African-American and ethnic groups organized consciousness movements, a steadily growing number of academic institutions have incorporated GLBT Studies programs into their curricula. Today, a number of prestigious universities hold GLBT Studies organizing committees – even entire departments. Majors in gay and lesbian studies are offered by Wesleyan University, the University of Chicago and Brown University, among others. Minors are offered by Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, State University of New York (SUNY), Bowdoin College, Humboldt State University and the University of Minnesota.

But the conservative atmosphere of Villanova put Polk’s course very much against the grain. Polk decided to create a web-based forum so that his students could have anonymous conversations outside of the classroom, as well as encouraging conversations within the classroom walls.

The website proved useful: As the course got underway, an attack from an ultra-conservative school newspaper put students on the defensive and inhibited not only learning, but open discussion of the issues within the classroom – making Polk’s teaching website, named erraticimpact.com and still running as a philosophy website today, even more crucial.

“It was a very right-wing, caustic attack on everything liberal happening on campus,” remembers Polk of the newspaper. “… And they got onto this course, and they started writing about it every week, and we really started fearing for the students.”

Polk, who taught a section of the course that focused on the use of language in culture, seized the bigotry of not only the school newspaper’s language but also of the Vatican itself, and used it as examples to teach about society’s linguistic constructions of homosexuality.

“I took the language that was coming out of that paper, and used that language as an example … and I also took language used by the Catholic Church and began looking at the language they’ve put on paper … and it was shocking to me … because I’d never really looked into it. And I realized as I was doing the course that I could never work for an institution that had that to say about me and my loved ones. I definitely changed my whole career.”

“Constructing and Deconstructing Homosexuality” was the last course Polk taught at Villanova before handing in his resignation.

By taking the language of politics and culture and applying them to philosophical and cultural studies for analysis by students in an academic setting, Polk joined a strong gay and lesbian studies tradition that dates back to the 1950s. That’s when University of California-Los Angeles psychologist Evelyn Hooker introduced a landmark study revealing that the psychological health of gay men didn’t differ from that of heterosexual men. As recently as 1997 the University of Southern California and the ONE Institute led research exploring the declassification of homosexuality as a disease in Western countries, leading to a decision by the Chinese Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.

But exactly how relevant is a course like “Homoeroticism in British Literature” (offered recently at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) to the larger GLBT community?

“I don’t know how important Queer Theory is,” admits Polk, who now facilitates several academic websites from his home in Reno, Nev., including one website called Queer Theory that examines current topics in academia. “In the scheme of things there might be other things that are happening that are much more important. People are out trying to change the vote. And philosophy particularly – it always kind of flabbergasts me how out of touch philosophy is with the rest of the world … figuring out some dead white male’s philosophical theories that have nothing to do with anything any more.”

However, Polk says, there’s something worthwhile about examining life’s big questions from a GLBT perspective.

“Queer Theory disrupts a lot of things, it’s unsettling,” says Polk. “It leads to general questions about identity, and political things like marriage and assimilation: ‘Should we get assimilated into the general culture?’ is a big question in academia … ‘Do we always want to be disrupting the status quo?’ These questions do leak out. It’s hard for me to say [how relevant it is] because I’ve been in academia all my life, but my first response is that [GLBT Studies] is a good thing. It’s like a gas line to what we’re dealing with all the time. It’s kind of disruptive, unsettling voice that we need.”

With dozens of queer studies courses offered across the nation, and many more in places like England and Canada, it’s not surprising that the university setting – which has historically fostered progressive movements, from Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam activism, to feminism – has begun to incorporate the GLBT experience into historical, sociological and cultural studies. Everything from theology and political science, to biology and musicology, are offering courses that take on a GLBT perspective.

And, in addition to the scholarship and scientific study that the academy can provide, queer cultural analysis by intellectual pioneers like Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley professor whose book, Gender Trouble, has had a big impact on identity scholarship, and Michael Warner, an English Professor at Rutgers who is equally comfortable lecturing on American Literature or sexual politics, can shake up the university establishment in a positive way.

“Queer Theory often … dealt with the question of nature vs. nurture: ‘Are queer bodies constructed or are they natural?’” says Polk. “And that’s a very political question. … So somebody like Butler brings up those questions … that even sex, not even sexuality or gender identity, but sex [itself] is sculpted by cultures … It kind of hearkens back to a mid-20th Century notion that we are nothing, literally no thing, and we’re created. We’re constructed by giant theories of things, and that can be very unsettling for people. People don’t want to believe that we’re a product of influence.”

Unfortunately, Polk’s pioneering course for Villanova turned out to be too unsettling for some of the university’s alumni, parents and perhaps even the city. Polk’s class inspired threats from alumni to withdraw funds from the university; it made the headlines in the Philadelphia Inquirer; and even made its way to the Vatican in the form of a letter to the Pope. The university itself, says Polk, was supportive of the course – but Polk himself didn’t quite recover from his new-found awareness of what he considers to be discriminatory language used by the Vatican.

“I wasn’t brought up Catholic,” says Polk, “ … but … looking at the Catholic tradition as an academic, there’s a basis created where all kinds of critique can take place – but when it gets outside the realm of academics, that’s where it becomes a problem.”

For students and scholars, the academic world can provide a place where assumptions and long-held beliefs are challenged without recriminations or judgement. As long as there are sacred beliefs shaping our culture, society will need a safe place to examine and reexamine those beliefs.

“… A few years back there were no Women’s Studies departments,” explains Polk, “and there were all these women who wanted to study Women’s Studies and there was no place. There are not that many Queer Theory programs, but the ones that are there offer this place to study something that is very important to quite a few people, so it creates this free space for learning.”

Talking with people who live between the GLBT community and academe brings out the importance of one of the most traditional aspects in any learning experience – books.

Ali Liebegott and Anna Joy Springer are two local writers who each have a foot in the academic world. Both hold Masters of Fine Arts degrees in writing, and teach at University of California San Diego. They are out, active women who bring their sexual orientation into the classroom – and they’re also a couple, who married last February during San Francisco’s mass marriage ceremonies.

Liebegott, whose book-length poem The Beautifully Worthless comes out next month on Suspect Thoughts Press, emphasizes that the books she introduces her students to strongly reflect her own youthful escape from society through literature. With a reading list that features writers like Anne Carson, Arundhati Roy, Linda Barry and Denis Johnson, Liebegott’s courses encourage exploration of different lives and identities in the classroom – and the discussions are often continued, she says, when students come to her office to hang out.

“I think a lot of the books that I’m really interested in, are [because] I grew up with a relationship with literature that was like an escape, and like an escape from my own sadness. And I was growing up in a time where there was less awareness of gays and lesbians – there were no TV shows about gays and lesbians and it was really isolating. So I try to have a varied reading list in many, many ways. … There’s always an issue. I always make sure I read to the class as a lesbian. … Themes in the books [include] incest, drug addiction, suicide – the students like the books for the most part, but it’s emotionally draining. … All sorts of discussions come up in class – everything.”

“It’s a community,” says Anna Joy Springer of the college experience. Springer also has a book coming out on Suspect Thoughts Press in the next year or so. “It’s a place where you get to talk about things, and it’s asking people to come together and talk critically about things that affect people’s lives. And there are very few other kinds of work that ask people to do that kind of thing.”

But as writers, Springer and Liebegott emphasize one of the most important aspects of a GLBT presence in the academic establishment, and that is the role of writing GLBT perspectives and voices into the culture at large.

As a gay writer, Springer explains that she gets students thinking about where their identity – and perhaps their identity politics – comes into their writing.

“Often,” says Springer, “because of the kinds of issues that I’m having them write about, their stories are issues of identity and contingencies of identity … and so they have to start thinking about how they place themselves in a historical and cultural context. And so I sort of model for them what I’m talking about and how my identity and my historical and cultural positioning informs my work, informs my aesthetic, and I ask them to start thinking about that sort of thing too.”

Gay writers writing gay characters is one way to present this valid, universal experience into popular and literary culture. Perhaps the dramatic increase in GLBT representation on television and in popular culture is reflective of the acceptance of GLBT visibility in areas of scholarship and the academic establishment.

“I just think it’s so important for even, like, terribly bad novels to come out with gay characters,” laughs Liebegott, who is working on a novel that includes more complicated gay characters than she says are usually found in pop-culture and on television. “In the novel that I’m working on there’s a big part of it [inspired by] when I was young, going to the library looking for gay books. And the only gay books were the ones evangelical Christians did about gay youth running around and doing things like siphoning gas, sort of like Go Ask Alice. Those were the ones that I used to run to the library to find … It was like, ‘Who am I in this?’ … I’m continually struck by how different it must be now growing up, even just [being able to see] two girls making out on TV.”

Springer also uses the classroom as a forum for writing – and rethinking – the queer experience.

“We’re not only doing counter-discursive talking,” says Springer, “we’re also practicing alternate ways of viewing people by creating characters and creating situations that are complicitous with popular media representations, and that also turn those representations against themselves. … Everyone has their relationship to their sexuality and their love,” says Springer, “so we talk about the kind of Queer Theory concept of queering – inverting heteronormative perspectives in all different sorts of ways … even … at the level of grammar and syntax.”

What all of these big words add up to, is a desire to make a difference in the world, through the world of ideas.

Polk’s class on deconstruction was really, he says, “something to do with some kind of reaching out. Half of the students were gay, and the other half had gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and so forth, and they were there to defend them. … So I guess Queer Theory does have important personal and political implications that extend out beyond the academy.”

Springer’s goals are even larger: “I want people to be able to write things that help other people perceive reality in a way that allows for more freedom and more peace for everyone, and more equity and more pleasure,” she says. “This is my world domination plan,” she laughs, realizing how ambitious her words sound. “This is on my to-do list every day, and it’s why I always feel like I’m not totally getting everything done.”