The Forcible Haircut

Mitt Romney in the Cranbrook yearbook: “Give a guy enough rope and he’ll hang himself.” (Photo credit: The New York Times)

The Washington Post
wrote this week about Mitt Romney’s time at the Cranbrook prep school,
highlighting an incident in which Romney led a group in assaulting a
fellow student. When Romney saw soft-spoken new student John Lauber with
bleach-blond hair hanging over one eye, Romney told his friend, “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!”
Later Romney led his friends to Lauber’s dorm room where they held down
the terrified student while Romney hacked at Lauber’s hair with
scissors. Lauber was crying and screaming for help. The Washington Post
verified the story by independently interviewing five people who were
students at Cranbrook at the time and who witnessed or participated in
the assault. After Lauber was attacked by Romney and his friends,
“Lauber seemed to disappear. He returned days later with his shortened
hair back to its natural brown. He finished the year but ultimately left
the school before graduation — thrown out for smoking a cigarette.”
(Lauber’s sisters disagree that he allowed his hair to return to it’s
natural color, saying “he never stopped bleaching it,” keeping blond
hair until his death from liver cancer in 2004.)

Romney’s Response

When the Washington Post story broke, Romney’s campaign said that he
had no memory of the incident. (Contrast this with the interviews with
the other men involved in the attack who were later horrified at their
own behavior, some of them apologizing to Lauber. Phillip Maxwell, who
helped hold Lauber down while Romney cut Lauber’s hair, questions if
Romney has truly forgotten the attack. Maxwell told the New York Times,
“I would think this would be seared in his memory…. Certainly for the
other people that were involved, nobody has forgotten.”) Then Romney
gave a weak apology in an interview on a Fox News radio show:

“Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if
anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for
that. I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high
school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize…”

Why does that apology sound so insincere? Because it’s conditional.
It only kicks in as an apology if one happens to be hurt or offended,
never mind just assuming that when someone is bullied and physically
assaulted that people (especially the victim) are both hurt and
offended. Romney then takes issue with the article for portraying
Lauber as a target for such “hijinks” because of, according to the
Washington Post, Lauber’s “nonconformity and presumed homosexuality”:

“I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.”

What Romney Doesn’t Get

Here’s what Romney doesn’t get about anti-gay bullying: he assumes
that if the bully didn’t know or even presume that the victim was gay
that it’s not “anti-gay bullying,” it’s just “hijinks.” There are many
out queer students who are bullied every day because of their sexual
orientation. And there are many students who are bullied every day
because they are presumed to be queer. Some of those presumed to be
queer are straight and others come out later in life (as John Lauber
did). This happens today and it happened when Romney was a teenager. And
in the past, when sexual orientation and gender identity were less
openly discussed (and identity politics as we know it had yet to emerge)
much of the bullying that went on was not tied to a named identity
assigned to the victim. While homosexuality was not the furthest thing
from everyone’s minds in the 1960s, I do believe Romney when he says that it was the furthest thing from his mind. From Romney’s heterocentic viewpoint, he couldn’t
conceive of the possibility of Lauber being gay. But just because
Romney didn’t presume Lauber’s homosexuality doesn’t mean that his
assault on Lauber shouldn’t be considered under the umbrella of
“anti-gay bullying.” Romney may not have attached Lauber’s gender presentation to a sexual orientation, but that doesn’t change why Romney bullied him: Romney assaulted Lauber for transgressing gender norms (as defined by Romney.)
In the end, it doesn’t matter if Lauber was gay or if Romney presumed
he was gay; Romney attacked Lauber because of his flamboyant gender
presentation (“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong.”), and that’s
anti-gay bullying.