Dr. Jarm

Jesus cast the demons into pigs. I offered to take them instead. They’re teaching assistants now. Unionized.

Omg

Happy Pride from Dr. Jarm.
You are sacred. You are scholarly. You are still here.
Come as you are. Leave glitter on the altar. Office hours are open.

Pride is not a party for palatability.
It’s not a corporate holiday.
It’s a chaotic seminar of self-invention.
Attendance is optional. Glitter is mandatory.

To the queer theologians, pastors, poets, screamers, and saints:
Thank you. You made room in the temple for the rest of us.
You taught us that worship can be a dance, a protest, a kiss.

Pride is a kind of worship.
A sermon in sequins.
A Eucharist of chosen family.
A baptism in sweat, light, and refusal to die quietly.

Pride is protest. Pride is party. Pride is paperwork denied, and a kiss anyway.
Pride is screaming and resting.
Pride is the syllabus we write when no one else will teach us how to live.

To the closeted ones:
You owe no one your truth until it feels safe.
Your heart is not on a deadline.
You are still real. Still queer. Still holy.

To my queer students:
You do not need to be respectable to be real.
You do not need to be explainable to be loved.
You are not a “teachable moment.”
You are the curriculum.

My office bookshelf holds theory and tinsel.
Sedgwick leans against a jar of glitter.
Butler’s notes are bookmarked with a wristband from a 1998 protest and a receipt from a diner where someone whispered “I think I’m gay.”
This is research. This is sacred.

Pride is not permission. It’s resistance.
It is joy under surveillance.
It is theory in stilettos.
It is choosing yourself on the days the world tries to redact you.

My belief is this:
If God is love, then queerness is holy.
If Christ walked with the outcast, then He walks the parade route too, with a tambourine and a trans flag tied to his belt.

To be queer is not to be outside the divine.
You were never meant to be banished from the pew or the pulpit.
You are a psalm in sneakers. A benediction in glitter. A holy text walking upright.

A reminder: queer history is not linear.
It loops. It screams. It gets banned from the curriculum.
Then it shows up anyway in footnotes, subtext, fashion, and longing.
Pride is both presence and haunting.

Hell yeah brother

People ask me if I believe in demons. I say: I’ve chaired three committees this year. Draw your own conclusions.

Had to tell a student today: “Yes, you may write your final paper in blood. Just cite your sources.”

End of thread. Not the end of the resistance.
Harvard gave me its libraries and its myths.
Chicago gave me its ferocity.
And my past, present, and future students give me every reason to keep screaming.

I stand with you. I will write your letters. I will fax your appeals. I will hiss behind closed doors and gnaw through whatever red tape they create.
Education must not bow to borders.

To the students feeling abandoned:
You are not an afterthought. You are the engine.
American academia would collapse into its own irrelevance without your presence.

My courses at UChicago remain open in spirit and in practice. If the gates are locked, we’ll hold class in the alley behind the archive. Education has always survived in exile. It is, in many ways, most alive there.

What we’re witnessing is xenophobia cosplaying as policy.
It’s nationalism with a diploma frame.
And yes, it’s unchristlike.
To slam the door on the curious while preaching enlightenment is theological hypocrisy.

International students don’t just “add flavor” to institutions. They bring frameworks, epistemologies, and stories that rewire the syllabus from the inside out.
They don’t diversify; they destabilize. That’s where real education begins.

The international students I’ve taught work twice as hard with half the security. Learning in a foreign country, across languages and bureaucracies, is already a heroic act.
Now you’re telling them their presence is conditional? That’s not policy. That’s cruelty.

I've taught courses on horror, media theory, and garbage theology.
Let me be absolutely clear:
What the government is doing is horror, not metaphorically, but structurally, functionally, and bureaucratically. A ghost story where the door is locked & the welcome mat is a trapdoor

I teach at the University of Chicago now. But I remember what Harvard gave me: grit, paradox, and voices from every hemisphere.
If you strip international students out of that equation, what’s left?
A mirror. And mirrors don’t teach you anything.

As someone who earned my B.A., Master of Divinity, and Ph.D. in Theology from Harvard, let me begin here: this move to ban international students from Harvard is a calculated act of intellectual exclusion, and it dishonors the very ideals Harvard champions.

Released #onthisday in 1958 is the film I met one of the best friends I've had in my life: House on Haunted Hill.

Wasn't the first time I'd worked with Castle. Was the first time I worked with Vincent.

He used to have me over while he cooked and we'd talk for hours. Miss you, buddy.

Gotta repost my bangers on this app

Anyway, the city? Looks like it's overflowing with trash, but it's all bodies.

Fuckin' bummer.

The people?

Shit.

The possums?

Starting our own commune.

But that one dude stabbing everyone to death is Bill Moseley, and I've loved him since we worked together on TCM 2.

(Yeah, this is an oldie)