Tag Archives | Gender

Beyond Tolerance

Looking into the history of the India Point Project for yesterday’s post, I was struck by how our description of ourselves and our organizations changed as we became more visible to the mainstream. Take two articles from the same publication, by the same author, describing community groups meeting at two different locations. In this 2002 Bay Windows article, one of the partners in the still yet-to-open India Point Project was described as “the Enforcers (a gay social group that funds nonprofits)”. But in this 1999 article about the groups displaced by the closure of RITA’s Place, the same group is described as “Enforcers RI, a group of leather, S&M and fetishist people that conducts fundraising for AIDS and other causes”. I remember when the Enforcers were still around – they met at AIDS Project RI when I worked there and were my first exposure to an organized leather community. While they were certainly very engaged in raising funds for LGBT groups, I wonder how they felt about having their central purpose vanillafied to “a gay social group that funds nonprofits”.

Part of the reason that I left full-time LGBTQ activism is that I didn’t want to sell the “we’re just like everybody else” line. (Also because the pay and the hours sucked, but that’s a post for another time.) Our movement was launched out of the closet by a police raid on a club full of drag queens, butches, gutter punks, homeless queer youth and sex workers who couldn’t be pushed any farther (see pic below), but we’ve lost track of our roots. We’ve moved from Stonewall Riots to Stonewall Kitchen. As I said to Jef a while ago, there’s no gay sex in the gay rights movement, because talking about gay sex makes people feel squirmy and we’re just here for our rights. I guess I’m sort of a bourgeois queer liberationist, believing that there are differences in our various subcultures which should be embraced and celebrated. As the gay rights movement nationally moved toward a set of mainstream ideals (queers should have the right to get married and join the army), and sold out our trans brothers and sisters again and again, I got very personally disillusioned with the work, and very concerned about my own ability to personally represent the party line. We started to push a “teaching tolerance” agenda that I just couldn’t get behind. I don’t want to be tolerated, like a bad smell or a too cold meal. I don’t want to be asked to change or pretend or tone it down and stop making people uncomfortable. I want to be part of a liberation movement that asks us all to confront our own discomfort and recognize that difference is beautiful and vital and critical.

I’m not sure how to end this post except to acknowledge that this is an ongoing conversation that I hope keeps happening within and outside queer communities. I’d love to have some of it here, so please feel free to respond or repost.

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My new Love

Don’t start any rumors, I’m keeping my old love, and not just because I’m afraid to give up the political connections our partnership contains. But I’ve got a new love: local anonymous queer propagandists f.i.e.r.c.e.n.e.s.s.. They have posted a really excellent text on privilege and queerness, which I’m happy to attribute to its author if they come forward….

It’s not just what you know — it’s what you never have to know. It’s happening every day, at that party or park or potluck, when you can look like what you really are and touch who you really want to touch without feeling like you’re violating others’ expectations. It’s never being forced to examine accepted ideas of gender and sexuality, despite their arbitrary nature. It’s never having to realize that people are seeing you as something you know you are not.

Privilege is about safety and belonging. It lies hidden in identities and desires that don’t need to be justified or defended or even spoken of, because they reaffirm the identities and desires of most of the people around you. Privilege is assuming, before you even get there, that your gender and your sexuality are welcome and expected wherever you might want to go. (emphasis mine)

I don’t know about you but I think about how welcome my gender and sexuality will be whenever I go out, and I’m almost always prepared to be unexpected at best. It doesn’t usually influence where or when I go, or much of how I present myself, but it certainly influences my feeling of armoring up to go out into the world. Being visibly queer is a complicated thing, and many brilliant folks I know are marginalized because of it. Being accepted in the mainstream is lovely in many ways, but it comes with the pressure to be acceptable to the mainstream. I think hard about where I am and am not willing to compromise. (I don’t shave my legs, but I always wear pants.) My gender is not an unconscious thing – it’s something I do, think about, wrestle with, and prepare to confront folks about on a daily basis.

I’ve been hearing some pushback that some recent queer events have been hostile to folks perceived to be heterosexual or heteronormative. This is not part of my vision of queer liberation. I’d love to think and talk more about how we create spaces to be queer in its original sense: transgressive and nonconformist, outside the norm. Not to rigidly expect that everyone look like us, or that only freaks and outlaws be invited, but where the new norm is no norm. Because we all deserve the privilege of feeling like we’re welcome and expected.

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Around New England: CT House Approves Transgender Discrimination Bill

While Representatives in Rhode Island were busy passing Civil Union Legislation, in Connecticut (where same-sex marriage is legal) the House was passing a bill to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity

House Approves Transgender Discrimination Bill
CTnow.com:

HARTFORD —— After five hours of sometimes emotional debate Thursday night, the House of Representatives voted 77-62 to approve a controversial bill intended to protect members of the transgender community from discrimination.

The bill, which now goes to the Senate, would prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity or expression” in employment, public accommodations, the sale or rental of housing, the granting of credit and other laws that fall under the jurisdiction of the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.

The bill defines “gender identity or expression” as a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not it is different from that assigned at birth or traditionally associated with the person’s physiology. Its provisions would go into effect Oct. 1.

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