13
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
· 13.1 Assess queer representation in documentary films.
· 13.2 Explain the significance of film and music festivals to queer and trans community building.
· 13.3 Describe the contributions of music specifically composed by and for queer people.
· 13.4 Identify the emergence of print media specifically for LGBTQ people.
· 13.5 List the diversity of queer and trans expression and worldmaking in the contemporary world.
The experience of living queer has typically been located at the crossroads of embodiment and disembodiment. We are defined by our corporeal selves, our sexual desires and affectional preferences. As David Bell and Jon Binnie write, “[E]roticism is the basis of [our] community” (87). We tell each other to come out because we wish to be visible as queer; we wish to embody a real identity. Simultaneously, we are sometimes disembodied by our cultures. We are ordered to disappear, to inhabit a closet where we can’t be seen by the straights, the young, and the innocent. We are told not to “speak its name,” not to “flaunt it.” Our experience of culture—our sexual citizenship, as it were—is fraught with this uncomfortable double consciousness. We often engage in commerce, in the arts, in political activism, precisely to find a visible, viable place in our culture, a place where our embodied identities need not feel the erasure of a closeting hegemony. Jeffrey Weeks argues that the sexual citizen “makes a claim to transcend the limits of the personal sphere by going public, but the going public is, in a necessary but nevertheless paradoxical move, about protecting the possibilities of private life and private choice.” This way of doing citizenship, Weeks goes on to say, is the only way that “difference can [ever] find a proper home” (37). Let us think about the concept of home as it relates to LGBTQ people.
Gays and lesbians do not have a “home” to return to, either in territorial/historical terms or in the sense of present-day enclaves; most gays and lesbians live amidst their heterosexual families and neighbors without the promise even of a local community center to find affirmation and support. Most grow up convinced that they are “the only one” in their communities. Urban centers ameliorate this situation for those with the resources and desire to relocate, but such relocation involves a separation from, and often a rejection of, their community of birth. Those who do not want to live in cities, or who cannot so choose, often live their lives in isolation. Even those who create a home, or a common culture are in a situation drastically different from that faced by racial, ethnic, or national groups; such cultures and homes are created as adults, after the experience of isolation and rejection from one’s family and community. (Phelan 30)
Queer “homes,” then, are intensely sought after but (for many) ephemeral spaces, purchased through the pink economy, that mythical entity accessible only to white, rich, entitled gay men and lesbians.
How queers create that sense of home, or how they come to feel at home in the larger cultures in which they live, has been the subject of both serious and playful attention. Several books on “how to be gay” poke fun at normative constructions of LGBTQ identity. For instance, So You Want to Be a Lesbian? A Guide for Amateurs and Professionals, by Liz Tracey and Sydney Pokorny, covers a variety of topics from coming out, flirting, and the promises (and pitfalls) of monogamy to lesbian culture, lesbian cuisine, lesbian vehicles, and “dyke cult heroes.” Full of humor and fun “facts,” So You Want to Be a Lesbian? much like its companion volume, The Unofficial Gay Manual, is largely a parody of a popular genre, the self-help book. While these books are mostly tongue-in-cheek, the popularity of such “guides” suggests a relatively normative sense of what it means to be gay or lesbian. A comparable book has appeared for bisexuals, The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe: Quips, Tips, and Lists for Those Who Go Both Ways, by Nicole Kristal and Mike Szymanski. And for trans folk, the Transgender Guide offers “steps to success” in coming out and dating. More seriously, books such as Virtually Normal by Andrew Sullivan and A Place at the Table by Bruce Bawer argue that gays and lesbians should strive to fit into the dominant culture, adopting its nonhomophobic norms to increase tolerance for gay people.
British writer Mark Simpson’s edited collection, provocatively titled Anti-Gay, critiques such assimilationist moves and argues for valuing a more transgressive kind of queerness:
That many non-heterosexuals were already itching to escape from gay’s clingy, cartoony embrace has already been demonstrated with queer [There was] initially at least a strong strain of punkish transgression running through queer which was quite liberating for many. Groups like Homocult, the situationist art collective in Manchester, who specialized in “negative” images of homosexuality; North American zinesters like Bimbox who arguably invented queer; the work of film directors like Bruce LaBruce, Tom Kalin, and Todd Haynes who, as Kalin put it, aimed to put the “homo” back in “homicide”; and Queercore, a bad-attitude trash sound attracting a younger generation of deviants who didn’t want or weren’t wanted by what they took to be heterosexuality but didn’t want to sip cappuccino on Old Compton Street or Santa Monica Boulevard either. (xv)
Indeed, while some LGBTQ activists and artists may transgress the norms of the larger cultures in which they live, other queers focus attention on troubling normative expectations within their communities. These artists and activists often feel that queer people are too quick to assimilate into larger cultures, unwilling to examine their sexual prejudices and repressions. Some of them also believe that queers have simply become another commodity market, full of consumers who are eager to buy the latest cars, don the latest fashions, and sport the latest “must-have” gadgets, knickknacks, and art. In recent years especially, many young (and not-so-young) LGBTQ people have openly refused what they see as the limits of the terms gay and lesbian. At the same time, however, the perceived need for an identity marker, a “home” and community referent, remains. We note, for instance, that there are no fewer than 32 terms for various nonbinary gender categories in Wikipedia’s “List of Nonbinary Identities.” Queer folks still seek to belong; but they now face the challenge of identifying with a particular group in a world where fluidity has become a primary value.
In this chapter, we consider how some types of alternative media—as opposed to the more mainstream media products discussed earlier in this book—are used by LGBTQ people to build their own queer culture and community. We classify as “alternative” those media that have two characteristics: they aim to reach a particular (limited) audience, specifically a group that seeks knowledge and validation of a point of view, and they lie outside the realm of “mainstream” media, that is, high-budget, high-visibility productions that stand to gross millions of dollars at the box office, newsstand, or bookstore. Any of the media we discussed earlier— film, television, and the internet—can have both mainstream and alternative manifestations. For instance, documentary films, unlike feature films, are typically shown in small-seating art theaters. They play to an educated, culturally elite audience, and studios spend little on advertising and promotion. Keeping this distinction between mainstream and alternative in mind, we begin with the assumption that cultural artifacts—such as comic strips, independent documentary films and music, LGBTQ newspapers and newsletters, and even festivals such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF)—are produced and consumed to fulfill needs. One of the overriding needs seems to have to do with the search for community, a sense of home.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS
The documentary Flag Wars (Zeitgeist 2003, directed by Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras) was advertised as “a poignant account of the politics and pain of gentrification. Working-class black residents in Columbus, Ohio, fight to hold on to their homes. Realtors and gay homebuyers see fixer-uppers. The clashes expose prejudice and self-interest on both sides, as well as the common dream to have a home to call your own” (“Flag Wars”). On one level, the opposition is direct: “We didn’t have any problems till they moved in here,” says a straight Black resident. “If you don’t want to renovate it, don’t live in it,” counters a white gay man. But Flag Wars is far more complex than this simple juxtaposition might suggest. It elucidates some traditional cultural divides: between rich and poor, gay and straight, black and white, even traditional and contemporary. These divides complicate what can be characterized as the search for community undertaken by many LGBTQ people. It’s not uncommon to think of LGBTQ people as displaced and disenfranchised, and those characterizations are in many ways accurate, but this film asks what happens when the supposedly disenfranchised have access to the culture’s resources—money and the legal system, for example—and use them to enfranchise themselves in new locations. The questions addressed in Flag Wars have to do with what happens when LGBTQ people begin establishing homes in locations where others are already living, and with balancing the benefits to a community when property is materially “improved” at the cost of pricing out those who already live in it.
Jon Binnie reminds us that “[i]t is one of the touchstones of the geographies of sexualities that it is only possible to be queer in certain places and spaces. The search for fixity is one in which gay men and lesbians participate endlessly” (82). Flag Wars shows us both the need that gay gentrifiers have for habitable home space and community in an often-hostile world and the need current residents of urban neighborhoods must hold on to the home spaces that sustain them. Both see themselves as the “rightful” inhabitants of the neighborhood—gentrifiers because their work “improves” the area’s cultural capital and the current residents because they have built lives for themselves in the very homes others would “improve.” Although the film seems at first to lay blame for the community conflict at the feet of gay white people—like a lesbian real estate agent whose attitude could be described as predatory—the filmmakers are finally careful to show “that villain and hero, victim and victimizer, good and bad are aspects of all of us” (Bryant). We see how both groups—Black residents and gay gentrifiers—have been victimized by social, cultural, and legal forces. The real estate agent, referring to a string of muggings and robberies, justifies her presence in the neighborhood by saying, “We’re all busting our ass out here trying to make a difference.” A Black community leader fighting to keep a colorful sign over his front door in defiance of housing codes remarks, “They’ve got a free right to occupy. It’s our responsibility to keep our own identity.” Flag Wars illustrates the inevitable tensions not only between continuing residents and incoming gentrifiers but also between oppressions based on race and class and sexuality. The Black community leader who recognizes the need to “keep our own identity” is acknowledging how difficult it can be to resist what Sarah Schulman calls the “gentrification of the mind” [λ Chapter 4].
In Flag Wars, then, the issue of identity for both groups is key to their understanding of home. In some of the same ways, the documentary film Shinjuku Boys (20th Century Vixen, 1995, directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams) explores the connection between identity—in this case, a few so-called Onnabes, described by the narrator as “women who have decided to live as men”—and the quest for place. The film is set in Japan and follows several Onnabes working in Tokyo’s New Marilyn Club, whose clientele is “almost exclusively heterosexual women who have become disappointed with born men” (“Annabe”). The melancholy tone of the film results primarily from the exclusion experienced by the Onnabes—not only from tradition-bound patriarchal Japanese culture but also from that culture’s normative identity categories. Although the women who visit the New Marilyn Club consider the Onnabes “ideal men” and compete for their attention, outside the club, the “boys” themselves, living as men but without the privilege of men born men, lack a home in the culture. In some of the same ways, the well-known documentary Paris Is Burning (Miramax, 1990, directed by Jennie Livingston) “focuses on drag queens living in New York City and their ‘house’ culture, which provides a sense of community and support for the flamboyant and often socially shunned performers” (“Paris Is Burning”). The house system, complete with mothers and fathers and other family members, is designed to provide a home and a family to people oppressed in multiple simultaneous ways: by sexuality, by race (most are of color), by ethnicity (most are Latin), or by gender expression. A more up-to-date documentary, Kiki, examines a newer kind of ballroom culture centering LGBTQ youth in the 2000s. According to the film’s website, Kiki focuses on “[t]he spectacular Kiki balls, a consistent component of the Kiki subculture, [which] offer performers a safe and empowered space to enact various modes of gender expression, including a stylized femininity that, if executed in the communities in which they grew up in, could provoke ridicule and violence. Kiki scene-members range in age from young teens to 20’s, and many have been thrown out of their homes by their families or otherwise find themselves on the streets. As LGBTQ people-of-color, they constitute a minority within a minority” (http://www.kikimovie.com/synopsis) [λ Chapter 7]. Another documentary, Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World (After Stonewall Productions 2003, directed by John Scagliotti), offers narratives from lesbian, gay, and transgender-identified people in the Global South who are seeking both physical safety and a sense of home in often extremely hostile environments. Opening with the story of a Cairo resident, Ashraf Zanati, who was “tortured, humiliated, beaten and forced to spend 13 months in prison” (Dangerous Living), the film shows how queer visibility in some parts of the world can complicate the move to create community. The film characterizes the search for home in highly personal ways. Zanati powerfully declares, “My sexuality is my own sexuality. It doesn’t belong to anybody. Not to my government, not to my brother, my sister, my family. No.” Zanati sees the claiming of his sexuality as a move away from his family, perhaps even his country of origin. But the reality of sexuality lies in its embeddedness, not just in personal conceptions of self but in social, cultural, and even political matrices. The search for home, then, can rarely be an individual journey, as personal as it may seem; it is often a collective journey, as groups attempt to form new families, communities, and counter publics.
Figure 13.1 Still from Shinjuku Boys.
Shinjuku Boys. Image courtesy of Vixen Films
FILM AND MUSIC FESTIVALS
Film and music festivals have historically been configured as locations where LGBTQ people can meet to enjoy creative expressions of queer identification. These festivals are venues for viewing and distributing truly independent films whose makers lack the deep pockets for advertising that mainstream filmmakers enjoy. LGBTQ film festivals are commonplace in many parts of the world. A quick Google search provides links to advertisements for film festivals in many countries—Italy, Australia, the United States, the Canary Islands, Spain, and Canada, to name just a few. In fact, the PlanetOut website lists more than 150 lesbian and gay film festivals, many of which occur annually. This proliferation leads GLBTQ.com to ask whether these film festivals are “still necessary given the significant number of gay-themed films now seeing wider theatrical distribution” [λ Chapter 11]. In many ways, the answer is yes, they are, given that queers are a “complex people yearning for the experience of community—being together, sharing our different realities, exchanging ideas, cruising each other.” LGBTQ film festivals are one of the “relatively few places where we get to experience community” (“Film Festivals”).
Like film festivals, music festivals provide spaces for LGBTQ people to create community through creative expression. Gay & Lesbian Association (GALA) Choruses has as its mission “to support GLBT choruses as we change our world through song.” Claiming the Philadelphia-based Anna Crusis Women’s Choir, founded in 1975, as their “most-tenured” group, GALA boasts a membership of more than 100 choruses and 10,000 singers worldwide. The organization, which hosts periodic international and regional gatherings, holds concerts that attract not only queer participants but major musical and arts celebrities, such as Maya Angelou, Natalie Cole, Liza Minnelli, Holly Near, and Kate Clinton (“About GALA Choruses”). GALA festival performances are often profound experiences for participants, reflecting the diversity of queer life and community. Catherine Roma, founder of both Anna Crusis and MUSE, the Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir, notes that “every movement for social change has been accompanied by strong singing.” She goes on to say, “We in the gay and lesbian choral movement are really just in a lengthy line of music for social change … the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement” (Roma). A desire for such “social change” has found not just musical expression but also political expression in the work of many LGBTQ choruses in response to the AIDS crisis. Gay men’s choruses in New York and San Francisco, for example, raised significant amounts of money and generated much volunteer time to address AIDS, even as their membership was being decimated by the epidemic (“Gay Men’s Chorus”). During the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic, which involved required lockdowns for singing groups, and which also coincided with nationwide Black Lives Matter protests police brutality, many GALA choirs used Zoom and other online technology to produce and disseminate musical programs with a social justice edge.
Unlike film festivals and choral festivals, which inhabit different physical spaces year by year, the MWMF was tied to a particular place in central Michigan (called “The Land” by festie-goers). Boden Sandstrom writes, “The Festival was created as separate … ‘womyn-only’ space isolated from the hegemonic culture” (47). The MWMF first took place in 1976, a time when some lesbians were forming separatist groups [λ Chapter 4] on a communitarian model, based on “feminist political analysis which rejected the patriarchal and capitalist system” (77). The MWMF was the result of a conscious “process of building and creating an environment according to [women’s] own vision” (111). Stressing this utopian feel, Bonnie Morris’s book about women’s music festivals, including in Michigan, is titled Eden Built by Eves. For all its 40 years of existence, and despite weathering some intense ideological storms, Michigan functioned as a safe “home” for lesbian (and some other) women. Sandstrom quotes a Michigan festie-goer talking about her experiences: “Coming into the total women’s space of the festival was definitely a culture clash/shock initially. I felt a gradual relaxing of mind and muscle, and when I began to drink [at] this new well, my thirst was insatiable.” She speaks of Michigan as “coming back home,” contrasting its “warmth and support” with the “straight, patriarchal world [that] shakes and rattles and threatens.” (283)
Figure 13.2 MUSE, Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir.
Dorothy Smith
The festival ended after the 2015 event. No specific reasons were given by founder Lisa Vogel, but despite controversy over Camp Trans in the last years, its 40-year run was transformative for many lesbian feminists, and its absence will be keenly felt by the women who experienced it as an intimate and sheltering home (Ring).
Figure 13.3 2008 MWMF poster.
2008 Michfest Poster Designed by Cynthia Clabough.
QUEER MUSIC
Queer music has its mainstream and commercial dimensions, and several openly lesbian, gay, and bisexual pop and rock artists have enriched the popular music industry and have served as role models for any number of young queer people. Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M (who identifies as a “queer artist”) are among the most successful of such musicians. Still, not all the “out” musicians address queer issues in their music, and if they do, they often do so in covert or subtle ways. At times, gay artists (e.g., George Michael) are outed against their will, and other seemingly queer-friendly artists, such as Madonna or, more recently, Lady Gaga, are accused of using homo- and bi-eroticism to be edgy and enhance their notoriety. So, we are left with a crucial question: Can we count on these artists to directly address the concerns and issues of queer people? To find the music that speaks—or sings—to this question, many look to alternative music and musical venues, which often eschew or limit ties to the corporate music industry in the hopes of maintaining a high degree of autonomy and freedom to pursue artistic visions.
Central to the MWMF experience is, of course, the music, a particular subgenre called Women’s Music. To some extent a product of the lesbian-feminist generation but also appealing to younger women, the Women’s Music phenomenon combines lesbian-feminist politics with intense emotional self-expression. Beginning in the early 1970s with the self-consciously feminist music and lyrics of Alix Dobkin, Maxine Feldman, Linda Tillery, and others, Women’s Music crossed into the “mainstream” with k.d. lang, Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, and contemporary artists such as the Cliks. Composers including Kay Gardner and Therese Edell used a contemporary classical style to celebrate spaces women have created, specifically the MWMF. Gardner’s ritual music for Michigan and her Wiccan oratorio Ouruboros, and Edell’s Michigan festival anthem “Gather In” all express women’s need for safe and empowering community.
The new Women’s Music subgenre galvanized many lesbians into seeking and creating venues where all aspects of production—recording, mixing, sound quality, and so forth—were done by women. In 1972, Holly Near began bringing out albums on her Redwood label, and the next year, Alix Dobkin inaugurated Women’s Wax Works. But “the most influential, most quintessential, most lesbionic label” was Olivia Records (Baumgardner). Cofounded in 1973 by Judy Dlugacz and other members of the Furies and Radicalesbians collectives in Washington, D.C. [λ Chapter 4], its purpose was to record, distribute, and market women’s music. Olivia’s first 45-rpm record featured Meg Christian on one side and Cris Williamson on the other; it brought in $12,000, enough to make Christian’s first album, Now You Know, and then Williamson’s blockbuster, The Changer and the Changed. Changer sold 60,000 to 80,000 copies in its first year and, as of 2007, had sold more than 300,000 copies. Its success allowed Olivia to outsource its distribution end, which became Goldenrod Music in 1975. In 1976, Laurie Fuchs established Ladyslipper, “a mail order catalog devoted to distributing women’s music.” Fuchs recalls, “When I first started the catalog, I thought I could cover everything recorded by women”—and ironically, in the mid-1970s, that was not outside the realm of possibility (Baumgardner). Olivia and the other labels established a powerful presence at Michigan and other music festivals in the United States, cementing the relationship between performance venues and alternative labels in the popularization of Women’s Music.
Figure 13.4 Romanovsky and Phillips just moments after receiving the Heritage Award from Outmusic, New York City, 2003.
Romanovsky & Phillips just moments after receiving the Heritage Award from Outmusic, New York City 2003.
Inspired by feminism and its musical offshoots, Mehn’s music, written and performed by males, bills itself as anti-patriarchal. According to Ron Romanovsky of the gay music group Romanovsky & Phillips, Mehn’s music arises out of a “movement of gay and straight men who are [invested in] creating non-sexist music” (“Mehn’s Music”).
Believing that most Western music has been patriarchal, with male composers dominating music [his]tory, Romanovsky and others, such as Mark Weigle, Doug Stevens, and the group Pansy Division, promote music that decries sexism and homophobia while celebrating male intimacy and homoerotic sexuality. Michael Callen (1955–1993), among the most famous of gay male songwriters, wrote poignantly about the need to revise normative conceptions of love, family, and community to create a space in which queer people could find respect. In his song “Redefine the Family,” Callen composed an anthem in praise of alternative family constructions:
My lover’s name is Richard
His lover’s name is Pat
We’re one big happy family
Is there a box for that?
We live here with Pam and Lyn
They’re lesbians and lovers
Together, we’re raising three great kids
Gertrude, and her two brothers. (Callen)
Recordings of Mehn’s music are most readily available through distributors that specialize in women’s and lesbian music, such as Ladyslipper.
In the 21st century, as various nonbinary identities proliferate, including among individuals who are apparently “straight,” what passes for “queer” music has become fuzzier and broader. To be sure, singers such as Tegan and Sara and the still-popular Indigo Girls aim at a specifically lesbian audience, although both have enjoyed some crossover success. Pierre Lapointe, Little Nas, Guy Sebastian, Sam Smith, Esteman, and others reside in a loosely defined gay realm. And “straight” artists make a point of offering queer-supportive music; here we think of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl (and I liked it)” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”
Other domains of popular music are seeing similar shifts. Rap and hip-hop have the perception of being intrinsically homophobic, transphobic and sexist. And while such may be true of some rap and hip-hop musicians and culture, it is important to recognize that there has been an influx of diverse narratives into this community in the last couple of decades. The 2000s have seen the emergence of queer rap and hip-hop led by Black and brown queer and transgender individuals. Some mainstream artists like Lil Nas X, Frank Ocean, Kehlani, and Janelle Monae have also used their platforms to reach the widest audiences possible to share messages of inclusion, support and normalization of same-gender relationships. Even more progressively, artists like Mykki Blanco, Cakes da Killa, Ms Boogie, JayWill/Kandie, and Mother have challenged the dominant narrative within hip-hop of straight masculinity being essential to being “real” and authentically part of the hip-hop community. Each of these artists has chosen to challenge that notion through both their art and their actual bodies. Rather than trying to represent themselves as cis gender, they have authentically expressed themselves through drag or gender nonconformity.
LGBTQ JOURNALISM: MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS, AND COMICS
In Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America, journalist Rodger Streitmatter contends,
The most important single contribution lesbian and gay journalism has made—and will continue to make—may be one most straight people simply are not able to fathom. For half a century, reading gay publications has served as a first tenuous step for men and women embarking on the very personal, and often profoundly difficult, journey toward acknowledging their homosexuality to themselves and the world around them. (347)
Like the pulps and pictorials of the post–World War II period, early gay and lesbian newsletters let queers across the country know that they were not alone [λ Chapters 9 and 10]. But beyond providing touchstones for identifications and pleas for tolerance and understanding, gay and lesbian writers for newsletters, magazines, and other periodicals borrowed from the activist energies of the 1960s and 1970s to begin organizing queers communally and politically. Streitmatter notes that “America’s alternative media have evolved because groups of people outside the mainstream of society—most notably African Americans and women—historically have been denied a voice in conventional media networks” (308). Gay and lesbian activists claimed journalistic spaces to promote increasingly politicized agendas, and magazines such as The Advocate provided journalistic coverage of social, cultural, and political issues of concern to gay and lesbian people. When The Advocate was still a local Los Angeles newspaper in the late 1960s, its writers attempted to mobilize queers to fight back against homophobic legal injustice. Writing about how L.A. police broke into a private residence to arrest two men on charges of “lewd conduct,” The Advocate devoted its front page to urging gay people to respond:
We are bleeding now, and L.A. Gays sit in their big homes and fancy apartments planning their next garden party. Wake up! It isn’t just the bar queer and the street walker who is in danger. Our fancy homes and apartments are no longer all that safe. Our lives and our freedom are on the line. (qtd. in Streitmatter 148)
While The Advocate continues today, offering U.S. LGBTQ people a prominent source of news about issues facing queer people, some short-lived publications from the 1960s and 1970s offered more radical advice. For instance, Come Out! “urged the annihilation of the nuclear family,” and Killer Dyke “called for eliminating mental institutions, marriage, private property, and the state” and for all Americans to be given “free food, free housing, free clothing, free education, and free marijuana” (Streitmatter 150). The vision espoused by such publications was often one that agitated for an interrogation or reimagining of the idea of home at local and national levels. The advent of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s propelled a growing number of publications, such as The Advocate and Outweek, to address the homophobia that made the government largely silent about a disease disproportionately affecting gay men [λ Chapter 4]. These publications were not beyond bickering among themselves, with Outweek, for instance, criticizing The Advocate for advertising porn videos depicting unsafe sex practices (Streitmatter 280–81).
Political journalism relating to LGBTQ issues continues with The Washington Blade, which claims to be the “oldest LGBT newspaper in the United States,” having been founded in 1969. Situated in Washington, D.C., with versions in other major metropolitan areas, the Blade provides detailed coverage of issues such as gay marriage, gay people in the military, and politicians who support (or not) a variety of LGBTQ concerns and issues. Comparable kinds of magazines and newspapers have sprung up throughout the world. Some originate in countries where LGBTQ organizing has been going on for decades: Gay Times, QX Magazine, Diva, and Capital Gay in England, for instance, or the Sydney Star Observer, Bi the Way, and Brother Sister in Australia. Other publications chronicle emerging LGBTQ consciousness in countries that are just beginning to articulate it: Masok from Hungary, Lambda from Turkey, Gay News FILO and INACZEJ from Poland, O Pothos from Greece, and Kekec from Slovenia represent a few examples. Throughout the world, LGBTQ magazines and newspapers constitute a lifeline, a necessary link and introduction to queer community for those already connected to it and for those seeking such community for the first time.
Find Out More about and consider the claim in Michael Sibalis’s article on Paris’s Marais district at the end of this chapter: “Consommer gay, c’est s’affirmer” (To consume gay is to affirm oneself).
Today, several “lifestyle” magazines, such as Out, Girlfriends, Genre (for “smart, stylish, and tuned in” gay men), and Gay Times, offer not only political commentary but social and cultural news, fashion advice, and consumer reports as well. Understanding the increasing buying power of queer markets, these magazines are often loaded with advertisements from corporations that seek a share of the “gay dollar.” While such magazines may pander to a middle- and upper-class gay market, they still speak to attempts to create a sense of community, even on a national scale, for many queer people.
Important attractions included in many LGBTQ magazines and newspapers are gay-themed cartoons and comic strips. Over the past three decades, these publications and, more recently, the Internet have enabled LGBTQ cartoonists to reach a wide audience with their pointed commentaries on queer life. Eric Orner’s “playfully self-reflexive … and surrealistic” strips narrating The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green and Michael-Christopher’s series Living the Life first became famous after appearing in gay-themed publications. According to Reyhan Harmanci, Orner’s Ethan Green appeared in “more than a hundred newspapers and alt-weeklies in America and Europe” before being made into a movie in 2006. Living the Life was aimed specifically at Black gay men and ran in WHASSUP! and CLIKQUE magazines. In 1991, Diane DiMassa introduced Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, which appeared in Robert Kirby’s Strange-Looking Exile, The Advocate, and elsewhere. DiMassa describes Hothead Paisan as “comics for the fed-up, rage therapy for the marginalized. Way cheaper than a shrink.”
Figure 13.5 Panel from DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan.
Source: Panel from DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan, Dyke Strippers. By Roz Warren. Cleis, 1995, p. 59.
DiMassa’s “lesbian terrorist” contrasts sharply with Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF). Bechdel’s strips began in the 1980s in such publications as Chicago Gay Life, Hot Wire, Lesbian Contradiction, and Womanews, then moved to paperback collections until Bechdel stopped writing the series in 2008. DTWOF “documents the life, loves, and politics of a fairly diverse group of characters (most of them lesbians) … featuring both humorous soap-opera storylines and biting topical commentary” (“Dykes”). Set in several domestic locations—a women’s bookstore, characters’ homes, a commune where four of the characters live—Bechdel’s DTWOF makes much of the daily interactions among characters Mo, Sparrow, Ginger, Tony, Sydney, Clarice, Jezanna, and others. Readers of the strip become intimately involved in the lives of these characters as they work their way through the books. When Tony and Clarice and their son Raffi move to the suburbs, we wonder how they will, as an interracial lesbian couple, be received by their new neighbors. And when Clarice locks horns with one of those neighbors over Raffi’s insistence that he “can too marry Stone Cold Steve Austin” when he grows up, readers are invited to see the poignancy and humor of the moment when the neighbor child responds (much to his father’s chagrin), “You cannot, cause I’m gonna marry him, and we’re gonna kick your butt” (Post-Dykes 77). Bechdel’s work, like much lesbian and gay literature, also uses specific kinds of inside jokes, many of which have to do with romantic relationships and domestic issues. In one of her earliest collections, Dykes to Watch Out For: Great Romances That Never Were, Bechdel’s “Guide to the First Sleepover” provides a few dos and don’ts for the first date, one of which is “Don’t Get Carried Away,” a panel that shows one woman asking another, “So, when are you moving in?” This reference is picked up again on the cover of Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For, where Clarice, Tony, and Raffi are shown moving into their suburban home with the aid of the strip’s other characters and a truck from “Y’all Haul.” These references are to one of the longest running lesbian inside jokes: What does a lesbian bring on the second date? A U-Haul.
Find Out More in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home (a 2006 National Book Critics Circle award finalist for autobiography) and Are You My Mother? (2012).
The U-Haul joke reflects lesbians’ (and, by extension, LGBTQ people in general) desire to establish meaningful home spaces in a world that does not endorse nonnuclear, non-heterosexual families. Queer partners in DTWOF face rejection from their families of origin. Toni, for instance, refuses her father’s request that she leave Clarice and “come home with us so Rafael can grow up in a real family” (Hot Throbbing 57). Sparrow’s parents threaten, “If you expect to inherit a penny from us, we insist you marry this man” (Dykes and Sundry 153). In a real sense, much of DTWOF claims the right of queer people to form families of choice and establish “homesteads” in the face of a world that enforces compulsory heterosexuality
MANY JOURNEYS, MANY HOMES
Many of the alternative media and venues we have been discussing in this chapter find homes for production and dissemination in what have come to be known as gay ghettos—urban areas that LGBTQ people have claimed as their own in some of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. Locales such as the Castro in San Francisco, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, Greenwich Village in New York City, the Via San Giovanni in the Laterano district of Rome, or the Oxford Street area in Sydney, Australia, contain concentrations of queer-owned businesses, stores, entertainment complexes, sex shops, and housing. Often figured as refuges for LGBTQ people, gay ghettos serve as home for many queers who have migrated to large urban areas in search of greater freedom for self-expression; local and even national gay rights organizations often have headquarters and offices alongside the shops that queers frequent. These areas also support a variety of alternative media, including independent bookstores featuring books from gay and gay-friendly presses, movie theaters offering annual LGBTQ film festivals, and coffee shops providing access to numerous new weeklies, many of which are free. In these ways, the ghettos offer a sense of home that is often markedly different from that experienced by many queer people who grow up in households that are intolerant of their sexual and affectional desires. But they are more than just places of escape; they offer the opportunity to reinvent the idea of home—in often very queer, nonnormative, and unexpected ways.
Figure 13.6 Street scene from the Marais District of Paris, where many French LGBTQ people have chosen to live.
© Michelle Gibson
In the United States, these neighborhoods arose in the decades following World War II, when many people found themselves shipped overseas or relocated to metropolitan areas after being drafted into either the army or the wartime workforce. After the war, many lesbians and gay people decided to stay in the metropolitan areas that served as their ports of embarkation. As urban areas underwent a variety of changes in the mid to late 20th century, including the move of middle-class people into the suburbs, many queers moved into abandoned or decaying urban areas to revitalize them, claiming a home. In some ways, we might describe this movement of queers as a kind of diaspora—perhaps an inverse diaspora in which a group isn’t forced to leave a homeland and disperse but rather exists as a dispersed people journeying toward home and community. This search for home is not without cost; the gentrification described in Flag Wars can be one of the negative consequences of the development of gay neighborhoods in that some queer people renovate and remodel existing communities into fashionable districts, pricing out previous residents. At the same time, commentator Richard Florida suggests that the presence of a strong and visible gay community is a sign of health in American cities; such communities speak to both a city’s acceptance of diversity and its support of creative pursuits, such as alternative media.
One question that might arise concerning this chapter is how film and music festivals, as well as urban neighborhoods where LGBTQ people tend to live or visit, fit into a chapter about alternative media. Festivals and neighborhoods are, after all, locations rather than artifacts of creative expression. But if we look more closely, we recognize that alternative media depend on a kind of communal sharing or word of mouth for their distribution and popularity. And often, festivals and neighborhoods where LGBTQ people congregate are sites for exchange of information about new films, music, news, and ideas. Even this way of understanding festivals and neighborhoods, though, ignores what is perhaps a less obvious reality about these locations—namely, that their communal nature facilitates the exchange and development of creative work by bringing together diverse populations of people who share some similar interests. These places embody the homing desire that Anne-Marie Fortier says is “about motions of attachment”:
[The queer life] is lived in motions: the motions of journeying between homes, the motions of hailing ghosts from the past, the motions of leaving or staying put, of “moving on” or “going back,” the motions of cutting or adding, the motions of continual reprocessing of what home is/was/might have been. But “home” is also remembered by attaching it, even momentarily, to a place where we strive to make home and to bodies and relationships that touch us, have touched us, in meaningful ways. (130–1)
The locations where LGBTQ alternative creative expressions are nurtured and shared are thus “homes” in this dynamic sense, for they enable attachment to “bodies and relationships that touch us.” For LGBT people, reinvented concepts of home and family through alternative spaces, activities, and artifacts can function as lifelines to community. These various aspects of communal experience have allowed many queer people—especially those in prosperous nations who have access to the resources available in large metropolitan centers—to construct a coherent, identity-based subculture, a queer home.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The term alternative media is most often used to refer to media that fall outside the mainstream and are not corporately supported. In this chapter, we have defined it more broadly because of our sense that much media geared directly at an LGBTQ audience qualify as alternative in a world where many mainstream communications corporations are still hesitant to support work that deals with nonnormative sexuality. What do you think about the choices we have made? Write us a letter in which you make a cogent and well-developed case for your agreement or disagreement with our choices in this area. If you can find colleagues in your class with whom to discuss this issue, find out what they think and make your letter a community effort.
2. In this chapter we discussed the MWMF and its closure in 2015. The festival was extremely important to several lesbian feminists for many years as not only a safe space in which to be womyn but as a powerful form of womyn- and lesbian-centered culture building. Why do you think it has ended after so many years? Some might argue that the creation of such a separate space acted as a kind of intervention in the larger culture that isn’t needed any more. Do you agree or disagree? Can you imagine a set of cultural and political circumstances that would prompt the re-creation of this space or one like it?
3. Throughout this chapter, we have evoked “the search for home” as a significant dimension of LGBTQ experience. This concept can be problematized in many ways: such a frame can be read as “normalizing” LGBTQ lives by making them fit a heteronormative model, the diversity of definitions of the word home can get lost if the term is used too generally, and the concept of home is often used in capitalist societies to encourage uncritical participation in economic acquisition. What do you think about the way a journey toward a sense of home is used in this chapter? Do you accept it as related to alternative media and space? Why or why not?
4. As this is the last chapter, we assume that you have now read all or most of the book. What have you learned? What has surprised you? What has disappointed you? What do you want to know more about? Draft a short paper or journal entry in which you explore more fully through careful research an issue you have read about in Finding Out. Share the results by preparing a presentation or publication with a specific audience in mind.
READINGS
Michael Sibalis
(August 2004), Canada
From “Urban Space and Homosexuality: The Example of the Marais, Paris’ ‘Gay Ghetto’”
Gay Men and Urban Space in Paris
… Gay men have a special relationship to urban space. Only in cities are there enough homosexually inclined men to permit the emergence of a self-aware community with its own commercial venues, social and political organizations and distinctive sub-culture. In the words of the Danish sociologist Henning Bech, “being homosexual is a way of being, a form of existence.” Homosexuals belong to one of a number of social worlds (Bech does not identify the others) that are all essentially urban: they are largely worlds of strangers and not just of personal acquaintances; they depend in part upon the non-personal, urban free flow of signs and information, as well as upon the pool of strangers, for recruitment and reproduction; they occupy time-space slices of the city and need urban stages to be enacted on (Bech 153–156).
We know a great deal about the urban spaces used by Parisian homosexuals (generally called “sodomites” or “pederasts” before 1900) since the early 1700s, both outdoor ones (parks, gardens, riverbanks, quays and streets) and indoor ones (taverns, bars, clubs and restaurants). In the 18th and 19th centuries, these were spread across the city, but were usually situated on its margins, either literally (on its physical periphery) or figuratively (in poorer and seamier districts). Beginning in the 1880s, however, commercial venues catering to homosexuals clustered in the Montmartre quarter of northern Paris, known for bohemianism and illicit sexuality, including female prostitution. In the 1920s and 1930s, other districts, like the Rue de Lappe near the Bastille or Montparnasse in the south, also became important to Paris’ gay sub-culture. After the Second World War, gay people frequented the bars, clubs and cafés of the Left Bank district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the center of post-war intellectual life and non-conformity. In the 1970s, homosexual nightlife migrated across the Seine to the streets between the Palais-Royal and the Opera House and, most famously, to the Rue Sainte-Anne. In marked contrast to Montmartre and Saint-Germain, this was a calm residential and business neighborhood, almost deserted after the workday ended; the possibility of going out in relative secrecy is probably what attracted gay customers to its venues.
The popularity of the Rue Sainte-Anne lasted hardly more than a decade. In June 1983, a gay journalist observed that the homosexual geography of the capital has changed dramatically. Saint-Germain and the Rue Sainte-Anne are out. Les Halles and especially the Marais are in.
Several factors explain the shift. First, there was the accessibility of the Marais, which is centrally located and easily reached by public transport. A few hundred meters to the west lie Les Halles, former site of Paris’ wholesale food market, which was transferred to the suburbs in 1969. In the 1970s, Les Halles underwent major commercial redevelopment, which included construction of an underground station (opened in December 1977) to link the subway system and the RER (Réseau Express Régional), a network of suburban trains that served 60 per cent of the population of the Paris region (Michel). The nearby Avenue Victoria, running between City Hall and Châtelet, is also the main terminus for the city’s night buses, which operate from 1:30 AM to 5:30 AM.
Secondly, the renovated Marais had an undoubted aesthetic appeal. In the overblown rhetoric and rather stilted English of a recent bilingual guidebook:
No other area of Paris has such a strong personality despite its [architectural] diversity. The same beauty of its dwellings can be seen in every street, the same refinement of the stones, the same warmth of the thoroughfares and everywhere the same poetic poetry [sic]. The Marais has a spirit, a soul, an immaterial existence beyond the mirror of life. (Auffray 8)
The attractiveness increased in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Marais was turned into an important cultural and artistic quarter. The Pompidou Centre (a new national museum of contemporary art) opened on its western edge in 1977 and the opening or refurbishing of other museums and the proliferation of commercial art galleries soon followed.
But there is a third factor that explains how and why the Marais became the center of Parisian gay life. Gay businessmen recognized that the Marais, with its low rents and real-estate prices, was ripe for investment. In this respect, the gay Marais, like gay villages and ghettos in Britain and North America, developed spontaneously in response to favorable market conditions. But gay investors in Paris were concerned with more than the balance sheet. They consciously set out to create a new gay quarter as much because of their personal convictions as from their desire to benefit financially from an evident commercial opportunity….
The Marais and the Emergence of a Community
The Marais has thus become a clearly delineated gay space in the heart of Paris, where gay men and lesbians can stroll together or kiss in the street without embarrassment or risk of harassment. In the convoluted jargon of a geographer, such public displays of affection constitute an “appropriation and territorialization [of a quarter] through the street behavior of the clientele of gay establishments [who] challenge the hetero-centric character of public spaces and thus give the Marais a conspicuous territoriality” (Bordet 119).
The average homosexual would put it more simply. According to one gay man, “One feels more among family here [in the Marais] than anywhere else in Paris. Perhaps that’s what we mean by the [gay] community” (Darne 8).
And for another, who recently moved from Lille to Paris, the Marais represents his community’s financial clout: “I was glad to see that les pédés [‘fags’ or ‘poofters’] had money and could open stylish establishments. I was glad to belong to something organized, which represented a certain economic power” (Laforgerie [1998] 20).
Their enthusiastic appreciation of the ghetto is a relatively recent attitude and even today is not shared by all gays and lesbians. As long ago as 1964, the monthly magazine Arcadie, organ of France’s politically conservative “homophile” association, the Club Littéraire et Scientifique des Pays Latin (Literary and Scientific Club of the Latin Countries), warned French homosexuals against copying what was occurring in the US by creating
a little artificial world, enclosed and suffocating, where everything would be homosexual: not only the bars, restaurants and movie theatres, but also the houses, the streets (in New York several streets are already almost entirely inhabited by homosexuals), the neighborhoods. A world where one could live one’s entire life without seeing anything other than homosexuals, without knowing anything other than homosexuality. In Europe that is called ghettos. We hate this false, harmful and grotesque conception of homosexuality. (Daniel 387)
Radical gay militants of the 1970s had little in common with their homophile elders, but they too denounced gay ghettos—both the “commercial ghetto,” meaning the bars at Saint-Germain-des-Prés or on the Rue Sainte-Anne, and the “wild ghetto” constituted by the parks, gardens and public urinals where homosexual men hunted for sexual adventure (Martel 77).
Radicals believed that ghettos encouraged a separatist homosexual identity (J. Girard 132–133), whereas they wanted homosexuals to participate in the revolutionary transformation of society as a whole: “Instead of shutting everybody up in their own space, we need to change the world so that we find ourselves all mixed together” (Boyer 74).
Some gay radicals, however, eventually changed their minds and came to recognize the political potential of the gay ghetto. Guy Hocquenghem (1946–88), the emblematic radical militant of the 1970s, told an American interviewer in 1980:
We don’t have a gay community in France. That is, we have a gay movement— with several organizations actively working for political rights, as in all the Western countries—but people do not feel part of a community, nor do they live together in certain parts of the city, as they do here in New York City or in San Francisco—for example. And this is the most crucial difference and the most significant aspect of gay life in the U.S.: not only having a “movement,” but having a sense of community—even if it takes the form of “ghettos”— because it is the basis for anything else. (Blasius 36)
The relationship evoked here by Hocquenghem—linking territory, collective identity and political activism—is a complex one. Veteran militant Jean Le Bitoux, for instance, has argued that the gay community appeared first and then produced the gay Marais:
The homosexual community that was successfully emerging most likely wanted to complete this social emergence in the 1980s with a space “for expressing an identity” [un espace “identitaire”]. An emergent community needed a new geographical anchorage. (Le Bitoux 49)
Other analyses invert the equation, however, insisting that the Marais created a gay community and not the other way around. For example, Yves Roussel has noted that, whatever their political camp, homosexual activists of the 1950s–1970s rejected the formation of a distinct gay community (conservatives advocating assimilation into society, radicals wanting to overthrow it), but that by the 1990s a new generation had come to embrace “identity politics.”
Many are the men and women who see themselves as belonging to a minority group, which is the victim of a process of exclusion; this sentiment of exclusion has combined with the intense desire to constitute and to structure a homosexual community. (Roussel 85)
He has attributed this shift to several factors, including the need to mobilize against the AIDS epidemic, but one particularly significant determinant has been “the emergence of a vast ensemble of gay commercial enterprises [that] have allowed for the constitution of a community of homosexual consumers with characteristic lifestyles” (Roussel 107). Jan-Willem Duyvendak has similarly concluded that “in the middle of the 1980s, the concentration of gay clubs and bars, such as in the Marais in Paris, provided a certain ‘infrastructure’ for a community,” although he minimizes this community’s political activism: “the militants took the occasion to go dancing rather than to demonstrate” (Duyvendak 79).
Gay businessmen share this view that their venues have contributed to the growing sense of community among French gays. In the mid-1980s, the gay entrepreneur David Girard (1959–90) responded to those activists who criticized him for his brazen capitalist spirit by declaring that “[t]he bars owner who, in the summer, opens an outdoor terrace where dozens of guys meet openly, is at least as militant as they are. I think that I have done more for gays than they ever have” (D. Girard [1986] 164).
He even told his customers: “This gay life that is ever more present and diversified in Paris, it is first of all you who create it by consuming” (D. Girard [1983]). This was precisely the message put out in an advertising campaign by the SNEG in 1996: “To consume gay is to affirm one’s identity” (“Consommer gay, c’est s’affirmer”). The campaign’s avowed purpose was to promote its members, but “it is equally a communitarian campaign, a way to bring home to people the visibility of gay establishments” (Primo).
Arguments like these are certainly self-interested on the part of the businessmen who advance them, but that does not mean that they are without merit. As Scott Gunther has recently pointed out,
The transformed Marais of the 80s provided a space for the development of a gay identity that had not existed before in France. As the community grew, gays themselves gained a reputation as respectable, resourceful, and affluent. Throughout the 80s, the emerging gay identity and geographical space of the Marais became increasingly inseparable and by the early 90s it seemed impossible to imagine the existence of one without the other. The resulting community, which may initially have been defined by a sexual orientation, became increasingly united by shared tastes, cultural preferences in music and food, and even by a distinct “Marais look” among the gay male inhabitants. (Gunther 34)
Not surprisingly, the proliferation and increasing visibility of gay establishments in the Marais and the concomitant development of a self-conscious gay community have resulted in conflict with some long-time residents who resent the on-going influx of gays and the dramatic changes that they have brought about in the quarter. There is also discord among homosexuals and lesbians themselves, many of whom disapprove of the Marais or feel excluded by its dominant cultural values.
Disputed Territory
Sudden change in a neighborhood often alarms its residents, a problem that has by no means been unique to the Marais. In the Butte-aux-Cailles district in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, the artists, writers and middle class who took over this once working-class neighborhood in the 1980s now complain that it “has become one of the new meeting places for Parisian youth. All year long, music coming from the bars and noisy laughter invade the streets into the early hours of the morning. This nightlife has become a nightmare for certain inhabitants” (Chenay).
In the Popincourt district of the 11th arrondissement, it is the “Chinese invasion” by Chinese-born wholesalers in the clothing trades that upsets residents, who find the immigrants “discreet, kind, likeable,” but insist that “they have killed the quarter” by taking over every shop that comes onto the market, with the result that there are fewer stores, bakeries and restaurants (Goudet). But nowhere in Paris has the changing character of a neighborhood aroused more sustained animosity and acrimony than in the Marais.
Homosexuals have had relatively little trouble with the Marais’ other significant minority, the orthodox Jews who live on and around the Rue des Rosiers on the very edge of the gay neighborhood. When the only Jewish tobacconists on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple became a gay bar in 1983, “[the Jews] were furious that we had taken over this sacred place on their territory,” Maurice McGrath has recalled, but “very quickly, we fraternized.” Gay businesses even lent their support to protect the quarter in 1986 during a wave of anti-Semitic terrorism (Chayet). In contrast, there has been a long-festering dispute with some of the Marais’ middle-class residents who, unhappy with the gay influx, have sometimes expressed themselves in words that carry an explicit or implicit homophobic message.
The Association Aubriot-Guillemites has been at the forefront of the struggle against gay businesses. Residents founded the association, named for two small streets in the Marais, in 1978 to protect the area from damage to the architectural quality of buildings and to the environment, noise, especially at night, nuisances, various inconveniences, and generally anything that might trouble the peace and comfort of the inhabitants of the area. (Association circular, c. 1996, reproduced in Méreaux)
By the mid-1990s, the association was denouncing “the major alteration in the atmosphere of the quarter brought about by the proliferation of homosexual businesses” and calling on its members to report “the multiple incidents that bear witness to the accelerated degradation of daily life in our quarter: noise pollution, solicitation of young boys, prostitution, sexual relations on the public street.” (There is in fact little or no evidence for most of these charges.) The association warned that “a small group dreams of making this quarter the equivalent of the homosexual quarters of certain large American cities, which the inhabitants do not want at any price” (Razemon and Galceran, 1996a and 1996b; Rémès). In 1997, it went so far as to declare that no normally constituted citizen, whether homosexual or heterosexual, can approve of the multiplication of these specialized bars the inevitable result of which is segregationist and discriminatory and the sole purpose of which is nothing other than the economic exploitation of homosexuality. (e-m@le magazine)
Under pressure from the Association Aubriot-Guillemites, the mayor of the 4th arrondissement, Pierre-Charles Krieg, told his constituents in 1996 that “a structured homosexual community has recently received coverage in the media that is disproportionate and dangerous to the harmony of local life.” While deploring the “simplistic and racist ideas of thoroughgoing homophobes,” he also criticized the “proselytism, ostentation or virulence” allegedly manifested by the neighborhood’s gay men (Krieg). Krieg was a conservative Gaullist, but even a socialist municipal councilor declared herself “generally hostile to communitarianism, a fortiori if there is risk of [creating] a ghetto” (Pitte 51–52). The dispute crystallized in the “Affair of the Flags.” In July 1995, Bernard Bousset, as president of SNEG, suggested that gay and gay-friendly businesses in the Marais display the “rainbow flag” (the internationally recognized symbol of gay people) on their façades and some 15 businesses did so. The Association Aubriot-Guillemites objected and in April 1996 the police invoked an ordinance issued by the prefect of police in 1884 and ordered the removal of the flags (which Mayor Krieg contemptuously dismissed as “multicolored rags”) on the grounds that the grouped and quasi-systematic display of overly large emblems risks arousing hostile reactions. And in these circumstances, it is not necessary to wait for trouble to occur before imposing a ban. (Baverel; Berthemet; Razemon and Galceran 1996a)
The flags soon reappeared or were replaced with more discreet rainbow decals stuck on windows and doors, but the dispute was symbolic of deeper and more persistent concerns. In late 1990, a new police commissioner, determined to put an end to “ten years of laxness,” began a crack-down on noise in the quarter which, bar owners claimed, amounted to “police harassment” of their establishments (Rouy; Illico). In 1995/96, gay bars in the Marais deplored another round of harassment by police, including reports for “disturbing the peace at night” drawn up in the late morning or early evening (Rémès). A series of meetings held in early 1997 by police, municipal officials and representatives of SNEG produced an agreement for concerted efforts “to diminish the nuisances for residents from ‘nighttime’ establishments” (Paris Centre). Another series of discussions followed in the spring of 1999, after renewed complaints about noisy bars and customers who gathered outside the doors of certain establishments, blocking the pavement and sometimes impeding the circulation of automobiles in the street. The Association of Co-owners in the Marais Quarter (Association des Copropriétaires du Quartier du Marais) even advocated closing bars at 11 PM (instead of 2 AM). One gay publication observed that “these problems raise the issue of a veritable redevelopment of the quarter by residents, businesspeople, police and administrators,” but its proposed solution (“the creation of districts designated for partying, leisure and places for socializing”) was probably unrealistic (Abal). In 2003, the municipality had to put metal rivets in the pavement to delimit the outdoor terraces of restaurants and cafés that were encroaching too far onto the pavement along the Rue des Archives (Laforgerie 2003, 31–32).
Although in the past decade or so the French press has been generally favorable to gay demands for equal rights, coverage of gay issues has rarely been free of unconscious prejudice, especially where the Marais is concerned. As David Caron has pointed out, the heading above one newspaper article about the Marais—”The gay flag hangs over the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie”—typically used “a metaphor for foreign invasion” to describe the gay presence in the Marais (Caron 151). Newspapers tend to ignore lesbians, portray gay men as hedonistic and sex-obsessed revelers, equate homosexual “visibility” with “provocation” (of heterosexuals) and depict the Marais as a geographical and metaphorical “ghetto” and the headquarters of gay “corporatism,” “communitarianism” or “militant apartheid” (Huyez). As these charges indicate, the conflict within the neighborhood over the use of urban space has much broader ideological implications arising from the way that the French conceptualize their society.
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Sergio Arguello
(2011), United States
“They Were Here First: LGBTQ Seniors in Los Angeles”
You walk towards the bar. You’re about to order a drink when you notice the ravishing stranger near the counter. As the two of you make eye contact and you open your mouth to mumble a cheesy pick-up line, the lights go off. It’s pitch black, people begin to mutter. This is not part of the show, nor a blown fuse. Instinctively, you make your way towards the nearest exit, but it is locked from the outside. The crowd panics. You hear glass shattering somewhere, someone tries to climb out the window, a scream, followed by sirens. The police are outside waiting to arrest each person climbing down through the window, for “masquerading” or wearing clothes of the opposite gender. The year is 1970, and this is another raid of another gay bar. This seems like a horror story from the distant past, yet there are people among us who remember living through this.
As Kathleen Sullivan, the director for senior’s programs at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, said: “This is the number one thing people don’t know about LGBT seniors. They lived through so many traumatic events during such a valuable time of their lives.” But after enduring so many difficulties that we will never understand, today’s LGBT seniors still face many more.
Few of us think about old age and its hardships, let alone those faced by LGBT- and queer-identified seniors. However, with more openly gay and lesbian seniors than ever in the history of the US, this once mute section of society has begun to voice its needs, injuries and hopes.
Despite the social and political progress, the queer community has made in the last few decades, the statistics for the remaining members of what is sometimes known as the “Lost Generation” are still heart-wrenching: according to a study by the National Association of Social Workers, over 75% of LGBT seniors live alone, a figure twice as high as their straight counterparts. 90% of LGBT seniors do not have the support of children since adoption by same-sex couples was nearly unheard of until about twenty years ago. Most alarmingly, 20% of LGBT seniors have no one to contact in case of emergency.
Perhaps more nuanced than the numbers are other factors such as estrangement from their natal families and psychological trauma from the AIDS epidemic, which took the life of so many of their peers. Even those fortunate enough to age with a partner must face the fact that upon the death of one, the other will obtain no benefits from social security, pension, or inheritance laws. The death of a partner might very well leave a senior unable to support him- or herself economically. Without warning, the hunger for human warmth might yield to the pressure of actual hunger.
Figure 13.7 LGBT Senior Care.
Source: Catherine Thurston/National Association of Social Workers.
It is not uncommon to hear about discrimination, whether subtle or blatant, against LGBT seniors in the healthcare industry. Many seniors are simply too uncomfortable to claim the bare minimum level of resources provided to them by law, due to lack of trust or fear of ill treatment. This is unfortunate since LGBT seniors are twice as likely to lack health insurance. The threat of physical and emotional abuse, a cruel truth for the elderly, is more present for LGBT seniors. While the crisis of bullying against LGBT youth has come into the media spotlight in recent times, the abuse against LGBT seniors continues to be an issue on the most remote margins of the agenda.
But there are many resources available, the most important of which are the people who give their time and energy for the benefit of LGBT seniors. The people factor is the key component of the seniors’ program of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center because, as Sullivan explains, “For so long the establishment, be it the public or whatever, was openly discriminatory against [LGBT individuals].” Because of the long-seated distrust that accompanies such trauma, “many seniors who reach out to conventional resources feel the need to closet themselves.” Ironically, many of these seniors seek out an opportunity to socialize, but if they do not feel safe, they will shut themselves in, thereby sinking lower into their feelings of depression and isolation.
Therefore, the importance of programs focused on welcoming queer seniors cannot be overstated, especially resources for those that are not gay, white, and male. The senior’s program at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center has made reaching out to marginal groups a top priority goal and has already seen many improvements in its representations of these traditionally overlooked people. Its current gender demographics break down to 55% men and 45% women – a huge improvement in the latter over the past few years, largely due to several programs exclusively for women that have been created to reach out to the lesbian community. Similarly, the center provides services for both bilingual and monolingual Spanish speakers. This is no accident; Sullivan explains, “It is estimated that by the year 2030, 40% of the population 65 and over [in California] will be composed of Latina women.”
The senior’s program is set on providing services and programs to as many subsections as possible, especially marginal groups, since it is those people who are least willing to reach out to resources who need them the most. Unfortunately, transgender seniors are rare among the program clientele. “We have one or two transgender regulars,” admits Sullivan.
Yet the center does not limit itself to mahjong and counseling: one of its greatest contributions is sensitivity training to institutions, from healthcare facilities to governmental offices. “We are a five-person office; we know we won’t be able to reach out to every senior citizen who needs us, so we try to educate as many people as possible.” The training sessions usually begin with a screening of Glenne McElhinney’s 2009 breakthrough film “On These Shoulders We Stand,” a documentary about the stories of eleven LGBT seniors through the earliest years of the gay rights movement in Los Angeles. As one of these seniors says: “[Today’s youth] need to know that there’s people that survived all that shit.” The hope for people like Sullivan is that once people know, they will be more inclined to listen to the voices that have been silent for so long.
Sergio Arguello, “They Were Here First: LGBTQ Seniors in Los Angeles.” OutWrite, Fall 2011.
Descriptions of Images and Figures
The agenda on the poster reads as follows.
Tuesday: Yang Ying • The Vagina Monologues directed by Alix Olson featuring Elvira Kurt, Margo Gomez, Staceyann Chin, Alix Olson and special guests.
Wednesday: Singer songwriter spotlight featuring Mei Chern, Nicole Reynolds, Julie Clark, Sista Otis opening celebration Ruthie Foster, Betty.
Thursday: Angie Evans, Garrison Starr, Patrice Pike, Yang Ying, the vagina monologues directed by Alix Olson featuring Elvira Kurt, Marga Gomez, Staceyann Chin, Alix Olson and special guests Hanifah walidah, Ferron and bitch Von Iva.
Friday: Hip hop at high noon with Jenro, Medusa, Yo majesty, Boyskout, Natalia Zukerman Ellis with Anne Heaton, Jambalaya, Isle of Klezbos, Erin McKeown, Toshi reagon and bog lovely.
Saturday: Cocomiama, Blame Sally, Kinnie Starr, Emma’s revolution, holly near Laura love and Harpersferry, Patty Larkin, Chix Lix Flix, and Antogone rising.
Sunday: Comedy Sunday with Sandra Valls, Poppy Champlin, Marga Gomez, Ukaka Hill, Aleah Long, and Ruth Barrett.
The details of the cartoon are as follows:
The speech bubble above the man’s head reads as follows: Anyway, this is pretty fucking cool exclamatory mark. One million queers in D C is probably really, really pissing a lot of people off exclamatory mark.
The speech bubble above the cat’s head reads as follows. Can’t help but notice how peaceful the whole thing is exclamatory mark.
The data on the table reads as follows:
67% of medical professionals report that LGBT seniors receive substandard care.
90% of LGBT seniors are childless.
80% of LGBT seniors enter old age without a partner.
51% of LGBT seniors lack wills and explicit end-of-life plans.
20% of LGBT seniors lack an emergency contact.
A variety of alternative and nonmainstream media have assisted LGBTQ people in developing both identity and community. These media have at turns facilitated and hindered political activism and consciousness.