6
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
· 6.1 Describe the challenges and creative possibilities of diversity within the LGBT “community.”
· 6.2 Explain how bisexuality is often erased in the broader LGBT community.
· 6.3 Describe intersexuality’s connection to LGBT.
· 6.4 Explain on the emergence of queerness within the LGBT community as both umbrella term and challenge to conformity.
· 6.5 List the advantages that non-queer allies bring to the LGBT community.
· 6.6 Describe what controversial sexual outlaws are as well as their uneasy relationship to the LGBT community.
Imagine a Gay Pride Day parade—a sunny weekend in mid-June, crowds bustling, vendors hawking their rainbow-striped goods. The parade features floats, marching bands, and costumed characters filing past. There go the leaders of the local gay rights organization, accompanied by the mayor and members of the city council, then proud families from Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). There are several large groups from major local corporations in matching T-shirts. A growling rumble ushers in the Dykes on Bikes, followed by a leathermen troop. A gaggle of drag queens, bringing up the rear, draws the largest number of shouts, catcalls, and whistles as the parade draws to a close.
Of course, numerous other folks, organizations, and groups may march past you in such a parade—all attesting to the diversity of those who identify as LGBTQ. But the good cheer and festivities of a pride day parade conceal tensions within that diversity, the kind of strain that exists when any large “family” gathers together to make—and define—a community. In the process of defining a community, the place or even desirability of some is called into question. For instance, the equality and rights activists at the front of the parade might frown a bit at the presence of the leathermen and drag queens; after all, the more flamboyant members of our community might strike an unsettling chord with sympathetic straight voters and dispel the sense that we queers are “normal folk,” just like everyone else. Conversely, that woman, marching with the drag queens, the one transitioning from being a man who likes men to a straight-identified woman, may be wondering if she is in the right parade. Will her queer community accept her once she has completed her transition and married her sweetheart? Will she still be queer?
Figure 6.1 A Gay Pride Parade in Cincinnati, Ohio.
© Michelle Gibson
We can trace the expansion of the LGBTQ community by looking at some work that has attempted to capture the richness of who we are as a people. It is remarkably easy to leave out, either by accidental oversight or unexamined prejudice, potential allies or others who could make common cause with us. When attempting to chronicle gay life in America in his 1980 book, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, author Edmund White had to admit, “I criticize my book for concentrating on gay men in big cities and for ignoring lesbians as well as small-town or rural life” (336). In 400 pages, he could cover only so much of our diversity, and he ended up leaving out any significant discussion of women. Over a decade later, anthropologist Gilbert Herdt’s collection Gay Culture in America: Essays from the Field (1992) attempted a more comprehensive view of what it means to be gay in the United States; his book contains essays on Black men, “nonghetto” or suburban gays, and gay Mexican Americans. Still, bisexuals and trans people were largely ignored by the authors in Herdt’s collection.
Indeed, determining who is and isn’t part of the LGBTQ community is not as simple as it might seem on the surface. LGBTQ activist groups, even as they fight for inclusion in society, have historically disputed issues of inclusion and equality within their own ranks. Consider the following examples:
· Transgender and transsexual individuals have argued for at least a generation that lesbian and gay organizations do not recognize and respond to their struggle for inclusion and equality.
· In the late 20th century, many lesbian feminists believed butch and femme lesbians were replicating “the heterosexual institution with its role playing dualities” (Johnston 155).
· LGBTQ people who also identify as sadomasochist have historically been seen as outside the mainstream in the larger LGBTQ movement.
· In many ways and over many years, white-led LGBTQ political and social groups have engaged in overtly and covertly racist behavior. Bars, for example, have refused to admit Black patrons (“Director’s Finding”). Even online chat room participants describe eliciting more responses if they claim to be white rather than of color (Gosine). And very recently Equitas Health, a health care provider for the LGBTQ community, has been accused by former employees of fostering “an environment of racial discrimination” (Thompson 1B).
· In the 1970s, some radical lesbian groups articulated negative feelings toward bisexual women, who, they claimed, “take energy from women and give it to men” (Moore).
The debates around these issues and others have consistently arisen within organizations whose work it is to fight for inclusion and equality. Diversity enriches our communities, our sense of what it means to be a member of the LGBTQ family. It also complicates matters. Just as feminists have debated whether pornography has a place in feminism, many queers have debated at different times whether challenging or controversial aspects of our community deserve a place. Within queer communities, intense debates have raged over who is really queer, who belongs under the queer umbrella. Of course, what is called “challenging” or “controversial” and decisions about who “belongs” often change over time and as contexts change.
These debates and examples prompt us to recognize that diversity—even the notion that diversity is important and desirable—is socially constructed. This means that the very decision to present a chapter on queer diversity in a text such as this is dependent on (1) a social setting in which diversity is acknowledged, (2) persistent attention to differences among those who identify as queer, and (3) resistance to monolithic thinking about queerness. Hence, this chapter focuses on some of the visible points of contestation in the emergence of self-consciously queer communities. One way we can develop a sense of how diversity problematizes—and enriches—a queer community is by examining the common label—LGBT—used to describe who we are and whom we include. Some commentators and comedians quip that the alphabetic shorthand of “LGBT” itself is insufficient to encompass the diversity of queers seeking community, shelter, or acknowledgment. Some have suggested, for instance, that we are LGBTQ (Q for queer … or is it Q for questioning?), LGBTQA (A for allies, or for asexuality), LGBTQIA (I for intersexuals), and so forth. With this in mind, let us consider how diversity complicates the sense of community—in some challenging but ultimately productive ways.
Figure 6.2 A Gay Pride Parade in Cincinnati, Ohio.
© Michelle Gibson
L … G … T …: A STORY OF PUSH AND PULL
As we have noted in previous chapters, some lesbian feminists have promoted lesbian separatism [λ Chapter 4], understanding that sexism is as significant an issue to lesbians as homophobia. The idea of separatism has sparked debates about definitions of woman and womanhood itself. Monique Wittig, a French philosopher and feminist, is famous for arguing that “lesbians are not women.” Following Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist who argued that “one is not born a woman” but learns the cultural expectations of womanhood and femininity as part of her lived experience, Wittig argues that, in heterosexist patriarchal systems, the category woman makes sense only in relation to men. Lesbians invested in woman-to-woman relationships thus abandon significant relations to men and are therefore not women. As Wittig explains, “[I]t would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women” (32). Of course, many other women and lesbian thinkers, such as Adrienne Rich, disagree, stating that lesbians are women who must confront both homophobia and sexism in patriarchal and male-dominated societies.
Other lesbians have made stark distinctions between different kinds of lesbians. In the introduction to the dystopian novel, Doc and Fluff, Pat Califia, writing as a lesbian, says that it is “about dykes, not lesbians” (xiv). Califia characterizes lesbians as assimilationists: “To affiliate with lesbians is to select a strategy of mainstreaming, emphasizing what one has in common with straight people, working for the recognition of domestic partnership, and basically accepting a heterosexual and capitalist model for the good life,” “uncritically adopting those standards and those ideals” and failing to focus on the “real enemy—the institution of heterosexuality.” “Dykes,” on the other hand, “have no choice about being visible,” and “[d]yke culture is about confrontation, acquiring and protecting territory, and taking care of your own” (xv–xvi).
As you can see, definitional debates about identity—who we are and what our identities mean—can create provocative positions and disagreements. Recognition and discussion of transgenderism and transsexualism, for instance, have resulted in significant challenges to the parameters of the identity of woman. Are male-to-female (MtF or M2F) transsexuals actually women? Because they once lived as men, can they truly understand the sexism that many women find to be a key experience of women in patriarchal societies? What about those who become involved intimately with transsexuals? A lesbian activist friend of ours recently married a female-to-male (FtM or F2M) transsexual activist. Is the lesbian still a lesbian? Her husband once lived as a woman but now lives as a man; how does such a change affect the way our friend feels about her own identity—and about how others perceive her identity?
Debates about lesbian-identified women undergoing transition to become men have raged within the lesbian community. Some feel that FtMs should be excluded from lesbian communities, even if they lived for years as lesbian-identified women. Alix Dobkin, writing in “The Emperor’s New Gender,” suggests that the rise and appeal of transgenderism is tempting some women to reject their womanhood and embrace gender ambiguity (at best) or male identification (at worst); she sees such changes as ongoing symptoms of sexism and misogyny:
Gays and lesbians have struggled for decades to be able to name ourselves and to BE ourselves. But now, in our own community we are expected to applaud Dykes rejecting womanhood and embrace men taking it over. In our smart, brave and compassionate community, being “different” is the unifying thread holding us together in a diverse crazy quilt of which queers are justifiably proud.
But while we’re at it, let’s also honour our identity and history. And our women. Then maybe our girls won’t be so eager to run. So let’s put away the knives. Can we talk? (n.p.)
Pat Califia herself was a self-identified butch dyke who transitioned from female to male; he lived for years with another FtM transsexual and now goes by the name Patrick Califia-Rice.
Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex, written by Califia-Rice post-transition, includes a chapter in which he considers the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) [λ Chapter 13], Alix Dobkin, and the challenges that transpeople sometimes pose to lesbians. The chapter titled “Sexual Politics, FtMs, and Dykes: Who Will Leap Out of Bed First?” poignantly details Califia-Rice’s own personal struggles to maintain connections with the lesbian communities that nurtured her and were her first home:
I think lesbians have a right to ask why FTM’s who pass fully as male want to be given the right to participate in all-women events. It’s legitimate to ask if this is simple opportunism. Yes, it can be difficult to clarify one’s identity; sometimes simply saying you are a man or a woman is not entirely accurate. Since the FTM community is much smaller than the lesbian community, and many of us maintain friendship ties or erotic connections there, it can be painful and frightening to have to give up these resources. (117)
Califia-Rice also points out that FtMs sometime have a difficult time fitting into gay male communities if they identify as gay or bi men. He writes in the chapter “Trannyfags Unzipped” that “[g]ay/bisexual female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs) are just starting to become more visible. This can be pretty jarring for gay men who base their common identity on having a dick” (132). Even other FtMs balked at Califia-Rice and his partner’s decision to interrupt the partner’s transition so he could give birth, since “real men” aren’t really “supposed” to want to bear children. Califia- Rice, writing in an article titled “Family Values,” says that he and his partner received verbal taunts from “a handful of straight-identified homophobic FtMs online who started calling Matt by his girl name, because real men don’t get pregnant. One of these bigots even said it would be better for our baby to be born dead than be raised by two people who are ‘confused about their gender.’ “
In an attempt to bridge the gap between his various communities, Califia-Rice has suggested that FtMs and butch dykes may have much in common, such as having to grapple with what typically “masculine” interests or gender presentation might mean for their lives. Vik Savage, self-described as a “Butch Dyke not FTM,” sharply disagrees, saying that past lesbians “had good boundaries around men and oppression. We don’t. We’re all freakin’ wishy-washy with our B***SH*T about ‘oh but they’re SO like us!’. Fuck that! They’re MEN, dudes! MEN, MEN, MEN, MEN. Hello!!!!!” Despite Califia-Rice’s eloquence and his insistence that he has not “renounced” his history as a dyke, questions of community still haunt his discussions about transmen, transwomen, lesbianism, and feminism. Diverse experiences of sexuality and gender have complicated intimacies and identities within and among these communities.
BISEXUAL ERASURE IN THE LGBTQ COMMUNITY
For years, the letter B—for bisexual—has been tacked onto the L and the G, with T coming a bit more recently, but many Bs have never found themselves particularly welcome in or a part of lesbian and gay communities. Many gays and lesbians have believed that bisexuals are just “going through a phase” on their way to “true” gayness or lesbianism, or that they are trying to hold on to straight privilege while fooling around with people of their own sex. And, in fact, a controversial article published in 2005 in the New York Times pointedly asked, “Gay, Straight, or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited.” The article’s author, Benedict Carey, reported on some studies suggesting that “[p]eople who claim bisexuality … are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted.” Despite such negativity and bad press, bisexual activists have formed groups locally, nationally, and worldwide to educate others about bisexuality and bisexual identity. In the United States, BiNet USA (http://www.binetusa.org/) is perhaps the largest and most politically active of organizations for bisexual people.
Bi-eroticism is a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon, argues Marjorie Garber in her influential 1995 book, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, which traces the representation of bi-erotic intimacies in over two millennia of Western art, texts, and media. Garber carefully avoids labeling bi-eroticism as bisexual identity, and she thus avoids the fallacy of presentism. Rather, Garber carefully and exhaustively documents how numerous major artists, actors, thinkers, and philosophers—from Shakespeare to Wilde, from Sappho to Frida Kahlo—explored in their works attraction and intimate affection that are neither exclusively straight nor gay. Shakespeare’s acclaimed sonnet sequence, for instance, contains sets of love poems written about and to a woman (the “dark lady” of the sonnets) as well as to a young male friend (the actual subject of the famous sonnet often used in weddings, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”). Garber’s work ultimately asks that we question our assumptions about the sexual identities of past figures. Oscar Wilde, for instance, has long been thought of as a gay icon, but he was also a loving father who deeply cared for his children and his wife. Is Wilde then gay? What do his bi-erotic investments say about his sexuality and his identity? Along the same lines, other scholars and writers, such as Wayne Bryant in his 1997 book Bisexual Characters in Film: From Anaïs to Zee, as well as Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka’ahumanu in their 1991 collection of bisexual coming-out stories Bi Any Other Name, document the presence of bi-eroticism in a variety of media products and nonfiction narratives. Bi Any Other Name in particular shows the difficulties faced by those attempting to assert an identity as bisexuals; such individuals often face hostility from both gays and straights who deny their existence as bisexuals and question their right to name themselves and their attractions.
Some scholars note that the seemingly persistent unwillingness to acknowledge or discuss bisexuality and bi-eroticism throughout the West has roots in both a general fear of sexuality and an attempt to delineate clear distinctions between gays and straights. Bisexuals, existing somewhere apart from the two, pose a threat to the binary construct that gives both homosexuality and heterosexuality their meaningfulness in relation to one another. Along these lines, Yale law professor Kenji Yoshino has argued provocatively in “The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure” that bisexuality should be contrasted to monosexuality—the erotic and affectional investment in loving either people of the same sex or the opposite sex—but not both. For Yoshino, monosexuals have much to gain not just by ignoring bisexuality but by actively denying its existence:
The first investment monosexuals have in bisexual erasure is an interest in stabilizing sexual orientation. The component of that interest shared by both straights and gays is an interest in knowing one’s place in the social order: both straights and gays value this knowledge because it relieves them of the anxiety of identity interrogation. Straights have a more specific interest in ensuring the stability of heterosexuality because that identity is privileged. Less intuitively, gays also have a specific interest in guarding the stability of homosexuality, insofar as they view that stability as the predicate for the “immutability defense” or for effective political mobilization. Bisexuality is thus threatening to all monosexuals because it makes it impossible to prove a monosexual identity. (362)
Yoshino also suggests that monosexuals are troubled by the specter of bisexual “nonmonogamy,” which many gays, lesbians, and straights assume to be a key aspect of bisexuality. Gays and lesbians seeking to be accepted by mainstream Western society, which figures intimate relationships as ideally monogamous, fear that bisexual nonmonogamy threatens gays’ ability to pass as “normal.” The truth, of course, is much more complicated. Many bisexually identified people are indeed monogamous, just as many gays, lesbians, and straights are most decidedly not monogamous. Furthermore, many gays and lesbians fear bisexuality because it seems to suggest that one can choose one’s sexuality. In contrast, many gays and lesbians (as well as some straights) want to argue that their sexuality is not chosen and is thus natural—a powerful argument in some people’s eyes for extending civil rights and protections to gays and lesbians [λ Chapter 5]. Bisexuality, then, is an intolerable position in the eyes of many gays, lesbians, and straights.
We can see the extent of bisexual erasure in reactions to Brokeback Mountain (2005), Ang Lee’s controversial film about an erotic relationship between two male cowboys. Both cowboys are married and have intimate relations with women in addition to their stormy and complex decades-long affair with one another. Amy Andre, in an article for American Sexuality Magazine, proposes that
Brokeback Mountain is not a movie about gay people, and there are no gay people in it. There. I said it. Despite what you may have read in the many reviews that have come out about this new cowboy feature film, Brokeback Mountain is a bisexual picture. Why can’t film reviewers say the word “bisexual” when they see lead characters with sexual and romantic relationships with both men and women?
Andre’s assertion that the film is actually about two bisexual men, not just two closeted gay men, may be debatable. But her point that discussion about the film largely avoided any consideration of the potential bisexuality of the characters speaks to the extent to which bisexuality and bi-eroticism are seldom taken seriously or even acknowledged in the larger culture. When bisexuality is noticed by the media, it is often depicted in damaging and noxious ways. In the introduction to their edited collection Bisexual Men in Culture and Society, Brett Beemyn and Erich Steinman assert that “[n]ot only are there relatively few cultural images of men who are attracted to more than one gender, but the representations that do exist often focus on how behaviorally bisexual men supposedly pose a hidden HIV threat to heterosexual women” (3) [λ Chapter 8]. According to the myth, then, married bisexual men are on the down low, sneaking off for secret liaisons with other men and potentially bringing home sexually transmitted diseases. Such representations, as well as the persistent attempts to erase bisexuality from the culture, are frequent targets of bisexual activists. The American Institute of Bisexuality, for instance, has pledged to raise awareness of not only the existence of bisexuality but also the many contributions that bisexuals make to culture, society, the arts, and the numerous communities to which they belong (http://www.bisexual.org).
INTERSEXUALITY
Intersexuals are among the newest to find voice in the LGBTQ community. Intersexuals are individuals who in the past would have been labeled hermaphrodites; they are typically born with both male and female genitalia or sex organs or with indeterminate genitalia—that is, genitals that are not clearly male or female sex organs, such as large clitorises that resemble small penises. Many intersexuals in the West are subject to surgery as infants to “correct” their gender indeterminacy and to “fix” them as either clearly male or clearly female. While some intersexuals are not aware that their hermaphroditism was corrected, others report being shocked to discover that they were subjected to such surgical procedures as infants.
The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) advocates an end to these surgeries and, in their words, “is devoted to systemic change to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.” ISNA believes firmly that “[i]ntersexuality is primarily a problem of stigma and trauma, not gender,” and that “[p]arents’ distress must not be treated by surgery on the child.” Many intersexed activists argue that their fight is comparable to that of queers who advocate individual self-determination and freedom from normative gender constructions. We can hear the connections between intersexed and queer activists in the following quotation from Morgan Holmes’s essay “Queer Cut Bodies”:
Intersexed adults are first intersexed minors who have been subjected to the wills of their families and doctors. Avoidance of surgeries serving no purpose except to make the intersexed child more appealing to parents and to their culture is a fine place to start reconceptualizing the intersexed body. (106)
Many queers can identify with Holmes’s characterization of children “subjected to the wills of their families” and to being forced to become “more appealing” (i.e., less queer). But more than such similarities, the intersexed and many queers collectively fight the imposition of heteronormative values and ideas—not only on the way we choose to love and to be intimate but on our very bodies as well.
Q: BEYOND SEXUAL IDENTITY
The letter Q is sometimes added to the LGBT grouping to signify either those who are “questioning” or those who prefer the term queer to describe their sexual identities or affinities. Some use the word queer as a catchall for the LGBTQ conglomerate, but many others prefer queer as a political term. Specifically, queer is used to mark those whose sexualities, sexual practices, or erotic and affectional investments lie outside the mainstream of normative heterosexuality. Some activists in the 1990s (and to this day) use the term queer aggressively, signaling that they have taken a term once used to stigmatize homosexuals and other “perverts” and are now using it proudly, even defiantly. We are queer—so what? The reclamation of the word queer, then, serves to defy normative, conventional society and its bigoted exclusions. As David Halperin puts it in Saint Foucault, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (62).
Some writers have explored the usefulness of queer as a marker of the transgressive margins, while others have developed different terms to promote a queer ethos—the celebration of sexual difference and nonnormative eroticism. For instance, Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel use the term pomosexual to describe a postmodern sexuality that is free, exploratory, and unwilling to confine itself to specific labels. In their edited collection, Pomosexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality, they note the similarity between the terms pomosexual and queer:
the “pomosexual,” who, like the queer s/he closely resembles, may not be tied to a single sexual identity, may not be content to reside within a category measurable by social scientists or acknowledged by either rainbow-festooned gays or by Ward and June Cleaver. (23)
For many writers such as Queen, a well-known sex activist, queer foregrounds not only difference but also pleasure, an aspect of sexual politics that many pomosexuals feel is often overlooked or underconsidered in public discussions of sex and sexuality.
Along similar lines, others in the LGBTQ community have attempted to emphasize the diversity of sexual interests and erotic styles by forming subcultural groups focused on particular identifications. For instance, some gay men identify strongly with “bear culture” and call themselves “bears” (men a bit larger or hairier than the norm) or “bear cubs” (men who love men who are a bit larger or hairier than the norm). Bears break out of the consumerist stereotype, fostered by shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which figures gay men as slim, super health-conscious, interior-decorating gurus; bears, in contrast, are large men whose interests tend to be typically (even stereotypically) masculine, such as sports, camping, and roughhousing. In The Bear Book II, Les Wright notes that bears challenge any sense of normative gayness or queerness: “All of these Ur-springs of the bearstream trickled along because in the invention of ‘gaymen’ and ‘gay culture,’ ideas and concepts required the invention of a new vocabulary to describe categories and subcategories inside the love that so long had dared not speak its name” (xlii).
While groups such as the bears highlight the diversity of erotic interest and life-styles within the LGBTQ community, many queers do not necessarily experience queer communities as stylistic free-for-alls. For some, the challenge of diversity is finding a comfortable place within the diversity, and some critics and scholars worry about the establishment of hierarchies that oppress people who do not fit into particular groups. For instance, in some gay male communities, men who are “straight-acting” are more valued and sought after as sexual partners than others. Wayne Martino argues that discriminating hierarchies may be evolving within gay male communities around the notion of straight-acting, particularly
[w]ithin a sociocultural context in which specific discourses about straight-acting masculinities gain a particular authoritative status or ascendancy—for example, from “Bears” who claim that they don’t engage in “faggoty sex” to “gainers” who deliberately put on weight to adopt a particular way of being masculine that challenges the idealization of the gay male body. (Kendall and Martino 58)
In general, the seeming freedom implied in terms such as queer or pomosexual needs to be considered against the often restrictive, even oppressive social and sexual practices in which people actually engage.
Conforming to certain styles, fashions, or self-presentations may be one way to deal with the diversity within LGBTQ communities, but the pressure to conform has created a fair amount of backlash. For example, Christy Calame and Robbie Scott Phillips capture some of the frustration with conformity. In their provocative manifesto, “Fuck Your Healthy Gay Lifestyle (The FRINGE Manifesto—Freaks, Radicals, and Inverts Nail Gay Elite!),” they argue that
[g]ays and lesbians do not exist—there are only queers and straights. Those known as ‘gay and lesbian people’ are essentially straight assholes who sleep with members of their same sex and have nothing to do with queerness except their fear and rape of it. Queers are twisted and disgusting, beautiful and glamorous, extreme and alive. We live outside the margin and move to keep working edges, surviving co-optations, decimation, and attack by those so-called gay and lesbian people. (233)
Scholars such as Michael Warner have taken such critiques seriously; his book, The Trouble with Normal, analyzes how some gays and lesbians seek political favor by attempting to demonstrate that little difference exists between gays and straights; they argue that rights should be equitably distributed because we are all, essentially, the same. For instance, the Log Cabin Republicans, a national group of U.S. lesbian and gay Republicans, have advocated primarily for legalizing gay marriage and open military service because these rights bring gays into the American mainstream—thus promoting a sense of queers as “normal” citizens. Now that these goals have been achieved, the Log Cabin group continues to work to “advance our civil rights” and to promote “civil equality and equal protection under the law” (Log Cabin). They strongly denounced the Donald Trump-led Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, joining other anti-Trump groups such as the Lincoln Project and the Republican Accountability Project in advocating for civil rights, voting rights, and LGBTQ rights. While other queers, such as Calame and Phillips, argue that access to rights should not hinge on sameness but should be available to all irrespective of difference, the Log Cabin organization and other more conservative groups take an assimilationist stance.
Historian John D’Emilio, writing in “Gay Politics, Gay Community,” notes that the “[g]rowth [of the lesbian and gay community] has also meant differentiation, diversity, and divisions. Gay communities around the country are coming to mirror the society at large with all of the conflicting interests that stem from differences of gender, race, and class” (94). This recognition prompts many questions. In particular, when we attempt to capture the diversity of the LGBTQ community, we still need to ask, “Who is not represented by the LGBTQ label?” Is the experience, for instance, of African American gays and lesbians in the United States the same as their white counterparts? What about Latinx and Asian Americans? What about queers in different national contexts? We will have much more to say about the intersections among different identity categories (queerness, race, ethnicity, social class, and gender) in Chapters 7 and 8.
For now, we can consider briefly how the experience of social class often intersects with and complicates the experience of queerness. Some critics have—with no small justification—claimed that LGBTQ communities and rights organizations have been dominated by white, middle-class interests, values, and people. Social class has long been overlooked as an important consideration when understanding and representing oneself as queer. Amber Hollibaugh writes eloquently about the enforced silences imposed on working-class LGBTQ people:
I am a high-femme, mixed-race, white-trash lesbian. And even after all these years of living in a middle-class gay community, I often feel left outside when people speak about their backgrounds, their families. And if you listen to the current telling of “our” queer tale, people like me would seem an anomaly. Because, we are told—and we tell ourselves—queerness can’t be poor. (Queers Without Money)
The documentary film Small Town Gay Bar (2006) poignantly demonstrates Hollibaugh’s point: The film depicts queer life in rural Mississippi, where LGBTQ people feel safe identifying themselves only in bars, many of which are not visibly marked as queer and are found by word of mouth. Nicola Field, in her book Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia, summarizes the importance of considering social class as a significant dimension of one’s experience of queerness:
Demonstrating as lesbians and gay men, many of us would not dare to wear our working clothes. We may be afraid of being recognised, of facing repercussions at work where we are isolated and alone. We are visible in a crowd but we remain largely invisible in our daily lives. The sense of solidarity that comes with marching and mingling as part of a mass of gay people is therefore a welcome relief from the isolation of everyday life. When we march we say that this is the one day of the year that belongs to “us.” However, it is impossible to sustain this sense of political power once the carnival is over. (152)
Indeed, the “invisibility” experienced by many working-class queers is at times a necessary component of moving out of the working class. Many working-class queers, for instance, consider service in the armed forces a way to obtain money for a college education. The U.S. military’s DADT [λ Chapter 4] policy once made being queer in the military much more challenging, complicating class mobility for many queers.
A FOR ALLIES
The queer community has also had complex, productive, and at times troubled relationships with those who might be potential allies. These allies have much to offer the queer community in terms of support and insight, but alliances have not always been easy. For instance, people throughout the kink community, including a wide variety of fetishists and sadomasochists interested in alternative forms of sexual expression, may not necessarily be interested in homo- or bi-erotic behavior, but their nonnormative sexualities make them likely allies with queers. Many of them consider themselves queer in the broadest sense of the word. Sadomasochists (S/M), in particular, face social stigmas comparable to those of many in the LGBTQ community; in “The Joy of S/M,” Susan Wright suggests that “[t]he biggest burden for s/m practitioners is the social stigma. I’ve come to expect that the Christian Right will attack us for our sexual choices, deriding us and labeling our behavior as wrong because it is not what they would choose to do.” While such discrimination might make practitioners of S/M seemingly natural allies with queers, Wright notes that many in the LGBT community actively discriminate against those who are vocal about their kink interests. She cites a 1994 survey that “found that 56% of the 539 s/m women surveyed had been the victim of violence—harassment, discrimination, or assault—by fellow lesbians because of their s/m orientation. Clearly s/m practitioners have a long fight ahead for equal protection and our civil rights.” Of course, some queers are themselves actively invested in S/M, as both an erotic practice and as a vehicle for forming community with other like-minded individuals. Califia-Rice has long been a strong advocate for S/M, and queer authors such as Dennis Cooper have written extensively—and provocatively—about fringe, fetish, and sadomasochistic sexual practices [λ Chapter 9]. Still, many in the LGBT community find such interests repugnant, particularly as they seem “abnormal,” and give the lie to arguments that queers are much like straights. What is ironic about such objections is the reality that many in S/M communities are themselves straight.
Another group that has both supporters and detractors within the larger LGBTQ community is sex workers. The International Union of Sex Workers has identified a number of demands that would benefit sex workers throughout the world. These include the following:
· Clean and safe places to work.
· The right to choose whether to work on our own or co-operatively with other sex workers.
· The absolute right to say no.
· Access to training—our jobs require very special skills and professional standards.
· Access to health clinics where we do not feel stigmatised.
· Re-training programmes for sex workers who want to leave the industry.
· An end to social attitudes which stigmatise those who are or have been sex workers.
Certainly, many queers have similarly argued for access to health services, the right to feel safe at work, and freedom from stigmatization. Amber Hollibaugh asks why it has taken so long for the needs of sex workers to attract the attention of feminist thinkers and activists—those who are invested in protecting the rights of women. Her answer underscores the social class division that frequently exists between middle- and upper class feminists and many female sex workers: “Maybe because it’s hard to listen—I mean really pay attention to—a woman who, without other options, could easily be cleaning your toilet? Maybe because it’s intolerable to listen to the point of view of a woman who makes her living sucking off your husband?” (181). Hollibaugh suggests that ignorance about queer sex workers is even more acute:
If the world of sex work is usually concealed, the world of lesbian sex workers is completely invisible. Throughout every part of the sex-trade business, there are lesbians working as hookers and dancers, as dykes who function in massage parlors and as the lesbian madams of brothels and escort services—and as prostitutes’ rights organizers around the world. (183)
DIVERSE CONTROVERSIES
We conclude this chapter with analysis of two debates that have highlighted the contentiousness—and limits—of inclusivity within broader LGBTQ communities. In “Messages of Exclusion: Gender, Movements, and Symbolic Boundaries,” Joshua Gamson describes and theorizes controversies surrounding two groups, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF) and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) as they attempt to police the boundaries of their own communities.
One highly visible debate among lesbians grew up around what many saw as the exclusionary practices of the MWMF. The MWMF was founded by Lisa and Kristie Vogel and Mary Kindig in 1976. Conceived as a space for female performers to showcase their work in a supportive and nurturing environment, the festival drew thousands of women each year and became a legendary cultural event for lesbian feminists throughout the United States. Throughout its history, the MWMF underwent repeated critiques from women who challenged the festival to be more inclusive. Some claimed the MWMF needed to respond more fully to the specific needs of women of color, women with disabilities, poor women, and others. And, in many cases, organizers made significant changes to the festival to address those concerns. The most heated debate concerning MWMF, however, began in 1991 when a festie-goer (as attendees are called) was removed from the land after revealing that she was transsexual. Nancy Burkholder, who by all reports had attended the festival the year before without difficulties, came to represent what many believe was the inappropriately exclusionary MWMF policy that only women-born-women (WBW) be allowed to attend the festival. After the Burkholder incident, a group of women within the festival began protesting the WBW policy. In 1993, some women who practiced S/M approached the protesters and offered their services as security. In 1999, under the leadership of trans activist Riki Wilchins, a group of transwomen established Camp Trans, an annual protest outside the festival grounds. Of the controversy, Lisa Vogel said,
It’s our right and it’s our responsibility to say who we want the event to be for and … who we’re organizing it for; it’s not making a judgment or a statement … about anybody else. It wasn’t back in 1976 when we said it was women only, and it’s not in 2005 when we want it to be for women-born-women. Our queer community is diverse, and I support separate and whole space for anybody who wants it. (Lo)
Vogel clearly did not see exclusionary practices as problematic in this instance. Her argument seemed to be that this process of exclusion highlights the complexities that arise when groups are oppressed on a number of different levels. In this case, Vogel argued that WBW, as a result of living a lifetime of oppression related to their sex, experience femaleness very differently than do transwomen, who bring with them to women-only environments the experience of privilege born of living as males in a sexist society. Trans activists countered this argument by pointing out that many male-to-female transgendered and transsexual individuals face a type of sexist discrimination similar to that faced by girls and women. Choosing to live as women in a sexist world, they argued, neutralizes any previous male privilege they may have enjoyed earlier in their lives. Moreover, they claimed the right to define their womanness outside of exclusionary terms such as women-born-men. This controversy, which continued until the closing of the festival in 2015, foregrounded the complexities of identity and identity politics.
A very different debate concerning inclusion and equality in organizations fighting for sexual freedom has to do with the distinction between the freedoms adults should enjoy with other consenting adults and the freedoms adults should enjoy in their relationships with children. The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), for example, has argued for decades that its members are treated as outsiders in the LGBTQ movement, and debates about whether NAMBLA’s concerns fall within or outside the parameters of the larger fight for sexual freedom are intense, emotional, and politically significant. In 1993, the ILGA became the first LGBTQ group to receive consultative status in the United Nations Economic and Social Council; a year later, the ILGA lost its consultative status because UN members complained about its connections to pedophile groups such as NAMBLA and the Dutch group Vereniging Martijn. ILGA responded by expelling NAMBLA, Vereniging Martijn, and a group called Project Truth from its ranks and began the work of regaining its consultative status (Gamson). Partly in response to the ILGA situation, Gregory King of the Human Rights Campaign Fund declared, “NAMBLA is not a gay organization. They are not part of our community and we thoroughly reject their efforts to insinuate that pedophilia is an issue related to gay and lesbian civil rights” (qtd. in Gamson 179). Finally, in 2011, ILGA regained consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (“UN Economic”). Some would argue that ILGA’s expulsion of NAMBLA is tantamount to retreating from a liberationist view of sexuality that would question long-held attitudes that create sexually repressive environments. Others counterargue that supporting pedophiles who want to legalize sexual relationships between children and adults means condoning the oppression of children who are not prepared to make sexual decisions that serve their own best interests.
As Gamson points out, there is an odd relationship between the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and the ILGA and NAMBLA controversies. The situations are, of course, extremely different, for it is impossible to equate the desire of male-to-female transsexual and transgender people to be accepted as women with the efforts of a group whose goal is to secure the right for adult men to engage in sexual activity with boys. But in both cases, important questions are being asked about the issue of inclusion and exclusion. Gamson articulates these questions in this way: “Who is calling the question of public exclusion and for what political purposes? Who are the audiences being targeted and how do they (or the perception of them by those attacking and defending versions of collective identity) shape the outcome?” (192). In the case of MWMF, the question was called by participants in the festival, women who believed strongly that in a sexist culture, women-born-men would bring with them to women’s space the sexist values and attitudes that WBW in such a space were attempting to resist. In the case of the ILGA, the question was called by the American religious right in the person of the late Senator Jesse Helms, who proposed a bill (signed into law by Bill Clinton) that would withhold $119 million in donations to the UN until the U.S. president could determine that no organizations supporting pedophilia were granted any “official status, accreditation, or recognition” within the UN (Gamson 185).
For as long as there has been a gay rights movement, gay rights opponents have asserted a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia; despite consistent refutation of such correlation by the psychiatric community, the notion has persisted that gay men are sexual predators who pose a danger to children. The power of this myth showed up in the popular support for Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children Campaign; in the argument made by many in the Catholic Church that the problem of child sexual abuse by priests would be solved by purging the priesthood of all homosexuals; in the argument by the Boy Scouts of America that gay scout leaders pose a threat to scouts; in the efforts across the United States and throughout the Global North to keep LGBTQ people from teaching, adopting, and raising children; and in the myriad other circumstances in which pedophilia and homosexuality are conflated. These attempts to link LGBTQ people with pedophiles are rooted in the notion that all sexual difference is equivalent—and dangerous.
Amnesty International’s statement on the oppression of LGBTQ people includes the following:
In virtually every part of the globe, LGBT lives are constrained by a web of laws and social practices which deny them an equal right to life, liberty and physical security, as well as other fundamental rights such as freedom of association, freedom of expression and rights to private life, employment, education and health care. While the degree to which discrimination is institutionalized varies from country to country, almost nowhere are LGBT people treated as fully equal before the law. (“Crimes”)
In many cases, the struggle of LGBTQ people for inclusion and equality focuses on eliminating discrimination in the most basic areas of human life. We struggle for the fundamental freedoms granted to our heterosexual counterparts—to raise our families, to enjoy the civil liberties our governments provide for their citizens, and to have our basic human rights protected. But issues related to inclusion and equality have as much to do with the way people treat one another on a daily basis as they have to do with “rights.” Governments and other institutions—LGBTQ organizations included—that engage in exclusionary practices and treat groups of citizens unequally establish and maintain environments that sharply delineate between insiders and outsiders.
As you can see, the issue of diversity within the LGBTQ community is complex and often vexed. In significant ways, we are queer because of that diversity, because of our difference from normative cultural conceptions of appropriate gender behavior and accepted sexual practice. Still, many queers, when encountering sexual diversity, act much as many straights do when encountering queerness—with hesitation, skepticism, and sometimes hostility. Whether such skepticism and hostility are warranted varies from issue to issue, identity to identity, and community to community. In his apologia for homosexuality titled Corydon, French author André Gide requests that we do not “understand” him too quickly—that we do not assume that what seems different can be honored by viewing it as less complex than it actually is. The diversity within the LGBTQ community ensures that any understanding of queerness that jumps to quick conclusions is likely to be foiled upon closer examination. This diversity—this complexity—makes our experiences in many ways all the richer, particularly as we are prompted to think more deeply and critically about what queer is—and could be.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. One myth of American culture suggests that we in the United States comprise a melting pot of different nationalities, identities, and communities. In what ways is the LGBTQ community in this country a melting pot? Is the metaphor of the melting pot appropriate or even accurate? Try to generate a list of other or better metaphors. Consider your experiences or those of queers you might know. Record your own and others’ reflections on queerness and the melting pot metaphor.
2. Certainly, issues of diversity complicate unified and collective political action, particularly in that different identity groups may want to promote different agendas addressing their own particular issues or experiences. At the same time, a variety of different queers—ranging from gay men and intersexuals to FtM transsexuals and lesbian separatists—might have commonalities around which to organize politically. What are they? Are there queer values that many diverse members of LGBTQ communities might be able to advance as a political agenda?
3. Early in this chapter, we raised the alphabet issue—the expanding string of letters used to identify the diversity within queer communities. As we noted, some people prefer to use the term queer as a catchall for this diversity, while others, particularly some feminists, feel that the word queer erases or elides women’s interests and focuses on men. Can you think of another word or phrase to replace queer or LGBT to represent the LGBTQ community? What are the advantages of your chosen word or phrase? What are its potential disadvantages? Who is likely to support it? Who not? Why?
READINGS
John Aravosis
(October 8, 2007), United States
“How Did the T Get in LGBT?”
Like an ever-expanding mushroom cloud of diversity, every few years America’s gay leaders and activists welcome a new category of member to the community. Wikipedia walks us through our complicated family history:
“LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered] or GLBT are the most common terms [to describe the gay community]. When not inclusive of transgender people it is shortened to LGB. It may also include two additional Qs for queer and questioning (sometimes abbreviated with a question mark) (LGBTQ, LGBTQQ, GLBTQ2); a variant being LGBU, where U stands for ‘unsure’, an I for intersex (LGBTI), another T for transsexual (LGBTT), another T (or TS or the numeral 2) for two-spirited people, and an A for straight allies or asexual (LGBTA). At its fullest, then, it is some permutation of LGBTTTIQQA.”
In simpler times we were all gay. But then the word “gay” started to mean “gay men” more than women, so we switched to the more inclusive “gay and lesbian.” Bisexuals, who were only part-time gays, insisted that we add them too, so we did (not without some protest), and by the early 1990s we were the lesbian, gay and bisexual, or LGB community. Sometime in the late ‘90s, a few gay rights groups and activists started using a new acronym, LGBT—adding T for transgender/transsexual. And that’s when today’s trouble started.
America’s gay community, or rather, its leadership, is apoplectic over the imminent passage of the first federal gay civil rights legislation, the Employment NonDiscrimination Act, or ENDA. ENDA would make it illegal for an employer to fire, or refuse to hire or promote, an otherwise qualified candidate simply because of their sexual orientation (gay, straight, lesbian or bisexual). (Contrary to popular belief, it is legal to fire someone for being gay under federal law and in 31 states.) You’d think this would be cause for celebration, but not so much.
ENDA was first introduced 30 years ago. In all that time, it only protected sexual orientation and never included gender identity. This year, that changed, and gender identity was added to the bill. Coincidentally, this year is also the first time that ENDA actually has a real chance of passing both the House and Senate—but only if gender identity isn’t in the bill. So the bill’s author, openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., dropped the transgendered from the bill, and all hell broke loose. Gay activists and 220 national and local gay rights groups angrily demanded that gender identity be put back in the bill, guaranteeing its defeat for years to come. Many of them, suddenly and conveniently, found all sorts of “flaws” with legislation that they had embraced the previous 29 years. They convinced House Democratic leaders to delay action on ENDA till later in October. They’d rather have no bill at all than pass one that didn’t include the transgendered.
Then an odd thing happened. I started asking friends and colleagues, ranging from senior members of the gay political/journalistic establishment to apolitical friends around the country to the tens of thousands of daily readers of my blog, if they thought we should pass ENDA this year even without gender identity. Everyone felt bad about taking gender identity out of ENDA, everyone supported transgender rights, and everyone told me “pass it anyway.”
Their main argument, which I support: practical politics. Civil rights legislation—hell, all legislation—is a series of compromises. You rarely get everything you want, nor do you get it all at once. Blacks, for example, won the right to vote in 1870. Women didn’t get that same right until 1920. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided a large umbrella of rights based on race, religion, sex and national origin, but failed to mention gays or people with disabilities. People with disabilities were finally given specific rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, but gays as a class have still to be granted a single civil right at the federal level. If we waited until society was ready to accept each and every member of the civil rights community before passing any civil rights legislation, we’d have no civil rights laws at all. Someone is always left behind, at least temporarily. It stinks, but it’s the way it’s always worked, and it’s the way you win….
I have a sense that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above, and thus it never stuck with a large number of gays who weren’t running national organizations, weren’t activists, or weren’t living in liberal gay enclaves like San Francisco and New York. Sure, many of the rest of us accepted de facto that transgendered people were members of the community, but only because our leaders kept telling us it was so. A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins. It’s a fair question, but one we know we dare not ask. It is simply not p.c. in the gay community to question how and why the T got added on to the LGB, let alone ask what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I’m not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause, but I simply don’t get how I am just as closely related to a transsexual (who is often not gay) as I am to a lesbian (who is). Is it wrong for me to simply ask why? …
I know firsthand that it’s not safe in the gay community to ask questions about how the transgendered fit in. I also know that I am not alone in my questions, or my fear of asking them. While I’ve been taking abuse for my position, I’ve also been amazed by the number of phone calls, e-mails and people stopping me on the street here in Washington, both straight and gay, thanking me for asking the questions I did, for voicing the doubts that they share. (Not surprisingly, many of these expressions of solidarity have been off-the-record.) …
Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Liberals want it all now. And that’s why, in the culture wars, conservatives often win and we often lose. While conservatives spend years, if not decades, trying to convince Americans that certain judges are “activists,” that gays “recruit” children, and that Democrats never saw an abortion they didn’t like, we often come up with last-minute ideas and expect everyone to vote for them simply because we’re right. Conservatives are happy with piecemeal victory, liberals with noble failure. We rarely make the necessary investment in convincing people that we’re right because we consider it offensive to have to explain an obvious truth. When it comes time to pass legislation, too many liberals just expect good and virtuous bills to become law by magic, without the years of legwork necessary to secure a majority of the votes in Congress and the majority support of the people. We expect our congressional allies to fall on their swords for us when we’ve failed to create a culture in which it’s safe for politicians to support our agenda and do the right thing. ENDA, introduced for the first time 30 years ago, is an exception to that rule. It took 30 years to get to the point where the Congress and the public are in favor of legislation banning job discrimination against gays….
That’s why James Dobson, Tony Perkins and the men at the Concerned Women for America are so hell-bent on defeating ENDA. To the religious right, ENDA without gender identity isn’t a weak, meaningless bill fraught with loopholes. Our enemies know that passage of any federal gay civil rights legislation is a legislative and cultural milestone that would make it that much easier for all of us—gays and lesbians, bisexuals and eventually even the transgendered—to realize all of our civil rights in our lifetime.
I’ll take that half-a-loaf any day.
“How Did the T Get in LGBT?” by John Aravosis, Salon.com, 8 Oct. 2007, www.salon.com/2007/10/08/lgbt/.
Susan Stryker
(October 11, 2007), United States
“Why the T in LGBT Is Here to Stay”
Pity poor John Aravosis, the gay rights crusader from AmericaBlog whose “How Did the T Get in LGBT?” essay, in reference to the controversy over gender identity protections in the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act, was published on Salon a few days ago.
To hear Aravosis tell it, he and multitudes of like-minded gay souls have been sitting at the civil rights table for more than 30 years, waiting to be served. Now, after many years of blood, sweat, toil and tears, a feast in the form of federal protection against sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace has finally been prepared. Lips are being licked, chops smacked, saliva salivated, when—WTF!?!—a gaunt figure lurches through the door.
It is a transgender person, cupped hands extended, begging for food. Seems somebody on the guest list—maybe a lot of somebodies—let this stranger in off the streets without consulting everyone else beforehand, claiming he-she-it-or-whatever was a relative of some sort. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a fabulous dinner party starts surreally morphing into one of those OxFam fundraisers dramatizing third-world hunger whose sole function is to make the “haves” feel guilty for the plight of the “have-nots.”
Maitre d’ Barney Frank offers an elegant pretext for throwing the bum out. The establishment’s new management, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is caught off-guard by the awkward turn of events, but deftly shuffles the hubbub into the wings and starts working the room, all smiles, to reassure the assembled guests that a somber and long-sought civil rights victory will be celebrated in short order.
Aravosis and those who share his me-first perspective are not so sure. Seeing half a loaf of civil rights protection on the table before them, and sensing that the soirée might come to a premature and unexpected denouement, they make a grab, elbows akimbo, for said truncated loaf. This is, after all, their party.
In my line of work—teaching history and theory of sexuality and gender— we’ve invented a polysyllabic technical term applicable to Aravosis & Co., which is homocentric, whose definition Aravosis supplies when he asserts, as he did in his recent essay, that gay is the term around which the GLBT universe revolves. By gay he means gay men like himself, to which is added (in descending order of importance), lesbian, bisexual and transgender, beyond which lies an even more obscure region of poorly understood and infrequently observed identities.
Aravosis isn’t questioning the place of the T in the GLBT batting order; he’s just concerned with properly marking the distinction between “enough like me” and “too different from me” to merit inclusion in the categories with which he identifies….
Aravosis, not being one to mince words when it comes to mincing meat, wants to know what he, as a gay man, has “in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman.” The answer is “gender.” The last time I checked my dictionary, homosexuality had something to do with people of one gender tending to fall in love with people of the same gender. The meaning of homosexuality thus depends on the definition of gender. However much Aravosis might wish to cut the trannies away from the rest of his herd, thereby preserving a place free of gender trouble for just plain gay guys such as himself, that operation isn’t conceptually possible. Gender and sexuality are like two lines intersecting on a graph, and trying to make them parallel undoes the very notion of homo-, hetero- or bisexuality….
Without solid theoretical ground to stand on, Aravosis resorts to flights of rhetorical fancy in lieu of an argument against gender protections. He characterizes the more than 300 GLBT organizations nationwide now on record as supporting a gender-inclusive ENDA, which collectively speak on behalf of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, as plotting something of a palace coup. They attempt, he claims, to force the gay movement—along with the country that is poised to embrace them—to crawl unwillingly into bed with a big bunch of tranny whatevers. Aravosis positions himself as a man giving voice to an oppressed silent majority, a majority too cowed by their fear of appearing “politically incorrect” to express their true feelings, in order to proclaim “that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above.”
…
Transgender people have their own history of civil rights activism in the United States, one that is in fact older, though smaller and less consequential, than the gay civil rights movement. In 1895, a group of self-described “androgynes” in New York organized a “little club” called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, based on their self- perceived need “to unite for defense against the world’s bitter persecution.” Half a century later, at the same time some gay and lesbian people were forming the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, transgender people were forming the Society for Equality in Dress. When gay and lesbian people were fighting for social justice in the militant heyday of the 1960s, transgender people were conducting sit-in protests at Dewey’s lunch counter in Philadelphia, fighting in the streets with cops from hell outside Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and mixing it up at Stonewall along with lots of other folks.
There was a vibrant history of transgender activism and movement building through the 1970s, when it suddenly became fashionable on the left to think of transgender people as antigay and antifeminist. Gay people were seen as freeing themselves from the straitjacket of psychopathology, while transgender people were clamoring to get into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association; feminists were seen as freeing themselves from the oppressiveness of patriarchal gender, while transgender people were perpetuating worn-out stereotypes of men and women. It’s a familiar refrain, even now. Transgender arguments for access to appropriate healthcare, or observations that no one is ever free from being gendered, fell on deaf ears.
Until the early 1990s, that is, when a new generation of queer kids, the post-baby boomers whose political sensibilities had been forged in the context of the AIDS crisis, started coming into adulthood. They were receptive to transgender issues in a new way—and that more-inclusive understanding has been steadily building for nearly two decades.
Aravosis and those who agree with him think that the “trans revolution” has come from outside, or from above, the rank-and-file gay movement. No—it comes from below, and from within. The outrage that many people in the queer, trans, LGBT or whatever-you-want-to-call-it community feel over how a gender-inclusive ENDA has been torpedoed from within is directed at so-called leaders who are out of touch with social reality. It has to do with a generation of effort directed toward building an inclusive movement being pissed away by the clueless and the phobic. That’s why every single GLBT organization of any size at the national and state levels—with the sole exception of the spineless Human Rights Campaign—has unequivocally come out in support of gender protections within ENDA, and has opposed the effort to pass legislation protecting only sexual orientation.
What happens in Congress in the weeks ahead on this historic issue is anybody’s guess. I urge all of you who support the vision of an inclusive ENDA to contact your representatives in government and let your views be known.
“Why the T in LGBT Is Here to Stay,” by Susan Stryker, Salon.com, 11 Oct. 2007, www.salon.com/2007/10/11/transgender_2/.
Within queer communities, intense debates have raged over who is “OK,” who belongs under the queer umbrella. This chapter details some of the parameters of those debates.