You know, I am just learning about the 99% Spring....and I am having some mixed feelings. I know a number of the letter signers, and I trust them (for example, Sarita Gupta--Jobs with Justice--and I were student organizers involved with USSA together in the mid-90s, and Rashad Robinson and I go way back). I do, however, have some issues with how organized labor centric the push is considered how few folks are actually part of organized labor at this point. Now, I believe that organized labor should be a central component of any organizing related to economic justice, but immediately, on looking at the signers and the labor focus, my first instinct was to say...this isn't about me....which is deep on a number of levels, right...both on the level of why don't I see myself as an inheritor of the right to organized labor but also it has clearly to do with the racism, homophobia, and lack of ability of organized labor to speak to me and my experience as a nonprofit worker. Aka...those of us that have spent the bulk of our lives agitating for change have largely done so within the non-profit industrial complex, which organized labor has ignored or been unable to crack (I am being clear that there have been widely divergent reasons and what is true on the national stage regarding energy and willingness does not often match up with local labor organizing).
Now...the prominent role of organized labor in calling for the 99% Spring is NOT why I am skeptical. I want to be clear. I am a lover of organized labor...but I do feel it necessary to call out that it did make me feel uncomfortable and made me question who was calling this week long event and if/did/didn't they do their work to make sure that the signers/callers were broad and deep enough to not elicit such a reaction. If I am having this reaction and I KNOW some of the folks calling for the action, I am clear that folks that have no direct connection to the list of folks behind the call will have even less impetus to connect this work to their own lives.
But on another level...my gut...after thoroughly reading the 99% Spring website has an even bigger, more troublesome question: SO WHAT?
So what we have a week of actions/trainings/teach-ins...that will, if successful, raise visibility...but to what end? What happens on April 16th? What will the 100,000 folks be doing on April 17th? How will the energy be sustained? What are the next step goals? What are m the outcomes that this is helping to push forward? What's the next strategy to reach an end goal or benchmark and how does this push us there? How does this build infrastructure? How does this build movement instead of continuing our silo-ed, largely uncoordinated/and sometimes at odds work? How does this create a broader and deeper more unified political understanding of the moment and the long term politic in effect? How does this change the dialogue? Who gets to participate in these direct actions? Who does this leave out? Specifically what does this mean for the formally incarcerated? Immigrants, documented or otherwise, and those that can't afford to miss work to participate in actions that could have them facing jail time? What else is there that can be done that is more sustainable, achieves the same visibility goals, and allows disenfranchised folks to continue to advocate on their own behalf without putting themselves at undue risk of incarceration, deportation, or further economic marginalization?
I actually believe that folks in their communities already KNOW the tactics that are going to lead to their own victories in narrow ways. Farm workers organizing in the Upper Midwest have the example of farm workers in the Southwest to draw on. What I want is to know and strategize with those farm workers and connect their liberation directly to mine as I do economic justice work with queer/trans/elderly/HIV positive/people of color/homeless folks in New York City. I want to build a coherent framework that connects our liberation struggles into a real movement and not a bifurcated exercise that still fails to address the inherent oppressions at play in the Occupy movement that this 99% Spring, as imagined, seems to be on the verge of replicating.
I am not saying don't do it. Nor will I stand in the way of it. But as it stands, as a co-executive director, I would not push for the involvement of my organization in the 99% Spring (PLEASE NOTE THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION AND IS LIKELY TO NOT BE SHARED BY ALL OF MY COLLEAGUES OR MOST OF MY FRIENDS FOR THAT MATTER). It is beyond time that we grow up as social justice movement(s), and understand the difference between tactics and strategies, and it is super beyond time that we figure out how to define successes and start setting benchmarks that we can reach, together...distinctly and directly investing in each others liberation across the silos in which we find ourselves. My liberation is directly connected to all of yours. It's time to create real strategies that get us to that liberated space....which...we will find....is only a starting point.
Showing posts with label Liberation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberation. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Equality Sucks!
From 2002 until 2007, I had the privilege of being a member of the Visions Collective. The Visions Collective was an intentionally intersectional group of artists, academics, and organizers that spanned broad racial, gender, sexuality, and age demographics. The genesis of the group was a discussion series held by the now defunct Freire Center in Minneapolis, which brought a group of folks together to discuss a number of topics, one of which was Israel/Palestine. The second intifada was in full swing, and a question was raised about suicide bombing attacks as legitimate acts of resistance versus acts of terror. The room was divided but the majority consensus was that when there is such a terrific and terrible imbalance of power between two peoples and when one people holds enormous and overwhelming military might that suicide bombing can be and has been used as a legitimate revolutionary war tactic.
For the lefty Jews in the room this triggered a deep and irrational reaction tied to political Zionism as practiced in Israel (which is distinct and different from the original aims of the Zionist movement). The outcome was that we realized that there were no spaces where we, who all identified as somewhere on the spectrum from progressive to radical, could come together to discuss and learn how to navigate what we termed "the places that stick." On the Left the issue of Israel/Palestine is perhaps the single most divisive issue because of the history of the Holocaust and the rhetoric of the Israeli government. But the fact remains that as allies to each other on the Left, we needed to develop a space to conscientiously and purposefully jump into those "places that stick," and figure out how to justly engage with one another in those hard places.
For five years, the Visions Collective met roughly monthly. Our only goal was to be intentional with one another and to talk about those hard places. We were not an organizing collective, we published no papers, and we had no agenda other than to build with one another over food and friendship. The collective was comprised of some amazing folks: Sara Leedom, Coya White Hat Artichoker, Juliana Hu Pegues, Ricardo Levins Morales, Nikki Kubista, Jeff Nygaard, Lisa Albrecht, and me.
I will never forget the day when Ricardo said:
When asking for equality, we must ask the question, "Equal to what?"
What a tremendously simple and overwhelmingly profound statement. It made me think, for the first, time, about it means to ask for equality whether that be racial equality, gender equality, or, the hot button issue of the day, marriage equality. At its foundation, in the United States, asking for equality really means to ask to be equal to and have the same opportunites as white, straight, wealthy men: aka the right to oppress others, the right to make enormous wealth on the backs of others, the right to degrade the environment for profit, the right to colonize and control the developing world, the right to amass private property, and the right to participate full as oppressors in the most heinous and oppressive neoliberal systems at the center of how the world operates.
No thank you.
Let's look, for a moment, at the institution of marriage. We are asking to be equal participants in an institution that was designed to subjugate women, perpetuate clan based power structures and preserve wealth within a kinship network with the specific caveat that the wealth, property and power be controlled by men. We are asking to be equal to a system that promotes and elevates one type of family structure, hold it up as sacred, and provide it with overwhelming benefits that are not accessible by either individuals that choose to live their lives singly, are forced to do so my circumstance, or choose to construct families and relationships on models that blow up the one person/one person binary paradigm.
No thank you.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely beleive that any two people that wish to join together in marriage should receive the benefits that are available to a "straight couple." But I want to be clear in articulating what it is we are ACTUALLY asking to participate in and what it actually means to prop up the institution of marriage (plus, we all know just how wonderfully marriage actually works...).
The word equality is disgusting. I'd rather be called a nigger than be called equal.
I learned from Ricardo and the other folks in the Vision's Collective that what we REALLY want and what we REALLY should ask for is marriage justice, racial justice, relationship liberation, economic justice. The difference is very simple: justice and liberation require that each individual be supported, loved, upheld, and valued as a whole and perfect instrument with personal autonomy, sovereignity and integrity while also REQUIRING that personal power and privilege be balanced against not only ones immediate community needs and requirements but also against global needs and requirements. Economic justice means that everyone on the planet has food, water, clothing, shelter, education, and recreation before anyone else gets to have EXTRA food, EXTRA water, EXTRA clthing, EXTRA shelter, so on and so far. And by extra I mean more than the abundance needed to live your life well, wholly, and fully. No one should starve so that someone else can eat, but we should all eat what we need and not beyond excess because we believe we have a right to it based on our privilege.
Justice and liberation also require that we deconstruct misguided oppressive notions of what is or is not a valid union between peoples; if everyone involved is a consenting, informed, supported, and liberated adult freely choosing to participate in whatever type of relationship configuration, as long as it is loving and sustaining that relationship structure should enjoy all the rights and privileges of any other relationship structure that enjoys government sanction. Justice helps us understand that my liberation supports your liberation and blows up the notion that if somehow I should earn my freedom you will lose yours...we all get to be free. How sweet is that?
Equality sucks. I want no part of it.
Justice and liberation...now that I am down with.
For the lefty Jews in the room this triggered a deep and irrational reaction tied to political Zionism as practiced in Israel (which is distinct and different from the original aims of the Zionist movement). The outcome was that we realized that there were no spaces where we, who all identified as somewhere on the spectrum from progressive to radical, could come together to discuss and learn how to navigate what we termed "the places that stick." On the Left the issue of Israel/Palestine is perhaps the single most divisive issue because of the history of the Holocaust and the rhetoric of the Israeli government. But the fact remains that as allies to each other on the Left, we needed to develop a space to conscientiously and purposefully jump into those "places that stick," and figure out how to justly engage with one another in those hard places.
For five years, the Visions Collective met roughly monthly. Our only goal was to be intentional with one another and to talk about those hard places. We were not an organizing collective, we published no papers, and we had no agenda other than to build with one another over food and friendship. The collective was comprised of some amazing folks: Sara Leedom, Coya White Hat Artichoker, Juliana Hu Pegues, Ricardo Levins Morales, Nikki Kubista, Jeff Nygaard, Lisa Albrecht, and me.
I will never forget the day when Ricardo said:
When asking for equality, we must ask the question, "Equal to what?"
What a tremendously simple and overwhelmingly profound statement. It made me think, for the first, time, about it means to ask for equality whether that be racial equality, gender equality, or, the hot button issue of the day, marriage equality. At its foundation, in the United States, asking for equality really means to ask to be equal to and have the same opportunites as white, straight, wealthy men: aka the right to oppress others, the right to make enormous wealth on the backs of others, the right to degrade the environment for profit, the right to colonize and control the developing world, the right to amass private property, and the right to participate full as oppressors in the most heinous and oppressive neoliberal systems at the center of how the world operates.
No thank you.
Let's look, for a moment, at the institution of marriage. We are asking to be equal participants in an institution that was designed to subjugate women, perpetuate clan based power structures and preserve wealth within a kinship network with the specific caveat that the wealth, property and power be controlled by men. We are asking to be equal to a system that promotes and elevates one type of family structure, hold it up as sacred, and provide it with overwhelming benefits that are not accessible by either individuals that choose to live their lives singly, are forced to do so my circumstance, or choose to construct families and relationships on models that blow up the one person/one person binary paradigm.
No thank you.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely beleive that any two people that wish to join together in marriage should receive the benefits that are available to a "straight couple." But I want to be clear in articulating what it is we are ACTUALLY asking to participate in and what it actually means to prop up the institution of marriage (plus, we all know just how wonderfully marriage actually works...).
The word equality is disgusting. I'd rather be called a nigger than be called equal.
I learned from Ricardo and the other folks in the Vision's Collective that what we REALLY want and what we REALLY should ask for is marriage justice, racial justice, relationship liberation, economic justice. The difference is very simple: justice and liberation require that each individual be supported, loved, upheld, and valued as a whole and perfect instrument with personal autonomy, sovereignity and integrity while also REQUIRING that personal power and privilege be balanced against not only ones immediate community needs and requirements but also against global needs and requirements. Economic justice means that everyone on the planet has food, water, clothing, shelter, education, and recreation before anyone else gets to have EXTRA food, EXTRA water, EXTRA clthing, EXTRA shelter, so on and so far. And by extra I mean more than the abundance needed to live your life well, wholly, and fully. No one should starve so that someone else can eat, but we should all eat what we need and not beyond excess because we believe we have a right to it based on our privilege.
Justice and liberation also require that we deconstruct misguided oppressive notions of what is or is not a valid union between peoples; if everyone involved is a consenting, informed, supported, and liberated adult freely choosing to participate in whatever type of relationship configuration, as long as it is loving and sustaining that relationship structure should enjoy all the rights and privileges of any other relationship structure that enjoys government sanction. Justice helps us understand that my liberation supports your liberation and blows up the notion that if somehow I should earn my freedom you will lose yours...we all get to be free. How sweet is that?
Equality sucks. I want no part of it.
Justice and liberation...now that I am down with.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Theater Review: Jomama Jones
Last night, I hopped off the E train in SoHo and was greeted by a slap directly to the forehead by Old Man Winter. As my brain crystallized and froze over, I whispered a prayer for my boy Kenyon Farrow. The prayer went something like this:
"Dear Baby Jesus, please let this show be good tonight. I know the ticket is free. And I know I would walk across lava to get some face time with Kenyon. But I have lost three toes due to this arctic air, and if this show ain't no good, I am going to chew off three of Kenyon's and sew them on my feet. Hey Glory. Hallelujah. Amen."
I walked into the SoHo Repertory Theater, into a narrow hallway, which was packed on both sides by bundled up theater-goers. I was greeted by an adorable Asian woman that looked like she'd been molested by Ziggy Stardust. At the same time, I saw Kenyon, Asian Ziggy gave us a card on which to write a wish, and Kenyon and I sat down to obey her interstellar command.
Shortly thereafter, I noticed the sign for the bar, and Kenyon noticed the sign for the bathroom (he is much more evolved than I am). A few moments later, we were climbing the stairs and about to grab our seats, when I grabbed Kenyon and said, "I might be tripping, but I am fairly certain that the gentleman seated in the waiting area is Djola Branner, a friend of mine from Minneapolis that teaches in Amherst, MA."
It had been a few years since I'd seen Djola, so I erred on the side of not feeling foolish by screaming his name and having it turn out not to be him. Kenyon and I went to find our seats, and who should appear but my friends Christian and Mark. Immediately, my expectations for the show were raised. Kenyon has impeccable taste, but Christian has flawless taste. Between the two, I was expecting this performer to get up on stage and shoot rainbows out of her eyebrows.
Waiting for the show to begin, Kenyon and I ended up in the last row (in a very small theater, so the view was perfect), and into the theater walks the possibly Djola Branner. Well, the only open seats were right next to me, and as the possible Djola climbed over me, I squinted at him and said, "Ain't you Djola?" He looked at me a little startled and said, "Yes, I'm Djola." And I said, "Lord it's Brandon from Minneapolis."
Right there we had ourselves a reunion. It was fantastic. Djola thought I was still living in Oakland, and I had to let him know that I'd been in NYC for almost two years (way to keep up, Djola). We loved up on each other for a minute, and then the show started (beforehand, I found out that Djola knew the performer, who had spent some time in Minneapolis as well).
From the minute the lights dimmed and the curtains were drawn back, I knew that I was about to be changed for good.
Onto the stage walked Jomama Jones and the Peaches. I had to rub my eyes, and I almost made a collect call to Heaven, because when Jomama took the stage I thought, for a minute, that Miss Lena Horne had faked her own death and was now doing independent theater in lower Manhattan.
Jomama Jones, a character created and lived by Daniel Alexander Jones, was everything that I didn't know I needed. Combining original music, dance, storytelling, theater, lots of campy drama, and beautifully poignant moments, Jomama Jones took us on a journey that was never overtly anything but was subversively genderqueer, all about liberation for people of color, woman powerful, and responsibly communal. It would have been easy for this show to bludgeon the audience, instead, it gently and firmly carried the audience along with it, waking up the best in each of us, and helping us to see each other as a united community.,
Jomama Jones is the best in everyone of us.
Helga Davis and Sonja Perryman were the primary backup vocalists and co-performers along with Jomama, and let me tell you that when these women sang NOTHING else existed in my world. Helga has one of those voices that is vaguely reminiscent of Tina Turner but only in the way that it crosses over into the "traditionally" masculine, snatches you up by the back of your neck, and makes you call out to Jesus. And Sonja's voice was soul sexy smooth, like warm honey on cornbread and fresh maple syrup straight out of the boiler. These women not only sang, they LIVED.
It was a blessing to see Jomama Jones last night and to experience the beauty of that character, the storytelling, and the amazing cast and musicians that made it all come alive. For Tamar-kali and for Jomama Jones, I owe Kenyon Farrow a deep debt.
Thank you Jomama (Daniel), Sonja, Helga, and the rest of the cast. You have a forever fan right here. And how wonderful to get to share the show with an audience that included new and old friends. One love y'all.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Why the Prop 8 Decision Really Matters...
Let me begin by saying that the decision by United States District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker in California was a rousing victory. For same-sex marriage advocates, the victory is that the fundamental right to marry has been acknowledged to include same-sex couples. I am very happy for them, but that is the very last reason that I am excited about this ruling. Indeed, and this can be addressed in another blog--and has been addressed widely and coherently by the Beyond Marriage Coalition--the same-sex marriage movement (please note I said the movement and not the goal) is, in many ways, harmful to the overall fight for queer liberation, supports and injects assimilationist values in the queer movement, and has diverted an overwhelming amount of resources into a narrow issue that, while relevant to all same-sex couples, is not a priority for many queer folks particularly many queer people of color, gender queer, polyamorous and non-monogamous queers, people living with HIV/AIDS and so many other segments of the movement and community.
The true victory of the ruling in Prop 8 is what was contained in the judgment and the facts found by the court. These particular findings, particularly if upheld by the 9th Circuit Court, which is where this fight moves next, have the potential to radically and permanently alter the social landscape of the United States in much the same way that Brown v Board of Education and Loving v Virginia did for people of color.
I am not a lawyer, but, as I mentioned recently, reading rulings gives me a woody.
To begin with, Judge Walker establishes the basis for judgment. The plaintiffs assert that Prop 8 denies them both Due Process, which is protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and equal protection under the law, which is also included in the 14th amendment. On page 109, Judge Vauhn makes his first judgment that is critical: he applies the requirement of strict scrutiny.
In the legal system, when making a challenge to a law, there are different levels of examination that a judge can choose to apply to the case. The most stringent of those is strict scrutiny which demands that the government must show a fundamental and compelling argument for why it is enacting laws that restrict a fundamental right. If the Judge had decided that the government must only show rational basis when denying a group of citizens a fundamental right, he would basically be saying, "Come up with a logical argument, you don't really have to have any interest besides your argument, and if the argument sounds good, well, heck...it's good enough for me too." When strict scrutiny is applied the judge is saying, "Not only better this argument be good and rational, you have to prove to me how the state itself would be harmed by allowing this right to be practiced...and when I say harmed...you better give me dollars and cents, floods, famines, plagues, and the spontaneous cloning of Sarah Palin every time a gay gets married..." Amen.
By establishing the requirement of strict scrutiny, Judge Walker sets a precedent for examination of the case that the 9th Circuit is unlikely to overturn, which means that the appeal will also be held to a higher standard and the burden of proof lies with the defendants and not the plaintiffs. This is key.
Then Judge Walker does something that makes me want to lay a wet sloppy one on him. On page 113 of the ruling, he states:
Translation: "Get it together....men no longer own women, and women are no longer required to be barefoot and pregnant at home."
But wait, it gets even better when Judge Walker establishes in his ruling the direct connection between heterosexism and sexism! Now, progressive folks have been screaming for years that the root of homophobia and heterosexism is straight up sexism...now...it is part of the judicial record. Why is this important you ask? There is a huge body of case law, and it is clearly established in all 50 states and the federal government that discrimination based on sex is illegal and can not be justified in any way under the Constitution. Judge Walker states, "Sexual orientation discrimination is thus a phenomenon distinct from, but related to, sex discrimination."
And then Judge Walker offers up a coup de grace when he writes:
This is critical. The judge has now created a ruling that requires that lower courts, when receiving cases challenging based on sexual orientation MUST also recognize them as sex discrimination. While the jurisprudence around sexual orientation is limited in many polities, the body of judicial rulings around sex discrimination are not. The judge has just opened a huge door and expanded the ways in which queer folks should be protected not only based on sexual orientation but on sex.
Next Judge Walker does something that makes me want to go from making out with him to being his number one butt boy...he states that:
This statement is extremely critical in two respects. The first is that this statement says flat out that any and all future legislation that attempts to legislate based on restricting the rights of queer folks MUST adhere to the standard of strict scrutiny, thereby excising the possibility of rational basis review, and then he smacks the Prop 8 advocates in the face by saying that even if he hadn't chosen to apply strict scrutiny to his ruling that the law was so laughable and so ass backwards that it would not have stood up even against the lowest standard of judicial review. WORK! WORK! WORK!
The judge also tosses out the argument that just because an idea, practice, or legal tradition has an "ancient lineage," meaning that "things have always been this way," is irrelevant to a discussion of a fundamental right, and, in fact, has no place in a legal discussion.
And finally, and I believe this is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the most significant of all:
The good judge says that if a right has been deemed fundamental then no body politic, whether it be a state legislation, a city council, a county legislature, a referendum of the voters or the U.S. Congress can vote to alienate those rights.
To summarize, the good judge ruled that strict scrutiny must be applied to questions of sexual orientation; discrimination based on sexual orientation is equivalent to sex discrimination; old prejudices and attitudes, no matter how long they have been held, are not legitimate reasons to deny a group of people their fundamental rights; and moral tyranny by a legislature or the voting public can not be tolerated, and, in fact the public does not have the right to take a way a groups fundamental human rights through an electoral process.
The ruling was 138 pages long, and there was a tremendous amount of thought, examination, and introspection that went into it. The judge backed up his fact finding and rulings with both judicial precedence and peer reviewed research. He systematically ripped apart the arguments of the defendants, and in one ruling wiped out the age old attacks on queers by the Right that says we are not good enough to marry, raise families, or have sex. He uses conservative jurisprudence to bolster his ruling even quoting Bowers v Hardwick, a case that went the wrong way for queer folks, to establish the reasoning behind why Prop 8 is wrong. These are the true reasons why the ruling on Prop 8 is a victory for the queer community. And through a smart, strategic, and nuanced reading of this ruling, the queer movement has a new collection of tools in the fight for our liberation. Marriage was the vehicle....but it isn't and should never be the focal point or the end point. Liberation is the end point, and we need to continue to define what that looks like and create a strategic way for ALL of us to get there without sacrificing or setting aside our history of sexual liberation, gender expression, kink, joy and all around queerness.
The true victory of the ruling in Prop 8 is what was contained in the judgment and the facts found by the court. These particular findings, particularly if upheld by the 9th Circuit Court, which is where this fight moves next, have the potential to radically and permanently alter the social landscape of the United States in much the same way that Brown v Board of Education and Loving v Virginia did for people of color.
I am not a lawyer, but, as I mentioned recently, reading rulings gives me a woody.
To begin with, Judge Walker establishes the basis for judgment. The plaintiffs assert that Prop 8 denies them both Due Process, which is protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and equal protection under the law, which is also included in the 14th amendment. On page 109, Judge Vauhn makes his first judgment that is critical: he applies the requirement of strict scrutiny.
In the legal system, when making a challenge to a law, there are different levels of examination that a judge can choose to apply to the case. The most stringent of those is strict scrutiny which demands that the government must show a fundamental and compelling argument for why it is enacting laws that restrict a fundamental right. If the Judge had decided that the government must only show rational basis when denying a group of citizens a fundamental right, he would basically be saying, "Come up with a logical argument, you don't really have to have any interest besides your argument, and if the argument sounds good, well, heck...it's good enough for me too." When strict scrutiny is applied the judge is saying, "Not only better this argument be good and rational, you have to prove to me how the state itself would be harmed by allowing this right to be practiced...and when I say harmed...you better give me dollars and cents, floods, famines, plagues, and the spontaneous cloning of Sarah Palin every time a gay gets married..." Amen.
By establishing the requirement of strict scrutiny, Judge Walker sets a precedent for examination of the case that the 9th Circuit is unlikely to overturn, which means that the appeal will also be held to a higher standard and the burden of proof lies with the defendants and not the plaintiffs. This is key.
Then Judge Walker does something that makes me want to lay a wet sloppy one on him. On page 113 of the ruling, he states:
The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage.That time has passed.
Translation: "Get it together....men no longer own women, and women are no longer required to be barefoot and pregnant at home."
But wait, it gets even better when Judge Walker establishes in his ruling the direct connection between heterosexism and sexism! Now, progressive folks have been screaming for years that the root of homophobia and heterosexism is straight up sexism...now...it is part of the judicial record. Why is this important you ask? There is a huge body of case law, and it is clearly established in all 50 states and the federal government that discrimination based on sex is illegal and can not be justified in any way under the Constitution. Judge Walker states, "Sexual orientation discrimination is thus a phenomenon distinct from, but related to, sex discrimination."
And then Judge Walker offers up a coup de grace when he writes:
Proposition 8 targets gays and lesbians in a manner specific to their sexual orientation and, because of their
relationship to one another, Proposition 8 targets them specifically due to sex. Having considered the evidence, the
relationship between sex and sexual orientation and the fact that Proposition 8 eliminates a right only a gay man or a lesbian would exercise, the court determines that plaintiffs’ equal protection claim is based on sexual orientation, but this claim is equivalent to a claim of discrimination based on sex.
This is critical. The judge has now created a ruling that requires that lower courts, when receiving cases challenging based on sexual orientation MUST also recognize them as sex discrimination. While the jurisprudence around sexual orientation is limited in many polities, the body of judicial rulings around sex discrimination are not. The judge has just opened a huge door and expanded the ways in which queer folks should be protected not only based on sexual orientation but on sex.
Next Judge Walker does something that makes me want to go from making out with him to being his number one butt boy...he states that:
The trial record shows that strict scrutiny is the appropriate standard of review to apply to legislative classifications based on sexual orientation. All classifications based on sexual orientation appear suspect, as the evidence shows that California would rarely, if ever, have a reason to categorize individuals based on their sexual orientation. Here, however, strict scrutiny is unnecessary. Proposition 8 fails to survive even rational basis review.
This statement is extremely critical in two respects. The first is that this statement says flat out that any and all future legislation that attempts to legislate based on restricting the rights of queer folks MUST adhere to the standard of strict scrutiny, thereby excising the possibility of rational basis review, and then he smacks the Prop 8 advocates in the face by saying that even if he hadn't chosen to apply strict scrutiny to his ruling that the law was so laughable and so ass backwards that it would not have stood up even against the lowest standard of judicial review. WORK! WORK! WORK!
The judge also tosses out the argument that just because an idea, practice, or legal tradition has an "ancient lineage," meaning that "things have always been this way," is irrelevant to a discussion of a fundamental right, and, in fact, has no place in a legal discussion.
And finally, and I believe this is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the most significant of all:
That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as “fundamental rights may
not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.” West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, 319.
The good judge says that if a right has been deemed fundamental then no body politic, whether it be a state legislation, a city council, a county legislature, a referendum of the voters or the U.S. Congress can vote to alienate those rights.
To summarize, the good judge ruled that strict scrutiny must be applied to questions of sexual orientation; discrimination based on sexual orientation is equivalent to sex discrimination; old prejudices and attitudes, no matter how long they have been held, are not legitimate reasons to deny a group of people their fundamental rights; and moral tyranny by a legislature or the voting public can not be tolerated, and, in fact the public does not have the right to take a way a groups fundamental human rights through an electoral process.
The ruling was 138 pages long, and there was a tremendous amount of thought, examination, and introspection that went into it. The judge backed up his fact finding and rulings with both judicial precedence and peer reviewed research. He systematically ripped apart the arguments of the defendants, and in one ruling wiped out the age old attacks on queers by the Right that says we are not good enough to marry, raise families, or have sex. He uses conservative jurisprudence to bolster his ruling even quoting Bowers v Hardwick, a case that went the wrong way for queer folks, to establish the reasoning behind why Prop 8 is wrong. These are the true reasons why the ruling on Prop 8 is a victory for the queer community. And through a smart, strategic, and nuanced reading of this ruling, the queer movement has a new collection of tools in the fight for our liberation. Marriage was the vehicle....but it isn't and should never be the focal point or the end point. Liberation is the end point, and we need to continue to define what that looks like and create a strategic way for ALL of us to get there without sacrificing or setting aside our history of sexual liberation, gender expression, kink, joy and all around queerness.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage
I read this today, and I fell instantly in love with the authors. This takes some of the things that I discussed in some of my previous posts and further develops similar thoughts and ideas. Please check out the original posting at Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!
Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!
By queerkidssaynomarriage
It’s hard for us to believe what we’re hearing these days. Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed black men and bashing queers, and gays want more policing. More and more Americans are suffering and dying because they can’t get decent health care, and gays want weddings. What happened to us? Where have our communities gone? Did gays really sell out that easily?
As young queer people raised in queer families and communities, we reject the liberal gay agenda that gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality. The queer families and communities we are proud to have been raised in are nothing like the ones transformed by marriage equality. This agenda fractures our communities, pits us against natural allies, supports unequal power structures, obscures urgent queer concerns, abandons struggle for mutual sustainability inside queer communities and disregards our awesomely fabulous queer history.
Children of queers have a serious stake in this. The media sure thinks so, anyway. The photographs circulated after San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2004 decision to marry gay couples at City Hall show men exchanging rings with young children strapped to their chests and toddlers holding their moms’ hands as city officials lead them through vows. As Newsom runs for governor these images of children and their newly married gay parents travel with him, supposedly expressing how deeply Newsom cares about families: keeping them together, ensuring their safety, meeting their needs. These photos, however, obscure very real aspects of his political record that have torn families apart: his disregard for affordable housing, his attacks on welfare, his support for increased policing and incarceration that separate parents from children and his new practice of deporting minors accused – not convicted – of crimes. As young people with queer parents we are not proud of the “family values” politic put forth by these images and the marriage equality campaign. We don’t want gay marriage activism conducted in our name – we realize that it’s hurting us, not helping us.
We think long-term monogamous partnerships are valid and beautiful ways of structuring and experiencing family, but we don’t see them as any more inherently valuable or legitimate than the many other family structures. We believe in each individual and family’s right to live their queer identity however they find meaningful or necessary, including when that means getting married. However, the consequences of the fight for legal inclusion in the marriage structure are terrifying. We’re seeing queer communities fractured as one model of family is being hailed and accepted as the norm, and we are seeing queer families and communities ignore and effectively work against groups who we see as natural allies, such as immigrant families, poor families, and families suffering from booming incarceration rates. We reject the idea that any relationship based on love should have to register with the state. Marriage is an institution used primarily consolidate privilege, and we think real change will only come from getting rid of a system that continually doles out privilege to a few more, rather than trying to reform it. We know that most families, straight or gay, don’t fit in with the standards for marriage, and see many straight families being penalized for not conforming to the standard the government has set: single moms trying to get on welfare, extended family members trying to gain custody, friends kept from being each other’s legal representatives. We have far more in common with those straight families than we do with the kinds of gay families that would benefit from marriage. We are seeing a gay political agenda become single-issue to focus on marriage and leave behind many very serious issues such as social, economic, and racial justice.
How the marriage agenda is leaving behind awesome queer history.
We’re seeing the marriage equality agenda turn its back on a tradition of queer activism that began with Stonewall and other fierce queer revolts and that continued through the AIDS crisis. Equality California keeps on sending us videos of big, happy, gay families, and they’re making us sick: gay parents pushing kids on swings, gay parents making their kids’ lunches, the whole gay family safe inside the walls of their own homes. Wait a second, is it true? It’s as if they’ve found some sort of magical formula: once you have children, your life instantly transforms into a scene of domestic bliss, straight out of a 1950’s movie. The message is clear. Instead of dancing, instead of having casual sex, instead of rioting, all of the “responsible” gays have gone and had children. And now that they’ve had children, they won’t be bothering you at all anymore. There’s an implicit promise that once gays get their rights, they’ll disappear again. Once they can be at home with the kids, there’s no reason for them to be political, after all!
Listening to this promise, we’re a bit stunned. Whoever said domesticity wasn’t political? Wasn’t it just a few years ago that the feminists taught us that the personal is political? That cooking, cleaning, raising children and putting in countless hours of physical, emotional, and intellectual labor should not mean withdrawing from the public sphere or surrendering your political voice? After all, we were raised by queers who created domestic lives that were always politically engaged, who raised kids and raised hell at the same time. What makes Equality California think that an official marriage certificate is going to make us any less loud and queer? Oh wait. We remember. It’s that sneaky thing about late liberal capitalism: its promise of formal rights over real restructuring, of citizenship for those who can participate in the state’s economic plan over economic justice for all. Once you have your formal rights (like a marriage license), you can participate in the market economy and no longer need a political voice. Looking around at the world we live in, we’re unconvinced.
We’re also seeing another alarming story surface: If gays are ready to get married and have children, the AIDS crisis must be over! Gay men shaped up after AIDS hit, or at least the smart ones did. Those responsible enough to survive realized that they wanted children, and promptly settled down into relationships that were monogamous and that, presumably, carried no risk of HIV contraction. Come on. We reject all the moralizing about parenthood, responsibility, and sexual practice that goes on in this story. Besides the obvious fact that the AIDS crisis is not over, in the US or abroad, we realize that parenthood and non-monogamy aren’t mutually exclusive. The gay marriage movement wants us to believe that you need a sperm donor or an adoption agency to have children, but we know that there are more ways to make queer families than any of us can imagine. We refuse the packaged and groomed history that writes out the many HIV+ individuals in our lives and communities who are living healthily, loving in monogamous and non-monogamous relationships and raising children. We challenge our queer communities to remember our awesomely radical history of building families and raising children in highly political, inventive, and non-traditional ways.
How marriage equality fractures our community and pits us against our strongest allies.
We believe that the argument for gay marriage obscures the many structural, social, and economic forces that break families apart and take people away from their loved ones. Just for starters, there’s the explosion in incarceration levels, national and international migration for economic survival, deportation, unaffordable housing, and lack of access to drug rehabilitation services. The argument for gay marriage also ignores the economic changes and cuts to social services that make it nearly impossible for families to stay together and survive: welfare cuts, fewer after school programs, less public housing, worse medical care, not enough social workers, failing schools, the economic crisis in general.
We choose solidarity with immigrant families whom the state denies legal recognition and families targeted by prisons, wars, and horrible jobs. We reject the state violence that separates children from parents and decides where families begin and end, drawing lines of illegality through relationships. We see this as part of a larger effort on the part of the state to control our families and relationships in order to preserve a system that relies on creating an underclass deprived of security in order to ensure power for a few. We know that everyone has a complex identity, and that many queer families face separation due to one or more of the causes mentioned here, now or in the future. We would like to see our queer community recognize marriage rights as a short-term solution to the larger problem of the government’s disregard for the many family structures that exist. As queers, we need to take an active role in exposing and fighting the deeper sources of this problem. We won’t let the government decide what does and does not constitute a family.
The way that the marriage agenda phrases its argument about healthcare shows just how blind it is to the needs of the queer community. It has adopted marriage as a single-issue agenda, making it seem like the queer community’s only interest in healthcare is in the inclusion of some members of two person partnerships in the already exclusive healthcare system. Health care is a basic human right to which everyone is entitled, not one that should be extended through certain kinds of individual partnerships. We know this from queer history, and if we forget it, we will continue to let our community live in danger. The question of universal healthcare is urgent to queers because large groups of people inside our communities face incredible difficulty and violence receiving medical care, such as trans people who seek hormone treatment or surgery, people who are HIV positive, and queer and trans youth who are forced to live on the street. Instead of equalizing access to health care, marriage rights would allow a small group of people who have partnered themselves in monogamous configurations to receive care. If we accept the marriage agenda’s so-called solution, we’ll leave out most of our community.
Perhaps because the gay marriage movement has forgotten about the plurality and diversity of queer communities and queer activism, it has tried to gloss over its shortcomings by appropriating the struggles of other communities. We reject the notion that “gay is the new black,” that the fight for marriage equality is parallel to the fight for civil rights, that queer rights and rights for people of color are mutually exclusive. We don’t believe that fighting for inclusion in marriage is the same as fighting to end segregation. Drawing that parallel erases queer people of color and makes light of the structural racism that the civil rights movement fought against. The comparison is made as if communities of color, and black communities in particular, now enjoy structural equality. We know that’s not true. We would like to see a queer community that, rather than appropriating the narrative of the civil rights movement for its marriage equality campaign, takes an active role in exposing and protesting structural inequality and structural racism.
Rather than choosing to fight the things that keep structural racism intact, the liberal gay agenda has chosen to promote them. The gay agenda continually fights for increased hate crimes legislation that would incarcerate and execute perpetrators of hate crimes. We believe that incarceration destroys communities and families, and does not address why queer bashings happen. Increased hate crimes legislation would only lock more people up. In a country where entire communities are ravaged by how many of their members get sent to jail, where prisons are profit-driven institutions, where incarceration only creates more violence, we won’t accept anything that promotes prison as a solution. Our communities are already preyed upon by prisons – trans people, sex workers, and street kids live with the constant threat of incarceration. We believe that real, long-term solutions are found in models of restorative and transformative justice, and in building communities that can positively and profoundly deal with violence. We challenge our queer communities to confront what we are afraid of rather than locking it up, and to join members of our community and natural allies in opposing anything that would expand prisons.
The gay marriage agenda also supports the expansion of the army, seemingly forgetting about all of the ways that the army creates and maintains violence and power. The gay marriage agenda fights to abolish the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, promoting the military’s policy and seeking inclusion. We’ve thought long and hard about this, and we can’t remember liking anything that the US military has done in a really long time. What we do remember is how the military mines places where poor people and people of color live, taking advantage of the lack of opportunities that exist for kids in those communities and convincing them to join the army. We think it’s time that queers fight the army and the wars it is engaged in instead of asking for permission to enter.
Marriage doesn’t promise real security.
As the economy collapses, as the number of Americans without a job, without healthcare, without savings, without any kind of social security net increases, it’s easy to understand how marriage has become an instant cure-all for some. Recognizing that many in our community have lived through strained or broken relationships with their biological families, through the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, through self-doubt about and stigmatization of their relationships, we understand where the desire for the security promised by marriage comes from. However, we see the promotion of gay marriage as something that tries to put a band-aid over deeper sources of insecurity, both social and economic. With marriage, the state is able to absolve itself of responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, as evidenced by the HRC’s argument that with gay marriage, the state could kick more people off of welfare. If the HRC got its way, the queers who do not want, or are not eligible for, marriage would be even less secure than before. We’re frightened by the way the marriage agenda wants to break up our community in this way, and we’re committed to fighting any kind of politics that demonizes poor people and welfare recipients. We challenge our queer communities to build a politics that promotes wealth redistribution. What if, rather than donating to the HRC campaign, we pooled our wealth to create a community emergency fund for members of our community who face foreclosure, need expensive medical care or find themselves in any other economic emergency? As queers, we need to take our anger, our fear, and our hope and recognize the wealth of resources that we already have, in order to build alternative structures. We don’t need to assimilate when we have each other.
We’re not like everyone else.
Everywhere we turn, it seems like someone wants us to support gay marriage. From enthusiastic canvassers on the street to liberal professors in the academy, from gay lawyers to straight soccer moms, there’s someone smiling at us, eager to let us know how strongly they support our “right to marry,” waiting for what should be our easy affirmation. And there seems to be no space for us to resist the agenda that has been imposed upon us. We’re fed up with the way that the gay marriage movement has tried to assimilate us, to swallow up our families, our lives, and our lovers into its clean-cut standards for what queer love, responsibility, and commitment should look like. We reject the idea that we should strive to see straight family configurations reflected in our families. We’re offended by the idea that white, middle-class gays – rather than genderqueers, poor people, single moms, prisoners, people of color, immigrants without papers, or anyone whose life falls outside of the norm that the state has set – should be our “natural” allies. We refuse to feel indebted or grateful to those who have decided it’s time for us to be pulled out from the fringe and into the status quo. We know that there are more of us on the outside than on the inside, and we realize our power.
We write this feeling as if we have to grab our community back from the clutches of the gay marriage movement. We’re frightened by its path and its incessant desire to assimilate. Believe it or not, we felt incredibly safe, happy, taken care of, and fulfilled with the many queer biological and chosen parents who raised us without the right to marry. Having grown up in queer families and communities we strongly believe that queers are not like everyone else. Queers are sexy, resourceful, creative, and brave enough to challenge an oppressive system with their lifestyle. In the ways that our families might resemble nuclear, straight families, it is accidental and coincidental, something that lies at the surface. We do not believe that queer relationships are the mere derivatives of straight relationships. We can play house without wanting to be straight. Our families are tangled, messy and beautiful – just like so many straight families who don’t fit into the official version of family. We want to build communities of all kinds of families, families that can exist – that do exist – without the recognition of the state. We don’t believe that parenting is cause for an end to political participation. We believe that nurturing the growth, voice and imagination of children as a parent, a family and a community is a profoundly radical act. We want to build networks of accountability and dependence that lie outside the bounds of the government, the kinds of networks that we grew up in, the kinds of networks that we know support single-parent families, immigrant families, families who have members in the military or in prison, and all kinds of chosen families. These families, our families, work through our collective resources, strengths, commitments, and desires, and we wouldn’t change them for anything.
Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!
By queerkidssaynomarriage
It’s hard for us to believe what we’re hearing these days. Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed black men and bashing queers, and gays want more policing. More and more Americans are suffering and dying because they can’t get decent health care, and gays want weddings. What happened to us? Where have our communities gone? Did gays really sell out that easily?
As young queer people raised in queer families and communities, we reject the liberal gay agenda that gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality. The queer families and communities we are proud to have been raised in are nothing like the ones transformed by marriage equality. This agenda fractures our communities, pits us against natural allies, supports unequal power structures, obscures urgent queer concerns, abandons struggle for mutual sustainability inside queer communities and disregards our awesomely fabulous queer history.
Children of queers have a serious stake in this. The media sure thinks so, anyway. The photographs circulated after San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2004 decision to marry gay couples at City Hall show men exchanging rings with young children strapped to their chests and toddlers holding their moms’ hands as city officials lead them through vows. As Newsom runs for governor these images of children and their newly married gay parents travel with him, supposedly expressing how deeply Newsom cares about families: keeping them together, ensuring their safety, meeting their needs. These photos, however, obscure very real aspects of his political record that have torn families apart: his disregard for affordable housing, his attacks on welfare, his support for increased policing and incarceration that separate parents from children and his new practice of deporting minors accused – not convicted – of crimes. As young people with queer parents we are not proud of the “family values” politic put forth by these images and the marriage equality campaign. We don’t want gay marriage activism conducted in our name – we realize that it’s hurting us, not helping us.
We think long-term monogamous partnerships are valid and beautiful ways of structuring and experiencing family, but we don’t see them as any more inherently valuable or legitimate than the many other family structures. We believe in each individual and family’s right to live their queer identity however they find meaningful or necessary, including when that means getting married. However, the consequences of the fight for legal inclusion in the marriage structure are terrifying. We’re seeing queer communities fractured as one model of family is being hailed and accepted as the norm, and we are seeing queer families and communities ignore and effectively work against groups who we see as natural allies, such as immigrant families, poor families, and families suffering from booming incarceration rates. We reject the idea that any relationship based on love should have to register with the state. Marriage is an institution used primarily consolidate privilege, and we think real change will only come from getting rid of a system that continually doles out privilege to a few more, rather than trying to reform it. We know that most families, straight or gay, don’t fit in with the standards for marriage, and see many straight families being penalized for not conforming to the standard the government has set: single moms trying to get on welfare, extended family members trying to gain custody, friends kept from being each other’s legal representatives. We have far more in common with those straight families than we do with the kinds of gay families that would benefit from marriage. We are seeing a gay political agenda become single-issue to focus on marriage and leave behind many very serious issues such as social, economic, and racial justice.
How the marriage agenda is leaving behind awesome queer history.
We’re seeing the marriage equality agenda turn its back on a tradition of queer activism that began with Stonewall and other fierce queer revolts and that continued through the AIDS crisis. Equality California keeps on sending us videos of big, happy, gay families, and they’re making us sick: gay parents pushing kids on swings, gay parents making their kids’ lunches, the whole gay family safe inside the walls of their own homes. Wait a second, is it true? It’s as if they’ve found some sort of magical formula: once you have children, your life instantly transforms into a scene of domestic bliss, straight out of a 1950’s movie. The message is clear. Instead of dancing, instead of having casual sex, instead of rioting, all of the “responsible” gays have gone and had children. And now that they’ve had children, they won’t be bothering you at all anymore. There’s an implicit promise that once gays get their rights, they’ll disappear again. Once they can be at home with the kids, there’s no reason for them to be political, after all!
Listening to this promise, we’re a bit stunned. Whoever said domesticity wasn’t political? Wasn’t it just a few years ago that the feminists taught us that the personal is political? That cooking, cleaning, raising children and putting in countless hours of physical, emotional, and intellectual labor should not mean withdrawing from the public sphere or surrendering your political voice? After all, we were raised by queers who created domestic lives that were always politically engaged, who raised kids and raised hell at the same time. What makes Equality California think that an official marriage certificate is going to make us any less loud and queer? Oh wait. We remember. It’s that sneaky thing about late liberal capitalism: its promise of formal rights over real restructuring, of citizenship for those who can participate in the state’s economic plan over economic justice for all. Once you have your formal rights (like a marriage license), you can participate in the market economy and no longer need a political voice. Looking around at the world we live in, we’re unconvinced.
We’re also seeing another alarming story surface: If gays are ready to get married and have children, the AIDS crisis must be over! Gay men shaped up after AIDS hit, or at least the smart ones did. Those responsible enough to survive realized that they wanted children, and promptly settled down into relationships that were monogamous and that, presumably, carried no risk of HIV contraction. Come on. We reject all the moralizing about parenthood, responsibility, and sexual practice that goes on in this story. Besides the obvious fact that the AIDS crisis is not over, in the US or abroad, we realize that parenthood and non-monogamy aren’t mutually exclusive. The gay marriage movement wants us to believe that you need a sperm donor or an adoption agency to have children, but we know that there are more ways to make queer families than any of us can imagine. We refuse the packaged and groomed history that writes out the many HIV+ individuals in our lives and communities who are living healthily, loving in monogamous and non-monogamous relationships and raising children. We challenge our queer communities to remember our awesomely radical history of building families and raising children in highly political, inventive, and non-traditional ways.
How marriage equality fractures our community and pits us against our strongest allies.
We believe that the argument for gay marriage obscures the many structural, social, and economic forces that break families apart and take people away from their loved ones. Just for starters, there’s the explosion in incarceration levels, national and international migration for economic survival, deportation, unaffordable housing, and lack of access to drug rehabilitation services. The argument for gay marriage also ignores the economic changes and cuts to social services that make it nearly impossible for families to stay together and survive: welfare cuts, fewer after school programs, less public housing, worse medical care, not enough social workers, failing schools, the economic crisis in general.
We choose solidarity with immigrant families whom the state denies legal recognition and families targeted by prisons, wars, and horrible jobs. We reject the state violence that separates children from parents and decides where families begin and end, drawing lines of illegality through relationships. We see this as part of a larger effort on the part of the state to control our families and relationships in order to preserve a system that relies on creating an underclass deprived of security in order to ensure power for a few. We know that everyone has a complex identity, and that many queer families face separation due to one or more of the causes mentioned here, now or in the future. We would like to see our queer community recognize marriage rights as a short-term solution to the larger problem of the government’s disregard for the many family structures that exist. As queers, we need to take an active role in exposing and fighting the deeper sources of this problem. We won’t let the government decide what does and does not constitute a family.
The way that the marriage agenda phrases its argument about healthcare shows just how blind it is to the needs of the queer community. It has adopted marriage as a single-issue agenda, making it seem like the queer community’s only interest in healthcare is in the inclusion of some members of two person partnerships in the already exclusive healthcare system. Health care is a basic human right to which everyone is entitled, not one that should be extended through certain kinds of individual partnerships. We know this from queer history, and if we forget it, we will continue to let our community live in danger. The question of universal healthcare is urgent to queers because large groups of people inside our communities face incredible difficulty and violence receiving medical care, such as trans people who seek hormone treatment or surgery, people who are HIV positive, and queer and trans youth who are forced to live on the street. Instead of equalizing access to health care, marriage rights would allow a small group of people who have partnered themselves in monogamous configurations to receive care. If we accept the marriage agenda’s so-called solution, we’ll leave out most of our community.
Perhaps because the gay marriage movement has forgotten about the plurality and diversity of queer communities and queer activism, it has tried to gloss over its shortcomings by appropriating the struggles of other communities. We reject the notion that “gay is the new black,” that the fight for marriage equality is parallel to the fight for civil rights, that queer rights and rights for people of color are mutually exclusive. We don’t believe that fighting for inclusion in marriage is the same as fighting to end segregation. Drawing that parallel erases queer people of color and makes light of the structural racism that the civil rights movement fought against. The comparison is made as if communities of color, and black communities in particular, now enjoy structural equality. We know that’s not true. We would like to see a queer community that, rather than appropriating the narrative of the civil rights movement for its marriage equality campaign, takes an active role in exposing and protesting structural inequality and structural racism.
Rather than choosing to fight the things that keep structural racism intact, the liberal gay agenda has chosen to promote them. The gay agenda continually fights for increased hate crimes legislation that would incarcerate and execute perpetrators of hate crimes. We believe that incarceration destroys communities and families, and does not address why queer bashings happen. Increased hate crimes legislation would only lock more people up. In a country where entire communities are ravaged by how many of their members get sent to jail, where prisons are profit-driven institutions, where incarceration only creates more violence, we won’t accept anything that promotes prison as a solution. Our communities are already preyed upon by prisons – trans people, sex workers, and street kids live with the constant threat of incarceration. We believe that real, long-term solutions are found in models of restorative and transformative justice, and in building communities that can positively and profoundly deal with violence. We challenge our queer communities to confront what we are afraid of rather than locking it up, and to join members of our community and natural allies in opposing anything that would expand prisons.
The gay marriage agenda also supports the expansion of the army, seemingly forgetting about all of the ways that the army creates and maintains violence and power. The gay marriage agenda fights to abolish the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, promoting the military’s policy and seeking inclusion. We’ve thought long and hard about this, and we can’t remember liking anything that the US military has done in a really long time. What we do remember is how the military mines places where poor people and people of color live, taking advantage of the lack of opportunities that exist for kids in those communities and convincing them to join the army. We think it’s time that queers fight the army and the wars it is engaged in instead of asking for permission to enter.
Marriage doesn’t promise real security.
As the economy collapses, as the number of Americans without a job, without healthcare, without savings, without any kind of social security net increases, it’s easy to understand how marriage has become an instant cure-all for some. Recognizing that many in our community have lived through strained or broken relationships with their biological families, through the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, through self-doubt about and stigmatization of their relationships, we understand where the desire for the security promised by marriage comes from. However, we see the promotion of gay marriage as something that tries to put a band-aid over deeper sources of insecurity, both social and economic. With marriage, the state is able to absolve itself of responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, as evidenced by the HRC’s argument that with gay marriage, the state could kick more people off of welfare. If the HRC got its way, the queers who do not want, or are not eligible for, marriage would be even less secure than before. We’re frightened by the way the marriage agenda wants to break up our community in this way, and we’re committed to fighting any kind of politics that demonizes poor people and welfare recipients. We challenge our queer communities to build a politics that promotes wealth redistribution. What if, rather than donating to the HRC campaign, we pooled our wealth to create a community emergency fund for members of our community who face foreclosure, need expensive medical care or find themselves in any other economic emergency? As queers, we need to take our anger, our fear, and our hope and recognize the wealth of resources that we already have, in order to build alternative structures. We don’t need to assimilate when we have each other.
We’re not like everyone else.
Everywhere we turn, it seems like someone wants us to support gay marriage. From enthusiastic canvassers on the street to liberal professors in the academy, from gay lawyers to straight soccer moms, there’s someone smiling at us, eager to let us know how strongly they support our “right to marry,” waiting for what should be our easy affirmation. And there seems to be no space for us to resist the agenda that has been imposed upon us. We’re fed up with the way that the gay marriage movement has tried to assimilate us, to swallow up our families, our lives, and our lovers into its clean-cut standards for what queer love, responsibility, and commitment should look like. We reject the idea that we should strive to see straight family configurations reflected in our families. We’re offended by the idea that white, middle-class gays – rather than genderqueers, poor people, single moms, prisoners, people of color, immigrants without papers, or anyone whose life falls outside of the norm that the state has set – should be our “natural” allies. We refuse to feel indebted or grateful to those who have decided it’s time for us to be pulled out from the fringe and into the status quo. We know that there are more of us on the outside than on the inside, and we realize our power.
We write this feeling as if we have to grab our community back from the clutches of the gay marriage movement. We’re frightened by its path and its incessant desire to assimilate. Believe it or not, we felt incredibly safe, happy, taken care of, and fulfilled with the many queer biological and chosen parents who raised us without the right to marry. Having grown up in queer families and communities we strongly believe that queers are not like everyone else. Queers are sexy, resourceful, creative, and brave enough to challenge an oppressive system with their lifestyle. In the ways that our families might resemble nuclear, straight families, it is accidental and coincidental, something that lies at the surface. We do not believe that queer relationships are the mere derivatives of straight relationships. We can play house without wanting to be straight. Our families are tangled, messy and beautiful – just like so many straight families who don’t fit into the official version of family. We want to build communities of all kinds of families, families that can exist – that do exist – without the recognition of the state. We don’t believe that parenting is cause for an end to political participation. We believe that nurturing the growth, voice and imagination of children as a parent, a family and a community is a profoundly radical act. We want to build networks of accountability and dependence that lie outside the bounds of the government, the kinds of networks that we grew up in, the kinds of networks that we know support single-parent families, immigrant families, families who have members in the military or in prison, and all kinds of chosen families. These families, our families, work through our collective resources, strengths, commitments, and desires, and we wouldn’t change them for anything.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Equality March. Now What?
So, I have had a number of people, both in the U.S. and Canada, ask me my thoughts on the Equality March. I was pretty much bombarded in the last 24 hours asking my opinion on the event. Last night I was firm in asking my loving community to give me the night to think about the event, read more of the articles concerning the event, and formulate my opinion.
Here it is.
Let me begin by saying that I did not attend the march for the reasons that I outlined previously. I continue to stand by those reasons.
I will not go so far as Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) who said in an article that he thought the march was a waste of time and effort. For the tens of thousands of people that attended the event, it was an empowering experience and was an energizing moment in their lives. Many people that I care deeply about attended the event, and one of the women that I love and admire, Penelope Williams, was selected as a speaker from the bisexual community. For those people, the event was an important exercise in visibility. I support their participation, and I believe that they got what they needed from the march. Penelope, btw, was invited to speak after intense lobbying by bisexual organizers that, in the last days leading up to the event, found that there was only one speaker from the bisexual community scheduled to address the crowd. You'd think by 2009 the marginalization of bisexual members of our community would be a thing of the past. Whoops.
Unfortunately the community at large and the movement specifically will find that the march was not productive in the least in terms of pushing forward a policy agenda. Obama is dead on right that the economy, the two wars, and health care are much more important issues than the rights of queer folks to openly serve as a part of the U.S. war machine, the marriage battle, or any number of narrow issues that are very important but nowhere near as important as ending war, rebuilding the economy, and establishing a national right to affordable (should be free) healthcare. The reality of politics is that the President has only so much political capital to expend at any one time. The more deft politically Obama is now the more room he has to push a more progressive agenda later. A bevy of polls in recent days have shown that his popularity is climbing again, topping 56%, and he has managed to not only contain but also turn around the spin of the massive conservative publicity machine.
Giving the Right base mobilizing, religious fervor fodder right now would not only retard the movement forward with healthcare and the economy, it would gut any real progress on LGBT liberation in the future. No one is asking our community to wait our turn...what is being asked is that we recognize that ending war, rebuilding the economy, and healthcare reform ARE OUR ISSUES AS WELL!
We are not separate from or outside of those issues and for queers that are progressive, we understand that those issues are at the top of our queer political agenda as they should be. What good is the right to marry if I can't afford a wedding? What good is the right to serve in the military if, after being awarded for service by life long mental health damage, I can't afford to go to the ER (and don't get me started on VA Medical services)? It is time for our community to grow up and learn some political sophistication.
If Obama wins on healthcare, the economy, and successfully gets us out of Iraq...his popularity will skyrocket, and members of Congress will not have the political will to oppose him on issues that, right now, would paralyze the political process and end up setting our justice movement backwards.
And let's talk about justice versus equality. Another failure of the march was the name: Equality. I am not interested in equality. I have no interest in being equal to a cultural system that awards racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and ableism (which, incidentally, are truly at the core of our community's marginalization). I have no interest in joining a system of exploitation in exchange for the right to marry, be sent to war and die for oil, or bring my houseboy in the country legally through narrow immigration reform.
I am interested in liberation ad justice, which necessitates us dismantling systems based in oppression and replacing them with agreements that respect the inherent dignities of each person without creating a new hierarchical system of oppression and privilege in order to maintain those new rights. That means tearing apart the institution of marriage and replacing it with a system of legal union that is not based in centuries of sexism and case law that favors the wealthy over the poor, men over women, or in the case of child custody, women over men. It means looking at the military industrial complex and making a decision to create laws that stringently outline when a President can order troops to war, ends war for financial gain, restricts war time profiteering, and abolishes the poverty and racial draft once and for all. It means health care reform that ends in single payer universal health care.
Unfortunately, we have been trained from the gate and through the non-profit industrial complex to accept crumbs instead of a slice of the pie. Guess what? We deserve the whole damn pie. Until we get it, we need to fight for the biggest pieces first, the ones that will feed the most, sustain the most, support the most and will feed us and strengthen us to make further charges, and harder fights, possible and winnable.
Here it is.
Let me begin by saying that I did not attend the march for the reasons that I outlined previously. I continue to stand by those reasons.
I will not go so far as Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) who said in an article that he thought the march was a waste of time and effort. For the tens of thousands of people that attended the event, it was an empowering experience and was an energizing moment in their lives. Many people that I care deeply about attended the event, and one of the women that I love and admire, Penelope Williams, was selected as a speaker from the bisexual community. For those people, the event was an important exercise in visibility. I support their participation, and I believe that they got what they needed from the march. Penelope, btw, was invited to speak after intense lobbying by bisexual organizers that, in the last days leading up to the event, found that there was only one speaker from the bisexual community scheduled to address the crowd. You'd think by 2009 the marginalization of bisexual members of our community would be a thing of the past. Whoops.
Unfortunately the community at large and the movement specifically will find that the march was not productive in the least in terms of pushing forward a policy agenda. Obama is dead on right that the economy, the two wars, and health care are much more important issues than the rights of queer folks to openly serve as a part of the U.S. war machine, the marriage battle, or any number of narrow issues that are very important but nowhere near as important as ending war, rebuilding the economy, and establishing a national right to affordable (should be free) healthcare. The reality of politics is that the President has only so much political capital to expend at any one time. The more deft politically Obama is now the more room he has to push a more progressive agenda later. A bevy of polls in recent days have shown that his popularity is climbing again, topping 56%, and he has managed to not only contain but also turn around the spin of the massive conservative publicity machine.
Giving the Right base mobilizing, religious fervor fodder right now would not only retard the movement forward with healthcare and the economy, it would gut any real progress on LGBT liberation in the future. No one is asking our community to wait our turn...what is being asked is that we recognize that ending war, rebuilding the economy, and healthcare reform ARE OUR ISSUES AS WELL!
We are not separate from or outside of those issues and for queers that are progressive, we understand that those issues are at the top of our queer political agenda as they should be. What good is the right to marry if I can't afford a wedding? What good is the right to serve in the military if, after being awarded for service by life long mental health damage, I can't afford to go to the ER (and don't get me started on VA Medical services)? It is time for our community to grow up and learn some political sophistication.
If Obama wins on healthcare, the economy, and successfully gets us out of Iraq...his popularity will skyrocket, and members of Congress will not have the political will to oppose him on issues that, right now, would paralyze the political process and end up setting our justice movement backwards.
And let's talk about justice versus equality. Another failure of the march was the name: Equality. I am not interested in equality. I have no interest in being equal to a cultural system that awards racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and ableism (which, incidentally, are truly at the core of our community's marginalization). I have no interest in joining a system of exploitation in exchange for the right to marry, be sent to war and die for oil, or bring my houseboy in the country legally through narrow immigration reform.
I am interested in liberation ad justice, which necessitates us dismantling systems based in oppression and replacing them with agreements that respect the inherent dignities of each person without creating a new hierarchical system of oppression and privilege in order to maintain those new rights. That means tearing apart the institution of marriage and replacing it with a system of legal union that is not based in centuries of sexism and case law that favors the wealthy over the poor, men over women, or in the case of child custody, women over men. It means looking at the military industrial complex and making a decision to create laws that stringently outline when a President can order troops to war, ends war for financial gain, restricts war time profiteering, and abolishes the poverty and racial draft once and for all. It means health care reform that ends in single payer universal health care.
Unfortunately, we have been trained from the gate and through the non-profit industrial complex to accept crumbs instead of a slice of the pie. Guess what? We deserve the whole damn pie. Until we get it, we need to fight for the biggest pieces first, the ones that will feed the most, sustain the most, support the most and will feed us and strengthen us to make further charges, and harder fights, possible and winnable.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Idjku: Russia Has Lost Its Mind So I Be Strokin'
News Update: Jackass head of the GOP says that gay marriage will HURT small businesses...what the fuck?
There are those songs in the world...that when you hear them...they just raise your spirits...they get your feet to tappin' and put a smile on your face.
This morning, as I thumbed through the news...and heard about the 40-80 queer activists in Russia arrested and treated brutally for daring to put on a pride march...I had to stop...take a moment...put in my earbuds...and find some musical joy. Right now, as I muse on the complacency that so many queer folks in the U.S. feel...I am finding joy in Clarence Carter's Strokin'..and A Brand New Day from The Wiz. At the heart of Clarence Carter's song is a celebration of sex and sexuality for the joy of sex and sexuality...in a Brand New Day...Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, Nipsey Russell and Ted Ross are celebrating triumph over Evilene...the Wicked Witch of West Harlem...and the joy that freedom promises.
The beaten and jailed activists in Moscow took to the streets last night against the Wicked Witch of the Kremlin for the right to love (and fuck) freely.
In the United States, in most (though not all) places, we take our right to freely assemble for granted. We take to the streets for Pride festivals as a matter of course. We know that if our festivals and demonstrations are denied, we have legal recourse that we can pursue. The road we walk isn't always easy but, in every major U.S. city, Pride parades and Pride festivals are generally found listed on city websites and generally raise few institutional eyebrows...though there are almost always pockets of religious fundamentalists on a couple of corners waving flags.
Nowhere in the United States in the last two decades have we had to worry about violent reactions from state authorities to our queer pride marches and rallies (the same can not be said for other more radical demonstrations addressing issues of racial and economic justice...America is better than some places but it also has a long ass way to go).
Each year, I endure the diatribes by people like Andrew Sullivan...that rail against the drag queens and leather daddies...the tit slinging dykes on bikes and the fetish queens as they march proudly down Mainstreet U.S.A putting sex in liberation and liberation in sex right out in public view and swirling all up in a gender stew. My blood boils when the regressivists and assimilationists get indignant and demand that we put our celebration and joy back in the closet.
(His Eye is on the Sparrow just came on....”why should I feel discouraged...” Truthfully...I don't).
It is in times like these, when I am reminded of how small our little blue planet really is..that I remember why...almost every year since 1995 I have marched in a queer pride parade no matter where I happened to find myself. While Minneapolis may be a welcoming place, and it might be chic to be a chick with a dick in NYC...there are plenty of places on this planet...where it is not.
When we fight for our own liberation and make ourselves visible...we are not just showing up for ourselves or our community...we are showing up for those that we have no idea are watching. We show up for those that are watching from behind the window shades or behind the old Iron Curtain. We are marching on a global stage to proclaim to a global family that no matter where you are...you have a right to be who you were born to be...without out apology and without violent repression from your government.
We take up arms, internationally, against the Word Trade Organization and unchecked globalization. We cry out against Buddhist monks being jailed and beaten in Tibet. We screamed loudly and with one voice against apartheid in South Africa, and when Slobodan Milosevic decide genocide was an answer....we posed a new question and went to the aid of Kosovo. It is about damn time that we show the same solidarity with those struggling for the right to love and fuck whosoever they choose without regard to gender or sexual identity whether or not they are on the next block or on the next continent.
This week has seen signing of a bill by the President of Uruguay to allow queers to serve in that nation's military. The NY State Assembly passed a queer marriage bill. And Russia struck down with a great fury on rights demonstrators. These things are part of one grand justice tapestry. When the weave is beautiful, but one part of the tapestry snags, the beauty of the whole is reduced. My heart goes out the Russian queer community. But, as Russia turns more and more to partnership with the European Union, it is incumbent on the EU to hold Russia to the same standards it holds its member states...namely requiring the elimination of state sanctioned oppression of queer and genderqueer folks.
Europe can not enjoy the immense resources of Russia while ignoring the human rights abuses of the Russian government and maintain any standing as a human rights crusader in other areas of the world. When economic interests trump human interests the gates of Hell open wider and the Devil rolls out the red carpet to all those involved and Heaven shudders on its foundations.
We are one family...let's act like one.
There are those songs in the world...that when you hear them...they just raise your spirits...they get your feet to tappin' and put a smile on your face.
This morning, as I thumbed through the news...and heard about the 40-80 queer activists in Russia arrested and treated brutally for daring to put on a pride march...I had to stop...take a moment...put in my earbuds...and find some musical joy. Right now, as I muse on the complacency that so many queer folks in the U.S. feel...I am finding joy in Clarence Carter's Strokin'..and A Brand New Day from The Wiz. At the heart of Clarence Carter's song is a celebration of sex and sexuality for the joy of sex and sexuality...in a Brand New Day...Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, Nipsey Russell and Ted Ross are celebrating triumph over Evilene...the Wicked Witch of West Harlem...and the joy that freedom promises.
The beaten and jailed activists in Moscow took to the streets last night against the Wicked Witch of the Kremlin for the right to love (and fuck) freely.
In the United States, in most (though not all) places, we take our right to freely assemble for granted. We take to the streets for Pride festivals as a matter of course. We know that if our festivals and demonstrations are denied, we have legal recourse that we can pursue. The road we walk isn't always easy but, in every major U.S. city, Pride parades and Pride festivals are generally found listed on city websites and generally raise few institutional eyebrows...though there are almost always pockets of religious fundamentalists on a couple of corners waving flags.
Nowhere in the United States in the last two decades have we had to worry about violent reactions from state authorities to our queer pride marches and rallies (the same can not be said for other more radical demonstrations addressing issues of racial and economic justice...America is better than some places but it also has a long ass way to go).
Each year, I endure the diatribes by people like Andrew Sullivan...that rail against the drag queens and leather daddies...the tit slinging dykes on bikes and the fetish queens as they march proudly down Mainstreet U.S.A putting sex in liberation and liberation in sex right out in public view and swirling all up in a gender stew. My blood boils when the regressivists and assimilationists get indignant and demand that we put our celebration and joy back in the closet.
(His Eye is on the Sparrow just came on....”why should I feel discouraged...” Truthfully...I don't).
It is in times like these, when I am reminded of how small our little blue planet really is..that I remember why...almost every year since 1995 I have marched in a queer pride parade no matter where I happened to find myself. While Minneapolis may be a welcoming place, and it might be chic to be a chick with a dick in NYC...there are plenty of places on this planet...where it is not.
When we fight for our own liberation and make ourselves visible...we are not just showing up for ourselves or our community...we are showing up for those that we have no idea are watching. We show up for those that are watching from behind the window shades or behind the old Iron Curtain. We are marching on a global stage to proclaim to a global family that no matter where you are...you have a right to be who you were born to be...without out apology and without violent repression from your government.
We take up arms, internationally, against the Word Trade Organization and unchecked globalization. We cry out against Buddhist monks being jailed and beaten in Tibet. We screamed loudly and with one voice against apartheid in South Africa, and when Slobodan Milosevic decide genocide was an answer....we posed a new question and went to the aid of Kosovo. It is about damn time that we show the same solidarity with those struggling for the right to love and fuck whosoever they choose without regard to gender or sexual identity whether or not they are on the next block or on the next continent.
This week has seen signing of a bill by the President of Uruguay to allow queers to serve in that nation's military. The NY State Assembly passed a queer marriage bill. And Russia struck down with a great fury on rights demonstrators. These things are part of one grand justice tapestry. When the weave is beautiful, but one part of the tapestry snags, the beauty of the whole is reduced. My heart goes out the Russian queer community. But, as Russia turns more and more to partnership with the European Union, it is incumbent on the EU to hold Russia to the same standards it holds its member states...namely requiring the elimination of state sanctioned oppression of queer and genderqueer folks.
Europe can not enjoy the immense resources of Russia while ignoring the human rights abuses of the Russian government and maintain any standing as a human rights crusader in other areas of the world. When economic interests trump human interests the gates of Hell open wider and the Devil rolls out the red carpet to all those involved and Heaven shudders on its foundations.
We are one family...let's act like one.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Wisdom According to RuPaul: All Life is Drag
My masuclinity is in no way infringed upon or diminished by my feminity. Who I am as a man is determined by how I move through the world, the results and intentions of my actions, and the way I make misakes, learn from those mistakes, and continue growing. It has nothing to do with the fact that I have a dick and balls swinging from my crotch. From time to time and day to day my external appearance will shift, change, regress, progress, and morph based on a whole host of internal and external factors. The me you see is my drag persona of the day. Yesterday, I was in softball drag...swinging a bat, pitchin' a ball, and bonding with the lady boys. Tomorrow I could be in a suit, pitching a public policy stance to a Senate staff member, and the day after may find me in high drag with a Lady Bunny wig, four inches of eye lashes, and 32" of titties all shoved into a strappy sparkly number that I picked up from Daffys. All of those would be, if I chose, me. And, frankly, all those have been me.
Today, I was reading an article in Metro Source NY about RuPaul and RuPaul's drag race. What I thought was going to be a fluff article in a free queer rag turned out to be a frank, honest, and hilarious discussion about drag and its POWER in our community. Too often, as RuPaul points out,
...drag in general has been a scapegoat for people to say, 'See! There it is! That's why gay people can't get ahead. Look at these drag queens, they don't represent us,' Ru says. "Bitch, we ain't trying to represent you. We're just doing our thing. You're the only one concerned with us representing you..."
The article continues with a quotation from my friend and Drag Race winner Bebe Benet, "Drag comes with a lot of stereotypes. But the fact is we we're just men. We're men trying to express ourselves."
Let me be really clear to the heteronormative assimiliationist dick heads (and I really do mean dick heads as it is most often biological MEN that are saying the things to which Bebe and Ru are responding)...WITHOUT DRAG QUEENS YOUR ASSMILIATIONIST-I-JUST-WANNA-BE-LIKE-STRAIGHT-FOLKS-AND-MILK-THIS-CAPITALIST-SYSTEM-AND-OPPRESS-MY NEIGHBORS ASSES would still find yourselves being hauled out of dark, grimy dank bars by the cops and having billy clubs shoved, without lube, in your married-suburban-behinds. It was NOT white men at Stonewall that led the riots. It was not power lesbians in Armani business suits...it was black and Puerto Rican Drag Queens and trans folks, people like Sylvia Rivera, who put their lives on the line and revolted. It was boys in dresses and girls in pants and ties that took to the streets on that hot night on June 28, 1969 and threw high heeled shoes through the glass window keeping us from our freedom and liberation. You owe your right to take those RSVP cruises and dance in drug orgy circuit parties to the same people that you try to hide, shame, sweep under the rug, and ignore...except...of course...when you want a night of fun, talent, and entertainment.
Trans folks and drag queens/kings should be at the front of every Pride Parade, chair of every queer organization, and on the front page of every damn queer publication from now until we can lay down our high heels, unroll our curlers, and roller skate into Freedomland!
RuPaul summed up the role of drag in our community very well, when she said, "Drag has always reminded the culture to not take itself so seriously and that you are not your car, you are not your hair color or your religion or the friends tht you hang around...You are a spiritual being having a human experience. Don't get it twisted."
I don't have it twisted Miss Ru. I know that this body and this world is shaped by the spirit within and not what I own or even the biology I was given. Thank you to RuPaul and to Bebe Zahara Benet for reminding us of who we really are. Thank you to the drag queens that took me in when I was a baby queer escaping from classes to find community in a dimly lit night club in Asheville, NC. God rest you Jazzmine James for loving me and making me laugh and smile...I bet you have one hell of a warddrobe in Heaven and can finally do drag that includes being able to change your race on demand (that was one white girl that wanted to be a black girl in the worst way). And thank you to Sylvia (say hey to Jazz for me) and to the rest of the trans folks and drag queens that, 40 years ago, threw their shoes, took to the streets, and started a revolution that ignited an entire globe. From Australia to the Arctic Circle every queer on this planet owes ya'll...and owes you big.
Today, I was reading an article in Metro Source NY about RuPaul and RuPaul's drag race. What I thought was going to be a fluff article in a free queer rag turned out to be a frank, honest, and hilarious discussion about drag and its POWER in our community. Too often, as RuPaul points out,
...drag in general has been a scapegoat for people to say, 'See! There it is! That's why gay people can't get ahead. Look at these drag queens, they don't represent us,' Ru says. "Bitch, we ain't trying to represent you. We're just doing our thing. You're the only one concerned with us representing you..."
The article continues with a quotation from my friend and Drag Race winner Bebe Benet, "Drag comes with a lot of stereotypes. But the fact is we we're just men. We're men trying to express ourselves."
Let me be really clear to the heteronormative assimiliationist dick heads (and I really do mean dick heads as it is most often biological MEN that are saying the things to which Bebe and Ru are responding)...WITHOUT DRAG QUEENS YOUR ASSMILIATIONIST-I-JUST-WANNA-BE-LIKE-STRAIGHT-FOLKS-AND-MILK-THIS-CAPITALIST-SYSTEM-AND-OPPRESS-MY NEIGHBORS ASSES would still find yourselves being hauled out of dark, grimy dank bars by the cops and having billy clubs shoved, without lube, in your married-suburban-behinds. It was NOT white men at Stonewall that led the riots. It was not power lesbians in Armani business suits...it was black and Puerto Rican Drag Queens and trans folks, people like Sylvia Rivera, who put their lives on the line and revolted. It was boys in dresses and girls in pants and ties that took to the streets on that hot night on June 28, 1969 and threw high heeled shoes through the glass window keeping us from our freedom and liberation. You owe your right to take those RSVP cruises and dance in drug orgy circuit parties to the same people that you try to hide, shame, sweep under the rug, and ignore...except...of course...when you want a night of fun, talent, and entertainment.
Trans folks and drag queens/kings should be at the front of every Pride Parade, chair of every queer organization, and on the front page of every damn queer publication from now until we can lay down our high heels, unroll our curlers, and roller skate into Freedomland!
RuPaul summed up the role of drag in our community very well, when she said, "Drag has always reminded the culture to not take itself so seriously and that you are not your car, you are not your hair color or your religion or the friends tht you hang around...You are a spiritual being having a human experience. Don't get it twisted."
I don't have it twisted Miss Ru. I know that this body and this world is shaped by the spirit within and not what I own or even the biology I was given. Thank you to RuPaul and to Bebe Zahara Benet for reminding us of who we really are. Thank you to the drag queens that took me in when I was a baby queer escaping from classes to find community in a dimly lit night club in Asheville, NC. God rest you Jazzmine James for loving me and making me laugh and smile...I bet you have one hell of a warddrobe in Heaven and can finally do drag that includes being able to change your race on demand (that was one white girl that wanted to be a black girl in the worst way). And thank you to Sylvia (say hey to Jazz for me) and to the rest of the trans folks and drag queens that, 40 years ago, threw their shoes, took to the streets, and started a revolution that ignited an entire globe. From Australia to the Arctic Circle every queer on this planet owes ya'll...and owes you big.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Chittlin's Are Good For the Soul
(This article was written for and submitted to BlackPower.com)
Three times a year, I wake up before the sun, put pots of various sizes on the stove to boil, spend hours dicing, chopping, cleaning, tearing, baking, frying, broiling and carving up a feast. Collard greens slow cooked for hours with hamhocks, until the meat is falling off the hock and the greens are smooth as silk and melt on your tongue. Macaroni nd cheese that is akin to one of Pele's sacred mountains, cheese bubbling and percolating throughout layers and layers of macaroni masking as sediment, top golden brown and crisp with occassional butter, mozarella, and cheddar magma breaking through the surface. Turkey, slow roasted in the oven, garlic cloves slipped beneath the skin, the skin rubbed with olive oil, seasoning salt, garlic salt, pepper, and pats of butter snuck inside to make sure it stays so moist that the juices bead on the surface and sweat down the sides when you pull it from the oven. Mash potatoes and homemade turkey gravy. Stuffing. Pies. Glorified rice. Gizzards and neckbones. These are the blessings that I lay on the people I love, these are the spells and incantations I work to bring health and strength to my family, these are a holy inheritance that has sustained my people and my family for more than three centuries. This is soul food.
For those that did not grow up in a black family or a Southern family, soul food is viewed as a quaint regional cuisine. Perhaps you have had chicken and waffles at Amy Ruth's or sampled the greens and mac and cheese at Gladys Knight's Chicken and Waffles. Perhaps you have tried chitterlings on a dare or ate jambalaya while on vacation in New Orleans. For those of us that know better, we know that soul food is the way that our family keeps our history alive. Standing around the kitchen on Easter, watching my Great Aunt Sis cleaning chittlin's and telling me how putting a potato and an onion in the pot kills the smell was always the signal that a story was on its way. She would then turn to me and, in the same breath, tell me how the black community burned down the Negro school when the Supreme Court orderd the end of segregation so the white folks could never make them go back. With a chuckle, she would stir the greens, wink, and say, “But I don't know nothin' 'bout that.”
In my time, I have had to confront rabid vege-naziis that rail at me for eating meat. Having no understanding of what it means to take what was once thrown at you....trash given to trash...and making living, delicious, sustenance out of it. Pigs feet and chitterlings, neck bones and hog maws, tails and tongue. These were the things doled out to the least and from which we made the most. These are the foods that fed Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X (minus the pork). These are the foods that fed Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. These are the foods that fed Assata Shakur and Marcus Garvey and Maya Angelou and all of those black folks that laid the bricks of the road we now travel so much more easily because of their sacrifice and the celebration they made of scraps and ends.
On Thanksgiving morning, Christmas morning, and Easter morning, I wake up with joy in my heart. I turn on the stove, and I look at the bountiful blessing of histoy laid out in front of me. I lose all sense of time as I pour my love, joy, affection, sorrow, pain, and hope into every dish, into every cut and slice, into every pot. This is soul food. Food that sustains the soul, that is a gift, that is to be cherished and treasured and eaten as a way to celebrate family, history, the ones we love, and ourselves.
Three times a year, I wake up before the sun, put pots of various sizes on the stove to boil, spend hours dicing, chopping, cleaning, tearing, baking, frying, broiling and carving up a feast. Collard greens slow cooked for hours with hamhocks, until the meat is falling off the hock and the greens are smooth as silk and melt on your tongue. Macaroni nd cheese that is akin to one of Pele's sacred mountains, cheese bubbling and percolating throughout layers and layers of macaroni masking as sediment, top golden brown and crisp with occassional butter, mozarella, and cheddar magma breaking through the surface. Turkey, slow roasted in the oven, garlic cloves slipped beneath the skin, the skin rubbed with olive oil, seasoning salt, garlic salt, pepper, and pats of butter snuck inside to make sure it stays so moist that the juices bead on the surface and sweat down the sides when you pull it from the oven. Mash potatoes and homemade turkey gravy. Stuffing. Pies. Glorified rice. Gizzards and neckbones. These are the blessings that I lay on the people I love, these are the spells and incantations I work to bring health and strength to my family, these are a holy inheritance that has sustained my people and my family for more than three centuries. This is soul food.
For those that did not grow up in a black family or a Southern family, soul food is viewed as a quaint regional cuisine. Perhaps you have had chicken and waffles at Amy Ruth's or sampled the greens and mac and cheese at Gladys Knight's Chicken and Waffles. Perhaps you have tried chitterlings on a dare or ate jambalaya while on vacation in New Orleans. For those of us that know better, we know that soul food is the way that our family keeps our history alive. Standing around the kitchen on Easter, watching my Great Aunt Sis cleaning chittlin's and telling me how putting a potato and an onion in the pot kills the smell was always the signal that a story was on its way. She would then turn to me and, in the same breath, tell me how the black community burned down the Negro school when the Supreme Court orderd the end of segregation so the white folks could never make them go back. With a chuckle, she would stir the greens, wink, and say, “But I don't know nothin' 'bout that.”
In my time, I have had to confront rabid vege-naziis that rail at me for eating meat. Having no understanding of what it means to take what was once thrown at you....trash given to trash...and making living, delicious, sustenance out of it. Pigs feet and chitterlings, neck bones and hog maws, tails and tongue. These were the things doled out to the least and from which we made the most. These are the foods that fed Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X (minus the pork). These are the foods that fed Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. These are the foods that fed Assata Shakur and Marcus Garvey and Maya Angelou and all of those black folks that laid the bricks of the road we now travel so much more easily because of their sacrifice and the celebration they made of scraps and ends.
On Thanksgiving morning, Christmas morning, and Easter morning, I wake up with joy in my heart. I turn on the stove, and I look at the bountiful blessing of histoy laid out in front of me. I lose all sense of time as I pour my love, joy, affection, sorrow, pain, and hope into every dish, into every cut and slice, into every pot. This is soul food. Food that sustains the soul, that is a gift, that is to be cherished and treasured and eaten as a way to celebrate family, history, the ones we love, and ourselves.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Happy International Women's Day
To all of my women identified friends and family, whether you were born female bodied or have embraced an identity that encompasses that of a woman, I wish you a year with greater strides towards gender freedom and gender liberation. The power to walk freely in this world, without shackles and weights attached to the body you demonstrate, is a gift freely given to those called men, but those called men also fail to feel the invisible restraints created as a counterbalance to the awesome oppressions we have visited and maintain on bio and genderqueer women. The impact of sexism and heterosexism is felt widely and broadly without regard to the genitalia found below your beltline. But overwhelmingly the violence and oppression that maintains the power structure of sexism is targetted at women and the genderqueer. On this International Women's Day, it is my wish that we all remember that our liberations are truly tied up together with one another and that each of us has a deep and abiding role to play in freeing ourselves and rejecting the power of privilege that maintains cycles of violence and continued oppression of the women in this world. Much love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)