Lately, at some point in a discussion of gay rights (and the lack there of) someone will inevitably tell me to be patient, and I’m sick of it. Um, no. I am at zero patience in attaining equality as a human. Not at this point. Not with all of the information we have in our hands. Not in 2008. No way.
I asked Violet the other night how come we haven’t seen a surge in historian suicides in the last 8 years or so. I mean, these people spend their lives researching and documenting the past so that we can learn about and consider, in times before us or in places that we don’t personally exist, how things have happened, what has worked and what didn’t. My guess is that they also have a sneaking hope that this information will be considered in present time.
So, either most of us aren’t considering anything that we have not personally experienced or the current majority of the collective social conscious isn’t taking the time to truly consider what legal, emotional, and social ramifications they are taking the time to empower and impose on their queer co-workers and sisters and aunts and friends and children and dads and neighbors. Maybe taking this time would not leave time to catch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives? Or maybe a part of our humanness is that we are doomed to continue to learn the hard lessons over and over.. and over regardless of what we do or don’t know.
But I just don’t see anywhere else in our recent US history where landmark rights were/are being handed out and then yanked away like they have been with queer rights.
I mean, when we finally decided that women weren’t as dumb as we had previously thought we gave them the right to vote. And to our pleasant surprise the political system didn’t explode and so we never reversed this decision.
Abortion is extremely contentious and is constantly under attack, but thus far the right to make that decision for our own body has held strong enough since the day it passed (not without constant maintenance, but point is it became federal law and still is).
We eventually realized that when people with different skin colors marry each other or share the same drinking fountains or go to the same schools that the sky doesn’t start to collapse on top of us in large deadly chunks and so we legalized it all. And interracial marriage and desegregation have never been legally re-revoked.
Now granted, these examples took a lot of time and diligence and pain staking social activism and created massive social divisions and did not happen easily or overnight. I am not trying to make them look like simple feats. They weren’t and they aren’t. The thing is, measure 8 and the like are just more of the many examples of the legal attempts to take human rights away from a minority that had JUST BEEN GRANTED these rights a few months earlier. AND IT PASSED. And this seems to be the theme with ‘gay rights’ and I am wondering why this is happening and how this is legal?
Ok, getting off of my circular tangent here to make a point: I am concerned about how we are going to try and challenge all of this, in general, in the big picture. I am looking at history and I see that things like waging war work sometimes. I can see that protests and strikes have brought light to and have created a platform for change. I see that unexpected civil disobedience tends to make news and is a good way to get air time.
But looking at this last presidential election, the one where a black man with a funny name, that most people had never heard of before, accused of incompetence and all sorts of suspicious no-no’s, somehow, caught our attention. And one by one we started to listen to him and more of us than not liked what he said above all else. What he had to say trumped the powerful potential detriment of his skin color, because let us not be fooled and dismiss the power of the color of our skin in this country. I am looking at history and I am seeing a new wave of how to create political progress and I just saw some of the previously mentioned tactics getting booed and voted out of Washington.
No more dirty campaigning. No more half witted pretty faces. No more slander. No more wasting time trying to correct outrageous mistruths. No more bullshit distractions. No more yelling back and forth. No more name calling. No more manipulation. No more us versus them.
So, before my last statement, I want to make clear that I am not suggesting or superimposing a right and wrong for anyone else here. I am just talking about me. Plus, I think that variety paves smart progress. So, for those of you who are standing outside with signs and for those of you who are creating social chaos through radical gestures and for those of you who are yelling or not saying anything- I totally respect you and your decisions, so long as your brain and your heart were in on the decision making process.
But, for now, I will come out and say that you will not find me protesting at a Mormon church, nor will you find me publicly pledging my allegiances on myfacespacebook, nor will I go on strike for my rights as a homo. And honestly, I still don’t know what to do about things like measure 8 or the guy who threatened to kill me over eye contact a few days ago. But I am looking at our political history and our political present and I see a trend that I like. Pushing and shoving works sometimes, but it doesn’t last and the backlash seems to be a grand call for something different. Em left a well written and smart comment on my last post that included, “Many people who voted for Barack voted for republicans in other elections, but he explained to them why they needed to vote for him.”
How simple. How reasonable. How peaceful. How authentic. And it worked.
So, my gay agenda of now, as I will openly admit to having one, is to be willing to explain over and over, to anyone, until I am blue in the face, why I think I deserve the opportunity to be treated with the same decency and rights and respects and protections as anyone else. And I’ll just see where that gets me.
Don’t get me wrong, I am totally pissed off and encourage everyone to do what feels right. And I do love a good fight now and then, it just seems to me that it’s time to try something new.
6 comments
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November 12, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Caitlin
That’s a righteous gay agenda. I have adopted a similar one. Thank you for your words. I wanted to pass on to you this awesome op-ed — http://tinyurl.com/675xd4 — which restored my own faith that the U.S. Constitution, no matter how much anyone would like to disregard it, is with us on this one.
November 12, 2008 at 10:20 pm
em
Hi again, thanks for linking me. I was nervous leaving my … well not so much a comment as my *own* gay agenda. I wanted to mention how horrified I was about the guy in the train. What I secretly suspect is that this is the point where all the BS excuses based on Christian homophobia fall apart in the face of the courts and the resistance from the people and the calm and patient explaining*. I don’t think that will stop crazy people from being threatening, but I hope that there will be less of them.
*The frustrated historians will tell you that history is full of examples where someone thought they were delivering a crushing defeat only to discover that it was the final straw instead.
February 9, 2009 at 11:25 am
d
so I know you posted this months and months ago, but I just came across your blog and wanted to leave a note…
while I agree with you re: patience (I too am sick sick SICK of that fucking word), I disagree that we have never seen this before. specifically when you look at race, and issues of racial minorities in this country – for example, after the civil war, during reconstruction, none of that bullshit segregation existed. blacks could legally vote, serve in political office, etc… but white racist folks managed to overturn all of those hard worn rights and reinstate racist and segregationist practices, which were then legally overturned 100 years later. treaties made with indigenous peoples of this continent have been ignored, bypassed, and shattered ever since they were made (continuing into what one might call “recent history”). and, coming from a white queer/lesbian, I don’t believe that the these experiences can ever be equated to the lgbtq struggle, at any point in history or present. that is not to make one particular struggle less important than the other, but rather to give honor to the differences. I hate seeing signs that compare segregation to marriage equality – they are two battles that have incredibly different histories. comparing them also implies that no folks of color are queer and all queers are white, by comparing them in such a way. does that make sense? it erases the people that straddle both identities.
anyway, the point is, and maybe I’m biased because I am in school to teach american history, but I really think that historians ought to rule the world.
February 9, 2009 at 2:39 pm
jesse james
Thanks for the comment – I really appreciate you taking the time to read and comment like that. I just want to clarify a few points:
This post was not to compare any historic ‘struggles’ or ‘battles’ to or against others. The comparison I was making was the repetitive lack of collective social progression in our society with ‘contentious’ issues that, in hindsight, then tend to be seen and documented as issues of human rights and equality and freedom (that is my nice way of saying that stupidity, ignorance and resistance in the way of revamping legally protected out-dated thought rein far too long- and once there is some form of legally protected social change, eventually ithe story has gone from ‘ew gross’ to ‘I just can’t believe we use to have different drinking fountains!’). This post was not to say that the struggle women went through to gain the legal right to vote or make choices about their bodies, or that desegregation has anything to do with or has any comparison to marriage equality. It doesn’t. I fully agree with you that comparing the very different struggles is beyond moot – it is dangerous and invalidating. I think the venomous resistance is comparable though.
You say: “comparing them also implies that no folks of color are queer and all queers are white, by comparing them in such a way.”
I am rereading my post and just don’t see how I imply this. Feel free to respond and help me see this – but again, I am not comparing the struggle – but the legally protected social resistances, and I am certainly not assuming, nor did I even elude to neatly boxed oppressions – I mention women voting, not the color or the gender/sexuality of the women.
Another point I fear might have been missed is that my biggest nerd crushes are on historians and social activists like Howard Zinn. They map out ‘what and what not to do next time and why’ – and why oh why aren’t we listening?!?
February 9, 2009 at 3:35 pm
d
I definitely see what you mean about similarities between the venemous resistance to social movements and progression. I agree entirely. perhaps my comment was more geared towards the trajectory that such an argument can, and often does, follow.
the statement you quoted above was less directly about your post and more about the general tendency of liberal/progressive/whatever movements to blend struggles for racial equality, struggles for gender equality, sexual orientation equality, etc. while they are blended certainly for those who exist with intersecting identities, often these types of rhetorical choices are made by those who are not personally aware or experienced in such an existence. I am thinking of a photograph I saw of a young woman holding a sign in an anti-prop 8 march that read: “separate is not equal.” it was a powerful image, and a powerful rhetorical choice. however, at what price do we get this powerful image? this young woman did not live through segregation, nor would she have been negatively affected by it. it seems, to me, to be ignoring an experience she has never nor will ever have in favor of a powerful statement. this lacks integrity, in my eyes. this is not what you did in your post, and I’m sure that young woman wasn’t even thinking that far. but there you go.
and about the statement you quoted: when an argument is presented that says “these are the ways that the struggle for ____ is similar to the struggle for ____,” the argument is automatically set up in an A and B way, like black folks go in column A and queer folks go in column B, which ignores that it’s more like a venn diagram. example: black people couldn’t marry white people, which is like how two women or two men are barred from marriage. but what about the black gay men who could not marry twice over? or the indigenous gay women who could not even vote twice over on their right to marry and are not even technically citizens for several different reasons yet are tied to american law? which column do they go in? there are people with intersecting identities whose experiences are not necessarily more alligned with one or the other, nor should they have to choose unless they, well, choose to. you can kinda see this manifest in history with most human rights movements: the feminist movement ignoring queers and POC, the black power movement shunting most of the women into secretarial work, the most recent marriage equality movement blaming blacks for the passing of Prop 8. I would argue that the dominant historical narrative about, for example, the feminist movement, conjures up images of white women. but we know from history that there were lesbians, a contentious topic, and there were WOC who were not welcomed to discuss “their issues,” there were working class women whose experiences were not congruent. so if we, for example, compare women’s rights with civil rights on one level, there is a dichotomy set up that erases those women who straddle both movements. I don’t know if I am making myself clear, at all. I think maybe I’m just rambling at this point.
again, I think what I’m trying to say is less driven specifically by what you wrote, but more by that particular line of argument that is easily taken in a dangerous direction.
February 9, 2009 at 3:36 pm
d
edit: the photograph was of a young white woman holding the sign. I should’ve clarified.