Community Action Center

Community Action Center is screening at MIX 24 on Sunday, November 20 at 3 PM. 

This screening will probably be sold out because every thinking, feeling woman in NYC who has any interest in lesbian sexuality will be there. Every lesbian in NYC will be there to watch and discuss CAC because exactly how often do we get to see explicit images of dyke sex on a big screen with an audience full of queers? Almost never! 

Year round at MIX NYC we leave no stone unturned in our desire to provide our audience with access to images of women fucking. Images that were not designed to be sold, not designed for straight wankers, and god help us, not designed to educate anyone. Because we know we can do better than all that. We can do better. Every dyke in this city needs to see this film and talk about it with her lovers and exes and BFFs and even with dykes she hasn't met yet. We need more dialogue about sexuality, and we need to have it in public places, not just in our homes and parties. Not just on our blogs and various online feeds. Not just those of us who publicly write about sex online but those of us who privately think about sex all the time. We need to sit together in the dark with other lesbians and watch 69 minutes of porn, and look at pussies and assholes and and dildoes and nipples then stay there and then discuss it together. Stay right the fuck there and talk about it. 

Whether it is to say, "Oh I was turned on by the scene by the railroad tracks," or "Oh this doesnt represent me, I don't see anyone with my body type here" and "Oh, I don't ever want to have sex like in that one scene, but I liked the piercing," and so on and on. Love it or hate it, pornography made by and about lesbians is too important to ignore. Because Jesus Fucking Christ, there is a real dearth of this material. And there is not enough of this dialogue. And you know deep down lesbians always want to talk about the politics of representation while thinking about getting it on. And of course you can look at videos online all day but you will not find anything like this and besides, you will be at home looking at your computer and what is that all about anyway? 

In utopia, a diverse and inclusive community of queers of all genders watch porn together all the time. In the real world, cisgender fags should see this film too. So many dykes I know watch gay porn because we love you and your sex turns us on. And suffice it to say that our watching pornography together is powerful. Every step we take towards better understanding of each other improves us. (That does not mean you can look at, comment upon or touch my boobs.) 

We often want to start our community building conversations in identity and movement aspirations. Maybe grounding our conversation in the pleasures and displeasures, the politics and erotics of looking, can get us started too. How are overlapping identities represented? How does inclusion work in friendship as well as in community as well as in screen time?

Community Action Center self-consciously takes up the challenges of representation that are a huge part of feminist discourse associated with what is commonly referred to as the second wave of feminism. By locating some of the scenes in nature, CAC connects itself to a tradition of cultural feminism around the feminine being rooted in nature and the earth, being all wild and ritualistic and so on. In the 1980s lesbian porn had titles like Erotic in Nature, and even straight mainstream porn with lesbian themes was often on the arty side. The S/M scenes in CAC bring to mind the feminist schism of the 1990s where S/M and pornography were hotly debated and feminism painfully struggled to contain and sustain disagreement, to become large enough to hold contradictions. So many of the same challenges have been hanging around in lesbian pornography since we started the problematic project of controlling our own images and asking whether objectification could be done without dehumanization. CAC often takes these themes over the edge, going just that one step further. With the images like the archetypal witch and her literal broomstick ride, CAC overstates the problem of feminist representation of women's sexuality and reminds us of the lengthy history of this debate. Is there a way out of the conundrum of being the object of desire and the desire to be more than an object? The feminist project of liberation is alive and well here, as CAC surfaces this puzzle with equal parts earnestness and irony. 

There is a tone of serious parody that I personally enjoyed a lot about the film. The pizza boy from the straight porn world makes a guest appearance. So does a busty woman washing a car, in a kind of classic tacky erotica tribute that goes on long enough to make you think repeatedly about what exactly you are seeing here. What is the meaning of invoking these images, in a way that is simultaneously humorous and humorless? What about pubic hair that is long enough to braid? A send up on the idea of feminists and lesbians being humorless, here we have the comedic and the dead-serious appearing simultaneously.

So mark your calendar for the CAC screening. Right by where you marked for when you are expecting your period, or going to therapy, or your haircut. Brace yourself to see some dyke sex for real. Because if we don't watch this now, how can we be sure work like this will keep getting made? If we don't show up to see images of ourselves, who the fuck will? We are not seeing shit like this on TV or cable or the movies. If our sexuality never leaves the confines of our apartments, does it really make a sound? What are you so busy doing, anyway? Assembling lists of suggestively homoerotic scenes from otherwise straight pop culture? Replaying the scene where Shane fucks Rosanna Arquette with a strap-on? Watching your well-worn VHS tape of Bound? Rifling through old issues of Leg Show?

Public dyke sex is critical not only for our liberation, but also just to have our own sexuality and dialogue about it and to have that documented and real and public and collaborative and important and prioritized and of course critical, and of course political, we are dykes after all, aren't we? So I don't give a fuck if you already saw this on a loop in a gallery, and I don't care if you already saw it at the center or in park slope. I don't care if you loved it and can't wait to see it again or if you jerked off or if it made you uncomfortable or if it offended you or even if you found it pretentious. I'm not asking you to take your pants off though you are welcome to, but just to show the fuck up and watch some women get it on. Just get your ass to this screening. Every dyke in NYC needs to be there because prioritizing our pleasure, our bodies and our sex lives is revolutionary. And at a time when the state and its corporate masters are shutting down our speech and regulating where, when and how our bodies may meet and assemble, it might do us some good to assemble around the body itself and all its potential pleasures.

The Invisible Shield

I have been working in the education sector since 1999. In the past four years I have been laid off from two jobs, first at a for-profit then at a non-profit. At my last full-time job, there was this video of a high school lesson on how diseases spread, focused on HIV. The video was chosen by folks at the top of the organization to be used as an example mediocre lesson to be critiqued. The content of the lesson was inaccurate and full of misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, the kind of scare-tactic misinformation that makes infection seem inevitable and unavoidable. The lesson was also poorly taught, which is why it was chosen. It did not occur to the people who selected it that the video might get a reaction out of anyone with a personal experience of HIV/AIDS, by distracting, angering, insulting or just annoying them. They might not be able see and critique the lesson clearly through all the bullshit.

Two straight white women selected this video, a mid and upper level manager. They must never have really thought about what it is like to be positive, or to have a parent or a lover or a friend with HIV/AIDS. How else could they fail to notice the content? This is how heterosupremacism protects straight people from seeing reality that is not even outside their experience or world, but just right outside their cubicle. We worked in the same office but in different realities. Unknowing participation in the day-to-day hetero-centric power dynamics allows straight people to get by without taking responsibility for their homophobia. Privilege forms a shield of ignorance that deflects responsibility for the harm that others experience through unwittingly homophobic actions. This shield is itself an instrument of homophobia, no less so for being invisible to the people it is protecting. The protection likely makes it easier to consistently plead ignorance than to take responsibility for learning about homophobia.

It made me go a little crazy to watch the reality I live in and know so well not be given a moment’s consideration. Our team managed to block the video from being used by arguing that it would create a disadvantage for anyone whose life had been impacted by HIV/AIDS. A modified version was used instead. Considering the NYC schools and neighborhoods we worked in and served, that adds up to a lot of people. The thing that was so stunning about this experience was the extent to which something so central to my experience was so nonexistent to the people running the organization I worked in. I felt betrayed because I had trusted that forward thinking educators were forward thinking in other areas too. My trust was misplaced.

And all this really illuminates the protection afforded to some straight people by heterosupremacism. It is the delusion of being morally good even in the very moment when they are excluding anyone outside of their privileged circle. They fall back on their good intentions and persist in ignorance. In contrast, straight people who have personal experiences with HIV/AIDS lose their ignorance, in that they literally cannot ignore HIV/AIDS. They come into contact with a form of stigmatization related to sex and the body that more privileged straight people never experience. It would be easier to separate out all the different forms of privilege, to make this simple, but that would do a disservice to the people who were on my team at work, all of whom are straight, some are white, more are black, some single and some married. They don’t spend time with lots of queer people besides me, but they also don’t go around in a stupor thinking no one they know has HIV/AIDS. They live in a world that includes people with AIDS and know it is not neutral content for assessing good and bad instruction. We all work in schools in neighborhoods with disproportionately high impact. So their access to heterosupremacist privilege intersects with race and/or class and/or geography and is consequently limited in this particular context. We were all severely pissed off about the selection of this video and took effective and strategic action. I was so grateful to not be alone in my anger! I had spent over two years on this team, slowly and painstakingly building relationships and trust, sharing myself and learning about each of my colleagues as individuals. So I felt like I really earned the support I received from them and offered to them during this particularly challenging incident.

The woman who selected that video lesson was barely held accountable because, well, she just Didn’t Know! And her boss Didn’t Realize! She expressed embarrassment but not responsibility. When her boss first heard that our team had objections about the video, she immediately offered to talk to me about it, assuming it was the queer person alone who had objected. But every person on my team had a visceral reaction to the video and found the ignorance at the top of the organization inexcusable. Either way, the folks responsible for selecting the video pleaded ignorance and were ashamed. But they didn’t take responsibility for educating themselves. They viewed it as a one-time occurrence, an embarrassing oversight, not as an indicator of a huge blind spot in their human awareness that only they could fill in for themselves through active self-education. Not to mention the fact that we were all professional educators!

Privilege means never having to really imagine or understand the differences and experiences of others. I used to theorize that being conservative was a result of a lack of imagination. I thought it came from not being able to imagine what it is like to be anyone but yourself. I thought conservatives wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs because of being unable to imagine anything better. But systems of oppression protect the privileged from more than just their imaginations. And this kind of conservatism is a default state, with the imagination being actively blocked from a richer understanding of human experience. “I just didn’t know” and “I never realized…” are not only excuses but also the very stuff of privilege itself. Heterosupremacism protects the privileged from the work of having to notice, from having to pay attention, from having to think, from having to know things. It protects them from being uncomfortable and from taking responsibility. And it also precludes them from experiencing empathy and connecting across differences.

Audre Lorde talks about this very phenomenon in her classic The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. The title is often quoted but the context is less often discussed. The short essay was originally a talk given at a feminist conference, where she was invited to be on a panel, the only panel where black and lesbian feminist perspectives were considered. Lorde courageously decided to take up this fact in her talk, and specifically to take on the conference organizers’ privileged response of Not Knowing Who To Ask and Not Realizing They Were Doing Anything Wrong. Instead of taking responsibility, the conference organizers relied on the very person they were excluding. They felt like their lack of knowledge was a neutral fact. But this studied lack of knowledge about difference is no accident; it is how exclusion and dehumanization work to perpetuate themselves. This combination of ignorance and irresponsibility in the face of difference is exactly the “master’s tool” that Lorde is referencing:

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought…

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

What I want is for us to take up some of the hardest problems in front of us. One of the reasons these problems are so hard is because no one wants to take them up! Sincerely taking them up will start to produce a change in us. People who dig into their discomfort and fear will be different from people who keep their blinders on and proceed as usual. It is a process that challenges us to persist through discomfort. Even before the evolution of ideas or opinions, the very act of taking up heterosupremacism will change us. And people don’t exactly fear change, but fear that change will produce loss with nothing tangible to be gained. People fear loss, and they are right, they will lose something. To start they will lose the fantasy of their sexuality being natural and normal and the fantasy of being morally righteous. Facing this loss will take courage.

Straight people who take up heterosupremacism will become other than what they are, because the process will change their self-concept. The hard problem for me is staying with them, sitting with the pain and not going into a rage and subsequently shutting down. The questions that came up for me there remain with me. Can I love straight people well enough to see them through their loss, even when I am feeling rejected as a consequence? Can I encourage them? To support them in accepting that they will no longer have access to self-affirming myths of human nature, or that the mythology might change entirely? I want them to see and be curious about our differences, and be curious about the implications of these differences. And I want us ALL to be more in touch with reality, more connected by understanding, and more comfortable with complexity. I am no longer in that workplace sitting side by side with straight people working through our differences, but the learning and patience I took away from the practice of sitting with heterosupremacism and building alliances was infinitely more valuable than my minimal severance payment.

Parental Archive

Standing.

Far right.

High Cholesterol

Overheard on my block tonight: "You act like a boy so I'm going to fight you like a boy."


Right now I am looking at this picture where I'm riding piggyback on a new friend. You can't see it in the picture but we are in front of maybe a hundred cheering queer people who are out in the park for a day of games, dress-up and socializing. We are on our way to collect a tiny prize for our field day team as part of a very promising evolutionary current in the local community ecosystem. Suddenly I'm thinking back to a certain day in high school. After school I was walking to my car and somebody threw a rock that hit me on the left hip and bounced off. It was about the size of a baseball, probably a chunk of broken concrete and gravel. That shit was everywhere where I grew up, paving a new parking lot or strip mall that would go unoccupied. Somebody threw a rock at my crotch. I never saw who threw it but I wonder where are they now? Sometimes I still think about all the people who convinced me to feel so alone and subhuman that I wanted to kill myself when I was little more than a kid. Now I have my share of problems but my life turned out all right. How did the conformity you so passionately enforced work out for you? I imagine your cholesterol is sky high and your wife left you and your house was foreclosed and you lost all your hair. I wonder if they do anything differently now in my old high school, if the teachers and children there have heard about Lawrence King or Sakia Gunn. I think about how fortunate I was to suffer only the most minor of forms of violence, the rocks, spit and insults. It would be great to one day feel more compassion for people in my past, but for the moment I just know I need to release all this rage I tried to swallow for so long.

Reminders from an Undated Work Journal

1. It's not about me.
2. Respect people's time.
3. Everything relates to goals and values. Details reflect priorities.
4. Don't act when you are triggered.
5. Get over how you think things should be and work with how things are.
6. People are mobilized by feelings and relationships.

Shit List Day 4: Family Values

Rather than go in to a critique of patriarchy, or the potential damage of bad families, I want to look at the idea of family as an exclusionary anti/social unit. Patriarchal families have been extremely bad for women and children, and that should always be named because it is infuriating and unacceptable. However right now I am primarily interested in having some conversations about how the family itself serves to obstruct a more supportive social system overall.

Families function to favor the set of people who are Blood Relations over the set of people who are Others. From the healthiest to the most oppressive, families all share a relationship to the question of who counts as family and who doesn’t. This way of dividing up the world has been completely exploited in the everyone-for-themselves capitalist system.  Economic oppression thrives in part on the idea that I don’t owe anything to anyone except my own flesh and blood. We can all do better. Queer people are here to do better. We are here to destroy family values.

When it comes to providing empathy and taking responsibility, our culture teaches us to prioritize family members over all the other humans to whom we are not related. Of course empathy and responsibility are not actually limited resources. But that is another conversation, because in our consumer culture we behave as though everything were a limited resource. So the idea of family enshrines care for a tiny set of people and diminishes responsibility for the rest. This fundamental aspect of family values is considered admirable because it is usually described as a form of loyalty.

The underside of family loyalty is a social order that lacks care for many, many, many, many people who need it. The system is set up to create a no-win situation where struggling families are simply not up to the multitude of challenges facing them, including emotional, economic, health challenges. Then the state and the community get to evade responsibility by pointing to some imagined moral failing of those same families.

In my birth family, two of the four of us were periodically hospitalized for mental illnesses and we certainly could have used some support from outside. But there we were, closed up in our suburban house, a family that offered little to its members and was unknown to others. We were not Family to anyone else. In other words, we were not in the set of cared-for people belonging to anyone capable of providing actual care.

So you say some families value empathy, healing, service, and caring for others? They are on their way to destroying family values and building new ones. Your family is a big household full of friends who chose to be together? Your family is tiny but made up of people who consider the babysitter a sister? You are building new family values. The old and the new live together side-by-side today, and sometimes you can feel the conflict happening. It doesn’t exactly help that we use the same word for both more open and more closed family systems. We all need a new normal. The default cannot remain the family that excludes. Right now many families straddle two worlds, waiting for the new to begin as the old passes away. We need to think carefully about what we wish to preserve from this contested territory.

On one hand, I want the new normal to question the ethics of valuing some people over others. The concept of family hinges on who is in and who is out. The conventional idea of family is based on the exclusion of the immoral, unwholesome other, in other words, the queer, the person who is with somebody the others do not approve of, the "illegitimate" child, etc. We have all had enough of that!

On the other hand, I want to note even the most loving family as currently constructed is still isolated and very often not up to all the work we expect from it. The family is inadequate to provide individuals with all the social, emotional and economic support that would make for healthier, flourishing human beings.

So the family is failing those it excludes, then under pressure it is failing those included as well. The family is failing, failing, failing. Can gay marriage be part of both the old and the new? It seems to me to hold too fast to the old. In the wrong hands, gay marriage serves to further de-legitimize our tribes and families of choice. NPR has provided some minimal coverage of conscientious objectors to gay marriage by inviting Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on as a guest on at least 2 occasions. Recently there was coverage of the NY marriage decision, and the same interviewer who has spoken with Mattilda awkwardly brought up the fact that some gays think there is something “special” to preserve about gayness, separate and apart from marriage. A guy about to marry his long-time boyfriend responded, “Yes but we are tired of being second-class citizens.” Was he referring to the ability to marry, or is that what single people and unmarried lovers are? Or is that what people in relationships outside monogamy are? I found his response illuminating because it spoke on many levels regardless of whether the speaker would deny or confirm my reading. If anything, it is heterosupremacism that makes us second-class citizens, not the law in isolation and not the status of being unmarried. I wonder how single straight people felt hearing that interview.

The meaning of family may be contested but real families in the real world still kick out queer children and sometimes drive them to suicide. Real families still struggle and implode under pressures that are simply too great. We cannot rehabilitate that shit by simply demanding a place within it. Our presence alone will not do the trick. We need better values where care includes people who are neither your relatives nor connected to you by the rule of the state, and where a variety of relationships are respected. Before we jump to perpetuate a system that exists at our expense, we might consider whether we want to continue to even use the word “family.” But in the meantime, let’s preserve a practice well embedded in the queer community’s history and in our best present moments: caring for one another regardless of blood or law.

Shit List Day 3: Queers

I will be among the first to point out that the queer community has a million problems, flaws and failings. We fuck up regularly. We keep trying to love each other well, and sometimes we succeed in spectacular and very moving ways. Then sometimes we don’t try. Then some other times we exclude each other, accidentally or worse. Sometimes we behave like self-righteous douche bags, especially when we think we’re being “radical.” All too often we are as racist, classist, misogynist, transphobic and otherwise deluded as the larger culture we are trying to resist. Sometimes we replicate the very problems we try to address. Sometimes I need to manifest the presence of my finger up my butt just to deal with all the glittery elitism, cliquish condescension and premature enlightenment.

At the same time that I often feel alienated, I am also very proud of us. We have our love and we have our hope and best of all we have each other. I’m proud of our resilience and all we have survived. When I was a closeted kid, somebody told me that gays stick together because their families reject them. It gave me hope. And for gay marriage to divide my people into pairs when we have already created a more successful and more loving and more expansive social structure is positively frightening. Community doesn’t happen by accident but the mainstream default state of individual isolation requires very little effort. I fear the impact gay marriage will have on gay community. I fear that marriage might narrow the group of people we care for into a "family" at the expense of the expansive group of cared-for people we currently call our community.

My personal commitment to always actively build community has made my life more fulfilling than I ever dreamed it would be. I have experienced more love among queer people than I ever hoped to receive from a straight family structure, more than I ever saw around me in my straight upbringing, more than I imagined I would ever deserve or attain. I was brought up to believe as a dyke I would be doomed to unrequited love for straight women who could never possibly love me back. I was not going to marry so I would die alone. My life has already turned out much better than I had ever imagined, and certainly better than I had been raised to expect. The ongoing work of entering, understanding, sharing and repairing queer community has been and continues to be fundamental to sustaining my ability to exist in this world.

Gay marriage feels much too much like the compulsory heterosexuality I experienced growing up in the suburbs. At our best we have made markedly different, more just and more rewarding lives for ourselves. I want us to be able to stick with it and keep working on it. The fabric of the queer community is delicate and requires our care. If we throw it in the marriage washing machine and it disintegrates into couples, we’ll ruin something very precious, something that improves the world through its presence. Weakening the queer community would be a real loss for everyone who has ever wanted something more from their love relationships than what has been socially dictated. Hand wash only, please!

Shit List Day 2: Gays Aspiring to Marriage

The day after the NY marriage decision, the Michael Kors store had HRC logos all over their window. Behind the window was a display of wedding cakes topped with bride-bride and groom-groom decorations. At the dyke march I saw lots of great subversive signs, but right outside the Michael Kors store I saw somebody with “Cuomo-sexual” written on their back. The juxtaposition embodied much of what has been troubling me.

Could you be more of an unquestioning minion of the state? Could you more openly discredit the hard work our people did in favor of praising an opportunistic (and social service-cutting) governor? I could have grabbed this person by the neck, repeated “no” very firmly, and smacked them on the behind with a rolled up newspaper. Queer people! Please do not behave like lap dogs. We are not on this earth to form a market group or as a voting block for inadequately progressive politicians/corporate shills. Have some self-respect. We’re not here merely to vote or make campaign donations to Cuomo. I could have broken the window at Michael Kors and shit in their display.

Even as a child I wanted more relational options than the two I was taught: married or old maid. I realize that some of my more difficult feelings about gay marriage go all the way back to being indoctrinated to believe that if I didn’t get married then I would die alone. From my earliest memories, I rejected this dichotomy. I knew there had to be something better.

Some gay people want to get married, often for child custody, citizenship and/or healthcare, and sometimes for romantic reasons. Many of us do not want to get married. Of course our marriages should be recognized, but that still doesn’t make marriage something to aspire to. Nothing will convince me it is a good idea to force my most intimate relationships into more conventional frameworks; I am much too proud of how hard we work at breaking free from monogamy, jealousy, possession and patriarchy. I enjoy my queer relationships, writing, art, music, humor, fashion, films, house parties, political activism, made-up families, academic theory and counter culture. I love the queer culture boom happening right now. I hope a million new organizations, collectives and households form. Bottom line is that I like my friendships and love and culture as they are, totally queer. And I feel no less protective of this community than any other doberman would.

Shit List Day 1: Straight Homophobic Patriarchs

Four days after the NY Gay marriage decision, this guy on the train was yelling, “Civil rights are for people who are civilized. A woman letting another woman fuck her with a strap-on is not civilized. A man fucking another man up the ass is not civilized.” He was arguing loudly with a woman who was clearly offended and yelling right back. I went to another car.

But what I could have done was swipe the ugly little hat off his head. It was part of his ridiculous religious garb. I could have thrown it on the floor and crushed it with my boot. What I could have done was snap his head right off his shoulders and kick it down the length of the train to shut him up.

When I went back to my workplace after being laid off to turn in my final paperwork to Chuck in HR, he told me all about how he was leaving early to see his daughter’s recital. I minimally acknowledged what he was saying, as I had done the first time Chuck was introduced to a bunch of us and had attempted to build a rapport by talking about his family and football.

But what I could have done was smash all the framed pictures of his kids that he keeps on his desk. What I could have done was sit him down and talk about how the all straight-power high-fives make the workplace extremely fucking uncomfortable for people like me. So many good dads and committed moms there, trying to manage their work-life balance! Every check-in, every conference call, every meeting, people were constantly affirming their wholesome heterosexuality. It made me feel invisible and furious that the only way people could relate was through this hetero banter where I had never had anything to add. What the fuck do I have to say about your morning sickness or engagement or sleepless nights with the newborn? Holidays were the worst. The head of HR should know better, so I could force him to be educated clockwork orange style. Actually I am not even sure that would work. Even after all that I might have no choice but to beat him over the head with a giant dildo.

The law that now allows gays to marry in NY includes “exemptions” for religious organizations. Homophobic organizations are officially exempt from respecting the gay marriage law. In order for this to happen, a lot of people had to think it was reasonable to hate gays. It is considered a moral issue for churches and religious non-profits to discriminate against us. Their “right” to discriminate is written in to this law such that if it is ever taken away, the law is invalidated. The law that passed functionally legitimates the homophobia of the church. A lot of fuss was made by republicans about “protecting religious freedom,” conflating the desire to discriminate against queers with freedom of religion. (I am pretty sure freedom of religion was supposed to be freedom from state mandated religion.)

For this one, I could make some kind of breakthrough in astrophysics that would prove beyond any question that there is definitely no such thing as god. But that wouldn’t work because religious fucks are all about having faith despite evidence. Maybe I could call on the gods of Ancient Greece to smite them for their hubris. Or maybe there could be a god who appears on earth just to tell the fundamentalists of every religion that the only people doomed to hell are those dumb enough to take scripture literally. A fantasy that is really satisfying here would have to destroy both the church and the state, so maybe the fantasy is simply apocalypse. But you know some surviving asshole would immediately want to set up a church.

On Being Both Queer and Human at the Same Time

Heterosupremacism blocks queers from being a part of the culture’s stories about what is normal, human, decent or good. Our likenesses, our histories, our kinship networks, are all missing from what is considered normal. Now people may object, “Oh what is normal anyway?” It’s nice when folks want to play at defying norms, but Normal is serious business. Normal that gets discussed is one thing, but Normal that gets enforced with silence and absence is another. This Normal is something queers have to contend with in our every interaction. In part it determines whether we will or will not be relatable. If you can’t talk to me about guy stuff and I’m not one of the girls, can you talk to me at all? This question sounds kind of funny but has been part of my real experience, particularly in professional settings. I have had to seriously consider my relate-ability as an organizer and a leader in straight education sector workplaces. I have discussed it with bosses and mentors, and I am grateful that more recently I have had the chance to experience it out in the open, instead of always just missing connections and feeling like an outsider for no clear reason.

Heterosupremacism is perpetuated by actively excluding that which is queer from our consciousness. What we think about, what occurs to us off the top of our heads is not the product of chance, but rather the result of a steady stream of stories presented to us over and over again. These stories make up our culture and are ingrained in our consciousness. The stories will not get questioned or rewritten without an active effort on the part of straight people to stop and look at what they have been trained to ignore, to seek to understand that which they have been trained is incomprehensible, and to make friends with those they have been trained to see as exceptional, abnormal, immoral, other. Heterosupremacism is the system that protects straight people from feeling responsible. Power acts to reproduce itself, and heterosupremacism is a self-serving feedback loop: Here is what is normal, so ignore this, that and definitely the other thing. Here is what is Normal, here it is again, and again. Something queer just showed up? That’s an exception and you can safely disregard it. Heterosupremacism keeps the queer as exceptional and either irrelevant or evil or both.

It is somewhat less common today for people to publicly spell out their homophobia but they still do sometimes like NY gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino saying "And I don't want them [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn't." This is an open statement of heterosupremacism in that it literally negates the validity of our existence. Paladino also said "I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family." He is speaking directly to his perceived moral superiority. The statement is literally asserting the fact of being better, he uses the slightly milder words “better off” and “much more successful.”

When I hear stuff like this I have several simultaneous reactions. I am hurt and angered. And I am also relieved. There is some part of me that is relieved when I hear some fucked up homophobia because I feel like I’m picking up on it all the time subliminally but it is never stated outright. Hearing it outright makes me feel relieved that I am not crazy. So when I see the full face of hatred, I am hurt but I also have a sick sense of relief that all the homophobia I have been sensing beneath the surface is finally out in the open.

Josh Vlasto from the opponent Cuomo campaign said Paladino's comments demonstrate “a stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality." Democrats pointing at somebody like Carl Paladino and calling him homophobic are not actually condemning him, they are merely naming that he is homophobic. But wait, they didn’t actually do that. They said his remarks demonstrated homophobia. That is an even weaker statement than I initially thought. They weren’t even courageous enough to attach homophobia to the person, but rather more safely to his remarks.

Democrats act as though calling out Paladino’s homophobia makes them our allies, but it doesn’t. This incident brought to my mind the reality that democrats naming homophobia still may not be clear on the meaning of that word. It came across to me as though they were calling him a name, calling him Bad, but not making any statement of their own against homophobia, not actually making any positive action to ally themselves with queers. What a great deal-- they got to state their liberal version of moral superiority without taking any actual action against homophobia.

When Tracy Morgan expressed some unfortunately standard homophobic ideas in his stand-up comedy routine, responses were similar in that they focused on the words and not the intention. The words were condemned but not the heterosupremacism. This is a subtle but important difference. Morgan said, “I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville.” I am not so concerned about his words, but more the thought and character of somebody whose words included the idea that being gay is something you learn from the media, and that he would kill his own son if he turned out gay, lesbians aren’t real, and kids who are bullied should stop complaining and stand up for themselves. Tina Fea, producer of the TV show he is on, said “I'm glad to hear that Tracy apologized for his comments.” Again emphasizing the comments as though this were a matter of poor word choice. NBC made reference to “homophobic remarks.” All the discussion is focused on the words because of fear of taking up their meaning. Heterosupremacism wins when straight people agree on what can and cannot be said, without changing any underlying beliefs, attitudes or assumptions.

Of course what Morgan actually said is very telling. Like with Paladino, it is a case of heterosupremacism being spoken out loud. When Morgan denied that lesbians are real, it reminded me of a straight colleague who explained away middle school girls coming out by making reference to the immaturity of boys their age. People honestly believe that lesbians aren’t real, and I had to have a conversation with my colleague about how lesbianism is not about boys at all, and is really real all on its own. Paladino said queerness was brainwashing, and Morgan blamed the media. When our realness and very existence is questioned, the normality of heterosupremacism is maintained at our expense. When Morgan said he would stab his own son if he turned out gay, I thought about a middle school boy who came out to one of the principals I used to work with. The kid’s father came in for a meeting and told the principal that no son of his was going to be gay because, “What would my boys think if they found out?” People hate the idea of having a queer kid, feel implicated and humiliated by it. This is not an accident of word choice.

The media has taken an interest in representing bullying as the source of queer kid’s suicides. We all know, if we pause to think, that many people are bullied and do not kill themselves. Many people who experience bullying are able to believe the bullies are wrong about them, or are able to focus on other more pleasant aspects of their lives, or are able to muster the courage to stand against the bullies. The root of “courage” is “cour” or heart. Encourage means to give heart to others. Bullying and the absence of encouragement are a dangerous combination, but even this analysis is just scratching the surface. In my personal experience, the masculinity I was being bullied for also made my parents uncomfortable around me and was the very same thing that adults and strangers regularly shamed and shunned me for. The message was so consistent that I mostly wound up believing the bullies were right about me. A much more recent example is a kid I heard about in one of the elementary schools I used to work with, whose teacher made fun of him for being too feminine. The kid himself told the principal it was like some of the bricks had been falling on him but suddenly all the bricks were falling on him.

Courage has to come from somewhere, and children have access to far fewer heart resources than adults. The fact that there are so few sources of encouragement for very young queers is something the media has missed in their interest in bullies. And of course they missed it, because they are implicated. The media has also failed to look at parents, teachers, witnesses, etc. The media has failed to look at its own portrayal of queers as wealthy, white and heteronormative. They continuously fail to actually “investigate” the fact that we are all complicit in queer children’s suicides. If the audience of the rather popular show South Park can watch an episode where queer kids in a christian conversion camp are killing themselves left and right, surely it doesn’t take crack investigative journalism to see the causal connection between the pressures of societal homophobia and suicide. The reason they stop at the surface isn’t because they lack the ability to see further. We do not want to see any further because investigation will lead to feeling responsible for the despicable immorality of heterosupremacism. It might destroy our self-image as a moral society. Our shared responsibility is exactly what we are unwilling to face.

The heterosupremacist mainstream media minimally represent us by showing those of us who are relatively less threatening to the status quo, and we’re supposed to be grateful for this inclusion. Acknowledging all the identities and relationships that are outside heterosupremacism would shed light on the fact that there isn’t anything morally superior about straight people or their relationships, nor are they any more natural. The ideal of heterosexuality and monogamous pairing is maintained by the systematic exclusion of all other varieties of sexual behaviors and intimate relationships. The assertion of our rights and the assertion of our existence overlap in this case. Asserting that people who are very much like heterosexuals deserve rights is very different from asserting that people who are very different from heterosexuals exist, are real, and also have rights.

If queers were represented more accurately in the media, or in entertainment, or sports, or politics, we might have an in-road into participating in the culture as ourselves. We would benefit from this participation by being seen and acknowledged for our differences, not forced through the filter of our similarities. Let’s give straight people enough credit to know they can understand our differences rather than dismiss them. I would love to see this conversation approached with curiosity. We’re not all the same deep down. But it’s going to be OK anyway. I’m proud of our differences and would like sometimes to see them acknowledged outside my immediate subculture. If our participation as ourselves in the larger culture is impossible, if our representation is impossible, then we do not get seen or acknowledged. We are not allowed to be real. And where you see the word “real,” read “human.” I want everyone and especially queer children to see that queer life is possible and it is real and it is a pleasure.

Judith Butler wrote something about this from the lens of how our identities are socially mediated. In Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy, she says:

…when we struggle for rights, we are not simply struggling for rights to attach to my person, but we are struggling to be conceived as persons. And there is a difference between the former and the latter. If we are struggling for rights that attach, or should attach, to my personhood, then we assume that personhood as already constituted. But if we are struggling not only to be conceived as persons, but to create a social transformation of the very meaning of personhood, then the assertion of rights becomes a way of intervening into the social and political process by which the human is articulated.

The challenge is not how to integrate queer people into the existing straight society, the challenge is the dissolution of straight society and heterosupremacist ideas of what qualifies as human.  When we are actually included, by definition, it will no longer be a straight society.  Attempts to integrate us without making anything other than linguistic changes to current laws, without changing anything other than spousal pronouns, will not only fail the vast majority of queers but will also do a disservice to all straight people in the continued limitation of their own options and world view, their own gender expression and relationships with each other. A heterosupremacist society cannot integrate us and remain heterosupremacist. It can’t simply adjust its choice of words and smooth things over. The culture cannot both have us in it and remain unchanged. 

Pulling on the Marriage Thread

What is at stake for straight people in taking up the fight against homophobia? Now I am not talking about cheering from the sidelines or supporting gay marriage from the couch, checkbook or even the voting booth. In order to cultivate better friendships, I have to wonder what it will mean for straight people to really stand with queers. Some of my straight friends are very invested in this question too. Just a few times in my life, I have been asked with the utmost sincerity for help understanding homophobia. I deeply appreciate being asked. Connecting with the straight people I love around homophobia very much informs my understanding of this heterosupremacist culture where available explanations of homophobia have proven so inadequate. And seeing people willing to challenge their own hetero privilege is powerful and has strengthened me in my belief that it can be done. So what is the cost for those who authentically and sincerely desire to be with us in the struggle? And how is it connected to the fears of those who would do anything to stop us?

Injustice wouldn’t be so enduring if it weren’t benefiting anyone. To explore the question of what is at stake for straight people, we need to look for what they get out of the status quo. What do straight people stand to lose, for instance, if queer people get married? Why is marriage such an infuriating issue for homophobic people? Marriage is a loose thread I would like to pull and pull and see what falls apart. There are a million more issues to explore, arguably a million times more important that marriage. Yet no matter how hard most queer people try to have a vision of justice larger than matrimony, marriage comes up again and again (and again) as the singular issue that commands everyone’s attention. 

Gay marriage will secure some rights for some gays. It will not create real change for queer people and certainly will not convert marriage from a patriarchal ownership compact into a baggage-free expression of love. And yet there is such strong opposition and a lot of support and all kinds of emotion surrounding this issue. From both the support and all the opposition, it seems to me we are actually talking about marriage not only as a legal institution but also as a marker of moral righteousness. And this is illuminating because it reveals some of the underlying, unstated beliefs in this so-called debate. It’s illuminating because it suggests more of an explanation of why people are so worked up! If gays marry, it will spoil the congratulatory marriage discourse by making marriage less wholesome. Beyond the legal benefits, gift registry and reception expense, marriage is all about conferring moral goodness. Beyond Proposition 8 court battles are people’s concepts of good and evil.

For a long time I struggled to pinpoint the homophobia in people’s steady stream of marriage congratulations. Wedding talk has always been extremely stressful for me. I have never been able to authentically relate to the fuss over engagement and marriage, so I have observed the way people behave in order to be able to make some semblance of a socially acceptable response to engagement announcements. (I’m kind of like an anthropologist that way, or a sociopath.) Finally I realized it is not the couple or the displaying of the ring that scares me. It’s the fawning and more so the pressure for everyone to fawn. In order to be perceived as a moral person, or even as a person at all, I have to provide my compulsory approval for compulsory heteronormativity. I can’t bring myself to fawn, but I have trained myself to ask a few cursory questions about the proposal and wedding planning process. This banter is a form of social affirmation reserved for heterosexuals. It is more than simply being happy for somebody. It is congratulating them on joining the morally wholesome ranks of The Family.

Hi B,

I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, and about the part on how you don't want to NOT be happy for a friend who is engaged or expecting. And I assured you that is not what I want. Yet there is a grain of truth here- there will be a loss. On a personal level, I still want you to be happy. But the truth is that if straight folks start to really understand homophobia and how it functions in hetero social structures (including conventional gender roles) to exclude what is queer, it will be less fun to be straight. And you can't NOT notice anymore. If straight folks really start to understand how homophobia works, looks and sounds, well, it will be kind of deafening. It will no longer be unproblematic to participate in a hetero-reinforcing behaviors all the time. "Straight" won't easily mean honest and good anymore. People will start to notice when they are enjoying camaraderie that's about how men and women are supposed to relate. Everyone can still love their family but you won't be able to assume every human aspires to a life just like yours, or that it is totally natural, and you will have to think about how to love any current or future queer family member and how to include them. So queerness actually does jeopardize family values. It doesn't destroy them, it just shows how stuff people think is wholesome, natural, normal, universal is actually painfully exclusive when you are on the receiving end. (Dr. Laura was right to be afraid of us!) No seriously, it will be less fun. I didn't say no fun, just less fun.

For NY Times Liberals who passively support gay marriage, they maintain their moral superiority while allowing some of us to be superior too, at least those of us who want to live in monogamous couples and raise children. (In today’s baby-madness cult of motherhood, we have conveniently forgotten/erased the married straight people who do not want children.) Most liberals are willing to permit queer peoples’ entry into the realm of the morally good if we shape our lives along the same lines as theirs, substituting a “same sex” partner where an “opposite sex” partner would be. For them, marriage confers its moral superiority by collecting moral touchstones like the state, monogamy, permanence, romantic love and parenting into a super-set of moral goodness.  Queers can exist in relationship to that moral goodness as long as we accept all the other premises too. This conditionality might not be explicitly articulated, but instead manifests in beliefs like: Gays are just normal people like us! But some are really a little too “out there.” In this liberal assessment of queerdom, the vast majority of us are excluded, transgender people are consistently ignored and left out, and mainstream-minded gays are allowed to loudly insist they are representative. No substantive change occurs in the culture, no self-examination, just a small renegotiation of barriers. There is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in the liberal framework, in fact, the life choices of liberals are reinforced by the idea that everyone really just wants the same things they want.

For Fox News Conservatives who oppose gay marriage, any entry of queers into marriage jeopardizes their moral dominance.  They cannot maintain their moral superiority if marriage becomes tainted, because unlike liberals who will still feel good about marriage and their liberal world, conservatives will no longer be able to feel good about their conservative world if gays are in it.  For them, marriage confers its moral superiority precisely through the exclusion of degenerate queers, and by collecting moral touchstones like the church, monogamy, purity, permanence, parenting, family values and heritage. Queers cannot exist in relationship to morality because by definition we are immoral, even if we are married and monogamous and conform to societal expectations in every single way but one. Clearly there is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in this conservative framework, in fact, getting outraged by the gay rights movement bolsters their self-image as morally good. Protesters at the dyke march and gay pride clearly derive a great satisfaction from their own superiority. We can observe their pleasure at these events. In a more benign-seeming form, straight people who recommend civil unions may be responding subconsciously to the threat to their moral self-valuation. They are conflicted. They want to be fair but they don’t want to give up any of their own moral righteousness. The thing that makes marriage special for conservatives is the conference of morality, bringing the married couple up a level on the moral hierarchy. And the way to keep straight marriage moral is to keep queer people immoral.

Whether embedded in liberal tolerance or conservative intolerance, heterosupremacism as a persistent social structure will more than likely survive gay marriage unscathed. For me, the liberal version is still soul-crushing in how it seeks to diminish our uniqueness and sets normality as a gatekeeper to recognition. (I came out as a lesbian in my early twenties but I’ve always been queer and never been normal.) In the liberal version we still have to conform in order to be recognizable as human beings, and in the conservative version no matter how much we conform we can never be recognizable. Heterosupremacism wins whenever liberals tolerate our palatable differences and whenever conservatives condemn those same differences. Either way, being straight is central and being queer is marginal. Either way, most of us do not even get to be part of the argument.

Queer freedom requires dislodging heterosexuality from its central position. It will make heterosexuality less awesome… but will also open a whole world of human expression to queer and straight people alike, and everyone else too. Examples of how forced heteronormative conformity hurts straight people are everywhere. Dismantling heterosupremacism will require us to see more people as fully human, including more unmarried people, gender nonconforming people, childless people, sex workers, single parents, recluses, sluts, faeries, people with all different kinds of sexualities and life arrangements. More possibilities will open up for everyone when heterosupremacism is named and disputed and undermined.

With those expanded possibilities will come loss. A lot of people in many different places in society will enjoy less moral self-satisfaction, and that will be a loss for straight people regardless of what other privileges and/or forms of discrimination they face in terms of gender, race, class, age or anything. For liberals and conservatives alike, disrupting heterosupremacism will produce an uncomfortable sensation of the ground shifting underfoot. It may even be a devastating loss for some to realize that such a source of pride, the traditional marriage, is just one of many ways to arrange our love relationships. Heterosexuality and heteronormative lifestyles can no longer remain admirable in and of themselves. People are proud of their families. Part of that pride comes from feeling morally good, and getting admiration and acknowledgement. Part of that goodness, admiration and acknowledgement is rooted in being Not Queer, but normal and natural and wholesome. That’s the part needs to go. And it’s a big one. Maybe acknowledging the loss will help us move our energy forward instead of in this tiresome circular marriage conversation. We cannot tiptoe around heterosupremacism but we have to acknowledge that we are asking people not only to make an intellectual move but an emotional one too. The conversation I hope to have with straight people is not the tedious recitation of similarities and differences, but the difficult examination of all that is at stake in our solidarity.

Heterosupremacism

While often described as fear or hatred of homosexuals, homophobia can be more accurately and more literally be explained by the word heterosupremacism. Further it may be useful to introduce the word heterosupremacism into our conversations about homophobia, in order to break through some of the avoidance and denial that homophobia often seems to evoke. The word “homophobic” in particular seems to clam up straight people, at least in my experience. When straight people feel homophobia is being attached to them or their actions, they tend to shut down and stop listening. (If they are conservative, they shut down because they are angry at being held to an expectation they do not agree with. It’s nonsense! If they are liberal, they shut down because they are making a leap in their own mind from homophobia to being a bad person, and if there is one thing a liberal cannot tolerate, it is the suggestion that they are not a good person. It just can’t be!) My hope is that if we start a conversation about the social phenomenon of heterosupremacism, straight people will be able to stand to stay in the conversation.

A lot of radical queer discourse criticizes assimilation, but my current interests are the multitude of phenomena around straight people’s homophobia. I want to start using the word heterosupremacism to encompass and better explain all the homophobia I encounter. I am present in the straight world and I love my straight people. And while I am constantly disappointed with queers who aspire to little more than assimilation, my personal revolutionary impulse is to challenge our whole culture not just other queer people. Gays who want to blend in to straight culture and leave it more or less unchallenged perpetuate homophobia. But they didn’t invent it.

The word homophobia resists clear definition because almost every available definition fails to capture its scope. The word is used for everything from violence against queers to straight men’s fear of expressing their love for their male friends. Heterosupremacism better captures the enormity of the context in which so many permutations of homophobia flourish. Homophobia itself is an ever-expanding and self-sustaining set of harmful, violent, insidiously soul-crushing activities that arise from heterosupremacism. Heterosupremacy is a close collaborator with the behemoths patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, and may in fact be considered a bloated appendage of patriarchy that has taken on a life of its own.

For the time being, here is a working definition of Heterosupremacism:

1. Belief in the moral superiority of heterosexual people, families and lifestyles, along with a corresponding belief in the moral inferiority or defectiveness of queers and all others who deviate from heteronormativity in expressions of gender, desire, and/or kinship arrangements.

• Politicians or other authority figures opportunistically positioning themselves with their families in order to be seen as morally good, upstanding and virtuous. He’s a “family man.”
• Congratulatory discourse characterized by heterosupremacist approval code words, such as “family values” and “Main Street.”

2. A worldview that does not include the queer and is perpetually startled, surprised, shocked, and/or disgusted by the appearance and presence of that which is queer. Failure to see or notice all that is queer, and statements of disbelief, skepticism or obliteration that separate the queer from the real.

• When people do not acknowledge sexual orientation, or say it does not matter, thereby literally diminishing the importance of your identity and simultaneously ignoring the differences you are expressing.

3. A form of sexism/patriarchy that applies specifically to valuing heterosexuality, praising it, lauding its various expressions as valuable in and of themselves, and treating it as universal and normal.

• Gay marriage as a normalizing movement where differences are denied, almost a form of “sexual orientation blindness.”
• The absence from public sight all the single parent families, communal living households, multi-generational households and families where there are no blood relations, all of which have existed throughout history and continue to exist and flourish.

4. Discourse that affirms traditional gender roles regardless of whether or not it specifically pertains to sexuality.

• The assertion that the patriarchal family is somehow “natural.”
• Retrograde explanations of gender-conforming behaviors in terms of biological functions designed to perpetuate the species, evolutionary biology, and/or references to oppressive behaviors as being “hard-wired.”

A straight friend told me about his homophobic mother. A lesbian couple moved in next door, and she got to know them. Eventually she came to think that they were nice and normal and not so bad at all. My friend cited this reduction in her homophobia, and noted the importance of becoming familiar in order to reduce fear and hate. Yet thinking the lesbians next door are normal does not decrease homophobia. She simply moved them from queer into not-queer. This change of heart does not move any actual beliefs or assumptions about those who are queer. It merely permits one set of (wealthy, white, Massachusetts married) lesbians into the concept of normal, and maybe primed that barrier for another homo to make a similar move in the future. If we understand homophobia as an activity of institutionalized heterosupremacism, it would be much easier for me to explain to my friend that sadly, this change of opinion is not so earth shattering as he believes. His mother’s exceptional neighbors drive home the reality of heterosupremacism. Heterosupremacism is so firmly in place that while these two women can change their status within it, the change does not dislodge the system in which our whole conversation is happening.

Heterosupremacism is hegemonic, and what I mean by that is it doesn’t have to be articulated belief in order to be present. In fact it derives some of its power from being unstated, from seldom being named. By not being named, it is perpetuated not as an ideology, but as simply the agreed upon “the way things are,” which provides it with protection from criticism and opposition. The uniqueness of our humanity is ignored when we frame everything in terms of heterosupremacist standards for our appearances, gender expressions, relationships, sexuality and identity. No one is spared from the pressure to conform, and gender and sexuality benefit from a world-wide voluntary police force maintaining the status quo (Your parents, teachers, neighbors, boss, etc.) We skip the step of forming an opinion about heterosupremacist standards because they have already colonized us all and set up shop in our minds and bodies. Consequently we have a responsibility to name this colonizing power as accurately and as often as we possibly can, in order to regain some of our freedom. Queer, straight and otherwise, humans will breathe easier when heterosupremacism can be named, discussed and diminished in its tight grip over how we understand each other and ourselves.

Bodies and Technologies in Resistance

A conversation with scholar and grassroots activist Sarah Roberts about participating in and documenting the protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's "budget repair bill," underway at the State Capitol in Madison, WI. All photographs by Sarah. We met on Facebook.

A sign greeting Capitol visitors, late night, February 20th

Sloan: At what point did you decide to head to the Capitol? Was there a specific issue, pivotal statement or moment where you decided?

Sarah: Actually, my first response with regard to Governor Walker's egregious actions of February 11th was to take part in a small rally the very next day.  This was called for Saturday, February 12th at noon, and announced, naturally, on Facebook, in response to Walker's late Friday afternoon pre-weekend "budget repair bill" announcement - a tactic used to mitigate the potential for response.  The event at the UW Campus's Memorial Union had about 100 turn out.  I went with a friend.  We listened to a few speakers and talked between each other about what to do.  The plan to deliver the valentines to Walker on Monday, the 14th, was underway at that point.

On Monday, I joined about 2000 or so people who had convened in the Rotunda.  The majority of these people were affiliated with the University - TAs, students and faculty (and staff).  After that, I had to leave town on Tuesday afternoon and did not return until Thursday. I was desperate for news from the ground, and so began to heavily utilize Twitter, as well as Facebook, to connect with others.  At this point, larger scale protests had begun and I felt I had to get home.

Meanwhile, my friend (with whom I'd attended the Saturday rally) was featured on Democracy Now! and asked Noam Chomsky to comment on the situation in Wisconsin. As Professor Chomsky so rightly pointed out, the program being unleashed by Walker is part of a larger fabric of Shock Doctrine-esque economic policies designed to decimate the middle classes, extract all capital for the profiteers and to browbeat the populace into submission via the unleashing of so many terrible policies at once. Prof. Chomsky also, quite rightly, called out the national Democratic party, whose absence has been conspicuous, by identifying their compromised position as bedfellows with Wall St. What was also immediately clear to me was that this was a coordinated effort and that this boilerplate legislation, undoubtedly formulated at the level of the Republican Governors' Association and bankrolled by wealthy oligarchs, was the trajectory for Walker's campaign all along. I believe this fact has been born out by the unveiling of nearly identical legislation across the country, in Ohio, Idaho, Indiana, and many other states.

So, it wasn't that there was a pivotal moment, but more so that the series of events, beginning with the outrageous "budget repair bill" (usually just a cursory mechanism passed without much fanfare) and escalating over the following days, absolutely demanded a response. All I could do was converge up on the Capitol.

The February 12th demonstration at the Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison campus

The Capitol Rotunda, two days later, February 14th

Sloan: How long were you present, and have you been staying overnight or going home and returning?

Sarah: Since I was diagnosed with an illness and required frequent treatment last fall, I am now dividing my time out of state for part of each week for work and school, with the rest of the time spent in Madison, where I have medical and familial support systems.  I have been on site at the Capitol in some capacity each day I've been at home since February 12th.  That has, at times, taken the form of 10-hour days inside the Capitol and out, sometimes it's meant coming in the evening and staying inside the Capitol until 3 AM doing my own work there, sometimes it's been delivering supplies donated from my graduate student-employee union at my university to the University of Wisconsin's TAA (of which I was a member during my Master's degree), and so on.  I have elected not to actually sleep at the Capitol, although I have spent many late nights there, because I am in recovery from serious illness and need to rest at home for health reasons.  Many of my close friends have spent nights there. 

The scene inside the Capitol has been unbelievable.  It's been orderly, peaceful, community-oriented, self-sustaining and clean. I actually suspect that it has confounded and frustrated many GOP legislators, who could not fathom nor stand such an organic and organized outpouring of ingenuity and people power - without corporate intervention or authoritarian policies. This has included such innovations as the creation of a medic station, a daycare, food stations, rotating bands of volunteer cleaning brigades, tampons stocked in the bathrooms, hand sanitizer distributed throughout the building, free socks, toothpaste and toothbrushes, a lending library, the entire of the Capitol covered in handmade informational posters (put up using special low-residue tape).  The Wisconsin State Capitol is a _revered_ building, and those occupying it have certainly treated it as such.  It was an amazing thing to have experienced.  Of course, this has now all been dismantled, and Walker and his cronies are illegally restricting access to the building, in the face of a court order and the State Constitution that prohibits this.

Rep. Hulsey's door, covered in thank-you notes from pro-union Capitol visitors, February 20th

Sloan: What are some of the qualities of the protesters? What are the conversations and daily interactions like?

Sarah: As you can see from this video I put together, the protesters are truly an amazing and diverse group of people.  On the two Saturdays, we had tens of thousands of people (a realistic estimate from last Saturday, Feb. 26th, is around 100,000 on site) from all walks of life.  Many are union members, but the membership runs the gamut from bricklayers to musicians to teachers to electrical workers, teamsters, public employees, airline pilots, firefighters, police, service workers, and so on.  It's extraordinary.

I have yet to have had an unpleasant encounter with a union supporter. The atmosphere has been one of jovial camaraderie, mutual aid, sharing, thanks, and respect.  Have you ever heard a chorus of 100,000 people spontaneously shouting "thank you" in recognition of a positive act on the part of a politician, speaker, musician or leader?  It's something I can't describe in words.  People's creativity has also shone through, evidence of which you can see in the video I made.  I can assure you, however, that the sorts of reports I've been hearing in the mainstream press are, by and large, completely inaccurate and mostly useless.  Fox News has been the worst with this. For example, I saw last night that they'd made a report, aired on the O'Reilly Factor, about attacks from unions, into which they'd disingenously spliced in footage from another incident, only slightly changing the caption in order to obfuscate the origin of the video.  I mean, there are palm trees in the footage.  Have you ever seen palm trees in Wisconsin?  In February?  Yet, in the short time period in which that footage airs, how many viewers of O'Reilly's program actually notice the palm trees, or notice the slight change in caption and differentiate this event from the wholly peaceful days of protest in Madison?

The magnitude of the deliberate media manipulation in the above example is unconscionable, but in just as many cases, the issue has been a lack of accuracy about the situation on-site, such as CNN's significant underestimate of the crowd size from last Saturday. As a critical digital media student and scholar, with a focus on digital labor issues, I am fairly wary about claims about the purported power of social media to effect change when they feel too strongly technologically-deterministic.  Yet I cannot express how important these media have been to me, and my fellow resistors, as we've endeavored to get a more accurate picture out about what is actually happening, including using the embedding of real-time media such as photos and video.  Blogs and CMS-driven sites (e.g., http://www.defendwisconsin.org/), Twitter (hashtag #wiunion, among others), Facebook - these have been invaluable tools and will undoubtedly continue to be.  Cell phones, smart phones, cameras with video capabilities, relatively inexpensive flip cams, and so on, have been critically important tools for media production as well as for quick and immediate information dissemination - breaking legal decisions, maneuvers by the GOP to manipulate protestors' access to the building, flash actions, etc.  My own Facebook page, too, has been given a radical makeover and now serves as a clearinghouse for information, news articles, others' photos or videos, requests for action, and so on, that I've personally curated.  I've lost a few Facebook "friends" in the process who may not be as captivated by these events as am I, but gained a lot more, including connecting online with numerous state legislators.

Beyond the dichotomy between mainstream mass media and organic, amateur and local citizen-media, there has also been a great void for accurate news reporting being picked up throughout the unfolding of this situation by alternative media outlets.  Democracy Now!, for example, has covered the legislative battles and ensuing protests, almost daily on their program.

Sloan: What has the queer presence been? I saw a fleeting rainbow flag in your video, but I am wondering about how all the issues are intersecting in real time?

Sarah: I've seen a number of rainbow flags, and a "Lesbians for Labor" sign. Mostly, people seem to be identifying and/or affiliating based on their unions, so they'll be marching under the banner of "Milwaukee Area Teachers Association" or "SEIU" or "Teamsters Local xxxx."  I can't say I have necessarily felt this as a lack, but more that people are coalescing on the issue of labor, and bringing their personal and political identities to bear under that umbrella.  Certainly I see people I know from many different corners of social justice activism on the ground in Madison, so people are obviously clear how this draconian legislation will touch them, whomever they are.  As the saying goes, oft repeated these last few weeks, "an injury to one is an injury to all."

"Lesbians for Labor" at the Capitol

Sloan: Skip this if it is too personal or out there, though I think you were getting at this already in a lot of what you said. Can you comment more on the decision to protest with physical presence? Specifically, when I became aware (via Facebook) of your participation in the protests, I immediately thought about how you had recently been in the hospital. Followed by thinking... Sarah has too much integrity to sit this out. Sometimes our values make decisions for us. But what does protesting with our bodies mean in a culture so fixated on interacting through technology?

Sarah: This is actually a compelling and astute question, and I think it's worthy of thought, so I appreciate you asking (and thank you for the kind compliment).  As you know, I spent November and December dealing with acute illness and had a very serious brush with death and a prolonged hospital stay.  Since I was discharged from the hospital at the end of December, my health has been my primary focus (whether I've wanted it to be or not).  This has meant dealing with the physical implications of having been sick - loss of stamina, fatigue, healing, etc. - as well as with the somewhat unexpected mental health issues of this experience - healing from fear, grief, the shock of going from wellness to illness, etc.  Frankly, I've often wryly laughed to myself in recent days that I owe Scott Walker one for getting my mind off my illness for the first time since I was diagnosed - thanks, pal.  Meanwhile, issues of health care funding and costs are obviously at the forefront of my mind (NB: BadgerCare funding, an erstwhile model program for state-level health care for those who cannot obtain it elsewhere and frequently a matter of life and death for those who rely upon it, is on Walker's chopping block).  As I described earlier, the process of becoming active in this resistance movement was organic for me; I really just showed up that first day, February 12th, out of a sense that it was the one thing I could do. From then on, being physically present on the Capitol grounds felt like an important component of my act of resistance.  Body count has mattered throughout these events, particularly as a number of mass media outlets have mysteriously seemed to underreport the number of people on site (particularly last Saturday, Feb. 26th, when over 100,000 people amassed on the Capitol grounds and inside the building).

Interestingly, I've noticed that my own negotiation of physically present vs. acting through technological intermediaries has not been simply dichotomous.  Rather, I've found myself at the Capitol in the midst of the unfolding events, chanting or marching with the crowd, with phone in hand for reporting out to Twitter, while holding onto a handheld HD digital video camera to record the scene - then quickly rushing to my laptop to upload the media, usually in a raw form, on the spot.  I've also been watching others do similar things; both protestors and documentarians of the events as they unfold.  It's a process of immediate documentation, media production and dissemination.  I've been asking myself why it's so important to me, personally, to carry out this process of documentation, and I had the answer handed to me quite concisely when I saw the now-notorious Bill O'Reilly clip describing (decrying) the "riots in Madison" as mentioned earlier. So, it's a rather common sight to see arms and hands extended above over the crowds wielding video and still cameras.  Some of these media make their way to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, but a lot of it is simply being dumped onto hard drives and into personal digital archives.

All of this is to say that physical presence as an act of visible resistance has been and continues to be critically important to those in Madison.  But for those who cannot be - whether due to fatigue and a need to recharge at the end of a 10-hour day spent in sub-freezing weather in protest, or to being dispersed throughout the country (and world), online engagement has offered a critical outlet for people who want to hear testimony or view evidence from people on the ground. The relationship between the online resistance efforts and those on the ground is absolutely symbiotic, with each enhancing and extending the reach of the other.  But because of my close physical proximity to the events, as well as the direct impact on me and loved ones of the proposed measures, I was unable to be content with participating solely online. I am deeply grateful, however, for the ways in which those tools and platforms have allowed me to narrate what I see and do in near-real-time, wherever my physical body may find itself.  It also allows for people to participate physically to the extent of their abilities (such as people who might have illness, may become fatigued, may have different physical abilities that make longterm on-the-ground action difficult, and so on), and to carry on the work in the online paradigm.