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. 

ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993

The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group, including Gran Fury, Silence=Death Project, Gang, and Fierce Pussy. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition ACT UP New York provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

In October I went to Cambridge and saw the unprecedented exhibition ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993.   I took a lot of pictures in order to include them here as a treat for friends who are too far away or otherwise unable to make the trip.  I feel so grateful that I was able to visit and fortunate to know both co-directors of the ACT UP Oral History Project through my involvement with MIX NYC.  I am not sure that I would have been aware of the exhibit otherwise.

On the way to Cambridge I was thinking back to the time I called in to the Brian Lehrer radio show and talked to the woman who screened the calls that day, World AIDS Day.  I was not on the air, but I was telling her that Brian Lehrer has been talking for 20 minutes about whether or not the “stigma of AIDS” has decreased without once mentioning homophobia, without naming the fact that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was originally called Gay Related Immune Deficiency.  I was literally choking on the words, saying this was all wrong, historically inaccurate, an inexcusable omission.  Where else do we think that stigma came from?  She said she would let Brian know.  I am no expert on this history but at least I know what I remember...

A central theme of the exhibition is the intersection of art and activism, and much of the exhibit amounts to an archive of visual activism and oral history.  The exhibit spans two separate galleries. The first gallery contains the ACT UP Oral History Project and some large-scale visual art, including a fabulously wheat pasted women’s bathroom by Fierce Pussy.  The upstairs gallery has a timeline of milestones, films installed on a loop with a single bench to sit and watch, and a display of posters and stickers.  There are also some prints of the original posters available for visitors.  The film installation includes work by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) and United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by Jim Hubbard, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Upstairs, I got totally caught up in the film installation and found myself watching it in its entirety.  One of the films included an expose on the biased media coverage of the 1989 ACT UP and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) Stop the Church action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Watching this transported me back in time.  It made me realize that even within the incredibly homophobic coverage of the action, enough truth squeaked through to have a powerful impact on my life’s direction.  This is no overstatement.  I was a kid and learned about the die-in from TV, but even with this very condemning media coverage I still identified with the protesters.  At 15 in my parent’s house, I came to life for that brief footage. It was one of those pivotal life moments.  

At the exhibit here in the present, I learned that the media got this footage from a participating activist, edited the hell out of it and excised reproductive freedom entirely from their coverage.  But even in that limited, incomplete footage, I had seen my queer future, and shivered in my suburban closet.  Through the haze of media disapproval and selective reporting, I saw not only the commitment and integrity of the protesters but also what they were up against.  I was an angry teenage girl seeing people stand up to those sexist old fucks in the church, confronting Cardinal O’Connor as nothing more than a creepy old man who had so much say over the stories we tell ourselves about sex.  He had so much say over what little conversation there was about HIV/AIDS.  Seeing Cardinal O’Connor step over bodies was the perfect non-metaphor for what was happening.  This action was more than symbolic, it was literally true.

For context, three years prior to the Stop the Church action, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”  I heard a portion of that statement in one of the videos, and I felt compelled to track down the exact quote and read it a couple times in an effort to understand the depth of the immorality we were and are up against. 

A time line covers a full wall in the upstairs gallery.  Reading it filled in some gaps in my memory and many more gaps in what I even knew about in the first place.  This history is hardly collected anywhere and certainly not taught to anyone.  Seeing the time line was more than informative, it was powerful.  One of many new things I learned was how in 1992, ACT UP held a political funeral in DC and a procession of 11 people scattered the ashes of their loved ones on the White House lawn.  This event was noted on the wall and there was film footage too, and it really blew me away.  I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of a comparable moment in history.  The only image that comes to my mind is the Memphis sanitation worker strike where some carried signs that read "I am a man."  In both cases people were demanding their humanity be recognized and thereby confronting the deepest roots of the specific injustice at hand.

1981

1991

I watched some footage of a group decision-making process in the midst of an action. A group of protesters at City Hall was trying to come to consensus about whether or not to block traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Some were ready to go, others wanted to wait for more media to arrive to maximize coverage.  Showing even such a minor disagreement is critical to preserving a real history.  There was also some footage of non-violent civil disobedience training.  It was great to see this collaboration documented, to keep away the mythologizing of spontaneous demonstration when there is so much planning, training, debate, and plain old hard work that goes in to making art, protests and demonstrations.

Downstairs, the ACT UP Oral History Project is set up with 14 monitors each displaying a different set of full-length interviews for a total of 102 interviews, many over an hour long.  Each monitor is set up with 2 pairs of headphones and two seats.  The arrangement lends itself to listening with a friend.  The set-up itself seems to request that you share the interview and enter into a conversation, rather than passively listening or keeping what you hear to yourself.  It suggests not only learning but also engagement.

The interviews contain personal stories and the larger story of collective action making a difference.  In one interview I was watching, the person being interviewed recalls a specific action at a Republican fund raiser.   Off-screen interviewer Sarah Schulman, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project, asks questions like, "Who else was there, what were their names?"  With this line of questioning, we are hearing not only one individual’s history but also learning our shared history, who we lost, what they did, what ideas they had, what art they made.  And we witness their grief.

The oral histories are now available to students to use in their research projects and available for scholarly study through Harvard University.  And I have some hope that the attention of this particular school has the potential to act as an intervention into academic amnesia about the HIV/AIDS crisis, or maybe even staunch the flow of our history from being drained away by the likes of national public radio.  Maybe amnesia is not the right word, it is more deliberate ignorance of both recent history and the current crisis.   The preservation of these oral histories is in direct defiance of the way our lives and realities are so often ignored. In this way, it seems to be a direct continuation of the work of ACT UP in demanding to be seen, acknowledged and recognized as people.

The protest posters and other art in the exhibit detail a clear connection between healthcare, AIDS activism and reproductive freedom.  The connection is rarely made explicit today, so it was very refreshing to see it plainly demonstrated that when the state attempts to control our sexuality through the restriction of any form of healthcare or information related to sex, we are NOT free.  One of my favorite aspects of the politics represented here is the refusal to compromise on how everything is connected to everything else.  The fact that so much of the art was created by collectives speaks to this sense of connection.  In many different ways the artists and activists declare that our lives, our bodies and our sexuality are deserving of respect, honor and care.  Not just some of us, not just the wealthy ones, not just the monogamous couples, not just those of us with kids.  This message of connection and inclusion could not be more relevant to the current healthcare legislation that would exclude funding for abortion. 

In the words of Gran Fury, “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference make AIDS a political crisis.”  ACT UP could have taken up any one of these strands to fight against, but chose to go after all of them and more, all the while exposing the racism, sexism and homophobia at the center of the crisis.  All the art and documentation in this exhibit points to the possibility of working on the details and the big picture all at the same time.  The group affected changes in both the law and the culture.  I was really struck by how the activists could see and define the roots of a crisis in real time, right as it was unfolding.  ACT UP took on not only the church, not only the government, not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the belief systems in our culture that perpetuate and permit the deaths of huge numbers of people at the so-called margins.  All these documents, posters, interviews and stickers comprise a legacy, a legacy of values like responsibility, loyalty and commitment.


The feeling I took away from the exhibit was nothing less than a moral obligation to continue to work in the same way, by identifying the root causes of injustice and going after them while at the same time not losing track of the real world details that need to be addressed on a daily basis.  The feeling mirrored the time I saw the Stop the Church action on the evening news 20 years ago, but this time there was also a rare sense of external recognition of my cultural identity as queer person.  The disapproving lens was gone, temporarily lifted to reveal a space full of visible, audible expressions of who we are, what we do and how we love.  The exhibit provides a mirror where we actually show up as a community with some shared values and shared history, demanding to be fully recognized as human beings without any qualifications, without trotting out today's tired argument that we are fully human because of how similar we are to straight people, because we have jobs and go shopping, etc.  No "because" at all.  Just respect.

A Gathering Storm

Part 1: That Dreadful Storm

Now I am no fan of gay marriage, but I am well aware that the self-appointed defenders of marriage hate the shit out of queers. The legalization of gay marriage in five out of fifty states motivated homophobes to create A Gathering Storm, a TV commercial that literally voices the fear of homosexuals.  Miss California, please. “No offense,” they claim, in an attempt to inoculate themselves against charges of being offensively hateful.  Opposition to gay marriage provides a convenient way for homophobes to oppose homosexuality without appearing to openly hate us; it allows them to shamelessly display, discuss and demonstrate their homophobia without literally stating it.  Through their opposition to gay marriage they can voice their opposition to gay lives but tell themselves and others that they are not bigots. They merely want to protect marriage. 

The National Organization for Marriage website further provides so-called facts to back up the dramatic statements in their commercial.  The explanations reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of rights.  In each fact presented, the group articulates an instance in which a religious organization or individual was attempting to discriminate against a homosexual, and ran up against some form of legal trouble.  Examples include a fertility clinic doctor who refused to treat a lesbian patient and a church that refused to host a gay marriage ceremony.  The so-called rights they are afraid of losing boil down to the “right” to engage in discrimination without any consequences.  Every example consists of people feeling entitled to treat us as less than human because of their flimsy morality, and by invoking parenthood and church they speak to institutions that conservatives want desperately to own.

The ad has some inherently hilarious elements, like the earnest delivery of the line “I am afraid,” and the reference at the end to forming “a rainbow coalition.” The seemingly earnest approach and bizarre special effects might seem dated or inept in the context of high production-quality media. But the heavy-handed approach speaks effectively to an existing audience with a message that resonates for those who feel threatened by queers and who do not give a damn about slick media.  A Gathering Storm was not intended for anyone who thinks the presentation of the message is lame. It was intended for people who already believe in the message and need just a nudge to be stirred into action.  Actually, the seemingly naive, hokey quality fits into that old family-values-versus-liberal-elite trope most recently voiced by Sarah Palin with her joe-sixpack and her you-betcha. 

By emphasizing fear instead of hate, they seek to cultivate the belief that straight people are the victims of homosexuals, that homosexuals are more privileged than straight people, and that homosexuals are invading their world.  Homos get put into the role of the liberal elite, versus the decent and moral god-fearing folks who made that commercial.  This mentality of fear is a fertile ground for hatred, in fact it creates the feelings of disempowerment and instability that help hatred to grow.  It is a mindset that lends itself to hatred.  The hate is real and its impact is real.  Imagined victimization at the hands of a supposedly powerful minority exceeding their social status helps motivate white supremacists, anti-Semites, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and homophobes alike. 

Part 2: The Witty Response

What a huge response A Gathering Storm has generated!  There are too many parodies to watch in just one sitting.  Who is making ALL these parodies?  From amateurs on You Tube to Steven Colbert, to a bunch of TV actors and Lance Bass, the parodies proliferate far beyond the gay community.  Everyone wants to get in on the fun and show support for gay marriage... maybe the parodies are even winning over more straight allies for gay marriage. Straight liberals enjoy being in on the joke when it comes to queerness, in the know, with it, etc.  Add to that the fact that no one wants to be the butt of the joke.  The studio audience was in a laughing fit over Steven Colbert’s parody of A Gathering Storm and his commentary.  We have managed to make homophobia un-cool in certain privileged social circles.  While that is a little something, it is not much and it is not unproblematic.

The ad and its response illuminate one of the major reasons that affluent straight liberals can really get into supporting gay marriage: They risk NOTHING in supporting it. In fact, supporting gay marriage helps them feel good about themselves.  With every plea for marriage, gays serve to reaffirm the consumer/hetero lifestyle of marriage, ownership and offspring.  Straight people can look to us and feel content that their life choices are Good and Correct, so much so that gay people are just begging to attain this same exact life.  Now, I love my straight friends and that is why I know we can do better than this.  We can and do have friendships and alliances based on mutuality, respect and empathy.  But for a lot of straight married folks it must feel somewhat affirming to know that all us homos want is to be more like them.  We’re not the promiscuous free-loving seducers, exuberantly skipping down Fifth Avenue in our underwear... we are the committed monogamous neighbors.  Gays become much safer for previously uninterested straight people to accept as long as we aspire to nothing more than a life just like theirs.  Straight liberals love the marriage movement message because it poses no threat to how they live or what they believe.  They can be good liberals and support gay marriage and enjoy the moral high ground without having to give up anything, rethink anything, or do anything differently. The gay right is going out of their way to assure straight people the way things are is good and everything is just fine (except for gays not being allowed to get married.)  Every time there is a media story about gay marriage, it comes without the voices of progressive queers, without feminist queers, and without all of us proud queers who do not believe we need to get married in order to be fully human. 

Our voices are left out because it serves the advancement of the gay marriage movement to affirm the status quo as something universally appealing.  Our voices are left out because they threaten the social order far more than gay marriage ever could.  The affirmation of marriage may even assuage some of married people’s internal discontent, the doubts and fears they have about their own choices.  The gay marriage movement reassures straights that the patriarchal nuclear family structure is the best and only desirable way to live.  These structures exist at the expense of people in open or unconventional relationships, single people, transgender people, single parents, extended families, tribes and communities.   Marriages attain their status and legitimacy in part from our exclusion.  The continued replacement of “gay rights” with “gay marriage” reduces both our movement and our humanity.  In fact, it reduces everyone’s humanity, because it makes it seem as though you need to be in a relationship to have any sexuality at all.

And at risk of taking ALL the fun out of watching the parodies: What exactly is so funny about people placing an ad advocating against the legal rights of a minority, against rights that do not even exist except in five out of fifty states?  Would this be funny if it were about any other minority?  Of course, we’re special, and I’m not being sarcastic, our identity and culture have lots to do with sex and sex is a source of fun and obsession for pretty much every living thing on earth.  And of course humor itself is a legitimate and often effective form of resistance, one of my personal favorites.  But I do not think that is all of what is happening here.  Homophobia is not being addressed in a way that would change any homophobe’s mind, it is being addressed in a way that mostly just affirms the self righteous self-image of gay marriage advocates.

Part 3: Being Proud is Not the Same as Being Self-Righteous

The best part of these parodies for gay marriage advocates, what ever their sexual orientation, is that they get to feel really good about themselves while laughing at homophobes. Consequently there is a very real self-righteous sense of superiority being affirmed in these parodies.  The parodies are funny, but not that funny.  The mirth is in sharing a laugh at the expense of homophobes who are voicing something seemingly ridiculous.  The mirth shares the same variety of ugly self righteousness that came up in public conversations after the passage of Proposition 8 that blamed black people, absolved straight white people, and erased black queers all together.  Those who are laughing at the parodies get to feel like they are better than the ignorant fools who made that commercial.

For queers, there is definitely some appeal to the idea of feeling superior to homophobes. Of course we want to feel good, better than the people who are constantly sending us the message we are crazy, diseased, perverted villains.  Part of our cultural legacy is a fierce desire to say we are not villains, not inferior, not to be looked down upon.  For straights, I imagine they must enjoy thinking of themselves as morally better and more cosmopolitan and progressive than those ignorant, prejudiced, hatemongering homophobes.  There is also power in the act of dis-identifying with homophobes, and sometimes we all like to affirm our identity by point out what we are not.  Of course the desire to be better-than is very human and makes a lot of sense!  Liberals of every sexual orientation want to be good people, want to be on the right side of things.  But what does this orgy of superiority really accomplish? Straight liberals get to go back to their state-sanctioned relationships with the knowledge that they are better than those ignorant homophobes, with no changes to their thinking, values or behaviors.  Queers get to be funny and charming and get acknowledged by straights. 

What is missing here are the actual challenges that queers face on a daily basis that have to do with accessing adequate safety and humanity, not with accessing privilege and conformity.  So we enjoy a bunch of parodies, feel confident that we are on the right side of things, and go back to what ever we were doing before. Conveniently, we all feel better without actually doing anything differently. 

Part 4: Alliances

With friends and foes like these, I am not sure where that leaves queer rights, let alone queer liberation.  Consider Sean Penn, speaking up at the academy awards on behalf of gay marriage. 

For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

On one hand, he made an excellent move by casting shame on homophobes.  Shame has long been used against queers, so it was thoughtful of him to invert that usual theme and use their very own weapon against them.  On the other hand, “equal rights for everyone?”  Not much to aspire to here.  “Equal rights” is an empty concept in an unjust society.  “Equal rights” are not going to end homophobia, nor are they going to teach kids to stop harassing other kids who are different.  So-called equality in a racist, classist, sexist society is not going to stop guys with baseball bats from beating Jose Sucuzhanay to death for walking arm-in-arm with his brother. 

The very next day after Sean Penn’s speech at the Oscars, the following quote appeared in the NY Times:

If we give the money to the widows, they will spend it unwisely because they are uneducated and they don't know about budgeting. But if we find her a husband, there will be a person in charge of her and her children for the rest of their lives.

MAZIN al-SHIHAN, director of a city agency in Baghdad, on his plan to pay men to marry Iraqi war widows.

Make no mistake about it, THIS is the very same institution we aspire to join.  We are kidding ourselves if we think a few homos getting married can alter or romanticize the fact of what marriage is: a legal institution that exists for the purpose of perpetuating male ownership and authority over women and children. 

And speaking of children, where exactly were all these advocates of gay marriage when Sakia Gunn and Lawrence King were killed? How about when Jaheem Harrera or Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover committed suicide? The comedic affect of all these parodies is pretty unimpressive when we consider how deeply homophobic our culture is, right now, today.  Queer children get killed or commit suicide while we take cheap shots at poorly produced advertisements. 

We have made it easier for straight people to like us, because instead of challenging the system that rejected us, we are asking to be let back in and promising to leave it relatively unchanged.  Instead of speaking up on behalf of our people who are harassed, bullied and killed, we are asking to be part of the family again.  Instead of asking for justice, we are asking for equality. Some of us have been seduced by the temptations of straight liberal approval and feeling superior to homophobes.  It all works out to support the status quo, and the hollow, oppressive nuclear family continues to dominate as the only legitimate social grouping by being propped up on the backs of all those who are excluded from it.  Gay marriage legislation addresses homophobia in an extremely superficial, marginal way.  So after everyone has a good laugh at the Gathering Storm parodies, maybe we can get on to the actual work of rethinking the way status quo gender and sexuality function in service of patriarchy, and start doing a better job looking out for those who are getting left out, crushed and even killed in the process.

Childhood Sexuality

The single most profound moment in the formation of my sexuality during my childhood was seeing Madonna’s Open Your Heart video.  One of the first images is of a peep show booth window going up to reveal two sailors in white uniforms watching the show, faces touching, hands touching.  Madonna is dancing in the peep show, and she is arguably at her hottest, with fishnets, corset, bleached hair and all kinds of sexiness.  Later, even briefer than the image of the sailors, is the image of a woman in a fancy suit jacket and tie watching intently with her hand near her mouth.  Blink and you miss her.  I was very young and much like Sarah Palin staring down Putin across the Bering Strait, I did not blink. Other peep show spectators include a perv with thick glasses and a cowboy who cannot stand to look away as the booth window closes.  The woman appears again as the last image of the peep show spectators, she is smoking a cigarette after the conclusion of Madonna’s stage performance.  How delightfully suggestive!  Or have all of us non-smokers forgotten what some women like to do after cumming? And of course there is the young boy who is barred from entering the peep show but sneaks in, and Madonna gives him a kiss and dances off into the sunset with him at the end of the video, in a spectacle of exuberance and pleasure.  From the sailors alone, I knew I was queer, I knew I was like them.  In fact, the whole cast of characters played out in my emerging sexual landscape. I knew without a doubt that I wanted into that world, the world of peep shows, strippers, sailors, cowboys, women in ties, perverts and other assorted degenerates.  As a child watching a music video, I recognized the world I belonged in!  Some may call Madonna’s forays into queer worlds cultural appropriation.  But in my suburban prison, Madonna was a breath of fresh air, the promise that another world of sexuality existed, one that was not based on the dominant heterosexual mythology of getting to various bases and painful first times.