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.