Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Image: Jeffery Walls
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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and the editor of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.
My mother, a straight white woman in her early sixties, recently moved to a newly gentrified area of Washington, DC. The formerly black neighbourhood is filled with young white professionals, and my mother’s building is heavily populated by wealthy gay men. Not surprisingly, the busy pavement is a popular spot for canvassers. The other day, my mother encountered a smiling gay man enquiring, “Are you interested in gay rights?” When she stopped, he asked her to support gay marriage with a financial contribution. My mother told him she believed gay people should have the same rights as straight people – hospital visitation, tax breaks, inheritance rights, healthcare, and the rest – but she didn’t think this should only happen through marriage. The canvasser explained that marriage would help gay people to become part of the mainstream. My mother asked: what about gay people who aren’t mainstream?
When I came out to my mother 18 years ago, she urged me to see Charles Soccarides, the famous conversion therapist. Her path from liberal homophobe to potential advocate of non-mainstream queers is unfortunately not a common trajectory. As US gay organisations have become obsessed with access to straight privilege at any cost, the disastrous institution of marriage – crucible for straight conformity, wife-beating, child abuse, and other forms of domestic terrorism – has become the ultimate status symbol for successful gays. They’ve shifted funding away from essential services like AIDS healthcare, sex education, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, youth and senior programmes, trans health, counselling, and homeless care. Crucial struggles like the fight against US militarism, mass incarceration, and anti-immigrant hysteria are pushed to the margins of the gay agenda, which valorises the right to serve in the military, the need to further empower a criminal legal system through hate crimes legislation, and marriage as the ultimate solution for citizenship woes.
In California in 2008, gay marriage advocates (and their straight allies) spent over $43 million fighting against Proposition 8, which sought to overturn a court decision legalising gay marriage; their ads featured an endless array of cookie-cutter straight-acting gays spouting patriotic “we’re just like you” rhetoric. Proposition 8 passed. You would think this would have inspired a shift in strategy, but what did these organisations decide they needed? More funding!
Now we’re treated to another media charade as the fate of Proposition 8 lands in Federal court, and gay marriage maniacs battle it out with crazed homophobes to decide who deserves the right to get hitched to the state. Meanwhile, everyone outside the mainstream gets ditched.
And why should us mainstream, suburban gays fight for YOUR rights? You clearly have no respect for, or desire to fight for our rights.
@Jeff: because you're not a monster who only cares about himself? Do you tell homeless people asking for change "what did you ever give me?" We're oppressed, you're not. When you get marriage, adoption, and military service you're going to have nothing in the way of complete citizenship. The rest of us are going to face police violence, deportation, homelessness, lack of healthcare, lack of education, and so on. No shit we don't care about your "right" to be "normal."
@KT If you're in a host country according to its rules you don't have to worry about deportation. The other challenges you list are hardly unique to gay and lesbians.
Actually, GR - and anyone else - in fact, a recognisable queer identity makes you far more vulnerable to police harassment, lack of healthcare, etc. Yes, these challenges are not unique to gays and lesbians, but being identified as queer makes you a bigger target for harassment, exclusion and exploitation.
I'm part of a grassroots organisation Gender JUST in Chicago, and our work with queer youth in schools gives us many examples of students being picked on by staff, security and fellow students for their sexuality. In schools with fewer resources and poorer demographics, those students may already face harassment, but all of it is compounded by them being queer in a homophobic environment.
As for deportation: Your chance of gaining asylum on the basis of persecution as part of a sexual minority is significantly more fraught than that for "regular" asylum because the courts have outdated perceptions of what queer people should look and behave like. Also, the bar for "proving" persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation is significantly higher than, say, on the grounds of political persecution.
We could go down the entire list this way. Queerness exacerbates material oppression. Those who don't believe that or understand it usually speak from a position of straight or straight-acting privilege.