There is a case to be made for having a sense of community among lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. There is a strong sense of shared experience, and a strong sense of common problems. But there is also a danger of the community turning in on itself, and becoming insular and incestuous.
When the real life Brendan Teena was murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska in 1993 it was an as egregious attack as the one on Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Teena was a transgender and Shepard was a gay man. Both were murdered under horrific circumstances that generated a lot of media coverage and public outcry.
It is a shared experience that spans the wide LGBT-community that certain segments of the population are willing to murder us in the most horrific ways. It is a phenomenon that is evident globally, as witnessed by the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho in London in 1999. Today the headlines tend to describe acts of this nature in countries in the Middle East, notably Iran that hangs gay people on a regular basis, and in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The murderers are the most extreme of the opposition arrayed against the LGBT-community, but there is a shade of grey from this extreme over to the open and acceptable side. That grey zone spans over proponents for legislation such as DOMA and Proposition 8 in the United States, and the separate legislation for gay “marriages” in the United Kingdom, the Civil Partnerships, as well as the current fight for adoption rights against the Catholic adoption agencies in the UK.
When I was a fresh out of the closet gay man so many years ago, I volunteered as a phone councillor for troubled gay teens that were trapped in their small communities and their tragic circumstances. Recurring themes were parental abuse, thoughts of suicide, depression, substance abuse, and a long litany of woes.
In light of all this, one of our instructions was to get the teens “into the community”. We were instructed to bring the kids into the ghetto where we could talk to them, give them role models, and protect them from their families or friends or environment. Or simply try to protect them from themselves. The power of community was immense, and benevolent.
The community had an evident worth in the shared experiences and the shared problems we all faced to a smaller or greater extent in our lives. The community could give protection, give counselling, and give medical help in that time of HIV and the ravages of AIDS.
Preservation and protection were the values of the community, while we struggled for equality, but as LGBT is making large strides on that side we are more and more often faced with a debate about protecting the community itself, instead of having the community to protect its members.
One organisation that appears to push this exclusionary view is the US literary website LAMBDA, who has been in the centre of a literary storm these last days when a writer called Victoria Brownstone attacked women that write romance novels with gay male relationships. One of her stated reasons for this was that straight women appropriated gay male relationships for sexual titillation.
As LGBT-people are winning the debate, another debate is simmering, and that is the question of whether using the new equality on a level footing with the rest of society is actually “heterosexual conformity”.
In queer philosophy there is this thing called hetero-normativity, which means that society as a whole conforms to heterosexuals in expectations planning and function of the society. In effect, at its simplest form, you are assumed to be a heterosexual until you tell otherwise, and society plans and acts as if everyone is in fact heterosexual, until told otherwise.
In this view, actually using the new equal footing with heterosexuals is submitting to the hetero norm, and therefore LGBT should resist using the equality and strive for exclusivity. What that means is that the gay community should preserve itself because the gay community should be separate, but equal, to the straight society.
We’re at the deep end of the LGBT-politics here and in these waters actually using say a same-sex marriage would be to conform to heterosexism. What LGBT-people have spent decades, if not centuries, for is, in fact, not acceptable in this light. It makes me wonder what it is we fight for. Isn’t it equality? Now that we have it, should we throw it away since it’s supposed to mean we conform?
No. Personally, I feel that there is a need for a gay community in that it is damned nice to go to a gay bar and talk to people that are like me. There is a value in not having to guess about a guy’s orientation at that bar, but to assume that a visitor to a gay bar is in fact gay or bisexual.
But the ambition, for me, is that in fifty years time no one will do to us what the murderers did to Brendan Teena and Matthew Shepard. The dream is that it would be unthinkable because gay people and straight people are not segregated into separate spheres of existence, or exclusivity if you will.
If that means that the LGBT-community will dissolve into a loose chain of services for specific needs, then that is a price I’m willing to pay, if it means that I’ll be considered not in light of my sex-partners gender, but in light of how I am as a human being. Equality is more important than the community. I’d rather live my life as I see fit in a world where gayness is completely irrelevant to people, and gayness is viewed the same as straightness, than having an LGBT-community just for the sake of having an LGBT-community.
Tags: civil partnership, doma, gay, gay marriage, homosexuality, lgbt, politics, prop 8, proposition 8
I appreciate the desire to be a cool underground movement but it’s nonsense to argue that being equal is a form of conformity. It is to how a movement transforms. Our identity remains intake while our rights and protections become the same as others. It’s one thing to argue that you don’t want equality but another to attack those who do as conformists.
Um, you didn’t read the post right? Read it, and you will see I make the opposite argument to what you think I did.
South Australia here. Well done man that was impressive stuff. In australia we have similar kinda of thought but never as extreme as America. A discussion that pops up from time to time is the Sydney Mardi Gras. For example if we want equal right should we not act normal as heterosexual do not have events as such. And if big events where taken away, what gay recreational events would bring community together. The Mardi Gras was originally started out as a protest then evolved into a yearly event which in turn now a party. My option is that it is evolved so even if the laws did change etc there is no reason to stop an even that brings community together like other events such as Christmas new years etc.