At the deep end of LGBT politics

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.

George Michael charged again; Anti-gay backtracking; Daniel Radcliffe talks nice; and Abe Lincoln for President

Now, George Michael is getting used to the attentions of the police, because he was recently caught again driving under the influence, and smashing into a shop with his car. At the same time he smashed into the headlines again, with another arrest. Like the site AfterElton.com says: “it seems he’s developed a fetisch for getting arrested.”

But George Michael isn’t the only one with a PR problem. Remember the ruckus last week over Judge Vaughn Walkers ruling that Californias Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in the state, was unconstitutional? Today, as the temporary stay on same-sex wedding bells chiming all over the state was lifted, a couple of anti-gay personages were busy backtracking. One was the american conservative commentator Glen Beck and the other was the Australian senate candidate Wendy Francis.

Cause for celebrations all around, in other words. Which brings us over to more somber political news concerning one of the forefather of the present United States, Abraham Lincoln. If you’re in NewYork, and feel like celebrating in the spirit of it all, you can go and watch “Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party” which opens in New York.

And finally, Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame, talks nice about gay people in Out magazine as he is set to star in a new Broadway play called ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying‘, which will open in March next year.

Gay marriage around the world

California is a US state known for its earthquakes. One of them took place in the week that went by, but this time it was a legal earthquake. San Francisco didn’t fall into the sea.

I am of course talking about the ruling from Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker where he declared that the state’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional on equal protection grounds. That has got the opposition to gay marriage to throw a hizzy fit, to use a quaint expression of one of my internet friends. They are now seeking to have Mr Walker impeached.

I can understand why. In the 136-page ruling, Mr Walker demolished all the propaganda we have heard over these last decades with a clear and concise logic. We also note that the proponents for the ban failed to provide an adequate legal defence of the ban, calling only two witnesses who ended up contradicting each other, and who was ruled to be unreliable.

As overturning the ruling requires that the proponents demolish the judge’s findings, I can see why they would – after the utter annihilation of their rhetoric in the ruling – try to demolish the character of the judge instead.

But California is not the only place to fret about gay marriages. Catholic Mexico City has been in the news too today about the matter. The Mexican Supreme court ruled today that the city’s law permitting gay marriage was indeed constitutional.

One of the things in the ruling was the determination that civil unions, and thus indeed our civil partnerships, were second class arrangements. They were designed to make opposite sex-relationships superior to same-sex ones. I wish politicians on this side of the pond would take a leaf from that book, and have another look at our own laws. Why is it that our civil partnerships can’t be performed in a church? It is because they are second class arrangements meant to make heterosexual marriages superior to ours.