letting go

Nobody likes change, and nobody likes letting go of something if it's what they're comfortable with and what they're used to. But change is sometimes necessary for improvement, and the process of letting go can catalyze developments in ourselves and in society.

The students taking this course needed to let go to some extent of their sensitivities. While we can aim in our discussions to use terminology to not offend anyone (Homosexual or Queer? To each their own), the very subject matter is bound to make students, especially straight students, uncomfortable. Additionally, we are looking at LGBT culture against the backdrop of dominant society and while we can bring in the various racial and class discrepancies within the LGBT community, some of those issues deserve entire courses dedicated to them. We needed to let go of the sense of individual slights whenever a white society was assumed to be the norm and the first and easiest context to put an LGBT issue in. Returning to the concerns of straight classmates. Queers Read This: I Hate Straights, was supposed to make you uncomfortable and question your role as the A in LGBTA. A straight person will not find a comfortable home in the LGBT community, they will find a coalition. As Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall points out in Bitches in Solitude, "Home is where you want to feel safe with others life you; coalition is a deeply painful and difficult process during which you come to terms with others who are different in the pursuit of a finite common goal" She goes on to assert that believing in unity is a recipe for disaster, manifested as an "explosion of our repressed differences." Perhaps that's how we should have come into this course, as a coalition (while not as extreme as those mentioned by Chang Hall) rather than as a welcoming comfortable place to discuss issues that most students relate to very personally. The LGBT community should be welcoming, but upon entering it one should be prepared to find more difference than similarities.

The first "letting go" I noticed as we followed LGBT history from the 1900s was the abandonment of the loneliness surrounding believing that you are the only one. As homosexuality was medicalized and gay men and lesbians oppressed, they were also recognized as a subset of the population and thrown together, ironically strengthening individual thoughts of isolation. D'Emilio speaks to this in his Overview of Homosexuality and American Society, “the medical model promoted the articulation of a gay identity and made it easier for may lesbians and homosexuals to come out.”

Moving forward in time, many people had difficulty letting go of the didactic thinking that a gay person must either be an outlaw or an assimilationist, the idea that there was no place in society for someone who wanted to exist in it as their own person. Groups like Mattachine hindered this release because they did not allow sufficient mobility within the organization to set up a supported stance in the middle of the diad. It’s almost as if these groups knew their foundation was dependent on the prevalence of the diad and thus deviation would be their destruction. Which is pretty much what happened.

A crucial thing to let go of is the heteronormative ideal, a slow process beginning in the 1960s that still has not reached resolution. By releasing this ideal, dominant society will respect and eventually accept lesbians and gay men as members of society and as equals. This was the take home message I got from Duberman’s Stonewall narrative. Stonewall was a turning point not because it forced people to band together or because it was an explosion that infiltrated and effected every queer person in America, because neither of those things truly happened, Stonewall gave members of the gay and lesbian community something to think about, it let them question how they were being treated and decide (possibly for the first time) if they were going to accept that role in society or fight for something better.

Finally, the thing that we still need to let go of, that I am afraid may not happen for a while, is the need to constantly criticize and marginalize our own. Examples of this that I have brought up over the course of this blog have ranged from Roy Cohn’s rejection of the homosexual community due to their lack of clout to prejudice in the lesbian community excluding femmes and transwomen (MWMF) as well as transmen.

In conclusion, and this is really my conclusion for what this course has taught me, be flexible. Be flexible in your definitions of gender, and other people’s lifestyles won’t bother you. Be willing to work alongside people who are different from you because that difference brings strength to your common cause. Dare to fall on the edge of a two-sided dichotomy coin. Question the norm. And, most importantly, a win against dominant society does not give you leave to start oppressing your own.

Karen

Will The Real Vagina Please Stand Up?

The feminist rejection of transwomen as women. Kate Bornstein reasons that this exclusion comes from the MTF transsexual carrying a degree of their male privledge into their newly-gendered life and into the "women-only" space. Borstein goes on to prescribe the eradication of male priveledge from all environments as the best option, but we all know that's not going to happen overnight. And neither will acceptance of transwomen in women-only spaces.

This topic reminded me of the skirmish at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. MWFM is amoung very few women's festivals with a Women-born-Women only policy. WBW policies center around women's experiences and childhood as a "girl" are unique, learned, and transformative mainly due to them functioning under patriarchy. Judith Butler grounds WBW policies in gender being a performance. The general gist of the MWFM incident was that Nancy Burkholder was kicked out of the festival after disclosing her transsexual status. I can remember at the time being revolted by the fact that a group of what I could only assume were very empowered, compassionate women dedicated to minimizing oppression in our society, were giving this (whether they like it or not) member of their community a taste of the medicine they were used to being dealt. Furthermore, the fact that much of the WBW policy rationale is grounded in segregation by who grew up under patriarchy only further propagates patriarchy's influence in women's lives down the line. Outrage from transgender activists initiaged "Camp Trans," which meets every year at the same time as the festival just across the street.
Camp Trans Wiki
Transmission from Camp Trans
Camp Trans Comic

Taste of MWMF and it's musical performances


Camp Trans declares victory


One last reflection on gender. I am of the opinion that to some degree people take on gender traits of those they are attracted to in a semi-dilusional strive for acceptance. I believe this t be especially true in the case of promiscuity. I think that young women who are not yet defined in their sexuality and sexual practices, may take on a promiscuous air in order to be accepted by the men they are interested in. My assertion may fall apart when extended to lesbians and gay men. If a lesbian took on the gender characteristics of her female lover she would just act more female and a likewise for a man. And this does not correlate to the the gender stereotypes of the effeminate man and the butch women.

Also, because I like our article writers' blogs, here is Kate Bornstein's

Silence is safe.

Reactions to "Tongues Untied" by Marlon Riggs:

What Silence is. He ends with saying that Silence is a double edged sword that cuts both ways. This is an issue that comes up in history all of the time. Silence Gives Consent. If you don't act out, you will continue to be walked over. Cultural history is full of instances full of frustration at the wronged masses not joining their voices together in revolt. I don't think these masses are given enough credit.

The snap diva sequence reminded me of one of the vignettes in George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, entitled "The Gospel according to Miss Roj."
Not as good as Carleton's performance last year, but it'll do:


I had a small revelation while watching Tongues Untied. I had often been curious why I was so comfortable with the visual display of gay male sex. Shows like (forgive me) "Queer as Folk" or movies like "Brokeback Mountain" contain very stimulating sex scenes that I am almost more comfortable with than heterosexual and lesbian sex scenes. What occurred to me during "Tonuges Untied," was that a possible reason for me liking gay male sex scenes was that they did not make me jealous. Unlike intimate scenes involving women, I did not feel excluded. Perhaps I only noticed this now being double-excluded for being being white as well as female. I use "excluded" here not in a emotional sense rather in a physical sense. I realize that most gay people are "boring," and the sex scenes I have been exposed to are generally unrealistic. But the rational still holds true to some extent. This is also a large part of why straight men like lesbian porn so much, there's no guy on screen for them to get jealous of.

ex-gays and their crowns

The Ex-Gay Obama story is striking a chord with me. Obama is campaigning through South Carolina with an ex-gay singer with an ex-gay homophobic agenda. Some are of the belief that Obama needs the support of the homophobic black church community. Which leads me to ask...
Who's more homophobic, the white church or the black church?
If homosexuality is a white thing, then it's the black church, right? How much more of a taboo is it to be gay in a black community? As someone who has very little exposure to church, and even less exposure to being black I can only respond to these questions based on the stereotypes the media and entertainment industry has built up. While I realize the following examples are not the basis of an argument, I feel that they help to elucidate a few of the misconceptions that white society may have about the black church community and it's view(s) on homosexuality.
Two reasons the black church may not be as homophobic as the white church:
1. I saw the show CROWNS when I was in my formative teenage years. Combining this magical experience of a loving, supportive accepting black church with everything like it seen on TV and in the movies, it was not difficult to get the impression that black people where some of the most accepting and tolerant people around.
2. Black. Male. AIDS. I can't count how many times I've seen this combination of traits, and they weren't all drug related.
I suppose the point I'm trying to make here is not that black churches should not be/are not homophobic, rather that from a CAMS perspective, there might be some credence to portrayals of black community being not very reliable (gasp, TV/movies are lying!)

The Trujillo article about lesbians in chicano communities brought to my attention for the first time the idea of Homosexuality as a white thing, and therefore is rejected even more violently from non-white communities, such as the Chicano community. It seems that this is a prevalent enough phenomena that it would apply to most non-white cultures and therefore answer the question with: Yes, black churches are more homophobic. Does that still mean Obama needs to cater to them to get the support he needs from the black community, well we'll see how well he holds up on the tour.

Footings

Before going into Joan Nestle's "The Fem Question" I want to respond to the L word comment in the course blog.

There seems to be this inability to escape from dominant parent culture. At what point do you stop struggling and make a home for yourself in what you have. I am not advocating we submit to patriarchy, merely that we not dismiss our parent cultures entirely, afterall we did stem from them.

Aureliano credits shows like "The L Word" to the radicals of the 70s because they were able to "break the essentialist model of womanhood." So we break the model, the radical lesbian emerges, unhindered from societies restrictions (for the most part). What makes them different from one another? To answer this I found a video clip which attempts to summarize the variety of characters on Showtime's "The L Word."



Going a little deeper into a few of the characters. Criticism of lesbians, especially those falling into the Butch/Fem identification accuses them of recreating the patriarichal relationships they "worked so hard to break out of." With women's sexual liberation came the gradual acceptance of women's sexual promiscuity. When is a woman exerting her sexual freedom and when is she making a power play. It seems that there is this notion of promiscuity in lesbian encounters as being purely derived, whereas a heterosexual woman exerting her sexual options is interpreted as raising issue with her male lover in an unnatural shift of power. This following scene exemplifies modern day butch/femm as well as the writers combining aspects of both heterosexual and lesbian relationships regarding monogamy.



The heterosexual aspect is the femm "flipping her shit" and doing something crazy in response to infidelity. The lesbain aspect is the honesty and cool the butch takes in dealing with her deeds.

So where does Nestle's Fem discussion fit in here.
First I'd like to note that Nestle seems to take her femness quite seriously as part of her identity, not just when writing to define the feminist fem, but also as in her introductory line on her website.
Pathologically the fem was "stripped of all power, made into a foolish woman who can easily be beckoned over into the right camp," in their aptness to bisexuality. Bisexuals sometimes feel left out in queer communities because they don't feel gay enough. I feel like the same mechanism is at work with Fems in the lesbian community. A Lesbian looks like this, and if you don't look like this, maybe you're as confused as a bisexual. It's interesting to note the turnover. From lesbians being not even recognized as a minority to having a solid enough niche in society carved out that they can start criticizing and marginalizing their own. It's human nature. As soon as we have a footing we have to make sure someone else has less of one.

For the raw castings of Joan Nestle's thoughts, her blog.

Bully, Coward, Victim.

Explosion of gay sex in the 1970s, it was how they fought back, it was what they had.
AIDS surfaces in the mid 1980s forcing people to talk about sex in ways they never wanted to before.

As a society, there was no way of knowing at the time that we were endangering ourselves and our futures by having so much sex. There is nowhere for the blame to lie. Crimp and Shilts and Kramer can quarrel until the cows come home, and being the least extreme Crimp is probably closer to the truth, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was no way of knowing. Now we can blame homophobia, or lack of support for safe sex education.

Anonymity less of an option.

We briefly touched on in class media that has captured, and in some people’s views, glorified AIDS in the 1980s. After some writers block, that really amounted more to an inability to feel like I had the whole picture, I decided I should watch Angels in America before writing this post. By reputation I knew it was not a movie to watch unless I was prepared to cry for the rest of the night, but mid-term break seemed like as good a time as ever.
One of Roy Conn’s catchphrases is “only in America,” generally referring to some outrageous social phenomenon, that is in fact, not at all outrageous, because we are in America. Well Roy, only in America could a medical disease become so ingrained in our culture and history. The words under his name in the AIDS quilt are "Bully, Coward, Victim." And you can bet Al Pacino knew that when playing the role in the movie.

Douglas Crimp mentions that the reason AIDS was noticed was because of gay middle-class men. If it had only infected the people our society tries to ignore it would not have been noticed as quickly. As it is, the fact that gay men, despite being a minority, had maneuvered their way into middle class jobs where they appeared no different, that AIDS became visible. I am also very impressed with the development of AIDSpeak, that a cooping mechanism developed in an attempt to bridge this understanding/communication gap between the gay community and dominant society. According to Shilts AIDSpeak is a "new syntax that allows gay political leaders to address and largely determine and largely determine public health policy." Of all the things the gay community did during the 80s to deal with the AIDS epidemic and gain footing, AIDSpeak, while not necessarily steming from the people, certainly seems to have done wonders to help them.

The shit that hits the fan with AIDS is anonymity. Those who got by by leading two lives had a much harder time when pegged with defining and incriminating markings.

If it weren’t for AIDS, could heterodomanant society have succeded in simultaneously ignoring and shunning homosexual practices for the rest of eternity? Perhaps. Roy Conn’s scene at the end of Chapter 1 in Angels in America speaks to this issue in many ways.

Blank-centric

As we discussed extensively in class, the period surrounding Stonewall heralded the movement from a heterocentric to a homocentric way of thinking, at least among the gay community. I would like to examine this time period using slightly different definitions of homocentric and heterocentric, those based in physics. Heterocentric is the having of different centers, said of rays that do not meet at a common focus. Homocentric is the having of the same center, denoting rays that meet at a common focus.

Not only was movement for gay reform disjointed and unfortunately based in a heterosexual society, but by its very nature it was heterocentric—individuals and groups did not meet at a common focus. The most glaring example of this being Mattachine and the revolutionary scism that Craig was involved in. If the mother of all gay organizations can’t agree on a message, what hope does that give for the rest of the community? This analogy carries over into the post-Stonewall era where we characterized the GAA as being more reformist than the GLF. The GAA worked within the heterocentric system with a few connected immediate goals. While these goals all fought for gay rights, there was no defining single focus of the group. The work encompassed many individual focused projects but lacked the vision of a complete picture.

The Stonewall riots showed solidarity among those involved, and even for those unaware on Pine Island, it was a catalyst for forming gays and lesbians as a minority group. For the first time there was a single focus; a greater vision for a future with less persecution and a system that accepted and respected them. The GLF was revolutionary, they refused to believe that homophobia could be removed from the current system, and therefore the system had to change. While this revolution may have never come, the creation of this ideal, and the actions made in its name gave gays and lesbians a common focus. A focus I believe is still alive today.

Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist refers to the ethos of a selected group of people, and since in this course we are studying the socio-cultural history of a selected group of people (LGBT community) I find it important, at this time to delve a little more into how each of the characters in Duberman’s “Stonewall” relate to and/or reflect the Zeitgeist of the 1960s.

First of all, I think it is perfectly all right, when studying one thing in such depth, to be somewhat general when refering to the context. Because we are so tuned in to the LGBT issues in the 1960s, it is acceptable for some generalizations to be made regarding race issues, politics, etc. Not that these are less important, merely that they are not what we’re immediately concerned with. I feel that this sensitivity to temporary classification is distracting some class discussions from focusing on specific LGBT histories. These generalizations can be clumped, to some extent, into the 1960s’ Zeitgeist. This is probably the most important reason I have for including Zeitgeist in my personal ramblings regarding Duberman’s narrative.

From class I took that 1960s Zeitgeist was primarilly made up of Revolutionary counter-culture and the struggle for civil rights. While there are many parrallels that can be drawn between the fight for LGBT rights and the civil rights struggle, the one I find to be the most interesting and causal is the infectious impatience. It’s the domino affect of one person’s disruptive behavior giving others the encouragement to act out. But instead, it’s as if to say: “It’s ok to act now, it’s ok to be impatient, in fact, it’s the only way this will ever get done.” None of these were new ideas; they just required the catalysis of impatience in order to actually happen.

When we look at history, we see what was accomplished and we see what hardships people went through in order to attain said accomplishments. But what we don’t see are the smaller obstacles that these “revolutionaries” ran into every day, every month, or even every year. Each of Duberman’s characters have some nuance to their life or upbringing that sets them apart from how these “types of people” are remembered in history. Perhaps I can elucidate: Hippies/Yippies, definitely part of the 1960s Zeitgeist, but apparently homophobic. Craig and Foster, same common cause, but intellectually differed substantially.

Duberman’s narrative gives dimension to Zeitgeist ideals. It wasn’t just about angry people rising up against the Man; there were thousands of positions people took on a spectrum, each in it for different reasons and each facing their own specific obstacles.

And now for something random yet relative....



Karen

Symposium

There was something in D'Emilio's first chapter of "Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities" that reminded me of a reading done at my cousin's wedding in San Francisco last month. The reading was from Plato's Symposium, which I had never heard of at the time. I looked in vain to identify the exact passage they used, but failed to find words that were familiar. It was the blatant acceptance of members of the same sex loving each other that I found so stimulating. Being read at a wedding between a ma and a woman seemed to be saying "We recognize it is unfair that we can marry and others can not, but at least we care." Now realizing that Plato's Symposium is where the term "Uranian" came from, I deamed it absolutely necessary to find this passage and complete the connection.

Here is the closest I could find to what was used in the wedding:

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male...
And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.

Identity makes Sex about Love

It seems to be that there were two large steps from colonial America and the complete absence of gay and lesbian identity, to the second half of the 20th century when pretty much everyone knew what a gay person was, and generally had an opinion about it.

The first step was individual awareness. As capitalism drew men and women out of the home and into the marketplace at the end of the 19th century there was a general chaos of activity, allowing those with “abnormal” attractions to fly under the radar and have some mobility and freedom to explore those attractions. In other words, it was the first opportunity for people to be aware of and act upon attraction to those of the same sex.

The second step would be the medicalization of homosexuality, bringing it into the daylight for everyone to see and criticize and say “oh, that’s what’s been going on.” We all know how therapeutic naming our fears can be. Heteronormative society had been fearing the myth of the homosexual and persecuting those accused of buggery for decades, so it must have come as somewhat of a relief to be able to put this heinous monster in a box that could be classified. While it is ironic that it was this trauma and persecution that helped develop gay and lesbian identity by making gay people visible to eachother, I very much agree that this “baptism by fire” is somewhat necessary for new identities to emerge. It doesn’t just happen overnight and it’s never going to be easy.

So far I’ve said nothing new. What I’m interested in is when it became about love. Identity makes sex about love, love for partners as well as love for those in the community you identify with. Edward Carpenter believed that Uranians greatest service in society would be in “solving the problems of affection and of the heart,” and that “Love is at last to take its rightful place as the binding directing force of society.” I am not asserting that all gays and lesbians equate their sexual encounters with love, we are all human afterall. However, the sacrifice they made in their lives for love was indeed greater than had been generally seen before. Literature and film can’t get enough of “love’s sacrifice,” but those scenarios are never realistic and rarely can a large group of people identify with the plight. This was different. Everyone who embraced their gay or lesbian identity in order to be with the people they loved sacrificed standing or safety in society. Thus, to some extent, to identify was to say: love is important to me.

Purpose?

While the purpose of this blog is for the class WGST 111, American "Queer", I feel somewhat of a need to explain my reasons for taking this class and (more importantly) choosing the blog option. I assistant directed a Mindy Garner's acting comps show last Winter; Jane Chambers' "Last Summer at Bluefish Cove," or as most Carleton students remember it as, "that lesbian play." This was the first thing to spark my academic interest in gay and lesbian issues. While many study history to better understand the present (or not repeat the mistakes of our past), I find my fascination with the content of this course is more centered on history for history's sake, seen in the time it took place and not immediately transposed and compared to the present. This class and my blog is somewhat of an homage to what I learned from doing that play and how it has inspired me to take a more active role in my own life via intellectual discovery and not so much of the "I feel, I think, I want..." side of queer issues. Hence, getting this out of the way beforehand so that I can move beyond Bluefish.

A Taste of Bluefish

Just to get a feel for what this show I keep talking about was about....
Also, see if you can spot me!