"Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)"
--Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger," Sister Outsider
I'm angry.
I'm angry that Proposition 8 passed. I wasn't angry on Wednesday, but I'm angry today.
I'm angry that some posters here are so willing to sell LGBT people down the river so quickly, calling us "racists", seemingly with impunity and ignoring the LGBT movement's anti-racist history. Many of the Gay Rights Movement's initial white supporters--such as Harry Hay--were also involved in the Civil Rights Movement. However, it's just easier to say "gays are racist", even if it's not true, because it absolves non-queer progressives of their own heterosexism and homophobia. Legitimate critique of the homophobia within the African-American community--a critique launched thirty years ago by feminist Black lesbian Audre Lorde and echoed by other queer Black intellectuals such as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam--is uncritically labeled "gay racism" here on the DailyKos. The failure to recognize and address this homophobia, as both Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill so eloquently argued decades ago, hamstrings both the queer community and the African-American community. Uncritically calling anyone who suggests we analyze it a "racist" only further divides people.
I'm angry that progressives remain so willing to court queer votes, queer money, and queer support, only to stab us in the back after they've secured their win. We were told, this time around, this is a "new progressive movement", that everyone's a part of it. Like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football, I fell for it. I should have known better, though. It's not like I haven't seen this before. The fraudulent charge of "gay racism" gives non-queer progressives an easy excuse to betray the GLBT people who helped move them forward in 2006 and today.
I'm angry, so I turned to some old writings on anger, beginning with a flier I first saw in the student union of my college campus when I was 18. It read "QUEERS READ THIS!" in huge letters across the top. I did. At 18, I was shocked and offended. "This can't possibly work! We have to build bridges between communities! We have to work with other minorities, with feminists, with other progressives. There is no use in being angry." I was naive.
"I hate straight people who can't listen to queer anger
without saying 'hey, all straight people aren't like that.
I'm straight too, you know,' as if their egos don't get
enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist
world. Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our
just anger brought on by their fucked up society?! Why add
the reassurance of 'Of course, I don't mean you. You don't
act that way.' Let them figure out for themselves whether
they deserve to be included in our anger.
But of course that would mean listening to our anger,
which they almost never do. They deflect it, by saying 'I'm
not like that' or 'Now look who's generalizing' or 'You'll
catch more flies with honey ... ' or 'If you focus on the
negative you just give out more power' or 'you're not the
only one in the world who's suffering.' They say 'Don't
yell at me, I'm on your side' or 'I think you're
overreacting' or 'BOY, YOU'RE BITTER.'
They've taught us that good queers don't get mad.
They've taught us so well that we not only hide our anger
from them, we hide it from each other. WE EVEN HIDE IT FROM
OURSELVES. We hide it with substance abuse and suicide and
overarhcieving in the hope of proving our worth. They bash
us and stab us and shoot us and bomb us in ever increasing
numbers and still we freak out when angry queers carry
banners or signs that say BASH BACK. For the last decade
they let us die in droves and still we thank President Bush
for planting a fucking tree, applaud him for likening PWAs
to car accident victims who refuse to wear seatbelts. LET
YOURSELF BE ANGRY. Let yourself be angry that the price of
our visibility is the constant threat of violence, anti-
queer violence to which practically every segment of this
society contributes. Let yourself feel angry that THERE IS
NO PLACE IN THIS COUNTRY WHERE WE ARE SAFE, no place where
we are not targeted for hatred and attack, the self-hatred,
the suicide --- of the closet. The next time some straight
person comes down on you for being angry, tell them that
until things change, you don't need any more evidence that
the world turns at your expense. You don't need to see only
hetero couple grocery shopping on your TV ... You don't
want any more baby pictures shoved in your face until you
can have or keep your own. No more weddings, showers,
anniversaries, please, unless they are our own brothers and
sisters celebrating. And tell them not to dismiss you by
saying 'You have rights,' 'You have privileges,' 'You're
overreacting,' or 'You have a victim's mentality.' Tell
them 'GO AWAY FROM ME, until YOU can change.' Go away and
try on a world without the brave, strong queers that are its
backbone, that are its guts and brains and souls. Go tell
them go away until they have spent a month walking hand in
hand in public with someone of the same sex. After they
survive that, then you'll hear what they have to say about
queer anger.
Otherwise, tell them to shut up and listen."
--Anonymous Queers, June 1990, "Queers Read This"
I'm angry, so I turned to Audre Lorde's essay on "The Uses of Anger", a natural fit. What she says about anger and guilt, about hurt feelings, and about identifying "who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies" is worth paying attention to. Who are our allies with whom we have grave differences? Who are our genuine enemies? This anger, Lorde said, helps clear the air. The failure to express it for fear of making others feel guilty, she said, merely protects the status quo.
"And, yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another. . . voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed."
"I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness."
"But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies."
"Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives."
"We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here."
--all Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger," Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984
I'm angry, so I turned to Kate Bornstein, transgender activist. Our anger tells us we must act. We must change.
"We don't deserve the ridicule, the stares, the fists in our bellies. We are entitled to our anger in response to this oppression: our anger is a message to ourselves that we need to get active and change something in order to survive. So we resist the oppression, the violence--we resist the tendency of the culture to see us as a joke."
--Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, 1994
I'm angry, so I turned to Frederick Douglass to remind me that there are those who want change without work. To remind me that agitation is necessary.
"If there is not struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation. . . want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will."
--Frederick Douglass
I'm angry, so, finally, I turned to Dr. Martin Luther King. He did not tell Black people not to be angry. He urged them to turn anger into action--and whites claimed that was "extremism".
"If. . . repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, 'Get rid of your discontent.' Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail", 1963
I'm angry, and I'm not the least bit apologetic about it.