Yesterday morning, I gave my last final of the semester. It was my Sex and Gender class, and walking into the final, one of my students stopped to chat with me. A week earlier, we had been discussing HIV/AIDS. As a sociologist, I deal with this as a social phenomenon, and one of the things I try to impart on my students is the historical context. I mentioned that in a summer class I teach on mass media and lesbian and gay communities and social movements, I have students watch Philadelphia and Silverlake LIfe: The View From Here in the same week as a way of looking at how AIDS was presented in film, and the difference between straight and gay points of view in producing AIDS narratives. The "realness" the sense from the initial viewing of the Hanks/Washington/Demme production gets blown out of the water when the watch the autobiographical documentary of the death of Tom Joslin. I hate Phliadelphia, absolutely despise it, as I'll get to.
My student was shocked by Silverlake Life, not read for the scenes of a human being wasting away and dying of the disease, as well as taken aback by the very real differences in perspective offered by the two films. Despite the honors for Tom Hanks, Philadelphia, if you look at the narrative structure, is a film about Denzel Washington's character. It is he that goes through the cathartic change. Philadelphia is a film about straight America, and a film in which that America lets itself off the hook for the response to HIV/AIDS.
Three years prior to that film, in the height of ACT-UP and Queer Nation activism, a group of anonymous activists produced a flyer for New York's gay pride parade. They titled it simply, "Queers read this!." Its radical message, produced when the United States was quite literally still telling us to "just go die already" still resonates today. Indeed, in the aftermath of Prop 8 and the Warren fiasco, it feels even more relevant than it has in years.
There's a section of the piece titled "I hate straights" that feels particularly apropos at this time. I already know that the title will have people fuming. The text will be unread as people criticize the nasty radical queers for being too far out, intolerant in their own way, too totalizing, whatever. I'm going to reprint that, though, and ask people to read it for themselves, to ask whether or not it's actually speaking about them. In doing so, I hope people will apply this piece to the current events, to finally figure out where all of this queer anger is coming from. As the authors of the piece not, "let them figure out if they're included in our anger" and that understanding can only come if they "shut up and listen."
I HATE STRAIGHTS
I have friends. Some of them are straight.
Year after year, I see my straight friends. I want to see them, to see how they are doing, to add newness to our long and complicated histories, to experience some continuity. Year after year I continue to realize that the facts of my life are irrelevant to them and that I am only half listened to, that I am an appendage to the doings of a greater world, a world of power and privilege, of the laws of installation, a world of exclusion. "That's not true," argue my straight friends. There is the one certainty in the politics of power: those left out of it beg for inclusion, while the insiders claim that they already are. Men do it to women, whites do it to blacks, and everyone does it to queers. The main dividing line, both conscious and unconscious, is procreation ... and that magic word --- Family. Frequently, the ones we are born into disown us when they find out who we really are, and to make matters worse, we are prevented from having our own. We are punished, insulted, cut off, and treated like seditionaries in terms of child rearing, both damned if we try and damned if we abstain. It's as if the propagation of the species is such a fragile directive that without enforcing it as if it were an agenda, humankind would melt back into the primeval ooze.
I hate having to convice straight people that lesbians and gays live in a war zone, that we're surrounded by bomb blasts only we seem to hear, that our bodies and souls are heaped high, dead from fright or bashed or raped, dying of grief or disease, stripped of our personhood.
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 [sic] 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.
I haven't read this piece in quite a while. I find myself going back to it every so often, though. This has been one of those times, though. For all the progress we've made, we still remain outsiders in our own nation. We are still subject to terroristic violence (This spring's report of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects should be very interesting--I'm putting money on a spike in anti-queer violence over the course of the autumn in California. There's always a spike in anti-queer violence when our lives are the subject of political debate. It jumped about 30% here in Massachusetts while our legislature was debating taking marriage rights away in the Commonwealth, with large jumps in violence occurring during the Constitutional Convention. That's not surprising. When queer lives are at the center of controversy, queer people get assaulted and killed. That's a pretty standard trend.
So, yes, we're angry. We're angry that our lives are still devalued. And we're angry that the President-Elect has, during this time when our lives and relationships have been particularly devalued, has chosen a primary proponent of that devaluation to speak for the nation. We're angry that bigoted assholes like Kenn Starr are working to nullify existing relationship.
[[Disclaimer, this is queer anger of which I'm speaking. Some folks are hunky-dory with everything that's been going on, and don't feel any kind of rage. They'll probably get fussy with me for saying such nasty things, for being so, well, damned radical. So be it. I speak for myself. But, in drawing on a history of queer mobilization based in the rage of exclusion and murder, of the restriction and repeal of rights. Yes, I speak from a source of rage...a useful source of rage.
Shut up and listen. I wonder who will be able to.
