I'm tired. I'm tired of the "gay is the new black" nonsense. I'm tired of "you can hide your sexuality." I'm just fucking tired.
I'm a gay man. I'm a sociologist one of whose teaching specializations is Race, but who also teaches Sexuality and Gender. One of the things I'm proudest of is that I'm a white man whose Race and Ethnicity classes students of color compete to get into and who is asked to speak to student-of-color organizations. That's a level of trust and legitimacy that doesn't come easy and that I've had to work hard to gain. And I'm proud of it. That's why some of the conversations that have occurred since election day have been so depressing and painful.
One of the things i talk about in the classroom, be it in a class on Race or Sexuality or Gender, is that these are not characteristics that inhere individuals, but instead systems of organization. And, they aren't just systems of organization, but systems of domination. Additionally, and this is one of the areas that seems so hard to grasp, the are systems of domination that reinforce each other.
Think about the Ashley Todd case. We all remember her. She's the young white woman who carved a "B" in her face and claimed to be sexually attacked by a large black man. For many of us, her story was familiar. It was the same story told by Charles Stewart, a Boston man who claimed a black man killed his pregnant wife, when it was he who had done it. It was the same story told by Susan Smith, a white woman who drowned her children and blamed a black man. It was the same story told by George H.W. Bush, who used Willie Horton to play on fears of black men raping white women in an ad against Mike Dukakis. It was the same story when Time magazine darkened images of O.J. Simpson (a man, I am still convinced, who was both guilty and framed by the LAPD). The point I am trying to make here is that Ashley Todd was able to draw upon cultural constructions of black male sexuality as threatening. Race and Sexuality come together here. The co-produce each other, and do so in ways that pathologize black male heterosexuality as threatening. They also do so in ways to that produce white femininity as under threat from black male sexuality.
This co-production also occurs in the "black vs. gay" narrative that has been produced from since the election, and which I've seen not only here on dKos, but in a variety of other settings. Gayness is constructed as exclusively white. It's also produced in such ways that civil rights claims made by LGBT folks are rendered illegitimate because the queers haven't suffered enough. Their/our suffering is excluded from the suffering produced by racial domination. Not only is it excluded, it is rendered not important enough to make claims to civil rights. The "How dare you compare your suffering" statement is consistently used to negate queer oppression. (And it's going to be very, very hard to convince me that the "offense" contained in the "How dare you" statements tends to be because of who is making claims, because it's queer people.)
What I want to emphasize is the systematic nature of oppression based on race and on sexuality.
About five years ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. For much of the Twentieth Century, these laws were a bulward of anti-gay oppression. For much of the 19th, they served to not only oppress those who would engage in same-sex behavior, but also to uphold the color line. Prosecutions, when they occurred, were often engaged in when the color line was crossed. Yes, gay sex was illegal, but interracial gay sex was punished. Again, the systems of domination co-constitute each other.
Gay is not the new black. These categories are distinct and overlap, and the systems of oppression that are Race and Sexuality tend to fuck over people in whichever category is at the bottom.
Sexuality, in sociological terms, isn't something that comes from inside. Instead, it is produced by society. Very few people here are probably aware that it was illegal for homosexuals to enter the United States for the majority of the Twentieth Century. That was a prohibition only lifted in 1990. Very few people are probably aware that more homosexuals were discharged during the mid-century McCarthyite era than were discharged for being communist. Very few people are probably aware that homosexuals were tortured by psychiatrists using electroconvulsive therapies to "cure" them. Very few people are still aware that queers were targeted by the Nazis, and then re-imprisoned by the "liberators." [There's a comment in that diary that I currently wish weren't hidden. It's the same "how dare you" claim that I'm discussing. It's hidden, but it basically says, "I'm offended you're trying to appropriate the suffering of the Holocaust for a contemporary political goal, and it erases and ignores the historical fact that queers were targeted. Again, the offense is that queers dare note their own historical oppression, and connect it to other forms of oppression. The "offense" is that it's queers.]
The point, again, is not to compare suffering, to engage in "who's been hurt more," but instead to recognize that Sexuality as a system--like race as a system--has produced legal and other institutional mechanisms through which people have been actively harmed. The closet isn't a privilege, but is instead an oppressive institution, the "protection" of which has traditionally lay not in the hands of gay people, but of straight institutions that could be removed at any time.
I'm tired. I'm tired of white queer folks claiming their oppression is the same as black folks. I'm tired of heterosexual people of color making claims that queers haven't suffered enough. People in all of these categories need to recognize that their oppression, while not the same, all flows from social systems. No one has a monopoly on suffering, and no one's suffering is the same as another's.
However, suffering is suffering.
