Dear Suzanne,
I think there is an enemy. Karl Rove and the like...all the people who have been engineering this cultural divide for so many years. I don't disagree with you at all. I don't want to be a condescending liberal. But Rove is a genius. He manipulated the vote by getting gay marriage proposals on the ballots. A lot of people hate gays. I really KNOW that. As a gay person I don't know if I'm willing to live in the midwest. I've never been physically attacked. But I've been verbally attacked on the street. And once almost physically attacked but the situation was de-escalated. And that was all in New England. And I grew up in a house where some of my parents' friends equated homosexuals to nazis (how I don't know, I just heard him say it) and child molesters, and to be perfectly honest I don't think I am emotionally strong enough to live in a place where I would be under assault like that again. It is a small but constant assault. It's hard not to internalize that kind of hatred. So nix for me on moving to the Mid-west. I've spent a long time trying to get to San Francisco. You straight lefties go first. I'll be glad to visit. But the hatred feels extremely personal to me and terrifies me. Last night Kate and I lay in bed saying "why do they hate us?" And it's a very real question for us. To know that a majority of the people would rather stop us from getting married than stop 100,000 dead civilians in an unjust war.
But it seems that everyone is having the same reaction: we have to figure out how to bridge this cultural gap. I'd like to hear about any possible actions we can take, a sustained activism. But I think you're wrong to think there is no enemy. There is and it's the people who profit from sustaining this divide.
Love,
M
PS: I might move to an artists commune in the midwest if all my friends go. But it would have to be like 50 people who sustain me already.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Maggie, Ange, Minor Americans,
On account of my focus on the presidential election this time round, plus the incredible number of ballot initiatives I had to deal with as a California voter, I was not really that aware of how many anti-gay initiatives were on ballots nationwide until I started seeing the returns come in on election day. My first reaction was well, it’s predictable, alot of these states are in the south, and it’s a predictable knee-jerk reaction to all the hoopla that’s been made about gay marriage and marriage in general. My next reaction was to start feeling a lot of chills down my spine— everyone in America is out to get me, I’ll never visit any of these states ever again, if it’s not race they bash me for it’ll be sexuality, not only everyone in America is out to get me but also everyone I work with everyday here in San Mateo, nice straight people who are otherwise very open-minded and with it and who I’m totally out to but who for some reason aren’t looking as upset about the anti-gay returns as I am and does this mean they too are secretly plotting against me and my kind? I was starting to really spiral down this paranoia loop when my girlfriend Jenny reminded me that the backlash is all part of the process of social evolution, that it’s actually a sign that the issue has really taken root in the national consciousness as a whole, prompting fear and panic among the people slowest to change, and that this kind of polarized battleground is exactly what needs to occur for the dialectic to run its course and the fact that there is in fact all this fear and panic in a way shows that the conservatives are paddling desperately with all their might against the tide and that the tide will inevitably drown them out over time, the tide will prevail.
So I think the gay rights movement is making incredible process and we just need to continue what we’ve already been doing because it’s working. Besides volunteering or contributing a few dollars to activist orgs like the Human Rights Campaign, we can continue doing acts of minor activism. This means coming out, coming out often, to as many people as you can (within reason of course with regard to your personal safety), and generally pushing the socio-geographical envelope that demarcates where and when queerness starts feeling regular and natural. If you’re queer, come out in your workplace if you can, especially if you work somewhere outside an urban center (here in the Bay Area, cultural hepness progressively diminishes the farther south you go – I’m secure being out in San Mateo, though it still feels like pushing the envelope, maybe a manila envelope, whereas in San Jose it was like pushing a big priority mail package while dodging square, silently phobic suburbanites in the hall). You don’t need to go very far outside of San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, before finding people you can convert or at least influence. If you’re straight and have queer friends and/or family members, mention these people in your casual conversations with co-workers, bosses, whoever. The diehard haters are a lost cause as far as I’m concerned, but the pure phobes, the people who are just simply nervous or afraid of gayness because it’s strange and unfamiliar to them, those are the ones who can be worked on, and obviously many of them have been worked on, or else we wouldn’t be at the crisis point that we are in now.
best,
Pam
Post a Comment