Queers in intersection
where we strive to articulate
how the war against women and their bodies,
from the Burning Times until the beginning of the dismantling of abortion rights,
is connected to the masculinization of healing,
to the hardening of religious dogma,
to the driving out of the Goddess,
the expulsion of The Other --of Muslims & Jews from Spain,
is connected to the slave trade
and the invasion of the Americas,
where Africans and indigenous people were massacred,
because they were considered to be like women,
incarnations of evil, unbridled lust,
too connected to body and sex,
and where the Earth was destroyed because,
like women, it was wild,
like dark-skinned people,
it needed to be dominated and controlled.
- elias farajajé-jones, CC 95
I open with this quote from EFJ - one of my favorite bisexuals -- who is Dean
of Faculty at Starr-King School for the Ministry -- because it’s such
a good _crystalline_ summary - of how & why oppressions and liberation movements
intertwine.
And one of the worst ways they get under our skin, one of the most insidious ways oppressions interconnect, is _inside_ us, and among us. As the Red Star Singers say, “we do their work, by aiming for each other, instead of together aiming for the Man,” (that’s “Man” with a capital “M”) -- that is, when we’re not consciously aware of oppression AND opposing it, and even if we are, we also internalize it; that’s how oppressions work. They work especially through our natural willingness to get along, and through our fears and despair. It’s not just that we perpetuate our oppression on ourselves to our own detriment, but also that it serves The Man’s, or the repressive system's, goals when we perform its oppression ON ourselves, saving the system the labor costs.
As another favorite bisexual of mine, Starhawk, says,
"And so, on bad days we hear our own inner voices murmuring, ‘It’s
hopeless. We’ve lost. The forces we face are too strong for us. Give up.’
These voices seem reasonable, sensible. But any Witch can recognize a spell
being cast.
A spell is a story we tell ourselves that shapes our emotional and psychic world.
The media, the authorities tell a story so pervasive that most people mistake
it for reality. We’re fighting a righteous war against the Source of All
Evil, and everyone supports Bush, and corporate control is the only way to be
safe and to provide what we need, and to question is Evil, too.
The counterspell is simple: tell a different story."
So tonight let's tell different stories and think together about what we can take from these stories in the way of guidance and encouragement to sustain ourselves for the hard times ahead.
I want to acknowledge that I still regularly get discouraged and enraged by social injustices, so much that I often go numb. For example, I internalize so much that I get guilty, as your elder, I feel embarrassed and frustrated that the gay movement became more of a "gay merchandising enterprise" before many of you could experience its initial beauty and fierceness. But then I realize that you are the fruits of that passion, the queer coming out in this country. YOU hold the seeds for radicalizing blossoming that I haven’t dreamed of yet. So I’m ready and I’m also here to help.
What is it about experiencing our bisexuality, or even just appreciating the bisexual perspective expressed by others in the world, that _helps_ people identify with a multiplicity of issues, to both understand the connections between them, - and to have the courage to stand at the intersections and mobilize others to see and act? Sometimes I’ve thought that us people with consciously hybrid loyalties, with mixed heritages, who celebrate the rich, varied cultures we weave together –_become_ strong and flexibly inclusive _because_ we travel back & forth between worlds.
It makes us good educators, scouts, interpreters, and bodhissatvas. Bodhissatvas especially – those little Buddhist beings who _could_ leave the human plane behind they’re so evolved, but who stay here with us, helping us all get free, because THEY KNOW, that none of us are free until all of us are free, that not only is freedom a constant struggle but that it doesn’t work in compartments, in narrowly confined agenda areas. Freedom is like the elements: it percolates through everything and everywhere when true tansformation takes place.
When I was packing to fly up here I ran into a Brandeis alum, - my neighbor, Susan Townsend. She called her time at Brandeis the crucible of her activism and told me this story.
"Arrived first year to protests against Dow Chemical Company, who made the toxic Agent Orange and dropped it on Vietnam. Martin Luther King was murdered that April and his funeral was broadcast outside the 3 chapels. My sophomore year the Black students took over Ford Hall and junior year the Sociology Bldg. became National Student Strike HQ after the killings at Kent State and Jackson State when the U.S. invaded Cambodia. The young people from the local high school marched to Brandeis demanding us striking students provide a workshop to help them understand the issues of the war.
25 years later I returned for a reunion. I wore my tux to the dance, ran to the dorm to change into a dress when i got too hot, and danced the last dance with another woman .... to "have you ever loved a woman"
I talked with Marty Feldman that night, an exciting sociology professor who’d
managed to integrate Marx and Freud in our class. He made me feel comfortable
and proud of my hospital workers union-organizing … amongst the many professional
classmates gathered there!”
Hearing my friend’s story about all the issues she learned here in the
late 60s, early 70s, I’m thinking – so what’s the big mystery?
Why is there even any argument that oppressions interconnect, that liberation
movements have a multiplying effect? But unfortunately there still is. And often
the biggest obstacle to us seeing the connections is NOT conservative thought
or assimilationists or apologists for the system, but the way WE give their
ideas power within our own heads.
At least Jerry Falwell -- remember his 9ll comment about gays, feminists and pagans and free speech advocates and abortionists helping cause it? - well as offenisve as his comment is, at least he knows that progressive issues aren't isolaetd, that they do connect. What we learned fighting the anti-gay amendments, state-by-state, over the last decade – is that the right-wing was a lot quicker to understand the connections between bisexuality and lesbian/gay issues, and between all these and transgender issues, than the narrow-focused gay national leadership was. Sad but true.
But i'm proud of a lot of things. Our movements for social and economic justice, equality, freedom and peace have made vastly important contributions to improving the lives of millions of people. We've played a critical role in ending the war in southeast asia, helping end Jim Crow and winning some basic civil rights, winning the right to abortion and putting the demands for women's equality on the agenda, working to build a powerful South African divestment movement and to ending U.S. intervention in Latin America. Creating Movements that changed the ways people think about nuclear energy and weapons. And much more. And a lot of people are involved in more than one of these movements, and articulating the connections between them as they organize, all the time.
Of course the mainstream media minimizes connections between liberation movements and doesn’t analyze how oppressions interconnect. At most there’s two sides to an issue and only one ‘right’ one, right? Yeah.
As long as issues appear black/white, us/them, and each distinct issue is “separate,’
… debate is suppressed and real analysis and understanding on a broad
public level is avoided. I have here Exhibits A & B ……
Exhibit A, from last Tuesday’s Wash Post, is an article called “Berkeley
Students Rally for Palestine.” It’s a fairly informational article
about a rally of several hundred students and community members but it's actually
about another Hillel-sponsored vigil at the same time, _not_ reflected in the
headline. It explains how the Palestianian solidarity rally commemorated the
anniversary of the deaths of more than 100 Palestinians at Deir Yassin during
the 1948 war and that the Hillel rally was in honor of Holocaust Remembrance
Day. The article also does a good job of pointing out that Jewish students from
Jews for a Free Palestine were part of the rally for Palestine and that hate
crimes against both Arabs and Jews have occurred on campus. So far so good.
But then the reporter ends with what I call the gratuituous dismissive: and
the language goes like this:
“Today’s rally was no big deal by Berkeley standards and had little in common with the famous protests of the 1960s, philosophy professor John Searle said. ‘In those days all students had specific concerns about what was going on in Vietnam and the United States government’s responsibility. Today’s events only appeal to those people w/a commitment to Israel or a commitment to Palestine,’ he said, pointing out that many participants were not even students. But he added that today’s protest was larger than anything during the Persian Gulf War when there was no protest movement to speak of at Berkeley.” Hello?
Also in that day’s paper was
an article titled, “Demonstrators Plan to Unite Varied Causes in D.C.
Protest.” Aha, I thought, for ‘interconnected oppressions and liberation
movements,’ that’s a fairly good headline. The lead paragraph says
that “demonstrators from several points on the activist compass hope to
turn the streets of Washington later this month into a massive, multipurpose
protest... Protests, concerts and teach-ins are planned…” But then,
after they’ve just said that all these demos are being coordinated, they
describe them as being different groups –
“anti-globalization activists …,
college students condemning the war in Afghanistan …,
Palestinian rights demonstrators …,
and others calling for an end to injustice in Colombia.”
It’s great that we have this kind of advance info in the press and that the different issues are described. But still, it sounds like they’re separate causes and the reasons why these groups have coordinated their actions remain unclear.
One of the actual fliers for A20 makes it clearer – (HOLDS UP FLIER) – putting WAR AND RACISM in bold print but making the various manifestations of war and racism in the placards below (READS THEM ALOUD) – clear. So is this 4 different demonstrations, … or NOT?
You know, the last time the LGBT movement was really connected to progressive
issues, nationally, was in 1993, the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay
and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation – exact title, I know cause I was part
of the groups that negotiated every word of that title exactly – even
to the point of knowing why it said “bi” but NOT “bisexual,”
how “bi” got included for the first time EVER, and why “transgendered”
did not get included in the title of that march, but has become a bigger issue
ever since. And the 93 march platform included a lot of social justice demands,
some of them of a global nature. We were criticized and ridiculed for making
those connections. But 7 years before Seattle, and now, more than ever, they
are a part of LGBT people’s everyday lives and need to be an integral
part of LGBT liberation, inseparably.
My other favorite thing about how the 93 march's agenda was formed and the work pulling it off was mounted is that it was built on voting representation at the grassroots level -- regionally & locally -- with delegates chosen at public town meetings around the country, not in some back-room at a hotel rented by the Human Rights Campaign (which is what later happened with the Milleniuum March travesty in the year 2000). In 1993 the regions were all required to have gender and racial parity – meaning 50% women and 50% people of color, or else you didn’t vote on how the March was to be organized, your whole region lost your vote. This was brilliant, and it worked wonderfully. Study the records of that time and don’t believe any revisionist history you hear about the process being “unmanageable,” or the platform being “too divisive, too much a laundry list.” On the contrary – it was the most inclusive, radicalizing national event I’ve been involved with in a long, long time … until the anti-globalization movement came along, which has lifted my spirits again.
One thing, that ties the present day bisexual experience into fighting for social justice for all is that bisexuals are always identifying with more than one group anyway. We bis learn early that we want it all, we don’t have to choose, that it’s spirit-killing for us, in fact, and that we must resist it for our sanity. Once one gets over bowing to either/or, the rest is easy. (just kidding) But it IS about facing the fact that I can either buckle down and choose one of two, for me, partial, attenuated existences (gay or het); OR I can refuse to settle for only these options and work to change society instead.
As Starhawk always says, we need
role models, to hear stories of inspirational struggle, and to have the tools
of theory and practical skills-building that fuel resistance and built unity
across issues and groups. And I’m sure being brought up in Washington,
DC – center stage for many a demonstration and clash of ideas -- has helped
give me courage and analysis too. I was born nursing on demonstrations like
mother’s milk. Literally. The first demonstration I remember was the one
my mother went to protesting the presence of nuclear fall-out in women’s
breast-milk. This was before there was any environmental movement or even a
women’s movement as we know it now. But my grandmother remembered her
high school teacher taking the class to march for women’s right to vote
in the early 1900s down Pennsylvania Ave. in front of the White House, and she
made it clear to me that she still couldn’t vote for President because
Washington, DC was an occupied colony and the people who live there, still today,
are denied the right to control the city’s budget, school system, etc.
Tell your Representative in Congress to change this, for all of us.
I found my voice and courage as a teen witnessing the Sixties civil rights movement
hearing Martin Luther King speak in public parks, feeling the crowd chorus response,
working summer jobs as a government intern
in the War on Poverty. My family went to a Washington, DC church that was shattered,
and transformed, by racial tension during the Fifties and Sixties. As black
people moved into the neighborhood, the majority of the church's white members
fled until, by third grade, I was the only white child in my Sunday School class.
Perhaps my early experience as a white minority in a loving black church helped
me to travel between groups -- to organize women's caucuses within mixed gender
groups, to defend lesbian rights in larger women's groups, to identify and confront
class and race issues wherever I go.
What I learned was a simple litany – of race, gender, class.
It’s been expanded a bit so that gender includes a LOT more than it did in the early women’s liberation 70s, and class is now about an understanding of post-colonial, post-communist GLOBAL capitalism, and there are other issues like disability rights and ageism, yet, the useful exercise of measuring each new, or old, organizing effort against the scales of race, gender & class is still an essential daily touchstone.
Since it is clear that we are all currently suffering from a collective PTS syndrome, post-traumatic stress since 911, now amplified by Bush’s eternal war on terrorism and the bloody escalations in Israel and Palestine, I want to stress that my calling as an activist comes deeply _from_ a place of needing to survive mental anguish and revulsion. The world felt so crazy when I graduated college in 1970 (not so different a time than now) that I sought my place and honed my skills in the emerging social change movements as a way to reclaim my sanity, nothing less.
More than thirty years later, I haven’t given up! (I eventually did decide to go back to school and earned a doctorate recently, but I created a degree that no one else has ever done and am creating a whole new profession along with it. It’s not like I’m giving up on social change while I’m trying to pay back my loans.)
I want each of you to be strong and happy activists. I want everyone to be passionate about making dreams come true, to go for it to the max!, to figure out how to mobilize and make the connections and do the joyous essential work that gets us from the dream to new, more humane, inclusive realities. And since I know, from experience, how complex this is, I’m less concerned about what kind of progressive activism you do, and more concerned with us all keeping on supporting each other and learning from our differences as well as our commonalities, comparing notes as we go along.
The wonderful black lesbian scholar, BARBARA SMITH taught me this. At a national gay conference she spoke at once she said, “I don’t care _who_ you sleep with (i.e. whether it's same-sex, or not). What I care about is what SIDE you’re on.” - that is, what you stand for, who you stand with, is much more important than any individual identity or sex act. We need to be about being on the side of liberation and justice, with as many different groups of people as we can. Sexual liberation is only part of that. Doing broad-based grassroots organizing with as many people as we can connect to IS movement building. As Barbara says,
"If our work and strategies do not confront the vicious attacks against poor women and their children, immigrants who in this era just happen to be almost entirely people of color, our incarcerated sisters and brothers, those who are homeless, hungry and in despair, especially our youth and our elders, then we are not doing the work." (Black Nations/Queer Nations Conference 95)
In April I always think of Martin Luther King. I know his birthday is observed in January and that February is Black History Month, but April is when he was killed, when we lost him, during the spring, a time full of life and promise and hope – when suddenly everything shattered. A time, like now, when we were at war and there was great concern and confusion about what the best path to peace might be. Towards the end of his life King spoke fiercely about the Interconnectedness of Oppressions, the relation between civil rights at home, the rights of working people, and human rights abroad. I have no question that, were he alive today, he would link racism and classism to the liberation of women, and lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgendered people, of every race, gender, economic status, and age.
It’s really quite simple –
we must just ask ourselves, in everything we do,
what is our gender analysis (which includes gender roles, heterosexism and sexism),
what is our economic and class analysis of this situation at hand,
and what part does race play, along with religion, ethnicity and culture?
Then we put it all together and create our goals & strategies from that.
How many of you white people in the audience have happily been a racial minority in a group you were involved in and relaxed enough in your white minority status to follow the leadership of people of color, put yourself in their service, support their political goals, and learn important lessons from this? If not, why not? What are you waiting for? Same goes for middle class and owning class people, asking working class people how we can help. These are precious, indispensable experiences we all need to move forward together.
We have had the opportunity in this country, recently, to examine a lot of our collective prejudices and stereotypes about Arab-Americans and about Islam. Not enough, but a beginning. But I haven't seen a concurrent consciousness about anti-Semitism. So I have been thinking about what my role as a Gentile is, or needs to be, in interrupting anti-Semitism, during this time of dangerous polarization and horrible pain for Jews and Palestinians. It's very delicate. Anti-Semitism is often ignored in non-Jewish settings or eclipsed in over-arching discussions of 'prejudice." It's a lot more. It's one of the most basic, ancient ways a majority oppressor group has OTHERIZED a minority in our history. Setting up us/them situations, naming any group as Other, never works, but it has been particularly tragic for the Jewish people. And as exasperated as I am with current Israeli government policy, that is a principle i keep in mind while working for an equitable/peaceful resolution to the Mideast crisis.
Which is why groups like Jews for
Peace particularly move me and humble me with their courage. I read about Adam
Shapiro, from Brooklyn, one of the founders of the International Solidarity
Movement, a volunteer group that has helped bring nonviolent activists from
around the world into besieged Palestinian communities. And then there's another
New Yorker, Jordan Flaherty, an organizer of a union local, who has been involved
in the fair trade movement. He's staying in the Al-Azzah refugee camp in Bethlehem
and dodges Israeli sniper fire to bring supplies to Palestinian families under
curfew. There are hundreds of others. Though we don't hear about them often
enough through U.S. news channels I have a feeling from what i know about the
people hear that you could tell me some of those stories from your own experiences
and those of your friends.
(Laura Flanders, Common Dreams, source)
I recently read Michael Moore's new book, _Stupid White Men_.. Have any of you seen it? And one of the great thing about this funny, funny brilliant book is that Moore makes it very clear that we don't have democracy any longer in this country, that we are dangerously close to a police state. Multi-national corporations are taking over the democratic process and replacing it with custom designed laws, policies and treaties which govern almost every aspect of our lives -- including what we eat, what we wear, the news we hear, the purchases we make. (They even tried to stop the publishing of his book, after 911 and he had to fight for 6 months to get it out.) And since corporate influence over the political process is making traditional solutions of mending environmental and other problems through legislative action more difficult, I look to First World/Third World countries, to people in India, Africa, Latin America and other survivors of colonialism, often, to guide me in how we can reclaim democracy. For instance, the Living Democracy Movement in India, one of whose founders is the amazing environmentalist Vandana Shiva. Shiva says,
"we started the living democracy movement to respond to the enclosures of the commons that is at the core of economic globalization. the living dem. mov. is simultaneously an ecology movement, an anti-poverty mov, a recovery of the commons mov, a deepening of democracy mov, a peace mov. It builds on decades of movements defending people's rights to resources, the movements for local, direct democracy, our freedom movements gifts of Swadeshi (economic sovereignty), Swaraj (Self-rule) and satyagraha (non-cooperation w/unjust rule). It seeks to strengthen rights enshrined in our Constitution."
I love hearing Shiva say this, especially since hearing recent U.S. opinion polls that at least CLAIM (i hope it's not true) that the U.S. public is not all that sure we need to keep our constitutional rights during times of war against terrorism like now. President Bush's war on terrorism will _not_ succeed because it fails to address the interconnected roots of terrorism - economic insecurity, cultural subordination, and ecological dispossession, but I’m very afraid of what we'll lose in the meantime..
We need to understand the intersections between oppressions and the ways liberation movements link up, because this understanding is key to our defense, to our fight-back. As Shiva says, "economic globalization is fueling economic insecurity, eroding cultural diversity and identity, and assaulting the political freedoms of citizens. It is providing fertile ground for the cultivation of (MORE) fundamentalism and terrorism. Instead of integrating people, corporate globalization is tearing apart communities." (World Social Forum, Feb 2002)
But we don't have to go to India to stand by Vandana Shiva's side, nor go to Palestine to hold the nonviolent line with our bodies, or any other place than right here, now. As white lesbian peace activist Leslie Cagan said, in this piece of hers i just read, "Our job, as residents of the United States, is not to help those poor suffering people all over the world but to articulate the ways all of our daily struggles are tied to one another." And, i would add, to do something about it, justice-wise.
As for the LGBT movement, rather than narrowly focusing on gay marriage type issues, we need to broaden what _is_ a gay issue (just like in the women's movement we are always struggling to make all issues women's issues, and to make them men's issues too). The beauty of the AIDS activism of the 90s that we lost, for instance, is that it was intertwined with a fight for universal health coverage, whether you're married or not. The fight for universal health care is a gay issue. So are immigrants rights, women's rights, needle exchange programs, queer, cross-cultural curriculums which include sexuality, safe-sex education and queer teen suicide prevention, and much more.
There are more people active in a wide range of struggles, and with a more comprehensive political analysis, than there were at the height of the 1960s and that's incredibly heartening! Yet right-wing backlash has taken a huge toll and there are vast areas of social and cultural space once opened by the creative energies of the youth and student movements, the civil rights, black, women's and queer movements -- that are shut down now and closed off.
But our vision, our vision of a beloved community for all, keeps coming back. And what our task today is is the task of fully comprehending HOW our issues all connect, and to see the ways that distinct issues are informed or shaped by other issues, and then to ACT from that analysis, always remembering that the goal of unity is not so much to bring together left organizations that already share a critique of capitalism and other systems of oppression but to bring together ALL the diverse constituencies that make up our national experience.
ANd in our task of re-articulating HOW all our issues connect and acting from that analysis, bringing together broader and broader parts of this country we see, for example, that demonstrating against the war can be an opening to challenge racism, to spotlight the U.S.'s historic role of training, arming and supporting terrorists -- including Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. If our country's leaders define this as an age of terrorism, then we persist in asking why an economy dependent on oil-based long-distance transport makes any sense. And the anthrax scare is a perfect opportunity to push for true domestic security in the form of a well-funded, functioning public health system, support for local food producers, development of alternative energy resources, etc. The right wing uses the attacks and the war to justify their agenda but we can use awareness and education as an aikido-like force, to redraw their picture of reality and send it back to them, changed.
I'd like to end with a quote from someone that was passed on to me, and then open up the discussion to all of us together sharing some of our questions and stories about how oppressions and liberation movements interconnect for us right now in our lives. This is an e-mail comment i received, sent out to a list serve I belong to called The Body Sacred. It's entitled The Principles of Loving and Terrorism:
"Globalization has already ended the possibility of American security unless everyone is secure. Imagine if the U.S. became known as: the major power using its vast resources to eliminate global poverty, hunger, homelessness, and economic inequality. The major power using its resources to combat global warming and invest in ecological sustainability of the planet, and embodied an ethos of mutual caring and open-hearted generosity to the peoples of the world.
The greatest security will not come through armies or counterviolence, not through revenge or hatred, but through building a world of love and open-heartedness, a world in which the recognition of the sanctity of everyone on the planet shapes very economic, social and political institution.
If we really want to protect ourselves
we need to start now
creating a world
that no longer dehumanizes others,
no longer tolerates oppression,
and closes our eyes to the suffering of others."
Shalom
Namaste
Blessed Be
Gracias a la Vida.
Copywrite Loraine Hutchins