Interview on gay liberation: Desiring a new society not just spaces of tolerance
- Details
- Category: Feminism & Sexuality
- Created on Friday, 09 December 2011 02:29
- Written by Voice Collective
"Freedom is an understandably contagious idea...
"We want straight people reading this article to understand that the liberation of LGBTQ etc. people is not just about some 'others,' but is about their lives too. It is about expanding the realm of freedom and possibility that they live in along with us.
"We’re not trying to carve out a little spaces of tolerance in existing society. We’re trying to overthrow the existing society and create a new one, because the same existing society that is crushing queer people as queer people is crushing just about everyone else, and the planet to boot! This is the same society that is perpetuating imperialist war after imperialist war, or locking people up by the millions!"
The following interview conducted with several participants in the Kasama project and the Voice Collective who have been active in queer politics within Louisiana.
The interview was conducted by a reporter for a university newspaper in Louisiana. It focused on the efforts repeal of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA is a federal law which seeks to legally limit marriage and the rights associated with marriage to couples made up of one man and one woman. The attempt to repeal that bill is, therefore, an effort to advance the legalization of marriage between same-sex couples.
* * * * * * * * * *
Why do you believe there is so much support behind the new bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)?
First off, it’s just over a month since the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the U.S. military’s formal policy of discrimination against people with marginalized sexualities. So there may be some general momentum at this particular moment.
And the Democrats behind this new bill have their own complex agendas (the 2012 elections are coming up). But we think that the most important thing to be emphasized here is that this is part of a great historical tide. Like the fight for amnesty for undocumented immigrants, the LGBTQ etc. movement is one of the great, original social movements of our time (and there are similarities between them). The fact is that a global sea change has already occurred, which is proof that when people rise up and organize, the world can change.
Those who are against equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexed people etc. are losing!
Despite all the pessimism about backwards and apathetic youth in the United States, perhaps a majority people under 30 are reasonably sympathetic to equality in this realm. And there’s quite a few people over 30, too, who don’t exactly have a Victorian sensibility about all this.
For many young people now, our society’s suppression of same-sex relationships is as absurd and outrageous as our society’s long-standing suppression of relationships among people of different “races.” The culture is changing, and there’s probably no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Will the repealing of the DOMA affect gay marriage, turning it into a states' rights issue? Will this sway states to recognize same-sex couples as married and how?
It’s not hard to imagine that the repeal of DOMA would initiate sharper battles over same-sex marriage in individual states.
It is noteworthy that although president Bill Clinton (a Democrat!) signed DOMA into law in 1996, the District of Columbia and six states have recognized same-sex marriage since then.
In other words, those sharp battles over social norms are already being fought within the states, and by removing the federal law which has created severe fetters for those struggles, we could possibly see an intensification of similar struggles at the state level. As for whether this repeal would lead to a state-level recognition of same-sex couples as married, we cannot be too hasty in our predictions. But we think it’s important to note here that these battles are not just for lawmakers and non-profit elites.
A lesson we draw from history is that the force, popularity, and duration of people’s struggles from the bottom up seem to be the decisive factors any time that there is a battle for liberation from systemic injustice. Our hope—not just as queer people but as part of humanity—lies in ordinary people getting organized on a mass scale.
Can this start a trend which sees same-sex marriage accepted not only lawfully, but by a social majority? How and why?
This trend is already occurring, and a repeal of DOMA would further accelerate that.
We also think that it is very important to understand that this trend is part of a broader historical process, and has implications for people who don’t consider themselves to be LGBT.
The oppression of minority sexualities is deeply intertwined with the oppression of women, and the rise of women’s liberation movements is closely connected with the movements for the liberation of sexual minorities. And in turn, women’s liberation is part of an even bigger modern historical project of human emancipation.
The defeat of slavery in the U.S., for example, and the rise of the civil rights movements, the black power movements, and movements to free people from capitalist oppression and exploitation are all part of that project of liberation.
There’s a graffiti slogan from the revolutionary uprising in France in 1968:
"The liberation of humanity is all or nothing!"
We need that kind of outlook now more than ever. Liberation is not limited to the assertion of a small minority’s rights against everyone else—it is an unfolding process and shows that the recognition and embrace of the now-marginalized provides a glimpse of a broader liberation.
If the demonized have a right to “be”—suddenly, it opens a window of possibility and escape from the suffering that most people endure in intimate life. Freedom is an understandably contagious idea.
The French Revolution and the Enlightenment ideals it represented helped spark the 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti that overthrew slavery.
We want straight people reading this article to understand that the liberation of LGBTQ etc. people is not just about some “others,” but is about their lives too. It is about expanding the realm of freedom and possibility that they live in along with us. We’re not trying to carve out a little spaces of tolerance in existing society. We’re trying to overthrow the existing society and create a new one, because the same existing society that is crushing queer people as queer people is crushing just about everyone else, and the planet to boot! This is the same society that is perpetuating imperialist war after imperialist war, or locking people up by the millions!
How do you feel this is being supported in Louisiana?
We really are not in a position to gauge the atmosphere of LA in a precise way, but we hope that it is favorable. As part of the big historical movement we were talking about earlier, people here have a higher degree of consciousness on these matters than they used to.
But getting equal legal rights for queer people would certainly be an uphill battle. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional, but still in Louisiana people who are convicted of offering oral sex for money are prosecuted as sex offenders rather than for prostitution. In effect, already vulnerable people (often women of color) who are pressured by their life situations to do sex work end up facing the legal repercussions and stigmatization that a child rapist would, and it sets off the spiral of misfortune that one would imagine—all because oral sex is labeled unnatural in a 205-year-old legal statute. That’s unfortunately part of what we’re up against.
Some oppose the DOMA as unnecessary or unfair, but are still unsure of their stance in regards to same-sex marriage. What does this signify?
This fact, to the extent that it is true, is indicative of so many things. It signifies the obscene nature of politics today. It’s obscene and perverted to steal liberties away from informed consenting adults for things that they do with their bodies.
Of course, those who oppose same-sex marriage will claim that the obscenity lies in the bedroom of same-sex sexuality. But what they miss is the fundamental perversion that this thought presupposes: what is truly obscene is their obsession with the non-oppressive sexual relations of other people in their own privacy. It is voyeuristic and bordering on pornographic.
It signifies a bad political system that has lost touch with the pertinent and the ethical.
Why is it that what people do with their genitals, as informed consenting adults, is a cause for concern, but where we are dropping bombs or the very fact that we are dropping bombs goes more or less unnoticed? Why does politics intervene where it shouldn’t (in consenting adults’ bedrooms) but not where it should (ending aggressive warfare)?
It signifies that the alienation inherent in the current education system, and in the wider series of social systems, has taken roots in these people’s minds. Here we are following social theorist Slavoj Zizek who remarked that philosophy is a very useful tool for solving practical everyday questions. And when people who have been alienated from their own ability to reason clearly and discern just from unjust, they indeed find themselves in such positions of uncertainty, which you have referenced in your question.
What so many of us need today is good philosophy, honest conversation, and the objective study of the relevant facts. The uncertainty and confusion around so-called political issues today is comparable to the great parables of Jesus when he said
“because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”
The alienating representation of our world and these issues through the education system and the mass media have stolen our eyes and ears of reason. It is precisely good philosophy that is the way out of this bad situation.
Also, consciousness is always subject to uneven development. This is irreducible. Ideas develop unevenly both within individuals and among them. One thing which is important to remember here is that ideas are also tied to a time and place, and the sea-change in favor of same-sex relations is the result of many years of people’s movements. Once the movement for queer liberation got underway, nothing would ever be the same. People made leaps in startlingly short periods. We should expect bigger upsurges in our own time to push people’s consciousness further. That’s up to us as a generation.
Should the repeal of DOMA pass? Will it pass and why?
It should pass. Access to marriage equality and all the benefits associated with it is a just demand; precisely as the struggles for black people to get to vote and for undocumented workers to not face police repression and deportation are just.
At the same time we must appreciate that achieving these demands is not in itself liberation. For that to transpire, we need profound social transformation that would get rid of all social oppression and exploitation. And for this to take place, the broad masses of the population have to organize themselves and start to think about the question of taking power from the elites who currently run things.
We can’t forget this at any step along the way. But whether this current bill will pass is a good question, and it will have a real impact on people’s lives and the future terrain we fight on in the struggle for liberation.
People in this conversation
Comments (5)
-
The Voice Collective members who were interviewed here shared the following comments to accompany the post:
<blockquote>"We are sharing our responses here to spark thought amongst today’s radicals and revolutionaries. Without attempting to offer a model, we think that our struggle to respond to these questions is emblematic of the big struggles that we are all going through as we think about what are politics are and how we can present them to other people, especially when those people don’t already share our radical views.
"We were trying to approximate something like the mass line as developed by Mao Zedong and others. Our goal was to find meaningful ways to talk about the immediate issues under discussion (same-sex marriage) because these are important and must be confronted; they have effects on real people’s lives. But, at the same time, frame them in terms of the big sweep of history, and in terms of real liberation, which transcends the actuality and the logic of any immediate struggles. We wanted to show, also, how the liberation of marginalized sexualities is connected in myriad ways with the liberation of women, for example, as well as all the rest of us. We wanted, in short, to present a big idea of human liberation. We wanted our responses to express a new, universalistic language of emancipation.
"Doing that is not simple. We have to talk in ways that people understand, because our talk resonates with our on time, and so on. And the dialectical problem indicated above is that we should avoid making a “left” or “right” mistake, if we can usefully borrow that language from the communist movements of the last century.
"The left mistake would be to pay little attention to understanding where people are at, or to not think deeply about how the “up close” issues at hand really impact their lives. If we take that route, we might dismiss “gay marriage” as a silly liberal concern, as purely a concession to the political dominance of a patriarchal form of heterosexuality, precisely because it does not break strongly enough with existing norms. Certainly, we want to think beyond the marriage form of kinship, and we promote experimentation in the realm of gender and sexuality. We want to be revolutionary but plugged into the present movements.
"The right mistake, on the other hand, would be to cave in to the pressure to focus exclusively on the up-close and the here-and-now. In other words, we would not talk about liberation as a long-term historical project, and just talk about all the familiar stakes in the gay marriage battle, etc. etc. It’s easy to do that, especially in situations where we are not determining the parameters of discussion, as when interviewed by the mainstream media.
"To take either of these routes would be unfortunate, because people today are more open to talking about liberation than they have been at any point in my own lifetime and in the lifetimes of many people who are reading this. We need to think deeply about how we’re going to approach this opportunity. How do we talk when there are openings for us to talk?"</blockquote>0 Like -
Guest (Skeezyfish)
PermalinkHello Comrades/Possums,
Just some (not so) brief thoughts....
Firstly, a caution. If you are going to write on behalf of "LGBT" issues it's important that you actually address Trans oppression. Trans people are oppressed on the basis of their gender, not on the basis of sexuality. While LGB and T oppression are obviously intertwined, they are nevertheless distinct, especially when it comes to assigning priority to the reforms we take up. DADT and same-sex marriage is irrelevant for trans people except to the extent that they happen to be gay, straight, or bisexual. It is important that we don't unintentionally continue the process of erasure which sees trans issues simply "disappeared" so that the broader LGB community doesn't have to address what it considers a bugbear. If we as communists are committed to fighting for full queer liberation we have to address the continued marginalisation of trans people (in addition to people of colour and working-class people) within the "gay rights movement". That has to start with building awareness within the broader queer movement and within our revolutionary organisations that trans oppression is distinct from oppression of "sexual minorities". If we don't, we will unintentionally continue the process of appropriating the mantle of fighting for trans issues when in fact we're continuing the process of marginalisation.
Secondly, I want to address this: "Our goal was to find meaningful ways to talk about the immediate issues under discussion (same-sex marriage) because these are important and must be confronted; they have effects on real people’s lives. But, at the same time, frame them in terms of the big sweep of history, and in terms of real liberation, which transcends the actuality and the logic of any immediate struggles. We wanted to show, also, how the liberation of marginalized sexualities is connected in myriad ways with the liberation of women, for example, as well as all the rest of us. We wanted, in short, to present a big idea of human liberation".
Moving queer struggles beyond the day-to-day immediate reform onto the larger issue of liberation and broader anti-oppression, is something we've had to address concretely in building a queer liberation organisation in New Zealand. I was quite fixated on advocating for our need to orientate towards those "big ideas" of liberation and broader anti-oppression in our initial, formative meetings. What surprised me though is how *naturally* and *instinctively* our organisation orientated towards liberation and broader anti-oppression of its own volition. Not all queer activist organisations will naturally align that way. What we have to do is look at the structural reasons why different groups act the way they do. Let me highlight 3 structural features of our organisation.
(1.) Our organisation is staunchly anti-oppression because it is a *diverse* organisation. Our membership is a high proportion of stroppy dykes and trans people. Different oppressions aren't experienced independently of each other. The women in our organisation did not experience their queer oppression independently of their oppression as women. For example, lesbian households have an average income 25% less than that of a gay household because there are two women wage-earners. The diversity of our organisation leads us to having an organic understanding that queer oppression is just one of the ways they are oppression under capitalism. By building understanding among the different ways we each concretely experience queer oppression, we began to build understanding of each other’s distinct forms of oppression. We also learned how to stand in solidarity with each other. If we weren’t a heterogeneous organisation this wouldn’t have happened. An amusing development coming out of this organic understanding of different oppressions is the sheer depth to which "solidarity" has become interwoven into our lexicon. People are using a word, that in most circles seems archaic, and not only do they understand what it means, but they actually feel its meaning passionately.
(2.) Our organisation is focused on liberation as opposed to one or two well-publicised reforms (like marriage) because it is working-class in its composition. While people's politics are generally liberal, the social composition is essentially radical. It is radical, because queer oppression is shaped and moulded by capitalism. People's concrete experience of queer oppression can't be removed from their class position. The middle-class experience of queer oppression generally views "marriage" as the last great hurdle in the road to "legal equality". While this is the ideology propagated by our middle-class queer leadership in the press and in the political parties, we down below experience queer oppression rather differently. For example, two of our members are youth who, having been kicked out of home by their parents, were ignored by the state welfare agency which regarded them as having left home for "lifestyle reasons". Many of us are visibly queer, and face the last hired first fired syndrome (especially our trans members). Many of our members had to leave school early because they experience dismorphia when having to wear uniforms that didn’t match their gender, or because the homophobic bullying was so intense they feared for their physical safety and were emotionally pushed to the breaking point, etc. etc. etc. Our experiences of oppression go much further than any one simple reform. Naturally we come to a radical "liberation" rather than "rights" position.
Incidentally, in New Zealand, we have civil unions which are the same in all but name with marriage. Nevertheless, the political parties, the press, and the wider queer community (as led by our middle-class leaders in the political parties and in the press) continue to focus incessantly on marriage (and adoption) as being the final battle to legal equality. One of the campaigns I was really keen on was "repeal the marriage act"--get the state out of regulating our relationships all together. What was interesting is the absolute minority within the organisation who wanted to have anything to do with marriage. It seems that while marriage and adoption is where some people are at, other issues can mobile people as well, and often more passionately. While I agree that marriage has to be addressed, I would refrain from feeling that one has to engage exclusively on the terms set out by the gay-rights NGO machine. In fact, *not* working on marriage may be the best method for uniting the advanced as opposed to getting lost while engaging the intermediate on their swampy ideological ground. ...However, no doubt marriage takes on a working-class characteristic in the US where immigration and health-care are so tied into legal recognition of a relationship.
(3.) Our organisation has quite a number of strong revolutionary leaders. Although not as important as the other two structural reasons, this one seemed worth mentioning. We have a number of good leaders who are able to influence the group at key times and ensure the proper development of the radical potential. One year in and there has also an absence of red-baiting. Largely mitigated because, although we are communists, we also built quite a profile in working within the community prior building our organisation and consequently there wasn't the flavour of hijacking or simply being a front-group. This last bit is quite important to having had the credibility and standing to influence the advanced as we did.
Thirdly, I mention all of this because I agree that it is important to make neither the "left" or "right" mistake. I also agree that "“The left mistake would be to pay little attention to understanding where people are at, or to not think deeply about how the “up close” issues at hand really impact their lives". However, I also think talking about queer oppression exclusively on the grounds as defined by our middle-class leaders is a symptom of not having looked really "up close" at how queer oppression is concretely experienced by working-class people. It is also not putting forward a working-class ideology as it relates to queer oppression.
A useful way to "talk about liberation as a long-term historical project" and move it beyond "the familiar stakes in the gay marriage battle" is to conduct a series of interviews with a diverse set of working-class queers. Ask them to share their personal stories and their experiences of queer oppression. Use those stories to consistently challenge the absence of *working-class* issues in the mainstream gay-rights agenda.
Move beyond engaging on the grounds of marriage and actually begin to consolidate an organisation of queers for a transformative change based on a clear liberation and anti-oppression position. Once you have an organisation with that transformative line, engage in the broader more nebulous and swampy struggle with the intermediate. That is the appropriate balance between the mistaken “left” and “right” lines IMHO.0 Like -
Guest (SKS)
Permalinkhttp://asiancorrespondent.com/44762/philippine-rebels-welcome-gays-gay-marriage-into-ranks/
I hope its posts now...0 Like -
Guest (Ian Anderson)
PermalinkAgree with Skeezy about looking at the class composition of the struggle and developing counter-hegemony, as someone who's often made the left mistake of focusing on the limitations of liberal discourse over immediate struggles.
Would like to clarify that Civil Unions don't grant adoption. There is still a liberal gay marriage campaign (very corporate, parliament & police-friendly, run by a straight Labour Party hack) in parallel to the more community-driven approach of Queer Avengers. We don't reject gay marriage but especially after Civil Unions were won it's pretty marginal to struggles such as queering schools, opposing street violence, trans homelessness etc.
Sidenote: quite fond of the NPA's dual power gay marriage thing, whoever hasn't seen these marriage pics they are great:
http://www.workers.org/world/2005/npa_0224/0 Like
Sustain Kasama
Latest Comments
Latest Open Threads
Kasama is a communist project for the forcible overthrow and transformation of all existing social conditions. We are open to learning, unafraid to admit our own uncertainties. We will not shrink from what we do know: the solutions cannot be found within the current world order or the choices it provides. We are for revolution. We seek to find the forms of organization and action for the people most dispossessed by this system to free themselves and all humanity.
To take this road, we need a fearless, open-eyed debate, discussion and engagement. We need fresh analyses of the rapid changes shaping the world around us. We need to sum up a century of revolutionary strategies and attempts, victories and defeats – instead of the conventional wisdom and facile verdicts that paralyze our movements. We need to re-imagine a radical politics that can take life among people and move mountains.
Dig in.