Tonight I attended a panel called Desiring Change: Sexuality in Multi-Issue Organizing at Barnard College, my alma mater. Like most thought-provoking and star-studded events there, it was put on by the Center for Research on Women. On the panel were Amber Hollibaugh, Surina Khan, & Scot Nakagawa (you can read their bios in that first link). I’m going to focus on the words of queer femme activist Amber Hollibaugh, who wrote one of my favorite books and has proved to be an inspiring and thought-provoking teacher every time I hear her speak.
The issue at hand is incredibly complex and fraught and yet so basic to organizing and movement building. How do we integrate parts of our lives that are so fragmented? More specifically, why is sexuality (especially queer sexuality) such an untouchable and detached issue in our social change movements? This question is especially poignant when we think about how many activists across the board are queer, and how many of us are forced to separate who we are as sexual beings from who we are in the rest of our lives – even in the most progressive/radical of movements.
I can’t summarize the whole panel, as much as I’d like to. A number of points resonated with me that I’d like to share. Amber talked about her own identity, how she grew up poor and mixed-race, how she entered social movements with multiple identities that she struggled to keep separate. She was a lesbian and a sex-worker and was very active in both the civil rights and feminist movements (among others). She spoke about feminist discussions about sex work, discussions had with the assumption that no feminist had had any experience as a sex worker.
This is a continuing problem of a feminist movement that imagines “woman” only as white and middle-class. Self-hatred joins together with racism and classism to create a catch-22 scenario, where the white feminists are unfamiliar with the identities of a group that they are taking part in silencing, and the silenced group is too freaked out about being “out” to make their own needs and struggles heard. In the Jewish community, where the assumption is that you are Ashkenazi and middle-class, making yourself heard as Mizrahi or Sephardi or working-class is an uphill battle.
What’s amazing, though, is that we all have complicated lives and identities. Even middle-class white women don’t live up to the standard against which everyone else is judged. Once the silence is broken, we realize that this so-called “minority” is no minority at all. This whole notion that any single-issue movement can actually speak for everyone is kind of a farce. And this also goes for the mainstream LGBT movement that is pouring resources and energy into “Marriage Equality.” (if that doesn’t define them as single-issue movement, I don’t know what does).
Thank goodness for Beyond Marriage and its signatories – a list that includes all three panelists. It was getting pretty exhausting trying to explain my opposition to the current same-sex marriage movement without being allied with the Christian right. It’s a pretty perfect example of this multi-issue thing put into practice. And again, as with many of the issues the panelists discussed, it’s not about a minority pushing its views in. The fact is, most queer people (and some would argue that most straight people) do not fit into the narrow configuration of “family” that the same-sex marriage movement puts forward. It doesn’t account for our complicated, messy lives. All of our lives and identities and problems are multi-issue – why should our social change movements not follow through?
Postscript: as usual, I finish my discussion with more questions than I started with. In part 2 – coming this weekend – I’ll try to flesh out some of the questions this panel brought up for me, specifically around sex. Specifically, what is it about queer sexual identity that makes even the most progressive activists so twitchy?