Sooo, apparently the extremely tenuous and recent nature of the LGBTQ+ community’s legal right to exist was not actually super widely known to a lot of people on Tumblr?
Which clarifies some stuff in retrospect. I have so often wanted to grab people by their lapels and shout, “Stop picking on someone for not meeting your entry requirements! We need everyone we can get, you asshole! DON’T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THEY HATE US OUT THERE?”
Aaaapparently… no, they did not know. Or they knew and were a conservative psyop preparing the ground for our loss of legal rights. Fun times!
So: Look, it is bad. Shit is scary. They really do hate us out there. You’re not wrong.
But: This is what we’ve always fought. This boat we’re in with its antique fittings and strange markings on the floor is a battleship. Work has always been going on in the basements, and when shit gets tough, we clear away clutter and roll out the cannons.
I found this chart a couple weeks ago and hung onto it because it felt like the map to my first 25 years on this earth:
[Image description: A graph titled “Same Sex Marriage: Public Polls since 1988.” It is from FiveThirtyEight’s NYT column. It records the percentage of US Americans polled who would say yes or no to legalizing same-sex marriage, from 1988 to 2011.
The two lines begin with roughly 10% saying yes in 1988, and 70% saying no; the two lines gradually draw closer over the years, until by 2011, the percent saying finally dips under 50%, and the group saying yes makes a tentative reach for the majority. End of image description.]
After some great social change has happened, when everyone has admitted that gay marriage is very cute and Pride is a colourful parade, hooray, people like to pretend that it was just natural and inevitable and happened on its own. People just became less prejudiced! Courts just decided on a case! Governments just passed a law!
In reality, it was a vicious fucking fight, every fucking time. Every fucking where. There are a lot of people who deeply, sincerely believe that a hundred years ago, society had good rules about sex and gender and intercourse and marriage, and that changing those rules has made the world worse. They don’t always agree on the specifics, but they can work together far enough to fight anyone with new ideas.
This is why we are a community. Even when we don’t have the same experiences of attraction or identity, even when we don’t do the same things, even when we have wildly different ideas of a good time. Because when these groups take aim, we’re all under fire, and none of us is responsible for why they hate us.
In some ways I think it’s a miracle that there seems to be a generation that did not grow up, as I grew up, constantly glued to news reports about What Percentage of Society Hates Us this month. I can’t imagine who I’d be if my brain and heart and soul hadn’t been tied up, that whole time, in the political question of whether I’d get to dream of a decent future.
I think that it will give us strength to have people who can imagine a world where no one hates us. Who believe in it so strongly they can taste it. That’s my prediction: If you didn’t know this was coming, you’ll be a boon to us, because we have always needed joy so fiercely, in this fight, to keep us going on. We have needed drag queens and punk bands and “her wife” and safe space stickers. Parade floats and wedding days and little dogs with rainbow collars, badges and banners and meetups, because more than anything else we need to fight our own despair, and our fear that the world will never get any better than this.
It will. We know it will. We can taste it.
Look up to the history, organizations, and people who’ve got us this far for information on what forms of activism will actually advance our political goals. Look to the side to make sure the comrades within reach are keeping their heads above water, and that you’re keeping enough joy going to stay alive. Look back to see who’s more vulnerable than you are that you might have forgotten or been tempted to leave behind. Look after each other. Look after yourself.
We can do this.
To your battle stations.
Same-sex marriage was not even a blip on the radar in the late 80s, even in liberal minded queer communities. “Everyone knew” marriage was about some semblance of the possibility of having kids together.
AIDS changed that. Or rather, Reagan and the medical industry’s callous indifference to suffering and death changed that. Suddenly, people were dying alone because their beloved partner of decades was “not legal family” and couldn’t even visit them in the hospital. And then their estranged, hostile family inherited their house.
So we fought for marriage rights, knowing it would set back or sideline some of the battles, because this one was most important.
We got it; yay!
…We also got a rising wave of TERFs, and a growing number of suburban gay men who decided that the rest of the queer agenda (read: equal rights and opportunities for everyone) were no longer something they needed to push for.
And that was understandable. They were TIRED. We’re all tired.
On the other hand, we also got a wave of young queer people who reached adulthood (or teen-hood) post-Lawrence v Texas, who have no memories of a world when two men kissing was literally a crime.
And we need your hope. Your optimism. We need your shock, the appalled “WTF?!?!?” reaction to the idea that it could be illegal to be in love, to plan to be married and share your life with someone dear to you.
Because those of us who remember (and celebrated) Lawrence, don’t have it in us to be shocked anymore. We know there are people who not only hate us for being queer, but who want us dead. Who want our children taken from us. Want us fired from our jobs and kicked out of our homes. Want us forcibly raped by a cis person of the opposite sex, to “teach us” to “stop being perverts.”
And what we need. Is open communication.
You younger people, newer queer people, need to know that no really, some of them seriously hate us, hate us all, want us destroyed, and no, it’s not anything you did and nothing you can change. We can discuss the possible motivations and reasons and how conservative communities foster this kind of hate, but… that’s not the same as having a way to change it. You need to take the threat seriously.
And we. We older people. Long-time activists. The ones who built the current communities on death and ashes in the wake of AIDS. We need your hope. Your joy. Your enthusiasm. Your belief that this is just how you are, and that the queer community should be beautiful and loving and artistic and creative and supportive, and that it can be.
Because we can’t always believe that.
We can tell you what’s worked in the past, and more importantly, what hasn’t. We can make plans, organize groups, write template letters to share, help get people set up for voting and teach how to spot the lies and doublespeak in what looks like innocuous reports.
But we can’t always know where we’re going, what we’re trying to reach, because we’ve spent a lot of time in the dark places. We know we want out, but we don’t always know what that looks like.
All of those would be cheaper than imprisoning people, so if you’re against it, it can’t be because of money.
One of the most successful illusions the prison industrial complex and its proponents create is that these issues which result in high incarceration rates (poverty, homelessness, “breaking the law”) are unsolvable. Or rather, that incarceration somehow solves these things.
The truth is that policing and incarceration exacerbates these issues. Every dollar spent on building prisons is money not spent on all of the responses mentioned above.
as soon as you understand that prisons are for profit and provide slave labor the reason why the status quo demands we don’t provide this stuff for citizens becomes clear. We need a constant supply of slaves to keep everything afloat is the underlying belief of capitalism.
ye but tbh california and new york shouldn’t dictate what the rest of the us should do imo
California and New York aren’t sentient hive minds.
6 million people in California voted for Trump in 2020. 5 million Texans voted for Biden. 3 million New Yorkers voted for Trump.
But in the winner-take-all Electoral College, those peoples votes all got thrown out.
Stop imagining states as perfect political monoliths. Stop treating states as coherent entities that perfectly represent the opinions of the political majority, regardless of how slim that margin is.
Stop acting like a person’s *geographic location* should affect the *value* of their vote.
I want to add- switching the presidential election over to a simple popular vote, while better than the convoluted nonsense we have now, still isn’t the best solution.
1. For elections in which there is only 1 or 2 seats up for grabs (president, governor, senator, etc) ranked choice voting is a better system.
2. For elections where multiple seats are at stake (city council, house of representatives) - either party proportional or mixed-member proportional systems are really good. (And, because we wouldn’t be using first-past-the-post for each congressional district anymore, would reduce or even eliminate gerrymandering)
