Queer Culture: Our History & Our Legacy - An Essay by Julie R. Enszer
As I write this in 2006 I have no more rights today than I did the very first time I went to a kiss-in on the campus of the University of Michigan in 1988 or the day I crossed the threshold of Affirmations Lesbian/Gay Community Center in 1990.
When I am feeling bluesy, that statement distresses more than any other I can imagine. When I am feeling disconsolate, I feel like the first fifteen years of my professional life resulted in nothing. No progress for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. No concrete, tangible advancements for queer folks.
I don’t let myself fall into that fit of depression. I remind myself that there have been tremendous strides in visibility for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. I think about the Academy Award winning films this year, Capote and Brokeback Mountain. I think about 1992 when Debra Chasnoff won the Academy Award for her documentary, Deadly Deception, about nuclear weapons and their environmental consequences—she publicly thanked her wife. I wept. I think about Will and Grace and Jack and Karen. I think about the legions of couples I know that have gotten married in Canada or Massachusetts; the couples that have been civilly united in Vermont. I think about the children of GLBT couples and their parents who are educating every single day they live their lives as they send children to schools and camps and sports practices and school clubs. I feel heartened by all of these advancements.
Still, my exuberance is tempered by the analysis of Urvashi Vaid; virtual equality continues to be the ruling factor of our lives. Virtual equality defines our existence. We have made advance in public visibility and acceptance, but we are without legal protection. How will we achieve true legal equality when, as a result of virtual equality, so many of us live as though we have already achieved full equality?
Want to read more? You can download the full essay as a .pdf here or by entering http://idisk.me.com/julierenszer/public/QueerCulture.pdf into your browser.
This essay has been published as a limited edition folio and is available for purchase here, http://web.mac.com/julierenszer/Julie_R._Enszer/Contact.html
For more information about Julie R. Enszer, click here to visit her homepage www.JulieREnszer.com.
Labels: Julie R. Enszer
posted by Julie R. Enszer | 1:30 AM
3 Comments:
This is sort of random, and maybe it has nothing to do with what you wrote in the essay.. I sort of ramble on... but, I'll say it anyway.
I didn't read the entire essay, but I wanted to say that while there might not have been a lot of progress in the US, in terms of rights, I think there is movement in the rest of the world.. Maybe. I hope. Perhaps I only say so because I am in Canada, still, progress is slow and there is a lot that needs attention, besides the LGBT community.
I think what is more important than rights is the view of the non-LGBT community of LGBT people. And I think that is improving. Maybe again it is because I am in Canada, maybe it is because I am in Toronto, maybe it is even because I am getting older and people around me are getting smarter and begin to stop listening to their homophobic parents.
I think the fact that people come out at 12, or later in their teens, and we have Gay-Straight Alliances in high-schools, and groups to educate and to provide support is definitely improvement. A LOT of improvement.
I came out at 12, and I never lost a friend over it (in fact I have been told I opened many peoples eyes, I guess because it is a fairly young age) and well, I am only 17 (turning 18) now, not much older, not much wiser, but I don't think many people could've said the same thing 20, 30, years ago about coming out and not losing friends or even facing much homophobia at all.
Queer culture is important, but I think is also important not to seperate queer culture from the rest of the world. Because, and this is funny to me, I feel uncomfortable most in the queer-part of Toronto. I feel uncomfortable being at some queer event. I feel uncomfortable during Pride Week. It feels weird to put so much emphasis on it, and for me, that is a good thing.
I have to agree with vanillanutcreme. In the short time I have been out the UK has made tangible progress with regards to LGBT rights.
I am now able to have a civil partnership should I want to, which although still not 'marriage', is a legal recognition of homosexual relationships.
However, what I think is more important is, as VNC said, the changing perceptions that the 'mainstream' have of LGBT people. I have two male friends, both straight, who were going to get 'married' in order to save on university fees. That may sound more like an abuse of gay rights than an endorsement, but consider this: these are two young, single men who are willing to publically commit themselves to someone of the same sex, and are supported by their families, without a single person making homophobic assumptions.
To me, that is a world of progress and I'm sorry that the US is somehow not making the same steps forward that much of the western world is making right now.
Eloise
The responses to Julie's Queer Culture essay have struck me in a queer, uneasy sort of way. Perhaps, they miss the point, for while there have most certainly been "improvements" in the lot and life of homosexuals. Vaid's book, Virtual Equality, in effect, resonants what the reality is: homosexuals enjoy the benefits of progressive thinking. We do not "enjoy" the most basic of all civil rights: equal treatment and protection under the law.
Call it whatever you like, but the core social and cultural strictures against homosexuals are intact, and progress today does not, and never will, guarantee progress tomorrow.
I offer three historical episodes as examples: Immediately after the Civil War, newly freed American
Negro men (not women)"enjoyed" franchise, education, and electoral representation on a scale never before imagined or seen before. There were Black senators, congressmen, professors, doctors and lawyers. But it did not take very long to strip these gains and install Jim Crow law, which took decades to disassemble.
German Jewry believed, until the very end, that they were Germans more than Jews; they were "assimilated." And in the heady days of the early Weimar Republic (post WWI Germany): "The German Jewish tradition reached its apex; artists and intellectuals strove as never before to transcend nationality and religion. The flower of secular, cosmopolitan Europe sought to exorcise irrationality by trying to comprehend it rationally" (Amos Elon. The Pity of It All:A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933. Picador, 2002).
And homosexuality flourished in Weimar Germany. Berlin was its crown jewel, and Magnus Hirshfield the founder of the first gay rights organization in history, in 1895. By 1933, his institutes and libraries was destroyed, and "historians have verified that at least ten thousand to fifteen thousand gay men, and an undetermined number of lesbians, were killed by Nazis in concentration camps" (Viad, 1995, 40).
I disagree with vanillanutcreme's position that, "what is more important than rights is the view of the non-LGBT community of LGBT people." This sentiment is dangerous and illusional precisly because it rationalizes existing conditions and presumes that the view of the non-LGBT communities is magnaminous and kind, and will prevail in doing the right thing and leaving us alone to live as we choose.
It is also dangeous because it does not consider the ballooning political power of religious fundamentalism. Go to this website and see for yourself a frightening example of how atavistic fundamental religious groups are: href="http://www.armorofgodpjs.com/
I certainly acknowledge the progress of GLBTQ people throughout the world, but one must remember that large urban areas have an astonishing diversity of cultures and practices. Small, rural or semirural areas are very different.
I also acknowledge that as a 51-year-old lesbian (who came out in 1980-1981), and whose only child is a 26-year-old lesbian, my perspectives are more circumspect and even cynical from those of vanillanutcreme and Eloise.
Yet I caution against ever believing that theoretical and virtual equality is enough. It is not. It is theoretical and virtual.
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