Author’s Note: This post was in my drafts and never published. Putting it up now, some two years later.
I identify as a radical queer. “Radical” is a big scary word, so I thought I’d go into what that means.
In contemporary North American culture there exists people whom I call “the othered.” These are people whose rejection from society is actively encouraged. In that group there are trans people, who are under constant attack from propaganda dehumanizing them. There are non-binary people whose existence defies society’s very narrow tolerance for departing from gender conventions. There are polyamorous people, asexual folk, intersex people, sexually active women, sex workers, fat women, seropositive individuals, victims of sexual assault, and so many more who are ridiculed and rejected by society.
If you want a concise list just turn to Cards Against Humanity or even Apples to Apples and look at the options there. You’ll notice that the people they let you pick on are the same ones that everyone already picks on. Ready to ridicule midgets, trannies, or the homeless again?
Which brings me to the current rights narrative. When you look to the end goal for gay rights organizations, and increasingly trans rights organizations, they are not interested in having a society in which everyone is valued equally as a participant. What they want is for them to be in on the joke. Remove their card from the Cards Against Humanity deck, but keep all those others in there.
What ends up happening is that the lobbying by professional rights organizations advocate for those from “the othered” who are the best candidates for assimilation within society. “We’re just like you!” Those organizations never end up advocating for the others. Professional gay rights lobbied for marriage and adoption, but then was all but silent for the elderly queers, young homeless queers, queers who are victims of assault from inside their communities, disabled queers, and pretty much everyone else except for a small sliver of people. Which not coincidentally in order to be accepted by society had to be “good gays” : affluent, monogamous, working age, middle class, able-bodied, and white. There is always less tolerance for diversity in the newly assimilated others – they have to be homogeneous in other ways. The gay thing has to be the exception.
As a radical, I don’t believe in cherry picking. I want everyone to be regarded in society as fully-fledged people. That’s the “radical” part of my beliefs. That also means that I view the entire structure of society, which at every level enforces this rejection of people, as flawed. That goes from newspapers, to who gets elected, to what goes into movies. The end goal I see is change at every one of these levels.
