The new separatism and why we need to lean in this Pride.
When I got the press release about Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, wanting to march in the New York City LGBT Pride parade with a banner reading “Straight Is Great!” I decided enough is enough, already.
Donohue was upset about the fact that New York City’s leadership had boycotted the St. Patrick’s Day Parade because of its anti-gay policy. This was his salvo back.
In answer to Donohue’s request, David Studinski, the march director for NYC Pride 2014, said, “Sure.” Chris Frederick, the managing director of NYC Pride 2014, said, “Why not?”
I was aghast.
No, Mr. Donohue, you can’t march in our parade, because you hate us. You’ve likened us to animals and murderers. You’ve said—even as you call yourself a Christian—that we are an error in God’s plan.
So no, Mr. Donohue, you aren’t welcome at the celebration of our lives, our struggles, and all we have had to overcome just to survive. The world has far more people like you than like Jesus (whom you claim to worship), who said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Or people like your own (and my) Pope Francis, who has said he can no longer object to gay priests and is reconsidering his stance on civil unions.
What was the NYC Pride leadership thinking? Why not invite the Westboro Baptist Church to march with us? Or the KKK? Or the Aryan Brotherhood?
I’m all for inclusion, as anyone who has been reading this column for the past two-plus decades knows, but enough is enough. Why would we ever invite haters into our biggest Pride march? Have we become so invested in having straight people like us that we would do anything to gain their approval?
The Donohue incident made me question anew what our movement is in 2014. I haven’t heard anything but “marriage” and “military” for nearly a decade. Yet lesbians are still most likely living in poverty.
Young lesbians are frequent victims of rape on college campuses. Lesbians are still being discriminated against in employment and housing and education. Lesbian mothers are still battling former partners for their children. Lesbians are still facing an epidemic of cancer. And that’s just in the United States.
There has to be more to our movement than having straight people merely tolerate us while we embrace what used to be seen as their most repressive institutions.
It’s time for a tactical shift. It’s time, I think, for a new separatism. Why are men still making decisions for women in the movement? Whether it’s about the Pride march or adding yet more ingredients to the LGBTQQIA salad, where is the lesbian input? What about the needs of women? What about the very specific issues that lesbians—and lesbians alone—face, issues that have yet to be addressed 45 years after Stonewall?
When I say separatism, I’m not saying we all need to buy a plot of land in Oregon and go off into the woods, shave our heads, and talk about hating men and overthrowing the patriarchy (although we do need to overthrow the patriarchy, for everyone’s sake). I’m talking about what Malcolm X (oh, I know—controversial figure, but one of the most important voices in black civil rights) spoke of when he talked about the need for black separatism.
Malcolm X wasn’t suggesting that African Americans (he was the first to use that term, instead of “Negro” or the then-militant term “black”) literally separate themselves from white Americans. He was saying that African Americans needed to look at where they stood in America, and what they needed to do to achieve equality.
Malcolm X asserted that African Americans couldn’t achieve equality by embracing the very people—whites—who were their oppressors. He said that what blacks needed to do was what we now call “self-care”—put themselves first and foremost—because no one else was going to. Part of putting themselves first, Malcolm X insisted, was neither to apologize for it nor to be conciliatory to whites about it.
That’s what I am saying lesbians need to do: Step back, take stock of who we are and where we stand in American and “queer” society, and ask ourselves if we even matter in this increasingly inclusive-of-others and exclusive-of-us movement. We need to put lesbians at the center of our universe and not apologize for it.
Men have never apologized for putting themselves first. In fact, it’s expected that they do so. It’s not the job of feminists and lesbians to take care of everyone else before we take care of ourselves.
On social media, I recently had an argument with a gay male writer over the issue of violence against lesbians. He totally dismissed the growing wave of global anti-lesbian violence, which includes everything from online threats, to street harassment, to gang rape, honor killing, corrective rape, enforced marriage, imprisonment, and murder.
I have written about this wave of violence extensively for Curve, SheWired, and the Advocate. I was talking facts. He was talking “Who cares?” Our argument was ugly, public, and misogynist.
Lesbians I know who witnessed this brawl were appalled but not surprised. Lesbians have been shunted aside for some time in this not-so-big-tent LGBTQQIA movement, where the L is expected to be silent.
In the years after Stonewall, lesbians were told “gay” included us also. Now, we’ve been shoved back into that space of silence, with many young lesbians—Ellen Page is a recent example—afraid to even say the word “lesbian.”
Why?
Because lesbianism doesn’t include men. Lesbians don’t have sex with men. They don’t factor men or penises into their worldview. It doesn’t matter that gay men don’t have sex with women or factor women or vaginas into their worldview—because men still own the world and every girl is born second-class in every nation, developed or developing.
As long as the reality of our second-class status persists, we will continue to be doubly or even triply oppressed, unlike men. What is more, gay and bisexual men are oppressed specifically because straight society sees them as “feminine,” and trans women are victims of violence specifically because straight men see them as trying to “pass” for female.
Which means sexism and misogyny, male oppression, and male violence should be our single priority in the LGBT movement, since they impact all of us and present a very real and terrifying danger to us.
And yet they are not a priority, because the primary victims are female and our movement, like it or not, remains misogynist at its core: It is still, 45 years in, a movement run predominately for men, by men.
Just as Malcolm X knew that whites, even whites working in the civil rights movement, couldn’t comprehend the oppression of blacks, I know that men, even men who assert that they are our allies, can’t comprehend the oppression of women.
One in three women globally is the victim of male violence. That’s more than 1 billion women. Ten percent of them are lesbians. And while other members of the LGBTQQIA community are victims of violence, they are also victims of male violence. Gay men, bisexuals of either sex, queers, trans of either sex—we are all victims of the same oppressor and the same source of violence: men.
When are we going to acknowledge that reality?
Maybe lesbians need a break from that. Maybe we need to initiate the kind of self-care and self-advocacy Malcolm X was arguing for in the 1960s. Maybe we need to put women first—because no one else will. Maybe we need to embrace the L and eschew the other letters for now, while we focus on an equity that men can’t prioritize because it’s not about them.
Do lesbians even know what our issues are, or have our issues been too occluded by the needs of others?
Lesbians are 10 times as likely to have our partners deported, we are the women most likely to end up in prison, the girls most likely to be bullied at school, the women most likely to be passed over for promotion at our jobs, the women most likely to get cancer, the women least likely to have appropriate gynecological care. Yes, it’s a long list and it’s getting longer all the time. What can we do about it?
This year for Pride, perhaps we need to have pride in ourselves. Not turn our backs on our gay/trans/queer/questioning/intersex compatriots, but shift our focus. In the nearly half-century of Pride, we have yet to ascend to becoming equal members of our own community, let alone the global village.
It’s time for a new separatism. Not to shut others out, but to embrace ourselves and our needs, and the very real threat against us as lesbians.
As you read this, a lesbian is being correctively raped in South Africa—or in Richmond, California. A teenage lesbian is being bullied and sexually harassed at school. A Ugandan is being arrested and taken to jail just for being lesbian, and a lesbian in Mississippi is being arrested for being too butch. A father has just beaten his lesbian daughter, Britney Cosby, to death in Galveston, Texas, and shot her lover, Crystal Jackson, in the head.
Five years before Stonewall, the neighbors of Kitty Genovese listened to her screams as she was stabbed and raped, and they did nothing. Was it because they knew she was a lesbian and thought perhaps she deserved to die, much the way Bill Donohue thinks about lesbians and gay men today? Yet he was invited to walk in our Pride parade.
And what about 15-year-old Sakia Gunn, murdered 11 years ago for spurning the advances of a man who harassed her and her girlfriend on the street.
Or Jackie Nanyanjo, deported from the UK, where she sought asylum, back to her native Uganda, where she was killed because she was a lesbian.
Or Duduzile Zozo, murdered last year a week before Pride in South Africa—correctively raped and left with a toilet brush rupturing her vagina and uterus.
Nearly 50 years after Stonewall, we are always putting other members of our movement first. No one has ever put us first, including ourselves. Lesbians need to lean in. Embrace the new separatism and celebrate our own lesbian pride.