Queer Rage

I hate straight people who can’t listen to queer anger without saying “hey, all straight people aren’t like that. I’m straight too, you know,” as if their egos don’t get enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world. Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our just anger brought on by their f—ed up society?! Why add the reassurance of “Of course, I don’t mean you. You don’t act that way.” Let them figure out for themselves whether they deserve to be included in our anger.

But of course that would mean listening to our anger, which they almost never do. They deflect it, by saying “I’m not like that” or “now look who’s generalizing” or “You’ll catch more flies with honey … ” or “If you focus on the negative you just give out more power” or “you’re not the only one in the world who’s suffering.” They say “Don’t yell at me, I’m on your side” or “I think you’re overreacting” or “Boy, you’re bitter.”

 

– The Queer Nation Manifesto 

 

Last weeks post involved a quote from The Queer Nation referring to the way in which straight people have taught us that good queers don’t get angry. A good queer is one that accepts the “progress” that others have made for us. According to straight people, and some queers who have accepted the straight position, we should be thankful for things like same-sex marriage and the repeal of DADT. However, the acceptance of progress is a form of passivity that forgets the importance of queers of the past who fought for our recognition while maintaining the uniqueness of queer identities. We forget about the politics of groups like ACT UP and the protests of Stonewall. These histories are ignored in favor of assimilationist strategies that we are taught are good because of straightness. 

 

Rather, we need to use our anger at straightness as the starting point for our politics. We need to stop accepting liberal progress narratives that keep us passive and have forced us to conform to what a “good citizen” should look like. Benjamin Shepard writes, 

Thus, play intermingled with a full range of emotions—from despair to pathos, from pleasure to terror. Charles King, a veteran of ACT UP New York’s Housing Committee, which evolved into Housing Works, of which he is now president, explained that these combined feelings of joy and anger fueled the group’s work: I actually think it’s a combination of the two. . . . The AIDS movement in the 1980s was fueled by this amazing combination of taking grief and anger and turning it into this powerful energy for action. But in the course of that, developing this comradely love. Yes, the anger was the fuel. It’s what brought us together and taking that anger and not just sitting with it. . . not just letting grief turn into despair. Bringing it into some sort of action was very cathartic, but also what was cathartic in the process was all the loving that was taking place.  

 

Anger can be transformative. Anger is a strategy that allows us to develop creative strategies for resistance against heteronormative institutions and practices. I am tired, and we should all be tired of both straight people along others in our own community telling us that we should be happy about all of the progress that has been made. FUCK THAT PROGRESS. Our passivity and acceptance of it makes us forget about the queer bashing that so many in our community face everyday. Anti-queerness is still just as prevalent as ever, but under the guise of tolerance we have covered up the physical and psychological violence that so many queers face everyday. There are homeless queer youth everywhere. There are queer people being assaulted in our streets. There are parents telling their children they are going to get AIDS and die, that they are perverts and should die, and are sending them to therapy to “make them straight.” Governments – state and local are complacent and strategically prevent us from having access to housing, jobs, and other material resources. Instead of being fucking happy about same-sex marriage, we should be fucking mad. We should be angry that we pretend that it’s getting better. IT IS NOT! Stop pretending. Be angry. Utilize our rage to confront the ways in which anti-queerness continue to perpetuate violence against queer bodies everywhere. 

 

 

This picture was posted on Facebook by somebody that my friend knew in high school while on his mission with the LDS church. Are you angry now?

 

 

Queering Marriage

I have encountered multiple people throughout the last few years who don’t understand why I am so critical of marriage. The fight for same-sex marriage as the key rallying point for the “queer community” has created a false sense of progress. The constant search for equality through marriage doesn’t do anything to change systems of inequality and a culture of heteronormativity that allows for anti-queerness to thrive. In fact, same-sex marriage does quite the opposite. It includes a particular part of the queer community into a structure that is organized around straightness. 

 

Commitment is not bad.

The institution of marriage is.

 

Currently, marriage is organized around normative models of what it means to be a family. The idealized nuclear family becomes the center for what the good life is. Marriage is only assumed to be good when the family is structured around traditional roles. Marriage is good because it provides financial incentives. Marriage is good because it is a monogamous long term commitment between two people. This is the key to happiness. But what sort of consequences does this have? It reestablishes normative assumptions and moral codes of what relationships and commitment should look like. Any relationships that are see as “alternative,” are peripheralized, and are seen as deviant. 

 

So what do we do in the face of the failure of the supposed progress of same-sex marriage? Embrace its failure.

The process of queering, which I understand as rupturing the hetero-progress narrative can be used as a method to disrupt the problems of same-sex marriage. Embracing failure is a method of queer negativity. When we encounter things like failure, shame, rage, and anger; we can use those feelings as starting points for our politics. Our subjective experiences surrounded by failure can either influence us to choose assimilation strategies that will tell us to shed our queerness, or can influence us to embrace the radical difference that we embody. We can embrace failure by refusing to assimilate into the very institutions, structures, and people that hate us. Why should we let others tell us that their model of commitment towards each other should be what we need to conform to? 

 

The Queer Nation Manifesto indicates that, 

They’ve taught us that good queers don’t get mad. They’ve taught us so well that we not only hide our anger from them, we hide it from each other. We even hide it from ourselves. We hide it with substance abuse and suicide and overachieving in the hope of proving our worth. They bash us and stab us and shoot us and bomb us in ever increasing numbers and still we freak out when angry queers carry banners or signs that say Bash Back. For the last decade they let us die in droves and still we thank President Bush for planting a f—ing tree, applaud him for likening PWAs to car accident victims who refuse to wear seatbelts. Let yourself be angry. Let yourself be angry that the price for visibility is the constant threat of violence, anti-queer violence to which practically every segment of this society contributes. Let yourself feel angry that there is no place in this country where we are safe, no place where we are not targeted for hatred and attack, the self-hatred, the suicide – of the closet.

The next time some straight person comes down on you for being angry, tell them that until things change, you don’t need any more evidence that the world turns at your expense. You don’t need to see only hetero couple grocery shopping on your TV … You don’t want any more baby pictures shoved in your face until you can have or keep your own. No more weddings, showers, anniversaries, please, unless they are our own brothers and sisters celebrating. And tell them not to dismiss you by saying “You have rights,” “You have privileges,” “You are overreacting,” or “You have a victim’s mentality.” Tell them “Go away from me, until you change.” Go away and try on a world without the brave, strong queers that are its backbone, that are its guts and brains and souls. Go tell them go away until they have spent a month walking hand in hand in public with someone of the same sex. After they survive that, then you’ll hear what they have to say about queer anger. Otherwise, tell them to shut up and listen.

 

Instead of accepting the fight for same-sex marriage as beneficial, we should utilize its failure as basis to become angry. The acceptance of fake equality has taught us to be passive. Instead, we need to be angry and say NO.

Failure – A Political Space

Today, I am writing a follow up from my last post about embracing failure, which is a concept that I use out of Jack Halberstam’s work “The Queer Art of Failure.” Failure, often times is seen as negative and as problematic. People associate failure with the inability to achieve a particular goal. However, failure can be seen in a more positive light as a method for political resistance. Failure becomes a way to disassociate ourselves with problematic hegemonic institutions and practices.

 

One of the major problems with the current fight for “queer rights” today, is that we have, or others have spoken on our behalf to fight for our inclusion into structures that have failed us. Marriage has become the perfect example of this. Marriage is the place where heteronormativity has been celebrated in addition to being a major sites for queer exclusion. It is the place in which the ideal nuclear family has been celebrated. Queer people that choose not to or refuse to conform to particular family structures are marked as deviant and for violence. Additionally, marriage is a failed institution. Divorce rates are high. It has turned into an economic incentive versus affective bonds between people. The list goes on.

 

So why do we think that marriage among other forms of inclusion are the solution? Why do we seek to make problematic structures and institutions like marriage that are opposed to queerness better? Why do we try including ourselves into a group of people that have no desire to call us their friend? Finally, why do we seek inclusion into spaces, just because some straight people like Macklemore have promoted our “inclusion?” The drive to fix these places that have always failed us can never be the answer. Heteronormativity and straightness have only perpetuated violence against difference. Every time we fail to “fix” the problem, we begin to hate ourselves because we just can’t understand why straight people are so hostile towards us, towards who we are, towards our culture. We just don’t understand why straight people can’t get it. Instead, we blame ourselves. We just didn’t fight hard enough. We couldn’t explain our similarities well enough. It becomes a never ending cycle in which queers will never be on the top.

 

This is not just a critique of marriage, but a call to let the places where anti-queerness thrives, to fail.  Embracing failure is a method of political resistance. Embracing failure is a strategy in which we refuse to participate in the spaces that have failed it. We allow for those spaces to collapse in on themselves. The problem is that we give failed institutions and spaces legitimacy through our continued search for inclusion. Instead of seeking participation and inclusion, failure becomes a space to stand in opposition.

 

Allison D. Carr explains,

Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more  creative, more cooperative,  more surprising ways of being in the world” (2). Thus, failure as a term gets queered; playing with the idea that failure is something to be avoided, Halberstam urges us to discover the energetic underlife of failure as a tool for undoing narratives of hetero- success and progress.

And that,

adopting a lifestyle of failure, a way of living that allows us to escape the  punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and   predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And where failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary   thinking.

 

Embracing failure is a way to work against the “progress narrative” that I mentioned in my previous post. Embracing failure is the refusal to seek inclusion and embracing the radical difference that queerness offers that exists at the periphery. It embraces the difference that we are told that we should give up so that we can conform to be the “ideal citizen.”