Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
BY URVASHI VAID
A
This special report was made possible through the generous support of the Gill Foundation, the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr Fund, and Tides. The views in these articles are not necessarily those of the organizations. ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN STAUFFER
n acquaintance baited me with a question at a dinner party not long ago. "So, is the movement over?" she asked loudly. I was surprised by her contemptuous tone. But because I didn't want to embarrass my hostesses, I demurred: "Gosh, what do you mean over? Not in my mind." "You know, now that we have won marriage," she said. "It's over, done, right?" We were dining in Massachusetts, so she was marginally correct about marriage. The question was being asked by a lesbian who had impeccable civil-rights credentials; while not an active participant in the LGBT movement, she had long been an ally. She had grown skeptical of the movement's commitment to anything but a narrow ver-
sion of equal rights. It was a revealing moment. Several months later, I found myself listening, and protesting politely, as a major gay power broker told me that when his state legalized marriage equality, that state's gay-rights agenda would be done. In places where marriage equality has already been achieved and opposition to it has retreated, political disagreement has arisen about remaining goals. In March, NewYork state's gay lobby even fired the executive director who steered the coalition win on marriage. The given reason was that he had not articulated a clear vision and was not meeting fundraising objectives; the subtext was a dispute about the group's agenda going forward. The fact is that LGBT people differ in their views about the society they are fighting to achieve, about the forces arrayed against the full acceptance of LGBT people and, therefore, about when the movement will in fact be successful. In my book Virtual Equality, written more than 17 years ago, I argued that if the LGBT movement ignored the broader and structural dynamics of racism, economic exploitation, gender inequity, and cultural freedom, it would accomplish what other civil-rights movements in America have
WWW.PR0SPECT.ORG
38
MAY
2012
VIARR
a partial, conditional simulacrum called equal rights. We would attain a state of virtual equality that would grant legal and formal equal rights to LGBT people but would not transform the institutions of society that repress sexual, racial, and gender difference. The formal, largely legal measures of equality that the LGBT movement has pursued over the past two decades have become far less substantive than what it sought in the 1970s and 1980s. From a movement demanding that LGBT people be able to live a public life in a world in which queer sexualities are not only tolerated but celebrated, tbe movement now seeks tbe mucb narrower rigbt to live an undisturbed private life. From an exploration of queer difference, the movement has turned into a cbeerleading squad for LGBT sameness. In my lifetime, LGBT organizations have moved away from actively working for reproductive justice, which lesbians, bisexuals, progressive gay men, and transgender people fought for throughout the 1970s and 1980s; challenging racism, which was a central plank at the first national March on Washington in 1979; and working for economic justice, which was reflected in the prounion coalition-building done by Harvey Milk and activists in the late 1970s, in the Coors beer boycott, and in queer alliances with the United Farm Workers. No longer would we find a nationally organized LGBT presence at a major anti-war rally, as we saw at the 1981 demonstration against the war in El Salvador. Few LGBT organizations are engaged in articulating a new urban policy, seeking a more effective response to homelessness and poverty, or using their clout in the service of universal health care. Today's mainstream LGBT movement is strangely silent on the broader social-justice challenges facing the world, oddly complacent in its acceptance of racial, gender, and economic inequalities, and vocal only in its challenge to the conditions facing a white, middleclass conception of the "status queer." This impoverishment of ambition and idealism is a strategic error. It misunderstands the challenge queer people pose to the status quo. It shamefully avoids the responsibility that a queer movement must take to advocate for all segments of LGBT communities. And it is deluded in its belief that legal, deeply symbolic acts of recognitionlike admission into traditional institutions such as marriageare actually acts of transformation that will end the rejection and marginalization
THE
Urvashi Void is the director of the Engaging Tradition Project at Coiumbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuaiity Law. This articie is adapted from her forthcoming booi<, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Limits of LGBT Politics, which wiii be published in July by Magnus Books.
AMERICAN
PROSPECT
39
of LGBT people. Without a broader definition of equality, the LGBT politics currently pursued will yield only a conditional equality, one that will always be contingent upon "good behavior."
were not equal in fact." Formal equal rights were a crucial first step; next had to come the struggle for black empowerment, freedom, and respect. The achievement of civil rights made the gap between formal and substantive equality even clearer. Similarly, by the late 1980s, the women's movement had won many of the formal legal gains it sought, despite the failure of the federal Equal Rights Amendment. These achievements created opportunities for women, and over time they changed many cultural attitudes. However, 30-plus years later, formal equality for women has not removed the glass ceiling for women in top jobs, not transformed women's role in families, and not produced equal pay for equal workmen still earn $1.22 to every dollar a woman earns, and the disparity only increases when race is considered. Nor has it brought an end to violence against women by producing a new respect for women. As the legal scholar and activist Dean Spade writes, declarations of legal equality by the state "leave in place the conditions that actually produce the disproportionate poverty, criminalization, imprisonment, deportation, and violence trans [and LGBT] people face while papering it over with a veneer of fairness." Equal rights and equal protection can be granted without disturbing many of the hierarchies, institutions, or traditions that perpetuate the idea that LGBT difference is unnatural, immoral, wrong, or harmful to society. A movement focused on justice would engage the underlying systems of gender conformity, religious disenfranchisement, and political domination that reproduee LGBT inequality culturally even as it is outlawed legally. Second, a more ambitious movement would fight for economic justice alongside legal rights. Equality as it is currently articulated in the LGBT movement has been emptied of its redistributive content and represents a politics of compliance with liberal capitalism rather than a critique of the exclusions the system perpetuates. Yet a growing amount of data shows the great economic range of experiences to be found within LGBT communities. In recent groundbreaking reports, several leading think tanksthe Williams Institute at UCLA, the Movement Advancement Project, the Center for American Progress (CAP), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the National Center for Transgender Equalityhave shown that poverty in the LGBT community is at least as common as poverty in the broader world. Just as in that broader world, it burdens people of color disparately. Median household income for LGBT people ranges from $35,000 in the poorest states to
WWW.PROSPECT.ORG
BEYOND MARRIAGE
$65,000 in wealthier ones. LGBT families are twice as likely to live in poverty as are heterosexual families. Disparities in access to health insurance are dramatic, with CAP estimating that 43 percent of transgender people lack health insurance, as do 23 percent of LGBT people. Transgender people experience double the rate of unemployment as the general population and are four times more likely to live in poverty. African American people in same-sex couples and same-sex couples who live in rural areas are much more likely to be poor than white or urban same-sex couples. Anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of homeless youth are estimated to be LGBT. An LGBT equality politics that ignores this economic context is in the end a politics of exclusion. Third, a justice movement would not allow racial justice and gender issues to drop out of the LGBT political and policy agenda. The definition of "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," or "transgender" in the current mainstream movement, unconsciously (or consciously) refers mostly to white people and often really refers to white gay men. How else can one explain the movement's silence on issues that have a clear and disproportionate impact on LGBT people of color? How else can one explain the lack of racial and even gender representation on the governing boards and in the leadership of mainstream LGBT organizations? I've often been told that fighting racism is the job of another movement, not oursthat race may be important, but we need to focus on LGBT issues alone. Adding race would make our agenda too big. Similarly, I've been told that the women's movement is where lesbians, bisexual women, and trans women should deal with issues like income inequality, violence against women, and attacks on women's liberty through invasive regulation of reproduction. It's time to stop making excuses and change practices. The mainstream LGBT agenda must address race and gender because they produce harsh differences in the lived experience of white and brown and black people in America and because sexism remains a structural realityboth within and outside the LGBT community.
definition of what they see as a "gay" issue. Marriage activists, for instance, would continue to fight fiercely for the freedom to marry but also for the right of all people to have health insurance, regardless of marital status. The movement would support a family-policy agenda that recognized and strengthened social supports for singleparent or grandparent-led families, instead of seeking protections only for gay versions of the nuclear family. It would challenge the racism, sexism, and transphobia of criminal-justice systems, along with the over-policing of communities of color and harassment of sexual and gender nonconforming people. It would address violence against women. It would work to combat sexual assault and trafficking. It could also expand its focus on bullied schoolchildren, adding a challenge to racial biases in the administration of student discipline. It could become a major voice in the campaign against sexual abuse of young people. It could use its political clout and capital in the service of reproductive freedom and help resist the right wing's attacks on Planned Parenthood, defending an organization that provides urgent primary health care to many poor women and kids. To broaden their agendas, the major LGBT organizationslike the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Forcemust become more representative of the diversity of queer America in their missions, programs, and composition. They also must become more democratic. Beyond writing a check or filling out a survey, there are limited mechanisms for participation in these groups. This has led to institutions acting in ways that are not in sync with some parts of their claimed community, while being overly responsive to others. Leaders will privately tell you that they spend most of their time courting, listening to, and worrying about people from whom they are generating resources for their organizational budgets. What is amazing is how few people these donors actually represent. Of an estimated 8.7 million LGBT people in the U.S., approximately 3 percent are donors to LGBT organizations, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Fewer than 12,500 people gave more than $1,000 to 37 of the largest LGBT groups in 2010. Because such a small number of people donate to LGBT organizations, those who give a large amount have a hugely disproportionate effect on the attention of LGBT institutional leaders. Last year, on a panel at which I spoke, the facilitator asked whether the panelists believed that
THE
ARE-FORMED LGBT MOVEMENT FOCOSEOON SOCIAL JOSTICE WOOLO COMMIT ITSELETOONE TRUTH: THAT NOT All LGBT PEOPLE ARE WHITE OR WELL-OFE
A RE FORiVIED LGBT
movement focused on social justice would commit itself to one truth: that not all LGBT people are white or well-off It might consider adopting the principle of "No Queer Left Behind." To transform into a social-justice movement, LGBT organizations would have to broaden the
A M E R I C A N
PROSPECT
4 I
MAPPING LGBTHIGHT
h iune 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled marriage discrimirtation unconstitutional. In November 2008, voters narrowly passed a constitutional amendment barring same-sex couples from marriage. The amendment is being challenged in court. The 78,000 marriages performed in 2008 are valid.
the LGBT movement stands at some new "tipping point." We all did the dance of equivocation: Yes, we said, we are in some ways. But we don't like that frame, because there is no one magical point at which things tip over and gay nirvana emerges. The history of social movements is not about tipping points; it is about turning pointsmoments that present new challenges, offer new choices, or open up possibilities that hard work or some fortuitous and unplanned action created. History is made by actions taken, choices seized. Such a turning point faces the LGBT movement as its equality agenda succeeds. We have an opportunity to turn away from an ever-narrowing understanding of LGBT freedom and an isolationist form of LGBT politics. We also have the chance to avoid missteps by other social movements that have journeyed to a dead end of equal rights in an increasingly unjust world. Queer activists have an opportunity to renew a focus on a safer and saner world for all, on contributing solutions to the big problemseconomic injustice, environmental degradation, structural racism, gender rigidity and its consequences, and undemocratic power. The choice to challenge the status quo at its deepest roots will ultimately protect LGBT people the most. H
42 MAY 2o1 2
n 1989, Denmark pioneered "registered partnership"the world's first law to offer legal, public recognition of same-sex pairs' private bonds. Separate wasn't equal, but this was still a critical breakthrough. Other countries soon followed. Today, all of Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and much of North and Latin America have at least some form of legal recognition and protection for same-sex pairs, systems that vary as much as different nations' marriage and partnership schemes do in general. For instance, both Canada and Australia recognize "de facto" unmarried partners after a certain period of living together, whether or not they register. In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to extend the "M" word to same-sex couples. Today, ten countries marry same-sex pairs. Denmark is set to join them later this year. E.J.G.
WWW.PR0SPECT.ORG
Copyright of American Prospect is the property of American Prospect and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.