FROM THE EDITORS Over the last year the NoHeterOx zine and facebook page has acted as a radical intervention into the assimilationist gay rights movement, advocating for a queerness that permeates our everyday lives. Our community needs a queerness that refuses to be silent, to be tied up by the stranglehold of a capitalist ethic that sees each of our struggles as individual fights. We need to deny a praxis of fucking over more marginalised groups in our community for our own personal gain. Our gold standard of liberation cannot be knocking on the doors of our oppressors begging to be let into a white-walled nuclear family; instead we need to centre a politic of diversity in love, sexuality and gender – that is to say we need to rip down the very walls of heteropatriarchy and build a new society that instead celebrates our expressions of passion and self in all their incredible variations. From poetry to interviews to essays this issue weaves together just some of the threads of that variation to produce a space in which we can express our queerness - necessarily deficient – without fear of cis-het violence. We hope you enjoy the pieces that relate you but more importantly take on the ones that don’t, the ones that make you squirm in your seat and use them to build communities of solidarity in common struggle irrespective of personal identity. In solidarity and fabulous rage, Rowan Davis * The depth and breadth of Oxford’s queer community never ceases to amaze me. It’s evident reading through the contributions in this zine the amount of thought everyone puts into our discourse and it honours me to get to edit the incredible stories that people have shared for No HeterOx. Putting together a zine can be a tough process. It can be more time consuming and more stressful than you might have expected. But the end product is the greatest reward. Getting to have played some part in releasing these stories is an honour. It is so important that our voices are heard. That we stand up and be counted. That we don’t let ourselves be marginalised. Our oppressors will never be our liberators. So we need to set ourselves free. And sharing our experiences, telling our stories, freeing our creativity is one of the most beautiful ways to do this. Thank you for everybody
who has contributed, donated or engaged with this zine. We’re all fucking great. Jessy
*
I’ve been thinking recently about this space, about finding myself and then losing myself in its queerness; about how beautiful it is to lose yourself in community knowing that you will be found again. When reading the pieces which have gone into this zine, I’ve been struck by their rawness and honesty, by a community who is not afraid to question and chastise itself. I have been awed by the bravery of our contributors in losing themselves in our queerness. This zine was set up to be a space both for questioning and healing, for self-criticism and restoration and I believe we have stayed true to that. I’ve been asked quite frequently why the oppressed seem constantly to be in despair. It brings to mind Audre Lorde’s Oberlin College Commencement Address: “To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair—despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless… You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation—survival.” We are not weak. We do not cower. Our existence is resistance. Our being is an interruption of power. We break our silence to survive. As you read the zine, remember that. Annie xxx
POLITICAL LESBIANISM ANONYMOUS
People approach political lesbianism as one of the jokes of 1970s feminism. It’s meant to be the ultimate stereotype of man-hating feminists, of unreasonable women who cannot see any good in men. Some people argue that it is offensive, that some women are ‘really’ attracted to only women and political lesbians appropriate that oppression without having lived truly as lesbians. I am a political lesbian. For me, it is one of the more valuable choices I have made concerning my love life. I am lucky in a way; I am attracted to a whole bunch of different people and a whole lot of different genders. Of these, I choose to only pursue long-term romantic relationships with women. Gender is not biological. Instead it is a set of behaviours; iterated performances of gendered norms construct a gender identity for the individual, which comes prior to biological sex. In this way, there is no ‘natural’ man or woman, only humans who become gendered through society’s production of gender norms. Because power is diffuse through our social system, meaning that because we have reached personhood in a gendered system we cannot help but to act in gendered ways. Power produces gendered subjects, then subjects reproduce gender. To use the language of critical theory, there is no prediscursive self. Instead, individuals are produced by power dynamics and our consciousnesses are limited by them. We cannot simply choose to live outside of gender inequality because we are all produced by it.
Gender itself is both is a matrix of expressed power and expressing power. This means that power, found in the way that society is structured, produces gendered people. This, in turn, creates more power, found in further iterations of gender. Gender is the outcome of a power-diffuse society. Notably, these gendered norms are oppositional and asymmetrical. We understand masculinity in its opposition to femininity. The contrast between the two is what makes them intelligible. For example, our association of masculinity with rationality and femininity with emotionality only becomes comprehensible through one’s correlation with the other. However, this becomes political at the point where those things associated with masculinity are valued more highly than those things associated with femininity. Strength, independence, culture, politics (etc. etc.) - those things we construct as masculine - are things which society values more highly than ways of living which are considered more feminine. In this way, masculinity exists in a way which gives men power over women. This power dynamic is not a set of individual acts of kindness or cruelty that come from individual men, but is a part of gender itself. All men have access to gender expression that give them power over women. This is particularly potent in a sexual context. MacKinnon argues that gender is sexuality; the core to our understandings of gender are seen in sexual
dynamics between men and women. Sexual dominance expresses our collective understanding of masculinity; sexual submissiveness expresses our cultural understandings of femininity. It’s insidious presence is seen everywhere; our social discourse of relationships is about men having power of women. We can see this in our traditional norms of relationships: men pay for dinner, women have sex/withhold sex according to men’s desires, men have the final say. Men are meant to take on the valued roles of work outside the home, whereas women are relegated to a work of domestic labour which our capitalist system deems so unworthy that it does not even have the smallest of prices. In this context, relationships between men and women (romantic or otherwise) are such that women are disempowered and men are empowered. Our gendered norms are about men expressing power over women. My personal experiences reflect this – I have felt most feminine when I have felt vulnerable to a man. Vulnerability – defined as ‘liability to succumb’ to the desires of a man – has been the only unifying factor of my romantic relationships with men. In my sexual relationships I have only felt valuable in how I am sexually desirable to them, with sexual desirability taking on a fucker/fucked relation. I have felt feminine when I am the fucked, and perform such that he can feel masculine by doing the fucking. Even my relationships with men who have called themselves feminists have replicated this. Because gender comes prior to consciousness, the norms which we un-
wittingly fall into reproduce gendered power. Romantic relationships are some of the most intimate that we have. They can affect us in ways which permeate us deeply. For me, they are the relationships which have had the largest impact on my life. Of course, they are not the only relationships that can be meaningful, but for me, they occupy a space in my life which is the most personal. I deserve better than a relationship in which I am disempowered. Judith Butler argues that subversion of gender norms is the way we make progress as a society and I agree – women acting in ways that demonstrate power outside of our gendered norms is not impossible. However, such conscious acts of subversion are difficult, they require the effort of constant examination of our behaviours. Even the most minute behaviours can replicate the disempowerment of women. For me, this effort is impossible in a relationship; it requires a near-constant denial of the power structure in which we have been created. Political lesbianism then, for me, is about a more egalitarian romantic life. The risks of bringing the dynamics of power into the most intimate spaces in my life are too large. As a survivor of long term sexual abuse, I do not want to open up a space which endangers me to the patterns of coercive control which I believe are the corollary of gender. Political lesbianism is about embracing a love of women outside of how women are defined by the oppressive functions of gender.
THE BYE BI PREJUDICE CAMPAIGN
CHARLOTTE COOPER BEGLIN AND ADAM WARD This Michaelmas, OUSU LGBTQ Campaign ran Bye Bi Prejudice, a campaign to raise awareness about the difficulties bi/pan people face, and to give them a voice to talk about their sexual identity. We hope you saw the messages non-monosexual students sent in, either in your pidges or online (if you didn’t you can see them at www.facebook.com/ ByeBiPrejudice). We were delighted with the high levels of engagement with the campaign, both in Oxford and from the wider bi/pan community, and want to thank everyone who took part. The campaign was inspired partly by the need to increase awareness of the specific difficulties people of non-monosexual identities can face both within the LGBTQ community and in society in general. Homophobia is a well-known problem, but ‘monosexism’ – the belief that attraction to one gender is natural or better – is talked about far less. Consequently there can be less inclusion of bi/pan people, and less attention to the issues they face. Research suggests that bisexuals face the highest rates of mental health problems of any of the larger sexual identity groups, are less likely to be comfortable with their sexuality and out to their loved ones, and can face ‘double discrimination’ from both heterosexuals and homosexuals. The Bisexuality Report concluded that bi invisibility and biphobia contribute strongly to these disturbing trends. It is this context of marginalization of bi/pan identities that made us think a campaign would be valuable. What did we learn from the campaign? Perhaps the biggest lesson was the show of diversity of bi/pan voices in
Oxford. People submitted messages and pictures that were witty, angry, cheeky, political, artistic, and sometimes all of the above. Some people identified as pansexual, emphasizing their potential attraction to all genders. Others preferred the term bisexual (many bisexuals still reject a binary model of gender, pointing out how ‘bi’ can refer to both attraction to the same gender and attraction to other genders). The harmful impact of bi/pan stereotypes was clear, as many students reacted against the notion that they might be confused, greedy, traitors to the LGBTQ community, or just going through a phase. The issues of erasure and disbelief were also prevalent. Many of the submissions focused on how their sexual identity could be erased when they were in a relationship, or how they felt their sexuality was not seen as valid until they had performed it in some way. On the other hand, we received many messages emphasizing joy and pride in these sexual identities, and telling bi prejudice to stick it! We hope Bye Bi Prejudice helped elevate bi/pan voices, and show the importance of considering non-monosexual identities and their unique issues. We should be careful about making assumptions about identity based on behaviour. We should use one rule only to tell who’s bisexual – whether they identify as such. We should avoid automatically hating on people of different genders getting together in queer spaces. We should resist monosexism and stereotypes of bi/pan people. Together, we can say Bye Bi Prejudice!
UNMANNED
HENRX HOLMES As a dmab non-binary person who experiences relatively little body dysphoria, there is an ever-present feeling in the back of my mind that I do not belong. My use of ‘he’ pronouns and historically male name displayed on Facebook appear to give me what to the uncritical eye might be called ‘cis-passing privilege’. The term that our hypothetically ignorant friend is looking for is in fact non-binary erasure. It ignores the fact that I routinely butcher my sentences to be as non-specific as possible to certain old friends. Even among wonderful and truscum-battling friends I still avoid the label trans, instead occasionally asking for ‘they’ pronouns to be used and trying to talk of men as an outsider. There is a very restricted image in a lot of people’s minds about transcending the gender binary. This is typically the Tilda Swinton/Brian Molkoesque androgynous waif. Mainstream media praises itself for being so progressive as some stick-thin, conventionally attractive white person models clothes for both men and women. This isn’t objectively a bad thing, but the elevation of such expression very much denies the existence of the majority of non-binary people. There is a similar trend with the reaction to trans men and trans women, when people who would celebrate a cis man wearing makeup or a cis woman cutting her hair short seem to require all trans woman to wear nothing but flowery dresses and trans men must play every sport and own at least seven baseball caps. The heart of this is this central idea
that you can reject your designated gender but only if you embrace the ‘opposite’. I imagine that this part of my identity (you know, the one I’ve come to terms with after thinking about it extensively) could be seen as mere internalised homophobia, and a result of viewing my personal preferences and self-image as just being opposed to traditional masculinity. This is a misrepresentation as the important thing that my stance is aiming to reclaim is masculinity itself. Masculinity is not male. The most visible demonstration of non-male masculinity comes through women, and especially queer women. Judith Halberstam, in his book ‘Female Masculinity’ talks about the film Goldeneye as showcasing the modern spectrum and diversity of masculinity. The central character of Piers Brosnan’s James Bond portrays a traditional heterosexual male masculinity via suits, guns and gadgets. Without these, the depiction falters. Various other characters, such as Judi Dench’s M and Desmond Llewellyn’s Q are said to show a female masculinity and a queer masculinity respectively, each of which Bond must engage with to properly perform his own through the tokens he receives from them. Queer male masculinity is a difficult topic to navigate, especially nowadays in light of the Grindr profile snapshot. For such people, it is here that the middle class cis white male identities most clearly manifest themselves; we see that warning sign above all other warning signs ‘straight acting masc4masc. no Asians, no blacks, no femmes’. If it wasn’t
immediately obvious, these people are assholes and should be avoided. Toxic masculinity within gay men is far from a modern thing. It is very evident in the work of some of the early gay writers such as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin in the 40’s and 50’s. In such books, the object of desire often has a wife who is reduced to nothing but a tragic obstacle in the man’s quest. Part of this comes from the need to conceal the illegal sexuality. This misogynist basis continued as we move into the drawings of Tom of Finland and the leather scene that developed around them; this ideal of the ultramasculine and the utter rejection of the female and anything vaguely related became the epitome of gay lust. Yet simultaneously we see the rise of the butch lesbian. This type of masculinity is more complex than the unstable, violent performance found in men and the modern equivalent has been effectively embraced outside of the traditional white sphere it initially became known in. This combination of the male and the masculine thus leads to a lot of issues, often in the misogynistic utter rejection of any female or feminine traits. However, the surgical removal of masculinity and transplanting them across all genders shows that the oppression inherent in maledom isn’t inherently connected to the masculine. This is the position that I, and others like me, find ourselves in. As a dmab person who, in recent months, has felt more and more dysphoric in male roles that people place me in, I’ve been flitting between genders, although never anything near womanhood. On top of this, through a punk aesthetic and my personal queer attraction to the masculine male (admittedly, probably influ-
enced from similar problematic causes as above), my connection to the female/ feminine side of queer identity is exclusively in joining in with their calls to kill all men. While being short, fat and hairless (there is that odd reversal of body hair masculinising fat bodies) inherently demasculinises me when interpreted as a queer man, it still restricts one to that limited male-female spectrum, and is very much a femininity rather than a femaleness, which I would reject on its male grounds as well as the feminine (and this is saying nothing of when people tell me what they want to do to my “boycunt”). Moving away from the male should move you away from these implications while being influenced by them, and thus I can revel in the counterposition of perhaps a feminised body with unmale masculine intentions. This often does not sit with people well. My seemingly male body, complete with lack of physical dysmorphia, combined with a masculine presentation, leads my protestations that I am in fact not a man to be largely ignored. Of course, many non-binary people, myself included, still struggle with this. When everybody talks about you as if you’re a man, you tend to subconsciously assume that too, and guilt comes along when you’ve watched endless films about cis white middle class gay men and felt drawn to such characters. The important thing is to not to give in. I identify with these gay men’s stories because I shared similar experiences, not because my identity necessarily falls in line with theirs. I can watch Looking obsessively and love those characters in the same way that Lilo and Mulan were my childhood role models. The queer experience has
underlying similarities throughout, just as Disney films about loneliness, family and not fitting called out to a nerdy young proto-queer. There is constant pressure to conform to the gender binary, and even where it is accepted there are preconceptions on how one should break free of it. This is basically just as oppressive as leaving them be; we must dismantle structures rather than
just adjusting them to fit better with how we understand the world. There will always be people who won’t fit. Maleness and femaleness are not opposite ends of a one-dimensional spectrum. Masculinity and femininity are likewise not opposites, and in no way fundamentally connected to gender. Let people live their lives, and explore and understand themselves however they choose.
IN DEFENCE OF GLEE DAVID MCSHANE
I had to explain to the cameraman that ‘you’ve done it from a man’s eye view. You’re shooting and you’re going from my face down to my chest and it’s great but it’s not me.’ - FKA twigs I’d rather go to the school from Buffy and face vampires. Considering the life-in-death fate of the Glee kids has me break out in a cold sweat. Imagine getting into Broadway or Yale only to find yourself (without justification) back in a high school choir room singing Journey to a fresh-faced batch of sacrifices. It’s the stuff of nightmares. But I still watch. Why? Maybe because here’s a storyline I can reject. Even though I don’t want to be, I could be one of Glee’s plethora of queer teens. My existence is recognised from the ground up. It allowed me to enter its narrative and then my own. I began to phrase my identity in a way that was not a negation of the heteronormative stance. Glee inspired an enduring devotion because it was the first mirror I found to my homonormativity. Transparent, OITNB, Faking It: they’re not important, they’re vital.
Dealing (respectively) with Trans, Lesbian or Intersex plot-lines, they each open their audience to, and so vindicate, a non-hetero perspective. Their unanimous message is that these perspectives are worthy of a full series: there’s the promise of futurity, which the queer child is usually disavowed. As children we are only ever proto-queer; our identities are held in suspension, retroactively realised because sexuality is so closely aligned with sex. There is no social space for the truly queer child. Sexuality is so sure of itself, the property of a completed adult, that the term seems like a sexual imposition. But stories show how we do not ‘come out’ but become in a series of gestures towards identities we kept quiet until our late teens. Stories can give voice to that void before we ‘find ourselves’ or ‘come out’; terms which imply that a queer self didn’t exist before adulthood. So I’ll take any script, no matter how shit, if it gives voice to the void. We might learn to talk at the same time as rest of our class, rather than being held a few grades behind. That’s why I regrettably, lovingly, watch Glee.
THE WEST LEADING THE REST? DISCUSSING LGBT RIGHTS REFORM SEAN BULLOCK
Four months ago I set out intending to write a thesis entitled ‘Gay Marriage in Japan’. I’m queer and I do Oriental Studies; it seemed like a natural choice. I had a good idea of how the thesis was going to read: ‘The west now has gay marriage, isn’t that great? Japan does not. They need to become more like us.’ I now realise why I was wrong. Like most reading this, my views of queers and queer activism in the nonwestern world were shaped by western LGBT publications like Pink News. A search for ‘Japan’ on Pink News returned some predictable results: the election of ‘Japan’s first openly gay politician’ in 2011, the lesbian wedding ceremony held at Disney Land Tokyo in 2013, along with the usual array of sensationalist articles of the ‘look how weird Japan is’-variety including one about a recipe book ‘which uses condoms as a device for cooking’. Basically, I believe western LGBT journalism on Japan, along with the rest of the non-western world, enforces two paradigms: 1) the rest of the world is lagging behind the west in terms of LGBT rights and activism. 2) However, they are slowly becoming more like us, and these changes are welcomed by all queers globally. Now I have done my research, I say this is bullshit. Although admittedly Pink News is a U.K. publication, I have a noticed a tendency for it to focus overwhelmingly on topics easily relatable to the western reader such as gay marriage. Pink News’ focus on gay marriage is well demonstrated for example in one bizarre article about same-sex marriage being
introduced into the Nintendo DS game Harvest Moon. I find this sort of journalism problematic. It paints an over-simplified picture of queer activism in Japan, erases local queer histories, ignores local discourses and overlooks the local social context. My thesis would probably have fallen into all of these traps. My criticism of Pink News is somewhat unfortunate given the good intentions of this publication but had they done some basic research they would have realised the following: 1) Japanese queer history is not immature compared to the West. Queer discourses in Japan are advanced; Japan’s queer press is as old as ours; and queer politicians have actually been around since the 60s. Homosexuality has been around forever, everywhere, after all. 2) The espousal of globalised homosexual identities by all non-western queers should not be taken for granted. Not all queers in Japan call themselves ‘queer’ let alone ‘gay’. The arrival of globalised LGB identities in the 1970s and transnational medical models of transgenderism in the 1990s were in competition with already long-established paradigms of homosexuality and gender diversity, and not all queers in Japan feel that their experiences can be articulated through foreign terminology and imported identity categories. 3) Queers in Japan do not generally consider themselves to be in opposition to the law. They have no reason to; homosexuality has never been criminalised and there is no history of police
persecution. Japan has not and will not ever have its own Stonewall. 4) Gay marriage in queer Japanese communities has not received the near unanimous ‘yes’ it got over here. This has been made clear by the field work of numerous academics as well as my own discussions with Japanese queer activists. Without getting too far into the nitty gritty of the Japanese household registration system, many Japanese queers do not wish to appropriate an institution which already gives rise to all sorts of discrimination, from single mothers to foreigners. Others argue that gay marriage would privilege certain homosexual relationships (monogomous, married) whilst disenfranchising others (polygamous, cohabiting). Whilst the ‘symbolic inferiority’ of domestic partnerships formed a key argument for gay marriage in the U.K. and Europe, many Japanese queers actually see domestic
partnerships as preferable since, unlike marriages, they are situated entirely outside of the household registration system. Whilst my observations are obviously specific to a region I am familiar with, I imagine that these themes could be easily applied to other non-western contexts. Pink News’ report of ‘India’s first ever out transgender mayor’ earlier this year provides another curious example. It is not my intention to deny that discrimination does not exist or that the situation is perfect already. There are homosexuals in Japan right now who need partnership rights. Legal reform is required: that is a fact. Does this mean all Japanese queers, and all queers worldwide, want to be like us? No. The ‘west leading the rest’ is not always an appropriate paradigm in which to discuss LGBT rights reform.
BEING A QUEER FRESHER HENRIETTA MOSFORTH With rainbow flags hanging out of college windows up and down Oxford for Equalities Week, it seems the perfect time to sum up the positives of being a queer fresher. From the beginning of Michaelmas, when trips to Wahoo/Bridge et al. were interspersed with trips to BabyLove and Plush during Freshers Week (with queer freshers getting undeniably more excited over the latter) the LGBTQ scene has been one of the best parts of Oxford life. Although queer representation varies hugely between colleges, the LGBTQ Soc ensures everyone feels part of a community, due to heaps of events and a weekly email-schedule (that feels like the online equivalent of an all-identities-encompassing hug). The events are organised by a group of fantastically dressed, fantastically queer second, third and fourth years (the bastions of the LGBTQ student experience). As friendly as they are awe-inspiring, they arrange more things to do than could be done by any one individual - and provide enough free food and drink to lure even the most anti-social fresher out into public. While it is pretty easy to pull at LGBTQ Soc events, it is also pretty easy to make friends. Eventually queer freshers end up developing a covert network of queer acquaintances. There is a distinct thrill in bumping into someone you met on a demonstration or in a gay bar or at a crew-date (any drunken embarrassment was probably
mutual). However this does have the undue side effect of baffling straight friends when you get reciprocated nods and waves in the street from apparent strangers. Another positive of the queer fresher experience is chance to explore identities. Think your gender might be more fluid than previously suspected? Meet others experiencing the same thing. Feel like a polyamorous relationship might suit you better than a monogamous one? Attend a talk about it by an eminent psychology professor. Oxford provides queer freshers with a community in which any identity is legitimate. Given that universities in general are progressive oases to be enjoyed briefly before graduation (a.k.a. expulsion into the heternormative wider world) it is important grab as many chances at self-actualisation as possible. Being a queer fresher at Oxford involves some undeniably scary moments - speaking at a WomCam meeting in front of feminists who know more about feminism than you do, climbing the pole in Plush or venturing into hoards at the first weekly drinks of term are a few examples. Nevertheless, the opportunity to shape your identity and to be entirely accepted by your queer peers is too good not to outweigh any negatives. For any LGBTQ individual, it is impossible to think of a better way to spend the formative years of university.
(GENDER) QUEER IN BERLIN THEA BRADBURY
“This is kind of a personal question, but are you a lesbian?” To answer yes would be inaccurate and no is technically correct but leads into the binary assumption that I’m straight. Any hesitation in the answer will be interpreted as my being closeted, and I am hesitating, because asexual but interested in women (and with notable and bewildering exceptions to both those principles) is a hell of an asterisk to append to anything. I had a snappy answer to this question a while back, but no-one’s asked me it for long enough that I’ve forgotten, because Berlin and the Berliners don’t really give a shit whether you’re gay or not. Homo- (or bi-, or pan-, hell, maybe even a-) sexuality is an unmarked characteristic here; it’s not that they don’t realise you’re queer; they just don’t care. Which isn’t to say that life is perfect, as my best friend, a lesbian and an angry drunk, points out as she yells ‘Oh, go get married, at least you can do that!’ at a straight girl she’s arguing with. But Berlin queers would rather fuck than assimilate anyway. The guy asking me the question here is a foreigner, which explains why he cares. I’m a foreigner too, but I’ve settled in enough that I haven’t thought about the mess of who I do or don’t fancy for a whole month, which is more or less a record. I resent him for bringing it back up, so I answer with another question: “You’re asking because of my hair, right?” I’d shaved my head when I got to Berlin and away from chance visits from my mother, because I knew she’d take a buzzcut as another indicator that I was asexual, or possibly that I was ‘turning into a boy’, and while both these things were, to
varying degrees, true, I really just wanted to see what it would look like. In Berlin, it is entirely appropriate, even encouraged, to shave your head just for the hell of it. In Berlin, I look striking, not queer, because everyone here is potentially queer, and so it stops being a marked characteristic. (I Skyped my mother the night I shaved my head. She cried.) And yet, his question - obtrusive, unexpected, unnecessary - nags at me. Here, we’re tied down to a language even more binary than English: I find myself tagging my self-descriptions with -in, the feminine suffix, because the only alternative is to use the masculine form and have people assume I can’t speak German properly. I have friends who fight this, who refer to themselves stubbornly with both pronouns or neither, but fighting a whole language sounds more exhausting than anything back home, and anyway, I learnt all my self-descriptions back in school when feminine pronouns seemed perfectly sufficient. Those aren’t the only limitations on my language, either: I could write you a thesis on globalisation auf Deutsch, but no-one ever taught me how to flirt in a language that isn’t my own. (I can’t flirt in English, either, but let’s overlook that for now.) I rarely bother to tell people I’m asexual in English, because it takes too much explaining; German barely even has a word for it. I’m too scared to kiss anyone in Berlin, because I know I won’t be able to explain why I don’t want to sleep with them. And now I’ve started thinking about the difficulties of being queer here, I can’t stop. I stare daggers at Are You A Lesbian Guy for the rest of the day.
OVER BREAKFAST JENNY WALKER
You reach across the table as if to pluck a bit of fluff from my sweater. Instead, I see your eyelashes flutter as you take a sip of coffee; your other hand casually passing through bone like it’s nothing and holding my heart, right there on your palm in the café clatter and hum. I place my teaspoon down carefully, slowly, so it hardly even shakes, though the whole place is buckling, damn-near swooning, beneath our lightly touching feet.
“CAMP” IN THE 21ST CENTURY FREDERICK SHUFFREY What does it mean to be “camp” nowadays? Gay male identity has not been immune to the ravages of cultural and technical progress and assimilationist politics. We now live in a world of “masc4masc” and “no femmes please”, phrases that should be immediate turnoffs to anyone involved in expanding queer spaces and identity, no matter how much you want to “get off ”. This is a world of sharp divides and dichotomies in how gay men view ourselves: bear, twink, gaybro, femme, top, bottom. Increasingly camp culture is simply referred to as a thing of the past, something that united gay men when we were persecuted and closeted, a common identifier in seedy clubs and public spaces. If it’s not altogether forgotten as a relic of a bygone era, it’s dismissed as just for drag queens and feminine gays. It’s a fad for “silly queens”, disparagingly referred to as idiotic, frivolous, not “helpful” if “we gays” want to be taken seriously by “straight society.” It is one of many victims of heteronormative, cultural gentrification. Thus, one’s views on camp culture, something so lighthearted and humorous, can become indicative of something far more serious: the LGBTQ rights movement as a whole. And that is appropriate, because camp, counterintuitively, is serious, and is inextricably tied up with what sexual and gender liberation seeks to achieve. What was so radical, what is still so radical, in our modern world, about campness, is it’s utter overthrowing of gender norms that no matter how
much we wish away, still undergird the structures of heterosexual patriarchy and oppress those victimised by it. Camp was so dominant among gay men of the early twentieth century because they understood, far better than we even realise today, why homosexuality was so threatening to the society of their day. To accept relationships outside of the dominant male, passive female prototype was to challenge the very foundations of patriarchy. If sexual partners could associate as equals, what would that spell for the institution of marriage, founded as it was on the headship of the husband over the family. Gay men, and women, saw that and adopted it as their own. They were empowered by their embrace of what society feared most, effeminate men. Second perhaps only to the “gays-as-child-molesters” canard, is the pejorative image of the effeminate gay man, flitting around to a musical number, with limp wrists and an exaggerated lisp. This was the great threat to masculinity and patriarchy. Effeminacy, camp style is far more than just loving Liza and Barbra, fabulous as they are. It is a challenge to society, today as much as it was sixty years ago, to reject the misogyny that is behind patriarchy and homophobia. It is not a mere coincidence that most camp, gay “icons”, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Bette Midler, Dolly Parton, Cher, are women. Nor is it coincidental that these are women who rose to the top of the arts world, from music to acting to theatre, in a male-dominated business. To be camp, to celebrate
these icons was to champion them and their frequent struggles against sexism, so reminiscent of the homophobia so many gay men encountered. Gay men cheered on as these women rose up the ladder because they saw in their rise the possible liberation from a life of oppression, secrecy and shame. Therefore it should not be with shame that we remember that the Stonewall riots were started by drag queens and transwomen, but, ironically, with pride. Nor should we forget that much of that visceral anger so palpable in the air that night was related to sadness over the death of the queen of all gay icons, Judy Garland, only a few days earlier from an overdose. Of course, camp is not all serious. It is fun, it is silly, it is over the top. Its mere name conjures up images of drag and music and lightheartedness. Camp is political, but it’s also about knowing the words to Don’t Rain On My Parade, memorising Liza’s dance routine in Life is a Cabaret, remembering the overly dramatic scenes of Mommy Dearest. It’s about drag queens and musicals, fashion and drama. But camp has never been, and never will be, divorced from the political context of its time, and the feminist and gay rights struggles. Camp icons knew who their audiences were and played to them. If you always found Dorothy’s trip to colourful Oz away from dull, harsh Kansas to be relatable, don’t be too surprised. Neither do I want to suggest that “camp” has been all good. It’s been often the source of mockery and derision toward gay men. From Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? to the exaggerated lisp of a playground bully,
there are some moments of camp we might like to forget. Those appreciative of camp culture have far too often forgotten the central contribution of women to its development, erasing their presence unforgivably. Nor, perhaps, do we need to dwell on certain drag queens who think campness gives them the right to pass judgement on what transphobic slurs are “acceptable” or not. What does all this mean in the 21st century? What lessons might we learn from our camper elders? As fantastic as the expansion of gay male identity has been, away from mere stereotypes towards the whole spectrum from drag queen to leather daddies, it has brought with it often a harsh rebuke of those seen as acting “overly feminine.” Could these newly empowered, mainstreamed gay men end up contracting queer identity in an effort to appease heteronormative society? I hope not. That would truly be a loss for a gay rights movement that, somewhere, deep inside, still wishes to challenge norms and looks for liberation from the system, not equality within it. Until then, I’ll be getting my glad rags on, blasting Dolly Parton on the speakers and watching Some Like It Hot for the 157th time.
AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS DANIEL DANIEL SHAO Nicholas Daniel is one of the world’s greatest living Oboists, being the only player of his instrument to win the coveted BBC Young Musician of the Year award, in 1980. He is a founding member of the Haffner Wind Ensemble and Britten Sinfonia, a Professor at the Musikhochschule in Trossingen, Germany, and has performed on nearly all of the world’s greatest stages, including as Concerto soloist at the BBC Proms. He is also comfortably queer, living with his partner Piotr and their two gorgeous cats. DS: You came out as gay quite a while into your career, and are famously open, if you don’t mind my saying so. You have continued to do incredibly well, foraying into the world of conducting and scaling new heights as a world-class oboist and instructor. This should act as an inspiration to young people worried about any possible detriment associated with being queer in the classical music industry. Are there any insights concerning your ‘coming out’ experience (any of the ways in which people responded) which you would like to share? ND: Obviously coming out is still, sadly, a big thing for almost everyone. I wish it weren’t, but it was for me and it was for the older of my two sons. My own evolution to it was slow burn, yes, and afterwards I realised that before I could evolve in this way there had been many things deep inside myself that needed to be aligned. When my kids were young I fell quickly, absolutely madly and deeply in love with my now husband Piotr, and it was utterly simple to identify myself as gay from that point. It was not simple in my life, practically speaking, but as it was the easiest and most natural thing to feel. I believed it must be right because it felt so true and that all would be well. In almost every sense all IS well, and in myself there is a clarity and simplicity that I had no idea I was missing. It was absolutely noticeable in my
playing and conducting first, before I told anyone. Close friends were asking what was going on just from hearing me perform, identifying a new directness and simplicity in my communication as a musician and a new ease in myself. This to me was quite surprising, but on reflection I realised that as it’s an artist’s job first of all to be honest with themselves, this new clarity was a quantum jump in my self understanding. In my evolution to openly gay I was never anything but honest with myself but there is another deeper honesty that involves listening to oneself on another level and being brave and adjusting to what you discover and feel. I envy those that have a clarity about being gay early in life, but the glacier of self understanding that constantly reshapes and reforms the artist works in all of us all the time. Yes it can be destructive, but that’s part of renewal. The more we can listen and understand ourselves and subjugate our egos the more there is to learn and enjoy. Coming out itself was unbelievably natural and easy in the end, although the fear of people not accepting it or being angry with me for what happened in my previous marriage was very big. Absolutely all my friends and family were completely astonishingly good about it. My 80 year old Auntie, when I told her said “oh yes I hear there’s a lot of that about, dear’ and accepted it completely from the outset. A close friend who I work with in my Festival in Leicester said “I love anyone who loves you”, and my now ex Mother in Law, who was also 80 at the time, was the first person to insist that all the parties should meet and said that she knew and trusted that I would never have done this unless I really meant it, as she had known and loved me for 25 years and therefore accepted it. My sons, after a while, said that I just seemed the same except more ‘me’ and more relaxed. There were only two people who openly said hurtful things to me, and they,
perhaps oddly, purport to be Christians. Oh, and there was the badge of honour of being called a “fuckin fagit’ on Hollywood Boulevard in LA. That went STRAIGHT onto Facebook. DS: A big topic of discussion within the LGBT+ community today is the perpetuating of limiting and essentialist gender roles by LGBT+ individuals; on Grindr you needn’t search far to find people wearing the badge of ‘masc looking for masc’, and the trope of the classic ‘lipstick lesbian’ is still a prized one. Of course both of these labels are extremely limiting, with the idea of people glamorising projected ‘straightness’ (which is ultimately at odds with their sexual identity) seeming truly problematic. Within the Western classical music tradition, there still seems to be a certain fear of the body, and indeed of any LGBT+ sexual identity, despite an apparent contradiction from the huge number of queer composers and performers in the canon. As Susan McClary points out in ‘Feminine Endings’, music can often reinforce gender roles: ‘People learn how to be gendered beings through interaction with cultural discourses such as music’. Projected ‘straightness’ seems to be the norm here as well. Have you felt any kind of pressure from the ‘academy’ to mould your sexual identity, be it covert or more blatant, and if so, has it come more from a straight or queer crowd? ND: I would always resist any hidden or blatant pressure to mould me in any way. That’s nobody’s business but mine, so I suspect nobody has tried, perhaps seeing quite quickly it would be a waste of energy. I found in the early days of people hearing I was out that straight women wanted me to behave in a certain way with them, and I was pretty uncomfortable with that. I love that straight women often feel very comfortable with gay men and it’s a whole new dimension to explore, but suddenly becoming something different didn’t feel like me. I know that’s not really what you’re asking about, but pressure from ‘the academy’? Absolutely not at all. I
think that sometimes the tension of ‘whether it matters’ can send a message that somehow it does. The more we can relax and enjoy who we are and be ourselves the less tension there is in other people. I have strong role models in this respect with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Their lives were lived openly queer at a time when it was considerably trickier than now. I knew Pears well and was lucky enough to have his support and encouragement when I was starting out. Their combined talent and their love for each other is still very inspiring to me. DS: Around the mid-1980s, feminist and queer angles on the humanities began to become more and more accepted, pioneered by scholars such as Michel Foucalt, Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. Susan McClary argues that Musicology has ‘lagged behind’ Literature and Film studies in terms of Queer analysis; indeed it took until 1994 for Philip Brett’s seminal ‘Queering the Pitch’ to be written, and the book still does not enjoy a position at the centre of Musicological discourse. There has been huge uproar in the music world concerning Schubert’s unknown sexuality, stemming from Maynard Solomon’s 1989 article, which suggests that the ‘Schubert circle’ largely consisted of homosexuals. He advised against relating it to his music, yet many scholars have controversially (and perhaps problematically) linked the perceived ‘femininity’ of Schubert’s music to his queerness. Schubert’s ‘sensuality’, and thus ‘feminine’ weakness, can apparently never reach the ‘structural greatness’ of masculine Beethoven’s logic, perhaps summated by his ‘fairly’ to modulate to the dominant at the end of the Unfinished Symphony’s exposition. Bollocks to that! Do you feel that sexuality can manifest itself musically, in either performance or composition, and if so how? ND: ‘PERHAPS problematically??’ No perhaps about it, that’s a problematic attitude indeed and a load of tosh. Some of the strongest musical structures I know come from Schubert AND ANYWAY what a hugely
offensive argument to say that femininity equates to lack of ‘structural greatness’. What shocks me is that these opinions come from post 1989 not 1889. I would have thought that the combination of musicology and ‘queer analysis’ was an absolute minefield! I am sure that sexuality manifests itself in composition and performance. Any good to great composer (writer, choreographer, visual artist-creator) MUST have at least a subconscious understanding of the archetypes of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in themselves and their music, and in the beautiful play between them. A composer like Oliver Knussen, a straight man, has extreme delicacy and refinement (perhaps typical feminine attributes, hmm I’m in the minefield already) and controls his materials and structures brilliantly, as does Elliot Carter. Thea Musgrave, a straight woman, writes with a structural clarity and directness from the essence of the individual phrases to the overall structural clarity. With the wonderful married team of Helen Grime and Huw Watkins, both superbly gifted composers, the interplay with themselves and between the two of them in this respect is fascinating. Watkins is a volatile, singing voice, Grime is thoughtful, expanding perfect structures that explode less frequently but also powerfully. I’m giving examples of straight male and female artists because they could arguably be expected to be more strongly polarised: clearly not so. In the same way that it’s a major aim of mine to get people to forget the medium of the oboe when
I perform and listen just to the music and the communication, I think music has the great asset that it HAS to steer between sexual identities in order to reflect all of life as well as it does. As performers our job is to internally become the music and therefore we have to travel between those identities with great fluidity. I would say again that the less resistance we can find in ourselves to connecting with these aspects of living, the better we will be able to understand them.
THE CATCH WYSTAN
I, customer at coffeehouse, sip, cough. In twinkling hairband, keen barista moves To stroke my elbow; grins, “Ça va?” He proves A nimbler talker with his clothing off. Impulsive, hectic, brief– but never scoff At real release: the body preapproves Fresh conquest. Surely, grappling with his grooves, I top the physical, turn philosophe? His aftertaste, a caffeine-kick, persists, Inspiring energy and dizzy flow, Until I see him (elfin, fey) next day Perform for others, slavish with his wrists. Although I know the rules of come-and-go, This time I push his searching touch away.
THE HELPING HAND WYSTAN
Delight of low bulbs. “Catch me (if you can),” Mascaraed dancer urges with his eyes, Angling at bar by me. The drink he buys Is purest pitch: “Pour moi? Le Coup de Main.” We leave entwined. He’s clearly greener than Élan’s lip-tease has claimed, and sheds the guise Of cool at once: á deux, he begs his prize. I wake, aflame, and stretch to find my fan. Joy goes; he’s gone– or so I guess, until (“Until”! You saving word!) I hear a voice, Flirty, endorsing, floating from the door: “Enfin, you wake!” He’s glowing; I rejoice And soon he’s close again, demanding more. We walk, that day, handholding, in the ville.
COMING OUT RONAK SHARMA
When an individual from the LGBTQ community comes out to their friends and family, it is a tremendous personal accomplishment. But, it is also a societal failure, and often, amidst the celebration on the part of the individual, it can be easy to forget to question the shortcomings of society. Many queer people spend years, even decades, living a lie, because from birth, society by default places the cisgender + heterosexual label on them. Once they do come out, even if they are accepted, society is often quick to forget the suffering that these individuals may have faced in their 'closet' years. In many parts of the world, this initial secrecy and suppression is almost seen as an inevitable part of life for a queer person (if queer people are even accepted at all in the first place). The closest thing I can compare society's conception of coming out to is a moral confession. When else is someone expected to make an announcement to all those they know, when feeling very nervous, and a fear of being not accepted or judged? The only difference being that when coming out, there is no moral basis that requires confessing. Once, I overheard someone tell a female toddler I am close to 'You're going to find a handsome boy
for yourself one day'. I told this to a queer friend of mine, who remarked that such a heteronormative upbringing is acceptable, because there is nothing wrong with people assuming a child will turn out to be what most children are. It saddened me to hear my friend accept this ingrained heteronormativity, despite my friend himself having faced a hard time coming out. It is right from childhood that society starts placing unattainable expectations on queer people, and small talk with toddlers soon turns into 'It's high time you find a boyfriend/girlfriend'. Right from the beginning, it is oppressive to assume a child is cisgender or heterosexual. Only when this stops will queer people not have the pressure and pain of coming out. We need to criticise those who see the idea of queer people coming out to their family and peers as an inevitable feature of our society, even if those people do not hate or discriminate against queer people. The LGBTQ community will never be truly liberated until we lift the burden of silence, secrecy and fear off the shoulders of young queer people. By default in society we are expected to present ourselves as straight and cisgender, whilst feelings of rejection, guilt, and isolation fill our minds.
LEST WE FORGET ED SIDDONS
QUEER HISTORY AND INTERGENERATIONAL DISJUNCTION The first: fifty-five, hairthinning, paunch-growing and skin slightly loose, no longer hugging bone or flesh but sagging under its weight. The second: nineteen, Jager-fuelled, vest snug against a body still tight, preparing himself to lose his shit when Drunk in Love comes on. The second can’t imagine himself the first, won’t imagine himself the first, and sure as fuck won’t approach the first. The first might approach the second, but his intentions will always and only ever be read as a come-on and often-though-not-always rebuffed. “Twinkhunter…” the second thinks, eye-rolls, downs the rest of his drink and glides off, leaving his future at the bar. There’s nothing quite like the fear of a gay man confronted with age. In an increasingly aestheticized cisgay community, age is a horror and the aged are abject. When self-esteem, sexual capital and rigid ideas of the desirable body are inseparable, the loss of youth is the loss of power and the loss of self. If what you are is that twink, and what you define yourself against is that daddy, age presents a threat better ignored. We dismiss ageing
queers, yet the histories they could offer us could open new possibilities for the queer present. The fear of age isn’t harmful purely because of the anxieties and psychic pressures that it engenders – significant, widespread, and increasing as they are. Beyond dysmorphia, eating disorders, anxieties and selfloathing, the fear of age denies constructions of a queer past through the transmission of oral narratives, anecdotes and experiences. Fear of age and the exclusion of those older constitute a generational break that denies the reconstruction of queer histories by silencing the first-hand experiences that could facilitate broader cultural remembrance. In response, three stages of action; reconnection with older queers through the creation and preservation of queer spaces; then, intergenerational interaction that does not shy away from even the darkest periods of our shared queer past and breaks the silence of HIV-AIDS in particular; finally, the creation and interrogation of queer cultural memory that will provide new possibilities both for our queer identities and our political action in the present.
IDENTITY AND THE THREAT OF HISTORICAL DISTANCE Queerness is a curious draw elements of ones identity that state. It is one of the few ‘identicome second to familial models, ties’ in which you are not born into but become the primary – if not your milieu, or variations thereof. the only – sources from which As reproductive justice, adopidentity forms. tion rights, and access to medi When all the media offers cally assisted pregnancy flounders is cis-gay white men picket-fenced across Europe, queer children (or and happily partnered, and when children who will be queer) are the media is the primary force for rarely born into or brought up by the construction of one’s queer queer families. The family, maybe identity, swathes of queers are the most crucial site of identity unrepresented, and those who are construction in nuclear Western find themselves routinely offered systems, will almost always fail limited models which necessarily you as a queer person. Where you determine and limit their unaren’t rejected, there will be gaps derstanding of what their queerthat Mother and Father won’t be ness might mean. When all we able to fill as they might for an are shown is an unrepresentative understanding of your class, your present or idealised pasts, what it racial identity or your cisgender. means to be queer is obfuscated. If family gives you context – a his- Projects to reform the tory – then queerness removes it. media and macro-cultural repre When the family doesn’t sentations of queers are necessary, provide – can’t provide – queers but our representation will always turn to the media. Questions and necessarily be determined by of representation (though often how palatable they are to majorpainted by conservative cishet ity cishet audiences. We can wait communities as a narcissistic for GLAAD, Stonewall and the demand for reflection of the self) HRC to act for us – an ‘us’ that become crucial, maybe the unique is, in fact, less representative and ways of understanding your queer- comprehensive by the day – or we ness. To the extent that identity can act. Queers on the ground can formation is a conscious process, act to create and preserve spaces mass-market representations are – bars, reading groups, tea dances, no longer sources from which to anything – that invite the identities
that mass media won’t provide us with, can show us the histories that nobody wants to hear. Older gays have things to teach us, stories from Stonewall, the sexual liberation of the sixties and seventies, clandestine bars and severe state repression. But they also have much to teach us about something even more fundamental: survival. The AIDS epidemic radically refigured queer identity, and our present cannot be fully under-
stood without it. Its unique horrors provide unique lessons, and to lose the existential battle fought by older queers is to lose more than we can afford. We’re still getting infected, we’re still dying, and we’re still being pedalled drugs that can only be bought by the richest persons and nations. To create a present with radical possibilities for self-understanding and liberation, from the disease and from oppression, a turn to the past is necessary.
HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE The creation of intergenerational communities that might help us recover this past is thwarted not only by queer fears of ageing and the cult of youth, powerful though each factor is. Recovering histories and queer pasts from living storytellers is difficult, because thousands of our storytellers are absent. Not absent like not in Plush; not absent like not in Oxford; absent like dead. Absent like ashes blowing somewhere remote when ‘contaminated’ queer bodies were refused burial; absent like sitting in urns as constant reminders of what the combination of disease and institutional prejudice can do;
absent like forgotten, commemorated nowhere by families that rejected their queer offspring. AIDS almost destroyed queer life at the first time that the possibility of significant, open, and enduring communities were forming. AIDS almost destroyed our possibility of a queer past. AIDS was not always AIDS; in the hospitals of New York as AIDS-related deaths began appearing in 1981 the as yet unnamed syndrome was informally known as WOGS: Wrath of God Syndrome. When, in that same year, medical conference sought an official name, the first decided upon was GRID: Gay Related Im-
mune Deficiency. If the first signals the institutional prejudice not simply in conservative communities and Reagan’s government but medical discourse at large, the latter symbolises that aetiology was rooted in identity, that is, that the cause of HIV-AIDS was who you are, not what you do. The gay body was rapidly conflated with the diseased body, and while GRID was renamed AIDS but months after, institutional prejudice founded on a moralising, homophobic obsession with aetiology set in motion the cultural forces that facilitated the deaths of over 300,000 people in the USA, and millions worldwide. For four years, Reagan made no mention of AIDS. If ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) were proving that ‘Silence = Death’, American and European state apparatuses had blood on their hands unlikely ever to be washed off. Significant moves to raise awareness of AIDS only came in the US in 1985 with the AIDSrelated death of Rock Hudson. Why? Because his supposed heterosexuality taught the population that they too, as law-abiding godfearing heteros, might be infected. It takes a straight death to value a
queer body. Effective antiretroviral treatment wasn’t developed until 1997 with the combination therapy known as HAART (High Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy). In the intervening years, millions died globally, and queer communities were erased throughout the world at precisely the point when in certain nations they were coming into being. The Stonewall riots of 1969, while not necessarily the birth of queer activists as many historians would have it, did nevertheless represent a turning point, and the beginning of an age of community and sexual liberation amongst queers that had never previously existed. Queer communities were destroyed, and commemorative efforts from the AIDS Quilt to the archiving of ACT UP materials tried to commemorate queer loss on an unprecedented scale. But with commemoration comes historicisation, and the AIDS crisis is little discussed, commercially unappealing, a vaguely remembered problem of the past whose relevance to contemporary queer life is seen as minimal. Yet AIDS necessitated enormous cultural and political resistance – and in many respects gave birth to Queer theory in the academy and
beyond – whose lessons, whose histories and whose on-going threats pose existential threats to queer identity and queer people
worldwide. And yet all that remains, it appears, is silence.
REMEMBRANCE, RECONSTRUCTION AND RENEWAL Giving even the above potted history of the crisis is staggeringly incomplete, geographically, demographically, and theoretically, yet its purpose is to highlight but one of the crucial stories slipping from our grasp. Culture and even queer culture is forgetting, often deliberately, its past. One of the most serious cultural traumas of the late twentieth century is eerily ignored. So, while neoconservative gay agendas have taken up marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as their raison d’etre, they have comprehensively ignored AIDS in the 21st Century, both the crisis as it now manifests itself, and the remembrance of the deadly era before HAART. Straight society wants to forget its crimes against us, and queers want to forget a traumatic past. But trauma is never forgotten, never resolved by ignoring, and our present will never be intelligible without a past, no matter how dark. This is a call to remember, and a mission statement for the radical power of
memory. In If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past, Christopher Reed and Christopher Castiglia take up precisely this call-to-arms in an incisive study of the crisis and cultural memory of it. Memory, they argue, is created and “produced from need.” That is, “singly or collectively, we remember what we need to know” and thus forget what we do not or do not wish to. Memory being determined by the present has left us incomplete histories; our reconstruction of the past is tainted and blurred by a desire to turn away from the trauma of AIDS, and as such, we are losing a history that is crucial for the present. We are reaching a stage in which “The sexual past [has been] relentlessly reconfigured as a site of infectious irresponsibility rather than valued for generating and maintaining systems of cultural communication and care that provided the best often the only - response to disease, backlash and death.” Queer
worlds pre-AIDS are reported only as promiscuous hedonism; queer lives during AIDS are rarely reported at all. Queer history, paradoxical, afamilial, and almost impossible as it might be, can offer new possibilities for the queer present. Memory, the past, or our version of it, must begin to inform queer subjectivity and queer political practice: as Reed and Castiglia have it, “Unlike utopias, which cast their visions into a perpetually receding future, prone to dismissal on the grounds of implausibility, memories insist that what once was might be again.” Memory might allow us access to the radical worlds being built before the AIDS crisis struck, worlds that fought for liberation more comprehensive than we do today. So let’s remember. Let’s remember the sexual liberation of the pre-AIDS world and understand how safe sex practices might facilitate its (refigured) revival. Let’s remember how the communities formed postStonewall supported each other, provided shelter for each other, and fought for each other as we no longer do. Let’s remember how AIDS provoked one of the most spectacular, comprehensive and
intelligent resistance movements that modern history has seen, blending theory and practice, philosophy and praxis, as never before. Let’s fight against the closure of organisations like Queers 4 Economic Justice who hark back to a more radical and liberationist aim. Let’s fight against the closure of important queer spaces like the Joiner’s Arms. Let’s fight against out fear of age and our blissful ignorance of our past, and let’s reconnect with those who might make remembrance possible. Only then will we rediscover our histories, understand and refigure our identities and construct a meaningful political philosophy for the present and future. Maybe then, once more, we’ll act the fuck up.
(love)speak
ANNIE TERIBA Eden has nestled her head amongst the swelling egos; who will wake such soft sibilance from her slumber and fall amongst the settled sheets (That is to say, can she love me much longer)? this is not about love, but to render ourselves become and find in this darkness softening eyes (That is to say, I have never found such softness before) she will find me in the firewood render me a city of ash teach me to map these scars to tenderness (That is to say, I know now that not all gods find their tongues in gunpowder and shotgun barrel) just as time is fleeting, even we will soon forget ourselves to gasp for what little air is to be found at the surface The poet will make a habit of pain until she learns the face of healing search for my eyes in this dark you will find them lost in yours entranced by tightening skin and sharpening breath and the assonance I found in you alone must I paint you a muse but everything I sought in the forage show me the fountain from where I might drink the last of this sorry pain into nothing
What else might our survival resemble but the reflection in which we have realised dysmorphia but histories cannot be written out of love anymore than this redemption and so, who will write our (love)story but me who had found in you the will to be (That is to say, even keloid scars can fade into insignificance) and so where might we start a tale whose beginning is stuttering her fear of the end (That is to say, we read what lines these palms had written for us)
DECOLONISING THE AFRICAN QUEER MOVEMENT ANDILE MNGXITAMA
Celebrations of Zanu-PF’s massive parliamentary and presidential victory have been marred by homophobia within the most revolutionary party in Zimbabwe. This presents us with the question of how we can decolonise our societies and liberate ourselves from all forms of oppression, including on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender and Intersexed Community (LGBTI) issue. This concern is no longer a marginal one because often the LGBTI struggle is hijacked by procolonial white supremacists. This is so primarily because the LGBTI struggle lacks a thorough anticolonial ideological framework. There is little doubt in the imagination of most black nationalists who see colonialism and white supremacy as the defining questions, even in the 21st century, that Zimbabwe is the most advanced in the fight for black liberation. Decolonisation is essentially a land issue, where the native takes back the land and the white settler is rendered superfluous or flees to their mother country. Only upon this event can a new relationship emerge among
the people, one that is no longer defined by the indignity of colonial oppression. There is no doubt that Zimbabwe has indeed resolved the land question under the leadership of President Mugabe and Zanu-PF. However, both social liberation and the deepening of democratisation of the economy must still be advanced. It can be said that with the indigenisation process currently under way in Zimbabwe, where the government compels all major companies to shed 51% of their ownership to Zimbabweans, the struggle on the economic plain is also at an advanced stage. It’s not an easy matter that such global companies as Anglo-American have indeed signed away 51% of its platinum mines in Zimbabwe. Again Zanu-PF has to be commended for designing an ownership formula that is much more advanced and more broad-based than South Africa’s elite-benefiting BEE programme. In Zimbabwe the expropriated 51% is distributed as follows; 10% to workers, 10% to the local mining community, 10% is to a BEE-type consortia and the state takes 21% into a national
fund. The key is that ordinary Zimbabweans benefit directly and severally. The question is how, then, within this reality of impressive decolonisation, do we confront the problem of homophobia? What has happened up until now is that the LGBTI movement has failed to raise the issue of sexuality politics as central to decolonisation. Because the LGBTI movement lacks a radical anti-colonial framework, often its concerns have been hijacked by the West to attack the decolonisation programme in Zimbabwe. It must worry us all that those who proclaim solidarity with the LGBTI struggles from Europe and the US are the same people who reject decolonisation and hate Mugabe for his anti-colonial efforts. It can be said therefore, that Zanu-PF’s homophobia has been used by colonial forces to attack a revolutionary programme. The burden unfortunately falls within the LGBTI movement to undertake an almost impossible task of rejecting the western false allies and an internal struggle against homophobia and other related oppressions. Here, the liberal hyper individual rights discourses must be tempered with collective concerns because before we are
queer, straight, or anything else, we are black and shaped fundamentally by our experiences of slavery and colonialism. A unifying discourse of sexuality politics as central to decolonisation has to be found and struggles around it mounted. The legitimate argument that homophobia is a colonial Victorian construct can no longer be made to mock Mugabe and Zanu-PF from the vantage point of generalised western denigration of Africa and the Black. Within this search for radically decolonising queer politics must be a study of how in South Africa the extension of gay rights has not meant the protection of black gay people against violence or discrimination. In reality, gay rights in South Africa are white rights. This is so because one is black before one is gay and as a consequence one lives one’s queerness through one’s race. The shocking racist events of last year’s Jo’burg Pride, where black lesbians came under attack from their fellow white queer people, makes this point even more clearly. It’s also a known fact that only black lesbians find themselves faced with the reality of being murdered for their sexuality. This is because they
re already trapped within black spaces that do not respect life, not only of gay people. The above conundrum raises the question the western and white influenced LGBTI movement often avoids in theory and indeed that there is no possibility of liberating individuals on the basis of their gender or sexual orientation outside a generalised decolonialising and anti white supremacist struggle. From this point of view, in the Zimbabwean situation, our first responsibility is to defend and advance the decolonising struggle, while we advance the course of liberation all at once. Here, a dialectical move is called for, it has to be stated publicly that Zanu-PF is the most authentic friend of the queer African in its decolonising moment and, at the same time, the worst enemy when it advances homophobic rhetoric and politics. From here the challenge is how to construct decolonising queer politics that don’t, by default, land the LGBTI movement in the hands of colonialists. Some promising yet underdeveloped discourse is heard in some South African black LGBTI activists who have constructed the slogan, “Lesbians for Land�, a further development of this line of
thought would open up possibilities of a unifying struggle for land and gender sexuality. In constructing such a new queer politics, regard will have to be given to the fact that a new morality and value system is being constructed, demonstrating how what is regarded as African is in most instances the creation of our colonisers. One hopes that in the 2018 elections Zanu-PF will elaborate a new vision on sexuality politics and begin to see the LGBTI movement as a legitimate part of decolonisation. That reality is dependent in large part on what the African Queer Movement does between now and then to decolonise itself. This article was first published in the Mail and the Guardian.