Closed Community: Dealing with the Coronavirus by Bambi
A
s most people reading this will realize, the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has become a global pandemic affecting the lives of millions of people around the world. An aspect of that impact has been the cancellation of many GLBTQ events—film festivals, Pride events, and the closure of many communities and places where many of RFD’s readers gather to create community. As you know we’ve been running a gathering guide in our Spring issue annually for a while now listing gatherings from Oregon to China, from Ontario to New Zealand, from New Mexico to Austria, and the list goes on. So first off, although I assume everyone is checking each community’s websites for details how they are handling the COVID-19 crisis, I hope everyone will consider how to best handle the loss of access to community in this difficult time. Many folks have organized Zoom events—a virtual dance party, a talent show, a heart circle—all done online and involving people from all over. So I commend people’s use of technology to assist in keeping community alive by experimenting how to engage community while “staying in place”. That leads me to the other aspect of closure of many gathering sites, Faerie sanctuaries limiting or closing themselves off from accepting visitors. As an editor at RFD, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with many members of the larger “gathering” in community and the spaces that host them, and so I have to say I’ve been very impressed with the internal conversations about “safe space”, queer space and sanctuary in a time like this. Many sanctuaries were founded either early in the Radical Faerie history or as a result of the need for safe spaces in the wake of the AIDS crisis. So it’s easy to draw analogies to providing sanctuary now as we did then during the period of HIV/AIDS. But like many communities faced with this dilemma who decided to limit or close themselves off to gatherings or visitors, I think we have a clear distinction to contend with—HIV was spread in a very narrow and specific way— through unprotected sexual contact, through needle use or via blood transfusion before the blood supple was tested. COVID-19 is a respira6
RFD 182 Summer 2020
tory illness which is easily spread in confined spaces. So people had to make a moral decision about how to maintain a safe space while also being aware of the limits of what a community could realistically provide. I’ve seen a number of communities draft very useful letters detailing the reasons for limiting access to a property and the reasons events, gatherings and visitation were either limited or cancelled. I’ve seen online a number of people raise the issue of people facing oppression, people needing safe space in this difficult time and raising the issue of privilege versus those who are at the margins and are without. Painting these spaces as cis white male enclaves of privilege while the reality is that most of the spaces we inhabit, use to come together in are often not rich, not wealthy financially but also were never designed to provide services to a large number of people in a pandemic. People can harken back to the days of HIV but the reality is that Faerie sanctuaries especially were then very small microcosms of community they didn’t intend to serve the entire or whole community. By that I mean not words of self-limitation (saying white gay male) but in terms of the audience, the people in the “know”, people who understood what a place was, what it offered and I think most importantly who they knew there. Not ways of winnowing out women, people of color or others. That we leap ahead forty odd years later those communities have grown, expanded involvement and thus began to include people. So then COVID-19 happens. And poof, they are places of exclusion. Yet I’d like to ask people to honestly ask ourselves about the honest ability of people in small communal settings handling a pandemic we’ve not seen since the 1918 flu pandemic? So personally, I can fully understand each community making a judgement call about their ability to assist and provide for people in the larger community. I think it’s discerning of our ability as community and it also speaks to the larger conversations about how to deal with this virus—to limit contact, to “stay in place” and to limit exposure to others to both protect yourself
