An open letter to James Lileks

[solarbird]

James Lileks blogged about identity politics today, and the Castro District's reaction to Lawrence vs. Texas.

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James -

You missed the point. I really think you did. That's okay, but I wanted to try to explain it to you.

Until Lawrence vs. Texas, we gayfolk weren't really citizens.

Oh, sure, we had technical US citizenship, and US passports if we wanted them; that's true enough. But we could be made illegal at will. And many states had chosen to do so, in the past, and had refused to reconsider it when asked.

If you're gay, or lesbian - or queer of any sort, really - and even vaguely aware of the state of your nation, you can't not notice that. You can't not be aware of it, all the time.

It doesn't matter that the number of prosecutions per year was low. Compared to the volume of illegal immigration, the number of job-related illegal employment busts per year is low, too. But in both cases, the situation is the same: in many parts of the country, we were made illegal (via the "sodomy laws"), which makes us just as much not citizens as any undocumented worker.

You don't understand that because you've never had to keep a list of states where it may and may not be safe to travel, and you've never had to spend time with lawyers trying to get your partnership wrapped up in some additional legal wrapper that may and may not survive challenge in a state court from a total stranger. You've never had a national religious/political movement which lists legislation and a Constitutional amendment against you as their number one priourity.

We have. We have always been singled out as "separate" and "lesser." In law and action, not just in rhetoric, we are defined, as a group, and excluded, as a group.

And we aren't the ones who started that.

So yes, we practice identity politics. We do it because identity politics has been forced upon us, by the people who would do us the most harm they could, and by the people who wouldn't, but are happy to go along. There have been genuine attempts - exclusively from inside the queer community, as far as I know - to transcend that; it was popular in the late 90s, in the boom, after the mid-90s anti-queer demi-pogroms had come to an end and it was looking like we might not have to fight survival battles every year. It was talked about a lot as the "post-gay" movement, which held that you could move beyond identity.

Lawrence vs. Texas, briefly, gave it a real shot of happening. And then the fundamentalists, and the party they now largely control, began lashing out, and haven't stopped yet.

Fault us for identity politics if you will. But make no mistake: it is become forced upon us. We group, because we are grouped by others. We group, because we must.


You are: CATWOMAN!


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Comments

[avram]

Hey, it's not as if Lileks is actually interested in fact-based arguemnts. If he was, he might have noticed that it's not just people on the left who fly their own flags.

[firni.livejournal.com]

I canNOT believe that there are actually people in the town I live in (here in Washington) who fly that particular flag (on the backs of their pickemup trucks, natch).

Most of them are teenagers, or close to it. I guess they don't teach about that particular war in U.S. History classes anymore.

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

Beautifully said, my dear!

Did you actually mail it somewhere to be published?
Cathy

[solarbird]

Who would publish a blog response?

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Well put.

What do you say we make it a felony to post pictures of unfortunate recipes from the 50's? Maybe then Jim will understand what it's like.

Grr!

[solarbird]

That doesn't strike to the core, of course. Yeah, he makes a lot of money on ripping bad ideas of the past - I have both books and have laughed and laughed and laughed - but it's not core to who he is. It's not him. It's something he enjoys. And that's a world of difference.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

That's a very well-written response. I think you could remove the references specific to Lileks and post/publish this somewhere as a general defense of identity politics.

I do think that there is a divisive aspect to identity politics, but the insight that you express so well is that this division doesn't come from within. It's a deliberate division imposed on all sorts of people to keep them from working together in our common interest.

That's also why marriage equality (along with sexual equality, the issue Lileks is talking about) is even more important than anti-discrimination law. Anti-discrimination law is defensive; it is protecting people, group by group. Marriage equality directly confronts the division of people into categories, which is something that's in everyone's interest. There's a reason that conservatives like to paint the issue a "gay marriage," because that reinforces the division of identity politics that they rely upon to keep things the way they are, or even make things worse. When it's reframed as marriage for everyone, regardless of category, it's much more attractive to a general audience.

[wrog]

something I'll need to refer to the next time I get shit about Christians being "persecuted" in this country.

[solarbird]

What many of them mean when they say that is that they aren't allowed to impose the ramifications of their religious beliefs on others. I.e., not allowing them to outlaw gayfolk or abortion is persecuting them, because they don't get their way.

I've heard this more than once from people high in the food chain. So. La.

[flit.livejournal.com]

This rocks. A lot!