I KISSED AN UNGENDERED PERSON AND I LIKED IT-
IN A NONMONOGAMOUS TOTALLY QUEER AND THREATENING TO FAMILY VALUES MANNER.
All too often the queer community are pressured, by the mainstream but also by their peers, into assimilating into a containable, ‘acceptable’ queer identity.Rachael Wright fucks some shit up, and asks the question: is it really so horrible to be obscene?
Stop, just a second! Press pause on your Elton John or Melissa Etheridge, turn off that Ellen DeGeneres, Will and Grace, or The L Word on your TV screen. Take down the posters of Jodie Foster, Rosie O’Donnell, Queer As Folk. In fact, why don’t you just leave happy homo suburbia and follow me over here to the subversive queer zone?
If you are brave enough to realise there’s more to queer identity than the happy white fags portrayed in Hollywood and in mainstream culture generally, then I congratulate you! However, it’s not gonna be easy. Rejecting identities thrown upon us by the mainstream is hard enough, but challenging commonly held beliefs within our own communities, oh that’s harder than a pile of glass dildos.
Before any of you jump straight on to the interweb posting rants about how I’m a crazy separatist lesbian angry feminist, let me assure you that it would not only be a waste of everyone’s time, but would also be entirely misguided. I’m not even a lesbian, just a big raging queer (some say bifurious), so shame. Nor am I a separatist, but I am incredibly passionate about not wanting our community to be “just like straight people”, coz let’s face it, we’re not!
Straight people have straight sex (most of the time). Straight people usually don’t have to come out. Straight people usually don’t have to face the same amount of internal conflict in realising their sexuality is oppressed and straight people are NOT discriminated against and persecuted as a group, based on their sexuality. Mainstream straight culture also has a fundamentally fucked up and ridiculous way of discussing and envisioning sexuality.
It is my personal view that trying to portray queer sexualities as tame, non-threatening, and based around family values may do us as a group more harm than it will achieve. Let’s face it, trying to get mainstream society to accept us as just like them is effectively trying to get permission to assimilate. And when we assimilate, we’ll be doing so into a racist sexist homophobic society, on their terms. Coz look, look, there’s Rainbow Labour, and anyone who’s got representation in government can’t be that persecuted, right?
Wrong. It’s my fundamental belief that I don’t want any community I’m a part of to be accepted as little “threat to family life”. Guess what, I am a threat to family life, I’m a sex-crazed sex-worker with no qualms about doing anything consensual, and I wanna tear apart the institution of marriage, tear down male privilege in society, and make you all discuss your sexuality honestly and openly and without inhibition and judgement, just once. I will destroy the family structure as we know it, if I can, so fuck you mainstream New Zealand, and your opposite-sex monogamous partner and your 2.5 kids and your sub-standard sex education.
People often complain about the queer community being sexobsessed, all of our events being focused around our sexuality, and of us talking about sex too much. The bit that really tickles my fanny about this complaint is that it often comes from within the queer community. Hello, internalised homophobia?! These attitudes scream to me of repressive sex-negative views, of people believing that having sex, especially queer sex, is in some way dirty or secret, and that talking about it must be a bad thing. God forbid we offend or alarm the masses with our queeriffic sex-lives, huh, guys? But what if, after ten years of the queer community discussing sex on a regular basis, we managed to create a new dialogue about sexuality? A dialogue without binaries, without assumptions that render oppressed groups invisible, with language that empowers survivors of sexual violence, and with a dialogue that recognises each individual’s right to truly own their sexuality, without repression. It is not until sexual repression vanishes that anyone can truly and wholly give consent.
The queer community has a proud history of fighting oppression, and this is not oppression that we experience in isolation. What if the ‘them’ that we are supposedly indistinguishable from is really the default mainstream ‘them’, a ‘them’ that ignores differences? Do we wanna become a wealthy, white, able-bodied, chauvinistic ‘them’, at the cost of leaving behind the members of our communities that really feel the repression most? Political dialogue around queer rights too often relies on presenting the face that the media wants, a face that won’t challenge that status quo, and a face that won’t demand mainstream culture actually get its act together and support all members of society.
I feel that I should clarify that I’m not against ‘family’ in its widest definition, but I find that the nuclear model of the family is set up based on male control of women, and on ideas surrounding women being primary caregivers. I’m not a threat to children, monogamous couples, or elderly relations who need care in old age. However, I am a threat to a restricted idea of what a family is (an idea that most families in Aotearoa don’t fit, queer or otherwise), and I AM a threat to an institution which disadvantages women. Resisting assimilation opens up the topic of family, among other issues, to revision, and to society creating a new alternative.
I hope that after reading this, you’re gonna see things just a little bit differently. I’m not advocating that we all escape to live in communes in San Francisco. Although that could be awesome, I’m not telling you all to go all separatist on this shit. Instead, I hope that you might question what the mainstream tells us about queer identity. Start to challenge ideas of our community as one homogenous group of happy homos. Some of us aren’t happy, some of us aren’t homos, and all of us need to fight against assimilation and fight to achieve radical change.