💛 “Losing, Reclaiming, and Reconciling My Religion with My Sexuality”
After twenty-two years of searching and trying to make myself into what “I” thought everyone else, including God, wanted me to be, the Lord spoke to me in a manner that was uniquely his own.
—@clayrivers
This colorful picture book is a celebration of love, understanding, openness and diversity. It is beautiful and powerful read, perfect for #pridemonth !
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley.
I really enjoyed this collection of speeches. They tied together well with the overall topics. The introduction and information about history before each speech was very informative. The speeches covered a diverse number of identities and struggles involved with our LGBTQ+ community.
Planning on attending another nearby #pride2024 celebration tomorrow afternoon. It's about an hour's drive each way, and runs from noon until 10pm. I'm hopeful that I will have the requisite #spoons in order to go the day.
Last time, the crowds didn't overwhelm me, which I was pleased by. I assume that had a lot to to do with being around my tribe.
Happy #Pride!
(I still haven't decided if I agree with this theory- I need to watch this again, either way- but I have zero problem with it and it DOES make a lot of sense...)
The idea that seeing or talking about LGBTQ+ themes in books poses a threat to children or society goes back to medieval times.
Records of queer people and their lives from the Middle Ages are more plentiful than many people realize, but writings about the history were censored by religious leaders.
As usual, my light fantasy romance books (LGBTQ+ characters, positive rep) are on sale for all of June at Smashwords. DRM-free, and I’m happy to virtually assist with sideloading to your ereader if you need it.
And as usual, I will donate ALL my June royalties, not just from Smashwords sales, to an Australian LGBTQ+ charity (at the moment I favour the Equality Project, but am open to suggestions).
The Uses of Illicit Art (m/m romance) is my most popular book but I’d like to put in a good word for Fair Haven (m/nb romance) and Domesticated Magic (transm/m romance).
Well, that essay grew in scope and has now become a three-parter! The first part will be about the history of the ideology known as gender binarism, the second part will be about the gay rights movement, and the third part will be my own analysis of how these issues are showing up in present day digital spaces.
PART ONE
We will begin with a couple of articles. The first article is here:
I highly encourage you to read this article, but it discusses how pre-colonial African societies held varying, highly flexible ideas about gender and gender norms. Femininity and masculinity were both quite fluid. However, Western colonialism purposefully destroyed these cultural practices in an attempt to homogenize these societies’ behavior to force them to become “civilized”. Violence, shaming, and criminalization were all used as tools to accomplish this. Today, modern African countries still bear the scars of that colonialism, with transmisia being just as common as it is in the West.
Once again, read it for more information, but this article examines various examples of how some indigenous societies in North America and Asia treasured gender fluidity. Not only did cultural practices include those who lived gender fluidity, they also emphasized the importance of such people in spirituality and storytelling. Despite resistance from these indigenous societies, Western colonialism marginalized these practices and attempted to repress these people as much as possible.
Both of these articles show us how Western colonialism, as well as white supremacist patriarchal ideals of masculinity and femininity as rigid and based in anatomy, were forced upon many indigenous peoples and ended up trampling their relatively flexible gender categories. This, in a nutshell, is what is meant when we discuss gender binarism. It is a Western ideology that forces white, “civilized” gender norms on the racial Other, who is depicted as savage, immoral, and deviant.
PART TWO
In this part, we will be looking at the origin of the gay rights movement through the lens of the involvement of two key trans people of color, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
Let’s do some reviewing. In this article you will find a brief summary of how both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera became friends and were closely involved with the burgeoning gay rights movement, including their presence at Stonewall and founding of S.T.A.R. :
You can see in this article a mention of how they experienced resistance within the more mainstream gay rights movement. We will expand on this in the next article:
This article is MUCH more in depth. If you’re only going to read one article from this post, make sure it’s this one. While difficult to summarize, I want to draw your attention to a few essential elements. First, the members of S.T.A.R. were predominantly working class and what we would refer to today as trans people of color. Second, they openly allied themselves with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers in a show of solidarity against white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. Third, the white middle class mainstream gay movement was openly hostile to the members of S.T.A.R. due to that movement’s white supremacist attitudes and adherence to respectability politics, even going so far as to ban Sylvia Rivera from speaking at a Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1973, the first iteration of what eventually became Pride. (She spoke anyway, and you should watch the video, it’s quite stirring: https://vimeo.com/234353103)
Looking at these historical examples, we can see that the gay rights movement suffered immensely from its allegiance to white supremacy and assimilationism. These destructive allegiances fractured the movement, and we see the results today. We have achieved marriage equality (except for disabled folks), the pet issue of white middle class gays, and an ongoing trans genocide simultaneously. Trans people of color suffer the worst, and while we have since then elevated Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as founding figures of Pride, the Pride parades of today are capitalist white supremacist celebrations of assimilationism with corporations and cops involved in almost every city. Pinkwashing and homonationalism run rampant.
To close part two, you can read more about Marsha P. Johnson here:
PART THREE
For part three, some analysis of my own. Today in the queer community, we are still grappling with the legacy of gender binarism and white supremacy. The fact of the matter is, you cannot dismantle the gender binary without dismantling white supremacy. If you read the history you will see: gender binarism comes from white supremacy and colonialism. The gay rights movement has largely failed to recognize this fact, and our efforts to, as Sylvia Rivera put it, fight for “Gay Power” have been limited and sabotaged by a stubborn adherence to white supremacy. The gay rights movement of the 70s should have heralded the vision, power, and passion of the members of S.T.A.R. and joined their efforts in coalition building, instead of marginalizing them because they were less palatable to the establishment. All because they were poor, not white, and less “polished” (read: civilized).
And we see the legacy of white supremacist Western colonialism even in our queer digital spaces today. For example, I and many other queer and trans BIPOC before me have been raising the alarm about white supremacy on the fediverse for years. We have been speaking at length about how our issues should be centered in digital activism as well. How has this call to action been received?
True to form, white queer and trans people have been extremely hostile to us, claiming that we are participating in transmisia in our efforts to make the fedi a safer space for everyone. To those people I have this to say: it is impossible for you to truly fight transmisia without divesting from white supremacy, the system that invented and forced transmisia on the world. You who fail to align your activism with the struggles of colonized peoples can only ever be agents of white supremacy and therefore agents of transmisia. Many of you will declare your allyship with the colonized and oppressed communities of color, but your actions prove the lie behind your words. False allyship to the colonized and oppressed is just another white supremacist and transmisic tool of destruction.
To close, I will be blunt and specific. For all of you who claim that Ro or WelshPixie are puppetmasters and that those of us working in solidarity with them are members of a cult or are deluded by their manipulations, I have this to say:
You do not have my permission to deny my fucking agency any longer. I am fully capable of speaking for myself as a Black nonbinary transfeminine person. I do not need you or anyone else to tell me how to think or what to believe. I have read the history and I can see the truth, plain as the nose on my face. Furthermore, it is my opinion that any person who examines the facts and is able to renounce their allegiance to white supremacy and gender binarism will believe as I do.
Shame on you for denying my agency! Shame on you for betraying your queer and trans comrades of color with your white supremacist and transmisic ways! Shame on you for participating in a mass disinformation and harassment campaign against those of us FIGHTING to be a part of this community!
Reading the history of colonialism, white supremacy, gender binarism and the gay rights movement and looking at what’s going on now, I have one question.
Happy #PrideMonth 🏳️🌈
Spotlight on the troubled genius that was Jeffrey Catherine Jones (1944-2011). Some treasures of mine along with an excellent biography and more artwork at the link.