I hate how we, within our communities, works so hard to police, to judge, and to ultimately tear our own communities apart. Heck, who needs the conservatives and the far right to bring us down, when truly, we are already working as small groups to tear us apart from the inside?
Just the other day, I saw someone posting on how to describe the difference between lesbian and queer. Certainly, this is an important differential for many, although too, there are in fact lesbian queers, and queer lesbians (as well as other permutations). However, their answer was not logical, nor was it simple. However, it did boil down to queers being awesome and aware and political, and lesbians, and I quote “are boring.” I ask you, how is saying “lesbians are boring” helpful to the queer movement? Or the LGBTQ community at all? Certainly yes, SOME lesbians are boring. Some queers are awesome. And sometimes, some of them are reversed.
We paint sub-communities within larger communities with one brush stroke; gay boys like to party, lesbians are boring, queers are too radical, bisexuals don’t know what they want, trans folks are their own entity, Doms are super serious, slaves are flakey, switches are greedy; you name it, we have a full fledge stereotype to go with it. By doing so, we create drama with in and directly next to the very same communities that we are claiming to support, and want to grow and thrive.
When we say things like “lesbians are boring,” how does that make us any better than our political enemies saying that the gays are promiscuous and out to ruin marriage? Or that there is something “unnatural” about being transgender? We are creating a hierarchy of oppression, and working very hard to push away those who are, or may have worked to become our allies. There are so many intersections of identities (what about queer, trans lesbian identified women?) that when we focus on one that just doesn’t see radical or traditional enough and take them down, we are really cutting part of our own rope as well.
It happens in the queer community. It happens in the kink community. It happens in the poly community, in the Tantra community, in the sex education community. Name a smaller, less than mainstream community, and somewhere within it, you’ll see the in fighting, mud slinging and identity bashing. I have no doubt that every single one of us has participated in this at some point. It’s the thing to do.
I call for it to stop. This is just one of the many ways that the mainstream, the oppressors, the majority, whatever you choose to call it, works to keep us down, to keep us unequal, to keep us marginalized. With all of this in fighting, why would they even need to spend the time working to smash us down further when we are doing the job for them and handing them our dismantled and broken communities on a silver platter? We don’t all have the same politics, same identities, same ways we live our lives. However, we do have the power to band together, to say fuck you to the man, and to allow ourselves the change to come together and rise up as united communities. I challenge us to give it a true go, boring folks and all.