WHEN CONSERVATIVES CLAIM THAT BEING PRO-STRAIGHT IS DIFFERENT FROM BEING ANTI-GAY
Quick Hit: Guernica interviews Ayana Mathis
Guernica has just published a great interview with Ayana Mathis, who has just published her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, to great popular and critical success. The whole transcript is worth the read, but my favorite parts were Mathis’s descriptions of writing minority characters without burdening them with representation. She explains:
My book has a pre–civil rights setting with a post–civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called “The Black Experience,” though undoubtedly there was one once. In the book I have a character called Lawrence say that he doesn’t want Hattie to be just another downtrodden black woman, and I think what he’s getting at with that statement is the idea of individuation. There’s a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black. Hattie is a nuanced character. She makes terrible mistakes, she is prone to longing and yearning and whimsy. She is also a sexual being. I had hoped to write a black female matriarch who wasn’t reduced to her iron will or her capacity to endure hardship. This is a caricature, and I was writing against that kind of thing…
As for Floyd, he’s certainly a very important character in the book. I couldn’t imagine a book with this many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write him as a person, not just a gay person. I found his chapter one of the most difficult to write because I seemed to be tempted to write some kind of coming out story. Many people have done that far better than I ever could, and I found I was relying on reductive tropes—what I was producing was boring, predictable. I had to think about the fact that first and foremost Floyd was a guy, a guy away from home for the first time. I had to resist the temptation to define him as gay. I had to tell his particular experience in a very particular set of circumstances.
You can (and should) read the interview here.
Acceptance is not the goal
Gallup just released the results of its annual poll surveying Americans’ moral views on a number of hot topics, from adultery to polygamy to birth control. In general, respondents seem to have grown more progressive. According to Gallup, 59% of Americans believe gay and lesbian relationships are “morally acceptable,” up from 40% in 2001, when the annual questionnaire was first administered. Sixty-three percent of 2013 respondents are alright with teens having sex, compared to 32% 12 years ago. While only 45% of those polled in ’01 “personally believe[d] that in general it is morally acceptable” to have a baby out of marriage, now 60% do. Birth control got the “meh, ok” from 91%.
This is good news. In a country where kids are literally bullied to death for their sexualities, where a gay man was shot down last weekend in New York, where even those who survive often face inexcusable discrimination, the fact that an additional fifth of the country now think the queers shouldn’t all burn in hell is a big deal. A growing acceptance of teen sexuality, I hope, will allow for substantive, positive sex education. Unmarried mothers are unsupported by their government and, too often, their neighbors, so increased tolerance has real, positive effects on real women’s lives.
With that being said, I don’t like the question.
Obviously, if the choices are Americans finding queer relationships “morally acceptable” or “morally wrong”–as Gallup poses the options–I’d rather the former. But the poll’s frame is conservative and stigmatizing, regardless of the outcome. In choosing the categories and asking respondents to deliver ethical verdicts, Gallup reinforces the dangerous power dynamics of the tolerant and the tolerated, the normal and the deviant. Gallup’s choice to ask whether same-sex relationships, but not opposite-sex relationships, are morally acceptable may be explained as a reflection of current debate and law–hetero couples allowed to marry each in every state–but the question still reinforces the division between the default sexuality we will never doubt and the mutant forms whose moral acceptability must be determined.
Besides, I don’t think moral acceptability should be our goal. Let’s aim instead for celebration. This isn’t me griping that we haven’t progressed as far as I’d like because the standard Gallup tested and celebration are fundamentally different forms of engagement. Acceptance admits X behavior or identity isn’t bad. Celebration declares that it’s good. The tolerant are fine that there are gays in the neighborhood, while the celebratory are glad the world is queer. We find positive value where Gallup probes acceptability. We don’t think liberation is found in assimilation.
Behold the spectacle that is poverty! NYC bus tour offers the “ghetto” as an attraction
The Black Youth Project reported that a bus tour in New York City called Real Bronx Tours was apparently offering its patrons the opportunity to see what what a “real ghetto” looks like. They ride through the Bronx, a New York borough that is heavily populated with poor people of color, making fun of residents and wowing their audience with stories about how dangerous the neighborhood is.
This is obviously problematic in more ways than one. On the surface level, it doesn’t seem to be a service worth its money. According to someone on the tour:
“At one point during the tour, Battaglia [the tour guide] allegedly told the tourists in front of pantry line, ‘I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,’ Battaglia told the tourists. ‘We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.’”
It’s obvious that they have little to no knowledge about the areas that you are guiding people on a tour of if 1. They aren’t able to identify a food pantry that they pass every week and 2. They aren’t able to conclude that a building that has people entering without food leaving with carts full of it is a food pantry. I’m just not sure how qualified they are for this job.
And then there’s the fact that they are exploiting poor communities for a profit, all the while perpetuating a pathology of poor. According to the patron, Battaglia also made comments about St. Mary’s Park being the right neighborhood to be in if someone wanted to die. These comments not only brazenly display the inherent class privilege of Battaglia and the tour bus patrons, but also shows a blatant disregard for the matrix of oppression that creates places like the Bronx.
In my opinion, an effective tour of the area would talk about the racist, capitalist systems that leave places like the Bronx poor and dangerous (for the actual residents more so than someone cruising by on a tour bus). But it would also draw attention to the community spirit, the history and lasting influence of hip hop, and readily identify spaces like the local food pantry for its service to the community.
Daily Feminist Cheat Sheet
Gabrielle Molina
Queens middle school student Gabrielle Molina hanged herself after months of gendered bullying.
The repercussions of speaking up about sexual violence.
Best frenemies forever! BGD tackles Femme of Color Competition.
There’s nothing funny about the Girls porn parody.
Chief Keef threatens to “smack the shit” out of Katy Perry… so Katy Perry apologizes for “offending” him.
Support young women of color initiatives.
“The truth about trolls is that they are just sad people with nothing to contribute.”
The House hearing on a 20-week abortion ban is farcical.
Despite the rumors that millenials are just a bunch of lazy egotists, U.S. student activists are on fire.
100 questions and answers about Indian Americans.
The Rumpus interviews the “Ivy League Pornographer.”
Bringing back Wonder Woman.
Last but not least: Congratulations, Zerlina, for graduating from law school!