Against Equality

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

So how do we build an LGBT movement? Despite the enormous turnout at pride parades we don't really have one.

For a while people rallied for the same-sex marriage fight, but if Facebook posts are any indication, a big minority was relieved when the "reactionary" fight for gay marriage in California went bust. "Now we can get back to more important issues."

How do we reconcile a fractured community? Can we? In the absence of a charismatic leader like Martin Luther King, we need to reach beyond disputed goals towards shared ideals.

Liberty, or rather, liberation, used to be our battle cry. Today, mainstream organizers focus almost all their attention on equality. There's Equality Arizona, Immigration Equality, and even the Dallas Principles advocating not just Equality but Dignity.

Sometimes equality is supposed to mean full civil rights for LGBT people, from marriage to military service. Sometimes it's a moral assertion, aiming to establish that we're as good and valuable as anybody else. Then there's the social component to declarations of equality -- we really are the same as you despite who we sleep with. We're homeowners, parents, tax-payers eager to get married.

All of those definitions of equality fall short both as practical goals, and overarching ideals.

Just in terms of social change, it's shortsighted to see legal equality as an end in itself. African American history teaches us that it's only a stepping stone and tool. Slavery was outlawed, separate but equal accommodations were removed from the books. Finally, heterosexual black folks could marry who they wanted, even whites. But even after all those laws changed, the fight's not over. There's an African American in the White House, but no real racial justice. Is the average black child free to cast a thought in any direction? Even walk down any street?

Which is why Patrick Henry did not cry, "Give me equal representation under colonial tax laws and a seat at the master's table, or give me death." He demanded liberty, which supercedes all the rest as a political end.

Metaphysical demands for equality, aiming to establish our basic worth as humans, create a whole new set of problems. The main one is that asking for "equality," even demanding it, is entirely counterproductive. It implies we weren't born with it and diminishes us. It turns us into beggars in front of the rich, whether we ask for equality hat in hand, or brick in fist.

If you don't know it, the gatekeepers of power certainly do. They revel in the pleasure of bestowing crumbs of rights, then patting our heads as if we were not disinherited equals, but a strange breed of dogs. (See almost every pandering, self-congratulatory word of Obama's June 29th speech for proof).

Which raises the question, in our quest for equality, just what and who are we trying to be equal to? The word itself is burdened by the idea of sameness, a mathematical equivalence incompatible with our roots of liberation. Working towards it -- as a primary goal -- seems to actually encourage conformity, enforce it, even. I feel increasingly I should wear pearls when I protest. Pop a baby and join a church to prove that I'm just the same as everybody else, except for the small matter of who I screw.

This push for social equivalence ignores those of us who fled our natal world, not just for queer self-preservation, but at a kind of horror at the whole stifling heterosexual world, the petrified functions of mothers and fathers, the extension of their roles in the neighborhood, church, community, and school where they strangle each other into a likeminded homogeneity that targets artists as much as dykes.

Which is why I argue, once again, that we need to go further if we want a real movement. Beyond laws to justice. Beyond equality to liberty in every facet of our lives, rejecting the limitations of equality that bind and restrain everyone of us.

When queers can finally retire from the battlefield, hets can, too. People can marry. Or not. Go to church. Or not. Differences should not be either "tolerated," or celebrated, but expected and enjoyed as a part of the human condition. You don't walk like a man or a woman but yourself. You can sleep on the right side or the left. Pursue your life. Aspire. Dream. What a world if kids could even move freely through space.

For that, only a hunger for liberation is enough. Something no one can legislate or award.

As French dyke musician Nadia Boulanger (1887 – 1979) said, "Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance."

Queers all know something about that.

Imagining Equality for Women and Queers

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I thought I could imagine equality, but not really. As an activist, I just push forward in the dark with no idea towards what. I got a glimpse Sunday when I tuned in to one of France's CNN-like channels just in time to catch a Latin American map and a voice talking about which country gave which rights to queers. Colombia's High Court had just ruled that same-sex couples had to be given the same rights as heterosexual ones in common-law relationships.

After answering a couple questions from the anchor about Argentina and Brazil, the commentator said, "But that's yesterday's news. Today, Iceland just got a lesbian prime minister. Granted, they're a small country of just 300,000 people. But still. The first openly gay head of state in the world."

I was pleasantly shocked. A whole gay segment on TV. And a gay commentator to boot smiling away as they flashed the photo of Johanna Sigurdardottir, the most popular politician in Iceland, and described how she was supposed to save the place from financial ruin. I punched my girlfriend in the arm. "They're doing a gay segment of the news. Are you listening? And the commentator's a fag."

Even after the anchor moved on to something else, I kept muttering, "A gay segment. Imagine that. A gay segment." Including background and context as naturally as they would for a report on developments in Malaysia or Taiwan. Or for that matter the auto industry.

Usually, if LGBT people make the news, it's as protestors, or victims. We're always the fringe, always the beggars on the outside looking in, no matter how "mainstream" our spokespeople look. In the U.S., especially, news producers (like organizers of inaugurations) then give air time to bigots so they can indulge in a false sense of balanced coverage and remind us just how much we're hated.

Which was why it was so particularly moving to hear the matter-of-fact description of Johanna Sigurdardottir's rise from union activist at IcelandAir to regular politics. No apologia for her queerness. No pats on the bottom for the white-haired dame.

It made me happy for a while, then depressed. God, I'm tired of homophobia. I'm tired of misogyny. I'm tired of promises of change then more of the same, even in Obama's stimulus package. When it isn't giving bankers free dough, it's all about rewards for dickholders. Even though women make up almost half of the workforce, Obama's projects primarily create jobs in extremely male fields like "green" industries, technology, construction, and mining where the few women that manage to survive have to fight for equal pay.

The programs to bring women into traditionally male jobs have had little success though their rate might improve now that it's easier for female employees to sue (thanks to Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.)

Trying to justify the disparity, the January release from the Obama administration used old data indicating women suffered less from unemployment during downturns. Unfortunately, August numbers showed women hitting unemployment as often men.

In fact, the National Women's Law Center crunched the numbers and found adult women's unemployment rising almost three times as fast as men's. "While the unemployment rate for men rose from 5.3 percent to 5.6 percent between July and August (a 5.7% increase), the unemployment rate for women jumped from 4.6 percent to 5.3 percent – a 15 percent increase in one month." Subcategories of black women and women supporting families were much harder hit.

Adding insult to injury to poor women, Obama and the Democrats dumped a measure from the stimulus package that would have allowed Medicaid coverage of family planning services, which includes birth control, but also a lot of basic gynecological services, like pap smears.

A New York Times editorial reports that the measure would have provided coverage to 2.3 million women by 2014 and saved $200 million over five years. Also, "the Medicaid family planning provision would reduce the number of abortions by helping an estimated half-million women avoid unplanned pregnancy, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute."

The editorial blamed the GOP for their obstructionist politics and lack of commitment to women's rights and health. I blame Obama and the Democrats who already signaled in the presidential campaign that women's rights were a commitment of convenience. If it is convenient, they're committed. If not, not.

For instance, when all Obama had to do was sign a paper to revoke the gag rule forbidding U.S. funding of international programs that included family planning services -- he did. But when the similar Medicaid provision in the stimulus plan required a vote, traded favors and a backbone, women's interests were summarily dumped.

I'd likewise be surprised to see even a partial repeal of DOMA before an Angeln Saddleback pig takes to the sky.