The debate and discussion around Pride Hamilton continues, with an LGBTQ+ community debrief scheduled for Wednesday night to help people process the attack on Pride and its aftermath, as well as discuss goals for going forward; because of that the event is a private one for LGBTQ+ people in general (and their allies who were present at Pride) and is being billed as a safe space… insofar as any space is safe for our community these days. One of the things we keep hearing from LGBTQ+ people in the Hamilton is a sense of fear and isolation that has developed because of the attacks on Pride and the ongoing failure — I would go so far as to say refusal — of the police and city hall to address the continued flood of hate crimes in the city of Hamilton. This is what makes community events like debriefs so important as a tool of connection and healing; while attending a rally can be empowering, marching around and waving signs isn’t the complete package when it comes to dealing with trauma.
There’s been some concern about the wording around Wednesday’s event, in that it excludes straight people — even straight allies — unless they’re accompanying an LGBTQ+ person. I understand the intention of the organizers, though: they want to make sure that the queer community gets the opportunity to focus on ourselves in a safe space. It’s not that the LGBTQ+ community doesn’t value the support of straight allies… but sometimes you’ve just got to take care of yourself. There’s a certain aspect of performance that has to be done in front of outsiders, and that can change the dynamic in such a way that real healing is de-emphasized in favour of presenting a strong front. For the same reason — and despite some grumbling — the debrief won’t be streamed or recorded for the benefit of those who can’t physically be present.
As I said, I understand why the decision has been made to limit access to this particular debrief, and while I acknowledge the concerns about able-ism and the disappointment of those who can’t make it, I support the intentions of the organizers because dear gods does the LGBTQ+ community in Hamilton need some healing, and they want to make sure this is a space to do that.
Despite that, I won’t be attending the debrief… largely for the reason that I live about 40 minutes outside the city. Getting into Hamilton is a whole-afternoon prospect for me, so I tend not to do it more than a couple of times a month. Gas is expensive and frankly every road between here and there is torn up during the summer months anyway (seriously – the direct route, 58 to 406 to QEW is outright closed at the QEW Toronto-bound ramps, so you’re into a mess of surface-street detours, many of them also under construction as well.)
But I do consider myself a part of the Hamilton/Niagara LGBTQ+ community. Hamilton is the nearest large city to me (if you exclude Buffalo, because an international border is a pretty solid boundary.) I try to contribute online. I attend rallies at City Hall. I shop in Hamilton stores. I follow queer events in the city. If I wanted to, I consider that I have every right to attend that meeting.
Which is why I was so incredibly pissed off at an exchange I had with another member of a Hamilton LGBTQ+ facebook group earlier this week. The debate started when someone complained that they were “tired of hearing about Hamilton Pride” and thought we should “move on.” During the lively discussion which followed, another group member (whom I suspect from their FB profile was a troll) tried to derail and shut down the discussion with pro-police and anti-activist statements. When I called them on it, they messaged me directly, threatening to expose me as a “fake queer” who was “not part of the community.” Not, it became clear, because I lived well out of town but because one of the public photos on my Facebook profile is a wedding photo of me and my partner. My female partner. I couldn’t be a member of the LGBTQ+ community because my spouse is of a different gender than I am.
Yeah, I loved having a fake-account troll trying to blackmail me with the dark and terrible secret that I’ve openly posted on my public internet profile. So I asked them if they knew what the “B” in “LGBTQ+” stood for, and the conversation went downhill from there. Blocking and a report to the group admin swiftly ensued.
So, for the record (and again) I am bisexual. For me the person matters, not what genitals they have. I have had relationships with male, female and transgendered partners in the past. The fact that I am in a long-term monogamous relationship with my current spouse not changed that fact and will never change that fact. One of the earliest serious discussions in our relationship was about my sexuality; she is accepting and supportive of that aspect of me (of course, if she hadn’t been our relationship would have been a lot shorter.)
This is an extremely important thing to understand about me: I am not married to a wonderful woman; I am married to a wonderful person who happens to identify as female. I want to spend the rest of my life with that person; I want to make a home, raise a family and grow old with this one person who completes and complements me so perfectly. We are partners, in every sense of the word, and the particular configuration of my partner’s chromosomes and/or genitalia are completely irrelevant to our hopes, dreams and future plans and are frankly nobody’s goddamn business but our own.
But it pisses me off to no end when someone tries to play gatekeeper because I don’t fit their idea of what an LGBTQ+ person looks like (*cough* Fred Eisenberger, *cough*). And yeah, that was a troll, so they were acting in bad faith from the get-go, but it’s not the first time I’ve been subject to that sort of gatekeeping and it won’t be the last.
I’ve mentioned bi exclusion before on this blog, and it’s a real problem in the LGBTQ+ community. My own LGBTQ identity is both complicated and painfully stereotypical. I was raised in a devout Catholic family, in the Catholic school system, and I didn’t know anything about anything when it came to queer issues. I never even heard the word “bisexual” until my senior year. My teen years were stunted by a painful and self-conscious awareness that I was different from the other boys because they were interested in girls, and I was interested in them… although I was also interested in girls, hence some confusion which led to a lot of self-defeating (and retrospectively embarrassing) behaviour. When I got to college, I figured I was gay and got involved in the first same-sex relationship I could find (an emotionally and physically abusive serial predator, of course). Later I got involved with women, and then again with a man, and then with a trans-man, and so on… and so my understanding evolved. Straight man, gay man, bi-man. (I’m leaving aside the whole pan- vs bi- debate, for simplicity’s sake.)
Dealing with bi erasure and bi-phobia has been a theme throughout my adult life — not just from straight people (although I’ve dealt with that, of course) but also from within the LGBTQ+ community. I was outed (against my will) as a gay man in college by another gay student. During my university years I came out (again) as a bisexual man when I got involved in student activism, and even became one of the coordinators for our on-campus LGBTQ+ student group. I faced a lot of resistance from inside the LGBTQ+ community because I was a bi-identified man, which cumulated in a campaign of attempted character assassination and a small group of gay-identified men actively trying to sabotage the organization’s efforts because I was running it. (Sadly, my year as coordinator ended up being focused largely on keeping the group treading water rather than getting anything useful accomplished, which has been a lasting regret.)
That sort of malicious gatekeeping is, unfortunately, one of the great and frustrating pitfalls of the queer community. Just as offensive as bi erasure is the recent wave of TERF bullshit that swept through the community — TERF being an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”, a self-identified minority withing of the feminist movement which is transphobic and rejects trans women from feminist spaces. A similar term is “SWERF”, sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. (Apparently TERFs and SWERFs object to being called that, but I’ve got little sympathy for them: I’m honestly not clear how you’ve got the gonads to identify as a feminist if you’re going to be anti-trans and anti-sex-worker.) I’ve had too many trans (and for that matter, sex-worker) friends to arbitrarily exclude certain people from the community simply because they don’t fit someone’s opinion as a valid part of the community.
Which brings me back around to the Hamilton situation. There’s a division with in the LGBTQ+ community, largely between white middle-class lesbians and gays who are worried about respectability politics, and the rollicking, brawling, unapologetically activist trans- and gender-diverse anarchist queers who’ve been organizing and defending the community. Mayor Eisenburger ignored the street-level queers and then appointed his own “respectable” advisors, then decried the activists as not being part of the community.
Okay, yes, I know it’s not quite as simple as that; I’m trying to make a rhetorical point, here: that this is another form of malicious gatekeeping, the powerful defining what our community must look like in order to be invited to the table.
Gatekeeping doesn’t necessarily have to be malicious; what Hamilton Pride is trying to do with its debrief is a prime example of positive gatekeeping; of trying to preserve a space for the community to do it’s own work. But a lot of gatekeeping is malicious: What Mayor Eisenberger is doing with his gatekeeping is trying to redefine the LGBTQ+ community into a more convenient and compliant one by excluding the noisy and non-compliant as “not part of the community.” Trans- and bi-exclusion from within the community is also malicious because it’s an attempt to preserving some sort of bullshit exclusionary vision of what “queer” actually means.
No one else gets to define me as queer. No one gets to tell me whether or not I’m part of the LGBTQ+ community because of my orientation… in the same way that nobody gets to tell me whether or not I’m part of any community because of my orientation.
I’m a large, bearded, outdoorsy cis-male who drinks whiskey and smokes cigars and carries a multitool and does leatherworking as a hobby and who likes flannel shirts and who is married to a beautiful and courageous person who just happens to be a woman. I will admit that at first glance I look super hetero-normative. But I am not straight. I am part of the LGBTQ+ community and proudly, defiantly queer.
And nobody, nobody, gets to define me but me.
