Who is getting left out of this conversation?
Why is this how we talk about queerness over and over and over again?
Dean Spade of the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project writes about
the erasure of queer people of color in the rhetoric of the passing of Prop 8 in California. Erasure of queer people of color is alive and well in queer movements.
At the "Campus Progress" national conference this summer in Washington DC I attended a panel on the future of the civil rights movement and there was a speaker on the panel from the
Human Rights Campaign. She spoke about how young people are so much more accepting of queer people because of the wide spread images of queer people in the media. This person did not talk about which queer people were being highlighted. She did not talk about the reality that white queer celebrities are taken as the norm of what it means to be queer and that the HRC feeds into those stereotypes. She cited
Ellen Degeneres as such a strong positive image of what it means to be queer and in the spotlight. Regardless of how you feel about the talk show host it spoke volumes to a long standing critique of the HRC as being a nationally listened to and government respected voice representing a very limited reality of what it means to be queer. I was fuming by the end of the panel and talked to her about this critique of the HRC. (don't buy it about the hrc? check out
this) She was well aware and agreed with a great deal of it but failed to understand that her examples and assumptions that all publicity is good publicity was really damning and left people out.
There's so much to be done before I'd be comfortable with slapping one of those blue and yellow equal signs on my car.
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