Six on History: LBGTQ History
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1) Spectrum Analysis, by Joey Alison Sayers The NIB
VATICAN CITY — "The Vatican has expressed concerns to the Italian government about a gay rights bill working its way through Parliament, prompting cries on Tuesday of church interference from liberal politicians, gestures of gratitude from conservatives and renewed tensions in the historically complicated relationship of neighboring governments that both call Rome home.
The Vatican confirmed Tuesday morning that the Holy See’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, hand delivered a letter at a Vatican event last week to the Italian ambassador to the Holy See expressing deep reservations about the bill.
Advocates for the legislation say it offers overdue protections to L.G.B.T. Italians from violence and discrimination. But the Vatican said on Tuesday that the bill infringed upon guaranteed religious liberties, and risked exposing the church’s core beliefs, such as limiting the priesthood to men, or only recognizing marriage between a man and a woman, to charges of criminal discrimination.
repositioned; after snack, the older, all-day boys—who tore off,
one by one, the turtles’ shells, a hippo’s quiet heft, and fed
the bashful ones their heads—huddled around their stockpile of
letters and laid out a dirty word that made the other kids
giggle or gasp and Miss Margaret tap the backs of their hands with
the yellow wooden yardstick. I couldn’t read yet.
I wouldn’t talk, either;
my language was the felt
flowers in the clear plastic tub, at the back table by the window, which
looked out at the slide, glistening like a tongue in
the brash noon light. An older boy stole
my poppy, so I assembled a pansy, pre-cut
by Miss Margaret at her house after school. I imagined her
pouring over a private abundance
of patterned scissors for the jaggedness of a lily’s leaf, then the sturdy
kitchen shears for a pile of rose petals. Years later, she’d return beneath
the tangled top sheet of dreams, and before I could smooth
the intrusion in me, a muscle-drenched arm—veins like a textbook’s
anatomical orchid, dense hair
like my father had—guided her two fingers farther
into the scissor’s doubled gape—
Blistering then in the fully-bloomed heat,
the swings seemed to rock, but within themselves, the way
a lightbulb, untouched for years, holds a spasm
in its tungsten, a self-possessed momentum, awaiting fingers
on the switch. A group of girls, that day, trudged over,
at Miss Margaret’s insistence, barrettes wincing above their ears,
the button I’d cut from my best Sunday dress a makeshift bud
atop a glue glob smear. They asked me if I wanted
to play house. I set my pink felt down.
I didn’t know I could be the father, so
I said I’d be the dog. They named me Princess. One girl put on
an apron, white plastic pearls. Two others, fabric dolls in hand,
the daughters. One adhered
a costume mustache and a voice
absurdly low. We arranged the mats by color for the rooms in our
make-believe home. I played my part; I laid in the yard,
on the green pieces, the letters, an F, an A. My job, I’d decided, was not
to bound into the room, pretend-panting at my family’s feet,
with the whimper
dogs give when they want to be loved, but—
watching Miss Margaret tend to the bullies, our tiny table set,
the family complete, curled up in
my own constant obstinate heat—to guard my made-up post,
on the bladeless lawn, alone, even if anyone called my name."
About This Poem
“This poem began, as queer adulthood can begin, by reanimating the play intuited in childhood. What populates my playroom? This speaker’s lyric preoccupation is not identity but privacy, their tension between interiority and interaction, their resistance stemming not from shame but from a self-possession that, through the “quiet heft” of its observation, participates. The felt flowers are, after all, present and available in their clear container. Privacy, the poem taught me, does not preclude the world.”
—Noah Baldino
" ... I'm far from the only Black person to be disillusioned by mainstream Pride celebrations. Jaelynn Scott, executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, an organization based in Tacoma, Washington, which provides free and low-cost legal services to marginalized communities, tells Mic that Pride had issues with overwhelmingly whiteness even when she came out in the mid-90's. Because of that, Scott says, "Pride never really resonated with me growing up."
"In Mississippi, we really didn't come out. We weren't doing the rainbow flags. That wasn't the way we celebrated. We celebrated at Splash Houston and other specifically Black queer events," Scott explains. That disconnect didn't only stem from Pride consistently centering the experiences of white, cis gay men. As Scott says, "Pride didn't have meaning to me because I also didn't know the history."
Let mainstream events today tell it and Pride is brought to you by AT&T, Comcast, Walmart, and other corporations that are quick to slap a rainbow over their logo while donating to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians. The multi-day resistance against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York City that launched the modern gay rights movement as we know it — including Pride — is ignored. After all, acknowledging the Stonewall Riots, and Pride's origins as a response to police brutality, certainly wouldn't help in ongoing efforts to make queerness more palatable to the mainstream.
It's hard to bury history forever, though. The Stonewall Riots took place relatively recently, in 1969. Before her death, Marsha P. Johnson, a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) alongside Sylvia Rivera, often spoke about her involvement in the riots. Through her legacy and the legacy of the other people who made a stand at Stonewall 50 years ago, many LGBTQ+ people of color have taken up the rallying cry that "the first Pride was a riot." It's not only a protest maxim against mainstream Pride's exclusionary practices, but it helps people of color forge connections with a celebration that can sometimes feel like it's not welcoming them.
"After I learned the history that Black trans women and Latinx trans women were the start of Pride and kept the movement going, I've reclaimed Pride for myself," Scott says. 'I think as an organization and a community ... that's what we've been doing: a constant sort of reclaiming Pride for us, and moving away from this white gay corporate pride.' ... "
" ... But Chappelle took it a step further: “I’m jealous. I’m not the only Black person that feels this way,” he said. “We Blacks, we look at the gay community and we go, ‘God damn it! Look how well that movement is going!’ And we’ve been trapped in this predicament for hundreds of years. How the f— are you making that kind of progress?”
The flaw here is that despite Chappelle claiming that he’s talking to the white community, he failed to offer any context to race and sexuality — in particular, how the Black community is grappling with acceptance.
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In The Closer, Chappelle recounts a story about having the cops called on him by a gay white man in Texas. “And this, the thing that I’m describing, is a major issue that I have with that community,” he said. “Gay people are minorities — until they need to be white again.”
Chappelle is addressing white people, but he does very little to protect the queer and transgender Black men and Black women who live in both worlds and fight both fights. At The Closer’s conclusion, Chappelle pleads for the LGBTQ community to stop “punching down” on his people. “Punching down,” in essence, is what Chappelle has been doing the last several years to a community that includes people who look like him. Even if they aren’t his intended targets, that’s nearly unforgivable to a man who says he fights for Black folks every day. ... "
