a l'allure garconniere

sheresists:

yellowbeesteward:

“Dan Savage recently launched the It Gets Better Project, a youtube testimonial campaign designed to remind queer teens that it gets better after high school. Savage and those joining the project attempt to address the uptick or at least an alarming concentration of teen suicides over their actual or perceived sexuality by reminding queer youth that high school ends and the bullying stops; you’ll move to an urban gay enclave, meet the man of your dreams, and have a wonderful, sparkly, magical life. Maybe even get married, because, you know that’s what all the other gays are doing.

I want to get one thing clear right out of the bat:

I think that the It Gets Better Project at its core is a good idea. Queer teens need to hear from their peers and their forebears that there is indeed hope. That life is indeed worthwhile and that high school is not, in fact, the end of the world.

What I question is this seeming meta-narrative that many in the gay mainstream are pushing: Get out of high school; flee your biggoted small town and move to an urban gay enclave; join the gay community as a card carrying member of the League of Fashionable Culture Generators; Enlightened, Accepting Queers versus Ignorant, Biggoted Straights; Urban versus Rural; Us versus Them.

It’s this kind of self-congratulatory back-patting that the gay community is so want to do that I question: the notion that the gay community has it all figured out; that gay folk are so morally, culturally, and politically superior to the backwater, cousin-marrying, neanderthals of small town America; that once you leave high school and become a full member of the gay community, you will be accepted with open arms and you too will get to go out dancing every night and gossip about your latest fling over mimosas at Sunday brunch.

I fear that the way in which people are presenting the gay narrative to these impressionable teens is this sense that their lives will inevitably improve. That’s just not true. They can get better, definitely. But we have to be real and transparent about the gay community and its problems.

It sure is easy for Dan Savage to talk about how wonderful his life turned out, because hey… it kind of did. Lucrative book and advice column deals under his belt, a legion of faithful fans, and a wicked hot husband, to boot. Am I criticizing Dan for his charmed life? Absolutely not. Congratulations are in order. He achieved the highly unlikely. I’m genuinely really, really happy for him. He deserves it. We all deserve a great life.

But the fact of the matter is that not everyone gets it. Yes, that’s right… even if you’re gay and have endured all kinds of unspeakable wrongs, the magical vending machine in the sky called karma doesn’t actually keep a running balance of good things owed to you. You have to fight for it. Things don’t always work out. They can, but you have to fight for it. You have to know what you want and be willing to fight tooth and nail for it.

For example, I had a typically unfortunate gay experience growing up. I was teased through middle and high school for being gay. I angsted over the conflict between my faith and my sexuality. I was terrified of what my conservative Christian family would do if they discovered my queerness. I suppressed my sexuality, my emotions, my struggles. I contemplated suicide, or rather I contemplated the possibility of never being born (because suicide was a sin… see how screwed up I was?). And part of what brought me out of my self-imposed death spiral and helped me come out was, in fact, Dan Savage and his advice columns. Or at least him and the promise of urban gay nirvana I was promised through shows like Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

I kept telling myself that mantra which Dan is now preaching: It Gets Better. It Gets Better. Did it get better? Yes and no. My college experience was actually probably worse than high school, at least on the homophobia front. In high school I only got the teasing, name calling, and rumors behind my back; but college brought me in intimate familiarity with harassment, threats to life, physical violence, same-sex rape and institutional dispassion for my situation.

And so I reasoned that of course college didn’t bring the gay nirvana I was promised. I went to a small liberal arts college in the South. What could I expect? So my spare time and summers were spent interning at queer organizations, becoming deeply involved in queer politics at school, etc. I majored in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, I interned with the Human Rights Campaign— I was building my life towards that gay promise… but only to find that the gay community is not perfect and has its own problems.

The gay community’s problems surrounding race and gender became abundantly evident to me as queer men of color, especially feminine queer men of color get pushed to the fringes of gay life. I was shocked by the openly racist comments that were slung by gay activists against the African American community over a perceived bias which allegedly led to the passage of Proposition 8 (this has been disproved, just for the record). Even today, in the aftermath of Tyler Clementi’s tragic death, I have been shocked by anti-Asian and anti-South-Asian comments and insinuations on how Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei’s Asian background could have contributed to the tragic circumstances. I’ve documented on Bilerico my very personal struggle with the gay community, its sexual racism, and its effects both personally and sociologically.

The gay promise failed me. I went from being ostracized by my straight classmates in high school to being ostracized by many white gay men in an urban gay enclave.

Cry me a river, Amy Tan.

And what has given me hope? I came to find a queer Asian community service organization that allowed me to find a safe space to commune with, network, befriend, and organize with other queer Asian men. It has become clear to me that the gay promise which Dan Savage espouses only applies to some people. And that if it doesn’t apply to you, you have to make your own space.

So what are the takeaways from all this?

Yes, the It Gets Better Project is a great thing. We need to be reaching out to queer youth to instill in them a sense of hope and knowledge that “there is a place for us,” to quote Dan Savage’s West Side Story reference. But we also have to be aware and critical of the very real problems and deficiencies the current gay community has in its inability to make that gay promise accessible to everyone who falls under the rainbow banner.

So does it get better?

It can.” Filed by: Jason Tseng October 3, 2010 11:30 AM

Ugh, I hate that. As minorities (though I cannot speak specifically as a gay man), we are taught that if we work hard enough and suffer through some tough times, that we can still follow the ‘American Dream.’ It’s pure and utter bullshit that everyone will be granted the same opportunities and it’s invalidating as hell for those of us who don’t really ever see it getting better. Did we just fail to show ‘them’ that we’re just as good as they are? Is it our own damn fault?And, do we really want think that ‘getting better’ means being granted all the same material advantages of capitalism? Also, I’m glad that this article gestures towards the privileged position of Dan Savage. Can he speak as a trans person? Can he speak as a visible minority? Can he speak as a new immigrant? Can he speak as a woman? Can he speak as a person with a disability? Hey guess what, queer folks are all these folks too! And guess what, gay men can be privileged and bigoted too!

bolded emphasis added by me. she resists being amazing yet again. unfortunately i’ve had to stop responding/reading comments on jezebel and other websites that are reacting to the criticisms that have been raised about the it gets better project because i feel like there is this overwhelming White Liberal party going on. commentors all over the place have been like, “wow, you really have to dig deep to find something wrong with this project” or “i thought this would be the one thing that we could all agree on! you guys are just divisive cynics.” here is the one that made me literally say out loud “oh fuck off”:

OH NOES IT DOESN’T INCLUDE ALL TYPES OF EVERYTHING AND DOESN’T ADDRESS EVERY SINGLE NEED AND CONCERN IN THE LGBTQ SPECTRUM!

So what? Get the fuck over yourself, negative nancy. It’s going to help a lot of kids. That’s all that matters.

to top it off, there are at least a dozen “haters gonna hate” comments which infuriate me because they are just so dimissive. excuse me, at least i took to the time to articulate exactly what i think the shortcomings of the project are, and i even avoided going into a long rant about my problems with dan savage in general (as he has been accused of racism, misogyny, biphobia and a whole lot of other issues in the past). the least you could do would be to take my criticisms and the criticisms of others into consideration before completely dismissing them. your privilege is showing.

i’m also pretty bummed freshlycharles took down their original critique video of the project and posted their own it gets better video. i was about to go post a positive comment since they got a flood of negative ones, only to find he had taken it down “thanks” to them. i mean whatever it is their decision but really, what is so bad about calling attention to the drawbacks of this project? and acknowledging there is a lot more work to be done than posting a youtube video to try and help suicidal queer teens? i don’t really see anything that horribly wrong with that!

and finally i am just gonna put it out there: i can’t STAND it when people say “don’t just bitch about it! do something!” hey, sometimes the thing that has instigated the best kind of activist work has been someone just “bitching” about it. some of the best “somethings” i’ve done has been sitting in front of a keyboard and writing an article that ends up being read by thousands of people. you have to acknowledge what the problems are before you can attempt to improve a problem. i mean obviously this depends on the context and issue and all that kind of stuff but i just don’t know when this became a positive statement in feminist communities. i was an “activist” in the traditional sense for years and it was pretty soul-sucking in some ways, and emotionally intense and yeah i’m proud of some of the events and rallies but sometimes i feel much better and more productive behind a keyboard. how many great organizers have i known that have suffered burnouts and have endured shitty years of their lives all because “their community needs them.” your community needs you to take care of yourself, too. not everyone can be an organizer, not everyone can or wants to be out in the streets. that doesn’t mean you have to invalidate any work that is not explicitly activist work. fuck that noise.

(via woc-resist)

seaponies:

(via ateliertovar)

ew. hell yes you should.

this is the worst i’ve seen yet. will respond tomorrow, too angry right now.

nightmarebrunette:

robot-heart-politics:

The problem is that the viewpoint presented is not a universally male viewpoint. It is a universally sexist viewpoint. And if you feel that men can’t express dissatisfaction with their daily routine without also expressing hostility toward their wives or girlfriends, without blaming women for the unsavory aspects of their lives (which, btw, grown men are more than capable of changing), then I think we’ve arrived at an essential problem: you (and many others) think misogyny is normal, universal, and therefore, not controversial.

[…] In my opinion, all viewpoints are NOT acceptable, even where they aren’t explicitly violent or encouraging violence. Racism and sexism are an evil not because they are, in and of themselves, violent, but because: 1) they encourage the wholesale devaluing of human beings not based on individual merit but instead on membership to a group which they have no control over, and 2) by devaluing an entire group of people, you fail to see them as an equal and equally valuable human being—only when a person views another person as inherently less valuable or worthy is violence possible. You don’t commit violence against those you respect or hold in equal estimation to yourself.

Whenever I catch a commercial aired on ESPN or some other presumed male-only programming, I’m not only taken aback by how women are treated but how men are treated. My first thought is not “as a woman, I’m offended” but rather “wow, if I were a man, I would be so offended.” Because advertisers seem to assume men are all profoundly stupid, governed only by interests in food, sex, and cars, and incapable of interacting with women in any positive or even functional way. It’s a pretty uncharitable point of view. (See also that now-old Dockers “there’s always time to be a man” campaign. Because apparently Dockers thinks its consumers are cripplingly insecure about their masculinity and are therefore desperate enough to buy anything that might stave off their sense of worthlessness.)