Eli Steffen

Creative Consultant, Writer, Performer

Emerald City Queer

by

“These kids, they don’t even want to get married,” Exclaimed James Lecesne with surprise as we met for coffee last January in Seattle, WA.  Lecesne is the founder of the nations first lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) suicide prevention hotline, the Trevor Project.  As is often the case when two queers get together these days, the topic of gay marriage had inevitably come up.  With the recent passage of Referendum 74, legalizing gay marriage in Washington State, this topic seemed particularly relevant.  Over the previous months, Lecesne had traveled around the country talking with many LGBTQ people and was astonished to discover that not everyone shares his belief that the expansion of marriage equality laws around the country is a historic victory for the LGTBTQ movement.

            What Lecesne, and many LGBTQ folks are discovering is a new subculture that has emerged here in Seattle and across the country challenging many of the basic assumptions, practices, and goals of the mainstream LGBTQ movement.  Nowhere is the divide more prevalent than in the opposing views on gay marriage.  Questioning the narrative of gay marriage as the natural next step for LGBTQ rights, this new subculture suggests that marriage equality is at best a distraction and at worst a step backwards for the gay liberation movement.  Calling themselves “Queer”, they are the latest manifestation of a struggle that has been waging within the LGBTQ civil rights movement from its inception. 

            (Note: in this essay I will use the capitalized “Queer” to refer to this particular subculture and will use a lowercase queer [or LGBTQ] as a catch-all phrase referring to anyone who is either not straight or not cis-gendered, meaning someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth.) 

The history of modern queer politics in the US, can be viewed as a struggle between two political strategies and correlating cultural values.  The first was assimilation, which Simon Moritz described in a recent Huffington Post article, What I Learned From Gay Sex: Misogyny and Homophobia:

…60 years ago queer role models fought for the right to exist in public or private. To gain those rights, they used an effective strategy called assimilation, which dictated that queer people look and act as much as possible like straight people.

 

Although this was, in part, a survival tactic, it was also based on a moral belief of many gays and lesbians.  It was argued that LGBTQ cultural and political institutions should fit within straight, mainstream values.  The only difference, assimilations contended, between gay folks and heterosexuals was whom they sleep with. (Early lesbian and gay politics did not account for transgender people, many of whom are straight.)  We can see how this logic would lead to the modern marriage equality movement, which proposes, like straight folks, the highest forms of LGBTQ love should be expressed through the institution of marriage. 

In late June 1969, assimilationist politics were challenged in several nights of violent protest, known as the Stonewall Riots.  This event, and the organizing that followed, marked a drastic divergence from the politics of sameness characteristic of assimilationism.  In part, this was a result of the leaders of the uprising.    The Stonewall Riots were led predominantly by drag queens, sex workers, and butch lesbians, many of who were people of color and who would not have been welcome at early gay or lesbian protests. 

One major shift, was the understanding that distinctly queer cultural practices and spaces existed, were important, and worth fighting for.  LGBTQ people were not just straight people who slept with someone of the same gender, but had distinct ideas about community, gender, culture, and politics.  Furthermore, it was believed that the new gay liberation movement should seek to address many of the social ills that plagued mainstream straight and LGBTQ society a like, such as racism and sexism.

 

In Seattle, On the third Thursday of ever month, you can find the inheritors of this tradition taking their cloths off for money and a new sense of beauty.  Debauchery, a project of Lily Devine Productions, describes itself as “queers stripping for queers in hot, anti-oppressive space, raising money for organizations that serve the queer community.” 

A roommate first brought me to Debauchery a year ago and I was amazed at the diversity of bodies and body parts I saw.  Founded in Oakland in 2005 and started up in Seattle 2 years ago, Debauchery presents sexy performances by queer bodies not commonly describe as beautiful in mainstream LGBTQ or straight culture. 

That all people should be seen as sexy, however their bodies look, is a radical departure from mainstream gay and straight restrictive notions of beauty.  Generally these boil down to being as thin as possible, as white as possible, and as able bodied (lacking any physical disability) as possible. In keeping with assimilationist politics that queer people who be and be attracted to the same this straight be are, most LGBTQ people and media has promoted this idea of sexy.  Shows like Queer as Folk, The L Word, even Will and Grace all feature characters who fit this description. In opposition to this, Debauchery declares that fat, people of color, and disabled folks can be sexy on their own terms.

Expanding on this, Queer culture goes further, rejecting all gender, sexual, and relationship hierarchies common among LGBTQ and straight mainstream cultures.  There are as many genders, sexualities, and desired relationship structures as there are people, believe most Queers, and each one is as legit, loving, and real as any other. The only valid criteria for judging other’s choices within Queer culture are: does someone freely choose it and does it hurt another person?

Within these cultural values, the fight to legalize gay marriage takes a problematic light.  Many Queers argue that the legal institution of marriage is coercive, forcing people into a particular kind of relationship in order to gain necessary benefits and privileges.  For example, people might feel forced to marry someone for medical benefits or hospital visitation rights, without any desire to actually marry that person. 

 

In March 2011, the City of Seattle gave $100,000 grant supporting the formation of Queer Youth Space (QYS).  A year and a half later, the space on 911 E Pike opened it doors.  As a youth-led arts and activist space, QYS seeks to provide a place where young LGBTQ people can empower themselves. 

Although QYS takes the more expansive definition of the word “queer,” referring to anyone either not straight or cis-gendered, it holds many of the same values as the specific Queer subculture.  “Liberation from racism, classism, seixsm… ;  breaking down norms that define our behavior; (and) breaking down hierarchy (sic),” are all stated values and all reflect an alignment of QYS with the basic Queer tenant that people should be supported in living the lives they want. 

However, like Debaucher, QYS recognizes that it is not enough to just say or believe it.  There are institutions and systems that actively prevent people from fully being able to realize the freedom of Queerness.  Racism, classism, and sexism are all examples of systems that restrict people and which QYS challenges through conscientious hiring practices and spaces for specific marginalized populations.  Furthermore, QYS provides a safe space for youth to explore their various identities, normalizing the changeability of gender and sexuality.

            This understanding of fluidity is a central tenant of most Queers’ understanding of sex, gender, and relationship structures and a key criticism of gay marriage.  For, through its coercive use of legal rights and privileges, many of which can only be accessed through marriage (for example, married people are taxed at a significantly lower rate than single folks), it forces people into a relationship structure that is limited in its ability to change overtime.  Marriage is legally between only 2 people and yet there are many straight and queer people who practice some form of polyamory (having multiple sex and/or romantic partners.) Thus marriage restricts their ability to freely choose the life they want to live. 

   

            Queer poetry blew my mind.  In November 2010, I was beginning to come out as trans when another housemate brought me to the Bent Mentor Showcase.  On stage, I watched a procession of the most fabulously fierce LGBTQ people read poems and stories about what it means to survive and thrive outside of the great straight dream.  We all know this fantasy, it is the one where everyone gets married, has two point five kids, a dog, and a white picket fence.  There were tales of hiking the Appalachian Trail in a skirt; accounts of gay bashings and gays bashing back; and poems of love and sex on hot Paris nights when the boys, like the statues, were wet with dew.  Not everyone’s idea of a good night, but I was entranced.  It was all I had ever hoped for for my community and myself.  It was Queer through and through and I loved it.  (Full disclosure, I previously worked for Bent Arts.)

            Bent Arts is the nation’s first queer writing school.  Founded in 2000, by a local Seattle poet, Tara Hardy, Bent seeks to empower all LGBTQ people and to celebrate queer writing.  Taking an expansive view of queerness, Bent is a school for anyone who chooses to identify as “queer.”  In recent years this has come to include straight people who are interested in viewing their sexuality and gender as something more than set in stone. 

            One of the interesting things about Queerness, is its effort to redefine what belongs within the identity and what does not.  Traditionally, in LGBTQ communities, belonging has been based on strict sexual and gender identities.  Men who had sex with men were gay.  Women who had sex with women were lesbian.  Even in older notions of queerness, having sex with someone of the same gender identity was a requirement.  Straights were not welcome.  (Again we must recognize the invisibilizing of trans people in much of mainstream queer culture.) 

            In Queer communities, these restrictions are being redefined.  Values and political beliefs are much more the criteria for acceptance within Queerness.  Straight people who respect the Queer notions of fluid, non-hierarchical sexuality, gender, and relationship structures are welcome. 

            Like many Seattle Queer institutions, Bent seeks to wrestle with power and privilege in society at large and within LGBTQ communities.  In their mission, Bent states a desire:

 

…(To) create a safe space for all artists and encourage underrepresented voices by incorporating social justice and anti-oppression values into our curricula and organizational policies.

 

The openness of Bent’s definition of “queerness” is, in part, a result of this goal.  Historically, because of restrictive definitions of what it meant to be gay or lesbian, many people did not fit into either straight, lesbian or gay community and were forced to fend for themselves or find like mind misfits.  Through using the word “queer”, and endowing it with an expansive definition, “you are if you say you are”, Bent seeks to dismantle much of what has come to be known as “identity policing.”  This is when a person or group attempts to say who can or can’t identify as a particular identity and is generally regarded as poor form in many Queer communities that seek to support all people’s ability to identify as they see fit.            

           

Queer folks are attempting to reimagine what it means to be LGBTQ and straight, for that matter, by recognizing the ways current social norms and legal policies restrict people’s freedom.  Instead, Queers propose a politics and culture that supports people’s ability to choose from the unlimited possibilities of gender, sexuality, and relationship status without fear of prejudice.  The need to assimilate for safety or privileges is understood as antithetical to Queerness.  Legal marriage, with its vast web of legal and economic rights, makes it hard for people to choose other forms of relationship status.  Instead of forcing people fit themselves into mainstream norms and laws, Queers attempt to build politics, cultures, and spaces which leave room for a wide range of identities, while recognizing systems of oppression at play in our society.

 

Circles in Reverse: My Families Experiences of Multi-Generational Healing Work

by

Trigger Warning: In this piece I will be discussing experiences of sexual and physical violence.  Please be warned and take care of yourself.

         A couple of months ago I had two experiences in quick succession, which led me to appreciate the generational healing my family has practice for at least half a century.  Generational healing I would define as physical, emotional, and spiritual practice with the goal of leaving the next generation better equipped to address the hardships of living within capitalism than current or previous generations.  It is when we take anger management classes in order to yell at our kids less; it is when we address our histories of abuse cause we know violence is a cycle we want to stop; it is when we go to therapy to learn about feelings we were always taught to keep berried so we can teach our youth to honor their emotions.  Most, if not all, healing work has implications for the generations to come.  My purpose is not to distinguish between different kinds of healing, but instead to look at the ways that the work I have been able to do has built upon and been made possible by the therapeutic practices my parents engaged in. 

         This is not to say they were perfect parents or completely interrupted the cycles of violence they were raised in.  I can still remember the storms of rage (as I like to call them) my father would fly into, often times for completely ridiculous things (I was once thrown out of our car in winter for farting).   One of my brothers and I were subjected to similar cycles of sexual violence my parents spent so much of their lives working to undue. 

         Sometime around 1988-89, my brother (age 6-7) and I (age 4-5) followed an older boy (age 13-14) from our mosque to a near by park where he molested us.  Some days later I told my older brother about the incident, a clever end-around the older boy’s threats that if we told “our parents” he would beat us up.  What ensued was the hot-mess of sexual violence within tight-knit religious communities.  The older boy was believed to be lacking in “responsibility” and was put in charge of all the other children during our weekly prayers that my brother and I continued to attend.  This was the situation until my family finally moved across the country some two or three years later. (The dates are confused because I do not have direct memory of this incident and the stories I’ve been told vary in timeline.)   

         While watching the Perks of Being a Wallflower, a couple of months ago with a date I was triggered back into the emotional-physical distress of this experience.  Towards the end of the movie, the main character, Charlie (an emotionally troubled high school freshman misfit), is making out with his good friend and secret love, Sam.  During this first-kiss experience for Charlie, Sam rubs his inner thigh triggering memories of molestation that Charlie had not remembered until that moment.  In the ensuing breakdown and recovery we learn that Charlie’s deceased and beloved aunt, molested him as a young boy.

         As a survivor of childhood sexual violence, watching this was a deeply triggering experience for me.  I felt my stomach clench, my consciousness felt pulled up out of my body, and my eyes began to water as my muscles tightened.  I felt like I not only knew what Charlie was feeling, but living it with him.  As someone who does not remember my molestation, I am often triggered by physically intimate moments without forewarning and usually have trouble “turning off the thoughts” (an expression of Charlie’s.)  

         Getting triggered is never fun, being triggered on a date with a new romantic interest is really quite distressing.  However, because of the multi-generational healing work my family and I have done I was able to recognize these feelings for what they were (a trigger response), practice self-grounding exercises, and seek supportive physical contact from my date.  These allowed me to continue the date in an engaged and emotionally present state instead of burying my emotions and pretending to feel something I did not.   

         This is not to say that the triggered state disappeared, in fact the next morning I woke up definitely in emotional distress.  In response I continued to practice healthy behavior made possible by generational healing.  I called my mom, who was able to engage in emotionally comforting dialogue about her child (me) while being reminded of my molest as a child and the harmful affects that has had on my life.  This is not an easy thing to do for a mother, especially at eight in the morning.  However, because of the psychological work she has done she was able to provide this supportive and healing function for me. 

         After our conversation I did some journaling about feeling deep emotional pain and how frustrating it is to be so easily “nocked off’ my game.  Journaling about our emotions and our lives has been in my family at least since my father’s 20’s.  When I was 9 years old, my mother helped me start my first journal, writing down my dreams and discussing their meanings with me.   

         Finally I had a cathartic cry, allowing myself to externalize and acknowledge deeply felt feelings of pain and distress.  Although none of this “cured” me of my emotions, nor does it mean I will not be triggered by similar events in the future, they did allow me to get on with my life in an emotionally “healthy” state. 

         Emotions were made important and worthy of consideration through the hard work of my parents who have been going to therapy and/or engaged in spiritual practice since the 1960’s.  This is not trivial nor is it work that is generally accepted and promoted in mainstream society/culture.  In fact, due to its challenges of traditional power structures and cycles of violence (misogyny, male [domestic] violence, substance abuse to name a few) these are practices that are often much maligned and stigmatized.  Only in the last 10-20 years has going to therapy become a relatively socially acceptable practice (it is still often a sign of “something wrong with you,” evoking shame.)  My ability to even admit my feelings much less have the emotional maturity to dialogue with myself enough to transition from a place of distress to catharsis is a direct result of my parents’ self-healing efforts.

 

The second event took place a few weeks later.  That morning I was on my way to a strategic-planning meeting for the organization I was working for, when a man approached me to borrow my cell-phone to make a call.  I gave him my phone which he did use to make a call and then a short-time later he began to walk away.  I followed him, asking for my phone back, at which point the man attempted to run away.  After a brief chase, in which it became clear he was not going to out run me, he turned around to confront me, asking me, “what are you going to do about it,” clearly challenging me to fight him. My masculine socialization screamed for me to do just that.  However, having just heard of a friend who was stabbed and nearly died after fighting with a mugger (over a phone), I made the choice not to. 

         Clearly masculinity was not the only dynamic at play and my decision reflects a high degree of class privilege I have (I knew I could afford another phone).  However, I do not believe that my father could have made a similar choice at my age or at the very least it would have been considerably harder and fraught with much more self-shaming than it was for me.  For my father, it would have been very difficult for him not to see this as a challenge to his sense of self as a man socialized to protect himself and his loved ones with violence.  I, on the other hand, was able to see this as a self-affirming experience that, although traumatic and charged with self-shaming (for I too was socialized male), was a sign of my families efforts to undue the cycles of violence inherent in US mainstream definitions of manhood.

            Through acknowledging and addressing traumatic and trigger events I experience not only the healing work I have done, but the work my parents and past generations in my family have done.  I was able to resist the normative responses called for by male socialization, find support from loved ones, and deal with my emotions so as to be able to continue to live my life without the need to suppress or self-medicate.  These represent powerful changes in how people in my family define “healthy” living and I am grateful to my parents for making it possible.

A Search for the Double-Helix of Identity

by

Note: I want to acknowledge all the feminist, POC, and queer thinkers and actors on whose shoulders I work.  Some of these folks I am aware of and have read and many I have not but still feel their influence.  It is fun to think through this for myself and to share it, I imagine others have thought through similar ideas.  I welcome thoughts, comments, or suggestions of resources for further exploration of this topic.

As a queer, anti-oppressive, person studying how culture works, I spend a lot of my time and energy thinking about and seeing the world through identity.  How, I wonder, does this weird thing called identity work?  Are there unifying concepts that can help us understand why people choose identities, how they work, and how they are useful in our lives?  Is there a basic DNA to all identities and if so what is it? 

            First off, lets briefly define identity.  Identity is basically shorthand for a unifying commonality that not everyone has. When two people share an identity they are in effect saying, “Hey, we share X and that is different from those other people and as such we should stick together (in some way.)”  There is obviously more to identity, namely what this unification ends up looking like, but for now I want to focus on the X. 

Is there a way to understand the various kinds of things that people in an identity share?  Are there useful categories of sharing on which identities build themselves?  In what areas do humans find unifying commonality? 

I would propose four basic ways that identities find unity (note many identities use several at the same time.)  These are ancestral history, lived experience, personal desire, and common belief. 

            By ancestral history, I mean to point out that many identities base their membership (unity) on a set of common experiences their ancestors had before they were born.  For example, a key part of white identity in the US is that of immigration and colonization.  Although our families had different interactions with these historic forces, all white people (in the US) share a history of moving here from somewhere else and in imposing European values on an inhabited land.

Another important aspect of ancestral history is holding shared narratives about what happened before the current generation and how that impacts folks living today.  For example, a key part of white identity is our history of “discovering” and “civilizing” the world.  Although this has resulted in a diverse white population, white folks all share a common narrative about white exploration and taming of “savage” lands and peoples. 

            The second block of our identity DNA is lived experience, by which I refer to events that happened to people sharing the identity (as apposed to their ancestors.)  Lesbians and gays come in all shapes and sizes and yet everyone “comes out.”  Even folks who never “really had to come out” must address this common experience as part of their identity.  To be lesbian or gay is to have to actively define your sexuality as not straight and the first time you do that is your “coming out.” 

            Sometimes we build identity based on a shared set of desires.  Gay men want to have sex with men.  To be a gay man, most folks would argue, you must desire sex with other men.

Here we can see that identities often fit into multiple categories.  Gayness is both an identity of lived experience and common desire.  To be gay, it is generally held that you must have lived a series of events (including “coming out”) and hold a particular desire (having sex with people of your gender). 

Finally, there is belief.  Political organizations are a perfect example of this.  Being a socialist does not require any particular history, but instead requires you to adhere to a particular set of beliefs. 

It is definitely true that different people are often contesting the defining attributes of any identity and this creates a rang of who holds a given identity.  However, it is also true that for identity to be useful as shorthand for a unifying commonality, there must be some shared ancestral history, lived experience, personal desire, or common belief.  Without these there is no sharing on which to build the resulting manifestations of unity (ie. community, shared culture, specific spaces, etc)   

 

All this makes me wonder where queerness lies.  Is it an identity of experience, desire or one of belief?  Is queerness based on not being straight and cis-gendered and all the particular encounters with homophobia, trans phobia, and sexism that entails?  Is it an understanding of shared desires and, if so, what are they? Are beliefs the underpinning of a queer identity?  Do we share a similar understanding about how the world is and how people should act within it? Or is it some weird hybrid? 

And where does choice come to play in all of this?  How much agency do we as individuals or as community hold over the unifying attributes of our identities?  Are we stuck with what is or can we decide to make our identities into something new?

 

Not sure the answers but excited to keep looking.  I would love to hear any thoughts you have.