I’m terrified at how straight everything in my world has become. It used to be that it was simply all the books, songs, movies, television, holiday cards, religions, t-shirts, posters, handbills, and assorted questions on standardized testing that propped up the straight hierarchy of our cultural norms.
Having just returned from 4 days of talking about Queer history with college students from around the United States I am realizing that in addition to everything else that is imagined or created for straight people, now even Queer people are becoming straight. Any who have known me for more than a few minutes know that I don’t take well to assimilation. My Queer and Trans radical siblings have been fighting on the sidelines for years as the alternative voice to the mantra of “We are just like you” but I don’t think I realized until this week that we are losing.
I don’t mind being a single voice or even the first voice of a radical alternative to many young people, but the creeping cold dead hand of assimilation has outpaced our efforts. It’s not just that young people haven’t heard of folks fighting against marriage equality or for prison reform, it’s that they cannot imagine what a radical point of view looks like. Have we gone so far that there is nothing left but the picket fence and the ultimate decay of capitalism? Is there no way that what we are as Queer people can stand as an alternative both for young Gays AND young straight people?
If you really want to tell your friends a tale of terror this October then tell them how close we are to becoming one homogeneous nation who is so asleep that we lumber into the future without a hope for something new or better than right now.
Having just returned from 4 days of talking about Queer history with college students from around the United States I am realizing that in addition to everything else that is imagined or created for straight people, now even Queer people are becoming straight. Any who have known me for more than a few minutes know that I don’t take well to assimilation. My Queer and Trans radical siblings have been fighting on the sidelines for years as the alternative voice to the mantra of “We are just like you” but I don’t think I realized until this week that we are losing.
I don’t mind being a single voice or even the first voice of a radical alternative to many young people, but the creeping cold dead hand of assimilation has outpaced our efforts. It’s not just that young people haven’t heard of folks fighting against marriage equality or for prison reform, it’s that they cannot imagine what a radical point of view looks like. Have we gone so far that there is nothing left but the picket fence and the ultimate decay of capitalism? Is there no way that what we are as Queer people can stand as an alternative both for young Gays AND young straight people?
If you really want to tell your friends a tale of terror this October then tell them how close we are to becoming one homogeneous nation who is so asleep that we lumber into the future without a hope for something new or better than right now.
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