It’s odd to invest in something with such focus and drive for 8 months and then see it unfold without any problems.  I have been so worked up pulling together the local Queer history timeline for Charlotte that I don’t think I ever really thought about what would happen when it actually went up on the wall. 

Last Thursday I faced my fear of exposure and went to an opening reception at the Levine Museum of the New South to unveil not just the Timeline, but also the other three exhibits that will be part of LGBTQ Perspectives on Equality.  I gathered together my closest friends (including my darling mother) had a drink and then went to the museum to see all the work put together in one place.  When we left the house there was literally a giant rainbow from horizon to horizon, I think it was Google’s way of telling us that things were going to be amazing.

I knew deep down that people would like it, what I was not prepared for was the level of emotion that I received from the museumgoers.  I walked into a throng of people who could not believe that it was really happening.  I was nervous because I knew I didn’t have a complete picture of the community and I hoped that our local Queers would cut us some slack.  As I walked around the museum, I noticed that people were asking a lot of questions with smiles on their faces, and people seemed thrilled with all that had been pulled together.  I was asked to give a few remarks and since I am not the kind of person who believes in writing things down, I wanted to be as real as I could in that moment. 

I am not certain that my remarks were the most pulled together in the world but as I began talking about what the timeline could do for the community I gazed around the room to see tears in people’s eyes and smiles on all the faces.  I wanted people to know that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender history existed in Charlotte from the very beginning.  I wanted people to know that we have lead the way in the South and that while we didn’t always get it right, we had learned from our mistakes.  I hope this project inspires people to learn more about Queer history.  I hope it can fire up Southerners to see themselves as part of the moment and to claim their rightful place in the history.  Most of all I hope people leave feeling motivated to do more and to help us complicate this picture even further. 

Please check out the coverage of the exhibit at:

The Washington Post

The Charlotte Observer

Q-Notes

How Will Gay Marriage Save Us?
 It’s a question that I ask on a daily basis.  The responses I get range from cries for acceptance, to pleas for benefits, to Hallmark Card nonsense about love and ever after.  It’s a question that we do not ask enough and I am starting to understand why we are not asking this question more often.  This is a scary question to ask because the answer might mean that we have wasted the monetary, intellectual, and physical resources of the last 20 years in a fruitless effort to gain something that looks like “equality” when what we wanted was liberation.  How can such a simple question garner such fear?  The answer to how will marriage save us is  so vital to how we progress as a community that is must be asked.  The answer (sadly) is very simple: Gay Marriage cannot and will not get us what we want.

Its really not Gay Marriage’s fault, it tries to be the tie that binds us together but it falls noticeably short in this regard.  The thing about Gay Marriage is that is cannot give us the theoretical freedoms that we want because nothing about our participation in it elicits these freedoms.  I mean sure, it will give one couple, one at a time, access to death or hospital or workplace benefits.   But does even the supposed freedom this offers to one single couple seem like a marker for progress?  For something to be liberatory it must by definition act for the extension of the common good.  If our goal is one couple at a time then we must change the rhetoric of our community.  Marriage is not the great equalizer; it is merely the doorway for freedoms for a limited few, while leaving a majority of others out in the cold with no freedoms at all.

So now comes the impossible situation many of us face.  Every day it seems there is some celebration as yet another local municipality strikes at the theoretical discrimination of marriage.   As I was typing this an announcement about Florida scrolled across my screen.  We are suppose to cheer with raised hands about a “victory” for our collective freedom and yet I sit here without access to any of these future freedoms because I have the audacity to be single, or Poly, or not interested in state sanctioning of my relationships.  And if I have the audacity to complain I am suddenly a hater of love, a person who wants children to be without protections, or worse yet, bad at being Gay.  I was in fact TERRIBLE at being Gay, which is why I went to Queer in the first place. 

You cannot simply call something “progress” and expect it to be true.  You cannot blindly follow the plans of others, no mater how much visibility they have, and expect a clean result.  You cannot proclaim connections to earlier movements, declare yourself the next recipient of a legacy, or speak with sweeping generalizations and expect everyone to simply move aside.  And yet that is what's happening in the Queer community. Real liberation lies within critical thinking, compassionate outreach, and reconnecting to grassroots networks.  It is here that perhaps our fear of marriage’s limitations will dissipate and when we hear “it can’t” we will ask, “Well then what’s next?”