Our Queer Future Is Already Here
It’s just not very evenly distributed
We live in perilous times. And for many queer people, the world is not safe even in countries that we often think of having legislative protections. James Finn gave a provocative prompt based on this:
Does the future for queer people see us as lovers or lepers? (My paraphrasing.)
Passing same-sex marriage into law in many countries gave us this illusory hope that we had made it to some destination. We pride ourselves, and rightly so, on how far we have come. And yet doing so means we can too easily close our eyes to how far we still have to go.
Growing up in the 1980s, anyone could have been forgiven to think that apartheid would live forever in South Africa or the Cold War would continue indefinitely. And then in the space of a year, over 1989–1990, we saw a monumental dismantling of these systems of oppression.
It was easy to think, in 1990, that we were moving into a new era where the people of South Africa and Eastern Europe would live with greater freedoms and prosperity. And while the political shifts in these regions were most certainly welcome, it also just opened up a door to newer and different kinds of problems.
In representative democracies, we hand our power over to a group of representatives to do our bidding. And when we do that, it is easy to absolve ourselves of responsibility. We think that making legislative changes (like the same-sex marriage bill) will solve our problems.
But while legislative changes are slow and tiresome, they are often the easy part. They are marked with clearly defined milestones that can be pointed to as a success. We can say that we passed the Civil Rights Act or the Same-Sex Marriage Act and from then on those issues are resolved.
But anyone who experiences intergenerational discrimination will tell you that no act of government will solve an issue overnight. You cannot change a cultural problem with a legislative solution.
The racial reckoning of 2020 in the United States brought to the public attention (by which I mean, the attention of white people) how little progress had been made since the 1960s for people of color.
The hardest work occurs within our cultures and within the personal worldviews of each citizen. And no act of government will ever do the work that each citizen needs to do for themselves and for each other. That is the part we still haven’t figured out.
The future is already here
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. — William Gibson
It is easy to think of the future as some disconnected state or time yet to come. But time is a construct of the mind, and culturally these states are fluid expressions that are constantly changing or sometimes even remain static.
Either way, the future is here now, living very clearly before us.
A grand queer future is here for some. Some people are living their best, public, queer lives with high levels of notoriety and respect. Platforms like Netflix and Instagram have done wonders for allowing people to express and thrive with their stories.
Others, on the other hand, still have to contend with whether they can survive going out into the streets or even to come out to their families and communities.
Discrimination is never a one-dimensional experience. Some people are dealing with multilayered intersectionality of discrimination that includes gender, age, class, race, or religion.
In other words, if you are a white gay male, you are more likely to have an easier time than a transgendered person of color.
Add in elements of class such as income levels that can afford people more options of where to live safely, or the level of cultural acceptance that exists within certain racial or religious communities and you now have a different proposition.
In each of these scenarios, we have lovers and lepers. Those who are accepted and those who are rejected.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable truth in all of this is that homophobia is alive and thriving even in LGBTQIA+ communities. If we cannot understand and accept each other, how are we ever going to expect society to do that for us?
Lovers or lepers?
James Finn asked where I think we are headed in this new year. The difficult part of his provocation is there isn’t a simple answer to this binary question. In my estimation, at least for 2022, sadly both will remain locked in place for some time.
And just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made a powerful impact in legal and political arenas such as education, employment, and voting (which is still a tenuous proposition in some geographies), there are still vast impacts of intergenerational systemic racism alive today.
Unless we tackle the deeper cultural issues at play here, queer folks will likely still face forms of discrimination in 2082, not just 2022. I realize that sounds cynical, but just as the future is already here, the future is also an extension of the present.
The real work begins within ourselves. Whether it’s facing one’s own ignorance around racism or looking at when and how we accept or reject people in our lives, the question must first be asked by the individual.
I ruminate on this all the time. I tried writing some eloquent paragraph or two about the questions we need to ask ourselves or about the work we need to do as a community. But I don’t even know what to say.
Perhaps that is part of it. Maybe the first step is simple to live in the recognition that there’s a problem here. I won’t stop thinking about it or writing about it. And maybe, at some point, I will come up with something to say that could make a difference.
In the meantime, I will keep reading the perspectives of other queer folks, my fellow lovers, on Prism & Pen (and beyond) and expand my worldview. I think that’s what 2022 will look like for me.
Something shorter and more empowering . . .
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Lepers or Loved: LGBTQ New Year Beginnings.
