The Bilerico Project

Why I Won't Come Out on National Coming Out Day

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:30:00 -0500

Note: I wrote this piece last year and am resurrecting it here, with a few additions.

This is the week of the March on Washington. Or, wait, is it the March Through Washington, a city that will be missing most of its lawmakers and the now Nobel Peace Prize Winner President Obama himself on the day of? I won't waste too much time writing about something that seems designed to be little more than a publicity event for a few celebrity queers except to say that my best hope is that the mostly, I suspect, younger crowd that's going to go will come away with a sense of the greed and manipulation of gay politicos, fat cat organisations, and power brokers. And that their hunger for public engagement will eventually be channeled towards more substantial and radical critiques than simplistic calls for "equality" that don't go beyond the usual Holy Trinity of Hate Crimes Legislation, Marriage, and Don't Ask Don't Tell. And that some might want to ask why a march organised as an LGBT-no-Q-thank-you March makes no significant mention of HIV/AIDS or the persistent violence towards and surveillance of queers and why it seems, instead, bent on wrapping itself in a blanket of normalcy designed to get phobic straight people to tolerate us just a leeeeeeettle bit more.

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Why Hate Crimes Legislation Is A Terrible Idea: A Reminder

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:00:00 -0500

We've seen a number of posts supportive of hate crimes legislation. The widespread perception is that only hate-mongering Republicans are against it, but in fact a lot of queer radical activists and groups are against it for entirely different reasons. Below are excerpts and links to just two examples of dissent. The first is a Sylvia Riviera Law Project Statement in April of this year that addressed the addition of hate crimes legislation to NY's Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and the second is a piece I wrote for Bilerico some months ago. Note that the SRLP statement was co-signed by FIERCE,
Queers for Economic Justice, Peter Cicchino Youth Project, and Audre Lorde Project.

I'm working on collecting statements from a number of grassroots queer radical groups that are also against HCL; if you know of one in your area, drop me a line. I don't want to give the impression that queer resistance can only be counted if it occurs within the framework of the Non Profit Industrial Complex. There's a lot of amazing and usually unfunded queer radical work being done on prison abolition work, for instance, and I know those folk are against HCL as well.

Links and excerpts after the jump.

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Proof: The Gay Marriage Movement Is Draining Resources from Queer Activism

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:30:00 -0500

As anyone who's been reading my posts on gay marriage knows by now, I've been critical of the "movement" for taking away much-needed resources and energy from far more important queer issues. I'll discuss that issue in greater detail in a longer post, but for now here are links to two pieces that provide the kind of numbers and details many of us have suspected from the start. Note that this is not framed as a journalistic exposé, but as the affirmation of a hypothesis I've been mulling over for a while.

Links and excerpts after the jump.

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Queer music Friday - Billie Holiday

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:00:00 -0500

In honour of Billie Holiday. Who was, as one website puts it: "rather openly bisexual".

Here's Holiday singing "Strange Fruit":

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Dump Gay Marriage Now

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:30:00 -0500

The Canadian queer radical journal No More Potlucks has just published my piece "Dump Gay Marriage Now." A print-on-demand edition will also be available.

"Dump Gay Marriage" was sparked by my Bilerico Project piece, "Prop 8 Is a Distraction, or: NOW Can We Dump Gay Marriage?". The two pieces are quite different, with only a couple of paragraphs remaining from the original, so please do read this new one and let me know what you think.

My thanks to Ryan Conrad for sharing his amazing photograph. And to the Bilerico readers who made the original post one of the most popular, and who engaged in one of the more nuanced conversations we've had here in a while.

Excerpt and link after the jump.

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I'll Be Debating Gay Marriage on the Radio

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:00:00 -0500

I will be debating gay marriage at 2 PM, CST, Friday, June 26, with Gay Liberation Network's Bob Schwartz, on Vocalo, the locally-focused Chicago Public Radio outlet at 89.5 FM WBEW. You should be able to listen to it on the web at http://vocalo.org/ wherever you are.

The program apparently has a call-in component, so tune in and participate. And do feel free to give me feedback later!

He's Not Your Daddy, or: Obama and the Personal Politics of Gay Marriage

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:00:00 -0500

As I've written countless times before, I think gay marriage is the wrong cause and should be dumped immediately. So I didn't think I'd care much about the recent Department of Justice move to dismiss the Smelt case against DOMA. But, to my surprise, I found myself enthralled by the legal arguments that have sprung up around it. I'll be writing on these at greater length, but for now I wanted to share some preliminary musings and observations about the initial gay and lesbian responses to the administration's case.

First, I was struck by the amount of petulance and, frankly, sheer hysteria that marked the outburst against Obama who has, it seems, gone from being the Great Hope to the Great Betrayer. Although I haven't done a scientific count, I'm willing to bet that "betrayal" has been the most used word in the gay blogosphere over the last few days. For the most part, I concur with Alex Blaze's analysis of the issue and especially when he writes that "The Smelt case was a bad idea from the beginning that the gay activist community opposed, but the plaintiffs and their lawyer went ahead with it anyway." I don't even support gay marriage, but I'm bemused by the extent to which people are defending a suit that they may not even agree with in the first place. It's a little bit like the old joke: the food here is terrible, and there's so little of it. In this case: The lawsuit here is terrible, yes, and how dare he dare he seek its dismissal!

In that light, for gay marriage activists to now insist that Obama ought not to have sought to dismiss the case is a bit like poking someone with a very sharp spear and then crying foul when they do what they can to retaliate. Let me just say this as a layperson: if you file a lawsuit, the other party is going to file to dismiss. That's kind of how it works.

Second, I'm intrigued at the level of personal bile and anger leveled at Obama and the paradoxically high level of expectation that people seem to have for him. The sense of betrayal around the Smelt case exposes the extent to which people seem to have over-invested in Obama's supposed munificence and good will towards the gay community. Yes, he's clearly brilliant. Yes, he may well be to the left of Bush, which is not saying very much. But come on people, he's not your daddy.

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UAFA (Uniting American Families Act): Facts and Fiction

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:30:00 -0500

This piece originally appeared on Queercents.com and reappears here with some changes. An account of what transpired there can be found at "Yasmin Nair: Eat This!" Or: How to Leave Comments Without Going up In Flames." No matter how much you disagree, I hope Projectors will avoid the combination of vitriol, emotional manipulation, and downright lies that seems inevitable whenever UAFA is actually scrutinised. I know that we can instead push a conversation forward as we did in my "Eat This!" post. UAFA goes to a Senate hearing on June 3.

Shirley Tan came here in 1986 as a tourist. Then, she overstayed her visa, supposedly after meeting her female partner Jay Mercado who was, like her, originally from the Phillipines. Mercado is currently a citizen, but Tan is still undocumented. They have been domestic partners for a while, according to a People article, and even wed in 2004. Tan gave birth to their twin sons who are both citizens. In 1995, Tan applied for asylum because, in 1979, according to her, a cousin shot her in the head and killed her mother and sister. In 2002, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) served Tan with an order of deportation, but the couple claim to never have received it. Finally, this year, on January 28, ICE agents showed up at the couple's Pacifica California home and arrested her. Today, after a flurry of press coverage, comes the news that her order of deportation has been stayed through 2010 and a private bill on her behalf has been issued in Congress.

Immigration Equality and other supporters of Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) have made Shirley Tan and her family members the poster children for a piece of legislation that, they claim, would guarantee that binational couples like the Tan-Mercados are able to stay together. Why is this important? Under existing law, in many circumstances, heterosexual married citizens or permanent residents are able to sponsor their partners for immigration.

The average person on the street assumes that immigration through marriage is a "Ta-da!" solution. Your partner/best friend's visa expired and she might have to return to her country when she'd rather stay here? Ta-da! A quick visit to the County marriage office and all your problems are solved. UAFA proffers to many the same quick-fix method by simply inserting the words "permanent partners" wherever the word "spouse" is mentioned. In reality, immigration through marriage, even for straight couples, doesn't work so easily.

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Prop 8 is a Distraction, or: NOW can we Dump Gay Marriage as a Cause?

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:30:00 -0500

Note from Bil: I've pushed Yasmin's post back up to the top because comments are still going strong, but it had fallen pretty far down the page. I've pushed it back up so others can check out the conversation and participate. Kudos to Projectors for making this the most civil, engaging and intelligent comment thread I've seen in a long time.

Today's decision by the California Supreme Court will, no doubt, cause gays and lesbians to gather to express their anger over the recent decision. But in the midst of all the emotional outbursts, a lot of us are left to silently wonder how and why either Prop 8 or marriage became the raging issues of the so-called gay movement. The recent ruling will re-energize gay marriage advocates, but I suggest that we use it as an opportunity to drastically alter our course: Dump marriage now.

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"Yasmin Nair: Eat This!" Or: How to Leave Comments Without Going up In Flames

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:00:00 -0500

I recently began my stint as a regular contributor on queercents.com. The blog, devoted to queers and money, has a tagline that reads: "We're here, we're queer, and we're not going shopping without coupons." My first post was about the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA), widely touted by many in the gay community as the gay immigration bill. I work on and write about immigration a lot, and it made sense that a subject so intimately connected to labor issues should be discussed on queercents. To date, there has been no widespread discussion on UAFA. Instead, like gay marriage, UAFA has been thrust down our collective queer throat as something we should all support. My piece, to the best of my knowledge, is among the very, very few to explicitly critique UAFA. The immigration scholar Eithne Luibhéid has written about UAFA in a special issue of GLQ (14:2-3), but it's not available to a general audience.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) is an ever-evolving beast. There will never be a perfect immigration bill. The persistent xenophobia and racism of anti-immigration activists, combined with a general ignorance about the economic reasons for our current crisis, means that it will be a long time before we craft an immigration policy that's both sensible and humane. In other words, there's no perfect solution. But UAFA is especially problematic on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it privileges certain kinds of couples over others and the fact that it might even distract from CIR.

I've written about immigration here on Bilerico and elsewhere, and I fully expected both opposition and discussion. I also know from my experience that some UAFA supporters are capable of incredibly nasty and vicious responses, even as they go on about why the world should recognize their love and commitment (clearly, they're incapable of recognizing irony). So, I expected discussion and even fervent opposition. But I think it's fair to say that Nina Smith (founder of Queercents), Serena Freewomyn (editor) and I were taken aback by the vitriol that spewed forth.

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Gay Bars and Bachelorettes, Oh My!

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Sun, 03 May 2009 11:30:00 -0500

Remember all the fuss about gay bars banning bachelorette parties? The story erupted with Dawn Turner Trices's piece in the Chicago Tribune. In it, she wrote about Geno Zaharakis, the owner of Cocktail, putting a sign outside stating that the establishment would not welcome bachelorette parties. According to Zaharakis, watching straight women celebrate their upcoming unions was especially grating given that gay marriage is not allowed in Illinois. And, as anyone who has been within sloshing distance of a public straight bachelorette shindig knows, something really weird happens to straight women in the presence of gay men - they turn into drunken, pawing creatures from the Victoria's Secret Pink Lagoon and treat the men around them... much as drunken straight men treat women in their immediate vicinity in a bar.

Turner Trice's story prompted a lot of discussion, and most of it centered around the issue of gay marriage. But it set me thinking about the history of gay bars, and the different forms of exclusion practiced in and around them. After all, it wasn't too long ago when Chicago bars were constantly raided by vice squads, and there are raids practiced on gay establishments and/or or gay cruising areas to this day. At the same time, a lot of gay bars still perform implicit forms of exclusion by asking for forms of identification only from some, often people of color. Gay bars are often located in gentrifying or vastly gentrified neighborhoods, which makes them complicit, willingly or not, in economic purges that displace residents.

But there are also gay bars that are swept away in the rush to gentrify, the ones that cater to a clientelle that's drawn from their neighborhoods and that disappear once the developers have had their way. My recent piece in Windy City Times looks at such complicated histories of exclusion and inclusion, and places this story of bachelorettes and gays in a wider context.

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Gays All A-Twitter about Amazon: How They Nearly Ended Capitalism But Chose to Hate Porn Instead

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:30:00 -0500

The Amazon debacle hasn't quite left us. For now, I offer some observations on what transpired over the last few days. None of this is based on more than my following the "debates" over various websites, Facebook accounts and the occasional ramble through twitter posts. The statements below are musings and not to be mistaken for an in-depth analysis (that will come later). No sources were killed during the course of this writing.

I understood the reasons why authors were up in arms, and I also understood why the gay community was and is worried about the potential of censorship, given the history of gay books being censored. And yet, it's been hard to show much support for a community that, over the past few days, has shown itself inclined to jump to conclusions and, worse, make some pretty harsh judgments about what counts as appropriate "Literature."

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I Support Gay Marriage

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:30:00 -0500

Added June 24: Readers of this post are strongly advised to look closely at the date of publication.

As regular readers of Bilerico know, I've written a lot of posts critical of gay marriage. I've received a great deal of criticism for my views and my knee-jerk, pseudo-lefty, wanna-be-feminist knee-jerk response has always been to sneer at them in disdain.

But, recently, I've been rethinking my views on gay marriage. A lot of commenters have made excellent points. For instance, one reminded me that "there are also LGBT community members fighting for economic justice within their communities of color," and that single fact blew me away. Even as a person of color, I had never thought about those connections. And yet another put it succinctly: "We are just as good as anyone else and deserve the same rights as all citizens." Of course, I thought, we are as good as anyone else. Surely we too deserve marriage.

And thinking along those lines, I began to wonder: what was really keeping me from fighting for gay marriage? What was my resistance really about? I've spent the last few weeks mulling over those questions and the result has been a drastic shift in my perspective. I have decided to come out for gay marriage. But first, I wanted to share the reason for my prior resistance to marriage.

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The Kids Aren't Alright : The Gay Marriage Movement and its Manipulation of Children and Youth

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:00:00 -0500

The Religious Right is notorious for its manipulation of children, especially in its anti-gay tirades. The passage of Proposition 8 was prompted in part by the incitement of fear about what children might have to endure: the spectacle of gay sex, or worse, the spectacle of gay marriage. In its "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons," the Catholic Church is firm on the issue: "Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development."

And then it goes on to pull in an authority only slightly less important than god: "This is gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case."

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How Gay Marriage Put an End to Gay Sex

yasmin@bilerico.com (Yasmin Nair) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:30:00 -0500

Years ago, I was at a queer political meeting on a Sunday afternoon. Some of us felt that our group lacked a broad enough representation of all demographics, particularly women. A man, at the time a dear friend of mine, let's call him X, said, "We usually have more women at our meetings, but look at us today! We're all men!" A puzzled silence fell upon the group, and I turned towards him with what I hoped were eyes brimming with inquiry. At which point, X turned beet red and apologised profusely: "I'm so sorry, Yasmin! It's just that I always think of you as a gay man!"

X, who knew enough about my sex life, had long seen me as one of the boys. And I've long declared myself a gay man in a woman's body. I purred in response to his words.

Everything I know about sex I learnt from gay men. By sex, I don't just mean specific acts but the whole fuck-and-be-fucked, sex-doesn't-have-to-mean-hello-or-even-goodbye attitude that I have treasured most about the culture of gay sex. And it's a culture that I see, sadly, dwindling. Or, at the very least, being made invisible as a brand new culture of homo/hetero (the two are so interchangeable these days) normativity takes its place.

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