Respectability politics - the idea that we must make ourselves more palatable, more appealing to the conservatives who want us dead - have been around as long as the fight for queer rights. Even though their line in the sand of what is acceptable and what is "just too far" is always inching back, always retracting 10 feet for every few inches gained. They blame our own community, anyone who is too different or loud or doesn't quite fit into a neat box, for the actions of those who would and HAVE taken away our rights as easily as picking from a church buffet & left us for dead.
Let me make one thing clear. I didn't choose to be a target.
I didn't choose to be 14 and have FAG written in sharpie across my entire new jacket. I didn't choose to be mocked (and sometimes attacked) every single day for having too much hair in too many places, for being more at home wading in mud pulling cattails than wearing a dress that felt like barbed wire, for being too much of a gross dyke. I didn't choose the constant threats of rape or "a good time that will show me how wrong I am" from men in their 40s while I was a 16 year old cashier, or out at a park. I didn't choose for the mother of my first girlfriend to tell me I was going to hell, that I was a monster, that she would charge me with statutory rape on my 18th birthday if I ever had sex with my partner a year younger than me. I didn't choose to lose friends because their parents were worried I might Turn Them Gay, or because it was just "too stressful" to go against the flow with their new army wife friends. I didn't choose the friends of my partners who've tried to convince them that I could never love them, because I'm bisexual and greedy, or really Too gay, or really not gay ENOUGH. I certainly didn't fucking choose to have my rights to marriage, healthcare, and the ability to ever go home and feel even a little bit safe again taken day. After day. After day.
Most of those things happened to me before I ever cut my hair short, or dyed it loud, or came out as trans, or for a lot of them before even I knew I was gay. They always knew. They always know their targets no matter how well you try to hide.
What I DID choose for myself, was how I was going to respond to all of that. Was if I was going to run back into a closet full of venomous snakes and false promises of safety, or look at the risks versus the reality of living in a cage and walk out regardless. I chose to make a home for myself in my own body, one that I could feel comfortable and happy in, even knowing it would make the target on my back more visible. I didn't choose to have it placed there, but I sure as hell chose to be queer and out and an example to other kids buried in their ink-covered jackets that they can survive and become who THEY want to be. I chose to embrace all the things about myself that conservatives want us to cut off to be acceptable - the disability that was otherwise KILLING me to try and push through, the gender fuckery, the inclination for non-monogamy, all the rough edges that the middle class WASPS of the Proper LGBT Movement have been begging us to sand down because please pretty please they want to be RESPECTABLE goddamnit! They don't want to be FREAKS they just want the right to a happy marriage, and if we are the cost, well - what's the lives of those who were bleeding out worth anyways, better to leave them to the wolves and hope they'll be sated enough never to arrive at OUR door.
For some people being gay was never a choice. For me, I have to choose every single day. To keep being queer and myself and stubborn and BRAVE enough not to retreat and hide, just because the worst of the worst around me will it. I choose to make and fight for the world that I want, one where everyone has a place and no one has to force themselves into a certain broken shape just to fit, and I can only do that by living queer and loud and finding and working WITH my community, not against it at every beat. By accepting that every one of us has a place at the table, and making sure that table is big enough to handle the weight. Not by cutting away anything unseemly or difficult, and certainly not by blaming the very people under attack for the ire of those who aim to erase them from being.
Keep being gay. Keep being queer. Keep being LGBTQIA2+ if that's what makes you happy. But FUCK anyone who tells you your own people are the problem for not Toning Themselves Down, while the leaders of one the most influential nations on the planet do everything in their power to erase every aspect of our existence. There's a clear enemy here, and it's not some teenager with bright hair and a hope for something better.
annaxmalina
dededos
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
