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Over
the Rainbow
Why we still need queer culture in post-Civil Partnership
Britain
The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival has just completed a successful 22nd season, while across the country people are busy putting together programmes for Queer Up North, Brighton Pride and any other number of events you care to mention. Yet there are those in our midst who are questioning, in these post-Civil Partnership times, whether we still need to retain any form of "queer culture".
The assimilating types will have us believe that now we have equal legal status we should just sit quietly and say nothing. "The fight is over," they tell us and so, according to them, we no longer have a right to a sense of queer identity or a forum to express our ideas, thoughts and view points.
Well, if you're happy to forget the campaigners who earned you the privilege of being openly gay without running the risk of having your head kicked in, then quite frankly you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.
For all that has been achieved in the past few decades, it would be ludicrous to forget about our past. Let's remember that until just 5 years ago England still had Section 28 that prevented local councils from promoting homosexual relationships as anything other than abnormal. It's not such a distant memory that we should be complacent.
That said, I'm not quite sure who decided that queer or gay culture was all about fighting anyway, for me it's always been as much to do with celebration, and personally I still find a lot to celebrate.
Look around you on Pride day and you won't see people with balled fists yelling and shouting, you'll see happy, smiling faces, people holding hands and enjoying their day of being allowed to express themselves freely in public.
What chokes me up is that it's the very people who fought for our liberty that are now being excluded from contemporary gay society - the drag queens who fought at Stonewall and the outsiders like Quentin Crisp who stood up for what they believed in. These people are now being dismissed for being too much of a stereotype by the precious straight-acting gays who worry so much about their image and have no respect for their history.
As a result, marginalised queer groups and, for example, the transsexual and transgender communities are being shunned in favour of heterosexual values and principles.
Meanwhile, gay and lesbian support centres, such as the Metro Centre in Greenwich, are regularly visited by young people who are struggling to come to terms with their sexuality. Their counselling services struggle to meet supply and demand and, due to the limits of funding, they rely heavily on volunteers. To suggest that people are moving smoothly from childhood into a happy, problem-free homosexual lifestyle is naïve to say the least. And that's to say nothing of the isolated older people and people of ethnic backgrounds who also go there to seek help and advice.
The gay club scene is all fine and dandy, but the thought of late nights, loud music, drugs and alcohol isn't for everyone. We also need to maintain a body of culture that acts as an information exchange and a place to express queer art in its many exciting forms, whether it is debate, literature, performance or film.
Quite often, amongst my social group, I find the people who are likely to be disparaging of queer culture are those who have never fully come out. Either they're secretive at work, or haven't actually told their parents. If being gay isn't central to your personal identity then fine, but please don't try to deny the rest of us the right to define ourselves as we see fit and have space to mix with others of our ilk.
I guess this is where I see the difference between post-modern LGB and queer. LGB has become just about having sex or relationships with people of your own biological grouping. Queer is more of a sense of disenfranchised identity.
To identify as queer you need to understand what it means to be an outsider, to feel excluded and have to search for a sense of belonging. Queer is an unquantifiable state of consciousness that alters its meaning according to the situation of the person who uses it. It is fluid and allows its members to enjoy their individuality.
As queer people it is our duty to explore alternative lifestyles and be supportive of those who exhibit unique or extreme personalities. The more assimilated the gay world seeks to become, the more we should continue to celebrate and document our history for the future generations. Then they won't have to grow up feeling lonely and bewildered the way that we did.
Civil Partnerships are such a double-edged sword. Equality is one thing, but many of us wanted to escape the claustrophobic institution of marriage and the oppressive belief that we must all end up in couples - nicely matched up and paired off, with the family stood round beaming at the wedding. A lot of us left home to get away from that dictatorship and went off in search of something that felt right for us. Now we find ourselves spun around and sent straight back to where we started; and we're not even allowed to put a rainbow flag in our aspidistra.
By all means stay at home with your adopted kids, do your day job and worry about your mortgage payments. Meanwhile some of us will be creating art, facilitating festivals and enjoying the freedom our lifestyle brings us. We won't oppress you if you don't oppress us, because at the moment the fight isn't over, we've just switched to fighting between ourselves.
To have a world that truly reflects the ideal of queer, we need to respect each other regardless of interests, politics and self-identified gender - camp queen, butch dyke, tranny or straight-acting home maker, we have all been awarded our uniqueness, so let's not try to destroy each other.
April 2008
Augusten Burroughs
