Because of work today, I wasn't able to go to two different events: a talk by one of my very favorite writers, Sameul R. Delany, and the protests that were organized today in all fifty states about the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which institutionalizes bigotry by amending the state constitution to prevent same-sex marriage, although the State Supreme Court ruled that it should be legal, and over 50,000 couples got married in California between that ruling and November 4. The Mormon Church and the Catholic Church have been working together for over 11 years to prevent the legalization of gay marriage, and pumped millions of dollars and volunteers into the effort to pass Prop 8. Regardless of what your feelings may be about whether or not marriage should be the top civil rights issue for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people when there are so many other problems to face, this mobilization of bigotry on the same day that an African-American was elected president, has wounded and angered many gay people and their allies, families, and friends. JoinTheImpact.
Behind all the legal arguments, there are the heartbreaking stories of couples who have suffered because they do not have the legal protections of marriage.
Today, demonstrations took place in about all over the country, in cities big and small: at this post on Pam's House Blend, read the comments for great stories about many of these places! In spite of what seems to have been universally bad weather, there were large turnouts. For more news, go to the Join The Impact! site
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Thanks to you, I knew about the Delany talk (free!). He was lovely, and while he mostly just ("just"?) read from his work, he did take questions for about 15 minutes.
I thought of a topic you and I have touched upon when a young woman in the row behind me asked Delany how he balances writing with teaching Creative Writing (at Temple U for the last 7 years).
"I don't!" he responded. "If you figure out how to do it, e-mail me!"
He talked a bit about how impossible it is to do your own work and teach, then he said directly to the woman,
"My advice to you is to get out of academe."
She hadn't said her question was personal, but she proved it was by her response:
"I already have."
He congratulated her.
(Someone also asked him about Prop 8 and he said he didn't have much to say except it was dreadful.)
Walker Art Center archived the talk at channel.walkerart.org
Honestly, it was his physical presence that was special, however, not so much what he said, though it is nice to be read to--especially by someone reading his own lyrical work.
Hmmm... do you question "whether or not marriage should be the top civil rights issue for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people when there are so many other problems to face" ?
I see all civil rights as links on a chain--there is no "top." But perhaps I am a romantic. No, make that definitely I am.
thanks for letting me know it was archived. I really wish I could have gone, but I needed to do this thing for work, and it was a good thing, both for work reasons and personal; I ended up being able to support some colleagues in a way that felt important to me.
About the issue of priorities: I am all for people putting their time and energy into the causess that are important to them, and I am totally behind those who are trying to make marriage legal for same-sex couples. But I also agree with those who say that this issue has displaced some other issues that are extremely important for people who are vulnerable to violence: gay youth who are forced into homelessness, trans people who are subjected to routine violence when they need to use the bathroom in public spaces like schools, work discrimination which is still legal in many states and deprived people of their livelihood. There are many issues of racism and sexism that play themselves out in these struggles as well. I'm still really angry at the HRC for pushing trans people out of the ENDA bill for political expediency last year, and as a woman I am pissed at how marriage is still an institution that reinforces gender discrimination among heterosexuals. So, I would have been out at the event in support of marriage as a civil right, but I understand and respect the views of my colleagues and friends who find the emphasis on marriage to be irrelevant to their own struggles.
It seems sad to me that we should be fighting among ourselves about whose discrimination is worse...
Couldn't it be both/and, not either/or?
Ah--but that would be science fiction I'm thinking of, wouldn't it? not my own species, I'm afraid. : )
I really see why some imaginative boundaryless people like Delany went into the sci-fi genre, where we can play with such possibilities.
It's not so much an issue of whose discrimination is worse (and I hate those kinds of conversations) as it is who gets to set the agenda, who defines the problem, who decides how to spend the money and time, and who continues to get left out of those processes, when the enemies are powerful and well-funded. Coalition building is hard work.
Oh, yes, shudder--I remember that well...
This is what I had in mind when I referred to Delany--this bit he tells of how sci-fi influenced him as a young man. This is from an interview in Nerve.com:
http://www.nerve.com/Dispatches/Westerfeld/SpaceCowboy/
Samuel R. Delany: "Take a story like "The World Well Lost," written by Theodore Sturgeon in 1950. Two alien lovers come to Earth, one larger than the other, and everyone assumes that they're male and female. The story is told from the point of view of two security men who guard their starship, themselves close friends.
"Eventually, the guards discover that the aliens are both male, and indeed are gay. They've taken flight from their home planet because of terrible homophobia there.
"One guard, a typical 1950s Earth male, is disgusted by this and doesn't know what to do, he even suggests killing the aliens. But the other talks him out of it.
"At the end of the story, the first guard goes to sleep back in their quarters. His friend remains awake, looking at him, and we realize that he's in love with him.
"I read it in an anthology when I was about fourteen or fifteen and broke out crying, exactly as I was supposed to. I was quite touched by it, and it certainly helped make it possible to talk about those things later on in my own work, like the gay, human characters in the story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones."
"Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable — and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human. "
So, Joanna, thanks again for pointing SRD out to me--I have been wanting to write about him all weekend and haven't had the time to really get down and wrestle with some of the stuff that came up for me, like this.
He even mentions Star Trek & K/S in the interview! So you know I've gotta love him.
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