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Reclaiming Our Pride
Why We Can No Longer Look the Other Way
Camp Trans Confronts Transphobia at Michigan Women's Music Festival
Reclaiming Our Pride
Excerpts
from the Pride Day Speech by Peggy Luhrs
Happy
Pride Day everyone! I’d like to see us reclaim our pride as a liberation
movement.
After 9/11 I joined one of the first
vigils at the top of Church Street. My sign read “the antidote to
terror is increasing human rights for all.” I believe that more
now than ever.
Using war to respond to terror has
been one of the stupidest blunders the U.S. has ever made. Oh, and what’s
this got to do with gay pride? The Pride theme this year is “Peace
Out.” Peace out... stay calm. We need to do that on a personal level
so as not to add to the ever-expanding level of violence in the U.S. and
the rest of the world.
But collective action for peace and
human rights is what I see missing. The GLBTQ movement began as part of
the liberation struggles of the mid-20th century: civil rights, women’s
liberation, lesbian and gay liberation, coexisting and part and parcel
of the anti Vietnam War movement. There is no greater enforcer of gender
roles than the culture of militarism, which defines men as killers and
dominators and women as supportive wives and sacrificing mothers. After
Vietnam, the Pentagon began a “Make America a Man Again” program.
They had to conquer the dreaded Vietnam syndrome; that people were turning
against war. They needed to make war popular again. They do it by making
war a manly endeavor. They have video games now for recruiting teens.
Games that make war seem like a fun... well ... video game.
The media now refuses to show the
reality of war. We don’t see the corpses, the wounded and maimed.
We try to ignore the fact that life on earth itself is in doubt because
of the consumptive and militaristic practices of the American empire.
Despite the myth that our wars have won us our freedom, the reality is
that wars always bring greater repression. Each war has torn away our
freedoms and instituted an ever-larger military, industrial, energy complex.
Women are considered spoils of war,
always in danger of rape and just so much collateral damage. All deaths
but those of soldiers are collateral damage. Thirty percent of women in
the military have experienced rape or attempted rape, and I’m sure
that’s a low number since women underreport. The military does not
want gays because of the threat to this rigid gender hierarchy. Horrors!
Men might treat other men the
way many men treat women. That is the big fear. Terror has been as much
the ally of the state as its enemy. We now have a huge and hugely useless
state apparatus that spies on our every communication and keeps tabs on
our political activity, but cannot actually protect us from terror or
from hurricanes. We are deeper in debt as a nation than we have ever been
and yet there is no money for schools or healthcare or sheltering the
homeless, ending poverty or repairing our much-abused environment.
They are spying on gay peace
groups. Focus on the Family tells us that marriage equality for queers
is being brought to us by the forces of hell. Perhaps we should start
breathing fire. African Americans are once again under the rule of a coalition
of racist good old boys. And their votes are being annulled. None of us
who oppose the ruling cabal can trust that our votes will be counted.
But reacting as we are meant to by being intimidated by the State/the
government does no one any good. We react to the labeling of the right
and refuse to take the moral high ground which I think rightly belongs
to those seeking peace and human rights. Since the Reagan backlash against
equality, the debate has moved steadily to the right with devastating
consequences for all but the rich and the energy and war profiteers. Why
are we so insecure about all this? Because it is not the manly way?
In our movement, I’d like
to see more pride; less fear: a movement inclusive of all races and classes.
I am particularly tired of parts of our movement feeling they should tell
others how to be and when and where they should participate. Like those
whose main goal is marriage wanting to keep the Queer Liberation Army
from participating in a demonstration for the Gender Identity Bill. I
am very tired of folks who think they are the ones who know how politics
works and who should be squelched in the name of success.
Whose success is it if it isn’t
inclusive? I’m tired of it for two reasons. First, it’s wrong,
it’s undemocratic, and it marginalizes the more radical among us.
Second, I’m tired of it because it doesn’t work.
This how we lost the ERA in Vermont,
the Equal Rights amendment for women in Vermont. It doesn’t work
and yet it goes on, whether it’s Mattachine throwing out its founders
for being leftist when the organization became popular, or the Vermont
ERA committee leaving out grassroots feminist organizations because they
weren’t ladylike enough or the Democratic Party afraid to take a
stance against the illegal, immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq because
the insider wisdom in Washington says they can’t.
Guess what? Insider wisdom means to
protect insiders. It is its working. The rich are getting richer; insider
wisdom is about preserving power for those who have some. It’s not
about liberation.
The Democrats are getting more like the
Republicans and the LGBTQ movement with its roots in women’s liberation
and gay liberation, a movement for sexual liberation, is becoming the
marriage movement.
It is not that we shouldn’t
have equality in access to marriage with its privileged status.
It’s the price of working to
be acceptable. Acceptable to whom? Winning over your enemies isn’t
a bad idea. But if you sacrifi ce your allies to acceptability it is both
a betrayal of the community and it makes the political mistake of alienating
the base.
Let us be proud to be part of a liberation
movement that means expanding our rights and the expansion of human rights
for everyone including those in Islamic countries who are murdered for
being queer or independent women.
We’ve been fighting for our
right to love. That’s a much bigger word than marriage.
We can’t achieve liberation
in a corrupt culture of domination. Our full acceptance is tied to our
fully accepting our responsibility to be part of the human community by
working for peace and expanding human rights for all.
This is the speech I gave on Pride
Day 2006. I want to correct the part that says “Like those whose
main goal is marriage wanting to keep the Queer Liberation Army from participating
in a demonstration for the Gender Identity Bill.” I have subsequently
been informed that the QLA was not discouraged from attending, but that
the entire TransAction group, not just marriage advocates, wanted to ensure
QLA Cheerleaders were not present because it was felt that would take
the focus off of Governor Douglas’s being the first Vermont Governor
to veto expanding rights for Vermonters.WCAX used this part of the speech
to say that there is a division in the community.
This is the first time in 24
years that WCAX broadcast any part of my speeches. So the media likes
to promote conflict. I think we need a movement that appreciates all the
folks who contribute to it. We should applaud anyone or any group working
to increase ourrights. My main point here was to warn against the idea
that any group has the answer for all of us and to call for a much broader
and braver response to the backlash we have been suffering from for so
long now.
Peggy Luhrs is a longtime activist from Burlington.