“[We] want to be treated like full citizens! Equality. Not
special rights, but the rights that we’ve already agreed upon… The gay agenda…
Some of you may be calling it the Constitution of the United States” – LZ
Granderson (2012)
A
few months ago a TEDTalk appeared in my YouTube newsfeed titled “The myth of the gay agenda”
by LZ Granderson (2012). “What is the
gay agenda?” I thought to myself. I am a straight male, with only limited, second-hand
knowledge of the LGBT community. I’m not exactly on the inside of debates such
as marriage equality so I was just really interested to find out what the LGBT
community actually stands for and what they are still striving for today. Now,
after I’ve listened to Kurt Iveson’s lecture “Sexual Citizenship” (2012) and read
Michael Warner’s “The Trouble With Normal” (2008), I better understand where
Granderson comes from when he talks about citizenship.
Being
a citizen is about being entitled to the enjoyment of rights and privileges
within society in exchange for the fulfilling of obligations and duties. One
important but contested area here is the right to public space. Both Warner and
Granderson give prominent examples of discrimination against homosexuals in
public space: the zoning laws brought enacted in New York City in 1998 by Rudy
Giuliani, the fact that in many US states, people can still be evicted from
their home or fired from their job based purely on their sexuality.
However,
public space is much more multi-faceted than this. As Iveson puts it, the right
to public space also includes the right to be able to act and express one’s
self freely in public work spaces, social spaces, and open spaces (Iveson
2012); for your behaviours, practises and activities to be accepted in these
spaces. Here, social and cultural factors are the driving forces of
discrimination against the LGBT community.
Warner
asserts that the gay community are oppressed by the “dominant assumptions” in
society “about what goes without saying, what can be said without a breach of
decorum” (Warner 2000), they suffer from the normalisation of their sexuality
as a source of shame. In his view, the common understanding that the “closet”
is “an individual’s lie about him- or herself” is mythology; rather, the
“closet” is built around queers by societal norms.
This
institutionalised dominance of heterosexuality restricts the gay community’s
access to public space in that its members are not able to openly express
themselves in public. Iveson gave many examples in his lecture: in work spaces,
heterosexuals speak freely about their weekend activities with their spouse and
children but homosexuals are not always given this liberty; in social and open
spaces, it is common that homosexuals do not feel comfortable expressing their
sexuality for fear of being targeted or discriminated against in the form of
violence or access to establishments.
I
think that Granderson illustrates all of these points in his speech. He talks
about constantly hearing the term “gay lifestyle”, reflecting a common view
that homosexuals lead a type of “lifestyle” not included in the mainstream. He’s
even heard from some politicians that the “gay lifestyle” is “a greater threat
to civilisation than terrorism”. “That’s when I got scared”, he jokes, “if I’m
gay and if I’m doing something that’s going to destroy civilisation I need to
figure out what this stuff is and I need to stop doing this right now”. As long
as homosexuality is seen as a different lifestyle, as out of the ordinary, it
won’t be included as “acceptable” or “appropriate” for public space and the
forms of heteronormative discrimination Iveson talks about will continue.
Later
he admits, “I figured if I made it funny, you wouldn’t feel as threatened”,
which I think reveals how tentatively a homosexual person has to navigate the
heteronormativised world and demonstrates the less obvious ways in which
homosexuals’ access to public space is restricted.
Granting
homosexuals full access to rights as full citizens is not just a legalistic
issue as it starts as a social and cultural one. What I’ve taken out of my
exposure to the gay and lesbian movement, is that it’s less about accommodating
homosexuality into existing social frameworks of “respectability and mainstream
acceptance” (Warner 2000) but recognising them as a different but equal form of
“normal” and judging them on their abilities and not on their sexuality. I
think only then would the socially normalised forms of discrimination against
homosexuals be able to be dealt with. As Granderson puts it, from his daily
coffee to the way he raises his son, he wants to be treated like a full
citizen.
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