when you march, stand up straight/when you fill the world with hate
First up: Apologies about the major hiatus this blog has taken (again). Family bereavement, relocating from London to Liverpool and a sudden upsurge in my freelance work have all combined to distract me from my duty to you, dear readers. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, I will work harder. Mini-rants can now be found on Twitter, and I have a guest-blog post up at The F Word, about the film (500) Days of Summer.
And now onto our feature presentation: The National Front are boycotting this autumn's Reading Pride. In preparation for the parade, taking place on the 5th September, police have banned offensive placards and no more than 20 people are allowed to congregate . The NF, who have already marched against the annual parade, are protesting at the 'flamboyance' of the gay community. A recent blog post by Swindon National Front argues that "the very nature and ideology behind White Nationalism condemns homosexuality and its promotion"
In a country that grows ever more tolerant of sexual identity, where even our Prime Minister makes grand statements like "you can't legislate love", is there really a need for annual celebrations of sexual identity?
Surely the fact that we can have these celebrations proves that we no longer need them - as Stonewall's advertising campaign reminds us, some people are gay, it's time to get over it. No big deal. In fact, it's so OK to be gay that the word has now been reclaimed to mean 'rubbish' - but that's not homophobic, it's just a sign that people are more tolerant these days. Right?
Not exactly.
Yes, we're lucky that it's safer to be queer in the UK than it is to be in, say, Russia or Croatia, whose gay pride parades were beset with homophobic violence. But the fact that homophobic hate crimes in Manchester, whose own Gay Pride festivities come to a glittering climax with this weekend's parade, rose by 63% in 2008 paints a less rosy picture. Remember, this is a city known for embracing the gay community, the city that spawned the original Queer as Folk.
The protestors at Reading won't be complaining about civil partnerships or the increasing number of gay bars, their problem isn't that the government encourages discussion of homosexuality in schools. Their problem - and the problem with all homophobes, no matter how much they may dissemble - is with gay people, period. They say 'flamboyance', when they mean 'existence.'
Gay Pride parades don't promote homosexuality. But if, as the National Front claim, homosexuality really is such a threat to their master race utopia, maybe we should start.
And if you're going to get riled up, it's always a good idea to do it with a soundtrack:
Silly fears about lesbian dads are an irrelevance today, and may never amount to more than science fiction.
- Mark Henderson, The Times
In an article in the Times, a columnist reassures his readership that “the End of Men” is merely mass hysteria with no foundation in scientific fact, and that “the dawn of an Amazonian dystopia” is not, in fact, nigh. What it amounts to, of course, is a backlash to the very hazy potential of two women biologically creating a child by terrified heterosexual men – “[t]he indignant railing against Nature usurped, of course, conveniently forgets that most women are not lesbians and will always find it more fun to breed the old-fashioned way.” God forbid that any woman should enjoy making love (or, for that matter, babies) without the presence of a man. It is a castration complex with parenting as the [supposedly envied] phallus.
By “silly fears about lesbian dads”, Henderson really means that the very idea of a woman taking on a traditionally male role – in this case, co-parent of a child – is at best ridiculous, and at worst unnatural. If my partner and I choose to have kids, there won’t be a father involved, regardless of the genetic make-up of the child. It may have my DNA, it may have hers, it may have neither. It may, due to some wonderful scientific advance, have both. But that child will have two mothers and, in all probability, no father. The use of gendered language to describe the non-foetus-carrying partner is deceptive – and designed to highlight the supposedly unnatural nature of same-sex parenting. It also rams home the idea of a binary gender system, one in which there is only biological male and biological female, with no room for the grey areas between the sexes, for someone to define as one gender but inhabit the body commonly attributed to the other.
It is equally an argument about that old bugbear of the Daily Mail, single mothers. Whilst a positive male role model in child’s life is something to be encouraged – I’d be the first to state that I benefitted enormously by one – it doesn’t have to be the father. Families can exist without the presence of a father, and that existance can be a happy one when the father figure would otherwise be a poor influence or have a detrimental effect on the family. Obviously the gender roles here can be reversed – women are no more natural parents than men are – and whilst no-one would argue that being a single parent is easy, it is often the lesser of two evils. Better to be in a stable and loving environment, no matter how many parents of either sex one has, than to be brought up in an attitude of either violence or indifference.
When we look into each other's eyes with That look That two lesbians passing in the street I know exactly what I'm looking at look
- That Look, Rachel Jury
I change styles like I change my mind, I tried to change a tyre but I'm not that way inclined.
- I Won't Change You, Sophie Ellis Bextor
The New York Times has an interesting article on cars and gay stereotypes, that's gotten me thinking about the steretypes I fulfil as a lesbian. Here's a confession - my partner and I had our first date at an Ani diFranco gig. Whenever I tell people that, they roll their eyes and say "Of course you did." However, if she said that - and she probably wouldn't, for fear of looking like a dyke cliche - she wouldn't get the same response.
When I was fourteen, shortly before I came out to my parents, I cut my shoulder length hair into a crew cut. I told my mother I wanted to look "elfin, like Audrey Hepburn." Really, I just wanted my appearance to reflect what I was feeling. I wanted my hair to raise the questions about my sexuality that I was afraid to raise myself. Ten years later I've let it grow out, but I'm not feeling any less of a cliche. My music taste leans towards the 'angsty chicks with guitars who don't shave their armpits' genre. I have two cats who I unashamedly refer to as my children. I watch The L Word and mourn the loss of Buffy, Xena and Star Trek Voyager from our screens - Sarah Jane Smith, the leather jacketed women's libber, is my favourite Doctor Who companion. I eat quorn and read feminist literature and I have three pairs of Doc Martens and more than one rainbow badge. I'm pretty damn gay.
However, that description sums up a lot of straight women I know, and it doesn't come within a country mile of describing my girlfriend (except the cats part. But they love me more). She doesn't define herself as a feminist, but she does define herself as a Conservative. She likes Ani but wishes someone would introduce her to a razor. She's non-scene, and uses the word 'gay' as an affectionate but mocking epithet - but she likes women. If Eddie Izzard is a male lesbian, then she's a gay heterosexual. There's a scene in But I'm a Cheerleader - see, I said I was a cliche - where Clea Duvall's character introduces herself by saying "I like girls. A lot. Oh, and I'm a homosexual." Although this scene is set up to parody your average AA meeting, it says a lot about how queerness is defined. It's about the clothes you wear, the activities you engage in - Megan, the lead character, gives the film its title when she insists that she can't be a lesbian because she's a cheerleader, as if those things were mutually exclusive. Why do some lesbians refute these signifiers, and why are some drawn to them?
In the NY Times article, queer theorist and drag king Judith Halberstam argues that "not all gays want to be normative." We're allowed to relish our Otherness, to have the thing that marks us out be celebrated rather than concealed. Whilst I can pass for straight, I don't want to. The keyring that says 'I can't even think straight', the badge with two intertwined venus symbols, they're all precautions against misinterpretations. The image people may form of me without them isn't offensive to me, it's just inaccurate. I've blogged in the past about how the clothes women wear signify certain things to different people, and that the message one person gets isn't the message that is intended. I'm happy to use my body as a billboard to advertise who I am, because it means that I'm controlling the perceptions people make of me. A gay journalist and former engineer in the article is quoted as saying that “traditionally we are used to being defined by others. Driving a stylish car can be a way of taking control back and saying 'this is who I am'.”
Performance poet Rachel Jury explores this in her poetry collection, Laughing Lesbians. She acknowledges the complexity of the issue - in one poem, the title of which shamefully escapes me, the narrator takes a 'How Gay Are You?' quiz only to discover, much to her surprise, that despite identifying as a lesbian she's actually quite straight. But another poem, That Look (which can be found here, at the wonderful Word Power website) uses the same theme of queer signifiers to give a sense of hidden community and attraction.
Of course there are different types of signifiers for different dykes. I may fulfil some stereotypes, but I fail completely in others. I know all the words to Little Plastic Castles, but I don't understand the offside rule and I can't change a tyre. My girlfriend understand both, and has been referred to as "the son-in-law I thought I'd never have" by my father (although not within my straight sister's earshot). I've frequently heard femme women complain about not being taken seriously by 'real' lesbians, or being assumed to be bisexual - or worse, bicurious.
I applaud the spirit behind the NY Times article, because it challenges the heteronormativity of the mainstream press. Part of me thinks it would be nice to get past all that, to just be people instead of gay, straight, whatever. But part of me enjoys the sense of community I get from being this particular minority - when Tina said in a recent L Word episode that she missed "being part of something secret and special" when she became involved with a man, I understood what she meant. I was also sick a little bit in my mouth, because there really are less nauseating ways of expressing that.
Having been a former artists' model and recovering academic, Kaite is now an author, blogger and freelance journalist.
In between trying to stave off writer's block with retail therapy and over-hyped, mass-produced media, she writes for The Guardian, Lesbilicious, Mookychick and herself.
Her weaknesses include lipgloss, flavoured vodka, TV shows where the sassy grrl sidekick saves the day, angsty girls with guitars and expensive notebooks.
She refuses to accept that she has too many books.
