Standing Out

Earlier in 1999, Jerry Falwell came out openly against a certain purple Teletubby™ who, he believed, was subliminally slipping gay propaganda into small children’s minds. Why was this children’s television character the target of a conservative religious figure’s disapproval?

First, Tinky Winky is purple, a symbolic color that blends pink and blue—colors that have historically symbolized males and females. Second, the upside-down triangle on top of Tinky’s head resembles the millions of triangles sewn onto the shirts of alleged queers in Nazi death camps during World War II, a symbol many queer organizations and activists use to symbolize remembrance and survival.

At first I snickered and dismissed Falwell for his homophobic crusades to wipe America clean of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people. Then I became angry. The words of Huey Newton, a founding member of the Black Panther Party, entered my mind: “Power is the ability to define phenomena.”

Denouncing a children’s television character for appearing “gay” is not only public persecution for queer people, but it is also a right-wing tactic used to delegitimize freedom struggles. Jerry Falwell, as ludicrous and reactionary as he is, has power, and his announcement lumped same gender-loving people into one static community with a fixed set of symbols—defining for the world a gay phenomena.

This issue of Southern Exposure is an historic one. Our purpose is to revolutionize our thinking by capturing people’s realities in a way that shows how racism, sexism, classism, and ageism are intertwined and that our identities are constantly shifting. As Matt Nicholson writes in “Trans Guys and Moonpies,” “We all shift identities several times in our lives—from youth to adult, student to worker, healthy to sick.” Standing Out allows queer people to shape, name or redefine phenomena on our own terms.

In this issue, we also take a close look at the organizing strategies of the Louisville Fairness Campaign in the hills of Kentucky. Embracing a broad social justice agenda, the Fairness Campaign has broken new ground and changed laws that had allowed job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Their organizing strategy has broadened an activist base and sent a message to progressive communities that change is coming—and it’s a multi-issue movement. Similarly, in a father-daughter dialogue between John and Wendi O’Neal, Wendi emphasizes the importance of a movement built on a multi-issue strategy. She tells her father, “I feel in my body the intersections between race, class, gender and sexuality in ways that you don’t experience.”

The globalization of our cultures, economies, spiritualities, and policies is hurling us toward a time and place where our strategies can be united and our power shifted. We are also facing and working to eliminate serious threats to democracy, the environment, our bodies, our workplaces and our communities.

What does globalization and a new world order have to do with loving the same gender? This issue of Southern Exposure is built on the premise that a queer liberation movement can act as an agent to shift the power away from those who oppress to those who have historically been oppressed.

Within this issue we’ve also captured people’s realities through Personal Hirstories,¹ first-person accounts by queer people of color that tell us there is no singular gay community, as Jerry Falwell would like to have us believe. Our decision to emphasize this is very strategic—as queer people we exist in multiple communities and subcultures—and we must define ourselves by our own terms.

So why do we use the word “Queer”? While blood flows and gun shots ring through the walls of mosques, synagogues, office buildings and schools, let’s queerly defy the violence that sends so many spirits off this planet. As black men are dragged, Korean Americans shot, white gay men murdered, women raped on the job, and children drugged in schools, we can queerly shape a vision that cleans the air, educates students, cares for the elderly, houses the homeless, strengthens the spirits of the depressed, and transforms the hearts of those who hate.

¹ “Hirstory” is a genderless term used here to change the way we think of history—a straight male-dominated way of remembering ourselves and our struggles.