What’s Sex Got to Do With It?

The following article contains anti-gay slurs.

“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power ofour unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” — Audre Lorde, “The Power of the Erotic” 

 

I was a virgin until I was twenty-one, the night a guy from Dartmouth came down to Montgomery with his rowing team and got me drunk as a skunk and I stripped naked with him behind the country club and we had sex, me alternately exclaiming "I am the earth mother" and "I am not an easy lay!" I retrieved my grass-stained dress, the only thing I had to wear to church the next morning as I repented as best I could through a headache that started at my shoulder blades and scrambled the syntax of the Doxology and the Apostle's Creed.

I did not know to masturbate until I was twenty; I had figured anything that had "master" in it was only for men.

This is not to say that I was not in love with girls and women since I was at least about four, beginning with my Mama and my next door neighbor Judy. One of my early memories is of Judy riding her bike on the sidewalk across the street while I was standing in a new dress getting my picture taken, a photo that failed to show my little heart snapping out of my chest towards Judy's churning legs and the spinning spokes. Preadolescence was the perfect cover; females are not yet expected to have matured into heterosexuality.

But by thirteen, all my girlfriends shifted their emotional allegiance to boys, leaving me exposed. They spent their spare time groping with the most uninteresting males on the plastic seats of old cars, while I practiced the piano, wondering if there was something about me that would always keep me from love.

I was not so much out of sight, as out of language. I didn't know the world "homosexual" until I read it when I was eleven or twelve, in the early 60s, in an article in Life magazine, one of the first treatments of the urban gay subculture in the mainstream media. In the back corner of my brain in which I allowed such conversations, it occurred to me that the word might explain a lot. But my problem, at nine and thirteen and twenty, was not that I was not seen; more that I was not named. Or, the names available carried such lethal stigma.

Queer: alone, outside community, outside family, outside love, the only one. Genuine invisibility would have been a relief; instead, I had painfully visible efforts at invisibility, futile efforts to suck all my energy back in: a child of the universe, trying to be a black hole. I had little means to figure the "curious abrupt questions [that] stirred within me," as the great faggot poet of democracy Walt Whitman wrote, questions of how "I had received identity in my body, that I was I knew was of my body, and what I knew I should be I knew I should be of my body." So the struggle to fix elusive language to the slippery category of sexual identity has been a central preoccupation of my life, as it has been for many lesbians and gay men of my generation.

My task in this essay is to look at sexuality as a dynamic of power, a shaper of identity and culture; and at heterosexism and homophobia as part of the tangled intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in Southern and U.S. culture.

Forces such as globalization, structural adjustment, privatization, downsizing, automation and new information/ computer technologies are propelling us into the next century through decisions made by a minuscule segment of the population, the ultra-rich and CEOs of multinationals. The results - a declining economy and cultural deterioration - are blamed on the most vulnerable among the rest of us, with sexuality at the core of scapegoating mythologies about welfare, crime, and gay rights.

Yet in discourses of civil rights and economic materialism, sexuality is often left over from, or out of, the discussions. I am convinced that clarity on the question of sexuality is a requirement if we are to create a qualitatively different human interaction going into the next millennium.

 

Race and the Invisible Dyke

As an adolescent, with no one available to translate for or with me the language of my body, I began to translate it myself into the language of race. When I was thirteen, in 1963, I lay on my belly underneath some shrubs to watch several black children my age walk across the breezeway at my high school, surrounded by hundreds of state troopers sent by George Wallace to keep my school from integrating.

I have circled back many times to my moment of identity with the three black children inside the circle of force, a "queer" empathy with their aloneness. It has since occurred to me that they might instead have felt a huge sense of power and pride together at having braved the troopers, after the President of the United States threatened to federalize the National Guard in their behalf. But to me, they were lonely because I was lonely, and we were all surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.

I saw also, clearly, how race and sex and white people's confusions about both were hopelessly intermingled. Even from my segregated family, I could see that the Black uprising all around me was deeply spiritual in its challenge to the morality of white supremacist culture. But I heard white people defending that culture by attacking the sexual morality of the civil rights movement. The Selma to Montgomery March, one of the great ethical pilgrimages of the twentieth century, was dismissed as an occasion for white nuns to have sex with black men on the state capitol grounds, leaving used condoms in the bushes. Viola Luizzo, the white woman from Detroit who was murdered by Klansmen driving marchers back from Montgomery, was dismissed as a whore [see "From Selma to Sorrow," Southern Exposure, Fall 1999].

In the years after this, as a generation of lesbians and gay men have gained our own acknowledged presence and language, I have found myself puzzled and frustrated at how the movement against homophobia and heterosexism and for gay/lesbian liberation could grow up often so seemingly separate from the movement against racism and for the liberation of people of color.

I am puzzled, as always, by the opposition of blackness and gayness, which the Religious Right has propagated as a "wedge" strategy. Blackness signifies much more than dark skin, given the sexual history of slavery, in which any slave masters had sexual access to black women, and any offspring "followed the condition of the mother" into slavery, however light the child's skin. Passing as white under a regime of white supremacy was every bit as much a temptation and strategy as passing as straight under heterosexist regimes, and neither comes without cost.

Nor is "invisibility" only a category of gay life. Ralph Ellison begins his classic novel in my hometown of Tuskegee, Alabama, with a metaphor I totally understand: "I am an invisible man." Racism, like homophobia, is predicated on an invisibility located not so much in the "biochemical accident of my epidermis," as Ellison's narrator explains, as "a matter of the construction of their inner eye."

Like Ellison, as a child in Tuskegee I knew there was something about me, elusive as fog, that people around me acted out of but never explained. We wondered "whether [we weren't] simply a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."

Racism in the gay community and homophobia in the black community are realities, as are the deliberately divisive tactics of the Right. But is there also something in the category of "civil rights" that causes confusion and disjunction about the complexity of "having and being a body"? Have the praxes of our movements - their political discourse of civil rights and related strategies of legal protection - somehow hijacked us all?

 

Civil Rights: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of ...?

It is no accident that the civil rights movement gave me ways to understand my sexuality. When I encountered it from beneath the bushes, the impact to me was revolutionary. Not that this movement was monolithic. We whites knew the differences among the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panthers were vast. But it was all "radical" to me, because it shook my culture and my family to the root, because our racism went that deep. I left Alabama for graduate school, fleeing the racism as much as the (still unnamed) homophobia.

Second-wave feminism and moving away from home had given me the context to finally come out as a lesbian; and I learned how women's struggles grew up within, alongside, and at times in opposition to black struggles. In the early 1980s I started a "career" in political organizing. Now, in the late 1980's and '90s, were gay people like myself "hijacking" the civil rights movement?

Lesbian and gay movements from the 1970s to this day, in fact, do make claims using civil rights laws and legal concepts that emerged from antiracist struggles. The movement against hate violence, in which I participated for much of the 1980s, offers one instance of the efforts to extend "civil rights" to include sexual orientation.

All of the federal protections, such as they were, applied to race, and none to sexual orientation. In 1983, moreover, national civil rights groups generally did not include homophobic violence in discussions of "hate violence." In North Carolina, we could handily document hundreds of brutal acts perpetrated against African Americans, Native Americans, Jews and gay people, as a part of building a coalition against hate violence, since fascism tends to call forth United Fronts. Violence was the bloody common thread among stigmatized identities.

Gay civil rights strategies have moved more successfully at the municipal level, where many cities passed ordinances including gay people as a "protected class." It was these successes that the Right targeted in a series of ballot initiatives pioneered in such places as Oregon and Colorado, with the arguments that gayness was a "behavior-based lifestyle" and thus any rights we might gain were "special rights," with the implication that all gays had class privilege.

Pressing myself to understand how anti-racist advances became available to anti-homophobic struggles, in 1994 I bought two textbooks on Constitutional Law and read the rights sections. Right-wing propagandists argued that gay people have "hijackd" the civil rights movement, but I saw how the particular struggles of African Americans that resulted in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments have repeatedly resulted in extending legal concepts far beyond the African-American community to other groups. The Supreme Court's decision in Romer v. Evans (1996) finally acknowledged the Fourteenth Amendment rights of lesbians and gay male citizens. The Supreme Court declared that gay people are not strangers to the law.

"Equal protection" arguments on the Fourteenth Amendment can apply for lesbians and gay men to discrimination in housing and jobs and freedom from hate violence; to police brutality and political repression, all of which are also tactics used against people of color. Sodomy laws in half the states (and most Southern states) make lesbians and gay men second class citizens.

But there are also places where gay experience does not fit the historic experience of the African-American community about which much of the civil rights language emerged. Visible lesbian and gay communities and political movements are fairly recent developments in the United States. Although many white lesbians and gay men are subjected to employment discrimination, being born into straight families has protected us from being ghettoized as a superexploited class over decades and generations, as had often happened with people of color. Consequently, there is less of a case, in my opinion, for affirmative action for gay people.

Gay people likewise did not need the Fifteenth Amendment's protection of voting, since gay people as such have never been legally prohibited from voting although lesbians as women have and lesbian and gay African Americans and Native Americans have as people of color.

But not coming from contexts of struggle, many middle-class white gay people did not realize how con- tested these civil rights discourses were, or how fragile were the gains to people of color given a virulent racist backlash and a declining economy. At the same time, legal scholars of color began to seriously challenge the reigning legal ideologies about race built in the 1960s and 1970s because they "treat the exercise of racial power as rare and aberrational rather than as systemic and ingrained" and place "virtually the entire range of everyday social practice in America" beyond the reach of the law.

Civil rights is also a limited paradigm for social transformation, for gay people as for other oppressed people. The limits of "civil rights" are the limits of classic nineteenth century liberalism. Rights belong to the basic social unit of the individual, not to "groups." This view of human nature accompanied the rise of capitalism, with individual as consumer or as worker in competition for jobs. An individual's motivation was to get as large a share as possible of available resources, maximizing self-interest. Such a competitive and isolated self will inevitably be miserable and looking for people to blame.

No wonder, then, that such a philosophical tradition, encoded in civil rights law, can not comprehend or address the processes whereby groups are systematically privileged or oppressed. No wonder that the demand for "group rights," as in aggressive affirmative action, has been so denounced by liberals and conservatives alike. It is the individualism of this tradition that enables the Right to condemn gay and lesbian sexuality as individual choice, the repercussions of which are thereby beyond the scope of civil rights protection.

The rights framework also requires us to prove our belonging by proving our victimhood. We gain "strict judicial scrutiny" in Fourteenth Amendment cases by establishing ourselves as a "special [discriminated] class." Many gay people respond by clamoring to prove we are a "real [read: persecuted] minority," distracting us from rights held as the preserve of the "majority," variously constituted as white, male, propertied, and straight. With these victim arguments, we could persuade a good many people that we should not be mutilated, tortured, or brutally attacked, barely asserting our right to life. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which in Biblical terms some of my friends call "fullness of life," are quite another matter.

 

Historical Materialism ... But What About the Orgasms?

Historical materialism is a second major paradigm for bringing together race, class, gender and sexuality in the United States. What are the possibilities that an understanding of sexuality brings to transformative movements based in class?

In 1992, I began working for the Urban-Rural Mission (URM) of the World Council of Churches, a program that brings together community organizers, liberation theologians and activists from the church to forward transformational organizing in local contexts all over the world. I got a crash course in the economy, a view of shifting economic terrain in what is being called "globalization."

In 1992 I attended a special gathering of the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network, a "sister" organization to the URM. It had as its theme "Building Just Relationships for the Next 500 Years" as part of the Quincentenary. As far as I could tell, I was the only out homosexual in sight. I faced a nagging question: How does the lesbian part of me fit in? How does homophobia intersect with these issues of gross capitalist exploitation? "What," I pondered, "is a dyke to think about NAFTA?"

The answer took on words in a conversation with a man named "Sarge," a 50-year-old Black man who organizes the homeless in Atlanta. During a break, he sang a song about all the "mean things" down here on earth, like homelessness, crime - and women wanting to be men, men powdering their noses, and similar "abominations." As the succeeding verses sank in, my palms began to sweat and my heart began to pound. I considered jumping up to interrupt him, or stomping or slipping out of the room. I decided, instead, to try to open a dialogue.

First, I approached the singer privately and shared with him my thoughts and reactions. He explained, among other things, that the song had been inspired by the presence of a good many gay street people in Atlanta's Piedmont Park, many of whom he said (and I believe him) were his friends. Then, working with the conference planners, we carried this discussion into the larger group, where I began to clarify for myself the questions I had framed earlier. It was a moment of deepened articulation in my emerging queer socialism.

What I said went something like this:

First off, given the forces we are up against, who decides to powder his nose is pretty inconsequential. Second, in some cultures, the male and female principles are not so at war as they are in this culture, and people like the berdache in American Indian societies were considered holy people. Perhaps those street queers in Piedmont Park are our holy people, cast out by both black and gay communities.

Anyway, if most women acted like women are supposed to act, we would be completely passive, just lay down and die.

Next, people of color have suffered for 500 years from the European/ Christian war between mind and body, soul and body, projected onto cultures that often had more holistic world-views. The same mind/body split that led the 100 white men owning poultry plants in Mississippi to tell the workers "we only want your bodies, not your minds" also defines gay men and lesbians in this period as only perverse bodies engaged in sinful /sick/ illegal physical acts, as "abomination."

We gay people know that we humans are not only "means of production," however much capitalism seeks to define us that way. Our needs include not only the survival needs of food, shelter, health care and clothing, but also dignity, pleasure, intimacy and love. But all gay men and lesbians also need to understand more clearly (as some of us do) how we are also workers, means of production: we need to see how, in the same way we are defined by an obsession with our bodies and our sexuality, black women in Mississippi poultry plants and Mexican women in maquilas are also defined as only bodies, to be used and discarded, machines without feelings and souls. We need to understand more fully how our fates are implicated in theirs in order to deepen our own political vision and the possibilities of our own eventual freedom.

 

How to Get Back—or Forward—to That Space?

I began to see what we have been taught to think of as "private" (as in "private sphere," or "private property") is not private at all, in the sense of being isolated and individualized, but more "intimate," the ground on which genuine transformation, community and relationship occur. There is nothing private about multinational control. There is nothing intimate about the drive for profit. What people long for is not privacy, but intimacy; not individualism, but the freedom to be their peculiar (queer) selves and be in community. Sexuality is key in both processes.

The brilliant lesbian African-Caribbean poet and activist Audre Lorde explained the power of sexual being, and the stakes of incorporating the power of the erotic in our political practice. In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," she explained:

"The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For once having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

We are in a period of global reorganization. For some, the principle is maximizing profits and power. For others, it is using this most recent crisis to reach, once again, for more just human arrangements, "an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all," and this development assumes our sustainable participation in the natural world, our kinship with the animals and plants, the minerals and water and air; with all the whirling molecules. This is the very old way of love, and it calls us to find new paths. Many of us are reaching for new connections and new ways to explain them.

Desire, Audre Lorde teaches us, is after all desire for something or someone; and the ability for people to experience autonomous sexual desire is linked to our ability to desire health, decent jobs, safe neighborhoods, all the things we consider fullness of life. Before we can get what we want, we have to know what we want: to feel it physically: the desire for another person... for justice... for God; perhaps, after all, they are all the same longing