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CHOY: A mass movement can only occur if enough of us feel we’re directly victims or if we can directly identify with the victims. Like a raid on the baths. But something like that hasn’t happened recently. So I don’t know if the community is asleep as much as it’s in an in-between state. RAPHAEL: Do you think one of the next wars could be the liberation of the heterosexual? CHOY: We should liberate heterosexuals from heterosexualism – their imposition and stereotyping of everyone else as being like them – just as we should liberate fundamentalists. WALCOTT: I get to teach a lot of what we call the younger generation – people who are between the ages of 19 and 23. And among them, they are really divided. Some of them are sex radicals, and some of them are so deeply conservative that they would say things like, “Heterosexuals rule the world, and if gay people want to be accepted, then we must pattern ourselves after those kind of behaviours.” One of the things I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently is also what I will call – playing with the word “fundamentalism” – gay and lesbian fundamentalism. RAPHAEL: What is gay and lesbian fundamentalism? WALCOTT: It’s a hell-bent desire on heterosexual respectability. What it means is that there are members of “the gay and lesbian community” that become unacceptable. It has a foundation – not unlike many other religious fundamentalisms – that is deeply moral. I don’t want to pick on the [gay] rights people, but definitely the overwhelming kind of argument for rights has produced this gay moralistic fundamentalism which puts down people who question boundaries, who raise difficult questions, who behave in a way that might trouble some of us. CHOY: Our version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” RAPHAEL: I think the religious fundamentalists are actually more angered by the gay and lesbian fundamentalist project. When you argue about the rights of S/M clubs or all sorts of trans expression, from cross-dressing to changing our bodies, it’s easy for the religious right to say, “Look, they’re freaks.” But the current religious fundamentalist beast was awoken once we wanted gay rights – gay marriage, gay families, gay adoption, when some gays actually wanted to mimic them. WALCOTT: There was no way that middle-class white folk were gonna keep their kids outside the doors forever. There’s no way. The rights movement is a way of bringing them back in, especially at a time when capitalism is in crisis. Who should we bring back into the fold to create a niche market but our white sons and daughters, who are just like us? They have sex slightly differently from us, but in a polite society, we don’t talk about sex anyhow. I think the real movement of queer radicalism in the next five years or so will be when we can all close our eyes and the queers that we imagine are queers of colour, are trans people, and so forth. Right now when we close our eyes, we see a straight-looking white guy in a suit. RAPHAEL: But when you look at the beginning of the gay movement, there were a disproportionate number of Jews who were at the forefront. Ashkenazi Jews were white, could blend in, yet still went through being a minority. Also, in the ’70s, the echoes of the Holocaust were still loud. So you had your Larry Kramers and Harvey Milks leading the charge. WALCOTT: And part of what has happened in the moment of achieving rights is that “proper lesbian and gay history” is undergoing a radical rewriting. And part of that rewriting is that all the marginal, outlaw figures of Jews, blacks, Latinos and drag queens have been written out of history. And our history has been populated with the first white Christian couple who challenged this pension law. And it’s not to say that these people are not radical and important and that we shouldn’t know their names and know the organizations that threw the cupcake sale to raise the money to pay for their defence. We need to know that. But we also need to know the names of the drag queens at Stonewall who said, “No more of this shit.” Another way in which I want to talk about sexual liberation would be, for instance, the need to recapture AIDS, and to say that AIDS was something that defined us in the ’80s and the ’90s. It brought us into a very particular political voice. In fact, I would argue, as some people are arguing, that if it wasn’t for HIV/AIDS, we would not even be going down the [gay] rights road. HIV has proved to us that if we couldn’t make a strong case around rights – being like everyone else – then heaven knows what those people might have done to us. RAPHAEL: And I think that if there was a moment when queer concentration camps were to be built, it would have been around AIDS. But that did not happen. And I don’t think we appreciate that victory. CHOY: We get a glimpse of heaven when we’re in Canada. I say that often, because I feel that when we have enough people liberated to continue the conversation and the debate – that’s still unique given that this is just one continent of many continents. I think what Canada has to offer is a space and a world in which these new gay debates can continue to push the boundaries and alter and allow people to be more tolerant of other people. RAPHAEL: You can look back historically and you can understand and appreciate and respect certain moments. We needed the idea of a distinct “gay” culture in the ’70s, and we needed rights to respond to AIDS. But now maybe we can say that there were a few white lies we told along the way, and maybe we have to go back and revisit some of them. Like the notion that sexual orientation is fixed. I look with hope to the trans revolution to bring that debate to another level – men who have become women who end up in relationships with women, for example. Sexuality is in fact fluid. WALCOTT: What my conservative queer students would tell you is – and these are queers talking to other queers – “You damn queers. You made heterosexuals comfortable with thinking that if you’re queer, it was innate. You were born that way. And now, 10 years later, you’re gonna come back and tell them all, ‘Well next month, I might meet a woman…’” I totally agree with you, Mitchel. I oppose that conservative standard of sexuality. RAPHAEL: But sometimes you sit back and you feel guilty when you challenge something like, say, gay marriage. The guilt comes over you because you know that the Prime Minister accepting gay marriage is going to have an impact on the kids in the small towns who don’t have a gay village, have no queer politics whatsoever, are scared shitless. And their parents may accept them a little bit more because they saw Paul Martin on TV saying, “My friend had a lesbian daughter, she almost committed suicide, and this is a matter of human rights.” CHOY: Isn’t that the transcendent goal for people who speak of liberation? To understand that being human means to be fluid and that when more knowledge comes in from the sciences, from the arts, from psychology, from wherever, we should never, never hesitate to debate the knowledge and its consequences. WALCOTT: I think that there are ways in which the “unspeakable” sexual minorities of queer culture will shake up the 21st century, because there’s so much of queer culture that has yet to come out. Announcing that one is gay or lesbian or even bisexual is, in some ways, no longer such a big thing. But the woman who comes out as a lesbian but likes really, really boyish girls, so much so that she might even entertain a bio-boy – that troubles people. People don’t want to hear that. CHOY: I think that instead of calling it queer culture, it should be called sexual culture. Because then that includes what’s happening in the heterosexual world, where they discover that they might like a threesome, or a fivesome. And we have to be careful, too, because some of us who think we are liberated can’t tolerate the liberation of other people. And that’s a real battle. But you see, most of these battles are about the internal structures of how we perceive ourselves as human. We have to ask the question: what makes us human? And I think that one of the answers is that being human is to be fluid, and to acknowledge that fluidity and people’s flow at different ages, different places. RAPHAEL: It’s that deep dark secret that I guess certain queers and especially a writer, somebody in the media, or an academic know – that yes, there is a real sexual fluidity. CHOY: But the obvious is never apparent to the majority and to those who are simply rigid. The American Declaration of Independence has that marvellous statement about the right to pursue your own happiness. We don’t have that in the Canadian Constitution. Now, a phrase like that is liberating. WALCOTT: We began this discussion about what would be the new queer war. It’s gonna be a civil war. It’s not gonna be an Us against Them. We’ve conquered heterosexuals. In a sense, they want to be gay. That’s why we have Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Its gonna be a tremendous war among ourselves, working out the questions of racism, age discrimination, working out the place of the transgender and the transsexual within a larger queer politics. It’s going to be an intense kind of civil war as middle- and upper-class queers move and expand into heterosexualism. And what I think is interesting around rights is that nothing we have achieved as rights thus far has really required heterosexuals to start thinking critically about heterosexualism. What’s happened is that heterosexualism has expanded so we can get our pension, our benefits, and now marriage. RAPHAEL: I think one of the queer communities’ main problems now is that people party only with their own group. They are only in a room with people who like hard-core house and do E. Or a piano bar where everyone is over 50. Queers don’t usually come from situations where you can sit with your parents and they tell you, “Oh well this was how it was back in my day,” and you can get that wealth of knowledge. It wasn’t always like that. WALCOTT: There was a historical moment when, for complex social and cultural reasons, generations would bump into each other. We either all had that one Saturday night dance at the community centre, or there were only two nightclubs and one was popular on Friday night and one was popular on Saturday. But now we’ve got 10. So we’re not bumping into each other all the time, which means that I can hang out in the ghetto and never necessarily have to encounter a leather fag unless I go to The Black Eagle. CHOY: We’re not talking to each other. How will you create a space where we will talk to each other? WALCOTT: That’s going to be one of our new struggles. RAPHAEL: The irony is that people who go to the same places constantly complain that it’s the same old same old. WALCOTT: I think those struggles, and the fact that we have these conversations, is one step, though, right? The fact that some of us are still willing to come and say, “Everything we’ve achieved today is really, really good, but we still need more.” RAPHAEL: As much as it’s corporate now, we do have one day a year when everyone does show up – Pride. CHOY: But what we’re talking about is that people tend to tribalize; they want to belong. And coming from a range of insecurities, they’re so happy to be sticking together and looking like each other. But what I think we’re trying to say is, is there a way to get people to a level of comfort where if there was a problem, they would all feel OK to show up? It wouldn’t just be the talkers, the politicians. RAPHAEL: And that’s the scary thing. I think that the diaspora of gay communities are sitting ducks for a big political issue. You sit and you really wonder – when bathhouses are raided, it’s still mostly the ’81 bathhouse generation that’s there to protest. WALCOTT: But things are changing. I was watching CBC and the reporter said they’d interview two Canadian couples who had survived the tsunami and the first interview was a man and woman from Montreal. The second couple was two gay men from Vancouver. And it wasn’t made abnormal, it wasn’t sensationalized. CHOY: This is exactly where I think battles are being won. The war is the revolution within, obviously, to make the real difference. RAPHAEL: And appreciate the victories. CHOY: Appreciate and celebrate them. RAPHAEL: Part of war and winning wars or winning battles is a sense of celebration and remembering. And I think that, sadly, the queer community is bad at honouring and remembering those who came before. WALCOTT: We often forget that wars leave a lot of carnage behind. A lot of hurt, a lot of scars. And these queers battles have left a lot of carnage behind. And we really have to remember what that means. We could also start to celebrate the victories and not forget the cost – and the costs have been tremendous. RAPHAEL: Queers also need to realize that they may fight for something they will not benefit from in their lifetime, or in the moment. Look at all the early AIDS activists who only got AZT, which chances are helped kill them. There was a generation that got so angry that they demanded radical things from the government. WALCOTT: And those men are some of the carnage I’m talking about, because those men were brave and fabulous and they came up and said, “You know what? This disease is taking down way too many of us and we’re not gonna go down without a fight. We’re gonna make sure that you’re gonna become accountable and responsible.” And they put into place a very particular queer gay male public voice. CHOY: And there are the allies, too, who were often straight medical service people who stood their ground in hospitals. There’s an amazing history that unites us, but we often think of it only in terms that divide us. • |
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