on the Lambda Literary Awards and the art of disappearing

[rm]

This is quite nearly one of those things I don't feel like talking about. It is not something I want to have to take a position on, nor is it something I am entirely sure of my position on. But I also don't feel like I can do what I do, live as I live, speak as I speak and believe and advocate for the things I fundamentally believe about stories if I don't comment on it.

The short summary, for those of you who may not be aware is that there's been a series of discussions/statements/shifts on what the Lambda Literary Awards are and should be, specifically whether they are designed to honor LGBT writers or LGBT books. (To my discomfort, the LLA don't include Q -- I know "queer" is a controversial reclaiming word, but there are absolutely, positively members of our community who self-identify as queer (myself included) and are, as such, more appropriately defined with a label that includes the Q).

One of the ideas most tossed around in the discussion has been this idea that gay writers are sick of seeing straight people win awards for books about their world. And one of the responses I see most tossed around is "the Lambda Literary Awards want to know what you do in your bedroom."

Can anyone see why I'm upset yet?

One of the many things that has me upset is the fact that everyone involved has some valid points. The idea of awards honoring queer authors is good. So is the idea of honoring queer stories. Meanwhile, what is and what should be the purpose of the Lambda Literary Awards?

And even if the Lambda Literary Awards were to come up with a solution similar to that of the Carl Brandon Society (which offers awards both for a work of spec fic by an author of color and for works that deal with issues of race and ethnicity regardless of author identification -- which I think is a fantastic solution that I whole-heartedly support; I just don't think it works in the case of the LGBTQ community and the rest of this post is about why), we're still left with a discussion of "queer cred" that hurts, and, in fact, threatens, a lot of people, especially people who are bi, genderqueer, and/or trans.

In fact, as soon as there is a "queer litmus test," we've turned ourselves into the enemy. Searching out the queer for good reasons is still as potentially harmful as searching the queer out for the bad reasons. If we decide there's a checklist of what makes you queer, it gives anti-gay folk ammunition: it for bisexual people in heterosexual pairings creates the idea of thoughtcrime; for trans and genderqueer people it creates public rights to private bodies. That, in short, sucks.

But it also does nothing to resolve the issues of privilege within the LGBTQ community (and that's without my getting into the misogyny and racism that the LGBTQ community as a whole simply has not done enough work on addressing). Being able to be out privileges you (sometimes at costs); being closeted can allow you access to other privileges (at a cost), and each identity within the LGBTQ spectrum comes with yet more privileges and costs: we all know the degree of suspicion bisexual women are met with (there's a separate, different set of suspicions we throw onto bisexual men), and we all know the mainstream "rewards" (said loosely and bitterly) and headaches of fetishization (gay men in slash fandom; femme gay women in mainstream culture; various body types in the porn industry).

These types of issues, to some degree, plague all oppressed groups (again, see how the Carl Brandon Society has chosen to navigate the awards issue -- it looks sensible to me). But they are particularly weird in the LGBTQ community, because when I go outside and you see me, and you don't know anything about me, do I look gay? What does that mean? Am I gay because of who I fuck or who I love or because of my gender or the role I see for my body in the world? Where do the awards classify non-op trans people in same-gender relationships which some people, not having a clue, might argue are actually heterosexual in nature? What do we say about the person who has been married for ten years to someone of the opposite gender, but was married to someone of the same before that? For that matter, what about queer women who write about queer men or vice-versa? Do our bodies and creative impulses have to be in line with our sexual preferences as well? And what do we say to poly people who may have good reasons not to want to be out and take their circle of relationships with them?

How do we, as queer people, prove who we are?

That's the crux of it, really. That's always been the crux of it, with our little in jokes and code words (did the straight people get all the Wizard of Oz amusement at the end of The Rachel Maddow Show last night?) and gestures and habits that some of us don't like or engage in or even know? Who are we and what is our culture? How is that changing as we're more accepted. Are we losing things unique to a fictional, monolithic gay culture in the fight for marriage equality? I'm so struck by all the people I don't see marching in the Pride parades now like I did ten and twenty years ago, the Bears and the Leathermen, people who, despite the fact that I'm such a weird, queer, bi, lesbian, girl, man thing in my head, are the people who were my role models, who taught me about being gay and being an activist and living in this hidden place of codes between the worlds.

You people and your quaint little categories.

I think sometimes, often even, that the future of the gay rights movement largely includes our letting the boundaries blur. We don't get to be the big gay exclusionary fortress of secret coolness anymore, or whatever the fuck it is we were telling ourselves we were doing while we were just trying to stay alive.

Gay is more things than it used to be. And maybe, one day, in my lifetime even, it'll be a word that doesn't even matter, doesn't even mean anything, except to people who remember, and people who are old-fashioned, and people who see loss even in the advance of the best progress imaginable.

That's the moment we're at, and that this controversy with the Lambda Literary Awards defines: progress and loss, fear and regret, and a need to redefine community.

So what's my answer? I'm still not 100% sure, other than knowing that awards should do good things, not bad things. That's sort of the point. Awards = good, right?

Look, I do know this: stories matter.

Sometimes they come to me in the middle of the night, I wake up and I know there was once a person with a name, a history, a life -- and sometimes they died a hundred years ago and sometimes they haven't been born yet, but they're so real, they're right there, like I can touch them. I write them, when I can, and grieve them often, in ways I've learned to be smart enough not to talk about.

At times that bothers me, the silence I feel obligated to that comes with storytelling. It bothers me when I write, which is one manner of inhabiting a character, and it bothers me when I act, which is another. But I've learned to live with it because stories, and the people they are about, are, in the telling, more important than me.

I'm just a translator, a medium, a canvass and a liar. Their stories matter so much that in the telling of them, all I can wish is to disappear.

And I love them so much, the people I tell into being.

Which means that when it comes to the business of awards my gut says, honor them. Not me. Not writers. Characters. Stories. Honor them.

Which is just one more way of saying, I'm gay, I'm out, I am verrrrrrrrrry queer, but you know what? I'm pretty sure the Lambda Literary Awards don't actually need to know any of that.

Comments

[vashtan.livejournal.com]

THIS.

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

the Lambda Literary Awards want to know what you do in your bedroom.

Unless they are an active participant, they sure as hell don't.

[demotu.livejournal.com]

This is so many good things. I have lots of feelings but, as I have been doing nothing but physics for a couple of weeks and spending a lot of that wrapping my head around quantum mechanics, I had the funny thought that a bisexual person is like a photon in a double slit experiment: that they like (go through) both genders (slits) is very much the truth, regardless of the fact that when you see them with one gender (block off one slit) they're 100% in a relationship with that gender. It doesn't make their bisexuality less of a fact, it just makes it impossible to see, if that's the only data you ever collect.

Which is a useful way of thinking of it, at least for the bisexual physics student in a het relationship. :P Chances are that's incomprehensible to anyone who missed out on Young's Double Slit experiment (and the "no, actually, light is NOT either a wave or a particle depending on the situation" lecture), but hey! It's an oft-described experiment, in pop science and academic science.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The problem, and I've been guilty of stating this fail in the past, despite having romantic history with both men and women myself, is this idea that when a bisexual person is in a heterosexual relationship they aren't dealing with oppression. They may not be experiencing the same ramifications of repression at that moment in time, but it's still there and still has an impact even if it's a different one or transpires in time differently, you know?

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.

As a playwright, I write the stories that pop into my head. They are about all different kinds of people in all different kinds of relationships. As a straight, divorced woman, sometimes I wonder if I *shouldn't* tell the stories of the gay characters that jump up and down in the back of me head screaming "pick me! pick me!" I wonder how my privilege affects the stories, affects the way I write them, all of it.

So thank you for making the stories what is important. I'm just the messenger, the storyteller, the one taking dictation from the people living in other worlds in my skull, and if the story is compelling it will affect all different kinds of people.

The best moment ever was having my mom tell me that she cried at the end of my play about two women.

[argentla.livejournal.com]

I strongly agree, and you've articulated it very well.

I'm very troubled by the degree to which the same-sex marriage debate has become about assimilation. Last night, actually, I sent an e-mail to a friend about that issue. Two of my friends got married in California last summer, and now they're in limbo, and naturally very concerned about the fate of Prop. 8. But every time they post about it or talk about it, it's all about wanting to be accepted as Normal. "Why can't our love be accepted like everybody else's?" I feel for them, and particularly for the stupid legal issues they have to struggle with (being considered married by the state but not the feds for tax purposes, for instance), but whenever they frame the struggle in those terms, I find it more alienating.

I feel like by making the debate about marriage, rather than basic rights -- I ask myself why people don't seem to be fighting as hard for ENDA -- it's become an exercise in exactly the kind of "queer cred" you describe. The good, photogenic, non-confrontational queers, the ones who just want kids and the house in the 'burbs and the Range Rover and the dog, will all be sanctioned, while the ones who threaten straight sensibilities -- trans people, bisexuals, bears, leather queens, etc. -- will be thrown under the bus even by the queer community, even more than they already are.

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, of course. It goes back to the "degrees of privilege" thing you were talking about here. I have the privilege of not being viewed as queer by anyone whom I don't tell - and I don't take that lightly and try to be aware of it when engaging with queer issues - but it also means I lack the privilege of having "queer cred". In a way, it means I'm judged less in straight communities, and more in queer communities, and if you do the math that means I deal with judgement 10% of the time to the 90% of the time someone in a visible same sex relationship does.

But that's putting numbers to experience in a sort of obviously ridiculous way. I don't get stared at when I walk down the street with my partner, and that's one thing, but it's another thing to sit there and listen to one of your friends go on about how they're not comfortable with lesbians because they have no idea you like women, too. Trying to quantify those experiences is silly - the best we can do is be aware of the differences in our experiences and act thoughtfully. Which is true of anyone, I guess!

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

"I think sometimes, often even, that the future of the gay rights movement largely includes our letting the boundaries blur. We don't get to be the big gay exclusionary fortress of secret coolness anymore, or whatever the fuck it is we were telling ourselves we were doing while we were just trying to stay alive."

+1. Hell, +10.

Most of the people of my generation, I think, don't care whether someone's gay or not - "moral" relates to theft and murder and is irrelevant-to-the-point-of-absurdity with regard to behavior between consenting adults.

There are still a few redoubts left, but as far as I can see, the really big gay-rights victories have been decisively won. The fortress mentality probably did make a lot of sense in the `60s and `70s, but - as I see it - it's redundant and counterproductive as we move into the 2010s.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Is it necessarily a function of bears and leather queens being *thrown* under the bus? I'm not at all familiar with their scenes, but at one point I knew a lot of punk and hippie types. These are groups that deliberately self-identify as outsiders, that *intend* to threaten and offend mainstream sensibilities.

Isn't that sort of the *point* of that kind of public self-identification?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I don't have time right now to do it justice, but I would argue very strongly against both bear and leather community being self-identified with the intent to threaten and offend mainstream sensibilities. It was, in my very weird insider/outsider experience of it, a way to create family and rules amongst people who had largely been cast out of their own.

[rm.livejournal.com]

As someone who witnessed and experience anti-gay violence more than once in the '90s, and as someone who is mindful about the lack of employment protections and basic relationship-related (inheritance, immigration, etc.) rights, I think there are still a lot of big, big, big battles we're still fighting. We're allowed to say what they are now, and that's huge. We're allowed to exist in the world now (in certain circumscribed ways, if we're discussing the media), and that is also huge.

But until the law catches up with the overwhelming attitude of people who are largely younger than me, it's hard for me to say that we're almost there.

For my older friends and relatives, men in their fifties who lost dozens of people, it's impossible for me to tell them the fortress can be a little more welcoming now. God, why should they?

Among other things, it's reasonable to argue that there is wide-spread PTSD within the LGBTQ community as a whole and just as is the case with bigotry, wounds like that are too often only healed on a community-wide basis through attrition.

It's going to hurt here for a long time. It is amazing though to see all the people who don't have to live with that though. This week's New York Times piece on kids coming out in junior high makes an excellent footnote to the discussion.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Said NYT article being this one.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I'm finding a hard time articulating something coherent to say about this post, as it is an important one.

The lines are constantly blurring as you say. Still, I find myself wanting to be more a part of that older (old-school) "inside" Lesbian group, but am wary because I know that if I'm going to be with man, I'll be excluded and the whole "unreliable" bi stereotype is out in full force, which pisses me off, because that's something you hear from both sides of the sexuality fence.

And the point should be the stories; stories are who we are, who other people are and they have the ability to transcend the categories we are compelled (forced) to box ourselves in and that's what the awards should really be about.

The whole younger people being more accepting/tolerant may be true if you grow up in the right places and meet the right places.
And living in a country in which queer rights are waaaaaay better than in other places, the violence committed against us and the fact that there kids are called "Homo!" at school and "Lesbian" is a pejorative (not to mention that there is one LGBTQ youth shelter in the whole country)... is telling.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to tell you, the state of things where you are, sounds (with the complicating issues that are Israel, of course) very much how things were here twenty years ago. That's in part, when you're like "eh" I'm like "no, it sucks, I _know_."

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Well, Israel is always behind the rest of the Western World by about twenty years.
I mean, we had the 11th Pride Parade this year in Tel-Aviv and the 5th in Jerusalem... all of which were not in the main streets.

When I was a teenager I would go to Rocky Horror Picture Show in irder to feel part of the "community", but it was just a tiny venue once a month which happened out of town late at night and for a 15-16 year old queer who couldn't drive and without a lot of friends... the isolation was maddening at times.
Still, if you're not in Tel-Aviv and to a lesser extent Jerusalem... there is not a whole lot of queer "culture" around to be found.

There are youth groups which are awesome, which need more volunteers... guess what I'm trying to do.

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

i'm... hmm - i don't know if i *should* have an opinion on this as i'm sort of on the outside looking in..? but my initial thought, having read nothing on this but your post, is that awards should honor the works and what they achieve without even looking at the person behind them
and then of course, you said:
Which means that when it comes to the business of awards my gut says, honor them. Not me. Not writers. Characters. Stories. Honor them.

so i think, yeah, that is my thought exactly - but, in general, i always look at the work and often forget or don't even know the person(s) behind it or anything about them

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

And just so I don't sound utterly selfish and such, this is an encouraging comment and I think you for it.

I'm glad that there is perspective to be had.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hey, you've had a bad week. No worries.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

This is honestly the best post I've seen on this so far -- and the least reactive. I also think the LLA should consider emulating the Carl Brandon Society's awards--though, I thought, when I read the clarification of the guidelines, that they already offered an allies award? Granted, I just found out about it today so it probably doesn't do what I think it does.

Anyway, I think the foundation would have been better served if they'd waited until Jan 2010 to change things. There is a lot of hurt out there I think because some straight writers were banking on entering this year only to find out that months of hopes are now impossible.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Now I'm cringing at my typos!

Gah! Staying up late... not good for being articulate, precise or especially coherent.

Thanks again.

[julesndairyland.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for this post.
You have been able to articulate so much of what I have been struggling with recently.

(snipped)
I think sometimes, often even, that the future of the gay rights movement largely includes our letting the boundaries blur. We don't get to be the big gay exclusionary fortress of secret coolness anymore, or whatever the fuck it is we were telling ourselves we were doing while we were just trying to stay alive...

Awards = Good...

Which means that when it comes to the business of awards my gut says, honor them. Not me. Not writers. Characters. Stories. Honor them.

I see this played out very much as a generational issue in my adoptive community. Often the young people I work with don't fit "cleanly" (nor do they desire to do so) into the established LGBT categories. But their resistance to 'play by the rules' then allows further marginalization from the dominant folks in the Lesbian & Gay community. So ageism, gender-ignorance/intolerance and queer-phobia/hatred fracture us even move (and let's not forget the racism that comes along too).

So there is a long way to go, but there are leaders there - if we let them lead.


*this seems disjointed, sorry if it is incomprehensible*

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

I have the privilege of not being viewed as queer by anyone whom I don't tell - and I don't take that lightly and try to be aware of it when engaging with queer issues - but it also means I lack the privilege of having "queer cred". In a way, it means I'm judged less in straight communities, and more in queer communities...

I was accepted in the lesbian community as a child because my mother is gay. As a teen - I want to say I was 18 or 19, so a late teen - I had the very unpleasant experience of having my mother's first wife tell me that she was tired of bisexuals being allowed into lesbian spaces at festivals. She felt very strongly that there was a need for lesbian-only space. And in that moment, I was cut out of a not-insignificant part of her life.

(Ironically, she has since gone on to marry a man and move out west.)

So - yeah. I grok.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly.

[better-late24.livejournal.com]

Were the awards originally to honor the authors or the stories? Both? Just wondering if it's been a shift or just brought been an issue lately.

[rm.livejournal.com]

If my understanding of the situation is correct, it was never explicitly stated, because the awards were created at a point when there was an expectation that straight authors would be uninterested in addressing queer topics. The current discussion and "clarification" (that raises this issue of "what is LGBT?") is a result of that non-specificity leading to a perception of straight authors winning awards for gay-themed works.