I’m terrible at giving directions. I love maps but I don’t carry one in my head, so I have to pause and really think through how to get somewhere when asked. I also have set routine routes which, if departed from, leave me momentarily confused. I sometimes have to remind myself where I’m headed so I don’t automatically go somewhere else more familiar. And, of course, it’s hard to figure out where you should be going when, really, you’re not going anywhere at all.
New Year’s Day is always a time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we might want to go. A new year always provides the illusion of hope for a new start, a change from old bad habits before we sink back to those comfortable old bad habits.
This topic also seems to be buzzing around the blogosphere with online commentators—of whom there are about ten million—pondering where the LGBT movement is headed now that so much of the agenda that we always denied having has been accomplished. Some advocacy organizations, like Freedom to Marry, are actually closing up shop since they have accomplished their mission. Of course, we will still get funding solicitations from them. Other groups have begun to scale back their operations now that LGB, but maybe not T, issues have gone mainstream.
There needs to be a new agenda, say the blog masters. We’re at a point of having seen many—though not all—statutory barriers to living life gay or lesbian, and sometimes even trans, removed. Now what do we do?
Well, as the line goes, it ain’t over till it’s over. And, guess what, it ain’t over. I get suspicious or maybe even just paranoid when someone declares a movement over. Here it seems to mean that straight-acting, white men have gotten what they want, so everybody else should just quiet down and get on with things, like making money now that Big Money has found that the gay community is very easy to get along with.
So, we still have kids living on the street with practically no chance of a decent future without an education and a home. Bullying is still rampant in schools and school administrators are still reluctant to do anything about it.
If you’re in any way an effeminate male, a drag queen, a fairy, don’t expect the corporate law firms to welcome you. If you’re too strong a woman, your chances for success are probably reduced as well. And trans still makes most people squirm in their executive suites. Remember, in the TV show Will and Grace, Will operated in the corporate office while his flamboyant friend Jack was always scheming for ways to make it.
And, then, there’s us. The aging lesbian and gay and trans segment of the population that the still youth-obsessed society still doesn’t want to face. Many of us live in fearful isolation. Many, if not most, of us still fear being trapped and vulnerable in hostile situations such as nursing homes that are clueless if not simply hateful to LGBT elders. I don’t see myself as shy about who I am and who I live with, but I dread being consigned to some miserable and hostile facility. If school principals are reluctant to deal with bullying, nursing home administrators are about two centuries behind them.
Plenty of LGBT people are still marginalized and there is something we can do about it. Gay marriage was never the whole agenda and now that we have that we can get back to the original idea. We still need to build communities. We still need to figure out in a positive light who we are, how we are different, what we have to offer. In a way, the assimilation phase is over with marriage. Now we can go back to being ourselves. Not just dealing with needs and demands and issues, but with supporting one another and valuing one another in all our crazy diversity. We still need to find each other and join together.
Till death do us part, you might say.
© 4 January 2016
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