Breaking the Spell: Rethinking queer community

[Novelafemme]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

LTD:

You bring up an interesting issue. One that I think needs to be discussed in the broader queer community because the question of assimilation is one all minority groups have to face at various times. What I'm about to say is filtered through my experiences, growing up as an upper-middle class black kid, in a predominately white neighborhood, in the 1970s.

My family used to get accused of being assimilationist and being insufficiently 'black' because my parents were college professors and they had the same kind of expectations other middle-class professionals have. I have often wondered what alternative those folks who made that line of argument had in mind. I also wondered how those who followed their advice/ideas fared in their lives.

Not everything comes down to economics but economics do count. I often wonder if we would have been more sufficiently 'black' if my parents hadn't put themselves through college and had expressed no preference for my sister and I going to college either. I do not think we were trying to be 'as good as' whites. I do think we were trying to live our lives with dignity and in the process of doing so we were going to show that the idea that blacks weren't as capable as whites as a lie.

The things you critique may not be the idealized way of family formation but they are the ways that we have. Yes, my wife and I live a very assimilated life. I work in an office that allows me to be a nerd at work (meaning I get to wear jeans, tee-shirts and running shoes) while paying me a professional salary. My wife goes to school on her little pink scooter. On the weekends I'm not working, we put the dog in the car and drive him to the dog park. When we come home, we putter about the house, maybe have friends over for dinner. Four times a year we pick up the shipment from our wine club. Very assimilated.

I rather like that I could invite my coworkers to our wedding without fear and have people show up and enjoy themselves. I rather like that I can talk about my wife in the day-to-day office banter about the latest antics of the dog or what-have-you, and not fear that I'm going to be called into the HR office and told I no longer have a job. Because of that, I can support us while my wife goes to school full-time. That way, she can focus on her studies. If being an assimilated black lesbian is the price I pay for that, it is a price well worth paying.

Would it be better if, instead of average lives, queer people only lived at the margins of society? I've watched this play out in the black community and what I've seen in the four decades that experiment has been run hasn't really done much to recommend deliberate marginalization. What's the difference? It's the difference between making enough to live on and not making enough to live on.

At any rate, society may not *want* marriage torn down. Society gets a vote in how society is constituted so if marriage is going to be torn down and built into something else, a convincing argument will have to be made and it may have to be made over the course of generations. If it is a truly better idea, then it will be adopted and one day *that* will become the new normal. I believe--and my observations of how different black communities have fared since the 60s seems to bolster my hypothesis--that the path to the world you hint at runs through the suburban house of assimilated queers.

I say that because I believe, based upon how we were treated when I first started school in the neighborhood and how we were treated when I graduated high school, that my parents assimilation and raising us assimilated did more good for the cause of race relations than all of the fist-raising Black Power stances that were all the vogue during that period. Why? Because when we first moved into the house and until I was, probably, in the second grade our house would be egged. We had a cross burnt on our lawn when we first moved in. My dad caught one of the egg throwers, dragged him in the house and made him call his parents. They came and picked him up and they were none-too-pleased at the experience. A decade later, these very same people were showing up at my parent's door on a very different mission. This time they wanted advice because they looked at my sister and I, looked at their own kids, and figured my parents were doing SOMETHING right. Their kids were in trouble with school and the law. My sister and I were at the top of our respective classes, never in trouble with the law, and were known around the neighborhood as industrious (we always had some kind of money-making scheme going on because our parents didn't believe in allowances so we had paper routes and mowed lawns or did babysitting).

That is quite the change, don't you think? This isn't a story of gaining the acceptance of white folks. This is a story about how people's minds change. When we moved in, the people around us thought we had no business in that neighborhood. By the time I left home, my parents were pillars of the community, leaders in the neighborhood and the 'go-to' people if you were having trouble with your kids.

Cheers
Aj

AJ, are you referring to your marriage/wedding as a commitment ceremony or a tried and true, legally binding marriage?