Pride Week has some shameful gaps

Reflecting on my feelings of "pride" at the beginning of Pride Week has brought about writer's block. Considering that some readers who are not familiar with the gay community might be boxing me in as the representative of the whole "Gay Community," should I unleash my anger and air our dirty laundry? That would cause the non-queer progressive activists on campus to gossip, "The gay community is so divided! What a shame." Or should I silence my frustrations and try to cookie-cut my words into a language people can digest easily—Intro to Gay Issues 101—and paint us as one big, happy, rainbow, homogenous community?

RAVI D'CRUZ/YH

I finally decided to talk about an issue that is not just a gay issue, but one that plagues all people: silence and oppression. Understanding the ways that silence and oppression work involves hearing what is not spoken and seeing what is not visible. Take a look at the posters for Pride Week and the schedule of events. Notice that only one event features a (token) person of color. And although there is a panel and a film series that focus on issues of race, the rest of Pride Week is white. Turn the same gaze on the assumptions about gays that are already embedded in your mind. Remember all the images and ideas you have collected in association with the word gay: scenes from Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, or If These Walls Could Talk, or pictures from the pages of the most popular gay magazines, like Out.

The face of pride is white, usually male, and associated with a person from an upper-middle class upbringing. The issues that have become prominent within the LGBT/queer movement are therefore organized around a singular form of oppression—homophobia.

Why is it that we don't see more brown faces put forward as representing gayness? And why aren't welfare reform, the prison-industrial complex, the HIV/AIDS destruction of communities of color, and police brutality put forward as gay issues? Why do we hear about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a white gay male from the Midwest, but not about the murder of Amanda Milan, a black transgender woman from New York City? By looking at what's left out, we are able to see the ways that oppression works within our "progressive" movements (e.g., why do reproductive rights activists mainly focus on abortion? What about the coerced sterilization and the criminalization of black, Latina, and native women mothers that go on everyday?).

It's not enough to fight for the right to marry, to be a boy scout, or to work in a big corporation without harassment. Gay activists inflate homophobia as the sole evil of this world and deflate other issues stemming from class and race. Queer people of color are asked to come to Pride Week or to the gay activist movement leaving our poverty and/or race behind. We are pressured to just be gay. Although the leaders of the gay movement also experience multiple identities—as white people, as capitalists, and overwhelmingly as males—these identities are the norm. Homophobia keeps them from fully accessing their race and class privileges, but it does not completely block them from privileges that are denied to many queer and straight people of color. White supremacy and classism work within the gay movement to silence people of color, making us invisible and negating a universal understanding of oppression.

With deep pride, I can say that I am a black queer dyke from a working-poor background. As a person who faces multiple oppressions, I do not identify much with Pride Week and the larger LGBT movement. I do not see myself reflected. I am fighting against racism in the anti-homophobia movement and homophobia in anti-racist movements. My pride week is about being in the company of others who are just as committed to ending silence and oppression and to creating a space in which we can exist with all of our parts.

Erica Waples, MC '02, is a co-coordinator of PRISM, a discussion/activist group for queer people of color.

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