Queer Country

Ok. This is starting to feel like a personal photo album more than a blog. I’ll stop this soon (promise)…but here are links to the the Boston talks:

A really nice podcast (http://cyber NULL.law NULL.harvard NULL.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman142) of the interview David Weinberger (of “Small Things Loosely Joined” fame) did with me after the Berkman Center talk

The archived webcast (http://cyber NULL.law NULL.harvard NULL.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/02/gray) of the Berkman talk

…and, have to shout out to my friend and media scholar extraordinaire, Mark Deuze (http://deuze NULL.blogspot NULL.com/). I slipped in a reference to his work on “living in media” (a new project that follows up his book Media Work (http://amzn NULL.com/0745639259)) but the cite didn’t make its way from my brain to my mouth.

I’ll post more about some of the questions that have come up since my talks in Boston (definitely some great food for thought for me). In the meantime, here’s a link to the op-ed (http://www NULL.guardian NULL.co NULL.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/16/gay-country-urban-community) I published in The Guardian today. It’s a nice recap of my main arguments from the book. Enjoy!

This week, I had the pleasure of playing with social media researcher (and fellow youth culture rabble rouser) danah boyd at the Microsoft Research (http://research NULL.microsoft NULL.com/en-us/people/dmb/) campus in Cambridge, MA. I also gave a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society that gave me a chance to gush about librarians–and say gay and Internet policy in the same breath– something I’ve been meaning to do for years now!

You see, one of my favorite stories that didn’t make it into the book was the experience of a group of youth whose world changed the day their local public librarian decided to reposition the two Internet-accessible public terminals so that passers-by could not easily see patrons’ surfing. Many of us who enjoy the comfort and privacy of zippy home broadband access might think “so what?…they’re still in a public space, right?” But, for rural LGBT and questioning young people with no personal access to a home PC, living in communities still dependent on dial-up service, and facing the hurdles of draconian filtering and monitoring software on all their school computers, the public library’s computers became the primary “private” gateway for their queer explorations. I’m working on a more “academeze” version of this story but the upshot is this: Like policy analysts Paul DiMaggio and Eszter Hargittai argued back in 2001, information access is SOOO much more than whether a computer and the net are present or absent (what some folks in the biz call “media penetration” or “domestication”–an unfortunate choice of terms, I know). The divide between digital “haves” and “have-nots” involves a complicated set of conditions way beyond securing hardware. That public librarian in rural Eastern Kentucky addressed what DiMaggio and Hargittai called “digital inequality”–queer young people’s direct access to not just the equipment to browse but the social possibilities for their autonomous use and social validation to use the computers for something more than term papers.

Because I heard the story of the librarian’s cool move from the youth themselves somewhat after the fact, I never had the chance to go back and ask the library if they knew what a difference they were making for these young people (and if they did, would they be as happy about?)…But now’s my chance to dive back into the details of digital inequality in the rural U.S. and the strategies young people use to workaround and re-purpose the constrained access they have to rebuild their own senses of public-ness and queer visibility.

If you’re like me, you were holding your breath and hoping that marriage equality would win the day in Maine on November 4. It didn’t. Mainers voted 53% in favor of repealing a law recently passed and signed by their Governor that granted marriage to same-sex couples. On the flip(pant) side: they did legalize distribution of medical marijuana. It’s not that I think these issues are related but they were on the same ballot (giving me an easy title for this blog post).

Marriage equality came to Maine through legislative action, distinguishing the campaign from the court fight it took to pass marriage in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Unfortunately, like the 30 states before it, when Maine’s residents had a chance to vote on the issue, they voted down the right of its citizens to choose a same-sex partner for marital bliss. The national news analysis (strangely less visible than you’d think) noted that Maine’s most populous city, Portland, overwhelmingly came out against the repeal of same-sex marriage but it was those “conservative regions to the north (http://www NULL.nytimes NULL.com/2009/11/05/us/politics/05maine NULL.html)” that could not be swayed.

While voting patterns can tell us something about where to take the fight (i.e., “regions to the north” in Maine), they can’t tell us how we might need to re-define what we’re fighting for when we’re working out in the country (punned intended).

Let me clarify: When we struggle over marriage equality (whether fought state-by-state or on the national stage) our strategies suggest that winning is a matter of clarifying our message and delivering it (personally) to folks who haven’t thought about our rights before. But, I’d argue, we also need to translate why our issues might (or should) matter to someone who sees LGBT life as strictly a city (or white or upper class) thing.

One of the most important moves LGBT rights advocates can do now is not just assess whether we need to shift from a state-by-state approach to a Federal frontal attack of the Defense of Marriage Act. We also need to ask why we find it so difficult to imagine doing both. To win in states like Maine (or states like Kentucky, Indiana, or Tennessee, discussed in Out in the Country), we have to engage rural communities and others we have long seen as an “immovable middle,” and reckon with the complicated questions they are asking like “Are we talking about the same thing when we talk about the meaning of family and marriage?” “Are we prepared to make a case for why young people should learn about same-sex couples in schools?” And, most pressing, “how will supporting marriage equality address basic needs and political goals in communities where struggles for equality are far from over for the majority of residents?”

This is the next stage of our struggle. What can we do to struggle effectively? Stay tuned as I hash out some innovative strategies from conversations with the folks I meet on the Queer Country Book Tour (next stop: A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco’s Castro District, Thursday November 19, 7:30 p.m.)…come join the conversation?

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act (http://www NULL.nytimes NULL.com/2009/10/23/us/politics/23hate NULL.html) will move from the United States’ legislative branch to its executive west wing today (Thursday October 22, 2009 for the blogo-record). President Obama promised Matthew Shepard’s mother, Judy, that he would sign the bill if it made it to the Oval Office desk. This means a great deal in places where local officials don’t or can’t track crimes that target a person’s “perceived or actual gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability” without the aid of Federal resources. That includes most rural counties in the U.S. and my entire adoptive state of Indiana since we don’t recognize hate crimes of any kind.

To date, we’ve had nothing but anecdotal evidence and a patchwork of earnest non-profit organizations to make sense of the socio-spatial dimensions of queer-motivated hate crimes…Who commits these crimes? Where do they happen? Are they more likely to happen in places like Laramie, WY than Los Angeles, CA? What can we do to address them constructively? If/when passed, this new hate crimes law will include $5 million dollars for investigation of these critical questions (and, doing the math, that’s really not enough…so we should think of this as a start).

Perhaps as important as the legislation itself was the conversation it fueled in queer advocacy circles on two key issues: we had to discuss the importance of including (indeed, demanding) gender identity in hate crimes legislation and 2) we had to consider how the violence wrought be hate crimes can feed the violence wrought by an unjust justice/incarceration system.

As any butch grrl in a plaid shirt and buzzcut or sissy boi in skinny jeans and a fohawk can tell you, queer kids get bashed because they aren’t wearing their gender “properly.” in other words, they are targeted more often for disturbing a visual gender norm than because they’re swapping PDA with their LGBT sweeties. Transwomen and transmen (particularly transpeople of color) are bashed because they don’t meet some queerhater’s normative ideals of “the” gender boxes. While sexual orientation is in the mix, we’re usually not wearing it on our sleeves (except when we’re holding a matching-gender lover in our arms). No, we’re likely breaking gendercodes when the fisticuffs start flying. So excluding gender identity from hate crimes legislation is like turning the lights out before you burn down your own house. What’s the point?

Perhaps (perhaps) more challenging in the hate crimes legislation debate was pushing gay and lesbian people to think about how expansion of hate crimes legislation necessarily calls on us to examine the in/justice of the incarceration system (many have called it the “prison industrial complex”–I just don’t want to throw that term around on this blog…so, check out Critical Resistance (http://criticalresistance NULL.org) for more on PIC). At one stage of the legislative debate, Republican Senators planned to attach the death penalty to prosecution of hate crimes (presumably to shake some of the bill’s more liberal anti-death penalty supporters from their support). But there were plenty of gay and lesbian supporters who didn’t flinch. Bring it on their unwavering support for hate crimes legislation seemed to suggest. Kill the bashing bastards.

Whoa. To collectively get behind such a sentiment, we would have to believe (in addition to other things) that our system is flawless in its execution of justice. And it is not. Far from it. In fact, as the New York Times reported (http://www NULL.nytimes NULL.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison NULL.html) back in 2008, we lock up more (arguably young, poor, disabled, racially oppressed, politically marginalized, and gender-transgressive) folks than any other nation in the world.

Fortunately, the Senate amendments that would’ve made hate crimes necessarily carry the weight of the death penalty failed to make it to the final bill. But what if we had been willing to put the death penalty on the table? What about default extended prison sentences? Thanks to some heavy lobbying efforts by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, we don’t have to face ourselves in the morning in such a moral morass.

May this new legislation draw our attention to the complexities and intimacies that produce hate rather than lull us into believing we’ve found the legislative magic bullet to prevent it.

October 2nd, I spent the length of the day (and into the night) surrounded by other folks deeply invested in discussing why LGBT studies scholars (among others) haven’t thought that much about queer life outside cities. The symposium, organized by the amazing Nadine Hubbs (http://www NULL.music NULL.umich NULL.edu/faculty_staff/bio NULL.php?u=&lname=hubbs&fname=nadine), Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Music Theory at University of Michigan, looked at the state of queer debate when it comes to working class, rural, and nonmetropolitan studies. Two things that really struck me about not only the papers but the questions and comments from the audience participants: 1) the interdisciplinarity of the conversation and 2) the pressing desire for a return to a meatier, more critical analysis of class. In some cases, our different academic training pushed us to translate our work in ways that I found incredibly exciting. For example, I found myself constantly qualifying my comments–clarifying that, for the communities I worked with, poverty and rurality go hand-in-hand. Most (but not all) of the youth I worked with came from and continue to live lives defined by what they can’t access. Most have extremely limited social and economic resources. Even in cases where they or their families might tentatively occupy the middle class their rural surroundings complicate the value of their incomes (even if you make $50,000 a year, it doesn’t give you greater local access to better schools, medical care, or cultural scenes because those structures and services just aren’t there to buy).

There is so much more to say about this symposium but I need more time to digest my thoughts before I I can say much more here. I do feel like the graduate students I met suggest that there is now momentum to move us past the conversation of “gee, queer studies should really look at this.” Finally.

Thanks Nadine, Terri, and all the other UMich folks for hosting.

I find it impossible not to throw on an accent (my version of the Texan variety) when I tell people I just returned from some book talks in New York City. I grew up with that Pace Picanté Sauce (“Pick up the Pace!”) commercial that jiggled salsa made in NEW YORK CITY was just blasphemous. Well, perhaps a book on rural LGBT and questioning youth seems equally out of place against the backdrop of Manhattan’s skyscrapers? But I can’t think of a better audience than the folks I met delivering talks for the Second Tuesday Lecture series at NYC’s LGBT Community Center and, later in the week, at Hofstra University. City dwellers are a key constituency I hope to recruit as I share the stories of rural LGBT youth working to improve their lives and those of their communities.

The LGBT Community Center talk generated some fantastic discussion about what urban queer organizers and advocates can or should do for their country cousins. While I don’t land anyplace definitive in the book, I argue that the lessons I learned from the youth I worked with can teach us all about the limits of statewide and national organizing that ignores the specific needs and contexts of rural communities. So my message is less about what rural communities “need” from city centers and more about what models of organizing they suggest for our collective future (BIG HINT: coalitional politics go much further than single-issue fights in communities with limited capacity to organize people, money, and political momentum).

Students and faculty at Hofstra University taught me how to translate the specifics of this case study on digital media and identity negotiation that, to date, I’ve primarily presented to LGBT-identifying non-academic types. My heart-felt thanks to the Hofstra faculty and students for pushing me to underscore not only the political but intellectual/scholarly implications of this work. I tend to downplay what I think I’m academically up to in “Out in the Country” and there’s nothing like a smart, attentive audience to remind me of the other conversations I hope to continue as I carry on this “Queer Country” book tour.

Lastly, thanks to Dr. Cynthia Chris for snapping this photo of my book stacked on the shelves of NYC’s Book Culture (http://www NULL.bookculture NULL.com/). There’s nothing like seeing a book you wrote living on a shelf someplace that isn’t in your own home.

You know, every time I do an interview with a sharp journalist (like Mandy Van Deven (http://bitchmagazine NULL.org/profile/mandy-van-deven)), I learn a bit more about my own book. Mandy’s questions really pushed me to more fully articulate the lessons I hope this book offers LGBTQ activists and our allies.

When Mandy interviewed me for Wiretap Magazine (http://www NULL.wiretapmag NULL.org/stories/44464/) (and reviewed Out in the Country on Bitch Magazine’s blog (http://bitchmagazine NULL.org/post/of-queers-and-cowboys), cross-posted to the Feminist Review (http://www NULL.feministreview NULL.org/)), she captured one of the most important insights I think rural LGBTQ youth have to offer statewide and national queer organizers: until we grapple with the contingencies that shape the lives of rural LGBTQ youth and their communities, we cannot effectively move a national LGBTQ rights agenda forward. To substantively change the day-t0-day lives of those living beyond or rendered invisible by urban queer scenes, we must radically rethink the unexamined urban and classed biases that animate much of our political work.

While we’ve attended to Harvey Milk’s credo “move to the nearest city” we haven’t given as much attention to the importance of Milk’s other political legacy: a deep commitment to finding common cause and prioritizing coalitions to advance an issue that encompasses–rather than narrowly targets–our own. It is not politically enough to tell people they should care about our issues. The day that LGBTQ community organizers dedicate as much energy (financial and human) to the fundamental needs we share with rural communities (access to healthcare, for example) as we do securing specific forms of social recognition (marriage equality, for example) will be the day that the gay agenda really does take root in the rural United States.

Hi everyone,

A few friends (and relatives) out in Dallas, Texas, may have heard me on NPR-affiliate KERA 90.1FM’s Think w/ Krys Boyd Wednesday August 26th. For those who missed the program (which was WAY fun), you can check out the podacast of the hour-long, call-in show archived here (http://podcastdownload NULL.npr NULL.org/anon NULL.npr-podcasts/podcast/77/510036/112280019/KERA_112280019 NULL.mp3?_kip_ipx=1762292935-1251655965). I received my first crank call a few days later. A man with a twang not unlike my own phoned me, asked to speak to Mary Gray, argued with me that I didn’t sound like Mary Gray, and told me “Steve heard you in Dallas…you know he’s moved in with him.” It didn’t make any sense to me either. But he sounded peeved. I told him since I didn’t know who he was and I knew who I was that I would hang up now. Nothing says “recognition” quite like a crank call.

I actually met Fred Phelps shortly before I moved to Kentucky to start my initial research for what would become Out in the County. For those unfamiliar with Westboro Baptist Church minister Fred Phelps and his church congregants (reported to be made up entirely of his extended family), they have made a name for themselves toting “God Hates Fags” signs around the country to protest events ranging from Matthew Shepard’s memorial service to funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

I was a graduate student in Communication at the University of California, San Diego at the time. I was in Lawrence, Kansas, for the first Association of Internet Researchers (http://aoir NULL.org) conference (they’ve grown into a great group of digital media researchers and will celebrate their 10th anniversary this year). Little did I know that Fred Phelps would be in Lawrence that same weekend (and me without a proper counter-protest outfit to wear). I thought he was your garden variety false prophet crackpot until I spotted the “God Hates Fags” signs. This was 1999, only a year after Matthew Shepard’s murder in Wyoming. Every queer activist knew about the “God Hates Fags” guy but I didn’t know the name of the person behind the sign until that day. He was on campus protesting…well…it was hard to decipher what exactly he was protesting. Some of his signs said “Gayhawks” so my guess was that he thought the University of Kansas Jayhawks needed to man up or something (just teasing Jayhawks fans).

Anyway, it was wonderful to see so many college students buzzing around Phelps challenging his biblical condemnations of homosexuality and generally letting him know his spew was not welcome on their campus (gotta love college students for their penchant to respectfully talk back to grumpy old white men). Like so many agitators who traffic in hyperbole, Phelps’ thin-lipped smile betrayed the deep satisfaction he seemed to draw from all the attention. He stood on a concrete step, in strikingly bright, white gardening gloves clutching his golden oldie “God Hates Fags” day-glo orange sign and basked in the hatred. Before the party broke up, I managed to grab one of the young progressive passers-by and have my picture taken with Phelps (but for the life of me! I can’t find it–I will keep looking and hopefully post it later).

Truth be told: Phelps is a godsend to LGBT organizing. He makes homo haters embarrassed of their hatred. Who wants to stand next to someone who brandishes signs like “Thank God for Sept 11″ or “Fags Burn in Hell?” as his followers did in Boyd County, Kentucky back in January 2003. In Chapter 3 (School Fight! Local Struggles Over National Advocacy Strategies) readers will find a discussion of one community’s struggle over accepting the presence of a gay-straight alliance (GSA) club at the local high school. Area churches held rallies in the town protesting the club. But, when Pastor Fred Phelps’ clan traveled from Topeka, Kansas, to launch their own protest (not of the GSA but of the local churches for allowing the club to form in the first place), the local Commission on Human Rights office (an office established in 1960 in Kentucky to monitor and prevent job discrimination based on race) organized a rally. Dubbed the CommUnity Rally, the event attempted to challenge state and national depictions of rural Kentucky as simply homophobic and narrow-minded, protest the Westboro Church’s presence, and condemn discrimination of all kinds in their county’s small towns. Interestingly the CommUity Rally stopped shot of publicly advocating for the gay-straight alliance but praised the youth involved in creating it (the GSA’s youth leaders were conspicuously absent from the rally’s line up of speakers).

The presence of Fred Phelps was just what the town needed to sort out who was the more abhorrent stranger. These kids might be queer. But they were Boyd County’s queer kids. In fact, some residents a few counties away used the Phelps’ Kentucky visit to fundraise for their own community groups working with LGBTQ youth. They collected pledges of nickels to dollars for every minute Phelps’ group stood out in the January cold waving their signs.

And, as important, the CommUnity Rally was an opportunity to redeem the town’s reputation as a tolerant and accepting place (the limits of its success and links to a history of attempts to name and address discrimination against racial difference will have to wait for another blog entry). While uncomfortable recognizing and naming the queer difference in the room, the event’s organizers used the logic of familiarity and the language of civil rights to demonstrate the community’s embrace of all locals and repudiate any stranger coming to condemn their own.

Thanks, Pastor Fred. Keep up the great work.