we walk through this world together

This semester I’ve had the pleasure of reading my favorite book in my college career, Gender Outlaws: The NextGeneration by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. The book is a collection of submissions by gender outlaws that include poems, comics, research, and short vignettes. The book is outstanding, but it wasn’t the gorgeous writing that got me, or the way it pushes the boundaries of everything you thought you knew about gender, it’s my favorite because it touched my heart.

When I picked up the book for the first time I really didn’t expect to have a personal connection with the content. I am no gender outlaw. I am a cis woman who conforms to gender expectations- a girl who loves nail polish, long flowing dresses, and romance stories. I expected it to be interesting and illuminating, like everything we’ve read, but to learn more about other people than I did about myself. Let me tell you a secret: there are times where I don’t feel queer enough for the community, not radical enough or knowledgeable enough, wondering if my lived experiences fit in with everyone else. This unlikely book was for me.

About 60 pages in, I sat, heart pounding as I read my feelings in plain typeface, “I’ve somehow managed to foist my way into a community to which I don’t really belong”. Suddenly, ironically, the miles disappeared and I felt connected to Quince Mountain, the author of the piece. I felt like he was sitting right next to me, holding my hand and letting me know how he re-found his place as “part of an enormous, queer thing” and how community is not necessarily about who we are as individuals, but what we create together. At the end of his story he reminded me that “no, I am not colorful enough, not queer enough to reshape the world. It turns out, no one of us is”.

And it didn’t end there. Throughout the book I have dog-eared pages and underlined phrases and I realized that though our lives and identities are completely different, this book was filled with a chorus of voices that spoke to me with our common experiences.

And this almost transcendental experience got me thinking. We spend so much time wrapped up in our identities, defending our right to feel how we feel. Identity politics can be really healing, and I’ve also seen how cutting identity politics can be. Our groups fragment into subgroups and we start bickering about who is and isn’t allowed to be present or worse, we start devaluing identities we perceive as a threat.

Instead of identity, I like the idea (also from Gender Outlaws) of organizing ourselves by experience, because that’s what drives our thoughts, our politics, and our healing. Obviously no two people will have exactly the same experience but I found so many of my own thoughts and feelings in the different stories of Gender Outlaws that I can’t imagine it not working at some level.

This book was for me. It spoke to me with my own words from different voices, identities, and life stories and taught me a lot more than I bargained for.   

But really, this book is for everyone, because I believe that we can all find ourselves within someone else and I’d be surprised if anyone could get through this book without finding themselves within the pages.  

Scholastic Research on the QPOC community

In the coming weeks, I'll be completing a grad school level research project as part of the NASPA Undergraduate Fellows Program. My research topic is on how Queer People of Color navigate their identities in various social setting such as racial spaces, queer spaces, the classroom and professional settings.  Before I could conduct my own research, I had to find and review the literature that was already out there. What I found both surprised me and didn't surprise me.

I FOUND ALMOST NOTHING!

This surprised me because I found all these articles on intersectionality, but all of it was in terms of race and gender. I found maybe one article that threw sexual orientation in the mix. And for gender identity, it was all binary. It didn't surprise me because when you think about it, queer people of color are often not the focus of any movement. They sit in a space that people tend to forget about. I've noticed that a lot of times it's an either/or type situation; never a both. The fight for "gay" rights focuses on white people and the fight against racism focuses on heterosexual people. With this being my observation, I'm not surprised that people aren't studying the QPOC community. 

This makes me really upset that I don't have the time to publish the research I'm doing this semester. I found two articles total that touched on the QPOC community and one was about a legal case. I'm super interested in how QPOC navigate their identities because there can be a lot of homophobia & heterosexism in the racial spaces and a lot of racism in queer spaces. Personally, I feel like I have to pick and choose my identities depending on the space I'm in. And even when doing so, I still feel like the identity I'm suppressing is even more visible because I'm constantly thinking about if I'm showing it. 

It gets lonely when you feel like you can't fully connect with a group of people. In one of my classes, we watched Marlon Riggs's "Black Is, Black Ain't." I first watched this documentary in my Black Queer Literature and Film class. After seeing it again and seeing some of the quotes made by many prominent black figures only made it clearer that there is still a ton of homophobia in the black community. I also read an article for my project that referenced the film and it gave some clarity to these statements. It said that there is a strong sense of homophobia (especially towards black gay males) because black men have to be hyper masculine; they've been emasculated for so much of history that anything deviating from this is wrong and detrimental to the cause. 

Agree or disagree if you may, this puts queer people of color in a sticky situation. They can't fully identify with their racial community nor can they fully identify with the queer community. This is why I'm doing the research I'm doing. Intersectionality, in my opinion, is the when two identities combine to create a new and unique experience for an individual. Queer people of color have to live with the intersections of race and sexual orientation and/or gender identity. I'm excited to see what I find and hopefully I'll be able to add to the literature out there so that further down the line, it's not as difficult for people to look up research on Queer people of color and people will want to.