IT’S THE GAY DEBATERS!
Ted Kerr / ted@vueweekly.com
It may not have appeared that way to others, but my friend Angie and I were self-defined exiles in high school. It was how we felt and so how we interacted with the world. We joined the speech and debate club as a way to be heard and express ourselves. We competed in the duo acting category and we were surprisingly good at it considering we only practiced when we should have been in math class.
The height of our success came at the regional championships, where we blew the competition away, qualifying that day for another round where we would have to write a speech and present in front of all the judges, competitors and parents.
I can’t remember what Angie spoke about, but I remember delivering a speech about lessons in hard work that my first boss, Stan, had taught me. It was met with rousing heart-felt applause. Even as the moderator was announcing that we would be taking a short break to tally up the scores people were beginning to gather around to congratulate me. It was ridiculous, but I felt on top of the world.
One woman, a parent, watched me intently my whole speech. I remember her face because it was so fixated on mine. As she pushed through the crowd, I could see her mouth begin to form with a question. I begin to feign humbleness in anticipated response.
“Are you boy or are you girl?” she asked, a relieved smile filling her face like she had just gotten something off her chest or had the best poop of her life.
“What?” I choked out, the assembled crowd ready for the punch line.
“The whole time you were speaking I was trying to figure it out, are you a boy or a girl?”
People silently and quickly began to leave the scene. My face went from the rose of victory to the scarlet of shame and confusion as I began to consider the possibility that she wasn’t the only one with the same question. “Boy,” I mumbled, my voice cracking as I said it.
“Oh,” she said, not fully convinced or satisfied.
Soon I was standing there with only Angie at my side feeling my heart racing. It wasn’t being mistaken for a girl that was the issue, it was not being seen for who I truly was that was bothering me.
That day was the first time I had ever had to come out about my gender, but it would not be the last. It reached its peak in the years after high school while I was working retail. The cashier would ask a customer, “Was there a salesperson helping you?” to which the response was often, “Yes, that nice girl over there,” while pointing at me.
At first I was confused, I don’t look like a girl and even through I have feminine mannerisms, so does Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy, but no one confuses him with Hannah Montana. It is only in the last few years that I have realized it is not how I look but other people’s definition of gender that makes me appear womanly in their eyes. It is my softness, the fact I wear scarves and my urge to partake in seemingly girly activities that cues people to label me female.
I was reminded of the speech and debate incident last week while in Toronto for Inside Out, a Lesbian and Gay film festival where I had the privilege of attending the Queer Here/Queer Now symposium. The two-day event presented by V-Tape and Inside Out was an opportunity to focus on “current social-political themes in queer media art production, presentation and dissemination” with contributions from writers, thinkers and artists like Thomas Waugh, Allyson Mitchell, Tom Kalin, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan.
One of the most heated moments was a discussion around gender representation on film and the use of labels and pronouns. Two main camps were represented in the discussion; The “call it as I see it“ group, which felt they will call people by the pronoun they feel fits, and the ”I will call you what you want” group. Throughout the discussion, which for one small moment became verbally violent, there were peacekeepers in the room who attempted to conjure up the positive momentum of late ‘90s queer post-identity politics. In the glow of the New Queer Wave in Cinema and gigantic strides forward in the AIDS movement there was optimism that suggested that despite our differences all homosexuals could move forward under the happy umbrella of queer. Groups like Queer Nation emerged as heir apparent to the perceivably now unneeded anger of ACT-UP.
The peacekeepers brought up post-identity politics as a way of suggesting that a framework in which we could move beyond labels already existed, that we needn’t discuss how to talk about each other but instead conceive of a way to talk about people without labels.
While I was initially on board with the peacekeepers, one person said what was for me a productive statement: “post-identity politics might be a solution for those who have already had their identities recognized but for those who haven’t, post isn’t an option.”
As our rights and acceptance has increased, so too has our shared queer complexity. No longer divided by just a binary gender divide, we now also negotiate social, political, multiple gender, racial, spiritual and economic considerations as well.
As was felt at the symposium, we as sexual and gender minorities are entering exciting times where once again the euphoria of gained ground and the reality of those not yet heard are coming to a head. As Shawna Dempsey suggested on the first day of the symposium, we as a community are at our best when we are fighting.
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