The attack on Shannon Barry and the robust conversation-changing response by Edmonton queers last April kicked off what ended up being a long hard summer that grew to include solidarity work with Queers Against Israeli Apartheid when it was almost censored from participating in Toronto's Pride Parade, and a rally and fundraiser in support of G20 protesters. To sum up this triad of actions in one sentence does not capture the unrelenting sense of being attacked and called to action that the summer's heat brought—nor the emotional and energetic cost paid for being active by people who can often least afford it. It was a summer where capital city queers and activists put their skills to the mat for the betterment of their city and country. But at what cost? As summer fades and winter begins many queers are left wondering if they can continue to live in such a harsh climate.
While many local queers were buoyed by the activism of this summer, and have a new sense of pride in their community and new connections and friends, the others are left hurt, angry and disillusioned. It is exhausting for those always on the defence, unearthing injustice, educating others and working to call people out on it. What is it worth for these queers to always be fighting? Where is the pay off for them when at most "greater awareness" is created but nothing really changes? Often these people best able to identify inequality are most negatively impacted by it so the cost of sticking one's neck out when they are already targeted for their queerness or otherness is higher than for others. For many, the depths of disappointment are reached not when dominant forces fail to evolve but when there is insufficient support from the queer/activist community, or when the communities replicate the oppression they are supposedly fighting against.
In some ways queer activism can be understood as disrupting current and insufficient ways of doing things based on a ideals of normality (rooted often in heterosexuality) that cause violence against those that do not fit into the definition of normal. Be it questioning the police state, challenging notions of free speech, or working to defy the consolidation of power, queers work to complicate the way that power works. What would it mean then if queers were not always activating against something and rather were working for something? In reading the essay "Sex in Public" I feel as though authors Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner make such a case when they talk about queer world-making, or queer culture-building—creating a world in which heterosexism and the domination of norms are removed and replaced with "changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture and sex."
For a while I thought maybe queer world-making was the way forward. I could see the burn out in my friends and the way we had become more negative, suspicious and always ready for a fight. I thought if there was a way to get out of the cycle of fighting, ditching the world and starting our own was the way out.
One day as I was contemplating this around the bases to a conclusion, a guy in a pick-up truck yelled "QUEER!" out of his window at me. It was as if the universe didn't believe I was going to get the right conclusion and sent the bluntest, dumbest instrument it could to teach me that while queer world-making is not a waste of time, it is not the final answer. We cannot escape the larger systems in which we exist. The problem is that these queer worlds still exist within violent and oppressive systems.
Yet not all is lost: hearty Edmonton queers fear not, starting this summer and continuing into the depths of winter a group has sprung up to address the violence of inaccessibility within Edmonton's queer community. The group will audit venues, rating places based on their accessibility for the community to reference when hosting or attending events. This group highlights that in the end there may not be a final answer in demolishing violence, but along the way, through support, queer worlds can be made. So, yes, we live in a harsh world, but it can be made a bit softer by small interventions.
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