There seem to be only two voices emerging in reaction to violence against queers: the police and limited gay media. Both are inadequate sources for providing a full conversation at a time when queer bodies are becoming more visible and, therefore, in some ways, more vulnerable.
In the last decade police have worked through training, outreach and other means to be seen as allies to LGBT communities. This alignment has allowed the police to do a better job of protecting citizens and helped members of the gay community feel safer.
Critics of neoliberalism, like Dean Spade, articulate problems with queers allying closely with the police (and so the state) better than I can. The caution for me is that while I respect the job police do, I understand their loyalty is to uphold laws that are not and more obviously in the past, have not been, queer-friendly. The police exist to maintain order, and this is inherently anti-queer. How can a force that is tasked with enforcing the status quo ever be fully available for people who by their very nature question it, work against it?
While the police's anti-queer existence does not stop them from serving and protecting gay citizens it does stump the institution in how it can conceive and react to violence. Frameworks like hate crime legislation are helpful when violence is a clear-cut homophobic attack but not useful when dealing with other violence directed towards queers such as systemic discrimination, homelessness and drug laws.
Police are also not overly useful when violence is directed towards marginalized people within the LGBT community. I helped organize last year's Edmonton's Transgender Day of Remembrance. At first I was shocked but happy to hear that over the past decade there was only one reported death that could be attributed to someone's transgender identity. But through conversation I was then sobered; talking to members of the trans community, there is a resistance to report acts of violence to the police.
While the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) does attempt to make inroads to make it more approachable to the trans community, living in a province where sexual reassignment surgery has been delisted, some within the community cannot see any arm of the state as possibly being available to them. This unfortunately undoes much of the good work that members of the EPS do. It also highlights the limited role that police can have around violence towards queers.
"Is Gay Bashing on the Rise?" asked a headline appearing last week on XTRA.ca in reaction to a recent wave of violence directed towards gay men in Ontario, including the death of Chris Skinner. Born out of the influential publication Body Politic, XTRA is a rare gay media outlet that actually covers queer news. It provides national, balanced news coverage by including queer-lensed stories on politics, current events and entertainment. In thinking about the above headline, I wonder if it serves to undermine XTRA's big picture work by stalling the conversation of violence towards queers by highlighting only physical attacks. This limited casting of violence, possibly resulting in too shallow a field of outrage, creates a limited reaction and does not get into the everyday violence that queers experience.
Such news stories also provide too narrow a view of who is being affected by violence. The other day a friend pointed out how often when "hate crimes" are reported in the gay media the victim is almost always a young white male. While someone could argue this is because most homophobic violence is directed towards visibly gay men, a more complex reading is useful.
We live in a culture, writer Sarah Schulman points out, obsessed with the coming-of-age story of white males—a tale as old as Jesus. When something interrupts this narrative, even if the protagonist happens to be gay, it is news. When a woman is attacked, unless she's a celebrity or a mom, it goes unreported. This is mirrored in gay media. The only high-profile story appearing last year in the gay media looking at violence towards lesbians was when a couple was assaulted in front of their children.
Common sense tells us in a culture that does not understand trans lives or value women more attacks happen than are being reported. This makes the proliferation of reports and articles about hurt white gay male bodies all the more upsetting and highlights the limited ways—due to a lack of resources—media, like the police, cover violence.
Seemingly at the heart of police and gay media's response to violence is the question of how it can be stopped. Due to the limited ways in which media and police can and should conceive and intervene in queer lives, maybe a useful question we can all ask, as suggested by Dean Spade, would instead be: what makes harm possible?
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