Top Quotes: “Real Queer America” — Samantha Allen
Background: Allen travels to several conservative states to interview active members of queer communities within them — both in blue cities and college towns and more truly oppressive areas. She finds that adversity breeds solidarity and that queer communities are tighter-knit than those of SF or NYC due to their smaller size and their need to brand together to fight BS laws and more salient day-to-day discrimination.
Intro
“I came out as trans in Atlanta; fell in love in Bloomington, Indiana; and found my ride-or-die friends in East Tennessee. This is what I’ve learned on my travels: America is a deeply queer country — not just the liberal bastions and enclaves, but the so-called real America sandwiched between the coasts.”
“Young people are choosing to less to live in huge, expensive cities, which were traditionally friendlier toward LGBTQ individuals, and choosing instead to make lives for themselves in small and mid-tier cities in the middle and southern states.”
“The fact that so many of these smaller and mid-tier cities have been passing nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people makes it easier to live there, even if there is no legal recourse to be found at the state level. According to the Movement Advancement Project, which ranks states on their LGBT policies from ‘negative’ to ‘high,’ 47% of the LGBT population now lives in states ranked ‘low’ or below. This means that almost half of queer people in this country are spread across the South and the Midwest, Texas and the Dakotas, and other red regions.”
“Oppression and opposition can build the most beautiful connections.”
“There is a vitality to queerness where you least expect it. A refusal to be complacent. A warmth in being bonded together by the omnipresent atmospheric pressure of bigoted policies and legislative threats. Because we are still climbing from the bottom, we still need each other.”
“SF and NYC might be vaunted LGBT hot spots, but they are also exhausting and brutal places to visit, let alone live. The queer communities there can be cliquey, too, because people are spoiled for choice; in red-state oases, I’ve felt so much more adhesiveness between the L and the G and the B and the T. So not only am I not afraid to be queer in red states, red states are where I prefer to be queer.”
Utah
“The leading cause of death for Utah youth is suicide. The high suicide rate is more than just a stat — it’s a stain on the state, a reminder that all the progress LGBT activists are making in Utah is worthless if youth die before they can see it.”
“According to the Utah Department of Health, children ages 10–17 account for over 22% of all suicide attempts in the state, even though they constitute only 13% of the population. From 2012–2014, Utah had the 8th-highest youth-suicide rate in the country — and that rate has tripled since 2007.”
“[Utah LGBTQ leader] Troy describes the early-2015 negotiation process [with Mormon lawmakers] as ‘the most stressful 45 days of my life’-a ‘big, epic compromise’ that ‘could have fallen apart at any moment.’ Equality Utah was willing to make some concessions, such as exempting nonprofits with religious affiliations from the non-discrimination bill, in order to get vital LGBT protections passed, but they weren’t willing to compromise on who within that acronym would be covered (including trans folks). The Mormon Church also drew some uncrossable lines in the sand, among them exempting BYU student housing from the bill’s prohibition on housing discrimination. But giving the Mormons a few thousand rental units in order to get hundreds of thousands of units covered statewide seemed like the right thing to do. The first draft of the bill was ‘awful and we really had to fight over it,’ but by the end of the process, all parties agreed on a single piece of proposed legislation: Senate Bill 296. And then there was Troy Williams of the Capitol 13, the spunky ex-Mormon upstart everyone had doubted, shaking hands with two Mormon apostles — two of the 12 most powerful men in the religion standing shoulder to shoulder with an openly gay activist. ‘That had never happened in the history of Mormonism ever,’ Troy says.”
Bathroom Bills
“As a trans person, you never know when some self-appointed potty vigilante is going to spot you and decide to make a scene.”
“Early on in my transition, when I was less confident in my appearance than I am now, figuring out where to go to the bathroom on a long road trip felt like planning a bank robbery. I liked one-or two-stall restrooms in chain restaurants that had enough foot traffic to feel safe but weren’t so busy that there would be a line. Often I would hold it in for long stretches until I found an exit that looked promising. And as nearly a third of trans people reported having done in the 2015 Transgender Survey, I avoided food and water — even when I was hungry or thirsty — just so I would have to use the bathroom less frequently.”
“I’m a person, not the harbinger of some cultural apocalypse. Intellectually, I can tell myself that these bathroom bills are the product of cynical backroom scheming: when same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in 2015, anti-LGBT hate groups needed a new scapegoat to stay relevant and keep raising money. It’s not a coincidence that there were over double the number of anti-trans bills filed in state legislatures in 2016 as there were in 2015: when you’re fighting a lucrative culture war, it’s a savvier choice to simply change the target than to surrender.”
“Reporters tend to ask trans people boilerplate questions like ‘When did you know?’ or ‘How does it feel?’ or the ever-popular but remarkably invasive ‘Do you want the surgery?’ When I interview other trans people, I treat them like equals, not science experiments. There are 1.4 million trans Americans!”
Texas
“The single word that best describes the nonsense LGBT Texans have to deal with is still. Texas still has a ‘no promo homo’ law requiring any sex-education programs to ‘state that homosexual conduct is not an acceptable lifestyle and is a criminal offense.’ Even though the state has a trillion-dollar economy, Texas still doesn’t have employment non-discrimination protections for LGBT workers. And Texas still has a law criminalizing sodomy, even though the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas rendered it obsolete. Every attempt to formally repeal the sodomy ban has since failed.”
“Trans Texans have an especially hard lot. Anyone born here must obtain a court order to change the gender marker on their birth certificate — a challenging process because ‘some Texan officials and judges are averse to issuing one.’ I changed my CA birth certificate with a doctor’s note; a trans minor born in Texas would have enormous trouble doing the same — and the religious right here knows it.”
“Max began exhibiting ‘weird behaviors’ as early as preschool, his mom says — or at least they were weird to her without any context. When he was two — and going by a feminine name — Amber praised him for being a ‘good girl’ and he shouted, ‘Mom! I not a girl! I a boy and I like Spiderman!’ At age four, he asked: ‘Mom, can scientists turn me into a boy?’”
“In the first grade, after Amber discovered that Max had been holding it in all day at school to avoid using the girls’ restroom, she had a conversation with him in which he made his identity clear, and indicated that he would prefer ‘he’ to ‘she.’ The newly out boy ‘went back to school on a Monday with new pronouns and a new name and a new bathroom and he lost zero friends because kids don’t give a fuck.’ Nor did his mother give any fucks about how she would be perceived as a parent, immediately smoothing things over with school officials to ensure they used his new name and allowed him to use the boys’ bathroom. ‘It’s your job to love your kid,’ she says, ‘It shouldn’t be hard.’”
South Texas
“In the early 1900s, developers rebranded the completely mountainless South Texas floodplain as ‘Magic Valley’ to make the real estate more appealing. The ‘Magic’ part went away; the ‘Valley’ stuck.”
“Tens of thousands of people in the area are undocumented and law enforcement officers are everywhere.”
“Her mother worked across the street from the Rio Grande River at an elementary school that would go on lockdown whenever someone was spotted wading across the river. The area is defined by the constant pressure of the Border Patrol.”
“With an increasingly militarized border to the south and interior border checkpoints to the north, the Rio Grande is more like a vise than a valley, trapping undocumented Americans and their loved ones in one of the country’s most impoverished areas.”
Conclusion
“There’s a tendency to consider anything in human behavior that is unusual, not well known, or not well understood as neurotic, psychopathic, immature, perverse, or the expression of some other sort of psychologic disturbance.” — Albert Kinsey
“Estrogen is not made out of sugar and spice. In pill form, it’s synthesized from two decidedly unsexy ingredients: soy and yams.”
“‘The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects,’ Kinsey once wrote, ‘The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.’”
“Kinsey rejected ‘discrete categories,’ which he said were rare in ‘nature’ but all too common in the ‘human mind,’ with its nasty habit of ‘trying to force facts into separate pigeon-holes.’”
“‘The queer world,’ they wrote, ‘is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintances, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternative routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies.’”
“[The bar] is a perfect example of the red-state queer ethos that being politically active is a responsibility, not a choice.”
“When I started transitioning in 2012, I didn’t know how being trans would affect my job prospects other than adversely. 15% of respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey said they were unemployed — 3x the overall US unemployment rate. Almost a third of us were living in poverty, compared with less than 15% of American adults.”
“Queerness is as much about friendship as it is about sex. Cultural theorist Jack Halberstam wrote that we should try to ‘detach queerness from sexual identity’ and pay attention to ‘queer friendships’ and ‘queer networks’ instead. That may seem like a radical notion at first: after all, the fact that I have sex with another woman seems to be a big part of what makes me queer in society’s eyes. But most of my life takes place outside the bedroom — and my queerness seems to come along with me wherever I go. Halberstam argues what makes queer people a ‘perceived menace’ to the ‘institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction’ has at least as much to do with the unusual ways in which we connect to each other as it does with the actual Leviticus-banned intercourse itself.”
“My queerness doesn’t exclusively stem from my relationship with my wife; it’s also an alternative way of existing in the world.”
“‘To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another — that’s the problem,’ Foucault wrote. The kind of category-defying love Foucault describes is a ‘problem’ only because love is supposed to stay inside the proper social channels in our heteronormative culture. The family you’re born into is the family you’re supposed to be content with — and we are told repeatedly, without any explanation or supporting evidence, that we are meant to ‘love them no matter what.’ To fit into such a culture, your friendships ought to be lesser bonds than your familial ties — which, in turn, are second only to the sexual contract you share with your partner. Probe that unspoken ordering too insistently and you will receive only tautologies in return: ‘Because they’re your family,’ or ‘Because he’s your husband — that’s why.’ But when you’re queer, you learn how arbitrary that way of looking at the world can be. The people with whom you grew up can become strangers in a single, heartbreaking moment. You discover as a queer person that there’s nothing stopping you from imbuing your friendships with the same meaning that most people attach to their familial relationships. You stop looking for the truth about your identity and instead, as Foucault advised, ‘use [your] sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.’”
“Love, it seems, is like dish soap: a little bit goes a long way. So, if it strikes you as insane that 88% of LGBT adults do not think about social acceptance when we choose a place to live, it’s because most of us know we can build a chosen family almost anywhere — even in Tennessee.”
“As the Trevor Project notes, every ‘episode of LGBT victimization’ increases the likelihood that an LGBT person will self-harm by 2.5 times on average. For queer people, that which doesn’t kill us often makes us more likely to hurt ourselves.”
“In 2016 Gallup found that 7% of millennials identified as LGBT. And initial indications suggest that Generation Z is going to be even queerer, especially when it comes to gender: one 2016 report from a forecasting agency found that only 48% of people in this teenage bracket said they were ‘exclusively heterosexual,’ while just 44% said they bought clothes based exclusively on the gender they were assigned at birth.”
