A very worthwhile call for essays over at QLit: Rejecting the Bedroom: Sex and Sexuality as a Site of Queer Resistance and Space. Anyone with a bent toward queer theory should get up in this biz! The question being asked is totally fascinating: how can queer people make the bedroom not the only place in which it is safe to “be” queer? And how can they “queer” the bedroom on their own terms? I can’t wait to read the answers people come up with to these questions.
It raises all sorts of questions about how much the sex we have identifies/shapes/distinguishes us and how we make that sex part of ourselves as a meaningful contribution to the lives we want to lead. And it’s an important question, particularly right now, as same-sex marriages start up in the wonderfully accepting city of New York. There have been many articles and many photos from this past weekend, when the first same-sex marriages were performed here in the city (on a lottery system to avoid overcrowding, which is kind of funny and kind of annoying all at once), but this photo set by the Washington Post almost made me cry. You’ll see why.
This website, however, DID make me cry. The struggle to discover and claim a space in which to be oneself, whether queer or anything else, is one that is so vitally important, and yet in so many places it is forced into a position secondary to the struggle to simply exist. These are the people who get left out of important discussions like the one QLit is opening, not because the issue is unimportant but because the marginalized and forgotten are busy trying to make their very existence a reality, in their own lives and in the minds of others. The struggle for queer recognition and space is the same struggle as the fight for awareness of native people everywhere, but nowhere more so than in this country, where we are so fascinated by the exotic and the “authentic” but forget about the promises we’ve broken to our own people. Please visit HonorTheTreaties.org and spread the word. Educate others. If you live in America and don’t know about the Laramie treaties or the Supreme Court Ruling about the Black Hills or the fact that the war against the Lakota was the only war in which America negotiated for peace by conceding every demand made by the enemy… You SHOULD.
We who espouse the ideology that we can all get along if we are willing to listen to one another must remember that even the voices that are often unheard are the ones we must endeavor most to heed.