Queer Issue 2012

Voices of “The Queer Youth of Today”

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For the cover of our Queer Pride Issue, the Guardian rallied a group together to take some photos and ask them about their experiences as queer youths in the Bay Area. Go to the jump to hear more from Angel, Brian, Dennis, and Huitzi.

(Photos by Keeney and Law)

 

Angel, Intern, SF LGBT Community Center
“I’m really excited for Pride! I’ve never been… this is going to be my first time, so I’m really excited…”

Brian, Recent SF Transplant
“I grew up in Texas. By coming out here I’m coming into a new world where it’s ok being gay, it’s ok being you you are, it’s ok me loving Angel, and it’s ok flaunting it. No one is going to say anything about that. I think the Bay Area is where I was meant to be.”

Dennis, Poet/Musician/Queer Youth Educator
“What inspires me is adversity, because it’s something that enrages me and something that fuels me to overcome.”

Huitzi, Poet
“What inspires me? Seeing other people display their strength. Especially if they want to help people that are going through the same things they did. Seeing people take a stand for what they believe in… I love that.”

LGBT Pride: the good, the bad and the ugly

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OPINION No doubt about it, LGBT Pride is a mixed bag.

Long gone are the days when Gay Freedom Day, later Gay Pride, was a one-day affair, a protest march and celebration to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in New York City in June, 1969.

These days, it’s a month-long, corporate-sponsored, $1.8 million-dollar, glitzy affair with events at fancy hotels and a “parade” (not a march) that remains totally out of touch with the radical, grassroots activism that first created it. Not only are contingents charged to participate, but curbside barricades make it impossible for onlookers to jump in, and participants are asked to “donate” to enter the festival after the parade. Even if the pride committee waives the fee for small groups, why does anyone have to pay to be part of pride?

Especially given that it has corporate sponsors with very deep pockets. Some of those sponsors are strange — and ugly — bedfellows indeed. They include Wells Fargo and B of A, two banking institutions that have been foreclosing queer and other people out of their homes. Their motto might well be, “We take Pride in evicting you.” What does it say about our community that we allow these institutions to use our events to buy good PR? Banks don’t deserve good PR, especially when the government is not holding them accountable in any real way for what they continue to do to us.

Fortunately, there are pride events that remain true to the fiery, uncompromising spirit that was demonstrated by those queens who refused to go quietly into the paddy wagons 43 years ago. Including the Faetopia “pop-up queer arts, ecology, theater and community center” at the old Tower Records space at Market and Noe, with lots of great events continuing through June 22 (www.faetopia.com); and the Vito Russo documentary, Vito, at the Frameline Film Festival last week. Vito’s life of gay and AIDS activism is a reminder of why Pride month exists. It’s just a shame that Wells Fargo is a sponsor of the festival.

You won’t find banks sponsoring the Trans and the Dyke marches (Friday, June 22 and Saturday, 23 respectively). Nothing in Pride month comes closer to being like the 1970s gay Pride marches (that I miss so much) than these two grassroots efforts.

Finally, a coalition calling itself OccuPride plans to protest the “increasingly commercialized” Pride parade that caters “only to those of us with money to spend.” According to a press statement, it will also “honor our radical roots for full liberation for women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, all the oppressed and marginalized.” Sounds like a Gay Liberation Front manifesto I helped write 42 years ago. Join up with OccuPride on June 24 at 10 AM at Mission and Main, or at Taylor and Turk at 2:30 PM for a rally on the site of the former Compton’s Cafeteria where, three years before Stonewall, drag queens rioted.

Like Vito a reminder of where we came from.

A longtime queer and tenants rights activist, Tommi Avicolli Mecca was involved with organizing Philly’s first pride march in 1972. He is editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State: the Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights).

Prancing at the revolution

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marke@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE “Right now it seems we have more in common with the Christian Right than the gay liberation movement. We’ve become so focused on marriage as the end-all and be-all of gay rights that it’s completely within the realm of possibility that the next leader of Focus on the Family could be a gay man. We all have to get married now for tax breaks, health care, or to stay in this country? Are you kidding me?” Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein spilled some truth into my hot pink Princess phone.

“I don’t know how we got to this position where we’re either agitating for more tax breaks for the rich via marriage, or we’re treating people like disposable objects on hookup sites because they don’t conform to certain standards. It’s really sickening. How does any of this further any agenda at all besides becoming what we’re supposed to be fighting against? I don’t get it.”

Sycamore Bernstein, who often writes for the Guardian, was speaking about the impetus behind her latest book, Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press), an invigorating collection of essays from a vast variety of queer people that “challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle.” (Let’s just say that President Obama’s limp “evolution” on same-sex marriage was not going to be a topic of conversation.) From envisioning a more faggoty Internet and reclaiming perversity as a proud, queer norm to honestly exploring the complex cultural confusions that Western-originating political expressions of gayness can wreak on immigrant and native homos, Faggots goes there with inspiring directness.

“I wanted to put out something that captured the spectrum of radical queer thinking that’s been going on while it seems everyone else was in line to get married. There are so many topics that affect our lives that have just been completely bulldozed by the ‘gay rights’ corporate lobbying groups’ crazed marriagemania.

“For example, Chris Bartlett, in his contribution ‘Gravity and Levity’ talks about how the idea of ‘risk’ in the gay community has been so associated with AIDS that it may have pushed any aspiration towards risk — emotionally, politically, socially — right out of gay consciousness. Yet being gay used to be all about taking risks. It’s what got us so far in the first place!

“I think exploring how the medicalization of AIDS terminology may have numbed us from each other — or how race still defines us in the ‘community,’ or how every dollar sucked into the corporate marriage machine means less for those in need of actual life or death help, or how hate crimes legislation ridiculously puts more power and resources into the hands of the very system oppressing us — is something we desperately need right now. We’re raising an entire generation to think that marriage is the only fight. Meanwhile, we’re discriminating against ourselves in so many other ways.”

Faggots is no mere spitting into the wind, either. Although Sycamore Bernstein has been sounding the assimilationist alarm for years, the prolific author and activist, now living in Seattle, has been surprised by the tome’s positive reception. (“It’s quite shocking!” she says with a lilting laugh.) Edmund White, Samuel R. Delaney, and Mx Justin Vivian Bond offered blurbs, and younger readers and the press have been grabbing onto Faggots’ incendiary yet sophisticated tone. Could the recent wave of AIDS activist nostalgia and a Occupy-like disillusionment with big money Pride sponsorships (embodied locally, especially, by a Wells Fargo advertisement covering the entire front page of Bay Area Reporter’s Pride Issue and a Stoli-sponsored GLAAD Pride float) be buoying the book’s popularity?

“I think the re-emergence of interest in things like ACT UP is very interesting. When I came to San Francisco I was part of ACT UP, and — with everybody dying from drugs, suicide, and AIDS — there was a real drive to come together to confront this massive structural neglect and recognize how brutalities align themselves to bring about our annihilation. But nostalgia can be dangerous without recognizing the reality. There was a very real, very dangerous moment in the 1990s when activism suddenly became about discrimination in the military, of all things.

“It turned from trying to guarantee health care for all to being about whether or not we could go die faster in wars. Whose decision was that?”

Marke B. is the author of Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Gude for Youth (Zest)

 

OccuPride remembers

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yael@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE “First of all, the parade wouldn’t have barricades, because that immediately creates an us versus them divide, and then you see the parade as just the groups and companies that can afford the fee, which is like $450. Anyone who wanted to march could march, regardless of what the sheriff or Fire Department says. There would be tents for connections to services that people desperately need. I’m not opposed to having companies there, but they shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of Pride. And there should be more about the history, because people don’t know it. In the Holocaust, anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 gays were worked to death in Dachau and other work camps. That’s where the pink triangle comes from. But people think Harvey Milk pulled it out of his ass or something.”

That’s what Scott Rossi, one of the organizers of San Francisco’s OccuPride march, told me when I asked him what his ideal SF Pride Parade would look like. The protest’s rallying cry is Community Not Commodity, and the group hopes to bring some rebellious spirit to the parade, which they say has become too watered down with corporate sponsors and assimiliation-lovin’ politics.

Some of the action’s organizers are from Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland, but the majority are a coalition of radical queer groups like HAVOQ, Pride at Work, Act Up, and QUIT (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism).

Honestly, it would be weird if there wasn’t a group with an anti-capitalist critique of the parade disrupting Pride this year. It’s been a tradition since 1992 when Act Up members joined the parade and staged intermittent Die-Ins, collapsing every seven minutes, the frequency that people were dying from AIDS that year.

Act Up and related groups staged similar demonstrations practically every year. A decade later, two Gay Shame protesters were arrested when they attempted to enter the parade. That year’s parade was sponsored by Budweiser, and Gay Shame had created a seven-foot-tall cardboard Budweiser can that read “Vomit Out Budweiser Pride and the Selling of Queer Identities,” and other props to confront “the consumerism, blind patriotism and assimilationist agenda of the Pride Parade.”

And radical queers show no sign of stopping. Veteran gay rights warrior Tommi Mecca was at basically all of these disruptions, and he won’t be missing out on this year’s events. Mecca was 21 when he helped organize the first Pride March in Philadelphia in 1972.

“Pride used to be a protest,” Mecca recalls. “It was very free. There were no barricades on the street, there were very few rules. We didn’t have contingents, people just gathered, and at some point there were speeches, usually by activists…I don’t know when it started getting corporate sponsors.”

But the glitz! The glamour! The music enhanced by electricity! Today, Pride is a giant, televised affair — this year, sponsored by Wells Fargo.

“Don’t people in Pride realize how much we’re being used by Wells Fargo?” Mecca said. “It just reeks.”

So if you go to the parade, smell the sweet smell of protesters promoting “pride not profit, a movement not a market, and community not commodity.” After all, if it wasn’t for queer radicals in the ’70s, there wouldn’t be a Pride at all.

A poly push?

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culture@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE Is San Francisco’s polyamorous community experiencing a renaissance? Pepper Mint, organizer of the recent sex education conference Open SF (www.open-sf.org), suspects the non-monogamous in the Bay Area have finally reached a critical mass. His proof? Over the weekend of June 8, OpenSF was attended by over 500 of the poly-curious and practicing.

It might be, however, that they’ve finally found something to relate to. Sonya Brewer, a somatic psychotherapist, OpenSF lecture facilitator, and queer woman of color, has been a practicing polyamorist for 15 years. Brewer pegged the high attendance numbers on Mint’s efforts to diversify the conference and include sexual minorities and other oppressed groups on its planning committee.

Those values were reflected in the conference’s keynote address, delivered by trans-identified sex educator Ignacio Rivera and transgender health educator and social justice activist Yoseñio V. Lewis. The two hosted a lecture entitled “Kink, Race, and Class,” which sought to inspire dialogue about how social forces play into the world of kink. It was one of the many unique talks over the weekend that both celebrated and critiqued the diversity and spread of the polyamorous community.

Looking over the list of lectures for the weekend — “Sex Work and Non-Monogamy,” “Fat Sluts, Hungry Virgins,” and “Trans Queering Your Sex,” to name a few — it was hard to decide which talks to attend.

I settled on two: Kathy Labriola’s “Unmasking the Green-Eyed Monster: Managing Jealousy in Open Relationships” and the Maggie Mayhem-led “Second Generation Poly.” Labriola’s hour-long talk examined jealousy from an anthropological perspective, highlighting it as a universal experience that manifests itself depending on one’s cultural upbringing. The bad news? Jealousy is unavoidable. The good news? It’s a learned behavior, and you can learn to manage it. Labriola provided us with a handy checklist to use in determining whether insecurities are based in fact or freak-out.

“Identify a situation that makes you jealous and ask the questions,” Labriola advised. “One, [do] I have a resource I value very much and I’m fearful of losing? Two, [does] another person wants that resource.? Three, [do] you believe you are in direct competition for something you want? Four, [do] you believe if push comes to shove you will lose out?” Unless you answered yes to all four, she counseled, your jealousy can be worked through.

Mayhem, dressed in a fluorescent orange space suit (a representation of her “out-of-this-world” situation, she said) sat on a panel with her partner in life and in porn Ned (www.meetthemayhems.com) and his polyamorous family: his father, and his father’s second partner — a non-hierarchical term, Maggie was quick to clarify. Maggie and her family discussed negotiating boundaries at sex parties, raising children with more than two parents, and the stigma parents of sex-positive offspring can encounter.

Given the general focus of Open SF, Maggie’s key advice had resonance: “Be the author to your own happily ever after,” she told us.

Make it better now

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yael@sfbg.com

Noted queer writer and speaker Dan Savage sent a hopeful message to LGBT youth with his 2010 YouTube video, “It Gets Better.” But many queer youth in the Bay Area say they aren’t willing to wait.

“If my adult self could talk to my 14 year old self and tell him anything, I would tell him to really believe the lyrics from “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There really is a place for us. There really is a place for you. And that one day you will have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community. And that life gets better,” Savage said.

Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s message went viral. It inspired hundreds of similar videos and eventually led to the creation of the It Gets Better Project, headquartered in Los Angeles. The videos were a response to a tragic cluster of suicides by children bullied for seeming gay, a trend that was only unusual in that the media picked up on it. And for many teens across the country, the “It Gets Better” videos provided crucial hope and support.

But last week, I was talking to Stephanie, Lolo, Ose, and Mia Tu Mutch, four Bay Area teens, about what its like to be a queer youth today. We were talking at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), a center for queer youth in the heart of the Castro.

When I asked about the “It Gets Better” videos, they all had the same reaction: “Ugh. I don’t like those videos. I don’t like those at all.”

“Those videos are depressing,” Lolo said.

“Yeah. ‘Just wait ’til you’re an adult?'” Stephanie asked.

“Just wait ’til you’re an adult, and your problems will go away,” Mia said, shaking her head.

“And it’s celebrities, too,” Ose noted. “‘I got thousands of dollars, and it gets better!'”

The four of them are facilitators at LYRIC, leading weekly community-building workshops that deal with issues queer kids face. Between 17 and 21 years old, these youth are not waiting for it to get better. They’re doing it for themselves.

 

LYRIC’S OUTREACH

LYRIC definitely promotes pride and empowerment. Founded in 1988, LYRIC organizers worked to secure funding for a physical space a few years later. Since then, this purple house on Collingwood has functioned as a crucial center for Bay Area queer youth. It offers counseling, food, clothing, community building workshops that kids teach, and a safe place to hang out.

But LYRIC, like many nonprofits, has felt the impact of the severe government cuts to health and human services. As a result, its budget has suffered steady declines from approximately $1.2 million in 2008 to $954,000 this, year primarily due to shrinking government funding.

But LYRIC refuses to give up offering paid internships, a rarity in the nonprofit world.

“The City has made it clear that they no longer intend to invest significant funding into subsidized employment model programs — they want to serve greater numbers of youth at a much lower unit cost — even if we all understand that some of the most marginalized youth will no longer be getting the intensive level of support they need to make it to a successful adulthood” LYRIC’s Executive Director Jodi Schwartz told me, explaining that the organization is now growing support by more grassroots funding networks.

“We used to hire 60-70 young people per year, now it’s more like 20,” Schwartz says.

The organization still serves about 400 young people per year.

“I would guess we have 6,000 queer youth living in the city,” Schwartz said. “So we’re not reaching everyone. Not to say that all those 6,000 queer youth need a LYRIC, but they need community. We all need community.”

Youth from across the country come to San Francisco seeking that community. Often they have escaped intolerant, abusive, or dangerous situations in their families or hometowns. But when they arrive in this storied city, these youth are often disappointed.

“I was that kid who left a small town in Texas and who got to San Francisco as fast as I could,” Mia told me. “And I was like, you know, I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a job, and I’ll do this and that. And it was really hard.”

” I think that the difference is that there are more LGBT specific languages and policies, and organizations that are affirming. All of that is the best in the US, probably,” Mia said. “And there are all these cultural groups and all of that. But queerphobia and transphobia exist here just like it exists everywhere else.”

“So my big thing is how we have all these systems in place that make us a little more queer friendly,” she said. “But how do we actually get the public to stop hating people, to stop doing hate crimes, to stop bullying?”

Ose, who now lives in the Bayview, grew up closer to the city. But coming from a religious family in Modesto, he says, “I had heard things about the Castro itself. I always thought the Castro was the devil…I was a church boy.”

He remembers fear that someone he knew would recognize him in the forbidden neighborhood, that “my mom would find out and be like, what are you doing in the Castro? So I was scared to death my parents would find out I was coming to the Castro.”

That was two years ago. Now, Ose works in the Castro, and he was dressed in cut-off shorts and a slicked back Mohawk, long painted nails clicking on the table. “I’m hella gayed out,” he happily reports.

When Mia made it to San Francisco, she initially settled into the Tenderloin, rather than the gentrifying Castro.

“As a trans person, a lot of trans history is in the Tenderloin and there’s a lot of trans women who live in the Tenderloin and who work in the Tenderloin,” she explained. “So I feel more at home there. Even though it isn’t technically the gay neighborhood, it’s always been the queer ghetto and that’s where the low income and queer people of color live a lot.”

The Tenderloin is also the site of many of the services that queer youth use. Mia made some of her first local connections at Trans: Thrive, a program of the Asian Pacific Islander Center. And many of the kids at LYRIC, as well as the city’s other queer teens, benefit from Larkin Street Youth Services.

The homeless shelter oversees the only beds reserved for queer youth in the city, all 22 of them, a number Schwartz believes in inadequate. A report from Larkin Street in 2010 found that 30 percent of the homeless youth they serve identify as LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning).

LYRIC is part of the Community Partnership for LGBTQQ Youth and the Dimensions Clinic Collaborative, which includes service organizations like the queer-specific health clinic Dimensions, the nearby LGBT Center, the Bay Area Young Positives HIV health and support nonprofit, and the city’s Department of Public Health. But LYRIC is one of only a few organizations that focuses on fun, informative community-building workshops.

 

ACCEPTANCE NOW

Savage promised queer kids that, in the distant future, they would “have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community.” But LYRIC’s workshops, largely envisioned and run by the youth themselves, show kids that they don’t need to wait: they can create those supportive networks for themselves, in the here and now.

Another such community-building effort was on display at the LGBT Center on June 15: Youth Speaks’ queer poetry slam Queeriosity. The show, which was preceded by five weeks of free poetry workshops for and by queer youth, brought together young queer people from across the Bay Area, and one could feel the love and support in the air.

“Queeriosity is important because, in the poetry scene, we have so many people with so many different backgrounds,” Milani Pelley, one of the show’s hosts and a poet who works with youth in the workshops, told me. “A lot of times people who get identified in the LGBT category, they don’t have that space where they’re front and center and it’s a space for them. It’s very important that we celebrate everyone.”

Pelley, 24, has been working with Youth Speaks since she was 16. She said the message of the It Gets Better videos might be too simple.

“Thinking about being an adult versus a teenager, adults go through the same things,” she said. “The only difference is it’s not encouraged to speak out about it, you’re supposed to act like you have it together and it’s okay.”

Mia said youthful teasing and bullying are precursors to hate crimes: “Bullying and hate crimes are related because it’s all about people not accepting you, and then violently reacting to who are. So either throwing insults or beating you up.”

On April 29, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland in a likely hate crime. CeCe McDonald’s recent case has also exhibited the dangers and injustice trans women of color face. The young Chicago woman defended herself against a bigoted attacker who she ended up killing, only to spend time in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, get convicted on manslaughter, and, last week, be placed in a men’s prison to serve her sentence.

I asked the four LYRIC teachers about the campaigns of national organizations like the Human Rights Committee — such as marriage equity or LGBT soldiers — and they all shook their heads.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the national platforms of the major gay organizations and the actual realities of queer youth,” Mia said. “Like they don’t even have queer youth in the majority of their meetings, but then they act like they’re the ones fighting for our rights, you know.”

For example, she said “marriage equality wouldn’t affect me at all. Yeah, it would be okay, it would be better if it was equal across the board. But when you have people dying because of hate crimes, and dying because of bullying, and dying because they don’t have a place to stay and they’re on the streets, it’s like, I just feel like those are a lot more pressing than getting a piece of paper from the government.”

 

SETTING THE AGENDA

Mia serves on the city’s Youth Commission, where she’s designing training programs for service providers to work with LGBT youth. Ose is working with Schwartz to create programming for LGBTQ youth who don’t want to take the common path of rejecting religion and spirituality as they come to terms with other parts of their identity.

“I go to church a lot,” Ose explained. “I grew up as a Christian. And I wanted to touch base on that because a lot of times, the youth that I come across, the majority of them are being silenced…I’m still going through some issues with my own church, especially with my pastor because just recently I’ve heard that he dislikes me over the fact of the way I dress, the way I act, my feminine gestures.”

Stephanie sighed and said, “I wish there were more LYRICS around the city. One in Bayview, one in every district. And Oakland too.”

“People who provide counseling, food, clothes, water if you need it,” Lola added. “A safe space to go to, a place where you can make friends, and make connections. There need to be more places like that specifically for queer youth.”

Even in San Francisco, harassment is a reality in youth programs and schools. In 2009, the SFUSD studied Youth Risk Behavior in San Francisco’s elementary through high school public schools, and found that more than 80 percent of students reported hearing anti-gay remarks at school, and more than 40 percent said they had never heard school staff stop others from making those remarks. The survey also found that students who identified as LGBT were significantly more likely than their peers to report skipping school out of concern for their safety.

Queer youth will never stop finding informal networks of support. But structured settings like LYRIC can be vital. At places like LYRIC, youth find the community, the love, and the friends that Savage promised would appear with time — before they turn 18.

“It’s easier to build relationships and to build community when its structured, when it has a little bit of structure like, hey, this is a queer specified setting, we’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to hang out, we’re gonna do this, and then you kind of build community off of that. And because it’s based on identity, you feel more comfortable to talk about that,” Mia explained. “You have to change your reality. And you have to be the one to change it for yourself. Because ain’t nobody gonna make it better for you.”