I’m likely to say this a lot. It’s almost going to be like a mantra. This blog began, really began, directly after the election of Barack Obama and the passage of Prop 8 in California.
My husband and I were vacationing at a gay resort, and that’s an important part of the story. When you’re around several thousand like-minded individuals, it’s easy to feel a level of confidence as well as a level of support from your peers.
I created this thomascwaters.com as a sandbox. A space in which to learn how to use WordPress. My real desire at that time was building my podcast, A Queer Look at the Bible (QLATB). But, as we watched the election returns on the big screen TVs in the resort bar, surrounded by hundreds of gay guys, I knew I had to write! I had to write about LGBTQ politics more than I needed to work on my podcast.
Today, I find ourselves in a similar but different situation. IA majority of my focus on other projects, and yet I have so much in my head that I feel like I need to get it out. So here it goes.
In the almost 20 years I’ve been blogging, I’ve watched the LGBTQIA community struggle and fracture. Some of this was a useful outcome. Some part of it was about breaking away from the false façade that made us appear as if we were one unified community. But we never really were that. Our community was infected with patriarchy every bit as much as everything around us is. Indeed, it would’ve been a miracle had that not been the case. Because every organizational structure has grown up and then born out of the patriarchy. So, it was a good thing when parts of our community chose to rise up and speak out against this problem. It was a first step towards helping create a better world around us, if we could break some of the structural racism, classism, and sexism upon which our community and every bit of civilization is based.
This was at a time in which the community, in the broadest sense, suffered, as we began to take a look at and dissect it ourselves. And much like how therapy works for an individual, this breakdown and rebuilding is a challenging prospect. It doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it happen without trouble and controversy. But this process of deciding what we are and what parts of us we need to change is essential for the community to rise up even stronger.
And in my opinion, we’re still working on all that. Indeed, we may be working at it harder now than ever before, as the patriarchy is doing everything in its power to squash all dissent.
I don’t want to seem hokey and suggest that resolving all of this is simple. Well, perhaps it is simple, but extremely difficult.
“What the world needs now is love.”
Isn’t that a beautiful sentiment? I wish it was easy to create it.
So today, I’d like to suggest that while we can’t create a world of love overnight. We may not even be able to change a little bit of it overnight. But what we can do is begin to look at and acknowledge how we add more love into the LGBTQIA community. How do we begin to acknowledge the problems within the whole umbrella community and, without turning a blind eye to those problems, refocus our energies on working together for the better of all of us?
Did you ever participate in one of those team-building exercises, where you were handed an assortment of disparate items? Like a few paper clips, a rubber band, and a match, and then you’re given a certain amount of time for you and your group to figure out how to use those items to do something?
It’s easy to look at these varied items and see each and every one of them as not enough to do what needs to be done, to make whatever it is you need to make. But for some reason in this exercise, a group of people is able to start to work together to take these pieces that don’t fit and put them together in such a way that something magical happens.
I think it’s because we’re given these items. No one in the group can say to another person in the group, “It’s your fault because you didn’t bring the right items.” None of us own the shortcomings of our items. Or perhaps all of us own the shortcomings of our items. However you look at it, the group begins to work together, often with laughter, and a useful creativity to come up with something.
The patriarchy overall has done a good job trying to tear us individually apart. It has tried to point out and highlight the shortcomings of gay men, lesbian women, transgender persons, and bisexuals. And without a doubt, the shortcomings do exist. But if we could stand back—just to step further from the mirror and see all of us in the picture, we will recognize that every group within the whole has shortcomings, and that the only path forward is working together.
So how to accomplish that? I believe it starts with recognizing what the real enemy is. And for my money, the real enemy is this concept called the patriarchy. A structural form of control and organization that exists and survives only when the individuals it is trying to control pick it up and use it to beat up each other.
I was 12 years old at the time of the Stonewall uprising. It is nothing that crossed my radar until I was much older and starting to come out at 18. But one of the earliest pieces of this discomfort that led to what happened at Stonewall and other events since, was the felt need for a true sexual liberation. That search for liberation got caught up in the patriarchy and got turned around into simply seeking equal rights. This emphasis on rights made sense on the one hand because we are in the US, a country of laws.
But what was missing from this equation is the fact that we assumed that some had rights that others did not. And we blamed it on the people that had those rights, as if they were actively seeking to keep the rest of us from having those rights. And while this is partly true, it is more false than true.
The structure of patriarchy was the real problem, and it used the people in power as its foot soldiers to continue to maintain its dominance.
One of the reasons I believe this is because as I look around today, I see straight men as just as messed up and broken as any other group of persons. Even though they are predominantly the foot soldiers doing the damage, they act almost as zombies simply doing what their master, structural patriarchy, is demanding from them. And it’s killing them every bit as much as it’s killing the rest of us.
Indeed, the ability for persons to now claim that empathy is a fault. This alone is evidence of just how broken everyone is, including the foot soldiers.
I believe that within the LGBTQ community, the solution starts with recognizing that all of us, because we were raised in a system of patriarchy, bring elements or consequences of that with us. That none of us are so much more righteous than the rest. And that all of us are being damaged by structural patriarchy. If we quit blaming each other, wasting our time, pointing our fingers at each other, we can possibly turn our collective energy towards the bigger issue, structural patriarchy.
We haven’t been trained to either see or understand the problem as some structure of power. We have been trained to believe that there are good people and bad people. Cops and robbers, Cowboys and Indians, there are so many ways in which we are trained to blame other people and fit them into a binary, and be oblivious to the structure within which those people are simply actors.
So let’s quit wasting our time and energy fighting each other. If any of us are going to get out of this alive. If any of us are going to stop the growth of an authoritarian patriarchal power structure, all of us must work together towards the big goal of crashing the patriarchy.
All of us must stop and ask ourselves how we individually and collectively will be benefited by together battling this foe, structural patriarchy.
I’m likely to say this a lot. It’s almost going to be like a mantra. This blog began, really began, directly after the election of Barack Obama and the passage of Prop 8 in California.
My husband and I were vacationing at a gay resort, and that’s an important part of the story. When you’re around several thousand like-minded individuals, it’s easy to feel a level of confidence as well as a level of support from your peers.
I created this thomascwaters.com as a sandbox. A space in which to learn how to use WordPress. My real desire at that time was building my podcast, A Queer Look at the Bible (QLATB). But, as we watched the election returns on the big screen TVs in the resort bar, surrounded by hundreds of gay guys, I knew I had to write! I had to write about LGBTQ politics more than I needed to work on my podcast.
Today, I find ourselves in a similar but different situation. IA majority of my focus on other projects, and yet I have so much in my head that I feel like I need to get it out. So here it goes.
In the almost 20 years I’ve been blogging, I’ve watched the LGBTQIA community struggle and fracture. Some of this was a useful outcome. Some part of it was about breaking away from the false façade that made us appear as if we were one unified community. But we never really were that. Our community was infected with patriarchy every bit as much as everything around us is. Indeed, it would’ve been a miracle had that not been the case. Because every organizational structure has grown up and then born out of the patriarchy. So, it was a good thing when parts of our community chose to rise up and speak out against this problem. It was a first step towards helping create a better world around us, if we could break some of the structural racism, classism, and sexism upon which our community and every bit of civilization is based.
This was at a time in which the community, in the broadest sense, suffered, as we began to take a look at and dissect it ourselves. And much like how therapy works for an individual, this breakdown and rebuilding is a challenging prospect. It doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it happen without trouble and controversy. But this process of deciding what we are and what parts of us we need to change is essential for the community to rise up even stronger.
And in my opinion, we’re still working on all that. Indeed, we may be working at it harder now than ever before, as the patriarchy is doing everything in its power to squash all dissent.
I don’t want to seem hokey and suggest that resolving all of this is simple. Well, perhaps it is simple, but extremely difficult.
“What the world needs now is love.”
Isn’t that a beautiful sentiment? I wish it was easy to create it.
So today, I’d like to suggest that while we can’t create a world of love overnight. We may not even be able to change a little bit of it overnight. But what we can do is begin to look at and acknowledge how we add more love into the LGBTQIA community. How do we begin to acknowledge the problems within the whole umbrella community and, without turning a blind eye to those problems, refocus our energies on working together for the better of all of us?
Did you ever participate in one of those team-building exercises, where you were handed an assortment of disparate items? Like a few paper clips, a rubber band, and a match, and then you’re given a certain amount of time for you and your group to figure out how to use those items to do something?
It’s easy to look at these varied items and see each and every one of them as not enough to do what needs to be done, to make whatever it is you need to make. But for some reason in this exercise, a group of people is able to start to work together to take these pieces that don’t fit and put them together in such a way that something magical happens.
I think it’s because we’re given these items. No one in the group can say to another person in the group, “It’s your fault because you didn’t bring the right items.” None of us own the shortcomings of our items. Or perhaps all of us own the shortcomings of our items. However you look at it, the group begins to work together, often with laughter, and a useful creativity to come up with something.
The patriarchy overall has done a good job trying to tear us individually apart. It has tried to point out and highlight the shortcomings of gay men, lesbian women, transgender persons, and bisexuals. And without a doubt, the shortcomings do exist. But if we could stand back—just to step further from the mirror and see all of us in the picture, we will recognize that every group within the whole has shortcomings, and that the only path forward is working together.
So how to accomplish that? I believe it starts with recognizing what the real enemy is. And for my money, the real enemy is this concept called the patriarchy. A structural form of control and organization that exists and survives only when the individuals it is trying to control pick it up and use it to beat up each other.
I was 12 years old at the time of the Stonewall uprising. It is nothing that crossed my radar until I was much older and starting to come out at 18. But one of the earliest pieces of this discomfort that led to what happened at Stonewall and other events since, was the felt need for a true sexual liberation. That search for liberation got caught up in the patriarchy and got turned around into simply seeking equal rights. This emphasis on rights made sense on the one hand because we are in the US, a country of laws.
But what was missing from this equation is the fact that we assumed that some had rights that others did not. And we blamed it on the people that had those rights, as if they were actively seeking to keep the rest of us from having those rights. And while this is partly true, it is more false than true.
The structure of patriarchy was the real problem, and it used the people in power as its foot soldiers to continue to maintain its dominance.
One of the reasons I believe this is because as I look around today, I see straight men as just as messed up and broken as any other group of persons. Even though they are predominantly the foot soldiers doing the damage, they act almost as zombies simply doing what their master, structural patriarchy, is demanding from them. And it’s killing them every bit as much as it’s killing the rest of us.
Indeed, the ability for persons to now claim that empathy is a fault. This alone is evidence of just how broken everyone is, including the foot soldiers.
I believe that within the LGBTQ community, the solution starts with recognizing that all of us, because we were raised in a system of patriarchy, bring elements or consequences of that with us. That none of us are so much more righteous than the rest. And that all of us are being damaged by structural patriarchy. If we quit blaming each other, wasting our time, pointing our fingers at each other, we can possibly turn our collective energy towards the bigger issue, structural patriarchy.
We haven’t been trained to either see or understand the problem as some structure of power. We have been trained to believe that there are good people and bad people. Cops and robbers, Cowboys and Indians, there are so many ways in which we are trained to blame other people and fit them into a binary, and be oblivious to the structure within which those people are simply actors.
So let’s quit wasting our time and energy fighting each other. If any of us are going to get out of this alive. If any of us are going to stop the growth of an authoritarian patriarchal power structure, all of us must work together towards the big goal of crashing the patriarchy.
All of us must stop and ask ourselves how we individually and collectively will be benefited by together battling this foe, structural patriarchy.