If you choose to bathe in your internalized homophobia, like a drunk with cologne, we allow it.
by Charles Stephens
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Every idea starts out good, perhaps, even if it ends up being counterproductive in the end. And no where is that more evident than in the term “MSM” or men that have sex with men.I get it. Those of us that work in the HIV realm, we want to be inclusive. We want to be sensitive to individuals and communities that we serve. We want to acknowledge their cultural distastes for customs, concepts, and symbols that appear foreign to their communities. Most importantly, we want to reach those individuals with our prevention messages that might not see themselves in something addressing gay men, even if they engage in the same behaviors, spaces, and communities, as those that identify as gay. So “msm” like a one-size fits all label, was created to include the gaggle of men engaged in sexual desires, pleasures, and behaviors with other men, that do not identify as gay. However, I wonder if the unintended consequence, as we try to be open, as we try to be inclusive, is to reinforce the stigmatization of gay-identity.
On one hand we say, being gay is ok, being gay is natural, being gay is normal, but then we turn around and say, if you are someone that for all practical purposes is gay, but choose not to identify with gay community, culture, politics or history, if you choose to distance yourselves from us, we support and affirm that. If you choose to bathe in your internalized homophobia, like a drunk with cologne, we allow it. If you choose to remain wounded, we meet you there, without showing you an alternative means.
Let me talk about black men for a moment. I’m not certain how rampant the MSM label is among HIV Preventionists that work with white men, but for black men the term MSM is a template. The thought is that black men, and there is research that supports this I suppose, are less willing to identify with the category gay. So what. As someone that is black and identifies unrepentantly as gay, and at times, queer, I have always found such a strategy problematic. First, one of the most important approaches we can take to HIV Prevention, and the most important work ahead of us, is to
de-stigmatize gay identity. Period.
Yes, even for black men.
And yet there is a reluctance to assert this. A reluctance to insist upon positive identity development as a tool, to facilitate more optimal health outcomes. And though I can’t prove this, I wonder if there is a racism and homophobia that upholds the apprehension of individuals working in HIV prevention around institutionalizing the normalization of a gay identity.
Homophobia because I am unconvinced that you can be all right with being gay, support gay rights, find homophobia problematic, and accept and enable others to not be ok with their gayness.
Racism, because the well-meaning white people in Public Health, that work in research, epidemiology, and education, mistake internalized homophobia for some sort of cultural difference. We haven’t invented another term for black people who don’t like the label “black” or “African-American” to describe themselves, and believe me they are out there. We would think that ridiculous. Yet we continue to enable internalized homophobia through our reluctance to normalize gay identity through our messages, in our programs, and in the discourse overall.
Moving forward, let us toss out the ridiculous label of “MSM.” We need to reach gay men with messages that target them. We need to de-stigmatize gay identity as the latest approach to do HIV Prevention. And we have to discontinue having a few select spokespeople for groups, even the loudest voices, arrest our aims because of the fear we will offend.
Charles Stephens is an Atlanta-based writer and organizer. Check out his blog.
Yeah, I get it. MSM is a ridiculous identity and I've yet to meet anyone who identifies himself as MSM. But there are men who DONT like to call themselves "gay," for a variety of reasons including internalized homophobia. I think men have a right to define their identify however they choose. Who are we to tell them differently.
ReplyDeleteWow, what a breath of fresh air. I've been saying this for years.
ReplyDeleteIf you engage in homosexual behavior you're gay or bisexual. Or at least enough to pull off the behavior. You might own that or not, or have a hard time with the label but that doesn't change the fact that you have some degree of same-sex desire. You make the very good point that calling gay men something else is stigmatizing.
It's condescending to posit that men of color shouldn't be described as gay. It serves to promote the exclusion of black men from the gay community--something that inequity and racism already are too effective at doing. It sets up a dichotomy in which white race is associated with gayness and cultural capital, and other races are associated with merely having sex with other men, which seems awfully mechanistic, as though that defines the sex lives of those men.
I think it's one thing to use a term other than "gay" when addressing a group of guys who'll seriously be turned off by the term "gay"--and that the need for that is less common than most of us are used to thinking. Certainly in dialogue between preventionists we should be able to discuss the needs of all homosexually active males as gay and bisexual men.
*waves to Ted*
ReplyDeleteIn first world, developed, Western nations, MSM is a fig leaf for the discomfort of epidemiologist and public health types in dealing with gay, which is the cultural formation around homosexual behaviour and desire. If you reduce it to behaviours and then abstract it to MSM, you don't have to deal with bodies and feelings and variations of identity and shame. Behaviour -> disease, nice and simple.
The MOMENT you step outside that context, gay stops making sense, except in tiny little rich well-educated enclaves. IRMA presented a really great presentation by Shivanandha Khan from the Naz foundation on this topic about a month back. According to my friend and workmate Suzy, he's been doing the same preso for about twenty years. The gist is that sexuality is the wrong frame for understanding the behaviour, which makes sense according to gender - the penetrative partner remains a straight male, because that's just what men do, they penetrate. Charles, I know you're not talking about discourse in this context, and in the settings in which we both work I think gay/bisexual men is preferable terminology, but this is the blog for the *International* Rectal Microbicide Advocates, isn't it?
Gay Shame
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_shame
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22gay+shame%22
Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore
That's Revolting
Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
New Revised and Expanded Edition 2008
http://www.pgw.com/catalog/search.asp?ISBN=9781593761950
http://softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-56-5
As the growing gay mainstream prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value.
What's more, queers remain under attack: Gay youth shelters can be vetoed because they might reduce property values.
Trannies are out because they might offend straights.
That's Revolting! offers a bracing tonic to these trends.
Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, That's Revolting! collects timely essays such as "Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face," "Gay Art Guerrillas," and "Queer Parents: An Oxymoron Or Just Plain Moronic?" by unrepentant activists like Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein, and Carol Queen.
This updated edition contains seven new selections that cover everything from rural, working-class youth in Massachusetts to gay life in New Orleans to the infamous Drop the Debt/Stop AIDS action in New York.
This lively composite portrait of cutting-edge queer activism is a clarion call for anyone who questions the value of becoming the Stepford Homosexual.
There's more to life than platinum: challenging the tyranny of sweatshop-produced rainbow flags and participatory patriarchy
Ten years ago one might not have imagined the largest national gay rights lobbying group (Human Rights Campaign) endorsing a right-wing Republican Senatorial candidate (Al D'Amato in New York), or the San Francisco Pride parade adopting the Budweiser advertising slogan as its offcial theme (2002). As an assimilationist gay mainstream wields increasing power, the focus of gay struggle has become limited to marriage, military service, and adoption. The gay mainstream presents a sanitized, straight-friendly version of gay identity which makes it safe for Richard Chamberlain or Rosie O'Donnell to come out, and still rake in the bucks. By the twisted priorities of this gay mainstream, it's okay to oppose a queer youth shelter becuase it might interfere with property values, or to fight against the inclusion of transgendered people under hate crimes legislation because this might not appeal to straight voters. As the gay mainstream ironically prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value - and calls this progress.
That's Revolting shows us what the new queer resistance looks like. The collection is a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia. That's Revolting uses queer identity and struggle as a starting point from which to reframe, reclaim, and re-shape the world. The collection challenges the commercialized, commodified, and hyper-objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models.
Edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore (aka Mattilda), the creator and driving force behind Gay Shame, the radical queer organization in San Francisco that was primarily responsible for the protests, mobilizations, and guerilla tactics that shut down the city of San Francisco in response to the declaration of war on Iraq, That's Revolting brings the post-identity politics of a new generation of pissed off queers to the light. The collection is both a blueprint and a call to action.
Includes seven new essyas:
A piece about the Gay Liberation Front in the '70s
A piece from the ACT UP Oral History Project
A conversation between former members of the George
Jackson Brigade ('70s radicals)
An essay about rural working class queer youth in Massachusetts
An essay on New Orleans
A piece about the Drop The Debt/STOP AIDS action in New York
About the author:
Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is the author of a novel, Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts), and the editor of Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (Haworth 2000) and Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth, forthcoming 2003). Her writing has been widely published, in places as diverse as Best American Erotica, Best American Gay Fiction, Women and Performance, and Slingshot. She is an instigator of Gay Shame: the Virus in the System, the radical queer activist group that celebrates resistance by fighting the monster of assimilation. Mattilda selected and introduced Best Gay Erotica 2006, and is currently working on a new anthology, tentatively titled Realness is Overrated: Rejecting the Requirement to Pass.
Mattilda lives in San Francisco, but regularly tours nationally: in the past, she has appeared in independent bookstores, community centers, performance venues and universities including Yale, Brown, University of Chicago, DePauw, NYU, UCLA, University of Massachusetts, Mills College, Antioch, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, UC Santa Cruz, Georgetown University and others.
"Startlingly bold and provocative."
—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States
"Excellent writing and unabashed left politics combine to make this collection vibrant and energizing. The diversity of voices�young and old, people of color, working class, and, of course, every shade of queer�is impressive. These amazing essays represent an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist perspective in a positive, optimistic, and even hilarious manner."
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975
"That's Revolting! reads like a patchwork alternative history of the gay '90s and 2000s: the part queers played in the anti-globalization movement, their responses to racist 'quality-of-life' policing, how they coped with welfare reform and the withering of social services and their valiant efforts to banish tacky corporate sponsorship from gay pride parades.
—In These Times
"That's Revolting! is a pre-emptive line in the sand, a radical embrace of the political creativity of the 'outsider.' It calls us all, regardless of our specific sexual and gender identities, to resist the pressures to assimilate into an increasingly belligerent and racist normality. Ranging from New York to San Francisco, from prison cells to the prison camp life of occupied Palestine, That's Revolting! does more than map out the nether regions of queer identity politics. The articles and interviews gathered together here are full of the collective wisdom of generations of activists determined to take the social space needed to live their lives. Inspiring, angry, ribald and also soberly self-critical, this book is a great way to dispel the post-election blues and expand your notions of what a better world can be."
—Left Turn
"Tired of being represented by the Rich White Homosexual Lobby and its corporate and media sponsors? Pick up That's Revolting! and find the bracing world of vivid, provocative, radical queer visionary argument and activism that you need to feel challenged, goaded, energized and alive."
—Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy
Amen, amen, and AMEN! Let's remember that MSM was floated by the feds, under President Clinton's watch and HHS Secretary Donna Shalala's leadership. A period of time when, sadly, "No Promo Homo" flourished, so let's be careful about how we tell the history of that era. The word was to get the word gay out of every federal funding application. MSM wasn't anyone's identity, but sort of a silent wink and nudge to keep the money flowing (not unlike using "National" when referring to the work of Black folk in the late 80s). Sadly, this is another side effect of HIV prevention and our collective failure to think beyond program outcomes and funding opportunities.
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