We, together

Remarks delivered at Memorial Church, Harvard University, October 12, 2010

Queer and Allied Candlelight Vigil

Does it get better?

As we gather tonight, on the twelfth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s passing, in the shadow of many – too many suicides by LGBTQ youth in recent weeks, it is hard not to wonder, sometimes, whether it really does ever get better.

As a historian of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements – the movements for equal rights, the movements for justice, freedom, and liberation – I’m here tonight to tell you that it does get better… when we come together and when we make it better.

Our communities are shrouded in so many myths.

Myths that we have no history. Myths that we are invisible. Myths that we are alone. Many more myths, that we are sick, that we are wrong, that we are victims.

These myths can, quite literally, kill.

While our names, while our categories, our labels change across time and place, across all sorts of lines of difference, those of us who don’t quite fit into the norms of sexuality and gender have found each other. We have found each other for love, for friendship through the decades, through the centuries… we have found each other for joy, for solace … we have come together, in remembrance, in solidarity and in resistance. We have carried on and we have acted up.

We have done so in unexpected ways and unexpected places. We can look back to Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, two African American women in 1860s Hartford, Connecticut, who exchanged passionate, erotic letters for at least a decade. We can look to mid-20th century Mississippi, to the “men like that,” who found each other in the churches, the farms, and the other institutions of the rural South. We can look to all sorts of women, men, and gender non-conformists who built communities together, from elite colleges to the working-class streets of cities, large and small.

We, together.

We, together, made it better.

We mark one painful anniversary tonight. But let me note another, far more joyous anniversary approaching. Next month, on November 11th, we will mark the 60th anniversary of the first meeting of the Mattachine Society – the first meeting of the first enduring gay rights organization in the United States. Nearly a full two decades before the landmark riots at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, the “homophiles” began educating themselves, building social and political networks, challenging discriminatory laws, and demanding inclusion into American society on an equal basis with heterosexual citizens. The homophiles – of the Mattachine Society, of the Daughters of Bilitis – America’s first lesbian rights organization – also sought and found heterosexual allies, in science and law, in politics and religion. Allies like Evelyn Hooker, the pioneering psychologist whose research – in the 1950s – found no difference in social adjustment between heterosexuals and homosexuals. Allies like Willie Brown, the future mayor, who became an outspoken ally of queer San Franciscans before Stonewall, long before Harvey Milk.

In much darker political and cultural times, we were not alone.

We, together, make it better.

With our drastically over-simplified sense of history, we look for individual heroes – individual heroes that stand in for collective movements.

Rosa sat down, Martin marched. Susan B. Anthony brought us women’s voting rights; Rachel Carson birthed environmentalism by writing of silent springs.

Harvey Milk gave us hope.

Heroic though all these women and men might be, they have become larger than life, icons, metaphors. They, not we.

Just next month, we enter the seventh decade of the movement for LGBTQ rights and freedom in America. The seventh decade – isn’t that something? And where’s that in your history textbooks, in your history classes? Where are the mid-1960s pickets at the White House and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall Where are the transgender patrons of Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, who rioted against police harassment, also in the mid-1960s? How about those activists who organized in the 1970s against the lies of Anita Bryant and her kin, against those who cloaked prejudice in the rhetoric of family values – as if we didn’t build our own families?

Just look around at everyone gathered here in the candlelight, and tell me that we don’t have family.

Where are those activists – gay, lesbian, bi, trans, allied – in the 1980s and early 1990s, who came together – from the nation’s capital to small towns in Tennessee – to demand the government fund HIV research, that the health care establishment practice from a place of healing, not injury, and that the media stop spreading misinformation about our communities and our lives.

We, together, made it better.

Audre Lorde* spoke of how the adage that “you can’t fight City Hall is a rumor spread by City Hall.” Well, when you hear about our invisibility, our silence, our being alone, I ask you to think about in whose interest is it for us to be unseen, silent, isolated?

We see a broad range of movements today for LGBTQ rights and freedom – from the battle for marriage equality to transgender campaigns to challenge how we all think about gender. The tensions between equality and inclusion on the one hand, liberation and justice on the other hand are nothing new. They have shaped our movement for sixty years, and they shape so many other movements that stand in solidarity with us. But we stand together, not in spite of our differences, but strengthened by our difference.

We, together, make history.

We, together, make it better.

*Since writing this, I’ve also heard this credited to Saul Alinsky, which is certainly consistent with his work. I haven’t found a definitive attribution yet to either Alinsky or Lorde, or anyone else, but welcome one.

The audio recording can be found here:

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