Alternative Media and the Search for Queer Space

CHAPTER 15 The Politics of Location Alternative Media and the Search for Queer Space he experience of living queer has typically been located at the crossroads of embodiment and disembodiment. We are defined by our corporeal selves, Tour sexual desires and affectional preferences. As David Bell and Jon Binnie write, “[E]roticism is the basis of [our] community” (87). We tell each other to come out because we wish to be visible as queer; we wish to embody a real iden - tity. Simultaneously, we are disembodied by our cultures. We are ordered to disap - pear, to inhabit a closet where we can’t be seen by the straights, the young, and the innocent. We are to ld not to “speak its name,” not to “flaunt it.” Our experience of culture—our sexual citizenship, as it were—is fraught with this uncomfort - able double consciousness. We often engage in commerce, in the arts, in politi - cal activism, precisely to find a visible viable place in our culture, a place where our embodied identities need not feel the erasure of a closeting hegemony. Jeffrey Weeks argues that the sexual citizen “makes a claim to transcend the lim - its of the personal sphere by going public, but the going public is, in a necessary but nevertheless paradoxical move, about protecting the possibilities of private life and private choice.” This way of doing citizenship, Weeks goes on to say, is the only way that “difference can [ever] find a proper home” (37). Let us think about the concept of “home” as it relates to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgen - der (LGBT) people. 399 400 CHAPTER 15 Gays and lesbians do not have a “home” to return to, either in territorial/ historical terms or in the sense of present-day enclaves; most gays and lesbians live amidst their heterosexual families and neighbors without the promise even of a local community center to find affirmation and support. Most grow up convinced that they are “the only one” in their communities. Urban centers ameliorate this situation for those with the resources and desire to relo - cate, but such relocation involves a separation from, and often a rejection of, their community of birth. Those who do not want to live in cities, or who can - not so choose, often live their lives in isolation. Even those who create a home or a common culture are in a situation drastically different from that faced by racial, ethnic, or national groups; such cultures and homes are created as adults, after the experience of isolation and rejection from one’s family and community. (Phelan 30) Queer “homes,” then, are intensely sought after but, (for many) ephemeral spaces, purchased through the “pink economy,” that mythical entity accessible only to rich entitled gay men and lesbians. In this chapter, we consider how some types of alternative media—as opposed to the more mainstream media products discussed earlier in this book—are used by LGBT people to build community. We classify as “alternative” those media that have two characteristics: they aim to reach a particular (limited) audience, specifically a group that seeks knowledge and validation of a point of view, and they lie outside the realm of “mainstream” media, that is, high-budget, high-visibility productions that stand to gross millions of dollars at the box office, newsstand, or bookstore. Any of the media we discussed earlier—film, television, and the Internet—can have both “mainstream” and “alternative” manifestations. For instance, documentary films, unlike feature films, are typically shown in small-seating art theaters. They play to an educated, culturally elite audience, and studios spend little on advertising and promotion. Keeping this distinction between mainstream and alternative in mind, we begin with the assumption that cultural artifacts—such as comic strips, inde - pendent documentary films and music, LGBT newspapers and newsletters, and even festivals such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—are produced and consumed to fulfill particular needs. One of the overriding needs seems to have to do with the search for community, a sense of home. Documentary Films he documentary Flag Wars (Zeitgeist 2003, dir. Linda Goode Bryant and Laura TPoitras) was advertised as “a poignant account of the politics and pain of gen - trification. Working-class black residents in Columbus, Ohio fight to hold on to The Politics of Location 401 their homes. Realtors and gay home-buyers see fixer-uppers. The clashes expose prejudice and self-interest on both sides, as well as the common dream to have a home to call your own” (“Flag Wars”). On one level, the opposition is direct: “We did n’t have any problems till they moved in here,” says a straight black resident. “If you don’t want to renovate it, don’t live in it,” counters a white gay man. But Flag Wars is far more complex than this simple juxtaposition might suggest. It elucidates some traditional cultural divides: between rich and poor, gay and straight, black and white, even traditional and contemporary. These divides complicate what can be characterized as the search for community undertaken by many LGBT people. It’s not uncommon to think of LGBT people as displaced and disenfranchised, and those characterizations are in many ways accurate, but this film asks what happens when the supposedly disenfranchised have access to the culture’s resources— money and the legal system, for example—and use them to enfranchise themselves in new locations. The questions addressed in Flag Wars have to do with what hap - pens when LGBT people begin establishing “homes” in locations where others are already living and with balancing the benefits to a community when property is materially “improved” at the cost of pricing out those who already live in it. Jon Binnie reminds us that “[i]t is one of the touchstones of the geographies of sexualities that it is only possible to be queer in certain places and spaces. The search for fixity is one in which gay men and lesbians participate endlessly” (82). Flag Wars shows us both the need that gay gentrifiers have for habitable home space and community in an often hostile world, as well as the need current resi - dents of urban neighborhoods have to hold onto the home spaces that sustain them. Both see themselves as the “rightful” inhabitants of the neighborhood— gentrifiers because their work “improves” the area’s cultural capital and the current residents because they have built lives for themselves in the very homes others would “improve.” Although the film seems at first to lay blame for the community conflict at the feet of gay white people—like a lesbian real estate agent whose attitude could be described as predatory—the filmmakers are finally careful to show “that villain and hero, victim and victimizer, good and bad are aspects of all of us” (Bryant). We see how both groups—black residents and gay gentrifiers— have been victimized by social, cultural, and legal forces. The real estate agent, referring to a string of muggings and robberies, justifies her presence in the neigh - borhood by saying, “We’re all busting our ass out here trying to make a difference.” A black community leader fighting to keep a colorful sign over his front door in defiance of housing codes remarks, “They’ve got a free right to occupy. It’s our responsibility to keep our own identity.” In Flag Wars, then, the issue of identity for both groups is key to their under - standing of home. In some of the same ways, the documentary film Shinjuku Boys (20th Century Vixen, 1995, dir. Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams) explores the connection between identity—in this case, a number of so-called 402 CHAPTER 15 Onnabes described by the narrator as “women who have decided to live as men”—and the quest for place. The film is set in Japan and follows several Onnabes working in Tokyo’s New Marilyn Club, whose clientele is “almost exclu - sively heterosexual women who have become disappointed with born men” (“Annabe”). The melancholy tone of the film results primarily from the exclu - sion experienced by the Onnabes—not only from tradition-bound patriarchal Japanese culture but also from their culture’s normative identity categories. Although the women who visit the New Marilyn Club consider the Onnabes “ideal men” and compete for their attention, outside the club, the “boys” them - selves, living as men but without the privilege of men-born-men, lack a “home” in the culture. Another documentary, Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World (After Stonewall Productions 2003, dir. John Scagliotti), offers narratives from lesbian, gay, and transgender-identified people in the Global South who are seeking both physical safety and a sense of home in often extremely hostile environments. Opening with the story of a Cairo resident, Ashraf Zanati, who was “tortured, humiliated, beaten and forced to spend 13 months in prison” (“Dangerous Living”), the film shows how queer visibility in some parts of the world can complicate the move to create community. The film characterizes the search for home in highly personal ways. Zanati powerfully declares, “My sexuality is my own sexuality. It doesn’t belong to anybody. Not to my government, not to my brother, my sister, my family. No.” Zanati sees the claiming of his sexuality as a move away from his family, perhaps even his coun - try of origin. But the reality of sexuality lies in its embeddedness, not just in per - sonal conceptions of self but in social, cultural, and even political matrices. The search for home, then, can rarely be an individual journey, as personal as it may seem; it is often a collective journey, as groups attempt to form new families, communities, and counterpublics.

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