Category — Queer Voices

When the name Sylvia Lee Rivera is mentioned, without a doubt ones first thought, comment or reflection is that “Sylvia is widely credited with throwing the first shoe (or depending upon the remembrance first or second bottle, Molotov cocktail, etc) at Stonewall.” From that point on, the remembrance and analysis of Sylvia is strongly influenced by this pivotal moment in queer history. Very little of what is remembered, spoken or written about Sylvia deviates much from that of her involvement in Stonewall and the succeeding predominately white, middle class led LGBT movement. And sadly even within the Trans community to which Sylvia dedicated her life to, she is primarily whitewashed along with her radical politics being marginalized or even totally omitted!

However, Sylvia like most great figures in history was a true social justice revolutionary, if not insurrectionist, figure whose life, beliefs, actions and words embraced an intersectional essence. Jessi Gan’s 2007 Centro Journal piece titled “Still at the back of the bus”: Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle is one of the few pieces that critique’s the remembrance of Sylvia Rivera by many writers in light of their clear omission of Sylvia’s intersectionality. Sylvia remained predominately an unknown figure ~ even though her activism, writings and influence within the New York City “gay and lesbian” movement of the late sixties and early seventies, albeit short lived, was highly influential. It was not until the publication of Martin Dubermans Stonewall that her role in the Stonewall riots became widely known. And not long after this, Sylvia re-emerged onto the NYC scene with her innate anger and passion fighting loudly for queer street youth and Trans folks of color, until her untimely death in February 2002. Even after her death however, the name Sylvia Rivera and Stonewall were so intertwined that much of her revolutionary social justice work was never recognized. Fortunately due to the extensive research and subsequent publication of The Gay Liberation Movement in New York, Stephan L. Cohen puts into context a picture of Sylvia that goes far beyond Stonewall, and allows us a glimpse into her life and her actions via an excellent treatise on S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).

With the rise of Transgender politics during the 1990’s, Sylvia became the matriarch of this resurgent movement. However her stature in this movement was primarily due to her documented role in the Stonewall riots, and this was used by many transgender activists to demand a seat within the gay and lesbian movement and the inclusion of transgender within the existing gay and lesbian organizations and civil rights struggles.

Yet coming back to the analysis by Jessi Gan I reproduce the section below which goes to the heart that Sylvia was much more than Stonewall. In fact the underpinnings of the Stonewall rebellion actually reflected more of the class and race issues faced by queer street youth rather than the traditionally embraced view that has enabled middle class white gays and lesbians to view themselves as resistant and radical.

“… just as “gay” had excluded “transgender” in the Stonewall imaginary, the claim that “transgender people were at Stonewall too” enacted its own omissions of difference and hierarchy within the term “transgender.” Rivera was poor and Latina, while some transgender activists making political claims on the basis of her history were white and middle-class. She was being praised for becoming visible as transgender while her racial and class visibility were being simultaneously concealed. Some recovery projects lubricated by Rivera’s memory-in their simultaneous forgetting of the white supremacist and capitalist logics that had constructed her raced and classed otherness-served to unify transgender politics along a gendered axis. The elisions enabled transgender activist Leslie Feinberg, in hir book Trans Liberation, to invoke a broad coalition of people united solely by a political desire to take gender “beyond pink or blue.” This pluralistic approach celebrated Rivera’s struggle as one “face” in a sea of “trans movement” faces. The anthology GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, similarly, called for a “gender movement” that would ensure “full equality for all Americans regardless of gender.” The inclusion of Rivera’s life story in the largely white GenderQueer lent a multicultural “diversity” and historical authenticity to the young, racially unmarked coalitional identity, “genderqueer,” that had emerged out of middle-class college settings. But the elision of intersectionality in the name of coalitional myth-making served to reinscribe other myths. The myth of equal transgender oppression left capitalism and white supremacy unchallenged, often foreclosing coalitional alignments unmoored from gender analysis, while enabling transgender people to avoid considering their complicity in the maintenance of simultaneous and interlocking systems of oppression. Rivera is, moreover, profoundly important in a Latina, transgender, and queer historiography where histories of transgender people of color are few and far between.

Sylvia: Insurrectionist, Mother, Visionary, Revolutionary
To paraphrase Jessi Gan, an analysis of Sylvia’s life should alert us to the simple fact that trans visibility is not a simple binary of male/female; though rather an intersection of the multiple kinds of visibilities, differentially situated in relation to power, intersect and overlap in people’s lives. The consequences of visibility are determined in part by one’s place in society, and by the systems of power that define gendered and racialized meanings onto the bodies discrimination.

Sylvia Rivera was born a Puerto Rican/Venezuelan effeminate boy whose birth father had disappeared and her mother’s second husband was a drug dealer who showed no interest in children. Sylvia’s mother committed suicide when Sylvia was only 3 years old and so she ended up living with her Venezuelan grandmother who despised her femininity and dark skin. Sylvia grew up poor and without love and so at age 10 left home to seek a new life hustling on 42nd Street. Sylvia’s life was very hard, though through her early life experiences and struggles, she learned to find a new definition of community and family. [Read more →]

Queers Without Borders proudly asks YOU to contribute to the third issue of queer voices, a zine which provides a snapshot of the complex lives and political realities of the broad number of folks who live and love freely, in a world that pushes us in the opposite direction.

We are looking for any number of different forms of expression, including cartoons, poetry, essays, stories, personal narratives, prose, news stories, art (black and white) and most likely whatever else you can come up with.

As far as content, our very favorite stuff has political struggle and personal experience go hand-in-hand, connecting the dots between different (but related) struggles, and particularly when yours is a voice that is generally excluded in the LGBfakeT mainstream–people of color, immigrants, women, workers, homeless, youth, sex workers, trans people, BDSM perverts, fairies, boi dykes, drag kings and queens, polyamorous folks, and any number of the people that wage the fight to live and love freely.

Deadline is August 22nd 2010. Send submissions to QueersWithoutBorders@gmail.com.

As the capitalist media, corporations and their soulless management prepare for the “holiday” onslaught of constant media brainwashing, senseless greed, manipulation, practices of usury to enslave, and on and on and on; not to mention the sickening music with which to march the lemmings to their malls of worship ~ I offer you our annual queer rendition of ‘Twas the Night Before Black Friday.

‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY
By Jerimarie Liesegang of Queers without Borders

Twas the night before Black Friday, when all through the store,
Not a cash register was ringing, not even a penny rolling on the floor;

The sale signs were hung with the rollback prices near,
In hopes that the greedy capitalists would soon appear;

The store associates were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of the morning cheer and squiggle danced in their heads;
And the Managers with their Walkie Talkies and the CEO with his serpent,
Had just settled down for a long winters holiday enslavement,

When out in the parking lot there arose such a clatter,
That the Blackwater Guard sprang from his post to see what was the matter,
Away to the front doors he sprang like a flash,
Tore open the cash registers and threw aside the cash,
When, to the Blackwater guards’ wondering eyes should appear,
But a hijacked manger, so devilish and near,
That he knew in a flash it must be the Queers,
With a little old driver, who so looked like the messiah,

[Read more →]

On the evening of August 1st in Tel Aviv, someone entered a youth group meeting at a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community center and opened fire, killing two people and injuring many more, some critically.

We mourn the loss of those killed and injured, and are outraged by this homophobic violence. As people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and/or queer (LGBTQ), we empathize with the pain, fear, and rage that friends, loved ones, and communities are experiencing. We are heartened that people all over the world are coming together to mourn these deaths and to stand against the violence and hatred that caused them. May this loss compel us towards greater justice, compassion and humanity!

As people who reject the Zionist premise of safety based on violence and isolation of people from each other, we cannot subscibe to the representation of this crime as an isolated event, separated from the violence that pervades the state of Israel. To sincerely engage with the question of building true safety, we must recognize the systemic aspects of this incident. Israel is marketed as a gay-friendly tourist destination and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. In fact, LGBTQ people of all ethnicities and religions face discrimination and violence in Israel, just as we do in all other parts of the world. [Read more →]

 Please post feedback and suggestions. I’m pretty happy with it, though admittedly the image I picked has everything to do with the fact that it fits into the space that I had to work with.

cross posted from sdsqueercaucus

Over the last few years mainstream gay advocacy groups have focused their efforts on one issue, a panacea to seemingly solve all forms of inequality that gays are faced with: marriage rights. With the passage of Proposition 8 this summer in California, many people’s hopes that gays would achieve full equality in this country were dashed. What was even more distressing, however, was the wave of racist backlash against people of color in California, who were accused of being the cause of Prop 8’s passage (this is a completely unfounded claim, as studies have shown). When I look at the actions of HRC, GLAAD, and other mainstream gay advocacy groups from the past years, they make me sad to call myself queer. In particular, their perpetual focus on marriage rights as the most pressing issue facing queers, the only obstacle blocking the [Read more →]

Calling All Those with Queer Sensibilities–From CT to Beyond! Queers Without Borders is Going to Print Again and We Need Your Help! In Connecticut (as with most places throughout the world) there is a decided lack of queer voices in media. In Hartford, this often seems doubly the case.

Queers without Borders is a multi-issue group arguing for a radically different conception of politics—one that does not separate struggles for sexual dignity from struggles against racism, sexism, class exploitation, and the policing of gender conformity. We house a blog site at http://queerswithoutborders.com/wpmu/ but want to add queer voices to print media (especially in the greater Hartford area) to provide an alternative to the politics-as-usual approach of existing publications geared toward the LGBT community (and beyond!).

With this in mind, we need YOUR help!!! This is a call for submissions to our second print publication, Queer Voices. Reformatting into a ‘zine format, we have focused this issue on personal experience. Send us your stories, poems, comics, etc. (the sky would be the limit, if we believed in such things as “limits”) for print in our second issue of Queer Voices! We are especially looking for pieces that outline personal experiences with queer identity, politics, theory, and practice. As well, we seek submissions that take note of the intersections between the politics of sexuality, race, class, gender, nation of origin, ability, age, and any host of subjectivities that have been formed into hierarchies in our often messy world. After all, none of these identities exist independently of the others and to talk of one is to talk of them all (even when ignored, what goes unsaid is often as telling as what is actually articulated)! Submissions should be emailed to queerswithoutborders@gmail.com by March 15th, 2009.

Thank you for your time and submissions! Projects like this cannot exist without the active involvement of many! We need YOU! We need each other! Yours in solidarity, Queers without Borders!

To our fabulous anarchist-comrades and fellow radicals alike.

As you are well aware, bash Back! Has been fucking shit up fierce-and looking damn sexy in the process. Queer and Trans insurrection is hot right now; we’ve been infecting this country with something a lot more meaningful and glittery than obama fever. New chapters are springing up all over the country. As expected, the reaction has begun hitting back. Harassment, intimidation, and other forms of persecution are intensifying on behalf of both agents of the state and citizen fuckheads. Know houses are frequented by marked and unmarked cars. We are receiving a constant stream of threats. Police have contacted three different individual’s parents in Milwaukee as well as others in Lansing; unable to in any charges on us, their questions instead focused on gathering information pertaining to our organizational structure, personal relationships, as well as other things. Since the situation is as such, we are making a call for solidarity. We hope your unending support will manifest itself thru attacks even more sparkly than ours. We wish to say to you and our oppressors that any and all forms of repression only work to intensify our efforts. We will not stop until all capitalist, statists, and hetero-normative institutions are destroyed, and the ruins bedazzled.

Until sodomites are squatting the white house;

Yours from the wettest wildest dreams you’ve ever had.

Bash Back!

www.bashbacknews.wordpress.com

In a joyous break from the drumbeat of the Marriage debacle, I offer the following piece first published on QWB almost a year ago to the day.  Enjoy.

‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY
By Jerimarie Liesegang of Queers without Borders

Twas the night before Black Friday, when all through the store,
Not a cash register was ringing, not even a penny rolling on the floor;

The sale signs were hung with the rollback prices near,
In hopes that the greedy capitalists would soon appear;

The store associates were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of the morning cheer and squiggle danced in their heads;
And the Managers with their Walkie Talkies and the CEO with his serpent,
Had just settled down for a long winters holiday enslavement,
When out in the parking lot there arose such a clatter,
That the Blackwater Guard sprang from his post to see what was the matter,
Away to the front doors he sprang like a flash,
Tore open the cash registers and threw aside the cash,
When, to the Blackwater guards’ wondering eyes should appear,
But a hijacked manger, so devilish and near,
That he knew in a flash it must be the Queers,
With a little old driver, who looked like the messiah,

[Read more →]