1 WHAT IS āTHE QUEER AGENDA?ā
DOI: 10.4324/9781315151106-2
Paulina Helm-Hernandez, interviewed by Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis
Editorās Introduction:
There is no one queer agenda. However, the mainstream marriage equality movement did not address the myriad social justice issues facing queer communities. This interview with Paulina Helm-Hernandez, who was a panelist on the opening plenary on the future of LGBTQ politics After Marriage and who is the former co-director of a southern regional LGBTQ organization called Southerners on New Ground points to the need for an intersectional understanding of a queer agendaāan agenda that is grounded in the knowledge that the issues queer and trans people face are a product of the overlapping systems of neo-liberal capitalism, global White supremacy, and heterosexism. These systems especially marginalize and oppress poor people, undocumented people, people of color, non-binary, trans, and queer people. Moreover, while a lot of activism is focused in urban centers, it is vital that we understand the importance of geographical location in shaping queer peopleās experiences within these systems. A deprivation and lack of access to resources such as high-quality employment, education, and healthcare that is free from discrimination and systemic violence often leads to entanglements with the prison industrial complex and deprives queer folks of basic human dignity. Paulina Helm-Hernandez points not only to the need for a continued intersectional queer liberation movement but also to the importance of queer communities in addressing these issues. This chapter, like the entire book, aims to grapple with what our shared destiny is: are there aspects of a queer agenda that bring us all together in collective struggle for queer liberation? If there is a queer agenda, it must not just address the injustices of heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia but turn to social justice issues and tackle head-on White supremacy, poverty, and an unjust immigration system.
JOSEPH DEFILIPPIS: So, when you think about the issues facing your communitiesāthis doesnāt have to be about the actual work SONG is doingāwhether you are working on those issues or not, what are the issues facing the communities among the people that you work with? What would you say are the most pressing needs of southern queer folks? What are the issues that would need to be addressed by a movement for liberation?
PAULINA HELM-HERNANDEZ: There are so many issues that affect our folks ā¦. One of the things that we have thought a lot about has been around sharpening our understanding of what is actually happening in our region and what opportunities there are to also move on those, and who is willing to move with us. And a lot of the issues that we have found to be a common thread across the board has been issues of criminalization against our folks; issues of racial and economic justice; issues both specific to the culture shift moment that we are facing with the growing LGBT community, which is to say that a lot of our folks are really struggling with building and finding community. Huge struggles around isolation, particularly in parts of our region that are in small towns, rural, more country if you will. Definitely issues of geographic and political isolation are huge ā¦ we know that what they are experiencing every day is also so reflective, and not just in a symbolic way, but reflective in the daily reality of what the south as a region faces not just in pockets and places where thereās quite a bit of LGBT infrastructure and visibilityāplaces like Atlanta, GA or like Durham, NC that sometimes give little shining beacons of hope for the rest of the south. When, in reality, a lot of our people are not living in those communities and are experiencing vastly different conditions and things that make it extremely hard to also think about what their role in the movement is when the vast majority of our people actually are facing pretty severe survival issues. Pretty explicit survival issues such as: dealing with poverty; dealing with lack of access to healthcare; we have a huge and growing immigrant community in the southāa lot of undocumented folks in our community very much working very low wage jobs, working in the very informal economies that have no benefits, no safety net built into them. Also there is so much violence in our communities, and we know that thereās been sort of a growing awareness about the sort of layers of trauma that our people experience. And then sort of how that trickles all the way down from violence from the state, violence from institutions that shape our lives, and violence from inside of our own communities and relationships and families. And really sort of being able to sort of push back against that.
And one of the other major issues, of course, is around immigration as well. Focusing explicitly not just around access issues but also around the common thread that has always been in the southāthat there needs to always be, of course, an understanding that so much of our region is so shaped by the history and legacy of slavery and colonization and that thereās an entire trajectory about how that has also shaped the experience, explicitly of black folks in the south, explicitly of immigrant folks in the south, explicitly of other people of colorāAPI, middle eastern, and other folks of colorāin the south. That has really had to do a lot with the core issue being white supremacy. And the sort of trickle down effects of white supremacy that sometimes do show up in pretty basic access issues, but other in more, sort of like, really hostile climates that our people have to experience every single day to just even get by.
So, you know, one of the things thatās happening in Atlanta, for example, around the crux of that over-policing, and white supremacy, and, to be frank, just gay assimilation in places like Atlanta that have a growing also middle-class community as well and folks that are definitely coming there for really good reasonsāfor like financial safety and for a lot of other reasonsāand then form this little sort of community hubs in places like Atlanta. They get to be out, they get to have a little bit more income and more money and more visibility ā¦ and distance themselves, if you will, from the reality of working class and poor people that donāt have the same level of economic access, may or may not pass as gender non-conforming folks, may or may not have access to jobs that actually are able to sort of put them in a different place in terms of their safety net.
JD:Ā Iām interested in the work that you do with undocumented immigrants. Did you ever have to justify why you are working with immigrants? Because for a lot of equality-based groups, or other organizations that are working on more specific issues, they have a very narrow idea of what a gay issue is. And do you sometimes have to talk about āwhat is an LGBT issue?ā Can you talk about that?
PHH:Ā Immigration ā¦ [has] been one of the pretty defining fronts of struggle in our region at this time. And one of the things that has come hand in hand with, of course, the changing demographics in our region with the increase of immigration, also the growing wave of African American folks who grew up in the south or with families who are from the south who were exiled out of the south or chose to leave, either during segregation or Jim Crow, and are now returning generationally back to the south. And we are seeing a backlash to that demographic shift, which has been increased policing and violence against immigrant communities. Both in some ways symbolic of all communities of color but also in some ways very strategically to continue to push a white supremacist agenda in the south, both politically and policy wise.
And weāve seen that happen in states like where I live in Georgia and our neighboring states like Alabama and Florida, introducing copycat laws like the one from Arizona, SB1070, and sort of continuing to replicate this idea that if the federal government isnāt doing a āgood enoughā job of enforcing immigration policy, that the states themselves would take that on. We know this is part of the legacy of the statesā rights movement in the southeast as a way to also be able to have an entire region be locked so deeply into the legacy of white supremacy ā¦. And so, part of our work has been, 1) to do political education with the LGBT community around even understanding what does immigration even mean, what actually are the root causes of immigration, what are some of the most common misconceptionsānot just āwho comes and everybody wants to come to the USā versus the fact that immigration is a global issue, that people are migrating all over the world all the time.
And one of the things that is happening in our region is that we have an opportunity, also, as one of the major players of ā¦ exiling people out of their own countries by destroying their economies, we have an opportunity to actually take some leadership, not just as a country, but in our region and in our movements to also say āhow do we change our own understanding around what citizenship even meansā ā¦ and to examine how citizenship, historically, has always been used to define our proximity to privilege.
And so, for us itās been really important to do that level of political education with our communities ā¦ and leaning into that conversation, a lot of the folks ā¦ have known that there was a flawed sort of message that we were being sold, and this packet of lies around the fact that if we have tighter enforcement and surveillance, itās going to make us safer. We saw that immediately after 9/11. Sort of scapegoating and blaming of Muslim communities around this country and the assumption that if we police them, if we incarcerate them, if we cage them, if we disappear them, we will all feel safer. Right? Or this assumption that, you know, if we deport all undocumented immigrants, all of the sudden, the rest of us are going to be pulled immediately out of poverty, or that we are all going to immediately have the kind of sustainable jobs that we need, or that we are all going to immediately be in safer communities. Right? And we have to be willing to lean into that conversation and to engage and grapple with what it means to be in a multi-racial community, to be in a region that has always pitted, particularly, black and brown folks against each otherāto actually be willing to sort of turn that contradiction around to say what is our willingness to actually organize and build together? To our shared destiny, really, as communities? And one of the things that we have also seen on the flip side has been a lot of the push back and backlash, from folks in the LGBT community about āwhy are you working around immigration? This is not a queer issue. This is not at all related to the LGBT equality.ā And really, also, this idea that the only way to really engage our community can only be made through same-sex marriage. Right? That, like, any attention that you place on any other issue or priority is taken away from this main issue. What a lot of people see as the only priority. Not even, like, on a scale. They are like, āitās either that or nothing.ā And, for us, itās been interesting to ā¦ push back against ā¦ this assumption that ā¦ we can actually divorce ourselves from the reality of undocumented communities in this country today.
To me, it is just literally impossible to be able to talk about what we are going to look like as a country, like, not even like ten years from now, but even five years from now, without acknowledging that we have long passed the moment of having an immigration crisis. I feel like we are in a little bit of a watershed moment where we have to examine what our actual end game is. In some ways, parallel to the way that same-sex marriage has been seen as the only issue, in the immigrant rights movement comprehensive immigration reform has been seen as the only legitimate demand. And for a lot of our folks, for us, it actually is important to engage with that.
Itās important because we see that as a step, if you will, in our longer goal to actually transform the idea of citizenship, to talk about indigenous sovereignty and the role of indigenous communities, in defining that conversation. Of the pushing back of the white nativist movement that assumes that only white people have claim to the US, only white people have claim to legitimate citizenship in this country. And so, 1) we want to engage with the comprehensive immigration reform debate, absolutely. We think it is necessary ā¦. And part of our work has also been, honestly, to mobilize LGBT folks in solidarity and in support of, and as part of, the broader LGBT movement and the immigrant rights movement. To be able to mobilize intersectional strategies that are helping to further common goals, helping to further common demands. And there isnāt political alignment everywhere, but the places where there is political alignment that there has to be a willingness to move. So, if we say, not one more person should be deported until there actually is a solid policy solution that has been brought to bear ā¦. And if we are saying that we are so symbolically against trans folks being killed on the streets, then we actually have to be willing to move around it. And we have to be willing to build strategies that are bridging both, that actually are about helping to intervene on that violence, that actually are about longer term solutions to lift up the safety and dignity for all of our folks. And not even in a vague way but in a way that is actually going to transform the individual role and the collective role that our community has to play in their own self-determination and in their own liberation.
JD: Can you talk about how poverty is affecting your community, specifically. And if that becomes a major issue for you in your work? Specifically, poverty as a queer issue. How does poverty affect queer people in a specific way and are they more vulnerable to it?
PHH:Ā Yeah. ā¦ Itās important to be truthful and honest about what our people are really struggling with and the level of poverty that our folks are actually struggling with and sitting in ā¦ and feeling so deeply crushed by that ā¦. Because thereās been this idea that same-sex marriage is going to automatically lift everybody out of poverty. And what we are seeing is that itās actually not true. There are more and more people we know that are relying on the collective safety net of our communities, that are relying more and more on street economies, that are relying more and more on underground economies both as undocumented people but also as gender non-conforming people who donāt have identification that matches their gender identity. As more and more people are farther and farther away from where the centers of economic progress are seen as. And having to move farther and farther away and what the infrastructure even looks like ā¦ to bring those folks into the fold of our work while we know poverty has also become a major issue.
And so itās funny to talk about poverty in some ways as a new issue in the south because itās not a new issue. Itās always been the poorest, one of the poorest regions in the country and definitely one of the regions that has been very much shaped by the sharp disconnect between very, very wealthy people and very, very poor people. And so for us thatās always been a reality. We know that that has also been a reality that economic access has been used as a tool for white supremacy. Right? We know that blocking economic access, blocking access to education, blocking access to better-paying jobs has been a way to also keep communities of color and poor people continually in this sort of invisibility ā¦. We know that the south has a long history of re-districting and ā¦ we know that so much of the infrastructure of the south, economic infrastructure for sure, has been shaped by the design of the right wing and by the design of the white supremacist in the US.
And part of our work has been to not just uplift how poverty is absolutely of course related to racial justice, or economic justice is related to racial justice, but to also say that as more and more people are slipping farther and deeper into poverty and more and more of our folks are relying on each other to be able to just barely survive, what does it actually mean that we are placing all of our energy, again, on (marriage), this idea of a singular way of not just being validated but of creating family. Thatās actually not reflective of how most people are surviving. Thatās not reflective of how most people are actually living who are in poverty. And itās not reflective of what people have historically had to do in order to survive, which is to collectivize. And so, for us itās a moment ā¦ of a true opportunity to shift what our priority has been around this idea that class is somehow going to buffer you from homophobia and transphobia.
2 ANTI-BLACKNESS AND āTHE QUEER AGENDAā
DOI: 10.4324/9781315151106-3
Post-conference reflections with Hari Ziyad Hari Ziyad, interviewed by Angela Jones
Editorās Introduction:
At the After Marriage Conference Hari Ziyad, the founder and editor of RaceBaitR,1 was a panelist on the opening plenary on the future of LGBTQ politics After Marriage. In this post-conference interview Ziyad raises important points about the relationship between White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and queer communities. If there is a queer agenda, anti-racism efforts and confronting the continued impact of White supremacy must shape it.
ANGELA JONES: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became involved in activism?
HARI ZIYAD: I grew up in Cleveland, OH, in a family of nineteen siblings and with a Hare Krsna mother and Muslim father. My mother was one of the first Black people initiated into her sect of Hinduism in America, and my father converted to Islam in his youth as well. I learned a lot from how they created their own communities and sense of belonging within their different and, by many accounts, historically divergent spiritual paths. My parents laid out to me an example of the multitude of experiences Blackness can hold, evidenced not only by both the sheer number of children they raised, but also by the way their rare multi-faith relationship worked and never came in conflict with their embrace of Blackness.
In large part because of them, I have always searched for a deeper, more encompassing understanding of what identity means as a Black person in a place as anti-Black as America. Coming into adulthood, I used the lens I crafted under my parents to understand my queerness, which made it easier to come to terms with my gender/sexuality journey, but, perhaps not so surprisingly, this is where my parentsā grasp of the expansiveness of Blackness seemed to stop short. They had always told me in so many ways, both indirectly and explicitly, that the worldās restrictions around whom I could be should be defied, and that it had to be if I was ever going to be a free as a Black person, but in this instance they seemed to reinforce those very same restrictions. It was an interesting incongruity.
They have grown a lot since, but on top of my own experiences with anti-Blackness, it was my parentsā inability to extend their radical Black imagination to my queerness that was a big part of the reason I began doing activist work. It was clear to me that for the world they wanted to create, and spent so much effort toward creatingāa utopian world in which Black people are free to explore varying s...
