Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

The fight for LGBT rights started with a riot. Gays, drag queens, transgender people, and other gender and sex non-conforming individuals were hounded, attacked and criminalized by the legal system just for being themselves in those days. LGBTs had no freedom of association. Gays were banned from the military and from government employment solely based on a queer criminal archetype – the ‘queer security threat’, which, along with other queer archetypes, would make appearances at different times in our history. Gay bars and hangouts were routinely raided, their patrons arrested and charged with crimes. Then, in 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York, LGBTs started fighting back – attacking the police establishment and the prevalent belief that LGBT people should be charged with crimes and branded as lawbreakers. The Stonewall riots marked a shift in the way LGBTs would allow institutionalized homophobia to affect them:

It was on the night of June 27, 1969, that a routine police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Christopher Street hangout for gays, run by the Mafia, prompted not cowed obedience from the customers but uncharacteristic fury and outrage. It was not unusual for the police to raid gay bars, and they did so regularly, to arrest transvestites and harass the customers. What made the raid of the Stonewall Inn unusual is that the gay and lesbian patrons spontaneously fought back, tossing beer cans, bricks and anything else in reach at the police officers, who responded by beating many of the protesters and arresting dozens of others.

Beacon Press has published Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, a revolutionary work seeking an entirely new perspective on the rights of LGBT people in the United States. Focusing on the criminal legal system, the book details the years of systematic abuse and institutional and structural problems with that system – taking a hard look into our jails, police and courts – showing us that they not only prevent LGBT people from getting the justice they deserve, but that institutions such as those work against LGBTs to criminalize them based on stereotypes and homophobia – even when they ostensibly exist to help and protect LGBTs.

Reflections on the trial of Lawrence King’s murderer

Brandon McInerney was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison yesterday for the execution-style murder of Lawrence King in a junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The jury had deadlocked but since McInerney is so young – seventeen now, fourteen when he murdered King – a plea deal was reached so that a new trial could be avoided. McInerney will be nearly thirty-nine years old when he is eligible to get out of prison.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network issued a statement that most resembles my thoughts: “Ventura County along with communities and school districts everywhere must come together to promote a culture of respect and nurture the true potential found in every individual regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression[.]”

The thing is, though, it goes deeper than even they suggest. Communities and school districts can and should do grassroots work to promote respect for everyone and to finally have discussions of sexual orientation, gender identity and race – all of which, as I’ve noted, played into this tragedy in a myriad of conflicting ways. This would be necessary even if this event had never taken place. It’s a little disconcerting that there is little incentive to have face-to-face discussions and to do grassroots community-building without some impetus like a brutal murder.

But this is also a time to reflect on the media’s role in this saga – and discuss the ways in which it is necessary to change that institution to better reflect the reality of our lives and the goals we seek. After all, the media was quick to attack the victim and to ignore many angles of this story:

How did we get to this point? Why could a jury in a murder trial in which thirty witnesses saw the shooting not reach a verdict? Why is the media attacking the victim of the shooting, claiming that he “taunted” a “sweet-faced boy” into shooting him point blank in the head? Did King ‘ask for it’? Why did the judge allow the jury to consider a voluntary manslaughter charge for a person who admitted the murder and talked about how he contemplated murdering King and planned it out?
[…]
At the outset, King was portrayed as weird, flamboyant, and anything but a typical boy. How King chooses to dress should, of course, not lead to his murder but that logic is seemingly lost in this article. They go on to blame coming out of the closet as one factor for the murder[.]

It only got worse from there. And it wasn’t just that they portrayed the victim as the real villain in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity – it was race as well. The murderer had a lot of white supremacist literature and had clothing and other things with gang symbols on them. Most of the reporting on the issue of white supremacy – and there wasn’t much, despite the fact that there were expert witnesses testifying at the trial on race and sexual orientation and white supremacy and how they are intertwined in some ways – only occurred after a defense witness appeared on the stand to “debunk” the prosecution’s evidence. Needless to say, the media’s slant on that aspect was nearly universally hostile toward the prosecution’s witness and to the idea that white supremacy exists, that people – even teenagers – are still interested in it, and that it plays a role in anything happening in our country.

If we are going to do some serious thinking about our own communities and our own approaches (or lack of approaches) to these issues, then we need to reconsider our reliance on traditional media – or step up our fight to make our traditional more reliable and less openly hostile toward minorities.

There were conversations that could have begun to take place on a large scale. Pretending like these murders and crimes are always committed by “one bad apple” as a means to avoid discussions of race and sexual orientation or gender identity has been the go-to line in so many situations and for so many years, so many decades. It’s become embedded in our culture that we can’t deal with problems as a whole anymore, we have to see everything and everyone as individual events, individual people, not connected in any way to any bigger picture. But there is always a bigger picture and there are always going to be difficult and painful issues and pretending like this isn’t the case will only cause harm to our society – and especially those who are minorities, the ones who most desperately need these conversations to happen.

While we were thinking on these issues, we could have also asked ourselves why we consider our system a system of “justice” in the first place, as if the word justice is devoid of any meaning except to label what we do to people our government considers to be horrible. This is a conflicting issue for me – I think that far too often, someone can commit a crime against a gay/lesbian, bi or transgender person and it not only ends in an acquittal but society itself usually approves of the acquittal and makes some excuse as to why it was necessary. This is a problem. People tend to dismiss real and valid complaints of queer – and I use that term to refer to everyone in our inclusive community – individuals and how we, too, are hurt by our criminal “justice” system, and roll their eyes at our complaints that our society and our media institutions promote bigotry against us and put forward the notion that it’s not that bad to kill someone for being gay, bi or for gender incongruence – one often gathers, from reading media reports or even from speaking in groups on these issues, that the gay, bi or transgender person who was brutally murdered or raped “had it coming” for being so “open” about their differences with heteronormative society. It’s hard to feel welcome in a society that won’t even admit that killing minorities is a larger issue and an important one and that it needs to be addressed by our communities. It’s hard to not feel a sense of relief when, finally, fucking finally, someone commits a crime like this and society sends a message, through a District Attorney, that this type of behavior is something society does not approve of.

However, as I said, this isn’t really justice. I am not sure that locking everyone away for many years is what we as a society should consider just and fair. I’m certainly vehemently opposed to state-sanctioned murder (euphemistically, “the death penalty.”) While a message needs to be sent by our society that queer people and other minorities can’t just be attacked, brutalized, murdered, stalked and everything else, I’m not so sure that imprisonment, in itself, sends that message in a way I fully support. And I’m even less sure that imprisoning a seventeen year old for twenty-one years sends the message – after this kind of trial and media circus, just locking him away may end the national conversation, and that is truly a lost opportunity.

Issues of criminal justice, imprisonment and the death penalty affect queer people as well – it’s important to note that locking people away like this can adversely affect us, even as we imprison those who kill us. Imprisonment of queer people can happen at a more rapid pace and in larger numbers than heterosexuals, and when we are in prison, we are treated differently from everyone else. There is a certain masculine culture that exists in prison (and that’s not entirely different from most of society, to be fair; it is just more noticeable in a cramped environment like a prison) and any male seen as feminine is “weak” and abuse happens. It can be worse for transgender prisoners. There are reports going back for decades of transgender prisoners who are only allowed to remain locked up in a prison filled with people who match the gender assigned to them at birth, not their actual gender. In a lot of cases, transgender prisoners are also denied hormone therapy – vital medical treatment that is absolutely vital for people who are transgender. And HIV/AIDS meds are in short supply in these prisons as well. Many people, both heterosexual and queer, have not been allowed their required dosages of HIV meds while imprisoned. And treatment of these conditions in prison clinics is also sub par.

This is all in addition to our legal system itself – it is designed to work against queer people and other minorities. In many cases, a queer defendant’s counsel is inadequately equipped to handle a case against the defendant. Attorneys have accepted plea deals on behalf of transgender defendants that led to that person being assigned to a prison that contained male prisoners when the defendant was female. Stereotypes, anti-queer archetypes are used at trial against queer defendants and then repeated by the media – as happened in this case. Anti-queer sentiment has been documented as fairly prevalent in trials and widespread bias leads to a negative outcome in so many situations.

I favor abolition of prisons and replacement with different forms of community responses to violence and crime. And I favor a complete reworking of our legal system and elimination of the biases that exist within it.

Given these issues, I wonder if being too supportive of McInerney’s twenty-one year sentence is too easy, a way to prop up a failed system and a failed response to crime. I wonder if there are better, longer-lasting ways to handle this type of continuous violence against specific minorities. I wonder if it’s putting a band-aid on our problems when we should be doing a lot more to end violence against our most oppressed communities and the injustices inherent in our daily lives.

An invisible minority

(Crossposted from my piece at The Huffington Post)

We are an invisible minority, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of us recently in a speech to the United Nations: unseen and unheard from in many parts of the world, even hidden away in parts of our own country. Our stories aren’t told, not even now, and our history has been wiped out, washed away to hide us from sight, to keep the history of the world, of our country, as clean as possible. Our faces aren’t seen, our voices silenced, by death or fear.

Our queer community, our people, our group of “others,” is invisible.

In the South, where I live, it’s still an exceedingly arduous task just toiling one’s way through the rough landscape of this sanitized atmosphere: everything seems so bleak, so far away. It’s as if you’re supposed to think, supposed to always be afraid, that there’s no one like you here, no one on your side.

Just coming out to anyone as gay is a process, a terrifying chore that you hope you never have to do. You dwell on it, agonize over it like nothing else in your life, knowing nothing you will ever experience will compare to this. But you know you have to do it. I had to do it to feel honest; I couldn’t deal with the dishonesty, not anymore. And the other choice I had was a coward’s choice — never something for me.

Living in a place like this, you make choices daily, hourly, about how open, how “queer,” how “other” you want to be, how much you want to expose yourself to the people around you, if at all. And then there are times when you don’t do it, and you’re left feeling empty, a shell, someone who’s not really “you,” because your community, the place where you grew up and work and make your home, doesn’t accept you.

Invisibility is so much more dangerous than the alternative. For me, coming out made me more visible. For others in the queer community, for people who are transgender, visibility means something different — but all of us are driven to be seen; we’ve earned our place here. Being seen can change you, and it changes everyone around you.

Being disabled, in a wheelchair, I deal with the contrast every day — one minority status that stays invisible, and one that’s left open, out in the light, possibly exposed to the whims of some bully, somewhere.

It seems so much more impossible to fight back against anti-gay attacks than it does when I’m targeted for being disabled. I have to wonder about opening myself up to confirming who I am, and the uncomfortable silences, the bitter looks, the angry sneers from the people who don’t, or won’t, understand. Only in that situation have I ever had to contemplate the fact that they would know, the people attacking me would know, the people around me would know, and only in that situation have I felt the utter fear, the anxiety of movement, the dread of knowing that any action I could take could go so wrong for me, could end friendships, could alter the rest of my life in ways I couldn’t even conceive of at the time because all I could focus on was the cold, paralyzing anxiety, the unease that never really goes away. People already know I’m disabled. You can see a wheelchair. If you attack someone in a wheelchair, they can fight back against attacks on disabled people, and there’s no revealing secret. They already see you.

I’ve always felt stunned when anyone even bothered to discuss my disability in a negative way, much less to outright attack me. I’ve always had back-up. I’ve never felt alone in that. I don’t think people always understand what they can see, but they will defend it if they feel the need. The very sight of a person in a wheelchair being hounded by bullies, being threatened or even physically hurt, can make your heart ache. And even more telling, it makes the other person look stupid. Who wants to be seen doing that? Anytime I’ve been hounded by people for being disabled, it’s always in secret, in the shadows. And I’ve always felt as if people try to be as subtle as possible, or as hidden as possible, when they’re bullying or discriminating. No one has outright refused to hire me for a job. But they’ve held job fairs where “everyone gets called back” and you can guess who didn’t get called back. They’ve wondered whether I can really do this job, because the counters are so high, or whether I can do this job, because my health seems so volatile. They always try to be careful. No one comes up to me in the middle of a crowd and attacks me for being in a wheelchair. But if I’m alone, if it’s just me alone reading an email, or me going down an empty hallway, or me alone in my truck at night, that’s when they go for it. They can type rude things when their friends aren’t around. They can turn their headlights on so bright at night and get so close to my truck when I’m driving alone at night that I have to pull off the road because I’m blinded — this has happened to me; I’m told by cops it happens all the time to disabled people, that people love to prank those who can’t fight back, in the dark alone.

But attacking someone for being gay? In Alabama? That’s something that’s completely accepted and almost a part of entry into Southern life. They’ll come right out and call you “faggot,”; they’ll scream their heads off that you’re a “tranny”; they’ll find you and beat you up in a classroom in a school filled with thousands of people. It’s almost no problem. No big deal. No skin off their backs. The worst anyone really gets for attacking a queer person is a slap on the wrist, even somewhere like the United States. I grew up listening to the worst type of language. I lived through the worst kind of verbal abuse — completely unintentional, and that was what made it so terrible, knowing they could just say whatever they wanted. I will probably always remember how easy it was for everyone in my family to throw around words like “queer” — used in a negative way, of course, because using the words our people use to celebrate ourselves as an insult, a talking point, a cheap line, is the easiest thing to do — and I could do nothing but sit there and take it. There’s nothing, no power against this type of attack, against this type of language, and you feel it directed at you, because that’s you, they don’t know, but it’s you, it will always be you, and you can’t change. You can’t change them. You wait in silence for the day you can finally leave and know it will be better. And there’s the powerlessness that always seems to come when you know, you just know, in the deepest part of your heart, where it always stays forever, that they wouldn’t do this if they knew, if they’d always known, if you’d just said something. It seems like it’s just words, really. It’s not that hard.

It’s only admitting who you are. But it’s the price — the price is always so steep and you can’t go back, ever. Thinking about it even now that I’m on my own, remembering the desperation I felt and the conflict that always seemed to be inside me, I just don’t want to keep things like that in my head always.

Hiding always leads to so much danger, whether it’s the danger of a queer person hiding themselves away from the world in hopes of making it through the day, or the danger of a bully hiding themselves away in a dark corner, in hopes of making it through an attack on an unsuspecting victim.

I’m around people all the time who feel like they can throw out comments about gay people indiscriminately because I don’t “look” gay. Because I’m not the one out in the open. Try to get someone to mock my disability and it isn’t as easy, because it’s not out in the open where everyone can see. And you wonder if you should stay or leave. Is it really different somewhere else, or is this all there is for you? You might even wonder if, after everything you’ve heard, everything you’ve experienced, this is what you deserve.

I think that matters — the difference between being invisible and being seen — if you want to eradicate hatred of queer people or anyone else. Making yourself visible changes everything.

#OWS: The “99%” is more fractured than we would care to admit

(crossposted at ABLC)

I couldn’t go to #OccupyMobile. I wanted to, very much, but I was in the hospital. While everyone was taking over parks, setting up tents and camping out in protest of income inequality, I was nearly wasted away in constant pain in a sanitized bed in a room where everything smelled sterile, drowned in antiseptic. Were I able to attend, anyway, it wouldn’t have been for very long – I am in a wheelchair and camping out in a park, getting out of my chair, sleeping on the ground in a cold and dirty tent, even if I could have gone I couldn’t have stayed – I couldn’t have been a part of this. The privilege of being able to forgo thinking about your health, where you might find a place to sleep or even some flat ground to wheel across is a privilege to which I’ve never had access. From the outset I was stuck “participating” in the movement – since I do believe in a lot of its underlying goals – by going online and reading or writing about it.

For a movement that rests on visibility at parks or other open areas, this isn’t much of a way to participate and to feel welcomed.

It’s bigger than ableism, though.

How many black Occupiers have there been? Not too many. We have a so-called justice system in this country that was formulated at the same time our forebears were beginning to dabble in slavery. This system has for centuries worked to arrest and detain blacks and keep them in prison throughout much of their lives. Three strikes laws and the “War on Drugs” have made it necessary for black people to consider every thing they do very carefully so that they don’t upset the ugly institutions the country was built upon and end up in jail one too many times, or under the batons of some angry white cops; even in so-called liberal cities police violence has always been rampant and extensive. Racial violence and fears run deep.

This necessitates many potential Occupiers who care about issues of income inequality staying home, away from violence and arrests. An arrest of a black person does not have the same consequences that an arrest of a white person has, and that is a problem that deserves wider attention if we are ever going to discuss real equality in this country. So many Occupiers were so happy to be arrested, so proud of ‘taking on the system’ because getting arrested isn’t as bad for a majority of Americans. I wish people could see how that is not taking on any system at all, but is instead exercising a level of privilege to make a smaller point on a vague issue that is divorced from other issues and should not be.

How can we discuss “income inequality” but not racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia or transphobia?

A friend of mine once argued with someone about issues facing people who are both black and gay, and he was told that “gay trumps race any day.” It sometimes feels that this type of thinking goes on in this country, and that it’s going on in OWS, even as they are trying to fight some of the problems facing both gay and black people, and those who live in both of those worlds. It feels like people think “class trumps race/gender/homophobia/biphobia/transphobia.” It doesn’t. It’s impossible to take on those things one-by-one, just separating each out in a clean and accessible way.

There is a depth to the problems in this country that many are missing – and this is happening among our liberal and progressive friends.

In a lot of ways we are not “the 99%,” because we are the 12% of blacks, the 72% of whites, the 16% of latino/as. We’re the 1.7% of gays 18 years old or older.

We’re separated by bigger institutional issues that have been around for centuries, since at least the 1600s. And we are not discussing them. They’re not seen as a part of the Occupy movement, only a separate issue to be worked out once there is “income equality'” and people have jobs and the economy is great again.

There is no mention of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or the fact that in 34 states, people are being fired-at-will because of their gender identity. In 29 states, people can legally be fired for their sexual orientation. What about jobs for them? What about their “income inequality”? There is no mention of any way at all to prevent joblessness and income inequality for our community.

It is the same for disabled people even with laws that are designed to prevent employment discrimination: they just come up with new and different ways to not hire us or to fire us for not having the ability to be in two places at once or to do a lot of tasks that involve standing. This shows that these issues are far bigger than laws or biases but are part of a bigger institutional system of injustice aimed at keeping people white and heterosexual and cisgender.

Women continue to make less money than men.

And what about police violence, or crime measures? The 0ccupiers are getting arrested and seeing police violence and getting a taste of the life of an average black person – or at least the daily fears that this life may become something that they deal with at any given moment – and the occupiers are still not discussing ways to end anti-black police violence, or violence in general.

When I started reading the reports of the violence against transgender occupiers, that’s when I knew that the thinking behind this movement might not be as spot-on as some say that it is.

A problem with building a real “99%” movement – one of the biggest problems – is that we all have so many personal biases. We all engage in stereotypical thinking and I include myself in this on purpose – I may be gay and disabled, but living in Alabama, whiteness is so “important” that it makes me privileged, regardless of the other parts of me. The face-to-face, personal racism/homophobia/transphobia that we are dealing with can be staggering. It’s incredibly difficult to get people to confront issues like anti-black police violence or criminal injustices when so many whites just don’t like black people.

We saw it with Proposition 8 in California.

That was blamed on the black community with such rapidity that it immediately brings to mind the fact that we are all a fractured society. We were “trying to build a movement” then, too, to fight homophobic laws. The fact that we in the LGBT community would not just blame that on a single minority with one distinctive feature – and I’m not getting into whether “race” is even a real thing in this piece because it is getting long enough already – but that we would “go there” so quickly really frightened me from almost the moment it happened.

Those of us who know that blaming race is not an accurate story are still fighting against the myth even today, in 2011.

That is but one example of the bigotry of every community, the unconscious, or even sometimes conscious, biases we all deal with that prevent us all from truly coming together and really being “the 99%” Until we do that, and until we fight “income inequality” alongside some of the bigger issues that are institutional, we won’t have justice or equality. We can be the 99%, but we are not there yet.