How can this be changed? While it seems clear that gay men, transgender, intersex, and other gender-variant people are associated with women and their subjugation, some may argue that capitalism or the class privilege of men in patriarchy is the primary struggle. The patriarchy, through the ideology of masculinity and the gender binary upholds the oppression of sexual minorities. And capitalism is the system that it promotes. In 1989, John Stoltenberg, a scholar and antipornography activist, wrote in a book called Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, “Cultural homophobia keeps men’s sexual aggression directed towards women. Homophobia keeps men acting in concert as male supremacists so they won’t be perceived as an appropriate target for male supremacist sexual treatment. Male supremacy requires homophobia to keep men safe from the sexual aggression of men.”
During the terrifying war that split Yugoslavia, men had the license to violate women in a big way. Lepa Mladjenovich, a lesbian, feminist, and anti-war activist, struggled with the hierarchy of important issues that were being promoted by the Yugoslav government and media. The struggle for lesbian human rights did not even make it to the list of issues of the day. When people were getting killed in an ethnic war and others were scrounging for food and necessities, how could one argue for the importance of the struggle for queer rights? Lepa writes about an incident that brought home the importance of all struggles.
Three men stopped four of us while we were writing lesbian graffiti [in Belgrade]. They came and attacked us precisely as lesbians. Two of them were in the back with hockey sticks and one of them stood in front of me. He watched me, I watched him and I thought “This is a face that demands war. I had never seen him before. He pushed me to the wall, broke my eyeglasses and shouted “You dirty lesbian, I can throw you in this door and kill you—no one would know. Clear off!” When I asked him who he was, he exclaimed “Don’t you utter your dirty words. The mosque is the place for you.” Lesbians were dirtying his straight male street, just as Muslims were dirtying his straight Serb street. Gay men were being harassed in their parks, Roma people were being spat upon, women were forever first victims of their husbands.
After that, it was evident that war implies hatred directed against every difference, against Moslems in Belgrade, then against Roma, Albanians, lesbians—once upon a time in other places Others were Jews and communists. It opened in my mind so clearly that opposing war means coming out with the logic of supporting all social differences at once. One of the aims of war and pro-fascist ideology is not only separation of people of different nationalities, but the separation of people’s own identities as well.
These are wise words from a sister and activist, educated through struggle. Hers is the only answer—to unite and not allow ourselves to be divided by the forces that are driven to dominate, silence, or even annihilate us. Some may say, isn’t sex a private issue? When people lose their jobs or cannot get housing or cannot see loved ones, when they are dying, sexuality becomes a political and human rights issue. Being quiet and ashamed about one’s sexuality only leads to sickness and decay. Uniting with other oppressed sectors can mean hope, safety in numbers, and mutual support.
Bandied about in the 1990s was an absurd statement made by a famous Russian woman personality on a talk show, when the open discussion of homosexuality had just begun. “There is no sex in Russia,” she said in all seriousness. She was alluding to the idea that open sexual expression, including pornography, had been banned in the USSR and Russia, an idea similar to the denial of homosexual existence in some Arab countries where there is a long tradition of same-sex sexual activity in the bathhouses. Denial does not make homosexuality go away.
Throughout the world, queers have been told to hide their identities and not flaunt their sexuality, while heterosexuals have been given full permission to kiss in public and talk about their affairs, etc. Meanwhile queers must bury their identities, which promotes self-hatred and a neurotic fear of what others think about them, which in turn leads to health problems and sometimes violent homophobic reactions. Just as society is stuck on the two-gender model, never deviating from that possibility, so gays and lesbians are told not to exist and to subscribe to the heterosexual norm.
In our times, it is still acceptable to publicly subordinate women and queers through social rules, violence, and patriarchy. How is this private? In Russia and Uganda and other places today, being queer is deemed criminal. Worldwide, even women in the twenty-first century have still not overthrown the yoke of their oppression and that fact attests to the strong interest of the economic and social system in keeping traditions in place. Thus the argument that all struggles have to be fought simultaneously becomes more compelling.
Fixed ideas of gender and sexuality can be challenged by the understanding that all identity exists in relation to others. Scholar Kira Hall suggests that the kothi (feminine men who take a passive role in relationship with men) in India need a man to help define them as women. Kuzmich, the man I interviewed in Russia, when asked how he managed to survive in the camp, said he identified as active. He purposely posed as an active/masculine partner in prison to escape the brutality that the passive/feminine prisoners were subject to. This is not unlike the patriarchal setup in many societies—the male/active partner identifies as such so he can continue to be the man and have dominion over a family (his world), while the female/passive is ridiculed and marginalized for her gender.
Feminist and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis originally coined the term queer theory to show the radical, subversive, and changeable character of sexual identity, “queer unsettles and questions the genderedness of sexuality.” Queer theory as a term means looking at things from a untraditional, unusual point of view. In her book Queer Theory, Annamarie Jagose notes, “Teresa de Lauretis, the theorist often credited with inaugurating the phrase ‘queer theory’, abandoned it barely three years later, on the grounds that it had been taken over by those mainstream forces and institutions it was coined to resist.” Queer theory can still be useful in analyzing sexuality.
What does it mean to look at things through queer eyes? An acquaintance in St. Petersburg had just read Tsvetaeva’s novella, Story about Sonechka, about the gay theater world. When we discussed it, I asked, “Did you know that Tsvetaeva was bisexual or lesbian?” She paused, then said she had to read it again with that in mind. How different and enriched that reading could be! She could hypothesize queerly about Tsvetaeva’s interest in Sonya Golidey and the two gay actors who are featured so prominently.
Queer theory says that sexuality and gender are socially constructed and that this should be kept in mind in the reading of a text. It challenges strictly held identities and points to a fluidity in gender and identity. Arising from feminism and the exploration of women’s roles in society and of fixed identities, queer theory questions the idea that sexuality and even gender are part of the essential self. Queer theory is a reading that acknowledges complexity and experiences that cannot be labeled or permanently identified. Judith Butler, in her seminal work on queer theory, Gender Trouble, raises the questions: Isn’t identity a performance? Aren’t sexual acts and gender and sexual identities socially constructed? Queer theory is a deconstruction of these ideas. And that is precisely what the Russians taught me—that U.S. activists’ labeling approach to identity is odd, not normal. Identity and relationships are more flexible and fluid; just as there are many genders, there can be many sexual identities.