A few years ago, in 2011, ai was working on one on of the computers at QPIRG Concordia when a friend came by and asked what me ai’d been up to recently. Ai responded by saying that ai was helping to organize a demo against gentrification and police presence in the Village.
“Oh,” they said, “like the queers versus the gays?”
No, that’s not what the demo was about, ai tried to explain. Of the people who were, at that time, doing their best to put political pressure on the city government to bring more cops into the Village – and who were complaining very loudly in the media about drug users, dealers, “prostitutes”, and so on – ai was quite certain that at least a few of them had a tendency to use a postmodernish “queer discourse” rather than an essentialist “gay discourse” in their description of their own identities, their conversations about sexuality, and so on. It seemed to me that, to the extent that one could designate some people as “queers” and some other people as “gays”, we would find both queers and gays on both sides of the Village’s own little class struggle.
Ai tried to explain, too, that a person’s analysis of sexuality and gender had very little bearing on either their class position (which wasn’t an entirely accurate statement, as ai will explain in a bit) or on what action they would take to defend and entrench that position. You could, for instance, understand the gender binary as a social construction and simultaneously advocate social Darwinism, the essential goodness of cops, and les criminaux hors de mon Village!
All of this seemed to be a little bit lost on my friend, which was frustrating.
At this point, ai should probably define “queer discourse”, but this is, of course, a rather difficult task. The meaning of the word “queer” is rather difficult to pinpoint – and really, it’s much better to talk about the word’s meanings (plural) rather than even entertain the pretense that it only refers to one thing. This issue is well-illustrated on page 28 of the generally excellent text Terror Incognita by CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective. Of the four main categories of meaning provided (each of which contains a variable number of more precise meanings), the one ai would like to highlight the most is the third of these: “queer” as a subcultural label. To the extent that queers constitute a subculture, it is evident enough that both myself and my aforementioned friend (call em Friend A) are part of the Montréal iteration of that subculture.
Consider another conversation ai had with another friend (friend B), this one more recently, in 2014. This second friend had recently found a new apartment, and ai asked where it was. Ey named a certain street, and on hearing the name of this street, ai was able to name one of eir roommates; ai had been to the house before. After saying “oh, wow!” or something, ey commented in the following way, as a means to make sense of how ai could identify eir new house perfectly: “Ai guess there aren’t that many queers on that street, eh?” This statement struck me as odd when ai heard it because, by my reckoning, there were probably many queers on that street – it is, for the record, a rather long north-south stretch. But this friend of mine was clearly making reference only to a smaller population of queers, one that is defined by far more than particular forms of sexuality or the condition of relating to prevailing gender norms as an outsider, and which is comprised of people far more likely to self-identify as “queer”. Indeed, there probably aren’t very many people on this street who belong to this (anglophone) queer subculture that is, in part, defined by both its fluency in, and comfortableness with, the vocabulary of queerness, and which can also be defined in relation to its generally anti-capitalist politics.
Going back to the original conversation a few years ago, in QPIRG Concordia, one could take this subcultural definition and then argue that, indeed, the demo ai was helping to organize was a matter of queers versus gays. Me and my fellow organizers were indeed queers. The people that we could most effectively mobilize were, for the most part, also queers. The people on the other side were, one could reasonably deduce, older, and thus less likely to be familiar with the strange ways of our new queer subculture. They were also mostly francophone, whereas ourselves and the others in our subculture were, and are, principally anglo.
(To be clear, there are francophone queers, too, but in my experience, being both francophone and self-identified as queer at the one and the same time tends to equate with perfect fluency in English, as well as a tendency to plaster English – not just anglicisms, but actual English – all over any political organizing that you might choose to do.)
As an organizer of that 2011 anti-police demo, though, ai didn’t want the demo to be a matter of queers versus gays. Ai wanted it to be a matter of those opposed to social cleansing versus those advocating for social cleansing or carrying it out. It’s certainly true that queers, in the subcultural sense, would be among those opposed to social cleansing, and ai definitely wanted them out in the streets – but ai also wanted to make space for those who were more affected by social cleansing, a group that included many people significantly less fluent, or comfortable with, the vocabulary of queerness than your average McGill undergraduate. In fact, ai would prefer to have more of the latter than the former, even if (horror of horrors) the majority of demo participants had ended up being straight. A lot of the propaganda put out by me and fellow demo organizers emphasized that social cleansing in the Village was a matter of rich queers versus poor queers, and ai think this is worth mentioning, because, y’know, it’s true. But since we don’t know shit about shit, the majority of the Village’s most affected population could very well have been heterosexual people with annoyingly heterosexual attitudes, and yet they would still be the most affected population, i.e. those most justified in participating in a demonstration against the Village’s gentrification!
At this point, ai want to talk about queer supremacy.
There is a prevailing attitude in the previously described queer subculture that it is better to be queer than being any of the alternatives to queer. A third friend of mine (friend C, and very much a queer herself, both in the sense of being part of the Montréal iteration of a broader anglo queer subculture, and also just being queer) made a critique of this attitude in 2009 or 2010, and she described it as “queer supremacy”. Ai thought that was funny, so that’s the term ai’ll use for it.
Just to avoid possible confusion: “queer supremacy” is the name for an attitude that is only found in a recognizable way within a particular subculture; it is not the name for a materially existent system of domination that reproduces itself over time. Compare and contrast to “white supremacy”: whereas an individual person may or may not possess an attitude that can be characterized as white supremacist, that same person, if white and living in a white supremacist society, simply will experience the accorded benefits. Ai guess you could say the same thing about a person who is queer in a queer supremacist society, but such a society has never existed!
In any case, queer supremacy tends to manifest itself in a number of ways. It’s possible that a queer person only wants to hang out with other queers, for example, and that may be because of a quality of feeling more comfortable when around other queers, potentially, or based on the verifiable fact that other queers are likely to understand a great deal of one’s experience in a way that non-queers are unlikely to. There can come a point, however, when “straights” or “breeders” are denigrated as actually being less capable of understanding things that, to be clear, they certainly should understand, and also as necessarily (or, at least, very much more frequently) possessing attitudes that are both obviously not held by all heterosexuals and which are also obviously held by plenty of non-heterosexuals.
Straight people, in this society, ought to know about what it’s like to be queer, and cis people ought to know what it’s like to be trans. This is, of course, not completely knowable, because they are not capable of experiencing others’ subjectivities, obviously. But it is, ai would argue, understandable – at least to a point!
In any case, in queer supremacist circles that also value an anti-capitalist politic, and which have analyses about how capitalism and heteronormativity and cis patriarchy are mutually reinforcing, there is often an idea that being queer is, at the very least, some kind of anti-capitalist act. Ai am just gonna say that this is silly, and also self-congratulating if you happen to be queer. It is worse, though, when those non-heterosexuals who are not anti-capitalist (because, for example, they believe in the good of free markets) or not anti-state (because, for example, they are police officers) are somehow seen as less than queer, or improperly queer, or most interestingly of all, traitors to queer people.
For me, the cop who self-identifies as queer and maybe does some sexy stuff with a person of the same assigned gender once in a while is both a queer and a cop. It seems weird to take away that cop’s queer label. Not because ai particularly care about the cop’s feelings, but because ai reject the idea that ai’m can’t hate a person who is queer. Ai mean, if there is anything deserving of the label “tribal mentality”, this is it. Ai am gonna hate who ai want to hate, queer or not.
(Aside: ai actually don’t hate cops; they are beneath any kind of emotional consideration, really, and hatred is generally self-destructive in any circumstance.)
For me, it is clear that most queer people are proletarian or working-class, and that queer people are still oppressed in you-can-get-gay-married Québec on the basis of the fact that they are queer. So the project of queer liberation needs to be an important part of the anarchist project, here and everywhere – though ai would argue that the project of liberating queer desires of all people generally is more important than seeking to expand the power of specific queer individuals, especially if we’re talking about individuals already already possess all kinds of power as a result of white privilege, male privilege, cisness, high-quality citizenship, available funds, or whatever else.
Some queer people are not proletarian or working-class, though. Some queer people do not do anything useful towards destroying this nightmare of a society (including, y’know, not just capitalists, but some people in the anti-capitalist-by-conviction queer subculture that ai am a part of). When organizing to get cops out of the Village, ai want to make it clear that ai don’t care about these people. For me, if there’s any abstract group of people ai’m doing this organizing for (as opposed to, y’know, a non-abstract group of people like me and my peeps), it’s the proletariat!
So ai think this post is a little too harsh, but ai’m gonna publish it anyway. On a final note, though, let me just say that ai hope people don’t think ai’m knocking queerness in some boring, “anti-eccentric”, the-real-oppressed-have-better-things-to-do way. In my opinion, the Village needs to be way more queer, and way more accommodating to way more forms of queerness. Like, what the fuck is the deal that ai can’t even be naked in public in any part of the Village, even on a nice summer day? And as for people who have very specific fetishes, or desires to fuck in public, or whatever, it seems to me that a neighbourhood like the Village is supposed to be the place where they can do all that. Except they can’t, whether or not they have money, i.e. regardless of their class.
There’s more than class oppression going on, in other words!
So, to conclude, things would have to be different in a properly awesome proletarian Village. Like, ai would have to be able to hang out on a patio naked if ai wanted to (in a place where it’s been designated that non-sexual nudism is cool), someone could be guzzling some scally lads’ piss a few alleys away (in, of course, the designated Alley of Piss), some people could be acting like puppies (in a parc de caninisme humain?), and so on and so forth. Also, for the more vanilla folks, you could still go to a club and find someone to take home to your normal bed – but it wouldn’t cost you so much bloody cash, if any at all.