As the fist hurtled towards me I curled up. Rather pathetically I was worried about the punch breaking my glasses because they’d have to be replaced, which I couldn’t afford. Whereas my cheek bone could be reset by the NHS and that would be for free. It was either that or it was vanity. Who wants a facial blemish, even if it’s a battle scar won fighting the Nazis? Not the Nazis of Churchill in World War Two notoriety of course – even I am not that old – but their latter-day incarnation, the NF. The National Front. They were running rather amok in Brighton in the late seventies and we were picketing a meeting they were having in a hall that no longer stands, having given way to a Millets and a bike shop.
As I was kicked, he shouted Fucking Q***r. I still won’t write the Q word in full. To me it’s the gay N Word. It was what I was taunted with in the lunch queue – just for being in the school play I think. It was what he spat as he kicked me again, this time in the ribs. But no matter how many people tell me it’s been reclaimed. No matter how many times I am bombarded on Twitter or email with news of another apparently fashionably titled Q***r history event, Q***r Studies lecture or Q***ring the Pier webinar, I feel that punch. That boot to my bones. I just hear that sneering schoolboy slur.
I am no hero, that’s not why I tell the story. I have no idea whether I am a coward or not. I have a bit of moral backbone inherited from my parents and a great sense of fairness, passed down particularly by my father. But I don’t feel brave.
LGBTQIA+? What does this mean? The authors of this muddle have turned one of the great passions of my life, lesbian and gay equality, into a slightly secure password on the internet.
At Prep School we were made to box. I formed a pact with my friend James, against whom I was drawn to fight, that we wouldn’t hit each other. We danced around until we tried the patience of Mr Watson, the Maths teacher, who was the referee. “Just get on with it”. So, reluctantly, I hit James. And then said out loud for the whole school to hear, “Sorry”.
I am no fighter. I have however felt recently the compelling need to stand up and fight at least for some small injection of sense into current LGBTQIA+ narratives and politics. LGBTQIA+? What does this mean? I know what the word salad stands for. But what sense does it make? The authors of this muddle have turned one of the great passions of my life, lesbian and gay equality, into a slightly secure password on the internet.
This alphabet soup is supposed to link together a group of people who form some kind of “community”. I was asked recently if I was LGBT? I replied that you can’t be all of them. What lies behind it is the notion that anyone who is vaguely in the sex/gender/ sexual orientation/gender identity Venn diagram shares a life in common. Well here’s news to all those who insist that their own personal identity is of such overwhelming importance to the rest of the world that they think dying their hair pink and wearing the odd bit of androgynous clothing and adding more capital letters to the mix makes them special, when you get hit in the face it’s because you’re a poof or a lezza. Gay or Lesbian. That’s true whether the punch is metaphorical – not getting the job or the promotion or just being mocked – or physical. Nothing more.
What we share, if not in the specific at least in the general, is an experience of prejudice. It may no longer be an all-day event but it’s still often an everyday event. But the thing about the success of our campaigns over the last decades is that we’ve made some progress. And with that success comes diversity in views, lifestyles, politics, attitudes to gender, about the significance of being gay to our lives. The point was to campaign for freedom. Not to fight for an ever-expanding litany of initials that further and further label human experience into sub groups which are then coerced into a false “community”.
When we are discriminated against, that clown’s pocket of a category has some meaning. If you experience bias, it’s because you don’t conform. In our case to sexual norms. As a group what we share is something of the experience of an offence to our liberty. But if you are going to insist that it matters politically that you are non-binary or neutrois (what??) or pan sexual or asexual, you are confusing subjective personal identity with the struggle for equality and justice.
One of the key outcomes of progress on diversity is that it produces a flowering of difference. Labels shouldn’t contain people. They should be enablers of difference, not prisons of sameness.
The thing about bigotry is that it’s not so intelligent. Nuance is not a significant feature of prejudice. Instead it just lumps people into large groups. And then hates them. LGBT. BAME. Women. The product is Homophobia, Racism, Sexism. The struggle is to defeat those and exceed the labels. One of the key outcomes of progress on diversity is that it produces a flowering of difference. Labels shouldn’t contain people. They should be enablers of difference, not prisons of sameness.
LGBT etc is not a community. The only thing that makes it meaningful is that it’s the loose alliance of people who have had to, and often still have to, fight discrimination in one part of their lives. It only has salience as a political struggle, not as a trendy collection of personal identities which seem to be adopted for little other reason than to make people feel a bit special.
There are men and women, and lesbian and gays (bisexuals only experience discrimination when they are being their gay selves) and when we recognise the honesty of that, we have a chance of finding what we do have in common and making alliances to fight for it. The personal maybe political, but the struggle for equality and fairness is material not therapeutic. No amount of refashioning the Q word to invoke some inchoate notion of rebelliousness is of any use in that fight. It’s just muddled and self-indulgent thinking.
Simon Fanshawe is a Consultant, writer and co-founder of Stonewall.
Simon’s new book The Power of Difference is out in August published by Kogan Page.
Putting the Q in its rightful place.These butlerian nightmares help nobody.