As a lawyer, the legal front in this struggle was foremost on my mind, and on that legal front, the rights of everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella are bound up together. In writing this work I found myself wanting to document the situation of LGBTQ+ rights during the year 2017, a time when those rights were expanding, and yet the LGBTQ+ community was under siege from the federal government. Why am I writing about gender identity? What charisma do I feel estranged from? What authority am I claiming? Also, what happens when I connect my own experiences with those of Gavin Grimm, Chelsea Manning, Ash Whitaker, Mercedes Williamson, and Jane Doe? Aren’t I using these individual struggles-struggles different from anything I have experienced-to advance a legal and artistic agenda from which I realize all the benefits without paying any of the costs? How is this any different from the acquisitive impulses that have long guided systems of patriarchy and white supremacy? To ask what we think we know, and how we might undermine our own sense of authority.” Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, Introduction, in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap, eds., at pages 17-18 (Fence Books 2015). I’ve therefore thought about the questions that Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine suggest that white writers ask themselves about their desire to write about race: “why and what for . . . ? What is the charisma of what I feel estranged from, and why might I wish to enter and inhabit it. . . . As a bisexual man, I have experienced mistreatment due to my sexual orientation, but I am not transgender and have not experienced gender identity discrimination. Throughout this work I discuss legal developments, cases, and arguments about both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. (The text of “The Bisexual Purge” appears in issue five of Oversound, published in 2019.)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |