In The Ladies' Room: Looking Back At Queer Politics
Original Artwork by Brian Sliwak
All week, we’ve been bringing you coverage of the National Equality March. This weekend’s march was something that was incredibly important for me; it was the biggest call to political action I’ve experienced.
I’ve mentioned in previous columns that while at school, I was lucky enough to have a great professor who really mentored me and inspired me to become much more interested and involved in the queer political movement. That professor was Melinda Plastas, and she was not only a great influence on my academic career, but also a great personal influence. As an Visting Assistant Professor of Politics at Bates College and a longtime activist, she taught me that having a clear and thorough understanding of what the queer community has done in the past is incredibly important–without understanding what queer activists have done in the past, our own work can fall short.
That’s why, when the National Equality March came around, I found myself thinking of Melinda. She was involved in the anti-racism movement, the women’s rights movement and the queer movement. She was also a participant in the 1987 and 1993 March on Washington, and so for this column, I thought it would be interesting to talk to her, and learn more about her experiences organizing and fighting for queer rights. Below, our conversation about Melinda’s early work in the queer movement, some great stories about the 1987 March on Washington, radicalism in the queer movement, and how she feels about the progress we’ve made since she got involved.
TNG: Could you tell me about some of the work you’ve done in the queer movement?
Melinda Plastas: My early stuff started in Philadelphia. I was a member of the Mayor’s commission for sexual minorities in Philadelphia in the early and mid-80s, and we took the commission over and turned it into an activist commission and worked on a lot of issues like training police officers in homophobia, and looking at race politics in bars in the city and really worked on making the commission multiracial. And then another thing was there was a national gay and lesbian work brigade that went to Nicaragua to help the revolution there, so we thought it was important to link the fact that there were tons of gay activists already working in Central America politics, but our presence really wasn’t acknowledged. So I helped organize a work brigade in Philadelphia that went and did that work. So those were some of the early things.
TNG: Can you tell me more about the ’87 march?
MP: The ’87 march… The figures that the organizers put out is that there were half a million of us there. It was massive and absolutely huge; you had never seen so many people, just so huge. So I was there for the actual march, and then there were–the figures run between 600 and 900 hundred of us–that did the civil disobedience at the Supreme Court, because the Bowers v. Hardwick ruling had just gone through, which basically said that gays don’t have the right to privacy. So we were protesting that ruling. And lots of things were really important about all of that.
Before the civil disobedience action, the night before, there was a huge meeting in one of the churches to sort of talk about how the CD was going to happen. There were hundreds of people there and part of what I remember so much from that march were the gender politics. The AIDS crisis was hitting pretty hard and ACT UP was just getting on the scene, and, in the 70′s, it wasn’t necessarily that gays and lesbians saw themselves as united. Lots of queer women felt that gay men weren’t dealing with sexism and some queer women were judgmental of gay male behavior, so there were rifts, and the rifts started to heal in some ways at the ’87 march. The lesbians who had been doing civil disobedience for quite a while snapped to it and did a good job training folks how to do it. And at the church I remember a bunch of gay men getting up at the front podium and applauding the women in the audience for their organizational capacity, and also for the lessons that they were teaching from the woman’s health care movement that gay men could use in thinking about how to deal with the AIDS crisis. So I just think that there were just a lot of tender and political moments within the movement.
And I can remember when we got arrested and got stuck on a bus for hours with really painful handcuffs on, and the men and women on the bus just having a lot of funny conversations and frank conversations. So I think it was interesting to think about the kind of gender politics that were going on there.
And also, just tons of funny moments. So here we are, all lined up in front of the Supreme Court, arrested with handcuffs on, and the police were serious, there to protect justice from us, and somebody started chanting, “Gay Cops Don’t Smile.” And so here you have all these really serious looking cops going “Uh oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do at this moment?”
TNG: Can you tell me a little bit more about working with the police officers? At the march they were all respectful and polite, was that always the case?
MP: In the early 80′s, a lot of work still needed to be done to explain what homophobia was, training police what to do when they saw gay bashing incidences, or what gay harassment looked like on the streets and what their job was on intervening on those issues. And I’ve got to say, in the city of Philadelphia–I think if I’m right, it was Mayor Goode–we got support from the mayor’s office, so it wasn’t like it was highly protested. It was just that it was sort of in the early stages of doing those kinds of trainings and just making the police officers aware of what the issues were in our community. So I don’t think it was a hostile environment; it was just some of the early stages of training the police. We would literally just write training manuals for the police so that they would raise their awareness about how homophobia works. And also because it was the early stages of the AIDS crisis, homophobia was on the rise, and gay people were so stigmatized. But I would say that the relationships were pretty much cordial.
And at the March on Washington, it was just hysterical that there were hundreds and hundreds of police lined up as if we were really going to do something violent. So just to break the tension we would come up with these chants and indeed some of the officers would start laughing. So it was a nice kind of way to break the ice and say, “Okay, our issue isn’t necessarily with you, it’s with the justice system of the United States that has just passed this ridiculous ruling.”
TNG: How do you feel about the political direction of the gay movement right now?
MP: Thinking about the ’93 march, what I remember a lot was that there was an active conversation about should queer communities support the first Gulf War. and should we be arguing about letting gays into the military. The NGLTF (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force), and the national director, Urvashi Vaid, really had sort of a radical political perspective that is more in line with my kind of anti-militarist perspective. And I remember just really appreciating that she said, “Queer rights can’t be single-issue.” Does militarization forward gay liberation? Do we want to be asking for the right to join the military, or do we want to be critiquing militarization at its core? That was huge. Those were conversations we were having in our local communities, and conversations the NLGFT were putting out there. And if I remember correctly, the NGLFT came out against the Gulf War. As a gay organization, they had the right and the necessity to think about those kinds of issues. I do fear that things have gotten a little more middle-of-the-road. Are we looking for access to faulty institutions like marriage and the military? Or are we really questioning what creates a nation in which all people are free? I fear that we’ve lost the sharpness of those questions. I wasn’t there over the weekend, but I saw the report back that the movement has lost its edge and it’s radicalism. I don’t like to speak in grand claims, but I would be sorry if those questions aren’t being asked, because I think they are vital questions. I don’t think you have to believe that we’ve got to get rid of marriage or we’ve got to get rid of the military, but I think we need to ask questions about the function of those institutions.
TNG: No, I think a lot of that’s being lost. This weekend it was all about equality, about repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act and marriage rights, but there wasn’t a lot of questioning of those institutions.
MP: Again, that’s all very important as well, but I think we’ve all got to be able to say okay, the strategy is now the discourse of equality; it’s not the discourse of radical change. And to realize that many social movements have had real big fights about, “Well, okay, what’s the outcome we want? What are we looking for?” Is it liberal change or radical change, equality or freedom? But at the same time, as I’m sure you experienced yesterday, I think huge marches–everything from having to raise the money in Idaho to get yourself there, to traveling with your friends to people you randomly meet–I think they do really great things at the same time. There’s been this reporting in the press that, “It was a waste of our time” or, “It was the perfect thing to do.” Those two extremes don’t really capture it. I remember in ’93 seeing the lesbian avengers eating fire in Dupont was the highlight. I can’t even remember who gave the big speeches, I remember watching women eating fire. It was totally great.
TNG: The thing that really stuck out for me at this march was that there were a ton of younger people there. At the rally, a lot of the speakers were older and they kept saying how great it was that all us younger people were out. And I think it was really empowering for a lot of us, to be part of something so huge and to really be active in fighting for what we want.
MP: I think that’s so valuable! That’s what I was going to say. I think I was 27 when I went to my first one, so older than you, but still under 30. And it was so radicalizing, just being there in our nation’s capital with all these random people was really, really important and it was really radicalizing. And I think that can’t be underestimated.
TNG: Right. And I really do think it inspired a lot of people to keep working and fighting.
MP: That is so important. As I’m sitting here talking to you, all I’m thinking, all I can do is talk in these grand-scheme pictures and what’s gotten lost are the texture of those individual stories. I think that’s where all the power really is, is in those individual stories. What’s transformed for the people that you’ve talked to.
TNG: Well, can you tell me about your story and what inspired you to get involved?
MP: I think for me, as to my political development, I’m not really a single-issue person. Coming out as queer was important to me, but even before that I was involved in anti-racism work, the women’s movement and the peace movement. So for me it’s all linked together with the that for freedom to exist it has to exist in all spheres of everyone’s life. So I really came at queer politics with that framework, and because of that a lot of my early queer political work was working on racism within the gay and lesbian movement. So my political involvement came from a holistic perspective. And you know from being in Women’s Studies that the kind of things I was reading as an undergraduate was early Audre Lorde and early bell hooks, which was really a clear articulation all about having to work on all these issues at the same time. I know that’s not very grounded, but I did come at it from a justice angle. I really came at it through my peace work.
TNG: For my last question, I just wanted to ask you how you feel about the progress that has been made and if you feel like there’s been a lot progress made since you got involved?
MP: I’m not so good with the progress question. I think there’s a way that queers are still seen as sexual strangers, tolerated within society but still the other. Is that necessarily bad? It’s that question of do we want to assimilate or do we want to create completely different views about family and marriage and community and morality and all that kind of stuff. I do have a sense that for more and more gay youth it’s easier to be out, and that’s so absolutely important, but that the politics of our elected officials remain weak, and that’s a shame. That they can’t just step up and do what’s right. I think there’s more safety out there, more general acceptance, less turmoil for gay youth. So I think on some level, grassroots people and families and communities and schools might be doing a lot more better work than our elected officials are on queer issues.
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