Queerness, Kinship, and Unitarianism: Reflections for Pride by Liz Constable

One is not born, but becomes straight
(Sara Ahmed paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir)

When Linda invited me to share some thoughts with you all for our Pride Celebration service, I felt honoured and also a little flummoxed about what I could contribute to a congregation of Unitarians whose collective and individual histories abound in concrete examples of support for the dignity, rights, and full inclusion of LGBTQIA people? And so the project of composing words for you was simultaneously easier and yet also more challenging. As an educator for my entire career, I’m also so very accustomed to the dialogic component of communication so I do invite any and all questions, contestations and objections! 

First, a vignette of my own experiences of Pride at a specific time in history---early 1990s---when Gay Pride events in the US were witnessing the emergence of Queer politics and activism as very positive motors for socio-political transformation. My participation in San Francisco Pride events at this particular historical juncture prompted me to focus today on the positive contributions ‘queer’ness brings to Gay and Lesbian politics and Gay Pride. And then, how do queer theory and activism, on the one hand, and Unitarian values, on the other, speak to each other?’

I hope to show that queer values have a particular affinity with Unitarian values; to show that Unitarianism and queerness can be allies for each other in the ways both challenge dogma and creeds; both stay open to new ways of understanding; both prioritize the underlying connectedness of humanity and develop inter-connections among groups; and finally, both consider that the understanding of the worlds we inhabit is not fixed once and for all, but instead emerges from a process of becoming, an open search where we all make choices.

June early 1990s, Market Street, San Francisco Pride

The roar of the motorcycles of the Dykes on Bikes felt like so many fanfares sounding out the confidence and defiance of the women in the saddles. Exhilaration: theirs and mine. Fierce, fearless, radiant in their exuberant solidarity, resplendent in their leather, revelling in the capacity for joy their eroticism embodied, these dykes were, as tradition has it, leading the SF Pride March. But where was I in my own life journey at this event? In my early 30s, I’d re-oriented a heterosexual life, and embarked on a long-term relationship with an American friend, Sharon, a faculty member at Cal State University, Los Angeles.  Standing in the densely packed crowds on Market Street, the very publicness and visibility of the dykes on bikes---the gathering of minoritized bodies in public space---thrilled me, disoriented me, and transfixed me. What moved me was the transformation of public space into one where dissident sexual minorities had become the majority. These women’s very public performativity of the erotic as a creative energy seemed to intimate a radical socio-political potential. The visibility of their bodies occupying public space seemed to expand the very potential of collective action for social change beyond my own lived experience at that time. Visibility matters.

And then, Queer Nation and Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) were also very powerful presences at Pride that year. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in efforts to push President Reagan, and then Bush, to support funding for medical research into AIDS, sexual dissidents had reclaimed and re-signified the adjective ‘queer.’ They turned the adjective ‘queer’ away from its history as shaming insult and slur into proud self-identification in Queer Nation (1990). ‘Queer Nation: Get Used to It!,’ ‘Queers Bash Back,’ ‘Warning: Homophobia Can be Dangerous to your Health.’ Queer Nation’s punchy slogans on neon stickers were visible on backpacks and clothing, my own included. The political activism of Queer Nation and Act Up shaped public space that day, building alliances and coalitions across social groups, infusing activism with campy humour, and with justified anger. As African American lesbian writer, Audre Lorde, puts it, ‘Anger [. . .] loaded with information and energy.’ The bristling energy of righteous, or justified anger also mapped out a world of new forms of kinship through coalitional political activism. 

Today, I imagine that when we think of the term ‘queer,’ and the way it circulates in popular culture, it functions for many of us as a rather amorphous umbrella term, or to denote a taste for beauty and style, as in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I also suspect that ‘queerness’ has become detached from its role as a political perspective that is aligned with other social justice struggles to challenge, overhaul and transform dominant social frameworks rather than assimilate into them. In other words, rather anodyne and superficial associations with queer aesthetics rather than queer politics seem to prevail. And yet, queer theory and activism developed in the early 1990s in part to push back against and reject the aspirations of often privileged, white, middle-class gays and lesbians seeking to adapt existing social norms, and to be accepted as ‘normal.’ To take just one example, where gay and lesbian activists worked for the legalization of same-sex marriage, queer activists rejected marriage as the primary institution sanctioning intimacy. Queer activists have focused more on exposing the exclusions and violences perpetuated by social norms grounded in binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, straight/gay, hetero/homo, private/public, normal/abnormal that prioritize one term over the other. For example, queerness opens up the spaces of both/and, both masculine and feminine, as in the identity of genderqueer. Queer lives are also about the potentialities of lives ‘unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing,’ (Jack Halberstam). In this, queer lives take on the challenge of constructing non-biological kinship, building connections and community, in the absence of models, but to create the conditions of possibility for other ways of dwelling in the world.  And in this respect, queer lives and politics open up understandings of what counts as a life worth living. Or as cultural critic Sara Ahmed puts it, queer values seek to ‘to give support to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange and out of place.’

In 2021, it might seem that in the UK, we have witnessed the growing and open acceptance of the experiences, desires, lives and loves of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer individuals over recent decades. And perhaps, we might even ask ourselves whether the annual Pride celebrations here have already accomplished the social justice goals they gave themselves, and brought visibility to specific demands for policy changes and structural reforms necessary to enable LGBTQIA individuals to live and work free from discrimination, hatred, shame and stigma?    

A quick review of the situations of LGBTQIA individuals here in the UK and worldwide reminds us that plenty of gender justice work, and struggles for the rights of sexual minorities, still continue in the UK and across the globe. As the Stonewall.org website reports, over 75, 000 young LGBTQIA people are bullied at school in the UK each year; over 100 hate crimes are committed against LGBTQIA people each day in the UK; more than 2 in 5 trans people in the UK have been attacked or threatened with violence; and in over 70 countries, same-sex relationships remain illegal (of course, in the former Commonwealth countries, many of the laws criminalizing same-sex relations originate in British colonial legislation).

The role, significance, and impact of Pride celebrations are, as this indicates, inevitably and necessarily, completely context-dependent. A case in point: just this last month, in Hungary, the right-wing government of Orban, following the example of Russia, passed laws making it illegal for information considered to be promoting same sex relations or gender change to be shared with under-18s. This comes on top of Orban’s acceleration of the pace of anti-LGBTQ legislation this last year, by denying the right of adoption to LGBTQIA people and by voting on a bill to deny trans people legal recognition. In this context, Budapest Pride, that took place yesterday, July 24th, provided a crucially important public and visible experience of kinship and solidarity for all LGBTQIA individuals but particularly for young LGBTQIA people in Hungary.

Let’s return to my title for a moment: ‘One is not born, but becomes straight.’ What is Sara Ahmed, queer feminist philosopher, doing here with her clever re-writing of Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that, ‘One is not born, but rather, becomes woman’? We become heterosexual through the formative influence of institutional practices, from education to religion, from medicine to the criminal justice system and immigration law, that have endorsed and enforced a system of norms, a set of ideals to which people aspire. Ahmed reminds us that ‘becoming straight,’ is simply one possible direction, or orientation, taken towards others and objects. One possible mode of becoming.

Making Kin

In opting not to ‘become straight,’ queers have often developed non-biological kinship networks; they have also done this when their choices have resulted in rejection by their families. And in developing these non-familial kinship networks, they open up new kinds of connection independent of familial lines and genealogies. LGBTQIA communities have always fostered and cherished kinship relations as precious and valid alternatives to biological relations. And in turn, through political activism, queer kinship relations have enlarged the possible meanings of family, connectedness, intimacies, and coalitional politics for everybody.

Caring for an ailing friend may generate queer kinship and intimacy; sharing expertise across generations may generate queer kinship and intimacy; participating in activist social justice projects with others who see things differently, or whose social location is different, may generate queer kinship and intimacy.

As we think about these, we notice that the connotations of intimacy have shifted away from the default definition in heterosexual relations (namely sexual intimacy). Intimacy has become a more capacious and generous mode of sociality in queer thinking.

Furthermore, queer kinship as a non-biological sense of belonging undoes the hierarchy implicit in the binary of human-nonhuman, and as a result kinship is generated across species. What does queer kinship share here with Unitarian values?

‘Making kin’ across binaries (such as human-animal, animate-inanimate) extends the role of kinship to care of the environment and of all the creatures that enrich it. Cross-species kinship values the enhancing of environmental protections that maintain biodiversity in the face of threats from agribusiness; it seeks to minimize the role of the extractive industries that pollute the planet and increase global warming.  Kinship and the making of kin across species (human-animal) has for years animated modes of spirituality in many indigenous peoples in the Americas. And in our Western European context, queer kinship re-invests human-animal connectedness with a similar respect for non-human species, and departs from traditions of man’s dominion over animals. In all of these ways, queer kinship and Unitarianism share a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and are deeply committed to environmental justice and climate justice. For those interested in thinking more about queer kinship across species, the work of Donna Haraway is inspirational.

At their core, queer politics and activism challenge binary oppositions that limit you to either this or that. Queerness questions social norms and belief systems that tell you there are no in-between options, no both/and. And here, queer politics and activism once again dialogues with Unitarian values. As Reverend Roger, at my previous UU church in Sacramento, California, puts it, ‘Nearly every UU congregation exists as a denial and a rejection of a binary understanding of religious community. It’s not this or that—it can be this and that. Since it is based on values and not on a creed, a liberal congregation is a living, breathing, hymn-singing example that there are things in-between the limited choices of this or that when it comes to religious community and religious expression. In these times, we are learning that not everybody fits into the box which is the binary choice of man or woman, of boy or girl, of him or her. There is more variety in our gender identities and our gender expressions than can be contained by two genders. Hence, some folks are asking to be referred to by different pronouns. In particular, many nonbinary folks request being referred to not as he or she, him or her, but by the pronoun they or them. This is a request for respect. What else could show more basic respect than to acknowledge how others identify themselves and how they express that identity?’ May queer politics and activism and Unitarianism continue to dialogue so productively with each other.