Are the LGBTQ movements’ politics flexible, variable, situational, and direct enough to accommodate our multiple identities?

Consider how many folks in the mainstream LGBTQ movement unquestioningly support The Mathew Shepard Act, a national hate-crimes act that supports enhanced penalties for perpetrators. Few people question the assumption that this is a good idea.

Heroically, Queers for Economic Justice came out in early April in opposition to the Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act because it supports Hate Crimes Legislation, which could be used to systematically attack communities of color and trans-people by extending sentences of folks within historically marginalized and oppressed communities.

“It pains us that we nevertheless cannot support the current GENDA bill, because we cannot and will not support hate crimes legislation. Rather than serving as protection for oppressed people, the hate crimes portion of this law may expose our communities to more danger-from prejudiced institutions far more powerful and pervasive than individual bigots.”

QEJ does well to point out that the power of systemic and institutional violence extends well beyond the capacity of individuals.  QEJ’s analysis continues:

“Hate crime laws are an easy way for the government to act like it is on our communities’ side while continuing to discriminate against us. Liberal politicians and institutions can claim “anti-oppression” legitimacy and win points with communities affected by prejudice, while simultaneously using “sentencing enhancement” to justify building more prisons to lock us up in. Hate crime laws foreground a single accused individual as the “cause” of racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or any number of other oppressive prejudices.”

For those who have rejected the idea of passing  The Mathew Shepard Act, coming out against a piece of legislation so symbolically powerful is a brave move.

Matthew Shepard’s tragic death has been crafted into a symbolic representation of all hate-crimes against LGBTQ people. Unfortunately, turning Shepard into a poster-boy victim of LGBTQ crimes asserts LGBTQ identities as white, gay, male, and rural. In reality, hate crimes against LGBTQ communities largely impact women, transgender people, people of color and poor people who remain in the shadows of Shepard’s iconic, white, gay, male image.

To adequately address violence, the LGBTQ movement must bring visibility to these intersecting, marginalized, most-impacted communities, demonstrating that the universal, iconic image of one gay, white, male victim cannot represent the complexity of our communities and the various oppressions we face.

For many folks, the murderer of Angie Zapata, Allen Ray Andrade, has become the iconic image of the violent perpetrator, the bigot, the murderer of all LGBTQ people. Is it any surprise that a white man has been appointed as the symbol of LGBTQ innocence and a person of color has been appointed as the symbol of homophobic violence?

Creating universal images of what perpetrators look like, scapegoating individuals rather than building systemic accountability, the LGBTQ movement often fails to take into account the many systemic forms of violence that often go unchallenged and remain invisible under the shadows of bigots: the prison industrial complex, the military, the church, violence in compulsory schools, and within the courts.

While our movements must hold individual perpetrators accountable, we should develop organizational responses to the larger acts of systemic violence and build coalitions across our movements to dismantle institutional perpetration.

I don’t think it’s wise for the vast majority of our queer movements to be invested in legislative change, a love-affair with the courts, and dependency on the protection of and negotiations with the police. That being said, I also hesitate to think that those of us who want to create vital alternatives to our current economic, legal, and ideological systems should waste a ton of time chastising our movements about reformist tendencies when there is so much work that needs to be done.

We have an obligation to work across our movements, engage in heated dialog and critique, but not at the expense the direct action we need to take to create the world we want to see.