wildfire/23_chap17.html

<h1>CHAPTER 17</h1>
<h2>Gay Rights and AIDS: Men's Issues Sidetracking Feminism Again<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></h2>
<p>On October 11, 1987, I was not in the streets of Washington, D.C., marching in the National March for Lesbian and Gay rights. In fact, though I Hved only ten minutes from downtown D.C., I refused to go. I refused to go because I refused by my presence to lend credence to the phallacy that gay rights include rights for Lesbians. Gay rights are rights for men. To the degree that they are won, women will find once again that we have drained our vast creative energies into men's lives only to have little or none of it return to bless us. It is absurd to continue to believe that laws in patriarchy can or will protect women. Because the very foundations of patriarchy rest on our bowed heads and bent backs, men's laws never have protected us and never will.</p>
<p>When we talk about the gay movement, we are in reality talking about two very distinct and disparate movements, as disparate as men's and women's realities in this act of the human drama. It is true that both movements are about rights for men, that people involved in both are under the mistaken assumption that homosexuality is the same phenomenon in women as in men, and that both labor under the even greater misconception that women's and men's experiences in society are alike enough that they can be united fairly by what appears to be a common oppression.</p>
<p>But the similarities stop there. One movement is comprised of the men who are directly affected by whatever gains are made. The other is composed of women who are working for rights for gay men, who naively believe that gay men are our "brothers" and that when they win, we win; women who still need men's approval; women who still need to believe that men care about us as we care about them; women who may be sexual with other women but who are basically male-identified, needing the feeling of importance that associating with the ruling class affords the slaves.</p>
<p>Gay men are men. They may be oppressed in many ways, but because they are male, like their heterosexual brothers they have privilege at the expense of every woman living. Patriarchy is set up for men. It is organized to work to some degree for all men and though obviously less for some than for others, still <i>exclusively</i> for men. Though gay men suffer discrimination in comparison with heterosexual men, they have many more opportunities and openings in the world than either Lesbians or heterosexual women. On the whole, they make much more money, they are taken much more seriously, they are listened to with much greater respect and attention, and they enjoy direct access to the resources of this all-male club we call society, as well as to the extremely varied and rich resources of their "little sisters" in the Lesbian sorority.</p>
<p>All the while they are sucking the marrow from our bones, the sap from our veins, at least as many of them hate and fear us - and with as much venom and ugliness - as their more sexually conservative brother vampires.</p>
<p>Just as Lesbians run the risk of working for gay rights only to find that gay men, the beneficiaries, are oblivious to their sacrifice, as, man-like, they maddeningly accept them as their due, in the same way, we can also give much time and compassion and energy to AIDS work to find again that our efforts are taken for granted and, worst of all, that we have no time left for our own work, for women's revolution.</p>
<p>Because history attests that there will always be some urgent reason, such as AIDS, for women to put aside our important concerns, we must insist now on putting our own lives first, we must refuse to get sidetracked again. Abolition sidetracked us, men's wars sidetracked us, the peace movement sidetracked us, Central American politics and the so-called New Age movement have currently united with AIDS to sidetrack us. We can go on forever fighting men's battles.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting that we ignore AIDS or that we be unfeeling about others' lives. But I am suggesting that the vast majority of AIDS victims are men and that men need to learn to take care of themselves and one another. I am suggesting that we stop matronizing gay men and realize that they are grown up and can deal with their own community disaster; that they <i>need</i> to deal with it, need to learn whatever it has to teach them, and that we deprive them of this when we rush in to do for them what they should be learning to do for themselves.</p>
<p>Any mother will tell you that if you take over a child's life and deal with his every crisis, you infantilize him, you prevent him from developing the characterological depth, from learning the compassion, from finding the skills he might otherwise have found.</p>
<p>AIDS is horrific; no one deserves it, no one brings it upon themselves. But I think feminists need seriously to consider the possibility that men with AIDS, and gay men without AIDS, and heterosexual men without AIDS, and women who are not feminists and don't identify with women anyway - that these people are the ones who must help the stricken gay community, who must give what needs to be given.</p>
<p>There are so few of us who understand the importance of women in the world at this time that we must not allow ourselves to forget for a moment the purpose for which we were born, must not allow anyone else's problems to supersede our great work or to distract us from it. We must remain loyal to women, never again to allow ourselves to put women's needs and lives on hold while we take care of <i>any</i> men for <i>any</i> reason. If we remain at the level of development where any trouble that arises in the men's world can lay first claim to our time and attention, we will not have the integrity, energy, or direction to build a new world, the work we came to Earth to do.</p>
<p>After all, if we don't learn to take women seriously, nobody else is going to either. And the world can no longer survive women's not having a foremost place on it, and in it, and in our hearts.</p>
<p>When women object, "But we don't have horrible problems like AIDS," I have to remind them about women's lives, including the fact that every year men in this country murder 10,000 of us - an FBI figure and therefore ridiculously low. While it is true that in the last three years 24,000 men have died of AIDS, in the same time men have murdered <i>at least</i> 30,000 women. We read and hear about AIDS everywhere, but hardly any notice is paid to the terrorist regime under which women survive - unless some man provides a sensation by being electrocuted for murdering more than his share of us.</p>
<p>Women say to me, "But we don't have anything like AIDS" not only because they have been blinded to the danger their own lives are in every second, but also because they have been taught to deny the massive incest and battering and rape and poverty. In particular, they have been trained to deny their spiritual slavery, their lack of belief in themselves and other women and in their importance. Internalized oppression is a far more serious disease than AIDS, afflicting as it does more than half the human race.</p>
<p>Our inability to believe in and love ourselves - that's an AIDS of the soul that's been raging now for 5,000 years and has wiped out millions of women. And we don't have a problem? And we've got to rush out there and help the guys with AIDS? Such behavior is a symptom of our own dis-ease: we will run off at once to attend to the first thing that happens to men and leave women dying, not even seeing them, not even caring because we don't care enough about ourselves.</p>
<p>I have learned all too well how few men - gay or otherwise - want to hear about women's oppression. In order not to have to listen, they often immediately begin to talk about men's problems, tell me that men are oppressed too. The effect is to mask women's oppression or to erase it altogether.</p>
<p>This is easier to understand when it applies to race. White women, for instance, have a decided tendency to display the same behavior with women of color. It is often so painful to hear about our collaboration in their oppression that we say to them, "Well, you know, we've got problems, too. I mean, white middle class women's lives are not all a bed of roses." Their answer to us is the same answer we give the men who complain about their "oppression": "We have been forced to look at you constantly for centuries. By focusing our attention again on <i>your</i> experience, you are making <i>our</i> experience invisible. If you don't want to know about us, don't listen, but don't ask us to listen to your problems any more. If you want to hear ours, you will have to put yours aside, because ours are very different."</p>
<p>Women's lives and problems are very different from men's, as different as if we fell to earth from the Pleiades, and Lesbian experience is equally alien in comparison with that of gay males.</p>
<p>Perhaps I could find some time in my life for gay men's difficulties if that community were rallying to women's catastrophes, if gay men on a grand scale were demonstrating a keen and urgent understanding of women's torture by pouring money and time and energy and love into the Women's Liberation Movement. Since I see almost no evidence of this, however, I am not in a hurry to donate the precious days of my life to gay men.</p>

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<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> This piece is abstracted roughly from an interview with me by Cynthia Yockey that was published in the Washington D.C. gay paper, <i>Lambda Rising Book Report, A Contemporary Review of Gay &amp; Lesbian Literature</i>, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 1 and 5.</p>