(Re)queering our campuses: some godless ideas
On Facebook this week, my recent post about
religionists using queer language
drew several interesting comments. In particular, I got messages from various members of my university’s LGBT society, which I mentioned very briefly without being as generous as I might have been. One feels acutely aware in the wake of #Occupy that ‘What do you actually
want?
’ isn’t always worth answering, but in this post I’m going to try and be more constructive.
The issue of LGBTsocs being depoliticised social clubs rears its conceptual head time and again, and seems to crop up in groups at all kinds of universities, so while what I say is informed partly by my own experience, I’m targeting it at student LGBT groups in general. I should mention that I was never on committee on the one at my university (or very involved in general, for reasons I’ll explain). I do however come from quite a solid background in student atheism – and something I want to suggest here, having straddled these two communities to the point of climax, is that we’re facing some rather similar internal issues.
What is it, then, that we both need to do differently? Well…
Let’s stop saying ‘We aren’t here to be political.’
When people like me say LGBTsocs should involve activism rather than just weekly drinks socials and brunches, or variations thereupon, one of the things we’re always told is, ‘The society’s mostly about welfare. We’re here to be a positive environment for members, not to be political.’ I’m sorry, but… bullshit.
Any line between welfare provision and politics depends entirely on perspective. The white, relatively privileged, typically cismale students who tend to dominate LGBTsocs might regard the subversion of gender as political or abstracted, but I’m given to understand that if you’re genderqueer and have to navigate spaces like ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ toilets every day, that sure as hell is a welfare issue.
In student atheism, we have a similar problem with privilege-determined understandings of our own remit. Concepts of
humanism
and
secularism
are often prioritised over discussions of actual non-belief, because apparently there’s ‘nothing to discuss’ about ‘just’ being atheists; the state of being a non-believer is much less frequently acknowledged as consequential in itself than it ought to be.
Would this be true if atheist student groups were run mainly by black students from pentecostal Christian communities? By ex-Muslims? By kids whose childhoods were spent in Orthodox Synagogues? If you’re one of those people, ‘just being an atheist’
is
important in itself. If you’re one of those people, you often have to be brave just to say you don’t believe, let alone join a group about it. So…
Let’s reach out more to people outside our societies.
One of the accompanying statements that often goes with ‘Let’s avoid politics’ is ‘We’re here for our own members. The SU are there for everybody else.’
If we really care about welfare in principle, we need to realise that the people whose is most imperilled are the ones who don’t come to our meetings. Again, this goes equally for atheists and queers on campus: the students afraid to say they’re not believers are usually the same ones afraid to say they’re not straight, and if they’re afraid to say it they’ll rarely turn up on our doorsteps in the numbers that they could. So we need to get through to them other than in person.
Instead of basing entire societies around weekly drinks, why not have LGBTsoc podcasts at the weekends? Why not set up a YouTube channel? Why not get on student radio? However many posters you put up, the numbers who’ll want to attend a meeting in person without any warm-up will always be limited. One person said on Facebook that the reasons ‘politics’ was avoided was that it meant more people picked condoms up at socials and had safer sex; great that we’re taking sex-positivity seriously, but why not be proactive about it? One popular suggestion at
was that it advertise itself with society-branded condoms (custom ones can be ordered online), pigeon-holed to fellow students or thrown with a smile to passers-by in the union building.
Let’s start to inspect our universities.
Particularly on campus, one of the things the women’s movement did particularly well in the 60s and later was the identification of institutionalised misogyny. Student feminists pointed to the rules that separated them from male students and staff; to academics’ offensive comments; to results gaps; to objectifying images on the walls. And they made noise about it.
I’d love to see LGBTsocs send their members, especially trans students, into each of their universities’ buildings and areas – into every college, or hall of residence, or faculty building – looking for cissexist arrangement of facilities, or listening out for boorish rugby players using ‘gay’ as a pejorative. I’d love for queerphobic members of staff to have their names noted down, and for the bad experiences of queer students at each part of each university to be documented. And I’d like for posters to be put up there, on every wall or library window or toilet door, detailing all the things that needed to change.
Again, I’d like to see atheist societies do this too. Particularly at a time when our own most mild-mannered images are
being blacklisted by student unions
, I’d like us to go around our universities, noting every poster telling us we’ll go to Hell on a religious society’s behalf. I’d like us to take note of theocratic practices in our institutions, like official prayers or religious mottos in public universities. Again, we need to flag this up.
Let’s avoid implicitly sexualised points of entry – especially with regard to alcohol.
Pub socials are a common thing in atheist societies, and despite being a non-drinker I must say I enjoy them. (I like pubs, and having the fruitiest drink at the table when I order tonic and lime.) But what put me off my university’s LGBTsoc very early on was that its major regular event, and its chief point of access for newcomers, took the form of a drinks social – usually brightly coloured vodka shots – followed by a trip to a gay nightclub. This gave the prior proceedings the atmosphere of a ‘pre drinks’ event – you know, when students gather in someone’s room to get mildly pissed before arriving at the club?
I don’t like environments where the implied social objective is finding someone else in the group to have sex with you. I have Grindr for that, and friends, and internet porn. I don’t like feeling ostracised because I’m not interested, or because people aren’t interested in me, or sneaking away early because like many people, I don’t find clubbing appealing. I don’t like not knowing people as well the next week because we haven’t spoken very long. And what’s more, I’m pretty sure the most vulnerable members or potential members of LGBTsocs don’t like all these things either.
Even with comparatively laid back and unpressured atheist pub socials, there’s a growing consciousness that women atheists are expressing discomfort with those kinds of settings, and concern about them impeding female membership of our societies. (A friend from
Leeds Atheist Society
informs me she can’t go to pub socials without being hit on constantly. This doesn’t seem a problem for her, but it is for many.) Instead of, or at least in addition to drinks socials and club nights, couldn’t we incorporate actual solid meals to the way we interact? The
Atheist Community of Austin
, though not a student group, are well known for holding regular meals at a local restaurant after their webcast, and seem to attract a lot of involvement that way.
Let’s not get dependent on big business for support.
Now, I accept I’m a silly old young Marxist with a deep fried chip of class war on his shoulder and a thirst for the heads of the heads of major corporations. (Yes, you read that right.) But I have to say, part of me died when first I saw ‘Sponsored by Deloitte’ on my LGBTsoc’s public material.
I understand that whatever your politics, a need for cash is a frequent reality in activism of all kinds. Hell, I’ve chased some fairly ambitious sponsorship-based budgets in my time. The trouble with leaning on people like Deloitte is that, like all corporate bodies who chase profit, they depend on the approval of privileged majorities.
What if an LGBTsoc decides it should campaign to legalise incest? It should, by the way.
What if some of its members decide public sex acts are a good way of acting up to fight erotic shame? That was considered mainstream activism in the 60s and 70s.
What if their sponsors, in this case Deloitte, decide their customers don’t want to see their name beneath those images? What if they threaten to withdraw financial support? What if the society has to agree to abide by their principles in future – by an organisation’s, that is, which may or may not share all their aims but which they nonetheless require to rubber stamp their decisions?
This is, again, an issue in atheist societies too. The experiences I’ve had with sponsorship from national groups have been mixed, some of them very good and some very bad; I’ve been in teams which had to reconsider plans for certain events or think about how it advertised based on its principal donors. If you’ve found a funding model that works for you, of course you should stick with it – but I’m inclined to think rediscovering the grassroots spirit is sometimes more important than a fast buck.
Let’s be more visible to ethnic minorities.
In Oxford, where I pretend (not always successfully) to study things, the student body has almost no black or minority ethnic population in its ranks. One side effect of this disturbing fact is that student groups are rather used to being almost entirely white, and have a to some extent legitimate excuse; whereas our fellow godless and queer societies elsewhere are habitually uncomfortable with their milkiness, we rest easy on the issue. Easier than we should.
I’ve already covered that we need to be aware of the world our member lists. That includes non-students, and Oxford has a huge group of minority ethnic communities in its near-eastern boroughs, especially Cowley and St. Clements. The domination of the British black community in particular by conservative Christianity is undoubtedly one of the major factors in its still-kicking homophobia as well as its near-total lack of out atheists – but so is the fact we’ve failed as activists to engage with it for so long.
If I were holding events in Oxford now, either with LGBTsoc or with the atheist society, I’d make sure to hold an event at least every couple of weeks in a non-university venue, in that part of the city; and I’d make sure to cover the entire area in posters advertising it. I’d do the same in the equivalent parts of whatever other city I was in, at a different university. Provocative and a potential cause of tensions, yes, but in Jen McCreight’s words it’s edgy-but-friendly and we need to do it.
Finally, perhaps most controversially…
Let’s actually discuss gay marriage’s pros and cons.
And by this, I mean
let’s actually talk about it
– not just listen to straight people argue about it amongst themselves, at present on the soundstages of the Republican Party debates, and define our aims based on the resultant media narrative.
Perhaps this is my age showing, but did the gay community ever actually have a discussion about whether marriage should be its goal? Despite the fact that on proposing this in the 1990s, Andrew Sullivan got spat on regularly by other queers, it seems LGBT support for the idea has spontaneously formed without a great deal of internal discourse on the topic – because of course, with the mainstream media greatly amplifying the voices of straight politicians, it comes only naturally to seek by default what some of them want to allow us. (Nice of them.)
I’m convinced, and I have good evidence for it, that large of numbers of queers don’t have anything like the enthusiasm for marriage they’re expected to have; some of us, and I include myself in this, count themselves against it on ideological grounds. And whatever the conclusion this is an internal discussion we need to have, before even vaster swathes of people are alienated from the LGBT mainstream.
Atheists too need to remember that not all of them fit the roles the press have given them – that not all atheist activists find religion objectionable; that not all are appreciative of Richard Dawkins; that not all are hard-nosed, calculator-wielding left brainers who care only for science. We need to reengage with the people in our own communities who don’t fit the established mould, regardless of who we think is right. However the discussion ends, we need to start it, because we can’t risk excluding people who can help us when it matters.
That’s a very abstact note to end on, and need not apply more to student groups than anyone else, except perhaps in the sense that the approaches of today’s students will matter more when they’ve grown up. Based on the student atheist community in the UK today, I sense British atheism will look quite different in 30 years’ time from how it looks now; and it matters, for the same reason, how LGBTsocs at universities are behaving.
Alex Gabriel
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