Its an Individual Thing

Considering the topic of my last blog, I though our class discussion on Monday concerning the “acceptance vs. respect” dialogue, and whether or not it is still persistent today was quite interesting. Although some of the class made eloquent points about how they believe this debate is over, it seemed that if some of the class (and thus a portion, though small, of the gay community) believes that it is still persistent, then it is still persistent. Although, today’s organizations seem to have found more of a balance by which they are not constantly bickering, these issues of acceptance and respect, or celebration and normalization, are still issues for many people.
The trend in national organizations today (see OutProud at http://www.outproud.org/ and The Human Rights Campaign at http://www.hrc.org/issues/coming_out.asp for examples) is to encourage and support coming out, in a way that was definitely not acceptable in Mattachine and the other lesbian and gay organizations during the 40’s, 50’s, 60’ and 70’s (and I think the 80’s too, but we haven’t started that reading yet). And even though I don’t know of any organizations that suggest that LGBT people shouldn’t come out, or should try to assimilate more effectively, I still think that are many individuals of LGBT identity who do believe that and live their lives to that effect, which means to me that the debate continues. I think that the most common way for LGBT people to show their ‘assimilist’ views is to be completely unconnected the queer community, to steer away from activism, pride banquets, and anything that has clearly visible gay connections, or at least that’s the assimilationist attitude that I’ve seen at Carleton. Ultimately, I think both sides has merits, that we should strive for both acceptance and respect, that its counter-productive to split apart the gay community with two nouns we should all be working towards. And I believe the same is true for celebrating and normalizing. In our community, in every community, there are moments for celebrating, moments for normalizing, moments for acceptance, and moments for respect. Today, its just a matter of figuring out which is which.