Toward a New Queer Politic

By Kirk Grisham, September 28, 2009

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Interview: Kenyon Farrow explains how to push the LGBTQ agenda beyond gay marriage.

But that's exactly what Kenyon Farrow does. As the interim executive director for Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ), Farrow advocates for racial and economic justice policies that incorporate issues of race, class and sexuality.

Farrow's work challenges mandatory sentencing drug laws, unjust immigration policies and welfare reform from a queer perspective. As a journalist, activist and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Fellow he's known for his critical approach to queer politics. He is also co-editing a forthcoming book titled A New Queer Agenda.

He sat down with WireTap to talk about how mainstream LGBT movements can actually hinder radical change and how gay marriage and military inclusion adversely affects the lives of many queer people.

Kirk Grisham: Tell me about some recent victories you have experienced in your organizing.

Kenyon Farrow: A policy victory we have had in the last couple years was getting New York City domestic partnership law to apply to the Department of Homeless Services, because it didn't before. Queer people couldn't apply for family shelter.

Also, the work done by FIERCE at the piers -- they are going to have a community space, and that's amazing.

KG: There has been a great deal of public attention given to gay marriage. Do you think that should be the priority for queer groups?

KF: Marriage in and of itself cannot come close to solving a range of the other social, political and economic problems that poor queer people face, like housing and healthcare. It doesn't solve the problems around asserting one's gender identity as it relates to the state and access to work.

So you are already talking about an exclusive few that could benefit from it socially or politically. Marriage just doesn't make sense for poor people, trans people and immigrants.

There's a school of thought that suggests queer people should not be fighting for marriage, period. We should not be demanding that the state recognize a singular kind of coupled relationship. That is never how queer people have largely aligned our lives or communities, and that is a line of thought that I would agree with.

KG: How significant do you believe it is to do queer organizing around campaigns for economic justice?

KF: Well, I think it's very important to be doing campaigns and organizing, and even basic research around economic conditions that queer people face, and the ability to care for oneself as a queer issue.

In the last 30 years, there has been a push for the state to do less in terms of actual social supports for people. With much of the welfare reform, there was a push for people to rely on their nuclear family unit as the place through which people get a range of those needs taken care of. So if you are queer and in a homophobic and transphobic society, the opportunities for you to be able to rely on your familial networks are often not met.

That increases the isolation and real situations of poverty that people face. You have a welfare state that has increasingly pushed for marriage promotion, public benefits and a range of abstinence-only programs, but all these sorts of things have really pushed the hetero-normative politic that is also tied to social services and people being able to access them. Where does that leave poor queer people?

In more than half the states in the U.S. you can still be fired (PDF) for being queer, and those are right-to-work states, which means there are no unions.

Think about those connections there -- between the right to organize and the ability to be fired for being queer. You have to think and consider an economic justice framework that is relevant to queer people.

KG: How does queer organizing for economic justice connect with other LGBTQ issues? For example, some states have hate crime legislation that have minimum or mandatory sentencing laws (PDF).

KF: The hate crimes legislation is generally problematic, especially for queer folks. Consider the larger context of the U.S. prison system: We are five percent of the world's population but we make up 25 percent of the prisoners. Nearly half (PDF) the people in U.S. prisons are people of African descent, 60 percent (PDF) are non-white and 98 percent (PDF) are poor.

Hate crime legislation is going to largely target people of color, largely black men. Prisons are homophobic institutions! It makes no sense to send people to a homophobic institution who are, in fact, homophobes. It exacerbates the problem. I personally think it increases the amount of homophobia in communities where people are highly imprisoned.

KG: What can gays and lesbians who are not familiar with movements for racial and economic justice learn from your work and that of QEJ?

KF: I think what is to be learned from organizations like QEJ or Southerners On the Ground, is that instead of working around specific policy challenges, we come from a position of asking, "Who else does this affect?" and "What is the larger social issue or context outside of what this particular piece of policy means?"

How do we build a movement that actually benefits everybody? I think that's something that the marriage movement has tried to do. It has attempted to get all these different constituencies to get on board with marriage regardless of whether the people see it as an issue in their communities.

Every time the gays are in crisis, they call a black minister to get on TV and say how much they love the gays. That's bullshit! Where were Lamba Legal, HRC, all the national organizations when Katrina happened? Where are they on ending mandatory minimum sentencing (PDF) for crack cocaine? On education reform?

KG: How are young people redefining the radical LGBTQ movement?

KF: There are things that I see queer young people doing that I think are really interesting politically and socially, that past generations haven't been able to tackle.

I will also say, specifically, for younger queer black people that I see there's been a kind of culture shift that I think is really interesting. The young kids remind me of the queens, dykes and trannies who were around when I was a kid in the '70s and early '80s.

They ain't trying be in the closet, they ain't trying to give you a thug effect, they are fem queens [who] be on the train and don't give a fuck. Same thing with the dykes. That is great. It was like that when I was a kid. The queers who were around in the black community were very visible.

I think AIDS had a lot to do with shifting those dynamics, along with prison expansion and globalization. There's a whole thesis about that. But I see that kind of fearlessness as really cool; I'm really into it.

KG: And that's activism! Be out and walking down the street in New York!

KF: Right! I totally think it's activism.

I always use this quote from Angela Davis: "Isn't it interesting how much easier it is to build institutions than it is to dismantle discourses?" I think it is much easier to fight or challenge a policy or law. It is much more difficult to subvert the actual logic that it relies on. That is the work to me. I think [this] is what we as activists have to be able to do.

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Kenyon Farrow's Speech at 2009 Creating Change Conference:

For more, visit:

Kenyon Farrow's website:

http://kenyonfarrow.com/

Queers for Economic Justice:

http://q4ej.org/

FIERCE:

http://www.fiercenyc.org/

Kirk is a writer and student living in New York. His work explores domestic issues surrounding sexuality, health, education and criminal justice.