queerly classed and healing justice

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.  Linda Hogan

To resource is an old word,  an old French word* that, at the time people started recording language, was used to mean “source, a spring.” In the ways of language and culture, the meaning shifted over time. What started as something of the earth, a gratitude word about the flourishing of water, of life that wells up from the ground became, at the start of modern times, a word that means to rally and rise again. Somewhere along the early 18th century, when places like France and England were trading in stolen lands and stolen bodies, the word began to refer to community wealth. I like the phrase “community wealth,” but the worn down bones behind how community wealth is used here, the 18th century bones, point to something different from what I want it to mean. The 18th century is a time of exploding wealth, of unbelievable riches extracted from forests of untouched wood, beaver skins, sugar cane, tobacco, and corn; of wealth extracted from unwilling human labor.

As I was reading about this generational shift in how the word “resource” holds meaning, I remembered that part of my line is French and that, in the 18th century, a whole bunch of my French folks lived there, on the Breton coast and in Lombardy, as well as here, in their stolen Canadian villages. I think about their walled villages, every boy child and adult male taking a turn with rifles, watching the perimeter, militia as family culture, protecting their community’s wealth. And I remember that part of my line is Miqmaq and Abenaki, those indigenous bodies merged with these French lines, for all of the reasons why bodies come together in times of conquest. And I thought of how ancestors are a resource. And I thought of how lots of ancestors need to heal. And I thought of how we, their descendants, need to repair, to remember, to account for, to stand in the truth of our ancestors’ harm and our ancestors’ pain. And I remembered that it helps to know that there was a before, because, of course, there is always a before. A time when a word that became tied to the objectification of lives for sale, from human to countless fields of soy to the liquefied fossilized algae that millions of years later we pump into cars; how this word began in the before with our deepest connection to the earth. This deepest before is the relative that we depend on and are part of, water from a spring, freely given to all who kneel down to touch its source. Resource. Community wealth that has moved from water that is life to objects that can be bought and sold, accumulated and locked away for a private few. Here, then, sit the lineage of some of my people, of many of your people, in a single word. 

And so I will wander this word, holding the truth of its before as well as its after, knowing that healing emerges in the movement between the two. Resourcing is the base, the spring, the source. We resource the individual body through self-care, through getting the deep support needed to shift how histories are held within the cells as pain or despair or difficulty breathing... we use the word when we are talking about having enough resources to buy food or get to work (or have a job) or have a safe and steady home...or when we are talking about having access to the resources needed to ensure we can move safely around the physical world we live within… or when we are talking about whole communities having the resources needed to heal from generational trauma, to raise their children safely, and to be able to dream softly or loudly into the future. 

Poverty is another old French word. The first time it was written down so we could remember it was in the 1100s and by then, it meant wretched condition. It meant misery. It’s a word that is older than that, possibly from when language was new, the Sanskrit that is generations before clunky modern things like English and French. In Sanskrit, a language still alive in India even as I am writing in the flow of one of its descendants, “pau” means few or little. And pau became poverty. And here, again, there are generations of experience, to move from something as neutral as few or little to a state of being where, because there is little, there is misery. There is misery. So many stories in the lives lived between little and wretched..

Everything we experience in the present moment has a before. Everything. And the sediment of each generation, of each act and inaction, is what layers up to make the ground we rest upon. Resourcing is about each of the life moments that led from sacred to extractive, from having little to being in pain within life because there is not enough. 

So then, turning to those histories, to connecting the before to the now, means having a conversation about what we celebrate and what we heal. To pull out the individual threads from the snarl and the tangle, to understand how pau became poverty and water became private ownership, means also having a conversation about class. Both at the same time, woven through each other. Having a conversation about class means having a conversation about ending violence. Anything structural that continually prevents a person or a community from having space, from being able to stand in their own dignity and breathe, is a form of violence. Poverty is a form of violence. Poverty only exists within a class system. The first step in healing is always about ending violence; which, in this case, means ending the class system that allows poverty to continue.  And so healing work is, at its core, about many things including about class. Always, whether we name it or not. 

Conversations about class should be simple. Are you and your kin’s basic needs met? And not just barely met so that you are just this side of hungry - for food, for safety, for a steady home - all the time. I mean met in ways that guarantee and support your sense of dignity and the dignity of your kin. There is nothing complicated about this. We all understand this basic human right when we are those wise beings called children.

Class conversations in the US weave together a whole bunch of things. First, there is the basic math of it. How much do you need, how much do you have, and what is the under- or over- within that equation? But it’s not just about math. Class in the US is also a hard and messy conversation that sets up a tension between two different strands. On the one hand, class is a deeply embedded cultural inheritance tied to a specific form of whiteness. It’s the unfinished rage of a 2,000 year European battle over land, taxes, and religious freedom that defined cultural communities in opposition to each other. That 2,000 year old mix of peasant rebellions and the use of the military by the wealthy to force order was carried along with dandelion seeds and smallpox and planted here, on this land, to define this thing called the United States. This is class as culture. This is not always class about poverty versus wealth as much as class about the descendants of a Euro-fight, of more than 70 generations of trying to hold on to what is yours in the face of kin who just want to get richer. As white elders working through the Cultural Wellness Center have named, everything whites have done on this land they first practiced on themselves. The descendants of this Euro-fight look like many things: from radical working class led labor- and community- organizing to reactionary just-me-for-mine libertarianism to some flavors of anarchism to reactive racialized rage and panic; white folks believing that such a thing as white genocide exists, this European trauma response that has nothing to do with current US collectives lives.

And then finally and most importantly here in the US, class is essentially about race.  And class and is essentially about the continued work of colonization through the constant attacks on Native treaties and Native bodies. It is the fact of first contact for the purposes of wealth accumulation combined with the  17th century creation of the concept of “white” and the evolution of race as a justifiable reason for accumulating that wealth through the violence of slavery.

There are poor white folks. There are middle class and wealthy people of color. And still. And still. Race and the lived truth of being traditional and indigenous continue to be some of the primary determining factors in who is multigenerationally poor* and who is not. This is the primary indicator in who holds multigenerational wealth, as in cash and commodities not as in culture and spiritual integrity, and who does not. Class access is about cash but it’s also about access to systems of autonomy like the right to your own cultural or traditional practices and lands and to walking uninterrupted down the street or into a Starbucks or picnicking on the lawn or cars that drive along the highway without the dangerous risk of being profiled and pulled over. Class is also about access to systems of prestige like specific jobs and colleges and neighborhoods and lack of confusion about your right to your smarts and your successes and those letters that might come after your name.

My first focus, my first political and cultural home, was doing work around class and economic justice both before and then after I came out, within the glory of queerness and queer communities. I didn’t grow up thinking about class. I used words like blue collar/white collar or rich/poor/middle class, but I never really paid attention to what that meant. Some people had more than us, some people had less, and my normal was just my normal. I moved to England when I was 19 and stayed there for almost 7 years. In England, people talk about class. In England, class is the traditional organizing principle. After 7 years, I could discern accents and dress and a million and one codes that pointed to someone’s class and culture. All of the learning about class helped me to understand my own family’s experience. It helped me take a mess of internalized shame and turn it into pride and connection. I’m still grateful for that.

There is a lot about the relationship between class and healing that I want to write about. And I will. But one of the reasons I am writing this particular blog post on this particular day is because I just put a book on my site, making it open source for whoever wants to read it. In the early 1990s, I was co-manager of a journal called Evergreen Chronicles, a journal of queer arts and culture. We put out a special issue on class in queer communities. One of the editors with South End Press, Loie Hayes, reached out to us, asking if we would be interested in doing a book on the same subject. I was the only person at Evergreen who had time - and way too much enthusiasm - so a bunch of years later, Queerly Classed was published. (side note: have I said yet that I love being queer?)

I decided to put Queerly Classed here as an open source book for a couple of different reasons. First, because there is a real gap in the before-internet and post-internet materials available. Queer communities in the 1980s and 1990s produced an extraordinary amount of cultural and political work and infrastructure.  Much of this work was grievously impacted by the AIDS crisis as we lost many beloved, brilliant and powerful voices. The cultural work back then carried the same tangle as cultural work does today: the brilliance of those most impacted by homo- and transphobia and its mixing with racism and mysogyny and ableism creating gorgeous poetic political manifestos that lead us, too many white people defining queerness only in white terms, tensions between shifting the mainstream versus leaving it entirely, tensions around gender, class, culture, region (really, not everything good comes from NYC or the Bay) and more. Real people in real times, repeating and resisting histories.

A testament to the power of these movements was the scale of targeted attack by the fundamentalist christian and economic Right to minimize and disappear the complex truth of our queer lives. Their actions decimated an ecosystem of small independent presses which means if you are queer and you were born in the internet age, you probably don’t have access to a lot of your history*. They created the marriage debate and then watched as we picked it up and ran with it. They were specific times that came out of specific times and that set us up for the specific times we live within.

A few things to say: Queerly Classed came out just as we were moving from a gender-binaried way of talking about queerness to a more fluid or broader way of experiencing ourselves and understanding gender. For this reason “queer” exists alongside “lesbian and gay.” Within not too many years, this was an outdated way of referring to our collective lives. Some of the contributors to this anthology no longer name their gender and/or identities in the same way they did in 1997. While the language of identity in this book is not fully in alignment with the language of identity today, the experiences described are often the same or similar. The other reason to tell this story is because of South End Press. We lost a great deal when this publisher had to close their doors. Many first books were published here, books by radical movement leaders from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Some of those books have been republished in other places, but many have not. We lost other radical feminist, queer and queer-friendly publishers with that same commitment to cultural work and community organizing: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Firebrand Books, and others. Books from some of those presses have been picked up elsewhere, but others are now only circulating in libraries, private collectives and second hand book sales. Thankfully, there is a new surge of independent publishers who see themselves as organizers and cultural workers.   

So with all of that, here is one of the many books and journals and zines that lived only in paper form.  Nearly half of the contributors have since passed. Some are now known to us by different names. Some are less public as figures than they were in the 1990s, others are more or differently known.

Over the years, people have also asked for the book. Occasionally I get a flurry of emails or facebook messages about Queerly Classed and I always assume that some Gender and Sexuality Studies course has put the book on the syllabus. It makes me smile, particularly as we are now over 25 years since publication. According to the World Health Organization, that’s the length of a generation.

And of course, some of putting this book here is about personal ego. Meaning, I am proud of this book, proud of the work we did to make it happen and of the conversations we had as a result. So here it is, a link to the book. Gratitude to Eli Clare, a South End Press author, dear friend, and someone with a piece in QC, who suggested doing this. And gentle holding to those in the book who have passed since it was published: Allan Bérubé, Justin Chin, Jane VanderBosch, B. Michael Hunter, Michiyo Fukiya, Harold McNeil Robinson and David Becker.

It’s funny (and I am linking arms with you dear ones who are in your 50s and 60s as well) how much the developmental stage of this age includes wanting or experiencing the past as visible in a particular way. Wanting to tell stories about the “how it was” feels like a physical need. At 56, I am still at the young side, but I wonder if this desire is a natural unspooling. An elder in my life describes it this way: you spend your whole life filling your pockets up with experiences and then, at one point, you want to start taking the stories out. Emptying your pockets and giving what you’ve been carrying to someone else. Then maybe, if you’re lucky, when it’s time to go you know it because, when you reach down, your pockets are empty.

And so here. And here again. Queers and class and the healing that doesn’t end.

….If you liked this piece, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee.

*for those of you who do not speak English as a first language, whose people did not have a choice about whether or not you speak English, I want to recognize that talking about the history of this language means talking about the same histories that led to you being forced to speak it, or believing that the only way to be strong and survive was to learn this language. This is also woven through this story and is held within each word of the language I am writing in. May we learn how to talk to each other, whether through voice or through sign or in any other way, without having to leave behind the words of our heart.

*Being economically poor is not the same thing as being culturally or spiritually poor. I want to talk about class here but I also want to disrupt the body-objectification that is laced through the word “poverty,” carrying all of the emotional impact of the word “wretched.” Real people with real lives. Ending poverty is about building access. Often, ironically not ironically, those who have the most economic access are also the most culturally and spiritually poor.

*Thank you to every single archivist, republisher, community and academic cultural worker who refuses to allow this loss and has made the works of so many, like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Essex Hemphill, and more be part of the vibrancy of what informs the current moment of transformation and life.