Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights - New York Review of Books
Masha Gessen
In the penultimate paragraph of Masha Gessen's "Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights," she writes, "Looking at a person who embodies choice—the possibility of being or becoming different—can be like staring into the abyss of uncertainty." "Person," here, means a member of the LGBT community and represents what Gessen calls, "a convenient stand-in for an entire era of liberalization," that has ushered in a wave of authoritarian regimes across the world. This is a rather tidy reading of the motions that have lead countries as disparate as Turkey and the United States to come to the same conclusion and elect the same type of leaders. What seems more likely is that the rhetoric of difference is used by the left and right to elicit a emotional response to protect one's own at all costs. This article is an entry from the left and it must be tossed in the same waste bin as similar arguments from the right.
Members of the LGBT community are normal and any attempt to suggest that their existence is something outside of society, beacon of hope or coming of the apocalypse, is to accept the idea that difference inexorably separates us when, in fact, difference could be the thing that unites us. If this article is to be believed, a queer society is, by rule, a freer society. If only that were the case. Our work would be so easy. Sadly, our problems are much deeper.
For example, the Dyke March exclusion of a lesbian expressing her Jewishness makes sense in the context the West's casual antisemitism. The organizers fell into traditional authoritarian roles because that's what normally happens when people gain power and they are as normal as anyone else. Queerness, as such, does not cause societies to be one thing or the other. Societies are what they are because of the laws (natural and artificial) that govern them.
The ways in which the West deals with queer people, and difference in general, is problematic, but the problem is in the problematization of that or any other difference.
Take this article and replace the premise that suppression of queer rights is "the frontier in the global turn toward autocracy," and replace it with the premise that suppression of Morman rights is "the frontier in the global turn toward autocracy" and have it published in the summer of 2016 as an attack on the advances of LGBT rights under the authoritarian regime of Barack Obama and one starts to understand how difference is weaponize by left and right to separate people.
We need a different "difference" argument. One that goes something like -- we are all different and that's what makes us the same. Difference is not a threat, it's our path to building a more inclusive society.
In order for this idea to take hold, we must reject arguments that celebrate our particular difference as the exemplar of all differences. Such a rejection of self interest is difficult and counter-intuitive and may require an intellectualization of our emotions in a way that may not be possible on a grand scale. If it is achievable, we could dismantle the structures in our society that have been built on the lies of us-vs-them tribalism. Slavery was built into the law. Mass incarceration of blacks is built into the law. Police use of force is built into the law. The gross mistreatment of queer communities is built into the law. These are the problems and only a united front of all of us can fix them.
We can only achieve radical change if we are all feed up with being manipulated by our emotions and are organized to create a society worthy of the idea that each one of us is created equal and has curtain inalienable rights that must be defended by the rule of law.
