December 22, 2008

National Day of Mourning for Victims of LGBTQ Violence: Great Idea, Terrible Timing

Email forward:

National day of mourning for victims of LGBTQ violence

Please support and publicize a national day of mourning for the victims of LGBTQ violence on January 20th, 2009. Such an action has been inspired by the appointment of Rick Warren to give the opening prayer at the presidential inaugural.

We as LGBTQ citizens and allies feel that declaring a day of mourning will highlight the tragedy of anti-LGBTQ violence. It will call attention to such violence’s direct correlation with the rhetoric of homophobic politicians and religious leaders. In addition, a day of mourning would take the focus off Warren himself and off of same-sex marriage as the only issue that affects LGBTQ people. Clearly, not all people against same-sex marriage are homophobes. Nevertheless, same-sex marriage has been used as a wedge issue to attack LGBTQ people and much of the mainstream press is currently saying that we are criticizing the Warren choice simply because Warren is against same-sex marriage.

Few people, despite their stand on such issues as same-sex marriage, could publically condone violence. We have a right to be angry at this time, since many of us voted for and supported Obama throughout his election. However, expressing anger at the time of the inauguration, will certainly only be used as an excuse to attack us further. It’s true, that there will be time for future anger and Obama will certainly have much to answer to in terms of our community. However, it seems at this time, mourning might be a much more appropriate response to the fanfare on January 20th (of which we have been excluded - to date no LGBTQ person has been invited to speak or perform at the inauguration). And indeed, anger is often the other face of the deep grief that many of us have had to endure.

Spread the word. Support a national day of mourning for the victims of LGBTQ violence on January 20th, 2009.

A fine idea, but I doubt it will get much traction as we need our straight allies on board to get any attention, and most of the world will be glued to the swearing-in. More than that, however, you run the risk of it coinciding with Martin Luther King Day in off-election years, which not only takes away attention, but could appear to be some underhanded way of trying to dilute attention from MLK — as well as trying to ride the coattails of the black civil rights movement. We get lambasted for that enough already; we don’t need to set ourselves up to defend another well-meaning but half-baked move that makes us look like we’re trying to usurp MLK Day.

I’d rather a National Day of Mourning coincided with the birthday or death anniversary of a victim of anti-LGBT violence. Sure, Matt Shepard would be the obvious choice, but too obvious; I’d choose someone like Sakia Gunn: She was young (15), she was a lesbian (we do need to remind folks that gay white men are not the only target), and she was a person of color (I don’t have links handy, but it’s important to remember that LGBTs of color are the victims far more often than whites). Most of all, Sakia’s name is barely known within the LGBT community at large, and almost completely unknown in the straight world; I’d like to make everyone realize that we all live with the constant threat of attack, just for being who we are. To that end, you couldn’t do better than to put the face of a 15-year-old black lesbian murdered in New Jersey on a movement to build awareness of anti-LGBT violence. And it’s high time we found a way to honor Sakia herself.

We’d also do a lot better to build a movement, rather than come up with a single Day of Mourning in kneejerk reaction to Rick Warren. There are other ways to address Rick Warren (and Barack Obama’s own stubborn homophobia); while I have no doubt the idea for a Day of Mourning slated for Inauguration Day is genuine and sincere, we’d be trivializing the endless, daily threat of anti-LGBT violence — and inviting major backlash when tension between the hetero African-American community and the LGBT community is at an all-time high.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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