The Human Agenda: Conversations about Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity

By Joe Wenke

GISELE ALICEA, (AKA GISELE XTRAVAGANZA) fashion model: "Transgender people are real people. We have mothers. We have fathers. . . .We have families. We have somewhere that we came from." ASH BECKHAM, speaker and advocate: "It's really hard to not empathize with someone that you have a human connection with." IAN HARVIE, comedian: "It is brave to be yourself." DR. CARYS MASSARELLA, emergency physician: "Being transgender is not biologically hazardous." CARMEN CARRERA, performer and fashion model: "We are one human race. Some women have penises. Some men have vaginas. What's the big deal?" ELEGANCE BRATTON, filmmaker: "There is such a massive gap in understanding between what has been sold as the gay life and what has been the experience of gay people of color." ANDRE ST. CLAIR, actor: "You can refer to me as male or female. As long as you're not doing it disrespectfully, I'll respond." Y-LOVE, hip hop artist: "You can only have unity through diversity. Otherwise, it's just homogeneity." ANDREW SOLOMON, author: "I think there is a tyranny of the norm. . . . But actually what science indicates is that diversity is what strengthens a society or a culture or a species." Also featuring Kristin Russo, Aidan Key, Hida Viloria, Hina Wong-Kalu, Dr. Jonipher Kupono Kwong, Kevin Fisher-Paulson, Dr. John Allen and the Rainbow Support Group, Rabbi Amy Bernstein, Dr. Mark Maxwell and Timothy Young.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Wenke
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9780986337925

Joe Wenke

JOE WENKE is a writer, social critic and LGBTQI rights activist. He is the founder and publisher of Trans Über, a publishing company with a focus on promoting LGBTQI rights, free thought and equality for all people. Wenke is the author of The Human Agenda: Conversations about Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity; Looking for Potholes, Poems; The Talk Show, A Novel; Free Air, Poems; Papal Bull: An Ex-Catholic Calls Out the Catholic Church; You Got To Be Kidding! A Radical Satire of the Bible and Mailer's America. Wenke received a B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in English from Penn State and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut.

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KRISTIN RUSSO

So many of these issues, as serious as they are, in so many cases really hinge on universal human needs.

Kristin Russo is co-founder along with Dannielle Owens-Reid of Everyone Is Gay, which works to improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning/queer youth. Together, they provide honest advice to kids while keeping them laughing; talk to students across the country in an effort to create caring, compassionate school environments and work with parents of LGBTQ kids to help foster an ongoing dialogue and a deeper understanding of life.

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Joe: Kristin, what I find fascinating is that you’re working in a communications medium that to me seems not just old school but positively moribund: it’s the old advice column. As somebody from the baby boom generation, I know about it through Dear Abby and Ann Landers. And yet you and Dannielle have really transformed that genre. You’ve made it fresh and fun and real, so I’m wondering, did you have to evolve towards that goal? Obviously the style of Everyone Is Gay reflects your personalities, but was it like that day one? Was it like this Big Bang, and just like that you had completely re-invented the genre?

Kristin: Well when we started the site and began giving advice, our main objective was to be fun and funny. We really didn’t have any concept of the fact that we would slowly begin to take on serious questions and address them in a way that incorporated lightheartedness in a style that hadn’t been used before. Having said that, I don’t know that we completely re-invented the wheel. When I first moved to New York City in 2000, I would pick up the Village Voice as often as I could so that I could read Dan Savage’s column. His columns were hilarious and brutally honest. They had a very different tone. I really think they informed the way that I approached my writing. They helped me realize that I could say what I was feeling and also make people laugh about issues that might not always be hilarious to everyone.

Joe: It’s so important to inject humor into your answers because you’re dealing with really serious issues, life and death issues in some cases, and to have credibility and to be able to connect with people that you don’t know otherwise, which raises another question: you seem to be so on point all the time, and yet practically speaking all you know about these people is what you have in their questions. How do you deal with that—the fact that you know so little and that you’re dealing with such serious issues that touch the lives of young people who are trying to find themselves in terms of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity?

Kristin: I think that Dannielle and I have both approached this the same way since day one, which is that we’ve lived our lives and we have experience from having lived those lives that we draw upon. Also, I have a master’s degree in gender studies, so that informs some of the way that I write and some of the way that I communicate too. But what we have found and what I think our entire movement is hinged on is that so many of these issues, as serious as they are, in so many cases really hinge on universal human needs. For example, that kid who is terrified to come out to his parents because he thinks he might get kicked out of his house. He isn’t sure about XYZ. Yeah, there are specifics, and those specifics are rooted in sexuality, but at the end of the day most of us can understand what it is to have parents and what it is to be afraid of what your parents might think about a particular facet of your love life. So that’s just really informed us, and it’s really propelled us forward—just sort of accessing our own human experience and talking about it as clearly and concisely as we can.

Joe: Also, you call your project Everyone is Gay, which is a self-evident truth. Everybody knows that’s true, but I think it’s cool that you came up with that. What exactly do you mean when you say, Everyone is gay?

Kristin: Well, complete transparency. When we named the website it was just a website, we didn’t know it was going to turn into an organization.

Joe: It was just called website at first?

Kristin: Yeah, we started as a Tumblr, and Dannielle and I Gchatted one day and said to each other we should name it this funny thing or the other funny thing, and at the same moment she said, No one is straight, and I said, Everyone is gay, and then I got on the subway, and when I got above ground, she had texted me and said It’s up! I launched it. It’s called ‘Everyone is Gay.’ And so at first, it was just supposed to be funny, like tongue-in-cheek—Everyone’s gay. But now if somebody says I came out to my friends as trans, and they’re being super supportive, but I don’t know that they really understand it, and I feel misunderstood, it’s like all right, so let’s say, Everyone is trans. On the other hand, let’s say, Everyone is gay in the case of the kid who didn’t want to come out to his parents as gay. What are you asking for in that case? You’re really asking for the approval of your parents and for the acceptance and understanding of your friends. And so that’s really what the name has come to mean to us now, but in its inception it was just for laughs.

Joe: What’s interesting to me though is that you’re really addressing the same kind of point that I’m trying to address in this project with the phrase, The Human Agenda. The Human Agenda is actually an ironic commentary on the old hate speech phrase the homosexual agenda. When I Tweet about that, I’ll say, the homosexual agenda is the human agenda—it’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In other words we’re all people; we’re all looking to achieve the same goals. And I say the same thing about the transgender agenda—that it’s the human agenda. And so I think it’s finding that common ground that provides an opportunity to communicate and to understand that is so important, particularly on issues of gender identity, which it disturbs me so deeply to say are still so little understood—I think even less understood than sexual orientation. Would you agree with that?

Kristin: Oh, absolutely, wholeheartedly. I think that trans people and trans issues are just now beginning to get the attention that they have deserved for a long time, and I think there’s a really, really long road ahead for recognition and understanding of the trans experience.

Joe: Ian Harvie, who is a trans man stand-up comedian, is also participating in The Human Agenda project. He uses his experience as a trans man as a basis for much of his comedy just as you and Dannielle use your own life experiences as the basis for giving advice, and he has this bit in his act where he says you know I actually had to come out to my parents twice. First, as a girl, I told them one day, you know, Mom and Dad, I like girls. And then the second time it was like, well, Mom and Dad I still like girls, but guess what? I wanna be a dude. So it’s true. Trans men and women often end up coming out twice to their parents, and, you know, you do have to think, what was that like for his parents just as much as what was that like for him.

Kristin: Mm-hmm.

Joe: So, it’s an issue that I think is very difficult to address. What about, though, that whole issue of coming out and of families? You’ve started the Parents Project. I really would like to get an understanding from you about the extent to which you think families maybe are more supportive than they used to be when their kids come out, whether from a sexual orientation or gender identity standpoint. I mean you’ve spoken to tens of thousands of young people at this point and are in touch with parents and are traveling to schools around the country. If you were to take the pulse right now of what it is like in families and what it is like for kids to come out, what would you say?

Kristin: You know, I think that there’s definitely a difference mostly in the knowledge category when it comes to parents. I think since I came out to my parents, I don’t know, God, fifteen years ago or something like that, I think there are more parents who are a bit more educated on what life might look like for their LGBTQ kid in the future, so I think that helps. But in terms of taking the pulse of the young people who have to do the coming out, it doesn’t seem different at all. The fear and the uncertainty and the confusion about how to talk about this with parents are just as present. It’s identical to how it was, you know, fifteen years ago. We have so many young people who, when they talk about their parents, it’s very plain that their parents are very accepting, very open-minded, but still they’re just terrified. So many kids think that even though their parents are open-minded and understand issues, it will be different when it’s their kid and so that fear is still really, really alive in the lives of many young people.

Joe: Well, I would think that it’s a fundamental issue for caring, loving parents. If you know your child is gay or lesbian or transgender, you’re going to worry about them being persecuted for that. You’re going to worry about them being bullied at school. How do you deal with that issue, both from a kid perspective and a parent perspective, the whole issue of bullying?

Kristin: Well, you know, that’s a really tricky question to unpack. Dannielle and I have a new book called This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids that goes hand in hand with the Parents Project. It’s our first foray into really talking about bullying and trying to talk about bullying from the parents’ perspective. So many of the things that I had read online were logical on paper. They seemed to make sense like—these are the steps that you take, and you should make sure that XYZ knows, and in some cases maybe you have a great school administration, and maybe they know exactly how to handle the situation, and maybe those steps will work, but it seemed like there was a lot of the reality missing—for example, the fact that you’re going to have some serious fears and feelings about this, the fact that your kid might not want you to approach the school administration, and so I would say to a parent who’s dealing with that, the first step is always to talk to your kid, because your kid is on the front lines. Your kid is the one that’s in that school, and they know. They know the teachers who are going to be their allies. They know the teachers who are not, and I think being able to have an open dialogue, as open as possible with your kid, is always the first step. If you’re afraid that your kid is in danger and your kid won’t talk to you, then obviously you have to take action on your own, but I think a lot of parents kind of discredit the knowledge that their kids have about what’s going on in that situation and go right to the administration or teachers. I think it’s important to start with the young person first.

Joe: I think what’s disturbing too is that bullying goes on throughout life for people in the LGBTQ community. I did a piece for the Huffington Post focused on transgender women called That’s a Man! And it had to do with the fact that it’s really literally still dangerous to walk down the street if you are an LGBTQ person, even in a progressive city like New York. For example, there was a transgender woman, Islan Nettles, who was killed when she was walking down the street with some friends in Harlem in the summer of 2013. The killing actually occurred in front of a police precinct. Her attacker still has not been brought to justice. Also, Mayor Bloomberg came out and said that although hate crimes were significantly reduced in New York City, they had more than doubled with respect to the LGBTQ community. And so you have these issues continuing throughout life and for that reason they’re just so difficult to deal with. Do you find apart from family, that a lot of the kids you’re dealing with do have peers at least that they can talk to? Do they have outlets to confide their feelings about themselves and their hopes and their fears?

Kristin: A lot of them do. I think that the presence of gay-straight alliances in middle schools and high schools is much greater than it was years ago. Also, we’re seeing more of a presence of queer characters in television and in movies. So there’s more ability for young people to dialogue with their peers about some of these issues. But I think that the presence of the Internet is really one of the biggest steps in allowing young people to talk about their questions and their fears because even knowing that your friends maybe accept you and you’ve come out as bisexual and everything’s cool, it doesn’t really give you a complete outlet to ask the questions you really have, because you feel silly or you feel like maybe you’re supposed to know already. And so I think that the space of the Internet, being able to Google things, is really important, and, you know, Tumblr is a huge community. We have people answering questions for each other, and you can ask things anonymously, and there is such a community there that I think it bridges what is lacking in peer-to-peer conversations.

Joe: Can you talk a little bit more about your book for parents?

Kristin: Sure, absolutely. It was sort of a no brainer for us to make the next step of Everyone Is Gay be dialogue with parents whose kids had just come out to them. So many of the questions that we get both through our site and when we tour schools are about either heart break and relationships or coming out to parents or explaining terminology to parents. For example, a parent might understand what gay means, but they might have no idea what the terms queer or gender queer mean. There are a lot of terms, and parents are trying to keep up. Also, we’re struggling to keep up with some of the age-old questions, like is this my fault? Did I do something wrong to cause my child to be gay? After Dannielle and I talked about it a bit, we decided we would put our resources together and our own experience with our families together and write a book. When we looked online for resources for parents, we didn’t find much. PFLAG (http://community.pflag.org/) has a great presence within communities, but other than that, there wasn’t a strong presence of videos and collected advice for parents who have these pretty common questions. So we decided we would create it because we wanted to put something in the back of the book for parents to find online, and that’s where the Parents Project was born. So it will include articles from experts, advice from Dannielle and me, advice from other parents, conversations with youth and coming out stories. It will include a large video library that we’ll be building as well for parents that will help them find resources in their communities.

Joe: And you’re also on YouTube.

Kristin: Yeah, we’re on YouTube, and we’re also working with some other people in the community. For example, a friend of ours, Lauren, identifies as trans, and she’s doing a bunch of advice questions in video format that are more related to trans issues.

Joe: You mentioned the word queer a moment ago. I’d like to talk a little bit about the language of self-identification. The language is, of course, self-validating. I wonder what your point of view is though on the use of the word queer, which seems not only to refer to sexual orientation but to gender identity. Do you think that word is being successfully reinvented, and do you think that it’s being used clearly? I have a Ph.D. in English, and I have to be honest. I find that it’s used by different people in different ways all the time, and I find myself being a little bit confused by it—that is to say, people who are trans using that term or people who are gender fluid in addition to people who are lesbian or gay. What’s your take on the use of that word?

Kristin: Well, you’re just full of the hard questions. I come from an academic background where I took courses on Queer Theory, so I’ve been around the use of that word in so many different contexts, and I do find it to be really powerful because so many of the other words that we use are a little bit more limited in what they define, although again that’s changing every day. But for me personally I identify as a female, and I am married to a woman who identifies as a female. And so the word lesbian you’d think would fit for me. I don’t know why, but the word lesbian doesn’t ever make me feel exactly right. It doesn’t seem to fit who I am, and that’s because of my own experience with that word. But the word queer to me means a lot more than that. It speaks to me more—more than just to my sexuality, but also to the general way that I operate in my day-to-day life. When I think of the word queer and how expansive it can be, I think, for example, of a friend of mine who lives in Virginia and rides freight trains as a mode of transportation and also as a way of having fun. It’s this totally underground society where they have timetables, and they can find the trains and ride on those trains, and there’s something to me that’s inherently queer about the way my friend lives his life. He identifies as a man, and he’s married to a woman, but he lives really outside of the grid that I think a lot of us are expected to live within. And so to me that’s my understanding of the word queer, and I think that it’s really great for people to be able to access a word that doesn’t have very stringent demarcations.

Joe: Right.

Kristin: It can be a little confusing, but I kind of think that’s the fun of it, and that’s an example of the positive things that are happening with the reclaiming of that word. But it’s so personal, you know. It’s all so personal.

Joe: It is personal, but you just brought out I think a really interesting connotation of the word—that it means being subversive.

Kristin: Exactly.

Joe: Undermining stereotypes or conventions. I think that is very powerful. But I think it’s a very mixed bag when you try to reclaim words, like the use of the word