Do the Letters in LGBTQI+ Have Anything to Do with Community?

The inclusivity of the LGBTQI+ community.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Don’t get me wrong: I like all the letters that could be added to become LGBTQI+. In fact, I think there should be more – the more the merrier.

Now, that will drive copy editors and those who are worried that they won’t know what the short-hand version is for referring to all those souls represented with even more letters even crazier. There are people already complaining about the length of the lists now.

The problem for those who gripe about it is actually a fact of reality – there is so much diversity in the world about us. It seems obvious that Nature loves diversity.

But the idea of diversity makes people who need to confine everything and everyone in nice, neat boxes uncomfortable. It’s hard to admit that hardly anyone fits into a couple of our familiar, settled categories.

The reactionary response to those who embrace the latest science of gender and sexuality in which those old categories that were accepted about gender are exposed as obsolete is a current example. That we know so much more about human complexity than what was taught back in high school biology class contradicts the rhetoric of regressive politicians who scare us for their own purposes by playing on our emotional need to hang on to the well-worn, if outdated, ideas conditioned into us.

Those who are brave enough to come out as non-binary, transgender, or anything that challenges our old thinking about gender roles have therefore become lightning rods for the fear that we instead need to reimagine what we’ve so far just internalized about anyone not straight-acting, straight-looking, or straight-thinking enough. As I’ve been writing for decades, our society’s definition of “straight” is an obligatory cultural performance imposed on anyone no matter what their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Straight is not the same as “heterosexual.” Heterosexual is one possible orientation – “straight” is the role even they have to learn to live out of the fear that if they don’t, they’ll be treated as LGBTQ+ people still are. If two self-identified heterosexual men decide to express their friendship by holding hands as they walk down most streets in the U.S., they’re still likely to be treated to the scorn, and even violence, gay men experience.

And even the letter “T” in any list doesn’t represent one single, quickly defined, personal identity. There is no standardized transgender community of those who self-identify with the “T.”

And that is true for what we’re trying to include with the use of any one of those letters. No wonder people are shocked when someone they find out is included in one of those categories doesn’t fit their ingrained preconceptions.

The idea that there is something like a “gay male community,” for example, assumes that all gay men agree on what that looks like and also that it functions like a community where working together, identifying with the others, and supporting each other against outside forces, hold it together. One only need to look at the self-identified gay men in the current administration or the rich right-wing gay men who supported its election to see that they have little interest in community with those not rich enough, straight-acting enough, or even anti-some of these other letters enough to be thought of as brothers in their struggles and identity.

Economic class, race, nationality, age, ability, and other factors that are used to divide the larger society also divide each of those letters as well as all of them combined. President Lyndon Johnson recognized that, putting it bluntly: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

The powerful have always seen that creating divisions among everyday people over identities is one of the best ways to keep them fighting with each other so they’re too divided to become a powerful force. And today one political party has learned that if it can continue to blame and scapegoat LGBTQI+ people to the masses, the focus on them will protect the party’s power.

The work of becoming anything like a recognized community, if that’s what we want, requires recognition of what now divides us into ineffectiveness as well as doing the hard personal work of facing it in our own daily lives. “Coming out” with an identity is only a beginning, not a guarantee of health.

One of the common risks of finally identifying with one of those letters is the feeling that your own letter isn’t getting enough attention or being taken seriously enough – as if there’s a scarcity of attention to go around. Historically, this has been the case when we’ve faced the other isms in society.

That can also keep us separated from those other letters if we can’t also empathize with their struggles.

The good news is that larger communities can be created – what’s learned can be unlearned. It begins with the belief that one is a member of a larger group and by defining that group as bigger than oneself and mere personal advancement. As author/activist Grace Lee Boggs put it: “Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.”

But currently, the idea that there is an LGBTQI+ community with common interests just doesn’t fit. There are many communities, and they’ll need to be able to work together. They’ll need to face the multiple issues of oppression in our society and have the humility to listen, believe, and be an ally to those in those other letters.

Let’s be thankful to organizations that are actually attempting to build bridges. Let’s be allies with them as they make their way through a society based not on community but divisiveness, the feeling that there’s a scarcity of resources to go around, and that fear of the diversity among us that Nature seems to cherish.

*The Minor Details*

Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, is author of When Religion Is an Addiction; Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to Be Human and other works. Contact him at www.FairnessProject.org