The beginning of a new year is a time to reflect; to look inward, and maybe think about what we, as individuals and as a community, can do to make the coming year a bit better than previous ones; to think of ways we can improve our approach to life and to others around us.
Of course, all such musings tend to be on the idealistic side of the graph – we all wish for world peace, better/healthier lives, dignity, comfort, safety and prosperity, just to name a few. Like many New Year’s resolutions, of course, they never actually come to pass or don’t come to pass in quite the way we had envisioned. Perhaps the point is the envisioning of them to begin with, because nothing can come to fruition without first creating it in our minds.
Setting aside personal resolutions, perhaps it would be useful to think about what we, as a community, can resolve to try and do in the next 12 months.
Every year we hear complaints about how “community” doesn’t really exist, or how superficial it is if it does exist, how “political” it can be, etc. I think “community” does exist. It may not be quite the warm, welcoming, open and supportive environment we all assume it would be as we start to come out into it, but it is there and, like so much in life, it is - by and large - what we make of it.
Looking back over the last few years, I can see some sterling examples of ”the community” creating something worthwhile. Not just this macrocosm of GLBT, but local communities made up of the individuals who, in turn, created and make up the organizations, bars, cafes, social networks, and organize events, both small and large, in a particular city, or work on issues of importance to the community as a whole.
The first thing that springs to mind is equal marriage. The “community” pushed that forward, made it happen. We made it happen on so many different levels. It wasn’t just the “handful” of activists in Toronto and Ottawa that won all us queer folk the right to marry the person we love, if we chose to - although in many ways those activists were on the forefront of the struggle and received very little of the glory and a lot of the flack – it was individuals.
It was the quiet gay or lesbian couple down the street who decided that their lives together were every bit as valid as the heterosexual couple across the street and who decided to start presenting themselves as a couple; married in all but name and being clear that they believed they deserved to be married in name.
It was our parents who looked at the life we had with our respective life partners and saw a reflection of the life they had with theirs. It was our friends and, yes, the activists in our midst, who spoke out when some bozo started going on about how the sanctity of marriage was under attack by ‘them radicals.’ It was a myriad of different constellations of people, coming together in a common struggle to make it happen. And it did.
I look further back and see how a community made a difference in the face of a terrifying, deadly and devastating disease; how that community stood its ground, in so many fields and on so many levels, and demanded we be listened to, respected, and dealt with properly.
Much of today’s support and education networks for HIV/AIDS sprang from the gay men’s community responding to a threat when nobody else would. Those networks didn’t come out of some governmental agency, or some Congressional or Parliamentary directive; it came from those whose lives were being directly impacted by a disease nobody wanted to talk about, let alone do anything about. It was, literally, a bunch of concerned men and women, gathering around kitchen tables and in community centre drop-ins, and coffee houses and bars who asked ‘what are we going to do’ and then coming up with some answers to that question and implementing them. It was individuals losing lovers, friends, chosen family, and other people around them, or at risk of becoming infected and dying themselves, who created something positive out of something so horribly negative.
I look further back still and see the formation of what we know today as “community” rather than just a collection of individuals with nothing more in common than a sexual interest in other men or other women. Think about that for a minute: Building community involved creating an infrastructure where none existed; setting up counseling and support centres, information phone lines, sports leagues, social networks, resource libraries, discussion groups, activist groups, and social groups of all descriptions. Even more than that, however, it involved a truly radical mind set shift from secretive, furtive, illegal activity undertaken by isolated individuals and creating a mind set that understood who we were in terms of “orientation” and of recognizing a commonality that included, but went beyond, sexuality.
In some urban centres a simultaneous phenomenon was emerging that had hitherto been unheard of – neighbourhoods whose over-arching characteristic was they were primarily populated by homosexuals choosing to congregate and live their lives openly in a specific geographic area rather than trying to blend into the society and culture around them by hiding not only ‘what’ they were but, more profoundly, ‘who’ they were. Being formed for and by homosexuals, thereby consciously carved out a certain ethos, an atmosphere, which declared in no uncertain terms “this is gay territory.”
The 1980’s saw the birth of the Gay Village in areas such as The Castro in San Francisco, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, Christopher Street and, to a certain degree, Greenwich Village in New York City, St. Catherine’s in Montreal, Centretown in Ottawa, and the West End in Vancouver. Community was being created, not by happenstance, but consciously.
We, as a community, are capable of accomplishing so much, of improving the lives of our brother and sister queer folk – and therefore our own - of making a difference not just for ourselves, but for society at large.
But, like any community, there are internal stresses and conflicts that sometimes overshadow the accomplishments and the potential. It is difficult in our day-to-day lives to step back and avoid those conflicts. It is easy to emotionally engage and get caught up in them. It is part of being human.
No community is immune, be it a community based on orientation and gender identities, a community based on ethnicity or race, a small town somewhere, a religious faith…all communities, like all families, experience conflict and upset and struggle and varying degrees of acceptance of others within that community. Is there an answer to avoiding, or at least resolving, such undermining of what community means? Sure…like the creation of community itself, it starts with each of us, as individuals, resolving to contribute what we can for the greater good; each other.
It’s not easy. Every one of us sees the world – and community – in terms of how it relates to us and not so much in terms of how we relate to the world/community. That, too, is part of being human. But another part of being human, history shows us, is being able to reach beyond our limitations, to create things of beauty and ideas of sparkling construction that will endure and enrich not just our own lives, or the lives of others, but Life itself. The creation, and maintenance, of what we know as ‘community’ is an amazing thing, something to be treasured and nurtured and built upon.
Perhaps, as we move into a fresh new year, full of promise and potential and possibility, we can all resolve to add to the building of community so that all have some place to feel safe, respected, and secure.
