How Can We Say ‘It Gets Better’ After Orlando?
(The link is an article by my friend Anthony Easton, for MTV
news. Please prioritise the article, not the thoughts of mine it prompted.)“Don’t politicise”, people are told after terrible events.
But politicisation is inevitable – much of the time, it’s just a symptom of the
need for context and meaning, the urge to fit events into a story. Narratives
are how we process our lives and the world: breaking this urge is not easy.And narratives are readily available. The murders in Orlando
slotted into two very familiar ones. The first narrative was of Islamic terror,
the malign force of ISIS directing its attackers from outside and within “the
West”, constantly seeking to harm. The second narrative was of gun violence,
the lethal ease of American murder.Both these narratives have the support of powerful actors.
The Republican party, the European right, the right-wing media and ISIS itself
back the first. President Obama, the Democratic party and liberal US media back
the second. The stories are not contradictory, of course – no nationalist
European demagogue, keen to bang the drum against ISIS, also wants US-style gun ‘freedom’. It’s only the
battle for primacy that makes them feel that way, as each side accuses the
other of ignoring its chosen story.But with Orlando a third story fights to be heard. The
narrative of decades of homophobic violence against LGBT people and communities
in America and beyond: physical violence, state violence, legal violence, acts
of terror. All ongoing. This narrative is inconvenient, just as LGBT people are so often
seen as inconvenient. Watch, if you can bear, the clip of Owen Jones (a gay
man) being shouted down to the point of leaving a Sky News studio by
commentators desperate that their narrative about Orlando – it was an “attack
on humanity”, on “all of us” – gets to dominate. “It was an attack on LGBT
people-“ Jones says about a slaughter in a gay club during Pride month .”ON ALL
PEOPLE” the presenter thunders. No. For a trivial example, this was not an
attack on me.The LGBT people I know, and those I read on social media are
not a unit. They have not been unanimous that this third inconvenient narrative
is the lens through which to view Orlando. Other voices are always available.
But from what I have seen they have felt overwhelmingly that it is the lens. The
story that homophobia continues, that violence continues, is in the interest of
no major political party. It is inconvenient not just at this immediate framing
level. It cuts across mainstream political stories from right and left about progress or its
supposed costs; stories of lesbian and gay people as liberated by marriage; of
young bi or genderqueer people as pampered; of trans women as threats themselves.The inconvenient story demands space, and volume.