TWO GREAT SPEECHES BY GREAT MEN

AND WHY INCLUSIVENESS WILL NOT HARM US

In 1970, Huey P Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, gave a speech about homosexuality. It is notably queasy. Newton stated the impulse was sometimes to hit a homosexual in the mouth, (as it was to tell a woman to be quiet). However, he was clear that the people who were in those days called homosexuals, were among the most oppressed in society. They should be welcomed into the revolutionary movement, and seen as allies.

This speech was given about a year after the Stonewall riot. Newton was among the first to understand that the gay liberation movement was an ally. After all, it was modelled on the Black liberation movement. Gay people had watched the civil rights movement and they learned from it.

There had been moves towards freedom and rights for Black people in the United States since, well, the beginning of slavery.

There had also been similar moves towards freedom and rights for women since the early nineteenth century.

Prior to that, there had always been women and Black people of power in white male dominated societies. There has always been mixing, always been exceptional individuals.

The movement for Gay liberation was a little different because the notion of homosexuality was a relatively new one. There are many different ways of forming intimate relationships and humans have done all of them. So, men have always loved men, and women have always loved women, but they often did so within the norms of their societies. The notion of being ‘a homosexual’ really arose at the end of nineteenth century. The notion of ‘heterosexual’ came even later. By the mid twentieth century, in the middle of the terrifying McCarthy era, groups of gay men and lesbian women began to advocate for freedom and rights in what was called the homophile movement. They were tentative, respectable, law abiding. There was a lot to lose. The Stonewall riots brought to the light of public attention the diversity of Queer experience in New York at the time: drag queens, street queens, transvestites, butch lesbians. Terms we don’t care for these days, but which maybe reflect the fact that reality is always analogue and never digital and people can be all sorts of things, including pretty rough around the edges when life is hard.

So Huey P Newton’s speech, allying Gay liberation with Black liberation, was ahead of its time. He was dead right.

Because there is an ongoing revolutionary movement for inclusiveness, freedom and rights. Newton was clear about allyship, and also clear about who is and is not our enemy. Women and Gay people have never been the enemy of Black people. This is a revolutionary movement for inclusiveness, freedom and rights.  Rinse. Repeat. Now, we are super fucking clear about who are enemies are. It is not women, or Black people, or Queer people.

The thing about a growing movement towards inclusiveness, freedom and rights, is it grows and includes. I feel for older feminist women who are wary of what seems like an awful lot of bandwidth being taken up by trans people. Feminists fought for their spaces, for their safety and their clear and distinct voices, for decades. The project is far from over, in fact it is now in even more jeopardy, and now more people are muscling in on it. People whose language and mores we don’t understand, who are asking for attention and help and resources.

I would say two things:

Let us remember our history. If you remember how fraught the feminist world was in the seventies and eighties, it was hard to be anything. Could you be straight and a feminist? Could you have a son and be a feminist? Remember all the flavours of being a lesbian? If you were me, you were always getting it wrong. Remember how language was policed, how angry people got? The thing is, it was all good stuff in the end. Official language became more inclusive. Homosexual law reform happened. We realized how the personal is political. It was noisy and ridiculous and messy but sometimes that is how things get done. Also, as I explained above, homosexuality is a recent concept and it emerged out of a slew of many different ways of being what we now call queer, from the enslaved Athenian who complained he not only has to plough his master’s field, but also his master, to the Molly houses of Georgian England, to Mancunian trans bricklayer Harry Stokes of the early nineteenth century. So if trans people seem flighty and inconsistent and overly complicated, that is because our history of sexual identity has always been like that. And if you feel queasy, you might just about be where Huey P Newton was in 1970, and I wish you well.

The other thing is that this is a revolutionary movement of inclusion, and it is a good one. Everyone who experiences oppression should be welcomed and supported. Of course there are overarching principles that stop fascists and pedophiles and so on, but otherwise, as Newton pointed out, if there are problems with method and practice, they should be seen as such and not that the people themselves are problems. So yes, this is all part of the feminist project.

Kyriarchy is a really useful feminist idea, which I take to be that we all experience oppression and unfreedom at multiple points. They are like interlocking points of hierarchy, domination and subjugation. Some of us experience more multiple points than others, but we are all here under kyriarchy. Some of us experience points of oppression because of who we are as groups, others because of beliefs or more personal identities. I can do quite well by being white, and educated, but not so well by being female and precariously employed. I can be honest and aware of where I can be dominant, and not misuse that. I can be aware of where I am oppressed. All those around me have slightly different points of oppression, maybe more or less.

This brings me to the second great speech. I was introduced to kyriarchy by the great Behrouz Boochani. Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish Iranian who became a refugee and was imprisoned in Australia’s great shame, Manus Island. While there, he wrote a book on a smuggled cellphone and sent it in a series of single messages to Omid Tofighian, an Iranian Australian philosopher, who translated it into English. The book, “No Friend but the Mountains” was a success, because it is bloody brilliant, and here is where it got weird. Behrouz was given a one month visa to attend the Word book festival in Otautahi Christchurch in 2019. He and Omid spoke to the book festival-attending, chattering classes, in the packed-out hall of a posh private school. I was there. Behrouz spoke some English but mostly it was a three way translated conversation between himself, Omid, and the compere, whose name I have forgotten. They talked about kyriarchy. Then Behrouz turned to the audience and said:

“You are all in prison”

And everybody cheered! All of what passes for the haute bourgeoisie of Christchurch, all the thin women with their ruddy husbands, and the flash cars out the front, and me, and my friend, we all got it! We all knew it, in our goddam bones! We know we are not free! We know we are slaves to the algorithm, yoked into predictability, stupefied by endless work and spiritual aridity.  

I mean, actually, I have no idea what was in anyone else’s head, but everybody cheered like mad after being introduced to this rather difficult concept, and I felt we call got it, and in that moment we all sensed a moment of release.

Surely we all deserve that, and more. If there is a movement of inclusivity and freedom, surely it must ally itself with all who struggle under kyriarchy. An injury to one is an injury to all, they say. I don’t care if all the flavours of quarks are genders. I don’t get to roll my eyes.  I do care that someone I know is scared they will be killed because of who they are, and that things have suddenly got that much more terrifying. I have always said, and I say it again, reality is analogue, not digital. We are all lots of things at once, and the better for it.