Queer?: Striking a balance between inclusiveness and exclusiveness

I read the first two chapters of Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia while I was on a plane going to Dallas. “Queerness is not yet here… we are not yet queer” (p1). Queerness, for Muñoz, is a “potentiality,” something that we can dream about but never attain in this lifetime. The unattainability of queerness was a difficult concept for me to understand semantically– I automatically wondered how someone could identify as “queer” if queerness doesn’t yet exist. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “I dream of being queer” or “maybe someday I’ll be queer”? The introduction seems to suggest that identifying as queer is not really about a current, concrete sexual identity; it is about a having a specific dream for a future world. What exactly does Muñoz’s queer utopia look like? Although he categorizes it as a “concrete utopia,” it is difficult to find a concrete definition of what exactly this utopia is in the first two chapters. One of the most definitive sentences of the queer utopia appears at the very end of chapter one: “an LGBT position that does not bend to straight time’s gravitational pull” (32). Muñoz criticizes the LGBT movement’s attempts to operate within the heterosexist system without trying to dismantle it; two examples of the LGBT movement bending to “straight time” are the struggles for same-sex marriage and for the abolishment of military policies such as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

I attended Creating Change conference at Dallas. Creating Change is the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual conference on LGBT Equality. I spent a weekend in a hotel with about 3,000 other LGBTQQIAA (am I forgetting any letters?) people. Workshop leaders often joked about operating on “queer time” (everything began about fifteen minutes late). For the first time in my life, I could safely assume that everyone I encountered was queer unless they specifically “came out” to me as a straight ally (only a few did, but I suspected a few others who weren’t quite out of the closet). Was I encountering something similar to Muñoz’s vague definition of a queer utopia? I think so.

Leaving the hotel was a bit unsettling. I was on an escalator, and when I looked behind me, someone was taking down the gender neutral bathroom signs that marked every bathroom on the conference floors. De-creating change. When the other four Princeton students and I started to recap the conference before the plane took off, people in the seats around us got visibly upset. Queertopia was over.

This is where Muñoz lost me. Perhaps marriage and the military are “straight” institutions, but how can ignoring these inequalities or claiming to be above these “mainstream” issues make the millions of people who enjoy those institutions understand why they should be interested in a queer utopia? How can a queer movement attain a queer utopia without the help of the hundreds of thousands of LGBT people who do want marriage and military equality? Maybe my ideas for creating change are limited because I normally operate in “straight time,” but I’d much rather slowly fight for equality within the system than live the rest of my life outside of a system or build a new, entirely “queer” system from scratch.

As Gayle Rubin’s radical theory of sex suggests, a possible definition of “queer” is one that encompasses all of the groups that are subordinate to the pinnacle of the hierarchy of sex – vanilla, missionary position sex that occurs in a bed between a man and a woman who are in a long-term, monogamous relationship. In this definition, “queer” seems to be an extremely inclusive term. Muñoz’s conception of “queer” seems to narrow the movement down to people who want to live entirely outside of heterosexual institutions – and what exactly is a heterosexual institution? If the present world is a straight one, aren’t most of the institutions created in this world also “straight”? What makes an institution “queer”? As Muñoz seems to suggest through carefully selected excerpts, is a queer utopia also a communal world (and what makes communism queer)? Before reading Cruising Utopia, I conceived of the queer movement as an inclusive movement that fights for all LGBT equalities, regardless of how radical they are. I don’t see how a small, radical, isolated movement can reconstruct the entire world to fit a queer utopia. Also, I am not convinced that a queer utopia hinges upon the destruction of capitalism. Comparing Muñoz’s definition of a queer utopia to Rubin’s broad definition of what it means to have a radical sexuality (which boldly advocates the abolishment of the stigmatization of pedophiles) leads to a larger question: is the queer movement an exclusive group of radicals who have a common set of sexual, social, political, and economic ideals, or is it an inclusive group that encompasses all sexual radicals? Creating a movement involves striking a careful balance between inclusiveness and exclusiveness – a too exclusive movement finds few allies, and a too inclusive movement will watch members walk away from a movement that fails to properly define them.