This is a guest post from Sparky, of Spark in Darkness.
Many of you are familiar with him from Livejournal, as well
as from his insightful and often hilarious commentary here.
Each Tuesday, Womanist Musings will be featuring a post from
Sparky.
I’ve written a post before about low expectations
and
why we need to expect more from straight, cis people.
There’s a bare minimum of decent adult behaviour they should grow
up and start observing
Well, the first step to ensuring that is to
stop fawning over them for every damn little thing. There are a ridiculous
number of straight, cis people who expect parades, parties and baked
goods in responds to every remotely kind word or just an admission that
they’re not bigots (well, claim not to be). It’s a ridiculously
low standard and we have some responsibility for this – because
we do praise people (and, on a related note but one I won’t go into
here – media representations) for even the most paltry, weak
efforts.
Now, this isn’t something I say to other
GBLT people as individuals because I don’t approve of that. People
have to negotiate their circumstances as best they can and everyone
tends to know their own lives better than outsiders. One of the many
aggravating things about being a marginalised person is policing from
fellows about doing marginalisation/activism right
That’s not to say I’m not going to throw lots of criticism at a
Quisling, I most certainly will, but nor will I shame people for the
accommodations they have to make in their own lives and in their own
contexts. We all have to walk our own roads and no-one knows what potholes,
road blocks and black ice that lurk down yours but yourself. And if
that means you have to fuss a few straight people and hand out cookies,
even through gritted teeth, well you know the people around you and
how you have to survive among them best
That changes entirely for professional advocate
bodies which, for a huge myriad of reasons, I just have no time for,
I really really don’t, not any of them. For every good thing they
do, there seems to be a monumental shitton of crap they pull (which
turns into a twofer of annoyance since their arseholery is annoying
and then you get further arseholes who decide that I need to apologise
on behalf of an organisation based on another continent – because,
y’know, all gay people are collectively responsible for what every
gay person does, don’tchaknow, and individuality is something only
privileged people get).
Anyway, before I got derailed a little, let’s
get back to fawning, because this is one of the many many things that
I hate about these organisations that purport to speak for us. It seems
like, to be “relevant” these orgs are usually more interested in
appealing to the straight oppressors, to be part of the system than
they are to be advocates for the people they’re supposed to be advocating.
And one of the classic ways they do this is by not just handing out
Cookies – but Cakes, tarts and a whole patisserie of pastries for
the slightest damn reason. And it has to stop – stop making us cheap,
stop making us easily bought, stop pretending we have to be appreciative
for basic humanity – you have, annoyingly, far too large a platform
to be handing out ally cookies so casually.