While December may be the month of glad tidings and goodwill to all men, it seems this only extends to the affluent within the LGBT community.
Commentators were recently debating the accessibility of a community event. One vocal participant responded to the criticism that it was priced out of the reach of some LGBT people as follows. I’m paraphrasing but I’m confident that the sentiment is accurate: tough! If you can’t afford it, don’t come. Delivered with a spiteful, mocking comment.
Now I believe passionately in free speech. I believe in the right of free citizens to speak their minds even if it offends me to my very core (which this does). I don’t believe in censorship, I think it far better to challenge a (crass) argument than to stifle it.
So, firstly, is this a specifically trans issue? Yes, because local research shows that trans people tend to have considerably lower incomes than non-trans LGB people. Check out Count Me In Too for the evidence. But more than that, I would like to ask you when it become acceptable within the LGBT community to hate and mock poor people?
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument, and put the right-wing double-speak term ‘economic exclusion’ on it if you like, but we’re talking about people expressing that they were too poor to participate in an LGBT community event and being spitefully dismissed and mocked for it.
The evil offspring of vicious Thatcherism and commercial greed, you would think that such a sentiment would be roundly condemned by right-thinking LGBT people. But as far as I can tell, these sentiments have been met with at best, apathy and at worst, keen support. Well I repudiate it. I declare it despicable and immoral and I distance myself from it utterly. I will not join in the chorus of people whose fear in a politically manufactured period of austerity leads them to turn on the most excluded and marginalised. I have nothing but contempt for such views.
There’s a nasty stereotype about gay men: their pockets brimming with all those disposable pink pounds have no time in all the shopping, clubbing and shagging to care about social justice, after all it’s such a drag! It just gets in the way of the party! And that’s just what this is, a nasty stereotype. Some the most tireless workers for social justice I know are gay men. But when these kind of ‘I’m alright Jack, sod the rest of you’ sentiments get expressed, this is what people leave themselves looking like: a tired, selfish, spiteful stereotype.
So what’s the answer? Here’s a radical idea. How about we start listening to poor LGBT people instead of dismissing and despising them? Together, we might be able to find some constructive solutions so we can all join in what the LGBT community and culture has to offer.
On a final note, this will be my last column for GScene. It’s time for pastures new for me to pursue some personal projects. So, I’d like to thank the GScene team and say that if I have occasionally made you think in a new way about trans issues, that feels like time well spent. Good wishes for Christmas and the New Year.
Nick writes this column in a personal capacity.
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