Summary: The experience of America’s queerfolk has been not unlike that of the Irish in America. Both the LGBT and Irish-American communities have undergone a long process of integration --not assimilation-- into an American community composed largely of immigrants, and in which every person is a member of some minority. Full participation of the Irish as first-class citizens in our American commonwealth is now a matter-of-fact reality. America's queerfolk should be guided by the experience of the Gael in America and take hope and inspiration from it.
By: Paul S. Marchand
"You will be assimilated; resistance is futile."
-Locutus of Borg, from Star Trek, the Next Generation
I refuse to be assimilated!
-Anonymous Queer National, c. 1992
As any aficionado of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager can tell you, the Borg are a nasty lot. They are a mixture of man and machine, a collective bent on conquering the galaxy by "assimilating" everything in their path, turning conquered races into Borg drones, parts of a hive in which no single member possess any distinct individuality. Among the Borg, the pronoun I yields place to the pronoun we, as it often does in highly homogenous or totalitarian cultures.
As Americans in general, and as queerfolk in particular, lesbians and gay men, together with the bisexual and the transgendered, necessarily live lives in which our definition of ourselves as a community is intimately bound up in our identification of ourselves as individuals, in which I necessarily comes before We, and is its prerequisite. Of all of the great nations of the world, America stands out as the quintessential "nation of immigrants," composed of voyagers and exiles from every one of the worlds tongues, nations, and stations; from every religion or none at all, from every zone of conflict or street of violence, from the vastnesses of continents scorched by equinoctial suns to the fringes of green and seagirt islands such as Éire, granite-buttressed and battered by the ageless pounding of Atlantic breakers.
In a sense, every American is a member of some minority group or other. We queerfolk are no exception. To be sure, our American story has been until recent years largely identified as the history of the white settlers, primarily British and northern European, who came to what is now Virginia and the northeast. Yet in truth, our history is the history of a lengthy series of arrivals, even that of the first peoples who arrived so many thousands of years ago across the now-drowned land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.
On Saint Patrick's day, of course, we recall the experience of the Irish in America, and rightly so, for that experience has molded the history of America and of Éire, and has changed the lives of every Irish-American, and every Irishman. The story of the Gael in the New World is almost a textbook example of the importance of integration as against assimilation. We who are of Irish descent brought with us from the ancestral island a culture, a world view, a faith, and most importantly, a faculty for the written and the spoken word that has been almost without peer in the history of the English language. If nothing else, our own Irish integration into the American commmonwealth has been witnessed by a string of recent Presidents of Irish descent: Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and even Obama (or is that O’Bama?).
Yet the one great sin against blood, faith, and heritage of which the Irish-Americans can never be accused is that of being assimilated into an alien culture and entirely abandoning their own. Instead, the Irish ---like so many others before and since--- beginning as outsiders, integrated themselves into American society, and in so doing, influenced that society in ways both obvious and subtle. Even the Famine Irish, who fled the Potato Famine of the 1840s ---and were often the poorest of the poor and the rudest of the rude--- came as members of a culture that though often dormant under English occupation, possessed and possesses still an ancient and noble heritage. And without the leavening and the gifts of the Irish and of their culture, our own American culture would be perceptibly poorer.
After all, the Irishman James Joyce once asked, who but the Irish could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?
On the Feast of Saint Patrick, then, American queerfolk should perhaps look to the Irish in America, not with simple nostalgia, or even with mere pride of ancestry (if, dear reader, you happen like the author to be of Irish descent), but rather as our teachers, from whose example and history in this country we may take instruction and inspiration. For against the Irish immigrants, particularly the Famine Irish, were ranged many of the most powerful social and political forces of the day, united in fear and dislike of a proud but primitive people from a different culture, of a Roman Catholic people in a Protestant republic, of a communitarian people in a land of rugged individualists, and of poor people in a society just beginning to come to terms with the potentialities of staggering wealth.
Why, the nativist element demanded, did we have to admit the Irish at all? And if we had to let them in, why couldn't the Irish just be assimilated until they adopted the faith and culture of the Protestant population? Against such an initial background, the history of the Irish community in this country has been a history of initial rejection, a history of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and fear, yet also a history of slow, steady surmounting of barriers, a history of building bridges, paying dues, and establishing bona fides, a history, in short, of integration.
Yet such a history is decades in the making, and true integration is the accomplishment of generations. For Irish-Americans, the struggle to secure equal rights was in many ways closely parallel to the struggle that we are waging today as queer people. Over against us are powerful social and political forces as united in their fear and dislike of us as their forebears were of the Irish. For in a society that still defines family largely as biological units, we define family in other, perhaps more spiritual ways. Indeed, our struggle to be able to create families, and to place those families squarely within the ambit of protection that the law should guarantee to every family, has not been an overnight thing, but has indeed been the outcome of decades, even generations, of work.
In a society that fears any expression of social nonconformity, we queerfolk are cultural subversives, questioning the dominant paradigm at every turn. In a culture that tends to regard aesthetics with a jaundiced and Puritan eye that sees beauty as pagan and per se unacceptable, we embrace beauty, taste, and elegance forthrightly as essential aspects of a life worth living in full. Against a mentality that seems to have little time for joy and the pursuit of happiness, we demand the right to find joy and to pursue happiness, and to live life as if there were twenty five hours in every day; for who (even with HIV/AIDS having been reduced, more or less, to the status of a long-term chronic illness) can truly know how much time he or she has?
Finally, of course, in contrast with a narrow and limited conversation about gender roles, we dare to speak the love that others would constrain to silence, honestly admitting the possibility that two women or two men can love one another, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
In short, we make many of our straight neighbors uncomfortable, in much the same way as the communitarian, Catholic, Irish, must have discomfited their individualistic, Protestant, neighbors. And if we have taken the blueprint for much of the legal strategy of our cause from the struggle of the African-American community, perhaps we ought to take the blueprint for our social and political integration from the Irish. Our community, as such, is in many ways a new arrival on the American scene since Stonewall, and past experience suggests that it is unrealistic to expect the immediate crumbling of all barriers.
Yet, as the Irish demonstrated, open participation in the life of the larger community leads to habituation; habituation leads to accommodation; accommodation leads to toleration, and toleration leads to acceptance and integration. When integration happens, barriers fall and hitherto separate cultures or subcultures can teach and learn from one another, and can enrich one another. Who would have thought, just two decades ago, that we might well be nearing the day on which David and Jonathan (or Sean and Patrick) or Ruth and Naomi (or Bridget and Siobhan) might be able to go and get themselves married, legally and fully, in a nation that has finally acknowledged that it is as okay to be queer as it is to be Irish?
If, then, on Saint Patrick's Day the Irish part of me can say "I'm here, I'm Irish, get used to it," the queer part of me can take the same tack, and together with my LBGT brothers and sisters, also say "We're queer, we're here, we're fabulous, get used to it." The challenge, thus, is a simple one. If today, the presence a contingent of gay and lesbian Hibernians marching in a St. Patrick's Day Parade, or the mere fact of a Pride Parade, can cause controversy and confrontation, let us set our goals, aspirations and efforts toward an ultimate reality of integration such that in due time the presence of lesbian and gay Hibernians in a St. Patrick's Day Parade or a pride parade ---or Bridget and Siobhan’s wedding--- is nothing more than matter-of-fact reality, unremarkable in itself.
When, and only when, our integration is so complete that our participation in the life of the nation is accepted as a matter of course, will we be able to speak of being true, first class citizens in the contemplation of our law, our politics, and our society. Only when our participation is accepted as an everyday reality will we truly be able to say that we -like the Irish- have finally come to America.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an Irish/Celtic-American attorney with a typically French name that would fit comfortably into any Paris or Marseilles phone book. He lives and practices in Cathedral City, where he served two terms as a city councilmember. The views contained herein are his own, and not those of any entity or organization with which he is associated. They are not intended, and should not be taken as, legal advice. This post is an adaptation of a column Mr. Marchand wrote in 1998 and has been updated.
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