We Are All Blood

Just So We're Clear

Photo by Thiago Rocha on Unsplash

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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My father once told me a story about going out to play tennis with a friend while he was in college.

They drove all around the campus and all around town looking for an open court but every single one was taken. Then they drove by the college for Native American students, a much smaller school that was on what had been the outskirts of the city when it was founded.

The tennis courts on the edge of their campus were empty.

I don’t remember if he said it was a known thing that only students and faculty of that college were permitted to use those courts or if there was a sign stating as much but they decided to play there despite that. If a campus security guard happened by, he knew they’d likely tell ‘em to scram and they would.

And a campus security officer did drive by, stopped, got out of his vehicle and walked over to them. He asked for my father’s ID. Obviously not in possession of a student ID for the college in question, he handed over his driver’s license. The officer took a look at his license for a moment, looked back at him and then handed it back.

“Y’all have a nice day.”

At the time, my father said he didn’t know what exactly happened. But then he realized the officer saw my father’s heavily tanned skin—a result of growing up in farming towns of the virtually treeless prairie—and the last name on his ID that could have derived from an indigenous ancestry and determined my father was Native American. That he had the right to use that tennis court.

I did not know then but I know now that my father was a beneficiary of cultural appropriation, however unintentional or seemingly harmless. Of course, it wasn’t anything along the lines of, say, Rachel Dolezal, but he still accessed a privilege that was otherwise only available to a group that otherwise was a victim of his culture for centuries. He received something to which he had no right.

I feared this was what I was doing when I began to come out. I’ve written before about my response to a gay man in a Facebook Group dismissing dating bi men but my fear was about more than whether a guy would have sex with me. Would I be sneered at when I showed up at a gay bar or Pride event? Would my interests in queer social groups be rebuffed? Would my comments that reference my identity be rejected? Would I just be seen as a poseur, an opportunist, someone wanting the resources of queer spaces and folk when I already have benefitted from (and continue to benefit from!) my association with cis-het white patriarchal culture? All this was based on my reasonable belief that a group that was so marginalized and oppressed had good reason to guard against interlopers who could dilute what little power they had, if not outright subvert it.

I recently finished Caleb Gayle’s We Refuse To Forget, where he goes into the history and ongoing fight for recognition of Black Creeks, people once considered full citizens of the Creek Nation.

Early on, Gayle notes that the Creek Nation, like other closely-related southeastern Native American tribes such as the Cherokee and Seminole, adopted Black people who were brought to America as slaves, just as they had also adopted some white people. Some of these Black folk were slaves of the Creeks, some were escaped or freed slaves, some were never slaves at all. Regardless of how they became part of the Creeks, all were considered Creek, regardless of how dark their skin was. Black Creeks have been Creek chiefs, negotiated treaties with the U.S. government, received land allotments as part of their membership in the tribe.

But not everyone saw Black Creeks as Creek. As seems to always be the case, this started with white men who disenfranchised and dispossessed the Creeks and other Native American tribes while simultaneously bringing Black people to their land by force. Representatives of that culture, starting with European colonizers before turning into the United States government, could not see Black folk as anything but Black. You could be white and be Creek. But if you were Black, you were just Black.

And over time, that racist and narrow view of who was Creek—a view not created by Creeks themselves—began to take hold, particularly among those Creeks who were also white. And finally, in the 1970s, a Creek chief who also passed as white along with some other tribal elders, drafted a new tribal constitution that identified those who were Creek and those who were just “Freedmen.”

“There were more that was non-Indians or half-blood or less, who outnumbered the fullbloods, all of these totaled about 11,000, and there were only 18,000 on the entire Roll, so there was only 9,000 above one-half blood. That’s the reason they lost control, the FULLBLOOD lost control. That’s what we’re fighting, the blood quantum, trying to get back and let the people control because under the old Constitution, you’ve lost before you ever started.”

Chief Cox, as attributed by Caleb Gayle, We Refuse To Forget

Perhaps I’m not being fair. I am neither Black nor Creek nor Black Creek. Who am I to say who qualifies to be part of the Creek Nation, part of a people that I myself am not part of? The very attorney who is leading the fight to allow Black Creeks to once again be full citizens and beneficiaries of the Creek Nation didn’t even know of his legacy as a Black Creek until some college librarian told him he was. Gayle himself isn’t a Black Creek; he is a black man whose parents are Jamaican immigrants.

Several weeks ago a post came across my Substack feed from an older gay man in California going to a conference in Great Britain, called The Gay Men’s Conference. This event was focused on a negative view of gender identity ideology and trans folk in general. He said he learned about terms such as TERF and “captured gay.” He said he did not consider himself anti-trans and yet he said he’s tired of trans folk being the focus of everything queer.

For me, the bottom line is about fostering dignity and well-being for gay men.

Does “X policy/ideology” celebrate and empower gay men?

Yes? I’m for it.

Does “X policy/ideology” require me to give up my right to care for and freely associate with other gay men?

No? I’m gonna push back.

This is essentially the same logic behind a a self-described “lesbians born female” group in Australia seeking to exclude trans women* from their events. Just like the man above, they feel their place in the queer community is threatened, that they are going to be pushed out by people who they do not see as kin. Again, who am I to tell them otherwise? I am not a woman and have never experienced the barriers and hurdles and humiliations that our culture has inflicted upon women, particularly queer women.

I also have never run a business, much less a medical clinic. The anti-trans fervor sweeping the current federal regime led the Whitman-Walker Clinic, which has served the queer community’s needs for decades, to remove any public-facing mention of services they offer for trans folk.

“We could not take chances that we would not be able to continue services,” Britt Walsh, specialty director of care, says. “That our FQHC designation would be taken away, that we wouldn’t make payroll. So we pulled things down from our website.”

And then there’s one of the online support groups for late-blooming men I am in, where moderators have discouraged discussion of controversial topics such as trans rights in order to keep the peace between a larger trans-supportive and a smaller (and, as always more vocal) transphobic group.

All these people are just protecting themselves, protecting their communities, right? Just like Chief Cox who believed that people he never considered Creek could be Creek.

But, at least by Gayle’s assertion, Cox’s beliefs and actions were definitively not Creek themselves.

Cox had done what his many forebears would not do: he bought into the overly simplistic view that race should determine one’s access to citizenship. He embraced the notion that the Creek Nation had uniquely rejected decades before: that people couldn’t be both Black and Creek. Cox codified this view because, as with his choice to pass as white to get the job at the Public Service Company of Oklahoma, he knew that being white had a currency in America that no measure of hard work by a marginalized person could buy. He used the anti-Indigenous tropes that had been used against his ancestors and leveraged it to separate the Black people who had called the Creek Nation home.

As a Black man, Gayle knows what it means to have your identity constrained because of a dominant culture’s inability to look past a binary, to appreciate the richness of cultural experience and exchange.

Decrying the current moment’s focus on trans rights, the inclusion of trans folk in queer spaces or the necessity of abandoning them for a “greater good” are similarly antithetical to queer community. The gay rights movement itself would never have happened without trans folk. Trans women contributed to feminism. And there is nothing shameful about rendering medical care that a person needs to lead a fulfilling life on their own terms.

The root of anti-trans sentiment within the queer community is borne of the same failing of Chief Cox: a desire for proximity to power, to privilege, to people who can provide a direct benefit to one’s station. It is doing the work of the very people who wish to destroy all queer folk. It is borne of the myopic belief that the eradication of trans folk from the world will be where it ends or that even if it doesn’t stop there that those same queer folk will be protected because of who they are individually, who they know.

But what do I know? I’ve only identified as queer for two years. I never got beat up for being queer, got turned down for a job or housing for being queer, was disowned by my family for being queer, lost entire friend groups to AIDS because we were all queer. I have largely led a typical heteronormative life.

And yet, I am familiar with one aspect of queer experience, cis and trans alike: the knowledge that who I felt like on the inside didn’t match who I was on the outside. It didn’t matter that it had nothing to do with my body. All that mattered was that it wasn’t me. And I couldn’t keep not being me. Even at the risk of losing my marriage, my family, my friends.

Self-determination is something every person is worthy of. I don’t need to have been queer my whole life or even most of my life to know and accept that.

Trans rights are human rights. Trans rights are queer rights. And if you don’t agree you can get in the fucking sea.