Maybe Brian Kinney was right.

A recent article on 365gay.com got me thinking about the current state of the queer community. The article deals with the death of the gay village, specifically the Castro district in San Francisco. The Castro is considered by most to be the central queer community in the country and, at least according to this article, it is dying. What is happening in Castro, is happening in some degree in many large cities with a significant queer population.

As members of the queer community gain social acceptance, we are being brought into the fabric of “mainstream” society and the need to be in communities made up of people largely like us is dissipating. While it is obviously a good thing that we are making headway in terms of civil and social justice, is our progress a matter of integration or assimilation?

The conflict between maintaining cultural and individual identity is not new or exclusive to the queer community. Immigrants face the same conflict when coming into American culture in trying to decide how much of their native cultural identity to hold onto in their new homeland. When my grandparents came from Hungary after the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, they decided to keep as much of their cultural identity as possible. They did not Americanize their name and taught their children, and me, their native language.

While they chose to maintain a connection with the old country, many others did not. Some with difficult Hungarian names shortened or changed them so that they would be more pronounceable. They worked as hard as they could to learn English and when it came time to teach their American born children, they did not pass down the tradition of the Hungarian language. These families wanted to assimilate into the American culture and gain the acceptance of their American born neighbors, a new addition to the melting pot.

American culture is described almost exclusively as a melting pot, where individual identities were expected to meld into the whole. In the melting pot, different influences add to the overall taste, but individual identity is associated first and foremost with the mixture. When someone comes along and decides to keep their identity, it is seen by many to be a direct threat to the whole. The melting pot creates what is generally accepted as a mainstream and dominant culture. In the case of American culture, it is most commonly aligned with a white, heterosexual, predominantly male, Christian identity, which is seen as neutral. Anything other than this is abnormal and a threat to the greater culture. (read for an interesting take on the melting pot theory)

Instead of the melting pot, I would prefer to see the development of a culture where individual identities and cultures can be maintained while still coming together to form shared community. Individuality and social identity do not have to be mutually exclusive. I can be proud of my Hungarian and American heritage, without it being a threat to either. I can be proud of my queerness, without it being an insult or affront to those who don’t share my effectual orientation. I can be in a committed relationship, which may not fit every definition or characteristics of other’s relationships without it being a threat.

Brian Kinney rejected the idea of queer marriage, not as a rights issue but as an issue of assimilation. More and more people are coming to support the queer community, and I totally support that notion. But, I wonder, is the support conditional on “us” looking more like “them”? To take it one further, do they support all of the queer community including drag queens, leather daddies and bathhouses? If not, then do we have to give up these things in order to gain and win acceptance?

The queer community is not united, like any minority we are subject to internal hatred and struggles, which keep us from moving forward. There are many within the community who want to “whitewash” our heritage in hopes of gaining a greater acceptance to the society as a whole. The need to clean up our image often manifests in internal conflicts with the “less desirable” aspects of our community. Like it or not, we have a history and we can’t deny it, we have to embrace it, understand it and grow from it. We would not have the queer liberation movement if it weren’t for a few drag queens willing to stand up for themselves chanting:

'We are the Stonewall girls

We wear our hair in curls

We wear no underwear

We show our pubic hair...

We wear our dungarees

Above our nelly knees!'

In short, we should be proud of who we are, and our quest for liberation should not have to come at the abandonment of who we are. What the queer liberation movement should be fighting for is integration and not assimilation. If we are to gain liberty and acceptance as a default of assimilation, then we haven’t won anything at all. We’ve only changed ourselves to fit in, and that is unacceptable.