Month: July 2013

Broken screens, the lotto and how exhausting it can be to be broke.

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , , 8 Comments

“buy yourself a lottery ticket. The universe owes you one”

That was a friend of mine’s response to my litany of all the small things that went wrong in the past 40 hours or so. FYI, that was this: my plane being hours late so I didn’t get home in time for anything but (some) sleep, being woken up by my neighbour’s alarm far too early, feeling ill yesterday and missing training, that incident in the shop where the other guy took my bin tags and it took us 15 minutes to sort it out, my ereader’s screen breaking (moment of silence for my wonderful bookmachine, please), and then being kept awake by thunderstorms and- you guessed it- my neighbour’s goddamn alarm an hour before I had to get up. Again.

Obviously I don’t think that buying a lotto ticket would do much good in any practical sense. I am well aware that the universe doesn’t owe anyone a thing. And that the chances of winning the lotto are vanishingly tiny.

I’m still tempted.

I’m tempted for the same reason that people light candles for people. Because I’ve had a complicated time lately (eh, in more ways than the last day!) and I need to remind myself that hope is a thing. That things can get better. Not that they’re horrendous right now, but with a lot of things on my mind and less resources than I’d like to deal with them, life can feel pretty damn exhausting. That’s a thing they don’t really tell you about, isn’t it? How a tenner’s worth of bin tags can scare you when you’re short of money and know you’ll stay that way for months. How a broken screen means just another thing to do without, and how goddamn frustrating it is to see all the little things break and know how long it will take to get anything fixed.

I know I’m not too badly off. I’m broke, not poor– I have enough money for rent, bills and food. I’m not scraping by on £10 a week to feed my family. I’m damn good at cooking food that’s both cheap and mouthwateringly delicious. If I’m careful (and oh, I never knew how tiring it would be to be careful every single day) I can afford to either have nice things every so often, or to get away for a few days sometimes. I’m lucky- I have a bike to drive around in, live in a city with parks, beaches, forests and mountains all within an hour’s drive at most. I still have a laptop that still works and I have wonderful friends and a park to go skating in not ten minutes drive from my front door. I have courgette (zucchini, USians. Zucchini.) plants out the back threatening to take over the world like baobabs from The Little Prince, I can barely eat fast enough to keep up with the spring onions growing next to them, and the mint plant I coaxed to life from years-old seeds doubled in size in the week I was away.

But I’m fucking tired of going to work every day and not being able to afford to replace the screen on my ereader. Which isn’t a dig at work, by the way- I rather like the place. I’m tired because a lot of why I missed training yesterday? Was because I really can’t afford to eat out or eat convenience food for a while after my week away and since my plane was so late I had no food in my house and hadn’t been able to cook a few days of food the night before.

Holding things together is tiring. Knowing that you’ll be absolutely fine- as long as nothing goes wrong- is tiring. Not having much time or money? Is exhausting, because living on a tight budget takes work. Living on a tighter budget than you need to- both with time and money- because you know that you need that little extra wiggle-room when things inevitably go wrong? Even more so. And when more than one or two small things go wrong and you see your weeks or months of wiggle-room knocked back in hours or days? That’s exhausting. Yes, there’s times when I just want to hide away in my room, shut the world out, tell them all they can go to hell and cry.

So maybe I’ll get that lotto ticket after all.

It’s the placebo effect, innit? You do things that symbolise getting better for you, and you feel better. You feel better, so you have more spoons to do better things. It’s a symbol, a statement that you really do wish for more. That you know that things can be hard, even when they’re also good. And that you haven’t given up yet.

Edit a couple of hours later: I got the lotto ticket. Wish me luck 😉

Broken screens, the lotto and how exhausting it can be to be broke.
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FTBConscience Reproductive Rights

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , 5 Comments

Last Saturday evening, I took a few hours off from BiCon to pop over to an entirely different kind of conference- FTBConscience, Freethought Blogs’s first ever annual conference, located right here on these internets. While the bar was a little lacking (or would have been, if I didn’t have another con bar to go to right after), the conference was anything but.

I spoke on a panel on Reproductive Rights, alongside Brianne Bilyeu, Greg Laden, Bree Pearsall, Fausta Luchini, Robin Marty and Nicole Harris– an intimidatingly brilliant bunch of choice activists, bloggers and scientists if ever I saw one. Check out the full footage here:

If you like that, then you’ll definitely want to take a look at, y’know, all the other sessions. Internets are magic!

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FTBConscience Reproductive Rights

Why You Need To Quit Calling Homophobes Closet Cases.

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , , , , 24 Comments

A comment over at The Journal:

Homophobia is often a symptom of latent homosexuality. Homophobes need to be encouraged to accept their orientation.

I quote it because it’s so common. We hear this all the time. Someone expresses wildly homophobic views, and the response is that they must be closeted themselves. They’ve got some issues to deal with, amirite? Some personal stuff they need to work out. Wink. Nudge. Know what I mean?

Yeah. I know what you mean.

Sometimes you’re right. Lots of people do respond to internal conflicts by acting out. Loads of vehemently homophobic people are closeted. But I’ve got a few issues with ‘homophobes are all queers’ being our go-to explanation.

It’s homophobic.

You’re a straight ally or a happy out queer. You don’t go around using homophobic slurs- except maybe with your BFFs in private, because that’s different. Until, that is, someone starts loudly proclaiming that queers are evil sodomites who’re bound to hell and should be kept far, far away from children. Against them, all bets are off, and you just know that the best way to get under their skin is to call them the thing that they hate the most. And y’know what?  I’ll bet you also do it because it’s fun. We don’t get many chances to make gleeful insinuations about someone’s orientation. That’s normally considered impolite, isn’t it? But when it comes to loud homophobes, we can gleefully let out our gossipy sides and speculate to our heart’s content.

It’s a pity that by doing that, we’re throwing queers under the bus. We’re perpetuating the idea that there’s something salacious about queerness. That it’s okay- even in very particular circumstances- to mock someone’s internal struggles with a homophobic society.

Closet cases’ orientations shouldn’t matter. You advocate homophobia? I’ll come down like a ton of bricks on your views. What goes on inside your head is irrelevant to me, in all but one instance.

You see, to be honest, homophobic closet cases are one of the few kinds of homophobes I’d have genuine sympathy for. I get that coming out is terrifying. I get that internalised homophobia can mess you up. Those things damage us all, and closeted homophobes have been damaged even more than most of them. I oppose their views utterly- and at the same time I wish them the best and hope that they’ll learn to accept and love who they are. But I know that’s one hell of a tough road.

Which brings me to straight people.

Straight people are off the hook.

A hell of a lot of the speculation about loud homophobes’ orientations seems to come, not from queers, but from straight people. The straight people who we know and love, who call themselves allies and love us right back. Lots of the time, it comes from straight folks who walk the ally walk as well as talking the talk- the people who march beside us, defend us even when we’re not around, listen when we tell t hem how it is, support us. I love you guys to pieces, by the way!

But when you say that the loudest homophobes are closeted LGBT folks, you erase the fact that the vast, vast majority of homophobia doesn’t come from closeted people. It comes from straight people. Casual, everyday homophobia overwhelmingly comes from straight people (and yes, by the way, I know that all of you aren’t like that). The vast majority of people who vote against marriage equality are straight. The vast majority of the people who draft gender recognition legislation that enshrines gatekeeping, divorce, diagnoses and compulsory surgery are cis. The people who think that knowing we even exist should be kept from kids, because we’re too ‘confusing’? Mostly straight and cis. The people who treat us ever-so-slightly differently, who tokenise us, who judge us by how closely we conform to stereotypes? Mostly straight and cis. And, yeah, most of the people who brainwash, reject and demonise us are straight and cis too.

But if we joke that homophobes are all homos, we let straight people rest easy. Homophobia becomes something that isn’t just targeted at LGBTQ people. It’s something perpetuated by us too. Homophobia stops being straight people’s problem.

It erases the structures that make closet cases into homophobes.

Do homophobic closeted queers exist? Hell yeah! Is it a disproportionate thing? I think it is! Do closeted homophobes come from nowhere? No.

Every closeted homophobe is themself a victim of decades of oppression. They’re not demons. They’re seriously, horribly damaged people who have been twisted into caricatures of the antithesis of what they should be. They’ve been so profoundly distorted by the communities they grew up and live in that  It’s gotta be horrible, and they didn’t start it. Our society is riddled with homophobic structures both overt and subtle. Homophobic queers are the crowning glory of a society that tells us that who we are is shameful and disgusting. If we want to fix that? We have to look a little deeper. We have to quit looking at the weeds and dig out the roots.

Isn’t that just letting closeted homophobes off the hook?

I hope not!

There’s a huge difference between the responses that we have to homophobes who’ve been outed, and the idea that every single homophobe gets tarred the the queer label. If we know that a particular person is a hypocritical, lying piece of shit who’s, say, using their massive public influence to turn people against LGBT folks while secretly messing around with people of a distinctly similar gender to their own? They’re fair game. Homophobes in general, though? Let’s remember that they’re far more likely to just be garden variety hetero bigots.

And just because I can, have some Roy Zimmerman:

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Why You Need To Quit Calling Homophobes Closet Cases.

LGBT Community and Pride: Where have they been?

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , , , , Leave a comment

In the past week we heard a lot from people from all sides of our community regarding Dublin Pride’s decision not to allow speakers from community and activist groups after Saturday’s parade. Fortunately for everyone, Pride were able to come to an agreement with LGBTQ groups, allowing them a small amount of time to address the Pride crowds.

There’s one thing I kept on hearing last week from some people associated with Pride Committee members that I’d like to address, and that’s this: where were the community and activist groups all year? While Pride Committee members were volunteering their time to put on a festival.. where was everyone else?

Where were they? Here, of course. Everywhere.

I find it difficult to understand how members of the Pride committee could see that they gave long hours to their group, but not that everyone else is doing the same.

The vast majority of the work that goes into every LGBT community or activist group in the country is voluntary. Even organisations with paid staff rely heavily on volunteers. Throughout the country, every evening and weekend, people give long hours of their time and donate their incredible expertise to build our communities and campaign for inclusion and equality.

We all give our time.

Activist and community groups build and sustain the community that Pride celebrates. They give us a place to go for the other 50 weeks of the year. They run the support groups and helplines. They organise our regular meetups. They run the campaigns that will- oh, they will– build a society where LGBTQ people are not only equally respected under the law, but equally valued as members of our society.

Activist and community groups have been working their butts off on activism and community building. That’s what they do. They also gave Dublin Pride what they asked for- filled out their forms to be part of the parade- and no doubt assumed that in the absence of any further information, the day would continue to be organised in a similar way to how it had been for years. Dublin Pride are the people who had responsibility for letting everyone else know if something else was going on.

If they didn’t do that? They should own up. Complaining about having put in long hours to people who do the exact same thing with their own evenings and weekends? Not doing anyone any favours. Hopefully next year’s committee can learn from this year’s mistakes, take ownership of their jobs and make an event that is both a spectacular party and a call to action.

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LGBT Community and Pride: Where have they been?