Queer Space, the collective/community center into which I poured my early twenties, turned 10 years old this year. Actually, last December, but who's counting. The current collective thinks it was born in 1998. And I self-identify as 29. Whatever.
Queer Space has changed a lot (I hear) but some of the collective members have been there all along, which is crazy/fantastic/impossible. They demanded a letter that they could read at the birthday party. Instead, Contrary Mary sent them something that should definitely *not* be read out loud at any kind of party. But queer history is important!!!
Should just say up front that this letter is from my own memories. There were at least a dozen more people who busted their asses for years to make Queer Space happen and I didn't write about any of them here. There were dozens more who busted their asses after I left Ireland in 1999, whom I don't know at all. One of the starter-uppers, the brilliant and unstoppable Barbary Cook, promises to force us to write essays for an anthology about how it all went down. Till then, sorry if my history is a little me-focused.
Dear Queer Space,
Happy birthday! It’s so exciting that the little spark that a scrappy bunch of queers lit 10 years ago took on its own life – that even as people came and went, and the idea of what Queer Space should be shifted, that getting a bunch of ourselves into a room to envision something better than what we had really did turn out to be a way to shape our community. Who knew?
Queer Space is amazing in lots of ways, but there are at least two things that make it really, really special. First, it’s a direct offshoot of the truly revolutionary direct action organizing of ACT UP – the movement built on the lesson of AIDS that queers just couldn’t be silent anymore, that we had to stand up and demand some space in the world, and stop worrying about being polite and safe, or we would die. So Queer Space is really an important piece of movement history. Second, I think it’s fair to say that Queer Space has transformed Belfast just by existing. It’s just a crazy example of how taking the risk of breaking silence, saying things out loud that are maybe considered irrelevant or obnoxious (like “Hey, I’m queer!”), can change everything.
So even though it makes this birthday wish into a longish letter, I wanted to write down some of the history… You can skip to the end if it’s too long for the party!
In 1994, I was trying to avoid dropping out of college and I ended up on a study abroad trip to Queens. At the time, the queer scene was mostly just the Parliament and the Crow’s Nest, and there was nothing queer at all in the whole university. Being a good little American busybody activist queer, though, I decided it was my job to start an LGB Soc. I put up some signs, people showed up and soon we had a great group. But when the term was ending and it came time to set a new contact person, no one would be it. Everyone was so unwilling to write down their name next to the letters “LGB” that they preferred to let the group disband. And this was the same problem that kept people from speaking out when bad things happened to queers, or when queers needed something – no one was willing to be the face.
A few of us thought we could solve that problem by creating an organization with its own space, that could put its own name to statements about queer issues, and where someone could call – whether it was a queer looking to connect with a community or a journalist wanting to write about queer lives – and people could speak without being personally named. It could’ve been any kind of space as long as it had a telephone. But since there was also nowhere to find queer books or information either, we settled on the idea of a library. There were a few obstacles, like no money and no space… and I had to go back to the States to finish college. But we all said we’d try to raise some money and come back together to make it happen.
I went back to NYC all excited about queer organizing in Belfast, and the first thing I did was look around for funding. I saw that there was this group, the Irish Lesbian & Gay Organization, which I’d vaguely known about in high school. Back then they’d made the news because the Ancient Order of Hibernians had banned them from the St. Patrick’s Parade on Fifth Avenue, claiming that queers were perverted and anyway “there’s no such thing as an Irish gay person.” When the NYC Mayor got around the ban by inviting ILGO to march with him, onlookers had thrown beer and trash at them. Now in 1995, they were still fighting the homophobia and brutality represented by the parade.
I went along to an ILGO meeting and told them about the plan to make a new queer space in Belfast, and asked if they’d help fund it. I thought I was very bold going there, and I also remember that the meeting was intimidating as hell. It was nothing like Belfast, where queers were mostly just fun and I was the one pushing politics. These were Irish immigrants who were talking about challenging the Cardinal’s homophobia, which seemed unbelievably brazen. They talked about exposing the biased way that police enforced rules to stop queers protesting, and the attempts of old guard Irish immigrants to keep up the myth of Ireland as a holy place populated by little old straight ladies with lace kerchiefs. Their analysis of what it meant to be queer, to be immigrants, to be women (which most were) and to be Irish was based on big ideas about democracy, anti-imperialism that included Irish republicanism, and breaking old chains like the one that says people should behave like good little boys and girls even as they’re marginalized. In that first meeting I heard them talk about how city officials were hiding behind the Church in order to violate queers’ rights, and strategize how to get people into the streets to fight bigotry in person and force the police to show their true colors by arresting protesters. This meeting was the machinery of a movement. So when I asked about money for a queer library in Belfast, they looked a bit blank, said they had no funding themselves – and got right back to the subject of how to change New York.
I stayed anyway. I never asked about money again, but I learned tons and tons about organizing, making the media listen to you, and not being afraid of the controls that are in place to keep people from trying to change the order of things, like arrest. I learned how, if you’re willing to take a risk, you can use turn those controls on their head. For example, the police tried to say they were sorry to muzzle us but they “didn’t have enough resources” to let us protest homophobia, but when we protested anyway they found enough resources to arrest us, and the resulting media attention gave more exposure to our protest – and to the police’s lie – than any march we could have staged.
Many ILGO members were also in ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which was using a lot of the same tactics to force the US government deal with the AIDS crisis. At the time, it was mostly queer. ACT UP was fearless and really, really well-informed. ACT UP knew the government was lying when it said it couldn’t test drugs on women or people of color to make sure they actually worked (the first drug didn’t, but the studies were only done on white men till ACT UP fought for more trials.) And they were incredibly bold and won incredible victories. They took over buildings, they took over a live national newscast and started talking about AIDS on the air. They literally made the government develop the drugs that finally slowed the wave of death among gay men and other people deemed “throwaways.”
ILGO and ACT UP were built on some common principles. We were steeped in them, and I think the more seasoned queers spent a lot of time deliberately drilling them into us: Anyone in the community could join and no one was the leader. Everyone was responsible for bringing information to the table, and coming up with ideas about how to move forward. Courage and creativity were some of the best perks of queerness, and we should use them. Everyone had a role to play. There was nothing that couldn’t be done; queers were well-connected and resourceful, and closeted people in positions of power especially owed the benefit of their connections to the activists who were doing the hard work of being out. Funding was poison because it made you dependent on more funding, and fear of losing your funding could be used to shut you up. (There was plenty of evidence to show that community support could move mountains: we heard a million times that the Lesbian Herstory Archives had bought a whole building on donations of $1 and $5.)
By the time I finally graduated college and was ready to go back to make our little library, ILGO and ACT UP had completely changed my sense of what was possible. I’d given up on looking for funding, and had instead been buying remaindered queer books out of dollar bins. I was sure a group of people could just do it if we wanted to. (I still did apply for a grant, but one of the decision-makers was an émigré from Belfast. He asked “how are you going to keep a community center safe in that war zone?” I said “I’m not, how could I?” And that was the end of that.)
I got back to Belfast in early in 1997 and looked for the people who had said, two and a half years before, that we’d regroup and make a queer space. It was probably stupid to think they’d just been waiting for me… of course they weren’t. They’d grown up and gotten real jobs. So I just started calling up queers up and making them have coffee with me – some whom I’d known, others who just seemed likely to be interested – and told them this thing was definitely happening. Don’t think I outright lied to anyone… it was a pretty brazen claim, though. I also made a dinky little website and some flyers. People started to be interested, and took up flyering themselves. We had some meetings. We started using the language of “collective” and talking about “when we open.” We rented a space with money borrowed from my savings account, painted it purple, e-mailed out a call for furniture and it appeared. We had a stereo, some CDs and a coffeemaker. (The song that made it all happen was “Step by Step.”) We put in the books, made coffee and told people to put in 50p if they had some. Everyone did, and some people put in a lot more. I can remember how much money I put up to rent the place – couldn’t have been that much – but I was paid back within the year out of the coffee donation basket.
And we had that big meeting. The space was barely open, I think. We’d flyered the hell out of the Parliament and the Crow’s Nest. We already had a healthy collective of a dozen people and they brought loads more people too. The plan was to come up with a set of ideas and agreements about what the space would be, and to do it collectively. But also to challenge the community to do a lot of things that people had never done, like run an organization without bosses, and a political organization at that. And to politicize queer identity, to explicitly refuse to hide the existence and nature of this queer place. And to sit down with each other to make deliberate decisions about what a Belfast queer community should look like aside from a pub crew or a population targeted for health outreach.
I’d drafted some operating principles and poured into them every idea about queer freedom, democracy, resistance and resolution I’d learned from ILGO and ACT UP. I remember it took a while for the 60 people in the room to finally all agree and understand what those actually meant for them. We saved the question about the name for last, I think. I personally really wanted it to be called “queer” and some of the people who had already been working in the collective wanted it too. Maybe the people who worked on it, also, were more politicized already, or had been out for long enough to have history with Belfast’s feminist queer organizing in decades before. But a lot of the other people in the room were brand new, which made us nervous but also excited. We had a long conversation on whether or not to use the word “queer.” We talked about including transgender people in the name of the place, and about how important it was or wasn’t to use the name itself to take up some new space in people’s ears. It went on for hours, literally. I still can’t believe everyone finally agreed to call it Queer Space – it would probably still be a difficult argument now – but it happened. And it was a great leap of faith by the people in the room, most of whom were taking a huge chance on something totally new.
And then Queer Space existed! Thank god for students and the dole, because the place was full and everyone was a volunteer. People learned how to join into the collective. We took Belfast by storm, hanging flyers for events and sometimes just flyers about the fact that queers existed; we posted the word “queer” all over the city. We got lots of media attention, sent out press releases, maintained e-mail lists, made connections with queer groups in other places. We formed a little direct action cell called Queer Action Belfast which had a particularly great logo, and made t-shirts, and protested Newt Gingrich and posted signs asking “Do you love the lesbians in your life?” To me, it was like the sun coming up. Maybe it was different for people who were from there… But suddenly people were coming from Derry, Dundalk, and even Dublin for queer events in Belfast. New club nights opened that were either gay on purpose or just became, and accepted becoming, gay. The Belfast Pride committee was revived, and all the political parties turned up to a forum on gay rights. They were even all supportive, or at least said they were. (There was one exception… I wrote about that forum in Fortnight magazine, saying that all the parties had pledged their support. But Stephen King, the gay man full of contradictions who was homophobe John Taylor’s right hand, threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t retract because the UUP definitely did not support gay rights.) Queers were out in the light of day, and straight people were having to make room for us. It was really clear that we’d changed everything, mostly just by being out, making something for all queers to share, and being available to the outside world for comment. And we were transformed ourselves.
And that’s why I love Queer Space. So happy birthday! You’re my favorite revolution. Miss you all & hope to see you again soon.
xoxo
emmaia
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