Communication Currents

Years ago, I was at the post-parade rally for Seattle’s LGBT Pride celebration. It was unusually sunny and warm, and someone on the stage was screaming at us. Seattle is not much of a screaming town, but someone was shouting into the public address system, “Dan Savage does not speak for gay Seattle!”

Writer, commentator, and activist Dan Savage is best known today as co-founder of the It Gets Better Project. Organized around YouTube’s video sharing, It Gets Better solicits and distributes messages to sexual and gender minority youth. The videos let them know that, although things might be tough, in adulthood, “it gets better.” Inspired in part by a well publicized series of suicides by sexual and gender minority youth, over 430,000 supporters have taken its pledge and made over 10,000 videos including individuals, celebrities, sports teams, and public figures.

It Gets Better is a vibrant example of free speech today.  It demonstrates the effectiveness of social media, affording production and distribution of public service messages at much lower costs that TV or print. It demonstrates free speech between public figures and private citizens, and between urban enclaves and rural hinterlands.  When journalists discovered it, we saw social and mass media interacting. When Google put it in a TV ad, we saw free and commercial speech partnering.  In contrast, the messages I received as a young gay teen were mostly occasional gay TV and movie characters shown obliquely, negatively, or stereotypically; and sensationalistic news reports on pedophiles, protests, or AIDS. We had free speech—even legislation to support it, like the FCC’s now-repealed Fairness Doctrine—but nothing compared to today.

Unhindered sharing of messages, whether factual information or emotional expression, such as the higher suicide risk for sexual and gender minority teens or the suffering and coded messages in slave songs, connects people, fostering the empathy and respect necessary for democracy: Witness the significant role of social media in the revolutions of the Arab Spring.

(Not, however, to sound utterly utopian. Social media, like all communication technologies, are supportive tools and not driving forces of social change. The Arab Spring was started by Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-sacrificing protest, not Twitter. Moreover, technologies can be unplugged, as in recent efforts by law enforcement to limit the free speech of activist groups by shutting down wireless networks.)

I want to consider a few different types of free speech in regards to civil rights and social justice movements. The first is most familiar: a minority cause or disempowered group speaking to larger society. This is the free speech that makes our democracy more than simple (and potentially tyrannical) majority rule. It is the speech of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harvey Milk, César Chávez, and Rachel Carson, of protest songs and alternative media. All of these, in different ways, rely on our First Amendment right to say, There are problems or injustices you may not know; People exist that are different from you, but deserve respect and rights. This is free speech of minorities to the majority.

However, I want to point out another type: free speech within a minority. This sounds deceptively simple. After all, if they are united by a shared identity or cause, then don’t they already agree? I would like to point out two exceptions: internal differences and internal conflicts.

First, as It Gets Better demonstrates, there are differences within groups. There are sexual and gender minority youth, adults, and elders. Working with queer youth in rural South Carolina is very different from when I was in Seattle and Los Angeles. The youths’ experiences are different—in some, but not all, ways—from mine as a teen in suburban Texas and activist in Chicago. For the vitality of our movement, we have to speak freely to each other. My generation largely lacked elders with whom we could communicate: my earliest image of my lesbian and gay elders was as molesters in child safety films in public school. Today, we have to overcome fears of our own aging or being branded predators in order to reach out and keep youth alive, healthy, and strong to face tomorrow’s challenges. For example, cross-generational mentoring programs, organized by educational, health, and community organizations, could be structured to facilitate addressing and allaying stereotypes of ageism, youthful disrespect, and sexual predation. While obviously ensuring young persons’ safety and power to resist unwanted romantic overtures, we must also challenge cultural stereotypes of youth as the peak of attractiveness, of older persons as always attracted to youth, and of sexual and gender minorities as disproportionately inclined toward this.

Second are conflicts within groups. Speech must flow freely, even when it is negative. We must air dirty laundry. We each belong to multiple groups and identities, and bring diverse perspectives to them. In the name of political expediency, it is often urged to deny such conflicts, to present a “unified front.” Suffragists sacrificed women of color to hasten their larger goal. Some second-wave feminists resisted sexual and gender minorities as a “lesbian menace.” Civil rights leaders often encouraged women and sexual minority constituents to hold off on their issues. Gay liberation leaders neglected women, transgendered persons, and bisexuals.  American revolutionaries set aside the issue of slavery, only to have it arise in a bloody civil war decades later.

This is shortsighted. Conflict makes groups stronger. Civil rights, feminism, sexual and minority rights have grown when they chose the hard path of facing conflicts. When, during a tour of Britain, nineteenth-century feminist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells publicly accused the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of ignoring lynching in the American South, it was seen by many as threatening the work of the temperance movement to politicize women afraid to enter the suffrage movement. Yet, each movement only grew stronger, and her efforts led to formation of the influential British Anti-lynching Committee. Today, sexual and gender minority movements need to recognize feminism and civil rights as not merely potential fundraising partners, token members, or ideals to give lip service to, but more actively plan public speech and political tactics that firmly position all as part of the same movement. Signs of this can be seen in the increasing use of the umbrella term “social justice” movements. My scholarly field of cultural studies began, in part, as a marginal, maverick effort from British adult education to value working-class and other cultures beyond the “high culture” taught in universities. Cultural studies challenged the educational establishment, but its leaders were taken aback when women pointed out they were reproducing many of higher education’s sexist structures and assumptions. Shouting matches and debates ensued, but coming through that experience helped the field become accepted at universities around the world.

Which returns me to that Pride celebration in Seattle. What had Dan Savage said that made that one speaker so angry? I can’t remember. Savage’s sex-advice column, Savage Love, has been controversial since its inception in 1991. Moreover, as Editor of The Stranger, Seattle’s popular alternative weekly and de facto queer newspaper, he was probably the city’s most powerful gay male voice. But I remember that moment because it made me proud that my community was engaging very publicly in disagreement. There was no What if the straights hear you?! The man on stage spoke freely, and it provoked more discussion among many of us there.  I wouldn’t say that being rebuked in public led somehow to Savage co-founding It Gets Better, but they share an engagement with internal free speech that is just as necessary as freely speaking to the world at large.