“Queer Enough to Get Over the Rainbow”

The following talk was presented by Mirha-Soleil Ross on June 17th, 2000 as part of an event entitled: "Queers Making Trouble: Activism for All Ages." The event brought together queer and transsexual artists and activists from many generations and diverse cultural backgrounds for an evening of politically charged poetry, film, music, and spoken word.
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I host a weekly animal rights radio show on CIUT 89.5 FM. On Thursday, June 15th, while anti-poverty activists were getting their bones crushed and their eyes burnt by our Oh-so-loving representatives of injustice,1 I had the honor to interview on our show Rod Coronado. He is an indigenous traditionalist of the Pascua-Yaqui Nation and has been an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activist since 1985.

He was the first US activist to be incarcerated in a federal prison for actions carried out on behalf of the earth and the animals. He was sentenced to four and a half years for his participation in the 1992 Animal liberation raid and arson attack on the Michigan States University's Fur Bearer Research Facility. Thirty-two years of research intended to benefit the fur farm industry was destroyed and two minks from the Experimental Fur Farm were rescued. He was released from jail last year and returned to his homeland in Tucson, Arizona to gain back some strength from his elders and to teach indigenous youth in a high school about the animals and the earth.

There are so many industries that torture and destroy in all impunity billions of animals every year in North America. So I asked Rod why, as an animal liberation and indigenous warrior, he has focused his attacks against the fur industry.

He answered:

"As an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They [the fur industry] were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the new world. They were the ones who introduced disease. They were the ones to introduce alcoholism. They were the ones who introduced gunpowder, and many, many things that led to our decimation. So it's a continuation of a century old resistance to conquest, colonialism, and imperialism. So I have an incredible amount of empathy for the animals on fur farms and in the wild in steel jawed leghold traps because they are suffering just as my ancestors suffered and the fur trade today is the modern incarnation of those very same people who murdered and destroyed my people in my homeland."

After the interview, I was walking with my boyfriend in the direction of Queen's Park [where anti-poverty activists were demonstrating] to see if there was still some action going on over there. Unfortunately all that was left were stinky flattened piles of horseshit and police officers babbling, almost drooling onto overly agitated journalists with stinky flattened horseshit stuck under their shoes. There wasn't much left to do so this gave me some time to think about my own activism and about how so many times, over the last 14 years, I wished that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transsexuals as communities were able to make the kinds of powerful connections that Rod Coronado had just made on the radio. I thought about how so many times I wished making connections between oppressions and political networking in the queer community meant more than just building alliances between the "Princess Diana Memorial Synchronized Swimming Gay Team" and the "Ontario-Support-Network-for-Lesbians-and-Gays-Who-Prefer-Pepsi-to-Coke-With-Their-Doritos".

How many times did I feel like asking queer people what they will do once they obtain same sex benefits all across the board. Once they have the right to marry and even get the Pope's benediction for it. Once they own Canada Wonderland and the Maple Leaf Garden. Once they attain the ultimate objective on the official queer political agenda: the right - during Pride Week Celebrations - to hang a giant rainbow flag, symbol of our unshakable unity in diversity from the top of the CN Tower. Then what will happen?

Are they going to comfortably sit at home on their lazy queer asses? What are they going to do once they've become respectable enough citizens to occupy half the seats of the Reform Party? I know many gay men will probably keep on spending some significant amount of time kissing the police ass to get the cops to chase the prostitutes out of their Mega-Merry-Old-Gay-City so that THEY can get to the bathhouse without having to bear the sight of women renting their pussies to guys THEY wish THEY were able to suck off for free. 2

I'm wondering if they'll finally sit down and reflect on the fact that their nice theme park, their dandelion-free golf course, their dream cottages by the lake, their condos, and twelve dozen bathhouses are built on stolen indian land. I'm wondering if they'll finally have enough "time" to realize that their fully equipped leather chamber is the product of a vile industry that murders billions of cows every year and reduces them to mere meat-making and milking machines, to "mammalian bio-reactors". I'm wondering if they'll think about the inhumane and numbing working conditions of workers from racial and cultural minorities in slaughterhouses in the US. I'm wondering if thinking about all of these things will make them women and men enough, human and humane enough, queer enough to transform their chambers into 100% post-consumer leatherette boudoirs.

I was 16 years old when I saw a documentary on television showing animals - coyotes, foxes, minks, wolves, birds, raccoons, and lynxes - agonizing for hours in Conibear, steel jaw leghold traps, and in snares. I was so traumatized by what I saw that I immediately knew those 12 minutes of footage had instantly and radically changed my life forever. Seeing those animals struggling in traps, chewing their own legs to get away, drowning underwater while trying to pull their heads out of those metal claws that ripped their flesh instantly brought back to my consciousness every single incident of violence and inhumanity I had ever seen perpetrated by human beings against other human beings or animals. From the daily beatings I endured in elementary and high school for years, to a certain white male teacher in my 7th grade class cracking jokes about the lips of a black student. From my uncle and aunt catching my four year old cousin smoking and deciding to teach him a lesson by restraining him and burning his fingers with a lighter to watching Roots on television and seeing Kunta Kinte getting his foot hacked off by a plantation owner. From watching a film called "Mourrir à Tue-Tête" in which a man beats up a woman, rapes her, and pisses on her at the end to being forced by my parents to go ice-fishing when I was 5 years' old and feeling so helpless when witnessing a group of 6 kids kicking and dismembering a large, live, and struggling dog-fish. All of these images and many more came up to my head and paralyzed me for hours. I have never been able since then to separate one from another.

After seeing this program, I did make some links. I immediately quit eating meat even though I thought I was going to die within one month and even though my parents drove me crazy repeating I had been brainwashed. As a typical “white trash” quebecois kid, I had survived my whole life on baloney, cheap n' fat ground beef, white Weston bread with raspberry jam, Cheez Wiz, overboiled white potatoes, the bi-weekly Poutine Royale, and on the gastronomy served at such five star restaurants as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Harvey's.

I also started going to animal rights demonstrations and there I came in contact with people that my social location had until then prevented me from meeting. I was all at once excited, intimidated, and impressed by them. I had never met someone who had a "Masters" or a "Doctorate." I was especially surprised to learn that you could be a Doctor in literature! I knew nothing from nothing then. I had never read a book, didn't speak English, and came from a poor and illiterate family. And when I say illiterate, I don't mean that my parents hadn't read the latest Milan Kundera, but that they were both elementary school drop-outs and that until the age of forty, my father wasn't even able to read the name of a street. What I mean is that I grew up until the age of 16 with the TV guide as my only source of literature, both fiction and non-fiction. The people I met in the animal rights movement helped me learn non-slang French, helped me with my grammar, encouraged me to learn English and Spanish, and to return to school. Most of them were women who were involved in other social movements. They supported my young mind and heart and built on my genuine feelings of caring for animals and humans in order to help me gain a more comprehensive understanding of the ways animals, some groups of human beings, and the earth are treated by the dominant culture and its systems. They did so with generosity, with respect, without imposing any kind of political program on me and without any condescendence towards my lack of formal or non-formal education or what we call in French "Culture". Many of them were also lesbian-feminists so my first readings consisted of books by women like Ti-Grace Atkinson, Denise Boucher, Jovette Marchessault, Marie-Claire Blais, and Anne-Marie Alonzo. I often felt very stupid and discouraged when they would get too poetic because I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. I especially had difficulty reading Nicole Brossard: I would inevitably fall asleep after one page. But these women friends told me not to worry, that ease with reading came with practice. They also added that they too often fell asleep trying to read some of her books.

Anything else political I've done since then - any demonstration or petition or action or movement I've been a part of - is a direct result of the consciousness I developed from the support of these activists and from my overall involvement with the animal rights movement.

To this day, the people who make me vibrate, who inspire me, who lift my spirit, who turn me on, who nourish me intellectually, politically, and spiritually are activists, writers, and artists who are not scared of being ridiculed for having the courage to bring down in their personal and political lives the untouchable barriers instituted and maintained between human and non-human animals by centuries of western propaganda.

They are people like long time vegan and civil rights' activist Dick Gregory who makes a strong comparison between the way animals are treated by the meat industry and the living conditions of African Americans in the ghettos. They are people like talk show host Montel Williams who shed tears on his program one day when talking about how he cannot separate images of chained and beaten circus African and Asian elephants from images of the enslavement of his own people in America.

They are people like legendary performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who barely escaped the Nazi holocaust with her family and who asks:

"How dare we? How dare we do this? As horrible and abominable the Nazi period was, it was mercifully short. But we have been doing this to animals for countless centuries... And in the last century it has gotten to a point, because of our technology, where we are capable of eradicating billions of animals a year and breeding them in order to do this, in order to torture and kill them, and for reasons which are spurious, which are absolutely no longer necessary and cannot be condoned."

Other people who have made similar contributions include labor activist Cesar Chavez, researcher Jane Goodall, writer Alice Walker, ecofeminist Greta Gaard, Rasta artist and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as John Africa and the people from the MOVE Organization.

In her latest book "Stolen Harvest," Indian environmentalist and physicist Vandana Shiva writes:

"At the threshold of the third millennium, liberation strategies have to ensure that human freedom is not gained at the cost of other species, that freedom for one race or gender is not based on increased subjugation of other races and genders. In each of these strivings for freedom, the challenge is to include the other. For more than two centuries, patriarchal, eurocentric, and anthropocentric scientific discourse has treated women, other cultures, and other species as objects. Experts have been treated as the only legitimate knowers. For more than two decades, feminist movements, Third World and indigenous people's movements, and ecological and animal rights movements have questioned this objectification and denial of subjecthood."

I'll finish by saying that I'm hoping one day the queer movement is able to open its political agenda to recognize and embrace struggles that go beyond its immediate boundaries. I am not too optimistic that this will happen but I would love for you to prove me wrong.

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1 In the afternoon of June 15th, 2000, over 1000 anti-poverty activists walked to the Ontario Legislature to protest the conservative Harris Government's raging war against the poor. The protestors were met with extreme brutality. Eighteen were arrested and detained, many were seriously injured, trampled by police horses, pepper-sprayed, and beaten.

2 Tensions reached a peak in Toronto's gay district during the summer of 1999 as middle-class gay men lobbied the City and its police services to rid "their" streets of undesirable elements. As a result, hundreds of street youth, homeless people, psychiatric survivors, and prostitutes endured the daily harassment and assault of the police and local residents. In one infamous public meeting, a gay man stood up and urged the police to arrest all female and transsexual hookers hanging out in the gay village so that " he could get to the bathhouse in peace!"