Our Queer Future Is Already Here
It’s just not very evenly distributed
We live in perilous times. And for many queer people, the world is not safe even in countries that we often think of having legislative protections. James Finn gave a provocative prompt based on this:
Does the future for queer people see us as lovers or lepers? (My paraphrasing.)
Passing same-sex marriage into law in many countries gave us this illusory hope that we had made it to some destination. We pride ourselves, and rightly so, on how far we have come. And yet doing so means we can too easily close our eyes to how far we still have to go.
Growing up in the 1980s, anyone could have been forgiven to think that apartheid would live forever in South Africa or the Cold War would continue indefinitely. And then in the space of a year, over 1989–1990, we saw a monumental dismantling of these systems of oppression.
It was easy to think, in 1990, that we were moving into a new era where the people of South Africa and Eastern Europe would live with greater freedoms and prosperity. And while the political shifts in these regions were most certainly welcome, it also just opened up a door to newer and different kinds of problems.
