Blog: Are There Queers in the Future? On Children & Historical Erasure 

Whitney once said that she believes the children are our future. I love Whitney as much as the next queen trapped in a cis-femme’s body but I’d like to take a moment to critically examine that claim. Whitney was simply voicing an emotional plea to look to children for hope, to act on their behalf: a plea which pervades our culture.

The idea of the future seems to be intertwined with ideas and expectations of heterosexuality, of ability, of whiteness. If you have any doubts about this claim, watch The Jetsons.

When we put children at the forefront of political movements and our future we place a premium on reproductive (that is heterosexual) romance and sexuality. Scholars, including Jose Esteban Munoz and Lee Edelman, ask then: What place do queers have in this future? Edelman argues against futurity. Munoz argues that queer people of color cannot afford to imagine a world without future.

While visiting Southern California for the Critical Ethnic Studies: The Future of Genocide Conference at UC Riverside, I decided to make a trip to the Museum of Tolerance with my friend Gabe. On the second floor is the Holocaust memorial exhibit. Everyone is given a card with the face and name of a Jewish child who had either been killed during or managed to survive the Halocaust. As we walked through the multi-media exhibit, we were told about the rise of Nazism, of the world’s apathy, of the ultimate liberation at the hands of the Allies. This was very emotionally loaded for me and, I think, the other people around me.

In the final room of the exhibit, a faux gas chamber, we were shown images of infants and children who had been killed at the hands of Nazis. This was doubtless to give some idea of the level of the atrocity experienced by Jews, but this was also about something else. It was about furthering the project of reifying the child. The child - the product of heterosexual intercourse - becomes this fetish of heterosexuality and what kind of monster would want to destroy this product of sacred bond? Rather than focus on the inhumanity of all suffering, I was expected to see that killing children is the worst thing that someone could ever do. And we must never let anyone ever do this again.

Gabe brought up the fact that during the Hitler regime (as well as other regimes, like Castro’s Cuba) homosexuals were routinely persecuted, imprisoned, experimented upon and killed. Hitler saw homosexuality as incompatible with racial purity and proliferation of Aryans. In 1935, it became law that “A male who commits a sex offense with another male or allows himself to be used by another male for a sex offense shall be punished with imprisonment.” The estimated number of gay men exterminated during the Holocaust range from 10,000 to 15,000.

The exhibit made one reference to the persecution of queers, and noted that though they were imprisoned and killed they were not singled out by the Nazi regime in the way that Jews were. Likely this statement was made without malicious intent. It likely seemed innocuous to the writer, editor, voice artist and exhibit curator. But its effect was this: The people who were killed were good, well-intentioned, and of course, heterosexual citizens just like you and me. They weren’t sexually aberrant. We’re not asking you to see the persecution of queers as worthy of inspiring anger or sadness.

I imagine that it is this very sentiment that has placed adoption at the center of the conservative gay movement.

Forgive me the morbidity of this discussion, but I use this recent experience to illustrate something that happens all the time. As a cisgendered woman in a relationship with a cisgendered man, I feel the pressure of child-bearing often. More significantly, I feel the romantic pull of the “bond” that women have with their children, the “worthwhile” nature of parenting, the “sacrifice” I’m expected to make that will gain me access to the “specialness” of the mommy club. But my politics (and selfish desire not to potentially jeopardize my vulva’s happiness) land me squarely onto a firmly held anti-reproduction stance. I think longingly of what it would mean to my mom and grandma (who are both still alive) if I had a baby. I think about us holding hands, 4 generations of Latina women, at Disneyland, eating ice cream on the beach, laughing, and otherwise participating in heterosexuality and capitalism. The pull is so strong, so achingly alluring. As a predominantly heterosexual woman I can access that future if I wanted. I can’t entirely imagine what the allure may be for someone whose humanity is in question because of who they fuck or love or both. But I can imagine what the allure is for someone whose humanity is in question because of their skin color (brown), their gender (womyn) or their size (fat!).

We cannot continue to invoke humanity through heterosexuality.

We cannot continue to demand that heterosexuality is a pre-requisite for citizenship.

I think that’s all I have to say. For now.