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Good Stories are Powerful Lifelines.

Op-Ed: This  West Virginian Lawmaker plainly implied he would commit a hate crime if his children were gay. HOW?!?

2/20/2019

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Eric Porterfield is a name that many of you have probably heard by now.

He’s the Republican lawmaker who recently made headlines with his commentary on the LGBTQ+ community being a “modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan.” 

Given President's day yesterday was celebrating a rather horrifying symbol for most minorities, I'd like to take the time to discuss this "lawmaker's" comments in depth. 

I've linked the section on LGBTQ+ identities here, and the full interview is provided below.

Prepare to throw your device out the window...
TW warning: Implied LGBTQ+ hate violence

Angry Yet?

This made my stomach drop. 

His outward hatred of gays and lesbians is also accompanied with the symbol of trumps presidency crowned upon his head. 

His comments are an active reminder of how many other people share his dangerous beliefs.  This hatred is becoming common. There is a growing group of individuals who have been emboldened by the current administration to encourage hatred and violence towards minority groups.
Picture: Eric Porterfield comments to the WVVA reporter that he would drown his kids if he discovered they were gay. link: https://wvva.com/news/top-stories/2019/02/10/delegate-porterfield-stands-by-his-statements-regarding-the-lgbtq-community/
Porterfield even went as far as to imply that he would drown his own children should they come out as gay or lesbian and did so with a grin on his face (pictured right). ​​​

It's particularly troubling though that so many of them, Eric Porterfield included, think of themselves as victims rather than recognizing their accountability in the oppression of others.

They see the movements towards equal rights as taking away from their piece of the pie, instead of seeing the reality of people simply trying to improve their quality of life and come out from under the fear and discrimination they have faced.

It’s absurd for those who have been on the receiving end of discrimination for our identities to hear from those in positions of privilege that our fight for equality is somehow threatening. 
Porterfield's extremist supporters are harmful to the progress of our community because they attempt to silence and devalue our struggles. 

Porterfield has since been asked to resign, but is showing of no signs of doing so.  He continues to stand by his statements.

We must keep in mind that he still has a strong backing in the very conservative 27th district of West Virginia. 

So why would he feel the pressure to back down? His supporters feel safe vocalizing and acting upon their own dangerous philosophies and they no-doubt feel empowered by the lack of consequences they see him facing. 

So what can we do?

We can use this as fuel to empower ourselves too.

​It’s moments like these that we must work harder to bring each other up and realize how important our support is to one another. It’s easy to become discouraged, exhausted, and distant during times of strife, but at the end of the day we have to stand together if we have any hope of achieving our goals of a more equal and loving society.   
​
So, if you're out and able, or you're an ally, we strongly recommend you share this blog, and our resource database to others so they can have the tools they need to combat "parents" like Mr. Porterfield.  

If you are a child with a Porterfield parent - we're here for you. 
Share our Resources Page!
Picture: Eric Porterfield comments to the WVVA reporter that he would drown his kids if he discovered they were gay. link: https://wvva.com/news/top-stories/2019/02/10/delegate-porterfield-stands-by-his-statements-regarding-the-lgbtq-community/If you're curious for some horrible reason, the full interview is here


Picture

This Op-Ed was written by Lane Lunsford

Lane is our support group facilitator for the support group Bitter/Sweet.  She is also an advocate for bisexual people and a body piercer for her local tattoo shop.  She adores sloths, and her husband.

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Martin Luther King Jr's Ideology and the Queer Community

1/23/2019

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Over Martin Luther King Jr. day, the LGBT+ community got to "celebrate" by hearing the news that transgender military members would not be protected from President Trump’s trans military ban.

The timing of this violation rather struck us on a day that celebrates diversity and civil rights.


So let’s talk about that...

Engage in the conversation with us on this post if you like!

Peaceful Protest and Inter-sectional Activism

Martin Luther King Jr. was known for his staunch belief in peaceful protest; non-violent actions and demonstrations in order to incite change and awareness.  And his arguments were often inter-sectional.  His message burned brightly and inspired LGBTQ+ activists from that point forward.

While not every activist in the 1960’s was friendly to black people, many black and white voices united for LGBTQ rights.

Before Stonewall was the BCSL protest (Black Cat Demonstration in Silver Lake).

At the time of Stonewall, kissing a same-sex person in public warranted a sexual offense
in California. Activists gathered to respond to an unjust police raid on New Year’s Day where many people were arrested for kissing their partners. 
Want to learn more about queer history and vocabulary? Visit...
Picture: Transwhat? A guide towards allyship Link: http://transwhat.org/
An educational glossary of popular and new LGBT+ terms.
Picture: GLSEN Link: https://www.glsen.org/
An education organization for educating you on LGBTQ+ history, current events, and more.
And find more resources, just like this in our Resource Database! 

King's influence in future LGBTQ movements

Picture: The NTTCN staff at work. Link: https://www.nqttcn.com/The NTTCN staff at work!
​While the Stonewall riots are only loosely connected to King in concept, it warrants discussion
when LGBTQ and black rights are on the table. Black queer people have been contributing to King’s dream of equality since day one.

Although Stonewall was not a peaceful protest, it helped build a foundation for all people to be safe regardless of color, gender or sexuality.  It started with a black trans woman's shoe.

In 1969, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, among many others, were victims to a string of
wrongful raids in gay bars and other safe spaces.

Johnson, a black trans*woman, is most often credited with being the first to resist the police violence that night, which included exposing people’s genitals and groping lesbians.

​After the riot Johnson and Rivera founded STAR, which helped young, homeless transgender people—with a focus on black youth—get off the street.

TheTrans Therapists of Color Network carries on STARs work and specializes in inter-sectional therapy to ensure black and other under-served communities get the mental healthcare they deserve. You can find them on our resource database.

King's Spirituality and Religious LGBTQ people

​King believed in community and non-violence to the point of being arrested and jailed several times at demonstrations where he wrote the famous Birmingham Letter.

His spirituality influenced his identity greatly as an activist. The second Selma march was punctuated by King stopping when met with state troopers to kneel and pray.  He is quoted as saying “the holy spirit revives my soul again”.

Many LGBTQ people struggle with reconciling their faith and sexuality or don’t know where to start if they come to realize they are a spiritual person.

The Unitarian Universalist Organization, a national spiritual community who championed MLK's work in civil rights as part of their doctrine, also strongly LGBTQ activism and provide a safe place for any person struggling with housing, religious conflict, or finding community.
I'd like to end this by saying we've mentioned a lot of resources and I'd be remiss as the resource database coordinator if I didn't say you can find ALL of these resources on our database here.

About the Author: Ricki Palmisano

Ricki is the Database coordinator for RESCQU.NET. She vets and establishes partnerships with organizations to ensure closet-friendly resources are in the database.
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Let's talk about mental health in the  LGBTQ+ Community

1/16/2019

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PictureTwo people excitedly fight for healthcare in America.Two people excitedly fight for healthcare in America.
In Capitalist Realism, the social critic Mark Fisher said the focus on discussing mental health in purely biochemical terms works hand-in-hand with its depoliticization.

Most people who experience mental health problems will find the  discussion of mental health in purely biochemical terms familiar, and it can be helpful in de-stigmatizing mental health; “I’m not choosing to be depressed, the chemicals in my brain make me depressed.”

But, I have an issue with this that I’d like to talk about in this blog:

Only talking about mental health in medical terms can be harmful to the LGBTQ+ community.
Social and political conversations get closed off when we speak about mental health biologically because the “problem” becomes isolated to the individual’s brain chemistry.  And in the process, we ignore the social and political realities those conditions are a part of. 

​Mental Illness in the Queer Community

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI);
  • ​Members of the LGBTQ+ community are 3 times more likely to experience mental health issues, such as depression and generalized anxiety disorder than straight people.

  • LGBTQ+  youth are 3 times more likely to commit suicide and engage in self-harm. Somewhere between 38%-65% of trans individuals experience suicidal ideation.

  • Between 20-30% of the LGBTQ+ community abuse hard drugs, compared 9% of the general population. 25% of the LGBTQ+ community abuses alcohol, - double the general public’s 5-10%.

​Members of the LGBTQ+ community also experience “minority stress.”

Minority stress is a kind of constant anxiety that minorities feel due to constant awareness of their actions. Are they drawing too much attention to themselves? Are they representing their community? Do they have reliable social support?

Are they in danger?

Constant minority stress (obviously) leads to worse mental health issues.

Progress has been made to reduce minority stress, but constant diagnosis’ of the LGBT+ community ignores the nature of LGBT+ people’s environmental stresses.  In other words, the discussion of mental health as a biological issue has built a stigma that has been used in turn, as a tactic by LGBTQ+ rights opponents to remove power from our identities.
Banner for the Fund The Database Campaign from RESCQU.net

Politics and Mental Health

So we’ve been talking pretty up-in-the-air here, but let’s get real:

 The diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues carry undeniable political impact for the minority people who are diagnosed.

While being diagnosed on its own is overall an empowering thing for an individual, there is a power-exchange between the prescribing doctor and the patient, in the diagnosis.

It is fundamentally a political act to determine whether certain behaviors are acceptable or in the bounds of illness and whether people should be allowed to live freely given that condition.

To declare someone “mad” is to remove agency from their life. Leveraging mental health diagnosis’ has been a longstanding tactic of maintaining the status quo, and the strategy has become more potent with the medicalization of mental health in the early 20th century.

Feminists and civil rights activists have been famously institutionalized for their political activity, but in the case of the LGBTQ+ community, the focus has been on declaring someone to have a mental disorder— not for acting a certain way, but for being a certain way.

For a long time, having a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis preemptively closed off the possibility of political action because it was a mental health condition.

Until 1973, being gay, lesbian, or bisexual was officially considered a mental illness. It was only in 2013 that the term gender dysphoria came to replace the term Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM, which was done to help align psychiatric practices with the aim of helping trans folk with their mental health rather than treating being trans in itself as a mental disorder.

Being queer was forcibly depoliticized which made it appear politically neutral.

2 examples
           
A current example of this forced neutralization can be seen in the conversation around transgender bathroom rights. Opponents of these rights often close trans folk out of the discussion entirely by attributing their trans status to a dangerous or contagious disorder or sexual deviancy.


We also see this issue in conversion therapy. While it’s not recognized as a legitimate psychiatric practice, the message inherent to conversion therapy is that “being gay needs to be fixed rather than understood as an identity.”

In each case, psychiatric practice is used to transform a social issue into an individual one and then as a clear “problem” to be solved with that person.

And because  LGBTQ+ youth are much more susceptible to this loss of power and identity the risk is magnified horrifically.

If this occurs, the political and social realities leading to widespread anxiety in young minorities would be closed off to the conversation. They would lose their voice and with it any hope of a political solution.

They would lose any platform for managing their own identities.

Politicizing LGBTQ+ Mental Health

When the prevalence of mental health issues for members of the LGBTQ+ community and the messy political history of psychiatry, are taken together it shows a clear need for a more forward political discussion.  

Now again, the biochemical discussion of mental health is useful for helping members of the LGBTQ+ community individually. We need a proper medical vocabulary to help diagnose what problems exist within one’s brain chemistry and prescribe treatments for the symptoms.

BUT

If the discussion ends there we are left with a system that atomizes mental health, closes off the possibility for political change doesn’t approach minority stress, and renders the LGBTQ+ community captives to pharmaceutical solutions.
Politicizing the constant anxiety and depression associated with being queer is a necessary step in queer liberation. These collective illnesses demand collective action.

Maintaining a purely scientific, biochemical discussion of mental health silences this collective action. We must treat medicalization as a political tool for reforming the social needs of marginalized communities instead of repressing them.

Dylan T. Clark

Writer and editor for Rescqu.net. Mostly sparkles.

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