Going After Ellen

I wrote a letter to Ellen DeGeneres about the homophobic climate in the United States, a letter that urged her to act. Although I do admire and appreciate Ellen's contributions to my experience as a queer-identified individual, I wanted to be critical of her actions and stances in my letter, letting her know my dissatisfaction with the overplay of fighting for equal marriage rights for gay people and invisibility of the struggles of queer-identified people of color as well as trans-identified individuals that I see in the LGBTQ movement. In order to explain all of this, I had to first let Ellen know the context of oppression and repression in which I see the recent suicides and highlighting of bullying queer (or queer-suspected) teens. Ellen's coming out in 1997 and continued fight to make the world a more open space for people to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc. are both exponential improvements to the hostile climate that preceded it. I cannot overplay how much I appreciate the flack that Ellen, in the public eye, took on behalf of all of us who would eventually come out as "not straight" in some way, and with this acknowledgment, I wish to push Ellen to further her activism by really taking a stand and naming what exactly is going on in our country. And the name that I suggest to Ellen is the extreme homophobia that still informs much of our policies, but especially the hearts and minds of people whom bullied/outed the teens that committed suicide. And to be integrative, I will include that in our culture we dichotomize gender, race, ability, and even age, employing the rationale of binary opposition, or to define something by what it is not to explain away any differences. Of course, with binary opposition comes the groupthink of "us" versus "them" that always ends up with the depiction of "them" as lesser, deficient, or evil.