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Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Queer activist sits down with students, discusses faults in mainstream gay rights movement

[media-credit name=” Chelsea Merrigan” align=”alignnone” width=”336″]NEWS_roundtable_ChelseaMerrigan[/media-credit]

With a group of students gathered around a table at the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Campus Center, Queer activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore kicked off her shoes and explained her ideas on the future of the queer movement.

Sycamore answered questions about her new book “The End of San Francisco” and her experiences with queer activism at a brown bag discussion Friday in an event celebrating LGBTQ history month.

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Her book emphasizes the failures of the mainstream gay movement, as well as the irony of how the transgender movement is currently making some of the same mistakes, Sycamore said.

“I feel that the point of the transgender term as an umbrella term is that anyone can create more options and I feel like the T on the LGBT isn’t there,” Sycamore said. “It’s a fixed identity that mimics the others and that for me is sad — it doesn’t actualize the potential of trans.”

Groups designated to help transgendered persons have actually counter-productively created violent behavior against transgender people, Sycamore said, emphasizing the importance of taking a stand against these groups.

An attendee agreed that at times she feels the most excluded by the radical queer culture.

Sycamore said one of the goals of her book is to advocate against the violence demonstrated by these “failure institutions.”

“The idea that we have arrived, figured things out and created alternatives is actually camouflaging horrible behavior of radical queers with a more intoxicating rhetoric,” Sycamore said. “When the people we believe in act in a similar way, they might look cuter but it’s the same kind of violent behavior.”

Sycamore said she has participated in many protests in order to advocate her beliefs against such violence. She said one protest in particular took place in 2003 against a LGBT Center in San Francisco that “failed in its responsibilities” by functioning as an institution that was “built as a corporate meeting space that didn’t serve the community.”

Sycamore said although San Francisco was the center for activism and radical queer politics, her experience in the city and with its culture turned out to be “disappointing.”

“It was like living in a place of loss,” Sycamore said. “I was just there for familiarity.”

Sycamore said writing her book helped her finally transcend the comfortable familiarity of San Francisco and leave the city.

Talking about past failure is a great way to create change for the future, Sycamore said. A step toward progress would be to defund the “failure institutions” and create something new that empowers those currently being silenced, she said.

A mechanism for achieving this goal would be to strive for political leaders to use an intersexual analysis when making decisions, Sycamore said.

“Speaking on a macro-political scale, instead of narrowing the options like always before, politics needs to adhere to a larger crowd,” Sycamore said.

Sycamore also spoke on campus on Wednesday about identity politics and rejecting the mainstream gay movement.

At age 19, she found sanctuary in the “fringe” of San Francisco. Sycamore lived in a neighborhood called The Mission, where queer activism flourished, as the community fought against the conventional gay agenda.

“We were rejecting the worlds that rejected us,” Sycamore said on the instigation of the Gay Shame movement.

Sycamore said the movement’s aims were to contradict gay politics concerning gay marriage and militarism. She said the problem with these agendas was that they were largely viewed as ending points as opposed to starting points for gay rights and said these distract from more important issues like housing security and health care.

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