THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

It had started out so easy. A bunch of queers, people like me who were always not right when it came to being a boy or a girl or whatever, finally found a way to laugh about being left out because we were just not right. We all could laugh about having the most outrageous drag queen perform and parody a representation of us in this attempt for the office of mayor because we were left out without even trying. No man in a dress much less any type of transgender person, no conservative straight-looking or straight-acting lesbian or gay man, none of these figures could hope to be mayor in 1990. So laughing about it seemed a good option and we were good at it because we had heard all the jokes. We understood what was so funny about being a girly boy, or a mannish woman. People had been telling us that our whole lives, so when Joan decided to "run" for president, we just thought this will be even funnier. But then the joke took a serious turn, because suddenly the campaign was at odds with basic ideas on how many of us saw ourselves. That's when the parody wasn't so funny anymore.

Some men very close to Joan decided on a running mate, Miriam Ben Shalom, a lesbian who lost her position in the military through blatant discrimination. Miriam's fight against this wrong had made her a political figure. After all, who can't agree that it's a basic right to have a job or career, even in the military, and not lose it for being LGBT? It's a basic issue of justice, unless you're a Republican or a Supreme Court justice, but in Queer Nation many of us came at it from the other side, as in, who wants to be in the military? We had just protested the first Gulf War, a stance I'm even more proud of today after the second Gulf War, a war started in lies, and prosecuted to no clear benefit. Wait—no benefit? It destroyed Iraq, outraged the world and killed or maimed people in our military and in the country we invaded. Now, more than ever, our powerful military seems a dangerous toy that all too easily falls into the hands of foolish, rash simpletons, like the kind of straight white men who usually run this country.

Sorry to go off like that but, as you can see, I'm not too old to remember, and, if memory serves, it was a real problem for me and many others in QN to have someone so proud about having been in the military as a part of our political representation, even if that representation wasn't really a representation at all but a joke. And that was just the beginning of the problem. Those opposed to Miriam began to fear everyone wasn't equal in QN, that men made decisions while women and their friends weren't even consulted. To fix things, those who didn't want Miriam in the campaign wanted instead a fairer campaign process, to have Joan be more accountable to us like a real candidate who listened to our demands and heeded our decisions. When that didn't happen, people started saying Miriam was picked by a boy's club while those "in the club" felt a bunch of humorless ideologues, I think that's code for lesbian, were just spoiling the fun. And besides who are they to tell us how to put on a drag show? That's when it all really fell apart. Even in our little democracy-loving, consensus-building group, women and men, and boys and girls were not equal—or, more precisely, boys were going to exclude girls and girls ( though many boys sided with them ) were going to spoil the fun. Joan's attempt for president was many things—a joke, a parody, a drag show—but a drag queen running for president wasn't a representation of us. It was supposed to show that we were outside, excluded. It was supposed to show that our political system was a mess without us, but instead of just making fun of that mess, we became just like that mess, saying you don't represent me, or you are excluding me, or you want to control me, all things that were probably true in QN even before we stopped laughing about the joke, it was just that while we were having fun, we hadn't really noticed all that before.

Worse, the campaign and QN split, and even worse than that, it suddenly seemed that everyone in QN or the campaign was saying, this is who I am and you are threatening it. And that's all very reasonable, but QN had helped me articulate a position that was subtly different in an important way, one that made me feel powerful and even free, that is, you may hate me for being girly or think I'm too girly to be a real member of this society, but hey that's ridiculous and it's your problem, not mine, or as we used to say, we're here, we're queer, get used to it. The thing is, when we used to say that, I know, even looking back from the very far side of 30, that we weren't afraid of what people thought or how they might make us feel. We weren't worried about any threat, especially among ourselves, or anything that might keep us from our primary goal, to rally around a claim to belong. We made ourselves heard and it worked as long as we didn't fight amongst ourselves, or complain, or whine, or lose our sense humor.

At times I've wondered who would want to remember a joke that went awry, but the question "if a bad actor can be president, why not a good drag queen?" that slogan and the campaign that generated it was more than just a question or a joke. It represents a moment when laughing at difference from a shared sense of purpose allowed a bunch of queers—who were always not right when it came to being a boy or a girl or whatever—to get together to make people laugh at the very real problem of exclusion and denial that governed our queer lives. This wasn't something about our lives, but it did make our lives about something.