Sometimes, in our efforts to correct one instance of intolerance, we forget others.
Two weeks ago, a Miami-Dade judge declared Florida’s anti-gay adoption law unconstitutional and allowed Vanessa Alenier to adopt the one-year-old she and her partner Melanie Leon have been fostering.
The ultra-conservative Orlando’s Florida Family Policy Council (FPC) sent out an alert to its members last week, describing the ruling. It included a photo of a lesbian couple sporting mullets the likes of which I haven’t seen for many years. Neither woman is smiling, and I doubt most people would consider it a flattering photo.
The couple in the picture, however, is not Alenier and Leon. Orlando Sentinel writer Scott Maxwell rightly calls the Family Policy Council to task for this, and offers up a strong endorsement for allowing loving same-sex couples to adopt.
He calls the mulleted couple “abnormal-looking,” though, and says: “The couple look so odd (you literally can’t tell whether they are male or female) that one might wonder how any judge could place a young child with such a disturbing-looking duo.”
Making lesbians look strange and scary seems to have been the FPC’s intent, and Maxwell is right to point that out—but by equating oddity with the fact that you can’t tell their gender, he himself risks offending a good part of the LGBT community.
I’ll cut him some slack because it’s not entirely clear if he’s just trying to show what the FPC’s perspective likely was. Still, I am reminded of conversations I have with a straight friend (and general ally) every year in June, when he wonders why the Pride Parades always seem to feature the “weirder” members of our community: drag queens, leatherfolk, scantily clad young men, and the like. “Don’t they know they’re not helping the cause?” is his usual type of remark. “How are people ever going to accept them if they dress like that?”
Fact is, for every lesbian couple that looks “like J.Crew models,” as Maxwell describes the real Alenier and Leon, there is another that doesn’t. Some of us are overweight, or tattooed, or of ambiguous gender, or the victims of unfortunate haircuts. Just like straight people (though I like to think our tattoos are cooler).
The FPC’s attempt to distort the truth in order to promote unflattering lesbian stereotypes is reprehensible. Let’s use the opportunity, however, not only to chastise them, but also to remember the diversity in our community. We’re not just seeking equality for the pretty people.
THANK YOU for writing this post. This is exactly the point I was making to…well, myself the other day.
I second Ms Loaf’s THANK YOU. I all of the above: overweight (given prevailing standards), tatooed, of ambiguous gender, and (depending on your taste) the victim of an unfortunate haircut. I DEFINITELY had a mullet in the 1980s. Show me the lesbian alive during that decade who didn’t, and I’ll eat my dyke cliché baseball hat.
My sister pretty much barks up the same tree annually (“Don’t those freak show elements of the LGBT community know they’re driving nice reasonable folks like me away?”), and I have never gained any traction against that view. I know many of us never will, but it’s critical that from within the community we understand that the moment we think it’s alright to isolate and disempower some of us to mollify mainstream palates, ALL of us are at risk.
Brava, and thank you again.
Er, “I am all of the above” it should have been. Maybe I should add: “plus unable to remember the occasional verb.”
Also: great title.