An Ally at the LGBQT Thirty-Five and Under Workshop
“Jeanne D’Arc” (the International Liberation Reference Person for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, and Transgender People) and “David Nijinsky” (the Assistant International Liberation Reference Person for these constituencies) led a groundbreaking workshop this year near Boston, Massachusetts, USA. About seventy LGBQT Co-Counselors age thirty-five and under attended. I was lucky enough to attend as one of three older allies.
Participants came from across the United States and from Canada, England, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and India. A significant number had immigrated to North America from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and a few other countries. The most prevalent identity was Queer, though many identified as Bisexual, Gay, Unidentified, or Lesbian. Overall, it was a group of activists eager to learn and use whatever would make them more effective. Many of them had been in RC for only two to five years, but the workshop functioned much like a leaders’ workshop because everyone came so ready to work. I felt like I was present at the beginning of a movement.
“Jeanne D’Arc” opened the workshop by offering us the goal of falling in love with each other, with RC theory, and with our own minds.
Here are some of the main topics covered and directions given:
- Taking the risk of not being liked
- Honesty, integrity, and doing what’s right and facing whatever feelings that brings up
- Challenging distrust and secrecy
- Gaining a solid understanding of RC theory (including by reading books by and watching videos of Harvey Jackins, and listening to Tim Jackins’s CDs), so we can really know what RC is and what it isn’t
- Trusting the discharge and re-evaluation process—we will lose distress and retain our humanness; the goal is to have more and more of our own thinking and an increasingly accurate picture of reality
- Holding everything up to the light of discharge, with no end result in mind except gaining clarity about what is reality and what is distress
- Working on early sexual memories and sex
- Remembering our connections and using them to do things that we find difficult
IDENTITIES
All identities function to help us find people who are “like us” and to separate us from those who are the “other.”
It can be easier to work on our distresses with people we can tell [perceive] are like us. Identities also function as a bulwark against oppression.
Every identity includes ways we retain our humanity and ways we hang on to distresses. For example, as LGBQT people we have fought to love people of the same sex against huge societal pressures, and to create and commit ourselves to families of choice. Sharing these things widely would benefit all humanity. Also, at some point, seeing only the people within our identity as “ours” or safe becomes a limitation and we need to challenge ourselves to claim everyone.
This is how we encourage people to discharge on any identity:
1) Claim it—take pride in what is good about the identity and talk about how it is for you
2) Clean it up—discharge the effects of the oppression, internalized oppression, and early hurts that go along with the identity
3) Throw it out—discharge any attachments to the identity that hold back your re-emergence and your embracing all people as yours
In RC we have a different picture of identities than in the wide world. For us identities are not fixed, inherited, or a set package and may shift as a result of discharge or decisions. “Human” is the identity we retain.
Discharging on early sexual memories is foundational. Harvey Jackins wrote, in the pamphlet A Rational Theory of Sexuality, that almost everything we assume to be normal or natural in the area of sex has its origins in early hurt experiences, and that unbidden sexual feelings, and the inability to have sexual feelings when we decide to, are the result of distress.
Singling out LGBQT sex as distressed is one of the components of LGBQT oppression (we’re “bad, wrong, dirty, disgusting, and need to be fixed or eliminated”). In fact, everyone’s sexuality is full of distress.
Identities among LGBQT people have evolved over time, in part because many LGBQT people have distresses of feeling different. In earlier generations, people were “homosexual.” With the Gay rights and women’s movements, the identities shifted to Gay and Lesbian. Many in the next generation adopted the Bisexual, then Queer, then Gender Queer/Gender Fluid, Unidentified, polyamourous, non-binary, and so on, identities. When the people claiming these identities were young, there were differences in the “wallpaper” of what was going on [happening] in society. For example, many of the Bisexual and some of the Queer folks had lonely beginnings as incubator babies or as children, with two working parents, who came home from school to an empty house.
The Trans/Cross-Dressing/Drag identities have their own history and progression. “Jeanne D’Arc” did a thorough talk on the current situation regarding the Trans identity, which I can’t do justice to [express adequately] in this report. Some of it is available in recent Present Time articles and in the upcoming Side by Side (the RC journal about LGBQT liberation).
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion
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