Why Macklemore's Approval Isn't Enough

A few years ago, I remember that Macklemore released a song called "Same Love." To this day, I have never listened to that piece of music, at least not of my own accord. Supposedly, this song was a landmark in the queer rights movement. To think, that a movement composed of millions of people from all across the world of many different sexual orientations and genders and with many opinions that they have been literally screaming at the world for the past 50+ years would need the voice of a heterosexual cisgender man to legitimize their thoughts, feelings, and the meanings of their lives. As unlikely as it seems, this was apparently true. The debut of this song triggered a surge of positive feelings towards queer people, seemingly marking an enormous social victory for the queer community. 

As a queer person, as odd as it sounds, I don't like that this phenomenon occurred. Many people are confused by this; they say, "Shouldn't you be happy that people are becoming more accepting of you?" The answer is no. To help you understand, please imagine that you are straight, as you probably are. Now, here's the difficult part: please imagine that everyone else in the world is queer. It is completely normal for two people of the same sex or gender to be together. There is a significant portion of the population that is transgender. There are also lots of people that are identified as non-binary (neither male nor female), regardless of sex. You are often seen as odd because you identify as the gender associated with the sex that you were designated at birth, and because your sexual orientation causes you to be attracted to people of the opposite sex. When you are with your friends, you are continually excluded from conversations about their queer relationships. In media such as books, television, and movies, an extremely high percentage of the people and relationships portrayed are queer, with only a few side characters rarely being identified as straight. Even then, they exist only as the brunt of jokes: they say stereotypically "straight" things, everyone has a good laugh, and then they move on with the real point of the show. You and other straight people feel marginalized because of this, to say the least, and you seek to draw attention to the idea of being straight and try to make it normal in society through social activism. From queers, you are met with quiet, mostly uncaring approval at best and outright hatred and disgust at worst. 

Now, imagine, that after years and years of trying to rectify this situation and being constantly marginalized, excluded, and degraded, that a queer rapper named Macklemore writes a song about being straight. Millions of queer people across the world are touched, and acceptance grows. But you are still marginalized and isolated and alone, because you still have no voice, because Macklemore is speaking over you and you still cannot be heard. Meanwhile, he makes millions of dollars off of stealing your voice and saying what you have been trying to say for years. 

The queer community doesn't need Macklemore to speak for us. What we need is to be listened to. What we need is actual, legitimate representation in the media and in other places. One of these places, and the place that I feel is the most important, is in the Health classes that take place in public schools. In Health classes, at least in my experience (and I am growing up in the heart of Blue Liberal America, in a state that has legalized gay marriage) are significantly lacking in teaching about diverse sexualities. At least in the Health 1 class that I took at Brien McMahon High School in my freshman year, we discussed heterosexual sex extensively, but the only time that we discussed homosexual sex--or any variety of queerness--was to promote the acceptance of queer people into society. And that's wonderful. I think that the school should continue to have that as a part of its curriculum. However, that's not enough. The school may have rules and regulations to protect queer students from harassment, but that doesn't fix the core of the issue: that we are still seen as fundamentally 'other,' permanently excluded from the heteronormative society of America no matter how much legislation is passed in favor of us and in our protection. 

The first step to take to rectify this, at least in terms of public schools, is comprehensive sexual education. Students need to be educated about all the different kinds of sexualities (heterosexuality, homsexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, asexuality, etc) as well as all the different genders (cisgender, transgender, and variants upon being non-binary). This is an important step in getting the heterosexual population of Brien McMahon High School and other Norwalk public schools to accept queer people--and not just superficially. Queer students can no longer be marginalized. They can no longer sit silently in Health class, thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong with them regardless of all of the rules that the school has laid out in the name of their protection. They don't deserve a special day in Health to tell people not to discriminate against them, they need for the system to act as if they don't deserve to be discriminated against. The only way to do this is to include them in the curriculum, as if they were just like everybody else. Because they are. We are. Queer people are just like anybody else, and all that we want is for the rest of the world to listen to us and understand who we are.