Doing solidarity

[Speech given at the Mel­bourne Bisexual Net­work Annual Gen­eral Meet­ing 2022]

I’d like to start with acknow­ledging the cus­todi­ans of the lands we’re meet­ing on. I’m on the lands of the Wur­undjeri Woi Wur­rung people of the Kulin Nation. I recog­nise the sov­er­eignty of the First Peoples of this land and their unbroken con­nec­tion to land, sea, sky and com­munity. I pay my respects to elders past and present.I wel­come emer­ging lead­ers and any First Nations people with us in the room today. And I commit to work­ing towards Makkar­ratta and Treaty along­side First Nations peoples.

My name is Ros­anne Ber­sten and I’m a Jewish queer aut­istic social justice trainer.

No, wait. My name is Phoenix and I’m a kinky auto­choris­sexual poet, writer and activist.

To quote famous bisexual Walt Whit­man, I am large, I con­tain multitudes.

Either way, my pro­nouns are xe and xyr. Nice to meet you all.

As you’ve just heard, my work involves edu­cat­ing people about the inter­sect­ing sys­tems that shape our exper­i­ences of ourselves. One of the things we often hear in train­ing is that people feel like they can’t bring their whole selves into a space. But we all do this: frac­ture ourselves in order to con­form. And today I want to talk to you about what it might look like if that wasn’t the case.

Some of you might have heard me talk­ing before about solid­ar­ity. But what is solid­ar­ity? I like this piece from the Jewish Voice for Peace Hag­gadah with a nod to Paulo Freire’s Ped­agogy of the Oppressed:

Solid­ar­ity is hard work. It requires ongo­ing self-reflec­tion, clear account­ab­il­ity struc­tures, con­tinual learn­ing and crit­ical think­ing. Also: humil­ity, empathy, com­mit­ment, hope and love. True solid­ar­ity unites com­munit­ies with dif­fer­ent levels of oppres­sion and priv­ilege in the common struggle for lib­er­a­tion. It involves com­munity build­ing, sup­port in struggle, aware­ness of our own rela­tion­ship to dif­fer­ent forms of oppres­sion, and com­mit­ment to action that is account­able to those most dir­ectly affected by injustice.

But what does that mean in prac­tice? For Uncle Wil­liam Cooper in 1938, a Yorta Yorta man whose people were in the middle of a gen­o­cide of their own, it meant being one of the few people to protest the Nazi treat­ment of the Jews. He saw what was coming because it was his exper­i­ence too. And now, that means, for me as a des­cend­ant of Jewish refugees, attend­ing the vigil for 15-year-old Cas­sius Turvey whose life was dis­gust­ingly cut short by racist thugs so recently.

How do we do solid­ar­ity? What is com­munity if it’s not based on identity?

I’ve been feel­ing really isol­ated recently, so in a way, what I’m about to say is as much an exhorta­tion to myself as it is to you.

In the begin­ning of my 2003 Master thesis on sexu­al­ity, eth­ni­city and dis­ab­il­ity, I wrote a mar­ginal note, a lit­eral note in the mar­gins. It said:

I am the I that must be silent here. I am the thread that must be invis­ible but I cannot be silent here. I am expec­ted to erase myself, remove myself, hide myself, unspoken author, modest wit­ness, silent observer. I speak only through the cracks, I whis­per through the frac­tured mirror, I crave, I scream, I act. Weave me into your night­mares. To reveal my frayed, mul­ti­col­oured, mul­ti­valent self is to turn over the cloth, show the under­side where the stitch­ing is, reveal the lie of smooth stri­ated space. I am not sup­posed to tell you I love women and men. I am not sup­posed to hint at my res­on­ances with matry­oska dolls. I am not sup­posed to remind you about piroski, latkes, bubble n squeak, tang and frozen rasp­berry ices in the Sydney heat. I am not sup­posed to mutter to you about tingling limbs, aching backs, memory lapses. I am espe­cially not sup­posed to talk to you about rope, whips, blind­folds, intens­ity. Hide, hide. Quiet now.

I think grow­ing up Jewish is an inter­est­ing train­ing ground for being bisexual or queer. We could pass as white and there’s pres­sure to assim­il­ate but there’s also this fierce determ­in­a­tion not to do that, because if we do that, Hitler’s won, you know? The Per­sian king Xerxes the First has won. Anti­o­chus IV has won. Sorry, I’m being a tiny bit flip­pant, but they tried to anni­hil­ate us a lot, you know? Most of our fest­ivals are ‘they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!’

So we are fiercely Jewish in the face of grow­ing right-wing move­ments, and we don’t hide.

I came out as bi when I was 15. I’d kissed the girl I had a crush on in a tent on a school excur­sion to see Halley’s comet. It’s abso­lutely bizarre to me that it was 35 years ago. I told my mother pretty much imme­di­ately and she asked me whether kiss­ing Justine was any dif­fer­ent from kiss­ing James. I thought about it. Nope. 

But it never occurred to me to hide who I was. Kids at school would say, ‘bye!’ on part­ing and I would cheer­fully call back, ‘hetero!’ and then say, ‘What? I thought we were naming each other’s sexu­al­it­ies!’ It became a won­der­ful, long-run­ning joke.

When I intro­duced my mother to Geor­gia, many years later, my mother was thrilled I’d met a nice Jewish girl. When I had a child with a blond Amer­ican guy, my mother was more con­cerned to make sure that I was going to raise the kid Jewish than the fact my part­ner was bisexual too. I’ve been lucky, but it’s not all roses: my kid’s trans non­bin­ary iden­tity has had some push­back in the family.

So when I finally worked out that there was some sort of pres­sure to let any rela­tion­ship I had sub­sume me into either a het­ero­sexual or gay iden­tity, I rightly saw it as the same kind of pres­sure to assim­il­ate that we got as Jews. 

Our oppress­ors see the con­nec­tions between us too.

In 1996, I was involved in craft­ing the memorial in Sydney for queer and gender-diverse people killed in the Holo­caust and through viol­ence since. It’s an amaz­ing art work: a pink tri­angle with the faces of con­cen­tra­tion camp inmates as a trans­par­ent white over­lay and black poles form­ing another tri­angle, so that from above, it looks like a Star of David. I knew what I wrote had to encom­pass all of us. I wrote: 

We remem­ber you who have suffered or died at the hands of others, women who have loved women; men who have loved men; and all those who have refused the gender roles others have expec­ted us to play. Noth­ing shall purge your death from our memories.

There are many stor­ies of solid­ar­ity to come out of our past.

But what of our present? Stigma and the pres­sure to assim­il­ate exists every­where. It’s a form of col­lect­ive gas­light­ing, lying to us about what will happen if we step out proudly into the light of com­munity, con­nec­tion and love.And some­times, if a person is alone, the lie is true: people lose jobs, or hous­ing, or safety. But what if they’re not alone? What if there are enough of us to catch them?

This is my call to you all now. To create spaces that are broad enough, per­meable enough, flex­ible enough to wel­come all of us in our crys­tal­line, pris­matic difference.

First: be proud, be who you are, dance, sing, cel­eb­rate your sexu­al­ity, your cul­ture, your body, your abil­ity. Yes, coming out over and over and over is tedi­ous but in the end, it’s affirm­ing and an act of defi­ance in itself.

And second: look to see who else you can lift up as you go. Who’s strug­gling? How can you help? Some­times we need to leave our com­munit­ies to be safe — our com­munit­ies of faith can be homo­phobic, biphobic, trans­phobic, our queer com­munit­ies can be racist. But once you’re safe, reach back.

As I also said in my Mas­ters thesis in 2003:

A rewrit­ten Jewish prac­tice is only pos­sible, iron­ic­ally, with an immer­sion and under­stand­ing of tra­di­tional Jewish prac­tice, which excludes so many of us who feel unwanted or unne­ces­sary as women and queers… By leav­ing the Jewish com­munity, we failed to trans­form it. By leav­ing the Gay and Les­bian com­munity, we failed to trans­form it. These res­on­ances I now find moving within and between altern­at­ive queer, altern­at­ive Jewish and the vari­ous inter­sec­tions of these allow for liens between these spaces, allow for these spaces to expand to be trans­formed until they are seam­less. Not merged seam­lessly, not to say at all that they are some­how now identical, but rather than it should be impossible to determ­ine at which point one has begun and another ended.

And if you can’t reach back, if that’s too pain­ful, pay it for­ward: reach across. Recog­nise the com­mon­al­it­ies of your exper­i­ence with the exper­i­ence of First Nations folks, dis­abled folks, sur­viv­ors of trauma — the other people in the room. What does it look like if we reject the entire concept of assim­il­a­tion or even integ­ra­tion into the major­ity? What if we over­throw it, put­ting in its place a rhizo­matic net­work of autonom­ous collectivities?

In 2004 Nik Beuret, now an aca­demic at the Uni­ver­sity of Essex as far as I can tell, but when I knew him a rad­ical Mel­bourne anarch­ist, wrote, 

“The trick is to nav­ig­ate the rela­tions in a way that sets up iden­tit­ies that are open to muta­tion, and collectivities/communities that are stable yet pro­mote change and pos­sib­il­ity and departure”. 

Lim­inal sub­jects — that’s us, the queers, the bisexu­als, the trans­gender peeps, the enbies, mul­tiracial and mul­ti­cul­tural, the inter­sec­tional, all of us in-between­ers — may move through a vari­ety of strategies to nego­ti­ate com­fort spaces while oppress­ive sys­tems con­tinue to demand con­form­ity, but the stra­tegic alli­ances we create, the rad­ical net­works of res­ist­ance, open up poten­tial escape routes that may even­tu­ally render ‘safe space’ unne­ces­sary, moving beyond the limits and into a kal­eido­scope of ourselves. It’s time to create the world we want to live in — one of respect, com­munity, mutual aid and col­lect­ive joy.

Thank you.