Anne Balay

Organizing.

Class and sexuality overlap in my life in ways that Matt Brim illuminates in his new book Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke University Press, March 20, 2020).

I’m a writer, activist, professor, car mechanic, trucker, and union organizer. I’ve published two books that tell the stories of blue-collar queers.* The people I write about often thank me for making them feel less alone, and for putting their experience in a context that explains it to others, and to themselves. Brim’s book does something like that for me, and damn it feels good. But also enraging. Which is, of course, his goal. And mine.      

As I begin week nine of COVID-19 quarantine, waiting for my unemployment claim to be approved, I’m reminded that part of being queer, at least for me, is feeling angry and desperate and outside.

This is not my first time taking the walk of shame poverty demands, but it still feels shitty to see the rings of safety by which some people are insulated, and it feels profoundly queer to live with the fear that attends exclusion.

Am I a lesbian by virtue of my desire for women and the misty memory of its fulfillment, or by virtue of my daily worry whether Missouri has approved my benefits? Or by my calculation, when looking through my cupboards, of how much longer I can wait? Or by my awareness that I am housed, have family and friends ready to bail me out, and am healthy so I know my anxiety is overdramatic, or at least premature?

It’s not that being broke is the same as being queer, or that all broke people are queer, or that poverty and queerness somehow compete for primacy in my life, or ever. Rather, the way I personally experience my queerness as I interact in the world is more through cash-flow insecurity than through deviant sexuality.

Nobody particularly cares who I fuck, but they certainly care what I say. My words, spoken and written, push me away from the comfort of middle-class security. Brim describes this well: “class doesn’t merely structure queer life, it is an important base determinant of ways, including educational ways, that we come to know our sexual selves” (p. 71).

For example, I knew me and Matt would get along when, on page 22, he reveals his salary. This is so rare and so working-class. Brim himself is not poor and never was, but he says his students at the College of Staten Island and his queerness taught him this working-class thing: holding income secret creates rings of belonging and thus rings of exclusion. Unions fight that hierarchy of information and Brim reminds us: so should queers.

Unions and queers, he explains by way of Miriam Frank and Amber Holibaugh, should be natural allies. When employers rank their workers silently, and workers agree not to discuss this hierarchy, it comes to seem natural. And capitalism wins.

For example, well-endowed and prestigious Universities don’t claim they are better than Community Colleges because they don’t have to.

And Queer Studies Professors don’t claim higher status than truckers or prostitutes for the same reason.

Both of these comparisons look much different from the bottom than they do from the top.

Brim’s key point, as paraphrased and maybe over-dramatized by me, is that unconscious erasure of these class hierarchies is effectively the same as proud white-supremacist justification of race hierarchies as natural. And that's profoundly unqueer. Straight, even. So there.

So where do unions fit into this? Most recently, I worked organizing adjunct professors at Saint Louis Community College for Service Employees International Union, Local 1.

I spent my days wandering the halls of the four branches of this profoundly under-resourced institution, catching adjuncts as they left their classes, and trying to engage them in conversation. I wanted to learn who they were and what they wanted.

Most said they were trying hard to serve their students with their hands tied behind their backs. When we tried to brainstorm how to make change, we had to swing pretty wide.

One adjunct works at the campus near Ferguson, which is served by one bus per hour. She learned that her students were chronically ten minutes late because their alternative was to be fifty minutes early. Given their jobs and families, they made the choice they could.

A queer union response hears this problem, rather than penalizing late students, and responds by considering the needs of all students. Neither the bus schedule nor the college calendar is likely to bend. But teachers, late students, and prompt ones can make common cause by discussing the class basis of the problem and queering rigid time demands.

Queers don’t want access to white picket fences, we want uneven and exciting pleasures. And we want cookies. The Chef who teaches pastry in the basement of the Forest Park Campus, his students who pull their stripes and smocks over their fast food uniforms, the custodian who times her shifts so she (like me) swings by as they are testing their edible coursework, we all actively desire this way of being in the world.

We see education, not as a way out, but a way in; an ability to connect with our city and its people.

We want the place and the way that we are, rather than to chase an unattainable other. We want to pursue a goal that is scorned and despised. We want to perversely reject upward mobility in favor of solidarity with our fellows. What a union offers at this place and in this time is a transparent purpose: coming out into community.

When you’re hired into a union job they tell you what you will be making when that will change, and how. It’s out there, and you can look it up. Other jobs preserve a veil of mystery, and sometimes expect employees to act like they don’t care – that passion for the work overrides such shallow concerns about pay. And thus hierarchies of reward and race and insider-ness go into the closet.

Higher Education is in chaos right now. Like all other aspects of American capitalism, it already was in chaos, but COVID-19 is forcing us to acknowledge that. Though we don’t know what fall semester will look like, we can assume that the Ivies and would-be Ivies will protect their dragon hordes.

As queers and union people, let’s not go back into that closet. Let’s create solidarity across class, between schools and regions, against disciplines, because, as Brim reminds us, that’s the queer thing to do. And education will never be the same.

*
Anne Balay, Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (University of North Carolina Press, September 2018).

Anne Balay, Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers (University of North Carolina Press, April 7, 2014).

TAGS: Blue-collar, work, working class