Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the Left and the Jesus People USA

Living Belonging Differently

This mode of politics which seeks encounter, and the potentialities and capacities that flow from encounter, may characterize “identity politics” more than critics allow. Given the difficulties of living in a hetero- and gender-normative world, many of us in Queer to the Left found belonging in a queer—as in LGBT—identity. But we were not reducible to that identity or to an inclusion-seeking form of identity politics that might be expected to flow from it. Queer to the Left’s “identity politics” instead aimed to elaborate and enact a left politic that attuned to the complexity of oppression, to the ways that sexuality, for example, is lived through race, class, and gender, how class is lived through race, and so on.¹ In a context where middle-class gay white men in the neighborhood had aligned themselves with gentrification, Queer to the Left participants wanted to live belonging differently, not primarily through identity but through politics, through doing together and being-in-it-with, with one another and with others fighting for social transformation.

Coalition certainly forces encounter, as Reagon reminds when distinguishing between “home” and the more dangerous work in coalition where you don’t much “get fed.”² But it allows encounter as well, offering nourishment, although of a sort that feeds other political appetites. The COURAJ coalition certainly fed Queer to the Left’s desire to engage in activism that differed from what the establishment-oriented gay movement offered. By the late 1990s, the fight for gay marriage had colonized the gay movement. Queer to the Left lamented that reduction of gay politics to an identity-based claim for rights, for admission into the status quo. We were hungry for something else, and it couldn’t be returning to traditional leftist politics either, where gayness tends to be seen as a mere “lifestyle,” heteronormativity is relegated to a secondary issue, and bodies and pleasures are deemed non-political.

The COURAJ coalition allowed a different politic to emerge, one that drew connections between gentrification, the increased policing that accompanies it, economic precarity, and disappearing queer worlds. It provided Queer to the Left a space to join others in the struggle for low-cost housing, to build trust with others in the coalition in a manner that allowed us to inject an analysis of homophobia into the broader discussion about the workings of gentrification, and to fight for the promises and possibilities that public street life and varied neighborhoods hold, and that life under racial capitalism largely disallows: chance meetings and mixings of different worlds, unanticipated interactions and intimacies, what Samuel Delany describes as “interclass contact.”³ As one Queer to the Left member reminded me, that politic and its desires aligned well with what coalition itself provides: a context for people to live belonging differently, through politics and doing together beyond fixed identity.⁴

Just as the coalition was a space from which Queer to the Left challenged narrow renderings of gay identity and politics, this unlikely coalescing also allowed JPUSA to perform evangelical identity and politics differently. Arguing that the Christian faith had “been hijacked” by “fascists” and that the devil was doing “his best work in this nation right now through the Christian Right,” Jon Trott suggested that JPUSA found belonging more through this coalition than evangelical identity: “the reality was we felt way more at home with Queer to the Left than we did with a lot of our evangelical friends.”⁵ With the gay mainstream pursuing respectability and constructing Queer to the Left as extremists, we too felt marginal in our “community” and more at home in a coalition that placed no strictures on our left politics or queerness (even if Jon and other religious participants believed that homosexual sex was “proscribed by scripture”⁶ ). Queer to the Left member Joey Mogul described “feeling betrayed by the gay mainstream” when the big organizations lent their names but refused to provide any resources that would aid our work exposing prosecutors’ use of homophobia to secure the death penalty: “I was not interested in doing that work of changing the gay mainstream anymore…. I was done.” She instead wanted to work in a multi-racial, multi-class activist context “with various people and communities who believe in racial justice,” and “to create new communities and new organizing avenues and spaces to do the work around the death penalty, policing, housing.” Rather than doing activism within the gay community, it “felt more important to put our energy into” these new avenues, with their unknown potentialities.⁷ This encounter between leftist queers and Jesus freaks—themselves on the margins of evangelical Christianity—offers an example of what Cathy Cohen describes as the radical potential of movement building rooted in a “shared marginal relationship to dominant power.”⁸

Becoming-With: Convergence without Unity in the Contact Zones of Coalition

What happens in the contact zones of coalition? That is, what does being-with do? Post-colonial and science studies scholars deploy the concept of contact to remind us that entities come into being relationally, through entanglement. Consider Vinciane Despret’s interpretation of the story of Clever Hans, a horse who lived in Berlin in the early part of the 20th century and seemed able to do math.⁹ When given math problems, Hans tapped out the correct answers with his hoof. People were perplexed so they asked a veterinarian, a director of an institute of psychology, a math teacher, a retired army officer to watch Hans solve math problems and try to figure out how. It turned out that humans unintentionally and involuntarily made barely perceptible bodily movements that signaled to Hans when to begin tapping and when to stop. After giving Hans the problem and in anticipation of him beginning to tap out the answer, the questioners unwittingly made a slight forward-leaning motion with their heads and bodies; when Hans reached the correct answer, the humans released tension from their bodies and made a slight upward jerk with their heads. Hans was able to answer their questions correctly because, as Despret puts it, he had attuned to and thereby learned how to read human bodies. Rather than an ability to do math, his genius was learning how to relate to these other beings. Hans had become “human-sensitive.” Even more, Hans had “taught the humans, without their knowledge, the right gestures to (involuntarily) perform;”¹⁰ he had made his humans, unwittingly, become “horse-sensitive.” Both were altered by being together: Hans was becoming horse-with-human and the humans, human-with-horse.¹¹

This relational becoming is about affecting and being affected through encounter, through ongoing being-together, and becoming differently as a result. As with Hans and his humans, we were becoming in that relational manner; we were becoming “Queer to the Left-with-JPUSA,” and they were becoming “JPUSA-with-Queer to the Left.” Through our encounter, we constituted one another differently. Where before, Queer to the Left had been a queer group that mostly related to the gay rights movement and had no formal relation to any religious group, it now was something else. It was still queer, still left, but differently so. And that was true as well for the Jesus People who now were a Christian group in relation to a queer group. We were no longer direct opposites, if we ever had been. Being in the room together encouraged each group to shed stereotypes about one another and to particularize its own universalizing cosmology. Jon Trott noted that “there is always pain” when you are “close to difference” but stressed that “the good outweighs the suffering.” He continued: “That’s what relationships with Queer to the Left and other people teach me…. The suffering means you’re having to stretch, and nobody wants to stretch. I’d rather stay in my comfort zone and watch Glenn Beck and believe the whole world’s a conspiracy than have to actually go, oh, no, this is a…human being. And who’s to say that my world is so much better than theirs?”¹² For Queer to the Left, along with challenging our heretofore unquestioned valuing of secularism and pigeon-holing of Christianity, being in this coalition also encouraged us to move away from political purism. Each group might have rejected the other or attempted to reconcile our irresoluble differences, but neither did. Instead, it was, in José Muñoz’s words, a strange “kind of crossing,” a rather thrilling relational becoming.¹³

Coalition provides a space to be and do together, and become differently as a result; to sense other possibilities, open toward the unknown, experiment, and learn from mistakes; to develop trust and practices of solidarity; and to build new collectivities and new worlds. When I asked Jon Trott what it was like to work with Queer to the Left, he suggested both the strangeness and thrill of this coalition: “Oh, I loved it…. It was so fun to be able to say ‘Jesus People USA in their coalition with Queer to the Left,’ and see people on the [gentrifiers’] blogs in the area go, ‘Yeah, it’s stupid. The Jesus People and Queer to the Left? What kind of a world is this anyway?’” Jon continued: “It was a pretty cool one, really. I kind of like that, you know?”¹⁴ A comment made by a COURAJ member at a public hearing similarly suggested that this mutual becoming was generating something unexpected, difficult to fathom, and rich with potential: “you know something interesting is happening when these leftist queers and the Jesus People USA are working together.”¹⁵

Some cautionary notes: In drawing from this history to consider what a coalition can do, I do not mean to suggest that groups should resolve differences by sweeping them under the carpet. The very names of the groups precluded anybody hiding or ignoring differences, and in any event, the coalition did not require burying differences, or resolving them. Nor am I proposing a fantasy of conflict-free togetherness, as if we all could and should rise above the conflicts that frequently preclude or undo coalitions. Queer to the Left did not somehow “get over it;” we were not affronted by JPUSA’s homophobia because the latter wasn’t explicitly homophobic in our presence, and if they had been, we probably would have challenged them.⁷ As part of principled political struggle within a coalition, expressing anger might be especially vital, as Audre Lorde famously argued: “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.”¹⁶

Nor do I mean to suggest that coalition always and only offers something promising. Touching across difference, as Reagon cautions, is dangerous. It requires a willingness to risk something, to take the risk, for example, of moving beyond yourself and being changed. As well, you may not get what you want, or what you need. Encounters always happen in historically specific contexts of often deeply-grooved power differentials and can spur fears, resentments, furies, guilt, and shame. So, encounter entails risk, and, occupying different social positions, we all face different risks.

But encounter also is both inevitable and necessary: to live is to encounter a world of other entities, and we urgently need to learn to live with beings who differ from ourselves. There is no recipe for how to converge with divergence and without unity, but something that allowed JPUSA and Queer to the Left to work together was that no one decided in advance who we all were. Remarking that the U.S. has become “an intensely tribal society,” Richard Sennett discusses how, “lacking direct experience of others,” we “fall back on fearful fantasies” and think we know “what other people are like without knowing them.”¹⁷ To be sure, we all had “encountered” one another before: JPUSA had pre-existing ideas about queers and Queer to the Left had pre-existing ideas about evangelical Christians. But perhaps our coalescing was an instance, following Sara Ahmed, of “re-encountering these encounters” where, rather than holding one another in place, we left open the question of who everyone was, which allowed leaving open the question of who everyone might become.¹⁸ Shane Phelan suggests the necessity of precisely that openness to process and potentiality: “the problem for coalition politics is not ‘What do we share?’ but rather ‘What might we share as we develop our identities through the process of coalition?’”¹⁹ At the start, our identities perhaps contradicted one another, but staying open while being in the room together allowed for the possibility of coming to feel affinity even so.

Uptown’s remarkable history of coalition across racial lines probably also paved the way for this unlikely coming together. The “original rainbow coalition” that formed in 1969 in response to police brutality included the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots Organization, the latter a group of Uptown-based poor white revolutionaries from Appalachia whose initial emblem included the Confederate flag.²⁰ Black Panther Bobby Lee, a key force behind that coalition’s formation, said the following about working with the Young Patriots: “It wasn’t easy to build an alliance…. I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. That was how the Rainbow Coalition was built, real slow.”²¹ As one of the few racially and economically mixed neighborhoods in Chicago, Uptown conveys that history; you might feel it just by walking around. Queer to the Left members may not have known this history, but members of COURAJ like Marc Kaplan did, as did Jon Trott from JPUSA who was fascinated by it.²² Recalling Huey Newton’s 1970 public letter calling on Black Panthers to unite with the women’s and gay liberation movements, Kaplan noted that the neighborhood’s openness to queer sexualities also goes back to that period.²³ The “long legs” of Uptown’s political history, with its marked commitment to solidarity across difference, reached into COURAJ’s low-cost housing coalition.

I do not want to overstate this relationship. Queer to the Left and JPUSA were at the beginning of the beginning of being near one another, trying out being in the room together without assuming malice or utter incompatibility and without coming to quick conclusions about one another, but also without getting to know each other well. We were engaged in aspects of what María Lugones calls “playful ‘world’-travel” in the sense that we recognized the co-existence of multiple worlds and were open to uncertainty and surprise and perhaps self-reconstruction when those worlds met. But our travelling did not take us to the point where we came to know each other’s reality, “what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes.” As Lugones notes, “Only when we have travelled to each other’s ‘worlds’ are we fully subjects to each other.” We were not engaged in that sort of “deep coalition.”²⁴ Members of JPUSA and Queer to the Left did not spend a lot of time together, and when we did, other COURAJ folks were always in the room. Drawing from Haraway, I would suggest we were strangers only beginning to learn how to play together, involved in something more like “accompanying than companioning.”²⁵

Even so, for a short while we were in proximity to, opening ourselves toward, starting to get to know, placing trust in, learning from, affecting, and making ourselves available to being affected by, one another. “Strange encounters” that take the form of “alignment (rather than merger),” Ahmed writes, allow activists to remake “what it is that we may yet have in common.”²⁶

Coda

Haraway poses an important question: “what obligations ensue from the experience of entangled lives once touch has been initiated?”²⁷ Two incidents that occurred after this low-cost housing coalition had largely disbanded are suggestive of the complex, non-linear afterlives that might follow such encounters across difference. First, fast forward to 2008 when Fred Phelps and members of his Westboro Baptist Church came to Chicago with their “God Hates Fags” signs to protest President-elect Obama. The lone counter-protester was Jon Trott from the Jesus People, holding a sign that said: “Gays Are Our Neighbors.”²⁸

The second incident occurred three years later, when I interviewed Jon and asked him about homosexuality. It “isn’t God’s ideal for you,” he told me, and continued, “I believe that if you pursue Jesus far enough, you would discover yourself being called into places you’ve never been, maybe, which might be actually a journey out of homosexuality.”¹⁴ Jon’s comment reiterates that this is not a story of unity or of navigating conflict by denying difference, and it reminds as well that the outcome of touching across difference is open. Both groups wanted to go places we had never been, that was part of what allowed this coalition to exist. For members of Queer to the Left, that was not a journey toward Jesus or out of homosexuality—Jon and I both smiled when he said that—but we were drawn, I think, to a space where we could do political activism in a manner that refused political purism and tribalism and enabled world-building with unlike others, where the outcome was not foreordained.

My curiosity is about the capacities of coalitions, what they can allow to happen, the promise and potentiality of becoming coalitional. Bloch writes that the not-yet is not known in advance and it surprises us when it arrives.²⁹ He offers a non-teleological left politic that, refreshingly, proposes no blueprint or roadmap but instead leaves an openness to the question of what is to be done. Precisely because the future is undecided and open, we can and need to try stuff out, pulling from the not-yet of the past and present in the interests of moving forward.

1. Queer to the Left’s agit-prop highlighted how homophobia and transphobia contributed to gentrification’s displacement of poor people. [↩]
2. Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 359. [↩]
3. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 111. Many Queer to the Left members were influenced by Delany’s book which beautifully depicts the points of contact and surprising encounters, sexual and not, that happen among queer and other strangers in urban streets. [↩]
4. Conversation with Laurie Palmer, July 19, 2015. [↩]
5. Interview with Jon Trott, 2016, emphasis his. [↩]
6. Interview with Jon Trott, 2016. [↩]
7. Interview with Joey Mogul, 2012. [↩] [↩]
8. Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3(4), 1997, 458. [↩]
9. Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis,” Body & Society 10, 2-3 (2004): 111-134. Thank you to Carla Freccero for pointing me toward Despret. [↩]
10. Despret, “Body We Care For,” 115. [↩]
11. Despret, “Body We Care For,” 122. [↩]
12. Interview with Jon Trott, 2011. The changed context among evangelicals in the late 1990s, especially more open disagreement regarding homosexuality, likely affected Jon as well. Thank you to Susan Harding for discussing that history with me. [↩]
13. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 14. [↩]
14. Interview with Jon Trott, 2011. [↩] [↩]
15. My recollection is from a community meeting about the Wilson Yard held at Truman College, Chicago. [↩]
16. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press 1984). [↩]
17. Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 3-4. [↩]
18. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (New York: Routledge, 2000), 17 and throughout. [↩]
19. Shane Phelan, Getting Specific (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 140, emphasis hers. [↩]
20. Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011). See also Patrick King, “Young Patriots at the United Against Fascism Conferece,” Viewpoint Magazine, August 10, 2015, https://viewpointmag.com/2015/08/10/young-patriots-at-the-united-front-against-fascism-conference/ , accessed July 1, 2016. [↩]
21. Quoted in “Young Patriots and Panthers: A Story of White Anti-Racism,” December 5, 2009, on the site Redneck Revolt, https://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2009/12/05/YOUNG-PATRIOTS-AND-PANTHERS-A-STORY-OF-WHITE-ANTIRACISM, accessed July 21, 2017. [↩]
22. Interview with Marc Kaplan, 2016; interview with Jon Trott, 2016. [↩]
23. Interview with Marc Kaplan, 2016. [↩]
24. María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) 97-98, emphases hers. [↩]
25. Haraway, When Species Meet, 232, 253. [↩]
26. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 180-81, emphasis in original. [↩]
27. Haraway, When Species Meet, 280. [↩]
28. Yasmin Nair, “Clash at the Center,” Windy City Times, December 17, 2008. [↩]
29. Bloch, Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, 42. [↩]