Critical Response #5 Sedgwick and Screaming Queens

I found the movie for this week, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, to be very interesting. It always interests me to see how queers from earlier decades, or even centuries, lived their lives. Because you don’t hear as much about queer people from those eras since those people had to be more secretive about their sexual identity than most people are today. It was sad that there was so little, basically none, tolerance for transgender people back then. Though there isn’t very much nowadays either. Some of the people that were interviewed, I would have assumed were women anyway. The riot that occurred at Compton’s cafeteria seemed to have such a change in the police response to the transgender people, shows me that the queer community just needed to band together and unite more. It was nice that after the riot they were able to go buy women’s clothes and wear what they wanted without being harassed about it. I don’t think this would really work today though, with the police today, I think riots would be handled with much more brutality and more people would be imprisoned. It was also interesting to learn a bit about the first sex changes that were made available for the transgender community, and to hear about how this helped so many people become who they were truly meant to be. I was also pretty surprised to hear that the police officer interviewed for this film, had gotten fired after his enemies planted narcotics in his desk. That made me angry, because he was this one good cop, that was actually doing what police officers should do, and he gets set up and fired.

            In Epistemology of the Closet, is largely a response to other writings, but presents its own arguments about the queer community in its responses. The “closet” argument is probably the one that interested me most. Because even as someone who is straight, you hear a lot about this “closet” that people may be stuck inside, and about how hard coming out can be for people. I do believe that that would be hard, especially if you don’t feel that the people you love and know well would be supporting to you. But as Sedgwick argues, I do believe that the ‘closet’ is a bit contradictory. To be stuck in the closet is to be oppressing yourself almost, hiding a part of yourself that is just as important as every other piece of your identity. But coming out could lead to oppression from others, even rejection. As Sedgwick argues, this separation of sexualities, and the connotations presented by both identities, should be destroyed. I think if people stopped putting so much weight on heterosexuality or homosexuality, and didn’t think of heterosexuality as something that is more ‘normal’ while homosexuality is weird or even sinful, the world could be a better place, really.