Opinion: Looking up at the Stars

Tomorrow, Zach Wahls, a young icon for LGBT equality, will address the Democratic National Convention. It’s a great moment for the LGBT rights movement to have the child of a same-gender parent home to address a national political convention.

However, I pause at the channels that promoted his rise to stardom.

Since I began organizing in this movement, I’ve seen a cult of personality form around young LGBT heroes. Like clockwork, once a year, adult leaders seem to let catapult one youth into national stardom. I am humbled that some of these youth are friends of mine, but I want to dig deeper at the way the LGBT movement works to embrace individual leaders. I believe that in the best contexts, celebrities can provide inspiration, but at its lowest, display shallowness. Too often today, we are presented with individual icons talking about themselves – rarely with leaders representing movements of people.

In 2010, we welcomed Katie Miller to the stage. She boldly resigned from the military at West Point just before DADT was repealed. She became a fixture on national news programs speaking out as a young person against discrimination in the armed forces. Since then, she has articulated a message of inclusion she shares at events across the county.

In 2011, we celebrated Daniel Hernandez. While he asserts that he was not an LGBT activist, he happened to be gay and a student intern with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at the time she and others were attacked. His quick support of the congresswoman proved to be a great help to her survival – and Daniel has since been hailed as a hero across the United States and accepted numerous honors.

This year we come to Zach Wahls, who rose to fame with his passionate testimony defending marriage equality on the Iowa House floor. He has written a book about growing up in a same-gender parent household and spoken at many large forums. Moreover, Wahls has embraced activism in opposition to the boy scouts’ ban on gay members.

Generally, these young icons come from privileged backgrounds, or come to fame because they are close to channels of political power. We can only ponder if they would all be regulars on CNN if Katie had not come from a prominent military background, if Zach was not as charismatic, or even, if Daniel worked for a conservative congresswoman. Would even their stories be heard? We can be excited and sure they have bright futures ahead in politics and leadership.

Looking at the stars of the LGBT community, what is a young, transgender youth of color supposed to look up and see? We can only hope one day for a reflection.

The pattern of LGBT youth heroes seems to send the message that primarily white and privileged youth are the ones who deserve to be promoted to the national stage, literally. I write this intentionally as a white, gay student, in solidarity with all the stories buried and forgotten.

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s grappled tremendously with this issue. Leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Roy Wilkins would regularly draw thousands of people to hear them speak. Mostly they were male and successful community leaders.

Ella Baker, a proponent of forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the major student-run arm of the civil rights movement, believed that a community should lead together, instead of being the followers of a few charming individuals.

In a biography of Ella, former SNCC participant Joanne Grant writes that she “believed strongly in the importance of organizing people to formulate their own questions, to define their own problems, and to find their own solutions…she held firmly to the concept of group-centered leadership rather than a leadership-centered group.”

I am concerned that spending so much time honoring celebrities over humbling ourselves to local advocacy can further LGBT community stratification. At least, it would be nice for us to push the larger LGBT movement to give the spotlight more to ordinary folks we can believe in too.

In the end, civil rights movements have seen their greatest successes when normal, everyday people banded together to realize their power. It wasn’t by carrying anyone else’s autograph – but by becoming our own heroes.

Zach Wahls clearly deserves this speaking engagement. And I will definitely watch and cheer him on. But in my mind, I’ll be waiting for the day a national political convention invites a queer youth to the stage to tell her story of fighting for the lives of others – and not just commentating on it with a few calculated talking points from an agent.

How long should I hold my breath?

This opinion post was written by Jason Landau Goodman, a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and can be reached at jgoodman@pennsec.org.

Leave a Reply