CBELOVED OMMUNITY by caleb rainey As we are all well-aware, February is best known for its 14th day. For the
next two weeks, we can all expect to be inundated by heart-shaped boxes, dozens of long-stemmed roses and endless ads for the diamonds and lingerie that we simply must have for the most romantic day of the year. Yet, amidst all of this Cupid madness, many often forget that February is also Black History Month. While I would like to focus my first column on love, I also want to do so without neglecting this other aspect of February. In light of this, I have been thinking about the different types of love that humans have the capacity to feel and enact. One such type of love, perhaps best articulated by the Black radical Martin
Luther King Jr., is communal love, or what King called “beloved community.” Communal love is not something we tend to think of when we imagine love. In fact, the kind of romantic love we usually envision, especially in February, is extremely individualistic and sexual. Yet King’s vision of a beloved community is one that our generation desperately needs to embrace. Beloved community means believing in the fundamental interconnectedness of every human be- ing that has existed or will exist. Yet beloved community is not only a belief,
“But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end
is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
but also a practice. It is a practice of non-violence, respect for all living things, prioritizing people over profit and sister and brotherhood. Creating beloved community for LGBT people includes both radical self-love as well as a passion- ate and active embrace of every member of our community. What I mean by radical self-love is not a narcissistic, selfish and self-indulgent
prioritizing of the individual, but a deep and abiding respect for all of one’s self and a refusal to allow any part of ourselves to be disrespected, denigrated or ignored. For LGBT people, this type of self-love can be particularly difficult. We have all been raised in an environment where queerness is marginalized at best and hated at worst. Homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism are ever-present in our daily lives. Embracing the queer self takes a lifetime of work. It is a process of rooting out the internalized homophobia or transphobia that we have been burdened with. When we do things like constantly and unabash- edly out ourselves, refuse to date and partner with closeted individuals or hold our partner’s hand, no matter how frightened we may feel, we practice radical self-love. This self-love forms the foundation for communal love because one cannot love his or her community and participate in the creation of a beloved community if one does not radically love one’s queer self. For LGBT people today, communal love demands that we fight for a world
where everyone who falls under our LGBT acronym can experience beloved community. Racism, ageism, sexism and economic injustice are all barriers to creating a queer beloved community. These barriers to love create an environ- ment where many LGBT people of color feel neglected and unwanted, where lesbians to often feel silenced, our elders feel disposable and our working class, poor and homeless feel invisible and forgotten. The LGBT community can come together in the spirit of King’s vision to
actively and aggressively tear down these barriers. The creation of beloved community entails much more than lip service to a cause or an idea. It requires concrete daily actions in the service of dismantling the oppressions that make our brothers and sisters feel unloved by the larger community. SO THIS FEBRUARY, TRY A NEW KIND OF LOVE... TOGETHER, WE CAN BUILD A BELOVED COMMUNITY!
54 RAGE monthly | FEBRUARY 2014 | FEBRUARY 2014
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