“I want to know what it’s like to be normal” are the opening words of this gripping video made by MoveOn.org, an organization that aims to be the political voice of everyday Americans. Through montage and poetry, we hear the voices of people from the LGBT community bring to light all the emotions that all of us have felt at some point of our lives, questions we have raised within ourselves, and the anger we have felt because society for so long has told us that our very existence is wrong.
Well, it isn’t. But let’s be honest, we have all had our moments of weakness where we question why we were born lesbian/gay. I wholly and completely love myself, but as a human, I too am weak. Videos and voices such as these always put a smile of my face and give me the courage to continue fighting the war… even though my war is as simple as living my life.
Enjoy!
Let me say this first: everyone craves acceptance and love. We all want a community that supports us. I don’t however understand what that has to do with being “normal” in any way. This video does say some important things about equality and sexuality in our societies but given the fact that the whole premise of queer rights is about challenging the existence of a ‘norm’ and pushing at its boundaries, I think we politically defeat ourselves every time we try to gain acceptance with the emotional cry ‘I just want to be normal.’
We also need to think about what the desire to be ‘normal’ has done to the queer movement – the production of a ‘homonorm’ in places like the United States to start with: a respectable, median-average, ‘normal’ way to be queer that others other ways of being homosexual, trans, genderqueer or whatever you are. Do we want ‘acceptance’ at the cost of a radical politics that is proud of its separateness and its opposition to all ideas of ‘normal’?
We need to stop apologising, to subject our desire to be normal to the rigorous scrutiny of what we’re giving up by wanting this.