dependents, or communities that take in non-blood relatives as their own, struggle to survive off of welfare checks or minimal paychecks. These families do not readily and predictably churn out the future, obedient disciplined workers that will deliver their bodies to capitalism, in exchange for a pittance of a wage. Our rejection of capitalist discipline is written off, as our cultural inadequacies. Perceiving our labor as unwanted and untrustworthy, capitalists reject us from the economy and ship us off to prisons, nursing homes, mental institutions or into the informal economy of the streets, still managing in the process, to extract some profit for themselves through our oppression.
Middle class ideology cannot liberate us because it reiterates capitalist attacks on our chosen, non-heteronormative families. It will teach us to reject the families we have, and to settle for the more nuclear, more hetero, the more “responsible” family. Yet another non profit will offer us job training programs for the worst, cheapest, most demeaning service sector jobs and expect us to be thankful. Clinton’s welfare act did just that and masqueraded itself as a well-meaning “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” program. This is couched in terms of us learning “life skills,” learning to be responsible citizens under a capitalist system, to unlearn our rebellion. Yet there is no understanding that many of us disdain these programs and these jobs, not because we are lazy, but because class oppression at the workplace, in the service sector is not a desirable alternative. That we would find a minimum wage job ruled by an increasingly heavy- handed managements, demeaning and undesirable, is then blamed on us: We are undeserving, lazy and untrustworthy.
It is not a surprise that Stonewall took place on the streets, in the dingiest bar that made its business serving queers ostracized from other parts of the city. Fierce queers, many whom were people of color and sex workers, worked the streets and came out in defense of it. Where jobs in the formal economy shut out queers, particularly transfolk, the streets and its informal economy was and still is, seen as the only place to find money, and family. Where hormones are too expensive and inaccessible because our needs are seen only as elective options by the insurance industries, then street versions make for sufficient transitions. However, the rise of AIDS among queer communities in the 1980s is a reflection of the challenges of street lives, of poverty, and of a lack of accessible comprehensive healthcare, lest we should over-romanticize its dangers. The complete neglect of the state, the rhetoric of blame that rained on queer communities as a result of the AIDS epidemic, shows how our survival cannot happen without a fight.
Recognizing that any struggle needs strategic allies, where do we turn to? Middle class ideology, through the state and the non profit industrial complex, advocates to save us from ourselves, and help us overcome our queerness, abandoning our chosen families in the process. Even the progressive non profits advocate for us through back room deals with the state or the Democrats, who have proven only to be the worst, two-faced betrayers of queer liberation. If we can agree that such resolutions are unsatisfying, who then can queers who engage in the informal economy, for whom the streets is home, turn to for our collective liberation? How can we make the struggle against discrimination of transfolk at workplaces, the