Roomful Project Information

What is Gatekeeping?

-  Is Gatekeeping useful or harmful?

- Are exclusionary practices ever called for?

-What things should or should not be "gate kept?"

The Honorable Kenneth E. Reeves (The HistoryMakers A2006.065), interviewed by Robert Hayden, April 6, 2006, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 10, The Honorable Kenneth E. Reeves talks about his sexual identity as a gay man

You Have Been READ Library source 1

Johnson, E., 2016. No Tea, No Shade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

You Have Been READ Library source 2

You Have Been READ Library source 3 "Vogue" Madonna

You Have Been READ Library source 4 "POSE FX"

 

Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. University of Minnesota Press. 

You Have Been READ Library source 5

Carolyn Whigham (The HistoryMakers A2017.076), interviewed by Larry Crowe, March 28, 2017, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 4, Carolyn Whigham talks about the tolerance of gay women in black cultures

NYC Pride 2020

Frankie Knuckles (The HistoryMakers A2013.235), interviewed by Anthony Poole, August 23, 2013, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 4, story 10, Frankie Knuckles talks about being gay in the New York club scene

 Drag Goes Mainstream

E. Lynn Harris (The HistoryMakers A2004.207), interviewed by Larry Crowe, October 15, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 4, story 8, E. Lynn Harris reflects on his identity as a gay man

Inclusion of new gender inclusive emojis with new iPhones

“I’m a mess

That don’t rhyme with shit

It’s just true”

- “L.E.S.” Childish Gambino

15 Times I choked on my own silence with the suffocating hands of my coping mechanisms

1. The last skinny boy I allowed to take solace in me  

Clears his throat 

morphs his voice into the best Prince Charming and  

Says 

“You’re not that big”

I mean  

It shouldn’t be too hard for you to lose those damn pesky pounds”

That night 

I won a slam with a love poem dedicated to my thighs I believed no lines of 

2. I wrote this poem while researching the cost of fat transplant cursing myself for all the money I could have saved instead of spending it on food I am staring at my pictures from middle school 

wishing for the weight I had in seventh grade 

Pissed off that I was just as insecure back then

That I took that nearly flat stomach for granted 

I can’t even look at my old pictures without getting the urge to not eat for days 

3. When people call me beautiful I laugh and swallow my denial like a good meal 

My sadness has a funny way of making everyone I love into a gun

Every word they say a trigger 

Everyday harder to dodge bullets and compliments in the same breath 

4. Sometimes I want to cry 

And not feel like I have to write a fucking  poem about it 

5. I think my poems get tired of me too 

6. My depression becomes the room that swallows the elephant 

Makes my bed feel coffin when the poems ain't enough 

And I want to forget what morning looks like

7. My asylum is in the arms of a girl who held me like a promise she would not keep

Who tap dances with my antidepressants everytime I answer her calls

When I read my poem about her to my parents

I changed her pronouns 

I love this body with question marks and negligence 

Protect my comfort zone  enough to sacrifice my healing 

8. I learn this as queer

As black 

As woman

As sex

As love 

As my heart

A thing to be broken before knowing it could be whole 

9. There are people who become indigenous to my body before I could

And this is the story of how I learned to like girls

And boys

And everything but myself 

10. I was interrogated out my closet by the bullies in my middle school math class 

Just to find no space in the room to claim as my own

11. I am constantly seeking to be enough I consume air for breakfast 

Binge at lunch 

Cuss myself out by dinner 

Consume nothing the next day 

Binge at 4 am 

Suck in my stomach until I get back home in the afternoon

Try not to throw up

Try not to breathe 

I am never satisfied with the results 

My stomach feels like a bottomless pit one day and a graveyard the next 

12. This body is waiting to be woken up to

Without judgement or apology about what it is and who it belongs to 

13. I Want the elephant to stop feeling like the elephant in the room I want my room to just be my room

For my tears to be my tears 

For my poems to belong to me 

14. I want to belong to someone

 

15. I want to belong to myself again

 Mapping

In the context of the LGBTQIAP+ community, gatekeeping is a term used by trans women to describe how they are kept from accessing necessary medical care (such as hormone replacement therapy, various surgeries, and more) by cis doctors on an arbitrary basis (ie. being a lesbian, being gender nonconforming, mental illness and neurodivergency, racial bias, etc.) Recently this term has been co-opted by cishet people to talk about how they can be excluded from accessing LGBT spaces and resources. Gatekeeping often relies on historical revision and denial of the lived experiences of oppressed peoples. Popular targets for modern gatekeeping include questioning people, nonbinary people, and a-spec people, but all queer people other than healthy white gender conforming cisgender gay men attracted to other healthy white gender conforming cisgender men have been the targets of gatekeeping in the past, and any queer group may be the target of gatekeeping in the future. 

Recently though, there has been a reclamation of the term to describe the act of continuing to ensure that queerness and its community is consistently offered to queer folx. In the HistoryMakers clips, each speaker described the experience of having to preserve queerness and the queer folx who surround them. while Lynn Harris's discusses what it was like as a writer to expand his audience to in clude folx who were not queer who wanted to understand queer culture. As black queerness especially becomes less oral tradition and more documented through digital history with shows such as Pose and Rupaul's Drag Race following historical films like "Paris is Burning," it gives those outside of the queer community the opportunity to see the beauty of it, but to also take and co-opt it as we have seen in pride and Twitter language which is now crowded with white cis-normativity. 

I would like to further explore this idea of queerness becoming for everyone through technology and how to make sure the right folx are not getting excommunicated from their own spaces.