Earthblog

Written by Elliott Johnston

Peter Vielehr is hosting a book club to strengthen the Fort Collins queer community.

Peter Vielehr, dressed as “Dixanne Harlot,” gets ready to host “Under The Covers,” a drag show held at Bas Bleu Theatre earlier this year. The show launched the Fortitude program, which is geared towards Northern Colorado gay, bisexual, queer, and questioning men.

The Fort Collins progressive community has some catching up to do when it comes to discussing queer issues. We can talk environmentalism, we can talk bikes, we can talk farmers markets while drinking home-brewed beer while riding a bike, but when it comes to GLBT issues, we don’t really talk. While non-profits like Lamda and Northern Colorado AIDS Project do important educational outreach in the community, Peter Vielehr, a Health Educator at NCAP and a facilitator of a new book group called Queer Reads, says that being queer-identified in Fort Collins isn’t so easy to be, even in our more (supposedly) open-minded settings.  

Queer Reads, which meets on the first Wednesday of each month at the Lamda Community Center, is designed to get people talking. The first meeting was held at the beginning of March, where Written on The Body by Jeanette Winterson, an experimental text questioning gender boundaries, was analyzed.

Vielehr is selecting books and leading discussion for the first three sessions, and then the group will vote on what to read for the rest of the year.  Matter Daily recently spoke to Vielehr about why Queer Reads is important for Fort Collins, why the word queer is appropriate, and what allies can do to make the Fort Collins queer community feel more accepted.

Matter Daily: Talk about how Queer Reads got started.

Peter Vielehr: Yeah, so the book club was an offshoot of a few of us talking about what’s missing in our community, and stuff that we would want to do and be a apart of. A book club is exactly that, because there are not enough spaces in town to actually get together with other queer people and talk about queer issues. And not in a bar, which is where most of that happens. I really wanted to a place where you have intelligent discussions around reading, because that’s something that a lot of us like to do.

MD: Have you gone to book clubs before, or have you led any book clubs?

PV: I’ve never been to a book club. I don’t think any of us have ever been to a book club. Because most book clubs that are around are not reading books that are relevant to my community, and (maybe it’s a stereotype on my part) but I don’t want to be around a bunch of middle-aged women. My grandmother was in bookclubs, and all these middle-aged, stay-at-home moms. That’s not really the book club that we wanted to start. We wanted to start something that is very politically oriented and queer oriented, so that we can discuss a lot of issues in the queer community that are very queer-specific.

MD: And politically oriented, would that mean supporting gay rights?

PV: Well, the next book we are reading is called That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Basically it’s a book that talks about how the mainstream gay movement isn’t always inclusive, and how the things that have been pushed for might disadvantage people of color, or trans people, or low-income people — looking at those social justice points. Bringing those together in a way that is action oriented.

MD: Is there anything that the biking or homegrown food communities — the so-called progressive communities in Fort Collins — can do to be more aware of queer issues?

PV: Our group is open to all allies. We don’t want to make it only queer people. So it’s open to the ally community. And there are ally authors that are writing queer books [i.e. Middlesex].

But I really think just being aware that not everyone around you is the exact same. I get into a lot of situations in Fort Collins where I don’t want to come out. People might be open, but they aren’t necessarily accepting. I’m the one out in the group of guys all talking about their girlfriends, and I’m the only one who is different. So it’s easier to keep your mouth shut than it is to say something and come out. I really think a lot of people who really mean well sometimes do make it more difficult.

MD: How?

PV: Just by living in their privilege of not having to think about it. Not having to think that there are people who are struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity. And being able to just not have to think about it is definitely a privilege. I’ve found that a few times in the community: that it’s not even talked about. Why make a GLBT section in bookstores when we just want everyone to be equal? The world doesn’t work that way. So, I think there are ways that people can be more inclusive, and I constantly strive to be more inclusive. But, I’m not perfect. Nobody is perfect.

MD: Personally, I’ve noticed that most of my gay friends in Fort Collins have moved away, and my lesbian friends have been relatively more comfortable with the culture here. Has that come up in your discussions?

PV: We know that when guys want to go out, they go to Denver and go to clubs. We know that’s what happens. There really isn’t a strong community up here, and we are really just trying to build that. There is a pretty good lesbian community up here, and so we are really trying to tap into that as well, and make the community a little bit more solidified instead of sectioned off in parts.

MD: Can you talk about Fortitude?

PV: It’s a program that is a part of NCAP geared towards gay, bisexual, queer, and questioning men, though most of our events, unless they are closed events, women can come if they are allies and want to be a part. We are a pretty open group, but we are geared towards gay, bi, and queer men.

MD: Is it relatively new?

PV: It is. It just started at the beginning of this year. Basically, Fortitude is funded through state grants and basically the goal is to address spread and stigma of HIV in our community through action. So, we do that in a couple of ways. One, we create community, and we do that in social events. We educate ourselves and we do educational events. And we also pulled in a component of doing outreach to the community. So the guys that are involved in our program will go out and they’ll talk to their friends and other people and give them information about HIV. Really just trying to get the information out there in the community. And when we haven’t had a whole lot of it, there hasn’t been a lot of outreach going on for a while.

MD: Do you think it is a struggle or not to engage the college community?

PV: It’s always a struggle. College students have a lot of different pulls—organizations on campus. One of our goals is just to reach out them more, because one of the highest rates of HIV transmission is in college-aged gay men. That’s a really important population for us to work with. When I was in college it would have been really important for me to have that sort of community as well.

MD: Is there anything you’d like to add about the book club?

PV: I just think that it’s going to be a really welcoming space. And we want everyone who is interested in reading and wants to learn more about queer issues to come learn.

And also, just to talk about the word queer really quick. So a lot of people see it and don’t really understand why we are using it. But queer has a couple meanings. The academic movement around queer is in Queer Theory, where we can break down the barriers between gender, and if we stop looking at people as male and female and let people identify how they want, and we can also look at people as people instead of a gender that we are attracted to. So if we say, instead of, “I’m attracted to men,” we could say, “I’m attracted to anybody that I’m attracted to.” It might not always be men. It might be a woman. It might be someone who is transgender.

There’s that meaning of it, and then there is a radical queer movement happening right now, mostly in urban areas. And queer is really a political term around organizing for justice and equality, where the mainstream gay movement hasn’t necessarily represented the entire community. The queer movement tries to represent everybody and have a social justice approach of how to change the community and make it a better place.

MD: So that’s exactly what you are meaning by Queer Reads: the open definition.

PV: It’s also an umbrella term. It’s an umbrella for anybody who doesn’t fit into the hetero spectrum— gay, straight, bi. But anywhere along there, anyone can identify as queer. If I were only to have sex with women, I was only attracted to women, but I didn’t want to identify myself as straight, queer is a perfectly fine identifier too. So it’s simply an umbrella term that can mean anybody who is not normative in his or her sexuality, which I don’t think anybody really is. There is no such thing as normal. And then with gender too: it takes gender off the binary (either male or female) and sort of looks at it as a spectrum. And so that’s what we really want to do. To have a place where we can analyze books from that perspective: that sexuality happens on a spectrum and gender happens on a spectrum. So that is really important for me personally, to have that space to discuss books. Because, going to your average book club, you’re not going to be able to discuss it that way.

That’s Revolting: Queer Reads’ next book

MD: I see that the terminology at LAMDA has moved from GLBT to GLBTIQQA [Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, and Ally]. How is Intersex different than Transgender?

PV: So, intersex is a term for somebody who is born with ambiguous genitalia. Transgender is an umbrella term for somebody who doesn’t identify with the assigned sex that they were given at birth. So there is a separate category for the two. And ambiguous genitalia is really common. It happens about 3 in every 1000 kids. Historically, those kids have actually had reassignment and been turned into females. And there are a lot of famous historical cases about intersex people who were given the wrong sex so to speak. So they were force-reassigned. So there is a lot of organizing happening around the intersex community to try to get doctors to stop performing unnecessary genital surgery on infants, which is a lot less common now, which is great. It’s really important that that stops happening, and then kids are able to choose if they want to have surgery.

And then under the transgender umbrella, there is transsexual, there is cross-dressing, there is gender-queer. But mainly that term applies to somebody who doesn’t identify with his or her assigned sex at birth.

Anyhow, I sometimes see acronyms that are like forty letters long.

MD: Right, I believe that it’s important to make people feel included, but sometimes, I’m like, ‘wow, that acronym is getting really long.’

PV: And sometimes we joke about the alphabet soup. And that’s why attaching the queer onto it is really important, because it can cover all these different terms. So just labeling it as queer community is just a really big term for anybody who doesn’t necessarily fit the norm with their sexuality or gender.

MD: Yeah, and it’s interesting because queer is re-appropriated. And my mom is pretty open-minded, but when I’ve used the word queer for a political rally or something, she’s been uncomfortable with it, even though she supports the cause. But, I don’t think the younger generations have as much trouble with it.

PV: I think there is a generational thing to it. Also, it’s an urban/rural type thing. I see a lot of guys, especially from more rural areas, that are a little bit older that really don’t like the term, because that was the term that was used against them for a long time. I still use the term, and I identify as queer. So it’s really interesting when we get into the debates of how much should we include it, when our members feel uncomfortable with it, but some of our members identify that way. It’s sort of a fine line to walk.

But I really believe that’s where the movement is going in a lot of ways, and that’s how we are going to get some of the best change, is to create an all-inclusive group that wants to look at the issues and inequalities. There are a lot of them out there. It’s so easy just to ignore them and not think about them and just think, “oh, it’s all equal.” But we know it’s not. Even in the work that we do [at NCAP], with people living with HIV, there is so much inequality. The there’s the stigma against HIV and most of our clients are in poverty and a lot of clients are people of color and a lot of our clients are gay. If you add all these inequalities up, it creates a system that basically keeps them down. So it is really important for us to organize around changing a lot of those things.

The next Queer Reads will be held at the Lamda Community Center, 212 S. Mason Street, in Fort Collins, Wednesday, April 7, 7-9pm. The book up for discussion will be That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, a collection of essays edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore.

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