QUEER RIGHTS – ANIMAL RIGHTS
Mirha-Soleil Ross does some straight talking with Claudette Vaughan.
CLAUDETTE: For readers who aren’t familiar with your work, please
tell us some history about yourself and how you became an AR activist.
MIRHA-SOLEIL: I’m a transsexual videomaker, performer and a long-time
prostitute and sex workers’ rights activist. I grew up in a poor neighborhood
on the south shore of Montréal (French-Québec) in a francophone
and mostly illiterate family. In the mid ’80s, when I was about 16 years old,
I watched a TV documentary about fur that included footage of animals caught
in snares and leg-hold traps. It changed my life forever. I was so traumatised
by what I witnessed that the next day I ran to an anti-fur protest.
That’s when I met a whole bunch of animal rights activists. I had lots of
questions; they had good answers and by 6pm that same night, I had stopped
eating meat, stopped wearing leather, and was eager to learn and do a whole
lot more. In terms of animal rights work, some of my main contributions have
included hosting for four years a weekly animal rights radio show called Animal
Voices on CIUT 89.5 FM (broadcast on the web at www.ciut.fm). In 1997, I
also developed the first-ever publicly-funded social services program for
low income and street-active transsexual and transgendered people in Toronto.
Called MEAL-TRANS, the program included a weekly meal drop-in where we served
the best vegan food in town. I coordinated the program from 1997-1999 and
then passed the leadership on to another transsexual woman named Christina
Strang who ran the project very well until 2002. Unfortunately she then accepted
a new job at another agency and the new MEAL-TRANS staff recently started
serving flesh. Another action I did was when I got elected Grand Marshal for
the annual Toronto Queer Pride Parade in recognition of my work within the
trans and sex workers’ communities. I decided to use that opportunity to
celebrate my own favourite group of heroes: the Animal Liberation Front. I
organized a contingent of activists who carried placards that highlighted
ALF actions spanning two decades. So while irritating leftwing radical queer
activists kept complaining about how queer pride had become too corporate,
too mainstream and too apolitical, we led the parade celebrating an organisation
that is identified as a domestic terrorist threat in North America! I was
dressed up as The Lady of the Beasts and the 20 activists accompanying me
were in army fatigues and wearing coyote masks. All along the route, while
up to a million people applauded, the activists lined up in front of every
McDonald’s and every leather shop, and as I screamed “Meat is Murder!” or
“Leather Sucks!”, they lifted their legs and pretended to piss on the store
fronts ... It was a real treat!
CLAUDETTE: The scam of animal experimentation and the vivisection community
has yet to be exposed in a big way from within the gay, lesbian or transgender
community. Why do you think this is?
MIRHA-SOLEIL: I think it is the overall mass-scale exploitation and
abuse of animals – not just animal experimentation – that has yet to be exposed
in any way within queer communities. I learnt at an early age that it was
a mistake to think of queer people, even the most politicised ones, as any
more “revolutionary” or more likely to care about animals than anyone else.
They can be just as self-centred and self-serving as any other group around.
In addition to that, the gay community has been affected by AIDS and, outside
of a few exceptions, supports animal-based research and multi-national pharmaceutical
companies. For as long as they can be made to believe that it can help increase
treatment options for their own asses, they really won’t give a shit about
anyone else, especially not animals. And then you also have a small group
that refers to itself as “the leather community” – another whiny bunch who
think they look tough strutting around in their expensive designer fetish
gears. Don’t let me get into that one! I grew up in a family of really masculine
construction workers and none of them needed a leather jock-strap to feel
male. Both of my grand-mothers could knock a man down in a flash and neither
ever needed anything more than one fist to assert their power as women. So
the whole queer leather scene with its grotesque clowns trying to have their
taste for dead skin recognised as an “oppression” is nothing short of an elaborate
and sick joke to me.
CLAUDETTE: You’ve dedicated a lot of energy trying to highlight the
issue of queers’ unwillingness to fight for the rights of animals. Your activism
is an extraordinary accomplishment. How did you arrive there?
MIRHA-SOLEIL: I didn’t become politically active in the first place
because I wanted to improve my own life circumstances, but because I cared
about other animals, human and non-human. I was involved in the animal rights
movement and in other types of social justice activities long before I did
anything that revolved around queer or transsexual or sex worker or poverty
issues. And I think that it was for me a very healthy process in terms of
consciousness and development. If you care and feel revolted at the
sight of a tiny mouse stuck in a glue trap in someone’s kitchen cupboard,
then it won’t be hard convincing you to care about the future of humankind.
And yes, I’ve tried to do my part to try to address animal issues within
the queer community whenever I’ve had an opportunity. I’ll give you an example.
In 2000, I was invited by two curators to create a new short video
for an upcoming special screening at the Toronto International Inside Out
Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The video had to address the theme of “trans
romance”. The attendance was going to be really great, around 750 people.
So my partner Mark Karbusicky and I wondered how we could explore the topic
of “trans romance” while exposing the nauseating treatment of animals in
factory farms and slaughterhouses, and how we could make that package interesting
and relevant to a young, mostly queer and trans audience. We ended
up using a series of interviews with a group of sexually diverse vegans who
spoke about their preference for other vegans as romantic and sexual partners.
In addition to that, in the first half of the video, we used explicit images
of me and Mark having sex and in the second, we used video footage of animals
in slaughterhouses and factory farms. It turned out to be a success!
The film “G-SPrOuT!” has been shown at over 25 international queer, trans,
and other independent film festivals (including the Melbourne Queer Film Festival),
and we constantly have people telling us about the impact the video had on
them, including many who say it made them stop eating meat. Thousands and
thousands of people have seen the film, exactly the kind of people who will
not watch a tape of raw footage distributed by PETA or Farm Sanctuary.
So when we hear animal rights activists say they want to reach out to diverse
communities, we say to them that that they need to rethink the way they present
animal rights issues to these communities. You need to have different strategies
and you need to have people who already have their roots within these communities
do the work. And you need to empower them and put them in charge. Unfortunately,
it would appear as though there isn’t much interest in learning about these
kinds of successful educational tools and campaigns because we tried over
and over again to get G-SPrOuT! screened at animal rights and vegetarian conferences
and it was never accepted.
CLAUDETTE: Sex workers have become increasingly organised this past
decade demanding reforms of laws that punish consensual commercial sex. Are
you disappointed with the hypocrisy of feminist groups who have shunned the
issue while still professing to work for women’s rights?
MIRHA-SOLEIL: Western feminists have conveniently treated prostitution
as the ultimate symbol of male violence and of women’s economic and sexual
subjugation. But for the last three decades, we’ve had in the West (and for
even longer than that in so-called “third world” countries) groups and networks
of prostitutes who have clearly articulated what our political needs are
and what needs to be accomplished legally and culturally in order for us
to work and live more safely and with more dignity. Internationally
at this point, we have consensus on basic goals such as the need to have prostitution
recognised as legitimate work and decriminalised. We do not believe
that prostitution is inherently exploitative, degrading or hurtful. Instead
we think that the various anti-prostitution laws and vicious cultural attitudes
towards prostitution and prostitutes create a context within which our most
fundamental human rights can be violated, a climate within which some think
it is ok to harass, rape and kill us. Our analysis and positions as working
prostitutes have been elaborated from years and years of daily experience
of prostitution. They are not the results of abstract theorising conducted
by feminist social scientists who have never turned a trick and who have
spent most of their lives buried deep down within their library books. Unfortunately
the animal rights community has been one social justice movement where the
voices of prostitutes have been painfully absent, and this in the presence
of very disparaging and hurtful attitudes and propaganda. Writers like Carol
Adams, Gary Francione and Jim Mason all regurgitate old seventies misinformed
radical feminist ramblings around prostitution and pornography. They make
offensive and trivialising comparison between consenting adult women working
in the sex trade and non-consenting animals murdered by the meat industry.
And they do so without ever speaking to us. If anyone is going to start writing
articles and developing theories linking meat to pornography and prostitution
and the so-called objectification of women’s bodies, then I insist that we
– as women and as prostitutes and as sex workers – be the first ones consulted
regarding these matters!
CLAUDETTE: In your one-woman show Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thought
from an Unrepentant Whore, you’ve made a connection between coyotes and prostitutes.
Please tell us about that.
MIRHA-SOLEIL: In 1999, I got funding to write and produce my first
full-length performance, a series of character-based and autobiographical
monologues addressing anti-prostitution discourses and campaigns. I
wanted to detail the way various groups like feminists, social workers and
law enforcement agencies all work together to create a society within which
both our work and our lives as prostitutes are devalued with often tragic
consequences. I also wanted to show how the violence that is perpetrated against
us ends up being used by all of them to fuel their own anti-prostitution ideologies
and further their own agendas with absolutely no regard for what we – as
working prostitutes – say we need in order to improve our working and living
conditions. So when I started thinking about what I wanted to do, I got interested
by one of the longest running prostitutes’ rights organisations in the United
States. That organisation is called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics)
and I read that the acronym COYOTE was originally picked by founder Margot
Saint-James because the animal stood as a perfect metaphor for the way prostitutes
were and continue to be viewed and treated in our culture: as threatening
intruders, carriers of diseases, and as vermin to be eliminated. So
on one hand I was intrigued by this comparison, but on the other very uncomfortable
with having an entire nation of animals used once again as a metaphor so
gratuitously – that is, without any proper representation or compensation.
And I decided that as a prostitute and as an animal rights activist, it was
my duty to try to give a little bit back to the coyotes and show people the
brutal reality faced by hundreds of thousands of them every year in North
America – being poisoned, shot and trapped as part of various hunting contests
and “control” programs. Indirectly, I also wanted to ask some hard questions
regarding our use of animals as “metaphors” for human suffering. How appropriate
is it to compare our own human suffering to that of animals when most of
the time, quantitatively and qualitatively, there is so much disparity between
the two? I presented the show here in Toronto in 2001 and I will perform
it again in September 2003 in New York as part of WOW Café’s first
National Transgender Theatre Festival.
CLAUDETTE: I’ve made a connection between women and animals and here’s
one example. In Australia recently a woman was brutally raped. She commented
at the time that the intruder was tearing out large chunks of her flesh with
his mouth, trying to mutilate her. I’m collecting files on this third aspect
of rape, ie, mutilation and decapitation, and I’m convinced it all began
with animal mutilation – vivisections, de-beaking, tail-docking, castration,
etc. Any thoughts on the matter?
MIRHA-SOLEIL: I do believe there are some connections between cruelty
to animals and violence towards some groups of humans, including women. And
I do think that it can be strategically useful to point these out at specific
times and as part of specific campaigns. But I am not one who is obsessively
trying to “connect everything” as the eco-feminist slogan goes ... I think
animal abuse, what’s happening in labs, on fur farms, in slaughterhouses,
on trap lines, in live animal markets, etc, is something that in and of itself
we as a society need to recognise as gruesome and unacceptable, regardless
of whether or not it directly affects us as humans. For as long as we don’t
acknowledge that specific form of violence for what it is and for as long
as we are not deeply moved to end it, we will be morally bankrupt and yes,
I believe we will continue to commit atrocities towards other humans.
CLAUDETTE: What is your vision for the continuance of the AR movement?
Mine is that there must emerge a second women’s movement intrinsically linked
to the AR movement. Unlike the ’60s when women were burning their bras, this
time we’ll be burning our leather shoes!
MIRHA-SOLEIL: As a quick and catchy image I like it but I would love
to see something more meaningful done with the skins of these animals, something
that would more dramatically highlight where they came from and what they
really represent, the horror and the suffering behind them. Also, I
think that at least here in North America, we have already seen what people
refer to as “second wave” and “third wave” feminisms, and I haven’t found
these to be any more friendly towards animals. It can actually be quite the
opposite. A lot of hip and young “third wave” feminists see vegetarianism
as some tacky and embarrassing vestige from very problematic, old-fashioned,
feminist politics. So therefore as a transsexual and as a prostitute and as
someone deeply committed to fighting for animal liberation, I have become
less and less inclined to rely on feminism to provide me with an appropriate
framework within which to think and solve broader political issues, including
animal rights. I have just seen too often how seriously feminists can fuck
up and how much damage they can cause. I am extremely concerned with
anyone trying to impose a single political or philosophic framework on the
entire animal rights movement. I think the health and success of this movement
will depend on its ability not to be dominated by one political ideology.
The more we will see caring for animals and resistance to animal abuse flourish
in a multitude of geographical, cultural, linguistic, religious, class and
ethnic contexts, the more likely our movement is to survive, diversify, expand
and be successful. The most important thing is that everywhere in the world,
there are people who can recognise animal cruelty and abuse when they see
it perpetrated. Whether they decide to fight it based on their feminist or
religious beliefs or as part of their anti-speciesist or anti-colonial efforts
is really secondary to me.
This interview first appeared in Vegan
Voice magazine, “Promoting Compassion for All Beings”, PO Box 30, Nimbin
NSW 2480 Australia. Phone: 02 6689 7498 Website:
http://veganic.net