As part of DePaul’s annual Dignity Week, the Center for Intercultural Programs hosted an event designed to give students a look at individuals who routinely have their human dignity challenged, criminalized, or otherwise denied: the LGBT community.
Titled “Queer (In)Justice” the presentation and discussions were led by Joey Mogul, a DePaul adjunct professor of law and practicing attorney.
Students arrived in droves for the first of two presentations Oct. 19, braving terrible weather to listen to Mogul speak about the history of LGBT criminalization, particularly as it pertained to LGBT individuals of color. Two presentations were needed since the event attracted a lot of interest from the DePaul community.
“I’m hoping to get a perspective that’s outside of my own,” said Cary Callison, a sophomore who heard about the presentation through both her LGBT studies and her Sex and Gender classes. “I hope to learn something I otherwise wouldn’t know about.”
Mogul’s presentation began with a small picture passed around the room of a scanned painting of men being attacked by dogs while other men watched. The painting, Mogul said, depicted one of the first recorded accusations of “sodomy and cross-dressing,” when Spanish conquistadors in Panama saw a number of men dressed in what they considered female attire.
“Forty indigenous men were thrown to [the conquistadors’] hunting dogs and torn apart,” said Mogul, for the perceived crime of not conforming to the European idea of masculinity.
“Many indigenous societies had a range of gender identities,” Mogul said. Invading European nations felt that in order to establish their way of life, gender fluidity had to be suppressed, and a rigid hierarchy established in its place. That hierarchy was then used as a basis to subjugate, enslave, or kill indigenous peoples who participated in non-conforming gender behavior.
This history, Mogul explained, makes up the foundation of race and gender policing that we see today. It’s a problem that has persisted since before the U.S. was a country, she asserted, but it has not been a focus of LGBT advocacy for some time.
“It’s important for the LGBT [community] to recognize that the criminalization of queer and transgendered people isn’t over and [the LGBT community] need to devote time, energy and resources to advocate and care for them,” Mogul said after the presentation.
Mogul referenced her own history as an attorney advocating for gay and transgendered individuals who had been unfairly treated, harassed, or otherwise criminalized by the criminal justice system, including cases of police brutality in Chicago as recently as 2010.
“We are all influenced by archetypes,” Mogul said, pointing to the symbolic significance of old laws–including sodomy, cross-dressing, and vagrancy laws–used to single out and degrade members of the transgendered and “gender nonconformist” communities.
The 1986 Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick to make homosexual activity–even consensual, even in the privacy of one’s home–illegal “gave renewed legal weight to the idea that queers as a class were worthy of punishment.”
At the end of the presentation, students were given the opportunity to ask Mogul questions. One student wanted to know how society could hold people like the police accountable for brutality against the LGBT community when the behavior was ingrained in the legal system.
“Accountability is something we must strive for every day,” Mogul replied, adding that in many police training programs there is little or no mention of how to respectfully interact with a queer or transgendered person in prison. “The gender binary has pernicious consequences in the detention environment,” she said.
Ultimately, Mogul hoped that the students who had come to listen to her speak would leave with three realizations: That the definition of “criminal” was not a neutral one, that the criminal system does target and punish LGBT people of color, and that in “this age of mass incarceration” LGBT people of color are being impacted by a race-based system.
She also hoped that the students would leave inspired to work to preserve the dignity of these communities.
“We need to work on behalf of all criminalized queer and transgendered [people],” she said. “These folks are worthy and deserving of our help and support.”