Hello Homo! Election Interview with Brian Sims!
I feel like there is so much attention given to just the primary election. Then people stop paying attention to politics as soon as it’s over. I wish people would stay engaged in politics on the local level and pay attention to politics between presidential elections. What advice do you have?
Homo: This is such a real question. Especially within queer culture and LGBTQ+ social movements. We see so much attention focused on the big election, yet there are so many missed opportunities for political visibility and change within our communities, cities, and states.
I had the absolute pleasure sitting down with politician, civil rights attorney, and LGBTQ+ activist Brian Sims. Brian was the first openly gay man elected to Pennsylvania state legislator in 2013. He now lives in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC with his partner and dog. We had a lovely chat based on this question. Here is an overview of that conversation.
Brian Simms: I have a couple of things to say about this. First, I could not agree more. It can be a real frustrating thing to see this sort of the rise and fall of how (and when) people are interested in politics. It comes and goes in a way that feels like the beginning and end of seasons or shows rather than these critically important moments in our civil rights. You watch people’s interests fade because a candidate they liked didn’t last while you still know that your fundamental rights are on the table. So, your bright, sparkly candidate isn’t there, but my rights still might be, and that frustrates the heck out of me.
I think the reason I am so optimistic about this (contemporary politics) is because of who is starting to make these decisions about us. And that is us.
Barney Frank was the first out member of Congress, and he was and is famously a cantankerous person. He can be really gruff. But Barney Frank used to say, “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu.” That has been the sort of hallmark of America’s approach to LGBTQ+ equality.
The fact that we have lacked so many rights in so many places. The fact that we have now had to undergo that we’re sort of in the middle of our second wave of a fight for civil rights, and that in a lot of places that’s that that wave is overtaking us. This seems sort of almost lost on us given the fact that we seek out (LGBTQ+) elected officials, and you see a trans woman on the cover of Time. But we are nowhere near being appropriately represented in government, and when we are, it is good, and it’s actually extra good.
Empathy
Now, I believe that good public policy is a result of empathy. It always sounds high-minded when a person says it, especially a cis white guy. But I don’t mean it in that way. I mean it very literally. I can’t know about all the things that I would have voted on in a given year. A thousand votes in a given cycle. In order to learn about those things, people had to come in and teach me, how is this vote going to impact this person, this community, this plant, this budget, this school, the air, the water? Those people are lobbyists.
Lobbyists do great work when they’re lobbying for people to have free healthcare, for everyone to get educated or a have a roof over their head. They (lobbyists) do terrible work when they’re doing the opposite of those things. They are teaching a decision-maker how to make a decision that isn’t about them. Of those 1,000 bills, only about 50 ever impacted my life. Everything else required me to put myself in somebody else’s shoes, the definition of empathy.
But it turns out empathy isn’t equally shared in this country. It turns out, and this should come as no surprise to most people, that women, for example, are statistically, significantly more empathetic than men. People of color are more empathetic than white people. Second- and third-generation immigrants are more empathetic than longer term Americans.
Empathy is not a biological response or component in any way. It is societal. It’s a social response. Empathy is one of the sorts of skills and tools you build when your environments aren’t just simply made for you or handed to you. You’ve got to know how other people think how other people respond. Women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people have a higher level of empathy.
Fighting Cis-White-Male Homogeneity
Cis, gay white men tend to screw up a lot of the data about empathy among LGBTQ+ populations. Now it’s hard. We’re lots of things, right? There’s a reason that rainbows are our symbol. Queer people are everywhere. But the empathy scores of LGBTQ+ people I’ve seen says that cis, gay white men don’t tend to rate the same way. As a cis, white, gay man, it’s important to lead with that (empathy). I see it anecdotally in my life and advocacy every day as well. So, it doesn’t surprise me to see that.
If it follows that empathy is good in public policy, it should also follow that more people with empathy make for better public policy. States that have the highest numbers of women in them, the highest numbers of people of color, and/or the highest numbers of LGBTQ+ people in them, aren’t necessarily the most liberal states, but they’re the states with the most functioning democracies. They’re the states where issues get introduced, experts get heard from. They have up or down votes. Bills get sent to a governor; they get a vote, or they get vetoed, and the machines work.
In places where there is homogeneity, which is always cis, white, male homogeneity. What you see is that that once one or two or three people have made up their mind in those types of environments, the rest are going to make up their exact same mind for the exact same reasons. In those states we lose all the myriad benefits of diversity, but also your just lesser functioning.
Optimism
Now, here’s why I’m optimistic, Jesse. In the last 20 years, especially the last 10 years, we’ve seen more women, more people of color, more second-generation immigrants and more LGBTQ+ people run for office and win than we saw in the 30 years before it.
The decision makers that we’re seeing in states now are starting to look like us. They’re starting to sound more like us. There is no question that even within LGBTQ+ communities, even within marginalized communities, there is elitism, undue heritage, and privilege. We still have to combat all of those things within our own community. In fact, we have to do it more to show others how and why they can do it themselves.
But also, we are becoming more of the government that governs us than we have ever been before. When we are the deciders, we don’t just make better decisions about our own equality; we make better decisions about the equality and the lives of people who we will never meet and who we may never fully understand. And that’s what’s so different. And that’s why I’m so optimistic.
Homo: Brian and I went on to talk about how to facilitate and engage with friends and family members in conversation about local politics. Keep an eye out next week for that portion of my interview with LGBTQ+ politician and activist Brian Sims.
Follow Brian on Instagram here @briansimspa. Follow me on Instagram @holistic.homosexual for updates on my new column and stay tuned for the next HELLO HOMO! See you next week!
Have a question you would like answered? Submit your questions directly to me at hellohomo@ofm.media.
Disclaimer: Hello Homo is for informational and educational purposes and is not a substitute for mental health treatment. Hello Homo (Jesse Proia) is not providing mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment to readers. If you are someone you know is experience a mental health crisis or emergency, please contact 911, 988 or go to the nearest emergency room.
