There’s No Place for Hate in Candler Park
By Joshua Jarrett
Everything we display in our community like flags, yard signs or even what we stock in our Little Libraries, says something about what we see within ourselves and the face we want to show others.
Recently, I saw a public message of hate, one that I know this neighborhood would never want to send.
Homophobia and transphobia, whether subtle or overt, has no place in any community. Messaging which seeks to further the hateful idea that queer community members are a nuisance, a problem, or dangerous is harmful to those very people. While the pushers of this kind of messaging often rely on false information and stereotypes, the true message is always to conform to a repressive hetero-orthodoxy or become a pariah.
Furthermore, this messaging works to incentivize those in the in-group (straight people, cis people) and shun those in the out-group (such as LGBTQIA+ people.) Consider how often in our cultural history some panicked “do-gooder” insists that they are coming for our women, our children, or our jobs.
This kind of messaging often happens in quiet, little ways. And recently, some quiet little anti-gay propaganda just like this was discovered in our otherwise bright and warm community.
Affixed onto some power poles at the corner of McLendon and Candler Park Drive were stickers depicting a boot with rainbow stripping crushing the word “Woman.”
Typically, a boot represents an oppressive class that seeks to destroy an oppressed class, but here, it’s been inverted (presumably, in a way the creator believes is clever) to express the idea that “The Gays” are somehow the enemy of women. Never mind that some women are also gay — pretending whole communities and populations of people don’t even exist is sometimes necessary for the messaging to appear coherent. Here, we see the familiar reliance on the old “They’re coming for our women,” trope.
It’s pathetic of course, but like all scammers, they aren’t aiming to sell it to anyone with their head on straight.
The sticker also included a URL, one of several that direct passersby to a website run by a known transphobe whose identity I’d rather not mention here. Basically, this is Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) stuff. TERF, for those unaware, is the word used to describe an ideological group that uses feminist-sounding language to push deeply conservative and exclusive philosophy. Typically they represent, as the name implies, an anti-trans agenda, but recently some in this camp have joined a more tinfoil-hatted set to attack gay people as well.
I understand this might seem like a lot of hay over some stickers, but as you can see sometimes these quiet little things become quite dark when examined.
This ugliness should not be tolerated. Candler Park is a beautiful place to live, it is a welcoming place. I came here for all the reasons that make it beautiful and safe for my partner and me. It’s the kind of place I want to live.
So, what’s there to be done? Outlaw stickers? Ridiculous. Not only would that be impossible to enforce, but also I like graffiti. Maybe we could organize ad hoc sticker hunts where we patrol the streets like Batman armed with an old credit card for scrapping, but that feels a bit trite. No, I think for now my strategy is to try to take the ugliness out of the world when I see it and try to put beauty into the world when I’m inspired.
But I’m open to ideas.
Joshua Jarrett is an artist and writer living in Candler Park.