An Interview with Daniel Stone

Daniel Stone appeared to me in a vision, holding a large tome entitled: Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Søren Kierkegaard and wearing a t-shirt that read "Talk Nerdy To Me". I emerged from the vision knowing that I had to gain audience with this wise philosopher of impressive mane and ambiguous repute. Rumor has it that Stone can be found late at night wandering in hidden tunnels, searching for truth and adventure...lost, but not forever, in Kierkegaard's third realm of despair. No idea what I'm talking about? Me either. Read on.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

I am 20 years old, I am from Columbia SC. I’m a junior at CofC, I’m a Biology/Philosophy major. I’m interested in all kinds of fun things like Kierkegaard, Marx, and radical environmentalism, and also ecology and conservation. I’m interested in the convergence point where people and the environment come together.

What’s your definition of community?

Community is a people willing to come together for some cause that is larger than their own.

What would you say your community is?

I am sort of a jack of all trades. I’ve got the queer community going on, I’ve gotten very in with the philosophy department and I end up hanging out with them a lot--and we get into arguments all the time, how philosophers will do! And I’ve still got my friends group from Columbia too.

What is your main role in the queer community in Charleston?

I helped with QueerFest, that was awesome. I am the vice president of the CofC GSA. I do organizing and stuff for We Are Family, and I just try to keep conversation going within the queer community and between our community and other communities.

Would you differentiate the queer community from the gay community?

This is probably the thing that interests me the most. I really didn’t start off identifying as gay, but queer clicked with me right away. I feel that the gay community is more a demographic than an orientation. The queer community organizes itself in way that if you feel you are part of the community, you are entered in to it, and there are so many factors that allow you access that community. Your membership doesn’t hinge just on you being attracted to the same sex. The gay community doesn’t really encapsulate the MSM community, there’s a lot of exclusion of bisexuals and pansexuals. It’s just more exclusionary.

What is your definition of queer?

Okay, let me put on my professorial suit. It’s not just a sexual orientation, it’s an approach to sexuality. I take a very Sartrean approach to what queer means to me--we are almost the sole creators of our sexuality. We find it, and we ascribe characteristics to ourselves. We are the people who constantly rewrite it and constantly reaffirm it over and over. It’s realizing that you can write something else, that you are in control of what you write, and what your character is, and that, coming with this freedom is the responsibility for this. Queerness means you are very actively responsible for your sexuality, for consent, for practicing safe sex, for all those things.

How would you say that this idea which you just articulated engages with the current debate within the gay community, and between the gay community and other communities, such as the religious community, about choice and sexual orientation?

My opinion on this is not very mainstream, as far as the LGBT community goes. I feel that tying the entire argument around the idea that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that therefore, we should have the same access to marriage or rights, frames the entire conversation the wrong which way around. I feel that the argument should be “I am human, and I deserve this,” instead of “I’m like you, but different, but I didn’t have a choice.” I get to take responsibility for liking whoever I like. It is my right as a human to like whoever I like and I should be allowed access for those reasons, not for some sympathy. I worry about framing the argument in the way of “I didn’t have a choice, I was created this way”. I think that’s dangerous as far as limiting access for other people goes. I have the choice to like anyone--how is this argument going to protect me? How will it protect pansexuals? Or bisexuals? Or trans people? And I’m worried about once and if gay marriage gets passed, who is going to fight for trans rights if the argument is framed this way? How will we fight for other freedoms and social liberties that we haven’t even discovered yet because our conscious social awareness isn’t even heightened enough for us to realize that our current way of framing things is drawing the line in a way that circumscribes our future options?

What is your definition of feminism?

I surrender! No more! My favorite definition of feminism, that I wish more people would subscribe to, is that it is the voice of oppressed people. I’m really into reading black feminist literature--they felt that because they were at the intersection of race, class and gender that it they were freed, everyone else would be freed too. I have some problems with the word itself, because it can cut off other people, and it seems to frame itself as what it’s not. Because recent feminist philosophy moves away from just being about women’s issues. It showed that it was moving past that. I’m definitely supportive of current feminist philosophy, even if I wish it had a different name.

Pick three things that you would want to see happen in Charleston in the next year.

Bikes everywhere. I mean they’re there, but I want a bike explosion in Charleston.

I also want a Queer Collective. The Charleston Women’s Collective started off as a women’s empowerment, safe-space organization, and then moved towards an activist organization, and then a few males started Men’s Collective for a hot minute, and now both organizations have pressed the pause button, and there is talk about things starting back up. There was some talk after Queerfest of possibly moving the ideas that motivated that event into a sustainable, ongoing organization and I wanted that to be Queer Collective, and I really want to get that off the ground. I want to keep building queer community, making sure everyone knows each other, making a safe space where people can talk about whats going on. Where Women’s Collective and Men’s Collective fall apart is that some people don’t feel comfortable talking in a single-gender space, like we had this one trans friend who wasn’t really comfortable in either space. I would feel more comfortable talking to a group of my queer peers than talking to just a group of males or females, because there’s an understanding there that isn’t encapsulated in just your group of guys.

The third thing I’d really like to see is recycling for downtown businesses. I’m at this one coffee shop all the time, and they have to throw away so many recyclables because the city won’t pick them up, and they would need them to be picked up almost every day. The funds aren’t there, and that’s for all of downtown, it’s ridiculous!

Describe your ideal world--what does the Daniel Stone utopia look like?

It’s so green! It’s also so queer...actually it wouldn’t even need to be queer anymore. That’s the whole beauty of it. My idea of the perfect utopia isn’t actually that radical. Everyone’s got a project, it doesn’t have to be crazy, doesn’t have to be huge. People are living with each other in harmony, they’re living with nature in harmony, they’re living with themselves. There’s no guilt, people get to be exactly who they are. It’s not that crazy, and it’s not that hard.

What pronouns do you prefer?

Lady. Mister. Mister Lady. I really don't care what you call me, Daniel is the best pronoun, hereby decreed. I really don't get offended. With my long hair I’ve been ma’amed my whole life. I’m so used to gender buffoonery!

Name one stereotype about LGBTQQIA people and debunk it.

The myth I am going to debunk is that males have to fall under either a gay or straight label, and that there is no gray area. I’m all about the gray area. So whether it’s in Charleston or on the national stage, we really don't have a lot of faces or voices of people to cling on to and realize that there is this gray area. There are a lot of examples of bisexual female stars, the endless array of Lady Gagas and such, but for guys, this is not the case at all. There are a couple of gay movies stars, singers, but as far as bi guys go, the only one I can think of is Patrick Wolf; he's awesome he's pansexual, he got arrested...but there are really no examples on the US national stage, or in Charleston. There are gay men running gay organizations and in the media, but there’s no room for flexibility, there’s no room for this playfulness that I'm after. And we’re out there! It’s just that we aren't on the forefront and in peoples faces, because it’s dangerous to what our society conceives as masculine and those who get to occupy that space. There is a pressure to choose.

Ok, I want to know why this issue of fluidity should be so important to the gay community--why is it important for there to not be a gay community, but a wider queer community? Why should the gay community become so inclusive that it is no longer accurate to simply call it gay?

Well on a practical political level, if the gay rights movement that is currently going on wants to keep the moral high ground, they have got to actually have that moral high ground, they have to be nonexclusive, they have to be accepting of all of the communities they say they represent. If they are representing bisexuals and transexuals and queers and questionings and intersexuals and asexuals and pansexuals, they’re gonna have to do it, they’re gonna have to step up, they are gonna have to not engage in double think and dissonance, they’re gonna have to do it.

I read zine after zine about queers who are angry because they feel excluded. They want to be part of the movement, but they realize that they’re being kicked off for a smaller and smaller and smaller minority of the mostly gay and lesbian community’s benefit, it’s like the white picket fence and adoption, thats what’s going on. There are so many issues that the community needs to worry about--youth homelessness, prison conditions, abuse, there are all these very politically real conditions that the entire community faces every day that are not middle class gay and lesbians getting married in the suburbs. I mean that matters too, but marriage is not our biggest battle, our biggest battle is changing how everything works. There has got to be a whole paradigm shift of how we see people. We need solidarity. You’re gonna have to have everyone linking arms and committing to the long haul. We’re gonna have to commit to fight oppression of all sorts in all areas. It extends beyond sexual orientation. There’s so much classism and racism and ableism and sexism within our communities. We can’t be fighting with each other if were going to be fighting something else on a much bigger stage.

If you had to ask yourself an interview question, what would it be?

That’s so meta! Ok, how would you open up discussion more with in the queer community? I guess I would try and figure out what the barriers are to conversation. I feel like a lot of people don't want to talk about these things. I feel like getting a conversation started can be super burdensome. There’s so much apathy, people thinking that it doesn't affect them, that it’s not their concern. People have to realize that even if something hasn't impacted them directly, it could at any minute. Kyriarchy affects you and you don't even know it, and thats the tragedy. It extends to a lot of our current issues, it’s like the tragedy of the commons. It’s a mess. It’s the idea that we’re in the middle of the issue and we are making it worse, and we don’t feel like we have the power to change it, and so we don’t do anything about it. You have to get people to believe that they are already involved; they are already making political decisions. Back to Sartre, you are responsible for everything you do--action and inaction are both choices. You are already changing how the discussion works by not doing anything about it. So we need to be working on that, because we are going to be responsible for not fixing it if we don't work on it.

Why should the environmentalist community care about queer issues, and why should the queer community care about environmental issues? how are those interdependent?

Oppression groups often end up being one and the same, there’s intersectionality. So from the environmental side, some things I am interested in are conservation and environmental justice, and ecofeminism. You look at things that are creating the needs for these movements: large scale international development, globalization, industrialization, (which is basically capitalism), the agro military industrial complex. Then you have queerness which could include the oppressions of racism and patriarchy and kyriarchy and class. Addressing this set of issues causes us to find their roots right in the middle of capitalism, industrialization, imperialism. So we may have very many very disparate symptoms, such as homophobia and a lack of clean water, but we find that they stem from a very few number of causes. It takes some unpacking to realize that a lot of the problems that I am interested in have the same source, it’s just that things get wider as they flow downstream.

Thank you so much Daniel, I always enjoy talking with you!