So you can imagine my surprise when the US Census Bureau announced that for the 2010 Census, they were not counting LGBT(Q)* identities. This is supposed to be a portrait of Identities of People who Live in the United States. And so, as their ads say, we can't figure out how many classrooms the United States needs unless we know how many schoolchildren are there. But, we also can't see how many people are affected by not recognizing LGBT(Q) identities in socio-political discourse. (Yeah, I said socio-political discourse on my blog.)
Which brings me to the Queer The Census movement. The Queer The Census movement - a product of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force - is mass-producing free stickers for everyone who wants one to identify themselves to the Census Bureau to show them a population of people who are not-straight, and want their identity to count.** (Conveniently, almost a full month into the Census, the Census bureau announced if you were an LGBTQ in a long-term, committed partnership and wanted to list yourself as "married" rather than "single", it is okay to list your partner as your husband or wife. Way to devalidate any long-term same-sex partnerships for anyone who submitted their census form in the first month.)
If you have your census form sitting in front of you and you don't have a sticker, you can download a PDF from their website and use packing tape to put it on your form. You have the option of checking off lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or a straight ally - an identity that almost everyone can categorize themselves under, even if it's a little limiting or broad. Below are pictures of me Queering the Census. Please do this - it's really important.
* I'm notating (Q) as such because Queer and Questioning are sometimes a little too broad in categorization. This is not a bad thing, but if we can get everyone to identify predominantly on an identity which is easily quantifiable by the whole country? That would be so wonderful.
** In a similar act of ignorance, Hispanic/Latino/Latina identities are equally as ignored in the category of "Race".
