For a while at Davidson College many students have fought to exclude Chick-fil-A from our campus community because its president opposed same-sex marriage stating that traditional forms of marriage were where his values lie. It was to my surprise that I started to see Chick-fil-A’s delicious spicy chicken sandwiches again on campus since last year’s Spring Frolics and during our recent Winterfest. No, you read right. They were delicious. Although I didn’t get a spicy chicken sandwich during Winterfest, because they ran out, I have eaten from Chick-fil-A before. And as a transgirl from the North, I am not impervious to hunger, especially if it’s food already bought with my student activities fee money. But let me give you some more information before you make any conclusions about my values and queer activism.
I’m a transgirl from Boston, MA. Our mayor in 2012 actively did not want a very certain fast-food fried chicken chain from the South into our city. Mainly because of their stance on same-sex marriage and how they made donations to anti-gay organizations such as conversion therapy practices, the kind where they torture the gay away, earning it a practice that can neither be called conversion nor therapy. The only successful results gay conversion therapy can claim to are the high depression and following suicide rates of the victims to this disgusting endorsement of Christian values. I continue to struggle in understanding how self-proclaimed loving parents would make their children go through such a torture and I sadly, bitterly, and logically conclude that these people ignore the harm they do to people like me because once we choose to die by suicide, we are then finally closer to God.
Unfortunately for them, I am not interested in an eternal afterlife. Fuck it. Like Bianca Del Rio once said, if there really is a special place in hell reserved for me, it’s called the throne. And if I get to be with my community, then the daunting threat of hell does not seem to be that bad. It just might be a big ole queer party with our drag mother, Lucifer.
Speaking of drag queens, the music video created by Willam, Detox, and Vicky Vox trolling Chick-Fil-A is the kind of queer pettiness I am all for.
When it comes to queer activism, I look to people like Shane Windmeyer, the founder and executive director of Campus Pride, the leading queer organization for queer student leadership development and campus organizing to create better and safer college campus communities located in our very own Charlotte, NC. Having personally met Shane myself, I am only further impressed by the amount of sheer hard work and emotional labor he has put in to create a better world for queer youth. In August of 2012, Shane wrote “The Secret Recipe for Funding Hate Groups: 5 Simple Facts About Chick-fil-A,” tracing the business’s financial contributions to anti-LGBTQ organizations. Shane’s work extends beyond this when in late January of 2013, just a few months after his first article, he wrote “Dan and Me: My Coming Out as a Friend of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A,” where after extensive phone calls, text messages, and in-person meetings with Dan Cathy, Chick-fil-A’s president and COO, Chick-fil-A shared their 2011 IRS Form 990 showing that their funding of anti-queer organizations had already stopped. Looking through their 990 form with the fiscal year ending in 2015, it seems they have indeed not contributed to anti-queer organizations as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center since.
Knowing that Chick-fil-A no longer contributes to these documented hate organizations has allowed me some peace around my college campus as I started to see big organizations on campus cater from them. After all, let’s be honest, as much as I love fried chicken as much as the next person, I am a bit tired of Tenders all the time and have heard great things about Chick-fil-A’s waffle fries. I am not impervious to hunger and fried potatoes. But just because Chick-fil-A no longer supports anti-queer organizations mean I will be exclusively eating from them and supporting them now. If anything, I believe the chain has a lot to make up for in their past support of queer coercion and criminalization.
We as student leaders on campus who have access to a budget need to understand that our choices in how we use our funds are a direct endorsement of certain values when we cater from certain restaurants for social events, speaker events, or holiday events. Money is one of the most basic forms of power and we are essentially giving power to these businesses by employing their services or purchasing their food. So I continue to question where can we get our food from that is socially just and responsible? Must we remain in the territories of fried chicken or can we branch out to more options such as chicken tandoori, teriyaki, or shawarma? I would love to see us try more flavors from the South but maybe we’ll just stay confused whenever we happen to find a leaf in our chipotle.
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