Matari Sehati

Oleh. Dian T Indrawaná

Dalam perspektif feminis dikatakan bahwa perempuan adalah the second sex, ia adalah seks yang kedua dari laki-laki dalam masyarakat yang patriarkis. Dalam "seks kedua ini" masih banyak sekali perbincangan yang belum terjawab. Apalagi dari komunitas lesbian, yang adalah dipandang sebagai the third sex, karena orientasi seksualnya yang berbeda, maka mereka diasingkan bahkan cenderung teraniaya lebih parah daripada perempuan yang heteroseks atau orientasi seksual lawan jenis yang dianggap normal. Dari Berbagai pandangan tentang komunitas lesbian, sebenarnya akan membuka sebuah wacana baru tentang perkembangan LGBT. Oleh karena itu, dalam membahas komunitas ini memiliki etika tersendiri dibandingan dengan komunitas LGBT yang lain. Kemudian etika ini dapat tersimpulkan bahwa etika lesbianisme merupakan etika yang membongkar pengertian umum tentang "apa yang baik" dan "apa yang buruk". Dengan demikian, etika lesbian berangkat dari semangat untuk resistensi terhadap etika yang telah "disepakati secara alamiah". Etika ini juga bersifat perjuangan dan anti dominasi sama dengan etika feminisme. Namun yang membedakan adalah pijakan yang kuat pada kreatifitas dan pemaknaan hidup yang cair, artinya, hidup tidak dimaknai dengan ketegangan dan pencarian kebenaran "akhirat" akan tetapi dengan "permainan" dan keinginan untuk selalu berkreasi[1].

Pada tulisan saya kali ini, jika etika lesbian disangkut pautkan dengan pencarian kebenaran akhirat, maka saya memberikan satu wacana dari pandangan Alkitab bahwa Alkitab tidak melarang relasi cinta kasih dan tanggung jawab di antara pasangan perempuan. Alkitab menentang segala bentuk relasi antar manusia yang menindas dan mengeksploitasi sesamanya, baik dalam relasi lesbian maupun dalam relasi hetero. Nah, sekarang yang menjadi pertanyaan disini adalah siapakah kita manusia yang berani mengklaim lesbian itu dosa sementara Tuhan Bapa sendiri pun sama sekali tidak pernah mengatakan apapun tentang hal itu? Apakah itu hanya klaim dari beberapa kelompok yang picik akan keberadaan komunitas lesbian?

Terlepas dari pembahasan dosa atau tidaknya relasi cinta kasih komunitas LGBT, terutama lesbian merupakan perempuan yang juga memiliki persoalan yang sama kompleksnya dengan kaum perempuan pada umumnya: hak-hak sipil, politik, ekonomi, sosial dan budaya. Namun sebagai kelompok seksual minoritas, lesbian mengalami persoalan yang jauh lebih berat dari kelompok perempuan hetero, terutama adanya hambatan dalam masalah mendapatkan hak-hak sipil dan politiknya. Menurut RR. Agustine dari Ardhanary Institute menjelaskan tentang perjuangan atau pun gerakan lesbian bahwa sesudah reformasi (2000-2008) jelas merupakan bukti kebangkitan kaum lesbian dari ruang yang ekslusif menuju ruang yang inklusif. Kebangkitan tersebut menjadi sebuah gerakan yang mentransformasi strategi gerakan sesuai dengan kondisi sosial dan politik yang berkembang. Dimana gerakan lesbian menjadi lebih kuat dan melembaga dengan lahirnya organisasi-organisasi lesbian juga dukungan dari kelompok-kelompok yang lain seperti kelompok perempuan dan HAM serta Pluralisme. Gerakan lesbian Indonesia pun telah berkonstribusi cukup besar dalam mendorong pemajuan HAM secara international dengan terlibat di dalam gerakan LGBT international.

Akan tetapi masih begitu banyak orang-orang yang menentang akan keberadaan komunitas lesbian ini atas dasar ajaran agama yang melarangnya, sehingga terbentuknya stimulus seseorang tentang LGBT yang lebih sering dinamakan homofobia. Seperti, berdasarkan pada ayat yang menceritakan umat Luth, bukan pada hukum pun konteks kisah Luth tidak dibaca secara utuh yang diplototi hanya kutipan "mendatangai laki-laki". Sementara sebab-sebab lain yang justru diulang-ulang: kaum Luth yang ingin mengusir Luth, menyamun, berbuat keonaran, hendak melakukan kejahatan terhadap tamu dan ingin mempermalukan Luth, sehingga Luth terpaksa menawarkan putri-putri-nya untuk tidak dijadikan dasar sama sekali. Kemudian homofobia berdasarkan pada teks yang tidak memiliki otoritas, yakni: hadis-hadis lemah dan palsu. Tetapi berbeda dengan pernyataan sikap yang ditulis oleh Siti Musdah Mulia. Dalam tulisan beliau tertulis bahwa Allah hanya Melihat Taqwa, bukan Orientasi Seksual Manusia.[*]

In 1972, a group of women and men including Joan Nestle, mostly gay, who worked or had been educated in the City University of New York and had participated in the liberation movements of the l960s, founded the Gay Academic Union (GAU). Dedicated to representing the concerns of lesbian and gay students, teachers, and workers, GAU also launched projects to ensure gay inclusion in course content. At the first conference of the organization, a bomb threat emptied the auditorium, but the conference continued. As was common in the early 1970s, after a year of working together, several of the women decided they needed a separate meeting space to discuss sexism in the organization, among other things. Two consciousness- raising groups were formed and one of them, which included Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel, became the founding site of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. At one meeting in 1974, Julia Stanley and Joan Nestle, who had come out before the Gay Liberation Movement, talked about the precariousness of lesbian culture and how so much of our past culture was seen only through patriarchal eyes. Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallo and Pamela Oline, with histories ranging from lesbian-feminism to political lesbianism, joined in and, thus, a new concept was born - a grassroots Lesbian archives.

Later in 1974, a larger group of women started meeting on a regular basis to work out the deeper vision of this undertaking. One of the first tasks the group undertook was to send off a news release to all of the then existing lesbian, feminist and gay publications announcing the groundbreaking undertaking. This was a testing of the waters, to see if the community shared in our vision. The answer was "yes", and in the next year, 1975, LHA published its first free newsletter. In the same year, the Archives found its home for the next 15 years in Joan Nestle's Upper West Side Manhattan apartment on 92nd St. Deborah Edel and Joan shared these years with the Archives in this home. And so did thousands of volunteers and visitors. Deb and Joan agreed that the first ten years of the Archives would be to build the trust of the communities it was serving. They were determined to keep all of the services of the Archives free, to not seek government funding, and to build grassroots support for the project. To accomplish this, Deb and Joan had carried around early journal issues, photographs, letters, and so on, in shopping bags, speaking to whomever invited them. The venues ranged from living rooms where all present were sworn to secrecy, to women's festivals, gay church and synagogue gatherings, classrooms and bars.

By the late 1970s, to save wear and tear on the more fragile artifacts, they created the Archives' slide show. The slide show meant they could demonstrate the history of the Archives and raise issues about the challenges facing a Lesbian Archives and Lesbian history work in general, while making appeals for more materials. The main point of the slide show was to turn shame into a sense of cherished history, to change the meaning of history to include every woman who had the courage to touch another woman, whether for a night or a lifetime. "To change deprivation into cultural plentitude" as Joan said in hundreds of tours she gave in the apartment of the overflowing collection. A version of the slideshow still exists today, custom fitted to whomever is showing it. In 1978, Judith Schwarz, a pioneering grassroots Lesbian historian, joined the collective, bringing with her all her skills in information organizing. Georgia Brooks, a tireless activist in the New Jersey and New York communities, also joined. Georgia launched the first Black Lesbian Studies group at the Archives, which held its meetings around the famous French peasant dining room table that we bought for $30 on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 1973. It is now back in Brooklyn in our permanent home.

One other person closely connected with the Archives until her death was Mabel Hampton, (1902-1986), a woman who had lived her long life in the African-American Lesbian community. Mabel donated her extensive collection of 1950s lesbian paperbacks and often came to volunteer nights. From the earliest days of the Archives, one night a week was devoted to volunteers working with the collection -groups of very different women spread out over the whole apartment filing, sorting, cataloguing, and opening mail. Many women came to volunteer nights just to hear Mabel tell her tales of drag balls in Harlem and her version of the wild parties of the Harlem Renaissance. In the mid-1980s when we realized we needed to find a larger home for the Archives and to spread the responsibility for the now huge collection, we created a Coordinating Committee that spearheaded a concerted fundraising drive so we could purchase a building for the collection. We purchased our new home, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1990 and officially opened it in June 1993. The bank was dubious about taking a risk on our non-hierarchical collective with no guaranteed source of income, but we raised the money to pay back the bank in record time. That trust we had talked about building in 1974 was there when we - all of us -needed it.