Sick of being pacified - co-opting of gay liberation movement - Brief Article - Column

Forget about new funding for social service agencies or any other human need. Queers of the world, get ready to hold a bake sale.

My girlfriend asks me about the symptoms of mad cow disease whenever she hears W. Bush speak. But how to define the malady that afflicts and silences gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people since the November election? Here are the symptoms:

Amnesia: An administration filled with the scumbags who helped kill thousands of gay and bisexual men, women, and transgendered people with their opposition to GLBT equality from 1981 to 1993 is now hailed by some as our friends and others as benign. Cheney--who did nothing to help GLBT people while in Congress or when he ran the Pentagon. Powell--who actively opposed lifting the military ban. And the legions of minions from the staffs of Armey, Lott, DeLay, and other deformities of the Right in Congress.

Incoherence: The few crumbs thrown at us are applauded with an intensity that makes the lapdogs of Clinton-era politics seem restrained. Bush reappointed an AIDS czar--why is this a surprise and not an expectation? He appointed an openly gay man to a gay job--big deal; only 150 more to go till he beats the record of the last administration.

Denial: Gay conservatives and moderates are cheery--see, three months into the new White House and no ovens yet; see, the Right is not winning; see, none of that dreary multiculturalism, just the minstrel-show kind of inclusion we like.

Indifference: Our democracy has experienced a hostile takeover, with government now run as a club of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Reversal after reversal on environmental regulations, a homicidal tax plan that sentences the working poor to beggar status at the doorways of religious institutions, Rumsfeld's secret Pentagon revamping plans to get more contracts to his cronies in the war industry--all done by people so cozy with industry that they have oil tankers named after them.

Hypocrisy: The faith-based funding initiative is truly biblical: robbing Peter to pay Paul, stealing from people to pay churches. Forget about new funding for GLBT social service agencies or any other human need. Queers of the world, get ready to hold a bake sale.

What is the dominant GLBT reaction? As long as I get laid. I don't care if you get fucked. As long as I have my Queer as Folk, my paycheck, my car, my circuit parry, my second-parent adoption, my civil union, my DP benefits, my zones of freedom in 11 states, my opera tickets, my second, third, fourth house, who cares if you have yours.

What is this affliction? The narcissism of conservatism? The cowardice of centrism? The insularity of progressivism? Maybe all three.

The malaise affecting our movement--co-optation, tokenism, surrender--affects all social justice movements. The liberation rhetoric is so co-opted today that the seminal freedom speech of our lifetime is sold by its trustees to sell crap. Advertisers claim the mantle of revolutionary while those of us who supposedly wage the struggle for justice try to be respectable. While business portrays itself as hip, the nonprofit sector spends hours trying to be more professional, emulating models of corporate hierarchy discredited in business schools.

"Money has reckoned the soul of America," wrote Allen Ginsberg. And so it seems in our movement, from silence equals death to silence equals wealth. What if I don't want to surrender? What if I don't want to watch guys come out from under their tired old white hoods and tell me they love Latinos? What if I want to put my life on the line for something more noble than the "freedom" of U.S. corporations to sell clothes made by Bangladeshi children for 10 [cts.] a day to Chinese consumers?

Maybe mad cow disease is the malady I have--perfect that a Hindu would get it. Its symptoms? Self-renewing optimism about the radical change created as queer people live open and honest lives. An unglamorous commitment to funding and creating state-based policy and organizing work. Determined personal involvement and support for organizing to build progressive electoral majorities in districts across the country. And above all, a ferocious faith-based activism, grounded in love, seeking economic, racial, and social justice that no hypocrite, thief, or cynic can derail.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group