Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Black homophobia isn’t especially galling because of their history in this country. White homophobia is especially galling because white conservatives have the resources and, my god, the energy to make defeating LGBT rights such a priority.

—–
Unfortunately this becomes a problem when, as the No on Prop 8 people did, gay marriage is presented as a civil rights issue.

It is. I want to emphasize this: it is. But it isn’t the same as the civil rights issues that have long been the focus of African American efforts, and I think many (white) gay-rights activists fail to recognize the nuances.

i rilly rilly need some popcorn and goobers since i’m getting all this entertainment at no extra charge. no cost for the tix means i can afford the junky snacks to munch on.

I was reading up on how gay emancipation movements weren’t born until the 1970s (not) in a book I picked up at a benefit for the library last week: _Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History_ by David Allyn.

I keep reading all these posts by people who seem to have not one scintilla of familiarity with the history of GLBTQ struggles against, you know, being put to death and shit. It’s slaying me, especially when the goal is to educate white homos that they ought to be more cognizant of the history of black civil rights struggles. because, apparently, no one ever heard of Harry Hay or Henry Gerber or allies like Emma Goldman or the pink triangle. what is equally fascinating is this weird assumption that the fight for gay marriage is somehow coming at the wrong time and that is was fought in the courts, primarily, not the streets, and gosh doesn’t that just tell you something about white privilege. geddit? because they used the courts, not the streets, there’s something inherently privileged about that. not that, possibly, since heteronormative oppression is different from racial oppression, then the struggle and strategies are going to be fucking different.

naw. let’s just decide that any struggle for civil rights must proceed one way and that it must be precipitated by egregious events that make that struggle *truly* worthy, against which any other struggle, if it’s not cast as life and death, if it’s about anything less than addressing deep wounded pains, then it’s just. not. serious. enough. and how dare anyone call it a civil rights struggle! I mean, it is — except when it’s not.

Because there is some kind of right time and right way and right strategy and right degree of pained woundedness for a civil rights struggle to proceed. in such claims is a tacitly assumed normative model of what a civil rights struggle must look like — a normative model of what a “real” struggle” must involve and what “real” oppression consists of.

silly superficial things like gay marriage — so not important.

Of course, buried in the conversation is also the assumption that no one was working on or trying to do something about oppression before Stonewall.

Which of course points at the tacit assumption that the oppressions are comparable. Dig it? In other words, dropping out of society and, say, creating separatist sub-cultures and keeping your head down, so as not to call too much attention to yourself, this isn’t a form of resistance to oppression. Not anything worthy of the name anyway. And the naming, that gets to be done, apparently by some coterie who defines what resistance to reall oppression is all about.

*rolls eyes*

because, I don’t know about you people, but you didn’t even get the balls to protest your rights until after other people had been protesting. Obviously, things weren’t all that bad or you would have been up in arms before! Jeez!

try as people might, they really seem incapable of extracting themselves from the pitfalls of a wounded attachment to an identity as irrepressibly powerless.

yeah. i like that conjunction: irrepressibly powerless.