Queer Gnosis

by Troy Williams

I’ve been thinking a lot about radical queer politics lately — inspired by Lisa Duggan and Cleve Jones, among others.  On Friday’s RadioActive I hosted a Queer Nation retrospective to honor the more “in-your-face” roots of gay activism in the nation and here at home in Utah.  It was great to speak with QN organizer Curtis Jenson, gay historian Ben Williams and my good friend Matthew Landis.  They took it to the streets when it was dangerous to do so.  They interupted General Conference, staged kiss-ins at shopping malls and threw down with skinheads.  Whenever someone tells me that I am “too radical” (which various vanilla politicians like to do) I just think — wow — you have you no understanding of gay history.  I am tame compared to Queer Nation.  And I’m proud to have had the opportunity to speak with them — and a little jealous that I missed out on all the fun.  Listen to the entire podcast for a lively conversation on Utah’s gay pioneers.  And thanks guys for inspiring this week’s article. 

The Radical Roots of Queer Politics
by Troy Williams

Something is in the air.  Something new is waiting to be born.  And all of us are anxiously waiting to see what is next for the LGBT community.  While our attention is focused on California’s Supreme Court’s “day of decision” on Prop 8, we need to look at the larger picture.  Regardless of what happens in May, we still have tremendous work to do.  We’ve been fighting (and mostly loosing) state by state battles over marriage rights.  Maybe now it’s time to focus on larger goals – specifically a massive concentrated political campaign to insure social equality on the federal level.  And not just for LGBT Americans – but for all U.S. citizens. 

Hard fact: Excluding a revelation from god, queers will never achieve full citizenship in Utah until the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down DOMA laws and rules Amendment 3 unconstitutional. Even if the California Supreme Court overturns Prop 8, it will still only be a symbolic (though emotionally satisfying) victory.  California gay marriages still won’t provide queer familial recognition on the national level. Given that the Utah Legislature is filled with regressive anachronisms posing as lawmakers, the best we can do here is stage political theatre to keep our issues at the heart of public debate.  And that is an important work. 

On that note, Equality Utah’s Common Ground Initiative has been stellar.  National gay organizations could learn a great deal from their work.  Real creative change always comes from the grassroots.  Imagine what might happen if the big national organizations modeled Common Grounds on a federal level.  Imagine LAMBDA Legal working aggressively together with the Human Rights Campaign and the National Center for Lesbian Rights – not in individual states – but across the country to insure legal protections, health care, and worker rights for all Americans.  I believe such a coalition with a broad base social agenda would be unstoppable. 

But let’s expand our vision even bigger.   It’s critical to remember that the early gay rights movement was born out of the desire for dynamic social disruption and change.  Looking back, we realize that our movement had more radical origins and objectives than we currently aspire.

Two queer activists who remember these days are Lisa Duggan and Cleve Jones.  Duggan teaches American Studies at NYU and Cleve Jones is an AIDS activist, union organizer and the political protégé of Harvey Milk (and lucky us, will be our Grand Marshal this year at Pride!).  Both Duggan and Jones argue passionately that we must focus our goals on the federal level.  They also recognize that the gay rights movement is more than just marriage equality – it’s a full-on social peace and justice movement that must never be divorced from the broader issues of war, poverty, labor, race and gender inequality. 

On a recent interview on KRCL’s RadioActive, Cleve Jones stated, “Most young people in [the gay] community are unaware that they are part of a movement that grew out of a revolutionary and radical politics in this country.  Most of us who were there in the early days of gay liberation came to it through the anti-war movement, through the feminist movement, through the civil rights struggle and early environmentalist movement.  We began to find each other, and realized it was time to start to fight for our own rights. People have the right to turn away from that history and not acknowledge it.   But to do so is to loose one of the great strengths of our community.”    

Lisa Duggan laments the demise of the progressive social-left movements of the 60’s and 70’s.  In her book, Twilight for Equality? she documents the fragmentation of our movement into the myriad of single-issue “identity politics” of today. “No longer representative of a broad-based progressive movement, many of the dominant national lesbian and gay civil rights organizations have become the lobbying, legal and public relations firms for an increasingly narrow gay, moneyed elite.  Consequently, the push for gay marriage and military service has replaced the array of political, cultural and economic issues that galvanized the national groups as they first emerged from a progressive social movement context several decades earlier.” (p. 45).  

We are here today because of big thinkers who had bigger ideas for transforming the world.  And in a sense, we’ve lost that vision.  We’ve lost the audacity of ACT UP and Queer Nation.  Both Jones and Duggan acknowledge that many in the gay community are content to be a willing demographic for corporations to market products to. For some, the focus of gay activism centers solely around domesticity and consumption.  It’s about enjoying straight privilege and material status at the exclusion of larger issues.  But we are so much more. We are the children of radical revolutionaries born with a mandate to shake the planet. All great queer activists past and present – Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk, Emma Goldman, Lisa Duggan and many more – envision the LGBT political force as a massive social justice movement.  They always think big.  This is more than just matching bands and designer gowns.  This is about total cultural liberation.

We should never accept compromise.  We are citizens of this nation and we need to be treated as such.  And it is past time the federal government stepped up and acknowledged our lives.  Now as we focus our efforts federally, this does not mean we should stop working in our own state.  Utah queers need to keep raising all kinds of hell.  We need to keep agitating, pushing and driving.  We need to keep supporting Equality Utah and the Pride Center.  We need to keep coming out, staging protests, writing letters and being a damned nuisance.  We must keep our discontent at the center of public discourse.  And with that, we should always keep our eyes focused on the federal level.  With that, we must remember the work of those who came before.  We need to continue their vision, and work tirelessly for the liberation of ALL people. 

Utah has become the frontline of the nation’s culture wars.  The whole world is watching us.  Let’s put on one helluva show.