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.  It was great to speak with QNUtah 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 interrupted 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 no understanding of gay history.  We are
tame compared to Queer Nation.  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 losing) 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.