Are We All Queer Now?

An article in the January 2019 edition of The Atlantic Magazine makes a provocative proposal. Its author suggests we drop the "LGBT" from usage and use only the Q, for "queer," to cover everyone. It's ironic that I, as a member of what was Queer Nation/San Francisco, would oppose this suggestion. We employed the term back in the late 80's, to the horror of some our own lesbian and gay elders at the time, to distinguish ourselves and to forge new ground in the area of sexuality and radical politics.

During one media conference in San Francisco at the time, the late playwright Edward Albee harangued us younger self-styled "queers" for using the term and for snapping our fingers rather than applauding with our hands. We never made our point, and Albee never recovered the audience. We just heckled each other during what was supposed to be his speech.

Before Queer Nation began its steady implosion into oblivion, the term "queer" briefly crossed the mote into academia. The moment I began to see a flurry of thick books by aspiring academics I'd never heard of, making dissertation material out of the word, I knew we were over as a radical political movement.

Where, I do not care to know, are all those Routledge publications with Queer in the title?

ORIGINS OF A CONSTRUCTED "COMMUNITY"

At about the same time, the Advocate was the only national "gay" magazine. In fact, that is how it presented itself on its masthead - as a "gay magazine" - until the competing, short-lived, "OutWeek" came out of New York staffed by activists and troublemakers, like journalist Michaelangelo Signorile, and aspiring writers, like me. "OutWeek's" masthead read "Lesbian and Gay Magazine," which was groundbreaking, and this eventually pressured the Advocate to follow suit and include lesbians.

From where I do not know, around this same time bisexuals and transgenders were added to an acronym that flowed cumbersomely over the tongue: LGBT. But at no point, no where, was the radical posture embraced by queers ever adopted by the rest of the acronym; just the opposite.

As Black empowerment and health activist Dr.Cleo Manago has pointed out numerous times, it was white men who expanded the "LGBT" acronym, but Black gay men have seen little benefit. The liberation movement that became an nonprofit-funded equality movement skipped right over Black men, who still bear a disproportionate HIV infection rate, lack of access to care, higher mortality to AIDS-related maladies, and poverty.

This acronymizing might have come from the same squeamish Victorian-era convention of referring to the legs, thighs, and breasts of chicken as "white meat" and "dark meat" because certain body parts, like non-confirming sexualities, cannot be uttered in polite company or in the New York Times, which, by the way, stuck for too long to the term "homosexual" as its standard.

Granted we in San Francisco were living in a bubble, but none of us knew exactly where the bisexual or transgender movements were. I do not say we did not knew where bisexuals or transgenders were; they were all around us. And for maybe the span of one full moon in the very early 80's, bisexuality became sort of a fad among certain celebrities. David Bowie confessed in a Time Magazine interview of going out and picking up guys while his wife was cruising females.

But there were no marches of bisexuals.

Then the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit, and those rare self-proclaimed bisexual celebrities, like Bowie, went back into the walk-in closets and to posing with their red-carpet spouses.

Meanwhile, gay men and lesbians responded with a survival movement.

It was within a belated sexual revolution that conversely exposed gay men to the risks of a mysterious pandemic and launched this survival movement. But it was as queers that a new generation of radical lesbians were empowered and forced issues drawn already from the feminist movement into activist circles.

So by abandoning most of the LGBTQ acronym, the question remains where this came from, but also more importantly have we reached a pinnacle in our activism where the lesbian and gay distinction can be dropped?

Hardly, I'd argue.

REACTIONARY SETBACKS

Right before our eyes, we have seen major setbacks in the feminist and broader radical movements, including the labor movement. This dilution of the term queer must be seen in this context.

I not only think the dropping of the "LGBT" is poorly timed, but also that removing it is part of this regression against a broader liberatory movement, a regression that seeks to undermine feminism, neuter what is left of the former "gay liberation" struggle, by re-centering patriarchal and capitalist priorities and anti-labor tendencies.

After Clinton's compromising "Don't Ask Don't Tell," it was reportedly Black lesbians who suffered the highest expulsion rate from the US military, but the movement taking shape gave little hint of this. The obsession seemed to be on young white men who could double as cover boys for Calvin Klein ads.

Radical feminism was similarly marginalized, a move as old as the attacks against militant elements from labor organizing. Not coincidentally, they are often one and the same.

In the last generation, alternative voices permissive of pornography and prostitution within the feminism have emerged. The resistance to "prostitution" as misogynist and exploitative has fallen out of favor. Organizing the "sex worker" in unions is in; and the idea that pornography is degradation and commodification of women has been replaced. It is an act of empowerment for women's sexuality.

The alternative voices have refurbished reactionary priorities with a radical veneer. Battle lines within the left are drawn.

Andrea Dworkin in 1968

Germaine Greer in 1970

Those of us who resist this shift, and those older, radical feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer, who have built their activist lives, in part, on the abolition of pornography and prostitution and liberation from capitalism had thought their next battle was the slave labor of women's domestic work, pioneered as far back as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Margaret Sanger, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Claudia Jones. Recently, this is has been prioritized by Silivia Federicci, Selma James, and Angela Davis (Davis admittedly occupies both camps as she has made women's unpaid work an issue but also advocates for "sex workers")

REACTIONARY FEMINISM

In a piece with a terribly unfortunate and divisive title, Australian feminist and academic Caroline Norma, professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, chronicles the careful but deliberate dismantling of the feminist gains barely made by the more radical second-wave feminists.

The Australian Broadcast Corporation [ABC] site published the Norma piece, regrettably titled "Transgenderism: the Latest Anti-Feminist Wedge Issue." This title is obviously unfortunate because it frames, as so many reactionaries would, the trans community as having some sort of dysfunction. In doing so, the title alone is a repellant to those of us who know that all proletariat are valuable in the class struggle against capitalism and deserve our solidarity as much as we deserve theirs.

But the title signals that Norma is about to wade into the latest, raucous debate among the left on the side seeming to some as unevolved and out of touch as Mr. Albee's as he scolded us over our heckling. Or is her broader point that the advocacy of "transwomen are women" is a reactionary Trojan Horse, by allegedly "alternative" voices, which risks further silencing of radical feminism itself?

Norma traces the beginning of the modern attack against second-wave radical feminism to 1980, when the "malaise" of the Carter Administration and winters of discontent under British Labour were transformed into the reactionary Reagan's "morning in America" and Thatcherism. I don't think this is coincidental to the attacks on the women's movement under discussion. The Right came out renewed to annihilate any threat to its status.

A new McCarthyism was employed tactically against the remaining vestiges of the radical left, targeting especially labor, women, and sexual minorities. Recall Reagan's firing of the air-traffic controllers and Thatcher branding the coal miners "the enemy within."

Prof. Norma makes some salient arguments in the piece that demand our attention. I have wondered the irony that a radical feminist like Greer, who has devoted 50 years of her life to dismantling the roots of femininity as a patriarchal construct and, therefore, a construct of capitalism, should herself be silenced and cast aside by the left.

Norma's thesis is that these reactionary moves by activists cloaked as leftists is to dismantle the radical feminist movement altogether by purging feminists like Greer just as certainly as the labor movement was dismantled by purging Communists, and that there will be, in the final hour, no one to defend it.

MAXIMIZE RADICALISM

This is why, even as a proud member of what Queer Nation was at its height, the suggestion that we remove lesbians and gays, as entities, is as premature as removing the distinction between men and women, or white and non-white. This is no time to obscure our differences as expressed through radical demands. The late CPUSA organizer and gay liberation advocate, Harry Hay, argued that we "maximize our differences." It is from our distinct experiences as women and men, lesbian and gay that we fulfill the broader liberation project as a proletariat truly dismantling all evidences - and dependencies - of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. Our disparate communities still have much to offer the word queer, if it is to fulfill what its originators wanted for it. Queer is not finished. Radical feminists must be heard. Black gay men must be recognized. The original inhabitants of these North American lands and their views of sexuality and the universe, must be appreciated.

We still have work to do.