A Hot Pink Statement
This story was blowing up my Facebook all day. A group of queer vandals paint bombed the HRC gift shop in Dupont Circle last night and spray painted the word "Stonewall" in hot pink across the sidewalk. The glamdalizers, as they referred to themselves, released a pretty kickass statement LulzSec-style on PasteBin. The full text of it reads somewhere between manifesto, artist's statement and political rant. The impetus for this particular crime, and it is a crime, albeit a silly and oddly tastefully done crime, was to protest HRC's equivocating role as a lobbyist for G.L.B.(and hardly ever T.) rights, how deplorable the state of queer life is in DC (trans murders galore, the lack of actual funding for the DC Center) and the fact that HRC rakes in millions of dollars and does jack shit to prove its worth.
Right on.
The references that they point to at the end for further research are awesome, and point to the origin of the art terror at play in this action. The first being a 2008 zine from Milwaukee entitled "Towards the Queerest Insurrection" which brings queer politics into a true anarchist discourse with some lofty references from Genet and Foucault. There are some awesome stylized images of Divine as Dawn Davenport from Female Trouble with the slogan "Filth is our politics! Filth is our life!" The second reference was to a more tongue-in-cheek manifesto from Toronto entitled the "S.C.A.B. Manifesto" where S.C.A.B. stands for the Society for the Complete Annihilation of Breeding. Though their tinyURL link was invalid and I had to hunt it down in the wilds of the internet. The SCAB Manifesto is much more extravagant in claiming action in a number of bizarre terrorist acts against heterosexuals and advocating for mad queer sex and parthenogenesis. It was hilarious and awesome.
These really say a lot about where these people are coming from. They're obviously well read in anarchist queer literature. I mean, I've read a lot of anarchist lit and a lot of queer lit, but I've never gone down the rabbit hole of radical zines to find these kinds of obscure publications. I guess I'm not as radical as I thought I was!
Reaction to the event has been kind of mixed among my friends and the greater gay blogosphere. Some see it as a hilarious moment, others see it as juvenile behavior, and some are downright incredulous that gay people would attack a gay establishment. But their literature makes it clear. These are anti-establishment queers. Many of my friends and I have lamented the waste and deplorable actions of HRC to sell off parts of the community for political expediency for microscopic incremental gains. One of my friends questioned why it was the HRC store and not the HRC headquarters building which has a giant concrete sign out front. That's also pretty clear, the HRC store is the very symbol of selling-out. Why bother to do the hard work of organizing a protest when you can buy a trendy tote bag instead? Why get a megaphone to make a statement when you can buy a non-descript blue and yellow bumper sticker with no words on it. HRC, as its logo proves, is all about hiding in plain sight. It's not a rainbow of the out there over-the-top gays, it's just two colors in the shape of a mathematical symbol. Easily dismissable for those not in the know. Perhaps the reason why HRC has thrown trans people under the bus time and time again is because trans-people blur the line of "equal" that HRC toes, by their very bodies as being too "other." But I'm post-hoc rationalizing transphobia on behalf of HRC. Let's not do that for them. Surely someone there could explain.
The invocation of the Stonewall anniversary was also a timely one. Slate has been running an amazing series of articles on the death of the gay bar in gay culture and the meaning of it all. They did a great piece on why Stonewall itself was important and how it grew to be bigger than just another raid on a gay bar that everyone had seen before. It was a confluence of not only the raid (and the raid that preceded it days before), but also the wider readership of the Village Voice and how that local news weekly really captured the event, thus giving it national level exposure. This news attention led to mounting pressure to raise resistance and pull back on the practice of raiding gay bars. The article however neglects to mention also the death of Judy Garland, which happened merely six days previously and had left deep emotional impact on the gay community from which they were still reeling. Stonewall has been invoked every June since then as a rallying cry for gay liberation, and the subsequent Christopher Street Liberation Day event has ballooned into today's massive Gay Pride world wide megaplex.
This last weekend, while I was in Toronto for a pretty radical conference for librarians, Gay Pride and the signing of the statewide Gay Marriage bill engulfed New York. It was no mistake that this bill passed in June. Cuomo knows how to play, and he did it masterfully. But the tipping point in New York wasn't HRC or any of the other marriage equality forces. No, it was the guarantee of millionaire libertarians to bankroll Republican campaigns. Michael Barbaro writing in the NY Times lays out the financial reality behind the marriage vote. See, Republicans can't take money from an HRC. They never will, because it will alienate the rest of their electoral base (i.e. social conservatives). But they can take a shitload of money from an individual donor. This article points more to how broken our political system is than about marriage rights or anything else really. But the sentiment of gaining political ground, and coming closer to erasing discriminatory practices against GLBT people was what wound up ruling the weekend.
In the wake of the NY marriage bonanza and Stonewall anniversary we now have the question posed by the glamdals: what are we queers doing with our identity and heritage? Look at where we've come from, look at where we're going and how we're getting there. We've substituted actual action for sales. Our pride parades are just as full of banks and advertisers (if not more so by far) as it is to be full of activists. Many of my friends in DC prefer to go to the Dyke March, which is still radical and queer and totally ad hoc, than to go to the officially sponsor driven Pride Parade. The Slate series on the death of gay bars comes from the same question. Gay culture was built to what it became through bars, often in a very unsavory way. And now people are eschewing the gay bar for gay social clubs; gay hiking groups, gay bowling leagues, gay sci-fi fanboys, gay methodism, you name any activity and slap a gay on the front of it, and it's probably out there. In some ways this opens the world to us, but in other ways it dilutes the coherence of a united queer identity. We can argue about whether or not there ever was a united queer identity, but that's the myth we're looking at here.
I have been wondering about where all this equalizing is going. Is our ultimate goal to have queer lives be something that just exist, that no one questions, that no one cares about? Do we really want to just blend into society and have sexuality be a menu of options with no identity and no politics attached to it? Love is love is love? Isn't that Sweden? Are people going to just stop at binary marriage arrangements? Is the ideal that we can just be people, in whatever configuration of love and desire that we wish and that affords us all the legal arrangements unquestionably open to everyone in any variation? What do we with our granular oddball identities then?
And yet on the other hand am I clinging to my little identity boxes? Am I clinging to labels of gay, queer, married, femme, bottom, etc. etc. etc. What happens when we smash the labels? What happens when we abandon division? What happens to me when I become one with all of my fellow human beings?
That question is both beautiful and terrifying.