(I’m sharing this post written by Allan because it’s beautifully written and contains a message that hopefully will resonate with you. -ABL)
Actual Progressives celebrate Progress.
You’re probably familiar with the title quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., who was paraphrasing the words of Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker from 1853. And you may also be familiar with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein (though no evidence exists that he said it): when asked to name the greatest invention by man, he replied, “Compound interest.”
Let me show you how little changes add up over time, how incremental steps function like compound interest to deliver huge pay-offs. But it takes time, which is something the Poutrage Princes and Princesses of the Professional Left don’t understand. Change, real change, is not about you and your pet cause or your need for immediate gratification or your need to see your enemies smitten.
I’ll focus on the topic I know best, the gay rights movement. There has been, and continues to be, a push-pull between progress and regress, with gay people often on opposing sides in every battle. But when you step back and look at the bigger picture, you cannot deny that progress happens, albeit incrementally and fitfully. It is maddening and frustrating to live your life on the front lines of a movement for social change, as I have. And yet I have seen things in my lifetime that I truly never expected to happen.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Let’s start in the mid-70s, the era in which I attained adulthood, with the first battle for gay rights I joined.
Anita Sucks
Many cities and counties, and even a few states, began to pass ordinances that added gays and lesbians to the list of classifications protected from discrimination. There was opposition from the politicians of the right, and from the pulpits, but laws started passing that said a landlord couldn’t refuse to rent to two adults of the same gender, or an employer couldn’t fire someone because they were believed to be gay. One such county was Dade, in Florida.
And then came Anita Bryant. She launched a group called Save Our Children and began a scorched-earth campaign of slanderous lies and relentless fear-mongering about the evil homosechsuals who were going to recruit your children, molest them and turn them into gays.
At that moment, I was a sophomore in college at the University of Chicago. I still hadn’t come out to my family, but I was ready to be openly gay on campus. During the school year I had taken on the responsibility, along with a lesbian friend, of reviving the gay and lesbian student organization that had been formed in the late 60s, but had faltered for a lack of leadership. The College of the U of C was, and is, an intellectually rigorous school, and not one known for its social life. Margaret and I searched out the current club officers and they were happy for someone who had the time and inclination to take over, so we elected ourselves co-presidents.
We had a little office in the student union building, and we moved in and started taking over the world. We learned from the student activities office that they rarely spent their full budget because student groups didn’t ask for any money, so we helped them out by planning and executing a Gay Awareness Weekend, with speakers, films, a religious service (Margaret was a divinity student), workshops and a party with a live band. We started attending monthly meetings of the Chicago coalition of gay and lesbian rights groups, got plugged in to the local political scene, and I started dating Bill Kelley, the pre-eminent gay rights activist in Chicago who was involved in the founding and leadership of many early gay rights groups. He made appearances on local TV news and current affairs programs, and he was profiled in a cover story in the Chicago Reader that spring, so going out with him was very heady for a skinny 19-year-old. Bill was older than me, though very youthful in appearance, so much so that I was surprised in Googling him for this post to learn that he had enrolled at the U of C when I was two years old.
We were all very focused and concerned about what was going on in Florida, because we could see the threat this alliance between evangelical Christians and conservative politicians represented. Because Anita was their commercial spokesmodel, a call for a boycott of Florida orange juice went out. A popular T-shirt of the moment featured the words “Anita Sucks” over a drawing of an orange.
In June of 1977, voters in Dade County repealed their gay rights ordinance by 69-31. (Yes, 69. Ironic, no?)
The night of the election, the community reeled, and Bill and others called for a candlelight vigil at the Water Tower rather than something more angry or violent.
And exactly as we feared, Anita began to take her crusade national. If you’ve seen the movie Milk, you’re aware of how this was viewed in San Francisco. What we all knew was that we had to stand up and fight, and if we were being bashed, we had to bash back. The boycott intensified.
Anita started making appearances around the country, taking her message of hate and discrimination to other communities where people were divided over gay rights legislation. Everywhere she went, her appearance was polarizing, and for the nascent gay and lesbian rights movement, it was galvanizing.
The Chicago Shriners booked Anita to headline their patriotic Flag Day jubilee that summer, and she would be performing at their auditorium, the Medinah Temple, on Chicago’s near north side. When word got out, our community mobilized. The local gay press promoted a counter-demonstration. People were advised to dress conservatively so as not to encourage the media to focus their attention on a few individuals.
And the city of Chicago turned out. The crowd was estimated at 5,000 protestors, and we ringed the entire city block occupied by the Medinah Temple, and in fact our marching line was sent up and down the streets an extra block at several places because there were too many of us to fit on the sidewalk. Though the show was reportedly sold out, only about one-third of the audience even turned out for it.
From the Temple, we moved our rally to the plaza along the Chicago River in front of the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times Buildings, just to make sure that the news media noticed there had been a protest. And the next morning, huge photos showing the crowds were plastered on the front pages of the Chicago newspapers, and we were told it had been the largest gay and lesbian rights demonstration in US history, until San Francisco stole our thunder just two days later with a giant rally of their own.
All across the country, crowds turned out in record numbers to send the message that Anita Bryant and her anti-gay crusade were not welcome, and that if people attempted to replicate her crusade, they would not go unchallenged.
In October of that year, while in Iowa, Anita was answered in the most beautiful and perfect way possible.
Notice that Anita is in the process of lying to the press about exactly what she had been doing for the past several months when she gets pied. I found this interesting narrative written by someone who was acquainted with the pie-throwing band of pranksters, who had traveled south from Minnesota to confront Bryant.
Watching that video now, and hearing how the people who were protesting Anita Bryant are described as “four self-proclaimed homosexuals from Minneapolis”, should give you a flavor of how gays were viewed at the time. Think of young people growing up in that period, watching all of this play out on TV while they struggled with their own difference, and the pressure they faced to fit in, to blend in, and to be like everyone else, or else be the target of all that hate.
Anita had some successes, in St. Paul, MN for one, where a gay-rights ordinance was repealed in 1978. But the Florida Orange Growers quietly let her contract lapse, and she was never again seen as anything other than a controversial and disreputable hate-monger.
So, that was then, and this is now.
We’ve gone through ups and downs. AIDS kicked our ass in the 1980s, but it made those of us stronger who dodged the bullet or survived until effective treatments were developed. We developed a deeper appreciation of why legal recognition of same-sex relationships was important as we saw partners shut out by families in the health-care decisions for terminally ill patients, and relatives swoop in and take away all the property that gay couples had acquired together. Counties and states began to recognize domestic partnerships, and couples could register, though they didn’t gain any Federal rights for their unions.
The election of the charming Democrat from Arkansas who felt our pain in 1992 looked encouraging, but by the time his administration was done, we were saddled with both the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT). Thanks, Bill.
In Houston, TX in 1998 police burst into an apartment because a neighbor had falsely reported a domestic disturbance involving a man with a gun, but found instead two men having sex, and lacking anything else with which to charge them, they were arrested for sodomy. In 2003 the US Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that laws against consensual sexual relations between adults were unconstitutional, and another legal impediment to LGBT equality was knocked down everywhere.
And all the while, depictions of gay and lesbian people in the media began to evolve. When ABC introduced its soap-opera parody Soap in 1977, the openly gay character played by Billy Crystal was portrayed as a suicidal mess seeking a sex-change so he could be a proper partner for his pro football star boyfriend. Reaction from gay groups led the producers to redirect the story arc of his character and he became an audience favorite for the run of the series. Later Tom Hanks won an Oscar for playing gay and dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, and Will & Grace made everyone want to have a sassy gay friend of their own.
Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, and it didn’t break off the Eastern seaboard and sink into the Atlantic. Here in California, courts ruled it was unconstitutional to deny marriage to same-sex couples, and on June 17, 2008, my partner and I rushed to claim a license and get married right away, because Proposition 8, which would negate that court ruling, was already in the works for the November ballot.
I chose to devote my energies toward electing Obama as president rather than focusing on the No on 8 campaign, because I reasoned that having a Democrat heading the Executive branch (especially one who lined up favorably next to his competitors on LGBT issues) would do more good for my people than would fighting a state referendum, and winning that battle while losing the national culture war. And though we came close, election night was bittersweet for me. I was in a hotel in Reno, where I had spent much of the last month doing get-out-the-vote work for Obama on the ground all over Nevada. I had actually totalled my car that morning on an icy road on my way to go hang flyers on doorknobs before people in Carson City woke up. And I saw Obama win Nevada, just as we had believed he could, and the national election, and watched the people in Chicago explode with joy and gratitude; and I also learned that Prop 8 had passed, and my marriage was now in limbo.
Once the stink of GWBush was aired out of the White House, Obama signed the Mathew Shepard Act AND the repeal of DADT into law, and ceased to defend DOMA in the courts. Relationship recognition laws continued to percolate through state legislatures, sometimes with heartening and wonderful results, other times falling short. In California, the bigots who took away our right to marry tried, but failed, to nullify our existing marriage license. Meanwhile, polling suggests that the country has officially crossed the tipping point not only on civil unions, but even on same-sex marriage.
And in 2011, on the campus of the University of Arkansas, a group of young men got together and made a music video. The director, a student named Devon Parks, is a personable young man who already has his own entry at the Internet Movie Database for a short film he produced, shot and directed and in which he stars.
I reached out to him and asked him about the video, which I first saw online at Joe.My.God., where the commenters fought over who was going to be the boyfriend of whichever one they thought cutest. I asked him if it had seemed weird at all to them to lip-synch to a pop song sung by a girl, or if they worried if people would think they were gay as a result of it.
He replied:
We are all six good Christian guys and so glad that people of all backgrounds can watch it and know we are trying to enjoy the life we’ve been blessed with and love people no matter what… my roommate Chris (the first guy seen in the video with the newspaper) and I decided to do a music video to this song because of the energy the song provides we thought it could be fun. I think the video is mainly being perceived as just some guys having fun. Sure people will think we’re gay or idiots or ridiculous but people seem to be enjoying it. We have no regrets about it.
Just as I never imagined that in my lifetime, I would be able to enter a county clerk’s office and obtain a marriage license with my male partner, I never imagined that a group of young Christian men at a southern college would be so blasé about how their sexual orientation is perceived by others, and so comfortable behaving in non-stereotypically male fashion in front of friends and strangers.
And when you juxtapose the imagery of my youth with theirs, you cannot deny that the world has changed in profound ways for the better, and that we can only imagine how the interest on our long-term investment in equality will continue to compound.
So when I see people confusing a a single battle, like election results for Prop 8 in 2008, with the entire war; or throwing their hands up in despair because Obama didn’t just wave a magic wand and make everything that’s bad for gay people disappear the day after he was sworn in; and even denigrating him as a homophobe in spite of the undeniable changes he has shepherded through our recalcitrant and change-averse institutions of government; I sigh and remember that they can’t see the arc from where they’re standing, and try again to explain what it looks like when you take the longer view.
In the profile I linked to above Bill Kelley, who was already an established and experienced player in the battle for gay and lesbian equality when I met him in 1977, had the following exchange with the reporter:
WCT: Do you have any advice for younger activists?
BK: Patience … which is always hard for young people to accept. Also, they should learn from history; I always did. When I was a child, I related better to older people; I was interested in what had happened before. History is such a useful tool for activism; you learn what to expect in terms of opposition and opportunity. Lastly, don’t write off older people. They still can be very helpful, not only in terms of intellectual resources but in terms of ideas.
Oh, and Chicago’s Medinah Temple, the site of that infamous performance by Anita Bryant? In 2001 the building was remodeled, and it reopened in 2003.
As a Bloomingdale’s.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
[cross-posted here at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]
eemom
tee hee
Angry Black Lady
i didn’t post it in the spirit of tee hee, although i know some will receive it that way. :)
Maude
I knew someone in the 1970’s that decided to work for Gay Rights. What was scary is it could have gotten him killed.
Human Rights are the most important thing in the world.
eemom
@Angry Black Lady:
oh, I know you didn’t, and it IS a fine post.
But still. Tee hee.
Barb (formerly Gex)
Thanks for this.
arguingwithsignposts
Wait, how is this justice? Also, tl;dr
eemom
@arguingwithsignposts:
I think it’s because gay men shop at Bloomie’s. (?)
Hillary Rettig
What a GREAT post. As author of a book on activism, I’m constantly reminding young activists that we have made astounding progress in just half a century. You can skim any newspaper archives, or watch any episode of Mad Men.
The suffering and injustice that remain are terrible, but if you just focus on them without seeing the victories, it is bound to be demoralizing. That’s too bad, because not only is activism crucially important, it’s the basis for a life of engagement and joy.
Hillary
Author of The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way
http://www.lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560906
PIGL
Also, too, thanks for this.
It’s good to be reminded that sometimes things really can change (fairly) rapidly and (totally) dramatically for the better.
Zipperupus
It is justice because Bloomie’s sells Balenciaga, Fendi, Valentino, Cavalli and every other homosexual-powered fashion house you can imagine.
JPL
With the same message Anita Bryant could win the republican nomination now a days.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@JPL: That’s the scary part, isn’t it. Thanks for the reminder that patience is required.
debit
Thank you for this.
Jay C
@JPL:
Maybe: but not to much effect, I’d say. A BIG difference between the late ’70s and now, however, is that back then Anita Bryant’s overwrought “OMG the homos are out to rape your children!!!” rant was probably closer to the majority opinion of the public at large: and the “gay rights” movement for toleration/equality was a fringe viewpoint. While the numbers may not be completely reversed in 2011 (though we might wish they were), one can’t say the same about public attitudes today.
Gay-bashing as political argument hasn’t gone away – and sadly, probably never will – but (outside the Bible Belt) isn’t the campaign issue it was thirty years ago.
Progress.
Tim, Interrupted
Great post, Allan.
Could you provide a link to anyone who actually wrote or said that this is what they expected, or who actually gave up on Obama the day after he took office for these reasons?
Thanks.
Tim, Interrupted
As far as the video goes, I’ll take the ginger with the goatee.
sidhra
Anita Bryant put me off orange juice for years. Great post.
Corner Stone
Great post ABL! Thank you for this.
MikeJ
@Tim, Interrupted: There’s a regular commenter here that falls into that category.
Tim, Interrupted
@MikeJ:
Can you provide a link, MikeJ? It would be great to know who that is.
Thanks.
gwangung
Hmmm….yes.
Slowly but surely, going forward in increments will win the race (but we all probably know that we should grab big leaps if they present themselves).
Andrew Abshier
Oh, and the moral crusader Anita Bryant built a theatre in Branson, Missouri, the heart of Wingnut Central in the state (Roy Blunt’s old CD includes Branson). It went broke, and she absconded with the funds, leaving her employees high and dry. So she has Republican Christian values…quelle surprise.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Hillary Rettig: I would say that it’s not only demoralizing, but also counter-factual and ignoble.
If we behave as if all is woe and nothing but, as if nothing has changed and certainly not for the better, we are not only re-writing history, we are doing a genuine disservice to the many brave men and women who fought before us, dishonoring their service and forgetting their sacrifices.
We’re also essentially telling ourselves that nothing can ever chance. And if that’s the truth, why even try?
NobodySpecial
Kind of defeats the message to bitch about the first President who actually tried to allow homosexuals to serve openly.
Or is this the part where the folks who tell us to be patient ignore the fact that that was the best deal we were going to be able to get, and pushing for more would have made sure we got nothing?
jc
I am beginning to hate that quote.
Sorry to be a party pooper here, and really I shouldn’t, but – here I go anyway.
YES – in terms of women equality, gay equality, the arc does bend towards justice. Civil rights, I’m happy to say, has continued to do so, and that’s around the world, in fits and starts. The current moving forward in the Arab world, the forward movement in Latin America, even the small increments of forward movement in China, all speak to this.
But just like the situation in North Korea is an outlier, as was Iraq, that was an outlier – both sustained artificially, because of larger socio-economic forces –
in the same way, regarding the Two Americas issue –
The United States, has been moving backwards, in terms of economic justice (not ‘equality’, but justice). CEO’s and the investor class aren’t making 100 times what they used to make, because the arc bends towards justice.
And there are no workable solutions for this, because the status quo is maintained due to artificial forces propping up the imbalance.
Political forces are totally captured by large businesses, and they care little about justice.
Aided by a news culture, also captured by conglomerates.
Perhaps we’ve reached a turning point, given that teachers and firefighters are being pushed as ‘leeches’. Maybe the cognitive dissonance will be too much.
I’ll believe it when I see it, at this point, after 30 years of movement in the other direction.
But I was very pleased with Obama’s victory in 2008, elated, in every possible way.
Hopefully then the political situation will turn around as well. Though there are very few socio-economic pressures, that are pushing back against the current status quo.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
really conservatives major concern with teh gay seems to be the slippery slope. they feel themselves losing the power to control the outreach of society from where they perceive themselves, as the natural middle.
they still want to believe that they are best equipped to speak for everyone. gay history, black history, women’s history, history of anything that evolves a thesis that there were people other than white,male, christian, married, heterosexuals, from a leadership class that shaped the current world,scares them. that many people struggled in the 1950s for example, is hard for them to imagine, even if they lived it, because they simply weren’t exposed to it, or didn’t see it for what it was at the time.
i love it when conservatives argue that there should be no black history, only history, because they still think they can preserve their myths.
moar gay history.
it’s really the part that is hiding in plain sight. it exposes the conservative tendency to not want to look too deeply at the past, for fear of what they might find out they were lied to about. the things we have always been lying about. that most people, weren’t so happy at the time they think of as the good old days.
daveNYC
I wish, the real truth of the matter is “People Are Broken.”
suzanne
@Tim, Interrupted: It’s mclaren and WyldPirate. Go Google-fu for yourself.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
This week, I’ll be teaching Frank O’Hara’s poem “Homosexuality,” (which you can read here if you’re interested), and the thing I love most about doing it is watching the looks of horror and disbelief on most of my students’ faces when I explain to them just how far LGBT rights have come since that poem was published in the mid 60’s. Because they’ve grown up with out gay people on tv, and probably in their extended families, and their high schools had gay-straight alliances, and they have out gay friends now, and the idea that there would be legal and social repercussions for being out seems alien to them.
Okay, that’s in part because I’m in south Florida, and it’s really gay-friendly now–the Anita Bryant effect has diminished a little, to say the least. But the fact that they’re horrified by the idea that people would have to stay closeted for their own safety says to me that there’s been a significant change in the mindset of people toward LGBT issues just in my lifetime, and while the war isn’t over yet, the battle victories are piling up.
Corner Stone
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Will & Grace.
Left Coast Tom
Great post, thanks.
I’m having a pretty hard time seeing Allan’s alleged “homophobia” in it, though… :-)
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
I read this yesterday at your place, ABL, but didn’t want to get involved in the comments section there, but I must say that it’s a GREAT post, not only in how it’s a good example of how controversial issues aren’t resolved with the snap of the fingers, but also as a memoir/history piece.
Very well done, Allan. Thanks for giving it more exposure here, ABL.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@jc:
Three steps forward, two steps back…We’ll get there eventually.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Thanks. Now I’ll be singing “Opposites Attract” all fucking night, and seeing MC Skat Kat in my dreams.
celticdragonchick
Angry Black Lady
If I weren’t already married, I would so have a crush on you. :)
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I agree. This was an awesome post ABL! Thank you for this!
Master of Karate and Friendship
Oh, I get it: so opening up more land to oil-drilling (and approving the Deepwater Horizon which crashed and burned) is an incremental step toward an oil-free economy and a clean environment, not a step clear in the other direction!
Escalating the war against Afghanistan (and bombing sites in places like Pakistan and Yemen) is an incremental step toward a more peaceful world, not a step in the opposite direction!
Not prosecuting US officials for torture or fraud is an incremental step toward justice, not a step in exactly the wrong direction!
It’s all so clear to me now!
Don K
I can remember in the fall of ’73 when I heard on the radio that the American Psychiatric Society had voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and I distinctly remember the fights of ’77 and ’78, over the gay-rights ordinance in Dade, and the Briggs Amendment in California. I also distinctly remember the assassination of Harvey Milk in ’78. I knew I was gay at age 14, in ’68, and a year later David fucking Reuben published his toxic book. Not only was I fated not to find love, but I should submit to the tender mercies of a shrink to get changed. From those points of view, we’ve made amazing progress. I’ve seen my company institute same-sex partner benefits and add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy. My relationship with my partner was a non-event at work, and is a non-event here in Bloomfield township. And I know some actual married couples in Massachusetts.
And yet, and yet… As one gets older, it’s easier to take a long view, but at the same time I’ve become more impatient, because I realize I’ve probably only got 20-25 years left, max, and there’s a lot left to be done. I want to see it made illegal to fire someone just because they have a picture of their partner on their desk at work. I want to see same-sex partners have equal immigration rights as straight married couple have. And I want to get married right here in the state of Michigan before either I or my partner dies.
So for the time being I have to vacillate between half-empty and half-full. I really think Obama is on our side deep in his heart, and I recognize how hard it is to make things happen at the federal level. It just gets so frustrating sometimes.
OzoneR
@NobodySpecial:
yeah but he *GASP* compromised.
Master of Karate and Friendship
Obama filed a lawsuit alleging DADT was unconstitutional?
Master of Karate and Friendship
@Tim, Interrupted:
Data isn’t needed here at BJ.
OzoneR
@Master of Karate and Friendship:
No, he did one better, he signed a bill repealing it.
Master of Karate and Friendship
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_why_we_cant_wait_1964/
eemom
@Corner Stone:
I demand you take a lie detector test for those two comments.
Corner Stone
@OzoneR: I agree with you, this is a pretty awesome post by ABL. Thanks for this!
Corner Stone
@eemom: Personally, I think cross posting en toto to BJ is probably the best contribution imaginable. Thanks for this!
Bob Loblaw
So nobody’s gonna mention the fact that this Bill Kelley character’s a bit of a perv for hitting on sexually experimental college students half his age, huh?
Also, we’re through the looking glass here people. We’ve been assimilated. Resistance was futile.
Allan
Hi everyone! ABL totally surprised me by reposting this here at BJ, and I was just going into a meeting of my local Democratic Club when she did, so I was unable to respond before now.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read it, in spite of its inherent tl;dr-ness. I appreciate the comments and all the feedback.
Let me collect my thoughts and I’ll respond to people who had specific questions as I can.
eemom
@Corner Stone:
you haz a jealous. You always haz a jealous when people you hate — i.e., everybody — get front paged.
In this particular instance, given your OTR views about ABL and Allan, you probably haz a quintuple quadrupled jealous to the eleventieth power.
And yet — here you are, in your own pre-adolescent-arrested-development passive-aggressive kinda way……trying to man up to the inevitable. Who’d’a thunk.
Corner Stone
@eemom:
Damn. You sound suspiciously like M_C. A little loopy, a little crazy and a lot immature.
But I thought this post by ABL was really pretty eye opening.
Thanks for this!
Corner Stone
@Bob Loblaw:
Into what? I, for one, thought this post by ABL was pretty strong.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
President Obama’s increment is smaller than yours.
.
.
Corner Stone
@eemom:
“Otherwise Totally Reasonable” ?
Corner Stone
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: Uncle Clarence Thomas, do you mean if we tried to divide the space between GWB and Obama’s foreign policy positions we could keep going into infinity, and never actually reach the answer?
Corner Stone
What does happen when you try to divide by zero, BTW?
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Corner Stone:
.
.
Given that any number divided by itself is 1, dividing by zero is not the problem.
.
.
Corner Stone
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: Uncle Clarence Thomas, I was actually going for “approaches infinity:, but I like your answer too. Also.
fraught
Bloomingdale’s used to be code for gay back in the day. Saturdays in the men’s department in NY was fierce for cruising.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
@Corner Stone:
.
.
Identity vs assymptote, eh? Speaking of Angry Black Malady, math is easy.
.
.
Corner Stone
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: Speaking of easy…
Allan
@NobodySpecial: Yeah, I’m pretty hard on Bill Clinton, am I not? Perhaps I should cut him more slack, though it did truly suck to see such regress for gay rights during a Democratic presidency. But Congress, as usual, was a big part of the problem, and they share much of the blame.
Allan
@Corner Stone: I’ll be sure and tell ABL how much you enjoyed her work next time I talk to her. Thanks for reading it!
Corner Stone
@Allan: I thought her post here was pretty excellent. Tell her I said thanks for this!
Allan
@Bob Loblaw: It wasn’t like that at all, though that’s a pretty good description of the night John Wayne Gacy hit on me.
nancydarling
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: Chaney, Goodman, Schwerer
Barry
@suzanne: “WyldPirate”
that guy is the equivalent of the drunken a-hole who walks through the park cursing at people. Without the excuse of drunkenness.
If any whackjob is considered proof of a tendency in a group, then ‘proof’ means nothing.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
@JPL:
Do you really think the Rethugs would consider an ignorant, homophobic, former beauty queen as a legitimate contender for the Presidency?
…Oh. Never mind.
ornery curmudgeon
You lost me a while ago, Angry BL, because it’s impossible to read things like this “Poutrage Princes and Princesses of the Professional Left” and care what you say.
In my less sanguine moments I actually blame the state of this nation on people supposedly on ‘the Left’ that constantly scapegoat their ‘own side.’ I wonder what the world would look like if we had let Nader speak about the corporate buyout of our political system, or hadn’t abandoned Spitzer, or Dean, and had shown solidarity or at least that fighting for Progressives had some UP side.
We’ve always had the stupid crazies, but there can be no success fighting alongside people who reinforce things the enemy says (Professional Left, princesses). What is the word for people who still (STILL) do this? Not ally, not friend, not intelligent, not good.
Chrisd
Reading the post, I am again reminded of how much social progress has been wrought locally and how little is ultimately due to national-level politicans who tend to follow rather than lead. Perhaps the take-home meassage for younger activists is less patience than sober expectations from party leaders.
Tim, Interrupted
@Bob Loblaw:
Perhaps the “hitting on” was reversed in this case?
I thought about mentioning that little side note in Allan’s article, but decided to leave it to others. :D Apparently, sleeping with influential and powerful people is a successful strategy, even within the gay rights movement. Who knew? :) I see it all the time in the theatre world, and of course in the salons of D.C. political/press power, but it somehow surprises me coming from BJ Hall Monitor Allan. I would think he’d be above such tawdry methods.
Tim, Interrupted
@Corner Stone:
Hmmmm…I suspect, and hope, that Corner Stone is being facetious. But hey, I’ll bite: This really IS an awesome post!
Tim, Interrupted
@Corner Stone:
HAHAHAHA
renegademom3
jesus christ.
we are ALL fucking dented cans in the grocery store of life.
it’s what makes us so fabulous.
why be normal?
Continental Op
The US can move in a progressive direction on issues that don’t cost billionaires money. I said can not will because of the whittling away of abortion rights.
Allan
@Tim, Interrupted: Slut-shaming is also a popular tactic among skeevy assholes who just want to lob passive-aggressive stinkbombs.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Thanks for this. I first came out in the early 90’s, in the height of another backlash. Murders and assaults against gay people were shooting up. I knew people who were fired after being outed. I knew people who had been physically attacked. Most of my friends had attempted suicide at one point or another, or a least seriously considered attempting (like me). I came out to my parents, and it was not pretty. They didn’t reject me, but it was very very hard for us both. I remained difficult for several years. My mother thought all her dreams for me had died, that I would always be alone. My dad was sure that if I just TRIED to sleep with the opposite sex, I would be converted.
Flash forward 15 years, and my mom helped me pick out a wedding dress. We didn’t have a legal wedding. That would have been really great. But marraige, ultimately, isn’t about state sanction. It is about publicly vowing to be each other’s family and to be there for each other come what may. Incidently, all my coworkers came to the wedding.
I am so glad I survived through all those darker times. Back then, I couldn’t imagine how beautiful life could be today. I know there is much further to go, but the world I live in is light years better than the one I was born into (at least for civil rights).
brantl
@NobodySpecial: You call that openly? I don’t. Not by a long shot.
Angry Black Lady
i’m fairly certain that the Allan/ABL borg will get over it.
Allan
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Thank you so much for sharing your story.
I’ve lost so many friends and loved ones along the way, to violence, to self-destruction, to AIDS, that I feel compelled to keep going, and talking, and sharing my story out of a kind of survivor’s guilt. I won’t let all that loss be in vain.
Tim, Interrupted
@Allan:
Again with the name calling, which is about all you have.
I certainly didn’t call or refer to you as a “slut.” Are you suggesting that I did? Do you consider yourself a “slut?” If so, that self hatred would help explain the homophobic insults you were slinging in another recent thread.
The most vicious homophobes are always the self hating gay men.
Allan
@Tim, Interrupted: Here. Go educate yourself.
Because it’s a feminist site, you’ll want to mentally re-purpose the information to infighting between gay men to appreciate what you’re attempting to do to me with these comments, but I will highlight this one section:
And your final sentence really says it all. Check the mirror.
A L
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
See now when MLK said this, it worked because he was actually doing something to bend it that way.
In the hands of ABL, though, it’s just an excuse to do nothing.
Keep braying about victories over Anita Bryant, a person nobody has ever heard of, while the world continues to burn. Our future generations would thank you provided they ever exist at all.
Angry Black Lady
are you brain dead or something?
never mind. don’t answer that. i already know the answer.
A L
Preaching to the choir and recycling five-year-old Internet memes does not bend the arc of moral history. Sorry ABL-chan
Tim, Interrupted
@Allan:
Allan, I know all about yours and ABL’s endless list of rhetorical techniques you employ yourselves, but project onto other people, like you’re doing here. If you don’t like that someone says “blue,” you scream “he said red!” and then go into your explanation of how saying “red” is unfair.
You are the only one here who implied or inferred that you are a slut, or that you feel ashamed of being one. I don’t really understand why that would be, but there it is.
Oh!…look in the mirror.
Questions though: Do you think that people frequently use sex to attain power and/or influence? If they do, does that necessarily make them a “slut?” Does the practice call into question the overall legitimacy of their resulting position/talents/capabilities?
Also, too, furthermore: Why don’t you just ignore my comments? Cole gets abused in his threads all the time; mostly he goes on his merry way.
Finally…you still have not provided a link to where any commenter on this blog or anywhere else actually claimed that BO was a failure on gay rights the day after his inauguration or gave up on him because all gay problems had not otherwise been solved at that point. I wonder why you would make false implications like that in a major post?
Saoirse
@Hillary Rigget (and all): I, too, came of age in the 1970s – at exactly the time Sens. Church and Rockefeller were holding Congressional hearings into the abuse by the secret agencies of our military dictatorship against civil rights activists under their (then illegal, now legal) COINTELPRO program, which attorney, civil rights activist and NYU professor Brian Glick found in 1989 was still in operation despite the CIA’s and FBI’s assurance in 1976 the program would be discontinued. This was also about the time when a public health services agent in San Francisco began his six-year odyssey trying to find a reporter who would break what we have come to learn was a bioslavery program by an agency of the U.S. government (which subsequently became the CDC, the budge of which is administered by the Pentagon) that reified indigent African-American men (and all those with whom they came into contact) in a multi-decade longitudinal study of tertiary syphilis, much of which was conducted after penicillin, the cure for syphilis, was discovered. Also at this time the CDC instituted bioweapons research to create a pathogenic disease that could destroy the human immune system and a pathogenic disease that could disable the human immune system – thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of the gene splicing technique that made the creation of novel pathogens possible. The U.S. propaganda machine has consistently lied to Americans about its research programs and the state of the science of proteonomics and genomics. For example, according to the New York Times, U.S. researcher George Cochran of the University of Utah created a synthetic, infectious viral pathogen from inert chemicals in 1962 (New York Times, August 28, 1962, p. 33:1), and researchers at Stanford created viral core DNA material five years later (New York Times, December 17, 1967, Section IV, p. 7:1), but in May of 2008, propaganda appeared in the U.K. press that was picked up in the U.S. press stating this was a specific area of research yet to be accomplished (McKie, Robin: “Biologists Join the Race to Create Synthetic Life,” The Guardian, Sun., April 2008). This research, of course, mitigates against the “natural” epidemiology theory espoused by the U.S. government and in particular its AIDS orthodoxy, which operates in the exact same business model as other disease-for-profit models, such as cancer, do – essentially, the “disaster capitalism” that Naomi Klein speaks of in The Shock Doctrine. Reporter Eileen Welsome tells us in The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments During the Cold War, that most people who have been under surveillance by the U.S. government’s research establishment their entire lives in numerous radiation experiments for which they gave no consent to participate will never know that they have been reified in these programs – wrongly attributing their lifelong illnesses to congenital or genetic predispositions. These research programs alone included millions of people world-wide and the mechanisms through which they were undertaken have never been abolished.
For decades millions of people like me have had their bodies and lives stolen from them in research programs to create all the different types of AIDS in the world: chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, or non-HIV/AIDS; secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, etc. I could go on and on and on about what it’s like to be given non-HIV/AIDS over the course of a lifetime through ” vaccine injury” and be literally tortured by one doctor and researcher after another – and to be given, over the course of a decade, no social benefits and nothing but contempt from the orthodox AIDS community – but it would do no good. The vast majority of AIDS activists have been manipulated by their fear of having financial support taken away from them. They are led by people who see anyone with a competing interest for those research dollars as a threat, not a compatriot (divide and conquer works) because the money raised by the AIDS orthodoxy community supports a vast and hidden public/private alliance whose goal is not to cure AIDS but to perpetuate the research in lucrative contracts. I want to make it clear that neither I, nor any other person with a non-HIV/AIDS, is a threat to anyone – firstly, because the bioslavery programs into we have been dragooned have had as their goal the subjugation and elimination from society large groups of people (see, generally, Osler’s Web). We have been given antiviral treatment and vaccines to restore us to some health, often only to be dragooned into other research protocols against our will. This infrastructure is a direct result of activists’ inability to push for things such as patients’ rights (diagnosis and treatment on demand FOR EVERYONE), human research subject controls, the U.S. as a signatory to the bioweapons convention treaty, etc., and that inability comes from the never-ending war our government has waged against activists such as myself. The fate of all of us was sealed when the group of gay AIDS-infected San Franciscan men who tried to sue the government for the right to take only the antivirals which were restoring them to health and not take the then deadly AZT antiretroviral lost that right. I am not just a survivor of this holocaust – I am also a target of the U.S. government’s covert war against its activists – the war that never ended even as the FBI and CIA were lying to Congress in the 1970s, promising it would.
I worked in the Bay Village of Boston at an architectural firm from 1982-1984. All of the liberal gay men I worked with at that time are now dead. The only gay people I have known in the last 25 years (my veterinarian, one of my former doctors) who have been healthy have been gay conservatives, or people who claimed to be liberal but have supported this medicoresearch system of torture (my veterinarian, my former doctor). I don’t see that as a coincidence. Each and every day I am terrorized with cell control (colloquially called, “gangstalking”) and tortured with EMF, among other things – just for speaking the truth about the AIDS I was given. This is what your progenitors in the last half-century have fought and died en masse to “protect,” not your freedom – because you are not free. Injustice anywhere means justice everywhere is threatened. You’ll have to pardon me and “pet” peeve of wanting to be free, but the arc of the moral universe, at least here, in America, has bent tragically beyond the immoral to the amoral, and anyone who defends it as otherwise is either (a) deluded (not surprising; many of our government’s most heinous human rights abuses are mind controlling in nature), or (b) co-opted.
Finally, I’d like to point out that the Nazis killed 15 types more “undesirable” human beings than just Jewish people, and like those 15 other types of human beings, we American bioslaves are human beings, too. We don’t deserve to be enslaved, tortured, terrorized for speaking out against our enslavement and torturers and murdered any more than those 15 other types of human beings who were thusly persecuted by the Nazis deserved to be. We are human beings also, and we deserve to be acknowledged as such. Any human rights campaign that does not do so is not a human rights campaign but a PAC with a very narrow focus and mission having less to do with human rights and more to do with maintaining the abominable status quo.
http://www.dontfearyourfreedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/you-are-not-free_23.html
AAA Bonds
“The Professional Left” is a phrase that is God’s gift to conservatives.
Stop using it.
Allan
@Tim, Interrupted: I introduced the term “slut-shaming” into the conversation to describe your behaviors. And reading is fundamental: I guess you missed this sentence from the first paragraph in the educational material I provided you.
As for your other questions, well, I’ll just take your excellent advice and ignore them, and you. Have fun cultivating the approval of BobLobLaw by slut-shaming other gay men!
Tim, Interrupted
@Allan:
As always, with your type, it’s telling that you haven’t answered any of my non-slut questions. You seem to be all hung up on your ambivalent feelings regarding your self-slut shaming.
I will have fun mocking your ridiculous posts as long as you continue to have fun making them.
All best.
Saoirse
@Hillary Rettig: @Hillary Rigget (and all): I, too, came of age in the 1970s – at exactly the time Sens. Church and Rockefeller were holding Congressional hearings into the abuse by the secret agencies of our military dictatorship against civil rights activists under their (then illegal, now legal) COINTELPRO program, which attorney, civil rights activist and NYU professor Brian Glick found in 1989 was still in operation despite the CIA’s and FBI’s assurance in 1976 the program would be discontinued. This was also about the time when a public health services agent in San Francisco began his six-year odyssey trying to find a reporter who would break what we have come to learn was a bioslavery program by an agency of the U.S. government (which subsequently became the CDC, the budge of which is administered by the Pentagon) that reified indigent African-American men (and all those with whom they came into contact) in a multi-decade longitudinal study of tertiary syphilis, much of which was conducted after penicillin, the cure for syphilis, was discovered. Also at this time the CDC instituted bioweapons research to create a pathogenic disease that could destroy the human immune system and a pathogenic disease that could disable the human immune system – thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of the gene splicing technique that made the creation of novel pathogens possible. The U.S. propaganda machine has consistently lied to Americans about its research programs and the state of the science of proteonomics and genomics. For example, according to the New York Times, U.S. researcher George Cochran of the University of Utah created a synthetic, infectious viral pathogen from inert chemicals in 1962 (New York Times, August 28, 1962, p. 33:1), and researchers at Stanford created viral core DNA material five years later (New York Times, December 17, 1967, Section IV, p. 7:1), but in May of 2008, propaganda appeared in the U.K. press that was picked up in the U.S. press stating this was a specific area of research yet to be accomplished (McKie, Robin: “Biologists Join the Race to Create Synthetic Life,” The Guardian, Sun., April 2008). This research, of course, mitigates against the “natural” epidemiology theory espoused by the U.S. government and in particular its AIDS orthodoxy, which operates in the exact same business model as other disease-for-profit models, such as cancer, do – essentially, the “disaster capitalism” that Naomi Klein speaks of in The Shock Doctrine. Reporter Eileen Welsome tells us in The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments During the Cold War, that most people who have been under surveillance by the U.S. government’s research establishment their entire lives in numerous radiation experiments for which they gave no consent to participate will never know that they have been reified in these programs – wrongly attributing their lifelong illnesses to congenital or genetic predispositions. These research programs alone included millions of people world-wide and the mechanisms through which they were undertaken have never been abolished.
For decades millions of people like me have had their bodies and lives stolen from them in research programs to create all the different types of AIDS in the world: chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, or non-HIV/AIDS; secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, etc. I could go on and on and on about what it’s like to be given non-HIV/AIDS over the course of a lifetime through ” vaccine injury” and be literally tortured by one doctor and researcher after another – and to be given, over the course of a decade, no social benefits and nothing but contempt from the orthodox AIDS community – but it would do no good. The vast majority of AIDS activists have been manipulated by their fear of having financial support taken away from them. They are led by people who see anyone with a competing interest for those research dollars as a threat, not a compatriot (divide and conquer works) because the money raised by the AIDS orthodoxy community supports a vast and hidden public/private alliance whose goal is not to cure AIDS but to perpetuate the research in lucrative contracts. I want to make it clear that neither I, nor any other person with a non-HIV/AIDS, is a threat to anyone – firstly, because the bioslavery programs into we have been dragooned have had as their goal the subjugation and elimination from society large groups of people (see, generally, Osler’s Web). We have been given antiviral treatment and vaccines to restore us to some health, often only to be dragooned into other research protocols against our will. This infrastructure is a direct result of activists’ inability to push for things such as patients’ rights (diagnosis and treatment on demand FOR EVERYONE), human research subject controls, the U.S. as a signatory to the bioweapons convention treaty, etc., and that inability comes from the never-ending war our government has waged against activists such as myself. The fate of all of us was sealed when the group of gay AIDS-infected San Franciscan men who tried to sue the government for the right to take only the antivirals which were restoring them to health and not take the then deadly AZT antiretroviral lost that right. I am not just a survivor of this holocaust – I am also a target of the U.S. government’s covert war against its activists – the war that never ended even as the FBI and CIA were lying to Congress in the 1970s, promising it would.
I worked in the Bay Village of Boston at an architectural firm from 1982-1984. All of the liberal gay men I worked with at that time are now dead. The only gay people I have known in the last 25 years (my veterinarian, one of my former doctors) who have been healthy have been gay conservatives, or people who claimed to be liberal but have supported this medicoresearch system of torture (my veterinarian, my former doctor). I don’t see that as a coincidence. Each and every day I am terrorized with cell control (colloquially called, “gangstalking”) and tortured with EMF, among other things – just for speaking the truth about the AIDS I was given. This is what your progenitors in the last half-century have fought and died en masse to “protect,” not your freedom – because you are not free. Injustice anywhere means justice everywhere is threatened. You’ll have to pardon me and “pet” peeve of wanting to be free, but the arc of the moral universe, at least here, in America, has bent tragically beyond the immoral to the amoral, and anyone who defends it as otherwise is either (a) deluded (not surprising; many of our government’s most heinous human rights abuses are mind controlling in nature), or (b) co-opted.
Finally, I’d like to point out that the Nazis killed 15 types more “undesirable” human beings than just Jewish people, and like those 15 other types of human beings, we American bioslaves are human beings, too. We don’t deserve to be enslaved, tortured, terrorized for speaking out against our enslavement and torturers and murdered any more than those 15 other types of human beings who were thusly persecuted by the Nazis deserved to be. We are human beings also, and we deserve to be acknowledged as such. Any human rights campaign that does not do so is not a human rights campaign but a PAC with a very narrow focus and mission having less to do with human rights and more to do with maintaining the abominable status quo.
http://dontfearyourfreedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/about-bioslavery.html