"Homo Economics is an exciting book analyzing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people's relationship to the market, to gender roles and to the economic system. These provocative essays clearly explain how class biases and divisions operate to frustrate queer progress. The authors argue convincingly for a movement with the vision and willingness to tackle the gender, class, racial, and economic inequalities of capitalism. In this period of global economic exploitation, social turmoil and domestic cutbacks, this collection makes an invaluable contribution to progressive thoery in general and to queer progressive practice in particular.
Michael Pugliese, who has a queer brain, but I'm a socialist fool.
www.tnr.com
Political power versus buying power. A Day at the National Mall
By SARAH WILDMAN Issue date: 05.15.00 Post date: 05.04.00
It was hot and sunny, the first real day of spring. And people turned out in droves--wallets stuffed with bills, t-shirts tied around taut waists--to a street festival on Pennsylvania Avenue. Toddlers screamed; moms and dads posed for pictures. The smell of food frying filled the air, and pricey bottles of water overflowed trash cans. Dot-coms passed out freebies--bright yellow bags emblazoned with the logo GAY.COM and stickers reading PLANETOUT.COM. Banners advertising the event's corporate sponsors--United Airlines, America Online, Miller Brewing Company, and others--were visible at every turn. Welcome to the gay rights movement 2000. The ostensible message of last week's Millennium March on Washington was "Organize." Sponsored most prominently by the nation's largest gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the march was billed as a political gathering to galvanize the gay vote for November. But the real message may have been "Consume." The march showed how deeply enmeshed gay culture and corporate culture have become. And it illustrated the strange dilemma that this fusion presents. It's all well and good to join the commercial mainstream--in fact, it's a sign of equality. But for a still-oppressed minority, it's equality of a precarious sort, because the commercial mainstream in twenty-first-century America is a pretty apolitical place. In fact, it tends to turn activism into kitsch. The street fair accompanying the march sprawled through six caged-in blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue. For $5 a head (a suggested "donation" that, if not paid, apparently kept you outside the gates), festival-goers gained entrance to a bustle of commercial activity. Vendors hawked gay-friendly CDs, rainbow jewelry, and clothes. Square dancing was an option. The Showtime cable network set up a stage from which it promoted its "powerful programming that smashes stereotypes and breaks down barriers" and passed out fans embossed with words like "disco whore" to the sweaty crowd. "I think it's wonderful," said a woman from Florida. "People with money are the ones who will make equality happen. If we support them, they'll support us." The scene served as graphic testament to the vision of HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch, who famously told The Washington Post in 1996, "I have an activist heart, but I am a capitalist tool." A few blocks away, on the Mall, where speakers addressed a crowd of hundreds of thousands, people were selling things too. The dais was heavy on celebrities like Anne Heche and Melissa Etheridge. Ellen DeGeneres appeared onstage in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and--in a show of gratitude to the owners of ABC, the home of her (now canceled) eponymous sitcom--thanked Disney. Even when speakers did focus on issues, the crowd seemed strangely uninformed. "That representative was fucking awesome!" said a 20-year-old from Richmond, Virginia, with multiple piercings after Wisconsin Representative Tammy Baldwin spoke. "I don't know her name, though. I'm not really into politics." Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis star, made perhaps the most gratuitous plug of the day. Although Navratilova, because of her sexual orientation, lost out on many endorsements during her tennis career, her retirement coincided with the explosion of the gay market. Hoping to tap into it, since leaving the sport she's shilled for several companies, including Subaru--rapidly becoming lesbians' unofficial car of choice, with ad slogans like "It's not a choice. It's the way we're built"--and Visa, with its "Rainbow Card." After a brief motivational speech, Navratilova proudly proclaimed that the Rainbow Card has raised more than $1 million for lesbian and gay causes since it was introduced in 1995. While she spoke, people in the crowd distributed Rainbow Card stickers bearing the slogan PEEL AND WEAR WITH PRIDE! and advertising the card's toll-free number.
With all this shilling, there wasn't much time left for substance. No one felt the pinch more than the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), an organization that fights harassment of gays and lesbians in the Armed Forces. Representatives from SLDN had been slotted for the final few minutes of the six-hour speaking program, but when the celebrity-packed afternoon ran late, concerned sldn reps were told they would be cut from the schedule. Only after much protest was sldn given a few minutes of stage time--right before the dais was dismantled. So when Patricia Kutteles--whose son Private Barry Winchell was murdered last summer by a fellow soldier at Fort Campbell because he was gay--made her first-ever public call to end the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, only a few hundred stragglers were there to hear it. Retired Major General Vance Coleman, a straight African American officer and the highest-ranking member of the military ever to address a gay crowd, spoke for less than a minute. "To the extent that the purpose of a march like this is to galvanize people," lamented Michelle Benecke of SLDN, "[marchers] didn't get an update on this issue [and] didn't receive any details about what they could do once they get back home to make a difference." But Benecke's earnest fretting felt out of place. Toward the end of the day, as the parade of celebrity speakers was beginning to wind down, a white, middle-aged lesbian took a break on the steps of the nearby National Gallery of Art. "Oh God," she moaned to one of her friends, "this event has so many speakers. We're gay! Can't that also mean gay like fun?" For better and for worse, it can.
Recently: Shawn Zeller explained why gays and lesbians were the most rabid critics of the Millennium March.