"I have an activist heart, but I am a capitalist tool."

[Michael Pugliese]

TNR Online | A Day at the National Mall by Sarah Wildman    This book caught
my eye the other day. "Homo Economics : Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian
and Gay Life, " by Amy Gluckman (Editor), Betsy Reed (Editor) The editors
are on the editorial collective of Dollars & Sense. Here is the Urvashi Vaid
review from the amazon.com (boo hiss!) website.

 "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.