Marta
Michael Pugliese wrote:
> 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.
-- Marta Russell author Los Angeles, CA Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract http://www.commoncouragepress.com/russell_ramps.html