I admit to reading the archive very superficially..
Yoshie seems worried that the gay international will become in her words an "agent of Empire" by providing the necessary human rights imprimatur for the invasion of Iran? I don't think is an important justification for sanctions or war. Perhaps it's the only one that resonates with leftists but then we are arguing only with ourselves within the ivory tower.
But yes post 9/11 we did see Hollywood grant Oscars to Denzel (get it) and Halle (wasn't going to watch that one) and get giddy about Brokeback (how long did it take Hollywood not to kill off any and all gay characters in a movie?) American had to prove its liberalism in its war on fundamentalism. And what to make of the flamboyant homosexual Pim Fortuyn trying to close down Muslim immigration in the name of liberalism?
So I can understand that some already recognized minorities may become beneficiaries of what becomes an imperialist and racist war on terror in which the new racial category of the illegal enemy combant, a form of bare life stripped of rights and political standing, has already been created (see Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Claude Paye and thanks to Monthly Review for translating him). At the same time, what seems to have been shored up is patriarchy--haven't read Susan Faludi's book yet, but it seems obvious to me that less oppressive sexuality is not the vehicle but the victim of the imperialist war on terror.
Yet even with Fortuyn, the unfortunate victim of yet another violent crime by a vegan animal rights activist, the appropriate response was not to dismiss the importance of gay rights or to assert a cultural relativistic denial of gay oppression while hoping for a revival of premodern forms of sexuality but to question the legality of testing peoples' most private opinions as a condition for right bearing citizenship. A dose of Andie's liberalism. This after all is a road gays themselves should not go down. I think it would be tactically and ethically stupid to rail against morally compromised homosexuals as the agent of racist immigration policy. We should split gay rights activists on the question of racist immigration policy while recognizing that some gays are in fact racists just as some minorities are in fact homophobes.
So all we need underline is the real point: It is simply racist for the state to enter selectively into the private sanctum of Muslim immigrants. In other words, it's not a question of gay rights but racist state power.
What I am very concerned about is the reifying of gay international and Muslim immigrant community and pitting them against another, the agents of Empire versus the anti liberal patriarchs.
At the very least, Yoshie's formulations are not doing enough to prevent such an unhappy result. To call identity activists agents of Empire casts a penumbra of multiple meanings.
Rakesh