LGBT Political Cul-de-sac: Make a U-Turn

[dcsmart]

SHERRY WOLF is author of the forthcoming Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of Gay Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009). She is a member of the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.

ON THE EVE OF 2009, it is impossible to speak of a national gay liberation movement, as that would entail active groups of people mobilizing at the grassroots to achieve common aims. There has not been a national march on Washington to demand civil rights, to say nothing of liberation, since 1993.1 The vibrant twenty-fifth anniversary march commemorating the 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York City the following year drew an estimated one million people, but these actions were not used by mainstream gay organizations with money and powerful connections to build grassroots movements as a means of winning concrete gains.

The largest and most visible LGBT group is the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which from its inception has been a lobbying group that touts corporate sponsors such as American Airlines, Citibank, and IBM. There are, of course, small but important local initiatives to stop reactionary legislation or fight incidents of violence against LGBT people. But these are usually defensive battles, disconnected, and short-lived -- regardless of the intentions of many committed activists.

With the virtual collapse of an organized left over the last thirty years, the quest for LGBT liberation has been abandoned as impractical, undesirable, or just plain Utopian. Under attack by a confident right, most existing LGBT groups struggle to challenge bigotry and reactionary legislation, or provide social services to gay teens under siege or people with HIV/AIDS in a climate of slashed social services. Discussions about the origins of gay oppression inside the nuclear family, class society's construction of strict gender roles, and the material and ideological connection between LGBT and women's oppression exist today almost exclusively on the margins of the left and in the classrooms of a few radical professors. These ideological and organizational weaknesses feed off each other and amount to a lowering of expectations and demands.

This political retreat has been decades in the making. The combative gay liberation movement that flourished in the years following the Stonewall Rebellion was effectively absorbed into the Democratic Party by the mid-1970s. The fact that the last march on Washington was scheduled after the 1992 presidential election, rather than as a show of force beforehand to pressure the candidate Bill Clinton, was itself a concession to the notion that LGBT activists ought not expose the Democrats to gay scrutiny lest their broader appeal be tarnished. What was tragedy under Clinton became almost farcical with Barack Obama's rise. No prominent LGBT organization demanded that the candidate even defend same-sex marriage. And Obama offered nothing but verbal palliatives on LGBT issues alongside explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. Lack of independence from the Democrats has left LGBT activists in a self-defeating cul-de-sac, giving politicians an official pass to maintain homophobic and oppressive policies.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue46/Wolf46.htm

[Terran]

1. I'm not an expert, certainly, but

I'm getting a feeling that this person is not very well tuned into the effect of the Web on leftist organizing...and that marching in the streets isn't the only way to make progress these days.

I would agree that the passage of Prop 8 was a major failure of the LGBT community in California, a show of overconfidnce and laziness that backfired enormously; but overall, I think this person is ignoring a great deal of progress that has ocurred over the exact time period that she's writing about.

[JackBeck]

2. There hasn't been a march since 1993? Really?

I could have sworn I organized a trip for me and my friends to the Millennium March on Washington in April 2000.