Sour Pride

I waited until after the weekend to talk about this here, even though I did mention it over on Facebook.

Have we come a long way since that mythic night in 1969, when the Queens fought back against a routine Vice-Squad raid of a Mafia-run gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village? Yes. Undoubtedly.

Background check of my bona fides:

I'd turned 21 the week before. I was in the Navy and had just reported for duty after a year of boot camp and electronics schools, to the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland. It was weeks before even a hint of the events in New York managed to filter down to where I was. And where I was was alone and lonely inside my own skin, absolutely convinced that I was doomed to a lifetime of secrecy about who, and what, I really was. I remember being thrilled to hear that there had been a "queer uprising" of some sort in New York City. It gave me a teensy bit of hope that maybe the future might be okay for me, after all.

Long story short, I got out of the service and came flying out of the closet, got very involved in gay lib on a grassroots level at the University of Delaware, got burnt by same, swore off gay lib and gay politics -- moved to Seattle -- moved to New York, attended a few early Pride Parades and most importantly... I saw where it was all going.

It was all going to a party.

The early parades were rag-tag events, scheduled mostly by word of mouth in those pre-internet, pre-email days. Mouth and pamphlets and underground newspapers.

They didn't need no stinkin' permits to march. Everybody just "showed up" on Central Park West and started organizing themselves behind banners. There were no "floats" or flatbed trucks full of scantily-clad party boyz and blaring disco music, tossing Mardi Gras beads to the gawkers along Fifth.

The cops didn't interfere because, to be honest, there were about a quarter of a million of us and about 10,000 of them.

But then, and rather quickly, the marches got sold out. To corporate interests and the aforementioned flat-bed trucks loaded with Party-Boyz.

And Pride stopped being political.

Look, I like a party as much as anyone else. But there is a time and a place for it. And Pride Parades are NOT it. NOT yet. When we have achieved our political goals of full, unbridled, equality before the law ... then, and only then ... can we "reward" ourselves with a parade with floats sponsored by Bud Lite and American Express.

Until then, there is work to be done. Political work. Hard work. In your fucking-face work.

Our lives are at stake here. And a once-a-year, blow off some steam, Disco-on-Fifth, is not a fit way to demonstrate against discrimination and in favor of civil rights for LGBT peoples from coast to coast. All it is is just a fucking bone thrown to us by an establishment with a vested interest in keeping us "uppity faggots" in our place.

A minor annoyance to the majority and a battered-wife reliable cashcow to the Democratic Party.

And if that don't piss you off, then just what will it take?

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I seem to have struck a nerve with a few people with my post, both above and over on Facebook. My friend Robin posted something remarkably similar on her website. You can jump directly to her post, here. I've also added her to my list of Daily Reads under "Here's What I Don't Get." Check it out. Eclectic, feminist and po'd at the status quo. Like me!

Harvey Who?

I'm coming into Manhattan this Friday to see "Gypsy" with Patti Lupone at a special holiday matinee. It's required in order to keep up my standing in the gay union (One Jules Styne musical PLUS a Gay Diva = 1,000 BONUS QUEER POINTS).

After copping my ticket (great seat, too. Aisle seat, 5th row Mezz -- the ideal seat for any musical, especially at the St. James Theater) I realized that I was going to be in town "for the evening" and that I could either a) see another show (big $) OR b) see the movie "Milk" which opens tomorrow in "selected cities" (translation = "cities with humongous gay and/or ultra-liberal populations, many of whom are either in show biz or they know people who are), namely Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.



Being the sort of guy I am (on a budget), I decided to see "Milk." Then I decided to invite some other gay people I know who are also in recovery. I called my friend "M" first and blurted out my plan. "Oh", he said, "I'd LOVE to go." Well, that was easy. Then he added, "Who was Milk?"

WHO WAS MILK???!!!! I was horrified. Appalled. Scandalized. Don't they teach these kids ANYTHING these days? They don't know where Zimbabwe is and they never heard of Harvey Milk. Tsk. Tsk.

Granted, "M" was exactly 1 year old when Harvey and George Moscone were assassinated, thus, sadly, launching Dianne Feinstein's political career on the national stage with her tearful announcement on nationwide TV of the deaths of the Mayor and city Supervisor. He was unaware, too, of Dan White and the ridiculous "Twinkie Defense." Or the fact that White, after a few years in prison, was set free, only to off himself a short time later.

I jettisoned plans to invite anyone else and determined that "M" was going to be my gay good deed of the month. I was going to educate this lad, whether he wanted it or not.

Seriously, though, we shouldn't be too surprised that Prop 8 passed in California, given the lousy job my generation has done of keeping the gay lib flame alive AND of passing along gay history to the next generation of gay, lesbian and transgendered youth.

But it was so easy to give up. The "Uncle Moms" among us made it easy to surrender, with their soothing talk of "making nice with the straights" and "it'll come... in time.... just give it time." It was about assuaging the feelings of straight people ... and denying and subjugating our own. It was about making straight people "comfortable" with having us around.

BULLFRIGGINSHIT. We should've been out there marching and demonstrating and making straight people VERY uncomfortable all along. But then AIDS came along and some of us actually bought into the RRR (radical religulous right - or Rockin' Ronnie Reagan)'s assertions that we were being "punished" for our previously hedonistic lifestyle, when, in fact, AIDS had been around for a hundred years, was primarily transmitted via heterosexual intercourse in Africa and was no more "our fault" than the sun, the moon or the stars. That, coupled with the Uncle Mom's pleadings to "play nice" proved to be too much for the handful of radicals who remained.

By the time the 80's were over, the few radical faeries left got involved in either ACT-UP or Queer Nation, both of which groups eventually succumbed to political infighting and subsequent fracturing.

Maybe it's radical time again. I feel emboldened, even at the ripe old age of 60, to once again take to the streets (this time without the aid of "marshals" and "permits" and "police escorts") to make the point that:

I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!

Screw the establishment.

Oh, and marriage is just the tip of my iceberg. Full, unfettered, equal protection and rights under the law, is what I want. And when do I want it? 1972.

I think Harvey would've approved.


p.s. I got tickets to see the revival of "West Side Story" this coming March, too. I'm in Show-Queen Heaven right now.

Gay Lib - 4.0

[Both posters copyright Austin Cline]

The internets is atwitter with news that Gay Lib has been re-born, re-furbished, re-packaged and is hot-to-trot. It turns out that a whole generation (which one is it, Gen AA? Gen BBB?) has just "discovered" that you can take to the streets to register your dissatisfaction with things in general, including the status quo.

Well, whoop-di-friggin-do.

We boomers managed to organize anti-war demonstrations with 500,000 people using little more than telephones (anybody remember them?) and things called "Underground Newspapers" such as The Village Voice, The Great Speckled Bird and my favorite in Washington, DC, The Quicksilver Times. Granted, it took somewhat longer than 72 hours to throw these things together, given the lack of the internet, PDA's, iPhones, Crackberries and the other assorted electronic effluvia of modern life.

By my real point today is that everyone's ire seems to be pointed at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Said organization apparently ordered it's members to cough up tons of money they didn't have in order to BACK passage of Preparation H8 in California.

So, many of my young compatriots have focused all of their anger, bile and ire on... LDS.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of organized religions which I personally think are just money making machines for the folks who run 'em. And they use the concept of "sin" to keep their membership in line ... and to try to keep the rest of us in line, too.

But, as my friend Jake on his blog, Nofo, says (and I'm totally paraphrasing him here), their "mythology doesn't trump my reality" or words to that effect. I couldn't agree more. This country has, for too long and way too often, allowed people's fervent beliefs in fables and fantasies to dictate public policy.

We have, over the centuries, used such fervently held beliefs to rationalize the heinous institution of slavery. We used such beliefs to try, time and time again to "regulate" sin, such as we did with Prohibition. But the truth is that we are a nation of adulterous, drunken, philandering, lying, cheating, backstabbing Puritans. We sin without remorse except for the remorse of being caught at it. And then we cry and wail and blame it on the fact that we were molested as youngsters or we blame it on the booze, or the pharmaceuticals we've been taking.

And now, I'm ashamed to say, my fellow gays blame OUR failure to bash down Prep H8 on a church whose major sin seems to have been that they were better organized than we were. God love the folks at HRC, GLAAD and a handful of other groups. They tried.

However....

someone in the late 70's said that the Gay Rights Movement was doomed to failure because we were such a disparate group, lacking a single, unique and public "marker" indicating who and what we are. It's too easy for many of us to "pass". And many of us opt for "passing" rather than electing to do the really heavy lifting involved in being professionaly queer.

I'm sincerely glad to see the youngsters starting to exercise some political muscle. I hope they don't give up the way a lot of us did way back when. I also hope they'll remember this:

The Fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars.... but in ourselves.

Oh, and some advice for the Professional Kristians out there, too. There is nothing fragile about you. You hold all the cards and you know it. So quit playing the f*cking victim here.

Gay people ARE the victims and you ARE the bashers.

Rollerena: Diva, activist, skater, legend.

The first time I heard of RollerArena (later, Rollerena), I was fresh out of the Navy and the closet and running up and down the east coast, in the fall of 1972, attending various gay lib functions at sister universities to the U. of D., where I was the President of the fledgling LGBT group there. It was said that Roller showed up, like Batman, only in a tattered old wedding dress, eyeglasses that looked like Barry Humphries castoffs, and roller skates, at anything that smacked of political gayeity or just plain fabulousness.

The first time I saw Rollerena was on a streetcorner in Greenwich Village, around Christmas of 1972, when my then boyfriend, for my Christmas present, had gotten us tickets to see "Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill" which was playing at the Theater de Lys (later renamed the Lucille Lortel theater), on Christopher Street. I was enthralled as Rollerena whizzed by, tattered train dragging in the slush, holding a magic wand like Glinda's, waving it over the crowds on the sidewalk, bestowing his Queer Blessings on us all. Roller was street theater. Roller was Guerilla gayness. Roller was my Hero(ine).

One rumor had it that by day he was a block trader at a brokerage house (Wrong. He worked at a city agency), but by night he became the doyenne of dramatic faggotry. It was known that he was one of the darlings of Studio 54 and could be found there many nights of the week. But he wasn't just a disco diva. No, no. This public display of fabulousness had a serious, political purpose behind it.

The next time I saw Roller was in the summer of 1973, at the NY Pride March. I've blogged before about what disorganized messes the Pride Marches were in those days (and a helluva lot more fun than the pre-packaged ones they stage today). Roller didn't remember my name, but he remembered my tallness or something, for he came flitting over to greet me where I had joined the congregation from Rutgers (to say "hi" to a bunch of my fellow radical faeries from that fine institution of insubordination). He, as were we all, was charged by the electricity in the air. In those days civil disobedience was one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs around. ("Hello, my name is Chance? Wouldn't you like to give Chance a piece?")

I continued to hear about Roller over the years, even as I drifted away from my gay lib roots. Sometime, probably in the early 90's, I thought about Roller and wondered whatever became of him. But in those pre-internets day, there was no easy way to check up on him.

Then, on a whim, this morning I googled him.

There's a nice little article about Rollerena here. You should read it. Rollerena is an important part of Your Gay History!
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HOT FLASH!

Rep. Richard Curtis, the Washington State Closet Case I flagellated here yesterday, has resigned (surprise, surprise).

It's also rumored he's in the market for a good divorce lawyer.