A 'CREATING CHANGE' SURVIVOR STORY

by Natalie Newton

I attend the Creating Change Conference as a UCLA Queer Alliance representative in 2003.  The new executive chair of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force explained in a paranoid fever pitch that all queers should vote to prevent the gay-marriage-wedge-issue from granting Bush another term of tyranny.  No one at the conference challenged the electoral system itself as one which will never deliver real liberation for queers, poor people, women, people of color, or anyone really who is not a rich, white, heterosexual male.  Like the NGLTF, university campus student activist groups perpetuate actually conformist politics under the guise of change.  My work with the queer communities at UCLA and the UCLA Clothesline Project (a sexual violence awareness advocacy group) wasted so much of my time and precious energy.  I stayed with Clothesline Project for two years, hanging on to one or two hours of discussion on radical feminist politics for a speakout at Take Back the Night and to bring the editor of “That’s Revolting: Queers Resisting Assimilation” to present on her book at UCLA.  Looking back, the losses incurred far outweighed these gains in spreading radical politics.  After I left, Clothesline leadership returns to buying buttons and ribbons instead of trying to create an infrastructure of materials that could help survivors of sexual violence who lose everything when they leave their abusive partners for example; the sorority girl population continues to grow with thier heteronormative, thin-body-image and white-beauty-standard value systems unchallenged in meetings; and the leaders who reject radical politics return to investing resources in conservative institutions like the school newspaper.  The UCLA queer communities still cling to gay marriage as a premiere political issue and send students to the Creating Change Conference to learn about “activism.”  There is no lasting way to “infiltrate” liberal student groups that have no real intention of venturing outside of the safety of the campus with any radical politics.  There are too many people who join the mainstream campaigns like voting, gay marriage, or pass out daisies instead of confronting perpetrators of sexual violence in a serious way, or people who are ultimately involved to put more on their resume or to fufill a need for power to make any substantial, systematic, and lasting changes. 

Everyone loses when students do campus organizing due to problems with structure as well.  The university siphons people into a hierarchical system of organization in which “signatorees” and a “Consititution” must be drafted in order for the group to exist and to obtain funding. This system basically requires students to replicate the false promises, power structures, and fiscal self-regurgitation this country perpetuates in its own Constitution.  Organizers get screwed over as they never grow out of the luxury of power, recognition, and validation from society as “leaders”.  Granting great power and control to individuals to direct a larger group of people suffocates a space where active critique of everyone can happen.  Institutional power feeds people’s false sense of entitlement and reproduces cycles of institutional abuse that the group is supposedly trying to combat in the first place.  Members of campus groups get screwed over under the direction of often over-committed, power-hungry, and egotistical student “leaders” as they fumble with say, the bureaucracy required to buy a $17-gallon of iced tea for a student banquet from the university catering service.  And the participants, audiences, and everyone in between who go to the events that student non-profit campus groups put on could have better spent their $7 for parking at an event that they could have had more control over as non-students or to an event whose strings are not attached to an institution whose student body perpetuates class, race, gender, and sexual privilege of the pre-existing elite year after year.  On the ground level, we are the creators of this world, so return to us for change, not an institution.

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