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Trash Talking In Queer Activism
Approved for the Division
(Sociology)
Erich Steinman
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I want to thank my family, my mom, my dad, Thalia and Sophia for their support and many hours of watching CSI. I am ever-indebted to my wife, Usnea. Thanks to my companion Jordan Kirk, the only person I could have a truly homosexual relationship with. Thank you to Elos Cutter for many a back porch theoretical examination. Bridget Clancy, Andrea Christopher, Maya Rowland and others for keeping me honest and making me go out. Adele Carpenter, Tuesday Smillie, Michelle O’Brien, Valentine, and Nicholas Clarkson for being colleagues in queer theorizing outside the classroom. Thanks to Leah, Parker, Lana, Jen, Kate, Sarah T., Megan, Nansi, and everyone here at Reed College for solidarity. Fureigh for many offers of food and brainy insights, Carole for taking me in, and Arini for dinner. Amelia for cadre support, transcribing some interviews, and brilliant copy-editing. Silke Akerson for reviewing my draft and long walks. Also, thanks to Collette Gordon for insights and cupcakes. Thank you to Dana for taking it to the next level with me, welcoming me into her life for two full weeks of data collection in San Francisco.
Thank you to Erich Steinman, for extensive guidance and support throughout this process. Also, thanks Marc Schneiberg for giving attention when I demanded it. I am grateful to my third and fourth readers, Jacqueline Dirks and Pancho Savery, for extending themselves and providing extensive line edits on my drafts. Thanks to the R.W. Hodge Fund for its financial support for my thesis data collection, and the Undergraduate Initiative Research Committee for financially supporting my data collection. Jim Van Buskirk, Program Manager at the San Francisco Public Library James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, thanks for connecting me to resources and being excited about my project. Anne Lorimer for recommending literature, Michael Raey for meeting with me about interviews, and Kyriell Noon for consultation. I’m grateful to Susan Stryker for sarcastically telling me my project is bankrupt. I’m grateful to Lisa Moore for taking time out to read over my draft and for your guidance in my last year.
Precision in language is vital to discussing queer politics. Within this thesis, I use “LGBT” to refer to the umbrella encompassing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities. I use the term “queer” to refer both to a specific political action logic and to individuals who self-identify as queer; which use I am employing should be clear from the context. Both of these identity classifications are narrowed in my categorization of organizations as “mainstream LGBT” and “oppositional queer.” When I use the term “mainstream LGBT,” I am referring to a complex tangle of associated features. It implies an interest group politics that pursues movement goals within established political channels and defines goals in accordance with a minority or essentialist understanding of group identity. When I use the classification “oppositional queer,” I am referring to a contentious politics that uses non-institutional tactics in order to advance goals consistent with a liberationist ideology aiming to liberate all oppressed people. These categories will be complicated and deepened by this thesis. While the imposition of binary classifications risks polarizing and oversimplifying complex issues, I found these classifications useful for describing already extant ambiguous categories that are continually constructed and deconstructed via social movement activity.
What is the role of pronounced conflict within social movements? Extensive internecine criticism is discounted as deleterious infighting within scholarship and by many activists themselves. While such views seem to be self-evident, they rest on unexamined assumptions. Is conflict inherently destructive or counterproductive? How do activists themselves think about extensive and sometimes personalized criticism of other activists and organizations? Drawing upon but critiquing social movement theory, I argue that while conflict may produce organizational crises and burnout, it also produces new social movement activity. In-movement criticism may generate organizations, produce protests, and contribute to oppositional identity construction. Thus, engaging in criticism may function as a form of social movement activity. However, such productive aspects of criticism are easily overlooked by social movement scholarship, particularly if criticizers fail to advance formal political goals or target movement opponents. Similarly, cultural and emotional benefits of issuing criticism are easily overlooked. I use data from 17 in-depth interviews to explore the roles of conflict in the context of LGBT and queer efforts for change. Based on the interview data and within an in-depth historical contextualization, I argue that oppositional queer groups are born out of criticism of LGBT interest group and identity-based organizing. Queer groups’ tactics draw power from a shared understanding of the LGBT movement’s logic and tactics. I draw upon interviews with both oppositional queer activists and mainstream LGBT activists to argue that the emergence of oppositional queer activism is a productive result of criticism that illustrates the generative power of oppositional identity construction.
This thesis is dedicated to my family: Gabriel Shannon, Stephen Sady, Thalia Sady, and Sophia Sady.
Introduction: Criticism in Context
Serious consideration of queerness as a logic of action can force important revisions in approaches to collective identity formation and deployment and their relationship to political gains. First, it calls attention to the fact that secure boundaries and stabilized identities are necessarily not general, but in the specific – a point current social movement theory largely misses. The link between the two logics, the ways in which the American political environment makes stable collective identities both necessary and damaging, is sorely undertheorized and underexamined (Gamson, 1995: 402-3).
Joshua Gamson asserts that the “queer dilemma” brought to bear on social movement theory is that the destabilization of collective identity may itself be a goal and accomplishment of collective action (1995: 403). He compares this impulse to removing a rug from under one’s own feet. This seemingly self-destructive impulse serves as the object of my study. I sought to account for oppositional queer groups leveling scathing criticisms against mainstream LGBT organizations. I found that oppositional queer groups use the tools of identity-based organizing in order to destabilize the goals and tactics of mainstream LGBT groups. Because mainstream LGBT groups aim to embrace diverse identities, queer challenges to interest group politics resonate with in-group authority. Thus oppositional queers’ shared lexicon and the common tactic of identity deployment, matched with their identities as supposed beneficiaries of LGBT activism, imbues oppositional queer activists’ criticisms with meaning. Internally, criticism serves as a mechanism for boundary construction through which oppositional queers distinguish themselves from mainstream LGBT individuals, fortifying a reflexive “anti” identity. The external critique on the movement and the internal solidarity building combine as products of scathing criticisms.
In my first chapter, I draw on political process theory and the literature of “culturalist” scholars who critique social movement theory for its failure to account for forms of protest that appear to be at odds with social change. I then narrow my focus to scholars who elaborate the role of identity in collective action and the particular intensification of self-representation in identity political movements, resulting in identity proliferation and internecine conflict that is considered detrimental to social action. I then move to literature considering the queer action logic in order to expand on how identity proliferation and the destabilization of identity categories can be understood as productive or generative. Having reviewed relevant literature, I present my hypothesis, suggesting that criticism and talking trash are political acts, and that they generate social movement activity. I detail my methodology and give a rationale for case selection, outlining the in-depth interview process and how I drew 17 activists from both oppositional queer and mainstream LGBT organizations in Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California. I end the first chapter with short descriptions of each of these organizations and a note about the troubles of classifying queer and LGBT activism within the same movement.
In my second chapter, “The Queer Intervention,” I provide a brief history of the emergence of queer activism as marked by the emergence of Queer Nation in 1990 as an offshoot of the radical AIDS direct action group ACT UP. The history I provide is a critical re-evaluation of sociologist Elizabeth A. Armstrong’s account of queer movement emergence. Through this critical history I illustrate the early queer movement’s influence on the tactics and identities of present-day oppositional queer organizations. I end my history chapter by touching on styles of political action particular to gay, LGBT, and queer activism: the use of camp humor and the act of shaming.
In my third chapter, “Talking Trash,” I use data from 17 in-depth interviews to describe the nature of critique: breaking it down into personal indictments and stories of scandal, both styles of critiquing in conversation within groups. I also describe direct actions designed to “crash the party” of LGBT groups. These actions demonstrate how critique operates external to oppositional queer groups. After establishing the modes of critique, I discuss the content of oppositional queer critiques that object to minority model organizing toward citizenship rights such as equal marriage for LGBT individuals. With the mode and content clarified, I turn to participants’ explicit understandings of conflict, as participants have intentions when issuing criticism and are conscious of its effects. I outline explicit understandings of criticism held by oppositional queer and mainstream LGBT groups. Then I move to the dynamics that were not explicitly identified by participants as produced by criticism, but I found to be outcomes of the same practice. These dynamics include inaction and organizational crises, and affect mainstream LGBT and oppositional queer groups differently.
In my fourth and final chapter, I discuss the dynamics at play between criticized and criticizing organizations. The conflict-centered interactions between these two types of groups are open-ended, as LGBT participants ignore, defuse, or incorporate critiques. When incorporated, oppositional queer groups tend to reject incorporation. Thus, the interactive relationship is unresolved. In the second part of the final chapter, I delve further into the function of criticism in shoring up oppositional queer identity. Once again using my interview data, I discuss the ways that oppositional queer activists fortify radical identity and thereby sustain the possibility of ongoing critique by talking about distinctions and criticizing a mainstream LGBT “other.” I also found that participants constructed boundaries within oppositional queer culture, and I touch on this other side of oppositional queer identity construction. In my conclusion I summarize my findings, expound upon possible generalizations of my findings and reflect on the shortcomings of my research project.
Chapter One: Social Movement Theory and Identity Movements
Structure, Rationality, Culture, and the State in Social Movement Theory
In-movement targeting of mainstream organizations by oppositional groups suggests a quandary for social movement scholarship, which traditionally has regarded social movement activity as a challenge to state power posed by excluded groups. At this juncture in social movement scholarship, political process theory is the dominant model for collective action. Political process theory emerged as a twofold critique. It responded first to the shortcomings of classical models that framed social movement activity as the result of psychological distress. Additionally, political process theory addressed the inadequacies of resource mobilization theory, which aims to correct the emphasis on individual deprivation in classical models in order to account for collective action. Resource mobilization theory focused on resources critical to generating collective action, arguing that grievances are not sufficient to spur movement activity and casting movement participants as rational actors reliant on elites and resources. Doug McAdam (1982) critiques resource mobilization theory in his presentation of political process theory. He argues that resource mobilization theory fails to examine the risks attendant to relying on elites: the threat of withdrawal of support and cooptation (1982: 27-29). Instead, McAdam stresses the importance of a mass base accompanied by the understanding that oppression is both unjust and subject to change as causal variables lost in the overextension of the term “resources” (1982: 34). McAdam asserts that excluded groups can produce and sustain collective action, but are constrained by environmental factors. Thus, activity is reliant on interplay between internal organizational strength and the changing structure of political opportunities, culminating in an intersubjective understanding of grievances and the possibility for change that McAdam calls “cognitive liberation” (1982: 39-51). McAdam’s model for collective action provides for the social construction of some constraints, and also factors in environmental openness, but turns the attention of subsequent social movement scholars away from forms and factors involved in collective action projects that are absent from his model.
A vibrant body of literature aimed at reclaiming concepts undervalued by structuralist and rationalist social movement theory demonstrates the limitations of political process theory in explaining cultural goals and tactics. Culturalist scholars champion social movements that are not adequately accounted for by political process theory, such as animal rights and AIDS activism (Groves, 2001; Jasper, 1997; and Gould, 2000 and 2001). .Mary Bernstein argues that political process theory both does not extend to social movement activity, which “appears to be at cross-purposes with policy change,” and fails to legitimate cultural activity aimed at reproducing identity (1997: 534). For Bernstein and others, political process theory has led scholars of social movements to discount cultural goals, prefiguritive politics, and activity based on voicing dissent or expressing moral outrage (Bernstein, 1997; Armstrong and Bernstein, 2004; Jasper, 1997; Polletta, 2002). For example, Armstrong and Bernstein criticize political process theory and its revisions for continuing to define protest only as activity targeting the state, and suggest definitions for social movement activity that include actors targeting any authority, not just state or institutional authority (2004: 12). Their revision would account for protest targeting sources of authority from within a social movement. On a similar note, Francesca Polletta argues that some groups have been overlooked by scholars of social movements due to the perception of participatory democratic structures as hostile to “considerations of political efficacy” (2002: 203). This leaves an oversight in social movement scholarship regarding organizational innovations such as participatory democracy: a form of decentralized consensus-based decision-making, which aims to mitigate organizational cooptation. Polletta (2002) argues that participatory democratic forms of organizations are designed to maintain the group’s accountability to its members by resisting engagement with the political structure, which may lead to accountability to and emulation of that structure. By overlooking groups who refuse such engagement, the literature is biased toward groups directly addressing the political structure and away from “prefigurative” organizations, whose visions of the world are realized through how the organization is run. For prefigurative organizations, where the way in which a meeting is run is imbued with powerful political meaning, critiques and attacks may be integral to organizational operation (Polletta, 2002). Such an oversight in the literature makes scholarship vulnerable to dismissing the dynamics of infighting as apolitical or damaging, because intra as well as inter-organizational criticisms do not appear to advance “political” change.
Identities and Identity Construction in Social Movements
There is no consensus in social movements literature on the role of collective identity. However, identity is relevant to all social movement organizing in that shared identities as oppressed workers or citizens, for example, provide a basis for shared grievances, and identity as activists develops with participation. While identity plays a role in all social movement organizing, it has not been sufficiently elaborated upon by literature approaching social movements. Culturalists critique social movement scholarship for only dealing with identity insofar as it has a functional relationship to what are considered legitimate goals, such as member recruitment or strategic deployment aimed at policy change. Culturalists claim that this biases scholarship to dismiss important dimensions of social movement activity (Bernstein, 1997; Gamson, 1995; Taylor and Whittier, 1992; Jasper, 1997; Polletta, 2002). Further, scholars assert that movement participation and identity development are co-constitutive; Gamson (1995) critiques existing social movement literature for presuming that identity is a pre-existing resource. Armstrong and Bernstein join in the criticism, writing, “an approach that treats categories as natural often misses that even the most seemingly materialist attempts to address unequal distribution of valuable societal resources are generally also struggles over social honor and classification” (2004: 17). Thus, they argue, identity is implicated in many movements that have not been labeled as identity movements, and categorization is actively constructed instead of springing from essential traits. Additionally, culturalists argue that identity as activists influences social movement activity. Polletta claims that groups develop collective identity around tactics or the organization of meetings, arguing that groups may continue using a strategically useless tactic because it has been integrated into group identity (2002: 22). Jasper (1997) adds that participants may choose tactics because they are familiar or because they identify with them. In sum, identity is an important aspect of any collective action project; identity categories are not fixed, but are contested and generated through social movement activity, and further, social movement actors may integrate forms of protest into their identities. Identities are contested and created via social movement participation, and also profoundly affect social movement activity.
Particularly in social movements premised on identity politics, social movement actors’ subject positions are crucial. Even more than a shared socio-structural location that often grounds other types of movements, collective identities are premised on shared experiences, providing the bases for collective grievances and positive identity building projects. Tactically, identity categories supply legitimacy when speaking to the interest of a racial, sexual, or gender group, or can be deployed strategically in order to influence movement outcomes. Thus, while all social movements involve participants with multiple identities that carry varying degrees of meaning, the logic of identity politics requires participants to subvert other identities to the supremacy of one “master identity.” In the LGBT movement, the master identity is sexuality (Armstrong, 2002: 136). This power invested in identity raises the stakes around identity, increases complexity, and places identity at the center of conflict. Self-representation is hotly debated in many identity-based social movements because emphasis on likeness or difference impacts the reception of the wider public, a consideration with different implications depending on goals.
The dialectical relationship between identity construction and collective action suggests the political significance of explicit criticism within the gay movement. Mary Bernstein’s (1997) analysis of identity deployment helps account for personal attacks and the attention given to individual consumption choices featured in oppositional queer critiques. Bernstein defines “identity deployment” as “expressing identity such that the terrain of conflict becomes the individual person so that the values, categories, and practices of individuals become subject to debate” (1997: 537-8). Detailed criticisms of individuals and organizations may appear petty or unrelated to social movement activity. However, when identity is the plane on which debate takes place, these seemingly inconsequential details are charged with political relevance. Thus, identity deployment provides a framework for understanding why criticizing the consumption habits of politicians and executive directors is a political activity for those engaged in the talk. Additionally, identity deployment accounts for why these critiques are potent when leveled against LGBT movement participants, who share this understanding of individual values and practices. This generates an informal agreement premised in identity deployment as a major tactic where individual practices and values are subject to vehement contestation.
Considering the meaningfulness of identity and self-representation in identity movements situates the vehemence of conflicts, like those over assimilationism, that have been the hallmark of gay activism. Optimal identity deployment is harshly contested in LGBT activism, as it is torn between impulses to represent difference from and impulses to emphasize likeness with the dominant heterosexual culture. Debates about the best way to represent sexual difference are a long-time feature of LGBT organizing, with assimilationism or the emphasis on similarity running along politically accomodationist lines and emphasis on difference corresponding with militance. The dialectical relationship between accomodationism and militance, assimilationism and anti-assimilationism, forges identity categories through oppositional identity construction. Oppositional identity construction refers to the process by which identities are constructed by contrast to other groups. Oppositional identity construction is one mechanism by which identities are proliferated. In the following section, I explore two intertwined axes on which oppositional identities are constructed: identification with forms of activism and identification with marginalized groups.
Some culturalists argue that the proliferation of different in-group identities takes place not just due to differing racial, class, or sexual identities, but also due to identifications with different forms of activism. Francesca Polletta notes the identity work of organization members shoring up their identities as distinct from organizations they see themselves as unlike; she shows that SNCC members distinguished themselves from social workers and do-gooders, questioning the relationship between programs aimed to “salve the pain of oppression” and radical change (2002: 98). This distancing was not limited to internal effects: it guided the types of projects the organization chose. Polletta shows how this distancing impacts how groups organize, taking the example of feminist groups’ use of collectivist organizing to dissociate themselves from masculine bureaucracy. She writes, “the association of a deliberative option with a particular group affects whether it is perceived as sufficiently radical or ideologically consistent and whether it is seen as practical, political, and efficacious.” (2002: 23). This assertion that strategic viability is socially constructed, and Polletta’s emphasis on the extent to which activists identify with organizational structure demonstrates how criticisms targeting another group’s organizational structure, especially when contrasted to a preferred structure, promote oppositional identity development along the axis of activism.
To many scholars, identity proliferation, conflicts over its deployment, and the intensity of oppositional identity formation associated with identity movements, produce deleterious conflict that wastes the energies of social movement actors. Barbara Ryan (1989) argues that ideology can be destructive when it is used to bolster identity. She cites interview evidence of “trashing,” harshly criticizing other activists’ politics, in the Women’s Movement (1989: 248). Ryan’s contention is that radical feminists adopted ideological purity in order to distinguish themselves from “establishment” women, bolstering their positive identities by using oppositional identity construction. Ryan claims that “competitive models of right thinking” generated by this boundary work between radical and non-radical activists is destructive (1989: 245). While Ryan argues convincingly that ideological disagreements in the Women’s Movement were really about identity, she does not present a convincing case that these disagreements were damaging. Her claim that “activists of this time period consider the impact of antagonistic group relations to be a major cause of many women leaving the movement” stands unsubstantiated within the text, especially when followed by assertions that liberal cooptation was responsible and that internal dissention due to organization was as much to blame as inter-group conflict (1989: 248). Overall, Ryan’s evidence shows that feminists have reappraised those conflicts as more about identity than ideology, but does not confirm that internal dissention is responsible for major member loss.
Ryan is not alone in accounting for movement failure with internal dissention. Arlene Stein (1992) argues that the destruction, due to factionalism, of a single cohesive lesbian political logic has decentered lesbianism. For Stein, these destructive forces are enacted through “border skirmishes” within lesbian feminism. She argues that what was problematic “was not so much that boundary-making took place, but that the discourse of the movement, rooted in notions of authenticity and inclusion, ran so completely counter to it” (1992: 558). Stein draws on Susan Krieger’s claims that “integralism” or the “yearning for totalizing identity” is intensified within communities where both desire for personal affirmation and desire for individuality are strong (1992: 558-9). The assertion is that social movements with logics of inclusion and unity sow the seeds of particularly intense border skirmishes. Taylor and Whittier agree, writing, “it is easy to understand how identity politics promotes a kind of cultural endogamy that, paradoxically, erects boundaries within the challenging group, dividing it on the basis of race, class, age, religion, ethnicity, and other factors” (1992: 113-114). Echoing Taylor and Whittier’s assertion that identity politics produce identities and, therefore, conflict over identities, Armstrong writes:
Ironically, the identity logic that produced a commitment to gay identity simultaneously heightened the salience of identity in society in general and created equally compelling commitments to racial, ethnic, and gender identities … the intensified commitment to identities in all these movements made the emergence of critiques of exclusion inevitable. (2002: 139) The gay movement, with its identity political logic and tactics, generates identity challenges and promotes identity proliferation. Armstrong argues that the absorption of critiques neutralizes the threat posed to the movement, implicitly reinforcing the assertion that unity provides solidarity and undercutting the assertion that disunity may promote solidarity. In order to explore the assertion that identity movements generate critiques over exclusion, I critique Armstrong’s account of gay movement success in the face of the destructive threat of identity proliferation. Identity Political Logic in Armstrong’s Account of the Gay Movement The gay identity movement, since its synthesis into identity politics and interest group organizing in the mid-1970s, privileges certain interests within the gay movement: namely the interests of white, middle class, gay men or, within lesbian feminism, lesbians (Armstrong, 2002; Gamson, 1995; Stein, 1992; Vaid, 1995, to name a few). The gay movement’s marginalization of women and people of color has generated a vibrant discourse against gay identity politics that demand that members subsume identities such as race and gender under the master-identity of gayness. The actions of these activists have generated a number of organizations and actions that are often subsumed under the umbrella of the LGBT movement in historical accounts. Elizabeth Armstrong’s cultural-institutional account of the gay movement is no exception. In Forging Gay Identities (2002), Armstrong argues that the gay movement’s political logic of “unity through disunity” resolved challenges of excluded groups and mended the fissures generated by “gay” and “lesbian” as primary identity categories. This dominant frame of the gay movement was flexible and compelling enough to promote crystallization of a lesbian and gay field. Armstrong’s findings differ from what most social movements theorists would claim, in that “the focus on identity building and identity elaboration has not proved to be paralyzing or divisive for the gay movement. Paradoxically, the unity and diversity of the gay community seem inextricably interconnected” (2002: 2). She argues that the cognitive frame of the gay movement promoted the survival of the movement both by interpreting interest group politics and commercial pleasure-seeking activity as contributing to the construction of gay identity, and by expanding to accommodate types of diversity for which the frame was originally never intended (2002: 23). Armstrong writes that the very values of the movement, which claimed to celebrate diversity but which really intended only to refer to sexual and ideological diversity among white gay men, provided the basis for the critique made by white lesbians, lesbians of color, and gay men of color when they were excluded from the movement (2002: 153). Armstrong argues that the cognitive frame of “unity through disunity” expanded to embrace and neutralize these critiques. I problematize Armstrong’s classification of these groups, suggesting that her measure of success may conceal another variable: movement participation due to conflict over exclusion and ideological disagreements. Armstrong considers the emergence of new organizations as testament to the strength of an identity-embracing frame, failing to account for organizations developed due to internal dissention and splintering or due to the mobilization of marginalized individuals in response to exclusion. Elizabeth Armstrong acknowledges that the gay and lesbian movement is far from egalitarian, and that a unified movement does not follow from a frame of unity. However, Armstrong’s measure for the burgeoning gay and lesbian field may conceal splintering, conflict, and fragmentation. When constructing a database of gay organizations in San Francisco, Armstrong coded the organizations, including all organizations that state either in their name or in their mission statement that they are composed of either sexual or gender minority people. This includes “homosexual, homophile, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transvestite, transgender, leather, BDSM, or sex workers,” folding potentially autonomous or oppositional organizations into her measure for the gay movement (2002: 208). Armstrong collapses the development of gay identity organizations with organizations formed in protest to existing organizations or in response to rejection based on transgendered or bisexual identity. Thus, the more organizations developed in response to exclusion or as departures from the lesbian and gay movement, the more “gay” organizations Armstrong counts. This absorption of fracturing and conflict is consistent with the frame of the gay movement that Armstrong identifies, “unity through disunity,” but may disguise generative effects of in-movement contention. The literature reflects that identities are constructed, contested, and destroyed through social movement activity, and that identity political movements continually produce new identities and new conflicts about inclusion. Within the literature, the gay movement exemplifies these identity-based conflicts with a rich history of boundary contestation over newly intensified identity categories. The emergence of the queer action logic in 1990 forced explicit interrogation of the role of identity in collective action, and provoked social movements literature to wrestle with the same challenge. Joshua Gamson (1995) makes the case that the queer action logic provides an intervention for social movement literature to account for the impulse to dismantle collective identity, claiming that the “queer dilemma” rests in the fact that it is both productive to shore up and to deconstruct identity categories. Due to the internal contradiction implicit in drawing power from identity categories that are the bases for oppression, disrupting or loosening identity categories serving as the foundation of ethnic/essentialist models of sexuality are legitimate targets for queer attack (1995: 389). Queerness “calls for a more developed theory of collective identity formation and its relationship to both institutions and meanings, an understanding that includes the impulse to take apart that identity from within,” argues Gamson, challenging the assumption in social movement theory that stable identity categories fortify a movement. The queer action logic suggests the productive power of dismantling identity categories (1995: 391). The contradiction of matching an identity-destroying impulse with the creation of “queer” as a collective identity may be generative in and of itself. E.J. Rand cites Michel Foucault to claim, “it is the contradictions that haunt and inhabit the construction of queer identities that produce the most interesting kinds of ‘identity talk’ and that lead to the proliferation of meanings associated with queer” (2004: 297). For Rand, the contradictions within queer identity promote new discourses and thus prevent it from being closed. She argues, “the process of identity negotiation produces an expansion of the possible meanings and referents of queer,” thus multiplying available identities and expanding the meanings associated with queer identity. Rand argues that this legacy of contradictions has outlived Queer Nation, which she claims dissolved due to tensions and conflicts around that very identity proliferation (2004: 303-4). Even in light of Rand’s argument for productive identity proliferation, such production appears to doom the organization that made it possible.
While oppositional identity construction is aggressively engaged in by oppositional queer groups, this type of borderwork is not a one-way street. Rand writes of the radical flank effect created by Queer Nation, that the constitution of a queer identity as quite distinct from a gay or lesbian identity, then, is a project undertaken not only by queers themselves (who want to delineate their perspectives and goals from those of gay and lesbian assimilationists), but also by the gays and lesbians who want to make sure that they are never mistaken for queers. (2004: 302) The point to take from Rand is two-fold: the mutuality of the identity construction, shored up both by queers and by gay and lesbian assimilationists, and the benefit derived from oppositional identity construction on the side of mainstream gays.
My review of the literature suggests an adjusted understanding of generative or positive effects of social movement activity. While political process theory would define positive effects in accordance with institutional policy change, an analysis responsive to the assertions of culturalists is that there are positive effects of social movement activity that may not relate to, or act against, policy change. Further, social movement scholarship that takes identity construction and deployment as central to understanding collective action shows how internal identity building within social movements and dynamic, oppositional identity building proliferate identities available for social movement participants and may motivate social movement activities by spurring debate and dissention. I suspect that conflict produces enhanced social movement activity. I refer to this as a generative effect, meaning that through engaging in criticism, the boundaries of the social movement are contested, and solidified or broken down. The normative concepts of “productive” are restructured, and the identities available to members of minority groups are increased and further complicated. Thus, while criticism may not contribute to policy change or combat formal anti-gay opposition, it may generate cultural effects such as identity proliferation and internal solidarity. Further, when these mechanisms of oppositional identity deployment are turned outward to other groups, they may change the overall goals of the movement itself.
I problematize the widely held perception, articulated in Barbara Ryan’s (1989) article, that these conflicts are damaging to movement activity, despite the intensification of identity categories and the possibility that factionalism is distressing to individual actors. While the assumption that identity proliferation and conflict are damaging thrives both in social movements literature and in folk understandings within the gay movement, I argue that border skirmishes catalyze organizational formation and protest activity within identity political movements. This assertion fits in with sociological thinking about the function of conflict: conflict helps define group boundaries and shores up identities of those within a group. Internal solidarity is built through boundary maintenance, serving to stabilize groups by reinforcing the common identity of movement insiders. Thus, the gay movement created these identities as salient collectivities and politicized them, providing a cognitive frame that views deviant sexual identity as a basis for oppression, and, for implicitly collective action. Innovations like the tactic of “coming out,” and the practice of shoring up identity categories via systematically rejecting members whose identities were considered threatening (such as bisexuals and transgendered people) or threatened the image of the movement (like BDSM practitioners and butch and femme lesbians) have developed with the identity political logic of the gay movement and inform the dynamics of conflict. I challenge both received knowledge and folk theories about the destructive power of conflict, which presume that any lack of solidarity is negative, or that energy expended on internal debate is energy better spent addressing formal opposition or promoting “positive” change. Such claims find support in extant literature, though this literature has fallen short of a nuanced approach to cultural and identity outcomes. Political process theory and resource mobilization theory take as a resource a unified identity category, and consider identity fortification and building to be beneficial bonuses of activity addressing the state, insofar as this identity building forms a basis for state-targeted claims. Recalling Ryan (1989), after the fashion of political process theory, “talking trash” in order to reinforce ideological purity is deleterious to movement activity because it factionalizes. I am interested in questioning the assertions that factionalism prevents social movement activity and that “talking trash” destroys social movements. The literature has not provided sufficient answers to these questions. To that end, I look for culturally generative effects: the proliferation of different types of identities available, increased participation in protest activity, and ideological interventions in the broader movement.
I study oppositional queer criticisms of mainstream LGBT organizations and politics in order to explore the underexamined role of criticism within social movements, particularly identity political movements. I sought interview responses addressing what activists think about conflict and what their intentions are when engaged in conflict. I also observed outcomes produced by criticism and conflict. In order to assess my hypothesis, I define measures of productive results of conflict. Productive implies different observable phenomena depending on the social movement literature one draws on. Outcomes such as tactical innovation and evidence of resisting cooptation are suggested by political process theory. The galvanization of mainstream groups against oppositional groups may build internal solidarity on both sides of a critique, strengthening mainstream commitments to interest group politics while similarly fusing oppositional groups to disruptive insurgence. In light of culturalist critiques, evidence of vitality, ideological and moral consistency with social movement actors, and pleasure taken in protest might also be generative effects. Drawing on literature addressing the role of collective identity, boundary contestation may cause a proliferation of available identities, and strengthen the convictions associated with those identities. In the course of my research, I examined both participants’ explicit understandings of conflict and critique as vital or detrimental, and was attentive to evidence of the mechanisms of oppositional identity construction. At the same time, I sought evidence that would contradict my hypothesis by demonstrating the singularly destructive nature of conflict. Social movements theory alerts us to the dissolution of social movement groups or the decline of a social movement. Culturalist critiques suggest strained friendships and guilt would curtail individual participation. Relating to collective identity, it is possible that conflict could render identities so complex and multiple that it would be hard to anchor social solidarity to them. Thus, while I am not able to formally test competing predictions about the effects of conflict, I do consider negative effects, even though my study is primarily oriented towards exploring the possibility of positive effects. Clearly, both positive and negative effects may co-exist. However, as I have asserted above, the existence of positive effects is under-theorized and studied, and thus I focus my attention on this.
The gay movement is ideally suited to explore the role of factionalism, conflict, and oppositional identity construction in social movements. It is considered the quintessential identity movement: exemplary of the pitfalls of identity-based organizing (Bernstein, 1997: 532). Better still, the queer action logic presents a challenge to the premise of identity-based organizing, leveling a critique against the minority model which bases collective identity around shared sexual minority identity and oppression. I identified queer organizations engaged in public disputes with mainstream LGBT groups, and drew interviewees from groups who were critiquing and from those who were critiqued. In-group speech and actions directly addressing other organizations are, respectively, two central modes through which inter-organizational and inter-personal critique occurs. I gather data on these two expressions of criticism through interviews with purposively-selected movement participants.
I interviewed 17 activists in Portland and San Francisco in an effort to determine if infighting and conflict generate social movement activity. My desire to capture the whole phenomenon led me to interview both the criticizers and those whom they criticized. As I found in the course of gathering data, criticism is a dynamic process, and engaging in it opens one and one’s group to intensified critique. By focusing on perceived hypocrisy in mainstream groups, oppositional groups were opening themselves to similar claims. Thus, it was important for me to interview members of oppositional queer groups and also interview members of targeted mainstream LGBT groups. I had the opportunity to examine these dynamics in two US cities: Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California. This allowed me to compare the critical dynamics across two different political contexts. I conducted 17 in-depth, loosely structured interviews with individuals who were members and former members of groups engaged in public conflict. I designed a loosely structured interview in order to gather responses about conflict among organizations in the LGBT movement. The open form allowed in-depth detail in response to questions asking biographical information, organizational information, and, finally, asking directly about conflict among organizations. This allowed me to both address directly what participants think about conflict, and to get a sense of indirect or unintended outcomes of conflict. Respondents were strongly encouraged to invent a pseudonym in order to preserve their anonymity. However, seven respondents refused and asked that I use their real names. The interview was designed in order to invite participants to engage in critique with me, the interviewer. The interview itself is a speech event of criticism, and as the interviewer I positioned myself to interactively enable, rather than curtail, the “talking shit” of my interviewees. This is an important dimension of methodology: as an interviewer, I expressed shock, made faces, and laughed along with my participants. I did not react in ways that were disingenuous: I did not fake emotional reactions. However, I made the choice as a researcher to not censor my reactions. While this may have biased the interviews, it was necessary in order to structure the event of “talking trash.”
Another factor that contributed to enabling critique is my identity presentation. Participants engaged with me both as a student researcher and as a fellow queer. My deep commitment to radical social change and to queer activism contributed to the quality of my research by equipping me with crucial cultural knowledge, vocabulary, and styles of speech and dress that situated me as an insider with oppositional queer participants. My presentation may have been a hindrance in my interviews with mainstream LGBT participants, as my youth and my interest in conflict may have signaled that my thesis would be critical of older activists and associated centrism in the movement. Overall, I cannot emphasize enough how much this project relied on the contributions of the interview participants, who were willing to talk with me about the sensitive subject of conflict, gave me hours of their time, and invited me into their homes and their workplaces. Oppositional queers responded welcomingly to my gingerly emailed requests to attend their open meetings in spite of increasingly hostile police repression of radical groups, and mainstream LGBT activists set time aside in the middle of their workdays to speak candidly on volatile subjects. Data collection was an immense pleasure thanks to the participants. I recorded the interviews and took detailed notes during interview; later, I transcribed the recordings. The resulting collection of notes constitutes the primary data from which the analysis was developed.
The Cases: Portland and San Francisco
The oppositional queer organizations in my study, QueerRevolution (Portland) and Gay Shame (San Francisco), serve as excellent exemplars of movement activity in the form of criticism leveled at mainstream forms of activism. Both organizations emerged in order to demonstrate against, interrupt, or attempt to block the Pride Parade. Both groups persist in demonstrating against Pride annually. Gay Shame hosts the theatrical Gay Shame Awards and QueerRevolution marches, both objecting to gay consumerism and to the Pride Parade’s corporate sponsorship. The mainstream LGBT organizations, Basic Rights Oregon (Portland), and the LGBT Center (San Francisco), were chosen because they are among those organizations critiqued by Gay Shame and QueerRevolution, and they are exemplary of interest-group approaches to social change: they target policy change and deploy identity for education in order to garner support from a wider voting heterosexual public. Both are well-known in their communities. Basic Rights Oregon is the largest organization of its kind in Oregon, and the LGBT Center in San Francisco is a nexus of numerous organizations. My study spanned from fall of 2005 to spring of 2006. With support from Reed College’s Undergraduate Initiative Research Grant, I traveled to San Francisco, California for two weeks in January 2006 to conduct interviews with members of the oppositional queer group Gay Shame, as well as staff members of the LGBT Community Center. I attended open meetings of both oppositional queer groups in my study; however, the meetings were not the main sources of data. I attended in order to get a first-hand perspective on both groups, but primarily in order to recruit interviewees. All in all, I interviewed two former members and two current members of QueerRevolution, and two former members and three current members of Gay Shame, for a total of nine oppositional queer activists. Of the mainstream groups, I interviewed two staff members and the Executive Director of San Francisco’s LGBT Community Center, and, in Portland, one staff member and the Executive Director of Basic Rights Oregon, as well as the Executive Director of Love Makes a Family, totaling six activists working with mainstream LGBT organizations. In addition, I interviewed a former member of the Lesbian Avengers who organizes Portland’s Dyke March and collaborated with QueerRevolution in the Funeral for Queer Resistance action at Pride 2005, and historian and former Transgender Nation activist Susan Stryker. These last two participants are not included in my data of “oppositional queer” or “mainstream LGBT” activism because they are not members of groups engaged in these oppositional dynamics. Oppositional participants met with me in coffee shops and their homes, mainstream LGBT activists invited me into their offices for in-depth interviews which ranged from just under an hour to over three hours. Their generosity and patience has furnished this research project with empirical evidence.
QueerRevolution: Portland, Oregon QueerRevolution is a militant, anti-authoritarian, anticapitalist action queer group in Portland, Oregon. In their mission they proclaim, “we strive to develop radical queer culture as we reject the capitalist appropriation of queer culture, creating our own space and movement by learning from past revolutionary struggles.” QueerRevolution, which started in spring of 2002, is in the midst of an organizational transition. It has just become an open collective, whereas in past years new members went through a two-interview screening process. There has been a decline in membership, which organization members chalk up to some important members moving away and to the transitory lifestyles of radical activists. In the past, QueerRevolution organized interventions in Portland’s Pride celebration, tabled at events, typed up safer-space policies, and altered billboards and public spaces with queer messages using stickers and spray paint. At present, QueerRevolution hosts movie showings and discussions, advertising these events on Indymedia, a radical news website, and their list-serve. I attended a few monthly meetings in which two or three members of QueerRevolution got together and talked about the directions they would like to see QueerRevolution take. Gay Shame: San Francisco, California Gay Shame, like QueerRevolution, is a militant, anti-assimilationist queer group with a tactical focus on direct action. Gay Shame San Francisco has been around for a little bit longer than QueerRevolution. They have weekly open meetings at a radical bookstore in the Mission in San Francisco and have non-hierarchical organizational structure, using a consensus process in order to make decisions. The actions that Gay Shame puts on have changed over time: initially, they threw a celebration as an alternative to Pride, then brought an action into the Castro in order to explicitly criticize consumerism and assimilationism in mainstream LGBT culture. When I attended Gay Shame meetings, they had most recently been objecting to a conference on LGBT activism called “Creating Change,” hosted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and were starting projects against gentrification in Berkeley and the Tenderloin. Gay Shame had previously concentrated energy on criticizing the Castro culture and LGBT activism, but has branched out to work with the Coalition on Homelessness around anti-homeless political candidates and propositions. The Gay Shame meetings I attended focused primarily on strategizing around resisting gentrification both in the Tenderloin, a historically impoverished neighborhood being targeted for beautification and improvement by the Lower Polk Neighbors Association, and in Berkeley, where a historically black gay bar had lost its liquor license due to complaints from new businesses in the increasingly gentrified area.
Features of Oppositional Queer Organizations The oppositional queer organizations I studied oppose racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, ablest, and ageist oppression through the lens of a queer political action logic. The multi-issue politic they advance advocates directing movement resources to protecting the most vulnerable populations: invoked as queer kids, queer people of color, sex workers, and transgendered people. Combatting capitalism and imperialism, considered to be the root of oppressions, involves both internal and external assault on oppressive practices, including personal consumption. Direct action is not focused exclusively on formal opposition, like the Christian Right or the federal government, but exerts energy criticizing in-movement “others,” mainstream LGBT organizations. In my study, I concentrate on the criticisms leveled against mainstream LGBT culture and organizations, particularly on internal trash talk and externally directed “shaming” through protest demonstrations and wheat-pasted fliers, zines, stickers, and spray-painted stencils.
Both Gay Shame and QueerRevolution emerged to target the Pride Parade. On a national level, Pride has become increasingly commercialized, reliant on major corporate sponsorship, and is organized by mainstream LGBT Pride committees. Oppositional queer groups protest Pride as a representation of assimilationism and corruption in the gay movement. QueerRevolution staged a “Funeral For Queer Resistance” which interrupted and joined the route of the Pride Parade in Portland, Oregon in June 2005. A companion flyer distributed at the funerary march mourned the death of AIDS activism, queer war resistors, and the sex liberation movement, indicting the Human Rights Campaign for selling out to corporate sponsorship. Gay Shame hosts the annual Gay Shame Awards, a street-theatrical awards ceremony where participants “commend” the most hypocritical gays. These demonstrations employ explicit and adversarial tactics. Gay Shame, for example, uses effigies (replicas of people burned in order to make a statement against that person) at protests. In addition to criticizing mainstream LGBT organizations and individuals, both groups criticize non-LGBT organizations like the Lower Polk Neighbors, and politicians like San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom. Also, both groups actively organize around issues not generally associated with LGBT politics. For example, QueerRevolution staged a solidarity action against the Tualatin Valley Skins, going from door to door in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood where the neo-Nazi group planned a demonstration and asked if residents wanted someone to sit on their porch (interviews; F. O’Clock, M. Armstrong). Oppositional queer organizations are hostile to formal political engagement, and use loose consensus-based process in order to avoid hierarchy within the group. Like the women’s liberation movement, oppositional queer organizations are prefiguritive, attempting to model desirable society (an egalitarian one in which everyone participates) in their organizational form. Basic Rights Oregon and Love Makes a Family: Portland, Oregon Basic Rights Oregon is a conglomerate whose mission is to end discrimination against LGBT people in Oregon. Basic Rights Oregon is the largest LGBT organization in the state; it offers leadership in ballot campaigns and in lobbying the legislature for equal rights for sexual and gender minority people. The political organization is Basic Rights Oregon, their charitable nonprofit is called The Basic Rights Education Fund, and they have two Political Action Committees: a Ballot Measure Political Action Committee and a Candidate Political Action Committee. They are approaching their ten-year anniversary. Basic Rights Oregon was born in opposition to anti-gay ballot measures pushed by the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance, an anti-gay Christian Right group. Basic Rights Oregon was the product of a consolidation of a number of LGBT organizations, all competing for the same donor base. The transition was not a smooth one, and fallout from that confluence still survives ten years later with activists involved in past organizations and with donors.
Basic Rights Oregon’s work is reliant to some extent on the cycles of ballot initiatives and defensive response to anti-gay legislation. Their focus is on education; they do phone polling and door to door canvassing to try to educate voters about equal rights, as well as trying to educate legislators and embolden supportive legislators to support LGBT causes. Basic Rights Oregon receives support from a number of sources including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign. Coalition work is critical to them; they work with a number of organizations such as the Rural Organizing Project, Planned Parenthood, Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste, and others. Importantly, Basic Rights Oregon was the primary organization fighting against Measure 36, a constitutional amendment excluding same sex marriage in Oregon, which passed in 2005.
Basic Rights Oregon’s most visible conflict is not with an oppositional queer organization but with another mainstream LGBT organization, Love Makes a Family. Love Makes a Family was founded in 1992 to address marriage equality and to address LGBT issues in schools. Bonnie Tinker, the creator and Executive Director, has been at the center of an alternative newspaper controversy after she published her critical analysis of Basic Rights Oregon’s loss of the “No on 36” campaign which sought to prevent anti-gay Measure 36 from rendering equal marriage unconstitutional in Oregon. Tinker is vocally critical of Basic Rights Oregon’s strategies, particularly their failure to build coalitions with other organizations; and additionally, Love Makes a Family competes with Basic Rights Oregon for donor support. The LGBT Center is a large community center that houses a number of different organizations in San Francisco, as well as running five of its own programs. They have a building program where they rent space out and house events, helping a number of organizations by providing relatively affordable offices. The LGBT Center is not a political or legal organization, and it identifies its position as a community center: a place where people convene around LGBT issues. The LGBT Center runs an economic development program that brings job fairs, helps LGBT people get business loans, and helps queer youth with financial literacy. Through the Health and Wellness Program, the Center provides childcare and support for parents. The café housed within the building hosts queer open mic nights, they have film screenings, and the Center also houses a drop-in for youth under 23. The “Cyber Center” offers visitors an hour of free Internet use a day. Programs such as SNAP! are established with grants toward HIV/AIDS prevention, and free condoms and lubricant fill plastic jars around the front desk. The Center is a nexus of different organizations and provides informal referral to the hundreds of programs for LGBT people in San Francisco. With a staff of twenty, the Center runs between three and four hundred events for nine thousand visitors a month. The Center provides most events for free in an effort to reach as many people as possible.
Features of Mainstream LGBT Organizations The mainstream LGBT organizations in my study strive for policy change using institutional means. They believe that movement resources should be directed to establishing minority rights for sexual and gender minority people, focusing on issues like equal marriage, anti-discrimination and hate crimes legislation. Mainstream LGBT organizations are bureaucratically organized non-profits, with formal meetings and hierarchically organized decisionmaking. They host fundraisers and rely on donations in order to pay staff, lobby, develop voter education materials, and maintain office spaces. They also rely heavily on volunteers in order to run programs and campaigns. Tactics include phone banking, canvassing door-to-door, lobbying, applying for grants, and organizing fundraising events. Mainstream LGBT organizations tend to deploy identity for education, emphasizing likeness with the straight majority and issues related to family and business development. Mainstream LGBT organizations participate in Pride marches and take them to be one component of fortifying community solidarity, which benefits interest group goals.
I chose the mainstream LGBT organizations based on recent public clashes with oppositional queer organizations, completing sets of QueerRevolution—Basic Rights Oregon and Gay Shame—LGBT Center. In the aftermath of the Funeral For Queer Resistance action at Pride in Portland, Oregon, I witnessed members of QueerRevolution booing the demonstration of a group of Pride marchers, whom I then presumed to be Basic Rights Oregon. I later learned, through my interviews, that the Pride members had been representatives of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Basic Rights Oregon is the largest LGBT organization in Portland, and they get financial support from HRC, which does not have an office in Portland. Gay Shame targeted the LGBT Center when they hosted a fundraiser for then-Mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom. Gay Shame protested, passing out flyers and hot pink bags of trash in dissent. Police brutalized the demonstrators and four were arrested, prompting more demonstration against the LGBT Center and the police charges.
When evaluating productivity based on a proliferation of organizations, an analyst must be cautious that splintering may be read as a burgeoning movement. There is a risk, as mentioned in my critique of Elizabeth Armstrong’s analysis, that, by counting increased numbers of organizations, one is not counting the success of a particular movement frame. Instead, one risks including organizations that are separating from a movement, counting among successes organizations arising in response to the shortcomings of the frame. Thus my study is vulnerable to accepting the terms of the mainstream LGBT impulse to umbrella dissent and claim protesting actors and organizations as part of the overall diversity of the movement, as exemplified (to the frustration of QueerRevolution members) by the gay newspaper Just Out’s portrayal of them as “anti-pride protestors” one week and then incorporating them in the photomontage of Pride the following week (interview M. Armstrong; T. Fruit). While mainstream LGBT activists never questioned the inclusion of oppositional queers, some oppositional queers identify themselves as “oppositional to the GLBT movement,” or described two different movements (interviews; F. O’Clock, M. Armstrong). Further, members of both Gay Shame and QueerRevolution related their organizations not to LGBT or queer organizations, but instead to anarchist and anti-capitalist groups. QueerRevolution member Tomato Fruit summed this up quite succinctly, saying, “I see my place as—a queer group in the anti-capitalist movement instead of an anti-capitalist group in the queer movement.” This, along with characterizations of some organizations as part of a “marriage movement,” strongly suggest that the analytical categories that I brought as a researcher may have encouraged oppositional respondents to relate or distinguish their organizations and LGBT organizations; some have presented themselves in an organizational field with other anarchist and anti-capitalist groups. The same caution applies to mainstream organization Basic Rights Oregon: Roey Thorpe, the Executive Director, talked about seeing Basic Rights Oregon as a progressive social change organization devoted to LGBT issues, and said that, in that way, they had less in common with other LGBT organizations in Oregon, comparing Basic Rights Oregon instead with NARAL Pro-Choice America and the ACLU. She cited as further evidence of this the fact that half of the staff have opposite sex partners, and that over half of their supporters identify as straight. This ambiguity went unresolved and problematizes my claim that this conflict is internecine. Importantly, queer activists do not see their efforts as part of the same movement as groups defined as more mainstream LGBT. Participants saw oppositional queer activism as part of an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, and anarchist movement; a broader leftist movement to fight all oppression. Why not argue that oppositional queer groups and mainstream LGBT groups are part of different social movements? By taking the gay movement and consumerist gay institutions as their targets, oppositional queer groups develop tactics or “repertoires of contention” that are particular to the non-state institutions they criticize (Armstrong and Bernstein, 2004: 13). When listing the implications of understanding non-state institutions as targets of social movement activity, Armstrong and Bernstein ask: must one be an insider or an outsider to target a particular institution, what are the qualifications? (2004: 14) In order to participate in a queer critique of the mainstream LGBT movement, one must be queer, must be an insider. While oppositional queer respondents did not see themselves as part of the same movement — many were opposed to LGBT and marriage movement activity — it is necessary for them to have claims as beneficiaries of that movement activity in order to critique it.
Before evaluating my contentions using empirical evidence garnered from these interviews, the groups in my study should be historically contextualized. Oppositional queer groups like Gay Shame and QueerRevolution are distinct from other queer direct action groups like Queer Nation, with which they share many tactics and aesthetics, because they emerged as critiques of dominant social movement tactics and goals in an era of newly powerful interest group LGBT organizations and new striking commercialism in the gay movement. In order to illustrate the unique position of oppositional queer groups in contrast to mainstream LGBT activism, I will provide a brief history contextualizing the current gay movement in a legacy of AIDS activism, identity-based challenges to exclusion within the gay movement, and the emergence of a queer action logic. I argue that organizations such as Gay Shame and QueerRevolution represent a novel type of reflexive social movement activity that takes as its target LGBT activism and mainstream LGBT culture, using critique in an attempt to catalyze a transformative challenge to all forms of oppression.
Chapter Two: The Queer Intervention
The Rise of the Queer Movement: Debates and Analyses
In order to understand oppositional queer organizations, we must take into account the historical context of the queer intervention into gay politics, dated to the 1990 emergence of direct action group Queer Nation. I sketch a history of the emergence of the queer action logic, and in doing so, critically revisit Elizabeth Armstrong’s history of the gay movement. I describe the particularities of the queer intervention into gay identity politics: the impulse to destroy identity categories, the movement’s relationship to physical violence, and the political strategies of camp and shaming. Considering tactics like “shaming” in light of the history of queer direct action provides the necessary groundwork for analyzing trash talking among queer activists:
The emergence of queer identities, sensibilities, and politics was not just the latest fad in the lesbian and gay community. It represented an ideological and generational shift as profound as the transition from a homophile mentality to gay liberation. It has been partly a youthful reinvention of established ways of differing from heterosexual norms, perpetuating lesbian and gay culture through its transformation. But it also represents a significant departure—an anti-identity rather than an identity (Stryker and Van Buskirk, 1996: 118).
In the early 1990s, lesbian and gay politics encountered a combative new political action logic. A queer action logic critiques the concept of stable gay identity upon which the gay movement premises claims to minority rights. The queer critique is influenced by the writings of people of color who argue that identities such as race and class are subsumed underneath sexuality within the gay movement. Queer politics draws on battles over multiculturalism, marginalization of lesbian identity, stigmatization of leather and BDSM practices, and the exclusion of transgendered people in the gay movement (Cruikshank,1992; Vaid, 1995; Wilton, 1998; Califia, 2002; Stryker and Van Buskirk, 1998). Queerness is understood to accommodate multiple identities in contrast to a gay politic that fails to accommodate these complexities: a backlash against gay movement gains (Gamson, 1995: 591-2). Stryker and Van Buskirk echo this assertion, claiming it became safer to define oneself in terms of negatives (1996: 118). This negatively defined identity category was queer: queer meant not fitting in with mainstream gender or sexuality, nor fitting in with the options of the gay movement. Joshua Gamson identifies this practice as the embrace of perversity, opposing society itself, and questioning normality in heterosexual and homosexual contexts, writing: Queerness in its most distinctive forms shakes the ground on which gay and lesbian politics has been built, taking apart the ideas of “sexual minority” and a “gay community,” indeed of “gay” and “lesbian” and even “man” and “woman”. It builds on central difficulties of identity-based organizing: the instability of identities both individual and collective, their made-up yet necessary character. It exaggerates and explodes these troubles, haphazardly attempting to build a politics from the rubble of deconstructed collective categories. (Gamson, 1995: 390) Gamson characterizes this as a self-destructive impulse, evoking the image of pulling the rug out from under ones’ own feet, and his article provides an excellent starting point for the analysis of groups seemingly bent on dismantling their own movements. Gamson argues that the tension between the utility and destructiveness of identity categories, though present in all identity movements, is forced into the limelight by the queer action logic that takes the destabilization of collective identity as a goal and accomplishment of collective action. Gamson argues that the ethnic/essentialist politic of identity movements and, specifically, of the gay movement, demand clear group boundaries, and that the queer movement presents a disruptive and even threatening deconstructionist political logic that identifies binary identity categories like “gay” and “straight” as the origin of oppression. Gamson suggests that queer politics and deconstructive strategies fail to address the “very concrete and violent institutional forms to which the most logical answer is resistance in and through a particular identity” by attacking identity itself as “the fulcrum of domination” (1995: 597). This logic conceptualizes ethnic and minority categories as at once the basis for repression and a ready-made frame within which to organize. He argues that border-patrolling anti-queer arguments contain a pragmatic concern that unclear membership criteria jeopardize possible political gains for sexual minority people.
Accounts of the impact of the queer movement vary. I contradict Elizabeth Armstrong’s contention that the queer logic’s challenge was incorporated into the political logic of “unity through disunity.” Recalling my assertion that Armstrong does not fully account for movement activity generated by conflict, I contend that the queer action logic’s effect is obscured by Armstrong’s analytical categories that absorb queer and autonomous challenges under overall movement activity, using these organizations in her measure of LGBT movement strength. Armstrong attributes what she considers the short lifespan and low impact of the queer movement to the internal ambivalence of its frame, its failure to produce a viable alternative premise for organizing, the political climate, and the gay movement’s cooptation response. While many scholars equate the movement’s lifespan with that of Queer Nation, Gamson’s characterization of the queer movement as a combination of decentralized groups and an academic movement is more accurate. The spectrum of genders and sexuality that queerness deemed appropriately grouped by its deconstructive action logic reverberated through the gay movement from the clothes people wore to the identity categories “queer” opened up (see Stein, 1992; Gamson, 1995; Stryker and Van Buskirk, 1998). The enormous cultural productivity of the queer and trans movements survived Queer Nation well beyond its collapse: queer studies is the one of the fastest growing disciplines in the nation, since 1992. Nonetheless, Armstrong minimizes this impact, writing, “the ambivalence of queer politics resolved in favor of identity politics. The boundaries of the gay movement were extended and status hierarchies restructured” (2002: 183). Arguing that this further fortified the gay movement, she writes:
By incorporating bisexuals and transgenders, the gay identity movement acknowledged the ambiguity, contradiction, and complexity of sexual categorization. Allowing for this ambiguity helped forestall a more fundamental challenge to the logic of identity politics. Thus, queer politics helped solidify gay identity politics instead of undermining it. Stryker and Van Buskirk’s view that queer politics “represented an ideological and generational shift as profound as the transition from homophile mentality to gay liberation” overstated the case (2002: 184). Armstrong casts queerness as a failed sub-identity movement, conceding that queer politics succeeded in institutionalizing the inclusion of bisexual, queer, and transgendered people and claiming that, through this inclusion, queer politics were adopted and neutralized by the broader gay movement. She takes as evidence of “the domestication of queer politics” the early 1990s’ incorporation of “queer” into gay identity organization names (2002: 183). In her analysis, conflict is implicitly detrimental: the success of the field is measured as its absorption of challengers. While Armstrong argues that the queer movement was co-opted, she asserts that critical interventions challenging the dominant logic of the gay movement are vital with present interest group dominance and commercialization of the gay movement (2002: 190). In her assessment of the current state of the movement, Armstrong notes that interest group organizations have become so powerful that they are no longer accountable to members as they were in the past. Armstrong connects this change in the behavior of interest group organizations to increasing commercialization (2002: 188). Thus, Armstrong’s position in relationship to contentious politics within the gay movement is ambiguous: while she presents criticism as a potential threat to movement survival, her assessment of the current state of the movement implies that contentious politics may be all that prevents the gay movement from domination by powerful interest group politics, which increasingly constrict the diversity attended to while claiming to serve a broad constituency. These progressive challenges to interest group power in the gay movement are articulated by organizations I describe as oppositional queer organizations. While the word “oppositional” is intended to distinguish them from the broader queer movement of the 1990s, this is only to express that they represent a particular deployment of a queer action logic explicitly oppositional to the broader LGBT movement. Oppositional Queer Organizations: Particular Features The tactics, strategic use of identity, multi-issue politics, and organizational forms of oppositional queer organizations most immediately resemble those of the radical AIDS action group ACT UP and Queer Nation. However, oppositional queer groups are distinct from ACT UP and Queer Nation while actively referring to their strategies and semiotics. With further investigation we can see that oppositional queer groups are highly influenced by the women’s movement, lesbian feminist community-building, sex radical opposition to lesbian feminism, the work of feminists of color critiquing racism in the women’s movement, Black Power, and the transgender liberation movement. Outside of the scope of identity-based action, oppositional queer groups draw on anarchist and anti-consumerist activism, and on the critique of identity politics springing up among progressives in the 1990s. This pastiche of radical influences culminates in a devotion to challenging all forms of institutional oppression, summed up in the now familiar list of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ablism. The valorization of in-your-face provocative actions, the preference for direct action that takes the streets and nostalgically evokes rioting , and the use of agitprop for “urban redecoration” echo ACT UP and Queer Nation. The focus on taking over public spaces and creating “safe spaces” recalls Take Back the Night’s feminist actions and the lesbian feminist movement’s drive to create communities outside of heterosexual patriarchal control. Their reappropriation of corporate imagery in order to smear corporate sponsorship betrays anticonsumerist roots. These tactics combine in a repertoire of contention explicitly addressing the mainstreaming of the lesbian and gay movement. One legacy these movements transmit to oppositional queer groups is the political weight given to self-presentation. Taylor and Whittier argue that “appearance and demeanor are also implicit means of expressing one’s opposition,” citing lesbian feminist presentations like androgyny, sex radical feminine presentations associated with sex work, “gender-fuck” styles, and butch punk styles all extending from class analysis, as well as Black, Asian, and Latina lesbians presenting different cultural styles (1992: 121). In a movement torn between deploying identity for education (presenting palatable identities emphasizing similarity) and identity for critique (which presents freakiness and emphasizes difference), oppositional queer groups decidedly deploy the latter. Their flyers invite demonstrators to “Dress to absolutely terrifying ragged devastating excess” (Gavin Comes Out flyer for the protest at the Center, two Gay Shame Awards flyers). Public revelation of identity as a political strategy is structured by the development of “visibility” as politically meaningful and beneficial, despite the fact that visibility had not defeated racial or gender oppression (Weston, 2002: 47). In pointing out that the political meaningfulness of visibility is socially constructed, I do not argue that it lacks power. On the contrary, I argue that the tactics particular to oppositional queer groups are meaningful as addresses within the gay movement. The forms they take occasion more explanation, so I close my history by directly addressing the identity for critique deployment of “camp” and “shaming,” two uniquely queer forms of political action, and the queer use of language about violence. Camp’s political thrust is obscured by conceptualizations that distinguish “politics” from vulgar, feminine, aesthetically absorbed identity performance. Camp is a form of satire that exaggerates and exploits contradiction using drag and the reclamation of ugly or ridiculous popular culture objects with a gay sensibility. In her ethnography of drag performers, Esther Newton (1972) marvels, "one of the most confounding aspects of my interaction with the impersonators was their tendency to laugh at situations that to me were horrifying or tragic” (109). Oppositional group members laughed heartily when describing police brutality or sarcastically postulating about the future. One aspect of camp that Newton describes is a cynical worldview (1972: 129). Overt talk about depression, victimization, being used for sexual or economic exploitation are all elements of the sardonic humor and associated strongly with drag queens and hustlers: this is camp. Newton’s analysis of camp offers my study a new dimension along which to historicize anti-assimilationist politics, preventing me from making great claims about the “newness” of the kind of humor oppositional queer activists use in criticizing mainstream LGBT culture. For example, the anti-assimilationist roots of camp are evident in the following passage: “By accepting his homosexuality and flaunting it, the camp undercuts all homosexuals who won't accept the stigmatized identity. Only by fully embracing the stigma itself can one neutralize the sting and make it laughable” (Newton, 1972: 111). Camp’s embrace of stigmatized identity and its concomitant rejection of homosexuals who will not is similar to the anti-assimilationist cultural strategies of oppositional queer activists. Newton tempers the comparison, which is easy to rush to ahistorically, in her footnote: It's important to stress again that camp is a pre- or proto-political phenomenon. The anti-camp in this system is the person who wants to dissociate from the stigma and be like the oppressors. The camp says, “I am not like the oppressors.” But in so doing he agrees with the oppressor's definition of who he is. The new radicals deny the stigma in a different way, by saying that the oppressors are illegitimate. This step is only foreshadowed by camp.
While the camp existent in her 1960s ethnography may be considered proto-political, current manifestations of camp are explicitly political. Oppositional queer activists embrace the history of camp as a transgressive tactic, in part by emphasizing the role of drag queens in queer history as a retort to the gay movement’s erasure of transgendered participants. Oppositional queer groups both identify the oppressors as illegitimate and say “I am not like the oppressors” and, importantly for my analysis, “I am not like the anti-camp.” In light of Gamson’s argument that queer presents an anti-identity, refusing to agree with oppressors’ or sexual minority definitions, oppositional queer demonstrations of difference address heterosexual culture and mainstream LGBT pressures to deploy identity for education. The pressure to present identities that are palatable to oppressors is an assimilationist impulse with a pragmatic argument for forwarding polity gains that Gilad Padva describes as the “decampization of the queer” (2000: 228). Padva argues that the performance of camp is a political refusal to be normalized.
Camp uses its deviancy in contesting the oppressive social order ruled by heterodominance as a momentum of innovation and inspiration. Its deviant visibility, since its earlier expressions, has been a political one as an essential component of queer counterpraxis. This deviation from the social and sexual consensus is also political because camp reflects an aesthetic and ethical refusal to be visually normalized or silenced. (Padva, 2000: 228) This characterization of camp is consistent with oppositional queer use of camp humor and aesthetics. The display of anti-assimilationist camp identity, in the form of extreme drag spectacle at oppositional queer actions, is not the limit of camp sensibility in oppositional queer organizing: camp informs the speech practices of talking trash, and of imbuing political critique with the femme/fag inflection of gossip.
Additionally, camp informs a practice referred to as “shaming.” Eric Stanley writes on camp as a political spectacle of trash and shame, and on shame as a viable tool for queer insurrection (forthcoming). Stanley argues, “this textual tension and Gay Shame’s ability to ‘say the opposite’ (shame those in power) while not ‘giving up the contrary’ (not disavowing their own shame) opens up new ways of reading” (forthcoming: 9). Shaming those in power does not immunize the shamers. Stanley draws on Douglas Crimp (2002), arguing that shame both defines and erases identity, and Eve Sedgwick (1993), arguing that shame is a common ground queers stand on, prime for mobilization; to build on how accepting shame can be a tool for queer resistance (forthcoming: 2-3): “This cultural shift from identification with the abject that produces Camp sensibilities, to the rejection of one’s own abjection is both symptomatic and constitutive of the normalization of gay culture” (forthcoming: 4). Thus, shaming, just like camp, is imbued with political meaning as an anti-assimilationist strategy. There is a pleasure that comes with building solidarity and oppositional collective identity. Stanley writes that “Shame helps Gay Shame instigators remember that the seductions of assimilation and capitalism are mirages not accessible to them or their kind,” in her account of the pleasure produced by the act of shaming (forthcoming, 11). On April Fools Day, Gay Shame staged a “pro-war” rally dressed in their corporate “best,” chanting, “Bombs are Dropping! Just go shopping!” (interview; M. Money). This sarcastic model of protest is uniquely queer. Recalling the history of camp and shaming, we can see how oppositional queers evoke sarcasm and grim spectacle for protest. Mary Money asserted that it would be obvious to onlookers that this was not a normal pro-war rally, as they were making extreme comparisons “between dead babies and money” and that the group was “highlighting the outlandishness and the ridiculousness of the pro-war movement” and “it was just a fuckin’ good time.” At the Gay Shame Awards, people wear outrageous outfits and burn rainbow flags (interview; Mattilda). Activists, however, perceived a danger that goes along with the fun and joy of spectacle, and described one of the problems in Gay Shame as trying to fuse the party with the politics such that they became inseparable (interviews; Mattilda, Patsy, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu). This model of protest is not new, and is deeply camp in its reliance on tragedy to be politically effective. ACT UP also used similar campy theatrics to shame opposition:
In contrast to the tragic frame that justifies the death or banishment of victims, ACT UP members used comic frame and their positions as comic clowns to shame and ridicule their adversaries. ACT UP did not physically assault Koch, Reagan, or Bush, but debunked their inactions which were part and parcel of the tragic frame. Only by criticizing these political leaders’ indifference could ACT UP enact the argument that gay men and people with AIDS were valuable members of the community. (Christiansen and Hanson, 1996: 167)
Strategies that appear flippant or clownish are politicized in ways perhaps not immediately apparent, and have been employed in response to grim and violent situations in queer activism.
Physical violence appears to function as both a catalyst and a target for action for oppositional queer groups, similar to their queer forbearers. Oppositional queer organizations respond to bashing in a unique manner. Instead of advocating legislation to criminalize and punish hate crimes, participants invoked bashing rhetorically, in order to illustrate homophobic and transphobic oppression. Vulnerability to bashing was cited by interviewees as among the issues abandoned by marriage movement activity. QueerRevolution did an action in response to a sexual assault by printing vinyl stickers that said, “QUEER BASHING HAS OCCURRED IN THIS AREA” (interview; S. Marquez). This responsiveness to homophobic violence magnified the outrage at the police brutality targeting Gay Shame protest against the LGBT center, and activists flyered the Castro with zines featuring pictures of the injured protestors in the following days (interview; M. Money). Talking about and expressing anger about queer bashing is an important part of queer identity. “Whereas being queer and being angry or violent was previously assumed to be mutually exclusive,” Rand writes that it is now “an integral part of queer identity and as part of what distinguishes queers from gays and lesbians” (2004: 295). Oppositional queers also use violent imagery to exaggerate: Gay Shame’s literature volunteers ludicrously violent suggestions like the Mary (their invented mayoral candidate) For Mayor zine’s parody volunteering that law enforcement officers “be used as nutritious compost to fertilize Golden Gate Park” (Mary For Mayor). Within the same pamphlet, a photograph of gun-wielding Patty Hearst reads “Mary supports terrorism in all its forms.. Queer nation’s actions are sometimes described as terrorizing and antagonistic, and the individual or organization that they are protesting is cast as the victim. In other words, the protesters are viewed as inciting, rather than responding to, social problems (304 Note 6.). Both Gay Shame and QueerRevolution share with Queer Nation this reputation for instigating. They are cast as troublemakers, irresponsible, and irrational. These reputations are not uncharacteristic of radical leftist organizations, as Gould (2000, 2001)
points out about militance’s association with recklessness, but are exaggerated by oppositional queer employment of camp. Rand reminds us to probe claims that talking trash is an incitement of problems.
In sum, oppositional queer groups draw from a host of activist influences, and draw most strategies and identity self-presentation from radical AIDS street activism and early queer activity. Oppositional queer groups collage their influences into a liberationist politic that aims to end all oppressions. Oppositional queer groups employ the particular innovations of gay and queer activism, using camp humor to approach shaming and to respond to violence. This sociocultural context will inform analysis of interview data on critiques, participants’ explicit understandings and observed outcomes. I have suggested that conflict is generative. While scholars on social movements as well as critics on the Left agree that infighting is deleterious, I argue that there has been an oversight of the generative possibilities of conflict. Based on the sociocultural context of queer activism in Chapter Two, in this chapter I draw on interview data to address my core questions. What is the impact, intended and inadvertent, of “trashing” in social movements? My data, when interpreted in the context of queer history, provide evidence that “talking shit” may build internal solidarity. I found that oppositional and mainstream groups talk differently about conflict, and that criticism stimulates some kinds of productive activity, in addition to the negative impacts previously well established in the literature. Overall, participants’ responses about conflict were mixed and often ambivalent, with interviewees, variously speaking of conflict as debilitating, positive, and just par the for course. I claim that criticism and conflict among social movement organizations is certainly generative: as it were, groups like Gay Shame and QueerRevolution emerged as an oppositional critique to perceived dominance of more mainstream groups championing LGBT causes. In this manner, these oppositional organizations are born out of a critique of mainstream, moderate, and assimilationist LGBT politics. Tactics reflect this critical impulse. The defining tactic favored by Gay Shame, “shaming” organizations and individuals who are seen as hypocritical, is premised in conflict. Another type of evidence supporting my hypothesis were respondents’ mentions of demonstrations motivated by more mainstream groups having demonstrations, and mentions of an impulse to present an alternative queerness. In the following chapter, I will touch on the generative possibilities at work in oppositional identity construction, and I begin by discussing critique. The Nature of Critique and Conflict
Gay Shame started to create a home for queers who feel culturally homeless in a city that is supposedly a place for us to come to create our own sexual gender social identities and to create an oppositional culture that fights against all of the horrible things in the mainstream world, from consumerism to patriarchy, to imperialism, colonialism, in all the large and small ways. And also to hold mainstream gay people accountable for the violence that they enact. Because it’s not like straight people are going to be holding these mainstream gay people accountable so in a certain way as radical queers and queers who are sort of dedicated to an outsider politics and who are not attached to a nonprofit model, like, we have this opportunity to actually call people on their shit. And I think in certain ways not just an opportunity but a responsibility (interview; Mattilda).
In the interview above, Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) of Gay Shame conveys that the position of oppositional queers serves as both an opportunity and carries an obligation to “call people on their shit,” a form of criticism that implies that it is beneficial for the recipient. How is this responsibility enacted? I found that critique takes different forms, broadly grouped as public criticism and private trash talk. Public criticism may be a spectacle, activists dressing in outlandish costumes, as animals or criticized public figures, wearing extreme makeup or fake blood, and yelling into bullhorns with in-your-face signs. Public criticism also takes more muted forms, as in internet bulletins that are calls to action against mainstream LGBT organizations, or in newspaper interviews. Even in these fora, the language oppositional queers use must be sufficiently scathing. Private trash talk tended to take the form of educational gossip and extended jokes within groups, where participants took turns elaborating punch lines about the hypocrisy and corporatism of criticized groups. The style employed by oppositional queers evokes queer femininity, made heavy use of “catty” and “bitchy” tones associated with camp humor, and always was broken up with hearty laughter. Respondents used many different words to refer to a number of different types of conflict: “beef,” “slamming,” “tearing to shreds,” for example (interviews, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu, J. Keskitalo, Mattilda). Oppositional queers relish the act of critiquing. “We were just constantly berating them for their corporate fucking bullshit,” said M.N. Delgado of Gay Shame’s critique of the San Francisco Pride Committee. Importantly, trashing is fun, collective, and is the forum in which oppositional queers articulate just what they are opposed to.
Talking trash took place within the interviews, within the meetings, and in more public forums such as the local alternative papers and direct action events. Within meetings, for example, activists would engage in detailed, witty stories parodying other organizers and individuals whom the group was opposing. Often, the punch lines of these stories were particularly hypocritical assertions on the part of these others: for example, in one Gay Shame meeting participants joked about the new Human Rights Campaign store in the Castro, the punch-line being that the sign in the window proclaimed, “Coming Soon: with such revolutionary items such as…” listing HRC regalia. Attendees at the meeting scoffed at the hypocrisy of declaring “that damn equals sign” as revolutionary. A former member of Gay Shame explained:
That was what Gay Shame was about for me at least. Being queer but not going after the church or people on the so-called Right-Wing, it was more about taking people to task who call themselves Left-Wing but they use right-wing tactics or use racist or transphobic or sexist policies in like their organizing or in their just their regular social community. (interview; M.N. Delgado)
In this manner, organizational identity is rooted in not taking intuitive targets. Patsy, a member of Gay Shame, said, “we don’t let ourselves or other people off the hook,” saying that Gay Shame does not go after easy targets. The example he provided was that of course Gay Shame targets the war, but that in San Francisco that’s almost pointless, so instead of going after the war, Gay Shame will go after National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and show how they are connected. This private understanding of conflict is articulated in public forums:
We at Gay Shame are not all that interested in minor changes that happen from within. We don't want to take over the power mechanisms that exist now. We are not like a political party. We are more interested in criticizing and challenging from the outside. We don’t have any illusions or delusions about taking over the world. I mean, if it happened, we'd love it. We are challenging the way that privilege corrupts. (Mary Tyler Mutiny, quoted in “Pride Versus Shame”: San Francisco Bay Times, June 26, 2003: 7)
The critique itself, while leveled against individuals and groups, is part of a larger criticism. For example, some oppositional queer participants had a hard time with the limitations of my question about conflict, asking about conflictual relationships with other organizations. Mary Money said, “I’m sure that there is but I can’t say necessarily with another organization other than like the entire gay community or the Castro, unless you want to say the Castro is an organization.” This indicates that the criticisms are considered part of a larger battle. In the course of describing Gavin Newsom’s anti-homeless propositions, Patsy told me Newsom was from the wealthiest area in San Francisco and that he owns a bar and two wine shops, and is the son of a judge. She went on to note that Newsom’s wife is an ex-Victoria’s Secret model, special correspondent for Court TV, and that they are recently separated, “which is interesting considering he’s the marriage mayor.” Later in Patsy’s interview, he returned to the subject of Newsom, noting that Out Magazine named Newsom the hottest activist under 35. The detail Patsy supplied in the interview was not aimed to inform me about what Gavin Newsom’s life is like, but is rather to illustrate for me the outrageous hypocrisy of Newsom. The presentation of exempla, which indict individuals for hypocrisy and moral corruption, are one mode of trash talking, personal indictments. Former Gay Shame member Mary N. Delgado described using names of members of the Pride Committee in their literature and calling out Joey Cain, an “anarchist or whatever” for being “a corporate lackey”(interview, M.N. Delgado). Personal indictments can take place in private or in public, externalized with zines and flyers featuring the faces of individuals like Newsom proclaiming “the new face of fascism” or a wanted poster for the chair of “the brutal gentrification squad commonly known as the ‘Lower Polk Neighbors.’” For mainstream groups, these tactics have different implications for their supporters. These “character slams” may be perceived as taking on the tactics of the formal opposition, like the Christian Right (interview, J. Keskitalo).
Stories of Scandalous Hypocrisy
Gay Shame became … a direct action group dedicated to exposing all hypocrites, both the sort of mainstream gay people who use this sort of screen of community as something to hide behind and sort of oppress everyone else and get away with it but also everyone else who is complicit with that agenda (interview; Mattilda). One mode of critique is revealing the story of scandalous hypocrisy. This mode tends to be the juxtaposition with two contradictory features of other organizations, often employing the revelation of little-known facts about corruption and untruthfulness in mainstream organizations. These revelations may employ personal indictments to reveal dirt about individuals involved in groups. For example, one respondent told me about how Smirnoff has its own float in the San Francisco Pride Parade, while the Pride Committee advertises their refusal to accept sponsorship from cigarette companies, detailing that the float had drag queens with hair the same color as Smirnoff Raspberry Twist and laughing “it’s just so blatant!” In Portland, QueerRevolution member Max Armstrong told the story of Basic Rights Oregon refusing two volunteers a role in a media event because they were visibly transgendered:
I mean just because basically they looked too queer to be put in front of cameras. And they were just putting incredible hours, incredible hours into this and really they were volunteer trainers and all this shit and then like, yeah, being told, like [higher pitched voice] “you can’t go in front of the camera, we’re not gonna let you do that” ‘cause you look too queer basically. One of the most outrageous sources of stories of scandal were incidents in which direct action instigated by Gay Shame was met with police brutality. Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) said that Gay Shame had been unprepared for the arrests and brutality they encountered during their attempted interruption of the Pride Parade because “we had thought, oh the last thing the Pride Parade would want is to you know arrest queers for coming to the Pride Parade, it’s not going to look very good.” The group also encountered police brutality at their demonstration outside of San Francisco’s LGBT Center. Patsy described the moral shock of “the queer bashing at the LGBT Center,” saying,
That was one of those times in your life where it is just like, “Oh my God, everything that I say, no matter how outlandish it is, is actually true.” (Laughing) Because this is so fucked up that – this is 2003 – when queer people are not let inside the LGBT center and straight ruling-class men are allowed inside and escorted in by gay cops and then queer people are beat outside while gay people will stand inside, watching. Like, what’s happened, you know what I mean? Like, what’s going on? Nobody inside came out to help or cared, they were all just like looking, you know, it was totally like what they had wanted.
As reflected in Patsy’s conclusion that “everything I say, no matter how outlandish it is, is actually true,” these scandalous incidents confirm oppositional critiques of the mainstream LGBT agenda (interview; Mattilda). Mattilda pointed out that this became a scandal because queer liberation started as a response to police brutality: “what we have 30 years later is queer people being bashed by the cops outside what is supposedly our Center, in what is supposedly the sort of safest gayest of overpriced gentrified US cities.” The outrage of the bashing is accentuated by the inclusive message of the movement, which is supposed to protect queers.
Another type of conflictual generative critique is protesting events and demonstrations by other organizations. A number of Gay Shame’s actions were staged in order to “crash the party” of other LGBT organizations or of political candidates like Gavin Newsom. QueerRevolution’s Funeral for Queer Resistance was staged to intervene with Portland’s Pride celebration in 2005, as had their marches in past Pride celebrations. This impulse to show up if mainstream organizations or objectionable political figures organized events renders oppositional queer groups attentive to the activities of these others, checking their websites, and discussing the appropriate way to target events as though it is an obligation.
Among ideas thrown out at one QueerRevolution meeting were the idea of flyering cars with the equality stickers distributed by the Human Rights Campaign. This action would target the distribution of information critical of the HRC to its’ supporters. Also, members were talking about crashing Salon Q, a new “mixer” put on by HRC. Among the reasoning listed for these actions was that members could be more disruptive in this space, that it would be fun and draw people, and that it is important to express opposition to the Human Rights Campaign. Jokingly, one member volunteered bussing in queer youth and then realized the event may not even be all-ages. “That would be so fucked!” they cried. It was decided that if the event was not all-ages QueerRevolution would invite the youth anyway, to quite literally crash HRC’s fundraising party.
One of the reasons for considering this action was the conviction that it was unhealthy to relegate direct action to once a year, containing protest to QueerRevolution’s response to Pride. The sense of obligation to represent a different kind of queer activism emerged in the QueerRevolution meeting. Recalling Armstrong’s observation that the gay movement, now more than ever, is dominated by interest group organizations connected with increasing commercialism in the movement contextualizes this initiative to represent alternative forms of activism. Members from both oppositional groups expressed the desire to prevent interest group organizations from being the only face of sexual minority identity. Patsy commented on how it’s hard to find anything that’s not marriage, adoption, or military. Members from both groups expressed that they felt the distribution and wheat pasting of flyers was a way to attain this proliferation of queer possibilities (interview; Mattilda, T. Fruit, Patsy). One respondent reported the validation of hearing from people who would never come to Gay Shame meetings tell her that when they saw the flyers on telephone poles they felt sane for just one telephone pole (interview; Mattilda).
Content of the Critique: Privilege grab and who is left out
The Gay Shame awards where we were giving awards to different quote-unquote “community” people, organizations, individuals who are sort of doing fucked up things like contributing to an assimilationist agenda … and sort of fucking over everyone else in the process. (interview, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu)
When asked whom the mainstream LGBT movement leaves behind, Five O’Clock laughed and answered “the freaks.” They went on further to say, “just looking at the ad campaigns, smiling middle class gay people they don’t look like me! I’m not interested in what they’re advancing—leaving behind people who are threatening to the movement and to the people they are trying to convince, people who have something at stake.” When pressed as to what those people had at stake, O’Clock listed their lives, housing, everything. One participant took as an exemplar of mainstream LGBT goals an ad in the Pride Guide featuring a wistful-looking young white man which said, ‘I want to be able to get married without making a political statement,’” and laughing, told me, “that’s pretty much the agenda of the gay movement, it’s to completely embrace this horrible system of violence and capitalism and just like become part of it as much as possible in order to save their own asses.” This criticism of assimilationism in mainstream gay politics was predominant across oppositional queer groups:
That concept … that queer people have won a place in society and for so many people that couldn’t be less true. There are some people that have created a space for themselves to be comfortable in capitalism, um, and there are some people for whom that has been completely shut off. And I don’t even know that those people are even living their lives in the way that they would truly be wanting to live them. I mean, do they really like polo shirts and like jobs at Nike? Do they really like that? Like, probably not. So there’s the people who have assimilated have are not—I mean have really not liberated themselves. I don’t know maybe they’re fine with it, whatever. But there’s a lot of people who’ve been thrown out of that and sacrificed in the end. (interview; T. Fruit)
This QueerRevolution member articulates that the LGBT movement’s embrace of privilege is false and has come at the cost of more oppressed people. This perspective is corroborated by a number of other interviews with oppositional queers. Patsy, for example, said the goal of mainstream LGBT activism was “to acquire straight privilege at any cost.” Oppositional queer groups were opposed to marriage and against advocating hate crimes legislation (interviews; S. Marquez, M.N. Delgado). They objected to the tactical choices of mainstream LGBT groups, including the choice to downplay sex (interviews; S. Marquez, T. Fruit):
There are so many who have been left behind because it is so much easier to throw this issue out and then get this issue in. And that’s basically the system saying, “we will give in on this but not on this because this is too threatening” and trans people have been left out in the cold more than anything I think. People of color, poor people and there’s been this betrayal that’s so huge that it’s almost hard to go back. It’s like, the wealthy, the upper class GLBT movement has done so many deadly things and upper class GLBT people in general—I mean like the thing with the homeless shelter in the Castro district, do you know about that? That becomes like—now you’re my enemy, I’m sorry. Now you’re my enemy. Like when somebody doesn’t have a place to stay at night? What you want them to get picked up by the police officer so they can rape them? (interview, T. Fruit)
The passage above is exemplary of several dynamics at play in oppositional queer critiques. Fruit’s articulation of the sense of betrayal, the mainstream movement’s abandonment of particularly vulnerable groups like trans people, people of color and poor people, reflects a critique of assimilationism. Fruit’s invocation of the scandalous story of the Castro business owners who resisted the establishment of a queer youth center illustrates this point, and Fruit emphasizes dire need. Queer organization members frame movement goals in terms of survival and dire need, summoning images of the most oppressed (usually homeless sex workers) people whom the agenda of mainstream gay rights is not serving. Respondents listed people living with HIV and AIDS among people left behind by mainstream goals, wondering how many people have died because of this (interviews; S. Marquez, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu, Patsy). In Patsy’s interview she described this as the “most terrifying thing”: how HIV/AIDS has been replaced by marriage as a top priority, connecting this to assimilation as a disavowal of any deviance and a “fetishization of normality” that he thinks is really terrifying. Oppositional queers align themselves with the interests of homeless, transgendered, poor, HIV positive, sex worker queers and queer youth through their criticisms of mainstream organizations. Oppositional queers saw mainstream and assimilationist LGBT organizations and individuals as naïve for participating in governmental politics and believing that a straight culture would ever care about the rights of sexual minorities. One interviewee said that the goal of QueerRevolution was to dispel the myth of gay movement success, to show people that “heterosexist society will sacrifice them in a second,” continuing with, “if they have to do it for their political purposes the politicians will do whatever they need to, they’ll do it for you or against you, it’s not about loving you, it’s not about wanting your freedom it’s not even about giving you rights” (interview; T. Fruit). Max Armstrong criticized organizations like the Human Rights Campaign for endorsing political candidates who supported hate crimes legislation, saying that politicians like locking people up, and expressed exasperation with the surprise of assimilationist groups when politicians turned around and voted against gay rights. Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu, describing Gay Shame’s outrage that the LGBT Center was having a fundraiser with Mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom, said, “And we were of course like what the fuck? Why is the Center, you know, taking money from this straight ruling class evil anti-homeless racist politician?” These criticisms of mainstream LGBT groups have intended and unintended effects. In the following section, I look at participants’ explicit understandings of conflict in order to elaborate on the role of critique.
Participants’ Explicit Understandings of Conflict
Oppositional Explicit Understanding
That’s another critique that people say is that we’re against everything and we’re not for anything and I think that we also fundamentally believe in like deconstructing something or taking something apart that opens up space for other possibilities. (interview, Patsy)
Patsy articulates one way of understanding generative possibilities in critique; that by questioning the existing movement, activists are forging space for other possibilities. Patsy’s reasoning for this deconstructionist critique was that it is not dogmatic, leaving room for solutions to come from people, and that the goals of a queer critique are unattainable. The accusation that oppositional queer groups are “against everything and not for anything” was leveled against both oppositional groups. Max Armstrong problematized the label “infighting,” saying, “the argument is you’re creating infighting when you don’t go with us, that’s totally fucked up,” disputing the way the characterization of critique as infighting casts it as against the unity that is beneficial to the movement as a whole. Armstrong went on to express ambivalence about infighting: I really want to blame, I mean I think that infighting is really damaging to a certain extent as far as like, when like-- because. Like (sigh)… I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about how people like organize and like who people choose to work with and who people don’t but I feel like it really needs to be looked at in terms of like, will this help with the goals that you’re working towards with any population. (interview; M. Armstrong)
This ambivalence appears to resolve itself around concerns of efficacy. Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu mused on Gay Shame’s bad reputation and on the possibility that Gay Shame prevented other people from organizing:
… so I really wish there was some sort of queer people of color activist group because people are always claiming, you know—Gay Shame is fine, sure, people are going to have critiques of Gay Shame. Gay Shame is not perfect, Gay Shame is problematic like um… but um I never see anyone doing anything else. It’s like, does Gay Shame keep other people from organizing? It’s really intense it’s like—there are issues out there—I mean I don’t really know what can be done. We put together a zine about how to start a direct action group. A lot of the people who are only interested in partying and hanging out at the Eagle they don’t really ... they don’t really seem to be I mean if they have problems with Gay Shame they really could have started their own Gay Shame. For all the (laughs) apolitical trannyboy scensters that are like proliferating in the Mission they could you know start a huge Gay Shame they would have a lot of clout they would have all these members. No one’s interested in doing the direct action or taking those sorts of hands on political intervention like no one’s interested in that. But it’s interesting how Gay Shame is often scapegoated as being like this fucked up thing that does all these fucked up things. (interview, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu)
When asked to elaborate on the fucked up things, she listed that the group is mostly white and the group is mostly male, saying that there are a number of reasons that happens, citing that we live in a racist and patriarchal society. She resolves this uncertainty by saying, “I can see people feeling that they’re not empowered to do their own thing.” She ends this positively, saying that she is glad that Gay Shame exists because no one seems to care and lists off the war and the immanent overturning of Roe v. Wade, saying, “you know the world gets worse and worse but everyone’s I guess drinking.” Both of us laughed and she said, “I guess I kind of understand, that is intense with the world, but I don’t know—I don’t think it’s Gay Shame’s fault.” Trinitrototoluene Ampu’s analysis of the scapegoating of Gay Shame explores the possibility that their critiquing is preventing other collective action from taking place, but concludes with the conviction that Gay Shame does not actually stop other people because they could form their own organizations. Her references to drinking and to “trannyboy scenesters” foreshadow in-group boundary construction that I develop more in the fourth chapter.
A former member of Gay Shame described another possible problem of critique, that it barred the group from building coalitions with or collaborating with other organizations:
… we’d be really hypercritical of other people’s tactics and politics and stuff and there was a lot of serious, I don’t want to say snobbery, but yeah. It was kind of like — “Who wants to work with us? Ooh, them. I don’t think so” you know? Like, “whatever” like “Didn’t they do that one thing that one time?” and all this and this and “Didn’t they say this that one time” and “isn’t that person in that group?” and “oh my god, no.” And there were only a couple of people there that had knowledge of those groups and of those people you know so it was like (laughing) we were always just like taking their word for it and like not even like taking risks on like, oh, maybe we should try working with this group to like try. (interview; M.N. Delgado)
He speculated that the “hypercritical” nature of Gay Shame may have lost a possible coalition with Queers Undermining Israeli Terror (QUIT) due to problematic age dynamics and QUIT seeing Gay Shame as “stuck up”.
Explicit understandings of criticism among oppositional queers were rife with ambivalence. Tomato Fruit, a member of QueerRevolution in Portland, compared himself to Gay Shame’s slogan that they are a “Virus in the System.” After articulating the LGBT movement’s goal of finding a place in capitalist society, he said, “I see myself in sort of direct opposition to that. Um. So I almost see myself as like, Gay Shame as the Virus in the System – I’m almost like, a virus in the gay system like I’m a movement against the gay movement in so many ways and that gets really hard.” When encouraged to elaborate on how it is hard, he said, “Because I don’t want to fight other queer people but sometimes they just (pounding the table twice) force you into it!” And then dissolved into laughter. When pressed further, Fruit expressed deeper ambivalence:
My first reaction is I can’t be okay with this, and that needs to be— that needs to be destroyed. That concept of somebody who controls the movement, that controls the queer struggle, and speaks for it is an essentially dangerous and not-ok thing. At least for me. And it affects me so I have the need and right and necessity to fight it. But at the same time it’s like this weird feeling like ok, infighting has destroyed so many things, infighting has destroyed so many beautiful movements and so I think it’s a tactic question in the end. It’s like, do I address the HRC as— the HRC is a different thing though—do I address—they’re specifically bothersome to me, more so than most. I believe they were working on a gays in the military campaign. That’s just like over the top. But there are some ways in which I feel like, do I want to approach you as an institution that needs to be fought? Or an institution that needs to be maybe … disempowered through writing? Or do I want to address you as someone with a good heart who is trying to do something here and is fucking up? Do I address you as an enemy or do I address you as a comrade? And that’s difficult emotionally um it’s difficult but there’s so many different levels it’s like once you start turning certain people into your enemies it’s like, where do you draw the line?
Fruit’s ambivalence about where to draw the line of critique marked a number of the interviews. This ambivalence demonstrates that activists have conscious intentions in engaging in critique; these are reports of what participants think about conflict.
Patsy explicitly talked about factionalism as productive, particularly in regards to Gay Shame’s willingness to critique DIY (do-it-yourself) culture and Queerruption, an international radical queer conference. Patsy was clear that this willingness didn’t mean that they were enemies, that the line was drawn in relation to “what people are willing to give up. A lot of them I’m friendly with, it’s not like they’re evil people.” However, he said, it is sadder and harder because “we know that they know better and they choose not to,” referring to fellow radical queers’ unwillingness to give up certain privileges, and described this as “heartbreaking.” She compared San Francisco, where there are so many queers that factionalism is possible, to the few radical queers in Maine. Patsy mused:
So it’s interesting because they get a lot of stuff done but their analysis of things becomes really stuck because they don’t have – I think factionalism can sometimes force you to critique yourself (laughing) and critique other things and kind of push things in more interesting directions, but then they have that solidarity that is not here at all. (interview; Patsy)
Patsy’s observation about criticism contributing to movement dynamism at the cost of solidarity speaks to the complexity of the benefits of critique. While criticism keeps the movement honest, keeping activists on their toes both criticizing themselves and fortifying their criticisms of others, it forgoes the possibility of unified sentiment.
These high expectations and the pride in willingness to critique their own was something a number of oppositional queer respondents reflected. QueerRevolution declares a commitment to self-criticism in their mission statement. After listing “racism, classism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and ageism” as “among the greatest internal and external threats to the queer community,” their mission declares: “In acknowledging the intersectionality of these and other oppressions, we work to challenge and deconstruct our own privileges and work on our shit.” Accepting criticism is considered to be a critical element of working on shit. Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) described personal criticism as positive. She said in her early experiences in activism, it was positively formative because:
people would just tear each other to shreds and that was like the style of activism and that was considered okay and people were—and I was always like “oh I can take it because I know they’re not actually tearing me to shreds and it’s not actually the issue. (interview; Mattilda)
Mary N. Delgado described the failure of the group at times to be critical of themselves as a negative feature, confirming the positive valuation of self-reflection. Oppositional queers considered accepting criticism, critiquing oneself, and factionalized deconstructionist politics as positive. They expressed strong ambivalence about critique as well, unsure of where to draw the line between enemies and friends, and expressing concern that critique barred other groups from organizing. Some participants felt that critique prevented collaboration, and some expressed feeling heartbroken over it.
Mainstream Explicit Understandings
In his discussion of the role of the LGBT Center in San Francisco, Executive Deputy Director Thom Lynch identified “broadening our ability to work together as a community” as “one of the biggest challenges we have.” From his perspective, conflict within the community is not taken to be beneficial, but instead is an inevitable feature of organizing within the LGBT community. Mainstream LGBT participants expressed the contention that their organizations were targeted because of their size; Lynch ventured that because the Center building is so large, people presume they are rich and respond to them like they would an institution. He identified the fissions in the community along the lines of racism, lesbian anger at the continuing HIV rates in gay men, and critiques of radicals. Lynch used the term “big-footing” to describe larger, better-funded organizations raising money and having visibility “at the hurt of local organizations,” saying, “sometimes we feel bigfooted and sometimes people feel bigfooted by us.” This position of the Center, as in-between national and better-funded organizations and the multitude of smaller organizations in San Francisco paralleled that of mainstream LGBT organizations in Portland, Oregon. Mainstream organization participants expressed a desire to work together with community members insofar as this was possible (interviews; T. Lynch, R. Thorpe, J. Keskitalo). Roey Thorpe, describing a very public dispute between Basic Rights Oregon and Love Makes a Family, explained it as a problem of tactics and the language used when talking about marriage. “That conflict was painful for everybody involved, and certainly we’d rather work together with people,” she said, musing that she regretted that there wasn’t a way to include more people without compromising the action. Thus, she framed the conflict as a necessary cost of addressing polity goals. Thorpe described an avoidance tactic, talking about how Basic Rights Oregon has stayed away from these internal politics through coalition building. She said, for example, that it wasn’t like Planned Parenthood was going to argue with them about whether they used “GLBT” or “LGBT, ” or whether or not “queer” includes “trans.” Thus, by building coalitions with non-LGBT organizations, Basic Rights Oregon can skirt conflicts considered peripheral to movement goals.
The endorsement of radical perspectives insofar as they bolster the centrist image of mainstream LGBT groups by contrast was one mainstream LGBT understanding of conflict. Roey Thorpe cast the presence of radical organizations as possibly positive for Basic Rights Oregon. She presented the critiques of radical organizations as “different perspectives,” extending her vision of movement activity to include oppositional queer organizations, and framing their actions as positive for Basic Rights Oregon by casting them as moderate rather than radical:
One of my concerns is that our community doesn’t have enough diversity of viable organizations with different perspectives. I think as a movement we would be healthier, and there are times, especially during the legislative session when I think there were tactics that could’ve been used, like direct action, like having a more radical perspective that could have been really helpful in terms of positioning Basic Rights Oregon as moderate, um, sort of like Malcolm X did for Martin Luther King, if you will, but there just really weren’t organizations that you know had the capacity to do that and so you know even though I think there are times it could be a headache and could add tension and stress to my work, I think that it would be worth it in the long run to have more diversity.
Thorpe’s endorsement of these critiques despite the “tension and stress” they bring exemplifies mainstream LGBT interpretations of radical critiques as diversifying and therefore enriching the overall movement, as well as casting mainstream LGBT perspectives as moderate by contrast. Thorpe further endorsed critique in her account of a member of the Trans Advisory Board who would tell Basic Rights Oregon that they weren’t good enough and were never going to be good enough. “That’s important,” said Thorpe. “That’s what you need in order to make change.”
Roey Thorpe’s positive valuation of the trans community’s challenges to Basic Rights Oregon exemplifies mainstream incorporation responses to critique. Trans community members had felt excluded from the ballot measure campaign and then formed the Basic Rights Oregon Trans Advisory Group (TAG). TAG set goals for what it would mean for Basic Rights Oregon to be trans-inclusive, advising them to have trans people on the staff, and the board adopted those goals. Thorpe said that there was a lot more involvement of trans people at present, and that Basic Rights Oregon got better citing the involvement of really out visible trans people on the No on 36 campaign. She said no one was putting trans people in the back office to stuff envelopes, but that folks were invited to canvas door to door (this contradicts QueerRevolution member Max Armstrong’s assertion that trans people were asked not to appear in a media event against measure 36). A similar incorporation took place with Dawne Woody, who became involved with the Human Rights Campaign because she wrote letters in response to HRC’s move to “drop the T,” or no longer include “gender identity” among protected groups. She told HRC she would not be a token, but is criticized by fellow leaders in the trans community that she is a token for them.
Members of mainstream LGBT organizations understood that they were criticized for endorsing political candidates who were more conservative than they would find desirable and for accepting money from corporations (interviews; J. Keskitalo, T. Lynch). Thom Lynch directly addressed the criticisms Gay Shame leveled against the LGBT Center, noting that they were an anarchist group critical of corporatism, and they were protesting because Gavin Newsom had donated money and the because the Center was hosting him. Lynch defended such actions, saying, “we take money from rich people because otherwise we can’t keep the doors open,” mentioning the dangers of how much control rich people have. “So what we try to do now since then,” he said, is to:
… do mayoral debates here so in the last mayoral race we had all eight candidates here in a debate that I moderated but people int—people from Gay Shame interrupted that debate whenever Newsom spoke, when he came on to speak, so we had to actually ask them to leave the building and help them to leave the building and what I said to them that day, what I say now, is, you know, he was a guest in our building. We wanted to hear him talk and people have a right not to like him, and they have a right to protest him, they don’t have a right to stop anybody else from hearing what he has to say in a place where he’s invited. And you know there’s a lot of candidates there that those people would’ve not agreed with, or that I wouldnt’ve agreed with, but I’m not only inviting people here that I agree with. I want to hear—this has to be a place for all sorts of voices. But you’ll hear language about you know people who wear khakis and blue shirts you know all that but that’s that’s just a costume just like being an anarchist has its own costume (laughs) so we’re not that different that way. (interview; T. Lynch)
Lynch characterized Gay Shame activists as limiting the diversity of voices expressed, saying he respected that they disagreed but had no right to prevent others from listening. At the same time, he says, “we had to actually ask them to leave the building and help them leave the building,” which appears to contradict his contention that “this has to be a place for all sorts of voices.” These contradictory endorsements of a diversity of opinions resolve with Lynch’s observation that khakis and blue shirts are a costume just like anarchist clothes are a costume. His identification with the activists, emphasizing similarity, “we’re not that different that way,” incorporates other perspectives as a diversity of voices at the same time as identifying them as limiting the diversity of voices. The “unity through diversity” frame for the gay movement is thus featured in mainstream LGBT direct understandings of conflict, as part of the richness and diversity of the movement itself. Lynch’s subsequent assertion that he’d be happy if people could find an alternative way to run these kinds of organizations but the reality is fundraising is needed echoes Roey Thorpe’s lament that conflict is a necessary part of attaining goals.
Maude Foxy, a staff member of the LGBT Center, also addressed Gay Shame’s critique directly, asserting it is better to fight “from the inside out.” Foxy mentioned Gay Shame vandalized the Center, saying, “they used spray paint. I had to wash it off right before Pride they spray painted the front of our building they throw red paint on the window that to me is—is—fighting your own support system. Like we are not your enemy.” Maude Foxy said this in tandem with supporting a lot of Gay Shame’s causes, frustrated with the self-destructiveness of “fighting your own support system.” Later, they said, “we need to be focused on fighting religious zealots, those are the real enemies, not because you think we get money from Absolut.” When asked how the LGBT Center responded to these graffiti attacks, Foxy said:
we don’t really address that there’s not really a conflict except for like “hey that’s not cool that you grafittied the front of the Center sidewalk,” you know, like but there’s no “let’s get them on the phone and tell them that,” we just clean it up and let it be and hope to God it doesn’t happen again. But if it does, it does. There’s definitely a conflict there but not really a resolution. Or at least not yet. And I don’t think there ever will. At least for this place I don’t think there ever will be because how do you resolve something when there’s so – I see them as inherently the same, but— they’re— both parties see them as inherently different. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a middle ground made because we do get sponsorship from so-and-so, or this or that, but we use that sponsorship to help HIV infected people and to get our kids space for queer parents… So whereas I see it that way and they see it as “no, you’re still taking money from big businesses.” That’s why I don’t think there’ll ever be any kind of resolution or middle ground to it just to keep open minds that’s all one can do. (interview; M. Foxy)
Foxy’s response touches on non-response (hard to capture conclusively in interview), and agrees with other mainstream LGBT contentions that conflict is inevitable. Like Lynch, Foxy notes the similarity of Gay Shame activists and LGBT center activists, differing in identifying the belief that they are different. Responsive to the critiques of Gay Shame, Foxy says that there is no middle ground because the Center does accept funding but they put it to good use. Foxy’s resolution that all one can do is “keep open minds” again reflects the mainstream LGBT devotion to respecting difference and striving for unity. In this same spirit, Bonnie Tinker of Love Makes a Family developed a program, “a way to engage in controversy in a way that opens dialogue rather than increasing divides,” as a way of demilitarizing speech. “People don’t change their mind because of your moral superiority,” she said. This method is designed to train volunteers to not engage in the kind of criticism this study addresses. She joked with me, laughing while saying, “I’ve been involved in a number of conflicts. This is why I am now focusing on conflict resolution.”
Mainstream LGBT organization participants described a number of explicit understandings of conflict, considering conflict both a “headache” and positive. Conflict is understood as a necessary part of organizing with the LGBT community, and mainstream understandings of diversity expand to embrace oppositional queer critiques. Mainstream LGBT participants emphasize the likeness of critiquers and critiqued, expressing dismay at the apparent lack of resolution to conflicts.
Organization’s critiques produced effects both external to them, evident in some behaviors of their targets, and also produced the effect of building internal solidarity within organizations. Here I explore the external effects; and in the fourth and final chapter, I look at the internal effects: the role of critique in in-group social identity construction.
Inaction and Organizational Crises
The evidence in my study supports assertions that conflict among and within organizations may lead to inaction. Bonnie Tinker, active for over 25 years in equal marriage work and other activism, plans to resign as Executive Director of Love Makes A Family in part due to burnout and demoralization brought on by her public conflict with Roey Thorpe and Basic Rights Oregon (interview; B. Tinker). Burnout also may result from in-group conflict; while oppositional queer activists pride themselves in self-criticism, the possibility of burnout due to “over-processesing” looms. A number of oppositional queer activists volunteered memories of what Polletta would describe as “organizational crises” produced by disagreements within the group. Polletta defines organizational crises as:
disputes over organizational structure and decision-making occupied so much time that the group’s existing programs were brought to a standstill, or prevented the group from capitalizing on political opportunities that all the members recognized as important, or led to a substantial portion of the organization’s membership to leave. (Note 18: 236)
Both QueerRevolution and Gay Shame use loosely structured consensus process in order to make decisions. Activists expressed a wariness of over-processing. One respondent described an Anarchist People Of Color group as “lost in process” for a year and a half, and another described a different antiracist group becoming “bogged down” trying to decide their organizational structure until members all burned out (interviews; R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu, S. Marquez). Some groups celebrate processing, as for example in Gay Shame’s zine they cautioned that the group may have to process after an action for up to four weeks and encourages the reader to savor every minute of it (Are You Ready For Direct Action?). In the wake of the 2002 Gay Shame Awards in which Gay Shame controversially nominated a local hip hop group for a “Model Minority Award,” the group entered a six month period of “processing” in which a significant number of members left (interviews M.N. Delgado; Mattilda; R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu). Mary N. Delgado said that some members were asking why the group was mostly white, broaching racism within the organization:
but a lot of people were really resistant to any kind of self-reflection, or bored by it, or like, whatever, like “oh my god process.” We tried doing all these points of unity discussions, and like, it was really rough, it was like for months and months every meeting was about process and every meeting was about self-reflection or trying to be like self-reflection but other people were just resisting it, and a lot of people left the group after that because that’s when a lot of the authoritarian tendencies of people came out. In terms of like trying to figure out a group—trying to come to a consensus on our politics basically and what we’re about and what we’re looking to do. Instead of just doing these actions and not really worrying about it and we’re just this direct action group is really a statement of who we are and, um, a lot of people left and most of the people that left were either women or trans. Um… so we were (laughing) left with a collective of almost completely white biological men. (interview; M. N. Delgado)
This organizational crisis appears to have led to a “resolution” like that which Polletta describes; when sometimes organizations may come easily to consensus because dissenters leave the organization. For example, one Gay Shame participant said of this time that the “people with the biggest mouths sort of stuck it out” (interview, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu) and their instructional zine states, “we have found that consensus occurs remarkably easily, since we have worked through our common politics and we discuss issues extensively prior to calling for consensus” (Are You Ready For Direct Action?: 4).
Effects on the Mainstream Groups
“Everybody’s critical of us at one time or another,” said Thom Lynch of the LGBT Center, “in some ways you know you’re doing right if you’re not making everybody happy all the time because you know to lead or to be an organization that represents so many different points of view you’re gonna piss somebody off sometimes.” Reactions to criticism among mainstream groups were 1.) to dismiss criticism as part of the movement, 2.) to accept criticism and incorporate it, and 3.) to describe criticism as healthy without addressing its content.
Dismissals generally took the form of listing critiques that contradict themselves, emphasizing the uselessness of addressing critiques. Jessica Keskitalo of Basic Rights Oregon detailed the tactical criticisms, showing how incompatible some of the demands on Basic Rights Oregon are. Both staff of the LGBT Center and Basic Rights Oregon expressed the belief that they were targeted for critique because of their power and visibility in the community. Jessica Keskitalo talked about how BRO is just trying to meet goals, but that people in the community expect them to do everything because they are the biggest. The impossibility of pleasing the whole community dominated mainstream addresses of criticism. In the following passage, criticism is cast as an inevitable feature of the movement and endorsed as healthy:
There’s always been a tension in this movement between the fight for sexual liberation, that is not only about GLBT people but is also about the right to make sexual choices and to have sexual freedom in this society, between that and the kind of assimilationist piece of the movement which is about convincing people we’re really not all so different, and all that queer people want is to not be discriminated against, to live peacefully in the world, to have families. And, you know, I think that we— that that tension between those two things, between what used to be Gay Liberation and this other part of our movement, is always there. And I wouldn’t say that we choose one over the other but I would say that we you know our emphasis is on legal equality … I think that we’re a pretty mainstream progressive organization in that regard. I think that we’re not probably on the cutting edge of what’s most radical about our movement. And that isn’t to say that we disagree with the goals of the people who are there, it’s just not what our organization is. I think within our organization there’s a wide range of opinion about that, and I like that. I think it’s really healthy. (interview; R. Thorpe)
Roey Thorpe, Executive Director of Basic Rights Oregon in Portland, articulated the effects of these critiques in a way that exemplifies mainstream LGBT responses to criticism. She is aware that the criticism is leveled, understands its content, and sees it as a historical dimension of LGBT movement activity. Thorpe considers this range of opinions healthy and notes that just because Basic Rights Oregon isn’t devoted to radical causes doesn’t mean they don’t support the goals of more radical organizations. Thom Lynch echoed this celebration of radicalism, saying, “It’s good to have groups that are pushing, you know, whether I like what they’re saying or not. It’s good to have groups pushing from all sorts of sides.” He described pressures from the Left and from the Right, similar to talking about contradictory criticism, presenting the Center as caught in between these interests. Jessica Keskitalo of Basic Rights Oregon responded similarly, saying, “we get that pressure from all sides” in regards to radical criticisms that Basic Rights Oregon needs to rally and more conservative criticisms that it is too inflammatory.
Roey Thorpe argued that because the organization has been devoted to fighting off attack, “we’re a few steps behind,” but said she didn’t think it made sense to focus too much on the tension within the movement when everyone can agree that we deserve to pass a law against discrimination. “There’s broader cultural change that needs to occur but what that looks like and how it happens is something we can talk about once we get the basics taken care of.” This vision for change argues that trying to attain policy goals should come first, and the content of criticism can come after. Keskitalo talked about critiques of Basic Rights Oregon’s lack of transparency and lack of diffuse decision-making, describing this as part of Basic Rights Oregon’s goal-oriented style.
Including gender identity in anti-discrimination protections and in supporting transgender community members appears to be one of the ways that mainstream groups incorporate criticism. Jessica Keskitalo detailed critiques from the trans community about how Basic Rights Oregon countered the anti-same sex marriage ballot, addressing the language of “same sex” excluding trans issues. Thorpe went on further to say that there are still trans people who don’t feel included, “there’s always gotta be people pushing the envelope who aren’t gonna feel included and it’s those people I think who often push us forward.” This celebration of criticizing forces in the community was common across participants involved in mainstream LGBT organizations.
Overall, it was clear that mainstream organizations were aware of and had accurate, detailed understandings of the criticisms leveled against their organization. The following passage from my interview with BRO’s Field Organizer is exemplary of this attention and detail:
We took on an issue [gay marriage] that was something that um … wasn’t … (sigh) I’m trying to think about the right way to say this, that was really focused on the needs and the identities of a small portion of the LGBT community that it was about you know, perceived to be about people who are usually middle- upper class white frequently gay male but by virtue of seeing who got married lesbian couples who have kids who live a life that is usually much more affluent usually much more straight in a lot of ways than is representative of the bigger community and so was sort of like pushing this issue what about basic nondiscrimination legislation? What about, hate crimes? What about these other pieces of work that tap into the interests and encompass the identities of many more people who are part of this community and who support your organization? (interview; J. Keskitalo)
Keskitalo’s sympathy with criticisms and genuine concern was not unusual for mainstream activists. Like other participants, she saw her organization as targeted because of its size and power, and necessarily unable to address all needs. “We’re not going to try to piss someone off when we’re trying to get their vote,” she said, arguing that it was a tactical question. Overall, mainstream participants were distressed by conflict, interested in collaboration and unity, and frustrated and burnt out on trying to address critique.
Effects on Oppositional Groups
Patsy said simply, “at some point, everybody in this town hates us.” Gay Shame gently advises in their zine about direct action, “Don’t be worried if people hate you—when you take an unpopular stance (and we certainly hope you do), expect to be unpopular” (Are You Ready For Direct Action?: 7). Patsy characterizes the members of Gay Shame as the “outsider of the outsider,” whether because they don’t drink and don’t party and are antisocial. Mary N. Delgado said, “Gay Shame never really related that well to other organizations,” laughing heartily. Stanley describes Gay Shame as “under constant attack” due to their outrageous tactics in building an “ironic political myth” (Are You Ready For Direct Action?: 8). For example, during one Gay Shame meeting, organization members joked about an email that was entitled “Shame on YOU,” sharing that they received a number of emails thus titled.
Oppositional queer activists mused on how mainstream LGBT activists saw them. Both Patsy of Gay Shame and Five O’Clock of QueerRevolution said simply, “they see us as being against everything.” Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) took the fact that Gay Shame members get arrested when they target mainstream organizations as testimony to the threat felt by powerful gay people with privilege: “We could have like five people at a meeting and people still think like, ‘oh my god those Gay Shame people are really scary’ (laughs).” She went on to talk about how the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force was so scared by their call to action against the Creating Change activist conference that they sent people to Gay Shame meetings.
Many respondents said they didn’t think mainstream activists thought about them much:
I think overall they probably don’t even think about it and don’t and I think justifiably so ‘cause I don’t think that we’re really like, that a lot of what we’re doing is really a challenge to them. I think in some ways Pride was really worried about what was going to happen with Dyke March, like it was probably similar to, we were all like, before we were doing it thinking— God you know I was trying to contact jail support and like, we were like, wanting to like, you know, getting really concerned about making sure it was safe and all these things and, there was no issue. And I feel like we kind of sometimes overestimate our threat and I think in some ways my guess is that … Pride Northwest was overestimating our threat. So I mean I’m sure that, like, I would expect that a lot of those organizations, I mean Pride Northwest when they wrote – when the person from Pride Northwest when she wrote her thing she was like, “you know I sympathize with them and their views, but like, you know, they’re damaging the movement, they’re creating infighting, that kind of thing”. I think that’s (laughing) probably felt on both sides! (interview; M. Armstrong)
Patsy similarly laughed about how these organizations know Gay Shame has no power but will still “have really weird ideas and get irate and it’s like, we have no power!” When pressed further, Patsy said that this was because Gay Shame is the only queer group willing to critique marriage; that other radical-ish queer groups would say “it’s not right for me but people should be able to.” Other groups, Patsy said, could be called homophobic, but not Gay Shame. “That really scared them,” she said. Another respondent said:
Well my impression with Gay Shame, as far as activist people go, um, they either they really don’t care about us and we don’t really actually um – or they either really respect us and sort of let us be because they realize we’re doing things that they won’t. So, we don’t— we don’t— I mean Gay Shame as a group doesn’t presently seem to have any standing beef with any— even though our group has beef with people, or not necessarily beef but, like, uh like, on our end we’re just like, we can’t deal with these people. (interview; R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu)
She then went on to describe an Anarchist Action group that has a straight mentality, so Gay Shame avoids them. I will return to this avoidance in the next chapter, as I learned that the rejection of other groups, through avoiding association with them or ignoring overtures to work in coalition, is one of the effects of the critique interaction.
Another critique leveled against oppositional queers was that they were all privileged white people (interview; Patsy). Respondents said this was not true (interview; Patsy). Patsy noted “they write us funny hate-mail,” citing letters to the editor of the Bay Area Reporter about “how we need to grow up, we need to get jobs.” He identified this as “re-working out the master-slave narrative” noting how gendered, racialized and sexualized this paternalist approach is. Patsy went on to identify the allegation that Gay Shame was just a bunch of privileged people as a defensive mechanism of people they are critiquing. This was bolstered by a number of rumors about Gay Shame, rumors that they held an anti-racist training and nobody showed up, and rumors that they gave Deep Dickollective a Gay Shame Award for being racist against white people. Members believe these misperceptions affected community support and participation in Gay Shame actions (interview; M.N. Delgado). Mattilda talked about this with how everyone in San Francisco has an opinion of Gay Shame and it’s usually based on one thing, for example, “I went to this one demo of Gay Shame and they said something that was totally fucked up,” musing on how she is a “super critical” person but that it is popular to “be critical without actualizing anything else.” She also criticized these radical queers who refuse to participate for consuming goods and supporting spaces which are also “totally fucked up” and being shocked by people embracing femme-phobic leather bars as their “community.”
Oppositional activists presume that they will be unpopular. Some believed that their presence and presentation of alternate forms of activism posed a threat to mainstream LGBT groups, while others said they were ignored. Oppositional queers also talked about criticisms leveled against them, like the claim that they are all privileged. Participants dismissed this claim as exaggerated.
Chapter Four: Constructing Difference
I sought to examine both the external effects of critique and the effects internal to the group. My study focuses on the boundaries between oppositional/radical/queer activists and mainstream/liberal/LGBT activists. Taylor and Whittier write, “Boundaries mark the social territories of group relations by highlighting differences between activists and the web of others in the contested social world,” asserting that they are thus central to collective identity (1992: 111). Recalling work on oppositional identity construction, I touch on oppositional queer prerogative to resist incorporation, and explore ways these groups fortify against incorporation into mainstream LGBT goals. This brings us to an exploration of how “talking trash” may build internal solidarity for oppositional queers. Additionally, I will explore other “others” besides mainstream LGBT activists whom oppositional queers define themselves against: non-activist radical queers.
One oppositional queer respondent delighted in a newspaper debate between Pride Committee member Joey Cain and a member of Gay Shame in which Cain criticized Gay Shame, saying they only wanted to stand outside and yell outside the house but didn’t want to come inside and change it. Mary N. Delgado tittered with laughter describing the Gay Shame’s respondent’s assertion that “we’re perfectly willing to burn down the house.” This exemplifies the delight and pride (he said, “that was pretty genius”) that oppositional queers take in rejecting cooptation from mainstream groups. This is a subtler influence of the women’s movement and of lesbian feminist consensus process: the refusal to ally with or endorse organizations that contribute to patriarchy, or in the case of oppositional groups, that are capitalist or otherwise “fucked up”. Refusing to build coalitions serves as a way of expressing disapproval, or of rejecting gestures interpreted as intended to co-opt the organization’s image. Illustrative is the example of Gay Shame’s invitation to the University of Michigan’s Conference on Gay Shame (March 2003), which Mattilda characterized as an academic attempt to co-opt the cool of Gay Shame and, having laid claim to it, theorize and suggest it would “trickle down” to the masses. She scoffed at the conference’s failure to have any panels on activism besides the one that Gay Shame members were invited to, and noted that the panel scheduled after Gay Shame’s was entitled “Fuck Activism?” Few tactics irked oppositional queer activists more than LGBT movement organizations’ attempt to incorporate their critiques, leveled with the intent to destroy, under the umbrella of LGBT. Max Armstrong, Tomato Fruit, and s.b. all recounted to me the story of mainstream LGBT newspaper Just Out moving from lambasting QueerRevolution as “anti-gay pride activists” to incorporating photos of the Funeral for Queer Resistance into their photomontage of pride.
Efforts to neutralize community disputes at one point took the form of mainstream LGBT activists directly addressing Gay Shame. In response to Gay Shame’s call to action against their national activist conference, Creating Change, organizers came to Gay Shame open meetings anticipating Gay Shame’s action. These Creating Change organizers said they just wanted to hear the group’s concerns and that they wanted to make sure no one was harmed if an interruption took place. Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) laughed, describing the moment when they “cracked”, in response to her saying they shouldn’t serve food to homeless queer youth of color in the Marriott Hotel and they insisted they were doing it there anyway. Gay Shame decided not to do an action at Creating Change because they felt an action would be incorporated, asserting that they were not interested in changing the conference, they wanted a whole new model, and if that meant destroying Creating Change, then that was fine. In her explanation Mattilda said actions take place at Creating Change every year, and they were likely to react saying, “let’s give Gay Shame a whole day next year!” then, “I think it’s important for us to sort of stand outside.” When Gay Shame distributed their how-to start a direct action group zine outside the conference, members of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force thanked Gay Shame for being there. Patsy described them as “more savvy”, saying they know “how to deal with us” and that National Gay and Lesbian Task Force would have given Gay Shame any panel there. “If they incorporate us they can take the rage that is our lives and incorporate it into their program and charge $250 to come see us talk.” Implicitly, it is necessary for oppositional queer groups to resist incorporation.
Oppositional queer activists reject the idea that queer people doing activism should all work together. Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) spoke at length about not wanting to work with gay realtors and bar owners, that they were not her community, and that the idea of a monolithic community does not serve her. She stressed that there is no middle ground between being for and against marriage:
Another element of Gay Shame is to, as mainstream gay people steadily assimilate into the dominant culture that we despise, to make it clear that “actually that’s not okay.” I think that’s another thing we hear a lot is like, “well, you know, aren’t you for people to you know make their own choices?” It’s like, “Sure! We are for people to make your own choices. But when your choice is to step on other people to get ahead, that’s not just a choice. You‘re actually—” like it’s like, “oh well shouldn’t we let George Bush bomb Iraq ‘cause he wants to?” [sarcastic intonation] Actually, when you see something that’s wrong it’s not ok for people just to— it’s like [lisping] “can’t we create like a safe place for gay republicans to like figure out a way to take away women’s right to have an abortion” and—and for queer radicals! To fight for women’s right to abortion! It’s like well no, actually we can’t. [interviewer laughs] You know what I mean? So that’s just—and that’s really crucial to expose that whole bullshit and say like you know, no, the middle ground, the middle ground is quicksand and we don’t need to go there! [laughing] Like if the middle ground means putting a blanket over our heads and strangling ourselves to death like it’s not really – it’s not really a good place to be [both laugh]. (interview; Mattilda)
This resistance of incorporation challenges the concept of unity, centrism, and inclusion of multiple queer perspectives that are tenets of LGBT concepts of unity and togetherness. Oppositional queer refusals to be incorporated, combined with mainstream LGBT attempts to incorporate criticism, leaves an open ended, continuous dynamic among these organizations.
Identity Construction as a Category of Generative Effect
Evidence of Oppositional Identity Construction in relationship to the Mainstream LGBT, or “QUEER MUTINY NOT CONSUMER UNITY”
Solidarity is among the fundamental needs of social movements. In order to maintain ongoing resistance to incorporation, oppositional queer groups require solidarity as well. Towards this end, criticism also provides in-group identity building effects for critiquers. It generates solidarity as outsiders who sustains this work. Recalling work on the role of identity in social movements, and the deconstructionist approach to identity of a queer action logic, if groups do not rely on a static essentialist identity, oppositional identity building is one way activists can define who they are and continue to have group solidarity. The slogan “Queer Mutiny Not Consumer Unity” provides an excellent exemplar of what I mean by oppositional identity construction. In the first chapter, I touched on identities forged against a foil: oppositional identities, defined reflexively as “anti” something else. Oppositional queer participants actively construct queer identity and politics in contrast to objectionable forms of sexual minority activism and culture, calling simultaneously for “queer mutiny,” an aggressive queer politics, and “not consumer unity,” a statement against current mainstream LGBT activism and culture. What follows are the criticisms leveled against mainstream LGBT movement goals and examples of how these objections build an alternative “anti” identity. Then I will touch on evidence of positive identity construction against this foil, the supreme foil of the Human Rights Campaign, queers actively rejecting overtures of mainstream groups, and evidence of inside-group boundary work. Evidence of Oppositional Identity Construction
In addition to objecting to assimilation as a goal for LGBT movement activity, oppositional queer groups also object to the use of tactics that are considered assimilationist. One oppositional queer activist, who had previously volunteered for Basic Rights Oregon, referred to the tactics as “just awful,” saying: Going like door to door, as if that’s the way you get something like that addressed, by going door to door. And plus it’s like a dehumanizing experience to be like, you know what, [sarcastic, high-pitched tone] “you can be against gay marriage we don’t have to like, finish that debate out now. You don’t have to like queers, this is about putting it in the constitution.” [lightly hits the table] (interview; M. Armstrong)
In the interview above, Max Armstrong imitated a mainstream LGBT activist, using a mocking, high-pitched tone to emphasize the objectionably accommodating plea that canvassers were trained to use, going on in the imitation saying, “you can think of me as the scum of the earth, stomp on me, just not in the constitution, that’s all I’m asking, please.” The moments in which oppositional queers imitate or speak in the voice of mainstream queers are speech acts that concentrate oppositional identity work. Two oppositional queer respondents commented that it was obnoxious how mainstream groups evoked imagery of the Civil Rights movement, one using an upper-class sounding voice to say, “Well the blacks had their Civil Rights Movement, we’re going to have ours” (interviews; T. Fruit, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu). Imitations were interned in the service of sarcastic retellings of stories of scandalous hypocrisy and personal indictments heavily in some interviews.
Another method of differentiating from mainstream LGBT activists is self-presentation in fashion. Participants in both oppositional queer groups wore clothing associated with anarchist and radical styles, generally with a femme flair. In the past, Gay Shame encouraged participants to wear clothes that would mark them as a “pink bloc,” using anarchist styles that are normally all black in color. Mary Money delighted in the flash of pink among these all black wearing anarchist crews. At QueerRevolution’s funeral for queer resistance, most participants wore black (including “black bloc” face handkerchiefs), but this with the aim of emulating a funeral procession. Both groups embrace feminine imagery: QueerRevolution has posters featuring unicorns and butterflies, Gay Shame posters generally appropriating fashion models. Mary Money asserted that a glittery presentation was considered most transgressive.
The disparagement of other groups implicitly carries positive valuations of groups opposed to them. Oppositional queers take pride in prioritizing principles. “We don't believe in compromising in ways that a lot of groups do and a lot of times that's to our own ends but I think we'd rather go down in a big old flame than cover people in Red White and Blue Freedom to Marry stickers,” said Patsy. In addition to criticizing the agenda and tactics of mainstream LGBT organizing, oppositional queers define positive things against a foil of gayness. In Mary Money’s description of the Tire Beach event, she said, “I mean, generally just like a celebration of everything that’s not Pride, of like, you know, a celebration of being queer and non-assimilationist.” She described loving Gay Shame’s position as “an antithesis to mainstream queer ideology,” listing wealth, privilege, masculinity, and “Castro ideology.” This reflexive identity construction is reflected in oppositional queers seeing the purpose of their organization as presenting an alternative to a dominant or homogeneous LGBT movement. Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu talked about how essential it was to have a radical political queer organization because of the lack of direct action and the lack of interest in any politic outside of marriage, military, and (she laughed when she listed) gay clergymen, saying:
… to show that you know there is actually a whole world outside of that— that’s full of people who are marginalized and people who don’t fit into that and are interested on many levels—people who are essentially anarchists in ways. I mean I’m not trying to label anyone, but I myself identify as an anarchist and I don’t have anything for marriage, religion, family, I mean obviously (laughing) these weird mythic loyalties… There were a lot of aspects of the group that had this party agenda that really was sort of their version of like the mainstream’s sort of oppressive structures and mainstream oppressive paradigms and they just wanted to kind of cling to these and not have to be involved in any sort of critical dialogue. (interview; R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu)
In the passage above, unwillingness to be involved in a critical dialogue is aligned with mainstream LGBT politics and loyalties to assimilationist goals. Implicitly, an oppositional queer politic is willing to engage in critical dialogue. Further, direct action is considered a willingness to fight, and an unwillingness to engage in direct action is considered not fighting (interview, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu).
Queer is also simultaneously used as a tool, something to identify with, more encompassing of and a direct retort to the restrictions of LGBT. Within my study, a few respondents articulated queer identity in direct contrast to the available identities. Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) joked about forgetting to list her sexuality in the interview, “because we’re all queer! Oh. And I’m not okay absolutely not an LGBT! (laughs heartily) None of the above, thank you, I choose queer. Um and that is because I’m interested in creating something more devious and defiant than any of the four choices that are available (laughs heartily).”
Additionally, assimilation was characterized as damaging by another QueerRevolution participant, who in objection to Portland’s Pride theme “Everyday People” struck the table lightly during the interview proclaiming, “we are not everyday people and we are not trying to be everyday people” (interview, M. Armstrong). Framing assimilation as unhealthy, as a denial of what we are (“not everyday people”), uses the rhetoric of the LGBT movement in order to criticize it. As Weston and others argue, gay liberation created the strategy of coming out, of a true inner self, proclaiming and recognizing it as psychologically healthy as well as politically meaningful (1992; also see Armstrong 2002). By framing assimilation as a “damaging” goal that denies true identity (not being everyday people), this oppositional queer activist mobilized the tools of LGBT activism in their criticism of it.
Additional “others” for queer groups emerged in answers to direct questions regarding assimilation, goals, and legitimate tactics, and also asking how other organizations go wrong, fall short, or who is left out by their agenda. Recalling the boundary maintenance of SNCC members and animal rights activists, I found that oppositional group members distinguished themselves not only from LGBT outsiders but also from “outsiders” within: DIY culture, non-activist radical queers, and partiers (Polletta, 2002; Groves, 2001).The borderwork engaging these three groups cast them as eager to join on the oppositional queer bandwagon without the politics to back it up.
This is illustrated by the scandal around a stenciling campaign in which Gay Shame activists spray-painted “DIY BUSINESS IS STILL GENTRIFICATION” on the sidewalks of many local stores beloved by this community. Some members within Gay Shame didn’t want to criticize DIY businesses or ones within their community, and the business owners came to the meetings and confronted the group about the stenciling. Also they crossed the line with stenciling Modern Times, the bookstore where meetings are held, and were confronted by the bookstore and later published an apology on their website. Mattilda (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore) discussed this as a refusal to acknowledge oneself as a subject for critique, exemplified by gentrification that is often pioneered by queers who are then surprised when yuppies move in in their wake. She mused on how it was interesting that businesses felt compelled to sandblast the stencil off of the sidewalk, and gave credit to a local sex toy store that left it up: “Just people’s unwillingness to at the very basic level just hold themselves accountable is always sort of stunning.” Gay Shame’s organizational identity as “too hardcore” relies on the unwillingness of some radical queers to engage in the type of critique Gay Shame takes on (interview, Patsy). Patsy described this as a litmus test for activists, musing, “you start critiquing your own community and you can really see where people’s politics lie.” Oppositional queer groups valorize a willingness to critique oneself, and identify the split between themselves and apolitical people in radical queer communities as falling along a line of willingness to critique “insider” businesses, culture, organizations, and individuals. One of the major incidents of “drama” within Gay Shame was dispute over whether or not a mostly white group had a place criticizing a group of people of color, the nomination of homo-hop group Deep Dickollective for a Model Minority Gay Shame Award in 2002. Current members of Gay Shame talk about the importance of not allowing white guilt to bar people of color within the group from critiquing people of color (interviews; Patsy, M.N. Delgado). In addition, leeriness of engaging in vigorous critique was cited as the reason that some members left. Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu characterized the same conflict as follows:
… that was a big thing that caused a huge rift in the group because people were so completely embarrassed, people actually booed when the nomination was read, even though Deep Dickollective lost the model minority award to Eminem (both laugh)… Just the very notion of just like saying it was just too much for people, just couldn’t even fathom—just because we were we were implicating our—people in the crowd, we were implicating the—alternaqueer hipster Mission dyke mostly trannyboy white scene we were like basically indicting them. There was that thing of course (laughing) and like you know suddenly all those people could no longer go to Gay Shame meetings. (interview, R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu)
Gay Shame members shore up their identities as current members, those who have continued to be involved as Gay Shame has moved through being cool and “becoming uncool” (interview, Patsy). Importantly, the remaining members are mostly people assigned male at birth, and those who have left are referred to as “queer scenester anarchist trannyboy Mission scene” and “very Queerruption” (interview, Patsy). These people are “people who like to party” “very involved in the night life,” and “personal disguised as the political” (interview, Patsy). Patsy went on to describe members of Gay Shame by contrast, laughing and saying, “take the outsider and then find the outsider of the outsider.”
Gay Shame is really made up of people who don’t fit into the subculture for one reason or another. Either we are older or younger, or not white or not able-bodied or not—we don’t drink or we don’t party or we’re like anti-social or like you know, we’re shy. All those different things. Those are usually the people who stick around.
Thus, in addition to not finding subcultures effective as a basis for collective action, Gay Shame members are identified as not fitting into these misfit groups.
At the root of Gay Shame activists’ dismissal of this crowd described as “into partying” is boundary work between people who identify as queer activists to be cool, and it betrays a rejection of the development of an alternative culture as a legitimate movement goal. Gay Shame members actively disparage ghettoization, and demand change from the mainstream, while QueerRevolution members legitimate the creation of safe spaces as a movement goal. QueerRevolution, for example, hosted a movie night at a feminist bookstore in order to provide a safe space for queers to have company the day after Christmas, in response to painful rejection from families. Interviews indicated a similar sentiment, with interviewees prefacing complaints about lack of mobilization in radical queer scenes with talk about how it’s important to build a scene (interview, M. Armstrong). I get a strong sense that Gay Shame is skeptical of the personal as political, or relying too much on the lifestyle of resistance. Mary N. Delgado, an ex-Gay Shame member, claimed that when, due to internal tensions in the group, a number of dykes and transpeople stopped attending meetings, that remaining Gay Shame members dismissed them as “partiers,” saying, “look what they’re doing now,” refusing to examine other reasons for the alienation when he brought up that the meeting was all biological males. Another interviewee, a current member of Gay Shame, describes this period as the time when Gay Shame could have become a constant party if not for the intervention of outspoken members who stuck it out (R. Trinitrotoluene Ampu). Patsy’s account fits this story: he described these folks as popular “alternaqueers” who like to party and were afraid to lose their cool credentials, and that they all dropped out leaving the remaining members of Gay Shame.
Connected to the boundary work around scenester folks (who seem to be mostly dykes and trannyboys) is the disparagement of drinking and doing drugs. This antipathy toward use has historical roots, and may be connected to leftist anticonsumerism as well as early gay liberation. Max Armstrong listed among the achievements of QueerRevolution the creation of queer spaces outside of the bar and the Pride tent, noting as one of the reasons for changing the Dyke March into an anti-capitalism and more inclusive march conjoining with Queer Revolution the fact that traditionally Dyke March led everyone into the beer garden. Tomato Fruit expressed tenuous feelings about QueerRevolution’s judgment of bar culture, identifying himself as unusual in his desire to dance and hook up at gay bars, and distinct from a member who he described as proudly announcing they had not been in a gay bar in a decade. (after talking about his differences with people in QueerRevolution, one of whom proudly proclaimed they hadn’t been to a gay bar in ten years), Tomato Fruit said:
Some of those people who aren’t politicized and may not have the same like radicalized understanding of everything as I do are dear to me. Are very dear to me. So it gets into being like, who is—there’s this really really creepy line where it’s like so, I can easily dehumanize the director of the HRC for his racism and classism, but I can’t so do it with some of the boys I’ve slept with, people that I just—whatever beautiful freaks that just happen to not have like read a shit ton of feminist theory like I have. (interview; T. Fruit)
During one QueerRevolution meeting organization members argued that crashing the HRC’s “mixer” would be a viable action for the group because “people are going to party anyway, why not go to theirs?” This suggests a kind of sarcastic, but partially genuine solution to the tension between “partying” and political action within queer radical communities.
HRC: the Other of this Identity Process
The single organization that all participants in my study criticized was the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The Human Rights Campaign is a powerful, assimilationst national LGBT interest group organization. It has earned itself its status of representative of profiteering interest group politics with a political record that won it criticism from Armstrong (2002) and Gamson (2000). Former QueerRevolution member Five O’ Clock said simply, “That’s the difference between HRC and QueerRevolution. People who are middle class send a check to HRC.” Activists listed a litany of criticisms, including their awarding a Corporate Equality Award to a drug company, rumors that they fly pretty people out to staff their desk at Pride Parades, and conspiracies about them being staffed by homophobes, to soberer critiques of them for transforming gay rights into a marriage movement and focusing resources on their single organization (interviews; T. Fruit, M. Armstrong). Both Max Armstrong and Tomato Fruit of QueerRevolution were enormously tickled by the Human Rights Campaign’s “creepy weird ritual performance” at Pride 2005. Representatives of HRC marched around a flag in what was interpreted as a an inappropriate display of power, Fruit noting, “they paid for the fences at Pride.” Participants in QueerRevolution’s Funeral for Queer Resistance booed this display. Oppositional queer organization meetings in Portland and San Francisco featured moments to poke fun at the HRC, inventing marketing ideas for them. During one QueerRevolution meeting, members jokingly engaged in a fantasy campaign of the HRC. They joked about “Jr. HRC” in high school, where HRC would give kids khakis, a sign, and freedom rings. This was met with courses of laughter. At the Gay Shame meeting in San Francisco, one of the agenda items was an email chastising Gay Shame for targeting the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force instead of the HRC. Gay Shame members agreed that HRC was much worse, and brought up that they had stenciled Helping Right-wingers Cope (their alternative name for the acronym HRC) on the sidewalks. When an attendee brought up that HRC was opening a store in the Castro, members made jokes inventing products for them to sell there and laughing as well. The Human Rights Campaign’s supreme hypocrisy was ridiculed because their name has “human rights” in it, but they are not considered to be advancing human rights (interview; Mattilda).
I now return to the overall thesis to consider what these findings mean. What is the role of pronounced conflict within social movements? While internal dissension is conceived by social movement theorists and in popular understanding as destroying movements, I found evidence presenting a more mixed outcome. In-movement criticism may generate organizations, produce protests, and contribute to oppositional identity construction. Oppositional queer groups’ tactics draw power from the shared understanding of LGBT movement’s logic and tactics. Using interviews with both oppositional queer activists and mainstream LGBT activists I found that oppositional queer activism is a productive result of criticism that illustrates the generative power of oppositional identity construction. While I found that criticism was both generative and deleterious, these findings contribute to questioning the taken-for-granted knowledge that in-movement conflict is destructive.
Social movement theoretical understandings that take unified identity to be productive, and factionalism and criticism to be destructive, overlook several conditions that suggest conflict may be generative. By limiting definitions of social movement activity to that which targets the state, scholarship has been biased against examination of social movement activity that is irreverent to or acts at cross purposes with policy change. Thus the literature is biased against the study of prefigurative groups that are hostile to political involvement and groups whose organizational and decision-making structures are designed against cooptation. Additionally, this focus leads scholars to overlook activity that is aimed at the construction of collective identity. I explored these general issues by analyzing the LGBT movement, which is considered the quintessential identity movement, and is notorious for schisms and conflict along identity-based lines, and is thus ideally suited to examine dynamics relating to identity in collective action projects. My study is grounded in a historical critique of Elizabeth Armstrong’s account of the gay movement. I argue that Armstrong’s data may gloss over and subsume movement splintering under movement strength by including in her count of total organizations groups that may represent sepratist departures or response to exclusion.
I interviewed 17 activists drawn from groups involved in public conflict, grouped in sets of oppositional queer critiquers and critiqued mainstream LGBT organization members. I drew from groups in two cities, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, allowing me to compare these dynamics across local political contexts. Using insights from culturalist scholars to be attentive to forms of activism that do not target the state but instead target forms of authority within social movements, I contextualized the scathing criticisms oppositional queers level against mainstream LGBT activists and organizations. I found that within the identity political frame of the gay movement, the individual identities and consumption choices of mainstream activists and politicians become legitimate targets for criticism. The content of critique was rooted in assimilationism as an abandonment of vulnerable populations, and three modes 1.) personal indictments, 2.) stories of scandalous hypocrisy, and 3.) crashing the party. I foregrounded participants’ explicit understandings of critique in order to get at their intentions in critiquing, and their understandings of conflict in receiving criticism. Finding oppositional queers and mainstream LGBT activists had different understandings of conflict, the former valorizing deconstructionist politics and self-criticism, and the latter encountering criticism as a barrier to establishing collaboration and unity (which they strive for despite general convictions that it is unattainable). I observed effects and dynamics resulting from criticism, including inaction and organizational crisis. Mainstream groups dismissed, incorporated, and described criticism as healthy without addressing its content, while oppositional groups believed their criticisms were ignored, felt they were received as a threat, or were invalidated based on privilege. I expanded on the interaction between oppositional queer and mainstream LGBT organizations, demonstrating that it is constitutive to oppositional queer identity that they resist incorporation. Therefore, the critical relationship is unresolved. In order to sustain continuous criticism, oppositional groups build internal solidarity as “anti” mainstream LGBT, most extremely against the Human Rights Campaign, as well as “anti” other groups like apolitical queers partiers. Thus the critiques of oppositional queer organizations generate movement activity.
Alternative interpretations of my data could explore further the role of organizational crises and activist burnout. Additionally, the question of whether or not these criticisms are issued across two different social movements, one devoted to citizenship rights like marriage equality for LGBT people, and the other to liberation for all oppressed people, could be addressed in future research. While my interview cases were confined to oppositional queer and mainstream LGBT groups, interview evidence suggests oppositional queers related collaboratively with anarchist organizations and LGBT groups had coalitions with other progressive social change organizations, not gay organizations. Also, future research could explore the way that identity deployment is used to level critiques against targets outside of an identity movement, as illustrated by Gay Shame’s actions targeting Mayor Gavin Newsom. While these questions should be explored, research should not lose sight of the fact that oppositional queer groups define themselves against the predominant image of sexual minority rights, mainstream LGBT activism. While mainstream LGBT and oppositional queer groups do not imagine one another as co-collaborators, their continuously conflictual interactions still constitute the types of action they engage on their own.
As established in the first chapter, the gay movement is particularly prone to identity challenges and conflict. However, this does not limit the utility of my observations to “the quintessential identity movement” (Bernstein, 1997: 532). The dynamics of critiquing more mainstream organizations appear to play out in other forms of organizing which take this liberationist model of the end of all oppressions as their final goal. This includes anti-racist, environmentalist, and police accountability direct action groups. My findings predict similar oppositional identity construction dynamics in social movements that are not generally considered identity movements. What these organizations may illustrate is that these dynamics may exist when relationship of identity to the movement is variable. It is possible that boundary work along the axis of activist identity may be particularly vigorous in organizations not premised in an identity political logic, in order to build internal solidarity and collective identity. Thus, future research could explore the limits of critique outside of movements that recognize identity as a legitimate “political” ground for contestation. It is possible that with the influences of identity politics and feminism, activism around ethical consumption like anti-war activism, environmental groups, and animal rights, still house potent identity-based criticisms. Especially in light of general understandings of the personal as political, connecting personal consumption with global visions or inequality in a kind of day-to-day prefigurative politics, these observations may extend well outside of LGBT and queer activity. Only further research will tell.
Opening
Armstrong, E. A. (2002) Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. |
