DE-CENTER THE CENTER Graph used without permission from the official website of the San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center. http://www.sfcenter.org/aboutus.php Who needs the LGBT Center? Why does it appear that the "community" that needs resources the most is effectively prevented from accessing the resources available from its own community center? The graph above seems to answer that question: 60% of the Center’s assets going to building maintenance, administration, fundraising, and economic development programs that “stimulate self-sufficiency through guidance in financial savings and long-term investments in both housing and businesses” it seems clear where the center’s priorities lie. And how could they not? With corporate sponsors such as American Express, Bank of America, US Bank, Wells Fargo, AT&T, Comcast, Macy’s, Bechtel, Clorox, Lennar and Morgan Stanley, the current agenda for the Center is one of cold, consumeristic capitalism. Instead of being a Robin Hood-esque pipeline that feeds cash into programs that actually serve the community as a whole, the Center invests their corporate largesse into creating and nourishing a queer consumer/entrepreneur culture. For those without money or the willingness or ability to straighten up, stop flaming, and make some money (you can with their help! Their business development program “helps LGBT entrepreneurs create and grow small businesses”) their message is clear: get out and stay out. It is our contention that the purpose of a community center is to serve the community, not just the upper crust. The Center needs to stop transferring money between members of the same ruling class echelons of the gay power elite. We advocate for complete economic redistribution, not development. To this end, we have made the following demands of the Center: 1.) Make all Center facilities free, open and accessible to anyone explicitly interested in radical trans/queer politics ; includes: youth, seniors, people living with HIV/AIDS, persons with disabilities, homeless folks, drug addicts, sex workers, undocumented folks, and any and all other marginalized queers and trans peoples. 2.) Provide services for the poor and disenfranchised, such as (but not limited to): health care, eviction defense, food programs, affordable housing, showers, donation center with free stuff, accessible gender neutral restrooms, needle exchange, medical marijuana, lending library, and any other resource or use that is determined by those accessing them. 3.) Terminate board of directors and create public control of fundraising and how he money’s spent. 4.) Rename the Center. 5.) The Center should make a public apology to Gay Shame for the 2003 Newsom fundraiser bashing. 6.) Play a bigger role in advocating radical queer/trans, including (for starters): opposing the proposed Community Justice Center, opposing police and I.C.E., making radical trans queer history more accessible, allow a platform for a more complex debate on gay marriage, oppose the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and the non-profit industrial complex. 7.) No police or I.C.E. ever allowed in the building. 8.) Stop profiling bodies based on race, class, gender (relies strongly upon demand # 1). In addition, we have developed these demands on the center as an extension of our larger agenda of demands for society as a whole, which include: 1.) End the gender binary. 2.) End ethnic profiling. 3.) Fight classism. 4.) Fight capitalism. 5.) Create a politicized trans/queer community. A quick perusal of queer history will show that it was not the institutions and organizations who advocated for a quiet and orderly assimilation of queers into the straight world who succeeded in winning rights and recognition for queer and trans people. Rather, it was the flaming queens, including drag queens of color, and hustlers of the notoriously seedy Stonewall Inn who rained beer bottles down on the cops and started a riot that would change queer life forever. While the Mattachine Society (leading homophile organization of the time, advocated assimilation) pleaded for calm within the community, it was the queers who had cut their teeth in the various movements of the day who returned the next night to battle the cops. It was these fringe queers and transfolks who organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day march a year later to commemorate the riot, a march which eventually turned into the politically disassociated Pride celebration of current times. It is from within that tradition that we are acting today, as a part of a queer liberation movement who has always seen their work as inextricably linked to all other movements for liberation and continues to fight for an end to racism, sexism, classism and ultimately free-market capitalism. We view it as an absolute necessity to confront these ills wherever they may be, especially when they are within our own community, and to this end are here to “de-center the Center” today.

 

 

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