I know I was busy last week, but if you asked me to tell you what I did I would mostly draw a blank. Oh, I worked some and wrote some and helped friends some, but it was for the most part composed of such a host of little things that none of them actually stood out…except for Wednesday night, which was one of those lovely multi-hour duos in which everything goes just perfectly and one retires later with a deep sense of satisfaction and the feeling that all is right in one’s world. On Sunday Jae and I rode on her motorcycle with Dykes on Bikes at the front of Seattle’ Pride parade; we then walked back along the route and marched all the way again with SWOP Seattle. After that we floated about all afternoon with friends and went home tired and happy. I would’ve loved to post a picture of Jae & I on the bike, but she vetoed the ones I didn’t veto until there were none left for me to use; I therefore went with this one of me with a friend (who shall remain nameless) who decided to go to Pridefest in drag. And though my friend is a great guy and an ally to sex workers, this shot kind of symbolizes what Pride has become; it’s gone from a counterculture celebration thumbing its nose at The Establishment, to an Establishment celebration welcoming “respectable”, monogamous, vanilla gay folk with straight jobs to the big table while largely excluding all the queers who still deserve the name (including trans people, kinky folk and polyamorists) and actively ignoring sex workers. So yeah, Pride is pretty fake and commercial now, but I enjoy Christmas despite its commercialization as well. And now that picket-fence gay people have their state-approved marriage, perhaps they’ll no longer be able to put off the other sexual minorities they’ve been throwing under the bus for the last decade and a half.
Diary #261
June 30, 2015 by Maggie McNeill
Posted in Diary | Tagged activism, bisexuality, LGBT rights | 11 Comments
11 Responses
Leave a Reply to Maggie McNeillCancel reply
Visit my bookstore
This Month
Old Posts
Call me
Become a Blog Patron
Contact Maggie
If you’d like to ask me a question, click here.
If you made a comment and it doesn’t appear within a few hours, click on this one.
If you’d like to alert me to an interesting item, use this one.
And if you have a request, bouquet or brickbat or just want to introduce yourself, this is the one for you.
A Few References
Maggie on Twitter
My TweetsBoring but necessary legal stuff
All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.
That’s a shame.
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is as commercialised and mainstream as it gets these days – even the conservative political parties have floats – but there’s still plenty of room for all kinds of queers and sex workers. The local gay and lesbian community seem to be pretty much over the transphobia of earlier decades as well.
It’s huge these days. They say if all the marchers in the last Mardi Gras were laid end to end, nobody would be surprised.
But how are sex workers excluded from Seattle Pride? SWOP was allowed to march.
Are they explicitly excluded from the organising committee or something?
I misspoke a bit there; I didn’t mean that various groups were excluded from the parade itself; anyone with $250 to spend can get in whether they have anything to do with GLBT rights or not (“T-Mobile is committed to a diverse customer base; those who pay cash, those who use credit cards, thoe who…”). What I meant is that mainstream GLBT orgs are so infatuated by their newly-minted promotion to The Establishment that they ignore the fact that Stonewall, the event commemorated by Pride, was a FUCKING ANTI-COP RIOT started by trans & drag hookers, mostly black. Yet transpeople have been asked to sit quietly on their hands and wait in line behind the minority of queers who will ever want to marry and the miniscule fraction who will ever want to kill in the name of Uncle Sam; just recently a trans woman who protested at a White House event was BOOED and told to shut up by her so-called brothers and sisters. And young, middle-class gay folk who have never lived in a world where the cops actively persecuted them for their private sexual behavior, sign on to anti-whore petitions in their fucking gentrified neighborhoods and start rescue industry profiteering orgs that actively promote the hysteria which results in sex workers being starved, harassed, raped, jailed and murdered. So I say to the big GLBT orgs: We’ve supported YOU for 40 years now; when is our fucking turn?
Why have sex workers supported GLBT orgs for the past 40 years then? It must have been abundantly clear long before now that they’re never going to support sex workers and their allies, and now they are officially part of “the system.” Hopefully those few who manage to get married (the backlash has already begun) enjoy it a little bit before it all comes crashing down.
Because a disproportionate fraction of sex workers are queer. Well over half of male sex workers are gay, and somewhere around half of female sex workers (guesstimate) are bisexual. And something like 40% of all transgender people have done sex work at one time or another.
Okay, in that case now I’m wondering why the GLBT movement didn’t split long ago between those who merely wanted what “The Establishment” had while ignoring (or actively supporting) larger injustices, and those such as yourself and the people represented in the statistics you cite who are after true freedom.
C’mon, LGBTQ folk are just people. Homosexual doesn’t mean homogenous. There’s just as many arch-conservative queers as there are radical queers with most falling close to the political mainstream.
Naturally most LGBTQ activism is going to be on issues specific to the LGBTQ community. Why should their organisations adopt policies that are out of step with the opinions of most of their membership? Queers who are interested in branch and root political transformation should join groups who advocate for it rather than trying to capture and re-purpose LGBTQ rights groups.
And anyone who expects institutions to express loyalty, gratitude or anything other than realpolitik just doesn’t understand what an institution is.
Which is not the same as saying a high proportion of queers are sex workers (except in your final example). You might as well suggest that LGBTQ activism should also be about promoting the interests of interior decorators.
Actually I disagree with the laments that Pride Parades are too commercial, because that is actually a sign the movement for acceptance has succeeded. In the past, excluded groups held their St Patrick’s Day and Pullman’s parades featuring the hard working, respectable members of their groups to prove to the mainstream that they were already contributing members of society and therefore the discrimination shown them was wrong. In fact the whole thumbing their noses at the establishment hurt the LGBT cause far more than it helped, with too many participants coming across as spoiled brats who want to insult everything their parents stand for, oh but please keep paying for my stuff.
That expression on your face clearly sums up how you (and I!) feel about how mainstream gay pride has become in North America. Respectability politics a la “look! we just wanna get married and have babies just like good ole Mom and Dad” might have worked for marriage equality but it sure ain’t gonna work for sex workers. I’m hoping now that our vanilla gay friends will now have time to remember their sex working sisters and brothers not to mention the queers.
The above hypothetical conversation about thumbing noses at The Establishment is a bit much to follow having lived through many incarnations of the establishment and the rebellions to it.
What I am hearing in the attempt to define the them-s and the us-ens is really a request that all parts of the community be equally able to contribute to community and receive from it with respect and dignity.
It’s sort of an old hunter gatherer theme, that it is dangerous to be on the group’s periphery (out side the establishment) and it is equally as dangerous for the group to have in it’s midst people that don’t solidity contribute. Pride Day seems to be an expression of that dance of members of the community (group) celebrating and working out how they are community. Pulling together with the slogan “one for a all and all for one”
Working for community is at odds with the concept of tearing down an imperfect structure rather than restoring it; like an old house as in restoring community to where all parts of the community are equally able to contribute to community and receive from it with respect and dignity.
Nailed it.