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January-February, 2004
Volume 11, Number 1
What Became of Freedom Summer?
by Sarah Schulman
When I wrote this, I was an active founder of the Lesbian Avengers, an international organization that trained thousands of lesbians in direct action techniques. It was at the 1993 March on Washington that the Avengers and act-up Women’s Network created the first Dyke March—with 20,000 women, marching together with no permit. These participants brought the marches home to their cities and countries and created a new tradition. We worked on ballot measure campaigns around the country. At its height, the Avengers had 22 chapters on four continents. Then it crashed and burned, as all
anarchist
organizations must eventually do.
Today, we
have virtually no activist movement left at all. But that can’t last
forever. I
look forward to the work of younger people, and I am excited to see the
movement that they will build. They have a tougher job than we did
because they
are lied to every day by the media, both gay and mainstream, about how
free
they are, how little oppression still exists, and about the benefits of
“tolerance.” But I believe that eventually they will notice that their
lived
experience does not correspond to the way they are being represented.
False
representation is ultimately a lot more destructive than no
representation at
all. And it is finally more confusing.
The same
false story about AIDS that was current ten years ago is still being
promulgated, namely that self-oppressing gay people were alone until a
benevolent straight community heroically overcame its prejudice and
rescued
them. The thousands of people who forced action on AIDS, and the
movement we
built, have been forgotten from art and history.
Personally,
my response to this has been to work with my collaborator of seventeen
years,
Jim Hubbard, to create the act-up Oral History Project, a video archive
in
which surviving members of act-up New
York tell the true story of the AIDS crisis, how they changed the world
and
saved their own lives. (You can view this work at
www.actuporalhistory.org/beta.)
— New York,
October 2003
__________________________________________
FROM Summer, 1994
Freedom
Summer
Gays and lesbians are more visible today
than we may have
predicted even fifteen years ago. But that visibility has not brought
the kind
of acceptance and integration that we imagined. Many formerly
underground
aspects of our lives are now acknowledged in some manner by the general
public.
But they are positioned as parallel or special interest and are easy to
diminish or revile. When an aspect of gay life becomes acceptable for
public
consumption, it is increasingly defined, not by us, but by what I call
institutions of containment.
Clinton’s fiasco last year
with gays in the
military provides a perfect example of the media’s containment of gay
people.
The issue put us on the evening news, but truths about gay members of
the
military were distorted to fit comfortably into the prime-time box. As
we sat
in our living rooms watching supposedly straight generals, politicians,
and
newscasters debate whether we should have rights, the absence of openly
gay and
lesbian people from power was excruciatingly obvious. But even more
detrimental
was the media’s exclusive focus on the ban’s impact on white male
officers. The
fact that black women are kicked out of the military for homosexuality
at twice
the rate of white men was left out of the discourse in both the
straight media
and the continually racist gay and lesbian press. They created a false
public
image to fit the mainstream media’s criteria for which lives are
important
enough to be seen.
Fake
visibility occurs on many cultural and political fronts. Until the
release this
year of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, AIDS has been almost exclusively
the
territory of gay and lesbian filmmakers, whose films have been ignored.
Today,
we see that the only publicly acceptable presentation of the AIDS
crisis is one
created by a straight man. What was it about gay-produced films about
AIDS that
was unacceptable and that is not present in a work such as
Philadelphia? A
short list would include gay anger, gay sexuality, the abandonment of
gays and
lesbians and people with AIDS by their families, the impact of mass
death on
the individual, and the dimensions and reach of the gay and lesbian
community.
Now, with the advent of a fake public homosexuality constructed for
heterosexual consumption, we have Philadelphia saying it is
heterosexuals that
have defended and protected gay people with AIDS while other gays
lurked meekly
in the background. Is this what we had in mind when we imagined
visibility?
This parallel
existence is also evident in book publishing. For some time now, gay-
and
lesbian-themed literature has been marketed primarily to homosexual
readers by
both corporate and independent publishers. In our enthusiasm to
identify our
own literature, we underestimated how ferociously the dominant culture
would
refuse to accept these works as a part of American writing. While this
isolation initially resulted in the publication and wider distribution
of gay
and lesbian work, it reinforced straight people’s desire to stigmatize
the work
and separate it from the U.S. literary mosaic. As it now stands, black
women
writers are read by white readers, and Jewish writers are read by
Christian
readers. But for the most part, only a homosexual audience reads openly
gay
writers.
Of course,
the most important element of gay and lesbian life to be affected by
parallel
visibility is political organizing. For years, the gay movement was
dominated
by an assimilationist political style aimed at educating the
heterosexual
public about gay life, with a particular emphasis on coming out. But
today,
with openly gay and lesbian people in the media every day, we are still
losing
draconian anti-gay ballot measures by votes of two to one. Does this
mean the
general public cannot be convinced to accept lesbians and gays as
equals? If
so, what are the implications for political organizing? Recent trends
in grass
roots activism reflect the conclusions of Derrick Bell, who argues in
his book Faces
at the Bottom of the Well that racism is a permanent state. If we can
extrapolate that theory to sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, then
which
way forward for lesbian and gay organizing? Clinton’s sellout on the
military
ban was one of the more dramatic failures of coalition politics in
recent
memory. But what can we win alone?
Public
discourse in the United States is dominated today by the politics of
resentment. People who have always enjoyed basic civil rights are being
told by
the gay community and other disenfranchised groups that they have those
rights
only by accident of birth, not, as they believe, because of an inherent
and
deserving superiority. The response has been a widespread, multifaceted
propaganda campaign to dismiss all freedom movements as “politically
correct.”
Our coming out may not have changed straight people, but it has
dramatically
transformed us. We have a higher level of dignity, resolve, and unity
than ever
before, and we are in an excellent position to strategize our political
mission
for the next 25 years.
The time has
come to go beyond visibility to movement building. Trying to convince
heterosexuals that we are fully human is no longer a viable strategy.
We now
need to consolidate our base and win political power. The first step is
to
shift our focus away from Washington to local communities. This
November at
least thirteen anti-gay ballot measures will be put to popular vote.
Many of
these elections will take place in small towns and rural areas where
local gay
communities may not have the organizing skills and resources to win. To
date,
most communities fighting ballot measures have stayed in the closet,
framing
their campaigns around vague anti-discrimination rhetoric. But the
Right has
used homosexuality overtly in its propaganda, so our silence comes off
as
hiding and shame. Historically, every campaign that has relied on the
closet
strategy to fight anti-gay measures has lost. Most important, such
closemouthed
campaigns cannot reach out adequately to gay and lesbian people in the
affected
areas. We do not register these people to vote, and we do not help them
participate in the process of political rebellion.
Organizations
such as the Lesbian Avengers have already run a grass roots organizing
project
in Maine, and we are now preparing a few more for the November
elections. Other
gay and lesbian groups are also gearing up for the fight. This is
something
that we can all participate in—with or without existing organizations.
We need
to create our own Freedom Summer, in which gay and lesbian people,
especially
young people, travel across the country to join local communities in
fighting
anti-gay measures. We must not be tempted by Washington’s false
promises to
abandon our brothers and sisters on the front line. We need to act town
by
town, county by county, in hand-to-hand combat with the religious Right.
Finally,
there is another battle we must wage, one we have put off for 25 years
because
it is the most daunting task we have ever faced. The fact is, lesbians
and gays
and people with AIDS have stood consistently alone. We have not
received the
political and emotional support we deserve from our neighbors,
families, and
co-workers. No matter how we differ from each other, most lesbians and
gays
have been shamefully treated at some point, and many of us have been
abandoned
by our families. They have allowed us to live with fewer rights and
protections
than they enjoy, and they have failed to mobilize on our behalf. In
fact, they
are often our toughest and most painful opposition. We keep this as our
last
secret, something we discuss with each other but never bring into the
public
discourse.
As always
when we come forward as individuals, we are pathologized and dismissed.
Perhaps
if we come collectively, the initial reaction will be the same. But the
process
strengthens us and provides the sense of entitlement and determination
for
justice that we need and deserve.
Sarah Schulman, a playwright and novelist, is adapting Isaac Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story, for the stage.
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