A Queer Politic for LGBTQ Pride
We deserve so much more... some reflections on running my small town's pride
Mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations who latched on to same-sex marriage and abandoned health equity campaigns will continue to disavow queer politics for assimilationist ‘power,’ all while claiming to represent us. The queer activists calling on ‘queer’ companies to actually follow a queer politic are right. Stonewall was a riot against police brutality, a shaking up.
It is not lost of me that the same nation that keeps us in poverty, denies healthcare, uses incarceration as a violent “solution” to public health needs, and communicates in a million ways to our kids that they are better off dead, is the same nation funding Israeli genocide against Palestinians. It is too easy to say that Biden is spineless and that Trump would be worse. This nation’s whole mode of operation is fucked.
Many of us queers are settling for celebrations of visibility, trying to not get hatecrimed, trying to survive. We deserve so much more.
[See Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” and Dean Spade’s “What’s Wrong with Trans Rights?” ]
I am in charge of my town’s pride festival. It is an extension of my (unpaid) job at a community center (many thoughts on nonprofit exploitation of college student labor, for another time). The center is not queer in name, although our reputation is extremely queer. I’ve been especially feeling the need to make an LGBTQ+ celebration a reflection of queer abolitionist politics. However, the cultural and structural limitations on what this pride can be are well… a lot.
There will come a time when pride is separate from this community center. When that comes, political decisions will reflect on the organizers and not the community organization. It is useful for this community center to remain palatable so parents of all politics feel comfortable enough to let their kids attend. Particularly because rural queer youth are in such a state of power precarity, I am hesitant to make a big anti-apartheid statement at our Pride unless the teens want it. I do not want my political actions to be misused to threaten a kid’s access to this crucial community space. Politically flying under the radar makes it easier for us to support our kids.
Maybe you read the above paragraph and think it’s a bunch of excuses and baloney. Even as I write it I can’t tell if I believe it or if the hypothetical parents will have this as the final straw, and not the fact that we even do Pride in the first place.
Also, teens are smart. If they want to come to the space and their parents don’t want them to, they will come anyway.
But small-town politics are weird, and more people are impacted by this center than just those who work there and use our programming. We don’t currently get a lot of conservative attention. It would be nice to stay that way.
Maybe the larger priority within that whole paragraph was the condition of “unless the teens want it.” These teens are wonderfully political, the majority eons more progressive than I was at their age (which doesn’t say much considering high school me thought that the Green New Deal was communist and bad lmao). I am curious how to train up teens from having political ideas to being able to use hard skills for political gain.
What to do with seemingly conflicting priorities? How to teach multiple things at once? I want these kids to understand healthy relationships and know how good relationships feel in their bodies. I want them to have critical media consumption skills and for their analysis to be multi-faceted. I want them to know how to budget, and how to cook a nourishing meal. I want them to know how to say no, I want them to know what they want to say yes to. I want our dropouts to get GEDs and be connected to stable employment and housing. I want our unhoused kids to have safe homes. I want our schools to be safe places to learn.
I feel a lot of grief. Almost constantly. I am frustrated by gay politics that don’t honor the multiply marginalized status of queer people, particularly poor rural youth. I want to co-create a pride that allows these kids to be held in their complexity.
I don’t know what that means for form, function, programming, or politic. I just never want these kids to ever feel shame for who they are or where they come from.
feels like your stuck between a rock and a hard place... and I am remembering this rad quote that you sent me from INCITE!
“Despite the precarious and exploitative conditions, non-profit workers do more than simply reproduce the logics and further the harms of the non-profit industrial complex. The priorities and agenda of non-profit organizations are often set by workers with political commitments and values that resist the assumptions of the NPIC and subvert or manipulate the non-profit form to serve radical commitments. This can include centering the most vulnerable or marginalized members of the community through internal structures and mobilizing resources to support this work. Non-profit workers also educate funders and advocate for policy change, two channels through which they shape the broader conditions within which non-profits do their work. Such work exceeds service provision or programmatic activities, claiming space and resources for radical and transformative projects. [Foreward by Sony Munshi and Craig Willse, pp. xix]"
I am also, sadly, coming to terms with the reality that all who try to do this work in non-profits, academia, or other palatable venues will always ... and this gave me hope... I leave reading this with new questions I can ask myself as I navigate these muddy waters.
Hi Elio–thank you for this thought-provoking account of your work dancing between the need to craft a space for radical change and the foreseeable pushback of diving head-first into the kind of organizing we envision. I was struck by what you name as a "state of power precarity." Yet forging queer coalitions, as Cohen outlines, might our best shot at reshaping said (sad) reality. I look forward to hearing more about your journey!