Queer Progress
From Homophobia to Homonationalism
McCaskell, Tim
Publisher: Between the Lines, Toronto, Canada
Year Published: 2016
Pages: 510pp Price: $39.95 ISBN: 978-1-77113-278-7
Library of Congress Number: HQ76.8.C3M323 2016 Dewey: 306.76'609713
Resource Type: Book
Cx Number: CX20165
A political memoir by a leading gay rights and AIDS activist.
Abstract:
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Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: How did we get here from there?
Part I A New World in Birth
1 Invisible
2 Getting Noticed
3 Noticed
4 Shifting Sands
Part II The Rise of the Right
5 Onslaught
6 Sex and Death
7 Plague and Panic
Part III Walking With the Devil
8 By Any Means Necessary
9 Great Expectations
10 Seduction
Part IV Model Minority
11 Courtship
12 We're Not in Kansas Anymore
13 Homonationalism
Conclusion Looking Back, Looking Forward
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Notes
Index
From Publisher:
How did a social movement evolve from a small group of young radicals to the incorporation of LGBTQ communities into full citizenship on the model of Canadian multiculturalism?
Tim McCaskell contextualizes his work in gay, queer, and AIDS activism in Toronto from 1974 to 2014 within the shift from the Keynesian welfare state of the 1970s to the neoliberal economy of the new millennium. A shift that saw sexuality — once tightly regulated by conservative institutions— become an economic driver of late capitalism, and sexual minorities celebrated as a niche market. But even as it promoted legal equality, this shift increased disparity and social inequality. Today, the glue of sexual identity strains to hold together a community ever more fractured along lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the celebration of LGBTQ inclusion pinkwashes injustice at home and abroad.
Queer Progress tries to make sense of this transformation by narrating the complexities and contradictions of forty years of queer politics in Canada’s largest city.
Excerpts:
After the Second World War, capitalist democracies like Canada largely adopted Keynesian economics and Keynesian-inspired social liberalism. In a society where class disparities decreased, identity politics could emerge. The Keynesian social safety net provided a cushion for early lesbian and gay activists who risked careers and family support by coming out.
There was also a serious re-evaluation of the role of the family. George Smith argued that the idea that the family was the source of gay oppression was "mostly wrong." Talking about "the nuclear family" turned it into a thing (reified it) and attributed to it the power to cause other things. It didn't account for gay oppression under other kinship systems. Nor did it involve an analysis of changing family forms or dynamics under capitalism. Finally, it alienated working class people who often found in their families a refuge from work and the capitalist marketplace.
As time went on, people were talking less about "movement" and more about "community." The existence and visibility of community was itself coming to be seen as a political act.
There seemed to be growing recognition that gay men and lesbians represented "two distinct cultures," and there were as many divisions among lesbians as there were among gay men. But while that might have explained the difficulties in co-operating, it could also be used to justify male sexism and indifference to working together.
For activists, coming out had been the litmus test for commitment to the movement. In another heretical move, Jane Rule gored even that sacred cow, pointing out that the risks involved were very different for different people. While being gay and proud had made "an enormous difference to a generation of urban gay people," for others, "self acceptance can't come from the gay community alone but must include the understanding of parents, husbands, wives, children, co-workers." She warned against using coming out as "moral club to threaten people still in the closet… It is neither true nor kind to suggest that their silence is necessarily part of our oppression."
We had also become a movement that was just as comfortable arguing our case in courtrooms as in the streets, and often more accustomed to cultivating liberal power brokers than working on difficult alliances with other oppressed groups on broader social changes. We were learning to live with immediate, concrete, incremental changes - the next trial, the next court case - rather than dreaming about a fundamental reorganization of society.
At the same tine, George Smith was thinking about identity from a different perspective. He noted that the money government bodies were finally dedicating to AIDS was always within a public health framework. That meant protecting the uninfected (the public) from the infected (us).
We were ethically obliged to show solidarity for people persecuted because they had adopted lesbian or gay identities, but when we did so, we ran the risk of becoming part of the civilizing mission. At times Queer Theory, with its anxieties and insights about the potential contradictory and unintended consequences of any action, seemed a paralyzing influence.
As it spent more and more time attracting dollars, Pride Toronto's role had shifted from putting on a festival for our communities, to delivering LGBT bodies to corporate branding and advertising and helping the city market itself as a queer-friendly tourist destination.
In the context of this increasingly liberal movement, trans people became more assertive, and their stories more aligned with the gay coming-out narrative. Gay rights became about each individual's right to pursue happiness within existing social arrangements; transition, one more individual road to happiness. Finally, as gay Main Street became more comfortable with biological explanations - I was born this way - the argument "I was born in the wrong body" became more acceptable. A clearer distinction began to be made between gender identity and sexual orientation.
The rights-based strategy was remarkably successful in achieving its concrete goals and producing a cultural shift in the historically short period of less than one lifetime. At least some of us had been transformed from a group outside the law to full citizens and an important niche market. But marriage was not only a measure of our acceptance. It was becoming the condition for it. Those who still engaged in less seemly sexual activity, as evidenced by our HIV status, for example, became more vulnerable to state policing.
[W]hile the 1970s radicals drew on a century of socialist analysis and organizing, and imagined their project in the context of fundamental social change, queer's commitment to resisting oppressions has no unifying theory of a different kind of society.
Queer is also rife with contradictions. It is an anti-identity that simultaneously rejects and fetishizes identity. It so values the role of the outsider that, rather than seeing less radical, more normative lesbians and gay men as a constituency to be organized or won over, it more often uses them as a foil to highlight its own political righteousness. Everyone wants to be a radical activist, but no one wants to organize.
We need to tighten up our definition of pinkwashing to distinguish between the cynical deployment of our community for elite purposes, the social effects our celebrations generate, and their potential as a site of struggle.
But solidarity between relatively wealthy folks in the global North and those facing oppression elsewhere is hardly a relationship between equals. Expressions of solidarity can become colonial. The stock solution is that leadership should always reside with the more oppressed side of the equation. In practice, people on that side probably have enough difficulty figuring out their own local strategy and tactics, never mind managing those on the other side of the world. Our movement here didn't really have any idea what it was doing when we started, and there were all sorts of disagreements. Why should we assume it would be different elsewhere?
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