“Let’s call this song exactly what it is”
An exploration of how we reached this dark precipice:
There have always been people in our LGBT community who chose to erase the central and pivotal role that those who could not or would not easily assimilate into a white, heterosexually organized society have played in our collective and halting journey towards liberation.
No group has suffered more from this erasure than our trans siblings, who birthed the gay rights movement by not backing down in the face of police violence at Compton Cafeteria in 1966 and The Stonewall Inn in 1969.
But in the decades after those watershed events, many cis, white gay men in particular were more than content to ignore the ongoing intersectional struggles in their own community, as they used their white social capital to create privilege-adjacent lives by asserting that they weren’t a threat to the heterosexual order the way that those on the margins were, that they weren’t dangerous or subversive like those “others” whose refusal to assimilate into hierarchical patriarchy might prevent their own assimilation and acceptance.
Indeed most of their mainstream activism in the years after the AIDS crisis was dedicated to ensuring the passage of gay marriage, rather than trying to make sure the needs of the full community in its plurality took center in our activism as a whole.
But now, the folks who wanted to close the gates of the picket fence behind them are genuinely surprised that the right wing is fomenting a reactionary panic aimed at folks who fall into communities represented by the other three letters in the acronym, not just the “t.”
People like Andrew Sullivan, who thought that they could make common cause with posturing bigots like Christopher Rufo, a man who has baldly admitted to not only creating the utterly fabricated moral panic around the teaching of Critical Race Theory but also promulgating cynical and harmful stereotypes of contagion and coercion to accuse queer people, and even their allies, of being “groomers,” are being forced to confront that as gay men, they were merely being tolerated in Conservative spaces when that was expedient, and their desire to repackage themselves as “palatable” gays didn’t change the underlying contempt the Right Wing had for them (and all of us) all along.
Folks like stock footage young Republican ( but gay!) Brad Polumbo and his ilk don’t even seem to have figured out that their purchase on the Conservative dais might even be precarious. Useful idiots don’t usually grasp that their utility might recede when reactionary politics successfully gain even partial mainstream acceptance.
It remains to be seen if all these anti-trans, anti-gay bills churned out by reactionary think tanks, funded by dark money and animated by darker political calculations, will pass, or remain on the books, but as a child of the eighties and a person who came out in the nineties, I have to say I did not anticipate this level of legislative and judicial animus to re-emerge so full-throated in my forties.
Unfortunately, given the lack of significant societal pushback when the right wing began to mobilize suspicion around trans folks (with the assistance of white gay conservatives who courted token attention and white lesbian “gender critics” who fecklessly laundered right wing talking points ) an environment was created where it was not only possible, but even politically advantageous, to revive revolting and endangering tropes that people like Anita Bryant were pushing as far back as the seventies.
After all, Chris Rufo recently got a flattering “outdoorsy” photo of himself in the New York Times, which seems determined to “both sides” us into meekly accepting an alarming and growing fascist threat as long as they can still sell ad space for Rolexes in the Sunday magazine. And thus, unfortunately, he was given a chance to rhetorically obfuscate his embrace of stochastic terrorism in the paper of record for his clicks and donations business model.
The tacit permission Trump’s wrecking ball approach to the “bully pulpit” gave bigots in general cannot be overstated, but his total lack of interest in policy and actual governance produced a power vacuum in regards to judicial appointments that allowed folks like Leonard Leo to completely remake the composition of the court in just four years, as Trump’s only interest in the matter was to be able to brag about having “beautiful judges” at his rallies.
That a cohort of radical Catholics in cahoots with the long-ago politically radicalized Evangelicals had a rubber stamp to relitigate their long dissatisfaction with Vatican II, and pretty much all social progress since the sixties in general, could redetermine the ideological make up of the highest court is the product of a long game played by Machiavellian but patient folks like Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove and Leo himself, who long ago acknowledged his ideas were unpopular and would need to be foisted on a presumably resistant majority, but the final and most essential catalytic element for a wholly politicized Supreme Court came in the person of Donald Trump, a man so averse to deliberation and devoid of character that he ordered his judges off the Federalist list like they were fast food.
2.
Which leaves us in a place where with the almost certain overturn of the Roe vs. Wade decision, any subsequent ruling based on the right to “privacy” is in the crosshairs of a now inherently and very purposefully politicized Supreme Court.
While it has actually been a relief to watch the “groomer” rhetoric lose much of its steam in a short amount of time, (OK, Groomer?!?) and while claims of pedophilia are rhetorically florid to begin with, (especially coming from the party of Dennis Hastert, Matt Gaetz and Roy Moore) it still took an impassioned speech from Michigan State Representative Mallory McMorrow going viral, and Elise Stefanik’s failed attempt to run this hateful rhetoric up the food chain with her “pedo grifter” tweet to de-escalate what was really only just one front in the recently reconscripted but ongoing war against the right to “privacy” in general and the LGBT community in particular.
It is oppressive (to echo Panti Bliss) to have your humanity up for debate in the first place, but for our community to be put in even more present danger just so self-serving pretenders to the Trump throne like Ron Desantis or Greg Abbott can score points in the arena of bigotry is particularly galling. That we are in a political moment where such posturing is not readily condemned by a strong majority feels hopelessly regressive and actively dangerous.
Thanks to decades of activism and the bravery of people like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, Danny Sotomayor and so many others, who fought against and repudiated the bigotry and fear directed at us as a community, (in most cases at great cost) LGBTQ youth in the last couple of decades have had the possibility of coming to terms with their sexuality or gender identity and coming out in a markedly less hostile environment.
3.
It is telling that the sponsor of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Dennis Baxley, openly stated on the Florida Senate floor that he is very bothered that gay or trans students might feel suddenly like “they’re a celebrity” if they come out as gay or transgender, and then bemoaned that “where before they were a nobody.”
And of course he wants these kids to feel like unprotected “nobodies, because self realization and autonomy are inherently hostile to the project of hierarchical patriarchy, which quite evidently feels very much under assault these days.
In the nineties, the somewhat laughable phrase “alternative lifestyle” was used to describe gay life, but there is a an actual, real danger to entrenched societal hegemony in the unapologetic presentation of any kind of “alternative” to the established power structure.
Putting it quite simply, anyone thriving outside of the heterosexually organized, patriarchal hierarchy is a direct threat to its diminishing stranglehold on the American imagination, and that is exactly why its beneficiaries need to subjugate women and use whatever force necessary to reestablish the closet as a carceral space, because our relative freedom and their continued hierarchical power cannot coexist politically.
This is why reactionary politics has gained such an unfortunate and perilous foothold right now. If they’re going to launch a “Holy War,” a majority of the Country is de facto going to have to be construed as the enemy.
It is very much worth noting that the January 6th insurrection could have, and almost did succeed.
Reverse engineering a non-pluralistic, minority ruled fascist state is the last and only option the forces of patriarchy and recidivism have at their disposal at this point.
This is why the GOP has no platform— they’ve eschewed any pretense of persuasion, and intend to take back the full measure of their unearned hegemony by force, which also necessitates the preliminary elimination of any and all gun control.
Without stacked courts and rigorous suppression of every kind, the hegemony that white patriarchy has long held is vanishing, and since the loss of actual or even just perceived power is terrifying to these people, without them suppressing critical thinking, “hardening” all public spaces and making the teaching of history or pluralism illegal, they’ve already lost.
We just happen to be in their way, but if we don’t “call the song exactly what is,” we’re going to be whistling it on our way to the firing squad, and they’ve made it more than clear they are ready to pull the trigger.