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
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."
A few spoke about the need to express our anger. I replied that they could do it on their own time. Once they put on a marshalling band, their responsibility was not to their own feelings but to others. If civil disobedience was on the agenda, everyone had to agree beforehand. Those involved needed to be properly trained and ready for possible consequences. To do otherwise would be left opportunism of the worst sort and seriously damaging to the movement.
The greater the class inequality, the harder it was for the glue of sexual orientation to hold community together. The greater the inequality, the harder to establish the critical mass necessary to produce a movement.
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.
While the steering committee was now elected with an eye to ensuring the strong presence of people living with AIDS, at general meetings there could be no guarantee that HIV positive people would be in a majority. In such an open forum, whoever talked loudest and longest would dominate. Given the fragile state of health of many of our positive members, long debates at interminable meetings would mean they would likely leave before decisions were made.
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.
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.
The cultural shift was beneficial to the vast majority of LGBT people in Canada. But for those for whom homophobia was the only major barrier to acceptance, it was especially beneficial. Such people, now embraced by the nation, returned the embrace, and emerged as the homonationalist leadership. Early community leadership was a quasi-criminal class defending itself against the state. The new leadership was a propertied class, seeking state protection. Those without significant property and with little market value became more alienated.
Queer demonstrates the energy, enthusiasm, and optimism of youth, but its deep distrust of institutionalization, its hyper-egalitarian rejection of any organizational hierarchy, and its distain for more normative and mainstream politics often results in volatile short-term efforts without long-term goals or strategies. Queer represents a rejection of the status quo, but has been so far unable to imagine a solution to it, and its politics tends to be one of gestures rather than organizing towards concrete goals.
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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