The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  S: But I think that that position is much more palatable than a defense of a community-based culture, and a rejection of privatized family units on a reproductive model. That's what they don't want to hear…. What they do want to hear…

  AS: And that's what they love to hear. Gay people saying that. Because it just means that gay people don't want to be part of society, and they are very happy with that. There is nothing the mainstream likes more than some person standing up and saying, “We gay people reject all that you stand for.” They love that. That keeps us where we belong as far as they are concerned.

  S: I don't know, I watch my friends who are having children, now, you know. The lesbian baby boom. And suddenly their families who rejected them for twenty years are welcoming them back in because they are fitting some kind of model of motherhood. You know there has been…

  AS: You want them to stop doing that?

  S: You said they reject us wanting to enter the society on their terms. I say, no—the more we resemble their ideas of how we should behave…

  AS: It's a human model. It's not a heterosexual monopoly. It is a human goal—to define ourselves by where we've been instead of where we are going is demeaning to gay people. I think I certainly don't. I'm not out there to win a popularity contest. Even if you despise everything I've ever written, you can't say I've sought out popularity.

  S: You've gotten a lot of approval from mainstream culture.

  AS: If that's true, then why do my books sell to the gay community?

  S: Your books? I don't know your sales exactly, but you probably sell around thirty-five thousand copies. That is the top-out for gay male books. Did you know that? I've been in the gay book business for fifteen years and I can tell you that that is the limit above which almost no one speaking to gay people can go.

  AS: But that does mean some gay people are buying my books.

  S: But it is the same amount of gay and straight people combined who are buying other people's books. You claim to represent this huge majority, but your sales are entirely within the traditional framework of people who support gay male writing. It's the gay market. I read your book but not because I agree with you.

  AS: [laughs] I haven't been selected by anybody. All I've done is write and think and go out there.

  S: But other people do that too. And they don't have the same access. You know that, right?

  AS: I don't know that. I think anybody can have access. I didn't come with any particular, you know, privilege. I don't understand what that means. Anybody who can speak cogently and coherently and can write well can have access, period.

  S: Okay.

  AS: And the notion that someone is somehow selecting you because of some sinister cabal is absurd. And you keep referring to extreme leftists as “the community.” [laughs] They're not the community. They are not. They represent tiny fractions of gay people in this country. We know from exit polls that 33 percent of gay people voted Republican in 1998. Imagine that's underreporting. Forty percent are voting Republican. Are they not the community? Where do they come from?

  S: Okay.

  AS: They are the people who are being marginalized by the old elites. The old gay elites who want to keep their power and are losing it.

  S: What power?

  AS: The power to define who is gay or not.

  S: All those people did was give their lives to building a movement that made it possible for people like you to come out.

  AS: Nonsense.

  S: Oh, come on.

  AS: [laughs] I came out because I came out.

  S: No, a social context was created in which you could come out.

  AS: Believe me, I should be able to say why I came out. The existence of an extreme left wing of gay people as the representation of gay people prevented me from coming out. It prevents other people from coming out, because they do not feel that that is them. In fact, if they have to be quote unquote queer, then they're not going to come out. In fact, the establishment of these left-wing elites actually impedes the possibility of gay people living fulfilled lives. It keeps them back in the ghettos. In my view, the gay movement was hijacked in the late seventies, in the seventies.

  S: By street activists.

  AS: Yes.

  S: So, in your view, Stonewall was the downfall of the gay movement.

  AS: Yes, it was definitely a diversion from the capacity of gay integration into our society.

  S: Let me ask you one final question. Exactly how do you think change gets made?

  AS: It gets made every time a human being stands up in whatever context for a principle that makes sense to them. It doesn't have to be in a movement or politics. In the words of Robert Kennedy, when one person stands up against injustice, in whatever way it is.

  Even twelve years later, this interview is stunning on so many levels. It is an illustration of classic supremacy ideology. First, Mr. Sullivan does not understand that he is being elevated by a structure of domination. He believes that the selection system is neutral and merit based, and that he naturally rises to the top because of his superiority. He sees no relationship between the content of his argument and the reward of access. The second, most indelible element of supremacy ideology is also present— feeling oppressed by being asked to be accountable. He is offended that I think it notable that he opposes abortion beyond the first trimester. He is angry that his opposition to Roe v. Wade would be of concern. He laughs repeatedly and says that I am “PC”—the classic supremacy response to demands of accountability—because I don't want a corporate media-appointed representative of gay people who is antiabortion. The third, ever-present element of supremacy ideology is the false construction of powerful people as victimized by their subordinates. He claims that gay Republicans who voted for George H. W. Bush are oppressed by those of us who created all the foundational structures of service and acknowledgement that form the base of the gay community: the newspapers, the advocacy organizations, the activist movement, the social services, the daring to have essential public conversations even if they are met with disrespect—so that the basic paradigms of our existence can be articulated. And that he himself is oppressed by out gays, that it is us, and not homophobes or his family who kept him in the closet. He is offended at being asked to be accountable and he is incapable of thinking about himself in an analytical way, claiming that change comes from vague individual gestures without context. And finally, history has proven that gay marriage is dramatically more acceptable to the tolerance model than any true equality concept of distinct culture or community-based structure. In the end though, the fact that Mr. Sullivan is still alive and healthy is a direct consequence of the AIDS activist movement, and owes nothing to folks who, like himself, claim to “not be a group person.”

  Just for the sake of historical corrective, I want to excerpt a bit here from my 2007 interview in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review with Marcia Gallo about her book different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. I certainly don't want anyone coming away from my book without an accurate concept of who these early radicals were and how they built the movement in groups. These principled men and women made the sacrifice of being the shock troops willing to be out—they created the context for others, in the future, to become openly gay television pundits, despite gay Republicans.

  THE DAUGHTER OF THE DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS: INTERVIEW WITH MARCIA GALLO

  S: It was fascinating to discover in your book that the first lesbian organization was interracial from the first day in 1955.

  MG: There were interracial couples in DOB [Daughters of Bilitis], so white women were dealing with women of color on an intimate level. It was always a struggle. Some of them tried really hard to ensure interracial involvement and some of them didn't, but the consciousness was there. Which was one of the reasons I fell in love with these folks. I think that the idea of racial discrimination was very understood on a gut level, it wasn't theoretical. They were infl
uenced by people like Eleanor Roosevelt and A. Philip Randolph. They paid attention to racial struggles. They borrowed from the civil rights movement over and over again.

  But if you actually read their publication, The Ladder, it's not there. They took on race only as an example of a way for lesbians and gay men to assert their claims for equal rights. So, you don't see stories about the March on Washington per se, you see references to learning from the civil rights movement. They were the first to put women of color on the cover, but only three or four times in fourteen years. And the one African American president of DOB, in 1963—she was the first person of color to lead a gay or lesbian civil rights group—so far as I know remained pretty low key. So, fifty years of trying to deal with racism on a personal as well as organizational level. But that they struggled was what was so fascinating to me. Not that they were righteous. They would engage in these critical conversations about practice as well as politics. About racism, about separatism versus working with men, about trans issues.

  S: I love your perspective. You write about regular people who changed the world and ask about their various relationships to power. This is how a few generations of lesbians and feminists were trained to think. Yet in the contemporary moment, this point of view is most often mocked. If you think of dominant culture characterizations of a lesbian perspective, asking who has the power is considered to be a drag, humorless, ideological. Special interest, instead of as an organic, enlightened point of view.

  MG: Feminism is still subversive. It's still scary. Feminism means humanity moving forward and addressing inequalities. And that women lead. Independent women who do not need men for their emotional, physical, and economic well being are scary still. Even those of us who love men. I think that the fact that we strive to be independent is frightening because we challenge all the paradigms. When we're at our best we challenge the way power gets constructed. We challenge how knowledge is transmitted. We are just too powerful, too uncontrollable, too queer.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Gentrification of Our Literature

  The first gay book I ever saw was called Cycle Suck. It was on a shelf at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore on Christopher Street in 1975, next to some mimeographed pamphlets with titles like “The Woman-Identified Woman.” From the beginning, I have always known that this is as it should be. Separating distinctions between the sexually explicit and the politically necessary would never make sense. Yet, as I am writing this in 2009, a scandal erupts—first online and then in the mainstream print media. Amazon.com, the mail order bookseller mega-monster, got caught in what it called a “glitch.” In response to right-wing and Christian readers, Amazon removed books with sexual content from its ranking system, thereby ensuring that erotic and pornographic books would not be able to get on best-seller lists. Either deliberately or inadvertently, gay and lesbian books were included in the ban and so were automatically removed from the Amazon ranking system. This included some editions of all of my books. The response of the gay community was tepid at best. A number of spokespeople called upon by the mainstream media or speaking out on Facebook and various blogs were “shocked” and “outraged” (see above responses to the passing of Proposition 8). They couldn't believe this was happening to them. The event was treated as an anomaly, irregular and extreme. When it was made clear that these exclusions included James Baldwin novels, the outrage grew. How could “literature” be confused with pornography?

  For me, Amazon's actions were consistent with the way gay and lesbian literature has been contextualized in the United States. It is the surprise of some gay people and the pretend “mistake” of a media/industry that consistently marginalizes our work as a matter of course, that constitute the gentrified approach. As disenfranchised people often do the dirty work of the culture, we—gay, lesbian, bisexual (not yet transgendered, but that phenomena is inevitable) writers—gentrify ourselves. In the past, power brokers would not pretend that gay books were included when they were in fact excluded, and therefore susceptible gay people would not think that their work was included when it was in fact demeaned. The public explanation has changed, but the reality remains the same. The truth—that queer, sexually truthful literature is seen as pornographic, and is systematically kept out of the hands and minds of most Americans, gay and straight—has been replaced with a false story of a nonexistent integration and a fantasized equality, with no basis in lived fact. Truth is replaced by falsity, the false claim that the dominant culture writer does not have profound structural advantages replaces the truth that being out in one's work, sexually honest, and truthful about the lived homosexual experience guarantees that one's work will never be seen for its actual merit. The gentrified mind becomes unable to see lived experience because it is being bombarded by false stories. Even we, the practitioners, cannot understand the truthful positioning of our literature. In short, to be acceptable, literature cannot be sexually authentic. And, even though this is a requirement for approval, we look at the highly conditional and restricted approval as a sign of success instead of the failure that it actually is.

  In my own experience, the equation of queer literature with pornography is undeniable. Yes, this includes the banning of condom ads on television. Of course, in gay time, “recent” quickly disappears because so many participants are dead, and others have been silenced. It's hard to have collective memory when so many who were “there” are not “here” to say what happened. Once the recent past is remembered, then the Amazon “glitch” becomes all too consistent. So, here is just one example exhumed from memory.

  In 1994, a coalition of feminists and right-wing politicians in Canada passed a tariff code called Butler that was designed to restrict pornographic production. Instead, it was applied in such a way that it allowed officials at Canada customs to systematically detain and destroy gay and lesbian materials at the border. A gay bookstore in Vancouver, Little Sisters, had so much of its product seized at the border that it could no longer operate. As a result, Little Sisters decided to sue the Canadian government.

  My friend John Preston had just died of AIDS. He was the author of some iconic leather and S/M novels, many with literary bent. His novel Mister Benson had been serialized in Drummer magazine, and created a subcultural phenomena. Men would wear T-shirts asking Mister Benson? Or asserting Mister Benson! While he had a less explicit series called Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, John was perhaps best known for his book I Once Had a Master. Since he was newly dead, I was asked by the Little Sisters legal team to come to Vancouver and testify on John's behalf. And because I was very clear in my opposition to state repression of gay materials, I had no problem agreeing.

  The Canadian courthouse was quite shocking to this New Yorker. No metal detectors, no armed guards at rapt attention in every corner. The building looked like a Marriott hotel, with lovely plants, comfortable seating, and a coffee bar. But do not be fooled, the Canadian government proved to be a vicious animal with a demure exterior.

  Tensions were high in the courtroom the day I arrived. The trial had been going on for weeks and many writers had testified. Patrick Califia, who at the time had presented as female with the name Pat, had been on the witness stand the Friday before and had done so well that the Crown had refused to cross-examine him. Interestingly, “Pat”—who was known as a butch leather dyke—had taking the extreme step of wearing a brown corduroy dress, which impressed me. We were, after all, trying to win. I, and I assume many of the women testifying, had agonized over what to wear on the stand. The only nice dress I owned in 1994 was black velvet—kind of a parody of a dress, and something to be worn to the opera. Anyway, I wore pants. Becky Ross, a Canadian academic, testified before me. She wore a dress, but I think she always wore a dress. Anyway, the Crown had been pretty hard on her, asking her to define “fisting.”

  John's books were being persecuted on five counts. The questions I had to address were: Is it violent? Is it degrading? Is it dehumanizing? Does it have literary merit? Is it soc
ially redeeming? If I had had my way, I would have argued that even if the books were violent, degrading, et cetera, they still should be available. However, Canadian courts had already ruled on that question, so my only remaining strategy for protecting his books was to “prove” that Butler should not be applied to him. Not that the law was wrong.

  So many years later, this is the same conundrum gay writers faced with the Amazon exclusion. Mark Doty, Larry Kramer, and many other principled gay writers noted online and in print that books like Giovanni's Room and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit were being falsely labeled as pornography. Once again we were forced by a state or corporate apparatus to claim that our literature was different from that dirty stuff, instead of part and parcel with it. But it is the homosexuality that got the books marginalized in the first place. Not their sentence structure.

  If my editor will permit me, I would like to reproduce my court affidavit here. It may be the only chance most of you have to learn something about John, and that would please me greatly.

  TESTIMONY ON BEHALF OF JOHN PRESTON, VANCOUVER, 1994

  I, Sarah Miriam Schulman, have had an opportunity to review John Preston's books I Once Had a Master and Entertainment for a Master. After consulting the legal principles by which the Supreme Court of Canada determines whether a book is obscene, I can say without reservation that these books are not obscene.

  The first question is whether or not these books “contain explicit sex with violence.” It seems clear that there is no physical violation of characters, only mutually consensual sexual relationships. Furthermore, none of these consensual sex acts result in physical impairment or injury. Nor is there any threat of physical violence in his work, only the pretense of such threat as an essential part of the fantasy surrounding these mutually consensual sex acts. At all times the characters are aware that they are participating in a sexual/emotional interaction by their own choice and motivated by their own desires. Never do the characters appear to be victims of violence or in fear of actual violence. The only violation is a social kind experienced by gay men who are shunned or ostracized by the dominant culture purely because of their homosexuality.