Manifesto Destiny

Our discussion in class today, arguably one of our liveliest, was in some ways a very function of the manifesto we read: Queers Read This/I Hate Straights. By nature and design, a manifesto is meant to trigger strong feelings, and the “anonymous queers” who composed this particular piece of agitprop (agitation propaganda) clearly meant to evoke strong passions on two fronts, or as we said in class, polyvocally. The first audience would be gays and lesbians, both the radical elements of the community and those less so. The invocation of shared memories of alienation, anger, hurt, and fear are meant to draw the circle of queer identity broadly. The secondary audience, but no less important for dramatic impact, would be heterosexuals, and not, as J. noted in class, those who couldn’t care less for LGBT politics, but those heterosexuals engaged on some level with the community, broadly construed.

As M. also noted, the broadside is not meant to function as a workable or even convincing program of action. Rather, it is meant to shift consciousness, enable the “clicks” that lead to something else. The desire of Queer Nation, and the anonymous queer authors of the manifesto, hoped these clicks would lead to greater radicality in the community. In fact, whether or not that was actually the case is hard to measure, not the least of which is the brevity of organizational life span of Queer Nation itself (1990-1992/1993), but also because the larger effects of these types of social discourses are very difficult to trace, although it is the perspective of the course that the queer moment, or queer nationalism, or whatever you want to call it, was the opening for a period of questioning and debate that at once recast old debates in new garb (Mattachine radicals v. reformists, DOB v. Butches and Femmes, GLF v. GAA, etc), as well as signaled a new period of maturity in the LGBT community, in terms of both interior and exterior critique and a vociferous politics of debate that persisted through the 1990s. Some of this work we shall be reading in the next couple of weeks, and by way of example, Carla Trujillo’s piece assigned for Friday, is reflective somewhat of the growth in what counts as LGBTQ, in Trujillo’s case race, ethnicity, and cultural parameters of gender specific to the Mexican American community.

In some ways, the anonymous queer authors of Queers Read This/I Hate Straights break some conventional rules of the manifesto genre. But a clear understanding of the function of polemic might be useful here. The polemic is meant to be profane, to challenge conventional knowledge, and uncover, if we wanted to read it post-structurally, ideological tendencies and themes which, as we have noted before, prefer to be invisible. Again, the work of Louis Althusser might also prove to be valuable here: how does the ideology of heteronormativity “hail” us, call and command us? (This concept is also known as interpellation) Heteronormativity interpellates ("calls to us") us invisibly, through concepts such as the natural, the organic, the biological, the normal.

Interpellation is one reason why public displays of affection (PDAs) between lesbians and gay men are so shocking: it ruptures our understanding of the normal and natural order in which we participate, mostly unknowingly. A good way to measure this is to ask yourself a question, dependent on your subject position: If you are straight/heterosexual, what did you think or feel the first time you saw LGBT intimacy? Not just the body or bodies of LGBT people, but kissing, handholding, or whatever. Alternatively, if you are LGBT, what did you feel the first time you performed or revealed that intimacy in public (if ever)? The frisson, the thrill, risk, danger, disgust, or shock, is the effect of ideology revealing itself. But we have no language for such moments.

The anonymous queers are, to a certain extent, trying to give us language for that ideological process of both invisibility and “hailing.” This recognition necessarily involves violence, as it also involves ripping people out of their ideological cocoons. This is not to say that such efforts cannot go too far: ideological zeal can lead to some bad decisions. Outing as a practice of queer nationalists was deeply controversial for many LGBT people, for instance, as coming out is typically regarded by many people as a private, personal choice. (Whether this is true or not is open to debate) Similarly, polemic and manifesto have been used to ill effect in most revolutionary struggle, where a politics of “the ends justify the means,” borrowed from the French Revolution, has resulted in much human misery, in particular over the course of the social and political revolutions of the 20th century (Soviet, Stalinism, Nazism, the Khmer Rouge, decolonial nationalist revolutions in the developing world) and those of the 21st that borrow from it (Hugo Chavez and Chavismo come immediately to mind).

If we stick, however, to consciousness, the role and function of agitation propaganda, and “clicks,” Queers Read This/I Hate Straights does trigger a certain nausea through polemic, which is precisely the point. What LGBT people (and, for that matter, heterosexual readers) do with that nausea (I am thinking specifically of the Spanish word asco here) is, in the end, up to them.