Today’s discussion of Adam and Queer nationalism and activism at the dawn of the nineties to a certain extent hinges on how much you believe Adam as an interlocutor. What I think is compelling about his dismissal of Queer Nation as style politics is, one hand, the traditional leftist suspicion (inherited from late 19th century and early 20th century Marxism) of aesthetics as bourgeois preoccupation, and on the other a clear need to undermine Queer nationalist activism as not engaging with the mechanisms of the state in a beneficial way. But as one student remarked today, the true question is were LGBT mainstream organizations doing that critical engagement, and if so, why Queer Nation? The implication here being that Queer Nation does not happen in a vacuum, but is in response to some crisis.
The unfortunate polemic in Adam mars what is, in some ways, an interesting argument of the progression of movements and thought streams in LGBT America during the eighties that leads us to Queer nationalism. Adam wants you, the reader, to follow his point and agree with him, that Queer Nation and the politics that flowed from it were all surface. But the simple fact of the matter is that Queer Nation and the activism it engaged with represented something more tangible than a bunch of lesbians and gay men who wanted to wear ugly leather jackets and scream outside of government offices.
As a student remarked in class today, the rage of the HIV crisis was the fount of the larger critical perspective of needed action to combat homophobia and political inertia. By emerging out of the leading HIV activist organizations (ACT-UP) and working in that vein, Queer nationalists were attempting a course correction that, as noted in the last post and in class, implicated both LGBT organizing and mainstream heterodominant culture.
The question of whether appeals to state benevolence on LGBT civil rights questions have, of course, a long history, dating back to the original discussions in Mattachine over self-consciousness and legal confrontation, or the regime of experts. To a certain extent, Queer Nation deploys Harry Hay’s arguments on identity and pride based in difference from heterosexuals to form its politics. Adam’s rather ham-fisted disavowal of Queer Nation and queer activism of the early 1990s says more about his particular political perspectives and proclivities than anything, per se, about Queer Nation.
And to return to the question of style, it may be important for us to interrogate our suspicion of style politics. The Left has maintained a bias against “style” that in many ways one could argue was as much a product of political and social homophobia as any tangible political argument on bourgeois habits. Historically, LGBT people have used style to differentiate themselves from heterosexuals. We have discussed some of the politics of style in Butch/Femme/Kiki debates, and of course the widespread social stereotype of gay men as being concerned with fashion, looks, and home decoration (the hideous Queer Eye television series being just one co-opted example). Yet, we have also talked about how Butch/Femme/Kiki discussions, or the rise of the gay clone, were as political as they were sartorial, and reflected active and often contentious debates between lesbians and gay men on representation, self-presentation, and our relationship to the heterosexual world. Adam curiously reproduces what is arguably a deeply homophobic loathing in his simplistic dismissal of Queer Nation on the basis, almost exclusively, of style.
Regardless of the spinning tops of academics, the tangible effects both of LGBT rage and the questioning it produces proved to be more long lasting and influential, in the end, than just style politics. Where Adam may be getting it right, however, is in the increasing diversification of LGBT politics, in the face of the nagging desire for unity, that would spawn a series of discursive crises in the 1990s, such as outing, gays in the military, and gay marriage, which would split the LGBT community as much as provoked the ire and ungenerous attention of heterosexual America.
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