Activism, meet your new friend Branding.

Tim Gill is a wealthy, white, male US citizen. One can only imagine the endless privilege available to someone like him. The fact that he is a wealthy, white, gay male, US citizen of course compromises his access to every privilege extended through institutional patriarchy. However, so many gay men like him, who can hide their difference and maintain their “normalcy” in the boys club, do just that. Maybe Tim Gill did that for awhile, he made his money, a lot of money. But these days the software millionaire has stepped outside the inner circle, in order to reach out, around, up and down, to all those on the fringes who are fighting against marginalization. The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado was founded by Gill in 1996 with the mission of “financially supporting nonprofit organizations that enhance the quality of life in Colorado and promote equality for all people, while highlighting the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. ” The Fund’s policy is to award grants to non profits serving minority and deserving populations, non of them lgbt, with the stipulation that the fund’s name, ‘The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado” always be prominently displayed in their literature. That means supporters of The Latina Initiative, Care and Share Food Bank, Pike’s Peak Library District, Latin American Education Foundation, and Central City Opera to name a few, will all see and hear about The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado and know that they’ve made their important programming possible.

This in effect creates positive PR for lgbt communities by raising awareness that lgbt groups exist, thrive, and contribute. Gill is using the tools of consumerism-advertising, branding, incessant messaging, to firmly press the words and with them the idea and reality of gay and queer lives into the everyday experiences of conservative communities. It is even more ambitious work considering the locale. Colorado is not New York, it’s not California, this is not another ‘gay liberal throwing their money around’. Imagine if you will, a conservative, small town hockey mom passing out supply kits covered in Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado logos while she is volunteering with her fellow church goers at the local homeless shelter. Increasing the prevalence of the word “gay”, especially in spaces of positive association, goes far in making the word just a word. Not scary, threatening, or politically charged, just another word in our everyday.

What’s even more enjoyable is that he’s taking the disenfranchised model of non profit social service provision and made it an empowered locus of organizing for all minority groups affected by oppression. Institutional oppression, whether experienced by a gay person, a person of color, a gender queer person, a woman, an immigrant, it all derives from the same site of fear. The withholding of resources is not based on any one difference, but any difference that can be sighted in order to deny privilege to many for the sake of a few. Attention to differences among the different is a tool of oppressors, used to keep us fighting each other for scarce resources. Tim Gill provides a model of non profit funding that celebrates a common objective of equality and resource management rather than our usual fight to champion ones own oppression over another marginalized group.

To hear more about his efforts, listen on Marketplace by American Public Media.

Amen Richard.

In last month’s episode of In the Life, The Nation’s Richard Kim discusses lgbt and queer politics.

He’s good. He’s really really good.

See more at www.inthelifetv.org

Read more from Richard at www.thenation.com

Sorry Rich Guy…?

Mark Gill, who’s rather large in indie film, spoke during the LA Film Festival about the challenges of producing independent film in a narrowing market. Amongst the thirteen reasons he sighted as proof that indie film is just the wrong business to be in these days, number ten struck me:

“10: Movies now routinely fight with really compelling leisure alternatives that nobody in the last great era of cinema–the 1970s–even imagined: from iPods to Xboxes to Tivos to You Tubes to the radically improved behemoth that is cable television.”

This sad song echoes that of everyone over forty in Hollywood. I would be bummed if I were them too. Sure, it was way funner when you put money into a movie and made it back at the box office right away. Now we have to put more money into a film that has a much smaller change of making any back if at all when it hits viral and mobile content sites who might pay you once their “advertising” dollars come in.

Yes, it is a different business model. Indie film is really the last place I’d like to hear the lament over changing platforms. As a genre that fancies itself the last bastion of explorative, imaginative and informative cultural commentary, indie storytellers could look at the changing media market from the vantage point it provides to reach wider audiences. If one is that concerned with surpassing the “moronic, homogenized piece of lowest-common-denominator drivel” that is mass media, in order to bring singular narratives and quality storytelling to audiences, then the platform your message arrives on shouldn’t matter so much. New media technologies make informative content more tangible to the greatest number of people. It’s the messages that need to reach viewers and the voices that need to be heard, not the platform they’re seen on or the money made from their consumption.

9 Types of Internalized Patriarchal Oppression

Renee was kind enough to pass along this little gem of a blog. Did you know that there are 9 types of “lesbians”? I sure didn’t. Guess that degree in sex and gender from UCLA didn’t teach me nothin…

Given the terribly base and rather damaging aspects of the content, I’ve inquired as to the author’s motivation with this comment which I’ve left:

Frisky,

I would really like to know what you had hoped to achieve in voicing these opinions regarding lesbian sexuality? I understand you have a blog to run and content is content. I wonder at what point did you think to put down your neo-second wave flag long enough to consider how damaging it is to women on all ends of a sexuality spectrum to reinforce popular negative conceptions of lesbianism as predictable, performative, and uniform. Your sighting of these nine types of lesbians complete with celebrity examples tells us only that you have seen a few episodes of The L Word and sheds absolutely no light onto the rich theoretical discourse on sex and gender identity.

There are many problematic and off statements in your piece. But as a queer woman with multiple points of intersection across lines of gender, sexuality, I am primarily interested in understanding your motivation in generating content which reinforces such oppressive normative beliefs about female sexuality. I wonder if you notice the privilege you’ve invoked by perpetuating the primacy of heterosexuality as an institution by othering women who act outside of its constructs?

Love,
Your very own Lavender Scare

LoRo are “in a relationship” surfuckingprise…

I’m still waiting for Lindsay and Sam to start power dykin it up at East West, but for now we are finally safe to say that they are actually gay. In the past week, some of the celebrity news magazines who follow Lohan so closely have begun reporting such. I know, I know, i know, it’s been obvious. But the news mags have gone terribly far up until recently to maintain they are probably just “really close friends”.

Pictures of Sam and Lindsay have been running for months now with captions full of phrases like “best friends” “gal pals” “companions” and “inseparable twosome”. It wasn’t until last week when Ronson changed her Facebook status to “in a relationship” that the weekly mags began to describe their relationship as “rumored to be more than just gal pals.” So far, Life & Style Weekly is the only source using the words “gay” or “girlfriend” in describing the relationship.

Recently an LA Times reporter asked if this lack of outing was coming from a place of respect. As if maybe US Weekly and People Magazine’s refusal to acknowledge that Lindsay and Samantha are actually in a fully committed, high functioning lesbian relationship is more about concern for the celebs themselves rather than a calculated means of maintaining their sale value.

The idea that this lack of identification on the part of the mainstream press has anything to do with respect for their closet status is rather naive. It has everything to do with the fact that having a gay relationship, a stable one at that, does not sell. The tabloids are selling image, lifestyle, stereotypes we can all subscribe to. “Gay” does not sell in the Bible belt, it barely sells in LA.

The author of the times article inquired as to why the tabloids weren’t just ignoring this obviously gay relationship as they do with other out couples. Well, this is Lindsay effin Lohan we are talking about. The celebrity news machine as we know it today has been built upon the backs of paparazzi favorites like Lindsay and Britney. . These gossip outlets have been covering Lindsay since her days on Disney. She is still massive. She is selling and the goal has always been to keep her selling. The tabloids have been happy to run the pictures of Lohan in obvious close proximity to Ronson as long as they could use euphemisms to play dumb. Tabloid readers, or the majority of Americans, very much want to gobble up images of LoRo’s fantastical hipster celebrity life but they don’t want to have to admit that they are really gay.

Speculative gayness sells much better. Once a person or couple has been outed, they instantly become the “other”. There is no longer any hope that their questionable actions haven’t been just “celebrity fun” or “lifestyles of the rich and coked up”. Actual, real life queer relationships are a big fat affront to the conservative hetero-cultural norms that permeate this country. The truth is that most Americans are really not ready to consume queerness with the same fervor with which they consume Lindsay’s very public drug problems.

This model usually serves to keep the gay celebrity themselves quiet as well. The mags don’t ask too much, the celebs don’t tell too much, they both make a mint and everyone’s happy. But then Samantha had to go and change her Facebook profile, an action that leads to quite a few problems within the lesbian community anyway, and now the tabloids have no choice in the matter anymore. If they still want to run the sought after pics of Lindsay and Sam barely brushing hands outside The Ivy, the mags have to report it for what it actually is, a lesbian relationship.

Anibody listening?

Ok ladies, stay with me. I know we have oodles of gay icons within mainstream media these days. I know we have straight girls singing chart toppers about kissing girls. And while having lesbianism validated as an acceptable and fun way of cheating on your boyfriend is really empowering for us all, I think its very important we remember where our lesbian entertainment came from.
A long time ago, before Ellen even, the little folk singer from Buffalo became the face of the “lesbian” music genre. It was the early 90’s and Ani Difranco was playing her way to lesbian superstardom in colleges and bars across america, with songs like “The Whole Night” and “She Says”. Women’s studies dykes from Syracuse to Berkeley where beside themselves with pronoun delight. With her very own independent music label, Righteous Babe Records, Ani was the perfect symbol of female empowerment. And let’s not forget that she can fucking play. In 1998, Ani solidified her status as gay royalty with the songs “Two Little Girls” and “Little Plastic Castles”. It was all over. From here on out, you could be sure to run into each and every one of your ex girlfriends at an Ani show, you were lucky if you could even see the stage over all the huge masses of dreadlocks pilled on top of vegan heads, and you wouldn’t dare show up without your Feminist Majority or Food not Bombs T-shirt on. Ani became synonymous with all things lesbian culture. Oh sure, straight girls were listening too. But it was always a clear indicator that you had at least a six pack lesbo on your hands if you could get them to name their top 3 favorite Ani songs.
Here we are 10 years later and I wanna know, where have all the gays gone? Recently, I made the slow crawl down the 5 freeway to see Ani at the House of Blues in Anaheim or “Aniheim” as we referred to it for a month prior. Now when I was a young eager Ani fan, we used to have to sleep on the concrete outside the concert venue in order to win our front row spot during general admission shows. If you didn’t make it into the line by 8 am, forget it, you were seeing the show from the back with the straight people, in the “reluctant boyfriend holding pen” as Ani herself coined it.
But here it is 2008 and apparently one doesn’t need to show up until mid afternoon to get the coveted spot front row, left of center. Don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoyed the fact that dining at the House of Blues restaurant allows one to wait in the early entry line. We showed up at 3 for a late lunch, then took turns standing in line and ducking back into the bar for martini’s until we were let into the venue at 7. And then to make my Ani dreams come true, the stage was surrounded by a bar on either side that served throughout the show. I used to be the really excited bouncy girl in the front row, now I’m the drunk excited bouncy girl in the front row. Oops.
But my enabled drinking habits aside, what stuck out during this show is that the dreadlocks and the dedication are long gone. Sure the show drew more lesbians than the House of Blues in Anaheim sees on any day but some fortysomething year old Orange County dykes dressed up in their best Polo shirts does not an Ani crowd make. Where are the squealing young dykes? Where are college girls? Yes, maybe we have all grown up and grown out our hair but has lesbian culture really become that assimilated by heteronormative culture?
I’m just concerned that the more we see LGBT representations on prime time, on Mtv and at the Oscars, the lazier we get about remembering our roots. It is so important to have those images in those places but let’s not forget that the mainstream is just that, the mainstream. Queerness is still “the other” within popular media. Tila Tequila is making a mockery out of lesbian and bisexuality for the sake of her own bank account and Katy Perry’s pimping night life bi-curiosity on behalf of industry behemoth Capitol Records. LGBT youth today don’t have to look far to have their lifestyle’s recognized anymore, but is this kind of recognition really that positive and empowering? Furthermore, is it’s immediacy disenfranchising queer youth from finding the good stuff?