National Equality Marches in a New Generation

Sure the National Equality March on Washington was an epic media failure and an untimely distraction from the localized battles for queer rights waged in Maine and Washington, but as Lydia DePillis at Campus Progress reported, the march brought an unexpectedly high turnout from young activists. De Phillis said ; “Young people came from colleges all over the country—some call them the Prop. 8 generation or Stonewall 2.0.” and as you’d expect the youth of today to be called to arms, David Valk, the march’s Student Outreach Coordinator, later explained he organized their attendance almost entirely through facebook.

Well shoot, I’m excited.

As a Californian, I received condolences from many a straight ally when Prop 8 passed in a blaze of Orange County Evangelical glory. My response though often further confused my only slightly interested straight friends. I told them that I had expected it to pass and while that was a shame, I was excited to see the response from young Californians that the election had engendered. After all this is a generation of first-time voters who spent high school watching Will & Grace in prime time and Britney kiss Madona on MTV. These are straight kids who respect their LGBT counterparts and don’t support their elders instincts to suppress and closet them and LGBT kids who might now have a slightly easier time coming out now than someone did 20 or even 10 years ago. I know that I’m making a giant oversimplification of current pop culture. Will & Grace gives visibility only to the white wealthy buttoned up male while painting his queeny sidekick in the same zany piss take Hollywood’s used since the 1920’s and Britney and Madonna’s kiss subscribed to every stereotype that satisfies the male exploitation of lesbian sexuality but these images help make today’s youth much more comfortable with sexuality than the cast of Happy Days ever did.

This is a generation who don’t think it’s such a big deal to be gay because their world was just that bit more welcoming than ours was. But as gay culture became a bit more homo-normative, lgbt youth seemed less inclined toward a politicized identity. So when Prop. 8 passed and students and young professionals poured out of UCLA, out of West Hollywood and onto Wilshire Blvd night after night, I mused aloud to my uninterested straight coworkers how it was a good thing that this new generation of queers and their allies finally had something general and communal enough to get angry about. So they marched and tweeted and facebooked up a storm and they learned that we still have so much work to do despite the attention focused on us in the 90’s as consumers from television networks and vodka advertisers.

Prop. 8 made youth take notice in California and nationwide. They are angry now, they are active now, and they have new tools. How do older activists engage these passionate youth and their new-fangled technological devices?

Just When you Thought it was Safe to Turn on Showtime…

oh heeeeell no.

i thought we were done with The L Word?

Ilene Chaikin also thought her pilot for The Farm was gonna get picked up by Showtime… Turns out she was wrong.

Since they’ve passed, Chakin has found new inspiration from The L Word series she managed to run into the ground on the first go. The Real L Word: Los Angeles will feature “real” LA lesbians doing, you know, la lesbian stuff: drinking, partying, being incredibly femme, doing pilates, fame whoring and crying. Because as Chaiken said, “I believe we are not nearly finished telling our L Word stories.”

The thing is, the LAST thing anyone in the lgbtiq communities need is to tell more of these stories. Perhaps, at one point, it was important to establish ourselves as consumers, as a viable source of commerce, and now every major city has a row of gay bars and absolute vodka effin loves us now that we’ve shown we can party. And sure, the world as a whole loves consuming shows about vapid star fuckers vying for a piece of the la lifestyle via reality programming fame. But I fail to see how a reality show about lesbians who are fame hungry, sexy drinkers is going to improve the image of lesbians in the common consiousness of viewers.

We have better stories to tell. I’d much rather make and/or watch a show that followed women who are doing work that is for the betterment of lgbtiq people everywhere. Rather, we will watch The Real L Word which insists that real lesbians are heterosexual in appearance, over sexed and incapable of monogamy. If you want to make the point that lesbians are just like everyone else, why not follow a woman or couple who is living in everyday society, working, loving, etc and then explore how she encounters homophobia or oppression in her life. Then viewers might find commonalities to identify with, influencing their concept of gaynes as “otherness”. Rather, The Real L Word will support the concept that the lesbian woman is here for the fantasy of hetero men.

We have the blessing of having a voice in this country that  so many elsewhere don’t. I think it’s unfortunate that this type of program is often how we choose to use it.

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.