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?

LA’s “Lesbian Attack” Gets Stuck by the Man.

“Lesbian Attack” is a relatively new action group with the mission,”to infiltrate Los Angeles’ best straight bars and gay ‘em up with the hottest women we know. We don’t make deals with the bars; we don’t warn them we’re coming and we don’t advertise. This is a grass roots effort. Just OUR favorite women and THEIR favorite women.”

Next week ’s event has been announced with plans to attend an irrelevant sports bar on Melrose. In her most recent announcement Jones explains, “Though we don’t take money or warn the bars, we do want to take care of you. So we’ve booked the VIP room upstairs for a “private social mixer” to ensure everyone entry to El Guapo. Downstairs, there will be plenty of brews and confused boys. Upstairs, you can take a break from freaking out the straights with our private bar tender and DJ.”

At first, I was excited about the positive visibility efforts this group professed to make. But as the event approaches, it seems efforts are moving away from meeting our heterosexual community members on common ground. To attend a hetero-normative space and peacefully assert our relevance as lesbian women there is positive. It is important to challenge the claiming of space by hetero-normative society as well as their assumptions that women fit gendered norms of heterosexual desire and desirability. However, it is completely ineffective to “attack” an established heterosexual space and then retreat to our own “private room with dj and bar tender”. What lesson to we teach about inclusion when we ourselves practice separatism within our own public demonstration?

Is it not more appropriate to engage the community you seek to “infiltrate” where they are? Are we not seeking to take down barriers that hegeomonic institutions insist between our sexual practices? It seems the outcome one would hope for in such an event is the building of personal trust and precieved commonality between individuals. As in, we lesbians show up and are charming beyond belief and some heterosexuals walk away saying, “That was fun. I didn’t know “lesbians” were so nice and “normal”. I thought they were all man hating Feminists.” How can this type of exchanges occur when the “activists” of “Lesbian Attack” have booked a private room in the straight club they are attending for all their members to socialize, away from the “freaked out straights”?

I’m also disappointed that these events are created for “the hottest women we know”.  As if  the relevancy of women as lesbians will only be apparent if we are visable through the heterosexual male gaze. Inviting “hot lesbians”, read “straight looking lesbians”, reinforces heterosexual norms. It fails to challenge the primacy of heterosexual activity and desire in public space and rather agrees that women are only valuable when they fit male prescribed standards of beauty. What if women who don’t practice femme identity attend? Are queered representations of lesbianism unwelcome at “Lesbian Attack”?

For a group that is demanding inclusion, it seems detrimental to practice exclusion and seperatism within their own activism.

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.

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.