“Hello, Washington? It’s me, civil rights!”

Just because you rallied in WeHo for Prop 8 don’t mean you’re work is done. The campaign for marriage equality is a national issue, and we need to support each individual state’s battle. Call your friends in Washington, Maine, and Michigan, TODAY.

Washington:

Who we are: Approve Referendum 71 is the campaign to preserve domestic partnerships in Washington State. By voting to approve, voters retain the domestic partnership laws that were passed during this year’s legislative session, including using sick leave to care for a partner, adoption rights, insurance rights, and more.

What we need: We need phone bankers to get our supporters out to vote. Washington is an all mail-in ballot state, and we need to ensure our supporters put their ballots in the mail. Also, youth turnout is a critical component of our campaign, and youth turnout historically drops in off-year elections. So we need a lot of help to turn them out.

How you do it: Sign up here to make remote calls for Approve 71. We’ll then contact you for a training, and you can make GOTV calls.

Maine:

Who we are: The No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign is working to protect Maine’s recently-passed law legalizing marriage equality for same-sex couples. Our opponents have put the issue on the ballot for Nov 3, 2009. Because of Maine’s early voting election laws, people are already voting at the polls, so we need help immediately to turn out our side at the polls.

What we need: We need you to devote a few hours to Call for Equality. Call for Equality is a virtual phonebank set up so that you can call Maine voters wherever you are. Much of Maine is rural, where canvassing isn’t effective, so we need to reach these voters- along with other supporters- by phone. All you need is a phone and internet connection. No experience required! We’ll provide the training, and all you need is a a few hours to help get a win in Maine.

How you do it: Click here to sign up for a training and your shift. There are lots of times available for your convenience.

Kalamazoo, MI:

Who We Are: The Yes on Ordinance 1856 / One Kalamazoo campaign is working in Michigan to support the City Commission of Kalamazoo’s twice approved ordinance for housing, employment, and public accommodation protections for gay and transgender residents. Opponents forced a public referendum on the ordinance so dedicated local volunteers, led by former Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Jon Hoadley, are working to ensure voters say YES to fairness and equality and keep Ordinance 1856.

Why The Urgency: In the final weeks, the opposition has gone all out with aggressive disinformation and misleading red herrings to try to defeat the ordinance. This includes signs that say “No to Discrimination” (even though voting No actually supports continued discrimination of GLBT residents), transphobic door hangers and fliers, and now radio ads that falsely suggest that criminal behavior will become legal when this simply isn’t true. The Yes on Ordinance 1856 supporters are better organized but many voters who want to vote for gay and transgender people are getting confused by the opposition.

How To Help:

1) Help the One Kalamazoo campaign raise a final $10,000 specifically dedicated to fight back against the lies on the local TV and radio airwaves and fully fund the campaign’s final field and GOTV efforts.

Give here: http://www.actblue.com/page/3-2-1-countdown

2) If you live nearby and can physically volunteer in Kalamazoo sign up here. If you know anyone that lives in Kalamazoo, use the One Kalamazoo campaign’s online canvass tool to remind those voters that they need to vote on November 3rd and vote YES on Ordinance 1856 to support equality for gay and transgender people.

Contact voters: http://www.onekalamazoo.com/tellfriends2

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.

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

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