I dislike being forced into false positions by people waving holy pictures and praying for blasphemy so they can be outraged. Present company excepted, there is an awful lot of that on the left.
I didn't say anything about class collaborationism. The people running the Gay Pride show are unambiguously bourgeois and in fact barely liberal except in the neoliberal sense. No collaborationism in that--they know where their class loyalties lie. O'Brien, Goddess love him, and the journalist John Kyper with whom I once briefly collaborated on an article about youth exploitation in Harvard Square, are the only "gay activists" I've met in fifty years who don't fly into a rage at the bare mention of socialism. Really. Read the Washington Blade some time if you want to know where these people stand. Look, Lou--I'm as queer as you can get, and I was as active as one could be in the so-called Gay Community of Charlottesville. VA,, where I lived for thirteen years. I'm telling you--It was one rightwing crypto- or outright reactionary after another, and universal total hostility to the bare mention of socialism. I remember one awful gay "consciousness raising" session in which a wealthy guy prattled on for half an hour about how HE was PROUD to be a member of the PEPSI GENERATION! Then one of his buddies chimed in with a paean to his mother's "marble-topped Empire furniture." Then they all concluded the session by complaining about people who ate too many pretzels at the gay dances in the student union. This was consciousness-raising, Charlottesville style. Don't tell me this was a rarity. The reality is, as one of my best gay friends used to say, if you came from the right Virginia family at any time in history you could be as queer as you wanted to be as long as you didn't startle the horses. This hasn't changed that much in fifty years. You can be as activist as you want as long as you don't challenge capitalism and can display the right signs and tokens of social status. Do you think the elaborate "inclusiveness" policies of Accenture Corporation and the like come from the left? Anyway, what about Gompers, Meany, and Reuther? They all registered gains for the working class What makes Kameny different from them or better than Harry Hay and all the communists who got the whole ball rolling--or for that matter, the Stonewall crowd who were rioters owing far more to the New Left and the antiwar movement than to Mattachine. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4591): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4591 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79053974/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
