When Are Radical Gender Activists Going to Get Out of Our Own Way?

This morning, in observance of Corporate LGBT Pride Day, KPFA talk show host Philip Maldari actually devoted an hour to radical queer politics, or more precisely, to a critique of gay marriage. It was not bad. Of course, the two guests didn’t give credit to any of the people who have been making that critique and doing the activism to back it up for years, but they raised important issues. But then Philip, a gay man who until quite recently never identified himself as such on the air, said that he, and KPFA in general, never interviewed Harvey Milk back in the day because they considered Harvey too reformist for their then-revolutionary station.

“He was getting people to register to vote, saying ‘Forget about the revolution,’” Philip alleged.

Now first of all, that’s just not true. Harvey Milk was probably an arrogant jerk in a lot of ways, but he was very radical, and he never said anyone should give up on the revolution. He was pursuing electoral office, yes, but as part of a broad progressive coalition that briefly transformed San Francisco politics. He was the one who went bar to bar to get gay bars to drop Coors beer, building a coalition with unions to oppose Coors’ anti-gay and anti-labor policies.

And secondly, if that were the reason for ignoring Harvey Milk, you would assume that KPFA had interviewed a lot of radical queers to critique the mainstream gay movement. I’m pretty sure if you go back and look through the archives from that period, you’re going to find that they did not do that.

The real reason that the dominant group at KPFA didn’t interview Harvey Milk is the same reason they have not covered the campaign to get Israeli money out of the LGBT film festival or the Ban the Army, Not the Queers work: because they’re f***ing homophobes and have no critique of the patriarchy. It’s the same reason staff members like Philip are always trying to get rid of the one hour a week of gender-oriented programming KPFA has had for the last six years, and the reason KPFA has no queer show.

The Marxist left defined the gay movement and the women’s movement as bourgeois and reformist. To this day they refuse to pay attention to any but the most mainstream elements of those movements, and then use their bourgeois reformism to justify ignoring queer and women’s issues.

Neither of Philip’s guests challenged his revision of history. Of course, neither of them was living here during the time of Harvey Milk (I wasn’t either, but I moved here the year after Milk was killed, and got involved in the still-very-vibrant queer left within a few years of that), so they may not actually know either how progressive Milk was or how uninterested KPFA was in anything queer. They also didn’t challenge him because they are part of an unfortunate tendency by radical feminist and queer activists to collude in our own expungement.

The fact is that pretty much every social movement has its assimilationist mainstream, its radical and conservative wings. The queer movement is in no way unique in being painted in the mainstream media with the single brush that makes us look the most like the dominant society. But the women’s movement, and by extension the LGBTQ movement which grew out of it, may well be the most universally blamed for our own repression.

A couple weeks ago I went to a panel at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival where Erica Huggins, a leader of the Black Panther Party, spoke. She said that one of the things that contributed to the downfall of the Party was not dealing with misogyny and sexism in the group. I have heard a few women make statements like that before, but I’ve never heard anyone say that the main reason the Party ultimately failed to make lasting change was because of such internal problems. Clearly internal dynamics, including between men and women, contributed to a culture of suspicion which was exploited by the FBI in its COINTELPRO. But if divisions had not already existed, the FBI infiltrators would have set out to create them. Most of the left recognizes that it took a mighty effort by the government to bring down the Panthers.

Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement and other parts of the student counterculture were as white and middle-class dominated as parts of the second wave women’s movement and the post-Stonewall gay movement. But I don’t hear people using the cultural and class homogeneity of the student movements to dismiss their achievements, despite the fact that they didn’t bring down capitalism or end U.S. wars for empire.

But when the women’s movement is discussed in left-wing circles, its failures are attributed almost solely to its racism and narrow class base. Hardly anything is ever said about the concerted effort to dismantle the gains of the feminist movement, a backlash as intensive and pernicious as COINTELPRO. (In fact, it bears mentioning that parts of the women’s movement were targets of COINTELPRO.) If you listen to the mainstream media, patriarchy’s resurgence can be laid at the doorstep of male-bashing sex-negative bra-burners. If you listen to left media, you’ll blame the bourgeois biases of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Young women who are products of Women’s and Gender Studies programs at prestigious colleges say, “I don’t call myself a feminist because feminism is a white thing.” That’s almost the only thing they know about feminism. They don’t know that Michele Wallace, author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and a member of the Combahee River Collective, says “I’ve never understood how any woman could not be a feminist.” They don’t know that Egyptian doctor and former political prisoner Nawal el-Saadawi, said in a recent interview, “There are many feminisms, and I am a revolutionary anti-imperialist feminist.”

Revolutionary feminists and queer activists have an obligation to stand up for our own history. Everyone loves to believe they are doing something brand new and exciting, but the honest truth is, few of us ever are. It doesn’t make what we’re doing less valuable to give credit to those who came before us, and to those who are standing right beside us.

Pointless Blogging = Pointless Politics = Pointless Running

I was working on a post about my favorite topic - despair and its antidotes, and I ran into a post entitled "How Running a Marathon Is a Lot Like Being a Small Blogger" (and to Roxana, the author of that post, I can only say, you don't know what a "small blogger" really is - compared to me, you're HuffPo).

Check it out. It's brilliant. It completely changed what I was going to write.

She compares being a small "niche" blogger to being one of the people in the pack at the Boston Marathon - you do it for your own reasons, not to "win." I think that analogy is equally applicable to being a habitual protester/leftist decryer of the status quo.

The problem is that the awareness of how true that is, which has been good enough for me lo, these many years, is wearing thin.

A friend recently recommended the book How I Became a Famous Novelist. She said it was so much more than she expected, and that's why reading it was such a joy. She contrasted it with the much-hyped The Help, which she found so much less than it should have been. I think what I'm experiencing now is the activist version of her reading experience.

It's not that I suddenly need or expect to be effective. It's just that right at this moment, being the gnat buzzing around people's eyes for a minute on their way to Starbuck's is so much less than we could be, it's too depressing to keep doing it. For most of my activist life, people on the left have been predicting that our economy and environment were on the verge of collapse, and that when that happened, capitalism and imperialism would inevitably fall and a more caring form of social organization would take its place. At the same time that I was skeptical of those assumptions, I did take it for granted that the purpose of our organizing was to position ourselves to move into the void created by the capitalist elite fleeing to the Cayman Islands or wherever they've stashed their loot. But now the crash has come and the Tea Party has moved in to exploit it for the benefit of the same monied interests they pretend to oppose, and we, the left, are doing -- what? A few tepid demonstrations and a lawsuit or two. A couple good occupations of state capitols, a recall initiative in Wisconsin.

I am going to a demonstration after work today to save education in California. But what does it even mean to "save" a system that is already so broken, that it has the highest teacher-student ratio in the fifty states? Why are we demonstrating only to save education while health care and welfare and in-home support services for disabled people are also decimated? Simple: because the teachers' union doesn't represent the nurses or the IHSS workers, and no one represents the patients or the women who depend on CalWorks to feed themselves and their kids. Why won't any of my coworkers, many of whom are parents and nearly all of whom are products of California public schools, go to the demonstration? Simple: because no one asked them to, because no one thinks they really will.

Because no one thinks we can really win. Everyone knows that in order to win the crash, we need to unify and bring out everyone, professional workers and clerical workers and low-waged workers and unemployed and homeless and housed, union and nonunion, teachers, students, nurses, patients, people who don't come to demonstrations because they're busy writing grants for their nonprofits and people who don't come because they're home taking care of their elderly parents and people who don't come because they're out buying iPad2s.

Or because they're busy massaging their little blogs or running marathons they know they are not going to win.

My question is, when and how does the person 2/3 of the way back in the marathon suddenly get the idea that they could win if they acted like they could? I watch a lot of tennis and every now and then there's a player who's been plodding along year after year, getting to the quarterfinals or the semis now and then, who all of a sudden breaks through and wins a big tournament and before you know it they're #2 in the world. It happened to Patrick Rafter and Vera Zvonareva. And they were the same players the day before they won their first big tournament and the day after. They didn't get implants or something that enabled them to hit harder or run faster. They worked out, sure, but they'd been hard workers for years. They obviously always had the talent to win, and god knows, they always had the desire to win, but they didn't have the belief they could win. And for some reason, one day they did and after that they believed it because they had done it.

One big thing these sports stars have going for them is coaching. They have someone they are paying to be in their corner, to keep yelling "You Can Do It" from the sidelines. So maybe I'll take up a collection to hire a John Madden for the social justice movement.

3.5 Weeks In Paradise

I recently returned from almost four weeks at Hedgebrook, a women's writer's retreat on Whidbey Island in Washington State. The opportunity to spend that time engaging deeply with my own writing and other women writers was truly one of the most magical that I have ever had. I feel it changed me a lot, especially changed my relationship to writing and made me take myself more seriously as a writer. I had a lot of time and space to reflect on the purpose of writing and to remember that writing really does, at its core, change the world. (Hedgebrook's tag line is "Women Authoring Change.")

It was really special to be in a place that has nurtured the creative spirit of giants of women's writing, like Gloria Anzaldua and Adrienne Rich. To read the journal entries left by Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Gloria Steinem and Ursula LeGuin, and feel that by leaving my own entry I was in a tiny way blending my voice with theirs to make a great writer's soup to nourish the women who come after me. I was privileged to meet some amazing writers, whose work and friendship I will cherish always, and to find a kindred spirit in a local woman who offered to take me to lunch one day.

I have never written so deeply or with so much joy. I wrote pages and pages most days, without even noticing the passage of time. I was gifted with that precious experience I've heard of but never really believed in - where I felt I was watching my story unfold and only had to write it down. We will see what comes of it in terms of representation, publication and readership - the forms of outward success. But the inward success of knowing I did the best writing I could do, finding characters whose company I enjoyed, who whispered to me not only what needed to happen in my current book but where they (think they) want to go next - that no one can ever take from me and I thank Hedgebrook so so much for choosing me and Murder Under the Fig Tree for this adventure.

Check out my photos.

The website is www.hedgebrook.org for any woman writer (and writing is construed pretty broadly - the woman who took over my cottage was a very talented songwriter I went to hear the other night at a local club) who might want to apply in the future. The application deadline is in September for the year. And even though I know everyone is stretched in terms of donations, if you want to nurture women's creativity and bring out the voices of women hungry for change, please think about adding Hedgebrook to the organizations you support.

Are We Missing Our Own Party?

On Friday it was sunny but cold out, so I decided to go eat lunch in the Ferry Building, where I could stay warm but enjoy the view of the Bay and the boats. As I crossed the median strip between Market and Embarcadero, I noticed a Palestinian flag. I looked to see what it was and realized there was a small group of people – maybe 20 – with a number of different flags, all in the red, black, white and green common to the Arab world. I didn’t know but assumed that one was Egypt, one probably Libya, maybe another Tunisia. I got closer and realized that they were friends of mine, women from Code Pink and people from the various Palestine solidarity groups. I stopped for a moment, gave them a fist pump, but I was still in lunchtime mode, only 45 minutes left to eat and do an errand, so I wasn’t going to join the demo. Someone was talking through a bullhorn. I tried to understand what she was saying, but the bullhorn mike was too close to her mouth and the sound was muffled. I heard a number, like 700,000 something, but I wasn’t sure what it referred to. At first glance, I didn’t see any signs in English. When I looked more closely, there were some, no doubt saying “End US Aid to Israel,” “Down with Dictators,” all the things we typically say.

I understand that earlier there were a record number of journalists and the media coverage was great. Maybe there were also more people and the message was clearer. But for me, as a passerby, it was incomprehensible. Well, that’s unfair. Someone who wanted to comprehend it would be able to, but someone just walking by who was not Arab and not engaged in the issues would not be clear about who these people were or why they were standing there. I didn’t see anyone handing out leaflets, and there was certainly nothing that they were encouraging workers in the area to do.

Yesterday, I mentioned my impression to one of the organizers, which I probably should not have done. She said, “Well, that’s okay because we really just did it for ourselves.” Now I have said many times that cheering ourselves up is a perfectly legitimate reason to do actions. I do it all the time. There are times, lots of times, most of our times, when that’s the best we can do. This is not one of those times. This is a time when having a strategy could really pay off.

This is a moment when we should be able to build our movements by the tens of thousands. Whether we’re organizing workers or promoting international solidarity or confronting police violence or fighting budget cuts, we should be able to use the rising tide of mass mobilization and people power to get people to join us and support us. But there seems to be a perception or belief on the left that that is going to happen spontaneously, or even that it is already happening, that we don’t have to do anything but go out there and people will be inspired and connect with us. In meeting after meeting, I ask, “Does anyone else work in a corporate setting?” If anyone nodded, they would presumably know why I was asking. But in fact, no one ever does nod. My coworkers, who are mostly nonengaged leftists, are certainly interested in and supportive of the uprisings in Egypt and Libya and the protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the Midwest, but they neither hear about the solidarity protests before they happen nor would they consider going if they did. But they could, if someone asked them to. During the early part of the Iraq War, I saw many of them at protests. Even a few years ago, a group of workers from the copy center went to an anti-war protest on their lunch hour, because one of them had gotten a flier from The World Can’t Wait outside of a bookstore on Market Street. The conclusion I’m forced to draw is that most activists in this area, at least, do not regularly interact with nonactivists.

I spent most of yesterday at a meeting about boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, so I wasn’t able to join my friend, who works for the State of California, at the San Francisco demonstration in solidarity with public workers in Wisconsin. I guess it was pretty big, but none of the local people at the meeting I was at seemed to know about it. The thing is that you can have a pretty big demonstration attended by mainly public workers, because there are a lot of them. But that can also make you think that you are building a movement that extends beyond your interest group, and you’re not.

The actions in Wisconsin (which sadly do NOT (yet) comprise an uprising or a revolution, inspired as they may have been by the uprisings in North Africa), give public sector unions an unprecedented opportunity to gain support from nonunionized private sector workers. This is the time when union organizers in every city should be leafleting outside every transportation depot that carries people to their jobs in the morning, reminding workers that the unions are fighting for them, even if they don’t know it. If I were them, I would be making a palm card or a sign that said, “You have an eight-hour day [5 day week, minimum wage, sick pay] because of us.” Moreover, I would be printing up fliers that say, “Don’t ask why we should have benefits you don’t, ask how you can get them too.” Maybe the unions are doing that somewhere, but they are not doing it at the carpool drop-off point where I and thousands of my fellow San Francisco workers pour out of cars every day, or at the entrances to the BART stations in the evenings. They’re not even out there suggesting that we join their solidarity protests or send a pizza to the Capitol in Madison. They seem to be satisfied with opinion polls showing that 60% of Wisconsinites support the unions. 60% doesn’t actually seem that good, given what they have been doing.

For us in the international solidarity movements, particularly solidarity with parts of the Middle East, this is a time when we can really capitalize on the positive images of Arab people that are for once appearing daily in our media. But we cannot imagine that people are going to leap from those to coming out to our actions or telling their representatives to oppose U.S. aid to Israel. We need to think about what would get us from what we are: a pretty insular, but steadily growing, minority voice, to a serious factor in U.S. policy. One small idea that came up at our meeting last night: posters featuring identical photos of protesters in Egypt and Palestine being greeted with the same weapons, both provided by our tax money, with the caption, “Support Democracy in the Middle East, End U.S. Aid to Egypt and Israel.” And a website where people could actually find out how to do that.

This is a time when if we had a clear, simple target for boycott/divestment, we could make huge inroads, especially if we could show that it was connected both to repression in Palestine and in the Arab world (which many of them are). Because we haven’t done the ground work, we may not be poised to take advantage of this moment. But if it tells us anything, it is that there will be another, and the next time, we have no excuse not to be ready.

We Are All Egyptians

I started writing this last Monday, but I couldn't finish it. A type of awe built inside me as I watched the events in Egypt unfold. They speak for themselves and any effort to interpret or encapsulate them feels inappropriate. At the same time, all of us who are activists anywhere in the world need to ask, "What can we learn from their example?" The people of North Africa have created an opportunity for activists all over the world, by showing that change in a progressive direction is possible. The Egyptians forced the United States government to change its allegiance. And that in itself is just a humongous accomplishment. We have an obligation to them, as well as to ourselves, to look for a way to capitalize on it.

Some local activists respond by doing the same things they always do, stubbornly insisting that there's no magic bullet, that it's just a matter of doing it over and over again. Jeff Mackler, from Socialist Action and the new United National Action Committee, said that on KPFA's Morning Mix the other day. ANSWER has embodied that belief by calling solidarity demonstrations fastly and furiously, or perhaps by putting their name and their signs in front of demonstrations that were going to happen anyway. San Francisco Women In Black, my group, did it by holding our regular monthly vigil and adding a few signs about solidarity with Egyptian women.

Other activists of my generation and older have seized on the media analysis of these revolutions by saying "We have to use Facebook and Twitter." I can save them the trouble. I use Facebook and Twitter and it gets me nowhere. No one signs up for my events, no one retweets my tweets. It's hard not to take it personally, but I don't really think it's a reflection on the wisdom or relevance of my posts (though I could sure be wrong). It's that most of my friends are not spending much time logged into Facebook, and they won't log in just to sign up for my events. Only a few of them are on Twitter, and if they know how to follow me, they might read my tweets now and then but they don't retweet. Neither do I. I follow about 20 people, fewer than follow me (and let me apologize to anyone who does follow me because they don't get much, I generally remember to tweet every two months or so), but I have never once retweeted any post, however profound (and it's hard to be profound in 140 characters).

Last Saturday, my friend Preeti and I were on the way to UN Plaza for the demonstration in solidarity with the Egyptian uprising. She mentioned that all her friends said they were going, and commented, "If this were about some local issue, none of them would be going." We were just on time, and there were a lot of people in the plaza already. Some people said 5,000 or more. I am not good at crowds so I won't even try to estimate, but I know that the largest demonstrations I attended last year demanding single payer health care, or even the more moderate call for a public option, had about 200 people at them. I repeated Preeti's comment to some of my friends. They all said the same thing: "Well, but there wouldn't be a million people out there."

I said, "Well, the only reason there are a million people in Tahrir Square is because everyone came."

That seemed a truism to me, but the people I said it to apparently hadn't thought of it. Some of them looked confused.

A couple days later on Democracy Now!, I heard the video created by social media activist and April 6 Movement member Asmaa Mahfouz. This is the video callout that has been credited with kicking off the Egyptian uprising, although doubtless it was only one strand of the social braid that converged on the square. But the line in Mahfouz's video that especially caught my attention was this one:

"Whoever says it is not worth it because there will only be a handful of people, I want to tell him, 'You are the reason behind this, and you are a traitor, just like the president or any security cop who beats us in the streets.' Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference."

Okay, you may say, but really she knew that they would not just be a handful of people. She was just responding to the type of thing people usually say.

You'd be wrong.

Earlier in the video she tells this tale, "Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying, 'May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.' … I posted that I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I'll hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor. I even wrote my number so maybe people will come down with me. No one came except three guys—three guys and three armored cars of riot police."

No one came except three guys. That was on January 18. So what changed between that day and January 25? In another video she posted on the 24th, this is what she said.

"Tomorrow is the 25th, the day we've been waiting for, the day we all worked so hard for. The most beautiful thing about it is that those who worked on this were not politicians at all. It was all of us, all Egyptians. We worked hard. Children no older than 14, they printed the poster and started distributing it after prayers. Old people in their sixties and seventies helped, as well. People distributed it everywhere they could—in taxis, at the metro, in the street, in schools, universities, companies, government agencies. All of Egypt awaits tomorrow."

Asmaa didn't say anything about Facebook or Twitter. It's not that they didn't use it. It's been well documented that they did. But those media were supplemental to the old face-to-face ways of organizing. They are great for mobilizing the wired generation, the ones who never go more than a few seconds without checking their iPhones or Blackberries. But the key was the handing it out after prayers, in taxis, at the metro, in schools. That's the piece that we seem to have forgotten. Many actions these days are organized without even a paper flier. Email blasts have replaced phone trees. Admittedly, some actions organized exclusively online work out better than those where we try to use all the methods we know. Our actions for single payer in 2008 are an example – we did phone calls, we did fliering, we had trainings, and ultimately, we had the same 200 people that we can usually get. I can't explain why exactly. Some combination of people not having belief that it would do any good and not feeling the issue was a priority.

And the fact that their friends were not doing it. I know this for a fact. More than any other factor, what makes people decide to participate in something or not is whether or not their community – friends, family, church groups, whatever – is doing it. That's what Facebook is great for among those who use it for their social as well as their political networking. (Remember, it is a "social network.") It lets people know that they won't be showing up alone, it makes it a happening thing among a crowd of friends. But even virtual friendship is not something you can fake. Lots of people have "friends" on Facebook who are not their friends in the world, and those people are not going to follow them to a protest or other activity unless they're famous. Most of my Facebook friends seem to wait until they see who else has responded that they're coming to something to make their own decisions. Which is of course part of the problem. In a sheep society, the shepherd has all the power, and with apologies to those of you who have been trying in vain to lead a mass movement for oh, so many years, we have no shepherds that many people want to follow.

We can't copy the Egyptians or the Tunisians. We certainly don't want anyone copying them by lighting themselves on fire. We should not cynically invoke their struggle every time we are trying to get anyone to do anything, hoping to bathe ourselves in their reflected glory. We need to look carefully at their situation and our own, and discuss the differences and the similarities. And then we need to act on them, and not let this moment – like so many others – pass us by.

Yesterday on KPFA/Pacifica's "Living Room," I heard someone (I think it was David Madland of the American Worker Project - I can't check because the link on the website is broken) talking about the assault on public sector unions, which I wrote about a little while ago. He said that private sector workers need to defend the unions, even if they are not in one, because the unions are what prevent our wages and benefits from plummeting.

He is right, but he is wrong. He is right that without the unions, private sector workers would be screwed, and therefore, we should defend them. But he’s wrong to put it on private sector workers who have never in their lives seen a union organizer to step up and get out there and walk the line for the unions. As I wrote back in October, it’s the unions that need to realize that they need us, the unorganized private sector, because without us, they are very vulnerable to these attacks. The interviewee also said that polls show that 53% of U.S. nonunion workers would join a union if they had the opportunity to do so and thought they wouldn’t be fired for doing it. And that’s without the unions doing ANYTHING to reach out or counter the anti-union propaganda that we’ve all been hearing for decades. If they made even a token effort to organize any of the private sector work force, they could probably get that number up to like 80%. And if any of those organizing drives were successful, then the public worker-private worker class war would be out the window, the U.S. labor movement would be back in gear, and initiatives like cutting or privatizing Social Security and Medicare would suddenly get a lot harder.

So why do I say it’s the unions’ responsibility? Because one, they are the ones who have the resources to actually go to where those private sector workers are and talk to some; two, they are the ones who know – or should know – that we have need to get it together; and three, that would mean they were actually doing something that private sector workers could support, as opposed to now, when if one is (like me) a private sector worker who wants to defend the principal of collective bargaining, one has to look high and low for a picket line to join.

So come on, brethren. You’ve figured out that you need the support of the corporate sellout private sector workers you've shunned all these years. So now figure out that you need to do more than whine about us not supporting you, especially since the vast majority of working class people are not listening to Pacifica.

Twice Censored: Underreported Women's and Gender Issues of 2010

I was trying to think of what to do for last Monday's Women's Magazine, the first show of the New Year, when I ran across the Project Censored List of Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009-2010. Guess how many of those 25 stories related to a women's or gender issue?

You guessed it: NOT ONE.

Does that mean women's issues get lots of attention? I don't think so. But it does point to the masculinist bias of even the progressive media and media watchdogs.

So I built the show around a dozen or so women's or gender issues that I feel were short-shrifted last year.

Check out my list, and let me know what you would have put on yours.