Hey everyone,
I'd like to continue on today's discussion since we ran short on time.
The last thing we were talking about was the 80's and the rise of fundamentalism. In the 70's, we saw the rise of the "gay male clone," while in th 80's we saw an outburst of queerness and overall craziness in pop culture. The beginning of the 80's marked the beginning of the documented HIV/AIDS crisis and the rise of Christian / conservative fundamentalism.
Now we are seeing a second raise of Christian fundamentalism, and a lower activism among LGBTQ youth. Any thoughts?
1 comment:
I think what appears as a second wave of Christian fundamentalism is actually the mushrooming of petty fundamentalisms spawned by Reaganite and Thatcherite politics -- those two nerve centres of conservative economic and political thought from the 80s. I think the current fundamentalisms are petty, even banal, because they lack the showy and monolithic exterior of the 80s. Conservatism now lies at the heart of queer politics in much of the western world whether we like it or not: the rise of the 'homocons', Log Cabin Republicans, the fall of the organized academic Left in this country are just some of the symptoms of this petty conservatism. For the first time we see within the LGBT movement a sustained romance with the idea of 'community' (I, me, my community versus 'them'), with bourgeois rights (marriage, adoption, middle-class security) and with a half-baked notion of identity politics (I am what I buy and wear/ it's cool to be queer etc.). The American LGBT movement is the only thing we have for inspiration because it has really been the only broad-based organized movement in the name of sexual minorities in the 20th century that has produced a distinct history. But in the present moment the movement has wilfully forgotten its amazing history of intervention and radical critique -- best remembered through such mindblowing figures as Langston Hughes, Harry Hay, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig. Instead it courts the fundamentalist status quo. It's time to read a little more history than fight for our own precious place at the table!
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