A Dyke A Broad #20: The Nearly Spring Edition
There's Paris photos! Plus as always, notes on #lesbians, the LGBT unmovement, and taking Mel Brooks as my lord and savior.
Greetings from Paris…
That fabulous city where the delivery guys are so omniscient that they can tell you’re not home without trudging all the way to your apartment or even calling your phone, all by looking carefully at your address and seeing that you’re on the fifth floor. Where no one ever is. Especially if they’ve ordered something heavy, like an exercise bike. Like we did.
Whatever.
The week got better after we decided to quit waiting (for Godot) and cancelled the order. The Girl had her second dose of the vaccine, and I met a FB friend in the flesh, and she and her girlfriend and I sat around in the Chapeau Rouge park chatting, and lamenting the closing of dyke bars, and that the only way to meet girls these days is by becoming an activist. And while that’s how I met The Girl, it didn’t seem so dreary then. Because at least we weren’t just going out in the street with our earnest fists raised, but getting into trouble and pulling pranks, and everybody was sleeping with everybody. And celebrating our victories at the Clit Club or Crazy Nannies. And there was drinking and laughter, a lot of laughter, at least at first. And all our anger was mixed with ridiculous joy.
Aren’t people, dykes especially, getting tired of being so upright and so good? I’m fucking sick of it. Which partly explains my meditations on quitting, which in turn inspired a pal to remark:
Well that's the age-old question, isn't it? Whether to bother putting effort into trying to effect changes and getting pandered/condescended to and dismissed, or just do nothing, if the results will be the same. Maybe the question to ask is: when progress has actually been made, how did that come about? Was it by throwing all niceties to the wind and going for broke?
Probably the latter. Yes. But going for broke could take a lot of forms.
Which means thinking not just about 1) how far we’re willing to go to get X, and 2) do our tactics work or not. We also have to think about just how much we care, and if those two are even separate, the means (our tactics) and the end. Maybe it’s a bad idea to continue doing something for a worthwhile end if it makes you miserable. Even if it works. Because for activists, our lives themselves are the means, and there is never an end. Because no gains (or losses) are written in stone.
That just leaves us with our lives. And the terrible realization that it’s been years since I heard someone quote Emma Goldman. “If I can't dance it's not my revolution.”
The 2021 LGBT unmovement is not my revolution—if it ever was. Not just because “queer” activists increasingly join the rest of the world in using dykes, using homo females, as punching bags, but because they have entirely abandoned their brief, very brief, aspiration as a liberation movement, and melded whole-heartedly, and often opportunistically, into a broader, corporate-captured “progressive” project which is anything but.
In fact, it’s closer to a religion complete with fake intersectional catechism in which you can’t just agree 80% with something. You really have to check every box in every category from gender to the environment to questions of racism, or be ex-communicated. It doesn’t even matter if you agree with the principle, but not the tactic. Or just prefer a different word. Too bad. You’re out. Crying in the wilderness. Which means I —we —can’t just ask how best to fight for dykes, but against this whole reactionary, puritanical mindset.
I was reminded of a couple of possible role models the other day when I went to Square Fleury, and was afflicted with an earworm about springtime after seeing not just buds, but actual flowers.
Yep, for a couple days I went around humming “Springtime for Hitler and Germany…” And I remembered the first time I saw Mel Brooks’ film The Producers, which rocked me to the core, and even now leaves me with my mouth agape. I mean, a fucking musical about Hitler and the Holocaust?! Who would dare?
Then there was his History of the World, Part 1 where he jokes about the Inquisition and Torquemada. Plus there’s his work with black stand-up Richard Pryor, brilliant in his own right, who said the most unspeakable things about race. And addiction. And poverty.
I love them both, Mel Brooks, and Richard Pryor. There was nothing so important, nothing so horrifying to them that they could not frame it as comedy. Which has the perverse effect of disturbing our usual pious, right-thinking response, and reintroducing actual (and appropriate) horror when we find ourselves laughing at it.
I increasingly think that the only thing that can fight the sacrosanct and fossilized ideas of the Corporate-Captured, Female-Subjugation-Restoring Left is the absolutely profane. Jesus destroying the money-changers at the Temple. ACT-UP spitting the host onto the ground at St Pat’s in New York. Mel Brooks poking fun at the Hitler. Audre Lorde reminding us to quit trying to destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools.
There is more than one way to resist.
And because I don’t want to give the impression that I actually hate my beloved city of Paris, which I do not, even if it drives me crazy, here are some flowers. And bugs. From Square Fleury. Also two other songs (keep scrolling) that Paris springtime reminds me of.
Well, that’s all for now.
Disgruntledly yours,
I definitely agree with you about the intersectional "catechism", where you must toe the party line on everything and parrot the wording du jour. It's like no one ever learns from past movements, like they think they're creating worlds out of whole cloth in ways no one ever did before. Insisting on this Marxist purity has caused movements to crash and burn; if they'd opened themselves , some great progress could have been made (cf, the 9to5 organization for working women). You then you leave your movement vulnerable to the chance that people who might agree with you on most things will instead run fleeing for rightists who offer the illusion of security and less judgment. I have Sarah Schulman's collection of essays about activism, and in her telling of her first meeting with Maxine Wolfe mentions that Maxine's philosophy is "people can only be where they are". I got that book in 1994 and that mindset has stuck with me ever since.
You seem happy