The Urban Elf

On the day the that the U. S. House of Representatives failed to protect internet freedom and on the eve of the "Pride Not Prejudice - Diversity Not Division" themed Boston Pride Parade I have been musing and waiting for the tattoo of jackboots in the hall.

When we dwelled in the dark it was drag queens, butch dykes and leather men who led our charge from the fateful night at the Stonewall Inn into the early plague years of the 1980's. Then, chastened and heartbroken by AIDS and government that so glibly ignored it, the movement shifted from "Gay Liberation" to "Gay Rights" and thereby from social re-engineering to assimilation. When that shift took place it was the sweater queens, Gap and J. Crew lesbians, the A & F boys, the gay Republicans that took the reigns. Great advances were and continue to be made, but many of that latter generation of "leaders" and "the common wisdom" they engender view the constituencies that brought forth our early champions as "inconvenient", "problematic", and even "liabilities to the cause."

Within a community that is safer when hidden it is the moral duty of those who can "pass" to always remember that we are never free nor safe nor equal until those of us that are inescapably different are free and safe and equal. Passing is merely camouflage, a tactical illusion. It is still hiding. Hiding feeds and nurtures fear, and fear inevitably destroys an individual or community from the inside out. The argument for patience, for the more "acceptable" to make what provisional gains they can as a step to the eventual assurances of rights and freedoms for those further from the main, is a spurious one. Unless everyone within the community in question, regardless of degree of social camouflage possessed, sees themselves as the same as everyone else the yin-yang poisons of complacency and bitterness will fracture and debilitate that community. Those who have made advances will become covetous of those advantages and less likely to do anything they perceive a potentially endangering what ground they have made toward true equality. Those left behind will grow tired and resentful of mounting pleas and admonitions to be patient, eventually distrusting their former brethren nearly as much as they distrust the greater society.

The community now is fractured and neither faction retains enough momentum, votes, voices to be a real threat or irritant to the dominant paradigm. Eventually those with the least act or react out of boiled over anger, frustration, hurt and desperation. The marginal members caught between the oppressor and the most visibly oppressed are forced by necessity of keeping what status they have acquired to side against their less privileged brethren, to actively participate in "the solution" or at very least stand aside and keep mum. Once those at the bottom are no longer a "problem", the system rebalances. The "assimilated" others have less numbers and a weaker community. Their collective fear and guilt slowly infuse their ranks with a creeping and undirected paranoia... and they are inevitably next.