The GLBT Historical Society

This is awesome. Great job!

Ben Schatz, that you?

lets go gusy

Today , I am angrier than most days.
It could be this society and its system. Or maybe I am reacting to the morbid symptoms of what happened yesterday in Maine. But to tell you the truth, I am angry the most at those “LGBT activists”, sometimes leaders of our community, that emphasize fund raising activities over everything else, those that have turn themselves into “donation predators”, those that only worry about reaching their yearly financial goals because they know that if they don’t they are out of the “cause”.
Before the DC March I attended a meeting at the center where one of this “leaders” said that in Texas they already have an Institution that teaches LGBT activists how to encourage the LGBT population to develop the habit of donations towards our tribe. It made me sick. I almost puked.
When society sees LGBT activists, non-profit directors, politicians or preachers, with a personal monetary agenda, infected by the virus of ambition, it punishes with a YES on 1.
I would like to recall what happened with one of the earliest American gay movement organizations: the Mattachine Society. They were dedicated to the cultural and political liberation of homosexuals; but in the face of McCarthyism, they adopted conservative policies of accommodation (accommodationism) to the system. And failed.... See More
In addition, during the 1990s many large corporations developed high-powered marketing campaigns targeting LGBT communities. Many of these campaigns have promoted narrow standards of beauty, restricted social needs, and fostered a limited social expression that operates within mainstream consumerism. Many grassroots LGBT associations have criticized the effects of such consumerism on LGBT communities.

New groups on the LGBT community have also emerged to address inequalities such as of income and opportunity that affect LGBT people from minority and working-class backgrounds. A few weeks after Stonewall, gay and lesbian activists organized the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Drawing on the principles and rhetoric of many other radical movements of the 1960s, GLF saw its mission as revolutionary and set its sights on a complete transformation of society. Not only did it hope to dismantle social institutions such as heterosexual marriage and the bourgeois family, but its leaders also forcefully opposed consumer culture, militarism, racism, and sexism.

I think we need to re-think our struggle as LGBT activists and the emergence of lesbian and gay political identities and re-elaborate a plan to fight for our inalienable rights as multi-concern activists.
Our political and intellectual perspectives have been mutually influential for several decades. Let's start again, but first we ought to prune our unwanted branches.

Thank you for your impassioned comments. Do keep in mind the GLBT Historical Society is (otherwise being pro GLBT) a non-political organization founded with the goal of collecting our history. An archive of the passionate struggle, if you will, wherever that may take it.