The Perils Of Inclusion.

Something To Be Proud Of: Inclusion is not without its downside. Once inside the fold, there is a strong temptation to silence dissenting voices. Calling out instances of ongoing discrimination and oppression smacks too much of biting the hand that no longer strikes you. Far better to welcome in all the institutions and businesses so eager, now, to be associated with the rainbow banner. The Pride Parade needs sponsors - not dissidents.

SHOULD WE BE SURPRISED that the rainbow community turned out to be so conservative? That the effort of the Pride Parade board to address the fear so easily triggered by police uniforms has provoked such a swift and devastating backlash? That so many gay and lesbian people appear to have forgotten what it feels like to be labelled, singled-out, trashed and excluded? That so many New Zealanders seem unaware that it is precisely those who dwell furthest away from the blessings of societal acceptance that have the strongest claim to our care and protection?

Something has shifted. In the years separating the Hero Parade from the Pride Parade the straight world’s perception of the rainbow community and the rainbow community’s perception of itself have undergone profound changes. What was once considered wild and transgressive has been made safe. The civic leaders who railed against the Hero Parade’s raunchiness have gone. Until this past fortnight, civic and corporate institutions have been lining up to tell the world how proud they are of Pride.

It raises an important question. Was the “gay lifestyle”, as mainstream New Zealand insisted on calling the non-normative expression of human sexuality; or “queer culture”, as it often described itself; the product of the dominant culture’s repression? Did the amelioration of that repression lead to the well-behaved heterosexuality of the straight world becoming the model for a rainbow community no longer obliged to make virtues out of the vices it had for centuries been accused of embodying?

And was the straight world’s growing acceptance of the rainbow community accelerated by the latter’s demand to be admitted to all of society’s core institutions? Gays and lesbians insisted that they had as much to offer the armed forces and the police as heterosexual citizens. Indeed, there was no occupational grouping, no profession, which would not benefit from opening its doors to the non-straight population. Likewise, the right to marry, raise children, form families and bequeath property should be extended to all citizens regardless of their sexual preferences. What was there to fear or dislike about a community so determined to sign-up to all the world’s conventions?

The watchword, for straights and non-straights alike, was “inclusion”. The revolutionary rhetoric of the years immediately following the Stonewall Riot in New York’s Greenwich Village had been vindicated. The years of watching friends and lovers die of AIDS while the straight world looked on and did nothing had, in the end, brought people of good will to the understanding that pain and grief is universal. That, ultimately, our common humanity trumps our diverse sexuality. It was something to celebrate. Something to be proud of.

Hence the Pride Parade. Hence the sense of elation when institutions like the Police and the Armed Forces signalled their willingness to mouth the watchword. Now, at last, the horrors of the bad old days could be forgotten. The hazing, the beatings, the murders. All the ritual humiliations, perfected over centuries to punish those who failed the tests of church and state. Why dwell upon the history when uniformed members of the rainbow community were willing to march in step with the people their predecessors had persecuted?

Inclusion is not without its downside, however. Once inside the fold, there is a strong temptation to silence dissenting voices. Calling out instances of ongoing discrimination and oppression smacks too much of biting the hand that no longer strikes you. Far better to welcome in all the institutions and businesses so eager, now, to be associated with the rainbow banner – especially when you’re expected to cough-up $150,000 for the privilege of walking down Ponsonby Road. The Pride Parade needs sponsors – not dissidents.

But does that need for the corporate dollar mean that the issues raised by the trans community should simply be ignored? Should the fate of young people locked up in police cells and prisons with, at best, only a grudging acceptance of their gender identification or, at worst, uncaring disregard, be set to one side? Is the treatment meted out to them while the responsibility of Police and Corrections personnel unworthy of consideration?  Do their stories, laced as they are with all the trauma of marginalisation and despair, not count?

The Pride Parade board decided that they did count and voted narrowly to give the word “inclusion” a radical inflection. It was a brave decision – and they are paying a very high price for it. Those who have attempted to defend the board’s decision have been abused and  spat upon by angry supporters of the status quo. In terms of sheer numbers, it would appear that the majority of the rainbow community favour a more conservative definition of inclusion.

How quickly people forget.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 23 November 2018.

Gods And Monsters: Reflections On Saturday's "Auckland Pride Parade".

How You Can Tell That The Struggle Has Been Lost: When a parade intended as a celebration of people's rights is taken over by the State's primary instruments of coercion and control.

 

IMAGINE A MAY-DAY PARADE headed up by representatives of the Army, Navy and Air Force. With Police and Corrections officers following close behind! A little further back, Members of Parliament from the governing party wave gamely at the crowds lining the parade route. Only after all these groups have marched past, proudly declaring their solidarity with the working-class, do the country’s trade unions finally make their appearance. (May Day is, after all, a workers’ festival!)  Even so, interspersed among the union bands and banners, are expensive floats, sponsored by some of the country’s largest and most successful banks and businesses.

 

What would such a parade say about the status and purpose of the country’s trade union movement? Surely a May Day parade in which the country’s soldiers, policemen and jailers were given pride of place could only have been organised in the old Soviet Union or one of its East European satellites?

 

The prominent presence of the state’s key institutions of coercion and control would be proof positive that the trade union movement had long since ceased to be in any way subversive, transgressive, or emancipatory. It would signal that trade unionists had become “okay” people to know, and that their representatives could safely be invited to gatherings frequented by the good and the great.

 

It would also proclaim that the state was no longer frightened of trade unions or trade unionists. And why would it be? When nothing trade unions did in any way interfered with or disrupted the smooth operation of the system. What was not to like, when trade unionists now counted themselves among the strongest supporters of the political, economic and social status quo.

 

The final proof that the trade union movement had been completely swallowed up by the Establishment would a media release from the Council of Trade Unions celebrating the parade as “bigger, better and more mainstream” than ever before, and praising the “massive symbolism” of the armed forces’ and the Police’s participation.

 

Presumably, the CTU media release would end by pointing out that: “The contrast between the bad old days, when the Police were better known for batoning strikers on the picket-line, and when the army’s trucks were used for the transportation of scabs; and the progressive present, when nearly all large institutions can boast at least one Trade Union Liaison Officer; could hardly be more striking.”

 

Watching a May Day Parade in which everyone from the Army and the Police, to MPs and City Councillors were proudly waving red flags and punching the air with clenched-fist salutes would be deeply, deeply depressing. It would mean that the movement I had devoted much of my adult life to promoting and defending had been drained of all its radicalism and danger.

 

I would feel as shocked and alienated as I imagine many LGBTIQA Aucklanders felt when they saw what used to be called “The Hero Parade” turned into a showcase for the “openness and diversity” of  the New Zealand Defence Force, the Police, the Department of Corrections, Air New Zealand, assorted commercial radio stations and the ANZ Bank. As if all the vicious prejudices and hidden brutalities of “mainstream” New Zealand society have floated away like so many helium-filled balloons over Western Park.

 

New Zealand led the world in passing legislation that not only made collective bargaining legal but also supported it with taxpayer-funded institutions. Did that legislation succeed in overcoming the stigma attached to all those who demanded a greater share of the wealth their labour had created? No, it did not. There remained, deeply entrenched in New Zealand’s capitalist society, the most powerful antipathy towards trade unions. So much so that, in 1991, the National Party passed the Employment Contracts Act – in which even the term “trade union” did not appear.

 

Has the passage of legislation decriminalising homosexuality, recognising civil unions and legalising gay marriage truly eliminated the deeply entrenched negativity towards all things LGBTIQA in “mainstream” New Zealand society? Are we really as welcoming of “diversity”, so forgiving of difference, as Saturday’s “Auckland Pride Parade” organisers insisted? The tragically large number of young people committing suicide in response to their families’ and their peers’ reception of their sexual natures suggests that we are still very far from that goal.

 

More than forty years ago, the radical sociologist Herbert Marcuse coined the phrase “repressive tolerance” to describe the way capitalist society was subverting the traditional concept of liberal tolerance and transforming it into its opposite – subtle domination. All those institutions and social tendencies considered hostile to capitalism’s interests were gradually being absorbed into its processes and neutralised. As I watched the Auckland Pride Parade make its way along Ponsonby Road on Saturday night, and contrasted its corporate slickness with the wild and gloriously transgressive Hero Parades of the 1990s, I silently congratulated old Marcuse for his insight.

 

Protest: Thankfully, there was at least one human-being at Saturday's parade who still knew how to say "No!"

 

And later, when I read about the young person whose arm was broken by a security guard for daring to protest against the oxymoronic travesty of soldiers, police officers and jailers celebrating unconventional sexualities, I offered up a silent prayer to the gods and monsters of perversity and resistance: the ones who embolden rebels and keep the authorities off-balance. Among that gawking and guffawing crowd, they’d reassured me, there was at least one human-being who still knew how to say: “No!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 23 February 2015.