Gays Rights, Gun Rights, Gay Nationalism.

[Meldread]

I have to wonder why we, as a community, haven't begun talking about Gay Nationalism. We've reached a critical point in our history where it is obvious that (at least in America) we have no (or only a very few) straight allies. Most of them claim to support us, our human rights and yet when it comes right down to it they are either silent or secretly work against us.

We can't depend on them. We can only depend on ourselves. Why do we have to wait for approval from straights? They have nothing to gain one way or another. We face discrimination in all areas and walks of life, and the only advantage we have over others who have walked a similar road is our ability (most of us anyway) for us to blend in, and that is a blessing as well as a curse.

I think it's time for us to start getting real about this issue. It's going to be another 30 or so years before we see any type of equality for gays in this country nationwide. It's going to be an uphill battle, one fought tooth and nail, and even after we receive the legal rights we deserve and are legally on the same ground as everyone else, that isn't going to change the social stigma. In fact it will only create resentment by those who lose the battle.

It's time for us to get real and be honest. We can't depend on the police. Instead of cops protecting us from those who would do us harm, they sit around their stations, pull out .45 caliber guns and calmly say, 'I can make a big hole in a queers head with this.'

Of course we can't depend on our own neighbors to take a stand for us, because they are too busy burning down our homes and stealing our things as well as targeting our places of worship.

Lets face facts. We're in serious trouble. We're in very, deep, big serious trouble and things are gonna get a whole lot worse before they get any better.

I've held the belief that during the Black Civil Rights Movement that Martin Luther King Jr. isn't the real reason they were successful. No, what they did -- they made it palatable to the public. They allowed themselves to be seen as victims -- and they were -- but sympathy isn't what caused the movement's success. Whites feared black people and they still do to some extent to this day. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers they chose a different road. They didn't want to be victims anymore, they wanted to fight back and cause their abusers just as much pain and suffering as they caused for them.

How come the gay rights movement doesn't have the same type of people? Those who are willing to stand up and say "I'm not going to be a victim anymore." Someone who is going to stand up, pick up the torch and say, "If you come into my neighborhood you won't leave it alive." How many more times are we gonna allow "fag bashers" to drive into our community and treat us like crap before we start fighting back?

I for one am sick of being a victim. I see nothing wrong -- I think it is perfectly justified -- for shooting and killing a gay basher who was likely going to cause some trouble or harm for gays. I don't have sympathy for folks like that. They get what comes to them.

We need to stop appeasing straights so much. We need to start offering ultimatums and forming our own tight knit communities. We need to learn to depend on ourselves and each other. We need to stay ahead of the straights and find away to enable ourselves and learn to stop being victims. We need positive and strong role-models for our children and we need to find away to preserve our history and past. It needs to be etched into stone and placed in front of every straight man and woman who walks by that so many of the things they enjoy was made possible by gay people. So many of house hold historical names were gay or bi. Shakespeare. Alexander the Great. Michelangelo. Socrates, Plato, King Edward II, and on and on and on. We should make sure that is taught in schools.

Straights complain about us shoving our "gayness" in their face, I say we don't do it nearly enough, and I'm not talking about the sexual side of being gay. I'm talking about fighting back, forcefully, with words as well as anything else we can. Straights outta be made afraid of us. They should be afraid to enter our neighborhoods. They should be afraid to bash us because they'd be afraid we'd find out where they live and pay them a visit and teach them and their families a lesson. They will never respect us or acknowledge us as equals. That will never happen. So the best we can settle for is for them to be afraid.

I'm all out of sympathy. I'm all out of patients. I don't even consider myself an American anymore. If I was an American I'd be treated like one and I'm not. To me America is just a hostile nation that I owe no loyalty toward, and I could careless about what happens to it. It abandoned me the moment I was born, and all its promises turned out to be nothing more than poisonous lies.














---
I apologize for the rambling and ranting. I should probably get a journal or something.

[transeo]

1. I'm with you

We do need to form tighter comunities. We do need to look out for each other. We do need to fight back. But we also need to recruit str8 allies.

I know many that have participated in rallies with me and helped raise money for LGBT causes and are totally on our side. The problem is these are average folks, not government. We need to make sure that we instill a sense of fear in the bigots, not all str8 people. Otherwise we will end up with an even larger army against us.

Welcome those on our side and forcefully eject those who are not. And start getting vocal and fight back against bashers as a group.

[eallen]

2. Cape Cod secede!

I hope you let some of us straight sympathizer immigrate, once you found the Republic of Provincetown. Will it do, if I sail in with a rainbow colored spinnaker?

:hippie:

[Meldread]

3. Malcolm X's words are true for gays too.

You can just feel the parallels and really identify. Here are some excerpts from his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet" delivered on April 3, 1964. You can read it in full here.

<snip>
1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed. The most explosive year. Why? It's also a political year. It's the year when all of the white politicians will be back in the so-called Negro community jiving you and me for some votes. The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer.

Don't let anybody tell you anything about the odds are against you. If they draft you, they send you to Korea and make you face 800 million Chinese. If you can be brave over there, you can be brave right here. These odds aren't as great as those odds. And if you fight here, you will at least know what you're fighting for.

I'm not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I'm not a student of much of anything. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.

Well, I am one who doesn't believe in deluding myself. I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation; you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don't have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

<snip>

They're becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it's possible for them to see that every time there's an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who's going to sit in the White House and who's going to be in the dog house.

lt. was the black man's vote that put the present administration in Washington, D.C. Your vote, your dumb vote, your ignorant vote, your wasted vote put in an administration in Washington, D.C., that has seen fit to pass every kind of legislation imaginable, saving you until last, then filibustering on top of that. And your and my leaders have the audacity to run around clapping their hands and talk about how much progress we're making. And what a good president we have. If he wasn't good in Texas, he sure can't be good in Washington, D.C. Because Texas is a lynch state. It is in the same breath as Mississippi, no different; only they lynch you in Texas with a Texas accent and lynch you in Mississippi with a Mississippi accent. And these Negro leaders have the audacity to go and have some coffee in the White House with a Texan, a Southern cracker -- that's all he is -- and then come out and tell you and me that he's going to be better for us because, since he's from the South, he knows how to deal with the Southerners. What kind of logic is that?
----

I sometimes read that speech and listen to the audio when I need inspiration, and every time I hear it or read it I realize -- he's right. He's absolutely right. Granted, I don't know where Malcolm X stood on gay issues, and he most likely would have thrown us to the dogs like a hypocrite (like a lot of black people throw us to the dogs), but that's beside the point. He was right then and he is right now. We see the same thing happening.

We shouldn't be afraid to stand up and hold our vote hostage. It's our damn vote. It's the only power and say we have in anything and the Democrats seem to think that they own it. They take us for granted. They come into our communities every time there is an election and fill us with hope only to screw us when they get into office. THEY BLAME US FOR THE LOSS OF THEIR LAST ELECTION.

I say, fuck the Democrats. If they want our vote they outta earn our vote. We outta make that clear -- 80% of gays voted for John Kerry and all we got in return was BLAME FOR HIS FAILURE. We should stand up and say, "Whoever is going to begin fighting for gay rights is going to get the gay vote." If Democrats want to win they need our vote in close elections. We outta hold them hostage. You support us or you don't. Coming to our community isn't good enough. You have to go on the record and make it known before everyone. You must support gay marriage. You must support us completely and totally otherwise you won't get our vote.

I'm at the point now where I'd support a pro-gay Republican even if I disagreed with everything else. It's all about survival, it's all about getting what's rightfully mine. I'm going to take a personal oath -- I'm going to refuse to vote for anyone who doesn't support gay marriage and gay rights. I don't care who it is or where it is. If you want my vote, my support, my money -- then you work for me. Period. You are MY bitch, not the other way around.

As for gays who actively work against us and aid and support anti-gay candidates we should black list them. Destroy them. Crush them. They are worse than scum. They are aiding the enemy. They are traitors. People like Jeff Gannon and his ilk outta be black listed and be spit on like the scum they are. No sympathy. No mercy.

I'm no longer going to support the lesser of the two evils. I'm taking a Bush stance, "You're either with us or against us." That's the way I see it. If you want me on your side you are going to have to earn that right, that privilege, or otherwise you are nothing to me. I refuse to aid those who are only using me.

What difference does it make in our lives if we get a anti-gay Democrat in office? How is that any different than a anti-gay Republican? You are either with us or against us, there is no middle ground.

[Guy Fawkes]

12. Remember what happened at the end of his life...

Malcom X found Islam and started to preach peaceful resistance- and he was killed by one of his former followers.

[Meldread]

4. Dupe Self Deleted

Double post. Sorry. Self deleted.

[wli]

5. Calling for a new Sacred Band of Thebes?

Plato was optimistic about the effectiveness of such.

[sui generis]

8. I'll take up arms

and legs and other more entertaining body parts.

;)

Seriously though, stand and fight. If you don't want to be discriminated against for being gay you have to fight for equal rights for everybody, and you have to do it the old fashioned hard way.

Believe me, I would rather wade into a throng of freepfucks and beat the living crap out of them with my hands and feet than have to go sit in meetings with congressmen and write long letters and stand vigils and picket businesses and stand up for what's right in the board room and on the street. It's a LOT of work and it uses up a LOT of my life. The Band of Thebes does indeed exist in one form or another, we just don't swing swords these days.

Isolationism won't work. Economic power is what works. The gay community was crippled by the AIDS epidemic for a decade and a half. We were slaughtered one for every one that it missed in a couple of successive generations. We have seen our neighbors, and siblings and friends, and sometimes life partners, die, horribly, in agony and shame and fear, without hope. We have war stories having had our hearts torn out and handed back bleeding, that most people can't bear to even hear, and most of us have never seen a bullet or experienced physical violence. We have post traumatic stress disorder, and not just from losing 4 or 5 of our platoon buddies in a brief skirmish, but from losing dozens of dozens over the years. We have diamond and steel where our spines and nerves used to be.

And as a community we are finally growing older and more powerful, and more dangerous to our foes, a fact that you can get behind. We have political power. We have economic power. We have the power of human decency, and the strength of survivors, and we have real innate pride that "straight pride" parades offends so profoundly it isn't worthy of further comment.

Stick with us kid - we've got your back.

-sui

[kweerwolf]

6. Nationalism or separatism?

The word 'nationalism' conjures up some negative connotations for me. I'm more inclined to use the word 'separatism' to describe what you write about ... but that may just be spliting hairs since I've thought in the past that we should consider ourselves as LGBT first and foremost and Americans only by accident of birth.

I know that since the last election I've grown increasingly disenchanted with many of our so-called "straight allies" who mouth support for our issues, but when it comes right down to it would sell us out in a heartbeat.

We can expect homophobia to be rampant among the Republicans with their base of "Christian" cultists. What's sad is the more subtle form of homophobia we get from the Democrats (and there are plenty of examples of it right here on DU).

While it's nice that DU provides us our own forum, it's also become a sort of online "gay ghetto" for us. We get to speak our minds, but the vast majority of the straight DUers never bother to visit unless a posting is working it's way down the first page or two of the discussion forums. A posting about a hate crime might elicit "oh that's so bad ... those criminals should be punished" responses from a few straight allies. But for the most part our forum is ignored.

I used to think that true homophobia existed in only a few people and that most straights just didn't understand our issues because they had never took the time to truly empathize with the LGBT community. Now I'm learning that difference between Fred Phelps and most straight people is how deep you have to scratch to find the homophobe within.

Sound cynical? Maybe ... but even here on the DU I'd say that idea is based on experience rather than cynicism.

[Meldread]

9. I completely agree.

Just ask most straight folk on this board why John Kerry lost the election and you'll hear some variant blaming us for it. As if we are a weight on the Democratic Party dragging it down. It makes me so angry.

When I started the original post I was raging and practically sick to my stomach after reading about the two guys in FL who not only had their home burned to the ground, but later on had their home robbed right after that. Of course the neighbors saw "nothing." (Was probably the neighbors that did it.) The folks who did it are likely to get away with it. Then of course I read the thing about the cops and that just made me sick.

We do of course have some REAL straight allies around here. Muse comes to mind and all the wonderful work she has done in Kansas -- that should always be remembered. It's just unfortunate that MOST of our "allies" do nothing to help us and seem content to just provide us with lip service. (The old, "Yeah, that's sad. Chin up! Vote for a Democrat and it'll all be better!")

A large part of me wants to separate from the Straight Community. I don't even identify with straights much anymore. I see myself (and all LGBT people) as nearly being an entirely different race all together. The other part of me wants to stay in the straight community just to piss them off. Although being vindictive isn't likely to change anything.

Sadly, living in these conditions for so long has lead me to become cynical and cold-hearted. Were we not under constant attack or faced with such bigotry and hate I would likely support gun control. I don't. Because I believe LGBT outta have guns so they can defend themselves -- we NEED guns to defend ourselves -- we can't depend on the police. I probably wouldn't support the death penalty, but I do. I believe anyone who commits a hate crime outta be put to death and I want that death to be as painful and long as possible. Like using the electric chair but starting the voltage out low and slowly turning it up. Televise that a few times and I guarantee hate crimes would go down. Homophobes and other bigots would think twice before committing their crimes when they hear the screams and helpless pleas of their buddy.

I could go on, but there is no point. I am just starting to rant and ramble again at least I've found a use for our little ghetto here.

[Kipling]

7. I have an idea.

Why not get loads of GLBT people to emigrate to one state? That way, you'll choose the government... an all-gay/progressive government. You can make them spend more police resources on hate crime, legalise gay marriage, etc. It'll be like a little peice of gay-friendly paradise, without any problems (apart from the odd bigot who doesn't like what's happening to the neighbourhood, but remember, the police would be run by gays). And the tourism money from foreign GLBT's and progressives would be good.

[renaissanceguy]

10. I have a better idea.

Why don't we, instead, send fundies to their own island?

[davidinalameda]

11. or just send them all to South Carolina like they want

we should each sponsor a family to get them out of our communities