SK Multi-Hyphenate

Bachmann Glittered: 5 Reasons It's a Good Thing

1. Glitter satirizes her hyper-femininity, a key cause of her popularity.

2. Glitter has become a decidedly queer object. Deployed by queer activists upon a decidedly anti-queer figure, Bachmann's anti-queer record and discourse are exposed—and visually so, which yields maximum media impact.

3. A glittered Bachmann is a queered Bachmann. Via crafty activist sleight-of-hand, Bachmann becomes the figure of her ire for a moment—nay, permanently, given the visual evidence.

4. The glitter action shows that the Republican 2012 presidential field can't escape their anti-queer records and discourse—indeed, that the electorate will be reminded of their hateful positions and speech.

5. Glitter is fun!

Other reasons why a beglittered Bachmann is a good thing? Post them in the comments!

Glenn Ligon and the 1968 Memphis Strike

Glenn Ligon’s 1988 work Untitled (I Am a Man), a replica of the sign carried by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, is a prime example of his appropriative strategy. Not an original sign itself, nor an identical reproduction of one, Ligon’s painting is rather an appropriation of the sign, so that the words “I Am a Man” simultaneously exist in three separate but related contexts: the original historical context in which the message emerged, the context in which Ligon rendered that message, and the context in which a viewer apprehends the message. Indeed, Ligon sought to show in Untitled (I Am a Man) the “changing notions of what it means to carry a sign that says ‘I Am a Man’”—a kinetic discourse that, for him, is represented in part by the cracks on the painting’s surface. “The piece was made using oil paint and enamel paint mixed together, and that’s not a good combination,” Ligon has explained. “The minute I made the painting it started to crack, and given the subject matter, I thought that was interesting.”

Memphis 1968 is remembered as the place and year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, but the reason the civil rights leader came to Memphis—the sanitation strike—is less often recalled. On February 1st of that year, two black sanitation workers were accidentally killed when they were sucked into the compactor of a garbage truck. The tragedy underscored the inequity of the sanitation business, which was run by whites but carried out by an almost exclusively black workforce under vile, discriminatory conditions. As historian Michael K. Honey writes: “Hauling garbage was the kind of work the city assigned to blacks only." The men’s deaths were the proverbial last straw: eleven days later, on Lincoln’s birthday, some 1300 workers went on strike. The message they held aloft for the next two months—“I Am a Man”—responded as much to longstanding discourse that marginalized black people as less than human as it did to daily put-downs of “boy” from white supervisors. “‘I Am a Man’ meant freedom,” one sanitation worker recalled. “All we wanted was some decent working conditions, and a decent salary. And be treated like men, not like boys.”

One has to wonder, of course, which men were excluded from this effort to attain “freedom,” given that in 1968, one year before Stonewall, queer men of color certainly faced a double bind of delimited manhood—and this historical tension surely informed Ligon’s appropriation of the slogan in 1988. Indeed, the historical moment of the making of Untitled (I Am a Man) was suffused with its own tensions around queerness, not least because of the AIDS crisis and the rise of the Christian right, which found easy targets in “gay art.” (Ligon’s first professional exhibition was a 1989 group show—the same year a Mapplethorpe solo show was famously cancelled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. due to conservative outcry.) Ligon’s painting, then, highlights racial, gender, and sexual oppression—and the intersectional work performed by these fields of power—in two separate historical moments.

Furthermore, Ligon’s appropriated, reworked image excavates the historical centrality of queerness—of twinned homoeroticism and homophobia—to racial oppression at large. Eric Lott identifies this dialectic as the basis of minstrelsy, and also as a chief reason for the failure of “a possible interracial labor alliance” in the nineteenth century—a failure whose implications lingered long into the twentieth century. (Memphis’s political leaders, after all, refused to recognize the sanitation workers as members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the standoff only ended when the city finally conceded such recognition.) To my eyes, the specter of this dialectic, of this lost promise, haunts the Ligon painting. The work’s formal elements even record this fissure: oil and enamel mixed together results in surface cracks.

But what I also see in Untitled (I Am a Man) are the cracks, as it were, in today’s historical moment, in which the presence and power of a black man in the White House has spurred thinly veiled racialized opposition in the form of the tea party movement and persistent questions about a putatively missing birth certificate. Interestingly enough, the Obamas, perhaps in a gesture to their pathbreaking role, picked a Ligon to adorn their private quarters. A part of the same series that includes the Hurston quotations, Black Like Me No. 2 (1992) foregrounds a line from John Howard Griffin’s 1961 memoir Black Like Me, about the white author’s experience of darkening his skin and traveling the South as a “black” person. “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” the canvas reads—a lesson about how flimsy the notion of racial essentialism, and a politics based on it, is.

Further reading: Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign; Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Glenn Ligon's America

NYT slide show.

Ligon (after a preface) on "Untitled (I Am a Man)," 1988.

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repealed!

My take for New York mag's Daily Intel on today's Senate vote repealing "don't ask, don't tell" 17 years after it was enacted—and 41 years since Stonewall. Gay rights have come a long way, baby. We used to hate the military!

Triptych on 'Hide/Seek'

Rich; Cotter (review); Cotter (commentary).

The Tyler Clementi Vigil at Rutgers-Newark

Post Senate Fail, Whither 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'?

Yesterday New York magazine's Daily Intel blog ran my preview of what happens next in the effort to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." As Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, described it to me, the future looks bleak. So much for Lady Gaga.

HIV/AIDS and Obama

Saw this ad from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation yesterday in DC, near the Farragut West Metro stop just up the street from the White House. It's one of 16 ads posted in bus shelters in the vicinity of POTUS's headquarters, and the numbers say it all: $6.5 billion spent on the global "war" on AIDS in 2010, versus $102 billion spent on the Afghan war. Not mentioned: the number of casualties related to each effort; I'd bet more people are dying of AIDS around the world than are dying because of the war in Afghanistan.

I wrote about Obama's lackluster AIDS funding to date in an op-ed for CNN in July. The campaign above launched August 9th.

The 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' 'Die-In'

Yesterday Lt. Dan Choi and Capt. Jim Pietrangelo chained themselves to the White House fence again, joined by four other servicemembers. It was another bold, poignant action organized by Get Equal, and at least some of the mainstream press paid attention this time (such as CBS News, which produced the above video). It was exciting to see the on-the-spot updates trickle through my Twitter feed, and I opined that "ACT UP would be proud of the WH actions, and ACT UP got things done."

ACT UP, of course, is the foremost example of successful direct action in America in the last 30 or 40 years. (The anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and later in DC certainly sent a strong message of resistance but nevertheless failed to change the status quo.) Established in 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power sought to reverse years of government neglect of HIV/AIDS and to reduce the cost and clinical barriers to life-saving drugs like AZT. The group's website—yes, they're still around, and they meet weekly at New York's LGBT Community Center—has a detailed capsule history of ACT UP actions and impacts, but from the start, when they literally waylaid Wall Street to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies, they were an unyielding force. By the time they began employing political funerals in 1992—that year "the actual ashes of people we love" were dropped on the White House lawn—ACT UP had enormously changed domestic HIV/AIDS policy.

It's this legacy that Get Equal has now picked up. It's not their only inspiration—the civil-rights movement and Gandhi are two others—but when I see Dan Choi, in uniform, chained to the White House fence, I see a die-in. It's not a die-in, of course—though some gay servicemembers have died in part because of "don't ask, don't tell" (like Barry Winchell), Choi isn't simulating death. Instead, he and his compatriots are simulating imprisonment: the literal, conceptual, and psychological incarceration caused by the military's ban on open service. (I heard the sight of Choi and Pietrangelo the last time made some gay vets, like Eric Alva, the first servicemember injured in the Iraq war, physically sick. But isn't that the point? Reduced to its essence in the cold light of day, "don't ask, don't tell" is nauseating.)

To be sure, ACT UP can't be separated from HIV/AIDS—it's the only issue the group cared about, and, in the late '80s and early '90s, it was the only issue that mattered. But because of ACT UP's powerful activism, the LGBT community became a political constituency that policymakers ignored at their peril. This is the message of the Get Equal advocates, some of whom disrupted a House committee hearing today demanding that ENDA be marked up. I suggest they take another tactic from the ACT UP playbook and go after defense contractors like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, both of which protect LGBT employees from discrimination (and offer partner benefits to boot). If their stock prices dip thanks to a direct action or two, the Pentagon might need to conclude their review of "don't ask, don't tell" quite soon.