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

'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!

The Tyler Clementi Vigil at Rutgers-Newark

Rutgers President on Tyler Clementi's Suicide

Today at 4:28 p.m. Rutgers University president Richard L. McCormick issued the following LGBT-affirming statement on the loss of first-year student Tyler Clementi. In the Rutgers-wide email, McCormick reiterates the university's commitment to "the moral imperative of an open and egalitarian community" and notes that the country's second gay college student association was founded on the campus in 1969. McCormick also says he'll be meeting with LGBT student leaders to identify "areas in which Rutgers can better support the needs of this community." Altogether, I think his statement strikes the right notes for this tragic moment. It was certainly heartening to me, a new member of the Rutgers community as an MFA fiction student at the Newark campus.

As McCormick notes, there will be a vigil for Clementi this Sunday at 7 p.m. on the New Brunswick campus's Brower Commons. There will be another vigil for Clementi this Monday at 7 p.m. in Essex Room East of the Newark campus's Robeson student center. I'll be at that one.

McCormick's email in full:

Members of the Rutgers Community:

The Rutgers University community is mourning the death of first-year student Tyler Clementi.  We grieve for him and for his family, friends, and classmates as they deal with the tragic loss of a gifted young man who was a strong student and a highly accomplished musician.  Our community is preparing to hold a candlelight vigil on Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. at Brower Commons on the College Avenue campus.  This silent vigil will be an opportunity to come together in this difficult time to reaffirm our commitment to the values of civility, dignity, compassion, and respect for one another.

This tragedy and the events surrounding it have raised critical questions about the climate of our campuses.  Students, parents, and alumni have expressed deep concern that our university, which prides itself on its rich diversity, is not fully welcoming and accepting of all students.  They have expressed to me and to other Rutgers faculty and administrators the urgent need for every student to be able to live and study without fear of intimidation, discrimination, or threats to their privacy.

Rutgers has a strong history of social activism on behalf of diversity.  It was here in 1969 that the second gay college student organization in the country was founded.  In that same era, student protests led to expanded opportunities for students of color at Rutgers.  In the 1980s, our students spoke out forcefully and effectively against apartheid.  We also have a proud legacy of world renowned research on women and the preparation of women for leadership.

By its history Rutgers University is thus committed to the moral imperative of an open and egalitarian community.  That work continues today.  Last year Rutgers opened an LGBT resource center and established our first LGBT scholarship fund for undergraduate students.  And while we are working toward the creation of additional safe spaces in response to student concerns, we must make every space at Rutgers safe. Accordingly, I pledge that we will work even more closely with our student leaders to make certain that our campuses are places where students of all races, faiths, cultures, and orientations feel accepted and respected. 
In order to hear directly from our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, I am arranging to meet with student leaders of the LGBT community.  When we gather, we will discuss what they identify as the areas in which Rutgers can better support the needs of this community.

Let me also urge your participation in Project Civility (projectcivility.rutgers.edu), a two-year conversation on our New Brunswick campus about the meaning of respect and how we treat each other.  The critically important issues of personal privacy and the responsible uses of technology, which have been brought into sharp focus this week, are among the timely topics that Project Civility will examine.

Rutgers is an imperfect institution in an imperfect society, but we are always striving to find better ways to make every student feel comfortable and fully empowered.  We have the opportunity and the obligation to be a model for universities across the country.  Let us work together to make that happen.

Sincerely yours,

Richard L. McCormick

President

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.

Rewind: On Being in an HIV Vaccine Trial

 

In conjunction with my CNN.com op-ed on Obama falling behind Bush's AIDS funding, an archival treat: my 2008 Advocate account of participating in a doomed HIV vaccine trial. It tested a Merck hopeful and was carried out by the international HIV Vaccine Trials Network.

Executive Orders and 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

My reporting on how nondiscrimination will be achieved upon repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" is now up at New York mag's Daily Intel blog.

Last Thursday an amendment to do away with the ban on open service by gay troops was attached to the annual defense-authorization bill in both the House and Senate. However, the measure—for yet-to-be-determined reasons—doesn't include a nondiscrimination mandate. Since then, advocates have said they'll push Obama to issue an executive order explicitly banning discrimination against gay servicemembers. But, as former Clinton White House adviser Richard Socarides tells me in this piece, an executive order already exists barring anti-gay discrimination in the federal workforce. Once DADT's off the books, the EO should apply...

Related: Nondiscrimination Isn't in 'DADT' Repeal. Why?

Ex-SLDNer Speaks Out on 'DADT' Compromise

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell': When Compromise Goes Bad

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' 'Deal': Just Say No