Brody's Scribbles... Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto. Have We Made Progress Since 1971? (Part 11)

By Tim Trent (Dartmouth, England) MAR 15 | Yesterday's was a long article. Today's is shorter. It deals with the segment of the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto of 1971 which handles Self Oppression, something that truly is a state of mind. It might as easily have been called Self Ghettoisation, though that term seems to have been applied historically to loving conditions and location rather than a state of mind.

The Manifesto says:

SELF-OPPRESSION

The ultimate success of all forms of oppression is our self-oppression. Self-oppression is achieved when the gay person has adopted and internalised straight people's definition of what is good and bad. Self-oppression is saying: 'When you come down to it, we are abnormal'. Or doing what you most need and want to do, but with a sense of shame and loathing, or in a state of disassociation, pretending it isn't happening; cruising or cottaging not because you enjoy it, but because you're afraid of anything less anonymous. Self-oppression is saying: 'I accept what I am', and meaning: 'I accept that what I am is second-best and rather pathetic'. Self-oppression is any other kind of apology: 'We've been living together for ten years and all our married friends know about us and think we're just the same as them'. Why? You're not.

Self-oppression is the dolly lesbian who says: 'I can't stand those butch types who look like truck drivers'; the virile gay man who shakes his head at the thought of 'those pathetic queens'. This is self-oppression because it's just another way of saying: 'I'm a nice normal gay. just like an attractive heterosexual'.

The ultimate in self-oppression is to avoid confronting straight society, and thereby provoking further hostility: Self-oppression is saying, and believing: 'I am not oppressed'.

One might compare this to the success in recent times of terrorism. Let me use the IRA and the bombing campaigns they carried out on the UK mainland as an example. During the height of that campaign we had the Harrods bombing, the Canary Wharf bombing, the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings. We had many and pointless terrorist attacks and they failed unequivocally to oppress us. In the UK we spat in the eye of terrorists and went to the pub. We are always sorry for those who were killed or maimed and our hearts go out to those they loved and those who loved them, but we did not care one fig about the terrorists during those campaigns. They failed.

Now let us turn to the alleged plot to blow airliners out of the sky, detected and prevented by our security services in conjunction with other security services worldwide. I have no idea if it was a credible plot, if the alleged mechanism for blowing airliners out of the sky was feasible or not, or if there was more than a plot. By this I mean it may have been a real threat with real explosives, or it may have been a load of fanatics feeding on fear, but with no substance behind it - nothing to go "bang!"

To this episode of terrorism we reacted by introducing draconian measures to limit all our freedoms. We have willingly relinquished the freedom to carry drinks onto a plane, and submit ourselves to interminable lines of security checks, including a scanner which all but strips us naked.

And we give these newer events anniversaries! We celebrate terrorism. We give the lowlife who perpetrate such things an annual day of remembrance.

This new terrorism has succeeded where the IRA failed. It has made us oppress ourselves.

Read the manifesto now. Read it again and see why I've discussed this in terms of terrorism. We LGBT folk do celebrate anniversaries. We remember the Stonewall Riots, for example, a time when people decided that enough was enough.

And then we forget them.

Photo By See-Ming For SML 2008

And we exhibit all the tendencies and more spoken of in the manifesto. One could even say that to write an article saying so also perpetrates self oppression. And so it would if there were not a call to action made by criticising us for doing it.

We have been, we still are being, our own terrorists against ourselves.

Instead we must stand up straight, yes straight, and proud. Some people are gay. Get over it. I am a human being first and foremost. I will let no-one oppress me for my eye colour, my hair colour, my skin colour, my height, my weight, or any other attribute I have. I will let no-one use language designed to put me in a corner. I will not use it myself.

What will you do?

Will you stand with the black man with the rainbow flag? Will you be proud to be beside him and not put yourself down?

Or will the efforts made in 1971 have been in vain? For, truly, I see those efforts under the heading of Self Oppression to have been in vain.