By Tim Trent (Dartmouth, England) MAR 24 |Today we're certainly in the home straight of my analysis of the 1971 Gay Liberation Front Manifesto. The final section is entitled The Way Forward, and it has two subsections, today's is called 'Free Our Heads' and tomorrow's is 'Campaign'. I'm very much hoping they've saved the best for last.
As usual, verbatim:
The way forward-FREE OUR HEADS
The starting point of our liberation must be to rid ourselves of the oppression which lies in the head of every one of us. This means freeing our heads from self oppression and male chauvinism, and no longer organising our lives according to the patterns with which we are indoctrinated by straight society. It means that we must root out the idea that homosexuality is bad, sick or immoral, and develop a gay pride. In order to survive, most of us have either knuckled under to pretended that no oppression exists, and the result of this has been further to distort our heads. Within gay liberation, a number of consciousness-raising groups have already developed, in which we try to understand our oppression and learn new ways of thinking and behaving. The aim is to step outside the experience permitted by straight society, and to learn to love and trust one another. This is the precondition for acting and struggling together.By freeing our heads we get the confidence to come out publicly and proudly as gay people, and to win over our gay brothers and sisters to the ideas of gay liberation.
Without doubt there was oppression, huge oppression, in 1971. That oppression was the massed ranks of some sort of self styled and self counted 'moral majority', born of old religious taboos, and promoted by legislation, slowly repealed over the years, that homosexuals must be put to death. A poor unfortunate man in the USA, Murray Joseph Seidman has just been in the news as a victim of an alleged stoning to death by a young man John Joe Thomas who is alleged to have said that he followed biblical precedent in killing his friend.
As for his motive, Thomas pointed to the Old Testament in confessing to the crime on Wednesday. He told police the Bible says gays should be stoned to death "in certain situations" and that's the "answer" he "received from his prayers was to put an end to the victim's life.
Both of these men are victims, though one is the alleged perpetrator, too. Both of them were oppressed, the one by being killed and the other in his own mind for stating what he is quited as saying above.
Self oppression leads to many and complex issues, not least of which is outwardly expressed homophobia by homosexual people. As a teenager I was so afraid of the therapies I described in Part 10 that I displayed homophobia. The news every so often, and regularly enough to be no surprise, shows us rampantly anti-gay public figures admitting at last that they are, indeed, after all, when all is said and done, when push comes to shove, at the end of the day, not wishing to beat about the bush, not classically heterosexual. Look, here's a random one!
However, I think his problem goes deeper than that, I think Ashburn was lying to himself most of all. The mayor of West Sacramento, who is out, says he had observed Ashburn looking very uncomfortable in the corner in several gay hangouts. That doesn’t sound like a guy is comfortable in his own skin with his sexuality. Add that the fact that a gay rights organization gives him a big fat goose egg for his voting record, and Ashburn might as well change his last name to Cohn and be done with it.
That's a telling opinion. Lack of being comfortable in our own skin, whatever awkward attribute we possess, leads to many and bizarre actions. And yes, I stand by the use of 'awkward' in this context, because the gentleman concerned showed it to to be awkward for him by his own actions.
And this brings us back to Gay Pride. The manifesto was entirely correct. Though I've given the opinion in Part 18 that we are ill defined as a community because we are across all more easily defined communities, we have had the need to create and have created an all embracing LGBT identity. Regrettably the 'T' is ignored by organisations such as S onewall, an organisation which should know better, and really ought to be spelled 'Stonewall', but cannot be because it fails to embrace the 'T'.
Gay Pride is a mixture of a state of mind, of exuberant carnival celebration, of showing that we are many, of showing that we are human, and of belonging. Attending by complete accident the Gay Pride Parade in London on the Fourth of July 2009 as a spectator let me choose to change my life. I said at the time:
Things which were terrible back in the 1960s still seem terrible to those of us who were firmly in the closet then. It's hard to shake the fear of discovery. This article is hard to write, and pressing "Publish Post" will take me a while even though I am no longer hiding. But, today, in many nations in the world, we gay people can be ourselves at last. I can be myself at last. Gay kids can be themselves at last. Some People are Gay. Get over it!
And then I started to come out and not just to be gay but be proud to admit to that attribute that has been a part of me for ever. And, because I am no longer oppressed, while I do not flaunt my homosexuality, it is such a simple part of me that I speak of it when relevant.
We've come a very long way since 1971. We've made enormous progress. And much of that may be attributed to either the Gay Liberation Front itself or to the people who espoused and modified its revolutionary zeal to meet the needs they perceive and perceived.
By freeing our heads we get the confidence to come out publicly and proudly as gay people, and to win over our gay brothers and sisters to the ideas of gay liberation.
We have further to come, much further.
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