Gay Shame
a radical queer alternative
By Matilda (Matt Bernstein Sycamore)
http://www.spike00.com/clubky/gayshame.htm
http://www.google.com/search?q=gay+pride+shame
Gay Pride has become little more than a giant op****tunity for multi-
national cor****ations to target-market products to gay consumers.
Major companies focus en Pride-oriented ad campaigns, from beer and
liquor companies like Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Cuervo, Smirnoff, Skyy
and Bailey's to clothing companies like Polo, Banana Republic, Reebok,
and Macy's, car companies like Saab and BMW, and drug companies like
Bristol- Myers Squibb, GlaxoWellcome, and Abbott Laboratories. In San
Francisco and many large U.S. cities, Gay Pride is a fenced-off event,
where an endless parade of floats, from the vapid to the downright
scary, marches by: gay AT&T employees, gay Genentech employees, "gay-
friendly" politicians like racist Mayor Giuliani of New York or pro-
gentrification Mayor Brown of San Francisco, gay stockbrokers, gay
realtors, gay cops...
Many of the companies in attendance at Pride mask reactionary
agendas in order to court the gay dollar: right-wing Coors and Philip
Morris, union-busting Budweiser, and the old standbys-drug companies
like Bristol-Myers Squibb and G!axoWellcome, who always choose profits
over people's lives (especially people with AIDS). If the organizers
of the Pride Parade offer any agenda at all (sometimes they do not-
last year's San Francisco theme was "Queerific"), it is usually
organized along an assimilationist axis: gay marriage and gays-in-the-
military are common preoccupations. This year, though, SF Pride has
gone off the deep end by adapting Budweiser's advertising motto for
the official theme. "Be Yourself-Make It a Bud" has become "Be
Yourself-Change the World."
Queers appalled by "Budweiser Pride" are organizing to confront
the cor****ate beast with Gay Shame actions at the June 30 SF Pride
Parade. These actions will encourage people to celebrate queer
identities in ways other than buying a bunch of crap. So many people
are alienated by the consumerism and the assimilationist agenda of
"pride," and we call on everyone to resist this tyranny.
Gay Pride has not always been such a spectacle of consumption;
it's roots lie in the famous and everyday acts of queer resistance to
police brutality (Stonewall Riots, Compton Cafeteria Riots, etc).
Furthermore, since the beginning of cor****ate-sponsored "pride,"
queers have resisted by various means, from physically attacking the
organizers, to blocking elected officials from marching, to breaking
into the march with anti-consumerist messages. The first Gay Shame
event took place in 1998 in New York, organized by a collective of
queers who challenged the limiting agenda of of a gay movement that
refuses to address racism, misogyny, hetero***ism, and classism as an
intrinsic part of organizing. The free event took place at dumba, a
queer household and performance space in Brooklyn, and consisted of
drag, spoken word, and dance performances; speakers and tabling en
issues of welfare "reform," poverty and homelessness, the crackdown on
public *** and queer visibility, personal queer histories, and needle
exchange; vegan food; dancing and community-building.
Since then, Gay Shame festivals of resistance have occurred in
numerous cities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including San
Francisco, Toronto, Stockholm, and Barcelona. These events have taken
various forms-in Barcelona, for example, organizers blocked the parade
with shopping carts.
In San Francisco, the first Gay Shame event occurred last year,
when we took over Tire Beach, a rotting industrial park on the San
Francisco Bay. We turned Tire Beach into our queer autonomous space
for the day, which included free food, t-****rts, and various other
gifts, bands, spoken word, djs and dancing, a kidspace for children,
and speakers on issues including gentrification, U.S. colonization of
Vieques, and prison, youth, and trans activism. We encouraged people
to participate in creating their own radical queer space, and people
argued about political issues, created visual art, poured concrete and
made a mosaic, dyed hair, mudwrestled ****d, and had ***. We organized
the event in less than a month, and over four hundred people trekked
out to Tire Beach to join in the festivities.
As organizers of Gay Shame in San Francisco last year, however,
one of our main critique was that, in spite of our efforts to create a
politicized space, many participants were rude to the speakers and
seemed uninterested in anything beyond partying and socializing with
their friends. This year we resolved to be more confrontational, to
ensure that our political agenda would remain clear.
Gay Shame presented the Gay Shame Awards on May 25, in the center
of the whitewashed gayborhood of the Castro. We rewarded the most
hypocritical gays for their service to the "community," in order to
expose these evil-doers who use the sham of "pride" as a cover-up for
their greed and misdeeds. Hundreds of queers dressed to excess and
jammed Harvey Milk Plaza and blocked Castro Street for several hours
of dangerous glamour. Award categories included "Making More Queers
Homeless," "Helping Right- Wingers Cope," "Best Target Marketing,"
"Best Gender Segregation," "Best Racist- Ass Whites-Only Space,"
"Exploiting Our Youth," "The IN Award" (For Celebrities Who Should
Never Have Come Out in the" 'First Place), and "Legends" (Straight
Allies for, Reactionary Gays). We presented a radical queer
extravaganza, a fun and biting critique of the reactionary gay
mainstream- in the belly of the beast.
Gay Shame is committed to fighting tha rabid assimilationist
monster of cor****ate gay "pride" with a devastating mobilization of
queer brilliance. If you'd like to get involved, call 415 540-2947 or
email: gayshamesf at yahoo.com
http://www.spike00.com/clubky/gayshame.htm
By Matilda (Matt Bernstein Sycamore)
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