Quote:
Originally Posted by Slater
A quick thought on assimilation vs. radicalization ... I don't really see it as an either/or. I think both have a role to play and they can complement each other, as long as there are at least some common goals or outcomes.
My personal frame of reference for this is my activity in Queer Nation in the early 1990s. Some people in the gay community complained that we were too radical, too marginal, but in a conversation I had with a lesbian who had just become Seattle's first openly gay city council member, she pointed out that without QN, she would be the fringe, the radical edge. But with us out there, pushing boundaries, she suddenly looked more mainstream to people. The combination helped push the center, if you will, helped reframe the concept of normal.
Actually the group doing this really effectively right now is the right wing. With the Tea Partiers out there moving the radical edge beyond the bounds of sanity, the "center" of the Republican party suddenly seems more mainstream, despite the fact that they are so conservative that many Nixon-era policies would be considered practically leftist by today's Republican standards.
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This. Exactly. Neither end of the spectrum is wrong or "less than". Yes, groups like Queer Nation help make others seem more mainstream. At the same time, groups like the HRC are constantly being criticized for being too mainstream, too assimilationist, but those are the groups who can actually get in to have a conversation with a senator. Yes, we're pretty mainstream as queer couples go. And that's one of the reasons why we were able to make friends with the devout Christian couple across the street. People like us are the reason that they and a lot of people like them, all over the country, are realizing that gay people aren't a bunch of weirdos, that we're really just people, and we don't actually want anything that's unreasonable. We need both sides of that equation, the radical and the mainstream suburban, to make any real progress.