Excerpt: It’s hard to not admire HRC in the same way: Like the Alien, it’s a perfect beast, unclouded by liberal or left delusions about parity or justice.
Update, March 6, 2024: Urvashi Vaid, mentioned here, died on May 14, 2022, nearly a decade after this essay appeared. Her career was one that bore the appearance of complexity but which ended in the inevitable position taken by too many mainstream LGBT activists, of “pragmatism” against left queer politics. I’ll be examining her life and career more closely in a future essay.
Update, June 7, 2020: The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has, since the publication of this essay, been renamed The Task Force. It remains just as pernicious.
The internet is like a thrift store, where old clothes surface from the detritus of people’s homes and lives to be repackaged and sold as new. Every now and then an article gains new life as it gets forwarded again.
In that vein, two older pieces focusing on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), have been recirculating this week, ostensibly exposing the dark side of the world’s largest and most powerful LGBT organisation, with an annual budget of $40 million. Hannah Kapp-Klote’s piece is about HRC’s donor list, filled with drone manufacturers. The other, by Rachel (no last name given) is about HRC’s new ambitions to do international work. Both criticise HRC and reflect a wider sense that it’s betraying the history of the LGBTQ movement.
Kapp-Klote asks “…has the LGBT movement been kidnapped by power elites advocating for their own interests?” That question has often been asked and answered in the affirmative in queer radical circles because it evokes a comforting version of gay history which goes something like this: There was once a radical queer movement which believed in all kinds of social justice but was hijacked by conservative gays and lesbians with horrible politics.
This is bullshit.
In fact, there has never been a consistent, strong radical queer movement that coherently took on gay marriage as a problem. Radical queers often insist that AIDS dealt a literal and metaphorical death-blow to their agenda. It’s true that the crisis depleted our political energy and that HRC in particular took advantage of the exhaustion of the early 90s, but we have little proof that gay politics would be substantially different without the AIDS crisis. If anything, prominent survivors of the AIDS years, like Michelangelo Signorile and Cleve Jones, are amongst the most ardent supporters of gay marriage.1Yes, this is in fact a more complex and lengthy history which needs to be teased out. For more, you’ll have to wait for my book, Strange Love, about social justice and why its current form needs to die (and how to revive it!). And before everyone takes umbrage, let me also be clear: I’m not calling either article or writer bullshit but referring to the history that radical and other queers have assimilated.
In addition, the recent focus on HRC as a main player ignores the equally terrible politics of groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) which have successfully masqueraded as the progressive wings of the gay movement.
NGLTF, founded in 1973, has had a longer history than HRC, which began in 1980, but has been surpassed by the latter in both glitz and power. As a result, NGLTF will nip at HRC’s heels whenever possible. In 2004, HRC considered Bush’s attempt “to privatize Social Security partly in exchange for the right of gay partners to receive benefits under the program.” NGLTF issued a stinging public letter of rebuke, positioning itself as the progressive answer to HRC.
But NGLTF, with a budget that usually hovers around $8 million, wasn’t standing up for justice – it was trying to woo angry potential donors away from HRC.
In recent years, NGLTF has unrolled a new slogan, “Marriage Equality Is Just the Beginning.” But even this clearly establishes that marriage has to come first and is the bedrock of “gay rights.” Like its rival, NGLTF is embedded in the larger neoliberal agenda of privatisation by installing gay marriage as a central feature of “th movement.”
As I’ve argued countless times before, gay marriage is neoliberalism’s handiest little tool, part of a system of privatization where people must enter into private contracts like marriage in order to gain the most basic benefits—like health care, or the ability to decide who can receive their estates, small or large, upon death. You cannot claim any kind of radical or progressive agenda and still hew so closely to the fight for “marriage equality,” as NGLTF does.
So, while I detest HRC, I have nothing but contempt for the likes of NGLTF, its deceitful progressive agenda, and its position as a breeding ground for insidious positions in support of neoliberalism. For proof, we need look no further than its most famous alum, Urvashi Vaid, a former executive director of the organisation.
As an Indian-American child of immigrants and a lesbian, with roots in corporate philanthropy, a history of social justice with groups like ACT UP, and a plum position at Columbia University, Vaid has accumulated a massive reservoir of cultural capital. She is neoliberalism’s Perfect And Most Diverse Child.
In August 2013, she endorsed Christine Quinn.
Endorsements for Quinn largely came from the most privileged looking to cement their power with her presumed mayoralty; by the time of the election, Quinn was reviled by most progressives and leftists. Yet, there were no notable public criticisms of Vaid, even from them.
Vaid’s endorsement was not an aberration but typical of the efflorescence of gay neoliberal politics, embodied by groups like NGLTF which talk the progressive/left talk when convenient, but push for conservative issues like marriage, hate crime legislation, and open gay participation in the military. Vaid professes a wishy-washy critique of the emphasis on marriage (these days, all the cool kids are against gay marriage) and that has made her the Progressive Oracle of The Gays; she offers no pointed and structural critiques of capitalism, relying instead on a recycled politics of racial diversity to make her points.
And that, ultimately, is what allows so many to be shocked by HRC’s blatant conservatism while ignoring what Walter Benn Michaels might call the left neoliberalism of groups like NGLTF.
Which brings me to the issue of HRC’s much-reviled monstrous nature.
In Alien, the disembodied head of Ash muses about the creature savaging the ship: “Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
It’s hard to not admire HRC in the same way: Like the Alien, it’s a perfect beast, unclouded by liberal or left delusions about parity or justice. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an evil, gay monster bent on world domination for wealthy gay men and women who don’t worry about Social Security. But groups like NGLTF, Immigration Equality, and National Council for Lesbian Rights, to name only a few, pretend to be interested in justice while pushing the same conservative gay agenda.
To use another metaphor: If HRC, with its naked ambitions for power, is the George W. Bush of the gay movement, then NGLTF with its vapid rhetoric about being “more than marriage,” is its Obama, making public declarations about a just world while launching killer drones.
In a neoliberal battlegound, where progressive politics hide the most conservative agendas, I prefer the brute honesty of the monsters.
For more see my interview with Joe Solmonese and this Current Affairs piece on HRC.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I’ve written about the topic in “On Plagiarism,” a piece you should read and memorise. There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I can use and I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.