—with apologies to Poly Styrene
Eleven years ago, the Against Equality (AE) collective published a compilation of its three anthologies, critical of myopic topics of “gay pride.”1 As writers for AE note in the collection’s introduction, the day before SCOTUS trashed the Defense of Marriage Act (the ban on gay marriage signed by Bill Clinton) and California’s Prop 8 (the people’s ban on gay marriage), in 2013, the Justices had trashed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Two years before the SCOTUS derangement, my wife Andrea Carney and I had attended a local reading and signing by author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore because in October 2010 we’d seen her go face to face with anti-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell soldier Dan Choi on Democracy Now! Sycamore argued that with the repeal of DADT (it would be repealed in September 2011), gay people would be free to be sucked into the sorts of crazy conflicts that Choi was involved in, namely the Iraq war. Sycamore saw the issue in moral terms while Choi was more pragmatic, as seen below.
And so AE in turn critiques both the repeal of DADT as well as enactment of the DREAM Act; the former as outlined above and the latter because it potentially sucks immigrants into an imperialist fighting force. (As I took a break from writing these words, a DW newscast told me of Trump bombing Iran. What a bold, new opportunity for immigrants and gays to involve themselves in.)
That these topics might be debatable could be news to some, but to my mind AE sees hypocrisy (giving marriage with one hand, taking votes with the other) as the road to inquiry (how heteronormativity can be a double-edged sword).2 That’s a topic for another post, but it does inform what I ran into during this Pride Month.
The Hidden Cameras
The latest output by Canadian Joel Gibb, aka The Hidden Cameras, was pushed my way the other day by YouTube. Titled “How do you love?” the video features a mirrored split-screen of Gibb, now living in Berlin, taking sleek transports in a white A-shirt and pleated pants to a soundtrack that is EDM and forgettable. The lyrics are melancholic, mourning a liaison of mixed messages with a blank verse that I would find in several of the Cameras’ works.
Because I had watched this video, YouTube sent me a promo of “Ban Marriage” from 2003, the same year Gibb’s provinces began legalizing same-sex unions. But this is no slick political tract. Gibb uses words like outsider artist Howard Finster, being inspired by a God that may or may not have his back(side).
As if I hadn’t been paying attention, next I was sent “Underage” (2009) plumbing the possibilities of Gibb’s subversion.
Today I bought the two-LP 20th anniversary pressing of The Smell of Our Own, from which “Ban Marriage” is taken. Its lilting melodies—labeled “gay folk church music”—may belie somewhat its subjects: urination (turned to ice in the bitter cold, reflected in the yellow vinyl of this reissue), animals as cannibals, restroom stall sex and the soiled carpet of a peep show arcade, the shame and thrill of adulterous, closeted trysts, the legendary tongues of the damned, what men do with men “in the army or in the klan.”
And then there is a holy visit sent by God: golden flowers, honey, and—well, this is a band whose original label was called Evil Evil—disease.
I’m reminded of the Irish band Fatima Mansions and their motto “Keep Music Evil, Please.”3 They could sing the tenderest of tunes and then devolve a future R.E.M. chestnut into an announcer’s voiceover.
I’m further reminded that the Mansions titled an earlier EP The Only Solution: Another Revolution.4 As I wrote six years ago,
Shortly after Stonewall in the summer of ’69 [writer John] Lauritsen attended a meeting of gay people who were debating whether to align with the antiwar movement, with which John had been involved since 1965. He and the other radicals at the meeting carried the day and so the group eventually was dubbed Gay Liberation Front, a nod to the National Liberation Front—aka Viet Cong—of Vietnam. This is an example of the overlap I always saw as perfectly natural. As a kid I organized against the war in high school and and also wrote a book report on James Baldwin’s Another Country.5 Others might have preferred cubbyholes over connections.
The wisdom of our enlisting in a campaign to retain trans* people in a military that is an extra-Constitutional tool of a de facto king—in Iran, in Vietnam—is questionable. Oh, Equality, up yours!
Header image:
The Smell of Our Own
alternate album cover image
Notes
- Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, Ryan Conrad (ed.), Edinburg, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2014.
- From AE’s home page: “As queer thinkers, writers and artists, we are committed to dislodging the centrality of equality rhetoric and challenging the demand for inclusion in the institution of marriage, the US military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.”
- The motto is found in the CD booklet for Viva Dead Ponies, Radioactive Records, 1991.
- The Only Solution: Another Revolution, Radioactive Records, 1991.
- A couple of years later I would find all of Baldwin’s books on the shelves of my future wife Andrea Carney. Years after that we became acquainted with Stan Weir, who had worked and dialogued with Baldwin. See this section of my earlier post The feeble strength of one.