Now that I've had a few days to clear my head, post-Creating Change, I wanted to share a bit about my experiences presenting with fellow UM-er Paul Farber at the conference. We presented a workshop titled, "Making it Work: Mobilizing Lesbian & Gay Identities in the 21st Century" on Sunday morning - bright and early!

I came to Paul last fall to propose that we coordinate something for Creating Change, and in particular to consider facilitating a workshop that examined the difficulties identity-based movements will face in the coming years. But this is not news, of course. Lefties -- who often cut their teeth in identity-based movements and thus owe much to their existence -- take pleasure in casting stones at the thoroughly dead horse, "identity politics." I wanted to work with Paul to create a dialogue that avoided lamenting the pitfalls of identity-based organizing, because we are by now all too aware of these critiques.

Let's face it: "gay" and "lesbian" have dried up in some major urban centers as motiviating factors for organizing. Getting a thousand San Francisco gay men out to anything to advocate based on their sexual identity is laughable. It just isn't going to happen. That said, there are other places where there is still rich possibility for using these categories as starting place. There is diversity. And I wanted this workshop to recognize that.

And recognize it, we did. Though we faced stiff competition in our workshop block, we managed to get about 10 lively participants into the room who came from very different backgrounds. We had a member of the Task Force Board of Directors; Robyn Ochs, a bisexuality advocate who travels the nation speaking primarily on college campuses; a Midwesterner who worked primarily with the MCC (Metropolitan Community Church); two Michigan undergrads; an older lesbian who came out of the feminist movements of the 70s and 80s; and more! It was a great group of people.

Of course, the workshop was intended to raise questions, rather than answer them. Several key questions emerged out of our discussion:

1. Is it possible to flip issues to the front of our organizing, and identity to the back, and still wind up building communities of primarily LGBT people?
2. How do we deal with increasing institutionalization of our movements?
3. How can we use an asset-based model to improve and reframe our organizing efforts?
4. How do we define success in regards to political organizing?
5. What are the ingredients for that success - and how might we expect them to vary from place to place, and cultural context to cultural context?

I was particularly interested in that third question. We began the session with this quote from Ritch Savin-William's recent book, The New Gay Teenager:

In some respects, these teenagers might relate better to their pre-labeled, pre-identified grandparents than they do with their gay-liberated parents or their gay-resigned older cousins... For them 'gay' carries too much baggage."

We spent a good amount of time trying to digest what the "baggage" might look like. But I was struck at the end of the session by one of the participants who noted that baggage isn't just a ball and chain, but is also necessarily a set of resources. Your clothes and shaving kit, for example. Reframing in this way seems to me to be potentially very useful.

This made me think that perhaps what is needed is some resistance to the postmodern critique of "gay" and "lesbian," which to me seems to be implicitly a neoliberal project. What I mean by that is that these critiques have often demanded that categories reflect every tiny detail imaginable about an individual's existence. To that end, they have promoted the proliferation of increasingly particular sexual identities, like, for instance, "homoflexible" or even just the now hugely popular,"queer" (queer of course was never meant to be an identity, and was rather meant as a resistance to sexual identity itself - but nevermind that).

Along the way the old feminist addage, "the personal is political," has been perverted from its original meaning (a statement about the need for an analysis of the domestic sphere as a realm of politics) to how I have heard many use it today as a way to locate the starting point for politics at the level of individual experience. This last part is critical -- we have moved to a place where we expect and encourage our politics to flow from our own narrow experiences. This is dangerous, and to me, is why the postmodern / queer identity proliferation has had unintended neoliberal consequences.

Alas, it's 1:30 AM, and I am exhausted. I'll hopefully keep thinking about these issues, and churn something out more substantial in the coming months.