I was sent a link to an article written by Don Kilhener. He is known for his work with radical Gay movements in the 1970s, being a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front Los Angeles in 1970, a co-founder of the LA Gay Community Services Center in 1971, now the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and, based on his belief that being Homosexual was fundamentally different from being heterosexual, co-founder of the Radical Faeries movement. He was a familiar personality in my years in Southern California, but we differed in our opinions on Hetero-Assimilation as he was totally against it while I had a more moderate view coming from the Rights stance that Gays should have the same freedoms to exercise their rights feely and that their choices be respected. I do not have to agree with another’s choice. One of us would have seen marriage equality as Hetero-Assimilation while the other saw it as a right to be exercised or not.

We do totally agree, however, when he states in his article, “LGBTQ Assimilation/Elite Capture in Los Angeles — Outfest Implodes”, 

“While other peoples in the present, and historically, are desperately trying to create real community where we assume responsibility for each other, LGBTQ peoples blindly and unconsciously are letting their community slip through their fingers.”

This often happened in my experience, and still does in the present, as many LGBT support organizations have allowed their allies to be in control, often allowing them to speak for us claiming they can express us better to straight people than we can, as if we do not speak the same language, and too often deliver what they claim is best for us, but is actually useless for us but good for them as they get to feel warm and fuzzy while we have to settle for what is served.

It happens all too often when an individual is denied assistance from national and local organizations who see that person’s goal and where it was sought as inconsequential, but then, upon progress being made and attention beginning to be paid by a wider audience, will take it upon themselves to usurp the process, pushing the person who did the hard work into the shadows and reaping publicity by claiming they had been there all along, while actually not obtaining the original goal sought but the one they morphed it into to control it and have it become about them.

His concern was that the L.A. Community found out about the end of Outfest by way of a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about UCLA’s “Queer Rhapsody,” a Los Angeles GLBTQ film festival that came out of nowhere and which, in spite of the person in charge of  the UCLA Film and Television Archive, not an GLBT organization, and a central organizer of “Queer Rhapsody” declaring the importance of the GLBTQ community, will be held in five non-LGBTQ spaces and not in a central location eliminating the bringing of people together in a safe and shared place.   

Community was dispersed by others who acted in our name but without us, but, instead of being seen as that, like Sally Field at the Oscars, too many will see this as an act of love and not having what we built taken over for the benefit of others with no GLBTQ Community input.

Consider the spaces that are offered for GLBT events as a sign of some entity’s solidarity that comes with a list of things they would prefer not be present.

As a known political cartoonist, I was asked to submit some work to a digital Pride art display which, like another display in a nearby city, was originally planned to be physical but became digital with Covid. I chose what I considered to be relevant political issues and of those picked the ones I considered the best and most detailed. To allow viewers to see each artist’s submissions, the number of days was divided by the number of artists and that determined how many days each artist’s work was featured along with a short description of the works and a bio. The night before my assigned day, I got a notice from the organizers that because my works were not bright and cheery (they were about GLBT political issues of importance and as political cartoons were, of course, not all happiness and light), some people might find them a little uncomfortable, as apparently political cartoons are about upbeat topics, so it had been decided not to post the work I submitted, but one piece of ar I had done the previous year for a specific event. 

I was not allowed to have my time of Pride because someone, somewhere, at some time, for some reason may not agree with a cartoon. None, therefore, were shown while some had been instrumental in successful rights advocacy.

It is happening all over.

The term for this is “Elite Capture”. People within the GLBT Community, having power and influence because of family or business, may begin with pure intentions to better the community, but find they also benefit by progress and in the process of obtaining it slowly cede more power to allies who see benefit for themselves as well.

It generally takes the form of modifying the needs of the community without involving the Community. The allies Straight Splain us to ourselves and too many of us buy what they are selling.

Not long ago there was a local walk-out of GLBT students and their supporters at a local high school. The students may have had pure intentions, but it was the political usage of these students to attempt to rescind a newly and duly elected politician. While leading the students into thinking they were at the horizon of change in regard to diversity, those using the students had planned no follow up after this politician’s swearing in and the fine speeches that evening as it was mainly for show, and in the subsequent two years nothing has been done to address the students’ concerns as publicly as the political walk-out gambit.

They were discarded after use.

When I questioned the local GLBT Community umbrella organization it turned out the whole thing was orchestrated by allies who had nothing to follow up with and who were followed not led. The GLBT umbrella group should have prepared follow up action and not settle for a one-off assuming it would ripple out and change the world. We hear nothing about any progress regarding the students although the walk out did garner media attention and discussions in the tavern by my house for a day or two. We do, however, hear from and about the politician on a regular basis which is proof, to me anyway, that it was all for show.

But, golly gee, did we feel good that day with all the kids genuinely out of class for true support and with the speeches at the city Council meeting that night.

There is no visible follow up education, and the umbrella group admitted their tax exempt status makes them powerless to control things so the politics is handled by the Straights.

I and others  have been barred from what were once Gay events, things like parades and festivals, and have been cautioned often as we entered a GLBT event that it was “family friendly” as if we needed to be told to clean up our act and behave so as not to make the non-Gays uncomfortable as this was a friendly and welcoming thing and we apprently could not be our true selves as that inconvenienced those to whom we have opened our spaces without any requirement for respect of place. 

We welcome others into our space and then self-censure for their comfort as we make ourselves their guests in our space and our enjoyment should not diminish theirs.

Not long ago when the summer of BLM began and people were nervous about Covid and crowds, the organizers of Pride that June in a state’s capital city abruptly announced that there would be no Pride Month activities, even the digital art exhibit that was being assembled, not because of Covid restrictions but so as not to interfere with any BLM activities in person or digital. 

People who have earned the right to celebrate their Pride, with some doing so at great financial, physical, and mental cost were told they would not be able to celebrate that Pride because those who benefited from their work had decided to give the month away to those who had not asked them to do so.

I lived in Southern California and attended and participated in Pride Parades and Festivals in spite of threats made and physical attacks carried through some forty years ago and participated in and organized the same later in the Buckle of the Bible Belt where one rural town’s pride event had to be held on a college campus as there was guaranteed security against the received threats, religio-fascists threatened Pride activities and those who would be participating, and the KKK showed up to threaten Festival goers. However, the only time a Parade or Festival was canceled in any place I have lived, it was canceled by our own who, after comparing the needs of the two Communities, decided our celebrating Pride was not as important as making time for another demographic to either use our time or not, according to their schedule but, apparently, not having anything left the Month of June alone.

There was no canvassing of the Community about this, just the declaration that someone made the decision to do what we had successfully resisted for years, I.E, canceling Pride for someone else and not the Community.

In his final paragraph Don Kilhener wrote,

“Gay men and lesbians over 55 have disappeared at a time they should be assuming the role of tribal elders, providing community stability, tending to our spiritual well-being, and transmitting lived learning and tribal history to our young.”

My concern with that paragraph is that it implies those over 55 have walked away leaving the Community behind. In 2023 and 2024, I used an Amtrak USRail pass to travel to the places I had lived going back to the 1970s  when my teaching career began and the beginning of serious advocacy in the 1980s and beyond to see where they are after all the years. I spoke with mainly senior members of the Community and those still living with whom I had advocated.  

A common lament on the most recent trip to seven GLBT Communities was that the younger generations are rewriting history to make it more pleasant and erasing facts for myth. In my own experience with those curating my collection at the University of Central Oklahoma, I found that the 12 years of fighting that included my wrongful dismissal, a district court case to be reinstated, my prevailing in Appellate Court to cement that victory, and then dealing with the subsequent harassment as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity’ were inserted in school policies and survived for 12 years before the state legislature removed state-wide protections for Trans students was described as the school district having embraced diversity, and I had to fight to have the actual facts reinserted and the warm fuzzy words expunged. It was explained to me by the graduate students assigned the task of curation that the language was softened to be less triggering and more comfortable to read. 

They had erased reality and replaced it with the goal that we won having been a gift from someone else not something we as a Community had accomplished.

This, obviously, does not faithfully report history and robs future people from knowing their true history.

Many I spoke with, myself included, have been told by those who should hear the history that they do not want to hear our version as it is based on Patriarchy, very offensive toward those people with whom I worked when certain terms, common today, were unknown in 1969 and participants at Stonewall should not be judged by 2024 standards and knowledge, nor should those who learned along the way as new concepts came to light be either.

Those over 55 find they are being frozen out.

We have not “disappeared”. We have been ghosted. 

I will explain that tomorrow.

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