#the most radical progressive form of queer visibility and acceptance.

[britneyshakespeare]

wait james somerton sounds a lot like some people on tumblr when they start spouting off about queer history or supposed controversies within it. is that where you guys are getting your stuff? is it james somerton brain poisoning?

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming. If you like this series, or my other work, and want to see more of the same, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now.

One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time.

Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable.

Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away.

Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative.

Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility.

Folks, we’re talking today about Mainstreaming, the process by which a group or idea from the fringes of society moves towards the center. How strangers become neighbors and how thoughts become common sense. There is a concept known as the Overton Window, which I am not going to describe because plenty of people have done so already - link in the down there part - but, in short: as a fringe group becomes more visible, and their language becomes commonplace, their presence in society starts to seem normal. They become demystified. Some people who thought they were strange and threatening will start to warm up to them, though this does not happen across the board. Many who hated them when they were fringe will see their becoming mainstream as a kind of existential occupation of territory, as in “If this is normal now, what does that make me?”

But much of what is considered standard in society today has gone through this process.

Now, straight folks like myself often think that greater queer visibility and the proliferation of queer language is for our benefit; if our queer friends feel safe coming out to us and we know which words we should and shouldn’t use, it makes it easier for straights and queer folks to be pals! And it is true that no one gets mainstreamed without advocates in the existing mainstream, but let’s not beat around the bush: Language and Visibility are tools of consolidating power. Visibility means having a sense of your numbers. Common language means forming alliances. You get a bunch of formerly isolated gay men connecting with each other and accurately describing their experiences, you’ve got yourself a movement, with or without straight friends.

This is why it’s to the benefit of straight society to tell queer men they are isolated, because isolated queer men are in no position to make demands.

(Just so it doesn’t get left out of yet another conversation, Delany is writing about gay men because the book is a memoir and that’s his experience, but neither he nor I are ignoring that the Gay Rights movement was kicked off by trans women.)

Okay!

While the example I’m using is a positive one that any progressive worth their salt should be in favor of, mainstreaming is a morally neutral phenomenon. Culture is plastic. Any fringe group or idea can become normalized, regardless of its inherent worth. And, for a certain subset of extremely online people with fringe beliefs, who understand the ways mainstreaming has evolved in the attention economy, it can be a weapon.

We need to ask how a group of predominantly disgruntled twenty- and thirtysomething white men congregating on anonymous imageboards becomes a political movement, whose members get profiled in the New York Times, whose writing patterns are recognized by most of the internet, and whose figureheads get staffed in the White House. Where did the Alt-Right come from?

Mainstreaming is not a wholly organic process, because usually the people who get mainstreamed are actively working to become so. But people usually have only so much control over how and how fast this happens: A group expands its language and visibility; if this leads to larger numbers and greater mainstream acceptance, the process repeats, this time with a bigger group and a bigger audience; so long as there is growth, each cycle is more impactful, as the bigger a group is the faster it gets even bigger and the more common language becomes the faster it proliferates.

By all rights, if your beliefs are wildly unpopular, this process shouldn’t work. Your language and visibility don’t expand because too many people don’t want to talk like you or about you. So what do you do then? Well, normally, you either give up or bide your time, but, if you have a lot of media literacy and no real moral compass, you get it done dirty.

If the media doesn’t want to cover you, make yourself newsworthy. Threaten to publicly out immigrants in front of a crowd. Start a hoax about white student unions. Lead a white power rally and leave the hoods at home. Do the kinds of things that journalists cannot, in good conscience, ignore. Once you’ve made yourself news, they’ll feel they can’t publish a condemnation without getting your side of the story, so, bam, you’ve got an interview. The more erratic and dangerous you seem, the more they’ll want to write a profile so people can figure you out; the article about how surprisingly normal you seem in person basically writes itself. If you want to spread a conspiracy theory, send it to a small, local news site that doesn’t have the resources to fact check you; once they publish something salacious, all the bigger news channels will have to talk about it, if only to debunk it. Put provocative stuff in front of politicians; anything they retweet has to be news. In a pinch, you can always piggyback off a famous activist by making takedown videos, or, if you’re really ambitious, harass someone at a conference.

Everyone’s desperate for clicks. If you can generate them, you’ll get your message out.

If nobody’s adopting your language, adopt it for them. Make sure you and all your friends each have half a dozen fake Twitter accounts spamming the same terminology at everyone who discusses race, gender, orientation, or ability. Put every Jewish name in parentheses until everyone on the internet knows what that means whether they want to or not. Hell, don’t even do it yourself: Russia’s not the only one who can make bots. Make thousands of bots. And make sure your real account, your fake accounts, and your bots all talk the same so no one can tell the difference anymore. Make hashtags and get them trending all by yourself, and, while you’re at it, spam all the hashtags for movements you hate with porn and gore so they can’t be used. And if your words and memes still aren’t popular? Just steal words and memes that are already popular. Just decide “this? this means white power now,” “this is antifeminist now.” Saturate the web with your new usage, always insisting that you’re doing it “ironically,” while eroding confidence in anyone who uses these words in the original sense. And never stop insisting that most everyone would talk the same as you if there weren’t so much damn censorship.

Delany’s experience was having few words to describe himself that could conjure images of a gay man in a loving community. What the Alt-Right does is shout “you just call everyone you don’t like Nazis” while their people are giving interviews wearing Nazi paraphernalia; they even imply that calling dudes marching to the tune of “Jews will not replace us” Nazis is somehow antisemitic. Meanwhile they ask to be called identitarians and race realists. They want to stigmatize words that conjure images of white fascism - which, again, they very explicitly support - and replace them with words that conjure images of clean-cut philosophy majors.

And where Delany saw a group of 80 or 90 gay men reported in the papers as a group of 4 or 5, the Alt-Right wants to get reported as being much larger than it actually is. They want to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, up to and including violence, but to ensure that, any time the cameras train on a violent act, there is a man in a suit ready to distance himself from it; to paint the picture that, but for a few bad actors, this is a peaceful movement of young, presentable intellectuals.

This isn’t simply a battle between different ideologies, this is a battle over the definition of normal. The Alt-Right knows how plastic culture can be. Their anger comes from the normalization of things they hate, and their movement exists because they believe anything that becomes mainstream can be made fringe again. Which is why, if you wanna cater to them, you promise to reassert old norms.

Much as we’d like to believe people are driven by morality, most people are driven by the desire to be normal. And when the news is filled with images of swastikas, iron crosses, and tiki torches, the guy in the suit with the fashy haircut looks pretty normal by comparison. And that’s why he wears the suit.

Thankfully, the plasticity of culture cuts both ways. Just as surely as we can lose all the ground we’ve gained over the last half-century, everything the Alt-Right does to make itself palatable can be undone. (In fact, it’s maybe beginning to happen.) It’s going to be a long road that will probably require changes to how media platforms generate traffic and a lot of new politicians. But I want you to keep a phrase close to your heart: this is not normal.

That phrase has become something of a mantra since the election in 2016. It can be misused: white supremacy, sexism, and every other kind of bigotry are part of the fabric of American life and always have been, so, even if this is more extreme than the ushe, it’s not by nearly as much as most privileged people like to think. So I want you to treat it less like an observation and more as a statement of intent. Whatever shit the Alt-Right pulls, I want you to say: this is not normal; this is not normal; this is not normal.

We will not let this be normal.

[qqueenofhades]

Friend! Out of curiosity, as Resident Historian, do you have any thoughts on historical ableism and acceptance/non-acceptance of disability? (Ideally especially during the Golden Age of Piracy but I'm also generally fascinated)

Hehe. Of course I have Thoughts. When do I not have Thoughts.

Medieval disability studies have started to become a considerable trend in just the past 10 years or so, and that link above provides a brief overview and several selections for further reading. The medieval era is obviously the one I know most about, and there was – if no form of institutionalized or regularized medical care for the disabled and ill – not total ignorance of it either. Almshouses (essentially charity homes for the sick and disabled) and leper hospitals were increasingly common in Europe from the eleventh century on. Leprosy was associated with the crusades, and the founding of hospitals for them was viewed as both a social necessity, to segregate those with a highly visible, contagious, and debilitating disease from others, and as a charitable duty for the care of holy people (crusaders) who had achieved some virtue by their actions. There was considerable influence in ideas about the holiness of suffering, and that those who did so were closer to God. In fact, medieval care of the disabled was strongly influenced by classical Christian ideas of piety: care for the sick, feed the hungry, etc, and there were orders of monks and nuns dedicated to it. 

As ever, your class was the strongest determining factor of the care you received: if you were wealthy, you could pay for servants to tend your needs, and live fairly comfortably in your own home. Disability and illness was not a disqualifying factor from attaining high office (as you might expect in a world without modern medical care – everyone would be subject to the same things), and there are many representations of disability in medieval manuscripts. But if you were poor, you were reliant on whatever care your family could or wanted to provide for you, or had to hope you could get a place at an almshouse or similar institution. There were superstitions around disability, and if you had to work for your living in any way (aka everyone below the nobility), this seriously disadvantaged you. But the disabled lived fairly freely in their communities, including in positions of power, weren’t an uncommon or unexpected sight by any means, and had some basic (if doubtless not particularly comfortable) system set up for their care, based on religious charity and individual piety.

As leprosy, a visibly disfiguring physical disease, mostly disappeared from Western Europe around 1500, a new focus on mental disability appeared instead, centered especially on the imagery of the “Ship of Fools.” Michel Foucault talks about this in Madness and Civilization, but it was a particular theme in literature and art, based around the 1494 epic poem “Das Narrenschiff” by the humanist Sebastian Brant. It was, once again, a moral commentary on both humanity and, particularly, the corrupt Catholic Church. The “fools” were placed on a ship and ostracized (symbolically) from the body politic; madness was a concerning and troubling political feature among several monarchs (such as with Joanna “the Mad” of Castile and Charles VI of France, as well as Henry VI of England) and it began to be viewed more negatively than it necessarily had been in the medieval era. Aka: as ever, physical disability was easier to understand and to care for, but mental disabilities got the shaft.

In regard to the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1726, or thereabouts) pirates were, as ever, radical in their social organization and mores. We already know that they were hella queer, had their own form of gay marriage (often shared in a threesome with a woman) and in general were socially liberal, egalitarian, and democratic (honestly, Black Sails is incredibly accurate in capturing the spirit of the historical pirates’ republic and lifestyle, and it was conceived specifically in response to the brutality and oppression of the Navy, which many of them had fled). This extended to their treatment of disability, though medical care and disability had obviously been common to seamen long before pirates. However, while a debilitating injury often meant that a merchant or Navy sailor was turned out with not much option for future employment, pirates established basic workman’s comp and social insurance for everyone aboard a ship. Pirate articles often included specific provisions for disability and loss of limb; Henry Morgan’s in 1671 spell out various sums for the loss of a leg, arm, or eye. Furthermore, disability payments could sometimes continue indefinitely. So a pirate with a peg leg or a hook for a hand or an eyepatch (or all the other pirate trappings, many of which were popularized by Stevenson in Treasure Island) would actually be uncommon. If they got severely or traumatically injured in the line of duty, they could retire with enough money to support themselves, and not need to hazard the dangerous and difficult life of an amputee aboard a traditional sailing ship. (Incidentally, the popular image of a pirate is often how disability began to be represented in the media.)

The excavation and recovery of the Queen Anne’s Revenge has yielded nearly a full kit of medical supplies, and Blackbeard reportedly forced the three surgeons to stay aboard the ship when he captured it. There is some debate about how the image of the “disabled pirate” – Stevenson’s Long John Silver and Blind Pew, Barrie’s Captain Hook, etc – began to be common, and the answer is probably tied to the attitudes of the late 18th and overall 19th centuries, which were absolutely disastrous for disabled people. The rise of the asylums began around now, including the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital (from where we get the word “bedlam.”) Workhouses were built en masse, where the destitute poor and the actually disabled alike were shoved in indiscriminately and treated abominably, and “asylum tourism,” aka go to the madhouse to admire the architecture (and gape at the patients) was a real and horrifying thing. Thus, disability became tied to immorality, weakness, deficiency, and the need to be publically segregated from society (until then, the disabled had been cared for at home – there were a small number of patients in a few private charity hospitals in 1800, and by 1900, there were almost 100,000 in countless workhouses/asylums/general pits of misery). You have Capitalism! (take a shot) and the Industrial Revolution to thank for that. If you couldn’t work in a factory, and you couldn’t earn a wage, and you were a burden on your family who now would be expected to work for an income to support themselves, yep, it was the madhouse for you. And of course, plenty of totally non-mad people got shipped off as well. As I said. Disastrous.

In fact, we have Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Jane Cochran, a reporter at the New York World, who I wrote about in my first Timeless historical companion piece) to thank for starting a conversation around asylum reform. In 1887, in a groundbreaking piece of undercover journalism, she got herself committed to Blackwell’s Island asylum in New York and then wrote Ten Days in a Mad-House, revealing both the nightmarish conditions and how every doctor who examined her instantly declared her insane with no hope for recovery. It caused such an uproar that there finally started to be some attempt at oversight and reform for mental hospitals (although there is obviously still a long way to go, yeah – the nineteenth century was The Worst for this.)

So yes. As ever, that was probably more than anyone wanted to know, but the Golden Age of Piracy was particularly focused on social and financial care for members of its community who became disabled, paid pensions, and actually would not have needed to have too many walking wounded seamen/sailors, because there was no incentive to have to keep earning a wage by physical labor when you would be supported from the communal treasure chest. Aka yes, the pirates’ republic of the 17th and 18th centuries was light years more politically and culturally progressive than 21st century America (/stares at the latest Trumpcare bill/Obamacare repeal up in the Senate) and it ain’t close.

[republicstandard]

Burqa-Loving Theresa May is a Slave to Salafist Islam

Britain’s conservative Prime Minister Theresa May is no friend of conservative Christianity. May voted in favor of same-sex marriage in 2013. May tweeted her congratulations, when Ireland voted in favor of killing babies, aka abortion.

“The Irish Referendum yesterday was an impressive show of democracy which delivered a clear and unambiguous result. I congratulate the Irish people on their decision and all of #Together4Yes on their successful campaign.” – PM @theresa_may #repealedthe8th

— UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) May 27, 2018

Mother Theresa of Downing Street, who once voted against gay adoption and lowering the age of consent for homosexual acts, has been on a journey more akin to C. S. Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress than to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

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May’s counterfeit conservative government describes biblical sexual morality as “hateful” in the Wilton Park report. It blames Protestant evangelical churches for spreading “hate-filled messages”. It wants evangelical Christians in the Global South to reinterpret the Bible and accept LGBTI ideology. It calls for “challenging the interpretation of sacred texts”.

Unsurprisingly, it shoves hardcore feminism down the gullets of Christians in Commonwealth countries. “If the Bible is misinterpreted or mistaken on women, the same arguments will apply to LGBTI+,” it concludes and urges non-Western Christians to use a queer hermeneutic to interpret the Bible. The report also castigates western missionaries for “heteropatriarchy” and “an abhorrence of homosexuality”; a theme echoed by Mrs. May, when, in a brazen act of neo-colonialism she lectured the leaders of 35 Commonwealth nations on how she deeply regrets Britain’s legacy of anti-gay laws.

A foundational principle of Conservativism is limited government. The State should keep its nose out of most things—and let its people enjoy freedom from governmental interference. But May’s Tory government has thrust itself into the realm of religion, dangerously transgressing boundaries separating Church and State.

May wants to impose State-regulated liberal Christianity on Britain and the Commonwealth, though that may as well be atheism for all the meaning it contains. But, when it comes to Islam, May flip-flops from liberalism to extremism and welcomes a radical Salafism into the public square. In an act of schizophrenic double-dealing, she thumbs her nose at liberal Muslim scholars who are warning of the dangers of a militant Islam based on a literal interpretation of Islamic religious texts.

It is this cognitive dissonance that is at the heart of the Boris Johnson vs. Theresa May debate on the burqa. Politicians and the secular commentariat have missed the simmering cauldron for the teapot, i.e. the discussion on the burqa and other forms of “modest” Islamic dress for women is a fierce in-house intra-religious debate that has bedeviled Islam for centuries.

At the heart of the debate is the struggle for the soul of Islam and the clash of theologies to find the purportedly non-mythical brand of Islam that is compatible with the values of Western democracy. The struggle has been played out in Islamic countries like Turkey, where “the use of the headscarf in public spaces represents less a personal choice than a political attack on the fabric of the secular state”. Secularists in Turkey see the headscarf as a “ubiquitous and visible symbol of the Islamization of Turkish society”, as Angel Rabasa and F. Stephen Larrabee point out in The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey.

The headscarf or face veil is a dynamic and definitive symbol calibrated to divide the wheat from the chaff—to separate the “true” believers who have submitted entirely to Allah from the “nominal” Muslims who pick and choose from the Islamic scriptures as it suits them or as context and culture dictate.

The debate on the burqa is chiefly a theological debate. Muslims are asking the question: is the veil wajib (compulsory) for all Muslim women? There is no doubt in Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) that a Muslim woman’s hair and body should be covered. The dispute is over whether this extends to covering the face. Is face covering optional or mandatory?

The Koran does not mandate the face veil. The word hijab is the Arabic word for a curtain. The Koran instructs believers that if they had to ask Muhammad’s wives for anything they had to “speak to them from behind a curtain (hijab)” (33:53). Extrapolating from this verse, Muslims may conclude that the actions of Muhammad’s wives in veiling their entire bodies when meeting men who are not their relatives suggests that a hijab or burqa can also refer to clothing through which a woman conceals herself from view.

In the Koran, Allah commands Muhammad to tell his wives and Muslim women “that they should draw their cloaks (jilbab) over themselves” so they will not be molested (33:59). Again, devout Muslim women apply this to the face veil.

It is the Hadith that really opens a can of worms on the dispute over the burqa or hijab. For example, the hadith of Abu Dawood (No. 641) has Aisha, Muhammad’s wife claiming, "Allah does not accept the prayer of a woman who has reached puberty unless she wears a khimar (a head covering).” Numerous verses in different Hadith collections make the hijab and other head coverings mandatory. Those who insist on the full-face veil usually translate terms used for head coverings as “veils” or full-body coverings, leaving openings for one eye or two so that the woman can see the way.

A number of hadith interpret the verse instructing women to “draw their cloaks over themselves” as covering one’s head and face with the exception of one eye. (Ma’rifatul-Qur’an Vol.7, p.217; Tafsir Ibn Jarir Vol.22, p.29; Tafsir al-Qurtubi. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al- Ilmiyah. Vol.14, p.156; Tafsir Ibn Kathir). Even the pure women of Paradise wear face veils, how much more should earthly women, contend those who insist on the burqa, basing their case on a hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari (Vol.8, No. 6568).

Scholars have pointed out that the form of Islam practiced by most women who wear the burqa is Salafist Islam, the most potent form of political Islam. Salafism advocates a literal and binary interpretation of Islamic teachings as enjoined by Muhammad. Salafists trace their roots to Saudi Arabia. They glorify an idealized vision of the true Islam practiced by Muhammad and the Muslims, in the seventh and eighth centuries.

A German intelligence report points out how, “Salafism rejects the democratic principles of separation of state and religion, popular sovereignty, religious and sexual self-determination, gender equality and the fundamental right to physical integrity”. Salafism is “the fastest-growing Islamic movement in Europe”.

The 100 Muslim women who have written a letter demanding Boris Johnson’s expulsion from the Tory party are using secular-speak to con the Prime Minister and the public with their taqiyya (Islamic deception or dissimulation). They say they speaking as “free women who are able to speak for ourselves” but are, in essence, the radical voice of Islam. They candidly declare they wear the burqa “because we believe it is a means to get closer to God”.

At the moderate end of the spectrum is Taj Hargey, imam at the Oxford Islamic Congregation, who says that the burqa and niqab are “a nefarious component of a trendy gateway theology for religious extremism and militant Islam”. Munira Mirza, former Deputy Mayor of London, has also hit out at the Salafist face veil proponents for throwing: “moderate Muslims under the bus” and empowering “the unrepresentative grievance mongers and extremists who masquerade as Muslim community spokesmen”.

While moderate Muslims are backing Boris Johnson and even calling for a ban on the hideous and oppressive burqa, feminists like Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, have thrown their lot with Theresa May and the Salafists. In a statement reeking of monumental stupidity, Davidson compared Muslim women donning the burqa to Christians wearing a crucifix.

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Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Theresa May, the daughter of a liberal Anglo-Catholic vicar, has foolishly rushed into a centuries-long in-house intra-religious Islamic debate and declared her advocacy for Salafist Islam. The Prime Minister who has made every effort to stamp out biblical, conservative and orthodox Christianity is now leading the Charge of the Left Brigade and by providing state-sanctioned legitimacy to the burqa is declaring her patronage for the most oppressive symbol of toxic masculinity.

Boris Johnson must not apologize. The values of the British in Britain supercede the values of all others who arrive to their lands.

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