Tales of the Lavender Menace

Karla Jay, who edited one of the anthologies in which my work is published, wrote this memoir of her radical lesbian activism in New York in the '70s. It was published in 1999, but I just got around to reading it because of my renewed interest in the lesbian community through the L Word and because I made connections with young queer bloggers who made me aware that there was still a queer consciousness worth paying attention to.

Karla's book gave me new respect for my predecessors in her very readable and deftly analyzed account of what is now classic queer history, from the Stonewall rebellion to the consciousness raising groups in the feminist movement. Karla herself introduced consciousness raising to groups in Los Angeles and played a key role in getting lesbians recognized in the male dominated gay liberation movement. She was one of the founders of The Lavender Menace, a group that was responding to the attempt to suppress the presence of lesbians in the women's movement. There are some famous characters like Rita Mae Brown, portrayed from her early appearance demanding that lesbians be recognized in the women's movement.

Karla integrates her own coming out/coming of age story, beginning within the context of her dysfunctional family in New York City. Her nutcase of a mother spices up the narrative as does her anecdotes of her sexual adventures, her student lifestyle, oddball roommates, beloved cats, and the occasional live-in lover. But what she gave to me was confirmation that there was once a radical sensibility in the movement, one that asked for much more than assimilation into mainstream institutions like marriage and the army. One that envisioned a radical restructuring of family and relationships and community.

I resonated with how she used her sexuality to connect with women before really knowing them. I admired the ballsiness of the political actions they carried out and realized the significance of what they were doing. This was the history that had preceded my coming out. One that I was already poised to rebel against because it didn't fit my idea of lesbians as mysterious femme fatales informed more by Marlene Dietrich and the movie Cabaret than the women's movement, plus the influence of my matriarchal family with its own brand of feminism. It wasn't until the emergence of lipstick lesbians that I felt I could return to the lesbian community.

The World Is Flat

Reads like an Evangelical preacher explaining, to the already converted, how we will have heaven on Earth if everyone on the planet would just embrace Capitalism and repent from the evil ways of Communism, Marxism and terrorism.

NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Freidman, is well known, which is why so many people were reading this pap and mentioning it to me until I felt I had to suffer through it in order to respond intelligently. The first third of the book is about how the internet brought us globalized trade, thus "flattening" the world. All old news if you've kept up with technology or lost money in the dot.com debacle. Some interesting anecdotes of how India ramped up their call centers in Bangalore, that explains a lot about India's current stake in the world's economy, as well as China's, but it's really about Dell Computer's stake in the world and McDonalds.

All his details are a good example of how invested we are in increased complexity, vastly long supply lines, and an exponentially expanding power grid. He does not mention anything about how vulnerable these features make the whole world (except in the event of terrorism).

In the second third of the book he gives his readers a stern talking to about how Americans have to get back to discipline and hard work and figure this whole flat world thing out, in order to keep up with the much cheaper and better educated worker in India who so happily man (and woman) those call centers. At which point I suspect most will put the book down.

Near the end, he becomes so stunningly ill conceived, as to be rendered dangerous, if anyone bothers to read to the end of this tome. He has the audacity to suggest that Capitalism is the ultimate tool of peace because every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to make war on its neighbors (because supply lines have become so important). He does not mention that every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to be bombed by the US, back into the Stone Age, because it has not yet been colonized by corporate interests and needs to be humbled so it can be.

He explains the events of 9/11 as a cautionary tale about how the flattening of the world makes us vulnerable to the suicide bombers of the world (all 200 of them since 9/11) while making no mention of the impact of our sanctified, military terrorism, apart from some references to Bush and Co having behaved badly.

He does attempt to fend off critics of capitalism by offering to tweak the system with his suggestions for a more "compassionate" capitalism. His appeal to industry to take the compassionate route is about as effective a call to arms as a preacher's plea to his flock to abstain from sex (and for himself to abstain from buggering the choir).

His understanding of the world is so simplistic, he reminds me of our Teflon president, Reagan. I can just see him browsing a bookstore and saying to himself, "I don't need to read that, it's written by a Blah, Blah", whenever he comes upon anything that might challenge his viewpoint. I gather that most of the nation sees the world the way he presents it and conduct themselves in a similar fashion.