The Martin Duberman Reader (50 page)

—from
Waiting to Land
(2009)

I was unexpectedly given direction, in a chance conversation with Terry Boggis. She told me about a group of progressive queers involved in the Economic Justice Network, and invited me to the network's next meeting. I went, and met Joseph DeFilippis, a dynamo in his early thirties. We talked about the importance of setting up a nonprofit centered on the needs of the gay poor—people in shelters, prisons, unemployed, on welfare, without health care.

These aren't people available for taking on liaison work with progressive groups—their survival needs are simply too great. But they are people whose desperate situations are being largely ignored by the national LGBT movement. Joseph and I found that we were very much on the same wavelength politically, and we both wanted to move full steam ahead in setting up the new nonprofit. Joseph,
forty years younger than me, had the much fuller head of steam; my impulse is intact, but my follow-up drive less so. Anyway, Joseph and I have both learned from painful past experience that not everyone appreciates the locomotive pace, nor the expectation that every task would be completed on the promised date.

Still, by May 2002, thanks mostly to Joseph's untiring efforts, we were actually holding our first planning meeting. Spirits were high but attendance disappointingly low. Only a dozen or so people had shown up out of the thirty-two who'd expressed “strong interest.” Of most concern was that many of the no-shows were people of color; Joseph, who'd done almost all of the groundwork for the meeting, was deeply puzzled: he thought he'd had firm commitments. The people at the meeting I didn't already know profoundly impressed me; most were in their twenties, urgent, radical, and already devoting their lives to full-time work for a variety of social justice organizations (such as Coalition for the Homeless).

But we all agreed that we couldn't proceed to a second meeting until (as I wrote in my diary) “a good representation of people of color is invited to tell us whether this new enterprise really does feel congenial to them, and if not, how we can make it so.” A number of people, with Joseph again taking the lead, volunteered to sound out those who hadn't shown up. The soundings proved fruitful, and in July we held our second meeting—with eight of the fourteen attendees people of color. Two months after that, we had a full-day retreat; this time, only five of the fourteen people were white, though the gender breakdown was less good (nine to five male).

It was an exhilarating day. We started to form committees, put some structural building blocks in place (Joseph, by acclaim, became coordinator), and chose a name for ourselves: Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ). Consensus was rapidly achieved on nearly every issue, and good will was endemic (inevitably, the honeymoon will give way to occasional squabbles, but hopefully fewer than I've experienced in other organizations).

During the course of the meeting, concurrence quickly developed
over the scandalous avoidance in society at large and within the gay community itself of issues relating to welfare reform and prison conditions, LGBT homelessness, lack of access to health care, and antigay violence at low-paying worksites. The uniform view was that poverty is most acute among the LGBT young, the transgendered, and the elderly. I left the retreat, as I wrote in my diary, “full of enthusiasm for the work ahead.”

By 2004, the total income for QEJ was a little under $90,000. That allowed us to employ Joseph DeFilippis as coordinator, Jay Toole as a part-time organizer to work with LGBT people living in shelters, plus a part-time consultant to help us generate additional funds. Our ambitions were larger than our budget: high among our priorities were developing “Know Your Rights” programs for LGBT people who are homeless or in need of public benefits; holding community forums on neglected issues like providing shelter for transgendered people and LGBT youth; doing outreach to other small LGBT groups (FIERCE!; Al-Fatiha; the Neutral Zone; Latino Gay Men of New York; SONG; the Queer Immigration Rights Project, etc.) attempting to do comparable work; and teaching people to advocate for themselves.

In September 2004, [my partner] Eli and I gave a fund-raiser in our apartment for QEJ. The main point was “cultivation”—letting wealthy individual donors know that we exist—and we did collect nearly $7,000. But no thanks to the prosperous; exactly one prominent gay philanthropist attended. And no straight lefties, wealthy or otherwise. None of them even bothered to RSVP, let alone send a check. I guess I should stop being surprised at how little the heterosexual Left incorporates us into their vision of a better future; we get the lip service of tolerance, not the embrace of camaraderie. Anyway, the following year, QEJ became officially incorporated and—thanks to the support of a few small gay or left-leaning foundations (North Star, Open Meadows, Paul Rapoport, RESIST, Open Society, etc.) has continued to survive, with a slow rise in its
annual budgets and its offerings. For QEJ actually to thrive would require a considerable transformation in national values, and I include gay ones.

In the upshot, I stayed on the QEJ board for three years, until I finally had to turn full-time to completing
The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein.
QEJ remains alive, though not robust. Its budget and projects rise and fall year by year. Compared with the giant gay organizations (the HRC has eight hundred thousand members and an annual budget of $40 million), QEJ is still barely known, and woefully underfunded and understaffed. Yet in serving a poor, silent, and otherwise ignored segment of the LGBT community, it holds, in my view, the commanding moral ground.

The 2005 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force “Creating Change” conference [a gathering each year of LGBT activists and organizers to exchange views and strategies] gave off more than a few glints of hope that the cycle may again be turning, that the number of progressive voices within the LGBT community could shortly become a ringing choir (well, maybe an
a cappella
minichorus). The hope resides almost entirely with the younger generation, and with activists working outside the national LGBT organizations—like those from QEJ. Discontent with the narrow scope of the gay agenda—with its preeminent issue of gay marriage—is notably on the rise. The HRC Campaign may currently dominate the LGBT political scene but its grip on the future no longer seems assured.

HRC's legions represent the older, more prosperous segment of the LGBT community, those who grew up under terrifying threats of punishment, disclosure, and criminalization. They're understandably thrilled at the recent change in climate—at being normalized by clinicians and
courted
by straight politicians. They want more of the same and don't want their new status threatened by association with advocacy for the homeless and the poor. It's like the history of immigration: the newly assimilated want nothing to do with the newly arrived.

The surge in progressive values is taking place among the
seventeen-to-twenty-nine age group regardless of sexual orientation, providing hope that not only the gay movement, but the country, can be reclaimed from the self-seeking avarice of recent years. And now, happily, we have the unexpected emergence of Occupy Wall Street. Every new poll shows an increasing percentage of the young taking up progressive positions. They're more likely than the general public to favor, among other issues, a government-run universal health care system and an open-door policy on immigration.

One 2005
NBC News–Wall Street Journal
poll even found that 53 percent of
all
Americans disapprove of the Bush tax cuts on the grounds they'll lead to further curtailments in government social services. None of which means that major social change is around the corner: the corporations still go unchecked; the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen; membership in labor unions continues to slide; the feminist movement seems in disarray.

And in June 2012, Eli and I gave another QEJ fund-raiser in our apartment—and raised a measly $3,500.
Can
hope spring eternal?

—from
Waiting to Land
(2009)

H
ere are some facts you might not know: