In a stirring forty-minute lecture Tuesday that reproached the queer movement for avoiding larger public policy issues of war and civil liberties, queer activist Carmen Vazquez detailed what she called the “erosion of democracy” and enjoined queer activists to battle neo-conservative American leaders in a quest to prevent a new, fascist American state.
“I speak of democracy because somewhere on our journey, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people got so caught up in ourselves, in protecting ourselves, that we forgot where our journey started,” Vazquez said.
“This moment in America is heavy with the silence of liberals and progressives and a lot of queers who are afraid to speak,” she added.
Vazquez, a self-avowed butch lesbian socialist, directs public policy for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York City. A prized speaker, she has been published in several anthologies and served on the board of various queer resource centers.
As a child, Vazquez said her vision of democracy was where “bold, blooming flowers set the air with the sweetness of a young woman’s scent.” But as she aged, she said her eyes told her otherwise, that the dream’s beneficiaries “were white, male and rich and always were.”
Now, she says, a new terror has risen on the horizon, with President Bush as its masthead. She asserts that corporate interests have supplanted a vibrant democracy, and traces the Iraq war not to September 11, but to a conservative public policy document drafted in 2000 that proposed to establish global American hegemony.
“It speaks in blunt terms of American internationalism,” she said. “In essence, it lays out a plan for U.S. domination around the globe.”
This, she believes, represents an “erosion of democracy” which has also been compounded by legislation such as the Patriot Act.
“The Patriot Act and what we are doing in the Middle East are not democracy, they are the harbingers of fascism,” she said.
“It is an erosion of democracy witnessed by the acquiescence of our leaders…by a press so feeble it dare not question that only American bids are being considered for the rebuilding of Iraq.”
Democracy’s promise fades with economic despair, she noted.
“Democracy loses some of its luster when you don’t have a job,” she said. “Democracy isn’t uplifting when you can’t feed your child.”
“This country is in very real danger of killing democracy… because it is killing economic freedom,” she continued. “We don’t need to pull the rug out from under the poor to feed the frenzied Pentagon.”
She enjoined the LGBT community not to remain silent while democracy crumbles.
“We don’t live in lavender bubbles,” she said. “We live in the belly of the beast. We are citizens of an ever-weakening democracy.… Too many of us are stuck in the safety of our lives.
“The agenda of gay conservatives is narrow and intended to benefit the privileged,” she continued. It posits “that the only meaningful gay issues are the right to join the military and to right to marry.”
This cannot articulate the complexity of the gay community, she said.
Instead, she pushed queer activists to adopt the inclusive strategy of the civil rights movement, which saw the struggle of African Americans as the struggle of all oppressed peoples.
“We won’t win anything else until we understand that we can’t get anything if it only involves us,” she said. “If we think that the strangling of civil liberties at home and the war in Iraq won’t affect queers, we are mistaken.
“If we think funding for HIV/AIDS won’t be severely impacted by the costs to fight this war and occupy Iraq,” she added, “we are delusional.”
To escape this harrowing path, Vazquez proposes a serious reengagement with the political process.
“This means getting our hands dirty in electoral politics,” she said. “You have to get used to talking to elected officials.
“Go call your legislators,” she continued. “Go scream at them. Go make love to your girlfriend or boyfriend and then go back out on the streets.
“We have no right to assume that we’ll have another chance,” she concluded. “Go now.”