First published in Bay Windows on June 14, 2007
On Friday, June 1, I called my friend Robert on his cell phone shortly before 6 p.m., when he is usually preparing to leave his office in Manhattan. This time he was in Brooklyn, approaching Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church for the 10th anniversary celebration of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), which calls itself a “Community Organizing Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People of Color.” As Robert pronounced this I added, “When the Rainbow is Enuf,” referring to the famously long name of Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls.... He laughed and said, “Yes, when does it stop?!”
Titled “Living a Legacy: Celebrating Action, Imagination and Struggle,” the fundraiser was to start with food and gallery at 6 p.m., and performers and speakers at 7:30 p.m. The program included several speakers plus performances by the Lavender Light Gospel Choir and the Legendary House of Ninja (those are two separate groups, incidentally). I told Robert I had enjoyed the music of Lavender Light, a member of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses and the world’s first non-church-affiliated LGBT gospel choir. By then he was at the church door, and we hung up.
The next morning I returned from breakfast to find this message in Robert’s rich, bass-baritone drawl:
“The goddamn thing went on — it started at six with the dinner, and lasted until ten minutes till eleven. And I have to tell you that I knew something about the Audre Lorde Project, and I laud some of the work that they do, but I owe you an apology for some of the things that I’ve been dismissive about that you’ve said about some of these groups [meaning leftists]. Some of these people are crazy.
“It’s like, America’s a horrible place, and we’re neo-colonialist and need to open our borders and let everybody in the world come in if they want to for whatever opportunities they want, and we need to end the war on terrorism. Perhaps we need to end the war in Iraq, but why the war on terrorism? Oh, let’s just be sitting ducks and let them kill us all. And how America is no longer a democracy despite the fact that you can stand up in this church and say all these things.”
Experience suggests that if I were to express these views myself, I would be charged with neo-colonialism, based on the idea that as a white person I have no right to oppress people of color with my opinions. Robert, on the other hand, is African American, though I doubt it will go any better for me on this account with the professionally outraged left, who can charge me with arrogantly appropriating opinions of color. As Katharine Hepburn once said, “Never. The less.”
The ALP website (at www.alp.org) includes statements on war, immigration and marriage. In each case, as Robert suggested, they take things to extremes.
ALP opposes not just the war in Iraq but the war in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. In the case of Afghanistan, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime for refusing to turn over the Al Qaeda terrorists who were behind the 9/11 attacks and whom the Taliban were harboring. As to the war on terrorism, ALP throws out the anti-terrorism baby with the Bush Administration bathwater. Many of us who oppose President Bush’s use of torture, warrantless wiretaps and suspension of habeas corpus nonetheless recognize the need to defend our country against Islamist extremists. Similarly, one can oppose Bush’s unilateralism, military overreach and doctrine of pre-emptive strikes without ignoring the need for a strong military.
ALP not only opposes the recent nativist hysteria on immigration, but states, “Full legalization is a nonnegotiable demand.” They oppose the “path to legalization” compromise, oppose all guest worker proposals, and support “immediate access to full legalization” for all illegal aliens. I agree with their call for repeal of the HIV immigration ban; I agree that undocumented workers contribute to America’s economy; and I would like family unification with my own foreign partner. But the notion that we have no right to control our borders amounts to a denial of national sovereignty, which is radical indeed. And ALP’s rhetoric about dismantling the “prison-industrial complex” is designed to persuade no one.
ALP supports gay people’s right to civil marriage, but also embraces the more radical principles of the “Beyond Marriage” manifesto which I criticized last year, and of which ALP’s executive director, Kris Hayashi, is a signatory. As an example of the lunacy to which their Marxist-inspired, all-oppressions-are-linked philosophy leads them, they criticize gay-owned businesses that encouraged gay wedding trips to Hawai’i during that state’s marriage struggle. This is because “many within the indigenous Hawai’ian sovereignty movement — who had supported same-gender marriage — consider tourism to be one of the most destructive forces impacting Native Hawai’ians and their struggle for sovereignty.”
Robert had nothing but praise for one aspect of ALP’s celebration: the food. “It was quite ethnically diverse. They had Caribbean food and Indian food and soul food. They served several different kinds of meat, including pork. One of my friends pulled off some pieces of fatback, and this is a guy who’s a big health nut, and he went back and had a second piece.”
Let’s give credit: while they may charge bravely into political irrelevance, seizing the furthest margins of the national conversation, they sure can lay out a first-rate buffet.