Lady Gaga Wants to “Turn the World Gay”; The Pitfalls of an Economic Approach to LGBT Rights

Appearing on the cover of this month’s issue of Out magazine nude and smeared with lipstick, Lady Gaga told Out about her love of gay culture:

“I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream…It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.”

But she doesn’t seem to be joking about it: she noted that before going on tour with rapper Kanye West she told him, “I just want to be clear before we decide to do this together: I’m gay. My music is gay. My show is gay. And I love that it’s gay. And I love my gay fans and they’re all going to be coming to our show. And it’s going to remain gay.” As she revealed in her interview with Out, Lady Gaga feels profoundly indebted to the gay community for the success of her musical career, and she is going to try her hardest to please her gay fan base.

Read the whole interview with Out Magazine here.

I always worry when commercial interests target LGBT (usually just G) people; it’s simply another way to commodify LGBT interests in a way that is profitable. It is hard, however, to discount the effect that LGBT representation in the consumer market and the business world can have on promoting LGBT rights. Marx, in his materialist conception of history, argued that social relations are based upon relations of production; therefore, the rise of LGBT people as a consumer group and as a increasingly more visible part of the American middle class has been and will continue to have profound implications on LGBT rights. In this sense, exploiting whatever clout the LGBT community has as a consumer group could bring about positive change.

Nevertheless, we must ask who does this economic approach to LGBT rights benefit and who does it marginalize? Class becomes a major problem when a minority group desires to affect change by sheer economic power: the wealthiest, least marginalized members of that community will have their needs met first, and may very well inhibit the expansion of rights and acceptance to other members of the broader community. I believe that is exactly what is happening in the LGBT world. Middle-class gay white men, privileged because of their gender, class, and race, have become the dominant force in the commercialized LGBT market, the market to which Lady Gaga panders. In this process, gay white men have been instrumental in relegating issues of gender, class, and race to the fringes of the discourse on LGBT rights. What a wonder, then, is it that gay marriage is our number one political concern, that the “gay” media caters to white gay men, that most media coverage of LGBT people focuses on white gay men?

I would rather see a collaborative effort between LGBT people of all different classes, gender identities, and races (and their straight allies) unite to form a more comprehensive movement that addresses a broad swathe of issues affecting LGBT people: homelessness, workplace discrimination, hate crimes, healthcare, transphobia, heteronormative education, domestic partner benefits, etc. This approach would not only avoid marginalizing parts of the LGBT community, it would also bring in a larger group of people, both queer and straight, to help attack systemic problems in our society. Call it wanton idealism, but I do not think that the wealthy gays are going to be able to continue spearheading their exclusive rights effort for much longer.

Splainin’ the Republican Decline

So I was listening to the radio today, which is a never good idea where I live, and the radio host brought up a two week-old incident from the Sonia Sotomayor hearings where Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn told Sotomayor that she would “have lots of splainin’ to do”. In response to media criticisms of Coburn as insensitive and racist, the radio host indignantly inquired, “Was Coburn being racist? Or is our society overrun with hypersensitive liberals looking for something to get mad over?”  (what a subtle bias!) Of course, his first two guests were average-joe sounding dudes who agreed with him about how the liberal media has turned us into politically correct freaks, blah blah blah. The host cheerfully agreed, “Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t offensive, YOU [liberals] made it offensive by getting all upset over it!” (I love how the blame is passed onto the “angry minorities/liberals”).

The radio show discussion would have caused me a bout of depression–ignorance induces in me a depression that no SSRI can assuage–had I not later found a stellar analysis of the implications of this incident in Frank Rich’s article in the New York Times. In his article, Rich argues that Sotomayor’s nomination and the Republicans’ embarrassing treatment of race and gender issues during the hearings reflect the decline of the brand of staunch conservatism that has enjoyed political primacy for the past fifteen years. While I agree that the Republicans have been doing a wonderful job alienating themselves from just about everyone, I am, however, suspicious of how “liberal” Americans have become about race. The fact that we have books and articles written every other day entitled “Does race still matter?” contributes to that suspicion. Nevertheless, to see the old Republican vanguard humiliate themselves on TV when they try and address “hot topics” like race and gender gives me hope that their party and their ideology is on the decline.

And I believe that the Republicans’ extraordinary ignorance of the complexities of race has accelerated this decline. Awkward jokes about race, such as Coburn’s, are a hallmark of a generation of Americans who have no idea how to deal with the integration of minorities into the American mainstream. Indignant about having to even talk about racism, they would prefer ignoring race altogether–“let’s kill affirmative action because it affirms racial boundaries!”–or if they do talk about race, they will freak out if anyone criticizes them or points out their ignorance. Essentially, yeah, there was racism, SORRY, now shut up and deal with it! It is, ultimately, a colonialist attitude. The conservative movement in Japan to omit atrocities committed against peoples across East and Southeastern Asia is a fantastic parallel. Conservative Japanese historians argue that the Korean “comfort women” and Chinese victims of genocide are all sore “whiners” who need to move on. To include stories about their suffering in Japan’s national history, they argue, would be to undermine Japanese nationalism. “Do you want Japanese children to grow up hating Japan!?” they thunder. As the American and Japanese scenarios both reveal, the issue at hand is more about the oppressor than it is about the oppressed: the privileged group feels vulnerable about its ignorance of the experiences and struggles of the oppressed. That is why “a wise Latina” makes the Republicans so nervous. How many Republicans can say that they know what it is like to be a minority? How many of them were or had families that were complicit in segregation? There is a profound shame and vulnerability to be found in ignorance, and the race debate is an area where these feelings come out in their entirety. 

What to do, then? Well, I think we should begin with assuaging those feelings of shame and vulnerability by dispelling ignorance about race. W.E.B. Du Bois said that African Americans had a “double-consciousness”–that is, they were conscious of themselves as marginalized black people but also conscious of how white culture perceived them. White people do not have this double-consciousness because they live and breathe a culture that they have controlled and managed for centuries in this country. They are the ones doing the perceiving; they are not the perceived (while white people are perceived by minorities, the perceptions of minorities do not have the power to disenfranchise or negatively effect white people because of the latter’s is in a position of power superior to that of the minorities).

I personally enjoy Du Bois’ envisioned solution: “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

I would extend the argument to all races and cultures to simply say: we should strive to create a society where we are constantly learning about one another’s experiences, where we are not afraid to simply admit that we may be ignorant about other people and their experiences, but that we can learn and understand if we are courageous enough to bare open our hearts, put aside our pride, and commune with one another.