Ira Sachs: Gay Marxist Cinéaste

Sachs, who says he has a “Marxist perspective on how people live”, was raised in Memphis, the only openly gay teenager in his high school. He was one of only two out students in his class at Yale. He got his first taste of how economics can affect the makeup of a neighbourhood after moving to Brooklyn in 1988. “I was the white, Yale graduate coming to town to find my place,” he recalls. “I moved to an Italian neighbourhood – the street was Dominican. When I arrived there were three Dominican social clubs on my corner, and within three years they were all gone.” ...

Has his sexuality been a stumbling block? He equivocates. “I think the stories one chooses to tell – that’s what hinders you. I’m a gay man. But you may say first off that I’m a man. The power that sometimes comes with that is part of who I am, as much as the vulnerability that my sexuality might create.”

Change can’t come quickly, he thinks, because minority tastes must remain such in today’s marketplace. “I find that my generation of both gay film-makers and independent film-makers are having a hard time creating sustained careers because of content. Content needs to be homogenised. And what tends to happen is the dominant cultures tend to become the homogenous cultures.”

Guardian.

Possibly the most important gay Marxist filmmaker since Pasolini.

Nah, I haven't watched anything by him either.

Dick Morrison: Free

Last month saw the death of Dick Morrison, one of the founders of the gay liberation movement in this country and a Marxist activist.

These days when the ‘gay community’ has long since replaced the gay liberation movement and capitalist liberalism rules supreme in that community, the fact that the original liberation movement was a radical left-wing movement and its founders and activists were anti-capitalists has been largely submerged....

Red Line. 

Part of Fagburn's never ending commeration of gay Marxists.

Todd Haynes: Das Kapital

“What’s funny is how much of the conforming has come from within the gay community itself,” he says. “It’s part and parcel of the tremendous, almost unimaginable legislative advancements we’ve made. I’m not married myself, but I support gay marriage, gays in the military, all that. But those are the last places. When we were in our activist years, when the government was just allowing people to die from Aids, our understanding of the threat that marginal lives imposed on dominant lives was a tool for exposing the hypocrisy of the status quo, let alone [the government’s] heartlessness and neglect. Now, for the most part, everyone’s new favourite topic is how much they all love gays and lesbians, and transgender people are the trend.” ...
 
“Well, for the little kid, the teenager coming out, that’s great. It’s essential. But there are things we have traded in for that as well. Where is the outside now? Who stands beyond capitalism? Who is questioning corporate culture? The market has won. It accepts gay and lesbian lives because those people can spend money like anyone else. It is issues of poverty and race than need attention now, because they can’t spend the money.”

Observer profile.

Reader's Comment Of The Day: The Spectator

"Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today"

That should read, 'Atheist and homosexual, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today'

Why is The Spectator giving voice for Marxist saboteurs of Western Civilization, who use 'gay' for 'homosexual', knowing that a 'homosexual agenda' would be clearly seen as sabotage of Western Civilization, hence the more pleasant sounding 'gay agenda'. Similar is the term 'marriage equality', a slogan meant to preclude an objection to same sex marriage. But when persons are reminded what marriage is for (including those who are homosexual/lesbian), that being to socialize children into the worlds of men AND women, then we clearly see the (1) imbecility of the slogan 'marriage equality'; and (2) Marxist design to destroy Western Civilization by destroying children's critical parental bi-gender socialization.

Well said Spectator reader Dean Jackson!

High time someone exposed The Spectator's role in the great Marxist/homosexual conspiracy.

PS The clearly sane Mr Jackson is rather fond of leaving comments on his cruelly ignored theory.

Queerty: On Right-Wing Mouthpieces

Queerty is deffo not a right-wing mouthpiece.

No sirree.

They just love the fetishisation of US state military power.

'We gotta bomb Russia for the gays, dudes. Then we'll go for a holiday in sexy Israel and party with all those hot kid-killing conscript soldiers from the IDF.'

'Cause we only care about what we're told to.'

USA! USA! USA!

Only in braindrowned AmeriKKKa can a left-right divide be defined on whether you like the gays or not, and not on being opposed to capital.

Welcome to the new gay bourgeois ideal!
In no way are Queerty in the pay of their corporate paymasters.

Perhaps Queerty doth protest too much?

The fundamentalists were mobilised into a political force for the first time [circa 30 years ago] to provide a base for this reaction, and - to the extent that the political system functions, which is not much -- to shift the focus of many voters from the issues that really affect their interests (such as health, education, economic issues, wages) to religious crusades to block the teaching of evolution, gay rights and abortion rights...

These are all issues about which CEOs, for example, just don’t care very much. They care a lot about the other issues. And if you can shift the focus of debate and attention and presidential politics to questions quite marginal for the wealthy - questions of, say, gay rights -- that’s wonderful for people who want to destroy the labour unions, or to construct a social/political system for the benefit of the ultra-rich, while everyone else barely survives.

Thus the discourse and the focus shift to issues of great concern to the fundamentalists, but of only marginal concern to the people who own and run the society.

In fact, you could take a look at the attitudes of CEOs: they’re what are called liberal. They’re not very different from college professors. And if the population can become obsessed with “evolution theory” and gay rights, that’s fine, so long as the business world is running the social and economic policies with little interference.

After the last election, the business press described the “euphoria” in corporate boardrooms, and it wasn’t because they were against gay marriage. Some were, some weren’t; many of them or their children are gay anyway  - no, what they knew is that it was a free run for business.

And if you can manage that, that’s an achievement; it’s one of the ways the population can be kept under control - plus inducing fear, which is a standard device.

Noam Chomsky.

Hobsbawm: A Life In Politics

The great Eric Hobsbawn interviewed on Radio 4 by Simon Schama.