Tagged: LGBT movement
March 15th, 2014
Queer Dreams & Non-Profit Blues – October 4, 2013
When I started working in the queer movement in Boston in the late 1970s, formal LGBT organizations were very rare. Almost all the groups I worked with were not formally incorporated or registered with the government as nonprofits. Gay Community News, Lesbian and Gay Media Advocates, Allston Brighton Green Light Safe-house Project, LUNA, the Feminist Caucus of the Boston Food Coop. We were all volunteer groups, not registered, although organized around goals, values, decision-making processes and theories of governance and accountability. Funders for LGBT Issues noted there were about 50 LGBT organizations in 1969. These groups had to fight to even get formal governmental [...]
July 2nd, 2013
Imagining The Impossible
Review of Irresistible Revolution by Bettina Aptheker in The Women's Review of Books From: http://www.wcwonline.org/WRB-Issues/imagining-the-impossible Review of: Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Politics By Urvashi Vaid (New York: Magnus Books, 2012, 238 pp., $21.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Bettina Aptheker Urvashi Vaid is currently the director of the Engaging Tradition project at Columbia University Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. Trained as an attorney, she has been a remarkable and courageous organizer in the LGBT movement for thirty years. Her work is marked by a feminist [...]
July 2nd, 2013
Be Transformative, Not Transfixed!
(From The Nation.Com, June 27, 2013) Read more: What's Next for the LGBT Movement? | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/175015/whats-next-lgbt-movement#ixzz2XVb6kksn) The Lethe-soaked question of what comes after the marriage cases ignores the reality that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people’s lives are not yet free, equal or secure, even with the positive outcome of these Supreme Court decisions. Here’s a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of the LGBT movement in the US; and from that, a possible blueprint for the work ahead. Strengths: A compassionate and mobilized base of millions of LGBT people, their families and [...]
January 2nd, 2013
Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics
Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run. Order this book now - click on Amazon.Com on this linked page - or order from your favorite indy bookstore - click now ...Irresistible Revolution Early [...]
May 14th, 2012
Up With Chris Hayes – 5.12.12
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy There are a number of other clips from this show on the MSNBC web site.
May 5th, 2012
Thinking About Diversity
These informal remarks were given at a workshop sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University on April 2, 2012. The Center hosts interdisciplinary conversations among scholars focusing on "keywords." This conversation involved me, Ira Katznelson, Fred Harris and moderator Mae Ngai. Every time I sat down to think about today’s presentation, I found myself impatient, irritated, avoiding the topic. I realized the word diversity actually annoyed me a great deal, and even infuriated me to the point that I could not focus on this exercise. They say that if it’s hysterical, it’s historical. So I had to ask myself why this annoyed [...]
November 20th, 2011
Engaging Tradition Based Resistance
This talk was given at a program hosted by Political Research Associates and the LGBT Institute for Social Science and Public Policy at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, CUNY on October 13, 2011 Bryan Fischer: I believe we need a president who understands that just as Islam represents the greatest long term threat to our liberty so the homosexual agenda represents the greatest immediate threat to every freedom and right that is enshrined in the First Amendment, it's a particularly threat to religious liberty.... We need a president who understands that every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of religious liberty. We need a president who [...]
November 14th, 2011
Remembering Paula Ettelbrick at her Memorial Service
These remarks were given at Paula Ettelbrick's Memorial Service on November 14, 2011 in New York City. Time proved her prophetic in warning that marriage would narrow our freedom even as it expanded our rights. I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. In Dirge Without Music Edna St. Vincent Millay captures the strangeness of losing someone we love. It is devastating, if inevitable. But it is harder still to have lost Paula’s critical mind, loving [...]
March 15th, 2004
Sexuality & Its Discontents: The Challenge of Building a Progressive LGBT Movement
"The class divide is evident in the different between those who attend the fancy black tie dinners that raise political monies for our national organizations, and those who use the services provided by our social service agencies. You see the former represented in the media and on the L word; but you will not even see the latter referenced in a footnote to a report on poverty. The GLBT poor are invisible. So is the GLBT working class. A version of this presentation was given at Miami University Ohio in March of 2004 ©2004 Urvashi Vaid I want to speak to you tonight as an individual – as someone who spent more than 20 years working nearly full time in the GLBT movement. What I [...]