News & Letters, March 1999

New queer generation gathers to question all

Elders and advisors attempted to "educate" the youth with sessions featuring assimilationist figures like Candace Gingrich. They also encouraged strategies of working "inside" reformist organizations. The only leftist session at the conference was a lively discussion led by Jennifer Rycenga on Marxist-Humanism and revolutionary queer history. Youth flocked to this session and raised profound questions on the need for radical changes, a more inclusive movement, and the need to build a totally new society.

A critique of their parents' generation—the radicals of the '60s—was made with a decisively revolutionary twist. Fritze, a young lesbian, described how her mother had tried to talk her out of taking any direct political action by saying that "the '60s had failed and were dead." Fritze retorted, "Your failure does not mean revolution is impossible!"

Another gay college student, Adam, cogently pointed out that the '60s generation might be the first revolutionary movement which unequivocally knew it had failed, and that they were trying to impose their defeatism on the next generation.

The question that the studentsÑincluding high school students—were explicitly and repeatedly raising was "what happens after the revolution?" Unlike their parents' generation, and perhaps because they are queer and know how repressive those regimes were to sexual minorities, the queer youth showed no desire to tail end state powers that called themselves socialist, whether that be Cuba or the former Soviet Union.

Instead they felt free to ask the difficult questions of how we could re-create the dialectic without having revolutions turn into their opposite, a question explicitly raised by a 14-year-old gay youth.

As N&L reported in relation to queer movement activity in October and November of 1998, the vicious lynching of Matthew Shepard appears to have galvanized rather than cowed student activism. It was heartening to see radical straight students willing, indeed eager, to identify with queers. Opposition to police violence, support for Mumia's cause, feminist alliances, and attention to racism revealed this as a multiple issue queer youth movement. While the reformist and assimilationist trends were quite visible, they do not represent the liveliest segments of queer youth, who are ready to undertake their historic responsibility to "re-create the dialectic anew."

—Jennifer, Maya, and Suzanne

"Queer Notions III: Even More Thoughts on the Relation between Sexuality and Revolution," has just been published. Get it for $3 from News & Letters. See literature link for our address.

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