David Brooks struck again this week. In the latest in his long-in-the-tooth series of “splaining” columns in the New York Times, “How Cool Works in America Today,” the eminent splainer enlightened the world on “being woke,” as the kids say these days, which he posits as the new version of “cool.”
It includes “cool” gems like this:
The woke manner shares cool’s rebel posture, but it is the opposite of cool in certain respects.
Cool was politically detached, but being a social activist is required for being woke.
That’s right, he treats commitment to a cause as some poser trend, a protective measure employed by many Splainers to keep the peanut butter of meaning out of the white chocolate of their souls.
For a breakdown on the column, check out Kelly Macias’ piece, “David Brooks Tries To Explain Woke To The Rest Of Us, Fails Miserably.” Below you’ll find a satire based on this week’s column, but first a brief Introduction to Queer Nation.
Introduction
Between 1990 and 1993 or so, I was active in Queer Nation, which sprouted out of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Justice (ACT UP) in New York and spread from there to take on the rise of violence against LGBQT people. (I was in Seattle, Washington. We … were … everywhere.)
From the Queer Nation Manifesto:
Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred.
I wondered: What if David Brooks decided to explain this history to us, while also (bonus) explaining to the rest of us this week’s news about Trump’s ban on transgendered people serving in the military? (Just as he explains the history of cool, jazz, seemingly all 20th Century African American culture, and then Black Lives Matter, and then goes where no man has gone before and adds that right wing people can be “woke,” too.
(To repeat Kelly Macias’ title: “David Brooks Tries To Explain Woke To The Rest Of Us, Fails Miserably.” Truly you should read his piece, if only to get the immune boost that laughter can bring to you. Trigger warning: Stock photo of two laughing white women on that page.)
Furthermore, what if David Brooks confused and blended Queer Nation with Voguing, which if he were to nose around on the Internet for the seven minutes required for him to research one of his columns, he would discover reached a zenith of popularity during the same period as Queer Nation?
What if he mixed all these particular ingredients together to create this week’s David Brooks Soup?
Queer Nation (My Personal Experience, Not the Whole Story)
Queer Nation in the early 90s consisted of a diverse group of activists devoted to addressing issues facing people in the day to day. We would often emblazen ourselves with bright stickers with words like, “Homo,” “Fag,” “Dyke,” “Lesbo,” and other terms traditionally used against us as a way of saying, “Yes, I’m a fag. And?”
We would go to public places, hold kiss-ins and other actions, and generally enact Public Displays of Affection (PDA) equal to PDA acceptable for heterosexuals in the same space. A variety of actions took place. Pink Panthers and other groups formed street patrols in areas with frequent gay bashings in order to protect the innocent and push back against the guilty.
In Seattle, QN would meet at Seattle Central College. By the time I joined, it was so popular the auditorium was packed with hundreds of people. (Participation decreased over time. By 92, it felt this particular era had passed.)
There would be a large meeting with announcements and group business, followed by a series of people getting up to tell us about a problem that needed to be addressed, or a particular action people were planning, and then they’d say, “We’ll be over in that corner after the meeting, come join us if you’re interested.”
Next person, next person, next person, and when the meeting broke up, people who wanted to be involved with this or that action would meet in subgroups, plan the action, and then carry it out in the weeks or months ahead.
I recall an action that occurred after Rolling Stone magazine “discovered Seattle” during the post-grunge-”grunge” phase. Grunge had passed in Seattle by the time Nirvana hit big and “the world noticed,” so all the grunge bands suddenly had gigs, many had record contracts, and there was a grunge band proliferation that rivaled the breeding rate of Harry Mudd’s Tribbles. During this time in the media spotlight, Rolling Stone magazine came out and named the, I don’t know, 10 hippest bars or whatever, and they included the Rebar—without mentioning it was a queer space.
The Rebar, which hosted theatrical events and other shows, had a bar and a dance floor, and was—and is—a great place to go. (I lived about three blocks away. Now it’s 2000 miles so I don’t get by as often.)
Dan Savage staged some of his plays (writing, directing, and acting) with his theatre group Greek Active at the Rebar, and there were all sorts of other shows. The Rebar was a great queer place to be. (And is. I just haven’t been since 1995.)
The Rebar’s owner (or manager) came to the QN meeting one night seeking help to take back the bar. Since that Rolling Stone article came out, and Seattle was inundated by grunge-scene-seekers, droves of young heteros were showing up, mostly packs of young men, and there was increased violence against same sex displays of affection. A sort of hetero-gentrification took place.
(#notallstraightpeoplearehomophobic!)
The plan was to show up earlier than we might typically make our appearances so that more queer people than not would be there on any given night.
(#buttheseassholeswerehomophobic!).
The idea was to resaturate the crowd to make it predominantly queer again, to protect patrons if they were being harrassed by having an organized, peacefully overpowering response to any violent action, and to generally Display Same-Sex Affection Publicly again.
Make The Rebar Queer Again.
(Please don’t put that on a hat. Seriously, don’t put that on a hat. It’s going to be put on a hat.)
Satire Satire Satire and Notes on the Historical Period and Links
This piece includes some of the words we emblazened on our bodies back then when confronting the violence, defending queer space, and breaking ground in “new” spaces (everywhere else) to achieve the right to, well, exist in public.
In using words meant to offend us then and offend us now, which we took back to form a rhetorical shield and deweaponize for the bashers, bullies, and otherwise hateful, I mean to use them (twisted by DDB, of course) in the spirit with which we used them in this particular historical moment, a moment when Queer Nation continued the work of generations before us to carve out our rights to exist in public space. (A mere decade earlier when I lived in Milwaukee, police still raided bars regularly to make arrests for public affection.)
The goals shifted in the early 90s to claiming our right to exist as freely as “heteros” in ALL public space, and that work continues around the world today.
Links are included that can lead you to find out a bit about the real stories of people whose lives and accomplishments are presented here (in twisted form) throughout, including links to newspapers across the country about transgendered veterans speaking out against Trump’s misguided ban, the 2016 Rand study that debunks Trump, and a few links in the “milk maids” section that link to stories about some bizarre trends among alt right boys lately.
So, in this SATIRE SATIRE SATIRE, (did I mention the following is satire?), following his requisite seven minutes of online research, Dopelganger David Brooks explains voguing history, his hip-and-with-it conception of “transgendering in the military,” and on top of that, DDB-in-the-house uses words like homo, fag, queer, dyke, etc. in a manner, it’s safe to say, only he can do.
With MY deepest respect to the vogue dancers, queer nationalists, and all LGBTQ people in very part of society, and gratitude to the service of transgendered veterans and active military, here comes DDB’s take on all of that….
Is Transgendering In The Military The New “Voguing?”
By “Dopeleganger David Brooks”
If you were homoqueer in 1989, there’s a decent chance you wanted to dance like Willi Ninja, Jose Gutierez, Luis Camacho, Pepper Beija, Dorian Corey, or Angie, Brooke, or Venus Xtravaganza. In their own ways, these people defined vogue.
The vogue person is fierce, real, controlled, and self-possessed. The vogue person is gracefully competent, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know their worth. That’s because the vogue person has found his or her own “house,” and his or her own unique and authentic way of living with contorted or angular bodily poses while “reading” people with nonchalant intensity.
In their entertaining book, “Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-02,” photographer Chantal Regnault and author Stuart Baker illustrate how, inspired by model poses of Vogue magazine and the style of ancient Egyptian hierogplyphs, African American and Latino gay and transgender communities produced a dance characterized by model-like poses with angular and linear body movements.
Baker shows that vogue isn’t just a style, it’s an “embodied philosophy” that is anchored in being part of a house, calling someone “mother,” and reading people’s beads a lot.
No LGBQT person alive in 1989 deviated from the desire to be “vogue.” Every single homoqueer, as they liked to call themselves, wanted to strike rigid poses, throw shade, and stick their elbows up behind their back while thrusting their chins out in dramatic fashion. Just as every single faghomo without exception wanted to be Diana Ross from 1975 to 1985, then shifted to Whitney Houston in 1985, they all switched in unison in 1989 to joining “houses” and “competing against one another for their dancing skills, the verisimilitude of their drag and their ability to walk on the runway.”
Whether in business meetings, on construction jobs, or any other work location, the entire population of Les-Bi-Fags broke into dramatic walks, and discovered that beauty is where they found it. This alone is a key factor in the increased visibility for LesboTransBiGayism in the 1990s.
This included Washington National Gaurd colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, who disclosed on a routine security clearance form that she was a secret “Voguer,” and was subsequently discharged, and later vogued in the Seattle Pride Parade to cheers from the crowd. (Glenn Close starred as Cammermaryer in the 1995 film, “Voguing in Silence.”)
I started to look around to see if there might be another contemporary ethos that has replaced the vogue ethos. You could say the new Jay Z album 4:44 qualifies, since his mother comes out as an LGBTQHomoQueer and thus must have vogued throughout the years 1989 to 1992 relentlessly, but that strikes me as less of an exhibition of voguing ethos and more of a personal habit of every generation of this particular family landing a song on the Billboard Hot 100 in some uniquely record-breaking fashion.
A better candidate is “transgendering in the military.” The modern concept of “transgendering in the military” began, as far as anybody can tell, when President Obama was elected and he created transgenderism out of whole cloth. The “transgendering in the military” mentality became prominent in 2016, also thanks to Obama, when he directed the military to immediately become “openly transgendered.” Finally, on the last day of his presidency, Obama also ordered all apple pies to become peach pies, baseball bats to be replaced by labia shaped basketball nets, and signed a law into place requiring that all boys wear pink, use pink crayons, and play Pink records at least once per week.
Vogue was ballroom, but transgendering in the military requires being outside. Vogue was competitive while offering a collective sense of belonging, but transgendering in the military comes with tremendous medical costs. Vogue was physically rigid and involved runway walks, transgendering in the military requires engaging the enemy on the battlefield, and tanks.
Embrace it or not, transgendering in the military is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.
The transgendering in the military mentality has since been embraced on the alternative right, by the conservative “milkmaids,” young white supremacists who get together, take off their shirts, and pour milk all over their bodies in public but are totally not gay, who have now begun to do so wearing skirts.
To be transgendering in the military is to assume command responsibility and carry out a mission. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures, and to know a rifle is a rifle not a gun. The transgendering in the military manner shares vogue’s rebel posture, as well as back problems in middle age, but it is the opposite of vogue in certain respects.
Vogue was graceful fluid action, but being still for hours behind enemy lines is sometimes required for transgendering in the military. Vogue involved tutting, locking, and wrist illusions, but transgendering in the military is being liberty’s light.
Vogue was catwalk, duckwalk, dips, spin, and arms control; transgendering in the military is marching, manuevering, and the formal handling of arms.
While both are brave, passionate and dignified, it remains to be seen how substantive, rigorous, and effective this new nonbinariansim and genderqueeriantics will be.
--Dopelganger David Brooks out
Coda by Franks Human
It also remains to be seen whether or not transgendering in the military will survive the Trump presidency, or whether democracy will survive as well, but one thing is clear:
“Transgendering in the military” is on the side of democracy, while Trump is not.