Beyond Single Issues
by Sky Hall
Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars
Edited by Ryan Conrad
2011, Against Equality Publishing Collective, 85 pages, $10
On September 20, 2011, the ban on gay soldiers serving openly in the military ended, and over 100 celebrations were planned in cities across the U.S. and around the world. How many antiwar demonstrations were planned on that same day? What if 18 years of fighting for gays in the military were spent fighting against the U.S. military?” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore poses this question in the introduction to Against Equality’s latest pocket-sized anthology of essays.
What follows is eight pieces of sharp criticism (and a few cartoons by Mr. Fish, to boot) of the mainstream gay movement for inclusion of LGBTQ people in the military. Each questions why the historically left radical critique of war does not extend to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) and the issue of queers in the military. Somehow in the general dialogue around gay people in the armed forces, there has been very little criticism of the racist imperialism of the U.S. military, the increasing militarization of daily life in the United States, or the high risk of gender-based and sexual violence within the military. Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars is a provocative disruption of the pattern of ignoring these inconsistencies.
“Military service is not economic justice,” writes Kenyon Farrow, clearly just scratching the surface. That’s what I like about this simple, readable book. It scratches the surface and rocks the boat at the same time. Reading through the essays, noticing the various dates — even over the last 12 months — that this issue has come before us for public debate, it becomes painfully clear that poverty, harassment, lack of adequate healthcare, incarceration, and other structural problems that LGBTQ folks struggle with every day don’t come up for debate. Seen through this lens, military inclusion seems an alarmingly conservative goal.
Tamara Nopper explains why she opposes the repeal of DADT and also opposes the DREAM Act, which she fears could increase the size and capacity of the military by requiring some immigrants to serve time in the military as a pathway to legal residency and possible citizenship. Larry Goldsmith discusses Bradley Manning’s case. Jamal Rashad Jones summons the anti-imperialist, antiracist, anti-poverty, feminist reverberations of queer liberation. Bill Andriette’s look at military prisons and execution foreshadows Against Equality’s next anthology: radical queer critiques of the criminal justice system. Even arguments that I find hard to swallow, like Cecilia Cissell Lucas’s idea to reduce the size of the military by encouraging more and more types of discrimination, raise important notions. “There are plenty of other civil rights denied gay people for which we still need to fight—civil rights that do not trample on others’ human rights,” Lucas concludes.
“We have to move beyond these single-issue politics and take a broader view,” said Ryan Conrad, editor of this volume, in an interview with me during a rowdy, unpermitted march on the eve of the NyC Pride Parade. I had asked about how straight-identified antiwar activists might navigate this debate. “Just because a straight person is critiquing an LGBTQ person’s kinda shaky or unsubstantial politics, that’s not homophobic. I actually think that it’s being a better ally, because it means actually asking those deeper and broader questions that we all need to be asking…. We have to remember that people aren’t just queer but also have all these other attributes and identities. I think through that there is an interesting place in which coalition building can be done where there can be a more nuanced criticism of militarism and war that gets away from this single issue ‘discrimination is bad, so we need to do away with discrimination.’ So it’s like, okay, if you want to deal with discrimination, we need to talk about all forms of discrimination, not simply this civil rights issue.”
Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars can be purchased at an independent bookstore near you. Against Equality has many more articles and links in their online archive at againstequality.org.
Coming soon: entire interview with Ryan Conrad.
Sky Hall is a founding member of the Maine-based art activist group Beehive Design Collective and has volunteered with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and worked with WRL’s Archiving Committee.
