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	The Body Politic and Visions of Community
	Page 11 of 14 / Appx 1,790 words

Race, sex and solidarity
"Community" meets "the inviolability of desire"

The June 1983 issue of The Body Politic, it's 94th, did an Out in the City spread on Fruit Cocktail, "a gay extravaganza probably unlike anything North America has seen before." It was the first of what would become regular fundraisers for the Gay (later Lesbian and Gay) Community Appeal, the work of 250 mostly amateur volunteers, 150 of them on stage at the end -- drag queens and leathermen, dykes butch and femme -- their arms wild in the air as they belted out in rising unison, "Tonight we're gonna sing and dance and have our own show, 'cause everybody here is gay!"

But if old rifts were healing, the community's very growth would open up new ones, one of them that third question I spoke of at the beginning: just who counts as everybody?

A few pages later in the same issue, Ken Popert let readers in on one of our ad debates. They were, of course, perennial, but the crux of this one was new:

Recently, TBP declined to publish an advertisement which featured two magazines. One of them was entitled White Assed Super Pricks, the first letters emphasized ... so as to spell out WASP. Also on the cover were the flashlines "Unethnic" and "Unorthodox." Our brief debate over this ad revolved around a presumed conflict between two groups of readers. Should we refuse the ad in order to protect our nonwhite readers (and workers) from possible insult or injury? Or should we accept the ad to inform readers with a legitimate sexual preference that this magazine is available?

Ken speculated that the magazine might have been making fun of racism ("given the almost uniform whiteness of gay male porn [it] could be tongue-in-cheek" -- so to speak). But what if it had meant instead to appeal to racism? Well:

I know there are people who would say we have to struggle to overcome the racism in our desire, to remake our sexuality so that it more closely reflects our most thoughtful selves. Well, it's a noble sentiment, but what would it mean in practice? ... And doesn't the notion that we should modify our sexuality according to morality or politics subvert the intent of gay liberation? Gay liberation, before anything else, stands for the integrity and inviolability of sexual desire. The most constructive target in the fight against racism is not our own desires, but the institutionalization in our own community and in the surrounding society of racial inequalities. ...

Racism will go out of our sexuality when racism goes out of society, and not before.

In the September issue there was a page-and-a-half's worth of letters in response: seven of them, six critical, some angry, one signed by 23 women. This was on top of another page and a half of letters in the same issue, and almost a full page in the issue before, protesting the collective's decision to run an ad for Red Hot Video in Vancouver.

That ad had been only a quarter page, had consisted only of text, ran only once (in that same June 1983 issue), and was not the only porn video ad in the pages of the paper. But none of this was to the point. The collective had had to debate for several months before running that ad. Here's how we explained it in a small note in that June issue:

Some of us feared that accepting the ad would alienate many of our readers and supporters, especially in British Columbia, where a campaign to protest apparently violent videotapes seems to be drawing support from many in our community of friends -- feminists, lesbians and gay men. The final Collective sense, however, is that the anti-pornography movement is bad politics, a movement playing into the hands of right-wing moralizing elements in our society. We do not wish to side with that movement.

The issue had not been so politely aired as might be indicated by "a campaign ... seems to be drawing support." In November 1982 the Wimmin's Fire Brigade had torched the Red Hot Video outlet in Vancouver.

And though the collective acknowledged the concerns of "our readers and supporters" and "our community of friends" (with a little less distance than Ken citing over racial issues "a presumed conflict between two groups of readers") these battles did not just involve people "out there." The first big letter protesting the Red Hot Video ad, in the July / August 1983 issue, had been signed by 58 people, 24 of whom were, or had been, involved with TBP as writers, columnists and even former collective members.

The collective had responded in that issue, at greater and more thoughtful length than it had in June, but still very much as the collective that had, by then, been fighting state censorship in court for more than five years and had reported endlessly on other trials growing out of the Bath Raids:

We have never dismissed feminist critiques of pornography as "bad politics" -- but we have most surely attached that label to strategies that would give the state more power to control everyone's erotic lives. Red Hot Video has been singled out by people calling for precisely that kind of state control.

A major criticism raised by the letters we've received is that our acceptance of this ad is a breach of the solidarity that should exist between the feminist and gay liberation movements. ... It is no contribution to solidarity to imply that all gay men are on one side of this question and all women on the other. ... Solidarity has never meant papering over our differences. It doesn't mean demanding that others accept your entire body of beliefs before you'll agree to go on talking with them. It means the sharing of common ground, with respect for each other's autonomy and opinions.

Sometimes that's messy. Well, so be it.

The collective may have maintained its own solidarity in the Red Hot Video debate (the sides we initially took weren't based on gender, some women saying yes to the ad, some men no; and in the end we were all on the same side in that editorial), but racial issues would prove more divisive.

A draw-line on the cover of the April 1984 issue read: "Tim McCaskell on why racism is a gay issue." His feature article was called "You've got a nice body... for an Oriental." (See this cover on the introductory page of the TBP/PTP Inventory.) Lloyd Wong, a volunteer and for a short time a member of the collective, provided the body; others, also mostly Asian, provided the voices:

"Take Fruit Cocktail, for example," says Pei [Lim Pei Hsien, later a nationally known AIDS activist], another friend, from Malaysia. "The first big gay production here. How could I sit somebody down, including the producer and director, who are very dear friends of mine, and say, 'I, as a gay Asian, am not represented here.' The review in TBP didn't mention representation. People were so thrilled by it and said, 'This is my family' and 'This is the highest point,' when they had forgotten certain sisters and brothers who were not on stage. Richard, a third-world person, came backstage and said to me, 'I counted, there were five Asians and one black... in a cast of hundreds.' But most people weren't even aware of it."

In his own words, Tim took on Ken:

If Ken Popert is right when he says that racism will go out of our sexual lives when it goes out of our society, then getting it out of society and struggling with the complex ways that a racist society is affecting our "personal" lives is something that no gay person can afford to ignore.

Words would be exchanged again in 1985, after TBP ran a classified ad for a man seeking a black houseboy. Many of those words would be in print: in the April issue we published a five-page feature made up of our own internal memos and three long letters, all from Asian gay activists.

This time solidarity broke: the collective came up with a new classified ad policy Ken could not accept and he went on "intellectual strike," staying on staff but leaving the collective. He didn't come back on until September 1986, saying then, as I recall, that if this work was worth doing it was worth the compromise. And it was still worth doing.

But different conceptions of that work, and of its relation to communities, came out of all this.

For Ken and Gerald especially, sanitizing our sexuality in the name of solidarity was no more than self-oppression. I was mushier than they, but basically agreed. Others, Chris Bearchell among them but especially Tim, both long-time veterans of coalition politics, found us too willing to sacrifice allies to a new brand of liberationist purity.

Our internal differences, though they would finally help wear The Body Politic down to its demise, were mostly lost beyond our walls: other critics -- since May 1984 they had Rites as a medium, run by people who thought TBP had gone soft and slick -- branded the lot of us "sexual libertarians."

Looking back, I think there was another lesson here about community. The voices we at TBP -- now ourselves holding institutional power -- were forced to hear were voices organized. Self-organized.

In the February 1980 issue of The Body Politic, a 1/8th-page ad appeared at the bottom of page 12:

Asian and Gay/Lesbian? Let's talk about our common interests, histories and problems, and our relation to the Gay/ Lesbian Community and our own ethnic Communities. Join us c/o Richard Fung, Box R999, TBP.

By April 1980, the Gay Asian Discussion Group appeared on the Community Page and by September was featured there, in a small article written by a member of the group, as Gay Asians of Toronto.

In 1983, the strongest voices we heard on issues of race were Asian voices. They were still among the strongest in 1985 -- though joined in a stormy meeting with the collective by more recently organized voices: Zami, a black gay group, and Lesbians of Colour (both profiled by Tim McCaskell in TBP's December 1984 issue). They were at that meeting because the TBP volunteer who had first been troubled by that ad, an Asian man who saw that his concern didn't get much of a rise at the classifieds desk, went out and got help.

We didn't respond (however messily) to their concerns because we were nice. We responded because, now, they too had some power. We hadn't given it to them. They had used The Body Politic, as one medium among many, to get together and take it for themselves.

Next: A variety of means and media: The rise of Xtra; the fall of The Body Politic