SmoR 31 2161 book notes
Gay history with a new moral writers and film directors). The author does not "follow" history, he dresses it up and makes it ridiculous for his own ends. In this way his "false revelation" that gays reacted with denial to the AIDS epidemic in the mid1980s becomes for Martel the shining example of the gay "communitarian deviation" ", his book's central argument. Above the movement
In whose name does Martel speak? From what vantage point today does he pass judgement on others actions, thoughts and behaviour? What is the moral of his story? What are his historical and sociological methods? People blame Martel not so much for the position he takes but for his dishonesty in imposing his position on the facts, without ever making clear to the reader which is which.
The way he uses numerous quotations thoughout the book - a very French intellectual practice - often adds nothing to his argument and in many cases is even suspect. For example, Martel finds the history of the Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front (FHAR) particularly difficult. Born in action - from an Act Up-style zap against a TV broadcast called "Homosexuality: This Painful Problem" 3 — FHAR's achievement was to turn homosexuality and sexuality into political issues, issues of liberation. Martel minimises this political dimension. He shows the group's "stars" fighting with each other in anarchie battles whose political significance escapes him.
Formulas can be a seductive way of expressing ideas, but his formulas' stupidity makes one sick. "The tenors in FHAR had very different approaches to homosexuality and politics. What contradictions! What peculiarities! What sectarianism! Philippe Guy: a Maoist converted by reading Jean Genet. Francoise d'Eaubonne: libertarian feminism and straight love with gay boys. Helene Hazera: hysteria reined in by hormones. Daniel Guerin: anarchism flirting with Fernand Leger's engineers." (p. 36) In a forum last June in Paris, one former FHAR activist summed up his feelings: "He writes HAR's history as if we were the Socialist Party! Martel has understood exactly nothing."
The other "ordeal" in this book is its painful exposure in chapter 10 of the notorious "gay denial" of the AIDS epidemic, which denounces and castigates the attitude of lesbian/gay organisations. According to Martel, "everything has happened as if, faced with this catastrophe, activists were struck dumb, incapable of articulating ideas. They invent shows to put on: denouncing (the "correlation expressed in the words") 'gay cancer' is one of them." He continues, "But by denouncing 'gay cancer, activists "Rut hy denouncing oav cancer' activists
Frederic Martel's book Le rose et le noir (The Pink and the Black), acclaimed by the French press, has received more mixed reviews from lesbian/ gay and anti-AIDS organisations. They complain that his historical and sociological methods are dubious. Writing the history of the modern French lesbian/gay movement is certainly no easy task. But Martel's goal is less to establish the historical facts (even roughly) than to stigmatise in every possible way the "deviation" that he thinks threatens gay people: "communitarianism"
Martel's work seems seductive. He sets out to write "the history of a double revolution: first gay liberation, then AIDS". That explains his title: "pink" for gay people, "black" for AIDS. We have been waiting for this history for at least fifteen years.
The other purpose the author expresses in his prologue is "to deal with male homosexuality and female homosexuality" and try to analyse the dynamic relationship between NetWorkin Thrashing it out A month-long virtual conference, "Labour and the Internet" brought together hundreds of labour activists from around the world in January, to discuss how they and their unions are using the Internet to build a better labour movement.
The event was moderated by Eric Lee, author of Labour and the Internet: The
New Internationalism. Other seminars on Canada's Solidarity Network (SoliNet) include:
February: The Internet and labour in the third world
March: Technology organising
April: Labour mvmts worldwide
May: Russian labour movement
June: Education in the global economy
To join (free) >> www.solinet.org
Solidarity (USA)
The URL has been shortened. Meanwhile, the main page recorded 321 hits from 255 different locations in the first seven months of 1996. (Is that good or bad?).
http://www.labornet.org/solidarity 34 International Viewpoint the gay and women's movements. Curiously, the relationship between these two movements has been analysed very little in France.? Martel's disappointing treatment of this subject makes us regret all the more that it has not been dealt with more elsewhere. Intellectual fraud
The truth is that Martel's book, despite its 400 pages and tons of notes, does not fulfil these lofty ambitions, any more than it has won over the lesbian/gay movement's past and present activists. As many of them have stressed in numerous debates organised since the book came out, this history of lesbians and gay men in France is an intellectual fraud. It personalises the gay movement's theoretical debates and actions to excess; it fails to analyse, still less understand the social movements of the 1970s; it overestimates some forces and underestimates others (particularly far-left organisations); it fetishises high culture (great g Mexican Labor News The Home Page of the excellent Mexican Labor News and Analysis electronic newsletter now has an index of back issues and an urgent action alert section.
HTTP://www.igc.apc.org/unitedelect/
>> 103144.2651@compuserve.com Sector Critico (Spain) New site of FID, a foundation, close to the left "Critical Sector" in the biggest trade union, CC.OO.
http://www.lander.es/~jdaza Indonesia solidarity The webpage is being updated every Monday during the trials of PRD militants.
http://www.peg.apc.org/~asiet/
Listserv >> asiet@peg.apc.org International Viewpoint Listservs in English, Spanish, German and French. English listserv includes full contents of this magazine, and a selection of articles from our associated publications.
>> 100666.1443@compuserve.com
fall into the identity-politics trap that they claim to be fighting against. They confuse a disease that gay men do in fact get because of "what they do with a disease that gay men would supposedly get because of 'who they are'."(p. 225, author's emphasis)
In this part of his book Martel moralises and denounces. Unfortunately the people he denounces in this public way are not around to respond: they have died, precisely, from AIDS. He blames the way gay men lived, i.e. their sexual consumption patterns (back rooms and bathhouses), for their getting infected.
Martel can boast today of having been one of the only gay leaders to demand (albeit under a pseudonym) the closing of back rooms and bathhouses (as well as a ban on poppers, which he blames for gay men's dangerous behaviour).
Against a backdrop of "scandal" ', Martel paints an unflattering picture of the gay organisations, which he blames both for not realising the full seriousness of the new disease and for having defended themselves against those who used AIDS as a pretext for moralism and repression. In this discussion, contrary to any sound method and as "proof" of gay "denial", ', Martel contrasts editorials from the gay magazine Gai Pied — evidence in his eyes of gay groups irresponsibility -with articles from the mainstream press, mainly Le Monde and Libération. This is not a serious approach. It cannot do justice to the movement's attitude, particularly to the gay men who have been struggling against AIDS. Better to stay in the closet?
This sums up the main thesis of Martel's book. He defines "identity politics" as a bearer of danger, blindness and disaster. According to him, the most serious danger threatening lesbians and gay men is not the society that denies their right to exist, have equal rights and freely express their sexuality — he also forgets about the social and cultural construction of "homosexuality" - but the "temptation" of identity politics, symbolised by a supposed "culture of difference"
According to him. any sexual politics angerous because it threatens soci: cohesion and the sacrosanct "French-style" principle of integration, which he counterpoises to the dreaded US model. He deliberately amalgamates "minority culture" — which admittedly he can't understand with-
THE DISNEY COMPANY MAKES A LOT OF CHILDREN'S CLOTHES IN THE DESPERATELY POOR COUNTRY OF HAITI!
reviews out some understanding of popular culture! — with a "culture of difference" False conclusions
This ideological bias is reinforced in the book's last part, which tackles the resurgence of the lesbian/gay movement since 1988 and the growing success of Lesbian/Gay Pride demonstrations.* Martel rapidly dismisses this success, which gets in the way of his argument. In the end he laments the fact that the AIDS epidemic has bound the community together "and thus become a source of identity production". He continues, "Gay differentialism is getting a fresh response, which means a break with the 1980s.... Rushing off down the road of communitarianism, a whole movement is taking shape today with formation of a 'community' as its goal."(p. 391)
In his conclusion, his one-sided vision of the lesbian/gay movement leads him to overestimate the tendencies that he sees at work: "This is why it's too early to say whether this new communitarian impulse ... has already peaked, whether this movement is condemned from now on to repeat itself and play out an endless more-gay-than-thou, or whether on the contrary it prefigures a French gay movement in formation." If the latter is true, he says, then Gay Pride "reflects a social shift and demands a reconsideration of the French model of minority integration". (p. 397) Let us hope so: this would mean that the lesbian/gay movement had taken on a truly radical dimension. So far this is far from being the case. Reviewed by Sophie Massouri Review translated from Cahiers du feminisme no. 78, autumn 1996 1. Martel cites in his bibliography Jacques Girard's Le mouvement homosexual en France 1945-1980 ("The Gay Movement in France, 1945-80) without giving it due credit. 2. Francoise Picq's book on the women's movement (1993) deals with this relationship too briefly in ch. 8. 3. The programme was broadcast live on 10 March 1971, with invited guests from the medical establishment, church and judicial system. The issue being discussed was whether homosexuality is a crime or a sickness. The gay activists in the audience got up in the middle of the broadcast shouting slogans, including the famous chant "Down with the hetero-cops!" 4. The last lesbian/gay march in Paris in June 1996 brought together more than 100,000 people. Frederic Martel, Le Rose et le Noir: Les Homosexuels en France depuis 1968 (*The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in
A different Europe? Alternative conference, • Preparations for the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) are leading to the dismantling of public services and social security and rising unemployment in almost every EU member state. • the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) has begun: the fifteen member states are negotiating to revise the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty that has propelled the European Union into its current credibility crisis. According to plan, these negotiations are supposed to end with the signing of a new treaty by the heads of government during their June 1997 Amsterdam summit. • Together the EMU and IGC will largely determine the character of the European Union and thus the daily lives of Europe's citizens. But discussion of these developments is going on mainly among politicians. • Our Europe must be a Europe that carries out a strong social and environmental policy, creates jobs, eliminates the democratic deficit, offers equal opportunities to women and men, safeguards the rule of law, is hospitable to refugees, is open to the East and in solidarity with the South, disarms in order to contribute to peace, and promotes sustainable development both inside and outside Europe.
Parallel to the June 1997 Amsterdam Summit, there will be an alternative conference, demonstrations and other activities. We invite all progressive parties, groups, NGO's and others to take part Get in touch! Committee for a Different Europe, do A SEED Europe, P.O. Box 92066, 1090 AB Amsterdam, Holland. E-mail: ander.europa@aseed.antenna.nl & (+31) 20/66.82.23.6
France since 1968"),
Seuil, 1996.
YOU MUST BE
LIVING IN
FANTASY LAND!
Paris: Editions du
Disney Haiti Justice Campaign Pocahantas pyjamas cost $12 in New York. The Haitian women who make them get 5-7 cents. No wonder workers at Disney subcontractors are trying to organize. We want Disney to stop doing business with subcontractors who refuse their workers' demands for • A wage of at least $5 per day (double current rates) • genuine collective bargaining. • Improved working conditions, such as clean drinking water. • An end to indiscriminate layoffs, and firings for union organizing. We have postcards, fact sheets and other materials which you can adapt for local organizing efforts. Disney/Haiti Justice Campaign, PO. Box 755, Fort Washington Station, New York, NY 10001; (212) 242-0986. E-mail <bloom@soho.ios.com>.
February 1997 #285 35
IF WE HAD THE RIGHT TO UNIONIZE
AND BARGAIN WE COULD IMPROVE
CONDITIONS!