This is not the cheeriest thing I've ever posted here.
In George Orwell's 1984, the mottos on the towering government headquarters that loom over the city of London are
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
...slogans that more or less encapuslate the spin that the Trump administration has put for the past six months on American public discourse.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale seemed, when it was published forty years ago, an impossible theocratic nightmare. That is, until the Christian nationalists came out of the woodwork, a packed Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, natalists started bemoaning falling birthrates, and Moms for Liberty got down to the business of banning books from libraries.
It's sheer fantasy to imagine we've reached rock bottom.
Insidiously, we've often been lured into thinking that the internet is the great leveller that democratizes public discourse, gives everyone a voice, and is essential to any means of resistance. Certainly, it's vastly extended the possibilities of connection for LGBTQ people. When we can't find each other down the street, we've found each other online. This blog, which I started fifteen years ago, is one small case in point. To my amazement, it's been visited nearly 300,000 times.
But what the internet has done for us, ultimately, is a sideshow. We don't control it. To a very real degree it's already controlling us. Increasingly, we imagine our lives as unthinkable, or at least vastly diminished, without access to it. What we've come to think of as a tool for liberation and protest can easily turn out to be a mechanism of surveillance. With the rise of out-of-control AI, we're facing further erosion of critical thinking, and an accelerated landslide of disinformation masquerading as settled truth. In 1984, every home features a surveillance screen that broadcasts Big Brother directly into the living room. Uh, dude, we're more or less there.
Will reactionary forces come after blogs like this? Political advocacy websites? The web presence of community organizations? Online information about Pride festivals and NGOs that serve sexual minorities?
There's no turning back from the transformation of information technology over the last forty years. But it's time to ask: if unconstrained, grass-roots access to the online world ended--and that's hardly unthinkable at this point--how can we continue to find each other? How can we go on creating community? How can we keep each other alive, and safe, and flourishing?
I have no solid answer to propose. But I know it's time to ask the question. How do we build community, how do we connect with each other, how do we preserve and foster queer men's culture, how do we sustain the memory of our past struggles and victories, apart from online access? If we were to lose it, how do we imagine going on?
Because going on we will, and must.
The gay and lesbian movements didn't build themselves online. Amidst the Lavender Scare of the 1950's, the Mattachine Society met in small, independent local cells modelled on the organizational tactics of the Communist Party, of which founder Harry Hay had formerly been a member. Early lesbian 'zines were typed a few carbon copies at a time. Leaflets and phone trees spread word of gatherings and protests. Nobody at Stonewall was texting from a cell phone.
I'm not suggesting that we can simply return to those dogged, against-all-odds analog tactics from sixty or seventy years ago. But we can witness in them the resilience and resourcefulness that we manifested at another time when the arc of history showed no immediate sign of bending towards justice. We can find inspiration for the courage and determination that we may have to muster once again in a neofascist America.
