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Obama: The Advocate Interview

BunnyBlinks — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:28:00 +0000

If the internet is a race, I should’ve posted this a few days ago. Maybe that only matters if you’re blogging for money. I’m not, which is why I didn’t post this a few days ago when, well, I was working for money.

But yeah, there was this interview. I realize most of you weren’t sitting around like I was, waiting for this interview to be published. I certainly wasn’t alone in my anticipation, though. The Advocate‘s opening question asked Obama to address what had become a growing criticism of his making us wait so long for an interview with what many consider to be the flagship news magazine of the LGBT press.

The Advocate: Let’s start with what’s hot — why the silence on gay issues? You’ve done only one other interview with the LGBT press. I know people wish they were hearing more from you.

Senator Obama: I don’t think it’s fair to say “silence” on gay issues. The gay press may feel like I’m not giving them enough love. But basically, all press feels that way at all times. Obviously, when you’ve got a limited amount of time, you’ve got so many outlets. We tend not to do a whole bunch of specialized press. We try to do general press for a general readership.

But I haven’t been silent on gay issues. What’s happened is, I speak oftentimes to gay issues to a public general audience. When I spoke at Ebenezer Church for King Day, I talked about the need to get over the homophobia in the African-American community; when I deliver my stump speeches routinely I talk about the way that antigay sentiment is used to divide the country and distract us from issues that we need to be working on, and I include gay constituencies as people that should be treated with full honor and respect as part of the American family.

So I actually have been much more vocal on gay issues to general audiences than any other presidential candidate probably in history. What I probably haven’t done as much as the press would like is to put out as many specialized interviews. But that has more to do with our focus on general press than it does on… I promise you, the African-American press says the same thing.

I can’t help but think of my previous post on tags and labels, as well as this Slog post from Christopher Frizzelle. How many different magazines would he have to grant interviews to for everyone to feel equal? I understand there’s a desire in the LGBT community for a fair-minded president, but guess what: there are other communities who share the same desire. Isn’t Obama doing all of us a service when he directs his comments on LGBT issues (whatever those might be) to a Baptist Church, or to national audiences at a Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire and the 2004 DNC, rather than limiting himself to Hillary-style preaching to the choir while hoping no one else hears about it?

The three-page interview ends on the same theme. Has this guy been reading my mail, or what? It’s weird, really, and certainly unexpected to have a presidential candidate reaching out to me this way, as a member of that slowly but steadily growing constituency group comprised of people who will no longer think a certain way simply because of who we are (nor decide who we “are” based on somebody else’s checklist).

Do you have any regrets about the South Carolina tour? People there are still sort of mystified that you gave Donnie McClurkin the chance to get up onstage and do this, and he did go on sort of an antigay rant there.

I tell you what — my campaign is premised on trying to reach as many constituencies as possible and to go into as many places as possible, and sometimes that creates discomfort or turbulence. This goes back to your first question. If you’re segmenting your base into neat categories and constituency groups and you never try to bring them together and you just speak to them individually — so I keep the African-Americans neatly over here and the church folks neatly over there and the LGBT community neatly over there — then these kinds of issues don’t arise.

The flip side of it is, you never create the opportunity for people to have a conversation and to lift some of these issues up and to talk about them and to struggle with them, and our campaign is built around the idea that we should all be talking. And that creates some discomfort because people discover, gosh, within the Democratic Party or within Barack Obama’s campaign or within whatever sets of constituencies there are going to be some different points of view that might even be offensive to some folks. That’s not unique to this issue. I mean, ironically, my biggest … the biggest political news surrounding me over the last three weeks has been Reverend Wright, who offended a whole huge constituency with some of his statements but has been very good on gay and lesbian issues. I mean he’s one of the leaders in the African-American community of embracing, speaking out against homophobia, and talking about the importance of AIDS.

And so nobody is going to be perfectly aligned with my views. So what I hope is that people take me for who I am, for what I’ve said, and for what I’ve displayed in terms of my commitment to these issues, but understanding that there’s going to be a range of constituencies that I’m reaching out to and working on issues that we have in common, even though I may differ with them on other issues. And that’s true, also, by the way … well, I think that’s going to be true so long as I’m reaching out beyond the traditional Democratic base.

Remember (he seems to say), there are other people in this country, and they don’t always agree with you. Why don’t you invite each other over for a conversation instead of yelling unintelligibly from your sound-proof boxes? It might not be as bad as you think. Moreover, you might quickly learn that your neatly compartmentalized community isn’t as heterogeneous as you once thought.

It sure doesn’t hurt that he stays calm when talking about the attacks levied at him. I’ll admit to usually arguing this point a little less eloquently in debates with my more stubbornly issue-based-voter friends, perhaps a bit like Claire on “Six Feet Under” when she calmly explained to her brothers in this brief (NSFW) clip, “Newsflash! Other people exist!”

Obama teaches us to speak to each other in a way that makes it no longer necessary to make that first look around the room to see who’s listening. The respect that Obama has learned to show people who disagree with him on an issue has the welcome affect of lowering the temperature in our political debates, which is why Obama draws the support of many reasonable people who don’t agree with him on every issue.

There will undoubtedly be more occasions when we wish he would’ve phrased the truth a little differently. I hope by then we’ll have learned to get his back when he stumbles. If we don’t, we’ll lose yet another election, plain and simple, if not fair and square. Saying different things to different groups is easy, and they’ll all love you for it. But for how long? What happens when word gets out you’re speaking out of both sides of your mouth? Do you brazenly laugh in the faces of the special interests who support you? I choose respect over condescension any day.

Poolboy, Tags, and Labels

BunnyBlinks — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:00:00 +0000

A running (and perhaps somewhat childish) inside joke in my inner circle of Madison friends involves no more than a scripted, indignantly delivered one-liner: “Why do you always have to label me?” Other variations include “Why do you have to label everyone?” or “What’s up with you and your categories?”

It started with “Poolboy,” who earned his nickname in part with his handiness and helpfulness, but mostly, to be sure, on account of his appearance. Poolboy rolls with lots of different folks, including his young, cute, and clever kids, and a large, diverse group of friends and family. Perceptions of Poolboy vary remarkably from person to person and situation to situation, and he’s well aware of this phenomenon. So frequently it’s surreal, he’s asked oddly personal questions by strangers and acquaintances alike.

“Are you gay? But don’t you have kids? and wasn’t there a girlfriend?” he might get asked in the local gay bar.

Then there’s the just-as-frequent line of questioning: “You’re straight? But the purple hair!” someone will ask when they notice his lingering glance at a physically attractive woman I somehow failed to notice. (The hair, I’ve observed, is a conveniently mentionable symbol for any confidently expressed flamboyant mannerisms that usually go unmentioned.)

Generally, acquaintances feel forced to conclude, usually in a whisper, that “he must be bi.” All this unnecessary–and to him, pointless– speculation gets to be a little much for Poolboy. If pressed, he’d probably admit that his resistance to these categories is partially a political response. Mostly, though, the questions just annoy him. “I’m a doer, not a labeler. Can’t I just be ‘Poolboy’?”

Of course, without labels we’d have no language; without categories, education as we know it would be impossible. (We might, however, pay more attention to which sorts of words make for the best labels, describing processes, not things.) Moreover, many of us feel that gay (somewhat more so than lesbian) politics is based in the knowledge that people are born gay, and so “gay” must be a category.

In academic circles, there’s a push to embrace more and more narrowly defined labels as we specialize in ever smaller areas of expertise. I will admit to consciously resisting this trend in my own scholarly and pedagogical endeavors. But there’s no denying that labels–some helpful, many meaningless–are at the heart of “music analysis,” whose apparently jealous sibling discipline, “music theory,” constantly strives to label bigger and better systems.

Academic careers can be built on the coining of a new term or theory, especially once people adopt and/or reproduce it. This might not be a musically sensitive process, but it’s power. After all, academics are capitalists, too; especially, so it sometimes seems, when they claim not to be.

Admittedly, in talking about labels and categories we could be talking about any cultural phenomenon. Think: advertising and political demographics, like ~~“Soccer Moms,” “Nascar Dads,”~~ “Green-collar workers,” and “Obamicans.” How many tags–or should I say labels?–should I affix to this post? and why?

Poolboy, I think, is right to resist. Sure, the rest of us initially teased him, throwing what we first heard as trivial protest back at him. Now, though, questions like “Why do you have to label her a ‘bartender’?” have become a way of poking fun at each other while embracing the absurd. The childlike banter has evolved beyond the “your mom” joke into surprisingly sophisticated real-life sketch comedy.

A lot of power lies with those who frame a debate. We can, however, challenge and teach the debate framers, and refuse to answer with a simple, confirming or denying “yes” or “no.” We’re better off reformulating those questions that serve no purpose other than to divide us.

Poolboy reminds us that we can fight the power by playing around it.

A Visit

BunnyBlinks — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:28:00 +0000

A good friend–and that’s the understatement of the year– is coming to visit next week. The 2+ years we’ve gone without seeing each other is a new record, and one I’m slightly troubled by, if only because it means we’re getting to that age where things move so fast we begin to ignore those “bff” pledges from way back when. Like me, he has one foot in popular culture and one in academia. And each of those two feet has its own one smaller foot in something and another in something else. It was with him that I learned to embrace everything, and to criticize it, too.

The timing of his visit couldn’t be better. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve come to find the weight of infinite open-mindedness unbearable. No, I don’t mean I’m questioning relativism. That was never an issue: being open to everything never meant avoiding making judgments of value. I am, however, reluctantly beginning to accept that most people settle down into a style, a career, a belief, a property, a spouse, a pattern. And they’ll try to box you in, too. Regardless if they succeed, they’ll nonetheless ultimately box you out. Not this friend, though. I can’t wait to reconnect.