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Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics PDF

244 Pages·2018·2.661 MB·English
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Gay, Inc. This page intentionally left blank Gay, Inc. The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics Myrl Beam University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Portions of chapter 4 were published as “At the Limits of ‘By and For’: Space, Struggle, and the Non- Profitization of Queer Youth,” Scholar and Feminist Online 13, no. 2 (Spring 2016). Copyright 2018 by Myrl Beam All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys- tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beam, Myrl, author. Title: Gay, Inc. : the nonprofitization of queer politics / Myrl Beam. Description: Minneapolis : Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018001926 (print) | LCCN 2018020173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781452957760 (e-book) | ISBN 9781517901783 (hardback) | ISBN 9781517901790 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Nonprofit organizations—Middle West. | Gay liberation movement—Middle West. | Neoliberalism—Middle West. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural. | B USINESS & ECONOMICS / Nonprofit Organizations & Charities. Classification: LCC HD2798.M58 (ebook) | LCC HD2798.M58 B43 2018 (print) | DDC 362.89/6457630977—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001926 UMP BmB 2018 Contents Introduction 1 1. Neoliberalism, Nonprofitization, and Social Change 21 2. The Work of Compassion: Institutionalizing Affective 41 Economies of AIDS and Homelessness 3. Community and Its Others: Safety, Space, and Nonprofitization 81 4. Capital and Nonprofitization: At the Limits of “By and For” 117 5. Navigating the Crisis of Neoliberalism: A Stance of 149 Undefeated Despair Conclusion 189 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 207 Index 229 This page intentionally left blank Introduction We, the Left, have been described as being weak, fractured, disorganized. I attribute that to three things: COINTELPRO. 501(c)(3). Capitalism. Susanne Pharr, Plenary Session, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-P rofit Industrial Complex” Conference More insidious than the raw structural constraint exerted by the foundation/state/non- profit nexus is the way in which this new industry grounds an epistemology— literally, a way of knowing social change and resistance praxis— that is difficult to escape or rupture. Dylan Rodriguez, “The Political Logic of the Non-P rofit Industrial Complex” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded In June of 2013, timed to hit right before Gay Pride events, the Ali For- ney Center in New York City—t he largest social service agency for LGBT homeless youth in the country— released a video to promote a fundrais- ing collaboration with the gay- owned design house Nasty Pig. Nasty Pig donated T- shirts designed by gay celebrities like Alan Cumming, Michael Stipe, and Adam Lambert to be auctioned off to benefit the center. In the video promoting this fundraiser, Carl Siciliano, the executive direc- tor of the center, articulates a familiar explanatory narrative for queer youth homelessness— family rejection. According to this narrative, the primary cause for queer youth homelessness is homophobia within, and rejection from, the family. “Homophobia,” he says, “has a way of mak- ing children— teenagers— destitute. They come out and then they are put out.”1 According to Siciliano, the root cause of this queer kind of homeless- ness is homophobia— it literally is making children destitute. Homophobia, on its own, is not making children destitute. Being des- titute is making children destitute. Racialized poverty, not homophobia, is the root cause of homelessness, including queer youth homelessness.2 This 1 2 · IntroduCtIon is certainly not to say that many queer youth who are homeless do not have fraught relationships with their families of origin, experience homopho- bia, and get sent away from the home they knew. That can be the case for some young people, but it is only ever a piece of the story, and importantly, it doesn’t explain homelessness, especially persistent homelessness. When a young person with access to resources gets put out, that doesn’t neces- sarily translate into homelessness, and, when it does, the homelessness is not often long lasting. Instead, for most queer youth experiencing home- lessness, that homelessness is due to entire families and communities liv- ing in poverty, without access to affordable housing, trying to survive in the rubble of the failed social safety net. Public housing, public hospitals, and public benefits have been decimated over the last forty years while the prison system has expanded and a shift toward temporary and tenu- ous labor in the service sector has occurred. Why, if this broader context of racialized poverty is really at the heart of queer youth homelessness, is homophobia so frequently identified as the culprit, especially by organi- zations that should know better, working, as they do, with queer young people experiencing homelessness? The family rejection narrative is im- portant insofar as it is a compelling story for Ali Forney’s prime donor base: middle and upper income white gay and lesbian couples. In order to have that cash value, the narrative obscures the systemic political eco- nomic realities of racialized poverty in the United States, and it constructs queer youth homelessness as exceptional, separate from the figure of the undeserving poor so readily at hand. In other words, like so many organi- zations across the LGBT movement, Ali Forney’s approach to an issue it wants to address is driven by what wealthy donors need to hear in order to motivate them to give money. For two years I was employed in a queer youth nonprofit in Chicago as a case manager, working with young people experiencing homeless- ness and housing instability, most of whom were queer, many of whom were gender- nonconforming, and the large majority of whom were young people of color. For those young people who had experienced family re- jection, that was only ever one factor among many that attributed to their homelessness, and for many it wasn’t a factor at all. The actual factors— Chicago’s crumbling public health and education systems, the destruction of fifty thousand units of public housing, intense residential segregation and racialized policing, exclusion from labor markets, gentrification, and a punitive and policing public benefits system— are much less appealing to IntroduCtIon · 3 wealthy white gay donors, without whom organizations like the Ali Forney Center and The Broadway Youth Center, where I worked, would not exist. This contradiction— between the complex systemic violences that structure reality for young people and the direct service staff who worked with them, and the simplistic and individualized narrative used to sell those services to wealthy donors—i s merely one frustrating contradiction among many that make working in queer nonprofits so maddening. I re- member very clearly during my tenure at the Broadway Youth Center a staff meeting full of shared irritation about the neighborhood gay cham- ber of commerce organization’s attempts to pressure the Chicago Police Department to install a “blue light” surveillance camera at the intersection where our drop- in space was located. This proposed camera would enable increased policing of the young people who accessed the drop-i n, young people who were trying to get a meal, see the medical provider, perhaps meet with their case manager, or just connect with friends. Many had out- standing warrants, typically for the kinds of economic crimes engaged in by young people doing what they need to do in order to survive: loiter- ing, shoplifting, turnstile jumping, writing bad checks, sex work, or petty drug sales. In the face of this potential for increased surveillance there was amazing solidarity among the staff, a shared recognition that increased policing would make homeless queer youth less safe and leave their ability to negotiate hostile systems even more tenuous, and that it would have a differential impact on youth of color. I also remember, though, the shame I felt hours later as I, while staff- ing the drop- in, interrupted a young person rolling her way past the food table, filling her paper plate, chatting with her friends, giving them shit, and told her to put one of the pieces of pizza she grabbed back on the table so that everyone who came that afternoon would have something to eat. Me, a white college educated trans-m asculine person reprimanding an African American trans woman, maybe sixteen, for “taking more than her share”— as if I was not actually the person in that situation who had received more than my fair share. I remember trying to make a joke, to be as kind as one can be while policing the eating choices of someone else, to make it less humiliating and dehumanizing for that young person, but the power dynamic was stark, and there was no room for humor. Me, with my belly full, telling this person to leave drop- in hungry, knowing that those two pieces of pizza were all she would eat that day, perhaps all she’d eaten in days. And she looked at me incredulously, like “are you really doing

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