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Work to organize LGBT constituencies, by creating networks to link the grassroots organizations that are already doing astonishingly creative and productive work. Existing queer-of-color organizations, and those involved with poverty issues, are models for expansion and networking. Groups in New York City, including Queers for Economic Justice, The Audre Lorde Project, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and FIERCE, are expanding their communications and connections. The more these connections expand nationally and transnationally, through newly established networks, and via the Occupy movement and the World or US Social Forum and other sites, the more effective queer progressive voices can be. We need sites to circulate new ideas and to plan actions. Underwrite research into and analysis of the needs and dreams of the LGBT/queer population, not only within the United States but also across borders. LGBT movement leaders and organizations have too often collaborated in some of the mistakes of the nonprofit world in generalemphasizing the practical skills needed to forward an already set agenda, while deploying an anti-intellectual discourse, denigrating the analytic and imaginative labor required to create and transform one. Right now, we need all of our sharp minds in full gear analyzing abstract concepts and vocabularies as they come at us, as well as our practical strategic and tactical sense. We need as much knowledge as we can collect, and we need to understand everything thats being said and done in our name. Some data on the LGB population of California, collected and analyzed by Gary J. Gates and Christopher Ramos of the Williams Institute at UCLA (2008), is highly instructive.[1] The researchers creatively combined results from the 2005/2006 American Community Survey compiled by the US Census Bureau with data from the 2003 and 2005 California Health Survey to create a very useful and illuminating picture of the LGB demographic in California (they had no existing data on the transgender or intersex population). Though the data is interpreted to support the campaign for marriage equality, the numbers actually show that the majority of LGB individuals in California are not coupled, and that white and highly educated gay men and lesbians are the most likely to be partnered. If we take their data at face value, and derive a set of truly democratic policy priorities from them, we would come up with a very different vision for LGB and transgender, intersex, and other queer actionchild care, health care, progressive immigration reform, more egalitarian and democratic employment practices, affordable housing, and social support provisions, for instance, would come out ranked highly. Creating and proposing forms of relationship and household recognition designed for diverse living arrangements (including nonconjugal households) might replace marriage only as a policy priority. Thinking of alternatives to neoliberal capitalist economic organization might even come up quite clearly on our to-do list. Continue to generate and press forward with a friendly critique of the agenda of the mainstream LGBT organizations. The emphasis on the 3Msinclusion in the major neoliberal institutions of marriage, the military, and the marketreflects the priorities of a neoliberal era. During the 1990s, this agenda developed in direct relation to the rhetorical requirements of recognition in an economically conservative era. After neoliberalism, we need to emphasize transforming these institutions in ways that meet the needs of more of us, rather than simply plead or settle for inclusion in the status quo.
1. The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Gary J. Gates and Christopher Ramos, Census Snapshots: California Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Population, October 2008 (PDF). Accessed November 13, 2011. [Return to text]
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/after-neoliberalism-from-crisis-to-organizing-forqueer-economic-justice/