A lot is happening: Kopkind kicks off its summer season with our CineSLAM festival of short LGBTQ+ films, Saturday, June 24, 4 pm, The Latchis Theater, Main Street in Brattleboro, Vt. Click here for tickets and more info. Kopkind/CID Film Camp then commences for a week on July 16, followed by our week-long seminar/retreat for political journalists and organizers, beginning July 29. There’s a war on, against our youth, our bodies, our being, our families, our future. Kopkind has always been part of the fight-back and the liberating vision. Please help us with a donation by clicking the DONATE button above. It will mean so much.
Years ago, 1977 to be precise, Andy Kopkind wrote an article about the rise of what was then called the New Right for New Times magazine. (It appears in his vital collected work, The Thirty Years’ Wars, under the title “Culture Clash.”) He begins on the outskirts of Bensenville, Illinois, talking to a woman who “sells sweet corn by the street side.” Her politicization came via opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion and the perceived lesbian menace—an introduction to a well-coordinated politics of fear which raised the spectre of unisex bathrooms and demise of the family in order to organize a base for a far more pedestrian backlash agenda in the wake of the Sixties movements.
“Sooner or later,” Andy wrote, “pro-family activists find themselves pro: death penalty, Laetrile, nuclear power, local police, Panama Canal, saccharin, FBI, CIA, defense budget, public prayer and real estate growth. More likely than not, they are anti: bussing, welfare, public employee unions, affirmative action, amnesty [for draft resisters], marijuana, communes, gun control, pornography, the 55 mph speed limit, day-care centers, religious ecumenism, sex education, car pools and the Environ-mental Protection Act.”
Some of the references may be whiskered with age (and as Andy noted then, “of course, there are exceptions everywhere”), but the general pattern has been remark-ably sturdy, as witnessed today by thunderous campaigns against the dangers of drag brunches, trans youth, abortion everything, sex ed, ‘saying gay’ and so on, promoted by Ron DeSantis and his confederate governors, legislators, political aspirants, propagandists and grifters. Whether they believe any of it is beside the point; it’s power politics, baby.
The left, such as it is, has been spotty, to say the least, at recognizing that the right’s body politics is the spearpoint for its broader agenda, and thus, that in the struggle for a humane future, nothing is marginal.
In the 1970s, the black radical lesbian Combahee River Collective argued for recognizing people’s complex experience, and the multiple oppressions, based on sex, class, race, gender, geography etc., that are interconnected. In a way, that analysis was an update/elaboration on Dr. King’s “triple evils” of racism, war and economic exploitation. To our detriment, it was the road less traveled.
As filmmaker John Scagliotti, Andy’s life partner and Kopkind’s administrator, wrote in The Nation about the 1980s, “Straight progressives could not see that the contra war was intimately linked to the culture war; that the culture war was what was drawing the foot soldiers whose votes and organizational zeal emboldened the right to do pretty much whatever it wanted anywhere in the world; and so long as straight progressives were afraid to stand up against the real political dynamics that fed this growing monster in America, they would continue to lose.” Forty years later we’re still debating what is central, what is marginal.
Earlier this month, Laura Flanders (Kopkind mentor, 2018 and 2019) did an excellent segment of The Laura Flanders Show with Imara Jones, who founded TransLash Media and has mapped the connections between the anti-abortion movement and the anti-trans movement, underwritten by the same institutional funders and strategists. Some have been at work since the fright organizing against sex ed of the late 1960s morphed into organizing against the ERA and abortion and the gay rights movement; they now undergird the profusion of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation: 549 bills in state legislatures in 2023, 73 passed so far. For the right, the target changes; the objective does not.
This is the culture arm of the billionaires’ economic and political agenda for tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, union-busting, weapons-making, more pelf for themselves and growing immiseration for the rest. Its fruits were on display at a recent conference of right-wing Christian women, resurrecting the ghoulish memory of 1970s anti-ERA icon Phyllis Schlafly, a nuclear war hawk who saw political opportunity in redefining ‘equality’ to mean child and family endangerment. In attendance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to rouse the faithful against the supposed witch-hunt against Donald Trump. That got some applause but nothing like the hair-on-fire enthusiasm that greeted the verbal bashing of trans people, trans visibility. No matter; for Greene, it was all the same, because harnessing emotion is the tactical necessity. From Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign in the late Seventies to the Heritage Foundation’s current “Promise to America’s Children” to QAnon frenzy about “cannibal pedophiles” to gerrymandered right-wing legislative majorities to laws that target doctors and abortion assisters and trans people and basic being—these are all part of the great crimes behind great fortunes.
The headline to this post, “Bodies are the first site of liberation,” is from Imara Jones. Its inverse was offered by a Malaysian gay activist in an interview with Scagliotti for his 2003 film Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World: “Visibilty attracts the bullet.” Action brings reaction. Backlash does not happen without preceding gains. At Kopkind we talk about the long walk to the Freedom to Be. It is one fight.
Laura Flanders and JoAnn Wypijewski will be talking on these themes and more at the 22nd Century Conference in Minneapolis (July 6-9)—their session, titled “Anti-Sex, a Tool of Authoritarianism: Why Media Matters,” on Friday, July 7 at 4 pm.
ALSO: for people in the New York area, at 6:30 pm on Thursday, June 22, The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street in Manhattan, will be showing Kopkind/CID Film Camp alum Amir Amirani’s wonderful documentary We Are Many. The film is a history of the February 2003 protest to prevent the US war in Iraq, a momentous global event, and its legacies.
Kopkind Colony 