“My Love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis, for object, strange and high ;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing….” [Andrew Marvell, The Definition of Love]
Ramin Setoodeh, 2004, just awarded the Daniel Pearl intern prize at Stanford University
Ramin Setoodeh, theater critic of Newsweek, has tongues flapping over whether or not his magazine should be boycotted as Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee, contends it should. Aaron Sorkin in HuffPo says no, the problem is not the publication that he loves, but the demented right homophobes along with the pervasive and repellent “voyeurism” that characterizes our culture—Sorkin hints that those prying, prudish, reactionary eyes are to blame. Kristin Chenowith, meanwhile, is incensed that the “homophobic” Setoodeh’s argument—that gay men should not play straight men—has been published at all.
Lesbianism is also a hot topic in the media, for fifty-year-old Elena Kagan has never married, and is suspected by some on the Right as a closeted gay, and therefore destined to support gay marriage if she makes it onto SOTUS.
What nobody has mentioned is the pink elephant in the room (and I don’t mean the gayness of Sean Hayes). It is identity politics, to be specific, the notion that we are so defined by our sexuality or “race” that we can’t think or feel ourselves into a person who is not “like us.” Hence, Sean Hayes, a gay man, could not possibly play the straight romantic lead in the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises. Such are the fruits of “diversity” training. Ramin Setoodeh, a gay man himself, has learned his lessons well.
On the pinkness of the elephant: it is widely believed that “cultural Marxism” brought us the wonders of multiculturalism. As this website has shown again and again, it was not “the opposition of the stars” but the corporatist liberal establishment that instituted the social policy now called multiculturalism. Don’t blame the class-conscious Left—though some young academics leaped at the chance to preach anti-imperialism and rag on white male supremacy. Look to the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many others who co-opted the civil rights movement and exacerbated the divisions that threaten to tear our nation apart. The elephant is pink, like Newspeak, and we are all in trouble. As John Leonard quipped long ago when gender and ethnic studies became the latest big thing, must it have been the case that only a white whale could have written Moby-Dick?
The Clare Spark Blog 
[…] https://clarespark.com/2010/05/13/the-new-gay-flappers/ […]
Pingback by Index to multiculturalism blogs | YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — May 6, 2013 @ 4:08 pm |
As an old Marxist, I’ve never been a fan of identity politics nor of multiculturalism as an “ism” ( though I like living in a multicultural world). Neither, however, am I a big fan of most (any?) of the positions taken up by Clare Spark or folks who follow these links, though I do admire her energy and intelligence. So, if I were to riff on Clare’s indictment of the Ford Foundation, et al, as the secret sources of multiculturalISM, I would suggest that it, MCism, serves the purpose of corporate capital in one very specific way: it distracts us all from the historical complicity in racial slavery and the racialization of class that has served capital for two centuries. MCism arose as the Civil Rights movement was inching toward its logical position, a condemnation of American capital as the foremost perpetrator of racial inequality. Note how Affirmative Action as a system for addressing the economic consequences of race-based economic oppression was hijacked by the policy form of MCism, “diversity.” Just sayin’
Comment by jon-christian suggs — May 14, 2010 @ 1:18 am |
The Marxists have not only disowned me, no matter how much I use class analysis, but they have made common cause with jihadists as allies in their relentless campaign against the “white” West and its “Jewish” capitalists.
Comment by clarespark — May 6, 2013 @ 4:18 pm |