 Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
Revised and Expanded'>
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"Startlingly bold and provocative."
—Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States |
"Excellent writing and unabashed left politics combine to make this collection vibrant and energizing. The diversity of voices – young and old, people of color, working class, and, of course, every shade of queer – is impressive. These amazing essays represent an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist perspective in a positive, optimistic, and even hilarious manner."
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie and Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 |
"That's Revolting! reads like a patchwork alternative history of the gay '90s and 2000s: the part queers played in the anti-globalization movement, their responses to racist 'quality-of-life' policing, how they coped with welfare reform and the withering of social services and their valiant efforts to banish tacky corporate sponsorship from gay pride parades."
—In These Times |
"That's Revolting! is a pre-emptive line in the sand, a radical embrace of the political creativity of the 'outsider.' It calls us all, regardless of our specific sexual and gender identities, to resist the pressures to assimilate into an increasingly belligerent and racist normality. Ranging from New York to San Francisco, from prison cells to the prison camp life of occupied Palestine, That's Revolting! does more than map out the nether regions of queer identity politics. The articles and interviews gathered together here are full of the collective wisdom of generations of activists determined to take the social space needed to live their lives. Inspiring, angry, ribald and also soberly self-critical, this book is a great way to dispel the post-election blues and expand your notions of what a better world can be."
—Left Turn |
"Tired of being represented by the Rich White Homosexual Lobby and its corporate and media sponsors? Pick up That's Revolting! and find the bracing world of vivid, provocative, radical queer visionary argument and activism that you need to feel challenged, goaded, energized and alive."
—Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy | |
That's Revolting
Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
Revised and Expanded
Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore
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| Paper | 6" x 9" | 400 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-56-5 | List: $19.95 | 05/1/2008 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: Ten years ago one might not have imagined the largest national gay rights lobbying group (Human Rights Campaign) endorsing a right-wing Republican Senatorial candidate (Al D'Amato in New York), or the San Francisco Pride parade adopting the Budweiser advertising slogan as its offcial theme (2002). As an assimilationist gay mainstream wields increasing power, the focus of gay struggle has become limited to marriage, military service, and adoption. The gay mainstream presents a sanitized, straight-friendly version of gay identity which makes it safe for Richard Chamberlain or Rosie O'Donnell to come out, and still rake in the bucks. By the twisted priorities of this gay mainstream, it's okay to oppose a queer youth shelter becuase it might interfere with property values, or to fight against the inclusion of transgendered people under hate crimes legislation because this might not appeal to straight voters. As the gay mainstream ironically prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value - and calls this progress.
That's Revolting shows us what the new queer resistance looks like. The collection is a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia. That's Revolting uses queer identity and struggle as a starting point from which to reframe, reclaim, and re-shape the world. The collection challenges the commercialized, commodified, and hyper-objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models.
Edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore (aka Mattilda), the creator and driving force behind Gay Shame, the radical queer organization in San Francisco that was primarily responsible for the protests, mobilizations, and guerilla tactics that shut down the city of San Francisco in response to the declaration of war on Iraq, That's Revolting brings the post-identity politics of a new generation of pissed off queers to the light. The collection is both a blueprint and a call to action.
Includes seven new essyas:
A piece about the Gay Liberation Front in the '70s
A piece from the ACT UP Oral History Project
A conversation between former members of the George
Jackson Brigade ('70s radicals)
An essay about rural working class queer youth in Massachusetts
An essay on New Orleans
A piece about the Drop The Debt/STOP AIDS action in New York
About the author: Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is the author of a novel, Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts), and the editor of Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (Haworth 2000) and Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth, forthcoming 2003). Her writing has been widely published, in places as diverse as Best American Erotica, Best American Gay Fiction, Women and Performance, and Slingshot. She is an instigator of Gay Shame: the Virus in the System, the radical queer activist group that celebrates resistance by fighting the monster of assimilation. Mattilda selected and introduced Best Gay Erotica 2006, and is currently working on a new anthology, tentatively titled Realness is Overrated: Rejecting the Requirement to Pass.
Mattilda lives in San Francisco, but regularly tours nationally: in the past, she has appeared in independent bookstores, community centers, performance venues and universities including Yale, Brown, University of Chicago, DePauw, NYU, UCLA, University of Massachusetts, Mills College, Antioch, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, UC Santa Cruz, Georgetown University and others.
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