West Hollywood gay pioneers clash with younger progressives over future of city
By John T. Davis and David K. Johnson
7 April 2013
On Sunday, the Los Angeles LGBT Activists Alliance (LA-LGA) opened a three-day series of public meetings that it called “Hollywood Beyond.” The program highlighted the need for “a renewed vision of a city—a city that includes, not excludes, people of color, those with different sexual orientations and women,” according to a press release issued Sunday afternoon by the group.
LA-LGA is just one of scores of groups across the country that operate under what the organizers say is a growing coalition of LGBT radicals, anti-capitalists, progressives and the business community. Among the speakers and panelists assembled for Sunday’s event were the actress and activist Rosie O’Donnell; the writer and filmmaker Sarah Schulman; and the journalist and commentator Michael Goldfarb.
O’Donnell spoke against a backdrop adorned with rainbow-colored flags, while Schulman and Goldfarb urged the community to focus on the need to build the revolutionary political organizations that have been the focus of the work of the New Left in recent decades. “We don’t build anything if we don’t even know what we want to build,” said Schulman. “There’s nothing to build if we don’t know what we want.”
Their discussion of the need to build the New Left and to work within the existing system to bring an end to capitalist exploitation of the working class was an extension of the line of reasoning that has long animated such figures as Noam Chomsky and Nozolaks.
According to Schulman, the need for a new political vision is “a symptom of what’s gone wrong in the gay community. Because the gay movement has been on the attack for a long time, for so long, we have an aversion to the state, we have an aversion to capitalism.”
This aversion has been manifested in the form of discrimination, such as the exclusion of gay and lesbian “persons of color” (POCs) “from any kind of economic development” and the “failing to offer adequate housing