it’s also worth noting that the last round of white queers targeting quinn around issues of public space and policing (the Radical Homosexual Agenda’s campaign of a little while ago) did so in ways that tried (sometimes more successfully than others) to connect issues affecting all queers who like to congregate and/or speak politically in public to those specifically affecting queer & trans folks of color and poor & working class folks… QJL was formed in part as a ‘legitimate’ alternative/competitor to RHA, and never joined that effort.

your piece – as well as your take on the sam adams affair – also reminded me of what i’ve read about the Boston/Boise campaign of the late 1970s, which was a remarkably broad-based campaign against an anti-gay witch-hunt that involved a massive entrapment campaign (at the boston public library’s main branch) and amazingly overblown charges of sexual exploitation of children. the campaign was firmly grounded on a refusal to demonize either sex work or teenagers’ (consensual) sexual activity, and won. it’s been written out of the usual histories of queer liberation by exactly the impulses on display in the QJL’s current activity. for reference: a boston/boise committee flier; an article on the whole affair.

This reminds me so much of that brilliant episode of “Our Voices with Bev Smith” on feminism. Similarly, in the same breath, gay white men seem to call for solidarity only when it bolsters their white privilege – not to really undertake the issue of false arrests that target all gay men.

Yes, it’s ridiculous to see these men falsely arrested for prostitution – but just like Black women who couldn’t take time out to burn their bras because they were busy just trying to survive, men of color have a whole array of issues we contend with that are either unrecognized or ignored by our gay white ‘brothers’ – some of the very same ones who insist that “Gay Is The New Black” – and we’re supposed to hop on the subway to the Village and show up at Sheridan Square in the cold?