On Mardi Gras

If you're reading this, it's almost certain that you're aware I got mad online last night. Considering the response I've gotten from friends and family has ranged from supportive to concerned to hostile I've tried to expand and clarify my thoughts here.

In the twentieth century, a miracle happened. Revolution was brewing. Communism took country after country, the capitalist powers responded with social democracy. The middle class was the biggest it had ever been, the rich feared the poor.

In this context, the gay rights movement came about. Inspired by the Stonewall riots, a bunch of absolute legends took to the streets in a protest-cum-party which lead to police beatings, arrests, and public shaming. This instituted the annual tradition of Mardi Gras.

Essentially, of course, Mardi Gras is a pride parade. The significance of pride here is that queer culture is an underground culture, shamed into darkness for its deleterious effects on the family unit and gender roles. This cannot be overstated: being queer is hard. To be queer is to have a part of yourself utterly contingent on the enthusiastic approval of others- I am lucky I am not more queer and less materially privileged. But it's always possible to be queer, anywhere: people learn how to communicate queerness in hidden ways, to create secret communities. Pride is the direct inversion of shame: it follows pride should have at least two essential characteristics: visibility and accessibility.

We are certainly granted queer visibility by the Mardi Gras of the 21^st century: there is a lot of glitter, a decent amount of skin, dancing, disco music. But the accessibility of Mardi Gras is significantly managed by powerful interests. There remains among the floats themselves clearly a degree of access by left-wing causes, which is excellent, and these floats are of great value. But even in this case, our relation to the floats is for many, unfortunately possibly most, merely the consumption of a spectacle, that is to say, purely visual, rather than a moment of political action. Particularly the fact that the left wing floats are realistically speaking insufficiently contextualised for most viewers, who being the neoliberal subjects they are are unlikely to seek out the information for themselves.

Visibility, reconstituted as representation, PR, optics, lies, is something contemporary capitalist liberalism is perfectly happy to concede to queers in the middle class of the Global North (while internationally still operating as a queerphobic system, implementing reactionary regimes happy to shaft queer people all over the world.) But firstly don't get comfortable- if it were in the interests of the ruling class, the relative acceptance queers have now in the west would be entirely wound back. And secondly, it's manifestly obvious to me that representation without access is totally unacceptable. Put briefly it makes no difference how diverse the elite is if it's still repugnantly destructive.

Writing this now it seems obvious, but the movement of bodies last night was incredibly managed and geared above all towards consumption. I walked around the city and I saw the animated corpse of a liberatory movement. Of course it is genuinely ridiculous that I expected anything else. To think in the logic of neoliberalism, the error was my own mis-calibrated expectations of what Mardi Gras in 2017 is, in other words, the error was my hope.

But even with more moderate expectations the situation is pretty dire. Sydney is a bad place to go out at the best of times. A natural consequence of this combined with the systematic logic of guaranteeing visibility while deprioritising access is that unless you plan ahead, prepare, know how to go about it, know the right parties, the right attitudes to hold, the shadows, it's actually surprisingly hard to have a gay time at Mardi Gras. (In a better world, it would be hard to have a straight time at Mardi Gras. Isn't that the whole point?) I certainly failed. That is to say: On the night of Mardi Gras itself, when it comes to access, queer people have been pushed back underground. Where we belong.