That's a good point about going to the book group anyway, even if I don't make it all the way through the book. Thanks for the reminder; it wouldn't have occurred to me (I'm such a completist by nature...)
That is a really good & complicated question about how classism/elitism plays into queer US dynamics. Probably a dozen people could write books about it and come to different conclusions. Socioeconomic status is a HUGE part of the red state vs. blue state divide here, which is true not just of queer life but for everyone. Although urban poverty is, of course, rampant, it's also true that the country's wealth is concentrated on the coasts and in the cities, and the resentment about that on the part of Middle America is one of the things that Trump & Co used to race- and class-bait their way into office. (Though tbh: the swing contingent that voted him into office were middle-class suburban white women, so. Can't explain that.) And on the part of urban blue-state folks there is a lot of elitism about the "flyover states" (implication: that part of the country is literally only good for flying over on your way to the other coast). I am super guilty of this, which I think makes it good for me personally to read Allen's book.
As for how that plays out in specifically queer spaces... I think, though I'm really just speaking from my own experience, that the queer community here is less class-segregated now than it was at, say, mid-century, when butch/femme was very much a working-class thing, the middle and upper class lesbian scene was more about androgyny, and the two seldom mixed (and indeed, regarded each other with suspicion and contempt). There are still assimilationist versus non-assimilationist queer movements, and there's a perception that anti-assimilationist = working-class and assimilationist = middle & upper class. There's probably a grain of truth there—maybe more than a grain—but I also think in practice it's a lot more complicated. I'm having trouble expressing exactly what I mean... maybe what I'm trying to get at is a split between the activist contingents of both these queer classes, and just the cultural contingents....? For sure there was a section of middle-class queer America that agitated for their rights to live like heteronormative suburban married folks with kids, and then when they gained those rights, stopped showing up for the rest of the queer country. But there are also, from my experience, a LOT of middle-class folks who have been galvanized by the publicity around the trans rights movement and who are now agitating against (for example) bathroom bills when five or ten years ago they wouldn't have hit the streets at all. I think maybe we're in a moment where queer politics are becoming less defined by the fallout from the AIDS epidemic, and the class lines that were drawn in the 90s and 00s are perhaps shifting.
Though I do think there are certain movements, like the sex workers rights movement, that is in general extremely aversive to the mainstream middle-class LGBT culture, just like it's aversive to mainstream middle-class culture in general.
no subject
That is a really good & complicated question about how classism/elitism plays into queer US dynamics. Probably a dozen people could write books about it and come to different conclusions. Socioeconomic status is a HUGE part of the red state vs. blue state divide here, which is true not just of queer life but for everyone. Although urban poverty is, of course, rampant, it's also true that the country's wealth is concentrated on the coasts and in the cities, and the resentment about that on the part of Middle America is one of the things that Trump & Co used to race- and class-bait their way into office. (Though tbh: the swing contingent that voted him into office were middle-class suburban white women, so. Can't explain that.) And on the part of urban blue-state folks there is a lot of elitism about the "flyover states" (implication: that part of the country is literally only good for flying over on your way to the other coast). I am super guilty of this, which I think makes it good for me personally to read Allen's book.
As for how that plays out in specifically queer spaces... I think, though I'm really just speaking from my own experience, that the queer community here is less class-segregated now than it was at, say, mid-century, when butch/femme was very much a working-class thing, the middle and upper class lesbian scene was more about androgyny, and the two seldom mixed (and indeed, regarded each other with suspicion and contempt). There are still assimilationist versus non-assimilationist queer movements, and there's a perception that anti-assimilationist = working-class and assimilationist = middle & upper class. There's probably a grain of truth there—maybe more than a grain—but I also think in practice it's a lot more complicated. I'm having trouble expressing exactly what I mean... maybe what I'm trying to get at is a split between the activist contingents of both these queer classes, and just the cultural contingents....? For sure there was a section of middle-class queer America that agitated for their rights to live like heteronormative suburban married folks with kids, and then when they gained those rights, stopped showing up for the rest of the queer country. But there are also, from my experience, a LOT of middle-class folks who have been galvanized by the publicity around the trans rights movement and who are now agitating against (for example) bathroom bills when five or ten years ago they wouldn't have hit the streets at all. I think maybe we're in a moment where queer politics are becoming less defined by the fallout from the AIDS epidemic, and the class lines that were drawn in the 90s and 00s are perhaps shifting.
Though I do think there are certain movements, like the sex workers rights movement, that is in general extremely aversive to the mainstream middle-class LGBT culture, just like it's aversive to mainstream middle-class culture in general.