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Community cohesion has taken some heavy blows. Peter Cross wonders if it’s beyond repair.
Well this is going to offend; at least I certainly hope it will. I want to hear arms being crossed and every dudgeon being set to high.
Okay, what I mean is, our community needs another challenge, focus, raison d’être. Something that will bring us back together, a common goal or purpose.
In the ’50s and early ’60s we had the one common purpose of “keeping our closet safe”. We formed groups of like-minded men and women, met in secret places and kept our secrets safe. Everything was word of mouth as clubs began to open and then flourish.
In the late ’60s and ’70s, we found a new voice. Out of the anti-war, counter-culture protest movement and moratoriums we decided that we had something to say and we had a right to be heard. The more radical amongst us learned how to network, form cells, alliances, collectives and societies.
Slowly out of those disparate groupings, we put together a cohesive force that burst onto the streets of Sydney and marched. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! It was wonderful and exciting. It was the start of our brave new pink world. But somewhere along that road to full liberation we settled. Not everyone, but let’s be honest, most of us, settled for ‘our once-a-year day’. Mardi Gras. Until finally even that day is now becoming an irrelevancy. We settled for an existence rather than a life.
Then along came that big disease with the little name and suddenly we were focused again, united against a common enemy. All of that energy got us back out of the bars and onto the streets. This time we marched under a rainbow banner and demanded that “attention must be paid”. We were dying, slowly, painfully and in alarmingly increasing numbers. Not the pretty death we had hoped for after watching Now Voyager. Who was going to look after us if we didn’t start looking after each other?
As the pages of gay papers began to fill with the death notices of young men in their twenties and thirties, we decided that silence really did equal death and it was time to Act Up. Each victory was hard-fought and sometimes the battles took unexpected tolls on those fighting. Despair overwhelmed some and they found it impossible to go on.
So we formed more groups, groups of caring, unpaid volunteers like ANKALI and CSN to support not just the sick but the carers as well. Then new drugs began to appear, then combinations, then a 10-year life expectancy became 15, then 20, then … what was once a death sentence had become a manageable chronic illness.
So we gave up; not everyone, but most. The death notices were replaced with real estate adverts. The quilt was wrapped up and put away and now only occasionally bought out as a relic, an example of how things were. HIV/AIDS became the disease of ‘that generation’. Once a year the names of our martyrs are read to ever-decreasing numbers of people.
We lost our focus. Our bright but brief rainbow community dissolved into fractious internecine fighting. Our crusade became a vehicle for people to hitch their wagons to in order to promote their own careers and agendas. God save us all from pragmatists.
We are settling. And what is it that we are settling for? A life of self-congratulatory self-gratification, of selfishness rather than selflessness. We are still at war but now it’s with each other. The discriminated have become the discriminating. The one thing that the Festival of Light could never do we have done to ourselves.
We’ve gone from fabulous to fatuous. We’ve become a theme park for ‘out of towners’ to come to each weekend or on that one night in March, Mardi Gras, and point and stare and snigger at the ‘gays’. We’re becoming an irrelevancy, a footnote in the last part of a millennium gone by; being sucked slowly and inexorably into the mundane. We live small lives and because of that we are becoming smaller people, focused totally on ourselves.
So yes, we need another plague because maybe then we will come together truly as one community and stand up for something more important than our right to drink, drug and rut ourselves into oblivion, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The need is out there; it’s the willingness that’s lacking. All it will take to get us back on track is the desire to do something for someone else without once thinking “what’s in it for me?”. Will we do it?
Maybe violence is the new plague. Maybe the Reclaim the Street Vigil is the start of the new community.
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