Submissive Bottoms Have No Place In Gay Politics
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28 July 2009 | 9 Comments
Or I guess I should say being a submissive bottom to our enemies has no place in the gay political and legal agenda. Let me explain…
A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post saying I thought the major gay organizations were dead wrong for not fighting aggressively. Their argument was that they didn’t want negative legal precidents that could take decades to overturn. Basically groups like Lambda Legal, NCLR, The Human Rights Campaign, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Glaad think we shouldn’t fight fights unless we know we can win the fight. IMHO that line of reasoning is the political equivalent of being a submissive bottom to a rapist. While I’m all for actually being a submissive bottom to a rapist if that you’re thing – it has no place in gay politics. When your enemy is raping you, you get up, get him against a wall and beat him to a pulp.
Luckily there are powerful, upstanding straight people who don’t understand the reasoning behind our illustrious gay leadership’s argument. I mean think about it, who’s made the biggest difference lately? There was Gavin Newsom, the straight mayor of San Francisco who fought for gay marriage. There’s Jerry Brown, the straight Attorney General of California who refuses to have his office fight for bigotry. There’s David Patterson, the straight Governor of New York who is doing everything in his power to get gay marriage passed in New York. And now there’s Ted Olson and David Boies, the two opposing (straight) attorneys from the Bush v. Gore case, who are fighting Prop 8 despite all the major gay organizations asking them not to (and then reluctantly changing their mind after they realized it was going to happen whether they wanted it to or not). And last but not least is straight (?) Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley who is suing the federal government demanding the federal government treat married gay people from her state the same as married straight people.
Why is the gay rights movement being lead by straight people? Are all of our gay leaders submissive bottoms? All I can say is thank god for good straight people!
I’m not alone in my disgust for our gay leaders. David Mixner, who was in the Clinton administration, has been criticizing our leadership on his blog. In his latest post he talks about how the gay leadership opposed fighting Anita Bryant in 1978 with much the same reasoning they’re using today. When he, Harvey Milk, and many others refused to follow the gay leaders of the day and then won, the gay leaders who had opposed them were quite eager to take credit for a victory they had actually tried to torpedo. Mixner’s pushing the idea that we’ve got gay apartheid going on – and it’s gaining some traction and making it harder for the sub bottoms to argue their case.
We, each in our own way, need to stand up and fight for our rights. Do not roll over and be a submissive bottom when it comes to whether you’re treated with dignity, equality and respect. And don’t put up with other gay people who are being political and legal submissive bottoms. Stand up, be the dom top, and put them in their place and tell them what to do and when to do it. If you give money to their organizations stop and explain why. These sub bottoms are Uncle Toms and they have no place running our major civil rights and legal organizations.
Ahhh – But that gets right to the basic, solid reason why we HAVE NO HARVEY MILKS these days. We’re not allowed to.
It’s our diversity that is holding us back. In the old days, charismatic, powerful leaders would rally the troops, give passionate speeches and build unstoppable momentum. We’ve got plenty of those kinds of leaders among us, but they are driven away before they can reach the heights. Why?
Because the vast majority of them are dominant, white males. They will NEVER be allowed to lead again. They will be sniped at from behind the tall weeds, and undercut behind their backs. Nasty, untrue gossip will rise, and rise again, and keep rising until that nasty Top is driven away, heartbroken and dismayed.
Once so many of the gay male population died, women moved into the leadership gap. Not a problem. I applaud that. Our Diversity is Our Strength. However, they developed a consensus that women and people of color get extra votes, and white males get zero. NOTHING new was going to happen unless a women’s committee got to pee all over e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a women’s discussion group attempt to make solid plans for the future. Huge amounts of energy goes in, and NOTHING comes out. “But wait! I didn’t share enough of my feelings!” Bleah. To anybody with an ounce of assertiveness, it’s like having your head shoved into a bucket of warm spit. Months go by, and nobody can get consensus, so any good ideas get lost.
Leadership requires Executive Decisions, based on solid knowledge, courage and a strong sense of self. Dominant Leather Daddies have lots of that. How do I know?
Because I lived that nightmare for twelve years.
I’m not going to be too detailed, because I don’t want to get identified and pecked to death AGAIN. Suffice it to say that a large amount of the concepts, new traditions and fun that are happening right now worldwide originated from my imagination and idealism, rippling outward from my backwater town. I have a talent for creating Big Ideas Whose Time Has Come. I was a fountain of new excitement, and I erupted onto the leadership scene with a huge splash. I was a big, big name on the worldwide scene within three months. I won every titleholder competition by a wide margin (until I was blocked from any more of them). I traveled to many cities, giving speeches (to packed rooms everywhere) that became the new paradigm. I was bringing our community into the Post-Holocaust phase, and very successfully. I hosted at least two or three Class A events every week, month after month, year after year.
So, what happened?
Any successes that I came up with were immediately and aggressively resisted by the women and men of color. They did everything could to shut me down, get me fired, destroy my good name, get me punished and driven away. At the ninth Tribunal to Deal with That Nasty Top, I asked the crowd around me “So… What is the single worst thing that I have ever done?” They hemmed and hawed and looked everywhere but eye to eye with me. I said “I’m not asking for two or three things… Just one. What is it?”
Finally, a tiny lesbian said “Well, you’re awfully big and scary”, and everybody around nodded, and made noises of agreement. My response? “They have therapy for that nowadays.” The crowd growled at me and called me rude. I said “Nobody likes being discriminated against on the basis of physical characteristics that they can’t control. You’re bigoted against me, and I don’t have to sit here for it.” So, I left.
That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. That is the true reason why our community is laying there like roadkill. Real, charismatic, effective leaders are driven away, lost by the side of the road, and ineffective Glory Hogs (without an ounce of the real essence of leadership) get to preen for the cameras. They mistake bossiness for leadership.
I stayed strong for a long time, but I finally wore down. The huge men’s community still adored me, but I couldn’t get any traction any more. Folks were saying (with utter seriousness) that I had broken people’s limbs, that there had been a murder at my house, that I was a sociopath, and that no doesn’t mean no for me. It’s easy to slander dominant, highly-visible Tops – we are easy targets because we’re so scary. People will believe anything without proof.
After I left, everything in my town has dropped back down to the nothing-happening dial-tone buzz of an empty phone line. No more highly-motivated crowds sharing a communal spirit, no more money pumping steadily into our charity events, no more sensational new ideas erupting on the scene and spreading worldwide like wildfire. I’m sure that the situation suits somebody, but it’s a perfect metaphor for how we got to this point.
Take it for whatever it’s worth. I’ve been there, and I know.
RawTop: First, I love your site. Great site for those behind the scenes pig bottoms by night and conservative looking accountant during the day where people would be shocked to know that I had a tattoo.
Second, you are so right on topic with our politics. HRC is a huge one at that and have beef with them being to damn wimpy too much. So wimpy that I even wondered if they were for gay rights or noise control in neighborhoods.
I have been, throughout my life, one of those quiet individuals behind the scense, but whenever something pissed me off, I became very “opinionated,” as people would like to say. But the reality is, that is the only way to fight back now.
With a right wing that have no morals or sense of personal ethics, they use lies, fear, deception to get their agenda by. And they feel pride in doing so by calling themselves Christians who are only trying to save the world. The only way to fight back against these hypocrites is to call them out for who they are and say it loud. The louder and more often you say it, the more and more people will begin to hear it and then believe it.
The right use this tactic in their lying. If you say the lie enough, then it becomes truth. So we need to fight back by showing the shell of a person they are.
I am all for being loud, out there and disruptive if we are to get back what has been taken from all of us because we have been raped. The difference here is that we didn’t realize we were raped. We just thought we had a rough top pound us wrong because our ass was sore. That’s what happens when you put the blindfolds on and don’t know the dominant top who is pounding ya.
Thanks for your site and the comments.
@AnonymousTop
I can’t say that I know you, but you sound awfully big and scary.
@RawTop
Interesting post! I like the title, its a good hook.
“Submissive bottom” = self-loathing gay. Who knew?
Regarding the big organizations coming in and taking over, it still happens today. Particularly at the state level, where state organizations are getting things done and the big orgs sweep into town a few weeks from victory, take over, and then claim credit. It’s why no state organization likes HRC; they piggyback on what successful organizations are doing and steal the credit.
I get your point. I just don’t like the use of top/bottom metaphor because it only stigmatizes the bottoms even more.