Community Action Center

Community Action Center is screening at MIX 24 on Sunday, November 20 at 3 PM. 

This screening will probably be sold out because every thinking, feeling woman in NYC who has any interest in lesbian sexuality will be there. Every lesbian in NYC will be there to watch and discuss CAC because exactly how often do we get to see explicit images of dyke sex on a big screen with an audience full of queers? Almost never! 

Year round at MIX NYC we leave no stone unturned in our desire to provide our audience with access to images of women fucking. Images that were not designed to be sold, not designed for straight wankers, and god help us, not designed to educate anyone. Because we know we can do better than all that. We can do better. Every dyke in this city needs to see this film and talk about it with her lovers and exes and BFFs and even with dykes she hasn't met yet. We need more dialogue about sexuality, and we need to have it in public places, not just in our homes and parties. Not just on our blogs and various online feeds. Not just those of us who publicly write about sex online but those of us who privately think about sex all the time. We need to sit together in the dark with other lesbians and watch 69 minutes of porn, and look at pussies and assholes and and dildoes and nipples then stay there and then discuss it together. Stay right the fuck there and talk about it. 

Whether it is to say, "Oh I was turned on by the scene by the railroad tracks," or "Oh this doesnt represent me, I don't see anyone with my body type here" and "Oh, I don't ever want to have sex like in that one scene, but I liked the piercing," and so on and on. Love it or hate it, pornography made by and about lesbians is too important to ignore. Because Jesus Fucking Christ, there is a real dearth of this material. And there is not enough of this dialogue. And you know deep down lesbians always want to talk about the politics of representation while thinking about getting it on. And of course you can look at videos online all day but you will not find anything like this and besides, you will be at home looking at your computer and what is that all about anyway? 

In utopia, a diverse and inclusive community of queers of all genders watch porn together all the time. In the real world, cisgender fags should see this film too. So many dykes I know watch gay porn because we love you and your sex turns us on. And suffice it to say that our watching pornography together is powerful. Every step we take towards better understanding of each other improves us. (That does not mean you can look at, comment upon or touch my boobs.) 

We often want to start our community building conversations in identity and movement aspirations. Maybe grounding our conversation in the pleasures and displeasures, the politics and erotics of looking, can get us started too. How are overlapping identities represented? How does inclusion work in friendship as well as in community as well as in screen time?

Community Action Center self-consciously takes up the challenges of representation that are a huge part of feminist discourse associated with what is commonly referred to as the second wave of feminism. By locating some of the scenes in nature, CAC connects itself to a tradition of cultural feminism around the feminine being rooted in nature and the earth, being all wild and ritualistic and so on. In the 1980s lesbian porn had titles like Erotic in Nature, and even straight mainstream porn with lesbian themes was often on the arty side. The S/M scenes in CAC bring to mind the feminist schism of the 1990s where S/M and pornography were hotly debated and feminism painfully struggled to contain and sustain disagreement, to become large enough to hold contradictions. So many of the same challenges have been hanging around in lesbian pornography since we started the problematic project of controlling our own images and asking whether objectification could be done without dehumanization. CAC often takes these themes over the edge, going just that one step further. With the images like the archetypal witch and her literal broomstick ride, CAC overstates the problem of feminist representation of women's sexuality and reminds us of the lengthy history of this debate. Is there a way out of the conundrum of being the object of desire and the desire to be more than an object? The feminist project of liberation is alive and well here, as CAC surfaces this puzzle with equal parts earnestness and irony. 

There is a tone of serious parody that I personally enjoyed a lot about the film. The pizza boy from the straight porn world makes a guest appearance. So does a busty woman washing a car, in a kind of classic tacky erotica tribute that goes on long enough to make you think repeatedly about what exactly you are seeing here. What is the meaning of invoking these images, in a way that is simultaneously humorous and humorless? What about pubic hair that is long enough to braid? A send up on the idea of feminists and lesbians being humorless, here we have the comedic and the dead-serious appearing simultaneously.

So mark your calendar for the CAC screening. Right by where you marked for when you are expecting your period, or going to therapy, or your haircut. Brace yourself to see some dyke sex for real. Because if we don't watch this now, how can we be sure work like this will keep getting made? If we don't show up to see images of ourselves, who the fuck will? We are not seeing shit like this on TV or cable or the movies. If our sexuality never leaves the confines of our apartments, does it really make a sound? What are you so busy doing, anyway? Assembling lists of suggestively homoerotic scenes from otherwise straight pop culture? Replaying the scene where Shane fucks Rosanna Arquette with a strap-on? Watching your well-worn VHS tape of Bound? Rifling through old issues of Leg Show?

Public dyke sex is critical not only for our liberation, but also just to have our own sexuality and dialogue about it and to have that documented and real and public and collaborative and important and prioritized and of course critical, and of course political, we are dykes after all, aren't we? So I don't give a fuck if you already saw this on a loop in a gallery, and I don't care if you already saw it at the center or in park slope. I don't care if you loved it and can't wait to see it again or if you jerked off or if it made you uncomfortable or if it offended you or even if you found it pretentious. I'm not asking you to take your pants off though you are welcome to, but just to show the fuck up and watch some women get it on. Just get your ass to this screening. Every dyke in NYC needs to be there because prioritizing our pleasure, our bodies and our sex lives is revolutionary. And at a time when the state and its corporate masters are shutting down our speech and regulating where, when and how our bodies may meet and assemble, it might do us some good to assemble around the body itself and all its potential pleasures.

The Invisible Shield

I have been working in the education sector since 1999. In the past four years I have been laid off from two jobs, first at a for-profit then at a non-profit. At my last full-time job, there was this video of a high school lesson on how diseases spread, focused on HIV. The video was chosen by folks at the top of the organization to be used as an example mediocre lesson to be critiqued. The content of the lesson was inaccurate and full of misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, the kind of scare-tactic misinformation that makes infection seem inevitable and unavoidable. The lesson was also poorly taught, which is why it was chosen. It did not occur to the people who selected it that the video might get a reaction out of anyone with a personal experience of HIV/AIDS, by distracting, angering, insulting or just annoying them. They might not be able see and critique the lesson clearly through all the bullshit.

Two straight white women selected this video, a mid and upper level manager. They must never have really thought about what it is like to be positive, or to have a parent or a lover or a friend with HIV/AIDS. How else could they fail to notice the content? This is how heterosupremacism protects straight people from seeing reality that is not even outside their experience or world, but just right outside their cubicle. We worked in the same office but in different realities. Unknowing participation in the day-to-day hetero-centric power dynamics allows straight people to get by without taking responsibility for their homophobia. Privilege forms a shield of ignorance that deflects responsibility for the harm that others experience through unwittingly homophobic actions. This shield is itself an instrument of homophobia, no less so for being invisible to the people it is protecting. The protection likely makes it easier to consistently plead ignorance than to take responsibility for learning about homophobia.

It made me go a little crazy to watch the reality I live in and know so well not be given a moment’s consideration. Our team managed to block the video from being used by arguing that it would create a disadvantage for anyone whose life had been impacted by HIV/AIDS. A modified version was used instead. Considering the NYC schools and neighborhoods we worked in and served, that adds up to a lot of people. The thing that was so stunning about this experience was the extent to which something so central to my experience was so nonexistent to the people running the organization I worked in. I felt betrayed because I had trusted that forward thinking educators were forward thinking in other areas too. My trust was misplaced.

And all this really illuminates the protection afforded to some straight people by heterosupremacism. It is the delusion of being morally good even in the very moment when they are excluding anyone outside of their privileged circle. They fall back on their good intentions and persist in ignorance. In contrast, straight people who have personal experiences with HIV/AIDS lose their ignorance, in that they literally cannot ignore HIV/AIDS. They come into contact with a form of stigmatization related to sex and the body that more privileged straight people never experience. It would be easier to separate out all the different forms of privilege, to make this simple, but that would do a disservice to the people who were on my team at work, all of whom are straight, some are white, more are black, some single and some married. They don’t spend time with lots of queer people besides me, but they also don’t go around in a stupor thinking no one they know has HIV/AIDS. They live in a world that includes people with AIDS and know it is not neutral content for assessing good and bad instruction. We all work in schools in neighborhoods with disproportionately high impact. So their access to heterosupremacist privilege intersects with race and/or class and/or geography and is consequently limited in this particular context. We were all severely pissed off about the selection of this video and took effective and strategic action. I was so grateful to not be alone in my anger! I had spent over two years on this team, slowly and painstakingly building relationships and trust, sharing myself and learning about each of my colleagues as individuals. So I felt like I really earned the support I received from them and offered to them during this particularly challenging incident.

The woman who selected that video lesson was barely held accountable because, well, she just Didn’t Know! And her boss Didn’t Realize! She expressed embarrassment but not responsibility. When her boss first heard that our team had objections about the video, she immediately offered to talk to me about it, assuming it was the queer person alone who had objected. But every person on my team had a visceral reaction to the video and found the ignorance at the top of the organization inexcusable. Either way, the folks responsible for selecting the video pleaded ignorance and were ashamed. But they didn’t take responsibility for educating themselves. They viewed it as a one-time occurrence, an embarrassing oversight, not as an indicator of a huge blind spot in their human awareness that only they could fill in for themselves through active self-education. Not to mention the fact that we were all professional educators!

Privilege means never having to really imagine or understand the differences and experiences of others. I used to theorize that being conservative was a result of a lack of imagination. I thought it came from not being able to imagine what it is like to be anyone but yourself. I thought conservatives wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs because of being unable to imagine anything better. But systems of oppression protect the privileged from more than just their imaginations. And this kind of conservatism is a default state, with the imagination being actively blocked from a richer understanding of human experience. “I just didn’t know” and “I never realized…” are not only excuses but also the very stuff of privilege itself. Heterosupremacism protects the privileged from the work of having to notice, from having to pay attention, from having to think, from having to know things. It protects them from being uncomfortable and from taking responsibility. And it also precludes them from experiencing empathy and connecting across differences.

Audre Lorde talks about this very phenomenon in her classic The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. The title is often quoted but the context is less often discussed. The short essay was originally a talk given at a feminist conference, where she was invited to be on a panel, the only panel where black and lesbian feminist perspectives were considered. Lorde courageously decided to take up this fact in her talk, and specifically to take on the conference organizers’ privileged response of Not Knowing Who To Ask and Not Realizing They Were Doing Anything Wrong. Instead of taking responsibility, the conference organizers relied on the very person they were excluding. They felt like their lack of knowledge was a neutral fact. But this studied lack of knowledge about difference is no accident; it is how exclusion and dehumanization work to perpetuate themselves. This combination of ignorance and irresponsibility in the face of difference is exactly the “master’s tool” that Lorde is referencing:

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought…

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

What I want is for us to take up some of the hardest problems in front of us. One of the reasons these problems are so hard is because no one wants to take them up! Sincerely taking them up will start to produce a change in us. People who dig into their discomfort and fear will be different from people who keep their blinders on and proceed as usual. It is a process that challenges us to persist through discomfort. Even before the evolution of ideas or opinions, the very act of taking up heterosupremacism will change us. And people don’t exactly fear change, but fear that change will produce loss with nothing tangible to be gained. People fear loss, and they are right, they will lose something. To start they will lose the fantasy of their sexuality being natural and normal and the fantasy of being morally righteous. Facing this loss will take courage.

Straight people who take up heterosupremacism will become other than what they are, because the process will change their self-concept. The hard problem for me is staying with them, sitting with the pain and not going into a rage and subsequently shutting down. The questions that came up for me there remain with me. Can I love straight people well enough to see them through their loss, even when I am feeling rejected as a consequence? Can I encourage them? To support them in accepting that they will no longer have access to self-affirming myths of human nature, or that the mythology might change entirely? I want them to see and be curious about our differences, and be curious about the implications of these differences. And I want us ALL to be more in touch with reality, more connected by understanding, and more comfortable with complexity. I am no longer in that workplace sitting side by side with straight people working through our differences, but the learning and patience I took away from the practice of sitting with heterosupremacism and building alliances was infinitely more valuable than my minimal severance payment.

Parental Archive

Standing.

Far right.