The Man on the Fence Post

[Photograph: Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty]

By AJ Reed

I remember it like it was yesterday. I just sat down to work on my computer project for my vocational class when a breaking story came across the television playing in my class: Man Found on Fence Post, Laramie, Wyoming. The story that broke during their class period addressed a man that was on a fence post outside of Laramie, Wyoming—turning towards the television—listening intently to the news report. The adolescent learned that the story was about the man on the fence post that was left through the night. The story went on to say that two other men were with this particular man, who then beat him, put him in the back of their truck, and propped him up like a scarecrow on the fence post where he spent his final hours. When the man's body was found and taken to the hospital, is when they officially declared him dead after several days in the hospital. The adolescent felt an emptiness. They did not know the man on the news. However, they felt a loss of someone who was part of their community. The adolescent for a moment reflected that they could have been that man on the fence post in the news. The man on the fence was Matthew Shepard, and it was that moment that sparked my queer liberation.

As I began my queer liberation, I could that living in Midwest presented challenges. There were no real outlets or spaces for me to go to when I had questions, no mentors to help guide me. The only places where experiences and information were readily available were house parties thrown by gay men or heading into the bigger metro areas. Living in a rural area also meant that we did not have many figures to look up to when it came to conducting actions that needed to be done. When young people wanted to organize and affect change, there wasn’t a blue print already laid out by more experienced activists. So what do any young and idealistic people do? I joined forces with some friends and our first action just days after Matthew Shepard’s murder was participating in the National Day of Silence. With black electrical tape over our mouths, we walked the halls of our school in silent solidarity with queer students who are often not heard and seen by school systems. School staff did not always respond well to this type of protest. Students lost participation points in class or punished with detention. As the National Day of Silence movement took hold, progressive schools found ways to accommodate students who protested through this medium.

After graduating high school, I dug into the LGBTQ Rights movement. I developed an LGBTQ+ student organization, worked on marriage equality campaigns, and served in LGBTQ+ organizations that pushed for policy change. I also worked in social service and organizing in the own community. The quest to further my queer liberation led me to Christopher Street and the infamous Stonewall Inn. Sitting across the street from the historic space, I closed my eyes and listened to what the past and the present were trying to tell me. I heard the laughing and felt the hugs from my brothers and sisters of 1969. I heard the police sirens that broke into the spirit of what was Stonewall and the increasing desperation for equality that was bubbling out of the Inn. I was brought back to present day with police sirens as they quickly approached where I was sitting. In that moment, I wondered how far have we actually come since June 28, 1969 when the LGBTQ+ community had had enough and took to the streets.

We’ve made great strides since Stonewall. Nearly 20 countries, including the US, have legalized same-sex marriage. Organizations like the American Psychology Association and the World Health Organization dropped "homosexuality" as a mental illness in 1974 and declassified transgender as a mental disorder. The US Supreme Court declared that marriage for LGBTQ+ folx is constitutional and ruled that it is unconstitutional to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals in the workplace.

But what about Matthew Shepard? Or the 49 souls that were taken at Pulse Nightclub? Why are our trans and non-binary brothers and sisters being murdered at an alarming rate? Why is suicide the second leading cause of death among young folx who are queer? Why are we losing so many incredible people when we have all these rights?

Because the reality is that while we have laws in place to protect queer folx, we also have social organizations such as organized religion that are using their platforms to atoll their beliefs that loving someone of the same sex or gender is wrong. Our young people are hearing these messages and internalizing the hate toward themselves. The reality is that while the Supreme Court has acknowledged that marriage is something that everyone should have access to and that discrimination across the board is unconstitutional, there are people within the government ranks that are actively trying to dismantle policies and safeguards that are protecting marginalized communities. The reality is that there are businesses that are using religion and holes in the law to allow them to discriminate.

There will be challenges along the way when reaching towards progress, but we must not forget about the groundwork that has already been laid out for us. As Aristotle once said, “If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.” Look at pride parades today. Pride parades started as an uprising at the Stonewall Inn. An act of expression to demand the rights we need to be visible in mainstream society. It was a rallying cry to remind people of why we stood up to oppression in 1969. Today it is nothing more than corporate sponsorship, political opportunism, and allowing law enforcement to tell us how to run our parade. And when marriage equality became federal law, was when the other rights for our community got put on the backburner. As if marriage equality was the big move to be in a post-queer liberation state. Those that are fighting for queer liberation have not stopped since marriage equality, nor when rainbow capitalists took over pride parades. Our fight is more than marriage equality.

Queer liberation is more than just marriage equality. So many activists left the movement when marriage equality became federal law. Make no mistake, queer liberation means that we must demand a living wage, access to affordable and safe housing, employment, racial justice, access to meaningful healthcare, access to human services, opening the border, and abolishing the prison industrial complex. Veteran activist David Mixner reminds us that we are on the brink of losing our history. Pioneers and trailblazers are disappearing before our eyes. We cannot lose our history as the other side wants to erase our journey. Time is running out. Let us keep the spark for our fight for queer liberation.

Pete Buttigieg and the Folly of Identity Politics

[Photo Illustration by Kristen Hazzard/The Daily Beast / Photo Getty]

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

n the campaign trail, Pete Buttigieg can often be heard sharing his coming out story. An evocative speaker, he paints a beautiful picture of his life from when he was in the closet to eventually finding love in his partner, Chasten Buttigieg. Like others in the crowded Democratic primary race, Buttigieg is trying to be a first for this country — the first openly gay President. At other similar events, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, two women running to be the first female President of the United States, share their own stories of hardship they’ve faced as women in politics. While their stories are personal, their political strategies remain the same: to lean in on their respective identity groups to give their campaigns a boost. The strategy isn’t new. After all, it worked wonderfully for Barack Obama in 2008, catapulting him into the White House as the first Black President. Hillary Clinton did the same in 2016. Although she eventually lost to Donald Trump, the story of her loss became deeply personal for large groups of women across the country. Propelled by media narratives, the operative idea here is that, by electing a member of an oppressed group, you’re electing an ally to all oppressed groups who can effectively erase all oppression.

To see the logical fallacy of this argument, one only has to examine the platforms and records of these candidates. Kamala Harris, who dropped out in December 2019, had made a career out of oppressing the very identity group she leaned on. Warren has supported military budgets that have been used to bomb women and children in the Middle East. Klobuchar, similarly, has been a staunch supporter of American military intervention in Libya and Yemen. But the problem with this phenomenon is less about the failings of a handful of politicians, and more about identity politics as an organizational theory, which fails to recognize the vastly different material conditions and, therefore, interests of those who claim to represent them. It is not enough to have the next female, Black, queer, or disabled leader of the biggest capitalist country when capitalism and the state that props it up are at the heart of such oppressions.

The Roots of Identity Politics

The term, “identity politics” dates back to the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Founded in 1974, the CRC was a radical Black feminist organization formed as a response to the underrepresentation of Black women in the overwhelmingly white feminist movement and the overwhelmingly male Civil Rights Movement. The CRC was also an alternative to the National Black Feminist Organization, formed to create dialogue over racism within feminist organizations, arguing that simply identifying racism was politically insufficient as a plan of action. By describing the lived experience of black women as one of “interlocking systems of oppression,” they highlighted that the oppression of Black women couldn’t just be contained within the singular categories of sexism, racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. It was, in reality, a result of the combination of all those identities. The women of the CRC fully recognized that Black liberation wasn’t one that could be achieved under capitalism and recognized the need to reorganize society based on the needs of the most oppressed. In their pamphlet, they say, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

The CRC coined the term “identity politics” to characterize these tensions. In their formulation, they provided an analysis that drew from the lived experiences of Black women. The material lives of black women — who were (and continue to be) disproportionately affected by poverty, violence, and lack of healthcare and, as a result, are overrepresented in the working class and poor — made them particularly distrustful of capitalism. By recognizing that there was no liberation under capitalism for Black people, and much less for Black women, the CRC proposed a program to transform Black women into political agents who could ensure not just their freedoms, but the freedoms for all people.

The Problem with Postmodernism

In the decades that have followed, however, the term “identity politics” has been bastardized and stripped of any class analysis. Now, identity politics reflects a shift away from materialism to postmodernism and represents little more than token representation.

Born out of the “disappointed revolutionary generation of 1968 and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial ‘new middle class,'” postmodern philosophy posits that there is no idea of “truth” and gives primacy to relativism. It emerges from a rejection of oppression and a mistaken interpretation of Marxist determinism (the belief that an economy has to pass through phases before achieving socialism), treating truth and reason as “myths” that are designed to uphold existing hierarchies.

While postmodernism recognizes materialism, it only considers it to be a part of, and secondary to, larger ideas like society and culture. Under capitalism, however, the oppressive character of “culture” is deeply tied to the material need to oppress communities.

Capitalism lives on its ability to maintain a steady stream of cheap, waged labor — one that it sustains through the oppression of class, racial and gender minorities the world over. Whether through the exploitation of Black people through history, or through the exploitation of undocumented immigrant labor now, capitalists have long benefited by dividing the working class to drive down wages and used race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality to foster prejudice and division. In times when workers’ unity and collective action is weak, workers are also forced to compete among themselves for better pay and opportunities that can alleviate their conditions, leading to some workers using these divisions to advance their own interests. 

Today, minority and oppressed groups are discriminated against irrespective of their class reality because capitalist expansion has exacerbated, normalized, and codified this discrimation, making oppression a part of the cultural hegemony. In other words, capitalism relies upon the oppression of marginalized groups. The ruling classes use their influence to manipulate the culture of society to establish an oppressive status quo that is treated as natural and inevitable, and create the necessary conditions for their sustenance. 

Discrimination, therefore, is not just a matter of character; it’s a result of the material interests of the ruling classes. To erase such an analysis is to strip away the real intent of the ruling classes and reduce oppression to only a moral barrier that can be overcome without threatening capitalism itself.  

Such is the case of identity politics in the postmodern era, which becomes dissociated from the material relationships between people and society. Instead, it places importance on individual successes and identity performance. In this new era, as Asad Haider writes in Mistaken Identity, “the framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure.” Success of some members of oppressed groups under capitalism becomes akin to the liberation of all people. The belief is that, by “breaking the glass ceiling” and rising in ranks of capitalism, members of minority groups can use their influence to alleviate the suffering of others like them. What’s missing is how the ability to rise in those ranks and, more importantly, maintaining it requires exploiting members of the same groups they’re supposed to emancipate.

This trick has worked magnificently. While the radicalism in the streets during the 60s was successful in winning key equal rights laws, it died down over the following decades as key leaders of these movements made alliances with the bourgeoisie or were given token leadership positions in the offices of capital. While “equal rights” is law, systemic discrimination and violence remain facts of life for oppressed communities.

The proponents of identity politics promote the idea that simply diversifying the highest offices of imperial powers will alleviate oppression and can successfully challenge and bring down capitalism. As was the case with the first Black president, electing the first gay president or the first female president will bring no respite for the oppressed because, as leaders in capitalism, it is against their material interests to do so.

Dangers of Identity Politics Today

As Nancy Fraser writes, in the decades that followed the CRC, there was an unprecedented growth of progressive neoliberalism — an alliance between the increasing financialization of the economy and the new social movements that stressed on diversity. In this era, Fraser importantly points out, “the progressive-neoliberal program for a just status order did not aim to abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering’ ‘talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top.” 

Take, for example, the election of Barack Obama. Many, including some of the left, rallied around Obama’s 2008 candidacy both because of his rhetoric of “change” and because of the symbolic significance of his campaign. After he was elected, America was labelled “post-racial” because a Black man was finally president. Rooted in identity politics, it was widely believed that Obama, as a Black man, would understand and could then ease the oppression of Black and other minority communities.

Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. Under Obama, the U.S. expanded the drone program — which almost exclusively targets people of color in the Middle East — and deported more immigrants than under any other president up to that point. Anger within the Black community at home grew under the Obama presidency, with the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the face of this public outcry against systemic racism within the state, Obama was relatively inert. He made emotional speeches about Trayvon Martin and held some roundtable discussions in the White House about “criminal justice reform,” but did nothing to attack the carceral state. Young Black men continued to be far, far more likely to be killed by the police, and Obama opposed reparations. This is not (just) because of some grand moral failing on the part of Obama, but because as the President of the United States, he had to oversee the most racist entity in the world: U.S. imperialist capitalism. Without attacking that entity — something he was unwilling to do — there is no way to combat the institutional racism present in the United States.

The contradictions of identity politics can be seen in the U.S. and the world over. In the Democratic primaries, Buttigieg, as the first openly gay candidate, is increasing in popularity among the party’s liberal wing. However, anyone who believes that Buttigieg would commit himself, if he became president, to defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people is deluding themselves. Buttigieg will not combat capitalism — because he is committed to capitalism, as his willingness to get in bed with corporate donors already shows — and without combating capitalism, there is no way to resolve the oppression of LGBTQ+ people, or racism, or sexism, or any other form of specialized oppression.

This is a real danger in viewing oppressed groups as a monolith. By giving crumbs to some members of these groups, capitalism has formulated them into multi-class groups, wherein the material conditions, and therefore the material interests, vary vastly among their ranks. The lives and motivations of Roy Cohn or Peter Thiel or Milo Yiannopoulos, all gay men who helped Donald Trump get where he is, therefore, are very different from that of the vast numbers of trans* youth who experience homelessness.

The systematic corporatization of queer liberation, as has been the case with other liberation movements, refocuses the demands away from liberation towards representation, gay marriage, and other marginal demands. While these demands are not unimportant — and some, such as ensuring gender confirmation medical treatment, are potentially life-saving — they cannot be mistaken for the final goal. When the basic democratic demands of a movement become the total demands of the movement, it is easy for politicians to position themselves as allies in order to gain support. Such a politics allows for candidates like Joe Biden, who has a long history of opposing LGTBQ+ rights, to posture as an ally and go to Stonewall by offering late apologies and support to basic demands. 

Opportunists within oppressed groups have long exploited their identities to gain in the ranks of capitalism. Minority capitalists like Jay-Z exploit the working class — many of whom are Black — to enrich themselves and sell it as “representation.” But we don’t care for another Black or queer or female capitalist who’ll exploit us while they pretend to be our friend. We want the end of the capitalist system altogether.

None of Us are Free until All of Us are Free

There is no single person who can be elected, made a CEO, enriched, or placed in any other form of capitalist “representation” in order to singularly liberate all oppressed peoples. Such a liberation is only possible through the organization of the working class. In multi-class minority groups, the bourgeoisie with their unlimited means will constantly monopolize the conversation to further their material interests. While marches like the Women’s March or candidacies like Buttigieg’s and Warren’s can rally high numbers, they are severely limited in their ability to bring forth any material change because of their programs are in line with the interests of capital and are thus subservient to the ruling classes. On the contrary, a diverse working class coalition representing the most oppressed within its ranks can strike at the heart of all oppression and bring it crashing down. As Marx writes in the Communist Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

Today, capitalism is sustained by a global proletariat. Unlike the lies peddled by the ruling classes that are meant to divide us, the working class isn’t just made of straight white men, but is Black, brown, trans*, queer, disabled, female, and international. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. are tools of the ruling classes to divide the working class and keep it weak. A diverse, organized working class must take up the fights of specialized oppression.

Such alliances are not a pipe dream. In MadyGraf, a factory in Argentina, workers went on strike to protect a trans co-worker who was being denied her rights by management. They put forth clear, uncompromising demands for LGBTQ+ rights, challenged capitalist production, and won. But, fighting against trans prejudice also strengthened the unity of the workforce and prepared the workers for the fight against the mass layoffs that came three years later — one that they won by taking over the factory.

To gain real victories under capitalism, we have to strike similarly at the heart of capital. Take for example the recent Fuck the Police protests in New York City. These protests were organized in response to increased police presence and their targeting of racial minorities in the subway.. Imagine if, in addition to militant activists, there was also an organized group of transit workers who could have gone on strike until the movements’ demands were met. Today, in France and in Chile, activists have joined with the working class to do exactly that and are organizing mass strikes that are challenging capital and winning many of the movements’ demands.

We should not be fighting and settling for crumbs. The fight for the liberation of all oppressed groups is one that is deeply linked to the fight against capitalism. One cannot occur without the other. By fighting for the rights of the most oppressed, the working class can draw deep conclusions not just about their collective power, but also about how capitalism thrives on dividing and isolating them. Such fights act as schools of war for the coming revolution and directly challenge the foundations of capitalism. 

Token representatives like Buttigieg, or Warren, or even Obama are not our allies in the fight for queer liberation, or women’s liberation, or Black liberation. As leaders of the world imperialist project, their goals, irrespective of their intent, are diametrically opposite of the interests of the most oppressed within their communities. We cannot fall into the trap of identity politics and start supporting members of the ruling class just because they are a member of this or that oppressed group. Only a diverse, organized, and militant working class can bring about the world that we want.

Gay Liberation through Socialist Revolution: A Political History of the Lavender and Red Union's Gay Communism (An Interview)

By Marquis M.

The following is an interview with Walt Senterfitt, a former member of the Lavender and Red (which was also briefly known as the Red Flag Union), in his home in Boyle Heights, LA, to see what today's revolutionaries can learn from the unique history of the Lavender and Red Union.

This interview looks at the development, history, politics, and legacy of the Lavender and Red Union, an early gay communist political organization that was based in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1977.

Regardless of the specific politics of the Lavender and Red Union (which should be seen as a product of their time and of their relationship to the rest of the mid-'70s US left), we can gain a lot from studying the experiences they made during their brief life before they decided to merge with the Spartacist League in 1977. One of the points that came up in this interview again and again was the perspective that queer people will not be able to win alone. If we want liberation, then we will need to fight together in the same struggles as all the other oppressed groups that make up the working class with us. We cannot only focus on building organizations that just address our own concerns or our own narrow community (which the Lavender and Red Union called 'sectoralism'). This lesson, and many of the other points discussed in this interview, continue to be of importance for those of us who struggle with pushing back against the liberal, reformist, and class collaborationist tendencies in our movements.

Marquis: You grew up in the south?

Walt : I grew up in the south, mostly in northern Florida in the era of de jure Jim Crow racial segregation. Being in an officially legally segregated society - schools, public facilities, neighborhoods - and my reaction against it, which was based largely on a religious impulse initially, was what initially propelled my political awakening. However, it was kind of stunted because I was a white kid in a fairly backward small Southern town without any allies or anybody much to learn from even. So I would follow things through the news, like the awakening civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s. When I began to try to reach out to young black people on the other side of town, I quickly got squelched rather vigorously by the town fathers coming down on my parents and threatening to fire them from their jobs if they didn't shut up their noisy and traitorous kid. So we worked out a compromise that I would cool it for six months in exchange for leaving home early and going to college in the north. Which I thought would be a decisive act of liberation and freedom because I would get away from a small Southern town.

And go to someplace where everything was enlightened....

Where everything was enlightened, non-racist, and kind! Well of course that also led to my political awakening at the next stage. Oh! It's not just the south! Racism is not simply a southern problem. It just has a different accent up here, and different forms. But my political activity was still within the confines largely of liberalism, but inspired by the Southern black civil rights movement and I was in fact organizing fellow university students from the north to support it, and to travel down south and participate in voter registration, and Freedom Summer, and liberation schools and things like that. And then increasingly also turning to community organizing in poor communities in northern cities. I dropped out of university without finishing. Partly over conflict over feeling impulses towards being gay but not being able to accept that yet, or not having a context, or not knowing anybody else.

You weren't in contact with any gay community?

No. Now remember this period was pre-Stonewall, we're talking early-to-middle '60s. I worked with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and a group called the Northern Student Movement in Philadelphia after I dropped out and then moved to Washington D.C., worked for the National Student Association, which was basically a confederation of student governments. Unbeknownst to me until later it turned out to have been substantially secretly funded by the CIA together with thirty or forty other cultural and educational and artistic organizations in the US as a Cold War tactic because of the US government knowing that it wanted to be able to operate in third world and left movements internationally but wouldn't be able to get any traction if it were doing that in the government's own name.

So the whole story of the Lavender and Red Union goes back to the CIA.

No, but my own history does! So I ended up accidentally coming across this information and helping to expose it, in 1966, 1967. The government was at first going to deny it, but we had enough inside information that could corroborate it. So I got a call in the middle of the night from the controller of the NSA, the person who oversaw the relationship and the funding from the CIA, and he put this guy on the phone who at least said - and this was at three o'clock in the morning - that he was Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and he told me "Young man, you've betrayed your country..."

Congratulations!

"...we have ways to do deal with people, like drafting you and sending you to the front lines of Vietnam." I did stuff like write up the story and put it in a safe deposit box and write stuff telling my parents that if something happens to me.... But fortunately it became a big enough story with national press, and then they started unraveling all these different other organizations.... So I was an embarrassment but it also gave us some protection. Anyway. Not too long after that I left the NSA and moved to - I got married - moved to San Francisco, started an alternative school, was involved in the counterculture. And other ways of, you know, the whole mid-late '60s stuff that we were going to...

So you were kind of generically political. You didn't have a particular direction.

I knew that I was committed to social justice, to building a new society, but I was not primarily political in any organized way. Then in the course of that I also began to realize that I was queer, and that ultimately my marriage was not going to be sustainable in that context, so I came out, but fairly late, in my late 20s. This was two or three years after Stonewall. Stonewall helped me come out 'cause all of a sudden - OK, here are people that I can identify with, at least the radical wing of gay liberation was something that I could identify with. So I got involved in that a little bit late. Particularly since I moved back to Washington which was a bit late, since Washington D.C. has tended to be politically behind other parts of the country. For example, when I moved back to D.C. in '72 and the next year '73, I hooked up with a group of people and we wanted to propose the first gay pride in Washington, and we got shot down violently by the nascent gay community - "Oh no! You'll turn everybody against us! It will set us back for two years!" - just to have an open gay pride, which was already happening in New York, San Francisco, LA. So Washington was a few years later.

Had you been to a gay pride march before then?

No. I left San Francisco and I came out, and had been dealing with it pretty much on a personal level. So when I got to D.C. I was involved at the gay community level in terms of institution building, like helped to start a counseling center that was peer-based and sort of liberatory-based, not psychologically-based, started an alternative to bars for people that didn't drink or didn't like the atmosphere of bars to have social dances and interaction, started a VD clinic which later grew into a health clinic for gay men and ultimately for lesbian women.

That's a lot of things to start. Seems like you were very active.

Yeah, I was active. I was politically involved with what was left of the Gay Activist Alliance, which had already kind of gone rapidly up and down in DC. We fought things like the discriminatory and racist behavior of the gay bars. They would triple card black gay men in the city, or they would have a quota that when a bar got up to more than 10 or 15 percent black patrons, then they would start discouraging any more coming in on the theory that too many black people would discourage white patrons from coming. So we were fighting racism within the gay community, or within the institutions that serve the gay community. And with the people I was organizing with and with my own experience, looking back over the last few years, we became unhappy with this community building counterculture method of social change, and also with liberal pressure group politics for democratic rights.

Why were you unhappy with this? What did you see was limiting yourselves?

We weren't getting anywhere. Except short-term and limited demands. And the more you got involved and the more you opened your eyes, you saw that it was an interconnected system of exploitation and oppression, not just a question of a bad policy of the government, or incomplete or imperfect democracy, or not giving enough rights or equality to one group or another. It was a little inchoate but it was largely frustration with a lack of vision. I also personally felt frustrated with the New Left. We were basically informed by the New Left, and one of the things that was typical of the New Left is the old left is bad. They were wrong. That's associated with the Soviet Union. Nobody wants anything to do with them. At best they're stodgy, conservative, bureaucratic.... But the part that was frustrating me about this was that we didn't have anything to learn from the people who came before us. So frustration, or the New Left running its course, led to a number of people who were looking for a chance to study history and a chance to find theory that made sense, that would help explain the world, system, capitalism. At the same time there were beginning to be these generally Maoist pre-party formations, they called themselves - collectives that were aspiring to become part of the new communist movement, towards building a new party.

You mean like Revolutionary Union?

Yeah. Revolutionary Union, October League. Some of them had been around before, like the Progressive Labor Party. The Communist Workers' Party. And then some of the Trotskyist movement, which had been pretty much off to the side, but present, started coming in and intervening with the New Left in one way or another. So anyways, we found a woman who is now identified as a Maoist, who was a former Communist Party leader who had come down from New York to D.C. in the late '30s, early '40s. She agreed to teach the rest of us Marxism. So we collectively studied. We had a study group complex, as we called it, and there were 125 of us in 10 different groups of 12. So I got involved, while continuing the kind of the things that I've described before, in studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought - MLM-T3. On the one hand it was very exciting and it was like the first time I had read or study Marxism, other than reading the Communist Manifesto when I was a college freshman. This was like turning on the lights in a tunnel. It was like, Wow! Oh, yeah! OK! Class struggle! Working class! Capital! Fundamental contradiction! Exploitation! Class struggle driving motor force of history! Having that framework, rather belatedly, you know, because I was thirty years old or something coming to this, was exciting. We started having this trouble though, because I brought up homosexuality in the study group complex, and this woman said "No, we can discuss it, but the line's going to be unless you can show me different, unless you can show me the material basis for homosexuality and it's theoretical contribution to revolutionary struggle or the working class, you just basically need to know what's wrong with it. That it's like bourgeois...."

Bourgeois decadence?

Yeah... a symptom of bourgeois decadence. She wasn't so overtly homophobic. It was polite and soft in the language, but that was basically the line. It basically was the Chinese Communist Party's line. That this is one of the many deviations of human behavior that will disappear with socialism. I essentially got marginalized by this MLM-T3 study group complex. They didn't kick me out because I had some friends who respected me and who would have refused to allow that. But I saw that I was an uncomfortable minority. It made me think back to when I was a twelve year old boy in segregation Florida and there was nobody else there. So I started questioning. These people may have turned on the lights in the tunnel, but they sure do put blinders on. There's something wrong with this Stalinist-Maoist version of Marxism. And also, I wanted to be queer. A queer communist. A queer Marxist.

So through that study group you became Marxist.

Yes.

But you realized, "I am Marxist, but not this Marxism."

Yeah. So I started looking around and I found this little ad in a national gay paper that was about two lines at the bottom that said "Gay Liberation through socialist revolution!" I said, "What! Did I read that right? They sound like my kind of people!" So I wrote them from DC. They had just gotten founded about this time, '74 or early '75. In between my two years of nursing school, which is what I was doing my last few years in DC, I drove out here to LA to meet them to see what they were like. So I met them and was reasonably impressed, although they were awfully small. There were three to five of them total. I had discussions, and then I went back to DC and I started a little DC gay socialist study group that was using a kind of edited version of that same curriculum of this other study group complex, a little of the Mao and adding in a little Trotsky. Basically it was an introduction to Marxism. I wanted to recruit some other queers to Marxism so that I wouldn't be the only one. I also tried horizontal recruitment, as they called it - from the straight ones. So that went OK. One person ended up later moving with me to LA to join the L&RU and a couple others remained sympathizers. But I stayed in touch by correspondence with the people out here, the L&RU, and invited them to come to DC. We did a forum for this left milieu called 'Gay liberation through socialist revolution'. Later through struggle with the Spartacist League we dropped that slogan, but at the time it was cutting edge; it was the main slogan of the L&RU and of course it drove most people in the liberal and sectoralist queer community crazy - "What are you talking about socialist revolution, we just want equal rights". But we got 125 people to come out to that in DC, including some of the Maoists who spoke up and gave their line, but.... Since I got my nursing degree I came out here to join them.

So how did those three or five people in L.A come together?

I don't know exactly because I wasn't here and I don't remember the stories. I know they were all in the Maoist milieu and so they all had similar kind of rejection experiences to me. Because the Maoist milieu dominated the new left decomposition products of that time, and if you were a radical revolutionary anti-capitalist, that was the main game in town, with the Trotskyists having a little left field pocket, and then the anarchists - I don't know about LA, but they weren't a factor in DC. So then in '76 when I came to LA to join we expanded to 11. So we had brought in more people, including people that were less politically experienced. But there were some core politics, like we believed in a working class orientation, including implantation of cadre in industry and work in trade unions.

Can you explain what the implantation of cadre in industry means?

It's that you want to recruit people from the working class, but you also wanted to send people who may be from a petite bourgeois or working class background, but who became won to communism, into industry or into strategic places where they could help organize other workers or recruit from working class struggles and to work in the trade union movement. So out of our 11 we had two in communications, who were telephone workers and in the communication workers union, and me in health care, joining the health care workers union. We actually talked about that within the L&RU - you notice we weren't just talking queer politics, we were also trying to do our bit to help build a revolutionary working class movement. That's a part of the problem that we began to see here pretty soon. First of all, 11 is awful small, being out queer. And so being a gay liberation communist organization was not particularly helpful in organizing a revolutionary caucus within the communication workers union, or the nurses.

Did the organization actually send people into these workplaces to organize? You said that was a strategy.

Yeah. At least one of the communication workers was sent in. The other may have been their to start with, but he was there in part with the idea of being an organizer within. And before we later moved on into the Spartacist League, we were training a couple or three other people for jobs for implantation. Apprenticeships, and skilled trades for example, and electrician, transport workers. We were aiming for somebody in the ports. Didn't get that far, though.

So the goal then in doing this workplace organizing, would not be to, say, organize a queer caucus in the health care workers union.

No. It wasn't. Not at that time. And it was also contrary to our politics.

Why was that?

Well, we were saying that the role of queers in the maintenance of American capitalism is not strategic in the same way that, particularly black people - and later other people of color - and women is. That American capitalism and the domination of the American ruling class is integrally dependent on maintaining the special oppression of blacks, in particular, and also increasingly Latinos and other immigrant forces, and women. And that gay people are probably not going to find, or likely to find, full democratic rights without the leadership of a radical or revolutionary movement. But it's conceivable that they could. And I think that in the outcome of the last few years you can kind of see that it's conceivable that the nominal granting of democratic rights can happen within the structure of capitalism. So we were saying that we wanted to organize around the things that were strategic and fundamental while also we fought for women's liberation - and we sort of saw the queer question as in some ways integrally related to that - and for full democratic rights for everybody, that we have to make a point of fighting for everybody, even unpopular or small minorities, whether strategic or not. Though we didn't organize gay caucuses in our trade union work, we did raise the demand that unions should support full democratic rights and oppose discrimination against LGBT people. That way, we established a track record of the importance of the unions and the working class fighting to defend gay people when under attack, as with all marginalized groups. So we were in a position to quickly mobilize support when pogrom-type attacks came, as later happened during the hysteria around AIDS.

Earlier you were talking about whether it was possible to realize full democratic rights under capitalism. I think you were saying that at least for the United States.

It's theoretically possible to do that.

But it's not possible to do that for, say, black people, because capitalism, in the US, is formulated on the foundation of racism. But you said that for queer people, it's more of an... open question?

Yeah. I would say, once again I personally don't see it fully, but it's possible to extend democratic rights more and more and more on things like marriage, on things like serving in the military. They could also do, although they haven't yet, on nondiscrimination in the workplace, or nondiscrimination in housing. All these are aspects of full democratic rights. They can grant that without threatening hegemony, rule, power, including power to exploit the working class as a whole.

In some of Lavender and Red's writing about their goals or demands for sexuality and for queer struggle, they talked about a vision of being able to actually move beyond gender distinctions entirely, and not have - obviously - straight, gay, bisexual; not have masculine/feminine gender roles, not being assigned male and female. Is that something beyond democratic rights, are those things that you think can be achieved under capitalism?

No, that's beyond democratic rights. I think that's part of what that ultimately needs the socialist revolution. But I think that's integrally related to, and you can contextualize it within, the "woman question", in the traditional Marxist terminology. In terms of the elimination of patriarchy. I think retrospectively we could have gone beyond this to expand the potential contribution of queerness. But it's still a terrain that was opened up. I mean we want to be able to, for example, socialize reproduction of labor to create freedom from those traditional sex roles, including forms of sexual partnering. So I would say that's tied to to the original liberatory vision of Marxism. And we were certainly into extrapolating on that, and talking about that, and envisioning and imagining, but on the other hand we're not utopians. We're saying you don't get these things just by imagining them, you get them by working to change the material bases and the structure of capitalism and class rule.

You saw that struggle for liberated gender and sexuality as being part of what you called the "women question", and also that's clearly part of the gay liberation struggle. So how did you separate out the gay question from women's liberation struggles and patriarchy, and separate it as something that was not strategic?

Well, by saying not strategic doesn't mean it's unimportant. But because you were asking me initially around caucuses and about how you would organize caucuses. And it gets back also to sectoralism. To the extent that we sort of made a hard line about this, it was because we were fighting against sectoralism, which we felt is really going to weaken and divert the movement, or building a powerful unified working class movement that can ultimately smash capitalism, and the solidarity necessary to do it. With sectoralism, the tendency is that it ends up focusing more and more on the particular gains and demands and organizing increasingly narrowly around those, and often then it leads to, as we can see time and time again, to bending away from a revolutionary purpose by making alliances and concessions with capitalist forces, particularly liberals, saying "Oh, you support us on this so we won't challenge your basic power." At it's worst sectoralism can lead to support for fascism. For a very authoritarian form of capitalist state as long as you got your crumbs, or your particular narrow interests were protected. So we were very motivated by fighting against sectoralism. We were talking in terms of how you organize the fight, and particularly when there's a justification for separate forms of organization. And that wouldn't necessarily be hard and fast for all time. For us, for a caucus in the health care workers union, or the communication workers union, it was much more important to have a revolutionary or a class struggle trade unionist perspective that we were uniting all people around, as opposed to prioritizing a gay caucus, or a series of caucuses that might be parallel, like a gay caucus, and a women's caucus, and a Latino caucus, and a this and that caucus. At another time or with a more "advanced" nature of the struggle, you might have some of these different caucuses, all of which were revolutionary and class struggle, and were united at the same time.

But going into an industry, the first thing you do would not be going to find the other queer people there.

Yeah. Right. So, since we're on the labor thing, I had gotten involved in the trade union struggle struggle activism at Kaiser here in LA as a nurse. I had been involved in the new RN union, including pushing the contract negotiations in the most militant direction I could, including some democratic rights demands, including for queer people, and for the right for Filipinos to speak their language - they had a rule that you couldn't speak non-English in the hospital even in off-duty areas. And then a strike was coming up from the "non-professional" workers - the vocational nurses, and the nurse's aides, and the housekeepers, and the dietitians. And so the question was, what are the RNs going to do?, because we were in a different union than the majority of the workers. The perspective of the union leaders was, "We will keep working. But we will work to rule. We won't do other workers' jobs. But we will cross picket lines and come into work to take care of patients because that's our highest duty and blah blah blah." I argued as a class struggle trade unionist, no, picket line means don't cross, working class solidarity is an important principle that we must - in the case of the US - reestablish as inviolate, and furthermore practically for all of you worrying about the patients, if we have a solid strike Kaiser will be much more likely to settle then if we do this piecemeal work-to-rule shit. I was putting this forward as the queer, and also the commie. I put forward a position that no, we need to commit, we need to take a vote to not cross the picket line. I won that argument, and Kaiser settled the strike the next day, without even actually having gone out on strike. That was an example - a small one - of the kind of trade union work and class struggle intervention into a workplace that we tried to do.

Is that part of the reason why you thought it was a necessity to go beyond just being a small gay socialist organization, so you could include people like your coworkers? Because you saw it as necessary to organize there, in the hospital, as working class people, and that being working class people was the primary point of unity in the workplace?

I think so. Plus we needed size and you've got to open it up and have it on a different basis if you're going to recruit size. We weren't exactly making headway recruiting out of the gay political organizations.

Why? Why do you think that was?

'Cause we were commies. I mean 'cause people were saying, "You're unpopular. I'm a pro-capitalist queer. I want to succeed. I just want the right to make it in this society free from discrimination." Or they'd say "Oh, my main problem is not as a worker, my struggle is against patriarchy and male bosses." We were increasingly seeing we were gonna be stuck in a niche that is not exactly a springboard to being part of a movement for power, as long as we were just isolated as a small queer communist organization. That's just setting aside the question whether we were effective or not in our organizing. But just by definition we were narrowing ourself to this little piece, whereas our basic idea - the more we thought about it, and the more we studied broader history and movements - was that we needed to build a party. That was our belief as people being won to Leninism. That we needed to build a vanguard or a disciplined democratic centralist party. So we needed to find somebody else to hook up with.

Did you focus on trying to win the gay community over to socialist politics?

We tried. But first of all this history is pretty short. We're talking here just a matter of three, four years maximum before we abandoned that narrow existence. We went to gay pride. We leafleted. We put out a newspaper. We intersected issues in the gay community like the Gay and Lesbian Center strike. We were active in a campaign to boycott some big bar in West Hollywood because of it's anti-black discriminatory behaviors, just like in Washington. And we would try to organize queer contingents in anti-war and Chilean solidarity demos or actions. We did those kinds of things that would be trying to attract attention. Although then increasingly we focused more on study to try to figure out where to go next. So we took a lot of time reading.

What were some of the challenges that Lavender and Red brought to the LA gay movement?

We basically criticized saying capitalism is the problem, not the solution. Capitalism cannot be reformed. We're not the only ones in a shaky boat here. That it's all of us or none. There's other oppressed groups and if we don't express and fight for solidarity with your working class fellow gays and lesbians, who are also maybe Latina, and maybe also black, then that even more bluntly poses, well, are you going to have freedom as a black sissy queer without also challenging racism? Without also challenging sex roles and patriarchy? So you put that out there continuously.

So pointing out that actually, despite who the leadership of these liberal gay organizations might be, the vast majority of the queer community was in fact the working class, was in fact not white. And so by being so narrowly focused, they were leaving most people behind.

Yeah. Without fighting the other sources of the oppression of our community.

What were some of the challenges that you brought to left organizations around Los Angeles?

Why are you all so backward? Defending the worst in bourgeois society or Stalinism?

Did you have conflicts?

Well, we had arguments. We would often be shown the door. We would go to meetings that were run by these Maoist organizations or popular front coalitions and speak up, including queer demands or just speaking as out queer communists, and sometimes we'd get thrown out, shown the door by the security squads. You know, they said "You're being provocateurs", or sometimes we'd be police-baited, or disunity-baited, or, in a couple cases, "Get out of here faggots - will the security show them the door". Twice, that I went to.

Despite the rejection that Lavender and Red got from the established Maoist left, you still remained very committed to the idea that what queer people needed was socialist revolution.

Yeah. We thought these weren't really socialists. They were corrupter socialists, this tradition. Also things were beginning to change. I mean, we were having some impact - not just us, other people. I mean these people were getting a bit embarrassed because they were trying to recruit people too, from a broader perspective, like ex-liberals or still liberals, and they were getting uncomfortable with this. We were also suspicious, though, because then people began to switch, including some of the Trotskyist groups, like not only the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], but Workers' World. We would point out the hypocrisy of these groups that a few years ago wouldn't talk about queer people, and now they didn't come out with some analysis admitting how come they were wrong and why they changed, they just suddenly started being friendly and welcoming and adding a few token gay demands to their kitchen sink demand list. We were telling other gay people, don't be fooled by this kind of pandering. Ask for their analysis. Where's their strategy. Where's their program. And, most fundamentally, do they have a program for overthrowing capitalism.

Seeing the class contradiction, seeing the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class as being the crucial linchpin, is that perspective what made Lavender and Red realize it was necessary to not just organize gay people, not just organize working class gay people, but also to be together with anti-racist and feminist, and anti-imperialist struggles?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You talked about how your perspective on feminism was that it needed to be working class feminism. And you came into some debates about that with feminist groups during the strike at the Gay Community Services Center, which was one of the first established gay social service organizations, and which ended up getting a lot of funding....

This was actually before I moved out from DC, so I just know this second hand. But the workers attempted to organize a union because there were wholesale and arbitrary firings. And we supported those workers, and to some extent we might have implanted the idea that you need a union, you need to organize and negotiate as workers with the management for wages, working conditions, and against arbitrary firings.

One account I was reading basically said that the Lavender and Red Union were the people who came to the workers and said, "You should go on strike", and that idea won out, but there is one quote from one of the workers who was speaking against Lavender and Red's proposal, saying "This is not a labor issue. Our fight is about lesbian feminism versus male dominated hierarchy." It seems Lavender and Red's position was that actually workers being fired for organizing against their boss is probably a labor issue.

Yes! I think so. That's not to deny, and we didn't at the time, that it's not also a feminist issue.

So how did that play out in that strike?

As I recall the workers lost, but our position got a substantial amount of respect. But there was some lingering disagreement, sort of like markers were cast down: OK, this is how they see it, this is how we see it. But it did raise the issue - for some people for the first time - that even in the nonprofit, NGO, social services sector, there are labor issues. That because we're a queer organization does not suddenly resolve capitalism or resolve the tendency of bosses and managers to exploit, and abuse, and mistreat workers. That workers have a right to organize. And I think we had some modest success in at least instilling these basic principles which we were fighting for.

How did Lavender and Red see this NGO-ization of the early gay movement affecting things and what was your position on it?

It hadn't really happened yet enough for us to take it up as that issue specifically, except in specific concrete cases like this one. We saw that strike as an example of that, that a voluntary organization becomes an institution. We didn't foresee that it was going to become a tidal wave, or the degree to which it became the dominant mode.

Lavender and Red's existence is very interesting because it was very contradictory in the sense that this group formed that saw there was no place for queer struggle in the revolutionary left, and then at same had a political understanding that there wass no place for queer struggle by itself. And so I guess Lavender and Red probably saw its own existence as something of a failure.

Well, yeah, it certainly was contradictory from the start. That contradiction was embedded in it. But I would say that's not necessarily a failure, to have then gone through and transformed ourselves, and whoever else we influenced, with a vision that was not only transformative but transitional to a different perspective. And we probably played a small role in helping to transform at least a corner of the left. I would say that we also, we and other people who came along after us or in parallel, did have struggles within the left to clarify, or rectify, or challenge leftover or former positions. And a lot of these contradictions still.... Well, I started to say still exist but....

But for the contradictions to exist in the left, the left would need to still exist.

Yeah, that's why I sort of backed off. No, the thing that I'm saying that still exists, because I saw it again in Act Up twenty years later, was the fight against - in less explicitly political terms most of the time - a sectoralist, single-issue approach versus any solidarity, integrated struggle, and anti-capitalist perspective. And that has existed in different movements in the queer community as well.

So this approach against having a focus on just this one oppressed sector, and instead organizing in the united working class struggle with other oppressed groups - that's a perspective saying that revolutionary political organizations shouldn't be based only in one oppressed group. But is it a perspective saying that social movement groups shouldn't be only based in one community as well?

I personally wouldn't say that. I would say that there are rules for mass movements that are based in one sector, but there's always going to be the danger of that bending towards class collaborationism and accommodation with capitalism unless there's some countervailing active tendency. So I think, like your Chilean comrade was saying in that meeting a couple weeks ago, about there being different sectors of the popular movement, but then needing to have a party, a political organization, a formation, a structure, by which the unity of the struggles and the cross-fertilization and the critique and challenging takes place within the popular movement sectors. So I would say that I can certainly see - first of all, it's going to happen whether I or any other revolutionary approves of it - but I can see that it's not necessarily something to always to be fought and polemicized against, but to maybe be intervened within with a unified revolutionary perspective, and to have some way to link these together. And at times then it may outlive its usefulness. You could actually see if it's objectively becoming more of an obstacle in it's sectoral boundaries than it is a benefit in its mass mobilization potential.

Tell me a little bit about the transformation of the Lavender and Red Union. You said that after this period of intense activity, there was then a period of intense political study, saying "OK we've been doing this work in the left, in the gay community, where are we going?"

Right. Part of it was since we were coming out of a Maoist milieu, even though we weren't splitting from any explicit organizational connection, we felt like we needed to decide between the original Bolshevik vision of global international revolution, or as Trtosky concretizes, permanent revolution, versus the Stalinist/Maoist conception of socialism in one country, that, among other things led to accommodations with the...

National bourgeoisie.

National and international bourgeoisie. I mean, this was also Nixon in China time, you know. That shook up a whole lot of people in the Maoist left milieu - "What the fuck is he doing? The butcher of Vietnam being welcomed to Beijing!" That was the first big study. And so we came up with a document rejecting socialism in one country. So then we decided, OK we're basically committed to the Trotskyist tradition, so, which one?

It may seem interesting to someone that a gay communist organization would spend so much time studying the question of socialism in one country instead of spending that time studying sexuality and gender.

Well we saw ourselves as a part of - or wanted to be a part of - the global communist movement for revolution. And you can't just study one piece of that. You've got to try to find the central dividing lines or questions. That's the one that we encountered.

And it had a lot of importance in the context that you were in at that time.

Yeah, right now it might seem arcane and esoteric, but I think in the context why we did that instead of sexuality is not so hard to understand, because we were gay communists. Or gay revolutionaries. So he needed to study and sort ourselves out according to the key revolutionary questions that were facing us, as well as then we would expect to dialogue and counter with any putative partners about how they related to queerness and sexuality.

Basically at that point you're just choosing between Stalinism and Maoism and Trotskyism.

Yeah. This was a two stage process. The first was to choose Trotskyism and then to move to find out what form of Trotskyism. Then that requires a study of the Russian question. Is the Soviet Union a degenerated workers' state, or is it state capitalist, or bureaucratic collectivist? Once again a question that seems far removed from queer liberation, and I tell you people that we talked to about this said "Are you guys crazy?" Then somebody wrote a little headline on a story about the fusion of the Red Flag Union - as the Lavender and Red Union was known at that time - with the Spartacist League as "The fruits merge with the nuts".

After the Lavender and Red Union began studying the Russian question, there were a number of parties that came trying to....

Trying to pitch their version to us. We talked to the SWP, we talked maybe briefly to Workers World, although by that time nobody much had much respect for them; they had already gone over to Kim Il Sung as an exemplar of the revolution. Though maybe that came a little later. And the International Socialists [IS], and the RSL [Revolutionary Socialist League], which had been kind of a left split from the IS. We did talk to the Freedom Socialist Party too. They were the ones that were articulating the vision of socialist feminism. But it pretty much came down to between the Spartacist League and the Revolutionary Socialist League. It ended up being a twelve-three split. Twelve of us joined the Sparatacist League and three joined the RSL. It was partly a question of the way you came down on the Russia question. But it was also partly a question of style, temperament, and bent thing. The RSL was a little more loose, not such hard democratic centralist in their style. Right after the merger we were all in LA, and the Spartacist League was saying "OK, we're a national and international tendency, so you can't all stay in LA because we want you to spread out, so where are you going to go?" And some of us went to Detroit. Partly because the auto industry was hiring again. So there was going to be an opportunity of implanting a bunch of people in the auto industry after a period of stagnation and shrinking. As far as I know those three people who went with the RSL stayed in LA. The SL fraction split - a couple stayed here, some went to Detroit, Boston, Chicago, New York.

So the Lavender and Red Union mostly joined the Spartacist League, and the Spartacist League allowed you to filter out across the country. So what happened next? What was the legacy that you saw the Lavender and Red Union having within further organizing and militancy?

I think that one theme of this discussion is that we felt like we were able to express our deeper or broader political commitments through our involvement in a more comprehensive national and international revolutionary organization. To that extent I think we felt like it was successful for us as individuals and for the continuity of the political work or the political vision that we had. Later the SL certainly got more involved in queer struggle, even during the time that I was still there, which I was there for ten years. Like that case in Chicago. We were explicitly defending and mobilizing and getting labor union locals to defend a gay pride march in Chicago from a Nazi attack. And most of the rest of the left eschewed or shied away from that. The most they would do was say, "Oh, let's have a rally to protest the horror of the idea of the Nazis." And we're saying "Fuck that namby-pamby liberal-ass shit, let's stop them from coming here." Lavender and Red Union people had different skills. Some people continued to work in the communication workers' union, for example, only in a different city. Some people found skills as internal organizers, apparatus people. I worked in both health care and and in these anti-fascist mobilizations, and in the legal and political defense work. People went through with apprenticeships and were implanted into industry and industrial fractions. At that level, I would say that we also were able to bring the particular knowledge and skills of the queer community where there were opportunities to intersect, like with the anti-fascist organizing, and later in the AIDS movement, including infusing in the party - before the Spartacist League got totally isolated - and the other forces it it influenced in Europe, and Mexico, South Africa, Poland, Russia, with its commitment to queer liberation, queer rights as a part of a comprehensive communist party. That we brought that, our tradition and our personal histories into the broader life of this broader political organization; I think that had an impact.

You feel that the Lavender and Red Union was able to spread a bigger change to the rest of the left.

Yeah.

And so then you left after ten years.

Largely I burned out and just needed to take a few years off. But I was also beginning to question the continued relevance of the Spartacist League's fairly narrow application of Trotskyism and democratic centralism. Because I feel like the farther you get away from having a history of active involvement in leadership in mass workers' struggles, the more distorted, precious, esoteric, and just quirky the idea of embodying this tradition becomes. My own politics now, I would say I define myself as an anti-capitalist revolutionary, and sometimes I say I'm a communist. I mean readily I'll say that, it's just not always appropriate. But I'm not affiliated with any particular political organization or sectarian tradition. I'm still influenced by the Trotskyist tradition of Marxism more than any other single tradition, but I believe in, and I'm open to, more eclectic revolutionary anti-capitalist movement building. So there's this organization COiL [Communities Organizing in Liberation] that I've been an associate member of, and I'm a member of this Ultra-red political sound art collective that's international in three countries, and largely involved in trying to build a mass movement of tenants for housing justice, connected to the other struggles against capitalism that people in LA are engaged in right now.

You were involved in the AIDS movement after you left the Spartacist League.

I was. And I went back to school, got graduate degrees, and then AIDS kind of happened. So that's where I worked. I was involved in Act Up, and more broadly in pushing things within the AIDS movement that came out of that tradition that I've been a part of. Which is that an injury to one is an injury to all, that struggles against capitalism, against all forms of oppression, are indivisible. That you've got to solve the AIDS crisis with people who are also poor, black, trans, living in under-resourced countries, and that therefore the struggle has to be reflective of, or address, or connected to, struggles against all forms of oppression. And I've similarly found myself oppositional in many cases to people who said "No, the emphasis has just got to be on getting resources and focusing the attention of the system to solve this one crisis."

Any concluding wisdom on the lessons of the Lavender and Red Union?

Talking indirectly to the Turkish comrades, one of the things that we were attracted to from the Lavender and Red Union in the Spartacist League, is that the Spartacist League was committed to internationalism in an active way. Not just solidarity. But trying to found, or bond with, or establish relationships with revolutionary groups in other non-US countries. And that the US left should subordinate itself to an international revolutionary collective process, at least in ideal, and move in practical concrete steps. I still believe that.

Disproportionate Minority Contact & Criminological Theory

By Miah Register

It has been recently discovered that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (trans*), queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system (Holsinger & Hodge 2014; Hunt & Moodie-Mills 2012; Craziano & Wagner 2011). Hunt and Moodie-Mills (2014) also report that 60 percent of these youth are Black, Latino/a,. Further, despite the overrepresentation of LGBTQ youth in the juvenile justice system, the legal system's response has been lackluster, at best. In 1988, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) have responded with the Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) mandate, which was an amendment to the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act (U.S. Department of Justice OJJDP DMC Factsheet 2012). This act was intended to reduce the contact of minority youth in the juvenile justice system. Moreover, most research involving minority youth has denied the impact or intersecting identities and the oppression and lack of safe spaces for these young people to exist in society, in general, and in the juvenile justice system. Although feminist criminology has emerged and enhanced the narrow ideologies of classical criminological theory, many intersections have been left uncrossed in juvenile justice theory, research and practice. Since the inception of criminological theory, significant elements of the human identity have been overlooked as primary factors of disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile justice system. For example, Hirschi's (1969) model of social control argues that race and ethnicity are factors that are invariant. Further, this false sense of equality and inclusion encourages exclusion and erasure of the identities of minority groups: i.e. the focus of the current research-lesbians, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming black girls.

History of DMC

The DMC mandate originally intended to reduce the confinement of minority youth in the juvenile justice corrections facilities. Moreover, it required states receiving certain federal funding for juvenile justice programming to follow this mandate and its several components. In 1992, the JJDP Act "elevated the efforts" of the DMC mandate, and allocated 25 percent of the funding to state compliance. Further, the OJJDP proclaim that through the DMC mandate, they learned that minorities were overrepresented in all components of the juvenile justice system, as opposed to earlier beliefs that minorities were only disproportionately institutionalized. As a result, the mandate was amended in 2002 and renamed to Disproportionate Minority Contact for state municipalities to understand the necessity to address overrepresentation of minorities at every point of the justice system.

Further, at the inception of DMC, the OJJDP developed a model for states to emulate in their efforts to reduce minority contact. Their reduction model calls for state agencies to identify, assess, intervene, evaluate, and monitor DMC. The OJJDP claims that their efforts, while not complete, have catalyzed some institutional change. While they quote some positive changes in arrest statistics and in detention facilities, criminological scholars must approach this perceived change from a critical, intersectional lens to understand and asses the positive changes, if any, after the DMC mandate. While each state has implemented the DMC model to some extent, most states have monitored their programming, but they have failed to methodically evaluate the program's effectiveness. Thus, in this paper, I will critically examine the effectiveness of the DMC mandate in serving all minorities-not just Black boys. This evaluation will be conducted through a comprehensive literature review, as well as a theoretical analysis of the potential origins of this deeply rooted issue.

Theoretical Approach

This paper will utilize Blalock's (1967) racial threat theory as a basis to expand upon. In essence, primary ideology of racial threat theory will be expanded to encompass and explain the matrix of oppression for all minorities. This theory asserts that competition (for jobs, economic superiority, etc.) between Black and White people in the US causes an intensified level of social control exerted on Black people. An example of racial threat theory applied to the current plight of the juvenile justice system is the disproportionate involvement of Black youth at every contact point of the system. On the other hand, Black people, in general, represent a minority of less than 15 percent of the country. Thus, the representation of Black youth in the justice system is unjustifiable through realistic, critical approaches to criminological theory.

Moreover, in this paper, some literature is reviewed that deals with Hirschi's contrasting model of social control, which completely denies that racism, prejudice, bias, and corruption are real. These two theories of social control are purposely compared in this paper to illustrate the historic failure of the justice system to understand the "matrix of power" (Potter 2013). The next section of this paper discusses the literature and research studies conducted to understand the complexities of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, social control, and the juvenile justice system.

Literature Review

Although little research has been conducted regarding DMC, the mandate was analyzed in Leiber et al.'s (2011) study. The purpose of their research was to evaluate the effectiveness of the DMC mandate in decreasing racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. The researchers approached this topic through Durkheim's (1964) consensus theory and conflict (symbolic threat) view in relation to racial stereotyping. The consensus model argues that tradition, law, punishment, and treatment derive from a broad consensus of societal norms (Durkheim 1964). According to this criminological theory, racial disparities in crime are attributed to differential involvement in crime, gender, age, dysfunctional family structures and school misbehavior. (Tracy 2005). The conflict model alleges that minority youth possess feelings of fear and jealousy, which makes them pose a greater threat to society and public safety. Moreover, this studies draws from these theories to understand racial bias and stereotyping by practitioners in the juvenile justice system, particularly at intake (court referrals) and at judicial disposition. The researchers hypothesized that the race of the offender would have no influence on intake or judicial disposition before and after the DMC mandate, and that DMC would reduce decision-making outcomes.

The researchers utilized data from a county in Iowa, which was chosen by Congress in 1989 as one of five model states for the DMC mandate. The researchers reviewed about 5,700 cases ten years before and ten years after the DMC mandate, 60 percent being White offenders and 40 percent being Black offenders. They reviewed how both groups were treated in intake and during judicial disposition. Thus, the researchers found that their hypotheses, grounded in criminological theories that do not explain oppression and discrimination, were unsupported. They found that even after the DMC mandate, cases involving Black youth were referred to court more often than that of White youth, especially when Black youth derived from single-parent families. Moreover, the researchers also found that the effects of race become much more covert and indirect, but they were apparent under a critical lens. The researchers found decision-making was most impacted by race when the there is "no procedure for review;" i.e. when discretion is at its highest.

The researchers acknowledged that the data and sample were pulled from a single jurisdiction, which makes the ability to generalize based on their research questionable. Nonetheless, they urge for more research to be conducted on the effectiveness of the DMC mandate, as it has been in place for over 20 years.

Myers and Raymond (2010) studied the effect of heternormativity on the perspectives of elementary-aged girls. The researchers hypothesized that heteronormativity is not just the result of pubescent transformation; instead, it is intertwined within everyday life and interactions, even as young as five years old. Because there has been a gap in previous research (Renold 2006; Casper and Moore(2009), the authors prioritized the focus of heteronormativity and gender performance to a young population, as opposed to the middle and high school population. The authors examined how heteronormativity governs elementary girls' gender performance and their self-image and images of their peers. The researchers gathered a focus group of 43 girls, ages five through 11 (median age 9-years-old), grades kindergarten through fifth grade. The participants were primarily white, lower middle class girls, which represented the majority of the school's population. The girls were divided into age-appropriate groups, where discussion was moderated by a researcher, but was guided based on desirable topics of conversation. The researchers found that although the questions prepared were regarding the girls' general interests, the conversation constantly shifted to a boy-centered discussion. Most girls bashfully and secretly desired to discuss their crushes or dating climate in their elementary classes, and some were very open about the boy-centered interests and perceptions.

Through the conversations with girls, the researchers found evidence to support their hypothesis. They found that the girls defined themselves through the lens of boys, and their heteronormative ideologies were consistent with their firm beliefs that sexual orientation should match one's gender identity and expression. There were also consistent findings of heteronormativity being an agent of social control. The researchers found that heteronormativity was utilized as a mirror for girls to measure themselves and one another through a heterosexist lens, and through a very chivalrous, traditional ideology of what it means and looks like to be an "appropriate" girl. Finally, they found that this was policed through school policy and through home life standards. Moreover, most of the girls' parents followed very traditional gender roles.

The researchers acknowledged the lack of racial and economic diversity in their focus group. The participants were primarily white, lower-middle class socio-economic status, and the researchers noted that the group interviews were dominated by the white participants. This lack of representation silenced the perspectives of the young, Black and Latina girls in the focus group (which were they only people of color reported in the demographic notes). The researchers did not discuss this as an opportunity for future research.

Chesney-Lind, Morash, and Irwin (2003) conducted a literature review regarding the impact of policing girls' behavior. The researchers investigated how the policing of relational aggression between girls is utilized as a mechanism of social control. Moreover, they examined the implications of treating relational aggression as a criminal justice problem. The researchers explained that [relational] aggression can be a plethora of behaviors: eye-rolling, spreading rumors, breaking others' confidence, criticism of other girls' appearance and personality, sarcasm, and much more. Further, the researchers hypothesized that the relational aggression should not be handled in a punitive manner and it should not be governed under school zero tolerance and behavioral policies.

The researchers critically examined literature from the 1970s until the early 2000s. They found that most research has emphasized the necessity to prevent relational aggression between girls, because of the emotional and psychological damage they believed would be caused. Nonetheless, Chesney-Lind et al. (2007) also found that the research supporting this psychological damage is inconsistent. They found that intervening in relational aggression has adverse effects on girls. Moreover, the researchers gathered that this increases the formal social control over girlhood, femininity, and what it means to be a girl or woman.

Thus, while previous research suggested that relational aggression be prevented with gender-specific programming, Chesney-Lind et al. (2007) found this method inappropriate. Further, the researchers found that policing noncriminal behavior of girls increased their involvement in the criminal justice system, as opposed to preventing criminal behavior or juvenile girls. While juvenile girl crime rates may have increased, self-report studies suggest that violence amongst young, female offenders was decreasing (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice 2012). This supports the researchers' hypothesis that policing relational aggression will increase girls' involvement in the criminal justice system and have adverse effects. Further, extensive research has been conducted to understand policing of girls' noncriminal behavior. Eventually, scholars developed several theories to understand the needs of girls in the system and ways to better deal with girls in the system.

There has been much existing research on the dichotomy between the chivalry hypothesis and the evil woman hypothesis. The next section of the literature explores the many facets of these theories, as they have been tested several times. Moreover, Embry & Lyons (2012) conducted a study that looked to analyze the "evil woman hypothesis." They hypothesized that females who committed crimes diverting furthermost from traditional gender roles would receive harsher sentences. Further, the researchers believed that women would receive more severe sentences than men for sex offenses, as this type of violent, dominant, and powerful behavior is an egregious diversion from traditional gender roles.

The researchers analyzed data collected by the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) in order to examine the relationship between sentence lengths for males and females convicted and sentenced for sex offenses. The data was pulled from January 1994 through December 2004. There was little demographic information, offense type, and sentencing variable. The authors' analysis of previous research focusing on women as sex offenders was inconsistent; most research in this article focused on women as victims. Further, the researchers did not find evidence to support their hypothesis, based on the "evil woman thesis." Instead, based on their data sample of approximately 2,800 cases involving females and approximately 2,800 cases involved males, the researchers found that males were sentenced more harshly than females.

The researchers discussed some limitations to their study. When they controlled for offenders' criminal history, they found that sentencing discretion was misleading and unreliable, because females' and males' criminal histories are gendered, based on the chivalry hypothesis.

Thus, this study found evidence to support the chivalry hypothesis, which previous research has utilized to compare the discrepancies in sentencing of male and female offenders who commit the same crimes. The study did not mention the implications of race, class or sexual orientation in relation to sex offenses and sentencing discrepancies.

Spivak et al. (2014) also dissected the relevance of the chivalry hypothesis and the evil women theory in relation to female juvenile offenders. The researchers had multiple hypotheses to test the two theories: they projected that status offenders would be primarily girls, girls' cases would be more often referred to court, girls would have less guilty verdicts, and girls would more frequently be sentenced to custody as opposed to probation.

The researchers utilized the Oklahoma Office of Justice Affairs, where they examined approximately 3,000 cases of status offenders (controlling for race, age, prior history, type of status offense, and socio-economic status). Status offenses included runaway, truancy, 'school behavior problems,' 'beyond parental control,' and 'in need of supervision.' The authors found that their hypotheses were supported; however, the data was inconclusive in terms of the chivalry thesis and evil woman hypothesis. The results were inconsistent, which is parallel with most existing research testing these theories. It was apparent that in this focus group, status offenders were primarily females (approximately 57 percent).

Thus, the researchers discussed that the limitations of their study are the sample size. Because the sample was gathered just from Oklahoma, it is difficult to utilize this as a general consensus about female status offending. Also, the study controls for race, age, prior history, type of status offense, and socio-economic status. Nonetheless, it is imperative view these intersectional identities when truly understanding the methods of the juvenile justice system. Although many researchers have studied these models, there have been inconsistent results.

Hirschi's (1969) Social Control model

While the current study utilizes Blalock's (1967) theory on racial and minority threat, it is important to critically examine other models of social control. Further, Peguero, Popp, Latimore, Shekarkhar, and Koo (2011) critically examined Hirschi's (1969) classical criminological theory of social control. The researchers looked to examine the validity of social control theory and school misbehavior (juvenile delinquency) in relation to race and ethnicity. The authors asserted that previous criminological theory and research has failed to address race and ethnicity as a focal point; instead, race and ethnicity have historically been a "peripheral" (Peguero et. al 2011) aspect of findings in previous research. Further, the authors hypothesized that the relationship between social control theory and school misbehavior vary by race and ethnicity.

The researchers dissected the data from Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), which includes a national sample of 10th grade students. Each of the four elements of Hirschi's (1969) social control theory was used: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. School misbehavior was operationalized as noncriminal behaviors violate school rules. The researchers found that for the overall sample, each element of social control theory is consistent with explaining school misbehavior for white students. On the other hand, for Black, Latin American, and Asian American students, a variation of two of the four elements of social control theory explained school misbehaviors. For example, Black students' misbehavior did not correlate with their rates of self-reported attachment and involvement. The researchers assume that this is most likely due to students of color being discriminated against, and the likelihood of these students to not be connected to social conventions and normality. Thus, the historic exclusion of people of color from social normality may make them feel disconnected from generally White traditions and norms.

The researchers discussed limitations to this study. They understand that their analysis was drawn from data that represents a small age group of participants and a small date range. Also, the researchers acknowledge that, like the criminal justice system, social control theory is naturally gendered, and it especially fails to address intersectional identities. Lastly, the researchers strongly suggest that further research place race and ethnicity as a focal point, rather than an afterthought of data and criminological research.

Wordarski andMapson's (2008) study filled some gaps of previous research that researchers have encouraged more scholars to contend (Embry & Lyons 2012). Wordarski and Mapson (2008) examined the relationship of the four elements of Hirschi's (1969) social control theory and how it varies between Black and White female offenders. They hypothesized that there is a stronger relationship between the four elements of social control theory and crime rates of White female juvenile offenders than that of Black female juvenile offenders. The researchers used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), which comprehensively drew data regarding the environment of social behaviors. The PHDCN documented Chicago's social, economic, organizational, political, and cultural structures and significant changes that occurred between 1994 and 2001. The sample of the study was Black and White female juvenile offenders, ages 12 to 15.

The researchers asked several questions that were relevant to each of the four elements of social control theory. For example, to understand the girls' 'involvement' (in relation to social control theory), a question asked was "Was the subject involved in any other after-school program other than extracurricular activity" (231). Further, the term delinquency was operationalized as the commission of any illegal act by an individual under 18.

While the researchers found their hypothesis was not supported, they noted several significant implications to their study. Many of the questionnaires had missing data, as many participants were unwilling to report their criminal histories and prior involvement in any crimes. The researchers also concluded that their sample size was not diverse nor large enough to represent girls in the general juvenile population, as the sample size was 837, and they were primarily Black. Lastly, the researchers suggested that more longitudinal research be conducted in order to obtain consistent results on this matter, specifically as it pertains to race in relation to juvenile delinquency.

As most research has taken a narrow focus on determining extralegal factors in juvenile justice outcomes, Guevara et al. (2006) explored juvenile justice decision making in relation to both race and gender. Specifically, the researchers examined the effect of race on outcomes of juvenile justice and how these outcomes vary by gender. They also reviewed this in relation to the effectiveness of DMC. The researchers hypothesized that white females would receive more lenient judicial disposition than male youth of color .

The researchers collected case file data from two Midwestern counties from 1990 through 1994. The names of the counties were undisclosed, and they were referred to as County A and County B. Of a total population of approximately 200,000 people, the majority of residents were White (69 percent White, 15 percent Black, 15 percent Latino, and 1 percent Native American and Asian American). On the other hand, County B had a smaller population, and it was much less racially diverse (92 percent White, 3 percent Black, 2 percent Latino, 1 percent Native American, and 2 percent Asian American). The researchers randomly chose approximately 1,300 case files for County A and approximately 1,047 case files for County B. Further, the sample was primarily minorities, because out of a total 15,000 cases for County A and a total 6,000 cases for County B, the cases referred to court were primarily minorities.

Thus, the researchers did not find evidence to support their hypothesis. The researchers emphasized the necessity to examine race, gender, and the juvenile justice system-particularly decision making-from an intersectional approach, rather than a narrow lens. This was noted several times throughout the study. A major implication to the study was that the categories of race were divided based on status of White and non-White. These labels devalue the existence of people of color, and it places all people of color in a single category, as opposed to by race and ethnicity.

In order to truly dissect the impact of the juvenile justice system on queer, black girls, it is important to look at all components of the justice system. Goodkind and Miller (2006) examined a corrections facility and their gender-specific treatment methods after the 1992 federal mandate for gender-specific services for girls in the juvenile justice system. The researchers wanted to understand the (positive and negative) effects of an art therapy treatment program, designed specifically for girls in a corrections facility, because the art therapy program was based on gender stereotypes about girls. The authors evaluated the program and found that while the art therapy program has positive effects, the inmates (participants) also understand that it is very gender-stereotypical, and it enforces gender norms as a method of controlling young girls. The researchers used the work of Foucault to understand how gender-specific treatment can be utilized to control the behavior and "appropriateness" of young girls.

The authors did not explicitly make any predictions regarding the art therapy program, in regards to the effects it had on the female inmates; they wanted to study both the positive and negative effects and the perceptions of the female inmates and the staff members. The researchers conducted five focus groups of three to six female inmates. Of the 21 participants, 12 were Black, 7 were White, 1 was biracial, and 1 was Asian American. Women of color accounted for about 60 percent of the participants, and this was representative to the population of the entire institution. They also interviewed 14 administrative staff members-four were people of color, and 9 were women. Most of the participants identified very positive aspects of the art therapy program; however, they felt troubled by the fact that only females participated in the therapy program. The participants sensed that the therapy program was gender-specific, because of the notion that they are more "needy" or more "traumatized" than their male counterparts. It is important to note that the male inmates had access to the art studio, but they did not have to participate in the program with the art therapist.

The conversations were primarily about how the female inmates are expected to act "appropriately," and any deviation from appropriateness resulted in indirect or direct punishment. The inmates were expected to create art pertaining to gendered subjects: relationships, self-esteem, etc. Some inmates expressed their frustrations with the expectations of feminine appropriateness, particularly when as it pertains to creating art. The women expressed their concern for the therapy program and the institution, in general, polices feminine "appropriateness" as a way to control the girls.

The researchers concluded that it is important to question the positive effects of the art therapy program. It must be understood that gender-specific services in the juvenile justice system can "widen the net of social control," as an art therapy program can attempt to make girls conform to society's "gendered expectations of them."

Girls' sexuality has been a taboo topic in the juvenile justice system. Practitioners have historically failed to address sexuality and sexual orientation, and they have contributed to damaging assumptions and policing of "inappropriate" behavior of girls. Pasko (2010) conducted a historical analysis of juvenile justice policing of girls sexual behavior. This was an analysis of over a century of the courts and corrections systems, and the author found the ideology of practitioners has not changed much; nonetheless, the policing has become more indirect and covert through policies and the policing of "inappropriate behavior." Pasko also wanted to investigate how the juvenile justice system has dealt with girls' sexual orientation, specifically lesbian, bisexual, and queer girls.

In addition to the historical analysis, the researcher conducted interviews with juvenile justice professionals: current and former probation officers, and correctional facility administrators (counselors, therapists, and directors of residential facilities). The researcher included that all but five interviewees were female, and all but 13 were White. These practitioners had been in their position from four to 20 years, and they were from seven different (short-term and long-term) facilities. The interviewer noted that a few of the interviewers felt uncomfortable talking about sexuality and sexual orientation in their places of work; therefore, they arranged to meet at locations other than their offices.

The author included dozens of quotes from the interviewees, most of which portrayed signs of policing girls' "appropriateness" and sexual behavior through institutional policies, psychiatric treatment, and their own personal ideologies on girls' sexuality. The primary concern of the interviewees were girls' promiscuity and pregnancy inside and outside of the institutions, and the notion that lesbian behavior was temporary or the result of trauma, and methods of feeling power over others. It is also important to note that most of the girls who were in the institutions had not committed serious offenses, but that had violated conditions of probations, which were often related to sexual behavior-behavior that was not in line with traditional gender roles. Thus, the researcher found that the interviewees were mostly uncomfortable and unknowledgeable about sexual orientation and gender identity issues. To illustrate the climate of the institutions, the author included the following quote from an interviewee: "They are gay on the inside and straight when they get out. I just had a girl who was, 'Oh, I am in love with [girl].' And I said, 'Yeah right, back to your boyfriend you go when you get out. I am sure of it.' This research illustrated the problematic nature of juvenile facilities for queer girls, especially those expressing non-binary genders.

Crenshaw et. al (2015) found that most existing research on youth in the juvenile justice system excludes girls from analyses, assuming that girls are not as at-risk as boys are. The researchers also found that research focusing on race excluded gender (Guevera et al. 2006). Furthermore, the authors developed a report to draw attention to the misunderstood and misrepresented issues of Black girls and other girls of color in the juvenile justice system and the public school system. The report gathers data regarding the effect of school discipline, zero-tolerance (used interchangeably with "push-out") policies, and the almost inescapable pathways to incarceration (school-to-prison pipeline), poverty, and low-wage work. The researchers conducted interviews with high school girls of color from Boston and New York City public schools. While the report includes statistical analysis, it also provides insightful, first person dialogue from the interviews. The premise of this report was to provide a basis of discussion and increase awareness of "gendered consequences" of discipline tactics in schools that increasingly marginalize girls of color-primarily Black girls.

While the current study cannot address all of the researchers' findings, it is imperative to note that all of the issues found in the juvenile justice system as it pertains to Black girls need to be addressed in future research to develop intervention and best practices. Nonetheless, the findings most relevant to the current research are as follows: the authors found that girls felt extremely uncomfortable, unsafe, and discouraged in the school environment. They understood the devaluing effects of push-out policies, as they argued that administrators and teachers prioritized discipline over education. The researchers gathered that traditional gender roles were enforced, as girls were disciplined for behavior deemed as misconduct (that boys were not disciplined for). The authors also note that the school, in general had extreme security measures, such as police presence, metal detectors, etc., which many girls expressed how uncomfortable this made them, discouraging them from attending school.

The authors attributed some limitations to their research to the sample size. Most importantly, the researchers noted that existing data and statistics are difficult to interpret, because of the misrepresentation of race in many databases. Thus, the authors encouraged uniformity in data reporting, because of the lack of availability of consistent measures.

Holsinger and Hodge (2014) explored the climate of juvenile corrections facilities for incarcerated lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender girls. The authors wanted to understand the experiences LGBT girls, because of the disproportionate amount of this population incarcerated. The researchers critically examined the challenges facing the girls and the staff members, and they provide recommendations to better serve LGBT-identified girls in the correctional facilities.

To investigate the needs of LGBT girls, the authors conducted interviews with inmates and staff members. The authors were able to hear the perspectives of three LGB girls in residential facilities, and 21 staff members of these facilities. The results of these interviews show this particular facility illustrates the necessity of LGBT-affirming and protective policies, staff training, and implementation is imperative in order to create safe spaces for this overrepresented population in correctional facilities. The inmates reported that the facilities were uncomfortable for LGBT-identified girls. Moreover, the interviews with staff members portray the lack of knowledge and the dangerous marginalization and implicit discrimination and poor treatment of LGBT-girls. The facility also policed "appropriate" behavior, enforcing traditional gender norms, as well as a poor understanding and acknowledgement of LGBT identities, especially bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth.

The results of this study are telling and troubling, and illuminate the lack of space for existence of LGBT-identified girls in the justice system. Most of the staff members explained that dealing with LGBT girls in their facilities made their jobs more difficult. The researchers also noted that while there had been some attempted LGBT training done for staff members, the facility needs implementation. The results of this study are also indicative of the majority of findings throughout the literature analysis, which will be elaborated in the discussion of the major findings in the forthcoming sections of this paper.

Discussion

There has been exhaustive research conducted to understand, address, and increase awareness on minority populations in the juvenile justice system. After analyzing the literature, it was concluded that future research must focus on the marginalization of queer black girls as a group of people and how the layers of their identities interact, resulting in intensified oppression and trauma upon entering the juvenile justice system. The major findings were as follows: a) we have little knowledge on the perceptions of youth directly affected, but much knowledge on the lack of understanding of juvenile justice professionals and practitioners, b) most research has a diminishing, narrowed focus on one or two identities, and fail to convincingly address what happens when all of these identities collide in the margins of justice, c) most focus groups conducted reported a lack of diversity in their participants, as one social group was almost always overrepresented, d) the common theme of research on heterosexual and LGTQ girls discusses the enforcing of "appropriateness" and noncriminal, sexual and sexual orientation and gender identity-expressive behavior, and finally, e) the lack of a safe space for queer black girls to exist at every point of juvenile justice involvement.

Existing research has portrayed the power of first-person dialogue through one-on-one and group interviewing. This presentation of data has provided unparalleled insight into the perspectives of the participants in a research study, especially in the social science studying the human experience. While this approach has been utilized in the reviewed literature, most of the focus groups were to understand how equipped juvenile justice practitioners are to respond and address minority issues in corrections. While these interviews were very telling of the climate of current institutions, more youth perspective may appropriately address the issues the youth face. Nevertheless, because of staff testimonials, critical scholars can infer that the type of work that needs to be done to create safe spaces for minority youth.

Revisiting DMC

After reviewing existing research on the effectiveness of DMC and through the analysis of the OJJDP's data reporting techniques, it is clear that the DMC efforts were intended to address the issue of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American boys' disproportionate confinement. Moreover, these efforts failed to include other "minority" groups, such as LGBTQ, disabled, mentally ill, and poor youth, as well as a major population in the US: girls. The lack of focus on girls in the juvenile justice system has led to a misunderstanding in best practices in dealing with offending girls. As some research has tested the effectiveness of the DMC mandate, as well as the OJJDP's annual reviews of the decades-old program, implicitly excluding girls and other minority groups from the focus of these reviews illustrates the lack of understanding of disproportionate minority contact and responding to the needs of these populations upon intake into juvenile delinquency prevention programs.

More current literature, specifically as it pertains to black girls (a general representation of the focus of the current study), it is apparent that DMC has failed to include queer, black girls in its efforts, because of the reported increase in get-tough policies that have directly affected outcomes for queer, black girls.

Revisiting Minority Threat Theory

Minority threat theory is so important in discussing the findings of this literature. As Blalock (1967) identifies, racial threat theory manifests in the form of overpolicing urban communities of color and mass incarceration. In the same manner, the complete erasure and generalization of the outcomes and experiences of queer black girls exhibits minority threat theory. Much of the literature involving girls' sexuality and gender expression focuses on the "appropriateness" of girls' behavior and the policing of such. In addition, the policing of appropriateness manifests as follows: existing research has found that girls most often enter the system through status offending, conveying the policing of girls' behavior. Data on girls is often generalized to encompass the experiences of all girls; nonetheless, it would be a significant area of study to truly understand how queer, black girls are affected.

Conclusion: Call for intersectional thinking

Potter (2013) cites several intersectional, anti-essentialist, critical feminist criminologists and legal scholars in her article that fervently calls for critical criminologists to dig deeper into the statistical findings to understand the complexities of the human identities. In one section, Potter explains that plague of essentialism by feminist scholars throughout multiple disciplines. She asserts that "there is not a singular, shared experience among all women" (307). She then quotes the declaration of Wing (2003): "women of color are not merely White women plus color…or men of color plus gender. Instead, these identities must be multiplied together to create a holistic One when analyzing the nature of the discrimination against them" (307).

For decades, feminist criminologists have called for the study of intersectionality in criminological theory and practice (Potter 2013; Crenshaw 1989, 1991, 2015); nevertheless, as previously mentioned, this is not being done. Much data analysis has had a narrow focus, which Crenshaw (2015) dissects in her report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Crenshaw alleges that research on race excludes gender, and research on gender excludes race. Moreover, many data analyses have failed to focus on the multi-dimensional human identity and have, instead misrepresented and misinterpreted the needs of queer, black girls in a system that erases their interacting identities.

It is imperative that future research, policy, and practice take on an intersectional approach in order to truly reduce disproportionate minority contact. Otherwise, the oppression applied at the intersections will continue to intensify in the form of violence, brutality, mass incarceration, and erasure. The efforts to include all minority populations may not only contribute to the reduction of the overrepresentation of queer, black youth in the justice system, but it may also create safe spaces for them to decrease the double trauma enhanced by the justice system.

References

Blalock, H. Jr. (1967). Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. New York: Capricorn Books.

Chesney-Lind, M., Morash, M., Irwin, K. (2003). Policing Girlhood? Relational aggression and violence prevention. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice (5)3.

Crenshaw, K., Ocen, P., Nanda, J. (2015). Black girls matter: pushed out, overpoliced, and underprotected. African American Policy Forum. Columbia Law School Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of anti-discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139-167.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity, politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Reivew 43(6) 1241-1299.

Embry, R. ,Lyons, P. M. Jr. (2012). Sex-based sentencing: sentencing discrepancies between male and female sex offenders. Feminist Criminology

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Graziano, J. L., Wagner, E. F. (2011). Trauma among lesbians and bisexual girls in the juvenile justice system. Traumatology 17(2) 45-55.

Guevara, L., Herz, D., Spohn, C. (2006). Gender and juvenile justice decision making: what role does race play? Feminist Criminology, 1(4), 258-282.

Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holsinger, K., Hodge, J. P. (2014). The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender girls in juvenile justice system. Feminist Criminology, 1-25.

Hunt, J., Moodie-Mills, A. (2012). The unfair criminalization of gay and transgender youth: An overview of the experiences of LGBT youth in the juvenile justice system. Washington D.C.: Center for American Progress.

Leiber, M., Bishop, D., Chamlin, M. B. (2011). Juvenile justice decision-making before and after the implementation of the disproportionate minority contact (DMC) mandate. Justice Quarterly 28(3) 460-492.

Myers, K., Raymond, L. (2010). Elementary school girls and heteronormativity: the girl project. Gender & Society 24(2) 167-188.

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Peguero, A. A., Popp, A. M., Latimore, L., Shekarkhar, Z., Koo, D. J. (2011). Social control theory and school misbehavior: examining the role of race and ethnicity. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. 9(3) 259-275.

Pasko, L. (2010). Damaged daughters: the history of girls' sexuality and the juvenile justice system. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 100 (3), 1099-1130.

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Spivak, A. L., Wagner, B. M., Whitmer, J. M., Charish, C. L. (2014). Gender and status offending: judicial paternalism in juvenile justice processing. Feminist Criminology, 9(3), 224-248.

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