The ACT-UP Effect
Lynne Truss, in Eats Shoots & Leaves, takes a philosophically curious position in regard to "The Greengrocer's Apostrophe". Said apostrophe is a mechanism for creating plurals from fruit & vegetable names that are "foreign words ending with vowels" (banana, tomato, mango, and the like), that would otherwise lead to awkward eye/mouth coordination problems (how to pronounce "bananas" without it's sounding like a body part?); such plurals frequently, therefore (she claims), appear on signs as "banana's, mango's, tomato's", etc.
Here's the funny bit. Although Ms Truss is a self-proclaimed "stickler" (i.e., "conservative") about punctuation, she agrees that some punctuation mark that would distinguish these plurals would be a most welcome device, but that the "current rules of punctuation" prohibit it. In other words, she objects strenuously to the infraction of punctuation rules that the greengrocer's apostrophe represents, and simply could not condone or approve of such an infraction, but were it to become a "rule" at some future date (through continued infraction by someone else), she would then welcome it with delight and relief.
This psycho-emotional duality has many interesting instances; one example is, I think, relevant and illuminating towards the matter of equality for gay people and politics and society.
For lack of a better term, I think of the phenomenon as "The ACT-UP Effect". Those who were present and of a certain age in about the mid-eighties will remember the AIDS activism (some would say "extremist" or even "terrorist", I suppose, but they tend to be rhetorical extremists and verbal terrorists themselves) group begun by Larry Kramer called "AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power", or ACT-UP. The group used highly visible and confrontational tactics (one of the more famous: putting a giant condom over Jesse Helms' house) to get out their message that the federal government was moving too slowly on researching and approving treatments for AIDS.
They were correct about the government's foot-dragging and their direct action paid off in creating long-term change in government-led health research and regulation, for the better. Nevertheless, at the time, many many "gay leaders" (and even ordinary gay people!) wrung their hands in disapproval over ACT-UP's tactics, which they thought inappropriate, counterproductive, too provocative, and not to be condoned at all.
However! However: the same hand wringers later welcomed — and benefited from! — the changes that ACT-UP's actions had brought about.
Oh dear, what a moral quandry! How does one go about thanking someone for accomplishing something you desperately wanted, but in a way you didn't want them to do it?
I don't know, and I'm not going to worry about it either. I've decided that even if I may not condone the extremists, I'm not going to condemn them either. This I do in recognition of what we might call "social inertia", and there's a lesson here for those who [mistakenly] think that the "backlash" to recent successes in achieving marriage equality means "we" must tone down our demands, that we can accomplish change smoothly and without negative reaction if only "we" move slowly and gently enough.
Physical analogies abound for this observation: if you want to move something massive (i.e., with lots of inertia), like middle-of-the-road public opinion, it takes a lot of force to create perceptible motion. (Imagine a seesaw with a 600-pound gorilla on the other side; if you want to lift the gorilla, it helps if you sit at the extreme end of a long board on your side.) Trying to get all that inertia moving with tiny changes slowly made with incremental steps gets nowhere: it's just too hard to get it moving.
For better or worse–or both!–it seems that the only way to move massive public opinion is to tug at it as forcefully as we can pull from an extreme position, and by "extreme" I mean a good distance away from current opinion.
Significant, meaningful change always causes social backlash; creating backlash is, apparently, an important ritual for maintaining card-carrying Reactionary status.
Instead of worrying about reducing backlash, the hand-wringing "gay leaders" need to reflect on this bit of reality: how quickly social conservatives, when faced with the imminent reality of marriage between two men or two women, adopted "civil unions" ("Anything but 'marriage', please!") as the conservative position.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Tuesday, 25 January 2005 at 13.05
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And that reactionary behavior sometimes may be the root of the problem. I'm a firm believer that actions speak louder than words. Rhetoric, no matter how noble, sometimes grows tired.
You make very good points and I, too, don't want to criticize the gay radicals like ACT-UP. They were forceful and in hindsight, did get the CDC moving in the right direction.
Really like your posts. Keep up the great effort. Take care.