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	The Body Politic and Visions of Community
	Page 13 of 14 / Appx 1,200 words

Community(ies) now
-- or something else altogether

Some of the issues that gripped The Body Politic over its 15-year relationship with the idea of community seem almost quaint now. Others can still grip.

Pink Triangle Press has, partially and for the moment, dealt with the question of whether it is local or national by giving up trying to run a so-called national publication from Toronto, instead starting papers in other cities. Now there's not only Xtra but Capital Xtra and Xtra West, nationally linked but locally focused, each meant to be financially self-sustaining and editorially autonomous -- as long as they further the same cause. There's a new Mission Statement, dating from 1992, but in spirit it's much the same as in 1986; in fact much the same, if unwritten then, as in 1971.

Women make up a third of the Press's staff and hold the majority of its editorial jobs, though so far there still aren't many on its board of directors. But maybe more telling than the numbers is how infrequently they're noted. When there are divisions, it's rare that they're by gender. The ad imagery in each Xtra remains predominantly male, as does the commercial scene that generates it, but editorial content is more balanced and many lesbians, especially younger ones now, don't as often see the beef as a barrier to their own use of the papers' pages.

We don't hear much these days about the movement, though political action continues. And there are still a few guilt-tripping Farts -- blowing raspberries at people sitting around Toronto's famous ghetto gathering spot, "The Steps" of the Second Cup, instead of Walking for AIDS; tooting on about what a shame it is that more than half-a-million can come out for Pride Day when only (only!) 5,000 will demonstrate for spousal rights.

As ever, we're not quick to jump through hoops held up in attempted leadership. But never mind: today's finger-wagging flatulants -- more likely to be real estate agents than smart- assed college kids -- must compete with a lot of other voices. As for the ghetto: where any of the Press's papers finds one now, it doesn't call out the wreckers: it calls a real estate agent and asks about the rent.

Xtra looks out directly onto Church and Wellesley now, the heart of Toronto's gay downtown. Even though Xtra was born just off Queen West (where The Body Politic lived, in fact and sometimes in spirit, for most of its life) it can survey those streets as if having come home: here is the community -- in at least one sense of community -- that we ourselves helped build. The gay businesses along those streets are viewed now, mostly, as partners in that project. [For a closer look at this area see More on Church & Wellesley. Links there lead to related material.
(Full address: http://www.clga.ca/Material/Records/docs/toronto/morecw.htm)]

But if the existence of the ghetto isn't much a bone of contention any more, its composition and its claim on the definition of gay life (even if a claim only implied or inferred) certainly are.

In 1995, Toronto's Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee pulled off one of the biggest queer celebrations in North America -- out of fragmentation and just by a hair. The committee had fallen apart earlier that year and got pulled back together just in time; a record 600,000 people showed up for the event. It was an amazing achievement. But later the organizers heard the same kind of voices that were raised against Fruit Cocktail in 1983: I'm not male, not white, not well-off -- and your party wasn't about me.

For the most part, it was true. But for many it came as an attack, a demand, even a denigration of the struggles we've had to survive just to come this far: I don't care about your history -- this is now -- and what have you done for me lately? Knees jerked (we will try harder) but backs got up, too, making future tries harder still.

It's the done thing these days to say "communities" -- along with "diversity" and "inclusiveness" a watchword of the times. That's good, but not good enough.

The staff of Pink Triangle Press is more diverse than ever before, about a quarter of them clearly not WASP (not even everybody there is gay). Whether they are people of colour depends on how anyone, particularly they themselves, might define the term. It's rooted not in genetics but in the caste system of social power, and in identity politics at once acknowledging that system and meant to confront it -- just as gay and lesbian identities have been constructed to do.

In any case, no one at the Press is there as a token, there to represent some carefully chosen constituency. No one was hired in a rigorous attempt to "include" "diversity" (though we're all aware that it's happening and support it). They are all there in reflection of how social power in our piece of the world has changed.

I think we've seen something of how those changes happen. We did not come this far because our "diversity" was politely acknowledged; didn't get here by accepting any invitation to "inclusion" in someone else's world. None was offered. None would have been offered even if we had promised that, once inside, we'd resist any impulse to rearrange the furniture. We came together in enough numbers to wrest power for ourselves, to take the world, or pieces of it, and live there as we liked.

Women play unremarked roles at Pink Triangle Press now, as they didn't for many years at The Body Politic, because for a time a lot of women said they would not play. Lesbian separatism was painful for people seeking solidarity, but it gave lesbians some space to build their own bases of power.

And most men in the gay movement didn't just say: Well, so much for the dykes. We knew we still had issues in common and still paid those issues and their players attention. TBP reported on the Lesbian Organization of Toronto and would have tried to even if the one LOOT member most willing to work with men, Chris Bearchell, hadn't been there urging us on -- for too long as "Toronto's only lesbian."

Later Chris was not the only lesbian in town or at TBP, and even if some of the newer ones could be scathing about separatism, they could bring to their work with gay men (and with heterosexual feminists) the kind of clout they could not have had as individual lesbians without LOOT, even after LOOT was gone. [For more on LOOT see a review of Becki Ross's study, The House That Jill Built: A Lesbian Nation in Formation.
(Full address: http://www.clga.ca/Material/Books/docs/jill.htm)]

And we've seen that gay Asians, because they were organized -- having used The Body Politic as one way to organize -- could take on TBP itself. They were there in 1985 even when that classified ad asked for a black houseboy, not an "Oriental" one. They had no trouble seeing common cause in that with Zami and Lesbians of Colour, who could raise their voices in 1985 because, by then, they too were organized.

So, we have harder work to do than simply recreating the multicultural festival of Metro Caravan in gay guise and hoping that keeps everybody happy (and quiet). We should look past the bland concession of "diversity," past vaguely imperial notions of "inclusiveness" (welcome to my world: here's the rule book) -- and let's check all that colonizing talk about "outreach."

Let's get back to a richer concept, one we all know well: distinctiveness.

Next: What kind of world do you want? A polemical conclusion