The Gentrification of the Mind Read online

  “There are thousands,” I said.

  I loved that he wanted to know, and hated that he didn't get it, didn't understand what was missing, how much is gone. How would he?

  Another young man, similarly likeable and attractive, asked if he could come over and interview me. When he came to my apartment, I was surprised by the tenor of the interview. There was no urgency. He didn't have—as I expected he would— theories or ideas or passions that he wanted to talk over. I had hoped that he would bring new ideas into my life, but instead he wanted them from me. He didn't have something that he needed to know. He just wanted me to give him the interview. Recite my stories. I realized that he was looking for something to care about. He was looking for a hook.

  We never discussed if he was HIV-positive, how he negotiated sex, how he had internalized the conflicting message of AIDS.

  Ironically, a parallel experience occurred in my classroom at the College of Staten Island. That semester I was teaching night school. I had thirty-five kids of sixteen different nationalities in a writing workshop. Most of the kids who attend the College of Staten Island are working class or poor, many are immigrants. I had been at my job for eleven years, but it didn't take more than the first few months for me to learn that Staten Island is hell for queer kids. Year after year my colleague, queer theorist Matt Brim, and I cry on the night bus coming home from work about how profoundly traumatized our queer students are. We do everything we can to intervene but for most of them, by the time they get to us, it's too late. This night a girl, Michelle, came out in class. She had been taking my courses for two years and had never given any sign of being queer, but this one evening she read a story about falling in love with a girl in high school and starting a passionate sexual relationship. When her parents found out, they gave her an ultimatum. If she wanted to have a family, she would have to break up with her girlfriend. Without much thought, she followed their instructions. Three years later, waiting in the bathroom line of a Staten Island straight dive bar, she met another woman and fell in love. In her story, Michelle described uncontrollable desire, accompanied by the knowledge of the tremendous familial punishment that lurked, waiting to pounce. And it did. After one year together, again there was a terrible show-down with her family when they confronted her with her hidden cache of L Word DVDs. There was another ultimatum, and finally she again broke up with her lover in order to have parents. At the end of the story, the protagonist finds a boyfriend, Danny. She says that she is able to “be comfortable” with him. And the story closes with her parents gleefully welcoming Danny into their home to watch the football game, offering him a glass of beer.

  Later in my office, Michelle tells me, “I know my parents love and support me. This is just too hard for them to understand.”

  I say nothing, but I know that her parents do not love and do not support her. All they care about are themselves. They do not see her as real. And for now, she agrees with them.

  Although the young queer artists and Michelle come from diametrically opposed class positions, they are having a similar experience rooted in a lack of consciousness. For some reason, neither has any cultural context for being able to imagine a more humane, truthful, and open way of life, in which their expressions and self-perceptions would not have to be diminished for the approval of straight people. To be more assertive about their own experience.

  After that conversation, Jim and I sat down and reevaluated what we had been doing. All these years of conducting interviews, we had been focused on conveying the heroism of ACT UP. But we had not succeeded at conveying the suffering. We had not conveyed how profoundly oppressed we had been, and how we were able to see clearly and act effectively despite that. And we certainly had not addressed the consequences of AIDS on the living. No one had.

  Something had happened between A and B. Something had been erased. Some truth had been forgotten and replaced.

  A new arena of thought emerged in my mind. What happened was no longer the most pressing question. We had made progress in starting to document what had happened. Anyone could find out by reading the Oral History Project.

  Instead, I was being compelled by a much more complex question: What were the consequences of AIDS?

  How did it happen that there were two such different trajectories of consequence? That there was the suffering and trauma for some, and the vague unknowingness for others? What was the mechanism that obscured the reality and replaced it with something false, palatable, and benign? Something diminishing and destructive and yet that appeared so neutral?

  With this paradigm in place, I continued to watch my own experiences.

  I was invited to Hartford, Connecticut, one of the poorest cities in the country, to speak to an organization for women with AIDS. The HIV-positive women in the audience were mostly Black and Latina. Like every other person with AIDS in the world, they had become infected through injection drug use or unsafe sex with infected partners. Now they were students, community workers, safe sex educators, peer counselors. Many described themselves to me as “activists,” but actually they were working for social service agencies, or as part of AIDS bureaucracies. The distinction between service provision and activism has become elusive. Poor people are very interwoven into state agencies: there's a lot of surveillance and intersection. My life has shown me that activists win policy changes, and bureaucracies implement them. In a period like the present where there is no real activism, there are only bureaucracies. So, when there are severe budget cuts, lack of jobs, lack of educational opportunities, foreclosures, et cetera, there are no structures in place radical enough to be able to mobilize people to respond effectively. These women were under siege by U.S. government policies, but had no political movement, only a social service sector to occupy.

  My talk was about the history of the women with AIDS empowerment movement. I read them a piece I had published twenty-three years before in the Village Voice about women being excluded from experimental drug trials. The article included quotes from interviews with pharmaceutical executives about how “unreliable” women were, not dependable like “art professionals” (their euphemism for gay men). I then showed a sixteen-minute excerpt from Jim's film, about ACT UP's four-year campaign to change the Center for Disease Control's definition of AIDS so that women could get benefits. The film showed the early leaders of the women with AIDS movement, Black and Latina women—just like those in the audience. Katrina Haslip, Iris De La Cruz, Phyllis Sharpe— ex-prisoners, ex-addicts, ex-prostitutes, now leading a political movement, literally yelling and screaming in the rain in front of government buildings demanding policy changes. Jim had superimposed the birth dates and death dates under the name of each activist, so it quickly became clear that all of these leaders had died.

  When the lights came up, there was a kind of stunned silence. Later, I heard from many women in the audience, that they had no idea that any of this had ever happened. They did not know that women had ever been excluded from treatment, they did not know that women couldn't get benefits—and most importantly, they did not know that women exactly like themselves had been leaders and activists forcing government agencies to change their policies. Even though they were currently under-served, losing benefits through budget cuts, and in desperate need of an activist movement for poor people in America, they did not know their own legacy of leadership. They did not know that they could change the world, and that people in exactly their circumstance had already done so.

  On the way home these images were reeling in my mind. The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize one's self as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change.

  What is this process? What is this thing that homogenizes complexity, difference, dynamic dialogic action for change and replaces it with sameness? With a kind of institutionalization of culture? With a lack of demand on the powers that be? With c
ontainment?

  My answer to that question, always came back to the same concept: gentrification.

  First I needed to define my terms. To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomena: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of culture and relationship, and this destruction has profound consequences for the future lives of cities.

  But in the case of my particular question, while literal gentrification was very important to what I was observing, there was also a spiritual gentrification that was affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their own condition. There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.

  So I set out to write this book and articulate how

  • the unexplored consequences of AIDS

  • and the literal gentrification of cities

  • created a diminished consciousness about how political and artistic change get made.

  A number of interesting obstacles presented themselves as I worked.

  1. None of this can be proven. There are no statistics, footnotes or quantitative studies I can cite, conduct, or synthesize which can prove that the consequences of suffering combined with the homogenization of cities produces a change in consciousness.

  2. Therefore, it is best to acknowledge from the beginning that this book is really a personal intellectual memoir of what I have observed, experienced, and come to understand. It is not a scholarly or academic book. If I were an academic, I might describe my thesis this way: “A certain urban ecology of queer subcultural existence has been wiped out, through both AIDS and gentrification; this ecocide has resulted in less diversity. The author seeks to address this through radical insights and knowledge of vanished practices and the landscapes that necessitated them” (adopted from an anonymous reader's very helpful report submitted to the University of California Press about this manuscript). The reader also generously commented that the book “comes from a particular subcultural experience and is a valuable account of that subculture, as being a pertinent comment by a member of that subculture on large-scale issues of general importance.”

  3. That the gentrification of book publishing raises serious formal questions about how this story should be told.

  I mean, let's face it. In another era the late, fiercely radical, Lesbian visionary Jill Johnston could publish hardcover books in mainstream corporate publishing houses with no capital letters. Now she would have to self-publish Lesbian Nation, and no one would know it existed. How ideas are allowed to be expressed has narrowed considerably in the current era.

  In the period in which I emerged as a writer, the 1980s, small and large presses published books of queer ideas that were not academic. And even I managed to publish with both Duke University Press and Routledge without a single footnote. But times have changed. The town/gown split which makes the academy the home of much of the new work in queer thinking means that university presses too have become more narrow and professionalized in terms of what kinds of queer work they are willing to present.

  I am, after all, an artist who has published a number of books that are highly formally inventive. My novels, Empathy (1992) and The Mere Future (2009), in particular are not middlebrow literary novels, but rather use associative thinking, collage, wordplay, juxtaposition of materials, and other long-recognized methods of art practice to convey ideas so complex that derivative conventional narrative constructions would not do those ideas justice. In other words, some ideas have to be formally replicated, instead of being described. They have to be evoked. This is especially true when talking about urban experience. What music best evokes life in cities? Improvisational jazz, real rock and roll, and rap/hip-hop/sampling. It's the clash of systems that produces the authentic representation of the complex whole.

  Because the idea of The Gentrification of the Mind is an abstract one, although based in the realest, most fundamental experiences of being alive, there are places in this book where ideas are expressed cumulatively. They are not just laid out, or told, or recounted, but rather are revealed by the reader's taking in graphs, interviews, affidavits, dispersed anecdotes, profound shifts in place—by letting it all sink in and add up.

  This style means that each reader will have a different experience of the book. Which to me, is an antigentrification process: individuation of perception. Or perhaps I'm just an old school avant-guardian, and I don't like things to be formally predictable or bland. I realize that a certain uniformity of standard is inherent in the idea of the academy, but in this case, I rely enormously on the intellectual and aesthetic open-mindedness of the University of California Press, my editor Niels Hooper, and the kind anonymous reader, to allow the book to live and let the public experience and judge for themselves.

  But as a reader myself, I have always most enjoyed books that I can be interactive with. I like to fiercely agree with one idea— and fiercely disagree with the next. That kind of dynamic relationship requires a lot of ideas coming at once, from which the reader can pick and choose. Nothing bores me more than the one-long-slow-idea book, and I promise to never write one.

  I do not know who will be the president of the United States when you get around to reading this. Will it be some fascist Christian idiot whose supporters don't have the ability to conceptualize? Will it be a pure capitalist who is pro-choice but sells off public hospitals to his real estate developer friends to build even more luxury housing? Will it be Zelig Obama, the man who just wants to be liked, or Super–Franklin Delano–Obama, the guy who brought jobs, housing, health care, equal rights, and education to all Americans? Will gay Afghanis beg gay American soldiers to stop killing them in the name of Queer Nation? Will the market continually crash so that no one who has a job will ever be able to retire and everyone who is unemployed will never work again? Will a two-bedroom apartment with an elevator in Manhattan ever go below $900,000? Will there be a successful multicharacter play by an out lesbian author with an authentically lesbian protagonist in the American repertoire? Will my school not run out of paper and toner by January, so that the teachers won't have to pay for xeroxing out of our own pockets? Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they're consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?

  Let me make a prediction:

  Gentrification, the historic era of urban replacement, has come to an end.

  First of all, I would like to put in a request to historians to periodize gentrification. It should go in this order: the Cold War, Civil Rights, Vietnam, the Women's Revolution, the Disco Years, the Boom, Perestroika, and the Plague. Next is Gentrification and then, the Crash.

  I claim that—with the crash of the credit markets, the corporate bailout, institutionalized unemployment, the foreclosure epidemic, and prolonged war as the only way of employing poor people—this process, the influx of white money into mixed neighborhoods as a means of displacing the residents and replacing them with racial, cultural, and class homogeneity, will no longer be in motion. I predict that it will stop for a while.

  It is true that the damage from America's Second Gilded Age (see Boom above) has been profound and cannot be undone. And destroyed neighborhoods remain destroyed. And gentrified neighborhoods are not going to return to the people who used to live in them. But the remaining mixed low-income communities of our country, where longtime residents, young people, immigrants, and artists can afford to live and mix as equals are in far less danger of being invaded and neutralized due to the lack of credit. The monster that ate New York is taking a nap.

  Today, I pass empty storefronts throughout the ci
ty and wonder how long it is going to take for renegade theater companies to start renting out those spaces for weekends or weeks at a time, just to put on a show. I wonder how many more expensive restaurants can make it in the East Village. Maybe they will stop opening them. Landlords could potentially care that the only companies who can pay their commercial rents are Dunkin Donuts, banks, and Duane Reade. Might we possibly get some stores that actually sell things that people need? That provide community services? I think it's possible. An independent bookstore just opened on Avenue A while Barnes and Nobles closed on Astor Place. This is fantastic news. Can artists figure out how to show and be seen in the midst of this economic moment? I believe that if they are really creative they can. It's a moment filled with opportunity for people who can think for themselves. There are holes in the cultural fabric, and no one seems to be in tight control. Even the horrifying lack of jobs means that the yuppie road that some were blindly, socially obliged to follow is no longer a realistic option for many who were once invited. This means having to piece together “a living” through an eclectic combination of one's abilities, dreams, relationships, visions, will, and skill. Not a great setup for most, but very enriching for all if enough people can take advantage of the moment to create new paths.

  We are living in a fascinating, ungraspable time filled with potential and confusion. We don't actually know what is really going on with our economy: Is it a temporary disaster or a permanent one? We also don't know what is really going on with global relationships and human rights. Is the U.S. government really just a dusty one-room office in the subbasement of global capital? Are alliances and enmities just a performance? Whatever the “reality,” no one can say for sure how Americans, or at least Blue State Americans (let's secede from the Reds and get it over with), are going to come to understand this shifting experience of self and other. I do, however, believe that there is more potential for progressive human relationship within the multitude of crisis than there was during the blindly engorged, self-satisfied Gentrification era (the one between the Plague and the Crash). In order to shed its chains we have to at least try to understand. This book is my effort to find awareness about what was lost, what replaced it, and how to move forward to a more authentic and conscious and just way to live.