Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations

3. Getting Skilled in Queer Diversity: Christopher Street West

50 Chapter 3 Getting Skilled in Queer Diversity: Christopher Street West The ability to understand, manage, and speak about diversity has become a highly marketable skill—or, to use French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term, a new form of “cultural capital”—in the U.S. workplace. Corporations , universities, and government organizations have paid billions of dollars to diversity trainers in order to eliminate workplace discrimination and harassment, with varying degrees of success.1 When previous iterations of diversity management have failed to deliver the cross-cultural harmony they promised, new authorities have emerged to critique and redefine the field. A still-growing supply of books and certification programs provides business executives, managers, human resource specialists, consultants, entrepreneurs , and employees with the diversity skills necessary to get ahead in a changing global economy.2 Yet an extraordinary irony of the growing workplace diversity movement is that the most disadvantaged workers—those holding the lowest-paid positions, the working poor, immigrant workers— are those least likely to be recognized as experts on the subject of diversity. Instead, the kind of diversity-related knowledge deemed worthy of placement on one’s resume is typically that which is gained in college or as a manager or supervisor in the corporate workplace. The production of professional knowledge about diversity has helped to solidify class disparities rather than to challenge them. As described in the next chapter, even grassroots queer organizations have been affected by the corporate diversity management movement and the professionalization of diversity. National and large local queer organizations often recruit leaders directly from the corporate sector, resulting in the Getting Skilled in Queer Diversity 51 influx of corporate-modeled diversity trainings, data-driven approaches to inclusion, and instrumental logics that emphasize productivity and public image over social justice. But how do queer activists, at a more individual level, determine what it means to be knowledgeable about diversity? Have ideas about what it means to be a qualified activist evolved in response to the growing emphasis on multi-issue politics in the queer movement, and the political environment generally? Diversity skills—including the ability to speak publicly and articulately about the importance of diversity, to demonstrate one’s commitment to different groups and their concerns, and to critique others’ presumably deficient diversity skills—have currency not just within the business sector, but also within activist circles and community-based organizations. Diversity skills, as I will argue, are a core component of “activist capital,” or the skills that provide some activists with moral authority and social and professional advantages at the movement level. Knowledge of, and commitment to, multi-issue politics should be of critical importance to queer activists, but my concern in this chapter is with the ways in which claims to diversity expertise (and correspondingly, criticisms of other activists’ diversity-related incompetence) can work to mask class-based forms of difference or, more importantly, to marginalize working-class activists whose approach to diversity is framed as unprofessional. In 2000, I began participant observation research at Christopher Street West (CSW), the organization that produces L.A.’s LGBT pride festival and parade. Unwittingly, I began studying CSW just before a series of press expos és and political interventions drew attention to the “incompetence” and poor social skills of the event organizers. In this chapter, I tell the story of conflicts between the working-class organizers of CSW’s pride event, on the one hand, and lesbian and gay professionals, the gay press, and local gay poli­ ticians, on the other. Public criticisms of CSW came primarily from white gay men, who called for a “more professional” team of organizers— people who could ensure that the event better represented the race and gender diversity of the queer community. As I will show, these tensions point to the convergence of political values regarding the inclusion of multiple issues and differences, and upper-middle-class values that emphasize the importance of professionalism, visual aesthetics, and managerial skills. While some may view this convergence as a sign of progress, I point out what may be lost in this process: the contributions and representation of workingclass activists, as well as alternative conceptualizations of diversity that foreground subculture, spontaneity, and vulgarity. 52 Respectably Queer The Complexities of Class Despite the significance of class in the reproduction of social hierarchies, class identity has often received less focused attention than race and gender within both mainstream diversity projects and progressive...