If only the
wealthiest gays have any real say in the equality movement,
what's a poor 17-year-old artist and activist to do?
Satre is an incoming senior at Notre Dame
Academy, a private Catholic high school in Middleburg,
Va., and the founder of the Virginia LGBT activist
group Equality Fauquier-Culpeper. He writes
regular journal entries for The Advocate.
For the past
few weeks I have been staying in New York City's
Greenwich Village, studying at the CAP 21 studio
at New York University just a few blocks from
Stonewall. I ran away from Virginia to come back to my
senses, to return to my city of art. I have come
to take the artist in me out of
hibernation—the artist who had been clouded by
the darksome politics of activism and media at home.
I have often
wondered why it seems that in the gay rights
movement in particular, there is a certain
type of person I see all too often, who is an activist
simply to get praise, pity, and the hope of
fame. Is it the job of an activist working in
political campaigns to question and strive to push
the LGBT community for attention? Or is it to lift that
person in the "gay hierarchy," which excludes a
large number of people?
This high
school pettiness permeates some of the most profound and
prestigious organizations and people who work for
equality in our country. Nowadays, to survive in
the world of gay activism, one must be extremely
wealthy. You have no say in things if your pockets
are not deep with potential and actual
donations. You have no say in things if you are not
on the highest rung of the economic ladder. You
have no say in things if you are on the lower bars
of the social class system.
This economic
animosity that has taken firm hold of our movement has
made us forget where we came from and how we
began. We are our own society of people who run a
system that mirrors the politics of this
country—the politics of fortune and glory.
People are
abusing this movement for their own purposes, and it is
no rarity to witness such political perversity. We
have worked so hard and have come further than we
could have ever imagined since the Stonewall riots. Yet
money and politics have gripped this movement and will
not loosen their embrace. I am 17, and I want out
of this corrupt scene before it corrupts me.
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You can contact Satre at tully@tullysatre.com
or via his MySpace page at myspace.com/whitedeosil.