In which Lucy Mangan reveals the emperor's new clothes:
only in a closed environment and entirely self-validating community can the existence of George Osborne et al ever make true sense, even to them. Outside, there is always a good chance that someone is going to point a quivering finger and cry disbelievingly, "You!? You??!?? Chancellor of the exchequer of a G8 country? You?!?" or cause an incredulous and dangerously disconcerted crowd to gather round David Cameron - perhaps out on one of his date nights with Sam - by shouting, "They made you PM? But... but... but... I thought all you'd ever done was tell PR lies for some piss-poor TV company? Did I miss a global frigging memo or what? Or what?" Down would come the house of cards, if not, alas, the House of Commons.
Written because 'Duke University Press ends its influential Series Q this month', Queer and Then? is well worth a read to see how far society, and theory, has come (and what we risk losing still), but also particularly for this 'anonymous, photocopied broadside' from 1992, written by Zoe Leonard, 'a member of Fierce Pussy, a lesbian feminist group with roots in Act Up':
I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn't possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.
[And seriously, how have I not posted since May?!]