say for the sake of argument there's this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who is writing his memoir in the late 80s I'm just gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R Delaney he's been named dropped on this channel before and probably will be again because he's my favorite writer so Delaney is writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50s early 60s which is to say nearly a decade before Stonewall and the ops to share a couple of anecdotes which I will relate to you now
one is about the time when he decided to come out to his therapy group while being gay in mid-century New York brought Delaney a lot of joy he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix by reflex he presented himself as lonely and ashamed though in reality he was neither and while he did eventually describe himself more accurately he can't help but muse in the book on the limits of language at the time back then the word gay was explicitly associated with high camp and
effeminacy where Delaney's more of a bear a term that was not yet in common usage the default term was homosexual which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder queer and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriation so while all the words to describe himself were technically available they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men that they were isolated aberrant and pitiable another stories about Delaney being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups
by the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secret edoardo trailers any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him but none could get a view of the whole but during the raid from his vantage point Delaney saw for the first time the size of the entire crowd and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops in the morning the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who'd been arrested and not the 80 or 90 who got away both of these stories
are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self reinforcing a constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and consequently from each other and the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by street people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing that narrative Delaney argues that among the most revolutionary things the 60s did to culture was the radicalization of language redefining old terms and popularizing new ones and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers in short two of the most powerful tools
for making any marginalized group less marginalized our language and visibility folks we're talking today about mainstreaming the process by which a group or idea from the fringes of society moves towards the center how strangers become neighbors and how thoughts become common sense there's this concept known as the Overton Window which I am NOT going to describe because plenty of people have done so already linked in the down there part but in short as a fringe group becomes more visible and their language becomes more commonplace their presence in society starts to seem normal they become demystified
some people who thought they were strange and threatening will start to warm up to them though this doesn't happen across the board many who hated them when they were fringe will see they're becoming mainstream as a kind of existential occupation of territory as in if this is normal now what does that make me but much of what is considered standard in society today has gone through this process now straight folks like myself often think that greater queer visibility and the proliferation of queer language is for our benefit if our queer friends feel safe coming out
to us and we know which words we shouldn't shouldn't use it makes it easier for straights and queer folks to be pals and it is true that no one gets mainstreamed without advocates in the existing mainstream but let's not beat around the bush language and visibility are tools of consolidating power visibility means having a sense of your numbers common language means forming alliances you get a bunch of formerly isolated gay men connecting with each other and accurately describing their experiences you've got yourself a movement with or without straight friends this is why it's to the
benefit of straight society to tell queer men that they are isolated because isolated queer men are in no position to make demands just so it doesn't get left out of yet another conversation Delaney is writing about gay men because the book is a memoir and that's his experience but neither he nor I are ignoring that the gay rights movement was kicked off by trans women okay while the example I'm using is a positive one that any progressive worth their salt should be in favor of mainstreaming is a morally neutral phenomenon culture is plastic any fringe
group or idea can become normalized regardless of its inherent Worth and for a certain subset of extremely online people with fringe beliefs who understand the ways mainstreaming has evolved in the attention economy it can be a weapon we need to talk about how a group of predominantly disgruntled 20 and 30-something white men congregating on anonymous image boards becomes a political movement whose members get profiled in the New York Times who's writing patterns are recognized by most of the internet and whose figureheads get staffed in the White House where did the alt-right come from mainstreaming is
not a wholly organic process because usually the people who get mainstreamed are actively working to become so the people usually have only so much control over how and how fast this happens a group expands its language and disability if this leads to larger numbers and greater mainstream acceptance the process repeats this time with a bigger group and a larger audience so long as there is growth each cycle is more impactful as the bigger group is the faster it gets even bigger and the more common language becomes the faster it proliferates by all rights if your
beliefs are wildly unpopular this process shouldn't work your language and disability don't expand because too many people don't want to talk like you or about you so what then well normally you either give up or bide your time but if you have a lot of media literacy and no real moral compass you get it done dirty if the media doesn't want to cover you make yourself newsworthy threaten to publicly out immigrants in front of a crowd start a hoax about white student unions lead a white power rally and leave the hoods at home do the
kinds of things that journalists cannot in good conscience ignore and once you've made yourself news they'll feel they can't publish a condemnation without getting your side of the story so bam you've got yourself an interview the more erratic and dangerous you seem the more they'll want to write a profile so people can figure you out the article about how surprisingly normal you in person basically writes itself if you want to spread a conspiracy theory send it to a small local news site that doesn't have the resources to fact-check you once they publish something salacious all
the bigger news channels will have to talk about it if only to debunk it put provocative stuff in front of politicians because anything they retweet has to be news in a pinch you can always piggyback off a famous activist by making takedown videos or if you're really ambitious harass someone at a conference everyone is desperate for clicks if you can generate them you'll get your message out and if nobody's adopting your language adopt it for them make sure you and all your friends each have half a dozen fake Twitter accounts spamming the same terminology at
anyone who discusses race gender orientation or ability put every Jewish name in parentheses until everyone on the internet knows what that means whether they want to or not hell don't even do it yourself Russia is not the only one who can make BOTS make thousands of BOTS and make sure your real account your fake accounts and your BOTS all talk the same so that no one can tell the difference anymore make hashtags and get them trending all by yourself and while you're at it spam all the hashtags for movements you hate with porn and gore
so they can't be used and if your words and memes still aren't popular just steal words and memes that are already popular just decide this this means white power now this is anti-feminist now saturate the web with your new usage always insisting that you're doing it ironically while eroding confidence in anyone who uses these terms in the original sense and never stop insisting that everyone would talk the same as you if there weren't so much damn censorship Delaney's experience was having few words to describe himself that could conjure images of a gay man in a
loving community what the alt-right does is shout you just call everyone you don't like nazi while there people are giving interviews wearing Nazi paraphernalia they even argue that calling dudes marching to the tune of Jews will not replace us Nazis is somehow anti-semitic meanwhile they asked to be called identitarian x' and race realists they want to stigmatize words that conjure images of white fascism which again they very explicitly support and replace them with words that conjure images of clean-cut philosophy majors and where Delaney saw a group of 80 or 90 gay men reported in the
papers as a group of four or five the alt-right wants to get reported as being much larger than it actually is they want to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary up to an including violence but to ensure that any time the cameras trained on a violent act there is a man in a suit ready to distance himself from it to paint the picture that but for a few bad actors this is a peaceful movement of young presentable intellectuals this isn't simply a battle between different ideologies this is a battle over the definition of
normal the alt-right knows how plastic culture can be their anger comes from the normalization of things they hate and their movement exists because they believe anything that becomes mainstream can be made fringe again which is why if you want to cater to them you promise to reassert old norms much as we'd like to believe that people are driven by morality most people are driven by the desire to be normal and when the news is filled with images of swastikas iron crosses and tiki torches the guy in the suit with the fasci haircut looks pretty normal
by comparison and that's why he wears the suit thankfully the plasticity of culture cuts both ways just as surely as we can lose all the ground we've gained over the last half century everything the alt-right does to make itself palatable can be undone in fact it's maybe beginning to happen it's going to be a long road that will probably require changes to how media platforms generate traffic and a lot of new politicians but I want you to keep a phrase close to your heart this is not normal that phrase has become something of a mantra
since the election in 2016 and it can be misused white supremacy sexism and every other kind of bigotry are part of the fabric of American life and always have been so even if this is more extreme than the huge it's not by nearly as much as most privileged people like to think so I want you to treat this less like an observation and more like a statement of intent whatever [ __ ] the outright polls I want you to say this is not normal this is not normal this is not normal we will not let
this be normal [Music]
