KKKutest of the Castro Reportback...

I am Ralowe T. Ampu... i am a...well, black homosexual... uh, diagnosed male and an anarchist rapper
activist with radical queer direct action group gay shame, here in San Francisco.

This writing is supposed to be a record of the events
taking place today at a beauty paegeant at the Castro Street Fair,
the really mainstream misogynist patriarchal white consumer male space in San Francisco.

This is...
trying to be a beginning... first, I never (when in the Castro) feel "in of place"
(in a tongues untied sense, or...)
... or I, let's say... when entering the Castro district, I am always hyper-aware of my body...

a very loathsome hyper-awareness to be precise, where in general
my movements feel almost completely unmonitored anywhere else i go... it's like putting
my head in an
electric
current,
and I avoid it (going there: the Castro) as much as possible...
But! Today! (on the occasion of the Castro Street Fair and subject of this writing)
i figured out a tricky way to negotiate the gay gaze... (during the Gay Shame protest)
...if you wanna know:
it's a purple piece of shit costume that I found on 18th street a year ago nearly...
reinforced with chicken wire, and made to look like, um...
(a character from a major fast food chain that I'm going to deliberately omit...)

...wearing this armor, and with my world's loudest whistle, i set out to participate in a
disruption of a beauty contest at the Castro Street Fair...(with Gay Shame) "The Cutest of the Castro" it's called (the beauty contest)...
and all the contestants were male and white and young. well, except for four out of ten (i think at least ten, no more than ten, i think), being non-white races. originally, this was supposed to be a benefit for Maitri, which is an AIDS hospice, but they (Maitri) backed out, as was announced a week or so ago in the Bay Area Reporter. A place like Maitri where people with AIDS basically wait to die somehow felt awkward excepting money raised by a contest celebrating this fantasy fetish of youth and ability. which is interesting, because it might be interpreted that there is some shred of scruples in the mainstream gay world... but i doubt it... (despite all the "social consciousness" flying around in the "community" in the past months: see below...)
so, so, so we made this huge banner that said "BODY FASCISM - NOT CUTE" and proceeded to disrupt the contest. it was huge towering over the crowd of irate objectification revelers... you know, gay men are really mean.

but my costume made it possible to be in the middle of all this disgusting objectification and withstand the usual desperation that overcomes me whenever i'm in the castro... so that was really cool. i got on stage and tore the ugly Joe Philips "CUTEST OF THE CASTRO" banner... and they had to take it down...
I should have decked Heklina for yelling at my friend earlier when she handed her one of our fliers explaining why gay shame was there.
they offered to let us, the formidable protesters speak on their mike, but i don't think we had any of our fliers left to read that explained why body fascism is problematic...
it is for a number of reasons, as i was trying to explain to someone in the residence hotel that i live in... he told me that i was making too much of a big deal about it...
true, there are a number of other things that our group could have organized around, but my interest in participating was in hopefully expressing in a very defiant and angry public fashion how assigning prestige and desirability to a single elite white male ruling class creates a hierarchy that legitimizes the oppression of everyone else who does not fit into this category of respect and authority, therefore making possible such specific oppressive apparatuses as gentrification, police violence, exploitation, genocide, etc.

whether or not the connect-the-dots beginning-middle-end of this social narrative of systematic violence and disenfranchisement was effectively messaged to these coors-drinking muscle-idiots i'm not one hundred percent sure of, but at the very least, they heard our upset at the obvious reinforcement of misogyny, classism, ablism and racism with the selection of the contestants parading across the stage...
i kind of wish we could have shown how this is connected to the police murder of cammerin boyd, the transphobic homocide of delicious, the gentrifying business improvement of both bayview-hunters point by the third street light rail/"life sciences" biotech economy and gayborhood in lake merritt... that all these things occur among populations of a so-called "non-white other" which is deliberately omitted from representation in this contest... i am not stating that the racial representation of these oppressed people in this contest would be a good thing, particularly if all these contest were still all male, young and "cute"... even further, i am not stating that if these diverse people of all genders, classes and ages were contestants that it would not counteract the commodification of identity in a violent capitalist system... in summarizing, there are a great number of concerns to be resolved before even considering a "beauty contest" of any sort...

There's been a great deal of fuss lately about the Castro not being an inclusive space, but limiting the discussion to inclusion will not resolved the many other oppressive facets of a centralized urban gay center under capitalism catering mostly to men. I'm not impressed by the organizing that has been happening around the notion of "inclusion;" for a number of reasons it is not compatible with the broad project i've seen being facilitated during my participation with gay shame which seeks to multidimensionally continue historical struggles on a wide variety of fronts, from the assimilationist oxy-moron of gay marriage to the outrageous public police lynching/murder of cammerin boyd.

I'm posting all this to a site (sf.indybay.org) that has been the site (lately) of
mostly postings about MARRIAGE EQUALITY, MARRIAGE EQUALITY, MARRIAGE EQUALITY... sometimes it feels like our group (Gay Shame) is the only one
around willing to challenge all these problematic
examples of... well, social reproduction... or, in this particular context, the ways in which groups of people
continue to fuck themselves over in the same systems of fucked-over-ness over and over again...
perpetuating gender, class and racial hierarchies through beauty contests, very overtly through a beauty contest, and in somewhat more complex way through
marriage;
as a group of people who were ostracized and forced outside of gender norms through their sexuality seek to be inducted into this ostracizing authority by mimicking the social forms of this... ostracizing authority... er, and, like, basically completely sabotage any potential valuable oppositional viewpoint to said ostracizing authority...
(god that was sloppy... okay what i wanted to say was:
"...and in a somewhat more complex way through marriage *by assimilating into an oppressive paradigm*")
(fuck! that's not clear at all either: let me say: "in a more complex way through marriage *by queer people acting like straight people*" ... i mean,'
what's the point of being queer if you're trying to act
straight??) ... (that makes more sense...i think)

(note to sf.indybay.org lgbti/queer page moderator and Castro Street Fair creatine-abusers:) My point is that I see queer activism is being a lot more dynamic...
i think a queer identity
and a recognition of how one is oppressed because of
said queer identity
is a starting point to an unlimited political activity in many different and very involved levels...
beyond Pride, voting, marriage and beauty contests... (well, 3 out of 4 ain't bad)
Sincerely,
Ralowe T. Ampu (person in grimace costume)...

This report and recounting of the events taking place today at San Francisco's Castro Street Fair and the "Cutest of the Castro" [sic] beauty pageant occurring wherein and the Gay Shame protest transpiring concurrently thereof in closing marks the first actually flesh-and-blood action of said queer radical group "Gay Shame" this year 2004, with the promise of further and grander forms of insurgence soon. Gay Shame holds open meetings every Saturday 5:30 p.m. (sharp!) at Modern Times Bookstore (in the back) 888 Valencia Street at 20th: All Are Welcome. Their website is: http://www.gayshamesf.org/

Thanks for reading!
The virus in the sytstem.

RIP JonBenet Ramsey