"some are alive but dead. Consuming/ consumerist/ the good Americans"

~ poem by i

Mass culture, popular, or ‘pop’ culture, is an incredibly powerful propaganda tool in industrialized societies; utilizing various ‘avenues’ of discourse to make resonant its effects throughout the entire social organism, it becomes ubiquitous; moreover, under contemporary post-modern capitalism it generates and contours nearly the entirety of social organism. Just yesterday I was sitting at a café with a friend talking about ‘pop culture’ and how, especially with music, has a ‘brainwashing’ trance-like affect on society. At that moment, a man, in the gay neighborhood of Seattle walked past with a shirt that said ‘Pop Music Saved My Life.’ Perhaps this potentially queer man was ‘saved’ by pop music, but as with anything else that ‘saves’ one, there is usually a hidden-subtle ideology of control at work.

Capitalist culture and economics of consumerism affect nearly every society and sub-culture in the world. Right now, I would like to specifically look at where I ‘sit’ in society, as a gay man, a queer being and theorist in the United States. Within the LGBTQAI, or queer, community here exists people who want to ‘get normal’ and ‘be accepted’ – because who likes to be ostracized, right? Being invisible within the narratives of heteropatriarchy, from their ‘love stories’ to their institutions of power, like the military, family and marriage, queers are erased away from social space. We are ‘deleted’ from common consciousness; however, since the Stonewall Uprising in late 1960s, people have been coming out en masse and demonstrating their collective power. This was both a liberating act, and one that put queers into the category of ‘marketable demographic.’ Deleting queers from commons is still a part of dominant culture, and the 21st century ‘diversity’ obsessed ‘Lords of Capital,’ baby boomer CEOs and their yuppie mobs, have been pushing an agenda, along with wealthy queers and queer-consumerists, to ‘normalize’ us – or bring us into the precarious, but acceptable, world of consumerism, pseudo-individualism, marriage and nationalism.

The above deal being offered to us is a false one, one that we must say no to it, as Judith Butler pointed out when she rejected the ‘Courage’ award LGBTQAI award in Berlin, because as she noted the organizers of the event either sponsored or implicitly support a militaristic, racist homo-nationalism and homo-consumerism. Hyper-consumerism, the cult-of-self, normalization via heterosexual traditions like marriage & the military, the pseudo-connectivity of the ‘American’ bar scene & other frequently parroted pop-mass culture collectivist tropes are contemporary "panem et circenses," Latin for "bread and circuses" for the queers and queer culture. This current mise en scene of assimilation into straight society is not the end of queer struggle, it is, I believe, a part of the difficult work a community-marginalized goes through in a society that refuses to abolish its disparate hierarchies.

Instead of becoming queer-clones of heterosexual capitalism, which will only lead to a tepid ‘tolerance’ and tokenization for few queers and still keeps the rest of us in the oppressive non-consensual ‘sub-dom’ relationship of workers and bosses, we must kill the Idea of Lady GaGa, perhaps the strongest archetype of queer assimilation to-date. GaGa emulates, embodies and performs the idea of the ‘young-gay-man-fantasizing-as-if-heterosexual woman’ a strong narrative that goes back to Madonna and Judy Garland. Exploiting the need for a parallel love story within the queer community by offering hyper-romanticized and hyper-narcissistic songs about the big romantic Other, GaGa uses a long-standing cliché of pop music: turn focus onto the mysterious and elusive thought of the ‘partner’ – sexual, romantic and fulfilling every need. This Ideology of the Partner is a routinely used musical story; in fact, a walk through any grocery store will demonstrate pop music playing tunes of lost, found or impossible romance.

Marching in 2009 ‘equality’ spectacle in DC with Cleve Jones and others, Lady GaGa made a speech in support of gay marriage and assimilation into the military-industrial complex. She, pandering to a ‘marketable’ demographic and planning on the need of queers to be ‘recognized’ and heard, positioned herself as a corporate Queen. Posturing for the crowd, manipulating via romantic narratives targeted at gay men, promoting the hallmarks of capitalism: hyper-consumerist, pseudo-individualism, GaGa is the archetype of queer neoliberalism and assimilation into heteropatriarchy. S