Out at Work: Building a Gay-Labor Alliance. (Reviews).

Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery, eds. (University of Minnesota Press, 2000)

One of the most attractive features of Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCreery's Out at Work: Building a Gay-Labor Alliance is its sincerity--a genuine belief in the possibility for creating work environments based on equity. Such sincerity is bolstered by many of the volume's contributors, whose ideas and activist strategies rest on approaches and ideals that have served both gay and labor activists well. The promise offered by Out at Work is that gay and labor activists can learn from one another and, in the process, create transformative movements for positive and productive change. In the editors' words, "Out at Work is about advancing the workplace rights of lesbians, gay men, and other sexual minorities. We start from the belief that sexual rights can be pursued most effectively through a radical collation between the labor and LGBT movements" (xi).

The collection seems to have been completed shortly after the demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, and continued concern with the economy and its impact on the labor force makes this a timely anthology. Moreover, Krupat and McCreery benefit from recent work in examining the working lives of lesbians and gays. Mot notably, the editors acknowledge that part of their inspiration for their collection arose out of a viewing of the landmark film, Out at Work: Lesbians and Gay Men on the Job (produced by Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold).

While admiring Anderson and Gold's film, the editors of Out at Work--the book--concern themselves with a slightly different set of questions than Out at Work, the film. Krupat and McCreery make one primary distinction right away: "While the issue of coming out is implicit in virtually every essay in this anthology, there is actually very little in the book that speaks directly to the topic." Rather, the collection "focuses on a broad political issue: how to bring movements for gay and labor rights closer and into a long-lasting coalition" (xii).

To further this goal, the editors have organized their collection around a series of practical and pressing questions: "How would an effective gay-labor collaboration work? What would its goals be? What strategies would it employ to reach them? Is there a history from which both movements can learn?" (xiii). In many ways, asking such questions--or having to ask such questions--reminds us how much ground we have yet to cover in terms of socio-economic equality and justice. For instance, the editors rightly point out that "the majority of gays and lesbians are working-class people," and that "unions are obliged to represent the rights and demands of all employees in a workplace" (xiv). Acknowledging the obviousness of this, however, is not to lessen its importance; we, as activists, need to be reminded of our obligations to one another, and we need to interrogate-constantly--our own oversights, blindnesses, ignorances, and fears.

Moreover, by attempting to address the intersection of gay and working-class identity the editors and contributors of Out at Work offer useful advice about how to facilitate discussion and profitable exchange between labor and gay groups. By their own admission, the editors' goals are more "practical" than "theoretical," and essays tracing "The Growing Alliance between Gay and Union Activists," interviews with noted activists such as Riki Anne Wilchins and Amber Hollibaugh, discussions and forums about homophobia in the workplace--all offer personal insights into practical problems in thinking simultaneously and critically about how labor and gay activists can work collaboratively.

As such, I like this collection and found it often inspiring and even challenging. The editors' decision to address "thornier" issues, such as the rights of workers in the sex industry, is bold and provocative. Radical teachers will find much here to work with in their classrooms, and I can easily see the anthology as a useful text in a variety of courses--from classes specifically focused on labor issues to writing courses that want a powerful thematic focus.

In fact, a thorough and critical use of this collection in a course might also lead to an analysis of how the collaborative project forwarded--"building a gay-labor alliance"--is in need of a bit more critical reflection. More specifically, as I read through the collection, I increasingly sensed a disconnect between the practical questions addressed in the book and one of the major assumptions established in the first pages of the introduction. Indeed, the central assumption the editors make in their discussion of how to further this "long-lasting coalition" is that "class and identity are not separate categories of human experience, but integrated in the ways we understand our economic and social positions in life" (xiii). In many ways, this is one of the more pressing issues that gay and lesbian scholars and queer activists have been examining in the last several years, and its roots can even be traced to radical lesbian feminism and other early feminist thinking about labor, the use (and abuse) of the body in the social world, and the roles that define--and limit--our understanding of ourselves.

At the same time, though, the disconnect remains: the practical questions I pointed out earlier seem posed to bridge a "gap" between two separate movements, two distinct entities, whereas the stated assumption (rightly, I think) recognizes that class identity and sexuality identity are "integrated," and it suggests that a more powerful critique of our socio-economic situations and structures might proceed from this viewpoint, and not from a stance seeking "collaboration" between separate spheres of political endeavor.

This assumption steadily troubles the sincerity I noted earlier as one of the hallmarks of this collection. And that isn't really surprising, for trying to figure out how to translate into political action the insight that our identities are complexly integrated has been a problem addressed by many recent theorists and activists. We have had an easier time organizing around and lobbying for the rights of specific identities--one at a time. But, as these editors and many of their contributors acknowledge, this brand of single identity politics seems to have often eclipsed more thorough discussion--and potentially more thorough activism--about the many identities we occupy.

How can we begin doing this difficult work? In several ways, Krupat and McCreery attempt to address the difficult work of, in their words, not just "talking about the intersections between class and social identity," but starting to think "about social identity as fundamental to class" (xviii). For instance, in McCreery's contribution to the anthology, he discusses the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which, according to McCreery, "would do little to challenge heteronormative mores or conservative family values that dominate the workplace, many unions, and most mainstream LGBT organizations" (xix).

Out at Work also offers us many other hints, pointing out areas that need more work, more critical negotiation, more interrogation. For instance, certainly part of the "disconnect" between union activists and gay activists stems from homophobia on one side and a de-liberalizing assimilative strategy on the other. As the editors point out, "many LGBT activists and organizations remain aloof from the union movement, distrustftil and sometimes even disdainful, choosing instead a politics of assimilation that inhibits any radical analysis of class" (xv). To put this a tad less theoretically, some important gay rights organizations (such as the Human Rights Campaign) often cater to and serve a solidly middle- to upper-class strata of society--which is not surprising since much of their funding comes from queers with money. And, as McCreery and Krupat suggest, such organizations' steady emphasis on gay marriage as a "significant" social issue elides discussion of far more pressing social concerns--such as continued job discrimination against queers.

One of the more provocative pieces is a reprint of "Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism," a discussion between Amber Hollibaugh and Nikhil Pal Singh. Hollibaugh has been a long-time queer and labor activist, and her work never ceases to query the fundamental ways in which we think about our lives, our identities, our desires, and our bodies. Her interlocutor, Singh, is just as provocative, maintaining that:

Organizing should be based not on reductive notions of sameness but on a sense that, while we live our experiences differently through different modes of representation and desire, fundamentally we're engaged in a common struggle. We should not, in order to be sympathetic and understand each other, have to imagine ourselves as the same. (65)

While reading such a passage, I couldn't help but be reminded of my own institution's struggle with offering domestic partner benefits to its employees. Initial committee work to draft a proposal to submit to our administration involved heated debate, with many advocating that our best bet was to propose benefits only for same-sex couples. The reasoning behind this was varied, but it seemed to me that such a proposal came too close to "imitating" marriage, to pandering to a sensibility that maintains that we really aren't all that different from the straights: see, we have couples just like you do, so let us get married! Opening up these benefits to everyone would instead force us to acknowledge that many people lead their lives in "unconventional" ways, and some do not choose "traditional" living arrangements; this seemed too threatening for some. In those early discussions, I believe we failed to think of domestic partner benefits as an issue of economic equity for those either forbidden to marry or who cho ose not to marry, and we saw them instead as an opportunity to advance gay and lesbian couples as "legitimate."

More recently, our faculty union has proposed domestic partner benefits, but union leaders have categorized their proposal under the rubric "non-economic issues," while labeling general pay raises and discrepancies in salary between the genders as "compression and inequity." I have queried our union leadership about this, pointing out that seeing domestic partner benefits as a "non-economic issue" is a failure to understand them as a fundamentally economic issue. I can't help but believe that the split here stems from old--and I hope increasingly outdated--thinking about labor issues and gay issues as separate. In both scenarios, configuring DP benefits as an economic issue would certainly address disparities in compensation, but it would also prompt us to think a bit more critically about the social privileges accruing around certain institutions of hetero-normativity. Granted, this is tough work, but a persistence in seeing gay concerns and labor concerns as separate will eclipse important thinking--and opp ortunities for creating true equity and justice.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me be clear: I am not suggesting that establishing, promoting, and furthering collaborations between pre-existing organizations and groups is not important. It is, and such work contributes significantly to the causes of mutual understanding and the advocacy of greater social and economic equality. The concluding "forum," "Imagining the Gay-Labor Alliance: A Forum," poses--and answers--good questions about how gays and labor activists can collaborate successfully. Part of the success of such a piece lies in the combined thoughtfulness and experience of the contributors to the discussion--Urvashi Vaid, Kent Wing, Desma Holcomb, and Barney Frank. This is good work--and a good collection of thoughts, insights, and strategies. But I think that a critique which truly begins from another vantage point, one that sees class and sexuality as intimately intertwined, might be all the more powerful and provocative. And it might unite us in ways that we can only now envision through the lens o f collaborative negotiation. Out at Work gets us thinking along such lines, and I have a feeling--and a hope-- that others will further this work in even more powerful ways.

JONATHAN ALEXANDER writes frequently about queer issues. He has taught at the university level in Louisiana, Colorado, and Ohio, and he can be contacted at [e-mail].