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There's an upcoming free screening of "United in Anger: A History of Act UP," at the Gene Siskel theatre on December 1. 

I have very grave problems with the fact that the film is being introduced by Jeff Edwards, a Gender Studies and Political Science professor at Roosevelt University. He's also a former member of Queer to the Left, and the man who once attempted to discredit my subsequent work by writing, in a public email, that I was "damaged goods" and that my sex life (about which he seemed to claim to know a great deal) marked me as not queer enough. 

I dread the prospect of hundreds of  panels on the same topics:  “Will we ever again have a Black President?” or “Are we now PRE-racial?”, as if the problem were with the racial identity of a neoliberal President and not with his neoliberalism.

To those of you who insist that you will be the ones to hold Obama's feet to the fire: you are as deluded as those who marry alcoholics vowing to change them, and I have no interest in coddling your delusion.  When he wins—and I suspect he will, even if by a very slim margin—the only feet I plan on holding to the fire are yours.

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In the end, the public confrontations between the two men amount to little more than a Clash of Neoliberals.  We are enthralled as two wealthy men, one white and one black—both of whom have emerged from and owe their allegiance to specific economic power blocs—argue over points which betray their almost exactly similar policies.  Yet, like the most addicted gamblers, we still delude ourselves into thinking that we actually have a stake in this game. We are persuaded that a gamble is actually a choice, and that may be the biggest shell game of all.

We are not connected by the truth or universality of our experiences because our experiences are not universal.  Instead, we are connected by the systemic links between the oppressions that grind us down.