Commentary: Listless
This week, Time Magazine released its 2008 list of the 100 most influential people, and I just wasted close to an hour trolling the list for queers. You know who I found? Karl Lagerfeld and Suze Orman (all those popped collars don’t lie). Yeah, the creepy old Nosferatu of fashion and dieting, and the lady that makes me feel like shit for just paying the interest on my student loans. Okay, so Oprah’s on the list and we all know about Gayle, maybe designer Takashi Murakami and golfer Lorena Ochoa are undercover ‘mos, and I guess you could argue that Angelina Jolie is bi-serious. But otherwise, this list seems short on queer representatives.
Maybe it’s just Time catering to a more mainstream audience, maybe lists are passé, maybe nowadays influential queers don’t feel the need to make a case of their sexuality, maybe in times of war and recession queer issues become backseat or absorbed into bigger concerns?
Scanning the queer press, I come up with names like Thomas Beatie, Irshad Manji, John Waters, Anthony Romero, Perez Hilton, Donna Rose, Lawrence King, and Lance Bass. When I think about iconic queer figures, it’s always through sepia-toned lenses (i.e. nostalgia for heroes of yesterqueer, like David Wojnarowicz–pictured).
There have to be some current queer leaders and revolutionaries, heroes and pioneers, scientists and thinkers, artists and entertainers, and builders and titans missing from this list.
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I ask myself the same question. Keep in mind that the repository of men now in their 50s and beyond who may have lived lives that would qualify them as leaders was devastated by disease. How many have we lost who would have filled TIME magazine this year? In many ways, we’re on our own. We are the next generation of leaders. Hopefully we will aspire to be more than just pop musicians, fashion mavens, and reality tv personalities.
I’m gonna cast my vote for Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, the women who run Cleis Press.
Suze Orman is a partnered lesbian, as she has herself so aptly put it. Oh and Time is supposed to cater to the mainstream, seeing as how they want to make a profit. Cute ‘zines aren’t profitable for publishing conglomerates, no matter how many hipsters gush about them on their blogs. If you’re going to effectively critique it for anything it would be that it is (as would be expected for a publication for a domestic market with a few ancillary parts of the world) overweighted with Americans. Sadr is clearly far more influential than any of the presidential contenders, since he can pull on them like marionettes as he wishes.
Ben, I think it’s curious that you describe an age cohort of decidedly “Old Gays” as perhaps having qualifications for the list, when you reject any association with them as part of TNG’s mission statement.
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