Submitted by Robby Diesu, TNG contributor

Robby Diesu is a graduate of Catholic University with a degree in Political Theory and Philosophy. He has been involved with nonviolent struggles for the past 4 years.

I recently wrote a post for The New Gay about how voting in and of itself is utterly pointless. I also elaborated a little bit on how I theorize true liberation will and could occur for our communities. It pissed a lot of you off and that was the point.

The underlying thesis was to get people to start really thinking about voting, and how our liberation has nothing to do with it. It is crap that our constant plea is for the state to solve our problems and we need to start looking at other alternatives. We as a community need to start looking outside the conventional understanding that is thrown in our face about how we will achieve equality, or better yet be liberated.  So now that you voted, let’s talk about how we can make actual change. I want you to see that another world is possible and just voting is not going to make it happen.

As evidence to my thesis on change, that our liberation will come not from above but from within our own community, I offer this: Another analogy!

Although I loved going to Catholic University, there is something that needs to be known far and wide about it. It is a microcosm, particularly when you think about how the state interacts with the masses. The administration is concerned with one thing —its image to the public — and that’s about it.  There are those in power who control everything, and they are all white males. CUA has never had a female or a person of color as president.

The vast majority of students just don’t care about anything. There is a small majority who care about what’s going on in varying degrees. Then there are the students the university has chosen to be in power. All fit what the administration — the state, so to speak— see as those who should be the ones in control. They are young white republicans, with the occasional tokenized woman or person of color, thrown in. Yet what’s important about these students whom are considered the ones in power, is the fact that they only have the power that is given to them from the administration ­— or the state.

Of those who actually care about changing the system, or making Catholic a better place, there is an even slimmer minority who see the need to take direct action against the oppression. Those who want to take direct action against the system of oppression that was Catholic University formed the one thing the school feared the most. We started a group for the homos, and we named it CUAllies.

CUAllies is a prefect example of how we can make actual change, not by asking for help from the state, but by building our own communities. We need to make real change in society. Rejecting the norm that our livelihood and liberation should be left up to others, is the starting point.

What? You have never heard of CUAllies? Oh, that is probably because we refused to talk about what the mainstream gays rights movements pushed off as “What We Have to Do to Become Equals.” CUAllies is a student ran, horizontally organized, direct action, gay-straight alliance at the Catholic University, a university funded by the Vatican. CUAllies does outreach and education every week and created a place where a true community could form without the pressures of a society that rejects us. We are not recognized and rejected by the university administration, but that’s not what’s important to us. Creating a community that exist in the shell of the oppression of CUA and making sure everyone knows they can escape it is important.

So again my fellow hopefully soon-to-be liberated homos, we must not just vote if we want change. Remember that our liberation will not come from the state or others. It will come from us: from rebuilding our communities that are functioning from the power of ourselves. It is we, as human beings and as a collective movement that will bring about the real changes in a system that oppresses us. Until we reject the notions of the system, of a society controlled from the top and not the bottom, we are doomed to the cycle of oppression.

We need to keep our end goal of liberation as our focal point and not just equality… but that’s what the next article will be about.

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