Longtime LGBTQ organizer Scot Nakagawa has been fighting white nationalist movements for over 30 years, now as a senior partner at ChangeLab, a think tank on racial justice. Says Nakagawa, “We have to remember that even racist white gay men are still very vulnerable to discrimination” because they’re gay. “When one is under attack”—not by phantom Muslims, but by real, neighborhood gaybashers—“one picks up whatever shields one can,” even shields like racism that will not fight the true threat. In Donovan’s writing, it’s clear that what he’s terrified of most is “weakness,” especially male weakness. (He notes that he feels “disgusting” if he doesn’t train in a gym “for more than a few days.”) It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to guess that, at bottom, he feels profoundly weak and vulnerable. O’Meara, for his part, fears that he will be destroyed by African-American and Jewish “rot” and pollution. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to guess that he feels dirty, and at risk of decaying from within.
Rather than simply writing off the gay men who may be attracted to white nationalism, Nakagawa says: “It is really important to think about who those people are, and to try to reach out to them. Which means having compassion for them, as difficult as that may be.” Nakagawa feels that the left has too often behaved as though racism and sexism are primarily matters of personal character, rather than deep social structures that elites—the 1 percent—use to consolidate their power.
“It’s a bad choice to imagine that all these men are incredibly rich,” he adds. Rather than demonizing men who may long for a strong brotherhood to protect them in a society that is increasingly unsafe and un-nourishing for all of us, we should counter-organize among them and have the searching and committed conversations about racism and sexism that have too often eluded the gay community. In this time of great danger for both LGBTQ people and the entire country, the only real way to fight fascism is to offer a competing vision, for a society that will meet everyone’s needs rather than, as Donovan would have it, the needs of “the wolves” who seek to assert “dominance and control.” For at the end of the day, none of us is a wolf—or to say it another way, even wolves are vulnerable.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 