Poles and Holes: Discourse of Cosmopolitans

welcome to gay kindergarten, you sexy young things

The topic isn’t the topic. The subtext has overwhelmed the text.

Saticoy Elementary School, North Hollywood

Following a parent protest at a North Hollywood elementary school against an endlessly metastasizing LGBT curriculum (and a similar protest in suburban Glendale), the Los Angeles Unified School District has called down to the engine room for flank speed, and read this carefully:

The resolution introduced by board President Jackie Goldberg and member Nick Melvoin served as the board's official recognition of June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month — while also honoring October as LGBTQ+ History Month; Oct. 11 as National Coming Out Day; Nov. 20 as Transgender Day of Remembrance; March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility; and April 12 as a Day of Silence honoring the "contribution of the LGBTQ+ community."

All your base are belong to us. LGBT curriculum only fills days ending in -y, expanding like the first phase of a fuel-air explosive. It displaces; it shoves aside.

Something that has to be made clear before we can get to the Big Point:

News reports and political reactions to the parent protest at Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood predictably — you might say tediously — took up the emotionally loaded language about far-right extremism and cruel, angry bigots. But North Hollywood is represented on the Los Angeles City Council by a woke-signaling progressive, and represented in the state assembly by a Democrat, and represented in the state senate by a Democrat, and represented in the House by a Democrat. It’s North Hollywood, for crying out loud, film and television-adjacent, with a well-known arts district. It is not politically right. Pardon my language, but let’s just say it: Parents turning up to protest there are urban liberals who want a school to not tell their eight year-olds about boys who like to suck dick. Here: Go watch a parent say this. The far-right extremist framing is just a lie, and a shabby one.

No one is under the impression that children in North Hollywood need to be taught five thousand times a year that being gay is a thing, or that some children have two mommies, which they can figure out by looking at the carpool line outside their schools. The point — it’s increasingly clear — isn’t to teach something, but to capture a growing share of the potential for discourse. The point is hegemony, cultural power through the control of symbols and narratives. You don’t want us to teach this to your children in June? Fine, we’ll teach it to your children in June, and in October, and in March and April and November. The meaning of that maneuver is not obscure.

It’s not a conspiracy, a conscious, calculated effort by a group of people who know they’re conspiring. Instead, it’s the culmination of a century-old status-building process, the one described by Christopher Lasch and Angelo Codevilla, an oligarchic capturing of cultural castles by tacit acts of coalition. Lasch: “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it.” They define themselves oppositionally, creating an image of dumb flyover poors and then heaving a performative sigh that they aren’t low like that.

So here’s what the superintendent of the LAUSD says about the endless expansion of LGBT curriculum:

“I don’t think second-graders should learn about sexual behavior.”

“Oh, I see. You’re uneducated.”

The LGBT talisman — or maybe the LGBT cudgel — is a class signal, a status tool. It has nothing to do with its surface meaning. As political performance, it has nothing to do with people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. (The T is a more complicated topic for another time.) The cultural premises of Lawrence v. Texas and Obergfell are minimally contested: “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.” The emerging legal foundation of LGBT rights, over the last twenty years, has been about privacy and intimacy and your own bedroom; the cultural developments growing out of that base are about public symbols and class signaling and increasingly aggressive display.

The war is over. All that’s left is the marketplace of positional goods.