To read the front page of the New York Times yesterday was to indulge in yet another odious moment of the current U.S. political and economic crisis. The details of the Bush Budget were published, heralding bad news for everyone outside of the nation’s richest 2%. 20 Job training programs for unemployed workers gone. $400 million in public housing subsidy slashed. Federal public transit block grants obliterated. Social Security raided to pay for the biggest military buildup since the height of the Cold War.

I folded up the paper, shoved it back in the news stand, and thought I'd head out to the Eagle or somewhere of the like to have a stiff belt and try to forget what I had just read. Yet as I made my way out to the queer bar I made the realization that I was heading into the battle zone, in that the queer music, art, and political scene will suffer tremendous collateral damage from the budget Washington is threatening to pass.

I chose to invoke the phrase “gay bashing” in the title of this piece because of the modernist haze that surrounds it. To think of gay liberation is to visualize fights with the cops at the gay bars in the 1970s, or the bath house shutdowns and sex hysteria of the early 1980s; overt struggle a lot of younger indie and punk kids, complacent in their ironic and "over it" mentality, fail to identify with. But I think we must revisit the urgency of past struggle in order to fully understand the magnitude of the current attacks on poor and working people. After all, cuts in public housing, public transit, and wellfare directly affect queer punks, fag artists, lesbo writers, or whoever may be outside of the elite that the current political trends benefit.

Historic theorists of capitalism, from father of free market theory Adam Smit, to American neo-conservative Milton Friedman have agreed that the central motivating factor that makes capitalism work is fear of starvation. You'd probably stay home and write or play music if you had a coice, but you have to go to work to pay the bills and feed yourself. The more fear there is that you wont make ends meet, the harder you'll work to stave off that fear of starvation and collapse.

The economic proposals going through congress are meant to make that very fear worse, so American workers will work longer hours for less money, and in return enhance the profit margins for their employers. You can hardly quit your dehumanizing temp job if there's no unemployment insurance to carry you while you look for a new job. Why quit your depressing temp job if there are no training funds for a better job. And god forbid you'd take up arms against your manager and unionize when other jobs are few, unemployment insurance fails to exist, and non-existant housing subsidy and weak rent control laws would see you on the street in weeks if you were fired. Eliminating these social programs and transferring the funding to the military increases the fear factor on the job, for the "what ifs" in a job loss situation are unthinkable.

The result is an upstreaming of money, out of our pockets from the fruit of our labor, and into the hands of corporate leaders at McDonalds, the Gap, and Starbucks that provide us with the depressing side of the reality in which we live.

So back to the gay bar, the independant art or film space, or the independent theatre. It takes resources to create the vibrant queer scene here in SF. Every queer bar night takes DJs that can afford to buy records, bar workers that can afford to live in the city, patrons that can afford to buy beer, and artists who can afford to work few enough hours to still make art. If this budget becomes law, and we hurl more bombs into more countries, the economic system will squeeze our community just like it will squeeze other working class people, immigrants, or welfare recipients. You will see young queers working longer hours to make less, while new Blockbusters and Virgin Megastores will pop up as corporate taxes are rolled back. And who can go to Club KY if you can't even make rent. Who can see a show at Bottom of the Hill if your credit card is maxed with grocery bills?

I urge us not to ignore the significance of these attacks on working people, artists, and all of us that make San Francisco an interesting place to live. It isn't 1969 anymore. The police aren't going to lock us out of the Hole in the Wall for being degenerates. But what if they work us so hard and pay us so little that we don't have the will to continue to produce the culture that keeps us alive?

But we still have the right to organize, and the right to stand up for ourselves. The Giullianni's of the world haven't "cleansed" the conversation of ideas. I suggest we make good on them, and take action like people in our position in the past in San Francisco did. Without our direct involvement, this country will loose the dialogue and the dissent that keep us physically and emotionally alive.