Ally Talk Is Always Cheap
It's all about business cards in the end
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Note: Not All Man’s posting schedule is Talking Tuesdays for general/unpaid content, and Fucking Fridays for paid/adult content. Be sure to toss me five bucks to see what’s in store Friday; in the meantime here’s the inaugural take.
To understand how allyship works in professional liberal politics, you need to see a professional Democrat’s business card. They have these tiny bugs in one or more corners, originally to show they’re union made and thus cost way too much and take way too long to print1. But everything is a commodity, and these days it’s a sorry Democratic business card that only has one bug. There’s a bug for everything: recycled paper, bamboo paper, soy ink, minority made, queer made, woman made, some of them have bugs in all four corners on both sides.
That’s exactly what it means to be a Democratic ally: you have stupid bugs on your business card.
I do not have any bugs on my cards; I got them for a few sawbucks off Vistaprint2. But for better and worse, for as long as I’ve worked in professional politics, when I’ve been an ally, I’ve gone all the way to war, heedless of any damage or cost to myself, and I haven’t stopped till I’m satisfied the war is over. That presented a rather unique problem: what do you do when someone actually walks the walk, even when the walk is littered with barbed wire and broken glass, and comes back covered in blood and says: okay, I did it, now what? And worse, he turns out to be one of those minorities your business card bugs say you support, and asks for receipts?
My new landlord was a queer ally to me, and he did it without saying a word about it. He’s a classic Chicago icon: a broad shouldered, white, married, retired Bears fan, renting his old generational home in Humboldt Park as a three-flat. When I met him to see the unit, I was nervous bordering on terrified. My family had withdrawn from me in the wake of my second divorce and queer rebound, leaving me with almost no social support network amid the financial collapse that always comes with the end of a marriage. Not only that, I fell for a sublet scam on Craigslist in a panic, and I was down to a handful of friends helping me out amid my usual delays in client billing. Fears raced through my head as I tried to keep my voice level and calm as I asked about renting it.
“I’m going to be honest,” I said, hating how my voice wavered. “I’m going through a divorce, my credit is bad, and I don’t have a co-signer. But I can pay you two months rent in advance and keep it that way, if you give me a chance.”
He nodded thoughtfully, and led me out to the front porch to talk. I hesitantly offered opinions about the neighborhood (I’ve always loved it, and the apartment is a moderate walk from my co-parent’s house), college football (I was wearing a USC t-shirt, and Carson Palmer was an overrated dirt bag), and my life (I want to stay here till my kids are grown and find stability). Finally, I said the unspoken truth:
“I came out to myself as bisexual in my second marriage,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek. “And that’s why it’s ended. It hasn’t been easy, and I really need a win here. If you can’t do it, I understand.”
He nodded again, and said he’d talk it over with his wife. Two days later I had a lease, and that one tiny act of flexibility did more for me than all the rainbow pins and best wishes and calls to action I’ve ever seen in my life, combined. He certainly didn’t see it that way; in his own words, he mostly wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy student. All that matters to me is that when I was so low I couldn’t do much more than plead for help, he met one of my most basic needs. He treated me like an ordinary person, and let me do something for him in exchange for doing something for me. That isn’t common for people like me, and most never make it even to where I am.
Far more common is a former friend and professional Democrat like me. He had always insisted that he sang my professional praises; in his words, “Everywhere I go, I tell people how smart Kaz Ballaski is.” He was effusive in his praise for my mental health, from my alcoholism recovery to acknowledging my trauma, and eventually my bisexuality. It was while I was getting my head around being on the autism spectrum like my son that he asked a question I’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of times:
“What can I do to support you?”
And that time, rather than reassure him that he already was supporting me by gushing about what a great ally he was, I simply said:
“By getting me a job.”
The record scratch was more like a screech. I’ve hunted for full time employment for a decade, trapped in over-education in my masters degree and a self-employment resume. In fact, over the past few years I’d asked that very friend for specific help getting specific job positions and clients, including his own boss, with no avail. He had even gotten hired by an office that had turned me down without comment. As I laid all this out, all he had was defensiveness and insistence that his intentions were good. The dumb excuses didn’t stop: he has struggles himself (he owns a house with dual income from government jobs), he was “there for me” when I came out to my second ex (and told me to think about her feelings and be nicer to her), he “didn’t remember” all the times I had talked to and texted him about what I was facing and struggling with. Eventually, I would discover he was keeping tabs on me for my second ex wife (out of concern for my mental health, of course), and cut ties with him entirely.
And he still had the gall to text me “Happy Pride!”
I’m From Liberal Idealism And I’m Here To Help
Another unique problem with me being in the room with professional liberals is that I happen to know exactly how seriously queer allyship is taken behind closed doors. Everyone flashes their cards and retweets Human Rights Campaign logos and proclaims they’re allies straight off the Stonewall Riot…while they ask me to prove Republicans are closeted gays so they can be attacked for “hypocrisy.” Or they ask to find proof they themselves are homophobic so they can’t be attacked with homophobia. I’m dead serious: one of my first Democratic clients made me hunt down documentation he had never supported gay adoption so he couldn’t be attacked over it3. Later in my career, a Democrat asked me to chase down a rumor that some vague divorce mess with the opponent was actually a gay affair. My younger son was playing on the grass in front of me while I carefully talked the manager down from it, emphasizing any and every other plausible alternative I could, all while biting my lip to keep from screaming how I really felt. Once a politician my client at the time supported said they wanted to repeal marriage equality; I walked into the office expecting we’d cut the politician off, and my boss promptly told me we were doubling our spending instead.
As the Wu Tang say: cash rules everything around me, even and especially allyship.
The other side of liberal allyship is its use as a weapon. We all agree we’re all allies; the bugs say it, after all. But when it comes time to decide who gets paid and who doesn’t (seriously, most political campaigns just don’t pay all of their vendors and staff in full), it’s a knife fight in a phone booth just to eat, and anything goes. When it’s not a self-validation or flex, allyship is a weapon: be an ally and do what I say, be an ally and get out of my way, be an ally and sit the fuck down while I count my cash.
If I was neurotypical, I might be able to deal with this charade in some sort of constructive/painless way. If I wasn’t a survivor who routinely flinches in the face of domineering white women, I might be able to deal with it. But I am Gary in Veep, not Dan. I’m not the smooth-talker you want on your side; I’m the strange gun dealer you want out of the way as soon as I’ve served my purpose. I couldn’t play someone even if I wanted to, and after trying everything else, the one thing I can consistently do for myself in my job is to simply say: I’m bisexual, so you can fuck with the queer person in the room, or you can take your business cards and go fuck yourself.
That’s not me saying you should be my ally. That’s me saying I can fuck you up worse than you can me now.
War in an Age of Opera
I’ve been called an ally a lot throughout my life, but one time will stay with me to the grave. A friend of mine had been shorted on her wages for a successful political campaign, to the point that she filed a complaint to force her ex-boss to pay her. They did, years later, while she struggled through one difficulty after another. Even the restitution was a cold comfort, buried in non-public administrative files while the politician sailed through a re-election.
I told her that if I ever could, I would do something about it.
Eight years later, that politician tried to run for a higher office, and I did. Using my client at the time as a vehicle, I arranged for my friend to tell her story, in full, by a sympathetic reporter. It was one of many shots at their faltering campaign, long forgotten now by everyone except her and me. And we both paid for it: a labor union that had supported that politician targeted us both professionally, in campaign after campaign, all because a woman had been wronged, and had a story that deserved to be told, and I helped her tell it.
“You’ve been a real ally,” she said to me after it had blown over.
“I hate that word,” I said tersely. I hated everything about it, how I saw it everywhere, thrown out by fools and cowards who were never around when the war actually came. I hated how it was stamped on me, as I rushed to help one person after another in desperate situations, not because it was my duty, not to set a good example, not to make up for patriarchy, but because I was one of them, beaten and assaulted by my spouse at home while run into brick walls at the office, dismissed as an angry lunatic as I melted down from it time and again. Every time I stood up for someone else, I was also pleading:
“Look, it’s not just me.”
But in the end, it always was just me, and I couldn’t stand being compared to the people who told me they were helping me with their boots and stiletto heels still on my neck.
“I know,” she said. “I do too. But your actions have still been that of an ally.”
And she has been to me, too.
Relax, I work for labor unions all the time; even unions hate union printers. They truly are awful.
To be clear, I am delighted to pay out the nose for my business cards, so long as someone actually hires me for it.
He lost anyway; why vote for a little homophobia when you can get all the homophobia from its official sponsors?