GLR May-June 2025

Is Nothing Sacred? This column admittedly relies mostly on secondary sources for material, but every so often your roving reporter makes a shocking discovery with his own eyes and ears, as happened at the gym the other day. Earbuds are ubiq uitous at gyms these days, but a few of us still prefer to hear what’s going on in the world, including the music they pipe in. Then it happened: a song came on with the main lyric “I’m going out,” sung to the tune of the 1980 hit single “I’m Com ing Out,” which was first recorded by Diana Ross and soon be came the unofficial anthem of the LGBT rights movement. There have been other songs called “I’m Going Out,” but this new hit version (recorded by Steve Aoki, Sam Feldt, and XAN DRA ) follows the exact melody of “I’m Coming Out” and al most seems to parody its lyrics, which famously declare: “I’m coming out/ I want the world to know/ Got to let it show. ... There’s a new me coming out.” The new song describes a bad breakup, but the singer won’t let that keep her down (or at home): “So I’m going out/ I’m gonna dance along/ Till I let you go/ I’m going out/ to get you off my mind/ love myself tonight.” So instead of reaching out to the world to tell one’s truth, the singer is plotting her passive-aggressive revenge in the form of good times at the club? Times really have changed. BTW

Deconstruc ti ng People From its first day in office, this Ad ministration has been on a crusade to deny the existence of transpeople by erasing any reference to transgender issues from official government documents and historical records. The im pulse seems to be of a piece with the Nazis’ policy of eradica tion of Jews and homosexuals, culminating in their physical extermination in the camps. But what if they could have ac complished the same result with the simple stroke of a pen? Why not a bureaucratic solution that eradicates a people’s identity by wiping them off the books, as it were, much as Stalin “vaporized” his enemies by erasing any trace of them, rendering them as “unpersons”? In modern lingo we might say that a personal identity is deconstructed thereby, proof that so cial roles like male and female are cultural creations rather than eternal truths. As an ideology, social constructionism tends to be associated with lefty politics and postmodernism and Queer Theory. As a vision of the future, it’s a hopeful one if indeed we live in a world where the arc of history bends toward justice. But what if we do not? Everything Must Go! Speaking of bureaucracy, which sociol ogist Max Weber understood so well, the propensity to apply uniform standards across the board is bound to produce catch 22’s and other absurdities. In its frenzy to purge any reference to transgender issues and a broad range of “gay” topics, the regime seems to have gone after it with a pretty crude knife, searching for individual words à la Google 1.0. Thus, for ex ample, they became a laughingstock when it was noticed that

TheG & LR

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