Why is this Fairy Calling me a Queer?: The Capitalist Interests Behind The Blues Clues Pride Parade
ViacomCBS should not be allowed at pride and should not have a position of influence within the communities it dares not even speak the names of. By its presence it necessitates a pride without gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people, and without any reference to LGBT communities.
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A dynamic that’s been worming its way through LGBT communities for the past decade or two at least is that corporations, led by non-profits, have increasingly taken it upon themselves to educate the new generation of LGBT youth. This was a niche which eagerly awaited market penetration; a young LGBT child comes out of the closet and there is more often than not very little for them in terms of mentors — in a capitalist, consumerist society, being deprived of mentors is nothing special, and this niche is increasingly filled by fictional characters even in the general population. In recent years, American pop culture in particular has focused on “representation”, which is an ideological justification for penetration by the free market into this niche along the lines of consumer demographics — “black representation” for African-Americans, “latino representaion” for latinos, and so on, divided not just along race but along any axis of identity one might think of.
LGBT communities have managed to shed some, but not all, of their stigmas. For instance, while it may appear on the surface that having an on screen pride parade on an episode of Blue’s Clues & You!™ marks an incredible victory in representation and inclusivity — basically the holy grail of this era of liberal politics — in reality this market outsourcing of community-building takes power away from the communities. We have become like a small country that is dependent on loans and investments of a superpower — while we have gained improved access to markets for all the reasons for which we might want that, it is not up to us what we create, it’s up to the funders, and should “supporting us” become unprofitable, they will stop.
In short, we are no longer in charge of our communities and we no longer direct its productive forces, the corporations are entrusted with exploiting and monetising the communities into consumer demographics with larger market shares. There is an inherent conflict between this and anyone who wants to turn LGBT communities into sites of emotional or spiritual fulfilment or real revolutionary power.
The Blue’s Clues & You!™ pride parade has been welcomed warmly even by people who are otherwise cautious or sceptical of corporate attempts to recuperate pride. It is considered that the efforts of Blue’s Clues & You!™ are somehow exceptional when compared to other corporate attempts to monetise pride. Maybe so, in their effectiveness. But it is important to strip away the sentimentality of this beloved children’s icon to reveal the corporate machinations underneath.
Blue’s Clues & You!™ is a television program made by Nickelodeon which is owned by ViacomCBS, a multinational mass media conglomerate which operates over 170 networks in approximately 180 countries and whose total assets are valued at the humanly unfathomable sum of 56.22 billion dollars. For reference, News Corporation is worth a quarter of that at 14.26 billion. ViacomCBS was formed in 2019 by the merger of Viacom and CBS, both of which were already owned by National Amusements. In addition to Nickelodeon, ViacomCBS also owns MTV, Paramount, BET, Comedy Central, Miramax, CBS, the CW, Showtime, VH1, and over a hundred other networks, including major local media outlets in major American cities and international news stations. It also only recently divested from the video game journalism industry, where it was formerly a juggernaut, owning such institutions as CNET, Gamespot, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, and MetaCritic, which it sold to Red Ventures only in October of 2020.
In short the corporations are raising our kids. They are telling very young LGBT children how to consider themselves and their identities, and they are not doing so — by nature of what they are, cannot do so — in a way that is grounded in the organic community. The result is a projection of a universalist, encyclopedist tendency which erases local history and creates something for mass consumption on a nationwide, even worldwide, scale. This is a reactionary tendency which young LGBTs are groomed into by pop culture from an early age, and most of the petty drama which currently consumes the communities’ energies and resources stem from it directly.
The song itself is a compilation of canonical, corporate-approved queer identities. While it does not claim itself to be extensive, it does portray itself as an introduction to the important identities one might encounter at a pride parade.
The Representational Politics of the Song Itself
The opening line of the song is “Look at all these families! Hi families! It’s time for a pride parade!”
Already, we have a serious problem because pride, at its core, is not and should not and never has been a family-friendly event. It is a transformative rupture achieved through violent physical confrontation with the police and the mafia. On the second night of the stonewall riots, which were started when the patrons of a mafia-owned bar repelled a routine raid of the establishment through physical force, the rioters distributed literature demanding that the community, not the police or the Mafia (or, implicitly, ViacomCBS) own its establishments. Pride is a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots about which Allen Ginsburg remarked, “the guys there were so beautiful — they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.”
It is not a “big parade” that young children go to with their “families”.
Not only are families welcome at ViacomCBS’s portrayal of pride, though, but it is actually families themselves, not individuals, who “go marching”! While the song concedes that “some people choose their family”, this is more of a media trope than a reality for most of us — LGBT youth are significantly overrepresented in the homeless population, with some estimates placing LGBT youth as something like 40% of all homeless people. Overeagerness to “choose family” can result in abuse or exploitation of vulnerable LGBT young people, which likely partially explains the fact that we’re also more likely than the average person to be targeted for violence, victims of domestic or sexual abuse, to have addiction issues or other mental health problems, etc.
To be blunt, although there are LGBT people who have or want families, myself included, “family” is not a word that belongs anywhere near LGBT experience in a general sense and is certainly not a pre-requisite to being present at pride. For many of us, ViacomCBS looking us in the eye and feeding us some bullshit about “chosen family” is tone-deaf and dangerous.
Issues like the tone of pride and the acceptability of corporate sponsorship are contentious within the communities, and ViacomCBS is here attempting to settle the question. ViacomCBS is likely to triumph in this conflict, because it is a 56.22 billion dollar multinational corporation while I currently make 73 dollars per month on Patreon.
(Incidentally, if you like this article, or even if you don’t, but think it’s bullshit that I live in poverty, the information for my Patreon and Ko-Fi will be at the bottom of this article.)
There is also something to be said by which identities are named in the song itself and which ones are not. The lyrics of the song itself contain reference to “non-binary”, “trans”, and “ace, bi and pan”, while lesbians and gays are referred to as “families with two mommies/daddies”. Also conspicuous is the lack of reference to any variant of the LGBT acronym.
Very likely, this is because at some chain in the corporate ladder, someone prohibited use of the words “gay”, “lesbian”, “asexual”, “bisexual”, “pansexual”, “transgender”, “transsexual”, and “intersex”. It may even be the case that some state or local laws might prohibit the use of these terms in childrens’ media. If this is the case, it’s more reason why ViacomCBS should not be allowed at pride and should not have a position of influence within the communities it dares not even speak the names of. By its presence it necessitates a pride without gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people, and without any reference to LGBT communities.
Notably, however, the song DOES contain reference to the controversial term “queer”, which unlike “gay” or “lesbian” is considered a slur by many. Supposedly, I have fought for the sake of pride in my identity. That’s what the “pride” means. Without pride in my identity, how am I to lose the wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago? Why will it not refer to me by the name of my identity, but only under the euphemism “queer family”?
I want to be clear that my intention here is not to personally take a stand in the terminology wars. I don’t personally hate the term MTF. I will go either way on queer — I don’t prefer it, but don’t care. The terminology wars are about aesthetic, not tactics, and while I have a personal opinion about what words I prefer, that isn’t my point here. The point is that ViacomCBS is attempting to settle the question along the lines of corporate censorship requirements and market demand, rather than through an intra-community discourse, a discourse which anyway has been poisoned by corporations like ViacomCBS for decades.
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries,” wrote Lenin, “the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
This video is a literal parade of defanged symbolism and neutralised liberation thought. It should be regarded as a series of effigies, meant to disempower us, render our names canonically unimportant or even unspeakable, strip our symbols and ideas of vigour and substance, and deceive you into believing that it is possible for you to be “represented” by a corporation in a decaying economic system whose ruinous effects and limited trajectory become more apparent day by day.
An ally who vanishes the second I call myself a lesbian is no ally at all.
Who is this Fairy calling me a Queer on Blue’s Clues?
To be blunt, I don’t think that anyone in human history has ever had less business being depicted with the raised fist symbol than Nina West, after whom the singer of the segment is openly modeled.
Nina West is the drag persona of real life performer Andrew Levitt, whose twitter is currently aglow with corporate endorsements from such entities as the TODAY show, NOH8, ET Canada, Lane Bryant, The Human Rights Campaign, and Out Magazine.
Levitt, under the name of his drag persona Nina West, wrote to Out Magazine that he grew up in Canton, in northeast Ohio. More specifically, the Columbus Dispatch says that he grew up in Greentown, which is part of the Canton-Massillon Metropolitan Statistical Area, but it is a statistical outlier within that area in that of the 3,804 people living there, 94.53% are white, and the median family income is over $101 thousand dollars, which is over twice as rich as the median income area in the statistical area as a whole and with about half as many non-white racial groups.
Going back to at least his great grandfather, he has a “long line of family involved in politics, especially organising and running the county Republican Party”, he tells Out Magazine, and recounts meeting former vice president Dan Quayle and actor Bruce Willis in middle school. “Although” his parents were Republicans, according to the article in the Columbus Dispatch, they were immediately supportive of him when he told them he was gay while attending Denison University. The very next day, his parents attended a disciplinary hearing in his support, seeking action against bullies who were tormenting him.
The Dispatch article, written a year prior to his appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race as Nina West, describes how “some of Levitt’s larger drag shows have raised as much as $17,000 in a night, with people even throwing credit cards on stage”, and describes speaking to his long-time friend Matthew Goldstein, who “has helped Levitt distribute that money” and “remembers one show in which Levitt raised so much money that he feared being robbed while walking down the street”. Goldman is the founder and executive director of a local “non-profit” called Besa, which nearly tripled its total revenue between 2016 and 2019 — in 2016 reporting total revenue of $227,881 and in 2019, $637,933.
Goldstein helped Levitt establish the Nina West Fund with the Columbus Foundation. “My parents wanted me to be a lawyer and then to eventually become a politician and I think that’s kind of what I’ve grown into in a different sense. … I feel that I am a politician and I’m a spokesperson for my community,” said the unelected Levitt to Out Magazine.
In other words, Levitt was basically bred for this. Not my words, but his — “knowing the environment that I came from, my parents basically bred me for this”, he continues from the above passage. “We might not agree politically but I know they are proud of me and are incredibly in awe of the child that they raised”.
For Levitt and his family, the political disagreement is, of course, at best a secondary concern compared to maintaining the power and prestige of the ruling class cross-generationally. It is an admission that ultimately, these “political questions” are about maintaining control within an increasingly closed economic class of owners. Levitt is catering to a different market demographic than his parents, but using the same discursive empire and techniques to serve the same class interests.
Levitt is, by his own admission, a “spokesperson for the community” who was appointed by the ruling class and not elected by us. It is unusually honest that he refers to this position as being a “politician”.
Levitt’s career skyrocketed after his appearance on the eleventh season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a show produced by World of Wonder, which has a reputation for open favouritism towards drag queens who are friendly for their brand, while the others are either openly shunned or given what the fans refer to as “the edit” or “the evil edit”, which means they are edited in a way that portrays them in an unfair way. The lip sync segment is especially notorious for open rigging; the production often decides that even queens who clearly win the lip sync should be sent home, with the result often determined in advance of even filming.
In other words, RuPaul himself as well as the production team are cast as a sort of villain, much like in a WWE plot, and this provides a part of the appeal and drama of the show. Former contestants openly acknowledge that they were treated in unfair ways and talk openly about certain segments being shot twice, some events being scripted, etc. By all accounts, the queens themselves do get some say in how this all plays out, although there are cases like that of Pearl Liaison in season 7, who RuPaul seems to have been genuinely cruel to, later confessing on his podcast that he wanted to “break her emotionally”.
One “victim” of the lip sync rigging was none other than Nina West, whose elimination caused outrage from even very mainstream figures like AOC.
Although openly acknowledged as an illusion, this open rigging gave West an air of underdog sympathy. The following quote from another, later article in the Concord Monitor is illuminating:
Levitt agrees that Nina’s stature might have benefited more from the outcry of support than if he had actually won the show. […]
“Drag is bigger than ever in mainstream pop culture, and I am benefiting from it,” Levitt said. “My life is amazing. It’s a gift to be working on this level, and it doesn’t seem real at times.”
According to this later Monitor article, published on 4 May, 2020, the
“Nina West Fund, established with the Columbus Foundation in 2015, has now raised about $3 million for nonprofits and charities from Besa to Flying Horse Farms.
“It was closer to $2 million in 2018, but the increased exposure on the reality show helped accelerate its growth.”
In other words, Levitt raised approximately half as much in the year after his appearance on Drag Race as in nearly two decades preceding.
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Rainbow Capitalism
We can take a slight detour to zoom in on some of the financial interests which have congealed around Nina West in two or so days (as of this writing) since the Blue’s Clues & You!™ segment. If we return to the earlier list of her celebrity and corporate endorsements earlier — the list I provided was the TODAY show, NOH8, ET Canada, Lane Bryant, the Human Rights Campiagn, and Out Magazine.
Keep in mind that this is an incomplete list of even the corporate interests which West personally retweeted in the few hours after the reveal. The corporate interests openly grooming their chosen child into his appointed position as politician for “the community” over the course of his 20 year career are much more than this.
If we build a profile certain patterns emerge.
1. The TODAY show, the flagship program of NBC Universal, which is owned by Comcast, the second largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world, with a total assets of 273.7 billion US dollars.
2. NOH8, a “non-profit organisation” which nonetheless reported a total revenue of over a quarter million dollars in 2018, 40.3% of which was earmarked for “executive compensation”,
3. ET Canada, which airs on the Global Television Network, which is owned by Corus Entertainment, which owns assets totaling 1.06 billion dollars US. The owner of Corus Entertainment, JR Shaw, also owns Shaw Communications, a telecommunications company which “provides” telephone, internet, television, and mobile services, with a total assets of 12.446 billion for the quarter ending February 2021, a 5.3% increase over 2020,
4. Lane Bryant a plus-size lingerie brand, which was purchased along with several other brands, to Sycamore Partners LLC, a “private equity firm specialising in retail and consumer investments” for $540 million. Sycamore Partners, LLC has approximately $10 billion in “aggregate committed capital” and employs a total of 28 people.
5. The Human Rights Campaign, another “non-profit” which nonetheless reported a total revenue of over 44 million dollars in 2019, over 37 million dollars of which came from “contributions and grants”. A section on hrc.org names Amazon, Apple, American Airlines, the Coca-Cola Company, Google, Intel, Lyft, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nationwide, Target, Pfizer, UPS, Raytheon, and others as its Platinum-tier “National Corporate Partners”. On the lesser Gold, Silver, and Bronze tiers are Nike, Nordstrom, Lexus, Capital One, BP (formerly British Petroleum), Chevron, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, US Bank, Pepsico, Shell, Starbucks, T Mobile, Hershey, and IBM, among many others. It is cartoonishly difficult to imagine a sector of the capitalist economy that isn’t somehow involved in funding the Human Rights Campaign, which in 2017 announced plans to spend $26 million supporting Democratic political candidates, especially in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
6. Out Magazine, which in 2017 was sold to a group led by Oreva Capital, who renamed the parent company Pride Media, which was described as “a 20 million dollar business” last year, and owns three other LGBT-focused publications. “There’s a lot of money in LGBT,” said an unnamed former executive.
The Blues Clues & You!™ fairy is an overprivileged drag queen with ancestral ties to a capitalist political party whose “mainstream appeal”, that is, appeal to the ruling class, was easily allied with local finance capital and NGOs, themselves in service to monopoly finance capital. This serves as a case study to Lenin’s thesis on imperialism. Of the six organisations listed above, two of them are “non-profit organisations”. Two more have recently changed hands from smaller to larger conglomerates, and, surprise, they’re the two which focus on a particular (rather than general) consumer demographic. Monopolisation is an expected outcome of capitalism and helps to maintain social bonds and networks of power, knowledge, and finance capital among the ruling class (such as Goldstein “helping Levitt establish” the Nina West Fund) while simultaneously destroying or purchasing institutions of knowledge transmission among the underclass so that we are unable to build independent community and instead literally sing along with them like children.
Within our lifetime, most of the communal structures of LGBT communities have been eroded and sidelined in popular discourse with our social reach wholly consumed by telecommunications and mass media conglomerates, the purpose of which is to rob our communities of everything we have produced. The younger generation, groomed as consumerist footsoldiers, no longer even understand our discourses while we and they alike fall into poverty and beg for our lives on the internet. Meanwhile, Viacom and CBS grow and merge and further consolidate and monopolise, becoming a more formidable foe than ever.
Andrew Levitt, meanwhile, who openly acknowledges that he was practically bred for this and that his life is so amazing it barely seems real, continues to play the role of a medieval or brahminic priest (a traditional role of which is in fact to vulgarise the icons of the underclass and canonise them as saints or whatever, as Lenin said), imploring the virtuous to volunteer their money so that it can be directed to the ruling class, including, according to the website, to such “past recipients” as the ACLU, Besa (which claimed over 4000 unpaid volunteers in its most recent available 990 form) and the Ronald McDonald house, while I and other LGBTs continue to beg for our lives on the internet. No money from the Nina West foundation has ever reached our patreons and ko-fi accounts, and I don’t suspect it ever will.
Lenin said that:
Domination, and the violence that is associated with it, such are the relationships that are typical of the “latest phase of capitalist development”; this is what inevitably had to result, and has resulted, from the formation of all-powerful economic monopolies
which means that as a general rule, what the corporations are saying and doing will always find a way to defeat people like me in the marketplace, whether that marketplace is of ideas or of goods and services.
While Marx was clear:
Even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion.
If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened.
Finally, to say that “the most favorable condition for wage-labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital”, is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it — the wealth of another which lords over that class — the more favorable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train.
These institutions create no employment, no resources, no wealth, fill none of the demands of our communities, which usually before anything else include basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare, opting instead for bourgeois objectives such as, quoting from the website (let us count the corporations) “to send an LGBT family on a Disney¹ cruise through Make-A-Wish², surprise another family at the Ronald McDonald House³ with a trip to Disney World⁴, and help make a fitting room renovation possible at Dress For Success⁵” while the underclass starves. Besa triples its value in three years, the Nina West Foundation sees a tenfold increase in its “non-”profits and becomes a part of the Columbus Foundation which manages the affairs of the ruling class of Columbus, Ohio. These bourgeois organisations subsidise each other into infinity and call it “philanthropy” while begging us for the money to do it.
This will continue to be the trend until the decimation of capitalism, because history, let alone Lenin, tells us that big capital gets bigger and bigger and penetrates more and more spheres of life, never to be disbarred from them until it is finally ruthlessly crushed by an increasingly violent and radicalised proletariat which has seized state power. As the contradictions of this moribund economic system become more and more apparent, LGBT people become increasingly scapegoated due to being increasingly thrust into the spotlight by an unelected neo-priesthood of “politicians” and “spokespersons” appointed by the ruling class to “represent” us. We are a sacred cow today, scapegoat tomorrow.
Begging for representation in a system imploding with contradictions is not a wise move even for what it aims to accomplish, it is tactically asinine because it relies on wavering alliances of convenience, but it’s also by and large not a tactic that authentically comes from the most impoverished or even the working class segments of our communities.
The LGBT community was born as counterculture, but it cannot be a counterculture forever, because nothing can — because the system is designed to consume everything and monetise everything and strip mine counterculture into “non-profit” organisations.
Precisely because we do not own our discourses, the stuff we argue about is frictionless bullshit. I openly prefer LGBT to queer in terms of my personal opinion, but it is not impossible to recuperate the term LGBT either and only an idiot would say that. Those who prefer queer should be aware that the market will likely again turn on queer as the target demographic starts to lash back against it, and that this “victory” is not yours but theirs. Furthermore, there’s no point in arguing about terminology of whether this or that group (asexuals! aromantics! intersex people!) is “queer”, because at this point lesbians barely qualify and we’re a couple years away at most from Raytheon openly claiming the label.
We do not, cannot, have control of our communities as long as this system continues to exist, because under it we are entitled not even to our own homes and health let alone our own discourses and resources and institutions. The neoliberal ideal is that we are voids for the market to fill and this will not change as long as we are all powerless Dickensian orphans without any concrete worker’s party or even organisation. It is flatly impossible to solve this problem through propaganda and counterculture.
The author of this article is stealth in real life and in other areas of her work, and currently unable to afford medication and immigration expenses. If you got something out of this article, or even if you didn’t but think that it’s bullshit that I live on less than a hundred dollars per month, consider making a pledge on my Patreon or a one-time donation on ko-fi. Following me on either site gets you a notification whenever I publish a new article like this and you also get the satisfaction of knowing that you’re helping someone who was doing educational trans sensitivity workshops for rural school districts as a teenager during the Bush years live a healthier and safer life.
