Lesbophobia and the NYC Mayoral Election

I hate to watch sitcoms with gay male characters, like the defunct New Normal, or the popular Modern Family. Almost inevitably they make stereotypical digs at how ugly and badly dressed dykes are. How humorless, because we don't laugh at jokes making us the butt.

Nobody hates dykes as much as fags. And of course, other dykes. Transfolks aren't always major boosters either. I declare this based on my Facebook page and the few queer articles I've read on New York's mayoral primaries where lefties who once blabbed how important it was to elect Obama, "He'll be our first black president," are all bashing Christine Quinn.

"I don't care if she is a lesbian. She's in bed with the real estate developers. I'd never vote for her," they shriek. Or they cite the times she's screwed queers, but never the times she's supported us. Apparently, historical groundbreaking is less important when it's the first woman, first dyke with the chance to run one of the biggest, most important, cities in the world.

To my dyke, female ears, their refrain sounds fishy, lesbophobic. Replay it substituting black. "I don't care if he is black, I'd never vote for him." Yeah, there's that little extra bigotry Obama gets now. A version of the hate Hillary Clinton got in the presidential primaries. That same feeling of ickiness at her child-bearing thighs and strident voice, the same rabid disgust I don't see opponents direct at our current crop of male mayoral candidate.

I'm not encouraging you to vote for Christine Quinn. I'm not entirely decided myself. But if you are going to vote for one of the boys, I'd like you to ask yourself if dyke-hating is playing a role. Especially in an election like this when nobody is exactly pristine. It's New York. To survive in politics here everybody cuts corners, cuts deals, shares flea-ridden beds.

Mr. DeBlasio and Mr. Liu alone have consorted with far worse than Quinn's bastard developers out to screw the poor: they kissed the ass of an actual murderer. In 2002 they were among the sixteen repulsive New York City Council members, all Democrats, mostly black, who either attended or sponsored a reception for Robert Mugabe at City Hall, touting him as Zimbabwe's liberation hero.

That may have been briefly true, but for the last several decades, Mugabe had been running one of the ugliest dictatorships in the world. Not only strong-arming his own people, rigging elections, and manipulating the economy, but burning down the houses of the opposition--with them still inside. Starving the districts of his enemies, regularly jailing and torturing them. And, to top it all, he's screamed, and continues to scream, about how queers are worse than dogs and sends mobs after us.

He was swimming in blood. And by backslapping him at City Hall, a rare honor given only to the likes of Mandela, idiot New York Dems like DeBlasio gave him a stronger grip on power, extended the violence and misery. But so what? Nobody cared then, and despite our occasional email sent about queers abroad, probably nobody cares now.

I can already hear the excuses, "That was a decade ago. It doesn't count." Or, "It was in Africa. They probably didn't know." Which is almost worse. Because who wants a mayor who's got his head so far up his moronic ass that he doesn't even read front page news counting Mugabe's victims? In 2008 DeBlasio, hinted at ignorance. With the info available, he should have known. "It was a mistake." Liu, however, still reportedly said, he didn’t see what "the big deal" was.

Nevertheless, Quinn's still the devil. And there are dykes still sneering, "I don't care if she is a lesbian... I'd never vote for her." They imply a dyke dumping on another dyke makes her opinion more objective, somehow praiseworthy, not infected with lesbophobia at all. Worse, they give the impression Quinn is running for mayor of Poughkeepsie, not New York City, where for the first time, a woman, a dyke, would have a global platform second only to the U.S. President, or maybe Secretary of State.

Maybe the same thing would happen with a fag mayoral candidate. Queers are such a weird minority. We're the first to say we're just like everybody else, no different at all. The first to stab each other in the back. I'm pretty sure when he was running for mayor, David Dinkins got the black vote. Fernando Ferrer, though he lost in the 2001 primary, got a lot of support from Latinos.

Sadly, it looks like Christine Quinn will only get crumbs from New York queers, because we're so fucking determined to be honest and open-minded. So determined to reject blind support (that does lead to disasters, see Mugabe, R.) that we despise solidarity. And because we hate dykes.

Maybe I'll support Quinn, after all. Cast a big dyke vote for the chance at a global voice.

Russian Queers Under Attack

By Kelly Cogswell

Unless we get involved, U.S. athletes will participate in the 2014 Olympics in Russia, where naked authoritarian rule has returned after a trial in democracy that only lasted long enough for the Eastern Orthodox Church to regain and consolidate its power, and for a vicious free market capitalism to create a few obscenely wealthy oligarchs.

The rest of the population has produced a handful of pro-democracy resisters, like the feminist punk rockers Pussy Riot, a lumpish and alienated majority, and a sizeable minority increasingly nostalgic for the bad old days when sacrificial victims might have disappeared (we won't speak of them), but at least there was order.

Part of that returning, Soviet-era order is the oppression of queers. The Church had done it before, but the secular State got in the business when it turned out that faggots didn't disappear along with the filthy upper classes. Like in Cuba, this state-sponsored homophobia became particularly virulent after a few years in the authoritarian swamp when it crossbred puritanical Christian morality with the macho, authoritarian cult of the Commie's New Man.

Queers, of course, are its natural enemy, dykes subverting the idea that things must be the way they are, with women submitting to their sharply bearded men, citizens bowing to the power of the State, and journalists regularly eating their words or having convenient and fatal accidents. Two men are just as bad because either you have a male abdicating his God-given supremacy, or a pair asserting the chaotic power of erotic democracy.

The worst Russian laws came in 1960 when queers were punished not just for having sex, but banned from working any job that had to do with kids, or playing any role in public. Plenty of gay men ended up in prison or worse. Dykes were more routinely sent to the nuthouse to have their queerness electroshocked out of them.

That famous anti-gay article 121.1 of the 1960 Soviet Criminal Code was only repealed two decades ago in 1993, less as a sign of a newfound commitment to civil equality, than a little early pink-washing to help get Russia in the EU. Up until late in '92, hundreds of gay men were still being convicted and imprisoned every year, while dyke activists like Alla Pitcherskaia not only risked repeated arrest, but threats of permanent imprisonment and electrodes.

When I was co-editing The Gully online magazine from 2000-2006, the Russian queers we worked with were reluctant to use their names. As it turned out, they had good reason.

Like Putin's authoritarian government, unapologetic homophobes have re-emerged mouthing both nationalistic, and religious arguments in their attempts to recriminalize homosexuality. They've been increasingly effective, shutting down some Pride Parades, and in June, as lesbians and gay men in the U.S. won federal recognition of their marriages, the Russian legislature voted almost unanimously to ban "pro-gay" propaganda. This incredibly broad law not only prohibits any positive portrayals of LGBT people, but criminalizes anybody that even acknowledges our existence in public. For all intents and purposes, it officially outlaws queer activism.

They're not stopping there. A new law bans gay couples from adopting, and another makes it legal to toss tourists into jail for a couple weeks if they're gay. Four Dutch tourists were recently arrested for "promoting homosexuality to children." More laws are in the works to remove children from lesbian and gay parents. Forget marriage.

Ultranationalists are the enforcers, acting with the state's approval, if not their funds. As new stadiums are built, and Olympic platitudes mouthed, the most popular sport in Russia is forming lynch mobs to attack queers in the street. Other far-right psychos are using social media to lure young gay teens into private spaces where they humiliate and torture them, then proudly post videos of their horrifying acts of patriotism on the internet. According to an internet poll, since this antigay crackdown intensified, fifteen percent of LGBT folks in Russia have been physically attacked for being gay.

It's hard to see much hope for Russian queers without outside intervention or a civil war. Because homophobia's only half the problem. Cultures can be changed, at least gradually. But you can't do it without the tools of civil society and democracy: persuasion and protest and speech. As outsiders, we can only vote with our money and prestige. Unlike the U.S., where we can also vote and agitate, at least for now.

Although we're heading a better direction on LGBT rights, we're moving in the tandem with Russia when it comes to destroying the tools of social change like free speech, and a vibrant media. And in the long run, it may be less significant to have a gay-friendly President, than one more determined than George W. Bush to attack the press, and make examples of whistle-blowers like Snowden and Manning rightly disgusted by the government's abuse of power to erode our precious democracy.