Notes on the State of the Queer Union

By Kelly Cogswell

Last week, I bought seeds, and potting soil, rigged a couple of egg cartons, and planted tomatoes and herbs. Before I went to bed yesterday, I saw the first pale sprouts of basil emerging. I check back every half hour now, to see what else has poked out. At least that hasn't changed. Stick some seeds in some dirt, add water. Something will grow despite the violence in the air. So much rage that I no longer know how to talk about it, much less confront it.

It seems like a decade since forty-nine people, mostly queer and Latino, were slaughtered in a gay club in Orlando, Florida by a guy with a lot of guns, even more rage, and a history of domestic violence. Since then, the U.S. saw fit to install a monstrously angry maniac in the extremely White House egging on the most fragile men among us to do their worst with four a.m. tweets, and each day seems like month.

Every day, we are attacked and harassed, sometimes killed. A couple of weeks ago, I was just standing on the subway, and this guy walked through the car, caught sight of my apparently inappropriately masculine hairdo, and started loudly saying, "Fucking lesbians, fucking gay men. I don't want them in my country."

It sounded bizarre coming from a short, brown, Latino man with a thick, Spanish-accent. But so what? He'd swallowed whole the antigay, white nationalist rhetoric, and not even the faggot an arms-length away met my eyes as the guy continued to repeat, "Fucking lesbians, fucking gay men. I don't want you in my country." I monitored him until he got off, wondering if anybody would help if he came over and smashed my face in, or tried to, like the guy who shattered the eye socket of that dyke on the Q train.

Last week, as if in answer to the critics that lefties don't care enough to get violent, James T. Hodgkinson, a Saunders supporter, shot up Republican congressmen practicing baseball. While his politics may have been somewhat different than the usual attacker, he was still the usual male with a history of violence-- a profile so common every case of Intimate Partner Violence should be treated as a sign of incipient terrorism. Who needs Syria when you can practice on the woman in the kitchen?

Good times in New York, 2017. Good times in the U.S.

Meanwhile, in France, the sane centrist Emmanuel Macron won the presidential election, and his party just gained a parliamentary majority, so he should be able to pass the modest reforms France has needed for decades, and push for social and economic equality for poor minorities. Just as important, his pro-EU stance has given new life to a foundering European Union. Instead of ending the E.U., Brexit, and the American fiasco, have made the need for European self-sufficiency increasingly clear in all matters from defense to the regional economy and the environment.

That's good news for European queers who benefit every day from the EU, whether they realize it or not. Not only is the EU an important funder of LGBTQ projects on the regional and local level, almost every local lawsuit on queer issues like marriage, adoption, basic civil rights cites EU agreements because they are often more progressive than those of member states. If Italian queers ever get to tie the knot, if French dykes gain access to insemination, if queers from countries experiencing a populist, rightward trajectory are able to protect themselves, they will likely owe at least a little to the E.U.

I don't know what we're going to do here in the States where the buck stops with a U.S. federal government actively hostile to its citizens, especially social minorities. Even before Trump, before the Minnesota jury that acquitted Jeronimo Yanez, in the 2016 shooting death of Philando Castile, there was no justice for Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd, Sean Bell, Tamir Rice, Freddie, Osca, K, Aiyana Jones, Ramarley Graham, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin...

Now, every civil right imaginable is under attack, along with the very premise of democracy. If we can't reach up for help, we're gonna have to reach out, go horizontal. Our lives may depend on it.

In Defense of Lesbians ie. Those Fucking Dykes

By Kelly Cogswell

On Saturday, May 20, two lesbians got attacked on the Q train. The news reports say it was an altercation over seats. Apparently two lezzies had them, and when Antoine Thomas got on the train he demanded theirs, bumping against them, and screaming "Faggot," and "Dyke."

When they asked him to calm down, he beat them, smashing one woman's face until she was unconscious. At the hospital, they treated her for a concussion, a broken eye socket, and a nice array of cuts.

Thomas was arrested by a transit cop, then charged with assault, menacing and harassment, but the next day, the judge in Brooklyn Criminal Court let him go without bail. Why not? It's just some man beating on women. And not just any women, but dykes.

It's tempting to blame the attack on Trump, and the ascendance of white, aggressively hetero, male nationalists. After all, violence always follows hate speech, and there has been a surge in it against women and queers, people of color and immigrants, since he took to the campaign trail.

The problem is, during the U.S. election 2016, or 2008, it wasn't just the extreme right sneering at Hillary Clinton's voice, her hair, her thighs. The left was just as thrilled to embrace every fake news story about her, and glory in attacking aspects of her career that they minimized, or ignored altogether in her male counterparts.

The truth is, the vast majority of Americans despise women. And long before Trump, lesbians already experienced this hate exponentially, because we are by definition women who primarily make our lives with other women--however you define that elusive creature.

Nevertheless, the women's movement is still not a particularly welcoming space for us. Straight women often don't see the woman in the dyke, and pack us off to the LGBT community the first chance they get as if we were extraterrestrials. Even among queers, we're screwed. An acquaintance did the breakdown of a European LGBT fund, and discovered that only a tiny, tiny fraction went to projects that prioritized lesbians.

Here in New York, I was at a performance and reading Friday night by two dyke artists as part of a celebration of the Lesbian Avengers 25th anniversary. A prominent gay man invited to attend more or less said he'd rather die than spend an evening with lesssssbians.

When my friend, a straight man, told me about it, I think I was supposed to laugh, make fun of the guy. But I felt like somebody punched me in the face. I'd forgotten for a moment just how much people hate us, how ridiculous and disgusting they think we are. How acceptable it still is for absolutely everybody to express these views, though not necessarily to our faces.

Every day I rediscover that the funny, chic, thin lesbians we think are giving us visibility are in fact perceived as the exception. The rest of us dykes are absolutely monstrous if we exist at all.

This is why the Lesbian Avengers was created in the first place, to bring us real visibility, call attention to our issues, reshape the stereotypes. It is a measure of how powerful lesbophobia is that this lesbian visibility group has been largely erased from women's and queer history. No matter that the New York Lesbian Avengers spawned sixty chapters worldwide, drew tens of thousands of dykes to enormous Dyke Marches which have persisted lo, these twenty-five years.

What a delightful cocktail--the misogyny and homophobia of lesbophobia. Lately, it is playing itself out in questions of language. I'd be rich, if I had a dollar for every time I've been told in the last few years that nobody uses the word, "lesbian" anymore. It's passé. It doesn't speak to the young'uns who prefer queer or fluid, anything but that word abandoned by everyone but our greying institutions and a very small minority of trans-denying bigots.

Nobody wonders why most replacements for "lesbian" conceal gender, obscure orientation, refuse to slam the door on the heterosexual privilege that women get when there's at least some possibility they'll sleep with a man.

Nobody asks if our hatred of that word, "lesbian," reflects in part our hatred of the women it represents because they are all... what? Boring? Dour? Humorless? Ugly? Angry? Trans-hating? And frigid, of course. Except when we are oversexed nymphomaniacs. Add your stereotype here _________.

Above all, nobody seems to care that we can't organize politically without a word that captures both the misogyny and homophobia that govern our experience no matter what we call ourselves. And if we don't organize, what will change?