France at the Authoritarian Crossroads

By Kelly Cogswell

It's almost a miracle, how in just one year, centrist Emanuel Macron and his supporters launched the grassroots movement En Marche! (Forward!) that not only got him into the second round of the presidential vote, but helped him win. Much of the work was done by folks who hadn't been involved in politics before, including many women, and people of color. Victories in the upcoming legislative elections, when voters are not facing the threat of white nationalist Le Pen, will hopefully confirm that democracy still works in France, and people not tapped into traditional parties can still have a voice if they are willing to knock on enough doors.

Even if they win, France is still at a crossroads. In the first round, almost fifty percent of voters chose a populist from the extreme right or the extreme left. In the final round, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant right-wing Marine Le Pen won thirty-four percent of the vote, drawing in not just voters from the center right, but poaching some from the extreme left. Like Trump, she also benefited from the many leftists who chose to stay home or vote blank and take their chances with virulent white nationalists, rather than vote for a centrist.

At a recent political meeting, Daniel Cohen-Bendit, whose family literally had to hide from the Nazis, blamed the growing power of the racist, authoritarian National Front on the French failure to remember and transmit their knowledge of Nazi atrocities. That's absolutely true, but I also blame the left worldwide for ignoring their own totalitarian past, so that when their candidate gets knocked out, it's no stretch for them to abstain, or even to embrace an extreme right promising to support workers. After all, class trumps everything, from misogyny to racism and the abuse of human rights. And when they say class, make no mistake, it's a white male factory worker they're thinking of.

It started with Stalin, who in the name of that working class, executed a million or so, "enemies of the state" often identified by their ethnicity. He killed another million in the gulags, and deliberately engineered famines that killed another five million, including more than a million nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, and 3.3 million in the Soviet Ukraine. Poles were targeted, too. According to historian Timothy Snyder, "it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe."

Not that anyone cares. Part of the problem with the left is that they are just as willing to ignore facts as any Trump voter. When it comes to Cuba, for instance, every report about the long-term failure of the 1959 revolution -- the poverty, the corruption, human rights abuses, the racism, and homophobia--has been denounced as fake news. Every voice protesting the treatment of the opposition is dismissed as a CIA plant, or just dismissed.

When I told a dyke acquaintance I'd never vote for the extreme left French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon-- a re-packaged Communist-- because he was too fond of tyrants—like Russia's Putin, Syria’s Assad, and Venezuela’s Maduro--she first claimed the media made up those connections. And when I pointed out his recent, lengthy eulogy for Castro, she declared her own love for Fidel. And when I brought up the queers he threw in jail there-- "including my girlfriend," she sneered like I was pathetic for letting concentration camps stand in the way of embracing the Revolution.

Most recently, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela seduced the masses at home and abroad with his fancy Bolivarian speeches. But if you dare explain to someone that the country is now an economic and political disaster where dissidents are jailed, you can't buy an aspirin or a roll of toilet paper, hospitals are closed, people are dying of hunger and there are mass protests where demonstrators across the political spectrum are shot dead in the street… the typical leftist response is, "But they're from The Right, aren't they?"

Call me a right-wing reactionary, but I find this callousness as monstrous as the bloated rage of any Trump or Le Pen, and just as racist. Instead of the exploitation of natural resources and labor, these colonialist revolutionaries worldwide prop up dictators with alt-facts, alt-narratives so they can play out their utopian fantasies. That the ordinary people in places like Venezuela and Cuba might aspire to the same standard of living, the same freedom and human rights that we enjoy in the U.S. or France, is of no consequence whatsoever.

This is playing out in France, too, where the left is determined to thwart Macron's incremental proposals for economic reform. They see only that the rich might benefit, never consider why so many people of color and immigrants who voted Socialist for decades and got nothing, might enthusiastically embrace the social mobility, jobs, and improved education that are largely the point of Macron's plans. I get the idea that they want black and brown people to stay poor and pure, untainted by the privilege or money they themselves inherit, which they often pretend appeared under their pillow, or grew on a tree.

The State of the Queer Cuban Nation

By Kelly Cogswell

Late in October, a handful of independent activists appeared for the first time before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reporting on the state of the LGBTI community in Cuba and asking the commission to pressure the regime not just on behalf of queers, but of any independent group trying to work for human rights on the island.

In the video, they seemed articulate, dignified, and maybe a little desperate, offering quiet reproaches to an international LGBT community that has a blind eye where Cuba is concerned, largely ignoring actual LGBT people trying to speak and work on their own behalf, while seeming to applaud every press release from CENESEX, the government-approved National Center for Sex Education run by the straight daughter of Cuba’s dynastic ruler, Raúl Castro.

Carlos Quesada of the International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights, said that the “so-called visibility” of Cuba’s queers internationally was dependent on one name, Mariela Castro and that “it contrasts with the actual situation of the members of the LGBTI community in Cuba.”

Determined to see if they could get something done outside the CENESEX bubble, a coalition of Cuban groups, including the Free Rainbow Alliance of Cuba (Alianza Arcoiris Libre de Cuba), the Trans Fantasy Network (RED-Trans Fantasía), The Foundation for the Rights of the LGBTI Community (Fundación por los derechos de la Comunidad LGBTI) and Divine Hope (Divina Esperanza), a queer Christian Group, decided to conduct their own study of the state of the queer Cuban nation. They prepared a questionnaire focusing on personal experiences of discrimination and violence, and whether or not LGBTI people had basic information about their human rights.

It was an ambitious project, especially for embattled independent groups. "By law, organizations that do not declare their support to the state are not allowed to be registered," explained Juana Mora, of the Free Rainbow Alliance of Cuba, and former member of CENESEX. She let those words speak for themselves, knowing that the commission would be well aware that in Cuba, independent activists and journalists face harassment, discrimination, violence, and arrest. Later on in the presentation, she and Quesada described how queer activists were continually monitored and their research materials seized and copied, routinely denounced as counterrevolutionaries, threatened, and subject to detention and interrogation.

Unsurprisingly, most LGBTI people approached for the study were too afraid, or too disillusioned to talk to them. Mora told the commission that "…in Cuba there's a culture of fear surrounding any discussion of human rights. Because when Cubans hear these words they think you're attacking the government. The other thing is, that since in Cuba there isn't a culture of respecting human rights, many people responded that it was a waste of time, knowing that nobody would do anything about your problems."

In the end, though, they persuaded 150 people nationwide to participate. Of these 26 were lesbians, 81 gay men, 19 bi people, 23 trans women, and 1 intersex. Sixty-six self-defined as white, 28 as being of African descent, and 44 as mixed race. Forty-four were between 15 - 25 years old, 56 were between 26 and 35, and 38 were older than 36.

Their news wasn't good. Despite the CENESEX “circus,” as Cuban queers typically call the institution's displays, violence and discrimination were incredibly high, especially on the institutional level. Eighty-seven said they had been assaulted both verbally and physically by cops, and arbitrarily detained. Forty-five had been discriminated against in the workplace, harassed or fired. Sixty-seven had experienced violence within their own families, including being thrown out of their homes. Violence and discrimination, both within and without the family, was worse the further you got from Havana. Cops regularly blackmailed and extorted rural queers. Worse, if they fled to Havana, they risked constant harassment and extortion by cops there and were often deported back to their place of origin. Trans people faced the worst of the violence and discrimination, especially if they were of African descent.

Mora testified that in general, very few of the people polled knew about international human rights instruments, or worldwide advances in LGBT rights. Few had access to resources or support on the island, especially in the areas of work and education. No statistics were kept about homophobic or transphobic murders. Few victims of violence even reported assaults because they weren't investigated, much less solved and prosecuted. "Nothing happened to the guilty. In only one highly public case was the murderer punished."

Sisy Montiel, coordinator of the Trans Fantasy Network, testified that she had become an activist because she herself was the victim of discrimination and violence, and as a young person was arrested so often for being "ostentatiously effeminate in public" that she barely finished high school.

She eventually got sex reassignment surgery, and found work in the theater, but many others like her were forced into prostitution, or killed themselves, literally encouraged by the state to end their lives. Things weren't much better now, she said. Kids are harassed so much in school they either leave or are expelled. Which meant they couldn't go to college or get decent jobs, usually forcing them into prostitution. Discrimination prevented most from getting medical care. Access was made even worse by racism, with black trans people being refused hormones and surgery.

After screening a short film, "Situation of LGBT population in Cuba, 2014-2015," they offered a list of recommendations, which again emphasized the need to pressure the Cuban government to respect independent organizations and civil society in general, and LGBT groups in particular, exposing how social change of any kind requires the same basic rights--to meet and assemble peacefully, to express themselves, fundamental rights that Cubans simply don't have. Not yet.

The Cuban government declined to participate in the hearing.

Hope for Queers Now in Cuba? Maybe

By Kelly Cogswell

President Obama made history this week by dumping a policy towards Cuba that hasn't helped a bit to usher in democracy or protect human rights. In fact, the fifty year effort of both Democrats and Republicans to isolate the island, and twist its little Caribbean arm, has only allowed Cuba's dictatorship to entrench itself. The country remains the only one in Latin America where pretty much every form of dissent is repressed.

Open your mouth, you may be smashed in the face by the cops, intimidated by angry mobs bussed in for the occasion, and other public acts of shaming and "repudiation" both in the street or if you get big enough, on the state-run media. Write a dissenting blog, you can forget holding a job or, until the regime's recent charm offensive, being allowed to leave the island prison. Once gone, you may be forbidden to return. The real gadflies are serially detained without any charges for several hours or several days, while the cops harass their families. Worse is long-term imprisonment.

So a little change can't hurt. A little opening. The only question is will this actually make things better for the average Cuban? Especially queers?

If you believe The New York Time's editorial board, Cuba was already on the verge of a hurricane of rainbow flags and unicorns. The only problem with this excellent news, delivered in Sunday's "Cuba's Gay Rights Evolution" is that it's largely bullshit, based on a distortion both of queer Cuban history as well as the current reality.

They didn't express any kind of skepticism at how Cuba's most visible LGBT rights advocate, The National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), is led by sexologist Mariela Castro, a straight white woman with a convenient last name and an outdated approach. They practically wet themselves heralding her bravery as "the first lawmaker in Cuban [post-revolutionary] history to cast a dissenting vote" in parliament. C'mon, she's the dictator's fucking daughter. Nobody's gonna drag her to jail, and they probably gave her the okay to do it. Can anybody say pink-washing?

And while Ms. Castro deserves props for getting gay issues out there, and winning free gender reassignment surgery and hormones for transpeople, the writers should have at least mentioned what happens to her "visible and empowered community" when they try to do things for themselves. Case in point is black lesbian and blogger Leannes Imbert Acosta, founder and director of the independent association, Observatorio Cubano de Derechos LGBT.(Cuban LGBT Rights Watch).

In 2012, when she asked the glorious CENESEX for help gathering information on the forced labor and re-education camps of the Sixties that incarcerated tens of thousands of queers, the governmental institution was rather less than responsive. And when Imbert Acosta went ahead with plans for her own exhibit on the camps, state security turned up at her door, confiscated her materials, and dragged her off to the cop station. Not for the first time.

The New York Times itself is complicit in erasing LGBT history in Cuba. Probably the most misleading part of the article was how they downplayed how viciously the regime has repressed LGBT people, writing that sexual minorities were "ostracized" and that "some" people were sent to "labor camps." "Ostracized" doesn't begin to describe the systematic antigay campaign of the government that not only passed punitive laws declaring us enemies of the state, but whipped up mobs as large and violent as any we've seen lately in Uganda.

And it wasn't just "some" gay men, but more like 25,000 that were incarcerated in brutal re-education and forced labor camps along with thousands more Jehovah's Witnesses and other undesirables. The gay men that could, fled. Suicide was not uncommon. Lesbians, often ignored in this history, were more often sent directly to jail or mental hospitals where the Cuban state attempted to electro-shock away their degenerate counterrevolutionary tendencies.

Neither was this vast wave of antigay hate over in the Seventies, as The Times implied. Even after the camps were closed following an international outcry in 1968, new antigay laws were passed, and plenty of LGBT people, especially dykes, continued to get booted from jobs, and end up in jails and mental hospitals during the Seventies and Eighties. People with HIV, especially queers, were forcibly interred in state run sanitaria until 1993. Even now, public decency and assembly laws are used to harass LGBT Cubans and people with HIV that can be convicted of the ever popular "pre-criminal social dangerousness." "Publicly manifested homosexuality" actually remains illegal.

Still, we should be hopeful at the new Cuba opening. At its worse, only the elite, white, military-connected kleptocracy--that already controls the economy-- will benefit. At its best, ordinary LGBT folks may get help from another two years of an Obama State Department which is actively supporting LGBT people worldwide.

What Cuban queers actually need to build an authentic LGBT movement, though, is what all Cubans need, the rights to free speech and assembly, the only real building blocks of change. Let's hope that doesn't get lost in the rush to pry open one more new market.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014) which includes large sections on LGBT Cuba.

A Cuban Primer for Queers

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's official. Cuba's taken a great leap forward against anti-gay hate. For the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) they're gonna screen "Aimée and Jaguar," "Querelle," and "Milk" with Sean Penn invited to the island as a guest of honor. The organizer is the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), led by heterosexual Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of current Cuban ruler Raúl Castro.

If you believe a week of state-sanctioned queer events spells the end of homophobia, you ought to give the Tea Party folks a racism pass. At a recent rally in Texas their speakers included a black doctor, and Hispanic and Vietnamese immigrants. Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times it seemed "like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad," but heck, at least they came up with some real minorities, not just hets that play fags on the silver screen.

Having Mariela Castro as the only recognizable name in Cuba fighting for queer rights is like having, oh, Lynne Cheney, as the only advocate for racial justice in the United States. If none of us are visible in Cuba, it's because actual queers are confined to jail as dissidents every time we try to organize for ourselves. Like anybody else. Which is perhaps the only real sign of our equality under the nonexistent rule of law.

Nevertheless, the global gay left continues to guard the Cuban regime as some kind of talisman of progressive hope, parroting Mariela Castro's press conferences, and publishing CENESEX's official IDAHO program almost in its entirety. Who cares that the event isn't organized by queers, or that participants in the panels will surely be screened for their politics? Nobody. Though one queer blogger did interrupt his celebration of Cuban wonderfulness to acknowledge, "things remain far from perfect and there is reason to believe that the rights of LGBT political dissenters in the island are still being curtailed." I don't even know where to start with that.

To be fair, some queer-related work is currently being done by academics in Cuba. But you have to ask just who has access to it. A few years ago, I was in Havana right before a major international conference on queer studies was due to take place, and none of the several dozen lesbians and gay men I spoke to had heard about the event. Now, countries offering IDAHO events are encouraged to broadcast some on the web, but with the internet blocked in Cuba, you can again forget access for queers there.

It is progress, I suppose, that we're not getting sent to internment camps for being queer. Instead, a gay man might be jailed for pre-criminal "dangerousness" or a host of other things. And while planners of a gay beauty pageant will still have state security pounding on their doors, they won't know if they're being arrested for their sexual identity, for organizing something not sanctioned by the ferociously paternal state, or because the state security forces want to steal their computers.

The last year in Cuba has been marked by growing scandals of government corruption and graft with millions being stashed in the traditional overseas bank accounts. The most horrifying example, though, is of the Mazorra psychiatric hospital where the employees were systematically stealing and reselling the patients' food. When the temperature dropped in February, as many as thirty of their emaciated victims froze to death. There was such an uproar when the news filtered out, even the government had to admit it.

Given that the regime is also getting slammed left and right for their record on human rights, it seems reasonable to think Cuba's IDAHO activities are almost purely an attempt to court good press. And why not? A totalitarian state can manufacture signs of progress as easily as commanding hate.

And they definitely need to turn things around. In early February, jailed Afro-Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike demanding better conditions for political prisoners. Guillermo Fariñas, a dissident journalist of color, immediately began his own hunger strike that will continue until he dies, or dissidents are freed. Before that, a group of African American intellectuals condemned Cuba for preserving a lily white regime and indulging racism -- despite it's declared end -- which pervades everything from racial profiling by cops to the "impromptu" mobs that attack the protesting "Damas de Blanco" as "ungrateful niggers" for demanding the release of their dissident husbands.

Queers are in the same Cuban boat. Despite current proclamations to the contrary, you just don't get real social change without activists, without visibility, without history, without a modicum of free speech. You have none of that in Cuba where hate remains the tool of choice to assemble mobs, and Fidel, like a holocaust denier, is still assuring his biographers that the gay internment camps that led to suicides, murders, and massive, terrified flight, are just imperialist lies.

For more information, I recommend the New York Book Review's Cuba: A Way Forward.

Queers Aren't the Only Targets in Cuba

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

After years of largely uncritical support for the Castro regime, the African American intelligentsia has finally been nudged into looking at the racial legacy of the revolution. The result is the "Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba."

Signed last week by sixty African Americans including Cornel West, Ruby Dee Davis, Melvin Van Peebles, and Jeremiah Wright, the Declaration asked the government for the release of Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an anti-racism advocate ostensibly jailed for the illegal possession of -- two sacks of cement. "[W]e cannot sit idly by and allow for decent, peaceful and dedicated civil rights activists in Cuba, and the black population as a whole, to be treated with callous disregard for their rights as citizens and as the most marginalized people on the island."

About time. Black and mixed-race Cubans make up as much as 62 percent of the total population (11 million), but most of the country's civil leadership is white. At the top, the twenty-one member Political Bureau of Cuba's Communist Party has only four black faces, and the all important thirty-nine member Council of Ministers a mere two, the composition of which can be blamed neither on the U.S. embargo nor the CIA.

Additionally, seventy-three percent of scientists and technicians, and eighty percent of the professors at the University of Havana are white. In 2005, 65.8 percent of able-bodied black Cubans were unemployed, twice the rate of white unemployment (nearly 30 percent). Conversely, the prison population is now estimated to be 85 percent black, with prisoners averaging in age between 18 – 28 years.

Because eighty-five percent of Cuban immigrants are white, remittances sent back home to their families worsen financial disparities. It's worth noting, however, that while white Cubans may be relatively better off, they aren't doing particularly well either. The country is bankrupt, and food and housing shortages are acute.

Probably the only real racial parity on the island is in the area of dissent. Many of the Cuba's best known political prisoners have been people of color, like librarian Omar Pernet Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physicians Darsi Ferrer, the inspiration for the Declaration, and Oscar Elias Biscet who was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King and forms of non-violent protest.

The only problem with the Declaration is that it implies that this "unprovoked violence, State intimidation and imprisonment" is somehow new for black activists.

You have to pick through the accompanying press release to find the acknowledgment that the roots of the problem were actually early in the revolution. While you, my queer reader, may have heard the regime sent a whole generation of fags and dykes into UMAP concentration camps, mental hospitals, and exile, the government was also busy hunting down advocates of "Black Power," and banning related organizations.

One of the most notable victims was Walterio Carbonell, a black intellectual and admirer of the French Negritude movement. Author of "Cómo surgió la cultura nacional" (How the National Culture Emerged) (1961), he exhumed the role of Afro-Cubans in the development of the Cuban nation, going far beyond a nod at musical contributions. He was silenced by his time in jail.

From the beginning, Afro-Cubans, like poor whites and peasants, were supposed to shut up and be grateful for what they'd gotten. The troublesome part of Black Power wasn't just the "Black," but the "Power," and a government determined not to share it.

For most of the dissidents I've cited earlier, race probably wasn't the determining factor in their arrest. Omar Pernet Hernández, released in 2008, wasn't even focused on anti-racism work. He was picked up with dozens of others in the March 2003 crackdown for opposing the regime and running an independent library from his house.

Anybody at all that opens their mouths, or steps outside the lines is liable for arrest in Cuba. White, working class blogger Yoani Sanchez (and her husband) have both been harassed, and beaten up. Jail is probably on the horizon. In August, cops stormed a meeting of the LGBT group Fundación Cuba that was trying to organize, not the overthrow of the government, but Mr. Gay Cuba. The event was planned for a public place to give some visibility to the LGBT community. For their trouble, the eleven were beaten, two were arrested and their computers seized.

Now, the regime seems to be preparing for another crackdown, warning the population that Obama plans to bomb or invade the island. A few weeks ago they ran a military exercise called "Bastion 2009" part of the "War of the Whole People" which included a practice run for rounding up dissidents and putting down riots.

It's increasingly obvious that you can't fight racism -- or homophobia, misogyny or poverty -- in Cuba, without fighting for basic civil rights, and that dirty word, democracy.

American Politics: Two Left Feet

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Some people have two left feet. America doesn't even have one, not a toenail. My latest theory is that the impotence of our left can be judged in inverse proportion to the amount of Che tee shirts worn by its proponents. And the decibel level of their response to political outrages.

When the Democrats recently forced out Van Jones as Obama's green jobs Tzar to quell Republican fury, the most I heard were squeaks from the left. Only whispers were offered in protest when Republican administrations tolerated, actually applauded conservatives who denied global warming as frequently as the Holocaust, posited a secret global government, and supported "Middle Eastern policies meant to hasten the second coming" as Michelle Goldberg notes in the American Prospect.

Why the relative silence? Especially when those revolutionary Che tee-shirts are in ample supply in the U.S.?

Because they don't indicate anything except failure, of good sense, and the imagination. What Republican would wear an image of Bush on the destroyer declaring victory in Iraq shortly before the place exploded, taking the entire region, and the American economy, more or less along for the ride? We won, we won. Kaboom. No. You wash your hands of the triumphalist image and move on.

The left, however, continues to embrace Che, who along with his bosom buddy Fidel, gave birth to an equal, if more localized, disaster. Cubans in that enormously fertile island are going hungry, and it's not all the fault of the embargo. Police profiling of black folks, even women, is as bad as in New Jersey. The lauded Cuban health care system is largely reserved for the party faithful. School kids don't have school uniforms, books. Or toilet paper. "Revolutionary" forces protect the working class by forbidding union organizing. Queers are arrested if they try to do anything outside the sphere of their protectrice Mariela Castro who defends us in a creepy, medicalized way as homossssssssexuals and transssssexuals that have to be tolerated because they were born that way.

Altogether, Cuba has become what Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez calls "a society marked by the criminalization of opinions, where even the nuts and children don't say what they think, just the drunks." Which are then arrested. After a clip was posted on YouTube of a hammered Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, "Panfilo" interrupting a video interview to announce that "what Cubans really needed was grub. We're horribly hungry," the middle-aged Afro-Cuban man got two years in jail.

And despite his early, and heroic departure, Che can't be absolved for how Cuba evolved. If I remember correctly, he was the architect of the "re-education" camps for prostitutes that went on to imprison queers, other social degenerates and enemies of the revolution that now include bloggers in addition to voluble drunks.

If that's the truth, why oh why oh why do so many in the American left cling to the myth of Che as hero, using Cuba as a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun?

Ignorant? Or just lazy? For a revolution all you need is a beret, a boat called Granma, a bunch of guys with guns, pure hearts, and a couple of weeks of ripe historical conditions. Change in a democracy, especially a mediocre one, takes years of wallowing in political filth, compromise, back room deals, insults, persistence, and of course buckets of dough.

It's more entertaining, cleaner to just go out on the streets to protest for women's and queer rights. Against war and against racism. To collect money for Green Peace and animal sanctuaries. With their insistence on keeping their hands spotless, I sometimes think the left have far more invested in our Puritan heritage than the religious right.

As a result we're not even in the game. Unlike most other democracies, we have no viable Green Party or other group of the left that could manage to get more than one or two representatives in the House. We have only the centrist and center-right Democrats up against the right-wing and extreme right Republicans.

Without the counterbalance of a political left, the extreme right easily paralyzes the Republicans, and pulls the center farther and farther towards their particular brand of schizophrenic American politics which manages to be both authoritarian and isolationist, paranoid, theocratic, and popular in an elitist (racist, misogynist, homophobic) kind of way.

The only solution is to artificially create a left. Where it could come from though, is anybody's guess. A cabbage patch? Storks? Churches have been the breeding ground of the rising extremists on the right. The left has nothing similar. Social justice movements in 2009 are too fragmented and demobilized to hatch a movement, or even the left wing of a baby chick.

Bad Language

By Kelly Cogswell

802 words

There should be limits on the limits we put on speech. So Isaiah Washington called Grey's Anatomy co-star T.R. Knight a faggot. Big deal. We've all heard the word before.

It's easy enough to distinguish from the tone whether "faggot" is a brain fart from an asshole, or an alarm bell, the last word you're gonna hear.

And Washington wasn't about to pull out a baseball bat and whale away at T.R. He just had an attack of the stupids, flapping his bigoted mouth in front of reporters and video cameras. He's like a turkey that goes outside in the rain, looks up at the gleam of the sky and drowns to death.

There are plenty of more dangerous homophobes around, they just speak softly, avoiding the necessity for Washington's endless flood of apologies for "inappropriate" and "offensive" language.

I'm not saying he should get a free pass, but what about proportion?

In a world where queers can still be ruled outlaws and sent to jail (Nigeria), banned from marriage and civic life (U.S.), not to mention hanged by the neck until dead (Iran), doesn't it seem wrong that a simple "faggot" said by a grinning idiot gets so much air time by comparison?

And what about free speech? Controlling it is a delicate matter. Sure, public gaffes are an opportunity to educate about the likes of homophobia and racism, but in the long term, focusing on language may impose not change, but silence.

Even worse, our war on bad language implies we have the right, the obligation even, to censor speech, sheathing the primary weapon we American queers have in our fight for civil rights and social change.

Better that we stick to the old ACT UP motto. Silence = Death. It's like the little black dress of democracy. Sometimes you wear it with pearls, sometimes with combat boots. And it can't apply just to us.

I've thought about it a lot in regards to Cuba. Since the revolution and its extremely long demise, Cuba's been a place where dissent mostly takes the form of shrugs or whispers. I was there four years ago for almost a month and nobody ever finished a sentence.

I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when I heard some intellectuals had actually criticized the government media. They had to.

It's the beginning of post-Castro jockeying for power and the Stalinist ghost of bad times past, Luis Pavón Tamayo, had been pulled out of obscurity for a TV special.

Suffice it to say that in the Seventies the gentleman headed up the National Council of Culture whose rumored motto was the punning: "If you don't listen to Council, old age won't be a problem."

At his direction, hundreds of artists and writers were sent to concentration camps, exile, or professional Siberia and "inxile," joining Jehovah's Witnesses, garden variety homos, and black power types like scholar Walterio Carbonell.

It's worth noting that words like "inappropriate" and "offensive" were then on the other linguistic foot, directed at us unrepentant queers for muddying up the purity of the revolution by our very existence.

If you're reading the Cuban tea leaves, Pavon's recent resurrection was clearly a sign that the far left (far right) wing of the Communist Party is winning at least some battles for control, which is not good for us.

Which is why the Cuban intelligentsia spoke up for once. Many suffered first-hand in the purges. In emails and letters they condemned not only the resurrection of Pavón, but the silence of intellectuals in Cuba during the Seventies.

Desiderio Navarro, literary critic and editor of journal Criterios, reminded them what the bad old days were like.

"... the heterosexuals (including the non-homophobes) ignored the fate of gays; the whites (including non-racists) ignored the fate of militant blacks; the traditionalists ignored the fate of the vanguard; the atheists (including the tolerant) of Catholics and other believers; the pro-Soviets of the anti-Social Realists and Marxists whose beliefs weren't in accord with the most recent line from Moscow; and so on.

We have to ask if this lack of individual moral responsibility can be repeated today among Cuba's intelligentsia."

Sure it can. Silence is easy, if not safer, than speech. And as Cuban revolutionaries found in their first years in power, censorship is a great temptation after being embattled for ages.

We activists have to consider that flipside in our war on "inappropriate" and "offensive" language.

Maybe a couple of decades of taking offense at offense has played a role in swamping American politics with propriety, civility, "non-partisanship" and silence that helped get us Bush as a President in 2000, and Iraq as our war a few years later.

As Audre Lorde wrote, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

ACT UP, Fight Back.


Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.