A Voice from Gay Ghana

By Kelly Cogswell

Ghana may be one of Africa's more democratic countries, but not for queers. Thanks in part to antigay campaigns encouraged (and financed) across West Africa by U.S. evangelicals, ninety-eight percent of people there believe that homosexuality is "morally unacceptable." Politicians openly denounce lesbians and gay men as foreigners and abominations. They blame us for AIDS, even demand that we be rounded up and jailed, not just under colonial-era laws prohibiting "unnatural acts" but anything they can think of, even genocide. In 2010, more than 1,000 protesters in the Western Region of Takoradi rallied against our mere existence.

Violence has been escalating, especially against gay men. Just a week or so ago in the capital city of Accra, event promoter Kinto Rothmans was ambushed by a mob, forced to admit he was gay, and brutally beaten. The video posted by a proud attacker immediately went viral. A few days before, a crowd of boys at St. Paul’s Senior High School in the small town of Danu tried to lynch two classmates accused of being gay. When two teachers tried to interfere, the boys rioted. The cops were called in and ended up fatally shooting a student.

Last year, Richard, now only 20, was forced to flee the country after a lifetime of harassment and abuse. In middle school, after telling his best friend he had a crush on him, Richard was flogged several times, then expelled. Back home, the village chief issued another round of punishments. "I was detained for about five days during which I wasn't fed. I was only given water every morning. I was also sent to a shrine where I was made to drink a calabash of blood. Then I was beaten, and they broke my right arm. Afterwards I was banished from my hometown. It was around my last year in middle school so I had to study on my own in order to take the final exams to get into high school."

He briefly lived with relatives in Accra, before he ended up at St. Paul’s, and can testify first hand to their anti-gay brutality. "I was seen with another guy by the school prefect who reported us to the head master. We were called to the front of the entire student body and asked to tell the whole school what the prefect saw us doing." Afterwards, they were beaten by several male teachers, then dragged on their knees to the school offices, and later humiliated again at another school assembly in which they were officially expelled.

When he got home, he was harangued by his aunts and uncles who eventually threatened to lynch him if they saw him talking to a boy. "They claimed I’d pollute them, and talk them into being gay."

His parents sent him to a different town up north, but it wasn't enough. His boyfriend from high school came to visit and they were seen in a local bar. A couple of days later, when he was shopping with a cousin, he was attacked by a pair of youths, two vigilante "zongo boys" that administer "instant justice" to anybody from queers to thieves.

One guy pinned his hands behind his back, the other started punching him in his stomach. "I struggled with them, but I couldn’t do anything because they were stronger than I was." His cousin called the police who dragged all four of them to the station and detained them for twenty-four hours. During his stay, he passed out and had to be rushed to the hospital with internal bleeding.

In the end, the cops let his attackers go, and charged him with being a homosexual. His family helped him flee again, but when the death threats continued anyway from local youths who threatened to lynch him on sight, his mother decided he had to leave Ghana before he ended up dead. She's a nurse, and worked with his two stepbrothers to get the money together.

Richard's in Texas now, studying to be an EMT, and working in the cafeteria when he can pick up the hours. The group Human Rights First is helping him to get a permanent visa. He says he tries not to think too much about why he came, or how alone he is. He just wants a normal life. Maybe he'll get it. We video chatted on Skype. I could see he's young, good-looking, though he seemed shell-shocked. His voice was nearly flat as he told me that it hurt to imagine he might never be able to go home. Or see his family again. "I tell myself at least no one is coming to kill me. Or beat me up because I am gay."

There's not much reason to hope things will change anytime soon. When Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama visited the U.S. not long ago, he was asked about homophobia in his country. "All he could say was that because of the culture there wasn't even room to talk about it. So he couldn't even make a comment about it. It makes me so sad. All that is going on back there and nobody is doing anything about it."

Still, when I asked about his hometown where most people are farmers or fisherman or traders, he wistfully told me, "It's really cool, more of a village, really, where almost everybody knows everybody. It's a friendly place to grow up," he said.

War Against Queers in Nigeria

By Kelly Cogswell

It's been one year since an anti-gay bill passed in Nigeria banning same-sex marriages that nobody was lobbying for. Membership in LGBT groups was also criminalized, along with any display of homo affection, making a handshake as dangerous as a handjob. The law goes even further, requiring citizens to report such things to the cops or face a decade or so in jail, just like the queers.

So far, the general population has been happy to help rid Nigeria of these disgusting un-Nigerians, especially gay men. It seems like every day they're picked up for no good reason and charged, often at the behest of their neighbors. Just Tuesday, the Sharia police in the north detained a dozen men at a birthday party, claiming that it was actually a gay wedding, and that they had arrested the "bride."

At this point, gay men with HIV would rather risk dying of AIDS than go anywhere near the clinics that provide their ARV drugs, but leave them vulnerable to stigmatization, blackmail, beatings and the lynch mob. Unsurprisingly, new infections are climbing. And those with the means flee the country altogether.

On Wednesday, I went to an event organized by the Nigerian LGBT community in New York City. They held a panel and screened the 2013 documentary Veil of Silence, which Habeeb Lawal started shooting while the law was still in draft form and some legislators were advocating the death penalty for same-sex acts instead of a mere fourteen years in jail. He alternated footage of gay men talking about their lives with politicians in half-empty chambers inveighing against the degeneracy and foreignness of homosexuals. Which is kind of ironic, considering that this anti-gay pogrom owes so much to American preachers bearing money and hate.

Nigeria's garden variety homophobia became especially toxic after visits from the likes of Reverend Rick Warren in 2008, who compared homosexuality to pedophilia. The hate was thoroughly institutionalized by 2009 when evangelists Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Schmierer headlined at a conference uncovering the horrors of the "gay agenda" for a mesmerized audience terrified at queers hellbent on recruiting their children.

Many Nigerians clearly believe the propaganda. In the movie, one gay man described being asked by his mother if he knew any white people. She was sure he had caught his gayness from them, like a case of the clap. Politicians may spread the lies for more cynical reasons. From Russia to Cuba to Zimbabwe, there's a long history of governments using the homosexual menace to distract everybody from the problems du jour.

In Nigeria's case, it's how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as well as the thin grip the government has on power, especially in the north. Boko Haram now controls large territories, kidnapping girls, and slaughtering whole villages. Human Rights Watch warns it may entirely derail the upcoming presidential election.

As the situation in the north deteriorates, international organizations may have some leverage to improve the situation of LGBT people. Cliff Cortex from the United Nations Development Programme reported that they were already pressuring Nigeria to comply with the human rights treaties it has signed, not to mention its own constitution. Even so, he didn't seem to see any breakthroughs on the horizon.

In the meantime, Marie de Cenival, from the Heartland Alliance, described how international organizations like hers were scrambling to find new terminology that would allow them to serve gay men without calling them that, or even hinting at it. Identifying them as Men Who Have Sex With Men was now almost as bad as calling them gay. One day it was "target" clients, another, they were part of the "at-risk population." Which could be anybody, really, from sex workers to house wives.

Thierry A. Ekon, a Togo native, and researcher on HIV/AIDS in the African communities in New York reported on the depressing statistics among Nigerians since the law passed: the elevated rates of HIV transmission, its late detection, and how only one or two percent of those infected said it had to do with homo sex, the rest claiming to have no idea how they got it.

Olumide Makanjuola, from Solidarity Alliance in Nigeria, pleaded for help. The very idea that the twelve men detained were actually trying to hold a wedding was laughable: "We wouldn't dare." The panel included several other members, but nobody really offered solutions, beyond supporting LGBT Nigerians that end up in New York.

That is the least we can do. We also have to pay attention, keep the problem visible, and support the queers who are working on it. We also need to help them flee when it gets too dangerous, and exile seems like the best solution, at least for a while. Oliver Anene, the gay Nigerian moderating the panel, was quick to point out that it was temporary. "We want to go home."

Allies Aren't Enough In Ferguson, San Fran

By Kelly Cogswell

Another unarmed black man is shot by a white cop, and as the situation explodes, plenty of right-thinking white folks are exhorting each of us blanquitos to become an ally. It's also what straight folks are supposed to become when another fag gets beaten, another transwoman mutilated and killed. Or a dyke gets raped.

I hate that word, ally. It is so patronizing. So besides the point. As if Michael Brown's death has no consequences for white lives. As if the murder of Bryan Higgins, radical faerie, this week in San Francisco won't touch hets. As if we could make our lives bubbles. No, not even bubbles which explode pretty easily. But pods maybe. Metal space ships exploring a different galaxy which we can leave whenever we want a change of scenery.

Sure, plenty of people are sheltered. Random attributes give us privileges, and we enjoy them as much as we can. I suppose it's even remarkable that anybody bothers to wring their hands at the latest horror. But the links are still there. We drag around our shared histories like toilet paper stuck to our shoes. Like that extra forty pounds we don't really notice anymore. Haven't for years. Doesn't mean that sodden, shitty thing isn't there. In the houses we can buy, the jobs we get. That bloody smudge on the sidewalk.

But as long as my passport says American, what happens in Ferguson, or Detroit, or Chicago is my business, too. As long as I am human, really. Seeing each other as separate and irrelevant is part of what got us into this mess to begin with. The inability to look each other in the eyes and recognize, "Okay, a person. Like me." Dogs are smarter than us. One sniff and they know what's what. Cat. Dog. Tree. Homos not so sapiens get distracted by all the superficial stuff, skin, hair, gestures, cars. Language. Act like they are mountain ranges with no clear path over. Are often glad that the barrier's there. And work to build higher ones.

In fact, differences really only exist in the painful middle distance. At the cellular level we are pretty much indistinguishable. And the further away you move the microscope, the more you can see how our futures are bound together, like the misery of our past. It's in our own interest to pay attention, and think about how we fit together. And then plunge in.

Which is why I wish we'd retire that word, ally. It implies that we don't really have to do much but have nice thoughts and maybe make a donation. Send some tents to the war zone. Sandwiches. Not go there yourself in the flesh. Risk getting hurt. Maybe physically, maybe just your feelings. I mean, you should try not to be a complete asshole, you're not the center of attention and maybe should listen more than you talk, but missteps are inevitable if you leave your space ship.

The thing we have to keep in mind is that we are not "allies". Not acting on anybody else's behalf. We don't deserve gold stars for getting involved in the society we belong to. We don't even have to pretend to understand somebody else's experience. We just have to believe we are more deeply connected than we admit. And if we fuck up sometimes, so what? If practice doesn't make perfect, it does make better. At least we aren't still deluded into believing we're somehow outside the problem, and that it won't bite us in the ass one day. Hasn't already infected our lives.

I thought about this a lot when I was out there on the frontlines as a Lesbian Avenger. I always figured that if dykes finally got treated with respect, had the room to make choices about sex and romance, weren't subjected to violence, it would stretch the possibilities for straight females like my bigoted hateful mom. Don't want to get married? Fine. Resent kids? Don't have to have any. And no problem if you don't want to put on the panty-hose, make nice, suck-up to the boss. If I can walk the streets unafraid as a lesbian, then you can, too.

It's pretty obvious how militarized, and bigoted policing affect the LGBT community. Fags of all races still get arrested in adult bookstores, get stung in illegal sex operations. Trans people, too, get profiled and harassed as prostitutes. Instead of getting help, many queers get harassed after assaults.

Even on a sheer tactical level, it's clear one segment of the population can't be assured justice while another goes without. It is a habit. We can't address violence against queers, or against people of color, without going after it in American society at large. We may have to address our problems in small ways, one law at a time, but our thinking has to be big enough to hold us all.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Queers in the Shadows

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'd like to say I care about the Republican triumph this mid-term elections, but I just don't. The Democrats are no prize for queers, and it's been clear for months that the bulk of the country was on another of its freakishly alienating trajectories. Like when Americans continued to embrace Bush as he defended the torturers of Abu Ghraib, only turning away when the economy sank.

Now, they're blaming a president of two years for a decade's mess, demanding he reduce spending, cut taxes, shrink the State, just don't touch my Medicare. And while they decry government corruption they elect a slurry of politicians that have both hands and even their feet in the till. Good luck with that.

I'm just glad the San Francisco Giants whooped Texas butt on Texas soil. It was repulsive watching the Bushes parade around the baseball diamond like they still owned the country, which I guess they do again. Nevertheless, the World Series trophy comes home to those gay-marryin' liberal hippies on the West Coast. Hah.

Screw the weekly, the yearly, the four-year cycle, anyway. I've decided to change my touchstones to decades, lifetimes, even. It's an inevitable shift after trying for these last few weeks to articulate the usefulness of the Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project. The capper was a show at El Museo del Barrio.

Called "Nueva York," it traces the impact of Spain, Latinos and Latin America on the development of New York City from 1613 to 1945. Contributions weren't just recent influences in music and art, but commerce, finance, and manufacturing. By the end, the exhibit manages to reorient the way we look at the whole vibrant city.

The Domino factory that stood so many years on the Brooklyn side of the East River is a remnant from New York's role as a major player in the Caribbean sugar trade. Father Felix Varela whose name is attached to more than one building on the Lower East Side and in 1988 got his own stamp, was only one of dozens of Latin American revolutionaries like Cuban compatriot José Martí to turn to New York both as a refuge, and a financial and media center where you could whip up support, money, even a shipment of arms.

Hispanic Jews were responsible for the first synagogue here, and what would New York be today without salsa and reggaeton, and all the signs declaring se habla español?

I was enchanted by the show until that moment thumbing through the binder of Men of Letters when I realized that, in fact, there were no women of letters in there at all, and only a handful in the exhibit. Only two or three men of color made it in. And queers were as invisible as we usually are in these traditional exhibits that are largely about straight pale men in the public sphere.

Does it matter? I always thought so. In 1992, when the Avengers began their campaign for lesbian visibility and survival, Ellen and Rosie were still in their respective closets. Christine Quinn was an unknown dyke at the Anti-Violence Project, and Lower East Side housing activist, and openly queer, Margarita López was five years away from winning a seat on the City Council.

When the Avengers did their first action, handing balloons to school kids suggesting they "Ask about lesbian lives," lesbian mothers had their kids stripped from them with impunity, we were totally excluded from public life, American culture, and even the printer almost misspelled the "L" word. Yeah, visibility seemed urgent.

Lately, now that queers are becoming more visible, people are beginning to dispute its value. What if it only makes us a target of bullying and violence? And what should we do with this growing visibility if we don't like the images we're stuck with, like the lesbian PTA moms, or the "Real" L word crew, that don't even have camp to redeem them?

We can't stuff lesbians back in the bottle, and I'm not sure we should. Unless you control a pretty good chunk of the country's wealth, visibility (and solidarity) is the only road to power. It's not surprising that it sometimes seems like a bruising election campaign, in which one side is forced to be unnaturally wholesome while the other slings mud and caricatures.

Visibility is a means, not the end, unless your only ambition is the mere acknowledgment of existence. Me, I want the moon. Or at least cultural and political integration, inserting ourselves in every history with the battle cry, "We're queer, we're here, and we always have been." Especially in New York. Like Latino immigrants, we came to the city in droves, seeking refuge and revolution. We shaped neighborhoods, made contributions in every field, planting seeds that have only begun to emerge.

The Equality Trap

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was still in upstate New York last week, and spent Sunday counting flags on the five mile walk into town. I lost track pretty quickly because the rarity along the road was the house with no stars, and no stripes hanging from a pole.

Maybe they wanted to make sure I knew I was in America, and not Canada or France. Maybe they wanted to proudly trumpet their identity. Which is really a no brainer since they're doing it in their own country.

Probably the flags were supposed to be proud reminders of the American heritage of liberty and freedom and equality. Which gave rise to thoughts about just what "equal" means in America. Your legal status? A moral or technical equivalent? How do you judge? Is it the ultimate yardstick?

In a column a couple of days before September 11th, Roger Cohen seemed to equate the World Trade Center bombing with the Holocaust when he asserted that putting an Islamic Cultural Center a couple blocks away from the WTC site (in an enormous city where you won't even be able to see the damn thing) was exactly like slapping down a bunch of crosses at a concentration camp.

Yes, he implied two and a half thousand dead in a horrible attack was the same as the systematic genocide of seven million. Is it really? In all senses? Or was the comparison just another perversion of our desire for "equality"?

We can't stand to be anything but equal, even in the scope of our suffering. Minorities argue over who's more oppressed. Angry White Men who first felt entitled to complain about being deprived of their crappy jobs by women, now moan about being deprived of their presidency by a Black terrorist Muslim fink. God knows we can't have our September tragedy overshadowed by a bunch of dead European Jews. Yes, Cohen is a Jewish Brit, but even with him, as a transplanted New Yorker, it's America first.

I wonder what will happen to the Gays when they finally get theirs. The day when we'll be considered full and equal citizens is approaching fast. Just last week, a federal judge ruled the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was unconstitutional. We'll see if it stands, like the ruling overturning the ban on same-sex marriage in California. And for years gay men have had the right to screw without getting arrested for sodomy.

When there are no laws against us, will we fall into the American habit of using equality to absolve us of our social responsibilities and debts? No one above or beneath us. No one even supporting us at our sides. In short, will equality be a moral and emotional trap?

I hadn't thought about it in precisely that way until my girlfriend started reading Tocqueville aloud when we were upstate and without a TV. In his musings on democracy, he warns how easy it is for tyrants to take advantage of a population that values equality as much, or more, than liberty. Fellow citizens become competitors for rights. They are isolated from their neighbors, content as long as they feel equal to the joneses, even if it just means they're equally miserable. I can't have anything to eat, neither can you, comrade. Dulled with equality, they ignore the despot at the top.

My girlfriend thought of Cuba. I thought about Bush the Second who made jokes and slapped his fellow citizens on their equal backs as he started wars, and unleashed his cronies on the environment and financial system. I also thought about queers. As our sense of equality increases, we become more conformist, and less community-minded. Our desire for liberty fades.

Being free is the only thing I've ever wanted. Not the easy freedom that leaves you unmoored and irresponsible as a child, but the kind that gives you an unfenced mind, allows you to choose and to act, to take your place in society, seizing it by force if you have to.

Equality's an illusion, anyway. Laws depend on enforcement, as I've said before. And laws, rightly so, only govern part of our lives. In America, social equality has degenerated into the mantras, "we're as good as anybody else," and "we don't owe nobody nuttin.'" Even if the government fixes our roads, subsidizes the community colleges our children go to, and builds the old age homes we stick our elders in, we still oughta defund the bastards. Screw the feds.

We imagine we don't need them. Or anybody. Reality doesn't come into it. Having won equality at great cost, we pull up the drawbridge, and alternate a conspicuous gloating with the fear that somebody will come to steal it. With a flag flying over it, every home is a vulnerable and isolated fort.

Groundhog Gay

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Here's to Groundhog Day, that gloomy 2nd day of February midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox when an unkempt rodent sticks its head out of its hole, and either retreats at a shadow that predicts six more weeks of winter, or frolics at the sign of early spring if there's nothing to see.

The logic is a mess. To cast a shadow there'd have to be sun, which one would imagine should lead any ordinary groundhog to expect better weather. But the pros like Punxsutawney Phil are apparently rotten, little, sharp-teethed cynics, turning up their squirrelly noses at every false glimmer and entrenching themselves against another sure round of sleet and bone-chilling cold.

The chubby, bitter Marmota monax is a tempting model what with all the false suns in the sky and the plethora of shadows. In a burst of wishful thinking and propaganda, CNN's Sanjay Gupta declared that Haiti doesn't need doctors any more, though many people with bad two-week old injuries have yet to see a doctor, and medicine's as scarce of food.

Likewise, the Senate hearings reconsidering lesbians and gay men in the military have been promoted as radiant promises of change, though just how that will manifest itself is unclear since nobody's even considering the repeal of the misnamed Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that somehow results in queers getting ejected right and left even without anybody telling anybody anything. Apparently, what we can expect is a shift in enforcement. As Pam of Pam's House Blend writes, "I guess the result depends on how you define the word "change.""

You could say the same for the administration's press release entitled "Expanding Opportunities for the LGBT Community" that starts by patting itself on the back for steering the country away from a depression, and goes on to claim its budget includes means for fighting discrimination against LGBT folk, supporting Federal employee domestic partner benefits, and a host of other things.

While there might be money earmarked for such projects, there's still the matter of political will and how you define "expanding." Just a couple of weeks ago Lambda Legal had to file suit against Obama's administration demanding the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) obey prior rulings by Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and cough up the spousal health insurance benefits awarded to Ninth Circuit judicial attorney Karen Golinski.

Frankly, I'll believe it's summer for queers when the fruit is on the vine. Until then, it's just more of the same rotten political weather. And this groundhog recommends full butt-wagging retreat, though maybe it's better if, like Staten Island Chuck, you instead sink your teeth into the nearest target. Last year it was Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

This year, take your pick. You'll have to get in line for a piece of the O-Man, but in the meantime consider all the New York politicos that promised the moon but shafted queers on same-sex marriage, or perhaps the evangelical conversion therapist of your choice that promises healing and gives years of torture instead. You could go for the American and Nazi Revisionist Scott Lively fueling antigay hate in Uganda, and only reluctantly suggesting conversion therapy instead of the ultimate cure, the death penalty.

Then there are the discredited American "experts" extending their conversion therapy movement into Britain, among them Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and Richard Cohen, who founded the International Healing Foundation, but has been permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association.

The damage they're causing in Britain and elsewhere isn't as immediately life-threatening as Africa, but don't underestimate the growing strength of the movement and its potential impact.

In an article this week in The Independent, "The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion" Patrick Strudwick describes how, under guise of treatment, more and more British shrinks are resuscitating the debunked stereotypes that homosexuals are all emotionally retarded, infantile, damaged, suffering from childhood abuse, pathological, sick, and sinful. An assertion of love between gay men was dismissed by one shrink as "... a darkness that's very real that keeps you as its dog, but of course our God is more powerful than that."

If you're tempted to snicker at them in this post-gay era, just look at the powerful effect this cocktail of religion and pseudoscience had on Strudwick. Openly gay and well-adjusted before going undercover, he afterwards found himself "confused and damaged. I began to constantly analyse why I found particular men attractive. Does that man represent something that's lacking in me? Do I want him because he looks strong which must mean I feel weak? Did something happen in my childhood? The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none."

Sometimes I think it's just as well more Americans don't have passports.

2009: Queer Year in Review

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"

It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.

Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.

We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.

Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.

In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.

In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."

That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.

The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.

Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.

Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.

Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.

In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.

He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.

And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.

Putting the Riot Back in Stonewall

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In a couple of weeks New Yorkers will be marking the anniversary of the Stonewall, but probably nobody's gonna throw a bottle or a punch.

State-by-state we're winning the rights to same-sex marriage. In the academic world, queer and gender studies programs are practically mainstream. And during the post-election protests against the passage of Prop H8te, there was a brief resurgence of LGBT street activism with young queers getting in on the act. With all that going on, why riot?

Maybe just to stay in practice. When activists in Spain won the right to same-sex marriage, they popped a cork and went home without sticking around to change the larger society. Years later, LGBT folks are hated just as much as ever, and without a community structure, without activists, enforcement of the right to marry, or anything else, seems to be almost impossible for any but the most well-connected.

Likewise, the development of "queer" studies programs in Spain, and in France as well, seem to actually be eroding gay activism. It's partly a matter of language. Embracing the foreign word "queer" with no association with homosexuality, deludes French and Spanish kids into believing they've come out even though culturally they have both feet in the closet, carefully sheltered from homophobia.

I could dismiss the "queer" thing in Europe as a peculiarly middle-class college phenomenon, except that in practice, "queer" theory -- deconstructing sexual orientation into an artificial veil of performed gender and constructed identities -- is actively used to stigmatize the words lesbian and gay as reactionary labels rooted in the past.

Nobody's taking to the streets for (or with) dinosaurs. Lesbians, especially, with the double whammy of homophobia and misogyny, are finding it impossible to recruit new activists, even if the little thugs populating the schoolyards of Europe don't care if you're only a collection of socially assigned values when they're taunting you as a dyke.

The state of activism is only marginally better in the U.S., where Stonewall 2.0 seems to have fizzled. And even without the specter of Spain, history warns us how fragile progress is without a strong activist base. In Prussia, for instance, statutes forbidding Jewish participation in liberal professions like the law was overturned just to be reinstated more brutally a few decades later in what was by then Germany.

In the United States, where laws are harder to pass and more rarely reversed, I don't expect a queer Holocaust, but things could get bad again even if they're just selectively enforced. Something with which Americans do have a long tradition. The white boy gets a warning for his gram of coke, while the black guy goes straight to jail. The fag killer getting off with a panic defense, the murderer of businessmen earns the chair.

As a perpetual minority, LGBT folks would be stupid to assume their progress is written in stone. But too many activists have been snoozing since ARV's demobilized AIDS activists and other groups like the Lesbian Avengers went kaput. We're not only silent, but assimilating, unraveling, passé. We've forgotten our strengths as a community, and how we are bound by more than same-sex sex.

Sometimes in the spring when I go to the French Agricultural Fair where children can see everything from sheep and cows to wine-making displays as they digest what it means to be French, I wish we could have the same sort of thing for LGBT folks. Something that lasts longer, and is more pedagogically ambitious than a festival or parade, aiming to convey decades, if not centuries, of history, culture, and identity.

Why not the same blend of lofty and camp, mixing stands of Birkenstocks and cosmos shaken not stirred, Judy Garland paraphernalia and Audre Lorde books? We need drag queens and kings to instruct their novices in the elaborate flamboyant display of a drag show, drape us in wigs and pearls and facial hair, and refuse to deconstruct the temporary transgressive joy.

We could have displays on activism, and how to write a press release and assign the most effective Twitter tags. We could commemorate the riots with a contest on beer bottle throwing judging participants on accuracy, ferocity and style in shattering plate glass windows.

I'm only half joking. And though my ideas are probably lame, the point I'm getting at is this: that if we want to survive as a community we have to do more than win the right to get married. We have to pick our myths and guard them jealously like everybody else. Both to survive, and nurture another generation, but also because our community traditions are worth something to the world at large.

Every minority community has their survival stories, but like fine wines each is rooted in a cultural terroir, with a unique balance of resistance, courage, joy. Queers, in particular, celebrate, or used to, an irreverence more liberating than the concessions of any hard fought law.

Imagining Equality for Women and Queers

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I thought I could imagine equality, but not really. As an activist, I just push forward in the dark with no idea towards what. I got a glimpse Sunday when I tuned in to one of France's CNN-like channels just in time to catch a Latin American map and a voice talking about which country gave which rights to queers. Colombia's High Court had just ruled that same-sex couples had to be given the same rights as heterosexual ones in common-law relationships.

After answering a couple questions from the anchor about Argentina and Brazil, the commentator said, "But that's yesterday's news. Today, Iceland just got a lesbian prime minister. Granted, they're a small country of just 300,000 people. But still. The first openly gay head of state in the world."

I was pleasantly shocked. A whole gay segment on TV. And a gay commentator to boot smiling away as they flashed the photo of Johanna Sigurdardottir, the most popular politician in Iceland, and described how she was supposed to save the place from financial ruin. I punched my girlfriend in the arm. "They're doing a gay segment of the news. Are you listening? And the commentator's a fag."

Even after the anchor moved on to something else, I kept muttering, "A gay segment. Imagine that. A gay segment." Including background and context as naturally as they would for a report on developments in Malaysia or Taiwan. Or for that matter the auto industry.

Usually, if LGBT people make the news, it's as protestors, or victims. We're always the fringe, always the beggars on the outside looking in, no matter how "mainstream" our spokespeople look. In the U.S., especially, news producers (like organizers of inaugurations) then give air time to bigots so they can indulge in a false sense of balanced coverage and remind us just how much we're hated.

Which was why it was so particularly moving to hear the matter-of-fact description of Johanna Sigurdardottir's rise from union activist at IcelandAir to regular politics. No apologia for her queerness. No pats on the bottom for the white-haired dame.

It made me happy for a while, then depressed. God, I'm tired of homophobia. I'm tired of misogyny. I'm tired of promises of change then more of the same, even in Obama's stimulus package. When it isn't giving bankers free dough, it's all about rewards for dickholders. Even though women make up almost half of the workforce, Obama's projects primarily create jobs in extremely male fields like "green" industries, technology, construction, and mining where the few women that manage to survive have to fight for equal pay.

The programs to bring women into traditionally male jobs have had little success though their rate might improve now that it's easier for female employees to sue (thanks to Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.)

Trying to justify the disparity, the January release from the Obama administration used old data indicating women suffered less from unemployment during downturns. Unfortunately, August numbers showed women hitting unemployment as often men.

In fact, the National Women's Law Center crunched the numbers and found adult women's unemployment rising almost three times as fast as men's. "While the unemployment rate for men rose from 5.3 percent to 5.6 percent between July and August (a 5.7% increase), the unemployment rate for women jumped from 4.6 percent to 5.3 percent – a 15 percent increase in one month." Subcategories of black women and women supporting families were much harder hit.

Adding insult to injury to poor women, Obama and the Democrats dumped a measure from the stimulus package that would have allowed Medicaid coverage of family planning services, which includes birth control, but also a lot of basic gynecological services, like pap smears.

A New York Times editorial reports that the measure would have provided coverage to 2.3 million women by 2014 and saved $200 million over five years. Also, "the Medicaid family planning provision would reduce the number of abortions by helping an estimated half-million women avoid unplanned pregnancy, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute."

The editorial blamed the GOP for their obstructionist politics and lack of commitment to women's rights and health. I blame Obama and the Democrats who already signaled in the presidential campaign that women's rights were a commitment of convenience. If it is convenient, they're committed. If not, not.

For instance, when all Obama had to do was sign a paper to revoke the gag rule forbidding U.S. funding of international programs that included family planning services -- he did. But when the similar Medicaid provision in the stimulus plan required a vote, traded favors and a backbone, women's interests were summarily dumped.

I'd likewise be surprised to see even a partial repeal of DOMA before an Angeln Saddleback pig takes to the sky.

Outraged? Better Late Than Never

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The only surprising thing about Obama's choice of a homophobic bigot to bless his inauguration, or for that matter, the Albany debacle with the Gang of Three, is the outrage that greeted them.

Where were the official queer protests when Obama campaigned with ex-gay Donnie McClurkin? Or when BO exalted the advice of Reverend Kirbyjon Caldwell who runs programs to free lesbians and gay men from their homosexuality? Or when Obama promised all those billions to expand Bush's faith-based programs?

Where was gay fury when the Obama campaign kicked off that "Faith, Family, Values Tour" which included former Indiana Congressman and pro-life Democrat Tim Roemer, along with Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec who fought Proposition 8 on the grounds that gay marriage is not only morally repugnant, but will probably bring down the species?

Where was our disgust in August, the first time Obama tried to court Rick Warren who supplemented homophobic rantings at home with declarations to African audiences that homosexuality was not a natural way of life and thus not a human right? Why didn't we blast Warren's AIDS programs that support Uganda evangelists who fight AIDS by advocating jail or death for queers?

And where were the boycotts when Obama refused to speak to the LGBT press, or gay advocates? Where were the denunciations when Obama asserted, on religious grounds, that marriage was between a man and a woman and the ban of same-sex marriage had nothing to do with the earlier miscegenation ban on interracial ones?

With all that silence, even from gay groups like HRC, why should we be surprised at getting screwed? Who's going to respect us if even gay groups don't advocate for LGBT rights, ostensibly putting Democratic interests above their own?

Of course Albany Democrats thought they could sacrifice gay rights in a power-sharing deal and not hear a peep. Sit quietly with your hands in your lap, the bigots will not only shove you to the back of the bus, but knock you right off the moving vehicle.

The only surprising thing about that episode was how ham-handed they were. Me, I'm gonna stab somebody in the back, I'd chose a nice thin blade of Spanish steel, so the victim doesn't wake up before it slices out their heart. New York Dems, though, tried to take off our head with a blunt and rusted saw while they were snickering loudly. I suspect their retreat is less a sign of respect, than a quick effort to silently regroup while they wait for their mail-order stiletto.

After eight years of Bush and two of Obamamania, queer activists have not only lost our momentum, but our self-respect. Why else stay silent while Obama's campaign gave an enormous platform to bigots that would like to exterminate us? Why else give millions of dollars without exacting something concrete in return?

And if we don't pressure Obama now, if we don't pressure all the Democrats for every minute of the next four years, we'll get what we deserve. A whole lot of nothing. Or worse. A regression to depths of hatred and bigotry we'd almost forgotten.

As a community, we need to banish compromise to the realm of politicians. Supporting hardline activists and advocates is the only one way to advance queer rights. Somebody has to be intransigent. Somebody has to refuse to see the big picture that always reduces queer rights to a piece of shit everybody else scrapes off their shoes.

We also have to hold everybody to the same standards. Bill Clinton, after all, was roundly criticized for courting evangelicals with prayer meetings with Billy Graham (who was frankly moderate compared to Warren), for signing into law the Defense of Marriage Act, and triangulating us into the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy of the armed forces.

Why did we criticize Clinton for that when, like Obama, he was just trying to fit us all under that great big tent of America? And of course get re-elected. Wasn't he better than the first Bush, better than Reagan after all? Like Obama, he had queer friends, and except for the whole gay marriage thing, really did have the best intentions towards us.

Repulsed? I hope so. Then as now, the only way to win progress is to make a god-awful noise, to make nuisances and asses of ourselves, to hold our ground.

Money in exchange for promises is never enough, especially when the lynchpin of the Democratic strategy is to become more Republican than the Republicans and to court conservatives almost purely on the basis of religious fundamentalism, instead of other issues, like that elusive goal of fiscal responsibility, not to mention clean government.

Our consolation prize: a gay marching band. Let them take their cue from the black athletes at the Mexico City Olympics, and impose on the crowd what they did. A raised fist. Silence. Shame.

Picking Victims

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Our adaptability is endless. Spend time with a person of a different race, you can relinquish prejudice, says Ben Carey in the New York Times. Then again, have your city bombed, and toot sweet from the ashes flowers anti-Muslim rage.

Suddenly a name like Mohammed or Hussein makes you fair game for airport delays, long ones, in grey rooms off to the side. You get elbowed in the hallway of your apartment building, graffiti spray painted on your door. All it takes is an accent, a funny language. Odd cooking smells. Clothes. Facial hair. A skeptical cast to the mouth, or strange prayers in it.

After 9/11, all the Arab guys at the deli suddenly spoke all English all the time. The shops and restaurants of Chinatown splashed Xeroxed American flags over their doors like the blood of first-born lambs, beseeching pass over, pass over, pass over.

Plenty of queers have the same prayer. I was foreign at birth. A little girl, I walked like my father, later held my coffee cup "just like a man." My mother was gagging when she screamed that, like I'd destroyed her life, and I hadn't even come out yet. More shared time wouldn't have helped, though it does sometimes.

Sometimes, it's familiarity that breeds contempt. Context is everything. Is your contact framed by tolerance or hate? Is there an imbalance of power? The kid that gets scapegoated at school, thirty classmates to one, what can she do to engender respect? At home, maybe she gets picked on by her family where parents and siblings egg each other on.

There's got to be somebody to kick around, especially when we feel threatened, or attacked by anything. Terrorists. CEO's. Bra-burning femmes. When the economy went south in the 70's, all the peace and love and fellow-feeling of the flower children got replaced with Jew-baiting and black-hating.

Ben Carey's post-election, self-congratulatory article ignores that see-saw of society. Our eternal fear of difference, the pleasure of ridicule, how we carefully define an outsider, so we ourselves can fit in. Sometimes we attack just because we're bored and there's a victim handy.

When Duanna Johnson, an African American transgender woman, got picked up for prostitution last February, the white Memphis cop Bridges McCrae started calling her he/she, faggot. When Duanna said she didn't like that, he and his partner took the opportunity to beat her up and teargas her.

Larry Godwin, the Memphis police director said the crime left him "sick" and "infuriated." I wonder why. Because a video of it hit the internet? Because some cops got caught and had to be fired so he could save face? Reportedly his first priority was to find out how and why the video got out.

The story had a familiar ending. Somebody shot Duanna Johnson a couple of weeks ago. She was dead when the cops found her, and who cares really? Not the police. No suspects, no visible desire to solve the thing. In the LGB(T) community, transgendered people are marginalized except for twenty minutes on Gay Pride Day when queers remember Stonewall was kicked off by drag queens like Sylvia Rivera.

Issues of race and class make transphobia worse. Imagine crack-addicted Duanna Johnson, a sometimes prostitute, sitting down for a cup of coffee with some nice white Prospect Park dyke who usually bonds with the other mothers over diapers and baby strollers. Imagine her having a martini with the DC lobbyist fag that works out twice a day, has a decent salary and definitely resembles Will more than Grace.

The consequences of their alienation are reflected in their murder rate. For transgendered people, it's between 10 and 16 times higher than your average American, not too far from the endangered young black urban male knocked off at about the rate of 12 times his white peers.

Doubly disposable, most of the transgendered dead are people of color. Those communities don't care either. With the police-beating and video, the Duanna Johnson case should have had echoes of Rodney King's. Where were the riots? Where were the politicians and preachers who have made careers out of denouncing police brutality? Were they immobilized by garden variety bigotry? Or have tranny hookers of color, like Harvard-educated, president-elects, miraculously transcended race?

While the ease with which we tag our enemies may be matched by our capacity to transform them into friends, the problem is they can easily switch categories again. Which is why I prefer civil rights arguments based on democracy's promises of equality rather than tugs to the heartstrings declaring I'm just the same as you. Feelings, like stock markets, don't always follow upwardly mobile lines. Blink once, turn your back, another queer is drowning in red.

November 20th was the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Economics 101

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I spent half of yesterday in front of MSNBC watching the market crash in slow motion, first dipping below 10,000 then sinking bit by bit until something like 800 points had been lost.

An hour before the closing bell, there was a small rally as traders dove in reflecting optimism about a global interest rate cut, or maybe they just snatched up some bargains because even blue chip stocks like Coke had lost a good chunk of their value. Hell, what do I know?

I've been haunting economic sites since the disaster interrupted our Palin feeding frenzy. It's like visiting a foreign country with its own language and rules, or deep sea diving where you can apparently get so turned around in the murky depths there's no way to know which direction is up except by watching the bubbles of your exhaled breath.

What I knew before about the workings of the market could fit in a teaspoon. Now, I think I could fill a whole Grande Caffe Latte cup from Starbucks, which by the way is not riding out this storm too well. They've closed a ton of stores, especially in Australia.

Nobody agrees on anything. Experts say 1) the big bailout (rescue) was not perfect but better than doing nothing, or 2) it will have no effect whatsoever, and it was a big mistake when we are going to need the money for a social safety net.

Likewise, they say that 1) the disastrous economy is going to last several months before gradually improving, or 2) life as we know it is completely over and pretty soon there'll be people selling apples by the side of the road, and not just the Greenmarket.

Everybody agrees we're in trouble in the short term. Except, maybe, for the Masters of the Universe ensconced in their Greenwich, Connecticut homes, people are going to be sliding from the upper class down to the middle where there will be plenty of room, because the middle class is sliding right down the coal chute straight to hell.

The upside is, Russia is too broke to start more wars, and maybe now it will finally be time for that nationwide dialogue about class I've been waiting for since 2000 when Ralph Nader nattered on about it in his failed presidential bid, and the anarchists were busy busting up the WTO in Seattle. Remember that?

These days, you only hear about class when the Republicans accuses Democrats of trying to start a class or culture war, though the Dems themselves only dare refer to it couched in the euphemistic language of "income disparity" or "economic interests." As in, "why don't those red state morons vote their economic interests?" Perhaps your snotty tone explains why.

The current Democrats, like Nader's Greens, have about as much understanding of working people as the Salvation Army types in Brecht's play, "Saint Joan of the Stockyards" (1931), who didn't understand why their offer of free soup, nice music, and haranguing calls for salvation didn't have a long-lasting appeal to the desperate.

I caught the play last Tuesday. It seemed contemporary, all the masked greed, manipulated economies. Especially, the character of Pierpont Mauler, speculator and meatpacking plant owner riding high, higher, highest until he sinks like a stone only to be welcomed back into the market by his friends and victims; things wouldn't be the same without his bright ideas. No such redemption for the poor people of the play like Joan Dark, who ends up dead of illness and hunger in the middle of a snowy Chicago street.

While we're not quite there yet, the play reminded me of the elephant in the room, that even now, in the midst of the current mortgage crisis and total economic crash we're still limiting our vocabulary to "Wall Street" versus "Main Street." There may be questions of greed, vengeance, loss, but nowhere do you find words related to "class" unless it's paired to Middle.

It's like trying to analyze the impact of hurricane Katrina, or police brutality or profiling without the words "race" or "racism." Though maybe the word "class" is irrelevant or outdated. The cognoscenti say we're post-race, and post-gay, even if queers are still blamed for everything, from the Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, to this current mess, which Barney Frank apparently caused having a homo affair a decade ago with one person associated with Fannie Mae mortgages.

On the other hand, maybe "class" analysis won't work because almost everybody in the U.S. sees themselves in the same middle one, from rich, multiple home-owners to the poor who are always just one job, one university degree, one generation away from the illustrious Middle both ends are played against.

Maybe, in fact, there is no poor, no rich at all. In America 2008, there are just "differently leveraged," all hedging their bets.

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

Voting My Conscience

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The Democratic tradition in New York City is to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils. So, up against George W. Bush, I voted first for Gore, then for Kerry, despite my discomfort with their relatively conservative social stances (literally posed in front of stained glass windows).

As my reward, the Democrats have swung more and more to the right. In Election 2008, the Democrats are almost more Republican than the Republicans I wouldn't vote for in '88 or '92, '96 or '00.

They are promising, for example, to dump way more money than Bush into faith-based programs which will not only erode the Church-State divide, but strengthen anti-choice, anti-gay forces. In a careful and deliberate campaign strategy to court conservatives, LGBT folk have already been shoved to the back of the bus in favor of highlighting homo-hating evangelicals. Positive statements about abortion have reportedly been withdrawn from the websites of many Democratic candidates.

Obama, the supposedly anti-establishment candidate flip-flopped from promising campaign finance reform to sticking his head in whatever trough presented itself leaving him beholden to a multitude of special interests. Under his leadership, Democrats are presenting bills to drill in protected land. And in another reversal, Mr. Obama, a lawyer specializing in constitutional issues, reneged on campaign promises, and voted for the FISA bill which further broadens the powers of "Homeland Security" and chews away at our civil liberties. Forget the misogyny surrounding his campaign.

Except for the considerable symbolic value of supporting the first African American nominee for president, the only reason any member of the left would vote for the Democrats is because they're up against the party of Abu Ghraib, the Iraq War, Pat Robertson, overt abortion bans, overt social control, and disastrous financial deregulation that McCain promises to introduce into health care, dismantling even the employer-based coverage most Americans rely on.

The Democrat's rightward acceleration may well be the fault of people like me, deluding ourselves into believing we weren't voting "for" one candidate, but "against" another. To politicians, a vote is a vote. A sign of approval, an implicit endorsement that's embedded in the language itself. You always vote "for" somebody. That seeming consent not only helps select a candidate, but shapes the trajectory of a party for years, win or lose.

After years of voting for increasingly right-wing knuckleheads, it's not surprising I'm stuck with a party that not only isn't in sync with my values, but in practice actually contradicts them. Winning will confirm Democratic tactics. Losing may send them even further right. Either way, I quit. As they say, "If all you ever do is all you've ever done, then all you'll ever get is all you ever got." And sometimes less.

I can't be blackmailed any more that a certain candidate will spell the actual end of the world. Admit it. The Bush administration wouldn't have been so destructive if not for the Congress members of both parties that were complicit at every step. And two years ago, when Democrats claimed the majority in both Houses, they could have brought the Bush administration to a complete standstill. The Republicans did it to Bill Clinton. But with the Democrats, it was pretty much business for Bush as usual.

We'll only get more of the same if we continue to vote for them, however reluctantly.

I spent a while this week trying to figure out my personal responsibility in this election. In purely statistical terms, my one vote is less than toilet paper. There has never been an election decided by a single vote. Even when Bush won Florida, and hence the 2000 election, political scientist James Fowler noted "the best a single voter could do would be to change the margin to 536 or to 538, neither of which would have changed the outcome."

On the other hand, Fowler pointed out that in reality people cluster together. There's a kind of "voter cascade" in which one person can literally bring several dozen like-minded people to the polls. This is a pretty good argument to persuade people to hold their nose and vote in a swing state. One person really can have an influence on an election. And that influence means you have actual leverage with the candidate and party.

The story's different in the solidly Democratic New York State. My vote could start a major cascade and still be ignored by national Democrats. If my vote doesn't count, withholding it won't have much of an impact either. The only votes that count in New York have dollar signs attached.

With nothing to lose or gain, I'm sadly free to disapprove any candidate from any party that courts evangelicals and conservatives at the expense of women and queers, the working class of all races, and especially and always our civil liberties, which are the basis of whatever freedoms we have left or hope to win.

Remembering Things Change

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

One thing you have to have as an activist, or even a voter, is the bottom-line belief that change is possible, and not just for the worse. I base my own belief on observations of nature. I guess you could call me a Darwinist.

Putting aside the evolution of our species, it's inarguable that water carves its way through rock even drip by drip. Rivers change course. Unexpected things and people emerge. There are Ghandi's sometimes. Sometimes two-headed calves. I'd been on the verge of forgetting until last week when I suddenly saw a boar in the Fountainebleau forest.

My girlfriend heard something moving, caught sight of the tusks and shouted for me to look, which made it run faster. What I saw was actually a piggish blur, charcoal black, and light on its feet. Before that we'd seen little bits of rumpled up soil all over the trails where some creature had been rooting, and here and there strange hoof prints that seemed to come from a small horse with toes.

It was sheer luck we saw one in the afternoon. Most of the spottings are at dawn or dusk, and we wouldn't have been in that part of the woods at all if I hadn't gotten us lost. Maybe I should do that more often. Don't look, but leap. So often what we see with our eyes is paralyzing. Like the news on TV.

Lately, it's Kenya at the top of the hour, where in a matter of weeks a contested election has degenerated into a bloody mess. The TV shows corpses lying in the road, currently the end sum of political scores. I wonder how soon it will be before the news breaks of masses of women getting raped, and queers lynched. Those old depressing wartime favorites.

I can't watch anymore, those high and low tech wars, the slaughters and assassinations. There's the U.S. election where the candidates remind us of the inherently dirty nature of politics where compromise, ambition, and power leave their own ugly marks. I shouldn't blame them when it's really too many years of Bush-watching that has instilled in me a perpetual and numbed self-loathing.

I'm an American after all, and America these days is synonymous with the Iraq War that destabilized the whole Middle East, and Bush's "War on Terror" which was really a war on civil liberties that gave free reign to pretenders like Putin. Now, the stock markets everywhere are collapsing thanks to the receding American economy. In short, we have a President whose inverted Midas touch turns everything to shit.

So, I was surprised to be surprised by the boar fleeing through the woods. And on Saturday I saw something even more astounding, the report that in Morocco one hundred intellectuals had published an open "Appeal for the Defense of Individual Rights" in a dozen journals, calling on the state to react to the "climate of intellectual terrorism" and denouncing the trial and conviction of six men "without proof" that only took place at the instigation of a rampaging mob.

In November, when a rumor of a gay wedding hit the streets of Ksar El Kebir, so did thousands of Islamists who demonstrated and clashed with police until civic forces caved in to the pressure and several men were arrested. They were summarily convicted, and the sentence upheld on appeal last week, though some of the sentences were slightly reduced.

The vitriol even among the usually more balanced press matched the hysteria we've seen in Egypt and Namibia. What a hate campaign. The sermons from the imams would curl your hair along with the violence of the demonstrators who have been primed for years to act on behalf of the "moral" and the "pure."

In Morocco, it's not just queers under attack. The letter stated, that for the last few years, there's been an increasing campaign against anybody, who "because of their taste, beliefs, opinions, or personal choices, are accused of 'offending Muslim sensibilities' and 'menacing traditional values of Moroccans.'" The offenders, mostly journalists, writers, artists, and fighters for human rights, are excommunicated, and crowds are encouraged towards physical violence, "In other words, to threaten lives."

Intellectuals had to do something. Queers are the canary in the coal mine for human rights. If they sacrifice us to the mob, even worse will follow. What surprised me, here, was that in the accompanying explanation of this open letter for personal liberties, the community of mostly heterosexual intellectuals admitted that one of the last straws for them had been, "the scandalous 'homo hunt' at Ksar El Kebir," bringing us openly into the room, and declaring solidarity. "You aren't alone." For a change.

Iraq, What's That?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'm a victim of serial amnesia. I'd almost managed to forget all those roadside bombs, the blank grinning faces of GI's hovering over naked Iraqis in Abu Ghraib until I got stuck on a plane and the only interesting thing to watch on video was "In the Valley of Elah" with Tommy Lee Jones.

A guy in my Laundromat had recommended it a couple months ago when he heard my accent and I admitted to being from the U.S. "Great movie. Really nice," he said. "A shame about the war. Lot of people dead. Lot of people." He turned to be North African, from Morocco, but a Jew. "There aren't so many there anymore. All immigrated, many to the last state," he said.

I didn't understand.

"You know, U.S. foreign policy. U.S. and Israel like that." He twisted two fingers together, and forced a small, bitter smile to his lips. "The 51st American state. You should see the movie."

So I did finally. It wasn't a masterpiece, but an antidote to amnesia. How can we still be in Iraq? Why did we ever go? How many decades will it take to stabilize the region? And what are we going to do with all the young monsters we unleashed there? Because what else are the soldiers who have been taught to kill and torture with the expectation of perfect immunity to everything but their own deaths?

Some of my cousins are among them. I've quit asking my sisters how they are. They're alive, I guess, or I'd have heard, but who are they now, those little blonde boys that used to tumble all over me and tug at my hair? I don't want to know.

Totaling up all the dead Iraqis and Americans, all the lost souls, the lost cities, the lost time isn't enough to convey the extent of that disaster. For that we need commentary, or art, aesthetics nicely mixed with fury. Or better yet, a multitude of histories.

Politicians are always talking about what they can take away from history, but somehow all the lessons end up like the takeaway Kung Pao chicken in the back of the fridge, half-eaten and reeking.

The lesson we're avoiding once again is how easy it is to go from oppressed to oppressor. That's what my friend from the Laundromat was alluding to. How the wandering Jew found a home at last and with the encouragement of the U.S. used it as a station to bully Palestine. How the U.S., which got hit so hard in 9/11 turned around and began to destroy not just the Middle East, but themselves.

Domination is a suicidal impulse history is full of. (Note all the Caesars that overreached, the inquisitions that ended up burning themselves at the stake.)

The curious thing about historical amnesia, is that the good stuff, too, fades away, especially if it were accomplished by women, or lesbians, people of color, the working class.

The Lesbian Avengers, for example, was a moment of real flight that nudged forward the queer community, and America at large, but even as an eyewitness, I have to make an effort to remember those years, drag out photos and videos of lesbians demonstrating on the street, eating fire, challenging passersby in Grand Central to join us in a lesbian waltz.

The lesson of history then was that ordinary people could act, we could change things, if not the world, at least increments of it. Without that knowledge, there's no liberation for queers, no possibility of democracy itself. We're stuck with the Bushes of the world, stuck with segregation and invisibility.

Memory is everything. And there's a battle on how to define it, the objective article privileged over the memoir and first person history, Reuters over the op-ed.

I ran across an entry about gay history in Wikipedia last week, that had a banner spread across the front declaring SOUNDS LIKE ADVERTISING, STYLE NOT RIGHT FOR US, REVISE, DELETE?, DESTROY, or something very like it. All because it had the word "groundbreaking" and a couple of laudatory quotes. The rest was all footnoted to within an inch of its interpretive life.

Who owns "groundbreaking" anyway when it's a certainty that holding hands with your lover in the streets of Newark is still worth a front page announcement in the New York Times? Who owns the word accomplishment? And are the facts enough when anybody can shape them?

We need more writers like Sarah Schulman, who may not always get her dates right as a historian, but as a writer captures the spirit. She dredges up, and hoards and remembers what she sees. It's not so easy staying awake with a media that devotes more time to Britney Spears than the Iraq War.

It's not so easy to care.

Breaking the Silence In Newark

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In the Sunday New York Times, there was an article about queers in Newark, and the delights of the virulent homophobia they face, including verbal harassment, violence, political bias, and scorn from the police, but no mention at all that the city is eighty percent African American. I guess it was enough to show the photos -- all black except for one Hispanic guy.

Why skip that detail in a portrait of the city? Because somebody might accuse the writer of implying that black people are more homophobic than whites? Or because nobody wants to admit that we don't all share the advances of the LGBT community that pundits like Andrew Sullivan keep declaring passé?

Newark is just a couple of miles from Christopher Street, but the activists there might as well be in Zimbabwe for all the support they get. Since Sakia Gunn was murdered four years ago, queers have been trying to get a LGBT center established, but have had no luck maneuvering through the politics at city hall, though Mayor Cory Booker did manage to get a rainbow flag hung last June earning himself a flood of hate mail. Zimbabwe, at least has the eyes of the world. Who's watching Newark?

Laquetta Nelson tried to get a PFLAG chapter started and couldn't get anyone to turn up. I've spoken to her in the past. She's a persistent woman. If she can't fill a room, it's because many people just aren't out, not from political reticence, but because they're afraid for their lives.

I know homophobia in Newark is complicated by other problems. The city's drawing new businesses, new arts centers, but the neighborhoods are a mess. There are gangs, and drugs. Nobody's safe. But why is it always us that has to wait? Why, a few miles from wealthy New York, are Newark queers so poor the only place they can have to themselves is a drop-in center in some crappy building on the outskirts of town where everybody coming and going is so vulnerable they don't want the address printed? Forget the comfort of gay bar, or a neighborhood like Chelsea.

Queers looking for company, for community, have to leave home, cross the river like the young women who tried to leave behind all that hate and violence, but found it renewed in the person of Dwayne Buckle. When they defended themselves and cut the guy, who got busted? Who's sitting in jail? Where is our community for them?

Sometimes I want to scream at all the professional "activists" in New York and San Francisco with their fresh scrubbed rainbow of faces and ask if they remember what it's like to struggle? For many of us, things like gay marriage are just icing on the cake. Plenty of us haven't had the main course yet, aren't even at the table.

It often comes down to class, the thing we Americans are terrible at. We can fill a room full of all kinds of skin tones, but when we open our educated mouths the diversity seems just an illusion.

And the queers in Newark aren't just black, many are poor. The article didn't really say that either, just that queers had to grapple with poverty in the city as if it weren't their own.

Maybe that's embarrassing, too, to describe someone as poor. Instead, one twenty-year old man was "homeless and jobless ... effectively orphaned." Avoiding words like unemployed, abandoned, broke, his condition sounds temporary, almost like a choice.

If only it were enough to wrap people in the cotton wool of civilizing language. If only by refusing to use the word "black" you could erase the tentacles of homophobia entwined in African American culture and pretend like it doesn't take some extra effort to yank them out.

Though maybe the writer, if he didn't want to get published in the New York Times, would be seething with rage, his words burning holes in the paper. Still, those gaps of silence are disturbing. They hide the truth of things, the roots.

Homophobia is everywhere, and everywhere has grafted itself onto the culture of the host like a parasite mutating to protect itself from changes in other victims nearby. Things have changed for middle-class urban whites? Don't count on the same for trailer trash.

And like athlete's foot loves the humidity of the locker room, homophobia loves the sweltering air of religion, whether it lives in a mosque or Pentecostal storefront or cathedral with spires reaching towards the sky.

Lucky Newark, the first black presidential candidate thinks it's okay to pander to homophobic black voters by welcoming anti-gay preachers into his Big, All-embracing, Non-partisan, "I'm a Better Feminist than Hillary" Tent. Do I hear an amen, brother? Pack your bags. We've been sold down the river again.

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

Celebrating International Immigrant Bashing Month

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

798 words

It's March again, and time to celebrate International Immigrant Bashing Month. Take your pick of dragging away elderly Chinese men when they pick up their grandkids after school in Paris, or yanking women from backpack factories in Massachusetts.

If that doesn't do it for you, follow the advice of New Jersey deejays and report your neighbors to the INS if they have so much as the whisper of an accent. They're taking your job, goshdangit, they're "invaders," fight back.

From Marseilles, France to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where the mayor is bringing suit to purge the place, you can work with likeminded folk to enjoy the benefits immigrants bring, without actually paying for them. Bash an immigrant today!

Not amused? That's pretty much the message of the right-wing from Europe to the U.S.

If you listen to the left, all you hear is a whole lot of nothing. That is, until elections roll around. In the U.S., now, there's a half-hearted attempt by both sides to naturalize a few illegal immigrants and maybe give back healthcare to their newborn American babies without demanding the infants' passports, driver's licenses, and credit history.

The issue is almost as invisible in the non-immigrant LGBT community. We don't have anything to say until a friend's lover is about to be deported, or for a few brief minutes when some Iranian queer is about to be sent back to face the hangman's noose. Never mind that plenty of us immigrate for the same reason as everybody else, bread and freedom.

Sometimes I get the idea we think it is, well, impolite to talk about immigration, racist even.

That delicate, magnolia blossom sensibility of noninterference means that the only people talking about immigrants are the crapules on the right that essentially want slaves to pick up their garbage, pluck their chickens, clean their hospitals and schools (but not use them), and never, ever open their mouths.

I'm not a radical opener up in terms of national immigration policies, believing neither in drawbridges and moats nor absolutely free entry with no requirements whatsoever. The issues are complicated. Social services ARE expensive. A rapid influx of immigrants CAN change the whole character of a previously homogenous community or nation, forcing them to grapple with tough issues.

But in economic terms alone, most "developed" economies would spit at the seams without immigrants, and democracies owe it to their ideals to offer refuge to at least some of the neediest, especially when it is first world wars that have screwed up their lives -- Iraq ring a bell?

What concerns me most is what happens to people both legal and illegal that have already settled in a place.

Except maybe for the very young, immigrating isn't something you do on a whim. The journey itself is often grueling, dangerous, and expensive. We've all heard reports about things going wrong in the crossing of Mexican deserts, or in the dark, airless container ships from China.

In Northern Africa, people gather from all over the continent to pay an enormous amount for the privilege of climbing into an open leaky boat and setting sail for any rocky beach considered Europe. A lot of people drown. That's desperation.

Once you finally get to a place like L.A., or New York or Paris, there's a chance for humiliation and harassment every time you go out the door. Maybe it's your race, or the way you walk. God knows opening your mouth is an ever present source of danger.

It's a little like being queer. Remember in the old days, when the typical explanation to bigots claiming gayness was a choice was a detailed list of the obstacles we face followed by the question, who really would choose that? -- the torture in schools, gay-bashing, discrimination in jobs and housing?

Immigrants have their own balance sheets. You may gain economically, live a less dangerous life (unless you get stuck in the ghetto, or beat up by cops, or die in transit), but you give up a lot, too, hearing your language around you, being able to express yourself or defend yourself, knowing the customs, playing a role you understand, having respect, family, a real identity, not to mention the land itself.

In places like Little Havana in Miami, if you could draw back the curtains of some of the houses you'd find old men sitting motionless on the couches with stunned looks on their faces. I have that same look sometimes in Paris, and the stakes for me aren't nearly so high.

It's far worse for the kids in their teens and twenties who face the opposite. Suddenly deported because of irregular papers, they find themselves in troubled countries where they don't speak the language, have no relatives, no connections, no nothing but the passport.

The real racism is not to talk about immigration, but to turn away.

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

Globalization, Rappers and Queers in Gay Paree

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

810 words

When it comes to American culture, you need comic strip words in big, fat letters like POW! and BLAM! for what we do to other people, or our own for that matter.

In France, half of the top hip-hop videos of last Sunday were American, including one P.Diddy, two Snoop Doggs and Miss Fergie Fergalicious singing about how hot she was, but not promiscuous. I went to a "queer" film festival later in the day where the name was not only American, but half the films.

This is a little more complicated, though, than McDonald's supplanting little cafes with mass-produced frites. It's a testimony to the strength of identity politics in the U.S.

In the case of rap, it has given --mostly men-- a short-cut to a Black identity, especially in France, and Cuba and other centers of the African Diaspora.

The musical genre itself has an accessible tradition of defiance, social commentary, and failing that, rage. Then there's the style, all the doo rags, baggy pants, Sean Jean jackets, and the bling. Wearing it all together is like wrapping yourself in a flag. You don't have to keep the beat.

I was on the subway the other day with a young black gansta wannabee pacing up and down the platform, and scaring all the rainbow of nice bourgeois Parisians, even though if you looked twice you could tell the baggy pants and doo-rag were a costume on him, a kind of carapace.

Maybe that extravagant shell is enough in a place like France which is so conformist that even its nonconformists conform to a particular mode. In France, they say the impetus for it isn't so much to erase people, endorse racism, or homophobia, but to preserve the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that are supposed to put everybody on the same ground as everyone else, neither higher or lower.

Frankly, most of us could get behind that idea. The failure of it has emerged as a main theme of French rappers who use this quintessentially black American form to assert their Frenchness and take on the myth.

I wasn't exactly taking notes Sunday when I stopped to watch the video countdown, but I was struck by one from a North African rapper rhyming about how even if he left the place, he was born here, the cité was his, and France would always be his home. It was too sweet for me with sun shining, green grass growing, and a beautiful brown woman getting black and brown men to shake hands, but nevertheless he was claiming space.

Another video had some white-looking guy getting incensed about a hip-hop song playing with the idea of France profound or the real France of the countryside. The song is playing on one radio and he turns it off, then it's coming from a car below and he leaves his apartment to go downstairs and turn it off there. After that, someone walks by with it playing on his headphones, which he grabs and smashes.

Then it's on a little radio that the women turn off when he approaches, but after a split second of silence, the women themselves begin singing. Then it's playing again in the taxi. And so on and so on. The "listeners," white and black and brown, finally sing, if I understood correctly, that they were the real France profound and that the bottom line was respect.

Some gay people turn to the U.S., too. The French assaulted American academics with Lacan and Derrida, and we return the favor with Judith Butler and "queer" studies. After seeing a couple of shows this week at the queer film festival I wasn't sure the French had come out ahead.

If you can set aside (try to) the homophobia and misogyny, and endorsement of random violence, what hip-hop offers is a mode of defiance, pride, a built-in attitude that encourages the disempowered to take on the powerful. It may not lead anywhere in the long run, but it's readymade, and anyone can tap into it.

All French people get with "queer" is some uprooted English word, apparently conveying the vague idea that there could be liberation and equality on the margins of society.

Some of the films in the "queer" festival were powerful (Black Nations, Queer Nations). Most were not. They were almost all old, and taken together, positively dusty. Worse, everything I like about the word got lost in the cultural translation.

Like with hip-hop, "queer" carries with it, or used to, flamboyance, shock value, energy, defiance, even joy, because it was rooted in a homo-identity like dyke or fag or drag queens that we built in the streets, risking our necks sometimes to be ourselves.

Queer was not a department of study in a university, an area of research, a retrospective. Look forward, or not at all.

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

Wearing the Mask of Diversity

Kelly Jean Cogswell

806 words

Fred Phelps has one message and he sticks to it. When the bastard holds a demo, he ignores casinos, distilleries, oral sex and the hundred other things that his puritanical god probably hates as well, and keeps right on declaring "God hates fags." I almost admire him.

Why can't the Left do that? Stick to one point, I mean, until we get our message across. Last fall in New York, I went to a demo for the International Day Against Torture, and while a few speakers mentioned Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, they mostly rambled on about low-income housing, hurricane Katrina, the stolen election, the war for oil, even Cuba.

I'd hoped for better here. After all, this is Paris, the subdividing, overanalyzing, hair-splitting capital of the world. There are seventy-five different kind of checking accounts you can sign up for, all with separate branded names. When it comes to human rights, you'd think they could focus on one issue at a time.

But no, when I went to an International Woman's Day march last week I found such a hodge-podge of messages that if you didn't know what the march was for from the get-go, you'd never figure it out. What and who were you supposed to be pulling for? Palestine? Iraq? Better immigration laws? Are American soldiers raping the women of France?

Why the mess? Some confusing desire for inclusion? Or something more troubling? Back at home, I started to wonder if the organizers didn't actually feel that demonstrating simply as a "woman" was something to be ashamed of.

It's an embarrassment, in fact, to feature only "women" when you can up the ante and talk about poor women, immigrant women, indigenous women, or women with AIDS, as if the actual word, "women" was a blank slate that needed a few qualifiers to give it meaning. Better yet, ignore women altogether and bash Bush.

One sign read, "No Feminism Without Anti-Imperialism," forbidding us to even talk about sexual politics without broadening the discussion. Apparently, the battle for women's rights by themselves is over and done with in France.

I wish somebody had told me. I would have hung up the crepe paper streamers and had a party. I'd have shot off firecrackers and bought eyeglasses instead of running my finger down the masthead of newspapers looking for women's names, or a woman to sit next at President Chirac's fancy desk.

I must've been imagining the problems with the maghreb men in my neighborhood who seem to think women shouldn't be on rollerblades. At least they use the opportunity to insult my friends or knock them to the ground. White French men do their sneering more politely, though at home they've been known to swing a hard fist.

Bourgeois little French girls are the worst of all. They look at a poster of presidential candidate Segolene Royal and shudder, "You can tell just by looking at her that her politics are awful. I'd never vote for her."

Next year I'll hold the march myself, dump half of the men that looked bored and weren't doing anything useful, but I'll leave all the same women there, the Iranian women in head scarves, the prostitutes and dykes, the immigrant moms, even the annoying white chicks with Palestinian schmattas.

Look closely. What's the tie that binds? To my eyes, the female experience is not eclipsed by race or class or nationality. You're vulnerable on the street. You're vulnerable in the home. Religions would rather burn you at the stake than embrace you, and when you immigrate with your family and things go wrong, you're the scapegoat.

Abroad, your rights are the first ones the U.S. trades when it needs to. Laura Bush promised great things for the women of Afghanistan and Iraq, but who got tossed overboard like Jonah when the going get rough and Bush had to court his mullahs?

Who is the surrogate victim in war? Who gets raped and murdered when things fall apart in Haiti or Darfur or New Orleans or post-World War II Berlin? Who always pays?

Differences are easy to see, all those skin colors and flags. Without ever really respecting them, we've begun to use them as kind of mask to hide what really pulls us together.

For women, it's our bodies, the grim reality of misogyny. People take one look at us and know we're evil, or merely incompetent. We're definitely expendable.

Queers do it, too. With so much emphasis on diversity, we forget what we have in common. Maybe we want to.

After all, some of us have begun to escape homophobia. We're safe -- as long as we don't leave our neighborhoods, get a flat tire on an unfamiliar road, speak to strangers, lose our jobs, or seek god.

Each blow comes as a surprise.

A Dyke in Sheep's Clothing

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

795 words.

The kids cry, the parents scream. You eat too much, and drink too much, and go home smelling so strongly of the barnyard that strange dogs follow you home.

That's the Salon de l'Agriculture in Paris, not so different from when I was six and left the Kentucky State Fair deranged from cotton candy, candied apples, bumper cars, and the dark strange smells of tobacco and cows.

This week, I went for an assignment I wrangled for my hometown paper. Nice work if you can get it, eating your way through the French countryside packed into a few square city blocks of convention center.

Besides, I actually like visiting all those animals in the midst of concrete and steel, at least once I choke down my antihistamine pills and my eyes quit watering.

I'm only one generation from the farm, and I remember making trips back to my great aunt's place and poking through the rows of corn that were taller than me, then getting put to work shucking it on the back porch.

I stepped barefoot in a cowpat once, and didn't squeal at all. It was cool and squishy and gross, but I was a better dyke then, and just washed it off without complaining too much, though yesterday morning I found some suspiciously crusty mud in the hall and didn't make a big deal about that either.

It's just recycled hay and the Salon was full of it. You notice right away. The smell hits you right between the eyes. After that it's the moos reverberating in the vast echo chamber of the convention center. Only later do you notice the slick spots you have to navigate around.

Keep going, the cows get bigger and bigger until each is about the size of an old VW van and pretty much the same shape. Imagine a Texas one with horns on the front, and a broken bag of fertilizer in the back and you get the idea.

The Salon features more than two dozen different cow breeds, the milk breeds, and the meat cattle, with and without horns, spots, bells. These French never lose a minute to instruct, so if you keep your eyes open there are exhibits teaching you all about them, from procreation to the hamburger on your plate. Or if you prefer, the cheese.

There was a hullabaloo a few weeks ago when it was revealed that one bull had done more than his share of fertilizing and half the cattle in Europe were related. That's bad breeding, from a genetically diverse sort of perspective, though unless I'm at a State Fair I tend hear the words more when I wipe my mouth with my shirt sleeve.

In fact, I thought a lot about good breeding when I got to the little pen with sheep. These days when I see them I want to ask, Are you a sister? At least that's what I think when I see the kids. A ewe doesn't get to the fair just on her looks. It's either how much wool or milk she produces, or the quality of the kids, lambs, I mean, (not the cute homo sapiens poking their hands through the bars).

Though after an afternoon looking at the breeding posters and displays, I have to wonder why anybody would invest in research to "cure" homo animals when so much fertilization is done artificially. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I did start to believe that Dr Charles Roselli's research in Britain is completely funded by the ultra-right wing in a plot to eliminate queers.

Which leads us to the irony that if our situations were reversed, and it was Paris dykes put there in the pens among other women, you couldn't pick us out by checking for an empty stall.

There's not much lesbian activism in France, but what exists is centered on adoption, the right to insemination, with a little marriage thrown in.

All we want to do is breed, breed, breed -- to such an extent I wonder if the urge isn't more powerful than biology, but part of the growing arsenal of lesbophobia and misogyny.

After all, not every straight woman wants kids. Why has it begun to define dykes now? Especially here, where society in general tends to be discrete about sex, your "private" life, but strictly enforces gender roles and still has a visceral reaction of repulsion to women doing what they shouldn't. Like running for President.

And while I think women should be able to adopt each other's kids, and get inseminated every spring if they want, I wouldn't mind seeing some young dykes take up space on their own account, burn a barn down, leave a hoof print on some deserving face.

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