Amnesia on Memorial Day

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

"¿Caíste?" she asked. Have you fallen? I had a vision of myself on a re-enactment battlefield dramatically clutching my saber-wounded gut as I fell to the ground, though all my mother-in-law wants to know, really, is if I've finally gotten sick like my girlfriend.

Yep. Brought low by the enemy, bacteria, I've gone completely reptilian. There's no yesterday or tomorrow. The size of the world's shrunk to my aching bones and the phlegm pooling in my lungs. I see nothing past the limits of my own thick skin. Like Republican Governor Jan Brewer who's been feverishly signing bills shrinking Arizona's immense and rich cultural history into the size of an Anglo pea.

First it was the law indiscriminately attacking all Hispanics as potential illegals no matter if their family was in the region centuries before it was American territory, and the closest they came to fluency in Spanish was a mastery of the Taco Bell menu.

Now, she's banning English teachers with foreign accents, and squashing ethnic studies programs because they ostensibly "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

Arizona state schools chief Tom Horne, and longtime advocate for the anti-ethnic studies bill, especially hates the Tucson Unified School District program which offers courses specializing in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies which he claims makes students resent a particular race. "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." The old South? I thought he was doing everything in his power to bring it back.

He's not entirely wrong to believe these kinds of programs can lead students to resentment. After all, "studies" of any kind just point to the bigotry that made them necessary in the first place, though eliminating them won't do much to nurture unity and respect. I'm pretty sure Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón didn't take even one course in Hispanic Studies before she fired into the U.S. Congress. The actual facts of American colonialism were enough. Likewise, Malcolm X didn't need to enroll at Stillman College to know black folk were getting screwed, and have an appropriately angry response.

As for me, I only have to spend an hour or two reading the latest example of straight people battering queers for sport, and erasing LGBT people and queer accomplishments from our mutual history to pass way beyond resentment to fury. Alone, the story of Harvey Milk could incite to violence. Perhaps queer studies should be banned as well.

For domestic tranquility, Arizona should follow the Texas example and purge curriculums of any hint that there was ever prejudice or inequalities in this country, and even that differences exist at all. Proposed revisions passed just a couple of days ago in Texas eliminate slavery from American history, rename the slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade," and establish that the civil war was purely about states' rights.

The black civil rights movement has been minimized, along with activists Susan B. Anthony and Upton Sinclair because if you erase militants, you erase the injustice that inspired them. And anybody following in their footsteps can be dismissed as liberal atheist nuts. "Slavery wasn't that bad or widespread" you could say. Or "Women were magnanimously given the vote when they were ready for it."

With all that going into the crapper, what is it Texans want more of? Davy Crockett, apparently. The King of Tennessee's Wild Frontier. At least until he bit the dust at the Alamo when Mexico was trying to reclaim territory that had just been theirs.

Good luck with that, is all I can say to the great states of Texas and Arizona. You can remember the Alamo all you want, but this victorious effort to shrink culture, and erase histories shaped by Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans into something determined almost solely by whites is more than anything a sign of your imminent demise, the myopia of sickness that in some ways harms white students most of all. Because in this modern world in which diversity and intellectual flexibility is the name of the game, they're the least likely to know there are multiple histories out there, whether the school board admits it or not.

As we prepare to celebrate Memorial Day, remembering dead patriots, and lost relatives, perhaps we should mourn memory itself which in growing expanses of our country has been distorted into a game of wishful thinking and intentional amnesia. If historians are increasingly the heroes in the battlegrounds for civil rights, we will have to accept that the schoolyard is as important as the streets or our courts.

Foreign Like Me

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was a foreigner for a couple of years in France, and it's not so bad as long as you have a proper visitor's visa. In exchange for fistfuls of documents, promises, little tiny photos and a check, the state gives you a laminated ID card, temporary status, and warnings they'll throw you out on your ear if you try to get a job, abuse their health services or just get on their nerves.

I didn't mind. It makes a difference knowing what the rules are, even if you skirt the edge doing critical reporting on things like demos of undocumented workers. I didn't have a big press agency behind me and every time I stepped out the door with a camera I wondered what would happen if the cops got pissed at me, and if they could put me on the next plane like the "sans papiers," no appeal?

Once the papers are taken care of, it's all about the culture. When Americans (of all races) make a mistake with language or customs the French brush it off with the phrase, "She's a foreigner after all. And what a cute accent." We can wear bright pink bomber hats with impunity. Denim head to toe. Speak too loudly, blurt out what we think about politics and be forgiven.

Of course the condescension can be annoying, especially on those rare occasions it bleeds over into hate. "Fucking dyke foreigner, go back where you came from." But I condescend back, so it's not particularly damaging. I am, in fact, a foreigner. And a dyke. The problem is when I feel foreign at home in America.

Queer in the land of straights, I mangle the customs, clothes, language, and expectations. But it's not cute there. I am a kind of traitor. Three years old, I was already struggling against scratchy tights. I didn't understand skirts, or later the right words to smooth over those heterosexual encounters. I held a coffee cup wrong. Brought home girls. Was banished, temporarily, by a mother who didn't want to hear from me until I was the girl God wanted me to be.

It wasn't only some moral disgust. But a sense of the foreign. I came not just from another country, but another planet, even. A foreigner like me has to have a lot of nerve to walk the streets with impunity, or demand respect, much less equality under the law, like the right to marry with all its tax-breaks and immigration benefits awarded to other citizens.

This homophobia as xenophobia expresses itself literally in places like Iran, Zimbabwe, or Jamaica, where bigots proclaim that homosexuality itself is an import from the foreign and decadent West, and go after their undocumented aliens with witch hunts, nooses and machetes.

In decadent France -- as in decadent America -- far too many families expel cuckoo children dropped in their hetero nests until there are flocks of our young on the street. Lately gay-bashers have been hunting in the Marais, a gay neighborhood in Paris. On St. Valentine's Day right-wing Catholic extremists attacked lesbian and gay activists trying to hold a kiss-in at the public plaza in front of Notre Dame. An antiviolence project was recently vandalized.

Again in Paris, but in October 2008, the young transman Shyne was brutally beaten by at least six aggressors after he was identified as having participated in a trans march the day before. Earlier that year, two young dykes were forced to flee the town of Segré in Northwestern France when they were harassed by a group of twenty young men who even fired blank bullets at them.

In 2009, Luc Amblard and Guy Bordenave, two entrepreneurs in the little town of Couy in the center of France were kidnapped, and killed. The trial is just starting for their murderers and horrific details were finally released that the two were buried alive -- tied up, and facing each other.

We are among the last acceptable victims, though in the US right now, actual "illegal aliens" are coming in at a close second. The new immigration enforcement law signed in Arizona last Friday, legitimizes racial profiling to identify them there, and has the effect of forcing Latino citizens to carry their papers everywhere they go, or end up on the wrong side of the border.

At least the "illegals" know what they risk -- the ruin of a carefully constructed life, the destruction of families. It may even cost them their lives depending on the state of their homelands. But they came willing to bear that sometimes gut-wrenching, sometimes low-grade fear because it was worth the chance.

It's a different matter to be considered foreign on your own patch and targeted for violence and expulsion. How do you stand that perpetual vertigo of being alien at home, either as queers or Latinos? The fear and casual misunderstandings? The constant battles? How do you plant your flag? How do you go home?

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.