Trading in Rage

By Kelly Cogswell

Donald Trump is all my fault. So are the Bernie Bros. I left the door open behind me and they snuck in with their red-faced, white-knuckled rage. I didn't know it would matter. Since mostly anger and rage propelled people onto the street to protest dyke-bashings, people dying of AIDS, I tried to provoke raw emotion when I co-founded The Gully online magazine in 2000 and first started writing commentary. I thought if only people knew about police brutality, the stolen election, anti-gay campaigns and betrayed revolutions, and poverty… If only we shared enough facts, explained them, drew connections, wrote about them with enough feeling to make them real, then people would be compelled to act.

Style was half the message. We wrote informally, usually in the first person. Sometimes we reported moderately, but often we ranted in outrage. It was the early days of the internet and our truthful anger stood in refreshing contrast to the decrepit and sterilized style of the usual mainstream newspapers. Our first tagline was even "digested news, raw opinion from the queer edge of America." Which meant we shouted. And why not? What else do you want from two dykes who had fought for years to draw attention to lesbian issues? Especially those affecting dykes of color, and queers on the global front?

What we said was important and hugely urgent. Everything online always is, and this style became the norm so quickly that outrage now trumps content online, and shoutiness and rage is considered an indicator of truth on both the Right and Left. As we see the flowering of it in the presidential campaign this year, I find myself going around like the stereotypical librarian whispering, "Shhhhhhhhhhhh" and trying to write like the über-civilized Henry James because it's the only way to ask what the endgame is these days, especially for so-called progressives. Liberation? Equality? Revenge?

Anger and rage have their limits. At first, it's liberating to voice them, denounce our oppressors, sneer at the powerful, and marvel at how our angry voices resound. But then we fall in love with the sound of them. Outrage becomes a habit. It narrows our gaze until we sometimes confuse the goals of justice or social change with a simple desire to humiliate and wound.

I recognize it in myself, trained to hate by a mother who was a specialist. A broken glass could set off an earthquake. She was worse during her divorce. I remember how she ranted against my horribly lazy, good-for-nothing father who really was kind of a dick. But there was something disgusting, too, about how the litany of her very real complaints, her grief and anguish always provided her with the grotesque satisfaction of a case proved. He was a monster with nothing redeeming at all. By contrast she was the victim, absolved and pure.

She took such pleasure in her hate, and with that hate the generalizations that always imply simplification and lies, the amnesia of her own failings. And sometimes I say, "Men are pigs", or even, "I hate men" just to see what it feels like to dip my toes back into hate, to see if I can get myself worked up. But the man-hating lesbian stereotype just requires too much energy, and like most dykes I'm nearly indifferent to the category of men except maybe for an hour or two after getting harassed on the street, or trying and failing to find work without smearing on the lipstick and dick-sucking smile. If the myth persists it's so that interested men can feel they've still got a central place in our female lives, and indirectly in our beds even if it's just as the objects of scorn. In terms of persistence, hate is far better than love.

That's really why I say "I hate men," to remind myself of the consequences. How that "hate" joins and opposes "I" to "men" immediately gendering my body and brain as female, caging me with males condemned to a toxic masculinity. Phrases like that leave none of us free. Which is why feminists prefer to denounce patriarchy and its systems which subjugate women, instead of accusing "men", so that all individuals have more room to maneuver. And more importantly, space to think and change.

In either case, hate is a trap, like shame. You can see the addicts online, the militants who take such pleasure in publically denouncing even unimportant people for racism or transphobia or misogyny, and the violent responses by bigots large and small to any accusation until all sides seem inextricably bound together, with people as happy to be hated as to hate.

It's hard to break free. I'm not sure we're supposed to. Like a bloodless war hate distracts us from the real enemies, from grappling with the systems that are resistant to change, and as indifferent to our anger or fear as the floodwaters of the Seine.

Gutenberg, the Internet, and Queer Rights

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I picture it sometimes. Martin Luther going up to the door of that cathedral in Wittenberg in 1517 and nailing up his 95 theses. Within a couple of weeks, the little theological bombs had spread throughout Germany. Within a couple of months, the beginning of the Protestant Reformation had hit the rest of Europe.

For an activist like me, it's an archetypical moment, Luther struggling to get his conscience down on paper, having the courage to post it in public, then having the luck that Gutenberg's relatively new printing press had been popularized. For once thought, expression, and technology came together in perfect sync.

I thought queers would have the same eureka experience with the Internet. Suddenly activists worldwide would have a giant door to nail their thoughts to. We'd have access to a variety of histories, ideas, activist techniques. Everybody would have a voice. We'd be visible from Argentina to Zimbabwe. Our progress would be exponential.

And it has been a useful tool, if not exactly magic. Information is offered up on a scale Gutenberg never dreamed of. Alternative magazines and publishing houses are started every day. And in practical terms for activists, listserve emails have replaced those phone trees no one wanted to do, along with costly newsletters, while the drudgery of meetings have been replaced by websites updated by the hour.

Readers are different, too. While some queers have been changed by all that information and have moved beyond self-acceptance to coming out and sometimes even activism, others just sit in a more comfortable closet. They no longer have to dare that trip to a gay bookstore or center or bar. And the sheer quantity of gay sites and the possibilities for armchair activism creates the illusion of visibility in the outside world. We've made all the progress we need. Street activists not required.

Likewise, the blog facilitates censorship, even as it fights it. For instance, it still is a tool for free speech and democracy when Generation Y blogger Yoani Sánchez is able to get a post up from her home in Havana, sneaking online to make a post or passing an entry to friends, but I'm worried about their negative effects on the rest of us.

I'm not speaking about the quality of the writing we produce. Though I could. No, the problem is that the easy publishing, and "unpublishing," of blogs has changed the value of the process. We have the idea that language is essentially disposable, or we are. Nothing is permanent. Nothing true. Change your mind, regret that "coming out" post (or your support for Obama), just erase, erase, erase.

Last year Xeni Jardin, an editor/blogger at the popular site BoingBoing.net decided to erase every reference there to former pal San Francisco Chronicle columnist and sex blogger Violet Blue. A firestorm erupted when it was discovered in June. According to a July 7 article in the New York Times, Xeni Jardin wouldn't discuss why she did it, except to allude to, "private matters and public behavior." It was a blog, she said. She didn't sign up to be a newspaper of public record.

Jardin was less cavalier about blocked information in June when the news broke that the Boing Boing site was censored in its entirety by a filter at the Denver International Airport.

In an interview with the Denver Post, she blasted filters in general, and harangued the Denver airport for using the same kind as Sudan and Kuwait where the dictators' censorship is ferocious. She also added plenty about "what the Internet is all about" including the free flow of culture, commerce and ideas.

Jardin apparently wants privileges without responsibilities, free speech without obligations to her readers. She wrote the posts she can change them, or erase them altogether goshdarnit. Or what good is it being the editor?

In the interest of full disclosure I admit I've been tempted to remove my own stuff from the online magazine I co-edited for six years. When I went to Cuba a couple of years ago, I was afraid some of my articles about the place could get me in hot water. They weren't kind. After the trip, I still wanted to erase them, this time because they seemed embarrassingly naive.

So why did I leave them? Mostly because so many other people are already trying to filter, block, destroy and erase us writers. Deleting even articles I don't like would mean doing their work for them, rewriting my own history, and compromising myself and my site. What is "unpublishing" but an electronic attempt to say, "I never said that"? What is it but a lie?

Queers, especially, should remember that erasing is a tool of our enemies. If we're going to indulge in it like Xeni Jardin, we can't complain when the thugs use it against us. And they do.

Send An Email, Save the World

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

805 words

So John Edwards hitched his cybercampaign to a couple of unknown mules and found himself yanking on the reins in horror. I'm not surprised. The internet is supposed to be the next big thing in democracy, but when it comes down to it, U.S. candidates really only see it as another fundraising and advertising tool.

Hence the outcry about bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. They were hired for their popularity and democratic cred, then had to issue a bushel of mea culpas for pre-historic, pre-hiring comments on abortion, queers, and the "Christofascist" Catholic Church.

Don't you know you should wipe your feet, ladies, before you come in the door?

The internet is a lot of things, but the blogosphere more than any other part of it is one big intimate invitation into somebody else's brain. People don't mince words or go salt-free all worried about the neighbors.

American politics needs more of that. There's so much pressure on candidates to sanitize themselves that in '04 we ended up with a Kerry so wooden he made Pinocchio look spry.

As candidates get more pre-fab, they look for ways to seem more hip, more current, accessible even, so they put up a site, hire bloggers and scream, "I'm on the internet. Visit my site."

But just what are we really invited to do? Watch their videos. Read their press releases. And give, give, give. Howard Dean's glorious and doomed assertion, "You have the power," has largely been transformed into, "You have the money, hand it to me." Even votes seem like an afterthought.

Not to say there isn't window dressing. The Take Action page of Hillary Clinton's "exploratory" site promises an open blog that is "a crucial part of our exciting national conversation about the direction of our country and the place to go to learn more about Hillary." Whoopee.

Mostly though, her Take Action page is about money. Giving it yourself, or getting someone else to.

Ditto for Barak Obama and the embattled Mr. Edwards whose Take Action page tells us that, "If we want to live in a moral and just America tomorrow, we must act today. Please donate using our secure online form." Rad, man.

McCain, who's had his own blogging controversies, doesn't even pretend. His action page asks supporters to "join our team here. Then choose actions on the right to help raise money, recruit your friends, and help get others involved in this effort." That's it.

In this internet age, we've mistaken information for participation. In their January report on the use of the internet in the 2006 elections, the Pew Research Center rightly touted the increasing importance of the internet, but if you look at what they're actually saying, it seems almost all of the activity goes one direction.

A small, but significant, percentage gave money. Most users just sucked up information about candidates' positions on the issues or voting records, or tried to confirm what they'd already learned. Twenty percent shockingly relied on the candidate's own site for the info.

Plenty of people forward emails or sent links to articles, but only eight percent posted their own political commentary. One percent created and posted their own political video or audio.

What that means to me is that the internet creates a false sense of involvement. Send an email, save the world. Even Pew fell into the trap, defining 23 percent of "campaign internet users" as "activists," not only people that came up with their own opinion, but anybody who hit forward on their email program.

Sure, informing yourself is an important prelude to participation, but passing on an email is just a kind of online gossip, barbershop and beauty parlor stuff. You feel connected, create community, but that's only the appetizer to democracy. There's nothing terribly active about it.

Frankly, there's only one presidential candidate using the internet to empower voters. And she's running in the wrong country.

In France, Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate has used internet organizing from the beginning, in part to sidestep the old boy (elephant) network of the Socialist Party, but more importantly to get feedback and organize real world meetings to ask people what they think are France's most significant problems, and, get this, found out what they think should be done to address them.

The big question in the press has been if she would actually incorporate all this feedback, all these opinions. From her definitive policy speech on February 11th, the answer is "Yes."

As the people demanded, she promised to boost pensions of poor people, raise minimum wage, support job creation for young people, and institute "citizen juries" to evaluate the work of local and federal government.

Win or lose, she's already made a difference just by raising expectations, and redefining political debate as something that should include us all.

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