Ten Ways I Aspire to Resist that Sniveling Bastard Trump and his Evil Republican Minions

By Kelly Cogswell

I try not to think about Trump. He's there in the White House, of course, but he's like the golden retriever with its head stuck out the car window grinning and drooling while the humanoids in charge careen down the highway scattering ink-stained bills from their latest heist.

I've seen the movie, and it's never ends well for anybody. Not for the insatiable thieves who are not only indifferent to their immediate victims, but leave a vast swathe of collateral damage, this time the U.S. economy, our justice system, democracy, even our literal environment where each Republican gesture opens the floodgates to poisons, pollution, exploitation.

In this flick, I imagine queer activists as that cop who imagined he was on the verge of retirement, and is bound to get tragically shot before the final scene, and either buried in a shallow grave, or drawn back into the fight to prevent the impending apocalypse bearing down yet again. The usual victims: the poor, people of color, immigrants, women. And of course LGBT people, queers that this Republican administration (and plenty of Democrats) would like to see disappear altogether.

It is tempting to give up, replace the rainbow flags with the white ones of defeat. But there are things I aspire to do, even if I'm not quite ready to build the barricades. Some are self-evident. Some not. At any rate, I...

1. Take to the streets. Demos are not only an expression of our collective anger (or joy) they help me remember that I'm not alone. They're also an important aerobic exercise for our rapidly eroding democracy. Whose streets? Our streets!

2. Take to the couch. On the days when it's a victory just to get out of bed, I celebrate the moment I venture past the bathroom, and actually get to the couch! Depression is real. Especially if you follow the news.

3. Reject Hate. Hate is easy. And I know from long experience that its cousin outrage is an effective tool to mobilize people. But when I indulge in those self-righteous rants a little too often I find myself becoming the thing I hate. Which is not a good look. But it also means I miss the chances that present themselves on a regular basis. Even the most monstrous bigot can be flipped.

4. Say thank you. To my friends, and enemies. To that very out queer. To the dyke organizing the resistance who could probably also use a beer or slice. Or a really loud whistle to get the attention of her troops.

5. Fly my freak flag high. Mike Pence and the rest of the degenerate Republicans (and Democrats) wish we'd just go away. It is our job to go out in the world more dykily, faggily, trannily than ever before. My hair is shorter than it's been in twenty years. My Docs are back on my old school feet. I'm also game for the occasional unexpected sequins, a giant new wig.

6. Support community businesses. It's better to give your dollars to embattled neighborhood queers, people of color, or immigrant businesses instead of giant conglomerates who are already making money hand over fist from the Trumpian kleptocracy. Though there's no way I’m walking to Fourteenth Street just to buy a farm stand apple. Seriously.

7. Lend a hand to community and alternative media. Placing an article with us isn't as sexy --or profitable--as the New York Times, but the truth is we cover stories others don't. For the last several weeks, it is queer sites that have been keeping murdered dykes in the headlines, that cover the deaths of trans women. While between 1.6 and 2.5 million people participated in women's marches around the world a couple weeks ago, Sunday's top five political talk shows gave them only seven seconds of coverage. Mainstream print media sucked, too.

8. Resist censorship from anybody. It's an addictive habit and double-edged sword. Language changes so rapidly even our allies are bound to screw up. So chill out, and pay more attention to what people do than what they say. Allow artists to take you to dark places. David Wojnarowicz transformed his rage by exploring it, knocked a hole in an airless room where we were suffocating.

9. Laugh. With my friends and lover. At my enemies, who sometimes shrink to a manageable size when we brandish a very small unthreatening object like a finger and shout "Riddikulus," in our best British accents.

10. Embrace Love. As friendship and sex. Kindness. Activism on my own behalf, and for us all.

What do you do?

Long Live the King! Celebrating Diane Torr

By Kelly Cogswell

Sunday afternoon, I gussied myself up and was at the door putting on my red shoes when I realized I was still wearing puffy white athletic socks. I was going to a memorial at Dixon Place for Diane Torr, a remarkable artist, extraordinary human, and king of all drag kings everywhere who died in May. So of course I stopped and changed.

The first time I met Diane, we were both on the bill for a fundraiser at Jennifer Monson's Williamsburg loft that in 1992 did double duty as a dance studio and performance space called the Matzoh Factory.

There was nothing legendary about the encounter. I had to piss and she was hogging the bathroom. "Come on in," she said in her slightly Scottish lilt. "Don't mind me." And when I hesitated-- because I'd never met this slightly stocky woman in trousers and a man's shirt, squinting in concentration as she used eyeliner or something to draw on a beard on her face, or maybe it was a mustache-- she said, "I promise not to look."

I wasn't so sure. She had a wicked gleam in her eye. And as a newly minted dyke, nearly fresh off the bus from Kentucky, I declined the offer, and had to read my poems with a busting bladder. Of course I almost peed myself when she performed.

Diane did experimental dance, performance, and film, but that night, she was my first drag king, and her work shook me as much as the Five Lesbian Brothers whom I'd just seen not long before, and were so unapologetically raunchily, lustfully, and lesbianishly perverse that I blushed all night long. As for drag performers, I'd seen drag queens in their high heels and big hair at a gay bar in Lexington where there were rumors of knife fights. And then again in New York en masse the time I'd been caught in the middle of the Halloween Parade.

But Diane was something else. She crackled with an energy fueled in part by anger, sex, and more than a little mischievous glee as she crossed boundaries you weren't supposed to. A woman making dick jokes and pulling one out of her pants!? Impossible. How she strides across the floor! How her form grows in mass and density as her largely feminine body accepts the mantle of masculinity!

Her performance was alternately an exploration, a critique, and maybe, revenge. She ran away from a violent, alcoholic father, and got dumped in reform school for her pains, where she had to fight to be allowed an academic education. She never took "no" for an answer, and won of course, even going on to college. Then in Seventies London, got radicalized as a feminist and Marxist, and studied dance before she moved to New York in '76 and discovered the downtown art and performance scene. She wasn't the only one who worked as a go-go dancer to pay the bills, but she was one of the few to defend their rights.

All that was in the delight and power she claimed with every step in front of the crowd at the Matzoh Factory. Yeah, this girl from Aberdeen that was supposed to be a shop assistant or factory worker can put on a suit and tie and take up as much space as you, you fucking wanker. There's not some magic power in your body.

She was committed to sharing the experience through her drag king workshops, which she'd launched just a couple years before. She later renamed them "Man for a Day," when drag kings exploded in popularity, leaning more and more towards entertainment and humor.

As hilarious as she could be, her "Man for a Day" project, teaching women to pass, wasn't a joke. And certainly not just a "performance" meant to fuel the work of gender theorists, as that word "performance" increasingly minimizes the consequences of how we express gender. How we get beat up for it, raped, ignored, and marginalized.

At 5'3" she learned aikido to defend herself on the streets. In a clip of a documentary they showed at the memorial yesterday, she explained that part of the attraction of going out in drag was the vacation it gave her from being Diane. From being a woman in public. It wasn't just about danger. "If you walk into a room as a man, you are seen. Walk in as a woman, and you're checked out. By both men and women. To see if you are sexy. At least until you're thirty-five or forty, then you aren't seen at all." As a man though, she existed. Was suddenly human.

That's the gist of what she said anyway. I wasn't taking notes, and was suddenly overcome with loss at the sound of her voice in the room, her kind face. It is impossible that this artist, this groundbreaking human--is gone.

When Facts Don't Matter: Activism in the New America

By Kelly Cogswell

During the presidential debates, every time Republican candidate Donald Trump opened his mouth he lied, and Democrats had a field day presenting the screen captures of a tweet he'd claimed never to have written, videos of him saying things he'd denied, photos of him chatting with shady characters he said he didn't know.

What a delusional ignoramus, we thought, and wondered who would vote for such a buffoon who got caught in every fib like a three-year old child who denied eating chocolate even though her face was smeared with the stuff. Likewise, who would get hung-up on the false kerfluffle over Clinton's servers and emails when the story was debunked a dozen times a day?

As it turns out, the only delusional members of the American electorate were ones who believed that facts matter. Masha Gessen nailed the problem in her essay, "The Putin Paradigm," in The New York Review of Books, in which she explains why fact-checking doesn't work when dealing with tyrants like Trump, or his role model Putin, who repeatedly and enthusiastically lies in the face of hard evidence. Putin claimed, for instance, after invading Crimea and Ukraine, that no troops were on the ground despite plentiful proof. Then later announced, that of course there were. So what?

The thing to remember is that, "His subsequent shift to truthful statements were not admissions given under duress: they were proud, even boastful affirmatives made at his convenience. Together, they communicated a single message: Putin’s power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality."

Gessen goes on to assert, that when reality itself is under attack, the only solution for the opposition is to shift from fact-based arguments to finding "a way to tell the bigger story—the story about the lies rather than the story of the lies; and the story about power that the lies obscure." She herself admits that this is harder than it sounds, particularly for the American media which is all about reporting the facts, and doesn't even like to report those unless they have been confirmed a dozen times.

For anybody who cares about democracy, this new embrace of the blatant lie is even more disturbing than Pence's hatred of women and queers, Trump's obvious incompetence and greed, his surrealistic, nihilistic anti-appointments, his ties to white supremacists, and explosions of rage that will soon be able to express themselves with nuclear launch codes.

American social progress, after all, has been built on facts, and on reason. When Sojourner Truth cried out, "And ain't I a woman?" She wasn't just tapping the sympathy of white women, but appealing to their brains, and eyes, to consider just what disqualified her from that category. LGBT arguments for legal equality are likewise just that: arguments. With reasons and facts, and logic. Everything Trump rejects, and everything his presidency could unravel.

Post-fact, I feel twelve years old and confronted with an abusive mother who was never persuaded by them. Our arguments always sounded like dialogue from some absurdist play. I'd declare "The earth is round," and offer physics, math, proof, and she'd answer, "Cherry Jell-O."

Like with Trump, it didn't matter if she knew she was lying, or was psychotic and actually believed what she said. Either way, her stated, and changeable beliefs governed my world. Ever since, I've struggled with just how much weight to give words. Why bother calling a chair a chair when somebody could call it a dog and insist I put a leash on it? This is why I sometimes abandon writing for visual art, and why I became an activist in the first place.

When language itself is debased by lies, when "signs" are tampered with, and words don't persuade, we are left with the physical world, the act, the signified. Somebody, of course, has to concern themselves with the facts, and keep rebutting Trump's factory of lies, but resistance now, more than ever, requires images, and gestures, also our irrefutable flesh. Stories can be made about that, too, but we can at least attempt to shape our own narrative even if we have to do it with an audience of six, or twelve, or twenty passersby. And we can also try to control how our bodies appear in the media, continuing to release our own videos and press releases like the small Russian activist group, Pussy Riot, which really gets under Putin's skin.

And as far as words go, when it comes to telling the larger political stories, and finding ways to approach the truth, we can't just offer alternative narratives, we have to find ways to demolish false ones, unmask Trump's desire for total power, even go undercover to plant seeds of dissent in the echo chambers and chat rooms the fascistic and ascendant "alt-right" has constructed for itself. We must also identify the ordinary people around us who can be brought to reason one by one by one.

Finding Our Feet--Together

By Kelly Cogswell

Last Tuesday, or maybe a decade ago, I ventured out in the rain to an anti-Trump meeting at an enormous Episcopal church uptown, where water was leaking into the foyer from the small domed entry and pooling on the tile. Inside, the large sanctuary was respectably full. The crowd was about half first-time activists of all ages, the rest middle-aged veterans of groups like ACT-UP, with stunned but determined faces.

The group agreed on a tactic-- direct action, with or without arrests -- then talked about issues for a while, before breaking into the usual sub-groups to introduce themselves and begin organizing. In the media committee we agreed it played a huge role in Trump's election, and would be an essential tool to fight back, shaping the meaning of our actions, creating our own--truthful--narrative of what Trump was up to. We still left without a name or an action. The biggest problem for anti-Trump activists isn't tools, but where on earth to start.

In some ways, the Trump-Pence regime is a crisis even broader and deeper than the early years of the AIDS epidemic when activists still had intersectional issues, but only a handful of targets: drug companies and researchers, homophobic evangelicals and the Catholic Church, CDC definitions that ignored women, government programs controlling health care access and information that betrayed queers, people of color and the poor.

This hydra has too many heads to count. And they're not just out to destroy the usual suspects, but the basic rules Americans have played by. Or aspired to, even when they failed us. I still want what I pledged my life to when I was six, Liberty and justice for all.

One person suggested holding a demo about free speech and assembly that would be as bold as possible, so that six months or a year from now we will have a yardstick to measure what we've lost when attacks on the Constitution and basic civil liberties take hold, and the once unthinkable becomes commonplace.

Pretty soon we'll believe we've always had a president-elect randomly creating policy tweet by unfettered, random, hateful tweet while his minions bring their calculated determination to stripping women and queers of their rights. And the other asylum inmates now in charge are perfectly justified in picking fights with China, or Iran. Stymying trade agreements. All agreements really, like terrifying three-year olds. Sometimes in the name of profit. Sometimes in the name of God.

Lately, I wonder whatever happened to reports of a new wave of evangelicals that were gay-neutral, pro-environment, less obsessed with abortion. Are they busy at home installing solar roofs, or did their fragile white egos catch fire with the politics of resentment? Is it them bashing the nearest queer, or Jew, or Muslim? Oh, poor white man lusting after more than a house and car and food. Oh poor white woman sleeping next to a disappointed spouse who dreams of a bare-chested Putin on a galloping horse.

Equality can't compare. Or the drudgery of democracy in which every vote counts, and must be counted.

I know what resentment is. I'm familiar with hate. I've put up with their bullshit dyke-baiting and woman-bashing for fifty years. And on bad days, I want what they do. To burn the whole thing down. I don't even care if I go with it. But then I see a little light somewhere. Hear a scrap of good news.

Like very early Monday morning when U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith ordered a recount to begin immediately in Michigan. "With the perceived integrity of the presidential election as it was conducted in Michigan at stake, concerns with cost pale in comparison." Just before that, the Obama administration halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

And for a moment I could see the point of the phone calls and emails, donations and demos. If there's a way forward, we have to draw the line beginning with the case of Standing Rock, where some very determined people were willing to put their bodies on the line over a period of weeks, and months, until the small encampment of Native Americans grew into an enormous movement. Because that's what change takes, time, patience, and activism in the flesh. It's the only way we have to remind politicians and business people that we exist beyond their policy reports and number crunching, and we won't be ignored.

The problem remains, though, that everybody can't be everywhere, can't do everything. And choosing a direction is especially difficult for those of us at the crossroads of identities. I'm beginning to believe it doesn't matter what you choose or how. Perhaps we should just leave it to chance. Like the woman passing a Planned Parenthood who saw protesters outside, and stopped, and went inside to volunteer. That's all any of us have to do. Pick one thing. Get plugged in. Make a stand.

Resisting Trump

By Kelly Cogswell

I take good news where I can find it in Trump's woman-hating, neo-Nazi, gay-bashing, Muslim-registering, anti-Semitic America. Last week, it arrived from a climate change conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, where delegates from 197 countries united to approve a statement urging immediate action in the face of Donald Trump's promise to pull out of the Paris Agreement and defund international efforts.

In one of his last appearances as Secretary of State, John Kerry delivered an emotional speech declaring that despite Trump's election, the U.S. fight against climate change wasn't over. Market forces would ensure a transition to a low carbon world even if policy didn't, because investments in renewable energy were absolutely exploding. And the vast majority of Americans supported action even if a powerful minority didn't.

I hope so. I really do. But the real reason this news cheered me a little was that I also learned that California was exploring how to join the climate talks as a subnational party if, or when, Trump makes good on his threat. In short, California is looking for ways to resist.

There's a good chance they can. The UN Convention on climate change declares "Any body or agency, whether national or international, governmental or non-governmental, which is qualified in matters covered by the Convention, and which has informed the secretariat of its wish to be represented at a session of the Conference of the Parties as an observer, may be so admitted unless at least one third of the Parties present object."

Even if they get thwarted by the Trump admin or Russian ally, nothing stops California, or New York or Oregon, from passing more stringent regulations. Now, at least, American states can still find ways to resist on an international level every time the official representatives of our country act against our interests. They can also guarantee abortion rights and minimum wages. For once, the tradition of respecting state's rights in the U.S. may work in the favor of progressives.

In other good news, individual cities like New York and San Francisco have declared that they won't participate in mass deportations and other unconscionable, bigoted acts, like any efforts to register Muslims. On Sunday, some New York politicians from the local, state, and federal level even jointly marched against hate and condemned Trump's administrative appointments. While press conferences aren't enough for the long run, they show that our daily protests have paid off. For now. Because no politician ever opens their mouths unless they think it will win them votes.

In the long run, we'll have to do both. Lay down in front of bulldozers and, like California, look for back doors not just to resist, but progress. Which means we activists have to commit ourselves to unraveling how our various levels of government actually work, understanding for instance the relationship between the beat cop and the Justice Department. The State Department and a queer film festival in Ankara.

Too many of us have seen our LGBT rights as a simple Christmas list of important issues, not as intertwined civil rights dependent on the health of our democracy and things like free speech and assembly. Clean votes. From now on, queer issues must include not just marriage equality or gender recognition, but the gerrymandering of voter districts, the suppression of voter rights, an independent judiciary actually committed to administering justice equally regardless of sexual orientation, gender, or race.

Not to say we should ignore specifically queer issues, but that we should see them in context. If you thought trans women of color had it tough before, imagine trying to work for their safety under a Justice Department led by a neo-Nazi. Every anti-bullying law everywhere will be under attack as well, along with hate crime ordinances. Those queers who couldn't access marriage in anti-gay regions, will face even worse obstacles. AIDS, in this new anti-gay, anti-Obamacare era, will probably hit us hard along with an epidemic of despair and self-loathing.

The worse things get, the more important it will be to demonstrate and put our queer, our brown, our black flesh out there, reminding politicians that we are not abstractions. And reminding ourselves of the power we have acting with, and for, each other.

It's not easy to take to the streets right now. Even experienced activists are still shell-shocked, and frightened. And we should be. It's easier to throw protesters in jail. And many of us are older, and already concerned about the vulnerabilities of our bodies. Getting hit by a cop or a bystander may not just put us out of commission for a few months, it may kill us.

And yet. And yet... "When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive." Audre Lorde.

When Trump Is King

By Kelly Cogswell

We could have done it. Had the first female President of the U.S. And one of the smartest, most prepared executives ever, but never underestimate misogyny. Never underestimate the vast selling power of hate and fear, and a sensationalist, ratings grabbing media that insisted on covering Trump as if he was a candidate like any other. Not a crook, a predator, a thug, a sleazebag racist openly endorsed by the KKK, and helped into office by a Russian dictator, a cowed FBI director, and the likes of Julian Assange who's not a radical truth-teller, just a resentful, but powerful, little fuck in some embassy basement.

What I really want to know is, what are we going to do about it? What are the Democrats? When Florida Republicans stole the vote in 2000 (later verified by the New York Times), none of the white Senate Dems protested during the roll call, and Gore was like, Gee shucks, what's a guy gonna do? Then the whole party rolled over as George W. conned the country about weapons of mass destruction, and followed him into a war that most of them now, including Clinton, acknowledge was a huge mistake.

So there you go. Afghanistan was succeeded by Iraq. And environmental treaties gutted or put aside, and almost every international agreement suspended for oil profiteering with Bush aided and abetted by a mainstream media that didn't dare, for instance, use the word torture to describe what resulted because his administration was so vindictive that rags like the Times were afraid their journalists would be excluded from a press conference or something. Then, the impact was mostly abroad. Domestically Bush made nice, never once called Latinos rapists, and had in his cabinet black and brown people like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and torture apologist Alberto Gonzales.

Trump is not even gonna play that. Not with a Republican Congress at his back. We're gonna see wackjob Giuliani redux, a Gingrich thrilled that Trump has promised to deport immigrants, destroy the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade, roll back marriage equality among other monstrous things. On the global level, Trump scorns not just specific agreements but the whole idea of international cooperation on trade, defense. If somebody annoys you, just nuke 'em, though handsomely reward your extreme right pals like Putin, France's Marine Le Pen.

So what I want to know is, are the Democrats and the media gonna roll over again, kiss goodbye the rule of law, accept dirty and missing votes, suppression of speech, of assembly, a politicized judiciary just so they can keep access? Make money? There's no question that all the Republicans who turned their backs on Trump last week are gonna kiss his ass today. But will the Democrats and the media bi-partisan and co-operate this country to death? Are they gonna throw the entire world under that very big fucking bus?

I really do need to know. My household's kinda vulnerable you see. Two queer females. One dependent on Obamacare. Another an immigrant. I wish I'd done more. But I've been paralyzed with a kind of sick fear. This country can be so ugly. The only moment I felt vaguely hopeful was last Saturday, when I went to Clinton's campaign headquarters downtown to get tickets to her election night rally and saw the enthusiastic mix of races and ages bent over their phones, sending texts to get out the vote under a distant banner acknowledging Orlando.

Everybody looked so calm and happy it made me a little teary. When I saw a woman take her two young daughters to pose in front of some Hillary signs, I nearly sobbed. I wonder if they're going to find some way to keep participating now that my fellow Americans have voted, not just for Trump, but against Hillary, against the last eight years of LGBT progress, new black and Native American activism, and women, women, everywhere.

Some of us will get lost in fear, or embrace an ugly cynicism because many of us imagined as I did growing up that our system of democracy was somehow as fixed and invulnerable as a statue of blindfolded Justice in which her scale never wavered. And when I began to understand misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, and that nothing was fixed, or guaranteed, the whole thing did seem rigged, like lies. I felt ashamed and guilty, and ready to keep the whole country at arm's length as if I could avoid contamination.

We can't. We shouldn't. The truth is that we are not the best country in the world, nor are we the worse. Not yet. We have done great things, and horrible things. What redeems us are the people here who understand that words like liberty, equality, justice are not facts, but aspirations, which require unending vigilance and the kind of hard work Clinton, anyway, was known for. It is time to recommit ourselves to the fight.

The Queer Kitchen

By Kelly Cogswell

So, I've been trying to write a cookbook for the last couple of years, deluded into thinking it would be a nice, light-hearted distraction from the horrors of politics. And why not? I had a bunch of good Kentucky recipes and decent home cook creds. There was even that summer during college that I did a stint in a professional kitchen at Yellowstone National Park.

I began as a dish dog, and got promoted to prep cook where I chopped about a thousand pounds of onions for French onion soup and made broccoli quiche. The adventure came to a quick and very painful end when I was lifting an enormous pot of boiling pasta, hit the edge of the stove, and tipped it over on myself. Who knew polyester pants could actually melt and stick to your flesh?

After that they shuttled me out of there as fast as they could. The guys didn't like having a girl in the kitchen, and they reassigned me to the gift shop where the most dangerous things I faced were the mice attracted by the huge blocks of fudge. It was too late, though. I was hooked, had learned how to use a chef's knife and cutting board like Julia Child on TV. When my mother or grandmother wanted to chop anything from a potato to a peach they'd hold it in their left hand and cut away at it with a small paring knife in their right. It was a miracle no one ended up with nubs.

For cookbook text, I thought I could tell a few stories like that about my family, and maybe even make them funny. You'd have to, after all. Cookbooks are a peculiar genre in which we all love the mothers and grandmothers that influenced us as home cooks, or even as professional ones. The cooking of our roots is shared without resentment. Healthy recipes are offered without the anxiety, self-loathing and fear that spawned them. If we admit we grew up on fried bologna sandwiches, Hamburger Helper, and canned green beans it is done only with sophisticated irony. In fact, let's have a dinner party with Jell-O salad and tuna casserole slathered with cream of mushroom soup and those crispy little onion rings. A martini will help us choke it down.

I tried to write that way, I really did. But it came off as false. I am as disgruntled in the kitchen as I am in the activist street, and have such mixed feelings about the whole thing it's a miracle that my cakes rise and the milk doesn't curdle. I have an abject fear of getting fat which is partly vanity, but mostly the diabetes that runs rampant in my family. One of my aunts died not long after they amputated both her legs.

And while my grandmother would bring out the baked ham and homemade cucumber pickles on holidays, and maybe a big pan of apple crisp, the rest of the time, she just wanted to boil up a hotdog for dinner or eat cheese and crackers. If she wanted to work all day in a hot kitchen, she could have stayed on the farm, working like a dog, and popping babies. Lord, she was happy when she got her tubes tied after her fourth baby. It was a step up to work in a factory. I think of her when I read about the slow food movement, or some writer hectoring us to get back in the luminous kitchen.

Then there are the cookbooks by black writers who carefully describe the contribution of black chefs to the Southern kitchen, detailing everything from cooking techniques to the actual seeds that they brought along on the slave ships. They celebrate survival and ingenuity, the ability to transform the leavings from the master's kitchen into haute cuisine.

And I can only marvel at how rational yet heartfelt it is, and begin to imagine the writer on Xanax. Yes, I know that "soul" food was reclaimed during the Black Power era, in the same way many of us have reclaimed the words fag or dyke or queer, but doesn't that recipe for mustard greens stick in your craw? Don't you want to throw that okra in my white face? I mean, the food is tasty and all, but doesn't it leave a bitter taste in your mouth?

I often forget just how deep my own grief goes until I step into the kitchen and roll out a pie crust or drop some biscuits onto a pan, and evoke my family and Kentucky, remember how my Southern Baptist mother disowned me for decades. And the preachers and politicians there still wish I were dead. And should that happen as it did in Orlando, would refuse to bury me, or bring a covered dish to my mourning lesbian family.

State of the Queer World

By Kelly Cogswell

This week, anyway, it seems that the world is lurching closer to acknowledging that we LGBT people deserve basic human rights and maybe even, the full rights of adult citizens. On April 7th, the high court of Colombia ruled that same-sex couples could marry. About the same time, the UN released the report, "ENDING VIOLENCE and other human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity."

The 91-page effort was result of a dialogue between the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations. It describes the horrible problems that we face worldwide, acknowledges them as human rights abuses, and calls for governments to work to end them.

Both achievements seem almost inevitable now, but I remember when queer activists in Colombia were still afraid for their lives and even the goal of half-assed civil unions seemed ridiculous because everybody's energy was consumed by the ongoing civil war. Queers, and women for that matter, never do well in a militarized environment. And Colombia had guerrillas, paramilitaries, the military, and government all at each other' throats.

I also remember when we were pariahs on the international scene. In the bad old pre-internet days queers were isolated and alone in their countries, and the U.S. State Department would pair up with Tehran and the Vatican to thwart any language in any international agreement that even acknowledged we existed, much less deserved human rights.

It was explosive when we began to gather at events like World Pride 2000 where activists from El Salvador, Romania, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Brazil could suddenly all bear witness on the same stage about how queers in their home countries were murdered, imprisoned, threatened. This was about the time that global organizations like Amnesty International finally acknowledged that LGBT rights were human rights, a hugely important boost.

If queers in Colombia can now get married, and if the UN is now advocating for our rights, it is because a lot of people worked really hard, year after year coming at problems every way they could think of. Militant queers took to the streets demanded change and demanding it now, other LGBT activists and their allies pressuring elected officials and policy-makers more politely, all of them sharing information and skills.

More and more, this exchange is happening on regional and international levels. Guatemalans are talking to Nicaraguans talking to Nigerians talking to Chinese. The rainbow of U.S. activists is also playing a role. Not just the usual alumni of ACT-UP involved in the global fight against AIDS, but maybe Latinos in the U.S. supporting the rights of queers to organize in Cuba.

Americans have a lot of power, and money. Sometimes we even use it for good. After Colombian queers won marriage equality this week, I noticed activist Elizabeth Castillo tweeted "Big hug @evanwolfson thanks by your support and passion!" After our own successes at home, it's only right that an architect of the victorious Freedom to Marry Campaign should help other queers fighting for the same rights. He even traveled there to speak out.

When Wally Brewster was appointed ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 2013, all he had to do to support queer visibility in the DR was to go to official functions with his partner Bob Satawake. Besides that, the two have hosted a small group of local LGBT activists at their official residence, and offered both funding and encouragement to local queer groups, ignoring the gay-baiting and insults from the likes of the repulsive Cardinal López, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo.

It's not that hard for Americans to support LGBT groups abroad. We've been there, we've done that, and in most places in the U.S., we still are. All of us, everywhere in the world, need organizations to track human rights abuses, lawyers to get us out of jail, advice on lobbying tactics, plane fares to conferences. Money for computers and offices. We also need funding for cultural programs like film festivals so we can create images of ourselves, shape our own identities.

In fact, successful U.S. organizations should make more of an effort to share skills and resources at home where one state can feel like 1952 and the next 2010. But while many LGBT Americans are at least familiar with LGBT struggles in Nigeria and China we often manage to ignore vast swaths of our own country until a ridiculous figure like Kim Davis emerges. Or until we get a "bathroom bill."

Race and class are clearly part of why we ignore them. A white person from California may have less baggage working with a black person from Ghana than with a person of color from Louisiana. But we Americans have all that wealth at our fingertips, and we owe it to each other to try harder.

Identity, Politics, and "Authenticity" Post-St. Pat's

By Kelly Cogswell

Last week, Irish queers marched behind their own banner in the Saint Patrick's Day parade for the first time ever in New York. In the photos they look so happy. More importantly, the crowd did, too. Most of them didn't even know it was a landmark year, assumed that battle was long over if they knew about it at all.

Nevertheless, I remember how faces in the crowd were twisted with hate the first time we tried to march in 1991, and all those years afterwards. They'd spit and curse. Scream that we had our own parade. The gay parade. And that they hoped we'd all die of AIDS. Then they'd go home and dig up the phone numbers of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, as well as of our spokespersons, and leave death threats on our answering machines. Some of us were bashed, some attacked. Some lost jobs.

I participated because I was queer, though not particularly Irish. And watched how these activists were gradually exhausted, frustrated. Even bored by a battle that went on year after year after year. The group splintered and reformed. Friendships and relationships were strained, sometimes destroyed. The broader LGBT community abandoned the fight because the parade was ridiculous after all. An excuse for straight people to get drunk on green beer. Or ogle underage girls in skimpy costumes smeared with lipstick and twirling batons.

I heard more than once, if they don't want you, why would you want them? Irish queers took pains to explain that identity is complicated and you can have more than one at the same time. You can be Irish and queer. Irish and female. Irish and Jewish. Irish and black. Marching as out LGBT people was a way for Irish queers to assert their existence within their broader Irish community. Other queer immigrant groups understood, and fought their own battles for inclusion in similar parades.

Identity was the heart of the problem. Not just what queers deserved to do as citizens. But in fact who got to be Irish in the non-Irish world of New York. The ultraconservative Catholic parade organizers there, The Ancient Order of Hibernians, were quite clear that being gay somehow disqualified you. Ideally, you would be not just straight but safely married with a passel of kids.

There were also issues of identity within the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization where some were Irish-Americans and others recent immigrants, a little puzzled about how the hyphenated identities in America worked. Each had very different understandings of what that word Irish meant. Nevertheless, they organized around it. Like they organized around "lesbian" and "gay". Then eventually "queer."

This battle, and plenty of others wouldn't have been won without "identity" politics. I'm not sure what other kind of politics there are. There is always some aspect of "identity" uniting us. Race. Class. Nation. There are just as many dividing us, though, so that if you start pulling threads the whole thing unravels.

Abroad, I'm visibly American, but it's complicated to define my relationship to those tourists demanding ketchup or those soldiers in Iraq. I have tits and a cunt but women sometimes scream at me in the bathroom. I have a certain amount of privilege associated with this skin, but beware of the assumptions you make because of it. And as a lesbian, well… There is something we recognize in each other when we pass on the street, but sit a bunch of us down at a table and we're suddenly mute strangers.

We need to begin to think about this contradiction in coherent ways. The main argument for marriage equality was that our identity was meaningless. Lesbian and gay couples were the same as hets and deserved the same rights. Nevertheless, activists found enough in common to organize together as queers. In fact, that's the only reason they could organize at all.

I see identity as an artificial thing that takes root. It has meaning and consequences which vary from one person to another. In one person over time. Activists are lost when we begin to believe our own PR-- that these differences actually mean something specific and fixed. We end up with territorial battles like the bitter feuds between some dykes and some trans women. As if it matters what a "woman" is, when none of us are safe in the street.

The word "Muslim" has become so weighty it is almost impossible to pronounce. Some hear it as an equivalent for terrorist. For the so-called progressive left (of all races) from the U.S. to Britain and France it often seems to mean victim or saint. They denounce troublesome secular-minded Muslims as "inauthentic," "self-loathing," or even, "Islamophobic."

I'm not surprised. Despite last week's victory, it sometimes seems we've gone nuts. That we've increasingly become our own Hibernians, dividing into camps, imagining there's only one way to define things--ours. And everyone else is an enemy.

Queers in Alphabet City

By Kelly Cogswell

What a mess. Already in March somebody suggested that trans people take their T and exit from the LGBT movement. And I eavesdropped on an all too typical election year conversation in which a young gay man long mentored by a dyke called her something along the lines of idiot cunt indicating just how much the G's despise the L's, and not just when they vote for Clinton. The invisibility of B's continues, though these days duck and cover seems a sensible life hack.

Queers of color, on the other hand, are less invisible than they were, thanks to some extent to their roles in #BlackLivesMatter. This, however, translates less into actual power in the queer community than new attacks from the right, as well as the white left which dismisses them as not authentically black, Latino, Asian… should they happen to support a white woman whose husband signed a crime law eventually used to send a huge swath of black men to jail. No matter that many in the black community--as well as the Black Congressional Caucus--applauded the law. At the time. Because they were sinfully short on hindsight.

This kind of stupidity is nothing new, but it certainly seems louder, faster, and more insistent. If in the old days, a lie could travel half way around the world while the truth was putting on its shoes, now, thanks to social media, it can circumnavigate the globe four or five million times, replicating itself in carefully witty memes, while the truth is still opening the closet and figuring out which pair of kicks to grab.

Ironic, considering I used to think that the internet was the best antidote to lies. During the George W. Bush administrations, I spent my time reading the latest nonsense his press office produced about everything from global warming to WMD, then writing articles in response proving why they were wrong using actual facts and offering as much context as I could manage. When it came to policy, I'd even try to think of alternatives.

Of course, the news cycle was longer then. Not as long as when we all waited for the early edition of the daily newspaper to come out, but you'd have a couple hours, maybe even a couple days between travesties that gave you time to assess the quality of information. See how ideas and information and trends fit together.

Sure, there's an upside to the new speed of media. When Hillary Clinton said something idiotic at Nancy Reagan's funeral, praising her as a "low-key AIDS" advocate, the internet immediately blew up. And just a few hours later she issued not just an apology but a full-fledged position paper on HIV/AIDS, highlighting the decades of mostly queer activism that have tried to stop it.

But even this speed troubles me. It somehow redefines our sense of what is right or true. We judge truthfulness by how meme-ish the tidbit becomes in the echo chamber of our followers and friends. When newsfeeds are refreshed every minute or two, and things appear by the second on social media, delays are lies. Context and scale are meaningless. Most importantly, we have no time to consider the future. Or even the different layers of past, because we are so busy keeping up with the now.

Living in internet time, our sense of the possible has been warped into a form of magical thinking. More and more we see cycles of impossible promises on the part of politicians and a backlash of rage when it turns out that the mayor or governor or president has to pass a law before they can give out free ponies. And to become a law, a bill has to get past committees and congresses and courts. And if it does eventually appear on the executive's desk, we are shocked to discover that the pony has become a hamster, funded by cuts in after school programs.

Which is why the process gets called sausage-making and often makes us sick. And why a quicky revolution can seem so attractive. Especially if you don't know most revolutions are unimaginable disasters. There are lots of victims. Usually the first people to support them.

Shit. I'm not saying what I need to. Maybe because I can't hear myself think. Everybody seems to be screaming. There's no time or space to think about the future lurking there just a little ways past this continuous present.

Nevertheless, we are building one out of mud and howls, mostly. The smuggest fury I've ever seen. And many of us are using against each other what Audre Lorde called the "master's tools", reinforcing homophobia. Racism. Misogyny. These deep-rooted and timeless hates.

Election 2016: Misogyny and the Audacity of Plans

By Kelly Cogswell

I haven't written anything about the election yet. Hillary Clinton is running again and there's so much misogyny involved I can't stand it. And the sheer idiocy. My God, whole crowds willing to swallow any crazy thing their candidates promises whether it's Trump vowing he'll throw out immigrants or end gay marriage. Or Bernie guaranteeing a revolution featuring single-payer healthcare and free college, and pie, and the sky.

So for the record, Hillary yes. Bernie no. And post-primaries, any Democrat will do.

Don't bother attacking. It's clear my opinion doesn't matter. I'm a woman after all. Judged for my voice: shrieky. My haircut: bad, needs washing. My record: smudged. I mean, I've been writing these columns for such a long time, anybody can find dozens (out of several hundred) that prove I've been a delusional fool. Nope, I'm not at all clean, but at least you know what you're getting.

Like with Hillary. Who is competent, careful, and has a reasonably progressive (though smudgy) track record of legislation and policy. When push comes to shove most of her stances are similar to Bernie's. Though when it comes to women, she's better.

She hasn't just cast votes, she has initiated a lot of programs and legislation on the national and international level. She has worked for us, horse-traded even, and gotten laws passed and policy implemented. She's an insider, and I'm okay with that in a world where women are second-class citizens at best, in the worst raped, enslaved, mutilated, hidden, and murdered, considered less than human.

So she doesn't make the same rousing speeches. I'm thrilled that she's a policy wonk, an egghead, an annoying Hermione Granger before she bonded with Harry Potter and Ron over that enormous troll. She's the Obama we got after the election. Thoughtful, capable and tough. And willing to go bi-partisan even if the Republicans aren't.

Campaign 2008, Obama gave great speeches sparkling with the audacity of hope. He encouraged us with his deep mellifluous voice, Yes, we can do anything, even end partisan rancor. Behold! The dawn of the most perfect union is near. Difficulties, like queers, were swept under the rug, as he effectively mobilized the enthusiastic Occupy Wall Street sympathizers that were often so fucking radical that they didn't need plans. Plans imply politics. Politics imply compromise, the establishment, and that nut-cracking bitch Hillary Clinton.

I thought he was going to be a total, bigoted, ineffectual asshole. I was wrong. Once he got elected, he governed as a realistic idealist, getting the job done in spite of the vicious Republican pummeling. He pulled the country back from economic meltdown, compromising his purity in ways that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren no doubt disapprove. He named Clinton Secretary of State and she helped him repair the international relations destroyed by Bush. He evolved on same-sex marriage.

And because you can't reform health care by signing, or refusing to sign, a few documents, Obama willingly dirtied his hands with a complicated project of law. Not just mobilizing enormous teams of lawyers to draft a bill that would stand up to a constitutional challenge. But persuading members of his own stodgy Democratic party to accept it, along with a few of the opposition.

All of that meant a great deal of politicking, and compromise, the insider stuff Bernie says he despises. And if his track record after 26 years in the House and Senate can be relied on, I think we can believe him. Only Senators Ted Cruz and Tim Scott have scores as awful as his on the bipartisan index (Georgetown University). And without political skills, Bernie's the same as every white leftie guy ever, waving his nice clean hands a lot and shouting about income inequality. And getting nothing at all done, because in fact, class doesn't trump everything, particularly race and gender. And blab doesn't get you very far.

Nope, I'd rather vote for an imperfect candidate with a wider vision and a pragmatic backbone. Someone who can work with others, and is unafraid to evolve. And who will have an unimaginable impact worldwide as the first female president of the enormously powerful United States of America.

Time for you to inappropriately invoke Thatcher; declare Bern a better feminist than Hillary, (try googling Dolezal, Rachel); and list Clinton's failures, which always include "flip-flopping" on same-sex marriage, even though you voted for Obama, proud to put the first black president in the White House, no matter that he was then against marriage equality, and even campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush. And no matter that even working the adoring crowds, Obama was no Malcolm X.

Nobody expected him to be. It's enough that with Hillary we'll get a good, maybe a great president. And she'll be more than a symbol of what women everywhere can do, but an actual advocate.

I was in France the day after the 2008 elections and I remember looking around the subway at the people of color, and remarking how most of them were grasping newspapers with Obama's smiling, victorious face. And how they were smiling too, and standing a little straighter. It was extraordinary.

Hillary's victory will mean as much worldwide to women. Maybe more.

Queer Ally, Defender of Justice, Resigns in France

Christiane Taubira ready to zoom off, but not into the sunset.

By Kelly Cogswell

I love Christiane Taubira. If she appeared before me like Yemaya, or the Virgin Mary, I'd fall at her feet. The French Republic has rarely had such a staunch and principled defender. As an elected deputy of the French parliament, she was the driving force behind a 2001 law recognizing slavery and the Atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. François Hollande's French Minister of Justice since 2012, she spent months introducing and defending the 2013 law that would give lesbians and gay men marriage equality, and establish her as one of the most hated targets of the extreme right.

She didn't care. Every day during the battle I'd wake up and check out YouTube to catch her latest impassioned speech, or snippy response, or even extended fit of giggles. She took the fight personally as a black woman. And said so. Equality was equality to her. And she'd been fighting for it her entire life. In France as a young black student newly arrived from her birthplace of Cayenne in French Guiana. In Guiana fighting for the cause of independence.

Now, faced with having to defend proposed legislation which actually attacks equality, she's walked away from her post, denouncing the antiterrorism measure that would strip convicted terrorists of French citizenship if they are dual nationals, even if they are born in France.

While it may seem like a small, symbolic gesture, that would almost never be applied, it is part of a Constitutional reform that will institutionalize inequality, officially creating two classes of French citizens. There are those who have citizenship permanently and irrevocably--mostly white French people born in France into white French families. And those whose citizenship is theoretically vulnerable--mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants who also have citizenship in another country.

This act can only exacerbate existing racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration sentiment at a moment when all of Europe is grappling with a huge swell of refugees. And citizens of color in France, including North African Jews, are already considered not quite French.

Most importantly, here, where Equality and Fraternity are two of the three pillars of the French Nation, along with Liberty, it also undermines what it means to be French. Like the U.S., France has never quite lived up to its ideals. But the average French person still believes in them, at least in the abstract. And when social and legal change does happen, some aspect of liberty or equality or fraternity will be the underlying argument. I can't imagine France without them. Will it be converted into a U.S. post-9/11, cynical or indifferent to vanishing civil liberties, secret prisons, a parallel justice system with its own Guantanamos, endless surveillance?

I saw the Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies during the holidays, and especially liked that scene between a Cold War spook and Tom Hanks who plays Brooklyn lawyer James Donovan defending an accused Russian spy. The CIA guy wants him to share confidential information, and tactics. And Donovan goes all Constitutional on him defending the right to a fair trial for everyone, and asking just what it is Americans have in common, anyway? Especially Americans like them, Donovan, the child of Irish parents? The spy guy with a German name?

Donovan answers his own rhetorical question by saying that nothing at all unites Americans. Just a few abstract ideas, a few principles. Like Equality. Especially equality under the law, a competent defense. For everyone.

It was eerie to watch the movie here in Paris just a few weeks after the November 13 attacks when people were still lighting candles and laying mountains of flowers in front of the cafes and restaurants and clubs where hundreds of men and women were slaughtered and maimed by ISIS terrorists. People were still afraid. The streets were half empty. Tourists had cancelled their reservations and many Parisians were avoiding cafes, especially the terraces. You could get a seat anywhere.

Also, Hollande had just made his big speech to the parliament with his ministers there in the front row. I saw Taubira listening as he tried to counter fear and grief with strength and anger, condemning the attacks. And of course, laying out his anti-terrorism measures, which included declaring a state of emergency, possible Constitutional reforms, and this provision to strip nationality.

When he said that, I thought I saw Taubira's face close in on itself. And afterwards, when she joined the whole room singing the Marseilleise, I wondered what that call to battle meant to her.

Now I know. A portion of her parting tweet was, "Parfois résister c'est rester, parfois résister c'est partir..." "Sometimes resisting means staying, sometimes resisting means walking away…" She'd stayed for months trying to fight the provision. But having failed, she couldn’t stay, and offer her seeming approval. Already, she's published a book-length essay against the legislation. She may have left the government, but she's still fighting for France.

Selling Misery

By Kelly Cogswell

If you read the headlines, or read my column for that matter, you'll want to go back to sleep, pull the covers up over your head and stay there. The terrorists are around the corner, the world is going to hell, and despite our progress, queers all over the universe have little shiny targets on their foreheads.

But how accurate is that view, even for me, who can actually see the effects of gunman and mad bombers just down my Parisian block? I read an article the other day reminding us that in places like the U.S. or France we were much more likely to be killed by food poisoning, or crossing the street, or falling off a ladder than we were by murderous assholes that swallowed a little too much Islamist (or Christianist) propaganda.

Last December, Slate published an article called, "The World Is Not Falling Apart," which used wide-ranging statistics to prove that the world was more peaceful than ever before in history. "Worldwide, about five to 10 times as many people die in police-blotter homicides as die in wars." When it came to terrorist attacks, Americans, anyway, were more likely to die of bee stings or "deer collisions, ignition of nightwear, and other mundane accidents."

Even women have seen improvement, no matter that in France, one dies every three days in an act of domestic terrorism committed by their boyfriends or husbands. In Brazil black women are slaughtered so frequently we really have to use the word femicide. Nevertheless, global rates of rape, sexual assault and intimate partner violence against women are considerably less than they were a few decades ago.

And for us queers, in the last few decades many places have seen the repeal of sodomy laws, huge marriage equality wins, and major progress on trans rights. Isn't it time to pop open a bottle of champagne and celebrate? What's the matter with me that I keep harping on violence, and deaths, and antigay campaigns?

Maybe it's my activist past. I have that saying trapped in my head that declares nobody is free until we all are. And when it comes to queers, there are plenty being left behind. In the United States, LGBT people of color, trans people, poor people. The ability to exercise our new right to marry also varies from region to region. We heard a lot about Morehead, Kentucky, but there are plenty of other places where county clerks have announced they won't hand out marriage licenses to queers. The only difference is things are already so bad for LGBT folks in those communities, that nobody feels supported enough or safe enough to even begin to challenge them.

And if we Americans lift our heads to look outside our own country we see places like Nigeria where the war on queers is overt and institutionalized. If we dare concern ourselves with the bloody rampage of the Islamic State we see queers thrown off of cliffs and out of windows. Stoned to death. Iran is looking positively civilized for occasionally sending us to the gallows.

But still, how often does it happen overall? Isn't this backlash an indication of how threatened some people are by our progress, our new visibility? What do I stand to gain by encouraging you to keep your champagne safely in the fridge, to be afraid? Especially in the increasingly privileged U.S.?

After September 11th, I remember that Bush and company played on our fear and anxiety to sell us censorship, and spying, a Department of Homeland Security, and a shiny new war in Iraq. Probably some in the Bush administration believed these things were useful. But many just liked the new power. And a great many more stood to profit financially from new control of old oil fields, or the giant machine of war. They also used fear and anger to inoculate us against their abuses, like the torture engaged in at the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

As for me, all I want is for you to stay awake, pay attention. Remain mobilized. History teaches us that trends can be reversed. Things seem like they're getting better now, but nobody knows how sturdy our progress is, especially if you look at how easy it's been for the anti-abortion people to roll back women's gains.

And we are vulnerable. Not just from our enemies but from our own authoritarian trends. Squashing internal dissent. Attacking speech because we don't agree, or it lacks nuance. Trying to get things banned. We've forgotten that civil liberties like freedom of speech and association are the most important weapons we have to protect the gains we've made, and hopefully enable new ones.

I wonder sometimes if I've helped fuel that whole trend, with my constant doom and glooming, making everything seem equally important, equally dire. Maybe I should try to lighten up, remember what liberation feels like, and joy.

The State of the Queer Cuban Nation

By Kelly Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cuban government declined to participate in the hearing.

Storifying Stonewall

By Kelly Cogswell

I'm not surprised that the director of the new movie "Stonewall," sidelined the butches and drag queens of color for a hero who was gay and white and male and so macho that nobody was gonna be checking his trousers to see if he had all the equipment promised by that pale chiseled face. After all, that's what the LGBT movement did, tidying up its history almost as quickly as the broken glass and ashes were cleared from the West Village streets.

Only four years afterwards, Sylvia Rivera, one of the original Stonewall riot girls, had to claw her way onto the stage of the 1973 Pride celebration, and wait out the jeers before she could speak about how trans women were getting beaten and raped in jail, and call on the community to look outside the inner circle of white middle-class concerns.

Even now, national LGBT groups put forward only their whitest, most gender-conforming foot, and until recently would jettison the T any time trans issues seemed a stumbling block to pro-gay legislation. Questions of racism in our community are still barely acknowledged.

So why would we expect more from the earnest gay director Roland Emmerich, who told Buzzfeed he just wanted to make sure LGBT kids knew their history, and in particular shed a little light on LGBT homelessness? I don't even care he said he wanted a "straight-acting" character that middle America could identify with, because isn't that what most directors want, especially mainstream directors like Emmerich?

He's best known for blockbuster action films that feature likeable, macho central figures, and narrative arcs that never diverge as they move towards their inevitably exciting but happy conclusions. While he deserves his props for casting actor Will Smith as the lead in "Independence Day," when that seemed a daring choice, and centering an interracial couple in "The Day After Tomorrow," these movies still warn us not to expect subtlety, and any careful handling of what historians like to call facts.

In fact, it seems he treated "Stonewall" like any fiction film, imagining that if somebody had to pick up that brick and throw it, and if it would help get this important story told, why not a nice white boy from Indiana that the rest of America could identify with, and maybe even elicit a little sympathy for LGBT issues, especially queer kids that were the bulk of the original Stonewall crowd? At least he didn't pretend to be doing a documentary, unlike some films about ACT-UP that also give the impression that our most important activists have always been white and male.

For me, the problem of "Stonewall" and other films like it is as much the form as the usual content. Suppose Emmerich had been writing the film now, taking into account all the recent progress we've had in trans visibility, and deciding to give center stage, for instance, to Marsha P. Johnson, would it would have changed the film in any significant way? Or like Dan, would a Marsha-like character exist mostly to suffer for a while, overcome adversity, and develop into a heroine, just in time for a happy, happy ending, in this case conveniently taking place before the real Marsha's violent death.

You'd get a black trans face in there, and maybe be closer to the facts, both of which are good, but not good enough, since what I want is a film about Stonewall and the queer experience that actually comes closer to the messy truth.

That's the fundamental problem, after all, with all these kinds of heroic social change films. They homogenize experience, flatten it out, so that it is impossible, for me anyway, to recognize "history" onscreen where all the activists are heroes, even if they are flawed. And success is always inevitable. Even last year's movie "Pride," had that kind of glow about it. No matter that the queer campaign in Britain to support striking miners eventually failed, we did get to see hearts and minds changed as some conservative miners relinquished their homophobia and supported the queers in a big fuzzy hug at their own Pride Parade. The death of one of the gay characters of AIDS just lent an additional poignancy to the whole thing.

I suppose it's tempting, especially for embattled movements, to create these little mythologies in which we raise our fists at the right places, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and never fight with each other for more than a few minutes. But they aren't real. Even if they are eventually made more representative, seemingly more accurate, these stories cannot be our stories until that traditional narrative is broken, twisted, queered. Until we learn to celebrate failure without sneering at success, and bust the story open to reveal how much we've accomplished, less by charging heroically ahead, than by simply persisting, sometimes in blind hope, sometimes in rage.

Hating Kim Davis

By Kelly Cogswell

Good ole Kim Davis, how we love to hate her. Long after she got sprung from jail, and same-sex couples were issued their marriage licenses, it's still Kim Davis as a lead on half the gay rags of the country and beyond. Mostly because she's so easy to hate. She's a woman, after all, and from rural Kentucky.

Her garden-variety bigotry gives you license to make jokes about hillbillies and incest, rednecks and Possum Bottom Kentucky Honeymoon Lodge and Bait shop. You get to rant smugly about her stupidity and backwardness and ignorant accent, and even declare that she shouldn't be sent to prison because it was bad enough that she already lived in "the soggy backlands of Rowan County, Kentucky."

And when you get tired of Kentucky-bashing Kim Davis you get to ridicule her body and her hair, and her four marriages to three men which allowed one self-declared Christian gay man the opportunity to frame an attack on her femaleness as a battle against hypocrisy, declaring, "God bless the whores who love multiple penises up their worn out holes…" and "cock-hungry crevices" to the delight of his "progressive" Facebook friends.

Women are participating too, in the same way former southerners are first in line to sneer at redneck hillbilly pervs. I quit reading articles about Hillary Clinton sometime in 2008 when lefty dykes would join the men ostensibly going after her politics, but mostly attacking her shrill irritating voice, and her incompetent hair, and her childbearing, ball-breaking hips. In fact, they wrote similar attacks against Sarah Palin, who shared none of her program, but all the same shameful equipment.

I also don't read what most "progressives" have to say about Southern politicians because there's always gonna be some line in there equivalent to "Go BACK to the part of Amerikkka that hatches bigots by the hog full… GIT!!!" Because apparently there are no bigots up north. Or out west. No homophobia. No racism. No ignorance. No religious fundamentalists. No dead queers, no cop bigots.

And by extension, the hillbilly heaven of the south has only those things. There are no large liberal swaths, or restaurants where black and white middle-class couples might all go for brunch. Or book fairs arranged by committees including black and white women that might welcome a dyke like me. In fact, by implying the south is exclusively comprised of white ignorant hillbillies there are no people of color at all, except I guess for a handful of morons waiting around to be the next certain victim.

You have to wonder where they all went, the growing numbers of immigrants, of Latinos, of Asians, but especially the African Americans who produced the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and now a huge crop of anti-AIDS activists that you've probably never heard of like Dr. Joyce Keller. Or Gina Brown. Who don't count at all in how we perceive the south because they are black, female and alive.

Every time I see this kind of South-bashing, I can hear the pathetic little voices after the 2000 election blaming us for the democratic loss, and asking why those idiot inbred hillbillies never vote in their own interests. Maybe we are. Maybe it was your own smug, bigoted assholery that sent poor people, and women, fleeing to the Republicans. And not just poor white people. And not just white women. Yes, racism is one of the primary reasons that the white working class keeps voting for the 1 percent, afraid those nameless hordes are gonna get their jobs, or their homes or their women. But your classist, regionalist sneers do a pretty good job of alienating a wide range of people.

In fact, the current Kim Davis-bashing has almost as much to say about hating people of color and immigrants as it does about southerners, not to mention women. Not just because the jokes and rants have managed to erase people of color from the narrative of the south with all that hillbilly crap. But because the nature of the rhetoric raises questions about just how serious white progressives can be when they support #blacklivesmatter or Syrian refugees or abortion clinics.

After all, if you're so fucking giddy, so absolutely happy to hate somebody with an accent, who comes from a region marked by poverty, who has a vagina, are you only gonna welcome those immigrants who don't make grammar mistakes or too much noise when they move in next door? Or only support the "good" blacks who don't interrupt Bernie Sanders' nice speeches with their shrill and angry demands? What about the dykes, or fags or trans people who refuse to keep to their carefully delineated place? What about all the rural queers? If we step out of line, will you hate us, too? You betcha.

My Life as a Girl Experiment 2: Skirting Drag

By Kelly Cogswell

It's been years since I've had to put on girl drag to go to an office, but I still throw on a skirt occasionally. My current fave: a furry brown thing that I wear with stripey tights. Once, on a kind of dare, I let a friend dress me up in his colorful wig, and silvery shoes, a rainbow colored unitard so tight it exposed my femaleness more completely than any clinging dress, and I unclenched my jaw and smiled for the camera, trying to find the drag queen inside me.

The worst experiment ever involved a bunch of South Asians, a New Mexico Latina, some kind of glittery sari, and me. I've never looked so white and dykely in my life, though in some ways, yesterday was worse, even if all I did was put on a sundress. It seemed like a good idea. The mercury hit more than ninety-five degrees in Paris and I liked how I felt half naked underneath the flimsy material that caught the faint breeze in the apartment.

But then I thought about stepping out on the street, and I started to hate that same naked feeling. So first I put a tank on over the subtle black and blue print, and pinned the bottom together with a safety pin, so I wouldn't show my knickers in a gust. Then I decided to wear my invincible Doc Marten boots.

After ten more minutes waiting around for my girlfriend to send one last email, I panicked and changed into my usual denim cutoffs and bland grey tank of urban camouflage that neither cloaks nor advertises my dykeness or femaleness, but also doesn't scream, "Look at me," like most girl drag, even those navy skirt suits worn with sensible heels.

It attracts male eyes, and with them, comments. They could be flattery, or insults. Doesn't matter. As a female, as a woman, your body isn't yours. You aren't allowed to clothe yourself for your own utility or pleasure, but always and only for men, and the women who enforce cultural standards. And those thoughts you were having, minding your own business as you were walking down the street, will almost surely be interrupted by some man's banal sexual fantasy, or his desire to assert his presence masking tyranny as a compliment.

Sure, some women always have an easy retort at hand, but if you shrink in the face of what men no doubt consider harmless repartee, if you don't reciprocate or appreciate their advances, if you actually rebuff them, then the banter is revealed as what it is, an exchange of volleys in a still lopsided war that I have shaped my life and my wardrobe to avoid.

So when we queers talk about how gender intersects with identity and expression (which is such a lovely word), we might consider how misleading the whole conversation can be for plenty of dykes like me.

After all, growing up, I was as comfortable in my Sunday School dress as in the tight white pants of my baseball uniform. I hated my body, of course, but most young females do. My self-loathing grew exponentially worse after I hit puberty at twelve, not because I was horrified by an obviously female body, but because that body was subject to almost constant harassment.

Even in jeans, I had guys touching me all the time, grabbing my butt, and following me home. I quit wearing makeup even on special occasions. During college, my clothes got baggier and baggier until I practically disappeared inside. Now I usually seem androgynous or masculine "presenting" when what I really feel is, wotever. Not human at all. A girlfriend once called me a brain on wheels and that's as good as anything.

I didn't choose my gender expression, so much as I retreated into it out of exhaustion and fear. Sometimes I suspect the occasional desire I have for a skirt or dress is a matter of nostalgia. Other times it's to see just how butch I really am, or am not. Or perhaps it's a desire to break out of my androgynous or masculine reality which I imagine is what some cis men feel when they pull out their enormous high heel shoes and beehive wigs, wanting to be at least temporarily whimsical. Maybe even ridiculous.

Because that's the other thing of course. How an egghead like me is forced into serious, more gender-neutral clothes not just to create a barrier around my little dyke body, but for the street cred of an activist and journalist. Nobody takes you seriously wearing colorful, girly clothes, but especially sundresses, sequins, feathers, tapestry, and/or furry skirts. All those toys we female types are allowed to play with, but which come at a price.

Confronting the Great, White HRC

By Kelly Cogswell

When Buzzfeed broke the news last week that the Human Rights Campaign had a diversity problem , the response among many activists was a great big, "Duh." The only surprise was that the HRC folks had commissioned the report themselves, and having decided to look in the mirror, actually admitted that staring back was the face of a privileged white gay male.

So kudos to HRC for bringing in outside consultants to respond to complaints of what the report called the "White Boys Club." More importantly, congrats on taking steps to make the organization less homogenous.

The only question is just how far HRC is willing to go. It's easy enough to create gender neutral bathrooms. And they'll probably even make some progress in respecting people's gender identities. It's not that hard, after all. If somebody that you thought was a woman asks you to refer to them with male pronouns, you just drop the "s" and start using "he."

Maybe HRC will even start seeing every new hire, every promotion as a chance to look around the table and ask, "Who's not here?" And to hire fresh talent who may happen to be women, racial minorities, or trans people.

But once they're there, will they actually have access to power or a chance to exercise their abilities? There's no shortage of women at HRC right now, just not in managerial positions. In fact, according to the report, the atmosphere is hostile to women and feminine men, with straight women privileged over bi women and dykes, not to mention trans women. And while some racial and gender minorities are represented, they're also not at the top. Which means it's not particularly reassuring to find that eighty percent of HRC employees apparently believe diversity is important since the other twenty percent seem to be running the show.

Entrenched as these gay, white males are, what on earth would persuade them to share power? Especially now, when they have so much juice that they even turn up on TV as Washington powerbrokers, waltzing in and out of Madame Secretary's outer office?

I have no idea. Especially since so much of their power comes from their huge war chest which they can use to lobby politicians or mobilize huge numbers of voters. And funders rarely like change. They want what they've bought and paid for. And if there's any handshaking to do, it better not be with anybody new. Besides, they're all part of the same informal network. Paul only wrote the check to Bob in the first place because they were both in the same dorm at Yale.

So if HRC leadership are tempted to integrate the boardroom, or even start new programs, I can imagine their fear. Donations may slip. Then their power. We queers are no better than the rest of society. We cling to the little we have. And the closer we get to the center of power, the more conservative we become, and the more we reflect its whiteness, its cis gendered, exclusionary maleness.

Still, what does it cost us activists to quit snickering and believe HRC can change, or even see that belief as a strategic necessity? How else can we push them towards it? Remind them of their goals, and demand action?

The organization is more complex than the greying monolithic beast we usually imagine. I was unexpectedly invited to HRC a year ago to talk about the Lesbian Avengers, and was surprised to see how many young lesbians were there in the audience, and how eager they were to talk about street activism and the limits of institutional power. I was prepared to do a big spiel defending my right to exist, but I didn't need to. Not to that crowd anyway. The young women were attracted to HRC, not for the meager salary, but because they thought HRC could make a difference. And because there weren't many alternatives. Increasingly they are speaking up.

It would be nice if we saw them as an integral part of HRC, not as a token appendage. Especially since this report seems to betray an inner fight for the soul of HRC and maybe the soul of the entire LGBT movement, which has never done a good job supporting our entire community. Now, as the marriage equality fight winds down, we should seize the opportunity to renew ourselves, and reconsider diversity as more than a pleasing balance of skin tones and genitalia, or even a question of abstract fairness.

Diversity is an asset. A pool of perspectives, imagination and experience. And if we are to solve our most intransigent problems, or even identify or articulate them, we need more than usual suspects on the job. Not just at HRC. But in any queer organization that wants to be fresh, relevant, and effective.

Read Internal Report: Major Diversity, Organizational Problems At Human Rights Campaign

Go Ireland? The Real Meaning of the Marriage Victory

By Kelly Cogswell

Apparently, rainbows broke out all over Ireland as people voted "yes" to letting queers tie the knot. It was hailed as remarkable victory for LGBT people, not just because it was the first successful attempt to hold a popular vote on same-sex marriage, but because the measure won widespread support across the nation from the big liberal city of Dublin to the tiniest villages boasting little more than a church and a pub.

As in the U.S., I'm not sure how important a marriage win is for our community at large. Because it's possible that support for same-sex marriage is less a departure from Ireland's entrenched conservative, Catholic values than a reflection of them. A successful trip to city hall largely boils down to giving the happy couple the right to declare monogamy, protect inheritance, and pay less tax. What could be more traditional than that?

In fact, that's how the global marriage equality movement has characterized itself, largely making its case by mothballing the freak flag, banishing liberation in favor of equality, and carefully removing the sex from homosexual. Most of the photos illustrating the marriage issue portray us as hand-holding milquetoasts, content with chaste kisses and changing the nappies of somebody else's kids. Our unions are spiritual. Our new rights as abstract as citizenship.

So far, this right to bear boutonnieres hasn't made much difference to queer lives in the flesh, in the street. We're still getting bashed outside our own bars, and bullied in the locker rooms. Queer kids are getting kicked out of their own homes. Pervasive social change is still a distant promise.

Nevertheless, some members of Ireland's Labour Party are interpreting the victory there as a sign it's time to improve the country's strict anti-abortion laws. First on the agenda is repealing the 1983 constitutional amendment giving the "unborn" an explicit right to life. Second is broadening the 2013 law that allows abortion only when a woman's on the verge of death or suicide.

Currently, unless they have the means to get abortions abroad, Irish women are forced to bear unwanted children, even in cases of rape, or when the fetus won't survive past birth. If you have an illegal abortion, you face up to fourteen years in jail. Even women that qualify for an abortion under the 2013 law can't always get them. Every year it seems there are cases of suicidal girls forced to carry a kid to term. Last year, a brain-dead woman was actually kept alive as a human incubator in an attempt to save a fetus.

Women just don't count for much, there, or anywhere. We lack dignity both in life and death. Which is the biggest problem when you try to look to marriage equality as a predictor of the abortion fight. Men (and women) are winning rights in the first case. The second is all about females. And what are we but our bodies and our flesh? Especially when it comes to abortion and there's no denying that at some point a penis came into contact with a vagina, or at least a sperm met up with an egg, and the result is growing there in a female belly.

If somebody insists on finding a queer comparison, a canary to sing about the end of Patriarchy, a better predictor would be the fate of trans and gender queer people. What happens to our girly boys and masculine girls when they dare step outside or into that rigid box of gender? The way we challenge expectations of bodies and control intersects more closely to issues of abortion and reproductive freedom than the question of marriage equality ever could.

And the state of the trans Irish nation doesn't give us much encouragement for an abortion fight. At the moment, trans people can legally change their names, but still not their genders. The Gender Recognition Bill currently in the works contains regressive medical certification requirements and age restrictions.

In a report published last year by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland showed that trans and genderqueer people paid a high price for moving beyond traditional roles. The verbal harassment is endless. One person said, "Every day [I'm] called a 'tranny', 'lezzer', 'lesbian', 'it's a man', 10 to 20 times a day every day in Dublin."

Trans people are attacked in bathrooms, on the street. In one of the worst cases of late, an 18-year-old was beaten, chased and raped for being a trans man. Like other trans victims, and the average woman, gay, straight, bi, trans, he didn't trust the police enough to report it. United in humiliation and fear, we have more in common than we think. Éirinn go Brách.

No Honeymoon in Brazil For Post-Marriage Queers

The cover of a Christian magazine.

By Kelly Cogswell

So the feds finally recognize your marriage, big deal. Pop a cork, swig some champagne, then get back to work. You can't legislate the end of homophobia. Just look at Brazil, with its enormous LGBT Pride Marches, marriage equality, and entrenched homophobia and violence.

I've been swapping messages about the state of Brazil's Queer Nation with Mariana Rodrigues, a 31 year old dyke activist who worked at Liga Brasileira de Lésbicas (League of Brazilian Lesbians) when she still lived in Sao Paolo. And she started off by telling me that despite all their legal progress, young queers that dare to come out are regularly met with fierce disapproval or even violence from family, friends and society at large. When one of her young friends announced he was gay, his father actually tossed him out of a moving car.

And despite the parades, most people are still closeted at work, or they wouldn't find any. Especially feminine gay men, and butch dykes. Trans people almost never find employment in a formal workplace. Luma Nogueira Andrade, the first trans university professor in the country, is a rare exception. Now, she's actually the first trans college president in Brazil at the University of International Integration of Brazil-Africa Lusophony (UNILAB) in the northeast. She describes herself as travesti (transsexual) instead of transgender to highlight the history of stigma and violence that transsexuals continue to face.

Almost one queer is killed every day in Brazil, with trans people accounting for half the victims, largely because they're forced to the margins of a society where violence is already endemic. In fact, violence against all LGBT people is increasing, especially in big cities like Sao Paolo and Rio. Mariana believes it is the beginning of an enormous backlash.

Just two weeks ago, a video went viral showing a huge group of young men, called "Gladiators of the Altar" shouting that they were going to hunt down queers and kill them. They are organized by one of the largest evangelical groups in Brazil, the enormous Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. A few days afterwards, Mariana found an equally horrifying post on their website, that shows an image of a father with a gun in his hand saying, "Who else wants to admit they're gay?" The caption: "everyone should have a gun at home to solve their own problems."

More and more, politicians attack LGBT people and women's rights during their campaigns, as they compete for the conservative, evangelical vote. Mariana was shocked when the Brazilian president, Dilma Roussef, actually vetoed a curriculum developed to help teachers cope better with diversity in schools. A member of the Workers Party which has been the most progressive on LGBT issues, Rouseff claimed that it was not the government's role to "spread sexual orientation propaganda."

As in the U.S., the division of church and state is increasingly blurred as conservative evangelical movements elect more and more legislators, and invest entire fortunes in buying up media outlets and creating giant lobbying machines. Marco Feliciano, a staunch evangelical, is now the president of Brazil's federal council of human rights. Besides declaring that black people are cursed because they didn't worship Jesus in Africa, he's also blamed bi people for the AIDS epidemic. Jair Bolsonaro, another evangelical deputy, said that children only become gay because they're not beaten enough. Both were re-elected in a landslide.

In the last election a Catholic candidate promised to create a mass movement rising up against the evil of homosexuality, which among other things, threatened the traditional family. In that case, the public defender filed a lawsuit against him because those statements were made on national television and incited hate crime. Last week he was sentenced to pay a fine which will go towards a public service announcement supporting LGBT rights, though it might be overturned on appeal.

Nevertheless, LGBT activists can't keep up, and Mariana worries that evangelical politicians may actually be able to reverse decades of legal and social progress in Brazil. Just recently, a program about gender equality and sexual orientation was removed from the national curriculum after intense lobbying from evangelicals. They claimed these "theories of gender are included to propagate and encourage homosexuality in children."

And in Tocantins, the state where Mariana now lives in central Brazil, LGBT activists worked for two years to pass a program containing provisions for education, health, social assistance and work, and insuring the LGBT population there basic human rights. Eight days after the plan was approved and announced, the state government caved in to pressure from Christian members and revoked the whole thing.

Even when the federal government does makes progressive recommendations, they are often ignored by the state governments. (Like in the United States, LGBT rights and protections vary from state to state). Sometimes policies are passed, but not implemented because they aren't awarded funds. Other times, judges rule according to their personal beliefs rather than the laws on the books.

Still, Mariana sees some positive shifts on the cultural front. A new soap opera featured a kiss by two older lesbians in the first episode. While there was a huge uproar from the evangelical population, there was also a number of strong, approving voices. This was progress from the first time there was a lesbian couple on a soap when it caused such outrage the writers almost immediately killed them off. Gay activists are organizing some beijaços (kiss-ins) to support the new show.

One new twist in the ongoing war for LGBT rights, is how evangelicals are beginning to claim that they themselves are victims of discrimination against Christians. They say that gay people are the abusive majority preventing them from exercising their "right" to denounce LGBT people, and even call for their eradication. If these cries of "heterophobia" sound familiar, it's because evangelical movements both north and south are joined at the pocketbook, and the tactic has been spreading in the U.S. as well. Indiana's only a heartbeat from Brazil.