By Kelly Jean Cogswell
804 words
Come on out. Knowing a real queer is the only thing that gets homophobic chickens to cross to our side of the street. On the other hand, it can wait until you have your own apartment, or better yet, a job and health insurance.
I'm not as adamant about coming out as I used to be. I grew up believing Jesus' promise that the truth will set you free, and when I was a teenager I took it to heart and liberated everybody to death.
Whoever dared ask, "How are you?" got an earful about my homework and my health. I never said good morning unless it actually was sunny outside, and my mood was equally bright. If I'd've known I was a dyke, I would have told you so. As it was, if your thighs bulged out inconveniently, and you asked how your pants looked, I'd confirm they made you seem fat.
That went on until college when somebody broke the news, "You're not so perfect yourself." Which I knew, but just didn't think everyone else did. And that was that. I bit my tongue, got civilized.
My last real stab at the truth was 1990, when in an agonized graduate school confession, I told this one professor, "I lie all the time. Everything I say from beginning to end is a half-truth or lie. From the time I first get up in the morning until I go to bed, I fudge, shade, hack, twist, and mangle the truth."
"That's terrible thing to say about yourself," she said, with wide, horrified eyes. "You can't mean that."
"I guess not," I said, accepting my life of lies, until a couple of years later when I came out to my family, my boss, and everyone else I could think of.
I mostly don't need to now. I look like a dyke, walk like a dyke, and go places accompanied by packs of dykes. I couldn't lie in the closet if I tried, though I'm not always sure where the truth gets you.
I've learned that as a tissue, lies wear better than you'd expect. In my ripe old age, I say, "Good morning" on rainy days with everybody else. When my friends ask, "How are you?" I answer, "Fine, fine," even if I'm broke and miserable and ready to jump off a bridge. "Fine" is a tiny little lie, a squirt of oil really, for the social cogs.
Besides, lying is almost a prerequisite to get an apartment anywhere. In Paris, I've jettisoned Marina by omission so I can be single again. It's not that I want landlords to think I'm straight, just alone. That's the only explanation for why someone might be applying for such miniscule digs. Except for poverty, which you don't want to cross their minds.
When you're talking about housing, you better adjust both your income and prospects upward. The only thing you can't lie about is your skin, and even there, you might give it a shot.
New York's as bad. When we were apartment hunting for Marina's mom, we had to drop her age by a decade just to see a roach-infested hole.
We found too that all the decent places wanted you to have not just an income that equaled three or four times the rent, but in some places ten or twenty-five or more. Where does that leave middle-class people, or god forbid, poor, without a few white lies or a wealthy cosigner?
The rich get the best of everything, even the truth.
Sometimes I sit back and imagine the luxury of it. April 15 rolls around, and you have receipts for everything you declare, and an accountant to go through them looking for loopholes. No worries about audits. Or files or pay stubs. No fear.
Not everybody can afford the truth. Fresh out of college, lying was the only way to get a job. They turned me away at McDonald's because I had an insincere, wolfish smile. An agency thought I looked too depressed to be a receptionist. Nowhere was there an opening for a poet.
My pal Amy convinced me to upgrade my computer skills, on my resume, anyway. When I finally got a job, I kept her on the phone walking me through the programs every day until I learned. What else should I have done? Recited verse on the subway? No. Lie, lie through your teeth.
In every big U.S. city, you see teenaged queers on the street. Baby dykes and fags, trannies who couldn't pass, or in a burst of youthful hopefulness and pride decided to come out. For a reward, maybe an uncle raped them, or their parents threw them out.
To tell the truth, the truth won't help them. What they need is a home -- and cold hard cash.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Pride Schmide, It's Not Enough
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
802 words.
Marina wants me to, so almost every year, I drag myself out of bed with feet sore from the Dyke March, slather on some sunscreen, and take the train uptown to watch the Pride Parade.
These days, it's full of bar floats and dancing boys, condom throwers, church choirs, ethnic groups and politicians, like a cross-section of America.
We march sometimes with the Brazilians for the sake of their homegrown music. But the best part is watching the people watching the parade in the Village, Westchester lesbians with button-downs rubbing shoulders with Brooklyn dykes with wife beaters and dreds, a couple of fabulous L-word types, plus the big beefy boytoys and skinny nerds, all applauding P-FLAG and wishing their parents were there, too.
For a minute, I love them all, out for the day, and proud, whatever that is. I looked pride up in my computer's dictionary, and if you throw out the stuff about lions, what you have left are feelings about accomplishments and qualities.
In truth, being gay isn't an accomplishment for most of the people I know. We don't have any more choice about being queer than a needle on a compass has to point north. We may as well throw a parade for humans with opposable thumbs. Give me an award, I can hold a pencil.
It's why I like the label sexual orientation. With "identity" there's the idea you can buy false ones, just give the guy on the corner fifty bucks. You wanna be bi this year? Or do you prefer boyz? How bout knocking off a few years? I swear these'll slip by Homeland Security.
Women are my magnetic north and I've always been pulled towards them even when I was twelve and thought that girls were gross. Everybody but me could see where I was pointed. When I came out my sisters said, "Oh, we figured you were like that."
Guys in cars knew before me, too. I got bottles heaved out at me a couple of times. "Fucking dyke." It was written all over me -- like being white. I wake up every morning and without any effort, there I am, in the neighborhood of beige, no badges or uniform required, or any particular sentimentality.
I was born that way and my girlfriend a couple of shades darker which gets her called white in Cuba, and a person of color in New York. Go figure. There's no accomplishment in skin. Even turtles have it, and potatoes. Why pride?
The sponsors call themselves the Heritage of Pride, and if you bring history into it, I guess you could be glad simply that you've survived, that we all have. It hasn't been easy. But I think they mean something else with heritage.
I've never understood that exactly -- Kentuckians like me celebrating Abraham Lincoln living in the state for about ten minutes as if his greatness rubbed off somehow in the soil and we're better for it. That kind of stuff is staking a claim like a tapeworm, eating someone else's food.
Maybe I should lighten up, and concede heritage as the role model thing, trying to find some vague, encouraging connection to somebody older or smarter or richer than you. But you have to know what the score is. Learn what you can from Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin, pin their faces on your vest pocket, but don't expect reciprocation.
At any rate, the champagne and parades and pride seem premature. There's gay marriage in a handful of places in the U.S. In the rest it's banned. In Moscow, queers get beaten every year at Gay Pride when they ignore the parade ban, march, face down violent brutes, and then get arrested while the thugs go scot-free.
Around New York, plenty of young dykes get baited so much the only question is why more don't erupt in violence against their harassers.
As a word, I'm not sure pride has a future. What have you done to be proud of lately? What have you ever done? A couple of decades after Stonewall "pride" smacks of complacence. We act as if the queer movement is a perpetual motion machine that chugs along with an occasional nudge and donations to the Human Rights Campaign, as if it's all been done.
Instead of Gay Pride, we need a day (or a week or year) of Gay Belligerence, Lesbian Audacity, Dyke Desire, Trans Aggression. Fury would be good, a boost for our community, good for our country, too, numbed first by Clinton's hospitality, then under Bush, by sheer despair. For me, anyway.
Lies and bombs. Habeus corpus was suspended, you know, prisoners tortured, and who cares? We have our dancing boys, all that beautiful gay energy that evaporates Monday morning like the dew.
Pride seems like a sin again.
802 words.
Marina wants me to, so almost every year, I drag myself out of bed with feet sore from the Dyke March, slather on some sunscreen, and take the train uptown to watch the Pride Parade.
These days, it's full of bar floats and dancing boys, condom throwers, church choirs, ethnic groups and politicians, like a cross-section of America.
We march sometimes with the Brazilians for the sake of their homegrown music. But the best part is watching the people watching the parade in the Village, Westchester lesbians with button-downs rubbing shoulders with Brooklyn dykes with wife beaters and dreds, a couple of fabulous L-word types, plus the big beefy boytoys and skinny nerds, all applauding P-FLAG and wishing their parents were there, too.
For a minute, I love them all, out for the day, and proud, whatever that is. I looked pride up in my computer's dictionary, and if you throw out the stuff about lions, what you have left are feelings about accomplishments and qualities.
In truth, being gay isn't an accomplishment for most of the people I know. We don't have any more choice about being queer than a needle on a compass has to point north. We may as well throw a parade for humans with opposable thumbs. Give me an award, I can hold a pencil.
It's why I like the label sexual orientation. With "identity" there's the idea you can buy false ones, just give the guy on the corner fifty bucks. You wanna be bi this year? Or do you prefer boyz? How bout knocking off a few years? I swear these'll slip by Homeland Security.
Women are my magnetic north and I've always been pulled towards them even when I was twelve and thought that girls were gross. Everybody but me could see where I was pointed. When I came out my sisters said, "Oh, we figured you were like that."
Guys in cars knew before me, too. I got bottles heaved out at me a couple of times. "Fucking dyke." It was written all over me -- like being white. I wake up every morning and without any effort, there I am, in the neighborhood of beige, no badges or uniform required, or any particular sentimentality.
I was born that way and my girlfriend a couple of shades darker which gets her called white in Cuba, and a person of color in New York. Go figure. There's no accomplishment in skin. Even turtles have it, and potatoes. Why pride?
The sponsors call themselves the Heritage of Pride, and if you bring history into it, I guess you could be glad simply that you've survived, that we all have. It hasn't been easy. But I think they mean something else with heritage.
I've never understood that exactly -- Kentuckians like me celebrating Abraham Lincoln living in the state for about ten minutes as if his greatness rubbed off somehow in the soil and we're better for it. That kind of stuff is staking a claim like a tapeworm, eating someone else's food.
Maybe I should lighten up, and concede heritage as the role model thing, trying to find some vague, encouraging connection to somebody older or smarter or richer than you. But you have to know what the score is. Learn what you can from Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin, pin their faces on your vest pocket, but don't expect reciprocation.
At any rate, the champagne and parades and pride seem premature. There's gay marriage in a handful of places in the U.S. In the rest it's banned. In Moscow, queers get beaten every year at Gay Pride when they ignore the parade ban, march, face down violent brutes, and then get arrested while the thugs go scot-free.
Around New York, plenty of young dykes get baited so much the only question is why more don't erupt in violence against their harassers.
As a word, I'm not sure pride has a future. What have you done to be proud of lately? What have you ever done? A couple of decades after Stonewall "pride" smacks of complacence. We act as if the queer movement is a perpetual motion machine that chugs along with an occasional nudge and donations to the Human Rights Campaign, as if it's all been done.
Instead of Gay Pride, we need a day (or a week or year) of Gay Belligerence, Lesbian Audacity, Dyke Desire, Trans Aggression. Fury would be good, a boost for our community, good for our country, too, numbed first by Clinton's hospitality, then under Bush, by sheer despair. For me, anyway.
Lies and bombs. Habeus corpus was suspended, you know, prisoners tortured, and who cares? We have our dancing boys, all that beautiful gay energy that evaporates Monday morning like the dew.
Pride seems like a sin again.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Lowering Our Sights, from Paris to Baghdad
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
If you need a queer role model, you can practically pull a name from the hat of Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. There's Oscar Wilde whose borrowed monument is covered in indelible pink kisses, and Gertrude Stein buried with Alice B. Toklas on the opposite side of her headstone. Colette's around somewhere, too, probably scribbling on the inside of her tomb.
Then there's the lesbian I visited Sunday -- Mary Fugate, the mostly anonymous teacher of high school French that my friend Amy's mom invoked when she came out. "You're just like your aunt."
Amy has a picture of her standing in front of a castle in south-west France, smiling directly at the camera with her then fashionable bob. Tante first visited Paris in the Twenties, and Amy used to imagine her hanging out with Nathalie Barney and Janet Flanner, though when she finally uncovered her great aunt's diary it just revealed an ordinary tourist taking in the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe.
She went back every year with her students, and sent the family postcards. For Amy, that image of an intelligent, self-sufficient woman was more important than sharing the same sexual orientation. When Amy turned away from her religious roots, and her mother said it again, "You're just like your aunt," it took some of the pressure off.
I like this story, the older woman paving the way for the young girl two generations after. It makes a difference, not being the first or the only. We need a path to follow, and why not that of an old maid aunt instead of some disastrous god or saint?
Those kids with the WWJD bracelets are setting their sights too high. Consider Bush, who in his search for role models decided to plump for God. If only he'd picked Babe Ruth, or Dizzy Dean, maybe he'd've stuck to his baseball team and heavy drinking, and left politics alone.
It hasn't turned out well for the rest of us, having a president embrace a monotheistic god that can't bear to share the sky with any lesser one.
Hence the preemptive, "unilateral" course in Iraq, and the butchery of democracy. Who needs it, anyway, you can almost hear him ask. All that talking, the faxes and emails and reports, the debates, and compromises, and numbers and facts when as a good Christian man, all you have to do really, is open your heart to God and Dick Cheney.
Almost all the messes we have now stem from that. It was just after Bush led the charge to Iraq that Israel took a self-justifying page from his book and preempted and unilateraled its way into a fresh Palestinian hell.
A then ambulatory Castro seized the American model and embarked on the biggest crackdown in decades, threw all twenty of the aging opposition into the country's gloriously revolutionary jails.
Likewise, in Turkey the so-called moderate Islamist parties keep their own opponents under wraps, put forward extremist candidates and try to ban pork production, while in Lebanon bombers are almost beginning to keep pace with those in the West Bank.
The current king of the unilateral, preemptive Bushian model is Vladamir Putin. After Bush sent his bombers to Baghdad, he abandoned the pretences of democracy in Russia, escalating attacks on the opposition at home, disappearing journalists, and maybe poisoning his enemies abroad. Now he's launching a new anti-US cold war complete with missile crises. All because of what Bush and his monotheistic god unleashed.
Ironically, the longer George W. Bush remains in power in the United States, the more prayer becomes the only option in the foreign policy department, whether you believe somebody is listening, or as Amy says, it's just a matter of brain chemistry. Get down on your knees and hope and pray for the best.
At the cemetery Sunday, rooks or crows, or whatever you call those large, black shrieking birds, flew from branch to branch. Black clouds and tunnels of sun hit the vast domed crematorium. With the tourists out searching for Jim Morrison's tomb down the cobble-stoned alleys, the place was almost peaceful, the Victorian crypts with little windows all in good repair, the leaves fat on the trees.
We took a walk after visiting her aunt's niche, and sat down on a bench across from Georges Bizet of Carmen fame though the "t" at the end was half scraped off.
Amy admitted she'd later found out her aunt was a tyrant in the classroom, and would terrorize the girls with too much makeup, scrubbing their over-rouged faces with Comet. "Instead of Nathalie Barney for an aunt, I got Carrie Nation."
It didn't change Amy's debt to her aunt, just made her think about what drained the joy from that adventurous, smiling face, and how hard it is to lead the way.
If you need a queer role model, you can practically pull a name from the hat of Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. There's Oscar Wilde whose borrowed monument is covered in indelible pink kisses, and Gertrude Stein buried with Alice B. Toklas on the opposite side of her headstone. Colette's around somewhere, too, probably scribbling on the inside of her tomb.
Then there's the lesbian I visited Sunday -- Mary Fugate, the mostly anonymous teacher of high school French that my friend Amy's mom invoked when she came out. "You're just like your aunt."
Amy has a picture of her standing in front of a castle in south-west France, smiling directly at the camera with her then fashionable bob. Tante first visited Paris in the Twenties, and Amy used to imagine her hanging out with Nathalie Barney and Janet Flanner, though when she finally uncovered her great aunt's diary it just revealed an ordinary tourist taking in the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe.
She went back every year with her students, and sent the family postcards. For Amy, that image of an intelligent, self-sufficient woman was more important than sharing the same sexual orientation. When Amy turned away from her religious roots, and her mother said it again, "You're just like your aunt," it took some of the pressure off.
I like this story, the older woman paving the way for the young girl two generations after. It makes a difference, not being the first or the only. We need a path to follow, and why not that of an old maid aunt instead of some disastrous god or saint?
Those kids with the WWJD bracelets are setting their sights too high. Consider Bush, who in his search for role models decided to plump for God. If only he'd picked Babe Ruth, or Dizzy Dean, maybe he'd've stuck to his baseball team and heavy drinking, and left politics alone.
It hasn't turned out well for the rest of us, having a president embrace a monotheistic god that can't bear to share the sky with any lesser one.
Hence the preemptive, "unilateral" course in Iraq, and the butchery of democracy. Who needs it, anyway, you can almost hear him ask. All that talking, the faxes and emails and reports, the debates, and compromises, and numbers and facts when as a good Christian man, all you have to do really, is open your heart to God and Dick Cheney.
Almost all the messes we have now stem from that. It was just after Bush led the charge to Iraq that Israel took a self-justifying page from his book and preempted and unilateraled its way into a fresh Palestinian hell.
A then ambulatory Castro seized the American model and embarked on the biggest crackdown in decades, threw all twenty of the aging opposition into the country's gloriously revolutionary jails.
Likewise, in Turkey the so-called moderate Islamist parties keep their own opponents under wraps, put forward extremist candidates and try to ban pork production, while in Lebanon bombers are almost beginning to keep pace with those in the West Bank.
The current king of the unilateral, preemptive Bushian model is Vladamir Putin. After Bush sent his bombers to Baghdad, he abandoned the pretences of democracy in Russia, escalating attacks on the opposition at home, disappearing journalists, and maybe poisoning his enemies abroad. Now he's launching a new anti-US cold war complete with missile crises. All because of what Bush and his monotheistic god unleashed.
Ironically, the longer George W. Bush remains in power in the United States, the more prayer becomes the only option in the foreign policy department, whether you believe somebody is listening, or as Amy says, it's just a matter of brain chemistry. Get down on your knees and hope and pray for the best.
At the cemetery Sunday, rooks or crows, or whatever you call those large, black shrieking birds, flew from branch to branch. Black clouds and tunnels of sun hit the vast domed crematorium. With the tourists out searching for Jim Morrison's tomb down the cobble-stoned alleys, the place was almost peaceful, the Victorian crypts with little windows all in good repair, the leaves fat on the trees.
We took a walk after visiting her aunt's niche, and sat down on a bench across from Georges Bizet of Carmen fame though the "t" at the end was half scraped off.
Amy admitted she'd later found out her aunt was a tyrant in the classroom, and would terrorize the girls with too much makeup, scrubbing their over-rouged faces with Comet. "Instead of Nathalie Barney for an aunt, I got Carrie Nation."
It didn't change Amy's debt to her aunt, just made her think about what drained the joy from that adventurous, smiling face, and how hard it is to lead the way.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Flying Blind in Paris
Kelly Jean Cogswell
803 words.
Last week, the French TV networks showed the new transgender mayor of Cambridge, England getting feted after winning her election. A couple of nights later, it was queers getting bashed at the Moscow Gay Pride.
France is literally in between. On the legal side, there's a pathetic civil union bill and no hope of better as long as the little Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the head of state. In society, most queers still operate on the "don't ask, don't tell" principle, which has unexpected implications since my gaydar has been haywire in Paris these last few months.
First, it was these two long-haired femmes in the subway with curvy waists and tight low-slung pants that were making out. Nice to see lesbians kissing in public, I thought, watching an old lady looking at them in disgust, until the pair got on the subway next to me and it turned out the shorter one with the flowing curls and soft little ass was actually a guy, then I gagged, too.
Last week, it was the dyke couple in my favorite grec frite place across the street. The two shorties with crew cuts and heavy metal tee shirts were feeding each other fries and sharing a gyro. One clearly had tits, but when I checked out the other more closely, he was concave where he should have been convex, and vice versa.
After I got over my disappointment, I wondered what straight French guy would want a girl with short hair and no makeup.
In Paris, lipstick is issued at birth to females, while males of all orientations are allowed to run the gender gamut from the testosterone-defined hulks to the Oscar Wildean, ruffle-wearing aesthetes who for all that pink, haven't left their macho entitlement at home.
If anything they're worse, dominating in mind games rather sheer bulk. It's hard not to look at the large, hard bodies of Serena Williams and Amelie Mauresmo this week at the French Open and wish they'd break these skinny little men in two.
American men stick out a mile here, with their thick arms and stiff ham-legged strides that make it seem like all the discs of their spines were fused together after kindergarten.
Even the American fags I saw last month at a wine fair have clearly spent way too much time at the gym, as if taxis hadn't been invented, and they expected to have to haul every crate home with their bare hands and then dig a cellar to keep it in. Do they have the same text inside, the same stories, these guys intent on changing the book cover?
Is it different when men and women transgress? When the TV featured the transgender Cambridge mayor, the journalists did a couple of interviews with men on the street who were asked how they felt about having a transgendered woman running the place, in fact, the first trannie mayor in all England.
It was clear they were looking for a couple of juicy insults, but even the tough, shaved head, footballer types said, "I think it's great. It shows Cambridge can still lead the way."
For them, crossing gender was a sign of progress -- despite what the mayor, Genny Baily, told the London Times, "People can take me as a role model if they want... But for transgender people, all we want is to disappear and become normal."
If Mayor Baily wanted to disappear, would she have run for office? Would she have chosen for her life partner another trannie woman making them doubly visible? You have to suspect a huge, unseemly "masculine" desire that she's forced to hide, now (s)he's a woman. What could it be, something on the national stage, even the PM spot?
More than the Williams sisters with their enormous shoulders, it's female ambition that creates real outrage these days. Fury comes from women as much as men, leaving only a hair's breadth between the rock and the hard place.
In France, that's where the former presidential candidate Segolene Royal is living again as she begins the battle to control the Socialist Party whose old bull elephants would rather trample the first new growths of political bamboo in years, than cede control to a woman.
Polls still show her the embodiment of the left in France, more than anyone else, but the old boys won't back her, as they didn't in the election, preferring to watch the rightist Sarkozy win, his two older sons shaking their long bleached blond hair at the cameras, his step-daughters smiling their lipsticked smiles which should not be dismissed.
Segolene smiles as brightly as any of them, but pairs her gender to an open, unsheathed ambition that will end by creating space for women, especially dykes who need that model of audacity and desire more than bare, naked lips.
803 words.
Last week, the French TV networks showed the new transgender mayor of Cambridge, England getting feted after winning her election. A couple of nights later, it was queers getting bashed at the Moscow Gay Pride.
France is literally in between. On the legal side, there's a pathetic civil union bill and no hope of better as long as the little Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the head of state. In society, most queers still operate on the "don't ask, don't tell" principle, which has unexpected implications since my gaydar has been haywire in Paris these last few months.
First, it was these two long-haired femmes in the subway with curvy waists and tight low-slung pants that were making out. Nice to see lesbians kissing in public, I thought, watching an old lady looking at them in disgust, until the pair got on the subway next to me and it turned out the shorter one with the flowing curls and soft little ass was actually a guy, then I gagged, too.
Last week, it was the dyke couple in my favorite grec frite place across the street. The two shorties with crew cuts and heavy metal tee shirts were feeding each other fries and sharing a gyro. One clearly had tits, but when I checked out the other more closely, he was concave where he should have been convex, and vice versa.
After I got over my disappointment, I wondered what straight French guy would want a girl with short hair and no makeup.
In Paris, lipstick is issued at birth to females, while males of all orientations are allowed to run the gender gamut from the testosterone-defined hulks to the Oscar Wildean, ruffle-wearing aesthetes who for all that pink, haven't left their macho entitlement at home.
If anything they're worse, dominating in mind games rather sheer bulk. It's hard not to look at the large, hard bodies of Serena Williams and Amelie Mauresmo this week at the French Open and wish they'd break these skinny little men in two.
American men stick out a mile here, with their thick arms and stiff ham-legged strides that make it seem like all the discs of their spines were fused together after kindergarten.
Even the American fags I saw last month at a wine fair have clearly spent way too much time at the gym, as if taxis hadn't been invented, and they expected to have to haul every crate home with their bare hands and then dig a cellar to keep it in. Do they have the same text inside, the same stories, these guys intent on changing the book cover?
Is it different when men and women transgress? When the TV featured the transgender Cambridge mayor, the journalists did a couple of interviews with men on the street who were asked how they felt about having a transgendered woman running the place, in fact, the first trannie mayor in all England.
It was clear they were looking for a couple of juicy insults, but even the tough, shaved head, footballer types said, "I think it's great. It shows Cambridge can still lead the way."
For them, crossing gender was a sign of progress -- despite what the mayor, Genny Baily, told the London Times, "People can take me as a role model if they want... But for transgender people, all we want is to disappear and become normal."
If Mayor Baily wanted to disappear, would she have run for office? Would she have chosen for her life partner another trannie woman making them doubly visible? You have to suspect a huge, unseemly "masculine" desire that she's forced to hide, now (s)he's a woman. What could it be, something on the national stage, even the PM spot?
More than the Williams sisters with their enormous shoulders, it's female ambition that creates real outrage these days. Fury comes from women as much as men, leaving only a hair's breadth between the rock and the hard place.
In France, that's where the former presidential candidate Segolene Royal is living again as she begins the battle to control the Socialist Party whose old bull elephants would rather trample the first new growths of political bamboo in years, than cede control to a woman.
Polls still show her the embodiment of the left in France, more than anyone else, but the old boys won't back her, as they didn't in the election, preferring to watch the rightist Sarkozy win, his two older sons shaking their long bleached blond hair at the cameras, his step-daughters smiling their lipsticked smiles which should not be dismissed.
Segolene smiles as brightly as any of them, but pairs her gender to an open, unsheathed ambition that will end by creating space for women, especially dykes who need that model of audacity and desire more than bare, naked lips.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Evolution: Putting God in His Place
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
803 words.
This weekend, the twenty-seven million dollar extravaganza of a Creation Museum opens up in Northern Kentucky. It was supposed to give God a boost, but by all accounts it's more like an expensive raspberry.
Kids will snicker at the exhibit showing what happens to young Christians when they doubt the infallible Word of God. Girls apparently end up at Planned Parenthood, and boys in their bedrooms with a girlie mag in one hand, and their dicks in the other.
On the science end, the museum has a model ark penning dinosaurs in with humans even though most of the rest of the world agrees Tyrannosaurus Rex died out long before the first raindrops fell on Noah's head.
I don't actually have a problem with that. I doubt evolution myself when Kansas creationist Kenneth R. Willard is on the verge of being elected President of the National Association of State Boards of Education.
Jerry Falwell may be dead now, but it seems like we keep having all the same fights, and it mostly boils down to sex, namely that no one, especially queers, should be having any.
The thing I really resent is that it's an Australian creationist, Ken Ham, behind the Kentucky museum.
With the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary housed there in my hometown of Louisville, and snake-handlers in the hills, don't we have plenty of our own homegrown fundamentalists to hatch hare-brained creationist exhibits?
Growing up, I swallowed it all, how God created the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh after declaring it all good. The only other story I heard more was the G-rated version of Noah and the Ark, maybe because they both had animals and the furry little creatures are supposed to lodge in the minds of children, or adults think so, anyway.
I'm pretty sure we'd have remembered as well if they'd told us how later on one of Noah's wives, or was it daughter, got him drunk so he'd screw her there in some cave and beget a lot of children to deal with post-flood depopulation and all. But again, screw sex.
As a kid, I used to close my eyes and try to imagine that vast, black, empty space that was all the world before the world was called into being by God whom I thought of as a kind of flashy magician.
He pulled the heavens and earth and animals and plants out of his hat, and then last of all, Adam and Eve, who could be considered the first taxonomists, forced to name everything in a kind of sub-contracting act of creation.
God getting all that done in six long days seemed just about right when each excruciating second of naptime at the Baptist Church kindergarten was like an eternity.
I couldn't tell time yet, and without those creaking hands dividing life into minutes and hours and days I was pretty sure you could create a whole universe between the snack and blankets and laying still, and the moment the teacher said, "You can get up now."
Even in Middle School, when I was studying that heretical nonsense of earth science and biology, it never crossed my mind to doubt the reality of the story. The two worlds coexisted, like water and air.
Not everything has to be reconciled. Like why Christians cling to that Old Testament creation story when there's another one found in the Jesus-filled New Testament. "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God."
It is that image that still sticks with me. I don't even think of it as metaphor, but a kind of literal description of creation.
There are the novels that get written over decades, and others that spring forth almost full grown like children from the head of Zeus. Why not animals from the hand of God, if you believe in one? Why not the world in six days? I don't scorn the literal-minded believer. After all, anything is possible with God. It's the definition of a supreme being.
The problem with the Creation Museum, science aside, is embedded in its title. It reduces the power of the God they're trying to promote to a couple of hi-tech tricks you can gape at, and then go buy a tee shirt and postcards afterwards. There's a short shrift for mystery, glory, awe, all the things I remember from childhood, or even from the struggle to fill paper with words.
The reverse is missing, too. I remember the old days, when there was the very real terror of hell, and I shivered in my bed at the thought of my soul rotting in sin.
Let's call it the Devolution Museum, reducing Creation to an Ark, Sin to the banality of abortion, or getting discovered whacking off.
803 words.
This weekend, the twenty-seven million dollar extravaganza of a Creation Museum opens up in Northern Kentucky. It was supposed to give God a boost, but by all accounts it's more like an expensive raspberry.
Kids will snicker at the exhibit showing what happens to young Christians when they doubt the infallible Word of God. Girls apparently end up at Planned Parenthood, and boys in their bedrooms with a girlie mag in one hand, and their dicks in the other.
On the science end, the museum has a model ark penning dinosaurs in with humans even though most of the rest of the world agrees Tyrannosaurus Rex died out long before the first raindrops fell on Noah's head.
I don't actually have a problem with that. I doubt evolution myself when Kansas creationist Kenneth R. Willard is on the verge of being elected President of the National Association of State Boards of Education.
Jerry Falwell may be dead now, but it seems like we keep having all the same fights, and it mostly boils down to sex, namely that no one, especially queers, should be having any.
The thing I really resent is that it's an Australian creationist, Ken Ham, behind the Kentucky museum.
With the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary housed there in my hometown of Louisville, and snake-handlers in the hills, don't we have plenty of our own homegrown fundamentalists to hatch hare-brained creationist exhibits?
Growing up, I swallowed it all, how God created the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh after declaring it all good. The only other story I heard more was the G-rated version of Noah and the Ark, maybe because they both had animals and the furry little creatures are supposed to lodge in the minds of children, or adults think so, anyway.
I'm pretty sure we'd have remembered as well if they'd told us how later on one of Noah's wives, or was it daughter, got him drunk so he'd screw her there in some cave and beget a lot of children to deal with post-flood depopulation and all. But again, screw sex.
As a kid, I used to close my eyes and try to imagine that vast, black, empty space that was all the world before the world was called into being by God whom I thought of as a kind of flashy magician.
He pulled the heavens and earth and animals and plants out of his hat, and then last of all, Adam and Eve, who could be considered the first taxonomists, forced to name everything in a kind of sub-contracting act of creation.
God getting all that done in six long days seemed just about right when each excruciating second of naptime at the Baptist Church kindergarten was like an eternity.
I couldn't tell time yet, and without those creaking hands dividing life into minutes and hours and days I was pretty sure you could create a whole universe between the snack and blankets and laying still, and the moment the teacher said, "You can get up now."
Even in Middle School, when I was studying that heretical nonsense of earth science and biology, it never crossed my mind to doubt the reality of the story. The two worlds coexisted, like water and air.
Not everything has to be reconciled. Like why Christians cling to that Old Testament creation story when there's another one found in the Jesus-filled New Testament. "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God."
It is that image that still sticks with me. I don't even think of it as metaphor, but a kind of literal description of creation.
There are the novels that get written over decades, and others that spring forth almost full grown like children from the head of Zeus. Why not animals from the hand of God, if you believe in one? Why not the world in six days? I don't scorn the literal-minded believer. After all, anything is possible with God. It's the definition of a supreme being.
The problem with the Creation Museum, science aside, is embedded in its title. It reduces the power of the God they're trying to promote to a couple of hi-tech tricks you can gape at, and then go buy a tee shirt and postcards afterwards. There's a short shrift for mystery, glory, awe, all the things I remember from childhood, or even from the struggle to fill paper with words.
The reverse is missing, too. I remember the old days, when there was the very real terror of hell, and I shivered in my bed at the thought of my soul rotting in sin.
Let's call it the Devolution Museum, reducing Creation to an Ark, Sin to the banality of abortion, or getting discovered whacking off.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Against Families
Kelly Jean Cogswell
800 words
If I could, I'd put a match to the institution of family and burn it down, then I'd sift the ashes for any large chunks, pour gasoline on them, and light the heap again until the whole thing blew away on the wind.
Do I hear an, "Amen, Sister"? Or did you send your mother a Mother's Day card, perhaps take her out to lunch last Sunday at some cheesy restaurant where they handed all the ladies a rose some Chilean woman picked, her skin rotting with insecticides, while someone else plucked off all the thorns?
The day before Mother's Day, a million and a half mostly Catholic people turned up in Rome for a "Family Day" rally. They smiled and cooed for the cameras, wiping the snotty noses of their children and complaining mildly, of course, this being a happy day, about homosexuals parading around like they were normal and persuading those Italian legislators to give them civil unions. Why, the Holy Father can hear the pillars of civilization crumbling all around Him.
If only it were that easy. Hell, I'd get married myself and bury them all in the dust of Saint Paul's. As it is, all those breeders are busy propping the institution up. And I include queers there, too, as the caryatid on the right, make no mistake.
Maybe I just don't know what families are. Watching the rally on TV, I didn't recognize any among the smiling greeting card faces. I didn't see one knife come out of the sheath, one father's noose get pulled around the tender throat of a boy, or a girl push a blade into her mother's flesh, and as the double-edge sword you hear so much about, feel it emerge into her own wounded heart.
There are other ways to have families, I guess. We queers like to talk about how we make our own, a question of choice and love, rather than blood. This is my family around me, we say at Thanksgiving when we're avoiding a trip back home to the genetic relations. Once, when I complained about my mother, someone said, "We're your family now," and gave me a hug. I'd only known her a few weeks. It creeped me out.
What happened to the word "friend"? I'm sorry it counts for so little. Even I misuse the word "family," though with a modifying "like." "She's like a sister," I say of a dyke friend, when we share an easy kind of familiarity and some affection behind it.
In the queer community, family can also mean people with shared history. There's that woman you played softball with for years, and on the strength of that lend her twenty when you see her in a coffee shop. The word works, too, with the ex of your current girlfriend who fills a big gap in the timeline before you, and can tell the kind of embarrassing stories about your true love that only family can. Remember that haircut? Then there's an activist you got arrested with a couple of times, before you started having political fights. She's family, too, even if you cross the street to avoid her, just like a real relation.
But, in the press when you read the words gay families, they don't mean that vast interlocking mix of personal and community history. It's only the two dykes with their kids. Or two fags. That nuclear thing that strangles us with an intimacy that was never quite intended. God, all the expectations we have for each other. The lines that get drawn like national borders between us and them. Inside are all the roles we haven't escaped.
Families are something out of context, like states, with their visas and quick deportations.
Last week, I got an email telling me my own congressman, Jerrold Nadler, along with Senator Patrick Leahy was reintroducing the Uniting American Families Act that would help queer bi-national couples. I was supposed to send letter of support, because, as Immigration Equality Director Rachel B. Tiven, says, "Dividing loving families, simply because they are gay or lesbian, is un-American..."
I support queer equality in everything, even our use of the word family, but I wish we wouldn't. We haven't changed the meaning enough. Whenever I hear it, my throat closes like there's a hand around it. Add American to the phrase, wave a few flags, kiss a baby, and the saccharine, sanctimonious tinge has me puking in the street. What word will we take next? Values? American family values? I'm sure it's been done.
Instead of more rights for more families, maybe we should give them all less, loosen their stranglehold on everything, tax rights, property, immigration, children, love. We should liberate that fierce affection that persists in spite of everything, that heals.
800 words
If I could, I'd put a match to the institution of family and burn it down, then I'd sift the ashes for any large chunks, pour gasoline on them, and light the heap again until the whole thing blew away on the wind.
Do I hear an, "Amen, Sister"? Or did you send your mother a Mother's Day card, perhaps take her out to lunch last Sunday at some cheesy restaurant where they handed all the ladies a rose some Chilean woman picked, her skin rotting with insecticides, while someone else plucked off all the thorns?
The day before Mother's Day, a million and a half mostly Catholic people turned up in Rome for a "Family Day" rally. They smiled and cooed for the cameras, wiping the snotty noses of their children and complaining mildly, of course, this being a happy day, about homosexuals parading around like they were normal and persuading those Italian legislators to give them civil unions. Why, the Holy Father can hear the pillars of civilization crumbling all around Him.
If only it were that easy. Hell, I'd get married myself and bury them all in the dust of Saint Paul's. As it is, all those breeders are busy propping the institution up. And I include queers there, too, as the caryatid on the right, make no mistake.
Maybe I just don't know what families are. Watching the rally on TV, I didn't recognize any among the smiling greeting card faces. I didn't see one knife come out of the sheath, one father's noose get pulled around the tender throat of a boy, or a girl push a blade into her mother's flesh, and as the double-edge sword you hear so much about, feel it emerge into her own wounded heart.
There are other ways to have families, I guess. We queers like to talk about how we make our own, a question of choice and love, rather than blood. This is my family around me, we say at Thanksgiving when we're avoiding a trip back home to the genetic relations. Once, when I complained about my mother, someone said, "We're your family now," and gave me a hug. I'd only known her a few weeks. It creeped me out.
What happened to the word "friend"? I'm sorry it counts for so little. Even I misuse the word "family," though with a modifying "like." "She's like a sister," I say of a dyke friend, when we share an easy kind of familiarity and some affection behind it.
In the queer community, family can also mean people with shared history. There's that woman you played softball with for years, and on the strength of that lend her twenty when you see her in a coffee shop. The word works, too, with the ex of your current girlfriend who fills a big gap in the timeline before you, and can tell the kind of embarrassing stories about your true love that only family can. Remember that haircut? Then there's an activist you got arrested with a couple of times, before you started having political fights. She's family, too, even if you cross the street to avoid her, just like a real relation.
But, in the press when you read the words gay families, they don't mean that vast interlocking mix of personal and community history. It's only the two dykes with their kids. Or two fags. That nuclear thing that strangles us with an intimacy that was never quite intended. God, all the expectations we have for each other. The lines that get drawn like national borders between us and them. Inside are all the roles we haven't escaped.
Families are something out of context, like states, with their visas and quick deportations.
Last week, I got an email telling me my own congressman, Jerrold Nadler, along with Senator Patrick Leahy was reintroducing the Uniting American Families Act that would help queer bi-national couples. I was supposed to send letter of support, because, as Immigration Equality Director Rachel B. Tiven, says, "Dividing loving families, simply because they are gay or lesbian, is un-American..."
I support queer equality in everything, even our use of the word family, but I wish we wouldn't. We haven't changed the meaning enough. Whenever I hear it, my throat closes like there's a hand around it. Add American to the phrase, wave a few flags, kiss a baby, and the saccharine, sanctimonious tinge has me puking in the street. What word will we take next? Values? American family values? I'm sure it's been done.
Instead of more rights for more families, maybe we should give them all less, loosen their stranglehold on everything, tax rights, property, immigration, children, love. We should liberate that fierce affection that persists in spite of everything, that heals.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Election Night Tears in France
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
802 words.
A few hours after rightist candidate Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidential election here in France last Sunday, I got tear-gassed at the Bastille.
I was on my way to catch the metro, but this fog rose around me like a dream, the thin column with the gold figure on top disappearing in smoke, and the cops moving around beside it.
There were anti-Sarkozy shouts, the sound of glass breaking, then one canister hit almost at my feet and I was blinded, stumbling around with the other stumbling figures.
I'd open my eyes for a split second, run half a block with my eyes closed and arms outstretched, then force them open briefly again, and run more until I was far enough away to crouch and weep the gas out of my eyes.
Politics is like that, I think, a lot of stumbling forward with a few quick moments of excruciating clarity.
And after Sunday night you can see what's going to happen here in France, the same way any idiot could predict how Bush's War on Terror would destroy civil liberties at home, and his war in Iraq enflame the Middle East.
Here, Sarkozy's ham-handed economic programs will rip apart the social fabric. Like Bush, he is less a social conservative than radical reformist. In his victory speech, he vowed to "rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect and merit."
In practice, he's going to hack away at job protection and health care to improve the economy, while trying to squelch dissent and deport illegal immigrants. Deep racial rifts will widen. And struggling working class people and small farmers will be pitted against the middle and upper classes as globalization hits home.
At a big pre-election rally a few weeks ago, he even promised to erase May '68, a phenomenon that began as student strikes for education reform and ended in a groundbreaking liberation movement that brought down the de Gaulle government and exploded an asphyxiating society. Ten million workers went on strike, and labor also saw huge gains.
While May '68 did leave behind mammoth and expensive social programs, and inflexible labor laws, what Sarkozy hates more than the economic legacy, is that of social justice and freedom.
Queers can forget about gay marriage. Despite his gestures towards affirmative action, people of color won't see a real fight against racism as long as what he's preaching is merit. And the immigrants, well...
In a preview of his new France, we've already seen sting operations at grade schools in which cops threaten to deport small children alone unless the whole family turn up ready to go.
Anybody not white is constantly in danger of being held if they don't have proper ID. One related episode of racial profiling set off a riot at the Gare du Nord. Ten thousand have already been deported, many of whom have lived their whole lives in France.
Sarkozy continually touts his background as the son of a Hungarian immigrant, but besides quick deportations, he has actually gone so far as to propose a Minister of Immigration and National Identity, to enforce assimilation.
In the weeks prior to the first round of the election, his campaign courted the extreme right supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen. While maintaining a carefully deniable distance for the candidate, Sarkozy's right-hand man suggested that members of Le Pen's anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-queer National Front party might even be welcome in the Sarko government.
Sarkozy's promise to erase a whole era has an unsavory taste when you put it together with stings at grade schools and mass deportations. Most schools in Paris have a plaque in front commemorating the five or six or twenty Jewish kids sent to the camps.
If it hadn't been for Segolene's speech, I'd be weeping and writhing in pain, or maybe buying a ticket back home. After each of the two Bush elections, the opposition pretty much disappeared. Like Gore. Like Kerry.
The difference here, though, when I pry my eyes open, is Segolene Royal, who is refusing to retreat quietly. As a candidate, she persevered despite lackluster support of her decrepit Socialist Party.
Why should she disappear from politics now because she can't be president? She cares about the country. The key to her campaign was grassroots organizing, and internet activism, not the faltering party machine that never quite gave her its full support. Like the number of her supporters, you could see her grow with every stage of her campaign.
Sunday night, when she gave her final speech to an enormous cheering crowd, saying that the election wasn't an ending but a beginning, you actually believed her.
Like her, her supporters have promised to stick around. Already the following morning, I got emails echoing the words of her final speech, "It's not over." That's enough for hope.
802 words.
A few hours after rightist candidate Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidential election here in France last Sunday, I got tear-gassed at the Bastille.
I was on my way to catch the metro, but this fog rose around me like a dream, the thin column with the gold figure on top disappearing in smoke, and the cops moving around beside it.
There were anti-Sarkozy shouts, the sound of glass breaking, then one canister hit almost at my feet and I was blinded, stumbling around with the other stumbling figures.
I'd open my eyes for a split second, run half a block with my eyes closed and arms outstretched, then force them open briefly again, and run more until I was far enough away to crouch and weep the gas out of my eyes.
Politics is like that, I think, a lot of stumbling forward with a few quick moments of excruciating clarity.
And after Sunday night you can see what's going to happen here in France, the same way any idiot could predict how Bush's War on Terror would destroy civil liberties at home, and his war in Iraq enflame the Middle East.
Here, Sarkozy's ham-handed economic programs will rip apart the social fabric. Like Bush, he is less a social conservative than radical reformist. In his victory speech, he vowed to "rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect and merit."
In practice, he's going to hack away at job protection and health care to improve the economy, while trying to squelch dissent and deport illegal immigrants. Deep racial rifts will widen. And struggling working class people and small farmers will be pitted against the middle and upper classes as globalization hits home.
At a big pre-election rally a few weeks ago, he even promised to erase May '68, a phenomenon that began as student strikes for education reform and ended in a groundbreaking liberation movement that brought down the de Gaulle government and exploded an asphyxiating society. Ten million workers went on strike, and labor also saw huge gains.
While May '68 did leave behind mammoth and expensive social programs, and inflexible labor laws, what Sarkozy hates more than the economic legacy, is that of social justice and freedom.
Queers can forget about gay marriage. Despite his gestures towards affirmative action, people of color won't see a real fight against racism as long as what he's preaching is merit. And the immigrants, well...
In a preview of his new France, we've already seen sting operations at grade schools in which cops threaten to deport small children alone unless the whole family turn up ready to go.
Anybody not white is constantly in danger of being held if they don't have proper ID. One related episode of racial profiling set off a riot at the Gare du Nord. Ten thousand have already been deported, many of whom have lived their whole lives in France.
Sarkozy continually touts his background as the son of a Hungarian immigrant, but besides quick deportations, he has actually gone so far as to propose a Minister of Immigration and National Identity, to enforce assimilation.
In the weeks prior to the first round of the election, his campaign courted the extreme right supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen. While maintaining a carefully deniable distance for the candidate, Sarkozy's right-hand man suggested that members of Le Pen's anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-queer National Front party might even be welcome in the Sarko government.
Sarkozy's promise to erase a whole era has an unsavory taste when you put it together with stings at grade schools and mass deportations. Most schools in Paris have a plaque in front commemorating the five or six or twenty Jewish kids sent to the camps.
If it hadn't been for Segolene's speech, I'd be weeping and writhing in pain, or maybe buying a ticket back home. After each of the two Bush elections, the opposition pretty much disappeared. Like Gore. Like Kerry.
The difference here, though, when I pry my eyes open, is Segolene Royal, who is refusing to retreat quietly. As a candidate, she persevered despite lackluster support of her decrepit Socialist Party.
Why should she disappear from politics now because she can't be president? She cares about the country. The key to her campaign was grassroots organizing, and internet activism, not the faltering party machine that never quite gave her its full support. Like the number of her supporters, you could see her grow with every stage of her campaign.
Sunday night, when she gave her final speech to an enormous cheering crowd, saying that the election wasn't an ending but a beginning, you actually believed her.
Like her, her supporters have promised to stick around. Already the following morning, I got emails echoing the words of her final speech, "It's not over." That's enough for hope.
Monday, April 30, 2007
General Incompetence: Reclaiming the Battlefield
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
811 words.
Terrorism isn't something I worry much about any more. When I take a plane, I pop a Xanax. If I die, I die. Crossing bridges I no longer try to hold my breathe the whole time like I did after 9/11 in the grade school superstition that it would keep me safe, and when I get on a train, I check my seat for coffee spills, not suspicious packages.
It's somebody else's job to worry about all that. Or it should be. Besides the moral issues involved in the fiasco of the Iraq War, daily revelations about the leaders of our armed forces and intelligence services pretty much indicate in terms of sheer effectiveness we've got chimps at the helm, or John Cage maybe, determining policy with throws of the I Ching.
I'm not exactly a hawk, but if we're going to have an army, or secret services, they should work. I have to agree with the Senator from New York, when she said, in the recent Democratic debate, "You know, we haven't secured our borders, our ports, our mass-transit systems. You can go across this country and see so much that has not been done."
Worse, what is being done is usually racist, undemocratic, and in tactical terms, garden variety stupid.
Take my flight back to New York this week. When they were handing out the immigration cards on the plane, I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me.
The whole trip we'd been terribly discrete with each other. What could be worse than a chatty seatmate for 8 and a half hours? Still, he seemed nice.
He spoke French and had a little accent in English that reminded me of this Colombian fag I know. I'd peeked over his shoulder every now and then and looked at what he was reading. It was all about renal transplantation and organ rejection in sensitive immunological systems.
It turned out he was a medical doctor in the last stage of his training. He was from the Middle East, but working in the Mid-West. He had a four-hour layover in New York. When I made sounds of commiseration, he said the delay was on purpose so he wouldn't miss his next flight.
"I'm always picked during their random searches. It's funny." He laughed a little, and said it again, "I'm always picked in random searches." He smiled faintly at how "always" and "random" could occur in the same sentence. "It's funny." So now he sticks in a few extra hours between changes for his pals at Homeland Security.
I could see why they might find him threatening, that striped blue shirt, those slacks that strained a little at the waist, his menacing giggle. Clearly, all that transplant stuff was code.
Everything is, after all. The list I compiled during the flight of things I had to do in the next three days from arguing about bills with the clinic to collecting for an article I'd done for a glossy mag was an SOS of a disgruntled American. I don't need a detonator to explode.
Poor guy. By now, all the aspiring terrorists have names like John Smythe and carefully coiffed blonde hair. The only thing my man does is think about kidneys night and day. When we landed, he called his mom to let her know he was safe. Or maybe that was code for I'll be taking out New York as soon as I get past those losers in customs.
What we should do is detain the generals and politicians that have bungled things so badly since 9/11 that they've created more terrorists than ever.
Last Saturday half the newspapers in the country gave front page space to, "A failure in generalship," an article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling first published in the Armed Forces Journal.
An army lifer and history wonk, Yingling ripped a new one for the armed services, and Congress, too, for neglecting their duties to prepare for war, and advise the civilian government of the realities pursuing it.
He takes it seriously, that little lieutenant colonel, going after the generals with quotes from every military theorist from Frederick the Great to Augustine and Andrew Krepinevich. I imagine he won't get his extra brass unless somebody wants to show how reformist they are and use a promotion for him as a shortcut.
What he hated the most was silence, generals that knew we were following the wrong course but didn't have the balls to go public with their concerns.
It's only ninety percent their fault. The rightwing in this country marches to whatever tune the president plays, and the left, such as it is, is far too pure to deeply consider issues of national security, much less create a safety net for military voices of dissent.
Leaving the battlefield to Republicans, we deserve what we get.
811 words.
Terrorism isn't something I worry much about any more. When I take a plane, I pop a Xanax. If I die, I die. Crossing bridges I no longer try to hold my breathe the whole time like I did after 9/11 in the grade school superstition that it would keep me safe, and when I get on a train, I check my seat for coffee spills, not suspicious packages.
It's somebody else's job to worry about all that. Or it should be. Besides the moral issues involved in the fiasco of the Iraq War, daily revelations about the leaders of our armed forces and intelligence services pretty much indicate in terms of sheer effectiveness we've got chimps at the helm, or John Cage maybe, determining policy with throws of the I Ching.
I'm not exactly a hawk, but if we're going to have an army, or secret services, they should work. I have to agree with the Senator from New York, when she said, in the recent Democratic debate, "You know, we haven't secured our borders, our ports, our mass-transit systems. You can go across this country and see so much that has not been done."
Worse, what is being done is usually racist, undemocratic, and in tactical terms, garden variety stupid.
Take my flight back to New York this week. When they were handing out the immigration cards on the plane, I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me.
The whole trip we'd been terribly discrete with each other. What could be worse than a chatty seatmate for 8 and a half hours? Still, he seemed nice.
He spoke French and had a little accent in English that reminded me of this Colombian fag I know. I'd peeked over his shoulder every now and then and looked at what he was reading. It was all about renal transplantation and organ rejection in sensitive immunological systems.
It turned out he was a medical doctor in the last stage of his training. He was from the Middle East, but working in the Mid-West. He had a four-hour layover in New York. When I made sounds of commiseration, he said the delay was on purpose so he wouldn't miss his next flight.
"I'm always picked during their random searches. It's funny." He laughed a little, and said it again, "I'm always picked in random searches." He smiled faintly at how "always" and "random" could occur in the same sentence. "It's funny." So now he sticks in a few extra hours between changes for his pals at Homeland Security.
I could see why they might find him threatening, that striped blue shirt, those slacks that strained a little at the waist, his menacing giggle. Clearly, all that transplant stuff was code.
Everything is, after all. The list I compiled during the flight of things I had to do in the next three days from arguing about bills with the clinic to collecting for an article I'd done for a glossy mag was an SOS of a disgruntled American. I don't need a detonator to explode.
Poor guy. By now, all the aspiring terrorists have names like John Smythe and carefully coiffed blonde hair. The only thing my man does is think about kidneys night and day. When we landed, he called his mom to let her know he was safe. Or maybe that was code for I'll be taking out New York as soon as I get past those losers in customs.
What we should do is detain the generals and politicians that have bungled things so badly since 9/11 that they've created more terrorists than ever.
Last Saturday half the newspapers in the country gave front page space to, "A failure in generalship," an article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling first published in the Armed Forces Journal.
An army lifer and history wonk, Yingling ripped a new one for the armed services, and Congress, too, for neglecting their duties to prepare for war, and advise the civilian government of the realities pursuing it.
He takes it seriously, that little lieutenant colonel, going after the generals with quotes from every military theorist from Frederick the Great to Augustine and Andrew Krepinevich. I imagine he won't get his extra brass unless somebody wants to show how reformist they are and use a promotion for him as a shortcut.
What he hated the most was silence, generals that knew we were following the wrong course but didn't have the balls to go public with their concerns.
It's only ninety percent their fault. The rightwing in this country marches to whatever tune the president plays, and the left, such as it is, is far too pure to deeply consider issues of national security, much less create a safety net for military voices of dissent.
Leaving the battlefield to Republicans, we deserve what we get.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Keeping Women Barefoot and Pregnant
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
807 words
So abortion's under attack, big deal. What does that have to do with a big dyke like me? I'm not withdrawing from a sperm bank, so an inconvenient fetus would have to mean rape, maybe Zeus himself coming down as a big swan and putting it to me. You figure the odds. Hell. Why don't straight chicks get out there and take care of themselves?
The women's movement never exactly embraced lesbians, even though once I grew tits back home in Kentucky, guys started to play grabass in the hallways at school. I was followed in the streets, whistled at, and cornered at parties like them.
With any display of emotion I'm still dismissed as PMS or temperamental or female. My IQ shrinks a dozen points along with pants pockets in women's departments. Still, sleep with other girls and "women" would just as soon consider you a third sex. If only.
Despite those women, despite a million to one chance of pregnancy, this Supreme Court ruling concerns me. Restrict abortion, a woman's fundamental right to control what goes on under her own skin, and she's lost everything.
I remember my grandmother telling me about my grandfather's father's three wives. When the first one popped a bunch of kids, and died, he married another to take care of the brats and get him more. The second died, too, and after the third, the neighbors, I think, put a stop to him.
She told me the story with horror, confessing that after something went wrong with her fourth delivery and they did a hysterectomy, she practically fell on her knees to thank God.
This was a religious woman, a Southern Baptist, who went on to whisper that she even supported abortion. "Men don't know what it's like," she said. Your body out of control, the danger, the responsibility after.
I didn't know myself, but I knew what it was like to walk through the halls at high school, unwelcome hands on my body, eyes on me if I walked down the street, endless comments. I didn't own myself. I didn't for years, until I got to New York and saw how even the most mild-mannered, pin-curled secretary would kick your ass if you took her seat on the subway.
That changed my life, seeing other ways to be a woman, though it helped even more when I met other dykes.
Men haven't learned much since my grandmother's day. In the ruling last week, the men of the Supreme Court asserted women have neither the right, nor the brains to choose what the abortion anti-choice activists have called "partial birth" in an effective advertising gambit.
Justice Kennedy actually wrote that banning the procedure was good because it would protect us females from a procedure we might not really understand and would almost certainly regret after.
What, after all, is more sacred than that little spark of unrealized life?
The traditional feminist response is -- the life of the mother and the quality of life of the rest of the family. They have more fodder than ever for the argument.
A couple of days after the ruling, the New York Times reported that infant mortality is going up in the American South, skyrocketing to almost double the national average among the poor black families of Mississippi.
Some doctors blame the national problems of obesity. Others, Bush's Medicaid and Welfare cuts, poverty, and race. Infant deaths among African Americans in Mississippi rose from 14.2 per thousand in 2004 to 17 per thousand births in 2005, while those among whites rose from 6.1 to 6.6 per thousand.
Oleta Fitzgerald, southern regional director for the Children's Defense Fund, told the Times, "When you see drops in the welfare rolls, when you see drops in Medicaid and children's insurance, you see a recipe for disaster. Somebody's not eating, somebody's not going to the doctor and unborn children suffer."
Bush certainly won't worry about it. The main thing is that babies get here on earth, if only for a few minutes. Lucky, lucky kids to be able to rot in the cold, hard ground instead of in the landfill as medical waste. Send a dove straight up to Jesus and hire a brass band for the funeral.
It's hard to believe this court ruling, this rise in infant mortality is happening at the same time as we get our first female speaker of the House, first woman as serious candidate for President.
I don't think our culture's changed so much as female politicians have figured out how to advance in a system which despises them as much as ever. More maybe. Like queers, the more visible they are, the bigger the backlash.
And if the rights of women are eroded, (which by the way includes dykes), there will be ripples in gay rights, all our bodies battlegrounds.
807 words
So abortion's under attack, big deal. What does that have to do with a big dyke like me? I'm not withdrawing from a sperm bank, so an inconvenient fetus would have to mean rape, maybe Zeus himself coming down as a big swan and putting it to me. You figure the odds. Hell. Why don't straight chicks get out there and take care of themselves?
The women's movement never exactly embraced lesbians, even though once I grew tits back home in Kentucky, guys started to play grabass in the hallways at school. I was followed in the streets, whistled at, and cornered at parties like them.
With any display of emotion I'm still dismissed as PMS or temperamental or female. My IQ shrinks a dozen points along with pants pockets in women's departments. Still, sleep with other girls and "women" would just as soon consider you a third sex. If only.
Despite those women, despite a million to one chance of pregnancy, this Supreme Court ruling concerns me. Restrict abortion, a woman's fundamental right to control what goes on under her own skin, and she's lost everything.
I remember my grandmother telling me about my grandfather's father's three wives. When the first one popped a bunch of kids, and died, he married another to take care of the brats and get him more. The second died, too, and after the third, the neighbors, I think, put a stop to him.
She told me the story with horror, confessing that after something went wrong with her fourth delivery and they did a hysterectomy, she practically fell on her knees to thank God.
This was a religious woman, a Southern Baptist, who went on to whisper that she even supported abortion. "Men don't know what it's like," she said. Your body out of control, the danger, the responsibility after.
I didn't know myself, but I knew what it was like to walk through the halls at high school, unwelcome hands on my body, eyes on me if I walked down the street, endless comments. I didn't own myself. I didn't for years, until I got to New York and saw how even the most mild-mannered, pin-curled secretary would kick your ass if you took her seat on the subway.
That changed my life, seeing other ways to be a woman, though it helped even more when I met other dykes.
Men haven't learned much since my grandmother's day. In the ruling last week, the men of the Supreme Court asserted women have neither the right, nor the brains to choose what the abortion anti-choice activists have called "partial birth" in an effective advertising gambit.
Justice Kennedy actually wrote that banning the procedure was good because it would protect us females from a procedure we might not really understand and would almost certainly regret after.
What, after all, is more sacred than that little spark of unrealized life?
The traditional feminist response is -- the life of the mother and the quality of life of the rest of the family. They have more fodder than ever for the argument.
A couple of days after the ruling, the New York Times reported that infant mortality is going up in the American South, skyrocketing to almost double the national average among the poor black families of Mississippi.
Some doctors blame the national problems of obesity. Others, Bush's Medicaid and Welfare cuts, poverty, and race. Infant deaths among African Americans in Mississippi rose from 14.2 per thousand in 2004 to 17 per thousand births in 2005, while those among whites rose from 6.1 to 6.6 per thousand.
Oleta Fitzgerald, southern regional director for the Children's Defense Fund, told the Times, "When you see drops in the welfare rolls, when you see drops in Medicaid and children's insurance, you see a recipe for disaster. Somebody's not eating, somebody's not going to the doctor and unborn children suffer."
Bush certainly won't worry about it. The main thing is that babies get here on earth, if only for a few minutes. Lucky, lucky kids to be able to rot in the cold, hard ground instead of in the landfill as medical waste. Send a dove straight up to Jesus and hire a brass band for the funeral.
It's hard to believe this court ruling, this rise in infant mortality is happening at the same time as we get our first female speaker of the House, first woman as serious candidate for President.
I don't think our culture's changed so much as female politicians have figured out how to advance in a system which despises them as much as ever. More maybe. Like queers, the more visible they are, the bigger the backlash.
And if the rights of women are eroded, (which by the way includes dykes), there will be ripples in gay rights, all our bodies battlegrounds.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Hand to Hand Combat for Democracy
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
801 words
Saturday, I dragged myself out of the house to flyer for Segolene Royal. So what if I was bribed first with lunch and a glass of champagne? I went.
You wouldn't believe the smile I pasted on, the careful display of the pamphlet with Sego's face, and the polite, "Bonjour, are you familiar with her platform?" All because these French people require a polite, personal touch or they feel free to give you hell. Even the people on our side fire away.
The white leftists are the worst. One guy said he'd vote for Sego, but ranted on about how she was caviar gauche, part of the privileged left in her high heels, and designer clothes, barely better than the right. Sounded like the people I know who voted for that bum Nader instead of Gore, and got us stuck with Bush.
Then there was the woman who got mad because I handed her husband a flyer and not her, even though they were passing at the speed of light, him a few feet away, her half a mile down the road with twelve kids between. I'm a dirty misogynist.
They don't like this, they don't like that. They scowl and moan and wait for some bearded revolutionary saint like Che to sweep down from the Argentinean plains and carry them off to Nirvana. Instead, all they have is this, this... woman... who repulses them with her smooth skin and nice clothes and practical politics.
The people of color are different. Almost all the French Africans and Asians smiled at the pamphlets and took them even with suitcases in both hands. Sego's the only one they stand a chance with. "Keep it up," they told us, or, "I wish I could vote."
Some looked scared. One North African guy said, "I've been here twenty-five years. This is my home, but if Sarkozy gets elected I'll always be a foreigner."
Besides deporting kids from grade schools, Sarko's doing a dance with the ultra right-wing extremist Le Pen who wants to send all the non-white people back where they came from, and if that happens to be France, then to the land of their ancestors.
There's a similar trend in the United States, but it seems like everybody I know has retreated -- to the countryside, parenthood, despair, Gay Paree.
The election won't spark a revolution. Leading the Democratic pack we've got Clinton and Obama who are better than Bush, but every time they declare their belief in God, and parse words on gay rights it's like a cold shower.
The Iraq War and the erosion of civil rights aren't close enough to light any fires either, unless you're an immigrant or soldier. I imagine we queers could have ignored Reagan's America if not for the AIDS crisis that set off a train of reactions that converged in groups like ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers.
It's not just apathy. Americans just aren't much good at engaging national politics. Part of it is our sheer size. I shrink in front of the map extending practically from one side of the world to the other.
Then there's tradition. Growing up in Kentucky, both politics and religion were banned from polite tables. You'd ruin your digestion and offend your guests. Besides, the thinking was, all you can do is make a fool of yourself, and there are already plenty of politicians willing to do that. Leave the scoundrels to it. Even going door-to-door for Jesus is too much. All those holier-than-thou people do it more for that glorious burst of self-satisfaction than the glory of God.
We Americans donate money and stock food banks, but shy away from taking on our neighbors, eye meeting eye, hand meeting hand in exchange for what? Promises? Something for nothing? I never saved a soul even though I was a staunch Christian, but I sold plenty of Girl Scout cookies. Pay your money get your Thin Mints.
I'm jealous when I watch these French people, armed only with ideas, go out to convert their friends and neighbors. It's a kind of intimacy with their country that stands in contrast to our disinterested patriotism. We slap flags on everything from car lots to sheet cakes, but never in our hearts.
The left, especially, stakes few claims. One of the last times I saw familiar faces on the streets was during the massive demos in 2003 against invading Iraq. During the mid-term election I got a couple of emails. I'm not sure how much they work. Can you get fired up in front of a keypad?
Maybe the problem is we don't know what we have, and without fearing loss, who cares enough to risk hand to hand combat? My hand with a pamphlet. Yours turning it away.
801 words
Saturday, I dragged myself out of the house to flyer for Segolene Royal. So what if I was bribed first with lunch and a glass of champagne? I went.
You wouldn't believe the smile I pasted on, the careful display of the pamphlet with Sego's face, and the polite, "Bonjour, are you familiar with her platform?" All because these French people require a polite, personal touch or they feel free to give you hell. Even the people on our side fire away.
The white leftists are the worst. One guy said he'd vote for Sego, but ranted on about how she was caviar gauche, part of the privileged left in her high heels, and designer clothes, barely better than the right. Sounded like the people I know who voted for that bum Nader instead of Gore, and got us stuck with Bush.
Then there was the woman who got mad because I handed her husband a flyer and not her, even though they were passing at the speed of light, him a few feet away, her half a mile down the road with twelve kids between. I'm a dirty misogynist.
They don't like this, they don't like that. They scowl and moan and wait for some bearded revolutionary saint like Che to sweep down from the Argentinean plains and carry them off to Nirvana. Instead, all they have is this, this... woman... who repulses them with her smooth skin and nice clothes and practical politics.
The people of color are different. Almost all the French Africans and Asians smiled at the pamphlets and took them even with suitcases in both hands. Sego's the only one they stand a chance with. "Keep it up," they told us, or, "I wish I could vote."
Some looked scared. One North African guy said, "I've been here twenty-five years. This is my home, but if Sarkozy gets elected I'll always be a foreigner."
Besides deporting kids from grade schools, Sarko's doing a dance with the ultra right-wing extremist Le Pen who wants to send all the non-white people back where they came from, and if that happens to be France, then to the land of their ancestors.
There's a similar trend in the United States, but it seems like everybody I know has retreated -- to the countryside, parenthood, despair, Gay Paree.
The election won't spark a revolution. Leading the Democratic pack we've got Clinton and Obama who are better than Bush, but every time they declare their belief in God, and parse words on gay rights it's like a cold shower.
The Iraq War and the erosion of civil rights aren't close enough to light any fires either, unless you're an immigrant or soldier. I imagine we queers could have ignored Reagan's America if not for the AIDS crisis that set off a train of reactions that converged in groups like ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers.
It's not just apathy. Americans just aren't much good at engaging national politics. Part of it is our sheer size. I shrink in front of the map extending practically from one side of the world to the other.
Then there's tradition. Growing up in Kentucky, both politics and religion were banned from polite tables. You'd ruin your digestion and offend your guests. Besides, the thinking was, all you can do is make a fool of yourself, and there are already plenty of politicians willing to do that. Leave the scoundrels to it. Even going door-to-door for Jesus is too much. All those holier-than-thou people do it more for that glorious burst of self-satisfaction than the glory of God.
We Americans donate money and stock food banks, but shy away from taking on our neighbors, eye meeting eye, hand meeting hand in exchange for what? Promises? Something for nothing? I never saved a soul even though I was a staunch Christian, but I sold plenty of Girl Scout cookies. Pay your money get your Thin Mints.
I'm jealous when I watch these French people, armed only with ideas, go out to convert their friends and neighbors. It's a kind of intimacy with their country that stands in contrast to our disinterested patriotism. We slap flags on everything from car lots to sheet cakes, but never in our hearts.
The left, especially, stakes few claims. One of the last times I saw familiar faces on the streets was during the massive demos in 2003 against invading Iraq. During the mid-term election I got a couple of emails. I'm not sure how much they work. Can you get fired up in front of a keypad?
Maybe the problem is we don't know what we have, and without fearing loss, who cares enough to risk hand to hand combat? My hand with a pamphlet. Yours turning it away.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Hating Women in France
Kelly Jean Cogswell
803 words
The presidential election is heating up in France, and if you had to give it a sound track, "Who let the dogs out?" might do for starters.
Packs of cops are out in full force rounding up immigrants so that rightist candidate and former Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy can prove he has the big dick you need to run a country, which may turn out to be the deciding qualification as voters go to the polls.
When my friend Marie went out flyering last weekend for candidate Segolene Royal, half of the men on the street only had to see her smiling female face on the pamphlet when they began cursing Sego, cursing Marie, and promising to vote for the extreme right, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-woman back to the dark ages Le Pen.
Some of the older women were almost as bad, shuddering dramatically as they turned away from the pamphlet as if Marie was flyering for Hamas in Tel Aviv or trying to dump a load of steaming dog doo in their hands. I wish she had. They need a shock, some of these women, to see where they really stand.
Even one of the other female volunteers flipped out when she saw an unofficial flyer Marie had made, "Quit listening to the machos, a better minimum wage is Royal."
This twenty-something chick ranted and raved that Marie was actually anti-feminist, setting back the campaign with that word "macho" which called attention to the fact Segolene was a woman, as if those men calling Sego a "filthy whore" hadn't noticed.
At first I thought the girl was a complete idiot. Then later, I thought, how French.
You have to understand that the place is a little like the dangerously hospitable South where I grew up, or Cuba maybe. At any rate, the machinery of French society is oiled by vast pools of politeness that make Paris seem like a sanitarium after years in New York.
Their traditional discretion has been a refuge for a lot of American outsiders from Gertrude Stein to James Baldwin.
You can do almost anything in France as long as you don't call attention to it. You're queer, fine, have as many homo lovers as you want, as long as you introduce them, when you must, as "my friend."
It's okay, too, if you're black, as long as you speak exactly like middle class white people, wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and manage to avoid using the word "black" in mixed company, even if you're referring to how you like your coffee.
As your reward, you'll be treated politely, invited to the best places, alone. People will even laugh at your jokes, amazed at your wit, and as with the Barak Obama's of the world, tell you how articulate you are.
Ditto for women. You wouldn't believe the rewards you get for a nice smile, and carefully coiffed hair.
The problem comes when you venture into public space. Maybe two girls want to embrace on the subway platform, a black kids wants to have a crack at a decent job, or a woman wants to run the country. Then, all that politeness turns to poison.
Bigots make a game of pushing you to the boiling point, and then retreating into politeness, saying you must have misunderstood. People of color are too sensitive. Women are paranoid and crazy and wrong. Queers kissing in public are just ... rude.
It's like confronting a flood with boxing gloves.
The suffocating force of politeness is why you suddenly get car burnings and riots here, a kind of gestural language responding to how society ties you up with actual words. It explains also the right-wing eruptions of profanity on the street, the institutionalized arrests of immigrants when the subtle imposition of invisibility isn't quite working anymore.
When Green Party mayor in Begles, near Bordeax, decided to officiate over France's first gay marriage in 2004, he was rewarded with a couple of years of vitriolic letters, death threats, and actual packages of human shit.
Gay men setting up house together in the countryside have been firebombed.
You have to be exceptional to charge it head on. I'm encouraged that Segolene Royal survived long enough to knock out the Socialist old boy network to claim the party nomination, much less stay neck and neck with macho Sarko.
Not only that, but she's sticking to the rules of the game that the house had fixed against her. She's had career and kids, done her time as a hack, wears high heels and skirts, and smiles with grace.
The longer she lasts, though, with her face on posters everywhere, her voice on the radio and TV, the more you hear the dog pack howl with rage. Hillary will get the same.
803 words
The presidential election is heating up in France, and if you had to give it a sound track, "Who let the dogs out?" might do for starters.
Packs of cops are out in full force rounding up immigrants so that rightist candidate and former Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy can prove he has the big dick you need to run a country, which may turn out to be the deciding qualification as voters go to the polls.
When my friend Marie went out flyering last weekend for candidate Segolene Royal, half of the men on the street only had to see her smiling female face on the pamphlet when they began cursing Sego, cursing Marie, and promising to vote for the extreme right, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-woman back to the dark ages Le Pen.
Some of the older women were almost as bad, shuddering dramatically as they turned away from the pamphlet as if Marie was flyering for Hamas in Tel Aviv or trying to dump a load of steaming dog doo in their hands. I wish she had. They need a shock, some of these women, to see where they really stand.
Even one of the other female volunteers flipped out when she saw an unofficial flyer Marie had made, "Quit listening to the machos, a better minimum wage is Royal."
This twenty-something chick ranted and raved that Marie was actually anti-feminist, setting back the campaign with that word "macho" which called attention to the fact Segolene was a woman, as if those men calling Sego a "filthy whore" hadn't noticed.
At first I thought the girl was a complete idiot. Then later, I thought, how French.
You have to understand that the place is a little like the dangerously hospitable South where I grew up, or Cuba maybe. At any rate, the machinery of French society is oiled by vast pools of politeness that make Paris seem like a sanitarium after years in New York.
Their traditional discretion has been a refuge for a lot of American outsiders from Gertrude Stein to James Baldwin.
You can do almost anything in France as long as you don't call attention to it. You're queer, fine, have as many homo lovers as you want, as long as you introduce them, when you must, as "my friend."
It's okay, too, if you're black, as long as you speak exactly like middle class white people, wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and manage to avoid using the word "black" in mixed company, even if you're referring to how you like your coffee.
As your reward, you'll be treated politely, invited to the best places, alone. People will even laugh at your jokes, amazed at your wit, and as with the Barak Obama's of the world, tell you how articulate you are.
Ditto for women. You wouldn't believe the rewards you get for a nice smile, and carefully coiffed hair.
The problem comes when you venture into public space. Maybe two girls want to embrace on the subway platform, a black kids wants to have a crack at a decent job, or a woman wants to run the country. Then, all that politeness turns to poison.
Bigots make a game of pushing you to the boiling point, and then retreating into politeness, saying you must have misunderstood. People of color are too sensitive. Women are paranoid and crazy and wrong. Queers kissing in public are just ... rude.
It's like confronting a flood with boxing gloves.
The suffocating force of politeness is why you suddenly get car burnings and riots here, a kind of gestural language responding to how society ties you up with actual words. It explains also the right-wing eruptions of profanity on the street, the institutionalized arrests of immigrants when the subtle imposition of invisibility isn't quite working anymore.
When Green Party mayor in Begles, near Bordeax, decided to officiate over France's first gay marriage in 2004, he was rewarded with a couple of years of vitriolic letters, death threats, and actual packages of human shit.
Gay men setting up house together in the countryside have been firebombed.
You have to be exceptional to charge it head on. I'm encouraged that Segolene Royal survived long enough to knock out the Socialist old boy network to claim the party nomination, much less stay neck and neck with macho Sarko.
Not only that, but she's sticking to the rules of the game that the house had fixed against her. She's had career and kids, done her time as a hack, wears high heels and skirts, and smiles with grace.
The longer she lasts, though, with her face on posters everywhere, her voice on the radio and TV, the more you hear the dog pack howl with rage. Hillary will get the same.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Queers Lost at Francophone AIDS Conference
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The 4th Francophone Conference on HIV/AIDS met last week in Paris. Political questions were handled with kid gloves, if at all, and everything from ethics in drug trials to HIV permutations was stuffed so elegantly into PowerPoint presentations that the mammoth obstacles of governments and history and biology seemed like mere pebbles in our path.
Still, the reality of AIDS intruded occasionally, like when you saw delegates choking down handfuls of pills, or ACT-UP Paris zapped the Abbott pharmaceutical company.
A Taste of Their Own Medicine
To get to the conference rooms two levels down at the Cité des Science et de l'Industrie, you had to pass warrens of stands from the big Pharma companies that make AIDS drugs and machines that count T-cells.
If you were anywhere near the Abbott booth on Friday, you got to see AIDS activists pour fake blood on the displays of glossy brochures where everybody taking Abbott drugs was happy. And they probably were, since a lot of people can't get their hands on the stuff -- especially in Thailand.
Vengeful after Thailand's decision to manufacture generic varieties of some of their drugs under a WTO agreement for health emergencies, Abbott has declared an "embargo" against them. None of their drugs for that country.
Forget about selling them the new second-line ARV cocktail, Kaletra, which is hugely important because there's no need for refrigeration, a groundbreaking advance for tropical countries where many don't have their own refrigerators.
To protest, activists painted bloody handprints everywhere, and shouted, "Ten thousand deaths a day aren't enough for Abbott," and "Kaletra: it's an emergency."
Forging Alliances
ACT-UP Paris organized the demo at the stand, but they were joined by dozens of African AIDS activists who tend to take actions like Abbott's very personally.
Most of them are HIV-positive, if not actually living with AIDS. In an earlier action in the morning, when a dozen members of ACT-UP interrupted an Abbott symposium to unfurl a banner reading "AIDS = DEATH UNDER COPYRIGHT" and ask for signatures demanding Abbott end the embargo, African activists were the first to get involved.
They walked out of the symposium en masse, and Jeanne Gapiya, founder of the AIDS organization ANSS in Burundi, helped pass out flyers. "It was an act of solidarity and revolt because it's the first time that we've seen a pharmaceutical company take such punitive measures against a country that was acting within the bounds of international law."
She takes Kaletra herself and said she couldn't live with herself if she just stood silently by. "I put myself in the shoes of Thai people, and wonder how they'll survive," she said.
Besides, as one man shouted, "Our countries are next - Solidarité!"
Khalil Elouardighi, a spokesman for ACT-UP, added that Abbott's hard-line stance on Thailand may well be a trial balloon for tactics on restricting access to other developing countries. "They increase their profit, while actually lowering the number of people treated."
Fighting For Ethical Drug Trials
The irony is that in the last few years, Africa and Southeast Asia have been overrun with researchers doing their drug trials on the "virgin bodies" that have never touched an aspirin, much less an antibiotic.
They test their experimental formulas, and then market the new-found drugs at hefty prices their guinea pigs could never afford.
And while big Pharma weeps over the erosion of intellectual property, not to mention profits, community activists struggle to hold researchers to the same basic ethical standards they'd use among gay men in San Francisco, for instance.
"Just because there are economic and cultural differences doesn't mean you have license to change the protocol," said Jean-Marie Talom of REDS Cameroon at a workshop on Ethics and Research. It was his critique of the Tenofovir research trial in Cameroon that ultimately led to its cancellation.
A kind of oral vaccine against HIV, researchers gave Tenofovir or a placebo to a test group of prostitutes, promising they were safe if they took it daily, and skipping the part of the protocol that said they had to tell the women about safe sex. So what if they got HIV and died? It's all grist for the statistic mill.
In fact the drug does seem to work, and Talom would have preferred that the study continue, only live up to its obligations.
It shouldn't be an either/or situation with drug trials, where activists either have to let studies continue unchallenged, or shut them down completely. There's a third way, he asserted. "Ideally, questionable studies could be halted temporarily until satisfactory changes are made, then continued."
Stopping them entirely is the worst outcome of all. "There's no progress without research. What we need is to have researchers and drug companies and activists and governments working together to move forward."
Crossing Borders
Unfortunately, transparency and good will is in short supply. In a later conversation, Talom admitted that he'd known some of the Tenofovir researchers for years. "We were practically like brothers, but when I started calling them for information on the study," he shook his head, "Nothing."
He finally asked activists in Paris to get involved, and it was only their connections that uncovered the paper trail of abuses. He was stonewalled again when he confronted the researchers and politicians to demand the study conform to its own protocol and inform the women about safe sex.
But again, nothing was done until activists in Paris zapped the Cameroon embassy and got a TV station to pick up the issue. Then the whole thing became a circus and the study was shut down.
Getting outsiders involved is a tricky issue. During the ethics workshop, activist Christine Kafando from Burkina Faso, chastised him, declaring, "Just because people are illiterate, doesn't mean they're beasts. We have ears, and they're open now. It's we that have to organize. We that have to learn. We that have to demand!"
That's true, kind of, but it doesn't take into account how many activists are hogtied by unresponsive, undemocratic governments, and the failure of the rule of law. Jeanne Gapiya of Borundi has been threatened with arrest so often it's almost, but not quite, a joke in her family.
When push comes to shove, activists do what they must to get the information out and protect people, even if it means asking for help from outside. Which is why African activists were there to participate as ACT-UP Paris left bloody handprints on walls of the Abbott booth, chanting, "It's an emergency."
So is the situation of gay men.
The Incredible Invisible Queers
Instead of emphasizing that HIV is an equal opportunity virus, all the new blah, blah, blah about how the face of AIDS has changed, and it is now a disease of straight people, has somehow managed to erase African and Asian queers.
At the conference, homos were sometimes included in laundry lists of "vulnerable populations" along with children, prostitutes, prisoners, and illegal immigrants, but often not. When a speaker finally focused on homo-transmission, it was in the context of France, Brazil and Holland.
Apparently, there are no queers in Afrique.
So much for the benefits of having gay men in positions of power in the AIDS hierarchies. By and large, they've kept their lips zipped on the subject of African homophobia, if they noticed at all.
Like with Bush and his quick jettisoning of women's issues when he has to negotiate with mullahs, I suspect professional fags have left us behind on purpose as they negotiate AIDS programs with homophobic health ministers.
While we were eating canapés and drinking champagne from one of the Pharma booths, prior to zapping Abbott, Olivier Jablonski, one of the few French queers actively fighting for gay Africans, got a text message that cops were rounding up queers in Senegal and a lot of people were trying to hide out on the beach.
How many of these guys do you think get tested, much less treated for HIV?
Already in Africa, straight men are afraid of the health system and the stigma of AIDS. I can't imagine the courage it takes to show your face at a clinic when you're a big fag in a country where homophobia can land you in jail, or dead in a muddy ditch along the side of the road.
Confidential testing is mostly imaginary. The best they can do is find a place far from their home communities, tell lies about hiding the test from the wife back home, and hope and pray none of their neighbors has the same idea.
For gay men in Africa, fighting homophobia = fighting AIDS.
Groups like ACT-UP Paris seem to have lost the connection when they scoot past national boundaries. They believe all forms of discrimination are related, and do fight homophobia, and sexism, et al, but all the gay stuff stays at home as if there were no queers south of Gibraltar, and the phantom African fag couldn't catch AIDS.
Larry Kramer is right. We need a queer army that goes everywhere. If the homophobes don't get the fags in Senegal, AIDS will. We should do something. C'mon, put on your pink triangles and pink Timberlands. Let's hijack a few tanks and march. Solidarité!
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Celebrating International Immigrant Bashing Month
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
798 words
It's March again, and time to celebrate International Immigrant Bashing Month. Take your pick of dragging away elderly Chinese men when they pick up their grandkids after school in Paris, or yanking women from backpack factories in Massachusetts.
If that doesn't do it for you, follow the advice of New Jersey deejays and report your neighbors to the INS if they have so much as the whisper of an accent. They're taking your job, goshdangit, they're "invaders," fight back.
From Marseilles, France to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where the mayor is bringing suit to purge the place, you can work with likeminded folk to enjoy the benefits immigrants bring, without actually paying for them. Bash an immigrant today!
Not amused? That's pretty much the message of the right-wing from Europe to the U.S.
If you listen to the left, all you hear is a whole lot of nothing. That is, until elections roll around. In the U.S., now, there's a half-hearted attempt by both sides to naturalize a few illegal immigrants and maybe give back healthcare to their newborn American babies without demanding the infants' passports, driver's licenses, and credit history.
The issue is almost as invisible in the non-immigrant LGBT community. We don't have anything to say until a friend's lover is about to be deported, or for a few brief minutes when some Iranian queer is about to be sent back to face the hangman's noose. Never mind that plenty of us immigrate for the same reason as everybody else, bread and freedom.
Sometimes I get the idea we think it is, well, impolite to talk about immigration, racist even.
That delicate, magnolia blossom sensibility of noninterference means that the only people talking about immigrants are the crapules on the right that essentially want slaves to pick up their garbage, pluck their chickens, clean their hospitals and schools (but not use them), and never, ever open their mouths.
I'm not a radical opener up in terms of national immigration policies, believing neither in drawbridges and moats nor absolutely free entry with no requirements whatsoever. The issues are complicated. Social services ARE expensive. A rapid influx of immigrants CAN change the whole character of a previously homogenous community or nation, forcing them to grapple with tough issues.
But in economic terms alone, most "developed" economies would spit at the seams without immigrants, and democracies owe it to their ideals to offer refuge to at least some of the neediest, especially when it is first world wars that have screwed up their lives -- Iraq ring a bell?
What concerns me most is what happens to people both legal and illegal that have already settled in a place.
Except maybe for the very young, immigrating isn't something you do on a whim. The journey itself is often grueling, dangerous, and expensive. We've all heard reports about things going wrong in the crossing of Mexican deserts, or in the dark, airless container ships from China.
In Northern Africa, people gather from all over the continent to pay an enormous amount for the privilege of climbing into an open leaky boat and setting sail for any rocky beach considered Europe. A lot of people drown. That's desperation.
Once you finally get to a place like L.A., or New York or Paris, there's a chance for humiliation and harassment every time you go out the door. Maybe it's your race, or the way you walk. God knows opening your mouth is an ever present source of danger.
It's a little like being queer. Remember in the old days, when the typical explanation to bigots claiming gayness was a choice was a detailed list of the obstacles we face followed by the question, who really would choose that? -- the torture in schools, gay-bashing, discrimination in jobs and housing?
Immigrants have their own balance sheets. You may gain economically, live a less dangerous life (unless you get stuck in the ghetto, or beat up by cops, or die in transit), but you give up a lot, too, hearing your language around you, being able to express yourself or defend yourself, knowing the customs, playing a role you understand, having respect, family, a real identity, not to mention the land itself.
In places like Little Havana in Miami, if you could draw back the curtains of some of the houses you'd find old men sitting motionless on the couches with stunned looks on their faces. I have that same look sometimes in Paris, and the stakes for me aren't nearly so high.
It's far worse for the kids in their teens and twenties who face the opposite. Suddenly deported because of irregular papers, they find themselves in troubled countries where they don't speak the language, have no relatives, no connections, no nothing but the passport.
The real racism is not to talk about immigration, but to turn away.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
798 words
It's March again, and time to celebrate International Immigrant Bashing Month. Take your pick of dragging away elderly Chinese men when they pick up their grandkids after school in Paris, or yanking women from backpack factories in Massachusetts.
If that doesn't do it for you, follow the advice of New Jersey deejays and report your neighbors to the INS if they have so much as the whisper of an accent. They're taking your job, goshdangit, they're "invaders," fight back.
From Marseilles, France to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, where the mayor is bringing suit to purge the place, you can work with likeminded folk to enjoy the benefits immigrants bring, without actually paying for them. Bash an immigrant today!
Not amused? That's pretty much the message of the right-wing from Europe to the U.S.
If you listen to the left, all you hear is a whole lot of nothing. That is, until elections roll around. In the U.S., now, there's a half-hearted attempt by both sides to naturalize a few illegal immigrants and maybe give back healthcare to their newborn American babies without demanding the infants' passports, driver's licenses, and credit history.
The issue is almost as invisible in the non-immigrant LGBT community. We don't have anything to say until a friend's lover is about to be deported, or for a few brief minutes when some Iranian queer is about to be sent back to face the hangman's noose. Never mind that plenty of us immigrate for the same reason as everybody else, bread and freedom.
Sometimes I get the idea we think it is, well, impolite to talk about immigration, racist even.
That delicate, magnolia blossom sensibility of noninterference means that the only people talking about immigrants are the crapules on the right that essentially want slaves to pick up their garbage, pluck their chickens, clean their hospitals and schools (but not use them), and never, ever open their mouths.
I'm not a radical opener up in terms of national immigration policies, believing neither in drawbridges and moats nor absolutely free entry with no requirements whatsoever. The issues are complicated. Social services ARE expensive. A rapid influx of immigrants CAN change the whole character of a previously homogenous community or nation, forcing them to grapple with tough issues.
But in economic terms alone, most "developed" economies would spit at the seams without immigrants, and democracies owe it to their ideals to offer refuge to at least some of the neediest, especially when it is first world wars that have screwed up their lives -- Iraq ring a bell?
What concerns me most is what happens to people both legal and illegal that have already settled in a place.
Except maybe for the very young, immigrating isn't something you do on a whim. The journey itself is often grueling, dangerous, and expensive. We've all heard reports about things going wrong in the crossing of Mexican deserts, or in the dark, airless container ships from China.
In Northern Africa, people gather from all over the continent to pay an enormous amount for the privilege of climbing into an open leaky boat and setting sail for any rocky beach considered Europe. A lot of people drown. That's desperation.
Once you finally get to a place like L.A., or New York or Paris, there's a chance for humiliation and harassment every time you go out the door. Maybe it's your race, or the way you walk. God knows opening your mouth is an ever present source of danger.
It's a little like being queer. Remember in the old days, when the typical explanation to bigots claiming gayness was a choice was a detailed list of the obstacles we face followed by the question, who really would choose that? -- the torture in schools, gay-bashing, discrimination in jobs and housing?
Immigrants have their own balance sheets. You may gain economically, live a less dangerous life (unless you get stuck in the ghetto, or beat up by cops, or die in transit), but you give up a lot, too, hearing your language around you, being able to express yourself or defend yourself, knowing the customs, playing a role you understand, having respect, family, a real identity, not to mention the land itself.
In places like Little Havana in Miami, if you could draw back the curtains of some of the houses you'd find old men sitting motionless on the couches with stunned looks on their faces. I have that same look sometimes in Paris, and the stakes for me aren't nearly so high.
It's far worse for the kids in their teens and twenties who face the opposite. Suddenly deported because of irregular papers, they find themselves in troubled countries where they don't speak the language, have no relatives, no connections, no nothing but the passport.
The real racism is not to talk about immigration, but to turn away.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Globalization, Rappers and Queers in Gay Paree
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
810 words
When it comes to American culture, you need comic strip words in big, fat letters like POW! and BLAM! for what we do to other people, or our own for that matter.
In France, half of the top hip-hop videos of last Sunday were American, including one P.Diddy, two Snoop Doggs and Miss Fergie Fergalicious singing about how hot she was, but not promiscuous. I went to a "queer" film festival later in the day where the name was not only American, but half the films.
This is a little more complicated, though, than McDonald's supplanting little cafes with mass-produced frites. It's a testimony to the strength of identity politics in the U.S.
In the case of rap, it has given --mostly men-- a short-cut to a Black identity, especially in France, and Cuba and other centers of the African Diaspora.
The musical genre itself has an accessible tradition of defiance, social commentary, and failing that, rage. Then there's the style, all the doo rags, baggy pants, Sean Jean jackets, and the bling. Wearing it all together is like wrapping yourself in a flag. You don't have to keep the beat.
I was on the subway the other day with a young black gansta wannabee pacing up and down the platform, and scaring all the rainbow of nice bourgeois Parisians, even though if you looked twice you could tell the baggy pants and doo-rag were a costume on him, a kind of carapace.
Maybe that extravagant shell is enough in a place like France which is so conformist that even its nonconformists conform to a particular mode. In France, they say the impetus for it isn't so much to erase people, endorse racism, or homophobia, but to preserve the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that are supposed to put everybody on the same ground as everyone else, neither higher or lower.
Frankly, most of us could get behind that idea. The failure of it has emerged as a main theme of French rappers who use this quintessentially black American form to assert their Frenchness and take on the myth.
I wasn't exactly taking notes Sunday when I stopped to watch the video countdown, but I was struck by one from a North African rapper rhyming about how even if he left the place, he was born here, the cité was his, and France would always be his home. It was too sweet for me with sun shining, green grass growing, and a beautiful brown woman getting black and brown men to shake hands, but nevertheless he was claiming space.
Another video had some white-looking guy getting incensed about a hip-hop song playing with the idea of France profound or the real France of the countryside. The song is playing on one radio and he turns it off, then it's coming from a car below and he leaves his apartment to go downstairs and turn it off there. After that, someone walks by with it playing on his headphones, which he grabs and smashes.
Then it's on a little radio that the women turn off when he approaches, but after a split second of silence, the women themselves begin singing. Then it's playing again in the taxi. And so on and so on. The "listeners," white and black and brown, finally sing, if I understood correctly, that they were the real France profound and that the bottom line was respect.
Some gay people turn to the U.S., too. The French assaulted American academics with Lacan and Derrida, and we return the favor with Judith Butler and "queer" studies. After seeing a couple of shows this week at the queer film festival I wasn't sure the French had come out ahead.
If you can set aside (try to) the homophobia and misogyny, and endorsement of random violence, what hip-hop offers is a mode of defiance, pride, a built-in attitude that encourages the disempowered to take on the powerful. It may not lead anywhere in the long run, but it's readymade, and anyone can tap into it.
All French people get with "queer" is some uprooted English word, apparently conveying the vague idea that there could be liberation and equality on the margins of society.
Some of the films in the "queer" festival were powerful (Black Nations, Queer Nations). Most were not. They were almost all old, and taken together, positively dusty. Worse, everything I like about the word got lost in the cultural translation.
Like with hip-hop, "queer" carries with it, or used to, flamboyance, shock value, energy, defiance, even joy, because it was rooted in a homo-identity like dyke or fag or drag queens that we built in the streets, risking our necks sometimes to be ourselves.
Queer was not a department of study in a university, an area of research, a retrospective. Look forward, or not at all.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
810 words
When it comes to American culture, you need comic strip words in big, fat letters like POW! and BLAM! for what we do to other people, or our own for that matter.
In France, half of the top hip-hop videos of last Sunday were American, including one P.Diddy, two Snoop Doggs and Miss Fergie Fergalicious singing about how hot she was, but not promiscuous. I went to a "queer" film festival later in the day where the name was not only American, but half the films.
This is a little more complicated, though, than McDonald's supplanting little cafes with mass-produced frites. It's a testimony to the strength of identity politics in the U.S.
In the case of rap, it has given --mostly men-- a short-cut to a Black identity, especially in France, and Cuba and other centers of the African Diaspora.
The musical genre itself has an accessible tradition of defiance, social commentary, and failing that, rage. Then there's the style, all the doo rags, baggy pants, Sean Jean jackets, and the bling. Wearing it all together is like wrapping yourself in a flag. You don't have to keep the beat.
I was on the subway the other day with a young black gansta wannabee pacing up and down the platform, and scaring all the rainbow of nice bourgeois Parisians, even though if you looked twice you could tell the baggy pants and doo-rag were a costume on him, a kind of carapace.
Maybe that extravagant shell is enough in a place like France which is so conformist that even its nonconformists conform to a particular mode. In France, they say the impetus for it isn't so much to erase people, endorse racism, or homophobia, but to preserve the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity that are supposed to put everybody on the same ground as everyone else, neither higher or lower.
Frankly, most of us could get behind that idea. The failure of it has emerged as a main theme of French rappers who use this quintessentially black American form to assert their Frenchness and take on the myth.
I wasn't exactly taking notes Sunday when I stopped to watch the video countdown, but I was struck by one from a North African rapper rhyming about how even if he left the place, he was born here, the cité was his, and France would always be his home. It was too sweet for me with sun shining, green grass growing, and a beautiful brown woman getting black and brown men to shake hands, but nevertheless he was claiming space.
Another video had some white-looking guy getting incensed about a hip-hop song playing with the idea of France profound or the real France of the countryside. The song is playing on one radio and he turns it off, then it's coming from a car below and he leaves his apartment to go downstairs and turn it off there. After that, someone walks by with it playing on his headphones, which he grabs and smashes.
Then it's on a little radio that the women turn off when he approaches, but after a split second of silence, the women themselves begin singing. Then it's playing again in the taxi. And so on and so on. The "listeners," white and black and brown, finally sing, if I understood correctly, that they were the real France profound and that the bottom line was respect.
Some gay people turn to the U.S., too. The French assaulted American academics with Lacan and Derrida, and we return the favor with Judith Butler and "queer" studies. After seeing a couple of shows this week at the queer film festival I wasn't sure the French had come out ahead.
If you can set aside (try to) the homophobia and misogyny, and endorsement of random violence, what hip-hop offers is a mode of defiance, pride, a built-in attitude that encourages the disempowered to take on the powerful. It may not lead anywhere in the long run, but it's readymade, and anyone can tap into it.
All French people get with "queer" is some uprooted English word, apparently conveying the vague idea that there could be liberation and equality on the margins of society.
Some of the films in the "queer" festival were powerful (Black Nations, Queer Nations). Most were not. They were almost all old, and taken together, positively dusty. Worse, everything I like about the word got lost in the cultural translation.
Like with hip-hop, "queer" carries with it, or used to, flamboyance, shock value, energy, defiance, even joy, because it was rooted in a homo-identity like dyke or fag or drag queens that we built in the streets, risking our necks sometimes to be ourselves.
Queer was not a department of study in a university, an area of research, a retrospective. Look forward, or not at all.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Wearing the Mask of Diversity
Kelly Jean Cogswell
806 words
Fred Phelps has one message and he sticks to it. When the bastard holds a demo, he ignores casinos, distilleries, oral sex and the hundred other things that his puritanical god probably hates as well, and keeps right on declaring "God hates fags." I almost admire him.
Why can't the Left do that? Stick to one point, I mean, until we get our message across. Last fall in New York, I went to a demo for the International Day Against Torture, and while a few speakers mentioned Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, they mostly rambled on about low-income housing, hurricane Katrina, the stolen election, the war for oil, even Cuba.
I'd hoped for better here. After all, this is Paris, the subdividing, overanalyzing, hair-splitting capital of the world. There are seventy-five different kind of checking accounts you can sign up for, all with separate branded names. When it comes to human rights, you'd think they could focus on one issue at a time.
But no, when I went to an International Woman's Day march last week I found such a hodge-podge of messages that if you didn't know what the march was for from the get-go, you'd never figure it out. What and who were you supposed to be pulling for? Palestine? Iraq? Better immigration laws? Are American soldiers raping the women of France?
Why the mess? Some confusing desire for inclusion? Or something more troubling? Back at home, I started to wonder if the organizers didn't actually feel that demonstrating simply as a "woman" was something to be ashamed of.
It's an embarrassment, in fact, to feature only "women" when you can up the ante and talk about poor women, immigrant women, indigenous women, or women with AIDS, as if the actual word, "women" was a blank slate that needed a few qualifiers to give it meaning. Better yet, ignore women altogether and bash Bush.
One sign read, "No Feminism Without Anti-Imperialism," forbidding us to even talk about sexual politics without broadening the discussion. Apparently, the battle for women's rights by themselves is over and done with in France.
I wish somebody had told me. I would have hung up the crepe paper streamers and had a party. I'd have shot off firecrackers and bought eyeglasses instead of running my finger down the masthead of newspapers looking for women's names, or a woman to sit next at President Chirac's fancy desk.
I must've been imagining the problems with the maghreb men in my neighborhood who seem to think women shouldn't be on rollerblades. At least they use the opportunity to insult my friends or knock them to the ground. White French men do their sneering more politely, though at home they've been known to swing a hard fist.
Bourgeois little French girls are the worst of all. They look at a poster of presidential candidate Segolene Royal and shudder, "You can tell just by looking at her that her politics are awful. I'd never vote for her."
Next year I'll hold the march myself, dump half of the men that looked bored and weren't doing anything useful, but I'll leave all the same women there, the Iranian women in head scarves, the prostitutes and dykes, the immigrant moms, even the annoying white chicks with Palestinian schmattas.
Look closely. What's the tie that binds? To my eyes, the female experience is not eclipsed by race or class or nationality. You're vulnerable on the street. You're vulnerable in the home. Religions would rather burn you at the stake than embrace you, and when you immigrate with your family and things go wrong, you're the scapegoat.
Abroad, your rights are the first ones the U.S. trades when it needs to. Laura Bush promised great things for the women of Afghanistan and Iraq, but who got tossed overboard like Jonah when the going get rough and Bush had to court his mullahs?
Who is the surrogate victim in war? Who gets raped and murdered when things fall apart in Haiti or Darfur or New Orleans or post-World War II Berlin? Who always pays?
Differences are easy to see, all those skin colors and flags. Without ever really respecting them, we've begun to use them as kind of mask to hide what really pulls us together.
For women, it's our bodies, the grim reality of misogyny. People take one look at us and know we're evil, or merely incompetent. We're definitely expendable.
Queers do it, too. With so much emphasis on diversity, we forget what we have in common. Maybe we want to.
After all, some of us have begun to escape homophobia. We're safe -- as long as we don't leave our neighborhoods, get a flat tire on an unfamiliar road, speak to strangers, lose our jobs, or seek god.
Each blow comes as a surprise.
806 words
Fred Phelps has one message and he sticks to it. When the bastard holds a demo, he ignores casinos, distilleries, oral sex and the hundred other things that his puritanical god probably hates as well, and keeps right on declaring "God hates fags." I almost admire him.
Why can't the Left do that? Stick to one point, I mean, until we get our message across. Last fall in New York, I went to a demo for the International Day Against Torture, and while a few speakers mentioned Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, they mostly rambled on about low-income housing, hurricane Katrina, the stolen election, the war for oil, even Cuba.
I'd hoped for better here. After all, this is Paris, the subdividing, overanalyzing, hair-splitting capital of the world. There are seventy-five different kind of checking accounts you can sign up for, all with separate branded names. When it comes to human rights, you'd think they could focus on one issue at a time.
But no, when I went to an International Woman's Day march last week I found such a hodge-podge of messages that if you didn't know what the march was for from the get-go, you'd never figure it out. What and who were you supposed to be pulling for? Palestine? Iraq? Better immigration laws? Are American soldiers raping the women of France?
Why the mess? Some confusing desire for inclusion? Or something more troubling? Back at home, I started to wonder if the organizers didn't actually feel that demonstrating simply as a "woman" was something to be ashamed of.
It's an embarrassment, in fact, to feature only "women" when you can up the ante and talk about poor women, immigrant women, indigenous women, or women with AIDS, as if the actual word, "women" was a blank slate that needed a few qualifiers to give it meaning. Better yet, ignore women altogether and bash Bush.
One sign read, "No Feminism Without Anti-Imperialism," forbidding us to even talk about sexual politics without broadening the discussion. Apparently, the battle for women's rights by themselves is over and done with in France.
I wish somebody had told me. I would have hung up the crepe paper streamers and had a party. I'd have shot off firecrackers and bought eyeglasses instead of running my finger down the masthead of newspapers looking for women's names, or a woman to sit next at President Chirac's fancy desk.
I must've been imagining the problems with the maghreb men in my neighborhood who seem to think women shouldn't be on rollerblades. At least they use the opportunity to insult my friends or knock them to the ground. White French men do their sneering more politely, though at home they've been known to swing a hard fist.
Bourgeois little French girls are the worst of all. They look at a poster of presidential candidate Segolene Royal and shudder, "You can tell just by looking at her that her politics are awful. I'd never vote for her."
Next year I'll hold the march myself, dump half of the men that looked bored and weren't doing anything useful, but I'll leave all the same women there, the Iranian women in head scarves, the prostitutes and dykes, the immigrant moms, even the annoying white chicks with Palestinian schmattas.
Look closely. What's the tie that binds? To my eyes, the female experience is not eclipsed by race or class or nationality. You're vulnerable on the street. You're vulnerable in the home. Religions would rather burn you at the stake than embrace you, and when you immigrate with your family and things go wrong, you're the scapegoat.
Abroad, your rights are the first ones the U.S. trades when it needs to. Laura Bush promised great things for the women of Afghanistan and Iraq, but who got tossed overboard like Jonah when the going get rough and Bush had to court his mullahs?
Who is the surrogate victim in war? Who gets raped and murdered when things fall apart in Haiti or Darfur or New Orleans or post-World War II Berlin? Who always pays?
Differences are easy to see, all those skin colors and flags. Without ever really respecting them, we've begun to use them as kind of mask to hide what really pulls us together.
For women, it's our bodies, the grim reality of misogyny. People take one look at us and know we're evil, or merely incompetent. We're definitely expendable.
Queers do it, too. With so much emphasis on diversity, we forget what we have in common. Maybe we want to.
After all, some of us have begun to escape homophobia. We're safe -- as long as we don't leave our neighborhoods, get a flat tire on an unfamiliar road, speak to strangers, lose our jobs, or seek god.
Each blow comes as a surprise.
Monday, March 05, 2007
A Dyke in Sheep's Clothing
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
795 words.
The kids cry, the parents scream. You eat too much, and drink too much, and go home smelling so strongly of the barnyard that strange dogs follow you home.
That's the Salon de l'Agriculture in Paris, not so different from when I was six and left the Kentucky State Fair deranged from cotton candy, candied apples, bumper cars, and the dark strange smells of tobacco and cows.
This week, I went for an assignment I wrangled for my hometown paper. Nice work if you can get it, eating your way through the French countryside packed into a few square city blocks of convention center.
Besides, I actually like visiting all those animals in the midst of concrete and steel, at least once I choke down my antihistamine pills and my eyes quit watering.
I'm only one generation from the farm, and I remember making trips back to my great aunt's place and poking through the rows of corn that were taller than me, then getting put to work shucking it on the back porch.
I stepped barefoot in a cowpat once, and didn't squeal at all. It was cool and squishy and gross, but I was a better dyke then, and just washed it off without complaining too much, though yesterday morning I found some suspiciously crusty mud in the hall and didn't make a big deal about that either.
It's just recycled hay and the Salon was full of it. You notice right away. The smell hits you right between the eyes. After that it's the moos reverberating in the vast echo chamber of the convention center. Only later do you notice the slick spots you have to navigate around.
Keep going, the cows get bigger and bigger until each is about the size of an old VW van and pretty much the same shape. Imagine a Texas one with horns on the front, and a broken bag of fertilizer in the back and you get the idea.
The Salon features more than two dozen different cow breeds, the milk breeds, and the meat cattle, with and without horns, spots, bells. These French never lose a minute to instruct, so if you keep your eyes open there are exhibits teaching you all about them, from procreation to the hamburger on your plate. Or if you prefer, the cheese.
There was a hullabaloo a few weeks ago when it was revealed that one bull had done more than his share of fertilizing and half the cattle in Europe were related. That's bad breeding, from a genetically diverse sort of perspective, though unless I'm at a State Fair I tend hear the words more when I wipe my mouth with my shirt sleeve.
In fact, I thought a lot about good breeding when I got to the little pen with sheep. These days when I see them I want to ask, Are you a sister? At least that's what I think when I see the kids. A ewe doesn't get to the fair just on her looks. It's either how much wool or milk she produces, or the quality of the kids, lambs, I mean, (not the cute homo sapiens poking their hands through the bars).
Though after an afternoon looking at the breeding posters and displays, I have to wonder why anybody would invest in research to "cure" homo animals when so much fertilization is done artificially. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I did start to believe that Dr Charles Roselli's research in Britain is completely funded by the ultra-right wing in a plot to eliminate queers.
Which leads us to the irony that if our situations were reversed, and it was Paris dykes put there in the pens among other women, you couldn't pick us out by checking for an empty stall.
There's not much lesbian activism in France, but what exists is centered on adoption, the right to insemination, with a little marriage thrown in.
All we want to do is breed, breed, breed -- to such an extent I wonder if the urge isn't more powerful than biology, but part of the growing arsenal of lesbophobia and misogyny.
After all, not every straight woman wants kids. Why has it begun to define dykes now? Especially here, where society in general tends to be discrete about sex, your "private" life, but strictly enforces gender roles and still has a visceral reaction of repulsion to women doing what they shouldn't. Like running for President.
And while I think women should be able to adopt each other's kids, and get inseminated every spring if they want, I wouldn't mind seeing some young dykes take up space on their own account, burn a barn down, leave a hoof print on some deserving face.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
795 words.
The kids cry, the parents scream. You eat too much, and drink too much, and go home smelling so strongly of the barnyard that strange dogs follow you home.
That's the Salon de l'Agriculture in Paris, not so different from when I was six and left the Kentucky State Fair deranged from cotton candy, candied apples, bumper cars, and the dark strange smells of tobacco and cows.
This week, I went for an assignment I wrangled for my hometown paper. Nice work if you can get it, eating your way through the French countryside packed into a few square city blocks of convention center.
Besides, I actually like visiting all those animals in the midst of concrete and steel, at least once I choke down my antihistamine pills and my eyes quit watering.
I'm only one generation from the farm, and I remember making trips back to my great aunt's place and poking through the rows of corn that were taller than me, then getting put to work shucking it on the back porch.
I stepped barefoot in a cowpat once, and didn't squeal at all. It was cool and squishy and gross, but I was a better dyke then, and just washed it off without complaining too much, though yesterday morning I found some suspiciously crusty mud in the hall and didn't make a big deal about that either.
It's just recycled hay and the Salon was full of it. You notice right away. The smell hits you right between the eyes. After that it's the moos reverberating in the vast echo chamber of the convention center. Only later do you notice the slick spots you have to navigate around.
Keep going, the cows get bigger and bigger until each is about the size of an old VW van and pretty much the same shape. Imagine a Texas one with horns on the front, and a broken bag of fertilizer in the back and you get the idea.
The Salon features more than two dozen different cow breeds, the milk breeds, and the meat cattle, with and without horns, spots, bells. These French never lose a minute to instruct, so if you keep your eyes open there are exhibits teaching you all about them, from procreation to the hamburger on your plate. Or if you prefer, the cheese.
There was a hullabaloo a few weeks ago when it was revealed that one bull had done more than his share of fertilizing and half the cattle in Europe were related. That's bad breeding, from a genetically diverse sort of perspective, though unless I'm at a State Fair I tend hear the words more when I wipe my mouth with my shirt sleeve.
In fact, I thought a lot about good breeding when I got to the little pen with sheep. These days when I see them I want to ask, Are you a sister? At least that's what I think when I see the kids. A ewe doesn't get to the fair just on her looks. It's either how much wool or milk she produces, or the quality of the kids, lambs, I mean, (not the cute homo sapiens poking their hands through the bars).
Though after an afternoon looking at the breeding posters and displays, I have to wonder why anybody would invest in research to "cure" homo animals when so much fertilization is done artificially. I'm not much into conspiracy theories, but I did start to believe that Dr Charles Roselli's research in Britain is completely funded by the ultra-right wing in a plot to eliminate queers.
Which leads us to the irony that if our situations were reversed, and it was Paris dykes put there in the pens among other women, you couldn't pick us out by checking for an empty stall.
There's not much lesbian activism in France, but what exists is centered on adoption, the right to insemination, with a little marriage thrown in.
All we want to do is breed, breed, breed -- to such an extent I wonder if the urge isn't more powerful than biology, but part of the growing arsenal of lesbophobia and misogyny.
After all, not every straight woman wants kids. Why has it begun to define dykes now? Especially here, where society in general tends to be discrete about sex, your "private" life, but strictly enforces gender roles and still has a visceral reaction of repulsion to women doing what they shouldn't. Like running for President.
And while I think women should be able to adopt each other's kids, and get inseminated every spring if they want, I wouldn't mind seeing some young dykes take up space on their own account, burn a barn down, leave a hoof print on some deserving face.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Bush Screws Women Globally: Still Gagging on the Rules
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
802 words
Now that Gore's got his Oscar, and Barbara Boxer's in charge of the Environment and Public Works Committee, a safer home for those cute little arctic seals is practically in the bag. But what about that other endangered category: women?
Since George W. Bush took office in 2001 imposing his global gag rule, we've been crushed between the rock and the hard place with no end in sight.
The gag rule cuts off U.S. funds to any foreign organization making any mention of abortion for any reason, no matter where the funding for those services came from. So even mention abortion among a hundred other things, and women in developing countries can kiss goodbye prenatal care and cancer screening and open their arms wide to the half a million women that will die this year during pregnancy or childbirth -- from largely preventable causes.
That's the rock. The hard place is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which does do some good in providing money for treatment and prevention of AIDS in developing countries, but again has a crushing provision that a full one-third of the prevention money go to programs preaching only abstinence.
For Bush, sex workers are garbage. Girls that aren't given the chance to say "no" are crap along the side of the road. Girls forced to marry young are what you scrape off your shoe. Women that already have HIV and have no means to prevent transmitting it aren't even on the map.
When are we going to roll that back?
Is it even on the agenda of the macho Dems when the bad news from Iraq takes half the newspaper every day, and the other half is consumed by presidential wannabees grunting at each other while garden variety torture cases barely get a mention. If another Abu Ghraib was uncovered now, or even if anyone wanted to follow-up on the old one, they'd have to wait in line behind whatever Hillar-Ama brainfart hits the stands next.
There's been little coverage of that lug José Padilla, the "enemy combatant" from Chicago that could barely spell his own name, but was nabbed in 2002 and thrown in an army brig for supposedly coordinating more deadly attacks. He's finally come up for trial and it turns out they tortured him so much he's almost completely insane. Forget poor women dying slowly of AIDS, or during deliveries.
I even resent all the coverage of Academy Awards, though Helen Mirren won best actress and I've had a crush on her for ages, except during her recent incarnation as the pin-curled, blue-rinsed Queen.
If I had my druthers it would other women on the front page this morning, all the forgotten ones dying and at risk, and the handful trying to do something about them.
As it turns out, overturning the gag rule is on the Democratic agenda, kinda, just not far up enough to make it to most newspapers. On January 22, Democratic Representative Nita Lowey from New York re-introduced the timeworn Global Democracy Promotion Act expressly devoted to overturning the gag rule. A couple of weeks ago, California's Rep. Barbara Lee, re-introduced the Pathways Act, which would remove the requirement that one-third of PEPFAR AIDS prevention programs be abstinence-based.
The problem is neither bill will go anywhere this time either. Even if the new clench-fisted, testosterone stoked Dems suddenly admitted sympathy for the problems of women, Bush would veto the bills anyway.
Pressure probably won't come from outside, either. Dr. Margaret Chan, the new director-general of the World Health Organization has announced that women's health is one of her top priorities, but she also seems to be courting America's Big Pharma in recent comments in Bangkok criticizing Thailand for challenging intellectual property laws to develop generic AIDS and cardiac drugs.
Will she turn a blind eye to the United States' global gag rule and PEPFAR policies that are based on moral crusades than good science and public interest? WHO knows?
Sexual and reproductive health worldwide is a mess. According to a global study published in the British medical journal the Lancet last November, international aid for family planning dropped from $560 million in 1995 to $460 million in 2003.
We need Helen Mirren to return, not as queen, but President, a kind of unsmiling, childless, tough-as-nails Inspector Tennyson to defend the rights of women.
Hillary is tough, and Pelosi, too, but I don't like seeing the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives doing photo shoots with a grandkid on her hip. She's being the dog that rolls over to expose her belly and show how non-threatening she is to all the male voters out there. Yeah, I understand the game, but it creeps me out.
Show your soft side long enough, some wolf'll rip it to shreds.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
802 words
Now that Gore's got his Oscar, and Barbara Boxer's in charge of the Environment and Public Works Committee, a safer home for those cute little arctic seals is practically in the bag. But what about that other endangered category: women?
Since George W. Bush took office in 2001 imposing his global gag rule, we've been crushed between the rock and the hard place with no end in sight.
The gag rule cuts off U.S. funds to any foreign organization making any mention of abortion for any reason, no matter where the funding for those services came from. So even mention abortion among a hundred other things, and women in developing countries can kiss goodbye prenatal care and cancer screening and open their arms wide to the half a million women that will die this year during pregnancy or childbirth -- from largely preventable causes.
That's the rock. The hard place is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which does do some good in providing money for treatment and prevention of AIDS in developing countries, but again has a crushing provision that a full one-third of the prevention money go to programs preaching only abstinence.
For Bush, sex workers are garbage. Girls that aren't given the chance to say "no" are crap along the side of the road. Girls forced to marry young are what you scrape off your shoe. Women that already have HIV and have no means to prevent transmitting it aren't even on the map.
When are we going to roll that back?
Is it even on the agenda of the macho Dems when the bad news from Iraq takes half the newspaper every day, and the other half is consumed by presidential wannabees grunting at each other while garden variety torture cases barely get a mention. If another Abu Ghraib was uncovered now, or even if anyone wanted to follow-up on the old one, they'd have to wait in line behind whatever Hillar-Ama brainfart hits the stands next.
There's been little coverage of that lug José Padilla, the "enemy combatant" from Chicago that could barely spell his own name, but was nabbed in 2002 and thrown in an army brig for supposedly coordinating more deadly attacks. He's finally come up for trial and it turns out they tortured him so much he's almost completely insane. Forget poor women dying slowly of AIDS, or during deliveries.
I even resent all the coverage of Academy Awards, though Helen Mirren won best actress and I've had a crush on her for ages, except during her recent incarnation as the pin-curled, blue-rinsed Queen.
If I had my druthers it would other women on the front page this morning, all the forgotten ones dying and at risk, and the handful trying to do something about them.
As it turns out, overturning the gag rule is on the Democratic agenda, kinda, just not far up enough to make it to most newspapers. On January 22, Democratic Representative Nita Lowey from New York re-introduced the timeworn Global Democracy Promotion Act expressly devoted to overturning the gag rule. A couple of weeks ago, California's Rep. Barbara Lee, re-introduced the Pathways Act, which would remove the requirement that one-third of PEPFAR AIDS prevention programs be abstinence-based.
The problem is neither bill will go anywhere this time either. Even if the new clench-fisted, testosterone stoked Dems suddenly admitted sympathy for the problems of women, Bush would veto the bills anyway.
Pressure probably won't come from outside, either. Dr. Margaret Chan, the new director-general of the World Health Organization has announced that women's health is one of her top priorities, but she also seems to be courting America's Big Pharma in recent comments in Bangkok criticizing Thailand for challenging intellectual property laws to develop generic AIDS and cardiac drugs.
Will she turn a blind eye to the United States' global gag rule and PEPFAR policies that are based on moral crusades than good science and public interest? WHO knows?
Sexual and reproductive health worldwide is a mess. According to a global study published in the British medical journal the Lancet last November, international aid for family planning dropped from $560 million in 1995 to $460 million in 2003.
We need Helen Mirren to return, not as queen, but President, a kind of unsmiling, childless, tough-as-nails Inspector Tennyson to defend the rights of women.
Hillary is tough, and Pelosi, too, but I don't like seeing the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives doing photo shoots with a grandkid on her hip. She's being the dog that rolls over to expose her belly and show how non-threatening she is to all the male voters out there. Yeah, I understand the game, but it creeps me out.
Show your soft side long enough, some wolf'll rip it to shreds.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Thoughts on Memory, Violence, and Ilan Halimi's Death as a Jew
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
808 words
In Paris, the flaneur capital of the world, you start one place, end up somewhere else in time and space.
Stop by the Hôtel de Ville to watch ice skaters twirl around in front of two cheesy igloos and the grandiose City Hall building, you'll see an enormous photo of Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian-French politician kidnapped in Colombia in 2002 and still held (if she's not dead) by FARC.
On the rue du Temple, you might be browsing for fancy handbags, and run across a plaque to Raoul Naudet, resistance member, who lived in the building before he got arrested and exterminated in the camp of Mauthausen in 1942.
Last year, I went out with Marina's mom for an ice cream, and we ended up at a memorial to French deportees.
There's a sandy park to one side of Notre Dame. At the far end, you see this long, low wall that's insignificant after the knobby soaring spires and muscular flying buttresses of the Cathedral.
In front is a little placard explaining the memorial, who was taken away and why, how many were exterminated, how many survived. Along the bottom edge are differently colored triangles and the yellow star used to mark the deportees.
Marina's Mom wept a little as she read. She knows the pink triangle is a gay thing, and that the Nazis had interred a lot of different kinds of people, but it hit her hard to see that triangle there condemning her own daughter and son to death camps along with gypsies and dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses, and of course, Jews.
I went back this week. It was the one year anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi, a young man, who was kidnapped by a neighborhood gang united in a love for money and hatred for Jews.
It didn't matter that he was a salaried worker in a cell phone store. He was a Jew and they can always come up with some dough, they said. The "Gang of Barbarians" lived up to their chosen name, torturing him for fun while they waited, then dumping his ravaged, barely living, body by some railroad tracks.
For a while the cops tried to cover up the nature of the death, nothing to do with him being a Jew, or them being Muslim even though they taunted the family with anti-Semitic rants when they made ransom calls, recited Muslim prayers, and in one ransom video, showed Ilan blindfolded with a gun to his head like the ones coming out of Iraq from kidnappers there.
Worst of all, was that some neighbors knew, and said nothing from fear or approval.
I went to an SOS Racisme march organized after the story broke. There were a lot of people, but not as many as I expected, and almost all the marchers were Jews. It was a peculiar experience, being in a march like that in Paris where it was just a couple of generations ago the French rounded up Jews like the people I was walking next to, and sent them to extermination camps.
Usually, when I go to a march, I feel invulnerable. That time, even surrounded by thousands of other people, I felt the joint frailty of our human bodies, and how easy it would be herd us all into cattle cars and kill us, that is, if you first re-imagined us as beasts and nothing more.
The march got ugly after a while when teenage Jewish boys started running around with Israeli flags and Jewish Defense League banners and handkerchiefs drawn up over their faces like guerillas. They shouted and shoved and laughed their heads off.
At first, they just seemed high spirited, reclaiming some ground after the petty harassments they put up with in the Metro, on the streets. Then we heard the sound of breaking store windows. Some of the older people were shaken. Later, a Muslim shopkeeper was roughed up, and a couple of passersby.
That's the double-edged sword of memory, fueling grudges and violence on the one side, on the other compassion. It could be you on the other side of the barbed wire fence.
At the memorial to the 200,000 martyred French deportees, visitors descend a narrow stairway into an imprisoning stone patio, circled all around with high walls. There's a kind of spiked sculpture on the far side, and a barred opening with a glimpse of the Seine.
You turn around and there's an impossibly small passageway into the main memorial, and tomb of an unknown deportee. Inside are narrow barred rooms and walls inscribed with the names of Nazi camps. The main chamber, that you see through bars, has thousands upon thousands of little stones on both sides, each a deportee. They catch the light, burn in the darkness.
As you leave, you see the inscription, "Forgive, but never forget."
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
808 words
In Paris, the flaneur capital of the world, you start one place, end up somewhere else in time and space.
Stop by the Hôtel de Ville to watch ice skaters twirl around in front of two cheesy igloos and the grandiose City Hall building, you'll see an enormous photo of Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian-French politician kidnapped in Colombia in 2002 and still held (if she's not dead) by FARC.
On the rue du Temple, you might be browsing for fancy handbags, and run across a plaque to Raoul Naudet, resistance member, who lived in the building before he got arrested and exterminated in the camp of Mauthausen in 1942.
Last year, I went out with Marina's mom for an ice cream, and we ended up at a memorial to French deportees.
There's a sandy park to one side of Notre Dame. At the far end, you see this long, low wall that's insignificant after the knobby soaring spires and muscular flying buttresses of the Cathedral.
In front is a little placard explaining the memorial, who was taken away and why, how many were exterminated, how many survived. Along the bottom edge are differently colored triangles and the yellow star used to mark the deportees.
Marina's Mom wept a little as she read. She knows the pink triangle is a gay thing, and that the Nazis had interred a lot of different kinds of people, but it hit her hard to see that triangle there condemning her own daughter and son to death camps along with gypsies and dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses, and of course, Jews.
I went back this week. It was the one year anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi, a young man, who was kidnapped by a neighborhood gang united in a love for money and hatred for Jews.
It didn't matter that he was a salaried worker in a cell phone store. He was a Jew and they can always come up with some dough, they said. The "Gang of Barbarians" lived up to their chosen name, torturing him for fun while they waited, then dumping his ravaged, barely living, body by some railroad tracks.
For a while the cops tried to cover up the nature of the death, nothing to do with him being a Jew, or them being Muslim even though they taunted the family with anti-Semitic rants when they made ransom calls, recited Muslim prayers, and in one ransom video, showed Ilan blindfolded with a gun to his head like the ones coming out of Iraq from kidnappers there.
Worst of all, was that some neighbors knew, and said nothing from fear or approval.
I went to an SOS Racisme march organized after the story broke. There were a lot of people, but not as many as I expected, and almost all the marchers were Jews. It was a peculiar experience, being in a march like that in Paris where it was just a couple of generations ago the French rounded up Jews like the people I was walking next to, and sent them to extermination camps.
Usually, when I go to a march, I feel invulnerable. That time, even surrounded by thousands of other people, I felt the joint frailty of our human bodies, and how easy it would be herd us all into cattle cars and kill us, that is, if you first re-imagined us as beasts and nothing more.
The march got ugly after a while when teenage Jewish boys started running around with Israeli flags and Jewish Defense League banners and handkerchiefs drawn up over their faces like guerillas. They shouted and shoved and laughed their heads off.
At first, they just seemed high spirited, reclaiming some ground after the petty harassments they put up with in the Metro, on the streets. Then we heard the sound of breaking store windows. Some of the older people were shaken. Later, a Muslim shopkeeper was roughed up, and a couple of passersby.
That's the double-edged sword of memory, fueling grudges and violence on the one side, on the other compassion. It could be you on the other side of the barbed wire fence.
At the memorial to the 200,000 martyred French deportees, visitors descend a narrow stairway into an imprisoning stone patio, circled all around with high walls. There's a kind of spiked sculpture on the far side, and a barred opening with a glimpse of the Seine.
You turn around and there's an impossibly small passageway into the main memorial, and tomb of an unknown deportee. Inside are narrow barred rooms and walls inscribed with the names of Nazi camps. The main chamber, that you see through bars, has thousands upon thousands of little stones on both sides, each a deportee. They catch the light, burn in the darkness.
As you leave, you see the inscription, "Forgive, but never forget."
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Send An Email, Save the World
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
805 words
So John Edwards hitched his cybercampaign to a couple of unknown mules and found himself yanking on the reins in horror. I'm not surprised. The internet is supposed to be the next big thing in democracy, but when it comes down to it, U.S. candidates really only see it as another fundraising and advertising tool.
Hence the outcry about bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. They were hired for their popularity and democratic cred, then had to issue a bushel of mea culpas for pre-historic, pre-hiring comments on abortion, queers, and the "Christofascist" Catholic Church.
Don't you know you should wipe your feet, ladies, before you come in the door?
The internet is a lot of things, but the blogosphere more than any other part of it is one big intimate invitation into somebody else's brain. People don't mince words or go salt-free all worried about the neighbors.
American politics needs more of that. There's so much pressure on candidates to sanitize themselves that in '04 we ended up with a Kerry so wooden he made Pinocchio look spry.
As candidates get more pre-fab, they look for ways to seem more hip, more current, accessible even, so they put up a site, hire bloggers and scream, "I'm on the internet. Visit my site."
But just what are we really invited to do? Watch their videos. Read their press releases. And give, give, give. Howard Dean's glorious and doomed assertion, "You have the power," has largely been transformed into, "You have the money, hand it to me." Even votes seem like an afterthought.
Not to say there isn't window dressing. The Take Action page of Hillary Clinton's "exploratory" site promises an open blog that is "a crucial part of our exciting national conversation about the direction of our country and the place to go to learn more about Hillary." Whoopee.
Mostly though, her Take Action page is about money. Giving it yourself, or getting someone else to.
Ditto for Barak Obama and the embattled Mr. Edwards whose Take Action page tells us that, "If we want to live in a moral and just America tomorrow, we must act today. Please donate using our secure online form." Rad, man.
McCain, who's had his own blogging controversies, doesn't even pretend. His action page asks supporters to "join our team here. Then choose actions on the right to help raise money, recruit your friends, and help get others involved in this effort." That's it.
In this internet age, we've mistaken information for participation. In their January report on the use of the internet in the 2006 elections, the Pew Research Center rightly touted the increasing importance of the internet, but if you look at what they're actually saying, it seems almost all of the activity goes one direction.
A small, but significant, percentage gave money. Most users just sucked up information about candidates' positions on the issues or voting records, or tried to confirm what they'd already learned. Twenty percent shockingly relied on the candidate's own site for the info.
Plenty of people forward emails or sent links to articles, but only eight percent posted their own political commentary. One percent created and posted their own political video or audio.
What that means to me is that the internet creates a false sense of involvement. Send an email, save the world. Even Pew fell into the trap, defining 23 percent of "campaign internet users" as "activists," not only people that came up with their own opinion, but anybody who hit forward on their email program.
Sure, informing yourself is an important prelude to participation, but passing on an email is just a kind of online gossip, barbershop and beauty parlor stuff. You feel connected, create community, but that's only the appetizer to democracy. There's nothing terribly active about it.
Frankly, there's only one presidential candidate using the internet to empower voters. And she's running in the wrong country.
In France, Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate has used internet organizing from the beginning, in part to sidestep the old boy (elephant) network of the Socialist Party, but more importantly to get feedback and organize real world meetings to ask people what they think are France's most significant problems, and, get this, found out what they think should be done to address them.
The big question in the press has been if she would actually incorporate all this feedback, all these opinions. From her definitive policy speech on February 11th, the answer is "Yes."
As the people demanded, she promised to boost pensions of poor people, raise minimum wage, support job creation for young people, and institute "citizen juries" to evaluate the work of local and federal government.
Win or lose, she's already made a difference just by raising expectations, and redefining political debate as something that should include us all.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
805 words
So John Edwards hitched his cybercampaign to a couple of unknown mules and found himself yanking on the reins in horror. I'm not surprised. The internet is supposed to be the next big thing in democracy, but when it comes down to it, U.S. candidates really only see it as another fundraising and advertising tool.
Hence the outcry about bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. They were hired for their popularity and democratic cred, then had to issue a bushel of mea culpas for pre-historic, pre-hiring comments on abortion, queers, and the "Christofascist" Catholic Church.
Don't you know you should wipe your feet, ladies, before you come in the door?
The internet is a lot of things, but the blogosphere more than any other part of it is one big intimate invitation into somebody else's brain. People don't mince words or go salt-free all worried about the neighbors.
American politics needs more of that. There's so much pressure on candidates to sanitize themselves that in '04 we ended up with a Kerry so wooden he made Pinocchio look spry.
As candidates get more pre-fab, they look for ways to seem more hip, more current, accessible even, so they put up a site, hire bloggers and scream, "I'm on the internet. Visit my site."
But just what are we really invited to do? Watch their videos. Read their press releases. And give, give, give. Howard Dean's glorious and doomed assertion, "You have the power," has largely been transformed into, "You have the money, hand it to me." Even votes seem like an afterthought.
Not to say there isn't window dressing. The Take Action page of Hillary Clinton's "exploratory" site promises an open blog that is "a crucial part of our exciting national conversation about the direction of our country and the place to go to learn more about Hillary." Whoopee.
Mostly though, her Take Action page is about money. Giving it yourself, or getting someone else to.
Ditto for Barak Obama and the embattled Mr. Edwards whose Take Action page tells us that, "If we want to live in a moral and just America tomorrow, we must act today. Please donate using our secure online form." Rad, man.
McCain, who's had his own blogging controversies, doesn't even pretend. His action page asks supporters to "join our team here. Then choose actions on the right to help raise money, recruit your friends, and help get others involved in this effort." That's it.
In this internet age, we've mistaken information for participation. In their January report on the use of the internet in the 2006 elections, the Pew Research Center rightly touted the increasing importance of the internet, but if you look at what they're actually saying, it seems almost all of the activity goes one direction.
A small, but significant, percentage gave money. Most users just sucked up information about candidates' positions on the issues or voting records, or tried to confirm what they'd already learned. Twenty percent shockingly relied on the candidate's own site for the info.
Plenty of people forward emails or sent links to articles, but only eight percent posted their own political commentary. One percent created and posted their own political video or audio.
What that means to me is that the internet creates a false sense of involvement. Send an email, save the world. Even Pew fell into the trap, defining 23 percent of "campaign internet users" as "activists," not only people that came up with their own opinion, but anybody who hit forward on their email program.
Sure, informing yourself is an important prelude to participation, but passing on an email is just a kind of online gossip, barbershop and beauty parlor stuff. You feel connected, create community, but that's only the appetizer to democracy. There's nothing terribly active about it.
Frankly, there's only one presidential candidate using the internet to empower voters. And she's running in the wrong country.
In France, Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate has used internet organizing from the beginning, in part to sidestep the old boy (elephant) network of the Socialist Party, but more importantly to get feedback and organize real world meetings to ask people what they think are France's most significant problems, and, get this, found out what they think should be done to address them.
The big question in the press has been if she would actually incorporate all this feedback, all these opinions. From her definitive policy speech on February 11th, the answer is "Yes."
As the people demanded, she promised to boost pensions of poor people, raise minimum wage, support job creation for young people, and institute "citizen juries" to evaluate the work of local and federal government.
Win or lose, she's already made a difference just by raising expectations, and redefining political debate as something that should include us all.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
No Deeper Than Skin
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
802 words.
You may not know a tailback from a nose tackle, but it was worth watching the Super Bowl last weekend anyway, and not just because there were guys in tight pants.
In a historic first, all the couch potatoes used to watching black Americans provide the muscle and speed of football, got to see them provide the brains as well when for the first time ever shots of the sidelines showed two African American coaches, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, directing the whole shebang.
People throw around words like post-feminism, and post-queer, but what does that mean, really, when we're still having so many firsts? First female Speaker of the House, maybe soon, a first female President.
I'm still a little surprised every time I flip on the tube in the afternoon and see Ellen Degeneres there, one of the first out dykes on TV making jokes in her chic dyke haircut, and white shoes, and tailored dyke suits. I remember how thousands of us lesbians came together in bars and living rooms to watch the coming out episode on her sitcom. The show tanked afterwards, but not her.
I'm glad. It's still important having the face of an out dyke on national TV. Remember how TV changed after 9/11? For almost a month, the rainbow of New York personalities like Al Sharpton, Margarita Lopez, and Freddy Ferrer along with the black and brown local newscasters were erased by the horror of the falling towers and the equally terrifying Giuliani show that featured all white guys all the time.
It was like I lost the city twice. Call me superficial, but appearances are everything.
Which is why I like to see black coaches, and dykes on the small and large screen, even a black female representing America as Secretary of State. So Condi was hatched from a Cold War nest of vipers, big deal. Any replacement would have been as bad. Meanwhile, she and Colin Powell changed the face of America. And abroad, even countries that themselves struggle with race and gender are forced to roll out the red carpet for the Ivy League, piano-playing, African American brainiac femme.
It doesn't entirely matter that Condi herself would probably rather not be seen either as female or black. Or that black businessman Ward Connerly is actively campaigning against affirmative action, what the French call "positive discrimination." They are what they are.
Besides, they're right to have concerns. Organizing around sexual identity or race, the very nature of identity politics, means reinforcing the idea that differences in things like skin, in and of themselves, are meaningful, which is a knife's edge away from bigotry.
So who needs affirmative action? We do.
A couple hundred years of democracy tells us we're all the same under the skin. But in actual practice, like I said, appearance is everything.
I thought about it the other day when I went out for a walk. I'm back in Paris now, and like New York it's a city of neighborhoods. When I found myself in the Goutte-d'Or area, I thought I'd found the anti-Lesbos, a quartier of men.
Some cafés and restaurants seemed to have all Moroccan or Algerian men, others all men from West Africa, Senegal maybe, or Côte d'Ivoire. Testosterone flowed instead of wine. When I paused at the door of a gyro stand, their eyes would follow me, usually with curiosity or indifference, a couple of times with hate.
One man bristled, literally, at my short hair and stared at my white face as if I was an animal waiting to devour him, and not just the lamb I could smell roasting from the street.
I finally got a sandwich in a shop where there were two other women, even if they were only there with their boyfriends in the midst of the men. Their uncovered females faces were like welcome beacons. Appearances again.
Whose street? Not mine, that's for sure.
Faces are like guide posts telling you where you can go. I probably could have gotten a sandwich in any of those places, but I wanted to be comfortable for the six minutes it took to make my sandwich.
For kids, seeing a reflection of themselves on the playing field or TV, in the classroom or news conference has higher stakes. How can a girl see herself as a scientist if all the math and science teachers are men? How can some Hispanic boy see himself going to university if all the pictures in the college brochures are jam-packed with white students?
It's trickier with queers, who usually have to come out in words, accept labels, repeatedly, because humans suffer from nothing if not serial amnesia. At any rate, coming out and staying there still matters.
The truth is that something profound changes when faces do.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
802 words.
You may not know a tailback from a nose tackle, but it was worth watching the Super Bowl last weekend anyway, and not just because there were guys in tight pants.
In a historic first, all the couch potatoes used to watching black Americans provide the muscle and speed of football, got to see them provide the brains as well when for the first time ever shots of the sidelines showed two African American coaches, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, directing the whole shebang.
People throw around words like post-feminism, and post-queer, but what does that mean, really, when we're still having so many firsts? First female Speaker of the House, maybe soon, a first female President.
I'm still a little surprised every time I flip on the tube in the afternoon and see Ellen Degeneres there, one of the first out dykes on TV making jokes in her chic dyke haircut, and white shoes, and tailored dyke suits. I remember how thousands of us lesbians came together in bars and living rooms to watch the coming out episode on her sitcom. The show tanked afterwards, but not her.
I'm glad. It's still important having the face of an out dyke on national TV. Remember how TV changed after 9/11? For almost a month, the rainbow of New York personalities like Al Sharpton, Margarita Lopez, and Freddy Ferrer along with the black and brown local newscasters were erased by the horror of the falling towers and the equally terrifying Giuliani show that featured all white guys all the time.
It was like I lost the city twice. Call me superficial, but appearances are everything.
Which is why I like to see black coaches, and dykes on the small and large screen, even a black female representing America as Secretary of State. So Condi was hatched from a Cold War nest of vipers, big deal. Any replacement would have been as bad. Meanwhile, she and Colin Powell changed the face of America. And abroad, even countries that themselves struggle with race and gender are forced to roll out the red carpet for the Ivy League, piano-playing, African American brainiac femme.
It doesn't entirely matter that Condi herself would probably rather not be seen either as female or black. Or that black businessman Ward Connerly is actively campaigning against affirmative action, what the French call "positive discrimination." They are what they are.
Besides, they're right to have concerns. Organizing around sexual identity or race, the very nature of identity politics, means reinforcing the idea that differences in things like skin, in and of themselves, are meaningful, which is a knife's edge away from bigotry.
So who needs affirmative action? We do.
A couple hundred years of democracy tells us we're all the same under the skin. But in actual practice, like I said, appearance is everything.
I thought about it the other day when I went out for a walk. I'm back in Paris now, and like New York it's a city of neighborhoods. When I found myself in the Goutte-d'Or area, I thought I'd found the anti-Lesbos, a quartier of men.
Some cafés and restaurants seemed to have all Moroccan or Algerian men, others all men from West Africa, Senegal maybe, or Côte d'Ivoire. Testosterone flowed instead of wine. When I paused at the door of a gyro stand, their eyes would follow me, usually with curiosity or indifference, a couple of times with hate.
One man bristled, literally, at my short hair and stared at my white face as if I was an animal waiting to devour him, and not just the lamb I could smell roasting from the street.
I finally got a sandwich in a shop where there were two other women, even if they were only there with their boyfriends in the midst of the men. Their uncovered females faces were like welcome beacons. Appearances again.
Whose street? Not mine, that's for sure.
Faces are like guide posts telling you where you can go. I probably could have gotten a sandwich in any of those places, but I wanted to be comfortable for the six minutes it took to make my sandwich.
For kids, seeing a reflection of themselves on the playing field or TV, in the classroom or news conference has higher stakes. How can a girl see herself as a scientist if all the math and science teachers are men? How can some Hispanic boy see himself going to university if all the pictures in the college brochures are jam-packed with white students?
It's trickier with queers, who usually have to come out in words, accept labels, repeatedly, because humans suffer from nothing if not serial amnesia. At any rate, coming out and staying there still matters.
The truth is that something profound changes when faces do.
Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.
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