By Kelly Jean Cogswell
With the Republicans on the ropes, the main Democratic candidates have finally been emboldened to take on health care. They're getting kudos for proposing universal care, with expanded federal health insurance, plenty of tax credits, and limits on Big Pharma.
What I didn't see, at least in Hillary's plan, was anything to do with "end-of-life" care, or whatever gentler phrase you can think of for nursing homes. By any name, nursing homes are the new flesh trade, the ultimate rag and bone shop where investors by and sell living meat and no one gets out alive.
They've always been bad. Have you seen the places? Have you smelled them? I've visited a bunch of the homes I'd end up in in New York. The stench hits you when you walk in, disinfectant, urine, sweat, misery and old cabbage soup.
There's no privacy and no private property that you can't fit in a pocket because you can't lock your door and stuff walks away. Keeping even a little CD player, or an ipod is almost impossible. The administration controls your eating and sleeping and shitting and bathing.
Add in the queer factor and hell itself looks appetizing by comparison. Imagine being stuck at the mercy of God-fearing, Christian nurses who already think dykes and fags should burn. That's my nightmare. No room to call my own. Even my body belongs to them. They manipulate it at when they can be bothered to.
Screw aging. We can talk about the perks of wisdom, but really, who looks forward to the mental slippage, the physical parts going one by one, the vulnerability? I do what I can to stay healthy, but there are limits. And there are limits to what our partners can do for us, if we're lucky enough to have them.
One in four of Americans end their lives in nursing homes. I'd rather die. In fact, it's the only point in common I have with my mother who says, "Just shoot me," when the aging quandary comes up. I offered once to do it then and there, but she didn't take me up on it.
I used to think I'd be okay if only I had the money for a private home. But now it seems that middle- and upper-class people are doomed, too.
As baby boomers age, nursing homes have become a new favorite of investment groups. Ronald E. Silva, president and CEO of Fillmore Capital told the New York Times, "There's essentially unlimited consumer demand as the baby boomers age ... I've never seen a surer bet."
Once the investment groups buy a place, the rush starts to decrease costs, and maximize profit, usually by dumping staff. The results are unsurprising.
Investigating private homes, the Times found people dead from preventable causes: complications of bedsores, tracheotomy tubes that were clogged because the staff was cut so far down in the name of profit nobody bothered to do basic checking of these bodies temporarily warehoused.
Ironic how we outlaw prostitution where sex workers are at least selling their own bodies, but we happily trade in buildings full of human beings. If they were on ships, they would be slaves. As it is, incapacitated people in nursing homes are more like pork bellies. I wouldn't be surprised if they were sold by the pound.
Seniors should be up in arms. Everybody should. We should pressure the democratic candidates who think it's enough to court the big voting block of seniors with promises to reduce the costs of prescription drugs and health screenings.
And good luck to 'em. This industry is as secretive and barely regulated as the old Ma Bell or for that matter, military contracting. They protect themselves with Byzantine corporate structures that make it impossible to hold anyone accountable.
But if we don't push for it, no one will. People already trapped in the industry are not able to advocate for themselves. They're already physically or mentally disabled, just plain tired, or hopeless.
Don't console yourself with hopes of alternative places, like assisted living complexes. Increasingly there are queer ones, but they are out of reach for most of us. A small home in the queer retirement community Palms of Manasota in Florida reportedly costs upward of $130,000. I can't afford to pitch even a tent there. And who wants to live in Florida anyway?
I'm not the only concerned one. In the 2006 MetLife "Out and Aging" lesbians were afraid their savings would run out. Fags were afraid of illness and dependence. Both were concerned that healthcare professionals wouldn't treat them with dignity and respect as they aged.
Frankly, we should all be terrified. Aging people are crap in America and old queers are even lower than straights. Maybe it's time for aging to move to the front of our agenda.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Emerging from the Atheist Closet
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Scientists are beginning to discover religion is hardwired into the human brain. I'm not surprised. In Paris, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cathedral. Their steeples punctuate the red tiled roofs. A couple of times a day bells fill the air.
As for America, the whole story of our "founding" is about religious dissidents looking for a home. Every couple of generations vast evangelical movements and spiritual awakenings sweep the country. We sprout a sect a minute. When we remember Native Americans, it's usually to mug them for their eagle feathers and prayer pipes and sweat lodges.
It's a wonder we ended up with a democracy at all, and not a succession of bloody theocracies.
Given all that, it's interesting to watch atheists begin to emerge from the closet. September 11th was the last straw. Sick equally of Muslims and Christians, groups of nonbelievers have sprung up all over, and have a growing presence on the internet with chat rooms and blogs, all determined to fight the surge in religion.
Their books are selling like hotcakes. "God Is Not Great" by the Brit Christopher Hitchens is number twelve on the New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction. "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins sneaks in at thirty-four, just after the Pope's "Jesus of Nazareth."
Still, atheists have an uphill battle, especially in the ultrareligious U.S. A poll a couple of weeks ago by Pew Research Center showed that only Muslims and atheists were longer shots than Mormons in terms of electability. But while forty-five percent said they had reservations about a Muslim contender for president, a whopping sixty-one percent of the participants said an atheist was pretty much out of the running for them.
A 2006 Minnesota study said Americans even preferred homos to atheists when it came to questions of trust. All queers do is have dirty disgusting sex. The godless are capable of anything.
Atheists are punished not just with political banishment, but violence. Put a "heathen" bumper sticker on your car, you risk a bashed windshield. Write a letter to the editor, expect a cross burnt on your lawn, at least in Alabama.
I spent a couple of days trying to imagine a world run by atheists. I found it more peaceful and safe--for me, anyway. There was less fuel for misogynists, less hate against queers. No "God is on my side" argument for wars and politics. No suicide bombers with virgins waiting in the wings. Without the excuse of God, greed, fury, ambition and hate have to stand naked. Like charity, kindness, generosity and love.
The problem is, as somebody who not only grew up Southern Baptist, but embraced the sect, my subconscious is crawling with religion. When I sit down to write, I often end up with a page full of religious imagery. Hell, I dream in it, while I work to erase religion from our political lives.
In Paris, I've even taken to haunting churches. The buildings are open all day and if you're out for a long walk, they offer a quiet place to sit and rest. Many of them are gorgeous, and besides, you're more likely to hear a string quartet than a mass. Religious services are held in discrete corners. The rest of the place is given over to art shows and concerts, and tourists who are asked to contribute a euro or two to keep them from falling to dust.
One of the cathedrals I like best is Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, newly famous for the nuptials of Eva Longoria and Tony Parker. Kings used to get married there. Then there's the small matter of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572.
The bells of the church were rung as signal to kick off the slaughter of a few thousand protestant Huguenots in town for a wedding. That's religion for you. Add in the priests that ran roughshod over French citizens for centuries, you get a perfect explanation of the anticlerical revolution that saw furious citizens pillage every church in the country.
I wonder sometimes why they didn't bring them down stone by stone like the Taliban did with the great stone Buddhas of Afghanistan. Was it residual religious respect? An appreciation for their beauty and history? Or just legendary French thrift? During the revolution, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois was used for storage, and later as a police station. Now it is what it is. A beautiful, slightly ravaged building next to city offices. A kind of momento mori.
I think that air of decay is what appeals to me. While we can't erase religion, maybe we can find a way in America to shrink it. We can start by shifting it from politics to culture, and we should teach it modesty, let it beg for every penny, like the beautiful crumbling churches of France.
Scientists are beginning to discover religion is hardwired into the human brain. I'm not surprised. In Paris, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cathedral. Their steeples punctuate the red tiled roofs. A couple of times a day bells fill the air.
As for America, the whole story of our "founding" is about religious dissidents looking for a home. Every couple of generations vast evangelical movements and spiritual awakenings sweep the country. We sprout a sect a minute. When we remember Native Americans, it's usually to mug them for their eagle feathers and prayer pipes and sweat lodges.
It's a wonder we ended up with a democracy at all, and not a succession of bloody theocracies.
Given all that, it's interesting to watch atheists begin to emerge from the closet. September 11th was the last straw. Sick equally of Muslims and Christians, groups of nonbelievers have sprung up all over, and have a growing presence on the internet with chat rooms and blogs, all determined to fight the surge in religion.
Their books are selling like hotcakes. "God Is Not Great" by the Brit Christopher Hitchens is number twelve on the New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction. "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins sneaks in at thirty-four, just after the Pope's "Jesus of Nazareth."
Still, atheists have an uphill battle, especially in the ultrareligious U.S. A poll a couple of weeks ago by Pew Research Center showed that only Muslims and atheists were longer shots than Mormons in terms of electability. But while forty-five percent said they had reservations about a Muslim contender for president, a whopping sixty-one percent of the participants said an atheist was pretty much out of the running for them.
A 2006 Minnesota study said Americans even preferred homos to atheists when it came to questions of trust. All queers do is have dirty disgusting sex. The godless are capable of anything.
Atheists are punished not just with political banishment, but violence. Put a "heathen" bumper sticker on your car, you risk a bashed windshield. Write a letter to the editor, expect a cross burnt on your lawn, at least in Alabama.
I spent a couple of days trying to imagine a world run by atheists. I found it more peaceful and safe--for me, anyway. There was less fuel for misogynists, less hate against queers. No "God is on my side" argument for wars and politics. No suicide bombers with virgins waiting in the wings. Without the excuse of God, greed, fury, ambition and hate have to stand naked. Like charity, kindness, generosity and love.
The problem is, as somebody who not only grew up Southern Baptist, but embraced the sect, my subconscious is crawling with religion. When I sit down to write, I often end up with a page full of religious imagery. Hell, I dream in it, while I work to erase religion from our political lives.
In Paris, I've even taken to haunting churches. The buildings are open all day and if you're out for a long walk, they offer a quiet place to sit and rest. Many of them are gorgeous, and besides, you're more likely to hear a string quartet than a mass. Religious services are held in discrete corners. The rest of the place is given over to art shows and concerts, and tourists who are asked to contribute a euro or two to keep them from falling to dust.
One of the cathedrals I like best is Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, newly famous for the nuptials of Eva Longoria and Tony Parker. Kings used to get married there. Then there's the small matter of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572.
The bells of the church were rung as signal to kick off the slaughter of a few thousand protestant Huguenots in town for a wedding. That's religion for you. Add in the priests that ran roughshod over French citizens for centuries, you get a perfect explanation of the anticlerical revolution that saw furious citizens pillage every church in the country.
I wonder sometimes why they didn't bring them down stone by stone like the Taliban did with the great stone Buddhas of Afghanistan. Was it residual religious respect? An appreciation for their beauty and history? Or just legendary French thrift? During the revolution, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois was used for storage, and later as a police station. Now it is what it is. A beautiful, slightly ravaged building next to city offices. A kind of momento mori.
I think that air of decay is what appeals to me. While we can't erase religion, maybe we can find a way in America to shrink it. We can start by shifting it from politics to culture, and we should teach it modesty, let it beg for every penny, like the beautiful crumbling churches of France.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Rose Is a Rose Is a September Bomb
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I know it's an old question, but what's in the name of a thing? I looked out my window the other morning, and where there are usually pigeons picking their way across the red roof tiles, I saw this bird not unlike a crow, but with much longer tail feathers and bright patches of electric blue along the sides, like a kind of penguin.
I don't know anything about birds, but that didn't keep me from thinking, "Tern, I wonder if it's a tern." At least that's what I wondered, until I stuck it in my blog and "Ampy" wrote in and said from the description it was probably a magpie.
She'd be appalled at my friend Zon who knowingly calls every tree a dogwood, even the enormous chestnuts along the Seine. It's perverse, but by and large who cares? Words can mean anything we want. No one else has to agree unless the desired end is communication, and not just some generic word for tree, though "tree" does well enough in most cases. Still, Zon argues, it doesn't have the poetry of dogwood.
The implications are different in Washington where politicians play games with language every time they open their mouths, and not for the sake of poetry. That word "America," can mean a field of corn, a cross, a gun, especially when it's followed by any combination of phrases that include either, "War" and "Terror" or "September."
And in the face of everything meaning almost anything, I'm tempted sometimes as a writer to go mute, that or develop my own dictionary, a lexicon of lexicogswell. The problem is it'd be outdated as soon as it was printed. Words erode as soon as they leave my mouth. Or computer. Starting with September.
I remember when that word used to mean the start of school, used books with their hoard of words, the trying on of hand-me-downs from my sisters, new shoes. In the countryside, it meant goldenrod and asters, the first turning of the leaves. Then there was the winding down of baseball.
Yeah, September was a nice word for a nice time, even in New York. And the day the towers fell was as beautiful a day as New York's seen with blue, blue sky and sun behind the towers, glinting off the falling glass, falling papers, falling people, then the dust and the fires that were only the beginning.
I wish New York could have mourned alone, instead of having a flag planted in our hearts like a dagger. Now it seems ridiculous to pause and grieve when America has thousands more dead, not to mention, (they never are) the tens of thousands of Iraqis that were liberated not only from Saddam but the convenience of regular food supplies, health care, safety, peace, and finally life itself.
That's September for you -- the new word for cynicism and profiteering in the midst of death, chaos, collapse, ruin and patriotism.
In the U.S., on the eleventh, all the baseball stadiums now hope to have a New York team so they can project the tumbling towers and the Star Spangled singer can get that extra little catch in the throat, so that they'll sell a few more twenty-dollar flags. In Washington, they trot out the date to sell new terrorism acts, or war plans.
General David H. Petraeus is at the front of the pack this year, hawking his plan to keep us in Iraq, so he can test a few pet theories on counterinsurgencies and put off the chaos of any withdrawal until a Democrat gets in office and has to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile we pour dead children into our cars along with the oil. Meanwhile, Rudolph Guiliani, Republican candidate for president sells himself as New York's wartime mayor from the blast. Even protests couldn't keep him away from the commemoration ceremony.
I even question our remembrance of LGBT fire fighters, and 9/11 heroes, using them to push ourselves forward as genuine patriots. If the end of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy finally gets bought by Congress, and it's suddenly okay to be queer in the military, it won't be because they admire our courage, but because it's easier to waive the ban on dykes and faggots than reinstitute the draft to recruit more bodies.
This September I'm in France where it's all rugby, rugby, rugby from the World Cup. There's still the Iraq War and September 11th remembrances, but I can watch kids buy schoolbooks without wanting to puke. I can look at the sky, and yellowing chestnuts (dogwoods) without feeling disgusted at how their falling leaves have been co-opted.
We have to remember what words mean, beginning with September, and moving along to truth, justice, and if we dare, America.
I know it's an old question, but what's in the name of a thing? I looked out my window the other morning, and where there are usually pigeons picking their way across the red roof tiles, I saw this bird not unlike a crow, but with much longer tail feathers and bright patches of electric blue along the sides, like a kind of penguin.
I don't know anything about birds, but that didn't keep me from thinking, "Tern, I wonder if it's a tern." At least that's what I wondered, until I stuck it in my blog and "Ampy" wrote in and said from the description it was probably a magpie.
She'd be appalled at my friend Zon who knowingly calls every tree a dogwood, even the enormous chestnuts along the Seine. It's perverse, but by and large who cares? Words can mean anything we want. No one else has to agree unless the desired end is communication, and not just some generic word for tree, though "tree" does well enough in most cases. Still, Zon argues, it doesn't have the poetry of dogwood.
The implications are different in Washington where politicians play games with language every time they open their mouths, and not for the sake of poetry. That word "America," can mean a field of corn, a cross, a gun, especially when it's followed by any combination of phrases that include either, "War" and "Terror" or "September."
And in the face of everything meaning almost anything, I'm tempted sometimes as a writer to go mute, that or develop my own dictionary, a lexicon of lexicogswell. The problem is it'd be outdated as soon as it was printed. Words erode as soon as they leave my mouth. Or computer. Starting with September.
I remember when that word used to mean the start of school, used books with their hoard of words, the trying on of hand-me-downs from my sisters, new shoes. In the countryside, it meant goldenrod and asters, the first turning of the leaves. Then there was the winding down of baseball.
Yeah, September was a nice word for a nice time, even in New York. And the day the towers fell was as beautiful a day as New York's seen with blue, blue sky and sun behind the towers, glinting off the falling glass, falling papers, falling people, then the dust and the fires that were only the beginning.
I wish New York could have mourned alone, instead of having a flag planted in our hearts like a dagger. Now it seems ridiculous to pause and grieve when America has thousands more dead, not to mention, (they never are) the tens of thousands of Iraqis that were liberated not only from Saddam but the convenience of regular food supplies, health care, safety, peace, and finally life itself.
That's September for you -- the new word for cynicism and profiteering in the midst of death, chaos, collapse, ruin and patriotism.
In the U.S., on the eleventh, all the baseball stadiums now hope to have a New York team so they can project the tumbling towers and the Star Spangled singer can get that extra little catch in the throat, so that they'll sell a few more twenty-dollar flags. In Washington, they trot out the date to sell new terrorism acts, or war plans.
General David H. Petraeus is at the front of the pack this year, hawking his plan to keep us in Iraq, so he can test a few pet theories on counterinsurgencies and put off the chaos of any withdrawal until a Democrat gets in office and has to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile we pour dead children into our cars along with the oil. Meanwhile, Rudolph Guiliani, Republican candidate for president sells himself as New York's wartime mayor from the blast. Even protests couldn't keep him away from the commemoration ceremony.
I even question our remembrance of LGBT fire fighters, and 9/11 heroes, using them to push ourselves forward as genuine patriots. If the end of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy finally gets bought by Congress, and it's suddenly okay to be queer in the military, it won't be because they admire our courage, but because it's easier to waive the ban on dykes and faggots than reinstitute the draft to recruit more bodies.
This September I'm in France where it's all rugby, rugby, rugby from the World Cup. There's still the Iraq War and September 11th remembrances, but I can watch kids buy schoolbooks without wanting to puke. I can look at the sky, and yellowing chestnuts (dogwoods) without feeling disgusted at how their falling leaves have been co-opted.
We have to remember what words mean, beginning with September, and moving along to truth, justice, and if we dare, America.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
In Praise of the Water Closet
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
If you're going to have a quickie, it might as well be in a public toilet where the basic needs are generally taken care of, and you have all the facilities for fluids to go hygienically from one tube down another. There, help getting off is an act of kindness really, like passing toilet paper between stalls when somebody's out. What's a simple blow job between men?
I've often wished it was as easy for dykes. There's always such a line outside the bathroom door, and inside, too, where there's the scrum at the mirrors and soap. If someone's tapping their foot, it's from impatience at the wailing toddler being coaxed to pee. There's the sound, too, of tampons being unwrapped that doesn't get anybody's juices flowing.
I've tried semi-public sex myself. A girlfriend and I went into the backroom of a bar once where the boys were having a sweetly chaste circle jerk, but when I decided to crawl under her skirt, the bouncer decided we were positively "unsafe" and tossed us out. Though now that I think about it, it was probably the sight of female parts that the guys didn't like, the invasion of boobs and omnivorous vaginas.
That's the thing about public sex. It stakes out territory, something I'd like to see women do more of. Out of a hundred seats in the U.S. Senate, only sixteen are dick free. In plenty of neighborhoods, women can barely walk on the street at night, much less fuck there, forget the ballot box. At a mere 5'5' I consider pepper spraying the dark spaces between cars and carrying a machete.
For women, getting arrested for cruising, or screwing each other in public would be an advance, a sign of entitlement, or at least daring.
I'd like to see marauding packs of dykes in all the dark alleys, peeing in corners like guys, leaving lipstick on lampposts and window panes, hanging out in toilets scaring away the hets who linger with powder and eyebrow pencils and diaper bags and are always demanding if I'm in the right bathroom until I'm tempted to flip up my shirt and show my meager tits.
Which makes me wonder what it means to "out" a guy who's already screwing in public. His body's out there. Or his dick is, anyway, before he puts it away and moves on. Is he gay? Or in this post-Stonewall age, just homosexual? Or nothing at all? Should we take him at his outraged word? "I'm not gay." Making him just another asshole?
Heterosexuality means so many things. It's a convenient mask even for straight people. There's nothing a man can't get away with if he puts on a suit and acquires a wife. As a woman, get a wedding ring, tuck a baby under your arm, and just wait for the social perks. You're a mother, that's it. Behind the façade, anything goes, screw the mailman or papergirl, find a sheep.
Straights themselves know that heterosexuality is a kind of amputation, a ritual scarring with benefits. I remember how my mother regretted marrying and told us so repeatedly, but at least it got her out of her parents' house.
Likewise, a little sex in the airport john shouldn't get in the way of a three bedroom split level with semi-detached garage or singing in the church choir or a nice congressional seat where you can fight the queers wedging open the safe little community you've built. Or that's how the reasoning goes in the dark corner of the closeted brain until you see the looks on your colleagues faces.
The delusion is interesting, though. I think queers pushing for marriage are often playing the same game, imagining the word will give them legitimacy, and not just tax advantages and inheritance rights. More importantly, it'll lay down a road map, offer roles so we don't have to keep reinventing ourselves, discovering what it means to be queer, what it means to be good.
I can see the point of that, too, like a suit and tie. I've always admired them, at least on Cary Grant who was born for a snow white shirt and suit coat. It must be a relief to get up in the morning and grab one of each with no need for coordination. The key is to remember all the latitude and longitude of what's underneath, and recognize that like heterosexuality, suits are a game and mask.
I sometimes want a short cut, too. Like religion with the rules that'll get you to heaven. Don't worry your pretty little head about morality. Just be a husband and husband, wife and wife. Leave your contradictions in the toilet.
You can find sex there, or violence, or love. You can make a cult of it, or catch something from the seat.
If you're going to have a quickie, it might as well be in a public toilet where the basic needs are generally taken care of, and you have all the facilities for fluids to go hygienically from one tube down another. There, help getting off is an act of kindness really, like passing toilet paper between stalls when somebody's out. What's a simple blow job between men?
I've often wished it was as easy for dykes. There's always such a line outside the bathroom door, and inside, too, where there's the scrum at the mirrors and soap. If someone's tapping their foot, it's from impatience at the wailing toddler being coaxed to pee. There's the sound, too, of tampons being unwrapped that doesn't get anybody's juices flowing.
I've tried semi-public sex myself. A girlfriend and I went into the backroom of a bar once where the boys were having a sweetly chaste circle jerk, but when I decided to crawl under her skirt, the bouncer decided we were positively "unsafe" and tossed us out. Though now that I think about it, it was probably the sight of female parts that the guys didn't like, the invasion of boobs and omnivorous vaginas.
That's the thing about public sex. It stakes out territory, something I'd like to see women do more of. Out of a hundred seats in the U.S. Senate, only sixteen are dick free. In plenty of neighborhoods, women can barely walk on the street at night, much less fuck there, forget the ballot box. At a mere 5'5' I consider pepper spraying the dark spaces between cars and carrying a machete.
For women, getting arrested for cruising, or screwing each other in public would be an advance, a sign of entitlement, or at least daring.
I'd like to see marauding packs of dykes in all the dark alleys, peeing in corners like guys, leaving lipstick on lampposts and window panes, hanging out in toilets scaring away the hets who linger with powder and eyebrow pencils and diaper bags and are always demanding if I'm in the right bathroom until I'm tempted to flip up my shirt and show my meager tits.
Which makes me wonder what it means to "out" a guy who's already screwing in public. His body's out there. Or his dick is, anyway, before he puts it away and moves on. Is he gay? Or in this post-Stonewall age, just homosexual? Or nothing at all? Should we take him at his outraged word? "I'm not gay." Making him just another asshole?
Heterosexuality means so many things. It's a convenient mask even for straight people. There's nothing a man can't get away with if he puts on a suit and acquires a wife. As a woman, get a wedding ring, tuck a baby under your arm, and just wait for the social perks. You're a mother, that's it. Behind the façade, anything goes, screw the mailman or papergirl, find a sheep.
Straights themselves know that heterosexuality is a kind of amputation, a ritual scarring with benefits. I remember how my mother regretted marrying and told us so repeatedly, but at least it got her out of her parents' house.
Likewise, a little sex in the airport john shouldn't get in the way of a three bedroom split level with semi-detached garage or singing in the church choir or a nice congressional seat where you can fight the queers wedging open the safe little community you've built. Or that's how the reasoning goes in the dark corner of the closeted brain until you see the looks on your colleagues faces.
The delusion is interesting, though. I think queers pushing for marriage are often playing the same game, imagining the word will give them legitimacy, and not just tax advantages and inheritance rights. More importantly, it'll lay down a road map, offer roles so we don't have to keep reinventing ourselves, discovering what it means to be queer, what it means to be good.
I can see the point of that, too, like a suit and tie. I've always admired them, at least on Cary Grant who was born for a snow white shirt and suit coat. It must be a relief to get up in the morning and grab one of each with no need for coordination. The key is to remember all the latitude and longitude of what's underneath, and recognize that like heterosexuality, suits are a game and mask.
I sometimes want a short cut, too. Like religion with the rules that'll get you to heaven. Don't worry your pretty little head about morality. Just be a husband and husband, wife and wife. Leave your contradictions in the toilet.
You can find sex there, or violence, or love. You can make a cult of it, or catch something from the seat.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Gonzo's Gone, Who's Next?
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
So Alberto Gonzales finally stepped down as U.S. Attorney General, declaring himself smarmily thankful for his "remarkable journey" and popping the champagne cork of the pity party by evoking his immigrant roots.
"I have lived the American dream," he said. "Even my worst days as attorney general were better than my father's best days."
I bet not. Alberto's been in the hot seat for Bush & Co. wire-tapping schemes, and for firing uncooperative U.S. attorneys. For an all too brief moment years and years ago he was wanly criticized for calling the Geneva Conventions, "quaint" in a post-9/11 world.
It was at his urging, the Department of Justice drafted a memo redefining the word "torture" to allow interrogators to do almost everything short of killing.
He defended Bush's secret prisons, stymied voting rights cases, reports of racial profiling, and according to the New York Times, undercut the federal case against Big Tobacco.
What heights for the son of an immigrant. He's even come a long way since he was Bush's Secretary of State in Texas where he and W. combined to kill more prisoners there than ever--fifty-six. What's a couple of humans more or less? What's a life if it's not yours?
His father must be rolling in his grave at a son who considers that a day spent rolling in the sewers of consecutive Bush administrations is better than any of his father's best. As if poor people can't have good days, too, moments of transcendence. A ragpicker is better than Gonzales. The prisoners he shat on sleep better than him.
The only funny thing about his resignation is that Gonzales tried to resign on the phone, but Bush wouldn't let him. He had to go all the way to Crawford, Texas, hat in hand, and do it over lunch. I'm not sure if it was a sign of Bush's misplaced loyalty, a desire to look his old pal in the eye and make sure things between them were square, or if it was just to make up the numbers at the Sunday family barbecue.
Bush's Texas entourage has been dwindling lately what with Rummy long gone, and Ken Rove, was it? The French President Nicolas Sarkozy came running for hamburgers an hour late, but his wife Cecilia backed out with a cold, a terrible, terrible cold that lasted about as long as the picnic.
Mrs. Gonzales, though, was polite enough to come for the last meal. I wonder what was on the menu. Hotdogs? Crow? Did Alberto get a request like prisoners spending their last night on death row? Maybe a nice rice pudding with extra cinnamon? That's calming, if nothing else.
At the press conference, Gonzales didn't give any reasons for resigning, and after making a brief statement literally fled the room before anybody could ask questions, or slap on cuffs.
"Better late than never," said Senator John Edwards when he heard about the resignation.
You could say that about the Democrats, too. They were impotent and fearful under a Republican majority, and barely show signs of life even now, when the tables are turned. What about all of them that gave the White House a free pass recently on a new spying bill? Are they gonna step down, too?
I wish all these people would get what they deserve like in those old Victorian novels where the bad old rich people would lose all their money and have to go begging to their former (now incredibly wealthy) victims for help.
What about the kind of justice you sometimes get in New York housing court where a judge will on occasion condemn landlords to live in their own crumbling rat- and roach-infested buildings until they do the repairs? There's a secret cell in a secret prison labeled Fredo, another for Bush.
Impeachment's not good enough. What is that really, but a chance for some other president to give a pardon? Congress will never throw anybody in the clink. I bet they don't even start proceedings against Bush. For that you need to get a blow job in the Oral Office.
With Bush, it's the American people that got screwed, and Iraqis, and Afghanis, and all the women globally who suffered when he banned health funds to programs offering family planning. Then there are the people living on islands and coasts as the sea levels rise... queers...
Our own Senator Schumer, who has been calling for Mr. Gonzales' departure weighed in with his own two cents, or being a politician, a good half dollar. "It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new leadership."
Don't we all?
So Alberto Gonzales finally stepped down as U.S. Attorney General, declaring himself smarmily thankful for his "remarkable journey" and popping the champagne cork of the pity party by evoking his immigrant roots.
"I have lived the American dream," he said. "Even my worst days as attorney general were better than my father's best days."
I bet not. Alberto's been in the hot seat for Bush & Co. wire-tapping schemes, and for firing uncooperative U.S. attorneys. For an all too brief moment years and years ago he was wanly criticized for calling the Geneva Conventions, "quaint" in a post-9/11 world.
It was at his urging, the Department of Justice drafted a memo redefining the word "torture" to allow interrogators to do almost everything short of killing.
He defended Bush's secret prisons, stymied voting rights cases, reports of racial profiling, and according to the New York Times, undercut the federal case against Big Tobacco.
What heights for the son of an immigrant. He's even come a long way since he was Bush's Secretary of State in Texas where he and W. combined to kill more prisoners there than ever--fifty-six. What's a couple of humans more or less? What's a life if it's not yours?
His father must be rolling in his grave at a son who considers that a day spent rolling in the sewers of consecutive Bush administrations is better than any of his father's best. As if poor people can't have good days, too, moments of transcendence. A ragpicker is better than Gonzales. The prisoners he shat on sleep better than him.
The only funny thing about his resignation is that Gonzales tried to resign on the phone, but Bush wouldn't let him. He had to go all the way to Crawford, Texas, hat in hand, and do it over lunch. I'm not sure if it was a sign of Bush's misplaced loyalty, a desire to look his old pal in the eye and make sure things between them were square, or if it was just to make up the numbers at the Sunday family barbecue.
Bush's Texas entourage has been dwindling lately what with Rummy long gone, and Ken Rove, was it? The French President Nicolas Sarkozy came running for hamburgers an hour late, but his wife Cecilia backed out with a cold, a terrible, terrible cold that lasted about as long as the picnic.
Mrs. Gonzales, though, was polite enough to come for the last meal. I wonder what was on the menu. Hotdogs? Crow? Did Alberto get a request like prisoners spending their last night on death row? Maybe a nice rice pudding with extra cinnamon? That's calming, if nothing else.
At the press conference, Gonzales didn't give any reasons for resigning, and after making a brief statement literally fled the room before anybody could ask questions, or slap on cuffs.
"Better late than never," said Senator John Edwards when he heard about the resignation.
You could say that about the Democrats, too. They were impotent and fearful under a Republican majority, and barely show signs of life even now, when the tables are turned. What about all of them that gave the White House a free pass recently on a new spying bill? Are they gonna step down, too?
I wish all these people would get what they deserve like in those old Victorian novels where the bad old rich people would lose all their money and have to go begging to their former (now incredibly wealthy) victims for help.
What about the kind of justice you sometimes get in New York housing court where a judge will on occasion condemn landlords to live in their own crumbling rat- and roach-infested buildings until they do the repairs? There's a secret cell in a secret prison labeled Fredo, another for Bush.
Impeachment's not good enough. What is that really, but a chance for some other president to give a pardon? Congress will never throw anybody in the clink. I bet they don't even start proceedings against Bush. For that you need to get a blow job in the Oral Office.
With Bush, it's the American people that got screwed, and Iraqis, and Afghanis, and all the women globally who suffered when he banned health funds to programs offering family planning. Then there are the people living on islands and coasts as the sea levels rise... queers...
Our own Senator Schumer, who has been calling for Mr. Gonzales' departure weighed in with his own two cents, or being a politician, a good half dollar. "It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new leadership."
Don't we all?
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Queer in the Age of Torture
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
For the last couple of weeks, French newsstands have been displaying this beefcake in a red speedo. He's got his hands behind his head and arches just a little to emphasize his bare naked chest. It's the cover of the struggling gay rag Tetu, but I'm not tempted to buy it.
The white, unmarked flesh seems so vulnerable plastered there in the plexiglass booth. I can't help but wonder what they'd do to it in Guantanamo or one of those secret prisons in Egypt where they practice torture, often on queers.
Sometimes I imagine the perfect pecs shot through with arrows like St. Sebastian. Other times, I see the body with a heap of others, blinded with hoods, piled naked on a cold concrete floor with Private Lindy England smiling over them right at the camera.
Then I think of Matthew Shepard beaten and left to die tied to a fence in Wyoming, and David Wojnarowicz whose flesh was mortified more slowly by AIDS because there were no ARVs yet, and who cared about another dead fag? "If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers," said one Texas governor.
We think we're safe now. In America, this week alone, we have all the Democratic candidates crowding the civil union bandwagon or leaping on the gay marriage horse, promising to dismantle the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy for homo soldiers.
Lutherans have even cracked open the gates to heaven. The denomination still bars us from being openly queer in the ministry, but now recommends to its bishops that they pray a lot before dumping us like hot fag potatoes if we somehow come out. In 2009 they hope to come to some kind of consensus about "human sexuality" and until then, caution is the better part of velour, and don't throw bricks at glass menageries.
There's one current moving forward, and one underneath tugging back. Either could drown us.
Think about it. What the Lutheran decision really means is that homophobic pastors are asked to stay their hands while in the backrooms of churches a bunch of others discuss us like plants or animals, considering whether we have souls, if we can serve God, be blessed in a union. If anybody wants to know how many of us can dance on the head of a pin, tell them about 982 fit, but only if we do the rumba.
Can progress root itself in this kind of shame? If it does, will it last? They hate us so much. And our meager gains aren't written in stone. Look at Roe v. Wade. After a couple of years under Bush, the decision that gave women control over basic little things like bearing children has eroded like the Jersey shoreline.
The gains of women and queers have almost always been linked. Maybe the losses will be, too. Maybe they are already, all those anti-gay marriage amendments thriving in individual States.
No matter how many times we've tried to sanitize our image, replacing drag queens and leather bears and dykes on bikes with two guys or two girls in tuxedoes, kissing chastely in front of a judge, declaring gay rights to be all about love and families, sir, please give us gay marriage, the hets still see boys in speedos rolling around on their sanctuary floors.
That's dangerous for us in the age of torture, when sex is a tool for humiliation and bodies alone are almost as superfluous as the limbs of our soldiers in Iraq. We've become hardened to words like waterboarding, stress positions, isolation. We saw corpses floating in New Orleans, lying bloated in muddy gutters, but we went on.
Justice with her blind eyes and sword isn't enough. You can't ask her for compassion, just dollars on the barrelhead when victims sue. Me, I prefer slatternly Liberty with her tits spilling from her dress leading a ragtag band to freedom. Perhaps soon in America there will be an epic battle like Godzilla and Mothra, but with Justice and Liberty duking it out.
It would be better if they worked together, but I don't see it happening. I don't see much of anything lately but unguarded flesh and a bruising world, an America that's turned her eyes away from what her hands do.
If words don't work, I'm not sure demos do either. There's something to the Buddhists priests that set themselves alight in protest. It's a last resort though. For when things get dire enough. The problem is yesterday was already bad. When will we know it's too much?
And will we even dare act? Queers think fondly of Stonewall, but most of us, if handed a bottle and pointed towards the plate glass window, would never have the guts to rare back and throw.
For the last couple of weeks, French newsstands have been displaying this beefcake in a red speedo. He's got his hands behind his head and arches just a little to emphasize his bare naked chest. It's the cover of the struggling gay rag Tetu, but I'm not tempted to buy it.
The white, unmarked flesh seems so vulnerable plastered there in the plexiglass booth. I can't help but wonder what they'd do to it in Guantanamo or one of those secret prisons in Egypt where they practice torture, often on queers.
Sometimes I imagine the perfect pecs shot through with arrows like St. Sebastian. Other times, I see the body with a heap of others, blinded with hoods, piled naked on a cold concrete floor with Private Lindy England smiling over them right at the camera.
Then I think of Matthew Shepard beaten and left to die tied to a fence in Wyoming, and David Wojnarowicz whose flesh was mortified more slowly by AIDS because there were no ARVs yet, and who cared about another dead fag? "If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers," said one Texas governor.
We think we're safe now. In America, this week alone, we have all the Democratic candidates crowding the civil union bandwagon or leaping on the gay marriage horse, promising to dismantle the Defense of Marriage Act, and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy for homo soldiers.
Lutherans have even cracked open the gates to heaven. The denomination still bars us from being openly queer in the ministry, but now recommends to its bishops that they pray a lot before dumping us like hot fag potatoes if we somehow come out. In 2009 they hope to come to some kind of consensus about "human sexuality" and until then, caution is the better part of velour, and don't throw bricks at glass menageries.
There's one current moving forward, and one underneath tugging back. Either could drown us.
Think about it. What the Lutheran decision really means is that homophobic pastors are asked to stay their hands while in the backrooms of churches a bunch of others discuss us like plants or animals, considering whether we have souls, if we can serve God, be blessed in a union. If anybody wants to know how many of us can dance on the head of a pin, tell them about 982 fit, but only if we do the rumba.
Can progress root itself in this kind of shame? If it does, will it last? They hate us so much. And our meager gains aren't written in stone. Look at Roe v. Wade. After a couple of years under Bush, the decision that gave women control over basic little things like bearing children has eroded like the Jersey shoreline.
The gains of women and queers have almost always been linked. Maybe the losses will be, too. Maybe they are already, all those anti-gay marriage amendments thriving in individual States.
No matter how many times we've tried to sanitize our image, replacing drag queens and leather bears and dykes on bikes with two guys or two girls in tuxedoes, kissing chastely in front of a judge, declaring gay rights to be all about love and families, sir, please give us gay marriage, the hets still see boys in speedos rolling around on their sanctuary floors.
That's dangerous for us in the age of torture, when sex is a tool for humiliation and bodies alone are almost as superfluous as the limbs of our soldiers in Iraq. We've become hardened to words like waterboarding, stress positions, isolation. We saw corpses floating in New Orleans, lying bloated in muddy gutters, but we went on.
Justice with her blind eyes and sword isn't enough. You can't ask her for compassion, just dollars on the barrelhead when victims sue. Me, I prefer slatternly Liberty with her tits spilling from her dress leading a ragtag band to freedom. Perhaps soon in America there will be an epic battle like Godzilla and Mothra, but with Justice and Liberty duking it out.
It would be better if they worked together, but I don't see it happening. I don't see much of anything lately but unguarded flesh and a bruising world, an America that's turned her eyes away from what her hands do.
If words don't work, I'm not sure demos do either. There's something to the Buddhists priests that set themselves alight in protest. It's a last resort though. For when things get dire enough. The problem is yesterday was already bad. When will we know it's too much?
And will we even dare act? Queers think fondly of Stonewall, but most of us, if handed a bottle and pointed towards the plate glass window, would never have the guts to rare back and throw.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Cry Fowl on Torture
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's a crime against nature, but I did it anyway, saved some pigeon from a prolonged and horrible death after the stupid thing slammed into our sliding glass balcony doors, and got stuck on the terrace.
That's what I think happened, anyway. I only came after the first thud, saw the pigeon and the pigeon-shaped smear on the door and made my assumptions.
I considered leaving it there. A month ago, its cousin caught me in the head with such a splashing shower of crap it took a roll of paper towels, a bath, and a Laundromat to get it all off. Now I had one on my balcony, and could have turned the tables, maybe shat on it for a change.
Despite my hard-boiled self I was moved. Every time it worked up the energy to fly off into space, it smashed against the dirty Plexiglass designed to keep toddlers from falling into the noxious schoolyard below. Three or four times it tried, each with a sickening thud that caught me in the gut.
There was something familiar about it. A bird in the hand, then the Bush, our great U.S. President getting ready to bomb Iran after his resounding failures in Iraq, not to mention that jolly vacation destination Afghanistan.
Opium growing is up again, and the Taliban retaking villages where they can, and elsewhere exploding suicide bombs. In Iraq, soldiers and civilians alike are still dropping like crows with West Nile. Women are back under wraps that Saddam at least didn't insist on. Queers get a couple of bullets in their heads for wearing ponytails.
Now Cheney's pushing for fun and games in Iran, and why not throw ourselves against that brick wall with U.S. commanders blaming Tehran for everything from the suicide bombers to the roadside bombs in Iraq? It's all a terrible plot, though for once Condi is up in arms against it, pushing for dialogue and diplomacy instead of the heavy artillery.
The smart money's on Cheney. He always gets his way. I imagine he will now, too. After a few harsh words from Dick and a prayer meeting Bush will claim the idea as his own and fly with it no matter if his father intervenes, or that little French pipsqueak Sarkozy who was invited for a picnic this weekend, but however much he loves the U.S. can never get behind this war unless he wants Paris to burn.
How many times can you set off with such optimism, slam into a solid object dragging a nation behind, without a little self-reflection?
If you're like the pigeon, endlessly. With each false start, each collision I'm astounded Bush hasn't put it together with the bruises on the U.S. economy, our heritage ripped to shreds with that black op torture.
You must have read the New Yorker piece about what the U.S. is doing in secret prisons for our "War on Terror," turning sinners into saints by mortifying their flesh, destroying their minds. Destroying ours.
Even the interrogators have nightmares. "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it's well outside the norm. You can't go to that dark a place without it changing you."
As for me, I turned away from my small chance for revenge, the pleasure of a helpless foe, the power.
Pigeon feathers were starting to accumulate in the corners, and there was poop on the tile. Each thumping crunch pointed to a new concussion, and the withering chance the creature would get itself off without an injury. There's nothing I can do for my country, but this pigeon anyway, had a lesbian rescuer.
I did hesitate. I'm afraid of birds, and I was on my way out to sign a contract for an apartment. I wanted to leave it there, hoping against hope the creature would think to fly up first, up, goshdangit, up, and then out, before I got back, but every time I watched the stupid thing just tried to go directly out.
Imagining a return to broken wings and filth, I pulled on a raincoat and gloves, everything but goggles which I would have worn if I'd had some after watching Hitchcock's birds, and went out on the balcony, muttering lies I would have said to a horse, like "Calm down darling, everything's fine, just fine."
I pushed a broom towards it, slipped it under the scared flapping wings, lifted it up, complete with bird, and watched the fat dirty thing fly away at an astounding speed considering the bird brain damage.
I got no backwards glance, or coo of thanks, nothing but a little stray fuzz and the greasy pigeon-shaped smear of Turin marking pity on my door.
It's a crime against nature, but I did it anyway, saved some pigeon from a prolonged and horrible death after the stupid thing slammed into our sliding glass balcony doors, and got stuck on the terrace.
That's what I think happened, anyway. I only came after the first thud, saw the pigeon and the pigeon-shaped smear on the door and made my assumptions.
I considered leaving it there. A month ago, its cousin caught me in the head with such a splashing shower of crap it took a roll of paper towels, a bath, and a Laundromat to get it all off. Now I had one on my balcony, and could have turned the tables, maybe shat on it for a change.
Despite my hard-boiled self I was moved. Every time it worked up the energy to fly off into space, it smashed against the dirty Plexiglass designed to keep toddlers from falling into the noxious schoolyard below. Three or four times it tried, each with a sickening thud that caught me in the gut.
There was something familiar about it. A bird in the hand, then the Bush, our great U.S. President getting ready to bomb Iran after his resounding failures in Iraq, not to mention that jolly vacation destination Afghanistan.
Opium growing is up again, and the Taliban retaking villages where they can, and elsewhere exploding suicide bombs. In Iraq, soldiers and civilians alike are still dropping like crows with West Nile. Women are back under wraps that Saddam at least didn't insist on. Queers get a couple of bullets in their heads for wearing ponytails.
Now Cheney's pushing for fun and games in Iran, and why not throw ourselves against that brick wall with U.S. commanders blaming Tehran for everything from the suicide bombers to the roadside bombs in Iraq? It's all a terrible plot, though for once Condi is up in arms against it, pushing for dialogue and diplomacy instead of the heavy artillery.
The smart money's on Cheney. He always gets his way. I imagine he will now, too. After a few harsh words from Dick and a prayer meeting Bush will claim the idea as his own and fly with it no matter if his father intervenes, or that little French pipsqueak Sarkozy who was invited for a picnic this weekend, but however much he loves the U.S. can never get behind this war unless he wants Paris to burn.
How many times can you set off with such optimism, slam into a solid object dragging a nation behind, without a little self-reflection?
If you're like the pigeon, endlessly. With each false start, each collision I'm astounded Bush hasn't put it together with the bruises on the U.S. economy, our heritage ripped to shreds with that black op torture.
You must have read the New Yorker piece about what the U.S. is doing in secret prisons for our "War on Terror," turning sinners into saints by mortifying their flesh, destroying their minds. Destroying ours.
Even the interrogators have nightmares. "When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it's well outside the norm. You can't go to that dark a place without it changing you."
As for me, I turned away from my small chance for revenge, the pleasure of a helpless foe, the power.
Pigeon feathers were starting to accumulate in the corners, and there was poop on the tile. Each thumping crunch pointed to a new concussion, and the withering chance the creature would get itself off without an injury. There's nothing I can do for my country, but this pigeon anyway, had a lesbian rescuer.
I did hesitate. I'm afraid of birds, and I was on my way out to sign a contract for an apartment. I wanted to leave it there, hoping against hope the creature would think to fly up first, up, goshdangit, up, and then out, before I got back, but every time I watched the stupid thing just tried to go directly out.
Imagining a return to broken wings and filth, I pulled on a raincoat and gloves, everything but goggles which I would have worn if I'd had some after watching Hitchcock's birds, and went out on the balcony, muttering lies I would have said to a horse, like "Calm down darling, everything's fine, just fine."
I pushed a broom towards it, slipped it under the scared flapping wings, lifted it up, complete with bird, and watched the fat dirty thing fly away at an astounding speed considering the bird brain damage.
I got no backwards glance, or coo of thanks, nothing but a little stray fuzz and the greasy pigeon-shaped smear of Turin marking pity on my door.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Terrorism: The Inside Job
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Acts of revolt aren't what they used to be. Either you blow a couple of thousand to kingdom come, or wear a Che Guevara tee-shirt and call it a revolution.
Sunday, a gaggle of fags on bikes almost ran me down on the sidewalk, and when I shouted, "Try using the road," one screamed back, "It's an act of transgression, you bourgeois pig." Apparently in Paris, if you take down a dyke pedestrian, the status quo crumbles at your feet.
In Rome, all it takes is a kiss, not Judas this time, but two guys going at it in front of the Coliseum. After getting arrested by an army of carabinieri, they turned into heroes, mobilizing thousands for a kiss-in, and winning for their tribe a gay street shut off from traffic for a few days a week.
Then there's Charles Merrill, the queer Palm Springs artist who hacked up the bible with a black marker and scissors, and a couple of weeks ago burnt up an old and expensive Koran his late wife left him.
I kind of liked that, taking on God, pissing off the extremists to make a point about homophobia and religion. Say what you like about modern interpretations and love being the true essence of Islam and Christianity, it's there in black and white for fundamentalists. God wants us dead.
The only problem is one gesture won't win that fight. You have to bolster the seawall between Church and State, and there's nothing sexy enough about that to attract a flamboyant artist, much less street activists.
I shouldn't judge. Lately I've been cowering in corners. Call it a side effect of being a foreigner in a country where the latest pastime is immigrant tossing, preferably African or Asian, but not exclusively. I've hung back at demonstrations, and not stuck around to bear witness when I've seen cops setting up checkpoints.
Last month, I thought about buzzing off all my hair, but only got a short little cut that makes me look positively cute and harmless, ears sticking out and everything.
Caution never pays. When I wanted to make a quick trip into England this week, I still got delayed at the ferry by a lengthy interrogation at passport control while the line behind me piled up with some suspicious looking backpackers that stank, if you ask me, of terrorism and drug smuggling.
I don't know exactly what marked me, my dykeness, the short spiky hair, or what. A haircut can be style in one place, a declaration of war in another. Once in the East Village, I did a Sinead O'Connor, shaved my head, and felt a brief moment of liberation.
A couple days later on the train to Bensonhurst, I found myself surrounded by a bunch of young black men arguing about whether I was a racist skinhead or if it was "Just a 'do, man. Just a 'do." It was September of '89. I was fresh off the bus from Kentucky and had never heard the name Yusuf Hawkins.
At the ferry, probably my simple existence was enough for suspicion, an act of challenge and revolt. We queers have to remind ourselves of that.
We've won hate crime laws, the occasional marriage and civil union victories, but it would be a big mistake to imagine we've changed what seems to be an almost biological revulsion towards difference.
By its nature, our homo orientation will always put us on the cultural shit list. We're turned in the wrong direction, headed away from the pack, sticking out, the sore thumbs, a threat to society.
I got a first class ticket by mistake and got to sit for a while in the lounge in a fancy leather club chair surrounded by thin, chinoed and button-downed English chaps who ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon with toast in polite plummy drawls.
A couple hundred yards away in the self-service café people loaded their plates with beans and toast and fried bread and eggs and these enormous sausages. All the men were blokes, and mates and the children were skinny and pasty white and the women scrawny or enormous bloated things.
I got stared at in both places, and in the first class lounge asked for my ticket and called "sir" all morning long by the waiter who was forced to serve me a free latte despite himself.
I'm an amnesiac to forget it, how humans shudder at difference, and how sometimes, difference shudders back, like Charles Merrill cutting the bible, burning the Koran like a flag.
Rarely, though, do real outsiders throw bombs. That takes something else, the fury of men who expected to belong, a will to power that mirrors the boys on top. In other words, it's an inside job.
Acts of revolt aren't what they used to be. Either you blow a couple of thousand to kingdom come, or wear a Che Guevara tee-shirt and call it a revolution.
Sunday, a gaggle of fags on bikes almost ran me down on the sidewalk, and when I shouted, "Try using the road," one screamed back, "It's an act of transgression, you bourgeois pig." Apparently in Paris, if you take down a dyke pedestrian, the status quo crumbles at your feet.
In Rome, all it takes is a kiss, not Judas this time, but two guys going at it in front of the Coliseum. After getting arrested by an army of carabinieri, they turned into heroes, mobilizing thousands for a kiss-in, and winning for their tribe a gay street shut off from traffic for a few days a week.
Then there's Charles Merrill, the queer Palm Springs artist who hacked up the bible with a black marker and scissors, and a couple of weeks ago burnt up an old and expensive Koran his late wife left him.
I kind of liked that, taking on God, pissing off the extremists to make a point about homophobia and religion. Say what you like about modern interpretations and love being the true essence of Islam and Christianity, it's there in black and white for fundamentalists. God wants us dead.
The only problem is one gesture won't win that fight. You have to bolster the seawall between Church and State, and there's nothing sexy enough about that to attract a flamboyant artist, much less street activists.
I shouldn't judge. Lately I've been cowering in corners. Call it a side effect of being a foreigner in a country where the latest pastime is immigrant tossing, preferably African or Asian, but not exclusively. I've hung back at demonstrations, and not stuck around to bear witness when I've seen cops setting up checkpoints.
Last month, I thought about buzzing off all my hair, but only got a short little cut that makes me look positively cute and harmless, ears sticking out and everything.
Caution never pays. When I wanted to make a quick trip into England this week, I still got delayed at the ferry by a lengthy interrogation at passport control while the line behind me piled up with some suspicious looking backpackers that stank, if you ask me, of terrorism and drug smuggling.
I don't know exactly what marked me, my dykeness, the short spiky hair, or what. A haircut can be style in one place, a declaration of war in another. Once in the East Village, I did a Sinead O'Connor, shaved my head, and felt a brief moment of liberation.
A couple days later on the train to Bensonhurst, I found myself surrounded by a bunch of young black men arguing about whether I was a racist skinhead or if it was "Just a 'do, man. Just a 'do." It was September of '89. I was fresh off the bus from Kentucky and had never heard the name Yusuf Hawkins.
At the ferry, probably my simple existence was enough for suspicion, an act of challenge and revolt. We queers have to remind ourselves of that.
We've won hate crime laws, the occasional marriage and civil union victories, but it would be a big mistake to imagine we've changed what seems to be an almost biological revulsion towards difference.
By its nature, our homo orientation will always put us on the cultural shit list. We're turned in the wrong direction, headed away from the pack, sticking out, the sore thumbs, a threat to society.
I got a first class ticket by mistake and got to sit for a while in the lounge in a fancy leather club chair surrounded by thin, chinoed and button-downed English chaps who ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon with toast in polite plummy drawls.
A couple hundred yards away in the self-service café people loaded their plates with beans and toast and fried bread and eggs and these enormous sausages. All the men were blokes, and mates and the children were skinny and pasty white and the women scrawny or enormous bloated things.
I got stared at in both places, and in the first class lounge asked for my ticket and called "sir" all morning long by the waiter who was forced to serve me a free latte despite himself.
I'm an amnesiac to forget it, how humans shudder at difference, and how sometimes, difference shudders back, like Charles Merrill cutting the bible, burning the Koran like a flag.
Rarely, though, do real outsiders throw bombs. That takes something else, the fury of men who expected to belong, a will to power that mirrors the boys on top. In other words, it's an inside job.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Queers As Terrorists -- Again!
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The Europeans have climbed into the gutter with the Americans, agreeing to give the lowdown on air travelers headed for the U.S.
Forget criminal records or terrorist ties, what Uncle Same wants to know about is race and ethnicity, politics, religion, and union membership, not to mention travel partners, health, and sexual orientation.
That's right, if you're a dyke or fag, you might be a terrorist, and Homeland Security is gonna find out, even if it means asking travel agents to keep track of who has requested a single queen-sized bed instead of two doubles, or who gets listed as next of kin.
Why? It might have prevented the attacks on September 11th. That's what Homeland Security Tzar Michael Chertoff says. Information like this would have, "within a matter of moments, helped to identify many of the nineteen hijackers by linking their methods of payment, phone numbers and seat assignments." Right, Mike.
What repulsive lies. What gall to drape our dead New Yorkers in the Stars and Stripes and use it to justify the new and improved American Stasi.
On Sunday, I watched the Tour de France hurtle to its dope-riddled conclusion along the Champs-Elysée. There were a couple of actual French people there, but most were tourists waving flags and cheering. All I could think of was how I wanted to burn them, the flags, I mean.
Sew a couple of strips of material together you can brighten up a picnic or car lot, spy on neighbors, send kids to die. What do we want nations for, even queer ones? Why do we need flags? I'll bring the gas. You bring the zippo.
Not that getting rid of them will help much. The gaggle of American tourists waiting with me on the pavement didn't have one between them, but they somehow managed to stake their claim. And over four excruciating hours, pressed against a metal barricade and holding in pee to hold my place, I got a crash course on what Americans think of the world, Europe, anyway.
To sum up, in Brussels they make great Belgian waffles. Chinese Italians don't make the best the pizza in Rome, and arranging the finale of a race to make eight loops along the Champs-Elysée is "so gay. Isn't it gay? They're not going anywhere."
That was the P.E. teacher and youth group leader, a muscular twenty-something white man with fair hair, fair skin and a slight twang, my compatriot, brother practically. After weeks of getting himself some culture, seeing the world, the best he could do was, "Isn't it gay?"
His companion, a sweet blonde girl who works in sales at the Body Shop, thought it was nice. "It means everybody gets to take lots of pictures."
I don't hate them. I'm just so depressed that it's clearly these folks that Homeland Security is making the country safe for. Me, I catch a plane, I'd be flagged for a dozen things. I could be hauled off to jail, and would these folks notice? They can barely find their way to the nearest Hard Rock Café.
How could you begin to explain to them that what's happening now makes New Yorkers both victims and perps? Half the 9/11 dead arrived in planes, or their parents did, and they came with big ideas, and their skins were all kinds of colors. And the next time somebody blows up something again, I bet it'll be the New York melting pot again.
I'm ashamed I didn't say anything about that whole "gay" thing. But I couldn't face them knowing what I was -- an American. Here, if you reveal that you share an accent, a language, Americans give you a fat complicit grin of Us against Them and I couldn't stand it.
I shouldn't have worried. When I finally did say something to one of the women after the racers had gone by in their first gay circuit, she said, "I thought you were foreign." "Nope." "So you're American?"
She didn't quite believe me. Maybe she'd never seen a dyke before, just a girl on the "L" Word series. And I hardly look like them with camo pants, tee, and short spiky hair nobody's spent a week on.
But it means something that the word which came to her mind wasn't lesbian or dyke, but foreign, even though she was the one far from home. It brought back images of those days in pre-med biology where foreign matter got lodged in throats, foreign cells tried to invade, and the protecting ones slowly enveloped and killed them.
I think the word foreign suits me, no matter where I am. My customs aren't yours. I burn flags. Or want to. In my mouth, all the words in your tongue mean something new.
The Europeans have climbed into the gutter with the Americans, agreeing to give the lowdown on air travelers headed for the U.S.
Forget criminal records or terrorist ties, what Uncle Same wants to know about is race and ethnicity, politics, religion, and union membership, not to mention travel partners, health, and sexual orientation.
That's right, if you're a dyke or fag, you might be a terrorist, and Homeland Security is gonna find out, even if it means asking travel agents to keep track of who has requested a single queen-sized bed instead of two doubles, or who gets listed as next of kin.
Why? It might have prevented the attacks on September 11th. That's what Homeland Security Tzar Michael Chertoff says. Information like this would have, "within a matter of moments, helped to identify many of the nineteen hijackers by linking their methods of payment, phone numbers and seat assignments." Right, Mike.
What repulsive lies. What gall to drape our dead New Yorkers in the Stars and Stripes and use it to justify the new and improved American Stasi.
On Sunday, I watched the Tour de France hurtle to its dope-riddled conclusion along the Champs-Elysée. There were a couple of actual French people there, but most were tourists waving flags and cheering. All I could think of was how I wanted to burn them, the flags, I mean.
Sew a couple of strips of material together you can brighten up a picnic or car lot, spy on neighbors, send kids to die. What do we want nations for, even queer ones? Why do we need flags? I'll bring the gas. You bring the zippo.
Not that getting rid of them will help much. The gaggle of American tourists waiting with me on the pavement didn't have one between them, but they somehow managed to stake their claim. And over four excruciating hours, pressed against a metal barricade and holding in pee to hold my place, I got a crash course on what Americans think of the world, Europe, anyway.
To sum up, in Brussels they make great Belgian waffles. Chinese Italians don't make the best the pizza in Rome, and arranging the finale of a race to make eight loops along the Champs-Elysée is "so gay. Isn't it gay? They're not going anywhere."
That was the P.E. teacher and youth group leader, a muscular twenty-something white man with fair hair, fair skin and a slight twang, my compatriot, brother practically. After weeks of getting himself some culture, seeing the world, the best he could do was, "Isn't it gay?"
His companion, a sweet blonde girl who works in sales at the Body Shop, thought it was nice. "It means everybody gets to take lots of pictures."
I don't hate them. I'm just so depressed that it's clearly these folks that Homeland Security is making the country safe for. Me, I catch a plane, I'd be flagged for a dozen things. I could be hauled off to jail, and would these folks notice? They can barely find their way to the nearest Hard Rock Café.
How could you begin to explain to them that what's happening now makes New Yorkers both victims and perps? Half the 9/11 dead arrived in planes, or their parents did, and they came with big ideas, and their skins were all kinds of colors. And the next time somebody blows up something again, I bet it'll be the New York melting pot again.
I'm ashamed I didn't say anything about that whole "gay" thing. But I couldn't face them knowing what I was -- an American. Here, if you reveal that you share an accent, a language, Americans give you a fat complicit grin of Us against Them and I couldn't stand it.
I shouldn't have worried. When I finally did say something to one of the women after the racers had gone by in their first gay circuit, she said, "I thought you were foreign." "Nope." "So you're American?"
She didn't quite believe me. Maybe she'd never seen a dyke before, just a girl on the "L" Word series. And I hardly look like them with camo pants, tee, and short spiky hair nobody's spent a week on.
But it means something that the word which came to her mind wasn't lesbian or dyke, but foreign, even though she was the one far from home. It brought back images of those days in pre-med biology where foreign matter got lodged in throats, foreign cells tried to invade, and the protecting ones slowly enveloped and killed them.
I think the word foreign suits me, no matter where I am. My customs aren't yours. I burn flags. Or want to. In my mouth, all the words in your tongue mean something new.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Cut It Off -- And Stop AIDS
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Women are dying of AIDS while some researcher bends over his penis, smiles at it fondly and imagines what little alteration would make it an all purpose tool safe to use again.
He's not the only one with his dick in his hand. Each new report on male circumcision pumps up the protection of that little snip, snip until pretty soon, I expect to see the numbers not only show the procedure will stop HIV dead, but reduce global warming, and maybe slow the Iraq war, too.
Not that it doesn't have limited benefits. Circumcision may lower the rate of transmission as much as fifty or sixty percent for men, as long as they screw in the missionary position, and only between the sheets of a few very controlled studies.
In the real world of South Africa, there's very little difference in HIV rates between communities that snip, and those that don't. In Northern Zambia, the difference only lasts until the young men move to the big city with its bright lights and Manolo Blahniks, metaphorically speaking.
Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV's came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn't help them. Or don't faggots count when you're counting heads?
Women aren't factored in at all except as a vector of disease. While millions of dollars are already pouring into circumcision programs even if only men have foreskins to whack off, women are struggling for equivalent funds for female condoms and microbicides, forget programs with as vague a goal as girl power, the real key to HIV prevention.
It's young women getting AIDS these days. UNAIDS says we already make up sixty percent of the fifteen to twenty-four year olds living with HIV/AIDS.
In sub-Saharan Africa girls of that age are three times more likely to be positive than their male peers. In the Caribbean it's 2.5 times. Why? Because in most places we still don't own our own bodies. Men think we're dirt and they treat us that way.
At a recent conference of HIV+ women in Kenya, activists talked about how more and men are raping virgins because they're assured of a "clean" screw.
It's a kind of rape, too, those men who know they're positive, or do plenty of high risk messing around, and still refuse to wear protection with their wives. Insist, and a woman may face violence from her husband and community, too.
Some activists told stories about how women are used as "testing kits" for their husbands, sent to clinics and when they come back positive, tossed out of the house with their kids. Often they are beaten first, sometimes raped. The men then find new "clean" wives that will get infected soon enough, but at least last long enough to take care of their bastard husbands.
The women in one seminar began by introducing themselves as widowed or separated with one kid or two or three, each proclaiming in no uncertain terms, they weren't in the market for another man. Maybe when pigs fly or hell freezes over.
If circumcision means anything to these positive women, it's just more of the same or worse. They're worried men may respond to the increased protection by throwing away their condoms and screwing everything that moves, hastening the spread of HIV. And having been promised near immunity, who will men blame when they catch it? Who risks violence and death? Ladies first, and girls.
Beyond the problem of HIV is the greater one of misogyny with a deep thread of lesbophobia. Women fighting AIDS are women fighting, stepping out of their place. In South Africa that can mean a death sentence.
Just last week, Sizakele Sigasa, an outreach coordinator at Positive Women's Network and queer activist, and Salome, a dyke friend of hers, were tortured and murdered. Sizakele when she was found, had her hands tied together by her underpants and her ankles tied together by her shoelaces. She had three bullet holes in her head and three in her collarbone.
In June, Simangele Nhlapho, a member of an HIV postive support group run by the same Positive Women's Network, was found dead with her two year old daughter. Both were raped before they were killed. The daughter also had her legs broken.
It's time for AIDS activists and researchers to shift their attention away from the penis and see the connection between hate and HIV and dead women. Only power will save us, not cuts, not even condoms unless we can make men wear them.
And if somebody still insists on tinkering around with men's dicks to stop spreading HIV, maybe they should do a more comprehensive procedure, call it the Bobbitt and cut the whole thing off.
Women are dying of AIDS while some researcher bends over his penis, smiles at it fondly and imagines what little alteration would make it an all purpose tool safe to use again.
He's not the only one with his dick in his hand. Each new report on male circumcision pumps up the protection of that little snip, snip until pretty soon, I expect to see the numbers not only show the procedure will stop HIV dead, but reduce global warming, and maybe slow the Iraq war, too.
Not that it doesn't have limited benefits. Circumcision may lower the rate of transmission as much as fifty or sixty percent for men, as long as they screw in the missionary position, and only between the sheets of a few very controlled studies.
In the real world of South Africa, there's very little difference in HIV rates between communities that snip, and those that don't. In Northern Zambia, the difference only lasts until the young men move to the big city with its bright lights and Manolo Blahniks, metaphorically speaking.
Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV's came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn't help them. Or don't faggots count when you're counting heads?
Women aren't factored in at all except as a vector of disease. While millions of dollars are already pouring into circumcision programs even if only men have foreskins to whack off, women are struggling for equivalent funds for female condoms and microbicides, forget programs with as vague a goal as girl power, the real key to HIV prevention.
It's young women getting AIDS these days. UNAIDS says we already make up sixty percent of the fifteen to twenty-four year olds living with HIV/AIDS.
In sub-Saharan Africa girls of that age are three times more likely to be positive than their male peers. In the Caribbean it's 2.5 times. Why? Because in most places we still don't own our own bodies. Men think we're dirt and they treat us that way.
At a recent conference of HIV+ women in Kenya, activists talked about how more and men are raping virgins because they're assured of a "clean" screw.
It's a kind of rape, too, those men who know they're positive, or do plenty of high risk messing around, and still refuse to wear protection with their wives. Insist, and a woman may face violence from her husband and community, too.
Some activists told stories about how women are used as "testing kits" for their husbands, sent to clinics and when they come back positive, tossed out of the house with their kids. Often they are beaten first, sometimes raped. The men then find new "clean" wives that will get infected soon enough, but at least last long enough to take care of their bastard husbands.
The women in one seminar began by introducing themselves as widowed or separated with one kid or two or three, each proclaiming in no uncertain terms, they weren't in the market for another man. Maybe when pigs fly or hell freezes over.
If circumcision means anything to these positive women, it's just more of the same or worse. They're worried men may respond to the increased protection by throwing away their condoms and screwing everything that moves, hastening the spread of HIV. And having been promised near immunity, who will men blame when they catch it? Who risks violence and death? Ladies first, and girls.
Beyond the problem of HIV is the greater one of misogyny with a deep thread of lesbophobia. Women fighting AIDS are women fighting, stepping out of their place. In South Africa that can mean a death sentence.
Just last week, Sizakele Sigasa, an outreach coordinator at Positive Women's Network and queer activist, and Salome, a dyke friend of hers, were tortured and murdered. Sizakele when she was found, had her hands tied together by her underpants and her ankles tied together by her shoelaces. She had three bullet holes in her head and three in her collarbone.
In June, Simangele Nhlapho, a member of an HIV postive support group run by the same Positive Women's Network, was found dead with her two year old daughter. Both were raped before they were killed. The daughter also had her legs broken.
It's time for AIDS activists and researchers to shift their attention away from the penis and see the connection between hate and HIV and dead women. Only power will save us, not cuts, not even condoms unless we can make men wear them.
And if somebody still insists on tinkering around with men's dicks to stop spreading HIV, maybe they should do a more comprehensive procedure, call it the Bobbitt and cut the whole thing off.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Selling Obama
By Kelly Cogswell
794 words
So Obama's really getting it done, in fundraising anyway, picking up four dollars here, four thousand there. He's fudging a bit, by counting sales of key chains, but why not? All those little contributions add up, not so much in money, but in sheer numbers. Count enough hat buyers, he can go to big donors saying, look at my grassroots support.
It would be nice if it were real, especially in modest black neighborhoods. It's not easy to mobilize people, get them to open their wallets--or their mouths. Women won Roe v. Wade and fell asleep. The biggest queer movement now is about gay marriage, and if we ever get that, watch the big snooze begin until the next Matthew Shepard.
Mobilizing anybody in the U.S. usually takes an enormous injustice, if not outright blood. It's nice to see Obama people rallying for something positive, having the first serious black candidate, maybe even the first black president of the United States of America.
It's a knife's edge he's walking on, though, portraying himself primarily as an American, and a black person second. He can't be too black or he'll scare off whites, as for people of color, plenty are buying those key chains to collect mostly because of the face printed on them.
Obama's lucky he has a nice one. The guy's handsome, no doubt about it. And his face reflects the youthful, outsider's energy he brings to his electoral campaign, though every now and again, you catch a glimpse of pure ambition behind the sincere smile and remember he's a politician. Listen closely, you can hear him change the cadence of his voice from venue to venue, all Ivy League on Charlie Rose, in front of a black crowd, nothing but preacherman.
I minded for a while, being Southernish myself, how people like him use our drawling intonations to show how down home they are, just folks. Remember Bush with his big grey cowboy hat?
It's just image, right? The foundation of politics. Hell, what are the stained-glass windows and stone carvings of all those European cathedrals but a kind of election poster for Christ?
But images without words aren't enough. Politics requires the human body, politicians making stump speeches to cheering or braying crowds. As soon as they could, men in top hats rode trains from one town to another in "whistle-stop campaigns."
At the same time, words are nothing without the face. This morning I'm thinking of Sojourner Truth. Probably some of her audiences had seen black people only as slaves up on auction blocks, animals really, baring their teeth so buyers could examine them like cattle for signs of ill health.
I imagine her, yet another black face, as she climbs up on a box, and instead of standing there silently, opens her mouth and demands equality. That image itself must have been a shock, even for progressive whites who had read abolitionist stuff.
Her declaration was even more revolutionary. "Ain't I a woman?" Those words plus her face were cultural dynamite. Not only was she a human with powers of speech, but a woman, a member of the fair sex, too.
Patrick Lozés of CRAN [Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires] likes to joke that there weren't any black people in France until a couple of years ago -- that was the first time activists used the word noir, black.
National unity and a kind of universalism is hugely important here, and groups used to shy away from any phrase that separated themselves out into communities. They contorted themselves with names like "people of African origin and other places not white, working to promote friendship, harmony, and diversity in a glorious France." I exaggerate, a little.
It took me a while to get exactly what he meant. I understood the "invisible man" of society and politics, but to say there were no blacks, hmmm. After all, queers have to come out, but as a general rule we wear our race, our skin outside, like pink triangles or yellow stars.
His point was, we can't see a thing until we name it. And I remembered how until I owned the word dyke for myself, whole hordes of lesbians passed by unnoticed. In college, I defended the besmirched reputations of girls on the field hockey team.
Once I owned the word, I could see. Not only them, but a little network of threads in the air connecting each to each.
With any luck, by accepting a word like black, understanding words like poor, Obama can see their real potential, and win or lose, accept the responsibility so many have given him. They're much more than little donor fish he can dangle as bait for the big.
794 words
So Obama's really getting it done, in fundraising anyway, picking up four dollars here, four thousand there. He's fudging a bit, by counting sales of key chains, but why not? All those little contributions add up, not so much in money, but in sheer numbers. Count enough hat buyers, he can go to big donors saying, look at my grassroots support.
It would be nice if it were real, especially in modest black neighborhoods. It's not easy to mobilize people, get them to open their wallets--or their mouths. Women won Roe v. Wade and fell asleep. The biggest queer movement now is about gay marriage, and if we ever get that, watch the big snooze begin until the next Matthew Shepard.
Mobilizing anybody in the U.S. usually takes an enormous injustice, if not outright blood. It's nice to see Obama people rallying for something positive, having the first serious black candidate, maybe even the first black president of the United States of America.
It's a knife's edge he's walking on, though, portraying himself primarily as an American, and a black person second. He can't be too black or he'll scare off whites, as for people of color, plenty are buying those key chains to collect mostly because of the face printed on them.
Obama's lucky he has a nice one. The guy's handsome, no doubt about it. And his face reflects the youthful, outsider's energy he brings to his electoral campaign, though every now and again, you catch a glimpse of pure ambition behind the sincere smile and remember he's a politician. Listen closely, you can hear him change the cadence of his voice from venue to venue, all Ivy League on Charlie Rose, in front of a black crowd, nothing but preacherman.
I minded for a while, being Southernish myself, how people like him use our drawling intonations to show how down home they are, just folks. Remember Bush with his big grey cowboy hat?
It's just image, right? The foundation of politics. Hell, what are the stained-glass windows and stone carvings of all those European cathedrals but a kind of election poster for Christ?
But images without words aren't enough. Politics requires the human body, politicians making stump speeches to cheering or braying crowds. As soon as they could, men in top hats rode trains from one town to another in "whistle-stop campaigns."
At the same time, words are nothing without the face. This morning I'm thinking of Sojourner Truth. Probably some of her audiences had seen black people only as slaves up on auction blocks, animals really, baring their teeth so buyers could examine them like cattle for signs of ill health.
I imagine her, yet another black face, as she climbs up on a box, and instead of standing there silently, opens her mouth and demands equality. That image itself must have been a shock, even for progressive whites who had read abolitionist stuff.
Her declaration was even more revolutionary. "Ain't I a woman?" Those words plus her face were cultural dynamite. Not only was she a human with powers of speech, but a woman, a member of the fair sex, too.
Patrick Lozés of CRAN [Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires] likes to joke that there weren't any black people in France until a couple of years ago -- that was the first time activists used the word noir, black.
National unity and a kind of universalism is hugely important here, and groups used to shy away from any phrase that separated themselves out into communities. They contorted themselves with names like "people of African origin and other places not white, working to promote friendship, harmony, and diversity in a glorious France." I exaggerate, a little.
It took me a while to get exactly what he meant. I understood the "invisible man" of society and politics, but to say there were no blacks, hmmm. After all, queers have to come out, but as a general rule we wear our race, our skin outside, like pink triangles or yellow stars.
His point was, we can't see a thing until we name it. And I remembered how until I owned the word dyke for myself, whole hordes of lesbians passed by unnoticed. In college, I defended the besmirched reputations of girls on the field hockey team.
Once I owned the word, I could see. Not only them, but a little network of threads in the air connecting each to each.
With any luck, by accepting a word like black, understanding words like poor, Obama can see their real potential, and win or lose, accept the responsibility so many have given him. They're much more than little donor fish he can dangle as bait for the big.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Darwin, Robespierre, and the Guillotine
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
On Saturday, Marina and I visited the Jardin des Plantes, settling in a sunny spot near the Natural History Museum where they unashamedly profess the gospel according to Darwin.
If reproduction is the key to the evolution of our species, we saw French society changing in front of our park bench. The gardens were crawling with breeders and their babies. Toddlers made their breaks for freedom down gravel paths. Babies squirmed in those belly pouches of eager fathers.
I'd forgotten heterosexuals didn't just have a different sexual orientation, but a whole host of squealing side effects. We had to wait two hours to see two other dykes, blissfully childless. As to fags, forget it.
In all that time, the only real sign of evolution was a white grandmother waiting for her brown grandkid to catch up. She stood there smiling as he reached in his trouser pockets for a tiny hanky, pretended to blow his nose then put the hanky back again. As kids will, he did it over and over and over until she in turn pretended to leave and he screamed and ran after.
It's not strange to see mixed race couples in Paris, or their offspring with white grandmothers. What with all the miscegenation, you'd almost get the idea the French have moved beyond racism.
In fact, Friday, the gay Paris mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, hitched a desperate and light-skinned Hispanic housewife to a black basketball star at City Hall, congratulating him on his work against racism. On Saturday, their nuptials continued in a cathedral near the Louvre Palace where kings used to marry their queens. That's progress, I guess.
So what if the mayor still doesn't have the right to get married himself, and the Latina housewife, Eva Longoria, represents the bigoted French cosmetics conglomerate, L'Oréal?
As she and Tony Parker were saying their "I do's," at the Hotel de Ville, L'Oréal's Garnier division was getting slammed for racial discrimination during a promotional campaign in 2000 when a company fax made it clear, if you weren't white, or "BBR," (bleu, blanc, rouge -- the colors of the French flag) they didn't want you handing out shampoo samples in France.
They may have hired Vanessa Williams, Beyoncé Knowles, and Longoria in the States, but especially in the global South, L'Oréal's "white is wonderful campaign" is still in full swing.
The TV in India is full of ads for Garnier Light, promising "fairer skin in just four weeks." In Korea, the L'Oreal brand, Vichy, touts BI-White. That print ad shows a dark-skinned face literally being unzipped to reveal fairer skin just under the surface. Black, I guess, is abominable.
As bigots, they're not alone in France. White grandparents may adore their little brown grandchildren, but they wouldn't give them a job.
Something like seventy-five percent of employers would prefer to hire whites. In fact, they not only prefer, they do. If you have the wrong name, the wrong address, they won't even read your resume. Which is why kids from the mostly black and "beur" suburbs go on sprees torching cars.
Call it a smoke signal. It's time for change, and breeding won't do it among humans. We can hold a pencil with our opposable thumbs, but in our brains we're still prehistoric beasts seeing everything as Us against Them.
Human evolution, now, is a question of society and law and politics.
Oddly, it's the right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy who seems prepped for change in France. Socialists talk about equality and social justice nonstop, but it's him that's done a Bush and stacked his cabinet with people of color.
Rachida Dati is Minister of Justice, making her the first woman of North African origin to hold a ministerial post. She's preparing to set up special departments in prosecutors' offices to handle cases of racial discrimination in hiring.
Later this month, another Sarko appointee of color, Secretary of State for Urban Policies, Fadela Amara, will visit an army recruiting office with the Minister of Defense in an attempt to address racism in the army.
The problem came to the forefront this week as France prepares to celebrate Bastille Day with a big military parade. Black activist, Patrick Lozés, published an open letter asking why you could see plenty of enlisted men of color, but almost no officers, none at all at the top. That may change under Sarkozy.
Not because he's a great guy. Critics say his appointments are just a PR ploy, stealing the thunder from the Socialists. After all, he continues to deport immigrants by the thousands.
I'm not sure his intentions matter. In the age of L'Oréal, dark faces at the top are by themselves a revolution in France.
As we bring out the bottles of blood red wine, the establishment "elephants" would do well to consider the lesson of the guillotine -- evolve or die.
On Saturday, Marina and I visited the Jardin des Plantes, settling in a sunny spot near the Natural History Museum where they unashamedly profess the gospel according to Darwin.
If reproduction is the key to the evolution of our species, we saw French society changing in front of our park bench. The gardens were crawling with breeders and their babies. Toddlers made their breaks for freedom down gravel paths. Babies squirmed in those belly pouches of eager fathers.
I'd forgotten heterosexuals didn't just have a different sexual orientation, but a whole host of squealing side effects. We had to wait two hours to see two other dykes, blissfully childless. As to fags, forget it.
In all that time, the only real sign of evolution was a white grandmother waiting for her brown grandkid to catch up. She stood there smiling as he reached in his trouser pockets for a tiny hanky, pretended to blow his nose then put the hanky back again. As kids will, he did it over and over and over until she in turn pretended to leave and he screamed and ran after.
It's not strange to see mixed race couples in Paris, or their offspring with white grandmothers. What with all the miscegenation, you'd almost get the idea the French have moved beyond racism.
In fact, Friday, the gay Paris mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, hitched a desperate and light-skinned Hispanic housewife to a black basketball star at City Hall, congratulating him on his work against racism. On Saturday, their nuptials continued in a cathedral near the Louvre Palace where kings used to marry their queens. That's progress, I guess.
So what if the mayor still doesn't have the right to get married himself, and the Latina housewife, Eva Longoria, represents the bigoted French cosmetics conglomerate, L'Oréal?
As she and Tony Parker were saying their "I do's," at the Hotel de Ville, L'Oréal's Garnier division was getting slammed for racial discrimination during a promotional campaign in 2000 when a company fax made it clear, if you weren't white, or "BBR," (bleu, blanc, rouge -- the colors of the French flag) they didn't want you handing out shampoo samples in France.
They may have hired Vanessa Williams, Beyoncé Knowles, and Longoria in the States, but especially in the global South, L'Oréal's "white is wonderful campaign" is still in full swing.
The TV in India is full of ads for Garnier Light, promising "fairer skin in just four weeks." In Korea, the L'Oreal brand, Vichy, touts BI-White. That print ad shows a dark-skinned face literally being unzipped to reveal fairer skin just under the surface. Black, I guess, is abominable.
As bigots, they're not alone in France. White grandparents may adore their little brown grandchildren, but they wouldn't give them a job.
Something like seventy-five percent of employers would prefer to hire whites. In fact, they not only prefer, they do. If you have the wrong name, the wrong address, they won't even read your resume. Which is why kids from the mostly black and "beur" suburbs go on sprees torching cars.
Call it a smoke signal. It's time for change, and breeding won't do it among humans. We can hold a pencil with our opposable thumbs, but in our brains we're still prehistoric beasts seeing everything as Us against Them.
Human evolution, now, is a question of society and law and politics.
Oddly, it's the right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy who seems prepped for change in France. Socialists talk about equality and social justice nonstop, but it's him that's done a Bush and stacked his cabinet with people of color.
Rachida Dati is Minister of Justice, making her the first woman of North African origin to hold a ministerial post. She's preparing to set up special departments in prosecutors' offices to handle cases of racial discrimination in hiring.
Later this month, another Sarko appointee of color, Secretary of State for Urban Policies, Fadela Amara, will visit an army recruiting office with the Minister of Defense in an attempt to address racism in the army.
The problem came to the forefront this week as France prepares to celebrate Bastille Day with a big military parade. Black activist, Patrick Lozés, published an open letter asking why you could see plenty of enlisted men of color, but almost no officers, none at all at the top. That may change under Sarkozy.
Not because he's a great guy. Critics say his appointments are just a PR ploy, stealing the thunder from the Socialists. After all, he continues to deport immigrants by the thousands.
I'm not sure his intentions matter. In the age of L'Oréal, dark faces at the top are by themselves a revolution in France.
As we bring out the bottles of blood red wine, the establishment "elephants" would do well to consider the lesson of the guillotine -- evolve or die.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Colorblind
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Last week, the Supreme Court gutted Brown v. the Board of Education, and so what? Maybe that'll get us lazy progressives off our fat self-satisfied couches and we'll come up with something better than these quota-based programs.
Busing, like affirmative action, was A-Okay for a decade or so, but lately seems more like opium for the masses than anything resembling salvation.
One of the cases that broke Brown's back came from my own hometown of Louisville. I was eleven when desegregation kicked in there. We lived a couple blocks away from a high school on an all white street, and most of the neighbors, my mother included, howled a lot about "the blacks" and their "special treatment" and declared the world about to end.
Well, the sky didn't fall for white people, no matter what my Mom says. But neither did African Americans get the moon.
Pipes got busted over heads, and students fought with knives and chains and fists. There was blood in the hallways along with tear gas and prone bodies in a kind of convulsion of mutual hate, then it was over.
A rainbow of kids used the same bathrooms, carved their initials into the same desks. When one of my big sisters got into fights at the high school, it was with other white girls, and the problem was over some greasy haired boy, not what color somebody was.
I guess that made busing a success -- if you threw out the "monkey" and "honkey" insults you'd hear sometimes, and ignored how there were only one or two black kids in the college prep programs, and how everybody shared the hallways, but white kids walked with white and black with black.
Interracial couples caught crap from both sides, though that may be different now, three decades years later, what with all the interskinned kisses in the movies.
Yep, everything's sweetness and light, thanks to a few kids stuck on a few buses leveling things out. We've got to protect that at all cost. As dissenting Justice Stephen G. Breyer warned, "This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret."
Maybe, maybe not. I personally think it might do us good to have to try something else.
Altogether we've been lulled into complacency by a congenial multiculturalism made up of good wishes and right thinking and not much else. You want a real benchmark of successful education, count up all the minority students in Ivy League colleges, better yet, try senators in Congress. You don't even need a whole hand.
It makes me sick how in the new millennium we practically wet ourselves thinking of the first black president, the first female. Obama and Hillary should have happened ages ago. Why are we still clinging to the ridiculous, primitive tools we had in 1975 that have only carried us this far?
We've dumped the computers and phones and TV's we used back then. Why not take this chance to trade in school busing and affirmative action for a new and improved anything?
Part of the problem was a failure of vision. We got rulings like Brown, but didn't understand just how important it was to keep pushing society to support successful women and people of color. Since the beginning of raced-based programs, the beneficiaries have been plagued by whispers. "They're tokens. They got special treatment. If they hadn't been black..." The laws changed, and I did, too, but not people like my mother.
Then there's the question of means. The ringleader of last week's decision, Chief Justice Roberts said, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Can you really argue with that? It's a simple idea, simply stated. If discrimination is wrong, it's wrong. In fact I'd like to plug sexual identity into Robert's clever phrase. We'd be home free with gay marriage. I'm not holding my breath, though, if it comes up on the docket.
Affirmative action, called positive discrimination in France, should raise questions when used as a lifetime crutch. You can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.
It might have been different if we thought of quotas in temporary terms. We'll use busing, affirmative action, just for twenty years, long enough to level the playing field, get one generation of kids educated, accustom businessmen to seeing other kinds of people in positions of power, then it's over.
We squandered our chance, assuming our victory was written in stone, like Roe v. Wade, and there was no urgency to press forward to consolidate these legal gains in the face of society.
I don't know where that leaves us. Some districts are trying to get around the ruling by integrating schools according to income rather than race. I don't see a future in it.
Last week, the Supreme Court gutted Brown v. the Board of Education, and so what? Maybe that'll get us lazy progressives off our fat self-satisfied couches and we'll come up with something better than these quota-based programs.
Busing, like affirmative action, was A-Okay for a decade or so, but lately seems more like opium for the masses than anything resembling salvation.
One of the cases that broke Brown's back came from my own hometown of Louisville. I was eleven when desegregation kicked in there. We lived a couple blocks away from a high school on an all white street, and most of the neighbors, my mother included, howled a lot about "the blacks" and their "special treatment" and declared the world about to end.
Well, the sky didn't fall for white people, no matter what my Mom says. But neither did African Americans get the moon.
Pipes got busted over heads, and students fought with knives and chains and fists. There was blood in the hallways along with tear gas and prone bodies in a kind of convulsion of mutual hate, then it was over.
A rainbow of kids used the same bathrooms, carved their initials into the same desks. When one of my big sisters got into fights at the high school, it was with other white girls, and the problem was over some greasy haired boy, not what color somebody was.
I guess that made busing a success -- if you threw out the "monkey" and "honkey" insults you'd hear sometimes, and ignored how there were only one or two black kids in the college prep programs, and how everybody shared the hallways, but white kids walked with white and black with black.
Interracial couples caught crap from both sides, though that may be different now, three decades years later, what with all the interskinned kisses in the movies.
Yep, everything's sweetness and light, thanks to a few kids stuck on a few buses leveling things out. We've got to protect that at all cost. As dissenting Justice Stephen G. Breyer warned, "This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret."
Maybe, maybe not. I personally think it might do us good to have to try something else.
Altogether we've been lulled into complacency by a congenial multiculturalism made up of good wishes and right thinking and not much else. You want a real benchmark of successful education, count up all the minority students in Ivy League colleges, better yet, try senators in Congress. You don't even need a whole hand.
It makes me sick how in the new millennium we practically wet ourselves thinking of the first black president, the first female. Obama and Hillary should have happened ages ago. Why are we still clinging to the ridiculous, primitive tools we had in 1975 that have only carried us this far?
We've dumped the computers and phones and TV's we used back then. Why not take this chance to trade in school busing and affirmative action for a new and improved anything?
Part of the problem was a failure of vision. We got rulings like Brown, but didn't understand just how important it was to keep pushing society to support successful women and people of color. Since the beginning of raced-based programs, the beneficiaries have been plagued by whispers. "They're tokens. They got special treatment. If they hadn't been black..." The laws changed, and I did, too, but not people like my mother.
Then there's the question of means. The ringleader of last week's decision, Chief Justice Roberts said, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Can you really argue with that? It's a simple idea, simply stated. If discrimination is wrong, it's wrong. In fact I'd like to plug sexual identity into Robert's clever phrase. We'd be home free with gay marriage. I'm not holding my breath, though, if it comes up on the docket.
Affirmative action, called positive discrimination in France, should raise questions when used as a lifetime crutch. You can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.
It might have been different if we thought of quotas in temporary terms. We'll use busing, affirmative action, just for twenty years, long enough to level the playing field, get one generation of kids educated, accustom businessmen to seeing other kinds of people in positions of power, then it's over.
We squandered our chance, assuming our victory was written in stone, like Roe v. Wade, and there was no urgency to press forward to consolidate these legal gains in the face of society.
I don't know where that leaves us. Some districts are trying to get around the ruling by integrating schools according to income rather than race. I don't see a future in it.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Habeas Columnus on Co-Dependence Day
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's almost the Fourth of July again, and time to get out the barbecues and sparklers, and watch the fireworks explode over the East River like so many dreams of American democracy. I believed in all that patriotic claptrap as a kid. Maybe I still do. Equality to me is self-evident. In the midst of our national amnesia, I still believe that even aliens have certain inalienable rights.
My problem is that being an American feels a lot like being a tiny hair on a charging bull. Alone, you don't have much say about where the creature's going. Even large groups only amount to a toenail, or hoof, though if you've ever seen the effect of an infected one, you can still hope to slow the animal down before everything in the china shop is broken.
Lately, all I see is wreckage, despite the wave of Democrats in Congress, and progress on gay marriage in New York. On Tuesday, the ACLU held a Day of Action in Washington, and the civil liberties group couldn't muster more than an eyebrow's worth of participants to demand that Congress end torture, and restore habeas corpus and the rest of the rights that used to make America America.
The streets should have been filled with hundreds of thousands, millions even, demanding the reinstatement of basic things like trials for when a single soul is up against the imprisoning power of the state. But most Americans don't even know what habeas corpus is, or how on earth it could get lost. Did someone leave it on the subway, or in the mall parking lot? Maybe if we all checked our pockets...?
Abstractions aren't our forte as a nation.
When did you last think about what liberty meant, or justice? What about that phrase "for all?" That's taking it too far, surely. We prefer to keep our literal-mindedness for the Bible, thank you very much.
For all our flag-waving and the use of Old Glory to decorate everything from used car lots to sheet cakes, we rarely contemplate what it means to be an American. We're content with the fireworks once a year, and now, brief distress at the flag on dead troops in Iraq.
Most of us float along unthinkingly because our distant borders let us avoid being an American in America. Identity is relative after all. Where would queers be without the straights? How can you be an American in the Midwest or South? Planted in Louisville, you're only from Kentucky, not uptight Indiana by comparison, or hippy-dippy California. You don't think about Canada or Mexico or anybody else.
It requires an enormous effort to feel the size of the place around you, the weight of the U.S. as it moves through the world, and an almost religious experience to accept it.
I didn't for years. If Faulkner and Flannery O'Conner could be excluded from the list of American writers, and considered separately in the "Southern" genre, why not me? I embraced that banner as a young writer. When people bashed American meddling in Latin America, I'd declare I wasn't really from the U.S., explaining the cultural and political difference of the South. Surprisingly, people actually agreed.
Later, I hid as a New Yorker, and separated myself as a queer. After 9/11 I thought a lot about secession and whether or not we could pull off an occidental Hong Kong. The rest of the country hates us anyway. Let them get along without us, and we'd quit taking it on the chin.
I'm more resigned now. Leave the U.S., get on a plane with the passport you ought to have, and up above the clouds, in the context of all those other boundaries, those other nations, there you are, the hair in the soup, responsible for that great stampeding beast you tried to leave behind. For good or for ill, you're an American, heir to Martin Luther King as much as George Bush and Rush Limbaugh.
Even the people at the top don't quite hold the reins. Condoleezza Rice was in Paris last week for the summit on the genocide in Darfur. She looks older than she did just a few years ago as a freshman Secretary of State when she thought she could handle Iraq.
Cheney mongered the war to gain oil, but Condi had the smell of ideology about her, reshaping the Middle East not just for self-interest but for some abstract idea of good in the world.
What American ambition. What a disaster. She still seems stunned behind the ravishing smile, wondering how mostly good intentions could have gone so wrong. It's only to be expected.
As big, ungainly, and dangerous as we are, our foreign policy should be Hippocratic, First do no harm.
It's almost the Fourth of July again, and time to get out the barbecues and sparklers, and watch the fireworks explode over the East River like so many dreams of American democracy. I believed in all that patriotic claptrap as a kid. Maybe I still do. Equality to me is self-evident. In the midst of our national amnesia, I still believe that even aliens have certain inalienable rights.
My problem is that being an American feels a lot like being a tiny hair on a charging bull. Alone, you don't have much say about where the creature's going. Even large groups only amount to a toenail, or hoof, though if you've ever seen the effect of an infected one, you can still hope to slow the animal down before everything in the china shop is broken.
Lately, all I see is wreckage, despite the wave of Democrats in Congress, and progress on gay marriage in New York. On Tuesday, the ACLU held a Day of Action in Washington, and the civil liberties group couldn't muster more than an eyebrow's worth of participants to demand that Congress end torture, and restore habeas corpus and the rest of the rights that used to make America America.
The streets should have been filled with hundreds of thousands, millions even, demanding the reinstatement of basic things like trials for when a single soul is up against the imprisoning power of the state. But most Americans don't even know what habeas corpus is, or how on earth it could get lost. Did someone leave it on the subway, or in the mall parking lot? Maybe if we all checked our pockets...?
Abstractions aren't our forte as a nation.
When did you last think about what liberty meant, or justice? What about that phrase "for all?" That's taking it too far, surely. We prefer to keep our literal-mindedness for the Bible, thank you very much.
For all our flag-waving and the use of Old Glory to decorate everything from used car lots to sheet cakes, we rarely contemplate what it means to be an American. We're content with the fireworks once a year, and now, brief distress at the flag on dead troops in Iraq.
Most of us float along unthinkingly because our distant borders let us avoid being an American in America. Identity is relative after all. Where would queers be without the straights? How can you be an American in the Midwest or South? Planted in Louisville, you're only from Kentucky, not uptight Indiana by comparison, or hippy-dippy California. You don't think about Canada or Mexico or anybody else.
It requires an enormous effort to feel the size of the place around you, the weight of the U.S. as it moves through the world, and an almost religious experience to accept it.
I didn't for years. If Faulkner and Flannery O'Conner could be excluded from the list of American writers, and considered separately in the "Southern" genre, why not me? I embraced that banner as a young writer. When people bashed American meddling in Latin America, I'd declare I wasn't really from the U.S., explaining the cultural and political difference of the South. Surprisingly, people actually agreed.
Later, I hid as a New Yorker, and separated myself as a queer. After 9/11 I thought a lot about secession and whether or not we could pull off an occidental Hong Kong. The rest of the country hates us anyway. Let them get along without us, and we'd quit taking it on the chin.
I'm more resigned now. Leave the U.S., get on a plane with the passport you ought to have, and up above the clouds, in the context of all those other boundaries, those other nations, there you are, the hair in the soup, responsible for that great stampeding beast you tried to leave behind. For good or for ill, you're an American, heir to Martin Luther King as much as George Bush and Rush Limbaugh.
Even the people at the top don't quite hold the reins. Condoleezza Rice was in Paris last week for the summit on the genocide in Darfur. She looks older than she did just a few years ago as a freshman Secretary of State when she thought she could handle Iraq.
Cheney mongered the war to gain oil, but Condi had the smell of ideology about her, reshaping the Middle East not just for self-interest but for some abstract idea of good in the world.
What American ambition. What a disaster. She still seems stunned behind the ravishing smile, wondering how mostly good intentions could have gone so wrong. It's only to be expected.
As big, ungainly, and dangerous as we are, our foreign policy should be Hippocratic, First do no harm.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Queer Economies: When the Truth Doesn't Pay
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.
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 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.
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