By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I meant to stalk Catherine Deneuve. I really did. She apparently lives at Place Saint Sulpice which is only a fifteen minute walk away. And it has plenty of benches for the lazy stalker, though you'd be advised to bring an umbrella, not so much for the rain but for the lurking pigeons.
Unfortunately, I've run out of time. I'd remember, then forget. Or have something else to do. Laundry doesn't wash itself. Groceries have to be bought. Paris streets demand to be walked, columns to be written. And in any event, just as I'm about to leave the country, she has begun to stalk me.
A couple of months ago she turned up in a dream. I've read stories of how she'd sued insulting journalists, and there was that time she sued the lesbian magazine Deneuve until they were forced to change their name to Curve. But in my dream she was quite nice.
She complimented me on my purple Wellies cast just for me in textured rubber, while I waxed eloquent about her pants made of cowhide that still had the hairs attached yet were nevertheless as supple and buttery as the finest Italian leather. They made an interesting contrast to her silky blouse that itself was composed of two or three green Indian prints.
Last night, Catherine appeared again, thinner than I remembered and perhaps angry I'd surfed past her Mississippi Mermaid, also starring that other great actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who rose to fame in the New Wave of French cinema and then sank into playing less exalted versions of the same gangsters, cops and conmen.
I can't remember much of the dream except that I put my hand on the ribs between her breasts and felt her heart beating madly as a bird. It wasn't sexy so much as a direct means of communication erasing the usual celluloid between us.
The first time I remember seeing her was in a video of the Jacques Demy musical, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It became my first favorite film. She was so strangely, untouchably beautiful. She sang and danced in the rain, not cheerfully, but while suffering in a way not at all American. That was around 1995. A few years later I saw the film 8 Women and was surprised at all the years she'd aged in between, until I remembered I saw the Umbrellas of Cherbourg long after it was made.
I still find her sexy. Maybe more than when she was young and terrifying. She still has that presence. She can still act. Seriously. I saw a character of hers once sink into a confusion of fear, self-pity, disgust, and somehow emerge with a wimpy determination. A tour de force that took a couple of seconds. She also has those transcendent moments where she puts forth the purely and nakedly beating heart that I felt between my fingers just last night.
Which is what really attracts me. How her communication is almost perfect, at least on the screen. I wish I could pull off the same in my metier. Especially when it comes to France. I had this idea when I came here that I'd sometimes write about what it was like to be an immigrant. The problem is that my immigrant-lite experience has created a growing sense of distance between worlds and words that has made it near impossible to describe.
You say tomato, I say tomate. You say potato, I say pomme de terre. And beyond the artifice of language, there's our personal lexicons. Paris, what does it mean to you? Champagne every day for breakfast? Cigarettes and Sartre for lunch? Bigots preventing those nice Muslim women from wearing their scarves? Communist medicine? And don't even start with that double-edged word, "American." Words conjure more words, images from god knows where. So much depends on shared context.
I should have known better. Already, when I moved from Kentucky to New York, there were regular letters and annual visits at first, then nothing. Not just because I came out as a lesbian (mother's translation: sinner ready to burn in hell), but because my life diverged further and further both from the worlds my family knew and even from the images they'd seen on the movie screen.
Every joke had to be explained, every little story became an epic because there were no reference points in common with their rural-rooted, suburban, church-going lives or with anybody's Mean Streets. I didn't know where to start. And ended with silence -- the flip side of all the shouting that dominates American politics now.
What's left but novels, films, and Catherine Deneuve? Self-contained, they build up context frame by frame, word by word until you feel the human heart beating underneath.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Health Care, Black Holes and Baby Dykes
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The world might be coming to an end. Not just because the Large Hadron Collider is back in action, or was, accelerating particles in 17 miles of track and potentially generating teensy-weensy black holes capable of swallowing up the earth in a single gulp, but because Obama actually got that health care reform bill passed.
I'd jump up and down and throw a party except I'm still a little miffed at whoever's bright idea it was to get fence-sitting Democrats on board by promising an Executive Order banning federal funding of abortion health care services. Keep the pompoms in the closet when poor women are getting screwed again.
Then there's the ongoing stranglehold of insurance companies brought in to lobby from the very start behind closed White House doors. I haven't forgotten that either. But as they say, better something than nothing in terms of health reform. It's a start. Things can be improved later. Though this Pablum would be considerably more believable if the Democrats had a backbone made of steel, rather than Silly Putty.
If I'm satisfied at all it's because a defeat would have given the Tea Party folks a whomping burst of momentum and shoved the Obama administration even further into the quicksand of caution and bipartisanship (cowardice, endless concessions) pretty much dooming to failure all his promises of change. I never really believed them, but what the heck? I can hope with the best of them.
What has impressed me lately is how in the midst of the hoo-ha about health care reform, the rest of the Obama administration managed to function at all. There were two wars to think about, Israel to chide, and they actually negotiated a treaty with Russia to reduce nukes. Obama will probably face much bigger hurdles than the ex-commies when it comes to getting the treaty approved. Right-wing Democrats and Republican politicians will no doubt continue to say No to everything like a bunch of terrible two-year-olds with a load in their pants.
I was also surprised to see Obama make a foray to Afghanistan to twist Hamid Karzai's arm in person. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico with half the U.S. government in tow to show a commitment to a state that's been brought practically to its knees by the drug wars. So yes, I'm glad health care reform passed, giving a little oomph to Obama instead of the hateful Tea Party mob, and showing folks his administration can take care of business. If they want to. Or if they're forced into a corner where they have to bare their little rat teeth.
Which raises the question of just what exactly queers would have to do to see some progress on any federal front like Don't Ask Don't Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act. Have a cappuccino or maybe Molotov cocktail party? Stage demonstrations where we foam from the mouth and all behave badly?
Our national organizations don't seem to cut it, especially compared to individual baby dykes in southern states. In Alabama in 2009, Tharptown High School student Cynthia Stewart successfully fought to bring her girlfriend to prom. The school initially decided to cancel its event, but reversed their decision after Stewart's case made headlines.
Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi followed suit, canceling its prom rather than allowing Constance McMillen to wear a tuxedo and arrive with her girlfriend, Ashli Pass, who also goes to Itawamba. Just afterwards McMillen told the Clarion-Ledger: "That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one." If only they would do that with marriage.
McMillen was tempted not to return to school because she was afraid everyone was going to hate her, but her family came through. "My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I am still proud of who I am. I want other kids to know that it's not right for schools to do that."
She went to court backed by the ACLU, and last week federal Judge Glen H. Davidson ruled that McMillen’s constitutional rights had been violated. He didn't force the school to hold a prom because parents are organizing one everyone can attend.
While she probably would have preferred a quicker resolution, it's been great seeing McMillen appear in photos with her family and girlfriend. The new faces of lesbian visibility are mighty cute. And if proms are what spur change in the South, I say more power to them.
It's not abstractions like equal rights that get under the skin of most people and force them to act. It's wanting to be like everybody else. Go to proms, get married. There's room for a more radical agenda, but interesting things often start small. With random collisions. Then big bangs.
The world might be coming to an end. Not just because the Large Hadron Collider is back in action, or was, accelerating particles in 17 miles of track and potentially generating teensy-weensy black holes capable of swallowing up the earth in a single gulp, but because Obama actually got that health care reform bill passed.
I'd jump up and down and throw a party except I'm still a little miffed at whoever's bright idea it was to get fence-sitting Democrats on board by promising an Executive Order banning federal funding of abortion health care services. Keep the pompoms in the closet when poor women are getting screwed again.
Then there's the ongoing stranglehold of insurance companies brought in to lobby from the very start behind closed White House doors. I haven't forgotten that either. But as they say, better something than nothing in terms of health reform. It's a start. Things can be improved later. Though this Pablum would be considerably more believable if the Democrats had a backbone made of steel, rather than Silly Putty.
If I'm satisfied at all it's because a defeat would have given the Tea Party folks a whomping burst of momentum and shoved the Obama administration even further into the quicksand of caution and bipartisanship (cowardice, endless concessions) pretty much dooming to failure all his promises of change. I never really believed them, but what the heck? I can hope with the best of them.
What has impressed me lately is how in the midst of the hoo-ha about health care reform, the rest of the Obama administration managed to function at all. There were two wars to think about, Israel to chide, and they actually negotiated a treaty with Russia to reduce nukes. Obama will probably face much bigger hurdles than the ex-commies when it comes to getting the treaty approved. Right-wing Democrats and Republican politicians will no doubt continue to say No to everything like a bunch of terrible two-year-olds with a load in their pants.
I was also surprised to see Obama make a foray to Afghanistan to twist Hamid Karzai's arm in person. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico with half the U.S. government in tow to show a commitment to a state that's been brought practically to its knees by the drug wars. So yes, I'm glad health care reform passed, giving a little oomph to Obama instead of the hateful Tea Party mob, and showing folks his administration can take care of business. If they want to. Or if they're forced into a corner where they have to bare their little rat teeth.
Which raises the question of just what exactly queers would have to do to see some progress on any federal front like Don't Ask Don't Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act. Have a cappuccino or maybe Molotov cocktail party? Stage demonstrations where we foam from the mouth and all behave badly?
Our national organizations don't seem to cut it, especially compared to individual baby dykes in southern states. In Alabama in 2009, Tharptown High School student Cynthia Stewart successfully fought to bring her girlfriend to prom. The school initially decided to cancel its event, but reversed their decision after Stewart's case made headlines.
Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi followed suit, canceling its prom rather than allowing Constance McMillen to wear a tuxedo and arrive with her girlfriend, Ashli Pass, who also goes to Itawamba. Just afterwards McMillen told the Clarion-Ledger: "That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one." If only they would do that with marriage.
McMillen was tempted not to return to school because she was afraid everyone was going to hate her, but her family came through. "My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I am still proud of who I am. I want other kids to know that it's not right for schools to do that."
She went to court backed by the ACLU, and last week federal Judge Glen H. Davidson ruled that McMillen’s constitutional rights had been violated. He didn't force the school to hold a prom because parents are organizing one everyone can attend.
While she probably would have preferred a quicker resolution, it's been great seeing McMillen appear in photos with her family and girlfriend. The new faces of lesbian visibility are mighty cute. And if proms are what spur change in the South, I say more power to them.
It's not abstractions like equal rights that get under the skin of most people and force them to act. It's wanting to be like everybody else. Go to proms, get married. There's room for a more radical agenda, but interesting things often start small. With random collisions. Then big bangs.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Dump Jefferson, That'll Show 'Em
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Americans never let a good fact get in the way of imagining a glorious past and even brighter future. I expect a remake of "Annie" any day now announcing that the sun will come out tomorrow, with the next chairman of the Fed telling Americans to bet their bottom dollar on it, buy a nice new car and drive off into the sunset.
France, by comparison, seems increasingly caught in a gloomy web of truth and sorrow that even a cheerful tune won't chase away. When study after study confirms an overheating planet, and weirding weather is embodied in a flooded Brittany coast and snowy southwest, the French tend to bend under the weight of science, and acknowledge something must be done -- as long as it doesn't cut too deeply into corporate profit margins or increase government debt.
The legacies of colonialism and religious wars are likewise dissected at length, along with tyrants from Torquemada to Hitler that can not be erased from history, at least not any time soon. In Paris, you can find plaques on elementary schools testifying "Thirteen Jewish students from this school died in concentration camps." "In this school, twenty-nine children were sent to the camps." Every month there's another made-for-TV movie set in occupied France.
Instead of imaging themselves created in the image of God, the French continue to cast a skeptical eye at human behavior and accept that homo not so sapiens evolved from apes. When Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race writer of the Three Musketeers (1844) had to respond to racist taunts, he replied, "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."
This doesn't mean Europe is perfect. You pretty much get the picture when you know that a French director recently gave the extremely white Gérard Depardieu a curly wig and brown make-up so he could play Dumas in a movie. Still, that's film.
In Texas, the State Board of Education has decided that reality itself is fluid, and above all as word-based as the fundamentalist religion that its stalwarts practice. Control the textbooks, get something down in paper and ink, or scratched into stone on a deserted mountaintop and there's a magical transformation of history. Darwin really is a liar and idiot, the British were the architects of American slavery, and white Americans were the driving forces of the African American civil rights movement.
Erase a few names here and there, and Texas can be changed from story of Native Americans and Spanish colonists into the single-handed creation of Anglo-Americans like Sam Austin, in which the Indians were mere transients and the Spanish didn't contribute so much as one pinky finger until their descendants saw how good the whites had it and immigrated from Mexico bringing fajitas, instant taco mix, and Salma Hayek.
Get out your Wite-Out, and the deist founders of the United States become bible-thumping Christians. Change a bit more and the nefarious Thomas Jefferson who wrote extensively about the Enlightenment and the "separation between church and state" no longer can be considered a real influence on revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, though he lived in France for years as ambassador of the young United States.
Texans have begun to revolt under this tyranny of idiocy. They've refused to re-elect some of the school board members, and protested appointments. Unfortunately, committee replacements can be almost as bad. One of their additions last spring was Peter Marshall, a Yankee preacher who likes to explain natural disasters from California wildfires to Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment for tolerating queers.
Delete, erase, proclaim.
It's not the first time Thomas Jefferson has been given the boot. I went to Transylvania University in Kentucky and was lucky enough to be among the twenty or so students that were awarded Thomas Jefferson scholarships. Before I left, the grant named for this former president, architect, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, yes, and slaveholder, was renamed for William T. Young, the famous (and rich) horse breeder and peanut butter manufacturer.
I couldn't help feeling diminished. There was a brief revolt of "TJ" scholars, but apparently the name was changed in gratitude for continuing gifts. It was sold, in other words, and the dough was more important than the name. Now, young scholars, instead of aspiring, however imperfectly, to equality, liberty and happiness, and an enlightened world guided by reason, can aspire to... what? Sandwich fillings and the inbreeding Kentuckians are already accused of, whether man or beast?
I shouldn't worry. After all, The sun'll come out tomorrow. Ya just gotta hang on come what may. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
Americans never let a good fact get in the way of imagining a glorious past and even brighter future. I expect a remake of "Annie" any day now announcing that the sun will come out tomorrow, with the next chairman of the Fed telling Americans to bet their bottom dollar on it, buy a nice new car and drive off into the sunset.
France, by comparison, seems increasingly caught in a gloomy web of truth and sorrow that even a cheerful tune won't chase away. When study after study confirms an overheating planet, and weirding weather is embodied in a flooded Brittany coast and snowy southwest, the French tend to bend under the weight of science, and acknowledge something must be done -- as long as it doesn't cut too deeply into corporate profit margins or increase government debt.
The legacies of colonialism and religious wars are likewise dissected at length, along with tyrants from Torquemada to Hitler that can not be erased from history, at least not any time soon. In Paris, you can find plaques on elementary schools testifying "Thirteen Jewish students from this school died in concentration camps." "In this school, twenty-nine children were sent to the camps." Every month there's another made-for-TV movie set in occupied France.
Instead of imaging themselves created in the image of God, the French continue to cast a skeptical eye at human behavior and accept that homo not so sapiens evolved from apes. When Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race writer of the Three Musketeers (1844) had to respond to racist taunts, he replied, "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."
This doesn't mean Europe is perfect. You pretty much get the picture when you know that a French director recently gave the extremely white Gérard Depardieu a curly wig and brown make-up so he could play Dumas in a movie. Still, that's film.
In Texas, the State Board of Education has decided that reality itself is fluid, and above all as word-based as the fundamentalist religion that its stalwarts practice. Control the textbooks, get something down in paper and ink, or scratched into stone on a deserted mountaintop and there's a magical transformation of history. Darwin really is a liar and idiot, the British were the architects of American slavery, and white Americans were the driving forces of the African American civil rights movement.
Erase a few names here and there, and Texas can be changed from story of Native Americans and Spanish colonists into the single-handed creation of Anglo-Americans like Sam Austin, in which the Indians were mere transients and the Spanish didn't contribute so much as one pinky finger until their descendants saw how good the whites had it and immigrated from Mexico bringing fajitas, instant taco mix, and Salma Hayek.
Get out your Wite-Out, and the deist founders of the United States become bible-thumping Christians. Change a bit more and the nefarious Thomas Jefferson who wrote extensively about the Enlightenment and the "separation between church and state" no longer can be considered a real influence on revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, though he lived in France for years as ambassador of the young United States.
Texans have begun to revolt under this tyranny of idiocy. They've refused to re-elect some of the school board members, and protested appointments. Unfortunately, committee replacements can be almost as bad. One of their additions last spring was Peter Marshall, a Yankee preacher who likes to explain natural disasters from California wildfires to Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment for tolerating queers.
Delete, erase, proclaim.
It's not the first time Thomas Jefferson has been given the boot. I went to Transylvania University in Kentucky and was lucky enough to be among the twenty or so students that were awarded Thomas Jefferson scholarships. Before I left, the grant named for this former president, architect, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, yes, and slaveholder, was renamed for William T. Young, the famous (and rich) horse breeder and peanut butter manufacturer.
I couldn't help feeling diminished. There was a brief revolt of "TJ" scholars, but apparently the name was changed in gratitude for continuing gifts. It was sold, in other words, and the dough was more important than the name. Now, young scholars, instead of aspiring, however imperfectly, to equality, liberty and happiness, and an enlightened world guided by reason, can aspire to... what? Sandwich fillings and the inbreeding Kentuckians are already accused of, whether man or beast?
I shouldn't worry. After all, The sun'll come out tomorrow. Ya just gotta hang on come what may. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Be Stupid
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I missed the lesbian and gay kiss-in on Valentine's Day here in Paris, and the March 1st pro-immigrant demos, but last month I did put in a little community service at Place de l'Odeon ripping down signs announcing, "Smart may have the brains, but Stupid has the balls. Be Stupid."
The posters were supposed to advertise jeans, but because they were in English, the real message seemed to be, "Humorless dykes and girly men urging restraint and careful consideration of things are totally lame; stupid assholes bombing Iraq, eating freedom fries, and ramming planes into buildings are so cool!"
It was a kind of Rorschach Test after eight years of Bush, a couple of all balls, no brains wars, and the new upsurge of flag-waving Tea Partiers. Still, as repulsed as I was by anti-intelligence and pro-risk posturing, I decided to rip down the signs myself with tourists staring and a guy screaming at me to get my "stupid hands off those signs." "Screw you. You wanted me to get stupid so I did."
Okay, so I couldn't hear exactly what the sign guy was yelling because he was across the street, but it could have been that. And I did mutter "Screw you." In two languages.
Destruction wasn't my first impulse. I'd actually seen the posters the day before and considered creating a dialogue with them by adding some graffiti pointing out the implications of the "Be Stupid" ideology, maybe a snarky "Bring Back Bush" penciled in, or "Evolution is a myth" or "Bomb Iran." But really, what was the point? I wondered. "Stupid" doesn't get sarcasm or subtlety. For Stupid, a pie in the face gets a laugh, but to get their attention better stick to brute force and bulldozers.
Responsible even in anger, I put the ripped up "Be Stupid" posters in the trash cans. They weren't replaced, though the motto had been spray-painted several times on the sidewalks. That, I left as a kind of memento mori. And every time I take the subway at l'Odeon I wonder what to do about the movement in the U.S. which is currently celebrating balls over brains with a kind of revivalist fervor.
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma federal building in 1995, endorsements of this brand of violently narcissistic patriotism were as marginal as snake-handlers in Kentucky hills. Survivalists hid in their enclaves which only came to our attention after disasters like the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.
A few weeks after Andrew Joseph Stack III attacked an IRS building in Texas, it's clear the balls are outdistancing the brains. In his recent New York Times article, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged, Frank Rich describes how Stack has a huge posthumous fan base. The entire press avoids the word terrorist. And every ambitious Republican from Scott Brown to Steve King is claiming they find it understandable, if perhaps lamentable, a tax-protester like Stack would be frustrated enough to get violent.
It's an actual former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, who boldly capped off her address to the National Tea Party Convention, promising the dramatic and violent, "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help."
In Texas, meanwhile, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, didn't actually offer to die herself, but did declare that "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
Radio personality Glenn Beck, who has labeled progressivism a cancer that "must be cut out of the system" only seems willing to risk the death of his enemies, not even his minions. Proof, perhaps, that the cynical Beck doesn't really have the balls?
Nowhere in the rapidly expanding Tea Party movement are any "smart" solutions requiring the drudgery of actually governing, like passing legislation that cannot be summarized in the balloon over a cartoon figure or balancing budgets that require functions not available on your ordinary calculator. And god knows you can't hold a dialogue.
What we have on our hands is a movement based on the heart-thumping thrill of a good tent meeting. The leaders of militias, and birthers, survivalists and conspiracy theorists work up their fire and brimstone pitch like a bunch of preachers performing for congregations writhing enjoyably in the delicious fear of sin, and joy of a dramatic sobbing repentance. And when the last hymn is sung, they won't forget to pass the hat.
And while the show goes on what are the consequences? A paralyzed government. And an increasingly virulent culture of balls over brains, a kind of virtual high school in which the football players and cheerleaders exercise their god-given right to torture the smart kids, fat girls, outsiders, and queers.
I missed the lesbian and gay kiss-in on Valentine's Day here in Paris, and the March 1st pro-immigrant demos, but last month I did put in a little community service at Place de l'Odeon ripping down signs announcing, "Smart may have the brains, but Stupid has the balls. Be Stupid."
The posters were supposed to advertise jeans, but because they were in English, the real message seemed to be, "Humorless dykes and girly men urging restraint and careful consideration of things are totally lame; stupid assholes bombing Iraq, eating freedom fries, and ramming planes into buildings are so cool!"
It was a kind of Rorschach Test after eight years of Bush, a couple of all balls, no brains wars, and the new upsurge of flag-waving Tea Partiers. Still, as repulsed as I was by anti-intelligence and pro-risk posturing, I decided to rip down the signs myself with tourists staring and a guy screaming at me to get my "stupid hands off those signs." "Screw you. You wanted me to get stupid so I did."
Okay, so I couldn't hear exactly what the sign guy was yelling because he was across the street, but it could have been that. And I did mutter "Screw you." In two languages.
Destruction wasn't my first impulse. I'd actually seen the posters the day before and considered creating a dialogue with them by adding some graffiti pointing out the implications of the "Be Stupid" ideology, maybe a snarky "Bring Back Bush" penciled in, or "Evolution is a myth" or "Bomb Iran." But really, what was the point? I wondered. "Stupid" doesn't get sarcasm or subtlety. For Stupid, a pie in the face gets a laugh, but to get their attention better stick to brute force and bulldozers.
Responsible even in anger, I put the ripped up "Be Stupid" posters in the trash cans. They weren't replaced, though the motto had been spray-painted several times on the sidewalks. That, I left as a kind of memento mori. And every time I take the subway at l'Odeon I wonder what to do about the movement in the U.S. which is currently celebrating balls over brains with a kind of revivalist fervor.
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma federal building in 1995, endorsements of this brand of violently narcissistic patriotism were as marginal as snake-handlers in Kentucky hills. Survivalists hid in their enclaves which only came to our attention after disasters like the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.
A few weeks after Andrew Joseph Stack III attacked an IRS building in Texas, it's clear the balls are outdistancing the brains. In his recent New York Times article, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged, Frank Rich describes how Stack has a huge posthumous fan base. The entire press avoids the word terrorist. And every ambitious Republican from Scott Brown to Steve King is claiming they find it understandable, if perhaps lamentable, a tax-protester like Stack would be frustrated enough to get violent.
It's an actual former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, who boldly capped off her address to the National Tea Party Convention, promising the dramatic and violent, "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help."
In Texas, meanwhile, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, didn't actually offer to die herself, but did declare that "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
Radio personality Glenn Beck, who has labeled progressivism a cancer that "must be cut out of the system" only seems willing to risk the death of his enemies, not even his minions. Proof, perhaps, that the cynical Beck doesn't really have the balls?
Nowhere in the rapidly expanding Tea Party movement are any "smart" solutions requiring the drudgery of actually governing, like passing legislation that cannot be summarized in the balloon over a cartoon figure or balancing budgets that require functions not available on your ordinary calculator. And god knows you can't hold a dialogue.
What we have on our hands is a movement based on the heart-thumping thrill of a good tent meeting. The leaders of militias, and birthers, survivalists and conspiracy theorists work up their fire and brimstone pitch like a bunch of preachers performing for congregations writhing enjoyably in the delicious fear of sin, and joy of a dramatic sobbing repentance. And when the last hymn is sung, they won't forget to pass the hat.
And while the show goes on what are the consequences? A paralyzed government. And an increasingly virulent culture of balls over brains, a kind of virtual high school in which the football players and cheerleaders exercise their god-given right to torture the smart kids, fat girls, outsiders, and queers.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Irish Blasphemy
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's par for the course when the Pope bashes openly gay people in Britain for having consensual homo sex, yet in Ireland refuses to fire the criminal bishops that covered up child abuse for several decades.
Apparently all that you need to make things right is a few stern words against rape and torture, a couple of Hail Marys and a "journey of repentance, reconciliation and renewal," as Irish Archbishop Sean Brady described the Pope's current visit to the Emerald Isle. Almost nobody in the hierarchy even got fired. Four Irish bishops offered their resignations, but Benedict only accepted one.
Maybe because the cover-up's not done yet and they need to reinforce the rewards of loyalty and teamwork. The papal envoy continues stonewalling investigators pursuing the conspiracy between the Catholic hierarchy and Irish cops. Imagine the scale of collaboration required to hide decades of systematic abuses by parish priests, and in Catholic-run residences where nuns and Christian Brothers got in on the act, too.
Victims told the Commission how both girls and boys were raped. They were humiliated, beaten and starved. Children had to scavenge for food in garbage cans, eat food meant for farm animals. They were badly flogged, purposely scalded and held under water. A boy was forced to lick shit from a priest's shoe. And it went on for generations.
How can you reconcile that as long as the Church is still ducking and running? "I wish to inform that it is not the practice of the Holy See that apostolic nuncios appear before parliamentary commissions," Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza wrote in a letter dated February 12.
Earlier, a successful suit by the Christian Brothers, which controlled most of the residences for boys in the country, forced the investigating Commission to withhold the names of the accused, thus preventing prosecution. It's the same silence, the same cloak of power that allowed the abuses in the first place.
In January, just a couple of months after the publication of the report, the Church got yet another tool. Since January, when a new blasphemy law went into effect, it's been illegal to say or publish anything that might provoke "outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion." You can torture children or cover it up with impunity, but draw a rude cartoon about priests and you could be punished with a fine of up to 25,000 euros.
In response to this attack on freedom of religion and of speech, Irish Atheists posted a webpage offering twenty-five blasphemous quotes from authors as diverse as Jesus, Mohammed, Mark Twain, George Carlin, and Bjork who in 1995 revealed she had been tempted by Buddhism, but "I've been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren't lesser beings, they're just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists."
Taken together, the list of quotes seems strangely anodyne, as if were calculated not to offend, except maybe for the James Kirkup poem, "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name," that had the narrator sucking the dead Jesus' cock.
It was comprised mostly of the typical denunciations of Judeo-Christian religions and their warmongering god as a "vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Believers were dismissed for being rubes. "Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate!" "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day."
The site avoided the far more common, more inflammatory "blasphemies." There was no drawing of Mohammed with a missile in his turban. Catholic priests weren't portrayed groping their choirboys. Nope, the Atheists didn't dare touch any of that. Not with Jesus' ten foot pole. In this era of culture wars, some blasphemies are cooler than others. Keep your snipes and god-bashing in the sphere of literature, art, music or comedy. Though not Danish cartoons.
When it comes to censorship, people seem to believe we can separate the baby from the bathwater, good speech from bad, ignoring how easily the brain grows accustomed to limits. And how these restrictions, heralded by some as a safeguard preventing descent into the filth of racism and homophobia, affect the entire play of our thoughts, damaging our capacity to question, judge, also to transcend. Keep your laws off my brain.
It is only blasphemy when challenges from heathen mouths are worse than torture and rape. Sleep soundly, assured that I cannot destroy your church just by thinking of priests touching children while others watch and approve, or I certainly would. The words on this page do nothing but impotently denounce the likes of Pope Benedict, and Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza. Every word out of their mouths is a offense.
It's par for the course when the Pope bashes openly gay people in Britain for having consensual homo sex, yet in Ireland refuses to fire the criminal bishops that covered up child abuse for several decades.
Apparently all that you need to make things right is a few stern words against rape and torture, a couple of Hail Marys and a "journey of repentance, reconciliation and renewal," as Irish Archbishop Sean Brady described the Pope's current visit to the Emerald Isle. Almost nobody in the hierarchy even got fired. Four Irish bishops offered their resignations, but Benedict only accepted one.
Maybe because the cover-up's not done yet and they need to reinforce the rewards of loyalty and teamwork. The papal envoy continues stonewalling investigators pursuing the conspiracy between the Catholic hierarchy and Irish cops. Imagine the scale of collaboration required to hide decades of systematic abuses by parish priests, and in Catholic-run residences where nuns and Christian Brothers got in on the act, too.
Victims told the Commission how both girls and boys were raped. They were humiliated, beaten and starved. Children had to scavenge for food in garbage cans, eat food meant for farm animals. They were badly flogged, purposely scalded and held under water. A boy was forced to lick shit from a priest's shoe. And it went on for generations.
How can you reconcile that as long as the Church is still ducking and running? "I wish to inform that it is not the practice of the Holy See that apostolic nuncios appear before parliamentary commissions," Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza wrote in a letter dated February 12.
Earlier, a successful suit by the Christian Brothers, which controlled most of the residences for boys in the country, forced the investigating Commission to withhold the names of the accused, thus preventing prosecution. It's the same silence, the same cloak of power that allowed the abuses in the first place.
In January, just a couple of months after the publication of the report, the Church got yet another tool. Since January, when a new blasphemy law went into effect, it's been illegal to say or publish anything that might provoke "outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion." You can torture children or cover it up with impunity, but draw a rude cartoon about priests and you could be punished with a fine of up to 25,000 euros.
In response to this attack on freedom of religion and of speech, Irish Atheists posted a webpage offering twenty-five blasphemous quotes from authors as diverse as Jesus, Mohammed, Mark Twain, George Carlin, and Bjork who in 1995 revealed she had been tempted by Buddhism, but "I've been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren't lesser beings, they're just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists."
Taken together, the list of quotes seems strangely anodyne, as if were calculated not to offend, except maybe for the James Kirkup poem, "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name," that had the narrator sucking the dead Jesus' cock.
It was comprised mostly of the typical denunciations of Judeo-Christian religions and their warmongering god as a "vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Believers were dismissed for being rubes. "Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate!" "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day."
The site avoided the far more common, more inflammatory "blasphemies." There was no drawing of Mohammed with a missile in his turban. Catholic priests weren't portrayed groping their choirboys. Nope, the Atheists didn't dare touch any of that. Not with Jesus' ten foot pole. In this era of culture wars, some blasphemies are cooler than others. Keep your snipes and god-bashing in the sphere of literature, art, music or comedy. Though not Danish cartoons.
When it comes to censorship, people seem to believe we can separate the baby from the bathwater, good speech from bad, ignoring how easily the brain grows accustomed to limits. And how these restrictions, heralded by some as a safeguard preventing descent into the filth of racism and homophobia, affect the entire play of our thoughts, damaging our capacity to question, judge, also to transcend. Keep your laws off my brain.
It is only blasphemy when challenges from heathen mouths are worse than torture and rape. Sleep soundly, assured that I cannot destroy your church just by thinking of priests touching children while others watch and approve, or I certainly would. The words on this page do nothing but impotently denounce the likes of Pope Benedict, and Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza. Every word out of their mouths is a offense.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Groundhog Gay
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Here's to Groundhog Day, that gloomy 2nd day of February midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox when an unkempt rodent sticks its head out of its hole, and either retreats at a shadow that predicts six more weeks of winter, or frolics at the sign of early spring if there's nothing to see.
The logic is a mess. To cast a shadow there'd have to be sun, which one would imagine should lead any ordinary groundhog to expect better weather. But the pros like Punxsutawney Phil are apparently rotten, little, sharp-teethed cynics, turning up their squirrelly noses at every false glimmer and entrenching themselves against another sure round of sleet and bone-chilling cold.
The chubby, bitter Marmota monax is a tempting model what with all the false suns in the sky and the plethora of shadows. In a burst of wishful thinking and propaganda, CNN's Sanjay Gupta declared that Haiti doesn't need doctors any more, though many people with bad two-week old injuries have yet to see a doctor, and medicine's as scarce of food.
Likewise, the Senate hearings reconsidering lesbians and gay men in the military have been promoted as radiant promises of change, though just how that will manifest itself is unclear since nobody's even considering the repeal of the misnamed Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that somehow results in queers getting ejected right and left even without anybody telling anybody anything. Apparently, what we can expect is a shift in enforcement. As Pam of Pam's House Blend writes, "I guess the result depends on how you define the word "change.""
You could say the same for the administration's press release entitled "Expanding Opportunities for the LGBT Community" that starts by patting itself on the back for steering the country away from a depression, and goes on to claim its budget includes means for fighting discrimination against LGBT folk, supporting Federal employee domestic partner benefits, and a host of other things.
While there might be money earmarked for such projects, there's still the matter of political will and how you define "expanding." Just a couple of weeks ago Lambda Legal had to file suit against Obama's administration demanding the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) obey prior rulings by Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and cough up the spousal health insurance benefits awarded to Ninth Circuit judicial attorney Karen Golinski.
Frankly, I'll believe it's summer for queers when the fruit is on the vine. Until then, it's just more of the same rotten political weather. And this groundhog recommends full butt-wagging retreat, though maybe it's better if, like Staten Island Chuck, you instead sink your teeth into the nearest target. Last year it was Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
This year, take your pick. You'll have to get in line for a piece of the O-Man, but in the meantime consider all the New York politicos that promised the moon but shafted queers on same-sex marriage, or perhaps the evangelical conversion therapist of your choice that promises healing and gives years of torture instead. You could go for the American and Nazi Revisionist Scott Lively fueling antigay hate in Uganda, and only reluctantly suggesting conversion therapy instead of the ultimate cure, the death penalty.
Then there are the discredited American "experts" extending their conversion therapy movement into Britain, among them Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and Richard Cohen, who founded the International Healing Foundation, but has been permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association.
The damage they're causing in Britain and elsewhere isn't as immediately life-threatening as Africa, but don't underestimate the growing strength of the movement and its potential impact.
In an article this week in The Independent, "The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion" Patrick Strudwick describes how, under guise of treatment, more and more British shrinks are resuscitating the debunked stereotypes that homosexuals are all emotionally retarded, infantile, damaged, suffering from childhood abuse, pathological, sick, and sinful. An assertion of love between gay men was dismissed by one shrink as "... a darkness that's very real that keeps you as its dog, but of course our God is more powerful than that."
If you're tempted to snicker at them in this post-gay era, just look at the powerful effect this cocktail of religion and pseudoscience had on Strudwick. Openly gay and well-adjusted before going undercover, he afterwards found himself "confused and damaged. I began to constantly analyse why I found particular men attractive. Does that man represent something that's lacking in me? Do I want him because he looks strong which must mean I feel weak? Did something happen in my childhood? The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none."
Sometimes I think it's just as well more Americans don't have passports.
Here's to Groundhog Day, that gloomy 2nd day of February midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox when an unkempt rodent sticks its head out of its hole, and either retreats at a shadow that predicts six more weeks of winter, or frolics at the sign of early spring if there's nothing to see.
The logic is a mess. To cast a shadow there'd have to be sun, which one would imagine should lead any ordinary groundhog to expect better weather. But the pros like Punxsutawney Phil are apparently rotten, little, sharp-teethed cynics, turning up their squirrelly noses at every false glimmer and entrenching themselves against another sure round of sleet and bone-chilling cold.
The chubby, bitter Marmota monax is a tempting model what with all the false suns in the sky and the plethora of shadows. In a burst of wishful thinking and propaganda, CNN's Sanjay Gupta declared that Haiti doesn't need doctors any more, though many people with bad two-week old injuries have yet to see a doctor, and medicine's as scarce of food.
Likewise, the Senate hearings reconsidering lesbians and gay men in the military have been promoted as radiant promises of change, though just how that will manifest itself is unclear since nobody's even considering the repeal of the misnamed Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that somehow results in queers getting ejected right and left even without anybody telling anybody anything. Apparently, what we can expect is a shift in enforcement. As Pam of Pam's House Blend writes, "I guess the result depends on how you define the word "change.""
You could say the same for the administration's press release entitled "Expanding Opportunities for the LGBT Community" that starts by patting itself on the back for steering the country away from a depression, and goes on to claim its budget includes means for fighting discrimination against LGBT folk, supporting Federal employee domestic partner benefits, and a host of other things.
While there might be money earmarked for such projects, there's still the matter of political will and how you define "expanding." Just a couple of weeks ago Lambda Legal had to file suit against Obama's administration demanding the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) obey prior rulings by Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and cough up the spousal health insurance benefits awarded to Ninth Circuit judicial attorney Karen Golinski.
Frankly, I'll believe it's summer for queers when the fruit is on the vine. Until then, it's just more of the same rotten political weather. And this groundhog recommends full butt-wagging retreat, though maybe it's better if, like Staten Island Chuck, you instead sink your teeth into the nearest target. Last year it was Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
This year, take your pick. You'll have to get in line for a piece of the O-Man, but in the meantime consider all the New York politicos that promised the moon but shafted queers on same-sex marriage, or perhaps the evangelical conversion therapist of your choice that promises healing and gives years of torture instead. You could go for the American and Nazi Revisionist Scott Lively fueling antigay hate in Uganda, and only reluctantly suggesting conversion therapy instead of the ultimate cure, the death penalty.
Then there are the discredited American "experts" extending their conversion therapy movement into Britain, among them Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and Richard Cohen, who founded the International Healing Foundation, but has been permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association.
The damage they're causing in Britain and elsewhere isn't as immediately life-threatening as Africa, but don't underestimate the growing strength of the movement and its potential impact.
In an article this week in The Independent, "The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion" Patrick Strudwick describes how, under guise of treatment, more and more British shrinks are resuscitating the debunked stereotypes that homosexuals are all emotionally retarded, infantile, damaged, suffering from childhood abuse, pathological, sick, and sinful. An assertion of love between gay men was dismissed by one shrink as "... a darkness that's very real that keeps you as its dog, but of course our God is more powerful than that."
If you're tempted to snicker at them in this post-gay era, just look at the powerful effect this cocktail of religion and pseudoscience had on Strudwick. Openly gay and well-adjusted before going undercover, he afterwards found himself "confused and damaged. I began to constantly analyse why I found particular men attractive. Does that man represent something that's lacking in me? Do I want him because he looks strong which must mean I feel weak? Did something happen in my childhood? The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none."
Sometimes I think it's just as well more Americans don't have passports.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Haiti
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I watch the news every night, while trying not to -- grey limbs sticking out of rubble, buzzing flies, and the groans of the wounded. I imagine Port-au-Prince like Gettysburg, only earth versus flesh, with tens of thousands dead in the space of a couple of miles and a couple of days, and in a hundred years you'll still hear stories of farmers plowing up bones.
9/11 was nothing. Here, the infrastructure of an entire nation was destroyed in minutes. Roads, jails, hospitals, police stations, government buildings and schools were reduced to dust filtering through the air, and the privileged who were trapped with their cell phones called for help before slowly giving way. Haitian President Preval has all but disappeared. I can't imagine how long it will take to restore even basic order.
Already, we see living men and boys fight over plastic packages of cookies, bottles of water, and whatever they pull from the ruins. Gang leaders are back in the slums ruling over the living and dead like Emperor Jones but with automatic weapons. Women don't dare to roam the streets, or battle for food. They and their kids are the most vulnerable to disease and starvation, and will probably comprise the majority of the second wave of dead.
And yet, and yet. On the TV, I see a man framing a house from timber pulled from the ruins. A woman boils water from a creek, and a boy scales fish. A neighborhood has organized itself, with young men sent to gather food and water for the rest. They close off the street for the night so people have somewhere safe to lay down their plastic tarps and sleep because their houses are shaky structures, or rubble. Beforehand, they sprinkle the street with water to quiet the dust.
In Jacmel, a small neglected city that spent the first several days after the quake without medical support or searchers, the Cine Institute students that are left are documenting their crippled city and struggling recovery efforts. Everywhere, journalists are twittering their stories, trying to get their own voices out. People survive however they can, and Haitians have had more practice than most, between the disasters of Mother Nature and the tyranny of men.
Monday, six days after the earthquake hit Haiti, was Martin Luther King day in the U.S. On Facebook Sarah Schulman offered a quote, "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."
MLK was talking about the need for street activism and Direct Action. But the truth to what he said extends even to the relief effort in Haiti, where the U.S. took charge of the airport, and asserted their own priorities, bringing in search and recovery equipment first, then U.S. military and their supplies, and only lastly humanitarian aide that is taking far too many days to reach the hungry, thirsty, suffering hands of Haitians.
I suppose the system was already in place long before Obama took office, and the military isn't known for its flexibility, or willingness to work and play with others. Still, it's hard to watch the director of an orphanage press a few cracker crumbs into the mouths of her dying children while warehouses of Brazilian food and French medicine accumulate just across the border in the Dominican Republic because some asshole general thinks expired protocols are more important than starving Haitians.
Privilege comes in all shapes. And it's not so much that we Americans need to give up ours as we need to learn to share, and relinquish the underlying assumption of superiority. We need to see laterally instead of in ladders and pyramids that not only feed racism, homophobia and nationalism, but poison our relationships even with our neighbors under the guise of America's competitive spirit.
If we open our pockets generously and temporarily when disaster strikes, I suspect it's often because it feeds our sense of privilege and grace as we bestow our gifts from our perch on Mount Olympus to the struggling mortals below.
As such, I had mixed feelings when I read reports LGBT-cruise lines like Atlantis, Olivia, and RSVP were coordinating fundraising efforts because as Judy Dlugacz, President and founder of Olivia Companies, explained to PR Newswire, many queers have stopped in Haitian ports on their vacations and that, "It is important that as LGBT Americans, we come together to show our community's solidarity and support for those living through this unimaginable disaster."
In fact, it's not "those" the LGBT community has to support, but us. A considerable chunk of suffering Haitians are queer. A hundred percent are human, just like us Americans who have intimate links to the troubled, bloody history of Haiti. I wonder what would happen if just once we looked at the TV like it was a mirror, and recognized our own faces staring back in grief.
I watch the news every night, while trying not to -- grey limbs sticking out of rubble, buzzing flies, and the groans of the wounded. I imagine Port-au-Prince like Gettysburg, only earth versus flesh, with tens of thousands dead in the space of a couple of miles and a couple of days, and in a hundred years you'll still hear stories of farmers plowing up bones.
9/11 was nothing. Here, the infrastructure of an entire nation was destroyed in minutes. Roads, jails, hospitals, police stations, government buildings and schools were reduced to dust filtering through the air, and the privileged who were trapped with their cell phones called for help before slowly giving way. Haitian President Preval has all but disappeared. I can't imagine how long it will take to restore even basic order.
Already, we see living men and boys fight over plastic packages of cookies, bottles of water, and whatever they pull from the ruins. Gang leaders are back in the slums ruling over the living and dead like Emperor Jones but with automatic weapons. Women don't dare to roam the streets, or battle for food. They and their kids are the most vulnerable to disease and starvation, and will probably comprise the majority of the second wave of dead.
And yet, and yet. On the TV, I see a man framing a house from timber pulled from the ruins. A woman boils water from a creek, and a boy scales fish. A neighborhood has organized itself, with young men sent to gather food and water for the rest. They close off the street for the night so people have somewhere safe to lay down their plastic tarps and sleep because their houses are shaky structures, or rubble. Beforehand, they sprinkle the street with water to quiet the dust.
In Jacmel, a small neglected city that spent the first several days after the quake without medical support or searchers, the Cine Institute students that are left are documenting their crippled city and struggling recovery efforts. Everywhere, journalists are twittering their stories, trying to get their own voices out. People survive however they can, and Haitians have had more practice than most, between the disasters of Mother Nature and the tyranny of men.
Monday, six days after the earthquake hit Haiti, was Martin Luther King day in the U.S. On Facebook Sarah Schulman offered a quote, "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."
MLK was talking about the need for street activism and Direct Action. But the truth to what he said extends even to the relief effort in Haiti, where the U.S. took charge of the airport, and asserted their own priorities, bringing in search and recovery equipment first, then U.S. military and their supplies, and only lastly humanitarian aide that is taking far too many days to reach the hungry, thirsty, suffering hands of Haitians.
I suppose the system was already in place long before Obama took office, and the military isn't known for its flexibility, or willingness to work and play with others. Still, it's hard to watch the director of an orphanage press a few cracker crumbs into the mouths of her dying children while warehouses of Brazilian food and French medicine accumulate just across the border in the Dominican Republic because some asshole general thinks expired protocols are more important than starving Haitians.
Privilege comes in all shapes. And it's not so much that we Americans need to give up ours as we need to learn to share, and relinquish the underlying assumption of superiority. We need to see laterally instead of in ladders and pyramids that not only feed racism, homophobia and nationalism, but poison our relationships even with our neighbors under the guise of America's competitive spirit.
If we open our pockets generously and temporarily when disaster strikes, I suspect it's often because it feeds our sense of privilege and grace as we bestow our gifts from our perch on Mount Olympus to the struggling mortals below.
As such, I had mixed feelings when I read reports LGBT-cruise lines like Atlantis, Olivia, and RSVP were coordinating fundraising efforts because as Judy Dlugacz, President and founder of Olivia Companies, explained to PR Newswire, many queers have stopped in Haitian ports on their vacations and that, "It is important that as LGBT Americans, we come together to show our community's solidarity and support for those living through this unimaginable disaster."
In fact, it's not "those" the LGBT community has to support, but us. A considerable chunk of suffering Haitians are queer. A hundred percent are human, just like us Americans who have intimate links to the troubled, bloody history of Haiti. I wonder what would happen if just once we looked at the TV like it was a mirror, and recognized our own faces staring back in grief.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
That Democratizing Decade
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I remember it well, December 31, 1999, and the collective fear that as the clock ticked over into a new millennium all our circuits would be melted, our data destroyed, and chaos unleashed upon an unprepared world. If only that had been the extent of it.
My girlfriend and I did what we could, backing up our old computers on now obsolete floppies, while others backed up public utilities and stockpiled water, guns, and gasoline for their generators tucked away in backyard bunkers they are renovating again for Obama's Socialist revolution.
Nothing happened, of course, except that I stayed home instead of going to a party, pulling the bubble wrap off of a bulbous pink monstrosity of an iMac that changed my life even without the Y2K disaster. Connect power plug to computer, computer to jack. Hold tight.
In a matter of minutes, I was released from the constraints of time, space, and the price of long distance landline telephone calls, into a universe that held instant communication, self-expression, information from any country, any language, any time, and the seeds of mad ravings. I hallucinated as my temperature rose to 104, and entered the decade with a fever and shakes, incoherent dreams, and the flu's racking, hacking cough that left me gasping for air.
A couple weeks later, my girlfriend and I started The Gully online magazine. Pre-WordPress, I coded the pages myself, and for six long years we weighed in on everything from World Cup soccer to same-sex marriage, election 2000, then 9/11. We covered queers in Jamaica, Taiwan, Guatemala, and Iran, and wrote a lot about Cuba, democracy, and that little rafter boy Elian.
We built a pretty good readership, but the blend of international news and gay issues wasn't exactly a hit, maybe because Cuba led us to talk a lot about democracy everywhere when the American left prefers to talk about rights. Much too soon, that word was ceded to George W. Bush who invaded Iraq under democracy's banner, ruining essential phrases, like "rule of law," or even "free speech" -- which Americans have more of than ever.
In the last ten years, online media has exploded, but not activism or political alternatives. It's not that we can't smell the stink. A ton of people complained online when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the election in 2000, but almost nobody took to the streets.
Big demonstrations against an Iraq War petered out once bombs started falling in 2003. In 2004, photos of Americans torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib circulated widely on the Internet to a certain amount of horror, but in the end the knowledge we were tyrants and despots, destroying our own democratic ideals, didn't move anybody to action except the ACLU.
Now, there's nothing but silence for a Democratic administration which ostensibly denounces torture, but fights all attempts to expose or prosecute it, and is again eroding due process with Executive Order 12425 which seems to give British police the right to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil without access to lawyers, or any troublesome thing like that.
In 2008, the Internet was a force in the Obama campaign, and briefly was useful when angry queers used Facebook and Twitter to organize demos when the anti-gay Prop 8 passed in California. But the "Join the Impact" calendar is sadly short of events, and what happened to the Obama machine when it came to winning health care votes or demanding accountability for the bail-out?
The most active people are the Tea Partiers who only know they hate everything. We of the left stomp on little fires as the house burns down. We'll work on campaigns, but nothing truly long-term. Neither the left nor right can be bothered to turn the around the tapestry and see how everything is connected on the other side.
When homo-obsessed American fundamentalists stick their dirty little fingers in Uganda, American queers give money, send emails and write letters, put pressure on foreign funding. Equally dangerous, though, in Uganda, is a shaky democracy punishing dissent and human rights activism. If we really want to save gay lives, aren't we going to have to push for basic conditions that allow for social change in general?
For me, it comes down to democracy and figuring out some way to reclaim the idea from twisted politicians like Bush. In our own country, in our own movement, I wish we'd talk less about rights and more about how we fit into this thing we call democracy. We're either equal or we're not. Under the Constitution, or not. Fuck customs. Fuck religion. In this melting pot of a country, all we have in common is our status under the law.
Here's hoping that this last decade fades away like a fever dream. I still can't breathe.
I remember it well, December 31, 1999, and the collective fear that as the clock ticked over into a new millennium all our circuits would be melted, our data destroyed, and chaos unleashed upon an unprepared world. If only that had been the extent of it.
My girlfriend and I did what we could, backing up our old computers on now obsolete floppies, while others backed up public utilities and stockpiled water, guns, and gasoline for their generators tucked away in backyard bunkers they are renovating again for Obama's Socialist revolution.
Nothing happened, of course, except that I stayed home instead of going to a party, pulling the bubble wrap off of a bulbous pink monstrosity of an iMac that changed my life even without the Y2K disaster. Connect power plug to computer, computer to jack. Hold tight.
In a matter of minutes, I was released from the constraints of time, space, and the price of long distance landline telephone calls, into a universe that held instant communication, self-expression, information from any country, any language, any time, and the seeds of mad ravings. I hallucinated as my temperature rose to 104, and entered the decade with a fever and shakes, incoherent dreams, and the flu's racking, hacking cough that left me gasping for air.
A couple weeks later, my girlfriend and I started The Gully online magazine. Pre-WordPress, I coded the pages myself, and for six long years we weighed in on everything from World Cup soccer to same-sex marriage, election 2000, then 9/11. We covered queers in Jamaica, Taiwan, Guatemala, and Iran, and wrote a lot about Cuba, democracy, and that little rafter boy Elian.
We built a pretty good readership, but the blend of international news and gay issues wasn't exactly a hit, maybe because Cuba led us to talk a lot about democracy everywhere when the American left prefers to talk about rights. Much too soon, that word was ceded to George W. Bush who invaded Iraq under democracy's banner, ruining essential phrases, like "rule of law," or even "free speech" -- which Americans have more of than ever.
In the last ten years, online media has exploded, but not activism or political alternatives. It's not that we can't smell the stink. A ton of people complained online when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the election in 2000, but almost nobody took to the streets.
Big demonstrations against an Iraq War petered out once bombs started falling in 2003. In 2004, photos of Americans torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib circulated widely on the Internet to a certain amount of horror, but in the end the knowledge we were tyrants and despots, destroying our own democratic ideals, didn't move anybody to action except the ACLU.
Now, there's nothing but silence for a Democratic administration which ostensibly denounces torture, but fights all attempts to expose or prosecute it, and is again eroding due process with Executive Order 12425 which seems to give British police the right to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil without access to lawyers, or any troublesome thing like that.
In 2008, the Internet was a force in the Obama campaign, and briefly was useful when angry queers used Facebook and Twitter to organize demos when the anti-gay Prop 8 passed in California. But the "Join the Impact" calendar is sadly short of events, and what happened to the Obama machine when it came to winning health care votes or demanding accountability for the bail-out?
The most active people are the Tea Partiers who only know they hate everything. We of the left stomp on little fires as the house burns down. We'll work on campaigns, but nothing truly long-term. Neither the left nor right can be bothered to turn the around the tapestry and see how everything is connected on the other side.
When homo-obsessed American fundamentalists stick their dirty little fingers in Uganda, American queers give money, send emails and write letters, put pressure on foreign funding. Equally dangerous, though, in Uganda, is a shaky democracy punishing dissent and human rights activism. If we really want to save gay lives, aren't we going to have to push for basic conditions that allow for social change in general?
For me, it comes down to democracy and figuring out some way to reclaim the idea from twisted politicians like Bush. In our own country, in our own movement, I wish we'd talk less about rights and more about how we fit into this thing we call democracy. We're either equal or we're not. Under the Constitution, or not. Fuck customs. Fuck religion. In this melting pot of a country, all we have in common is our status under the law.
Here's hoping that this last decade fades away like a fever dream. I still can't breathe.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
2009: Queer Year in Review
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"
It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.
Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.
We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.
Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.
In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.
In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."
That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.
The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.
Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.
Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.
Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.
In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.
He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.
And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.
Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"
It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.
Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.
We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.
Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.
In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.
In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."
That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.
The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.
Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.
Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.
Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.
In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.
He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.
And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Queers Aren't the Only Targets in Cuba
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
After years of largely uncritical support for the Castro regime, the African American intelligentsia has finally been nudged into looking at the racial legacy of the revolution. The result is the "Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba."
Signed last week by sixty African Americans including Cornel West, Ruby Dee Davis, Melvin Van Peebles, and Jeremiah Wright, the Declaration asked the government for the release of Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an anti-racism advocate ostensibly jailed for the illegal possession of -- two sacks of cement. "[W]e cannot sit idly by and allow for decent, peaceful and dedicated civil rights activists in Cuba, and the black population as a whole, to be treated with callous disregard for their rights as citizens and as the most marginalized people on the island."
About time. Black and mixed-race Cubans make up as much as 62 percent of the total population (11 million), but most of the country's civil leadership is white. At the top, the twenty-one member Political Bureau of Cuba's Communist Party has only four black faces, and the all important thirty-nine member Council of Ministers a mere two, the composition of which can be blamed neither on the U.S. embargo nor the CIA.
Additionally, seventy-three percent of scientists and technicians, and eighty percent of the professors at the University of Havana are white. In 2005, 65.8 percent of able-bodied black Cubans were unemployed, twice the rate of white unemployment (nearly 30 percent). Conversely, the prison population is now estimated to be 85 percent black, with prisoners averaging in age between 18 – 28 years.
Because eighty-five percent of Cuban immigrants are white, remittances sent back home to their families worsen financial disparities. It's worth noting, however, that while white Cubans may be relatively better off, they aren't doing particularly well either. The country is bankrupt, and food and housing shortages are acute.
Probably the only real racial parity on the island is in the area of dissent. Many of the Cuba's best known political prisoners have been people of color, like librarian Omar Pernet Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physicians Darsi Ferrer, the inspiration for the Declaration, and Oscar Elias Biscet who was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King and forms of non-violent protest.
The only problem with the Declaration is that it implies that this "unprovoked violence, State intimidation and imprisonment" is somehow new for black activists.
You have to pick through the accompanying press release to find the acknowledgment that the roots of the problem were actually early in the revolution. While you, my queer reader, may have heard the regime sent a whole generation of fags and dykes into UMAP concentration camps, mental hospitals, and exile, the government was also busy hunting down advocates of "Black Power," and banning related organizations.
One of the most notable victims was Walterio Carbonell, a black intellectual and admirer of the French Negritude movement. Author of "Cómo surgió la cultura nacional" (How the National Culture Emerged) (1961), he exhumed the role of Afro-Cubans in the development of the Cuban nation, going far beyond a nod at musical contributions. He was silenced by his time in jail.
From the beginning, Afro-Cubans, like poor whites and peasants, were supposed to shut up and be grateful for what they'd gotten. The troublesome part of Black Power wasn't just the "Black," but the "Power," and a government determined not to share it.
For most of the dissidents I've cited earlier, race probably wasn't the determining factor in their arrest. Omar Pernet Hernández, released in 2008, wasn't even focused on anti-racism work. He was picked up with dozens of others in the March 2003 crackdown for opposing the regime and running an independent library from his house.
Anybody at all that opens their mouths, or steps outside the lines is liable for arrest in Cuba. White, working class blogger Yoani Sanchez (and her husband) have both been harassed, and beaten up. Jail is probably on the horizon. In August, cops stormed a meeting of the LGBT group Fundación Cuba that was trying to organize, not the overthrow of the government, but Mr. Gay Cuba. The event was planned for a public place to give some visibility to the LGBT community. For their trouble, the eleven were beaten, two were arrested and their computers seized.
Now, the regime seems to be preparing for another crackdown, warning the population that Obama plans to bomb or invade the island. A few weeks ago they ran a military exercise called "Bastion 2009" part of the "War of the Whole People" which included a practice run for rounding up dissidents and putting down riots.
It's increasingly obvious that you can't fight racism -- or homophobia, misogyny or poverty -- in Cuba, without fighting for basic civil rights, and that dirty word, democracy.
After years of largely uncritical support for the Castro regime, the African American intelligentsia has finally been nudged into looking at the racial legacy of the revolution. The result is the "Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba."
Signed last week by sixty African Americans including Cornel West, Ruby Dee Davis, Melvin Van Peebles, and Jeremiah Wright, the Declaration asked the government for the release of Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an anti-racism advocate ostensibly jailed for the illegal possession of -- two sacks of cement. "[W]e cannot sit idly by and allow for decent, peaceful and dedicated civil rights activists in Cuba, and the black population as a whole, to be treated with callous disregard for their rights as citizens and as the most marginalized people on the island."
About time. Black and mixed-race Cubans make up as much as 62 percent of the total population (11 million), but most of the country's civil leadership is white. At the top, the twenty-one member Political Bureau of Cuba's Communist Party has only four black faces, and the all important thirty-nine member Council of Ministers a mere two, the composition of which can be blamed neither on the U.S. embargo nor the CIA.
Additionally, seventy-three percent of scientists and technicians, and eighty percent of the professors at the University of Havana are white. In 2005, 65.8 percent of able-bodied black Cubans were unemployed, twice the rate of white unemployment (nearly 30 percent). Conversely, the prison population is now estimated to be 85 percent black, with prisoners averaging in age between 18 – 28 years.
Because eighty-five percent of Cuban immigrants are white, remittances sent back home to their families worsen financial disparities. It's worth noting, however, that while white Cubans may be relatively better off, they aren't doing particularly well either. The country is bankrupt, and food and housing shortages are acute.
Probably the only real racial parity on the island is in the area of dissent. Many of the Cuba's best known political prisoners have been people of color, like librarian Omar Pernet Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physicians Darsi Ferrer, the inspiration for the Declaration, and Oscar Elias Biscet who was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King and forms of non-violent protest.
The only problem with the Declaration is that it implies that this "unprovoked violence, State intimidation and imprisonment" is somehow new for black activists.
You have to pick through the accompanying press release to find the acknowledgment that the roots of the problem were actually early in the revolution. While you, my queer reader, may have heard the regime sent a whole generation of fags and dykes into UMAP concentration camps, mental hospitals, and exile, the government was also busy hunting down advocates of "Black Power," and banning related organizations.
One of the most notable victims was Walterio Carbonell, a black intellectual and admirer of the French Negritude movement. Author of "Cómo surgió la cultura nacional" (How the National Culture Emerged) (1961), he exhumed the role of Afro-Cubans in the development of the Cuban nation, going far beyond a nod at musical contributions. He was silenced by his time in jail.
From the beginning, Afro-Cubans, like poor whites and peasants, were supposed to shut up and be grateful for what they'd gotten. The troublesome part of Black Power wasn't just the "Black," but the "Power," and a government determined not to share it.
For most of the dissidents I've cited earlier, race probably wasn't the determining factor in their arrest. Omar Pernet Hernández, released in 2008, wasn't even focused on anti-racism work. He was picked up with dozens of others in the March 2003 crackdown for opposing the regime and running an independent library from his house.
Anybody at all that opens their mouths, or steps outside the lines is liable for arrest in Cuba. White, working class blogger Yoani Sanchez (and her husband) have both been harassed, and beaten up. Jail is probably on the horizon. In August, cops stormed a meeting of the LGBT group Fundación Cuba that was trying to organize, not the overthrow of the government, but Mr. Gay Cuba. The event was planned for a public place to give some visibility to the LGBT community. For their trouble, the eleven were beaten, two were arrested and their computers seized.
Now, the regime seems to be preparing for another crackdown, warning the population that Obama plans to bomb or invade the island. A few weeks ago they ran a military exercise called "Bastion 2009" part of the "War of the Whole People" which included a practice run for rounding up dissidents and putting down riots.
It's increasingly obvious that you can't fight racism -- or homophobia, misogyny or poverty -- in Cuba, without fighting for basic civil rights, and that dirty word, democracy.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Beth Ditto, Rocks for Dykes in Paris
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It being very nearly Thanksgiving, let me lift a glass in gratitude to Beth Ditto, probably the most famous lesbian in Paris. She turns up nekkid on the cover of magazines, plays fashion shows, and gets interviewed for hip culture rags.
A couple nights ago when I was channel surfing I saw her on the show Taratata. The crowd gave her a standing ovation when she walked on stage, and yells and screams after her group Gossip rocked the house with a couple of songs.
A video montage about Gossip's history and influences used the "L" word first, when the host and narrator, Nagui Fam, announced that their breakthrough song, "Standing in the Way of Control" was "a manifesto that turned Gossip and Beth Ditto into a spokeswoman for the lesbian community, fat women and feminists, all at the same time."
After that, Nagui and Beth pronounced the word "lesbian" more times in fifteen minutes than I've heard in four years in France, and never with as much joy.
Here, broadcasters seem to deaden their faces when they announce LGBT pride, or the latest round in the court battle to let a nameless same-sex couple adopt a child. A few dyke politicians are out in the provinces, but by and large in France the curtain comes down on private lives which are defined as sacrosanct until it comes to hetero politicians getting snapped with women on their yachts, hetero kids swapping spit on the subway, hetero women popping kids on the hospital, taking kids for flu shots, as characters in movies, in art.
For weeks, the story headlining French papers has been the escape and eventual recapture of Jean Pierre Treiber accused of murdering two women who are usually defined as "friends," occasionally as a couple, never lesbians. Dead and alive, all that famous French discretion is for us.
For a moment, I thought it would be the same with Beth Ditto. When Nagui asked how she'd always been different, she went on to talk about being brought up on Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Patsy Cline, and how her young mother taught pro-choice values and self-confidence. "In fact, I thought other people were weird. Me weird? No, it's you guys."
About being a lesbian, nothing. And I thought, oh no. Not again. Another coy dyke. More silence. More invisibility. God, she seemed so sweet, and I thought she was more out! It broke my heart.
But like I said, I had it all wrong. A moment later Taratata did a public service giving an overview of Gossip and their influences featuring the Riot Grrl movement and lesbian musicians from Bikini Kill to K.D. Lang and some hip hop lesbian group that has a video where somebody wears an enormous pink pussy suit outside a hotdog stand. "Better lick it right, better touch it, better touch it right, better kiss it..."
Then Beth Ditto and Nagui led the audience in a chorus of "Une femme avec une femme" A woman with a woman, before he announced in solidarity, "Everybody's a lesbian here."
Then Nagui got all serious, looked her in the eye and said, like they always do in France, and the States, and every fucking where else. "Tell me, you've done your coming out. You've said, "I'm big, I'm a lesbian." There's nonstop kidding about that. Don't you think you've gotten to the point now where you should, perhaps, stop it?"
Only this time, it was obviously a set-up question for Beth who gave the question both barrels. No, I can't. "...Because we're not yet to the point in our culture and society where it's not a big deal. And until people stop getting beaten up for being gay, until people stop losing friends for being gay, until people stop being made fun of for being fat. Or told they're not going to be a singer when they grow up because they're not pretty enough. (Who fucking cares?) Until that is over, I have to make it a point so other girls, boys, queers, homos, drag queens, lizards, lesbians, dogs, cats, so they can grow up to be singers and say it doesn't matter anymore. But right now it matters a lot. It's not time. It's not time to put the torch down."
And if I quote the whole thing it's because I'm tired of saying it myself. Invisible, we are alone, and lonely and vulnerable. We have no allies. Even worse is only seeing queers when they're dead. Visibility may not be some magic wand to defeat homophobic assholes, but it plays a powerful role. Beth Ditto out in the world, and unashamed, makes space for the rest of us, speaks for me when she tells a hater to kiss her ass. Helps kids come out. Yup, I'm plenty thankful for that.
It being very nearly Thanksgiving, let me lift a glass in gratitude to Beth Ditto, probably the most famous lesbian in Paris. She turns up nekkid on the cover of magazines, plays fashion shows, and gets interviewed for hip culture rags.
A couple nights ago when I was channel surfing I saw her on the show Taratata. The crowd gave her a standing ovation when she walked on stage, and yells and screams after her group Gossip rocked the house with a couple of songs.
A video montage about Gossip's history and influences used the "L" word first, when the host and narrator, Nagui Fam, announced that their breakthrough song, "Standing in the Way of Control" was "a manifesto that turned Gossip and Beth Ditto into a spokeswoman for the lesbian community, fat women and feminists, all at the same time."
After that, Nagui and Beth pronounced the word "lesbian" more times in fifteen minutes than I've heard in four years in France, and never with as much joy.
Here, broadcasters seem to deaden their faces when they announce LGBT pride, or the latest round in the court battle to let a nameless same-sex couple adopt a child. A few dyke politicians are out in the provinces, but by and large in France the curtain comes down on private lives which are defined as sacrosanct until it comes to hetero politicians getting snapped with women on their yachts, hetero kids swapping spit on the subway, hetero women popping kids on the hospital, taking kids for flu shots, as characters in movies, in art.
For weeks, the story headlining French papers has been the escape and eventual recapture of Jean Pierre Treiber accused of murdering two women who are usually defined as "friends," occasionally as a couple, never lesbians. Dead and alive, all that famous French discretion is for us.
For a moment, I thought it would be the same with Beth Ditto. When Nagui asked how she'd always been different, she went on to talk about being brought up on Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Patsy Cline, and how her young mother taught pro-choice values and self-confidence. "In fact, I thought other people were weird. Me weird? No, it's you guys."
About being a lesbian, nothing. And I thought, oh no. Not again. Another coy dyke. More silence. More invisibility. God, she seemed so sweet, and I thought she was more out! It broke my heart.
But like I said, I had it all wrong. A moment later Taratata did a public service giving an overview of Gossip and their influences featuring the Riot Grrl movement and lesbian musicians from Bikini Kill to K.D. Lang and some hip hop lesbian group that has a video where somebody wears an enormous pink pussy suit outside a hotdog stand. "Better lick it right, better touch it, better touch it right, better kiss it..."
Then Beth Ditto and Nagui led the audience in a chorus of "Une femme avec une femme" A woman with a woman, before he announced in solidarity, "Everybody's a lesbian here."
Then Nagui got all serious, looked her in the eye and said, like they always do in France, and the States, and every fucking where else. "Tell me, you've done your coming out. You've said, "I'm big, I'm a lesbian." There's nonstop kidding about that. Don't you think you've gotten to the point now where you should, perhaps, stop it?"
Only this time, it was obviously a set-up question for Beth who gave the question both barrels. No, I can't. "...Because we're not yet to the point in our culture and society where it's not a big deal. And until people stop getting beaten up for being gay, until people stop losing friends for being gay, until people stop being made fun of for being fat. Or told they're not going to be a singer when they grow up because they're not pretty enough. (Who fucking cares?) Until that is over, I have to make it a point so other girls, boys, queers, homos, drag queens, lizards, lesbians, dogs, cats, so they can grow up to be singers and say it doesn't matter anymore. But right now it matters a lot. It's not time. It's not time to put the torch down."
And if I quote the whole thing it's because I'm tired of saying it myself. Invisible, we are alone, and lonely and vulnerable. We have no allies. Even worse is only seeing queers when they're dead. Visibility may not be some magic wand to defeat homophobic assholes, but it plays a powerful role. Beth Ditto out in the world, and unashamed, makes space for the rest of us, speaks for me when she tells a hater to kiss her ass. Helps kids come out. Yup, I'm plenty thankful for that.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Breaking Down Walls
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Every time I watch the images of the crowds streaming through Berlin's Cold War gates it's magic. God, what joy. What exhilaration when that wall you'd lived with for twenty-eight years just crumbles, and along with it the paranoia and surveillance and fear, the degradations and mutual betrayal of friends, all the lies you had to tell to others and yourself just to survive.
Afterwards, but before young Sarkozy and other tourists came for their photo ops, there were the guys with sledgehammers concentrating on each swing with a kind of unparalleled, single-minded fury. I could be them. I feel I am them, throwing my body and my life not just against the physical imprisoning restraints, but against all those barriers standing between me and freedom.
I can hear your silent sneer. "She's taken the metaphor too far once again. How the dyke exaggerates, now, when the LGBT community is making progress. You have to take the long view. Make a donation. Relax. Celebrate the federal hate crimes bill."
In fact, queers have taken one loss after another for the last twelve months from the loss of same-sex in California to the installation of anti-gay Rick Warren in Obama's inauguration to his administration's energetic defense of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Most recent is the repeal of same-sex marriage in Maine, which should remind us not only that same-sex marriage is not legal except in two or three states, but that it is explicitly banned in most.
LGBT people are condemned not just in America's laws, but in America's streets and hearts as second class citizens, children, criminals, pedophiles and child molesters. In many eyes, we are not even human finally, but worms, garbage and filth. We get beaten up in the street. Our younger selves are harassed in schools. We don't get decent health care even if we can afford it because our doctors are enemies to whom we tell nothing.
I don't understand the little shrug, the mere wince, or grimace when your face should be red with rage. Did the vast majority of queers in the United States enter into some kind of pact to be nice and polite, so as to not frighten the straights? Did you promise to knock softly on doors instead of battering them down? To speak sweetly in your phone banks instead of returning the filth they shower us with every day? To stay off the streets believing if you're good enough, kind enough, earnest enough, united, and homogenous enough change will come?
After all, the end of a generation only took one magic phrase from Ronald Reagan who ordered Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall." It had nothing to do with a disintegrating Soviet Union, a reformer in charge in Moscow who warned East Germans that Russia wouldn't arrive this time with tanks to back them up. The destruction of the wall had nothing to do with years of dissent, or vast demonstrations for reform that left border guards terrified when faced with a crowd that had been mistakenly told the border was opening up "immediately." It was a few words by an American president, and the magic of a good cause.
I'm less distressed by the legal reverses than our seeming stoicism in the face of them, and the same kind of egotistical and magical thinking many Americans used to interpret the fall of the Berlin wall. At a recent New York City march protesting the savage beating of a gay man, one councilmember actually said, "The one thing that has to happen is marriage equality so that people see that gays and lesbians are equal to everyone."
Actually, no. While same-sex marriage will make life easier for an enormous amount of gay people, marriage won't bring down the wall, homophobia, which divides us from straights in every aspect our lives: schoolrooms, churches, jobs, streets, families, and yes, courts.
In that respect, the Councilmember Tony Avella was more on target when he went on to admit that the city also needed a "deputy mayor for Human Rights to educate kids." I agree completely, and predict the fight to include lesbian, gay and transgender lives in the curriculum will be much more bitter than any same-sex marriage campaign. Which is perhaps why we have confined our efforts to asserting legal equality, and increasingly shut our eyes to the cultural and religious hate.
These days we build our own walls from the inside out, blocking the neighboring eyesores, and training ourselves not to see all the petty humiliations, the great wrongs that have nothing to do with us locked as we are behind mortar and stone. Are we in prison if we have the key?
I watch the images over and over. People streaming through the gates, destroying walls. I remember when we wanted more than equality, when we wanted to be free.
Every time I watch the images of the crowds streaming through Berlin's Cold War gates it's magic. God, what joy. What exhilaration when that wall you'd lived with for twenty-eight years just crumbles, and along with it the paranoia and surveillance and fear, the degradations and mutual betrayal of friends, all the lies you had to tell to others and yourself just to survive.
Afterwards, but before young Sarkozy and other tourists came for their photo ops, there were the guys with sledgehammers concentrating on each swing with a kind of unparalleled, single-minded fury. I could be them. I feel I am them, throwing my body and my life not just against the physical imprisoning restraints, but against all those barriers standing between me and freedom.
I can hear your silent sneer. "She's taken the metaphor too far once again. How the dyke exaggerates, now, when the LGBT community is making progress. You have to take the long view. Make a donation. Relax. Celebrate the federal hate crimes bill."
In fact, queers have taken one loss after another for the last twelve months from the loss of same-sex in California to the installation of anti-gay Rick Warren in Obama's inauguration to his administration's energetic defense of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Most recent is the repeal of same-sex marriage in Maine, which should remind us not only that same-sex marriage is not legal except in two or three states, but that it is explicitly banned in most.
LGBT people are condemned not just in America's laws, but in America's streets and hearts as second class citizens, children, criminals, pedophiles and child molesters. In many eyes, we are not even human finally, but worms, garbage and filth. We get beaten up in the street. Our younger selves are harassed in schools. We don't get decent health care even if we can afford it because our doctors are enemies to whom we tell nothing.
I don't understand the little shrug, the mere wince, or grimace when your face should be red with rage. Did the vast majority of queers in the United States enter into some kind of pact to be nice and polite, so as to not frighten the straights? Did you promise to knock softly on doors instead of battering them down? To speak sweetly in your phone banks instead of returning the filth they shower us with every day? To stay off the streets believing if you're good enough, kind enough, earnest enough, united, and homogenous enough change will come?
After all, the end of a generation only took one magic phrase from Ronald Reagan who ordered Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall." It had nothing to do with a disintegrating Soviet Union, a reformer in charge in Moscow who warned East Germans that Russia wouldn't arrive this time with tanks to back them up. The destruction of the wall had nothing to do with years of dissent, or vast demonstrations for reform that left border guards terrified when faced with a crowd that had been mistakenly told the border was opening up "immediately." It was a few words by an American president, and the magic of a good cause.
I'm less distressed by the legal reverses than our seeming stoicism in the face of them, and the same kind of egotistical and magical thinking many Americans used to interpret the fall of the Berlin wall. At a recent New York City march protesting the savage beating of a gay man, one councilmember actually said, "The one thing that has to happen is marriage equality so that people see that gays and lesbians are equal to everyone."
Actually, no. While same-sex marriage will make life easier for an enormous amount of gay people, marriage won't bring down the wall, homophobia, which divides us from straights in every aspect our lives: schoolrooms, churches, jobs, streets, families, and yes, courts.
In that respect, the Councilmember Tony Avella was more on target when he went on to admit that the city also needed a "deputy mayor for Human Rights to educate kids." I agree completely, and predict the fight to include lesbian, gay and transgender lives in the curriculum will be much more bitter than any same-sex marriage campaign. Which is perhaps why we have confined our efforts to asserting legal equality, and increasingly shut our eyes to the cultural and religious hate.
These days we build our own walls from the inside out, blocking the neighboring eyesores, and training ourselves not to see all the petty humiliations, the great wrongs that have nothing to do with us locked as we are behind mortar and stone. Are we in prison if we have the key?
I watch the images over and over. People streaming through the gates, destroying walls. I remember when we wanted more than equality, when we wanted to be free.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Herta Müller Is A Hero
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It should have gone to Philip Roth. Philip Roth, or maybe Joyce Carol Oates. That was the consensus on the American side of the pond after Herta Müller was named the latest winner of the Nobel prize in literature.
In a Washington Post article, Mary Jordan asked, "Herta who?" and quoted that luminary Harold Bloom announcing he had, "Nothing to talk about because I have never heard of this writer." Jordan likewise featured a German bookstore owner characterizing Müller as popular only "with a minority of intellectuals." Finally, an unnamed but "prominent editor and writer in New York" confirmed Müllar's insignificance declaring that the 18-member Nobel jury was "in some other universe." Which is absolutely true.
In this other universe that does not have America as its heart, we're celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. From Europe, the world seems bigger than from New York, and the stakes higher. Many countries of the former Soviet bloc are struggling with their totalitarian pasts, while established democracies are struggling to balance their mandate for civil liberties with the so-called exigencies of fighting terrorism.
And in this other universe where literature is still a battleground of ideas and not some popularity contest, Herta Müller was the perfect choice. Through more than twenty books, and a string of Europe's top prizes, she's obsessively and brilliantly considered the legacy of Communism in Romania, especially the spying, betrayal, hatred, and loss.
Born into a German-speaking minority in the Romanian countryside in 1953, her peasant mother suffered several years in a Ukrainian gulag, sent there like many other ethnic Germans by the Soviets that briefly occupied Romania after World War II.
During the war, her father was in the SS. "My father hated working in the fields and when he returned from the SS in 1945, he became a lorry driver and alcoholic. The combination is possible in the countryside. My mother was and remained a peasant in the corn and sunflower fields. Corn for me is the socialist plant par excellence: it displays its colours, grows in colonies, blocks the view and cuts your hands with its leaves while you're working."
She herded cows as a child and worked on the farm. After studying literature in college, she found work as a translator in a factory. To keep her job, she had to agree to spy for Ceausescu's secret police. When she refused twice, the functionary told her, "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river." Instead, he denounced her to the other workers as a spy and made her a pariah. Shortly afterwards she lost her job.
Like other uncooperative writers, her work was censored, and she was under constant surveillance. She was repeatedly interrogated and humiliated. Her house was bugged. They threatened her. Even in 1987 when she finally was able to move with her husband to Berlin, there were traces of the secret police.
In her essay, "Securitate in all but name," which appeared this July in the German weekly Die Zeit, she wrote that despite the execution of Ceausescu, the fall of the Berlin wall, and an innocuous new name, the Romanian Information Service, the secret police continues largely intact. "According to their own figures, 40% of the staff was taken on from the Securitate. The real percentage is probably much higher." The rest are retired, or "the new architects of the market economy."
In her novels, those implications are translated into human terms. After thirty years under a dictatorship she's an expert on the damage we do to ourselves with each complicit act, not just the active betrayals, but the times we turn our eyes away. When we accept. Or forget. And go silent.
We are lucky when writers like Müller refuse. There's a certain amount of courage you have to have. A certain amount of mulishness. A sense of self-preservation that extends beyond the body. We get a glimpse of that in her 1991 "Der Teufel Sitzt im Spiegel" (The devil sits in the mirror) quoted in Verena Auffermann's biographical essay about the writer:
"Writing is always the last thing, the only thing that I can (still) do, have to do, when there's nothing else I can do. When I write, it is always at the point where I can no longer deal with myself (and that also means the things that surround me). When I can no longer endure my senses. When I can no long endure thinking. When everything has become so complicated that I no longer know where the external things begin or end. Whether they are inside me or the other way round."
Word by word, our best writers pull back the curtains and show us the truth of the world. Müller does that in her novels and her life. One of her first acts as a laureate was to support embattled Chinese writers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
It should have gone to Philip Roth. Philip Roth, or maybe Joyce Carol Oates. That was the consensus on the American side of the pond after Herta Müller was named the latest winner of the Nobel prize in literature.
In a Washington Post article, Mary Jordan asked, "Herta who?" and quoted that luminary Harold Bloom announcing he had, "Nothing to talk about because I have never heard of this writer." Jordan likewise featured a German bookstore owner characterizing Müller as popular only "with a minority of intellectuals." Finally, an unnamed but "prominent editor and writer in New York" confirmed Müllar's insignificance declaring that the 18-member Nobel jury was "in some other universe." Which is absolutely true.
In this other universe that does not have America as its heart, we're celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. From Europe, the world seems bigger than from New York, and the stakes higher. Many countries of the former Soviet bloc are struggling with their totalitarian pasts, while established democracies are struggling to balance their mandate for civil liberties with the so-called exigencies of fighting terrorism.
And in this other universe where literature is still a battleground of ideas and not some popularity contest, Herta Müller was the perfect choice. Through more than twenty books, and a string of Europe's top prizes, she's obsessively and brilliantly considered the legacy of Communism in Romania, especially the spying, betrayal, hatred, and loss.
Born into a German-speaking minority in the Romanian countryside in 1953, her peasant mother suffered several years in a Ukrainian gulag, sent there like many other ethnic Germans by the Soviets that briefly occupied Romania after World War II.
During the war, her father was in the SS. "My father hated working in the fields and when he returned from the SS in 1945, he became a lorry driver and alcoholic. The combination is possible in the countryside. My mother was and remained a peasant in the corn and sunflower fields. Corn for me is the socialist plant par excellence: it displays its colours, grows in colonies, blocks the view and cuts your hands with its leaves while you're working."
She herded cows as a child and worked on the farm. After studying literature in college, she found work as a translator in a factory. To keep her job, she had to agree to spy for Ceausescu's secret police. When she refused twice, the functionary told her, "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river." Instead, he denounced her to the other workers as a spy and made her a pariah. Shortly afterwards she lost her job.
Like other uncooperative writers, her work was censored, and she was under constant surveillance. She was repeatedly interrogated and humiliated. Her house was bugged. They threatened her. Even in 1987 when she finally was able to move with her husband to Berlin, there were traces of the secret police.
In her essay, "Securitate in all but name," which appeared this July in the German weekly Die Zeit, she wrote that despite the execution of Ceausescu, the fall of the Berlin wall, and an innocuous new name, the Romanian Information Service, the secret police continues largely intact. "According to their own figures, 40% of the staff was taken on from the Securitate. The real percentage is probably much higher." The rest are retired, or "the new architects of the market economy."
In her novels, those implications are translated into human terms. After thirty years under a dictatorship she's an expert on the damage we do to ourselves with each complicit act, not just the active betrayals, but the times we turn our eyes away. When we accept. Or forget. And go silent.
We are lucky when writers like Müller refuse. There's a certain amount of courage you have to have. A certain amount of mulishness. A sense of self-preservation that extends beyond the body. We get a glimpse of that in her 1991 "Der Teufel Sitzt im Spiegel" (The devil sits in the mirror) quoted in Verena Auffermann's biographical essay about the writer:
"Writing is always the last thing, the only thing that I can (still) do, have to do, when there's nothing else I can do. When I write, it is always at the point where I can no longer deal with myself (and that also means the things that surround me). When I can no longer endure my senses. When I can no long endure thinking. When everything has become so complicated that I no longer know where the external things begin or end. Whether they are inside me or the other way round."
Word by word, our best writers pull back the curtains and show us the truth of the world. Müller does that in her novels and her life. One of her first acts as a laureate was to support embattled Chinese writers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Why We March
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
There are only a couple reasons to march, and plenty not to. Prior to the Sunday March for Equality in Washington, D.C., the compromised politicos of the Human Rights Campaign ilk expressed their preference that we queers sit in the closet with some gags on our mouths until 2017, so as not to embarrass the Promiser-In-Chief Barack Obama.
Some lefty queers were also refusing to go implying the march was morally bankrupt because it didn't emerge spontaneously from the grassroots movements, like children from the head of Zeus. Instead of piggybacking on the situation to get out their own messages by fielding raucous contingents, or marching on different routes, they encouraged people to put up their feet and settle in for self-righteous naps.
Meanwhile, journalist Gabriel Arana dismissed the march as irrelevant, explaining that visibility for equality just wasn't necessary. Most of America knew we were here and queer, and already supported civil unions or gay marriage in large numbers. What we needed was a protest against a dithering Obama refusing to set timelines for change.
There was also the host of more usual impediments: transportation, hotel rooms, time off, and ingrown toenails and stubbed toes that we really shouldn't put pressure on. I myself had the runs and a desire to stay near a toilet. Still, on Sunday morning I dragged myself out of the house. Not to D.C., but in a celebration of activism itself, to watch a small but earnest march in Paris sponsored by the "Comité de la jupe" (Skirt Committee). The group describes themselves as citizen Catholics, which I thought would be worth seeing because they could only have emerged in Republican France.
They met at the Arènes de Lutèce, a first century Gallo-Roman amphitheater where gladiators and slaves used to combat wild animals, and now kids play soccer, and old guys and dykes play boules in the dirty sand. It took me a minute to get the symbolism of ordinary Christians up against the lions of Rome, maybe because they reversed the order of things, meeting for lunch and inspiration inside the arena, before marching to the Roman lions outside in the Paris streets.
It's hard to imagine easier prey than this Skirt Committee organized on the internet by two women after a French Cardinal sneered at female participation in the Church declaring that his opposition "wasn't that they wore skirts, but a matter of having something inside their heads." This group headed by female Catholics is not only up against the outright hate multiplying in Rome but a virulent misogyny combined with the secularism of France.
Nevertheless, they're doing okay. They have about five hundred members united around the ambitious goal of making the Catholic Church more egalitarian and democratic, plus the peculiar idea that Christians should focus more on the values of Christ, including love, compassion, and courage.
While I'd like to sneer, I actually found the speech and manifesto really moving. What's not to like about equality and kindness, and commitment neither to leave your home territory nor shut up? The religious stuff aside, HRC and gay Democrats could learn a lot from these citizen Catholics who believe speaking out and criticizing from within is a serious moral imperative.
The crowd bubbled with a kind of anarchic joy when they filed down onto the sands to arrange themselves in groups. I could tell from their faces some had never marched before. Or for that matter, been to the big city of Paris. They were nervous and excited. They were inspired. Even if in practical terms you could say the march part was a flop.
What's the point of taking to the streets, when all you have are a few signs identifying far off places like Alsace and Bordeaux? Besides that, nothing. No placards, no five word message. They didn't even have a leading banner. I imagined passersby wondering who the heck were these people with the red bags and umbrellas? Tourists, probably. You had to get really close to read the fine print.
And yet, and yet. Marches always mean something. Even if the New York Times buries the story, as they did with the Equality March, or you only have a couple hundred feet on the pavement. You see each other. For an hour or two you own a chunk of public space. You exist in a way you don't at home alone. Your voice and your life are amplified in unimaginable ways.
And that's my point. We don't just march for them -- for media outlets, and passersby, and to pressure the powers that be on specific issues. We march for ourselves. It's a declaration of independence, of power, of democracy. Maybe even hope.
There are only a couple reasons to march, and plenty not to. Prior to the Sunday March for Equality in Washington, D.C., the compromised politicos of the Human Rights Campaign ilk expressed their preference that we queers sit in the closet with some gags on our mouths until 2017, so as not to embarrass the Promiser-In-Chief Barack Obama.
Some lefty queers were also refusing to go implying the march was morally bankrupt because it didn't emerge spontaneously from the grassroots movements, like children from the head of Zeus. Instead of piggybacking on the situation to get out their own messages by fielding raucous contingents, or marching on different routes, they encouraged people to put up their feet and settle in for self-righteous naps.
Meanwhile, journalist Gabriel Arana dismissed the march as irrelevant, explaining that visibility for equality just wasn't necessary. Most of America knew we were here and queer, and already supported civil unions or gay marriage in large numbers. What we needed was a protest against a dithering Obama refusing to set timelines for change.
There was also the host of more usual impediments: transportation, hotel rooms, time off, and ingrown toenails and stubbed toes that we really shouldn't put pressure on. I myself had the runs and a desire to stay near a toilet. Still, on Sunday morning I dragged myself out of the house. Not to D.C., but in a celebration of activism itself, to watch a small but earnest march in Paris sponsored by the "Comité de la jupe" (Skirt Committee). The group describes themselves as citizen Catholics, which I thought would be worth seeing because they could only have emerged in Republican France.
They met at the Arènes de Lutèce, a first century Gallo-Roman amphitheater where gladiators and slaves used to combat wild animals, and now kids play soccer, and old guys and dykes play boules in the dirty sand. It took me a minute to get the symbolism of ordinary Christians up against the lions of Rome, maybe because they reversed the order of things, meeting for lunch and inspiration inside the arena, before marching to the Roman lions outside in the Paris streets.
It's hard to imagine easier prey than this Skirt Committee organized on the internet by two women after a French Cardinal sneered at female participation in the Church declaring that his opposition "wasn't that they wore skirts, but a matter of having something inside their heads." This group headed by female Catholics is not only up against the outright hate multiplying in Rome but a virulent misogyny combined with the secularism of France.
Nevertheless, they're doing okay. They have about five hundred members united around the ambitious goal of making the Catholic Church more egalitarian and democratic, plus the peculiar idea that Christians should focus more on the values of Christ, including love, compassion, and courage.
While I'd like to sneer, I actually found the speech and manifesto really moving. What's not to like about equality and kindness, and commitment neither to leave your home territory nor shut up? The religious stuff aside, HRC and gay Democrats could learn a lot from these citizen Catholics who believe speaking out and criticizing from within is a serious moral imperative.
The crowd bubbled with a kind of anarchic joy when they filed down onto the sands to arrange themselves in groups. I could tell from their faces some had never marched before. Or for that matter, been to the big city of Paris. They were nervous and excited. They were inspired. Even if in practical terms you could say the march part was a flop.
What's the point of taking to the streets, when all you have are a few signs identifying far off places like Alsace and Bordeaux? Besides that, nothing. No placards, no five word message. They didn't even have a leading banner. I imagined passersby wondering who the heck were these people with the red bags and umbrellas? Tourists, probably. You had to get really close to read the fine print.
And yet, and yet. Marches always mean something. Even if the New York Times buries the story, as they did with the Equality March, or you only have a couple hundred feet on the pavement. You see each other. For an hour or two you own a chunk of public space. You exist in a way you don't at home alone. Your voice and your life are amplified in unimaginable ways.
And that's my point. We don't just march for them -- for media outlets, and passersby, and to pressure the powers that be on specific issues. We march for ourselves. It's a declaration of independence, of power, of democracy. Maybe even hope.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Redeeming Caster Semenya
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I saw the women's 800 meters in Berlin. This young thing was facing the cameras before the race started, pretending to brush a few specks of dust off her shoulders because that's what the other runners were to her, just dust she was gonna leave behind. She wasn't in the lead at first, but pretty soon she broke out and that was the end of it.
Afterwards, the French announcer said, there were two races, Caster Semenya's and the one everybody else was in. She didn't crack a smile. Just brushed off her shoulders again, that young woman from South Africa. Somebody handed her a flag and told her to take a victory lap. She did it sternly. A dyke, I figured. Stone butch and eighteen, with a lot to prove. More than I knew at the time.
It turns out she was waiting for the results of gender testing after complaints from some of the other runners and coaches about her sudden improvement, big muscles, deep voice when she came out of nowhere to win the African Junior Championship.
Plenty of writers blame the complaints on racism and misogyny. And it is always tough for black female athletes. Blogger Monica Roberts wasn't the only one to comment, "I know from my time on planet Earth, if an African descended female athlete excels in spectacular fashion, we get accused of cheating or have 'that's a man' shade hurled at us."
Like many others, she went on to talk about the Williams sisters whose complete dominance of the women's tennis circuit has brought on a lot of the same complaints. "They're too big, too strong. They're not real women." She also reminded us that Olympic champion Maria Mutola of Mozambique faced the same kind of accusations despite passing test after test.
Masculine women, and dykes, of course, get that nonsense all the time, no matter what their race. Martina Navratilova was in the hot seat for her muscley arms and total control of women's tennis a generation before the Williams sisters. For the rest of us, our girlness started getting called into question when we were little and beat boys in games.
All that makes a black, butch woman with wings on her feet fair game. And the medical juries are in. At least the information was leaked. Caster Semenya wasn't doping. But she is a "hermaphrodite" as they wrote in some headlines. Intersexed from those that wanted to be polite. No external male organs but reportedly testes hidden up in there.
I can't imagine what she thought, finding out in the morning paper, and looking down at a body that's suddenly foreign. Worrying everybody thinks she's a freak. Wondering if they'll let her compete again. If she can stand to.
The only good that's come out of the mess is that it gave birth to a couple of interesting articles about biological complexity explaining there are far more gender variations than we acknowledge both on the hormonal, biological and genetic levels. Hell, X's and Y's are scattered around like party favors.
Unfortunately, few of the articles went so far as to demand Semenya be accepted as an athlete, no question, by clarifying what matters most to her, that in terms of performance, most intersexed females with testes don't get enough of a handy hormonal spike to get any kind of advantage.
In fact, women with "normal" sex organs can produce unusually high levels of testosterone. What are we going to do about them? The only fair thing would be to test all the "female" athletes and establish one set of rules for everyone. Maybe even enforce them by administering hormones until they're all at exactly the same levels. Perhaps the tall ones should be shortened and the short ones stretched.
According to Peggy Orenstine, the Olympic Games quit gender-verifying female athletes in 1999 because it was proven the few women with atypical sex development didn't actually get a competitive edge. Worse, "it served only to humiliate them." Given that, it's hard to understand why the International Association of Athletics Federations continues to go after Caster Semenya.
The only challenge to Caster should be the field of runners. Unfortunately, besides the IAAF, there's now the emotional obstacle of stepping back into a stadium, and competing in front of a crowd when plenty of them are thinking she's a freak of nature, and not just because she blew away the world champion by almost two and a half seconds.
After the news broke, she withdrew from her next race and apparently began trauma counseling. I only hope it's coming from somebody kind and open-minded who won't stuff her into dresses, or try to extract her difference with a knife. I can't wait to see her run again. That beautiful burst of speed and defiance. Leaving all the other girls in the dust.
I saw the women's 800 meters in Berlin. This young thing was facing the cameras before the race started, pretending to brush a few specks of dust off her shoulders because that's what the other runners were to her, just dust she was gonna leave behind. She wasn't in the lead at first, but pretty soon she broke out and that was the end of it.
Afterwards, the French announcer said, there were two races, Caster Semenya's and the one everybody else was in. She didn't crack a smile. Just brushed off her shoulders again, that young woman from South Africa. Somebody handed her a flag and told her to take a victory lap. She did it sternly. A dyke, I figured. Stone butch and eighteen, with a lot to prove. More than I knew at the time.
It turns out she was waiting for the results of gender testing after complaints from some of the other runners and coaches about her sudden improvement, big muscles, deep voice when she came out of nowhere to win the African Junior Championship.
Plenty of writers blame the complaints on racism and misogyny. And it is always tough for black female athletes. Blogger Monica Roberts wasn't the only one to comment, "I know from my time on planet Earth, if an African descended female athlete excels in spectacular fashion, we get accused of cheating or have 'that's a man' shade hurled at us."
Like many others, she went on to talk about the Williams sisters whose complete dominance of the women's tennis circuit has brought on a lot of the same complaints. "They're too big, too strong. They're not real women." She also reminded us that Olympic champion Maria Mutola of Mozambique faced the same kind of accusations despite passing test after test.
Masculine women, and dykes, of course, get that nonsense all the time, no matter what their race. Martina Navratilova was in the hot seat for her muscley arms and total control of women's tennis a generation before the Williams sisters. For the rest of us, our girlness started getting called into question when we were little and beat boys in games.
All that makes a black, butch woman with wings on her feet fair game. And the medical juries are in. At least the information was leaked. Caster Semenya wasn't doping. But she is a "hermaphrodite" as they wrote in some headlines. Intersexed from those that wanted to be polite. No external male organs but reportedly testes hidden up in there.
I can't imagine what she thought, finding out in the morning paper, and looking down at a body that's suddenly foreign. Worrying everybody thinks she's a freak. Wondering if they'll let her compete again. If she can stand to.
The only good that's come out of the mess is that it gave birth to a couple of interesting articles about biological complexity explaining there are far more gender variations than we acknowledge both on the hormonal, biological and genetic levels. Hell, X's and Y's are scattered around like party favors.
Unfortunately, few of the articles went so far as to demand Semenya be accepted as an athlete, no question, by clarifying what matters most to her, that in terms of performance, most intersexed females with testes don't get enough of a handy hormonal spike to get any kind of advantage.
In fact, women with "normal" sex organs can produce unusually high levels of testosterone. What are we going to do about them? The only fair thing would be to test all the "female" athletes and establish one set of rules for everyone. Maybe even enforce them by administering hormones until they're all at exactly the same levels. Perhaps the tall ones should be shortened and the short ones stretched.
According to Peggy Orenstine, the Olympic Games quit gender-verifying female athletes in 1999 because it was proven the few women with atypical sex development didn't actually get a competitive edge. Worse, "it served only to humiliate them." Given that, it's hard to understand why the International Association of Athletics Federations continues to go after Caster Semenya.
The only challenge to Caster should be the field of runners. Unfortunately, besides the IAAF, there's now the emotional obstacle of stepping back into a stadium, and competing in front of a crowd when plenty of them are thinking she's a freak of nature, and not just because she blew away the world champion by almost two and a half seconds.
After the news broke, she withdrew from her next race and apparently began trauma counseling. I only hope it's coming from somebody kind and open-minded who won't stuff her into dresses, or try to extract her difference with a knife. I can't wait to see her run again. That beautiful burst of speed and defiance. Leaving all the other girls in the dust.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
American Politics: Two Left Feet
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Some people have two left feet. America doesn't even have one, not a toenail. My latest theory is that the impotence of our left can be judged in inverse proportion to the amount of Che tee shirts worn by its proponents. And the decibel level of their response to political outrages.
When the Democrats recently forced out Van Jones as Obama's green jobs Tzar to quell Republican fury, the most I heard were squeaks from the left. Only whispers were offered in protest when Republican administrations tolerated, actually applauded conservatives who denied global warming as frequently as the Holocaust, posited a secret global government, and supported "Middle Eastern policies meant to hasten the second coming" as Michelle Goldberg notes in the American Prospect.
Why the relative silence? Especially when those revolutionary Che tee-shirts are in ample supply in the U.S.?
Because they don't indicate anything except failure, of good sense, and the imagination. What Republican would wear an image of Bush on the destroyer declaring victory in Iraq shortly before the place exploded, taking the entire region, and the American economy, more or less along for the ride? We won, we won. Kaboom. No. You wash your hands of the triumphalist image and move on.
The left, however, continues to embrace Che, who along with his bosom buddy Fidel, gave birth to an equal, if more localized, disaster. Cubans in that enormously fertile island are going hungry, and it's not all the fault of the embargo. Police profiling of black folks, even women, is as bad as in New Jersey. The lauded Cuban health care system is largely reserved for the party faithful. School kids don't have school uniforms, books. Or toilet paper. "Revolutionary" forces protect the working class by forbidding union organizing. Queers are arrested if they try to do anything outside the sphere of their protectrice Mariela Castro who defends us in a creepy, medicalized way as homossssssssexuals and transssssexuals that have to be tolerated because they were born that way.
Altogether, Cuba has become what Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez calls "a society marked by the criminalization of opinions, where even the nuts and children don't say what they think, just the drunks." Which are then arrested. After a clip was posted on YouTube of a hammered Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, "Panfilo" interrupting a video interview to announce that "what Cubans really needed was grub. We're horribly hungry," the middle-aged Afro-Cuban man got two years in jail.
And despite his early, and heroic departure, Che can't be absolved for how Cuba evolved. If I remember correctly, he was the architect of the "re-education" camps for prostitutes that went on to imprison queers, other social degenerates and enemies of the revolution that now include bloggers in addition to voluble drunks.
If that's the truth, why oh why oh why do so many in the American left cling to the myth of Che as hero, using Cuba as a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun?
Ignorant? Or just lazy? For a revolution all you need is a beret, a boat called Granma, a bunch of guys with guns, pure hearts, and a couple of weeks of ripe historical conditions. Change in a democracy, especially a mediocre one, takes years of wallowing in political filth, compromise, back room deals, insults, persistence, and of course buckets of dough.
It's more entertaining, cleaner to just go out on the streets to protest for women's and queer rights. Against war and against racism. To collect money for Green Peace and animal sanctuaries. With their insistence on keeping their hands spotless, I sometimes think the left have far more invested in our Puritan heritage than the religious right.
As a result we're not even in the game. Unlike most other democracies, we have no viable Green Party or other group of the left that could manage to get more than one or two representatives in the House. We have only the centrist and center-right Democrats up against the right-wing and extreme right Republicans.
Without the counterbalance of a political left, the extreme right easily paralyzes the Republicans, and pulls the center farther and farther towards their particular brand of schizophrenic American politics which manages to be both authoritarian and isolationist, paranoid, theocratic, and popular in an elitist (racist, misogynist, homophobic) kind of way.
The only solution is to artificially create a left. Where it could come from though, is anybody's guess. A cabbage patch? Storks? Churches have been the breeding ground of the rising extremists on the right. The left has nothing similar. Social justice movements in 2009 are too fragmented and demobilized to hatch a movement, or even the left wing of a baby chick.
Some people have two left feet. America doesn't even have one, not a toenail. My latest theory is that the impotence of our left can be judged in inverse proportion to the amount of Che tee shirts worn by its proponents. And the decibel level of their response to political outrages.
When the Democrats recently forced out Van Jones as Obama's green jobs Tzar to quell Republican fury, the most I heard were squeaks from the left. Only whispers were offered in protest when Republican administrations tolerated, actually applauded conservatives who denied global warming as frequently as the Holocaust, posited a secret global government, and supported "Middle Eastern policies meant to hasten the second coming" as Michelle Goldberg notes in the American Prospect.
Why the relative silence? Especially when those revolutionary Che tee-shirts are in ample supply in the U.S.?
Because they don't indicate anything except failure, of good sense, and the imagination. What Republican would wear an image of Bush on the destroyer declaring victory in Iraq shortly before the place exploded, taking the entire region, and the American economy, more or less along for the ride? We won, we won. Kaboom. No. You wash your hands of the triumphalist image and move on.
The left, however, continues to embrace Che, who along with his bosom buddy Fidel, gave birth to an equal, if more localized, disaster. Cubans in that enormously fertile island are going hungry, and it's not all the fault of the embargo. Police profiling of black folks, even women, is as bad as in New Jersey. The lauded Cuban health care system is largely reserved for the party faithful. School kids don't have school uniforms, books. Or toilet paper. "Revolutionary" forces protect the working class by forbidding union organizing. Queers are arrested if they try to do anything outside the sphere of their protectrice Mariela Castro who defends us in a creepy, medicalized way as homossssssssexuals and transssssexuals that have to be tolerated because they were born that way.
Altogether, Cuba has become what Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez calls "a society marked by the criminalization of opinions, where even the nuts and children don't say what they think, just the drunks." Which are then arrested. After a clip was posted on YouTube of a hammered Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, "Panfilo" interrupting a video interview to announce that "what Cubans really needed was grub. We're horribly hungry," the middle-aged Afro-Cuban man got two years in jail.
And despite his early, and heroic departure, Che can't be absolved for how Cuba evolved. If I remember correctly, he was the architect of the "re-education" camps for prostitutes that went on to imprison queers, other social degenerates and enemies of the revolution that now include bloggers in addition to voluble drunks.
If that's the truth, why oh why oh why do so many in the American left cling to the myth of Che as hero, using Cuba as a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun?
Ignorant? Or just lazy? For a revolution all you need is a beret, a boat called Granma, a bunch of guys with guns, pure hearts, and a couple of weeks of ripe historical conditions. Change in a democracy, especially a mediocre one, takes years of wallowing in political filth, compromise, back room deals, insults, persistence, and of course buckets of dough.
It's more entertaining, cleaner to just go out on the streets to protest for women's and queer rights. Against war and against racism. To collect money for Green Peace and animal sanctuaries. With their insistence on keeping their hands spotless, I sometimes think the left have far more invested in our Puritan heritage than the religious right.
As a result we're not even in the game. Unlike most other democracies, we have no viable Green Party or other group of the left that could manage to get more than one or two representatives in the House. We have only the centrist and center-right Democrats up against the right-wing and extreme right Republicans.
Without the counterbalance of a political left, the extreme right easily paralyzes the Republicans, and pulls the center farther and farther towards their particular brand of schizophrenic American politics which manages to be both authoritarian and isolationist, paranoid, theocratic, and popular in an elitist (racist, misogynist, homophobic) kind of way.
The only solution is to artificially create a left. Where it could come from though, is anybody's guess. A cabbage patch? Storks? Churches have been the breeding ground of the rising extremists on the right. The left has nothing similar. Social justice movements in 2009 are too fragmented and demobilized to hatch a movement, or even the left wing of a baby chick.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Two Cents on Health Care
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
When I drop in on the American health care debate my only response is "Freaks!" Seriously. Universal health care = death panels? Communism? Armageddon? On the other hand, who on earth believes access and regulation will fix it all?
I'm an unexpected skeptic. I'm living in France where the value of universal coverage is self-evident. Despite their complaints about the high cost of care, middle-class French people pay very little, poor people pay nothing, and even outsiders like me benefit from government regulation, subsidies, and a system among the best in the world.
To give you an idea of what it means in financial terms, last year I had an ovarian cyst that involved a lot of doctor visits and eventually surgery. I paid full price for everything before my insurance returned the bulk of it. Sixty euros ($86) covered one visit to a private gynecologist, 28 euros for a visit to a public clinic. A sonogram was eighty euros. An MRI ran 454 euros. Surgery with three whole nights in the hospital was 4450 euros ($6367) including hospital bed, surgeons' fees, anesthesiologist, medication, bed pan, coffee and croissants. And I waited less than a month for this non-emergency surgery to be scheduled.
The most important thing, though, is that at every stage the care was competent and professional. Hell, it was the best I've ever had. Unsurprisingly, the World Health Organization as well as the Commonwealth Fund rank France, along with Switzerland, Britain, Canada, and Japan, as having the best health care system in the world, not just in access, but in having the best outcomes in all age categories for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and rates of other chronic diseases.
For me the question is, even if the flying pig of universal health coverage manages to get past the increasingly powerful lobbyists and their congressional lackeys to give every American insurance, can the United States actually transform its medical culture enough to make universal health care work? Access aside, America's existing health care system stinks. You can pay a lot, or pay a little, you're still in a country rated a pathetic 37th on results.
My theory is that the key to the success of French medical care is not just access, but access to one standard of care for everyone, not just in terms of how medical recommendations are made, but in terms of class.
I'd heard about it from one of my old neighbors, a medical social worker, who told me how he might spend a morning in a total slum with a recent hospital discharge, and the afternoon visiting a patient whose possible inheritors were squabbling in an adjoining room.
I got a chance to watch it myself last year. In the waiting room at the public hospital, there'd be a student, a middle-class matron, an au pair. The secretaries terrified rich and poor alike with the same French bureaucratic chill. The doctors greeted everyone with the same face of professional interest, the same polite handshake.
Compare that mix of patients and the imposition of the same social conventions to New York, where there's clearly a two-tier system of health. The poor are treated by specialists in the poor, who rarely leave their medical ghettoes to treat the rich. In public clinics, nurses snicker at patients to their faces, make fun of accents even if they have one themselves. Doctors, usually paid less than their peers in private practice, assume that the financial poverty includes moral and intellectual lack, too, and treat you accordingly.
Which is not to say they don't prescribe the expensive procedures and tests. The problem is the staff just don't take the same care with some poor schmuck as they would with the rich.
There was the time I was on Medicaid and having intestinal problems. They recommended a colonoscopy and I was right in the middle when the anesthesia wore off. They couldn't give me more because my blood pressure dropped, which they hadn't prepared for though apparently it's a common side-effect, and despite the fact I was begging them to stop, these medical professionals just went straight on like I wasn't there begging them to please, oh my god, please stop.
No, access isn't everything. I could tell you a dozen stories like that. Only a few of them mine. Should I be happy more people get access to that?
I think this two-tier system is also bad for the middle-class or rich. Aware of the differences in pocket books, the potential for patient lawsuits as much as the payoffs in lucrative tests and prescriptions, I doubt doctors give them the objective, thoughtful care they should. They don't refuse to offer useless treatments, don't take chances when they ought to.
Reform? Hell. Better burn down the house.
When I drop in on the American health care debate my only response is "Freaks!" Seriously. Universal health care = death panels? Communism? Armageddon? On the other hand, who on earth believes access and regulation will fix it all?
I'm an unexpected skeptic. I'm living in France where the value of universal coverage is self-evident. Despite their complaints about the high cost of care, middle-class French people pay very little, poor people pay nothing, and even outsiders like me benefit from government regulation, subsidies, and a system among the best in the world.
To give you an idea of what it means in financial terms, last year I had an ovarian cyst that involved a lot of doctor visits and eventually surgery. I paid full price for everything before my insurance returned the bulk of it. Sixty euros ($86) covered one visit to a private gynecologist, 28 euros for a visit to a public clinic. A sonogram was eighty euros. An MRI ran 454 euros. Surgery with three whole nights in the hospital was 4450 euros ($6367) including hospital bed, surgeons' fees, anesthesiologist, medication, bed pan, coffee and croissants. And I waited less than a month for this non-emergency surgery to be scheduled.
The most important thing, though, is that at every stage the care was competent and professional. Hell, it was the best I've ever had. Unsurprisingly, the World Health Organization as well as the Commonwealth Fund rank France, along with Switzerland, Britain, Canada, and Japan, as having the best health care system in the world, not just in access, but in having the best outcomes in all age categories for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and rates of other chronic diseases.
For me the question is, even if the flying pig of universal health coverage manages to get past the increasingly powerful lobbyists and their congressional lackeys to give every American insurance, can the United States actually transform its medical culture enough to make universal health care work? Access aside, America's existing health care system stinks. You can pay a lot, or pay a little, you're still in a country rated a pathetic 37th on results.
My theory is that the key to the success of French medical care is not just access, but access to one standard of care for everyone, not just in terms of how medical recommendations are made, but in terms of class.
I'd heard about it from one of my old neighbors, a medical social worker, who told me how he might spend a morning in a total slum with a recent hospital discharge, and the afternoon visiting a patient whose possible inheritors were squabbling in an adjoining room.
I got a chance to watch it myself last year. In the waiting room at the public hospital, there'd be a student, a middle-class matron, an au pair. The secretaries terrified rich and poor alike with the same French bureaucratic chill. The doctors greeted everyone with the same face of professional interest, the same polite handshake.
Compare that mix of patients and the imposition of the same social conventions to New York, where there's clearly a two-tier system of health. The poor are treated by specialists in the poor, who rarely leave their medical ghettoes to treat the rich. In public clinics, nurses snicker at patients to their faces, make fun of accents even if they have one themselves. Doctors, usually paid less than their peers in private practice, assume that the financial poverty includes moral and intellectual lack, too, and treat you accordingly.
Which is not to say they don't prescribe the expensive procedures and tests. The problem is the staff just don't take the same care with some poor schmuck as they would with the rich.
There was the time I was on Medicaid and having intestinal problems. They recommended a colonoscopy and I was right in the middle when the anesthesia wore off. They couldn't give me more because my blood pressure dropped, which they hadn't prepared for though apparently it's a common side-effect, and despite the fact I was begging them to stop, these medical professionals just went straight on like I wasn't there begging them to please, oh my god, please stop.
No, access isn't everything. I could tell you a dozen stories like that. Only a few of them mine. Should I be happy more people get access to that?
I think this two-tier system is also bad for the middle-class or rich. Aware of the differences in pocket books, the potential for patient lawsuits as much as the payoffs in lucrative tests and prescriptions, I doubt doctors give them the objective, thoughtful care they should. They don't refuse to offer useless treatments, don't take chances when they ought to.
Reform? Hell. Better burn down the house.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Muslim Women in France
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
You see tons of Muslim women in Paris near the Institut du Monde Arabe on the fancy Left Bank. They're mostly young and scholarly, and charge down the sidewalks with colored headscarves, or black hijabs and abayas floating behind them like capes.
They remind me of young queers taking to the street in their uniforms of leather bracelets and Doc Martens with pink and black triangles on everything, part fashion choice, part remembrance, hopefully even, a symbol of resistance. Because sometimes, if you're lucky, you can take the sign and means of oppression, and transform it into a declaration of war.
Not always though. It's enough to imagine what those pink and black triangles would mean on New York queers if dykes and fags across the river in New Jersey were actually obligated to wear them, embodying discrimination. Then, would the Nazi's pink or black triangle on your Manhattan leather jacket be an act of solidarity, or stupid ignorance? Are we even allowed ignorance any more in our tweet and blog world?
The double-edged nature of symbols arises every time some American jumps into the debate about "the right" of Muslim women to wear a headscarf or body-covering abaya, usually reducing the complicated social debate, especially in France, to a matter of religious freedom. Women should do what they want. Anybody considering restrictions must be a euro-centric Islamophobe.
Besides the problem that such critics erase Muslims that are opponents of "covering," the truth is religion is the least of the matter. In Paris, anyway. On the one hand, you do have those mostly young Muslim women of the scholarly Left Bank wearing headscarves, abayas, and sometimes even the burkha, partly in religious devotion, but often it seems like a flag of cultural difference that they wave at the charging French bull in a big fuck you.
And if they were the only Muslim women in France, maybe I'd say fashion, religion, who cares? It's not worth wasting our breath.
Unfortunately, cross the real and metaphorical river Seine and those little fabric squares covering hair, or bodies, even faces, have little to do with god, or even culture, but misogyny in its purest form. A whole range of women are actively coerced by brothers, boyfriends, fathers, even sons into "covering" in public, and they enforce their will with threats, beatings, rape, and the occasional old favorite of acid sprayed in any naked female face.
Pressure to comply seems worst in the banlieus, in the suburbs, where segregation and poverty are at their most intense, and angry young men are looking for ways to assert themselves. But you see it often enough in the poorer neighborhoods inside the city--the women creeping down the sidewalks behind the men that effectively own them. Tiny girls already in scarves, veiled seething teenagers, and their future selves -- not stylish liberated women at the fancy Left Bank Institut du Monde Arabe, but sacks of exhausted flesh broken with childbearing and hard work. There's nothing sanctifying or empowering at all about the ugly black dirty drapes that hide older Muslim women as they stagger down the street.
When I see them I want to ban all the abaya, hijabs, and headscarves I see. And give a good hard kick in the balls to the young men and boys with their degenerate fathers sauntering several yards in front of the women they despise as trash. I also want to yank aside those Left Bank Muslim girls and remind them that the symbols they're obviously playing with haven't been fully transformed. Black covering robes and scarves may work as a nose-thumbing gesture to the predominantly Christian West. But as a tool against the mostly masculine forces that have imposed them, they're not doing anything subversive at all.
The logical conclusion of "covering" women is a mere 3485.1 miles east in Afghanistan where that piece of compromised shit Hamid Karzai is throwing females to the Taliban wolves in hopes of improving his election chances there. The Shiite Personal Status Law he allowed to pass into effectiveness in July allows husbands to starve their wives if they fail to obey sexual demands, requires women to get male permission to leave the house, tolerates rape if the rapist coughs up dough for the girl or marries her. It strips women of rights to their own children, granting sole guardianship to their fathers and grandfathers.
While this law theoretically only enslaves Afghanistan's three million Shiite women, a huge amount of Afghan women of all origins have protested because it is expected to have an impact on all future legislation regarding family and women's rights.
Given that reality, one thing at least is clear. That it's not more freedom of religion most Muslim women need, but freedom from the monsters that use it to keep them safely hidden and in chains.
You see tons of Muslim women in Paris near the Institut du Monde Arabe on the fancy Left Bank. They're mostly young and scholarly, and charge down the sidewalks with colored headscarves, or black hijabs and abayas floating behind them like capes.
They remind me of young queers taking to the street in their uniforms of leather bracelets and Doc Martens with pink and black triangles on everything, part fashion choice, part remembrance, hopefully even, a symbol of resistance. Because sometimes, if you're lucky, you can take the sign and means of oppression, and transform it into a declaration of war.
Not always though. It's enough to imagine what those pink and black triangles would mean on New York queers if dykes and fags across the river in New Jersey were actually obligated to wear them, embodying discrimination. Then, would the Nazi's pink or black triangle on your Manhattan leather jacket be an act of solidarity, or stupid ignorance? Are we even allowed ignorance any more in our tweet and blog world?
The double-edged nature of symbols arises every time some American jumps into the debate about "the right" of Muslim women to wear a headscarf or body-covering abaya, usually reducing the complicated social debate, especially in France, to a matter of religious freedom. Women should do what they want. Anybody considering restrictions must be a euro-centric Islamophobe.
Besides the problem that such critics erase Muslims that are opponents of "covering," the truth is religion is the least of the matter. In Paris, anyway. On the one hand, you do have those mostly young Muslim women of the scholarly Left Bank wearing headscarves, abayas, and sometimes even the burkha, partly in religious devotion, but often it seems like a flag of cultural difference that they wave at the charging French bull in a big fuck you.
And if they were the only Muslim women in France, maybe I'd say fashion, religion, who cares? It's not worth wasting our breath.
Unfortunately, cross the real and metaphorical river Seine and those little fabric squares covering hair, or bodies, even faces, have little to do with god, or even culture, but misogyny in its purest form. A whole range of women are actively coerced by brothers, boyfriends, fathers, even sons into "covering" in public, and they enforce their will with threats, beatings, rape, and the occasional old favorite of acid sprayed in any naked female face.
Pressure to comply seems worst in the banlieus, in the suburbs, where segregation and poverty are at their most intense, and angry young men are looking for ways to assert themselves. But you see it often enough in the poorer neighborhoods inside the city--the women creeping down the sidewalks behind the men that effectively own them. Tiny girls already in scarves, veiled seething teenagers, and their future selves -- not stylish liberated women at the fancy Left Bank Institut du Monde Arabe, but sacks of exhausted flesh broken with childbearing and hard work. There's nothing sanctifying or empowering at all about the ugly black dirty drapes that hide older Muslim women as they stagger down the street.
When I see them I want to ban all the abaya, hijabs, and headscarves I see. And give a good hard kick in the balls to the young men and boys with their degenerate fathers sauntering several yards in front of the women they despise as trash. I also want to yank aside those Left Bank Muslim girls and remind them that the symbols they're obviously playing with haven't been fully transformed. Black covering robes and scarves may work as a nose-thumbing gesture to the predominantly Christian West. But as a tool against the mostly masculine forces that have imposed them, they're not doing anything subversive at all.
The logical conclusion of "covering" women is a mere 3485.1 miles east in Afghanistan where that piece of compromised shit Hamid Karzai is throwing females to the Taliban wolves in hopes of improving his election chances there. The Shiite Personal Status Law he allowed to pass into effectiveness in July allows husbands to starve their wives if they fail to obey sexual demands, requires women to get male permission to leave the house, tolerates rape if the rapist coughs up dough for the girl or marries her. It strips women of rights to their own children, granting sole guardianship to their fathers and grandfathers.
While this law theoretically only enslaves Afghanistan's three million Shiite women, a huge amount of Afghan women of all origins have protested because it is expected to have an impact on all future legislation regarding family and women's rights.
Given that reality, one thing at least is clear. That it's not more freedom of religion most Muslim women need, but freedom from the monsters that use it to keep them safely hidden and in chains.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Rethinking Outrage
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Terrible, the queer kids shot in Tel Aviv, terrible the lesbians raped and slaughtered in South Africa. Then there are the bashings and murders in the States. Terrible. We need more laws, more resolutions, more vigils and marches, more politicians on our side, more media, more verbage to step over on the way to work in the morning before the super sweeps it off the curb.
More and more I wonder where it gets us, that horror at sudden, deadly explosions of hate. The deaths we respond to are particularly dramatic, but unfortunately not rare. We remember the death of Mathew Shepard crucified to a fence post in Wyoming, not all the other queers dropped in back alleys with a blow to the head.
If we really paid attention, we'd be horrified every day. We'd be on the street ranting in sackcloth and ashes at the suffering so many of us are exposed to. Maybe we'd even go beyond the anger to action.
These days, I watch our queer community's brief moments of outrage with increasing fatigue and grief. Activists haven't found a way to harness that energy, and it usually doesn't achieve much. Folks get out on the street for one march, send an email to support a draft of one law that certainly won't put an end to deadly outbursts of antigay hate. For that, we need sustained and radical work to address two separate problems-- violence and homophobia -- which have taproots sunk so deep in our cultures it will take more than a bulldozer of a movement to rip them out.
And there's no signs we want to. How many queers argue open-mindedly for the right of women to wear burkhas, rally around the little crosses, and stars, support religion under the guise of religious and cultural freedom? We are complicit in giving preachers the keys to the state houses and schools, as if the arguments against queers weren't almost always moral ones, casting us as too unclean to be equal as humans or citizens. As if these moral arguments didn't sentence our bullied queer children to years of hell. As if they weren't in part responsible for the deaths of two young queers in Tel Aviv.
Only a revolution will save us. A real one. Things turned on their heads and kept there. We haven't seen many real revolutions. Usually there's some roulette motion where you end up like Cuba back at square one, or zero, because the human capacity for transcendence lasts, if you're lucky, about as long as a post-six-pack piss.
We can only hope for floods and earthquakes. Great event changers. Conversions. I suppose you could wish for a sudden explosion of Buddhists and Quakers who are at least nonviolent, though Jesus himself warned new wine bursts old wine skins. Better to try something altogether different. Maybe introduce valium into the tap water of our cities, half of which ends up packaged in bottles. Or instead of urging our citizens to eat more fruits and vegetables, ply them with more sugar and starches, reducing them into semi-permanent insulin shock, too weak to lift a violent hand.
Failing a revolution, we can only go at things piecemeal as usual. A law here, a community center there. Education is useful in moderation to spur activism. Learn too much about the world you can be crushed under the weight of all its bigots and idiots. What are the odds we can reach them all?
Ten to one you say, offering the magic percentage of queers in the world.
It's a point worth thinking about. Maybe we've been going at this social change stuff all wrong, trying to change things in a global way, when we should be thinking local. Like insurgents, perhaps we should act in small cells. Have an expansive vision, but stick to our limited territory of families, neighbors, friends. Like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons we could go door to door. "Have you ever met a queer? No? Then today's your lucky day. Look. No tail, or just a small one. No horns. Any questions? Have a copy of our sacred texts. A few poems by Audre Lorde. James Baldwin."
We should do what is possible. Think of it. Our agents are already in place in every family and town. The problem is, they are sleeping and the haters are awake. They are awake and looking for a target. We tell them with nods and winks and sermons who they can safely pick. We put the guns or machetes in their hands.
Our periodic and verbose catharses of outrage, do little more than reveal us to be a Queer Nation of Rip Van Winkles that wake long enough to express dismay at the world, then fall back asleep. By our silence, we recruit for the wrong side.
Terrible, the queer kids shot in Tel Aviv, terrible the lesbians raped and slaughtered in South Africa. Then there are the bashings and murders in the States. Terrible. We need more laws, more resolutions, more vigils and marches, more politicians on our side, more media, more verbage to step over on the way to work in the morning before the super sweeps it off the curb.
More and more I wonder where it gets us, that horror at sudden, deadly explosions of hate. The deaths we respond to are particularly dramatic, but unfortunately not rare. We remember the death of Mathew Shepard crucified to a fence post in Wyoming, not all the other queers dropped in back alleys with a blow to the head.
If we really paid attention, we'd be horrified every day. We'd be on the street ranting in sackcloth and ashes at the suffering so many of us are exposed to. Maybe we'd even go beyond the anger to action.
These days, I watch our queer community's brief moments of outrage with increasing fatigue and grief. Activists haven't found a way to harness that energy, and it usually doesn't achieve much. Folks get out on the street for one march, send an email to support a draft of one law that certainly won't put an end to deadly outbursts of antigay hate. For that, we need sustained and radical work to address two separate problems-- violence and homophobia -- which have taproots sunk so deep in our cultures it will take more than a bulldozer of a movement to rip them out.
And there's no signs we want to. How many queers argue open-mindedly for the right of women to wear burkhas, rally around the little crosses, and stars, support religion under the guise of religious and cultural freedom? We are complicit in giving preachers the keys to the state houses and schools, as if the arguments against queers weren't almost always moral ones, casting us as too unclean to be equal as humans or citizens. As if these moral arguments didn't sentence our bullied queer children to years of hell. As if they weren't in part responsible for the deaths of two young queers in Tel Aviv.
Only a revolution will save us. A real one. Things turned on their heads and kept there. We haven't seen many real revolutions. Usually there's some roulette motion where you end up like Cuba back at square one, or zero, because the human capacity for transcendence lasts, if you're lucky, about as long as a post-six-pack piss.
We can only hope for floods and earthquakes. Great event changers. Conversions. I suppose you could wish for a sudden explosion of Buddhists and Quakers who are at least nonviolent, though Jesus himself warned new wine bursts old wine skins. Better to try something altogether different. Maybe introduce valium into the tap water of our cities, half of which ends up packaged in bottles. Or instead of urging our citizens to eat more fruits and vegetables, ply them with more sugar and starches, reducing them into semi-permanent insulin shock, too weak to lift a violent hand.
Failing a revolution, we can only go at things piecemeal as usual. A law here, a community center there. Education is useful in moderation to spur activism. Learn too much about the world you can be crushed under the weight of all its bigots and idiots. What are the odds we can reach them all?
Ten to one you say, offering the magic percentage of queers in the world.
It's a point worth thinking about. Maybe we've been going at this social change stuff all wrong, trying to change things in a global way, when we should be thinking local. Like insurgents, perhaps we should act in small cells. Have an expansive vision, but stick to our limited territory of families, neighbors, friends. Like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons we could go door to door. "Have you ever met a queer? No? Then today's your lucky day. Look. No tail, or just a small one. No horns. Any questions? Have a copy of our sacred texts. A few poems by Audre Lorde. James Baldwin."
We should do what is possible. Think of it. Our agents are already in place in every family and town. The problem is, they are sleeping and the haters are awake. They are awake and looking for a target. We tell them with nods and winks and sermons who they can safely pick. We put the guns or machetes in their hands.
Our periodic and verbose catharses of outrage, do little more than reveal us to be a Queer Nation of Rip Van Winkles that wake long enough to express dismay at the world, then fall back asleep. By our silence, we recruit for the wrong side.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Racism, Commies, and the Moonwalk
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
French TV's been full of nostalgic documentaries celebrating the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's trip to the moon. It was hailed not only as a superpower's scientific advance, but a human achievement belonging to us all, a first step towards a glorious future in which we would all hold hands and sing Kumbaya while circling the campfire on our jetpacks.
All things considered, we didn't get very far. There's no man on Mars. No real space program. And as for our crappy life here on earth, every day brings a new flashback to the messy irrational hatreds of the Cold War era.
Like in segregated cities in the 50's, sixty black and Latino kids were booted from Philadelphia's The Valley Swim Club in late June even though their day camp had paid more than $1900 to join the "open membership" pool. The reason? "[C]oncern that a lot of kids would change the complexion ... and the atmosphere of the club."
Some kids reported that the pool attendants had been rather less euphemistic saying "they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately." At least one white parent loudly freaked, "Uh, what are all these black kids doing here? ... I'm scared they might do something to my child."
The Young Republican conference in July was an equally retro celebration of misogyny and racism. The group chose self-described "true conservative" Audra Shay as Chairman, over Rachel "must be a dyke" Hoff who was slammed as much for wearing pants as for supporting civil unions.
The skirt-clad winner Shay was elected despite, or because of, blatantly racist Facebook comments, LOL'ing in response to the statement we "need to take this country back from all of these mad coons" and responding to an effigy of Sarah Palin with "What no 'Obama in a noose? ... I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose."
One sign of progress, though, is that fifty years after we put a man on the moon, there are now enough Republicans of color in power to add their own garbage to America's racist cesspool. One of the biggest supporters of the violently bigoted Audra Shay was apparently Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, an Asian American periodically touted as the Republican answer to Obama.
Michael Steele, the African American head of the GOP, was on hand to tell the Young Republicans crowd he planned to attract more people of color to the party by offering up fried chicken and potato salad. Not support for small businesses in poor minority neighborhoods, or efforts to repeal drug laws responsible for dumping young black men in jail. Fried chicken and potato salad.
Republican attacks on justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor were almost as sophisticated, largely boiling down to "temperament" and "personality," code for "I don't trust you because you're a woman, a spic, a woman, a spic."
Democrats aren't immune from idiocy. In New York, State Senator Ruben Diaz, usually celebrated for his outrageous homophobia, brought his own racism to the table when he sneered at state Republicans as los republicanos blanquitos, "little Republican whitey's" in a Spanish-language interview.
Meanwhile, in Akron, Ohio, a group of black teenagers celebrated Independence Day by attacking a white family after a fireworks show yelling: "This is our world!" and "This is a black world!" The uninsured construction worker father ended up in critical care for five days, stacks of hospital bills, and questions about buying a gun.
Which would be easy enough in Missouri where a car-dealer is giving away free AK47's with his trucks. In an interview with an astounded journalist from the BBC, he explained that pretty much all Americans like guns, except for Commies, of course. When asked just what semiautomatic weapons were good for, he said you could have a lot of fun shooting stuff up, but that AK47's were especially useful in case of "home defense".
They could have used a few last week in Cambridge where a white neighbor called the police because a black man was struggling with the front door of a house in an apparent break-in attempt. Eventually, the nefarious black man, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested for getting pissed off that the cops came and questioned his right to enter his own home.
Instead of complaining, calling the policeman a racist for only doing his job, and irresponsibly provoking the situation by asking for his badge number, I suppose the distinguished professor Gates should have saved the cops the trouble and shot himself for intruding on the peace of mind of his lily-white neighbors.
That's post-race America in a nutshell. Forty years after the moonwalk, skin's still a disease too many of us are mad with.
French TV's been full of nostalgic documentaries celebrating the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's trip to the moon. It was hailed not only as a superpower's scientific advance, but a human achievement belonging to us all, a first step towards a glorious future in which we would all hold hands and sing Kumbaya while circling the campfire on our jetpacks.
All things considered, we didn't get very far. There's no man on Mars. No real space program. And as for our crappy life here on earth, every day brings a new flashback to the messy irrational hatreds of the Cold War era.
Like in segregated cities in the 50's, sixty black and Latino kids were booted from Philadelphia's The Valley Swim Club in late June even though their day camp had paid more than $1900 to join the "open membership" pool. The reason? "[C]oncern that a lot of kids would change the complexion ... and the atmosphere of the club."
Some kids reported that the pool attendants had been rather less euphemistic saying "they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately." At least one white parent loudly freaked, "Uh, what are all these black kids doing here? ... I'm scared they might do something to my child."
The Young Republican conference in July was an equally retro celebration of misogyny and racism. The group chose self-described "true conservative" Audra Shay as Chairman, over Rachel "must be a dyke" Hoff who was slammed as much for wearing pants as for supporting civil unions.
The skirt-clad winner Shay was elected despite, or because of, blatantly racist Facebook comments, LOL'ing in response to the statement we "need to take this country back from all of these mad coons" and responding to an effigy of Sarah Palin with "What no 'Obama in a noose? ... I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose."
One sign of progress, though, is that fifty years after we put a man on the moon, there are now enough Republicans of color in power to add their own garbage to America's racist cesspool. One of the biggest supporters of the violently bigoted Audra Shay was apparently Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, an Asian American periodically touted as the Republican answer to Obama.
Michael Steele, the African American head of the GOP, was on hand to tell the Young Republicans crowd he planned to attract more people of color to the party by offering up fried chicken and potato salad. Not support for small businesses in poor minority neighborhoods, or efforts to repeal drug laws responsible for dumping young black men in jail. Fried chicken and potato salad.
Republican attacks on justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor were almost as sophisticated, largely boiling down to "temperament" and "personality," code for "I don't trust you because you're a woman, a spic, a woman, a spic."
Democrats aren't immune from idiocy. In New York, State Senator Ruben Diaz, usually celebrated for his outrageous homophobia, brought his own racism to the table when he sneered at state Republicans as los republicanos blanquitos, "little Republican whitey's" in a Spanish-language interview.
Meanwhile, in Akron, Ohio, a group of black teenagers celebrated Independence Day by attacking a white family after a fireworks show yelling: "This is our world!" and "This is a black world!" The uninsured construction worker father ended up in critical care for five days, stacks of hospital bills, and questions about buying a gun.
Which would be easy enough in Missouri where a car-dealer is giving away free AK47's with his trucks. In an interview with an astounded journalist from the BBC, he explained that pretty much all Americans like guns, except for Commies, of course. When asked just what semiautomatic weapons were good for, he said you could have a lot of fun shooting stuff up, but that AK47's were especially useful in case of "home defense".
They could have used a few last week in Cambridge where a white neighbor called the police because a black man was struggling with the front door of a house in an apparent break-in attempt. Eventually, the nefarious black man, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested for getting pissed off that the cops came and questioned his right to enter his own home.
Instead of complaining, calling the policeman a racist for only doing his job, and irresponsibly provoking the situation by asking for his badge number, I suppose the distinguished professor Gates should have saved the cops the trouble and shot himself for intruding on the peace of mind of his lily-white neighbors.
That's post-race America in a nutshell. Forty years after the moonwalk, skin's still a disease too many of us are mad with.
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