Same-Sex Marriage Case Is No Roe V. Wade

By Kelly Jean Cogswell, Gay City News

In an op-ed piece masquerading as fact, The New York Times on Sunday declared that the "Shadow of Roe v. Wade Looms Over Ruling on Gay Marriage." According to them, any marriage equality decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court will face the same endless legal slog, misery, and sustained opposition, as the one legalizing abortion.

The primary source for the argument seems to be Michael J. Klarman, Harvard professor and author of "From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage." He wrote, "Intervening at this stage of a social reform movement would be somewhat analogous to Roe v. Wade, where the court essentially took the laws deregulating abortion in four states and turned them into a constitutional command for the other 46."

But with only a modest B.A. in the liberal arts, and no time at all clerking for Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I still have to respond, "Ummm, not really." Not analogous at all, except that most progressive cases face substantial backlash on the way to the Supreme Court. And that Republican wingnuts hate them equally, abortion and gay marriage. But then, they also hate gun control, the Fed, Obama, and a host of other things, and are busy fighting them, too.

While they're especially enraged at this stage of the process, maybe because they're terrified of anything to do with sex, and same-sex marriage smacks of it, just like abortion, it's unlikely that the landmark marriage cases will have the same legal trajectory as abortion. Not just because there are differences of political and social context as the lead Prop 8 lawyer, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., indicated. He told The Times Roe v. Wade had not been "subject to exhaustive public discussion, debate and support, including by the president and other high-ranking government officials from both parties..." Which is true, but kind of irrelevant.

The main reason the comparison doesn't hold is because the two cases are not just apples and oranges, but apples and balls of yarn. Apples and light bulbs. An abortion is a private, single act of limited duration, while getting married launches a whole state of being, a long-term, legal relationship not only between two individuals, but of those two individuals and any offspring, heirs, creditors, etc. with the government on every level. Which is why queer activists on the left, having fought so hard to keep the State out of our affairs, were initially reluctant to embrace the marriage fight, despite its gazillions of financial and legal benefits.

The most obvious parallel is the earlier fight against anti-miscegenation laws that was only won in 1967 with Loving v. Virginia. Sure, "mixed" marriages still inspire disgust among bigots, as I suppose same-sex marriage will continue to do, but there are only occasional instances in which churches or petty bureaucrats try to prevent them. There is certainly no big activist movement. There probably won't be for queers either.

Either now or in the future, once it is ruled on the federal level that same-sex marriage is legal, that right can't be eroded bit by bit as with abortion. Neither can it be restricted except by age as "straight" marriages are. That's what the attempt at civil unions was for. Conceding a few rights to shut up the big-mouthed queers. But once that word marriage is used on the federal level, either you're married or you're not. We have the same rights or we don't, and in that case we keep fighting.

Even if there is some kind of post-decision backlash, I'm pretty confident the scenario will be different. Women that have abortions in their teens and twenties often just want to forget about it, and move on. Queers won't be able to. Every single one of us who gets hitched, entangled in a marriage of love and bureaucracy, will become a queer activist reservist, always on call. For this issue, anyway. It won't be a matter of convenience, to be grappled with when needed. It will be woven into the fabric of our lives.

Another obvious difference is that the fight for marriage rights is fundamentally conservative compared to that for abortion. And as homophobia is pushed further to the margins of the equation, we've already seen stalwarts of the Religious Right speak in favor of same-sex marriage and its attendant monogamy and social stability. I don't remember seeing similar conversions to pro-choice positions.

Abortion rights are a harder sale. Partly because "pro-life" people call abortion murder. And some actually believe it. But also because misogyny has such horribly deep roots. We should remember that the LGBT movement will always be half-comprised of males, with white men at the forefront as long as our community is prey to the same sexism and racism as the outside world. And with a white, well-groomed male face on an issue like same-sex marriage, it'll get accepted sooner or later.

Follow me on Twitter @kellyatlarge .

Queer Citizens in Cuba's Shadow

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

Last week I drug myself to an LGBT forum for New York's democratic mayoral hopefuls. The 626 seats of Baruch's Mason Hall auditorium were packed with politically engaged queers. Nobody compelled to come. Nobody banned. And everything observed by the gaggle of press bearing witness with images and tweets offered almost instantaneously.

Paul Schindler, my Gay City News editor, had the job of drilling the candidates on LGBT issues like the cops' disgusting Stop and Frisk policies that in our community especially affect young queers of color and the transgender. He also asked about the growing number of HIV infections, homeless youth that are 40 percent queer. Each contender did their best to answer, sniping whenever they could at Christine Quinn the front-runner, and only woman and LGBT candidate. And she in return, had to keep her cool and sensibly explain, for example, why as city council speaker she's sitting on a bill about paid sick leave for workers in small businesses.

And I thought this is the way it's supposed to be. Candidates being held to account, exchanging views, fibbing probably, as politicians do, but not controlling the process. All of the candidates were subjected to embarrassing moments, tough follow-up questions, and a crowd cheering or booing, but stopping after a moment to let things go on. And everything, as I said, happening in front of the big eyes and big mouths of the press.

If I sound all corny about it, it's because a couple days before I'd been to an event at NYU featuring Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez who was finally allowed to leave the country after ten years of requests. She's continually defamed by the Cuban government, physically harassed, spied on in her home, even tossed in jail occasionally. But she counts herself lucky because other journalists are locked up for good, or have convenient car accidents merely for wishing to speak, to participate in the life of their country. And for thinking everyone else should have the chance, too.

In that island of silence and the meaningful ellipse, blogging is not an innocuous pastime. The government has done its best to restrict internet access, and even skew Google search results abroad by bombarding the web with their own propaganda, fake sites, fake links and likes, their own fake bloggers to create a screen of white noise. But they're doomed and they know it, like a glass any soprano can shatter.

Just look at how loudmouthed queers changed the U.S. from a place where we were pariahs regularly rousted and arrested, into this amazing political force. Gradually, we won the tools of democracy -- the rights to speak, to assemble, demonstrate, write, think, create, agitate, organize. Now we participate as equals (nearly). We sit in Mason Hall and hold the candidates to account. All of them wanting our votes, our support. Our money.

I hear some of you sneering that the system's not perfect, pointing out its failures. But so what? It's a fucking miracle it works at all, considering how humans are, either apathetic or with an overwhelming impulse to power. Cops everywhere get away with whatever they can. Politicians, even the best, believe the rules don't quite apply to them. Ordinary people abdicate their citizenship, often sit there like frogs in the pot as water gradually heats up.

In the U.S., where we have almost an unlimited latitude to protest, most of us kept mum as our civil liberties were eroded under Bush with his policies on detention, and domestic spying, and still don't speak up as Obama continues with more of the same.

It's an interesting mix of apathy, and ignorance. Few Americans understand or care how democracy works, and don't recognize the centrality of things like free speech and assembly or the role of the press. When I tried to get into a recent event at CUNY, "The Blogosphere and Civil Society in Cuba" the two smiling Cuban American students organizing the thing took an unhealthy pleasure in informing me the event was full, and in any case, it was more important for Cubans to have access to Yoani than Anglo reporters. And while I understood their pride in having a Cuban hero, it made me wonder if they understood why she was so important. Or how the press works, each journalist representing hundreds, or thousands of others who don't have a chance to see. Or a way to speak.

Worse, at that LGBT forum for mayoral candidates, I actually heard a woman announce that democracy sucked, even as she dripped with its privileges, complaining about the mediocre politicians and annoying crowd, flapping her gums.

The Secret of Power

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn finally tossed her hat in the ring, and came out as a candidate for New York's top job. It's a big deal. She'd be the first female mayor, not to mention the first dyke, in Gracie Mansion.

It's astounding that she's gotten this far. Being the first of anything requires a heck of a lot of raw talent, good timing, and of course plenty of people ahead of you breaking ground, like Tom Duane and Margarita Lopez who were among the first out queers in New York's City Council.

Beyond that, you have to have a certain mindset, a sense of privilege that refuses to concede, despite overwhelming evidence, that the face of power should be male, above all, and white, and straight. I'd like to think you can acquire that entitlement, like a basic proficiency in Math, if you just practice enough, but I'm not so sure.

Some people seem to know from the beginning that they are meant for great things. Probably when Quinn was a kid she arranged her blocks in the shape of City Hall, gave press conferences to her stuffed animals. "And when I'm mayor..." Or maybe it dawned on her slowly. She met a few politicians as she headed up the Anti-Violence Project, and thought, "I can do that." Then when she was elected to city council, she saw the inner workings of power and felt she measured up.

By any road, she arrived at the emotional place where she could stand in front of a bunch of journalists and declare her intention to govern one of the biggest cities of the world.

The rest of us need help even to inhabit our own lives. Just a couple of weeks ago, I showed a documentary about the Lesbian Avengers to a group of college students. And afterwards one still asked, "A lot of us feel like we don't have a voice. What should we do?" Even though I'd been talking already for half an hour about activism and big-mouthed dykes, she apparently didn't see the Avengers as role models, enabling her to make the leap, and declare, "How about we start an activist group?"

We'd also discussed social media and the Arab Spring. Maybe I should have asked them if they'd at least considered a blog, if they didn't want to take to New Jersey's mean streets. But it seemed too obvious to say. I mean, isn't their whole Twitter generation marked by a multiplicity of voices? A real cacophony?

I figured out too late the word "voice" was a misdirection. Probably their real question was: How do you get heard in the midst of all that noise? How do you gain power, or at least feel empowered? I wouldn't have known how to answer that either.

I realized then that it's not enough to talk about role models and opening doors. Sometimes they just lead to a broom closet, a small confined space, a cell. Our current means of communication don't take you very far when their conventions demand you restrict your announcements to the latest ap you downloaded, the game you played. Despite a few radical users, Twitter is mostly small talk on a grand scale.

Even if the door leads to the world outside, very few of us are Chris Quinns or Obamas. We're taught to stay behind the white line and we do. We're like dogs with those electronic collars that give them a shock when they go too far. Our internalized misogyny and homophobia and racism keep us on the leash. We are agoraphobic. Beyond this point lies pain and suffering, and a terrifying wilderness.

In fact, the only secret to having a voice is to speak. Or to act. Repeatedly. And hope for the best. When ordinary people first open their mouths, they don't know if somebody's going to listen. The Lesbian Avengers were begun by six dykes that decided they would put out a call to action, but if nobody else joined them, they would do it alone.

They were lucky that people responded. And they went from a handful of dykes to a roomful, then a worldwide movement. But nine times out of ten you're answered with silence. The timing is wrong. Or your message doesn't get across. And when that happens, you try again imagining that even if the world is not transformed, maybe you will be. Like a singer, your voice will get stronger. You'll hit the notes the first try. You'll please yourself, anyway. Annoy the neighbors.

You have to make it a habit. Sometimes if I have to, I talk to myself. In particularly bad patches, I've scribbled messages on stickers, left them on lampposts. In the subways. Like a trail of breadcrumbs for hungry birds.

For African Dykes, Zanele Muholi

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I forget sometimes how important art is, what images can do. Last week I got blown away by an exhibit in Chelsea at the Yancey Richardson Gallery. The photographer was Zanele Muholi. Her subjects were African dykes like herself. They stare out from the prints in their best ball caps and fedoras, bald heads and dreads, looking at you looking at them. Some are a little anxious about it. Some are pissed. Others have a sadness so vast behind their eyes your heart breaks for them.

Examine them closely. Too many have literal scars from life in South Africa and Zimbabwe. There's a faint white line near the mouth of one. A round scar on another's forehead like she'd been hit with a hammer. And maybe she had. South Africans haven't quite digested the post-apartheid constitution declaring queers off limits as punching bags. Women, too are verboten, though the model Reeva Steenkamp lived through several "domestic disturbances" before getting shot to death last week in the bathroom when her famous, violent boyfriend apparently mistook her for an intruder.

Violence in Southern Africa is endemic, a way of life, especially in poor townships where most of the photographed live. And Muholi is more than conscious of documenting a community in which "love is juxtaposed with violence."

For Muholi, each photo is art and activism combined. The images themselves are beautiful. The political part comes when you look in their eyes, and start to see them. So that's what an African lesbian looks like. An African transman. Though they don't look so different from plenty of dykes here. If you're not careful, you'll start to feel protective. There they are. Emotionally naked. An endangered human species.

Instead of feeling sorry for them, or lamenting your Western privilege, I recommend exercising it on their behalf. Even if, like Muholi, African dykes are more than capable of speaking for themselves. Still, they are extra vulnerable to violence and death. They need a net to dance over. Safe spaces. Chances to hang out. To play.

In soccer-crazed Africa, a lot of them are on "football" teams, or wish they were. Zanele Muholi, instead of launching one more social services outfit, started up a all-black lesbian soccer team in 2008 in her hometown of Umlazi, Durban. She named it Thokozani Football Club after out dyke soccer player Thokozani Qwabe, who was brutally murdered in 2007 just for being a lesbian. More than a few TFC players are survivors of "corrective rape" that were ostensibly attempts to turn them straight.

It's not just exercise they're after. Their site says, "We want to educate each other and our families, friends and communities that we exist, that we contribute to building a physically, socially, and emotionally healthy and democratic South African society, and that we deserve a life free of discrimination and violence due to homophobia."

Muholi and her team has been getting support from another group of soccer mad grrrls in France. Last year, Les Dégommeuses decided to go beyond arranging the occasional scrimmage, and launch a program they called "Foot for Love." Working with Lesbian of Color, Paris Foot Gay, Yagg.com, Rosa Bonheur and a bunch of others, they initiated a whole series of actions against homophobia during Pride Week in Paris last June.

Their biggest accomplishment was bringing over the Thokozani Football Club for an exhibition match in a big Paris stadium. They also showed Muholi's film, "Difficult Love," and held a die in to bring attention to lesbophobia and hate crimes in South Africa which didn't exactly come to a halt for gay pride.

The day after TFC arrived in Paris, a young dyke was shot in her own home in the Cape Town township de Nyanga. A couple of weeks before, a queer activist got his throat cut. It was another queer dead a few weeks before that. They rarely just get killed. There's usually rape of some kind, mutilation.

The only good news is that African dykes are finally getting some attention. One of Foot for Love's most notable supporters is world class soccer player Lilian Thuram, who has been involved in fighting discrimination in soccer, and recently spoke out on behalf of marriage equality in France.

Sometime next month, while the UN Commission on the Status of Women is holding a meeting focusing on ending violence against women and girls, Les Dégommeuses, in their role as advocates for Foot for Love, are participating in an event in Paris about the double whammy of lesbophobia.

I almost can't believe it. I remember when dykes stuck to the softball fields and golf courses, potlucks, and bars. And even our own clubs were always called "women's teams." I especially remember how hard it was to get feminists to utter the word lesbian on the international stage.

Let us celebrate the art of change.

Putting the Pope Out to Pasture

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's finally curtains for the inauspicious reign of Pope Benedict the Whatever who resigned just this morning citing health concerns as the reason for breaking a six hundred year old tradition of serving until death. I suspect he was just sulking after his attempts to "protect" straight marriage in France were soundly defeated.

Or maybe he was finally diagnosed with extreme irony deficiency. What else could you call it when a guy spends half his time trying to minimize man on boy sex abuse by priests, and the other half using any platform at hand to condemn perfectly consensual adult homo sexual relations and equality under the law? Or for attacking American nuns as radical feminists, just because they prioritized issues like poverty and social justice over homos at the altars, and desperate girls in abortion clinics?

I'd dance a little gay jig in the slush outside the door, but god knows who they'll slip in there next. There are predictions younger cardinals will go for a Pope from a nation like Ghana or Honduras to court Catholics in developing nations. The outgoing Pontiff doesn't get a vote, but in the past he's said choosing an African pope for the first time would "send a splendid signal to the world" about the universality of the church. On the other hand he didn't exactly stack the papal deck with likely candidates.

Most of his cardinals are still mostly white of good old European stock. And, in Ireland and Britain, bookmakers have Italian candidates running neck to neck with African ones. There's also a Canadian up there with his nose not far from the wire. And a Honduran in the chase.

Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze is definitely papabile, partly because nobody was ready for Ben's resignation, and at 80 Arinze will only stick around long enough for eager candidates to get their maneuvering done. Conservative in all things women and birth control, he's declared "It is not progress [to support gay marriage] it is decadence."

Probably the best hope for queers to be left alone is Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, though he's slipping in the odds. Turkson, a papal baby at 64, isn't particularly homo friendly, but he does have other things on his mind. Bloody wars in Africa. Poverty. Currently President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, he's been an outspoken critic of the global financial system. Against abortion and birth control, he does condones allowing married people with HIV to use condoms, though he said African condoms are so bad they might not get the job done. On the other hand, he got into hot water last year, screening an Islamaphobic YouTube clip asserting, "In just 39 years France will be an Islamic republic."

A growing favorite in the race, though probably not for queers, is the ultrawhite Cardinal Marc Ouellet, former Archbishop of Quebec. Another youngster at 68, he condemns abortion even in the case of rape, calling it a "moral crime." And in 2005, Ouellet told the Canadian Senate that the church would refuse to baptize the children of gay and lesbian parents, asserting that by marrying, same-sex couples demonstrated a public contempt for the Church.

He seemed to soften in 2007, publishing a letter in French-language newspapers in Quebec publicly apologizing on behalf of the Catholic Church for past "errors" including promoting "anti-Semitism, racism, indifference to First Nations and discrimination against women and homosexuals." But this gesture was less about "repentance and reconciliation" than a bid to re-establish Quebec's attachment to its "Christian and missionary identity" at a moment when the traditionally Catholic Quebec was getting ready to replace religious instruction with courses on ethics, morality and world religions.

There's not much hope for us on the Italian side, either. Cardinal Angelo Scola is head of the Milan diocese which has asserted that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and other horrors. He has strong links with Communion and Liberation, the ultra-conservative, anti-science, catholic political lobbying group like Opus Dei. He also gets on unfortunately well with his ultraconservative Muslim counterparts and will be sure to continue the tradition of the Vatican Muslim block activity against women and queers at the UN.

Better for everybody is Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, the president of the Church's confederation of relief and development agencies. He's considered a moderate, but he is anti-abortion and slammed Ricky Martin for using a surrogate mother. In his favor, he actually believes in science, and denounced global environmental policy as a kind of apartheid sacrificing developing nations.

There are plenty more, including Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict's number two and Vatican secretary of state, who actually blamed homosexual infiltration of the clergy for Catholic child sex scandals. We can count on him as a Benedict Redux, repeating the idiotic papal refrain that gay marriage is a bigger threat to the human race than disease, famine and terrorism.

If he wins, beware! I'll get gay-married for sure.

Selma, Seneca Falls, Stonewall

By Kelly Cogswell

All hail January. The first was not just New Year's Day, but the 150th anniversary of signing of the Emancipation Act by Abraham Lincoln. A couple weeks later, Barack Obama, our first black president, had his second inauguration ceremony on Martin Luther King Day.

I remember a lot of (white) people were pissed off when a reluctant Ronald Reagan signed MLK Day it into law in 1983. Accusations of pandering were made. It was done just to keep black people happy. What had the guy really done after all?

To be honest, I didn't know. It took me years to understand the deliberate holes in my country's history. Partly because in high school, we never did get past World War Two. The teacher was a football coach, and easily distracted. I should be generous and assume that people that resist queer history and queer lives are ignorant, but educable, like me.

The confluence of events, ending slavery, MLK Day, helped set the stage for Obama's inaugural speech that called on Americans to look backwards as well as forward, understand ourselves in the light of history. For once, Obama didn't mince words. Framed by the struggle to end slavery and racism, he attacked inequality from the first.

"... what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea... that all men are created equal..."

Of course, believing in equality doesn't make us exceptional at all. France, for example, has that whole liberty, equality, fraternity universalist presumption. But establishing the idea of equality as the tie that binds us was still a huge move on Obama's part. It resonated through the speech, especially when he linked Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall in one breath, pulling us all into America's fold.

That was the first time gay people had been mentioned in an inaugural speech. The first time Obama linked our fights unequivocally. Women, people of color, queers. It's a no-brainer if you believe equality is something a democracy should strive for. If you believe it's important to emphasize the "human" part of human rights.

As Americans, though, I'm not sure how deeply that idea binds us. We usually want equality for ourselves, not everybody else. In New York, we stare across the subway at each other like we're not just of different races and genders but of different species altogether, even if we all began life with the same essential equipment, a heart, brain, lungs, a skeleton, skin of some color over it.

I'm not sure what does hold us together. Habit? American Idol? Politicians often refer to America as "this great land of ours" as if other continents found unity inevitable, and what binds us is mostly geology and the shared flag that waves over it. Ideas have nothing to do with it. In fact, we tend to mistrust them.

Americans are a practical people. We perfected mass production of cars and iPhones and aps. Unions don't demonstrate for unity, but for something concrete like salaries and working conditions, weevils in the bread, insufficient circuses. You can't build movements around abstractions. That's why we ended up with identity politics, and single-issue activism. Which drives everybody crazy with its contradictions.

Ideally, activists keep their vision expansive and narrow at the same time, breaking down huge problems like homophobia or racism into smaller parts like same-sex marriage, or the overwhelming incarceration of young black men, at the same time trying to keep in mind how it all fits in.

The other conundrum is that while we have to get people to see and respect differences, we also have to make them difference-blind. Particularly when it comes to shaping culture and enforcing the law. We demand, "see me as the same and equal to any other human, but see me. Me."

We often end up focusing on the particularities, and convincing ourselves our specific fight is special. We establish hierarchies, pit oppressions against each other, Class against gender. Race against sexual identity. We forget that we are part of the larger struggle for equality, and freedom that extends well beyond this country, and pretty much defines the human condition.

Maybe only visionaries like King can pull it off. He had a talent for walking that line. Weaving it all together until a fight for a black student to sit at the lunch counter next to some white guy became a symbol of the fight for human dignity, the American Dream. Maybe we should repeat this like a mantra: Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall. Three fights. Same DNA.

Being Jodie Foster

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was maybe twelve or fourteen when some man at the hospital said, "You remind me of somebody. That actress. You know. What's her name? Straight hair? Young? She was in that movie a couple years ago?" Which he couldn't think of either.

I was taking newspapers around to patients, volunteering with the idea I'd go to med school, become a medical missionary. Had no idea what he was talking about. I barely watched TV, much less movies, "Called little girl something..." A nurse sick of listening to him blab, finally chimed in with, "The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane--Jodie Foster." And the guy said, "Yeah, you're creepy, just like her."

Great. You're all ready to get compared to a movie star, and you get the creepy one. I might have dismissed it, except it happened again. And again. "You remind me of whatshername." When I finally saw her picture I remember staring at it, wondering just what the resemblance was supposed to be beyond generic white female. Straight brownish hair. No distinguishing marks.

I didn't figure it out until ages afterward, when I watched a couple of her films, saw her move and speak. I discovered what we had in common wasn't a face or body, but a certain stern, direct gaze and a voice pitched for anything but girly giggles. And like me, she walked. She didn't swagger, sway, or prance, just put one foot in front of the other. When she tried to do different, it always seemed like a put on, making gender, sex, age all artificial. "Hey look, I'm being a grown-up female," her movements declared in Taxi Driver. Underneath it all was a touch of something else, anger probably.

Later on, I'd put a name to us both, dyke. It's as good as any, but say lesbian if you prefer. Or queer. She didn't use any of those words when she came out Sunday night at the Golden Globes. Instead, she joked about needing to be "loud and proud" and describing how she'd already come out many times, "to everyone she'd actually met," and thanked her recently ex- partner of decades. She sounded nervous, pained, irritated at having to repeat in public what she'd already done in private as a "fragile young girl."

And too many people, including queers, responded the way they always do, sneering, "We knew all along." "That wasn't a real coming out." They wanted something more direct, more radical, the birth of an activist. And probably in the past I would have screamed, too, "Come out, Jodie Foster, come out. We need all the help we can get."

I'm not sure anymore. Especially after seeing the anguish behind her smiling face. Because the truth isn't always as liberating as we'd like. In her case, she's probably merely relieved to get her publicist off her back, along with the LGBTQ community. She's not an Ellen who seemed truly freed by coming out. One difference is Ellen makes a living as herself. Even as a stand-up, her work centered on her personal life. She spoke in a version of her own voice, used her name. Shared facts. She had to contort herself to stay in the closet.

Jodie Foster is in a different category as an actor. They use their faces, their bodies as tools to be somebody else, only indirectly revealing themselves. Which she did. Especially when she was young and fearless, and less self-conscious. You watch those old movies and she practically burns. The best of her generation.

Now, she sometimes seems lost behind the armor she's accumulated. It happens as you age. I'm a lesbosaurus and I've lost some of the qualities we were supposed to have shared. Talking to strangers, I often stare off to the side. I'm aware of how I walk. I don't play with gender as much, putting on dress one day, a tie the next. I save my courage for this. Writing. Getting the words out. So let me celebrate Jodie Foster's brave coming out when the risks are so much greater for her, moving across the giant screens in theaters, or trapped forever in your smartphone.

I hope she resists the pressure to go further, do queer fundraisers, or promo spots for GLAAD. What Jody Foster should be doing is acting, and in my fondest dreams she chooses daring roles like the ones that launched her. Skip the lesbian moms, and please god, no more Anna Leonowens cavorting in Siam. I need a sequel to the quirky creepy girl who stared directly into your eyes, or a glimpse of a grown up Iris Steensma, who would be what, a junky? A born again Christian? Let Jodie Foster abdicate Clarice and be Hannibelle Lecter. Or a fully realized Virginia Woolf who risks it all, mixing intensity and anguish with joy and rage, love, even raw foolishness.

Bah and Humbug

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Thank god the holidays are over. I used to be freaked out by the whole psycho happy family display. Now, it's the ode to the passage of a dozen short months that drives me nuts. Seriously, who but farmers organize their projects in convenient twelve-month bundles with sparklers that go off at the end? Most of us are lucky if we clean the house a couple times, do a weekly load of laundry. Get our monthly bills paid. One year is much like rest.

Not that I'm sad to see the back of 2012. It was so unusually crappily full of natural disasters, illness and death, I haven't come close to finishing my to-do list yet. Or maybe I'm just inadequate, pathetically slow in an age when info arrives instantaneously on your smart phones, and events are livestreamed. Pretty soon we'll know about things before they happen. Get texts before they're conceived of. The present is officially obsolete.

I knew it was over when the four-year election cycle in the U.S. began speeding up. We got twenty-four meager months of governing. Then a two year blur of nonsensical whispers presaging the full-blown hysterical campaign that left little time or integrity for the creation and implementation of long-term plans. Hence the preponderance of cliffs. Fiscal and otherwise. That mean nothing to CEO's who all have golden parachutes cushioning their landing on the bankrupt beach.

Wednesday, the LA Times had a story about the young revolutionaries in Egypt. Two years ago in February they took to the streets, and in a political heartbeat saw Mubarak's entrenched corrupt authoritarian government fall. Thirty years gone, kinda. An authoritarian military government took its place until the recent elections when generals were succeeded by Islamists apparently determined to put another repressive lid on things. Anyway, the kids were depressed and pissed that there hadn't been a total transformation, that the evolution of their country wasn't up to the speed of the internet.

While the stakes in Egypt are higher, they reminded me of all the queer demos after Prop H8 got passed in California, the media declared a new movement, Stonewall 2.0, and all these kids (briefly) discovered the joy of the street, waxing lyrical and grateful before disappearing from view. Probably for a lot of reasons, chief among them that you have to have a mix of short and long-term tactics, short and long-term goals. Social change is a lot of work, though there's a future in it.

The Occupy movement spawned by the Arab Spring faced many of a similar morass of entrenched, complicated problems. And they've likewise largely disappeared except for Occupy Sandy in New York which seems to have done as much as FEMA in areas like Coney Island. They're good in a pinch. Enthusiastic. Ephemeral. Like most activists, great at calling attention to problems. Not so much at getting a handle on them.

The thing is human societies have more in common with the earth we walk on than the devices in our bags. River sometimes flood and change course, but mostly they dig their old bed deeper. Then lie in it. Blackberries, when they take over a field, persist nearly forever in the margins, re-growing thorny tangles every spring. Even those rapidly evolving birds that change their beak size every generation don't suddenly abandon wings or grow teeth.

In America, we've gotten used to corporations running around hand in hand with congresspeople. We absolve ourselves at our absence from the pavement with year-end donations to professional groups. Queers hit "add" on the automatic petition programs denouncing another dyke murder in South Africa, another governmental pogrom in Uganda or wherever.

I propose we pause for a minute. Take a couple of Alka-Seltzers and reconsider the calendar. Days are okay, pretty much inescapable with the lighting question. We can keep weeks, too, because without them there's no weekend. But I think we should resolve to skip the year in favor of the decade. Demote the celebration at the end of 365 days to something more like a superduper Friday night with an extended happy hour, the two4one's coming all night long. Only head out to Times Square once every ten years.

Urgency is so last year. I suspect we ignore intractable problems because they can't be solved immediately, wiped from the balance sheets. Though they're urgent as anything. Like housing queer youth. They still comprise a huge chunk of homeless kids out on the street. And for that matter, LGBT seniors (and even straights) all deserve safe, clean, respectful homes, too. I'm still traumatized every time I enter one of those long-term care facilities, formerly called nursing homes and see make-up slathered on the old ladies, no matter how butch. That'll be me soon. When time is really money and I'm all out.

Harking the Mayan Apocalypse

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

If Santa actually comes this year, and not the Mayan Apocalypse, all I want is a little peace. No angels harking and heralding. No kids getting shot. Not in Connecticut. Not anywhere. Isn't that why so many films are rated R, we don't want our babes exposed to the violence? Or is it just sex we're opposed to? Heterosex when they take too many clothes off? Homosex in all its forms?

I went to a gun show once. It was just like a carnival. There were families with kids, stalls with French fries and corndogs. I like me a good corndog with that glowing yellow mustard that they probably use as radioactive contrast for MRIs. After a deep-fried Snickers, you can buy pellet guns for the babies. Or a thirty-eight for her in lavender or pink, that isn't too big for a purse. I was surprised that my girlfriend knew what the serious stuff was. "Is that a Soviet blahbetty blab?" But then half the Cuban kids of her age were trained for an American invasion. Which actually came, by the way.

Americans prepare for something largely imaginary. Like maybe a photo shoot. When I was a kid, me and my sisters would pose as Charlie's Angels with their guns in the air. I've been known to use my own fingers to form a revolver. "Make my day." It's not just ego. We are so often afraid, even if our enemies aren't a solid ninety miles away. There are those damn undercover Canadians that talk just like us. Those Mexicans who have the nerve to speak differently, but still steal our jobs. Or maybe it'll be an invasion by aliens we're sure are just a cattle prod away.

Then there are real muggers and rapists. It seems every high school and college football team has one or two. Just look at Notre Dame, and Steubenville High. But instead of protection, people with guns usually have them taken away and find themselves not just violated, but dead. Or on the flip side, fearful people end up shooting innocent kids like Trayvon Martin. Real perps hardly ever get killed.

Still, after the latest shooting, somebody actually said the kindergarten teachers should have been packing. When Gabrielle Giffords was laid up in the hospital after getting plugged, more than one asshole declared, "If it had been me I'd've known right away with my extrasensory American sense that Jarod Lee Loughner was a danger and taken him out with a shot right between the eyes. Ditto for that joker James Eagan Holmes who went nuts in the Colorado movie theater."

Only guns can solve the gun problem. We'll fight fire with fire. Burn the whole place down. Why wait for the Mayan gods to extinguish the sun? Or send meteor showers, or whatever it is that will bring the 5125-year cycle of life on earth to an end?

Sometimes I wish the Apocalypse would come before the next atrocity. Human acts of generosity are often so comparatively small. We save dogs and sheep when they fall in rivers. Hand out a pair of shoes. While our acts of hatred are on the Olympian scale. Twenty dead kids. I can't even imagine it. When shootings happen in high schools I can sometimes understand. A troubled kid accustomed to guns goes back for revenge against bullies. It's an old, old story. But attacking seven year olds? No.

NRA types will defend the guns, and say Adam Lanza was sick, and probably he was. They'll point the finger at the failures of the mental health establishment. Which should have done more. And that will be right, too. Or maybe they'll blame the mother he killed. (Who taught him to shoot.) But it's more fundamental, a flaw in our culture, our species, maybe. We are so good at imagining the end of things. We embrace films where monsters attack our cities, or meteors are aimed at earth like an alien invasion.

We rarely imagine some dramatic way Will Smith could transform our existing lives into something better. The closest he came was playing Mohammed Ali, sports star and activist. If you don't aim for Buddha or Jesus, maybe that's all there is. One person taking a stand.

Bloomberg was right to call on Obama to do it, push back against our culture of guns. I'd like to see him go further and dump our new toys, the drones. And maybe the Israelis could sit on their hands for a while. And the Palestinians, too, even if theirs are more often filled with rocks. Congo is a disaster. Let's wish impotence for each rapists' dick. And that their knives and guns bend like rubber. That they go to bed early, dream of peace.

Which is all I want. That, and a pony.

The Elephant in the Room

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was at this party the other day, when the people I'd sat down with decided I'd become inconvenient. They wanted to invite this other girl to go out with them, but not me, so what to do? Being awkward or just assholes, their solution was to suddenly ignore me. Pretend like I'd ceased to exist while they talked about dressing up as vampires or something, and the reaction they got in bars.

I was tempted to wave my hand in front of their faces, and say, "Yoo hoo, still here." But it was more interesting to stay motionless in my chair, watch their contortions, and see how long they could keep it up. Indefinitely, it turned out, even if their eyes were forced to glide past my own like I was a kind of repellant particle scientists weren't able to detect yet except by the movement of others around it.

They reminded me of three-year olds that can make other people come and go just by covering their own eyes. Or like politicians who have the amazing capacity to erase the elephant or dyke or whatever in the room.

We just had a whole election cycle where, unless I'm mistaken, poor people weren't mentioned once, just the suffering middle class, though more and more people are dropping out of it, and fewer climbing in. And in four years of having our first black president, racism has also fallen off the national agenda even as it grew. Don't make eye contact, it will get bored.

In 2008, it was the leaders of the LGBT community who managed to shut their eyes to Obama's inconvenient relationships with bigots. He campaigned, for instance, with the same black, antigay preachers as Bush, and when he won, invited that Anglo pig Rick Warren to pronounce over his inauguration. Rick Warren equated gay marriage with polygamy and incest. Said abortion was genocide as much as the holocaust was. Took his campaign, and gazillions of his white fundamentalist American dollars, to the African continent where he egged on antigay efforts in places like Uganda, telling the press there queers had no human rights. Preach on, brother man. The Ugandans embraced your message, considering every couple of months the death penalty for queers.

Nobody seemed to remember that giving hate the podium always means more violence, more shame. And like an opportunistic infection, more AIDS. You have to be an idiot not to know why young black queers in the U.S. get HIV more than anybody else. For World AIDS day Reuters reported that in 2010, "72 percent of the estimated 12,000 new HIV infections in young people occurred in young men who have sex with men, and nearly half of new infections were among young, black males." The article did a pretty good job identifying the culprit. Not just lack of information, but homophobia.

Lately, even relatively conservative international organizations have started to consider it in their programs, talking about the "gay" stigma of AIDS. Men who have sex with men think they can only get it if they identify as "gay". Straight men don't think they can get the "gay" disease. Women in that constellation are apparently immune. UNAIDS aspires to get to zero. Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths.

The only effective way to get rid of the (gay) stigma of AIDS, is to get rid of the stigma of gay. Because the other side of cultures of intense homophobia is shame. Which in the case of young black men is amplified by racism. Unprotected sex can be just another slow suicide like the bottle. Or hanging around street corners. Or joining gangs.

Part of that may begin to turn around now that Obama's seen the light, and his positions have "evolved." In 2012 Hillary Clinton used her international platform as U.S. Secretary of State to declare that gay rights were human rights. A few weeks later, Barack Obama announced his support for marriage equality.

Despite worried/gloating pundits, it didn't cost him the election. He won queer votes. And people of color mostly stayed on board. In fact, he gave renewed hope to lots of queer activists and allies of color. The usual verbal gay-bashing has been muted. Several black celebrities like Jay-Z have actually come out against homophobia. "It's no different than discriminating against black. It's discrimination. Plain and simple." This sea change can only help struggling young queers of color.

It's a good start, but there's still the little intractable matter of racism and race. It's easier for a straight president to speak up for the queers than a black president to speak up unapologetically for himself and all the kids that look like him. They are invisible particles we swerve around trying to keep the lid on. Sacrificing them to keep somebody else's peace.

Notes From My Big Gay Hurricane

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I kept reminding myself to be grateful. We had gas to cook with, and a dry building, running water. I was freaked out anyway. No light, no phone, no internet, no heat, no pharmacies. The hospitals were evacuated one by one, and my girlfriend was just getting better after being really sick. In an emergency, I'd have to walk three or four blocks to a pay phone, or the little hotspot in front of Russ & Daughters, one of the few places open. During the day, anyway.

At night, we had to cope with the dark. In the city, the absence of light is somehow obscene. It's a sign of abandonment or poverty that reminded us of the bad old days when the neighborhood was all burnt-out buildings and drugs and illegal clubs.

Even in daytime, you had to use a flashlight to get upstairs and get the key in the lock. At night, you'd light a couple of candles. For a moment, the flame would be so beautiful. But then the dark would win out, limiting the sphere of each candle to a small, ineffective round. Shapes and colors dissolved. I felt like I'd been slipped a tab of acid. There were no hard surfaces except the ones you cracked your knees on.

We sat on the couch and listened to the news on the spare radio our upstairs neighbor lent us. I'd rage whenever the broadcaster said, "Check our website for more information." If I could access the internet, you fucker, I'd have power and connectivity, and wouldn't need the goddam info. Or the radio for that matter.

When we got tired of living in a black and white movie, we'd go to sleep, shedding clothes that were invisible until morning. There was a lamp by the bed. After a couple of days, it started to seemed quaint. We should have stuffed it in the closet, along with our computers and cell phones, the refrigerator which we used as a cupboard in case the mice invaded from downstairs.

We'd entered a different century, maybe earlier, maybe later depending on your dystopian point of view. Or we'd shifted sideways to a part of the world where electricity is a whim if it exists at all. You certainly don't have jobs dependent on it. Or mass transit. You also don't build homes so near the shore. Especially not with the same old vulnerable designs you'd have inland. Or even uptown.

If we looked out the windows in back, there was a strange rosy dawn on the northern horizon. It was the illuminated city we weren't a part of any more. People that went up above 39th Street would come back saying how weird it was there. Life continuing like we didn't exist at all. We looked for metaphors of border crossing, inequality. Passing from East to West Berlin. From Mexico to the United States. North Korea to the South.

Halloween, I had to get my girlfriend to the lab uptown and to our heroic doctor who actually kept office hours. The buses were too packed to get on. No taxis stopped. We had to go back home. I was prepared to walk all the way up to 40th to call around for help, but a neighbor told me about that Russ & Daughters hotspot and I used the last of my charge to call my friend Adriana who drove in all the way from Queens, waiting two hours on the 59th Street bridge to ferry us uptown where the little kids were all dressed up going door to door. As dusk set in, the lights came up just like always. Bizarre.

I was back uptown Thursday, waiting 45 minutes for a bus that had space. And after checking email and recharging the phone at the public library in midtown (thank you NYPL), I grabbed a slice and overheard a guy proclaiming his refugee status and showing off his growing beard. When I asked where he lived, he looked around shiftily and said, "39th Street," and when I made a loud raspberry noise, slurping spittle everywhere, he declared, "But on the south side. And we don't have water."

He turned his back on me and kept regaling his listener about all his difficulties being a whole block away from power, and that guy went on to talk about how he'd gotten on a bike and zipped downtown to have a look at the darkness, "It was really incredible." Probably by now he's been to Red Hook or Coney Island, savoring the misery. I didn't kill them.

On the way back home the buses were too full to get on, and I had to walk the 40 blocks back downtown with the light fading. After dark, I lit the flashlight at every black intersection, signaling my existence to indifferent cars and more biking tourists who kept shouting, "I can't see a thing. I can't see a thing."

Orlando Cruz and Seimone Augustus, Gay Heroes

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I can't remember who I looked up to when I was a kid. Probably the usual: parents, teachers, the pastor at church, or choir director, otherwise known as minister of music. Their power, though, diminished as I got older and started to see their flaws. Celebrities didn't figure into it at all, since my Southern Baptist mother didn't let us watch more than half an hour of the idiot box per day, and our exposure to music was pretty limited, though somehow my older sister Kim ended up a Kiss fan.

So I guess I'd have to say God was my role model, along with his mild-mannered son with the empty blue eyes that I got to know as my personal savior. If I have a strange and messianic take on things you can blame them, or the protestants for letting me read the bible on my own from the time I could sound out the words.

Probably I'm an exception. Even twenty years ago, most kids discovered the world filtered through their TV sets. MTV, which started in 1981, was why all the guys in high school went around with the sleeves of their blazers rolled up. And why girls started wearing their clothes inside out. By the time Madonna did her live performance at the MTV video music awards in '84, she and Cyndi Lauper had already made us understand that clothes were only costumes after all. A form of play and power. You could be femme in the morning, all butch in the afternoon, something else entirely at night.

And then there was Michael Jordan hawking his Air Jordan shoes so every kid in the world could dream of flying as high. And of being as stinking rich.

We aspire to what we see. Every public figure is a potential role model. We all are, I guess, just on different scales. Step into the limelight, you're defining what's possible. You're shaping lives. Chris Kluwe, the straight Vikings kicker, deserves props for using his juice for his witty takedowns of homophobic bigots, though I'd like to give most of my kudos to WNBA Minnesota Lynx star Seimone Augustus. In the last couple of months she's raised her dyke profile to fight an impending gay marriage ban in her adopted state.

Hero of the month, though, is Puerto Rican boxer, Orlando Cruz, who announced he was gay two weeks ago, then won his next bout just a couple days ago. Now, the 31-year-old former Olympian is the one and only openly gay pro boxer active in one of the most macho sports of all.

He was graceful, and grateful as he bounded out of the closet. He admitted it took some time to make his peace with it, including a few years in therapy. And when he was asked about romantic prospects, candidly explained he planned on staying single for a while so he could focus on the world championship. "The title belt is my new boyfriend," he joked.

His prospects are good. At least in the stats. He's got a 19-2-1 record with nine KO's. And a thick enough skin to ignore the guys at the gym in San Juan where he works out that have started to whisper they won't take a shower if he's in the locker room. He apparently scares them stiff. I mean limp. What's the risk of death or a concussion compared to getting scoped out by a fag?

The coming out of Orlando Cruz was good news at a moment when the sports page was shocked and awed at Lance Armstrong's years of doping, and there were loud lamentations from the likes of The New York Times' William C. Rhoden who declared "In light of the dramatic falls of Michael Vick, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Tiger Woods and now Lance Armstrong, we need to either recalibrate our definition of the sports hero or scrap it altogether."

His conclusion: sports heroes in particular deserve an exemption. It's apparently too much to bear the burden of sports excellence along with the illusions of fans, and the requirements of civilized behavior. In fact the reverse might be true. "Will all the good that Paterno accomplished be buried with him, overshadowed by the scandal?"

With apologists like Rhoden dismissing all those raped and molested boys as nothing more than a "scandal", no wonder so many athletes behave like pigs. They aren't held to a higher standard. On the contrary, they have to sink pretty low to be held accountable at all.

Now I think it's more than homophobia keeping gay athletes in the closet, but our complicity in telling them they don't owe nobody nuthin. Which means that every gay athlete who decides to honor the truth and come out deserves a thousand parades from the public at large, and a lifetime supply of tickertape.

Reasonable Men

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

A couple of days before the presidential debate, I was running an errand uptown when I crossed 57th Street, and saw a small horde of media with TV cameras and digital recorders. At their center was an older red-faced white guy who was holding something up, and talking about it in a voice that was mild-mannered and reasonable. When I got closer, I saw that his prize was a jar with a bobble-headed Obama planted in what looked like shit.

Part of his spiel was that it wasn't really fecal matter, just brown Play-Doh. He opened up the lid and took a sniff, and offered it to the reporters. "See, Play-Doh." Then went on to say it should sell for a couple hundred thousand dollars like the Piss Christ, the Andres Serrano photo of the crucifix immersed in actual urine. He, of course, hadn't used anything so offensive. Nope, he'd used Play-Doh. Big difference. No reason to get upset.

He made quite a contrast with the guy behind him, a Latino man with a handmade sign scribbled on cheap poster board. I thought he was protesting the speaker, he seemed so different in demeanor, not to mention race. He was definitely what cops and shrinks like to call agitated. "Get your hands off me. I have a right to be here," he shouted at a security guard. He looked nuts. Partly because he was alone. I kind of identified with him until he also started to rave against the Jew gallery owners.

Later I found out the two were both part of a Catholic group denouncing the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery that has Serrano's 1987 "Immersion (Piss Christ)" on display. It created quite a stir when it was first shown in '89. Protests have resurrected recently, most notably in France where last year four Catholic extremists went at it with a hammer at an exhibition in Avignon called "I Believe in Miracles."

I thought about the two men as I walked away. The smug mellifluous one with the florid face of the drinker. The taut brown one twisted with rage. They both scare me. The furious one because it seemed like it would be easy to push him towards violence. As Heinrich Heine wrote, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." But worse are the honeyed, "reasonable" types that usually do the pushing. Or kill with the stroke of a pen. They neutralize their opponents by making them look like radical fools. At the same time, they themselves often front for howling mobs, embracing their anger, nudging them in one direction or another. Chasing Jews. Chasing queers. Stringing up black men. Any convenient enemy.

As a dyke, I am always at a disadvantage with these rational men. Because everybody knows females are not strong enough to hold emotion and reason in one brain without becoming unbalanced. Speak too passionately and some deep, smooth voice will instantly dismiss you as being incapable of lucid thought. As being confused. Unhinged even, because it's that time of the month. Haw haw. It's worse for dykes, always suspected of harboring irrational man-hating rage.

Females are not the only victims of the double standard of passion. When Obama finally opened his mouth about the death of one more unarmed black kid, calmly declaring, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," his unwhite face made it an expression of black rage. At least in the eyes of white right-wingers which are quickly moving from wignut status into the Republican mainstream.

How do you fight that? If you're Obama, you become even more reasonable, even more repressed, professorial. Given to long lectures. Clinging to facts. Which is, I think, what happened in the presidential debate last Tuesday night. What's a black guy supposed to do when the smooth talking, and very white, Mitt Romney energetically piles on lie after shitty lie?

If you leap in, make a spirited defense, they'll say you went all Panther on their asses. Because even the mildest attack will be amplified by his black face. So Obama more or less just stood there. Wilted even. The way he's probably trained himself. No way he's gonna be the face of black rage. When he hears about an asshole waving around a bobbleheaded Obama in crap, the POTUS probably leans back and smiles, "I'm not going to dignify that with a comment." Which is okay for a turd-hawker like the Catholic League's smooth-talking William Donahue. Not against the Romney's of the world.

Who knows what will work? Definitely not just standing there and piling on the facts. So if he doesn't want to respond in anger to Romney, it'll have to be something else. Why not humor? Passion? A few one-liners? Love even, for America. A performance from the heart.

The War on Voters

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I got my ass to the polls last week, even though there was only one race to be decided, and had my usual bad luck. For a couple of years, I'd get this one nearly deaf woman that couldn't understand my name. It wouldn't have been a big deal, but she was also nuts, and every year refused to look at the ID I tried to show her to make things easier. She'd carry on shouting about how I didn't live in her district until some other worker would notice the brouhaha and intervene.

She wasn't there this time, and my name was easily found, but then both of the new voting machines had broken down just before I got there, and I was stuck at PS Something for half an hour clutching my ballot, while five or six poll workers all shouted at each other, and brandished pamphlets for the gizmos while the one other voter, an elderly guy with a walker, collapsed in a metal chair.

I figured they should have served cocktails, or something. Handed around those little wienies in sauce. Or at least handfuls of Xanax. To the workers.

Finally they figured out that they had to break the seal on the box, which meant they had to spend another ten minutes hunting for the scissors, "They were right here. Have you seen them?" Before they got the one thing snipped, and the other thing opened. By which time I cursed the name of the judge my neighbor had persuaded me to vote for. Whoever it was. I can't even remember now.

All of which I suppose is a privilege. In Cuba, anybody at all can vote, but there's only one guy to vote for. And in the U.S., until ninety two years ago, my titted, twatted self wouldn't have been allowed to vote at all. No business of mine what my masculine betters got up to.

Women's suffrage (as opposed to suffering) didn't come into effect until the late date of 1920. Black men theoretically got the vote in 1870, but in practice both black men and black women and tons of others weren't really free to go to the polls until 1965, just before I was born, when the U.S. passed the Voting Rights Act which finally dumped literacy tests, state poll taxes, and other restrictions set up as barriers not just to people of color, but poor people from a bunch of backgrounds.

For instance, it's worth noting that long after white male voters were no longer required to own property, Connecticut adopted the nation's first literacy test in 1855 to keep those pesky Irish-Catholic immigrants from getting their vote on.

Now they're at it again, the white male property owners, dipping deep into their bag of dirty tricks requiring photo id's that lots of young and urban people don't have, what with not driving cars. They're also demanding proof of citizenship, and cutting back on opportunities for voter registration. It's mind-blowing, a reminder of the cycles of history. And how important it is to remember no right is ever truly won. Better to think of them as temporary gains, stay engaged, and vigilant.

While 41 states have passed bills restricting voting, only seventeen of these will have relevant laws in effect this year with the potential to affect the election. That doesn't sound too bad until you do the math and find these states combine for something like 80 percent of the total of electoral votes needed to win the White House.

If Florida taught us anything in the 2000 election, it's that every vote counts. And if you don't want Mitt Romney to be president, you have to do more than snicker at the flip-flopper changing his positions yet again, strapping his dog to the car roof, and spray tanning to appeal to Latino voters. We got a lot of laughs out of Bush Jr.'s malapropisms, and see where that got us.

Better to do voter registration, and follow that up with carpools to places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Colorado, wherever Republicans are disenfranchising as many people as possible, and try to support people providing remedies.

Beyond that, it's also worth thinking about just what you're willing to do if things go sour. In 2000, most lefties stayed home when the Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida. Neither did they act when it was time to certify the vote in Congress, when not one Senator out of the 100 stood up to protest the widespread fraud and the disenfranchisement of black voters.

Al Gore, presiding as Clinton's Vice President, was his own worst enemy, just grinning and shrugging at the protesting Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. "The Chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois, but, hey..." Let’s just get this thing over with.

If that happens again, what will we do?

The New Democrats?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I wasn't the only one gasping in astonishment last week at how visible queers were at the Democratic Convention. They broke ground by including a pro-gay plank in their platform openly supporting same-sex marriage. Straights like Rahm Emanuel, Obama's first chief of staff, brought us up, acknowledging Obama's work to allow queers to serve openly in the military. Tammy Baldwin, the out dyke U.S. Representative, spoke to the crowd. So did Jared Polis, the out gay congressman from Colorado who didn't just present gayness in the flesh, but used the words, declaring, "My great-grandparents were immigrants. I am Jewish. I am gay."

In contract, the Republican National Convention officially invited the gay Log Cabin Republicans to attend for the first time, but the GOP had no openly gay speakers, and most importantly, its platform was "more aggressive in its opposition to women's reproductive rights and to gay rights than any in memory" according to a New York Times editorial.

Only four years ago, the Obama strategy was only minimally better than the Republican one. We were kept offstage at all costs, seen as a political, though not financial, liability. Throughout his run, Obama avoided gay photo ops, and any promises he made were to our trusty leaders behind closed doors. At the same time, he campaigned openly with some of the same gay-hating preachers as Bush. Adding insult to injury, he asked Rick Warren, architect of some of the most vicious and deadly gay-hating campaigns in Africa, to bless his administration.

I guess it didn't take, that invocation. Or maybe god has switched sides. Eventually, we got more than a thank you for our checks. The last few years have seen the end of DADT, Hillary's hugely important speech on the international stage declaring gay rights are human rights, and Obama's own declaration that LGBT people might just deserve equality in America, too, in particular when it comes to same-sex marriage.

We're told that this was the plan the whole time. Deal with the economic crisis, pass health care reform, and then when the most dire things were out of the way, move on to The Gays.

Yeah, maybe that was the plan. Or maybe Obama only kept his promises because for once we held the Democrats accountable. Starting with Warren's appearance at the inauguration when we squealed like hell. We also ranted about betrayal when Obama's justice department defended some of the US's anti-gay policies in court. We demonstrated, filed our own lawsuits, threatened to keep our money in our pockets, sometimes sidelined our own Democrat-ass kissing national organizations, to declare that if they didn't do better, they'd have to win 2012 without our big gay dollars and our big gay votes. And it paid off.

Now, in the post-Convention excitement at growing acceptance and visibility, it's essential to keep in mind that legal rights and cultural change do not emerge only from the audacity of hope, or as gifts from our benign leaders. If we just sit around thinking nice thoughts and cheerleading an ostensibly supportive party, not only will we not make more progress, but the little we've gained will be rolled back, quicker than you can exclaim, "Goddamn."

Change is the result of work. A ton of it. Using as many strategies as possible. Street activism and demos. Fat donations. Letters, emails, sit-ins, measured editorials, furious diatribes. Also important are movies, art, and books that in radical acts of imagination help us see more clearly the world around us, and imagine a whole new one. Artists can be like scientists, exploring the universe of identity in a controlled environment, sharing their results.

LGBT activists can't let up now. Just look at the erosion of pro-choice gains. Most states have implemented so many restrictions on abortion, it's all but illegal. And in terms of race, the Jim Crow laws may have been pulled from the books years ago, but New Racists are back at it, most notably passing laws designed to keep minorities and poor people from voting. Their language and rhetoric is full of hate. And individuals that five or ten years ago may have been indifferent to the subject when Collin Powell was secretary of state and Condi Rice advising U.S. President George W. Bush, now hold strong and repellent views that amount to Black is bad. And so are independent women.

It doesn't take much to shift the tenor of a party. A whole nation can suddenly swing to the right. Former allies can jump ship. Complacency will kill us. So can refusing to see ourselves as part of the larger American project of liberty and justice for all. Queers of color, immigrant queers, those of us with tits, and poor queers are already more embattled than ever. Hate's contagious. Everybody will pay if we don't push forward together.

The Republicans and the Commissars

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In case you haven't been paying attention, the platform that the GOP is presenting this week at the Republican National Convention is more "conservative" than any in the modern history of the party.

Don't be misled by that word, "conservative." The Republicans are not conserving anything. Not liberty, not freedom, not equality. They're committed to radical retreat, and not even to the glory days of Ronald Reagan, but some time around the Salem witch trials, when upstanding male citizens could burn up anybody they didn't like the looks of.

In this case, they want to keep people of color perpetually on guard, replicating Arizona policy where Hispanic citizens risk being deported to places they've never been if they forget to carry driver's licenses and birth certificates.

Women aren't full citizens either. Republicans want to remove the choice of abortion altogether, even in cases of rape or incest. And if abortion is allowed, force women to get ultrasounds and submit to invasive procedures. Forget the morning after pill, or anything that gives females control of their own wombs, or acknowledges status superior to cows.

In the military, women would also be banned again from combat roles, while the GOP opposition to "anything which might divide or weaken team cohesion, including intramilitary special interest demonstrations" seems like a coded promise to reinstate, "Don't Ask Don't Tell." Which would only be the beginning of their attacks on LGBT people.

The GOP platform commits them to ending same-sex marriage everywhere, and banning civil marriages between same-sex couples. Why? Because these "counterfeit marriages" might start giving us the idea that we are "normal".

When I see delegates applauding this kind of crap I try to breathe deep and think of the long term. There are cycles in history. Things repeat themselves like Phillip Glass with slight variations. They attack. We push back. We make a gain. They try to unravel it.

But patience isn't part of my make-up as an activist. Everybody that steps into the streets is going for the win. Sometimes I dream of how great it would be if each queer in the universe could put in two or three years of work and at the end of it, we have the same civil rights as anybody else, and the culture has shifted enough for us not only to breathe, but thrive. And that whatever we won could be locked in somehow.

Instead, you can put in a whole lifetime, and twenty years later you have the new Pat Buchanan declaring the same old Culture War where the targets are still women and queers, immigrants (all illegal), and racial and ethnic minorities (which all feel sorry for themselves and want handouts).

Russia is apparently on the same wave length where they're rolling things back, not only past inconvenient democracy, but past the commies and the commissars, right back to the Tsars, when breaking religious laws could land you in jail.

On August 17, three members of the all-girl Russian punk band Pussy Riot got sentenced to two years in a prison camp (prison camp!) for doing a quick "punk prayer" in February in Moscow's main Orthodox cathedral asking the virgin to "chase Putin" from power. They had been in jail since then awaiting their trial. Two others are in hiding.

They scoffed when their lawyers wanted them to ask for a presidential pardon. In fact, Nadejda Tolokonnikova said Putin should ask her pardon. She, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich intend to appeal on purely legal grounds.

After all, Russia's supposed to be a secular state, and a democracy, with free speech and everything. Though the judge that sentenced them had a clear religious bias, characterizing their prayer as "sacrilegious, blasphemous, and against church rules." And allowing witnesses against them declaring the grrrls were "evil forces," engaging in "diabolical leg movements."

Pussy Riot marked their conviction on "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" by releasing their first single called "Putin Lights Up the Fires," welcoming even more jail time, and envisioning a protest movement taking to the streets, and led by feminists. Go Grrrrrls!

The same day, in a decision that passed almost unnoticed in the midst of the international frenzy over Pussy Riot, another Russian court upheld a one hundred year ban on Moscow gay pride parades "to prevent public disorder, and because most Moscovites don't want them." Of course, plenty of Moscovites don't want Putin either, but that's a minor detail. Last year, St. Petersburg banned "homosexual propaganda" which includes any neutral or positive statement about lesbians and gay men.

I can only imagine the Republicans looking with envy and awe at the Great Bear, and wishing they had as sweet a deal as Putin, prison camps for big-mouthed female protestors, courts banning displays of queer pride for a hundred years. Poor Republicans. All they have is the jail that the Tampa police chief emptied out for protesters. Here's hoping we follow the example of Pussy Riot, push back against the bigots and demagogues, and fill the thing to the top.

Chavela Vargas, Lesbian Icon, Lives

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

She was 81 when she decided to kick open the closet door. It was the autumn of 2000, and she'd just gotten a big prize in Madrid after fifteen years in an alcoholic wilderness, then a decade of an incredible comeback partly engineered by gay filmmaker Pedro Almodovar who apparently tracked her down in a Mexico City bar, got her sober and back to work. At the time, there were hardly any out Latin American queers. And it meant something huge that she said it out loud, several times, even if everybody already knew that the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, womanizer was a dyke.

Afterwards, she did an interview in the Spanish paper El País and was so absolutely fierce, thumbing her nose at the Catholic Church, not worried about what anybody thought. "I've had to fight to be myself and to be respected. I'm proud to carry this stigma and call myself a lesbian . . . I've had to confront society and the Church, which says that homosexuals are damned. That's absurd. How can someone who's born like this be judged? I didn't attend lesbian classes. No one taught me to be this way. I was born this way, from the moment I opened my eyes in this world. I've never been to bed with a man. Never. That's how pure I am; I have nothing to be ashamed of. My gods made me the way I am."

She was born in Costa Rica in 1919, and fled to Mexico when she was 14, mostly to get away from a suffocating, conventional society and a family that tried to force her into its straitjacket. According to the BBC, she once said: "I never got to know my grandparents. My parents I got to know better than I would have liked. They never loved me and when they divorced, I stayed with my uncles, may they burn in hell!"

In Mexico, she somehow survived by singing on the streets, gradually moving into the bars. Only in her thirties did she really get popular by styling Mexican ranchero songs about love and loss, usually sung by men. Despite Mexico's own conservative culture, she stepped into their shoes, and found a way to fill the halls with her lush, raw voice, and masculine persona, tossing back tequila, lighting up cigars, and refusing to wear women's clothes, or change the pronouns in the songs. It was still women that done her wrong.

She became a favorite of artists like Frida Kahlo, apparently one of her many lovers. Chavela adored women almost as much as she loved singing, which was still topped by her passion for tequila. Rumor has it that she once kidnapped a woman at gunpoint. She always denied that one, but not that her slight limp was earned when she jumped out a window after being disappointed in love.

Her open desire for women fueled her music, but also made her a target for dickheads who even now dismiss her as a minor quirk, an outsider, though she transformed the ranchero landscape, outmanning the men, even if she repeatedly said she didn't want to be one. She was her own thing. Later on, she identified what it was. A dyke. And if men got an inferiority complex listening to her rough and tender voice that made even straight women swoon, that was their problem.

Chavela Vargas upended Mexican music. She cut more than 80 records, and composers used to say that she "robbed" the songs, not just squeezing every last bit of life from them, but like Billie Holiday, making every song so fully her own, it was nearly impossible for other singers to approach them afterwards.

Her fans continue to adore her. In April, she did a big recital at the Palacio de Bellas Artes de Mexico, around the time of the elections there. It was jam-packed with admirers of all ages. At the end they screamed, "Chavela for president!"

Usually, fatalistic about social change, one of her last political gestures was to tweet in support of lesbian visibility day on April 26. "Proud to be the way I am." "Let's raise our voices so we are not invisible." And the photo that she distributed with it, my god. She had these dark shades on, and her head a little thrown back, revealing the strong cut of her jaw, just supremely cool. Even at 93, the dyke was so incredibly sexy she smoldered. She'd burst into the world, and burned things up. Herself along with everybody else. Chavela Vargas left this earth on August 5 to conquer the rest of the universe.

Don't know Chavela? Give a listen to the classic "Chavela Vargas Le Canta a México," on the Orfeón label. It's also worth checking out her two tracks on the CD, "The Songs of Almodóvar" (Emd/Blue Note), which also includes Cuban greats La Lupe and Bola de Nieve, and 50's Chilean crooner Lucho Gatica.

Lesbians Lust for Everything

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Sometimes I get tired of being the dyke whining out in the godforsaken wilderness, complaining to the cactuses about how lesbians barely make a blip in mainstream culture. Straight men are satisfied with our cameos in porn as two housewives making out with each other until a carpenter or plumber turns up with his big tools. "Women" still shy away from the lavender menace, as if we have nothing to do with them because we only dance around Maypoles in May. (Yes, that was a dick joke).

The LGBT community's often no better. Lately, trans- and gender issues are way more compelling than our own, while G men still use the L word as a punch line, pretty much like they always have. A couple months ago, when blogger Alan Jacobs suggested that gay relationships should "start with the kind of intimacy that is more like friendship than anything else, and to trust that sexual satisfaction will arise from that" noted gay writer Andrew Sullivan's hilarious response was, "On what planet does Jacobs live? Planet lesbian?" BWAH HA HA. What a card. What a douche bag.

It was tempting to blast Sullivan for the sneer in that word, "lesbian." How he embraced the Victorian assumption that two wimmins together never actually screw, or go mad from desire: we just hold hands and simper at each other, making our experience so absolutely foreign to his gay, manly one, we deserve a whole separate planet. But I didn't write anything at the time. I couldn't muster the energy, not when lesbians so often seem to agree.

Last column I dumped on the new Lesbian Political Action Committee, because with all their focus on reproductive rights and women's issues, the most lesbian thing about them was their name. But in fact, lots of young female homos refuse even the name, declaring that they prefer the noncommittal "queer" which is ever so radical and chic. Or even "gay woman," because it sounds more ladylike, and with the "woman" on board, doesn't quite bar the door to men, which we're told is rude and prehistoric, unlikely to advance our careers.

You can hear them worrying about what the neighbors think, as they declare labels conveniently passé, and defend their position so vigorously they give off the sulfuric stench of lesbophobia, afraid the word lesbian will make them small and ridiculous. As if generic humans were so great, so dignified.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the indy girl-on-girl site Autostraddle.com, that doesn't shy away from the word lesbian, and is as comfortable with culture as politics, nestling articles on the endless possibilities of peanut butter up against the realities of dyke life in African countries. Because sometimes lesbians bond over politics, sometimes it's a shared passion for the gooey brown stuff.

Last week, I remembered a different kind of food. Dyke books, dyke art. The kind you get when you remember that labels aren't nooses, but fuses, which can go off with a bang.

First, I read Eileen Myles' novel, "Inferno." What a wonderful, ambitious work. She claimed a mainstay of the literary canon in the name of dykes and poets everywhere, and stuffed it full of her own life, which could have been mine, or yours. I'm an amnesiac, and her story reminded me how growing up in a hetero world I just kind of assumed I was straight even though I mooned after beautiful women, was struck dumb by them. One of her most important themes was that coming out as a dyke, as a lesbian, was as much a leap of imagination as it was a pussy on pussy act.

And Friday I went to Dixon Place to see the show, "Gomez and Tropicana Do Jan Brewer." They turned their two dyke Latina bodies, a smear of lipstick, some cowboy hats and a doll, into the raunchiest, funniest, most irreverent, most obscene performance I've watched in I can't remember how long. They were so fucking daring, so fucking free, being homo and hetero, men and women, white and Hispanic, hell, even goddesses and demon Chupacabra politicians like you'll only see at the Republican National Convention. It boggled the mind.

I sometimes forget that dyke artists exist, leading the way to creating a multiverse inside the boundaries of that terrifying word "lesbian" that we haven't finished with yet. And never will, because that's the thing with identity and language. Words shift. Or the world does. I like it best when we rock it ourselves instead of cowering.

So what if we're shoved to the margins? There are all sorts of interesting things in the folds of couches, jettisoned at the side of the road, in the wilderness. Every one of our lesbian lives redefines the syllables assigned to us. Breaks the mold. Or could. If we weren't so afraid. If we dared to grab it and run.

LPAC, It's Not Just for Lesbians

by Kelly Jean Cogswell

I first heard about LPAC when it was launched last week. And my cynical heart beat just a little faster. Yippee, the first ever lesbian political action committee, supported by big names like the actor Jane Lynch and Chicago Cubs co-owner, Laura Ricketts. Finally! Money for lesbian, and pro-lesbian, candidates. But then I went to their website www.teamlpac.com and got my dyke heart semi-broken.

On the FAQ page, I learned that the bipartisan LPAC was actually created because "Women’s equality and well-being is under attack in a way this country has not seen in decades; As a result, a dramatic window of opportunity exists to counter this onslaught by electing strong pro-women candidates running for office; We believe that a strong lesbian PAC will influence the political and social landscape generating results."

Their expanded answer, on the "why" page, was also largely about women, straight women. The word lesbian was only used once, twice if you count the L of LGBT. More than half was taken up by the attack on women's rights, and women's reproductive rights, especially access to abortion, and funding for Planned Parenthood. The mention of marriage equality, and the House vote on the Violence Against Women Act that excluded lesbians, along with Native Americans and undocumented immigrants, seemed almost like an afterthought.

So when I spoke to spokesperson and chair, Sarah Schmidt, I bluntly asked what the difference was between LPAC and any vaguely gay-friendly feminist thing created to elect progressive, or female, candidates. The obvious answer was that "Lesbian's right there in the title. It's the only lesbian PAC. And we're the only ones trying to engage lesbians in the political process."

I told her that wasn't exactly what I was getting at. "I noticed that on the website the word woman is used a lot. Lesbian, not so much. It's mostly about women's rights, and women's reproductive rights. Is it a tactic, to make people more comfortable with a lesbian project?"

She was equally frank in her response, "No, it's not a tactic. We're not trying to hide anything." She explained that part of what LPAC wants to do is make a difference in the horror show of the new war against women. The committee spent a year brainstorming before they launched the project, prodded into existence by lesbian activist Urvashi Vaid.

"As lesbians, there are a lot of things we care deeply about. We wanted broader connections to the American political process than just marriage equality and hate crimes. I'm a woman first. Who happens to be a lesbian. I think that gives me a unique perspective. We've had conversations with many, many lesbians telling us that LGBT rights are important, but so is abortion. 'Hey, I want to have the same salary as a man,' they told us. Lesbians also have links to other social justice issues."

To be honest, the war on women appalls me, too, how so many states are attacking not just abortion rights but contraception, how women were excluded from federal hearings on reproductive rights. And how even the word vagina is practically banned. And while I know that LPAC has to serve their market, I'm also worried lesbian issues will get lost in that word, woman. And I'm not just talking about marriage equality and dyke-bashings.

In many cases, lesbians don't even experience traditional "women's" issues in the same way as straight women. Domestic violence, for instance, means much more than only worrying about attacks from our partners. Lesbians are often at risk inside their own homes from the moment their orientation becomes apparent. We face corrective rape, beatings from our own family members and friends. We are sometimes locked in our rooms. Or tossed out on the streets. We run away. Drop out of school. Our relationships bear the additional burden of homophobia. All that in addition to misogyny.

Lesbians also don't face exactly the same challenges when it comes to equal pay for men and women in the same job. First you have to get hired. And plenty of dykes have trouble getting even the crappiest jobs. Because even if we manage to stay in school and get ourselves educated or trained, being hired often requires us to put on that still obligatory skirt, those pantyhose, some little tasteful earrings, and a benign smile. And many of us can't, or won't, pull it off.

And in general, while arguments about a woman's right to control her own body sometimes include discussions of homosex and our right to have it, and while abortion foes tend to be queer-hating bigots, and racists, and xenophobes, issues of "reproductive rights" still affect straight women way more often, and more directly than dykes. By definition, our eggs just don't have that much willing contact with sperm unless we actually want to have kids. The only time I ever went to Planned Parenthood was when I thought my first girlfriend gave me herpes.

No, lesbians are not women like other women. And while "women's" issues are important, and related to lesbian issues, they are not the same. And we must not let our common equipment obscure our very real differences.

At this point, seeing that bold-faced L in front of the PAC is the most radical part of the project. For the first time, contributors who have long supported Planned Parenthood, and campaigns for income equality, and other women's issues, can finally donate under their own name, Lesbian. And politicians will be forced to acknowledge just who it is that they owe. It would also be great if lesbians really were mobilized and politically engaged. Especially on our own behalf. Not once again as foot soldiers in a related, but separate, fight.

Dead Queers, Culture and The Law

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

New York State's anti-bullying law has finally gone into effect, and all the gay news sites are announcing, "Our kids are finally protected." "It's the end of bullying." As if a couple of paragraphs inserted here and there, magically keep kids from getting tormented, beaten up, or forced into suicide.

Did laws against murder keep some guy from firing a couple of rounds into teenage lesbian couple, Molly Olgin and Mary Kristene Chapa last week in Portland, Texas? Those don't apply when you're talking about dykes or women, or somebody that doesn't look quite white. Nope, the law didn't put a force field around them, or save Molly Olgin's life. It rarely can.

The law alone is like a message in a bottle. Maybe somebody'll get it. Maybe not. The same holds true when the law is breached, maybe you'll get justice. Maybe not. The real trick is to get the law off that scrap of paper, and into our heads installing itself as a personal value, an organizing principle that creates its own refrains reminding us, Those are other people, members of my human tribe, put down the gun.

Unfortunately, changing culture, changing society isn't something you can just lobby for or throw money at. Which is why LGBT people have mostly abandoned the project in favor of changing themselves. Becoming normal. In public, now, we mostly show up freshly scrubbed, paired off like sedated animals in the ark who can't even be bothered to growl, squawk or fuck.

The artists we applaud for coming out are already adored by the mainstream. I love Ricky Martin, but what does him coming out prove besides the fact that at least a few of us are presentable? Not scary at all? He's so good-looking, and good humored. Ditto for Ellen. You could take her home to your Nana. Wanda Sykes has a lot more edge, but she's not actually gonna cut anybody with it.

In some ways, this decade and a half of efforts to join the military, get married, adopt, be accepted like anybody else only reinforces the idea that heterosexual, gender-conforming, marriage aspiring people are the standard of normal. And the rest of us that can't, or won't pass, are still screwed. And as likely to be targeted because our sexual orientation is like a persistent, terrifying reminder of difference, that things don't have to be the way they are.

We say we want change, but we hardly ever do. Except for other people. Though there was a brief moment in the late 80's and 90's when LGBT people still embraced change and experiment. It wasn't just AIDS that provoked the queer art and activism of the 80's and 90's, shaping its bastard children ACT-UP, Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers.

There was Holly Hughes with her epochal The Well of Horniness, and all the WOW iconoclasts including the Five Lesbian Brothers. They created a lesbian theater that went beyond your mother's lesbian separatism that stood in opposition to a world dominated by men, rejecting their hostility and violence, and wrapping us tight in cotton wool against the general ferocity of the world.

What the WOW girls did was dismantle the world itself. If men existed at all, it was in faint echoes of old films and TV shows. And you could recast everybody's roles. There was sex, and humor, and more words for vagina than you can shake a stick at. They were raunchy, and irreverent and transformative. Pursuing their own peculiar world, they were incredibly free.

After them, I discovered a book by David Wojnarowicz, this poet/artist crying out to America as an unrepentant faggot, holding her accountable for all those AIDS deaths, all the suffering of queers sent into cultural exile. He demanded that the great narcissists of our country quit staring at their belly buttons and gaze into the distance. Into the future, that did not look at all like them.

And dyke poet Eileen Myles actually ran for President, with her dog Rosie, stumping her way into American life, ready or not. While in "After Dolores," novelist Sarah Schulman inserted dykes into a New York City that wasn't asked to embrace anybody. She just planted her own dyke flag. At PS 122 performance artist Carmelita Tropicana turned Cuban--and American-- culture upside down and inside and out, while her choreographer pal Jennifer Monson explored gracelessness and gravity, having her dancers collide mid-air.

That was a different time, when queers had the ambition to broaden America, the whole world, really, not just squeeze themselves into a tiny corner of it. We were sick of being midgets and pygmies. And knew, what I still know now, that if there is going to be safety for any of us, we can't just break down one wall, we have to destroy them all.