Allies Aren't Enough In Ferguson, San Fran

By Kelly Cogswell

Another unarmed black man is shot by a white cop, and as the situation explodes, plenty of right-thinking white folks are exhorting each of us blanquitos to become an ally. It's also what straight folks are supposed to become when another fag gets beaten, another transwoman mutilated and killed. Or a dyke gets raped.

I hate that word, ally. It is so patronizing. So besides the point. As if Michael Brown's death has no consequences for white lives. As if the murder of Bryan Higgins, radical faerie, this week in San Francisco won't touch hets. As if we could make our lives bubbles. No, not even bubbles which explode pretty easily. But pods maybe. Metal space ships exploring a different galaxy which we can leave whenever we want a change of scenery.

Sure, plenty of people are sheltered. Random attributes give us privileges, and we enjoy them as much as we can. I suppose it's even remarkable that anybody bothers to wring their hands at the latest horror. But the links are still there. We drag around our shared histories like toilet paper stuck to our shoes. Like that extra forty pounds we don't really notice anymore. Haven't for years. Doesn't mean that sodden, shitty thing isn't there. In the houses we can buy, the jobs we get. That bloody smudge on the sidewalk.

But as long as my passport says American, what happens in Ferguson, or Detroit, or Chicago is my business, too. As long as I am human, really. Seeing each other as separate and irrelevant is part of what got us into this mess to begin with. The inability to look each other in the eyes and recognize, "Okay, a person. Like me." Dogs are smarter than us. One sniff and they know what's what. Cat. Dog. Tree. Homos not so sapiens get distracted by all the superficial stuff, skin, hair, gestures, cars. Language. Act like they are mountain ranges with no clear path over. Are often glad that the barrier's there. And work to build higher ones.

In fact, differences really only exist in the painful middle distance. At the cellular level we are pretty much indistinguishable. And the further away you move the microscope, the more you can see how our futures are bound together, like the misery of our past. It's in our own interest to pay attention, and think about how we fit together. And then plunge in.

Which is why I wish we'd retire that word, ally. It implies that we don't really have to do much but have nice thoughts and maybe make a donation. Send some tents to the war zone. Sandwiches. Not go there yourself in the flesh. Risk getting hurt. Maybe physically, maybe just your feelings. I mean, you should try not to be a complete asshole, you're not the center of attention and maybe should listen more than you talk, but missteps are inevitable if you leave your space ship.

The thing we have to keep in mind is that we are not "allies". Not acting on anybody else's behalf. We don't deserve gold stars for getting involved in the society we belong to. We don't even have to pretend to understand somebody else's experience. We just have to believe we are more deeply connected than we admit. And if we fuck up sometimes, so what? If practice doesn't make perfect, it does make better. At least we aren't still deluded into believing we're somehow outside the problem, and that it won't bite us in the ass one day. Hasn't already infected our lives.

I thought about this a lot when I was out there on the frontlines as a Lesbian Avenger. I always figured that if dykes finally got treated with respect, had the room to make choices about sex and romance, weren't subjected to violence, it would stretch the possibilities for straight females like my bigoted hateful mom. Don't want to get married? Fine. Resent kids? Don't have to have any. And no problem if you don't want to put on the panty-hose, make nice, suck-up to the boss. If I can walk the streets unafraid as a lesbian, then you can, too.

It's pretty obvious how militarized, and bigoted policing affect the LGBT community. Fags of all races still get arrested in adult bookstores, get stung in illegal sex operations. Trans people, too, get profiled and harassed as prostitutes. Instead of getting help, many queers get harassed after assaults.

Even on a sheer tactical level, it's clear one segment of the population can't be assured justice while another goes without. It is a habit. We can't address violence against queers, or against people of color, without going after it in American society at large. We may have to address our problems in small ways, one law at a time, but our thinking has to be big enough to hold us all.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Gender Anxiety and the Joys of Swimming in France

By Kelly Cogswell

A decade or two ago, I was a member of the 14th Street Y. Trouble would start as soon as I'd step into the locker room and a couple of little old ladies would be sure to scream, "This is the Women's." I'd consider flashing my tits for a moment, but usually just mumbled "Fuck Off" under my breath and let them work it out among themselves.

If it wasn't them, it was the little kids. Mothers would bring all their children into the locker room even if they were practically in grade school, and more than once some creepy little boy would stare at me while I changed. The place was charged with gender and sex.

It was even worse when I went to swim. I could walk to the gym with my swimsuit under my clothes, but if I wanted a shower afterwards, so I could change into dry things, I'd have to get naked and deal with those horrible staring lecherous boys that did everything but whack off. Worse were the mothers that let them. And I know they knew because I saw them watching, too.

After a while, I just quit going. And didn't start swimming again until I moved to France, and discovered cheap public swimming pools. In Paris every neighborhood has a couple, and they operate all year around.

The best thing is that everybody goes into the same locker room, men, women, children, dykes. So no screams for the likes of me. Though it would probably still be complicated for some trans or intersex people.

Another perk is that the little boys aren't usually creepy, because children see plenty of adult bodies from the moment they start going to the pool. If you do get looked at, it's not aggressive and weird. Most people do it just enough to register who's standing next to them in the shower which everybody takes in a common area (in their swimsuits) before they get into the pool.

Which brings me to glory number three of Paris pools. They're so clean they barely smell. Truly. I'd thought that maybe they used less chlorine, but it turns out that most of the stink of American pools comes from the reaction between your lotion, sweat, and hair gel with the chlorine which creates a disgusting, eye-reddening soup. Add a little pee to the chlorine you get the fragrant chloramine.

The great quality of the water is an unintended consequence of the gender neutral spaces. Because everybody passes through the same shower area, and you have all these eyes on you, you stop and wash. No cheating. It's peer pressure at its best. The entries are also better arranged, so everybody steps in the disinfecting foot bath thing because it is almost impossible not to. Unless you can balance on a two-inch ledge.

Then you get down to it. You swim. Your vertebrae extend themselves. You relax. Become one with the water. When you're done, you return to bathe in the same common showers. People more or less unselfconsciously reach into their suits to apply soap to intimate areas. Back in the locker room, there are little private stalls if you need to take off your suit and strip down to your skin.

The only drawback is that you have to time things carefully. And avoid lunch time or after work when you end up as awkward sardines, thwacking your neighbor in the next lane, catching a foot in the face. Weekends are packed, too. During the actual school year, the pool closes at odd hours for groups of kids who early on learn to swim, and get the gender neutral locker room experience.

What can I say except, it works. The only surprise is that it happens here in France where they've been in the midst of an openly declared gender war since the adoption of a marriage equality law in 2013. There were huge demos against it, mobilizing hundreds of thousands.

The most vociferous opponents weren't so much against marriage rights per se, as the horrifying idea that same-sex unions will lead to the erosion of... gender roles. Their logo looked like the door signs for segregated bathrooms, little men in suits, little skirted figures. I think they were even in blue and pink.

Adoption and birth certificates send them right over the edge. It will be the end of the world if Parent 1 and Parent 2, replace "Mother" and "Father." Legal changes like that can apparently have a countrywide effect leading to the shrinking of penises and the unexpected growth or disappearance of tits.

Now they're screaming about gender in schools, and denouncing any curriculum that teaches the kids that little girls can be anything they want. Just like boys.

Bring on the Freudians. We've got a severe case of capricious gender anxiety here.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Gaza, Queers, and Banning Speech

By Kelly Cogswell

It's harder and harder to be a cheerful, card-carrying member of the LGBTQ community. If it's not the new spate of weddings, it's our obsession with the policing of speech. We catch some famous person saying homo or fag, bust their chops, and soon they're at HRC or GLAAD, beating their breasts and getting sensitivity training. A few days later, the same censors are screaming, Free speech! Free speech! because somebody wasn't allowed to march for something (that they agree with).

Those who demand limits, at least sometimes, might want to consider France as a cautionary tale. After World War Two and the massacre of Jews, there are serious penalties for speech inciting hate. Last week, Anne-Sophie Leclere, a local, first-time candidate for the extreme right, was sentenced to five months in jail and a 50,000 euros ($68,000) fine for publicly posting racist images, and making racist remarks about Christine Taubira, the Minister of Justice.

And just this weekend, in an effort to prevent anti-Semitic violence, Paris banned a march-- against the bombing of Palestinians. The government had what they considered a good reason. A similar demo last week devolved from criticism of Israel to denunciations of The Jews. Protesters with baseball bats tried to storm at least one synagogue, trapping a number of terrified people inside.

The ban, though, was denounced even by members of the governing party as anti-democratic, no matter that it was probably legit. The right to assemble apparently isn't written into the French constitution (though the right to strike is).

In any case, the ban, complete with threats of jail time and huge fines, only made things worse. Big mouths got to play the victim and no doubt claim Jews really do control the government. And after a semi-peaceful start, with a mixed crowd of all genders and ages, the march evolved into the usual melee featuring guys with their faces wrapped in those checkered scarves, and posing for the cameras with a cloud of teargas behind. The message that Israel should quit bombing Palestinians was largely lost.

Despite the predictable, though unintended consequences of curtailing speech, people still seem to think it's a good idea. I went to hear a talk by Stuart Milk the other day, and he seemed a little embarrassed when somebody asked him why Americans couldn't gag Scott Lively. He didn't exactly muster a spirited defense of our values. Just explained the law, kinda, then changed the subject as fast as he could.

And it's true, with near absolute free speech, Americans are stuck with the likes of preacher, and antigay activist Scott Lively. In the U.S., "hate speech" pretty much only has legal implications when accompanied by a concrete act of violence. Or when there's a direct and unmistakable cause and effect, like yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater, leading to somebody getting trampled to death. So Mr. Lively can travel the world spreading lies and hate about LGBT people, and he can't be prosecuted in America, until links between his antigay campaigns and violence become more and more direct. Or he's attacked from a different angle.

Faced with the consequences of such speech, it's difficult to accept the usual pat response that the answer to bad speech is more speech. What we should say, then, is that efforts to prevent hate speech may actually open the door to it, and thwart efforts to fight back.

We're seeing it play out in Europe. With the intention to prevent a reprise of the Holocaust, they introduced the idea that it is acceptable to criminalize speech that may incite a certain mindset (hate) which may incite a criminal act. From there, it's not much of a leap to decide to prevent the original speech from taking place.

And while you could shut up Scott Lively once and for all, you may also see more marches banned. Because something untoward might be said, which might eventually lead to violence.

In the worst case scenario, you get Russia. Because if the tools exist to ban Scott Lively, they exist to ban you. It all depends on who's on top. Take these ideas to their logical conclusion with a different ideological lens, it's not only possible, but practically necessary, to criminalize pro-gay speech. After all, societies agree on what is dangerous and repugnant, and if in Russia there is the widespread belief all queers are pedophiles, and also, somehow, magically, a threat to the state, speech in our defense is dangerous, too.

So keep this in mind--once legal tools exist to curb speech, we can't guarantee only the wise and good-hearted will be in control of them. So we better err on the side of scary, limitless speech. This is especially important (I'll say it again) for queers. We will always be a minority, always vulnerable. We need to protect the few weapons we have.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Blasting Past the Dyke March

By Kelly Cogswell

Last Saturday morning, I was sitting in a Toronto café watching the news when their World Pride rundown included a Dyke March. They actually said it on TV, "Dyke". And no buildings collapsed, or fire rained down from the sky, though it was pretty hot.

I even got a little sunburnt when I joined the dykes gathering in downtown's Allan Gardens, hanging out, and trying to figure out where their group was meeting. Because the closer we move towards legal equality, the more official and officious our events. In Toronto, there was registration for groups, and an order of march that actually had individuals asking if they could participate. On the upside, there were portable toilets, and the use of a free wheelchair if you needed one.

Tents were set up to give out NoH8 temporary tattoos. Others took pictures of kissing queers for some project or other. There was an informational type booth that didn't have much information, but plenty of cute volunteers, one of whom informed me she was straight, but looked disappointed when I didn't immediately applaud her benevolence.

I was at the march to give out stuff about the Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project, the same Avengers that started the whole Dyke March thing in 1993 in Washington, DC, when 20,000 lesbians were Out for Power. In 1994, on the anniversary of Stonewall, the original New York Avengers hosted the first international Dyke March, getting another 20,000 lezzies into the street to declare that Lesbians Lust For Power.

It was amazing. All those dykes from all over the world, stepping into the street as lesbians, many for the first time ever. They danced. They shouted. They ripped their shirts off with joy. And they did it with a radical political message and didn't ask anybody for permission.

I was warned Toronto's World Dyke March wouldn't have the same edge. Some of this year's organizers complained that the politics had been stripped away since an earlier group had responded to the siren song of money from Toronto's official Pride organization. And you don't get nothing for free.

Dyke issues, they said, were consistently swept under the rug. Like the violence we face, the constant harassment, the disenfranchisement, really, when so many young queers are booted from their homes, and don't make it through school. Uneducated, gender non-conforming, they can't find jobs, much less a way to participate in civic life.

In 2010, some outraged Toronto activists organized a Take Back the Dyke march which was almost as big as the official one. But in their estimation, it was too late to regain control. They've temporarily conceded the fight. Though this year transpeople -- equally pissed with the official Trans march -- were holding a competing event.

I heard so much trash talk that when I walked to the front, I expected corporate logos everywhere, glum girls in pearls and twinsets. But what I saw was the usual sea of cheerful dykes who were dancing, and flirting and waving clever signs. The crowd of 7,000 was led off by dykes on bikes, and included women's health centers, and one large group called Craft Action TO. Actually subsidized by Pride Toronto, they'd crocheted alternative Dyke March banners, and an extraordinary umbrella composed almost entirely of tits. Guided by Guatemalan dyke Adriana Alarcón, lesbians who had never touched yarn joined the new wave of craftivists, discussing politics as they got their craft on.

There was no denying the energy. Even the dykes who'd helped organize the earlier competing march seemed happy. Maybe because in large demos like this, it's the numbers that count. No matter what theme we have, or signs we wave, the primary message of a Dyke March is in our dyke bodies claiming public space en masse for a whole two hours. After all, despite our growing legal rights, dykes are still largely invisible in the public sphere from politics to TV, not to mention the streets.

Even the LGBT community would prefer to leave the L behind. The official World Pride Facebook page had lots more posts promoting the merchandise than they did for the Dyke March or other lesbian activities. One event organizer complained that his dyke stuff, even when it was official, almost never made it into the printed World Pride program.

Alone, a more radical march wouldn't solve these problems. To bring attention to specific issues, we may as well piggyback on official efforts, and seed their marches with groups of ten or fifteen, each carrying signs of our own choosing. We could also use Pride Week to host Speak Outs or create direct actions by small groups around the most pressing local issues.

The real question is how to harness that dyke energy from July to May, when the real work gets done.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

My Own Dyke Amnesia

By Kelly Cogswell

I admit it. Sometimes when the Dyke March rolls around again, and the committee starts asking the community for themes, I can't remember a single lesbian issue. As if I made up all our problems, and we should be perfect comfortably ceding place to gay men, bifolks, and trans, not to mention women.

And it's true, our practical concerns exist at a peculiar intersection of misogyny, homophobia, and gender. Like other females, lesbians know what it's like to get harassed by men on the street, face the demands for smiles, anger when we refuse. Lesbians, though, often get an extra level of fury because when we refuse to go out with some asshole, talk to him, or grin, we're seen as rejecting not just him, but his whole category. This is what leads to whole, systematic waves of "corrective" rape.

And if we decide to fight back, if we happen to be dykes of color, maybe working class, well, that doesn't work out so well either. In her new documentary film, "Out in the Night" blair dorosh-walther describes how a group of African American dykes were demonized when they responded with their own violence to an assault (by a black man) in New York's West Village. The press called them a "Lesbian Wolf Pack." The lawyers were worse, and four of the group got huge sentences.

If they'd been guys fighting back, maybe it would have been laughed off as one more testosterone laden encounter since the "victim" didn't die. If they'd been straight women, white, a little further up the social pecking order, maybe they'd even have been applauded as brave.

You want to talk class? Sure, lesbians are right there as well. As women, we already get less for the same work. But things get even more complicated if we come out. If we don't like being too femme. I struggled getting temp jobs because I couldn't stand all the baggage of nylons and heels and how wearing those things signals a certain female availability, brings more unwanted attention that drives me nuts.

Don't even get me started on health care, or the horror of finding a new gynecologist. I dread their questions about sexual activity and birth control. More than once my answers to female GYN's have earned me looks of disgust, transformed me into a repulsive creature they could barely stand to touch. They seemed to believe the mere sight of a woman turned me on, and never considered that the opposite might be the case, especially when she's holding a speculum.

Male GYN's can be as bad, the prurient questions, oh really? Though the worst ever was this lesbian who'd gotten caught up in the movement to uncover repressed abuse. She spent the whole exam trying to convince me I'd been screwed as a child. One of the few things I actually escaped. Yeah, good times at the GYN. No wonder most dykes would rather die of whatever than step inside a doctor's office.

I could go on detailing our marginalization by gay men, custody battles with ex-husbands, the violence, the battle for our souls, but let me return to my own amnesia, wondering how I could possibly forget these things which are not small, or insignificant.

There's no mystery, really, just the ongoing issue of invisibility. We don't exist enough as a category to even have our own problems. They all seem individual. Or can be assigned elsewhere. In 2014, we still have no real social presence, no power, no weight, no humanity. Hell, twenty years after the Lesbian Avengers, we dykes can barely bring ourselves to use the word, lesbian.

C'mon. Say it out loud. Lesbian. The word commonly understood to indicate female types who are into other female types and may span a variety of gender expressions from butch to femme to genderqueer, including people like me who after a long day in front of the computer are surprised to find they have arms and legs, much less the usual girly bits.

The world despises us, sneers, and we do little to fight back. Our own worst enemies, we actually attack each other under the false banner of inclusivity. If three or four lesbians decide to gather in our own name, a fifth will surely come along and tell us what lowlife, selfish bitches we are for not addressing bi-issues or trans stuff, working for women, or even global warming. Even we think we have no right to exist. No value as ourselves alone.

Which means lesbian organizing is still as radical and as urgent as ever. I think we should give it another shot. And if anybody dare use the word inclusive, we should turn it into an opportunity to make sure "lesbian" embraces every dyke across all our real and metaphorical geographies. If we don't take care of each other, who will?

The Dyke's Back in France

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Some people come to France to smoke Gitanes and eat croissants. I spent my first few days assembling Ikea products for my girlfriend's Cuban family. The first item was a book case, the second a nightstand to go by my mother-in-law's bed. Our household speaks English, Spanish and French and it sometimes feels like my head might explode. There are so many words at our disposal to describe a single thing, like a hammer, that Ikea miraculously communicates with a simple drawing.

It reminds me that while the differences of culture and language have a real impact on our lives and perceptions, (fromage sounds so much tastier than cheese) they're still pure artifice. Humans have more in common that we admit. At the very least we face a continual struggle with the physical world, and how to contain it. Even the poor have their sacks and carts. I have this wooden Ikea nightstand with a capacious drawer that needs a coat of varnish. We all have bodies holding their own moving, failing parts.

My mother-in-law is ninety-one now. A year ago, when she couldn't live alone in Queens anymore, we helped her move to her son's place in France. She just got out of the hospital after falling and cracking a vertebrae. She already had reduced mobility and the stoner's brain that comes with age and a bunch of mini-strokes.

All our time is spent in vigilance, making sure she has help standing up and sitting down. She's already forgotten why she was in the hospital, and doesn't understand why we freak out when she tries to go it alone. It's hard for her to shower in a bathtub that requires a lot of gizmos to enter and leave. And taking a walk is a big deal.

I'm deteriorating myself, can't think about anything but the next load of laundry. What to make for dinner. I've read that mothers of small children often feel this way, the circle of their lives reduced, their personalities eroded by confinement to the endless physical world and a tiny vocabulary of "Do this. Do that." "Oh my god. No! Stop!" At least their charges are small and easier to transport. A small tumble won't kill them. And little kids learn new tricks every day just like tiny circus dogs. You look at them and see a future. You have hope.

Faustina though, is gradually forgetting her own self, and relinquishing interests along with a lifetime of skills. She doesn't even pick fights any more, or hardly ever. And submits with indifference to what would have been an indignity six months ago.

We all know what's coming, if not this week, maybe in a few months. Or a year or two. It makes me anxious and gloomy. I think black thoughts. We just buried her other son eighteen months ago after seeing him through several rounds of chemo. Why bother with anything? Life continues but we don't. Screw the next generation. It won't last long, anyway. Eighty or ninety years max, with a few exceptions at either end.

Faustina's dying in slo-mo, and I have nothing to rage against. Nature has no complaint department, no web page. Accepts no petitions. Doesn't care about who clicks or doesn't. You can hold all the demos you want, but changes in political policy can't save her life, just improve it. I readjust my priorities. The qualities I try to cultivate now are patience and kindness, renewed as needed with chocolate and wine.

I could learn from this, but probably won't. Soon, my girlfriend and I will leave and resume our normalish lives. I'll forget the nearness of death, how temporary we all are, and the limits of social change. But now that I have that fleeting knowledge, what does it mean? Especially since I've spent a lifetime agitating for liberty and equality.

Right now, I'd like to see less rhetoric, more real vision. I'd especially like our community to devote more effort to remembering what we have in common--without diminishing difference. How about less recrimination and strife? More "Yesses!" Fewer, "No's!"

At the very least we should step outside our daily urgent battles and pretend occasionally that we've already prevailed. That the world has been transformed into a just and equal place, which has nevertheless preserved room for freedom. Imagining the future is here, let us carry it out into the streets and walk down them fearlessly, as ourselves. And let's speak as openly as we can, believing that someone will dare understand.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

The Death of the Queer Community?

By Kelly Cogswell

Every now and then, I howl in grief at the demise of queer activism, the closing of queer bars, and bookstores, the erasure of LGBT history, and the industrialization of our movement. Like others, I wonder if approaching legal equality, and social acceptance spell the end of the LGBT community. Not that I want social change to stop, but there's nothing like adversity to forge bonds and inspire everything from activists to artists to raucous sex.

If we endure, it's because there's more to our community than sexual and gender identity, and a history of survival. In June, as the whole city starts shitting rainbows, we get a hint at how deep the connections go when people who spend the rest of the year comfortably or painfully isolated turn up at Pride parades waving the flag. I attend by habit, and am surprised at the relief, maybe even the joy, at seeing a gazillion other identifiable queers. The mix of races, ethnicities, class.

That's community at its most basic, most mysterious. That feeling of instant recognition, of kinship that strikes me whenever I end up at a gathering of LGBT people whether it's in Louisville, Philly, DC, or Paris, France. It happens even when I glance across a subway car and see another dyke. With just a look, something powerful crosses the distance with mere eye contact, and it's not about sex.

The only question is what shape our community will take in the future, and if we aspire to be alive and vibrant, or only to satisfy a minor longing like we have sometimes for chocolate ice cream.

The community won't stay the same. Our LGBT lives are in flux. And my generation may well be the last in the United States to grapple with extreme, state-sponsored hate. In the Nineties, whole anti-gay movements swept the country, often followed by violence. President Clinton signed national legislation defining marriage as the legal union of a man and woman, burdening the subsequent generation with the fight for same-sex marriage.

On a personal level, coming out often had dire results, and even mixed responses meant we spent years avoiding the guilt-tripping and loathing of our genetic kin. A big part of our queer experience was creating alternative families. Finding new ways to celebrate Thanksgiving, creating our own bittersweet traditions, hosting a kind of Passover that celebrated our survival.

That's less and less in question for young queers. Do we remind them what the fight cost us? If we don't, what are we standing on? Culture and community both need roots to grow.

Nevertheless, Americans are not good with history. We resent its weight, and believe that anybody who speaks of it is ready for the grave. The closer we get to legal equality, the more distance we put between ourselves and those drag queens, rent boys, and big ole dykes that launched our movement. We assert we are just like everybody else, are afraid to acknowledge our shared experience of being pointed east while everybody went west, even if orientation and identity must have some effect on how we perceive things, no matter that this difference is becoming a more neutral experience.

I look often to the black community to get a sense of our future. Parallels end abruptly when it comes to transmitting culture and history. Before Martin Luther King's face started turning up on the TV in February, most black kids still knew there was a Civil Rights movement. Maybe their parents or grandparents were involved in the struggle. Or at least told them stories of their own struggles with racism. Even in total silence they could see things play out.

I didn't even have a name for myself, learned a little about a few famous dykes from my first girlfriends, and went around for years with a postcard of Gertrude Stein. When I got to New York, I heard Dorothy Alison read at Judith's Room. I got my real education as a young activist. If I heard about the Stonewall Riots, it was because I was involved in Lesbian Avengers, and we were planned demos and marches around the time of its anniversary.

Even now, we are still born among straights, the cisgender, and come of age among people who know nothing of furtive encounters, coming out, the baths, the clubs, drag shows, the art scene, our long activist history, and art scene, womyn's music festivals, the phenomenon of lesbian potlucks.

The challenge is to be open to the future, but find some way to transmit the history that is taking us there in a new millennium with few bars or bookstores, clubs, or activists. Without us, all our kids can do is go online where they'll find things at random, and have to build community from scratch every time.

Dirty Words

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Since my book came out, I've had people getting all freaked about how often I use the word, "dyke," which in my vocabulary is almost interchangeably with lesbian. It's not just straight people that get all squeamish. There was this young--gay woman?--that apparently had only heard bigots use "dyke". Though for the record, she could barely utter the word, "lesbian" either, and just talked vaguely about girls.

For a while now, RuPaul's Drag Race has been attacked over language, and recently the show was persuaded to quit using the controversial "she-mail" gag. Critics are also trying to get the word "tranny" banned, condemning anybody that uses it, even somebody who considers themselves trans, or has a clear drag queen identity.

I'd always thought the unspoken rules for reclaiming epithets had to do with who the speaker was. If some young black kid wants to call his pals, "niggahs" who am I to judge? As a white chick, they'd laugh in my face, anyway, the same way they sneer at those members of the African American community who go all ballistic when they hear the word. No, the generation who uses it just ignores them, and goes on about its linguistic business.

Likewise, I can say the word "dyke" as much as I want, with affection or bitter rage, admitting it often sounds wrong in other mouths--even when they don't turn it into a curse. Words bristle with their histories. I spent half an hour at a party once explaining to a gay white guy why it was a bad idea for him to use the n-word. "But they do." "So?" "They even call me that, sometimes. Why shouldn't I use it?" And I gave him my speech.

But lately, I've realized I break my own rules. For instance, I've often used "fag", even though I'm not one. I've even occasionally said, "tranny", though under very restricted circumstances. And not lately. So either words like "dyke" and "fag" don't function quite the same as "nigger", or I'm a big fat hypocrite. Neither is out of the question.

It helps if you know that for a while, anyway, during homo prehistory, a lot of us used those words in New York's LGBT activist community. Yeah, those were the days when "queer" might have described a three-dollar bill, tattooed dyke or bewigged, high-heeled man, not a university program for earnest undergrads carrying around volumes of Judith Butler.

Referring to ourselves as dykes, fags, trannies, queers actually meant something specific. More than reclaiming the bigoted slurs, and embracing our pariah status, we signaled our refusal to settle for the crumbs of mere tolerance, or pained acceptance. And this was a lot more than a radical pose. We were the fags from ACT-UP, dykes from Queer Nation or the Lesbian Avengers, trannies like Sylvia Rivera that would emerge sometimes in groups like STAR (Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries).

And, yes, we sometimes used those words to refer to each other. It was a sign of recognition. An acknowledgement we had something in common, mostly that we couldn't, wouldn't pass in polite society. In fact, we'd burn down the whole rotten structure the first chance we got. So if you were organizing an anti-violence march, you'd make sure to issue a call to all your dyke and fag friends. (Even among us, transfolks were often marginalized). But clearly excluded were all the nice LGBT people who were horrified at the noise we made, our unseemly low-class obnoxious behavior, the arrests we racked up, our refusal to fit in as we fought AIDS, violence, and homophobia.

One difference between then and now, was that our audience knew what the words meant. Like some stories that fail in the re-telling, maybe you had to be there. Code-switching, changing your vocabulary, your style, is a tactic for everybody outside the hegemony of power. Sometimes, we'd use those words in our speeches, and put them on banners. But not always. For public consumption, our spokespeople stuck to Standard White English, talked about lesbians and gay men.

If the language of Drag Race offends some, maybe it's because there's no context, or history. You get the insider words without any of the political edge. "Tranny" seems more like a joke than an act of resistance. What troubles me is how far their critics are willing to go--forbidding even drag queens from using a word that was commonly used in their own community. And given the history of the LGBT movement, this outcry seems less like a battle against transphobia, than one more attempt by the usual enforcers to keep troublesome dykes and fags and trannies in line so that one day soon, straight, white, middle class America will throw open its arms and welcome its dignified (Stepford) children home. Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger.

Against Religion--Again

By Kelly Cogswell

I noticed nobody in the queer community is rushing to chastise Brandeis University for caving in to pressure from religious groups and right-thinking academics, and deciding not to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali the honorary degree they'd promised. Apparently all our high-mindedness about free speech, and academic independence doesn't apply when we're dealing with a Somali-Dutch woman with a decidedly un-PC stance on Islam, once calling the religion "a destructive, nihilistic cult of death."

We're much more comfortable dealing with rage against them inbred hillbilly Southern Baptists or the Catholic Church. We lionize our own queer prophets like David Wojnarowicz who railed against our whole Christian country, especially that "fat cannibal" Cardinal John O'Connor, who sent queers to their deaths with his anti-gay, anti-condom policies. Plenty of us queer folks were thrilled when ACT-UP went into the belly of the beast for a demo at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

If Wojnarowicz were alive today, and up for some honorary award which got rescinded, you can bet we'd be out in force. But apparently you have more street cred dying of AIDS thanks to the Church than getting your genitals chopped up by local Muslims like Hirsi Ali. Or being forced to flee your country and live in hiding after writing the script for a modest film against Islam's treatment of women. Her collaborator, Theo van Gogh, was actually killed for his work on "Submission." And it's still not over. She's still at risk, and every day, she has to read about more murders done in the name of Allah, wars waged, girls just like her killed, raped or burned with acid for daring to uncover their faces, or learning to read.

I don't see a huge difference. Except Wojnarowicz is white like his most visible Christian targets, and Hirsi Ali and her targets are mostly not. And even progressive people of color shy away from condemning Islam for anything at all because so far we refuse to distinguish between justified fury, and a race-based Islamophobia the West indulges in at great length. An exception is when Christian bigots get worked up at the UN and make unsavory alliances with the likes of Iran to keep women and queers in their respective places.

Another factor in our silence is the growing visibility of LGBT people of all faiths who keep telling us how benign their religions are. And while I admire their work, (and bravery), and agree we need to create change on all fronts, I have a problem with most religions, especially Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

Censor what you like, speak of love, the Bible simmers with disdain for women, and erupts occasionally into pure hatred. It encourages people to stone women practically every time we open our mouths, and creates a terminal hatred for two men lying together. Yes, I could describe all those religions born of the Book as a variety of "destructive, nihilistic cults of hetero-male supremacy." I'll even put that into quotes so you can conveniently extract it.

The problem is that even if you could contact the typesetters, and eliminate those verses demanding death for people like me, hate will remain behind in the blank spaces. And there will always be Christians, always Muslims and Jews who will seize on those verses, and like queers of faith, claim that their version of their religion is the true one. And like queer Muslims, Christians, Jews, discounting inconvenient passages inciting either love or hate. Religions can go either way, creating a food bank for the starving, or a fund for antigay campaigns abroad from Russia to Uganda.

You're married to your entire faith, for better or worse. And all the people of the Book are stuck with dead queers. Queer refugees. All the frightened LGBT people trapped where they are. Some of them fighting, most hiding in fear for their lives. Plus all the dead and ravaged women. These days, much of that is due to Christian America, now celebrating Holy Week, and remembering the suffering of the Christ.

I have my own, more modest wounds. A mother that said she wouldn't accept me until I was the girl God wanted me to be. My sense of precariousness every time I step in the street, because some days I'm not up to insults, and I've had so many friends beaten for being queer. Then there's the invisibility. Watching a movie, reading a book, and never seeing myself. Which means queer kids, coming up in their hetero-households are all newborn. Without role models. Without histories. Blank, terrified slates each faith writes on, scribbling self-loathing and hate.

I'm even sick of the big religious conventions in which "progressive" religious folks assert that yes, I am human enough to be saved, to participate in their rites. To speak to God. Thanks ever so much. Yeah, I try to be tolerant around my religious friends, but I've never seen a church I'm not tempted to burn.

Regretting the Gay Future: Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me

By Kelly Cogswell

So I went to the Rainbow Book Fair this weekend, and cooed over all the new presses, the courage of self-publishers, writers of sci-fi, porn, roman noir, and the wan smoldering poets. At the same time, I tried to quell a growing, and uncomfortable, awareness at how much has changed in our community, wondering if it had to do with books themselves.

You don't see them all that much anymore. On the subway it's all tablets all the time, and Angry Candy, Crushed Birds or whatever. Our bookstores have gone, too. And not just the queer ones.

They had these wonderful wooden planks called shelves, and on the shelves little bundles of paper printed with a bunch of words that stayed right where you put them. No swapping out for another story. Just one that you could actually touch and thumb through. Smell the pages. I'm aroused just thinking of it. Though there were obvious limits like the weight. You could only pack a few on vacation. There was also that business with covers. A drawing of a guy in leather and chains might seem discordant next to the worn New Testament a woman mutters over on the F train. Not an issue on your Kindle.

Queer bookstores were practically churches. At Judith's Room, a mostly dyke place I found when I first came to New York, they had a bulletin board where you could advertise for roommates or sell your lesbian couch. And you knew that if somebody saw the ad, you had to at least have a few things in common. Probably cats. And all the books and magazines jostled up against one another. The anti-porn rag, Off Our Backs, was next to On Our Backs, the pro sex thing. Together, they had a little conversation that you miss now if you stick to the narrow recommendations generated only by your previous browsing history at Amazon where you'd never mistakenly grab Octavia for Judith Butler.

It often seems the insides of our books are changing, too, getting more and more segregated, smaller and benign, just like our community seems to be. Except for events like the Rainbow Book Fair when do we ever combustibly rub shoulders? The L meeting the G meeting the T meeting the B, not to mention the ethnic mix in a brutally ghettoized city? If we were split before, what would you call it now when the physically isolating internet is paired with a growing acceptance that no longer forces us into each other's reluctant arms? In the age of mass media, mass terror, multinational globalization, is the LBBT community actually going to succumb to an excess of niche marketing? Oh woe is me.

If I'm not careful, I'll turn this into one giant, whiny lament, the perverse tendency among those of us who came up as activists, and remember the sense of community forged in groups like ACT-UP, QUEER NATION and the Avengers, somehow magically forgetting all the in-fighting and misery, the times we wanted to kill each other, yeah, not to mention what spurred us into the streets to begin with. All the violence, and loss, invisibility, even the actual dead.

We find ourselves regretting the onset of marriage and baby strollers, the politicians who can spell l-e-s-b-i-a-n, even the drug cocktails fighting AIDS (no, not that). We rip down the institutions that we helped build, and denounce them for becoming, well, institutionalized and institutionalizing. And when we are done bemoaning them, let us continue to stare grimly at the young who stare back grimly at us for our failures confronting bigotry in our own community, and leaving them with equality, rather than liberty, and the old refrain, "This Used to Be."

Yes, let us all gnash our teeth, rent our clothes--as fashionably as possible-- and wallow in ashes and despair. Because nothing else good will ever emerge again. Nothing as radical or chic. Funny coming from me, I know, a de facto historian with a memoir mostly about the Lesbian Avengers. But my intentions weren't to recreate the past, just re-graft a missing episode where it belonged and see what grew next on the vine. Maybe nothing. Maybe some extraordinary thing I couldn't begin to imagine.

I swear, in the new gay year, I'm going to try to do that more. Instead of talking about the good old days, I'll begin to imagine the future starting from where we are right now. I'm not even sure what I want. Do you?

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life As a Lesbian Avenger. Demand it in your local library.

Video: Fighting Back Against Anti-Gay Laws in Africa

Anti-gay laws are sweeping across Africa, from Nigeria to Uganda. On Friday, as part of a Global Day of Action, hundreds of LGBT Africans and their allies protested in New York, encouraging Americans to get involved. Here's the video report from me and my filmmaker friend Harriet Hirshorn.

Nigeria Demo from Woman at the Reel on Vimeo.

Missing the Boat on LGBT Rights Abroad

By Kelly Cogswell

Putin's right up there as an evil genius, planning the invasion of Ukraine while all the nations of the world were sitting in his living room blissed out on ice skating and tsarist pomp, and ignoring human rights abuses, not to mention the outright targeting of queers.

Now his former guests are shocked and surprised at how the Russian troops celebrated the closing ceremonies of the Olympic with their own little fete on the Crimean border. I mean, it's one thing to strip LGBT Russians of their human and civil rights, beat the crap out of them, toss them in jail just for whispering the word "gay", and quite another to decide that Ukrainians don't have any rights to their own territory. How dare he?

I hope the International Olympic Committee has a collectively red face, and particularly twisted knickers. They awarded Russia the games in the first place, then papered over the graft and corruption, while officially banning protest, and squelching anybody trying to disrupt one of their events, or even raise a sign about human rights conditions. No doubt they're hoping this doesn't go down in history as another 1936 when the Olympics were held in a Berlin downplaying the German anti-Semitic agenda, and plans to invade most of Europe.

We like to pretend history moves in the direction of progress, more civil rights. More peace, but in fact that little trajectory has more ups and downs than a cardiogram. So who knows really, who'll die before this whole thing is over?

Not that the U.S. was better. Just like in '36, our government responded to complaints about human rights and demands for action with little more than a deep and serious frown, while flirting with a tiny boycott. Not of athletes of course. They sent plenty of athletes to Sochi, but not the VIP's they had slated to sit in the stands. Even at the time, you could practically see Putin rubbing his hands, and muttering, "Suckers!"

The American LGBT response was sadly pathetic, too. We of all people should understand the stakes. Nevertheless, all we did with our gay millions was buy American Apparel rags splattered with rainbows or whatever, and sign a few more online petitions. In an article in Slate, Russian-American journalist, Masha Gessen, an out lesbian, said our LGBT reps at the games partied in Sochi's gay bar abandoning the Russian queers who risked their lives out on the streets to demonstrate, having expected their foreign LGBT peers to support them with their own acts of protests.

Don't worry, oh you anti-homonationalists, she's not asking for queer nationalist troops to arrive on the ground and "liberate" Russian queers. Though if anybody has a couple hundred tanks and a billion dollars, I'm willing to give it a try. No, what she wanted is what most people want when they're trying to demand basic human and civil rights in an authoritarian state that has turned them into convenient scapegoats: a watchful eye from abroad, so that they don't "disappear" when they get snatched up by the cops. They could also use a little money if you have it so they can pay the enormous fines Putin's kangaroo courts use to crush his opponents.

Vigilance and money are even more important in deteriorating places like Uganda, or Nigeria, where there's plenty of danger from the state which has criminalized homosexuality, but far more from the lynch mobs which have been told queers are responsible for everything from the spread of malaria to struggling economies. LGBT people have to organize from the closet, and often have to flee their homes. Queers regularly end up dead. From what I hear, plenty of LGBT folks would rather have plane tickets and visas than computers or activists resources, so they can get the hell out before it's them, beaten or killed in the street.

We have to do something, anything, to support those that remain. Not forgetting that dykes and transpeople have double and triple problems. There's a war against women as well.

We can start by sidelining those few, but loud, "useful idiot" queers echoing the arguments of homophobes when they denounce Western outsiders who try to help, as homonationalists or colonialists. To me, they're the ones with the problem. How dare they counsel inaction? Sit by while LGBT people are imprisoned and killed?

So I'll say it again. It's time for American LGBT people to act. Not only because it's people like us being targeted in Russia, Africa and other points, but because our inaction is not neutral: it emboldens the queer cleansers. And because in Africa, particularly, we're responsible for amplifying local gay-hating: the money funding these bigots across the globe is coming from our own American (fundamentalist) pockets.

The Pussy Riot Olympics A Review of Masha Gessen's "Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot"

By Kelly Cogswell

If activism were an Olympic sport, Pussy Riot would have taken the gold for their 2012 punk prayer performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Central Moscow, asking, "Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out, / Chase Putin out, chase Putin out..." They picked the perfect target, sent a clear message, and got so much global media attention, they deserved a perfect score.

Unfortunately, instead of standing atop a podium, three of the five landed in jail, tried and convicted for "hooliganism inspired by religious hatred". Yekaterina Samutsevich was given a suspended sentence on appeal, but Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina served nearly their complete two year sentences in penal colonies before they were released in the recent amnesty for prisoners-- Putin's gambit for improved P.R. just prior to the Sochi Olympics.

In her new book, "Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot," journalist Masha Gessen transforms their now familiar story into an important exploration of rebellion itself, especially the role played by protest art and direct action when language no longer serves.

Unlike many progressive activists that see history as an arc with a pot of gold at the end of it, Gessen refreshingly asserts that it's a miracle Pussy Riot emerged at all. It's not enough to be an outcast to make protest art, "One also has to possess a sense that one can do something about it, the sense of being entitled to speak and to be heard." And the Russia that gave birth to Pussy Riot was placid with oil money, nearly mute in the face of an electoral system, judiciary, and media overwhelmingly controlled by Putin.

Trying to see what made them different, Gessen looked to their biographies and found the three jailed Pussy Riot members had quirky families, and more than one winter of discontent. They were curious, rebellious, avid readers, and despite the antifeminist culture, mostly encouraged by their families to speak their minds.

Nadya aspired to be a journalist before she was admitted at sixteen to the philosophy program at Moscow State University. She was disappointed by the other students which she quickly dismissed as mediocre and stupid, all except for Petya, a student a few years ahead who would become her boyfriend and collaborator.

Disgusted by Russian politics and society, the two didn't write radical treatises, or create new schools of philosophical thought, but joined another couple to form the art group, Voina (War),which took over public spaces like the subway to hold performances.

Gessen finds this unexpected move into art and direct action nearly inevitable, considering the legacy of the Soviet era that still echoes through everything from the surreal justice system to the glut of ex-KGB officers in lofty places from Putin to his pal, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the case of the two students, it was the Soviet impact on public rhetoric that made any other engagement impossible.

"Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left."

Gessen is onto something here, though it's not just Russians who have turned to performance art and direct action when language fails--for whatever reason. Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers held actions in public spaces. ACT-UP even disrupted a service at St. Patrick's Cathedral. And as Gessen herself noted, art and activism were blended in the Riot Grrrls. They, in part, inspired Pussy Riot when Nadya and other female members of Voina turned more and more towards feminism and LGBT issues.

The marginal always struggle to have a voice, find a mode of expression. It's often a radical act for us just to plant our bodies in public. As a writer, I suspect even Gessen had to consider how best to communicate the Pussy Riot story to an Anglo-American audience not only unfamiliar with Russian life and Russian politics, but often dismissive and sneering when confronted by performance art or direct action.

Her effective solution was to rely on anecdotes and details, make the world familiar. The prologue, for instance, begins with the simple phrase, "Gera wanted to pee." And Gessen describes what it's like for a four-year old girl, Gera, her dad, and granddad to go visit her now infamous mother, Nadya, in a Russian work camp. We see the squabbling, and irritation. The car of German journalists behind them. Then the penal colony with its endless rules for prisoners, and the rare visitors.

Details work the same way bodies do. When Gessen starts to write about Maria and Nadya's life in the penal colonies, details make their experience concrete, and keep the two from blurring into a generalized image of human misery. With "Words Will Break Cement" Gessen furthers the trend of what I'll call post-Soviet realists, like Yoani Sanchez in Cuba, who employ a similar strategy of understated description. Not only bearing witness to unforgivable conditions, the book illuminates the tools of resistance and social change.

Activism in Sepia: Losing Community

By Kelly Cogswell

It's Black History Month again, and time to celebrate the sepia-toned accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Watch TV, you'll learn it didn't really take work, just a lot of outrage at inequality, and the overwhelming desire for liberty, justice, and a long, pain-free life.

God, how this storytelling enrages me, how we cast a few chosen figures as heroes, and obscure any useful knowledge about the way movements actually work. In fact, the whole project seems over and done with, the monster of racism and white supremacy magically slain. So much for all the black men in prison. The inequalities of income. Voter disenfranchisement. The young black men killed in Florida when others Stand Their Ground.

Not that The Gays are any better when it comes to popularizing our history. We celebrate Pride around the anniversary of Stonewall, as if a few nights of rioting changed the world by themselves. We ignore all the activists before and after, except for Harvey Milk. And when the Supreme Court definitively overturns all the anti-gay state marriage laws, we'll toss a bunch of confetti in the air, and put the lawyers on pedestals. Hip, hip, fuckin' hurray.

Though when the worst of the courtroom battles are over, we'll discover, like African Americans, that we're left with our own intransigent problems: LGBT youth kicked out of their homes, the baby bigots in schools who torture young queer kids into suicide, or when they get older, beat the crap out of us on the street. Gay marriage won't protect anybody from AIDS. Transpeople will still find it tough getting jobs much less keeping them. And lesbians better look het, and knuckle-under, not just to homophobia but that social delight, misogyny.

Only a renewed movement can save us. Which you can forget as long as our only images of that are a few speeches and marches. A demo with horrible cops, and virtuous protesters. Not the late night conversations. The pamphlets, and phone trees, and endless, sometimes acrimonious meetings.

The real history of change is a story of tedium, and dashed hopes, too much coffee, quick affairs, so many failures that they eventually take on a critical mass that destroys the thickest walls, and somehow takes root-- if there's a thriving community, under siege, yes, but self-aware, with a language and identity that grows stronger day by day.

That was the situation, anyway, after Stonewall. And before that, when four young black freshmen from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University put on their Sunday best, and dared demand a snack at the Woolworth's lunch counter. They couldn't have done it alone in a time and place when Southern segregation was still enforced by violence, terror, and death.

Those four kids were able to fight back because they could feel the thousand and millions behind them. They were part of something bigger than themselves as students in a black college where black student groups thrived, sometimes partnering with the NAACP, sometimes emerging from black churches, sometimes in spite of them. It helped, also, that they knew of other black students that had been successful with similar protests in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. Activism begets more activism when there's a community primed and ready for it.

The irony is how quickly we minorities can become victims of our own success. Growing acceptance opens doors, and especially in the case of queers, isolates us from each other. Born among straights, young queers have begun to stay there, declaring, "I'm the same as you." The traditional community in New York is all but defunct. First dispersed from our ghettoes by gentrification, and newly satisfied with the merely gay-friendly, we've decided virtual contact is enough. Along with maybe the quick fuck.

One by one we've lost the bars, and bookstores, art projects and theaters. Activist organizations have been replaced by LGBT, Incorporated, the mammoth lobbying groups that lead the charge only in the most conservative, and acceptable, of fights. Only a few places have survived, like Women's One World Theater (WOW), and the LGBT Community Center.

As we consolidate our politics, the identity and language that evolved in the streets and bars have also been lost. Queers come out even before high school, but don't seem to have any sense of the collective, no matter how many Facebook groups they join, or selfies they "heart" on Tumblr. A girl likes girls. So what? She can still barely say the word, "lesbian," and is probably appalled by "dyke." Either because it sounds too butch, or because she hasn't heard it being reclaimed by a lesbian mouth.

And when they're turned away, insulted, bashed, all they can do is tweet about it. Post on Facebook and hope it goes viral. File a lawsuit. Shrug. What are the stakes after all? When we're only getting picked off one by one?

Homophobes United, But Queers…?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'm thrilled to know Vladimir Putin has gay acquaintances, but it doesn't do much to change my opinion of his bigoted, tyrannical regime. In fact, I doubt anybody buys the nice friendly gloss he's trying to give Russia before the place is inundated with Olympic ice skaters and skiers, and vodka-guzzling, tee-shirt buying crowds.

In Nigeria, meanwhile, antigay hate is right out in the open. Hundreds of gay men have been reportedly arrested since President Goodluck Jonathan signed the "Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act" last week, stripping LGBT Nigerians of most of their last remaining rights. Banning not just marriage, the legislation prohibits homoshows of affection, membership in gay groups or associations, and basically any language or activity that even hints LGBT people are human.

Ugandan queers are also under fresh attack. While President Yoweri Museveni declined to sign the similar "Anti-Homosexuality Bill" likewise punishing lesbian and gay people with life in prison, and jailing advocates, he gave antigay bigots encouragement, declaring us "sick" and "abnormal."

This is just the tip of the antigay iceberg in Africa, where in about thirty sub-Saharan countries, we face a range of punishments from prison to death, though the populations don't always wait for the state to pass sentence, and punish us themselves, with a beating here, a murder there. They often make our lives so horrible and hopeless, we do the fatal job ourselves.

My own hemisphere is barely better. At a holiday party I talked to a gay Jamaican couple who had recently fled to New York with just the clothes on their backs because somebody had found out that they'd gotten gay married on a trip to the U.S. And when that little detail spread, credible death threats followed.

In the United States, too, every advance is followed by a backlash on the streets and in the courts. Our homegrown homophobes draw their poison from the same well as everybody else, defending their antigay laws and violence with the identical blather about upholding religious and cultural values. No surprise then, that the money of fundamentalist American Christians fuels antigay campaigns worldwide, from Senegal to France.

The disturbing thing is that, while antigay bigots are united in their hatred for us, sharing strategies and money, we queers aren't allowed to do the same. We fight each enemy as if it were different, not one horrible beast with a gazillion different heads.

We identify different strains of homophobia, make allowances. Sometimes shy away from a full assault on bigots because it is said that they inherited their homophobia like their anti-sodomy laws from colonial rulers. (As if, unlike humans elsewhere in the world, no African person had ever felt hatred of the other. As if African politicians would never have thought of using queers as scapegoats to distract populations weary of dictatorships and failed economies. And as if they didn't make bad colonial laws worse.)

Too many of us even nod sagely at stories like one in the Global Post announcing, "Western-style activism may be hurting gay rights in Africa." This essentially blames African queers for their own oppression, and characterizes their most basic efforts to resist as somehow foreign. Because apparently those stupid African homos would never have thought to aspire to full human status, let alone hold a demo, write an op-ed or file a lawsuit, without Western influence or aid. Worse, it implies justice would have progressed merrily along its arc if only they had sat quietly with their hands in their laps.

It's weird, really, this rewriting of history, this assigning of strategies to one country or one movement, when all militants share them. Martin Luther King looked towards Ghandi. And Ghandi himself was apparently influenced by the American Thoreau, who got some of his own ideas from Indian philosophy and religion. American queers digested it all, inspired also by the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The LGBT movement in Latin America looked to student revolution in '68 France as well as New York's Stonewall. Nobody owns a thing.

This insistence on putting LGBT activists in another category because of their geography or race, is just another kind of racism. Ironically, it may have its roots in American multiculturalism. In an attempt to grapple with race, and make clear the value of difference, we came to suspect any assertion of sameness, especially between the East and West, the global North and global South, as a racist, colonial effort to erase. And it really is sometimes.

But now, if we're going to support LGBT activists risking their lives all over the world, it's urgent to remember we're the same species after all. Near cousin to the earthworm, and closer to the ape than the angel. And in the matter of homophobia, we're dealing with human nature at its best and worse. The universal hatred of difference. And the equally global desire to resist in every form.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (March 2014).

Through One Dyke's Eyes: Blue is the Warmest Color

By Kelly Cogswell

If I hadn't already admired Abdellatif Kechiche's films, I might not have gone to see Blue Is the Warmest Color. Based on the graphic novel in French by Julie Maroh, the film is the coming of age and coming out story of Adele, a 17 year old working class girl who falls in love with Emma, a middle class art student in the northern French town of Lille.

While the movie got great reviews in the "straight" press worldwide, in part for casting an interesting eye on class in France, far too many lesbians have ripped it to shreds, furious that the main characters were once again played by straight actresses, and more importantly, that the sex scenes were ridiculous. Demeaning. The whole thing was.

They blamed the male director and his unfortunately male gaze. Which got me wondering just what makes a lesbian's gaze different. My own dyke eyes linger sometimes on breasts and ass, and pretty much every other female surface from the curve of a waist to an elbow's crook. The biggest difference is that if I sometimes objectify females for my own lesbian pleasure, it is usually fleeting and hidden, not on screen at length.

My circumspection is all about homophobia, not high-mindedness. Show dyke desire in public, you still risk the attention of men that may well hit on you either metaphorically or literally. I even felt self-conscious in the movie house. The only identifiable dyke watching a lesbian-themed movie among a crowd of straights, I felt larger than usual. At risk. Like I was being seen, and judged. Which is partly why I think the dyke response was so harsh.

With so few lesbian images out there, they all represent you by proxy. You don't want the filmmaker to choose an angle that makes Adele's ass (yours) look too big, even if you believe the filmmaker meant to put you in her shoes, and see her the way she saw herself, sloppy and kind of ugly, surprised to be declared the prettiest girl in the class.

You hate Adele's dopey expression. The ridiculous sex that you want to be hot (we do more than just hold hands) but also discrete, dignified even, if sex is ever that. And when Adele's upset, you don't want to see snot on her face when she cries. At least not over and over.

There was plenty to make a dyke cringe, imagining herself up on the screen. But if you don't sit through that, you'll miss the moment the filmmaker switches over to a different gaze, portraying Adele through the eyes of her artist girlfriend, Emma, using all the light, all the angles that make Adele remarkably beautiful.

Seeing only what the filmmaker wanted me to, I hadn't suspected she could be transformed like that into far more than just meat, more than an object of pleasure or disgust. Which meant Kechiche transcended the limits of what critics usually mean by the "male" gaze. A gaze that dykes and transmen are sadly as capable of as any guy. "I'd like to get me a piece of that." "Ugh, did you see that dog?"

Lengthy sex scenes aside (the perfect time for a bathroom break in the three hour film), I thought Kechiche brought an incredible generosity and sympathy to the film. That's the only way he could have built the scenes I liked best. Including the most excruciating images I've ever seen of schoolyard homophobia. (Beware! Spoilers ahead.)

The scene began with the leader of her usual girl clique interrogating Adele about the blue-haired girl she'd been seen with, "She looked like a real dyke, a pussy-eater," before demanding to know if Adele herself was a dyke. Adele vehemently, painfully denied it, eventually launching herself at the other girl. Kechiche caught it all. How girls police each other. The complicity of those in the crowd. The terror of having to face that long walk across the courtyard with all those hostile eyes.

Just before that was a dyke bar scene, when the filmmaker caught what it might be like to venture into one for the first time and confront all that bubbling sexual energy. The openly lesbian stares, interested, hungry, appraising. Then there was the teasing and jostling among dyke friends. It was almost hyperrealistically true.

Ditto for the scene when Emma threw Adele out for cheating on her--one of the most anguished, best-acted, break-up scenes ever caught on film. Also remarkable was Adele's heart-breaking attempt at reconciliation, and Emma's response. The acting of Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adele) and Léa Seydoux (Emma) was amazing. There were plenty of quieter moments, also, that were gentle, humorous, and loving. Which means that even flawed, Blue Is the Warmest Color gives lesbians a rare humanity and depth, pretty much the only mainstream film I've seen that pulled it off.

New Times, New Tactics to Fight AIDS

I've got no new solutions to fighting HIV/AIDS, but I know we have to look for them. Some of the things we'd assumed are just plain wrong. Like successful treatment programs would lead to a lessening of stigma. Well, I've heard from a friend in Burundi that the reverse is true. Before, HIV+ people had to become activists to save their own lives and often found courage they never knew they had. They spoke out and changed people's attitudes. Now, with the new drugs, the newly diagnosed cower and run, and the drugs help them to. There are fewer activists, not more. And more silence.

In the U.S., too, activists are flailing even as infection rates are increasing, along with blasé attitudes. Many queers actually seem hostile to the idea that young LGBT people should be warned about HIV/AIDS. That last possibility hadn't crossed my mind until last week when I checked out the responses to Michael Specter's grief-stricken article in the New Yorker, about "What Young Gay Men Don't Know About AIDS."

In the threads, a significant amount of commenters, many of them gay, condemned Specter for his "scare tactics," his "labeling" and "stigmatizing." According to them, HIV/AIDS is a manageable disease just like diabetes, and old fogies like Specter should get over themselves. Things have changed. It was homophobic to keep pointing out that queers were getting the disease when straights were, too. A virus knows no gender, no sexual identity. It was racist to mention young black men were hardest hit.

While there are still plenty of people getting HIV because they don't know how to prevent it, and I know there is a trend of young queers of color who don't protect themselves because they figure "what the hell, I'm doomed, I'll get it anyway," these commenters seem to belong to a different category.

With and without HIV, gay and straight, they seem somehow... smug. They are part of the growing, and not just rightwing, trend of people who hate activists on principal. They are profoundly lazy, both physically and morally, invested in declaring HIV/AIDS "manageable" because that means they won't have to worry about condoms. Or responsibility. If they get HIV and pass it on, it's no big deal, they haven't ruined anybody's life or caused anybody's death. These commenters even blame gay AIDS activists for the disease's stigma, not homophobic bigots.

I can't imagine where to start with them. I suppose we could try to dispel the notion that any disease can be benign. I go especially nuts when they compare HIV/AIDS to diabetes, a real disaster of a "manageable" disease that runs in my family. You have to watch what you eat all the time, exercise, take your meds, test your blood sugar. Struggle to forgo sweet tea, potato chips. All the good stuff. Get it wrong, you're screwed.

It messes up your circulation and any little cut or bruise can be dangerous. A friend of mine lost half his foot. My aunt lost both her legs before she lost her life. You should have seen her in the hospital-- half the bed empty where her legs used to be, all the tubes snaking in and out. People go blind. Stroke out. It's the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, this manageable disease.

HIV is no better. Drugs don't work for everybody. Sometimes they have side effects. You have to remember to take them, and have insurance to pay for them. Even if your viral load drops, you have to get tested all the time because it might go up again. You worry with every cold, every flu. It's not like in the ads where one handsome guy takes a single pill and gets happily on with his life. It is so much better and easier to just wear a fucking condom. If you forget once or twice and get stuck with HIV. Well, cross that bridge when you come to it. But avoid that bridge. Burn it. Run away as fast as you can go. Flee for your life.

Also, you should know, HIV may cause more than just AIDS with its pneumonias and sarcomas. Up until last year I had a brother-in-law, Carlos. Decent guy. HIV+. He hadn't needed meds for years. One day he went to his doctor for a bad back and the doctor found these lumps. It turned out to be a kind of lymphoma that wasn't exactly AIDS-related but tends to appear in people with HIV, though very rarely in the general population. There was a bunch of chemo. It went away. Came back.

But you don't want to hear about that. HIV is manageable. No big deal. No weird cancers popping up. Nothing percolating, delaying. You have no role in its spread.

Donna Minkowitz, Growing Up Golem

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I saw her in the flesh for the first time at the gay museum downtown, this short, blonde, confident woman reading parts of her memoir aloud, and sucking down impressive amounts of water as if she still had muddy roots, and an urgent need to stay hydrated or crumble to dust.

A golem, of course, is one of those fabulous creatures that-- when rabbis still had the knowledge--could be constructed with wet clay and a magic word or two. They are usually meant to defend Jewish communities, but in general are compelled to do whatever their maker tells them to. And in the case of the golem Donna Minkowitz, shaped by her artist-philosopher mother, her commands were mostly to adore and entertain her mom.

Though Minkowitz claims she's human now, having been transformed by humanizing pain, there remain traces of her mother's orders not to make her audience sad. So she keeps the tone light despite the controlling, incestuously creepy mother. The dad who uses her as a punching bag. The messed up shrink. The malignant girlfriends. And the excruciating disease (injury? syndrome ?) that damaged her arms so much she can't use them to write, barely pick up the water. The book could have been a real tearjerker. Along the lines of, well, practically every memoir being published today.

If not for Growing Up Golem, I'd never have suspected her clay doll origins. Minkowitz always seemed human enough to me, powerful even, as a journalist who used to write for the Village Voice (when that rag was still good). She had a column called the Body Politics, and did some reporting, too. When I was a Lesbian Avenger, we'd plan an action, and somebody would say, "I'll call Donna and maybe she'll write something." And she often did, if I remember correctly.

A few years ago when I was starting my own memoir about my Avenger days, I dug up some articles and read what she had to say in the early Nineties about the extreme right-wing and the Christian Right. She seemed oddly thoughtful about them, interviewed the anti-environmentalist, anti-feminists, anti-queers with a real desire to understand. Later, she'd go undercover with the Promise Keepers as a teenage boy, putting her soft round face, and butchness to good use. She wrote with an authority I wished I had, but was apparently as much of a façade as her smiling goy boy face.

That's one of the threads of the book that she only deals with sideways. Her powerlessness, or sense of it, in the face of evidence to the contrary. As a golem, she downplays her possible role as defender against the hateful, violent hordes, and focuses instead on her maker's power to turn her own and off at will and to control her. It didn't matter that she could use her role at the Voice to get queers out on the street after a dyke-bashing: she still felt like an imposter. Real was her capitulation to the bizarre tyranny of her mother, and all the relationships she didn't really choose but falls into. We see how long it takes for her to admit desire. To stand up for herself.

You'd feel sorry for her, but she keeps you, Dear Reader, at broken arm's lengths, with her jokes and metaphors. Maybe she takes it even a little too far, so you can see what a burden it is, wanting to get the story out, but not bog down in the usual clichés of rotten childhoods, and physical hell that appear on the bestseller lists where memoirists are forced to craft every story into a tale of survival against the odds, a transformative experience juxtaposing hell with redemption, so you can end with the glorious choirs of heaven, not the off-key bewildering, mediocre soundtrack of most of our lives.

Reading, I wondered if that tactic was a dyke thing. Either we want to wallow in our suffering, or mask it, pretend like it doesn't matter. We often display it indirectly, so our survival can be admired, but you don't have to admit the shame of desiring sympathy and love, a tactic I employ myself. Is it a female thing, or a class thing? To fear our own power so much we don't even recognize it, and when we do, experience it as so incredibly fleeting we must have imagined the whole thing. I couldn't help wondering what would have happened if instead of embracing humanity, Minkowitz had stuck to her golem roots, found a way to break free of human commands, like golems occasionally do, then run completely and utterly amuck.

Our Veterans--Daring to Serve

It's the crack of dawn on Veteran's Day, and Denny Meyer is probably pinning on his medals and getting ready to come to Manhattan for the parade. He's a short dumpling of a guy with a mustache and a bad back. Words burst out of his mouth when he talks. It seems a stretch to imagine he's gay. Though he is, serving as a queer activist longer than a military guy. And no discharge in sight.

When I interviewed him last week, I got the idea he was lonely, despite all the work he does for groups like American Veterans for Equal Rights. It's not surprising though, an aging gay vet in a community that's uncomfortable with anybody who'd join a military that for decades shot us in the back, tossed us overboard, or beat us to death with baseball bats. Which was really just an extension of a mission to kill the enemy. Which was how we were defined until two years ago when Don't Ask, Don't Tell was dumped.

Even straight folks aren't particularly comfortable with vets. In these years of a volunteer military, we're all less likely to know even hets in uniform, and assume it's either for gun nuts or the poor and working class desperate for college money. Education is why my cousins joined up years ago. Then their kids did it because it became the family business.

When I asked, Denny said he enlisted for patriotism, in a moment of youthful idealism. His family were refugees from World War Two and the Holocaust. Raised in New York, he was taught that there was "nothing more precious than American freedom. Because the family was saved. By this country. Otherwise they would have been killed by the Nazis."

This experience translated into his mother's own version of silence equals death, a mandate to get involved, right wrongs, fight injustice, or face the consequences. Already in 1960, when he was thirteen, he participated in his first civil rights march, and got a bloody head for his trouble. And when he saw people burning flags in 1968, he left college to join up. "It's time to pay my country back for my family's freedom."

I don't think we understand that feeling anymore. A gratitude for freedom and democracy. A desire to protect or serve it. What remains of it anyway. The Left especially cringes in the face of those words, freedom and democracy, claiming they've been dirtied up by the likes of George W. Bush, and the saintly Reagan with his dirty little wars. When the Left speaks disparagingly of American privilege they usually mean our great wealth, the power of money and might at our fingertips, and ignore the things that are slipping away under the waving flags of Homeland Security or the Patriot Act.

For a while, the journalist and gay lawyer Glenn Greenwald seemed like an outlier, a freak, going on and on about civil liberties well after Obama got elected and most Democrats fell into silence about that prison camp Guantanamo, black ops, disappearances, the muzzling of free speech, profiling, domestic spying, endless wiretaps. If Snowden hadn't started feeding him info, Greenwald would still be just one more crazy activist screaming in the wilderness. Undone by his anger and refusal to mince words. What's wrong is wrong.

The Left, especially the queer one, doesn't connect the dots. That civil liberties and democratic rights are the foundation of our progress. If you want to change laws or attitudes, you need a brave few to come out and exercise their rights to speak and assemble. Shout their heads off. Spend a good chunk of their lives demonstrating. Like Maxine Wolfe. Margarita Lopez. All those queers in ACT UP, Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers, and plenty that came before.

We have fewer activists, fewer activist groups, a case of mass amnesia. The huge groups of the LGBT movement have gobbled up the small like any multinational. Gay rights is a profession, not a calling. Few people serve anymore. For a while I followed a bunch of blogs of young lesbians on Tumblr, and they seemed as isolated as any gay vet who at least has a purpose. I say it's time to institute a queer boot camp. Give them meaning, a community. Tell them there's plenty worth fighting for. And it's all at risk. History doesn't move in some inevitably upwards arc. Gains are fragile. And come at great cost.

They'd have to be crazy to join up, though. The LGBT community outside the big conglomerates isn't for the faint of heart. We prefer our heroes dead, so we can edit their speeches, put words in their mouths. The living we despise. We harangue our politicians for their compromise and carefulness, and reject our veteran, big-mouthed activists for their shrill, uncomfortable cries.

Audio short: One Gay Vet-- A History of Service