State of the Queer Nation 2018: Choosing Hope

By Kelly Cogswell

I've found them--out and proud young lesbians on Twitter. They're influenced by queer theory, denounce transphobia, but embrace the word lesbian, too, no matter what their pronouns are. One posts a series of lesbian laments along the lines of, "Over a week into Pride month and I still don't have a girlfriend. Why?" Another jokes about going full lesbian in the morning as she walks down the street remembering a kiss.

One day they squee over Janelle Monáe, Hayley Kiyoko and Kehlani-- and another day comment on how few lines the women of color get in Ocean's 8. For them the world goes on. Trump is banished to the margins. Not in an act of ignorance, but a kind of life-preserving resistance. We have to have hope after all. Why bother fighting for a future if there's no laughter or no love in it?

What a shock, what a delight to read their posts after the apocalyptical notes on Facebook from middle-aged queers like me, who occasionally polka-dot their desperation with videos of heroic Minnesotan raccoons. Not that the young ones aren't occasionally frightened. Not that they don't take to the streets sometimes. But for them, the daily news has a different resonance and weight. Or at least they hide their terror better.

After all, they haven't done this before. They woke with the 2014 murder by cop of Michael Brown, but were barely in diapers or not yet thought of in 1998 when the African American man James Byrd was drug behind a pick-up truck--by his neck. Or when the young, gay, and white Matthew Shepard was beaten and left bound to a fence. And retrovirals hit the scene transforming AIDS which up until then left gay men skeletons and women, well, women don't get AIDS. They just die from it.

Perhaps they were in pre-school when the Supremes awarded George W. Bush the election, the planes struck the Twin Towers, and anybody at all could predict the surge of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment, the erosion of civil rights and the destruction of American democracy.

By the time they hit high school, many of them found Gay and Straight Alliances or had vicarious support with GLEE. Obama was president. Marriage was quickly on the table, though not buying a home.

Their mix of whimsy, anger, lust is a great relief. After glancing at the headlines, catching the news, I'm slumped in the corner muttering, "We're fucked, we're fucked, we're fucked." We Americans slap immigrant children in cages, adults in prison camps, yank naturalized citizens from their homes.

Since the Supremes declared open season on queers "No Gays" signs have sprouted on businesses. I'm afraid HIV will be a death sentence again as Obamacare is slashed by a wannabe dictator president embracing killers and grifters, while our imperfect Democracy, which has allowed whatever progress we've made, is laying drunk in a ditch.

The sun should topple from the sky in shame. The earth should swallow us all. But never does. I often feel exhausted and alone. Especially when the cynical left gleefully lectures us, America never was great. We've always destroyed families--except nice white ones. We've always been the absolute worst. Nothing really has changed.

They deny the groundbreaking catastrophe of Trump. And ignore as well the sea change that gave birth to these young dykes on Twitter, most of them young people of color.

They deny history as much as the bible-embracing a-historians of Fake News and Trump. By forgetting--despite this attempted counter revolution--how much things have changed since the 1990s when Homophobia, Racism, Misogyny, all the Hates, really, hunted openly together like packs of conjoined wolves and activists acting up and fighting back and avenging would be careful to leave demos together, or at least in pairs because everybody had a friend that woke up in the hospital or not at all.

I remember hiding my sexual identity, rarely seeing black people on TV except as pimps and hookers. I remember funerals, lots of funerals, and straight people on TV laughing as they said we should all die of AIDS. I remember how the first red ribbons were a big deal. And how girls in my generation were the first to regularly be told we could be doctors. We could be lawyers.

Yes, things changed. Not enough. Not for everyone. But things change. There's no stasis. Neither is history some convenient lyrical arc bending towards justice. Or towards hell. It's more like a mechanical bull, an electrocardiogram bouncing up and down, sometimes in slow motion, sometimes with a violent lurch.

I don't know what tomorrow holds. But I do know that we have changed things-- for the better --before. Why not believe what history tells us is possible? Why not embrace hope? It’s the only thing that will save us.

Season of Grief

By Kelly Cogswell

My uncle died a couple days ago in Kentucky. I can't digest it. Maybe because I'd only seen him once since I left almost three decades ago. At first I'd make occasional pilgrimages back to visit my gay-hating mother, but there was too much suffering involved, it messed me up. So I finally quit going altogether, and lost them all-- cousins, uncles, sisters. Even now, with small reconciliations, it's too late to recover what's gone, or grieve what I already mourned.

I won't go back for the funeral. Who needs to revisit old wounds? Who needs a memorial, installation, TV program, anyway, to remind us of the dead? I know what I'm talking about. Saw both towers fall with my own eyes. Today, September 12th, 2016, it's enough to look at the sky which is the same bright blue that the passengers saw fifteen years ago before they crashed, the same gorgeous blue in which we first saw the two enormous plumes of smoke that would loom over the city for months. Or are burning still.

I've never been to the 9/11 memorial, though I've seen the selfies of friends who've grinned in front of it for their camera phones. I guess that´s better than the fake solemnity you sometimes get. One of New York's football teams went and during the pre-game show we got to see a video of this beefy white guy trying to bow his head but having trouble because his neck was so stiff with muscle. Probably we don't deserve better. The streets were still covered with ash when vendors began to sell tee-shirts, "I survived the Twin Towers" or whatever.

There's not much dignity in human history. It keeps repeating itself, sometimes in tragedy but mostly farce. We didn't even get a gloomy sky as backdrop. Worse, it was an election Tuesday in New York with the usual cast of ridiculous Democrats running for mayor. The big, red-faced, meaty-fingered Hevesi. The flip-flopper Ferrer. And whatshisname Green. I want to say Al, but that's just wishful thinking. Ana and I woke up to shouting from our neighbors behind us, and for some reason turned on the tube. Then Ana went downtown with her journalist's notebook, while I went up on the roof, saw the world changed, then went back downstairs and, after Ana returned safe, but covered in dust, predicted the rise of a stupid new American nationalism, cycles of revenge and retribution, foreign wars, racism, Islamophobia.

Nothing that came after was a surprise, not even the Islamophilia in which "progressives" absolve themselves of their own privilege and bigotry by letting that religion off the hook for misogyny and queer-bashing we'd never let slide in Catholics or Southern Baptists.

Still, I had nightmares. For weeks afterwards, local TV showed nothing but the buildings burning then falling, then burning, then falling, and people jumping from the upper stories again and again and again, and every night I'd be fleeing fireballs. When the bombing started in Afghanistan, portions of ravaged bodies would also enter my dreams. I was overcome with fury and grief, mourning the victims here in New York, but also those in Kabul, and then all of us who would be destroyed by the delayed real and metaphorical explosions any idiot could see coming in Bagdad, Aleppo, Orlando, Nice. Moscow.

Remember how Putin was emboldened to become less and less democratic after Bush's unilateral actions in Iraq? Remember that while the world was distracted, the Cuban regime arrested a huge swath of disgruntled bricklayers and independent librarians, many of which are still in jail, or exiled, or conveniently dead?

Our whole response was so stupid, but it's too late now. Even this cult of September 11th is weird because we usually mark the ends of wars, not the beginning, except in local ceremonies. And we're still in the middle of this one as a nation with no end in sight because the "War" Bush declared "On Terror" wasn't against a human enemy, but an abstraction, requiring not just the usual boots on the ground, but an army of watchdogs, an infrastructure of new language and a legacy of fear and loathing that we must continually replenish.

There's something so… made-up … about the whole thing I sometimes think we should be able to unravel it. We've been duped. Before September 11th we Americans didn't even have a Homeland to defend, just a home. Or a country that may or may not have embraced us, but was ours. Sadly, the history we repeat doesn't offer quick solutions. It's only easy to destroy.

Entitled to Bigotry?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In case you haven't heard, there's an Islamic center proposed for a spot a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. The multi-story project would be run by an interfaith board, and include a performance arts center, restaurant, pool, and yes, also, a mosque.

At first, the local opposition tried to block construction by arguing the site should have landmark status. And while I know we New Yorker's love our Burlington Coat Factories, it's no surprise the zoning board wasn't persuaded to save the 132-year-old factory of no architectural or cultural value.

When that challenge failed, opponents decided to get at the heart of the matter and use naked anti-Muslim sentiment to halt it in its tracks. And after a couple months of rabble-rousing, half the United States is suddenly up in arms against the Center, waving around the memories of the sacred families of the sacred victims like so many flags.

If you believe them, the building is nothing less than an affront to America itself, a hotbed of radical Islamist ferment designed to torture the grieving families of victims that mostly don't even live in New York, and certainly don't have to pass the construction mess on the way to work. It's enough that they'll know a Muslim might be nearby.

It's not racism or bigotry, just an effort really to spare the feelings of victims. As Abraham H. Foxman, the Director of the Anti-Defamation League put it, "Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational." Referring to September 11 family members, he said, "Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted."

It's an interesting idea, giving victims of trauma entitlement to bigotry. Perhaps we could introduce it into law, and award every dyke, fag, trannie, female, or person of color in the country a get out of jail free card because lord knows plenty of us have had our personal "holocausts" (if you insist on banalizing the word). In New York City alone, besides the several hundred acts of anti-queer violence every year, there's the perpetual and insidious prejudice.

Perhaps we should establish a hetero-free zone around the LGBT Center. Imagine the pain of suffering of watching two heterosexuals make out on the street corner when doing the same with your same-sex lover landed you and your boyfriend in the emergency room. We should demand all property buyers nearby be examined for traces of straightness. Longtime hetero residents should be expected to pack their bags or convert.

Sounds ridiculous, huh? You can really only indulge in bigoted exceptionalism if you're already a member of the cultural and political majority.

In any case, Tribeca, the area around the World Trade Center, has never been, and never should be, a "Muslim-free zone" as some bigots are demanding in both open and veiled statements.

One of the project's proponents, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has already been in the 'hood for years, running a small local mosque. Which means he belongs there as much as anybody, more than most. And the likes of Georgia politician Newt Gingrich and Alaska meddler Sarah Palin should keep their pie holes shut. Along with the New York Times, that reports the increasingly negative polls as if they should decide a local matter.

I'm not insensible to the meaning of the place. I live on First Street in Manhattan. I watched the Towers fall from my own rooftop, and for weeks and months afterwards breathed in the smoke and ash. I'm still not done grieving. But I'm a New Yorker. There have been disasters before. Horrible losses. Radical changes in landscape. Plagues and fires.

Like in 1911, when 146 mostly female garment factory workers were burned alive or died after jumping from the roof when their sweatshop factory caught fire. They couldn't escape because the doors had been locked by the owners to keep them inside. Until 9/11, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was the worst workplace disaster in New York City.

I can't imagine the horror, but some good came from it. People fought for factory safety standards. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union took off. What's the legacy of 9/11? Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

If we really want to respect the dead, it's time we quit using them as a platform for bigotry, or to score political points. We should ban presidents and politicians from tracking their muddy footprints through the blood. Let Washington stick to Memorials. Here in New York, we should look to the future, and try to build something, anything, that leads to understanding, prevents more deaths, refuses a movement of hate.