Election 2016: Misogyny and the Audacity of Plans

By Kelly Cogswell

I haven't written anything about the election yet. Hillary Clinton is running again and there's so much misogyny involved I can't stand it. And the sheer idiocy. My God, whole crowds willing to swallow any crazy thing their candidates promises whether it's Trump vowing he'll throw out immigrants or end gay marriage. Or Bernie guaranteeing a revolution featuring single-payer healthcare and free college, and pie, and the sky.

So for the record, Hillary yes. Bernie no. And post-primaries, any Democrat will do.

Don't bother attacking. It's clear my opinion doesn't matter. I'm a woman after all. Judged for my voice: shrieky. My haircut: bad, needs washing. My record: smudged. I mean, I've been writing these columns for such a long time, anybody can find dozens (out of several hundred) that prove I've been a delusional fool. Nope, I'm not at all clean, but at least you know what you're getting.

Like with Hillary. Who is competent, careful, and has a reasonably progressive (though smudgy) track record of legislation and policy. When push comes to shove most of her stances are similar to Bernie's. Though when it comes to women, she's better.

She hasn't just cast votes, she has initiated a lot of programs and legislation on the national and international level. She has worked for us, horse-traded even, and gotten laws passed and policy implemented. She's an insider, and I'm okay with that in a world where women are second-class citizens at best, in the worst raped, enslaved, mutilated, hidden, and murdered, considered less than human.

So she doesn't make the same rousing speeches. I'm thrilled that she's a policy wonk, an egghead, an annoying Hermione Granger before she bonded with Harry Potter and Ron over that enormous troll. She's the Obama we got after the election. Thoughtful, capable and tough. And willing to go bi-partisan even if the Republicans aren't.

Campaign 2008, Obama gave great speeches sparkling with the audacity of hope. He encouraged us with his deep mellifluous voice, Yes, we can do anything, even end partisan rancor. Behold! The dawn of the most perfect union is near. Difficulties, like queers, were swept under the rug, as he effectively mobilized the enthusiastic Occupy Wall Street sympathizers that were often so fucking radical that they didn't need plans. Plans imply politics. Politics imply compromise, the establishment, and that nut-cracking bitch Hillary Clinton.

I thought he was going to be a total, bigoted, ineffectual asshole. I was wrong. Once he got elected, he governed as a realistic idealist, getting the job done in spite of the vicious Republican pummeling. He pulled the country back from economic meltdown, compromising his purity in ways that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren no doubt disapprove. He named Clinton Secretary of State and she helped him repair the international relations destroyed by Bush. He evolved on same-sex marriage.

And because you can't reform health care by signing, or refusing to sign, a few documents, Obama willingly dirtied his hands with a complicated project of law. Not just mobilizing enormous teams of lawyers to draft a bill that would stand up to a constitutional challenge. But persuading members of his own stodgy Democratic party to accept it, along with a few of the opposition.

All of that meant a great deal of politicking, and compromise, the insider stuff Bernie says he despises. And if his track record after 26 years in the House and Senate can be relied on, I think we can believe him. Only Senators Ted Cruz and Tim Scott have scores as awful as his on the bipartisan index (Georgetown University). And without political skills, Bernie's the same as every white leftie guy ever, waving his nice clean hands a lot and shouting about income inequality. And getting nothing at all done, because in fact, class doesn't trump everything, particularly race and gender. And blab doesn't get you very far.

Nope, I'd rather vote for an imperfect candidate with a wider vision and a pragmatic backbone. Someone who can work with others, and is unafraid to evolve. And who will have an unimaginable impact worldwide as the first female president of the enormously powerful United States of America.

Time for you to inappropriately invoke Thatcher; declare Bern a better feminist than Hillary, (try googling Dolezal, Rachel); and list Clinton's failures, which always include "flip-flopping" on same-sex marriage, even though you voted for Obama, proud to put the first black president in the White House, no matter that he was then against marriage equality, and even campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush. And no matter that even working the adoring crowds, Obama was no Malcolm X.

Nobody expected him to be. It's enough that with Hillary we'll get a good, maybe a great president. And she'll be more than a symbol of what women everywhere can do, but an actual advocate.

I was in France the day after the 2008 elections and I remember looking around the subway at the people of color, and remarking how most of them were grasping newspapers with Obama's smiling, victorious face. And how they were smiling too, and standing a little straighter. It was extraordinary.

Hillary's victory will mean as much worldwide to women. Maybe more.

Hope for Queers Now in Cuba? Maybe

By Kelly Cogswell

President Obama made history this week by dumping a policy towards Cuba that hasn't helped a bit to usher in democracy or protect human rights. In fact, the fifty year effort of both Democrats and Republicans to isolate the island, and twist its little Caribbean arm, has only allowed Cuba's dictatorship to entrench itself. The country remains the only one in Latin America where pretty much every form of dissent is repressed.

Open your mouth, you may be smashed in the face by the cops, intimidated by angry mobs bussed in for the occasion, and other public acts of shaming and "repudiation" both in the street or if you get big enough, on the state-run media. Write a dissenting blog, you can forget holding a job or, until the regime's recent charm offensive, being allowed to leave the island prison. Once gone, you may be forbidden to return. The real gadflies are serially detained without any charges for several hours or several days, while the cops harass their families. Worse is long-term imprisonment.

So a little change can't hurt. A little opening. The only question is will this actually make things better for the average Cuban? Especially queers?

If you believe The New York Time's editorial board, Cuba was already on the verge of a hurricane of rainbow flags and unicorns. The only problem with this excellent news, delivered in Sunday's "Cuba's Gay Rights Evolution" is that it's largely bullshit, based on a distortion both of queer Cuban history as well as the current reality.

They didn't express any kind of skepticism at how Cuba's most visible LGBT rights advocate, The National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), is led by sexologist Mariela Castro, a straight white woman with a convenient last name and an outdated approach. They practically wet themselves heralding her bravery as "the first lawmaker in Cuban [post-revolutionary] history to cast a dissenting vote" in parliament. C'mon, she's the dictator's fucking daughter. Nobody's gonna drag her to jail, and they probably gave her the okay to do it. Can anybody say pink-washing?

And while Ms. Castro deserves props for getting gay issues out there, and winning free gender reassignment surgery and hormones for transpeople, the writers should have at least mentioned what happens to her "visible and empowered community" when they try to do things for themselves. Case in point is black lesbian and blogger Leannes Imbert Acosta, founder and director of the independent association, Observatorio Cubano de Derechos LGBT.(Cuban LGBT Rights Watch).

In 2012, when she asked the glorious CENESEX for help gathering information on the forced labor and re-education camps of the Sixties that incarcerated tens of thousands of queers, the governmental institution was rather less than responsive. And when Imbert Acosta went ahead with plans for her own exhibit on the camps, state security turned up at her door, confiscated her materials, and dragged her off to the cop station. Not for the first time.

The New York Times itself is complicit in erasing LGBT history in Cuba. Probably the most misleading part of the article was how they downplayed how viciously the regime has repressed LGBT people, writing that sexual minorities were "ostracized" and that "some" people were sent to "labor camps." "Ostracized" doesn't begin to describe the systematic antigay campaign of the government that not only passed punitive laws declaring us enemies of the state, but whipped up mobs as large and violent as any we've seen lately in Uganda.

And it wasn't just "some" gay men, but more like 25,000 that were incarcerated in brutal re-education and forced labor camps along with thousands more Jehovah's Witnesses and other undesirables. The gay men that could, fled. Suicide was not uncommon. Lesbians, often ignored in this history, were more often sent directly to jail or mental hospitals where the Cuban state attempted to electro-shock away their degenerate counterrevolutionary tendencies.

Neither was this vast wave of antigay hate over in the Seventies, as The Times implied. Even after the camps were closed following an international outcry in 1968, new antigay laws were passed, and plenty of LGBT people, especially dykes, continued to get booted from jobs, and end up in jails and mental hospitals during the Seventies and Eighties. People with HIV, especially queers, were forcibly interred in state run sanitaria until 1993. Even now, public decency and assembly laws are used to harass LGBT Cubans and people with HIV that can be convicted of the ever popular "pre-criminal social dangerousness." "Publicly manifested homosexuality" actually remains illegal.

Still, we should be hopeful at the new Cuba opening. At its worse, only the elite, white, military-connected kleptocracy--that already controls the economy-- will benefit. At its best, ordinary LGBT folks may get help from another two years of an Obama State Department which is actively supporting LGBT people worldwide.

What Cuban queers actually need to build an authentic LGBT movement, though, is what all Cubans need, the rights to free speech and assembly, the only real building blocks of change. Let's hope that doesn't get lost in the rush to pry open one more new market.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014) which includes large sections on LGBT Cuba.

2009: Queer Year in Review

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"

It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.

Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.

We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.

Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.

In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.

In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."

That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.

The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.

Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.

Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.

Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.

In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.

He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.

And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.

Celebrating Stonewall When the State of the Gay Union Stinks

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's that time of year when queers hold barbecues and parades, and lift their Cosmopolitans to the dykes and drag queens that helped start the modern LGBT movement. Our institutions honor an activist or two, usually a jovial sort that won't offend any of their funders, and point to Barney Frank, Ellen, Rachel Maddow, queers marrying in Massachusetts then declare, Yes, we've come a long way.

Right, I say. Take a whiff. The state of the gay union stinks.

Young queers are still swamped by hate, targeted by schoolmates, Sunday Schools, censorious families, and when they aren't the direct objects of violence, often do violence to themselves. Transgendered women are slaughtered in the streets. Dykes are beaten by cops and no one comes to our aid.

All last year, our "friends" in the Democratic Party ran a presidential campaign erasing queers whenever possible. Obama courted the evangelical vote campaigning with the likes of ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin preaching hell for queers, and bigot Kirbyjon Caldwell, who had also supported Bush.

The homophobia and hate sewn by these creatures is reaped in violence and ignorance and HIV. Queers of color are getting infected in huge numbers at home, along with plenty of their straight pals. Abroad, where our global HIV/AIDS programs haven't recovered from Bush, we endorse homophobes like Rick Warren, Obama's inaugural prayer giver, that have established entire empires of anti-gay hate encouraging people to pray away their disease, and keep "clean" by promoting abstinence, burning condoms, and viciously targeting gay men.

We've won same-sex marriage in a few states, though in most similar rights are increasingly banned and, in the anti-gay process, throw queers back into a repeat of Reagan's culture war. The biggest difference in today's anti-gay campaigns is how they increasingly target minority communities, putting LGBT people of color at greater risk, and expose the failure of LGBT programs that have written off immigrant and minority communities as irrelevant, irredeemable, or perhaps, unprofitable.

Most recently, the administration of our "fierce defender" Barack Obama submitted a brief to a federal court arguing that gay marriage would certainly lead to child abuse and incest. They even wrote, "[T]he public policy doctrine, which has long recognized the sovereign authority of the States to decline to give effect to the laws of a sister State at variance with their own legitimate public policy."

What? Could they possibly be saying it was a good thing that states once had the right not to acknowledge interracial marriages?

Talk about depravity. What are queers waiting for? Some celestial stick to reach down and stir us to life? A colossal mouth to appear outside our windows yelling, "WAKE THE FUCK UP! WHERE'S YOUR PRIDE? OR YOUR SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION?"

We should riot again. We should send packages of cow patties to the White House saying, "Return to sender." We should think of Lawrence King or Duanna Johnson and block traffic at court houses until we see justice done. And we should imagine what it is we really want.

Freedom is more powerful than health insurance, marriage, or even a vote. A rigged election may have gotten protesters out on the street in Iran, but it was the attempt to squash even their freedom to protest that kept them there.

When did our dreams of liberation give way to sterile demands for equality? How did equality deteriorate into piecemeal campaigns for legal rights like same-sex marriage which we largely support by wishful thinking, and donations to the "Human" Rights Campaign fund?

What stops us queers from leaving our houses and protesting? Is it an American thing? An election was stolen in 2000 and all we did was send a few angry emails. This president campaigned with a mouth full of narcotic promises. He was elected with lies and is trying to set legal precedents that will keep us in the gutter where his deeds have consistently declared we belong.

How long will we excuse his scorn as political tactics or mere mistakes? How long will we vote for Democrats that time after time declare the best policy is to wait? How long will we finance ineffective, racist lobbyists completely out of touch with the communities they are supposed to represent?

Long-time activist Cleve Jones is calling for a March on Washington in October. Why not? We need a new beginning. Even now, we should focus on the spirit of Stonewall, not all the nebulous accomplishments since. It's time to celebrate change itself. That terrifying and miraculous thing that arrives sometimes after years of labor, sometimes like a tsunami.

Spreading the Love in Health Care Reform

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

You want health care reform, you better just pack your bags and move to France, or maybe Sweden. You'll have time to learn the language, turn old and grey, and maybe kick the bucket before any real reform takes roots in the States, despite the love-fest at Obama's recent forum on healthcare.

Did you see that saccharine nonsense? Democrat Charles Rangel announcing how well he works with counterpart Republican Dave Camp on the Ways and Means Committee, while Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa seconded Obama, "If you aren't ambitious on a major problem like this ... it will never get done." Another Republican, Representative Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri, added, "All of us have to be willing to give a little."

Great. Put a reform bill on the agenda. Let's call for a vote. Get those 87 million uninsured Americans plans they can afford, new doctors trained, hospitals repaired, drug companies reined in, so we'll no longer be ashamed to show our faces to our Canadian neighbors that used to spend their days smirking as we snuck over the border to buy our prescription meds and bargain basement cigs.

Let's research not just cancer and stem cells, but AIDS, remember that? And cardiac disease in women since that's mostly what's killing us. Let's reinvigorate nursing, raise pay, and teach both doctors and nurses to respect all their patients, including poor people, and women, and queers.

Unfortunately, that jovial, harmonious tone at the forum was less due to a bipartisan commitment to improving healthcare than a joint determination to take credit for reform while actually watering it down as much as hospital coffee.

The first problem is the political sleazeballs that have accepted $1 billion in lobbying love from the insurance industry and big Pharma just in the last two years. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky who told Obama he was "among those interested in seeing us address entitlement reform" pulled in $425,000 since '05. That straight-shooting reformer McCain swallowed $546,000. The head of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, a Democrat of Montana, ate up $413,000.

Barack Obama himself raised more than $2 million from the insurance and pharmaceutical sectors during his record-breaking presidential campaign. The donations were all from individuals, and not PACs, so I guess they won't have much influence. Obama's certainly acted "independent" of LGBT people who dropped a boatload of dough on his campaign and got absolutely nothing in return. But queers are known for being suckers. Big Pharma, not so much.

Besides corruption there's the related problem of process. Obama declared that, "If we want to translate these goals into policies, we need a process that is as transparent and inclusive as possible." Couldn't agree more.

Too bad Obama's committee for "Healthcare Reform Dialogue" is pretty much restricted to heavy-hitters in the healthcare and Pharma industry. Worse, the meetings are held in secret, so we don't know exactly why two labor unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union apparently walked out of the last one. Perhaps they want their money back, too, after spending so much to get Obama in the White House.

There's window-dressing, of course. Characters like 24-year old firefighter, Travis Ulerick, are allowed to hand Obama a summary of all those thousands of community meetings held to discuss the health care crisis so he can use the moment to claim to be responsive to "the concerned citizens, like the folks on this stage."

Snarking aside, the biggest problem is that even if our glorious leaders had clean hands, and were acting in good faith, nobody knows how to untangle the mess.

American health and care is in as bad a shape as the economy, and like with the economy, experts have equally few ideas on how to set right something intertwined with finance, with culture, with infrastructure, education, hell, even the air we breathe and food we eat. And if they suddenly saw a burning bush showing them essential changes to make, they wouldn't dare implement the half.

The healthcare industry can't be attacked right now, not just because they lobby like mad, but because they're the only industry hiring as unemployment goes through the American roof. And who's going to take on Pharma when they have almost the only stocks holding most of their value in the diving market?

All Obama's tepid ideas that the Republican fringe nonetheless calls "radical" or "socialist" don't amount to much more than tinker and patch while insurance premiums rise and quality of care falls. There's little enough to fight over, little to dispute, though we no doubt will, mobilizing millions before both sides claim victory offering a few more people access to healthcare that won't be either cheap or good.

Gays Losing Ground to God

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In Pakistan, the government dumped democracy in the violent Shat region, agreeing Monday to institute homo-cidal Sharia law in exchange for the Taliban there laying down their arms, or at least not killing the local cops.

In the U.S., meanwhile, Obama's pushing ahead with his faith-based funding dumping money in social service programs run by religious groups that (to less deadly effect) also encourage the hatred of queers, the subjugation of women, as well as the extraordinary misconception that science is nothing more than a whacky belief system on the same plain of reality as flying carpets and time machines. Nevertheless, some dead guy on a cross coming back to life is the "gospel" truth and if we don't accept him as our personal savior we're more or less banned from running for public office, not to mention on a one-way ticket to hell.

And Gallup celebrated the birth of Darwin last week by asking citizens if they believed in evolution, and by the very shape of their question giving credence to the "No" thirty-nine percent of my glorious confreres answered with. Perhaps next time around they'll ask if we believe that the earth is round. I'll stick to the obvious and give it a definite "No."

The numbers of nonbelievers (in evolution) will only climb higher with Obama's paid-to-pray programs which contrary to campaign promises, offer no firewall between church and state, no safeguard to prevent uppity women or queers from being discriminated against either within the organization or as people served.

Neither is there an effective mechanism in these faith-based programs to prevent the faithful from proselytizing and disseminating such debatable claptrap as the seven day creation of the 4.5 billion year old earth, the sinfulness of homosexual sex, or the resurrection. I guess the government just has to take their discretion on faith.

Not that it matters. Even if they keep their holy traps shut, which they don't, the religious have plenty of opportunity for product placement, crosses on the wall, dinner in church basements with jingles (hymns) banging out from the speakers in less than subliminal advertising.

Apparently, the business of American democracy is not providing equality under the law, but bolstering higher laws and a random series of differentiated moralities that leaves a hell of a lot of us out in the cold.

Here's to four (eight?) more years of Rick Warren and the likes of the delightful Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson. Yeah, here's to good old Dick who plied his holocaust-denying patter at the St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Minnesota before he did it on Swedish television announcing, "There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies."

According to Williamson, Jews actually made up the gas chambers so they could play the victim and blackmail those gullible goys with perpetual underdog status.

Are these really the people we want to hand our tax dollars to? Before you get all mushy about how he's an isolated incident, let me tell you that like Rick Warren he's just the icicle at the tip of the burg.

Pope John Paul II purged whatever leftist tendencies lingered in the Church after Vatican Two. Now Williamson's no exception, but the rule, a guiding member of the actively proselytizing Catholic Society St. Pius X, which is quite overt in its efforts to erase Vatican Two, and return to the anti-ecumenical days in which people of other religions were not in any way God's children, Jews were still Christ-killers, women had an entirely subservient role, and queers weren't even targeted because they didn't exist.

The Catholic Society St. Pius X was founded by conservative French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a priest that battled change and explicitly rejected the Vatican declaration, Nostra Aetate, which absolved Jews of killing Christ and gave them the status, the "older brothers" of Christians.

While Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 along with the four Bishops he consecrated -- including Williamson-- the St. Pius X Society has continued to consolidate power. In France, they occupy several churches, including Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet, openly celebrating mass and conducting services in the center of Paris. Regis de Cacquerey, the district superior is received like any other religious leader, by the minister of the interior, Michele Alliot-Marie.

I dropped by Saint Nicolas the other day. It's as vibrant as any church I've seen in Paris. A bulletin board full of activities. Networks of jobs and housing. Young men came in and out in jeans, while plenty of old ladies knelt in prayer, their grey heads covered.

I'm here to say beware. Pope Benedict's decision to reinstate ontological fossils is less the bureaucratic mistake asserted by the Vatican, than a troubling sign of their growing influence. In all religions, all sects, it seems the future belongs to fundamentalists. Tear down the sea wall between church and state, we all drown.

Imagining Equality for Women and Queers

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I thought I could imagine equality, but not really. As an activist, I just push forward in the dark with no idea towards what. I got a glimpse Sunday when I tuned in to one of France's CNN-like channels just in time to catch a Latin American map and a voice talking about which country gave which rights to queers. Colombia's High Court had just ruled that same-sex couples had to be given the same rights as heterosexual ones in common-law relationships.

After answering a couple questions from the anchor about Argentina and Brazil, the commentator said, "But that's yesterday's news. Today, Iceland just got a lesbian prime minister. Granted, they're a small country of just 300,000 people. But still. The first openly gay head of state in the world."

I was pleasantly shocked. A whole gay segment on TV. And a gay commentator to boot smiling away as they flashed the photo of Johanna Sigurdardottir, the most popular politician in Iceland, and described how she was supposed to save the place from financial ruin. I punched my girlfriend in the arm. "They're doing a gay segment of the news. Are you listening? And the commentator's a fag."

Even after the anchor moved on to something else, I kept muttering, "A gay segment. Imagine that. A gay segment." Including background and context as naturally as they would for a report on developments in Malaysia or Taiwan. Or for that matter the auto industry.

Usually, if LGBT people make the news, it's as protestors, or victims. We're always the fringe, always the beggars on the outside looking in, no matter how "mainstream" our spokespeople look. In the U.S., especially, news producers (like organizers of inaugurations) then give air time to bigots so they can indulge in a false sense of balanced coverage and remind us just how much we're hated.

Which was why it was so particularly moving to hear the matter-of-fact description of Johanna Sigurdardottir's rise from union activist at IcelandAir to regular politics. No apologia for her queerness. No pats on the bottom for the white-haired dame.

It made me happy for a while, then depressed. God, I'm tired of homophobia. I'm tired of misogyny. I'm tired of promises of change then more of the same, even in Obama's stimulus package. When it isn't giving bankers free dough, it's all about rewards for dickholders. Even though women make up almost half of the workforce, Obama's projects primarily create jobs in extremely male fields like "green" industries, technology, construction, and mining where the few women that manage to survive have to fight for equal pay.

The programs to bring women into traditionally male jobs have had little success though their rate might improve now that it's easier for female employees to sue (thanks to Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.)

Trying to justify the disparity, the January release from the Obama administration used old data indicating women suffered less from unemployment during downturns. Unfortunately, August numbers showed women hitting unemployment as often men.

In fact, the National Women's Law Center crunched the numbers and found adult women's unemployment rising almost three times as fast as men's. "While the unemployment rate for men rose from 5.3 percent to 5.6 percent between July and August (a 5.7% increase), the unemployment rate for women jumped from 4.6 percent to 5.3 percent – a 15 percent increase in one month." Subcategories of black women and women supporting families were much harder hit.

Adding insult to injury to poor women, Obama and the Democrats dumped a measure from the stimulus package that would have allowed Medicaid coverage of family planning services, which includes birth control, but also a lot of basic gynecological services, like pap smears.

A New York Times editorial reports that the measure would have provided coverage to 2.3 million women by 2014 and saved $200 million over five years. Also, "the Medicaid family planning provision would reduce the number of abortions by helping an estimated half-million women avoid unplanned pregnancy, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute."

The editorial blamed the GOP for their obstructionist politics and lack of commitment to women's rights and health. I blame Obama and the Democrats who already signaled in the presidential campaign that women's rights were a commitment of convenience. If it is convenient, they're committed. If not, not.

For instance, when all Obama had to do was sign a paper to revoke the gag rule forbidding U.S. funding of international programs that included family planning services -- he did. But when the similar Medicaid provision in the stimulus plan required a vote, traded favors and a backbone, women's interests were summarily dumped.

I'd likewise be surprised to see even a partial repeal of DOMA before an Angeln Saddleback pig takes to the sky.

Obama Inauguration: Symbol of Change?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The wave of Obamaniacs that made their way across America to shiver at DC's National Mall knew Barack Obama was not just the forty-fourth president of the United States, but a symbol of historic achievement, of possibility, and yes, of change.

Just a couple of generations out from Rosa Parks and segregated lunch counters, ten years from the lynching of James Byrd, and three and a half years since the mostly black population of New Orleans was left for dead, it meant something that "Hail to the Chief" was finally played for a black man.

Yeah, I get that, even though I went to a high school where the battles of school busing had been fought before I got there, and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were already required reading in college. David Dinkins was mayor of New York in my first years there. Then Cory Booker took Newark. Denzel took two Oscars. Colin Powell and Condi Rice took the reins as Secretaries of State, and outshone the President.

History exists side by side with the future, and the symbolism of Obama's accomplishment resonates even in Paris where his election led to impromptu celebrations on the metro by people of color, and young black job applicants suddenly vowed to begin including their pictures with their resumes, hoping that the color of their face wouldn't land them in the recycling bin anymore. "Not when there's a black American president."

That's reason enough to celebrate. And in the spirit of the local countdown to "Obama Day," I tried to embrace at least the symbolism of his inauguration. Out with the old, in with the new, the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream and the reassertion of America's promises of liberty and justice.

But watching Obama bow his head at the bigot Rick Warren's invocation, I found myself shivering with fury, though according to the good ole boy Warren the proper way to overcome adversity is not via projectile vomiting and rage, but with "a quiet and humble response ... disagreement without being disagreeable."

Warren, mentioning something about "civility," too, in a tasteful jab at the queers uncivilized enough to demonstrate his participation, sounded a lot like George W. Bush in his own inaugural address in 2001. In case you've forgotten, the worst president in history began his term pledging (threatening) to conduct himself with "civility, courage, compassion and character," defining it as the "choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos." And apparently of silence and censorship over opposition.

We know where civility leads. Or should. After eight years of Bush. But for every queer outraged at Warren's presence at Obama's inauguration, it seems there's been another queer online trying to enforce silence. "Save your anger for something important. Warren's just a symbol."

Like Obama's just another president?

If we recognize the power of a symbol of a black man busting open the White House, rending history itself, how can we ignore what it means to put front and center the antigay, anti-choice, ultra-conservative Rick Warren? He's likewise riding a crest of cultural and historical momentum -- even if it's going the other direction.

Despite Obama's speech extolling the virtues of democracy, equality and justice, giving Warren an enormous platform at the inauguration sent a powerful message that in the name of inclusion, bigots have a place in the White House as long as they promise to smile. Bullies have justification to harass queer kids to death at schools. Preachers can excoriate gays and nurture HIV through ignorance, that men can dominate women. For the sake of Obama's symbol of that inclusiveness, queers face exclusion, homelessness, poverty, violence because we, apparently, are not deserving of rights. Who are not human, really, if you listen closely to pastor Rick when the national U.S. media isn't eavesdropping.

Frankly, queers are screwed when the symbol of Change gets caught embracing the symbol of Hate, even if Obama eventually allows us to openly serve in the military, and even dumps DOMA. Because if the black civil rights movement's taught us anything, it's that culture doesn't move in tandem with legislation. Laws go only a short way to solving the burning problems that the symbols of hate pour gasoline on. A black man may be president, but school boards will still find ways to segregate. There's a voting act, but votes have a way of going astray. Free black men are locked in jail in horrible numbers. And what about Latinos, and Asians, and Native Americans? We haven't come anywhere near to dealing with the complexity of race in America.

Obama's choice of the ultra-conservative (and long-winded) Rick Warren to bless his presidency is a reminder that queers have an even longer way to go. Civility and empty rhetoric won't take us there.

Obama's First Gift to Africa: Rick Warren

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

If you want to foster AIDS, and kill queers in Africa, Rick Warren's the man for you. While Warren's characterization of queers (and Jews and Muslims) as godless perverts fuel bigotry in the U.S., the real effects of inviting Warren to preside over Obama's inauguration will be felt in sub-Saharan Africa.

He has missions all over the place, and he's rolling in dough and influence built on the best P.R. campaign I've ever seen. He hobnobs with Bono and Melissa Etheridge while liberal journalists regurgitate his press releases, crowning him a moderate evangelical and touting his AIDS campaign which is little but a thinly veiled mask for his proselytizing work. The last thing he needs is more power.

In case you actually care, his campaign for AIDS prevention, in a region decimated by the disease, sneers at condoms, needle exchange, and sex education. He claims all those efforts merely slow the spread of AIDS when his plan can stop it flat. The secret -- abstinence before marriage, religious conversion, and not included on his website, that perennial favorite, queer-baiting.

One of his closest allies in Uganda in his so-called fight against AIDS is Martin Ssempa, an evangelical preacher who blames queers for the disease, makes a show of burning condoms, and this spring organized a rally with the theme, "A Call for Action on Behalf of the Victims of Homosexuality" where he spent most of his time railing against queers.

As far as treatment goes, Ssempsa offers faith healing in his Pentecostal services if only victims believe enough, and make a nice donation. In general, the bulk of his anti-AIDS activism seems to be legal battles to ensure that homosexuality remains illegal and the media continues to portray queers as sexual predators.

He's getting it done. Homosexuality is still illegal, and queers face increasing harassment and violence from the government to their next door neighbors. Newspapers sometimes print lists of people suspected of being lesbian or gay, opening them up to job loss, and physical violence. Several activists are arrested every year.

Though a Ugandan judge recently ruled in favor of LGBT activists protesting an illegal raid in 2005, it's more likely you'll get government officials like Deputy Attorney General Fred Ruhinde and Minister of Ethics and Integrity Nsaba Butoro who in 2007 actually joined a coalition of conservative Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Bahai congregations, "the Interfaith Coalition Against Homosexuality" calling for the arrest, deportation, and even murder of gays and lesbians.

And where's the sanctified Rick Warren in this delightful hate fest? Where's the man The New Yorker's Hendrik Herzberg complacently characterized as "much, much less of a jerk than, say, Pat Robertson or James Dobson" and whose inclusion in the inauguration he actually applauded as "another of Obama's brilliant chess moves"?

Well... when the Ugandan Anglican Archbishop Henry Orombi announced his aim to "purify" the Anglican Church by driving out gay and lesbian Christians and their supporters, Warren got right on board. When they announced their boycott of the global Anglican conference in March last year, he told the press, "The Church of England is wrong and I support the Church of Uganda on the boycott." Warren further declared that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. "We shall not tolerate this aspect at all."

Terrible for queers, Warren and his pals are almost worse for AIDS. Uganda's HIV infection rate, which had dipped from its height in 1986, has been climbing back up in recent times. The problem? Advocates like Warren and Ssempa dumping sex education and condom promotion in favor of abstinence-only programs which study after study show actually increase risky sex.

Homophobia and HIV/AIDS go together in Nigeria, too, where thanks to people like Rick Warren, UNAIDS estimate that only 18 percent of women and 21 percent of men between the ages of 15 and 24 correctly identify ways to prevent HIV. After South Africa, Nigeria has the second largest number of people living with HIV in Africa.

The most vulnerable of all are gay men. Warren has supported figures like the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, who in 2006 and 2007 campaigned ferociously for anti-gay legislation which stipulated five years' imprisonment to anyone who had anything to do with a same-sex marriage ceremony, participated in gay organizing, or frankly have anything to do with anything gay of any kind "directly or indirectly in public and in private."

And if hate-mongering is a habit, in 2005, Akinola was implicated in the massacre of more than 650 Muslims by a Christian mob tied to the Christian Association of Nigeria. He was president of the group at the time. For all this, Akinola earned praise from Warren in an April 2006 Time Magazine article lionizing him as a defender of the faith, a "Nelson Mandela", and "a model for Christians around the world."

Where's a lightning bolt when you need one?

Outraged? Better Late Than Never

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The only surprising thing about Obama's choice of a homophobic bigot to bless his inauguration, or for that matter, the Albany debacle with the Gang of Three, is the outrage that greeted them.

Where were the official queer protests when Obama campaigned with ex-gay Donnie McClurkin? Or when BO exalted the advice of Reverend Kirbyjon Caldwell who runs programs to free lesbians and gay men from their homosexuality? Or when Obama promised all those billions to expand Bush's faith-based programs?

Where was gay fury when the Obama campaign kicked off that "Faith, Family, Values Tour" which included former Indiana Congressman and pro-life Democrat Tim Roemer, along with Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec who fought Proposition 8 on the grounds that gay marriage is not only morally repugnant, but will probably bring down the species?

Where was our disgust in August, the first time Obama tried to court Rick Warren who supplemented homophobic rantings at home with declarations to African audiences that homosexuality was not a natural way of life and thus not a human right? Why didn't we blast Warren's AIDS programs that support Uganda evangelists who fight AIDS by advocating jail or death for queers?

And where were the boycotts when Obama refused to speak to the LGBT press, or gay advocates? Where were the denunciations when Obama asserted, on religious grounds, that marriage was between a man and a woman and the ban of same-sex marriage had nothing to do with the earlier miscegenation ban on interracial ones?

With all that silence, even from gay groups like HRC, why should we be surprised at getting screwed? Who's going to respect us if even gay groups don't advocate for LGBT rights, ostensibly putting Democratic interests above their own?

Of course Albany Democrats thought they could sacrifice gay rights in a power-sharing deal and not hear a peep. Sit quietly with your hands in your lap, the bigots will not only shove you to the back of the bus, but knock you right off the moving vehicle.

The only surprising thing about that episode was how ham-handed they were. Me, I'm gonna stab somebody in the back, I'd chose a nice thin blade of Spanish steel, so the victim doesn't wake up before it slices out their heart. New York Dems, though, tried to take off our head with a blunt and rusted saw while they were snickering loudly. I suspect their retreat is less a sign of respect, than a quick effort to silently regroup while they wait for their mail-order stiletto.

After eight years of Bush and two of Obamamania, queer activists have not only lost our momentum, but our self-respect. Why else stay silent while Obama's campaign gave an enormous platform to bigots that would like to exterminate us? Why else give millions of dollars without exacting something concrete in return?

And if we don't pressure Obama now, if we don't pressure all the Democrats for every minute of the next four years, we'll get what we deserve. A whole lot of nothing. Or worse. A regression to depths of hatred and bigotry we'd almost forgotten.

As a community, we need to banish compromise to the realm of politicians. Supporting hardline activists and advocates is the only one way to advance queer rights. Somebody has to be intransigent. Somebody has to refuse to see the big picture that always reduces queer rights to a piece of shit everybody else scrapes off their shoes.

We also have to hold everybody to the same standards. Bill Clinton, after all, was roundly criticized for courting evangelicals with prayer meetings with Billy Graham (who was frankly moderate compared to Warren), for signing into law the Defense of Marriage Act, and triangulating us into the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy of the armed forces.

Why did we criticize Clinton for that when, like Obama, he was just trying to fit us all under that great big tent of America? And of course get re-elected. Wasn't he better than the first Bush, better than Reagan after all? Like Obama, he had queer friends, and except for the whole gay marriage thing, really did have the best intentions towards us.

Repulsed? I hope so. Then as now, the only way to win progress is to make a god-awful noise, to make nuisances and asses of ourselves, to hold our ground.

Money in exchange for promises is never enough, especially when the lynchpin of the Democratic strategy is to become more Republican than the Republicans and to court conservatives almost purely on the basis of religious fundamentalism, instead of other issues, like that elusive goal of fiscal responsibility, not to mention clean government.

Our consolation prize: a gay marching band. Let them take their cue from the black athletes at the Mexico City Olympics, and impose on the crowd what they did. A raised fist. Silence. Shame.

All Hail, McCain

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

McCain did what eighteen million women couldn't. By choosing Sarah Palin to run as VP, he got Obama and the Democrats to retrieve women from the shit heap where we'd been dumped. At least for the moment.

Already her Democratic handlers had forced the accomplished Mrs. Obama to put on her metaphorical apron and play mom and wife at the DNC. Hillary even interrupted the roll-call detailing the success of her own historic candidacy to ask that Obama be named the nominee by acclamation.

John Dickerson in Slate, who had predicted that women would immediately roll over for Obama after the primary dust settled, was busy considering whether or not Obama could win without the votes of persistently disgruntled Hillary supporters. And his conclusion before Palin was yes. There were plenty of new voters, and while, he wrote, Hillary supporters aren't "all crazy harridans or racists" they are "snippy, irritating, and impervious to reason (Obama is lucky not to have them)."

Obama couldn't have agreed more. Pre-Palin, when Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee dared ask Obama to reach out to the millions of women that supported Hillary, he reportedly said nope. That would take too much time and he had to focus on McCain. Obama also sniped, "If women take a moment to realize that on every issue important to women, John McCain is not in their corner, that would help them get over it."

Thank you, Mr. McCain, for your unintentional service to America, and challenge to Democratic Party misogynists. Without your nomination of Sarah Palin as VP, advocating abortion and progressive Supreme Court nominations would once again be women's only visible roles. Fall in line, the Dems blackmail us, or you'll lose the little you've got. The only real issue for women, half the American population, is apparently reproduction.

That's like reducing questions of racism and the role of people of color in America to affirmative action. Or reducing queer issues to gay marriage, and ignoring that at the root of our fight for legal rights and equality is the desire to end homophobia and discrimination, in short, to win liberation.

Since McCain nominated Palin, it's been every so slightly harder for Obama's attack dogs to continue to dismiss disgruntled Hillary supporters as divas, McCain plants, or simply nuts. ie. Go back in the attic where you belong, madwomen. Suddenly our votes count, and attacking us endlessly means risking that women like me will either vote for McCain and Palin, or just stay home.

The problem all along has been that Democrats imagine women are too stupid or irrational to understand the stakes of this election. We're somehow oblivious to the Iraq War, the mortgage crisis and the disastrous economy, the schools that are falling apart, and struggling families. As if we aren't usually the ones picking up the pieces.

Who after all gets stuck pinching pennies while working the worst-paying jobs? Who still ends up with the kids when families fall apart? Women. And women comprise a significant part of the hardcore anti-war activists, the widows, grieving mothers, even vets. Surely it's not women that have long been recognized as the key to successful economies.

Every misogynistic sneer, every suggestion we females stick to questions of female plumbing tells us Democrats don't give a crap about what we think, and that we're not a valuable part of the economic and social recovery of the United States.

If Democrats are stupid and arrogant enough to believe that, why should we trust them and reward them with our votes? Why should we think they're fit to lead? Leaders build bridges, they don't burn them. And the Democrats have burnt plenty in the name of unity. Trying to force Hillary out of the race when it had just begun. Making us fight for a roll call to register the votes she won. Resorting to nomination by acclamation.

That's not unity. It's a tyrannical attempt to erase dissent, and above all, erase women. Women of all races. It was a black woman, Sheila Jackson Lee, that Obama told to get over it. Party Unity My Ass. What Democrats were aiming for was victory, sheer domination over Hillary. Like when one wrestler has the other down on the mat with their arm twisted out of their socket and their legs broken in several places.

Confronted with that, Sarah Palin is a better role model for young women (and queers) despite her conservative social views, than the likes of the retooled Michelle Obama. Palin took on the corrupt Republican establishment in her own state. She defeated oil companies. She may wear go-go boots and drop litters of babies, but she's a fighter.

Remember what that is? Queers don't. In this election, the Log Cabin Republicans have been totally invisible. And queer Dems have been reduced to jumping for joy because Mrs. Obama turned up at an LGBT delegates luncheon. You can take my uterus and shove it.

Do I Hold My Nose and Vote for the "O?"

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There's every reason not to vote for McCain. He's against gay marriage, for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military, and lately announced his opposition to adoption by lesbian and gay couples, though in an amended statement, he added that as president he wouldn't actually legislate against it. That was up to the States.

The poor Log Cabin Republicans who took such a beating with Bush, have only been able to boost McCain by saying he did vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment a couple of years ago, and frankly, gay issues aren't really that important anyway. "Like all Americans, gays and lesbians have wide-ranging concerns -- from foreign policy to the environment to soaring gas prices to the size of the federal government and more."

Unfortunately for them, McCain doesn't shine there either. He'd let that genius Phil Gramm monitor the "mental recession" as Treasury Secretary, allow Afghanistan and Iraq degenerate to bitter ends, and in general continue to pursue disastrous Bush policies everywhere else from social security to the Supreme Court. And he's anti-abortion.

It's also a bad sign that he hasn't bothered to learn to use the internet. It's not a sign of old age, senior citizens surf with best, but of general stupidity. He obviously doesn't think the internet's relevant. Like keeping up with the casualties in Kabul. Or acting on the mortgage crisis.

No, McCain's certainly not gonna win my vote. But Obama might not either.

Like McCain, Obama's against gay marriage, though he sometimes talks about gay rights, or used to, before he adopted the campaign strategy of "faith guru" Mara Vanderslice. She believes Democrats should never mention the separation of church and state, and should generally avoid mentioning the word "gay," much less be seen with any of us.

Obama has snubbed LGBT events, largely ignores our press, and instead, campaigns with many of the same right-wing, homophobic, evangelical preachers that promoted Bush. Chief among them is Kirbyjon Caldwell, former bond-trader, and currently prosperity gospel pastor who was hand in glove with W., giving the benedictions at his inaugural ceremonies, and reaping the reward of faith-based dollars.

Now, Caldwell's on the phone almost every day with Obama, and it's no secret who's going to benefit when Obama comes through with his own faith-based funds, now a "critical part" of his administration because "...social services to the poor and the needy have been consistently under-funded."

I remember when queers would have dumped any Democrat or Republican candidate giving dollars to churches and campaigning with bigots like ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin or Caldwell, whose own church hosted a ministry that reportedly was "created to provide Christ centered instruction for those seeking freedom from homosexuality."

It's also worth mentioning that Obama's imminent nomination is marked by the first Democratic National Convention ever to open with a religious service.

To elect Obama, it seems, is to elect the Bush of the left, pandering to the same right-wing evangelicals, and paying them off in with the same cash. Don't get me started on his vote on unleashing wire-tappers, again, right in line with Bush.

Let me be clear. I'm not a single issue voter. I don't need pompoms and cheerleaders for gay marriage when there's a war on, and the economy's on the road to hell and I can't afford allergy medicine, much less a mammogram. Obama is better than McCain on issues like health care and Iraq. But I cannot go to the polls in November and vote for a man sending the message that gay people are an embarrassment, worthy only of the back of the bus.

And I cannot vote for a man committed to policies that either protect the status quo, or in some cases make gay lives worse. Already under Bush, faith-based programs have siphoned money away from LGBT programs focused on everything from AIDS to job-training. LGBT employees have been thrown out of their jobs with Christian charities without recourse. Forty percent of homeless youth are queer. Many are thrown out because of it. And at faith-based shelters, they're hassled, abused, and ridiculed. Nascent self-loathing is confirmed. The 1964 Civil Rights Act Obama says will prevent discrimination simply doesn't include us, and won't for the foreseeable future.

If Obama wants my vote, he'll have to earn it. He could start with very public meetings with lesbian, gay and transgender leaders and speeches focusing on LGBT issues from gay marriage to gay-bashing in schools.

The rest of it's up to you activists. Frankly, I need assurances from Obama gay fan club members that if I vote for him I won't be the only one holding him accountable for broken promises. He's already backtracked on campaign finance and the electronic surveillance bill among other things, and he hasn't even been elected yet.

Does the Internet Let Lying Liars Lie?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'm a big fan of "Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)" just for the title alone. And if Al Franken were running for president instead of senator of Minnesota, I'd be right there handing out buttons and twisting every arm in reach. Mostly to bother national-level Democrats.

I can't believe that in an election year that should have gone down in history as "Truth (And the Truth-telling Democrats Who Let It Sweep Them Into the White House)" we're watching the two Democratic candidates sideline the catastrophic Republican presidency whose unilateral military action, the deregulation of the banking industry, and obsession with Saddam Hussein led directly to a tanking global economy, and disastrous war.

Their preferred discussion: a preacher's missteps on race. Or this week, one more thing about Clinton's husband Bill. And don't forget questions of bitterness, religion, and gun control in the heartland. That's thanks to Obama's comments that small-town voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" as a way to explain their frustrations.

As far as I remember, he said much the same thing in his famous race speech, only with more compassion. The only real note of interest in this is the proportion the comment took on, and that it was Mayhill Fowler, a pro-Obama "citizen journalist" blogger who reported it because she "was taken aback" at his elitist sneer, and didn't think it was ethical to let it slide by in silence.

Me, I'm glad she opened her mouth. Not because Obama's remarks should tip any election scale, but because Fowler redeemed my faith in the internet. As a writer and activist, I had high hopes for it as a conduit of truth. With something as accessible and "democratic" as the internet, it seemed like tons of people would uncover the smoking guns of politics, blow the whistle on hypocrites and evil-doers, speak out, dissent, Act-up.

But what seemed an amazing tool for providing alternative views has given precedence to the same handful of voices we were faced with before. The difference is that they are now amplified (and distorted) by hundreds of thousands of mouths all shouting the same thing. The comments on online articles, all seem written by the same two or three people taking the same hard lines on politics. They adamantly agree or disagree, but rarely shake their heads in skepticism, and wonder if any of it is true, even their own impulses. If there are more perspectives out there, they're buried in silence.

By contrast, there's the constant stream of information, the rattle of the blogosphere, disasters instantly brought home on our miniscule screens that confront us with every starving peasant, every corpse there to see. In essence, the internet brings details and news instead of knowledge, and where's the revolution in that?

Activists haven't figured out the medium either. I remember how the internet was supposed to help us connect, let us learn from each other. And in the brief twenty minutes of protest in New York prior to the Iraq War, it was an important organizing tool. Now what? The bickering that used to take place in community centers and church basements happens in chatrooms. Those with the quickest fingers, and a facility with language still impose their will. Beyond that, the internet is a glorified phone tree that we use to set dates for meetings.

I don't see better ideas, or analysis that carefully makes its way towards the complicated truth. I feel more and more like a dinosaur. Drop me in a tar pit and leave me be. I could use the quiet. Imagine it, silence. Sometimes I consider the drastic step of turning off my computer, but my girlfriend is clicking away across the room. It's too late. We have laptops growing from our thighs. A wave of information pounds into the room. And like greedy consumers, we drink every drop there is, and swell up like toads on the verge of bursting.

I think of sending her a message. "How about a date?" I get it typed out, but then I'm worried that if she accepts I might miss an email, a development. Something could blow-up. Or fall down. She might not recognize me. I might not know myself.

We get caught up in the Net Stream, forget what we were looking for, or get intoxicated by the sound of our own voices when they join the agreeing mob. Which is why I congratulate Mayhill Fowler. She began blogging to get the truth out about a candidate she believed in, but when he showed a private face different from his public one, she stuck to her guns and reported that truth, too. It's a small step, but in the right direction.

National Amnesia & the Bum's Rush For Hillary

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's not just an ignorance of history, but serial amnesia that's destroying the U.S. One Viet Nam isn't enough? Let's give Iraq a try. Nostalgic for McCarthy? We can unleash that delicious invention of Homeland Security. Too young to remember the cool breadlines of the Depression? No worries. We can arrange some, along with bank runs, lost homes, and suicides.

It's deja vu all over again with Obama and Hillary. Every paper this week has some pundit exhorting Hillary to back out immediately, concede, disappear, get lost, evaporate. The pressure is worse inside the Democratic Party itself where the good ole boys are sneering, "C'mon sweetheart, baby, doll, be a good sport."

Even if I didn't think Obama was a pig-in-waiting, I'd be up in arms, having flashbacks to Election 2000 when Al Gore literally handed Bush the election with a tap of his gavel.

Blame the Supreme Court if you want, but in the final analysis it was Gore himself presiding over the Senate who quashed the objections of the Congressional Black Caucus to Florida's electoral vote, offering a grin and shrug to Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., who had just denounced fraud and black voter disenfranchisement, saying, "The chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois, but, hey..."

"Don't you know, that's not the way the game is played?" Al seemed to mean. He wanted to get home, lick his wounds, and maybe Tipper. Other members of Congress had schedules to keep, an inauguration to hold, committees to jockey for. So what if they had to pretend that the Republicans hadn't already changed the rules to the game getting the Supreme Court to intervene on their behalf? Just concede, already. Get off the stage like a good loser.

Nobody could have predicted what would follow, especially after 9/11, but that concession smelled bad to most of us. As I wrote in The Gully at the time, "This is the little tableau that should haunt our new American century -- a smiling, smug Al Gore tapping his gavel to silence the protests of twenty Democratic, mostly black Representatives, while in the background white Republicans shout 'out of order.'"

And it has haunted us, whether we remember the source of the specter or not. Al's retreat not only enabled a Bush presidency, but reinforced the tone leading to eight years of a jovial partisanship that enabled the headlong rush to the Iraq War, greedy deregulation and disastrous economic collapse, the burgeoning national deficit, and by instituting a policy of unilateral action on an international stage, the deterioration of democracy in all corners of the globe. All was done under the watch of spineless career politicians who wanted to make things easy on themselves, who cut deals, and squashed dissent.

Now, knocked head over heels by the Obama candidacy, the formerly irate Democratic faithful have forgotten that demanding premature concessions can have ugly consequences. Oh, quit sneering at the comparison. Sure, Hillary's uncertain bid for November is not exactly the same as Bush taking the White House. And yes, Hillary may not make it to the finish line, but trying to silence her now raises that same little matter of democracy, of representation, of diversity, which is not just a matter of skin, but of voices.

Shutting her up buries the 94 percent of El Paso County, Texas that supports her. It buries me. The only thing worse is when we do it to ourselves, like Democrats under Bush.

Meanwhile, her perseverance makes her something we haven't seen in a long time and need to reconsider: either an idealist, or bad loser. Shouldn't we have more of both? People that hold their positions to the bitter end? Fighters who refuse to retreat smiling from the ring, who are impolite enough to bleed on the carpet of their enemies?

No matter who wins in November, we desperately need that capacity to dig in our heels and resist. Civil liberties have gone to hell. The Constitution has unraveled. There's a ton of rebuilding to do, and activists demobilized during two "friendly" Clinton administrations and stream-rolled under Bush's bipartisanship must prepare to constantly hector the next President, even a Democratic one. Because without us, I guarantee they'll find it easier to leave things as they are in the midst of putting out new political and economic fires.

Like biological diversity, the key is dissent. The more voices and ideas, the better our odds of survival. As for dissent, Hillary's persistence is the only model we've had for ages.

As I did after Gore gave his "Aw, shucks" concession in the Senate, I call once again for a return to a garden variety, even fundamentalist, democracy in which we value every voice, and don't give candidates the bum's rush until we've counted every single vote.

Screw Unity, Save America!

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'm definitely a freak. There's a drum beating out there and I'm no where near in step. In fact, I don't even hear it. Just a dripping in the kitchen sink that calls for a plumber rather than some political savior like Obama.

I finally managed to have a look at his recent speech on race after reading glowing reports from both sides of the aisle. Expecting to bask in the warm glow of his great vision for America, I felt my skin crawl at his insistence on unity, unity, unity.

In my experience, unity usually translates as "Shut your trap, Bitch," or more nicely, "We'll get to your issue when we've solved the really important ones. It's just not the right time." Funny, the right time never does come.

After all, isn't unity what we've had under Bush? The minority Democrats voted in lockstep with Republicans for an Iraq War which is now costing us $5000 per second, burdening a family of four with about $330 per month, a failed economy, not to mention dead American relations, whole cemeteries of Iraqis, and a Middle East that may well be destabilized for generations to come.

Then there're the boatload of democratic perversions in the name of Homeland Security like wire-tapping, racial profiling, oh, and Guantanamo, that have continued even with a Democratic majority in Congress, all because we have to be unified to fight that endless War on Terror that has as many definitions as that soporific word, "nice."

Obama, above all, seems like a nice man. His heart is in the right place wanting to welcome everybody into his big tent, though I still balk at his campaigning down South with the same black preachers that Bush used for their popular rabble-rousing and money-raising capability. You just have to ignore their hellfire and brimstone conviction that all us queers are going to burn eternally. Come on in.

I get the idea he just can't abide anger. Not that he doesn't understand it. In this speech, Obama gives one of the more passionate defenses of anger in black and working class communities that I've seen, citing its deep roots, the damage it can do, how it can embitter, paralyze and blind. All true, including the fact we have to see past our anger to find solutions.

The problem is that he'd be happier if we put our anger entirely aside. It "... is exploited by politicians." "It distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition..." "Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits..."

He's forgotten, or never knew, that anger is one of the few things, maybe the only thing, that gets us into the street. Fury about injustice was what sent Jesus on a rampage in the temple knocking over the tents of moneylenders. Anger freed Malcolm X, ACT-UP, the Lesbian Avengers. It is an essential engine for change.

I am afraid we Americans are not angry enough, and that insistence on unity will lead to a white-washing of the past eight years, skipping the justice stage for reconciliation, and leaving Bush's damage intact.

No one except the grunts will be responsible for the men and women we've tortured in American prisons. No one will be responsible for lying about the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction that got us into Iraq, or for deregulating the banks that are self-destructing, preaching the hate that translates into dead queers, refusing jobs and basic respect to people because of their accents or skin.

I find rage coordinates nicely with the Timberlands I wear to demos, though I understand the exigencies of politics. You can't only work from the margins, though it's the best place to be an activist. Politicians have other needs. To them I say, "Forge alliances if you must, hold hands, sing Kumbaya, but keep your eyes on justice."

For that reason, I'm wary of Obama. I'm troubled by how easily unity translates into silence and amnesia, and hope into absolution. I'm afraid of his Christian rhetoric that makes it seem like his victory is sanctified by Jesus, a manifestation of divine will, and genetics. "...Seared into my genetic makeup [is] the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one."

In Obama's America, what will happen to those of us that are part of the devil named Multitude, and insist on dissent? How will we be labeled? Will the censorship that was imposed by Bush and the Republicans in the name of patriotism and fear, be replaced by that other American fascism of Niceness, Unity, and Hope? Will anybody have the guts to speak the truth?

Election 2008: What Divides Us

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's not enough to worry about race and class and sexual identity this election. In New York there's also sheer and unmitigated stupidity -- the poll workers who resent it when you interrupt their early morning donuts and force them to wipe the sugar from their hands, open their ledgers and let you sign. Then there is the outdated and misleading information at voting websites and phone banks.

Last week, I called the General Election Board and asked if I could vote there because I'd be out of town. The woman said yes, so I hopped on the subway, and turned up at the office where a row of flabbergasted men told me I was nuts. "For that you have to go to the borough office. They're closing any minute. How long are you here?"

When I finally got to the next place on Varick Street, where you had to have serious ID before you could even go upstairs, there was a woman trying to change her party affiliation to Democrat. "I'm either Independent or nothing. They told me I could do it until the 15th."

The guy argued with her for ten minutes, but it became a moot point when he went back to check and she was already registered Democrat. From 2003. "I don't know why they couldn't have told me that on the phone when I asked," she complained.

I had an easy time voting, but we commiserated going down in the elevator. "It's discouraging," she said. "It's like they don't want people to vote. What if you were a new citizen? An immigrant? This would all be so off-putting."

Not for her. She spoke standard white English, was dressed to the nines, with café au lait skin. I wondered what her background was. When it comes to voting, there's a world of difference between African Americans and Latinos. I guessed first generation Dominican but couldn't bring myself to ask.

The atmosphere surrounding race is changing again in the country, and not for the better. It's a little like after the Diallo shooting when there was mutual defensiveness and hair-trigger tempers among New Yorkers. It was justified then. But the recent exchanges between the Obama and Clinton camps are almost as bad, and any truce they may have come up with doesn't hold with the rest of us.

It's not easy to deal with race in America. And I'm still worried when I hear Obama insist that skin is something more than a temporary bridge, or his campaign imply it's some kind of guarantee against racism. Which is what they must have thought when they briefly attempted to cast South Asians as economic bogeymen this summer, demonizing Indian contributors to Clinton, and invoke robber barons who "laid off American workers to hire Indian techies."

Obama apologized of course and washed his hands. That's politics. All the dirty tricks in the book. And the press is just as happy as anybody else to jump in, managing to insult almost everyone by explaining Hillary's sudden surge in New Hampshire with the fact that she cried and got the female pity vote, especially from uneducated whites with lower incomes -- in other words, all those who were too ignorant and racist and stupidly feminist anyway to vote for Obama. Another bridge burnt there like a candle to the joys of America.

Anybody'll say anything. Sometime or other a Clinton staffer actually called Obama "uppity". Clinton's remark this week that MLK needed LBJ to solidify social gains, though somewhat true, was about as graceless as what inspired it -- Obama climbing onto the pedestal and declaring himself the next Martin Luther King. What a bunch of buffoons.

A truce may help them out of the election, but the scuffle is a sign that America's still in the same old mess. And once again putting black and white folks at the center of the debate about race to the exclusion of everybody else. So much for Hispanics representing one in eight residents in 2000, and slated to be one of four by 2050.

No wonder Hispanic voters don't see Obama as a bridge to anything, partly because they don't recognize his name but also because a dark skin doesn't mean much when they're consistently left out of the equation. Clinton gets points because of her husband, but she shouldn't count her chickens either.

In general almost half see themselves as independent and vote that way. Last time it was for the family values of Bush. This time, Latino indies are leaning more toward the Democratic side, especially after the Republicans' recent immigration laws, and the Iraq War fiasco. There's no perfect choice.

Voting may be a hassle, but nothing is more off-putting in politics than politicians.

Embodying Virtue in America

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Is anybody else disturbed by how race is playing out in this election? -- the messianic message sent out by Obama's team that because of genetics he's got some third world and cross-cultural insight, as if his black skin alone were a bridge. Maybe it is. Maybe not. And god knows we could use one. In terms of race, the U.S. moves one step forward, three back, as they say.

Sure, queers know best about homophobia, women about misogyny, people of color about racism. But does that suffering give each person of color, each woman, each queer some special insight, some gift? Does it make us better? Is that experience enough to turn us into experts on how to extract the nation from its divisions? No, not by itself.

Bigotry is just as likely to leave us wounded and embittered as enlightened. Some turn the pain inward. There are plenty of queer homophobes -- most of them in the U.S. Congress. And Africa and Latin America are full of men like Robert Mugabe who with his dark skin hasn't built any bridges at all between white and blacks, rich and poor. In fact he burns bridges as fast as he can, along with the houses of the opposition, usually with troublesome black dissidents inside. Skin only gets you so far.

The election of a black president in the U.S. would be historic, an important symbol of what people of color can accomplish, and maybe it will build something, a footpath, maybe, but god only knows if it will give him the good sense to walk over it or not. Because race doesn't say anything about Obama himself. That kind of biological determinism, thinking race or sexual identity or gender gives you any qualities at all is the flip side of all the 'isms. In fact, it reinforces them.

In the Democratic primary, besides the question of skin, there's the related issue of sheer beauty. Obama apparently embodies every good thing in that glorious, virtuous face girls shriek over. White ones especially (polls show) are creaming their pants at rallies for the handsome guy in a way that reminds me of those erotic neocolonial French films that are always set on a yacht or some tropical island with drums beating so a white woman can screw her black stallion under the palm trees or up against a mast.

Are they screaming for Obama the candidate, or some erotic fantasy? It may help him win the Democratic nomination, but what effect will this tactic have in the long run? Another black man reduced to his body? Will they turn on him when he fails, as they all do, will they blame his race?

In the U.S., we speak incessantly of faith, but we're more literal-minded than ever. Virtue embodies itself in beauty, potential in skin. The CIA apparently only believes information, "intelligence," when it's bought with blood and screams.

What's a dumpy, matronly Hillary to do in that milieu? She stuffs her significant ass in tailored suits, wears her flaws out there like wrinkles. Experience is etched in her body, when we only want the brand new because it resembles perfection.

As a voter, I'm beginning to lean towards her, like I'd prefer to buy an apartment, if I had the money, that needed work. You can see all the existing problems that haven't been hidden under plaster and paint.

And unlike Obama, she can't pull off the hopeful ingénue. Time has made her cautious. A real politician. She splits hairs and prevaricates, but she has her bottom lines. Saudi Arabia's an important U.S. ally, but a couple weeks ago she very publicly condemned the rape of a woman there and the victim's subsequent sentencing to jail and lashes. After all, she shouldn't have been in a car with a man not her husband or brother. She shouldn't have been out at all.

Hillary didn't buy it, didn't make one gesture to cross-cultural understanding. Every canyon isn't an occasion to build a bridge. Sometimes we must refuse to understand. Torture, for instance, is always wrong, at American or Libyan or Saudi hands. Kindness and sympathy can't wash away blood.

I don't care if Hillary equivocates about how quickly she'll get us out of Iraq, or a dozen other things. Lately, I prefer calculating to hopeful, in its broadest sense. It's a dangerous, complicated world. As long as she's on my side, let's send forth a wolf to meet the wolves.

Breaking the Silence In Newark

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In the Sunday New York Times, there was an article about queers in Newark, and the delights of the virulent homophobia they face, including verbal harassment, violence, political bias, and scorn from the police, but no mention at all that the city is eighty percent African American. I guess it was enough to show the photos -- all black except for one Hispanic guy.

Why skip that detail in a portrait of the city? Because somebody might accuse the writer of implying that black people are more homophobic than whites? Or because nobody wants to admit that we don't all share the advances of the LGBT community that pundits like Andrew Sullivan keep declaring passé?

Newark is just a couple of miles from Christopher Street, but the activists there might as well be in Zimbabwe for all the support they get. Since Sakia Gunn was murdered four years ago, queers have been trying to get a LGBT center established, but have had no luck maneuvering through the politics at city hall, though Mayor Cory Booker did manage to get a rainbow flag hung last June earning himself a flood of hate mail. Zimbabwe, at least has the eyes of the world. Who's watching Newark?

Laquetta Nelson tried to get a PFLAG chapter started and couldn't get anyone to turn up. I've spoken to her in the past. She's a persistent woman. If she can't fill a room, it's because many people just aren't out, not from political reticence, but because they're afraid for their lives.

I know homophobia in Newark is complicated by other problems. The city's drawing new businesses, new arts centers, but the neighborhoods are a mess. There are gangs, and drugs. Nobody's safe. But why is it always us that has to wait? Why, a few miles from wealthy New York, are Newark queers so poor the only place they can have to themselves is a drop-in center in some crappy building on the outskirts of town where everybody coming and going is so vulnerable they don't want the address printed? Forget the comfort of gay bar, or a neighborhood like Chelsea.

Queers looking for company, for community, have to leave home, cross the river like the young women who tried to leave behind all that hate and violence, but found it renewed in the person of Dwayne Buckle. When they defended themselves and cut the guy, who got busted? Who's sitting in jail? Where is our community for them?

Sometimes I want to scream at all the professional "activists" in New York and San Francisco with their fresh scrubbed rainbow of faces and ask if they remember what it's like to struggle? For many of us, things like gay marriage are just icing on the cake. Plenty of us haven't had the main course yet, aren't even at the table.

It often comes down to class, the thing we Americans are terrible at. We can fill a room full of all kinds of skin tones, but when we open our educated mouths the diversity seems just an illusion.

And the queers in Newark aren't just black, many are poor. The article didn't really say that either, just that queers had to grapple with poverty in the city as if it weren't their own.

Maybe that's embarrassing, too, to describe someone as poor. Instead, one twenty-year old man was "homeless and jobless ... effectively orphaned." Avoiding words like unemployed, abandoned, broke, his condition sounds temporary, almost like a choice.

If only it were enough to wrap people in the cotton wool of civilizing language. If only by refusing to use the word "black" you could erase the tentacles of homophobia entwined in African American culture and pretend like it doesn't take some extra effort to yank them out.

Though maybe the writer, if he didn't want to get published in the New York Times, would be seething with rage, his words burning holes in the paper. Still, those gaps of silence are disturbing. They hide the truth of things, the roots.

Homophobia is everywhere, and everywhere has grafted itself onto the culture of the host like a parasite mutating to protect itself from changes in other victims nearby. Things have changed for middle-class urban whites? Don't count on the same for trailer trash.

And like athlete's foot loves the humidity of the locker room, homophobia loves the sweltering air of religion, whether it lives in a mosque or Pentecostal storefront or cathedral with spires reaching towards the sky.

Lucky Newark, the first black presidential candidate thinks it's okay to pander to homophobic black voters by welcoming anti-gay preachers into his Big, All-embracing, Non-partisan, "I'm a Better Feminist than Hillary" Tent. Do I hear an amen, brother? Pack your bags. We've been sold down the river again.

Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com