By Kelly Jean Cogswell
On August 2, New York lost one of its unsung heros, African American lesbian Candice Boyce, a driving force for social justice, early founder of the LGBT community, and mainstay of the Center. I remember her as an intelligent, generous, and extraordinarily committed activist, words I don't always put in the same sentence.
I met her in '94 or '95 at a moment when I was thoroughly sick of activism and activists. I'd worked my heart out, and in a couple of devastating moments watched everything go up in the smoke of personal conflict. The egos and power plays and struggles for turf had become more important than the goal.
Candice got involved as an elder stateswoman, and tried to make peace. She embraced all of us, even me, a little pipsqueak of a white dyke, not too long out of Kentucky. She laid one kind hand on my shoulder, and it was enough to help me keep it together through an extremely ugly meeting.
Like many New Yorkers, her respect for diversity began at home. Born in 1943 at Harlem hospital, her maternal grandmother was from Barbados. Her paternal grandmother was Native American. As she became an activist, she fought for social justice for everyone: women, African Americans, and the LGBT community. Her most important work was for lesbians of color.
She was one of the co-founders of Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin, Inc., eventually becoming the director. She has said that at the time of the group's founding in 1974, "there was no other place for women of color to go and sit down and talk about what it means to be a black lesbian in America."
Originally created as the Black Lesbian Caucus of the New York City Gay Activists Alliance, Salsa Soul founders (Betty "Achebe" Jean Powell, the Reverend Dolores Jackson, Harriet Austin, Sonia Bailey, Luvenia Pinson, Maua Flowers, and Candice) aimed to help and inspire "third world gay women," and "share in the strengthening and productivity of the whole gay community."
To a large extent they were successful in their mission. They offered safe spaces for embattled lesbians of color, created The Jemima Writers Collective, and in the 70's and 80's published Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians and Salsa Soul Gayzette. Their contributors included Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, and yes, Audre Lorde.
Candice was a steadying force as Salsa Soul Sisters evolved into African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change, which is still going strong as the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States.
I can't imagine it was smooth sailing. Nurturing groups is hard, thankless work. You have to manage the complexities of individuals, and layered on top of them the weight of differing classes, cultures, ethnicities, plus the egos that grow along with your organization.
And as the world changes, goals do, too. In this case, realism trumped utopia. The extraordinary ambition of Salsa Soul to embrace all "Third World Wimmin" was sharpened to focus on African American lesbians. Even then, they could have failed. Organizing for social justice is extremely tough. Only the rare people like Candice make it possible.
You have to believe you have a mission, and you have to be persistent. And by all accounts, Candice would sometimes beat a dead horse. But without that stubbornness, where would we be? It was fueled by a keen sense of purpose. She herself wrote, “I am an activist, I am a warrior, but above all I am compassionate. I have given my self to the struggle for black lesbian & lesbians of all colors and oppression everywhere."
I can almost see a few readers sneering. "Doesn't think much of herself, does she?" But dedicated activists have to have an almost evangelical zeal or they frankly wouldn't bother. And the facts bore her out. She was a fighter and protector. She was compassionate. Her work benefited us all.
In this increasingly now-driven society, when few of us persevere without a clear victory in sight, preferably by next Tuesday, Candice Boyce kept her nose to the grindstone. I suspect she didn't think too much about the tickertape parades at the end. What she had in her sights were lesbians, especially black lesbians, and the social and economic battles they were still fighting.
I thought about her when I ran across this phrase from the Pirkei Avot, an ancient Jewish text that has a lot to say about activism and social justice, a lot to say about Candice: "you are not obligated to complete the work; neither are you permitted to desist from it." That will be worth keeping in mind the next time I'm tempted to turn my back on the community, and take up basket weaving.
Candice Boyce is survived by Linda Rice, her partner since 1997, and wife since 2007, as well as tons of loving family and friends. If you want to honor her memory, it's simple. Get up off your ass. Engage. Be kind.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Monday, August 02, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Argentina's Gay Marriage Victory in Context
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Argentina's Senate did Bastille Day up right, celebrating the holiday with a revolutionary vote approving modifications to the law that will make same-sex marriage legal. Here's hoping that while stuffing themselves with cake and champagne, queer newlyweds tip their tiaras to all the activists that made it possible.
The LGBT Federation of Argentina (FALGBT) certainly deserves plenty of credit. Headed up by Maria Rachid, they managed an effective campaign for marriage equality despite a strong, and well-financed counter-attack by the Christian Right. For the occasion, fundamentalist Catholics like Opus Dei actually consorted with their usual enemy, fundamentalist evangelical Protestants, to get sixty thousand anti-queer demonstrators on the street.
They used buzzwords like 'God's war' or 'the devil's project,' which President Cristina Fernandez finally denounced as recalling "the times of the Inquisition." They also used the same empty, tired rhetoric against same-sex marriage as the Catholic Church used to fight the campaign to legalize divorce in the 80's. (It's an attack against families! There is only one mother! Think of the children!)
Kudos to FALGBT for turning it to their advantage in a brilliant ad campaign declaring: "If divorce didn't end the world, marriage equality won't either."
The only bone I'd have to pick with FALGBT was how their general secretary, Esteban Paulon, seemed to be claiming all the credit and slamming other LGBT groups when he declared, "I'm proud that we never tried for civil unions, always for complete equality."
In all likelihood, FALGBT didn't bother with civil unions because they didn't have to. Argentina's most populous city, Buenos Aires, had them since the end of 2002 when the city council became the first in Latin America to approve a gay civil union ordinance. That victory belongs largely to CHA (Comunidad Homosexual Argentina), which worked their asses off for a year and a half, winning the vote 29 to 10 after five hours of stormy debate and a ton of obstacles queers didn't have to face this time around.
In 2001, tens of thousands of starving Argentineans were on the streets banging pots and demonstrating against one of the worst social, economic and political crisis of the century. The economy had tanked, and just a year before, president Fernando de la Rúa had abdicated after a massive strike and "disturbances" that killed at least 22 people.
Even though CHA's campaign was on a local level, I can only imagine how often they heard, "Now's not the time. Just wait until next year." Well, they didn't wait, and set a regional example that was followed by several other civil union measures across Latin America.
CHA's very existence was an accomplishment. There had been informal gay groups in Argentina inspired in part by the May '68 revolt in Paris and Stonewall in '69. But in the 80's, just as the Catholic Church was losing its fight against the evils of divorce, CHA was fighting to be the first LGBT group to be officially incorporated by the state. Initially, they were refused as a threat to "morality and decency."
According to an open letter published by Argentinean activist Alfredo González, the tide only turned in 1991 after a campaign of support in New York. Activists picketed the consulate, wrote letters to newspapers, and finally confronted president Carlos Menem when he came to speak at Columbia University.
Instead of comfortably burnishing Argentina's democratic image in front of an adoring crowd, Menem was faced with queer hecklers demanding to know where he stood on rights for homosexuals in Argentina, and especially on CHA's legal standing. Shortly afterwards CHA was official. And they're still around and still fighting, even though in this week's articles there was no mention of their active role in Argentina's same-sex marriage victory.
In fact, a variety of Argentinean groups have been fighting for marriage equality since CHA's initial victory with civil unions. The first group was the Gay Association for Civil Rights. They didn't get much of a result, but in '98, the Society for the Integration of Gay and Lesbian Argentina actually got the deputy Laura Musa to propose a bill, though it didn't get off the ground.
Since then measures have been proposed every two years. Even CHA, which first offered a national civil union bill, eventually returned with one for same-sex marriage. Activists also pursued the issue on the judicial front. Couples like Martín Canevaro and Carlos Álvarez, and Norma Castillo and Ramona "Cachita" Arévalo got married then fought back when their cases were challenged in court.
Since debate on the victorious bill began in November, several groups, including CHA and FALGBT have been working tirelessly, along with hundreds of independent activists. Lobbying and speaking in hearings, building on long years of work, they made it happen -- together.
Argentina's Senate did Bastille Day up right, celebrating the holiday with a revolutionary vote approving modifications to the law that will make same-sex marriage legal. Here's hoping that while stuffing themselves with cake and champagne, queer newlyweds tip their tiaras to all the activists that made it possible.
The LGBT Federation of Argentina (FALGBT) certainly deserves plenty of credit. Headed up by Maria Rachid, they managed an effective campaign for marriage equality despite a strong, and well-financed counter-attack by the Christian Right. For the occasion, fundamentalist Catholics like Opus Dei actually consorted with their usual enemy, fundamentalist evangelical Protestants, to get sixty thousand anti-queer demonstrators on the street.
They used buzzwords like 'God's war' or 'the devil's project,' which President Cristina Fernandez finally denounced as recalling "the times of the Inquisition." They also used the same empty, tired rhetoric against same-sex marriage as the Catholic Church used to fight the campaign to legalize divorce in the 80's. (It's an attack against families! There is only one mother! Think of the children!)
Kudos to FALGBT for turning it to their advantage in a brilliant ad campaign declaring: "If divorce didn't end the world, marriage equality won't either."
The only bone I'd have to pick with FALGBT was how their general secretary, Esteban Paulon, seemed to be claiming all the credit and slamming other LGBT groups when he declared, "I'm proud that we never tried for civil unions, always for complete equality."
In all likelihood, FALGBT didn't bother with civil unions because they didn't have to. Argentina's most populous city, Buenos Aires, had them since the end of 2002 when the city council became the first in Latin America to approve a gay civil union ordinance. That victory belongs largely to CHA (Comunidad Homosexual Argentina), which worked their asses off for a year and a half, winning the vote 29 to 10 after five hours of stormy debate and a ton of obstacles queers didn't have to face this time around.
In 2001, tens of thousands of starving Argentineans were on the streets banging pots and demonstrating against one of the worst social, economic and political crisis of the century. The economy had tanked, and just a year before, president Fernando de la Rúa had abdicated after a massive strike and "disturbances" that killed at least 22 people.
Even though CHA's campaign was on a local level, I can only imagine how often they heard, "Now's not the time. Just wait until next year." Well, they didn't wait, and set a regional example that was followed by several other civil union measures across Latin America.
CHA's very existence was an accomplishment. There had been informal gay groups in Argentina inspired in part by the May '68 revolt in Paris and Stonewall in '69. But in the 80's, just as the Catholic Church was losing its fight against the evils of divorce, CHA was fighting to be the first LGBT group to be officially incorporated by the state. Initially, they were refused as a threat to "morality and decency."
According to an open letter published by Argentinean activist Alfredo González, the tide only turned in 1991 after a campaign of support in New York. Activists picketed the consulate, wrote letters to newspapers, and finally confronted president Carlos Menem when he came to speak at Columbia University.
Instead of comfortably burnishing Argentina's democratic image in front of an adoring crowd, Menem was faced with queer hecklers demanding to know where he stood on rights for homosexuals in Argentina, and especially on CHA's legal standing. Shortly afterwards CHA was official. And they're still around and still fighting, even though in this week's articles there was no mention of their active role in Argentina's same-sex marriage victory.
In fact, a variety of Argentinean groups have been fighting for marriage equality since CHA's initial victory with civil unions. The first group was the Gay Association for Civil Rights. They didn't get much of a result, but in '98, the Society for the Integration of Gay and Lesbian Argentina actually got the deputy Laura Musa to propose a bill, though it didn't get off the ground.
Since then measures have been proposed every two years. Even CHA, which first offered a national civil union bill, eventually returned with one for same-sex marriage. Activists also pursued the issue on the judicial front. Couples like Martín Canevaro and Carlos Álvarez, and Norma Castillo and Ramona "Cachita" Arévalo got married then fought back when their cases were challenged in court.
Since debate on the victorious bill began in November, several groups, including CHA and FALGBT have been working tirelessly, along with hundreds of independent activists. Lobbying and speaking in hearings, building on long years of work, they made it happen -- together.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Dyke Pride
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
There are plenty of lesbians who think we're on the way up. They're "out". They fit in, and feel like they're just a hairsbreadth away from getting their props in society. They'll take the legislature over the streets any day. But for the rest of us desperate for a voice and face, there's still the Dyke March.
We meet at Bryant Park at 5 the Saturday before the LGBT Pride Parade. Things start off slow because organizers don't ask for a permit, and there's always the show of a negotiation with the cops before we really get going. In a lesbian catechism, one dyke screams, "Whose streets?" And the celebrating faithful respond, "Our streets!" Until eventually they are.
Even if there's no other message -- and admittedly the signs are sometimes in short supply -- that single message is enough. Because we're taking not just any streets, but the fabled Fifth Avenue in New York City where you don't just shop, you parade. New York has dozens, and lesbians have as much right to the pavement as any of them, the Irish Hibernians and the Puerto Ricans, Hindus, Captive Nations. In fact, we are them, if you give us a closer look, which hardly anybody does.
Eighteen years after the Lesbian Avengers kicked off the first march, even a couple thousand dykes in one place rarely gets a line in the local press. We're like the inverse of unicorns which are often mentioned, rarely seen.
Let me quote my girlfriend, and declare, "We could disappear and who'd notice we'd gone?" Disapparate lesbians, and American culture at large would lose what? One talk show host, a cable news commentator, a reality TV show, and digging deeper, a couple of grrrrl bands, the school's gym teacher, and those two mommies down the block.
You'll see Latinos and African Americans in Woody Allen movies before you'll see dykes (except for Ellen) on network TV. Forget the movies, except maybe as a punch line. Music's not much better. Where's the second Melissa Etheridge? Or even a dyke writer under fifty? Where is the next Audre Lorde?
I don't think I'm so out of touch I'd miss a young dyke busting out, a Sarah Schulman or Jeanette Winterson, Sapphire, or Adrienne Rich. Are they even possible anymore since somebody opened the pressure cooker just that tiny little bit giving us a few token rights, role models you can count on one hand? Is a lesbian identity necessary? Is visibility? Do we need a community at all?
The Dyke March answers with a resounding yes. Besides the thousands of us in New York, there's the enormous Dyke March in San Francisco, and others in Toronto, and Portland, Boston, Chicago, and Phillie, and here and there in the South and Southwest. Plenty appear one year, disappear the next, and reappear later on.
This year, by the time we were several blocks in, where the Church Ladies for Choice serenaded marchers with the message, "God is a lesbian," our numbers had swelled to several thousand. I saw a lot of young dykes of color that probably identify with our few role models even less than me, and know why they're there in the street.
One young woman told me she'd been there every year since she was old enough. And when I asked her why, said, "Because I have to be. We're not equal yet."
There was another reason, too, that you could see in her face, and the faces of the other young women she was marching with -- joy. We don't mention it much. It's the kind of thing that gets erased in the debate about same-sex marriage and gays serving the flag. Like the idea of liberation, it disappears like the words lesbian and gay when assimilationist organizations like Equality Now choose their names.
And while equality has its clear and essential benefits, you can smell the omnipresent danger of being subsumed into the nice white middle-class heterosexual ideal in which we're all separated into couples, stuck in ticky-tacky suburban houses, and banal, insupportable lives. I want equality under the law, but so much more. I want to exist. I want to claim a few miles there in the center of my goddamn city with several thousand of my ilk.
Better yet, I want to build a lesbian golem to stamp through the universe of society's heterosexual imagination, where if we surface at all, it's still as porn. Or ridiculous maidens. We are mostly dust invisible in the corner. It would be better if we scraped it together and made a monster of it. Leave trails of muddy footprints, broken buildings, graffiti, scraps of paper with the words, "truth," "love," maybe "joy" scribbled on them.
There are plenty of lesbians who think we're on the way up. They're "out". They fit in, and feel like they're just a hairsbreadth away from getting their props in society. They'll take the legislature over the streets any day. But for the rest of us desperate for a voice and face, there's still the Dyke March.
We meet at Bryant Park at 5 the Saturday before the LGBT Pride Parade. Things start off slow because organizers don't ask for a permit, and there's always the show of a negotiation with the cops before we really get going. In a lesbian catechism, one dyke screams, "Whose streets?" And the celebrating faithful respond, "Our streets!" Until eventually they are.
Even if there's no other message -- and admittedly the signs are sometimes in short supply -- that single message is enough. Because we're taking not just any streets, but the fabled Fifth Avenue in New York City where you don't just shop, you parade. New York has dozens, and lesbians have as much right to the pavement as any of them, the Irish Hibernians and the Puerto Ricans, Hindus, Captive Nations. In fact, we are them, if you give us a closer look, which hardly anybody does.
Eighteen years after the Lesbian Avengers kicked off the first march, even a couple thousand dykes in one place rarely gets a line in the local press. We're like the inverse of unicorns which are often mentioned, rarely seen.
Let me quote my girlfriend, and declare, "We could disappear and who'd notice we'd gone?" Disapparate lesbians, and American culture at large would lose what? One talk show host, a cable news commentator, a reality TV show, and digging deeper, a couple of grrrrl bands, the school's gym teacher, and those two mommies down the block.
You'll see Latinos and African Americans in Woody Allen movies before you'll see dykes (except for Ellen) on network TV. Forget the movies, except maybe as a punch line. Music's not much better. Where's the second Melissa Etheridge? Or even a dyke writer under fifty? Where is the next Audre Lorde?
I don't think I'm so out of touch I'd miss a young dyke busting out, a Sarah Schulman or Jeanette Winterson, Sapphire, or Adrienne Rich. Are they even possible anymore since somebody opened the pressure cooker just that tiny little bit giving us a few token rights, role models you can count on one hand? Is a lesbian identity necessary? Is visibility? Do we need a community at all?
The Dyke March answers with a resounding yes. Besides the thousands of us in New York, there's the enormous Dyke March in San Francisco, and others in Toronto, and Portland, Boston, Chicago, and Phillie, and here and there in the South and Southwest. Plenty appear one year, disappear the next, and reappear later on.
This year, by the time we were several blocks in, where the Church Ladies for Choice serenaded marchers with the message, "God is a lesbian," our numbers had swelled to several thousand. I saw a lot of young dykes of color that probably identify with our few role models even less than me, and know why they're there in the street.
One young woman told me she'd been there every year since she was old enough. And when I asked her why, said, "Because I have to be. We're not equal yet."
There was another reason, too, that you could see in her face, and the faces of the other young women she was marching with -- joy. We don't mention it much. It's the kind of thing that gets erased in the debate about same-sex marriage and gays serving the flag. Like the idea of liberation, it disappears like the words lesbian and gay when assimilationist organizations like Equality Now choose their names.
And while equality has its clear and essential benefits, you can smell the omnipresent danger of being subsumed into the nice white middle-class heterosexual ideal in which we're all separated into couples, stuck in ticky-tacky suburban houses, and banal, insupportable lives. I want equality under the law, but so much more. I want to exist. I want to claim a few miles there in the center of my goddamn city with several thousand of my ilk.
Better yet, I want to build a lesbian golem to stamp through the universe of society's heterosexual imagination, where if we surface at all, it's still as porn. Or ridiculous maidens. We are mostly dust invisible in the corner. It would be better if we scraped it together and made a monster of it. Leave trails of muddy footprints, broken buildings, graffiti, scraps of paper with the words, "truth," "love," maybe "joy" scribbled on them.
Monday, June 21, 2010
South Africa's Dykes, My World Cup Heroes
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The Soccer World Cup opened June 11th in South Africa, but the country's toughest players weren't even at the stadium when Bafana Bafana opened play by battling to an unexpected draw with Mexico. No, South Africa's dyke players were celebrating the event on muddy rocky fields and in front of TV sets.
The country's most well known lesbian team, the Chosen FEW, watched the match at the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) founded in 2002 to advocate for black LBT women. Their soccer team was put together two years later, and took the bronze medal both at the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago and the 2008 International Gay and Lesbian FA Cup in London. In a couple of weeks, they're off to Germany for Gay Games VIII.
Their existence alone is a remarkable accomplishment, a sign of extraordinary determination from those who, as Audre Lorde put it, "were never meant to survive." In South Africa, a woman is raped every seventeen seconds, heterosexuals just because they're female, and lesbians to "correct" their sexual identity. Many lesbians end up dead, like Zoliswa Nkonyana.
An open dyke and lesbian activist, Nkonyana was tortured and murdered on February 4, 2006 after a confrontation with women who didn't want her to use the ladies toilet. She was just nineteen when she was beaten and stabbed by a group of men that followed her outside. The trial of her murderers has been postponed more than two dozen times, most recently in March, and it's hard to imagine her mother and girlfriend will ever get justice. So much for the LGBT equality enshrined in the national constitution.
Likewise, in 2008, Eudy Simelane, the openly gay former South Africa women's international footballer was raped and murdered. More than thirty dykes (that we know of) have been killed in South Africa in just this decade. Tumi Mkhuma, one of the strikers on the Chosen FEW, was also raped and beaten for being a lesbian, and was lucky to escape with her life. Like most South African rapists, her attacker was not brought to justice.
The violence comes not just from anonymous strangers. Deekay Sibanda, the team's captain and midfielder, while explaining to a journalist that they weren't allowed to play in the national women's soccer because of discrimination against lesbians, added, "Some of the women have been raped and brutalised and chased out by their families. Many had to leave education – they think lesbians will contaminate schools."
Their training conditions are no relief from that brutal reality. In Johannesburg, their practice field is a rocky mess of almost pure dirt that either raises clouds of dust, or transforms into a mass of mud and puddles. Still, it's worth it. When they step onto that field twenty-five embattled dykes are finally at home.
If you look, you'll find other dyke teams in Port Elizabeth and Capetown. On June 9, Spanish journalist Lali Cambra posted a blog entry in Madrid's daily newspaper El País about a match between Luleki Sizwe and Free Gender. The teams were from two black neighborhoods on the periphery of the city of Capetown. The field looked like an abandoned construction site, with bits of brick, rocks, and glass. Three players had to leave the game to get wounds treated. And by the time the match was over, everybody's legs were covered in blood. Nevertheless, in the match photos, both sides were grinning from ear to ear.
Fumeka Soldaat, the organizer of the Free Gender team told the journalist that playing soccer is one of the few times these young dykes can feel human. Young black lesbians often turn to drugs or prostitution when they're rejected and abused by their families, and can't find work. Soccer teams are hugely important to raise their self-esteem and give them a sense that they're not alone.
Still, she said, it's tough to arrange matches. There's the cost of uniforms and transportation. They have to come up with refs. And with complicated lives, it's hard for all the members to find the time to play. There's also the problem of finding any soccer field at all to host a dyke match, no matter how full of rocks and glass it is.
In particular, they have to work with local leaders to get assurances, "that there won't be homophobic displays or acts of violence." While Soldaat didn't seem thrilled by what it took to make the arrangements, she added it was a good tool for consciousness-raising, and "normalizing" lesbians in South African society.
As the World Cup continues, it's these dykes I'll be thinking about as I watch the soccer giants fall and unexpected heroes arise. Because if queers held a kind of World Cup for battling the homophobic odds with courage and grace, it would surely be South African dykes leading the pack into the final rounds.
Reminder: NYC Dyke March starts at Bryant Park, Saturday, June 26, 2010, 5 p.m.
The Soccer World Cup opened June 11th in South Africa, but the country's toughest players weren't even at the stadium when Bafana Bafana opened play by battling to an unexpected draw with Mexico. No, South Africa's dyke players were celebrating the event on muddy rocky fields and in front of TV sets.
The country's most well known lesbian team, the Chosen FEW, watched the match at the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) founded in 2002 to advocate for black LBT women. Their soccer team was put together two years later, and took the bronze medal both at the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago and the 2008 International Gay and Lesbian FA Cup in London. In a couple of weeks, they're off to Germany for Gay Games VIII.
Their existence alone is a remarkable accomplishment, a sign of extraordinary determination from those who, as Audre Lorde put it, "were never meant to survive." In South Africa, a woman is raped every seventeen seconds, heterosexuals just because they're female, and lesbians to "correct" their sexual identity. Many lesbians end up dead, like Zoliswa Nkonyana.
An open dyke and lesbian activist, Nkonyana was tortured and murdered on February 4, 2006 after a confrontation with women who didn't want her to use the ladies toilet. She was just nineteen when she was beaten and stabbed by a group of men that followed her outside. The trial of her murderers has been postponed more than two dozen times, most recently in March, and it's hard to imagine her mother and girlfriend will ever get justice. So much for the LGBT equality enshrined in the national constitution.
Likewise, in 2008, Eudy Simelane, the openly gay former South Africa women's international footballer was raped and murdered. More than thirty dykes (that we know of) have been killed in South Africa in just this decade. Tumi Mkhuma, one of the strikers on the Chosen FEW, was also raped and beaten for being a lesbian, and was lucky to escape with her life. Like most South African rapists, her attacker was not brought to justice.
The violence comes not just from anonymous strangers. Deekay Sibanda, the team's captain and midfielder, while explaining to a journalist that they weren't allowed to play in the national women's soccer because of discrimination against lesbians, added, "Some of the women have been raped and brutalised and chased out by their families. Many had to leave education – they think lesbians will contaminate schools."
Their training conditions are no relief from that brutal reality. In Johannesburg, their practice field is a rocky mess of almost pure dirt that either raises clouds of dust, or transforms into a mass of mud and puddles. Still, it's worth it. When they step onto that field twenty-five embattled dykes are finally at home.
If you look, you'll find other dyke teams in Port Elizabeth and Capetown. On June 9, Spanish journalist Lali Cambra posted a blog entry in Madrid's daily newspaper El País about a match between Luleki Sizwe and Free Gender. The teams were from two black neighborhoods on the periphery of the city of Capetown. The field looked like an abandoned construction site, with bits of brick, rocks, and glass. Three players had to leave the game to get wounds treated. And by the time the match was over, everybody's legs were covered in blood. Nevertheless, in the match photos, both sides were grinning from ear to ear.
Fumeka Soldaat, the organizer of the Free Gender team told the journalist that playing soccer is one of the few times these young dykes can feel human. Young black lesbians often turn to drugs or prostitution when they're rejected and abused by their families, and can't find work. Soccer teams are hugely important to raise their self-esteem and give them a sense that they're not alone.
Still, she said, it's tough to arrange matches. There's the cost of uniforms and transportation. They have to come up with refs. And with complicated lives, it's hard for all the members to find the time to play. There's also the problem of finding any soccer field at all to host a dyke match, no matter how full of rocks and glass it is.
In particular, they have to work with local leaders to get assurances, "that there won't be homophobic displays or acts of violence." While Soldaat didn't seem thrilled by what it took to make the arrangements, she added it was a good tool for consciousness-raising, and "normalizing" lesbians in South African society.
As the World Cup continues, it's these dykes I'll be thinking about as I watch the soccer giants fall and unexpected heroes arise. Because if queers held a kind of World Cup for battling the homophobic odds with courage and grace, it would surely be South African dykes leading the pack into the final rounds.
Reminder: NYC Dyke March starts at Bryant Park, Saturday, June 26, 2010, 5 p.m.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Equality Is Never Enough
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's that time of year again, when stores get out their rainbow flags to pull in proud homo customers, and het celebrities indulge in playful homo kisses to make the front page news, or at least the entertainment section. In the U.S., the White House and Congress are even benevolently clearing the way for queers to serve openly in the military.
Despite the hoo-hah from the heteros, actual LGBT folks, especially dykes, seem as irrelevant as ever. We're more tolerated in society, but we're not encouraged to participate as ourselves. Even Rachel Maddow and Ellen, our most famous lesbians, are perceived through a lens of hetero amnesia that can only be treated by repeated comings out, though I suppose they could also keep adoring girls perpetually at their sides to remind the straight folk that, no, it's not just a phase.
Even that would have its pitfalls. While you almost never have lesbian characters in movies or in TV shows, and dykes are still a rarity in politics, the girl-on-girl kiss has become a parlor trick for everyone from Madonna to Sandra Bullock and Scarlett Johansson. Ha ha. Two chicks kissing. Cool. Gross. What a hoot. It's almost up there with girls eating cockroaches or sticking their hands in a bucket of worms on Fear Factor.
Two ordinary dykes kissing on the subway in Queens don't get nearly the same ratings. All over the country, if queers aren't actually hauled to exorcisms and electroshock therapy, we are still mostly ostracized, if not beaten and raped. In most states, adoption rights are under attack, even if study after study shows we're good parents (especially lesbians). And for every single state that's granted same-sex marriage rights, ten have snatched them away.
And while I suppose legal gains require it, I've begun to wonder if all that lobbying and begging and pleading and donating that the LGBT community is engaged in doesn't somehow increase homophobia, and have an unintended diminishing effect on our own self-respect.
Consider, for example, our supplication of the President and Congress to end DADT. What it boils down to are variations on these themes beginning with, "Oh please..." "If you'd be so kind as to..." and following up with "I swear there will be no problems. Look at the integration of African Americans into the armed forces -- there were plenty of critics but the military didn't collapse." "Remember how the difficult transition from an army of conscripts into one of volunteers went pretty smoothly despite all the railing and warnings." "We only want to serve."
Tactically speaking, honey may attract more flies than vinegar. But do we really need flies? Are we spiders to want to eat them? In moral terms, asking for rights, arguing for rights, attracting support instead of demanding it, gives the impression that we're children begging for something, not adult humans entitled to it. The only counterbalance to all that politicking would be a sustained activist movement demanding, not begging for rights. "We're equal or we're not." "You're bigots or you're not."
That was the joy of the Stonewall Riots, when impatient drag queens and dykes seized their own lives and took to the streets. Queers weren't asking for equality. They asserted it. They claimed it. They freed themselves. At least for a few hours. It's why the image took root, why it inspired LGBT people all over the world.
If you reconsider that image, asking for legal equality, even demanding it, is not enough. What we want is to BE equal. To BE free. And changing laws is only part of it, like changing the tenor of society. Especially right now when it seems the whole U.S. has the idea of freedom and equality upside down and backwards.
The growing right-wing which supposedly takes its inspiration from the Boston Tea Party seems largely to have missed the point of that action which, like Stonewall, was to declare a kind of independence, the irrelevance of colonial powers.
Instead, like most of the LGBT community, Tea Partiers seem fixated on the idea that rights and freedom reside almost exclusively in our relationships to government and society. But if seeing DC as the ultimate power-broker turns queers into hopeful lobbyists rather than queer liberationists, it just makes straight conservatives afraid. Because if rights in their fullest sense can really be given, they can also be taken away.
Imagining that external forces ostensibly control not just their tax situation and health care, but their very lives, conservatives, especially marginal whites, are evolving into increasingly hysterical tea partiers terrified their nice white heterosexual children will be enchained by roving mobs of queers, blacks, and illegal aliens.
As we enter the gay pride season, and head towards July 4, queers should lead the way, thinking less about rights and equality, and more about life, liberation, and why not? the pursuit of that chimera -- happiness.
It's that time of year again, when stores get out their rainbow flags to pull in proud homo customers, and het celebrities indulge in playful homo kisses to make the front page news, or at least the entertainment section. In the U.S., the White House and Congress are even benevolently clearing the way for queers to serve openly in the military.
Despite the hoo-hah from the heteros, actual LGBT folks, especially dykes, seem as irrelevant as ever. We're more tolerated in society, but we're not encouraged to participate as ourselves. Even Rachel Maddow and Ellen, our most famous lesbians, are perceived through a lens of hetero amnesia that can only be treated by repeated comings out, though I suppose they could also keep adoring girls perpetually at their sides to remind the straight folk that, no, it's not just a phase.
Even that would have its pitfalls. While you almost never have lesbian characters in movies or in TV shows, and dykes are still a rarity in politics, the girl-on-girl kiss has become a parlor trick for everyone from Madonna to Sandra Bullock and Scarlett Johansson. Ha ha. Two chicks kissing. Cool. Gross. What a hoot. It's almost up there with girls eating cockroaches or sticking their hands in a bucket of worms on Fear Factor.
Two ordinary dykes kissing on the subway in Queens don't get nearly the same ratings. All over the country, if queers aren't actually hauled to exorcisms and electroshock therapy, we are still mostly ostracized, if not beaten and raped. In most states, adoption rights are under attack, even if study after study shows we're good parents (especially lesbians). And for every single state that's granted same-sex marriage rights, ten have snatched them away.
And while I suppose legal gains require it, I've begun to wonder if all that lobbying and begging and pleading and donating that the LGBT community is engaged in doesn't somehow increase homophobia, and have an unintended diminishing effect on our own self-respect.
Consider, for example, our supplication of the President and Congress to end DADT. What it boils down to are variations on these themes beginning with, "Oh please..." "If you'd be so kind as to..." and following up with "I swear there will be no problems. Look at the integration of African Americans into the armed forces -- there were plenty of critics but the military didn't collapse." "Remember how the difficult transition from an army of conscripts into one of volunteers went pretty smoothly despite all the railing and warnings." "We only want to serve."
Tactically speaking, honey may attract more flies than vinegar. But do we really need flies? Are we spiders to want to eat them? In moral terms, asking for rights, arguing for rights, attracting support instead of demanding it, gives the impression that we're children begging for something, not adult humans entitled to it. The only counterbalance to all that politicking would be a sustained activist movement demanding, not begging for rights. "We're equal or we're not." "You're bigots or you're not."
That was the joy of the Stonewall Riots, when impatient drag queens and dykes seized their own lives and took to the streets. Queers weren't asking for equality. They asserted it. They claimed it. They freed themselves. At least for a few hours. It's why the image took root, why it inspired LGBT people all over the world.
If you reconsider that image, asking for legal equality, even demanding it, is not enough. What we want is to BE equal. To BE free. And changing laws is only part of it, like changing the tenor of society. Especially right now when it seems the whole U.S. has the idea of freedom and equality upside down and backwards.
The growing right-wing which supposedly takes its inspiration from the Boston Tea Party seems largely to have missed the point of that action which, like Stonewall, was to declare a kind of independence, the irrelevance of colonial powers.
Instead, like most of the LGBT community, Tea Partiers seem fixated on the idea that rights and freedom reside almost exclusively in our relationships to government and society. But if seeing DC as the ultimate power-broker turns queers into hopeful lobbyists rather than queer liberationists, it just makes straight conservatives afraid. Because if rights in their fullest sense can really be given, they can also be taken away.
Imagining that external forces ostensibly control not just their tax situation and health care, but their very lives, conservatives, especially marginal whites, are evolving into increasingly hysterical tea partiers terrified their nice white heterosexual children will be enchained by roving mobs of queers, blacks, and illegal aliens.
As we enter the gay pride season, and head towards July 4, queers should lead the way, thinking less about rights and equality, and more about life, liberation, and why not? the pursuit of that chimera -- happiness.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Amnesia on Memorial Day
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
"¿Caíste?" she asked. Have you fallen? I had a vision of myself on a re-enactment battlefield dramatically clutching my saber-wounded gut as I fell to the ground, though all my mother-in-law wants to know, really, is if I've finally gotten sick like my girlfriend.
Yep. Brought low by the enemy, bacteria, I've gone completely reptilian. There's no yesterday or tomorrow. The size of the world's shrunk to my aching bones and the phlegm pooling in my lungs. I see nothing past the limits of my own thick skin. Like Republican Governor Jan Brewer who's been feverishly signing bills shrinking Arizona's immense and rich cultural history into the size of an Anglo pea.
First it was the law indiscriminately attacking all Hispanics as potential illegals no matter if their family was in the region centuries before it was American territory, and the closest they came to fluency in Spanish was a mastery of the Taco Bell menu.
Now, she's banning English teachers with foreign accents, and squashing ethnic studies programs because they ostensibly "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."
Arizona state schools chief Tom Horne, and longtime advocate for the anti-ethnic studies bill, especially hates the Tucson Unified School District program which offers courses specializing in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies which he claims makes students resent a particular race. "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." The old South? I thought he was doing everything in his power to bring it back.
He's not entirely wrong to believe these kinds of programs can lead students to resentment. After all, "studies" of any kind just point to the bigotry that made them necessary in the first place, though eliminating them won't do much to nurture unity and respect. I'm pretty sure Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón didn't take even one course in Hispanic Studies before she fired into the U.S. Congress. The actual facts of American colonialism were enough. Likewise, Malcolm X didn't need to enroll at Stillman College to know black folk were getting screwed, and have an appropriately angry response.
As for me, I only have to spend an hour or two reading the latest example of straight people battering queers for sport, and erasing LGBT people and queer accomplishments from our mutual history to pass way beyond resentment to fury. Alone, the story of Harvey Milk could incite to violence. Perhaps queer studies should be banned as well.
For domestic tranquility, Arizona should follow the Texas example and purge curriculums of any hint that there was ever prejudice or inequalities in this country, and even that differences exist at all. Proposed revisions passed just a couple of days ago in Texas eliminate slavery from American history, rename the slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade," and establish that the civil war was purely about states' rights.
The black civil rights movement has been minimized, along with activists Susan B. Anthony and Upton Sinclair because if you erase militants, you erase the injustice that inspired them. And anybody following in their footsteps can be dismissed as liberal atheist nuts. "Slavery wasn't that bad or widespread" you could say. Or "Women were magnanimously given the vote when they were ready for it."
With all that going into the crapper, what is it Texans want more of? Davy Crockett, apparently. The King of Tennessee's Wild Frontier. At least until he bit the dust at the Alamo when Mexico was trying to reclaim territory that had just been theirs.
Good luck with that, is all I can say to the great states of Texas and Arizona. You can remember the Alamo all you want, but this victorious effort to shrink culture, and erase histories shaped by Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans into something determined almost solely by whites is more than anything a sign of your imminent demise, the myopia of sickness that in some ways harms white students most of all. Because in this modern world in which diversity and intellectual flexibility is the name of the game, they're the least likely to know there are multiple histories out there, whether the school board admits it or not.
As we prepare to celebrate Memorial Day, remembering dead patriots, and lost relatives, perhaps we should mourn memory itself which in growing expanses of our country has been distorted into a game of wishful thinking and intentional amnesia. If historians are increasingly the heroes in the battlegrounds for civil rights, we will have to accept that the schoolyard is as important as the streets or our courts.
"¿Caíste?" she asked. Have you fallen? I had a vision of myself on a re-enactment battlefield dramatically clutching my saber-wounded gut as I fell to the ground, though all my mother-in-law wants to know, really, is if I've finally gotten sick like my girlfriend.
Yep. Brought low by the enemy, bacteria, I've gone completely reptilian. There's no yesterday or tomorrow. The size of the world's shrunk to my aching bones and the phlegm pooling in my lungs. I see nothing past the limits of my own thick skin. Like Republican Governor Jan Brewer who's been feverishly signing bills shrinking Arizona's immense and rich cultural history into the size of an Anglo pea.
First it was the law indiscriminately attacking all Hispanics as potential illegals no matter if their family was in the region centuries before it was American territory, and the closest they came to fluency in Spanish was a mastery of the Taco Bell menu.
Now, she's banning English teachers with foreign accents, and squashing ethnic studies programs because they ostensibly "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."
Arizona state schools chief Tom Horne, and longtime advocate for the anti-ethnic studies bill, especially hates the Tucson Unified School District program which offers courses specializing in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies which he claims makes students resent a particular race. "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." The old South? I thought he was doing everything in his power to bring it back.
He's not entirely wrong to believe these kinds of programs can lead students to resentment. After all, "studies" of any kind just point to the bigotry that made them necessary in the first place, though eliminating them won't do much to nurture unity and respect. I'm pretty sure Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón didn't take even one course in Hispanic Studies before she fired into the U.S. Congress. The actual facts of American colonialism were enough. Likewise, Malcolm X didn't need to enroll at Stillman College to know black folk were getting screwed, and have an appropriately angry response.
As for me, I only have to spend an hour or two reading the latest example of straight people battering queers for sport, and erasing LGBT people and queer accomplishments from our mutual history to pass way beyond resentment to fury. Alone, the story of Harvey Milk could incite to violence. Perhaps queer studies should be banned as well.
For domestic tranquility, Arizona should follow the Texas example and purge curriculums of any hint that there was ever prejudice or inequalities in this country, and even that differences exist at all. Proposed revisions passed just a couple of days ago in Texas eliminate slavery from American history, rename the slave trade the "Atlantic triangular trade," and establish that the civil war was purely about states' rights.
The black civil rights movement has been minimized, along with activists Susan B. Anthony and Upton Sinclair because if you erase militants, you erase the injustice that inspired them. And anybody following in their footsteps can be dismissed as liberal atheist nuts. "Slavery wasn't that bad or widespread" you could say. Or "Women were magnanimously given the vote when they were ready for it."
With all that going into the crapper, what is it Texans want more of? Davy Crockett, apparently. The King of Tennessee's Wild Frontier. At least until he bit the dust at the Alamo when Mexico was trying to reclaim territory that had just been theirs.
Good luck with that, is all I can say to the great states of Texas and Arizona. You can remember the Alamo all you want, but this victorious effort to shrink culture, and erase histories shaped by Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans into something determined almost solely by whites is more than anything a sign of your imminent demise, the myopia of sickness that in some ways harms white students most of all. Because in this modern world in which diversity and intellectual flexibility is the name of the game, they're the least likely to know there are multiple histories out there, whether the school board admits it or not.
As we prepare to celebrate Memorial Day, remembering dead patriots, and lost relatives, perhaps we should mourn memory itself which in growing expanses of our country has been distorted into a game of wishful thinking and intentional amnesia. If historians are increasingly the heroes in the battlegrounds for civil rights, we will have to accept that the schoolyard is as important as the streets or our courts.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
A Cuban Primer for Queers
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's official. Cuba's taken a great leap forward against anti-gay hate. For the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) they're gonna screen "Aimée and Jaguar," "Querelle," and "Milk" with Sean Penn invited to the island as a guest of honor. The organizer is the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), led by heterosexual Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of current Cuban ruler Raúl Castro.
If you believe a week of state-sanctioned queer events spells the end of homophobia, you ought to give the Tea Party folks a racism pass. At a recent rally in Texas their speakers included a black doctor, and Hispanic and Vietnamese immigrants. Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times it seemed "like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad," but heck, at least they came up with some real minorities, not just hets that play fags on the silver screen.
Having Mariela Castro as the only recognizable name in Cuba fighting for queer rights is like having, oh, Lynne Cheney, as the only advocate for racial justice in the United States. If none of us are visible in Cuba, it's because actual queers are confined to jail as dissidents every time we try to organize for ourselves. Like anybody else. Which is perhaps the only real sign of our equality under the nonexistent rule of law.
Nevertheless, the global gay left continues to guard the Cuban regime as some kind of talisman of progressive hope, parroting Mariela Castro's press conferences, and publishing CENESEX's official IDAHO program almost in its entirety. Who cares that the event isn't organized by queers, or that participants in the panels will surely be screened for their politics? Nobody. Though one queer blogger did interrupt his celebration of Cuban wonderfulness to acknowledge, "things remain far from perfect and there is reason to believe that the rights of LGBT political dissenters in the island are still being curtailed." I don't even know where to start with that.
To be fair, some queer-related work is currently being done by academics in Cuba. But you have to ask just who has access to it. A few years ago, I was in Havana right before a major international conference on queer studies was due to take place, and none of the several dozen lesbians and gay men I spoke to had heard about the event. Now, countries offering IDAHO events are encouraged to broadcast some on the web, but with the internet blocked in Cuba, you can again forget access for queers there.
It is progress, I suppose, that we're not getting sent to internment camps for being queer. Instead, a gay man might be jailed for pre-criminal "dangerousness" or a host of other things. And while planners of a gay beauty pageant will still have state security pounding on their doors, they won't know if they're being arrested for their sexual identity, for organizing something not sanctioned by the ferociously paternal state, or because the state security forces want to steal their computers.
The last year in Cuba has been marked by growing scandals of government corruption and graft with millions being stashed in the traditional overseas bank accounts. The most horrifying example, though, is of the Mazorra psychiatric hospital where the employees were systematically stealing and reselling the patients' food. When the temperature dropped in February, as many as thirty of their emaciated victims froze to death. There was such an uproar when the news filtered out, even the government had to admit it.
Given that the regime is also getting slammed left and right for their record on human rights, it seems reasonable to think Cuba's IDAHO activities are almost purely an attempt to court good press. And why not? A totalitarian state can manufacture signs of progress as easily as commanding hate.
And they definitely need to turn things around. In early February, jailed Afro-Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike demanding better conditions for political prisoners. Guillermo Fariñas, a dissident journalist of color, immediately began his own hunger strike that will continue until he dies, or dissidents are freed. Before that, a group of African American intellectuals condemned Cuba for preserving a lily white regime and indulging racism -- despite it's declared end -- which pervades everything from racial profiling by cops to the "impromptu" mobs that attack the protesting "Damas de Blanco" as "ungrateful niggers" for demanding the release of their dissident husbands.
Queers are in the same Cuban boat. Despite current proclamations to the contrary, you just don't get real social change without activists, without visibility, without history, without a modicum of free speech. You have none of that in Cuba where hate remains the tool of choice to assemble mobs, and Fidel, like a holocaust denier, is still assuring his biographers that the gay internment camps that led to suicides, murders, and massive, terrified flight, are just imperialist lies.
For more information, I recommend the New York Book Review's Cuba: A Way Forward.
It's official. Cuba's taken a great leap forward against anti-gay hate. For the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) they're gonna screen "Aimée and Jaguar," "Querelle," and "Milk" with Sean Penn invited to the island as a guest of honor. The organizer is the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), led by heterosexual Mariela Castro Espín, daughter of current Cuban ruler Raúl Castro.
If you believe a week of state-sanctioned queer events spells the end of homophobia, you ought to give the Tea Party folks a racism pass. At a recent rally in Texas their speakers included a black doctor, and Hispanic and Vietnamese immigrants. Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times it seemed "like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad," but heck, at least they came up with some real minorities, not just hets that play fags on the silver screen.
Having Mariela Castro as the only recognizable name in Cuba fighting for queer rights is like having, oh, Lynne Cheney, as the only advocate for racial justice in the United States. If none of us are visible in Cuba, it's because actual queers are confined to jail as dissidents every time we try to organize for ourselves. Like anybody else. Which is perhaps the only real sign of our equality under the nonexistent rule of law.
Nevertheless, the global gay left continues to guard the Cuban regime as some kind of talisman of progressive hope, parroting Mariela Castro's press conferences, and publishing CENESEX's official IDAHO program almost in its entirety. Who cares that the event isn't organized by queers, or that participants in the panels will surely be screened for their politics? Nobody. Though one queer blogger did interrupt his celebration of Cuban wonderfulness to acknowledge, "things remain far from perfect and there is reason to believe that the rights of LGBT political dissenters in the island are still being curtailed." I don't even know where to start with that.
To be fair, some queer-related work is currently being done by academics in Cuba. But you have to ask just who has access to it. A few years ago, I was in Havana right before a major international conference on queer studies was due to take place, and none of the several dozen lesbians and gay men I spoke to had heard about the event. Now, countries offering IDAHO events are encouraged to broadcast some on the web, but with the internet blocked in Cuba, you can again forget access for queers there.
It is progress, I suppose, that we're not getting sent to internment camps for being queer. Instead, a gay man might be jailed for pre-criminal "dangerousness" or a host of other things. And while planners of a gay beauty pageant will still have state security pounding on their doors, they won't know if they're being arrested for their sexual identity, for organizing something not sanctioned by the ferociously paternal state, or because the state security forces want to steal their computers.
The last year in Cuba has been marked by growing scandals of government corruption and graft with millions being stashed in the traditional overseas bank accounts. The most horrifying example, though, is of the Mazorra psychiatric hospital where the employees were systematically stealing and reselling the patients' food. When the temperature dropped in February, as many as thirty of their emaciated victims froze to death. There was such an uproar when the news filtered out, even the government had to admit it.
Given that the regime is also getting slammed left and right for their record on human rights, it seems reasonable to think Cuba's IDAHO activities are almost purely an attempt to court good press. And why not? A totalitarian state can manufacture signs of progress as easily as commanding hate.
And they definitely need to turn things around. In early February, jailed Afro-Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike demanding better conditions for political prisoners. Guillermo Fariñas, a dissident journalist of color, immediately began his own hunger strike that will continue until he dies, or dissidents are freed. Before that, a group of African American intellectuals condemned Cuba for preserving a lily white regime and indulging racism -- despite it's declared end -- which pervades everything from racial profiling by cops to the "impromptu" mobs that attack the protesting "Damas de Blanco" as "ungrateful niggers" for demanding the release of their dissident husbands.
Queers are in the same Cuban boat. Despite current proclamations to the contrary, you just don't get real social change without activists, without visibility, without history, without a modicum of free speech. You have none of that in Cuba where hate remains the tool of choice to assemble mobs, and Fidel, like a holocaust denier, is still assuring his biographers that the gay internment camps that led to suicides, murders, and massive, terrified flight, are just imperialist lies.
For more information, I recommend the New York Book Review's Cuba: A Way Forward.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Foreign Like Me
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I was a foreigner for a couple of years in France, and it's not so bad as long as you have a proper visitor's visa. In exchange for fistfuls of documents, promises, little tiny photos and a check, the state gives you a laminated ID card, temporary status, and warnings they'll throw you out on your ear if you try to get a job, abuse their health services or just get on their nerves.
I didn't mind. It makes a difference knowing what the rules are, even if you skirt the edge doing critical reporting on things like demos of undocumented workers. I didn't have a big press agency behind me and every time I stepped out the door with a camera I wondered what would happen if the cops got pissed at me, and if they could put me on the next plane like the "sans papiers," no appeal?
Once the papers are taken care of, it's all about the culture. When Americans (of all races) make a mistake with language or customs the French brush it off with the phrase, "She's a foreigner after all. And what a cute accent." We can wear bright pink bomber hats with impunity. Denim head to toe. Speak too loudly, blurt out what we think about politics and be forgiven.
Of course the condescension can be annoying, especially on those rare occasions it bleeds over into hate. "Fucking dyke foreigner, go back where you came from." But I condescend back, so it's not particularly damaging. I am, in fact, a foreigner. And a dyke. The problem is when I feel foreign at home in America.
Queer in the land of straights, I mangle the customs, clothes, language, and expectations. But it's not cute there. I am a kind of traitor. Three years old, I was already struggling against scratchy tights. I didn't understand skirts, or later the right words to smooth over those heterosexual encounters. I held a coffee cup wrong. Brought home girls. Was banished, temporarily, by a mother who didn't want to hear from me until I was the girl God wanted me to be.
It wasn't only some moral disgust. But a sense of the foreign. I came not just from another country, but another planet, even. A foreigner like me has to have a lot of nerve to walk the streets with impunity, or demand respect, much less equality under the law, like the right to marry with all its tax-breaks and immigration benefits awarded to other citizens.
This homophobia as xenophobia expresses itself literally in places like Iran, Zimbabwe, or Jamaica, where bigots proclaim that homosexuality itself is an import from the foreign and decadent West, and go after their undocumented aliens with witch hunts, nooses and machetes.
In decadent France -- as in decadent America -- far too many families expel cuckoo children dropped in their hetero nests until there are flocks of our young on the street. Lately gay-bashers have been hunting in the Marais, a gay neighborhood in Paris. On St. Valentine's Day right-wing Catholic extremists attacked lesbian and gay activists trying to hold a kiss-in at the public plaza in front of Notre Dame. An antiviolence project was recently vandalized.
Again in Paris, but in October 2008, the young transman Shyne was brutally beaten by at least six aggressors after he was identified as having participated in a trans march the day before. Earlier that year, two young dykes were forced to flee the town of Segré in Northwestern France when they were harassed by a group of twenty young men who even fired blank bullets at them.
In 2009, Luc Amblard and Guy Bordenave, two entrepreneurs in the little town of Couy in the center of France were kidnapped, and killed. The trial is just starting for their murderers and horrific details were finally released that the two were buried alive -- tied up, and facing each other.
We are among the last acceptable victims, though in the US right now, actual "illegal aliens" are coming in at a close second. The new immigration enforcement law signed in Arizona last Friday, legitimizes racial profiling to identify them there, and has the effect of forcing Latino citizens to carry their papers everywhere they go, or end up on the wrong side of the border.
At least the "illegals" know what they risk -- the ruin of a carefully constructed life, the destruction of families. It may even cost them their lives depending on the state of their homelands. But they came willing to bear that sometimes gut-wrenching, sometimes low-grade fear because it was worth the chance.
It's a different matter to be considered foreign on your own patch and targeted for violence and expulsion. How do you stand that perpetual vertigo of being alien at home, either as queers or Latinos? The fear and casual misunderstandings? The constant battles? How do you plant your flag? How do you go home?
I was a foreigner for a couple of years in France, and it's not so bad as long as you have a proper visitor's visa. In exchange for fistfuls of documents, promises, little tiny photos and a check, the state gives you a laminated ID card, temporary status, and warnings they'll throw you out on your ear if you try to get a job, abuse their health services or just get on their nerves.
I didn't mind. It makes a difference knowing what the rules are, even if you skirt the edge doing critical reporting on things like demos of undocumented workers. I didn't have a big press agency behind me and every time I stepped out the door with a camera I wondered what would happen if the cops got pissed at me, and if they could put me on the next plane like the "sans papiers," no appeal?
Once the papers are taken care of, it's all about the culture. When Americans (of all races) make a mistake with language or customs the French brush it off with the phrase, "She's a foreigner after all. And what a cute accent." We can wear bright pink bomber hats with impunity. Denim head to toe. Speak too loudly, blurt out what we think about politics and be forgiven.
Of course the condescension can be annoying, especially on those rare occasions it bleeds over into hate. "Fucking dyke foreigner, go back where you came from." But I condescend back, so it's not particularly damaging. I am, in fact, a foreigner. And a dyke. The problem is when I feel foreign at home in America.
Queer in the land of straights, I mangle the customs, clothes, language, and expectations. But it's not cute there. I am a kind of traitor. Three years old, I was already struggling against scratchy tights. I didn't understand skirts, or later the right words to smooth over those heterosexual encounters. I held a coffee cup wrong. Brought home girls. Was banished, temporarily, by a mother who didn't want to hear from me until I was the girl God wanted me to be.
It wasn't only some moral disgust. But a sense of the foreign. I came not just from another country, but another planet, even. A foreigner like me has to have a lot of nerve to walk the streets with impunity, or demand respect, much less equality under the law, like the right to marry with all its tax-breaks and immigration benefits awarded to other citizens.
This homophobia as xenophobia expresses itself literally in places like Iran, Zimbabwe, or Jamaica, where bigots proclaim that homosexuality itself is an import from the foreign and decadent West, and go after their undocumented aliens with witch hunts, nooses and machetes.
In decadent France -- as in decadent America -- far too many families expel cuckoo children dropped in their hetero nests until there are flocks of our young on the street. Lately gay-bashers have been hunting in the Marais, a gay neighborhood in Paris. On St. Valentine's Day right-wing Catholic extremists attacked lesbian and gay activists trying to hold a kiss-in at the public plaza in front of Notre Dame. An antiviolence project was recently vandalized.
Again in Paris, but in October 2008, the young transman Shyne was brutally beaten by at least six aggressors after he was identified as having participated in a trans march the day before. Earlier that year, two young dykes were forced to flee the town of Segré in Northwestern France when they were harassed by a group of twenty young men who even fired blank bullets at them.
In 2009, Luc Amblard and Guy Bordenave, two entrepreneurs in the little town of Couy in the center of France were kidnapped, and killed. The trial is just starting for their murderers and horrific details were finally released that the two were buried alive -- tied up, and facing each other.
We are among the last acceptable victims, though in the US right now, actual "illegal aliens" are coming in at a close second. The new immigration enforcement law signed in Arizona last Friday, legitimizes racial profiling to identify them there, and has the effect of forcing Latino citizens to carry their papers everywhere they go, or end up on the wrong side of the border.
At least the "illegals" know what they risk -- the ruin of a carefully constructed life, the destruction of families. It may even cost them their lives depending on the state of their homelands. But they came willing to bear that sometimes gut-wrenching, sometimes low-grade fear because it was worth the chance.
It's a different matter to be considered foreign on your own patch and targeted for violence and expulsion. How do you stand that perpetual vertigo of being alien at home, either as queers or Latinos? The fear and casual misunderstandings? The constant battles? How do you plant your flag? How do you go home?
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Stalking Catherine Deneuve
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I meant to stalk Catherine Deneuve. I really did. She apparently lives at Place Saint Sulpice which is only a fifteen minute walk away. And it has plenty of benches for the lazy stalker, though you'd be advised to bring an umbrella, not so much for the rain but for the lurking pigeons.
Unfortunately, I've run out of time. I'd remember, then forget. Or have something else to do. Laundry doesn't wash itself. Groceries have to be bought. Paris streets demand to be walked, columns to be written. And in any event, just as I'm about to leave the country, she has begun to stalk me.
A couple of months ago she turned up in a dream. I've read stories of how she'd sued insulting journalists, and there was that time she sued the lesbian magazine Deneuve until they were forced to change their name to Curve. But in my dream she was quite nice.
She complimented me on my purple Wellies cast just for me in textured rubber, while I waxed eloquent about her pants made of cowhide that still had the hairs attached yet were nevertheless as supple and buttery as the finest Italian leather. They made an interesting contrast to her silky blouse that itself was composed of two or three green Indian prints.
Last night, Catherine appeared again, thinner than I remembered and perhaps angry I'd surfed past her Mississippi Mermaid, also starring that other great actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who rose to fame in the New Wave of French cinema and then sank into playing less exalted versions of the same gangsters, cops and conmen.
I can't remember much of the dream except that I put my hand on the ribs between her breasts and felt her heart beating madly as a bird. It wasn't sexy so much as a direct means of communication erasing the usual celluloid between us.
The first time I remember seeing her was in a video of the Jacques Demy musical, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It became my first favorite film. She was so strangely, untouchably beautiful. She sang and danced in the rain, not cheerfully, but while suffering in a way not at all American. That was around 1995. A few years later I saw the film 8 Women and was surprised at all the years she'd aged in between, until I remembered I saw the Umbrellas of Cherbourg long after it was made.
I still find her sexy. Maybe more than when she was young and terrifying. She still has that presence. She can still act. Seriously. I saw a character of hers once sink into a confusion of fear, self-pity, disgust, and somehow emerge with a wimpy determination. A tour de force that took a couple of seconds. She also has those transcendent moments where she puts forth the purely and nakedly beating heart that I felt between my fingers just last night.
Which is what really attracts me. How her communication is almost perfect, at least on the screen. I wish I could pull off the same in my metier. Especially when it comes to France. I had this idea when I came here that I'd sometimes write about what it was like to be an immigrant. The problem is that my immigrant-lite experience has created a growing sense of distance between worlds and words that has made it near impossible to describe.
You say tomato, I say tomate. You say potato, I say pomme de terre. And beyond the artifice of language, there's our personal lexicons. Paris, what does it mean to you? Champagne every day for breakfast? Cigarettes and Sartre for lunch? Bigots preventing those nice Muslim women from wearing their scarves? Communist medicine? And don't even start with that double-edged word, "American." Words conjure more words, images from god knows where. So much depends on shared context.
I should have known better. Already, when I moved from Kentucky to New York, there were regular letters and annual visits at first, then nothing. Not just because I came out as a lesbian (mother's translation: sinner ready to burn in hell), but because my life diverged further and further both from the worlds my family knew and even from the images they'd seen on the movie screen.
Every joke had to be explained, every little story became an epic because there were no reference points in common with their rural-rooted, suburban, church-going lives or with anybody's Mean Streets. I didn't know where to start. And ended with silence -- the flip side of all the shouting that dominates American politics now.
What's left but novels, films, and Catherine Deneuve? Self-contained, they build up context frame by frame, word by word until you feel the human heart beating underneath.
I meant to stalk Catherine Deneuve. I really did. She apparently lives at Place Saint Sulpice which is only a fifteen minute walk away. And it has plenty of benches for the lazy stalker, though you'd be advised to bring an umbrella, not so much for the rain but for the lurking pigeons.
Unfortunately, I've run out of time. I'd remember, then forget. Or have something else to do. Laundry doesn't wash itself. Groceries have to be bought. Paris streets demand to be walked, columns to be written. And in any event, just as I'm about to leave the country, she has begun to stalk me.
A couple of months ago she turned up in a dream. I've read stories of how she'd sued insulting journalists, and there was that time she sued the lesbian magazine Deneuve until they were forced to change their name to Curve. But in my dream she was quite nice.
She complimented me on my purple Wellies cast just for me in textured rubber, while I waxed eloquent about her pants made of cowhide that still had the hairs attached yet were nevertheless as supple and buttery as the finest Italian leather. They made an interesting contrast to her silky blouse that itself was composed of two or three green Indian prints.
Last night, Catherine appeared again, thinner than I remembered and perhaps angry I'd surfed past her Mississippi Mermaid, also starring that other great actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who rose to fame in the New Wave of French cinema and then sank into playing less exalted versions of the same gangsters, cops and conmen.
I can't remember much of the dream except that I put my hand on the ribs between her breasts and felt her heart beating madly as a bird. It wasn't sexy so much as a direct means of communication erasing the usual celluloid between us.
The first time I remember seeing her was in a video of the Jacques Demy musical, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It became my first favorite film. She was so strangely, untouchably beautiful. She sang and danced in the rain, not cheerfully, but while suffering in a way not at all American. That was around 1995. A few years later I saw the film 8 Women and was surprised at all the years she'd aged in between, until I remembered I saw the Umbrellas of Cherbourg long after it was made.
I still find her sexy. Maybe more than when she was young and terrifying. She still has that presence. She can still act. Seriously. I saw a character of hers once sink into a confusion of fear, self-pity, disgust, and somehow emerge with a wimpy determination. A tour de force that took a couple of seconds. She also has those transcendent moments where she puts forth the purely and nakedly beating heart that I felt between my fingers just last night.
Which is what really attracts me. How her communication is almost perfect, at least on the screen. I wish I could pull off the same in my metier. Especially when it comes to France. I had this idea when I came here that I'd sometimes write about what it was like to be an immigrant. The problem is that my immigrant-lite experience has created a growing sense of distance between worlds and words that has made it near impossible to describe.
You say tomato, I say tomate. You say potato, I say pomme de terre. And beyond the artifice of language, there's our personal lexicons. Paris, what does it mean to you? Champagne every day for breakfast? Cigarettes and Sartre for lunch? Bigots preventing those nice Muslim women from wearing their scarves? Communist medicine? And don't even start with that double-edged word, "American." Words conjure more words, images from god knows where. So much depends on shared context.
I should have known better. Already, when I moved from Kentucky to New York, there were regular letters and annual visits at first, then nothing. Not just because I came out as a lesbian (mother's translation: sinner ready to burn in hell), but because my life diverged further and further both from the worlds my family knew and even from the images they'd seen on the movie screen.
Every joke had to be explained, every little story became an epic because there were no reference points in common with their rural-rooted, suburban, church-going lives or with anybody's Mean Streets. I didn't know where to start. And ended with silence -- the flip side of all the shouting that dominates American politics now.
What's left but novels, films, and Catherine Deneuve? Self-contained, they build up context frame by frame, word by word until you feel the human heart beating underneath.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Health Care, Black Holes and Baby Dykes
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The world might be coming to an end. Not just because the Large Hadron Collider is back in action, or was, accelerating particles in 17 miles of track and potentially generating teensy-weensy black holes capable of swallowing up the earth in a single gulp, but because Obama actually got that health care reform bill passed.
I'd jump up and down and throw a party except I'm still a little miffed at whoever's bright idea it was to get fence-sitting Democrats on board by promising an Executive Order banning federal funding of abortion health care services. Keep the pompoms in the closet when poor women are getting screwed again.
Then there's the ongoing stranglehold of insurance companies brought in to lobby from the very start behind closed White House doors. I haven't forgotten that either. But as they say, better something than nothing in terms of health reform. It's a start. Things can be improved later. Though this Pablum would be considerably more believable if the Democrats had a backbone made of steel, rather than Silly Putty.
If I'm satisfied at all it's because a defeat would have given the Tea Party folks a whomping burst of momentum and shoved the Obama administration even further into the quicksand of caution and bipartisanship (cowardice, endless concessions) pretty much dooming to failure all his promises of change. I never really believed them, but what the heck? I can hope with the best of them.
What has impressed me lately is how in the midst of the hoo-ha about health care reform, the rest of the Obama administration managed to function at all. There were two wars to think about, Israel to chide, and they actually negotiated a treaty with Russia to reduce nukes. Obama will probably face much bigger hurdles than the ex-commies when it comes to getting the treaty approved. Right-wing Democrats and Republican politicians will no doubt continue to say No to everything like a bunch of terrible two-year-olds with a load in their pants.
I was also surprised to see Obama make a foray to Afghanistan to twist Hamid Karzai's arm in person. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico with half the U.S. government in tow to show a commitment to a state that's been brought practically to its knees by the drug wars. So yes, I'm glad health care reform passed, giving a little oomph to Obama instead of the hateful Tea Party mob, and showing folks his administration can take care of business. If they want to. Or if they're forced into a corner where they have to bare their little rat teeth.
Which raises the question of just what exactly queers would have to do to see some progress on any federal front like Don't Ask Don't Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act. Have a cappuccino or maybe Molotov cocktail party? Stage demonstrations where we foam from the mouth and all behave badly?
Our national organizations don't seem to cut it, especially compared to individual baby dykes in southern states. In Alabama in 2009, Tharptown High School student Cynthia Stewart successfully fought to bring her girlfriend to prom. The school initially decided to cancel its event, but reversed their decision after Stewart's case made headlines.
Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi followed suit, canceling its prom rather than allowing Constance McMillen to wear a tuxedo and arrive with her girlfriend, Ashli Pass, who also goes to Itawamba. Just afterwards McMillen told the Clarion-Ledger: "That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one." If only they would do that with marriage.
McMillen was tempted not to return to school because she was afraid everyone was going to hate her, but her family came through. "My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I am still proud of who I am. I want other kids to know that it's not right for schools to do that."
She went to court backed by the ACLU, and last week federal Judge Glen H. Davidson ruled that McMillen’s constitutional rights had been violated. He didn't force the school to hold a prom because parents are organizing one everyone can attend.
While she probably would have preferred a quicker resolution, it's been great seeing McMillen appear in photos with her family and girlfriend. The new faces of lesbian visibility are mighty cute. And if proms are what spur change in the South, I say more power to them.
It's not abstractions like equal rights that get under the skin of most people and force them to act. It's wanting to be like everybody else. Go to proms, get married. There's room for a more radical agenda, but interesting things often start small. With random collisions. Then big bangs.
The world might be coming to an end. Not just because the Large Hadron Collider is back in action, or was, accelerating particles in 17 miles of track and potentially generating teensy-weensy black holes capable of swallowing up the earth in a single gulp, but because Obama actually got that health care reform bill passed.
I'd jump up and down and throw a party except I'm still a little miffed at whoever's bright idea it was to get fence-sitting Democrats on board by promising an Executive Order banning federal funding of abortion health care services. Keep the pompoms in the closet when poor women are getting screwed again.
Then there's the ongoing stranglehold of insurance companies brought in to lobby from the very start behind closed White House doors. I haven't forgotten that either. But as they say, better something than nothing in terms of health reform. It's a start. Things can be improved later. Though this Pablum would be considerably more believable if the Democrats had a backbone made of steel, rather than Silly Putty.
If I'm satisfied at all it's because a defeat would have given the Tea Party folks a whomping burst of momentum and shoved the Obama administration even further into the quicksand of caution and bipartisanship (cowardice, endless concessions) pretty much dooming to failure all his promises of change. I never really believed them, but what the heck? I can hope with the best of them.
What has impressed me lately is how in the midst of the hoo-ha about health care reform, the rest of the Obama administration managed to function at all. There were two wars to think about, Israel to chide, and they actually negotiated a treaty with Russia to reduce nukes. Obama will probably face much bigger hurdles than the ex-commies when it comes to getting the treaty approved. Right-wing Democrats and Republican politicians will no doubt continue to say No to everything like a bunch of terrible two-year-olds with a load in their pants.
I was also surprised to see Obama make a foray to Afghanistan to twist Hamid Karzai's arm in person. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton visited Mexico with half the U.S. government in tow to show a commitment to a state that's been brought practically to its knees by the drug wars. So yes, I'm glad health care reform passed, giving a little oomph to Obama instead of the hateful Tea Party mob, and showing folks his administration can take care of business. If they want to. Or if they're forced into a corner where they have to bare their little rat teeth.
Which raises the question of just what exactly queers would have to do to see some progress on any federal front like Don't Ask Don't Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act. Have a cappuccino or maybe Molotov cocktail party? Stage demonstrations where we foam from the mouth and all behave badly?
Our national organizations don't seem to cut it, especially compared to individual baby dykes in southern states. In Alabama in 2009, Tharptown High School student Cynthia Stewart successfully fought to bring her girlfriend to prom. The school initially decided to cancel its event, but reversed their decision after Stewart's case made headlines.
Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi followed suit, canceling its prom rather than allowing Constance McMillen to wear a tuxedo and arrive with her girlfriend, Ashli Pass, who also goes to Itawamba. Just afterwards McMillen told the Clarion-Ledger: "That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one." If only they would do that with marriage.
McMillen was tempted not to return to school because she was afraid everyone was going to hate her, but her family came through. "My daddy told me that I needed to show them that I am still proud of who I am. I want other kids to know that it's not right for schools to do that."
She went to court backed by the ACLU, and last week federal Judge Glen H. Davidson ruled that McMillen’s constitutional rights had been violated. He didn't force the school to hold a prom because parents are organizing one everyone can attend.
While she probably would have preferred a quicker resolution, it's been great seeing McMillen appear in photos with her family and girlfriend. The new faces of lesbian visibility are mighty cute. And if proms are what spur change in the South, I say more power to them.
It's not abstractions like equal rights that get under the skin of most people and force them to act. It's wanting to be like everybody else. Go to proms, get married. There's room for a more radical agenda, but interesting things often start small. With random collisions. Then big bangs.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Dump Jefferson, That'll Show 'Em
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Americans never let a good fact get in the way of imagining a glorious past and even brighter future. I expect a remake of "Annie" any day now announcing that the sun will come out tomorrow, with the next chairman of the Fed telling Americans to bet their bottom dollar on it, buy a nice new car and drive off into the sunset.
France, by comparison, seems increasingly caught in a gloomy web of truth and sorrow that even a cheerful tune won't chase away. When study after study confirms an overheating planet, and weirding weather is embodied in a flooded Brittany coast and snowy southwest, the French tend to bend under the weight of science, and acknowledge something must be done -- as long as it doesn't cut too deeply into corporate profit margins or increase government debt.
The legacies of colonialism and religious wars are likewise dissected at length, along with tyrants from Torquemada to Hitler that can not be erased from history, at least not any time soon. In Paris, you can find plaques on elementary schools testifying "Thirteen Jewish students from this school died in concentration camps." "In this school, twenty-nine children were sent to the camps." Every month there's another made-for-TV movie set in occupied France.
Instead of imaging themselves created in the image of God, the French continue to cast a skeptical eye at human behavior and accept that homo not so sapiens evolved from apes. When Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race writer of the Three Musketeers (1844) had to respond to racist taunts, he replied, "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."
This doesn't mean Europe is perfect. You pretty much get the picture when you know that a French director recently gave the extremely white Gérard Depardieu a curly wig and brown make-up so he could play Dumas in a movie. Still, that's film.
In Texas, the State Board of Education has decided that reality itself is fluid, and above all as word-based as the fundamentalist religion that its stalwarts practice. Control the textbooks, get something down in paper and ink, or scratched into stone on a deserted mountaintop and there's a magical transformation of history. Darwin really is a liar and idiot, the British were the architects of American slavery, and white Americans were the driving forces of the African American civil rights movement.
Erase a few names here and there, and Texas can be changed from story of Native Americans and Spanish colonists into the single-handed creation of Anglo-Americans like Sam Austin, in which the Indians were mere transients and the Spanish didn't contribute so much as one pinky finger until their descendants saw how good the whites had it and immigrated from Mexico bringing fajitas, instant taco mix, and Salma Hayek.
Get out your Wite-Out, and the deist founders of the United States become bible-thumping Christians. Change a bit more and the nefarious Thomas Jefferson who wrote extensively about the Enlightenment and the "separation between church and state" no longer can be considered a real influence on revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, though he lived in France for years as ambassador of the young United States.
Texans have begun to revolt under this tyranny of idiocy. They've refused to re-elect some of the school board members, and protested appointments. Unfortunately, committee replacements can be almost as bad. One of their additions last spring was Peter Marshall, a Yankee preacher who likes to explain natural disasters from California wildfires to Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment for tolerating queers.
Delete, erase, proclaim.
It's not the first time Thomas Jefferson has been given the boot. I went to Transylvania University in Kentucky and was lucky enough to be among the twenty or so students that were awarded Thomas Jefferson scholarships. Before I left, the grant named for this former president, architect, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, yes, and slaveholder, was renamed for William T. Young, the famous (and rich) horse breeder and peanut butter manufacturer.
I couldn't help feeling diminished. There was a brief revolt of "TJ" scholars, but apparently the name was changed in gratitude for continuing gifts. It was sold, in other words, and the dough was more important than the name. Now, young scholars, instead of aspiring, however imperfectly, to equality, liberty and happiness, and an enlightened world guided by reason, can aspire to... what? Sandwich fillings and the inbreeding Kentuckians are already accused of, whether man or beast?
I shouldn't worry. After all, The sun'll come out tomorrow. Ya just gotta hang on come what may. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
Americans never let a good fact get in the way of imagining a glorious past and even brighter future. I expect a remake of "Annie" any day now announcing that the sun will come out tomorrow, with the next chairman of the Fed telling Americans to bet their bottom dollar on it, buy a nice new car and drive off into the sunset.
France, by comparison, seems increasingly caught in a gloomy web of truth and sorrow that even a cheerful tune won't chase away. When study after study confirms an overheating planet, and weirding weather is embodied in a flooded Brittany coast and snowy southwest, the French tend to bend under the weight of science, and acknowledge something must be done -- as long as it doesn't cut too deeply into corporate profit margins or increase government debt.
The legacies of colonialism and religious wars are likewise dissected at length, along with tyrants from Torquemada to Hitler that can not be erased from history, at least not any time soon. In Paris, you can find plaques on elementary schools testifying "Thirteen Jewish students from this school died in concentration camps." "In this school, twenty-nine children were sent to the camps." Every month there's another made-for-TV movie set in occupied France.
Instead of imaging themselves created in the image of God, the French continue to cast a skeptical eye at human behavior and accept that homo not so sapiens evolved from apes. When Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race writer of the Three Musketeers (1844) had to respond to racist taunts, he replied, "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."
This doesn't mean Europe is perfect. You pretty much get the picture when you know that a French director recently gave the extremely white Gérard Depardieu a curly wig and brown make-up so he could play Dumas in a movie. Still, that's film.
In Texas, the State Board of Education has decided that reality itself is fluid, and above all as word-based as the fundamentalist religion that its stalwarts practice. Control the textbooks, get something down in paper and ink, or scratched into stone on a deserted mountaintop and there's a magical transformation of history. Darwin really is a liar and idiot, the British were the architects of American slavery, and white Americans were the driving forces of the African American civil rights movement.
Erase a few names here and there, and Texas can be changed from story of Native Americans and Spanish colonists into the single-handed creation of Anglo-Americans like Sam Austin, in which the Indians were mere transients and the Spanish didn't contribute so much as one pinky finger until their descendants saw how good the whites had it and immigrated from Mexico bringing fajitas, instant taco mix, and Salma Hayek.
Get out your Wite-Out, and the deist founders of the United States become bible-thumping Christians. Change a bit more and the nefarious Thomas Jefferson who wrote extensively about the Enlightenment and the "separation between church and state" no longer can be considered a real influence on revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, though he lived in France for years as ambassador of the young United States.
Texans have begun to revolt under this tyranny of idiocy. They've refused to re-elect some of the school board members, and protested appointments. Unfortunately, committee replacements can be almost as bad. One of their additions last spring was Peter Marshall, a Yankee preacher who likes to explain natural disasters from California wildfires to Hurricane Katrina as God's punishment for tolerating queers.
Delete, erase, proclaim.
It's not the first time Thomas Jefferson has been given the boot. I went to Transylvania University in Kentucky and was lucky enough to be among the twenty or so students that were awarded Thomas Jefferson scholarships. Before I left, the grant named for this former president, architect, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, yes, and slaveholder, was renamed for William T. Young, the famous (and rich) horse breeder and peanut butter manufacturer.
I couldn't help feeling diminished. There was a brief revolt of "TJ" scholars, but apparently the name was changed in gratitude for continuing gifts. It was sold, in other words, and the dough was more important than the name. Now, young scholars, instead of aspiring, however imperfectly, to equality, liberty and happiness, and an enlightened world guided by reason, can aspire to... what? Sandwich fillings and the inbreeding Kentuckians are already accused of, whether man or beast?
I shouldn't worry. After all, The sun'll come out tomorrow. Ya just gotta hang on come what may. Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Be Stupid
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I missed the lesbian and gay kiss-in on Valentine's Day here in Paris, and the March 1st pro-immigrant demos, but last month I did put in a little community service at Place de l'Odeon ripping down signs announcing, "Smart may have the brains, but Stupid has the balls. Be Stupid."
The posters were supposed to advertise jeans, but because they were in English, the real message seemed to be, "Humorless dykes and girly men urging restraint and careful consideration of things are totally lame; stupid assholes bombing Iraq, eating freedom fries, and ramming planes into buildings are so cool!"
It was a kind of Rorschach Test after eight years of Bush, a couple of all balls, no brains wars, and the new upsurge of flag-waving Tea Partiers. Still, as repulsed as I was by anti-intelligence and pro-risk posturing, I decided to rip down the signs myself with tourists staring and a guy screaming at me to get my "stupid hands off those signs." "Screw you. You wanted me to get stupid so I did."
Okay, so I couldn't hear exactly what the sign guy was yelling because he was across the street, but it could have been that. And I did mutter "Screw you." In two languages.
Destruction wasn't my first impulse. I'd actually seen the posters the day before and considered creating a dialogue with them by adding some graffiti pointing out the implications of the "Be Stupid" ideology, maybe a snarky "Bring Back Bush" penciled in, or "Evolution is a myth" or "Bomb Iran." But really, what was the point? I wondered. "Stupid" doesn't get sarcasm or subtlety. For Stupid, a pie in the face gets a laugh, but to get their attention better stick to brute force and bulldozers.
Responsible even in anger, I put the ripped up "Be Stupid" posters in the trash cans. They weren't replaced, though the motto had been spray-painted several times on the sidewalks. That, I left as a kind of memento mori. And every time I take the subway at l'Odeon I wonder what to do about the movement in the U.S. which is currently celebrating balls over brains with a kind of revivalist fervor.
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma federal building in 1995, endorsements of this brand of violently narcissistic patriotism were as marginal as snake-handlers in Kentucky hills. Survivalists hid in their enclaves which only came to our attention after disasters like the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.
A few weeks after Andrew Joseph Stack III attacked an IRS building in Texas, it's clear the balls are outdistancing the brains. In his recent New York Times article, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged, Frank Rich describes how Stack has a huge posthumous fan base. The entire press avoids the word terrorist. And every ambitious Republican from Scott Brown to Steve King is claiming they find it understandable, if perhaps lamentable, a tax-protester like Stack would be frustrated enough to get violent.
It's an actual former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, who boldly capped off her address to the National Tea Party Convention, promising the dramatic and violent, "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help."
In Texas, meanwhile, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, didn't actually offer to die herself, but did declare that "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
Radio personality Glenn Beck, who has labeled progressivism a cancer that "must be cut out of the system" only seems willing to risk the death of his enemies, not even his minions. Proof, perhaps, that the cynical Beck doesn't really have the balls?
Nowhere in the rapidly expanding Tea Party movement are any "smart" solutions requiring the drudgery of actually governing, like passing legislation that cannot be summarized in the balloon over a cartoon figure or balancing budgets that require functions not available on your ordinary calculator. And god knows you can't hold a dialogue.
What we have on our hands is a movement based on the heart-thumping thrill of a good tent meeting. The leaders of militias, and birthers, survivalists and conspiracy theorists work up their fire and brimstone pitch like a bunch of preachers performing for congregations writhing enjoyably in the delicious fear of sin, and joy of a dramatic sobbing repentance. And when the last hymn is sung, they won't forget to pass the hat.
And while the show goes on what are the consequences? A paralyzed government. And an increasingly virulent culture of balls over brains, a kind of virtual high school in which the football players and cheerleaders exercise their god-given right to torture the smart kids, fat girls, outsiders, and queers.
I missed the lesbian and gay kiss-in on Valentine's Day here in Paris, and the March 1st pro-immigrant demos, but last month I did put in a little community service at Place de l'Odeon ripping down signs announcing, "Smart may have the brains, but Stupid has the balls. Be Stupid."
The posters were supposed to advertise jeans, but because they were in English, the real message seemed to be, "Humorless dykes and girly men urging restraint and careful consideration of things are totally lame; stupid assholes bombing Iraq, eating freedom fries, and ramming planes into buildings are so cool!"
It was a kind of Rorschach Test after eight years of Bush, a couple of all balls, no brains wars, and the new upsurge of flag-waving Tea Partiers. Still, as repulsed as I was by anti-intelligence and pro-risk posturing, I decided to rip down the signs myself with tourists staring and a guy screaming at me to get my "stupid hands off those signs." "Screw you. You wanted me to get stupid so I did."
Okay, so I couldn't hear exactly what the sign guy was yelling because he was across the street, but it could have been that. And I did mutter "Screw you." In two languages.
Destruction wasn't my first impulse. I'd actually seen the posters the day before and considered creating a dialogue with them by adding some graffiti pointing out the implications of the "Be Stupid" ideology, maybe a snarky "Bring Back Bush" penciled in, or "Evolution is a myth" or "Bomb Iran." But really, what was the point? I wondered. "Stupid" doesn't get sarcasm or subtlety. For Stupid, a pie in the face gets a laugh, but to get their attention better stick to brute force and bulldozers.
Responsible even in anger, I put the ripped up "Be Stupid" posters in the trash cans. They weren't replaced, though the motto had been spray-painted several times on the sidewalks. That, I left as a kind of memento mori. And every time I take the subway at l'Odeon I wonder what to do about the movement in the U.S. which is currently celebrating balls over brains with a kind of revivalist fervor.
When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma federal building in 1995, endorsements of this brand of violently narcissistic patriotism were as marginal as snake-handlers in Kentucky hills. Survivalists hid in their enclaves which only came to our attention after disasters like the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.
A few weeks after Andrew Joseph Stack III attacked an IRS building in Texas, it's clear the balls are outdistancing the brains. In his recent New York Times article, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged, Frank Rich describes how Stack has a huge posthumous fan base. The entire press avoids the word terrorist. And every ambitious Republican from Scott Brown to Steve King is claiming they find it understandable, if perhaps lamentable, a tax-protester like Stack would be frustrated enough to get violent.
It's an actual former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, who boldly capped off her address to the National Tea Party Convention, promising the dramatic and violent, "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help."
In Texas, meanwhile, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, didn't actually offer to die herself, but did declare that "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
Radio personality Glenn Beck, who has labeled progressivism a cancer that "must be cut out of the system" only seems willing to risk the death of his enemies, not even his minions. Proof, perhaps, that the cynical Beck doesn't really have the balls?
Nowhere in the rapidly expanding Tea Party movement are any "smart" solutions requiring the drudgery of actually governing, like passing legislation that cannot be summarized in the balloon over a cartoon figure or balancing budgets that require functions not available on your ordinary calculator. And god knows you can't hold a dialogue.
What we have on our hands is a movement based on the heart-thumping thrill of a good tent meeting. The leaders of militias, and birthers, survivalists and conspiracy theorists work up their fire and brimstone pitch like a bunch of preachers performing for congregations writhing enjoyably in the delicious fear of sin, and joy of a dramatic sobbing repentance. And when the last hymn is sung, they won't forget to pass the hat.
And while the show goes on what are the consequences? A paralyzed government. And an increasingly virulent culture of balls over brains, a kind of virtual high school in which the football players and cheerleaders exercise their god-given right to torture the smart kids, fat girls, outsiders, and queers.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Irish Blasphemy
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's par for the course when the Pope bashes openly gay people in Britain for having consensual homo sex, yet in Ireland refuses to fire the criminal bishops that covered up child abuse for several decades.
Apparently all that you need to make things right is a few stern words against rape and torture, a couple of Hail Marys and a "journey of repentance, reconciliation and renewal," as Irish Archbishop Sean Brady described the Pope's current visit to the Emerald Isle. Almost nobody in the hierarchy even got fired. Four Irish bishops offered their resignations, but Benedict only accepted one.
Maybe because the cover-up's not done yet and they need to reinforce the rewards of loyalty and teamwork. The papal envoy continues stonewalling investigators pursuing the conspiracy between the Catholic hierarchy and Irish cops. Imagine the scale of collaboration required to hide decades of systematic abuses by parish priests, and in Catholic-run residences where nuns and Christian Brothers got in on the act, too.
Victims told the Commission how both girls and boys were raped. They were humiliated, beaten and starved. Children had to scavenge for food in garbage cans, eat food meant for farm animals. They were badly flogged, purposely scalded and held under water. A boy was forced to lick shit from a priest's shoe. And it went on for generations.
How can you reconcile that as long as the Church is still ducking and running? "I wish to inform that it is not the practice of the Holy See that apostolic nuncios appear before parliamentary commissions," Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza wrote in a letter dated February 12.
Earlier, a successful suit by the Christian Brothers, which controlled most of the residences for boys in the country, forced the investigating Commission to withhold the names of the accused, thus preventing prosecution. It's the same silence, the same cloak of power that allowed the abuses in the first place.
In January, just a couple of months after the publication of the report, the Church got yet another tool. Since January, when a new blasphemy law went into effect, it's been illegal to say or publish anything that might provoke "outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion." You can torture children or cover it up with impunity, but draw a rude cartoon about priests and you could be punished with a fine of up to 25,000 euros.
In response to this attack on freedom of religion and of speech, Irish Atheists posted a webpage offering twenty-five blasphemous quotes from authors as diverse as Jesus, Mohammed, Mark Twain, George Carlin, and Bjork who in 1995 revealed she had been tempted by Buddhism, but "I've been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren't lesser beings, they're just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists."
Taken together, the list of quotes seems strangely anodyne, as if were calculated not to offend, except maybe for the James Kirkup poem, "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name," that had the narrator sucking the dead Jesus' cock.
It was comprised mostly of the typical denunciations of Judeo-Christian religions and their warmongering god as a "vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Believers were dismissed for being rubes. "Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate!" "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day."
The site avoided the far more common, more inflammatory "blasphemies." There was no drawing of Mohammed with a missile in his turban. Catholic priests weren't portrayed groping their choirboys. Nope, the Atheists didn't dare touch any of that. Not with Jesus' ten foot pole. In this era of culture wars, some blasphemies are cooler than others. Keep your snipes and god-bashing in the sphere of literature, art, music or comedy. Though not Danish cartoons.
When it comes to censorship, people seem to believe we can separate the baby from the bathwater, good speech from bad, ignoring how easily the brain grows accustomed to limits. And how these restrictions, heralded by some as a safeguard preventing descent into the filth of racism and homophobia, affect the entire play of our thoughts, damaging our capacity to question, judge, also to transcend. Keep your laws off my brain.
It is only blasphemy when challenges from heathen mouths are worse than torture and rape. Sleep soundly, assured that I cannot destroy your church just by thinking of priests touching children while others watch and approve, or I certainly would. The words on this page do nothing but impotently denounce the likes of Pope Benedict, and Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza. Every word out of their mouths is a offense.
It's par for the course when the Pope bashes openly gay people in Britain for having consensual homo sex, yet in Ireland refuses to fire the criminal bishops that covered up child abuse for several decades.
Apparently all that you need to make things right is a few stern words against rape and torture, a couple of Hail Marys and a "journey of repentance, reconciliation and renewal," as Irish Archbishop Sean Brady described the Pope's current visit to the Emerald Isle. Almost nobody in the hierarchy even got fired. Four Irish bishops offered their resignations, but Benedict only accepted one.
Maybe because the cover-up's not done yet and they need to reinforce the rewards of loyalty and teamwork. The papal envoy continues stonewalling investigators pursuing the conspiracy between the Catholic hierarchy and Irish cops. Imagine the scale of collaboration required to hide decades of systematic abuses by parish priests, and in Catholic-run residences where nuns and Christian Brothers got in on the act, too.
Victims told the Commission how both girls and boys were raped. They were humiliated, beaten and starved. Children had to scavenge for food in garbage cans, eat food meant for farm animals. They were badly flogged, purposely scalded and held under water. A boy was forced to lick shit from a priest's shoe. And it went on for generations.
How can you reconcile that as long as the Church is still ducking and running? "I wish to inform that it is not the practice of the Holy See that apostolic nuncios appear before parliamentary commissions," Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza wrote in a letter dated February 12.
Earlier, a successful suit by the Christian Brothers, which controlled most of the residences for boys in the country, forced the investigating Commission to withhold the names of the accused, thus preventing prosecution. It's the same silence, the same cloak of power that allowed the abuses in the first place.
In January, just a couple of months after the publication of the report, the Church got yet another tool. Since January, when a new blasphemy law went into effect, it's been illegal to say or publish anything that might provoke "outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion." You can torture children or cover it up with impunity, but draw a rude cartoon about priests and you could be punished with a fine of up to 25,000 euros.
In response to this attack on freedom of religion and of speech, Irish Atheists posted a webpage offering twenty-five blasphemous quotes from authors as diverse as Jesus, Mohammed, Mark Twain, George Carlin, and Bjork who in 1995 revealed she had been tempted by Buddhism, but "I've been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren't lesser beings, they're just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists."
Taken together, the list of quotes seems strangely anodyne, as if were calculated not to offend, except maybe for the James Kirkup poem, "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name," that had the narrator sucking the dead Jesus' cock.
It was comprised mostly of the typical denunciations of Judeo-Christian religions and their warmongering god as a "vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Believers were dismissed for being rubes. "Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate!" "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day."
The site avoided the far more common, more inflammatory "blasphemies." There was no drawing of Mohammed with a missile in his turban. Catholic priests weren't portrayed groping their choirboys. Nope, the Atheists didn't dare touch any of that. Not with Jesus' ten foot pole. In this era of culture wars, some blasphemies are cooler than others. Keep your snipes and god-bashing in the sphere of literature, art, music or comedy. Though not Danish cartoons.
When it comes to censorship, people seem to believe we can separate the baby from the bathwater, good speech from bad, ignoring how easily the brain grows accustomed to limits. And how these restrictions, heralded by some as a safeguard preventing descent into the filth of racism and homophobia, affect the entire play of our thoughts, damaging our capacity to question, judge, also to transcend. Keep your laws off my brain.
It is only blasphemy when challenges from heathen mouths are worse than torture and rape. Sleep soundly, assured that I cannot destroy your church just by thinking of priests touching children while others watch and approve, or I certainly would. The words on this page do nothing but impotently denounce the likes of Pope Benedict, and Cardinal Giuseppe Leanza. Every word out of their mouths is a offense.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Groundhog Gay
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Here's to Groundhog Day, that gloomy 2nd day of February midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox when an unkempt rodent sticks its head out of its hole, and either retreats at a shadow that predicts six more weeks of winter, or frolics at the sign of early spring if there's nothing to see.
The logic is a mess. To cast a shadow there'd have to be sun, which one would imagine should lead any ordinary groundhog to expect better weather. But the pros like Punxsutawney Phil are apparently rotten, little, sharp-teethed cynics, turning up their squirrelly noses at every false glimmer and entrenching themselves against another sure round of sleet and bone-chilling cold.
The chubby, bitter Marmota monax is a tempting model what with all the false suns in the sky and the plethora of shadows. In a burst of wishful thinking and propaganda, CNN's Sanjay Gupta declared that Haiti doesn't need doctors any more, though many people with bad two-week old injuries have yet to see a doctor, and medicine's as scarce of food.
Likewise, the Senate hearings reconsidering lesbians and gay men in the military have been promoted as radiant promises of change, though just how that will manifest itself is unclear since nobody's even considering the repeal of the misnamed Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that somehow results in queers getting ejected right and left even without anybody telling anybody anything. Apparently, what we can expect is a shift in enforcement. As Pam of Pam's House Blend writes, "I guess the result depends on how you define the word "change.""
You could say the same for the administration's press release entitled "Expanding Opportunities for the LGBT Community" that starts by patting itself on the back for steering the country away from a depression, and goes on to claim its budget includes means for fighting discrimination against LGBT folk, supporting Federal employee domestic partner benefits, and a host of other things.
While there might be money earmarked for such projects, there's still the matter of political will and how you define "expanding." Just a couple of weeks ago Lambda Legal had to file suit against Obama's administration demanding the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) obey prior rulings by Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and cough up the spousal health insurance benefits awarded to Ninth Circuit judicial attorney Karen Golinski.
Frankly, I'll believe it's summer for queers when the fruit is on the vine. Until then, it's just more of the same rotten political weather. And this groundhog recommends full butt-wagging retreat, though maybe it's better if, like Staten Island Chuck, you instead sink your teeth into the nearest target. Last year it was Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
This year, take your pick. You'll have to get in line for a piece of the O-Man, but in the meantime consider all the New York politicos that promised the moon but shafted queers on same-sex marriage, or perhaps the evangelical conversion therapist of your choice that promises healing and gives years of torture instead. You could go for the American and Nazi Revisionist Scott Lively fueling antigay hate in Uganda, and only reluctantly suggesting conversion therapy instead of the ultimate cure, the death penalty.
Then there are the discredited American "experts" extending their conversion therapy movement into Britain, among them Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and Richard Cohen, who founded the International Healing Foundation, but has been permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association.
The damage they're causing in Britain and elsewhere isn't as immediately life-threatening as Africa, but don't underestimate the growing strength of the movement and its potential impact.
In an article this week in The Independent, "The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion" Patrick Strudwick describes how, under guise of treatment, more and more British shrinks are resuscitating the debunked stereotypes that homosexuals are all emotionally retarded, infantile, damaged, suffering from childhood abuse, pathological, sick, and sinful. An assertion of love between gay men was dismissed by one shrink as "... a darkness that's very real that keeps you as its dog, but of course our God is more powerful than that."
If you're tempted to snicker at them in this post-gay era, just look at the powerful effect this cocktail of religion and pseudoscience had on Strudwick. Openly gay and well-adjusted before going undercover, he afterwards found himself "confused and damaged. I began to constantly analyse why I found particular men attractive. Does that man represent something that's lacking in me? Do I want him because he looks strong which must mean I feel weak? Did something happen in my childhood? The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none."
Sometimes I think it's just as well more Americans don't have passports.
Here's to Groundhog Day, that gloomy 2nd day of February midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox when an unkempt rodent sticks its head out of its hole, and either retreats at a shadow that predicts six more weeks of winter, or frolics at the sign of early spring if there's nothing to see.
The logic is a mess. To cast a shadow there'd have to be sun, which one would imagine should lead any ordinary groundhog to expect better weather. But the pros like Punxsutawney Phil are apparently rotten, little, sharp-teethed cynics, turning up their squirrelly noses at every false glimmer and entrenching themselves against another sure round of sleet and bone-chilling cold.
The chubby, bitter Marmota monax is a tempting model what with all the false suns in the sky and the plethora of shadows. In a burst of wishful thinking and propaganda, CNN's Sanjay Gupta declared that Haiti doesn't need doctors any more, though many people with bad two-week old injuries have yet to see a doctor, and medicine's as scarce of food.
Likewise, the Senate hearings reconsidering lesbians and gay men in the military have been promoted as radiant promises of change, though just how that will manifest itself is unclear since nobody's even considering the repeal of the misnamed Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that somehow results in queers getting ejected right and left even without anybody telling anybody anything. Apparently, what we can expect is a shift in enforcement. As Pam of Pam's House Blend writes, "I guess the result depends on how you define the word "change.""
You could say the same for the administration's press release entitled "Expanding Opportunities for the LGBT Community" that starts by patting itself on the back for steering the country away from a depression, and goes on to claim its budget includes means for fighting discrimination against LGBT folk, supporting Federal employee domestic partner benefits, and a host of other things.
While there might be money earmarked for such projects, there's still the matter of political will and how you define "expanding." Just a couple of weeks ago Lambda Legal had to file suit against Obama's administration demanding the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) obey prior rulings by Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski and cough up the spousal health insurance benefits awarded to Ninth Circuit judicial attorney Karen Golinski.
Frankly, I'll believe it's summer for queers when the fruit is on the vine. Until then, it's just more of the same rotten political weather. And this groundhog recommends full butt-wagging retreat, though maybe it's better if, like Staten Island Chuck, you instead sink your teeth into the nearest target. Last year it was Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
This year, take your pick. You'll have to get in line for a piece of the O-Man, but in the meantime consider all the New York politicos that promised the moon but shafted queers on same-sex marriage, or perhaps the evangelical conversion therapist of your choice that promises healing and gives years of torture instead. You could go for the American and Nazi Revisionist Scott Lively fueling antigay hate in Uganda, and only reluctantly suggesting conversion therapy instead of the ultimate cure, the death penalty.
Then there are the discredited American "experts" extending their conversion therapy movement into Britain, among them Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and Richard Cohen, who founded the International Healing Foundation, but has been permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association.
The damage they're causing in Britain and elsewhere isn't as immediately life-threatening as Africa, but don't underestimate the growing strength of the movement and its potential impact.
In an article this week in The Independent, "The ex-gay files: The bizarre world of gay-to-straight conversion" Patrick Strudwick describes how, under guise of treatment, more and more British shrinks are resuscitating the debunked stereotypes that homosexuals are all emotionally retarded, infantile, damaged, suffering from childhood abuse, pathological, sick, and sinful. An assertion of love between gay men was dismissed by one shrink as "... a darkness that's very real that keeps you as its dog, but of course our God is more powerful than that."
If you're tempted to snicker at them in this post-gay era, just look at the powerful effect this cocktail of religion and pseudoscience had on Strudwick. Openly gay and well-adjusted before going undercover, he afterwards found himself "confused and damaged. I began to constantly analyse why I found particular men attractive. Does that man represent something that's lacking in me? Do I want him because he looks strong which must mean I feel weak? Did something happen in my childhood? The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none."
Sometimes I think it's just as well more Americans don't have passports.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Haiti
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I watch the news every night, while trying not to -- grey limbs sticking out of rubble, buzzing flies, and the groans of the wounded. I imagine Port-au-Prince like Gettysburg, only earth versus flesh, with tens of thousands dead in the space of a couple of miles and a couple of days, and in a hundred years you'll still hear stories of farmers plowing up bones.
9/11 was nothing. Here, the infrastructure of an entire nation was destroyed in minutes. Roads, jails, hospitals, police stations, government buildings and schools were reduced to dust filtering through the air, and the privileged who were trapped with their cell phones called for help before slowly giving way. Haitian President Preval has all but disappeared. I can't imagine how long it will take to restore even basic order.
Already, we see living men and boys fight over plastic packages of cookies, bottles of water, and whatever they pull from the ruins. Gang leaders are back in the slums ruling over the living and dead like Emperor Jones but with automatic weapons. Women don't dare to roam the streets, or battle for food. They and their kids are the most vulnerable to disease and starvation, and will probably comprise the majority of the second wave of dead.
And yet, and yet. On the TV, I see a man framing a house from timber pulled from the ruins. A woman boils water from a creek, and a boy scales fish. A neighborhood has organized itself, with young men sent to gather food and water for the rest. They close off the street for the night so people have somewhere safe to lay down their plastic tarps and sleep because their houses are shaky structures, or rubble. Beforehand, they sprinkle the street with water to quiet the dust.
In Jacmel, a small neglected city that spent the first several days after the quake without medical support or searchers, the Cine Institute students that are left are documenting their crippled city and struggling recovery efforts. Everywhere, journalists are twittering their stories, trying to get their own voices out. People survive however they can, and Haitians have had more practice than most, between the disasters of Mother Nature and the tyranny of men.
Monday, six days after the earthquake hit Haiti, was Martin Luther King day in the U.S. On Facebook Sarah Schulman offered a quote, "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."
MLK was talking about the need for street activism and Direct Action. But the truth to what he said extends even to the relief effort in Haiti, where the U.S. took charge of the airport, and asserted their own priorities, bringing in search and recovery equipment first, then U.S. military and their supplies, and only lastly humanitarian aide that is taking far too many days to reach the hungry, thirsty, suffering hands of Haitians.
I suppose the system was already in place long before Obama took office, and the military isn't known for its flexibility, or willingness to work and play with others. Still, it's hard to watch the director of an orphanage press a few cracker crumbs into the mouths of her dying children while warehouses of Brazilian food and French medicine accumulate just across the border in the Dominican Republic because some asshole general thinks expired protocols are more important than starving Haitians.
Privilege comes in all shapes. And it's not so much that we Americans need to give up ours as we need to learn to share, and relinquish the underlying assumption of superiority. We need to see laterally instead of in ladders and pyramids that not only feed racism, homophobia and nationalism, but poison our relationships even with our neighbors under the guise of America's competitive spirit.
If we open our pockets generously and temporarily when disaster strikes, I suspect it's often because it feeds our sense of privilege and grace as we bestow our gifts from our perch on Mount Olympus to the struggling mortals below.
As such, I had mixed feelings when I read reports LGBT-cruise lines like Atlantis, Olivia, and RSVP were coordinating fundraising efforts because as Judy Dlugacz, President and founder of Olivia Companies, explained to PR Newswire, many queers have stopped in Haitian ports on their vacations and that, "It is important that as LGBT Americans, we come together to show our community's solidarity and support for those living through this unimaginable disaster."
In fact, it's not "those" the LGBT community has to support, but us. A considerable chunk of suffering Haitians are queer. A hundred percent are human, just like us Americans who have intimate links to the troubled, bloody history of Haiti. I wonder what would happen if just once we looked at the TV like it was a mirror, and recognized our own faces staring back in grief.
I watch the news every night, while trying not to -- grey limbs sticking out of rubble, buzzing flies, and the groans of the wounded. I imagine Port-au-Prince like Gettysburg, only earth versus flesh, with tens of thousands dead in the space of a couple of miles and a couple of days, and in a hundred years you'll still hear stories of farmers plowing up bones.
9/11 was nothing. Here, the infrastructure of an entire nation was destroyed in minutes. Roads, jails, hospitals, police stations, government buildings and schools were reduced to dust filtering through the air, and the privileged who were trapped with their cell phones called for help before slowly giving way. Haitian President Preval has all but disappeared. I can't imagine how long it will take to restore even basic order.
Already, we see living men and boys fight over plastic packages of cookies, bottles of water, and whatever they pull from the ruins. Gang leaders are back in the slums ruling over the living and dead like Emperor Jones but with automatic weapons. Women don't dare to roam the streets, or battle for food. They and their kids are the most vulnerable to disease and starvation, and will probably comprise the majority of the second wave of dead.
And yet, and yet. On the TV, I see a man framing a house from timber pulled from the ruins. A woman boils water from a creek, and a boy scales fish. A neighborhood has organized itself, with young men sent to gather food and water for the rest. They close off the street for the night so people have somewhere safe to lay down their plastic tarps and sleep because their houses are shaky structures, or rubble. Beforehand, they sprinkle the street with water to quiet the dust.
In Jacmel, a small neglected city that spent the first several days after the quake without medical support or searchers, the Cine Institute students that are left are documenting their crippled city and struggling recovery efforts. Everywhere, journalists are twittering their stories, trying to get their own voices out. People survive however they can, and Haitians have had more practice than most, between the disasters of Mother Nature and the tyranny of men.
Monday, six days after the earthquake hit Haiti, was Martin Luther King day in the U.S. On Facebook Sarah Schulman offered a quote, "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily."
MLK was talking about the need for street activism and Direct Action. But the truth to what he said extends even to the relief effort in Haiti, where the U.S. took charge of the airport, and asserted their own priorities, bringing in search and recovery equipment first, then U.S. military and their supplies, and only lastly humanitarian aide that is taking far too many days to reach the hungry, thirsty, suffering hands of Haitians.
I suppose the system was already in place long before Obama took office, and the military isn't known for its flexibility, or willingness to work and play with others. Still, it's hard to watch the director of an orphanage press a few cracker crumbs into the mouths of her dying children while warehouses of Brazilian food and French medicine accumulate just across the border in the Dominican Republic because some asshole general thinks expired protocols are more important than starving Haitians.
Privilege comes in all shapes. And it's not so much that we Americans need to give up ours as we need to learn to share, and relinquish the underlying assumption of superiority. We need to see laterally instead of in ladders and pyramids that not only feed racism, homophobia and nationalism, but poison our relationships even with our neighbors under the guise of America's competitive spirit.
If we open our pockets generously and temporarily when disaster strikes, I suspect it's often because it feeds our sense of privilege and grace as we bestow our gifts from our perch on Mount Olympus to the struggling mortals below.
As such, I had mixed feelings when I read reports LGBT-cruise lines like Atlantis, Olivia, and RSVP were coordinating fundraising efforts because as Judy Dlugacz, President and founder of Olivia Companies, explained to PR Newswire, many queers have stopped in Haitian ports on their vacations and that, "It is important that as LGBT Americans, we come together to show our community's solidarity and support for those living through this unimaginable disaster."
In fact, it's not "those" the LGBT community has to support, but us. A considerable chunk of suffering Haitians are queer. A hundred percent are human, just like us Americans who have intimate links to the troubled, bloody history of Haiti. I wonder what would happen if just once we looked at the TV like it was a mirror, and recognized our own faces staring back in grief.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
That Democratizing Decade
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I remember it well, December 31, 1999, and the collective fear that as the clock ticked over into a new millennium all our circuits would be melted, our data destroyed, and chaos unleashed upon an unprepared world. If only that had been the extent of it.
My girlfriend and I did what we could, backing up our old computers on now obsolete floppies, while others backed up public utilities and stockpiled water, guns, and gasoline for their generators tucked away in backyard bunkers they are renovating again for Obama's Socialist revolution.
Nothing happened, of course, except that I stayed home instead of going to a party, pulling the bubble wrap off of a bulbous pink monstrosity of an iMac that changed my life even without the Y2K disaster. Connect power plug to computer, computer to jack. Hold tight.
In a matter of minutes, I was released from the constraints of time, space, and the price of long distance landline telephone calls, into a universe that held instant communication, self-expression, information from any country, any language, any time, and the seeds of mad ravings. I hallucinated as my temperature rose to 104, and entered the decade with a fever and shakes, incoherent dreams, and the flu's racking, hacking cough that left me gasping for air.
A couple weeks later, my girlfriend and I started The Gully online magazine. Pre-WordPress, I coded the pages myself, and for six long years we weighed in on everything from World Cup soccer to same-sex marriage, election 2000, then 9/11. We covered queers in Jamaica, Taiwan, Guatemala, and Iran, and wrote a lot about Cuba, democracy, and that little rafter boy Elian.
We built a pretty good readership, but the blend of international news and gay issues wasn't exactly a hit, maybe because Cuba led us to talk a lot about democracy everywhere when the American left prefers to talk about rights. Much too soon, that word was ceded to George W. Bush who invaded Iraq under democracy's banner, ruining essential phrases, like "rule of law," or even "free speech" -- which Americans have more of than ever.
In the last ten years, online media has exploded, but not activism or political alternatives. It's not that we can't smell the stink. A ton of people complained online when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the election in 2000, but almost nobody took to the streets.
Big demonstrations against an Iraq War petered out once bombs started falling in 2003. In 2004, photos of Americans torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib circulated widely on the Internet to a certain amount of horror, but in the end the knowledge we were tyrants and despots, destroying our own democratic ideals, didn't move anybody to action except the ACLU.
Now, there's nothing but silence for a Democratic administration which ostensibly denounces torture, but fights all attempts to expose or prosecute it, and is again eroding due process with Executive Order 12425 which seems to give British police the right to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil without access to lawyers, or any troublesome thing like that.
In 2008, the Internet was a force in the Obama campaign, and briefly was useful when angry queers used Facebook and Twitter to organize demos when the anti-gay Prop 8 passed in California. But the "Join the Impact" calendar is sadly short of events, and what happened to the Obama machine when it came to winning health care votes or demanding accountability for the bail-out?
The most active people are the Tea Partiers who only know they hate everything. We of the left stomp on little fires as the house burns down. We'll work on campaigns, but nothing truly long-term. Neither the left nor right can be bothered to turn the around the tapestry and see how everything is connected on the other side.
When homo-obsessed American fundamentalists stick their dirty little fingers in Uganda, American queers give money, send emails and write letters, put pressure on foreign funding. Equally dangerous, though, in Uganda, is a shaky democracy punishing dissent and human rights activism. If we really want to save gay lives, aren't we going to have to push for basic conditions that allow for social change in general?
For me, it comes down to democracy and figuring out some way to reclaim the idea from twisted politicians like Bush. In our own country, in our own movement, I wish we'd talk less about rights and more about how we fit into this thing we call democracy. We're either equal or we're not. Under the Constitution, or not. Fuck customs. Fuck religion. In this melting pot of a country, all we have in common is our status under the law.
Here's hoping that this last decade fades away like a fever dream. I still can't breathe.
I remember it well, December 31, 1999, and the collective fear that as the clock ticked over into a new millennium all our circuits would be melted, our data destroyed, and chaos unleashed upon an unprepared world. If only that had been the extent of it.
My girlfriend and I did what we could, backing up our old computers on now obsolete floppies, while others backed up public utilities and stockpiled water, guns, and gasoline for their generators tucked away in backyard bunkers they are renovating again for Obama's Socialist revolution.
Nothing happened, of course, except that I stayed home instead of going to a party, pulling the bubble wrap off of a bulbous pink monstrosity of an iMac that changed my life even without the Y2K disaster. Connect power plug to computer, computer to jack. Hold tight.
In a matter of minutes, I was released from the constraints of time, space, and the price of long distance landline telephone calls, into a universe that held instant communication, self-expression, information from any country, any language, any time, and the seeds of mad ravings. I hallucinated as my temperature rose to 104, and entered the decade with a fever and shakes, incoherent dreams, and the flu's racking, hacking cough that left me gasping for air.
A couple weeks later, my girlfriend and I started The Gully online magazine. Pre-WordPress, I coded the pages myself, and for six long years we weighed in on everything from World Cup soccer to same-sex marriage, election 2000, then 9/11. We covered queers in Jamaica, Taiwan, Guatemala, and Iran, and wrote a lot about Cuba, democracy, and that little rafter boy Elian.
We built a pretty good readership, but the blend of international news and gay issues wasn't exactly a hit, maybe because Cuba led us to talk a lot about democracy everywhere when the American left prefers to talk about rights. Much too soon, that word was ceded to George W. Bush who invaded Iraq under democracy's banner, ruining essential phrases, like "rule of law," or even "free speech" -- which Americans have more of than ever.
In the last ten years, online media has exploded, but not activism or political alternatives. It's not that we can't smell the stink. A ton of people complained online when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the election in 2000, but almost nobody took to the streets.
Big demonstrations against an Iraq War petered out once bombs started falling in 2003. In 2004, photos of Americans torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib circulated widely on the Internet to a certain amount of horror, but in the end the knowledge we were tyrants and despots, destroying our own democratic ideals, didn't move anybody to action except the ACLU.
Now, there's nothing but silence for a Democratic administration which ostensibly denounces torture, but fights all attempts to expose or prosecute it, and is again eroding due process with Executive Order 12425 which seems to give British police the right to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil without access to lawyers, or any troublesome thing like that.
In 2008, the Internet was a force in the Obama campaign, and briefly was useful when angry queers used Facebook and Twitter to organize demos when the anti-gay Prop 8 passed in California. But the "Join the Impact" calendar is sadly short of events, and what happened to the Obama machine when it came to winning health care votes or demanding accountability for the bail-out?
The most active people are the Tea Partiers who only know they hate everything. We of the left stomp on little fires as the house burns down. We'll work on campaigns, but nothing truly long-term. Neither the left nor right can be bothered to turn the around the tapestry and see how everything is connected on the other side.
When homo-obsessed American fundamentalists stick their dirty little fingers in Uganda, American queers give money, send emails and write letters, put pressure on foreign funding. Equally dangerous, though, in Uganda, is a shaky democracy punishing dissent and human rights activism. If we really want to save gay lives, aren't we going to have to push for basic conditions that allow for social change in general?
For me, it comes down to democracy and figuring out some way to reclaim the idea from twisted politicians like Bush. In our own country, in our own movement, I wish we'd talk less about rights and more about how we fit into this thing we call democracy. We're either equal or we're not. Under the Constitution, or not. Fuck customs. Fuck religion. In this melting pot of a country, all we have in common is our status under the law.
Here's hoping that this last decade fades away like a fever dream. I still can't breathe.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
2009: Queer Year in Review
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"
It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.
Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.
We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.
Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.
In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.
In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."
That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.
The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.
Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.
Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.
Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.
In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.
He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.
And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.
Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"
It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.
Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.
We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.
Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.
In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.
In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."
That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.
The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.
Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.
Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.
Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.
In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.
He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.
And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Queers Aren't the Only Targets in Cuba
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
After years of largely uncritical support for the Castro regime, the African American intelligentsia has finally been nudged into looking at the racial legacy of the revolution. The result is the "Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba."
Signed last week by sixty African Americans including Cornel West, Ruby Dee Davis, Melvin Van Peebles, and Jeremiah Wright, the Declaration asked the government for the release of Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an anti-racism advocate ostensibly jailed for the illegal possession of -- two sacks of cement. "[W]e cannot sit idly by and allow for decent, peaceful and dedicated civil rights activists in Cuba, and the black population as a whole, to be treated with callous disregard for their rights as citizens and as the most marginalized people on the island."
About time. Black and mixed-race Cubans make up as much as 62 percent of the total population (11 million), but most of the country's civil leadership is white. At the top, the twenty-one member Political Bureau of Cuba's Communist Party has only four black faces, and the all important thirty-nine member Council of Ministers a mere two, the composition of which can be blamed neither on the U.S. embargo nor the CIA.
Additionally, seventy-three percent of scientists and technicians, and eighty percent of the professors at the University of Havana are white. In 2005, 65.8 percent of able-bodied black Cubans were unemployed, twice the rate of white unemployment (nearly 30 percent). Conversely, the prison population is now estimated to be 85 percent black, with prisoners averaging in age between 18 – 28 years.
Because eighty-five percent of Cuban immigrants are white, remittances sent back home to their families worsen financial disparities. It's worth noting, however, that while white Cubans may be relatively better off, they aren't doing particularly well either. The country is bankrupt, and food and housing shortages are acute.
Probably the only real racial parity on the island is in the area of dissent. Many of the Cuba's best known political prisoners have been people of color, like librarian Omar Pernet Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physicians Darsi Ferrer, the inspiration for the Declaration, and Oscar Elias Biscet who was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King and forms of non-violent protest.
The only problem with the Declaration is that it implies that this "unprovoked violence, State intimidation and imprisonment" is somehow new for black activists.
You have to pick through the accompanying press release to find the acknowledgment that the roots of the problem were actually early in the revolution. While you, my queer reader, may have heard the regime sent a whole generation of fags and dykes into UMAP concentration camps, mental hospitals, and exile, the government was also busy hunting down advocates of "Black Power," and banning related organizations.
One of the most notable victims was Walterio Carbonell, a black intellectual and admirer of the French Negritude movement. Author of "Cómo surgió la cultura nacional" (How the National Culture Emerged) (1961), he exhumed the role of Afro-Cubans in the development of the Cuban nation, going far beyond a nod at musical contributions. He was silenced by his time in jail.
From the beginning, Afro-Cubans, like poor whites and peasants, were supposed to shut up and be grateful for what they'd gotten. The troublesome part of Black Power wasn't just the "Black," but the "Power," and a government determined not to share it.
For most of the dissidents I've cited earlier, race probably wasn't the determining factor in their arrest. Omar Pernet Hernández, released in 2008, wasn't even focused on anti-racism work. He was picked up with dozens of others in the March 2003 crackdown for opposing the regime and running an independent library from his house.
Anybody at all that opens their mouths, or steps outside the lines is liable for arrest in Cuba. White, working class blogger Yoani Sanchez (and her husband) have both been harassed, and beaten up. Jail is probably on the horizon. In August, cops stormed a meeting of the LGBT group Fundación Cuba that was trying to organize, not the overthrow of the government, but Mr. Gay Cuba. The event was planned for a public place to give some visibility to the LGBT community. For their trouble, the eleven were beaten, two were arrested and their computers seized.
Now, the regime seems to be preparing for another crackdown, warning the population that Obama plans to bomb or invade the island. A few weeks ago they ran a military exercise called "Bastion 2009" part of the "War of the Whole People" which included a practice run for rounding up dissidents and putting down riots.
It's increasingly obvious that you can't fight racism -- or homophobia, misogyny or poverty -- in Cuba, without fighting for basic civil rights, and that dirty word, democracy.
After years of largely uncritical support for the Castro regime, the African American intelligentsia has finally been nudged into looking at the racial legacy of the revolution. The result is the "Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba."
Signed last week by sixty African Americans including Cornel West, Ruby Dee Davis, Melvin Van Peebles, and Jeremiah Wright, the Declaration asked the government for the release of Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an anti-racism advocate ostensibly jailed for the illegal possession of -- two sacks of cement. "[W]e cannot sit idly by and allow for decent, peaceful and dedicated civil rights activists in Cuba, and the black population as a whole, to be treated with callous disregard for their rights as citizens and as the most marginalized people on the island."
About time. Black and mixed-race Cubans make up as much as 62 percent of the total population (11 million), but most of the country's civil leadership is white. At the top, the twenty-one member Political Bureau of Cuba's Communist Party has only four black faces, and the all important thirty-nine member Council of Ministers a mere two, the composition of which can be blamed neither on the U.S. embargo nor the CIA.
Additionally, seventy-three percent of scientists and technicians, and eighty percent of the professors at the University of Havana are white. In 2005, 65.8 percent of able-bodied black Cubans were unemployed, twice the rate of white unemployment (nearly 30 percent). Conversely, the prison population is now estimated to be 85 percent black, with prisoners averaging in age between 18 – 28 years.
Because eighty-five percent of Cuban immigrants are white, remittances sent back home to their families worsen financial disparities. It's worth noting, however, that while white Cubans may be relatively better off, they aren't doing particularly well either. The country is bankrupt, and food and housing shortages are acute.
Probably the only real racial parity on the island is in the area of dissent. Many of the Cuba's best known political prisoners have been people of color, like librarian Omar Pernet Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physicians Darsi Ferrer, the inspiration for the Declaration, and Oscar Elias Biscet who was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King and forms of non-violent protest.
The only problem with the Declaration is that it implies that this "unprovoked violence, State intimidation and imprisonment" is somehow new for black activists.
You have to pick through the accompanying press release to find the acknowledgment that the roots of the problem were actually early in the revolution. While you, my queer reader, may have heard the regime sent a whole generation of fags and dykes into UMAP concentration camps, mental hospitals, and exile, the government was also busy hunting down advocates of "Black Power," and banning related organizations.
One of the most notable victims was Walterio Carbonell, a black intellectual and admirer of the French Negritude movement. Author of "Cómo surgió la cultura nacional" (How the National Culture Emerged) (1961), he exhumed the role of Afro-Cubans in the development of the Cuban nation, going far beyond a nod at musical contributions. He was silenced by his time in jail.
From the beginning, Afro-Cubans, like poor whites and peasants, were supposed to shut up and be grateful for what they'd gotten. The troublesome part of Black Power wasn't just the "Black," but the "Power," and a government determined not to share it.
For most of the dissidents I've cited earlier, race probably wasn't the determining factor in their arrest. Omar Pernet Hernández, released in 2008, wasn't even focused on anti-racism work. He was picked up with dozens of others in the March 2003 crackdown for opposing the regime and running an independent library from his house.
Anybody at all that opens their mouths, or steps outside the lines is liable for arrest in Cuba. White, working class blogger Yoani Sanchez (and her husband) have both been harassed, and beaten up. Jail is probably on the horizon. In August, cops stormed a meeting of the LGBT group Fundación Cuba that was trying to organize, not the overthrow of the government, but Mr. Gay Cuba. The event was planned for a public place to give some visibility to the LGBT community. For their trouble, the eleven were beaten, two were arrested and their computers seized.
Now, the regime seems to be preparing for another crackdown, warning the population that Obama plans to bomb or invade the island. A few weeks ago they ran a military exercise called "Bastion 2009" part of the "War of the Whole People" which included a practice run for rounding up dissidents and putting down riots.
It's increasingly obvious that you can't fight racism -- or homophobia, misogyny or poverty -- in Cuba, without fighting for basic civil rights, and that dirty word, democracy.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Beth Ditto, Rocks for Dykes in Paris
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It being very nearly Thanksgiving, let me lift a glass in gratitude to Beth Ditto, probably the most famous lesbian in Paris. She turns up nekkid on the cover of magazines, plays fashion shows, and gets interviewed for hip culture rags.
A couple nights ago when I was channel surfing I saw her on the show Taratata. The crowd gave her a standing ovation when she walked on stage, and yells and screams after her group Gossip rocked the house with a couple of songs.
A video montage about Gossip's history and influences used the "L" word first, when the host and narrator, Nagui Fam, announced that their breakthrough song, "Standing in the Way of Control" was "a manifesto that turned Gossip and Beth Ditto into a spokeswoman for the lesbian community, fat women and feminists, all at the same time."
After that, Nagui and Beth pronounced the word "lesbian" more times in fifteen minutes than I've heard in four years in France, and never with as much joy.
Here, broadcasters seem to deaden their faces when they announce LGBT pride, or the latest round in the court battle to let a nameless same-sex couple adopt a child. A few dyke politicians are out in the provinces, but by and large in France the curtain comes down on private lives which are defined as sacrosanct until it comes to hetero politicians getting snapped with women on their yachts, hetero kids swapping spit on the subway, hetero women popping kids on the hospital, taking kids for flu shots, as characters in movies, in art.
For weeks, the story headlining French papers has been the escape and eventual recapture of Jean Pierre Treiber accused of murdering two women who are usually defined as "friends," occasionally as a couple, never lesbians. Dead and alive, all that famous French discretion is for us.
For a moment, I thought it would be the same with Beth Ditto. When Nagui asked how she'd always been different, she went on to talk about being brought up on Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Patsy Cline, and how her young mother taught pro-choice values and self-confidence. "In fact, I thought other people were weird. Me weird? No, it's you guys."
About being a lesbian, nothing. And I thought, oh no. Not again. Another coy dyke. More silence. More invisibility. God, she seemed so sweet, and I thought she was more out! It broke my heart.
But like I said, I had it all wrong. A moment later Taratata did a public service giving an overview of Gossip and their influences featuring the Riot Grrl movement and lesbian musicians from Bikini Kill to K.D. Lang and some hip hop lesbian group that has a video where somebody wears an enormous pink pussy suit outside a hotdog stand. "Better lick it right, better touch it, better touch it right, better kiss it..."
Then Beth Ditto and Nagui led the audience in a chorus of "Une femme avec une femme" A woman with a woman, before he announced in solidarity, "Everybody's a lesbian here."
Then Nagui got all serious, looked her in the eye and said, like they always do in France, and the States, and every fucking where else. "Tell me, you've done your coming out. You've said, "I'm big, I'm a lesbian." There's nonstop kidding about that. Don't you think you've gotten to the point now where you should, perhaps, stop it?"
Only this time, it was obviously a set-up question for Beth who gave the question both barrels. No, I can't. "...Because we're not yet to the point in our culture and society where it's not a big deal. And until people stop getting beaten up for being gay, until people stop losing friends for being gay, until people stop being made fun of for being fat. Or told they're not going to be a singer when they grow up because they're not pretty enough. (Who fucking cares?) Until that is over, I have to make it a point so other girls, boys, queers, homos, drag queens, lizards, lesbians, dogs, cats, so they can grow up to be singers and say it doesn't matter anymore. But right now it matters a lot. It's not time. It's not time to put the torch down."
And if I quote the whole thing it's because I'm tired of saying it myself. Invisible, we are alone, and lonely and vulnerable. We have no allies. Even worse is only seeing queers when they're dead. Visibility may not be some magic wand to defeat homophobic assholes, but it plays a powerful role. Beth Ditto out in the world, and unashamed, makes space for the rest of us, speaks for me when she tells a hater to kiss her ass. Helps kids come out. Yup, I'm plenty thankful for that.
It being very nearly Thanksgiving, let me lift a glass in gratitude to Beth Ditto, probably the most famous lesbian in Paris. She turns up nekkid on the cover of magazines, plays fashion shows, and gets interviewed for hip culture rags.
A couple nights ago when I was channel surfing I saw her on the show Taratata. The crowd gave her a standing ovation when she walked on stage, and yells and screams after her group Gossip rocked the house with a couple of songs.
A video montage about Gossip's history and influences used the "L" word first, when the host and narrator, Nagui Fam, announced that their breakthrough song, "Standing in the Way of Control" was "a manifesto that turned Gossip and Beth Ditto into a spokeswoman for the lesbian community, fat women and feminists, all at the same time."
After that, Nagui and Beth pronounced the word "lesbian" more times in fifteen minutes than I've heard in four years in France, and never with as much joy.
Here, broadcasters seem to deaden their faces when they announce LGBT pride, or the latest round in the court battle to let a nameless same-sex couple adopt a child. A few dyke politicians are out in the provinces, but by and large in France the curtain comes down on private lives which are defined as sacrosanct until it comes to hetero politicians getting snapped with women on their yachts, hetero kids swapping spit on the subway, hetero women popping kids on the hospital, taking kids for flu shots, as characters in movies, in art.
For weeks, the story headlining French papers has been the escape and eventual recapture of Jean Pierre Treiber accused of murdering two women who are usually defined as "friends," occasionally as a couple, never lesbians. Dead and alive, all that famous French discretion is for us.
For a moment, I thought it would be the same with Beth Ditto. When Nagui asked how she'd always been different, she went on to talk about being brought up on Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Patsy Cline, and how her young mother taught pro-choice values and self-confidence. "In fact, I thought other people were weird. Me weird? No, it's you guys."
About being a lesbian, nothing. And I thought, oh no. Not again. Another coy dyke. More silence. More invisibility. God, she seemed so sweet, and I thought she was more out! It broke my heart.
But like I said, I had it all wrong. A moment later Taratata did a public service giving an overview of Gossip and their influences featuring the Riot Grrl movement and lesbian musicians from Bikini Kill to K.D. Lang and some hip hop lesbian group that has a video where somebody wears an enormous pink pussy suit outside a hotdog stand. "Better lick it right, better touch it, better touch it right, better kiss it..."
Then Beth Ditto and Nagui led the audience in a chorus of "Une femme avec une femme" A woman with a woman, before he announced in solidarity, "Everybody's a lesbian here."
Then Nagui got all serious, looked her in the eye and said, like they always do in France, and the States, and every fucking where else. "Tell me, you've done your coming out. You've said, "I'm big, I'm a lesbian." There's nonstop kidding about that. Don't you think you've gotten to the point now where you should, perhaps, stop it?"
Only this time, it was obviously a set-up question for Beth who gave the question both barrels. No, I can't. "...Because we're not yet to the point in our culture and society where it's not a big deal. And until people stop getting beaten up for being gay, until people stop losing friends for being gay, until people stop being made fun of for being fat. Or told they're not going to be a singer when they grow up because they're not pretty enough. (Who fucking cares?) Until that is over, I have to make it a point so other girls, boys, queers, homos, drag queens, lizards, lesbians, dogs, cats, so they can grow up to be singers and say it doesn't matter anymore. But right now it matters a lot. It's not time. It's not time to put the torch down."
And if I quote the whole thing it's because I'm tired of saying it myself. Invisible, we are alone, and lonely and vulnerable. We have no allies. Even worse is only seeing queers when they're dead. Visibility may not be some magic wand to defeat homophobic assholes, but it plays a powerful role. Beth Ditto out in the world, and unashamed, makes space for the rest of us, speaks for me when she tells a hater to kiss her ass. Helps kids come out. Yup, I'm plenty thankful for that.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Breaking Down Walls
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Every time I watch the images of the crowds streaming through Berlin's Cold War gates it's magic. God, what joy. What exhilaration when that wall you'd lived with for twenty-eight years just crumbles, and along with it the paranoia and surveillance and fear, the degradations and mutual betrayal of friends, all the lies you had to tell to others and yourself just to survive.
Afterwards, but before young Sarkozy and other tourists came for their photo ops, there were the guys with sledgehammers concentrating on each swing with a kind of unparalleled, single-minded fury. I could be them. I feel I am them, throwing my body and my life not just against the physical imprisoning restraints, but against all those barriers standing between me and freedom.
I can hear your silent sneer. "She's taken the metaphor too far once again. How the dyke exaggerates, now, when the LGBT community is making progress. You have to take the long view. Make a donation. Relax. Celebrate the federal hate crimes bill."
In fact, queers have taken one loss after another for the last twelve months from the loss of same-sex in California to the installation of anti-gay Rick Warren in Obama's inauguration to his administration's energetic defense of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Most recent is the repeal of same-sex marriage in Maine, which should remind us not only that same-sex marriage is not legal except in two or three states, but that it is explicitly banned in most.
LGBT people are condemned not just in America's laws, but in America's streets and hearts as second class citizens, children, criminals, pedophiles and child molesters. In many eyes, we are not even human finally, but worms, garbage and filth. We get beaten up in the street. Our younger selves are harassed in schools. We don't get decent health care even if we can afford it because our doctors are enemies to whom we tell nothing.
I don't understand the little shrug, the mere wince, or grimace when your face should be red with rage. Did the vast majority of queers in the United States enter into some kind of pact to be nice and polite, so as to not frighten the straights? Did you promise to knock softly on doors instead of battering them down? To speak sweetly in your phone banks instead of returning the filth they shower us with every day? To stay off the streets believing if you're good enough, kind enough, earnest enough, united, and homogenous enough change will come?
After all, the end of a generation only took one magic phrase from Ronald Reagan who ordered Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall." It had nothing to do with a disintegrating Soviet Union, a reformer in charge in Moscow who warned East Germans that Russia wouldn't arrive this time with tanks to back them up. The destruction of the wall had nothing to do with years of dissent, or vast demonstrations for reform that left border guards terrified when faced with a crowd that had been mistakenly told the border was opening up "immediately." It was a few words by an American president, and the magic of a good cause.
I'm less distressed by the legal reverses than our seeming stoicism in the face of them, and the same kind of egotistical and magical thinking many Americans used to interpret the fall of the Berlin wall. At a recent New York City march protesting the savage beating of a gay man, one councilmember actually said, "The one thing that has to happen is marriage equality so that people see that gays and lesbians are equal to everyone."
Actually, no. While same-sex marriage will make life easier for an enormous amount of gay people, marriage won't bring down the wall, homophobia, which divides us from straights in every aspect our lives: schoolrooms, churches, jobs, streets, families, and yes, courts.
In that respect, the Councilmember Tony Avella was more on target when he went on to admit that the city also needed a "deputy mayor for Human Rights to educate kids." I agree completely, and predict the fight to include lesbian, gay and transgender lives in the curriculum will be much more bitter than any same-sex marriage campaign. Which is perhaps why we have confined our efforts to asserting legal equality, and increasingly shut our eyes to the cultural and religious hate.
These days we build our own walls from the inside out, blocking the neighboring eyesores, and training ourselves not to see all the petty humiliations, the great wrongs that have nothing to do with us locked as we are behind mortar and stone. Are we in prison if we have the key?
I watch the images over and over. People streaming through the gates, destroying walls. I remember when we wanted more than equality, when we wanted to be free.
Every time I watch the images of the crowds streaming through Berlin's Cold War gates it's magic. God, what joy. What exhilaration when that wall you'd lived with for twenty-eight years just crumbles, and along with it the paranoia and surveillance and fear, the degradations and mutual betrayal of friends, all the lies you had to tell to others and yourself just to survive.
Afterwards, but before young Sarkozy and other tourists came for their photo ops, there were the guys with sledgehammers concentrating on each swing with a kind of unparalleled, single-minded fury. I could be them. I feel I am them, throwing my body and my life not just against the physical imprisoning restraints, but against all those barriers standing between me and freedom.
I can hear your silent sneer. "She's taken the metaphor too far once again. How the dyke exaggerates, now, when the LGBT community is making progress. You have to take the long view. Make a donation. Relax. Celebrate the federal hate crimes bill."
In fact, queers have taken one loss after another for the last twelve months from the loss of same-sex in California to the installation of anti-gay Rick Warren in Obama's inauguration to his administration's energetic defense of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Most recent is the repeal of same-sex marriage in Maine, which should remind us not only that same-sex marriage is not legal except in two or three states, but that it is explicitly banned in most.
LGBT people are condemned not just in America's laws, but in America's streets and hearts as second class citizens, children, criminals, pedophiles and child molesters. In many eyes, we are not even human finally, but worms, garbage and filth. We get beaten up in the street. Our younger selves are harassed in schools. We don't get decent health care even if we can afford it because our doctors are enemies to whom we tell nothing.
I don't understand the little shrug, the mere wince, or grimace when your face should be red with rage. Did the vast majority of queers in the United States enter into some kind of pact to be nice and polite, so as to not frighten the straights? Did you promise to knock softly on doors instead of battering them down? To speak sweetly in your phone banks instead of returning the filth they shower us with every day? To stay off the streets believing if you're good enough, kind enough, earnest enough, united, and homogenous enough change will come?
After all, the end of a generation only took one magic phrase from Ronald Reagan who ordered Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall." It had nothing to do with a disintegrating Soviet Union, a reformer in charge in Moscow who warned East Germans that Russia wouldn't arrive this time with tanks to back them up. The destruction of the wall had nothing to do with years of dissent, or vast demonstrations for reform that left border guards terrified when faced with a crowd that had been mistakenly told the border was opening up "immediately." It was a few words by an American president, and the magic of a good cause.
I'm less distressed by the legal reverses than our seeming stoicism in the face of them, and the same kind of egotistical and magical thinking many Americans used to interpret the fall of the Berlin wall. At a recent New York City march protesting the savage beating of a gay man, one councilmember actually said, "The one thing that has to happen is marriage equality so that people see that gays and lesbians are equal to everyone."
Actually, no. While same-sex marriage will make life easier for an enormous amount of gay people, marriage won't bring down the wall, homophobia, which divides us from straights in every aspect our lives: schoolrooms, churches, jobs, streets, families, and yes, courts.
In that respect, the Councilmember Tony Avella was more on target when he went on to admit that the city also needed a "deputy mayor for Human Rights to educate kids." I agree completely, and predict the fight to include lesbian, gay and transgender lives in the curriculum will be much more bitter than any same-sex marriage campaign. Which is perhaps why we have confined our efforts to asserting legal equality, and increasingly shut our eyes to the cultural and religious hate.
These days we build our own walls from the inside out, blocking the neighboring eyesores, and training ourselves not to see all the petty humiliations, the great wrongs that have nothing to do with us locked as we are behind mortar and stone. Are we in prison if we have the key?
I watch the images over and over. People streaming through the gates, destroying walls. I remember when we wanted more than equality, when we wanted to be free.
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