Danger for Women, Queers In Hungary

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

While the world watches people in North Africa and the Middle East struggle for democratic reform, Christian extremists in Hungary have been busy unraveling them.

Hungary's new constitution, recently approved and slated to go into effect in January 2012, is a particular triumph for demagogues, grafters, and bigots of all stripes. Railroaded through parliament by the right-wing party Fidesz, which seized control last year with an unprecedented two-thirds parliamentary majority, it declares Hungary a Christian nation in the first few lines, and goes on from there to beef up presidential powers, and undermine rights for LGBT people and women.

Article M of the constitution reads that "Hungary protects the institution of marriage between man and woman, a matrimonial relationship voluntarily established, as well as the family as the basis for the survival of the nation."

That clause not only bans future and full equality in marriage, but seems to lay the groundwork to challenge the 1996 law recognizing inheritance and pension rights for common-law marriage for couples of any orientation, and the 2007 law that allows same-sex couples to officially register as partners, getting most of the same rights as heterosexual spouses except for the notable exceptions of adoption and artificial insemination.

The constitution also attacks abortion rights by declaring: "Human dignity is inviolable. Everyone has the right to life and human dignity. The life of a fetus will be protected from conception." Paired with law declaring the (heterosexual) family as the "basis for the survival of the nation," rogue women and queers could easily be considered enemies of the state.

The new constitution also rewards heterosexual people with extra votes in the bizarre provision that parents can vote on behalf of their underage children. For instance, if a couple has seven or eight kids, that's how many votes they'll be able to cast. Parents with no kids, or queers who have chosen not to spawn will be left out in the cold. This unequal representation is only one of the many provisions that is getting scrutiny from the European Union's constitutional law advisory body. Ironic, since Hungary holds the EU presidency this year.

József Szájer, one of the Constitution's three authors, member of the majority party, and vice-president of the center-right European People's Party group in the EU assembly asserts that Hungary's new constitution is absolutely in line with the values of the Union. He even translated the constitution's clause about Hungary's historic commitment to defending EU values. "We don't say that, but that would mean our fights with the Turks in the Middle Ages to the 1956 revolution, when European values have been defended," he said.

And at a moment when the new government has raided pension funds and imposed crisis taxes on banks, the energy and telecom sectors, and retail companies, the constitution strips the highest courts of the right to provide independent oversight of the budget. It also allows the President to dissolve parliament if a budget is not approved.

For lesbians and gay men, the new fascistic, Christian regime outlined in the constitution seems to signal the end of an era of relative tolerance, and the beginning of antigay campaign designed not only to prevent gains, but roll back existing ones. In the U.S., at the height of the "Culture War" in the early nineties, when antidiscrimination gains were battled all over the country, we learned that homophobic crusades have consequences far beyond overturning a few laws. Physical attacks and harassment multiply. So do murders.

Last week, a study in Oregon showed that you didn't even have to have active antigay campaigns to impact LGBT kids. It was enough to live in a politically conservative area for suicide attempts by gay teens to increase compared to kids in areas defined as progressive. Researchers used an index rating the percentage of same-sex couples, Democrats, liberal views, gay-straight alliances, and anti-bullying and antidiscrimination policies.

What's interesting is that living in more conservative districts also led to more suicide attempts by straight students. It makes sense. The less visible diversity is, the more pressure to conform. At an age pretty much characterized by insecurity, fear and self-loathing, that can as easily turn outwards into bullying somebody lower on the totem pole, as it can towards self-harm and suicide.

In Hungary, fighting back is going to be tough. Since the Fidesz party was elected last April, they've not only been busy writing a new constitution, but taking over previously independent organizations, and creating a media council with the mandate to impose huge fines on media outlets for indefinable crimes like offending "human dignity."

The future of women and queers in Hungary depends a lot on how long the relatively independent media holds out, and whether or not the Christian extremist Fidesz party comes through on promises to reduce Hungary's 45 percent unemployment rates.

The New Culture War

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I keep having flashbacks to the culture war of the early nineties. Like in December, when the Smithsonian precipitously yanked a video by gay artist David Wojnarowicz from its show "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" after two rightwing U.S. Representatives complained a few seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix were sacrilegious and offensive.

Two weeks ago at the National Gallery, a woman attacked Paul Gauguin's painting, "Two Tahitian Women," because it showed two women with bared breasts. When she couldn't extract it from behind the plexiglass shield, she pounded it with her fists, screaming that it was evil until a social worker from the Bronx tackled her and brought her down. She was worried about the children, what with the nudity, and two women. "It's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned." She also apparently claimed to be from the CIA and have a radio installed in her head.

This past week, the Republicans threatened to shut down the whole U.S. government over a budget fight. A main sticking point were conservative demands to defund Planned Parenthood and the UN Population Fund that provide women with information about contraception and family planning, even though both are already barred from using federal money to do actual abortions.

The national mood echoes the one Pat Buchanan amplified in his 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention. There, he launched a cultural war "for the soul of America" claiming the country would fall to the eroding horrors of gay marriage and "homosexual rights", abortion on demand, women in combat troops, secularism, rioting LA mobs, and "the raw sewage of pornography" otherwise known as queer art. Add immigration anxiety, and the war on terror, and you're almost ready for 2012.

The biggest difference between now and then for queers was that in the early nineties powerful queer voices actually confronted the bigoted values of this "Judeo-Christian" nation, particularly in New York City. If you took the bus, or went out for groceries, we found a paper trail plastered on billboards and lampposts. Our artists scribbled graffiti, designed posters for ACT-UP declaring Silence = Death, or campy flyers from the Lesbian Avengers showing Pam Grier holding her machine gun. The Dyke Action Machine spoofed American Gothic with dykes in overalls. And clothing designers like Kenneth Cole sent messages in support, reminding us what closets were really for.

If somebody got bashed, we marched to reclaim the streets. If the Catholic Archdiocese wanted to let gay men die, we took the fight to St. Pats Cathedral. School boards that wanted to erase any mention of queers from the curriculum had to face us at district meetings where we appeared with our pink or black triangles and banners and big mouths. We filled the downtown theaters where lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes got her start, and danced and fucked at provocatively named bars like the Clit Club.

Our energy was wild, sexy, angry, impish, whimsical, raw. But what's so scary now? Ellen, dancing in her sneakers with the grandmotherly audience members? That earnest character, Kurt, on Glee? Barney Frank? Rachel Maddow knows how to ask a pointed question, but we have no mass movement. Artists are safely back in galleries or museums, and the ordinary queer rarely leaves Facebook long enough to make it to a bedroom, much less a bar. We don't fight for rights or freedom, we organize like worker bees for equality. Nobody threatens to recruit.

And maybe, with our small gains tucked away, we could laugh at the crazy woman attacking Gauguin, or the Smithsonian for acting so hastily to dump Wojnarowicz if hate didn't continue to be so real. Virulent, homophobic campaigns still paint us as pedophiles, sinners, and pervs to prevent same-sex marriage and adoption. Kids are still getting bullied to death. We're still getting bashed.

The New York City Anti-Violence Project reports citywide problems. On February 22, Barie Shortell was attacked one block from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by a group shouting anti-gay slurs. On February 26, Robert Jenkins was beaten and choked because his Staten Island attacker claims he made sexual advances. On March 12, in Woodhaven, Queens, five men entered a party shouting anti-gay slurs, and killed 18-year old Anthony Collao when he tried to flee, even though the kid didn't identify as gay. On Sunday morning, March 27, two men followed Damian Furtch out of a West Village McDonalds and beat the crap out of him while using anti-gay insults. This winter I heard about a dyke and her girlfriend getting attacked and not bothering to report it. I suspect there are more. I'm not sure young queers even know AVP exists.

The war is ongoing, but are we really fighting back?

The Company of Women

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Sorry. I'm not done writing about Kentucky and my family. My mother's gotten sick and I spend way too much time dialing the 502 area code checking her health and dealing with relations who smugly believe they're not homophobes, but somehow can't bring themselves to use the words "gay" or "lesbian" or even "queer." Yesterday, my sister actually referred to my, ummm, "situation."

We've heard it a hundred times in films. Somebody murmurs, "We've got a situation here, people," and the next thing you know, secret service guys are crawling out of the closet, guns drawn, and throwing themselves on the perp. I started looking around for one before I realized she was talking about me.

Not that she doesn't have a point. My family thinks I avoided them for thirteen years because I was ashamed of being a dyke, when the truth is their pious tones of acceptance still make me want to buy an automatic and mow the bigots down. I was saving their lives. Saving mine. I am a menace.

I would have ended the conversation right there if we weren't talking about my mother whose voice now shakes with age and illness. She's terrified of being dependent, though it's hard to tell how much is real, how much the usual hysteria. I'm not sure it matters.

Pity has mostly replaced rage where my family is concerned. Especially for the women. With few exceptions, they eat and drink misery, lament like Job about their failing bodies, rotten husbands, the injustice of the world. And do absolutely nothing about them. Have diabetes? Pick up another cigarette, grab a smoothie at McDonald's. That'll show 'em.

My mother's specialty was attacking her children as lazy and fat like their father, then buying dozens of donuts to keep them that way. The bravest thing she ever did was demand a divorce. And it almost killed her. My grandmother preferred the longsuffering model. The long, loud sighs, the guilt-tripping, "Oh, my hands, my knees, how they hurt. You're young. Why don't you come live with me and help me?" She embraced the attendant privileges of the saint and victim.

It's not that these women have no different, better sides, but the accepted tradition is to submerge their humor, intelligence, creativity in a pool of misery, bile, and superiority. For years, I thought that summed up what women were. Sure there were figures like Geraldine Ferraro, getting her law degree at night, rising through the ranks, earning a VP nomination from Mondale, making a speech to the Democratic National Convention the summer I graduated from high school. But she was from a different universe. Another planet. The TV wasn't real. Everything in the newspapers was foreign, not just the stuff in the international section. What did she have to do with us? Or with me?

And while we can have a conversation about the role of misogyny in all this, and the men who keep encouraging women to turn the other cheek so they can keep pounding away at naked flesh, I'm more interested in female complicity. At how remarkably easy it seems for victims to embrace the role they're offered. All you have to do is stay where you are. Do nothing. Bare your throat for the knife, then go straight to heaven, after you teach your daughters to do the same.

If I escaped at all, it was because the definition of woman was, by default, heterosexual. Women may have been considered the opposite of men, but they were also constantly trying to pair with them. Even before I knew I was a dyke I wasn't going to fight other girls over the boys at school, squeeze myself into tight jeans, wear big ugly hair and war paint. There was no dignity in it.

It pretty much took the Lesbian Avengers, all those dozens of women, to reshape the way I saw the female of our species. Passivity wasn't valued in a direct action group. Neither were displays of sacrifice and goodness that began to seem like so much narcissism.

Ironically, the Avengers were perfectly in keeping with my Christian training in which turning the other cheek was not mutually exclusive to fighting injustice, beating plowshares into swords, condemning Pharisees, dumping relatives to save yourself. Jesus after all, wasn't shy about demanding that his apostles leave their families behind, let the dead bury the dead, and all that. Which suited me just fine. Though it banished me from the company of woman.

You see, I've lost the habit of sainthood. You can kvetch if you need to, no problem, but then you take action. You get your hands dirty, break nails. You push back.

Queer in River City

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It's hard to know where to start this week. Pro-democracy Libyan rebels are getting slaughtered by government forces. An unforgiving Mother Nature has been destroying Japan. New York's own Peter King seemed intent on launching an anti-Muslim witch hunt, though all the terrorists arrested in the U.S. this week are white Alaskans, and very American as they spout the rhetoric of the oppressed, while mostly trying to avoid substantial back taxes, prior gun charges, and domestic violence complaints.

For me, the big news is that I went back home to Kentucky for the second time in six months, after a gap of 13 years, and the plane didn't fall from the sky, or combust upon landing -- which I considered a real possibility. Instead I got a chance to look at Louisville and the surrounding region through the eyes of young queers.

I was there to give a talk on the Lesbian Avengers to students at Indiana University Southeast, but I'm pretty sure I learned more than them about the state of our Queer Nation. First, a couple of young lesbians in the audience talked about how a gay student was beaten up in a school bathroom recently, while a whole gang of kids looked on, but cops refused to classify it as a hate crime.

Then a dyke activist gave me a CD of a lesbian music group she'd played in during the early nineties, about the time I left, when I thought Louisville had no out dykes. The next day, the aging, twanging mother of a lesbian shop owner recommended a gay-friendly church. And at a party, a young black lesbian said she'd been all worked up about coming out recently, but was totally deflated when her parents said it was no big deal. Ditto for when she announced she wanted to be a drag king. "Well, we better go buy you some clothes," was the response. At a dyke bar, her dad actually knew a woman and her girlfriend. "Look, there's so-and-so."

The worst of it, for her, seems to be the persistent racial segregation of the LGBT community. Her closest friend is a young white fag, and they get hassled a little whenever they go to bars and clubs. What are you hanging with him for? Why are you with her?

The two share a house with his white boyfriend who is from rural Kentucky, but said he came out with no problem. His father still struggled, but wasn't horrible, and his mother was perfectly okay. Online, he's found other young queers from the same region, and they have a little Louisville network. Some of them are comfortable enough to have begun moving back home. He is considering it himself, and plans to enlist the help of progressive nuns in the area to get something going if he does return.

I started to feel kind of funny, and put it down to mixing wine and mojito and beer, but it may have been the unfamiliar sensation of hope. As a kid I went from Bethany Baptist Church to school to youth orchestra. In my rare visits back, it's mostly been family trauma in a homophobic swamp. Imagine getting support when you come out. Imagine expecting help from your church.

We sat at the party and contemplated each other in mutual awe. They thought it was cool I was living in New York and had been a Lesbian Avenger. I was impressed that they were living at home, in Kentucky, smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. I may have scrapped with the NYPD, but when it comes to family, I'm a yellow-bellied coward with a Jell-O heart.

My het female friends also got to see Louisville through queer eyes, not so much from listening to our stories, but because when they were out with me, people generally assumed they were dykes, too. There was the lady at the supermarket who scowled, shook her graying curls, and turned away when she pushed her cart past ours. There were bemused waitresses and clerks. Some hostile stares. A few curious looks. No indifference. Not yet.

Most of it didn't really register with me, except the hag in the supermarket that I thought was hilarious. But not Leigh, who said she didn't know what she would do if she wasn't greeted with a smile. Because that's what they do in Kentucky. They smile and smile even at complete strangers, even if they plan to stab you in the back. But apparently that social contract is purely for straights.

While acknowledging the openings in this relatively progressive city, too many still consider queers a menace, and the disease we have so contagious, even a lengthy glance can let it in through the eyes, or nose, or mouth, like the common cold. Look long enough, you could find yourself doing the unthinkable. You could find yourself in love.

Owning the Streets in the Facebook Era

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There have been riots ever since humans have had cities, strikes ever since we’ve begun leading mechanized lives. Mass movements have been claiming the streets ever since there have been masses. Facebook doesn’t change that. It’s just a new version of an old tool, media, that makes popular action easier and more effective.

Instead of sending human messengers, or letters, or telephone calls, you blog and tweet to share information, and rouse people to action. And when you get it done, instead of relying on word of mouth, or broadsheets, or TV or print coverage, you post a cellphone video on YouTube and hope it goes viral.

What all media does is augment the power of the street, not replace it. Especially for participants. Tunisia and Egypt have taught us that. If you want to know why, just ask where we literally live. Not in the blogosphere, but here, in our bodies, and out in the world.

It’s important for the powerless to remember, especially those of us defined by our flesh -- women, lesbians and gay men, the transgendered, people of color. Because that is what the world takes direct aim at, beating, bashing, raping, lynching the life out of us.

Hate crimes generally involve more brutality than other assaults. Why stab a faggot once, when you can do it a couple dozen times? The aim isn’t only murder, but destroying what they fear and despise. To this end, attackers are more likely to use hammers, baseball bats, ice picks, anything that allows repeated blows that can reduce a human being into so much pulp on the floor.

It’s why, in the segregated south, black men were systematically lynched, and women like Recy Taylor were so often gang raped. Sexual assaults were so common the NAACP had special investigators, like Rosa Parks, who did a lot more than refuse to give up her seat on the bus.

I’ll even stretch my authority and say dictatorships -- almost always justified as being for the good of “the people” -- are so brutal because they’re attempting not just to keep citizens submissive, but actually transform them in their imaginations from human beings into something less than ghosts. Every year it gets easier. Every year “the people” lose substance which the dictator sucks up like a vampire. Along with most of the national assets.

Reclaiming our existence from bigots, from haters, from tyrants, requires more than courts, online petitions, and updates, but re-establishing a physical presence, and waving the flags of our race, and gender, and sexual identity in front of hostile forces. Get big enough, the forces of power will be afraid, and either make concessions with the people always ready behind the scenes, or get in their private jets and fly away.

More importantly, taking to the streets allows us to reclaim our own sense of power and humanity. Once you relinquish your terror and step out there, something strange happens. Photographers always capture the raised fist of demonstrators, the grimace. But the truth is you’re as likely to start laughing with exhilaration. You must have seen it on the faces of demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia that began dancing long before their revolutions were won. I’ve tasted it myself in the Lesbian Avengers, stepping onto Fifth Avenue with enough others like me for my voice and life to be amplified.

I saw it, too, a couple of weeks ago, when I was watching a segment of “Eyes on the Prize” about the struggle to desegregate Albany, Georgia. The camera of these documentaries usually circles around men, but this time it showed a whole row of young women in a big meeting singing and clapping. The next day they were on the street, laughing their heads off, faces shining with joy.

You could put it down to their participation in the enormous civil rights movement that they must have known was going to change history, but they were also young girls in the midst of a personal revolution. There’s nothing else to call it, females emerging in a way that they’d rarely done before -- as themselves. For once, they were not scurrying past hoping not to be noticed. They were not afraid of getting raped by a gang of white men sneaking around in cars. If violence came, it would be direct. Face to face, between equals. These young women were radiant with existence, and screamed with laughter.

Freedom, finally, is not something that can be negotiated, legislated, or rebroadcast on YouTube. Though all that helps. It’s something you seize with both hands, claiming actual space in the physical world where oppression also lives.

An Egypt For Everyone?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

By the end of it, they were all in Tahrir Square - young kids hoisted onto the shoulders of their parents, old men arguing in groups, women and girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Even early on, soccer rowdies paired with the Muslim Brotherhood youth to beat back the cops, and at prayer, Muslims were ringed by Christians protecting them vigilantly from Mubarak’s thugs. Bean-eaters and steak-eaters sponged the blood from each other’s broken heads. We were there, too, lesbians, gay men, the transgendered, indistinguishably playing our part.

I got choked up watching, and if I were the believing kind, I’d get down on my knees and pray for this moment of grace to endure long past the first free election, and for Egyptians to figure out how to sustain that good will through the tough times of building a democratic state.

Even women passed through the crowd unmolested, scarves or not, because for a moment, the people in the crowd were all sisters and brothers united by a common desire not just for jobs, and bread, but freedom. You can’t write this stuff. You’d have to be pretty creative even to dream it. For too long Egyptians seemed resigned to a humiliating image as a nation full of long-suffering sheep that could be moved only by religious extremism. Now, they are courageous individuals, activists, artists, the new face of democracy itself.

I still can’t grasp the enormity of it. A thirty year dictatorship gone in a couple of weeks. And not by a military coup, or a group of revolutionaries (as we used to understand them) laboring for years in dark cellars, and dreaming of the moment they would rescue their longsuffering land, and as repositories of wisdom, claim the head of it.

No, the informal network of young Egyptians that seem to have sparked things off, sharing ideas and techniques, were led only by disgust at the tyranny and corruption, a desire for real freedom, and a willingness to learn from other nonviolent youth movements like that in Tunisia. If you were compiling dossiers on names that repeatedly came up among organizers, you’d have thick folders on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi more often than other Egyptian activists. Power holds little attraction for actual movement figures like Google executive Wael Ghonim who is content to yield to politicians now that Mubarak is gone.

Which doesn't mean he won't be involved. As somebody in the crowd at Tahrir Square noted wryly, “Now, we know our way here.” Translated, it means, “We’ll be back if the army refuses to relinquish power. If they refuse to lift the perpetual state of emergency. If the cops continue to torture. If they try to shut our mouths. If politicians steal, lie, abuse, or separate us, we’ll be back.”

The revolution must give queers confidence, too. It’s been ten years since the Mubarak regime launched an antigay campaign with the Queen’s Boat crackdown that landed fifty-two men in jail. They were subjected not only to police abuse and torture, but a media circus of a trial geared to distract Egyptians from grinding poverty, and establish the regime as defenders of Islamic morality instead of the Muslim Brotherhood. Twenty-three of the defendants were eventually sentenced to prison with hard labor, while the others were acquitted. Periodic crackdowns followed.

The reformed, secular state that protesters demanded would mean police will have less occasion to arrest LGBT people for offending public morality, the primary charge leveled against us in Egypt, a country without any specifically antigay laws. And with freedom of speech and of assembly, and a truly independent press, Egyptian queers will have the tools to fight homophobia openly. It will also be easier in the new Egyptian society where young people favor more tolerance for everyone.

Even if some old timer politician makes an effort to scapegoat queers as a distraction for their incompetence, and they probably will, it’s less likely the ruse will continue to work on a crowd that’s developed a taste for real change. And that gay man, or dyke, or transgendered person can always retort, “I was there, too, in Tahrir Square. I’m an Egyptian just like you. Are we equal or not?”

Reinventing the idea of citizenship is one of the huge accomplishments of the youth organizers. “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.” That entitlement is why people took to the streets, and stayed to clean up Tahrir Square after each day of protests.

Egypt belongs to them, now. They hold it in trust and guard their new democracy like a child. You can see pride and hope shimmering from faces in photos, from the TV screen, on YouTube. It is possible to change the world. The clean stones bear witness.

Gay Enough?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

On Wednesday, gay activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his home in Uganda. He's been under threat of violence since 2009 when he was one of the few queers to openly denounce legislation proposing to execute homosexuals, instead of just tossing them in jail. Afterwards, a local newspaper published an antigay rant along with David's picture on the front page under the title, "Hang Them."

Nevertheless, just two days after his murder, a young Ugandan lesbian, Brenda Namigadde, was on a plane in London's Heathrow awaiting deportation back to Uganda where the likes of antigay legislator David Bahati have already announced Brenda was only welcome if she repented or reformed.

Luckily, another judge issued an injunction and they pulled Brenda off the plane before it left, though she's still at risk. Not because the Brits don't recognize Uganda's danger for queers, but because Brenda has to prove definitively she's a lesbian. The British judge that rejected her claim for asylum said he wasn't convinced.

To him it was "strange" that her descriptions of gay life in Uganda and the United Kingdom, were "very generalised and quite simply lacking in the kind of detail and information of someone genuinely living that lifestyle. The Appellant claims to have freedom to live a life unconstrained and without prejudice. I find the information as to how she has done so over the lengthy period she has been in the United Kingdom singularly lacking in detail or coherence. The Appellant appears to have taken no interest in forms of media including magazines, books or other information relating to her sexual orientation.”

The problem is that gayness isn't a lifestyle. If push came to shove, probably even I can't prove I'm a dyke as that judge understands it. I write these articles for Gay City News, but instead of checking out queer-themed books I usually go for murder mysteries, or French poetry written by straight (though queerish) men like Blaise Cendrars.

Dykes bars have opened and closed without me darkening the door, except for those few weeks when I waitressed at Crazy Nanny's and went home with phone numbers shoved into my pockets that girls had given me "just in case" I had second thoughts about my girlfriend which I suppose a judge could just declare a roommate unless I had some video footage documenting sex acts.

Let me interrupt this column to see if the words lesbian or dyke are in the titles of any books on my shelf... Yes, "Living as a Lesbian" by Cheryl Clarke is on the shelf next to "Second-Hand Coat," a volume of poems by writer Ruth Stone that I'd also forgotten. She's not a dyke, but a pretty good poet with Virginia roots. If you happen to run across something of hers -- read it. She's great. And reminds me of back home.

Identity is tricky. Like with the books, the music in the house wouldn't convince you of anything either, though there's some Cuba there, and Kentucky, but also funk, blues, classical, the great Lou Reed. Ela Fitzgerald. And good luck if you're looking for clues in our apartment. It tends towards the Spartan. We like light and emptiness. The little bit of art we have is mostly abstract.

What does it say, that blossoming jasmine, the enormous snake plant, and the palm pressing against the ceiling? Only that we like a bit of living green around the place. Or that we feel the need of additional oxygen. The remnants of our lesbian activist lives are mostly tucked away in drawers cabinets. My own articles are filed under "work" on my computer.

Are we lesbians, or not, if all you have is what's in our heads and bodies, and our pre-occupations that a little surveillance might or might not reveal? My girlfriend and I have passed whole weeks talking about nothing but her aging mother, or problems in the building.

There are thousands of ways to be a lesbian, queer woman, dyke, gay. Somebody like Brenda Namigadde, forced to leave Uganda in 2003 when her relationship with a Canadian woman led to threats and violence, might not have had much time afterwards to give her dykeness much thought.

It's not easy being an immigrant and facing the challenges of living in a strange country, understanding the myriad of accents, finding work, making a new life. Maybe she prefers to read poetry or The Economist rather than the Pink News. Maybe when she goes out it's not to a gay bar, but just the corner pub where she just does her best to get drunk and forget the whole thing. Maybe she's even given up girls. Though that won't help her back in Uganda, where perception is enough to get you attacked. And embarrassing the government carries its own price.

Towards An American Dream

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

A couple of months, or a year from now, when another antigovernment or bigoted nut climbs to the top of a tower with a sniper's rifle, or puts a bomb in a bar, or buys a semi-automatic and kills a dozen or more, I'll wonder aloud why you're so surprised. We'll still have the same "eliminationist" speech, the same river of guns, the same untreated mentally ill giving teeth to unfettered hate.

All because there's no cause and effect for most amnesiac Americans. We throw a rock, and then stand there gape-mouthed in surprise when the window breaks. If the self-made man pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, the crazy must be just as independent in his craziness. It is a purely random matter that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, or pro-choice doctor George Tiller, or any number of queers have been put in the cross hairs and killed.

Unable, or unwilling, to see relationships, there's no cherry pie, Presidents' or MLK day that can help us forge a twenty-first century dream in which all the residents of the United States are equal to each other, members of an extended family, however dysfunctional. Forget working together towards anything as grandiose as life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.

Our highest aspiration is to retreat independently to our own separate homesteads with no loss of benefits or privileges. Down with taxes. But let me keep my Medicare and you better plow my roads. In truth, the last thing we want is real pioneer America, living on fatback and cornmeal and dried beans, shivering next to a smoky fire, dying of overwork, malnutrition, childbirth. And that's only if you were lucky enough to be white and free.

And what are Americans without a dream? Are we just shopkeepers? Pharisees? Have we actually lost the capacity to see beyond ourselves? Or is it the temporary effect of swallowing our own hook and line about Americans already having the best of everything from democracy and health care to education and flat screen TVs? No, it doesn't get any better than this.

Without dreams, our spirits and imaginations wither like old apples under a naked tree. The reason we don't learn geography anymore isn't because we're stupid, but because we don't quite believe anything exists beyond the parameters of our peeling picket fences. And the same atrophied muscle that obliterates Africa, Asia, Europe, is equally suspicious of the foreign past, though it also relinquishes the present as fast as it can, and can't even muster the energy to imagine a future more distant than the check-out guy at Starbucks two feet away.

What will guide us without dreams? Despair? Like in poverty-stricken Tunisia? On December 17, 2010, 26-year-old vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire because police seized his grocery cart. His eventual death set off riots of the poor, the young unemployed middle class, and students, all agitating for democratic and economic reform. Last week, these angry crowds forced the president for life to leave the country. Shortly afterwards, his second in command fled as well.

Elections are promised in six months. Observers are hopeful Tunisia can emerge as a democracy, and a secular one, at that. There's even talk that the fever will spread, and the whole of North Africa begin to transform itself into a more just, and democratic place.

Inspired, or maybe pushed over the edge by the example of Bouazizi's suicide and the effective riots in Tunisia, at least six more men have engaged in self-immolation in North Africa. Four men set themselves on fire in Algeria and one each in Mauritania and Egypt where protesters demanded reforms until the cops regained control.

I used to believe in the phoenix. I'm less sure these days, but maybe that's my own lack of faith. My own failure of imagination. Who am I to believe that the bodies on funeral pyres must stay dead? Though a phoenix is a little tricky. What exactly will reemerge?

Just a couple of days ago the former dictator Baby Doc returned unexpectedly to Haiti after being chased out nearly twenty-five years ago. Nobody quite knows what for, except to spread chaos in an already messy political situation where the governing party is hanging on by fraud, and a run-off after the recent election has been postponed.

Maybe he's become a philanthropist in his old age, and is there to return some of the money he siphoned off into Swiss accounts. Maybe he's there to get more. A year after the earthquake, most of the rubble remains where it fell, and three quarters of a million of Haitians are still in makeshift camps where women are raped in incredible numbers, kids die from dirty water, and international aid money flows like rain.

Queer Issues

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The lead story in Le Monde and El País Saturday was the inauguration of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil. Apparently power can be handed over in one of the biggest, most dynamic countries in the world, with the new leader remarkably a woman. Nevertheless, the New York Times has no choice but to feature the latest college bowl game.

That's pretty much par for the national course. I wonder about this sometimes. All the time, actually. How little vision there seems to be. Since the outside world intruded ten years ago on September 11, and despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we seem to be more insular than ever, less inclined to see how we fit into the universe we're grudgingly part of. Like little children, we squeeze our eyes shut and persuade ourselves everything else is gone.

For a moment, I considered insisting we see the world using some kind of mechanical metaphor with gears and cogs and things representing different countries, and inside the countries different classes and races, the wheels within wheels, all interconnected and driving each other, but it seems too neat. Too clear. Better imagery from the natural world where the wind can carry pollen to fertilize plants hundreds and thousands of miles away. Or blow pollution and acid rain. The best you can do is watch the trends, and batten down the hatches when a storm roars in. Like now. With the Birthers, Tea Partiers, and simmering poor.

In this regard, us queers are not much smarter than the rest of the country. We shut our eyes and define our issues as narrowly and separately as possible. As if the question of homos in the military, for instance, has nothing whatsoever to do with immigrant rights. We even miss the irony that the same legislature that overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell on December 18th also nixed the Dream Act that would have allowed kids without papers to take steps to become citizens like enrolling in college or joining the military.

There are tens of thousands of Americans that were brought to the U.S. as children, have grown up here, gone to school, rotted their brains with TV and internet, listened to our music, spoken the language, worn the same clothes as the other kids in their school, and yet have zero rights. Many didn't even realize they weren't citizens until they've needed a birth certificate to apply for a passport or driver's license. They only thought they were Americans.

That sudden excluding shock is not so different really, than expecting to be able to go to the prom, find an apartment, find a job, get married like everyone else, then having the door slammed in your face because your partner is the same gender as you. You're not really one of us. Not a full citizen. Not even a full adult, a full human.

The growing "us" and "them" mentality should have the LGBT community on high alert, and not just because there are queer immigrants who are going to get screwed by this xenophobic wave like their hetero peers. Hate and fear have a way of persisting, and expanding like wind-caught spores. That is why we, as out queers, should join the fight against anti-immigrant bills. Half a dozen states are planning not only to block paths to citizenship, but strip away current rights of undocumented immigrants including schooling, health care, and even automatic citizenship for children born in this country--guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Most of the legislature is based on Arizona's earlier legislation, even though many of the measures were stuck down. In Oklahoma, where they're calling their efforts "Arizona plus," they are even including provisions that would allow cops to seize any vehicles and property that transported or "harbored" undocumented immigrants. Which means somebody could work, pay taxes, buy a car or house, and have it stolen out from under them. Laws don't apply. An attitude that can be habit forming.

Do you really think that legislators, or cops for that matter, who perceive every brown-skinned person as probably outside the law, are really going to care if a fag gets beaten up in front of a bar or in a schoolyard? Or if a dyke gets raped or loses her job? If a tranny gets killed? When the circle of people acceptable to the law gets smaller and smaller, do you really think they'll let us in?

As long as we persist in seeing LGBT rights as a separate entity, a potted plant, that we can keep separate from the rest of the ecosystem, we may make limited progress, but not real change. We need an entire society that values human rights and liberation. Sure, queers have to keep working on queer issues. But it's time we do it with our eyes open. Paying attention. Remembering the whole that we're only one part of.

Do Ask, Do Tell -- About Torture

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Don't Ask, Don't Tell is finally over and done with, so get out the champagne, point it away from your lover's face, and pop the plastic cork. Eventually, the Defense of Marriage Act will be overturned. A couple more laws will be passed against homodiscrimination. And with full legal equality, we can dissolve into our country like the other lazy liberal slobs America plays host to, with mediocre marriages and crappy jobs and crappy health care, and not the faintest idea of what it means to be a citizen saddled with responsibilities along with rights in this behemoth of a nation that tramples its own ideals as thoughtlessly as peanut shells on the floor of a bar.

Better open two bottles. Or go straight for the scotch.

I'm thinking of how this military we are now so thrilled to be a part of aids and abets torture, and how much more easily it goes down under Obama, than under Bush. Surely you remember the demos after Abu Ghraib? They weren't particularly well attended, but they were there. There was certainly a hue and cry when the first orange jumpsuited prisoners were installed in cages in Guantánamo.

Nevertheless, despite all promises to the contrary, the latter remains open, and new victims tortured so frequently in military jails and black op sites that foreigners can now persuasively fight extradition into American hands.

All they have to do is point to Bradley Manning. For the last seven months, the 22-year-old soldier has been held in military jails under conditions of long-term isolation that most countries agree constitute torture. A model prisoner, and convicted of nothing whatsoever, he's nevertheless been kept in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours every day, forbidden even to exercise in his cell, and deprived of basic amenities like sheets for his bed.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently reported that, "as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation." That's us. That's America, still torturing kids, even if we've refined our methods since José Padilla who totally cracked while awaiting trial.

The question is why. Manning's no dangerous criminal that's killed 27 men with his bare hands, or a terrorist greybeard encouraging young things to blow themselves up in public places. He's a young soldier that either heroically or foolishly may have leaked materials related to what seemed like war crimes, including an Apache helicopter attacking and killing unarmed civilians.

As he wrote in an online chat with hacker Adrian Lamo prior to his arrest, he only wanted to give people an opportunity "to see the truth... regardless of who they are... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." He went on to write that if there was no outcry, and it didn't change anything, "we're doomed - as a species - i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens."

An investigation is probably appropriate. Not torture. Never torture. Especially when it's so clearly designed not to punish, but destroy him, both to deter other whistle-blowers, and to persuade a desperate Manning to implicate our new favorite enemy, Julian bin Assange.

For Americans these days, anything can justify torture. First it was the "War on Terror and the Folks that Should Really Give Us Our Oil For Free." Now it's our "War on Sources of Annoyance, Embarrassment, and Defective Condoms."

While queers were celebrating their new inclusion in the military, our Vice President Joseph Biden was telling NBC that WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, was a "high-tech terrorist." Before that, that Democratic asswipe Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the U.S. government to prosecute Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act, a precedent that would pretty much destroy American journalism, even entities like the New York Times.

Feinstein also wants to criminalize people like me if we dare re-post these leaks in our newspapers or blogs. And the U.S. government has apparently been warning federal employees that even reading classified State Department documents published anywhere via WikiLeaks shall be considered a crime.

Let me take this opportunity to formally announce that in future national elections I will no longer vote for Democrats. You had your chance to stand for liberty and justice, and you flushed it down the toilet along with a constitution that guarantees free speech, fair trials, and equal treatment under the law. And for me, those are the only "gay" issues that count. Every right we have, or hope to win, all the methods we have to gain them, stem from those basic ideals.

If queers forget that, we are lost.

Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman: Dykes Outside the Box

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

One of the best kept secrets in Lesbolandia is power couple Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, the doyennes of fantasy fiction. We sat down earlier this month and talked about writing, relationships, and the virtues of operating outside the box.

They met at a Boston Science Fiction Conference in 1985 when Delia was living in Boston and shopping a novella that would turn into her first book. One of the people she was directed to was Ellen who was living in New York and had unfortunately just left her editing job. She gave Delia a hand, anyway, and when Ellen moved to Boston a few years later, they became friends. In 1992, they finally began dating.

It was a natural match. They belonged to a new generation of writers that drew from a variety of sources including pre-Raphaelite painters, Victorian novelists, and "Man from U.N.C.L.E." in addition to fantasy icons C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They broke with the old masters when they realized "we did not have in us what they had in them," Ellen said. "We're not English. We don't go for long country walks. We all kind of grew up in the suburbs and were living in our twenties in bad neighborhoods in the cities."

The result was what one reviewer dubbed "fantasy of manners," later also called "mannerpunk." The setting is urban, and like in Dickens, often seesaws between high society and the criminal class. Books may have swordfights, but the plots more often hinge on social intrigue. The wry witty tone owes a lot to Jane Austen. Ellen's 1987 novel "Swordspoint" has become a classic of the subgenre.

Associated with the movement, and with each other, Ellen and Delia are much sought after to appear as a team at conferences and workshops. They've become the traditional featured writers for the New York Review of Science Fiction's December "Family Reading." This year's event was held last Tuesday at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art.

The gallery featured digital renderings of their book jackets, story illustrations, and wedding photos, including one of an enormous wedding cake. They've actually been married twice--to each other. The second time was at Delia's instigation in 2004, so they could "become part of the problem" if Massachusetts tried to repeal the law and dissolve queer marriages.

The crowd at the gallery seemed nonplussed by the whole lesbian thing. There was a mix of ages, races, sexual orientations, the conventional, chic, and the ultra geeky. The diversity was remarkable for segregated New York, but not necessarily for the science fiction and fantasy world. One of their fans told me that he'd been attracted to fantasy in the first place because it was all about "the Other," and that's what he was, young, queer, black. As Delia put it, speculative fiction is mostly about exploring "the fluidity of human identity, and what it means to be a human being, and not necessarily just a man. Or a woman."

Gender is central to their work. After writing the cult novel, "Swordspoint," focusing on two gay male characters in their twenties, Ellen began writing "The Privilege of the Sword," a sequel set twenty years later, exploring the same society, but this time through the eyes of a teenaged girl. The description of what it's like for Katherine when she puts on pants for the first time is pretty extraordinary. Delia's young adult novel, "Changeling," sends a young girl on a quest through a folkloric version of New York that includes mythical figures like the Mermaid Queen of New York Harbor that could just as easily be a biker dyke with spiky orange hair, a black vest, and nose to tail tattoos.

But while fantasy writers may respect the hard to categorize "Other" in their literature, publishers are not so crazy about books that blur the genre boundaries. If you do fantasy fiction, stick to the conventions. Ditto for other genres like historical novels. At the same time, too many mainstream readers won't approach books in the fantasy section at all because as Ellen says, they have fantasy cooties. But label the same books magical realism and stock them elsewhere, they'll gobble them up. Putting stuff into boxes keeps readers, and books, from crossing over.

Delia and Ellen and some of their friends, have founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation to promote art that crosses genre borders, and help writers present themselves to the marketers. The point is not just to sell books, but publish good writers that have read widely and bring everything that they have read to what they're writing. "That's how literature grows. That's how art grows. By bringing things in, and making something new of it."

Delia could as easily have been making an argument for diversity in biology, or music, and even politics. The idea filters into their joint Swordspoint-set novel, "The Fall of the Kings," which is partly a critique of a political class guarding its homogeneity, and the lengths the powerful will go to preserve their privilege. If magic had been called religion in the book, and it had been set in contemporary America, this portrait of a society engaged in censorship, spying, torture and intrigue wouldn't have been categorized as fantasy at all, but pure realism.

++++++++++++++

For Ellen and Delia in the flesh, check out these videos

Ellen Kushner on Getting Married -- Twice!

Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner on Mannerpunk and Modesty

Queers Need Their Own WikiLeaks

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

You'd think the Tea Partiers would be acclaiming WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, as their newest hero. What is he but the ultimate Buffy single-handedly taking on the global vampiric network of the U.S. government and the international banking industry, not to mention the autocrats of Africa and Eastern Europe?

By exposing how they operate, and sharing their inner workings with ordinary people, he may not be putting a stake in their dark pulsing hearts, but he's definitely inserting a splinter or two in their butts. All hail, Assange, defender of liberty and slayer of censorship.

But instead of congratulating Assange, our own Long Island Congressman Peter King, the incoming chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, told MyFox New York, that WikiLeaks should be declared a "foreign terrorist organization," and Assange prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Sarah Palin likewise called for Julian Assange to be pursued with "the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders." Bill O'Reilly called for Assange's execution as a traitor. Others are calling for the murder of his children and his lawyers.

All for what? Lifting the veil on diplomacy and confirming what we already largely knew? That Iran's Arab neighbors don't like the Persian country loaded up with nuclear warheads, diplomats lie a lot, and the U.S. has little leverage in the Middle East and Asia because, as Thomas Friedman put it in the New York Times, we're addicted to oil and Chinese credit? The only real surprise was the occasional proof of the competence of our foreign service, like the careful profile of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero.

Throughout Cablegate, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have behaved like responsible journalists, identifying and withholding documents that might truly compromise U.S. national security, not just embarrass the country. He even offered the U.S. government a chance to see them prior to publication, which the administration turned down--until the same offer came from The New York Times.

So what's the hoo-hah about? The internet is full of articles claiming the real story in Cablegate is not the cables, but the response to WikiLeaks itself and the seismic shift in media and the role of traditional outlets like The New York Times. Does all that insider trading leave them compromised, or does it give them special insight? Is that a fine line they can walk without falling off like a bunch of drunken slobs? Are they useless? Is the work of citizen bloggers and outsiders somehow truer, and more authentic?

We could ask the same questions about most of our major LGBT organizations which have grown further and further away from their outsider, activist roots. Though to be fair, if there's anything we've learned from the likes of Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers, it's that outsider status alone guarantees nothing. The left has as many wingnuts as the right. Activists immersed in a single issue in a single place, may lose sight of the big picture.

More to the point is the question of transparency and access. What sets Julian Assange apart is not his neutrality, but his openness. "This is what I think. Here are all my sources. Make up your own mind." He insists on the responsibility of the reader, of the individual citizen, and by offering them his evidence, empowers them to participate. This is the foundation of democracy, and something we could use more of.

Compare him to our unelected LGBT representatives that make backroom deals with politicians. Remember all the votes they thought they had with same-sex marriage in New York? Remember the 2008 election campaign, when Obama didn't throw us any crumbs in his platform, but our organizations still endorsed him after closed door meetings. "Trust us. He's in our corner." Are we partners in social change or not? Or have we just established one more ruling elite actively working to disenfranchise ordinary queers? Will our bigwigs continue getting screwed until they abandon the pleasant little thrill of secrecy?

I'm not saying national LGBT organizations should be ditched entirely. Assange handed over his treasure trove to the newspapers of record in the U.S, Britain, and Germany because they had the vast and knowledgeable personnel to sift through it. The difference is that he made sure we all had the same access.

The real challenge of WikiLeaks isn't to traditional media at all, but ideas of power and control that even the Tea Partiers want to preserve in case they can one day seize them. And Power lies in the difference between saying the emperor has no clothes, and actually posting his photo on Facebook so we can see the sagging naked flesh in all its repulsive decadence with the mole on the left shoulder blade and flaccid belly, all crowned by jaundiced eyes.

In Kentucky At The Breeder's Cup

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Earlier this month, I went back to Louisville for the first time in thirteen years. My mother still lives there, as well as my father, his second wife, and my oldest sister's family. My other sister came in from Colorado with her husband and kid. I set the "reunion" as far as possible from the landmine holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas when everything's supposed to be so happy-family and lovey-dovey that people all over the country have to get drunk to stand the sight of each other, and more than one gun goes off before you get to the pie. I wasn't going to give them a queer to aim at, even if things have changed, kind of.

As in most of the United States, the state of LGBT folks in Kentucky varies from region to region, city to city, and house to house. In Louisville, one teenaged girl I met, lured into the ROTC by promises of rock climbing trips, passed a semester or two arguing with her colonel, defending gays in the military and women's rights.

Across town, another young girl spent several weeks circulating a petition to preserve Don't Ask, Don't Tell and she's not even in the ROTC yet. She wears bits and pieces of her brother's uniform, and the two do drills when they're bored. She's my niece, and everybody says she's exactly like me. And despite herself, she liked me.

Then there's my mother. When my cousin picked me up at the airport, she told me she'd been lecturing the old dame to be more accepting, or failing that, bite her tongue. "I don't know how I'd feel if one of my kids had made that choice, but you still have to love them and welcome them into your house. And their companions, too. They're your kids, even if you don't agree with their lifestyles."

She meant it kindly, but I would have turned around and headed home right then, if I hadn't taken half a Xanax. Still, whatever she said to my mother worked. Mom didn't exactly ask after my girlfriend of seventeen years, but she did button her lip, and because I did, too, we passed our visit together in a relative truce. We went through pictures, and like the pro reporter I am, I asked leading questions, and let her chatter about whatever crossed her mind until she approached a dangerous subject.

It was what I was there for, to visit parents aging at an accelerated rate. To show my face. Which is the literal truth, especially for my mother, who can't stand the rest of me, in particular the rebellious brain packed with a lesbian lifetime.

I stayed at a hotel the first few nights where the lobby was deluxe, and the rest under construction with its long dark halls nearly deserted until a slew of visitors arrived for the Breeders Cup at Churchill Downs. What synchronicity. I ate a hamburger at the Dairy Queen, and huddled in bed. My girlfriend emailed me a post-election article celebrating the victories of "out" politicians, including Jim Gray, who was elected mayor of Lexington. I was glad things were changing in the state, even if not in time for an exile like me.

The visit with my father was calm. When I was done smiling and nodding to almost every surviving relation in Kentucky and the neighboring states, I went to stay with an old classmate who wasn't at all put off by reconnecting with a big dyke. She had one for a sister-in-law, in fact, and tells a queer-themed story about bonding with her husband-to-be at a Presbyterian youth event. After some homophobic kid mouthed off, the two exchanged glances, asking, "Do you agree with that?" When both shook their heads, no, a heterosexual romance was born.

I talked politics with her husband who teaches social studies at a high school for "at risk" kids. He said the girls were incredibly open, going around arm in arm, declaring they were lesbians, partly to provoke, partly to experiment without knowing entirely what it meant.

Queerish boys were more reticent. And with cause. When one kid from a troubled family came out as bi, his family gave him a lot of crap. A couple days later he disappeared from school, and hadn't been heard from since. Maybe the school was blamed for putting those notions in his head, and they sent him somewhere else. Maybe he got the crap beat out of him and can't leave the house.

That's the world we live in, moving forwards, sideways, and back.

In 2009, at least 22 people in the U.S. were murdered for being LGBT. Most were transwomen. Four out of five were people of color. November 20th was the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Queers in the Shadows

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'd like to say I care about the Republican triumph this mid-term elections, but I just don't. The Democrats are no prize for queers, and it's been clear for months that the bulk of the country was on another of its freakishly alienating trajectories. Like when Americans continued to embrace Bush as he defended the torturers of Abu Ghraib, only turning away when the economy sank.

Now, they're blaming a president of two years for a decade's mess, demanding he reduce spending, cut taxes, shrink the State, just don't touch my Medicare. And while they decry government corruption they elect a slurry of politicians that have both hands and even their feet in the till. Good luck with that.

I'm just glad the San Francisco Giants whooped Texas butt on Texas soil. It was repulsive watching the Bushes parade around the baseball diamond like they still owned the country, which I guess they do again. Nevertheless, the World Series trophy comes home to those gay-marryin' liberal hippies on the West Coast. Hah.

Screw the weekly, the yearly, the four-year cycle, anyway. I've decided to change my touchstones to decades, lifetimes, even. It's an inevitable shift after trying for these last few weeks to articulate the usefulness of the Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project. The capper was a show at El Museo del Barrio.

Called "Nueva York," it traces the impact of Spain, Latinos and Latin America on the development of New York City from 1613 to 1945. Contributions weren't just recent influences in music and art, but commerce, finance, and manufacturing. By the end, the exhibit manages to reorient the way we look at the whole vibrant city.

The Domino factory that stood so many years on the Brooklyn side of the East River is a remnant from New York's role as a major player in the Caribbean sugar trade. Father Felix Varela whose name is attached to more than one building on the Lower East Side and in 1988 got his own stamp, was only one of dozens of Latin American revolutionaries like Cuban compatriot José Martí to turn to New York both as a refuge, and a financial and media center where you could whip up support, money, even a shipment of arms.

Hispanic Jews were responsible for the first synagogue here, and what would New York be today without salsa and reggaeton, and all the signs declaring se habla español?

I was enchanted by the show until that moment thumbing through the binder of Men of Letters when I realized that, in fact, there were no women of letters in there at all, and only a handful in the exhibit. Only two or three men of color made it in. And queers were as invisible as we usually are in these traditional exhibits that are largely about straight pale men in the public sphere.

Does it matter? I always thought so. In 1992, when the Avengers began their campaign for lesbian visibility and survival, Ellen and Rosie were still in their respective closets. Christine Quinn was an unknown dyke at the Anti-Violence Project, and Lower East Side housing activist, and openly queer, Margarita López was five years away from winning a seat on the City Council.

When the Avengers did their first action, handing balloons to school kids suggesting they "Ask about lesbian lives," lesbian mothers had their kids stripped from them with impunity, we were totally excluded from public life, American culture, and even the printer almost misspelled the "L" word. Yeah, visibility seemed urgent.

Lately, now that queers are becoming more visible, people are beginning to dispute its value. What if it only makes us a target of bullying and violence? And what should we do with this growing visibility if we don't like the images we're stuck with, like the lesbian PTA moms, or the "Real" L word crew, that don't even have camp to redeem them?

We can't stuff lesbians back in the bottle, and I'm not sure we should. Unless you control a pretty good chunk of the country's wealth, visibility (and solidarity) is the only road to power. It's not surprising that it sometimes seems like a bruising election campaign, in which one side is forced to be unnaturally wholesome while the other slings mud and caricatures.

Visibility is a means, not the end, unless your only ambition is the mere acknowledgment of existence. Me, I want the moon. Or at least cultural and political integration, inserting ourselves in every history with the battle cry, "We're queer, we're here, and we always have been." Especially in New York. Like Latino immigrants, we came to the city in droves, seeking refuge and revolution. We shaped neighborhoods, made contributions in every field, planting seeds that have only begun to emerge.

Recognizing Our Prison Guards

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I am a little depressed almost all the time. It's a result of keeping my temper when I should be barricading buildings, storming Bastilles, or taking a big crap on your "progressive" doorstep. The tea party fury over furinners trying to steal their godgiven rights is nothing compared to what I feel at the daily betrayals of people pretending to have my big dyke back.

You can start with all those New York State politicians that took gay dollars and voted against same-sex marriage. There there's Obama whose hideous Justice Department is fighting as hard to keep the anti-gay military policy, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, as it does to keep Guantanamo detainees behind bars without fair trials, and wiretappers on the job at all the major and minor Telecoms.

Far worse are professional queers like Rick Garcia of Equality Illinois smarmily congratulating himself for his patience in a New York Times article about anti-Democrat anger among queers. "But change takes time; sometimes it takes a lot of time. A lot of folks just don't understand that." And thank god we don't. Not as long as fags are getting tortured and raped in the Bronx and suicided across the country. Not when the transgendered are getting murdered, dykes raped and harassed. Or just dragged down, and marginalized to death.

Supposedly homo-friendly feminism is still riddled with homophobia. Bloggers often write the innocuous "gay woman" instead of lesbian. And the other day, there were those lesbian, feminist playwrights who declared that they hadn't written about dykes or dyke issues because they were so limiting and they didn't want to be pigeonholed, but were still very much lesbians every minute they were writing and performing. I'll believe that when I see photos of their girlfriends eating fur pie under their typewriters as they wrote.

What they liked was that feminist strain of matriarchal rigmarole and mother daughter crap that in my humble opinion stuffed us into one more biologically determined fantasy as suffocating as any myth they were trying to reclaim. The real Greek gods at least subversively screwed their siblings, drank buckets too much, and gave a girl the option of springing full grown from the head of Zeus.

I wouldn't mind coming from there, or even under a rotting cabbage plant where you stand a chance to reinvent yourself as a genetically modified species with enormous capacities to resist parasites, mold, and other inconveniences. Yes, let me spring like water from a struck rock. Let me emerge like Godzilla from your nuclear waste.

Anything not human. Look around at our circumstances. I'm not sure humans actually deserve any kind of rights. We're so eager to be prison guards of our own kind, our own kin, though we call it something else when queers keep other queers in line, and females enforce nice womanly behavior, and mothers raise pig sons as princes or vice versa, and terrorize their daughters for trying to break free. Who needs colonizers when homegrown tyrants do just fine?

Can we make any progress until we line them up against the wall? At least acknowledge them? There are so many. How can we separate the dancer from the dance, the baby from the bath(water) before it gets tossed out?

Next month, I'm going home for the first time in a decade. My own mother could be dismissed as one more nutcase Southern Baptist tea partier. She was amazingly destructive. Tortured me as a dyke (and writer) and daughter while she prayed for me to turn straight and be the girl god wanted me to. She's old now. When I called, her voice wavered on the phone. She sounded a little confused, though not necessarily nicer.

Should I reject her as if she were a Sarah Palin? Allow age to absolve the old matriarch? Should I give her a break when she's surrounded by so many enemies, including plenty of old, new, and post- feminists that never consider that the same right-wing fundamentalists, and anti-choice women they alienate may have children that turn out to be dykes like me. And we remember how our mothers were treated. Even if they seem like a different species.

If you sneer at her, you'll dismiss me too, especially if your benchmark issue is abortion. I've never had one and never will unless I'm raped in the next twenty minutes before menopause hits. Lesbophobia, on the other hand, concerns us all. What do straight women get called when they refuse a date? What do they get called when they're the ball-breaking boss? "Fucking dykes." C'mon. Take up lesbophobia, dear feminists. I'm holding my breath.

Even the queers won't touch it, now that we're into equality, not dissecting hate, or changing society. Our smug professional queers do their best to tamp down our urgency, anger and despair. What do we do with these prison guards? They look like us when a riot's on.

Of Mice and Dykes

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Last week was the CLAGS conference on Lesbian Lives in the 1970's. One of the big questions they asked participants was, "What did you think you were doing?" The extraordinary answer was, "Changing the world."

In some of their mouths it sounded almost bitter. Some went on to blame Reagan for cutting down the hopes of the Seventies. Others blamed AIDS for drawing dykes into service organizations, and making them too nice or too tired to overthrow the patriarchy after taking care of their dying brothers.

Progressives haven't seen such ambition in ages, though there was a hint of it in Obama's presidential campaign before he transformed himself from charismatic leader into one more middle manager with his cards clutched to his chest, and bold positions abandoned as soon as the primary results were in.

If you look for cock-eyed optimism now, you'd have to go to the Tea Party movement. They are busy envisioning a second American Independence saga in which patriots can practice isolationist politics while keeping their jobs (and flat screen TVs) dependent on a global market. And without contributing to the common pot, they can also preserve all the advantages they've grown accustomed to in the greatest country in the world, like roads and hospitals and armies and bridges.

Crunch their impossible numbers and what you get is the portrait of a people that wants to be liberated from need and interdependence like a spoiled teenager ready to run away from home with her credit card and iphone (both paid by her parents) because somebody capped her calls or made her do chores.

They don't want to believe we're stuck with each other. Not just now, but forever. So maybe deluded is a better word than optimistic to describe such a movement, acknowledging there's a little bit of delusion in any attempt at social change. Or for that matter Obama's attempt to carve a middle, waffling road at this time of crisis.

These days, demoralized progressives are neither optimistic nor world-changers building lively antiwar, feminist, green, or LGBT movements. Queers arise sometimes like last week's Flash Mob demo against deadly homophobia in Grand Central Terminal, but there's nothing continuous, or urgent. There's no overarching dream. We're just consolidating gains, playing defense, or inching ahead.

It's partly because we transformed grassroots movements into institutions that have become establishments like so many others. People have their fiefdoms and ten-year financial projections. They tamp down any spark of revolution with caution. Half the LGBT organizations applauding the reversal of the Proposition 8 ruling in California's federal courts had advised the lawyers not to push ahead. It's not the right time. Halt in your tracks, you usurpers.

You could smell the dust coming off of the recent One Nation extravaganza before they stepped onto the D.C. mall. The marchers were apparently enthusiastic, but what they were forced to listen to were the same old speakers from the same stale institutions mouthing the same old platitudes. Up with good jobs, health insurance, and same-sex marriage. Down with racism, and immigrant- and gay-bashing. The underlying message was vote for Democrats in November. Heralding the rally as the beginning of anything is as deluded as expecting a suddenly "clean" administration in Albany.

I'm increasingly troubled by the equality-obsessed LGBT movement we have on our hands. Of course we have to push for legal rights, but what could be more conservative than only wanting the same things as the others have got?

That kind of vision won't change the world, or even solve bullying in schools. For that, you have to entirely revise American life, starting with the football and cheerleader culture of high schools and colleges that tortures all kids who are nerdy, awkward, overtly intelligent, or queer. You have to restructure the American Family. Get your hands dirty in combat with churches. You have to drive a bulldozer, or just imagine one. You have to dismantle the myths.

What a joke that in high school we're forced so brutally into tribes at the same time we're taught to admire those singular individuals that pull themselves up by their bootstraps, succeed without a helping hand from anybody, except of course Gawd. You don't have to be a genius to see how that American contradiction leads some to become bullies and cultural enforcers, others lone gunmen, either mowing down crowds, or taking out themselves.

Maybe it's time to recover our ambition, and set our sights not just at changing a law or two, but all of America. It will take a new grassroots movement, and a mixture of characteristics I've noticed in the country mice upstate: creativity, persistence, and a quick learning curve. You plug one hole, they find another soft spot to gnaw at. Ignore them, they'll have your house down on the ground in a flash.

Free Christiane Amanpour!

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

After being told three times this week how much better things are for queers than in the bad old days, I decided to spend the weekend taking stock. Hell, maybe I'm just a cranky old dyke unwilling to let go of her complaints, and her crap-colored glasses.

After two days with unusually open eyes, I have to announce that the verdict is mixed. There's no denying the legal progress. Even if Congress didn't dump Don't Ask, Don't Tell this month, we can screw in all fifty states without facing arrest for sodomy. Not that I even knew it was illegal coming up, but still. Culturally speaking, there's an actual Hollywood movie about lesbian moms, (though one still falls for a guy), and there's the homo kid on Glee that gets his head flushed in toilets (but his cool, butch father makes earnest anti-bashing statements).

And of course, there's the internet with its extraordinary potential for LGBT visibility and activism. But does it really make kids feel less alone in the world? Depending on where you live, a happy queer teen may seem like an alien from another planet. Cheerful chat rooms are parties you see from outside in the snow, with your starving face pressed against the glass.

Because the world most of us actually live in seems entirely populated by the aggressively heterosexual, with gender even more strictly enforced than a couple of decades ago. You can spend hours surfing TV and not see one woman under sixty that has short hair unless you run across a rerun of Demi Moore in Ghosts.

Guys all have hair that runs from short to ultra short, except for pro wrestlers and Samoan football players. Of the fifty black and Latino guys gathered for handball across the street, only three had long hair, dreds pulled back in ponytails. In front of Prune, the East Village restaurant, the men could all be straight from the army barber and the women from Vogue.

At Whole Foods on Houston, the only follicle deviants were girls with buzzed scalps that accentuated blade sharp cheekbones and dangly earrings. No androgyny there. Even the dykes that used to work security seemed to be gone.

While this is not exactly a Pew study, it stinks of anti-homo panic. Like seeing Christiane Amanpour with boofed up hair, enormous earbobs, and enough make-up to paint the side of a house. What happened to the international correspondent that wore khaki shirts, a bit of gloss, and the authority of untamed hair? What did you do with her? Free Christiane Amanpour!

I even watched WNYE2, but after twenty minutes and three different intersections didn't see any short-haired women, or willowy David Bowie figures. And upstate last month, there was only one girl with short hair working at McDonald's, the only muffdiver (except me) visible for miles, and she never made eye contact.

Every message on the street is no dykes, no fags, no flamboyant trannies allowed. And that's in New York. I can't imagine what it's like for queer kids in places where football players and cheerleaders still rule supreme. Along with Bible Study. God knows what preachers shout at them from the pulpits.

Even for me, so-called progress often seems like a dream. Who are you people that have accepting parents and go home willingly for Thanksgiving? Where are you queers that live in unstintingly accepting communities? Did you go undercover thinking to make it easier for the twins in the strollers? What about those few of us that can't pass, or won't? Should we cheer when we see the same Christine Quinn all dolled up in power suits and pearls that used to turn up at AVP meetings in sweats with rumpled hair. Oh, baby, let's sing the stone butch blues.

I suppose if I want dykes, even pseudo ones I'll have to buy the Millennium movie and watch Lisbeth stalk onto the screen, or get that Alien film with Sigourney Weaver's shaved head and jump shot, or Linda Hamilton in Terminator Two who could still be a dyke icon with those phenomenal arms, no matter who she finally screws.

My final report card for the state of queer nation is a C-. Legal progress creates a little space, but gender pressure does what it can to shrink social openings to such a pea-like size any acceptance requires you to pass for ultra-straight.

And me, I'm back where I usually am, declaring things have changed, but not nearly enough. And if we don't pay attention, what little we have can be stripped away. It's happening to straight women with legal rights as abortion gets more restricted every year. And if you don't realize how quickly tolerance can cede to hate after years of seeming progress, you just have to google "Obama," and pick your way through the filth.

Putting Dykes in Their Place: 70's Lesbians

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The Seventies were the "Me" decade of disco, bell bottoms, and platform shoes. They were also the decade of agitation for social change. Antiwar protestors demanded U.S. troops leave Vietnam. Feminists fought for Roe vs. Wade. The energy crisis converted oil addicts into environmentalists. The Black Panthers stalked across America's urban centers.

Queers, too, were still getting their riot on in a post-Stonewall explosion of art, politics, and sex. Warhol came out. Gay rights ordinances were being passed, then repealed. Harvey Milk managed to defeat the anti-gay Briggs Amendment in California. Fags were screwing their brains out in bathhouses, while dykes did what? Run off to womyn's land and sit around campfires in flannel shirts?

The reality is a lot more complex and interesting, and the point of the upcoming conference, "In Amerika They Call Us Dykes, Lesbian Lives in the 1970's." It features readings, films, and a wide-ranging set of panels including the inevitable "Women's Communities and Women's Land" "Lesbians at Play: Bars, Softball Fields, and other Lesbian Places", and "Women's Music and the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival." They also have "Black Lesbian Herstory in the 70s", "Strange Bedfellows: Lesbian Feminism and Sadomasochism," and "Building Lesbian Institutions."

Sarah Chinn, director of CLAGS, conference organizer, said the Seventies was chosen because it was a time of revolutionary change, in which a generation of women "could have an identity that wasn't available to them before: openly lesbian women," and that freedom and uncertainty led to an explosion of cultural and political activity that spawned current institutions, and much of today's LGBT politics and theory.

Case in point is conference volunteer, Urvashi Vaid, who was 18 years old in 1976 and thrilled to tell me that the program was loaded with big names like Alix Dobkin, Charlotte Bunch, Blanche Cook, and Cheryl Clarke, "lesbians that were active when I was a baby dyke and coming up."

The writer and political activist credits her political formation to the major voices of the time like Audre Lorde, even meeting Barbara Smith and the members of the Combahee River Collective that had radical and influential ideas about identity and the "simultaneity of oppressions."

Vaid was also schooled in feminist bookstores and women's spaces. "It was really different coming out in those days. Without institutions, without the internet, you felt like you were the only one. It was why feminist culture and lesbian music was so important, why Alix Dobkin was so important, why the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was so important. It gave us a chance to get together and see each other. It wasn't always about the music. Personally, I was listening to punk and rock. My favorite musician at the time was Patti Smith. But I'd go to a Holly Near concert for the community."

Controversial these days for periodic outbreaks of transphobia, Michigan was also the site of a massive outrage in 1972 when uberseparatists, The Van Dykes actually put on the first S & M "workshop". The Van Dykes were also responsible for a tee shirt that made the rounds of the feel-good women's music festivals that had a drawing of Patty Hearst holding a machine gun and "Killer Dyke" printed above.

Such are the contradictions of dyke culture in the Seventies. Some formed collectives. Others critiqued collectives as a form of tyranny. Some dykes fought pornography, while others were embracing sexual experimentation and nonmonogamy. Pat Califia, now a transman, was writing wildly popular pornography, while others burnt it. Many remained rooted in feminism and the abortion fight. But after repeated bashing at the hands of feminists like Betty Friedan, many members of the "Lavender Menace" went permanently AWOL.

A dyke could go from one extreme to another, trying on ideas like clothes, wearing them awhile, then tossing them aside, maybe with her last girlfriend. A burgeoning alternative media helped make it possible. Instead of starting blogs, everybody with access to a copy machine or a couple hundred bucks began their own magazine. Salsa Soul Sisters started Azalea: A Magazine for Third World Lesbians. There was also Heresies, Sinister Wisdom, which still exists today, The Furies, and Trivia, recently resurrected as an online publication.

Olivia Records, a women's music label begun by lesbian feminists, emerged from the women's music scene and soon became one of the targets of Anita Bryant's anti-homo crusade. They responded to the orange juice spokeswoman with the classic 1977 LP, "Lesbian Concentrate," that included Meg Christian's "Ode To A Gym Teacher" and Sue Fink's "Leaping Lesbians".

Lesbians started to claim physical spaces, creating utopias in rural areas, as well as in bars, coffee houses, sport leagues, bookstores, and theaters like Medusa's Revenge. Lesbians also began establishing more formal institutions. In 1975, the Lesbian Herstory Archive took root in Joan Nestle's apartment. In 1977, legal scholar Donna Hitchens started the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Lesbians participated in Lambda Legal almost from its start in 1973. Jean O'Leary, after a rocky road with mixed groups, was asked to co-direct the National Gay Task Force (NGTF), now the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

The conference covers almost all of that. But as Sarah Chinn acknowledged, "There will always be gaps." I noticed some in the fine arts. MIA (mostly) is the work begun by filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, performance artists like Muriel Miguel, Lois Weaver (Spiderwoman Theater), Peggy Shaw, Julia Dares (Hot Peaches), writer and performer Lola Pashalinski (Ridiculous Theatrical Company), and New Journalist Jill Johnston, who died earlier this week.

A writer for the Village Voice, Johnston created the scandal of the decade at a 1971 debate on feminism by reading a feminist-lesbian manifesto announcing that "all women are lesbians except those that don't know it yet," then bringing friends to the stage, making out, and rolling all over the floor. Norman Mailer, the moderator, demanded the women stop. "Come on, Jill, be a lady."

She just laughed, lifted up a girl and kissed her hard. It was the Seventies.

In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 70s, October 8-10, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, pre-registration suggested. http://www.70slesbians.org/

The Equality Trap

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was still in upstate New York last week, and spent Sunday counting flags on the five mile walk into town. I lost track pretty quickly because the rarity along the road was the house with no stars, and no stripes hanging from a pole.

Maybe they wanted to make sure I knew I was in America, and not Canada or France. Maybe they wanted to proudly trumpet their identity. Which is really a no brainer since they're doing it in their own country.

Probably the flags were supposed to be proud reminders of the American heritage of liberty and freedom and equality. Which gave rise to thoughts about just what "equal" means in America. Your legal status? A moral or technical equivalent? How do you judge? Is it the ultimate yardstick?

In a column a couple of days before September 11th, Roger Cohen seemed to equate the World Trade Center bombing with the Holocaust when he asserted that putting an Islamic Cultural Center a couple blocks away from the WTC site (in an enormous city where you won't even be able to see the damn thing) was exactly like slapping down a bunch of crosses at a concentration camp.

Yes, he implied two and a half thousand dead in a horrible attack was the same as the systematic genocide of seven million. Is it really? In all senses? Or was the comparison just another perversion of our desire for "equality"?

We can't stand to be anything but equal, even in the scope of our suffering. Minorities argue over who's more oppressed. Angry White Men who first felt entitled to complain about being deprived of their crappy jobs by women, now moan about being deprived of their presidency by a Black terrorist Muslim fink. God knows we can't have our September tragedy overshadowed by a bunch of dead European Jews. Yes, Cohen is a Jewish Brit, but even with him, as a transplanted New Yorker, it's America first.

I wonder what will happen to the Gays when they finally get theirs. The day when we'll be considered full and equal citizens is approaching fast. Just last week, a federal judge ruled the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was unconstitutional. We'll see if it stands, like the ruling overturning the ban on same-sex marriage in California. And for years gay men have had the right to screw without getting arrested for sodomy.

When there are no laws against us, will we fall into the American habit of using equality to absolve us of our social responsibilities and debts? No one above or beneath us. No one even supporting us at our sides. In short, will equality be a moral and emotional trap?

I hadn't thought about it in precisely that way until my girlfriend started reading Tocqueville aloud when we were upstate and without a TV. In his musings on democracy, he warns how easy it is for tyrants to take advantage of a population that values equality as much, or more, than liberty. Fellow citizens become competitors for rights. They are isolated from their neighbors, content as long as they feel equal to the joneses, even if it just means they're equally miserable. I can't have anything to eat, neither can you, comrade. Dulled with equality, they ignore the despot at the top.

My girlfriend thought of Cuba. I thought about Bush the Second who made jokes and slapped his fellow citizens on their equal backs as he started wars, and unleashed his cronies on the environment and financial system. I also thought about queers. As our sense of equality increases, we become more conformist, and less community-minded. Our desire for liberty fades.

Being free is the only thing I've ever wanted. Not the easy freedom that leaves you unmoored and irresponsible as a child, but the kind that gives you an unfenced mind, allows you to choose and to act, to take your place in society, seizing it by force if you have to.

Equality's an illusion, anyway. Laws depend on enforcement, as I've said before. And laws, rightly so, only govern part of our lives. In America, social equality has degenerated into the mantras, "we're as good as anybody else," and "we don't owe nobody nuttin.'" Even if the government fixes our roads, subsidizes the community colleges our children go to, and builds the old age homes we stick our elders in, we still oughta defund the bastards. Screw the feds.

We imagine we don't need them. Or anybody. Reality doesn't come into it. Having won equality at great cost, we pull up the drawbridge, and alternate a conspicuous gloating with the fear that somebody will come to steal it. With a flag flying over it, every home is a vulnerable and isolated fort.

A Battle For Our Lives

Earlier this week, I got an email about a young lesbian in a small town in Oklahoma who has been harassed for years, and not just verbally. She's reportedly been "run over by a car, cornered by a football team, her family completely abandoned by the entire town." She fought back for ages, thinking her struggle would make it easier for the kids that followed her, but she finally dropped out of high school when her mother was recently diagnosed with a serious illness. It was the last straw, but shouldn't have been.

There's been anti-bullying legislation in Oklahoma for several years. It was even updated in 2002, and 2008 when they included a provision for electronic harassment on social networking sites like Facebook. Every school district is required to have a Safe School Committee. Every district is supposed to have their own anti-bullying policies and programs, though with the caveat, "Nothing in this act shall be construed to impose a specific liability on any school district."

The problem is enforcement. Without an educated staff committed to safe schools, or a powerful LGBT community willing to make a ruckus, embarrass themselves or their opponents to put policies in effect, laws are nothing but squiggles on paper that betray LGBT children.

Tortured with impunity, a lot of queer kids skip class, skip school. Some drop out. Some kill themselves, which is when we finally hear about the years and years of bullying. If they stick it out, many queer students graduate as walking wounded, with faulty educations that don't prepare them for work or college where they might finally get a chance to flower.

It's our fault, and the fault of our national organizations that increasingly focus on passing laws and winning court cases. We rejoiced a couple weeks ago when the California court overturned Proposition 8 which banned same-sex marriage, and ignored how our earlier loss at the ballot meant we squandered a gazillion dollars and the perfect chance to educate and persuade Californians that lesbian and gay families are perfectly normal, and weren't going to bring traditional marriages crashing to the ground (unless they were already in freefall).

Now, we have the right to get married again, but California society hasn't changed. We didn't do the work, and all those queers still have to live next to the same straight neighbors who voted for their second class citizenship, and go to work next to the same hateful hets that wanted to grind them under their boots.

Worse, queer kids are still stuck in school with barbarian students that see them not just as pervs, but pervs with special rights protected by a liberal activist court guided by a Muslim mafia and probably the Jews. They don't even get the benefits of same-sex marriage, not for yonks. A law got changed, not minds. The shame is we had the chance to do both.

The underlying failure of the Prop H8 campaign wasn't just at the polls, but in the minds of organizers that saw stopping the measure as an end unto itself, not part of the larger battle to change society's perceptions of LGBT people, and create a strong, visible LGBT community that would be ready, win or lose, for all our other battles including bullying in school.

That will never be resolved by laws alone, but active participation from strong communities. And like so many issues related to hate and violence, the stakes aren't just high for LGBT kids, but for their tormentors, and everybody else on the sidelines.

Bullying children grow up to be bullying adults. In America, we don't have public debates anymore, but fear-mongering, name-calling, and hate-fests. Instead of beating somebody up in the locker room, we stick a knife in them in a cab. Mobs take to talk radio and tea parties. The bullies may not run the school yet, but they're damn close.

More and more, the LGBT fight for legal equality, community, and respect represents not just a battle for our lives, but for that embarrassing word "democracy," and the country's own soul.

There must be some good left in it, even in small towns in Oklahoma where extremely traditional life revolves around football, cheerleading, the county fair, watermelon festival, livestock judging, and lately, dyke-bashing.

Activists would do well to keep their strategies in perspective by considering what serves us all, not just middle-class, middle-aged folks ready to settle down. They could start by remembering what it's like to be a queer kid at the complete and utter mercy of our schoolmates, teachers, pastors, preachers, neighbors, siblings, and parents. Your courthouses and laws are nothing compared to them, and the only counterbalance is vigilance, and a strong community.