Dharun Ravi, Homophobia, and Race

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Christine Quinn, the head honchessa of New York's City Council tied the knot with another girl on Saturday, May 19, the same day the NAACP came out in support of marriage for all. I was happy to hear the announcement, but not particularly surprised. Just like I wasn't surprised either by the idiot black preachers in North Carolina raising their hands to God and inciting their congregations to hate.

Some people evolve. Like Obama. Like the NAACP. Others don't. Mitt Romney. The most Reverend Ruben Diaz. The Holy See. The only big ugly secret about black homophobia is that it's just like white homophobia, only with a different color scheme. The epidemic is particularly virulent in fundamentalist churches, and in communities (and nations) of all races where people are poor and angry, and their spiritual immune systems are already compromised, no matter how loud they pray.

It's tempting to focus our attention there. That's real homophobia, queers getting denounced from pulpits, hatred formalized in antigay laws that almost always lead to attacks and gay-bashing. If not executions. But hatred is almost as insidious when it's that casual kind of bigotry people indulge in because jokes need their butts. It's nice to have somebody around that you can kick for a laugh. Reduce in size to pump up your own ego, which so often feeds on the shame and humiliation of others.

It's why Dharun Ravi doesn't feel guilty for the death of Tyler Clementi, his roommate at Rutgers. He's not a homophobe. Not him. It was just a prank, setting up that webcam. It's not like he chased Ty into traffic wielding a baseball bat. Or pushed him from the bridge.

I remember myself at eighteen, and the panic and horror I felt when the door to my dorm room popped open and my roommate walked in and saw me messing around with a girl. She retreated as fast as she could, and was actually pretty cool about it, saying to put a note or something on the door next time. But there wasn't a next time, not in that room anyway. I was too ashamed.

I can't imagine what I would have done if I'd found out other people had actually watched. Seen me fumbling with a girl almost for the first time. Me touching her, her touching me. If my roommate had spread the word to 150 of her Twitter followers making fun of me, I would have been desperate, too. Especially if she continued to issue invitations promising more fun to come.

Ravi posted "People are having a viewing party with a bottle of Bacardi and beer in this kid's room for my roommate" and "Be careful it could get nasty" and "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it's happening again."

The word "rape" springs to mind. Where the point isn't the physical attack, the sex, but the dominance and humiliation. Because let's be honest. Ravi knew what he was doing. Had a clear intent to diminish Tyler, make him less than human. Multiply his shame with the number of witnesses. He didn't need a pulpit to assemble a jeering mob.

It worked. Tyler apparently viewed Ravi's Twitter posts 38 times. Tried to tell the school administration and take appropriate action. He asked for a different roommate. Tried to tell himself it wasn't that big a deal. But it didn't work. He couldn't live with the humiliation. Killed himself. Was pushed.

If Ravi lied about what he did, and tried to cover it up, erasing tweets, getting rid of posts, it wasn't from shame. It was just because it would be an awful lot of trouble.

It's worth saying his homophobia had nothing to do with his ethnicity, though India doesn't exactly embrace queers. In fact this kind of jolly American bullying shows his perfect assimilation into a country that talks a lot about equality, but doesn't really aspire to it.

Queer activists are no better. Half our failures are because our campaigns have been blinded by race or class. The exit polls on the Prop 8 debacle in California showed African Americans had been important movers in dumping same-sex marriage. But was the problem that black people were somehow intrinsically more homophobic than white ones, or that our wise gay leaders saw those differences, believed they were more than skin deep, and abandoned the fight? They rarely shape campaigns for poor neighborhood, especially ones that are full of minorities. As if they never vote.

It's time to for us all to admit that equality shouldn't just be a goal for the LGBT community, it should be our whole strategy. We should see everyone as a potential partner, as capable of change. In fact, we should demand it. The NAACP has opened a door. We should dash through it. Celebrate.

Viva Hollande!

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Sunday, I squeezed into a Mexican Irish bar in the Village with a bunch of French Socialists to watch their presidential election results. It was a little weird, since the day before was the Cinco de Mayo, when the Mexican army topped their French colonizers in the 1862 battle of Puebla. But whatever. Things change. We're all friends now.

Waiting around, they drank lime margaritas and coffee and beer, and when the official reports came on that Socialist candidate Francois Hollande squeaked past incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, they erupted in cheers. Even I joined in when Hollande said in his acceptance speech, that he would judge every issue in terms of justice and "jeunesse" youth. It was time to end all the ruptures and wounds, award everyone the same rights and responsibilities, refuse to abandon or discriminate against anybody.

Including queers. Hardly anybody got a specific mention in his speech, but during his campaign Hollande promised marriage equality, so we have that to look forward to unless the Socialists blow the upcoming parliamentary elections. Which is a real possibility because a fair amount of people only voted for Hollande because they suffer from such an extreme form of Sarkophobia, their only treatment was to vote for his ouster. Even if they'd habitually vote to the right.

Still, Hollande joyously claimed his victory, and I was clapping with everybody until he started making a big deal of the fact that it was the first time in a generation that the presidency would go to the Left, and only the second time since World War Two. And I remembered a little bitterly that he and his minions were part of the reason the Socialists have had such a long drought.

In 2007, their candidate was Segolene Royale, who was then Hollande's partner. Unlike Hollande, she was incredibly charismatic, and had a similar platform. Pro-Europe, pro-Green, anti-discrimination. She wanted reasonable immigration policies, and expressed support for same-sex marriage. The rank and file loved her. She packed stadiums with devoted young voters, people of color, and immigrants, even dykes that had been skeptical of her stiletto shoes, four kids, and Catholic upbringing.

Then as now, Nicolas Sarkozy courted the extreme right, blabbing about traditional French values, and fanning fears about illegal immigrants and new EU members that would snatch French jobs. He also used his powerful position as Interior Minister in the Chirac government to send out goons to grab presumed undocumented immigrants, no matter if they were eight years old or eighty. Or had left the proper papers at home in their drawers.

The only real difference between 2012 and 2007 is that the Socialist candidate then was a woman, and her party, run by Hollande, was so full of macho assholes, that they gave her very little support, even though the presidency was on the line. Socialist bigwig, homophobe, and former prime minister, Lionel Jospin, actually went on the record saying he'd vote for anybody but "La candidate," the female candidate.

I guess I should let it go. Grudges don't accomplish much in politics, or anywhere else. Look at how well the French and Mexicans get along these days. And no matter what happened before, Hollande's saying the right things now. We can always hold him accountable, pretend his promises aren't just cynical manipulation to get queer, lefty votes.

Let's face it. Politicians are not good people. Every time they open their mouths a lie falls out. But their psychosis is not that simple. They often seem to believe their own speeches, at least while they're giving them. What we have to do is encourage their delusions. In that flush of victory, Hollande no doubt did believe he was going to champion all of France, unite everybody with the valued ideas that the French are all supposed to share: liberty, equality and fraternity.

For a moment, in that cheering crowd, I believed, too, and felt like I belonged, at least as a former citizen of Paris, where I lived for years, participating in civic life. In 2007, I even handed out flyers for Segolene despite my fear somebody would hear my accent and attack, "Who do you think you are? Go back where you came from." The phrase seems to be a standard for bigoted idiots across the globe. And for immigrant pranksters.

Saturday, Cinco de Mayo, I got stuck at a crosswalk behind two drunk, white, sombreroed girls on 20th Street. And this guy in a compact car saw the hats, and shouted out the window, "Go back where you came from, you Mexicans." Which puzzled them, but I thought was pretty hilarious because he had a round brown face and Mexican accent. He howled with laughter as he peeled away. Claiming his own space, his own city as we all should, no matter what the voters or politicians say.

Support the Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project on Facebook.

Vargas Llosa: Against Hunting Gays In Latin America

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In March, 24-year old store clerk and gay activist Daniel Zamudio was attacked in a public park in Santiago, Chile, beaten intermittently for hours, carved with swastikas, and left for dead. He finally got to a hospital, but only survived three weeks.

Observers are calling him the Chilean Matthew Shepard, because the brutal murder has launched a national discussion about LGBT rights. An antidiscrimination law that has been languishing for seven years is even speeding through the legislature despite conservative lawmakers declaring it will lead to same-sex marriage, among other horrors.

Sunday, the Nobel prize-winning writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, spoke out in an op-ed called, “Hunting Gays.” He did more than the usual handwringing denunciation of violence; he published an indictment of all Latin America, whose countries, “without a single exception,” repressed, persecuted and marginalized queers, “with the open and massively enthusiastic support of the general public.”

He went so far as to say the murder of Daniel Zamudio was not just a random attack by four neo-Nazi wannabees, but the expression of “a culture that had the time-honored tradition of presenting lesbians and gay men as sick or depraved creatures that should be kept at a preventatively safe distance from normal people because they corrupt the healthy social body, inciting it towards sin, and to moral and physical degradation...”

“This idea of homosexuality is taught in schools, is transmitted in the heart of families, is preached from pulpits, disseminated in every means of communication, appears in public discourses, in radio and television programs, and in plays where “faggots” and “dykes” are always grotesque characters, out of place, ridiculous, and dangerous, altogether worthy of the disgust and repulsion of decent, ordinary, normal people. The Gay is always “the Other,” the one that negates and frightens us, but also fascinates, like the gaze of the cobra that freezes the innocent bird.”

He went on to talk about how anti-LGBT violence was common in the entire region, including his own homeland of Peru where on average, one LGBT person was killed per week. And because the Left keeps harping on the swastika angle, he emphasized that homophobia wasn’t just a problem of the conservative right or religious institutions. In the eighties, the two armed movements that wanted to establish communism in Peru systematically executed homosexuals in every town they captured just like the Spanish Inquisition.

He also, importantly, called homophobia and machismo, “two sides of the same coin.” And said they had to be attacked simultaneously.

Vargas Llosa is a respected public intellectual, and this op-ed published in Spain’s el País is almost as important for queers worldwide, especially in Latin America, as Clinton’s recent speech in Geneva declaring that LGBT rights were human rights. He didn’t mince words or come up with excuses. He put the blame where it belonged -- on culture. Which he said should be changed even if it was like moving mountains.

Vargas Llosa’s op-ed comes a couple of weeks after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Chile’s 2004 Supreme Court decision to separate a lesbian mother from her three daughters was in violation of the American Convention on Human Rights which assured her right to equality and non-discrimination.

It was the first time that the Court has ruled on a case of discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Chilean government has agreed to abide by the decision.

The court also affirmed that “sexual orientation and gender identity are protected categories in the American Convention under the phrase ‘other social condition’ established in article 1.1 of the Convention,” and that legal decisions can “diminish or restrict, in no way, a person’s rights because of their sexual orientation.”

The Court also found the Chilean State, through its Supreme Court ruling, “internationally responsible” of violating other principles found in the Convention, including the right to privacy, the protection of family, and the right of children to be heard.

The ruling stemmed from a 2002 custody battle between judge Karen Atala and her then husband, Jaime López Allende, that got increasingly bitter after she began living with her girlfriend. After two rulings in her favor, the Supreme Court of Chile intervened and gave custody of their three children to her ex-husband, arguing that because Atala was a lesbian, the children were in a “situation of risk” blah blah blah.

Although the ruling will not automatically return custody to Karen Atala, it is definitely a forward step for the whole continent. The Vargas Llosa piece is a reminder, though, that legal equality won’t solve all our problems as long as our cultures nurture hate and disgust towards LGBT people. As long as we comprise only a handful in every hundred, LGBT people, as “The Other,” are easily subjected to the mainstream’s perverse fascination and fear.

Down With Revolutionaries

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I’m wary of revolutionaries. Scratch the surface, and you often get budding tyrants ready to whip out their cattle prods or guillotines. And even if they start out on the right side, all it takes is for the wind to change direction, and the Arab Spring becomes a long hot brutal summer.

We’ve already seen it in North Africa, how the women that took to the streets last year to protest dictatorships are finding themselves excluded from power, with their masculine co-demonstrators just as happy to indulge in “virginity” tests as their former oppressors. Ditto for the queers clamoring for democracy. They’d faced prison and torture under the old regimes (anybody remember the Cairo 52?), and now face a wave of Islamists that trumpet any electoral victory as a sign of mass conversion.

In Iraq, following Bush’s engineered revolution, “emos” are getting their skulls crushed in. They’re mostly queer guys, or at least men perceived as gay with long hair and tight pants and musical proclivities that are not sufficiently masculine. Unfortunately, you can’t really blame Bush for this. That goes squarely on Iraqi shoulders. Or maybe Castro’s.

Because they’re using a script that got perfected in Cuba more than half a century ago. Need a convenient enemy? Why not target those long-haired hippy, rock-listening faggots? The men get to feel more het, more macho. The puritans get to feel more righteous. And anybody that has a creative or individual thought in their head gets the violent message. Keep your mouth shut.

Because the attack on emos is not only an attack on queers, but on youth, and diversity, and creativity--any sign at all that the world doesn’t have to be run by bitter old men and their rancid ideological gods. Artists might emerge. And new ideas. Which eventually means political oppositions. When gender lines are blurred, women will start getting uppity, too, and start seeing the world afresh. Where we will be then? Nope, better bash in the heads of gays. Control women. Control the utopia of orgasm and sex. Get your enforcers in gear.

It’s a popular tactic. Tying queer sex to the interests of the nation. Political candidates in the U.S. are doing it now, as if two men screwing could bring down the government. In Namibia, a few years ago, violent antigay rhetoric from the state led queers to flee in vast numbers. I should make it clear: enforcers aren’t just men. Females are just as keen, torturing their daughters to be submissive women, browbeating their young sons to behave like brutal, thoughtless men.

In Liberia, only last week, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf threw a curve to visiting Brit Tony Blair when she told a journalist that she supported laws that criminalize homosexuality. “We’ve got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve.” Like what? War-mongering? Slaughter? Rogue militias? Corruption? All those things are endemic there. Nope, she got a Nobel for standing up to all that.

The traditional values she supports keep women and men in their usual roles of sex and gender, that are apparently threatened by homosex. And probably females such as me. Like most official bigots, it’s hard to know if the Harvard-trained economist actually hates queers, or if she cynically jumped on the antigay bandwagon to distract her citizens from the poverty which has gone on so long it’s traditional, too.

Who knows? She could really hate queers. And not just fags. Plenty of dykes have fallen under the “feminist” bus. After all, we are not defined by men like they are. There are no husbands to beat us. We rarely wear the short skirt a rape can be blamed on. Birth control is not an issue unless we have bad cramps and need the extra hormones to regulate our periods. Without violence and children uniting us, what is the intersection except our biological equipment?

None really. To many women, the fact that dykes are free of men, somehow turns us into them, a masculinized enemy. And they hate us as much as those gangs of men performing “corrective” rapes on lesbians. It’s often women that furiously lock their lesbian daughters in their rooms. Send them to mental hospitals. Force them to marry. Harass them just for amusement. When I was eighteen or nineteen and working in a national park, it was a group of girls that would stand outside the room I shared with my girlfriend and yell, “lezzies, lezzies, lezzies.” It was humiliating. I was afraid to run through that gauntlet to get to my job.

Now, when people start making noise about change, my first ungrammatical questions is, “Who for?”

Queers: Against Liberation?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Americans spend a lot of national energy blabbing about the rights of individuals, and how to protect them, and then beat the crap out of everyone that shows the slightest signs of difference. The queer community’s just the same. We celebrate the Stonewall Riots every June, but focus all our energy on getting the right to serve in the army or marry. We rarely examine just why we take such a physical and emotional battering in school, or acknowledge the multitude of hardships afterwards that can’t be solved by the law or a bout of positive thinking.

Last week, long-time lesbian activist Maxine Wolfe reminded me how hard it still is for many dykes to make a living or get health care. And it’s true. Even now it’s practically impossible for us to find conventional jobs if we refuse to put on the straight female drag of pumps and pantyhose, and big smiles for the big bosses which are still almost all male. Female bosses are not reassuring. They too often besiege us with curious and intrusive questions, demanding to know just what makes lesbians tick.

“It Gets Better” is often a lie, unless you think having a freer social life is a consolation for having to work shitty, low-paying jobs, while still struggling to make ends meet. Or living with your parents. Or taking somebody else’s old meds when you get sick because you can’t afford to go to the doctor. No, if you can’t get a job, laws protecting queer employment don’t improve life a bit. Ditto for efforts forcing employers to cover our partners. Because you have to get that foot in the door first.

The LGBT movement is failing us as they focus almost exclusively on their legal laundry list, unaware, or indifferent to the fact that the benefits of law are usually restricted to those that conform to broader social norms. And many queers can’t, or won’t. And shouldn’t have to. Social change isn’t any change at all if it still depends on a majority of our community having baby showers and babies, and tying themselves in matrimonial knots.

LGBT folks often look towards the civil rights movement for inspiration. We might also want to look at the history of race in America as a cautionary tale for what will greet us if we continue blindly forward. The military was theoretically desegregated in 1948. The last laws forbidding interracial marriage were dumped in 1967 by the Supreme Court around the same time a lot of antidiscrimination laws were passed regarding employment.

But in 2012, even under our first black president, all you have to do is turn on the radio or read the congressional record to hear racist filth with concrete consequences. Incarceration rates of people of color are still hugely disproportionate to those of whites. Statistics on economic inequality are a nightmare. Racism is still alive and well in these United States of America. Which should be a lesson that legal change—while essential-- is not nearly enough.

For queers, the solution might be in reconsidering our roots. Maybe it’s time to downplay a little the legacy of the Mattachine Society demanding equal rights and asserting our sameness under the law, and recover our modern origins in the Stonewall Riots and liberation movements. Their goal were not to squish us into square holes, but open up society enough to make room for us all, maybe even rejoice in our difference. If biological diversity is important to the health of our planet, surely cultural and individual difference should be considered an incredible resource when it comes to fostering new ideas and renewing a moribund nation.

The change has to begin with us, inside the LGBT community. The last time we were anywhere near equilibrium in tactics was at the ‘93 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. In DC, and in our daily lives, the presence of national organizations focused largely on equality was offset by groups like Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers who threw the first Dyke March anywhere and mobilized 20,000 dykes. We’d also just experienced a flowering of queer art and theater that allowed us to unapologetically explore our own difference.

Unfortunately, mainstream organizations tend to treat activists focusing on social gains and liberation either as loudmouthed buffoons or dangerous threats to their largely assimilationist message: “We’re just like you.”

Activist queers, and queers of the left aren’t much better, refusing to acknowledge the role of the law in locking in progress. We have far less power and money, but equally oppressive orthodoxies, and our own ideological enforcers attacking any sheep that might stray towards an original thought and god forbid, propagate it. As if too much freedom was a horrifying and constant threat. Me, I’m ready to risk it.

Women, the Election, and the F-Word

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

They say this year’s election is all about women. Which really means it’s all about men. Men sitting on panels deciding what females should do with their girly bits. Men informing females of the virtues of keeping their knees closed so tight you could hold an aspirin between them. Men trying to require ultrasounds with plenty of penetration before abortion if you should be unchaste enough to let that Bayer tablet slip.

Surprisingly, none remarked that the safest way for women to avoid pregnancy is to have sex with each other. Or those plastic implements at the Toy Box. Or assorted fruits and vegetables. Probably just as well. In this ridiculous year there might be some kind of transformative event like a spider bite or electric strike at the moment of coitus that would allow a cross between the animal and plant kingdom. And we’d get something like a sentient turnip. A creature bitter and pungent, not too smart, with an affinity for dirt.

It usually doesn’t bother me, this “women” stuff. It never means me despite my female equipment. A couple months ago, I checked out that PBS documentary, “The Independent Woman: America in Primetime,” they didn’t say lesbian once, even if it’s what straight independent women get called all the time. “What are you? A fucking dyke?”

Mainstream stuff about women actively avoids us. Especially high profile programs like UN Women, even though many problems “women” face are worse for us. Men double-down on their violence against dykes. Ending corrective rapes alone are worthy of billion-dollar efforts. And most public TV is way too pathetic to even show lesbians holding hands unless it’s Gay Pride Month. Which was too bad, because the documentary had plenty of opportunities. Like when they talked about how Roseanne did groundbreaking portrayals of working class women with normal squabbling families. Why not slip in a reference, just one, to that lesbo subplot with Nancy that had a big impact at the time?

Or why not include Ellen’s coming out episode, which was as important as the time Murphy Brown popped a baby out of wedlock. Granted, the show Ellen wasn’t as good, or as long running as Murphy Brown, but there was just as much backlash to Ellen’s “Puppy” episode. And god knows having a dyke come out was far more radical in expanding our ideas of women taking charge of their lives than showing addict nurses or drug-dealing moms, which they made a point of including.

It was near miraculous that Ellen DeGeneres resurrected herself into a talk show powerhouse who’s getting all kind of promotional work, including Cover Girl make-up. When her recent contract with JC Penney prompted such a hoo-haw from the double digit, right-wing “Million Moms” it actually gave her a boost. Thanks, Moms, for shining just a bit more spotlight on a non-breeder.

I like to surprise Neanderthals by agreeing when they tell me that as a dyke, I’m not “a real woman.” That’s been clear to me for decades. To meet that criteria you first have to reproduce. Or make big efforts to avoid doing it. Or at least wish you had time to.

In fact, feminists are the first to remind you. The battle for “women’s” rights in the U.S. is almost solely characterized by questions of reproductive rights. The leadership of the almost defunct NOW must have gone done on their knees to thank the goddess for the ruckus when the Komen Foundation tried to defund Planned Parenthood.

Don’t mind me if I snicker when I see one more self-pitying article wondering why there are so few feminists, especially young ones. This week, Salon had a post by Shannon Kelley in which she quoted a young woman as speculating that she didn’t want to use the f-word because, “It’s hard to get passionate about a cause when you haven’t faced the consequences of what you’re fighting for.” Another didn’t want to be perceived as “so hard-core – men-haters, almost masculine.” In other words, she didn’t want to be mistaken as a lesbo.

That would have been the perfect moment for Kelley to address global feminism’s little problem of dyke-avoidance, if not actual dyke-baiting, if she really was serious about “equality. Equal rights. Equal pay. Equal opportunity. Blowing up gender stereotypes.” But she didn’t. I can only imagine it was because she may have had to use the l-word, and confront the movement’s homophobic past which they seem to cling to as ardently as any confederate fanatic clings to that Southern flag. Me, I’m not afraid of the f-word. Fuck you.

Dykes don’t even get their props when The Candidates start talking about homos, because they’re still focused on men. Men doing it with other men. And why not, when even LGBT media and organizations seem like they are by and for the G of our species? Give me a carrot any day.

Viva Pink-Washing!

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I can’t help it. I cheer when I see headlines like “Hillary Clinton declares 'gay rights are human rights’” or “Ecuador: Lesbian who led fight against 'gay conversion' clinics appointed to Presidential Cabinet.”

I know the U.S. has its own, unsavory civil rights failures from domestic spying and indefinite detentions, to murder abroad by drones. And that the appointment in Ecuador is probably just a gay-positive bone tossed out there to quell international protests over the clinics before people start noticing how they’re just the tip of a human rights iceberg. President Rafael Correa’s pastime is pretty much tinkering with his constitution to stifle the press and squash his opposition.

Still, LGBT rights ARE human rights, no matter what you think about other aspects of American policy. And in the case of Ecuador, Carina Vance Mafla, an out dyke, is still going to lead the national Health Ministry, even if most of the gay conversion clinics that got closed, apparently re-opened about half an hour later. Tyrants, especially, are always trumpeting that new bridge, that literacy program as they throw another dissident in jail, leave another journalist bleeding in the gutter.

At least you end up with a bridge. The question for queer activists is, do you burn the thing down in a fit of pique, or go after the tyrant for his tyranny? Lately we’ve favored burning the bridge even if it leaves vulnerable queers isolated on the other side.

LGBT puritans of the left are even going so far as to condemn "white, middle-class, Western" queers like me for supporting LGBT fights in the global south. Either I’m complicit with the tyrant’s pink-washing, or a racist colonial monster trying to enslave the masses and fiddle with unalterable foreign cultures for my own homonationalist gain.

Who needs the likes of Rick Warren when we’ve got good old Judith Butler et al doing the work of conservative bigots by telling gay activists to stay at home? Especially now, when American Christian fundamentalist money is pouring into Africa and Latin America to support anti-gay campaigns by their protégés there who advocate torture and violence, not just on the street, but as law in the courts. Shouldn’t queer dollars (and U.S. aid) support LGBT activists fighting back? Shouldn’t we care what happens to people like us in the rest of the world?

Yes, America has problems with human rights. But does that disqualify us from also doing some good? We’ve never exactly shone around racial issues. But should we have abstained from participating in the boycott that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa just because our hands weren’t quite clean?

Likewise, the United States has always had problems with sexism, and rights for women, (what on earth were they thinking at the Komen Foundation???), but should we have used that as an excuse to back away from supporting women’s rights globally?

The real problem with "middle-class, meddling, Western” queers is that we don’t get involved nearly enough considering all the money and power at our disposal. And when we do, we have the attention span of a flea, and no understanding at all that we have to look at how LGBT rights fit into the broader picture of human rights if we want any of our gains to endure.

We have to do more than click on online petitions, declare victory, then move on. The trick is to congratulate people like President Rafael Correa for appointing a dyke and closing twenty clinics. Then tell him we’ll keep a close eye on things, looking forward to the moment we can celebrate closing them all. And when it comes to Ecuadorian activists, we need to ask if they need more than just a click online. Do they need money? Technical assistance for websites and networking? Are they hampered by problems in civil society? The crackdown on the press? Freedom of speech is the cornerstone for any civil rights movement to succeed. What else can we do?

LGBT people that are still struggling for their rights have to seize, and celebrate, every single opening, pressure every ostensible ally including Hillary Clinton. I remember that when Bush appointed Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, I sneered at them as mere tokens. But it’s hard to imagine America voting a black man into the White House if we hadn’t spent several years seeing people of color in some of America’s top jobs.

The world is complicated. Politics are messy. Our progress can be manipulated. But so what? If we can split atoms, we can surely congratulate Ecuadorian queers for what gains they’ve made, AND denounce their country’s treatment of dissidents. Ditto for Uganda or Israel, pink-washer extraordinaire.

The good thing about getting tossed bones is that you can gnaw them clean, then carve them into unexpectedly sharp points. Yes we can.

Setting Priorities, Creating Change

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I didn’t go to the Creating Change Conference this past weekend, but here’s my twenty-five cents on what I would do if somebody suddenly made me queen of the LGBT community. First off, I’d ignore the “It gets better” project. Getting LGBTQ kids to believe time makes everything better is a big fat disempowering lie. Little bigots have a way of becoming big bigots and turning into our neighbors and bosses, and sometimes representatives in Congress.

Things only get better if we act to make them better, and in the case of queer kids and bullying, we all ought to be doing some ass-kicking now to improve things today. Hell, if I was queen, I’d go so far as to institute a national two year service for young queers helping them to get their riot on. Especially targeting schools.

Let them call us pedophiles if they want, but we’ve got to get more laws passed against bullying, and more importantly, stick around to get them enforced. Even better, we ought to showcase kids that are already empowered and fighting back, make sure these projects get as much publicity as the latest kid suicide.

We should also act for our second most vulnerable group -- our older LGBT people. Maybe later, as we begin to marry off like the mainstream population and spawn our own kids, aging queers won’t be more screwed than anybody else with crappy insurance and mediocre health care. But right now, older and disabled LGBT are often alone in the world, no partner, no heirs. And if we do have relatives, they may either ignore us, or see our disabilities as a chance to lock us away in the nursing home of their choice, far from other degenerates.

If you think being a queer kid sucked, don’t expect a joyous experience in nursing homes. Besides the misery of physical decay, you may face a situation a lot like high school with the popular girls grouped together, and the gender police out in full force. Over Christmas I saw one older woman use her walker to attack this butch, short haired woman. “You’re a man. Get out of here.”

We need queer-friendly nursing homes, and assisted living places, so we don’t end our lives in facilities we don’t choose, with incompatible roommates, and lives governed by nurses and doctors and aides that may be smearing our fingernails with polish, and slapping on lipstick if we don’t want it, and refusing it if we do. And now, we need to find ways to reach out to our elderly already in dire straights.

It’s best to avoid the whole thing as far as possible, by keeping queers in good shape to begin with, getting dykes and transpeople to see doctors regularly, but fags too, with a renewed focus on HIV. It continues to spread even if we only talk about it on World AIDS Day and pretend it’s Africa’s problem now. The truth is queers are still getting infected, especially queers of color, and even the lucky ones with an undetectable viral load aren’t exempt from problems.

HIV+ people have more serious illnesses than the rest of us. They face the diseases of aging earlier, like heart disease and osteoporosis, but also a range of non-AIDS related cancers like Hodgkin’s lymphoma which is tough to treat when you have HIV. As chemo’s killing off the cancer, it’s killing off your immune system, too, and opening the door for your HIV to make a comeback. We should be doing a lot more than we are.

We should also be thinking more than we are. As queen, I say that ten or twenty years after queer boot camp and mandatory activism, we should all be inducted into queer think tanks, trying to balance out action with fresh ideas from fresh brains. We especially need to think about how our community fits into our larger societies, and ask if we will be able to protect and consolidate gains as our traditional activist tools like free speech shrink in America.

It worries me a lot that our civil liberties have been eroding continuously in the decade since September 11, 2001, while the power of the executive branch has been growing exponentially. Get declared an enemy, and you can get tossed in jail, no trial, no jury, no recourse. They don’t like what you’re up to, they can now keep you under surveillance without warrants.

While these powers are mostly used in the War on Terror, they could easily be used against any trouble-making activist that happens to offend the governing party. It was only twenty years ago that former candidate for president Pat Robertson used his speech at the Republican National Convention to declare homos public enemy number one in the Culture War for America’s soul. Remember?

Memory and The Freedom Maze

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

The Freedom Maze is a wonderful, ambitious book, 18 years in the writing. Delia Sherman apparently started it just to give one bookish girl an adventure, but when she had to grapple with the complexities of slavery in the U.S., ended up with an important meditation on power and identity. It's marketed to younger readers, but probably only adults will get the nuances.

The story starts simply enough. In the year 1960, a 13-year-old white girl is stuck at her grandmother's house out in the Louisiana bayou, while her newly divorced mother takes a bookkeeping course back in New Orleans. Irritated and bored, she meets a magical creature that she begs for an adventure, preferably involving time travel, and gets zapped to 1860.

The set-up here is important. It may be a hundred years later, but Sophie turns up in exactly the same room, the same house, wearing her same clothes, no altered features or anything. The biggest difference is that the fields, already owned by her family, are now full of sugar cane, and those rotting buildings not far away are in decent repair and full of slaves. When her ancestors see an unknown young girl with the family nose, a suntan, unruly hair, and muddy clothes, they assume she's a young slave sent up from New Orleans by a brother who's not always as Christian as he should be with his female slaves.

One of Sherman's inspirations was a newspaper notice about escaped slaves, one of whom could pass as white. This conceit lets Sherman consider the shifting nature of identity, how "black" and "white" change according to the circumstances. When it comes to society, I am who you say I am. In some ways, it reminded me of Calderon's seventeenth century Spanish play, Life Is A Dream. I could just as easily be a tyrant as a tyrant's prisoner, and had better behave myself because god knows in which position I will wake up tomorrow.

It also allows Sherman to trace the transformation of a "free" person with the entitlements of class and race, into an enslaved one, partly answering the question, "Why did slaves stay slaves, and not just run away when there were no bars on the window?" -- which is a version of, "Why did it take so long for the citizens of Egypt to rise up against the tyrant Mubarak?" or "Why don't abused women leave their violent bastard husbands?"

The story is effective and persuasive, partly because Sherman, a fantasy writer, downplays typical fantasy elements. In earlier books, Changeling or The Fall of the Kings, a collaborative work in her partner, Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint series, magic, folklore, and heroic quests were central. In The Freedom Maze, though Sophie is eventually instrumental in helping one slave escape, the little white girl does not heroically lead the slaves out of Egypt. Neither does she have secret powers, or the benefit of magic satchels with tasty snacks.

What Sherman relies on most is the discipline of a fantasy writer's imagination. When you're constructing alternative worlds, you can't use short cuts like a brand of jeans or cell phone to establish social class or character. Sherman does the hard work of building her story detail by detail until her readers really believe in her characters and world. And what world could be stranger than the past when homespun cloth was rough against your skin, and humans owned each other like dogs?

Most of our interactions with what passes for history makes it seem strangely unreal, even fictional. Martin Luther King is cast as a hero, and unlike the traditional heroic quests of folklore, we barely acknowledge his helpers -- much less how he built on earlier advances.

Part of it is laziness on our part. It's easier to pick one man and make him almost mythical than tell the story of a complicated movement that ordinary people pushed forward over generations. Also, memory naturally streamlines things. I can barely remember life before my laptop and there was plenty of it. It requires a leap of imagination even to remember my 13-year-old self dragging a book bag and violin to school way off in Louisville, Ky.

Books like The Freedom Maze remind us that it's a radical act to remember -- or imagine -- the past, which is all history is, and why it's so essential. Not just because we might be doomed to repeat it, but because history enlarges our present lives, situates us in the middle of what came before and what will come after. It makes the world seem less strange, allows us to navigate it better, find our places in it. Maybe even plot a course instead of just plunging ahead randomly. If we can't look back, we can't look forward. We can't even look across the aisle in the subway and see each other.

Read more about Delia Sherman and her partner, Ellen Kushner, in Dykes Outside the Box.

Speechless

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Sunday morning, my girlfriend and I piled on the layers and shivered our way to the West Village to see a movie. The F train wasn’t running uptown, so we sprang for a cab and got there early. We thought about going for coffee to kill time, but a crowd accumulated quickly, and I got nervous until I realized most were there for the handsome Harry Belafonte, not the Wim Wender’s documentary about Pina Bausch.

Even in New York, the majority of people don’t care about dance, or art for that matter. I only discovered Bausch because I took a class on performance art in college where they showed part of “Carnations.” The segment was pretty simple, a guy in a suit doing a sign language version of “The Man I love” as Sophie Tucker sings it in the background.

I’d like to say it was the moment I realized the beauty of homolove and came out as queer, but no, I remember thinking, “Hmm, a guy, interesting choice,” and wondering if he was the only person around that could do sign language. The obvious went right over my head. Still, that performance stuck in my mind all these years as one of the purest expressions of romantic yearning I’d ever seen.

What can I say? It took me ages to see myself as queer, much less you. There were all those girls on the field hockey team that I defended as just affectionate, playing around, not lezzies at all. Football players roughhouse, too, after all, indulging in all that high spirited slapping and grappling, and walk around afterwards, their arms hanging loosely over each other’s shoulders.

Even after I’d had a girlfriend, I still didn’t see myself that way. Neither did the girl who started it, raising my hand to her mouth and kissing a finger somewhere between New Orleans and Kentucky, setting off a perfect storm in the twilight of a Greyhound bus.

We homo not so sapiens are talented in nothing, if not denial. Sometimes that’s essential for our survival. If I had come out as a teenager, I would have been even more miserable than I was. Maybe ended up homeless. When I broke the news to my mother as an adult, she said she didn’t want to hear from me again until I was the girl God meant for me to be. Imagine if I had heard that at fourteen? Why not bury it deep?

Knowledge isn’t that easy to come by—not for any of us. Partly because we don’t quit talking long enough to think. Pina Bausch said dance was for the moments when life leaves us speechless. But hardly anybody admits to speechlessness anymore. We tweet, tumblr, FB absolutely everything. We pronounce, rather than explore.

Political candidates feed the camera a diet of sound bites and certainty, all delivered from the lofty perch of moral high ground where there’s no room for doubt or absolute misery. No questions, like, “Are we going about this all wrong?” “Is there some third, fourth, fifth option?” In politics, there are no agnostics, no Noah’s ripe for conversion when they’re faced with an untamable ocean.

And when they—and the rest of us--have nothing else to say we quote other people. It’s Martin Luther King Day. So today people all across the land are ripping chunks out of his speeches and posting them. The bits are all interesting and inspiring. The observations are often still true, but it’s 2012. And I’m wondering that if MLK hadn’t died, and had been engaged in the struggle all this time, would he still be saying the same things so many years later? If he was, would we be listening?

Just for kicks I’ll take a second and imagine him as this grey-haired guy in a natty suit standing up there in front of the mall. What would he say? “Dream your own fucking dream, you idiots. These things have a sell-by date before they start to turn sour.” Maybe he’d rant and rave. Maybe he’d have fallen silent in disgust or despair, speechless as Pina Bausch. Maybe he would refuse to appear, like a recalcitrant groundhog.

Most of us probably should go mum. I can’t remember the last time I said something new. 2005, or even the last century? But maybe I’ve got it all wrong and all the blab is not an attempt to communicate, push knowledge forward, or share ideas. Maybe all our repetitive chatter is a kind of ritual, a hopeful yearning prayer in which sound itself is supposed to save us.

Passive Resistance in the New Year

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Surprisingly, I’m a little sorry to see the old year disappear. Sure, it had a few holes, was a little frayed around the collar and cuffs, but I could have stretched it out a bit longer, then pieced it into a quilt or something. But poof. It’s gone.

Perhaps I will refuse to move on. Who says a year has to have 365 days and must be reckoned by the movement of the sun around the earth? Or that it starts on January first, and not, for instance, sometime in April when the last of the snow starts to melt and jonquils poke up out of the mud?

What can you get done in a couple hundred days, after all? Some good things are done more quickly. It only takes a few hours to bake a loaf of this amazing Swedish rye, perfumed with fennel and molasses, or write a short essay. But two years haven’t been enough to rebuild Port-au-Prince since a quake leveled the place in January 12, 2010: remember that? And Haiti, the first independent nation in Latin America, has been working on the project of democracy ever since it stepped out alone in 1804.

Even the United States still has amateur status in the democracy game after two hundred thirty six years, with an up here (Hillary Clinton’s important speech acknowledging LGBT rights are human rights, the removal of troops from Iraq) and a down there, (going to Iraq in the first place, refusing to give “enemy combatants” their day in court.)

One man in Tunisia, setting himself alight sparked a rebellion in a matter of hours. But the hopefully named “Arab spring” didn’t end June 21st. In Egypt, civilian tyrants were succeeded by military ones, which in turn, may be followed by hardline Muslims ones, putting women and queers not just on the sidelines again, but maybe in the crosshairs. So for us, it might turn out to be no kind of spring at all, but a kind of blistering hellish and extended summer. But Egypt’s nightmarish Salafists—or even the presumably mellowing Muslim Brotherhood--won’t have the last word if enough people there simply refuse to submit to oppressive laws.

Unwritten ones can be more elusive, harder to fight. Like the ones that govern gender declaring you must walk in a certain way, swagger or mince. Or change your hair. The rules governing desire permit a little homosex to be tolerated occasionally, but not flaunted up front. Out loud. In the U.S., we even have rules governing time, that life must move at breakneck speed, and be filled with consumption both of information and stuff. We must have the latest iPhone or bust. Accumulate friends, and follow what they do in real time. Be connected every minute of the 24/7 because everything zips by so fast. Split seconds have become more relevant than the revolutions of stars around planets.

It makes it harder to be an activist. This illusion of speed, and the gratification of desire. I feel like a loser. I’ve been doing LGBT activism for how long now? Twenty years? And this year again, how many queers will kill themselves? How many will be killed, sacrificed to somebody else’s perverted sense of morality?

The news will break and people will be horribly outraged as if it has never happened before. We’ve lost our sense of perspective. That each death is a repetition, at the same time each death is unique and new and horrible with a single name attached.

If we don’t see the problem of homophobia and violence in its entirety, how it fits in with the rest, it can never be solved. But to see how big it is, and how long it’s gone on invites despair when even The New York Times updates its site every couple of minutes. Why can’t we update our lives? Update this country?

Things are moving, but not very fast. As a dyke activist, it’s infuriating. We have more rights, but why are we still so invisible? When I measure our gains by the speed of the internet, I’m sure I’ve wasted my life and would like to stop and try to think in more geological terms.

Upstate, in the Catskills, all the trees are stripped to the minimum. And the undergrowth has died back leaving the earth bare, exposing old boulders deposited by the glacial movements of glaciers that themselves helped carve out hollows and gullies and hillsides. I like staring at them, thinking of that river of ice and snow bearing along these indigestible, patient things that know how to endure, and assert themselves without counting hours or days or years. If we could pull that off—what a triumph.

Our Spinster Aunts and Uncles

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

Bing might still be dreaming of a white Christmas, but I'm longing for a nice, bright Bastille Day in July. The weather is better, and you get to celebrate the rise of the people and the end of kings, not their birth. And families have no role at all.

Let's face it. During the "holiday" season, the family schmaltz that's so often disagreeable for straight people is downright torture for many queers. Not enough has changed, especially for older or disabled LGBT people, who are often alone in the world, with no close family, no kids. And if you do have relatives, they may hate your queer guts and resent the shame you've brought down on their heads. When health issues strike, they've been known to ignore us entirely or, worse, joyfully lock us away in nursing homes, far from other LGBT people.

And after a lifetime in a bigoted world, we're more prey to physical and mental problems than the general population. A study published in November of last year, "The Aging and Health Report: Disparities and Resilience among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Older Adults," found that the older members of our community had significantly more "disability, physical and mental distress, victimization, discrimination, and lack of access to supportive aging and health services." Aging queers of color and the transgender have particularly hard times.

I hadn't thought much about aging until four or five years ago, when I visited my friend Al in an assisted living place on New York's Lower East Side. A black, gay photographer, Al couldn't take care of himself anymore after complications from diabetes and a bout with cancer. I found out later that he had family, but they didn't turn up until he was in the hospital on his deathbed, wheezing away on a respirator, and they got curious about his estate.

Al was pretty brave about the cancer. What bothered him most were the nurses. They were West Indian homophobes who spent their coffee breaks talking loudly about what they'd do to batty boys if they got the chance. Cut them into pieces, maybe, or set them on fire. It was the first time in his life Al stayed in the closet. And for the first time I started to panic about being poor and queer, and at the mercy of strangers. One more good reason to fight homophobia all over the world, I thought. The bigot nurses might end up in your neighborhood. And you're lying there, literally, in their vicious hands.

Last week, I visited another friend, this time in upstate New York. She'd been placed far from her old friends, but at least the nurses seemed nice enough. I didn't really get the creeps until I noticed something I hadn't counted on before: the other inmates. You can string Christmas lights, plant poinsettias right and left, and crank up the carols, but the simple fact is you don't get to choose your companions in institutions like that. It can be worse than high school. You don't get to go home in the afternoon.

The meanest was this carefully dressed and coiffed lady with a thin, pinched face, like my mother. She suddenly got up in her walker and came over to warn me, "He doesn't belong here. Get him out of here. He's not supposed to be in here!" I looked around but didn't see any male and thought she was having an episode of dementia, until I noticed the tall woman sitting behind me. She had short hair and an angular face and was maybe a dyke like me.

Gender police are everywhere. And they insist on getting their way. Later on, when the butch woman got up and was moving around with her walker, the angry, lipsticked woman scurried over and tried to smash her own walker into the butch one's, attempting to chase her away. The demolition derby could have been funny, I guess, if you weren't stuck there for the rest of your life. And unlike young queers, nobody can tell you, "It gets better."

As much as young queers, our aging and disabled people need our help and attention right now, including our physical presence. This is a simple enough matter. You don't have to change the world first, just put your coat on and go. My friend didn't recognize me at all, but she lit up anyway at the sight of somebody who was clearly a dyke. We held hands for a while, and she flirted a little, happy with the attention. Aging changes a lot, but not that. Not our queer hearts.

Election Pitfall: Hating on Hillbillies

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

All I want for Christmas is for our presidential candidates to be struck dumb for a week or two, maybe even through the Republican primary votes in Iowa and New Hampshire. Imagine Newt and Mitt, Ron and Michelle, their mouths opening and closing like fish. Getting all red-faced and frustrated when nothing comes out. And while I’m at it, let’s silence the pundits, too. And the screeching partisans indulging in bitterness and fury, sneering and hate.

It’s not that democracies don’t need debate. We surely do. We don’t even have to be particularly civil. I mourn the loss of Christopher Hitchens, who was himself a champion sneerer. The difference was that his scorn was always just the icing on a passionately reasoned argument footnoting observations from sources ranging from Greek historians to comic strips.

Most Americans, though, have grown to believe the sneer is the argument, and that personal insults about hair styles and lifestyles, and places of worship and of origin have the same weight as logic and reason. It dooms us when we try to solve complicated problems like the economy or foreign policy, education, or healthcare, deepens ordinary divisions like region, ethnicity and class.

A couple weeks ago, New York’s condescending, arrogant, Muslim-baiting Republican Representative Peter King indulged in casual slurs describing Newt Gingrich as condescending and arrogant, with "a Southern, anti-union attitude that appeals to the mentality of hillbillies at revival meetings."

A few days later, when news broke about that church in a small Kentucky town that banned an interracial couple from attending, many of the comments could be summed up as saying, “That’s terrible, but what can you expect in a barbaric place like that?” Because the American South, including Kentucky, and Newt’s Georgia, of course, has a lock on bigotry.

It gave me flashbacks to Election 2000. That was the year Al Gore went around trying not to use four syllable words, while George W. Bush grinned and drawled and tipped his cowboy hat, and good old Ralph Nader talked about globalization and the working class, while Naderites sneered at comparatively unimportant issues like racism and homophobia.

When the votes were tallied (or not), all the bulletin boards and letters to the editor, and platforms for rants were almost exclusively full of politically correct blue state types ignoring how Nader split the vote, and spilling out their vitriolic hate for “poor white trash” in the red states. “How stupid could they be pulling the lever for a rich Republican sure to cut their benefits?” “How could they be such idiots?” “Those Bubbas... those hillbillies... voting against their own interests.” Sometimes they even mentioned Kentucky by name. People that knew me. And knew where I was from. Though perhaps they thought it had worn off, me being up in New York so long. An East Village dyke.

Pundits explained it was a kind of delusion, poor Americans voting for Bush because they wanted to believe they could one day be like him, and pulling the Republican lever might give them a share in his good fortune. That may have been partly true. But it was strange no one said the obvious. That maybe we just didn’t want to vote for stuck up Gore or sneering Greens that talked about class and poverty but clearly despised us, knowing nothing about our lives or culture beyond the TV stereotypes that exist in shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, which have been reincarnated in Hillbilly Handfishin', Redneck Riviera, and American Hoggers.

These shows laugh at us, not with us. Pretend places like Atlanta or Louisville don’t exist, and haven’t moved into this century. Ignore social complexities. How a man like my uncle might still use the word “colored” but was more comfortable with his black co-workers at the factory than his university educated children. Maybe his black co-workers weren’t equally comfortable with him, but they weren’t at war.

In the imagination of this country, the South isn't just more conservative and religious, it's the sole repository of inbred idiots and genuine all consuming bigotry, as if racism or homophobia in Cincinnati or LA doesn’t really count. As if there’s no interstate trafficking in stupidity and hate. And poor people are even more stupid and degenerate if they speak with a twang.

What is this but an attempt to feel superior, for certain regions to feel absolved of our difficult history? It doesn’t matter that for every James Byrd Jr. there’s an Abner Louima. In ’92, New York City tried to get schools to accept the Rainbow Curriculum teaching school kids that everybody in the city was worthy of respect. But whites hated it because it validated people of color. Blacks, and Latinos, and whites hated it because it included queers. Ah, the United Hates of America. Can't we put a lid on it? Just for the holidays?

Getting in the Christmas Spirit

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I’ll probably die of cancer of some girly part, like tits or crotch, with Loki, the trickster god looking on and snickering at the irony, because I preach so often that it’s usually the ticker or lungs that gets women just like for men.

Loki’s the only god I’m ever tempted to believe in. Who else could be responsible for the Christmas season with all that earnest sanctimonious crap on the one hand, and Black Friday feeding frenzies and family shootouts on the other? I should probably build a little holiday shrine to the guy, and write a liturgy that starts with, “Pull my finger.”

Don’t worry, on my Christmas list I’ll ask for a sense of humor. I seem to have lost mine like an old glove. People have gone as far as to call me bitter, something no dyke has heard before. But what do you want, trying to pursue logic in a world that doesn’t have much? Maybe practice would help. In the New Year, I could resolve to wear my clothes inside out and backwards at least once a week. I already tried to laugh insouciantly when Culture War vet Newt Gingrich turned up as a presidential contender, blabbing about Christian values though he discarded one wife after another. IBut it sounded more like choking, so and the waiter tried the Heimlich maneuver.

Queers in West Africa should be laughing their heads off. Cynical, homophobic politicians there have decided that the best way to unify their countries split between Christian and Muslim bigots is to hate on queers, attacking us as a residual colonial threat not only towards the African family, and each country’s sovereignty, but civilization itself. Funny, right, that somebody could think we have such power? And that same-sex anything is attached to one country or another? Hah, hah. What idiots! If we had superpowers like that, those creeps would have been vaporized years ago.

I suppose you can laugh when you read about Alabama, where at least sixty-six people, have already been arrested for not carrying proper documentation as required by the new law targeting undocumented immigrants. The punch line? Half of them have been African Americans. Hah, hah. Fooled you. And this is Though I did think it was worth a chuckle or two: when I read how cops there also picked up a German Mercedes Benz executive that left his hotel without his passport. Ditto for a Japanese exec with Honda. This, after the state spent millions trying to attract foreign investment. How long do you think they’re going to stay, with a big welcome like that? And clever competing states like Missouri inviting car makers to relocate in there. “We are the Show Me State, not the Show Me Your Papers State.”

Even World Day Against AIDS has its little ironic kick. How many more people wear ribbons then, than on the International Day Against Homophobia? As if there were no connection. As if the biggest obstacle to dealing with HIV was largely research money, and not the gay stigma that lets straight guys go around spreading the virus because they can’t get a “gay” disease, and allows other men busy having sex with men to believe they can’t get HIV as long as they deny that word, gay, and stick to downlow. Or avoid one for shame. HIV isn’t really a virus at all, some microscopic creature passed from one human to another, but a linguistic contamination.

I was heartened for about a minute last week when I read the headline “Gambia: On World Aids Day SCB Calls for Fight Against Stigma.” But when I continued reading the article, which was probably more of a press release, by SCB, Standard Chartered Bank, they repeated the world stigma several times, but neglected to say what the stigma was or why AIDS should have it. Didn’t use the word “gay” once. Or anything else that reminded the world queers exist. Which kind of reinforces the stigma if you ask me having people so afraid of using the word you can’t print the unmentionable, embarrassing thing. Funny, huh? Hilarious. As UNAIDS reports that for every two people put on antiretroviral drugs, another five become newly infected. Often in these same West African countries where politicians are busy hating on queers. Irony. See, I recognize it.

Even if for me, it’ll probably be the heart attack after all. Because whenever I open my eyes, I find myself in a state of rage, with no passport out. Not until Loki answers my prayer, teaches me to embrace the ridiculous and deadly absurd.

Americans and Torture, No Problemo!

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Not that anybody cares, but the U.S. just celebrated the tenth anniversary of a monstrous milestone. On November 13, 2001, Bush legalized kidnappings, indefinite detention, secret military tribunals and hidden prisons for any suspected terrorist. Or suspected supporter of terrorism.

He ordered them all classified as military combatants. Except when it came time to applying the Geneva Convention. In which case they weren’t. Because the Geneva Convention gave soldiers certain rights. And he didn’t want to give terrorism suspects any. He wanted to make them something other than human. Something less than worms. Like queers.

Who are locked up for decades in prison-like schools and homes, tortured to within an inch of their lives without recourse to outside aid, tried by their grade school peers with scanty evidence under unspecified laws. And even released, are suspicious characters still subject to beatings, harassment, indefinite detention. Exile. Death in secret prisons.

“it is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.”

What do Americans have if not the law? Our moral purity? The Pledge of Allegiance declares our nation is under god. Not the constitution, or rule of law. Relying on god is a particular disaster in a protestant nation where individuals are encouraged to find their personal relationship to the deity, interpret the bible for themselves.

To Protestants like Bush, laws themselves are just phrases made up of words, and words like “torture” can be redefined to mean whatever suits our purposes. And in the casually minted dictionary popularized by Bush and Company, torture is a synonym for death. Anything less is only an interrogation “technique.”

Nobody protested much when Bush signed the order. Even in 2004, when disgusting images of Abu Ghraib flooded the internet, and the world was outraged, few Americans cared. Plenty even said those Muslims deserved it. Whether or not it produced information.

Americans, frankly, are indifferent to torture. I guess we don’t think it can happen to us. Or we’re more degenerate than I thought. It’s the only explanation for why Guantanamo’s still up and running, despite periodic statements from Obama that he’ll close the place down. One of these days. When Congress lets him. And why military tribunals are alive and well for terror suspects like Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, that was arrested before this directive and should have faced trial in a civilian court, instead of being held for ten years, sometimes in a CIA black site where he was tortured.

We are still engaging in extraordinary rendition (kidnapping). And while Obama did issue a directive ending torture, at least where we can see it, and “black sites” were theoretically closed in 2009, the CIA's perfectly happy to operate in support modes in foreign countries like Somalia when somebody else’s hands get dirty. They do their own questioning in temporary, deniable sites, like, for instance, a Navy vessel, where Somali terror suspect, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, was held and "interrogated” for weeks before being transferred to FBI custody and brought to the United States.

Even that fig leaf might disappear soon. GOP candidates are calling for the return of torture as if it were just a couple of licks with the paddle in high school. Bachman and Cain have come right out and said they’d support waterboarding. Rick Perry has declared he’d approve any technique at all that might “save young lives.” Mitt Romney’s said, “Enhanced interrogation techniques have to be used. Not torture, but enhanced interrogation techniques. Yes.”

To which Marc Theissen, Washington Post columnist, and former speechwriter for Rumsfeld, responded with joy and enthusiasm. “The willingness of so many Republican presidential candidates to speak out in defense of waterboarding is encouraging.” If he was horrified that the Obama administration was now killing terrorists with drones, it was because without “live captures,” they’d lose the opportunity for more waterboarding.

I understand greed better than this. Bankers amassing more and more money. Repossessing houses from people that will just have to find something to rent instead. Sucking up bailouts and awarding themselves huge bonuses because to some extent they can keep the idea of damage abstract. Who is my great wealth really hurting? Can you prove it was me?

With torture there’s no question. You know exactly who it that is feeling pain and exactly who is imposing it. Real flesh is being tortured, real minds. So why do Good Americans do it? All the science says it doesn’t work as a way to get information. U.S. and international law says it's wrong. Most religion says it’s an abomination. Is it because we believe Americans are exceptional? Despite our beastly behavior, we’re human, and our victims less than the bloody roosters we weep over, or eat?

After Sandusky, Back to Being Pedophiles

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

Jerry Sandusky, an assistant football coach at Penn State, had such a passion for underprivileged boys that he started his own foundation, The Second Mile, to help them whether they wanted it or not. "Sometimes they don't want it. Sometimes they don't understand what you're trying to do, but they want to be disciplined." That was a statement from his creepy '87 interview with NBC.

Now he's facing 40 counts of rape and assault, including two occasions at the school. Once, a janitor saw him "hugging" a young boy in the shower. Another time, an assistant coach actually saw him raping a kid. They both reported the occasions to their bosses, and when the bosses did nothing, they didn't pursue.

And if Sandusky's a criminal and perv, what do you call the circle of more than 15 men who knew he was abusing kids and let it go on? Even a bishop would have been troubled enough, at least for the sake of the institution, to move the guy to a different parish. But in the cloistered world of football, old Jerry stayed right where he was.

As for the students who rioted on behalf of the legendary head coach Joe Paterno, who got canned for turning a blind eye, well, I guess they don't think the lives of "underprivileged" boys count for much, not next to that of the winningest coach ever. With a wife and five kids, all Penn State grads, doing their bit to stack the stadium with 17(!) grandkids, Paterno had nothing to do with that homo Sandusky.

Yeah, that's right. Already in sports forums online, commenters are once again busy conflating homosexuality with pedophilia. Probably somewhere down the line, we'll even hear that poor Jerry was abused himself as a child. And the circle of guilt and blame will be offloaded -- again -- onto us queers, homos, fags (words not invoked in our slightly ironic, bittersweet way, but hatefully, with a slightly curled lip).

My only new thought is that the persistence of this stereotype is partly our own fault. The closer we get to legal equality, the more closeted we get about gay sex. Maybe it started with AIDS, when we wanted to separate gayness from sex because of the stigma of the disease.

But this sexlessness has gotten even more intense as our institutions have begun to focus on same-sex marriage. We mostly stick to talking points about the equal rights we want to win, like social security benefits, or the ability to file joint taxes. But more than anything, we wax lyrical about consecrating the love between two people who just happen to be of the same gender. Love, love, love, love, love. We want them to forget that those happily married couples will no doubt have sex, because that's what the bigots hate.

Two men getting it on. Two women. They have dirty minds. They imagine us as animals. With children. They work themselves up into pure disgust. That's probably what kept the Penn State guys in denial about Sandusky (who actually was doing all that), as much as the fear of what it would do to their football program.

And our fear of that fear, that disgust, is what drives lesbians and gay men into the sex closet, even as more and more of us are open about our "identities." It's why we've abandoned gay kids to bullies in schools. Get too close, somebody might think something ugly about us. And on the few occasions that lesbians or gay men have tried to do something about schools, our worst critics have been other queers.

I was a Lesbian Avenger. In 1992, for our first action, we demonstrated in favor of New York City's ill-fated Rainbow Curriculum, which was supposed to teach kids to respect each other. Most of it was about ethnicity, but out of the 440-something pages, six actually mentioned lesbians and gay men. So there was a huge backlash.

Our action: going to an elementary school with a marching band, handing out pamphlets with info about famous LGBT people, and balloons that said, "Ask about lesbian lives." Our t-shirts read, "I was a lesbian child." A few parents were upset, but most weren't. Our intent was clear: telling people to get informed and chill out about the whole thing.

And while Christian extremists responded the way they always did, the surprise was the queers. They were horrified that we'd gone to a school, like they were sacred places. Full of children. My god.

It's the same today. We'd rather let kids get bullied and abused and kill themselves than help them and risk getting called pedophiles ourselves. What does that say about us? And nothing will change until we get those bigots out of our heads and scream to the world, "We fuck. So what?"

A Reality Check About Breast Cancer

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

It's that time of year again when gangs of women in pink stride purposely down the sidewalk, and the NFL adds luminous fuchsia stripes to football uniforms. And, sure, many women's lives are saved by the big push calling attention to breast cancer. But other women are killed by the tits-crotch model of health care, giving them a false sense of security when their mammograms or pap smears come back negative.

The truth is that women are more likely to die from heart disease than all kinds of cancer combined. And when it comes to cancers, lung cancer is tops, then breast, then colorectal. Kidney cancer will get you before cervical cancer, and who checks for that? After cancer comes strokes and after that, chronic lung disease.

So why do most of our health check-ups still focus mainly on breast exams and pap smears, when we're a dozen times more likely to drop dead clutching our chests or hacking up a lung?

Prevention is part of it, and early treatment. Catch breast cancer early and your chances are good. That means fewer of us are dying from it. So numbers don't tell the whole story, and you still have to take care of your tits.

But there's also the misogyny factor. For centuries, the medical establishment has boiled down women's health to the female aspects of our bodies. No lungs or guts for us. No hearts. No little vessels waiting to explode in the head after a decade or two of cigarettes. And for dykes, don't forget the extra stress from lesbophobia.

No, the establishment is way more comfortable focusing on breast cancer, where the girly factor is reinforced by pink ribbons and fundraising walks held by cosmetic companies. Heart disease is so... butch. It makes you think of a fat guy dropping dead with a hotdog in one hand, a beer in another. Or a high-powered male exec who keels over between power meetings.

Another problem is the comparative difficulty of marketing heart disease prevention. For breast cancer, all you need to do is sell a quick visit to the gynecologist. But people fighting heart disease, strokes and lung cancer have to persuade folks to quit eating Big Macs and Snickers, get up off the couch and throw away the Marlboros. Not just for one afternoon. But weeks and months and years. The entire rest of their lives.

Lesbians (and bi women) probably suffer the most from the tits-crotch health care model. The community talks a lot about finding dyke-friendly health care providers because nobody's going to go to a clinic when they're afraid of a homophobe poking around in there. But because dykes smoke like chimneys compared to hets, are more likely to be heavy and have a ton more stress, it's absolutely urgent for us to have more general health care programs encouraging us to quit smoking and get fit. And for that matter, encouragement to come out. Hiding your sexual identity or living in the closet increases your stress level, which raises your risk for heart diseases, high blood pressure and strokes, not to mention depression and substance abuse.

Which brings me to the point, again. You want to save women's lives? Gotta look past that loverly pink.

We Are the 100 %

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I’ve spent half my life as a lesbian activist. First taking to the streets with the Lesbian Avengers, then as a journalist trying to mobilize Americans for the sake of their own withering democracy. Like when the Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency, making Florida votes toilet paper. Or when the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised the nation that torture isn’t torture when Americans do it.

So why, when the Occupy Wall Street movement finally emerges from grassroots America, do I find myself screaming, “Morons! Idiots!” What am I? A hypocrite? A newly minted neocon? An alien?

I’ve spent the last month tracking my flight pattern. If all my buttons got pushed, it’s not about the method. I still believe direct action is one of the only ways to deliver demands if you don’t have your own lobbyists. And that even without unifying goals, mass demonstrations themselves can be a useful message of popular discontent. They give a voice and body to people that until that moment had probably been reduced to abstractions in the minds of the reps we sent to Washington. Or for that matter, City Hall.

At the same time, street activism isn’t just for the audience. It can have a powerful effect on participants. For once, your voice is amplified. You exist. It can even empower us as citizens if we make that leap from airing grievances en masse to deciding to claim the whole country as a common project acknowledging shared goals and shared faults.

That’s the question, really. Will this moment of roused rabbles turn more people into citizens, or will it just be catharsis, leave them ideological consumers gobbling up the newest slogan, the quickest fix?

I have my doubts. Partly because I always do: humans as we know share far too much DNA with earthworms. But also because in the last twenty years only money worries have gotten Americans into the streets.

This historical moment of civic involvement is all about the bottom line. Even if we cloak it in the language of democracy and the American way of life, calling it patriotism when the Tea Partiers declare they’ve had enough of paying taxes and want to end the fed and shrink the government. Calling it a concern for democracy and inequality when the Occupiers, some of them, anyway, demand an end to taxation, and the end of the Fed, and a government corrupted by corporations.

The biggest difference is that the Tea Partiers want to cling to their cash because it might otherwise go to health care for the poor (especially immigrants), even if they themselves benefit from government projects like roads, and hospitals and public schools. And the Occupiers don’t want their money to go to the rich, even if they aren’t quite willing to give up their iPhones made by a company that profits from child labor, and subsidizes those bonuses to fat cat CEO’s and stockholders.

You could sum it up like this. All sides are freaked out by the tanking economy and don’t want to be poor. To save themselves, they’ve identified targets for their anger. Muslims, or people of color or queers are convenient enemies on the one side, and the ten percent on the other. Both hate big government.

Both sides also love to be victims. Of terrorists. Or immigrants. Or corporations. Which is why the Tea Party called itself the Tea Party, so that they can pretend they are poor oppressed colonists launching a movement for independence against the duly elected Obama, though they still seem to adore the appointed president Bush. And why the OWS folks tried to colonize the democracy movements of the “Arab Spring” declaring “We’re just like Egypt, just like Tunisia.” It was marketing. These are clear ways to establish tyrants and victims, gain instant legitimacy. And catchy names.

If I’ve moved past anything it’s simplicity, and seeing politics like a high school basketball game with two sides struggling over the same ball. I wonder if there’s a way out as long as we mask our real problems, our real natures with all these self-serving narratives. As long as we refuse to admit things are complicated, and that all of our hands our dirty, even if some are dirtier than others.

I include myself there, too. My TracFone is an embarrassment. If I suddenly came into some money I’d be awfully tempted to buy every Apple product on the market no matter how many employees commit suicide from the horrible conditions. But I’d have to shut up, then. Couldn’t hector, anybody. Not the racist right, the oblivious left.

Maybe I shouldn’t anyway. I don’t have the answers to anything from the Iraq War to the War on Terror to the incredible inequality of the U.S. economy. All I have is the intuition that the solution is complicated, painful and involves all Americans. That unpopular percentage, 100.

See Jane Lynch, Run

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Barnes & Noble to see Jane Lynch. I expected a line full of dykes waiting to meet one of their few heroes, but it was mostly straight women and fags until Lucy and Marie got there, and we butched the place up.

We killed time taking pictures of ourselves with Dust Jacket Jane and laughing until our faces hurt. She looked almost real if you draped a hoodie over the book to hide the corners and used a crappy phone camera. The trick was to hold her just a little in front of you so that your head wasn't enormously big by comparison.

Not a problem for me, the girls decided, since I have a pinhead. Lucy's is absolutely giant, but she's a surgeon. Or so she claims. The only thing I've seen her cut open was her enormous hamburger afterwards at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. There weren't any dykes there, either, but what did I care? There was beer and fried catfish, which I earned, waiting for them to get their damn books signed.

I don't think Jane liked us. We giggled too much. Didn't fawn. We already had pictures with her, after all. And to be honest, while I admire her as an actress, that show Glee really gets on my nerves. There's something repulsive about how they show kids suffering from one bigotry or another, then solve the whole mess with a couple of songs and a group hug.

In the real world, the fat chick would be throwing up in the bathroom, and the little faggot cutting his wrists. Doctors would be stuffing the baby dyke with Abilify. And the teachers, all of them, would look the other way during bullying. Maybe hold a prayer session, in fact, to exorcise the homos.

The other kids would be absolutely ruthless, not having revelations about our shared humanity, because they hardly ever do. If the little bastards who encouraged real-life kid Jamey Rodemeyer to kill himself become upset that he actually did it, it'll only be because the cops identified them and pressed some kind of charges. Or because their parents came down on them. Until then, I suspect the monsters are thrilled. What power they have. Just a few words and the fat priss is gone.

The glee club should worship Stephen King and not Sondheim, admit the existence of evil, and that it often lives in middle and high schools, which Buffy knew when she was slaying her vampires. That is the big flaw in the homopromo project, It Gets Better, on YouTube: it tells queer kids the future will be better but utterly concedes the present where we all live.

I'm lucky mine's good. I don't have to wake up every day and walk through doors that smell of cheap detergents and sweat and hormones. I don't have to try to pee in flimsy stalls surrounded by teenaged girls who would like to destroy me.

I have friends watching my back. After the book signing, and restaurant, they dragged me to Henrietta Hudson's, where, of all things, it was karaoke night. Nobody could belt like that Glee diva Rachel, but lord, you should have heard them sing. The only problem is that the Earth didn't move. All our joy didn't change a thing.

Women Pushing Forward, Dykes—Not So Much

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Last Friday, the 2011 Nobel committee split the peace prize among Liberians Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, and Yemeni writer Tawakkol Karman, recognizing them "…for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work." It’s one of only 12 peace prizes given to women in the 112 years of the award, and the first for an Arab woman.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s probably the most conventional of the three -- a Harvard-trained economist who became post-colonial Africa’s first woman president. Elected in 2005, she’s worked to promote development for her impoverished country, getting 4 billion dollars in foreign debts forgiven, and supporting the rights of women and girls.

The Liberian activist that made her election possible, was sister laureate, Leymah Gbowee, who worked first as a trauma counselor with ex-child soldiers, before participating in the fledgling women’s peace movement trying to end years of bloody civil war, widespread rapes, and the kidnapping of children for soldiers.

The movement began in Monrovia in 2002 with a daily peace encampment near a small market where women dressed in white, and fasted and prayed. She joined them, working to unite Muslim and Christian women, and developing additional strategies. One tactic was a sex strike persuading husbands to support the peace movement. It was extremely successful. Another time they threatened curses.

Not long after a huge march on Monrovia’s City Hall in 2003, dictator Charles Taylor agreed to meet. Three days later, there was a ceasefire. Soon after that, all sides negotiated an agreement that has held up, thanks to ongoing work. Taylor is currently awaiting a verdict at the Hague after being tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The women’s peace movement in Liberia has sparked interest all over the continent, encouraging women in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Zimbabwe to begin putting pressure on their own governments. The third laureate, journalist and leader in Yemen’s democratic revolt, Tawakkul Karman, has been equally inspiring to women in the Arab world.

Head of Women Journalists without Chains, she’s a longtime critic of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, organizing protests since 2007 to demand rights for women and increased freedom of the press.

It was her arrest in January that sparked massive protests demanding a democratic government. Since her release, she’s been with the other protesters in “Change” Square, despite very real fears she’ll be murdered or kidnapped.

Like other women protesters from the Arab Spring, she’s faced not only threats from her government, but from conservative forces in her own Islamic opposition party, Islah, that have denounced her uncovered face and close contact with men. Her own father was opposed, and tried to get her to stop, but when she wouldn’t he finally joined her.

Like the Liberian activists, the growing visibility of Tawakkul Karman is hugely important for women in the region. She’s openly called for women to take to the streets. They’re responding in droves, though most keep to the back of demos and wear the abaya and face veils.

It’s difficult to say what these awards mean for lesbians in Central Africa or Yemen. Even in democratic countries, we’re often excluded from women’s movements, and our own work rarely sees the light of day.

On Friday, for instance, while these three extraordinary women were being informed of their award, one South African court finally offered some small measure of justice in the murder of lesbian activist Zoliswa Nkonyana who was beaten, kicked, and stoned to death six years ago by a gang of youths.

The trial was postponed more than fifty times by a reluctant justice system and the incompetence and bigotry of local cops, but in the end, at least four out of the twenty accused were found guilty.

If the trial happened at all, it was due to pressure from groups like FreeGender, a black lesbian organization in Capetown whose founder and spokesperson Funeka Soldaat said that though they were happy about the judgment, too many people had been acquitted due to police incompetence.

She helped found the group because lesbians were being raped and killed and nobody cared. Mobilizing was tough: “lesbians were too scared to attend public demonstrations.” So they decided to create FreeGender, which would let them stand as a group against homophobia, holding workshops, and trying to get cops trained.

They’ve come a long way. In June they hosted the very first national black lesbian conference in South Africa, and participated in a groundbreaking task force of the Department of Justice aiming to combat the wave of rapes targeting lesbians in South Africa.

The LGBT community could take a page from Nobel committee’s book, and do more to highlight the work of queer activists like Funeka Soldaat, both with funding and recognition. It's how more activists are inspired.

So You Want to Be an Activist?

Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

People keep telling me I shouldn't be so dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street folks. It's early days yet. Somebody's got to do something about poverty and corruption. And there they are, eager and willing. Hell, they got arrested. They're practically ACT UP.

So I went to City Hall, where a demo was scheduled. Nobody was there except a bunch of bored-looking cops and aggressive squirrels, so I headed to their encampment a little further down Broadway. No one was doing anything, though I heard that there had been a couple of arrests. I watched people scribble homemade signs, and others do yoga, and still others sit in a circle and talk. And then I went off to a bench to read a copy of the cleverly named The Occupied Wall Street Journal, given to me by a white girl with blonde dreads and a bongo slung over her shoulder.

It could only have been written by young Americans who know absolutely nothing about anything and are damned proud of it. I learned that the recent riots in England were exactly the same as the ones in Egypt, and that the conditions in the United States were pretty much as dire as those in Tunisia. Heck, Occupy Wall Street is a card-carrying member of the Arab Spring.

And the strategy that I've been told would eventually emerge is apparently to take a hardline stance against hardline stances. Protesters are there to express a feeling. Yes, a feeling. Of mass injustice. And this feeling of mass injustice will create change with no leaders and no actual demands, because that's what corporate forces do, make demands with their filthy dollars. And OWS won't stoop to it until they're incredibly powerful. Or maybe they won't at all. The encampment is message enough about democracy in action.

This is what I'm supposed to take seriously?

If I'm skeptical and sneering, if I sound angry, it's because I want them to be better, smarter, more focused than they clearly are. The need for economic change is huge, and people are suffering (even if not as much as Tunisia or Egypt). I also want them to succeed as street activists. Since my stint in the Lesbian Avengers and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, I've been convinced that direct action is a hugely important tool, one of the few for social change when you don't have tons of money and congressmen in your pocket.

The problem is that organizing demos, not to mention movements, is more complicated than it looks. And Americans in particular are doomed if they model themselves after a few YouTube images of demos in the Middle East or Greece or wherever. But what the hell. This is a generation raised on Martin Luther King Day programs that largely consist of his "I Have a Dream" speech and a brief clip of marchers getting attacked by police and dogs and water hoses. All it takes to change the world is a megaphone, a heartfelt speech, a couple of conflicts with the cops, and an iPhone to tweet about it. LOL.

I'm going to pretend this is a teachable moment and remind you just why ACT UP was successful. In fact, let's use their actions disrupting Wall Street to talk about how the pros do it. They were fighting AIDS, right? Novices might have gone down to the stock exchange screaming, "You have a bunch of money and power. Stop AIDS now!" Like the OWS people screaming for the end of capitalism, and failing that, the end of the Federal Reserve. But that's not what they did.

Mentored by experienced activists, ACT UP had strategies, plans, priorities. In their Wall Street actions, their targets were mostly pharmaceutical and health care companies. One early demand was that companies invest in research for drugs to treat AIDS. When drugs finally appeared, activists demanded (and continue to demand) that the drugs be widely available for reasonable costs. "People NOT profits!" A clear target, a clear message arrived at by a hell of a lot of work, and endless cups of coffee. ACT UP researchers became so knowledgeable that drug companies later recruited them. That moment in the street was only a tiny part of their work -- which, by the way, had a huge impact on not only Big Pharma but U.S. policy.

That's what it takes. Feelings alone never changed a damn thing. Maybe the problem is that the protesters just aren't desperate enough to choose any goal lesser than the transformation of the world. They don't exactly represent the people suffering the most from poverty and corporate corruption. There were no single mothers with kids, few people of color or visible queers, almost nobody middle-aged, unemployed and desperately trying to get back into the job market or pay off a mortgage.

At least so far, most seem young, white, educated. Their prospects for getting a job are a lot tougher than they were five years ago, and they have college debt, but you can almost see the safety nets of race and class below them. They shouldn't apologize for that. They are who they are. The problem is that they believe they are universal and represent us all. They are the center of the world. And dumb as dirt if their publication is anything to go by.

Still...

Why not indulge in hope? We do have to start somewhere. They've tapped into something, showed that the left is still capable of life. Ideas could emerge from that soil. Maybe a couple of leaders. Even MLK had to learn as he went. In his autobiography, touching on the setbacks of the Albany Movement, he wrote:

The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale ... When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors. Our appraisals not only helped to make our subsequent tactics more effective, but revealed that Albany was far from an unqualified failure.

Anybody listening?