Against Revolutionary Tourists

By Kelly Cogswell

I won't go so far as to declare, "Anybody but de Blasio." New York lived through Giuliani. We'll probably survive de Blasio, too. But for the record, he shows all the signs of being a moron of the kind mass-produced by the Left, usually sporting a scruffy, bereted Che silk-screened on their chests. They embrace lefty revolutions that do some proxy nose-thumbing at the U.S., watch at a distance as ideologies and their consequences are writ large in somebody else's life.

When confronted with human rights abuses of their pet leftist regimes, they typically make half-hearted excuses, blaming a meddling U.S., (ignoring their own fingers in the pie), or tout access to health care or literacy or whatever. No matter that their revolutions' accomplishments were ages ago and relatively brief, and now the books are censored, the schools crumbling, health care reserved for the regime's faithful elite, and government critics end up in the brig or worse. They don't even notice that the gloriously downtrodden poor are still poor, and voiceless, unless you count the labor unions, run not by the workers but by their employers, the state.

No, when it comes to all that, I can't condemn Mr. de Blasio as being particularly unique -- one of those flowers that blossoms once a millennium. He's just the zucchini of leftwing cretins. Absolutely garden variety, celebrating every leftist revolution he's ever heard of. Usually a couple decades late.

In 1987, when he got involved supporting the Sandinistas, they'd already been in power since 1979, and it was no secret that they celebrated their victory over Somoza's brutal rightwing dictatorship with mass graves. Two or three years later they suspended civil liberties. And while they did teach peasants to read, the effort was often wasted when the newly literate were tortured or disappeared after protesting official policies.

While Reagan's contras helped destabilize the new Nicaraguan government, excuses for torture and mass murder and dictatorships make me think of Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. When she was told a serial killer was only evil because he was abused as a boy, she responded, "Bullshit... He killed and he raped because he liked doing it...Gottfried isn't the only kid who was ever mistreated."

A grave is much like another, whether Somoza put you there, or a Sandinista. By making excuses for these regimes, we lend them support that extends their lives, and makes us as complicit in their abuses as Reagan was with the contras, as all Americans are when we support Middle East dictatorships to keep a nice cheap flow of oil.

Still, faux revolutionaries will probably continue to idolize Cuba, even if the honeymoon of the 1959 revolution also lasted only a few months. Already, in 1960, our hero Che was setting up the first labor camps designed for "people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals." In the following years, they'd be filled with plenty of queers and dissidents. Most recently, people with AIDS were interned with only slightly better treatment.

It's hard to believe Mr. de Blasio didn't know that when he went there in the early Nineties to celebrate his honeymoon and supposedly protest the U.S. embargo. It was the beginning of the "Special Period" after the Soviet Union's collapse, when most people experienced the island as a place of hunger and repression, an enormous jail. The beaches and hotels open to him were closed to ordinary Cubans in a cultural apartheid (you can't blame on the U.S.) that only allowed them access if they were waiters or cooks or prostitutes. Here's to protesting U.S. policies over a mojito in a country where real protests are brutally suppressed!

It was even more vile, in 2002, when as a councilperson, he grinned next to Robert Mugabe in front of City Hall. Once a hero in Zimbabwe's fight for independence, the African dictator only continued to win elections by slaughtering his opposition, rigging votes, and distracting the population with anti-gay pogroms -- a favorite pastime of left-wing revolutions, especially those with communist roots like Cuba.

Since I can't rub de Blasio's nose in the messes his revolutionary tourism has supported, I'll just quote James Baldwin at him, "it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime."

Ever since Stalin, if not before, it's been clear there's no redeeming qualities in the dictatorships of the Left. And beyond that, history (and common sense) tell us, over and over, that social change can not be engineered from above. You can't march into Iraq and declare democracy. You can't torture and mass grave your way to freedom and economic justice. If interference by American government is wrong, so is interference and unquestioning support from any large groups of outsiders whose only real interest is in protecting a mythology, a cage that other people are forced to live and die in.

Inequality Addicts

By Kelly Cogswell

Last week, The New York Times broke the unsurprising news that Christine Quinn's electoral disaster may have been more than rejection of her politics, but of Quinn herself -- her female screech and high pitched voice, the childlessness supposedly antagonistic to families, her unfeminine pushiness and goshdang dykey masculinity no man wants to stare at, and of which no woman wants to be accused.

 

Her advisors saw it coming and told her she had to do something, but apparently Quinn refused to talk about it, either out of hubris and short-sightedness or despair. Realistically, there's little she could have done. If Quinn had tried to appear softer, she'd have seemed weak, or worse, duplicitous. There are some circles you just can't square.

 

All we can do is admit the problem like inequality addicts, try to take the first step again. "Hi, I'm Christine Quinn. I'm a dyke, and I'm screwed." We're not post-misogyny, post-homophobia, post-anything just because women have been able to vote for a while now, and even own property, and lesbians can mess around safely in their own beds, or tie the knot at City Hall and reduce their parents to happy blubbering idiots.

 

The problem is, there's no real change in sight. In movies and on TV gender roles are almost as rigid as ever. If we're lucky enough to get a female superhero with a muscle-bound gym bod, you can bet she'll have long girly hair. The toughest female politicians stuff themselves into pink Chanel skirts, while the religious councilors of their constituents advise their flock that their daughters shouldn't be sent to college. Keep 'em barefoot, pregnant, and ignernt as sin.

 

While a video of that preacher went viral on the internet, propelled by outraged feminists, nothing really happened. The women's movement is all but dead. LGBT groups are mostly mobilized for legal equality, and have minimal impact on daily life. In fact, there's little going on anywhere that might start giving people ideas. It's not like we've got a big movement against the Vietnam War or for Women's Rights. All is calm on the activist front. Ditto for the culture wars. There's no Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury on the horizon. No Harlem Renaissance, Audre Lorde or David Wojnarowicz.

 

In New York, activism has been particularly scarce since the demise of ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers. There were two or three big demos protested the Iraq War. A handful of folks denounced torture. Domestic spying is submitted to with barely a peep. Wall Street was occupied briefly then abandoned. After the Trayvon Martin verdict there were a few protests, but no budding movement. As humans, as Americans, it seems we've lost our hearts. We're dead in the water. Play taps or some old spiritual. Let's get it over with. Though maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there's some underground thing getting ready to bloom, though I doubt it.

 

The old tricks don't seem to work any more. In the U.S., we relied too long on identity politics to fuel progressive movements, rallying people around race, sexual orientation, gender. As if the categories had some independent existence tapping into hidden wells of Power. Raise your fist in the Black Power salute. Burn something like a bra. Or don't. Post-modern and queer theories seem to put the existence of any identity, especially the lesbian one, on the same plane as unicorns. Our lives are performed, not lived. They are as flexible and fluid as any Coney Island contortionist. No matter that the street tells us different, and the consequences of identity aren't flexible at all. Violence, rape, poverty of whole classes of people. Disenfranchisement.

 

And yet, and yet, what do we have in common? Females are just creatures with two mounds on their chests and reproductive organs conveniently tucked away. Even so, I get chased out of women's restrooms. Get called sir half the time in the street when my hair is short. Not that dykes embrace each other. We're too this or too that. Not enough of the other thing.

 

Likewise, nothing unites African Americans and other racial minorities but skin. Scratch beneath it and what do you have? More skin. And then flesh and icky stuff. Blood. And bones. It is only abstractions that are shared. The invisible web of history, and culture, or experience. Things that must be continually taught, continually explored. Whether the lesson comes from a bigot and is one of shame. Or something to celebrate, taught by somebody inside the community reminding us survival itself is reason enough for pride. We did it. You can, too.

 

Identity is largely an act of the imagination, filtered through imponderable flesh. It's a dream we deny the need for, but can't live without.

 

Lesbophobia and the NYC Mayoral Election

I hate to watch sitcoms with gay male characters, like the defunct New Normal, or the popular Modern Family. Almost inevitably they make stereotypical digs at how ugly and badly dressed dykes are. How humorless, because we don't laugh at jokes making us the butt.

Nobody hates dykes as much as fags. And of course, other dykes. Transfolks aren't always major boosters either. I declare this based on my Facebook page and the few queer articles I've read on New York's mayoral primaries where lefties who once blabbed how important it was to elect Obama, "He'll be our first black president," are all bashing Christine Quinn.

"I don't care if she is a lesbian. She's in bed with the real estate developers. I'd never vote for her," they shriek. Or they cite the times she's screwed queers, but never the times she's supported us. Apparently, historical groundbreaking is less important when it's the first woman, first dyke with the chance to run one of the biggest, most important, cities in the world.

To my dyke, female ears, their refrain sounds fishy, lesbophobic. Replay it substituting black. "I don't care if he is black, I'd never vote for him." Yeah, there's that little extra bigotry Obama gets now. A version of the hate Hillary Clinton got in the presidential primaries. That same feeling of ickiness at her child-bearing thighs and strident voice, the same rabid disgust I don't see opponents direct at our current crop of male mayoral candidate.

I'm not encouraging you to vote for Christine Quinn. I'm not entirely decided myself. But if you are going to vote for one of the boys, I'd like you to ask yourself if dyke-hating is playing a role. Especially in an election like this when nobody is exactly pristine. It's New York. To survive in politics here everybody cuts corners, cuts deals, shares flea-ridden beds.

Mr. DeBlasio and Mr. Liu alone have consorted with far worse than Quinn's bastard developers out to screw the poor: they kissed the ass of an actual murderer. In 2002 they were among the sixteen repulsive New York City Council members, all Democrats, mostly black, who either attended or sponsored a reception for Robert Mugabe at City Hall, touting him as Zimbabwe's liberation hero.

That may have been briefly true, but for the last several decades, Mugabe had been running one of the ugliest dictatorships in the world. Not only strong-arming his own people, rigging elections, and manipulating the economy, but burning down the houses of the opposition--with them still inside. Starving the districts of his enemies, regularly jailing and torturing them. And, to top it all, he's screamed, and continues to scream, about how queers are worse than dogs and sends mobs after us.

He was swimming in blood. And by backslapping him at City Hall, a rare honor given only to the likes of Mandela, idiot New York Dems like DeBlasio gave him a stronger grip on power, extended the violence and misery. But so what? Nobody cared then, and despite our occasional email sent about queers abroad, probably nobody cares now.

I can already hear the excuses, "That was a decade ago. It doesn't count." Or, "It was in Africa. They probably didn't know." Which is almost worse. Because who wants a mayor who's got his head so far up his moronic ass that he doesn't even read front page news counting Mugabe's victims? In 2008 DeBlasio, hinted at ignorance. With the info available, he should have known. "It was a mistake." Liu, however, still reportedly said, he didn’t see what "the big deal" was.

Nevertheless, Quinn's still the devil. And there are dykes still sneering, "I don't care if she is a lesbian... I'd never vote for her." They imply a dyke dumping on another dyke makes her opinion more objective, somehow praiseworthy, not infected with lesbophobia at all. Worse, they give the impression Quinn is running for mayor of Poughkeepsie, not New York City, where for the first time, a woman, a dyke, would have a global platform second only to the U.S. President, or maybe Secretary of State.

Maybe the same thing would happen with a fag mayoral candidate. Queers are such a weird minority. We're the first to say we're just like everybody else, no different at all. The first to stab each other in the back. I'm pretty sure when he was running for mayor, David Dinkins got the black vote. Fernando Ferrer, though he lost in the 2001 primary, got a lot of support from Latinos.

Sadly, it looks like Christine Quinn will only get crumbs from New York queers, because we're so fucking determined to be honest and open-minded. So determined to reject blind support (that does lead to disasters, see Mugabe, R.) that we despise solidarity. And because we hate dykes.

Maybe I'll support Quinn, after all. Cast a big dyke vote for the chance at a global voice.

Russian Queers Under Attack

By Kelly Cogswell

Unless we get involved, U.S. athletes will participate in the 2014 Olympics in Russia, where naked authoritarian rule has returned after a trial in democracy that only lasted long enough for the Eastern Orthodox Church to regain and consolidate its power, and for a vicious free market capitalism to create a few obscenely wealthy oligarchs.

The rest of the population has produced a handful of pro-democracy resisters, like the feminist punk rockers Pussy Riot, a lumpish and alienated majority, and a sizeable minority increasingly nostalgic for the bad old days when sacrificial victims might have disappeared (we won't speak of them), but at least there was order.

Part of that returning, Soviet-era order is the oppression of queers. The Church had done it before, but the secular State got in the business when it turned out that faggots didn't disappear along with the filthy upper classes. Like in Cuba, this state-sponsored homophobia became particularly virulent after a few years in the authoritarian swamp when it crossbred puritanical Christian morality with the macho, authoritarian cult of the Commie's New Man.

Queers, of course, are its natural enemy, dykes subverting the idea that things must be the way they are, with women submitting to their sharply bearded men, citizens bowing to the power of the State, and journalists regularly eating their words or having convenient and fatal accidents. Two men are just as bad because either you have a male abdicating his God-given supremacy, or a pair asserting the chaotic power of erotic democracy.

The worst Russian laws came in 1960 when queers were punished not just for having sex, but banned from working any job that had to do with kids, or playing any role in public. Plenty of gay men ended up in prison or worse. Dykes were more routinely sent to the nuthouse to have their queerness electroshocked out of them.

That famous anti-gay article 121.1 of the 1960 Soviet Criminal Code was only repealed two decades ago in 1993, less as a sign of a newfound commitment to civil equality, than a little early pink-washing to help get Russia in the EU. Up until late in '92, hundreds of gay men were still being convicted and imprisoned every year, while dyke activists like Alla Pitcherskaia not only risked repeated arrest, but threats of permanent imprisonment and electrodes.

When I was co-editing The Gully online magazine from 2000-2006, the Russian queers we worked with were reluctant to use their names. As it turned out, they had good reason.

Like Putin's authoritarian government, unapologetic homophobes have re-emerged mouthing both nationalistic, and religious arguments in their attempts to recriminalize homosexuality. They've been increasingly effective, shutting down some Pride Parades, and in June, as lesbians and gay men in the U.S. won federal recognition of their marriages, the Russian legislature voted almost unanimously to ban "pro-gay" propaganda. This incredibly broad law not only prohibits any positive portrayals of LGBT people, but criminalizes anybody that even acknowledges our existence in public. For all intents and purposes, it officially outlaws queer activism.

They're not stopping there. A new law bans gay couples from adopting, and another makes it legal to toss tourists into jail for a couple weeks if they're gay. Four Dutch tourists were recently arrested for "promoting homosexuality to children." More laws are in the works to remove children from lesbian and gay parents. Forget marriage.

Ultranationalists are the enforcers, acting with the state's approval, if not their funds. As new stadiums are built, and Olympic platitudes mouthed, the most popular sport in Russia is forming lynch mobs to attack queers in the street. Other far-right psychos are using social media to lure young gay teens into private spaces where they humiliate and torture them, then proudly post videos of their horrifying acts of patriotism on the internet. According to an internet poll, since this antigay crackdown intensified, fifteen percent of LGBT folks in Russia have been physically attacked for being gay.

It's hard to see much hope for Russian queers without outside intervention or a civil war. Because homophobia's only half the problem. Cultures can be changed, at least gradually. But you can't do it without the tools of civil society and democracy: persuasion and protest and speech. As outsiders, we can only vote with our money and prestige. Unlike the U.S., where we can also vote and agitate, at least for now.

Although we're heading a better direction on LGBT rights, we're moving in the tandem with Russia when it comes to destroying the tools of social change like free speech, and a vibrant media. And in the long run, it may be less significant to have a gay-friendly President, than one more determined than George W. Bush to attack the press, and make examples of whistle-blowers like Snowden and Manning rightly disgusted by the government's abuse of power to erode our precious democracy.

Trayvon Martin, and "We Are Caligula"

By Kelly Cogswell

A couple of days ago, I checked out a rehearsal of Susana Cook's new play, "We Are Caligula". It felt so retro, sitting on a folding chair and watching actual humans on the stage moving around in the flesh. It was kind of about that -- flesh -- and the disposable body. Who gets eaten and who doesn't. What makes somebody god enough to make the choice, and some body else so far below human they end up on the plate.

In short, with an entertaining blend of show tunes, massacres and orgies, "We Are Caligula" explores just how our species justifies war, and racism, and homophobia, and all the other stuff that ends in us devouring each other (and animals) without a second thought.

Sitting there, with sweat running down the back of my knees, I started thinking about Trayvon Martin. He's one of the black bodies that doesn't count for much, either in life or death. You could say he was killed twice. Once, quickly, by George Zimmerman, another time slowly, during the Florida trial, as bigots assassinated a whole race.

I've been wanting to say something, but didn't know what. I was surprised at how many people were shocked that Zimmerman got off. As if half the white liberals on Facebook only then discovered that Dame Justice wasn't as blind as they'd thought. I guess they hadn't noticed all the straight guys getting acquitted for shooting queers. "He came onto me, I was afraid." Or how women are always getting raped and killed while their attackers go free. And when it comes to race I seem to remember marching fifteen years ago when Amadou Diallo got shot 41 times by NYPD cops who were apparently terrified of a black man raising a wallet. Fear acquitted them, too.

The only question is whether the current outrage can grow legs and take off. After all, people went out in the streets after Diallo's death, but nothing much changed. Probably because it was mostly African Americans out marching in horror. After Zimmerman's recent acquittal, they've finally been joined by plenty of my white peeps who may have had a great awakening to racism, but are probably just shocked by this specific case with the shooter clearly out of control. The victim, Trayvon Martin so young, and puppyishly cute he looks as good on a poster as Matthew Shephard.

It's not enough. Even innocent, handsome, white Matthew Shephard might have disappeared from the radar if there hadn't been national LGBT groups ready to leap on his corpse for all they were worth, sending out flyers, demanding money, using his mother with incredible effect to bring attention to hate crimes legislation. "Matthew just happened to be my son, but he could have been yours, your son, your brother, your..." Which is literally true. Queers are usually born to straights, like cuckoos dropped in the nest.

Black kids, on the other hand, don't turn up so randomly in white families. So another script will have to encourage whites, whether entirely racist, or merely privileged, to make the leap and see kids like Trayvon as their kin.

I don't see any other way to put a stake through racism's heart. Surely not by making the opposite argument, as one blog does, smarmily calling attention to white privilege by declaring, We Are Not Trayvon Martin.

Even if it does have a certain consciousness-raising value, in the long term WeAreNotTrayvonMartin.com also has the unintended consequence of reinforcing the idea that human experiences are so different between races that they can't be bridged. And that racism itself is a singular set of problems. If that's the case, well, what can we really do beyond maybe getting that Florida law repealed, which allows fearful folks like Zimmerman to Stand Their Ground with a loaded gun.

I actually think we'd get further with a site declaring "We Are Trayvon Martin AND Also George Zimmerman." Because even though the system weights things heavily in favor of whites from life to liberty, individually, we are not as separate as we'd like, either in our goodness or evil. And any evolution of our society's culture will require an immense joint effort of the imagination that we can rarely be bothered to make.

In "We Are Caligula," it rang true when a couple of worried senators (and possible victims) got together to figure out how to depose the dangerous, bloodthirsty Caligula, but ended up deciding he wasn't so bad after all, he had his reasons, and Rome's finances were doing quite well. All things considered, change was scarier than Caligula, and frankly, required too much work.

"We Are Caligula" will be performed Saturday, August 3, 8:30 pm at Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, New York City.

Excepting the Anti-Family Jesus

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Despite our victories (probably because of them), Pride seems more and more like a kind of queer Thanksgiving with too much talk about family as we celebrate new gains protecting lesbian and gay ones via marriage, immigration equality, and adoption. While glad for the legal progress, it's worth saying that this kind of family is not the one so many of us tried to reclaim when the movement was more about liberation than equality, and we danced on sweaty dance floors to the sounds of Sister Sledge, grateful to have found a community, even a fractured one.

No, Family 2013 is the thing I fled when I came to New York -- the sanctimonious and claustrophobic unit whose purpose is not to draw together, but set apart, and privilege the small circle over the greater, the well-being of the few over the community. Even when queers are involved, family seems just a tiny extension of the first person, the jealous and avaricious "I" that slips a noose around your neck as soon as you're born. Which is why even though I'll probably benefit from some of these homofamily gains, I rarely use the word to talk about my relationship, it just seems so inadequate and debased.

What are families for, anyway? To consolidate wealth and power? Offer support? Reproduce? If not your genetics, ideology? We don't need big ones anymore for family farms or businesses. Ideally, the small unit of family could teach kids to cooperate with other individuals before shoving them out into the larger world, but the modern family seems more likely to teach conformity and competition. It's where gender roles are first enforced. Where we're taught to hate our neighbors. Keep up with the Joneses if you can't out-do them. Usually at the expense of that woman lying in the sidewalk. Not my problem. Family first.

There's nothing magic in families, though the fewer utilitarian reasons they have to exist, the more we spread greeting card myths like, They're the people that have to love you, no matter what. Families always have your back, just because. We ignore just how bad this latest incarnation of family is for kids who are lowest in the pecking order, in some ways less valuable than when they were at least weeding corn or working in sweatshops.

In every extended family there's the troubled mother who is allowed to torture her children in silence because it's too much effort to get involved. Or maybe it's the nephew who goes off in corners with little girls or little boys while the others turn a blind eye to avoid the scandal and damage to the sacred family name. Queer kids are bullied by their own parents, and siblings, isolated with no recourse.

And yet, even we queers still adore The Family. Long for one. Sometimes spend years in therapy to recast the narrative, instead of shrugging and abandoning it entirely, and aiming for something more radical than the pathetic Focus on the Family. I've never understood why Christian fundamentalists are so obsessed with preserving this particular institution when Jesus was one of the biggest anti-family figures in history.

I was reminded of this by Ta-Nehisi Coates who's been up to no good lately, reading the bible, and posting New Testament passages in his blog:

"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me..."

My favorite, though, would be the passage when a recruiting Jesus told one guy to skip his father's funeral and follow him. "Let the dead bury the dead." I remember as a kid being shocked and excited when I read that text. How it gave permission to crawl out of the trap and walk away. No backward glances.

It saved me even when I gave up the idea of leaving my family behind to become a missionary, and instead hopped on the Greyhound with the idea I could embrace the larger world, be a poet, and later become a dyke activist. For me, now, these passages are still a radical call to community and citizenship, demanding we open our eyes to the world beyond the one we were first born into or even chose.

To redeem that word, family, we have to do more than add the words gay or lesbian, but knock down walls to expand it, until it includes us all.

Celebrating Activists

By Kelly Cogswell

It was almost funny. One minute Obama enthusing in his Pride Month proclamation about "those who organized, agitated, and advocated for change." The next, Ellen Sturtz getting slammed for disrupting a fundraiser featuring First Lady Michelle Obama who didn't exactly embrace the activist.

Plenty in the LGBT community were suitably horrified. The moment was badly chosen, we were told. It wasn't nice, it wasn't polite. Etc. As if poor Miz Obama was some kind of shrinking violet, not a very public face of the administration, herself an important cog in the Democratic fundraising machine, while queers (including queers of color) wait and wait and wait for change.

I bring it up now, because it's typical of our community. We celebrate Stonewall, but resent activists, maybe because we don't understand their role in moving things forward. Our lobbyists take too much credit. So, we're wary of activists who may want us to do more than write checks. Like leave our homes and mobilize around stalled issues such as the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, and other federal protections (which the White House could advocate for right now, issue a directive) -- the whole reason Ellen Sturtz and GetEqual made a scene.

Even positive results in courts and legislatures require ongoing involvement by activists. How many laws are there against bullying? How many actually get enforced? That’s down to us watching silently from the sidelines. Even DOMA won’t be truly overturned unless bigmouthed watchdog troublemakers are there making sure all the controversial provisions, like those affecting immigration benefits, don’t get buried beneath red tape and paperwork.

We can’t count on Obama. Like most politicians, he'll do the bare minimum unless we're out there making a stink at every possible opportunity. The guy only “evolved” on the homo question, because we were there kicking and screaming. I remember how after he had the queer votes in the bag in the 2008 primary, he campaigned with the same gay-hating preachers as George W. Bush. And after he won the election, he tried to curry favor among right-wing legislators and voters by blabbing about a big tent and bringing the anti-gay zealot Rick Warren on board.

He probably would have continued in that vein if we hadn’t mobilized every trick in the book, financial influence, quiet whispers, and plenty of embarrassing public howls. And we can't stop now. Both because there are lots of pressing issues, and because despite what MLK asserted, history does not move towards progress in an inevitable arc. In this country alone, we've seen abortion rights eroded at an astronomical pace. Plenty of cities and states have rolled back ordinances protecting LGBT rights, and have actually passed antigay legislation legalizing discrimination against us.

Probably I've written this before, but it's worth saying again during pride month. Party as much as you want. Eat Bar-B-Q. Hook up with that cutie across the room. But take a couple minutes to think about what Stonewall launched, and how precarious our gains are if we get complaisant. You don't necessarily have to take to the streets, but everyone should be involved in some way. Come out -- to everyone. Speak up when you hear a homophobic joke. Anything.

Antigay violence and bullying are still awful. Most queer images are stereotypes of gay white men, the rest of us invisible. Our own community ignores our most urgent issues, including employment bias and poverty, affecting far more of us than marriage. Every month there's a new study showing families led by LGBT Americans are worse off financially than those headed by straights (even if other studies show we take better care of our kids). The latest, published by the Williams Institute of the UCLA Law School, shows even two white gay men are poorer than their counterparts.

It's simply harder for LGBT people to find good jobs, and even tougher for us to keep them. We don't start on equal footing, facing an uphill battle for a decent education thanks to bullying in schools, and additional problems at home and in our communities.

The most vulnerable among us are households headed by two African American dykes. They have the triple whammy of misogyny squared by racism by lesbophobia. What about them? They are barely visible in our community, much less in the world at large. Like their problems. For them, jobs are a queer issue, like poverty and hunger. And their effects accumulate in ways as horrible and lingering as violence.

For all our sakes, we need to acknowledge that change is not a done deal, and that it never comes as a reward to those who sit smiling nicely with their hands politely in their laps. Let's think beyond Stonewall, and try to support activists working today.

On Being an Aunt

By Kelly Cogswell

I spent a couple of days last week hanging out in a hospital room and watching the dreck that passes for children's programming --like that Disney movie, Mars Needs Moms. It's pretty much naked propaganda for the Mom, Dad, kid nuclear family.

This is the plot in a nutshell. The Martians come to earth and snatch likely maternal candidates, fatally extract their efficiency and discipline, which is then implanted in a Nannybot who is solely responsible for rearing the tiny aliens. No hugs. No love. Just orders.

One boy whose mom is grabbed, stows away on the space ship and tries to save her before she's irreparably harmed. He stumbles onto a small resistance movement that literally uncovers pre-historic paintings of a Mommy, Daddy and baby Martian on a canyon wall. After a series of mildly suspenseful hijinks, and lessons in love, the evil nanny-type Supervisor is overthrown, along with the commie-style, mass child-raising system. The original "natural" order is restored with the nuclear family (and men) back at the top.

I would have heaved, but it wouldn't have been sanitary.

No spoof of 1950's values, this horrifying thing just appeared in 2011, and is still getting played over and over, (and over) on a children's network. After watching it, I just sat there and seethed, even more uncomfortable than I already was. There's nothing like illness and the medical establishment to force you back into that whole heterosexual cesspool where your identity is entirely determined by who had heterosex with whom, and when.

Walk in the door to this particular Children's Hospital and immediately there are signs saying only parents and grandparents can stay overnight, though it wasn't too hard to get one of the wristbands that designated me as an additional guardian which meant I could stay, too. To the staff, my credentials were embodied in that word "aunt" which was only true in the strictest definition of the word. Because when the nurses and doctors asked me about the kid, was something normal for him, or not? I didn't really know. I only saw him once shortly after birth, then again as a young teen. Then there he was in the hospital bed recovering from brain surgery at sixteen.

It would have been more accurate to characterize me as an acquaintance with shared DNA, and shared stories from the pre-history of his mom's childhood that would have discouraged even Disney's Martians from trying to resurrect the mom, dad, baby scenario.

I don't understand what the big deal is about "families." I fled mine as soon as I could, and have only seen a few examples since that contradicted my experience. Though it seems like I turned up at the hospital as a result of family feeling, you should know I've done as much and more for friends. It's a question of ethics, not genetics. If you see need, you should try to meet it if you can. That is almost impossible if you stick to the nuclear family model which has dad holding mom holding the baby. While tripods are one of the most stable shapes around, they only work if all three legs are of equal length and strength. Otherwise, you get the usual disasters of gravity.

Still, forming tripods, no matter how dysfunctional, seems to be a common goal for most Americans, even queers. Long before the marriage equality train left the station, we were pairing off and acquiring kids. We turned our backs on any communal values that redefined family as anybody that had your back, maybe because it was increasingly passé to agitate, and make loud rude noises in the street, even for the sake of social change.

Or maybe we never were a community and the whole thing is a myth except for one Sunday in June. A lot of people participated in the huge historic marches in DC and elsewhere, but weren't we still just a small percentage? And how many of us just reconquered the couch after we got back home? These stories we tell ourselves about Stonewall, and queer family values, are they even true?

We're Americans, too, after all. We're part of a society that's incredibly fractured, partly because of our insistence on the family value tripod, partly because we still pretend to believe in that bootstrap model of success. We're on our own, and like it that way, at least until a hurricane or tornado hits. We don't interfere. Except when we do.

Queers are also as divided by difference as society at large. We let ourselves be separated by race, and misogyny, and questions of gender in which we have less and less room for ambiguity. Getting hitched could make these things worse. Marriage, from what I've seen of the hetero brand, separates as much as unites, hides chasms with cake.

Time Traveling With Richard Bowes

Richard Bowes reading at Strange Loop Gallery, NYC

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Lately, I've been talking to students about the Lesbian Avengers. I stand up there like a figure of authority, and show a video and answer questions about this dyke activist group I was a part of, and it's all so weird because what's my life is their history.

Like a strange kind of time traveler, I'm not just their past, but their future, too. The Avengers may have been most active in the 1990's, but direct action and political organizing are never obsolete. And eventually, some of those kids I'm talking to will realize that the uncomfortable burning sensation in the pit of their stomachs is rage, and they'll also take to the streets.

One of our queer writers aware at just how life loops and intersects is Richard Bowes. The present is mixed up with the past and future. Good blends with evil, and also mediocrity. An Irish American writer who grew up in 1950's Boston, Bowes mostly does sci-fi and fantasy. As a young writer, he wrote literally about time travel. Lately, much of his work is "realistic" with just a slightly paranormal twist though it is still concerned with time.

Minions of the Moon, one of his most autobiographical books, is also one of his best. Originally published in 1999, and just re-issued, the Lambda Award-winning novel plays hard and fast with the details, though its author did grapple with his sexual identity, and ended up a New York rent boy with a bad drug habit. The twist is that Bowes turns his addiction into a doppelganger who also represents that part of himself that emerges whenever he's stressed out, or needs to get out of a jam. The narrator, Kevin Grierson, calls that double his Shadow, and it sticks with him, appearing periodically even when he thinks it's long gone.

Bowes reminds us that Shadow is something we all have, not just as individuals, but as a society. I was reminded again this weekend of how time doesn't move on an endless, upward trajectory with lessons learned, misery redeemed, and progress written in stone. Even as we celebrate small gains, like the right to marry, youngish queers like Mark Carson, who was murdered by a homophobe in the West Village a few days ago, still cannot walk safely even in our gayest neighborhoods. Everything that's good in the past could happen again. But what was horrible is waiting for us, too.

Beyond that, there's also the merely surprising and absurd. Last week, I had a brief conversation with Bowes about his work and life which he writes about more factually in his upcoming book of interconnected stories, Dust Devil On a Quiet Street. He called his survival "pure luck." He should have died during all his years on the street. There were the sexual predators, the drug violence, the drugs themselves, but he somehow escaped. He never even did time because in those days the police were Irish, and he'd get a break because he looked like every cop's youngest brother. In a miserable joke, he even avoided HIV because he got cancer and was out of sexual commission during the worst of the epidemic.

His surprise at lasting when so many around him didn't, keeps his books honest. They never turn into "How I got clean" stories, or "Redemption through art" fables, or some queer mythology of survival. If he rebelled at Stonewall, it was partly because he was hanging out with some druggie friends, and being East Village riot aficionados, they never passed up a chance to screw with the cops. And if the old Italian ladies started screaming at the police from the windows, it was less solidarity with queers, than a neighborhood hatred of the law. The big revelation: even when we have to fight hard to survive, we owe a fair amount to luck and sometimes the intervention of strangers.

In his books, gender also doesn't stay on its assigned track. As a gay man, when he takes on his life, the main figures are naturally men. Still, when he writes about the enforced masculinity of the military system, even the draft board, he has a strangely "female" sensibility when he reveals how he hated the way they owned your body, taking your clothes and shaving your head like convicts. Stripping you down to your underwear and staring and judging. They enforced their will with beatings and sometimes rape. It was worse than selling yourself on the street where you could at least pretend to have some control.

In another recent book, The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others, Bowes takes on fairy tales, plunging further into the ambiguities of time and gender. Here, he narrates most of the stories from a female point of view, and seemed a little puzzled telling me about a writer who asked him why, and how, he pulled it off. "There's no trick to it", he told them. "All the characters are still me."

Follow Kelly Cogswell on Twitter @kellyatlarge

Mothers' Day and the Queer Kitchen

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

One of the few times I've been back to Kentucky in the last zillion years, my mother offered to make lunch if I came over. The menu turned out to be frozen pizza and brownies made from a mix, and for which I was truly grateful. The woman's a rotten cook. Mostly because she hates to. And why not? It's a helluva lotta work, and absolutely poisonous in social terms.

You have to wonder why the kitchen was ever women's place at all. It's dangerous and a little brutal. You could even say it's butch. You hack at things with sharpened knives, heave around enormous pots of boiling liquids. I worked as a prep cook one summer during college, and scalded the crap out of myself when the forty pound pot I was lifting spilled over just a little and the hot water landed on my belly. When I tried to pull my pants away, half the skin came, too. That same summer a girl I knew lost her eyebrows lighting a stove and was lucky to keep her eyes.

Still, I got pleasure out of learning the craft. Not to mention getting the paycheck. But I'm puzzled by people that idealize any part of cooking, especially the "traditional" kind. Whenever I read about yuppie chicks starting to make their own jam and pickles, I imagine my grandmother or great-grandmother trapped in a kitchen in the middle of August with mounds of fruits and vegetables all around her, and no air conditioning in sight. It must've been like a stint in hell. But if she didn't do it, her whole family would starve. And if she screwed up, didn't boil those jars long enough, she'd poison them all by spring. If you want to get back to your roots, what you really need is a little heat stroke or botulism.

Women didn't need feminism's encouragement to flee the kitchen. On the contrary, idealized femininity demanded it of them. White women who could afford it already had black and brown women getting their surrogate hands dirty. That's tradition, too. And part of why my mother embraced middle-class magazine food when she finally left her secretarial job and got married.

It was not only quick, but arranged things so she wouldn't have to break a nail, or even a sweat. It was a sign she'd succeeded, lifted herself out of her working class origins, turned her back on parents who had been factory workers once they left failing farms. They spoke with seriously embarrassing twangs. Said warter, instead of water. Warshed their clothes. Yeah, a lot of cans were opened in my house. A lot of tuna and hamburger were helped. Though once a week, when my dad was home from his job on the road, she would roast something. A chicken. A hunk of beef.

On Thanksgiving, too, while she conceded to tradition and made the turkey, the stuffing still came out of a cellophane bag and the piece de resistance was the casserole of green beans slathered in canned cream of mushroom soup, topped with canned French's onions. It was chic and convenient, with French right there in the title. There were also "salads" consisting largely of JELL-O, canned fruit, and frozen whipped "cream." Half the meal needed quotes.

I think about her sometimes when I'm making dinner. What an irony it's her dyke daughter who ended up back in the kitchen, cooking from scratch. Though I'm not the only one. In my East Village neighborhood overpopulated with restaurants, when you see gaggles of people in checked pants and white aprons sneaking a quick smoke, there is usually a tattooed dyke among them. I've never seen any girls as prissy as the ones featured on cooking shows. No buxom motherly types. No sex pots. Just wiry white girls who like the pace and the competition.

I was startled to discover my Cuban girlfriend's mom cooks no better than mine. Before blood pressure issues put her on a low-sodium diet, her favorite meal was pretty much anything from the Chinese take-out down the block. She was a grade school teacher. Her husband an accountant. A teenaged girl fresh from the countryside would do most of the cooking.

When Faustina finally approached the kitchen, it had been transformed, not by revolution or scarcity, but by Nitza Villapol whose cookbook, Cocina Criolla (Creole Kitchen), was aimed at the modern cook in the modern kitchen. It had a few recipes for the traditional dishes like picadillo, arroz con pollo, and beans speeded up in a pressure cooker. But it also had Waldorf Salad, the same disgusting concoction of apples and walnuts and mayonnaise that my mother used to make when she bowed to tradition, and entered the room she hated.

The Boston Attacks: Learning to Regret

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

He looked just like a young Bob Dylan, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, handsome as sin, and a little lost, with the same dark angelic ringlets, same soulful eyes. All the networks kept showing the photo Friday, right next to one of a boat parked in a suburban yard. Then, they'd show the scene around it, at night now, the darkness broken up with flashing lights, a gazillion trucks, and men with body armor and machine guns. And beyond them, an angry nation also prepared, maybe eager, to kill.

They'd tracked him down because the owner of the house and boat had noticed blood somewhere, on the side of the shed, or on the boat which had a ripped tarp. So we also knew he was wounded. And while the thing played out, and the whole sleepless night afterward, I kept wondering what that 19 year old baby was thinking as he lay inside, bleeding and cornered, his brother already dead. Probably just, "What the fuck. What the fuck." Whatever he'd imagined, toting his backpack to the race, it couldn't have been that. "What the fuck. What the fuck."

Maybe none of it had even seemed real until then. Just a game he was playing with his older brother. There are so many reality shows after all, which are all halfway rigged. And how many of us --let's be honest-- when we're older, look back at what we've done in our teens and twenties and wonder ourselves, What the fuck was I thinking? How did I dare? Sometimes what we did was monstrous. Sometimes insanely, dangerously good. And in either case we're lucky we survived because it wasn't our final trajectory.

To understand, and try to imagine justice, we have to remember that almost all of us are capable of evil, without it being particularly pure. We have a strong desire to wound and maim. We exonerate ourselves. When I read the David Remnick piece in the New Yorker identifying, "the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men" I thought you could substitute plenty of other things for "young men."

All those straights in France furiously queer-bashing because they're losing their exclusive right to marriage. Those men in the U.S. and India justifying rape as masculine power erodes. For a while in Cuba, women who had been curdling for ages got their kicks denouncing their nieces and nephews and kids to the cops who were rooting out queers. It's how Reinaldo Arenas ended up in jail on one occasion. Like others I know. But one mother, at least, lived to regret her own role in the jailing and abuse of her daughter.

Even a couple of stalwarts of the Westboro Baptist Church have seen the light. Just a couple of months ago, the smiling Megan Phelps-Roper, 27, and her sister, Grace, very publicly parted ways with their grandfather's church in Topeka, Kansas after spending their whole lives declaring "God hates fags." And even though their efforts probably killed more people than Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, maimed thousands more, though less visibly, encouraging self-loathing and suicides, rampant vitriol, gay-bashings, and the ignorance and stigma that spread HIV, there they are in polite society, getting kudos instead of blows.

And in case you think you're immune yourself, we Americans after September 11th became complicit in a national program of torture, turning our backs on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and all the black op sites. People died, or were destroyed and maimed and we didn't do a thing. Maybe because we thought we had good reason. Everybody always does.

So far, nobody seems to regret it much. The Obama administration is as pleased as anybody to sweep torture under the rug. Maybe in the future they'll repent. Just recently, years after he added more fuel to the anti-gay fire, Bill Clinton declared signing the Defense of Marriage Act was a big fucking mistake, not going so far as to admit he has blood on his hands, too, like the Phelps spawn.

This is why I was glad we didn't kill that nineteen year old cowering in a boat after his own monstrous act, even if I was glad it was over. At least his scene. He'll have the future to think it over as the drama goes on without him as it surely will. By the time he was caught, that eruption of violence engineered by two brothers had already been transformed by the likes of Fox News and CNN into dreadful fantasies of another Al Qaeda attack, or failing that, a kind of uprising by shadowy dark figures against the white American majority. And after accumulating more arms, and bb's, black powder, and pressure cookers, Tsarnaev's role will be filled by more deluded young men with names as likely to be Timothy or James as Dzhokhar.

Queering Democracy In France

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Seems like whenever you demand LGBT rights in a democracy, some asshole always declares, "It's a free country. You can do whatever you want inside your home. Why do you have to impose it on me?" Then they call you a fascist, and sometimes cap things off with the advice, "Go back where you came from." Which seems nuts at first, but has a certain twisted logic, since all hate's drawn from the same poisoned well, and our sense of freedom is related to physical space.

Democracy's most important battleground is always public, because freedom's not freedom in private, no matter how many stories you read about visionaries and mystics who find liberation behind the iron doors of a cell. For most of us, the outside world doesn't go away when we close our eyes. It's piped directly past our apartment walls and into our brains where we have to resist a constant broadcast of sneers and threats that aren't empty at all.

Even after decades of fighting back, I take up less space than I should because I know too well that whenever we attempt to escape from our personal jails, even with assumed names, and false identities, we still have to face the thought police, the unofficial cops of the existing order. We've all seen their victims. From the dyke who couldn't find a job, to the transwoman grabbed to play a little stop and frisk.

The forces of law and disorder are on high alert now in France where the status quo is threatened by a bill to make marriage legal for same-sex couples. At first they carefully projected the image of the happy traditional family, filling the streets with smiling moms and grinning, freshly scrubbed kids (many carted to the big cities by transportation paid for by Catholic monies, and marching under banners of fake associations), but the mask has started slipping.

Faced with defeat, the hundreds and thousands of people marching against same-sex marriage are doing it increasingly under truly fascist banners. Their demand? That France return to the country of yore when the Church ruled over everything, and everybody knew their place. Though in case you think it's just those damn Catholics, the Grand Rabbi of France, Giles Bernheim, known for plagiarizing some of his right-wing rants, has once again borrowed liberally for his latest antigay work.

More than the rhetoric is getting violent. During a recent march, members of the opposition party decided to engineer their own Arab Spring, a Printemps français, which wouldn't have meant more freedom for people, but less, and instead of signaling a willingness to sacrifice their own lives on the altar of politics, pretty much showed they only wanted to shed ours.

Then, a couple of weeks ago at Saint Etienne, a mob of Young Nationalists prevented the Socialist Deputy Erwann Binet from speaking at a meeting to explain the law about marriage equality to students. They took over the space, climbed on tables and reportedly shouted "France for the French!" threatening to pull the place to pieces. Afterwards, a similar conference scheduled for April 8 at the prestigious School of Political Science at Grenoble was cancelled after more promises of violence, including death threats against the organizer, Benjamin Rosmini.

They move in packs, pick us off like sheep. Last week alone, SOS Homophobia in France received sixty reports of assaults on LGBT people. And in good old Gai Paree just this past weekend, there was a particularly brutal attack in which several men attacked two guys for walking arm in arm. Wilfred de Bruijn doesn't even remember the assault, just leaving a party and waking up in an ambulance, throwing up blood. His boyfriend had to explain how his face turned into a pulpy broken mess. De Bruijn posted it on Facebook. "This is the face of homophobia."

That was in the 19th arrondissement, a tough neighborhood where there's lots of free-floating testosterone and kids of North African descent form gangs divided into Muslims and Jews, more out of convenience than religious conviction. Weekends often see their blood spilt. But apparently now, we're the prey.

Another couple was attacked the same night, this time in the 10th. Sylvain, the guy that got beaten, didn't look as bad as De Bruijn. But still. And Sunday night, in yet another neighborhood, a dozen masked thugs vandalized a cultural center hosting an important LGBT conference. Their banner was ripped down, and the front plastered over with posters for the antigay, "Manif pour tous," Demo for Everyone, being sponsored by the Printemps français. Which lately makes me think of Mel Brooks and his little ditty, Springtime for Hitler, (and Germany). Which seems to be catching on.

Maybe it will die down when the vote is over and done. I hope so. Let's lend our support to French queers who are trying to fight back with demos like the Rally Against Homophobia planned for Wednesday in Paris.

Same-Sex Marriage Case Is No Roe V. Wade

By Kelly Jean Cogswell, Gay City News

In an op-ed piece masquerading as fact, The New York Times on Sunday declared that the "Shadow of Roe v. Wade Looms Over Ruling on Gay Marriage." According to them, any marriage equality decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court will face the same endless legal slog, misery, and sustained opposition, as the one legalizing abortion.

The primary source for the argument seems to be Michael J. Klarman, Harvard professor and author of "From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage." He wrote, "Intervening at this stage of a social reform movement would be somewhat analogous to Roe v. Wade, where the court essentially took the laws deregulating abortion in four states and turned them into a constitutional command for the other 46."

But with only a modest B.A. in the liberal arts, and no time at all clerking for Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I still have to respond, "Ummm, not really." Not analogous at all, except that most progressive cases face substantial backlash on the way to the Supreme Court. And that Republican wingnuts hate them equally, abortion and gay marriage. But then, they also hate gun control, the Fed, Obama, and a host of other things, and are busy fighting them, too.

While they're especially enraged at this stage of the process, maybe because they're terrified of anything to do with sex, and same-sex marriage smacks of it, just like abortion, it's unlikely that the landmark marriage cases will have the same legal trajectory as abortion. Not just because there are differences of political and social context as the lead Prop 8 lawyer, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., indicated. He told The Times Roe v. Wade had not been "subject to exhaustive public discussion, debate and support, including by the president and other high-ranking government officials from both parties..." Which is true, but kind of irrelevant.

The main reason the comparison doesn't hold is because the two cases are not just apples and oranges, but apples and balls of yarn. Apples and light bulbs. An abortion is a private, single act of limited duration, while getting married launches a whole state of being, a long-term, legal relationship not only between two individuals, but of those two individuals and any offspring, heirs, creditors, etc. with the government on every level. Which is why queer activists on the left, having fought so hard to keep the State out of our affairs, were initially reluctant to embrace the marriage fight, despite its gazillions of financial and legal benefits.

The most obvious parallel is the earlier fight against anti-miscegenation laws that was only won in 1967 with Loving v. Virginia. Sure, "mixed" marriages still inspire disgust among bigots, as I suppose same-sex marriage will continue to do, but there are only occasional instances in which churches or petty bureaucrats try to prevent them. There is certainly no big activist movement. There probably won't be for queers either.

Either now or in the future, once it is ruled on the federal level that same-sex marriage is legal, that right can't be eroded bit by bit as with abortion. Neither can it be restricted except by age as "straight" marriages are. That's what the attempt at civil unions was for. Conceding a few rights to shut up the big-mouthed queers. But once that word marriage is used on the federal level, either you're married or you're not. We have the same rights or we don't, and in that case we keep fighting.

Even if there is some kind of post-decision backlash, I'm pretty confident the scenario will be different. Women that have abortions in their teens and twenties often just want to forget about it, and move on. Queers won't be able to. Every single one of us who gets hitched, entangled in a marriage of love and bureaucracy, will become a queer activist reservist, always on call. For this issue, anyway. It won't be a matter of convenience, to be grappled with when needed. It will be woven into the fabric of our lives.

Another obvious difference is that the fight for marriage rights is fundamentally conservative compared to that for abortion. And as homophobia is pushed further to the margins of the equation, we've already seen stalwarts of the Religious Right speak in favor of same-sex marriage and its attendant monogamy and social stability. I don't remember seeing similar conversions to pro-choice positions.

Abortion rights are a harder sale. Partly because "pro-life" people call abortion murder. And some actually believe it. But also because misogyny has such horribly deep roots. We should remember that the LGBT movement will always be half-comprised of males, with white men at the forefront as long as our community is prey to the same sexism and racism as the outside world. And with a white, well-groomed male face on an issue like same-sex marriage, it'll get accepted sooner or later.

Follow me on Twitter @kellyatlarge .

Queer Citizens in Cuba's Shadow

By Kelly Cogswell, HuffPost

Last week I drug myself to an LGBT forum for New York's democratic mayoral hopefuls. The 626 seats of Baruch's Mason Hall auditorium were packed with politically engaged queers. Nobody compelled to come. Nobody banned. And everything observed by the gaggle of press bearing witness with images and tweets offered almost instantaneously.

Paul Schindler, my Gay City News editor, had the job of drilling the candidates on LGBT issues like the cops' disgusting Stop and Frisk policies that in our community especially affect young queers of color and the transgender. He also asked about the growing number of HIV infections, homeless youth that are 40 percent queer. Each contender did their best to answer, sniping whenever they could at Christine Quinn the front-runner, and only woman and LGBT candidate. And she in return, had to keep her cool and sensibly explain, for example, why as city council speaker she's sitting on a bill about paid sick leave for workers in small businesses.

And I thought this is the way it's supposed to be. Candidates being held to account, exchanging views, fibbing probably, as politicians do, but not controlling the process. All of the candidates were subjected to embarrassing moments, tough follow-up questions, and a crowd cheering or booing, but stopping after a moment to let things go on. And everything, as I said, happening in front of the big eyes and big mouths of the press.

If I sound all corny about it, it's because a couple days before I'd been to an event at NYU featuring Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez who was finally allowed to leave the country after ten years of requests. She's continually defamed by the Cuban government, physically harassed, spied on in her home, even tossed in jail occasionally. But she counts herself lucky because other journalists are locked up for good, or have convenient car accidents merely for wishing to speak, to participate in the life of their country. And for thinking everyone else should have the chance, too.

In that island of silence and the meaningful ellipse, blogging is not an innocuous pastime. The government has done its best to restrict internet access, and even skew Google search results abroad by bombarding the web with their own propaganda, fake sites, fake links and likes, their own fake bloggers to create a screen of white noise. But they're doomed and they know it, like a glass any soprano can shatter.

Just look at how loudmouthed queers changed the U.S. from a place where we were pariahs regularly rousted and arrested, into this amazing political force. Gradually, we won the tools of democracy -- the rights to speak, to assemble, demonstrate, write, think, create, agitate, organize. Now we participate as equals (nearly). We sit in Mason Hall and hold the candidates to account. All of them wanting our votes, our support. Our money.

I hear some of you sneering that the system's not perfect, pointing out its failures. But so what? It's a fucking miracle it works at all, considering how humans are, either apathetic or with an overwhelming impulse to power. Cops everywhere get away with whatever they can. Politicians, even the best, believe the rules don't quite apply to them. Ordinary people abdicate their citizenship, often sit there like frogs in the pot as water gradually heats up.

In the U.S., where we have almost an unlimited latitude to protest, most of us kept mum as our civil liberties were eroded under Bush with his policies on detention, and domestic spying, and still don't speak up as Obama continues with more of the same.

It's an interesting mix of apathy, and ignorance. Few Americans understand or care how democracy works, and don't recognize the centrality of things like free speech and assembly or the role of the press. When I tried to get into a recent event at CUNY, "The Blogosphere and Civil Society in Cuba" the two smiling Cuban American students organizing the thing took an unhealthy pleasure in informing me the event was full, and in any case, it was more important for Cubans to have access to Yoani than Anglo reporters. And while I understood their pride in having a Cuban hero, it made me wonder if they understood why she was so important. Or how the press works, each journalist representing hundreds, or thousands of others who don't have a chance to see. Or a way to speak.

Worse, at that LGBT forum for mayoral candidates, I actually heard a woman announce that democracy sucked, even as she dripped with its privileges, complaining about the mediocre politicians and annoying crowd, flapping her gums.

The Secret of Power

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn finally tossed her hat in the ring, and came out as a candidate for New York's top job. It's a big deal. She'd be the first female mayor, not to mention the first dyke, in Gracie Mansion.

It's astounding that she's gotten this far. Being the first of anything requires a heck of a lot of raw talent, good timing, and of course plenty of people ahead of you breaking ground, like Tom Duane and Margarita Lopez who were among the first out queers in New York's City Council.

Beyond that, you have to have a certain mindset, a sense of privilege that refuses to concede, despite overwhelming evidence, that the face of power should be male, above all, and white, and straight. I'd like to think you can acquire that entitlement, like a basic proficiency in Math, if you just practice enough, but I'm not so sure.

Some people seem to know from the beginning that they are meant for great things. Probably when Quinn was a kid she arranged her blocks in the shape of City Hall, gave press conferences to her stuffed animals. "And when I'm mayor..." Or maybe it dawned on her slowly. She met a few politicians as she headed up the Anti-Violence Project, and thought, "I can do that." Then when she was elected to city council, she saw the inner workings of power and felt she measured up.

By any road, she arrived at the emotional place where she could stand in front of a bunch of journalists and declare her intention to govern one of the biggest cities of the world.

The rest of us need help even to inhabit our own lives. Just a couple of weeks ago, I showed a documentary about the Lesbian Avengers to a group of college students. And afterwards one still asked, "A lot of us feel like we don't have a voice. What should we do?" Even though I'd been talking already for half an hour about activism and big-mouthed dykes, she apparently didn't see the Avengers as role models, enabling her to make the leap, and declare, "How about we start an activist group?"

We'd also discussed social media and the Arab Spring. Maybe I should have asked them if they'd at least considered a blog, if they didn't want to take to New Jersey's mean streets. But it seemed too obvious to say. I mean, isn't their whole Twitter generation marked by a multiplicity of voices? A real cacophony?

I figured out too late the word "voice" was a misdirection. Probably their real question was: How do you get heard in the midst of all that noise? How do you gain power, or at least feel empowered? I wouldn't have known how to answer that either.

I realized then that it's not enough to talk about role models and opening doors. Sometimes they just lead to a broom closet, a small confined space, a cell. Our current means of communication don't take you very far when their conventions demand you restrict your announcements to the latest ap you downloaded, the game you played. Despite a few radical users, Twitter is mostly small talk on a grand scale.

Even if the door leads to the world outside, very few of us are Chris Quinns or Obamas. We're taught to stay behind the white line and we do. We're like dogs with those electronic collars that give them a shock when they go too far. Our internalized misogyny and homophobia and racism keep us on the leash. We are agoraphobic. Beyond this point lies pain and suffering, and a terrifying wilderness.

In fact, the only secret to having a voice is to speak. Or to act. Repeatedly. And hope for the best. When ordinary people first open their mouths, they don't know if somebody's going to listen. The Lesbian Avengers were begun by six dykes that decided they would put out a call to action, but if nobody else joined them, they would do it alone.

They were lucky that people responded. And they went from a handful of dykes to a roomful, then a worldwide movement. But nine times out of ten you're answered with silence. The timing is wrong. Or your message doesn't get across. And when that happens, you try again imagining that even if the world is not transformed, maybe you will be. Like a singer, your voice will get stronger. You'll hit the notes the first try. You'll please yourself, anyway. Annoy the neighbors.

You have to make it a habit. Sometimes if I have to, I talk to myself. In particularly bad patches, I've scribbled messages on stickers, left them on lampposts. In the subways. Like a trail of breadcrumbs for hungry birds.

For African Dykes, Zanele Muholi

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I forget sometimes how important art is, what images can do. Last week I got blown away by an exhibit in Chelsea at the Yancey Richardson Gallery. The photographer was Zanele Muholi. Her subjects were African dykes like herself. They stare out from the prints in their best ball caps and fedoras, bald heads and dreads, looking at you looking at them. Some are a little anxious about it. Some are pissed. Others have a sadness so vast behind their eyes your heart breaks for them.

Examine them closely. Too many have literal scars from life in South Africa and Zimbabwe. There's a faint white line near the mouth of one. A round scar on another's forehead like she'd been hit with a hammer. And maybe she had. South Africans haven't quite digested the post-apartheid constitution declaring queers off limits as punching bags. Women, too are verboten, though the model Reeva Steenkamp lived through several "domestic disturbances" before getting shot to death last week in the bathroom when her famous, violent boyfriend apparently mistook her for an intruder.

Violence in Southern Africa is endemic, a way of life, especially in poor townships where most of the photographed live. And Muholi is more than conscious of documenting a community in which "love is juxtaposed with violence."

For Muholi, each photo is art and activism combined. The images themselves are beautiful. The political part comes when you look in their eyes, and start to see them. So that's what an African lesbian looks like. An African transman. Though they don't look so different from plenty of dykes here. If you're not careful, you'll start to feel protective. There they are. Emotionally naked. An endangered human species.

Instead of feeling sorry for them, or lamenting your Western privilege, I recommend exercising it on their behalf. Even if, like Muholi, African dykes are more than capable of speaking for themselves. Still, they are extra vulnerable to violence and death. They need a net to dance over. Safe spaces. Chances to hang out. To play.

In soccer-crazed Africa, a lot of them are on "football" teams, or wish they were. Zanele Muholi, instead of launching one more social services outfit, started up a all-black lesbian soccer team in 2008 in her hometown of Umlazi, Durban. She named it Thokozani Football Club after out dyke soccer player Thokozani Qwabe, who was brutally murdered in 2007 just for being a lesbian. More than a few TFC players are survivors of "corrective rape" that were ostensibly attempts to turn them straight.

It's not just exercise they're after. Their site says, "We want to educate each other and our families, friends and communities that we exist, that we contribute to building a physically, socially, and emotionally healthy and democratic South African society, and that we deserve a life free of discrimination and violence due to homophobia."

Muholi and her team has been getting support from another group of soccer mad grrrls in France. Last year, Les Dégommeuses decided to go beyond arranging the occasional scrimmage, and launch a program they called "Foot for Love." Working with Lesbian of Color, Paris Foot Gay, Yagg.com, Rosa Bonheur and a bunch of others, they initiated a whole series of actions against homophobia during Pride Week in Paris last June.

Their biggest accomplishment was bringing over the Thokozani Football Club for an exhibition match in a big Paris stadium. They also showed Muholi's film, "Difficult Love," and held a die in to bring attention to lesbophobia and hate crimes in South Africa which didn't exactly come to a halt for gay pride.

The day after TFC arrived in Paris, a young dyke was shot in her own home in the Cape Town township de Nyanga. A couple of weeks before, a queer activist got his throat cut. It was another queer dead a few weeks before that. They rarely just get killed. There's usually rape of some kind, mutilation.

The only good news is that African dykes are finally getting some attention. One of Foot for Love's most notable supporters is world class soccer player Lilian Thuram, who has been involved in fighting discrimination in soccer, and recently spoke out on behalf of marriage equality in France.

Sometime next month, while the UN Commission on the Status of Women is holding a meeting focusing on ending violence against women and girls, Les Dégommeuses, in their role as advocates for Foot for Love, are participating in an event in Paris about the double whammy of lesbophobia.

I almost can't believe it. I remember when dykes stuck to the softball fields and golf courses, potlucks, and bars. And even our own clubs were always called "women's teams." I especially remember how hard it was to get feminists to utter the word lesbian on the international stage.

Let us celebrate the art of change.