I Still Like Hillary

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There's nothing more ridiculous in America than an aging woman. Unless you are one. This election season's underlined that. Instead of serious discussions about policy, you've got Obama making kitchen sink jokes, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd dismissing the battling Hillary as "a cornered raccoon."

I consider that a compliment on Hillary's behalf, and have "cornered raccoon" on my list as a quality I aspire to. I'm bold in a group. Alone I'm more of a mouse than a clawing Procyon. It's worse as I get older. I'm not as quick to respond when I'm insulted or when people stare. I sweat when I pitch articles. I worry about my weight, and my hair. If somebody would pay me, I'd give up journalism altogether and do a hair blog.

I'd start with stories about when I was four and my mother hacked my tangled pigtails off and gave me a bowl cut. After that, people kept calling me "son." What an embarrassment. Who wanted to be a boy? Apparently plenty, but not me. I had two sisters and a largely absent father, and didn't want to be banned from the girl club. As an adult, I walk that gender line like a national border, trying to straddle instead of crossing it, a dyke and perpetual alien in the country of women.

Approaching middle age, straight women seem increasingly foreign to dykes and vice versa, almost like different species, especially in the upper lower, lower middle class I'm from. Hets age exponentially after marriage and kids. Women begin wearing age appropriate clothing in pastel shades, or fighting against sags with high heels, stretch pants and layers of make up I wouldn't be caught dead in.

Dykes persist in their youth. We're good at it. What characterized my generation was a certain ferocity, and humor, too. Lesbian Avengers sometimes wore real capes. We left the Archdiocese and St. Pat's smelling of sulfur, plastering the place with labels, "Homophobia stinks." We ate fire in front of the White House.

How do we age after that? How do I inhabit this body that isn't prime for fleeing security guards? Of course, I can still kick whippersnapper ass. But it's not enough. And I recognize something in women like Hillary, whether or not they see something similar in me.

It comes down to living in female bodies, accumulating years. In all of us, tits emerged. Hips. The eyes of men focused on them and not our faces or brains. For some of us that was desirable, some not. Even some straight women cower all their lives in the shadow of their bodies. Others bloom early then fade. Some lucky few manage the trick like Hillary and sail boldly forth as matrons.

I have begun to admire confidence in women of middle age. No matter if they're in Chanel suits on podiums like Hillary, sporting plastic surgeries like Catherine Deneuve and still eclipsing all the others in the room, or like my aunts who displayed themselves in homemade denim pantsuits with flower sequin appliques.

Young men are not generous towards any of us. Straight girls are worse, despising spreading flesh and conventional taste. Perpetual sneers have left them tuned only to a man's reassuring voice.

Nobody should be surprised when plenty of these poor, broad-hipped women vote for Hillary. The press said in Pennsylvania they were casting a vote against Obama. The truth is, he barely exists for them. Like they barely exist for Obama except as the butt of jokes. How could they, shopping at WalMart and not Whole Foods? Eating iceberg lettuce when he's an arugula man? Having tits and spreading thighs and two crappy jobs and exploding debt no million dollar book deal is gonna wipe out?

He seems arrogant, young, and sheltered, no matter how many relatives he has in the developing world. Hillary, likewise, may not be the answer to the problems of older women, but at least she's learned not to sneer, not to dismiss cookie bakers any more.

Almost inadvertently, she's became my role model, and I wonder what will happen to that tiny bit of momentum Hillary's generated for women when -- if -- she loses? The feminist movement in the U.S. has been on life support for years. Will her little gains evaporate like our jobs and savings? Having lost, will we run and hide? Will we remember what it is to cling to the stage when the hook comes out? As it has again and again for Hillary?

Despite what the press says, a couple more months of a campaign won't destroy the Democratic Party, not when a decade or two of compromise, timidity, and self-satisfaction in the Boys Club already has. And the gains for women are huge. Here's to cornered raccoons!

Queer Collectibles: A Future in Bobbleheaded Popes?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

If I had a dashboard, it'd certainly have a Bobbleheaded Pope on it by now. Lisa Farbstein, the media relations director of the D.C. Metro barely touched the tip of the pope iceberg when she bought one on eBay for seventeen bucks and caused a brief hoo-hah using it for an advertising special recommending the commemorative $9 Metro "mass pass," good all day April 17th, the day the Pope celebrated mass in Washington.

The spot got canceled almost immediately, but it's still all over the net, gleefully posted in news sites reporting how it got yanked from YouTube because the Archdiocese wasn't happy. They complained that the Pope was in red, more suitable for a lowly cardinal, and there was something said, too, about dignity, as if you can have any spending your United States tour talking about reclaiming the Church from choirboy fixated fathers, and purging faggots from Catholic seminaries to protect the faith. He defended families, too, just not queer ones. Oh no, not him. Not yet anyway.

This is the plan. To pick up a Bobblehead. In fact, pick up a couple, with or without the car. And install them on a little stick. When I feel like it I'll point my finger, lecture, and do some consciousness-raising. "Man on man action never hurt anybody. Women deserve a shot at the priesthood. Queer immigrants have families they'd like to preserve. Dogs have souls, too."

The Bobbleheaded Pope, being an agreeable sort, will nod and nod with only a little encouragement from his stick. Which I suspect is the real reason the Archdiocese pressured to have the ad yanked. Practiced on a large enough scale (I'm counting on you), this sympathetic magic might force the flesh-and-blood man to nod his snarling, bigoted head the next time we ask him to celebrate a gay marriage. Give love a chance.

It's not that far-fetched. Everybody knows that after a while dolls begin to take on lives of their own, like politicians that do okay when they've got scripts to go by, but when they begin to ad lib in the dark, oh boy, just see what trouble they get into. Especially when righteousness is supposed to be on their side, like Obama, and Eliot Spitzer.

A Bobbleheaded Pope, unleashed from his handlers, could go almost any direction from Chucky to Teddy, though after the brief taste of fame he had with Lisa Farbstein, there's every indication he'll go the way of Barbie after she got her first big break in Todd Haynes' "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story." No indy film for years was worth its salt without a long-haired plastic beauty, and for that matter: a colon. And after his stint with the D.C. M.T.A. I've heard whispers the plastic pontiff is reading scripts.

Inspired by his convincing performance in the Metro ad, Mr. Haynes himself has reportedly rushed a script into development -- a biopic of the salacious adventures of the Bobblefather's predecessor Pope Benedict IX, whom the Catholic encyclopedia denigrates as an insult to the "chair of Saint Peter."

That epic tale, taking Benedict IX from his ascension as a twelve year old pope and whore-mongering adulthood, to his miserable death as a penitent at Grottaferrata, is facing stiff competition from a possible film by David Mamet who's embraced the figure's astounding facility to mouth his sharp-headed, staccato dialogue and has already storyboarded a translation of Ben Hur to the wilds of Chicago. After his screen test, Mamet had nothing but praise for Bobbleheaded Benedict's portrayal of the title role. "A reincarnation of Chuck. I picked a winner. Fockin' A."

It will be something to see. Imagine, Benedict's little bobblehead bobbing to the top of freezing Lake Michigan with his rescued boss, rocking back and forth in excitement in the famous chariot scene recast on sharpened rollerblades, and dare I suggest it, Barbie, making a comeback as his unconsummated love interest, Esther? Her contract with Haynes has expired and she's hardly aged a day. The American Girls have been jamming their CV's into Mamet's face every chance they get vying to play the dame, but what suffering do their faces hold? What depth really, when Barbara was unforgettable as the anorexic dying diva?

In an ironic twist, the producers wanted to offer the inexperienced Bobblehead the role of Christ, but Mamet nixed the idea outright, "No bit parts for Benedict. Not with a range like his. After Ben Hur, why not Katie Hepburn in On Golden Pond? We've talked. He agrees. God, I love Benedict. He's open to everything. Full frontal nudity. Even kissing a dude. Plus, he works cheap."

Does the Internet Let Lying Liars Lie?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burning Down the House

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

When I left the house on Sunday to join a demo, it was with my notebook and camera, and not a bottle stuffed with gasoline and a rag, though it's tempting sometimes.

Do activism long enough, and sooner or later you'll wonder what good it does, the wheat-pasting and flyering, all that marching peacefully in rainy or blistering streets when the powerful seem to take no notice of you, and your progress is measured in inches if there's any at all.

On those days, I dream of a more persuasive language to push things forward. In fact, I dream of blowing things up. Admit it. The bang of a collapsing building is a far more compelling expression of rage than a strongly worded column, or even a peaceful demo with a couple of thousand people.

These days, when democracy is imposed in war, and the Olympic games are hosted in dictatorships, why not use violence in places like Colombia where queers are slaughtered like dogs? Why not fight fire with fire?

In early February, Fredys Darío Pineda, a young LGBT and human rights activist was stabbed to death and the murder dismissed as a crime of passion. February 17th, 48 year-old Alirio de Jesús García was shot three times in the face. On February 20th a dismembered body was found in a garbage bag and later identified as Víctor Julio Castro, a 39-year old gay man. And those are just the murders we know about.

March 19th, Arley Alfonso Velásquez Delgado and Marco Tulio Tagorga Gómez, two gay men who scraped out a living by scavenging were both shot -- they'd been a couple for more than 15 years. March 23rd, the 19 year-old transgendered woman, Darlyn Acevedo, was killed by a group of men. Just a week or so ago, on the night of the 28 and 29th of March, two transgendered friends, Willis Argemiro Alarcón Padilla and Erick Jesús Mendoza Cruz were both shot to death in separate incidences by a cop who went out hunting trannies.

In the face of that, it seems ridiculous to write one more petition, or even pass an anti-violence law. I am tired of mourning dead queers. Tired of trying to remember the names of dead youths like Sakia Gunn, and older ones like Alirio de Jesús García who had managed to survive almost to fifty before he was cut-down.

Besides, I'm afraid of apathy. That little voice asking why we should care at all when these murders happen in far off Colombia, or the wilds of Newark where they have so many problems anyway. If it's not your sexual identity, then drugs, poverty, or sheer bad luck will kill you. In Colombia, who can even distinguish hate crimes when murder's practically the national pastime? Better to blow something up, than sink into paralysis at the scope of the problem, right?

If only swords weren't double-edged. Cut off somebody else's nose for spite, you'll find your own missing. In Colombia, for instance, the rightist paramilitaries picking off union leaders are matched eye for eye by the brutal corrupting tactics of the left-wing FARC. In the name of revolutionary ideals they deal drugs to finance their operations. They recruits kids and kidnap and kill politicians. Their politics haven't mattered for years.

The end has been gobbled up by their means, and they mostly serve to remind us that the benefits of destruction are short-lived. You make a big, bright, satisfying noise, and then you become the mirror of your enemy.

I thought of the failure of FARC as I stood in the cold with a couple thousand other Parisians demanding that they liberate Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian politician who has been held hostage in the jungle since 2002 as a human bargaining chip that's too important to cash in.

The irony is that she's pretty far left herself, or used to be. But instead of releasing her to do her work, fighting corruption and reforming the country they're both supposed to love, FARC clings to power and violence.

If there's an antidote, it was in the crowd of thousands that turned out to demand her release. It was a peculiar experience for me, marching for one woman who wasn't even dead yet. But it was a useful reminder that FARC, like Plato, got it wrong.

Things aren't divided neatly into halves that combine into lovers, or even the stasis of enemies and friends that make civil war. Instead, we are much smaller fragments of that one thing, humanity, which is sprinkled among us, and whole in none of us. And why we only destroy ourselves, trying to eradicate the enemy in a single blast.

National Amnesia & the Bum's Rush For Hillary

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screw Unity, Save America!

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of Prostitution

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Spitzer got caught with his pants down and right away the Times' editorial page was lambasting our former governor for considering buying sex a private matter. Worse, when a prostitute tried to defend her work to a journalist, the writer dismissed her as too damaged to speak for herself, no doubt abused as a child. Prostitution is anything but a victimless crime, the article said.

What arrogance. The only real crime in prostitution is our indifference to its problems which are pretty much the same as any other job. Are we supposed to be horrified because it's purely physical? Until recently, most labor was about selling the sweat of our brow. What's farming after all? Or assembling cars on the line? Modeling? Or acting? All of which have been denounced at one time or another as degrading, "low-class" activities.

Maybe it's the danger. Prostitutes are obviously at high risk for sexually transmitted disease. And alone in a room, in a car, in a back alley with a strange man, anything can happen. But every time a big storm blows up suddenly on the Atlantic, a couple of fishermen are drowned. My grandmother worked in a factory for a while and used to show me her mangled finger where the needle from a machine had gone straight through. She considered herself lucky. People lose entire limbs, not to mention their lives, all to pay the rent.

Neither is the humiliation of women unique to prostitution. Depending on the venue, it's not much better to work as a maid, an aide in a hospital wiping dirty asses, or for that matter a secretary. There are hundreds of ways to be profoundly humiliated. Ask any mother. If things have changed, it's because society has, thanks in part to unions and anti-discrimination laws, none of which protect prostitutes.

Oddly, the Spitzer coverage repeatedly invoked the international traffic in women as if it always applies to ordinary prostitutes, managing somehow to imply that the horror of slavery -- based on race, or sex -- is somehow related to the labor itself, even if after the Civil War, plenty of former slaves had to go back into the fields.

I persist in thinking that the real nightmare of slavery is that people are uprooted, transplanted, humiliated, abused, raped, tortured, and stolen from themselves. They are controlled mentally and physically. Choice is not a word in their vocabulary. They are not free, even to leave one horrible, dangerous job for another. Which means most prostitutes as free as any of us.

Likewise, the horror of children in the sex trade is only marginally worse than the kids locked in factories for days on end, chained literally to their machines, so their little fingers can do the delicate work of stitching American shirts. Slavery is slavery.

So what makes prostitution different, the sex acts themselves? Even though most of us perform them on a regular basis?

Last week, I saw an exhibit of a couple centuries of dirty books that used to be housed in the national library's basement, known as "L'Enfer".

I expected the books to be, well, more pornographic. Maybe because most dated from a different era, many of the engravings were absolutely delightful, portraying the pleasure of the artist in the female body. Naked thighs had the most luscious flesh. Asses were so round they begged to be touched.

The men weren't as much to look at. At least in the early images, they always had their clothes on with their dicks sticking out like hooks you could hang a hat on, though there were some amazing dick-based designs. One artist assembled them into a wreath with a bloom in the center that was not a flower at all.

The beauty of men didn't really emerge until Cocteau did his drawings for Jean Genet and homoerotic eyes saw the splendor of the male flesh whose necks and hips and hands had as much to recommend them as their dicks. That's art, I think. Even I wanted to touch them.

Like pornography, prostitution need not mean images of women being put through meat grinders, shrieking as their breasts are mangled, images that confuses hate and destruction with lust. Those aside, why not joyfully portray the objects of our desires? Why not fulfill them?

The problem with Spitzer wasn't that he bought sex, but that he broke a string of laws he was supposed to uphold. No matter that they're bad ones. It's time we allow love of all kinds to speak its name. And more importantly, show its face. We should integrate our lives and our laws. Prostitution IS a job like any other. The difference is we don't consider the workers human enough to have rights.

The Image in the Mirror

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Everything boils down to image, especially in an election year. Paying consultants millions of dollars to shape theirs, Hillary has become efficiency and experience embodied, Obama the poster boy for carefully crafted authenticity and boundless hope, and McCain the straight-shooting Vet that will defend the nation in these troubled times.

Queers know something about image, too. Fags are still fighting the ones that label them hairdressers and pedophiles. Dykes are ugly, humorless, man-hating monsters. At first we tried the suit and tie and pearls and dress approach to show we deserved to exist, but then moved on to denim cutoffs and combat boots for ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers to reclaim the power of queerness. As we gain ground politically, it's too bad we're creeping back into gender appropriate dresses and suits.

Images and reality aren't always in sync. A black actor in the White House foreshadowed Obama's run before he was even elected to the Senate. But while there's a black female running a division of detectives on Law and Order, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to see a woman of color become a common sight at the head of anything in the NYPD.

Women are still hookers and harpies on the one side, and saints and myths on the other. While I've always been partial to the Statue of Liberty raising her torch, and in France, the elegant, shapely, and scantily clad woman symbolizing Liberty leading the people to freedom, it's a little annoying when you crunch the numbers and realize just how far behind you really are in job equity and political power.

When she ran for President of France last year, Segolene Royal got ripped to shreds by her own party, some even daring to say she belonged back in the kitchen. Now it's Hillary getting literally portrayed as the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. There are T-shirts reading, "If only Hillary had married O.J. instead!" The South Park comedy team put a bomb in her vagina. That's not satire, it's pure hate.

I'm so demoralized I couldn't even face the Women's Day demo this weekend here in Paris, and went to see a movie instead. I should've aimed for something more escapist. As it turns out, Antonioni's 1966 film Blowup, which uses the plot of a thriller to meditate on the nature of reality and media and the imagination, is also a biting critique about women in the fashion industry.

There's not a scene of greater mutual loathing anywhere than the one between the models and the photographer, Thomas, who, sick of the beautiful women he only sees skindeep, longs to do something really worthwhile to prove his artistic mettle, like shoot undercover in a flop house. His photos expose the skinny arms and the swollen bellies of homeless men, along with his own indifference.

Meanwhile, the women he was condemned to photograph quickly had enough of the domineering photographer shouting at them to move their arms up and down and sideways, and smile on command. The rage behind the emptiness of their unlined faces reduces the superficial suffering of the girls in America's Next Top Model to the sugarcoated entertainment it is.

Antonioni wasn't criticizing the objectification of women. After all, turning women into images is part of his business as filmmaker, and we aestheticize things and people all the time. And with regards to fashion, there's nothing inherently the matter with longing for the beautiful.

For Antonioni, the problem was image-making itself, how it can drain the beauty from the beautiful, and reduce even the reality and humanity of the homeless men to just another image. Beautiful women aren't just beautiful. Miserable men are more than their visible misery. There's a difference between image and reality, even if there's a dialog between them especially in the areas of advertising and politics.

I'd like to sneer at image making myself, but for queers, image is how lawmakers are persuaded to legislate, and even how bullies identify their targets. We're engaged in a war of media, a war of language. In other words, image.

To that end, on Saturday, (while I was at the movies) a new feminist direct action group called La Barbe, celebrated the International Day of the Rights of Women by going to the center of Paris, scaling the statue of the Republique, putting a beard on the woman symbolizing Liberty, then denouncing the rise of women in French politics. "France is a country of men, led by men, that has little place for feminine ambitions," the spokeswoman said with a wink. "Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar's."

The women, of course, all wore fake beards. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Maybe Hillary should give it a try.

The Elite Makes a Comeback with Obama

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

The Democratic Party is changing, and God knows it needed to, leaning more towards women, Latinos, and African Americans. But apparently the biggest up-and-coming constituency is that overlooked minority of young, well-educated white people that earn over a hundred grand a year and identify as liberal, so liberal they'll vote for the guy that campaigns with the same hateful antigay preachers that campaigned for Bush.

I'd been worried about them. Up until now they hadn't been represented at all, and I'd wept to see them reassuring themselves by shopping at Whole Foods and buying apartments on the Lower East Side in their search for the authentic, the nitty-gritty, the colorful mixing of races and classes that used to rub elbows there.

Poor misguided things stuffing their organic groceries in their gas-guzzling SUV's as long-time renters get priced out of the neighborhood and the place gets whiter and whiter, cheating them out of the local color they slapped down millions for. The only thing that remains are the rats swarming over the streets at night. If they ever get exterminated, you can bet real estate agents will lobby to have them reintroduced like bears in the Pyrenees.

Unsurprisingly, Paris is as full of New Democrats as the East Village. They had an after-voting party on Super Tuesday, and I planned to go because something like ninety nine point nine percent of them are voting for Obama and I wanted to take a gander. Except that when I googled the party's location it was in a nightclub where you had to dress to the nines or at least the eights, and I was too intimidated to go. What would I wear? Could I afford a drink? I suspected they'd sneer at me, one of the few upper lower class Americans in Paris, and a Clinton supporter to boot.

Instead of whining, I should hop on the Obama gravy train, go back and get a grad school degree -- first plucking out my three grey hairs and shoplifting better clothes. He's got all that money pouring in, all that snake oil pouring out. It's a new and promising industry. Maybe I can get a job on the assembly line slapping labels on the bottles. Maybe even work my way up to foreman. It's my last chance for a decent job.

Americans rarely manufacture anything anymore and the small farms like my mother grew up on have been dead and gone for decades except for the ones producing boutique vegetables I can't afford to eat. The un- or moderately educated, if they have jobs, work for WalMart or wipe your grandmother's butt in the nursing home. It's why unions and the working class are quickly disappearing from the Democratic landscape unless we're also categorized as evangelicals.

So why not go into snake oil? Why not follow a Martin Luther King that has never really been in the street, and a Kennedy that hasn't finished his one and only term in the Senate, a Mother Teresa that hasn't touched a single leper? Oh, why not in this brave new world in which men are the best feminists, and the affluent young are the newest treasured minority in the party that at least used to give some support to the poor.

Why not join up? I could get grants to start a new anti-poverty movement, follow the party line and just tell everyone to think good thoughts, and in the meantime watch their characters grow, because as we all know suffering builds character and you won't even have to take out a second mortgage to live in the resulting house.

That's hope. That's faith. Like how a vote for Obama absolves young white people of racism even more than having one black friend. Electing a black president means we can put the centuries of misery, guilt, and recrimination behind us without lifting a finger.

It's not an attitude I understand. More and more I feel like a Martian stuck between the Democratic rock and the Republican hard place. In both parties, it seems optimism is enough, especially if you have a trust fund. The party politics are different, sure, but lately they wear the same young white rich face, speaking generally, and I don't feel at home. Especially when they both open their arms to evangelicals.

I'm considering starting my own party, Atheists For Nothing. (I'm actually more on the agnostic side, but Agnostics Considering Something doesn't have the same ring.) We'll promise Nothing, and instead of burning books with pornographic passages like religious fundamentalists, we'll burn them all. Huck Finn and Lolita in a big bonfire with the Bible and the Koran. We will likewise toss in all the political pamphlets promising a quick end to the war, a boost to the economy, world peace, happiness, and tranquility. Ashes speak louder than words.

Still Dying for Visibility

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There are municipal elections coming up in Paris in a couple of weeks, and we have gay mayor Bertrand Delanoe running for re-election, and a transgendered Algerian activist and actress, Pascale Ourbih, running for office in the 16th district.

Delanoe doesn't exactly arrive at meetings displaying his partner, if he even has one. The Socialist politician is definitely old school, keeping his personal life personal -- unlike Mr. Sarkozy. Still, Delanoe's "out." He supports gay issues. People know who he is.

Pascale Ourbih, too, is out there as a proud transgendered immigrant woman with strong support from her Green Party. And why not? She's articulate and smart. We need a dozen more like her everywhere. Like them both.

LGBT people in positions of authority are still largely invisible in the so-called liberal West. You can have a queer cracking jokes on TV, but rarely running a city or a high school. And what are trannies good for besides doing cameos spots on detective shows as soon-to-be-murdered prostitutes like black and Hispanic actresses used to do?

In the reality of schoolyards everywhere we're all just fucking lezzies, faggots, queers. We get harassed verbally, shoved in lockers, tormented to the point of suicide, and sometimes killed, like fifteen year-old baby-faced Lawrence King in California. He defied the bullies, came out as gay, sometimes wearing makeup and jewelry to school. As his reward, a fourteen year-old boy shot him in the head. Blew him away right there in the school computer lab with a bunch of other students looking on.

That's America. That's Jamaica. And Poland. France. Brazil. Zimbabwe. Egypt. (Add your country to the list). On an international level, queer-baiting is a sport almost as popular as soccer, though there's a continuum, certainly. Canada's no Ghana. Even within each country, our safety depends on our neighborhood, region, sex and class. Age, of course, matters. And whether we open our mouths.

In the United States, we have a particular tolerance for brutality in high and middle schools. Teachers and coaches overlook the jocular hazing of outcasts. It's all in good fun, you know. Sticks and stones break bones, but not words, which will never harm me. Right. They ignore the natural progression, and are somehow all terribly surprised when in an atmosphere that allows the harassment of faggots somebody ends by pulling out a gun and bagging one like a trophy moose. They're almost as surprised when queer kids hurry things along and do it to themselves.

There are so many kids at risk, and proportionally, so much silence. Where are the LGBT teachers and principals? Why aren't they our natural protectors? How come we die alone? The problem is, not enough teachers are out, even if they want to be. Homos attracted to teaching are still suspected of being pedophiles and generally considered bad influences. Be open about your sexual identity, and parents get upset and bother the administration. The kids are even worse.

A 2006 article in The Guardian reported that four out of five gay teachers and lecturers in Britain "experienced homophobia at work, ranging from offensive jokes to physical assault, with 86 percent of victims reporting that pupils were the worst offenders and 17 percent saying they were too scared to go to work."

In the U.S., it's easier to find Gay Straight Alliances for students than associations for LGBT teachers. Even in districts with anti-discrimination policies where they can't be fired, gay teachers may well be yanked out of the classroom and closeted by administrative work.

In an article in the American Bar Association journal, Christine Yared wrote her own Attorney General Warning, "Teaching is hazardous to the health of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and those perceived by others to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Teachers that fit into the above category may regularly experience anxiety, headaches, stomach problems, high blood pressure, depression, and in some cases death caused by career-related complications."

That was in 1997 when a teacher collapsed following a long battle with a school district. We haven't come very far since then, and Larry King paid the price.

In some ways, his fourteen year-old killer is paying as well. He was taught queers were fair game, objects of loathing and fear. Some adult put that gun in his hand. Now, even if a clever attorney gets him off, he'll always be a murderer. Larry King will always be dead. Like all the young queers that kill themselves every year, tortured into their graves because humans fear difference, because we are tribal by nature, superstitious, frightened, and addicted to scapegoats.

We can't expect teachers -- and students -- to step alone into that abyss. It's worth remembering, though, that if we won that battle, freeing teachers, educating kids, we'd win the whole damn war for liberation.

Change, Schmange

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There's only one Trojan horse each generation and I more or less missed it, like the 10:58 train to Poughkeepsie. Probably you did, too. Or you rode it awhile and got bucked off, or somebody shot it out from underneath you. Or the hidden door popped open to your surprise and glee, but nothing came out, because wishes aren't horses and there's hardly ever a pivotal moment in history where one event or one person tips the whole balance of things in the space of somebody's afternoon nap.

Most change comes incrementally. And if you ever get some violent convulsive shift you only have to wait a year or two until the revolution calcifies into one more intractable regime that'll take another couple of tons of dynamite and a century to move.

Still, change is something we're in love with. A magic word that opens doors and pocketbooks and sometimes even hearts. Unfortunately, change requires more than hope, though I guess it helps to have some. Patience and persistence are best, though I'm suspicious of any of those words in a politician's mouth. Lately, I don't trust words at all in the change game.

My blog entries have shrunk in direct proportion to the increase in election year blather. I have nothing to add to existing commentary except a faint retching sound. Maybe I should offer a scatological account of my daily life, a diary of my bowel movements that could become a giant metaphor for the political process, how problems like campaign finance, poverty, health care reform or extruding the U.S. from Iraq, get artificially chewed up, swallowed, digested, and simplified into fecal matter for the masses that isn't much more than rhetoric because solving most problems requires a certain acceptance of complexity and the time to unravel it.

Even social change based on identity politics, the most basic of ideas, requires people to make the effort to hold two contradictory thoughts in their heads at once. On the one hand, you have to believe that gender -- or race, or sexual identity -- is a social reality with incredible significance, and on the other that gender or whatever is an arbitrary biological factor that means absolutely nothing in and of itself.

Organize around one of these "identities" and you run the danger of reinforcing what you hate most, the artificial meaning of color, of tits, of that crush on another girl in gym class. I find it infuriating that in Campaign 2008, plenty of American voters are looking towards skin or gender alone for signs of change.

They may as well begin disemboweling chickens and reading tea leaves. On my blog this week, I've been getting a Google ad declaring "Unprecedented destruction will come in 2008, leading to America's fall." And next to that, an ad for "Obama 2008." Which means either that Obama is the antichrist and will lead to a kind of American apocalypse. Or that he's spending a boatload of money targeting Christian fundamentalists.

I've been getting a ton of their ads since I wrote a little blog entry last week on a Lookin' Good for Jesus cosmetics line that got banned in Singapore after Catholics got offended at the "Virtuous Vanilla" lip balm, and a "Get Tight with Christ" hand and body lotion that apparently had an image of Jesus surrounded by a couple of Mary Magdalene types.

The ad gods also offered the combination this week of "Unprecedented destruction" and an advertisement for auto insurance for foreigners in France. I saw it a couple of hours after I watched a driver let himself roll backwards down the hill while he talked to his friends on the sidewalk. I shouted, "Look out," and pointed at the car he was getting ready to crash into. But instead of being grateful, he gave me a dirty look before braking. A couple weeks ago, I saw another guy roll straight back downhill using the momentum to try to start the car, only there was a curve in the road and he backed into a pole.

There are a lot of hills in my neighborhood. And a lot of people rolling blindly through space and time. Maybe that's why they voted so optimistically for Sarkozy, the French candidate for change, who's been giving them all they wanted and more, tax cuts for the rich, retirement reform (I admit it was necessary), vast roundups of illegal immigrants arrested by the hundreds and thousands, as well as plans for French slums (also necessary).

You want the illusion of change, Sarko's the man for you. He's in perpetual motion, pathological motion, maybe, galloping around alone at the top of a mountain shifting snow back and forth. The problem is the entrenched interests of right and left hold their ground underneath. Movement, like promises, isn't necessarily the same as change. There's also the small matter of direction.

Seeing Dead People

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Unlike the Anglo media in the United States where every corpse has a shroud over it, French TV shows violence more or less uncensored. When people are killing each other in Iraq or Chad or the Sudan, or New Orleans, for that matter, we know what it looks like.

Limbs aren't strewn artistically, but are mangled and awkward. The dead look like sacks of garbage on the curb leaking a particularly disgusting liquid. Nobody falls in slow motion. And a gun going off can make a small unimpressive sound and still get the job done. Pop. Show's over for you, doll.

There have been plenty of bodies lately, what with bombs in Baghdad markets and machete wielding mobs all over Sub-Saharan Africa. And the Caribbean, too, at times. One by one lives are emptied out in violence, and the shells are piled up there for the dogs.

It gets you thinking, why a country might choose or not to show violence and the result of it. I suppose the censors in the U.S. would say that showing death is obscene and deadening, though you could also argue "out of sight, out of mind" is more disrespectful for those sacrificed on all sides in inconvenient, unpopular wars.

As for why they put the dead on TV here, maybe there's some French pride in their unflinching gaze, maybe, a desire for accuracy, though French media isn't exactly known for its investigative reporting. All I know is they show them, and I have to watch, though I do flinch. The least we can do with what's out in the world is keep our eyes open even if we have to wedge open the lids artificially like in Clockwork Orange.

It would be better, of course, to do something. Anything. Maybe lie down on the pavement in front of one of those tour busses candidates ride on with all the journalists hanging on their words, and at least cause a very slight bump someone can remark on.

Failing that, we must respect knowledge itself. Bear witness. Let the vision of evil change us. Try to understand, or reject understanding. Simmer. Hope one day to explode.

It means something to have watched Benazir Bhutto gunned down in her car in Pakistan and feel something crumble in myself. A long-time leader of the opposition, Bhutto knew what was waiting for her, and went out anyway, time after time, standing up in her car to show her face to the crowds until the Taliban killed her. What else can a secularist and democratic woman expect in the Islamist world?

Likewise, it means something to read every word of the articles describing how once again in Jamaica fundamentalist mobs slaughtered another gay man, and injured a couple more.

What a species! Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in Paris this week to ask for French citizenship and all its protections. Despite the fatwa against her, the Dutch government has decided not to protect the ex-Parliamentarian (and queer rights supporter) when she travels outside the country. You can hear them grumbling. "Too expensive. Too much trouble. And though she's not a bad writer in a non-fiction sort of way she's no Rushdie when it comes down to it."

Still, she was out there refusing to stay in her Dutch closet. She gave interviews, insisting on freedom, free speech, civil liberties even for Muslim women, describing the train wreck of a flailing multicultural society in which abuses are tolerated in the name of tolerance and the danger she's in is all her fault.

"Even if I shut up now and never said another word, it's too late. These people never forget," she explained for the thousandth time. And I thought of Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival," a poem I reread every so often as a kind of meditation on fear which concludes that if we're afraid whether we speak or not, "it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive."

And Hirsi Ali isn't. As a black woman, ex-Muslim, atheist, and enemy of an Islam she sees as fascist, odds are she'll end up a sack of garbage on the sidewalk like her collaborator, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. It's a peculiar and moving thing watching a dead woman demand that democracy live up to its promises.

It's just as peculiar, maybe, to sense the great silences like knives at the center of election year demagoguery and blather, in the midst of so much optimism and blindfolded hope to watch shadows gathering. I wonder sometimes as a writer if I make it worse, if one day I might be of greater service by instead of publishing another editorial analyzing the sorry state of our country I instead offer a blank page, empty and ominous, for everything we refuse to see.

A Reluctant Patriot in the Identity Wars

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

In the American left, it's a deeply held notion that for minorities the only road to equality is identity politics, all that organizing around skin-deep similarities and differences, the superficial qualities of gender or race waved like flags because there's no denying they have an often vicious impact.

Still, I'm a reluctant patriot. Sometimes the connections seem like anchors, an umbilical cord connecting me, for instance, to other women, other dykes. Other times there's pure nothing between us, and I feel like an asshole for insisting we share more than a species.

What really do I have in common with that chick clattering down the street in her high heels, purse swinging from elbows as she screams into her cell phone and runs for an appointment? Or that mother of four slumped on the bus? What about that baby dyke tough as nails standing by the modernist statue I always think looks like Gertrude Stein on roller skates? Do I dare approach, even smile? Barriers are everywhere.

Sunday, I stepped into this café in Paris where I'd never been and did something I hadn't done in ages, which was to belly up to the shiny zinc bar, order a coffee, and stand there and drink it while around me people read their papers and finished their meals.

Before the January first ban, clouds of smoke rose from tight mouths and yellowed fingers, issuing from the doors of bars and restaurants like a wall keeping out all of us non-smokers and asthmatics. Coating our clothes. Crawling into our hair and our lungs. Sending us running.

It was good coffee. And cheap. You get a discount in France for standing at the bar instead of sitting at a table inside or on the terrace. Maybe when I'm done writing this I'll go out and get a beer or small glass of white like the boys. And I'll stand there listening to the idle chat. Feel the life around me that appears in shifts. The unemployed and alcoholics early on. The ones in for a quick coffee fix after lunch. Mothers out for tea. The pre-dinner drinks. The students lingering for hours over an espresso. A couple stretching out the night.

I'd missed that, the sense of life passing through cafes like water, and dipping my toes in. But because I can't deal with smoke I'd been exiled in winter from that feeling of community that doesn't require you to make conversation. Just look up sometimes from your newspaper and smile at somebody's joke.

In New York I used to get that from the Laundromat, listening to the idle talk of regulars I knew by sight and that knew me. I could feel part of the species without having to work at it. I suppose that's why some people go to church and sit in the back pews, drop a dollar in the collection plate and leave before all the handshaking and accountability starts even if they find peculiar all that talk of God and Heaven and Eternal Life.

It's why just out of college I used to hang out in bars and cafes in the afternoon. There was this one in Cincinnati that had a pressed tin ceiling, a happy hour that started at two, and John Lee Hooker on the jukebox. The sun would stream in if there was any and I'd go in with a friend and order a drink, and enjoy doing nothing in the afternoon when everybody else was at work, and listening to scratchy blues.

Before that it was the kitchen table in my mother's house where neighbor women would stop by for a cup of coffee and the murmur of voices was their own music. I'm not sure how deep their friendships went. They ripped apart anybody not sitting there, but they were company for each other. They made the discrete little houses seem less like isolation cells where they were stuck with their children and husbands. They were connected. And I was, too, running in and out of the room with my sisters and the other kids.

I think American cinema gets it all wrong when they have Brando longingly declaring, "I coulda been a contender" or whoever else saying, "I coulda been somebody." A longing as deep or deeper is to be nobody at all as long as you can be it with other people.

I know it's ironic to write that, as hard as I've fought for queer and lesbian visibility, except that the flip side of being invisible, the ghost in the room, is that when somebody suddenly notices, they try to violently exorcise you, erase you, make you more of an outsider than before.

What I want to be is what I am, not invisible or of no account, not exactly like everyone else, but free and unremarked on, that girl drinking coffee, a common part of our common lives.

Reassessing Bush as America Falls

by Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was relieved to hear in Bush's State of the Union address that we had Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, the economy was fine, even if, just a little teensy bit, for the moment, uncertain. And above all that, "From expanding opportunity to protecting our country, we have made good progress."

The speech was almost pure fantasy for a president with a 29 percent approval rating, and 81 percent of an electorate thinking the country is on the wrong track. But to be fair, I suspect that next president, faced with having made minimal progress on the same intractable fronts, will deliver the same kind of pie-in-the-sky pronouncements.

Even stiff-upper-lip Britain rarely produces a Churchill who started off one famous speech with the simple declaration, "The news from France is very bad." And it was. France had just fallen to the Germans and the Brits were left alone in Europe.

America, the land of the most gung-ho people in the world is never going to warm to a president from any party admitting we face an uphill battle managing a tanking economy, a Middle East quagmire, and faltering super powers. No, what we demand from our leaders is hope. A shining new Kennedy or Reagan.

We should remember that this trafficking in perpetual optimism that characterizes America, especially post-Baby Boom, is largely why Bush was elected in the first place. He had a charismatic sense of destiny and wore the greatness of this country in his heroic Texas swagger. Along with a few lies about WMDs, our willing wardrobe of rose-colored glasses was why he could so easily drag us into Iraq with feeble promises of a quick victory.

That same degenerate optimism is also at the root of the banking crisis. The hubris of Bush deregulating everything with the convenient credo that the market always takes care of itself was matched only by all those delusional borrowers who now want to be absolved for grabbing every dollar on offer instead of leaving a little cautious cushion for disasters, job loss, a downturn in investments.

It was a symbiosis -- the guys running the shell game, and the marks that hand over their hard-earned money hoping to make a quick buck. They're feeling lucky.

When did modesty become a dirty word? And, in that light, should we immodestly blame all our messes on George W. Bush? I'm starting to reconsider.

Even George Soros, who's no Bush-lover, wrote recently in the Financial Times that while the administration played its part, "The current crisis is the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years."

Likewise, our diminishing role in the world is not only the result of Bush's tendency for preemptive and unilateral action plus nose-thumbing at the international community, but the consolidation and growth of the European Union and the rise of China as a third pole analyzed in depth by Parg Khanna in the New York Times last week.

As we get a peek behind the curtain, what we're beginning to see is that in many ways Bush merely pushed some of the dominoes that were already aligned to fall. Just not so far so fast.

Which means the news from France is very bad. Because if seven years of Bush is not largely responsible for America's current crisis, it's not enough for a president of either party just to be a hopeful anti-Bush. The situation is much more profound, and it would be great if we had a politician willing to break the news. If they've noticed at all.

Americans aren't known for their interest in international affairs, the big picture. Or even big maps. (Just where is Uzbekistan?) And much of the current slump in American confidence is due to good old dollars and cents, plus a little intuition.

We leave historical trends for academics. Even though the latest ones affect us beyond our identity as a super power with X-ray vision.

I'm not sure the downward slide is all bad. What is America anyway? Are we the land of the free? Or only the land of the super-sized fries, lending empires and international conglomerates all on their way out?

Freedom is something we do have control over. And while Bush can't be blamed for everything, the erosion of civil liberties in the States can certainly be laid at his feet, along with the Congresses that aided and abetted him. Even now, our newly Democratic congress is anything but democratic.

And then there are all the times that we Americans could have taken to the streets and didn't, preferring to sit on our metaphorical front porches and complain. Forget baseball and football. The blame game is the real American pastime. Our favorite recourse when false hope fails.

Remembering Things Change

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

One thing you have to have as an activist, or even a voter, is the bottom-line belief that change is possible, and not just for the worse. I base my own belief on observations of nature. I guess you could call me a Darwinist.

Putting aside the evolution of our species, it's inarguable that water carves its way through rock even drip by drip. Rivers change course. Unexpected things and people emerge. There are Ghandi's sometimes. Sometimes two-headed calves. I'd been on the verge of forgetting until last week when I suddenly saw a boar in the Fountainebleau forest.

My girlfriend heard something moving, caught sight of the tusks and shouted for me to look, which made it run faster. What I saw was actually a piggish blur, charcoal black, and light on its feet. Before that we'd seen little bits of rumpled up soil all over the trails where some creature had been rooting, and here and there strange hoof prints that seemed to come from a small horse with toes.

It was sheer luck we saw one in the afternoon. Most of the spottings are at dawn or dusk, and we wouldn't have been in that part of the woods at all if I hadn't gotten us lost. Maybe I should do that more often. Don't look, but leap. So often what we see with our eyes is paralyzing. Like the news on TV.

Lately, it's Kenya at the top of the hour, where in a matter of weeks a contested election has degenerated into a bloody mess. The TV shows corpses lying in the road, currently the end sum of political scores. I wonder how soon it will be before the news breaks of masses of women getting raped, and queers lynched. Those old depressing wartime favorites.

I can't watch anymore, those high and low tech wars, the slaughters and assassinations. There's the U.S. election where the candidates remind us of the inherently dirty nature of politics where compromise, ambition, and power leave their own ugly marks. I shouldn't blame them when it's really too many years of Bush-watching that has instilled in me a perpetual and numbed self-loathing.

I'm an American after all, and America these days is synonymous with the Iraq War that destabilized the whole Middle East, and Bush's "War on Terror" which was really a war on civil liberties that gave free reign to pretenders like Putin. Now, the stock markets everywhere are collapsing thanks to the receding American economy. In short, we have a President whose inverted Midas touch turns everything to shit.

So, I was surprised to be surprised by the boar fleeing through the woods. And on Saturday I saw something even more astounding, the report that in Morocco one hundred intellectuals had published an open "Appeal for the Defense of Individual Rights" in a dozen journals, calling on the state to react to the "climate of intellectual terrorism" and denouncing the trial and conviction of six men "without proof" that only took place at the instigation of a rampaging mob.

In November, when a rumor of a gay wedding hit the streets of Ksar El Kebir, so did thousands of Islamists who demonstrated and clashed with police until civic forces caved in to the pressure and several men were arrested. They were summarily convicted, and the sentence upheld on appeal last week, though some of the sentences were slightly reduced.

The vitriol even among the usually more balanced press matched the hysteria we've seen in Egypt and Namibia. What a hate campaign. The sermons from the imams would curl your hair along with the violence of the demonstrators who have been primed for years to act on behalf of the "moral" and the "pure."

In Morocco, it's not just queers under attack. The letter stated, that for the last few years, there's been an increasing campaign against anybody, who "because of their taste, beliefs, opinions, or personal choices, are accused of 'offending Muslim sensibilities' and 'menacing traditional values of Moroccans.'" The offenders, mostly journalists, writers, artists, and fighters for human rights, are excommunicated, and crowds are encouraged towards physical violence, "In other words, to threaten lives."

Intellectuals had to do something. Queers are the canary in the coal mine for human rights. If they sacrifice us to the mob, even worse will follow. What surprised me, here, was that in the accompanying explanation of this open letter for personal liberties, the community of mostly heterosexual intellectuals admitted that one of the last straws for them had been, "the scandalous 'homo hunt' at Ksar El Kebir," bringing us openly into the room, and declaring solidarity. "You aren't alone." For a change.

Election 2008: What Divides Us

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraq, What's That?

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I'm a victim of serial amnesia. I'd almost managed to forget all those roadside bombs, the blank grinning faces of GI's hovering over naked Iraqis in Abu Ghraib until I got stuck on a plane and the only interesting thing to watch on video was "In the Valley of Elah" with Tommy Lee Jones.

A guy in my Laundromat had recommended it a couple months ago when he heard my accent and I admitted to being from the U.S. "Great movie. Really nice," he said. "A shame about the war. Lot of people dead. Lot of people." He turned to be North African, from Morocco, but a Jew. "There aren't so many there anymore. All immigrated, many to the last state," he said.

I didn't understand.

"You know, U.S. foreign policy. U.S. and Israel like that." He twisted two fingers together, and forced a small, bitter smile to his lips. "The 51st American state. You should see the movie."

So I did finally. It wasn't a masterpiece, but an antidote to amnesia. How can we still be in Iraq? Why did we ever go? How many decades will it take to stabilize the region? And what are we going to do with all the young monsters we unleashed there? Because what else are the soldiers who have been taught to kill and torture with the expectation of perfect immunity to everything but their own deaths?

Some of my cousins are among them. I've quit asking my sisters how they are. They're alive, I guess, or I'd have heard, but who are they now, those little blonde boys that used to tumble all over me and tug at my hair? I don't want to know.

Totaling up all the dead Iraqis and Americans, all the lost souls, the lost cities, the lost time isn't enough to convey the extent of that disaster. For that we need commentary, or art, aesthetics nicely mixed with fury. Or better yet, a multitude of histories.

Politicians are always talking about what they can take away from history, but somehow all the lessons end up like the takeaway Kung Pao chicken in the back of the fridge, half-eaten and reeking.

The lesson we're avoiding once again is how easy it is to go from oppressed to oppressor. That's what my friend from the Laundromat was alluding to. How the wandering Jew found a home at last and with the encouragement of the U.S. used it as a station to bully Palestine. How the U.S., which got hit so hard in 9/11 turned around and began to destroy not just the Middle East, but themselves.

Domination is a suicidal impulse history is full of. (Note all the Caesars that overreached, the inquisitions that ended up burning themselves at the stake.)

The curious thing about historical amnesia, is that the good stuff, too, fades away, especially if it were accomplished by women, or lesbians, people of color, the working class.

The Lesbian Avengers, for example, was a moment of real flight that nudged forward the queer community, and America at large, but even as an eyewitness, I have to make an effort to remember those years, drag out photos and videos of lesbians demonstrating on the street, eating fire, challenging passersby in Grand Central to join us in a lesbian waltz.

The lesson of history then was that ordinary people could act, we could change things, if not the world, at least increments of it. Without that knowledge, there's no liberation for queers, no possibility of democracy itself. We're stuck with the Bushes of the world, stuck with segregation and invisibility.

Memory is everything. And there's a battle on how to define it, the objective article privileged over the memoir and first person history, Reuters over the op-ed.

I ran across an entry about gay history in Wikipedia last week, that had a banner spread across the front declaring SOUNDS LIKE ADVERTISING, STYLE NOT RIGHT FOR US, REVISE, DELETE?, DESTROY, or something very like it. All because it had the word "groundbreaking" and a couple of laudatory quotes. The rest was all footnoted to within an inch of its interpretive life.

Who owns "groundbreaking" anyway when it's a certainty that holding hands with your lover in the streets of Newark is still worth a front page announcement in the New York Times? Who owns the word accomplishment? And are the facts enough when anybody can shape them?

We need more writers like Sarah Schulman, who may not always get her dates right as a historian, but as a writer captures the spirit. She dredges up, and hoards and remembers what she sees. It's not so easy staying awake with a media that devotes more time to Britney Spears than the Iraq War.

It's not so easy to care.

When Wall Street Is Atlantis

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

For weeks Paris has been in a cold snap, and I go around the apartment with wool socks and twelve sweaters that disguise my shape so much, that the other day when I looked in the bathroom mirror after a shower I thought I was seeing some wispy, startled stranger.

We put insulation tape around the front door, wheel the little space heater to warm one room at time, and are incredibly conscious of how even a little crack in the window sucks the heat right out. Partly because the electric meter is exposed there on the wall, and we see it spin around every time we turn on the heater, or for that matter, use the oven. With the dollar in free fall, every bit of wasted energy counts.

The meter is a reminder, as well, of what we humans are doing to this increasingly watery planet. Environmentalists, until recently, liked to talk about melting polar icecaps. Now, more inhabited coastlines are disappearing so they needn't bother looking so far afield to make their points.

Last week, a French news channel did a whole segment on how Nags Head in South Carolina was being hit with the reality of global warming. They showed a map of the shrinking coastline, and interviewed a man who had already lost one house to the sea, but then bought another further inland. Now it, too, is on the verge of toppling in. Somebody from the Park's Service only gave it a year. "Those sandbags won't help a bit. Come back next fall, you'll never even know it was here."

Prognosis for Miami and Fort Lauderdale isn't good either. New Orleans, eight feet below sea level, already had a taste, and we're only dreaming that the islands that make up New York City can escape unscathed. San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle will be a little damp, too.

You don't have to agree global warming is one hundred percent an effect of human activity to understand we have to do what ever is at hand to slow things down. Or not. Who needs Indonesia anyway? Or Fire Island? We can let queer history float away like we often do. Wall Street will just be a state of mind and stockbrokers will have to telecommute to the Atlantis of their watery offices.

There was a UN conference for climate change a couple of weeks ago in Bali. As usual, the Americans were the stumbling block. And despite the chunky Al Gore's plea for the delegates to take action without the U.S., the sole developed nation to refuse to sign the Kyoto treaty, they softened their proposals to get the American representatives on board.

I don't know which is more pitiful, this endless capitulation to American bullying. Or the self-satisfied American inaction accompanied by whines of "Acting's unnecessary, too expensive, and I'm still not convinced by the science."

I suppose they think the rising seas aren't even a result of global warming. Or the seas aren't rising at all, and the rumor of disappearing beaches in places like Nag's Head is a fabrication, a trick, maybe, to increase tourism. See the island before it disappears! Take a video! Stick your finger in the wounds of Christ! It works apparently. The woman in charge of tourism told French reporters that the disaster had been a marketing bonanza, though it wasn't exactly a long term strategy.

Guess not. Me, I wouldn't buy New York real estate as investment, at least not too far east, or too far downtown which is going to be oh so underwater when the sea levels rise another foot or two, though if you had a second floor place, you could put in your own dock.

At least, it won't take the loss of the bronze Wall Street bull to end American intransigence. As Elizabeth Kolbert reported in the New Yorker, all of the Democrats have plans to lower carbon emissions, and none of the Republican candidates are, for once, in denial about the state of our seas.

The question now is when will the mayors of New York begin to address the problem? I'm glad Bloomberg is making plans about traffic and so on, but wait too long to deal with global warming, we'll end up living in Venice without the pleasures of risotto and those little boats. There are no shoals to protect us from the battering waves that would tip the things over.

As someone who watched the towers fall, and felt the reverberations of how the geography of New York was altered in a day, I feel an extra obligation to speak out. I know what we lost, and what we stand to lose on a much larger scale. Not in some distant future, but soon, in our lifetimes. The terrorists that shook us once can only dream of such destruction.

Embodying Virtue in America

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the Silence In Newark

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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