By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I wish the war for queer rights was more like traditional ones, where we could conquer territory, plant the rainbow flag, then retire from the scene. Unfortunately, most of our battles have mixed results. And the war shows signs of lasting even longer than operation, "Mired in Afghanistan."
That being said, one perfect victory is the ascension of poet, Kay Ryan. She's an out lesbian married not once, but twice to the same woman due to California's changing marriage laws. Even better, since she wasn't named Dyke of the Year, but Poet Laureate of the United States, she's a brilliant writer, head and shoulders above the usual nominees. I'm proud to type in the same language.
On the religious front, gay Bishop Gene Robinson is standing his hallowed ground. Out of 800 Anglican prelates, he was the only one that the Archbishop of Canterbury didn't invite to the Lambeth Conference held only once a decade. Why? Protests by some African and Asian bishops who wanted to ban not only Robinson, but those perverted American bishops who consecrated him. Gays, apparently, are lower than dogs and on par with the devil.
Instead of staying home and sulking like his 200 enemies, Robinson turned up anyway, cheekily holding a service for LGBT people outside the Canterbury Cathedral as the Archbishop was inside waxing lyrical about the Anglican tradition of "Unity in diversity."
It's increasingly urgent to have people like Gene Robinson working from the inside as the Church gains ground against the State in the U.S. Both Republican and Democratic candidates are preparing to dump more money into faith-based programs, pandering shamelessly to religious fundamentalists that preach hatred of homos from their pulpits.
This weekend, that homophobia translated into a shooting in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville where an unemployed truck driver opened fire, killing two, and injuring six others, because "he hated the liberal movement; and was upset with liberals in general as well as gays."
On my own home front, I should report that somebody from the city of Paris press office belatedly returned my call requesting a comment on Paris WiFi, the free wireless program sponsored by gay mayor Bertrand Delanoe, which unfortunately has a filter blocking any page with the words, "gay" "lesbian" "gai" "goudou" etc.
The press officer, Lionel Bordeaux, energetically assured me that the intention of the recently added filter was not to discriminate, but to protect minors, that the sites mentioned in my article had been unblocked, and that Paris WiFi had been asked to consider the matter.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bordeaux also implied that the mayor couldn't discriminate because he was openly gay, that the filter wasn't really a problem because there had only been two gay-related complaints and very few pages were blocked (140,000 out of a total of 27 million hits over two weeks). And that a filter blocking gay-related words was not censorship. "We don't censor here."
If I had been able to get a word in edgewise, I would have informed Mr. Bordeaux that minorities have a long tradition of betraying each other, and besides, discrimination doesn't have to be intentional. Also, complaints are no measure of anything when it comes to discrimination against queers. To complain, you have to be "out." You have to be ready for confrontation. You have to believe something will be done. And you have to know who to complain to.
Mr. Bordeaux himself refused to identify the person responsible for the filter, or even for the wifi program. "I don't see what importance the name of this person has for a journalist." Besides, he explained, the city had contracted the program to a private company, SFR, which had subcontracted the filter, so that the city really had nothing to do with the filter.
As to censorship, I would have liked to explain that no, Paris WiFi is not censoring in the traditional sense of the word -- they're doing something much worse. It would actually be an improvement if they aspired to good old-fashioned censorship in which actual humans attack writing work by work, red-penciling phrases, or killing single articles, books, plays. Orders to blackball writers or throw them in jail likewise operate (usually) on a case-by-case basis.
As reprehensible as they are, those quaint, old-fashioned censors seem to be working with scalpels compared to Paris' bargain basement internet filter for which context is entirely irrelevant, and the inclusion of a single indiscriminate word -- "gai" "lesbiana" "goudou" -- among many others, means that whole articles, whole websites, whole categories of writers are blocked and erased no matter what they have to say.
Asserting the viability of Band-Aid fixes, like their current mechanism to unblock the World Wide Web one page at a time, reveals either a profound ignorance of the nature of discrimination, or of the Internet. Parisians deserve better.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Do I Hold My Nose and Vote for the "O?"
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
There's every reason not to vote for McCain. He's against gay marriage, for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military, and lately announced his opposition to adoption by lesbian and gay couples, though in an amended statement, he added that as president he wouldn't actually legislate against it. That was up to the States.
The poor Log Cabin Republicans who took such a beating with Bush, have only been able to boost McCain by saying he did vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment a couple of years ago, and frankly, gay issues aren't really that important anyway. "Like all Americans, gays and lesbians have wide-ranging concerns -- from foreign policy to the environment to soaring gas prices to the size of the federal government and more."
Unfortunately for them, McCain doesn't shine there either. He'd let that genius Phil Gramm monitor the "mental recession" as Treasury Secretary, allow Afghanistan and Iraq degenerate to bitter ends, and in general continue to pursue disastrous Bush policies everywhere else from social security to the Supreme Court. And he's anti-abortion.
It's also a bad sign that he hasn't bothered to learn to use the internet. It's not a sign of old age, senior citizens surf with best, but of general stupidity. He obviously doesn't think the internet's relevant. Like keeping up with the casualties in Kabul. Or acting on the mortgage crisis.
No, McCain's certainly not gonna win my vote. But Obama might not either.
Like McCain, Obama's against gay marriage, though he sometimes talks about gay rights, or used to, before he adopted the campaign strategy of "faith guru" Mara Vanderslice. She believes Democrats should never mention the separation of church and state, and should generally avoid mentioning the word "gay," much less be seen with any of us.
Obama has snubbed LGBT events, largely ignores our press, and instead, campaigns with many of the same right-wing, homophobic, evangelical preachers that promoted Bush. Chief among them is Kirbyjon Caldwell, former bond-trader, and currently prosperity gospel pastor who was hand in glove with W., giving the benedictions at his inaugural ceremonies, and reaping the reward of faith-based dollars.
Now, Caldwell's on the phone almost every day with Obama, and it's no secret who's going to benefit when Obama comes through with his own faith-based funds, now a "critical part" of his administration because "...social services to the poor and the needy have been consistently under-funded."
I remember when queers would have dumped any Democrat or Republican candidate giving dollars to churches and campaigning with bigots like ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin or Caldwell, whose own church hosted a ministry that reportedly was "created to provide Christ centered instruction for those seeking freedom from homosexuality."
It's also worth mentioning that Obama's imminent nomination is marked by the first Democratic National Convention ever to open with a religious service.
To elect Obama, it seems, is to elect the Bush of the left, pandering to the same right-wing evangelicals, and paying them off in with the same cash. Don't get me started on his vote on unleashing wire-tappers, again, right in line with Bush.
Let me be clear. I'm not a single issue voter. I don't need pompoms and cheerleaders for gay marriage when there's a war on, and the economy's on the road to hell and I can't afford allergy medicine, much less a mammogram. Obama is better than McCain on issues like health care and Iraq. But I cannot go to the polls in November and vote for a man sending the message that gay people are an embarrassment, worthy only of the back of the bus.
And I cannot vote for a man committed to policies that either protect the status quo, or in some cases make gay lives worse. Already under Bush, faith-based programs have siphoned money away from LGBT programs focused on everything from AIDS to job-training. LGBT employees have been thrown out of their jobs with Christian charities without recourse. Forty percent of homeless youth are queer. Many are thrown out because of it. And at faith-based shelters, they're hassled, abused, and ridiculed. Nascent self-loathing is confirmed. The 1964 Civil Rights Act Obama says will prevent discrimination simply doesn't include us, and won't for the foreseeable future.
If Obama wants my vote, he'll have to earn it. He could start with very public meetings with lesbian, gay and transgender leaders and speeches focusing on LGBT issues from gay marriage to gay-bashing in schools.
The rest of it's up to you activists. Frankly, I need assurances from Obama gay fan club members that if I vote for him I won't be the only one holding him accountable for broken promises. He's already backtracked on campaign finance and the electronic surveillance bill among other things, and he hasn't even been elected yet.
There's every reason not to vote for McCain. He's against gay marriage, for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military, and lately announced his opposition to adoption by lesbian and gay couples, though in an amended statement, he added that as president he wouldn't actually legislate against it. That was up to the States.
The poor Log Cabin Republicans who took such a beating with Bush, have only been able to boost McCain by saying he did vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment a couple of years ago, and frankly, gay issues aren't really that important anyway. "Like all Americans, gays and lesbians have wide-ranging concerns -- from foreign policy to the environment to soaring gas prices to the size of the federal government and more."
Unfortunately for them, McCain doesn't shine there either. He'd let that genius Phil Gramm monitor the "mental recession" as Treasury Secretary, allow Afghanistan and Iraq degenerate to bitter ends, and in general continue to pursue disastrous Bush policies everywhere else from social security to the Supreme Court. And he's anti-abortion.
It's also a bad sign that he hasn't bothered to learn to use the internet. It's not a sign of old age, senior citizens surf with best, but of general stupidity. He obviously doesn't think the internet's relevant. Like keeping up with the casualties in Kabul. Or acting on the mortgage crisis.
No, McCain's certainly not gonna win my vote. But Obama might not either.
Like McCain, Obama's against gay marriage, though he sometimes talks about gay rights, or used to, before he adopted the campaign strategy of "faith guru" Mara Vanderslice. She believes Democrats should never mention the separation of church and state, and should generally avoid mentioning the word "gay," much less be seen with any of us.
Obama has snubbed LGBT events, largely ignores our press, and instead, campaigns with many of the same right-wing, homophobic, evangelical preachers that promoted Bush. Chief among them is Kirbyjon Caldwell, former bond-trader, and currently prosperity gospel pastor who was hand in glove with W., giving the benedictions at his inaugural ceremonies, and reaping the reward of faith-based dollars.
Now, Caldwell's on the phone almost every day with Obama, and it's no secret who's going to benefit when Obama comes through with his own faith-based funds, now a "critical part" of his administration because "...social services to the poor and the needy have been consistently under-funded."
I remember when queers would have dumped any Democrat or Republican candidate giving dollars to churches and campaigning with bigots like ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin or Caldwell, whose own church hosted a ministry that reportedly was "created to provide Christ centered instruction for those seeking freedom from homosexuality."
It's also worth mentioning that Obama's imminent nomination is marked by the first Democratic National Convention ever to open with a religious service.
To elect Obama, it seems, is to elect the Bush of the left, pandering to the same right-wing evangelicals, and paying them off in with the same cash. Don't get me started on his vote on unleashing wire-tappers, again, right in line with Bush.
Let me be clear. I'm not a single issue voter. I don't need pompoms and cheerleaders for gay marriage when there's a war on, and the economy's on the road to hell and I can't afford allergy medicine, much less a mammogram. Obama is better than McCain on issues like health care and Iraq. But I cannot go to the polls in November and vote for a man sending the message that gay people are an embarrassment, worthy only of the back of the bus.
And I cannot vote for a man committed to policies that either protect the status quo, or in some cases make gay lives worse. Already under Bush, faith-based programs have siphoned money away from LGBT programs focused on everything from AIDS to job-training. LGBT employees have been thrown out of their jobs with Christian charities without recourse. Forty percent of homeless youth are queer. Many are thrown out because of it. And at faith-based shelters, they're hassled, abused, and ridiculed. Nascent self-loathing is confirmed. The 1964 Civil Rights Act Obama says will prevent discrimination simply doesn't include us, and won't for the foreseeable future.
If Obama wants my vote, he'll have to earn it. He could start with very public meetings with lesbian, gay and transgender leaders and speeches focusing on LGBT issues from gay marriage to gay-bashing in schools.
The rest of it's up to you activists. Frankly, I need assurances from Obama gay fan club members that if I vote for him I won't be the only one holding him accountable for broken promises. He's already backtracked on campaign finance and the electronic surveillance bill among other things, and he hasn't even been elected yet.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Celebrating Revolution
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
All the best holidays are in the summer, no family smarminess or religious hypocrisy, just celebrations of revolution, revolution, revolution. From an insurrection at the Stonewall Inn to the Bastille prison where an angry mob jump-started the French Revolution by liberating the king's prisoners, all seven of them.
They also lay the groundwork for ages of tourism. A couple days later, when the previously established National Assembly ordered the Bastille burnt down and ripped apart, a few enterprising souls like Pierre-Francois Palloy kept some of the stones, carved miniature Bastille prisons, and later gave them away (or sold them) for souvenirs. George Washington apparently got one. And there are a couple in the Musee Carnavalet, the museum of the city.
That may be the real lesson of revolution. How short a trip it is from a symbol of liberation to life as a geegaw at somebody's souvenir stand. Independence, likewise, isn't as inevitable as it seems standing with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other. Have you read the Declaration of Independence lately? It's a miracle that the document worked at all, getting people to risk their lives, uniting them enough to stick together afterwards.
That's quite an accomplishment for a mere 1300 words, practically a telegram, considering it gave birth to a nation. There's some poetry there, and lofty sentiment, but it's no revolutionary tract. They declare the need to "dissolve political bands" not kick British butt. They even worried what the neighbors would think, giving for the historical record a modest list of complaints against the king that had forced the colonies to seek independence. The writers actually transitioned from their grievances to the ending with the logical, but reluctant, "we therefore..." War seemed as rhetorically and morally inevitable as did their success.
Maybe that was the idea. To seem reasonable above all. To force destiny and Providence to join their team. They needed all the help they could get. Revolutions don't often bear the fruit of democracy or freedom, not right away. In France they declared the Rights of Man, grass grew over the Bastille, but still their efforts collapsed under the weight of internal battles and bloodbaths, and external pressures from their troublesome British and Prussian neighbors eying the carnage. The church clung to power long after the monarchy, and the bourgeoisie did their utmost to replace the nobility.
One revolution wasn't enough. Like most places, France moved towards democracy with false starts and hiccups. Spain was even worse. I pity the schoolchildren that have to memorize that revolving door of republics, monarchies, republics until the Franco got his hooks in. Ditto for many Latin American nations where independence led often as not to dictatorships of father figures and "providential" leaders.
Despite their carefully stated goals laid out like accounting principles, and their brand new Constitution, the United States could have taken the same road. Plenty of constitutions have been used as toilet paper. In fact, that's the fate of most, and George Washington was a popular man. He was a revolutionary general, a freedom fighter like Robert Mugabe or Fidel Castro. Why not be president for life? Why not be king? Whispered offers were made and pledges of support by people that were afraid of the hoi polloi and the instability of a changing presidency.
With another man it might have worked. There may have been a few comfortable years, but dissatisfaction and abuses would have followed, and the reign of George I would have dissolved into violence. Like most places, civil war would have been the rule rather than the exception in our mostly peaceful national history. It was a matter of luck Washington's ambitions were limited to the cherry blossoms of Mount Vernon, or whatever he had there. He deserved his souvenir Bastille.
The cakewalk of our democracy has shaped our national character for better and worse. Instead of being plagued with doubts and hesitations, we believe all we have to do is to declare something to make it come true. Bring democracy to Iraq, why not? Unite the country? I'm the man for you. We are a nation of magical thinkers. Though optimists are better than cynics if you want change, they can be arrogant and reckless. And lately we Americans have been playing with matches like children that have never been burned.
In fact, we've come close to reducing the house to ashes plenty of times. There was Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps, McCarthy and committees of Un-American activities. Maybe we'll even survive the War on Terror and Guantanamo. But we can't go on much longer. Despite its sheer longevity, American democracy can eventually be damaged beyond repair. Its seeming inevitability is an accident of history, a myth.
In this season, the moral, I guess, is to value revolution's gains and vigilantly protect them, without revering destruction itself. It's a fleeting joy, like breaking windows or burning cars or lighting firecrackers. It doesn't always lead to anything. Not change. Not freedom. Though sometimes, it's a start.
All the best holidays are in the summer, no family smarminess or religious hypocrisy, just celebrations of revolution, revolution, revolution. From an insurrection at the Stonewall Inn to the Bastille prison where an angry mob jump-started the French Revolution by liberating the king's prisoners, all seven of them.
They also lay the groundwork for ages of tourism. A couple days later, when the previously established National Assembly ordered the Bastille burnt down and ripped apart, a few enterprising souls like Pierre-Francois Palloy kept some of the stones, carved miniature Bastille prisons, and later gave them away (or sold them) for souvenirs. George Washington apparently got one. And there are a couple in the Musee Carnavalet, the museum of the city.
That may be the real lesson of revolution. How short a trip it is from a symbol of liberation to life as a geegaw at somebody's souvenir stand. Independence, likewise, isn't as inevitable as it seems standing with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other. Have you read the Declaration of Independence lately? It's a miracle that the document worked at all, getting people to risk their lives, uniting them enough to stick together afterwards.
That's quite an accomplishment for a mere 1300 words, practically a telegram, considering it gave birth to a nation. There's some poetry there, and lofty sentiment, but it's no revolutionary tract. They declare the need to "dissolve political bands" not kick British butt. They even worried what the neighbors would think, giving for the historical record a modest list of complaints against the king that had forced the colonies to seek independence. The writers actually transitioned from their grievances to the ending with the logical, but reluctant, "we therefore..." War seemed as rhetorically and morally inevitable as did their success.
Maybe that was the idea. To seem reasonable above all. To force destiny and Providence to join their team. They needed all the help they could get. Revolutions don't often bear the fruit of democracy or freedom, not right away. In France they declared the Rights of Man, grass grew over the Bastille, but still their efforts collapsed under the weight of internal battles and bloodbaths, and external pressures from their troublesome British and Prussian neighbors eying the carnage. The church clung to power long after the monarchy, and the bourgeoisie did their utmost to replace the nobility.
One revolution wasn't enough. Like most places, France moved towards democracy with false starts and hiccups. Spain was even worse. I pity the schoolchildren that have to memorize that revolving door of republics, monarchies, republics until the Franco got his hooks in. Ditto for many Latin American nations where independence led often as not to dictatorships of father figures and "providential" leaders.
Despite their carefully stated goals laid out like accounting principles, and their brand new Constitution, the United States could have taken the same road. Plenty of constitutions have been used as toilet paper. In fact, that's the fate of most, and George Washington was a popular man. He was a revolutionary general, a freedom fighter like Robert Mugabe or Fidel Castro. Why not be president for life? Why not be king? Whispered offers were made and pledges of support by people that were afraid of the hoi polloi and the instability of a changing presidency.
With another man it might have worked. There may have been a few comfortable years, but dissatisfaction and abuses would have followed, and the reign of George I would have dissolved into violence. Like most places, civil war would have been the rule rather than the exception in our mostly peaceful national history. It was a matter of luck Washington's ambitions were limited to the cherry blossoms of Mount Vernon, or whatever he had there. He deserved his souvenir Bastille.
The cakewalk of our democracy has shaped our national character for better and worse. Instead of being plagued with doubts and hesitations, we believe all we have to do is to declare something to make it come true. Bring democracy to Iraq, why not? Unite the country? I'm the man for you. We are a nation of magical thinkers. Though optimists are better than cynics if you want change, they can be arrogant and reckless. And lately we Americans have been playing with matches like children that have never been burned.
In fact, we've come close to reducing the house to ashes plenty of times. There was Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps, McCarthy and committees of Un-American activities. Maybe we'll even survive the War on Terror and Guantanamo. But we can't go on much longer. Despite its sheer longevity, American democracy can eventually be damaged beyond repair. Its seeming inevitability is an accident of history, a myth.
In this season, the moral, I guess, is to value revolution's gains and vigilantly protect them, without revering destruction itself. It's a fleeting joy, like breaking windows or burning cars or lighting firecrackers. It doesn't always lead to anything. Not change. Not freedom. Though sometimes, it's a start.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Lesbian Writer's Block In Paris 2
There's free wifi in Paris at all of the libraries, and most of the parks and municipal buildings. A great thing, right? But for a while the program's pornography filter has been blocking almost every web page with the words "gay" or "lesbian" or "gai" or "goudou" or even "lesbiana." I can't research queer news or queer history or activism. Worse, I can't access my own Gay City or Gully online articles, even my blogs. Counting both journalism and activism, almost fifteen years of my work and life have disappeared.
At first it was infuriating, you can make appeals page by page, but why bother? Then it became disconcerting. Like looking in a mirror and seeing a blank space where your face used to be. There's a book of photographs called "The Commissar Vanishes" that records much the same effect. Fall out of favor, Stalin had you airbrushed from history, and often from life. There was a 1926 photo that at first showed Stalin with Antipov, Kirov and Schwernik, three top members of the CP. In a 1940 version, Antipov had disappeared. Nine years later Schwernik was gone. In the last, still based on the original photo, Stalin stood alone.
While I haven't actually been murdered, being erased sure makes my skin crawl.
Probably I'm a victim of somebody's war on pornography. "Think of the children. Oh, think of them, their tender little fingers typing "lesbian" into a search engine and getting page after page of porn, of misconceptions, of hardcore and disgusting stuff. And if the rest of it is blocked, isn't that an acceptable price to pay for protecting their delicate minds? Well, isn't it?" No. Not at all. And that's the best scenario. That queers like me are just caught by mistake in the net.
At worst, we're the victims of pure homophobia in which lesbians and gay men really are the targets, really are considered filth that should be kept out of the public waters of "democratized" information. I wouldn't totally discount the possibility.
Last week, I went to one of the city's information desks and asked an employee if she could help me navigate the Paris bureaucracy and identify the person or department responsible for the wifi filter. She asked why, and when I explained, using the words "gay" and "lesbian," her face went white, she quit listening, and backed away from the counter to avoid contagion. "Is there a problem with the connection? We're only responsible for problems with connections." She couldn't have been more upset if I'd pulled a gun or dropped my pants.
On the other hand, a young librarian didn't bat an eye at the word gay. She just didn't believe me at first. "It's not possible. Bertrand Delanoe is the mayor." She didn't say he was gay, but that's what she meant. A homophobic filter couldn't happen under a gay mayor's watch. But as of Tuesday afternoon Paris time, pages are still blocked, including articles with gay subject matter at the New York Times. All classified as "pornographie."
This morning I called the Paris press office to find out what's what. Everybody I wanted was busy or out of town. So, as ordered I sent an email asking 1) if Mr. Delanoe the gay mayor knew about the filter, and 2) what was going to be done to improve it? Nobody answered by my deadline.
I guess I could soldier on next week, trying to pull the thread and find out who exactly is responsible for the filter. As it turns out, the wifi program falls under the city's Department of Economic Development and Employment (DDEE) which lists Deputy Mayors Jean-Bernard Bros, Lyne Cohen-Solal, Jean-Louis Missika, and Christian Sautter as political overseers. I could call them directly, but I think I'll just blame Delanoe. He's been the moving force behind the program and god knows he's taken credit for efforts like this one to modernize the city, and stop the French brain drain by offering, in the program's own words, "unlimited access to information and culture." Let him take the responsibility when it fails.
It's not a small thing to be erased. Even by mistake. Even for the greater good. Almost the only thing we have are our names, "gay" "lesbian" and we shouldn't disappear without a fight.
I think it's why poor people so often are loud. Those drag queens on the corner mouthing off. Trashy types paddling their wailing kids at the K-mart or screaming from apartment windows and blasting music until they're assimilated into the silent mostly white middle-class world where we die on the hook of a partial smile and turned away eyes. All teenagers everywhere shouting and shrieking and scribbling graffiti and blogs and diaries. Even the poorest drunk can cackle and insult, shower us with curses if not with gold. It's what you do when all you own is your own voice, those last few fighting words.
At first it was infuriating, you can make appeals page by page, but why bother? Then it became disconcerting. Like looking in a mirror and seeing a blank space where your face used to be. There's a book of photographs called "The Commissar Vanishes" that records much the same effect. Fall out of favor, Stalin had you airbrushed from history, and often from life. There was a 1926 photo that at first showed Stalin with Antipov, Kirov and Schwernik, three top members of the CP. In a 1940 version, Antipov had disappeared. Nine years later Schwernik was gone. In the last, still based on the original photo, Stalin stood alone.
While I haven't actually been murdered, being erased sure makes my skin crawl.
Probably I'm a victim of somebody's war on pornography. "Think of the children. Oh, think of them, their tender little fingers typing "lesbian" into a search engine and getting page after page of porn, of misconceptions, of hardcore and disgusting stuff. And if the rest of it is blocked, isn't that an acceptable price to pay for protecting their delicate minds? Well, isn't it?" No. Not at all. And that's the best scenario. That queers like me are just caught by mistake in the net.
At worst, we're the victims of pure homophobia in which lesbians and gay men really are the targets, really are considered filth that should be kept out of the public waters of "democratized" information. I wouldn't totally discount the possibility.
Last week, I went to one of the city's information desks and asked an employee if she could help me navigate the Paris bureaucracy and identify the person or department responsible for the wifi filter. She asked why, and when I explained, using the words "gay" and "lesbian," her face went white, she quit listening, and backed away from the counter to avoid contagion. "Is there a problem with the connection? We're only responsible for problems with connections." She couldn't have been more upset if I'd pulled a gun or dropped my pants.
On the other hand, a young librarian didn't bat an eye at the word gay. She just didn't believe me at first. "It's not possible. Bertrand Delanoe is the mayor." She didn't say he was gay, but that's what she meant. A homophobic filter couldn't happen under a gay mayor's watch. But as of Tuesday afternoon Paris time, pages are still blocked, including articles with gay subject matter at the New York Times. All classified as "pornographie."
This morning I called the Paris press office to find out what's what. Everybody I wanted was busy or out of town. So, as ordered I sent an email asking 1) if Mr. Delanoe the gay mayor knew about the filter, and 2) what was going to be done to improve it? Nobody answered by my deadline.
I guess I could soldier on next week, trying to pull the thread and find out who exactly is responsible for the filter. As it turns out, the wifi program falls under the city's Department of Economic Development and Employment (DDEE) which lists Deputy Mayors Jean-Bernard Bros, Lyne Cohen-Solal, Jean-Louis Missika, and Christian Sautter as political overseers. I could call them directly, but I think I'll just blame Delanoe. He's been the moving force behind the program and god knows he's taken credit for efforts like this one to modernize the city, and stop the French brain drain by offering, in the program's own words, "unlimited access to information and culture." Let him take the responsibility when it fails.
It's not a small thing to be erased. Even by mistake. Even for the greater good. Almost the only thing we have are our names, "gay" "lesbian" and we shouldn't disappear without a fight.
I think it's why poor people so often are loud. Those drag queens on the corner mouthing off. Trashy types paddling their wailing kids at the K-mart or screaming from apartment windows and blasting music until they're assimilated into the silent mostly white middle-class world where we die on the hook of a partial smile and turned away eyes. All teenagers everywhere shouting and shrieking and scribbling graffiti and blogs and diaries. Even the poorest drunk can cackle and insult, shower us with curses if not with gold. It's what you do when all you own is your own voice, those last few fighting words.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Paris Gay Pride, Not So Gay for Dykes
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
You'd think lesbian culture would flower here in Paris, the city that welcomed Natalie Clifford Barney, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, and Colette, who once ran around my current neighborhood half-naked with bliss. But Saturday, we could barely get a dozen girls to march in the Paris Pride Parade as "Goudou explosive," Explosive Dyke.
After all, "There will already be a lot of lesbians at the parade." "Most lesbians in France are perfectly comfortable with themselves." ie. not combustible. "There are already lesbian groups."
We made our banner, bought toy trumpets and marched anyway. A dozen dykes representing five different countries. One of them even France.
The skeptics weren't entirely wrong. Among the half million at the parade, there were hordes of dykes. Of girls, anyway. You would have been hard-pressed to find a single lesbian tee shirt, dyke pin or black triangle that indicated the women were anything but straight females supporting their fag friends. Until they saw us. Then they smiled and waved. Some practically howled with joy at our raucous trumpets and that impolite name, "goudou" paired with "explosive" in big gold letters. Or maybe what they liked was the big, black "BOUM!"
The truth is, individuals can be as comfortable as they like, but generally things are crappy for dykes in France. There are only a handful of women at the top rung of anything. And among visible women, there's maybe one open lesbian, an actress whose name I can't remember. In Paris, the only feminist direct action group, "The Beard," is a recent creation. And the few lesbian groups that do exist are mostly lobbyists or theoreticians, miles away from your garden variety dyke.
If the lesbians here don't blow-up on a daily basis, it's only because their simmering anger is tamped down by the gradual and insidious nature of the assault. It's not like South Africa or Newark where we're murdered and raped in the streets. No, we're tolerated as long as we keep to our place. As long as we're invisible. As long as our efforts for civil rights don't actually make much of a stink.
The problem comes when we step out into public space, not as generic females, but as ourselves, as dykes. The moment you dare to share a kiss like all the slobbering adolescents in the Paris metro you're open to physical and verbal attack. Men'll come down on you like pile of bricks, and women, too, who love to shout obscenities as much as anyone.
Even marching in the parade, Goudou explosive had homos on the sidelines making snide comments about how well we blew our trumpets and what we could do with them later on. Young straight boys trailed around us telling us what gangs they were from and making all kinds of clichéd suggestions. Even the fag marching in front got in on the act lecturing us like we were infants about preparing for the moment of silence. "I asked you once politely to comply," he said, ignoring the big loud float full of men. Meanwhile, the two white guys announcing the participants refused to acknowledge we existed until we took a couple of menacing steps towards them.
Then there's the law where our discrimination is enshrined in a hundred ways. Artificial insemination is entirely off-limits to dykes who all go to Belgium instead. In terms of general homophobia, the pathetic civil union law was met with violent outrage when it passed in '99, and a few years ago, when a maverick (and straight) Green Party mayor in a lowly provincial town decided to perform a marriage for two gay men, he was inundated with physical threats, nasty letters, and packages of human feces from all over the country. Voila, the tolerant French.
Proust and Rimbaud would not be celebrities today, neither would courtesan Liane de Pougy or delicious Colette. Stumble across a lesbian, out comes the eraser, out comes the ridicule and scorn. Like on Sunday when I capped off my Gay Pride weekend by attending a little talk about the Temple of Friendship at 20 rue Jacob which, if you've heard of it at all, is because Natalie Barney held a half century of wild dyke parties and avant garde literary events there.
I expected juicy details about scandals and liaisons. Instead, the guy giving the lecture did his best to characterize her primarily as some rich American most notable for giving literary soirees for important straight men. He entitled the section about her, "The Temple Finds Its Vestal Virgin," and entirely erased her importance as a lesbian pioneer and icon, except for the coy, "Remy de Gourmont called her the Amazon. I'll leave it to your imagination as to why." Thank god, one explosive dyke stood up at the end, and set the record straight.
Even now, writing this column, the free wifi of the city of Paris is blocking every webpage with the word "lesbian" "gay" or "goudou." Even my own articles. Especially them. Turn your back for a minute, they'll shove you in the closet and lock the door.
You'd think lesbian culture would flower here in Paris, the city that welcomed Natalie Clifford Barney, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, and Colette, who once ran around my current neighborhood half-naked with bliss. But Saturday, we could barely get a dozen girls to march in the Paris Pride Parade as "Goudou explosive," Explosive Dyke.
After all, "There will already be a lot of lesbians at the parade." "Most lesbians in France are perfectly comfortable with themselves." ie. not combustible. "There are already lesbian groups."
We made our banner, bought toy trumpets and marched anyway. A dozen dykes representing five different countries. One of them even France.
The skeptics weren't entirely wrong. Among the half million at the parade, there were hordes of dykes. Of girls, anyway. You would have been hard-pressed to find a single lesbian tee shirt, dyke pin or black triangle that indicated the women were anything but straight females supporting their fag friends. Until they saw us. Then they smiled and waved. Some practically howled with joy at our raucous trumpets and that impolite name, "goudou" paired with "explosive" in big gold letters. Or maybe what they liked was the big, black "BOUM!"
The truth is, individuals can be as comfortable as they like, but generally things are crappy for dykes in France. There are only a handful of women at the top rung of anything. And among visible women, there's maybe one open lesbian, an actress whose name I can't remember. In Paris, the only feminist direct action group, "The Beard," is a recent creation. And the few lesbian groups that do exist are mostly lobbyists or theoreticians, miles away from your garden variety dyke.
If the lesbians here don't blow-up on a daily basis, it's only because their simmering anger is tamped down by the gradual and insidious nature of the assault. It's not like South Africa or Newark where we're murdered and raped in the streets. No, we're tolerated as long as we keep to our place. As long as we're invisible. As long as our efforts for civil rights don't actually make much of a stink.
The problem comes when we step out into public space, not as generic females, but as ourselves, as dykes. The moment you dare to share a kiss like all the slobbering adolescents in the Paris metro you're open to physical and verbal attack. Men'll come down on you like pile of bricks, and women, too, who love to shout obscenities as much as anyone.
Even marching in the parade, Goudou explosive had homos on the sidelines making snide comments about how well we blew our trumpets and what we could do with them later on. Young straight boys trailed around us telling us what gangs they were from and making all kinds of clichéd suggestions. Even the fag marching in front got in on the act lecturing us like we were infants about preparing for the moment of silence. "I asked you once politely to comply," he said, ignoring the big loud float full of men. Meanwhile, the two white guys announcing the participants refused to acknowledge we existed until we took a couple of menacing steps towards them.
Then there's the law where our discrimination is enshrined in a hundred ways. Artificial insemination is entirely off-limits to dykes who all go to Belgium instead. In terms of general homophobia, the pathetic civil union law was met with violent outrage when it passed in '99, and a few years ago, when a maverick (and straight) Green Party mayor in a lowly provincial town decided to perform a marriage for two gay men, he was inundated with physical threats, nasty letters, and packages of human feces from all over the country. Voila, the tolerant French.
Proust and Rimbaud would not be celebrities today, neither would courtesan Liane de Pougy or delicious Colette. Stumble across a lesbian, out comes the eraser, out comes the ridicule and scorn. Like on Sunday when I capped off my Gay Pride weekend by attending a little talk about the Temple of Friendship at 20 rue Jacob which, if you've heard of it at all, is because Natalie Barney held a half century of wild dyke parties and avant garde literary events there.
I expected juicy details about scandals and liaisons. Instead, the guy giving the lecture did his best to characterize her primarily as some rich American most notable for giving literary soirees for important straight men. He entitled the section about her, "The Temple Finds Its Vestal Virgin," and entirely erased her importance as a lesbian pioneer and icon, except for the coy, "Remy de Gourmont called her the Amazon. I'll leave it to your imagination as to why." Thank god, one explosive dyke stood up at the end, and set the record straight.
Even now, writing this column, the free wifi of the city of Paris is blocking every webpage with the word "lesbian" "gay" or "goudou." Even my own articles. Especially them. Turn your back for a minute, they'll shove you in the closet and lock the door.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Gender-Bashing: What Hillary-Hating Meant
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Every day when I walk into the street, I take myself with me -- a personality shaped by so many years of living, clothes tired from the wash, this body with hips and thighs and breasts I didn't think about much until this electoral campaign.
Growing older as a woman, I've gradually faded from public view. No more construction workers waggling their tongues at me and grabbing their dicks. No more gropes on the subway. Or those long undressing sneers. Until I happen to disagree with some man and all of a sudden I'm nothing but, "This Lady, here" or a "She..." drawn out to emphasize that at the heart of my obvious wrongness is my sex.
That's part of why Obama gives me the creeps. It says something about a man when underpinning the blogs and op-eds and comments of his most ardent partisans was the simple fact that they didn't hate his female opponent as a politician; they hated her as a woman. Like they must hate me.
The bias began in the hard news coverage of her campaign, though I suppose you could find some other explanation for just why, when Clinton won a major state, it would still be Obama's photo eating up the space above the fold of the New York Times. Or why the writers trotted out so many adjectives and adverbs. Such a forceful, definitive and hopeful, unifying, transcendent man has never before been seen.
In contrast to that elevating blather, Clinton got months and months of op-ed pages and blogs describing her voice as that of a shrieking harpy, or nagging wife. Her hips were fat and childbearing and repulsive. Her style was schoolmarmish, whiny, overbearing, or castrating. What she needed was a good screwing by a real man.
Even now, the illustrious New York Times only raises it as a question, was there sexism in the media's coverage? What else explains the bias, the overt physical hatred? What else explains why nobody was assigned to analyze why South Park writers hid nuclear weapons in Clinton's cartoon vagina, and some profiteer in tune with the national mood started selling the Hillary nut-cracker online, showing her loaded with shark-like teeth between her legs? Funny, the inventor himself said he'd never do a version of Obama, it might cause comment.
He's getting at the ugly truth. How venues that would never, ever, under any circumstances tolerate sneering comments about somebody's Jewish nose, or somebody else's black dick imagine that in the 21st century female hips and voices and cunts are still fair game. Reduce Clinton to her parts. She'll go away. Which is what everyone wanted. The loudest mouths, anyway.
Not me. She could be my cousin, my sister, my mother, my aunt. Which is why she got such support, way beyond white women of a certain age that the biased media kept talking about. Didn't you notice the photos? There were girls in a rainbow of shades. Plenty of African American, and Latina, and Asian women weeping when Clinton finally threw in the towel. I guess they don't count either.
Ironically, many of the most vociferous Hillary-haters were women, including dykes. It breaks my heart. Criticize her politics, fine. Why not? She's far from perfect. But it's pure self-loathing to sneer at her flesh which is like ours even if we stick it into jeans and tee shirts instead of admittedly horrendous pantsuits. I wonder sometimes if misogyny explains why so many young dykes prefer to come out as boyz, or anything but lesbians, a word which echoes so horribly of women, of the female, and reminds us we're on the losing team.
So much for post-feminism. So much for the level playing field. We have a long way to go yet. Clinton put a couple million cracks in the glass ceiling, but didn't break through. Women barely exist in top jobs in business. In the military, almost every one of us is harassed by her male peers, and a full third raped or assaulted by the time we leave or get killed. Don't blame it just on the war. It's our culture. Step out of line they'll step on you. No wonder that in the heartland of America, girls are pledging their virginity, not just to Jesus, but to their almighty daddies.
Hell, I wish Hillary had a nuclear bomb in her cunt. And that she'd take it to Washington, and bear down with her child-bearing hips on the nation's face. If she did. If she landed on it with all her atomic force, maybe she could destroy the temples of dickness that have taught us women to sneer at ourselves, to hate high-pitched sounds. To see our soft bodies as hateful and ridiculous. Maybe then we'd stand a chance.
Every day when I walk into the street, I take myself with me -- a personality shaped by so many years of living, clothes tired from the wash, this body with hips and thighs and breasts I didn't think about much until this electoral campaign.
Growing older as a woman, I've gradually faded from public view. No more construction workers waggling their tongues at me and grabbing their dicks. No more gropes on the subway. Or those long undressing sneers. Until I happen to disagree with some man and all of a sudden I'm nothing but, "This Lady, here" or a "She..." drawn out to emphasize that at the heart of my obvious wrongness is my sex.
That's part of why Obama gives me the creeps. It says something about a man when underpinning the blogs and op-eds and comments of his most ardent partisans was the simple fact that they didn't hate his female opponent as a politician; they hated her as a woman. Like they must hate me.
The bias began in the hard news coverage of her campaign, though I suppose you could find some other explanation for just why, when Clinton won a major state, it would still be Obama's photo eating up the space above the fold of the New York Times. Or why the writers trotted out so many adjectives and adverbs. Such a forceful, definitive and hopeful, unifying, transcendent man has never before been seen.
In contrast to that elevating blather, Clinton got months and months of op-ed pages and blogs describing her voice as that of a shrieking harpy, or nagging wife. Her hips were fat and childbearing and repulsive. Her style was schoolmarmish, whiny, overbearing, or castrating. What she needed was a good screwing by a real man.
Even now, the illustrious New York Times only raises it as a question, was there sexism in the media's coverage? What else explains the bias, the overt physical hatred? What else explains why nobody was assigned to analyze why South Park writers hid nuclear weapons in Clinton's cartoon vagina, and some profiteer in tune with the national mood started selling the Hillary nut-cracker online, showing her loaded with shark-like teeth between her legs? Funny, the inventor himself said he'd never do a version of Obama, it might cause comment.
He's getting at the ugly truth. How venues that would never, ever, under any circumstances tolerate sneering comments about somebody's Jewish nose, or somebody else's black dick imagine that in the 21st century female hips and voices and cunts are still fair game. Reduce Clinton to her parts. She'll go away. Which is what everyone wanted. The loudest mouths, anyway.
Not me. She could be my cousin, my sister, my mother, my aunt. Which is why she got such support, way beyond white women of a certain age that the biased media kept talking about. Didn't you notice the photos? There were girls in a rainbow of shades. Plenty of African American, and Latina, and Asian women weeping when Clinton finally threw in the towel. I guess they don't count either.
Ironically, many of the most vociferous Hillary-haters were women, including dykes. It breaks my heart. Criticize her politics, fine. Why not? She's far from perfect. But it's pure self-loathing to sneer at her flesh which is like ours even if we stick it into jeans and tee shirts instead of admittedly horrendous pantsuits. I wonder sometimes if misogyny explains why so many young dykes prefer to come out as boyz, or anything but lesbians, a word which echoes so horribly of women, of the female, and reminds us we're on the losing team.
So much for post-feminism. So much for the level playing field. We have a long way to go yet. Clinton put a couple million cracks in the glass ceiling, but didn't break through. Women barely exist in top jobs in business. In the military, almost every one of us is harassed by her male peers, and a full third raped or assaulted by the time we leave or get killed. Don't blame it just on the war. It's our culture. Step out of line they'll step on you. No wonder that in the heartland of America, girls are pledging their virginity, not just to Jesus, but to their almighty daddies.
Hell, I wish Hillary had a nuclear bomb in her cunt. And that she'd take it to Washington, and bear down with her child-bearing hips on the nation's face. If she did. If she landed on it with all her atomic force, maybe she could destroy the temples of dickness that have taught us women to sneer at ourselves, to hate high-pitched sounds. To see our soft bodies as hateful and ridiculous. Maybe then we'd stand a chance.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Laurie Marks: Queer Books for Queer Times
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Queers are a peculiar minority. We come from nowhere, and are raised by heterosexuals like eggs left in the wrong nest. We're exiles in a foreign culture, anthropologists from day one observing mating habits and pairings that have nothing to do with us. In short, we're the original aliens.
It's not surprising that fantasy and science fiction have a strong appeal. Growing up I read and re-read the "Narnia Chronicles" and anything by Madeleine L'Engle. I accepted the Bible without question. Why not winged prophets announcing the birth of babies or the end of the world? Why not burning bushes, tongues of fire, and outcast healers when I knew the world I lived in was not what it seemed?
There was a skinny, light-footed guy in college that took it even farther. He only wore green and claimed to be descended from Tolkien's fairies. He didn't have an easy time of it. Even from me. I sneered with the others behind his back. Now, I'm glad he had a cushion, an escape hatch until he figured out what he really was. He came out after college like I did.
That's the essence of the genre. There are plenty of boys with swords and bulging muscles and wands fighting troglodytes on Mars and engaging in kinky cross-species sex, but since the transformative 60's it's also a place where writers like Samuel R. Delany or Joanna Russ and Nicola Griffith have been able to explore notions of identity, ask "What if?" and station themselves just far enough away in time or space to get a good look at the earth.
One writer who does that particularly well is Laurie J. Marks. Her "Elemental Logic" series is a kind of social change fantasy that has more relevance in the post-9/11 era than most op-eds. How do you fight an enemy without becoming them? What happens when you give up on revenge?
She began writing as a kid in California. In a recent interview, Marks told me her first book was a fantasy novel about these two girls that have wings. "They were the good guys in the struggle of good versus evil. It didn't really have much of a plot, but I was twelve, what do you want?"
Marks was still flying in her first published book, "Delan the Mislaid" (1989), though she started being more scientific about it. "I actually researched how difficult it would be to fly when you're a full-sized human being. And that's how I ended up with these rather strange looking creatures with gigantic chests, little skinny legs and big giant wings kind of like bat wings. And even with those modifications I still had to assume it's a pretty light gravity and make it so they couldn't really fly, mostly they could just glide."
What appealed to me, when I borrowed the book from my then girlfriend, was the main character, Delan. She was a misfit among the Walkers, with misshapen lumps on her back, and a head for heights. She was considered female, but hid the truth that she was nothing at all. Before long we discovered Delan wasn't even the same race as the people that raised her. She grew wings during adolescence and turned out not to have no sex, but all of them. Delan was a hermaphrodite, eventually finding others of its kind, the Aeyries, and when they were embroiled in an inter-species war, Delan became a hero.
Since I was just coming out myself, the theme of self-discovery and finding people like me really hit home. The irony is, Marks hadn't figured out yet who she was. It was her own characters that broke the news, she says. She was working on "Dancing Jack" (1993), a book in which two women reunited after being separated because of some stupid fight, and they wouldn't let her go on with the plot until they had sex. She wrote the love scene imagining she'd delete it. Instead, the scene stayed, and she came out as lesbian.
I noticed it didn't change anything in her writing, though it explained a lot. Gender-bending and queer characters were always a constant. Marks would write about a farmer for a couple of pages and when you had a good picture of a guy in overalls tramping around in the mud, then she'd slip in a "she" or "her." Marks also divorced gender from sex. Anybody could sleep with anybody. Equipment didn't matter.
She's always tinkered with families, too, even if she ended up marrying her girlfriend and living in Massachusetts in a kind of nuclear family if you count the pets as kids. "It seemed to me that if you're breaking loose of assumed gender roles, that the shape of the family has to be changeable also. It's not that there are no nuclear families in my world, just that they're considered to be quite abnormal. You do, in the cities especially, get families where they can manage to be fairly small because it doesn't take as much labor to generate a living. So say, if people are in business, then they wouldn't need to have a huge family."
Marks believes that normalizing gender-blind roles for women and queers, along with alternative families is "a sort of a Utopian approach, bringing forward the contrast between the world as it is and the world as it should be. That's something that you can really only do in fantasy or science fiction."
For a reader like me, it's a pleasure, an affirmation. Though not everyone is equally happy about it. The few critical reviews at online booksellers didn't see how the characters would reproduce. "The world would be left empty. There are no real families."
The biggest change since Marks began writing is her move towards realism. Like the black sci-fi writer Octavia Butler who went from featuring multiple genders and gene-splicing extraterrestrials in "Lilith's Brood" to a contemplation of religion in the dystopian novels "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents," Marks has moved from a reliance on the extravagant tools of fantasy like flying that offered easy solution to problems, to a much more subtle form of magic, and a more complex human landscape.
For instance, in her 1992 book "The Watcher's Mask," an embattled tribe saves itself from the dominant culture by getting the tyrant to wear a magical charm. In "Fire Logic" (2002), the first of the Elemental Logic series, she lets them be slaughtered, partly because it's more realistic, but also because the elders of the tribe refuse to let Zanja, a witch with fire logic (enhanced intuition), introduce fear into their culture, even though there's a war going on outside their mountains.
In contrast, their neighbors, the other inhabitants of Shaftal, who were conquered in one horrible attack that will feel oddly familiar to New Yorkers, are letting themselves be changed by the colonizers who brutally kill guerrillas, and anyone they perceive as future threats. Gradually, as Shaftali reshape themselves into resistance fighters, the openness and generosity of their culture is also being destroyed.
Complicated questions arise. What future can be imagined except mutual slaughter? What role should we allow fear to play in our lives? Zanja lost everything when her tribe was slaughtered. Should she pursue revenge and become as ruthless as her enemies?
In the aftermath of 9/11 and our War on Terror, it's considerations like this that resonate with me, along with the great queer characters, even though Marks had actually been working on "Fire Logic" years before September 11th. Having an intersection with current events actually ended up working against her when a British publisher turned it down on the grounds that it wasn't "believable."
"What they meant was that they were still so much in this "us" versus "them" mindset that they didn't think people would accept the possibility that there could be peace without a victory, if that makes sense. That there actually are ways to end a conflict without one person being beaten into a pulp."
Marks herself isn't convinced it's possible in the real world. Not because humans are incapable of making compromises for the good of the whole, like giving up on revenge, or the satisfaction of being proved right, but because no humans have a culture that supports it. That's the advantage to writing fantasy. She can work to make it realistic in the context of the book. And that lets her comment on our reality.
"I think it does in some way operate as a criticism of how quick we are to slip into this way of seeing the world in which there's "us" and "them," and "enemies" and "friends," and how hard it is for us to base our relationships on what we hold in common rather than what we hold in difference. I know I sound like an idealist. I am one. Sort of."
That's good enough for me. As Wikipedia says, there are reasons why "members of science fiction fandom (including Forrest J Ackerman) were involved in the foundation of early groups such as the Daughters of Bilitis." We don't always need promises, just people to imagine the future, and a little hope.
Fire Logic (2002) was followed by Earth Logic (2004), and Water Logic (2007). There's no date yet for the appearance of Air Logic.
For Laurie Marks on Gay Marriage
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Civil War Blinders
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
A couple of years ago, I saw a flyer for a Civil War reenactment upstate, several hundred miles from the nearest battle. I didn't understand. What exactly were they reenacting? Who went, putting on uniforms and waving flags? Saturday, in Walton, New York, I got a chance to find out.
My girlfriend and I spent most of our time wandering around in the mud and freezing our asses off, so I guess it was authentic. We saw costumed reenactors boiling coffee over wood fires, and making stew in front of their pup tents. About two thirds were in a Union encampment, the rest rebs.
While some were fanatics with homespun clothing and handmade shoes, most of the men had pants right off the rack for eighty bucks, and a few of the guys were actually girls, their tits tucked in behind suspenders. Still, there were plenty of women in hoopskirt and petticoat drag. A guy played banjo and sang songs of the era, while Abraham Lincoln chatted with visitors and waited to get shot.
In the rebel camp, I looked for gasoline-soaked crosses ready to burn, but didn't find anything untoward except a digital camera or two. Later, an art teacher and history buff in brigadiers dress demonstrated how cannons worked, assisted by a crew of six made up of high school students he'd trained. Another participant gave out shaky bits of history while he was explaining Confederacy currency. Apparently soldiers always paid for the animals they took (false), leaving the farmers holding worthless cash after the war (true).
The skirmish at 2 was like that first battle at Bull Run when the D.C. locals came out with their picnic baskets and lawn chairs to watch the shooting. In Walton, it happened on the vast grassy expense that doubles as a parking lot during the fair. The cannon were particularly impressive, smoke rings emerging from earth-shaking blasts.
One kid asked where the tanks were. Another wanted to know how come nobody was dead. The soldiers would limp a little maybe, but nobody wanted to just lie there in the field staring at the circling mountains while everybody else got to run around and shoot. Or maybe they were put off by the cemetery across the road. Finally we got a couple of dramatic deaths when a rebel kid got tired of fighting and persuaded his father to charge the Union position, where they impaled themselves on bayonets.
Everyone seemed satisfied when it was over. There was a little bit history, plenty of smoke and bangs, and when it was over you could go eat funnel cakes and deep-fried Snickers. As for the participants, they got to wear costumes like on Halloween, and feel a part of some grand national drama the country's still obsessed with.
Every year, we turn out books and films with an updated Scarlett or Rhett. We reconsider battles. And the image of master and slave still figures so prominently in national discussions of race that I imagine I must be dreaming when I look around the train after work and see Bangladeshi men slumped next to Ecuadorians, a Chinese lady reading next to a Mexican family, folks from Cuba, Brazil, the Ukraine, and only here or there a black or white hipster American integrating the place.
In the afternoon, their kids fill the train, still boasting a range of visible ethnicities, accents all pure New York, their attitudes and clothes the same. They're Americans, our future, though when you mention civil war what they think of first may be dead relatives back in Colombia, or Afghanistan, and trawling those bloody waters won't suddenly unlock the national impasse and erase biases against accents and culture and skin. Because slavery was an extreme reflection of racism, not the cause of it. Now, after the end of the "institution," why are we still waiting to be emancipated from racism and hate which was always on both sides, no matter how many speeches Lincoln gave?
Maybe it's time for another reference point that's not so grey and blue, black and white as the statement we're fighting for democracy in Iraq. If that's not quite the truth, we should reconsider to what extent Yankees fought to preserve the union and then end slavery, and rebels fought for states' rights and to protect white privilege. The truth is always more complicated than what the bureaucrats say, lining up heroes and villains before they send us to death.
I wonder how many soldiers had those ideals to begin with. Like the reenactors, plenty went to war because they took joy in a costume, having a break from the daily grind, or just because their neighbors did. And maybe that's where we find our lessons, including the solution to racism. Not in the vast trends of history, but in smaller causes, enormous effects. What we have to do is change daily habits. Shape what the Joneses do.
A couple of years ago, I saw a flyer for a Civil War reenactment upstate, several hundred miles from the nearest battle. I didn't understand. What exactly were they reenacting? Who went, putting on uniforms and waving flags? Saturday, in Walton, New York, I got a chance to find out.
My girlfriend and I spent most of our time wandering around in the mud and freezing our asses off, so I guess it was authentic. We saw costumed reenactors boiling coffee over wood fires, and making stew in front of their pup tents. About two thirds were in a Union encampment, the rest rebs.
While some were fanatics with homespun clothing and handmade shoes, most of the men had pants right off the rack for eighty bucks, and a few of the guys were actually girls, their tits tucked in behind suspenders. Still, there were plenty of women in hoopskirt and petticoat drag. A guy played banjo and sang songs of the era, while Abraham Lincoln chatted with visitors and waited to get shot.
In the rebel camp, I looked for gasoline-soaked crosses ready to burn, but didn't find anything untoward except a digital camera or two. Later, an art teacher and history buff in brigadiers dress demonstrated how cannons worked, assisted by a crew of six made up of high school students he'd trained. Another participant gave out shaky bits of history while he was explaining Confederacy currency. Apparently soldiers always paid for the animals they took (false), leaving the farmers holding worthless cash after the war (true).
The skirmish at 2 was like that first battle at Bull Run when the D.C. locals came out with their picnic baskets and lawn chairs to watch the shooting. In Walton, it happened on the vast grassy expense that doubles as a parking lot during the fair. The cannon were particularly impressive, smoke rings emerging from earth-shaking blasts.
One kid asked where the tanks were. Another wanted to know how come nobody was dead. The soldiers would limp a little maybe, but nobody wanted to just lie there in the field staring at the circling mountains while everybody else got to run around and shoot. Or maybe they were put off by the cemetery across the road. Finally we got a couple of dramatic deaths when a rebel kid got tired of fighting and persuaded his father to charge the Union position, where they impaled themselves on bayonets.
Everyone seemed satisfied when it was over. There was a little bit history, plenty of smoke and bangs, and when it was over you could go eat funnel cakes and deep-fried Snickers. As for the participants, they got to wear costumes like on Halloween, and feel a part of some grand national drama the country's still obsessed with.
Every year, we turn out books and films with an updated Scarlett or Rhett. We reconsider battles. And the image of master and slave still figures so prominently in national discussions of race that I imagine I must be dreaming when I look around the train after work and see Bangladeshi men slumped next to Ecuadorians, a Chinese lady reading next to a Mexican family, folks from Cuba, Brazil, the Ukraine, and only here or there a black or white hipster American integrating the place.
In the afternoon, their kids fill the train, still boasting a range of visible ethnicities, accents all pure New York, their attitudes and clothes the same. They're Americans, our future, though when you mention civil war what they think of first may be dead relatives back in Colombia, or Afghanistan, and trawling those bloody waters won't suddenly unlock the national impasse and erase biases against accents and culture and skin. Because slavery was an extreme reflection of racism, not the cause of it. Now, after the end of the "institution," why are we still waiting to be emancipated from racism and hate which was always on both sides, no matter how many speeches Lincoln gave?
Maybe it's time for another reference point that's not so grey and blue, black and white as the statement we're fighting for democracy in Iraq. If that's not quite the truth, we should reconsider to what extent Yankees fought to preserve the union and then end slavery, and rebels fought for states' rights and to protect white privilege. The truth is always more complicated than what the bureaucrats say, lining up heroes and villains before they send us to death.
I wonder how many soldiers had those ideals to begin with. Like the reenactors, plenty went to war because they took joy in a costume, having a break from the daily grind, or just because their neighbors did. And maybe that's where we find our lessons, including the solution to racism. Not in the vast trends of history, but in smaller causes, enormous effects. What we have to do is change daily habits. Shape what the Joneses do.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Remembering the War On AIDS
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
On Memorial Day, my grandmother, and anybody else she collared, would head from Louisville back to the small farming community of Litchfield, Kentucky. We'd join my aunts weeding our relatives' graves, and stick little American flags in the tombstones of dead soldiers or vets.
There'd be food afterwards, baked ham, a half dozen kinds of pickles, and such long conversations about people "before my time" I thought maybe it'd be me in the ground next, bored clear to death. Still, it wasn't so bad. I got a sense of who I was, felt connected to the land, the country and my family, all in one swoop.
Now, there's a whole new crop of corpses with graves so fresh there are no weeds. Iraq and Afghanistan are still chewing up American soldiers, while civilians there fall by the hundreds. That's war. I'd almost forgotten it was the heart of Memorial Day. Instead of just having picnics, that's what we should remember.
And not just dead grunts. We queers have our own losses. Our own fights. Stonewall was the first sally in the modern queer rights movement, though it was the fight against AIDS almost twenty years later that marked us like World War II.
By the time Tom Hanks took to the silver screen as the dignified dying homosexual in the 1993 movie, Philadelphia, two hundred thousand mostly queer Americans were dead from AIDS, a whole generation gone, and fags had been declared the national enemy.
It was to some degree understandable. Maybe you don't remember, but the disease was terrifying. People with AIDS wasted away into skeletons, had ugly lesions on their faces. They went blind, suffocated slowly from pneumonia. And fags were the first ones blamed when the press finally got around to reporting on it after years of silence.
Preachers rallied around our supposed depravity, and called AIDS the judgment of God. Fear of the Gay Plague helped jump-start the Christian Right and evangelical movements, even after journalists began to report on the "slim disease" among heterosexuals in Africa.
I guess it was a war after all -- the system fighting to have us die in silence. Queers fighting for funding and research and care. We also had to fight the intertwined enemies of homophobia and fear, which were pretty clearly reflected in Philadelphia in which Denzel Washington, the black lawyer, begins the film disgusted at homos and afraid he can get AIDS just from being in the same room with the white faggot Tom Hanks, though he ends, because it is Hollywood, understanding and respecting the dying man.
It's hard to say what the impact was. Philadelphia was one of the first films to show queers as more than limp-wristed pervs. In fact Tom Hanks was positively noble, demonstrating such a benevolent, good-humored regard towards human foibles he practically glowed. Coupled with years of actions by groups like ACT-UP, it helped move us a few steps beyond the stereotypical degenerate queens. Suddenly, we were courageous. We were united and fierce.
Now, here we are, all over national TV in Brothers and Sisters, and Ugly Betty. We're even Desperate Housewives. AIDS galvanized us, trained a generation of activists while it damn near destroyed us. It still could.
The seeds are there. Don't you wonder sometimes if changes in social consciousness would have happened as quickly without the discover of ARV cocktails in 1996? In a flash, the embodiment of gayness was no longer in ravaged skeletons, but in gym-buffed bodies more healthy looking than those of hets.
Any kind of "Gay is great" slogan would have more currency with a smiling, salubrious face. I doubt Grace would have cozied up to Will if he was sitting on the couch with an oxygen tank, an IV drip, and a face marked with lesions. Would we be marrying in California? Adopting? Hell, no.
As Memorial Day approaches, I'm grateful for our progress, but still, I remember the hundreds of thousands we've lost. Our gains sometimes feel like a cardboard set in a storm. Yes, one of the largest states in the union declared queers can tie the knot, but the State Supreme Court vote was only 4 to 3. Groups in California plan to challenge the decision. In the rest of the U.S., twenty six out of the fifty states have constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.
HIV is on the rise among gay men again, especially among young fags of color. How many can we stand to lose to ignorance and self-loathing? One? One thousand? A hundred thou? We count too much on ARV's. The virus could mutate and make them irrelevant. Besides, there's the tanking economy and health care costs rising as fast as those of gasoline. If we aren't vigilant, ARV's may end up out of reach, and leave us repeating history.
On Memorial Day, my grandmother, and anybody else she collared, would head from Louisville back to the small farming community of Litchfield, Kentucky. We'd join my aunts weeding our relatives' graves, and stick little American flags in the tombstones of dead soldiers or vets.
There'd be food afterwards, baked ham, a half dozen kinds of pickles, and such long conversations about people "before my time" I thought maybe it'd be me in the ground next, bored clear to death. Still, it wasn't so bad. I got a sense of who I was, felt connected to the land, the country and my family, all in one swoop.
Now, there's a whole new crop of corpses with graves so fresh there are no weeds. Iraq and Afghanistan are still chewing up American soldiers, while civilians there fall by the hundreds. That's war. I'd almost forgotten it was the heart of Memorial Day. Instead of just having picnics, that's what we should remember.
And not just dead grunts. We queers have our own losses. Our own fights. Stonewall was the first sally in the modern queer rights movement, though it was the fight against AIDS almost twenty years later that marked us like World War II.
By the time Tom Hanks took to the silver screen as the dignified dying homosexual in the 1993 movie, Philadelphia, two hundred thousand mostly queer Americans were dead from AIDS, a whole generation gone, and fags had been declared the national enemy.
It was to some degree understandable. Maybe you don't remember, but the disease was terrifying. People with AIDS wasted away into skeletons, had ugly lesions on their faces. They went blind, suffocated slowly from pneumonia. And fags were the first ones blamed when the press finally got around to reporting on it after years of silence.
Preachers rallied around our supposed depravity, and called AIDS the judgment of God. Fear of the Gay Plague helped jump-start the Christian Right and evangelical movements, even after journalists began to report on the "slim disease" among heterosexuals in Africa.
I guess it was a war after all -- the system fighting to have us die in silence. Queers fighting for funding and research and care. We also had to fight the intertwined enemies of homophobia and fear, which were pretty clearly reflected in Philadelphia in which Denzel Washington, the black lawyer, begins the film disgusted at homos and afraid he can get AIDS just from being in the same room with the white faggot Tom Hanks, though he ends, because it is Hollywood, understanding and respecting the dying man.
It's hard to say what the impact was. Philadelphia was one of the first films to show queers as more than limp-wristed pervs. In fact Tom Hanks was positively noble, demonstrating such a benevolent, good-humored regard towards human foibles he practically glowed. Coupled with years of actions by groups like ACT-UP, it helped move us a few steps beyond the stereotypical degenerate queens. Suddenly, we were courageous. We were united and fierce.
Now, here we are, all over national TV in Brothers and Sisters, and Ugly Betty. We're even Desperate Housewives. AIDS galvanized us, trained a generation of activists while it damn near destroyed us. It still could.
The seeds are there. Don't you wonder sometimes if changes in social consciousness would have happened as quickly without the discover of ARV cocktails in 1996? In a flash, the embodiment of gayness was no longer in ravaged skeletons, but in gym-buffed bodies more healthy looking than those of hets.
Any kind of "Gay is great" slogan would have more currency with a smiling, salubrious face. I doubt Grace would have cozied up to Will if he was sitting on the couch with an oxygen tank, an IV drip, and a face marked with lesions. Would we be marrying in California? Adopting? Hell, no.
As Memorial Day approaches, I'm grateful for our progress, but still, I remember the hundreds of thousands we've lost. Our gains sometimes feel like a cardboard set in a storm. Yes, one of the largest states in the union declared queers can tie the knot, but the State Supreme Court vote was only 4 to 3. Groups in California plan to challenge the decision. In the rest of the U.S., twenty six out of the fifty states have constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.
HIV is on the rise among gay men again, especially among young fags of color. How many can we stand to lose to ignorance and self-loathing? One? One thousand? A hundred thou? We count too much on ARV's. The virus could mutate and make them irrelevant. Besides, there's the tanking economy and health care costs rising as fast as those of gasoline. If we aren't vigilant, ARV's may end up out of reach, and leave us repeating history.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A Mother Of A Day
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It started weeks before, the commercials for flowers and candies and brunches, and the soft news spots that culminated Sunday when mothers and children were out in force, young ones and old ones, rich and poor. Broadway was lined with them going to shows. Restaurants dumped their normal menus to offer prix fixe meals at prices guaranteed to test your filial love. The security guard at the gallery announced, "The building is closing now. You must leave. All you women, have a Happy Mother's Day." Even beggars in the subways wished every female the same hoping it would earn them a few extra dimes.
Not from me. I was out with my girlfriend and her mother. And theoretically I didn't mind. We've all got biological mothers, even dykes, and why not show affection if you want? But there's an age difference between Marina and me that means when we're out with her mother, we get mistaken for three generations of women, and people get these Hallmark smirks on their stupid mugs just thinking about all that heterosexual procreation. They stare at me in particular, wondering if I'm the last of the line, or I've left my own kiddies somewhere ready to carry things on.
I can practically feel my ovaries glow under their X-ray vision, and my womb protrude from their expectations that if I don't have any, I must want some. And I did for five minutes. Until I started an online magazine and running it took as much time and money as raising a kid. The only difference was I could kill it when it hit six years of age. With equal regret, but no prosecution.
Next Mother's Day I'll get my freak on. Go out in leather chaps -- if I can find a pair to borrow. Though I might still be pegged the dyke granddaughter unless my girlfriend wears a shirt, "I'm with her." Or conversely, I'll go with the heterosexual flow, borrow a kid myself, bring it along and see if the appearance of four generations of females can score us a couple of free drinks.
With the growing environmental disaster, and population pressure, there should really be a holiday celebrating women who resist biological urges and haven't popped any kids at all. We should get tax breaks like factories who reduce carbon emissions. Not that many women do. Dykes included. We're obsessed with babies. We inseminate or adopt, and probably screw up our children like our parents did, and in a couple of years all those novels about failed holiday dinners will have queer parents at the center of the plot.
I hate holidays. The family stuff. How they progress in pairs. Thanksgiving then Christmas, Mother's Day and Father's Day all shadowed by images of the ideal nuclear het family in which everyone gets along, and a puppy begs for scraps under the table. The only holiday I can stomach is Gay Pride. Long live Queer Nation. And even that's changed.
Remember when we used to complain that all the news stations only shot drag queens, or leather guys with studded collars and whips? Now, it's all scrubbed earnest faces talking about diversity in identical tones. The newscasters don't even call us homos anymore. Except for the context, we're indistinguishable from the hets.
Is that progress? Invisibility in the midst of visibility? How far can it go? Will we get punished if we step outside the lines? Probably.
The Hallmarkization of America is not just aimed at queers. I couldn't help noticing that the Obama-adoring press reserved a special kind of race-tinged vitriol for the so-called big-mouthed, ambitious, self-centered Reverend Wright that radical white preachers like Jerry Falwell never got. Al Sharpton got his share last week when he got arrested blocking traffic to protest the death of Sean Bell and the court decision that the cops that shot him had no responsibility. He's still a charlatan, exaggerator and seeker of attention, not justice.
Other than skin, style, and maybe degree, there's little difference between them and any white garden variety politician, performer, preacher. Nobody hits the public eye without effort and ambition. Mother Teresa didn't become a household name by keeping her hands folded in her lap. The trick is to wear the right mask. Shape the context. Pander if you can. Smile when they offer you roses for Mother's Day. Be gracious. Keep a stash of Xanax in your bag. Drink heavily. Fit in. It's 2008, after all.
Like for professional golfers, the key to winning these days is conformity. Go to the gym. Shape your body to be like a mannequin. Eliminate the plaid pants, knickerbockers and beer bellies of yore. Hide the peculiar hats, individual styles, quirks, perversions, rage, delight. To succeed, put away joy.
It started weeks before, the commercials for flowers and candies and brunches, and the soft news spots that culminated Sunday when mothers and children were out in force, young ones and old ones, rich and poor. Broadway was lined with them going to shows. Restaurants dumped their normal menus to offer prix fixe meals at prices guaranteed to test your filial love. The security guard at the gallery announced, "The building is closing now. You must leave. All you women, have a Happy Mother's Day." Even beggars in the subways wished every female the same hoping it would earn them a few extra dimes.
Not from me. I was out with my girlfriend and her mother. And theoretically I didn't mind. We've all got biological mothers, even dykes, and why not show affection if you want? But there's an age difference between Marina and me that means when we're out with her mother, we get mistaken for three generations of women, and people get these Hallmark smirks on their stupid mugs just thinking about all that heterosexual procreation. They stare at me in particular, wondering if I'm the last of the line, or I've left my own kiddies somewhere ready to carry things on.
I can practically feel my ovaries glow under their X-ray vision, and my womb protrude from their expectations that if I don't have any, I must want some. And I did for five minutes. Until I started an online magazine and running it took as much time and money as raising a kid. The only difference was I could kill it when it hit six years of age. With equal regret, but no prosecution.
Next Mother's Day I'll get my freak on. Go out in leather chaps -- if I can find a pair to borrow. Though I might still be pegged the dyke granddaughter unless my girlfriend wears a shirt, "I'm with her." Or conversely, I'll go with the heterosexual flow, borrow a kid myself, bring it along and see if the appearance of four generations of females can score us a couple of free drinks.
With the growing environmental disaster, and population pressure, there should really be a holiday celebrating women who resist biological urges and haven't popped any kids at all. We should get tax breaks like factories who reduce carbon emissions. Not that many women do. Dykes included. We're obsessed with babies. We inseminate or adopt, and probably screw up our children like our parents did, and in a couple of years all those novels about failed holiday dinners will have queer parents at the center of the plot.
I hate holidays. The family stuff. How they progress in pairs. Thanksgiving then Christmas, Mother's Day and Father's Day all shadowed by images of the ideal nuclear het family in which everyone gets along, and a puppy begs for scraps under the table. The only holiday I can stomach is Gay Pride. Long live Queer Nation. And even that's changed.
Remember when we used to complain that all the news stations only shot drag queens, or leather guys with studded collars and whips? Now, it's all scrubbed earnest faces talking about diversity in identical tones. The newscasters don't even call us homos anymore. Except for the context, we're indistinguishable from the hets.
Is that progress? Invisibility in the midst of visibility? How far can it go? Will we get punished if we step outside the lines? Probably.
The Hallmarkization of America is not just aimed at queers. I couldn't help noticing that the Obama-adoring press reserved a special kind of race-tinged vitriol for the so-called big-mouthed, ambitious, self-centered Reverend Wright that radical white preachers like Jerry Falwell never got. Al Sharpton got his share last week when he got arrested blocking traffic to protest the death of Sean Bell and the court decision that the cops that shot him had no responsibility. He's still a charlatan, exaggerator and seeker of attention, not justice.
Other than skin, style, and maybe degree, there's little difference between them and any white garden variety politician, performer, preacher. Nobody hits the public eye without effort and ambition. Mother Teresa didn't become a household name by keeping her hands folded in her lap. The trick is to wear the right mask. Shape the context. Pander if you can. Smile when they offer you roses for Mother's Day. Be gracious. Keep a stash of Xanax in your bag. Drink heavily. Fit in. It's 2008, after all.
Like for professional golfers, the key to winning these days is conformity. Go to the gym. Shape your body to be like a mannequin. Eliminate the plaid pants, knickerbockers and beer bellies of yore. Hide the peculiar hats, individual styles, quirks, perversions, rage, delight. To succeed, put away joy.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Being From Kentucky
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Why not celebrate your heritage? Mexicans have Cinco de Mayo. I have Derby Day. I always mark it one way or another, usually with a couple shots of Wild Turkey and a look at the race on TV.
You've got an hour of mostly white women clutching their big hats in the breeze, and the newscasters doing feel-good stories. This year, some jockey's kid was overcoming an incurable disease, and two immigrant owners that escaped the camps in Castro's Cuba so they could celebrate God and freedom, bought a bargain basement horse that turned out to be good enough to enter the race, if not win it.
In bourbon-laced Kentucky, the sun shines bright, the people are gay. Hard times may come a'knockin', but they always go away if you hold enough steamboat jaunts and dogwood festivals and barbeques. After the two-minute gallop, the governor gives some kind of speech about how the Derby is always a glorious day for "the Commonwealth, the horse-racing capital of the world, and a great place to play (and work)." Maybe he also remarks how Abraham Lincoln lived there.
And after all that patting themselves on the back, playing out a pageant of the newly sanitized South, I can still only manage a thin-lipped smile, an expression that a fox might wear staring at the gleaming trap it escaped from after chewing off a leg.
I don't know exactly where the pain comes from. The things I miss most are mixed up with childhood: the leisurely pace, words stretched out and crumpled with a regional accent, slow-cooked food that was already being replaced by McDonald's, fitting in. You can't go back home.
Mine is a peculiar nostalgia, watching Kentucky embodied in an event I've never been to. The only time I ever went to Churchill Downs was with my grandmother who took me one grey summer day when the place was mostly empty and only the regulars were scattered here and there in the stands. My grandmother didn't hold with gambling, or drinking or smoking for that matter, but she and my grandfather worked there sometimes as retirees running the elevator to the owners' boxes to pick up a little extra cash. It sure beat the factory and the farm.
Besides that, my only other connection to the track was that for a while I had a crush on the daughter of a jockey, this Panamanian girl on my high school field hockey team whose brother ironically had a crush on me. I think they were the only Latinos in my school which was mostly white and black with a few Asians thrown in. Their parents were evangelicals and prayed over me once, rubbing holy oil on my knee where I needed surgery. It would make a better story if I were actually healed. But the only thing that happened was my skin was nicely conditioned before they cut it up.
On Derby Day, my neighbors mostly held parties at home instead of going to the track, and I'd spend the day sneaking the disgusting dregs of mint juleps and watching tourists get lost in my suburban neighborhood which I never understood because it's not anywhere near Churchill Downs.
Maybe that's what's peculiar, watching all those tourists grinning and laughing at some authentic Kentucky experience I never had, and reducing the rest to chicken and horses and lurking fundamentalists. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is just across town, though Louisville's downright liberal compared to the rest of the state if you don't count my mother.
Or maybe they hear the word "darkies" linger behind the replacement word, "people" in "My Old Kentucky Home," though it was a Northerner, Stephen Foster, that put it there, and despite the objectionable word, he meant the song as a lament for what a slave lost when he was sold down the river.
As in most things, we were split down the middle in the Civil War. Some of us rename streets to honor native son Mohammed Ali while the rest tear the signs down. We're rural and urban. A fundamentalist Christian gave birth to me. Things are complicated, which you only understand when you live there surrounded like most Americans by fast food, flat screen TV's, and a fading schizophrenic culture.
In exile, all I have left is the Kentucky Derby pageant where the crowd snickers as they sing "The sun shines bright ... the people are gay." I look for signs and portents. And on Saturday, the winner Big Brown kicked equine ass from the 20th post position, which hasn't happened since 1929, the year of the stock market crash. And Eight Belles, the only filly, broke both front legs after she finished second in the race. It doesn't bode well for the economy, or Hillary either.
Why not celebrate your heritage? Mexicans have Cinco de Mayo. I have Derby Day. I always mark it one way or another, usually with a couple shots of Wild Turkey and a look at the race on TV.
You've got an hour of mostly white women clutching their big hats in the breeze, and the newscasters doing feel-good stories. This year, some jockey's kid was overcoming an incurable disease, and two immigrant owners that escaped the camps in Castro's Cuba so they could celebrate God and freedom, bought a bargain basement horse that turned out to be good enough to enter the race, if not win it.
In bourbon-laced Kentucky, the sun shines bright, the people are gay. Hard times may come a'knockin', but they always go away if you hold enough steamboat jaunts and dogwood festivals and barbeques. After the two-minute gallop, the governor gives some kind of speech about how the Derby is always a glorious day for "the Commonwealth, the horse-racing capital of the world, and a great place to play (and work)." Maybe he also remarks how Abraham Lincoln lived there.
And after all that patting themselves on the back, playing out a pageant of the newly sanitized South, I can still only manage a thin-lipped smile, an expression that a fox might wear staring at the gleaming trap it escaped from after chewing off a leg.
I don't know exactly where the pain comes from. The things I miss most are mixed up with childhood: the leisurely pace, words stretched out and crumpled with a regional accent, slow-cooked food that was already being replaced by McDonald's, fitting in. You can't go back home.
Mine is a peculiar nostalgia, watching Kentucky embodied in an event I've never been to. The only time I ever went to Churchill Downs was with my grandmother who took me one grey summer day when the place was mostly empty and only the regulars were scattered here and there in the stands. My grandmother didn't hold with gambling, or drinking or smoking for that matter, but she and my grandfather worked there sometimes as retirees running the elevator to the owners' boxes to pick up a little extra cash. It sure beat the factory and the farm.
Besides that, my only other connection to the track was that for a while I had a crush on the daughter of a jockey, this Panamanian girl on my high school field hockey team whose brother ironically had a crush on me. I think they were the only Latinos in my school which was mostly white and black with a few Asians thrown in. Their parents were evangelicals and prayed over me once, rubbing holy oil on my knee where I needed surgery. It would make a better story if I were actually healed. But the only thing that happened was my skin was nicely conditioned before they cut it up.
On Derby Day, my neighbors mostly held parties at home instead of going to the track, and I'd spend the day sneaking the disgusting dregs of mint juleps and watching tourists get lost in my suburban neighborhood which I never understood because it's not anywhere near Churchill Downs.
Maybe that's what's peculiar, watching all those tourists grinning and laughing at some authentic Kentucky experience I never had, and reducing the rest to chicken and horses and lurking fundamentalists. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is just across town, though Louisville's downright liberal compared to the rest of the state if you don't count my mother.
Or maybe they hear the word "darkies" linger behind the replacement word, "people" in "My Old Kentucky Home," though it was a Northerner, Stephen Foster, that put it there, and despite the objectionable word, he meant the song as a lament for what a slave lost when he was sold down the river.
As in most things, we were split down the middle in the Civil War. Some of us rename streets to honor native son Mohammed Ali while the rest tear the signs down. We're rural and urban. A fundamentalist Christian gave birth to me. Things are complicated, which you only understand when you live there surrounded like most Americans by fast food, flat screen TV's, and a fading schizophrenic culture.
In exile, all I have left is the Kentucky Derby pageant where the crowd snickers as they sing "The sun shines bright ... the people are gay." I look for signs and portents. And on Saturday, the winner Big Brown kicked equine ass from the 20th post position, which hasn't happened since 1929, the year of the stock market crash. And Eight Belles, the only filly, broke both front legs after she finished second in the race. It doesn't bode well for the economy, or Hillary either.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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!
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!
Monday, April 21, 2008
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."
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."
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, March 24, 2008
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?
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?
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
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.
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.
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