By Kelly Jean Cogswell
My girlfriend and I snuck out of New York well ahead of Irene’s arrival, but didn’t miss much here in the Catskills what with the rain that came pouring down, and the creek roaring up, and the wind hurling tree branches against the cabin roof. The electricity is out again, and for the first time in years I’m writing with paper and a pen.
Between all that, and the earthquake that had our Manhattan apartment dancing around last week, I feel comfortable announcing the world is coming to an end. Or should. I’ve been longing to see an end to the world in which we Americans pretend to be invulnerable in every way, though all it takes is a nice sized hurricane to disable our aging East Coast cities that are already losing ground to warming oceans. And the collapse of any segment of our financial infrastructure, like, say, the housing market, can bring our economy to its knees. Likewise for our broken political system that comes to a halt on the federal level every time some Tea Party monkey throws a wrench.
America seems increasingly ridiculous. Like a naked wrinkled Lear raging at a storm, but with even less a chance of coming to our senses. And it’s only going to get worse. In a little over a week it will be September 11th and the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Politicians of all stripes will hover like vultures claiming the dead for themselves. Waving them like flags over struggling presidential campaigns. Eating them for breakfast. Using them as excuses to prolong wars, or conversely to retrench at home. To build bunkers. To prevent mosques. To celebrate the deaths of the likes of Osama Bin Laden who will no doubt be resurrected for the occasion, then killed again at will. To declare above all, that America is number one and a bunch of terrorist thugs can’t take that away from us.
I used to think only New Yorkers had a right to mourn all those secretaries, and delivery guys and stockbrokers and waiters, and cleaning people, and IT folks, and cops and firemen lost at the World Trade Center. Now, I believe the dead belong only to themselves. And we should raise no monuments to them. Including the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. whose new creepy fascistic memorial was featured in the same edition of The New York Times that revealed the increasing ways black and minority Americans are being disenfranchised all over the U.S. with voter drives being thwarted, and federal I.D.’s required.
There was also a story about James Craig Anderson, a black man robbed and beaten by a group of white teenagers, then mowed down by one of their pickup trucks in a hotel parking lot. There’s not much to do in Jackson, Mississippi, so let’s play scare the nigger. Extra points if he’s fag.
Yeah, that’s right. It took the Times twelve paragraphs to reveal this “family” man’s partner was a guy and together they were raising a relative’s kid. And only a couple more paragraphs for Times writer Kim Severson to announce sexual orientation wasn’t a factor at all, even though she did report the driver, Deryl Dedmon had been accused earlier of gay-baiting a preacher’s kid and taunting him for having black friends. Why the coyness? Was he out cruising, partying? Are his biological family homophobes?
I suspect the only reason we use headstones and monuments is to weigh down the dead, keep them safe and impotent in their graves, save the living from their fury. C’mon, MLK. Sound the trumpets. Roll that stone away.
We Americans aspire to govern the world, but can’t control the worst parts of ourselves. And the contests in which we can claim number one are embarrassing. Like our top ranking among developed nations when it comes to income inequality. Or the most likely to let superstition trump science. Because if there is God as described by the Creationists, and we were conveniently created in his image that very first week of the universe’s existence, then we can dominate the earth, and all its lands and creatures, including those second-rate countries like Iraq that should have pacified themselves by now. We can play god. Kill faggots and the sons of Cain. We can do what we like.
God knows accepting evolution throws our current world off kilter. You have to value patience, acknowledge that the arbitrary plays a role. We’re a part of the world. Not in control of it. What a relief. Let us decide as Americans to retreat to the second or third or fourth spot in the global order. Let the dead bury the dead. Embrace modesty and thoughtfulness. Let us call down another storm that will wash away the hubris and crap we’re saddled with. Let us begin anew.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Checking the Weather
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
We’re up in the Catskills with no car and I’m obsessed with the weather. Will the storm hold off until I can hike to town and back for groceries? Will the sun last long enough to dry the laundry? Is that rain, or just wind moving through the birches or elms or whatever has that silvery bark and dangly, whispering leaves? Will I catch pneumonia if I get soaked?
I check the thermometer probably as much as I used to check the news, and use my dial-up Internet minutes to visit Yahoo’s weather page. It’s a change from activist drama, and the spectacle of blundering politicians on the U.S. stage. They’re doing their best to destroy what remains of the economy, while trying to blab themselves into the hot seat of the White House.
Among the Republicans, there’s no heavyweight preparing to emerge as a serious, thoughtful candidate, but that doesn’t mean anything. In the 2000 bid, George W. Bush ran mostly on charisma and that gee-shucks grin of his. For that matter, a nice smile didn’t hurt a flip-flopping Obama, either, when he was on the campaign trail. We like a genial president. Not too short. With nice, thick hair.
Pretty soon, they’ll all come into town and wave the flag and shed crocodile tears over New Yorkers dead these long ten years. If I could, I’d stay in bed until November. Up here, the only thing I listen to on the radio is Yankees baseball, and even then it’s more for the human voices than the suspense. Somebody’ll get a hit. Somebody won’t. After nine innings or so the guys will go home with another win or loss. I don’t much care.
I get philosophical up here staring at the sky. I have a cold. I’m depressed. With a few minor edits, I’m prepared to announce resistance is futile; nothing will ever change. Or can. Mark Twain in his day was already announcing American politicians were all scoundrels, and I see no reason to dissent. And Thoreau, who retreated to Walden Pond, but apparently within a safe distance of his mother’s cooking, declared you could pick up last decade’s newspaper and it would read more or less like one from the next full of political or economic intrigue, and a war here or there.
How can you argue with that? There is always a war. There are always politicians and merchants and missionaries lying through their teeth and bamboozling the population at large. Even riots seem the same. The broken shop windows and burning cars in London seem like the second act of the riots in Paris a couple of years ago, also set off by the death of two minority kids at the hands of cops.
Community organizers hold a sedate march or two, then testosterone takes over and rioters damage above all the mostly poor neighborhoods where they live themselves. That’ll show ‘em. That’ll change things. Protesters, of course, say they’re doing it to show their anger with the cops, and the racist system that leaves them unemployed and unemployable, and cuts services to the broke before taxing the rich. But every now and then a kid would admit, “I like burning cars. It’s fun.”
So why lift your eyes above your navel? Try to push back? Or influence the outcome? Why pick a team when there are idiots on all sides? Why cheer? A lot depends on perspective. The usual reasons have to do with the particulars that fill in the blanks. Just where is that pesky war? Whose house burned down? Was it your sister on the latest foundering ship? Are you part of a community still getting hit with an epidemic? Is it you loading your suitcases when you can’t pay the mortgage?
Or did you just recognize something of yourself, something human in that emaciated body on the front page of the newspaper? Or that pedestrian on the way to town? It happens every now and then. That leap of kinship. Lately, I’ve benefited myself. Our neighbors recognize my backpack now and have begun to stop, offering me lifts into town or back. They slip me phone numbers. “Call. We’ll arrange something. We go into town almost every day.” They know we’re two women together and don’t really care. What they can’t get over is how we have no car. Now that’s perverse. One neighhbor, Carol, has ordered all her friends stop. What does it cost them to pull over? I almost always accept. Grin. They already know where I live.
Today, thunderstorms are likely, again, with a high of 71. There’s a chance of rain weighing in at eighty percent. Tomorrow, more rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Then showers. Then thunderstorms. Then showers. Still, I’m covered.
We’re up in the Catskills with no car and I’m obsessed with the weather. Will the storm hold off until I can hike to town and back for groceries? Will the sun last long enough to dry the laundry? Is that rain, or just wind moving through the birches or elms or whatever has that silvery bark and dangly, whispering leaves? Will I catch pneumonia if I get soaked?
I check the thermometer probably as much as I used to check the news, and use my dial-up Internet minutes to visit Yahoo’s weather page. It’s a change from activist drama, and the spectacle of blundering politicians on the U.S. stage. They’re doing their best to destroy what remains of the economy, while trying to blab themselves into the hot seat of the White House.
Among the Republicans, there’s no heavyweight preparing to emerge as a serious, thoughtful candidate, but that doesn’t mean anything. In the 2000 bid, George W. Bush ran mostly on charisma and that gee-shucks grin of his. For that matter, a nice smile didn’t hurt a flip-flopping Obama, either, when he was on the campaign trail. We like a genial president. Not too short. With nice, thick hair.
Pretty soon, they’ll all come into town and wave the flag and shed crocodile tears over New Yorkers dead these long ten years. If I could, I’d stay in bed until November. Up here, the only thing I listen to on the radio is Yankees baseball, and even then it’s more for the human voices than the suspense. Somebody’ll get a hit. Somebody won’t. After nine innings or so the guys will go home with another win or loss. I don’t much care.
I get philosophical up here staring at the sky. I have a cold. I’m depressed. With a few minor edits, I’m prepared to announce resistance is futile; nothing will ever change. Or can. Mark Twain in his day was already announcing American politicians were all scoundrels, and I see no reason to dissent. And Thoreau, who retreated to Walden Pond, but apparently within a safe distance of his mother’s cooking, declared you could pick up last decade’s newspaper and it would read more or less like one from the next full of political or economic intrigue, and a war here or there.
How can you argue with that? There is always a war. There are always politicians and merchants and missionaries lying through their teeth and bamboozling the population at large. Even riots seem the same. The broken shop windows and burning cars in London seem like the second act of the riots in Paris a couple of years ago, also set off by the death of two minority kids at the hands of cops.
Community organizers hold a sedate march or two, then testosterone takes over and rioters damage above all the mostly poor neighborhoods where they live themselves. That’ll show ‘em. That’ll change things. Protesters, of course, say they’re doing it to show their anger with the cops, and the racist system that leaves them unemployed and unemployable, and cuts services to the broke before taxing the rich. But every now and then a kid would admit, “I like burning cars. It’s fun.”
So why lift your eyes above your navel? Try to push back? Or influence the outcome? Why pick a team when there are idiots on all sides? Why cheer? A lot depends on perspective. The usual reasons have to do with the particulars that fill in the blanks. Just where is that pesky war? Whose house burned down? Was it your sister on the latest foundering ship? Are you part of a community still getting hit with an epidemic? Is it you loading your suitcases when you can’t pay the mortgage?
Or did you just recognize something of yourself, something human in that emaciated body on the front page of the newspaper? Or that pedestrian on the way to town? It happens every now and then. That leap of kinship. Lately, I’ve benefited myself. Our neighbors recognize my backpack now and have begun to stop, offering me lifts into town or back. They slip me phone numbers. “Call. We’ll arrange something. We go into town almost every day.” They know we’re two women together and don’t really care. What they can’t get over is how we have no car. Now that’s perverse. One neighhbor, Carol, has ordered all her friends stop. What does it cost them to pull over? I almost always accept. Grin. They already know where I live.
Today, thunderstorms are likely, again, with a high of 71. There’s a chance of rain weighing in at eighty percent. Tomorrow, more rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Then showers. Then thunderstorms. Then showers. Still, I’m covered.
Monday, August 01, 2011
The War on the Present
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
You see it in the city all the time, the big crane and wrecking ball bringing down whole blocks of perfectly good tenements or warehouses that people were living in until the week before. Destruction seems cheaper than renovating, and besides you can usually build higher, construct more apartments, more offices. Make more money. Make your mark. I think of it as a kind of transmogrification of the flesh.
You see it in politics, too. Those impatient, uncompromising extremists from both the right and left trying to bring a government to its knees, destroy it altogether. Tea, anyone? If they only had a blank slate, an empty lot, then anything is possible. A few go so far as to mow down whole classes of people. What are they but old stones standing in the way of the glorious future, or the even more glorious past? Toss gypsies or queers in jails or concentration camps. Get out the wrecking ball for landowners, native peoples, Jews, Armenians. The teenaged supporters of the Social Democrats -- the governing party in Norway.
I'd like to say I don't understand at all, how Anders Behring Breivik could slaughter all those kids to resurrect a Muslim-free Europe. Or jihadists can kill thousands of people imagining that the fall of something like the World Trade Center would bring down World Trade itself and somehow make room for the Grand Caliphate 2.0 to reemerge. But the destructive impulse belongs to us all.
Who hasn't wanted to wipe the smiles off smug faces, or maybe erase the faces themselves? Who hasn't yearned for a moment to throw off the yoke of society, and the smothering burdens of history or family and culture? In college, an artist friend of mine spent a lot of time fantasizing about invading museums with a squirt gun full of acid and taking out every painting in sight. And with all that gone maybe he could create something new, express himself without all that weight around his neck.
Plenty of queers would have preferred to see the end of marriage altogether, rather than add same-sex couples to the already unsavory mix. You don't want to be like your parents. And you can't bring down the master's house with the master's tools and all that. Though American history says you can at least change the inhabitants. We have a black president in the White House.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had an enormous photo of Mayor Bloomberg, the two guys he joined in marriage, and their little girls. I think they were at Gracie Mansion. It didn't take bombs, just a hell of a lot of work. We can always hope that now we've joined the marriage club, the whole unworkable structure will collapse from the weight.
Often, the destructive impulse would remain just a brief urge without a network of religious thought behind it. Not just because the perpetrators are often true believers, but because it's usually religion that shapes how we understand what change is and the role it plays.
A couple days after the slaughter in Norway, I was walking home from the Laundromat and saw a woman with an enormous wooden cross hanging from her neck. There was a human figure nailed to it, preparing for death and resurrection. I grew up with the image of the cross, and don't usually think much about it. But as big as it was, with a tortured human figure hanging from it, I suddenly thought, What a barbaric thing to worship. Worse, there's no more dangerous model of change than transformation through violence. Or sudden miracles for that matter. There is nothing incremental about that whole water to wine thing. The best, the only change, is violent, quick, and totally transformative.
No wonder, even direct action and street protest aren't quick enough for the destructive character. They don't just hate Muslims, or queers, or Jews. Or Democrats. Or Republicans. They hate time itself. Being constrained to this moment where they are not free to rearrange history or perfectly manipulate the future. They are furious at the compromised present. The bricks and mortar. Our limiting flesh. The way things are. They don't just want to redeem the world or create change, but annihilate everything.
Lately, I've started to wish for more real atheists, more agnostics, more people who believe this world is all there is, and this moment is all we have. Forget any magic wrecking ball that will clear away the present and resurrect the past or propel us into a perfect, heavenly future. This is all we've got. Hard as it is to accept, our future like our past is rooted here. You have to claim it to move on. Like my friend who wanted to acid blast art, but conserves it now.
You see it in the city all the time, the big crane and wrecking ball bringing down whole blocks of perfectly good tenements or warehouses that people were living in until the week before. Destruction seems cheaper than renovating, and besides you can usually build higher, construct more apartments, more offices. Make more money. Make your mark. I think of it as a kind of transmogrification of the flesh.
You see it in politics, too. Those impatient, uncompromising extremists from both the right and left trying to bring a government to its knees, destroy it altogether. Tea, anyone? If they only had a blank slate, an empty lot, then anything is possible. A few go so far as to mow down whole classes of people. What are they but old stones standing in the way of the glorious future, or the even more glorious past? Toss gypsies or queers in jails or concentration camps. Get out the wrecking ball for landowners, native peoples, Jews, Armenians. The teenaged supporters of the Social Democrats -- the governing party in Norway.
I'd like to say I don't understand at all, how Anders Behring Breivik could slaughter all those kids to resurrect a Muslim-free Europe. Or jihadists can kill thousands of people imagining that the fall of something like the World Trade Center would bring down World Trade itself and somehow make room for the Grand Caliphate 2.0 to reemerge. But the destructive impulse belongs to us all.
Who hasn't wanted to wipe the smiles off smug faces, or maybe erase the faces themselves? Who hasn't yearned for a moment to throw off the yoke of society, and the smothering burdens of history or family and culture? In college, an artist friend of mine spent a lot of time fantasizing about invading museums with a squirt gun full of acid and taking out every painting in sight. And with all that gone maybe he could create something new, express himself without all that weight around his neck.
Plenty of queers would have preferred to see the end of marriage altogether, rather than add same-sex couples to the already unsavory mix. You don't want to be like your parents. And you can't bring down the master's house with the master's tools and all that. Though American history says you can at least change the inhabitants. We have a black president in the White House.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had an enormous photo of Mayor Bloomberg, the two guys he joined in marriage, and their little girls. I think they were at Gracie Mansion. It didn't take bombs, just a hell of a lot of work. We can always hope that now we've joined the marriage club, the whole unworkable structure will collapse from the weight.
Often, the destructive impulse would remain just a brief urge without a network of religious thought behind it. Not just because the perpetrators are often true believers, but because it's usually religion that shapes how we understand what change is and the role it plays.
A couple days after the slaughter in Norway, I was walking home from the Laundromat and saw a woman with an enormous wooden cross hanging from her neck. There was a human figure nailed to it, preparing for death and resurrection. I grew up with the image of the cross, and don't usually think much about it. But as big as it was, with a tortured human figure hanging from it, I suddenly thought, What a barbaric thing to worship. Worse, there's no more dangerous model of change than transformation through violence. Or sudden miracles for that matter. There is nothing incremental about that whole water to wine thing. The best, the only change, is violent, quick, and totally transformative.
No wonder, even direct action and street protest aren't quick enough for the destructive character. They don't just hate Muslims, or queers, or Jews. Or Democrats. Or Republicans. They hate time itself. Being constrained to this moment where they are not free to rearrange history or perfectly manipulate the future. They are furious at the compromised present. The bricks and mortar. Our limiting flesh. The way things are. They don't just want to redeem the world or create change, but annihilate everything.
Lately, I've started to wish for more real atheists, more agnostics, more people who believe this world is all there is, and this moment is all we have. Forget any magic wrecking ball that will clear away the present and resurrect the past or propel us into a perfect, heavenly future. This is all we've got. Hard as it is to accept, our future like our past is rooted here. You have to claim it to move on. Like my friend who wanted to acid blast art, but conserves it now.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Women's World Cup Soccer: On Hair, Beer, Bigotry
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Wow! Little tiny Japan beat the Amazonian U.S. and took the Women's World Cup of Soccer. The final was an amazing game, at least after the first ten minutes when the Japanese players looked stunned just to be on the pitch, and would have been squashed if the American players hadn't been unlucky enough to hit the goal posts twice.
I'm not an automatic U.S. fan. I even rooted against them during their quarter final against Brazil. They looked more like they were playing rugby than soccer, fouling players right and left, knocking them over, trying to stomp on them. If they led Brazil for a long time, it was because a Brazilian player sunk the ball into her own goal.
At half time, a couple of American guys came in the bar for brunch and started to slam on the Brazilian superstar Marta, screaming, "Take that, you bitch," every time she was fouled or missed a shot. They also did fake foreign accents to make fun of the "stupid bitch" ref when she made a bad call. To support the Americans, they kept shouting, "Go ladies." That display of nationalist and racist misogyny was capped off by the rousing sound of males voices screaming "USA, USA," when the Americans finally won.
I might have tried again for neutrality in the U.S. game against France (Allez les bleues!) if not for how the Americans truncated the FIFA speech before the match. In the last few years, the global soccer organization has made an effort to grapple with bigotry in soccer, among both fans and players. But while the statement read by a French player to the crowd encouraged them to respect all forms of diversity, specifically naming race and sexual orientation, the U.S. version spoke blandly about discrimination, and dumped homophobia altogether.
Who would have imagined it? France, which for years has lagged behind developed countries in LGBT rights, has somehow come to the conclusion that we are human. LGBT issues are even a factor in the upcoming presidential campaign where the center-left Socialists are promising to legalize same-sex marriage. The public actually supports it, though still balking at adoption.
I was ashamed that the American women didn't have the same courage, even if it's been years since the U.S. has been a leader in LGBT rights. Same-sex marriage is now legal in a few states, but in most it's banned. The military policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell limps on in the courts, and the Defense of Marriage Act signed by a Democrat president, is now protected (half-heartedly) by one. LGBT people are still largely invisible in American society, especially in sports. Worse, American Christians actively promote homophobia abroad, including in Nigeria where dyke players were purged from the national soccer team before the Cup.
I'd love to know if the U.S. refusal to take a stand against homophobia came from the players and coaches, the national governing board, or corporate pressure. Marketers still steer clear of anybody perceived as LGBT with the lingering belief that seeing us as role models will somehow contaminate vulnerable children. For whatever reason, most American soccer players stick to the ubiquitous ponytail that is supposed to dismiss the suspicion of dykishness. One long-haired player I kept seeing in commercials, was even forced to trot out her own kids to prove her heterosexual creds. Maybe I'll blame American lesbophobia for their loss. If Hope Solo didn't have so much hair, she would have been able to dive faster to block the penalty shots, like the brilliant goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori.
I almost didn't see the game because I dreaded getting stuck in another horrible crowd where we might have to break a bottle over somebody's racist, misogynist, lesbophobic head. But we were lucky enough to be in Sunnyside, Queens where there were enough Japanese fans to fill a quarter of the bar. One man brought his three kids, including a pre-teen boy that pretended to be too cool to care until the Japanese won and it was high fives all around. A bunch of Japanese girls had also brought their white American boyfriends who had been instructed in no uncertain terms who to root for if they wanted to get any booty ever again.
Because of that mix, the atmosphere was totally different than earlier matches we'd watched. More amiable, appreciative. It helped that the game was better, too. Skill, not brutality on display. Fans acknowledged brilliant plays on both sides of the ball. I actually applauded American goals because they were well-struck, perfect. After their second score a fan tried to start the chant, U.S.A., U.S.A., but only one person joined in. The room fell silent. You could hear somebody snicker in embarrassment. It's harder to get all nationalistic and self-righteous when the opposing fan is visible at your elbow, and you have to squeeze past them to pee.
Wow! Little tiny Japan beat the Amazonian U.S. and took the Women's World Cup of Soccer. The final was an amazing game, at least after the first ten minutes when the Japanese players looked stunned just to be on the pitch, and would have been squashed if the American players hadn't been unlucky enough to hit the goal posts twice.
I'm not an automatic U.S. fan. I even rooted against them during their quarter final against Brazil. They looked more like they were playing rugby than soccer, fouling players right and left, knocking them over, trying to stomp on them. If they led Brazil for a long time, it was because a Brazilian player sunk the ball into her own goal.
At half time, a couple of American guys came in the bar for brunch and started to slam on the Brazilian superstar Marta, screaming, "Take that, you bitch," every time she was fouled or missed a shot. They also did fake foreign accents to make fun of the "stupid bitch" ref when she made a bad call. To support the Americans, they kept shouting, "Go ladies." That display of nationalist and racist misogyny was capped off by the rousing sound of males voices screaming "USA, USA," when the Americans finally won.
I might have tried again for neutrality in the U.S. game against France (Allez les bleues!) if not for how the Americans truncated the FIFA speech before the match. In the last few years, the global soccer organization has made an effort to grapple with bigotry in soccer, among both fans and players. But while the statement read by a French player to the crowd encouraged them to respect all forms of diversity, specifically naming race and sexual orientation, the U.S. version spoke blandly about discrimination, and dumped homophobia altogether.
Who would have imagined it? France, which for years has lagged behind developed countries in LGBT rights, has somehow come to the conclusion that we are human. LGBT issues are even a factor in the upcoming presidential campaign where the center-left Socialists are promising to legalize same-sex marriage. The public actually supports it, though still balking at adoption.
I was ashamed that the American women didn't have the same courage, even if it's been years since the U.S. has been a leader in LGBT rights. Same-sex marriage is now legal in a few states, but in most it's banned. The military policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell limps on in the courts, and the Defense of Marriage Act signed by a Democrat president, is now protected (half-heartedly) by one. LGBT people are still largely invisible in American society, especially in sports. Worse, American Christians actively promote homophobia abroad, including in Nigeria where dyke players were purged from the national soccer team before the Cup.
I'd love to know if the U.S. refusal to take a stand against homophobia came from the players and coaches, the national governing board, or corporate pressure. Marketers still steer clear of anybody perceived as LGBT with the lingering belief that seeing us as role models will somehow contaminate vulnerable children. For whatever reason, most American soccer players stick to the ubiquitous ponytail that is supposed to dismiss the suspicion of dykishness. One long-haired player I kept seeing in commercials, was even forced to trot out her own kids to prove her heterosexual creds. Maybe I'll blame American lesbophobia for their loss. If Hope Solo didn't have so much hair, she would have been able to dive faster to block the penalty shots, like the brilliant goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori.
I almost didn't see the game because I dreaded getting stuck in another horrible crowd where we might have to break a bottle over somebody's racist, misogynist, lesbophobic head. But we were lucky enough to be in Sunnyside, Queens where there were enough Japanese fans to fill a quarter of the bar. One man brought his three kids, including a pre-teen boy that pretended to be too cool to care until the Japanese won and it was high fives all around. A bunch of Japanese girls had also brought their white American boyfriends who had been instructed in no uncertain terms who to root for if they wanted to get any booty ever again.
Because of that mix, the atmosphere was totally different than earlier matches we'd watched. More amiable, appreciative. It helped that the game was better, too. Skill, not brutality on display. Fans acknowledged brilliant plays on both sides of the ball. I actually applauded American goals because they were well-struck, perfect. After their second score a fan tried to start the chant, U.S.A., U.S.A., but only one person joined in. The room fell silent. You could hear somebody snicker in embarrassment. It's harder to get all nationalistic and self-righteous when the opposing fan is visible at your elbow, and you have to squeeze past them to pee.
Monday, July 04, 2011
Holding Democrats Accountable in 2012
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
My god, there actually is one Democrat committed and competent enough to keep a promise to queers. I'd think our victory in Albany was a dream, except that straight and gay people alike continue to ask me if I'm getting married. I'm noncommittal. Some of the financial and legal benefits would be nice, but there's the fact that marriage itself remains kind of repulsive.
Especially for dykes. We're still saddled with the word "wife," with all its disgusting history of women being largely equivalent to cows bought and traded from one family to another, with an obligation to breed, be submissive, and lactate on demand. Just like queers in the Democratic party.
Still, I welcome every new right. Getting same-sex marriage passed in New York is a big step forward at a moment when we're still faced with Obama waffling at LGBT fundraisers, and garden variety hate on the street.
Two days after the 19th annual New York Dyke March, which was finally covered by network TV news in another notable victory, and one day after a gazillion queers filled the streets for LGBT Pride, I was walking around the East Village and heard one teenage boy tell another, "I don't want to seem like a faggot, but..." A couple of blocks later, there was a table of sneering heterosexuals talking about a longhaired "thing" that you just knew had a dick.
I wasn't particularly surprised, except that both conversations happened within a couple of minutes of each other. Homo- and transphobia aren't going to disappear just because we can trek to the altar. Even hets avoid the outdated institution. At least until they see how much it costs to get things squared away at the lawyer's.
Nevertheless, the relics on the national scene don't realize how much the New York victory has shifted our perception. A couple of weeks ago, I could have heard that monstrosity of a New Jersey governor Chris Christie dissing gay marriage and thought, "What an asshole." Now, I think, "What a fossil. With a tin ear like that, he'll never be president." There's no way Log Cabin Republicans will settle for vague assurances anymore. Not when GOP votes turned the tide our way in Albany.
Obama should be warned, too, sucking up LGBT dollars as he hems and haws about his evolving view of same-sex marriage. He's going to have to do better than that if he wants gay votes in 2012. Letting us into the sinking military isn't enough as long as the Defense of Marriage Act is still on the books. There are an awful lot of queer voters, and we don't just have the dream of equality, we've had an actual taste of it, and we want more than promises.
Worse, for the Democrats, Andrew Cuomo has shown us what real friends look like. And it's time for queer activists (and editors), to stay mum in the next election, rather than cast their weight behind ineffectual half-hearted "allies" that take our money and our votes and despise us. If we don't have higher standards, we'll get what we deserve, which is nothing.
As for me, there won't be any more internal struggles as I try to chose between the lesser of two evils. I won't do it. And I won't sit at home sulking, either. I will actively encourage queers to reward the few gay-friendly Republicans running for any office at all. And if there are no gay-friendly candidates actively working for us, I'll encourage people to put their vote in their pockets and keep them clean. I mean it. This is the moment. We have momentum, or should, if we dare to seize it. And if the Democrats want to rely on their usual tactics, threatening us with the evil Republicans if we don't passively vote for them, I say okay. No problem.
The truth is a Republican president will continue most of Obama's policies, because he has continued those of Bush. Guantanamo, I believe, is still open. Domestic spying continues. Horrible homeland security measures have been renewed under Obama's watch, and even more added. Sure, he was a better choice than McCain in the financial department. Obama at least acknowledged there was a crisis going on. He's better than Bush was on the international front, kind of. He passed a very mediocre health reform bill. And he's thrown a few bones to women and queers. But I hate to say it, Bush did, too.
If the Democrats want our votes, they should earn them. If Republicans earn our votes, they should get them. Simple as that. Consider this a declaration of independence, submitted for review on the Fourth of July.
My god, there actually is one Democrat committed and competent enough to keep a promise to queers. I'd think our victory in Albany was a dream, except that straight and gay people alike continue to ask me if I'm getting married. I'm noncommittal. Some of the financial and legal benefits would be nice, but there's the fact that marriage itself remains kind of repulsive.
Especially for dykes. We're still saddled with the word "wife," with all its disgusting history of women being largely equivalent to cows bought and traded from one family to another, with an obligation to breed, be submissive, and lactate on demand. Just like queers in the Democratic party.
Still, I welcome every new right. Getting same-sex marriage passed in New York is a big step forward at a moment when we're still faced with Obama waffling at LGBT fundraisers, and garden variety hate on the street.
Two days after the 19th annual New York Dyke March, which was finally covered by network TV news in another notable victory, and one day after a gazillion queers filled the streets for LGBT Pride, I was walking around the East Village and heard one teenage boy tell another, "I don't want to seem like a faggot, but..." A couple of blocks later, there was a table of sneering heterosexuals talking about a longhaired "thing" that you just knew had a dick.
I wasn't particularly surprised, except that both conversations happened within a couple of minutes of each other. Homo- and transphobia aren't going to disappear just because we can trek to the altar. Even hets avoid the outdated institution. At least until they see how much it costs to get things squared away at the lawyer's.
Nevertheless, the relics on the national scene don't realize how much the New York victory has shifted our perception. A couple of weeks ago, I could have heard that monstrosity of a New Jersey governor Chris Christie dissing gay marriage and thought, "What an asshole." Now, I think, "What a fossil. With a tin ear like that, he'll never be president." There's no way Log Cabin Republicans will settle for vague assurances anymore. Not when GOP votes turned the tide our way in Albany.
Obama should be warned, too, sucking up LGBT dollars as he hems and haws about his evolving view of same-sex marriage. He's going to have to do better than that if he wants gay votes in 2012. Letting us into the sinking military isn't enough as long as the Defense of Marriage Act is still on the books. There are an awful lot of queer voters, and we don't just have the dream of equality, we've had an actual taste of it, and we want more than promises.
Worse, for the Democrats, Andrew Cuomo has shown us what real friends look like. And it's time for queer activists (and editors), to stay mum in the next election, rather than cast their weight behind ineffectual half-hearted "allies" that take our money and our votes and despise us. If we don't have higher standards, we'll get what we deserve, which is nothing.
As for me, there won't be any more internal struggles as I try to chose between the lesser of two evils. I won't do it. And I won't sit at home sulking, either. I will actively encourage queers to reward the few gay-friendly Republicans running for any office at all. And if there are no gay-friendly candidates actively working for us, I'll encourage people to put their vote in their pockets and keep them clean. I mean it. This is the moment. We have momentum, or should, if we dare to seize it. And if the Democrats want to rely on their usual tactics, threatening us with the evil Republicans if we don't passively vote for them, I say okay. No problem.
The truth is a Republican president will continue most of Obama's policies, because he has continued those of Bush. Guantanamo, I believe, is still open. Domestic spying continues. Horrible homeland security measures have been renewed under Obama's watch, and even more added. Sure, he was a better choice than McCain in the financial department. Obama at least acknowledged there was a crisis going on. He's better than Bush was on the international front, kind of. He passed a very mediocre health reform bill. And he's thrown a few bones to women and queers. But I hate to say it, Bush did, too.
If the Democrats want our votes, they should earn them. If Republicans earn our votes, they should get them. Simple as that. Consider this a declaration of independence, submitted for review on the Fourth of July.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Saving My Pride
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's LGBT Pride. I should get out there, wave the rainbow flag, celebrate. Especially since our New York State legislators are on the verge of legalizing same-sex marriage, and the UN Human Rights Council finally declared lesbians and gay men shouldn't get stoned to death, beaten up, tossed out of our jobs, or hung by the neck until dead.
This is hugely important for queers internationally. Especially for activists like Wamala Dennis who's risking his life as the director of Icebreakers, a group fighting AIDS, and defending LGBT rights in Uganda. For the last couple of years, they've been beating off attempts to make homosexuality punishable by death. That anti-gay campaign is headed by David Bahati, a fundamentalist Christian linked to The Family, a group of U.S. evangelicals with deep pockets.
The UN council vote gives all us activists another tool. And I should be thrilled at these advances, including marriage, but every time I think about a bunch of het politicians or priests or anybody else sitting around discussing whether or not queers like me should have rights equal to theirs, I want to stop by the nearest farm supply store, pick up a couple tons of chemical fertilizer, insert a fuse, and POW! BLAM! KABOOM!
It may be part of the process, but c'mon. It's totally repulsive having people sitting around trying to decide if I'm as good as them, as adult, as human as them. Because that's what this sort of equality blab amounts to. A bunch of hets trying to decide if we're worthy of marriage's privileges and responsibilities. If we're worthy to walk the earth, or should be buried under it, and forgotten.
While I wouldn't mind getting a few of those little amenities hets have enjoyed so long, like immigration and inheritance rights, that come with same-sex marriage. And while I want us all to be safe in the streets and in our homes. I've got news for our hetero friends. We don't need your vote to join the human race, or be declared worthy of anything at all. So when you're slapping yourself on the back for your nice progressive vote, don't count on my applause.
I'm saving that for the real heroes. The LGBT people doing it for themselves, like the song says. Taking to the streets, speaking out. Like Wamala Dennis. And every queer kid brave enough to join the Gay-Straight Alliance and slap on a triangle. Or put on mascara when it's supposed to be a baseball cap, or wear a tux instead of some frilly horrible dress.
In France, my newest heroes are Aline Pascale de Raykeer and Stephanie Daumas who actually did an interview about their civil union (PACS) and desires for same-sex marriage, and let their regional newspaper use not just their names, but their faces. You want to know what a lesbian looks like? Here ya go. They're beauts.
We forget that it's not just violence that keeps queers invisible. It can be the weight of culture as well. The habits of silence. And shame. Until recently, French queers kept to their place, sticking to the usual détente of the closet. There was a kind of unspoken agreement that if you were discrete your sophisticated compatriots wouldn't bother you much, and you could pretend you were morally equal even if legally you were something they scraped off the bottom of their shoes. When queers sued for civil rights, they did it anonymously, as Jane or John Does. We never saw their faces. Never heard their names.
Not any more. French queers aspire to more than tolerance. The slogan for the Pride march in Paris this year: "For equality: in 2011 we march, in 2012 we vote." That's more like it. No beseeching. No excuses. No blab. Demanding directly what they want. Even if it is equality. Aline and Stephanie talked mostly about marriage equality, and wanting kids. But in France, when you use that word, equality, it implies much more. Because the nation itself aspires to liberty, equality, fraternity. It's carved in stone on all the public buildings. You see it a hundred times a day. In France, equality implies a horizon beyond the straitjacket of legal rights. It is social, cultural, political, philosophical.
Not so much in America. Still, I shouldn't rain on anybody's parade. We're creeping forward. Sooner or later we'll win marriage rights across the board. People will get hitched, and when, as I suspect, society doesn't throw roses, we'll wake-up, reconsider our illusions, want more. And queer kids looking from het couples to gay couples may well shake their heads in disbelief and reject them both as prehistoric and gross. They should have that chance to dump it all. Imagine some new way to live their lives. Yeah, I can celebrate that.
Lesbians! Dykes! Gay women. Get your rriot on at the Dyke March, Sat. June 25, 5 p.m. Leaving from 42nd St & 5th Ave, Bryant Park. Guys support from the sidelines.
It's LGBT Pride. I should get out there, wave the rainbow flag, celebrate. Especially since our New York State legislators are on the verge of legalizing same-sex marriage, and the UN Human Rights Council finally declared lesbians and gay men shouldn't get stoned to death, beaten up, tossed out of our jobs, or hung by the neck until dead.
This is hugely important for queers internationally. Especially for activists like Wamala Dennis who's risking his life as the director of Icebreakers, a group fighting AIDS, and defending LGBT rights in Uganda. For the last couple of years, they've been beating off attempts to make homosexuality punishable by death. That anti-gay campaign is headed by David Bahati, a fundamentalist Christian linked to The Family, a group of U.S. evangelicals with deep pockets.
The UN council vote gives all us activists another tool. And I should be thrilled at these advances, including marriage, but every time I think about a bunch of het politicians or priests or anybody else sitting around discussing whether or not queers like me should have rights equal to theirs, I want to stop by the nearest farm supply store, pick up a couple tons of chemical fertilizer, insert a fuse, and POW! BLAM! KABOOM!
It may be part of the process, but c'mon. It's totally repulsive having people sitting around trying to decide if I'm as good as them, as adult, as human as them. Because that's what this sort of equality blab amounts to. A bunch of hets trying to decide if we're worthy of marriage's privileges and responsibilities. If we're worthy to walk the earth, or should be buried under it, and forgotten.
While I wouldn't mind getting a few of those little amenities hets have enjoyed so long, like immigration and inheritance rights, that come with same-sex marriage. And while I want us all to be safe in the streets and in our homes. I've got news for our hetero friends. We don't need your vote to join the human race, or be declared worthy of anything at all. So when you're slapping yourself on the back for your nice progressive vote, don't count on my applause.
I'm saving that for the real heroes. The LGBT people doing it for themselves, like the song says. Taking to the streets, speaking out. Like Wamala Dennis. And every queer kid brave enough to join the Gay-Straight Alliance and slap on a triangle. Or put on mascara when it's supposed to be a baseball cap, or wear a tux instead of some frilly horrible dress.
In France, my newest heroes are Aline Pascale de Raykeer and Stephanie Daumas who actually did an interview about their civil union (PACS) and desires for same-sex marriage, and let their regional newspaper use not just their names, but their faces. You want to know what a lesbian looks like? Here ya go. They're beauts.
We forget that it's not just violence that keeps queers invisible. It can be the weight of culture as well. The habits of silence. And shame. Until recently, French queers kept to their place, sticking to the usual détente of the closet. There was a kind of unspoken agreement that if you were discrete your sophisticated compatriots wouldn't bother you much, and you could pretend you were morally equal even if legally you were something they scraped off the bottom of their shoes. When queers sued for civil rights, they did it anonymously, as Jane or John Does. We never saw their faces. Never heard their names.
Not any more. French queers aspire to more than tolerance. The slogan for the Pride march in Paris this year: "For equality: in 2011 we march, in 2012 we vote." That's more like it. No beseeching. No excuses. No blab. Demanding directly what they want. Even if it is equality. Aline and Stephanie talked mostly about marriage equality, and wanting kids. But in France, when you use that word, equality, it implies much more. Because the nation itself aspires to liberty, equality, fraternity. It's carved in stone on all the public buildings. You see it a hundred times a day. In France, equality implies a horizon beyond the straitjacket of legal rights. It is social, cultural, political, philosophical.
Not so much in America. Still, I shouldn't rain on anybody's parade. We're creeping forward. Sooner or later we'll win marriage rights across the board. People will get hitched, and when, as I suspect, society doesn't throw roses, we'll wake-up, reconsider our illusions, want more. And queer kids looking from het couples to gay couples may well shake their heads in disbelief and reject them both as prehistoric and gross. They should have that chance to dump it all. Imagine some new way to live their lives. Yeah, I can celebrate that.
Lesbians! Dykes! Gay women. Get your rriot on at the Dyke March, Sat. June 25, 5 p.m. Leaving from 42nd St & 5th Ave, Bryant Park. Guys support from the sidelines.
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Ratopias
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The dogwood is blooming in the back garden. The clematis is full of fat purple flowers, and for a change we have a million red roses. I finally learned that this wasn't the species you prune the hell out of, trying to get rid of what they call suckers to make room for strong, promising growth. No, the thick and thin branches alike put out their gloriously fragrant buds.
The only problem, and there's always one in Eden, is that the rats are tunneling up underneath the roots. We tried the home remedy approach of shoving mothballs down the hole because, we were told, they really hate the smell. We learned that was true, but not necessarily effective, because all it did was infuriate them. For the next few days they angrily tossed the little white balls right back up at us, scattering them among the hostas.
Then we tried putting our old standby down the hole, peanut butter-flavored poison, but they returned that, too, probably because by then it also smelled of moth balls. When they finally did abandon that hole, they just dug another a couple of feet away. Which we dropped more poison into. At least one rat ate it, because it dropped dead under the roses and I had to extract its stinking, maggoty corpse from among the flat hosta leaves and a few thorny rose branches dipping down to the ground.
At least we're allowed to kill them if we can, though murder doesn't really work in the long run. It just signals to them that they need to reproduce more, replace the little scattered corpses. If you want rats to disappear for good, you have to starve them, cover your garbage well, and prevent restaurants from dumping grease and other crap in the drains. Good luck with that in the East Village. The place is disgusting. When it really gets hot the smell in the street will curl your hair.
We're really American in that way, do whatever we can get away with, whatever makes it easier right now. Which I understand. Every now and then when mold starts growing on the roses, or some horrible insect starts chewing away, I get whatever toxic substance is nearest and blast the crap out of them. Screw the water supply.
Activists, of course, are almost always reactive in the same way. We try to kill the rats, or at least silence them, instead of changing the conditions that encourage them to breed. That requires an entirely different strategy. Even establishing legal guidelines for equality, like overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, is only mid-term thinking. How can we change the whole game?
It seems impossible. It probably is. But shouldn't we let ourselves think about the impossible every now and then? Let our minds loose? I admit I've been reading Emerson, Thoreau, even Oscar Wilde who has more in common with the others than I thought. In some ways he was more farseeing, also more practical. He was an early advocate of socialism, distributing resources so that the poor would be liberated from their poverty and the rich liberated from the stifling weight of their possessions, which would allow everyone to fulfill, he thought, their individual potential. Except he also saw how easy socialism was to hijack, turn into one more version of fascism.
In fact, he all but declared real socialism impossible, before going on to say, "This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish."
The bigger question is why Americans have given up on utopias. (And queers on liberation). Communism, of course, gave utopias a bad name. Slaughters and tyranny will do that. We had a brief, drug-fueled wave of optimistic thinking in the Sixties and Seventies. Now, our only politics is that of the possible.
Why? Maybe we really believe everything important has already been done, and now all we have to do is refine things a little. Or maybe both the Right and the Left have come to prefer dystopias, and visions of the end of the world. On one side they scream, my god, the Muslims are coming, or Muslim black commie socialists. On the other, watch out for the reign of Sarah Palin. Or Gingrich. Whatever the devil is du jour.
We've ceded our imaginations to the rats. But they are only good for comic relief. Like the ones in my neighborhood, that jump out at unsuspecting partiers on the street as they scurry from parked car to garden to garbage heap.
The dogwood is blooming in the back garden. The clematis is full of fat purple flowers, and for a change we have a million red roses. I finally learned that this wasn't the species you prune the hell out of, trying to get rid of what they call suckers to make room for strong, promising growth. No, the thick and thin branches alike put out their gloriously fragrant buds.
The only problem, and there's always one in Eden, is that the rats are tunneling up underneath the roots. We tried the home remedy approach of shoving mothballs down the hole because, we were told, they really hate the smell. We learned that was true, but not necessarily effective, because all it did was infuriate them. For the next few days they angrily tossed the little white balls right back up at us, scattering them among the hostas.
Then we tried putting our old standby down the hole, peanut butter-flavored poison, but they returned that, too, probably because by then it also smelled of moth balls. When they finally did abandon that hole, they just dug another a couple of feet away. Which we dropped more poison into. At least one rat ate it, because it dropped dead under the roses and I had to extract its stinking, maggoty corpse from among the flat hosta leaves and a few thorny rose branches dipping down to the ground.
At least we're allowed to kill them if we can, though murder doesn't really work in the long run. It just signals to them that they need to reproduce more, replace the little scattered corpses. If you want rats to disappear for good, you have to starve them, cover your garbage well, and prevent restaurants from dumping grease and other crap in the drains. Good luck with that in the East Village. The place is disgusting. When it really gets hot the smell in the street will curl your hair.
We're really American in that way, do whatever we can get away with, whatever makes it easier right now. Which I understand. Every now and then when mold starts growing on the roses, or some horrible insect starts chewing away, I get whatever toxic substance is nearest and blast the crap out of them. Screw the water supply.
Activists, of course, are almost always reactive in the same way. We try to kill the rats, or at least silence them, instead of changing the conditions that encourage them to breed. That requires an entirely different strategy. Even establishing legal guidelines for equality, like overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, is only mid-term thinking. How can we change the whole game?
It seems impossible. It probably is. But shouldn't we let ourselves think about the impossible every now and then? Let our minds loose? I admit I've been reading Emerson, Thoreau, even Oscar Wilde who has more in common with the others than I thought. In some ways he was more farseeing, also more practical. He was an early advocate of socialism, distributing resources so that the poor would be liberated from their poverty and the rich liberated from the stifling weight of their possessions, which would allow everyone to fulfill, he thought, their individual potential. Except he also saw how easy socialism was to hijack, turn into one more version of fascism.
In fact, he all but declared real socialism impossible, before going on to say, "This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish."
The bigger question is why Americans have given up on utopias. (And queers on liberation). Communism, of course, gave utopias a bad name. Slaughters and tyranny will do that. We had a brief, drug-fueled wave of optimistic thinking in the Sixties and Seventies. Now, our only politics is that of the possible.
Why? Maybe we really believe everything important has already been done, and now all we have to do is refine things a little. Or maybe both the Right and the Left have come to prefer dystopias, and visions of the end of the world. On one side they scream, my god, the Muslims are coming, or Muslim black commie socialists. On the other, watch out for the reign of Sarah Palin. Or Gingrich. Whatever the devil is du jour.
We've ceded our imaginations to the rats. But they are only good for comic relief. Like the ones in my neighborhood, that jump out at unsuspecting partiers on the street as they scurry from parked car to garden to garbage heap.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Let's Hear It For the Girls
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's almost time to commemorate those movement-launching warriors of the Stonewall Rebellion, so get out those rainbow flags and cocktail glasses and checkbooks. What a better way to celebrate legendary dykes and drag queens and street fags than by kicking back and doing nothing! Or doing something, but calling it nothing. Because nothing is more shameful these days than calling yourself an activist.
I noticed it recently on Cat Greenleaf's show, Talk Stoop, when she interviewed that musician, Pete Wentz, who spent most of his time pitching a UNICEF project bringing clean water to remote parts of the world, but recoiled in horror when good old Cat called him an "activist." No sirree, bob, he wasn't an activist, just a guy helping a good and deserving cause. You might as well have called him a bra-burner.
And just a few days ago, there was a whole article in The New York Times by Rich Benjamin in which he urged queers to boycott straight weddings, but then carefully declared he wasn't "a gay-rights activist."
"Given the choice between a round of golf and a “discrimination teach-in,” I'll take the golf," he wrote. "Back in college, when I was asked to take part in a protest, I declined because it conflicted with Uncle Duke Day, an annual keg and marijuana bash. But now I'm a conscientious objector to all heterosexual weddings. It's less activism than common sense."
What's with this new wave of hating on activists? Especially, when there are barely any to be seen. It was more understandable in the eighties and early nineties when you actually had functional street activist groups like ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers, and there was a discernible split in both the tactics and attitudes of the change-makers of our community.
There were the pissed off street activists who believe that shaming and inconveniencing bigots was the quickest way to see change, and that efforts against all the antigay campaigns bankrolled by the Christian Right had to be done by out and proud queers as part of a larger strategy of community-building, that yes, included speak-outs and teach-ins.
On the other side, seemingly, were the far more conservative and patient activists of our national LGBT organizations who believed we'd get further with the honey of campaign contributions and mellifluous requests rather than the vinegary, in-your-face fury of loud-mouthed, tasteless queers just out for attention. They counted on legislation, lobbyists, behind the scene meetings, and professional polling companies that recommended their media campaigns avoid the words lesbian and gay since those words clearly inspired hate.
In Idaho, in '94, the two went head to head when the Lesbian Avengers Civil Rights Organizing Project was invited into the state to help fight an anti-gay referendum. A bunch of national organizations were already there, and their field workers were actually seen ripping down posters with the words lesbian, gay or queer. They also warned local queers not to work with the Avengers because we were nuts, irresponsible, practically pedophiles.
They did everything they could to get us to leave so that they, the professionals, could get on with their own closeted multi-million dollar campaign featuring literature that talked all about civil rights and doing the right thing for all Americans, but never about lesbians, or gay men, the bi, or transgendered.
As it turned out, the regions in Idaho where the Avengers managed things with our out, honest tactics did far better than the regions where our nicely funded organizations did their work. I hated them for years. Bunch of asshats. And wasn't it ACT-UP that pressured all those drug companies to work harder fighting AIDS, wasn't it activists that started projects like Housing Works? And was all this the product of deranged minds and narcissists? Why should activist be a dirty word?
The quarrel's not just about tactics. I'm pretty sure that with a cooling down period we could have agreed that both sides were better off if the carrot, on occasion, had a working relationship with the stick. And vice versa. Street activists need a few inside men. The lobbyists-types are better off if there are bigmouths in the streets, and stock exchanges, and cathedrals, giving them more political room to maneuver.
But I don't think it's just that. For a while I decided it was a question of color and class. Bigmouths after all seem so white trash, so ghetto. No matter who they actually are. While the institutions are extremely white and upper, and upper-middle class, speaking with appropriately refined accents.
But the key could as easily be gender, since Mr. Benjamin takes such care to define himself as a fun-loving guy taking a commonsense stand, in opposition to activists who are what? Illogical? Emotional? Female? Dour lesbians who alternate teach-ins with hysterical actions governed by vagina dentatas?
Screw you. Let's hear it for the girls, the dykes, the drag queens. Let's hear it for the activists.
It's almost time to commemorate those movement-launching warriors of the Stonewall Rebellion, so get out those rainbow flags and cocktail glasses and checkbooks. What a better way to celebrate legendary dykes and drag queens and street fags than by kicking back and doing nothing! Or doing something, but calling it nothing. Because nothing is more shameful these days than calling yourself an activist.
I noticed it recently on Cat Greenleaf's show, Talk Stoop, when she interviewed that musician, Pete Wentz, who spent most of his time pitching a UNICEF project bringing clean water to remote parts of the world, but recoiled in horror when good old Cat called him an "activist." No sirree, bob, he wasn't an activist, just a guy helping a good and deserving cause. You might as well have called him a bra-burner.
And just a few days ago, there was a whole article in The New York Times by Rich Benjamin in which he urged queers to boycott straight weddings, but then carefully declared he wasn't "a gay-rights activist."
"Given the choice between a round of golf and a “discrimination teach-in,” I'll take the golf," he wrote. "Back in college, when I was asked to take part in a protest, I declined because it conflicted with Uncle Duke Day, an annual keg and marijuana bash. But now I'm a conscientious objector to all heterosexual weddings. It's less activism than common sense."
What's with this new wave of hating on activists? Especially, when there are barely any to be seen. It was more understandable in the eighties and early nineties when you actually had functional street activist groups like ACT-UP and the Lesbian Avengers, and there was a discernible split in both the tactics and attitudes of the change-makers of our community.
There were the pissed off street activists who believe that shaming and inconveniencing bigots was the quickest way to see change, and that efforts against all the antigay campaigns bankrolled by the Christian Right had to be done by out and proud queers as part of a larger strategy of community-building, that yes, included speak-outs and teach-ins.
On the other side, seemingly, were the far more conservative and patient activists of our national LGBT organizations who believed we'd get further with the honey of campaign contributions and mellifluous requests rather than the vinegary, in-your-face fury of loud-mouthed, tasteless queers just out for attention. They counted on legislation, lobbyists, behind the scene meetings, and professional polling companies that recommended their media campaigns avoid the words lesbian and gay since those words clearly inspired hate.
In Idaho, in '94, the two went head to head when the Lesbian Avengers Civil Rights Organizing Project was invited into the state to help fight an anti-gay referendum. A bunch of national organizations were already there, and their field workers were actually seen ripping down posters with the words lesbian, gay or queer. They also warned local queers not to work with the Avengers because we were nuts, irresponsible, practically pedophiles.
They did everything they could to get us to leave so that they, the professionals, could get on with their own closeted multi-million dollar campaign featuring literature that talked all about civil rights and doing the right thing for all Americans, but never about lesbians, or gay men, the bi, or transgendered.
As it turned out, the regions in Idaho where the Avengers managed things with our out, honest tactics did far better than the regions where our nicely funded organizations did their work. I hated them for years. Bunch of asshats. And wasn't it ACT-UP that pressured all those drug companies to work harder fighting AIDS, wasn't it activists that started projects like Housing Works? And was all this the product of deranged minds and narcissists? Why should activist be a dirty word?
The quarrel's not just about tactics. I'm pretty sure that with a cooling down period we could have agreed that both sides were better off if the carrot, on occasion, had a working relationship with the stick. And vice versa. Street activists need a few inside men. The lobbyists-types are better off if there are bigmouths in the streets, and stock exchanges, and cathedrals, giving them more political room to maneuver.
But I don't think it's just that. For a while I decided it was a question of color and class. Bigmouths after all seem so white trash, so ghetto. No matter who they actually are. While the institutions are extremely white and upper, and upper-middle class, speaking with appropriately refined accents.
But the key could as easily be gender, since Mr. Benjamin takes such care to define himself as a fun-loving guy taking a commonsense stand, in opposition to activists who are what? Illogical? Emotional? Female? Dour lesbians who alternate teach-ins with hysterical actions governed by vagina dentatas?
Screw you. Let's hear it for the girls, the dykes, the drag queens. Let's hear it for the activists.
Monday, May 09, 2011
The Snail's Revolution
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Since I wrote last, curfew was declared in Tunisia where demonstrators are protesting the interim government, and elections may not happen in July after all. In Egypt, Muslims and Christians are honoring their own recent revolution by killing each other. The Syrian government aims to prevent one by rounding up democracy protesters and shooting into crowds. Bin Laden who wanted an Islamic one got dead, along with Col. Khadafi's son.
And in just a few weeks, in delightful Paris, Texas, an African American man, Bobby Yates, is set to go on trial for rape even though he lost his lower limbs in a hunting accident over two decades ago and is also paralyzed. Yes, in 2011, the accuser, a 16 year-old white female, who came to his home with two adult white males in March of 2008, has been given the benefit of the doubt, despite Yates' demonstrated disabilities, and the 911 tape of him calling for help, and begging for the cops to come help him get rid of the three who had been beating on him.
It's also time for the usual spring antics of New York State Senator Ruben Diaz, who's organizing an anti-gay, anti-abortion march, scheduled specifically for March 15 to draw numbers from the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and rebuke the AIDS Walk held the same day. His main beef-- same-sex marriage which may be coming up for a vote in the New York legislature later this month, and may actually get approved.
Queers can already get civil unionized in Chicago which will largely give them the rights to visit their spouses in the hospital and parade around in knock-off Kate Middleton wedding dresses and buy a replica of her royal engagement ring in genuine plated metal, and purty cut glass advertised for only $19.99 on whatever channel that is that runs old movies and pitches ostomy supplies and those little dangerous carts that on Avenue A are always on the verge of running me down.
In more promising news, Andrés Duque in his blog Blabbeando reported that one of the most popular characters in "Gran Hermano 2011," Argentina's version of Big Brother, was transman Alejandro Iglesias who lasted for three months before getting voted out in March. In the process, he talked a lot about his experiences, and has become an important advocate for trans issues, including a law coming up for debate that would make it quicker and easier for Argentinean transpeople to get national ID papers that reflect their chosen gender and name.
The courts there have been relatively progressive, in 2008 allowing transwoman, Tania Luna, to change her name without requiring gender reassignment surgery, conceding the hard fought battle of transactivists to establish that gender isn't just about the body.
New York City is definitely lagging on that front, battling Joann Marie Prinzivalli, a White Plains transwoman born in Brooklyn who wants to change the gender on her birth certificate. She can't have surgery for health reasons, but in a conversation with LoHud.com asserts her identity is "not just genitalia". It's an urgent matter for transpeople. Most don't have surgery because it's hugely expensive, has health risks, and to a lot of people seems unnecessary because gender is located less between the legs than between the ears.
Her New York opponents pathetically claim they can't let her change her birth certificate because it sets too many precedents, and raises too many questions. Like whether a transwoman who still has a penis should be in a women's prison or a men's. And what gender they would be considered in a hospital.
Which strikes me as one thing that separates trans issues from LG and B issues -- just how far people get up in the business of transpeople. Not obsessing just about what you do in bed and whether or not you want to get it on with them, but about every little physical moment as you pass through the world from your choice of underwear to bathrooms to changing rooms.
Maybe the solution is to establish hundred of gender variations, not just two or three. Like little nations. So many that they became meaningless as brands of instant oatmeal, though they never would be. Countries are still duking it out, even if they share plenty of interests. And the citizens inside each of those are as split as anybody else into their little tribes of religion, custom, ethnicity, flavor, race,
Yeah, every time I check out the news, I'm reminded of how humans share something like 96 percent of their DNA with chimps, and 75 percent of their DNA with nematodes. Which does a lot to explain how patiently we have to root through the dirt to make any progress at all. In fact, sharing 48 modules of genes with plants, it's a miracle we can walk upright at all.
Since I wrote last, curfew was declared in Tunisia where demonstrators are protesting the interim government, and elections may not happen in July after all. In Egypt, Muslims and Christians are honoring their own recent revolution by killing each other. The Syrian government aims to prevent one by rounding up democracy protesters and shooting into crowds. Bin Laden who wanted an Islamic one got dead, along with Col. Khadafi's son.
And in just a few weeks, in delightful Paris, Texas, an African American man, Bobby Yates, is set to go on trial for rape even though he lost his lower limbs in a hunting accident over two decades ago and is also paralyzed. Yes, in 2011, the accuser, a 16 year-old white female, who came to his home with two adult white males in March of 2008, has been given the benefit of the doubt, despite Yates' demonstrated disabilities, and the 911 tape of him calling for help, and begging for the cops to come help him get rid of the three who had been beating on him.
It's also time for the usual spring antics of New York State Senator Ruben Diaz, who's organizing an anti-gay, anti-abortion march, scheduled specifically for March 15 to draw numbers from the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and rebuke the AIDS Walk held the same day. His main beef-- same-sex marriage which may be coming up for a vote in the New York legislature later this month, and may actually get approved.
Queers can already get civil unionized in Chicago which will largely give them the rights to visit their spouses in the hospital and parade around in knock-off Kate Middleton wedding dresses and buy a replica of her royal engagement ring in genuine plated metal, and purty cut glass advertised for only $19.99 on whatever channel that is that runs old movies and pitches ostomy supplies and those little dangerous carts that on Avenue A are always on the verge of running me down.
In more promising news, Andrés Duque in his blog Blabbeando reported that one of the most popular characters in "Gran Hermano 2011," Argentina's version of Big Brother, was transman Alejandro Iglesias who lasted for three months before getting voted out in March. In the process, he talked a lot about his experiences, and has become an important advocate for trans issues, including a law coming up for debate that would make it quicker and easier for Argentinean transpeople to get national ID papers that reflect their chosen gender and name.
The courts there have been relatively progressive, in 2008 allowing transwoman, Tania Luna, to change her name without requiring gender reassignment surgery, conceding the hard fought battle of transactivists to establish that gender isn't just about the body.
New York City is definitely lagging on that front, battling Joann Marie Prinzivalli, a White Plains transwoman born in Brooklyn who wants to change the gender on her birth certificate. She can't have surgery for health reasons, but in a conversation with LoHud.com asserts her identity is "not just genitalia". It's an urgent matter for transpeople. Most don't have surgery because it's hugely expensive, has health risks, and to a lot of people seems unnecessary because gender is located less between the legs than between the ears.
Her New York opponents pathetically claim they can't let her change her birth certificate because it sets too many precedents, and raises too many questions. Like whether a transwoman who still has a penis should be in a women's prison or a men's. And what gender they would be considered in a hospital.
Which strikes me as one thing that separates trans issues from LG and B issues -- just how far people get up in the business of transpeople. Not obsessing just about what you do in bed and whether or not you want to get it on with them, but about every little physical moment as you pass through the world from your choice of underwear to bathrooms to changing rooms.
Maybe the solution is to establish hundred of gender variations, not just two or three. Like little nations. So many that they became meaningless as brands of instant oatmeal, though they never would be. Countries are still duking it out, even if they share plenty of interests. And the citizens inside each of those are as split as anybody else into their little tribes of religion, custom, ethnicity, flavor, race,
Yeah, every time I check out the news, I'm reminded of how humans share something like 96 percent of their DNA with chimps, and 75 percent of their DNA with nematodes. Which does a lot to explain how patiently we have to root through the dirt to make any progress at all. In fact, sharing 48 modules of genes with plants, it's a miracle we can walk upright at all.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Danger for Women, Queers In Hungary
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
While the world watches people in North Africa and the Middle East struggle for democratic reform, Christian extremists in Hungary have been busy unraveling them.
Hungary's new constitution, recently approved and slated to go into effect in January 2012, is a particular triumph for demagogues, grafters, and bigots of all stripes. Railroaded through parliament by the right-wing party Fidesz, which seized control last year with an unprecedented two-thirds parliamentary majority, it declares Hungary a Christian nation in the first few lines, and goes on from there to beef up presidential powers, and undermine rights for LGBT people and women.
Article M of the constitution reads that "Hungary protects the institution of marriage between man and woman, a matrimonial relationship voluntarily established, as well as the family as the basis for the survival of the nation."
That clause not only bans future and full equality in marriage, but seems to lay the groundwork to challenge the 1996 law recognizing inheritance and pension rights for common-law marriage for couples of any orientation, and the 2007 law that allows same-sex couples to officially register as partners, getting most of the same rights as heterosexual spouses except for the notable exceptions of adoption and artificial insemination.
The constitution also attacks abortion rights by declaring: "Human dignity is inviolable. Everyone has the right to life and human dignity. The life of a fetus will be protected from conception." Paired with law declaring the (heterosexual) family as the "basis for the survival of the nation," rogue women and queers could easily be considered enemies of the state.
The new constitution also rewards heterosexual people with extra votes in the bizarre provision that parents can vote on behalf of their underage children. For instance, if a couple has seven or eight kids, that's how many votes they'll be able to cast. Parents with no kids, or queers who have chosen not to spawn will be left out in the cold. This unequal representation is only one of the many provisions that is getting scrutiny from the European Union's constitutional law advisory body. Ironic, since Hungary holds the EU presidency this year.
József Szájer, one of the Constitution's three authors, member of the majority party, and vice-president of the center-right European People's Party group in the EU assembly asserts that Hungary's new constitution is absolutely in line with the values of the Union. He even translated the constitution's clause about Hungary's historic commitment to defending EU values. "We don't say that, but that would mean our fights with the Turks in the Middle Ages to the 1956 revolution, when European values have been defended," he said.
And at a moment when the new government has raided pension funds and imposed crisis taxes on banks, the energy and telecom sectors, and retail companies, the constitution strips the highest courts of the right to provide independent oversight of the budget. It also allows the President to dissolve parliament if a budget is not approved.
For lesbians and gay men, the new fascistic, Christian regime outlined in the constitution seems to signal the end of an era of relative tolerance, and the beginning of antigay campaign designed not only to prevent gains, but roll back existing ones. In the U.S., at the height of the "Culture War" in the early nineties, when antidiscrimination gains were battled all over the country, we learned that homophobic crusades have consequences far beyond overturning a few laws. Physical attacks and harassment multiply. So do murders.
Last week, a study in Oregon showed that you didn't even have to have active antigay campaigns to impact LGBT kids. It was enough to live in a politically conservative area for suicide attempts by gay teens to increase compared to kids in areas defined as progressive. Researchers used an index rating the percentage of same-sex couples, Democrats, liberal views, gay-straight alliances, and anti-bullying and antidiscrimination policies.
What's interesting is that living in more conservative districts also led to more suicide attempts by straight students. It makes sense. The less visible diversity is, the more pressure to conform. At an age pretty much characterized by insecurity, fear and self-loathing, that can as easily turn outwards into bullying somebody lower on the totem pole, as it can towards self-harm and suicide.
In Hungary, fighting back is going to be tough. Since the Fidesz party was elected last April, they've not only been busy writing a new constitution, but taking over previously independent organizations, and creating a media council with the mandate to impose huge fines on media outlets for indefinable crimes like offending "human dignity."
The future of women and queers in Hungary depends a lot on how long the relatively independent media holds out, and whether or not the Christian extremist Fidesz party comes through on promises to reduce Hungary's 45 percent unemployment rates.
While the world watches people in North Africa and the Middle East struggle for democratic reform, Christian extremists in Hungary have been busy unraveling them.
Hungary's new constitution, recently approved and slated to go into effect in January 2012, is a particular triumph for demagogues, grafters, and bigots of all stripes. Railroaded through parliament by the right-wing party Fidesz, which seized control last year with an unprecedented two-thirds parliamentary majority, it declares Hungary a Christian nation in the first few lines, and goes on from there to beef up presidential powers, and undermine rights for LGBT people and women.
Article M of the constitution reads that "Hungary protects the institution of marriage between man and woman, a matrimonial relationship voluntarily established, as well as the family as the basis for the survival of the nation."
That clause not only bans future and full equality in marriage, but seems to lay the groundwork to challenge the 1996 law recognizing inheritance and pension rights for common-law marriage for couples of any orientation, and the 2007 law that allows same-sex couples to officially register as partners, getting most of the same rights as heterosexual spouses except for the notable exceptions of adoption and artificial insemination.
The constitution also attacks abortion rights by declaring: "Human dignity is inviolable. Everyone has the right to life and human dignity. The life of a fetus will be protected from conception." Paired with law declaring the (heterosexual) family as the "basis for the survival of the nation," rogue women and queers could easily be considered enemies of the state.
The new constitution also rewards heterosexual people with extra votes in the bizarre provision that parents can vote on behalf of their underage children. For instance, if a couple has seven or eight kids, that's how many votes they'll be able to cast. Parents with no kids, or queers who have chosen not to spawn will be left out in the cold. This unequal representation is only one of the many provisions that is getting scrutiny from the European Union's constitutional law advisory body. Ironic, since Hungary holds the EU presidency this year.
József Szájer, one of the Constitution's three authors, member of the majority party, and vice-president of the center-right European People's Party group in the EU assembly asserts that Hungary's new constitution is absolutely in line with the values of the Union. He even translated the constitution's clause about Hungary's historic commitment to defending EU values. "We don't say that, but that would mean our fights with the Turks in the Middle Ages to the 1956 revolution, when European values have been defended," he said.
And at a moment when the new government has raided pension funds and imposed crisis taxes on banks, the energy and telecom sectors, and retail companies, the constitution strips the highest courts of the right to provide independent oversight of the budget. It also allows the President to dissolve parliament if a budget is not approved.
For lesbians and gay men, the new fascistic, Christian regime outlined in the constitution seems to signal the end of an era of relative tolerance, and the beginning of antigay campaign designed not only to prevent gains, but roll back existing ones. In the U.S., at the height of the "Culture War" in the early nineties, when antidiscrimination gains were battled all over the country, we learned that homophobic crusades have consequences far beyond overturning a few laws. Physical attacks and harassment multiply. So do murders.
Last week, a study in Oregon showed that you didn't even have to have active antigay campaigns to impact LGBT kids. It was enough to live in a politically conservative area for suicide attempts by gay teens to increase compared to kids in areas defined as progressive. Researchers used an index rating the percentage of same-sex couples, Democrats, liberal views, gay-straight alliances, and anti-bullying and antidiscrimination policies.
What's interesting is that living in more conservative districts also led to more suicide attempts by straight students. It makes sense. The less visible diversity is, the more pressure to conform. At an age pretty much characterized by insecurity, fear and self-loathing, that can as easily turn outwards into bullying somebody lower on the totem pole, as it can towards self-harm and suicide.
In Hungary, fighting back is going to be tough. Since the Fidesz party was elected last April, they've not only been busy writing a new constitution, but taking over previously independent organizations, and creating a media council with the mandate to impose huge fines on media outlets for indefinable crimes like offending "human dignity."
The future of women and queers in Hungary depends a lot on how long the relatively independent media holds out, and whether or not the Christian extremist Fidesz party comes through on promises to reduce Hungary's 45 percent unemployment rates.
Monday, April 11, 2011
The New Culture War
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
I keep having flashbacks to the culture war of the early nineties. Like in December, when the Smithsonian precipitously yanked a video by gay artist David Wojnarowicz from its show "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" after two rightwing U.S. Representatives complained a few seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix were sacrilegious and offensive.
Two weeks ago at the National Gallery, a woman attacked Paul Gauguin's painting, "Two Tahitian Women," because it showed two women with bared breasts. When she couldn't extract it from behind the plexiglass shield, she pounded it with her fists, screaming that it was evil until a social worker from the Bronx tackled her and brought her down. She was worried about the children, what with the nudity, and two women. "It's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned." She also apparently claimed to be from the CIA and have a radio installed in her head.
This past week, the Republicans threatened to shut down the whole U.S. government over a budget fight. A main sticking point were conservative demands to defund Planned Parenthood and the UN Population Fund that provide women with information about contraception and family planning, even though both are already barred from using federal money to do actual abortions.
The national mood echoes the one Pat Buchanan amplified in his 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention. There, he launched a cultural war "for the soul of America" claiming the country would fall to the eroding horrors of gay marriage and "homosexual rights", abortion on demand, women in combat troops, secularism, rioting LA mobs, and "the raw sewage of pornography" otherwise known as queer art. Add immigration anxiety, and the war on terror, and you're almost ready for 2012.
The biggest difference between now and then for queers was that in the early nineties powerful queer voices actually confronted the bigoted values of this "Judeo-Christian" nation, particularly in New York City. If you took the bus, or went out for groceries, we found a paper trail plastered on billboards and lampposts. Our artists scribbled graffiti, designed posters for ACT-UP declaring Silence = Death, or campy flyers from the Lesbian Avengers showing Pam Grier holding her machine gun. The Dyke Action Machine spoofed American Gothic with dykes in overalls. And clothing designers like Kenneth Cole sent messages in support, reminding us what closets were really for.
If somebody got bashed, we marched to reclaim the streets. If the Catholic Archdiocese wanted to let gay men die, we took the fight to St. Pats Cathedral. School boards that wanted to erase any mention of queers from the curriculum had to face us at district meetings where we appeared with our pink or black triangles and banners and big mouths. We filled the downtown theaters where lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes got her start, and danced and fucked at provocatively named bars like the Clit Club.
Our energy was wild, sexy, angry, impish, whimsical, raw. But what's so scary now? Ellen, dancing in her sneakers with the grandmotherly audience members? That earnest character, Kurt, on Glee? Barney Frank? Rachel Maddow knows how to ask a pointed question, but we have no mass movement. Artists are safely back in galleries or museums, and the ordinary queer rarely leaves Facebook long enough to make it to a bedroom, much less a bar. We don't fight for rights or freedom, we organize like worker bees for equality. Nobody threatens to recruit.
And maybe, with our small gains tucked away, we could laugh at the crazy woman attacking Gauguin, or the Smithsonian for acting so hastily to dump Wojnarowicz if hate didn't continue to be so real. Virulent, homophobic campaigns still paint us as pedophiles, sinners, and pervs to prevent same-sex marriage and adoption. Kids are still getting bullied to death. We're still getting bashed.
The New York City Anti-Violence Project reports citywide problems. On February 22, Barie Shortell was attacked one block from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by a group shouting anti-gay slurs. On February 26, Robert Jenkins was beaten and choked because his Staten Island attacker claims he made sexual advances. On March 12, in Woodhaven, Queens, five men entered a party shouting anti-gay slurs, and killed 18-year old Anthony Collao when he tried to flee, even though the kid didn't identify as gay. On Sunday morning, March 27, two men followed Damian Furtch out of a West Village McDonalds and beat the crap out of him while using anti-gay insults. This winter I heard about a dyke and her girlfriend getting attacked and not bothering to report it. I suspect there are more. I'm not sure young queers even know AVP exists.
The war is ongoing, but are we really fighting back?
I keep having flashbacks to the culture war of the early nineties. Like in December, when the Smithsonian precipitously yanked a video by gay artist David Wojnarowicz from its show "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" after two rightwing U.S. Representatives complained a few seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix were sacrilegious and offensive.
Two weeks ago at the National Gallery, a woman attacked Paul Gauguin's painting, "Two Tahitian Women," because it showed two women with bared breasts. When she couldn't extract it from behind the plexiglass shield, she pounded it with her fists, screaming that it was evil until a social worker from the Bronx tackled her and brought her down. She was worried about the children, what with the nudity, and two women. "It's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned." She also apparently claimed to be from the CIA and have a radio installed in her head.
This past week, the Republicans threatened to shut down the whole U.S. government over a budget fight. A main sticking point were conservative demands to defund Planned Parenthood and the UN Population Fund that provide women with information about contraception and family planning, even though both are already barred from using federal money to do actual abortions.
The national mood echoes the one Pat Buchanan amplified in his 1992 speech to the Republican National Convention. There, he launched a cultural war "for the soul of America" claiming the country would fall to the eroding horrors of gay marriage and "homosexual rights", abortion on demand, women in combat troops, secularism, rioting LA mobs, and "the raw sewage of pornography" otherwise known as queer art. Add immigration anxiety, and the war on terror, and you're almost ready for 2012.
The biggest difference between now and then for queers was that in the early nineties powerful queer voices actually confronted the bigoted values of this "Judeo-Christian" nation, particularly in New York City. If you took the bus, or went out for groceries, we found a paper trail plastered on billboards and lampposts. Our artists scribbled graffiti, designed posters for ACT-UP declaring Silence = Death, or campy flyers from the Lesbian Avengers showing Pam Grier holding her machine gun. The Dyke Action Machine spoofed American Gothic with dykes in overalls. And clothing designers like Kenneth Cole sent messages in support, reminding us what closets were really for.
If somebody got bashed, we marched to reclaim the streets. If the Catholic Archdiocese wanted to let gay men die, we took the fight to St. Pats Cathedral. School boards that wanted to erase any mention of queers from the curriculum had to face us at district meetings where we appeared with our pink or black triangles and banners and big mouths. We filled the downtown theaters where lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes got her start, and danced and fucked at provocatively named bars like the Clit Club.
Our energy was wild, sexy, angry, impish, whimsical, raw. But what's so scary now? Ellen, dancing in her sneakers with the grandmotherly audience members? That earnest character, Kurt, on Glee? Barney Frank? Rachel Maddow knows how to ask a pointed question, but we have no mass movement. Artists are safely back in galleries or museums, and the ordinary queer rarely leaves Facebook long enough to make it to a bedroom, much less a bar. We don't fight for rights or freedom, we organize like worker bees for equality. Nobody threatens to recruit.
And maybe, with our small gains tucked away, we could laugh at the crazy woman attacking Gauguin, or the Smithsonian for acting so hastily to dump Wojnarowicz if hate didn't continue to be so real. Virulent, homophobic campaigns still paint us as pedophiles, sinners, and pervs to prevent same-sex marriage and adoption. Kids are still getting bullied to death. We're still getting bashed.
The New York City Anti-Violence Project reports citywide problems. On February 22, Barie Shortell was attacked one block from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by a group shouting anti-gay slurs. On February 26, Robert Jenkins was beaten and choked because his Staten Island attacker claims he made sexual advances. On March 12, in Woodhaven, Queens, five men entered a party shouting anti-gay slurs, and killed 18-year old Anthony Collao when he tried to flee, even though the kid didn't identify as gay. On Sunday morning, March 27, two men followed Damian Furtch out of a West Village McDonalds and beat the crap out of him while using anti-gay insults. This winter I heard about a dyke and her girlfriend getting attacked and not bothering to report it. I suspect there are more. I'm not sure young queers even know AVP exists.
The war is ongoing, but are we really fighting back?
Monday, March 28, 2011
The Company of Women
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Sorry. I'm not done writing about Kentucky and my family. My mother's gotten sick and I spend way too much time dialing the 502 area code checking her health and dealing with relations who smugly believe they're not homophobes, but somehow can't bring themselves to use the words "gay" or "lesbian" or even "queer." Yesterday, my sister actually referred to my, ummm, "situation."
We've heard it a hundred times in films. Somebody murmurs, "We've got a situation here, people," and the next thing you know, secret service guys are crawling out of the closet, guns drawn, and throwing themselves on the perp. I started looking around for one before I realized she was talking about me.
Not that she doesn't have a point. My family thinks I avoided them for thirteen years because I was ashamed of being a dyke, when the truth is their pious tones of acceptance still make me want to buy an automatic and mow the bigots down. I was saving their lives. Saving mine. I am a menace.
I would have ended the conversation right there if we weren't talking about my mother whose voice now shakes with age and illness. She's terrified of being dependent, though it's hard to tell how much is real, how much the usual hysteria. I'm not sure it matters.
Pity has mostly replaced rage where my family is concerned. Especially for the women. With few exceptions, they eat and drink misery, lament like Job about their failing bodies, rotten husbands, the injustice of the world. And do absolutely nothing about them. Have diabetes? Pick up another cigarette, grab a smoothie at McDonald's. That'll show 'em.
My mother's specialty was attacking her children as lazy and fat like their father, then buying dozens of donuts to keep them that way. The bravest thing she ever did was demand a divorce. And it almost killed her. My grandmother preferred the longsuffering model. The long, loud sighs, the guilt-tripping, "Oh, my hands, my knees, how they hurt. You're young. Why don't you come live with me and help me?" She embraced the attendant privileges of the saint and victim.
It's not that these women have no different, better sides, but the accepted tradition is to submerge their humor, intelligence, creativity in a pool of misery, bile, and superiority. For years, I thought that summed up what women were. Sure there were figures like Geraldine Ferraro, getting her law degree at night, rising through the ranks, earning a VP nomination from Mondale, making a speech to the Democratic National Convention the summer I graduated from high school. But she was from a different universe. Another planet. The TV wasn't real. Everything in the newspapers was foreign, not just the stuff in the international section. What did she have to do with us? Or with me?
And while we can have a conversation about the role of misogyny in all this, and the men who keep encouraging women to turn the other cheek so they can keep pounding away at naked flesh, I'm more interested in female complicity. At how remarkably easy it seems for victims to embrace the role they're offered. All you have to do is stay where you are. Do nothing. Bare your throat for the knife, then go straight to heaven, after you teach your daughters to do the same.
If I escaped at all, it was because the definition of woman was, by default, heterosexual. Women may have been considered the opposite of men, but they were also constantly trying to pair with them. Even before I knew I was a dyke I wasn't going to fight other girls over the boys at school, squeeze myself into tight jeans, wear big ugly hair and war paint. There was no dignity in it.
It pretty much took the Lesbian Avengers, all those dozens of women, to reshape the way I saw the female of our species. Passivity wasn't valued in a direct action group. Neither were displays of sacrifice and goodness that began to seem like so much narcissism.
Ironically, the Avengers were perfectly in keeping with my Christian training in which turning the other cheek was not mutually exclusive to fighting injustice, beating plowshares into swords, condemning Pharisees, dumping relatives to save yourself. Jesus after all, wasn't shy about demanding that his apostles leave their families behind, let the dead bury the dead, and all that. Which suited me just fine. Though it banished me from the company of woman.
You see, I've lost the habit of sainthood. You can kvetch if you need to, no problem, but then you take action. You get your hands dirty, break nails. You push back.
Sorry. I'm not done writing about Kentucky and my family. My mother's gotten sick and I spend way too much time dialing the 502 area code checking her health and dealing with relations who smugly believe they're not homophobes, but somehow can't bring themselves to use the words "gay" or "lesbian" or even "queer." Yesterday, my sister actually referred to my, ummm, "situation."
We've heard it a hundred times in films. Somebody murmurs, "We've got a situation here, people," and the next thing you know, secret service guys are crawling out of the closet, guns drawn, and throwing themselves on the perp. I started looking around for one before I realized she was talking about me.
Not that she doesn't have a point. My family thinks I avoided them for thirteen years because I was ashamed of being a dyke, when the truth is their pious tones of acceptance still make me want to buy an automatic and mow the bigots down. I was saving their lives. Saving mine. I am a menace.
I would have ended the conversation right there if we weren't talking about my mother whose voice now shakes with age and illness. She's terrified of being dependent, though it's hard to tell how much is real, how much the usual hysteria. I'm not sure it matters.
Pity has mostly replaced rage where my family is concerned. Especially for the women. With few exceptions, they eat and drink misery, lament like Job about their failing bodies, rotten husbands, the injustice of the world. And do absolutely nothing about them. Have diabetes? Pick up another cigarette, grab a smoothie at McDonald's. That'll show 'em.
My mother's specialty was attacking her children as lazy and fat like their father, then buying dozens of donuts to keep them that way. The bravest thing she ever did was demand a divorce. And it almost killed her. My grandmother preferred the longsuffering model. The long, loud sighs, the guilt-tripping, "Oh, my hands, my knees, how they hurt. You're young. Why don't you come live with me and help me?" She embraced the attendant privileges of the saint and victim.
It's not that these women have no different, better sides, but the accepted tradition is to submerge their humor, intelligence, creativity in a pool of misery, bile, and superiority. For years, I thought that summed up what women were. Sure there were figures like Geraldine Ferraro, getting her law degree at night, rising through the ranks, earning a VP nomination from Mondale, making a speech to the Democratic National Convention the summer I graduated from high school. But she was from a different universe. Another planet. The TV wasn't real. Everything in the newspapers was foreign, not just the stuff in the international section. What did she have to do with us? Or with me?
And while we can have a conversation about the role of misogyny in all this, and the men who keep encouraging women to turn the other cheek so they can keep pounding away at naked flesh, I'm more interested in female complicity. At how remarkably easy it seems for victims to embrace the role they're offered. All you have to do is stay where you are. Do nothing. Bare your throat for the knife, then go straight to heaven, after you teach your daughters to do the same.
If I escaped at all, it was because the definition of woman was, by default, heterosexual. Women may have been considered the opposite of men, but they were also constantly trying to pair with them. Even before I knew I was a dyke I wasn't going to fight other girls over the boys at school, squeeze myself into tight jeans, wear big ugly hair and war paint. There was no dignity in it.
It pretty much took the Lesbian Avengers, all those dozens of women, to reshape the way I saw the female of our species. Passivity wasn't valued in a direct action group. Neither were displays of sacrifice and goodness that began to seem like so much narcissism.
Ironically, the Avengers were perfectly in keeping with my Christian training in which turning the other cheek was not mutually exclusive to fighting injustice, beating plowshares into swords, condemning Pharisees, dumping relatives to save yourself. Jesus after all, wasn't shy about demanding that his apostles leave their families behind, let the dead bury the dead, and all that. Which suited me just fine. Though it banished me from the company of woman.
You see, I've lost the habit of sainthood. You can kvetch if you need to, no problem, but then you take action. You get your hands dirty, break nails. You push back.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Queer in River City
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's hard to know where to start this week. Pro-democracy Libyan rebels are getting slaughtered by government forces. An unforgiving Mother Nature has been destroying Japan. New York's own Peter King seemed intent on launching an anti-Muslim witch hunt, though all the terrorists arrested in the U.S. this week are white Alaskans, and very American as they spout the rhetoric of the oppressed, while mostly trying to avoid substantial back taxes, prior gun charges, and domestic violence complaints.
For me, the big news is that I went back home to Kentucky for the second time in six months, after a gap of 13 years, and the plane didn't fall from the sky, or combust upon landing -- which I considered a real possibility. Instead I got a chance to look at Louisville and the surrounding region through the eyes of young queers.
I was there to give a talk on the Lesbian Avengers to students at Indiana University Southeast, but I'm pretty sure I learned more than them about the state of our Queer Nation. First, a couple of young lesbians in the audience talked about how a gay student was beaten up in a school bathroom recently, while a whole gang of kids looked on, but cops refused to classify it as a hate crime.
Then a dyke activist gave me a CD of a lesbian music group she'd played in during the early nineties, about the time I left, when I thought Louisville had no out dykes. The next day, the aging, twanging mother of a lesbian shop owner recommended a gay-friendly church. And at a party, a young black lesbian said she'd been all worked up about coming out recently, but was totally deflated when her parents said it was no big deal. Ditto for when she announced she wanted to be a drag king. "Well, we better go buy you some clothes," was the response. At a dyke bar, her dad actually knew a woman and her girlfriend. "Look, there's so-and-so."
The worst of it, for her, seems to be the persistent racial segregation of the LGBT community. Her closest friend is a young white fag, and they get hassled a little whenever they go to bars and clubs. What are you hanging with him for? Why are you with her?
The two share a house with his white boyfriend who is from rural Kentucky, but said he came out with no problem. His father still struggled, but wasn't horrible, and his mother was perfectly okay. Online, he's found other young queers from the same region, and they have a little Louisville network. Some of them are comfortable enough to have begun moving back home. He is considering it himself, and plans to enlist the help of progressive nuns in the area to get something going if he does return.
I started to feel kind of funny, and put it down to mixing wine and mojito and beer, but it may have been the unfamiliar sensation of hope. As a kid I went from Bethany Baptist Church to school to youth orchestra. In my rare visits back, it's mostly been family trauma in a homophobic swamp. Imagine getting support when you come out. Imagine expecting help from your church.
We sat at the party and contemplated each other in mutual awe. They thought it was cool I was living in New York and had been a Lesbian Avenger. I was impressed that they were living at home, in Kentucky, smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. I may have scrapped with the NYPD, but when it comes to family, I'm a yellow-bellied coward with a Jell-O heart.
My het female friends also got to see Louisville through queer eyes, not so much from listening to our stories, but because when they were out with me, people generally assumed they were dykes, too. There was the lady at the supermarket who scowled, shook her graying curls, and turned away when she pushed her cart past ours. There were bemused waitresses and clerks. Some hostile stares. A few curious looks. No indifference. Not yet.
Most of it didn't really register with me, except the hag in the supermarket that I thought was hilarious. But not Leigh, who said she didn't know what she would do if she wasn't greeted with a smile. Because that's what they do in Kentucky. They smile and smile even at complete strangers, even if they plan to stab you in the back. But apparently that social contract is purely for straights.
While acknowledging the openings in this relatively progressive city, too many still consider queers a menace, and the disease we have so contagious, even a lengthy glance can let it in through the eyes, or nose, or mouth, like the common cold. Look long enough, you could find yourself doing the unthinkable. You could find yourself in love.
It's hard to know where to start this week. Pro-democracy Libyan rebels are getting slaughtered by government forces. An unforgiving Mother Nature has been destroying Japan. New York's own Peter King seemed intent on launching an anti-Muslim witch hunt, though all the terrorists arrested in the U.S. this week are white Alaskans, and very American as they spout the rhetoric of the oppressed, while mostly trying to avoid substantial back taxes, prior gun charges, and domestic violence complaints.
For me, the big news is that I went back home to Kentucky for the second time in six months, after a gap of 13 years, and the plane didn't fall from the sky, or combust upon landing -- which I considered a real possibility. Instead I got a chance to look at Louisville and the surrounding region through the eyes of young queers.
I was there to give a talk on the Lesbian Avengers to students at Indiana University Southeast, but I'm pretty sure I learned more than them about the state of our Queer Nation. First, a couple of young lesbians in the audience talked about how a gay student was beaten up in a school bathroom recently, while a whole gang of kids looked on, but cops refused to classify it as a hate crime.
Then a dyke activist gave me a CD of a lesbian music group she'd played in during the early nineties, about the time I left, when I thought Louisville had no out dykes. The next day, the aging, twanging mother of a lesbian shop owner recommended a gay-friendly church. And at a party, a young black lesbian said she'd been all worked up about coming out recently, but was totally deflated when her parents said it was no big deal. Ditto for when she announced she wanted to be a drag king. "Well, we better go buy you some clothes," was the response. At a dyke bar, her dad actually knew a woman and her girlfriend. "Look, there's so-and-so."
The worst of it, for her, seems to be the persistent racial segregation of the LGBT community. Her closest friend is a young white fag, and they get hassled a little whenever they go to bars and clubs. What are you hanging with him for? Why are you with her?
The two share a house with his white boyfriend who is from rural Kentucky, but said he came out with no problem. His father still struggled, but wasn't horrible, and his mother was perfectly okay. Online, he's found other young queers from the same region, and they have a little Louisville network. Some of them are comfortable enough to have begun moving back home. He is considering it himself, and plans to enlist the help of progressive nuns in the area to get something going if he does return.
I started to feel kind of funny, and put it down to mixing wine and mojito and beer, but it may have been the unfamiliar sensation of hope. As a kid I went from Bethany Baptist Church to school to youth orchestra. In my rare visits back, it's mostly been family trauma in a homophobic swamp. Imagine getting support when you come out. Imagine expecting help from your church.
We sat at the party and contemplated each other in mutual awe. They thought it was cool I was living in New York and had been a Lesbian Avenger. I was impressed that they were living at home, in Kentucky, smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. I may have scrapped with the NYPD, but when it comes to family, I'm a yellow-bellied coward with a Jell-O heart.
My het female friends also got to see Louisville through queer eyes, not so much from listening to our stories, but because when they were out with me, people generally assumed they were dykes, too. There was the lady at the supermarket who scowled, shook her graying curls, and turned away when she pushed her cart past ours. There were bemused waitresses and clerks. Some hostile stares. A few curious looks. No indifference. Not yet.
Most of it didn't really register with me, except the hag in the supermarket that I thought was hilarious. But not Leigh, who said she didn't know what she would do if she wasn't greeted with a smile. Because that's what they do in Kentucky. They smile and smile even at complete strangers, even if they plan to stab you in the back. But apparently that social contract is purely for straights.
While acknowledging the openings in this relatively progressive city, too many still consider queers a menace, and the disease we have so contagious, even a lengthy glance can let it in through the eyes, or nose, or mouth, like the common cold. Look long enough, you could find yourself doing the unthinkable. You could find yourself in love.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Owning the Streets in the Facebook Era
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
There have been riots ever since humans have had cities, strikes ever since we’ve begun leading mechanized lives. Mass movements have been claiming the streets ever since there have been masses. Facebook doesn’t change that. It’s just a new version of an old tool, media, that makes popular action easier and more effective.
Instead of sending human messengers, or letters, or telephone calls, you blog and tweet to share information, and rouse people to action. And when you get it done, instead of relying on word of mouth, or broadsheets, or TV or print coverage, you post a cellphone video on YouTube and hope it goes viral.
What all media does is augment the power of the street, not replace it. Especially for participants. Tunisia and Egypt have taught us that. If you want to know why, just ask where we literally live. Not in the blogosphere, but here, in our bodies, and out in the world.
It’s important for the powerless to remember, especially those of us defined by our flesh -- women, lesbians and gay men, the transgendered, people of color. Because that is what the world takes direct aim at, beating, bashing, raping, lynching the life out of us.
Hate crimes generally involve more brutality than other assaults. Why stab a faggot once, when you can do it a couple dozen times? The aim isn’t only murder, but destroying what they fear and despise. To this end, attackers are more likely to use hammers, baseball bats, ice picks, anything that allows repeated blows that can reduce a human being into so much pulp on the floor.
It’s why, in the segregated south, black men were systematically lynched, and women like Recy Taylor were so often gang raped. Sexual assaults were so common the NAACP had special investigators, like Rosa Parks, who did a lot more than refuse to give up her seat on the bus.
I’ll even stretch my authority and say dictatorships -- almost always justified as being for the good of “the people” -- are so brutal because they’re attempting not just to keep citizens submissive, but actually transform them in their imaginations from human beings into something less than ghosts. Every year it gets easier. Every year “the people” lose substance which the dictator sucks up like a vampire. Along with most of the national assets.
Reclaiming our existence from bigots, from haters, from tyrants, requires more than courts, online petitions, and updates, but re-establishing a physical presence, and waving the flags of our race, and gender, and sexual identity in front of hostile forces. Get big enough, the forces of power will be afraid, and either make concessions with the people always ready behind the scenes, or get in their private jets and fly away.
More importantly, taking to the streets allows us to reclaim our own sense of power and humanity. Once you relinquish your terror and step out there, something strange happens. Photographers always capture the raised fist of demonstrators, the grimace. But the truth is you’re as likely to start laughing with exhilaration. You must have seen it on the faces of demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia that began dancing long before their revolutions were won. I’ve tasted it myself in the Lesbian Avengers, stepping onto Fifth Avenue with enough others like me for my voice and life to be amplified.
I saw it, too, a couple of weeks ago, when I was watching a segment of “Eyes on the Prize” about the struggle to desegregate Albany, Georgia. The camera of these documentaries usually circles around men, but this time it showed a whole row of young women in a big meeting singing and clapping. The next day they were on the street, laughing their heads off, faces shining with joy.
You could put it down to their participation in the enormous civil rights movement that they must have known was going to change history, but they were also young girls in the midst of a personal revolution. There’s nothing else to call it, females emerging in a way that they’d rarely done before -- as themselves. For once, they were not scurrying past hoping not to be noticed. They were not afraid of getting raped by a gang of white men sneaking around in cars. If violence came, it would be direct. Face to face, between equals. These young women were radiant with existence, and screamed with laughter.
Freedom, finally, is not something that can be negotiated, legislated, or rebroadcast on YouTube. Though all that helps. It’s something you seize with both hands, claiming actual space in the physical world where oppression also lives.
There have been riots ever since humans have had cities, strikes ever since we’ve begun leading mechanized lives. Mass movements have been claiming the streets ever since there have been masses. Facebook doesn’t change that. It’s just a new version of an old tool, media, that makes popular action easier and more effective.
Instead of sending human messengers, or letters, or telephone calls, you blog and tweet to share information, and rouse people to action. And when you get it done, instead of relying on word of mouth, or broadsheets, or TV or print coverage, you post a cellphone video on YouTube and hope it goes viral.
What all media does is augment the power of the street, not replace it. Especially for participants. Tunisia and Egypt have taught us that. If you want to know why, just ask where we literally live. Not in the blogosphere, but here, in our bodies, and out in the world.
It’s important for the powerless to remember, especially those of us defined by our flesh -- women, lesbians and gay men, the transgendered, people of color. Because that is what the world takes direct aim at, beating, bashing, raping, lynching the life out of us.
Hate crimes generally involve more brutality than other assaults. Why stab a faggot once, when you can do it a couple dozen times? The aim isn’t only murder, but destroying what they fear and despise. To this end, attackers are more likely to use hammers, baseball bats, ice picks, anything that allows repeated blows that can reduce a human being into so much pulp on the floor.
It’s why, in the segregated south, black men were systematically lynched, and women like Recy Taylor were so often gang raped. Sexual assaults were so common the NAACP had special investigators, like Rosa Parks, who did a lot more than refuse to give up her seat on the bus.
I’ll even stretch my authority and say dictatorships -- almost always justified as being for the good of “the people” -- are so brutal because they’re attempting not just to keep citizens submissive, but actually transform them in their imaginations from human beings into something less than ghosts. Every year it gets easier. Every year “the people” lose substance which the dictator sucks up like a vampire. Along with most of the national assets.
Reclaiming our existence from bigots, from haters, from tyrants, requires more than courts, online petitions, and updates, but re-establishing a physical presence, and waving the flags of our race, and gender, and sexual identity in front of hostile forces. Get big enough, the forces of power will be afraid, and either make concessions with the people always ready behind the scenes, or get in their private jets and fly away.
More importantly, taking to the streets allows us to reclaim our own sense of power and humanity. Once you relinquish your terror and step out there, something strange happens. Photographers always capture the raised fist of demonstrators, the grimace. But the truth is you’re as likely to start laughing with exhilaration. You must have seen it on the faces of demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia that began dancing long before their revolutions were won. I’ve tasted it myself in the Lesbian Avengers, stepping onto Fifth Avenue with enough others like me for my voice and life to be amplified.
I saw it, too, a couple of weeks ago, when I was watching a segment of “Eyes on the Prize” about the struggle to desegregate Albany, Georgia. The camera of these documentaries usually circles around men, but this time it showed a whole row of young women in a big meeting singing and clapping. The next day they were on the street, laughing their heads off, faces shining with joy.
You could put it down to their participation in the enormous civil rights movement that they must have known was going to change history, but they were also young girls in the midst of a personal revolution. There’s nothing else to call it, females emerging in a way that they’d rarely done before -- as themselves. For once, they were not scurrying past hoping not to be noticed. They were not afraid of getting raped by a gang of white men sneaking around in cars. If violence came, it would be direct. Face to face, between equals. These young women were radiant with existence, and screamed with laughter.
Freedom, finally, is not something that can be negotiated, legislated, or rebroadcast on YouTube. Though all that helps. It’s something you seize with both hands, claiming actual space in the physical world where oppression also lives.
Monday, February 14, 2011
An Egypt For Everyone?
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
By the end of it, they were all in Tahrir Square - young kids hoisted onto the shoulders of their parents, old men arguing in groups, women and girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Even early on, soccer rowdies paired with the Muslim Brotherhood youth to beat back the cops, and at prayer, Muslims were ringed by Christians protecting them vigilantly from Mubarak’s thugs. Bean-eaters and steak-eaters sponged the blood from each other’s broken heads. We were there, too, lesbians, gay men, the transgendered, indistinguishably playing our part.
I got choked up watching, and if I were the believing kind, I’d get down on my knees and pray for this moment of grace to endure long past the first free election, and for Egyptians to figure out how to sustain that good will through the tough times of building a democratic state.
Even women passed through the crowd unmolested, scarves or not, because for a moment, the people in the crowd were all sisters and brothers united by a common desire not just for jobs, and bread, but freedom. You can’t write this stuff. You’d have to be pretty creative even to dream it. For too long Egyptians seemed resigned to a humiliating image as a nation full of long-suffering sheep that could be moved only by religious extremism. Now, they are courageous individuals, activists, artists, the new face of democracy itself.
I still can’t grasp the enormity of it. A thirty year dictatorship gone in a couple of weeks. And not by a military coup, or a group of revolutionaries (as we used to understand them) laboring for years in dark cellars, and dreaming of the moment they would rescue their longsuffering land, and as repositories of wisdom, claim the head of it.
No, the informal network of young Egyptians that seem to have sparked things off, sharing ideas and techniques, were led only by disgust at the tyranny and corruption, a desire for real freedom, and a willingness to learn from other nonviolent youth movements like that in Tunisia. If you were compiling dossiers on names that repeatedly came up among organizers, you’d have thick folders on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi more often than other Egyptian activists. Power holds little attraction for actual movement figures like Google executive Wael Ghonim who is content to yield to politicians now that Mubarak is gone.
Which doesn't mean he won't be involved. As somebody in the crowd at Tahrir Square noted wryly, “Now, we know our way here.” Translated, it means, “We’ll be back if the army refuses to relinquish power. If they refuse to lift the perpetual state of emergency. If the cops continue to torture. If they try to shut our mouths. If politicians steal, lie, abuse, or separate us, we’ll be back.”
The revolution must give queers confidence, too. It’s been ten years since the Mubarak regime launched an antigay campaign with the Queen’s Boat crackdown that landed fifty-two men in jail. They were subjected not only to police abuse and torture, but a media circus of a trial geared to distract Egyptians from grinding poverty, and establish the regime as defenders of Islamic morality instead of the Muslim Brotherhood. Twenty-three of the defendants were eventually sentenced to prison with hard labor, while the others were acquitted. Periodic crackdowns followed.
The reformed, secular state that protesters demanded would mean police will have less occasion to arrest LGBT people for offending public morality, the primary charge leveled against us in Egypt, a country without any specifically antigay laws. And with freedom of speech and of assembly, and a truly independent press, Egyptian queers will have the tools to fight homophobia openly. It will also be easier in the new Egyptian society where young people favor more tolerance for everyone.
Even if some old timer politician makes an effort to scapegoat queers as a distraction for their incompetence, and they probably will, it’s less likely the ruse will continue to work on a crowd that’s developed a taste for real change. And that gay man, or dyke, or transgendered person can always retort, “I was there, too, in Tahrir Square. I’m an Egyptian just like you. Are we equal or not?”
Reinventing the idea of citizenship is one of the huge accomplishments of the youth organizers. “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.” That entitlement is why people took to the streets, and stayed to clean up Tahrir Square after each day of protests.
Egypt belongs to them, now. They hold it in trust and guard their new democracy like a child. You can see pride and hope shimmering from faces in photos, from the TV screen, on YouTube. It is possible to change the world. The clean stones bear witness.
By the end of it, they were all in Tahrir Square - young kids hoisted onto the shoulders of their parents, old men arguing in groups, women and girls screaming at the top of their lungs. Even early on, soccer rowdies paired with the Muslim Brotherhood youth to beat back the cops, and at prayer, Muslims were ringed by Christians protecting them vigilantly from Mubarak’s thugs. Bean-eaters and steak-eaters sponged the blood from each other’s broken heads. We were there, too, lesbians, gay men, the transgendered, indistinguishably playing our part.
I got choked up watching, and if I were the believing kind, I’d get down on my knees and pray for this moment of grace to endure long past the first free election, and for Egyptians to figure out how to sustain that good will through the tough times of building a democratic state.
Even women passed through the crowd unmolested, scarves or not, because for a moment, the people in the crowd were all sisters and brothers united by a common desire not just for jobs, and bread, but freedom. You can’t write this stuff. You’d have to be pretty creative even to dream it. For too long Egyptians seemed resigned to a humiliating image as a nation full of long-suffering sheep that could be moved only by religious extremism. Now, they are courageous individuals, activists, artists, the new face of democracy itself.
I still can’t grasp the enormity of it. A thirty year dictatorship gone in a couple of weeks. And not by a military coup, or a group of revolutionaries (as we used to understand them) laboring for years in dark cellars, and dreaming of the moment they would rescue their longsuffering land, and as repositories of wisdom, claim the head of it.
No, the informal network of young Egyptians that seem to have sparked things off, sharing ideas and techniques, were led only by disgust at the tyranny and corruption, a desire for real freedom, and a willingness to learn from other nonviolent youth movements like that in Tunisia. If you were compiling dossiers on names that repeatedly came up among organizers, you’d have thick folders on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandi more often than other Egyptian activists. Power holds little attraction for actual movement figures like Google executive Wael Ghonim who is content to yield to politicians now that Mubarak is gone.
Which doesn't mean he won't be involved. As somebody in the crowd at Tahrir Square noted wryly, “Now, we know our way here.” Translated, it means, “We’ll be back if the army refuses to relinquish power. If they refuse to lift the perpetual state of emergency. If the cops continue to torture. If they try to shut our mouths. If politicians steal, lie, abuse, or separate us, we’ll be back.”
The revolution must give queers confidence, too. It’s been ten years since the Mubarak regime launched an antigay campaign with the Queen’s Boat crackdown that landed fifty-two men in jail. They were subjected not only to police abuse and torture, but a media circus of a trial geared to distract Egyptians from grinding poverty, and establish the regime as defenders of Islamic morality instead of the Muslim Brotherhood. Twenty-three of the defendants were eventually sentenced to prison with hard labor, while the others were acquitted. Periodic crackdowns followed.
The reformed, secular state that protesters demanded would mean police will have less occasion to arrest LGBT people for offending public morality, the primary charge leveled against us in Egypt, a country without any specifically antigay laws. And with freedom of speech and of assembly, and a truly independent press, Egyptian queers will have the tools to fight homophobia openly. It will also be easier in the new Egyptian society where young people favor more tolerance for everyone.
Even if some old timer politician makes an effort to scapegoat queers as a distraction for their incompetence, and they probably will, it’s less likely the ruse will continue to work on a crowd that’s developed a taste for real change. And that gay man, or dyke, or transgendered person can always retort, “I was there, too, in Tahrir Square. I’m an Egyptian just like you. Are we equal or not?”
Reinventing the idea of citizenship is one of the huge accomplishments of the youth organizers. “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.” That entitlement is why people took to the streets, and stayed to clean up Tahrir Square after each day of protests.
Egypt belongs to them, now. They hold it in trust and guard their new democracy like a child. You can see pride and hope shimmering from faces in photos, from the TV screen, on YouTube. It is possible to change the world. The clean stones bear witness.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Gay Enough?
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
On Wednesday, gay activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his home in Uganda. He's been under threat of violence since 2009 when he was one of the few queers to openly denounce legislation proposing to execute homosexuals, instead of just tossing them in jail. Afterwards, a local newspaper published an antigay rant along with David's picture on the front page under the title, "Hang Them."
Nevertheless, just two days after his murder, a young Ugandan lesbian, Brenda Namigadde, was on a plane in London's Heathrow awaiting deportation back to Uganda where the likes of antigay legislator David Bahati have already announced Brenda was only welcome if she repented or reformed.
Luckily, another judge issued an injunction and they pulled Brenda off the plane before it left, though she's still at risk. Not because the Brits don't recognize Uganda's danger for queers, but because Brenda has to prove definitively she's a lesbian. The British judge that rejected her claim for asylum said he wasn't convinced.
To him it was "strange" that her descriptions of gay life in Uganda and the United Kingdom, were "very generalised and quite simply lacking in the kind of detail and information of someone genuinely living that lifestyle. The Appellant claims to have freedom to live a life unconstrained and without prejudice. I find the information as to how she has done so over the lengthy period she has been in the United Kingdom singularly lacking in detail or coherence. The Appellant appears to have taken no interest in forms of media including magazines, books or other information relating to her sexual orientation.”
The problem is that gayness isn't a lifestyle. If push came to shove, probably even I can't prove I'm a dyke as that judge understands it. I write these articles for Gay City News, but instead of checking out queer-themed books I usually go for murder mysteries, or French poetry written by straight (though queerish) men like Blaise Cendrars.
Dykes bars have opened and closed without me darkening the door, except for those few weeks when I waitressed at Crazy Nanny's and went home with phone numbers shoved into my pockets that girls had given me "just in case" I had second thoughts about my girlfriend which I suppose a judge could just declare a roommate unless I had some video footage documenting sex acts.
Let me interrupt this column to see if the words lesbian or dyke are in the titles of any books on my shelf... Yes, "Living as a Lesbian" by Cheryl Clarke is on the shelf next to "Second-Hand Coat," a volume of poems by writer Ruth Stone that I'd also forgotten. She's not a dyke, but a pretty good poet with Virginia roots. If you happen to run across something of hers -- read it. She's great. And reminds me of back home.
Identity is tricky. Like with the books, the music in the house wouldn't convince you of anything either, though there's some Cuba there, and Kentucky, but also funk, blues, classical, the great Lou Reed. Ela Fitzgerald. And good luck if you're looking for clues in our apartment. It tends towards the Spartan. We like light and emptiness. The little bit of art we have is mostly abstract.
What does it say, that blossoming jasmine, the enormous snake plant, and the palm pressing against the ceiling? Only that we like a bit of living green around the place. Or that we feel the need of additional oxygen. The remnants of our lesbian activist lives are mostly tucked away in drawers cabinets. My own articles are filed under "work" on my computer.
Are we lesbians, or not, if all you have is what's in our heads and bodies, and our pre-occupations that a little surveillance might or might not reveal? My girlfriend and I have passed whole weeks talking about nothing but her aging mother, or problems in the building.
There are thousands of ways to be a lesbian, queer woman, dyke, gay. Somebody like Brenda Namigadde, forced to leave Uganda in 2003 when her relationship with a Canadian woman led to threats and violence, might not have had much time afterwards to give her dykeness much thought.
It's not easy being an immigrant and facing the challenges of living in a strange country, understanding the myriad of accents, finding work, making a new life. Maybe she prefers to read poetry or The Economist rather than the Pink News. Maybe when she goes out it's not to a gay bar, but just the corner pub where she just does her best to get drunk and forget the whole thing. Maybe she's even given up girls. Though that won't help her back in Uganda, where perception is enough to get you attacked. And embarrassing the government carries its own price.
On Wednesday, gay activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his home in Uganda. He's been under threat of violence since 2009 when he was one of the few queers to openly denounce legislation proposing to execute homosexuals, instead of just tossing them in jail. Afterwards, a local newspaper published an antigay rant along with David's picture on the front page under the title, "Hang Them."
Nevertheless, just two days after his murder, a young Ugandan lesbian, Brenda Namigadde, was on a plane in London's Heathrow awaiting deportation back to Uganda where the likes of antigay legislator David Bahati have already announced Brenda was only welcome if she repented or reformed.
Luckily, another judge issued an injunction and they pulled Brenda off the plane before it left, though she's still at risk. Not because the Brits don't recognize Uganda's danger for queers, but because Brenda has to prove definitively she's a lesbian. The British judge that rejected her claim for asylum said he wasn't convinced.
To him it was "strange" that her descriptions of gay life in Uganda and the United Kingdom, were "very generalised and quite simply lacking in the kind of detail and information of someone genuinely living that lifestyle. The Appellant claims to have freedom to live a life unconstrained and without prejudice. I find the information as to how she has done so over the lengthy period she has been in the United Kingdom singularly lacking in detail or coherence. The Appellant appears to have taken no interest in forms of media including magazines, books or other information relating to her sexual orientation.”
The problem is that gayness isn't a lifestyle. If push came to shove, probably even I can't prove I'm a dyke as that judge understands it. I write these articles for Gay City News, but instead of checking out queer-themed books I usually go for murder mysteries, or French poetry written by straight (though queerish) men like Blaise Cendrars.
Dykes bars have opened and closed without me darkening the door, except for those few weeks when I waitressed at Crazy Nanny's and went home with phone numbers shoved into my pockets that girls had given me "just in case" I had second thoughts about my girlfriend which I suppose a judge could just declare a roommate unless I had some video footage documenting sex acts.
Let me interrupt this column to see if the words lesbian or dyke are in the titles of any books on my shelf... Yes, "Living as a Lesbian" by Cheryl Clarke is on the shelf next to "Second-Hand Coat," a volume of poems by writer Ruth Stone that I'd also forgotten. She's not a dyke, but a pretty good poet with Virginia roots. If you happen to run across something of hers -- read it. She's great. And reminds me of back home.
Identity is tricky. Like with the books, the music in the house wouldn't convince you of anything either, though there's some Cuba there, and Kentucky, but also funk, blues, classical, the great Lou Reed. Ela Fitzgerald. And good luck if you're looking for clues in our apartment. It tends towards the Spartan. We like light and emptiness. The little bit of art we have is mostly abstract.
What does it say, that blossoming jasmine, the enormous snake plant, and the palm pressing against the ceiling? Only that we like a bit of living green around the place. Or that we feel the need of additional oxygen. The remnants of our lesbian activist lives are mostly tucked away in drawers cabinets. My own articles are filed under "work" on my computer.
Are we lesbians, or not, if all you have is what's in our heads and bodies, and our pre-occupations that a little surveillance might or might not reveal? My girlfriend and I have passed whole weeks talking about nothing but her aging mother, or problems in the building.
There are thousands of ways to be a lesbian, queer woman, dyke, gay. Somebody like Brenda Namigadde, forced to leave Uganda in 2003 when her relationship with a Canadian woman led to threats and violence, might not have had much time afterwards to give her dykeness much thought.
It's not easy being an immigrant and facing the challenges of living in a strange country, understanding the myriad of accents, finding work, making a new life. Maybe she prefers to read poetry or The Economist rather than the Pink News. Maybe when she goes out it's not to a gay bar, but just the corner pub where she just does her best to get drunk and forget the whole thing. Maybe she's even given up girls. Though that won't help her back in Uganda, where perception is enough to get you attacked. And embarrassing the government carries its own price.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Towards An American Dream
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
A couple of months, or a year from now, when another antigovernment or bigoted nut climbs to the top of a tower with a sniper's rifle, or puts a bomb in a bar, or buys a semi-automatic and kills a dozen or more, I'll wonder aloud why you're so surprised. We'll still have the same "eliminationist" speech, the same river of guns, the same untreated mentally ill giving teeth to unfettered hate.
All because there's no cause and effect for most amnesiac Americans. We throw a rock, and then stand there gape-mouthed in surprise when the window breaks. If the self-made man pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, the crazy must be just as independent in his craziness. It is a purely random matter that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, or pro-choice doctor George Tiller, or any number of queers have been put in the cross hairs and killed.
Unable, or unwilling, to see relationships, there's no cherry pie, Presidents' or MLK day that can help us forge a twenty-first century dream in which all the residents of the United States are equal to each other, members of an extended family, however dysfunctional. Forget working together towards anything as grandiose as life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.
Our highest aspiration is to retreat independently to our own separate homesteads with no loss of benefits or privileges. Down with taxes. But let me keep my Medicare and you better plow my roads. In truth, the last thing we want is real pioneer America, living on fatback and cornmeal and dried beans, shivering next to a smoky fire, dying of overwork, malnutrition, childbirth. And that's only if you were lucky enough to be white and free.
And what are Americans without a dream? Are we just shopkeepers? Pharisees? Have we actually lost the capacity to see beyond ourselves? Or is it the temporary effect of swallowing our own hook and line about Americans already having the best of everything from democracy and health care to education and flat screen TVs? No, it doesn't get any better than this.
Without dreams, our spirits and imaginations wither like old apples under a naked tree. The reason we don't learn geography anymore isn't because we're stupid, but because we don't quite believe anything exists beyond the parameters of our peeling picket fences. And the same atrophied muscle that obliterates Africa, Asia, Europe, is equally suspicious of the foreign past, though it also relinquishes the present as fast as it can, and can't even muster the energy to imagine a future more distant than the check-out guy at Starbucks two feet away.
What will guide us without dreams? Despair? Like in poverty-stricken Tunisia? On December 17, 2010, 26-year-old vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire because police seized his grocery cart. His eventual death set off riots of the poor, the young unemployed middle class, and students, all agitating for democratic and economic reform. Last week, these angry crowds forced the president for life to leave the country. Shortly afterwards, his second in command fled as well.
Elections are promised in six months. Observers are hopeful Tunisia can emerge as a democracy, and a secular one, at that. There's even talk that the fever will spread, and the whole of North Africa begin to transform itself into a more just, and democratic place.
Inspired, or maybe pushed over the edge by the example of Bouazizi's suicide and the effective riots in Tunisia, at least six more men have engaged in self-immolation in North Africa. Four men set themselves on fire in Algeria and one each in Mauritania and Egypt where protesters demanded reforms until the cops regained control.
I used to believe in the phoenix. I'm less sure these days, but maybe that's my own lack of faith. My own failure of imagination. Who am I to believe that the bodies on funeral pyres must stay dead? Though a phoenix is a little tricky. What exactly will reemerge?
Just a couple of days ago the former dictator Baby Doc returned unexpectedly to Haiti after being chased out nearly twenty-five years ago. Nobody quite knows what for, except to spread chaos in an already messy political situation where the governing party is hanging on by fraud, and a run-off after the recent election has been postponed.
Maybe he's become a philanthropist in his old age, and is there to return some of the money he siphoned off into Swiss accounts. Maybe he's there to get more. A year after the earthquake, most of the rubble remains where it fell, and three quarters of a million of Haitians are still in makeshift camps where women are raped in incredible numbers, kids die from dirty water, and international aid money flows like rain.
A couple of months, or a year from now, when another antigovernment or bigoted nut climbs to the top of a tower with a sniper's rifle, or puts a bomb in a bar, or buys a semi-automatic and kills a dozen or more, I'll wonder aloud why you're so surprised. We'll still have the same "eliminationist" speech, the same river of guns, the same untreated mentally ill giving teeth to unfettered hate.
All because there's no cause and effect for most amnesiac Americans. We throw a rock, and then stand there gape-mouthed in surprise when the window breaks. If the self-made man pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, the crazy must be just as independent in his craziness. It is a purely random matter that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, or pro-choice doctor George Tiller, or any number of queers have been put in the cross hairs and killed.
Unable, or unwilling, to see relationships, there's no cherry pie, Presidents' or MLK day that can help us forge a twenty-first century dream in which all the residents of the United States are equal to each other, members of an extended family, however dysfunctional. Forget working together towards anything as grandiose as life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.
Our highest aspiration is to retreat independently to our own separate homesteads with no loss of benefits or privileges. Down with taxes. But let me keep my Medicare and you better plow my roads. In truth, the last thing we want is real pioneer America, living on fatback and cornmeal and dried beans, shivering next to a smoky fire, dying of overwork, malnutrition, childbirth. And that's only if you were lucky enough to be white and free.
And what are Americans without a dream? Are we just shopkeepers? Pharisees? Have we actually lost the capacity to see beyond ourselves? Or is it the temporary effect of swallowing our own hook and line about Americans already having the best of everything from democracy and health care to education and flat screen TVs? No, it doesn't get any better than this.
Without dreams, our spirits and imaginations wither like old apples under a naked tree. The reason we don't learn geography anymore isn't because we're stupid, but because we don't quite believe anything exists beyond the parameters of our peeling picket fences. And the same atrophied muscle that obliterates Africa, Asia, Europe, is equally suspicious of the foreign past, though it also relinquishes the present as fast as it can, and can't even muster the energy to imagine a future more distant than the check-out guy at Starbucks two feet away.
What will guide us without dreams? Despair? Like in poverty-stricken Tunisia? On December 17, 2010, 26-year-old vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire because police seized his grocery cart. His eventual death set off riots of the poor, the young unemployed middle class, and students, all agitating for democratic and economic reform. Last week, these angry crowds forced the president for life to leave the country. Shortly afterwards, his second in command fled as well.
Elections are promised in six months. Observers are hopeful Tunisia can emerge as a democracy, and a secular one, at that. There's even talk that the fever will spread, and the whole of North Africa begin to transform itself into a more just, and democratic place.
Inspired, or maybe pushed over the edge by the example of Bouazizi's suicide and the effective riots in Tunisia, at least six more men have engaged in self-immolation in North Africa. Four men set themselves on fire in Algeria and one each in Mauritania and Egypt where protesters demanded reforms until the cops regained control.
I used to believe in the phoenix. I'm less sure these days, but maybe that's my own lack of faith. My own failure of imagination. Who am I to believe that the bodies on funeral pyres must stay dead? Though a phoenix is a little tricky. What exactly will reemerge?
Just a couple of days ago the former dictator Baby Doc returned unexpectedly to Haiti after being chased out nearly twenty-five years ago. Nobody quite knows what for, except to spread chaos in an already messy political situation where the governing party is hanging on by fraud, and a run-off after the recent election has been postponed.
Maybe he's become a philanthropist in his old age, and is there to return some of the money he siphoned off into Swiss accounts. Maybe he's there to get more. A year after the earthquake, most of the rubble remains where it fell, and three quarters of a million of Haitians are still in makeshift camps where women are raped in incredible numbers, kids die from dirty water, and international aid money flows like rain.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Queer Issues
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
The lead story in Le Monde and El País Saturday was the inauguration of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil. Apparently power can be handed over in one of the biggest, most dynamic countries in the world, with the new leader remarkably a woman. Nevertheless, the New York Times has no choice but to feature the latest college bowl game.
That's pretty much par for the national course. I wonder about this sometimes. All the time, actually. How little vision there seems to be. Since the outside world intruded ten years ago on September 11, and despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we seem to be more insular than ever, less inclined to see how we fit into the universe we're grudgingly part of. Like little children, we squeeze our eyes shut and persuade ourselves everything else is gone.
For a moment, I considered insisting we see the world using some kind of mechanical metaphor with gears and cogs and things representing different countries, and inside the countries different classes and races, the wheels within wheels, all interconnected and driving each other, but it seems too neat. Too clear. Better imagery from the natural world where the wind can carry pollen to fertilize plants hundreds and thousands of miles away. Or blow pollution and acid rain. The best you can do is watch the trends, and batten down the hatches when a storm roars in. Like now. With the Birthers, Tea Partiers, and simmering poor.
In this regard, us queers are not much smarter than the rest of the country. We shut our eyes and define our issues as narrowly and separately as possible. As if the question of homos in the military, for instance, has nothing whatsoever to do with immigrant rights. We even miss the irony that the same legislature that overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell on December 18th also nixed the Dream Act that would have allowed kids without papers to take steps to become citizens like enrolling in college or joining the military.
There are tens of thousands of Americans that were brought to the U.S. as children, have grown up here, gone to school, rotted their brains with TV and internet, listened to our music, spoken the language, worn the same clothes as the other kids in their school, and yet have zero rights. Many didn't even realize they weren't citizens until they've needed a birth certificate to apply for a passport or driver's license. They only thought they were Americans.
That sudden excluding shock is not so different really, than expecting to be able to go to the prom, find an apartment, find a job, get married like everyone else, then having the door slammed in your face because your partner is the same gender as you. You're not really one of us. Not a full citizen. Not even a full adult, a full human.
The growing "us" and "them" mentality should have the LGBT community on high alert, and not just because there are queer immigrants who are going to get screwed by this xenophobic wave like their hetero peers. Hate and fear have a way of persisting, and expanding like wind-caught spores. That is why we, as out queers, should join the fight against anti-immigrant bills. Half a dozen states are planning not only to block paths to citizenship, but strip away current rights of undocumented immigrants including schooling, health care, and even automatic citizenship for children born in this country--guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Most of the legislature is based on Arizona's earlier legislation, even though many of the measures were stuck down. In Oklahoma, where they're calling their efforts "Arizona plus," they are even including provisions that would allow cops to seize any vehicles and property that transported or "harbored" undocumented immigrants. Which means somebody could work, pay taxes, buy a car or house, and have it stolen out from under them. Laws don't apply. An attitude that can be habit forming.
Do you really think that legislators, or cops for that matter, who perceive every brown-skinned person as probably outside the law, are really going to care if a fag gets beaten up in front of a bar or in a schoolyard? Or if a dyke gets raped or loses her job? If a tranny gets killed? When the circle of people acceptable to the law gets smaller and smaller, do you really think they'll let us in?
As long as we persist in seeing LGBT rights as a separate entity, a potted plant, that we can keep separate from the rest of the ecosystem, we may make limited progress, but not real change. We need an entire society that values human rights and liberation. Sure, queers have to keep working on queer issues. But it's time we do it with our eyes open. Paying attention. Remembering the whole that we're only one part of.
The lead story in Le Monde and El País Saturday was the inauguration of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil. Apparently power can be handed over in one of the biggest, most dynamic countries in the world, with the new leader remarkably a woman. Nevertheless, the New York Times has no choice but to feature the latest college bowl game.
That's pretty much par for the national course. I wonder about this sometimes. All the time, actually. How little vision there seems to be. Since the outside world intruded ten years ago on September 11, and despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we seem to be more insular than ever, less inclined to see how we fit into the universe we're grudgingly part of. Like little children, we squeeze our eyes shut and persuade ourselves everything else is gone.
For a moment, I considered insisting we see the world using some kind of mechanical metaphor with gears and cogs and things representing different countries, and inside the countries different classes and races, the wheels within wheels, all interconnected and driving each other, but it seems too neat. Too clear. Better imagery from the natural world where the wind can carry pollen to fertilize plants hundreds and thousands of miles away. Or blow pollution and acid rain. The best you can do is watch the trends, and batten down the hatches when a storm roars in. Like now. With the Birthers, Tea Partiers, and simmering poor.
In this regard, us queers are not much smarter than the rest of the country. We shut our eyes and define our issues as narrowly and separately as possible. As if the question of homos in the military, for instance, has nothing whatsoever to do with immigrant rights. We even miss the irony that the same legislature that overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell on December 18th also nixed the Dream Act that would have allowed kids without papers to take steps to become citizens like enrolling in college or joining the military.
There are tens of thousands of Americans that were brought to the U.S. as children, have grown up here, gone to school, rotted their brains with TV and internet, listened to our music, spoken the language, worn the same clothes as the other kids in their school, and yet have zero rights. Many didn't even realize they weren't citizens until they've needed a birth certificate to apply for a passport or driver's license. They only thought they were Americans.
That sudden excluding shock is not so different really, than expecting to be able to go to the prom, find an apartment, find a job, get married like everyone else, then having the door slammed in your face because your partner is the same gender as you. You're not really one of us. Not a full citizen. Not even a full adult, a full human.
The growing "us" and "them" mentality should have the LGBT community on high alert, and not just because there are queer immigrants who are going to get screwed by this xenophobic wave like their hetero peers. Hate and fear have a way of persisting, and expanding like wind-caught spores. That is why we, as out queers, should join the fight against anti-immigrant bills. Half a dozen states are planning not only to block paths to citizenship, but strip away current rights of undocumented immigrants including schooling, health care, and even automatic citizenship for children born in this country--guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Most of the legislature is based on Arizona's earlier legislation, even though many of the measures were stuck down. In Oklahoma, where they're calling their efforts "Arizona plus," they are even including provisions that would allow cops to seize any vehicles and property that transported or "harbored" undocumented immigrants. Which means somebody could work, pay taxes, buy a car or house, and have it stolen out from under them. Laws don't apply. An attitude that can be habit forming.
Do you really think that legislators, or cops for that matter, who perceive every brown-skinned person as probably outside the law, are really going to care if a fag gets beaten up in front of a bar or in a schoolyard? Or if a dyke gets raped or loses her job? If a tranny gets killed? When the circle of people acceptable to the law gets smaller and smaller, do you really think they'll let us in?
As long as we persist in seeing LGBT rights as a separate entity, a potted plant, that we can keep separate from the rest of the ecosystem, we may make limited progress, but not real change. We need an entire society that values human rights and liberation. Sure, queers have to keep working on queer issues. But it's time we do it with our eyes open. Paying attention. Remembering the whole that we're only one part of.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Do Ask, Do Tell -- About Torture
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Don't Ask, Don't Tell is finally over and done with, so get out the champagne, point it away from your lover's face, and pop the plastic cork. Eventually, the Defense of Marriage Act will be overturned. A couple more laws will be passed against homodiscrimination. And with full legal equality, we can dissolve into our country like the other lazy liberal slobs America plays host to, with mediocre marriages and crappy jobs and crappy health care, and not the faintest idea of what it means to be a citizen saddled with responsibilities along with rights in this behemoth of a nation that tramples its own ideals as thoughtlessly as peanut shells on the floor of a bar.
Better open two bottles. Or go straight for the scotch.
I'm thinking of how this military we are now so thrilled to be a part of aids and abets torture, and how much more easily it goes down under Obama, than under Bush. Surely you remember the demos after Abu Ghraib? They weren't particularly well attended, but they were there. There was certainly a hue and cry when the first orange jumpsuited prisoners were installed in cages in Guantánamo.
Nevertheless, despite all promises to the contrary, the latter remains open, and new victims tortured so frequently in military jails and black op sites that foreigners can now persuasively fight extradition into American hands.
All they have to do is point to Bradley Manning. For the last seven months, the 22-year-old soldier has been held in military jails under conditions of long-term isolation that most countries agree constitute torture. A model prisoner, and convicted of nothing whatsoever, he's nevertheless been kept in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours every day, forbidden even to exercise in his cell, and deprived of basic amenities like sheets for his bed.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently reported that, "as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation." That's us. That's America, still torturing kids, even if we've refined our methods since José Padilla who totally cracked while awaiting trial.
The question is why. Manning's no dangerous criminal that's killed 27 men with his bare hands, or a terrorist greybeard encouraging young things to blow themselves up in public places. He's a young soldier that either heroically or foolishly may have leaked materials related to what seemed like war crimes, including an Apache helicopter attacking and killing unarmed civilians.
As he wrote in an online chat with hacker Adrian Lamo prior to his arrest, he only wanted to give people an opportunity "to see the truth... regardless of who they are... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." He went on to write that if there was no outcry, and it didn't change anything, "we're doomed - as a species - i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens."
An investigation is probably appropriate. Not torture. Never torture. Especially when it's so clearly designed not to punish, but destroy him, both to deter other whistle-blowers, and to persuade a desperate Manning to implicate our new favorite enemy, Julian bin Assange.
For Americans these days, anything can justify torture. First it was the "War on Terror and the Folks that Should Really Give Us Our Oil For Free." Now it's our "War on Sources of Annoyance, Embarrassment, and Defective Condoms."
While queers were celebrating their new inclusion in the military, our Vice President Joseph Biden was telling NBC that WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, was a "high-tech terrorist." Before that, that Democratic asswipe Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the U.S. government to prosecute Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act, a precedent that would pretty much destroy American journalism, even entities like the New York Times.
Feinstein also wants to criminalize people like me if we dare re-post these leaks in our newspapers or blogs. And the U.S. government has apparently been warning federal employees that even reading classified State Department documents published anywhere via WikiLeaks shall be considered a crime.
Let me take this opportunity to formally announce that in future national elections I will no longer vote for Democrats. You had your chance to stand for liberty and justice, and you flushed it down the toilet along with a constitution that guarantees free speech, fair trials, and equal treatment under the law. And for me, those are the only "gay" issues that count. Every right we have, or hope to win, all the methods we have to gain them, stem from those basic ideals.
If queers forget that, we are lost.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell is finally over and done with, so get out the champagne, point it away from your lover's face, and pop the plastic cork. Eventually, the Defense of Marriage Act will be overturned. A couple more laws will be passed against homodiscrimination. And with full legal equality, we can dissolve into our country like the other lazy liberal slobs America plays host to, with mediocre marriages and crappy jobs and crappy health care, and not the faintest idea of what it means to be a citizen saddled with responsibilities along with rights in this behemoth of a nation that tramples its own ideals as thoughtlessly as peanut shells on the floor of a bar.
Better open two bottles. Or go straight for the scotch.
I'm thinking of how this military we are now so thrilled to be a part of aids and abets torture, and how much more easily it goes down under Obama, than under Bush. Surely you remember the demos after Abu Ghraib? They weren't particularly well attended, but they were there. There was certainly a hue and cry when the first orange jumpsuited prisoners were installed in cages in Guantánamo.
Nevertheless, despite all promises to the contrary, the latter remains open, and new victims tortured so frequently in military jails and black op sites that foreigners can now persuasively fight extradition into American hands.
All they have to do is point to Bradley Manning. For the last seven months, the 22-year-old soldier has been held in military jails under conditions of long-term isolation that most countries agree constitute torture. A model prisoner, and convicted of nothing whatsoever, he's nevertheless been kept in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours every day, forbidden even to exercise in his cell, and deprived of basic amenities like sheets for his bed.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently reported that, "as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation." That's us. That's America, still torturing kids, even if we've refined our methods since José Padilla who totally cracked while awaiting trial.
The question is why. Manning's no dangerous criminal that's killed 27 men with his bare hands, or a terrorist greybeard encouraging young things to blow themselves up in public places. He's a young soldier that either heroically or foolishly may have leaked materials related to what seemed like war crimes, including an Apache helicopter attacking and killing unarmed civilians.
As he wrote in an online chat with hacker Adrian Lamo prior to his arrest, he only wanted to give people an opportunity "to see the truth... regardless of who they are... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." He went on to write that if there was no outcry, and it didn't change anything, "we're doomed - as a species - i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens."
An investigation is probably appropriate. Not torture. Never torture. Especially when it's so clearly designed not to punish, but destroy him, both to deter other whistle-blowers, and to persuade a desperate Manning to implicate our new favorite enemy, Julian bin Assange.
For Americans these days, anything can justify torture. First it was the "War on Terror and the Folks that Should Really Give Us Our Oil For Free." Now it's our "War on Sources of Annoyance, Embarrassment, and Defective Condoms."
While queers were celebrating their new inclusion in the military, our Vice President Joseph Biden was telling NBC that WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, was a "high-tech terrorist." Before that, that Democratic asswipe Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the U.S. government to prosecute Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act, a precedent that would pretty much destroy American journalism, even entities like the New York Times.
Feinstein also wants to criminalize people like me if we dare re-post these leaks in our newspapers or blogs. And the U.S. government has apparently been warning federal employees that even reading classified State Department documents published anywhere via WikiLeaks shall be considered a crime.
Let me take this opportunity to formally announce that in future national elections I will no longer vote for Democrats. You had your chance to stand for liberty and justice, and you flushed it down the toilet along with a constitution that guarantees free speech, fair trials, and equal treatment under the law. And for me, those are the only "gay" issues that count. Every right we have, or hope to win, all the methods we have to gain them, stem from those basic ideals.
If queers forget that, we are lost.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman: Dykes Outside the Box
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
One of the best kept secrets in Lesbolandia is power couple Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, the doyennes of fantasy fiction. We sat down earlier this month and talked about writing, relationships, and the virtues of operating outside the box.
They met at a Boston Science Fiction Conference in 1985 when Delia was living in Boston and shopping a novella that would turn into her first book. One of the people she was directed to was Ellen who was living in New York and had unfortunately just left her editing job. She gave Delia a hand, anyway, and when Ellen moved to Boston a few years later, they became friends. In 1992, they finally began dating.
It was a natural match. They belonged to a new generation of writers that drew from a variety of sources including pre-Raphaelite painters, Victorian novelists, and "Man from U.N.C.L.E." in addition to fantasy icons C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They broke with the old masters when they realized "we did not have in us what they had in them," Ellen said. "We're not English. We don't go for long country walks. We all kind of grew up in the suburbs and were living in our twenties in bad neighborhoods in the cities."
The result was what one reviewer dubbed "fantasy of manners," later also called "mannerpunk." The setting is urban, and like in Dickens, often seesaws between high society and the criminal class. Books may have swordfights, but the plots more often hinge on social intrigue. The wry witty tone owes a lot to Jane Austen. Ellen's 1987 novel "Swordspoint" has become a classic of the subgenre.
Associated with the movement, and with each other, Ellen and Delia are much sought after to appear as a team at conferences and workshops. They've become the traditional featured writers for the New York Review of Science Fiction's December "Family Reading." This year's event was held last Tuesday at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art.
The gallery featured digital renderings of their book jackets, story illustrations, and wedding photos, including one of an enormous wedding cake. They've actually been married twice--to each other. The second time was at Delia's instigation in 2004, so they could "become part of the problem" if Massachusetts tried to repeal the law and dissolve queer marriages.
The crowd at the gallery seemed nonplussed by the whole lesbian thing. There was a mix of ages, races, sexual orientations, the conventional, chic, and the ultra geeky. The diversity was remarkable for segregated New York, but not necessarily for the science fiction and fantasy world. One of their fans told me that he'd been attracted to fantasy in the first place because it was all about "the Other," and that's what he was, young, queer, black. As Delia put it, speculative fiction is mostly about exploring "the fluidity of human identity, and what it means to be a human being, and not necessarily just a man. Or a woman."
Gender is central to their work. After writing the cult novel, "Swordspoint," focusing on two gay male characters in their twenties, Ellen began writing "The Privilege of the Sword," a sequel set twenty years later, exploring the same society, but this time through the eyes of a teenaged girl. The description of what it's like for Katherine when she puts on pants for the first time is pretty extraordinary. Delia's young adult novel, "Changeling," sends a young girl on a quest through a folkloric version of New York that includes mythical figures like the Mermaid Queen of New York Harbor that could just as easily be a biker dyke with spiky orange hair, a black vest, and nose to tail tattoos.
But while fantasy writers may respect the hard to categorize "Other" in their literature, publishers are not so crazy about books that blur the genre boundaries. If you do fantasy fiction, stick to the conventions. Ditto for other genres like historical novels. At the same time, too many mainstream readers won't approach books in the fantasy section at all because as Ellen says, they have fantasy cooties. But label the same books magical realism and stock them elsewhere, they'll gobble them up. Putting stuff into boxes keeps readers, and books, from crossing over.
Delia and Ellen and some of their friends, have founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation to promote art that crosses genre borders, and help writers present themselves to the marketers. The point is not just to sell books, but publish good writers that have read widely and bring everything that they have read to what they're writing. "That's how literature grows. That's how art grows. By bringing things in, and making something new of it."
Delia could as easily have been making an argument for diversity in biology, or music, and even politics. The idea filters into their joint Swordspoint-set novel, "The Fall of the Kings," which is partly a critique of a political class guarding its homogeneity, and the lengths the powerful will go to preserve their privilege. If magic had been called religion in the book, and it had been set in contemporary America, this portrait of a society engaged in censorship, spying, torture and intrigue wouldn't have been categorized as fantasy at all, but pure realism.
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For Ellen and Delia in the flesh, check out these videos
Ellen Kushner on Getting Married -- Twice!
Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner on Mannerpunk and Modesty
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