A Voice from Gay Ghana

By Kelly Cogswell

Ghana may be one of Africa's more democratic countries, but not for queers. Thanks in part to antigay campaigns encouraged (and financed) across West Africa by U.S. evangelicals, ninety-eight percent of people there believe that homosexuality is "morally unacceptable." Politicians openly denounce lesbians and gay men as foreigners and abominations. They blame us for AIDS, even demand that we be rounded up and jailed, not just under colonial-era laws prohibiting "unnatural acts" but anything they can think of, even genocide. In 2010, more than 1,000 protesters in the Western Region of Takoradi rallied against our mere existence.

Violence has been escalating, especially against gay men. Just a week or so ago in the capital city of Accra, event promoter Kinto Rothmans was ambushed by a mob, forced to admit he was gay, and brutally beaten. The video posted by a proud attacker immediately went viral. A few days before, a crowd of boys at St. Paul’s Senior High School in the small town of Danu tried to lynch two classmates accused of being gay. When two teachers tried to interfere, the boys rioted. The cops were called in and ended up fatally shooting a student.

Last year, Richard, now only 20, was forced to flee the country after a lifetime of harassment and abuse. In middle school, after telling his best friend he had a crush on him, Richard was flogged several times, then expelled. Back home, the village chief issued another round of punishments. "I was detained for about five days during which I wasn't fed. I was only given water every morning. I was also sent to a shrine where I was made to drink a calabash of blood. Then I was beaten, and they broke my right arm. Afterwards I was banished from my hometown. It was around my last year in middle school so I had to study on my own in order to take the final exams to get into high school."

He briefly lived with relatives in Accra, before he ended up at St. Paul’s, and can testify first hand to their anti-gay brutality. "I was seen with another guy by the school prefect who reported us to the head master. We were called to the front of the entire student body and asked to tell the whole school what the prefect saw us doing." Afterwards, they were beaten by several male teachers, then dragged on their knees to the school offices, and later humiliated again at another school assembly in which they were officially expelled.

When he got home, he was harangued by his aunts and uncles who eventually threatened to lynch him if they saw him talking to a boy. "They claimed I’d pollute them, and talk them into being gay."

His parents sent him to a different town up north, but it wasn't enough. His boyfriend from high school came to visit and they were seen in a local bar. A couple of days later, when he was shopping with a cousin, he was attacked by a pair of youths, two vigilante "zongo boys" that administer "instant justice" to anybody from queers to thieves.

One guy pinned his hands behind his back, the other started punching him in his stomach. "I struggled with them, but I couldn’t do anything because they were stronger than I was." His cousin called the police who dragged all four of them to the station and detained them for twenty-four hours. During his stay, he passed out and had to be rushed to the hospital with internal bleeding.

In the end, the cops let his attackers go, and charged him with being a homosexual. His family helped him flee again, but when the death threats continued anyway from local youths who threatened to lynch him on sight, his mother decided he had to leave Ghana before he ended up dead. She's a nurse, and worked with his two stepbrothers to get the money together.

Richard's in Texas now, studying to be an EMT, and working in the cafeteria when he can pick up the hours. The group Human Rights First is helping him to get a permanent visa. He says he tries not to think too much about why he came, or how alone he is. He just wants a normal life. Maybe he'll get it. We video chatted on Skype. I could see he's young, good-looking, though he seemed shell-shocked. His voice was nearly flat as he told me that it hurt to imagine he might never be able to go home. Or see his family again. "I tell myself at least no one is coming to kill me. Or beat me up because I am gay."

There's not much reason to hope things will change anytime soon. When Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama visited the U.S. not long ago, he was asked about homophobia in his country. "All he could say was that because of the culture there wasn't even room to talk about it. So he couldn't even make a comment about it. It makes me so sad. All that is going on back there and nobody is doing anything about it."

Still, when I asked about his hometown where most people are farmers or fisherman or traders, he wistfully told me, "It's really cool, more of a village, really, where almost everybody knows everybody. It's a friendly place to grow up," he said.

Embedded in Queer Turkey

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was in Turkey almost two weeks for an LGBT film festival, and at first it seemed like Paris or New York or San Francisco, where out queers hold popular events, discuss how to push things forward in a resistant, but mostly democratic society.

In fact, everybody smiled so much, was so fucking cheerful and effective I thought I'd landed in activist Nirvana. After a day running screenings and troubleshooting tech issues and moderating discussions, they even had enough energy to show up at the parties where they'd let their hair down and dance like joyful fiends while I crept away in exhausted shame.

Then, one day, I talked to a guy who stopped smiling long enough to admit he really despised his day job, but didn't dare leave because he could be out at work, a rare occurrence in Turkey. "It took so long to find it. I wasn't going to lie, like everybody else." All the gay guys he'd known in his twenties had caved in to the demands of their families and gotten married, to women of course. Then he counted out for me exactly how many more years and months he had to put in before his sentence was up and he could retire.

Next I heard that a trans woman had killed herself in Istanbul a week earlier. And that just last night someone's trans friend had died during sexual reassignment surgery, and nobody knew if the family would allow them to attend the service.

I also learned that the film festival that seemed to be going along so swimmingly actually had a film stuck in customs, delaying a screening. Not surprising in this increasingly Islamist country, where censorship is gaining ground and journalists are regularly arrested.

As we took the show on the road from Ankara, the capital, to Istanbul, an organizer got a phone call from some government type saying that Kuirfest didn't have all the correct permits to show a certain film, which meant a new tangle of complications. She spent the rest of the trip on the phone to the festival's lawyers.

Other pressures were less obvious. As we neared Istanbul on the bus, the woman next to me said that when she was in the city, she always made time to walk along the Bosphorus, the strait separating Asia from Europe, and dividing the city. She lamented that most of the women of Istanbul rarely visited the mythical water because the men in their lives all but confined them to their homes.

In Turkey, the society's so macho it makes Spain or Greece look positively matriarchal. Something like forty percent of women face violence at home, with hundreds slaughtered every year. And in the public sphere there's always some minister or other informing the country how obscene it is to see pregnant women on the streets, or, God forbid, see any woman at all with her mouth open, laughing.

At least Turkish women don't take it in silence. When Bülent Arinç, the deputy prime minister, came up with a choice bit last July, railing against immodesty, and the horror of a woman's laughing open mouth, Turkish women responded with snapshots and videos of themselves laughing as loud as they could. Their masculine allies tweeted, too, denouncing men who were so cowardly that laughing women terrified them.

Trans women and gay men frighten them, too. What could be more horrifying than effeminacy in a body with a dick? A man giving up his privilege? They are murdered like dogs, especially trans sex workers, and their deaths are dished up on the evening news. If the violence doesn't come from tricks or random bigots, or competition on the street, it's fathers and brothers trying to erase the family shame.

Many faced with a brutal life, decide to kill themselves. Crossing a bridge into Istanbul, one trans woman told me that so many in her community had jumped from it, they'd held a vigil there, unfurling a rainbow flag.

Lesbians, too, are strangled by gender, and the double whammy of lesbophobia and misogyny. I didn't understand just how invisible and marginal we were until I started tallying up the girls I'd met in different queer projects, and realized that almost all them called themselves "bi women", not dykes. Though as one explained, "Politically I'm a lesbian."

My love affair with queer Turkey lost some of its gloss on the bus when a trans woman declared that lesbians, all of us, were "as bad as white supremacists." Later, a rare out lesbian reinforced the familiar divide justifying the exclusion of trans women from a feminist group, if I understood correctly. What a joke. As if most straight women or men considered either trans women or dykes "real women". As if there was a whole strait between us, and no bridge in sight.

Still, I'm not quite ready to call it quits.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014)

War Against Queers in Nigeria

By Kelly Cogswell

It's been one year since an anti-gay bill passed in Nigeria banning same-sex marriages that nobody was lobbying for. Membership in LGBT groups was also criminalized, along with any display of homo affection, making a handshake as dangerous as a handjob. The law goes even further, requiring citizens to report such things to the cops or face a decade or so in jail, just like the queers.

So far, the general population has been happy to help rid Nigeria of these disgusting un-Nigerians, especially gay men. It seems like every day they're picked up for no good reason and charged, often at the behest of their neighbors. Just Tuesday, the Sharia police in the north detained a dozen men at a birthday party, claiming that it was actually a gay wedding, and that they had arrested the "bride."

At this point, gay men with HIV would rather risk dying of AIDS than go anywhere near the clinics that provide their ARV drugs, but leave them vulnerable to stigmatization, blackmail, beatings and the lynch mob. Unsurprisingly, new infections are climbing. And those with the means flee the country altogether.

On Wednesday, I went to an event organized by the Nigerian LGBT community in New York City. They held a panel and screened the 2013 documentary Veil of Silence, which Habeeb Lawal started shooting while the law was still in draft form and some legislators were advocating the death penalty for same-sex acts instead of a mere fourteen years in jail. He alternated footage of gay men talking about their lives with politicians in half-empty chambers inveighing against the degeneracy and foreignness of homosexuals. Which is kind of ironic, considering that this anti-gay pogrom owes so much to American preachers bearing money and hate.

Nigeria's garden variety homophobia became especially toxic after visits from the likes of Reverend Rick Warren in 2008, who compared homosexuality to pedophilia. The hate was thoroughly institutionalized by 2009 when evangelists Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Schmierer headlined at a conference uncovering the horrors of the "gay agenda" for a mesmerized audience terrified at queers hellbent on recruiting their children.

Many Nigerians clearly believe the propaganda. In the movie, one gay man described being asked by his mother if he knew any white people. She was sure he had caught his gayness from them, like a case of the clap. Politicians may spread the lies for more cynical reasons. From Russia to Cuba to Zimbabwe, there's a long history of governments using the homosexual menace to distract everybody from the problems du jour.

In Nigeria's case, it's how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as well as the thin grip the government has on power, especially in the north. Boko Haram now controls large territories, kidnapping girls, and slaughtering whole villages. Human Rights Watch warns it may entirely derail the upcoming presidential election.

As the situation in the north deteriorates, international organizations may have some leverage to improve the situation of LGBT people. Cliff Cortex from the United Nations Development Programme reported that they were already pressuring Nigeria to comply with the human rights treaties it has signed, not to mention its own constitution. Even so, he didn't seem to see any breakthroughs on the horizon.

In the meantime, Marie de Cenival, from the Heartland Alliance, described how international organizations like hers were scrambling to find new terminology that would allow them to serve gay men without calling them that, or even hinting at it. Identifying them as Men Who Have Sex With Men was now almost as bad as calling them gay. One day it was "target" clients, another, they were part of the "at-risk population." Which could be anybody, really, from sex workers to house wives.

Thierry A. Ekon, a Togo native, and researcher on HIV/AIDS in the African communities in New York reported on the depressing statistics among Nigerians since the law passed: the elevated rates of HIV transmission, its late detection, and how only one or two percent of those infected said it had to do with homo sex, the rest claiming to have no idea how they got it.

Olumide Makanjuola, from Solidarity Alliance in Nigeria, pleaded for help. The very idea that the twelve men detained were actually trying to hold a wedding was laughable: "We wouldn't dare." The panel included several other members, but nobody really offered solutions, beyond supporting LGBT Nigerians that end up in New York.

That is the least we can do. We also have to pay attention, keep the problem visible, and support the queers who are working on it. We also need to help them flee when it gets too dangerous, and exile seems like the best solution, at least for a while. Oliver Anene, the gay Nigerian moderating the panel, was quick to point out that it was temporary. "We want to go home."

Queer Turkey: A Snapshot

By Kelly Cogswell

I don't know what I expected to find at a kuir film festival in Turkey. Cops writing down the names of besieged queers, maybe. Or mobs of angry fundamentalists outside the degenerate theaters. But while I can see the tall white minarets of the local mosque from my hotel window, and hear the call to prayer a couple times a day, religion, at least in Ankara, the capital, still has a much smaller impact than in a place like, say, Egypt. In fact, I've seen more headscarves in certain Parisian neighborhoods than around here, where men on the street seem largely indifferent to women passing with their liberated hair.

As for LGBT folks, they're here, they're queer, and they've been organizing in earnest since the early Nineties. The human rights organization Lambda Istanbul was founded in '93. The largest national organization, Kaos GL, was formed the year afterwards, in Ankara, and became the first LGBT organization with legal status in 2005. Despite periodic efforts by the increasingly authoritarian Islamist government to get rid of them, the judiciary of this secular republic has repeatedly upheld their right to exist.

Civil society offers some support. Some newspapers cover LGBT issues and events. A request in 2012 to include some protections for LGBT people in the new constitution was supported by the main opposition party. Nevertheless, acceptance is not widespread, and while student groups and other efforts are growing every year, it's hard to imagine how most of these LGBT projects would survive without major foreign support.

When I went to lunch with Ömer Akpinar and Aylime Aslı Demir of Kaos GL, they unapologetically explained most of their funding came from a range of foreign embassies as well as human rights funds. There is a lot to do, and the money has to come from somewhere. The 13-member staff of Kaos GL is spread thin with a variety of projects from Pride marches that get bigger every year to queer publications and projects helping LGBT people survive. They also try to offer assistance to smaller groups.

One of their biggest efforts right now is directed to supporting LGBT refugees fleeing Iraq, Iran, and now Syria. Turkey is a transit point, and many will end up in Canada or the UK. In the meantime, the government places them in small cities and towns where they not only have to grapple with the difficulties of having fled their homes, and being foreign, but with the homophobia of conservative regions.

Kaos GL also has a campaign directed towards teachers and school counselors, in co-ordination with the teacher's union. Up until recently, if a struggling queer kid looked for help at school, they'd get ratted out to their parents, and the kids would often get yanked from the school. Nobody ever knew if they were living or dead. Kaos GL provides information, and encourages school staff to help the children without putting them in danger.

They also hold cultural events. Last year, for instance, they teamed up with a human rights center at Ankara University to show Lars Von Trier's "Nymphomaniac," banned by Turkish authorities for its extensive nude and sex scenes. The screening was denounced in the religious press, but they didn't mind much because afterwards five hundred people turned up to watch the movie and support them, instead of the expected one hundred.

According to Ömer and Aylime, the religious press is the main opponent of the LGBT movement. They aren't very good at it. Not yet, anyway. Most of their anti-gay articles are just cribbed verbatim from queer Turkish publications with the word "pervert" added on every time an L, G, B, or T is mentioned. As a consequence, the content and language are actually quite progressive if you ignore all the "perverts" sprinkled throughout.

While there aren't any specifically anti-gay groups, violence is a big problem for LGBT people, especially trans women who are murdered in epidemic proportions. One of the films in the festival, "Trans X Istanbul," showed two middle-aged trans women thumbing through a photo album in which they were among the only survivors.

In recent years, some of the violence in Istanbul has been inspired by more than transphobia. Property speculators have been using anti-trans campaigns to force them from desirable redevelopment areas. These hate campaigns are often followed by attacks and murders.

They're not suffering in silence. Trans women are some of the most visible, and radical, organizers in Turkey. In Ankara, they were the founders of The Pink Life Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Solidarity Association, which supports trans people, especially sex workers, and organizes the Kuirfest film festival, among other things.

Queer activists of all kinds got a boost from the huge antigovernment demos of 2013 that were sparked when cops squashed peaceful demonstrators trying to prevent Istanbul's Gezi Park from being replaced with a shopping mall and luxury housing. The resulting protests became a kind of referendum on Turkey's democracy, raising issues of freedom of speech and assembly, and protesting attacks on secularism. For most of the population, it was the first time they'd dared to take to the streets.

Mobilized and empowered, LGBT people started to create small groups all over the country, even in conservative towns. Which is essential. Faced with an eroding secularism, and a creaky democracy, queers need every hand on deck. And after the Gezi protests where they were often in the forefront, they may even have more allies. As Sedef Çakmak told one newspaper, "Gezi did in three weeks what would have otherwise taken us three years."

Check out Kaos GL (English) and Pink Life's Kuir Fest.

A Dyke In Defense of Offense: Yes, Je Suis Charlie

By Kelly Cogswell

I guess you know by now that the key staff at Charlie Hebdo in Paris were slaughtered by Islamist extremists outraged at, well, almost everything, but especially how the satirical magazine attacked Islamist extremists. But before their bodies were even cold, the glorious automatons of the American left were eviscerating the work of these dead cartoonists and journalists, taking it out of context, blaming the victims, projecting the subtext loud and clear: these colonialist, racist pigs only got what they deserved.

I don't even know where to start.

Except that if you think it's important to speak the truth to power, or at least try to, you should've had their backs. Not that Charlie Hebdo always got it right. Satire is tough. Sometimes they had brain farts like anyone else. Case in point--the time that they were trying to do a take down of Minute, the extreme right magazine that caricatured France's black Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, as a monkey, justifying it as humorous. Charlie Hebdo responded with their own version captioned, "Minute is not Charlie Hebdo. Racism is not funny…" While their intent was to critique racism, the image seemed to reinforce it. Like when some writers and filmmakers have depicted rape scenes, gay-bashings, and other graphic violence.

Fine. Whatever. Let them all be butchered, discarded without grief. Our artists should be perfect. And careful. We should put our work in the drawer for years, see if it holds up, and maybe wait until a team of censors can weigh in. Probably we should ban journalism altogether, along with late night comedy shows. Any form of media that is topical and subject to errors --of judgment, good taste, history, and our murky collective subconscious.

Somebody might mistake an attack on fat cat imams or violent Islamists like IS for an attack on Mohammed himself, or ordinary Muslims just trying to go to mosque and pay their bills. Neither should we repudiate the Israelis attacks on Palestinians because the resulting anti-Semitism will no doubt lead to dead Jews in Parisian supermarkets. No, don't expose the tyranny of the Castro brothers in Cuba, or it'll look like you're supporting U.S. meddling. Likewise, queers in West Africa getting stoned by mobs will have to do without our American help because somebody might accuse us of colonialism.

Above all, we must never grieve the imperfect dead. We must stand above the fray and keep our delicate white, our delicate, brown hands clean.

I read somewhere that all this criticism was progress, an attempt to avoid exercising "white male privilege." No matter that the resulting carefulness, outraged superiority and demand for perfection is itself rooted in privilege and power. The only careful people are those that have a lot to lose. Who if they aren't already there, believe they might yet be invited to the grownups' table, and having other resources at their command can define the only speech worth protecting, usually their own perfectly nuanced, calibrated, respectful and educated sneers.

People like me will never measure up. Mild as I am I'll be considered too shrill, too queer, too furious to always get it right. And when we open our traps we're dismissed or attacked. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You'd think she'd be heard as a nice brown Somali woman herself born inside the Muslim faith, but no. Every time she's scheduled to speak somewhere, there's a huge lefty outcry. Islamophobe! somebody screams. And maybe she is, literally, afraid of Islam. In the name of it, her female body was mutilated. People around her were murdered. She herself has been condemned to death. Me, I'm afraid of it, too. Like all religions. No matter how many reforms the Big Three go through, it's there in black and white that women are worthless. Queers should be killed. And we are killed any place, any time religious fundamentalists get the upper hand.

I feel sorry, I feel sick, at these nouveau Torquemadas offended at offense. If I was a cartoonist, I'd draw them with their heads protruding from a considerable ass, and the delicate rose of that hole would be their vile little mouths. Or maybe that's me. Or who I'd like to be some days. Like Charlie Hebdo a vulgar satirist down in the metaphorical mud, sneering at my betters, and making rude noises, but also wailing with inconsolable grief at the two towers I watched burn from the roof of my building, and then, also, at the resulting slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq. At all the dead in France. Because in some things you don't actually have to choose sides. In fact, you must not.

As Harry Bosch once said, fictional homicide detective, and the only prophet I revere, "Everybody counts or nobody counts."

Death by Gender: Leelah Alcorn

By Kelly Cogswell

When I try to think about gender, I have to go lie down with smelling salts, my head swirling with all the complications that we pull on like clothes over our biological sex. Even if you stick to binary territory, gender expression is constantly shifting. A big-haired, white trash girl like my sister has bigger balls than this Bengali upper-class straight guy poet I used to know. I'd dismissed a French-Asian waiter in Paris as generically masculine until his friends turned up and he became a total swish.

There's a lot we can say about gender expression, genetics, and the intersection of biology and society, but who really cares about the nuances when the consequences are hatred, bigotry, and one more young dead queer?

Last week, at 17, Leelah Alcorn stepped in front of a truck to end years of suffering. She came out as trans at fourteen, relieved to discover there was a word for somebody like her who had never felt like a boy. Her mother's response was to drag her to Christian conversion therapists, and tell her she'd "never be a real girl" and was going to hell. At sixteen, when she decided to try the intermediate approach by coming out as gay, her parents removed her from school, took away her phone, and any access to social media. When they gave it back, not long ago, she was too isolated and depressed to survive.

It's easy to blame her parents--they deserve it, offering up hate instead of love. Hellfire instead of any kind of help. Also to blame are the Christian conversion therapists who seem to specialize in driving queer kids of all kinds over the edge. But the problem goes a lot further, to the widespread policing of gender which often intersects with sexual orientation. Gay effeminate men are never real men except maybe when it comes to their paychecks. Dyke lives rarely appear in Women's history except maybe as scapegoats for the failure of the feminist movement's second wave.

In fact, transwomen like Janet Mock have more credibility as women than I do. When her book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, was reviewed in Jezebel, the reviewer began by announcing that it was "unfortunately not about how to achieve her fantastic hair. Oh, because those curls are glorious."

The readers got the message: she's one of us. One even commented that when it came to viewing trans people as humans like everybody else, "It helps that she "passes"- it's hard to see her as anything BUT a woman. While it's unfair for transpeople to be held to a societal standard that is for many unattainable, it definitely helps blur the gender boundaries. A lot of people still have this ridiculous view of transwomen as hulking dudes stumbling around awkwardly in heels dudes playing dress up."

Janet Mock doesn't just read as a woman, but a certain kind of woman. And even when she, and other trans activists like Laverne Cox have tried to shift the narrative away from transition and surgery, biology and beauty, nobody's hearing the message. In fact, they probably wouldn't get a platform at all if they looked more like early transactivists Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. Or even any aging housewife watching her own original tits sag.

This is important, because Leelah's suicide note reveals that it wasn't just the transphobia of her parents and church that drove her to suicide, but the belief that she had to transition early or she'd be an "ugly woman", which would literally be a fate worse than death.

"The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition,she wrote. "I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life ... I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself."

It's unbearable all the anguish and fear in her letter. It indicts the whole LGBT community, and our failure to grapple with our diversity and accept it. The more we advance, the more we put forward only our most pedicured feet, our most photo-shopped faces. Above all it underlines our long estrangement from feminism, which at its best yanks the clothes off both the emperor and the empress, and leaves them both shivering equally in the cold.

Hope for Queers Now in Cuba? Maybe

By Kelly Cogswell

President Obama made history this week by dumping a policy towards Cuba that hasn't helped a bit to usher in democracy or protect human rights. In fact, the fifty year effort of both Democrats and Republicans to isolate the island, and twist its little Caribbean arm, has only allowed Cuba's dictatorship to entrench itself. The country remains the only one in Latin America where pretty much every form of dissent is repressed.

Open your mouth, you may be smashed in the face by the cops, intimidated by angry mobs bussed in for the occasion, and other public acts of shaming and "repudiation" both in the street or if you get big enough, on the state-run media. Write a dissenting blog, you can forget holding a job or, until the regime's recent charm offensive, being allowed to leave the island prison. Once gone, you may be forbidden to return. The real gadflies are serially detained without any charges for several hours or several days, while the cops harass their families. Worse is long-term imprisonment.

So a little change can't hurt. A little opening. The only question is will this actually make things better for the average Cuban? Especially queers?

If you believe The New York Time's editorial board, Cuba was already on the verge of a hurricane of rainbow flags and unicorns. The only problem with this excellent news, delivered in Sunday's "Cuba's Gay Rights Evolution" is that it's largely bullshit, based on a distortion both of queer Cuban history as well as the current reality.

They didn't express any kind of skepticism at how Cuba's most visible LGBT rights advocate, The National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), is led by sexologist Mariela Castro, a straight white woman with a convenient last name and an outdated approach. They practically wet themselves heralding her bravery as "the first lawmaker in Cuban [post-revolutionary] history to cast a dissenting vote" in parliament. C'mon, she's the dictator's fucking daughter. Nobody's gonna drag her to jail, and they probably gave her the okay to do it. Can anybody say pink-washing?

And while Ms. Castro deserves props for getting gay issues out there, and winning free gender reassignment surgery and hormones for transpeople, the writers should have at least mentioned what happens to her "visible and empowered community" when they try to do things for themselves. Case in point is black lesbian and blogger Leannes Imbert Acosta, founder and director of the independent association, Observatorio Cubano de Derechos LGBT.(Cuban LGBT Rights Watch).

In 2012, when she asked the glorious CENESEX for help gathering information on the forced labor and re-education camps of the Sixties that incarcerated tens of thousands of queers, the governmental institution was rather less than responsive. And when Imbert Acosta went ahead with plans for her own exhibit on the camps, state security turned up at her door, confiscated her materials, and dragged her off to the cop station. Not for the first time.

The New York Times itself is complicit in erasing LGBT history in Cuba. Probably the most misleading part of the article was how they downplayed how viciously the regime has repressed LGBT people, writing that sexual minorities were "ostracized" and that "some" people were sent to "labor camps." "Ostracized" doesn't begin to describe the systematic antigay campaign of the government that not only passed punitive laws declaring us enemies of the state, but whipped up mobs as large and violent as any we've seen lately in Uganda.

And it wasn't just "some" gay men, but more like 25,000 that were incarcerated in brutal re-education and forced labor camps along with thousands more Jehovah's Witnesses and other undesirables. The gay men that could, fled. Suicide was not uncommon. Lesbians, often ignored in this history, were more often sent directly to jail or mental hospitals where the Cuban state attempted to electro-shock away their degenerate counterrevolutionary tendencies.

Neither was this vast wave of antigay hate over in the Seventies, as The Times implied. Even after the camps were closed following an international outcry in 1968, new antigay laws were passed, and plenty of LGBT people, especially dykes, continued to get booted from jobs, and end up in jails and mental hospitals during the Seventies and Eighties. People with HIV, especially queers, were forcibly interred in state run sanitaria until 1993. Even now, public decency and assembly laws are used to harass LGBT Cubans and people with HIV that can be convicted of the ever popular "pre-criminal social dangerousness." "Publicly manifested homosexuality" actually remains illegal.

Still, we should be hopeful at the new Cuba opening. At its worse, only the elite, white, military-connected kleptocracy--that already controls the economy-- will benefit. At its best, ordinary LGBT folks may get help from another two years of an Obama State Department which is actively supporting LGBT people worldwide.

What Cuban queers actually need to build an authentic LGBT movement, though, is what all Cubans need, the rights to free speech and assembly, the only real building blocks of change. Let's hope that doesn't get lost in the rush to pry open one more new market.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014) which includes large sections on LGBT Cuba.

All #BlackLivesMatter, and Advice to That Young Activist

By Kelly Cogswell

If there's any cause for hope on America's racism front, it is that young black woman in braces on the TV. She wasn't just a participant, but an organizer of some of the New York marches protesting Eric Garner's death, and the verdict that gave his cop murderer a free pass.

Watching her talk, you have to wonder how long it will be before the old guard try to wrangle her into speaking at one more March on Washington, or a big New York Rally Against Something or Other, sandwiching her in between reverend this, or congressman that, sucking up her youth and vitality the way they always do.

As an "older and wiser" activist, I feel I should give her some advice. Which first of all, is to ignore older and wiser activists of all kinds. You seem to know what you're doing, keep it up. And be especially wary of anybody offering a platform you haven't built yourself. The more successful you are, the more the old guard will come knocking at your door, and you can bet your bottom dollar they won't give much in exchange. Before you know it, your cause will have become a career, and whatever new ideas you had, whatever lines you were willing to cross will seem ridiculous, outlandish, not at all worth the risk.

I mean, really, what kind of sucker actually believes this U, S, of A, can deliver on its promises of liberty and justice for all? Or that it's worth putting yourself in harm's way for a man that's already dead? Naw, take the crumbs you can get and milk that expense account for all its worth. Not that they'll tell you that up front. They'll tell you that they're actually considering your ideas in Committee A. And adding some language to the guidelines Committee B is going to present. Change takes time, and blah blah blah. Come back next Thursday at nine for the photo op with the mayor.

No, my friend, better to do what you're doing, and refuse compromise. Let the wheelers and dealers wheel and deal. You stick to the streets. Allow yourself to dream a better city, better country. Demand everything. Fight hard, resist violence, and keep each other safe. Maybe even fly the freak flag once in a while. Avoid any proposition that requires new clothes.

All I want for Christmas is to see the hashtag upgraded to read #allblacklivesmatter. We know the names of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, but what about Dionte Green, another black death in Missouri, but gay this time? Doesn't he count, too? Or how about black cis-woman Yvette Smith who was shot twice by a deputy sheriff earlier this year in Texas? In 2010, Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley killed a young black girl Aiyana Jones. Sakia Gunn was killed for being a dyke, neither the first nor last. Friday, DeShawnda Bradley (Sanchez), a black trans woman was killed while she was pounding on a stranger's door for help.

All black lives matter, not just those of black men, and not just those killed by cops who wear on their shoulders the power of the State, and carry terror in the increasingly large guns, and teargas, and I never thought I'd say this--tanks.

Black women come in for more than their share of violence. And the deaths of black transwomen should inspire an equally enduring rage. Often committed brutally, and publicly, with extraordinary violence, their horrible deaths are meant to inspire fear in a whole population, just like lynchings. The life-and-death power on display here is not so much that of the State, but of an entire society that already forces transwomen of color to the margins. Makes school impossible, like finding decent jobs. Their lives matter, too.

Don't be afraid to say it. Maybe for the first time it would work. The movement seems open and free -- for the moment. I went down to a protest at Foley Square this week, and on my way saw young people of all races arriving together, as friends. Even if you don't believe the white kids are there for the long haul, and even if you'll often find their privilege shows, a generation ago those white kids wouldn't have been there at all. So they're learning. They're educable. And accepting. Dare everything.

Beyond that, what can I say? I've been at this a while, know how to work the press, marshal organized demos, but these free flowing, wonderful, cop-thwarting things popping up all over the city are beyond me. I'm thrilled to see street activism and direct action renewed, go beyond those sterile Facebook clicks. Some things like racism, like homophobia, won't change unless we confront them in the flesh. It's what our enemies are so afraid of.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Thanksgiving Stinks and the Kitchen Sink

By Kelly Cogswell

Yeah, we all know it. Despite the sea of Beaujolais nouveau, and twelve kinds of pie, Thanksgiving stinks for a lot of people. Though props to you queers that have everything lining up nicely on the health and wealth side of things, and somehow escaped the usual family trauma served up hot with a ladle or two of hate.

Still, I'll count my small and large blessings, just for kicks. And at the top of the list is how my local Rite Aid has gone right from crepe paper skeletons to chocolate Santas, so I can ignore Thanksgiving entirely, and stay in a sugar coma the whole holiday season. There's not much seven or eight handfuls of candy corn can't cure.

And I realized yesterday that I really appreciate the people who post cute photos of animals on Facebook. I mean, I like kittens as much as anybody, and little baby French bulldogs, but I'm never gonna go in search of them. And I'm way too cool to admit how hard I laughed at those two kittens in the coffee cups that looked exactly like frothy cappuccinos until I noticed the eyes.

And senility. Yeah, not mine. My mother's. She's not really a fan, but I can't deny the upside, that she's forgotten how repulsive she finds me and my dykeness, and is insanely grateful when I call, no matter what she tells folks afterwards. We can talk twenty minutes with no insults. No threats to pray away the gay, and for God to make me disgustingly normal. Of course it's heartbreaking, too. It would've been nice if she'd come around while she was still in full possession of her faculties, but beggars can't be choosers. You'll eat that free cheese and like it!

Which reminds me, cheese. Tangy fresh goat chèvre. Those rancid blues. And melty mozzarellas or gruyeres. I'm especially grateful for anything that bubbles up, browns, and gives a third degree burn to the roof of my mouth.

Of course I'm insanely thankful for artists and writers of all kind who are not afraid to fly the flag for freakdom, imagining things that aren't there, and seeing what is. And thanks to the people that have introduced me to the likes of Octavia Butler, and of course, Ursula K. Le Guin. I've loved her since I read The Dispossessed, and renewed my fangirl status after her speech at the National Book Awards about the power of books, and how "Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words."

That being said, all hail the people that go beyond words, and the laboratory of their art, and risk resisting bigotry and stupidity in the streets. And the courts. In Botswana this week, Legabibo, a gay and lesbian group won a landmark legal case in the country's High Court, allowing it to be officially registered. And in Uganda, where we're under attack, there are fierce, incredibly brave, activists fighting back.

Drag queens and kings are also on my short list. Those queers unafraid to take their garish wigs and stereotypical mannerisms into the street where they're most at risk. Who with their enormous fingernails, or dicks of extraordinary length unravel the artifice of femininity and masculinity that plague us all. Thank you. Mil gracias. You've taught and (sometimes) terrified me since that bar in Lexington, Kentucky where you used to carry switch blades. You know the one.

And for that matter, a shout out to my babe who is just as happy to see me in a furry brown skirt and stripey tights as the usual boring, please don't fuck with me, jeans. I admit to cowardice, and a nearly PTS desire to pass unnoticed in the streets. No catcalls. No challenges. No demands that I smile. All things being equal, my secret fashion perversions are neither butch nor femme, pink nor blue, but a desire to mix stripes with plaid. Smooth with rough or fleecy.

That's a pretty good start I think. Let me also acknowledge my friends, including activist colleagues that still have my back after a couple decades out of touch. And the joys of modern technology including flat screen TV's and cell phones. Email, that essential curse. Cooking shows. Salted cashews. Proper beds. Running water. And, of course, you, dear reader.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Democratic Armageddon and Post-Everything America

By Kelly Cogswell

The Democrats really got clobbered this mid-term. And all the progressives are wailing and gnashing their teeth. Still, we at least have a Democratic president for another two years, so it could be worse. And maybe it will be next election. The Republicans will probably keep the House and Senate, and maybe even install Ted Cruz in the White House. Or why not my boy, Rand Paul?

It was mostly their own fault. Democrats ran as fast and as far as they could from the Obama administration, and his disturbingly good record on the economy, employment, health care, same-sex marriage evolution, keeping promises to withdraw from war zones. I have a big problem with his record on civil liberties, domestic spying, Guantanamo, his refusal to arrest U.S. war criminals, but I won't quibble since even most lefties aren't as obsessed with that stuff.

What Democrats were trying to avoid was contamination by proxy. Attacked for every reason under the sun, Obama's failed, (or hasn't bothered?) to create a narrative of success. He's effectively decried as illegitimate, no matter that his white Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, actually stole his own election. No, let's impeach Obama for everything from the sheer nerve of his candidacy, the occasional executive order (that Bush used recklessly without qualm), his use of force (when Bush invaded several countries and started several wars). No, Obama is entitled to do nothing except say, yessuh to his betters instead of believing himself president. How dare he wear a black face in the very White House?

That is really the crux of the matter. And it calls to mind that phrase we heard all the time in 2008-- post-racial. It was a nice idea, real wishful thinking, having a post-racial country. That was also post-feminist, and nearly post-gay. Elect the African American guy and all our racial woes are suddenly over. Finally, a chance to hold hands and sing Kumbaya after all the episodes of police brutality, racist murders from Bensonhurst to Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo.

Except we're never post-anything. Sure, Obama's election was a sign of progress, but by itself it wasn't going to unravel the legacy of slavery. If anything, the backlash against Obama has clarified how racism and the institution of white supremacy snake their way through our society. We see it in housing policy, elections, employment and the police departments out there in Missouri rounding up their rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse people protesting the grand jury verdict in Ferguson where, in case you didn't notice, another white cop shot another young black male. We don't even mention the dead black women. Or raped women. Because that happens so often it's not worth a few words.

We have the same struggle with race in the LGBT community. Composed of all segments of the general public, we have the same racism, classism, misogyny, even homo- and trans-phobia. Our national (and local) institutions are usually pretty pale, pretty male in the leadership area. We ignore the poorer, browner parts of our communities, privileging the East and West Coasts.

I welcomed the news a couple months ago that HRC was going to invest a cool 8 million in a program down South. So far they're saying the right things about reaching out to local activists already in the field, and grappling with related questions of racial and economic justice. But will preliminary "conversations" really turn into real partnerships? I'd like to hope so.

At any rate, us queers in New York should pay attention, and avoid believing we've got it made now that most of us can finally marry and we've got a Democratic mayor somewhat amenable to the LGBT community. Republicans on the state level now have a strangle-hold on the legislature, and passing Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), or ending conversion therapy seem unlikely. And beyond legal change, there is still the eternal matter of violence. Being safe on the street. In our homes with homophobic parents. Bullying. Getting jobs if we're a little queer in the gender. The cultural invisibility that still makes each LGB or T or Q character on Netflix absolutely remarkable.

This will only get worse if we're subjected to a repeat of the Nineties antigay Culture Wars. What troubles me is that we'll be facing it with a community that is increasingly virtual. We let Gay Inc. deal with political pressure from the local level up. We're losing queer bars, bookstores (which admittedly are disappearing everywhere. The queer art scene is fragile at best. And if there are queer street activists, their existence passes largely unnoticed in the mainstream press.

In short, we have few of the networks we mobilized during the AIDS crisis, during the Culture Wars. We pull-off demos occasionally, but don't actually organize. I guess you could say we're post-activist.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Girl Gang, "Bande de Filles"

Review "Bande de Filles" (released in English as Girlhood)
Director: Céline Sciamma (Tomboy, Waterlilies)

You see them when you live in Paris, these small groups of black teenage girls that hang out near Chatelet or Les Halles, an area of the city with an enormous decrepit shopping center which smells of piss and bleach.

They move in packs, jostling and laughing. Picking victims of all races to heckle or scare, turn the tables for once. Everybody is a little afraid of them. God knows I am. They're the same girls that harassed me in high school. My sister was their white equivalent--getting in girl fights in high school and threatening to beat me up.

At the same time, they draw the eye. They're larger than life, practically glowing with beauty and rage and suppressed violence. I was happy when I found that Céline Sciamma (Tomboy, Waterlilies) actually made a film about them. I saw Bande de filles this summer at a festival in Paris, and was engaged from the first mysterious scene where we watch two teams playing American-style football with all its brutality and grace. You only realize they're women when they pull off their helmets.

Afterwards, we see the girls walk back home through a gauntlet of darkness and trash, and groups of loitering men. They shrink with each step. By the time they peel off one by one to enter their apartment blocks, and face their own domestic horrors, they are timid and small. The last is Marieme, a 16 year old who hooks up with three other girls when it's clear she's not going to be able to escape the projects.

We're not sure how much is an act, or playacting. They are teenagers after all, and their moods are mercurial. They take as much childlike pleasure in their friendship as they do in invoking violence, and we also get a few wistful moments when they retreat to a cheap hotel room with their shoplifting booty to hang out and dance to Rihanna.

I saw it in previews with an audience that was maybe seventy-five percent white. The white people were a little tense. Especially when a white salesgirl got intimidated and harassed by the gang. But every now and then you'd hear these little snickers from the people of color, or sighs of recognition, particularly from black women.

Last week I read an article in Slate (French) by Charlotte Pudlowsky called, "Being Invisible as a Black Woman in France." She described how few images of black women there were in politics and culture, and hailed Girl Gang as the first major film in France with a serious budget and professional cinematographers to feature a story with all black female leads.

Pudlowsky found, "This absence of models, is an absence of possible dreams, is an absence of choices and an absence of tools." Especially when you're seen as foreign, as stupid, as eating weird food. Almost every black woman she interviewed for the article looked to the U.S. for images of black intelligence, beauty, possibility. They embraced Toni Morrison, The Cosby Show, even Whoopi Goldberg in Jumping Jack Flash because this little black computer geek was the hero!

And most of their response to Girl Gang was positive, though if a few wished it hadn't been set in the slums. Still, as one person posted, "Even if it's not really your world, your city, your job, you still recognize yourself as a black woman, and you turn to your friend and you understand that it's you up there on the screen."

I was disappointed this morning on Facebook to read comments from the usual French leftists casually trashing the film in yet another febrile display of white anxiety and political correctness, "I haven't seen it but..." The blah blah blah boiled down to, "Who does she think she is, a white Parisian lesbian making a film about young black women from the ghetto?" Or "Creating the wrong impression is worse than none." It is alternately too stereotypical and too sociological. Because of course black filmmakers like Spike Lee never set their work in poor neighborhoods, and never try to explain anything. Nope, pure art for them.

I don't understand the Left. Not in France, or here either. We hate the stereotypes of the "good" blacks as much as the "bad" ones, and when we get complicated images, we hate them, too. We especially censor any suggestion that these girls emerge from households where black men may wield an arsenal of weapons from humiliation to their fists to keep their female relatives in line.

Erase that, you miss how remarkable it is any time these young black women try to explore their own power, even if it means standing outside the schools and shaking down other students, entertaining themselves with shoplifting, staking out territory and getting in fights with other girl gangs to protect their honor, which may not shine too brightly, but still endures.

Dusting Off Identity Politics

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Last week, yet another person told me that identity politics was dead. "Sure, as a strategy, it was okay for our generation, helped us get a lot done from AIDS to marriage, but the young ones aren't into labels. They use "queer" or whatever. Don't see the need for L-G-B-T at all." Which may well be true. Young queers can declare victory. Get married. Or not. Ride off into the sunset or ironically drink Bud out of mason jars at home.

Identity politics seems particularly dusty during specialized history months when PBS broadcasts a couple of documentaries on the likes of Harvey Milk like they do of Martin Luther King, or Cesar Chavez. Some simplistic little thing that fossilizes our struggles into something a kid can understand. Though nothing that breaks into straight, white, male History to indicate that our stories of liberation are as important and revolutionary as those of our founding fathers. In fact, are a kind of continuation of them. Not separate or apart.

Even I hate identity politics sometimes, because after years of calling attention to differences, we get groups of whacktivists who don't just acknowledge difference, but fetishize it, even enforce it, attacking any queer organizer who tries to offer parallels with, for instance, the black civil rights movements, because it is an "appropriation" of experience. Likewise, any attempt to connect queers in Nigeria with those in New York or even Mississippi are automatically denounced as a form of neo- or post- or maybe even pre-colonization.

Ostensibly attacking racism, or colonialism, it's hard to distinguish them from the bigots that believe that each group, each nation, is not just formed somewhat arbitrarily by skin color or sexual orientation, or gender, or geography, and the resulting experience, but is so profoundly and inherently different we're not just apples and oranges but sea slugs and skyscrapers. Which begs the question, if we're as foreign to each other as all that, on what planet can we be equal? Why bother with democracy at all?

The biggest argument to reconsider identity politics, is that even in places where City Hall flies the Rainbow flag in June, they'll still call you a faggot or dyke or tranny when they beat your ass, no matter how passé identity is. Critics of Obama don't really go after his politics, but his black skin. Women are still raped every couple of minutes just for having tits. When I was harassed on the street a couple of weeks ago it was as a big ole dyke. The legal barriers to my equality may be falling every day, but homophobia is still alive and well. Just like racism. And misogyny. All those things that impose identity, history, life experience, whether we want it or not.

Because the focus is identity, a more enlightened version of identity politics can respond. A willingness to do what Ta-Nehisi Coates is doing with race, asking what it means to be black, how racism is enmeshed in our national history and imagining some way to redress it. The only way to assure basic human rights is through political action. And the only way to wield political power is to be visible. And the only way for minorities to be visible is to organize around these arbitrary differences somebody started calling identities.

What queers need to articulate this time around, though, is that while differences exist, and they matter, they don't make us unrecognizable to each other, or the world. Like an extended family, each member may have a different personality, life, name, even gender, class, race, history or nationality, but we're still in it together.

If we are uncomfortable with the language that defines us, it is up to us to transform it by taking these awkward words and putting our bodies behind them, investing them with our lives. Only then, will they begin to change and "woman" will make room for the likes of me. And "lesbian" can mean blue jeans, Doc Martens and a Mohawk on Wednesdays, and on Saturdays a furry skirt and lipstick. Or wotever.

Even in our own community, we can intersect and be different and the same all at once. We can even shift between our identities because they aren't fixed. Though the consequences might be. The jobs we still don't get. The religions we're exiled from. The families many of us still leave behind to save ourselves.

We can do anything we want, except abandon the field of battle. I think in the midst of all this progress, we've failed to communicate to a younger generation just how vulnerable we are. That we LGBTQ people are a minority today, and always will be. A dangerous reality when humans have a predilection for punishing the different and powerless, and progress is never written in stone. Voting rights won generations ago are under attack again. Ditto for abortion rights.

Identity politics is dead. Long live identity politics.

Interview Sarah Schulman: One of the Last Lesbians Standing (In Publishing)

By Kelly Cogswell

Early in July I had a conversation with Sarah Schulman, writer, queer activist, and co-founder of the Lesbian Avengers. We talked about what contributed to the group's successful launch, including the vibrancy of the lesbian subculture in Seventies and Eighties. We also discussed why it's so hard for lesbians writers to break into the mainstream. Spoiler alert. Homophobia and niche marketing.

Here's are some edited excerpts:

SCHULMAN: When I wrote The Sophie Horowitz Story, in 1984, it was the third lesbian detective novel on the face of the earth. It was a brand new concept. And quickly became a reactionary idea. But for a very brief time, it was a progressive idea. Because the idea was that you could take a popular cultural form and put in lesbian content was something that hadn't happened before. Because my generation was the first generation that was out in popular culture. Prior to us, there was only underground lesbian culture and then there was popular culture. So, the reason that The Sophie Horowitz Story was so successful, even if it was still underground or whatever, was because people were excited at being inserted into the world.

But it started much earlier. The first WOW festival was in 1979 and I was involved in that. But that was a reflection of something that was already ongoing. There were things like Women News, which had existed before then, and the St. Mark's Lesbian Health Collective, and Ana Simo's project, Medusa's Revenge Theater. So that's the Seventies. And that's still underground culture. But there is a way that it's commenting on the world.

COGSWELL: I also remember reading the David Wojnarowicz book, and it was also a dialogue with the larger world.

SCHULMAN: But that's many years later. I also don't think that's the same. Because that's more an extension of underground culture. There's a split aesthetically. I come out of underground culture and I understand what it was. But I was also part of the move towards the insertion of the lesbian subject into The World. And this desire to be seen on your own terms in a public way. And there's always been a tension around that. I mean, it still exists. Today, you can be out as a lesbian writer, but if you have a lesbian protagonist, you can't have a successful book. You have to have a secondary character. And this has been true for decades, now. And it's still true.

COGSWELL: Who do you think is still trying to do that? Insert lesbians on their own terms? Into the world. Because it seems like that project has been abandoned.

SCHULMAN: People are trying. I run writing groups in my apartment for women who have queer content. People are also constantly sending me their manuscripts. I see that there are plays being written. I see that there are films being made. I see that there are books being written, but they never get out there. Or if they get out there and they're buried. But like this year, I chaired the Lammys lesbian fiction panel. And we read sixty books. And it was hard to find ten nominees. The best writers are abandoning the lesbian protagonist because they want to have real careers. And the ones who stick with it are either in the very early stages of their development, and don't have a lot of craft, or can't get published.

But it doesn't mean that the impulse isn't there. People are still doing it. They have a need to express. They just can't get into the marketplace.

COGSWELL: Do you think it's harder now than it was? I noticed that After Delores was published on a mainstream press.

SCHULMAN: Yeah, but you have to understand how that happened. First of all, I only got paid five thousand dollars for that book. Just so you understand that. So, a lesbian of my generation-- that is to say someone who has always been out -- got a job at Dutton as an editor. Right out of Smith College. And she already knew my work because I was known, and especially Girls, Visions and Everything was known. And a friend of hers stopped me at the health food store, and said that this woman Carol had gotten this job and that I should send her my next book. So I brought it over to the office. And then she called me a few days later and said she wanted to publish it.

Now this was before niche marketing. Right? Niche marketing starts in 1992. This is before that. So, when that book was published. It got a mainstream review in the New York Times by a man. Today, it would be reviewed by a lesbian. Because of niche marketing. Because of the containment. The containment was not in place yet.

COGSWELL: Do you see any way out? Do you see any way to go outside niche marketing?

SCHULMAN: In one of my books, I can't remember which, maybe as early as My American History I wrote out like a whole plan. Of how to turn around the problem of lesbian fiction. I had proposed a subway ad campaign with the prominent straight writers of the day. Like Amy Tan, and Terry McMillan, these people, saying, "We read lesbian books." Or companies sending lesbian writers out on tour with their famous straight writers. Or things like that. I mean, there's ways to do it. You just have to give people permission to read these books. But they don't want to. Because the homophobia is stronger than the desire for money.

It's true. I mean, people are trying to exploit every single underground impulse that exists, any little fucking thing that a person does you see it in an ad the next day, or you see it. My last book, or second to last, Gentrification of the Mind, has turned into some kind of cult classic, I get letters all the time, but the people who are willing to exploit everything in the world, don't want to exploit that. It is ideological. It's a problem of ideology.

I've talked to all of these organizations like Publishing Triangle, I've met with them, I've sent proposals. I'm like, what if you spoke to the publishing industry? What if you had meetings with people and said, "Look. You are repressing this literature." What if agents kept presenting the material over and over again? Until the point when editors were used to it and saw that it was coming? But they won't. They won't do anything that would actually produce a positive outcome.

The other thing is lesbians in publishing will not do anything. The last time I had a round of discussion with young lesbian editors I found they had no sense that their ability to be out on their job is a product of anybody else's labor. And they don't feel like they owe you anything. I mean, in one of my books I say that there was a time when any gay girl could call any other gay girl in America and she would call her back. Right? But forget it now.

Many of my peers have been driven out by this. There were maybe fifteen or so people who were publishing lesbian fiction during the time I was at Dutton--and none of those people are publishing adult fiction today. Except me. And those were all very interesting writers. Because it was a system of attrition. I just happened to be very, very, very, you know. Committed. I will spend a decade getting a book published. But other people are not willing to do that.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Re-Reading After Delores, by Sarah Schulman

By Kelly Cogswell

After Delores
By Sarah Schulman
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2nd Ed. (2013)

These days I mostly read to entertain myself and kill time, though books are still what I turn to when I need to understand my own life, or try to lend it meaning. After I gave up on the Bible, I obsessively read The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde's collection of poetry. Later on it was James Baldwin's essay The Fire Next Time. Both helped me survive in a world that hated queers, black ones especially, but white ones, too.

I found Dorothy Allison's Trash when I was trying to digest what it meant to be a southern lesbian, a Kentucky dyke in New York. And David Wojnarowicz' pure queer rage in Close to the Knives destroyed me, inspired me, made me want to make art, or maybe harm myself, and others.

A couple years ago, when I was thinking about the Lesbian Avengers, and trying to remember the New York they emerged from, I re-read After Delores (1988) by Sarah Schulman. Before I read it the first time, I'd seen her around. Gotten to know her a little in our small queer activist world. After Delores was a revelation. A lot different from her recent books like Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.

Still, I'd kinda forgotten about it. Blocked it out, really, because the book was too uncomfortably true. And reading it again, I not only remembered an East Village full of queers and artists that would maybe colonize a bar, or create a gallery or theater, I remembered the pleasure of the book itself. How natural it was, how full of a dykeness that was merely taken for granted. The narrator is nothing we're used to. Not some cute, cuddly lesbian dying to please, or the usual mess of a victim with yet another terrifying story of incest and rape, drug addiction, suicide attempts, and redemptive therapy. Not even a deadpan postmodern observer of hetero families.

No, what you get is a young East Village dyke waiting tables in a crappy diner. She's a little awkward, maybe even self-loathing. She doesn't know what to wear. Drinks too much. Can't quit thinking about her snaky ex-girlfriend Delores who dumped her for a woman with prospects. She has moments of thinking she looks pretty good. Other times, she's a little disgusted, or disgusting. She has issues of personal hygiene when she's miserable, and flashes of tenderness. She's honorable. Or would like to be. That's why she tries to solve the murder of another, younger dyke.

In many ways, the narrator could be me. Me then, in the Nineties, bumbling my way through relationships, and crappy jobs. Broke. Messy. Which is why I'd put it out of my mind. Reading this was a little like poking myself with a sharp stick. Schulman brought lesbians alive right there on the page.

You'd need dozens of books to convey the same information if you turned to nonfiction. And all the social scientists and gender theorists still wouldn't capture either the complexity or simplicity of identity. That thing you are when you go out of the house without a thought for the straight world, or even the judging queers. When you do what you do, and are what you are. Pre-verbal.

Here, Schulman pulls it off, writing as if she was entitled to, as if the battle was won and queers were human, and as universal as Philip Marlow, or Augie March. Maybe more so. This should have been the beginning of something. But it wasn't, really. Of the dozens of dykes writing about our lives in the Nineties, only a few like Eileen Myles have persisted. Only a few new ones have begun. Or been published. Because we're just not wanted.

So when lesbian writers want to be taken seriously, we often abandon our lives for more lofty subjects. And if we want to make money with dyke characters, what is there but porn, or cozy mysteries? And any dyke that tries to do something else. Good luck with that. Dyke presses have their bottom lines and are not always more welcoming than the mainstream.

Then of course, there's queer theory. Where lesbians are deciphered and deconstructed nearly to death. I'm told we don't even use that word anymore. We've been declared obsolete before we've even had a good chance to look at who we are, describe our lives from many points of view, digest them. That simple act of description is incredibly radical. It keeps our feet in reality. Entertains ambiguity. Our humanness. It is the necessary jumping off point.

I suppose this means lesbians don't have a future. Not because we'll be exterminated as an entire class, instead of individually. But because we haven't imagined that future. How can we without books and art, and lives lived consciously as dykes?

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Allies Aren't Enough In Ferguson, San Fran

By Kelly Cogswell

Another unarmed black man is shot by a white cop, and as the situation explodes, plenty of right-thinking white folks are exhorting each of us blanquitos to become an ally. It's also what straight folks are supposed to become when another fag gets beaten, another transwoman mutilated and killed. Or a dyke gets raped.

I hate that word, ally. It is so patronizing. So besides the point. As if Michael Brown's death has no consequences for white lives. As if the murder of Bryan Higgins, radical faerie, this week in San Francisco won't touch hets. As if we could make our lives bubbles. No, not even bubbles which explode pretty easily. But pods maybe. Metal space ships exploring a different galaxy which we can leave whenever we want a change of scenery.

Sure, plenty of people are sheltered. Random attributes give us privileges, and we enjoy them as much as we can. I suppose it's even remarkable that anybody bothers to wring their hands at the latest horror. But the links are still there. We drag around our shared histories like toilet paper stuck to our shoes. Like that extra forty pounds we don't really notice anymore. Haven't for years. Doesn't mean that sodden, shitty thing isn't there. In the houses we can buy, the jobs we get. That bloody smudge on the sidewalk.

But as long as my passport says American, what happens in Ferguson, or Detroit, or Chicago is my business, too. As long as I am human, really. Seeing each other as separate and irrelevant is part of what got us into this mess to begin with. The inability to look each other in the eyes and recognize, "Okay, a person. Like me." Dogs are smarter than us. One sniff and they know what's what. Cat. Dog. Tree. Homos not so sapiens get distracted by all the superficial stuff, skin, hair, gestures, cars. Language. Act like they are mountain ranges with no clear path over. Are often glad that the barrier's there. And work to build higher ones.

In fact, differences really only exist in the painful middle distance. At the cellular level we are pretty much indistinguishable. And the further away you move the microscope, the more you can see how our futures are bound together, like the misery of our past. It's in our own interest to pay attention, and think about how we fit together. And then plunge in.

Which is why I wish we'd retire that word, ally. It implies that we don't really have to do much but have nice thoughts and maybe make a donation. Send some tents to the war zone. Sandwiches. Not go there yourself in the flesh. Risk getting hurt. Maybe physically, maybe just your feelings. I mean, you should try not to be a complete asshole, you're not the center of attention and maybe should listen more than you talk, but missteps are inevitable if you leave your space ship.

The thing we have to keep in mind is that we are not "allies". Not acting on anybody else's behalf. We don't deserve gold stars for getting involved in the society we belong to. We don't even have to pretend to understand somebody else's experience. We just have to believe we are more deeply connected than we admit. And if we fuck up sometimes, so what? If practice doesn't make perfect, it does make better. At least we aren't still deluded into believing we're somehow outside the problem, and that it won't bite us in the ass one day. Hasn't already infected our lives.

I thought about this a lot when I was out there on the frontlines as a Lesbian Avenger. I always figured that if dykes finally got treated with respect, had the room to make choices about sex and romance, weren't subjected to violence, it would stretch the possibilities for straight females like my bigoted hateful mom. Don't want to get married? Fine. Resent kids? Don't have to have any. And no problem if you don't want to put on the panty-hose, make nice, suck-up to the boss. If I can walk the streets unafraid as a lesbian, then you can, too.

It's pretty obvious how militarized, and bigoted policing affect the LGBT community. Fags of all races still get arrested in adult bookstores, get stung in illegal sex operations. Trans people, too, get profiled and harassed as prostitutes. Instead of getting help, many queers get harassed after assaults.

Even on a sheer tactical level, it's clear one segment of the population can't be assured justice while another goes without. It is a habit. We can't address violence against queers, or against people of color, without going after it in American society at large. We may have to address our problems in small ways, one law at a time, but our thinking has to be big enough to hold us all.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Gender Anxiety and the Joys of Swimming in France

By Kelly Cogswell

A decade or two ago, I was a member of the 14th Street Y. Trouble would start as soon as I'd step into the locker room and a couple of little old ladies would be sure to scream, "This is the Women's." I'd consider flashing my tits for a moment, but usually just mumbled "Fuck Off" under my breath and let them work it out among themselves.

If it wasn't them, it was the little kids. Mothers would bring all their children into the locker room even if they were practically in grade school, and more than once some creepy little boy would stare at me while I changed. The place was charged with gender and sex.

It was even worse when I went to swim. I could walk to the gym with my swimsuit under my clothes, but if I wanted a shower afterwards, so I could change into dry things, I'd have to get naked and deal with those horrible staring lecherous boys that did everything but whack off. Worse were the mothers that let them. And I know they knew because I saw them watching, too.

After a while, I just quit going. And didn't start swimming again until I moved to France, and discovered cheap public swimming pools. In Paris every neighborhood has a couple, and they operate all year around.

The best thing is that everybody goes into the same locker room, men, women, children, dykes. So no screams for the likes of me. Though it would probably still be complicated for some trans or intersex people.

Another perk is that the little boys aren't usually creepy, because children see plenty of adult bodies from the moment they start going to the pool. If you do get looked at, it's not aggressive and weird. Most people do it just enough to register who's standing next to them in the shower which everybody takes in a common area (in their swimsuits) before they get into the pool.

Which brings me to glory number three of Paris pools. They're so clean they barely smell. Truly. I'd thought that maybe they used less chlorine, but it turns out that most of the stink of American pools comes from the reaction between your lotion, sweat, and hair gel with the chlorine which creates a disgusting, eye-reddening soup. Add a little pee to the chlorine you get the fragrant chloramine.

The great quality of the water is an unintended consequence of the gender neutral spaces. Because everybody passes through the same shower area, and you have all these eyes on you, you stop and wash. No cheating. It's peer pressure at its best. The entries are also better arranged, so everybody steps in the disinfecting foot bath thing because it is almost impossible not to. Unless you can balance on a two-inch ledge.

Then you get down to it. You swim. Your vertebrae extend themselves. You relax. Become one with the water. When you're done, you return to bathe in the same common showers. People more or less unselfconsciously reach into their suits to apply soap to intimate areas. Back in the locker room, there are little private stalls if you need to take off your suit and strip down to your skin.

The only drawback is that you have to time things carefully. And avoid lunch time or after work when you end up as awkward sardines, thwacking your neighbor in the next lane, catching a foot in the face. Weekends are packed, too. During the actual school year, the pool closes at odd hours for groups of kids who early on learn to swim, and get the gender neutral locker room experience.

What can I say except, it works. The only surprise is that it happens here in France where they've been in the midst of an openly declared gender war since the adoption of a marriage equality law in 2013. There were huge demos against it, mobilizing hundreds of thousands.

The most vociferous opponents weren't so much against marriage rights per se, as the horrifying idea that same-sex unions will lead to the erosion of... gender roles. Their logo looked like the door signs for segregated bathrooms, little men in suits, little skirted figures. I think they were even in blue and pink.

Adoption and birth certificates send them right over the edge. It will be the end of the world if Parent 1 and Parent 2, replace "Mother" and "Father." Legal changes like that can apparently have a countrywide effect leading to the shrinking of penises and the unexpected growth or disappearance of tits.

Now they're screaming about gender in schools, and denouncing any curriculum that teaches the kids that little girls can be anything they want. Just like boys.

Bring on the Freudians. We've got a severe case of capricious gender anxiety here.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Gaza, Queers, and Banning Speech

By Kelly Cogswell

It's harder and harder to be a cheerful, card-carrying member of the LGBTQ community. If it's not the new spate of weddings, it's our obsession with the policing of speech. We catch some famous person saying homo or fag, bust their chops, and soon they're at HRC or GLAAD, beating their breasts and getting sensitivity training. A few days later, the same censors are screaming, Free speech! Free speech! because somebody wasn't allowed to march for something (that they agree with).

Those who demand limits, at least sometimes, might want to consider France as a cautionary tale. After World War Two and the massacre of Jews, there are serious penalties for speech inciting hate. Last week, Anne-Sophie Leclere, a local, first-time candidate for the extreme right, was sentenced to five months in jail and a 50,000 euros ($68,000) fine for publicly posting racist images, and making racist remarks about Christine Taubira, the Minister of Justice.

And just this weekend, in an effort to prevent anti-Semitic violence, Paris banned a march-- against the bombing of Palestinians. The government had what they considered a good reason. A similar demo last week devolved from criticism of Israel to denunciations of The Jews. Protesters with baseball bats tried to storm at least one synagogue, trapping a number of terrified people inside.

The ban, though, was denounced even by members of the governing party as anti-democratic, no matter that it was probably legit. The right to assemble apparently isn't written into the French constitution (though the right to strike is).

In any case, the ban, complete with threats of jail time and huge fines, only made things worse. Big mouths got to play the victim and no doubt claim Jews really do control the government. And after a semi-peaceful start, with a mixed crowd of all genders and ages, the march evolved into the usual melee featuring guys with their faces wrapped in those checkered scarves, and posing for the cameras with a cloud of teargas behind. The message that Israel should quit bombing Palestinians was largely lost.

Despite the predictable, though unintended consequences of curtailing speech, people still seem to think it's a good idea. I went to hear a talk by Stuart Milk the other day, and he seemed a little embarrassed when somebody asked him why Americans couldn't gag Scott Lively. He didn't exactly muster a spirited defense of our values. Just explained the law, kinda, then changed the subject as fast as he could.

And it's true, with near absolute free speech, Americans are stuck with the likes of preacher, and antigay activist Scott Lively. In the U.S., "hate speech" pretty much only has legal implications when accompanied by a concrete act of violence. Or when there's a direct and unmistakable cause and effect, like yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater, leading to somebody getting trampled to death. So Mr. Lively can travel the world spreading lies and hate about LGBT people, and he can't be prosecuted in America, until links between his antigay campaigns and violence become more and more direct. Or he's attacked from a different angle.

Faced with the consequences of such speech, it's difficult to accept the usual pat response that the answer to bad speech is more speech. What we should say, then, is that efforts to prevent hate speech may actually open the door to it, and thwart efforts to fight back.

We're seeing it play out in Europe. With the intention to prevent a reprise of the Holocaust, they introduced the idea that it is acceptable to criminalize speech that may incite a certain mindset (hate) which may incite a criminal act. From there, it's not much of a leap to decide to prevent the original speech from taking place.

And while you could shut up Scott Lively once and for all, you may also see more marches banned. Because something untoward might be said, which might eventually lead to violence.

In the worst case scenario, you get Russia. Because if the tools exist to ban Scott Lively, they exist to ban you. It all depends on who's on top. Take these ideas to their logical conclusion with a different ideological lens, it's not only possible, but practically necessary, to criminalize pro-gay speech. After all, societies agree on what is dangerous and repugnant, and if in Russia there is the widespread belief all queers are pedophiles, and also, somehow, magically, a threat to the state, speech in our defense is dangerous, too.

So keep this in mind--once legal tools exist to curb speech, we can't guarantee only the wise and good-hearted will be in control of them. So we better err on the side of scary, limitless speech. This is especially important (I'll say it again) for queers. We will always be a minority, always vulnerable. We need to protect the few weapons we have.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

Blasting Past the Dyke March

By Kelly Cogswell

Last Saturday morning, I was sitting in a Toronto café watching the news when their World Pride rundown included a Dyke March. They actually said it on TV, "Dyke". And no buildings collapsed, or fire rained down from the sky, though it was pretty hot.

I even got a little sunburnt when I joined the dykes gathering in downtown's Allan Gardens, hanging out, and trying to figure out where their group was meeting. Because the closer we move towards legal equality, the more official and officious our events. In Toronto, there was registration for groups, and an order of march that actually had individuals asking if they could participate. On the upside, there were portable toilets, and the use of a free wheelchair if you needed one.

Tents were set up to give out NoH8 temporary tattoos. Others took pictures of kissing queers for some project or other. There was an informational type booth that didn't have much information, but plenty of cute volunteers, one of whom informed me she was straight, but looked disappointed when I didn't immediately applaud her benevolence.

I was at the march to give out stuff about the Lesbian Avenger Documentary Project, the same Avengers that started the whole Dyke March thing in 1993 in Washington, DC, when 20,000 lesbians were Out for Power. In 1994, on the anniversary of Stonewall, the original New York Avengers hosted the first international Dyke March, getting another 20,000 lezzies into the street to declare that Lesbians Lust For Power.

It was amazing. All those dykes from all over the world, stepping into the street as lesbians, many for the first time ever. They danced. They shouted. They ripped their shirts off with joy. And they did it with a radical political message and didn't ask anybody for permission.

I was warned Toronto's World Dyke March wouldn't have the same edge. Some of this year's organizers complained that the politics had been stripped away since an earlier group had responded to the siren song of money from Toronto's official Pride organization. And you don't get nothing for free.

Dyke issues, they said, were consistently swept under the rug. Like the violence we face, the constant harassment, the disenfranchisement, really, when so many young queers are booted from their homes, and don't make it through school. Uneducated, gender non-conforming, they can't find jobs, much less a way to participate in civic life.

In 2010, some outraged Toronto activists organized a Take Back the Dyke march which was almost as big as the official one. But in their estimation, it was too late to regain control. They've temporarily conceded the fight. Though this year transpeople -- equally pissed with the official Trans march -- were holding a competing event.

I heard so much trash talk that when I walked to the front, I expected corporate logos everywhere, glum girls in pearls and twinsets. But what I saw was the usual sea of cheerful dykes who were dancing, and flirting and waving clever signs. The crowd of 7,000 was led off by dykes on bikes, and included women's health centers, and one large group called Craft Action TO. Actually subsidized by Pride Toronto, they'd crocheted alternative Dyke March banners, and an extraordinary umbrella composed almost entirely of tits. Guided by Guatemalan dyke Adriana Alarcón, lesbians who had never touched yarn joined the new wave of craftivists, discussing politics as they got their craft on.

There was no denying the energy. Even the dykes who'd helped organize the earlier competing march seemed happy. Maybe because in large demos like this, it's the numbers that count. No matter what theme we have, or signs we wave, the primary message of a Dyke March is in our dyke bodies claiming public space en masse for a whole two hours. After all, despite our growing legal rights, dykes are still largely invisible in the public sphere from politics to TV, not to mention the streets.

Even the LGBT community would prefer to leave the L behind. The official World Pride Facebook page had lots more posts promoting the merchandise than they did for the Dyke March or other lesbian activities. One event organizer complained that his dyke stuff, even when it was official, almost never made it into the printed World Pride program.

Alone, a more radical march wouldn't solve these problems. To bring attention to specific issues, we may as well piggyback on official efforts, and seed their marches with groups of ten or fifteen, each carrying signs of our own choosing. We could also use Pride Week to host Speak Outs or create direct actions by small groups around the most pressing local issues.

The real question is how to harness that dyke energy from July to May, when the real work gets done.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).

My Own Dyke Amnesia

By Kelly Cogswell

I admit it. Sometimes when the Dyke March rolls around again, and the committee starts asking the community for themes, I can't remember a single lesbian issue. As if I made up all our problems, and we should be perfect comfortably ceding place to gay men, bifolks, and trans, not to mention women.

And it's true, our practical concerns exist at a peculiar intersection of misogyny, homophobia, and gender. Like other females, lesbians know what it's like to get harassed by men on the street, face the demands for smiles, anger when we refuse. Lesbians, though, often get an extra level of fury because when we refuse to go out with some asshole, talk to him, or grin, we're seen as rejecting not just him, but his whole category. This is what leads to whole, systematic waves of "corrective" rape.

And if we decide to fight back, if we happen to be dykes of color, maybe working class, well, that doesn't work out so well either. In her new documentary film, "Out in the Night" blair dorosh-walther describes how a group of African American dykes were demonized when they responded with their own violence to an assault (by a black man) in New York's West Village. The press called them a "Lesbian Wolf Pack." The lawyers were worse, and four of the group got huge sentences.

If they'd been guys fighting back, maybe it would have been laughed off as one more testosterone laden encounter since the "victim" didn't die. If they'd been straight women, white, a little further up the social pecking order, maybe they'd even have been applauded as brave.

You want to talk class? Sure, lesbians are right there as well. As women, we already get less for the same work. But things get even more complicated if we come out. If we don't like being too femme. I struggled getting temp jobs because I couldn't stand all the baggage of nylons and heels and how wearing those things signals a certain female availability, brings more unwanted attention that drives me nuts.

Don't even get me started on health care, or the horror of finding a new gynecologist. I dread their questions about sexual activity and birth control. More than once my answers to female GYN's have earned me looks of disgust, transformed me into a repulsive creature they could barely stand to touch. They seemed to believe the mere sight of a woman turned me on, and never considered that the opposite might be the case, especially when she's holding a speculum.

Male GYN's can be as bad, the prurient questions, oh really? Though the worst ever was this lesbian who'd gotten caught up in the movement to uncover repressed abuse. She spent the whole exam trying to convince me I'd been screwed as a child. One of the few things I actually escaped. Yeah, good times at the GYN. No wonder most dykes would rather die of whatever than step inside a doctor's office.

I could go on detailing our marginalization by gay men, custody battles with ex-husbands, the violence, the battle for our souls, but let me return to my own amnesia, wondering how I could possibly forget these things which are not small, or insignificant.

There's no mystery, really, just the ongoing issue of invisibility. We don't exist enough as a category to even have our own problems. They all seem individual. Or can be assigned elsewhere. In 2014, we still have no real social presence, no power, no weight, no humanity. Hell, twenty years after the Lesbian Avengers, we dykes can barely bring ourselves to use the word, lesbian.

C'mon. Say it out loud. Lesbian. The word commonly understood to indicate female types who are into other female types and may span a variety of gender expressions from butch to femme to genderqueer, including people like me who after a long day in front of the computer are surprised to find they have arms and legs, much less the usual girly bits.

The world despises us, sneers, and we do little to fight back. Our own worst enemies, we actually attack each other under the false banner of inclusivity. If three or four lesbians decide to gather in our own name, a fifth will surely come along and tell us what lowlife, selfish bitches we are for not addressing bi-issues or trans stuff, working for women, or even global warming. Even we think we have no right to exist. No value as ourselves alone.

Which means lesbian organizing is still as radical and as urgent as ever. I think we should give it another shot. And if anybody dare use the word inclusive, we should turn it into an opportunity to make sure "lesbian" embraces every dyke across all our real and metaphorical geographies. If we don't take care of each other, who will?

The Dyke's Back in France

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Some people come to France to smoke Gitanes and eat croissants. I spent my first few days assembling Ikea products for my girlfriend's Cuban family. The first item was a book case, the second a nightstand to go by my mother-in-law's bed. Our household speaks English, Spanish and French and it sometimes feels like my head might explode. There are so many words at our disposal to describe a single thing, like a hammer, that Ikea miraculously communicates with a simple drawing.

It reminds me that while the differences of culture and language have a real impact on our lives and perceptions, (fromage sounds so much tastier than cheese) they're still pure artifice. Humans have more in common that we admit. At the very least we face a continual struggle with the physical world, and how to contain it. Even the poor have their sacks and carts. I have this wooden Ikea nightstand with a capacious drawer that needs a coat of varnish. We all have bodies holding their own moving, failing parts.

My mother-in-law is ninety-one now. A year ago, when she couldn't live alone in Queens anymore, we helped her move to her son's place in France. She just got out of the hospital after falling and cracking a vertebrae. She already had reduced mobility and the stoner's brain that comes with age and a bunch of mini-strokes.

All our time is spent in vigilance, making sure she has help standing up and sitting down. She's already forgotten why she was in the hospital, and doesn't understand why we freak out when she tries to go it alone. It's hard for her to shower in a bathtub that requires a lot of gizmos to enter and leave. And taking a walk is a big deal.

I'm deteriorating myself, can't think about anything but the next load of laundry. What to make for dinner. I've read that mothers of small children often feel this way, the circle of their lives reduced, their personalities eroded by confinement to the endless physical world and a tiny vocabulary of "Do this. Do that." "Oh my god. No! Stop!" At least their charges are small and easier to transport. A small tumble won't kill them. And little kids learn new tricks every day just like tiny circus dogs. You look at them and see a future. You have hope.

Faustina though, is gradually forgetting her own self, and relinquishing interests along with a lifetime of skills. She doesn't even pick fights any more, or hardly ever. And submits with indifference to what would have been an indignity six months ago.

We all know what's coming, if not this week, maybe in a few months. Or a year or two. It makes me anxious and gloomy. I think black thoughts. We just buried her other son eighteen months ago after seeing him through several rounds of chemo. Why bother with anything? Life continues but we don't. Screw the next generation. It won't last long, anyway. Eighty or ninety years max, with a few exceptions at either end.

Faustina's dying in slo-mo, and I have nothing to rage against. Nature has no complaint department, no web page. Accepts no petitions. Doesn't care about who clicks or doesn't. You can hold all the demos you want, but changes in political policy can't save her life, just improve it. I readjust my priorities. The qualities I try to cultivate now are patience and kindness, renewed as needed with chocolate and wine.

I could learn from this, but probably won't. Soon, my girlfriend and I will leave and resume our normalish lives. I'll forget the nearness of death, how temporary we all are, and the limits of social change. But now that I have that fleeting knowledge, what does it mean? Especially since I've spent a lifetime agitating for liberty and equality.

Right now, I'd like to see less rhetoric, more real vision. I'd especially like our community to devote more effort to remembering what we have in common--without diminishing difference. How about less recrimination and strife? More "Yesses!" Fewer, "No's!"

At the very least we should step outside our daily urgent battles and pretend occasionally that we've already prevailed. That the world has been transformed into a just and equal place, which has nevertheless preserved room for freedom. Imagining the future is here, let us carry it out into the streets and walk down them fearlessly, as ourselves. And let's speak as openly as we can, believing that someone will dare understand.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014).