My Book Is Out!

My book is out! You can order Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia, 1969-1979, direct from the publisher in Paris. Cheap cover price, cheap, fast shipping. Support the new Foreign Languages Press! Here's the direct order link.

A reminder that going forward most of my Ethiopia posting will be at my research blog, Abyot–The Lost Revolution.

New Writing on Ethiopia

The really impressive independent communist website “Cosmonaut” commissioned an article by me on the Ethiopian Revolution. It’s framed as a discussion of internationalist solidarity. It’s based on the themes of my book manuscript, which I am currently shopping to publishers.

Here’s how it begins:

“Way back in 1848, the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admonished in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” This basic prescription for political solidarity flows obviously and organically from the understanding of global political economy that they (and their ideological heirs) spent decades investigating, defining, and fighting for on street barricades. Marx and Engels diagnosed that the vast majority of the world’s population shared a mutual interest by virtue of its exploitation and oppression at the hands of a global class system, here in corrupt decay, there in bloody infancy. They suggested a liberatory class struggle as a path of resistance that was conveniently locked inside that global political and economic system and enabled by its own contradictions. To reject, indeed to overturn, that global system of exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of humanity by a tiny controlling minority of kings, political elites, and captains of industry, Marx and Engels prescribed not only moral outrage, but an understanding they called “scientific” of how those oppressed and exploited people could employ their vast majority in numbers and their strategic social relationship to the means of production to win the class struggle, and with it a better future for humankind based on cooperation and the communal good.”

Read the full piece on Cosmonaut, and don’t forget my Ethiopian Research Project blog here.

Election Day

I am deeply aware that people fought and died for their right to vote. Democracy is, or rather, would be, a good thing, and surely it is righteous for people to demand not to be excluded from what passes for political process. Democracy is theoretically a mechanism whereby collectivity resolves into taking action in an act of shared commitment and responsibility. Problem is, I don't think that's what's actually happening right now.

My head has spent the last year split in two places, one watching this extended dumpster fire of an election, and two immersed in doing research on the probably esoteric (outside Ethiopia that is) subject of the Ethiopian revolution. There in 1974, a group of dedicated communist revolutionaries started an underground newsletter called "Democracy," that became one of the most well-read political papers in the country. The "Democracy" these folks argued for (and died for, by the thousands) was first demanded of the emperor Haile Selassie, and later, after the military snatched power from a popular uprising, became a rallying cry for pushing aside the military in favor of a popular people's government. So I've had quite a few occasions to think about what democracy might mean.

Listen, this, this USA, this is not a real democracy. This is a parody of democracy: it is not those abstaining from voting today who are spitting in the face of the freedom riders of the 1960s, it is the entire political system that is doing so. An elaborate and deeply embarrassing spectacle that wasted millions of dollars (ie, made a bunch of entertainment companies rich) just left people with the "choice" between a bloated fascist businessman, a deeply unprincipled and dishonest career politician responsible for the deaths of untold thousands who happens to be a woman, and a handful of quixotic alternatives who, with the one notable exception of Mimi Soltysik of the Socialist Party — who isn't even on most printed ballots — specialize in peddling low-frequency bullshit. (And to be clear I include there everyone from the problematic Greens and PSL, to the reprehensible SEP, SWP, libertarians and WWP).

It should be obvious, and yet strangely is not, to most, that this is in fact a dictatorship, the dictatorship of rich property owners we Marxists like to call the bourgeoisie. A government by and for rich people that has diabolically convinced millions that every few years being forced to rubberstamp choices presented to you from column A or column B, when mostly people want and need something else entirely, is actually what "democracy" looks like. It's not. And if you think dictatorship is a harsh word, take off your blinders and look at the role of police in this country and the role of the American military in the world, and see that "they" don't really give a shit what you think. Ruling though repression, fear and circuses, the class that owns this country needs us a lot more than we need them.

It's like a sickness what this country does to people. Like you, I have been indoctrinated for most of my almost 58 years that voting is a sacred responsibility. I have previously voted for Democrats, previously voted third parties, and occasionally abstained. The one thing I have learned is that I will never again close my ears to the evil promises of politicians in favor of the few morsels I want to actually hear. And yet with everything I know and I have studied, I still find myself wracked with guilty obligation. And so I have tried to figure out what I would do today.

Watching the intense fear that has been whipped up by both Democrats and Republicans fills me with both disgust and sadness. I can't blame or condemn most people for exercising what feels like the only thing they can do to stave off the obvious dangers ahead, though I urge folks to hit the books for the truth how that "I voted" sticker is zero defense against an actual fascist onslaught. I am, it must be said, pretty disappointed not in regular people with good hearts taking a stand against the vile and noxious Trump, but in leftists willing to overlook the vile and noxious Clinton, but that's a more complicated story.

I wish that the left was strong enough to run what I believe is actually correct, a campaign of revolutionary abstentionism. I think it would be an excellent step along the way to presenting a transcendent vision of liberation that revolutionaries need to find a way to re-popularize if we are ever to move out of the realm of symbolism. Symbolism is right now the only thing a micro-movement for revolutionary abstention can offer. One day the withholding of our participation in this game will be a weapon; it's not that yet.

It seems to be a beautiful day outside. I'm ever so privileged to be unemployed today and not quite at the bottom of my bank account. That same beautiful blue sky extends west to the Dakotas, and east across oceans and seas to Syria; distances far beyond sight and hearing yet not beyond knowledge.
I know where my polling place is. But I'm going to walk the other way.

Echoes of a past life: New Moon

New Moon New York was an open Pagan circle in New York City in the early 1990s. This footage has surfaced, bringing back some memories, a surprising memory hole, and a bit of personal embarassment. This video includes footage of several events, only one of which I attended, the probable “Lughnassadh” ritual that begins about at the 11 min. mark, held in either NYC's Central Park or Inwood Park. Yours truly may be seen at heard about 16:35, bearing that fuzzy red wheel. Yeah, we took ourselves pretty seriously, but we also had lots of fun. As silly as this looks to me 20+ years later, I learned a lot about myself and the world in that period. I'm pretty glad I graduated from this sort of Cosplay/LARP scene, now in my mid-50s I'm sort of mortified by the trappings of that chapter of my spirituality. That said, that moment of spirituality healed me of some fundamental life hurt and I wouldn't want to erase that chapter of my life even if it seems so curiously foreign to me now.

But these were good people. I note with sadness several faces no longer among the living, not least the legendary Alexei Kondratiev and his partner Len. I see my dear magical partner C, and my incredibly handsome but deeply conflicted and closeted boyfriend W, nicknamed by C “Mr. Outdoors.” It's good to remember my friends from New Moon. I'm surprised at how little of this event I remember, it all seems just out of reach. Which is okay, it was a really long time ago and I have moved far far away from that moment in my life.

And now, back to life as a 21st-century communist.

Mao Badges

I bought my first Mao badge when I was a teenager in the early 1970s. Since then I have accumulated a collection of several hundred. I thought I'd share a few of my favorites. I'll post up more in a few days. These badges were produced for decades, starting in the 1940s before the whole of China was liberated. The heyday of Mao badges was the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, when millions of varieties were manufactured for mass consumption: most of these were the red and silver "bicycle reflector" type made of aluminum, none of which I'm actually showing today.

The first two photos here show photos from badges of the early period, stamped out of steel and enameled. I'm told that these early pins have been heavily counterfeited, which surprises me not one bit, so who knows if this are legit originals, I don't. Notable here is the pin above with the silhouettes of Mao and Stalin, the one below dated 1948, and the one below showing a Chinese volunteer bayonetting a red blob labelled "America," issued in solidarity with the DPRK, clearly a composition like the "take that" stamps I have featured here The Cahokian.

This final batch of badges are all plastic: the heart and two of the white pins are soft, squishy, puffy vinyl.

A second blog!

EPRP demonstration in Ethiopia in 1976.

“What!?” you say, “He can barely keep up with this one!”

Well, it's true, I've become a very lazy blogger. While I'm extraordinarily proud of the year I wrote for this blog once a day, my contributions here have become far and few between. During the period I was writing for the Kasama Project, now ended, I hardly posted here at all. I'm finding my voice again though, so don't give up on me. Meanwhile, however, I have undertaken a new project I'm really excited about.

My new, second blog, certainly not replacing this one, is called “Abyot: The Lost Revolution” and it is documenting a research project I have undertaken on the Ethiopian revolution of the 1970s. I started this blog over a year ago and didn't really tell anybody about it; but now that I am well into the research project itself, I want to share what I'm learning, and I have begun much more regular postings.

It's a subject I have been interested in for, no lie, forty years. Here's an excerpt from my new blog's statement of intent:

In 1976 I was eighteen years old and a university student in Chicago. My brief tenure in college was marked by my increasing radicalization, as I became involved with the American revolutionary left. I became a voracious consumer of worldwide revolutionary literature along with the classics of Marxist theory. I attended protests and forums, conferences and demonstrations, and, in those long-ago days, admired the organization and fortitude of leftist students from around the world from places like Iran, Ethiopia, Eritrea and elsewhere. I went to demonstrations where police or right-wingers were menacing and threatening, and certainly saw the potential of brutality. In my years as a radical I've witnessed hundreds of arrests and atrocious acts of police violence. But my life has rarely been in direct danger as a result of my political activities....

In 1976 a revolution in Ethiopia was experiencing a crucial shift, and I watched and studied these events as they happened. Military officers were consolidating their co-optation of a mass, popular uprising. Thousands of revolutionary students my very age were out in the streets fighting for that revolution and attempting to resist the hijacking of the revolution by the military. The students, along with workers and peasants, were organized under the red banners of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), at the time a largely clandestine Marxist-Leninist formation. Very shortly the EPRP faced a massive, genocidal government campaign of violence and extermination. Dubbed "The Red Terror" by the military government, soon thousands of student revolutionaries my age were rounded up and murdered. The commitment of these young revolutionaries was inspirational to me, and gave me great pause to consider the contrasts and contradictions.

This blog is an investigation project.

What was the EPRP at the height of its power? What were the forces it was up against? What was the dynamic of the Ethiopian Revolution? Why did the EPRP lose?

I hope to excavate, if not rehabilitate, the historical reputation of the EPRP during its Marxist-Leninist period through a process of curation, collection, research and reportage. I will post articles, artwork and photos, book excerpts, reviews, and if I find them, reminiscences, about the Ethiopian revolution, primarily in the second half of the 1970s but extending through the 1980s.

At the new blog I have also posted a more expanded series of study questions which explains some of the issues I'm trying to understand. That post is entitled “8 Study Questions on the Ethiopian Revolution.”  And I've posted — and will update, as I go — the reading list of works I'm consulting for my research. I'm posting cool artwork, photos I find, sharing bits of the research and provocative bits of the story as it unfolds, and I hope to eventually produce more substantial essays about the subject of my studies itself.

If you're interested in revolutionary history, a story that is really woefully forgotten or misunderstood, hop on over and take a look! http://abyotawi.blogspot.com/

Again, today, I was lucky. And yet my eyes are filled with tears.

I spent my morning on the computer. Although my extended unemployment would allow me to sleep until noon or stay awake all night, I try to keep to a fairly normal human schedule. I wake up, I listen to the news on the radio. My cat leads me to his food dish, so I open a can. I breakfast at my desk. I log into my computer, checking Facebook, and a few other sites.

I have been relishing the coverage of Alakhbar English, a secular left-wing site out of Beirut. Their coverage of the Israeli pogrom on Gaza is righteously outraged, and their posture untainted by the immorality of Saudi or Qatari paymasters. A few days ago they put up a page: "The victims of Gaza: A list of Palestinians killed in Israel's ongoing assault." It keeps a running tally of the casualties, printing their names, their ages, and the brutal circumstances of their murder. It's hard to read; overwhelming. The passing of each precious life coolly noted, each child, woman, man, each martyr to the cause of living their own lives documented one last time.

I shared the link on Facebook. I noticed the metadata that Facebook shows with the post was outdated, reading "Updated July 22 at 6:45 pm: The Gaza health ministry has confirmed the deaths of 627 Palestinians so far in the besieged..." and then it drops off. Yet when I shared the link this morning, July 24, the article itself read a total of 746 deaths. I paused to consider what I had done yesterday, while the electrons of metadata caught up with the typing of a careful webmaster. I had not died. I had not had my home bombed, with or without warning. I had not had my sister, my mother, my father, my children, my friends killed, or maimed. I was not sent screaming into the street in mortal panic. I was very very lucky in my apartment thousands of miles away from, no, I won't call it a war...thousands of miles away from that massacre. What cosmic accident plunked me down here, privileged only to bear distant witness?

This morning I took care of tasks in the warmth of a humid, overcast, but quiet Brooklyn day. I worked on a flyer for a brilliant Palestine solidarity action tomorrow night, the guerrilla transformation of a benefit for the IDF into a benefit for medical aid for Gaza. My cat begged for some of my lunch. I drank iced coffee, followed by some delicious sour cherry juice from Turkey. I'm looking at the clock noting the time I must leave the house to be at tonight's Gaza solidarity rally in downtown Manhattan.

I checked back on my Facebook share this afternoon. The metadata stayed unchanged. I clicked through to the link.

Five hours.

"Updated July 24 at 7:00 pm: The Gaza health ministry has confirmed the deaths of 784 Palestinians so far in the besieged strip since Israel began its relentless assault on July 8. Among those killed, at least 175 were aged 18 or younger."

784.

Thirty-eight more precious lives taken, like that, in the moments it took me to avoid doing my laundry. I couldn't hear the screams, the cries, the crashing of bombs and bricks, I couldn't smell the smoke, the sulfur. I couldn't save any lives, stop any killing. I couldn't offer solace to anyone's unimaginable grief. I couldn't shut up the voices on the radio making grotesque rationalizations for their even more grotesque actions.

My rage seethes, leaving a hollow pit in my chest. I feel impotent, powerless.

This morning certain people I knew online spent time blaming the Palestinians for their own deaths, and in those hours more Palestinians — more people — were actually and literally killed by a calculating, cruel enemy.

Five hours. What did I do this morning? Again I was very lucky.

Everybody I know is okay today, going about their business.

Yet why are my eyes wet from tears?

Something awful is happening right this moment. Shut your eyes, turn away, it's still there, even if you can't see it.

It's time to do something.

Channelling Grief, Despair and Rage

This haunting photo shows volunteers sitting in the lobby of Al-Wafa orthopedic hospital in Gaza, acting as human shields after the hospital received warning shots from the IDF. A day or two later, the hospital was leveled by Israel.

At the start of the Israeli offensive against Gaza I promised my comrades I would write something about Gaza. As the days went by I found myself paralyzed. The rage at what was unfolding flowed through me, but the words jumped around inside my head like little wounds that wouldn't congeal.

I have never had such a difficult time writing anything before in my life. The past week has filled me with grief and despair. Beyond the horror of what's being done to virtually defenseless human beings is my sense of disgust at the people rationalizing the murder of children: all these defenders of Israel, whether politicians or just heartless regular people. But what's happening now is so important. This is a test of our humanity.

We as human beings cannot afford to look away from what is happening. It's ugly but it's really happening. The question is what will we do about it. So this is my article on the tragic affairs in Gaza. Finally last night the words came together and I was able to finish the article I had promised at 1 in the morning. I'm proud of it. I hope you'll read it.

What is happening in Gaza is not a conflict, it's a massacre. What is happening is not a war, but a pogrom, the herding together and culling of the captive Palestinian population.

Israel and its supporters have crafted a brutal narrative absolving themselves of all guilt for the mass murder they are committing. From the Israeli government, and the legions of Zionist agents spouting officially approved “hasbara,” or “explanations” in the media and on the internet, down through the echelons of politicians in countries far and wide — here in the US including conservative and liberal alike — we hear that Israel is just “defending itself” and “trying to prevent civilian casualties.” Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Read all of "Terror & Lies: Israel unleashed brutal pogrom against Gaza."

OWS Veterans Organizing Gaza Solidarity Action in NYC

Activists who cut their teeth in NYC's Occupy Wall Street movement are organizing a "Funeral March" in solidarity with the people of Gaza on Friday. There's a facebook page for the event. I'm proud to have contributed the flyer design for the event. There's even a version in Arabic. The event is being organized by the in-formation "Direct Action Front for Palestine." I'm almost paralyzed with rage at the brutality of Israel's action; I'm really glad to be a part of an action here in New York.

March Writings

I have a couple new pieces up on the Kasama site.

First up I wrote a short piece for International Women's Day. Entitled "International Women's Day: Oppression transformed into revolutionary power," it's a brief survey of some of the history behind the March 8 holiday:

"Today women are a significant part of the revolutionary movement: whether in the rural regions of India where armed women Maoist rebels challenge Indian capitalism (photo at top), or in the mass movements of the squares from Egypt to Wall Street, or in the spheres of theoretical exploration and debate necessary to take the communist movement to its next stage, women's voices are a crucial part of grounding the struggle in the reality of experiencing and challenging oppression. Revolutionary sisterhood is indeed powerful. Let's see what it can do next."

But what I'm really happy with is a short survey of some of my favorite radical songs. "Urban rebel music subverting your earwaves" takes a look at a handful of songs from Jill Scott, Ursula Rucker, Erykah Badu, Boots Riley and the Coup, and Welfare Poets. Faithful readers of The Cahokian will recognize a couple of these: I've written about the Rucker song and about Erykah Badu before.

I've combined a little bit of cultural critique, music appreciation, lots of song lyrics, and music clips and videos to discuss some surprisingly radical songs outside the more expected realms:

"When people start talking about radical or political music, I'm always surprised how the topic of conversation rarely moves outside the genres of hardcore head-banging punk or earnest sing-along folk. Sometimes talk moves on to the well-worn populism of mass-appeal pop-rock, the Springsteen/Mellencamp/Fleetwood Mac tunes so beloved by bourgeois politicians trying to put something over on voters, and there's the counterpoint of classic hip-hop with its righteous anger against cops and sometimes problematic derision of women and gays. Without disparaging any of these rich genres of music, I want to recommend some really great and really radical tunes from genre-busting urban musicians who sometimes defy easy categorization but whose visionary art is something that revolutionaries can really embrace."

There's some really great songs discussed. The Jill Scott number "My Petition" is a must-listen, and it really is amazingly subversive. The article was set off by re-listening to this song while riding the bus and paying attention to the lyrics. I hadn't noticed before how slyly Scott hooks you in to a critique of America while assuming at first she's talking about her love life. There's a song clip provided. Check it out!

I've also written a few short introductions for re-purposed content on Kasama. You can follow my postings there at this link.

Finally let me put in a plug for my daily work at the "Anti-Imperialist League" on Facebook. Every day I've been posting a picture with a first-person quote from a huge spectrum of revolutionaries. Each Saturday I post a quote about a little-known or forgotten episode of rebellion.

It's been really educational and rewarding. I've come to realize the importance of letting people speak on their own, and seeing how much traditional history actually disparages the record of oppressed people themselves. I don't find myself agreeing 100% with every analysis of imperialism offered, but the people featured, a worldwide mix of women and men, are all actual fighters or theoreticians against empire. And I've been able to feature some of the struggles that have always interested me, like the tragically brave Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) May Day rally of 1976 featured in the graphic above.

My goal is to continue the anti-imperialist quote of the day project for at least an entire year.

Recent Writings

Supporters of GEHO in Jinja, Uganda

After a long dry spell, I've been doing some more writing, all of it over on the Kasama website. Working with other members of the editorial collective, I've been helping to flag and introduce interesting articles from outside websites, as well as generating original content.

First up, I'm most proud of a long piece I spent a week researching and writing. Entitled "Real Enemies, False Friends: Imperialism and Homophobia in Africa," it covers the causes behind the wave of terrifying anti-gay repression in Africa. I've coined the phrase "weaponization of gay rights" to describe the hypocritical embrace of LGBT rights by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a neocolonialist cudgel in the arsenal of US imperialism. It's pretty timely in the context of the orgy of hypocrisy during the Sochi Olympics in which anti-gay, repressive Russia is being pilloried by the professedly pro-gay, but still repressive US. I take aim at local demagogues, American evangelicals like Scott Lively, imperialist politicians, and the worst alleged gay rights organization ever, the Human Rights Campaign.

Next up are a bunch of short introductions meant to frame and introduce articles for discussion:

"Sochi Olympics — stop anti-gay violence in Russia" is a Human Rights Watch report  on the disturbing increase in antigay violence following the passage of Russia's gay propaganda law. My introduction just presents some of the issues for those not familiar. I'd like to follow this up with a discussion of the attempted gay boycott of Sochi and its corporate sponsors, addressing some of the same issues of hypocritical imperialism as in my Uganda/Nigeria piece.

"East Baltimore — What the fuck is a selfie?" is an article about life in a world where social media doesn't reign supreme. My introduction is a call to examine the bubbles and presumptions leftists inhabit when thinking about interacting with the real world.

"Atlanta, unfit rulers should get out of the way" is an article about the calamitously unusual snowstorm that swept the south. My introduction talks about the clash of extreme weather and capitalist crisis.

"American Studies Association penalized by NY Senate for Israel boycott" talks about the attempted retaliation against supporters of the BDS movement in New York. My introduction introduces the BDS movement as a way of materially supporting the Palestinian struggle.

Since Kasama front paged my fairly critical piece on Peter Seeger, we chose another article that was more personally laudatory as a counterpoint. I introduced "Music journalist Dave Marsh remembers Pete Seeger" in the hopes of keeping a discussion going.

My personal life is still quite unsettled, but it feels good to be speaking my mind again and keeping up with the writing. I'd love feedback from readers.

Not Dead!

So, turns out everything they say about 21st-century capitalism is true!

I've been out of work for a few months now, dealing with caregiving for an elderly parent who's receiving inadequate insurance, and dealing with dwindling finances. We've put our home up for sale, and are making various plans to move forward, all of which involve lots of angst and concrete challenges and difficulties. It's all quite depressing, and as the months have gone on it turns out that it's hard to focus on one's literary voice in the midst of personal turmoil caused by the inability of the system to care for its people. I'm grateful for a solid relationship and a warm cat, and trying to remain optimistic and thinking longterm past temporary difficulties, but this all adds up to an extended absence from my blogging commitments.

I haven't abandoned The Cahokian, or given up writing longer pieces for other websites like Kasama, but my energy is focusing on keeping me above water. I'm hoping to return to regular posting here as life calms down, but I wanted to acknowledge my failure to post in, well, months.

Meanwhile, I haven't been absent from the world, I'm still trying to keep a finger in social networking. You can follow my work, mostly anti-imperialism focused, on a number of platforms:

Follow me on Pinterest

Follow my postings of anti-American propaganda on Tumblr: Anti-Americana

Follow occasional personal/political posts on Tumblr: cahokianish

Like my anti-imperialist quote-of-the-day project on Facebook: Anti-Imperialist League 

Follow me on Twitter: @CahokianISH

There's some overlap on the above, I'm trying to still have a voice despite everything. I feel like I have a lot left to say on a lot of subjects, but now isn't winding up to be the moment.

See you back here soon. And fuck capitalism.

Liberation Time Capsule

I'm not sure how it survived four moves and thirty years apparently undisturbed, but while rummaging through a box looking for something, this week I found a plastic bag filled with metal buttons from 1983. I wish my memories were as sharp, fresh and uncorroded as the pins folded on their backs. These pins date from the Lesbian and Gay Pride March of 1983, and there's a little story attached.

I was part of a group of leftists active inside the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, as the official pride planning coalition was then known. This was a year or two before Heritage of Pride corporatized and institutionalized the planning of New York's annual June festivities. It was a coalition of community and political organizations, run by an odd alliance of longtime activists who longed to make it into the halls of Democratic party machine politics and representatives from the gay business world, including some rumored to have deep connections to organized crime.

Everybody had an agenda. The folks in charge were trying very hard to figure out how to turn Lesbian and Gay Pride into a profit center; I don't remember if it was this 1983 march or the year before, but they engineered the redirection of the event from a march that burst out of the Village uptown toward a rally in Central Park to a parade that assembled uptown and funneled crowds downtown into a street festival and the bars and shops of a rapidly gentrifying gayborhood. They weren't terribly concerned with the politics of the event, though they sure didn't want it to be threatening.

I was there with my organization, the Revolutionary Socialist League, and allies in Lavender Left, CRASH (the Coalition against Racism, Anti-semitism, Sexism and Heterosexism), DARE (Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, Freedom Socialist Party, and the Coalition of Lesbian and Gay Male Socialists. It was time to come up with the annual slogan. Each year, the march and rally had a theme, and the theme's slogan was emblazoned on official banners and buttons. I have no memory of what the other slogans proposed were, but I came up with a slogan that encapsulated our own more radical, political agenda: "Diversity Is Our Strength, Liberation Is Our Fight." Oh, that first half doesn't sound like so much now in today's world of diversity programs sponsored by corporate Human Resources departments, but at the time it was a broadside against the whitewashing tendencies of a middle-class gay movement striving for middle-class respectability. The second half, in an era of struggle for New York's gay rights bill, set its sights on the evocative higher goal of liberation, achieved not through influencing politicians, but through self-struggle.

We were shocked when the volunteers from all those other community organizations liked our slogan better than the one the CSLDC bigs seemed to favor. The grassroots political groups, the religious folks, the volunteers, they loved it. We were angrily opposed by the Stonewall Democrats, the mafiosi, and the other business interests. Our radical slogan swept the vote, despite an attempt to stuff a bag full of ballots. "Diversity Is Our Strength, Liberation Is Our Fight" became the official slogan of the 1983 Christopher Street March & Festival! We looked forward to seeing the graphic treatment the publicity committee would develop.

Fast forward a couple meetings. The new buttons and banner designs were in, and were about to be unveiled!

Our jaws dropped. For the first time in the 12 or 13 years of the march, the slogan was left off the buttons, replaced by an unappealing abstract design. The corrupt ringleaders of CSLDC had their corporate revenge. "But it will be mentioned in the program," they said, over our loud protestations. We were done with CSLDC. We had all learned a lesson about the gay establishment.

So we organized the "Militant Stonewall Contingent for Lesbian and Gay Liberation." I designed a logo for a button, using the pink triangle, the symbol of gay resistance in those pre-rainbow flag days. I still remember the laborious manual mechanical pasteup of these designs in those pre-desktop publishing days. "Stonewall" evoked nothing short of revolutionary turmoil for us: at the time the building that had been and now is again a bar called Stonewall was a bagel restaurant. We produced hundreds of buttons in English and Spanish. And apparently, sometime after the march was over, bagged up the leftover buttons in such a way that I wouldn't notice them again for thirty years.

Frankly my first few pride marches in New York City are a bit of a blur. I wish I could report confidently that our Militant Stonewall Contingent was a raving success. I think it was actually pretty good, drawing together many otherwise not-so-friendly organizations left of gay center, but I'm not even sure if the few march photos I have from that era were that year or another. I know we were young, happy and energetic; the worst of the decimating AIDS assault still ahead of us. The photo above is either from 1983 or the year before. I'm happy to say I can still call the guy front and center in this photo a friend.

Hey, anybody want a button?

A Report from Occupy Sunset Park's Unity Day!

That's me in the middle with my OSP comrades making last minute preparations at Unity Day 2. Photo by Lisa Maya Knauer.

This blog entry is crossposted from the "Kasama Threads" blog feature on the new Kasama Project 2.0 website. Kasama has revamped its website to include a less bloggy section of main articles, an open section of contributed blog posts for discussion, and even a "Kasama Social" feature that aims to be something like a Red — as in Communist — Facebook, where you can make friends, engage in conversations, post statuses, and talk about issues facing revolutionaries. I decided to make this my first post in the Kasama threads feature, but wanted to share it here on my home blog too. Be sure to check out some of the other contributions on the Open Threads feature. 

On Monday, January 21, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park hosted its second annual celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Attended by over a hundred people in the working class community of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the event was held at St. Jacobi Church, the original home of Occupy Sandy.
This year’s event was smaller than our first Unity Day last year, but we managed to meet two important goals for this year’s event. Last year the overwhelming majority of the 300 participants were from the city-wide Occupy movement. This year we wanted to reach more people in the neighborhood, and by working with a number of co-sponsors, we managed to attract a more sizable percentage of neighborhood folks. We also wanted to present a “Spanish-language first” atmosphere in our event, since so many people we want to reach in the neighborhood are from colonized Puerto Rico or immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and in this we were successful: everything but some of the cultural performances was bilingual. I wound up MCing the event, testing the limits of my own Spanish, but it was really a rewarding experience.

The Welfare Poets perform;
photo by Dennis Flores.

We were a little ambitious in planning the event; and wound up having to jettison a series of small-group discussions and the candle light march we had planned for afterwards due to time, but we got great feedback in general for the program.
It opened with a procession of percussionists from an Afro-Caribbean drumming ensemble. This was followed by a blessing to MLK and the ancestors in Yoruba from the Lucumi Santeria tradition. People were invited to call out the names of people who had passed and soon names like Malcolm X, George Jackson, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita Lebron, Chief Bey and Fred Hampton were called out from the audience. The first speech was by Juan Carlos Ruiz of Occupy Sandy who urged us to put MLK in the context of current struggles. He roused the audience by asking the audience to stand up and tell each other “Tu lucha es mi lucha! Your struggle is my struggle!”

This was followed by a performance by the amazing Welfare Poets, a hip-hop/activist ensemble full of rappers, percussionists, drummers, dancers and singers. They were recently targeted by the NYPD, some of their members were arrested and accused of being associated with the Macheteros, underground Puerto Rican independence fighters. One of the Welfare Poets’ songs pointedly criticized President Obama and his drones. By the end of their performance people were dancing in the aisle.

The next speech was by Occupy Sunset Park and Occupy Sandy organizer Diego Ibañez. He talked about the the destruction Hurricane Sandy wreaked on poor communities in Brooklyn and Queens. Then he talked about the “slow hurricane” that effects neighborhoods like Sunset Park all the time: police violence, unemployment, physical neglect, the attacks on immigrants. He ended with a rousing chant of “Community is Unity and Unity is Power!”

The remainder of the program was short presentations by groups and individuals from the community, interspersed with poetry from the Peace Poets and Eric Aviles. First up was an organizer from the Workers Justice Project, a group which helps organize and protect immigrant day laborers. After she spoke one of the laborers spoke up, talking about how workers like himself were the unsung heroes of Hurricane Sandy, being among the first called in to do dangerous reconstruction work. He was moved to tears by the response of the audience. Next up were two of the rent-strikers of the 46th Street Tenants Association that Occupy Sunset Park has been helping. Sara, a forty-year resident of the buildings, originally from Honduras, told the story of living in a building neglected by a slumlord. She told how Occupy Sunset Park had helped them gain media access and the strength to force city agencies to step in. The other tenant, an elderly woman from Mexico, told the audience she didn’t care what people said about her being undocumented, she had the same rights as anyone else to a decent place to live. Next were two speakers from #YoSoy132NY. The first explained the rise of a new Mexican democracy movement organized in response to fraudulent elections, she said their struggle was the same as MLK’s struggle. The second told the story of being an indigenous native Mexican: how dare US immigration rules challenged her right to go anywhere on the continent she and her ancestors had always lived. The presentations were topped off by a rousing speech by a veteran of the Puerto Rican independence struggle, Alfredo Lopez, who echoed MLK’s last speech saying that he might not live to see the victory of our struggles but he was sure that that victory was on its way. Maritza Arrastia, an organizer with Occupy Sunset Park and a veteran of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party closed the speeches with a call for building real unity by building ongoing organizations that could challenge the difficult times that are coming.

We went downstairs for an delicious home-cooked Mexican meal. Surrounded by photos of struggles in the neighborhood and in Mexico, people ate their fill of rice and beans, tortillas and pork with spicy sauce, washed down with agua de lulo and agua de guanabana. I got a chance to talk to a number of attendees. Memorable was a guy and his girlfriend who were visiting from Argentina. When they got to the U.S., he said, he couldn’t believe how awful the political situation was. He was inspired to find something like the Asambleas Populares back home.

After dinner we were joined by the Cetiliztli Nahucampa Ensemble, a dance troupe that not only performs the dances of the indigenous Mexica (the so-called Aztecs), but performs them in the context of sacred ceremony. They lead a blessing to the four directions and to the earth in Spanish and Nahuatl before performing dances and then leading all the participants in a linked-hand serpent dance around the church basement as copal fumes drifted from the base of a carved log drum.

From my perspective the event was a great success. We hoped for a formal discussion in the event on what “unity” means and how to build it, and that didn’t happen, but we’re planning a follow-up event with a less ambitious agenda of dialogue and conversation. I thought it was really significant that none of our speakers talked about pressuring politicians or about reforming police departments or voting in more “responsible” figures into government. This was all about what the community could do for itself. In that regard I felt like it reflected what I feel is the continuing subversive message of the Occupy movement. This is about challenging capitalism in a creative way. The Occupy folks who came seemed a little less fresh-faced and more grizzled: many of them have spent months doing hurricane relief mutual @id.

In truth Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park has been struggling to maintain momentum; and for now anyway weekly General Assemblies have ceased. But it’s clear that something real is being built here. We now face the challenges of keeping the struggle sustainable and finding ways to keep people involved. It’s going to call for more creativity to keep building an anti-capitalist community-based movement that is both revolutionary in spirit and connected to peoples’ lives. But the roots we’ve been laying down and the connections we’ve made were really evident at this event. I remain a proud participant.

World AIDS Day 2012: In Memory of Joe Galanti

"He Kills Me": AIDS activist art from Gran Fury. Ronald Reagan, burn in hell!

I wish I had a picture of my late friend and comrade Joe Galanti. I have a vivid if incomplete memory of a specific photograph: taken at a revolutionary counterprotest of some KKK/Nazi rally in the midwest in the late 1970s, it shows Joe and other comrades charging forward against the enemy lines. The comrades are wearing painted football helmets and bearing shields: the anti-fascist confrontations of those days were serious business. I remember the expression on Joe's face in this photo, yelling some warcry: it's like a battlefield photo, which I guess indeed it was. I don't remember if Joe was charging the fascists directly in this photo or up against their police protection. I vaguely remember this action ended in arrest, but it was taken right before I got to know Joe, and the details are lost to time.

Joe was born Joe Alongi, but in the ways of the revolutionary left of those days renamed himself Joe Galanti, picking an old family name for his nom d'guerre. The Chicago left wasn't so huge that he was a stranger to me when we finally became friends in 1978 or 1979: I had surely seen him around at demonstrations or events. His party, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was notorious for its anti-Klan/anti-Nazi work. While not quite as notorious as the Communist Workers Party who had comrades literally martyred by fascist killers down in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end of that period, the RSL was definitely committed to building counterprotests that could literally stop the fascists in their tracks. Others on the left called them adventurists for their tactics, and remembering that photo there are certainly grains of truth in that argument. Chicago's segregated suburbs were infested with fascist vermin, of both the home-grown Klan variety and swastika-bearing, uniform dress-up German-style nazophiles. These were dangerous situations: I remember coming back from one suburban confrontation, must have been 1979 or 1980, when our car was followed from a counter-rally by a carload of Nazi sympathizers who tried ramming us off the highway: we escaped at high speed through a maze of suburban streets. The RSL had given up the football-helmeted charges by then but not the war itself.

The funny thing was that Joe was a pussycat. If he could be dynamic in action and a deft speech maker, he was soft-spoken and goofy in person. He was brilliant, with a great grasp of revolutionary politics and obviously a real commitment to fighting for his vision. Joe was also proudly out and gay, at a time when the left's relationship with the gay struggle was marked by great deals of ambivalence or even hostility.

Even though I had been warned off their adventurism, when I came out those many decades ago it was only natural that I would be forced to reevaluate the RSL since I was looking to integrate my communist politics with my newly open self-identity. I don't remember when I decided to treat Joe as something other than a raving lunatic, but at some point we began talking politics, and he really rocked my world.

He gave me a lot of space: he introduced me to another person in the RSL periphery, Michael Botkin, who would shortly become my roommate and also Joe's lover. We formed a sort of transitional organization, the boldly named Gay Revolutionary Discussion Group (GRDG, which we pronounced "Grudge"), and drew others toward the RSL from the gay activist world through this nominally independent core. Eventually I was ready to return to the hardcore left, formally joined the RSL, and GRDG folded into the League. It was smart organizing on Joe's part: and all the time we were studying the issues and organizing protests and intervening in the community. We organized protests against the movies "Cruising" and "Windows" and got involved in a fight against police repression of the Chicago gay community. I was really won to the RSL by Joe, who built a bridge between the critical Leninism of the RSL, community activism, and personal expression and identity.

Joe was fiercely charismatic: if he was intimidating at first, everyone who knew him soon fell in love with him. Having lived in New York City now for over thirty years, it's easy to forget how novel New Yorkers like Joe seemed to us quaint midwesterners back then. His New York accent and his dark Italian good looks were charming and compelling. I was happy when he and Michael became an item. We, sometimes with other comrades, would socialize frequently, going out to gay bars and discos or holding houseparties. Partying, Joe became a kind of psychedelic hippy, and warmly touchy and feely in ways enticing to those of us who grew up in Chicago's icy urbanity. He was an apostle of free love, and adored the icons of early gay counterculture.

It turned out Joe also had a personal secret dark side. He would sneak off to leather bars where he lived a whole different kind of life, one that even Michael didn't learn about til months after they had started becoming involved. This proved a bit of a challenge for Michael who didn't share the seriousness of the leather/S&M world, but he was game at least for a while. I remember sitting in our living room listening to music when Michael came out of his bedroom looking thoughtful and a little perplexed. "Hey I just fistfucked Joe." He announced before turning around and going back to his room off the kitchen in the back of the apartment. Joe seemed even happier having come out of this sort of second closet, though the intensity of Joe's sexuality became a tension on their relationship.

I was sad to leave Joe and Michael behind when I moved to New York in the late summer of 1981. I moved here to work for the League itself, and soon lived and breathed politics 24 hours a day. I stayed in touch with them, and saw them occasionally at national gatherings. But then that world just ended.

I remember several disturbing phone calls a couple years later. Calls from Joe, or Michael, or a mutual RSL friend. Joe was sick. Michael was sick. There was some weird factional trouble in the Chicago RSL. Michael left. It's confused in my memory... I remember a difficult conversation with Joe over the phone when he seemed deeply panicked...he had indeed been diagnosed with AIDS. Not a brand-new disease by then but still always a death sentence. He was discussing his plans: "If I live long enough..." the rest of this terrible pronouncement is blotted out of my memory by a rush of noise.

I saw him one more time. He came home to NYC on a sort of last pilgrimage...this was somewhere between 1985 and 1987. He seemed well, but much thinner.  He had a list of things to do. He wanted to feast on Nathan's oysters: he was shocked that they had become so expensive. Shortly thereafter I fell away from the League myself: personally terrified by AIDS and demoralized by the Reagan era, I was in political retreat and heading for hibernation. I don't even remember when the call came, or who it came from, that Joe had sickened again and succumbed to the disease. I'm guilty as hell that I was nowhere to be found. I miss him still: I miss his passion, his commitment, his courage, his ability to synthesize revolutionary politics into a compelling narrative. There's so much Joe didn't get to see. What a terrible terrible loss.

Joe loved to dance. He loved disco, and loved the adventurous new sounds that crept into the music after its r&b/funk base seemed to tire. One song I remember he loved to no end was "Pop Muzik," by M. This one's for you Joe.




I have been trying to honor my friends lost to AIDS each World AIDS day. Click here for my previous writings about them and the struggle against AIDS.

Annual Candy Samples Video Break!

Yes it's that time of year again! A new video from my favorite drag queen, the immortal Candy Samples, actress. This year's video is a tribute to the gay "bear" world, with a new song entitled "Bear Season." Once again yours truly has several background color roles, though my adorable boyfriend may be seen here as the guitar player. The videos are always a hoot to make, and this one was no different, though the extensive "green screen" filming meant that those of us in the cast had no idea whatsoever what the final product would look like. Bonus points to Candy for the Sarah Palin references!

The Lessons of the Sojourner Truth Organization

Truth and Revolution, A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, by Michael Staudenmaier

The Sojourner Truth Organization was one of the many small revolutionary left groups that dotted the American political landscape in the 1970s, spawned by the wave of radicalization that followed the upheavals of the 1960s. STO was also one of the many small revolutionary left groups that disbanded in the 1980s in the depths of the Reagan era. A wonderful new book, "Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization 1969-1986," by Michael Staudenmaier, has just been published by the anarchist book house AK Press that documents the rise and fall of a group that has long passed into leftwing legend.

While the book is a meticulously documented product of a close read of STO's printed archive and years of interviews with former members of the group, Staudenmaier is clearly not just performing an academic/historical exercise. The author has a history in the movement, and his attention to important discussions really shows. Many of the issues that STO innovated and grappled with remain relevant today, even though the face of the left is barely recognizable from STO's time. The period of STO's vibrancy may seem like ancient times, but as I myself can attest, many of us who were active in that long-ago era find ourselves still — or perhaps, again — active today, can look to STO's story for lessons about how to be revolutionaries in America. Staudenmaier astutely notes the relevance of this tale from a past wave of radicalization for today's Occupy-era radicals.

I confess that the first thing this book inspired in me was a wave of nostalgic memories. I'm 53 today and I joined my first communist organization back in 1976 fresh out of high school. My own political demoralization and falling away from the organized left occurred ten years later, about the same time STO disbanded. Indeed the last organization I was a member of (and the one I was a member of for the bulk of that period) , the Revolutionary Socialist League, itself disbanded a couple years later. (I'm also happy to report my return to ranks of the revolutionary-minded politically active in the current radicalization).

I joined the communist left in Chicago, which was in fact the home base of STO. The descriptions of STO's work, first in factory-floor organizing, and later in anti-imperialist solidarity work, anti-fascist activism and in regroupment-oriented party-building on the left, were all intensely familiar. The language that STO used to discuss its work and direction was the language I learned. The era of post-radicalization "lull" and de-industrialization was the era I grew up in politically; these were the same issues the RSL dealt with as well. I left Chicago for New York in 1981, but many of the scenes and issues and forces described in "Truth and Revolution" were as I remembered them. It made me wonder if all the groups struggling to stay relevant in that dark time of counterrevolution were all going through the same process without realizing that a period of organizational decline was universal among communist and socialist groups.

Interestingly, there was a brief moment when we in the RSL, then on a trajectory away from the Trotskyism and even Leninism that it had grown up in, were all fascinated by the Sojourner Truth Organization and discussed trying to orient to them in some way. I'm not sure whatever happened to that idea. Staudenmaier discusses at great length the unique path that STO traced. Its core founders were old left, but it grew up in the world of the so-called New Communist Movement, that is generally meant as the "Maoist" wing of the left that emerged from the 1960s student movement and rejected both the established Soviet Union-sponsored world communist parties and also the existing critical/oppositional Trotskyist communist movement. One could discuss endless factional hairsplitting among the parties and sects of that era, but the STO walked its own unique line. With a critique of "Stalinism," an affinity for the one-time Trotskyist and theorist of black liberation C.L.R. James, and a strong commitment to supporting "Third World" liberation organizations, as they were called back then, STO couldn't be easily pigeonholed.

One of STOs groundbreaking pamphlets: Understanding and Fighting White Supremacy

Staudenmaier discusses at great lengths STO's reputation for discussing and developing theory. He details how they tried to advance the ideas of Marxism and of Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci into a time like the 1970s and a country like the United States that presented so many challenges for revolutionaries. I found his discussions of STO's theory of "dual consciousness" incredibly thought-provoking.

Staudenmaier explains how STO, largely through the theoretical work of one its members, Noel Ignatin, made a name for itself addressing the key question for American radicals: racism. Ignatin addressed the theories of white skin privilege and the white blind spot, and explained how the white working class came to be poisoned by its material attachment to white supremacy. STO came to believe that the prime directive for white workers, indeed for white revolutionaries, was to support the autonomous organizing of black people, of Puerto Rican people, of world revolutionaries fighting against American hegemony. The arguments on racism and white supremacy are deeply compelling. These are arguments far removed from "traditional Marxism" and yet very familiar to many schools of political and cultural thought today. It strikes me that this theory of white supremacy is ripe to be returned to the sphere of making revolution. Nothing says "white supremacy" quite like today's allegedly post-racial consciousness.

And yet STO's theoretical innovations revealed a contradiction unsolved by STO that proved to be one of its unmaking: do white revolutionaries unite with black revolutionaries in a single organization? How are the theoretical differences that might arise breached? If revolutionaries support the autonomous organizing of oppressed and working people in all kinds of struggles, what is the role of a party to that autonomy? STO was not afraid to get its hands dirty in the struggle, but it somehow managed to get tangled up in its own argument and failed to recruit masses of people from the struggles in which it engaged.

Indeed it is in the issue of building an organization that can fight for the necessary massive societal change, a party of revolutionaries, that I found "Truth and Revolution" most thought-provoking. Clearly the 1970s/1980s model of competing hair-splitting self-proclaimed vanguard sects did not work. Much of the left globally is stuck in this model that seems quaint at best and cringe-worthy at worst. How to synthesize the many best traditions of Marxism, of Leninism, or of Anarchism, Maoism, or even Trotskyism, into something that might, you know, actually be capable of waging an actual revolutionary struggle and overturning the wretched mess that is globalized capitalism? This seems incredibly relevant.

For me, the Occupy movement has really made it clear that the first task of revolutionaries is to stay connected to changing reality, and engaged with the consciousness of people in motion. Contrast, for example, this exercise in sterility and self-righteous abstentionism from one ultrasectarian grouplet at this link to the wonderful "It's Five Minutes to Dawn and the Wind Smells like Freedom" statement of the Kasama Project aimed at Occupy activists. Some of the failures of the STO seem self-inflicted. But some of its failures were borne of the simple reality that fifty or a hundred people, even if they're all brilliant, committed and heroic, is not enough people to defeat an empire. But when the balance of forces shifts, people need to be ready and organized to ride the wave. Creating a vehicle that is creative, self-aware, flexible, and awake to the possibilities around us seems like an important thing.

"Truth and Revolution" is history. I suppose it's ultimately the story of a defeat: I don't think we understood how the reality Reaganism ushered in was going to be so successful in undoing the 1960s. I know we didn't understand the change that was happening to the world. But something is changing in the world, and as we try, again, to get it right, it's definitely worth going over the story of a group like the STO.

"Truth and Revolution" is available directly from the AK Press and also from mainstream vendors like Amazon.

Much of STO's published work is available on the internet at the remarkable Sojourner Truth Organization Digital Archive.

Donna Summer: She Said It Really Loud on the Radio

LaDonna Adrian Gaines, 1948 – 2012

Donna Summer was a phenomenon. Everything she did was on a grand scale. When her career broke through it was an explosion that lasted a decade, changing everything in its wake: our ears are still ringing.

When "Love to Love You Baby" hit the airwaves in 1975 I was in high school. The short version was a ubiquitous hit. The abbreviated moans and groans on the radio edit made it a novelty song: just naughty enough to make me slightly uncomfortable on weekend drives with my mom in the suburbs where we were briefly stranded. Minnie Riperton had already introduced the eargasm to the radio the year before with "Lovin' You," which was no doubt catchy but altogether different in scale. This song's slinkily suggestive groove was impossible to resist. But it was late at night as I lay in my bed reading and listening to the radio when I heard the full 16 minute glory of the song. It turned out not to be a few moans and groans but an extended symphonic orgasm, an intense aural documentary of ecstasy and passion. The guitar, the keys, the sweeping strings, the breathy voice, that funky long screw of a groove. I was a virgin but I knew what that song was about. I felt it. To not feel it, to not be swept up by its sensuality, one would have to be dead. It's the kind of song still, today, that makes me want to reach for a cigarette when it ends. And I haven't been a smoker in 25 years.

Two years later I had finished my first year of college and was spending a couple weeks in New York City. It's a longer story I've told parts of elsewhere on this blog, but I ended up late one weekend night down in the Village, the pre-gentrification Village, a block from the darkness under the still-standing elevated West Side Highway and the mysterious darkened ruin of riverside piers. It was Christopher Street Liberation Day 1977, and this incredible song was blaring from a soundtruck near the armory at the end of the street in the midst of a gay street festival. It was a synthesized beat like nothing I could have ever imagined, with dancing electric lines of crackling noise weaving in and out against a relentless pulsing beat. And there was that same breathy voice, singing once again about feeling "love" but clearly meaning raw, fiery sex. "I Feel Love" grabbed me like the superheated thick New York City night air. I wasn't yet out as a gay young man, and wouldn't be for a little while, but this magic moment cemented in my mind everything I imagined about future possibility.

A year or so later I was finally out, and as I gathered gay friends and learned to navigate the subterranean world of that long-ago hidden gay world, Donna Summer's music remained a constant. There were other artists I found more interesting, but none I ever found more compelling. Her sound was huge. I remember discovering her two-LP concept album "Once Upon a Time." Sure I listened to jazz and soul the rest of the time, but this amazing disco symphony was impossible to ignore. I first heard these songs on a dance floor somewhere in Chicago, probably at the Bistro. Lyrical, romantic, with a dramatic, almost operatic sweep: compositions with a pop catchiness but a furious grandiose ambition to seize the listener not in a heady idyll but in an ecstatic fury of dance and motion. As "Rumour Has It" segued into "I Love You" the lights in the disco would shimmer, the rhythms percolating against that insistent base drum and the sweep of the strings; the dance floor would fill with emotion. It was the happy ending of a fairytale come to life. I don't think I have ever listened to "I Love You" without feeling the memory of tears for the lost bliss of those fleeting otherworldly moments. I loved that record.

I also loved the song she recorded for the B-movie "The Deep," about as close as she ever got to doing a James Bond song (which would have been great!). I had that soundtrack with "Down Deep Inside" on otherworldly transparent blue vinyl. Her 15-minute version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime" from Thank God It's Friday? To die for. And hearing her duke it out with Barbra Streisand on the 11-minute version of "No More Tears" is priceless.

I'm not sure that I heard Donna Summer's 17-minute cover of Jimmy Webb's lyrically obtuse epic of loss "MacArthur Park" dancing at the Bistro, but I know that it played the night that my friend Joe announced he had scored a few hits of windowpane acid. Let's just say this song is fried into my brain. Who turns a strange and melancholic song about a cake melting in the rain into a 17-minute disco song? I don't know if it was Summer herself or her producers who came up with this audaciously insane bit of genius. It's like an opera's mad song: beginning with a slow piano against stately strings, like something out of a drama queen's handbag, it takes almost two minutes even to understand what's happening. Suddenly Summer gives a theatrical laugh and it's on. That unforgettable horn-laden hook. It's ecstatic nonsense but it works: anyone who heard this song at that time surely knows what I mean. These songs were all huge at the clubs. Everyone jumped up from their banquettes and bar stools and filled the dance floor to catch the wave.

I remember when her triumphant double album "Bad Girls" came out. I remember the shiny shiny gatefold on extra-thick stock. Unlike the anonymous cooing female voices of so many disco acts, here was Donna Summer the star. While she had always flirted with musical styles beyond disco, "Bad Girls" was her successful power-grab for pop fame. Disco, soul, rock, even country. She not not only did it all, she did it all well. She understood in 1979, well ahead of many of us, that the disco genre she had pioneered couldn't sustain her indefinitely. She did amazing things with disco concept albums — there were several — and with giving new disco life to  Barry Manilow songs, but she knew when she needed to reinvent herself.

Well, we all seem to need to do that now and again. I note how Donna Summer was around (again!) a few times at significant moments in my own life. When I moved to New York City there was her ambitious eponymous album produced by Quincy Jones. It wasn't her biggest commercial success but it's a great record.

I remember her 1983 record "She Works Hard for the Money" with some ambivalence. This was a super big pop hit for her, and certainly the songs were grandly envisioned. But I didn't love this new Donna Summer, and her new openly born-again Christian identity was hard to reconcile with the Donna Summer who helped a generation of gay men dance out of their closets on to the streets. I am prepared now to accept that the fading of her reputation among gay men was the product of inaccurate malicious rumor, but there was a moment when we felt a sting of betrayal. I've said it before but the 1980s were a terrible decade.

Her later records were never huge, though the ones I know have a few magic moments. To my great regret I never saw her perform live.

But eventually all was forgiven. She didn't take back what she gave us, even if for a moment there was uncomfortable silence. Donna, we loved you, we really loved you.

Another one gone too damn soon; this part of growing up and older is hard, to see the people who helped shaped us, even from the other side of speakers and wires, drop away. Dim all the lights, sweet darling.... Love it don't come easy. But when you find the perfect love, let it fill you up. 

Thank you Donna. Thanks for being the soundtrack to my growing up.