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.

Gay Pride 2011: Happy Gay Me!

That's my high school yearbook photo, from the year I graduated, 1976. Fortunately by then I had abandoned the really awful long stringy hair that had guaranteed I would be asked if I was a boy or a girl at least once a week. I was very serious. That's a quote from a 20th-century Chinese poet, Lu Hsun: "From the clay of life abandoned on the ground grow no lofty trees, only wild grass. Wild grass strikes no deep roots, has no beautiful flowers and leaves, yet it imbibes dew, water, and the blood, and flesh of the dead." Jesus, lighten up, dude! There's a more light-hearted photo of me in the Compass also: I'm dressed as a monk in my satirical rewrite of Shakespeare's Othello that was produced as a segment of the senior class variety show in the public high school in the incredibly privileged Connecticut suburb I had abruptly been made to call home for the previous three and a half years. If you've ever seen Ang Lee's brilliant film "The Ice Storm," minus the parental swingers at the key party you've seen my Connecticut life. I remember that ice storm.

I was not a light-hearted teenager, though I was not completely miserable either. Actually I loved school, and did well in it. Straight A's. I had friends in my classes, and a couple friends for after school and summers, but I spent most of my free time in High School sitting in the teachers' lounge hanging out with my English teachers. Mr. Economou and Ms. Burroughs were amazing teachers who challenged me to think clearly. They were great fun also. It wasn't that I was a teacher's pet, though I probably was. It was that I was deeply in physical love with the boy who I thought was the smartest, handsomest boy in the world, who was first invited to hang out on those comfy sofas, and after befriending me, invited me there with him. I'll call him T (having Googled him in adulthood he doesn't look like he'd enjoy being featured here).

I enjoyed cracking jokes with the teachers and learning so much, but most of all I enjoyed the opportunity to stare at T's crotch for hours and hours on end. It's how I spent a good portion of school season for the years 1974, 5 and 6. I didn't have particularly elaborate fantasies about T, but he filled out his corderoys and khakis very very well, if you know what I mean.

I thought about T a lot, even when I was home; though he lived in the very rich part of town and I lived in the very modest working-class section. We were not after-school friends. My mother loved books; she owned a lot of them. My father loved books, and he owned a lot of them. When they divorced the bulk of their combined book collection wound up in boxes that eventually made their way to our tiny attic in Connecticut. I made a nest in those books, and I had discovered all the good parts. I had also discovered that if I read the good parts and rubbed myself in a certain tremendously strange and exciting way, a disturbingly good sensation would occur sometimes involving, well, moisture that was most definitely not pee. Anyway as much as I loved the good parts of these books very few of them offered clues as to why I might find T so terribly intoxicating, and none really helped me turn my fantasies about him into particularly specific lurid scenarios, though I do remember that I had one particularly vivid dream involving reaching into his pocket for some keys. It was a terribly adult book collection, but avant garde literature from the 1950s and early 1960s rarely seemed to do more than occasionally mention queers.

Oh I knew what I was, without ever daring to put it into words. I was probably seven years old and playing with my little friend Herbie in Chicago when his father arrived home from work. His father proceeded to change out of his suit into his casual clothes in front of us. To be fair to Herbie's dad this was done completely unlasciviously without a tinge of impropriety. It was not what I saw when his father dropped his drawers — nothing actually, cause the tails of his dress shirt maintained his modesty — but what I felt. I certainly had no words for it, but here I am forty-five years later still remembering my absolute voyeuristic attraction; what I felt then as a seven-year-old boy is conjured up every time I see an unbelievably handsome man just out of possible reach in the middle age of my adulthood. It was stomach-thumping desire.

I didn't lose my virginity til I was nineteen, picking up a drunken Mexican man one cold winter night at a Chicago gay bar chosen because it was far from where I lived. He had a statue of the Virgin Mary on top of his TV set and a stack of porn in the tray underneath it. To my dismay he fell asleep in the middle of this momentous milestone. As Dan Savage says, "It gets better." So it wasn't like the hormones I discovered gestating inside me at age seven sent me on a ruinous or dissolute adolescence. I made a couple vague sexual overtures to friends in Junior High School before we left Chicago for Connecticut, but they were rejected good-naturedly and off-handedly. No friendships were lost. I developed a very dirty mind, but I was a very good serious boy.

After staring at T all year, he went off sailing for summer break. Which turned his skin a wonderful tan and bleached all the golden blonde in his hair to pure white by the start of school each fall. My last summer at home before senior year mother took me on a summer road trip. In Washington DC I passed by the hotel newsstand, my eyes widening at the copies of Playgirl arrayed beneath the cash register. I remember breaking out in cold sweat and the shakes as I grabbed a couple dollars out of my mother's purse later and went downstairs to make that magazine mine. The first time I jerked off to that magazine I imagine I lasted about thirty seconds. It was a very well read magazine by the time I finally tired of hiding it and guiltily threw it away by cramming it the bottom of a garbage bag.

I've never asked my mother when she figured out I was gay — she didn't confront me with it until after we had both (separately) moved to New York in the 1980s. But jesus the seventies were so fucked up she had to see it. I still remember the awkward evenings we spent sitting on the couch together watching TV movies of the week. There was "That Certain Summer," which history remembers as a ground-breaking movie: what I remember about it is my inability to meet my mother's gaze for hours afterward. And then there was "Born Innocent," starring Linda Blair. Yes, of Exorcist fame. Anyway, Linda is a bad girl, sent to reform school, and she gets dragged off by even worse girls into a storage closet where they rape her with the handle of a bathroom plunger. I can also still remember the loud crinkle of our TV dinner trays as my our running conversation during TV time turned into mortified silence. Well, in my mind I am a little confused whether it was a bathroom plunger in the film or some other utility object just as I'm a little confused at which I tried sticking up my own butt somewhat later. My bad! There was certainly a half-hearted and excruciatingly fumbling birds-and-bees talk from my mother. Fortunately school had covered all those details so it was mercifully brief.

I never confessed my lusts to T. Perhaps if I had been a teenage drinker things might have been different, but alas. I'm pretty sure he knew I worshiped the ground he walked on, or rather, the couch he spread his legs on as he propped them up on the low coffee table in that teachers' lounge. I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the attention. Who doesn't want worshipers, after all? But as though we were living out a curiously inverted "Brideshead Revisited," T's Sebastian act was a kind of private show for me never meant to have an actual pay off. Our friendship didn't last past graduation: He grew up to be the staid suburbanite, inheriting the respectable family mantle and I to be the raging gay liberationist/communist/pagan lost in the gritty big city. For what it's worth, my adult taste in adult men is nothing like T.

When I got to college back in Chicago in the fall of 1976, I felt very unsteady on my feet. There was actually an out gay couple, Marcus and Stuart, if the names don't escape me. Bravely for that time of decade they would hold hands as they crossed the school quad. And I would cross the street rather than be caught dead interacting with them. And that's what surprises me, because as a little gay seven year old, or a little gay Junior High School student or a bigger gay High School Student, I didn't know enough to feel shame at who and what I was. It was only with the passage into adulthood and the dissipation of my happy daydreams of T, that it occurred to me I was not necessarily like other people, and that the deep dark reality of the real me was not necessary something that would be welcomed and accepted by those around me. The next two years would be in some ways the hardest of my life as I strove to become somebody. I discovered I had somehow learned to be afraid of who I might be.

And that's what Gay Pride, a profoundly political holiday, ultimately gave me: the tools to conquer that fear; fear that didn't come from inside me, but was placed on me. I've written elsewhere on The Cahokian about my fruitful steps to coming out. I made it. I had to leave a lot behind, but I made it. I could do a lot more oversharing and talk about sexually maturing through the 1980s amidst the terrifying rise of AIDS, and perhaps I will someday. But the point I wanted to make here, now, was that once I was an innocent child, growing into the only person he knew how to be. Nobody made me gay, except perhaps God Him or Her self. My life was hard and easy, full of joy and pain, like most people lucky enough to make the journey through childhood.

When all of today's anti-gay marriage bigots say "think of the children," I do. I think of the gay child I was. I think of how lucky I was avoiding too harsh an eye of judgment. No parent ever told me not to be who I was. I thrived on tremendous unconditional love. I made my own mistakes. I had my own disappointments. I had my own successes. Every child, destined to be gay or destined to be straight, deserves that opportunity to discover who he or she can become. How afraid people are! And how sad that is, especially for the children who might be falsely protected from having the opportunity to discover who they are, free of condemnation and judgment.

Life is still sometimes scary. But I'm proud to be... me.

Remember Chicago's Haymarket Martyrs

I took this photo 25 years ago in Managua, Nicaragua, at the 1986 May Day rally organized by Nicaragua's left parties separate from the much larger rally organized by the ruling Sandinista Front, the FSLN. This banner from the opposition Communist Party of Nicaragua reads "...Saluda a los Trabajadores Nicaraguenses este Primero de Mayo, Centenario de los Martires de Chicago." meaning "Salute to the Nicaraguan Workers This May First, Centenary of the Chicago Martyrs."

Exactly 125 years ago in 1886, anarchists organized a rally in solidarity with striking workers at Chicago's Haymarket Square. A pipe bomb was thrown at police, killing one. Chaos ensued, with cops shooting their weapons wildly. Although the anarchists had nothing to do with the pipe bomb — historians believe it was thrown by a provocateur — they were rounded up and arrested. Eight were tried, one died in prison, and four of them were executed. The persecution and murder of the anarchist martyrs was a blatant act of political repression even though none of the arrested men were proven to have anything to do with the bomb. The workers were on strike for the eight-hour day: all of us around the world today who benefit from that standard of fairness owe a debt to those activists of 125 years ago. How cool that people in Nicaragua remembered those long ago heroes when today I imagine precious few in Chicago itself nod in their memory.

(In the very early 1980s before I left Chicago for New York, the socialist group I worked with, the Revolutionary Socialist League, had its offices in what they called Haymarket Hall or Haymarket Books, an old loft building south of Downtown off Haymarket Square that was reputed to have been the former headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. It was a beautiful old cast-iron building where public forums were sometimes held; freezing cold in winter thanks to its virtually prehistoric heating system. The RSL being long gone I'm imagining it's now someone's fabulously renovated yuppie loft.)

I Was a Teenage Trotskyite Spy

I was reminded in the comments to yesterday's post of an experience I had as a very young adult.

I've written here before about how when I got to college in 1976 I made some questionable choices. I had witnessed so much revolutionary social change up close in my young life, I couldn't believe that the student revolution was over. The Vietnam war had ended the year before, and I mean really ended with the expulsion of the last Americans and the destruction of their despotic puppet regime. My mother worked in academia and for a dozen years she had brought home tales of radical students running about from protest to protest and occupying administration buildings. During the 1968 Democratic Convention our living room was filled with bloodied students and staff taking refuge from Mayor Daley's police riot in the park.

I fancied myself a leftist and the minute I got settled in my dorm I went looking for the revolution. There was some kind of student organization orientation, and I remember carefully visiting all the radical student group tables. There was the Young Socialist Alliance, the Spartacus Youth League, what I think was then called the Revolutionary Student Brigade, and a handful of others. I bought a few newspapers, a couple pamphlets on world struggles with exciting evocative covers, and exchanged phone numbers with a few student organizers clearly eager to get started recruiting fresh meat from the incoming class. This was at University of Chicago on Chicago's south side: it had a history of radical activism going way back. And everybody knew that UC alum Bernardine Dohrn was then leader of the Weather Underground and actually organizing from underground, on the run from the Feds. I hadn't paid so much attention to the fact that UofC was also home to the infamous Chicago Boys, the murderous economists led by Milton Friedman trying out their crackpot freemarket economic theories on the backs of Chileans freshly subdued by a CIA-supported coup d'etat. The sad truth was that the UofC was actually more a hotbed of rightwing activism by then than left.

Anyway I met a guy named San from the Sparts. He was a really smart guy who really knew his stuff, could argue esoteric political points aggressively like nobody's business. He had a little bit of a crazy eye, which made him very intense, and although his tendency to argue until his lips were literally flecked with foaming spittle concerned me, he was very persuasive. I actually liked him quite a bit. I was fascinated by Trotskyism, even though I thought of myself as a bit of a Maoist. It seemed so noir, sort of dangerously romantic, evoking both courage and tragedy in its losing struggle against the current of Stalinism. My knowledge of Marxism-Leninism was very superficial, and it wasn't hard for San to convince me that Stalinism and Maoism had spent as much time, energy and blood preventing social change as engendering it.

I was what was called in Spartacist lingo a "contact." Which meant a sort of potentially recruitable interested person. San was quickly assigned to try to recruit me, another freshman and classmate named David (this is a different David, by the way, than I have referred to elsewhere in this blog), and a graduate student named Larry. All of us had expressed interest in the SYL and were deemed to be serious enough to be recruited.

The Sparts had -- well actually have, they're still around and their MO seems unchanged as near as I can tell now decades away from contact with them -- a bit of an obsession with other groups on the left. They called them "OROs," or "ostensibly revolutionary organizations," and somehow believed that the key to their own success was in harassing other left groups and showing them up to be not as authentically Marxist as themselves. They hoped to defeat the organizing efforts of their competitors, and I suppose, hoped to pick up survivors from the presumed wreckage of people disillusioned in the politics or practices of these competing sects. Something about the obscurata of all these sects fascinated me: like a stamp collection or a forgotten shelf in the library the self-perpetuated hair-splitting differences of various left parties, all tiny and all self-important, was endlessly amusing. Though I never developed the hectoring polemical verbal finesse of a good Spart, I was for a brief moment enthralled by it.

Anyway as I confessed before I eventually became a member of the Spartacus Youth League, and though it was such a formative time in my life that it seems like I hung around them for decades, I did so for almost exactly two years before moving up and out. Right about the time I felt like I was ready to sign up with them, I remember San took me aside.

There were two main Maoist parties in the U.S., both led by former members of different SDS factions. One of them, the October League, led by Michael Klonsky, was about to rebrand itself as the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist. This was big news because the CP (M-L) was also reputed to be winning official recognition from the Chinese Communist Party. Mao had just died, and while the brakes had been put on the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic had not yet gone on the "capitalist road." When that happened the other big Maoist sect -- the Revolutionary Communist Party -- broke with China. A third one became loyal to Albania's Enver Hoxha but that's a story too pathetic to even try to recall. But the CP (M-L) was set to become what it hoped would be the pro-Chinese equivalent of the old school pro-Soviet Communist Party. That never really happened, but for a moment in the seventies it seemed, at least to them, feasible. And the CP(M-L)'s founding congress was going to be held right there in Chicago. And it was most definitely not a public event.

San told me the Spartacist League wanted to observe that congress, and of course, roundly hated by the Maoists, there was no way that was actually gonna happen. (Back then when Maoists saw Trotskyists they usually started spontaneously chanting "Ice pick! Ice pick!" in reference to the weapon agents of Stalin used to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico in 1940). He knew that I had talked to all of the different left groups, and well knew of my tentatively abandoned fascination with Mao.



He asked me if I would talk to the October League activist I had met and ask if I, an innocent, unaffiliated and open-minded individual, could get an invitation to the CP (M-L) congress. He asked me to be a spy! In his (and my!) defense I don't believe there was anything disruptive intended. Nor do I believe that there was anything fishy in a, how shall I say this, government-influenced way. I think they just wanted a first-hand report of an important competitor's event. I, of course, said absolutely. That's what teenagers do, and I was 18. I don't remember her name but I went up to one of the Maoists I had met. "Hey I hear you're having a founding congress. I would love to attend!"

I remember raised eyebrows. Her response was guarded. I reminded her of how I was interested in Chairman Mao and her organization. "Maybe," she said. Skeptically, she exchanged phone numbers with me. She'd get back to me. I reported back to San, and he presumably went back to the Spart leaders and said the groundwork had been laid. I vaguely remember that this was all the very week leading up to the Congress. I remember feeling flushed with excitement. Nervous at my white lies, but I really wanted to see a Maoist party congress!

The night before the event I got a disappointing phone call. "We've made a policy decision," she said. "We're only inviting party members." I was so disappointed! And relieved. Who knows what happened at that Congress. I surely read about it in their newspaper, but the world has forgotten what happened there as surely as it has forgotten the long-gone October League and its long-gone successor the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist). Ironically, though my undercover career was abortive, when the competing Maoist group the RCP split in two the next year, a disguntled RCP member apparently dropped off a stack of documents with the Sparts for maximum impact: the leftist world learned of that factional crisis from the screaming headline on the Spartacist newspaper Workers Vanguard, "RCP SPLITS!" followed up with excruciating detail.

Anyway within a couple weeks I joined the SYL at the same time as my classmate David. We would set up a literature table in some commons area on the UofC campus a couple times a week. I was a terrible leftist newspaper salesman but I dutifully made the attempt every time I was so assigned. One day I heard a familiar female voice behind me. "Comrade!" I knew that voice; I was so busted. The blood rushed to my cheeks. "Comrade, Chairman Mao teaches us to be open and above board!" I turned and sure enough, it was my skeptical Maoist. She had a look on her face I have never forgotten, a knowing, contemptuous smirk colored with "I-knew-it" amusement that turned me into a puddle on the ground, wishing in my mind's mortified eye I could disappear the Spart newspapers I was feebly hawking. She turned and walked away. I had just proved that Trotskyites are spies. And so ended my brief but glorious career as a secret agent.

The top graphic is the cover of the transcripts of one of the Moscow Show trials, conducted by Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s to eliminate all left-wing opposition to his rule. I snagged it from the fascinating web magazine The Art Bin which republished them as an artistic inquiry. They're chilling reading...I used to own a couple. The Soviet government and international Communists were proud of these trials and you used to be able to easily find the thick trial transcripts bound into hardcover books at second-hand shops. The Trotskyists and fellow oppositionists all confessed to terrible crimes which had been completely invented by the Stalinist prosecutors, who were themselves purged in later show trials. Among the charges levelled against the Trotskyists was spying. Oh my sense of humor. The second graphic is a random Mao poster from cultural revolution era China.

"We Need Each Other"

I found these flyers from the first specifically gay political event I ever attended while digging out materials for my recent post on the 1984 gay march on the UN I helped organize. They were from a protest of police raids on Bughouse Square in Chicago, a popular cruising ground/meeting place for gay men, back in 1979. There's something quaint about the content of these flyers: "One Chicago for Gays & Lesbians, Also!" "Peaceful March" and "We Need Each Other." They're such plaintive calls for decency and solidarity, it's interesting to me that such simple, basic human rights level pleas should have been the political discourse a mere five years before the complicated sloganeering and copywrighting of that 1984 effort.

I don't remember too much about this event, or who "Gays & Lesbians for Action" were. The paragraph on the front of the event's actual program read, "In recent months several of our Bars, Business, and Meeting Places have subjected to unusual police action -- Bar Raids, excessive use of force, entrapement, and selective arrest. To adress this proverbal 'The straw that broke the camel's back', we have organized ourselves here tonight to prove that we, too, are enfranchised, viable, and visible citizens of the City of Chicago, and State of Illinois." (spelling and punctuation all as it appears. --ish)



This was not an event organized by a sophisticated political machine. The inside of the program appears above, with suggestions for chants and songs to be performed along the march and rally. Click on it to embiggen; it's worth a read. "Two four six eight, Gay is just as good as straight; Three five seven nine, Lesbians are might fine." I actually remember that chant.

In some ways we've come a long long way.

The Massacre Monument

When I was a boy in the 1960s, I used to linger at this statue in front of the Chicago Historical Society. It's huge--certainly in my memory--these figures are larger than life. It shows the Potawatomi Chief Black Partridge rescuing the white settler woman Margaret Helm from being killed during what is remembered as the Fort Dearborn Massacre, when Indian tribes allied with the British during the war of 1812 successfully destroyed the Chicago-area settlement of Fort Dearborn. It's an evocative statue in a sort of heroic realist style. The "hostile" warrior raises his tomahawk to strike, the "friendly" chief's hand raised to stop him; the lithe Ms. Helm writhes dramatically, indeed erotically, between them. A white baby raises his teeny hand out for aid at their feet. I don't remember the other side clearly, though I remember further mayhem: I think another Indian crouches over his fallen victim. There's a visceral quality to it all: the rippling muscles, the violent instant eternalized in bronze.

Sometime after my departure from Chicago in the 1970s this statue was removed to a warehouse, a victim of changing sensibilities, and protests from Native Americans have prevented its planned re-installation in a memorial park for Fort Dearborn. Indeed the term "Fort Dearborn Massacre" seems to be falling out of favor, replaced by the Battle of Fort Dearborn.

I'm sure the railroad robber baron who commissioned this statue in 1893--interestingly enough a few short years after the final defeat of the Sioux nation at Wounded Knee--intended it to strike fear into the hearts of little white boys and virginal white maidens. It's surely some kind of triumphant monument to the final defeat of the fearsome savages, and proof that the industrious white race deserved its victory, so recently having proved its mastery of the continent. It's a justification for everything that happened between 1812 and 1893 as the United States moved west, pushing the indigenous residents onto smaller and smaller patches of land at bayonet point.

Oh it's clear that in the battle/massacre of Fort Dearborn, the Indians killed about half of those hapless settlers, soldiers and civilian alike, about 45 of them, and the half who survived were sold to the British allies. But in the ocean of blood spilt by the new republic as it pushed into Indian lands, this massacre was but a drop.

I don't remember feeling fear when I looked at this statue as a little boy. What I remember feeling was a kind of admiration. I wanted to meet those fearsome Indians, and it didn't matter whether it was the "bad" one about to deprive Ms. Helm of her scalp, or the "good" one nobly intervening. Those weren't savages, those were people; mysterious and compelling people, but people nevertheless. When me and my little friends played settlers and Indians I knew from this statue I always wanted to be the Indian. In my own play fantasies with my little toy figures I remember that the Indians always won the battle of the bedroom floor. My poor little cowboy and pioneer figures; half the time I was content to leave them in the toybox and just play with plastic Indians. Is this the way the world works among children? Do we choose sides so early?

Today America's bugaboo is no longer wild Indians, it's Muslims and terrorists, though in the popular imagination those two words mean the same thing anyway. A community board in New York City has just given permission for the construction of an Islamic mosque and community center, Cordoba House, near the "ground zero" site of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, and predictably there's no end to the outrage. The imam of this center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has plainly condemned terrorism; numerous victims of the 911 attacks were Muslims, and yet somehow, in typically bigoted American fashion, because the 911 hijackers were Muslim extremists this mosque is being called an insensitive insult to the memory of the fallen. Well, to the memory of the fallen non-Muslims apparently, since they're the only ones who count. Somehow the presence of an Islamic center near the eventual 911 memorial is just too much for these people to bear.

Even on the gay blog I read frequently, Joe.My.God., this mosque has engendered a fierce debate, with numerous gay men repeating ridiculous canards against Islam, basically suggesting that all Muslims want nothing more than to behead gay men on sight.

I am struck by how the tomahawking Indian savage of past American imagination has been replaced by the bomb-throwing, sword-bearing Muslim savage of present American imagination: both are charging fearlessly toward our heads, their goal expanded from just our scalps to our entire heads. This is rich with metaphor. Americans are nothing if not consistent. I suppose we are lucky that artistic sensibilities have changed: I'm trying to picture the bronze statue showing fiendish Muslims ravaging a modern Ms. Margaret Helm.

There's just something so arrogant about American intolerance. 911 was a terrible tragedy. I witnessed it. I lived with it. I walked home across the bridge with thousands of other frightened, saddened people. Every morning for weeks after the attack I saw the pillar of fire and smoke from my bathroom window. The nearly three thousand innocent people who died that day deserve to be honored and remembered. But we have no monopoly on tragedy. Our suffering as Americans doesn't make us superior beings. How many 911s has the United States inflicted on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in its almost ten-year quest for vengeance? If you're a family in the rugged borderlands of Pakistan murdered by a predator drone that's mistaken you for a band of terrorists, is your death less tragic than an investment trader doomed at his or her desk? In the ocean of blood spilt during this misbegotten war between the US and "terror," what drops reflect the innocents of 911? Are those redder drops than all the people killed by "shock and awe" and its aftermath?

Whatever monument is built at the site of 911, I hope there are directions from there to Cordoba House. The monument to those lost that day needs to humanize people not demonize them. Oh I'm not saying it needs to rehabilitate the criminals who carried out the 911 attacks, nor am I offering sympathy for the perverse fundamentalists of Al-Qaeda. But as long as Americans fail to see themselves reflected in the faces of others, it will just be a matter of time before we have to build yet another monument to another massacre.

By way of humanizing the Potowatomi nation who won the Battle of Fort Dearborn--or committed the massacre of Fort Dearborn, your choice--check out The Pokagon Times for a video of the Pokagon band of Potawatomi performing at the rededication of a park at the site of Fort Dearbon in Chicago in 2009. A detailed history of the Potawatomi nations can be found at Tolatsga.org. Also recommended is the First Nations site index.

Top postcard photo from Chuckman's Chicago Nostalgia. Bottom image of the statue at its original location on the south side of Chicago from Wikipedia.