Murdoch Empire Crumbling?

I've been reading with great pleasure about the scandal that has befallen media mogul Rupert Murdoch's empire in the U.K. Not only has the flagship newspaper of Murdoch's empire been shut down ("voluntarily"), Murdoch's efforts to expand his television holdings in the U.K. have been spiked. Even better than this, his main English henchwoman Rebekah Brooks has been arrested, and his high-ranking employees on both sides of the Atlantic have started resigning.

The scandal in the U.K. broke out when it was discovered that Murdoch's people had hacked into the phones not only of gossip-foddering royalty, but of a murdered girl and families of soldiers killed in the various wars that the U.K. is helping out the United States with. The British are outraged — outraged — that Murdoch's organization seems to be put itself above the law and decency. Nevermind that just as in the U.S., Murdoch's media is incredibly popular. We'll set aside the hypocrisy for a moment and say it couldn't happen to a more disgusting media mogul.

Once Australian, Murdoch is of course not British, but American. And let us say a prayer to the Gods old and new that the wave of revulsion and ostracism sweeping the U.K. crosses the ocean and targets the American center of Murdoch's empire, his Fox News television channels — better called Faux News, or even more bitterly, Radio Rwanda. It would be nice to see someone find that his vile racist tabloids like the New York Post and his venture into respectability, the Wall Street Journal, are infested with the same illegal practices. We all know that Murdoch's American empire, thanks to the hideous Roger Ailes among others, are already far removed from anything resembling actual journalism, but given the lines the British operation crossed, it's hard to imagine that the American Murdoch culture is any less criminal. Time will tell...my fingers are crossed that somebody finds the dirt that is sure to be there.

Faux News is propaganda of the worst sort. It keeps its audience riveted with a diet of fear mongering and lies, and has become the paid host to dozens of the nation's leading right-wing parasites; its talking heads are among the most vacuously plastic and utterly unblinking and shameless uninformed morons I have ever seen. Anyone with half a brain can see the sickness that infects Faux News and its print allies. I for one hope that finally we're about to see its putrescence made clear for all.

Echoes of a Past Life: New York City Snapshot 1981

I was looking through some papers and found a carbon copy of a letter I had written to a friend almost thirty years ago, a few months after I moved to New York City. It's not particularly profound, but it had a nice description of my impressions of my new home. Following is an excerpt.

November 24, 1981

In general New York and my job agree with me. I like the city a whole lot; there's lots to do and see, and a lot of it's quite new to me.

I've been going on long walks to see the city, and the walks always prove worthwhile. There's Washington Square, down in the Village, which on Saturday afternoons is filled with people; one weekend there were at least two jazz groups playing for change, plus a few individual musicians, a fire-eater, drug sellers, etc.

The street people here are all interesting. Near my office was an amazing old black woman playing a cheap portable plastic organ: she had a huge smile on her face, a couple American flags stuck on a table, and played old favorites that somehow came out sounding like bizarre avant-garde classical music (Penderecki?). I remember also a young white guy playing guitar and singing folkish popular music (not very well at that) with a youngish black lady doing harmonies at his feet,

All of this is not to mention the transvestites in the gay part of the Village. Notable is black drag-bag lady named Cec (short for Cecily?) who wanders around at 3 in the morning giving profound advice. Last weekend after a bunch of us went out dancing we stopped in a 24-hour coffee joint around 5 am; sitting at the counter was an immaculate dressed and clean man having coffee and bagels with a bag lady. My friends tell me the guy is also a derelict, but sometimes he dresses up and cleans up, but always goes back to the gutter.

There is a frustration to the city: it's very crowded and this means one just has to accept a number of things. One has to accept the long lines everywhere, the crowded subways, the rot and decay. There's a fatalism here; people just die all the time for walking down the street and having a building fall down on them (or part of it anyway).

Living so closely with imminent non-discriminating death doesn't seem to make people value life more; I think people take life pretty much unseriously a lot of times, but this means people are peculiarly more tolerant.

Every once in a while someone just blows up — if a subway train is pulled out of service in the middle of its run often an older woman (usually) just decides she's upset that she has to get off the train and wait — it's a feeling of helplessness: they'll start to yell at anyone within earshot, not as though the victim of their yells could make things better, but that becomes irrelevant. It's more a way of letting off steam to be able to cope with the frustration of living here. The bureaucratism of city services is incredible here; but you just have to put up and shut up.

(The photo is not mine: it's a still from the movie "Style Wars," about NYC graffiti; it came out in 1982 so it seemed to fit.)

Anti-war Anthems: Ursula Rucker

A few weeks ago when jazz poet/prophet Gil Scott-Heron passed, I asked "who would tell the truth" in his absence. I realized shortly after that I had a prime candidate in mind in Ursula Rucker, a Philadelphia-based poet and singer. She's recorded three conventional albums, released two digital-only albums, and has worked as a featured guest with a host of important artists on the cutting edge of socially/spiritually/politically conscious music.

The video above is "Awakening," from the 2007 album Play with the Changes by the genius British duo 4hero. The chill-out groove is pure 4hero but the lyrical message is all Ursula Rucker: a sort of dialogue between mother and daughter about carrying the torch to the next generation.

"Sister girl wanna tell you about this thing
that's been weighing heavy on my heart
haunts both my dreams and my first breath,
hmmm where to start well
Revolution it seems has become an antique when
in my youth revolution was what we rose with the sun to seek
we were fierce

Now, our glory days are nothing but a page,
in an edge worn book
an afro a raised fist,
a black beret, black pride
set aside to mere history,
it saddens me,
hmm it saddens me,
but will these words fall on deaf ears cos my tears won't
fill up the riverbed of resistance and change,
it's gone dry
and gone and unkown are the names which gave that river its
tranquility, its beautiful force and godspeed
rise up out of the complacency induced sleep
we need, an Awakening.

Bring the noise daughter
now is the time for you and your generation to put this universal
chaos in order...

But Mama, the resistance seemed so futile,
when all the while, government and media massacre my dreams,
We, my brothers and sisters and me,
are at the mercy of Dotcoms,
Bombs that kill at least 30 daily
the constant downward spiral of music and humanity,
a general lack of concern, knowledge and history,
our potential leaders and spokespeople are chasing
materialistic ideals
seems our fates have been sealed with a Bling Bling kiss...

Mama, i still question the meanings of freedom and peace
but i will not retreat, i will instead meet
this challenge head on and heart strong.
Sing my protest songs..."

Rucker's poetry is often political like this, delivered in a beautifully eloquent shifting hybrid of poetry slam, singing, rap and confession: it's hip-hop at its most creative and conscious. I saw her perform once in New York City backed by only a guitarist with a sequencer: I was spellbound. She's angry sometimes, righteously indignant; she really knows how to preach. But if she can channel an angry Mother Earth as she does in 4hero's "Loveless" (another great video on youtube), she can also be vulnerable and even maternal.


"Release" from Rucker's 2003 album Silver or Lead, featuring music by NY Latin/groove DJ Little Louie Vega, is her 9/11 song:

"And blue that day
When, everything changed
What changed?
Who really changed?...

When towers be falling
And Babylon be calling your name, my name
How will we answer?
How will we answer?

With dread?
With faith?
With misplaced power or power of prayer?
With bigotry?
With humanity?
With love?
With love
Release

Release your heart"

She reverently follows the footsteps of important, and too often forgotten, female voices like Sonia Sanchez and Jayne Cortez who married poetry, music, feminist consciousness, and political commitment. Importantly she brings a youthful accessibility and hipness like Dana Bryant and Jill Scott, though I find her focus sharper and her edge harder. Aside from 4hero and Louie Vega, she's worked with Jazzanova, the Roots, King Britt, and even slick UK acid jazz group Incognito. Her recitations marry well with the European techno-groove sensibility that harvests American jazz-funk of the 1970s for inspiration, which also means she's perfect for my own taste in music.

While not all of her work is political, when she makes a statement I can't think of anyone else who presents the politics of social justice and liberation in such a profoundly spiritual way. From her perspective these things are not separate: the way human beings treat each other is called to a higher level of respect and consciousness. While these songs are not single-issue anti-war tunes, her observation of the blights on our world and society is unsparing and far-reaching.


This song is less overtly political, but a live version of the highlight title track from her most recent album "She Said," this one borders rock and roll. It's impossible to forget that hers is a woman's perspective, where love and hope share space with hope, bitterness and frustration. She specializes in, well, the truth.

As she sings on her recent album: "Wake the fuck up, cause t'ings have run amock!"

Kasama: Coming to Terms with a Legacy of Homophobia

When I was active in the organized left many years ago, the world stage was still marked by the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and depending on how you counted, by a strange three-way flux between the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and the People's Republic of China. Although its days were waning, the organized left counted numerous factions of every conceivable ideological variant in relationship to this grand world struggle, from loyal followers of a political line straight out of Moscow or Beijing (or Tirana) to heretical factions breaking from some line of orthodoxy and allegiance at a dozen spots along some timeline from the very beginning of the twentieth-century. With the seeming implosion of what claimed to be Marxism some twenty years ago many of these organizations disintegrated or faded away. Frankly, many of them deserved to fall into ignominy. Even though many of these organizations challenged the notion that the Soviet empire had anything to do with the working-class triumph envisioned by Marx, no stripe of socialist or communist organization seemed to weather that season untouched.

Now in a new millennium, in a world radically changed and realigned, it seems, at least to my eye, that leftists are trying to find their footing again. While my personal opinion of Marxism and Leninism remains unsettled, it's obvious to me that there is a crisis of leadership around the world. Whether it's militant workers action against an avowedly socialist government in Greece, or the mass protests in the Middle East, or even here at home where outside of the amazing Wisconsin protests most of the people taking their issues to the street are the right-wing teabagger mob, it's obvious that the people in power are staying in power because there is no clear ideology of opposition. I've been following a number of left-wing websites which strike me as attempting to re-grow a meaningful left. The most exciting part of this to me is that following the obvious failure or defeat of the left in the last century, the people engaged in this attempt are going over the dogma of the past and trying to find what to hang on to and what to discard.

The Kasama Project is an organization and website based in Chicago that has been running some really fascinating discussions on the legacy of the last-century's left movement (as well as information and discussion on today's struggles). Organized primarily around people with a history in Maoism, including former cadre of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Kasama's discussions are particularly thoughtful and challenging. While I often find much to disagree with, I give them full credit for daring to look backwards as well as forward.

I wanted to call attention to a discussion they've been having on the legacy of homophobia on the left, a subject dear to my own heart. In fact Kasama picked up my own story that I wrote here last year as part of their discussion. Their discussion has been ongoing and quite thorough and open. It's worth reading the main entries as well as the comment threads. Most of the people telling their stories went through the Maoist movement, so it's interesting to me, as a former Trotskyist, to compare notes and experiences.

Start with "My Life in a Red Closet," the story of Libri, a former RCP member. After reprinting my story, there's "Working with the RCP, Opposing the Homophobia," by another former RCP member. Then there's "Rejected by Comrades: My Love Was Just Love," by Andrew Copper who was refused membership in that party despite being a hard-working activist. Another recollection is "Suzie's Story: Queer, Isolated, Invisible." Today Kasama has unearthed an analytical document from the 1970s by a group of Maoist Lesbians: "1975 - Early Maoist Critique of Ant-gay Bigotry Among Maoists."

This discussion is amazing to me. I can't imagine the left as I knew it being so daring or honest with itself: and it's done with the intention of being constructive and healing. It's also incredibly encouraging to me that if anyone in this discussion has defended the old anti-gay ways of the left, I've missed it. Perhaps one day a left will rise out of the ashes that can move beyond the defeats and mistakes and betrayals that too often stained its path. What Kasama is doing gives me hope.

Update: Kasama excerpted this piece (thanks, Mike!), and notes that I've slightly misidentified the testimonies as being those of former RCP members when they're actually the testimonies of peripheral supporters or members of the RCP's youth group. So noted!)

Politicians Making Us Sweat

Today was a very hot day in New York City, and I had the day off from work; much needed emotionally though it was a non-paid furlough day: those modern-economy treats dispensed to freelancers during slow hot summers and slow holiday periods. Which is more than frustrating. I certainly never thought in my younger days that paid time off would be as obsolete as subway tokens.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to listen to all the liars lying on the teevee or radio on such an insufferably hot and humid day about this manufactured economic crisis. I'm not that good a psychic: how come nobody else sees that every word out of John Boehner's quivering tear-streaked mouth is a lie? And what is with Obama? His hair sure is gray. I guess all that stuff about defending certain basic principles was filed away in the same drawer with his opposition to wars.

I think what ultimately frustrates me is that it's so clearly a minority of people going through these horrible motions. Even if you buy the questionably democratic logic of the American electoral system, the Republican landslide of 2010 doesn't actually mean that a majority of Americans actually support their absurd positions. Why are they allowed to dictate the narrative on what's wrong with the economy and how to solve it?

If you page through the years of this blog, you'll see some gushingly enthusiastic posts for Obama. To my credit, always with a warning grain of salt, but to my embarrassment, I should have known better than what proved to be all my naive optimism about the capacity of the political system to right its wrongs. At the same time, I guess I'm personally encouraged that as much as what's going on is hard to watch, somewhat demoralizing and actually quite worrisome, I think my re-radicalization is absolutely, even if paradoxically, the fruit of the Obama era.

This last spring saw a wave of revolution sweep a huge swath through the Middle East; most of those revolutions remain unresolved and conflicted by internal and international contradictions. But it seems unlikely that eventually the momentum of resistance will not return to these shores, and maybe all of us who are reduced to the role of impotent spectators watching our future being sold to corporate America and its patrons will remember all the things that a few very smart people once knew. And next time, maybe we'll win.

(Vintage 1960s/70s Black Panther Party poster from the great Emory Douglas, the brilliant house graphic artist of the BPP.)

Repression: It's Not Just for Third-World Dictatorships Anymore

Citizens marked for assassination without trial. Torture. Extended detention without charges or trial. Police raids on the non-violent political opposition. Mass arrests. Government spying. Welcome to....America in the 21st century. Thank you, George Bush and Barack Obama.

Free Bradley Manning!
Check out this article on Al Jazeera English: "Bradley Manning, American Hero: Four reasons why Pfc Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not a prison cell." (Thanks Jon for the tip). Bradley Manning is a gay soldier being held naked in solitary confinement for his alleged role in passing along classified military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. This winter as the harsh, torturous and degrading conditions of Manning's confinement became known, Obama said at a press conference, "“I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” Obama said, suggesting some of those procedures were to protect Manning’s safety. “They have assured me that they are.” Hah. The Obama administration is doubling down on all of the Bush administration's efforts to hide its activities behind legal smokescreens and to ease its surveillance of private citizens.

Some will say, "Manning broke the law." Wait, Bradley Manning broke the law exposing the lies and hypocrisies and immorality of US actions in Iraq in Afghanistan? Or was it George Bush and his cronies who broke the law? Why are those war criminals free while a conscientious citizen like Manning rots in a tiny cell? Remember how crucial the Pentagon Papers were to ending the horrible chapter of American aggression in Vietnam? Which has history judged worse — murdering millions of Vietnamese civilians or publishing some secret incriminating documents? Bradley Manning is on the right side of history, and indeed, is a real hero. Visit the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Justice for Anwar al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen, born in New Mexico and now living as an expatriate in Yemen. He has some truly heinous political and religious beliefs. Allegedly a propagandist for Al-Qaeda, he's implicated in a number of terrorist attacks or attempted attacks. But as an American citizen, he is entitled the rights of American citizens: if he is guilty of a crime, let him be charged, arrested and tried for those crimes. Yet last spring President Obama authorized the "targeted killing" of al-Awlaki. No trial. No charges. No rights. None. Al-Awlaki seems a likely candidate for a guilty verdict and harsh punishment should American law actually be applied to his case; indeed to my knowledge al-Awlaki hasn't protested that he is being accused inaccurately. But assassination based on empirical evidence is not the way the rule of law is supposed to work. What about the next person the government decides might be subject to "targeted killing'? What is the threshold of empirical evidence? Since when is "kill them all, let God sort it out" constitutional process? If al-Awlaki is a criminal, let justice be served, not more murder.

Free the Cuban Five!
Fighting terrorism is something the U.S. government supports, right? Wrong! Gerardo Hernández, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando González are five Cuban citizens arrested in Florida in 1998 and imprisoned as spies. But what were the Cuban Five spying on? Sensitive U.S. military operations? No...they had gone undercover hoping to disrupt actual terrorist actions being planned by right-wing Cuban exiles being harbored in the United States. These terrorists had already killed numerous innocent civilians, as in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in the Caribbean. But because the terrorists are anti-communists and have close ties to the American CIA, they have been protected again and again by American authorities. The Cuban Five were treated to harsh conditions, excessive secrecy, and ultimately severe sentences after a questionable trial. Although an international campaign has been mounted to free the Five, President Obama's solicitor general Elena Kagan (now on the Supreme Court itself) actively petitioned the Supreme Court to deny any legal review of the case, and the court acceded to that request. Visit the National Comittee to Free the Cuban Five.

Hands off Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists!
Last fall the FBI conducted raids on private homes and offices in the Midwest belonging to anti-war and left-wing political activists. Targeted in the raids and proceeding Grand Jury witch-hunt was the Freedom Road Socialist Organization as well as Arab-American Palestine Solidarity activists. The activists are accused of "material support for terrorism," seemingly because the activists expressed political support for international opposition groups labelled "terrorist organizations" by American authorities. Apparently the government can label a foreign liberation movement a "terrorist organization" and then your right to express your free speech about supporting that movement is now forfeit. These raids and the implied government subversion and infiltration of anti-war and international solidarity movements are ominous. So much for "community organizing."

No One Is Illegal!
According to the LA Times, "Deportations under Obama have reached new heights for two years running, statistics show, but Republicans said they would use their new majority in the House to press for more aggressive enforcement without any path to legal status." Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are not the cause of the economic crisis, but they are increasingly scapegoats for it. Draconian and ultimately racist laws are sweeping largely Republican-run states in the South and Southwest. Blaming "foreigners" for America's problem is a time-honored tradition.

I'm just going to say it: people should be able to live where they want to live. The majority of immigrants without legal papers in the U.S. are hard-working people just trying to live their lives. Sure there are criminals and welfare cheats among them. Just as there are rich people who try to get out of paying their taxes. There are legal problems that can be addressed, but let's face it: this country was founded largely by undocumented immigrants, and at least today's immigrants aren't going around killing Indians. "Comprehensive immigration reform" is a virtually meaningless term used by Republicans to mean keeping brown people out, and by Democrats to mean watch what they say not what they do. My neighborhood is made richer by its interwoven fabric of immigrants, and my country is too. Make the laws reflect reality.

Defund the Machineries of Repression
I don't yet have a smartphone, though I think they're sorta cool, for a telephone. I'm not a big phone gabber. And I like facebook. It's fun to keep up with friends and there's something pleasantly voyeuristic about following people's streams, even those I barely know in real life. And as is evidently clear from my writing here, I'm against people being shipped off to other countries to fight wars. Wait...non-sequitur? Two words: predator drones. Modern technology rises to meet today's challenges.

At the risk of sounding a little paranoid, is nobody else concerned about the repressive potential of today's high technology? Oh peaceful activist today, tomorrow's government might consider you a dangerous terrorist. That sleek iPhone in your pocket with its built-in GPS and your four-square log-in, hello, there's an anti-personnel drone locked right in on you right now. And the person pressing the button on you is three states away. Duck! Those contingencies are among what the defense budget, i.e., your taxes, is providing with all that cash.

And to my mind that little paranoid nightmare scenario brings up the root issue: it's not just laws, which might be just or unjust. After all, in some ways laws are just rationalizations and excuses, easily manipulated, to be rewritten or reinterpreted as needed. To return to my favorite subject, as long as "they" are controlling the laws, and the power, "we" are pretty much at "their" mercy. Simple, eh?

Timely Update: No sooner had I written the above than I read this paragraph in an article about the Israeli disruption of the "Welcome To Palestine" Flytilla campaign this week: "Aided by Facebook, Israel on Friday prevented scores of pro-Palestinian activists from boarding Tel Aviv-bound flights in Europe, questioned dozens more upon arrival at its main airport and denied entry to 69, disrupting their attempts to reach the West Bank on a solidarity mission with the Palestinians. Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites, compiled a blacklist of more than 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel. On Friday, 310 of the activists who managed to land in Tel Aviv were detained for questioning...."

Anti-War Anthems: "Moments of a Soft Persuasion"

Okay, I'm projecting here, a little: the lyrics of this song don't actually mention war, in Vietnam or elsewhere. But the Peter Paul & Mary album this song is taken from was released the same week that two of the group's members were among those beaten and gassed by police in the suppression of anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. This song, a product of its era, is a spiritual affirmation profoundly and simply challenging the mindset that allows war to happen.

"Moments of the soft persuasion
Chiming bells, the first occasion
Tell the rest a smile awaken
Till the last reminder shaken
From whatever rue'd and sorrow;
Now, the time is now — tomorrow.

In the instant of remaking
Just the giving of the taking
In the instant of the living
Just the taking of the giving

Nothing more than earth and water
Smiles of Spring from barren daughter
Who at last in perfect motion
Turning 'round embrace the ocean
Gracious calf of mankind suffering;
Sacrifice of old is ending.

In the instant of remaking
Just the giving of the taking
In the instant of the living
Just the taking of the giving

Moments of the soft persuasion
Chiming bells, the first occasion
Tell the rest a smile awaken
Till the last reminder shaken
From whatever rue'd and sorrow;
Now, the time is now — tomorrow."
— Lyrics by Peter Yarrow

By my reading this song is a fairly profound challenge to revisit an often-ignored yet simple tenet of the Christian Bible: that the message of Jesus and his ultimate sacrifice in the New Testament is a repudiation of the religion of the Old Testament. By his self-sacrifice, Jesus says that the sacrifice and blood-letting and brutality that God seems to demand according to the Bible's early books is no longer necessary: a new age of peace and love brings mankind to a new relationship with the world and with God.

Cynics might well argue that Jesus made his call for such a religion of love in a barbaric world on the cusp of two thousand years more of barbarism and violence, and, to be honest, those cynics aren't wrong. Not being a Christian, I'm not going to undertake a defense of how the Christian church or the faith's believers reconcile what looks to me like a call for a revolution in human consciousness with what has actually been the history of that church or indeed the Christian world. It's hard to find "soft persuasion" or "the taking of the giving" in the Spanish inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the genocide against Native Americans, the Pope's failure to protect Italian Jews in the Second World War, or the hateful rantings of today's American fundamentalist Christians, to touch the tip of an iceberg. As I say I'm no Christian theologian.

But nevertheless, a little spiritual optimism goes a long way. The promise of a new age is foundational to all sorts of religious — and political — movements. The late Mary Travers opened up the liner notes to "Moments of a Soft Persuasion"'s album, Late Again, with a poem invoking the ever-ignored Cassandra: "Cassandra late,/The Prophets' meager wares/Are strewn about a weary world/A time when death requires sainthood undeserved./We are a world of mortal men/And man's great greatness is his hope."

And so this song is a softly persuasive polemic calling for, well, a soft persuasion over the clash of arms or the flash of a knife.

Anyway, I love this song.

A Very Simple Explanation

Anyone, Democrat or Republican, who says recipients of government services like Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security should bear a share of "deficit relief" is saying that regular working people and poor people should be, in effect, paying higher taxes. "Giving ground" to this argument is an utter obscenity.

Listen to their words carefully: when politicians say no tax increases, what they mean is no tax increases for rich people or corporations. It's not complicated or hard to understand. It doesn't require a doctorate in economics. There's plenty of money around. They just don't want US to share it.

And Now for a LIttle Natural Beauty

I spent the weekend up in the Catskills with my boyfriend at a beautiful century-old farmhouse owned by some friends of ours. The weather was extraordinary: bright and sunny alternating with thunderous downpours. The Catskills are low mountains but mountains nevertheless, and the weather is so much more dramatic than down here in the city.


The transitions from rain to dry made for some spectacular skies, hence these photos. Not trying to say anything particularly profound here, except how wonderful it is to get out of the city now and again to see what the world actually looks, feels, and smells like.


These pictures were taken in New Kingston and in Bovina, two very small towns about an hour further out from Woodstock.


This last one is not upside down, that's a reflection in a frog-filled pond. It was the Fourth of July weekend, but of course, these sights are a bit more than a couple hundred years old. I'm back in the city tonight, listening to fire-crackers and helicopters in the warm summer night.

(Photographs by me; click on them to see them larger.)

Repost: Also Born on the Fouth of July - A License to Kill

I'm away for the weekend so here's a repost of last year's Independence Day essay. 234, 235, who's counting?

Oh those immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence, every school child learns them by heart: "He [The King of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Yes that's from that long part at the end. The part you never really read, the long list of grievances against King George.

While it's true that the Declaration of Independence contains some inspiring and fiery anti-authoritarian language and some really finely wrought righteous indignation, it's pretty clear that this document's appellation of "merciless Indian Savages" on the residents just across the potential new nation's frontier is the beginning rationalization to treat said "merciless savages" savagely without mercy.

It's been said that the three main colonizers of the Americas all had different attitudes toward the native population: The Spanish wanted to enslave them and convert them to Catholicism, the French wanted to trade with them, and the English wanted to pretend that they weren't there, or if need be push them out of the way. These are oversimplified of course. But one can see in the history of the 18th-century a hardening of colonial attitudes toward Native Americans, especially in the Northeast. The defeat of the French and their Indian allies in the American theater of the Seven Years War (the "French and Indian War") in the 1760s by the English seems to have pushed settler America to greater hostility toward the Indian nations; nations that were it should be said, unifying and modernizing living side by side with the English. Disastrously, the Indian nations wound up generally allied to the English in the American Revolution, and huge numbers emigrated to English-held Canada upon Washington's victory.

I'm not sure of the specific historical reference point that this portion of the Declaration of Independence is referring to, but it's clear that the nascent Americans saw English attempts to build alliances with Native nations as a threat to settler expansion.



Joseph Brant, whose Mohawk name was Thayandanagea, and who looked nothing like this "Indian chewing gum" trading card from the 1930s, was a prosperous landowner in New York State who as the military leader of the Iroquois League allied with the English against the new Americans. ('Brant dressed in "the English mode" wearing "a suit of blue broad cloth.' points out Wikipedia.) While obviously his military alliance against the Americans post-dates the declaration of independence, it's clear that everybody in 1776 knew there was a collision coming between the western frontier of the colonies and the Indian nations abutted against it. While some of the Indian nations remained technologically behind the settlers, in many places north and south, nations like the Cherokee and Iroquois were growing into, pardon the phrase, "civilized" nations that were in direct competition with white settlers for land and resources. While there were nomadic hunter-gatherer Indian societies, along the frontier of the time this was really not the case. Remember that the wild west of the time was western New York State and Ohio.

The English and the French and the Indian nations tried numerous different strategies of alliance and conflict to subvert the others and gain or defend territorial advantage. Clearly the Americans wanted none of that: they wanted one thing, sovereignty. And so in its first, most important document, the Declaration of Independence, signed so long ago on the 4th of July 1776, the United States of America built right in the dehumanization of native peoples, and the implied right to do something about the threat posed by these "merciless savages." Because everybody also knows that when the colonists labelled untold thousands of people "merciless savages" who don't respect human life, they were pretty much preparing themselves for the coming genocide.

Between the victory of the Americans in 1783 and period after the end of the war of 1812, the borders of white settlement were pushed from the East coast states clear to the Mississippi, with the Indian nations in between defeated. The Americans had made good on their founding words.

History is, well, history. It can't be changed (unless you're the Texas schoolboard), and I don't actually believe that we as modern people are responsible for the mistakes and betrayals of our ancestors. July 4, 1776 brought a lot of good into the world also: anti-colonialism and radical republicanism were historically progressive achievements. But I think confronting our national mythology is a good thing, because if we as American individuals living today are hopefully not committing genocide against Native Americans, the surviving institutions we hold dear--and sometimes abhor--are all built on questionable foundations that do color modern American policy and judgment. It should also be pointed out that the "we" of the Declaration didn't even include the hundreds of thousands of African-ancestored Americans who were, at the time, living out back in slave quarters and not even considered in polite discussions of citizens and their inalienable rights.

So I think it's good to ponder exactly who were the "merciless savages" back in 1776 and the years that followed. Enjoy the fireworks, and the grilled processed tubes of mystery meat, I know I will. But say a prayer that one day those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness endowed by our Creator will apply equally to all the women and men clinging to this pretty boulder spinning through space.

Impunity x 3: Tales of Injustice

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Random Aftermath

Late spring thunderstorm, Spring 2011, from my office building, New York City.


Gay Pride sidewalk, June 2011, New York City.

Music break: I wish I was a hippie in Hawaii in 1972

This lovely song, "El Rey Pescador," is from the legendary private press album "These Trails," recorded by a bunch of hippies in Hawaii in the very early 1970s. Although the vocalist on this track is the Uruguayan singer Carlos Pardeiro, the album as a whole is the work of a Hawaiian guy and his girlfriend from California, plus a couple friends, sweetened in a studio by an engineer playing the amazing Arp analog synthesizer; the rest of it is not in Spanish.

I first heard this record a few years ago on a music blog, without knowing anything about it. I was excited to find out it's just made it to CD on a small Chicago-based label, Drag City. It features some beautiful singing, lots of acoustic guitar, dulcimer — standard hippy folk psychedelia fare — and the CD reissue sounds terrific. The CD also includes the full story of the musicians behind the record and how its release in 1973 was sort of an afterthought to its creation when the moment it documented had already passed. I heartily recommend the whole thing.

OK, back to reality now...

Be Careful Who You Get In Bed With, Indeed

This video, circulating around the internet the past week, shows an American gay activist named "Marc Pax" recounting how, on behalf of his "LGBT group," he offered to build support for the upcoming Peace Flotilla to Gaza and was rebuffed. He then claims he discovered the Peace Flotilla was connected to the "anti-gay" Palestinian organization Hamas. Well so he claimed.

It turns out that "Marc Pax" is an Israeli actor named Omer Gershon and that this "personal" video is the work of the Israeli government, heavily promoted by the Israeli government's propaganda press office. Read anti-Zionist activist Max Blumenthal's blog and the Electronic Intifada blog for all the lurid details. Even the staunchly pro-Israel New York Times now reports that this video is a "hoax."

This is a prime example of Israeli government "pinkwashing," its vile attempt to split the pro-Palestinian movement by suggesting that only Israel is the true friend of gays in the Middle East. This video is prime evidence that Pinkwashing propaganda is another example of the big lie. In fact, numerous publically gay figures are not only associated with the anti-Israeli Apartheid movement, they are involved with the upcoming peace flotilla, including John Greyson, who created the "Gaza Island" video posted here a few days ago, and renowned writer Alice Walker.

Israel's attempt to present any support to the Palestinian people of Gaza as political support to the Hamas government and therefore aid to terrorists is beneath contempt. That is its rationale for killing Palestinians with impunity, notably the same rationale used by repressive regimes worldwide. Call your enemies "terrorists" and people will look away as you butcher women and children. Every tyrant knows this and the fake-democracy Israel has learned that lesson well.

The Israeli government is pulling out all the stops to try to sabotage the Peace Flotilla. Having already announced it will repeat its acts of piracy in international waters, Israel and its hasbara propagandists as well as outright saboteurs are waging a massive campaign of disruption.

Mondoweiss and Max Blumenthal report on how the virulently anti-gay American pastor John Hagee is a bankroller of the so-called Israel Law Center, which just tried to sabotage the Flotilla by pressuring the crisis-ridden Greek government to declare the American flotilla ship, docked at a Greek port, "unseaworthy." So much for Israel's pro-gay credentials. It thrives on taking money from anti-gay American fundamentalist Christians eager for the end times which they pray Israel will hasten. Mondoweiss also reported that another Flotilla vessel docked in Greece has been physically sabotaged.

The Israeli government has been trying to warn journalists off the Flotilla as well: "I think we're seeing an absolute last ditch and paniced effort by the Israeli government to control the narrative of these flotilla ships. It's well known that activists on board last years flotilla recorded all events that took place and Israel has confiscated and destroyed most of the footage and so I think the Israeli government specifically addressing journalists is sending a message to the international community that Israel is going to, at all costs, control the narrative and control the story of these flotilla ships. Now the fact journalists have not wavered I think is a good sign for the international media and press freedom,"according to leftwing Israeli-American journalist Joseph Dana working for The Nation.

Don't be fooled: if you climb into bed with Israel and its lies you're climbing into bed with piracy and murder.

NY State Victory: Divorce Equality!

In a brilliant display of political maneuvering, and a stunning defeat for anti-gay bigots, New York's governor Cuomo succeeded last night in getting a marriage equality passed in the state's Republican-controlled State Senate. The previous governor had been unable to get a similar bill through two years ago when the State Senate was controlled by Democrats; this year's effort involved a massive behind the scenes push from marriage equality advocates, and the addition of somewhat redundant language that absolutely positively guaranteed religious institutions could hang on to bigoted practices if they so desired. Cuomo signed the bill into law almost immediately upon its passage.

Despite the massive lobbying efforts of hateful organizations like the National Organization for [sic] Marriage and New York's wretched Conservative Party, and despite rallies organized by bigoted religious fundamentalists (including one led by the lone Democratic Senate opponent Ruben Diaz, who is also a Pentacostal preacher), the bill passed with a several-vote majority: four brave Republicans bucked their party line and crossed over to support it. The NOMbies and their ilk tried again to inflict their backward beliefs and questionably selective interpretation of religion on our secular society and failed. Thank God decent people with a greater respect for the law and a more loving spiritual/religious philosophy prevailed.

And all of this on the Friday of Gay Pride Week, two days before one of the world's largest lesbian and gay pride parades takes to the streets of Manhattan. It's certainly something to celebrate, even if it's a local victory. This makes only six states where marriage of same-sex partners is recognized, and federal laws like DOMA and numerous state constitutional bans on marriage equality make anti-gay statutes still the law of the land as a whole.

According to friends, the streets of the Village were full of celebration last night, even though the uber-gentrified neighborhood is the shadow of the gayborhood it once was: only investment bankers and celebrities can afford to live there these days. I'm looking forward to more street partying tonight, and to a triumphant pride parade tomorrow. But as real and joyful as this victory is, I feel called to qualify the celebratory tone.

While as long as the marriages of straight people are recognized and legally advantageous, it's only just that the marriages of gay people be treated equally under the law. But what about that institution of marriage? Those of us of a certain age can remember a time when marriage was rightfully derided as a outdated relic of the past. Its origins as a tradition are not actually in the glorification of love or the holy sanctification of family relationships, but in a bourgeois property relationship where women were turned into the property of men.

And for many of us, a fairytale picture of marriage as the pinnacle of human fulfillment does not jibe with reality. My parents divorced after fifteen or so years of marriage before I was ten. My mother's second marriage lasted a little over a year; and my father once described his second marriage as an "on-again off-again" thing. My father's father divorced my father's wife when he (inaccurately) questioned my father's paternity. My mother and my grandmother were both forced to retool their lives completely upon finding themselves single. While my mom worked when she was married, she had to find a new career that would support the two of us independently. My grandmother was forced to find work in the mid-1930s, no easy feat. And yet despite hardship and disappointment, I don't think either my mother or grandmother would have described their lives as lesser for having spent the greater parts of their lives unmarried.

Closer to home and modern times, I love my boyfriend very much and feel very lucky to be with him for the six or so years we've been together, but our relationship is what we make of it: I'm not sure how recognition by the state would change its trajectory or legitimize our intimacy.

It's not that I'm heartless: I've read those stories of many-decades-long gay partners finally being able to marry with a tear in my eye. During the brief period when marriage equality was the law in California, lesbian activist pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were able to marry in 2008 after being a couple for fifty-six years, a few months before Del Martin passed on at the age of 87. And yet I wonder what are the ramifications of the gay movement, which once described itself as the "gay liberation movement," now aiming at the much more earthbound target of equality through marriage rights.

As I recently wrote, I grew up knowing I was gay. I never fantasized about getting married. Since I was never interested in meeting "the right girl," that ritual held no power for me. While the times I have been single I usually longed for a steady relationship; but what I longed for was companionship and intimacy and deep friendship, not a ceremony of bells and lace, and not a piece of paper from the government. How will little gay boys in the future grow up? Will they feel unfulfilled if they're not married in white by their early twenties? And what about our new gay divorcees? Will gay people get married too often? Everybody thinks straight people who get married and divorced too often are losers. How will that change gay male culture, where promiscuity and serial monogamy seem more accepted as alternatives to life-long commitment?

There's a collective of queer activists called "Against Equality." While I don't endorse their views as a whole, I think they ask provocative, important questions. Here's an excerpt from their statement on marriage:

"When it comes to gay marriage, the times, they are a-confusing. For instance, we recently overhead some people extolling the virtues of marriage, and how it allowed them to finally join in family gatherings as respectable married people, instead of skulking in as shamefully unmarried partners. They reminisced about the joys of being able to walk up to coworkers and introduce their husbands, the sparkle of their wedding rings legitimizing their socially sanctioned and forever-to-be unions....

Gay marriage apes hetero privilege and allows everyone to forget that marriage ought not to be the guarantor of rights like health care. In their constant invoking of the “right” to gay marriage, mainstream gays and lesbians express a confused tangle of wishes and desires. They claim to contest the Right’s conservative ideology yet insist that they are more moral and hence more deserving than sluts like us. They claim that they simply want the famous 1000+ benefits but all of these, like the right to claim protection in cases of domestic violence, can be made available to non-marital relationships.

We wish that the GM crowd would simply cop to it: Their vision of marriage is the same as that of the Right, and far from creating FULL EQUALITY NOW! as so many insist (in all caps and exclamation marks, no less) gay marriage increases economic inequality by perpetuating a system which deems married beings more worthy of the basics like health care and economic rights."

It's food for thought. Marriage equality is an important social victory, but when it turns to divorce equality, perhaps we should remember that civil rights and the liberation and fulfillment of human spirit are not equivalent. What is that prize we're keeping our eyes on, anyway?

(That art above is a quick ten-minute Photoshop cut and paste job by me, courtesy of Google images and modern technology. That's Barbie's Change-of-Heart Ken and Marx's Sam Cobra tying the rainbow ribbon!)

Hillary Clinton Endorses Israeli Piracy & Claims to Palestinian Waters

Hillary Clinton, Obama's Secretary of State, has just issued a statement on the upcoming blockade-running peace flotilla to Gaza: "We do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza...Just this week, the Israeli government approved a significant commitment to housing in Gaza. There will be construction materials entering Gaza. And we think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves."

That last sentence is the clincher: the flotilla has no intention of going near Israeli waters. It intends to go into Palestinian waters off Gaza. And besides that, the last flotilla, on which Israeli commandos assassinated eight peace activists including one American citizen (with total impunity), was in international waters when it was attacked. The flotilla is an example of nonviolent activism, which the American government claims to endorse, supporting international law and the rights of the Palestinian people, which the American government also claims to endorse, and now the American government, in advance, takes the side of pirates and murderers.

Back in 2009, Clinton claimed "the new U.S. administration will vigorously pursue the creation of a Palestinian state, stressing that movement toward Palestinian independence seems 'inescapable.'" Apparently her definition of a Palestinian State means something different than an independent nation with control of its own borders and neighboring waters, in other words, an Apartheid-style Bantustan.



(News first noted on Mondoweiss.)

Pinkwashing, a Definition

Timely for gay pride, from "The Queer Shadow Gallery Collective" and endorsed by a number of Arab queer organizations and individuals, June 2011:

Pinkwashing aims to sell Israeli racism, colonialism and apartheid as democratic and gay-friendly. This happens through bifurcation: On one hand, Israel, and especially Tel Aviv, are represented as cosmopolitan and LGBT, queer and trans-friendly places. At the same time, war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories and racist discrimination against Palestinians living in Israel are being euphemized and “pinkwashed”.

The use of LGBT rights in particular is not a coincidence: separating “gayness” from other forms of oppression and hiding behind claims of being apolitical serves this function perfectly. Ideology almost always calls itself non-ideological. Issues of racism within LGBT organizing have long been a source of tension between activists in the Global North and South, particularly as activism becomes more and more transnational and networks of solidarity are built across borders.

The idea that LGBT rights take precedence over other rights need not be stated outright: by claiming that LGBT rights and activism are apolitical, and by refusing to address these issues head on and recognizing that they are interconnected, that principle is made apparent.

(Photo from Queers for Palestine)

Gay Pride Week 2011: Flashback to 1989 - What a Riot!

This is a flyer from back in 1989, issued by the Radical Faeries in New York City on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The Stonewall Riots — some call it the Stonewall Rebellion — was the mythic beginning of the modern gay liberation movement when New York City police on a routine bar raid were met with resistance. You can click on the picture to see this flyer in its glory, but here's the first paragraph:

"Twenty years ago, on the night of Judy Garland's funeral, New York City cops went about their usual routine of harassing gay-bar patrons. But on that extraordinary night, an unorganized rabble of fed-up drag queens, dykes, radical street queers, and their friends at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village began to harass the cops back. They went on a rampaging riot giving birth to a new spirit and consciousness."

The Radical Faeries are free-spirited gay hippies who exist in a sort of parallel universe to mainstream gay society. They play with gender, politics and spirituality (and frankly, hygiene) in very creative ways: they're sort of modern day holy people, even twenty years after this flyer. This celebration planned a dramatic reenactment of the riot itself, which my memory fails to clearly remind me if I attended. I'm pretty sure in 1989 the Stonewall Inn, while today again a gay bar, was a take-out bagel restaurant.

I think it's important, even as the gay community changes and its priorities morph, to remember that back in 1969 it was not the accommodationists and assimiliationists of the gay world who took us on a journey to our civil rights, but the gay salt of the earth. If history books are full of famous people and "great men" leading the world to new places, reality reminds us it's the common people who really get it done.

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.

Cancel Your Concerts! Shades of "Ain't Gonna Play Sun City"

Gaza Island from Albino Squirrel Channel on Vimeo.

Back in the era of apartheid South Africa, Sun City was a internationally-renowned concert venue in the white-minority-ruled country. It was set up in one of the hopelessly corrupt fake-independent Bantustans to lure international tourists. Eventually, boycotting the hypnotic lure of Sun City was a badge of honor for socially conscious musicians. Refusing offers to play for the profit of racists became an important part of the movement to isolate the apartheid regime economically and culturally. The video above is an amazing (and fun!) part of the campaign to extend that movement to the BDS (Boycott-Divestments-Sanctions) campaign against the Israeli apartheid state.

The video calls on artists like Paul Simon, Moby, Kiri Te Kanawa, Duran Duran and others to cancel their plans to play in venues in Israel. It also builds support for the upcoming Freedom Flotilla 2 to break the Israeli blockade against Gaza: author Alice Walker, who will be on the flotilla, calls the blockade runners "the freedom riders of our time." Intentionally ironically, the American vessel in this flotilla has been christened "The Audacity of Hope." Israel has already announced its plans to commit piracy and terrorism against the flotilla. It warned — hilariously? tragically? — that anyone who defends themselves against boarding by Israeli pirates will be seen as an "attacker" and dealt with accordingly.

The musicians who boycotted Sun City are remembered as heroes who did the right thing. It will be the same with today's musicians who are confronted with a choice: money or morality. This film clip is the work of Canadian filmmaker John Greyson. Major props to him for making such a clever and accessible vehicle communicating the importance of the BDS campaign.

BDS is not just for famous people: it's something everybody can participate in by boycotting consumer products — such as Sabra (& Shattila) hummus — with ties to the Israeli state and forces of repression.