This Is Not Gay Liberation

 

It's gay pride season. This weekend is New York City's big gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pride parade. I've gone almost every year since I've lived in New York City, over thirty years. My first Pride was 1977, before I lived here. In the middle I went to Pride in Chicago. I marched many of those years. For a while I was even a member of the official planning coalition, before it became a nonprofit corporation. Back in those days we called it a gay pride "march."

The gay world has been abuzz with what would seem to be a slew of victories. The repeal of DADT has brought gay pride to, of all places, the Pentagon, where the masters of war plot how to subvert and attack people around the world. Apparently they will be taking a few moments from piloting child-killing drones over Pakistan and Yemen to celebrate "our rich diversity," as the flyer above reads. Later this year there will be a celebration of the end of DADT at the Intrepid, the aircraft-carrier turned museum floating in the Hudson off a New York City pier. That is, if they can swab the decks free of the bloodstains of thousands of Vietnamese killed by the Intrepid's planes in its period of service in the American war of aggression against Vietnam in the 1960s. Look! A rainbow flag!

Corporate sponsors are big news this year: a whole bunch of dubious corporations from Wells Fargo to Target have rolled out those rainbow flags, and the gay community rejoices, apparently turning a blind eye to the actual, you know, business practices and social role of these corporations. Hey, they're pro gay!

And speaking of taking time off from piloting drones, President Obama, er, came out in support of marriage equality. Well, he came out personally as a supporter of gay marriage. The day after the lesbian and gay community of North Carolina was devastated by a brutally anti-gay referendum that the President failed to comment on. Did I mention he thinks marriage equality is a states rights issue so his personal opinion doesn't mean he will intervene in such state struggles in the future? Oh sure I understand the limits of his executive power. He has certainly made clear the limits of his moral authority. It might come as no surprise that the gay community, deeply distrustful of Obama, immediately jumped full force on his reelection bandwagon. Seemingly, the only gay voices continuing criticism of the president are those on the right tainted by the dogwhistle racism of the Republicans.

Oh and a new book came out, which I can't imagine myself reading, by a heterosexual woman I'd not heard of before named Linda Hirshman entitled "Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution." Yes, it seems we have won. The struggle for our civil rights is over! No doubt we are now approaching the same state of grace as all of "post-racial" America.

This needs to be said: This is not gay liberation.

I'm finding myself surprisingly pissed off this year. Lesbian and gay pride always seemed like an opportunity to take our star turn: to celebrate our place in the fabric of the city, in the fabric of society. To walk about openly without worry, armed with great numbers in mutual solidarity. It seemed to me that while it was not always an overtly political event, it certainly had the political subtext of bringing our own struggle for social justice to the same field of battle where all the other struggles are waged.

But this year it feels to me like the gay community is saying, "hey, we got ours!" I think the community understands the threat from the religious right: it's clear a large minority of people in the United States have no love for the gays. But I think the gay establishment, and hence a large segment of the community, has also been utterly seduced by those fluttering rainbow flags. Gay pride has literally been sold to corporations. And those who question the sale, or suggest that a pinkwashing sleight of hand is at work, are being silenced or marginalized.

What a sham it is that corporations are waving rainbow flags at the same time they're busting unions, taking back basic benefits like paid healthcare and time off, and generally engaging in the looting of society for their own financial gain.
 
For me, "gay liberation" has always been intimately tied to "the revolution." That is, one social justice struggle among many that got at the core nature of capitalist society and its divide-and-rule strategies and materially-based oppressions inherent in that politico-economic system. I always argued that victory for our struggle as gay people — deeply connected to the role of women in capitalism — was not possible in a capitalist society. I don't feel equipped to address that huge question head-on in this essay, but I have to say that what the gay community is experiencing right now doesn't feel like a victory to me. I suppose the end of certain forms of legal discrimination are an advance for a certain privileged layer of the community that may benefit many gay people up and down the class spectrum, but something feels hollow.

While semi-covert gay organizations quietly existed for years before the  legendary Stonewall rebellion, the mass gay civil rights movement has its roots in the social uproar of the 1960s and the radical movement against American involvement in Vietnam. It's no accident that the first militant gay organization, the Gay Liberation Front, was named in the spirit of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, more commonly known as the Vietcong.

  

At its beginning the queer movement was a revolutionary movement. Perhaps the theory was undeveloped but the impulse was clear. One early group was even called STAR, or Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And in its earliest days gay liberationists united with others who recognized the connections. While shamefully some forces on the left were slow to embrace the gay struggle, black and Latino revolutionaries in the same gritty urban centers as the multi-racial gay community understood a natural alliance. The Occupy movement neighborhood assembly I work in, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, just showed the extraordinary documentary film "Palante, Siempre Palante" about the Young Lords Party, roughly the revolutionary Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panther Party. The film tells how the Young Lords openly and proudly supported gay liberation.

The gay movement went on a long journey toward moderation and respectability. A trans-class movement, it's no particular surprise that today's mainstream "LGBT" organizations are solidly in the pocket of the Democratic Party. But when I see today's pride parades built around corporate sponsorship or the narrow focus on "what's good for the gays" to the exclusion of any other social justice concerns, I am reminded over and over that it hasn't always been this way. Once upon a time gay people were protesting militarist monstrosities like the Intrepid. Now our political leaders are throwing a party on it.

It's not widely enough circulated, but back in 1970 the Black Panther Party's Huey Newton gave a speech in which he touched on the women's and gay liberation movements. The Black Panthers are sadly maligned in historical memory: virtually massacred by government COINTELPRO terrorism, the Panthers are misremembered as being violent, misremembered as some kind of glorified retrograde gang. Nothing could be further from the truth and Newton's far-thinking words from 1970 help reveal this:

"Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the women's right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppresed people in the society.... And maybe I'm now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that "even a homosexual can be a revolutionary." Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary. When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women's liberation movement." 

The whole text is quite remarkable, far more advanced than the politics of much of the left at the time. This history of connected revolutionary struggles needs to be revisited.

In New York and San Francisco #OWS contingents will be marching in the parades. They'll be pointing out all the corporate pinkwashing that's going on. Mainstream gays have already suggested this act of elementary and obvious political education is "disruption." They have accused Occupy people of being "outsiders," as if no actually queer person could possibly reject the sale of gay pride to corporate America.

"Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you."

Fighting civil discrimination is good. But fighting for the liberation of society is better. Let's not lose sight of the prize at the end: it's not about queer people being free just to be like suburban "middle-class" heterosexuals, it's about freeing society from all forms of oppressive relations.

The celebration of that victory will take place on the ruins of the Pentagon and at the site of the Intrepid being broken down into scrap.

Happy gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer pride. The struggle continues.

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.

A Few Modest Suggestions for a Very Proper Jubilee Celebration

Happy jubilee Queen Elizabeth! Thinking of you and your cousins! What could one possibly give one of the world's richest welfare parasites other than a few heartwarming tales?

"Arriving at the foot of the guillotine, Louis XVI looked for a moment at the instruments of his execution and asked Sanson why the drums had stopped beating. He came forward to speak, but there were shouts to the executioners to get on with their work. As he was strapped down, he exclaimed "My people, I die innocent!" Then, turning towards his executioners, Louis XVI declared "Gentlemen, I am innocent of everything of which I am accused. I hope that my blood may cement the good fortune of the French." The blade fell. It was 10:22 am. One of the assistants of Sanson showed the head of Louis XVI to the people, whereupon a huge cry of "Vive la Nation! Vive la République!" arose and an artillery salute rang out which reached the ears of the imprisoned Royal family." —eyewitness Charles Henri Sanson, 1794

"Nicholas, facing his family, turned and said "What?"[1] Yurovsky quickly repeated the order and the weapons were raised. The Empress and Grand Duchess Olga, according to a guard's reminiscence, had tried to cross themselves, but failed amid the shooting. Yurovsky reportedly raised his gun at Nicholas and fired; Nicholas fell dead instantly. The other executioners then began shooting until all the intended victims had fallen. Several more shots were fired and the doors opened to scatter the smoke.[1] There were some survivors, so P.Z. Yermakov stabbed them with bayonets because the shouts could be heard outside.[1] The last to die were Anastasia, Tatiana, Olga, and Maria, who were carrying several pounds (over 1.3 kilograms) of diamonds within their clothing, thus protecting them to an extent.[8] However, they were speared with bayonets as well. Olga sustained a gunshot wound to the head. Anastasia and Maria were said to have crouched up against a wall covering their heads in terror until Maria was shot down, and Anastasia was finished off with the bayonets. Yurovsky himself killed Tatiana and Alexei. Tatiana died from a single bullet through the back of her head.[9] Alexei received two bullets to the head, right behind the ear.[10] Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid, survived the initial onslaught but was quickly stabbed to death against the back wall while trying to defend herself with a small pillow she had carried that was filled with precious gems and jewels." — description based on eyewitness accounts, Yekaterinberg, Russia, 1918

"The king adjoins, 'I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.'The bishop: 'You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, - a good exchange.' Then the king asked the executioner, 'Is my hair well?' And taking off his cloak and George [the jeweled pendant of the Order of the Garter, bearing the figure of St. George], he delivered his George to the bishop. . . Then putting off his doublet and being in his waistcoat, he put on his cloak again, and looking upon the block, said to the executioner, 'You must set it fast.' The executioner: 'It is fast, sir.'...Then having said a few words to himself, as he stood, with hands and eyes lift up, immediately stooping down he laid his neck upon the block; and the executioner, again putting his hair under his cap, his Majesty, thinking he had been going to strike, bade him, 'Stay for the sign.' Executioner: 'Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty.' After a very short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the, executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging." — eyewitness report of the execution of King Charles 1, 1649

Still, perhaps this tale of compassion offers hope. Chin up!

"Next, testimony came from 27 teenagers and young adults who were former school children who testified to being the only survivors of the 180 children who were arrested and died in April 1979 after they threw rocks at Bokassa's passing Rolls-Royce during the students protest over wearing the costly school uniforms which they were forced to purchase from a factory owned by one of his wives. Several of them testified that on their first night in jail, Bokassa visited the prison and screamed at the children for their insolence. He was said to have ordered the prison guards to club the children to death, and Bokassa indeed participated, smashing the skulls of at least five children with his ebony walking stick....One of the most lurid allegations against Bokassa was the charge of cannibalism, which was technically superfluous. In the Central African Republic, statutes forbidding cannibalism classified any crime of eating human remains as a misdemeanour...Former president Dacko was called to the witness stand to testify that he had seen photographs of butchered bodies hanging in the dark cold-storage rooms of Bokassa's palace immediately after the 1979 coup. When the defence put up a reasonable doubt during the cross-examination of Dacko that he could not be positively sure if the photographs he had seen of dead bodies were used for consumption, Bokassa's former security chief of the palace was called to testify that he had cooked human flesh stored in the walk-in freezers and served it to Bokassa on an occasional basis. The prosecution did not examine the rumours that Bokassa had served the flesh of his victims to French President Giscard d'Estaing and other visiting dignitaries....On 12 June 1987, Bokassa was found guilty of all but the cannibalism charges. The court acknowledged that many individual allegations of murder had been levelled at Bokassa but found that the evidence was unimpeachable in only about 20 cases. Bokassa was said to have wept silently as Judge Franck sentenced him to death....On 29 February 1988, President Kolingba demonstrated his opposition to capital punishment by voiding the death penalty against Bokassa and commuted his sentence to life in prison in solitary confinement. With the return of democracy to the Central African Republic in 1993, Kolingba declared a general amnesty for all prisoners as one of his final acts as President, and Bokassa was released on 1 August 1993." — the fate of Jean Bedel Bokassa, the late self-crowned monarch of the former "Central African Empire

Hope, Danger and Struggle in Greece: SYRIZA's 40-point Program

Alex Tsipras, leader of SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece

Greece is in the headlines a lot, usually in the context of various economists or media analysts predicting disaster should the Greek people be allowed to control their own fortunes and reject the austerity measures being forced on the country by the European Union. What's really important to remember is whose side the media is on, and it's not the side of Greek working people, people who have been engaged in dramatic struggle against austerity and repression.

An election was just held in Greece. Because no single party achieved a majority, or could even unite with others to form a governing coalition, new elections have already been called for June. The current government is run by PASOK, the allegedly socialist party that has ruled the country for years. It has sold out every possible principle anyone calling themselves socialist might have, and is rightfully losing most of its support. PASOK didn't get enough votes to continue a government, nor did various right-wing and center-moderate parties. Disturbingly, a literal neo-Nazi party called Golden Dawn did get a significant vote, enough to gain seats in parliament. But the most fascinating development is the advancement of SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left. In the new elections, SYRIZA is expected to come in first. It is entirely possible SYRIZA will be able to form a government if other leftists agree to join a coalition. This is an incredible development. Surely a government run by SYRIZA will face incredible challenges: the threat of a military coup, of violence from the far right, even of intervention by the EU or NATO. But SYRIZA are not merely "alleged" socialists like PASOK or the victors of the recent French elections, it is a real coalition of real left groups, even including the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), a really interesting group often reported on over at Kasama.

I wanted to share the 40-point program of SYRIZA. (Source via Proyect). While any batch of these points could be the source of a good discussion about what is possible in elections, this list could serve as a blueprint for what is wrong with settling for the allegedly progressive dribs and drabs offered up by the Democratic Party to the legions of American voters clinging to the mistaken notion that voting for Democrats will solve anybody's problems (except perhaps those of the 1%). This arguably may not be a program for the seizure of revolutionary power by the autonomous working class, but it's a pretty thorough and radical series of demands that bridges what is possible with what is necessary, that expands the aspirations of popular power rather than shuts them down.

Here are the forty points:

1. Audit of the public debt and renegotiation of interest due and suspension of payments until the economy has revived and growth and employment return.
2. Demand the European Union to change the role of the European Central Bank so that it finances States and programs of public investment.
   
3. Raise income tax to 75% for all incomes over 500,000 euros.
4. Change the election laws to a proportional system.
   
5. Increase taxes on big companies to that of the European average.
6. Adoption of a tax on financial transactions and a special tax on luxury goods.
7. Prohibition of speculative financial derivatives.
   
8. Abolition of financial privileges for the Church and shipbuilding industry.
9. Combat the banks’ secret [measures] and the flight of capital abroad.
10. Cut drastically military expenditures.
11. Raise minimum salary to the pre-cut level, 750 euros per month.
12. Use buildings of the government, banks and the Church for the homeless.
13. Open dining rooms in public schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to children.
    
14. Free health benefits to the unemployed, homeless and those with low salaries.
15. Subvention up to 30% of mortgage payments for poor families who cannot meet payments.
16. Increase of subsidies for the unemployed. Increase social protection for one-parent families, the aged, disabled, and families with no income.
17. Fiscal reductions for goods of primary necessity.
18. Nationalization of banks.
19. Nationalization of ex-public (service & utilities) companies in strategic sectors for the growth of the country (railroads, airports, mail, water).
    
20. Preference for renewable energy and defence of the environment.
21. Equal salaries for men and women.
22. Limitation of precarious hiring and support for contracts for indeterminate time.
23. Extension of the protection of labor and salaries of part-time workers.
    
24. Recovery of collective (labor) contracts.
25. Increase inspections of labor and requirements for companies making bids for public contracts.
    
26. Constitutional reforms to guarantee separation of Church and State and protection of the right to education, health care and the environment.
27. Referendums on treaties and other accords with Europe.
28. Abolition of privileges for parliamentary deputies. Removal of special juridical protection for ministers and permission for the courts to proceed against members of the government.
    
29. Demilitarization of the Coast Guard and anti-insurrectional special troops. Prohibition for police to wear masks or use fire arms during demonstrations. Change training courses for police so as to underline social themes such as immigration, drugs and social factors.
    
30. Guarantee human rights in immigrant detention centers.
31. Facilitate the reunion of immigrant families.
32. Depenalization of consumption of drugs in favor of battle against drug traffic. Increase funding for drug rehab centers.
33. Regulate the right of conscientious objection in draft laws.
34. Increase funding for public health up to the average European level.(The European average is 6% of GDP; in Greece 3%.)
    
35. Elimination of payments by citizens for national health services.
36. Nationalization of private hospitals. Elimination of private participation in the national health system.
37. Withdrawal of Greek troops from Afghanistan and the Balkans. No Greek soldiers beyond our own borders.
    
38. Abolition of military cooperation with Israel.  Support for creation of a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders.
    
39. Negotiation of a stable accord with Turkey.
40. Closure of all foreign bases in Greece and withdrawal from NATO.

Anti-Americana: Trouble Starter

According to the New York Times, the Arabic portion of this sign reads, "Death to America, trouble starter and war starter." This is a protester from a pro-democracy rally in Bahrain. The pro-democracy movement in US-ally Bahrain was sold out by the US-Saudi alliance (see this post here in The Cahokian) last year. Good on these protesters for figuring out who wasn't on their side.

Donna Summer: She Said It Really Loud on the Radio

LaDonna Adrian Gaines, 1948 – 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Party's Over" - Return of a Familiar Friend?

"ARM TEH POOR," Graffiti in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, April 2012 (photo by me)

In the 1980s, a striking graffiti logo appeared all over the streets of lower east side Manhattan. The scene of an extended conflict over gentrification and how New York City would evolve, the LES was home to tenant activists, counter-culture punks, pioneering queers, artists, and the struggling Puerto Rican working class people who took the neighborhood over from the immigrant Jewish community who had, as it were, moved on up. The graffiti was an abstract depiction of an upturned cocktail, and was said to symbolize "The Party's Over." The graffiti was ubiquitous and mysterious, though it turns out it was completely the creation of a local musician and activist, Peter Missing. You can see an original here.

"OWS 2012" Graffiti in Union Square, March 2012 (photo by me)

Is the iconic "Party's Over" logo making a little comeback? I first noticed the upturned-cocktail in chalk at the Occupy Wall Street Union Square encampment in March. But then I noticed it on a lamp-post in Brooklyn, along with the inscription "ARM TEH POOR" ("teh" being the ironic/hipster misspelling of "the," of course) and a hammer and sickle.

It's got an almost apocalyptic resonance, this logo: Which isn't that far off, since the 1980s in which it first arrived was a massive cultural and political turning point both for the city and the world. It does seem appropriate that the symbol return with OWS, who reminds us that we are complaisant with today's challenges at our own risk.

Save the Palestinian Hunger Strikers!

Palestinian protesters (Che T-shirt sighting!) outside Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem last week. Photo from Alakhbar English.

Decades ago in the midst of another desperate struggle, imprisoned revolutionaries in Northern Ireland used the final weapon available, and went on a series of hunger strikes to bring attention to British repression. Several Irish Republican Army militants starved to death, including most famously Bobby Sands.

Today the desperate resistance tactic of the hunger strike is being deployed by some two thousand Palestinians in Israeli jails. Two of these protesters, in administrative detention without charges or recourse, are now said to be near death. Thaer Halahla, 34, and Bilal Thiab, 27, shown in the posters above, have been denied visits from their families and independent medical authorities.

Today the Israeli Supreme Court rejected their appeals to end their "administrative detention." At their hearing, one of the men fainted from weakness. The other, Mr. Halahla, is quoted saying, “I am a man who loves life, and I want to live in dignity. No human can accept being in jail for one hour without any charge or reason.” 

These two men are not accused of any crime, merely of being "potential terrorists" by virtue of their membership in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad faction. Sound familiar? This is what the NDAA law passed by Congress and signed by President Obama authorizes here in the United States.


Save Thaer Halahla and Bilal Thiab!

Priorities!

On May Day in Union Square I saw a contingent of people carrying signs with the old, albeit perfectly legitimate, chestnut of a slogan, "Money for Education, Not for War." I had to look twice though, cause out of the corner of my eye with my less than stellar vision at first I thought the signs said "Money for Revolution, not for War."

I was disappointed when I got a closer look. But hey, you never know!

“Another World Is Possible” – May Day in New York

Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park banner. Photo by me.

After months of planning and hard work May Day was a great success for the Occupy movement in New York City. Though you wouldn't know it from reading any New York newspapers, thousands of people participated in hundreds of actions all over the city during the day, and the culminating march from Union Square to Wall Street saw many tens of thousands of exuberant protesters filling the streets. Confrontations between demonstrators and police were few until the final hours of the protest, when cops violently broke up an assembly by some of the protesters who kept things going after the officially tolerated time.

While it is true that the "general strike" calls generated by many in the movement proved only symbolic, the day marked the vibrancy and deepening of Occupy, which spent the winter building ties in neighborhoods and communities, and across networks of activists and organizations. Occupy is anything but moribund.

For me the day started in Brooklyn, as my local neighborhood Occupy assembly, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, gathered on the Avenue in front of two local branches of the big banks Citibank and Chase. We had planned a march/speakout that would go through one of the main drags of the neighborhood, stopping at various stations to address issues relevant to this multi-ethnic, working class community. So at the point of assembly we carried out a skit about the role of the banks and about income inequality. About 35 of us marched.

The next stop, shown above, was at the offices of May First People Link, the independent radical internet service provider that has recently been targeted and harassed by the FBI. The First Amendment from the Bill of Rights was read in English and Spanish, and May First People Link members read a statement to the gathered protesters.

From there we moved on to the site of a horrible incident of police brutality in the neighborhood a few years ago where several members of the Acosta family, including the grandmother of the family, were strip searched and brutalized right out on the street. Harassment by the NYPD in Sunset Park is a daily thing for the neighborhood's Hispanic residents, many of them immigrants. A member of the Acosta family thanked us and reminded us of our right to reject police mistreatment.

Reclaiming the courthouse. Photo by OSP.

We moved on to the Courthouse building on 4th Avenue, which we have previously targeted for a "People's Repossession." This time we had a ribbon cutting ceremony, and placed a sign promised the "Future Home of the Sunset Park Community Center," and the gathered folks yelled out all the things we'd like to see in such a desperately needed bit of community space. Everything from free daycare and cultural classes to a health clinic and legal aid clinic. Right now this beautiful landmark building is occupied by cops being warehoused to push pencils. We rejected the idea that any immigrants to our neighborhood are "illegal."

From there we stopped at the Dewey Middle School. The city is cutting back services in our neighborhood to working-class families, cutting back funding to daycare and after-school programs, and threatening schools like this one with union-busting turnaround or transformation into for-profit charter schools. Dewey was just saved from turnaround by community outcry, and we celebrated that fact while giving Mayor Bloomberg's corporatist Department of Education "F's" on a giant report card for its role in toying with the education of the children of our community.

Occupying the Subway. Photo by OSP's Krys M.

From there we marched to the Subway at 36th Street and 4th Avenue. Above ground we stopped to call for full employment jobs programs and, well, for an end to capitalism! A bunch of us went down into the subway together (above, and yes, that's me) to ride to Union Square for the big march. On the subway we met up with folks from Occupy Red Hook who are also engaged in organizing an assembly in their neighborhood, right near ours.

Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park is a really awesome group of people I'm incredibly proud to work with. We planned the day's event together and carried it out in a real spirit of collectivity.

"Everything for Everyone – Dream Dangerously" Kasama banner in Manhattan. Photo from Kasama.

So into Manhattan we went. I spent some of the time with my Occupy Sunset Park comrades, and some of the time with comrades from the Kasama Project with their wonderfully challenging banner shown above. From my end of the absolutely packed Union Square I couldn't hear the tail end of the rally, but I marched most of the way downtown until my middle-aged ankles started complaining about the day of walking. I missed the assembly at the very end; friends reported that it was incredibly empowering and almost magically beautiful.

It was hard from any one spot amidst the assembled thousands to get a feel for the whole crowd. There were people from every imaginable left group, from unions and community organizations, and thousands of Occupy activists displaying their nack for truly revolutionary creativity. I ran into all sorts of people I've gotten to know from the past few months of organizing.

The mood was high and celebratory, despite occasional minor harassment from the cops who kept trying to pen the marchers in. It's the first time I can remember where a march this size was seized with such absolutely revolutionary optimism. People sang, and chanted, laughed and smiled. And while "This is what democracy looks like" was a favorite, Occupy really showed its colors by chanting things like "Another World Is Possible." This is absolutely a moment when people are coming together to see things with fresh eyes, casting away old illusions and attachments, and bringing a real spirit of hope and real change.

It was not, in the end, a general strike. And millions of New Yorkers probably didn't notice what happened. But I know I feel energized by this May Day; it was a taste of what we can do. A reminder, for sure, of all the work to be done. But tens of thousands of people did see it, did participate in it, and together we can keep building and growing.

For me the day was full of the positive lessons of what real democracy looks and feels like. It's not elections and waiting for somebody else to save us, knowing they will mostly betray us, it's taking things into our own hands because, well, the world is ours, the world, is us.

We Are Many

It's not the final offensive. It's not the moment of insurrection. The revolution isn't here. But all journeys begin with single steps. And we know what happens if we do...nothing.

The time has come to rise like lions, indeed.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Happy May Day!

Tomorrow: Another World Is Possible

Here's the flyer from the citywide May Day coalition for tomorrow's historic rally and march. See you on the streets!

May Day Is Almost Here!

Saturday my local Occupy group, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, is going to hold an outdoor General Assembly in Sunset Park itself, instead of inside the church parlour we usually meet in. After the GA we'll be having a parranda, a kind of moving rally to build support for May Day action, down the main drag of the neighborhood. As the poster above shows, we have a full plan for May First, starting with a local march, and then a trip to Manhattan for the humungous city-wide rally and march starting in Union Square. Very excited about all of it, though I know the day after it will be time to take a deep breath and take a longer gaze ahead.

It's been an exciting month, and one of the things that surprises me is how despite the fact that I actually have quite a lot to say, I'm finding the responsibility of doing political organizing in the real world holds me back from casually engaging in too much story telling or polemicizing here. But as certain events unfold, the time will be right to present them here eventually.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me. What are YOU doing on May First?

Yes, Helen Keller DID Nail It

I noticed that virtual NGO Moveon.org was passing around a Helen Keller quote. It's a nice quote about class, ("The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor, The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands are naught...we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights....") but it's an incomplete thought about the legacy of the legendary Helen Keller. Because the absolutely incredible Helen Keller was not just a social justice activist, she was a revolutionary socialist. First a member of the Socialist Party and later the Industrial Workers of the World, she had remarkable insight into the way the world worked, despite her disabilities. One might literally say that capitalism is such an oppressive system that even a blind person can see it.

A lot of the people in MoveOn.org are well-meaning, but the group has become a sort of shill for the Obama administration, and it's busy somewhat questionably muddying the waters between the Occupy movement and the Democrats through its "99% Spring" initiative. Somehow one doubts that MoveOn.org wants people to dig too deeply into Helen Keller's political legacy.


There was no nonsense or equivocation about the First World War from Keller. Like the wing of the socialist movement that broke from social democracy to form the communist movement, Keller refused to let her nationality get in the way of her solidarity with working people on the other side of a brutal, meaningless battlefield.

Here's a few ore choice quotes:

"I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle." — 1912

"The worker has nothing to lose but his chains, and he has a world to win. He can win it at one stroke from a world empire. We must form a fully equipped, militant international union so that we can take possesion of such a world empire. " — 1915

"In such a crisis the capitalist class cannot save itself or its institutions. Its police and armies will be powerless to put down the last revolt. For man at last will take his own, not considering the cost. When that day dawns, if the workers are not thoroughly organized, they may easily become a blind force of destruction, unable to check their own momentum, their cry for justice drowned in a howl of rage. Whatever is good and beneficent in our civilization can be saved only by the workers. And the Industrial Workers of the World is formed with the object of carrying on the business of the world when capitalism is overthrown. Whether the IWW increases in power or is crushed out of existence, the spirit that animates it is the spirit that must animate the labor movement if it is to have a revolutionary function." — 1918

"Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap." — 1929

Find more of her socialist writings here. There is also speculation that Helen Keller was a lesbian.

Next Weekend in Central Park: Spring Awakening 2012

"Spring Awakening 2012: Occupy New York City People's Assembly" is set for next weekend in New York City's Central Park. Full details are at the event's website here, and at their Facebook page here.

The event is in two parts, from 1pm to 3pm a open space gathering full of "soap boxing, teach-ins, music" and information/literature tables and blankets. The second half will be a facilitated assembly: a sort of rally that will break down into smaller groups to discuss strategy and planning for the Occupy movement in the upcoming period. It should be an interesting day, and it's not set as any kind of long-term occupation nor confrontation with authority so it should be our day in our space without the threat of state repression. A lot of folks from different Occupy groups and community and political organizations have been in on the planning. The Occupy group I've been participating in, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, should be representing.

See you there!

Full disclosure: I'm proud to say I've designed the flower-in-a-fist publicity materials for this event.

Occupy May First

No work
No school
No chores
No shopping
No banking

Who couldn't get behind all that? If that's what a general strike looks like today, I'm all for it.

May Day plans for New York City are unfolding: Maydaynyc.org

Supreme Court Voids Fourth Amendment

Apparently the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," doesn't mean what you thought it meant.

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that "Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed," (translation: strip searched, including full body-cavity search) even if "the detainee" has been arrested only for something as trivial as a traffic violation. Of course it was a five-four vote, with the four right-wing justices joined by right-moderate Kennedy, and opposed by the four alleged right-liberals on the bench. Thus with the stroke of a pen, one of the supposed bedrocks of American civil rights, one of the very bill of rights itself, is gutted.

The New York Times reports on the case of a man arrested for speeding and held in error on an outstanding warrant: “Turn around,” Mr. Florence, in an interview last year, recalled being told by jail officials. “Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” Yes, that is now legal. With absolute impunity, according to the alleged final authority on the law and the U.S. constitution.

Women and black people have long understood the limitations of legal protections written two hundred years ago by a bunch of rich, white male slaveowners, but now it's clear to everybody: "The right of the people not to be searched in their persons" does not include protection from cops looking up your asshole on their whim. Not according to a bunch of crazy right-wing Republican congressmen, but according to the fucking Supreme Court of the United States. And you thought the ruling that brought us "corporations are people" was a problem.

Don't mourn, organize.

A note on the paucity of posts here in the last week: I've been busy with the real world, which is a good thing. Building for my local Occupy group, including our push for May Day celebrations, "a day without the 99%." But I've also been fuming over the Trayvon Martin case, so angry at white America's anguish over George Zimmerman I've been scarcely able to organize my thoughts. I'm not sure which rediscovery is worse: the way racism is revealed to be so deeply woven into the fabric of white American culture, or the absolute inability beyond mere denial of white Americans to even acknowledge the possible existence of that racism. From liberals like the NY Times' columnist Gail Collins suggesting the issue at the center of the Martin tragedy is "gun control," (as though limiting rope sales would have effected anything in the era of lynching), to people posting (false) pictures of an allegedly gold-toothed Martin (to what, prove he deserved to die?) that have been spread by outright fascists like Stormfront and eaten up by white Americans unwilling to understand the real world, I've been disturbed and demoralized to the point of inarticulateness. But here we are. Hopefully my voice is coming back. —ISH

We Are The People I Have Been Waiting For

I stopped by New York's Union Square on Monday night to see a new incipient occupation run by some OWS folks. I had some mixed feelings about the small encampment, but the bricks next to the encampment were filed with lovely chalk graffitti, "We Are The People I Have Been Waiting For". Just about sums it up.



"People Have The Power," of course. One of those clichés that, well, if people really listened to, things would be a whole lot different.

Every night this week Union Square became the scene for a confrontation between cops who vastly outnumbered the number of people wanting to stay in the square, with some moments of grotesque brutality. There was a scene of an activist having a seizure while handcuffed on the ground while the cops stood around doing nothing. Midweek the same space was the scene of a few thousands-people strong rally of support for Trayvon Martin called the Million Hoodie March. By the end of the week the city installed sadly hilarious new signs around the park with a long list of "don'ts," each one accompanied by an icon, that ended with "no unpermitted rallies allowed." Pardon my french, but fuck you Bloomberg.

There's so much more to the Occupy movement right now than this bit of daily theater between demonstrators and cops. Neighborhood assemblies including the one I participate in are building up across the city, and daily actions and meetings display deeper concerns and visions than does this battle for public space. But Spring is here, and the voices shouting for justice are still being heard, and that is very good news indeed.

Justice for Trayvon Martin!

"This is America and the killing of Black people is just not considered a crime.

After 1955, the sweet face of Emmett Till, tortured to death in Mississippi by angry white men, haunted anyone with a conscience. Now we have the face of Trayvon Martin to remember. This is America, and that much has not changed.

And we have to deal with the fact that his killer was not even arrested. Not even arrested....

This is America, and whole sections of people are assumed to be criminal. It is called profiling — but it is really the ingrained standards inherited from slavery, Jim Crow and a whole structure of white supremacy. This is America, and armed white men are presumed to be innocent, justified and not a danger to their community. That too is a racial profiling — that envelops the militant racist like a protecting shield.

This is America. And when Black boys are murdered by angry white men, the authorities treat it as a tragic accident, not a crime."
— Kasama's Mike Ely