Author: jameswagner

QUEERS READ THIS!


[undocumented photo from the 2002 exhibition at the London club Queer Nation]
“QUEERS READ THIS!” was anonymously distributed during New York’s “Pride” weekend in 1990 as a tabloid piece with wonderful bold graphics. It became a manifesto. It reads as well today.
This is just one section of many:

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CANNOT LOSE
Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender- fuck and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every cunt, every heart and ass and dick is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we fuck, we win. We must fight for ourselves (no one else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We’ve given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let’s make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so, so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.


[Butch Femme Couples, circa 1920, donated to the New York Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center by Barbara Warren and Stephanie Grant]

home repairs

John Rechy suggests in a Commentary piece in Sunday’s LATimes that gratitude may not be the appropriate response to the decision in Lawrence and Garner vs. the State of Texas.

Without in any way belittling the decency of the justices in their brave opinion, some might view the decision as a vastly imperfect apology for the many lives devastated by cruel laws that made possible the myriad humiliations of gay people, the verbal assaults and screams of “faggot!” — the muggings, the suicides, the murders — all occurring even during this time of victory. The flagrant dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia and two of his colleagues — in an effort to uphold the Texas law — will help to keep fertile the atmosphere of hatred that allowed three men to mangle Trevor Broudy in West Hollywood and allowed Matthew Shepherd to be butchered in Wyoming.

No, we cannot be grateful.
Rechy writes only about the modern American experience,* but the horror is on a much larger scale than that. Violence against perceived sexual and behavioral deviation, never bounded by geography or time, continues today and beyond today, here and everywhere.
Instead of showing gratitude, we should be demanding reparations, and, since millions, even billions, of queers who have been crippled physically and psychologically for millenia by the assaults of a dumb, blind, malicious and implacable sexual establishment are now dead, lost or beyond recovery, the blood money and the attention should go to endow lively support centers for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and transexual youth at risk everywhere, like New York’s Y.E.S. No groups need more help and no groups can do more to repair us right here and around the world, now and maybe forever.
____________________
* One story excerpted from the LATimes piece:

In 1973, California finally repealed its anti-sodomy laws. But still, in 1977, driving home from UCLA in the early evening, I saw muggers fleeing from the man they had assaulted on the street. I drove the bleeding man to the police station so that a squad car would be sent to the area. The bruised man — clearly gay — was returning home with groceries when attacked. At the station, the sergeant studied him after I had recounted what I had seen, and asked him, “What did you try to do with those guys?”

[thanks to Barry]

god made him do it

The real reason the nation is going to hell in a hand basket was revealed by Ha’aretz recently but it has never appeared in the mainstream U.S. media, “save a tiny mention in the Post,” Eric Alterman wrote yesterday.

Anyway, according to “selected minutes acquired… from one of last week’s cease-fire negotiations between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts… Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans. According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: ‘God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.'”

In the words of that great American pundit and sage, Lily Tomlin, “If you speak to God, it’s a prayer, if God speaks to you it’s schizophrenia.”
[thanks to Jamie and Barry]

Reza half-way?

Reza is in Arkansas. Barry’s first, startling, half-serious reaction to the news: “I hope they don’t kill him.” Mr. B is from Arkansas, and having escaped only 15 years ago, he may have good reason to imagine the worst.
The message from Dave Hyslop, who is following him across the country:

Am siting in a little internet cafe in Fort Smith, AR with Reza. He ran into Fort Smith this evening. This makes five states he’s completed with Arkansas up next.
Hope to be in Little Rock by the morning of July 5th. A cousin of mine lives in Little Rock so we may drive in to see her the night of the 4th and attend a fireworks party…not sure yet.

Reza in Little Rock on the 4th of July. Now that sounds like a party worth a trip!

cutting off the nose to spite the face

Or is it a question of digging our own grave? In any event, this is just not worthy of a great nation, or of a people who think they are a part of a great nation.
French wine didn’t make us stupid. French wine didn’t make us do wretched things to people we know nothing about. French wine didn’t make us greedy and provincial and it did not endow us with a dangerous sense of moral superiority over the entire world. French wine didn’t make us cowards. French wine did not turn the world against us.
French wine will not end the “American century.”
We’re going to do it on our own.
We’ve been told all year that Americans want to punish France for showing good sense lately in its foreign policy, but I wasn’t ready to take the story seriously – until now.

The usual contingent of American wine merchants were mostly absent [from France’s largest wine fair this week in Bordeaux], confirming to many at the fair that American ill will over France’s opposition to the war in Iraq bruised more than egos.
French wine sales to the United States, once French winemakers’ most promising market and now one of their greatest competitors, are going down the drain.

Up to now I had actually thought this nonsense would blow away quickly and that we would soon be directing our anger to the right target: the entire American media and political establishment. In fact it’s clear we haven’t learned a thing, and the result will not be disaster just for certain French industries.
French wine, and perhaps the French aeronautical industry and many others as well, may never recover from American fear and stupidity, but in the end the real victim will be America and everything that a wise and generous America could have been for itself and for the world.
In the meantime, chez nous, we enjoyed a magnificent bottle of French wine last night. The entree was a plate of sauteed sea scallops on a bed of wilted frisee tossed with sauteed shallots, chanterelle and balsamic vinegar. The wine was a Muscat 1992 Grand Cru Goldert Domaine Zind Humbrecht, and the recipe was that of Mario Batalli. An odd combination, but I think “surf and turf” always requires imagination when matching wine and food. Besides, the Zind was getting antsy sitting in the rack here.
Vive la France!

India today

Bloggy has found real pride in Calcutta.
I was in this incredible city in the early nineties. There is no community like it anywhere, even in all of India, not least for its traditional culture of the arts, intellectualism and social radicalism. Pride is no beggar in Calcutta.
For a discussion of homosexuality in pre-Raj India generally, see this essay by Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik.

The term homosexuality and the laws prohibiting ‘unnatural’ sex were imposed across the world through imperial might. Though they exerted a powerful influence on subsequent attitudes, they were neither universal nor timeless. They were – it must be kept in mind – products of minds that were deeply influenced by the ‘sex is sin’ stance of the Christian Bible. With typical colonial condescension, European definitions, laws, theories and attitudes totally disregarded how similar sexual activity was perceived in other cultures.

marriage is a government sacrament?

All this is coming from the second most powerful person in the country (third, if we have to count Bush in addition to Cheney):

[Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist said he feared that the ruling on the Texas sodomy law could lead to a situation “where criminal activity within the home would in some way be condoned.”
“And I’m thinking of, whether it’s prostitution or illegal commercial drug activity in the home, and to have the courts come in, in this zone of privacy, and begin to define it gives me some concern,” Frist said.

No, the problem is as usual that he’s not thinking. The ideologue was speaking in the context of his announcement today of support for a constitutional amendment which would ban gay marriage, because

“I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between, what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined, as between a man and a woman.”

So, now the Radical Right, which has always said it is opposed to any extension of federal power, thinks the federal government should be given final authority over religious rites.
On some level I cannot get too enthused about the latest sodomy decision of the Supreme Court. I did not receive a gift last week. The justices did not give me the right to be me or the right to fuck. The rights were always mine, whether those people recognized them or not.
What has changed is the official opinion of 5 or 6 judges, and with much work that change will come to mean much more. [And we must not forget that the strategic appoinment by this administration of just 2 replacements could reverse the decision.] But Frist reminds us that the country itself hasn’t been changed overnight by Lawrence and Garner vs. the State of Texas. Opinion and behavior is not the direct product of the judicial system. The opposite may be closer to real experience, but there too it’s the lags and the snags which are always so painful.
I’m really an optimist, in spite of these musings. I just hate to see decent people take these things for granted. The malevolent ones never do. Also, like so much that has advanced humanity in the past, whether material or ethical and cultural, we must not think that there was anything inevitable about progress, or that only ordinary, individual mortals were responsible for it, or that we could start from scratch tomorrow and do it over. There are giants and saints, and they’ve been working at these things for a very long time. Sometimes they get a lot of help.
Thanks LAMBDA and so many other wonderworkers.