update on Zackie

Five months ago I wrote about Zackie Achmat. The good news is that he’s still alive. The bad news is that about 100,000 other South Africans have died unnecessarily in the meantime.
Zackie is slowly dying of AIDS, but he refuses to take the drugs that would keep him alive, until South Africa’s government makes them freely available to the poor. He has become a hero and a symbol in the struggle of AIDS patients and their advocates for recognition and for public medical care, but with the continuing resistance of the administration of President Thabo Mbeki to their appeals, the issue has become more complicated.

It is clear, but seldom spoken, that he is burdened with doubts about his pledge. In interviews his closest friends said that at times they sensed that he wished he could take it back. They said that no one, especially Mr. Achmat, ever dreamed that the government would withhold ARV’s as AIDS treatment for so long. What is worse, they said, is that if Mr. Achmat dies now, there is the real chance that his death would not help his cause.
Mr. Achmat acknowledged the same, fidgeting as if uncomfortable in his own reasoning. “The government won’t care one bit if I die,” he said. “I don’t think it will make a bit of difference in their policy.”

erasing cultures and dissent

Artists Against The War is inviting artists and art lovers in New York to gather all day next saturday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium BC from the Mediterranean to the Indus.” Works from Iraq and other countries currently living under the threat of US military aggression are displayed in this show.
They also suggest that on the same day, artists in other cities around the world join them in congregating in museums exhibiting ancient Near Eastern
art.
Visitors will quietly draw the objects around them, and before leaving the
museum, each will erase the drawings to symbolically reflect the
erasure of Iraqi culture and the silencing of dissent here at home.
For more information, and pictures, see the website.

tell Egypt we care

If Amnesty International can make it an important part of its agenda, New York queers and those who love or respect them, but of course anyone with a love of liberty and humanity, can make it over to the Egyptian Consulate in New York tomorrow, Friday, at lunch time.

Join activists from around the world in a Global Day of Action to mark the 2nd Anniversary of the arrest of the Cairo 52, and stop the ongoing persecution of men perceived to be gay in Egypt. Protest the continuing Internet entrapment, raids of private gatherings, and detention and ill-treatment of men in Egypt because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation.
Al-Fatiha and Amnesty International OUTfront call on all LGBT people and allies to put pressure on the Egyptian government to stop the targeting of men for arrests and prosecution because of their sexual orientation. Amnesty International considers people imprisoned solely on the basis of their sexual orientation as prisoners of conscience and calls for their immediate release.

Rallies are planned for cities across the U.S. and around the world. In one particularly visible protest, at noon tomorrow, 52 people will chain themselves on the Place des Nations, the entrance to the European headquarters of the United Nations, in Geneva.
Protests and actions are planned for Manila and Hong Kong. In Berlin there will be street theatre, in Madrid there will be a demonstrtion at the Debod Temple, an Egyptian temple given to Spain at the time of the construction of the Aswan Dam. In London a demonstration is planned at the site of Cleopatra’s Needle, and in lovely Ireland, pubs and clubs are being asked to allow Amnesty International to campaign in their venues and black tape will be stickered vertically onto their loo mirrors, so that when customers look into the mirrors they will look as if they are in a prison cell. Over the mirror will be the text, “you are behind bars for 30 seconds – in Egypt gay men are behind bars for three years.”
The New York details:

PROTEST/RALLY
Friday, May 9, 12:30 – 1:30 pm
The Egyptian Consulate
1110 Second Avenue (58/59 Sts)
New York City

Bring sassy, hand-made signs. Organizers are encouraging us to “wear red in solidarity with the clandestine resistance and celebration of gay pride taking place in Egypt.”

remember Jenin?

For the same reasons which make us ignorant of our own and everyone else’s past, most Americans don’t remember the Israeli invasion of Jenin just one year ago. But now there’s a book out in English, and it gamely attempts to get our attention. Because of the powerful politics behind the ownership of truth in the middle east, it may be recorded history’s only hope, and, as this review by a prominent Israeli academic suggests, it may tell as much as we will ever know about what really happened.

Each reader will take something different from this book. For me as an Israeli, I find the description of the soldiers’ conduct the most disturbing and most convincing part of the evidence. It is a story of the dehumanization that raged in Jenin. This is so well epitomized in the chronicles of Nidal Abu al-Hayjah as reported by Ihab Ayadi. After Nidal was wounded and lay crying for help, anyone who tried to come to his rescue was shot by Israeli snipers. He bled to death as so many others. Technically, he was not massacred, he was tortured to death. The deadly precision of the snipers as a means of deterring rescue operations is being reported in other testimonies in this book, such as that of Taha Zbyde, who was killed eventually by a sniper. This mode of action was and still is enacted wherever there is an Israeli operation in the occupied territories. It is part of the vicious repertoire of the inhuman occupation – the daily physical harassment and mental abuse at checkpoints, the prevention from pregnant mothers or the wounded to get to hospitals, the starvation and the confiscation of water. No wonder some Israelis felt this brings back memories from the darker days of the Second World War. I remembered Anna Frank’s diary when I read Um Sirri’s horrorific recollection of how women tried to swallow a cough that irritated the Israeli soldiers standing above them, pointing their loaded guns at them.

[thanks to Anees]

‘I can put little baseball players all over it?’

Tony Kushner and Mark Harris met five years ago. Last month they affirmed their partnership before friends in Manhattan. The occasion made the “VOWS” feature in the NYTimes Styles section this past Sunday.

They started planning their commitment ceremony soon after 9/11, buying rings at Tiffany’s and complementary gray-toned suits at Saks.
The sales clerks were all accommodating, they said. “One cake designer I called said, ‘We specialize in elaborate beautiful white flowers all over the cake,'” Mr. Harris recalled. “So I said, ‘I should tell you, this is for two men.’ There was a slight pause and she said, `I can put little baseball players all over it?'”

“a guitar’s all right John,”

John Lennon’s boyhood home, a modest 1930s semi-detached just outside of Liverpool’s center, has opened to the public with an English Heritage plaque on its facade. It’s now a museum. Yoko Ono bought the house in 2001 and donated it to the National Trust. It’s a sweet news story, but then, we expected that.
In 1945, when he was five, three years after his parents were divorced and with his father long at sea, his mother had decided her bohemian life with a new boyfriend was unsuitable for raising a child and John was put in the care of his uncle and aunt.

Uncle George died in 1955, and Aunt Mimi became the disciplinarian who tried to rein in the increasingly restive John. Ms. Ono said that one of Aunt Mimi’s habits — prying into her nephew’s diaries and notebooks — ended up contributing to his art. “He thought it was as if Mimi was looking over his shoulder, and so he started to write in gobbledygook, and he used to say that’s how surrealism first got into his work,” Ms. Ono said.
[The house] was sold in 1965, after Mr. Lennon bought a bungalow for his aunt on the English Channel coast at Poole in Dorset. For her new home, he gave her a stone tablet inscribed with a quote of hers that he wanted her never to forget.
It read, “A guitar’s all right John, but you’ll never earn a living by it.”

More information, with more pictures, is available on the Trust’s website. And on that site, Yoko describes the house, called Mendips: “This is the house where John did all his dreaming about his future, about the future of the world…and the rest is history!”

update on Reza


The Iranian cyclist arrested and held by our immigration authorities for about four months this winter is now in California and about to begin his last sprint to New York City, completing an odyssey of six years.
The short message below, which probably went to an enormous number of friends and supporters, doesn’t indicate whether he will be running on foot, as he had earlier indicated he would, or on the two wheels which have carried him around the world.

Hello everyone,
Everything is fine with me. I left Phoenix on Sunday,
April 27th and rode to Los Angeles and I am staying
with a new friend, Dave Hyslop in Marina del Rey,
California.
On May 11th (Mother’s Day) I will start the final leg
of my journey and travel to Ground Zero in New York
City.
Your suport has meant so much to me – thank you!
Sincerely,
Reza Baluchi

the silence of the sheep

The entire text of a letter in this week’s The Nation:

Skokie, Ill.
With the shooting over and the oilwells rescued from a despotic regime, it’s time to consider what posterity will think. An illegitimate President wages an illegal war, hijacks the Bill of Rights and raids the Treasury on behalf of those who already have too much – and a strange silence emanates from the organs of democracy. No debate in Congress, not even token opposition from the “opposition party” and shamefully little real reporting from our “embedded” echo-chamber media. As the Administration executes its program of aggression abroad and repression at home, sheepish acquiescence is the order of the day. What label will historians give this not-so-brave world of ours? May I suggest The Gelded Age?
Hugh Iglarsh

I care less about posterity’s opinion than our own, and I’m bothered by the chauvinist tint in what the writer proposes as a description of our age [The magazine’s editors themselves headlined the letter, OR, ‘THE GUILTY AGE ?’], but Mr. Iglarsh does have the story right.

not on our side

I think both the country and the state of New York would be better off having at least one empty senatorial seat than have it continue to be occupied by Hillary Rodham Clinton, and I could easily add the chair of our senior senator, Charles Schumer, to the trash heap. We’d save the expense of both establishments and be well rid of the hypocrisies of pretend-democrats (small d). I think I’d rather fight an enemy who believes in truth in labelling.
Lesbians and gays who have any understanding of the world should be particularly angry. Both senators have been more than enthusiastic about the Bush wars and the administration’s assaults on our domestic liberties, and both have come up pretty empty when it comes to meaningful support for queers, although we could argue, as Bloggy does, that Clinton must be confronted with her political cynicism even more than Schumer. She has been remarkably successful in presenting herself as a hero to homos all over the country, in spite of the absence of any evidence. Wishful thinking, I imagine. Are we so desperate? Are we all political bottoms?

Hillary’s no friend of queers
I have never understood why so many homos seems to think Hillary Clinton is somehow on our side. She takes our money and shows up and gay fundraisers, but that’s the extent of her “support”. While running for the Senate, she said she would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
It has now been one week since Senator Santorum’s remarks, and as this article in the Gay City News reminds us, she hasn’t managed to make any statement whatsoever. As of today, there’s no statement on Mr. Santorum on her web site, but she has found the time to announce legislation to establish “National Purple Heart Recognition Day” and praise Schweizer Aircraft Corporation and its support of our troops.
Chuck Schumer took a week to come up with a statement, but there’s nothing on his web site. He lives in Park Slope, so he has plenty of queer neighbors!
You can contact our illustrious senators here: Clinton and Schumer. Hillary doesn’t have “Gay and Lesbian issues” in the topic choices, but Schumer does.
[from Bloggy, May 3]

once again, wine from Pompei

“It is our humble homage to a site which is part of the heritage of the entire world. Vine growing began here, and here, after 2000 years, we once more propose a wine made in Pompeii.”

Senor Mastroberardino exaggerates a bit about the southern Italian origin of winemaking, but the Etruscan, Greek and Roman Campania’s accomplishment, and his own, is significant nevertheless.
Ok, not a story that will appeal to everyone, but it definitely appears made for me. My maybe-all-too-numerous passions include food, wine, Italy, Naples, ancient history, landscapes, cities, and so on. By coincidence late last night we sat down to a simple Campanian dish, Spaghettini alle Vongole con Brocoli di Rapa (thin spaghetti with brocoli rabe and clams, with garlic and hot pepper flakes) accompanied by a wonderful Campanian white, a Falanghina (dei Campi Flegrei). Perfect.
Now if we only had access to Mastroberardino’s Pompeian wine itself. But I’m definitely going to order more of that Falanghina.