LGBT Rights: Up and Down and Up Again

I've been down with a flu from the depths of hell but have been mostly following the news. The instantaneous and massive mobilization around Indiana governor Pence's religious discrimination ordinance was fabulous! Nothing I could have dreamed of witnessing in the bad old days. Most of the USA has now made it abundantly clear that denial of service based on bigotry is unacceptable.

Of course, every step forward brings a certain amount of backlash so events like Springfield Missouri repealing a gay rights ordinance is no surprise. And, as much as I distrust mainstream politics, civil rights protections of queers and people of color will be a frontline issues in the 2016 presidential election.

Our support can be deceptive. We have not crossed the finish line yet. In fact, if we look to the Black civil rights struggle as a model,  not only are the last laps of the most difficult ones, but the struggle itself is endless. Things inevitably will get a lot worse before they get better.

The best alternative would be to stop doing things in a piecemeal fashion: non-discrimination in employment, marriage,  housing, adoption, all the issues together under one civil rights protection statute, preferably issued by the Supreme Court. That is easier said than done. The ERA, Equal Rights Amendment for women, never made it across that finish line. Now the right wing has opened an abyss full of snapping crocodiles they call "religious freedom." It is part of their victim-based strategy of persecution, an interesting reversal of the actual dynamic.

But we need not despair. Among young people organized religion is rapidly declining. The last time that happened was during the late sixties and early seventies when my generation was coming of age. And you know how that played out.

So there is hope. We are in this for the long haul. Whenever people say how quickly the LGBT struggle has achieved some rights I wonder what version of history they are reading. Certainly not the sixty plus years of my struggle or that of my predecessors in whose footsteps I have walked.

Organizing Matters

Black lives matter. Women’s lives matter. Queer lives matter. Disabled lives matter. Every member of every ethnic group's lives matter. Working-class lives matter. All lives matter.

I am trying to be inclusive here, not divisive. Murder by law enforcement is appalling and wrong. It happens because the police, increasingly the arm of the new authoritarian state that is struggling for control, are the weapon of the one percent. They have been bought and paid for by the corporate personhood of the sickeningly wealthy. Yes, we must demonstrate against indiscriminate police murder without any accountability.

Getting out in the streets to demonstrate has always been a powerful tool to fight oppression. But now, more and more, the protests become the control group for testing every new military weapon. Sound canons that damage hearing are a new toy. The powers that be now bring strobe lights to make photo or video recording impossible. And, every day, more and more places are making the recording of police an illegal activity thus threatening the very basis of free speech.

This is a rat race and, unfortunately, the rats are winning. We are all potential criminals under constant surveillance. Survival itself has become so much more difficult since the banksters overthrew the economy taking away middle-class jobs and any remaining semblance of workers’ rights. Racism, sexism and ethnic prejudices are running wild. As far as trashing some minority group, anything goes It is no co-incidence that the atmosphere is starting to feel like Germany in the early 1930’s. The conditions are similar.

Massive demonstrations may take us in a different direction and they are worth a shot. It is also possible that we will see repression on a massive scale, unlike any we have seen before.

I’m not arguing for fear, just saying that we have to organize. Single issue struggle is fine but we need much more, a program that encompasses all our issues combined with the unity and commitment of each of us to fight for everyone. We will also need representative democratic structure with leaders we can trust.

Knowing that something is very, very wrong and desiring to fix it is the first step. We are on the tightrope now. On one side is a more egalitarian, compassionate society. Fascism on the other. The direction we will fall remains to be seen.

Are Lesbians Being Written Out of the LGBT Community?

I just finished reading an article in the "Huffington Post" about the 20 most compelling queers of 2013. 4 of them were born female. You heard right, 4 out of twenty! The remaining 16 were born male although some have transitioned to female and are living that way now. 

Lesbians who have been born and raised as women are NOT one fifth of the queer community's population! And it’s not just this one article. The huge photo on the cover of the New Year's edition of the Bay Times" shows men as men, men in drag and women with smiles and long hair (have you noticed the huge percentage of young females who wear their hair long now?) Not a single female butch among them. I am beginning to fear that little by little, step by step the male culture of the LGBT community is writing out those of us born with XX chromosomes.

And this is happening at a time when, more than ever, the needs of women worldwide deserve our attention and activism. Women are underrepresented in all spheres of life except for child birth and rearing in all countries of the world. We are treated as dependent children who need male guardians in some, made to cover our bodies, heads and often faces in others, denied literacy and education in many, killed for minor infractions or dowry issues in quite a few, surgically clitorectomized, infibulated and we have been subjected to a wide array of horrific procedures like foot-binding throughout the history of the world.

Here, in the Occidental world, we survive in what is usually referred to as “Western Civilization.” Cultures here have always been hostile to our gender. The percentage of women in government, science, technology, and all disciplines except for teaching, nursing, childcare, librarianship and social work is astoundingly small. And when men enter these “women’s fields” their ability to ascend to management is rapid and blindingly unjust.

Women are underrepresented in all aspects of society partly due to prejudice, but also because to be born a woman in any part of the globe takes a tremendous toll on self-esteem. We are not raised to believe ourselves capable of great things. From the minute you are strapped into those frilly pink what-evers, your chances of fulfilling any dreams other than marriage and children are significantly diminished. You will be sexualized, demeaned and degraded in a myriad of both blatant and subtle ways. And if your family is also oppressed by ethnicity or socio-economic class the struggle becomes that much more difficult.

Butch lesbians are no-frills feminist culture warriors who challenge the norm of "femininity" by simple virtue of existence. Against all odds we have unearthed some semblance of self-love and respect in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that society has no productive use for our style, not to mention our values. 

If  a preponderence of butch-leaning lesbians transition to men it leaves the majority who remain women in a more vulnerable position. Yes, people have to be true to their biological gender but the fact remains that becoming a man does reduce the problem of anti-woman oppression in an individual's life. It can be used as an easy fix to a much deeper problem.

Lesbians have always had our power drained when we try to work in mixed-gender environments. The gender net of human females is diverse and wide. I am all for fighting for the rights of transgender people. But just not at the expense of fair lesbian representation. Life is not a zero sum game. If the LGBT community writes us out of the fold, we will just keep raising hell on our own, a strategy we have learned well.

Marriage is Not the Answer

With all the rose-colored musings on the wonders of marriage that have arrived with our newly acquired, still limited marriage rights, you’d think that all the problems of the LGBT community had just been solved with one stroke of a Supreme Court Fairy’s pen. But this flurry of excitement, while contagious, obscures the fact that the institution of marriage is woefully inadequate as a panacea to remedy even the challenges of our personal lives, not to mention our political ones.

I remember, in the seventies, being totally perplexed when the boyfriend of politician Harvey Milk committed suicide. Someone who was part of a couple offing themselves? How could that be possible? What does this mean? In my own fantasies the idea of finding a girlfriend would put all my existential angst to rest.

Marriage is part of a canned, lobotomized prescription for” happiness,” and in reality not much more than a massive advertising campaign. Americans tend to worship the philosophy of “rugged individualism.” Within this doctrine, all formulas for a productive life begin and end with you and yours. The acquisition of wealth is but another of these personal solutions. Reproduction is fundamental as well. Babies are just a commodity created by the family.

In this world view, poor, minority, female, queer babies all have their roles to play whether it is as a target for police, cashier for a convenience store, CEO for an internet giant, or doctor for the upper crust. Whatever their future role, babies keep their parents in line financially and help disseminate this “capitalist mystique.”

At my old librarian job, access to system-wide emails was strictly limited. Yet, we all received announcements of a co-workers marriage or birth of a child. Never did we get information about an employee who’d written and produced a play, an art gallery opening featuring someone’s work or a mountain successfully climbed. In fact, those accomplishments were seen as threatening, taking away from our “real” work in the service hierarchy of the library.

Why are we encouraged to retreat into a universe of marriage, babies and private life? The answer seems obvious. Together, questioning, participating, exploring greater community issues is too threatening to the powers that be. We might grow to see and understand things that would make the crumbs they throw us harder to accept, one that could jeopardize their dominance and hegemony.

It is absolutely necessary that queers have the civil right to marry, to adopt children, to join the military and share every single right that heterosexuals possess. But to elevate marriage to the highest, most noble fulfilling goal is to perpetrate a lie. Each of us is a member of a larger community, beyond the nuclear family and its rigid boundaries. We must make political sense of our shared circumstances and rise and fall together

Unions: Safety and Discrimination Protection

The two tragic fires that have killed workers in Bangladesh remind us of labor’s history in the early years of the twentieth century when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant women.

Capitalism actively condones the murder of dispensable commodities like people who provide unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Now even the sweatshops of China are moving to even cheaper, less-regulated Bangladesh. American companies like Wal-Mart and Apple have increasingly relied on cheap third-world labor to produce their products as wages plummet and safety regulations evaporate in the United States, our country will once again look like a more desirable sweatshop location for vulture capitalists of all stripes.

With the active collusion of some large city mayors like Rahm Emanuel (Chicago) and Cory Booker (Newark) both labor union power and membership are diminishing. Unions have become an endangered species and will soon go the way of the dodo.

Yes, labor unions fight for the safety concerns of workers. These are paramount. Without your life, a job isn't worth much. But they also fight for job security and retention. The “employment at will” doctrine that is applied in the United States means any worker can be terminated for any reason whatsoever, whether or not it is job related.

If I had been unable to seek out union jobs, I could easily have been a street person instead of a retired homeowner. As a political activist and openly lesbian worker, I have been fired from employment in at least three instances where I was dismissed with the comment, “Your work is fine, you just don’t fit in.” Eating and having shelter are very important factors for a decent quality of life. They are necessary for both those who fit in as well as those who do not. It makes me angry and sad to think that LGBT young people today, who are lacking family emotional and financial support, cannot keep themselves out of poverty.

We desperately need international guidelines concerning workers’ safety. We also need non-discrimination laws to protect the livelihoods of non-traditional employees. Our lives and our jobs should not be too much to ask. We must resuscitate the unions before it is too late. 

Romney: The Scariest Thing This Halloween

Yes, I know that Obama has been a war-monger who has curtailed civil liberties and protections for everyone and yes, I would rather see a third party offer a true choice for all Americans. A Romney presidency would privatize life here in the USA and survival or the fittest would be our new national slogan. But as horrible as his “leadership” would be for immigrants, women, working and poor people in general, but it would be absolutely devastating to the well-being of LGBT Americans.

Romney has stated that the right to hospital visitation by a significant other would be up-for-grabs on a state-by-state basis under his administration. There would be more incidents like the Florida case where in April of 2010, Janice Langbehn was denied access to her dying partner of the past 18 years, Lisa Marie Pond.

Mitt has stated he will enshrine a marriage equals one man and one woman clause in the US Constitution and do everything in his power to take away same-gender marriage rights in those few states that have them.

He will ensure that the children of LGBT couples are discriminated against by noting on their birth certificates by striking out the words mother and father and writing in parent one and parent two. He resisted the printing out of gender-neutral birth certificates because this would be “detrimental to the family unit.” What would become of these “detrimental” families and their children is anybody’s guess but certainly not his concern.

When it comes to the issue of bullying in schools, Romney has opposed any administration-based efforts to oppose this practice or even to educate people about homophobia and gender-based bigotry.

Queer folks will need to kiss goodbye any hope of ending immigration and green card discrimination, housing discrimination, discrimination in access to “public” facilities, job discrimination and any other kind of anti-gay prejudice you can think of because Romney would try to take this country back to the days when gay sex itself was illegal.

In this era of hyper-nostalgia when all rights of women, religious and anti-religious minorities and immigrants are at stake it is important to draw the line somewhere. Yes, I know that the Obama administration is problematic in a multitude of ways, but the election of Mitt Romney would be an absolute nightmare.

Now as we are witnessing the effects of climate change first hand, we have a presidential candidate who has proposed to end FEMA funding too. Romney is a walking nightmare. I lived through the oppression of the fifties and have zero desire to repeat that experience now!

Where the Sustainability Movement Falters...

Of late, I have been participating in a resilience circle. These groups are organized offshoots of the "sustainability" movement whose goal is to create a local, independent economy which can but does not necessarily use currency as a standard of exchange. Theirs is a noble and idealistic vision. But alone, it is not viable for scattered people and communities. The struggle is as unattainable as trying to bring socialism in one fragment of a country in a rabidly capitalist world.

We dare not underestimate the raw power of capital and its well-armed defenders. The magnitude of the force and repression unleashed against the Occupy Movement, particularly in the United States, is just one small example of what we're up against. This once sleeping dog will not settle back into slumber without a fight. People who desire a more humane and interractive world have to actively battle for it on many fronts. The economic struggle is significant, the environmental struggle absolutely critical but these two alone are not enough.

It is imperative that we also organize ourselves against the hatred that is tossed out for our consumption, like a wad of raw meat in order to divert the attention of the underclass and manipulate us into taking out our frustration on one another.

We are given all kinds of targets to keep us busy with hatred and suspicion: immigrants, people of color, women, LGBT folks, Muslims, Jews, atheists and agnostics, even the nebulous category, "intellectuals." To ignore organized prejudice when it rears its ugly head is a huge omission that will defeat our struggle.

I used to mollify myself by calling up that myth, made popular in the book and movie "Exodus," that the people of Denmark all wore yellow stars so the Nazi couldn't pick out and round up Danish Jews. It is a noble, heart-warming story but, like many stories, it is fiction. Nonetheless, we will all have to emulate this fictitious example of our higher nature on the streets and in our communities as certain groups are singled out for mistreatment both by law as well as by lack of legal protection.

Examples of organized lawlessness include the fact African-Americans have served as a kind of shooting gallery for police of late making it clear that some people are more expendable than others. Lack of legal protection has splintered immigrant families, singled out LGBT people for all kinds of discrimination. Laws against rights have prevented many couples from marrying and are now beginning to target women's control of their/our own bodies. Workers, now desperate for jobs, are losing benefits, pensions job security and any control over the conditions in which they work.

No one person can change these terrible injustices alone. We must have an agenda, a complete program that includes both the environment and its people. Doing so requires a discipline, an inclusion and a unity that we didn't have in the seventies when we tried so hard to change the world. We can and must learn from these mistakes. We may not have a second chance.  

Bending Under the Weight...

A Heavy Burden

Ok, so here's a rundown of news that running us down. The Walmart gender discrimination lawsuit got thrown out by the US Supremes, setting a dangerous precedent for future class action lawsuits that deal with all forms of discrimination.

A 59 year old North Carolina guy robbed a bank, demanding only one dollar because he decided that prison would be the best place to get free health care to have a painful tumor in his chest treated. But because he didn't take much or have a weapon, he might not get the full three years of care that he was counting on.

New York State will vote on same-sex marriage tomorrow and Obama, who will be doing a fundraiser for LGBT folks. The ticket prices for this donation event range from $1,250 to $35,8000. Will he have any words of wisdom, even though his opinion is still "evolving" on the question of full civil rights for queer folks.

Housing prices are dropping, temperatures are rising, storms are brewing, collective bargaining rights are being legislated out of existence, the public sector salaries, benefits and pensions are being raided and drained and we now have a class of permanently unemployed and unemployable ex-workers. Income inequality is becoming an impassable abyss and the U.S. infrastructure is decaying.

The US postal service has stopped paying into retirement for its employees and will no longer have mail delivery on Saturdays. Postal collection boxes have all but disappeared from street corners.

I attended a reading at a local newly opened bookstore. Amazingly, they didn't have any restrooms for the use of those attending. This is the first time I've ever come across an issue like this at a public place in the United States. Even in places like Mexico and Turkey public facilities exist although they might not be all that clean.

Just coming out of the BART station to work this morning all the escalators were out of service and have been all week. I have no idea how disabled patrons are getting to street level.

In the vain hope of finding some solution to these problems, my partner and I went to a moveon.org meeting. We were quickly identified as an enemy element because, along with a few other group members, we were pushing for more concrete, activist solutions, instead of just their standard "house parties." The presenter informed us that to have any kind of a mass mobilization she would have to get permits and insurance very far in advance. I'm old enough to remember organizing situations where LGBT rights were being rescinded state by state and we just showed up and marched. Well mentioning the memory of another type of organizing got us both labeled troublemakers and not "real" Americans. To the moveon leadership."real" Americans don't live in Berkeley and have political sympathies with the "family values" bunch. Nightmares in the face of their attempt to "save the American dream," they even removed our names from their email list.

It's enough to make a sane person throw in the towel.  Americans are depressed, despondent completely resigned to the doom and destruction that awaits us. And our mainstream political parties and organized groups are not helping us out of our deepening rut. Zapata said, "It's better to live on your feet than die on your knees!" I guess that until we can stand up, we'll just keep crawling along.

Identity Issues and Boomer Homophobia...

Lately my queer identity has overpowered the other ways I identify myself. My various identies seem to ebb and flow depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, especially when among reserved folks, I feel terminally abrasive and jewish, in very sex-role circumscribed situations where all faces are male, I feel extremely female and among the economically privileged I feel very working-class. Now, among almost everyone I am beginning to feel really old. Yet, at rare and wonderful moments I feel as though I represent a universal human being, connected in many ways to everyone. It's never a question of one identity trumping the others, it's a far more fluid situation.

Of course, I feel very queer when I am singled out for discrimination. For example, I belonged briefly to a writing group that was overwhelmingly heterosexual. They were, like me, older lefties who were serious about writing. The format of socializing was very different from what I'm used to. The women didn't  reach out to each other very much. The person I got the most support from was a man. It wasn't a come on thing (he was married with kids), he just liked my writing. But I wasn't there to make friends so I let it go. The real reason I wound up leaving the group was that queer issues were not taken seriously. Civil rights issues for other racial and ethnic groups were, rightfully, regarded as an important struggle. But when I wrote a memoir piece about homophobia on the job they viewed it as a story about individual indiosyncracies presenting problems in a specific workplace.

An acquaintance of mine wound up in a nursing home. She was suffering from dementia. Her close friend/ex-lover would visit her there. The staff assumed she was her sister until one day she explained that Nan, in better days, had been her lover. This admission was a terrible mistake. Once the other old women realized that Nan was a lesbian, they became aftaid of her. In her dementia, Nan believed that she was in her own home and would sometimes wander around naked. Her roommate and fellow patients now considered her nudity a sexual come on. Due of the lack of conciousness and support of the staff, Nan had to ultimately find another place to live.

Homophobia, by its very definition, means fear. Will folks of the boomer generation and older ever overcome the way they were raised? As an old dog, I have learned quite a few new tricks so perhaps there is hope that one day we will come together to fight for us all.