"We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty"

From the Times:

International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great religious traditions.

Now major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable.

The article goes on to talk about a number of very interesting points, but one is especailly striking: the opposition of these Israeli religious leaders is being engineered, even literally paraded, by the American leader of an evangelical church that holds its services in a southern California hotel. But the article doesn't even quite give you the whole story when it calls this an internationalization of "the American culture wars over homosexuality," since in fact BOTH sides of the Jerusalem debate are profoundly contingent on developments in US political culture. We might ask why, that is, it makes sense for cities the world over celebrate the anniversary of an a civil disturbance that took place in lower Manhattan.

At the same time, for me at least, no amount of cultural relativism or historicity changes the fact that this is a question about whether or not gay people have full citizenship rights in Jerusalem. Remember, in 1970, when the first gay pride celebrations were organized in the United States, getting a police permit for a gay event was impossible in any city. The LAPD chief compared the idea to sanctioning a "parade of thieves and burglars." Today, when big-city governing regimes have become the locus of by far the greatest level of gay political power, even Republican mayoral candidates in many cities can't afford to skip the annual pride parade.

As for the religious leaders and their "unity"...it's always touching when folks put aside their differences to make sure full citizenship rights don't get into the wrong hands.

Raise gas prices to $4/gallon, and give feeding tubes to poor countries

1) Although I have questions about Thomas Friedman's strong support for nuclear power, which he bases on assessments made by "chairman of Global Business Network, a leading energy and strategy consulting firm," I think Democrat talking heads should be using his Sunday column as bullet points. He makes a really forceful case that the defects in the Bush administration's foreign and domestic policies are tightly interrelated, while drawing attention to the kinds of energy solutions that are wrongly taken off the table by powerful, issue-framing constituencies within both parties - like higher gas taxes, which are opposed by the entire right and by, on the left, the unions and people who sympathize with workers.

The traditional argument that Democrats make is that gas taxes are regressive, that they hurt poor people more than they hurt rich people. That is almost certainly true if you assume nothing else changes when the gas tax goes up - which is a pretty weird assumption. Because it's hard to deny that at least two things would change if the country adopted a $4/gallon floor on gas prices, as Friedman advocates: 1) the energy habits of private citizens, governments, and companies, and 2) the direction of research and investment in high energy-consuming industries. Within ten years, the built environment and consumer practices of our society could look markedly different, so different that it becomes difficult to say who benefits, and in what ways. In other words, it doesn't make sense to say that gas taxes hurt poor children without admitting that cars also hurt poor children.

Right now, I think what the Democrats need to do is sit down with the unions, the environmentalists, the antiwar and peace movements, and the liberal internationalists, and crucially those portions of corporate America with relatively low energy needs and that might have something to gain from cleaner air and water. This kind of very mundane coalition-building is how the New Deal was created and fought for, and it's also how Clinton generated backing for his single-payer health plan - which, yes, failed, but which really almost passed. (Nelson Liechtenstein argues that Clinton's single-payer health plan really did have, e.g., powerful corporate advocates among those old-line companies that already provided generous benefits - and it really might well have worked.) Clearly Clinton is not my model, but let's not forget the one ambitious thing he really did attempt. Obviously the Democrats can't afford to put all their eggs in one basket, but in order to avoid that, they do need to come up with more than one egg. They need to speak for something more than staving off for another year the crumbling of decades-old benefits and job security protections.

And Friedman also rightly ties Bush's failures to his ludicrous - dare one hope, ill-strategized? - fixation on privatizing Social Security. Because, after all, let's remember where Social Security comes from. It comes from this moment when the country faced devastating crises and progressive leaders put forward thoughtful new schemes for solving them. As my profsesor Jim Sparrow likes to point out, we tend to equate Social Security with the New Deal primarily because it's one of the only major New Deal innovations left; most of the others you know about, the WPA and so forth, were just sacrificed for WWII defense spending.

And Friedman's chosen rhetorical device is cute, too: "How will future historians explain it?"

2) I have always been drawn to the genre of "fake news," which is really just satire adapted to a world of mediatization and spectacle. Last year I became very interested in the kind of media-genic political satire that many progressive activists were trying very hard to cultivate (Billionaires for Bush may be the best example). Actually, the two major party organizations were doing the same thing on their own websites (think "Kerry Gas Tax Calculator").

I was recently sent the following long transcript, of slightly uncertain provenance, of an "April Fool's News" program recently aired on a program called "Out FM" on New York's WBAI radio. Despite the remarkably many spelling errors and the length and wordiness, I love this piece. It's full of images that just cry out to be created in styrofoam and cardboard and paint and brought to demonstrations. Since I couldn't find the text on the web, I forwarded it to Queer to the Left and I'm pasting in the whole thing:

In an an act of protest against the military's don't ask, don't tell policy of lesbian, gay, and bisexual exclusion, Private Sponge Bob Square Pants and (third) Leutenent Tinky Winky Teletubby held up Pride banners and openly booed Dick Cheney during his visit to "Massacres R Us" recruitment center in Waukashau, Wisconsin yesterday. Private Square Pants spoke from behind the 8 foot sound proof wall and under the 2 inch mesh netting surrounded by a radioactive force field of the heavily surveilled free speech zone set up 50 miles away from the recruitment center for the safety and security of called activists to engage in their constitutional right to abuse their freedom by incessantly wailing unappreciatively about the best nation on earth. Citing the 200 million dollars spent to expel 10,000 soldiers since Clinton's policy was implemented 10 years ago, Private Square Pants grew teary eyed as he told his own story: "When the recruiters came to my beloved deep sea town of bikini bottom, yes, I am a proud bottom, it was then that I knew I could find my place. Employee of the month at the Crusty Crab was not enough. I wanted more." The square panted sea sponge then explained how he was outed by a taped conversation Ms. Linda Tripp conducted with his friend Gary the snail outside of Private Square Pants' Pineapple home. According to embedded reporters, he was subsequently given a dishonorable discharge after a brief hearing by a completely fair and impartial military tribunal in an undisclosed compound near Bagdad. "But I uphold my honor," he proclaimed, hitching up his square fatigues as Officer Tinky Winky Teletuby, another don't ask don't tell casualty, took his magic red Marry Poppins handbag and pulled out an M-16 draped in a pride flag. "We will win this fight of gay liberation," the pore bearing bottom dwelling creature yelled, holding up the assault weapon of pride with his arm around the giant, purple, out and proud techno-baby. "And we will win the right to sacrifice our gay lives as we wreak terror, torture and mayhem to liberate the forever grateful Iraqi people!" A bill to repeal the don't ask don't tell policy is currently in the house. Cheney was unavailable for comment, apparently in an undisclosed location undisclosed to himself.

In his first action as newly appointed president of the World Bank, Project for a New American Century's Paul Wolfowitz answered to activist groups such as "Drop the Dept" when they claimed at a press conference that unpayable depts from loans to corrupt dictators as well as so called solutions of dept repayment such as programs of forced privatization, cyphen over half of the wealth out of developing nations, maintaining an oppresive cycle that keeps their citizenry severely impoverished and in the control of wealthier nations. In response to such accusations, Wolfowitz offered to use his new control of global wealth to open his bleeding heart by handing out pre-emptive unilateral attacks of charity. In a profitic demonstration of his pro-life intentions, Wolfowitz offered a generous life sustaining gift of one free kit containing one bible and one feeding tube for each and every global citizen who, due to massive depts, are denied food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and other basic necessities of life.

After the heroic "feeding tubes for all" act was carried out to ensure the sanctity of life for those less fortunate, Wolfowitz announced his generous new plan to provide dept relief while at the same time ridding the world of evil. In the faith based "Aid the Rightous and Pios" program, all deptors of good Christian countries, i.e. peoples of real religions, will enjoy a 10% cut in their monthly payments for five years. The gift surplus will be invested in the war on terror via god fearing corporations such as Halliburton, GE, Boeing, and Bechtel. All non-christian evil-doer nations who for some unknown reason can't seem to get it together to keep up with their loan payments will be severely punished with eternal penalty fines of evil. Nations may purchase salvation from evil status with favorable UN votes authorizing unilateral invasions by the US, the use of their torture facilities for outsourcing, and conversion to christianity.

All nation applicants to the "aid the rightous and pios" program will be reviewed by Pope John Paul the second, whose recent book, "Memory and Identity," clarifies evil with prime examples such as abortion and communism. As a staunch spokesperson and advocate of human rights, the Pope commented on the same-sex marriage movement when he ACTUALLY referred to it as quote "part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man."

Human Rights Campaign responded to the Pope's declaration of such clear and unquestionable distinctions between good and evil with an add campaign featuring James Earl Jones in Darth Vador garb proclaiming life is good on the dark side, especially for those who are willing and able to traditionally marry. HRC spokesperson I.M. Cronie cites the evil they embrace with support for Pfizer, a price gouging multi-billion dollar drug company who refuses to make life saving HIV medications affordable to the vast majority who need them, and HRC's proposed endorsement of Bush's social security plan in exchange for marginal same sex marriage rights that will benefit mostly those of middle and upper class. When questioned about HRC ignoring the needs of the majority in the LGBT community, Jones breathed heavily, grasped his light saber, referred vaguely to the force, and laughed maniacly.

Meanwhile, on the dark side, the force is also with newly appointed FCC chair Kevin Martin, who in an historical leap forward in gay and lesbian liberation, signed a joint contract with Human Rights Campaign and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, which will provide an official decency stamp for any TV or radio content containing same-sex as well as opposite sex marriage. HRC spokesperson I.M. Cronie applauded this milestone of inclusion into morality for gay and lesbian married couples. For the safety, security and sanctity of the one and only way to live decently, heretics who air content containing healthy depictions of non-conventional relationships, non-nuclear families, transgender existence, black empowerment, pacifism, civil disobedience, alternative scenes, or intentional communities of any type other than cults of militant christianity will be fined heavily, permenentantly banned from the free airwaves, and condemned to eternal damnation. Activist judges who attempt to uphold so called constitutional rights and thus aid and abet sabateurs of the free media by defending so called free expression of such unspeakable hedonism and debauchary, will be severely discredited, humiliated, and legally tortured by the decency tribunal.

And lastly, this just in: the gay agenda is still missing.

This is Peter Jonas with April Fools News.
www.outfm.org (ask them to post the audio files? it looks like a pretty laid-back operation)

Finally, a cute bumper sticker, if not always accurate in the age of alternative reproductive technologies, from a company called CarryABigSticker.com:

san francisco, home of the queer cutting-edge

Capitalism is so gay



end marriage



end marriage
Posted by Hello

they really said shit like that?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the person whose wireless connection I'm using. It was very kind of you to position your router within reach of the front half of Boost Coffee Shop. Perhaps you live across the street. In any case, thanks.

This morning I went to a garage sale on my block and found a textbook called Race Relations: Current Perspectives, published in 1973. The text on the back cover begins, "This reader concentrates on analysis of the black experience in American society and includes reports by black social scientists."

Is American democracy in a persistent vegetative state?

"we do not doubt that she's in a persistent vegetative state"
---lawyer for terri schiavo's parents in a court document, 2000

"The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling"
---David Wilkins, University of Minnesota Department of American Indian Studies

In the hours after the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, President Bill Clinton publicly expressed his condolences and followed up a few days later with a radio address in which he proposed new gun control measures and school safety projects.
---Washington Post, Friday paper

Congress tackles health care

In case you missed it, I'll pass along Jon Stewart's take on the Terri Schiavo law. He said that for those of you wondering how sick you have to be for Congress to pull itself together and do something about it, you have your answer. That diabetes and asthma your kid has? [expletive] 'em.

And he managed to work in the fact that Terri Schiavo's case did what the tsunami couldn't: it roused him to interrupt his vacation in Crawford.

always the glamorous thing

"I was always the glamorous thing, on and off stage," Sylvester said. "I really believed for a certain time that I was Josephine Baker. In my attitude, in my everything, I was Josephine Baker. I'd go out with a headdress and a sort of silly costume, and men would open and close doors for me, light my cigarettes. I wouldn't get out of a car until someone opened the door for me."

- Joshua Gamson, The Fabulous Sylvester, p. 58

If this State has decided not to allow same-sex couples to marry, it might be quite reasonable to ameliorate some of their practical concerns in such areas as taxation, health care, inheritance and the like. Such reasonableness does not substitute for the need to find a rational basis for denying same-sex marriage in the first place....

- SF County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer

The ways of my people

Do straight bars ever have signs like this one? I took this the other day at T's, where Brian took me to a tsunami fundraiser. T's does get credit for being the world's only even approximately half-gay, half-lesbian bar.

So it wasn't the white supremacists who killed Judge Lefkow's family. The other day I heard someone say it probably wasn't the white supremacists because on Law & Order it never would be (which made me feel all superior).

I'm going to San Francisco tomorrow! Woo hoo!

watch offending episode of "postcards from buster"

this is being shown ONLY through this weekend:
http://buster.familypride.org

(if you approve of the episode, you are being asked to call the department
of education to say so)

these signs were in andersonville shop windows today

in solidarity with judge lefkow and her family. it's not often that i feel genuinely touched by something red, white, and blue.
Posted by Hello

Coming soon: the Condi Effect. Send in your ideas!

Condoleezza Rice is nothing if not interesting, and I'd like to write a paper aobut her, I think. She is in some sense an embodiment of the Republicans' transformation. The Republicans have turned race and class into a "narrative," a "life story" that wraps itself around one. Honestly, the fact that Bush not only appointed the first Black Secretary of State, but he was succeeded by another African American and what's more a black woman, is historically significant, even if progressives are reluctant to acknowledge it (or they understand what's deeply problematic about it). "Compelling stories" are the fundamental insight between this administration - and if you tell a compelling enough story, it seems, you can get away with anything. No?

A slew of ideas...In my backyard; Reality TV's Society; Territorialization; "Partner" Rumors, Civil Unions/Expatriate Politics

My goodness....Many ideas and current affairs to write about. It's not every week that the execution-style murder of a federal judge's family takes place in one's neighborhood. On Tuesday morning I heard something on the radio about a judge's family being killed; around dusk my neighbor Brian stopped by and mentioned that the crime had taken place in the neighborhood and he thought maybe even on our block. I went online to read more about the story, which seemed ghoulish at first, then devastatingly sad, then an outrageous assault on a just society. By now, the killings and the investigation have been the top story in the local news every night for a solid week, people I talk to in other parts of the country have heard reports about them. The media truly does shape our experience. I have a tendency to resist forceful claims for the power of "the media," who I think are asked to do too much explanatory work, but it IS really powerful in specific, path-dependent kinds of ways. I had a conversation with Justin recently about what he called a kind of nexus between public school districts and the local TV news crews in constructing municipal-level public spheres. Later today, with Gerard and Natalie, I had a conversation about IMing being a form of social interaction uniquely well-suited to the problems of the pre-teen and teenager living in the suburbs, unable to get around except by car, unable to drive herself yet, in those hours from the late afternoon until bedtime.

Just now, I read that police were hopeful that Sunday's "America's Most Wanted," which would profile the Lefkow case, would manage to generate a crucial tip from a viewer, as the show has supposedly done many times in the past.

It has occurred to me, when I've channel-surfed through an extreme makevoer show, that really the next step would be for there to be reality shows as mechanisms for distributing health insurance and other highly valued but scarce goods and services fairly. The point of the reality show is to insert a game of chance into some stage, moment, problem, or dilemma of our lives that ordinarily involves a great deal of ordinary personal struggle and difficulty. There is a historian named Jackson Lears who likes to write about games of chance, and I think reality shows are actually a good example of the kind of thing he means.

Every day for the last week, from the afternoon rush hour until late at night, there have been TV trucks parked along Foster Avenue with those peculiar TV reporter antennas that accompany a scene marked off as newsworthy. For the first two days, the entire block of Lakewood Avenue, plus the alley running behind the Lefkows' house, were completely cordoned off by an unbelievable number of police cars. The sheer volume and pace of the unfolding law enforcement response was quite remarkable. They really don't have a lot to go on - basically some cigarette butts and one fingerprint - but they're apparently collecting security camera footage from convenience and liquor stores for many blocks in every direction, in the hope that some clue might be yielded.



Speaking of official responses, a couple of regular readers of the blog have written in to introduce themselves to me, and have let me know about a legislative effort to create civil unions in Connecticut, the legal case now facing the Washington State Supreme Court, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision to hear a challenge to the early 20th-century law that Governor Romney has been using in order to block the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples who do not reside or "intend to reside" in Massachusetts. The use of this law has seemingly been used to prevent Massachusetts from becoming a "gay marriage mill" for the rest of the country, as (according to Hendrik Hartog's study of 19th-century marriage) a succession of states served in turn as "divorce mills" for the rest of the country, attracting those who wanted out of the marriage contract and had no other way to get out of it than to move to another state.

It's striking how central the politics of states' rights are to the working out of the marriage issue - that both sides of the emerging marriage debate, that is, seem to believe that their "section," if you will, is suffering a truly unjust fate at the hands of the other. Those of us who are pleased to live in the five or six states with a reasonably plausible shot at seeing both courtroom and legislative progress on the marriage issue in the coming years feel that the federal Defense of Marriage Act infringes on our right to decide marriage policies locally and have them awarded "full faith and credit" by the other states as the Constitution seems to demand. (Except, it turns out, "full faith and credit" has never been interpreted as extending to the domain of marriage.) And certainly the red-staters think that other states (MA) and even other countries that a number of them have been writing letters to (Canada)...these places are vastly overstepping their own boundaries by offending their own strongly-held beliefs about the depth of Jesus' opposition to same-sex marriage.

Recently two very good gay male friends of mine have told each me that he and his boyfriend have decided to become serious, perhaps to be partners rather than simply boyfriends, and perhaps even thinking about getting married. It's pretty nutty-sounding, on one level, and yet pleasurable to hear just how nonchalantly so many gay people seem to have become about their confidence that they will win the right to marry.

Why is marriage better than civil unions? I had an argument with Gerard tonight about gay marriage and why we shouldn't be pushing for civil unions that include "all the rights" of marriage. I told him that the countries that have civil unions like Britain France and Belgium, marriage isn't used as a locus for the allocation and distribution of resources, such as corporate health insurance policies and federal Social Security payments, in the way that it is in the United States. That is, in those western European social democracies, where people actually have social rights and a welfare state, no one faces the problem of gaining or losing access to health insurance based on the (non)recognition of one's relationship. In this country, "the benefits" of marriage are lodged in so many nooks and crannies of corporate, university, and agency policies regarding employment, health care, birth, death, retirement, medical decision-making, liability, and so on; the people who endlessly tell you that married people are conferred 847 separate rights in the U.S. code are, in a certain sense, very right. (I figured that I would automatically win the argument with Gerard if I could manage to talk about how much better western Europe is.)

A note to Ryan: I read your email and I'll write back very soon, probably tomorrow. Thanks!

Celebrities who stay close

Okay, I just had to link to PFLAG's new campaign, stayclose.org, featuring JFB and cousin. Apparently these posters are in the New York subway. I think it's especially cool that they chose to use this "Ben fucking Jason" shot. You can read about how close they are, too.

Judge's family murdered

Just a couple blocks blocks from my apartment, a distinguished federal judge came home last night and found her husband and mother murdered:

In a discussion on a white nationalist Web site in 2003, members had posted the Lefkows' home address. Anti-Defamation League official Mark Pitcavage said another white supremacist's short-wave radio show last April had discussed killing the judge.

Investigators looking for a motive for the slayings searched for clues from the judge's professional life, including her role presiding over cases involving Hale and others.

Another paper reported that "about a dozen judges from the courthouse requested additional security Tuesday."

On another front, I was pleased by Justice Kennedy's ruling in Roper v. Simmons, finding the execution of juvenile offenders to be unconstitutional, and intrigued that Kennedy again placed so much emphasis on international opinion (as he did in Lawrence). To Justice Scalia, that a mere five members of the Supreme Court "and like-minded foreigners" could dictate such an interpretation is a "mockery" of our very constitutional system.

A new month

"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." - Hunter S. Thompson

Welcome to National Poetry Month, National Women's History Month, and National Kidney Month.

In their March/April issue, the magazine formerly known as the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review published three essays about the election (down from a Jan/Feb issue understandably almost totally devoted to how much America hates us). This month, the election has been rehashed by NGLTF's Creating Change conference director Sue Hyde; "San Francisco radical queer activist organization" Gay Shame founder and Edmund White "I have seen the future and it is [your book]" blurb recipient Matt Bernstein Sycamore; and me. My essay comes in parts 1 2 3 and 4.

Also, it has been brought to my attention that an SF Weekly columnist cited my San Francisco persona "Mary Chicago", which was invented essentially for the sole purpose of springing from jail my friend who was at the time putting me up. I figured, hey, somebody gives you a place to crash in America's most expensive city, the least you can do is try to get him out of jail. He had been taken into custody for - of all things - protesting the inclusion in the Gay Pride Parade of what Scribner's Encyclopedia of GLBT History of America called "moderate heterosexual mayoral candidate" (and the Weekly called longtime Gay Shame "bogeyman") Gavin Newsom. Sigh.

Oh: I passed my orals!


P.S. Madison possibly-interested-in-queer-history commentator: please do do me the kindness of dropping me an email, so I can know at least a little bit more about you. Yes. You may reach me at timsw at uchicago, et cetera.

P.P.S. Matt Bernstein Sycamore simply wouldn't stop talking about me in his little essay. Does he have a secret crush on me?