(Printed in Gay City News, August 6, 2004)
Vigil calls NYPD to task on anti-gay and race-based discrimination
If the hate-filled murder of Rodney Velasquez shocked the Bronx LGBT community in 2002, the wound has since been deepened by police inaction on the case, recounts Rodney’s mother, Haydee Galloza. After the initial suspect was cleared, police essentially closed the file. Now, she says, they don’t even respond to her queries.
Speaking to a small crowd gathered for an anniversary vigil near the Bronx apartment where Galloza found her son mutilated amid anti-gay scrawlings, she described police response as well as local news coverage of the murder: “They said ‘oh, a gay was stabbed, a gay was killed.’ He wasn’t ‘a gay’, he was a beautiful human being, he was my son. All I dream about is getting to the bottom of this.”
6/06/2007
80th birthday of Bob Kohler, queer activist extraordinaire
(Press release on behalf of all Bob's friends, from May 17, 2006)
BOB KOHLER, GAY ACTIVIST & FATHER FIGURE TO GENERATIONS OF QUEER STRUGGLE, TURNS 80.
New York – The NYC queer community celebrates Bob Kohler’s 80th birthday today. Bob has been an activist on behalf of gay rights, transsexual rights, queer youth and people with HIV/AIDS since those movements were born, beginning more than 40 years ago. In his career as a talent agent, Bob also broke barriers of racism in the theater and music industries.
Born in Queens, NY in 1926, Bob joined the Navy, served in the South Pacific where he “left a kidney behind.” After WWII, he worked in television before launching a talent agency in Hell’s Kitchen. Bob was among the first agents to represent non-famous Black artists and hold classes for Black performers who – since agents would not represent them – lacked audition experience. Although Bob tells stories of theater circles, A-list parties and witnessing celebrities’ darker pre-fame moments, he says “don’t make me out to be some big-shot. I was an independent agent who worked my ass off.”
To his younger friends Bob recounts stories of a queer world in another era: how he and his boyfriend Ed bought a fixer-upper in Amagansett in what became a gay enclave; of the show-biz lesbians who settled nearby Bridgehampton; about their eventual move to Cherry Grove and the Pines in Fire Island and the class wars that defined relations between the two gay settlements. Of the Hamptons days Bob says, “we were gay when it wasn’t cool to be gay, and I like to think that we did make a few openings here and there. We never closeted ourselves.”
On the second night of the Stonewall riots in 1969, Bob and other West Village community members called the first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front, which Bob (and historians) credit with “establishing radicalism in the New York gay community.” He went on to work with direct action and advocacy groups including ACT UP, Sex Panic!, The Neutral Zone, Fed Up Queers, the NYC AIDS Housing Network, Irish Queers, animal rights groups and others. Throughout his work, Bob was a father figure to activists and street kids, including Sylvia Rivera, who herself grew up to be a parent and mentor to queer youth.
In the late 1970s Bob became manager of the Club Baths. He fought the closure of bathhouses as a response to AIDS in the 1980s, arguing that they were controlled environments with condoms, soap and water and information – and that many bathhouses were willing to take on a community organizing role to stop the spread of HIV.
But homophobia and panic prevailed against the bathhouses, so Bob opened The Loft, a retail store with shops on Christopher Street and on Fire Island. He used the wild popularity of the shop to support independent designers like Patricia Field as they started out; and to leverage recognition of the queer community by marketers like Calvin Klein who pulled in enormous amounts of money from queers but failed, at times, to stand up for them.
In 1999 Bob helped form Fed Up Queers, a direct action cell that challenged the rise of right-wing gays groups, discriminatory AIDS policies and Mayor Giuliani’s targeting of queers, people with HIV/AIDS, people on welfare, low-income people and people of color, among other issues. In 2001, when the City of New York began illegally denying emergency housing to homeless people with AIDS, Bob became the core volunteer in an activist operation to pressure the city. Bob, who was 75 at the time, stood outside the housing agency for hours each day for a year, supporting PWAs and calling on politicians and news media. His work formed the basis of a lawsuit that forced the City into compliance with housing assistance laws hard-won by AIDS activists in the 1990s.
Most recently, Bob has mentored the queer youth of FIERCE! in their struggles against displacement, police harassment and attacks by residents of the gentrified, increasingly heterosexual West Village.
Thanks for everything and happy birthday, Bob!
###
BOB KOHLER, GAY ACTIVIST & FATHER FIGURE TO GENERATIONS OF QUEER STRUGGLE, TURNS 80.
New York – The NYC queer community celebrates Bob Kohler’s 80th birthday today. Bob has been an activist on behalf of gay rights, transsexual rights, queer youth and people with HIV/AIDS since those movements were born, beginning more than 40 years ago. In his career as a talent agent, Bob also broke barriers of racism in the theater and music industries.
Born in Queens, NY in 1926, Bob joined the Navy, served in the South Pacific where he “left a kidney behind.” After WWII, he worked in television before launching a talent agency in Hell’s Kitchen. Bob was among the first agents to represent non-famous Black artists and hold classes for Black performers who – since agents would not represent them – lacked audition experience. Although Bob tells stories of theater circles, A-list parties and witnessing celebrities’ darker pre-fame moments, he says “don’t make me out to be some big-shot. I was an independent agent who worked my ass off.”
To his younger friends Bob recounts stories of a queer world in another era: how he and his boyfriend Ed bought a fixer-upper in Amagansett in what became a gay enclave; of the show-biz lesbians who settled nearby Bridgehampton; about their eventual move to Cherry Grove and the Pines in Fire Island and the class wars that defined relations between the two gay settlements. Of the Hamptons days Bob says, “we were gay when it wasn’t cool to be gay, and I like to think that we did make a few openings here and there. We never closeted ourselves.”
On the second night of the Stonewall riots in 1969, Bob and other West Village community members called the first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front, which Bob (and historians) credit with “establishing radicalism in the New York gay community.” He went on to work with direct action and advocacy groups including ACT UP, Sex Panic!, The Neutral Zone, Fed Up Queers, the NYC AIDS Housing Network, Irish Queers, animal rights groups and others. Throughout his work, Bob was a father figure to activists and street kids, including Sylvia Rivera, who herself grew up to be a parent and mentor to queer youth.
In the late 1970s Bob became manager of the Club Baths. He fought the closure of bathhouses as a response to AIDS in the 1980s, arguing that they were controlled environments with condoms, soap and water and information – and that many bathhouses were willing to take on a community organizing role to stop the spread of HIV.
But homophobia and panic prevailed against the bathhouses, so Bob opened The Loft, a retail store with shops on Christopher Street and on Fire Island. He used the wild popularity of the shop to support independent designers like Patricia Field as they started out; and to leverage recognition of the queer community by marketers like Calvin Klein who pulled in enormous amounts of money from queers but failed, at times, to stand up for them.
In 1999 Bob helped form Fed Up Queers, a direct action cell that challenged the rise of right-wing gays groups, discriminatory AIDS policies and Mayor Giuliani’s targeting of queers, people with HIV/AIDS, people on welfare, low-income people and people of color, among other issues. In 2001, when the City of New York began illegally denying emergency housing to homeless people with AIDS, Bob became the core volunteer in an activist operation to pressure the city. Bob, who was 75 at the time, stood outside the housing agency for hours each day for a year, supporting PWAs and calling on politicians and news media. His work formed the basis of a lawsuit that forced the City into compliance with housing assistance laws hard-won by AIDS activists in the 1990s.
Most recently, Bob has mentored the queer youth of FIERCE! in their struggles against displacement, police harassment and attacks by residents of the gentrified, increasingly heterosexual West Village.
Thanks for everything and happy birthday, Bob!
###
Peaceful protest: why we need it, and why police must help it happen.
(Maybe never published? From May 2003.)
At three New York protests in the last two weeks, police used violence against protesters lying stock-still in the street; arrested onlookers who were doing nothing illegal; told arrestees they were being singled out for special [bad] treatment because of their political message; and detained them for longer than the legally-permitted 24 hours. In Oakland, police fired thick wooden bullets into a peaceful anti-war crowd, breaking skin and in some cases, breaking bones. New Yorkers wonder if we’re next.
Why would police repress dissent? Here’s a thought: $80 billion dollars will line the pockets of American companies supplying materials for the first three months of war. Billions more will be awarded in “rebuilding” contracts to powerful American companies. If Americans thought they were supporting a market rather than a liberation mission, might they be less enthusiastic about the war and those who led us into it? Protesters destabilize the war consensus. So label protesters ‘fringe,’ make dissent seem out there’ – and presto, a million protesters become an irrelevant focus group.
There’s more, though. Unless NYPD Commissioner Kelly ordered police to drag, kick and scream at protesters, cops have also been taking personal initiative in violence. They’re not getting any of that $80 billion, so what do they care? Perhaps it goes along with war-themed Easter baskets, now available at a store near you, which peddle toy machine guns next to chocolate eggs. Maybe war – the vision of Americans kicking the ass of the infidel – gets us into the authoritarian mood. We are enforcers. We don’t wait for attack, we’ll preempt you. You didn’t follow instructions? Watch out, now we’re mad. And he who has the firepower, or the handcuffs, rules the battlefield.
But the Constitution says otherwise. Police are simply not permitted to enforce political sentiment as law. They are not permitted to use their discretion in processing arrestees to “teach a lesson.” The Constitution forbids chilling of dissent. In spite of the Constitution, since 9/11 we have teetered between the idea of giving up our civil rights in the hope of protecting ourselves, and recognizing the sacred value of the rights America theoretically stands for. So it’s ironic – or maybe just awful – that as war purports to be spreading American freedom, American freedom is lost.
The injudiciousness of punitive policing goes far deeper even than legal concerns, to the core of the nation and our chances of ever recovering from war. The ability to dissent peacefully – without risking life and limb to do so – is the cornerstone of a peaceable society. When we can’t dissent peacefully, we will see violence. History tells us as much.
Who are these protesters, anyway? The bulk of anti-war protesters, contrary to the idea that only students take to the streets, are working adults who have been awakened by this crisis. They are people who take off of work, get a babysitter or dogwalker to take over for a day, and stand in the street for some fairly fundamental principles: among them, that we should not perpetrate violence against those who have not attacked, and that we should not be engaged in conquest. These are Americans, and although they come out to protest, they go back home to their lives. They are not prepared to graduate from peaceful protest to violence – although I know I couldn’t be the only one who feels, as I watch a cop kick a protester lying still on the ground, that I’d like to return the favor.
But in any movement are those who can be pushed to violence – especially as America changes in ways that feel like the end of democracy, and when dissenters find no avenue of non-violent resistance left open. When those who would rather continue peaceful protest can longer afford to venture into the street, if just being near a demonstration can get them arrested or hurt, resistance is left to those who are willing to risk violence.
That’s what American activist Rachel Corrie was trying to prevent when an Israeli army bulldozer ran her over in Gaza: not just the demolition of a civilian house, but the death of peaceful methods in a place where freedom to dissent is simply curtailed. It’s what Tom Hurdell, guiding children away from Israeli army snipers, was doing when an Israeli patrol shot him in the head in Rafah today. Rachel, Tom and their colleagues sought to preserve a place for non-violence by allowing protests to happen – with the protection of their privileged, non-Palestinian bodies – where nobody got killed. So that the next time Palestinian organizers planned a non-violent demonstration to give vent to frustrations which otherwise come out in suicide bombings, people could say “maybe I can come, since we survived the last one.” But what happens to dissent when it’s pushed underground? Does it disappear? Ask a Palestinian – or an Israeli.
The loss of freedoms threatens more than our individual right to go about our lives. It threatens our ability to dissent peacefully, to have major conversations about the future of our country and the world in public space. These conversations are the underpinnings of a non-violent society. And they are eroded with every wooden bullet, every false arrest, every police officer who tries to equate peaceful civil disobedience with violence, as if America owed nothing to activists who sat stubbornly in the street – labor organizers demanding an 8-hour day, Freedom Riders insisting on driving through a segregated town, AIDS activists demanding research be done on women and people of color – in pursuit of justice. The best way, the only way, to keep protest non-violent is to allow it. But perhaps some think it’s more useful, for the sake of that $80 billion and the surge of adrenaline our boys get when they lay into a crowd, to bring the war home.
At three New York protests in the last two weeks, police used violence against protesters lying stock-still in the street; arrested onlookers who were doing nothing illegal; told arrestees they were being singled out for special [bad] treatment because of their political message; and detained them for longer than the legally-permitted 24 hours. In Oakland, police fired thick wooden bullets into a peaceful anti-war crowd, breaking skin and in some cases, breaking bones. New Yorkers wonder if we’re next.
Why would police repress dissent? Here’s a thought: $80 billion dollars will line the pockets of American companies supplying materials for the first three months of war. Billions more will be awarded in “rebuilding” contracts to powerful American companies. If Americans thought they were supporting a market rather than a liberation mission, might they be less enthusiastic about the war and those who led us into it? Protesters destabilize the war consensus. So label protesters ‘fringe,’ make dissent seem out there’ – and presto, a million protesters become an irrelevant focus group.
There’s more, though. Unless NYPD Commissioner Kelly ordered police to drag, kick and scream at protesters, cops have also been taking personal initiative in violence. They’re not getting any of that $80 billion, so what do they care? Perhaps it goes along with war-themed Easter baskets, now available at a store near you, which peddle toy machine guns next to chocolate eggs. Maybe war – the vision of Americans kicking the ass of the infidel – gets us into the authoritarian mood. We are enforcers. We don’t wait for attack, we’ll preempt you. You didn’t follow instructions? Watch out, now we’re mad. And he who has the firepower, or the handcuffs, rules the battlefield.
But the Constitution says otherwise. Police are simply not permitted to enforce political sentiment as law. They are not permitted to use their discretion in processing arrestees to “teach a lesson.” The Constitution forbids chilling of dissent. In spite of the Constitution, since 9/11 we have teetered between the idea of giving up our civil rights in the hope of protecting ourselves, and recognizing the sacred value of the rights America theoretically stands for. So it’s ironic – or maybe just awful – that as war purports to be spreading American freedom, American freedom is lost.
The injudiciousness of punitive policing goes far deeper even than legal concerns, to the core of the nation and our chances of ever recovering from war. The ability to dissent peacefully – without risking life and limb to do so – is the cornerstone of a peaceable society. When we can’t dissent peacefully, we will see violence. History tells us as much.
Who are these protesters, anyway? The bulk of anti-war protesters, contrary to the idea that only students take to the streets, are working adults who have been awakened by this crisis. They are people who take off of work, get a babysitter or dogwalker to take over for a day, and stand in the street for some fairly fundamental principles: among them, that we should not perpetrate violence against those who have not attacked, and that we should not be engaged in conquest. These are Americans, and although they come out to protest, they go back home to their lives. They are not prepared to graduate from peaceful protest to violence – although I know I couldn’t be the only one who feels, as I watch a cop kick a protester lying still on the ground, that I’d like to return the favor.
But in any movement are those who can be pushed to violence – especially as America changes in ways that feel like the end of democracy, and when dissenters find no avenue of non-violent resistance left open. When those who would rather continue peaceful protest can longer afford to venture into the street, if just being near a demonstration can get them arrested or hurt, resistance is left to those who are willing to risk violence.
That’s what American activist Rachel Corrie was trying to prevent when an Israeli army bulldozer ran her over in Gaza: not just the demolition of a civilian house, but the death of peaceful methods in a place where freedom to dissent is simply curtailed. It’s what Tom Hurdell, guiding children away from Israeli army snipers, was doing when an Israeli patrol shot him in the head in Rafah today. Rachel, Tom and their colleagues sought to preserve a place for non-violence by allowing protests to happen – with the protection of their privileged, non-Palestinian bodies – where nobody got killed. So that the next time Palestinian organizers planned a non-violent demonstration to give vent to frustrations which otherwise come out in suicide bombings, people could say “maybe I can come, since we survived the last one.” But what happens to dissent when it’s pushed underground? Does it disappear? Ask a Palestinian – or an Israeli.
The loss of freedoms threatens more than our individual right to go about our lives. It threatens our ability to dissent peacefully, to have major conversations about the future of our country and the world in public space. These conversations are the underpinnings of a non-violent society. And they are eroded with every wooden bullet, every false arrest, every police officer who tries to equate peaceful civil disobedience with violence, as if America owed nothing to activists who sat stubbornly in the street – labor organizers demanding an 8-hour day, Freedom Riders insisting on driving through a segregated town, AIDS activists demanding research be done on women and people of color – in pursuit of justice. The best way, the only way, to keep protest non-violent is to allow it. But perhaps some think it’s more useful, for the sake of that $80 billion and the surge of adrenaline our boys get when they lay into a crowd, to bring the war home.
Tying the Constution in knots: DA turns due process against free speech
(I don't think this was ever published. It's a follow-up to the previous post, "Ready, Set, Repress: NYPD sets out to edit the Constitution.")
Having been arrested in 2003 while protesting the INS’ terrifying “registration” and detention of Arab and Muslim immigrants, my co-defendants and I had our lucky thirteenth court appearance just before the election. The criminal charges slapped on the 83 arrestees in our case – mostly young people of color engaging in a sit-down demonstration for the first time – were so inordinately high that most were forced to plead guilty on the spot to lesser charges, rather than risk fighting. Some whom the District Attorney labeled “chronic protesters” had been flatly offered 5-10 days jail time, no plea. But, certain that we’d committed no crime by demonstrating, we determined to fight.
The charges were bunk – that we prevented government employees from getting to work, for example, while video showed INS workers passing freely in and out of the building. We itched for our day in court. But after a year and a half in which the DA was “not ready” to try us, the speedy trial clock ran out and our cases were simply dismissed.
We might have felt lucky: beleaguered dissenters suddenly free to go, just in time for the election when we’d be freeing ourselves in a bigger way from the president who managed to make dissent a crime against democracy. But we were not.
We’d been had. Really, who could swallow the idea that the DA forgot to prepare for court? Strategically using due process as a weapon, the DA managed to punish us and curtail our speech for seventeen months, without ever going near a jury.
Under the cloak of due process, police can arrest anyone as long as they claim a reason, even if it’s disproven later. Arrestees can be saddled with whatever charges the DA likes; he isn’t bound by reasonableness. He can make wild charges about intent: for example, that protesters just want to snarl city traffic, not call attention to New York’s crises of education, housing, health care etc. – a rationale the City often asserts when prosecuting civil disobedience. He can charge peaceful protesters as criminals.
The DA then has the discretion to offer a plea bargain or take the case to court. In protest cases, plea-bargaining has come to mean that the arrestee may plead guilty to something slightly less damaging than the DA’s original smorgasbord of misdemeanors. Taking the case to a judge often means being dragged into court repeatedly until the speedy trial clock expires, which can take more than a year. The DA can do this even if he has no intention of actually prosecuting the case; the time is his to waste, and he allows many cases simply to time out But while the case is open, the defendant must avoid political dissent, because protesting is justification for arrest these days. And if they’re rearrested during their case, the charges get still higher and the cycle escalates.
Worse, although the DA rarely bothers to substantiate anti-protester allegations at trial, he’s been using a person’s history of arrest – whether or not they were found guilty – to try to jail them. In the case of demonstrators arrested last year protesting the war on Iraq and the US role in occupying Palestine, the DA secretly reopened sealed and dismissed cases, then cited those arrests when recommending jail sentences for the defendants. If his backroom tactics are upheld in court, the case will become precedent.
Prosecutors’ abuse of discretion in political cases is as old as the hills, and hard to challenge. But in New York City, it’s surrounded now by new, chartable practices that make it more obvious. More than any time in the last two decades, police break up demonstrations by making arrests regardless of whether a law has been broken. The DA applies criminal charges to political arrestees whose acts would once have been considered a simple code violation. To do this, the city dredged up a statute that it uses almost exclusively against dissenters, “Obstructing Governmental Administration;” there was no misdemeanor charge previously in use that characterized peaceful protest as a crime. (The practice is spreading – in upstate NY, protesters were charged with OGA for the first time on Election Day.) And the DA’s dogged pursuit of the right to use past arrests as a stand-in for a criminal record makes the assault on dissent excruciatingly clear.
“In point of fact,” says Kendall Thomas, Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University, “we’ve seen these abuses not only by New York City government, but by federal government: shadowing protesters, infiltrating community-based groups over issues from war to the Patriot Act. Though not unprecedented, they are perhaps more shocking in view of that fact that many people are engaged in activism for the first time, or believed that the excesses of past periods were no longer a problem.”
In the shadow of September 11th and war, millions have been moved to dissent, finding politics to be a life-and-death matter. But the veneer of democracy finally cracked last week, when just over half the nation voted that the other half should be silenced entirely.
Meanwhile attacks continue, on activists and on the rights they defend. We served the DA’s seventeen-month sentence of silence, but the INS detainees still wait in jail without lawyers. As the country does violence to democracy, dissent grows. Will dissenters be faced each time we speak with the choice of pleading down to crimes we haven’t committed, or signing up to be silenced by the DA’s case-dragging method? How long will it take for the city to run all of us through the local mill and finally strip us of our right to speak out on national issues? Will the task be done before it’s time to choose the next president? What about a new mayor?
Having been arrested in 2003 while protesting the INS’ terrifying “registration” and detention of Arab and Muslim immigrants, my co-defendants and I had our lucky thirteenth court appearance just before the election. The criminal charges slapped on the 83 arrestees in our case – mostly young people of color engaging in a sit-down demonstration for the first time – were so inordinately high that most were forced to plead guilty on the spot to lesser charges, rather than risk fighting. Some whom the District Attorney labeled “chronic protesters” had been flatly offered 5-10 days jail time, no plea. But, certain that we’d committed no crime by demonstrating, we determined to fight.
The charges were bunk – that we prevented government employees from getting to work, for example, while video showed INS workers passing freely in and out of the building. We itched for our day in court. But after a year and a half in which the DA was “not ready” to try us, the speedy trial clock ran out and our cases were simply dismissed.
We might have felt lucky: beleaguered dissenters suddenly free to go, just in time for the election when we’d be freeing ourselves in a bigger way from the president who managed to make dissent a crime against democracy. But we were not.
We’d been had. Really, who could swallow the idea that the DA forgot to prepare for court? Strategically using due process as a weapon, the DA managed to punish us and curtail our speech for seventeen months, without ever going near a jury.
Under the cloak of due process, police can arrest anyone as long as they claim a reason, even if it’s disproven later. Arrestees can be saddled with whatever charges the DA likes; he isn’t bound by reasonableness. He can make wild charges about intent: for example, that protesters just want to snarl city traffic, not call attention to New York’s crises of education, housing, health care etc. – a rationale the City often asserts when prosecuting civil disobedience. He can charge peaceful protesters as criminals.
The DA then has the discretion to offer a plea bargain or take the case to court. In protest cases, plea-bargaining has come to mean that the arrestee may plead guilty to something slightly less damaging than the DA’s original smorgasbord of misdemeanors. Taking the case to a judge often means being dragged into court repeatedly until the speedy trial clock expires, which can take more than a year. The DA can do this even if he has no intention of actually prosecuting the case; the time is his to waste, and he allows many cases simply to time out But while the case is open, the defendant must avoid political dissent, because protesting is justification for arrest these days. And if they’re rearrested during their case, the charges get still higher and the cycle escalates.
Worse, although the DA rarely bothers to substantiate anti-protester allegations at trial, he’s been using a person’s history of arrest – whether or not they were found guilty – to try to jail them. In the case of demonstrators arrested last year protesting the war on Iraq and the US role in occupying Palestine, the DA secretly reopened sealed and dismissed cases, then cited those arrests when recommending jail sentences for the defendants. If his backroom tactics are upheld in court, the case will become precedent.
Prosecutors’ abuse of discretion in political cases is as old as the hills, and hard to challenge. But in New York City, it’s surrounded now by new, chartable practices that make it more obvious. More than any time in the last two decades, police break up demonstrations by making arrests regardless of whether a law has been broken. The DA applies criminal charges to political arrestees whose acts would once have been considered a simple code violation. To do this, the city dredged up a statute that it uses almost exclusively against dissenters, “Obstructing Governmental Administration;” there was no misdemeanor charge previously in use that characterized peaceful protest as a crime. (The practice is spreading – in upstate NY, protesters were charged with OGA for the first time on Election Day.) And the DA’s dogged pursuit of the right to use past arrests as a stand-in for a criminal record makes the assault on dissent excruciatingly clear.
“In point of fact,” says Kendall Thomas, Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University, “we’ve seen these abuses not only by New York City government, but by federal government: shadowing protesters, infiltrating community-based groups over issues from war to the Patriot Act. Though not unprecedented, they are perhaps more shocking in view of that fact that many people are engaged in activism for the first time, or believed that the excesses of past periods were no longer a problem.”
In the shadow of September 11th and war, millions have been moved to dissent, finding politics to be a life-and-death matter. But the veneer of democracy finally cracked last week, when just over half the nation voted that the other half should be silenced entirely.
Meanwhile attacks continue, on activists and on the rights they defend. We served the DA’s seventeen-month sentence of silence, but the INS detainees still wait in jail without lawyers. As the country does violence to democracy, dissent grows. Will dissenters be faced each time we speak with the choice of pleading down to crimes we haven’t committed, or signing up to be silenced by the DA’s case-dragging method? How long will it take for the city to run all of us through the local mill and finally strip us of our right to speak out on national issues? Will the task be done before it’s time to choose the next president? What about a new mayor?
Ready, Set, Repress: NYPD sets out to edit the Constitution
(published in Newsday on May 16, 2003 under the boring title "Honoring the Constitution Could Save City Money")
Last week I went to jail. Just for a day -- it was a little message from the New York Police Department: Dissenter, beware. I had been demonstrating at the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement (formerly known as the INS) alongside activists from immigrant and minority groups.
We were protesting the government's new special registration requirement for Muslim immigrants, a big-brother mechanism not seen since the government decided that Japanese-Americans were "dangerous persons" in 1942. Under this new policy, some registrants who've checked into the bureau have been unable to check out - they've been caught up in what is called "administrative detention," where they have no date for release or trial.
So last Monday, 42 of us sat down to block the doors through which so many have disappeared. Civil disobedience: a small, time-honored gesture of objection. We sat on the ground with arms linked. Police threw us onto our stomachs, planted boots in our backs and wrenched our limbs in directions they're not supposed to go. Our wrists were cinched with plastic cuffs until our arms were blue.
At the precinct we gave fingerprints and identification to our arresting officers, and were marched out singly for intelligence-gathering interviews. Cops had written up summonses for about a third of us when the process suddenly ground to a halt. No more tickets were issued, so we spent the next 31 hours in jail, waiting to be arraigned on minor charges, such as disorderly conduct, which rarely send people to prison even if convicted. Could that be legal?
No. Last year the city paid me and 13 other New Yorkers $469,000 in damages for a similar violation of our rights. In 2000, with New York City still at war over the Amadou Diallo shooting, we had been demonstrating at the Police Academy. We wanted to make sure cadets learned the difference between a wallet and a gun. At the precinct, cops were writing up our summonses for future arraignments when they halted. So we spent the next 26 hours in jail, waiting to be charged with minor violations.
Our 2000 lawsuit charged that, in cases of political protest, the NYPD abused its discretion by jailing protesters without trial. City lawyers did not dispute the allegations and eventually even turned up an NYPD document outlining the police policy in writing. In addition to paying damages, the city agreed permanently to rescind the policy that had held protesters overnight.
But in 2003, protesters against the war in Iraq and the repression at home have encountered the same phenomenon: protesters arrested regardless of whether they've violated a law. Demonstrators held overnight on minor charges that carry no jail time. Dissenters charged with seemingly random violations often thrown out of court later. These are the practices of a police force actively chilling dissent, deliberately raising the cost of protest from hours to days.
Activists had hoped that Mayor Michael Bloomberg would not perpetuate the expensive failed policies of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, especially if the city faces such an enormous budget crunch. Giuliani's trademark dissent-squelching practices are under scrutiny in federal court - again. The NYPD is litigating another set of "punishment of dissent" lawsuits, this time facing off against me and nearly 400 other protesters illegally detained between 1999 and 2001. Once again we find ourselves in court to make the cops respect civil rights.
There's no sign that the NYPD plans to pull back from the national trend of assaults on dissent. Worse, it seems to be gambling that the current lawsuit will yield a new legal precedent allowing the NYPD simply to preempt the First Amendment. The city already faces a raft of new lawsuits arising from anti-war demonstrations and protests against the targeting of Muslims, Arabs and immigrants. The NYPD is already charged with false arrest of protesters and bystanders, excessive detention, violence against demonstrators and curtailing protest rights. The Bush administration isn't finished making war on selected enemies for political ends, or forking out billions in war contracts to its corporate friends. And the Republican Convention is just around the corner.
So there's a lot of dissent yet to be repressed. And the price of protest keeps rising. How long before we just can't afford to speak out?
If the city goes to trial and successfully spins protesters as a "threat to homeland security," it can get 400 litigants off its back and at the same time muzzle the right to speak out. Unchastened by the millions of dollars paid so far to protesters abused on Giuliani's watch (more than $1 million for the Matthew Shepard and Diallo protests alone), the Bloomberg administration seems willing to do the same. The city's lawsuit payout budget has been increasing annually. For 2003, they've budgeted $5.2 million. Of course, not all of it is for paying off protesters, but certainly a more constitutional policy regarding the right to free speech would save the city money. Then maybe it could be funding libraries and schools instead of jails.
Last week I went to jail. Just for a day -- it was a little message from the New York Police Department: Dissenter, beware. I had been demonstrating at the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement (formerly known as the INS) alongside activists from immigrant and minority groups.
We were protesting the government's new special registration requirement for Muslim immigrants, a big-brother mechanism not seen since the government decided that Japanese-Americans were "dangerous persons" in 1942. Under this new policy, some registrants who've checked into the bureau have been unable to check out - they've been caught up in what is called "administrative detention," where they have no date for release or trial.
So last Monday, 42 of us sat down to block the doors through which so many have disappeared. Civil disobedience: a small, time-honored gesture of objection. We sat on the ground with arms linked. Police threw us onto our stomachs, planted boots in our backs and wrenched our limbs in directions they're not supposed to go. Our wrists were cinched with plastic cuffs until our arms were blue.
At the precinct we gave fingerprints and identification to our arresting officers, and were marched out singly for intelligence-gathering interviews. Cops had written up summonses for about a third of us when the process suddenly ground to a halt. No more tickets were issued, so we spent the next 31 hours in jail, waiting to be arraigned on minor charges, such as disorderly conduct, which rarely send people to prison even if convicted. Could that be legal?
No. Last year the city paid me and 13 other New Yorkers $469,000 in damages for a similar violation of our rights. In 2000, with New York City still at war over the Amadou Diallo shooting, we had been demonstrating at the Police Academy. We wanted to make sure cadets learned the difference between a wallet and a gun. At the precinct, cops were writing up our summonses for future arraignments when they halted. So we spent the next 26 hours in jail, waiting to be charged with minor violations.
Our 2000 lawsuit charged that, in cases of political protest, the NYPD abused its discretion by jailing protesters without trial. City lawyers did not dispute the allegations and eventually even turned up an NYPD document outlining the police policy in writing. In addition to paying damages, the city agreed permanently to rescind the policy that had held protesters overnight.
But in 2003, protesters against the war in Iraq and the repression at home have encountered the same phenomenon: protesters arrested regardless of whether they've violated a law. Demonstrators held overnight on minor charges that carry no jail time. Dissenters charged with seemingly random violations often thrown out of court later. These are the practices of a police force actively chilling dissent, deliberately raising the cost of protest from hours to days.
Activists had hoped that Mayor Michael Bloomberg would not perpetuate the expensive failed policies of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, especially if the city faces such an enormous budget crunch. Giuliani's trademark dissent-squelching practices are under scrutiny in federal court - again. The NYPD is litigating another set of "punishment of dissent" lawsuits, this time facing off against me and nearly 400 other protesters illegally detained between 1999 and 2001. Once again we find ourselves in court to make the cops respect civil rights.
There's no sign that the NYPD plans to pull back from the national trend of assaults on dissent. Worse, it seems to be gambling that the current lawsuit will yield a new legal precedent allowing the NYPD simply to preempt the First Amendment. The city already faces a raft of new lawsuits arising from anti-war demonstrations and protests against the targeting of Muslims, Arabs and immigrants. The NYPD is already charged with false arrest of protesters and bystanders, excessive detention, violence against demonstrators and curtailing protest rights. The Bush administration isn't finished making war on selected enemies for political ends, or forking out billions in war contracts to its corporate friends. And the Republican Convention is just around the corner.
So there's a lot of dissent yet to be repressed. And the price of protest keeps rising. How long before we just can't afford to speak out?
If the city goes to trial and successfully spins protesters as a "threat to homeland security," it can get 400 litigants off its back and at the same time muzzle the right to speak out. Unchastened by the millions of dollars paid so far to protesters abused on Giuliani's watch (more than $1 million for the Matthew Shepard and Diallo protests alone), the Bloomberg administration seems willing to do the same. The city's lawsuit payout budget has been increasing annually. For 2003, they've budgeted $5.2 million. Of course, not all of it is for paying off protesters, but certainly a more constitutional policy regarding the right to free speech would save the city money. Then maybe it could be funding libraries and schools instead of jails.
Apartheid makes war
...How the separation of Jews and Palestinians is putting peace out of our reach
(From 2003?)
On a dry hilltop in the West Bank, there’s a kaffee klatsch one might be surprised to find anywhere in the world – Palestinian Arabs and American Jews, smoking, drinking coffee together and sleeping under the same roof. These are not crusty elites who might share a conference room at Harvard to sort out the problems of the Middle East, safe in the knowledge that no violence will take place at the table. These are Palestinian villagers who have lived 35 years under hostile Israeli control, many of whom have known no Jews besides soldiers and settlers. And these are Jews who have heard forever that Palestinians are barbaric, feudal and Jew-hating, and who, like the vast majority of American Jews, never met a Palestinian before coming to the West Bank.
Although just sitting together is groundbreaking, these Jews and Arabs are doing more than hanging out. They’re joining forces to combat a danger they’re convinced will destroy them both unless they confront it – Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and most urgently, the Separation Wall now blasting through Jayyous.
(From 2003?)
On a dry hilltop in the West Bank, there’s a kaffee klatsch one might be surprised to find anywhere in the world – Palestinian Arabs and American Jews, smoking, drinking coffee together and sleeping under the same roof. These are not crusty elites who might share a conference room at Harvard to sort out the problems of the Middle East, safe in the knowledge that no violence will take place at the table. These are Palestinian villagers who have lived 35 years under hostile Israeli control, many of whom have known no Jews besides soldiers and settlers. And these are Jews who have heard forever that Palestinians are barbaric, feudal and Jew-hating, and who, like the vast majority of American Jews, never met a Palestinian before coming to the West Bank.
Although just sitting together is groundbreaking, these Jews and Arabs are doing more than hanging out. They’re joining forces to combat a danger they’re convinced will destroy them both unless they confront it – Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and most urgently, the Separation Wall now blasting through Jayyous.
In the War on Activists, A Weapon Lost, A Weapon Gained
(Published in Lesbian & Gay New York (noe Gay City News) in December 2001)
With an iron hand and eight years of effort, Mayor Rudy Giuliani has gradually recalibrated New Yorkers' understanding of our own rights. When we plan demonstrations now, we weigh our right to protest against the likelihood of actually being allowed to do it. When we think of public space, we wonder if we meet the new definition of the "public" to whom space belongs; that we as queers, or poor people, or dissenters of any kind, may have to negotiate even for our right to be present.
These changes were hard won by Mayor Rudy and a team of strapping, belligerent cops who diligently instructed us on the new order of things. It helped if we were in handcuffs.
Year by year, Giuliani stockpiled weapons against dissenters. He appointed rubber-stamp judges to the criminal court, who sealed the fates of immigrants and people of color targeted for petty, non-violent offenses under the "Broken Windows" theory of policing. His policymakers wrote an order that anyone arrested at a protest must be held overnight in jail, rather than summonsed for a future court date and released. His police force escalated arrests of random protesters not engaged in illegal activities –– let the charges be thrown out later. And his prosecutors hunted down new statutes to use against protesters, from the once-obscure charge of "Obstructing Governmental Administration" to the antediluvian law against face masks. Giuliani determinedly raised the cost of speaking out.
These favorite weapons of Giuliani's regime have faced legal challenges by activists. Two of these battles have come to a head at the end of his reign.
A weapon lost, a weapon gained –– a federal court has struck down one hated practice, and Giuliani's criminal court has codified another.
St. Patrick's Day demonstrators, opposing the exclusion of Irish queers from the parade, were among the first to be subjected to the new anti-dissent tactics. In March 2000, 69 people attempted a protest march down Fifth Avenue. Arrested, berated, and threatened by Irish American cops, held in jail overnight, and slapped with escalated charges, they were eventually dragged into court on more than ten separate dates awaiting some kind of resolution of the case. Some had come from Ireland, and had to plead guilty to close their cases and go home. Many more plodded through court date after court date, stretching their employers' patience to the limit. When the case was over a year old with no progress, the remaining defendants were forced to plead guilty to a reduced charge so they could get on with their lives. All but one.
I brought my case to trial on December 5th, hoping finally to put an end to the practice of charging demonstrators with Obstructing Governmental Administration. OGA is a low-level felony, far too serious to be applied to demonstrators, which implies that the goal of the protester is not to march, not to speak out, but simply to prevent police from "doing their job." In keeping with Giuliani's vision, the charge spins activists as thugs.
Because of the seriousness of the charge, it entitles the accused to a jury trial –– no small thing in a court stacked with Giuliani appointees. But the weeks following September 11th (and maybe the years before it, too) were not a good time to rely on a jury of white, middle class New Yorkers to doubt the motives of the NYPD. I pleaded with the jury about the need and the right to speak out against bigotry, and about the importance of their role as arbiters of that right. They nodded. And after returning the "guilty" verdict, the forewoman stayed behind to tell me that they had all been so sympathetic; they believed I had done the right thing. Maybe it was beyond the jury's comprehension, but their verdict nearly guarantees that the City will go on charging protesters with OGA; and that the District Attorney will press those cases to trial rather than offer a reasonable plea bargain which preserves our ability to speak out.
Sentencing took place on December 20. The District Attorney asked the judge to order a sentence of ten days of community service. But the maximum sentence is a year in jail (for 2nd degree OGA, which was the charge in this case.) So the judge could have issued a sentence which would cost me my job and sweep the apartment I share with my girlfriend out from under our feet. Fortunately, Judge Matthew Cooper instead ruled that a criminal conviction was punishment enough for a good faith act of protest.
Giuliani's efforts to fence in dissenters will outlast him. Judges appointed during his administration will continue to hand down excessive verdicts. New Yorkers will have to unlearn our Giuliani-time habits before we can think and act freely again. And juries –– always whiter and wealthier than the population of the city since felons can't serve and people with strict, hourly-wage jobs tend to postpone jury duty –– will continue to think of free speech as a privilege long after activists remember it isn't.
On the other hand, a barrage of lawsuits recently forced the City to retire one of its most prized weapons against dissent. Detaining protesters in jail overnight, or "putting them through the system," proved so embarrassingly unconstitutional that the City refused even to defend the policy. The written order, long hidden from activist lawyers, has been rescinded for good. And a class-action lawsuit is in the works to compensate the many hundreds of arrestees who were summarily jailed without trial.
In spite of the risks, we're right to go on challenging repression; it's the only way to roll it back. Just as we risked a night in jail for the sake of our right to speak out, it's worthwhile to risk a conviction rather than allow the City to leverage our silence with excessive, punitive charges. Giuliani's fortress has to be dismantled on so many levels –– in the courts, in the psyche of police officers and juries, and in our own minds as well –– that every battle is valuable. Because progress is won by a series of both gains and losses. And because not fighting is far, far worse.
With an iron hand and eight years of effort, Mayor Rudy Giuliani has gradually recalibrated New Yorkers' understanding of our own rights. When we plan demonstrations now, we weigh our right to protest against the likelihood of actually being allowed to do it. When we think of public space, we wonder if we meet the new definition of the "public" to whom space belongs; that we as queers, or poor people, or dissenters of any kind, may have to negotiate even for our right to be present.
These changes were hard won by Mayor Rudy and a team of strapping, belligerent cops who diligently instructed us on the new order of things. It helped if we were in handcuffs.
Year by year, Giuliani stockpiled weapons against dissenters. He appointed rubber-stamp judges to the criminal court, who sealed the fates of immigrants and people of color targeted for petty, non-violent offenses under the "Broken Windows" theory of policing. His policymakers wrote an order that anyone arrested at a protest must be held overnight in jail, rather than summonsed for a future court date and released. His police force escalated arrests of random protesters not engaged in illegal activities –– let the charges be thrown out later. And his prosecutors hunted down new statutes to use against protesters, from the once-obscure charge of "Obstructing Governmental Administration" to the antediluvian law against face masks. Giuliani determinedly raised the cost of speaking out.
These favorite weapons of Giuliani's regime have faced legal challenges by activists. Two of these battles have come to a head at the end of his reign.
A weapon lost, a weapon gained –– a federal court has struck down one hated practice, and Giuliani's criminal court has codified another.
St. Patrick's Day demonstrators, opposing the exclusion of Irish queers from the parade, were among the first to be subjected to the new anti-dissent tactics. In March 2000, 69 people attempted a protest march down Fifth Avenue. Arrested, berated, and threatened by Irish American cops, held in jail overnight, and slapped with escalated charges, they were eventually dragged into court on more than ten separate dates awaiting some kind of resolution of the case. Some had come from Ireland, and had to plead guilty to close their cases and go home. Many more plodded through court date after court date, stretching their employers' patience to the limit. When the case was over a year old with no progress, the remaining defendants were forced to plead guilty to a reduced charge so they could get on with their lives. All but one.
I brought my case to trial on December 5th, hoping finally to put an end to the practice of charging demonstrators with Obstructing Governmental Administration. OGA is a low-level felony, far too serious to be applied to demonstrators, which implies that the goal of the protester is not to march, not to speak out, but simply to prevent police from "doing their job." In keeping with Giuliani's vision, the charge spins activists as thugs.
Because of the seriousness of the charge, it entitles the accused to a jury trial –– no small thing in a court stacked with Giuliani appointees. But the weeks following September 11th (and maybe the years before it, too) were not a good time to rely on a jury of white, middle class New Yorkers to doubt the motives of the NYPD. I pleaded with the jury about the need and the right to speak out against bigotry, and about the importance of their role as arbiters of that right. They nodded. And after returning the "guilty" verdict, the forewoman stayed behind to tell me that they had all been so sympathetic; they believed I had done the right thing. Maybe it was beyond the jury's comprehension, but their verdict nearly guarantees that the City will go on charging protesters with OGA; and that the District Attorney will press those cases to trial rather than offer a reasonable plea bargain which preserves our ability to speak out.
Sentencing took place on December 20. The District Attorney asked the judge to order a sentence of ten days of community service. But the maximum sentence is a year in jail (for 2nd degree OGA, which was the charge in this case.) So the judge could have issued a sentence which would cost me my job and sweep the apartment I share with my girlfriend out from under our feet. Fortunately, Judge Matthew Cooper instead ruled that a criminal conviction was punishment enough for a good faith act of protest.
Giuliani's efforts to fence in dissenters will outlast him. Judges appointed during his administration will continue to hand down excessive verdicts. New Yorkers will have to unlearn our Giuliani-time habits before we can think and act freely again. And juries –– always whiter and wealthier than the population of the city since felons can't serve and people with strict, hourly-wage jobs tend to postpone jury duty –– will continue to think of free speech as a privilege long after activists remember it isn't.
On the other hand, a barrage of lawsuits recently forced the City to retire one of its most prized weapons against dissent. Detaining protesters in jail overnight, or "putting them through the system," proved so embarrassingly unconstitutional that the City refused even to defend the policy. The written order, long hidden from activist lawyers, has been rescinded for good. And a class-action lawsuit is in the works to compensate the many hundreds of arrestees who were summarily jailed without trial.
In spite of the risks, we're right to go on challenging repression; it's the only way to roll it back. Just as we risked a night in jail for the sake of our right to speak out, it's worthwhile to risk a conviction rather than allow the City to leverage our silence with excessive, punitive charges. Giuliani's fortress has to be dismantled on so many levels –– in the courts, in the psyche of police officers and juries, and in our own minds as well –– that every battle is valuable. Because progress is won by a series of both gains and losses. And because not fighting is far, far worse.
Rebuilding Queer Community, Beyond Marriage
(printed in Gay City News, Vol.4, No.48, Dec. 1-7, 2005)
PERSPECTIVE/ A DISSENT FROM AN AGENDA
Rebuilding Queer Community, Beyond Marriage
By EMMAIA GELMAN
My mother loves gay marriage. She'd vote for it in a heartbeat. She phone-stalked Hillary Clinton about it and kvelled about Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor's whose maverick streak brought back memories of her own rebel days. She loves marriage for the same reason I don't-it's gays' big chance to be normal. If her kid is going to be gay, my mother wants a daughter-in-law and some grandbabies, not some boot-stomping dyke with an authority problem. To her, the whole queer-outsider thing smacks of bad manners. So although it's unsettling, I suppose it's not strange that the Marriage Gays-national institutions such as the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and others-remind me of my mother. And I so wish the Marriage Gays would stop telling me how to live my life.
During state anti-marriage referenda held during the past two years, exit-pollsters canvassed to find out who was "for or against us." Their results surprised Ken Sherrill, a Hunter College political science professor and a strategist for the marriage movement, who made an interesting presentation to a Harvard audience last month. Contradicting the long held view that knowing a gay person was a leading indicator of support for full equality, Sherrill learned that having a queer friend or relative didn't tend to make people vote for gay marriage. In one poll, 20 percent of queers themselves voted against marriage. In another, 51 percent of queers who supported marriage said they were just voting for the right to a loving relationship; it had nothing to do with wanting to register with the state, or at Macy's.
So it turns out that chasing respectability hasn't done much for us. The marriage movement, Sherrill explained, hoped that the coming-out of "respectable people" had changed the image of queers from oversexed riff-raff to "just folks." The image of queers as nice two-children-and-a-dog couples has been a centerpiece of marriage strategy. But queers lost on marriage in state after state, as our friends and family voted to reserve pieces of their state constitutions for "just straight folks."
The polls tell us that Marriage Gays have also been wrong about how queers think about our rights. Turns out we're not all on a mission to be middle-class normal after all. Mortgages and picket fences have to share a place in queerdom with raging feminists, junkies, pier queens, and other "others"-the people whose first-hand knowledge of how mainstream people screw marginal people has been the heart of queer resistance.
But ritzy queers have always used money, politicians, and the media to speak on behalf of the rest of us. The marriage problem is that bad habit in hyper-drive. National gay institutions have big money that hasn't been available to local queer communities. They've tapped the idea that homophobia is bad, and declared marriage to be the opposite of homophobia. They're speaking not just to the powerful, but to people en masse. About us. Without us.
Perversely, queers are on the receiving end too. In place of community organizing through which queers argued back and forth before putting out messages to the world, the marriage messaging campaigns are selling marriage back to us. If some folks do come together to support those campaigns, we're told: "Look, the marriage issue is coming from the grassroots!" But it isn't. And real grassroots organizing, where unity is a difficult, complex thing that can't be dictated from a Communications Department, is simply not equipped to challenge it.
A lot of thoughtful queers have been urging Marriage Gays to shift focus to the issues underlying marriage-that people need health insurance, and that immigrants have rights. Sherrill, reexamining the respectability tactic, has ideas too. He reports that in recent focus groups, ads explaining why it's impractical and disruptive to live a secret life seemed to be better than marriage-focused ads for getting straights to care about us. Although corporate-sponsored ads for tolerance aren't much more democratic than corporate-sponsored ads for marriage, asserting the need to act different-since we are different-makes sense.
But how do we make the switch? National queer groups have no more right to decide for us on a different approach than they had to tell us marriage was the issue in the first place. Is it possible to democratize an organization like HRC, which has a membership but eclipses queers who don't sign up; and whose sponsors include multinational corporation with appalling human rights records such as like Shell Oil and Nike? Can we seriously get queer rights through organizations that exclude us?
Like Iraq war rhetoric about "fighting the enemies of freedom," it's hard to object to "equality"-though it's easier to explain why it's a bad idea to stake a movement on equality legislation, a comparison of the U.S. civil rights movement with the current state racial equality making for a pretty chilling example. But the marriage movement has traded on deep inequalities among queers, and even its strategists are saying it's time to go another way. It's really important that the new way not just be a change in direction at the top of our weird, unelected system of representation. It has to include all of us in thinking about who queers are, deciding what's important, and with all our power, demanding the right to be different. So it can't be led by my mother, HRC, or anyone who wants-out of love or expediency-to mold us in their image.
PERSPECTIVE/ A DISSENT FROM AN AGENDA
Rebuilding Queer Community, Beyond Marriage
By EMMAIA GELMAN
My mother loves gay marriage. She'd vote for it in a heartbeat. She phone-stalked Hillary Clinton about it and kvelled about Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor's whose maverick streak brought back memories of her own rebel days. She loves marriage for the same reason I don't-it's gays' big chance to be normal. If her kid is going to be gay, my mother wants a daughter-in-law and some grandbabies, not some boot-stomping dyke with an authority problem. To her, the whole queer-outsider thing smacks of bad manners. So although it's unsettling, I suppose it's not strange that the Marriage Gays-national institutions such as the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and others-remind me of my mother. And I so wish the Marriage Gays would stop telling me how to live my life.
During state anti-marriage referenda held during the past two years, exit-pollsters canvassed to find out who was "for or against us." Their results surprised Ken Sherrill, a Hunter College political science professor and a strategist for the marriage movement, who made an interesting presentation to a Harvard audience last month. Contradicting the long held view that knowing a gay person was a leading indicator of support for full equality, Sherrill learned that having a queer friend or relative didn't tend to make people vote for gay marriage. In one poll, 20 percent of queers themselves voted against marriage. In another, 51 percent of queers who supported marriage said they were just voting for the right to a loving relationship; it had nothing to do with wanting to register with the state, or at Macy's.
So it turns out that chasing respectability hasn't done much for us. The marriage movement, Sherrill explained, hoped that the coming-out of "respectable people" had changed the image of queers from oversexed riff-raff to "just folks." The image of queers as nice two-children-and-a-dog couples has been a centerpiece of marriage strategy. But queers lost on marriage in state after state, as our friends and family voted to reserve pieces of their state constitutions for "just straight folks."
The polls tell us that Marriage Gays have also been wrong about how queers think about our rights. Turns out we're not all on a mission to be middle-class normal after all. Mortgages and picket fences have to share a place in queerdom with raging feminists, junkies, pier queens, and other "others"-the people whose first-hand knowledge of how mainstream people screw marginal people has been the heart of queer resistance.
But ritzy queers have always used money, politicians, and the media to speak on behalf of the rest of us. The marriage problem is that bad habit in hyper-drive. National gay institutions have big money that hasn't been available to local queer communities. They've tapped the idea that homophobia is bad, and declared marriage to be the opposite of homophobia. They're speaking not just to the powerful, but to people en masse. About us. Without us.
Perversely, queers are on the receiving end too. In place of community organizing through which queers argued back and forth before putting out messages to the world, the marriage messaging campaigns are selling marriage back to us. If some folks do come together to support those campaigns, we're told: "Look, the marriage issue is coming from the grassroots!" But it isn't. And real grassroots organizing, where unity is a difficult, complex thing that can't be dictated from a Communications Department, is simply not equipped to challenge it.
A lot of thoughtful queers have been urging Marriage Gays to shift focus to the issues underlying marriage-that people need health insurance, and that immigrants have rights. Sherrill, reexamining the respectability tactic, has ideas too. He reports that in recent focus groups, ads explaining why it's impractical and disruptive to live a secret life seemed to be better than marriage-focused ads for getting straights to care about us. Although corporate-sponsored ads for tolerance aren't much more democratic than corporate-sponsored ads for marriage, asserting the need to act different-since we are different-makes sense.
But how do we make the switch? National queer groups have no more right to decide for us on a different approach than they had to tell us marriage was the issue in the first place. Is it possible to democratize an organization like HRC, which has a membership but eclipses queers who don't sign up; and whose sponsors include multinational corporation with appalling human rights records such as like Shell Oil and Nike? Can we seriously get queer rights through organizations that exclude us?
Like Iraq war rhetoric about "fighting the enemies of freedom," it's hard to object to "equality"-though it's easier to explain why it's a bad idea to stake a movement on equality legislation, a comparison of the U.S. civil rights movement with the current state racial equality making for a pretty chilling example. But the marriage movement has traded on deep inequalities among queers, and even its strategists are saying it's time to go another way. It's really important that the new way not just be a change in direction at the top of our weird, unelected system of representation. It has to include all of us in thinking about who queers are, deciding what's important, and with all our power, demanding the right to be different. So it can't be led by my mother, HRC, or anyone who wants-out of love or expediency-to mold us in their image.
Love, Honor & Disobedience
(printed in Gay City News, Vol.3 No.310, March 4-10, 2004)
PERSPECTIVE/ACTIVISM
Love, Honor and Disobedience
By EMMAIA GELMAN
In massive acts of civil disobedience, queer-positive officials launched gay marriage for their constituents this month. Diverse queer opinions about the value of marriage aside, the officials did one thing indisputably right: acting in the public interest, they took action against the deep American well of hatred against queers emerging in the marriage debate.
The act undertaken by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom so shocked the queer community that thousands of us dropped everything and crossed state lines to get officially hitched, including plenty who hadn’t previously been interested in marrying but were moved to participate.
Newsom’s act so shocked our government that it was forced to go on the offensive. Forgetting that he’s not the Holy Father, George W. Bush called for a Constitutional amendment to codify the one part of marriage that comes solely from religion: its heterosexuality.
That’s what acts of civil disobedience do––expose a conflict so starkly that people are startled into action, and no one can pretend to be neutral. Tienenmen Square’s tank-blocking students launched a sudden international response to decades-old repression. Irish queers’ insistence on being visible on St. Patrick’s Day brought the homophobia of the NYPD, the courts, and the Catholic Church into plain sight, out from the closed corridors of power. Civil disobedience is the opposite of invisibility, of going along.
Direct action became a finely honed weapon against those who tried to invisibilize us, climaxing with office takeovers by thousands of ACT UPers and insanely media-savvy Lesbian Avengers’ actions. But later, the community fell prey to apathy, assimilation, and the AIDS deaths of many of our fiercest. Some would say we’ve gained a foothold in politics, courted by electeds on some issues even if we’re still sold out in other ways. Regardless, it’s our loss to have traded the power of queer bodies in the street for an ethereal electoral clout that depends largely on the weight of our pocketbooks and our success in seeming “normal.” It’s been our loss to tie our fates to politicians and institutional machinery we don’t control.
We’ve missed something of ourselves, too. Refusal to play by the rules of power, often exemplified by disobedience, was a crucial tie between queers and people battling other kinds of bigotry. Although queers are people of color, immigrants, low-wage workers, IV drug users, and other targeted people, as a community we’ve been historically reluctant to unite behind those oppressions.
At the same time, much of the queer vanguard has been people from the margins––think Sylvia Rivera, Leslie Feinberg, Audre Lorde, the ball queens who brought music, fashion, and fierceness, the kids who left behind middle-America to forge queer family in the West Village. So for many white or middle-class activists, dying-in, kissing-in, dropping a banner, and generally declining to be polite were important declarations of solidarity, refusals to trade justice for race or class privilege. And when the queers who disobeyed were heroes, queerness meant a street-based sort of pride. We weren’t stuffed shirts playing the American respectability game. We were confronting real problems, because as outsiders we could see that the system wasn’t made to work.
Thousands of queers have been schooled in solidarity through civil disobedience. In our sparring matches with cops we’ve learned the system’s spooky feints and jabs. How those trying to repress us will try first to divide us: immigrant queers from citizens; employed queers from the jobless, queers on medication from queers without it; gender-fuck queers from boy and girl queers; “bad queers” from “good ones.” Queer direct action culture, which does still exist, teaches activists not to put that kind of identifying information in the hands of authorities––in other words, not to use that privilege at all.
This is the core of the queer civil disobedience that smashed queer invisibility and tapped our strength: eschewing respectability based on the privileging of some people over others, and embracing solidarity with those who don’t even have the option of accepting or refusing power. But the upward mobility of queers has made that rebellion dangerous and increasingly rare––the more “respectable” we are, the more moneyed, engaged in party politics, the more we have to lose by disobeying, and by linking ourselves to people who are, plainly speaking, still seen as trash.
Which makes the orderly civil disobedience of marriage a strange animal. It’s certainly courageous, and brings a sense of relief that queers can still show up in the hundreds for meetings if they care about something, rather than relying on the Empire State Pride Agenda or the Human Rights Campaign to decide the community’s course. For those of us who have been struggling to keep grassroots queer action alive, it feels miraculous.
But it seems to contort us in new, frankly sinister ways. For one thing, it is totally focused on the act of queer coupling––not queers left behind despite the rising tide for others, or queers getting clobbered by HIV all over again, or any other kind of queers being marginalized as parts of the community are actually getting some respect. The only hints of parallel issues are the explanation that health care is too expensive to forgo the privileged rights that couples enjoy in accessing it, and the hope that marriage will address the immigration troubles of binational queer couples.
But there’s no reference to the vast injustice of class-segregated hospitals, closed borders, or any other larger issue. Unlike other campaigns where we’ve at least talked about who will be left behind––think of the push for SONDA, New York State’s queer rights legislation that bypassed trans people, or the tensions between upscale gays vs. queer pier youth in the West Village–– there’s no mention of what will happen to unmarried queers whose rights might now be pitted against those of officially-recognized couples, or of queers whose problems aren’t solved by marriage.
The language of organizing reflects this strangeness. E-mails waft around containing a mixed word palate alternately suggesting resistance and a suburban activity guide––a meeting at the Center for couples to organize direct action. When before has action planning been done by “couples only?” And words are absent: other queer missives highlight the national crackdown on immigrants, queer and otherwise; repression of queer activists as part of the larger assault on free speech; the urgency of doing our AIDS organizing alongside prison advocates or youth of color. We locate our work in the world we share. But the marriage cry for civil rights seems uncomplicated by its relationship to other struggles.
Beyond the language, it’s the act of civil disobedience that’s beautiful and terrifying, queers en masse tasting their own resistance. Many have cried assimilation at the push for marriage, but we don’t have to argue, now we’ll find out. Will the hundreds who turned out at the Center last week be back once they’re married, demanding adoption rights for unmarried queers, or universal health care? The thousands who bravely broke the law on principle in San Francisco––will they do it again for someone else’s rights?
If yes, then the right to marry is about self-determination, and a blazing victory. If no, then marriage was a golden calf, and for the sake of being “equal,” we’ve sacrificed our outsider’s vision, and we’ve used our most cherished weapon of resistance to do it.
PERSPECTIVE/ACTIVISM
Love, Honor and Disobedience
By EMMAIA GELMAN
In massive acts of civil disobedience, queer-positive officials launched gay marriage for their constituents this month. Diverse queer opinions about the value of marriage aside, the officials did one thing indisputably right: acting in the public interest, they took action against the deep American well of hatred against queers emerging in the marriage debate.
The act undertaken by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom so shocked the queer community that thousands of us dropped everything and crossed state lines to get officially hitched, including plenty who hadn’t previously been interested in marrying but were moved to participate.
Newsom’s act so shocked our government that it was forced to go on the offensive. Forgetting that he’s not the Holy Father, George W. Bush called for a Constitutional amendment to codify the one part of marriage that comes solely from religion: its heterosexuality.
That’s what acts of civil disobedience do––expose a conflict so starkly that people are startled into action, and no one can pretend to be neutral. Tienenmen Square’s tank-blocking students launched a sudden international response to decades-old repression. Irish queers’ insistence on being visible on St. Patrick’s Day brought the homophobia of the NYPD, the courts, and the Catholic Church into plain sight, out from the closed corridors of power. Civil disobedience is the opposite of invisibility, of going along.
Direct action became a finely honed weapon against those who tried to invisibilize us, climaxing with office takeovers by thousands of ACT UPers and insanely media-savvy Lesbian Avengers’ actions. But later, the community fell prey to apathy, assimilation, and the AIDS deaths of many of our fiercest. Some would say we’ve gained a foothold in politics, courted by electeds on some issues even if we’re still sold out in other ways. Regardless, it’s our loss to have traded the power of queer bodies in the street for an ethereal electoral clout that depends largely on the weight of our pocketbooks and our success in seeming “normal.” It’s been our loss to tie our fates to politicians and institutional machinery we don’t control.
We’ve missed something of ourselves, too. Refusal to play by the rules of power, often exemplified by disobedience, was a crucial tie between queers and people battling other kinds of bigotry. Although queers are people of color, immigrants, low-wage workers, IV drug users, and other targeted people, as a community we’ve been historically reluctant to unite behind those oppressions.
At the same time, much of the queer vanguard has been people from the margins––think Sylvia Rivera, Leslie Feinberg, Audre Lorde, the ball queens who brought music, fashion, and fierceness, the kids who left behind middle-America to forge queer family in the West Village. So for many white or middle-class activists, dying-in, kissing-in, dropping a banner, and generally declining to be polite were important declarations of solidarity, refusals to trade justice for race or class privilege. And when the queers who disobeyed were heroes, queerness meant a street-based sort of pride. We weren’t stuffed shirts playing the American respectability game. We were confronting real problems, because as outsiders we could see that the system wasn’t made to work.
Thousands of queers have been schooled in solidarity through civil disobedience. In our sparring matches with cops we’ve learned the system’s spooky feints and jabs. How those trying to repress us will try first to divide us: immigrant queers from citizens; employed queers from the jobless, queers on medication from queers without it; gender-fuck queers from boy and girl queers; “bad queers” from “good ones.” Queer direct action culture, which does still exist, teaches activists not to put that kind of identifying information in the hands of authorities––in other words, not to use that privilege at all.
This is the core of the queer civil disobedience that smashed queer invisibility and tapped our strength: eschewing respectability based on the privileging of some people over others, and embracing solidarity with those who don’t even have the option of accepting or refusing power. But the upward mobility of queers has made that rebellion dangerous and increasingly rare––the more “respectable” we are, the more moneyed, engaged in party politics, the more we have to lose by disobeying, and by linking ourselves to people who are, plainly speaking, still seen as trash.
Which makes the orderly civil disobedience of marriage a strange animal. It’s certainly courageous, and brings a sense of relief that queers can still show up in the hundreds for meetings if they care about something, rather than relying on the Empire State Pride Agenda or the Human Rights Campaign to decide the community’s course. For those of us who have been struggling to keep grassroots queer action alive, it feels miraculous.
But it seems to contort us in new, frankly sinister ways. For one thing, it is totally focused on the act of queer coupling––not queers left behind despite the rising tide for others, or queers getting clobbered by HIV all over again, or any other kind of queers being marginalized as parts of the community are actually getting some respect. The only hints of parallel issues are the explanation that health care is too expensive to forgo the privileged rights that couples enjoy in accessing it, and the hope that marriage will address the immigration troubles of binational queer couples.
But there’s no reference to the vast injustice of class-segregated hospitals, closed borders, or any other larger issue. Unlike other campaigns where we’ve at least talked about who will be left behind––think of the push for SONDA, New York State’s queer rights legislation that bypassed trans people, or the tensions between upscale gays vs. queer pier youth in the West Village–– there’s no mention of what will happen to unmarried queers whose rights might now be pitted against those of officially-recognized couples, or of queers whose problems aren’t solved by marriage.
The language of organizing reflects this strangeness. E-mails waft around containing a mixed word palate alternately suggesting resistance and a suburban activity guide––a meeting at the Center for couples to organize direct action. When before has action planning been done by “couples only?” And words are absent: other queer missives highlight the national crackdown on immigrants, queer and otherwise; repression of queer activists as part of the larger assault on free speech; the urgency of doing our AIDS organizing alongside prison advocates or youth of color. We locate our work in the world we share. But the marriage cry for civil rights seems uncomplicated by its relationship to other struggles.
Beyond the language, it’s the act of civil disobedience that’s beautiful and terrifying, queers en masse tasting their own resistance. Many have cried assimilation at the push for marriage, but we don’t have to argue, now we’ll find out. Will the hundreds who turned out at the Center last week be back once they’re married, demanding adoption rights for unmarried queers, or universal health care? The thousands who bravely broke the law on principle in San Francisco––will they do it again for someone else’s rights?
If yes, then the right to marry is about self-determination, and a blazing victory. If no, then marriage was a golden calf, and for the sake of being “equal,” we’ve sacrificed our outsider’s vision, and we’ve used our most cherished weapon of resistance to do it.
hello
...and le welcome.
To launch this strange public spectacle of blog, I present: the contents of my computer's basement. Stuff I've written for newspapers either so lo-cal that they don't have archives, or who didn't have archives back then, or who just decided my stuff wasn't worth valuable forever-space on their websites. Fair enough. I still have most of the things I wrote (strangely, a bunch of them seem to be the same article that I wrote in new words year after year...) Here they are, in the next few posts. Are you sitting comfortably? Ah.
To launch this strange public spectacle of blog, I present: the contents of my computer's basement. Stuff I've written for newspapers either so lo-cal that they don't have archives, or who didn't have archives back then, or who just decided my stuff wasn't worth valuable forever-space on their websites. Fair enough. I still have most of the things I wrote (strangely, a bunch of them seem to be the same article that I wrote in new words year after year...) Here they are, in the next few posts. Are you sitting comfortably? Ah.
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