mishmoshkeleh

Creamy summer soup for the kale-non-enthusiast

2010-05-21T14:08:00.005-04:00

Sometimes you feel so virtuous and ambitious that you buy a bunch of kale. Then it sits in your fridge for a week and wilts. Then you're not virtuous anymore: you're a wastrel. Save yourself. Here's a cold blender soup. It's much better than whatever you were thinking of making when the kale was still fresh.

Kale...

Use scissors to snip the kale leaves off of the stems. Use the whole bunch.

The kale will stack up high in the blender. Add water to about 1/3 of that height.

Pulse the blender a bunch of times to start breaking up the kale before you add more ingredients.

Mushrooms...

Throw in five or six fresh mushrooms -- white, crimini, etc. More will make it creamier.

Add more water until it's a thick soup (rather than a ball of vegetable shreds.) This will please your blender if it's struggling, as you once did, with the kale.

Avocado...

A little avocado -- a quarter, a half, whatever -- helps the mushrooms cream up.

Leek...

If you have one drying up in the fridge, put it in the soup. It adds a really nice flavor, but it's not critical.

Spices...

Chili powder -- a good amount.

Garlic powder -- don't go nuts, but don't skimp either.

Salt -- not too much.

Rules & recipes

2010-05-21T14:01:00.002-04:00

If we have met, then I have previously annoyed you with any of a flash sequence of fleeting food rules -- low carb, vegan, eating-only-delicious-things, and now finally raw. Sorry about that. Americans have way too much choice and we need some limits. To make up for it, I'm going to post some recipes that perhaps only the desperate rule-seeker would have tried, but which turn out to be amazingly delish.

Queer Space, you old dog!

2008-01-25T10:44:00.000-05:00

Queer Space, the collective/community center into which I poured my early twenties, turned 10 years old this year. Actually, last December, but who's counting. The current collective thinks it was born in 1998. And I self-identify as 29. Whatever.

Queer Space has changed a lot (I hear) but some of the collective members have been there all along, which is crazy/fantastic/impossible. They demanded a letter that they could read at the birthday party. Instead, Contrary Mary sent them something that should definitely *not* be read out loud at any kind of party. But queer history is important!!!

Should just say up front that this letter is from my own memories. There were at least a dozen more people who busted their asses for years to make Queer Space happen and I didn't write about any of them here. There were dozens more who busted their asses after I left Ireland in 1999, whom I don't know at all. One of the starter-uppers, the brilliant and unstoppable Barbary Cook, promises to force us to write essays for an anthology about how it all went down. Till then, sorry if my history is a little me-focused.

Dear Queer Space,

Happy birthday! It’s so exciting that the little spark that a scrappy bunch of queers lit 10 years ago took on its own life – that even as people came and went, and the idea of what Queer Space should be shifted, that getting a bunch of ourselves into a room to envision something better than what we had really did turn out to be a way to shape our community. Who knew?

Queer Space is amazing in lots of ways, but there are at least two things that make it really, really special. First, it’s a direct offshoot of the truly revolutionary direct action organizing of ACT UP – the movement built on the lesson of AIDS that queers just couldn’t be silent anymore, that we had to stand up and demand some space in the world, and stop worrying about being polite and safe, or we would die. So Queer Space is really an important piece of movement history. Second, I think it’s fair to say that Queer Space has transformed Belfast just by existing. It’s just a crazy example of how taking the risk of breaking silence, saying things out loud that are maybe considered irrelevant or obnoxious (like “Hey, I’m queer!”), can change everything.

So even though it makes this birthday wish into a longish letter, I wanted to write down some of the history… You can skip to the end if it’s too long for the party!

In 1994, I was trying to avoid dropping out of college and I ended up on a study abroad trip to Queens. At the time, the queer scene was mostly just the Parliament and the Crow’s Nest, and there was nothing queer at all in the whole university. Being a good little American busybody activist queer, though, I decided it was my job to start an LGB Soc. I put up some signs, people showed up and soon we had a great group. But when the term was ending and it came time to set a new contact person, no one would be it. Everyone was so unwilling to write down their name next to the letters “LGB” that they preferred to let the group disband. And this was the same problem that kept people from speaking out when bad things happened to queers, or when queers needed something – no one was willing to be the face.

A few of us thought we could solve that problem by creating an organization with its own space, that could put its own name to statements about queer issues, and where someone could call – whether it was a queer looking to connect with a community or a journalist wanting to write about queer lives – and people could speak without being personally named. It could’ve been any kind of space as long as it had a telephone. But since there was also nowhere to find queer books or information either, we settled on the idea of a library. There were a few obstacles, like no money and no space… and I had to go back to the States to finish college. But we all said we’d try to raise some money and come back together to make it happen.

I went back to NYC all excited about queer organizing in Belfast, and the first thing I did was look around for funding. I saw that there was this group, the Irish Lesbian & Gay Organization, which I’d vaguely known about in high school. Back then they’d made the news because the Ancient Order of Hibernians had banned them from the St. Patrick’s Parade on Fifth Avenue, claiming that queers were perverted and anyway “there’s no such thing as an Irish gay person.” When the NYC Mayor got around the ban by inviting ILGO to march with him, onlookers had thrown beer and trash at them. Now in 1995, they were still fighting the homophobia and brutality represented by the parade.

I went along to an ILGO meeting and told them about the plan to make a new queer space in Belfast, and asked if they’d help fund it. I thought I was very bold going there, and I also remember that the meeting was intimidating as hell. It was nothing like Belfast, where queers were mostly just fun and I was the one pushing politics. These were Irish immigrants who were talking about challenging the Cardinal’s homophobia, which seemed unbelievably brazen. They talked about exposing the biased way that police enforced rules to stop queers protesting, and the attempts of old guard Irish immigrants to keep up the myth of Ireland as a holy place populated by little old straight ladies with lace kerchiefs. Their analysis of what it meant to be queer, to be immigrants, to be women (which most were) and to be Irish was based on big ideas about democracy, anti-imperialism that included Irish republicanism, and breaking old chains like the one that says people should behave like good little boys and girls even as they’re marginalized. In that first meeting I heard them talk about how city officials were hiding behind the Church in order to violate queers’ rights, and strategize how to get people into the streets to fight bigotry in person and force the police to show their true colors by arresting protesters. This meeting was the machinery of a movement. So when I asked about money for a queer library in Belfast, they looked a bit blank, said they had no funding themselves – and got right back to the subject of how to change New York.

I stayed anyway. I never asked about money again, but I learned tons and tons about organizing, making the media listen to you, and not being afraid of the controls that are in place to keep people from trying to change the order of things, like arrest. I learned how, if you’re willing to take a risk, you can use turn those controls on their head. For example, the police tried to say they were sorry to muzzle us but they “didn’t have enough resources” to let us protest homophobia, but when we protested anyway they found enough resources to arrest us, and the resulting media attention gave more exposure to our protest – and to the police’s lie – than any march we could have staged.

Many ILGO members were also in ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which was using a lot of the same tactics to force the US government deal with the AIDS crisis. At the time, it was mostly queer. ACT UP was fearless and really, really well-informed. ACT UP knew the government was lying when it said it couldn’t test drugs on women or people of color to make sure they actually worked (the first drug didn’t, but the studies were only done on white men till ACT UP fought for more trials.) And they were incredibly bold and won incredible victories. They took over buildings, they took over a live national newscast and started talking about AIDS on the air. They literally made the government develop the drugs that finally slowed the wave of death among gay men and other people deemed “throwaways.”

ILGO and ACT UP were built on some common principles. We were steeped in them, and I think the more seasoned queers spent a lot of time deliberately drilling them into us: Anyone in the community could join and no one was the leader. Everyone was responsible for bringing information to the table, and coming up with ideas about how to move forward. Courage and creativity were some of the best perks of queerness, and we should use them. Everyone had a role to play. There was nothing that couldn’t be done; queers were well-connected and resourceful, and closeted people in positions of power especially owed the benefit of their connections to the activists who were doing the hard work of being out. Funding was poison because it made you dependent on more funding, and fear of losing your funding could be used to shut you up. (There was plenty of evidence to show that community support could move mountains: we heard a million times that the Lesbian Herstory Archives had bought a whole building on donations of $1 and $5.)

By the time I finally graduated college and was ready to go back to make our little library, ILGO and ACT UP had completely changed my sense of what was possible. I’d given up on looking for funding, and had instead been buying remaindered queer books out of dollar bins. I was sure a group of people could just do it if we wanted to. (I still did apply for a grant, but one of the decision-makers was an émigré from Belfast. He asked “how are you going to keep a community center safe in that war zone?” I said “I’m not, how could I?” And that was the end of that.)

I got back to Belfast in early in 1997 and looked for the people who had said, two and a half years before, that we’d regroup and make a queer space. It was probably stupid to think they’d just been waiting for me… of course they weren’t. They’d grown up and gotten real jobs. So I just started calling up queers up and making them have coffee with me – some whom I’d known, others who just seemed likely to be interested – and told them this thing was definitely happening. Don’t think I outright lied to anyone… it was a pretty brazen claim, though. I also made a dinky little website and some flyers. People started to be interested, and took up flyering themselves. We had some meetings. We started using the language of “collective” and talking about “when we open.” We rented a space with money borrowed from my savings account, painted it purple, e-mailed out a call for furniture and it appeared. We had a stereo, some CDs and a coffeemaker. (The song that made it all happen was “Step by Step.”) We put in the books, made coffee and told people to put in 50p if they had some. Everyone did, and some people put in a lot more. I can remember how much money I put up to rent the place – couldn’t have been that much – but I was paid back within the year out of the coffee donation basket.

And we had that big meeting. The space was barely open, I think. We’d flyered the hell out of the Parliament and the Crow’s Nest. We already had a healthy collective of a dozen people and they brought loads more people too. The plan was to come up with a set of ideas and agreements about what the space would be, and to do it collectively. But also to challenge the community to do a lot of things that people had never done, like run an organization without bosses, and a political organization at that. And to politicize queer identity, to explicitly refuse to hide the existence and nature of this queer place. And to sit down with each other to make deliberate decisions about what a Belfast queer community should look like aside from a pub crew or a population targeted for health outreach.

I’d drafted some operating principles and poured into them every idea about queer freedom, democracy, resistance and resolution I’d learned from ILGO and ACT UP. I remember it took a while for the 60 people in the room to finally all agree and understand what those actually meant for them. We saved the question about the name for last, I think. I personally really wanted it to be called “queer” and some of the people who had already been working in the collective wanted it too. Maybe the people who worked on it, also, were more politicized already, or had been out for long enough to have history with Belfast’s feminist queer organizing in decades before. But a lot of the other people in the room were brand new, which made us nervous but also excited. We had a long conversation on whether or not to use the word “queer.” We talked about including transgender people in the name of the place, and about how important it was or wasn’t to use the name itself to take up some new space in people’s ears. It went on for hours, literally. I still can’t believe everyone finally agreed to call it Queer Space – it would probably still be a difficult argument now – but it happened. And it was a great leap of faith by the people in the room, most of whom were taking a huge chance on something totally new.

And then Queer Space existed! Thank god for students and the dole, because the place was full and everyone was a volunteer. People learned how to join into the collective. We took Belfast by storm, hanging flyers for events and sometimes just flyers about the fact that queers existed; we posted the word “queer” all over the city. We got lots of media attention, sent out press releases, maintained e-mail lists, made connections with queer groups in other places. We formed a little direct action cell called Queer Action Belfast which had a particularly great logo, and made t-shirts, and protested Newt Gingrich and posted signs asking “Do you love the lesbians in your life?” To me, it was like the sun coming up. Maybe it was different for people who were from there… But suddenly people were coming from Derry, Dundalk, and even Dublin for queer events in Belfast. New club nights opened that were either gay on purpose or just became, and accepted becoming, gay. The Belfast Pride committee was revived, and all the political parties turned up to a forum on gay rights. They were even all supportive, or at least said they were. (There was one exception… I wrote about that forum in Fortnight magazine, saying that all the parties had pledged their support. But Stephen King, the gay man full of contradictions who was homophobe John Taylor’s right hand, threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t retract because the UUP definitely did not support gay rights.) Queers were out in the light of day, and straight people were having to make room for us. It was really clear that we’d changed everything, mostly just by being out, making something for all queers to share, and being available to the outside world for comment. And we were transformed ourselves.

And that’s why I love Queer Space. So happy birthday! You’re my favorite revolution. Miss you all & hope to see you again soon.

xoxo
emmaia

Who not to be (in the Bronx)

2007-09-30T09:06:00.000-04:00

In July. I was looking for an apartment in the solid New York tradition: partly to find housing, and partly to get a good nosey at apartments I'd never get into otherwise, get the dirt from supers, figure out what's happening in the secretive world of rent-regulated landlords. Not surprisingly, I found the deliberate, grinding machinery of gentrification in full screech, and I was going to post some notes about it here...

Meanwhile, I'd applied for an apartment in a lovely old family-owned building just below Mosholu, where a friend of a friend lives. She put in a word with the landlord. He called her back -- having googled me, I guess -- to say "this person you're recommending... you know she's an activist." He said (reportedly) "you know, sometimes we get an applicant and, ah, we recommend them to a building that might be better suited to them."

I was already in contortions to get the apartment. I was begging my girlfriend to let me get the lease without her name on it, to avoid credit drama. I was offering my richest, most prestigious relative as my guarantor. I was calling the landlord and being so nice and flexible. I hand delivered the application fee to Westchester with the swiftness of silver-heeled mercury, outfitted in my best smart, going-places white lady drag. Also, I #$%^& needed that apartment. So I did one more contortion: I didn't post those notes. For 3 months! And that's what you have to do to get an apartment. In the Bronx.

For the record: like most housing geeks who love the old beautiful buildings themselves, I'm a great tenant.

----------

July 2007
(...before the mortgage market plotzed)

We've been looking for apartments in the northwest Bronx. There are signs there of the same things that are happening everywhere else. Anywhere there's an empty lot, there's just as likely to be one of those faceless orange-and-yellow cinderblob buildings going up. They're not quite as bad as the condos in Brooklyn and Harlem, which mock the idea of "infill" by stuffing million-dollar apartments into sliver lots on blocks where the longer-term [Black] male residents are 50% unemployed. My consolation is that the free-wheeling lending that banks have been doing is about to end, so the pool of people who might buy those condos is shrinking dramatically and a bunch of those developers will lose their shirts.

I find myself on both sides of the struggle, though. On the one hand, we're the priced-out-of-Manhattan tenants that Bedford Park landlords have been waiting for. In one place, the super enthusiastically told us that the neighborhood had been "bad" but "not anymore," and that they were getting rid of the welfares, the Section 8s, "you know, the tenants who sit around all day." In the 90-unit building, they'd recently cleared 17 apartments. Sure enough, the hallways were full of families moving their stuff out. I guess the broker thought we looked like the kind of people who would take that as good news. The broker whose earlier career was as a superintendent herself, in the NYS prison system.

How do you get rid of Section 8 tenants, I asked? Oh, everyone does some little violation of their Section 8, the super said. Which presumably means that, not only are they losing their apartments to the re-branding of the Bronx -- they're probably losing their vouchers as well. For the record, his building was a total dump.

On the other hand, even though I'm pretty much the person for whom those condos are being built, I can't get an apartment. I'm a comfortably-situated white lady with high class credentials, and my girlfriend is too. (Yes we are, honey.) But our credit isn't that good. And one of us lived in an apartment where the tenants were once in housing court many years before, when a building burned and the owner didn't repair it -- which produces an "automatic denial" of our joint apartment application, according to the managers at Bedford Park Apartments. I've been in school, so I have no recent income history to speak of. Worse, now I'm self-employed. At the age of 33, when Jesus was already saving the whole world forever, I still need a guarantor. (One of the benefits of being the condo-target person is that I can easily find one... but that's another story about how inequality is multi-generational.)

More on how the Bronx is going, coming soon.

Live Earth on the hot ticket

2007-07-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

Got a fancy ticket for the Live Earth concert, Al Gore's huge, all-continent simulconcert whose mission was to "create a movement" to stop doing all the things we're doing to make the world hotter, wetter, stormier and generally a lot less welcoming. Although I watched the concert from an air-conditioned skybox whose windows were open the whole time and left with pockets full of consumer dross, it was actually pretty worthy all around. Al Gore looks like his life has improved a lot since the White House. Jane Goodall did a rockin impression of chimps' greeting call. And Miss Petra Nemcova... was entertainingly dim. Talking about surviving the tsunami, she said "I didn't feel hate for nature, I felt that the nature was screaming for help!" Anyway, it was a 360 degree eco-experience. Mostly.

For example, although the recycling got a little surreal, it was super serious. Pepsi organized hundreds of volunteers (all in t-shirts undoubtedly made under appalling labor conditions with non-sustainable materials...) to manage the recycling. They were so intent on their duties that they urged people to drink up their free Pepsis immediately so volunteers could take back the cans. But they did turn Giants Stadium into a model of waste-stream management. Meanwhile, having lived in enviro-forward Cambridge for the last 2 years, I can't get it into my head that NYC doesn't think those massive, hard plastic take-out containers are worth recycling. I keep polluting the recycling bin!

Interestingly, there didn't seem to be much other major corporate sponsorship besides MSN. Although the Live Earth website says Chevrolet sponsored the webcast... which is either weird or hopeful. What does this gaping corporate absence mean? That greening is about getting people to decide what we want for ourselves (with assistance from the Alliance for Climate Protection) and demanding it, instead of waiting to be told what we want by corporations? Madness!

According to the woman who cornered me holding a binder about wind energy, the entire show was also "powered by wind energy." Presumably that means the producers bought massive amounts of wind energy credits to offset their grid usage, not that they installed temporary wind turbines along the Jersey Turnpike and ran wires into the stadium.

And the demands that the concert made weren't just to politicians, but to the concert-goers. They weren't nicey-nice things either, like "why not take the stairs instead of the elevator?" (To which the appropriate reply is "why don't you get out of my face? The stairs aren't air conditioned!") It was more like, "Don't eat so much frickin meat, for God's sake! It's the least efficient way to get food in the entire universe! And don't eat fish either because the oceans can't keep up." (See the cow poop film which played on the screen between acts.) The messaging didn't quite get to "And there's no need to be self-righteous about eating everything made of soy, either, since it's destroying farming economies, and you should really think about adopting kids instead of begetting them" but maybe that would've been beyond audacious. It was pretty amazing to be in New Jersey and watch 50,000 fairly privileged people (tickets started at $60) get gently schooled about the meaning of meat. The producers brought the meat point all the way home, too. I was in the fancy skybox and eating for free, the Nation's blog reports that Giants Stadium also served veggie burgers and not dogs at the concession stand, a great little demonstration project. But there was nothing like that in the box, where the "vegetarian dish" was crabcakes... The meaty flow of corporate hospitality is just a little harder to interrupt, I guess.

My career as a jaded doubter isn't totally in jeopardy, though... Who's the target audience for this messaging? Middle class white people? Because that's who was there. (Watching Akon work really hard to play to the crowd reminded me of the Onion story about Bob Marley returning from the grave to break frat boys' bonds of oppression...) And the instructions to the crowd about how to live green were about shopping for eco-friendly (more expensive) things, weatherizing your house, etc. -- all great advice, but practical only for a particular set of people. There was nothing about the idea that, maybe if green vegetables were subsidized like corn, people could afford to eat them... And stuff. That's a problem that the environmental movement has had for a long time, but it does seem like the Gore push is about reshaping it for mass participation. Including stars who speak to audiences that aren't lily-white or traditionally crunchy is a good start, but it's not enough to bridge the class gap.

(Separately, mass transit, hello? Finding information about public transportation was a major chore, and then it looked like a horrible option. A shuttle that only runs until the event starts, and then doesn't make the return trip till the end? At a 7-hour show? We really tried not to drive, but it just didn't work.)

Anyway, I took every piece of promo material that was being handed out, just to see how big the pile got. Which I list here not to trash the concert, but just to say... we consume an insane amount of crap, which still counts even if it says "you should recycle" or "this crap is recycled."

In my pockets:

A flyer on buying wind energy credits (for which I actually had to beg, because the staff had been told not to give out paper at this event.)

A neck lanyard with a card-case: 30 square inches of plastic, suspended by a metal hook on a ribbon that says "Fabric made from waste fibrous stems of grain crops -- organic and bidegradable." It advertises energy-saving light bulbs and urges people to Take the Pledge. Sponsored by... the company that sells the light bulbs.

10 packets of "tree seeds" labeled Seeds of Change, explaining that planting a tree helps suck up carbon and advertising the Live Earth broadcast on MSN.

A flyer (shiny bad-for-the-earth paper) for WheatWare, alternative to plastic & wood disposable stuff (like chopsticks and golf tees, according to the flyer.)

A flyer (recycled paper) advertising the alleged State Fair in the parking lot next door; in reality, a 5-acre aggregation of funnel cake kiosks and some rides.

A t-shirt apparently (amazingly) handed out to every concert-goer with a packet of Sun Chips in plastic/foil, that says "Apathy is a harmful emission."

A can of Pepsi (I didn't drink up on demand)

A plastic bracelet apparently made of recycled Pepsi bottles (does turning old garbage into new garbage count as recycling?)

And a bunch of stuff given just to high-roller Guests of the Box, I think:

A smart, funny and probably factual book on how real, regular people might cut down on their environmental impact. If they can afford to. If not, when Peak Oil comes, the book demonstrates how to burrow underground.

A booklet on how to deconstruct global warming sceptics' snotty arguments.

A pamphlet asking for tax-deductible contributions to buy shares in wind farms... or something.

Another t-shirt from the Alliance for Climate Protection, saying "I pledged," which I actually totally believe was sustainably produced, because I don't think Gore is bullshitting.

A cookbook from Stonyfield Farm (cute, although I don't usually need to look up a recipe for yogurt and strawberries... And technically we should probably be vegan anyway.)

An oven mitt from S.Farm

A canvas shopping bag from S.Farm

A yogurt-cheese making kit, including cheese cloth and a very plastic spatula, from S.Farm

Coupons from S.Farm

An acai kernel bracelet "For Protection" and tribal street-cred

A booklet on switching to energy-efficient lighting, from the purveyor of energy-efficient lighting

Like I said... a lot. But dude. It was free.

Bronx LGBT community on the rise remembers one who fell

2007-06-06T18:43:00.000-04:00

(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.”

The murder, which took place August 4th, 2002, was marked by signs of hate: dozens of wounds, and graffiti, possibly intended to mislead police, reading “Bloods hate fags.” But police, who did initially investigate gang involvement in the crime, didn’t look much further before abandoning the case.

Although Community Affairs officers appeared at the Rodney Velasquez vigil, a phone call to the 42nd Precinct turned up a desk sergeant who did not recognize even the name of the case, and could discover only that the detective who had worked on the case is retired.

When asked what precinct detectives had done to pursue the case, an NYPD spokesperson answered: “The case isn’t considered closed – but if you only have a few leads, and they don’t turn up anything, you have to wait for someone to walk into the station and tell you something new.” Although LGBT community groups cite the NYPD’s record of homophobia as a factor in the failure to resolve such cases, the 42nd Precinct appears to be equally inactive in most of its murder investigations: precinct detectives made only 21 arrests on 29 murders in 2002 and 2003, CompStat data shows.

LGBT community members see police inaction as a problem that includes, but goes beyond, homophobia: “Most of the gay murders we’ve seen in the last few years are now cold cases,” says Basil Lucas, who coordinates hate crimes and police relations at AVP. “The presumption is that a gay victim must have been soliciting sex. And transgender people get even less support from police. The whispering begins immediately.”

“The Hate Crimes Task Force is always on the ball for us, but the lower rung beat cops, the report-takers, frequently minimize or ignore us.” Beat officers’ refusal process reports from gay individuals often means that police fail to prevent violence, said Lucas.

“If police weren’t so tied up chasing young people of color to prosecute them under the Rockfeller drug laws, they might have time to seriously investigate crimes against young people of color,” said Tony O’Rourke-Quintana, who is newly installed as the Executive Director of the Bronx Lesbian & Gay Health Resource Consortium. “If police care who committed this vicious murder, they can’t wait for clues to fall into their lap. They have to go out and get them.”

City officials report that violent crimes are decreasing, but anti-gay violence has risen 53% in the past year, according to the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence project. In the same period, LGBT groups have become increasingly visible in neighborhoods from Brooklyn to the Bronx; particularly groups organizing LGBT people of color and transgender communities.

Increases in homophobic violence are often linked to advances in LGBT visibility, as well as events that increase gender-based violence – for example, mass mobilization for war. But Bronx activists are careful to point out that solutions must come from beyond the LGBT community.

“We’re right to be out,” said Charles Rice of BAAD, the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, speaking at the Rodney Velasquez vigil. “We are not the problem. The problem comes when people feel they can express hate and violence against us.”

“We need to make sure we don’t isolate ourselves from each other in our fight against racism and other inequalities”, added Peter Serrano of South Bronx Concered Citizens. Serrano urged those who feel violent urges to attend anger management classes at SBCC.

The connection between “outness” and homophobic violence. Out people of color from working-class and immigrant families, particularly young people, often walk a line between pride and caution in the Bronx.

“The murder is not going to stop me being who I am,” said David, 16, of the Bronx Lesbian & Gay Health Resource Consortium’s youth group. “But it makes me more careful.”

Meanwhile, community groups call on anyone with information to report it wherever they feel safest – to the NYC Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, the Bronx Consortium or the NYPD at (800) 577-TIPS.

The Rodney Velasquez memorial vigil was attended by 30 Bronx community members, including representatives from the Bronx Lesbian & Gay Health Resouce Consortium, Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance, the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, South Bronx Concerned Citizens and Bronx Community Board 1.

80th birthday of Bob Kohler, queer activist extraordinaire

2007-06-06T18:40:00.000-04:00

(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!
###

Peaceful protest: why we need it, and why police must help it happen.

2007-06-06T18:38:00.000-04:00

(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.

Tying the Constution in knots: DA turns due process against free speech

2007-06-06T18:33:00.000-04:00

(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?

Ready, Set, Repress: NYPD sets out to edit the Constitution

2007-06-06T18:00:00.000-04:00

(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.

Hoisted by their own Apartheid

2007-06-06T17:57:00.000-04:00

...How the separation of Jews and Palestinians is putting peace out of our reach

(unpublished till now. from 2003, I think.)

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.

Jayyous is a small farming village in the West Bank, but it has the feel of the western United States. Its winding lanes are the kind that spring up organically, rather than the squarer kind made by planners. The white plastic arches of greenhouses line up on flat plots behind the school. A volleyball tournament caused a frenzy last month when Jayyous won the cup. Farmers sit together in the shade when their fields are too hot to work, talking about water, crops and fences. They strategize about avoiding starvation.

The town’s olive groves and fruit orchards start just behind the last house; the fields stretch into the horizon. 100 yards from the house there’s a deafening clatter. A steam shovel rears its scoop above the treeline, then lowers it to bite away pieces of Palestinian ancestral farms. Without looking up, the farmers know the steam shovel is flanked by Israeli guards-for-hire carrying automatic weapons. They know the guards, Israeli Jewish men with no love for Palestinians and no consequences for killing them, are peering through rolls of razor wire strung in piles through the groves, looking for movement. They know the guards shoot.

This is the Separation Wall, also called the Apartheid Wall by those who understand its purpose to be exclusion rather than separation. Although it runs many kilometers inside the West Bank, it’s often referred to as a "border." Israeli official sources call it a "security fence," but even George Bush called it a wall – and a problem.

The most immediate problem is that the Separation Wall has separated Jayyous’ farmers from 70% of their fields, and nearly all of their irrigated land. The land on the other side is now effectively, militarily, Israel.

“The deleterious effects of the wall on Jayyous are incalculable. The trees on the land have a sacral meaning to the villagers; I've seen them cry over their destruction like relatives that've been killed,” says David Bloom, a New Yorker, journalist and Jewish activist against the occupation. Bloom is living in Jayyous for the summer, helping organize demonstrations against the Wall, and maintaining links with other internationals working in the West Bank.

“Seventy percent of Jayyous residents rely on agriculture for their livelihood, and the Israeli confiscation of their lands is in effect marching orders for them, as there is no other work to be had. It's a shattering experience to watch these people get so screwed.”

There are other problems with the Separation Wall, too. Aside from the destruction of thousands of dunams of fields in the Wall’s path and the regular beatings of Palestinians by security guards and soldiers patrolling the Wall, it launches a huge wrench into the peace process. And it doesn’t even get a mention in the Road Map. Its impact on survival in Palestinian villages is so intense that one of them – the Wall or the villages – will have to go. But when Palestinian farmers met with their U.S.-approved Prime Minister Abu Mazen to demand the Wall be addressed in negotiations with Israel, Abu Mazen told them not to expect too much. It’s not in the Road Map, so it’s not a priority at the table.

“The wall is an unwritten order for emigration for Palestinians,” says Shareef Omar of the Palestinian farmer-led Land Defense Committee. “Why? The Wall is to confiscate our land and our well water. If they didn’t want to do that, they would build the Wall along the Green Line, and not six kilometers into our land. All our resources and water are now behind the Wall. And because of this, we are convinced that when Sharon gets the chance, he will close the gate. Without resources and without water, we can’t go on with life. We will have to leave the village just to continue living.”

Indifference to the overwhelming reality of the Wall seems epidemic among those engaged in the official Peace Process. It’s not a great surprise about Abu Mazen, who signed up to the Road Map because nothing else was on offer, and is now perversely obligated to hold it above the demands of his constituents. And it’s not a surprise about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, because the Separation Wall is his concession to his government coalition; he’d rather have the option of annexing the entire West Bank. But it is a surprise to find so much of the Israeli left still strumming the tinny note that good fences make good neighbors. It speaks to Israel’s narrowing political spectrum, in which the left sounds like the right, and dissenters are sweepingly branded “radicals.”

In fact, Israel’s Left, once defined at least by a tenuous relationship to a labor movement, has been reduced to an empty designation meaning only "people who mention peace." Bumper stickers plastered on thousands of cars read "The people want peace!" illustrating the strange contradiction of a country where voters overwhelmingly chose the hawkish Likud party. So, peace for whom? In Israel, "wanting peace" may mean anything from the NIMBY wish that Palestinians would just stop being a problem, to the peace of apartheid, which wants to cleanse Israel of Palestinians – and sure, give them a state they can go to. It almost never means sitting down with Palestinians to figure out how everyone involved can find both security, that much-repeated buzz word, and the less-mentioned self-determination. Only a handful of Israeli groups actually cross the Green Line to meet Palestinians locked in by the occupation. Doing so positions them as “radicals.”

The lack of Israeli-Palestinian communication is more serious than a missed nicety. It’s a symptom of the ethnic “separation” which Israel says is essential to its existence as a Jewish state. And Palestinians and Israelis working for peace – rather than a stalemate between their governments – are stymied by it. Mohammad in Jayyous watches nervously as the American Jews staying with him depart for Tel Aviv. It’s a half-hour trip he doesn’t get to take, to a city whose skyscrapers he can see from his roof. Anywhere Palestinians travel, even inside the West Bank, they can be stopped by an Israeli soldier for any reason, or no reason. They can be stripped of their identity papers, turned back or detained indefinitely – and those are just the things that can happen officially. Unofficially, Palestinians are beaten, harassed and tortured by soldiers in the way especially sadistic boys might torture an animal. It’s dangerous for Mohammad to leave home and illegal to cross the Green Line. He can’t get to the Israelis he’d like to talk with.

And though there are Israeli groups working with Palestinians, apartheid yokes them too. What are the structures of Palestinian grassroots organizing? Reading the papers, the average Israeli learns there isn’t any Palestinian movement besides Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the like. When Israeli activists do link up with organizers inside the Occupied Territories, their physical separation presents another hurdle. Aside from the historic fear between Israelis and Palestinians which demands a tentative approach to coming into each others’ spaces, Palestinian organizations are in upheaval following two years of Israeli-imposed 24-hour curfew which effectively shut many of them down. In addition, existing contacts are needed to make new contacts, since times are just too uncertain for cold-calls between Israelis and Palestinians.

So American Jews, having traveled 3000 miles to Jayyous, find themselves serving an odd function on this day: making links between Jayyous and the Israeli activists who live a taxi ride away. The Americans on their way to Tel Aviv are meeting with Israeli anti-occupation groups. Mohammad sends word that Jayyous wants to make contact with Israelis, make alliances. "I’ve wanted to work with Israeli activists," he says, "It’s so important for us to work together, because we are the ones who have to have peace together. But I don’t have a way to reach them." On the other end, Israeli activists ask the Americans, "Are you sure this village wants to work with Israelis?" Because some Palestinian villages, where non-violent organizers have been targeted for harassment, violence and disappearance by the Israeli army, feel they simply can’t take the risk. But in Jayyous the link has been forged, a victory against separation.

Like all apartheids, the one between Palestinians and Israeli Jews exists inside them as well as between them, deliberately cast into racial identity. But truth is far more complex than "Arab" and "Jew." About a third of the Israeli Jewish population is Mizrahi, or Eastern, meaning their families came from Arab or Muslim countries and were thoroughly Arab-identified. For thousands of years, their forbears spoke Arabic and Judeo-Arabic. No one in their bloodline ever uttered a word in Yiddish. Brought by European Zionists in the 1950s to settle Israel, Mizrahim are among Israel’s poorest residents, experiencing entrenched discrimination. In a country where social status is often predicated on whether your family helped establish the state, Jews who arrived after1948 (as did most Mizrahim) are permanently outside the golden circle. The overlap of Arab and Jewish identities is a major social problem for a country whose foundation myth is purely European, and fundamentally white.

Sami Shalom Chetrit is a writer and a founder of the Mizrahi Jewish movement, most recently producing “The Black Panthers (In Israel) Speak,” a documentary on Israel’s Mizrahi movement by the same name; the Israeli Black Panthers paralleled the U.S. Black Power movement in its demands to strip racist institutions of their hegemonic control. But Chetrit also works to deconstruct the politics of his own community, unraveling the threads of racism in Israeli society that tie discrimination against Mizrahim to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

“There is no way for a Mizrahi, an Arab Jew, to have an identity equal to an Ashkenazi Israeli but to erase his or her own identity constantly,” says Chetrit. “Because if you stop doing that, if you rest for a while, your Arabness is going to jump out again. And we don’t want that to happen! So the easiest way to do it – to erase your Arabness – is to erase some Arab. And that’s easy.”

Increasingly, Mizrahi Jews are battling racial privileging of Ashkenazi Zionists who form the core of Israel’s founding mythology. It’s a tall order even for those with "mainstream" privilege; white-skinned Jews of Zionist lineage – to oppose the elevation of the founders is to pit oneself not only against the government, but a central Israeli value. And for those outside the mainstream, the pressure to assimilate is intense. Not surprisingly, then, Arab Jews are demographically more hostile toward Palestinians than the general population, and further right on the Israeli political map. They’re joined on the right by new immigrants in pursuit of assimilation, including over a million Russians. Israeli human rights activists tend to be Ashkenazi, meaning European Jews, and non-immigrants, whose opposition to the Occupation doesn't pose a threat to their Israeli racial identity.

American Jewish activists identify the same phenomenon in the United States, where support for Israel often supercedes other, older, Jewish identities. Jews who question Israeli policy or the occupation are often branded "traitors.” Even among those who do oppose the occupation, many are quick to identify as supporters of Israel.

"There’s this intense alienation among many Jews who oppose the occupation," says Daniel Lang/Levitsky a Jewish community organizer in NewYork City. "They feel this need to say ‘but I’m still a Zionist!’ to bring themselves back into the Jewish mainstream. Because support for Israel is now understood to be identical with Jewishness. Not justice, not engagement with Jewish history and traditions, just unquestioning support for the Israeli government."

Last May, Lang/Levitsky protested at New York City’s Salute to Israel parade, with the New York City group Jews Against the Occupation and a coalition of anti-occupation organizers, against blanket acceptance of the Israeli policy of occupation. Parade-goers, including hundreds carrying peace signs, were outraged by the demonstration. But many seemed most enraged at the sight of the Jewish protesters, hurling accusations of treason. The experience was not a new one for Daniel Lang/Levitsky. “The reduction of Jewish identity to Zionism is nearly complete in the United States. There’s no longer a dialogue between Jews who think one thing and Jews who think another. At this point, dissenters struggle to be heard at all. Ironically, the escalation of the Israeli occupation is finally making it easier to point out that this is terribly wrong."

From the Separation Wall, to race and class struggle of Jews inside the Green Line, to American Jews’ worship of a European Israel, activists for peace and human rights battle denial across the Israeli landscape. "We encounter many people, many Jews, who tell us there’s no room for these memories," says Yosefa Mekyton, an Israeli Jewish activist with Zochrot. Zochrot, whose name is a feminized form of the Hebrew “remembering,” is translating memories of Palestinians’ 1948 expulsion from Arabic into Hebrew, hoping to undo their erasure from Israeli consciousness. "They tell us that remembering deportation of Palestinian Arabs, the destruction of over 500 villages, the violence Jews did in order to empty and control the land, is simply incompatible with our existence as we know it. And it's true in a way, because our existence as we know it is built on the erasure of those memories. If we want to live together, we have to acknowledge that something terrible, disastrous, has happened; we have come together to tell the stories."

In the War on Activists, A Weapon Lost, A Weapon Gained

2007-06-06T17:47:00.000-04:00

(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.

Rebuilding Queer Community, Beyond Marriage

2007-06-06T17:45:00.000-04:00

(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.

Love, Honor & Disobedience

2007-06-06T17:42:00.000-04:00

(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.

hello

2007-06-06T17:01:00.000-04:00

...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.