(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.
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