From Stonewall to Darfur: Drag Queens are Making a Difference

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This day in history, June 28, 1969, the first punch was thrown in the historic Stonewall Riots. Some say it was a drag queen, others a butch lesbian, and still others say it was some less gender-bending gay man.

The event is still a hot topic of debate in gay circles, with much disagreement about what actually precipitated the violence and who took part in it. One legend holds that Judy Garland's funeral, held June 27 in Manhattan, fanned the flames of gay rage. Other versions of the story claim that dozens of sequined drag queens and a mysterious, unidentified butch lesbian were at the forefront of the street rebellion. But a few facts seem certain.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a dingy, Mafia-run "private club" on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village with a predominantly gay clientele. The charge was illegal sale of alcohol. It was the second time that week the bar had been targeted by the police, and other gay bars had also been raided in prior weeks. Police officers lined up the Stonewall's 200 patrons to check identification. Most were free to leave, but the staff, as well as three drag queens and two male-to-female transsexuals, were detained.

Eyewitnesses recalled that the scene outside the bar was at first campy and festive. Patrons were joined by tourists and passers-by, and everyone cheered when a gay person emerged from the bar, dismissed by the police. But when a paddy wagon arrived and the police loaded the bar's staff and the three drag queens inside, the crowd on the street grew surly. One person threw a rock through a window, and eventually garbage cans, bottles, and even a parking meter were used to assault the building. Someone set a fire with lighter fluid. By newspaper accounts, 13 people were arrested and three police officers sustained minor injuries in the confrontation.

Later that night and into Sunday morning, a crowd again gathered in front of the ravaged bar. Many young gay men showed up to protest the flurry of raids, but they did so by handholding, kissing, and forming a chorus line. "We are the Stonewall girls," they sang, kicking their legs in front of the police. "We wear our hair in curls./We have no underwear./We show our pubic hair." Police cleared the street without incident this time, but another street altercation occurred a few days later.

Whatever or whomever tripped the wire on that violent rebellion, it had been a long time in coming. The gay rights movement had been underway and making political gains for some years, but an up-tick in bar raids that summer was wearing on the community. The iconic riots were a tipping point; a catalyst for the nascent movement.

Today's drag queens can turn their attention to other challenges. In May, a Minneapolis synagogue sponsored a drag show show to raise funds for Darfur. From Truthdig:

Cpl. Buju Ceesay wants to meet the young men who gyrated in sequin ball gowns and stilettos for his sake. They worship at a synagogue in Minneapolis, Minn.; he prays at a mosque in Banjul, Gambia. They are high school activists; he’s a 27-year-old peacekeeper with the African Union in Darfur. But even across 5,000 miles and a yawning cultural chasm, Cpl. Ceesay is pleased to hear about the “Drag Ball for Darfur” held at Congregation Shir Tikvah in May. Dancing across the stage in outrageous costumes, the students raised more than $7,000 for the Genocide Intervention Network, which in turn finances firewood patrols like the ones Ceesay conducts for the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS). “These patrols are the only way for us to protect women in the camps from rape and abduction as they venture out in search of sticks and twigs for their cooking,” the Gambian soldier explains. “But the African Union lacks the funds and morale to keep [the patrols] going, so we’ll take any help we can get ... including drag queens.”

She Is Not A Number...

She is a FREE heiress.














I'm thinking this is probably a coincidence. Still, it's kind of interesting.

Same as the Old Bosses

Just finishing the thought from the freshly minted Mother Jones article, "Meet the New Bosses." Subtitle: "After crashing the gate of the political establishment, bloggers are looking more like the next gatekeepers." Bingo!

Last June, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, former soldier, one-time Reagan Republican, and proprietor of the wildly successful liberal blog Daily Kos, sent an email to an invitation-only listserv known as Townhouse. Consisting of some 300 liberal bloggers, journalists, activists, and consultants, the list was an outgrowth of weekly strategy sessions held at a D.C. bar—a forum for brainstorming on issues and tactics, and a means of creating a "unified message," as Moulitsas later put it. Its members were bound by one main rule: Nothing from the list was to be quoted or distributed, which, this being politics, meant that a leak was bound to happen.

In the message that would end up putting Townhouse, briefly, on the outside world's radar, Moulitsas asked list members to "ignore" a blog item by the New York Times' Chris Suellentrop that revealed that Jerome Armstrong—founder of the popular liberal blog MyDD and a close friend and business associate of Moulitsas—had once been implicated in a stock-touting scheme. Suellentrop noted parallels between stock-hyping and bloggers' touting of candidates such as Howard Dean, who had hired both Armstrong and Moulitsas as consultants during his 2004 presidential campaign. Moulitsas, who had recently coauthored the book Crashing the Gate with Armstrong, told Townhouse members that these revelations were "a nonstory." "So far," he wrote, "this story isn't making the jump to the traditional media, and we shouldn't do anything to help make that happen." He urged participants to "starve it of oxygen."

When The New Republic's Jason Zengerle blogged about the Townhouse email, "The Kos" urged readers to cancel their subscriptions, writing, "It is now beyond clear that the dying New Republic is mortally wounded and cornered, desperate for relevance. It has lost half its circulation since the blogs arrived on the scene and they no longer (thank heavens!) have a monopoly on progressive punditry. We have hit their bottom line, we are hitting their patron saint hard (Joe Lieberman) and this is how they respond. By going after the entire movement." Many of Moulitsas' followers—Kossacks, they call themselves—then filled Zengerle's inbox with all manner of invective.

The irony is this: Moulitsas' reaction echoes the very control-the-message philosophy the blogosphere once rose up to fight... [emphasis mine]

Lots more good stuff in the Mother Jones piece, including some sparkling insight from my girl Maryscott O'Connor of My Left Wing. (Full disclosure: I am a front-page writer and editor for that site. I wouldn't want to be accused of undisclosed bias. That would surely be ironic, no?)

O'Connor speaks like she writes, in stream-of-consciousness bursts, and she told me she had begun to feel there was a "schism" in the blogosphere. "I think that certain bloggers, the big ones, think politics is sexy," she said. "They want in, and they're getting in. They'll do anything to get in, almost. They want a seat at the table. They want to be in the inner circle of the Democratic Party." A member of Townhouse, she was at first reluctant to talk about the list but changed her mind midway through our conversation, predicting that her comments would get her banished. "It's fucking Skull and Bones, man," she said. "The very secretive, behind-closed-doors nature of it is anathema to everything that blogging is supposed to be about: accountability. We are supposed to be showing the way, not skulking around behind closed doors, coming up with strategies. Those are the people who we're trying to fight. I know about 'the real world' and all that shit. But we're the idealists, aren't we?"

The article concludes with a list of quotes about the blogosphere. This one cracked me up:

micah sifry
It's true that Josh Marshall and Markos Moulitsas are very influential, but they are constantly held accountable by their audience. If Markos makes a mistake, right there in the blog comments people are bashing him. He can't stray that far from accountability, the way that editors of the old gatekeeping institutions—whether it was the New York Times or The Nation—were inherently insulated. It's no coincidence that you see a flowering of new voices and people earning their status on merit rather than going to the right college.

It would appear that Mr. Sifry is oblivious to just how many kossacks have been banished to cyberia.

I would probably have much more to say on this insightful bit of journalism, if I hadn't been saying it, and saying it, and saying it, until I'm tired of fucking saying it.

The Jack Bauer Defense

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So here's the deal: The power cord for my computer blew up. I'm waiting for a new one, but in the meanwhile, my PowerBook is a paperweight. But I had to take a few of the stolen moments on my husband's computer to blog yet another "24" horror story.

As I noted here, there is an apparent propensity amongst Republicans to use the fictitious action plots as apologia for their own dark impulses. This, even though actual, real-world, interrogation specialists say torture does not work.

As per Andrew Sullivan, it seems Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is also a Jack Bauer fan and had this to say:

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Yes, a member of the highest court in the land using a fictional character to argue against the rule of law. His comments were made, by the way, during a panel discussion on torture and terrorism law that included senior jurists from Canada and Europe. And we wonder why the US is becoming a laughingstock.

On the plus side, I think I'm beginning to understand why so many conservatives blame Hollywood for all our social ills. They think it's real. And they must think we're all as suggestible as they are.

For When the Thought Police Decide to Come for You... And They Will

They came first for the robots,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a robot...

On April 18th the sleepy college town of Kutztown, PA, became the setting for a heated clash between religious fundamentalism and modernity.

A religious group that staged a protest at Kutztown University today drew hundreds of angry students after members of the group told them they would burn in hell if they were gay, Jewish or Catholic.

Campus police led several of protesters away in hand-cuffs and led the rest off campus after as many as 300 students gathered around the group, according to witnesses.

Campus officials said there may have been arrests because the group had not gotten permission to be on campus. The protest took place on the Day of Silence, an annual event held to bring attention to bullying, harassment and discrimination of gays and lesbians in schools.

One of those arrested was college student and robot rights activist Charles Kline.

On April 18th, I was arrested. This normally wouldn’t be big news, but the situation arround which I was arrested brings up serious questions. I was arrested at Kutztown University, where I am a student, because I decided to try to liven the mood after the Life and Liberty Ministries began to upset students. They came on campus with signs that featured aborted fetuses, lists of people who will be going to hell, and catchy phrases such as “JESUS OR HELL”. I have friends who are gay, and these people who came onto Kutztown University’s campus without permission or prior notice were upsetting students all over campus.

I decided not to simply let them upset people, so I went to the bookstore and purchased a posterboard and sharpie marker and made my own sign. It said “Equal Rights for Robots”, a saying I thought no one would be able to take the wrong way. The protesters had been on campus for about two hours at this time, and the whole time the police were protecting them from the students. To my knowledge, the protesters at this time had not been asked to leave. With my sign in hand, I walked out and waved my sign in the air.

...

I was charged with Disorderly Conduct with intent to “alarm or annoy” and in the citation it says I was “warned repeatedly” to stop. Neither is true, and when I pointed this out to the officer who wrote it out for me he said something along the lines of I don’t care and made a comment along the lines of tell it to the judge. I plead not guilty and face a three hundred dollar fine or up to 90 days in jail if found guilty.

I have no love for religious intolerance, nor am I a fan of robots. They terrorize the elderly and eat their medicine. They're made of metal and they're strong. But can we truly call ourselves free if we are unable to express such diverse viewpoints without fear of persecution?

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm (1946)

"The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions."
-- Adlai E. Stevenson

And now a word from Old Glory Insurance...

So Why Do I Care About Paris Hilton?

I spent a good part of the last few days arguing about Paris Hilton. Among other subjects of debate, is the issue of why we should be discussing her in the first place. After all, as an individual, she is probably one of the most uninteresting people ever to usurp national interest. Ironically, this is exactly what makes her worthy of discussion. Her iconic status says far more about the country than it possibly could about her. She's a reflection of a culture run off the rails by economic disparity, ignorance, shallowness, and the gullibility of a public too easily distracted by bread and circuses. Or as one of my favorite bloggers Steven Weber put it:

A true-life, virtually unbelievable culture criminal, the embodiment of all that America® and it's affiliates (America-Lite, America Xtra Caff, McJesus, HistoryBeGone!, etc.) export to its citizenry and the world, she is like one of those characters at the end of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 walking around endlessly reciting books they have committed to memory in impart [sic] to future bookless generations the ingredients essential to humanity: knowledge, curiosity, imagination, the adhesive substances that bind the bricks of civilization. Only, Paris Hilton walks by herself in an isolated part of the forest, barely able to keep a Bazooka Joe comic in her head, stumbling over the big words and encouraging not mere passing scorn or fringe amusement but outright worship.

It's been said that Miss Hilton received a harsher sentence because of her celebrity status. If so she's been hoisted by her own petard, for she is the walking embodiment of an old cliché; quite literally famous for being famous. I think it's more likely that the Honorable Judge Sauer lobbed a very tiny book at Miss Hilton because she has consistently displayed an attitude that she is above the law.

"I can't believe that either attorney did not tell her that the suspension had been upheld," the judge said. "She wanted to disregard everything that was said and continue to drive no matter what."

What else can one possibly deduce about a person whose excuse for ignorance of the legal documents she signed is that she, "has people who do that for me." How many times does a person have to be cited for driving on a suspended license before some realization dawns?

But according to prosecutors, Hilton violated at least three terms of her probation. First, she failed to enroll in an alcohol education course within 21 days of her sentencing.

Second, she had several traffic violations after receiving probation. On February 27, 2007, she was stopped by L.A. Sheriff Deputies for driving “a new Bentley” at 70 m.p.h. in a 35 m.p.h. zone “in darkness without her headlights on,” and without a valid driver’s license.

The air must be rarefied, indeed, in a place where one can pull such a stunt and remain mystified when the judicial system catches up.

Like I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paris draws a legion of admirers convinced that she is above the law. Their offenses are too trifling, they say, to merit the statutory penalties for the crimes of which they were both convicted.

Like the George W. Bush, Miss Hilton lives far from the reality-based community.

"I've never lived around poor people," Wallis remembers Bush saying. "I don't know what they think. I really don't know what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?"

To people like Miss Hilton, even millionaires are poor.

A heated argument erupted last Friday between the two after Lohan approached Hilton, who had been partying with her sister, Nicky, and friends.

But the argument took a nasty turn when Paris and her oil heir pal, Brandon Davis, left a club on Monday night to go home.

As the pair walked to their car Davis - an oil heir worth $A31.4 billion($US24billion) - hurled a tirade of disgusting comments about Lohan.

...

He said: "I think she's worth about seven million dollars ($A9.16 million), which means she's really poor.

"It's disgusting. She lives in a motel."

He also let loose a racial insult against Lohan's former boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama.

"Is he in a mariachi band?" Davis said.

During the rant, Paris' publicist, Elliot Mintz, walks by her side, helpless and grim-faced.

He has been quick to try and distance Paris from the comments - despite the fact she laughed along and encouraged the rant.

For today, it seems Miss Hilton has hit the limits of what insulation her wealth and privilege could ensure. Screaming to her mother about the unfairness of it all, she was returned to halls of justice very different from those most of us would encounter.

Hilton was housed in the "special needs" unit of the 13-year-old jail, separate from most of its 2,200 inmates. The unit contains 12 two-person cells reserved for police officers, public officials, celebrities and other high-profile inmates. She didn't have a cellmate.

I can only hope that her social peers in the White House meet a similar fate. I won't hold my breath.

Dance of the Chicken-Hawks

The Worst Nightmare for a GOP Candidate is a Future Terrorist Attack Prevented by a Gay Hero.

-- Jon Stewart, "The Daily Show"

Well, we can't possibly have a bunch of girlie-men out-macho the war party. As Maureen Dowd points out, only John McCain has the military cred to even speak to this issue... which he does as stupidly as the rest.

Wolf Blitzer asked him about the Arabic linguists trained by the government who have been ousted from the military after being outed.

Mr. Giuliani, who procured three deferments to avoid Vietnam, replied that, with the war in Iraq raging, “This is not the time to deal with disruptive issues like this.”

If he’s so concerned with disruptive issues, maybe he should start worrying about this one: Two straight guys who slithered out of going to Vietnam are devising a losing strategy in Iraq year after year. W. and Dick Cheney have fouled things up so badly that Robert Gates and Tony Snow are now pointing to South Korea — where American troops have stayed for over half a century — as a model.

Mitt Romney agreed with Rudy on the issue. Instead of going to Vietnam, Mr. Romney spent two and a half years doing Mormon missionary work in France. Isn’t that like doing Peace Corps work in Monte Carlo?

At the memorial for Mark Bingham, the gay 6-foot-5 rugby player who was on Flight 93 on 9/11, John McCain said he might owe his life to the young man who helped fight the hijackers, bringing down the plane aiming to crash into the Capitol.

But Senator McCain wants gay troops to stay closeted...

Battlefield Gaffe

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Paul Krugman has some outrageous notions about what the press should focus on in its interminable coverage of this interminable election season.

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

I guess Mr. Krugman didn't get the memo about the 2008 election being a referendum on which candidate is the most Reaganesque.

Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

Well, I suppose we could focus on the minutiae of how we wound up in a conflict which has so far cost us over 3500 American lives -- or on the fact that we broke the 3500 mark this week -- but it's so much more interesting to focus on gaffes about a dead President.

Romney is probably heaving a sigh of relief that his rewrite of history hasn't added to his gaffe quotient, because he's assembled quite a record of bizarre ramblings. Ana Marie Cox provides a rundown of statements that give the lie to his boring, white-bread exterior and expose him to be an SF geek with an odd penchant for praising Hitler. National spokesman Kevin Madden explains:

He spends "23 hours, 59 minutes a day avoiding controversy...it's the one minute in the day where something is either lost in translation or he strays from conventional wisdom that reporters or opponents will pounce on."

And you thought being mind-numbingly dull was easy. It's actually a very carefully developed skill set. In a campaign focused entirely on image, bland is fine. Aping Tom Cruise isn't.

It's remarkable enough for a serious Presidential contender to name a book of genre fiction as his — or her — favorite novel. (The primary season reading list tends toward the classics and more serious contemporary literary fare.) But naming Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" on Fox News raised a host of questions Romney could have avoided if he'd named something by Ray Bradbury. First of all, many Americans already view Romney's own faith as suspiciously cultlike in some respects — so why draw personal attention to Hubbard's religion, Scientology, which has a more sinister reputation? Putting religion aside, "Battlefield Earth" is almost universally regarded as a terrible book, even by the standards of science fiction junkies.

Equally embarrassing is confusing the SF universe of Mormon author (and Curmudgette fave) Orson Scott Card with the policies of the real world French government.

Romney's blinding hatred for the French may have played a role in that merry mix-up. He also, apparently, considered "Hillary=France" bumper stickers. I think it's a bad idea, but if after the primaries, these two hyper-sanitized candidates face off, we could be seeing them on bumpers all across red state America. If they can expunge enough of their troubling personalities to make them media bullet-proof, who knows.

"Are We Rome?"

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Now that is a question I've asked, myself, many times? I'm no historian but the parallels have struck me as more than a little obvious. Which is why I privately refer to President Bush as Caligula. Salon takes up the question in a review of a new book of the same name. Former Atlantic Monthy editor Cullen Murphy's Are we Rome? hit bookstores last month.

So are there parallels? You betcha.

First, just as Romans saw Rome as the literal center of the world -- they placed in the Forum a stone omphalos, or "navel," that they believed stood over the entrance to Hades -- America's political ruling class suffers from delusions of Beltway grandeur. "[T]he way the tiny, elite subset of Americans who live in the nation's capital see America -- and see Washington itself," Murphy argues, is a "faulty premise" that "leads to an exaggerated sense of Washington's weight in the world: an exaggerated sense of its importance in the eyes of others, and of its ability to act alone." He tartly recounts the way that courtiers in such self-obsessed capitals become obsessed with prestige. In JFK's time, "only 29 people held the coveted title of 'assistant,' 'deputy assistant,' or 'special assistant' to the President; by the time Bill Clinton left office, there were 141 such people."

As a military spouse, I found this correlation rather chilling.

Second, there's military power. Like Rome, America suffers from a "two cultures" problem, in which military and civilian society are increasingly alien to each other. A Roman historian wrote that soldiers returning from distant posts were "most savage to look at, frightening to listen to, and boorish to talk with." Murphy notes: "America's Delta Force would fare no better in Saddle River, Brentwood, or Winnetka." Moreover, like Rome, America is unable to sustain its enormous military, and is forced to turn to outsiders -- for Rome, barbarians, for America, contractors. "The Iraq War is the most privatized major conflict since the Renaissance," Murphy notes.

This one is subtle, but it is probably the most disturbing in its portents for the future of our "democracy."

Murphy illuminates one key facet of the decline of Rome by citing the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, who explored the evolution of a single Latin term: the word "suffragium," which originally meant "voting tablet." Citizens could cast votes, although in practice great men who ran patronage systems controlled large blocs of votes. Over time, Roman democracy withered, but the patronage system remained, and the word "suffragium" came to mean only the pressure that a powerful man could exert on one's behalf. Eventually, the word came to denote simply the money paid for a favor: a bribe. Ste. Croix's devastating conclusion: "Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome."

In a telling historical-etymological comparison, Murphy looks at the history of the word "franchise." It too originally "had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility": It denoted the right to vote. "Only much later, in the mid twentieth century, did the idea of being granted certain 'rights' acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company's services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware ... In the Wiktionary, the commercial meaning of 'franchise' is now the primary definition. The definition involving political freedom and the right to vote comes fifth." Murphy's disturbing conclusion: "Looking back at the history of 'franchise,' then, it's tempting to write this epitaph: Here, in miniature, is the political history of America."

The book also addresses the role of neoconservative movement that, embracing our imperialism, has set the country on its most disastrous course yet.

Those who are inspired include figures whom Murphy calls the "triumphalists," who "see America as at long last assuming its imperial responsibilities, bringing about a global Pax Americana like the Pax Romana at its most commanding, in the first two centuries A.D." In this camp are neoconservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Max Boot and "the triumphalist-in-chief, trading jodhpurs for flight suit," George W. Bush. These figures unapologetically advocate that the U.S. dominate the world.

Are we Rome? There are certainly key differences, which the author addresses. But the similarities are akin to those which saw the decline of that once great empire. It is up to us whether we address these as, in Murphy's words, "a grim cautionary tale or an inspirational call to action."

From Jack Bauer to Keystone Cops and Other Tortured Hollywood Analogies

My husband has often quipped, while watching action movie pyrotechnics, "Oh, now, who filled that car with dynamite?" In his years as a Marine, he's picked up a few things about munitions. This can make him a real buzz-kill when one is trying to suspend disbelief about things exploding in dramatic fire balls and action heroes who mysteriously never suffer any hearing loss.

I guess over at Justice, they prefer the movie version of events. That would certainly fit with the increasing Republican conviction that terror imitates art. Only on a Hollywood soundstage could the JFK terror plot have resulted in, "unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction."

John Goglia, a former member of National Transportation Safety Board, said that if the plot had ever been carried out, it would likely have sparked a fire but little else, and certainly not the mass carnage authorities described.

"You could definitely reach the tank, definitely start the fire, but to get the kind of explosion that they were thinking that they were going to get... this is virtually impossible to do," he told AFP.

The fuel pipelines around the airport would similarly burn, rather than explode, because they are a full of fuel and unable to mix with enough oxygen.

Oh. And it turns out that these guys really had no actual resources or capacity to enact even this comically inept plot.

Furthermore, the plotters seem to have lacked the explosives and financial backing to carry out the attack.

Is it Groundhog Day?