Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Eating Raúl Castro: Brother Act, Too

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

804 words

Last Thursday, as Iraq burned and flared and burst into an S-O-S of body parts, the visionaries responsible for lighting that bomb sat comfortably in D.C. writing the script of a post-Castro Cuba.

Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove were there, so at first I figured the "leak" about the meeting was just a little Rovian propaganda geared towards earning Cuban American votes for Republicans.

Then I found out the meeting capped two days of enormous games at the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center in which 520 officials from 75 different federal, state and local agencies played the Cuban-U.S. version of Dungeons and Dragons. With us taxpayers footing the mini-bar bill.

One popular scenario had Fidel's death throwing the island into such chaos that Cuban refugees filled up detention centers from Florida to Texas, never mind that power has already calmly passed into his brother Raúl's hands.

Then there was the version that had the Cuban military in hand-to-hand combat in Havana against the island's pro-democracy forces, all sixteen aging radicals of them, who I guess assault the troops with Metamucil instead of Molotov cocktails.

Even if there are young firebrands among Cuba's splintered dissidents, they will be too busy squabbling with each other to go after the army, and none of them will have guns unless the U.S. brings them. Which might be the idea.

Homeland Security's Rear Admiral David W. Kunkel claimed they were only preparing for the remote chance of a mass exodus from the island. But if it were so remote, why have so many involved in the games, and why now when the U.S. is struggling to pull some kind of plan for Iraq out of its star-spangled ass?

The only answer that makes sense is that the same directors that brought us "Bombs Over Baghdad," and the "Adventure of Hurricane Katrina," are seriously preparing for another ball-buster of a hit, "Bay of Idiots: First Blood."

That's America for you, a can-do optimism that knows no bounds, neither time nor space, history, or common sense. If there's a will there's a way, always look on the sunny side.

In 2007, I will lose ten pounds on a diet of ice cream and Cheese Whiz. I will make myself smarter by watching more of the history channel, and stronger, not by getting off the subway one stop sooner, but by wrestling with my neighbors for the last available seat.

Cubans have their own cock-eyed history of optimism. What else can you call a cultural revolution, the belief you can bulldoze a nation and start again?

It happens on a smaller scale every New Year's Eve, or it used to. That day you sweep and mop the whole house. On the stroke of midnight, you toss all the filthy water out the window and start the New Year clean. (If you happen to be in the East Village Sunday night, don't look up.)

So why not an invasion?

After all, we've had success in Cuba before. Teddy took San Juan hill. Meyer Lansky conquered Havana with his craps tables and roulette wheels.

Blind faith can be enough. Of course, desperation is better.

Put the two together you get the Black civil rights moment and Martin Luther King. You don't need optimism when you're staring into a past marked with slavery, and a present of lynchings, segregated lunch counters and poverty.

The drag queens and bull dykes of the Stonewall riots weren't fighting for a bright future of equal rights and gay marriage, but against a present of beatings, raids, incarceration, death.

That's what's missing in Cuba. The desperate famine of the post-USSR "Special Period" is long gone. So is the totalitarian nature of the dictatorship that spurred the Mariel boatlift.

Sure, half a million Cubans would like to leave, but will they? Half the New Yorkers I know want out, but they don't leave their island either.

I was in Cuba a couple of years ago, and if I had to use two word to describe the place it would be "depressed" and "anxious." Forget blood in the streets, or mass migrations. Certainly, a U.S. invasion won't spur a democratic revolution.

Cubans have had their fill of trouble. They want more freedom, but won't kill to get it. The revolution is dead, and so are the revolutionaries. What Cuba has now is plenty of functionaries, mostly ones we can work with -- if we want to.

Raúl has officially extended his hand. Informally, women's groups in the U.S. are forming alliances with women there. Farmers are working on plans for Cross-Strait trade. Queers, at least Marina and I, are talking about what we can do to support our friends there.

That's a word Americans should learn in the New Year, "support," and let Cubans write their own future acts.

Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.

Eating Raúl Castro: Brother Act, Too

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

804 words

Last Thursday, as Iraq burned and flared and burst into an S-O-S of body parts, the visionaries responsible for lighting that bomb sat comfortably in D.C. writing the script of a post-Castro Cuba.

Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove were there, so at first I figured the "leak" about the meeting was just a little Rovian propaganda geared towards earning Cuban American votes for Republicans.

Then I found out the meeting capped two days of enormous games at the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center in which 520 officials from 75 different federal, state and local agencies played the Cuban-U.S. version of Dungeons and Dragons. With us taxpayers footing the mini-bar bill.

One popular scenario had Fidel's death throwing the island into such chaos that Cuban refugees filled up detention centers from Florida to Texas, never mind that power has already calmly passed into his brother Raúl's hands.

Then there was the version that had the Cuban military in hand-to-hand combat in Havana against the island's pro-democracy forces, all sixteen aging radicals of them, who I guess assault the troops with Metamucil instead of Molotov cocktails.

Even if there are young firebrands among Cuba's splintered dissidents, they will be too busy squabbling with each other to go after the army, and none of them will have guns unless the U.S. brings them. Which might be the idea.

Homeland Security's Rear Admiral David W. Kunkel claimed they were only preparing for the remote chance of a mass exodus from the island. But if it were so remote, why have so many involved in the games, and why now when the U.S. is struggling to pull some kind of plan for Iraq out of its star-spangled ass?

The only answer that makes sense is that the same directors that brought us "Bombs Over Baghdad," and the "Adventure of Hurricane Katrina," are seriously preparing for another ball-buster of a hit, "Bay of Idiots: First Blood."

That's America for you, a can-do optimism that knows no bounds, neither time nor space, history, or common sense. If there's a will there's a way, always look on the sunny side.

In 2007, I will lose ten pounds on a diet of ice cream and Cheese Whiz. I will make myself smarter by watching more of the history channel, and stronger, not by getting off the subway one stop sooner, but by wrestling with my neighbors for the last available seat.

Cubans have their own cock-eyed history of optimism. What else can you call a cultural revolution, the belief you can bulldoze a nation and start again?

It happens on a smaller scale every New Year's Eve, or it used to. That day you sweep and mop the whole house. On the stroke of midnight, you toss all the filthy water out the window and start the New Year clean. (If you happen to be in the East Village Sunday night, don't look up.)

So why not an invasion?

After all, we've had success in Cuba before. Teddy took San Juan hill. Meyer Lansky conquered Havana with his craps tables and roulette wheels.

Blind faith can be enough. Of course, desperation is better.

Put the two together you get the Black civil rights moment and Martin Luther King. You don't need optimism when you're staring into a past marked with slavery, and a present of lynchings, segregated lunch counters and poverty.

The drag queens and bull dykes of the Stonewall riots weren't fighting for a bright future of equal rights and gay marriage, but against a present of beatings, raids, incarceration, death.

That's what's missing in Cuba. The desperate famine of the post-USSR "Special Period" is long gone. So is the totalitarian nature of the dictatorship that spurred the Mariel boatlift.

Sure, half a million Cubans would like to leave, but will they? Half the New Yorkers I know want out, but they don't leave their island either.

I was in Cuba a couple of years ago, and if I had to use two word to describe the place it would be "depressed" and "anxious." Forget blood in the streets, or mass migrations. Certainly, a U.S. invasion won't spur a democratic revolution.

Cubans have had their fill of trouble. They want more freedom, but won't kill to get it. The revolution is dead, and so are the revolutionaries. What Cuba has now is plenty of functionaries, mostly ones we can work with -- if we want to.

Raúl has officially extended his hand. Informally, women's groups in the U.S. are forming alliances with women there. Farmers are working on plans for Cross-Strait trade. Queers, at least Marina and I, are talking about what we can do to support our friends there.

That's a word Americans should learn in the New Year, "support," and let Cubans write their own future acts.

Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.

Monday, December 18, 2006

For Whom the Wedding Bell Tolls

800 words

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Before I know it, I'll have the right to get down on one knee and ask my girlfriend Marina to marry me. Across the river in New Jersey, lawmakers just gave Jersey queers a separate but unequal civil union. Here in New York, gay marriage may come via Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer who promised to support the real deal, though he'll have to slip a bill past a mostly conservative legislature that would rather burn down every chapel in the state than see two dykes get hitched there.

At least we won't face opposition from presidential hopeful New York Senator Hillary Clinton who said she'd stay out of it, which is easy since a U.S. Senator like her doesn't actually have much to say in what happens back home.

I’m not popping the question yet. Sitting at the Ikea in New Jersey a few weeks ago, I could feel marriage closing in. Or to mix my metaphors, it passed before my eyes like your life is supposed to when you're staring death in the face.

I'd finished my shopping and slouched at the little café near the exit gobbling fifty cent hotdogs and drinking coffee. It seemed like only heterosexual couples went by, the whole range from those just moving in together, to newlyweds, the parents of three, and a handful of bitter old couples sniping at each other with their dentures bared.

At one point I thought that every pregnant woman in New Jersey was there, at least the skinny kind that works out until the last minute, and just grows a bowling ball down there in front.

Each usually had a nervous looking husband in tow, who had probably been all excited at first, but now that it was getting down to brass tacks and baby cribs had started to figure out that he was not just getting a kid, but a hand-over-fist consumer that'll spend eighteen, or twenty, or thirty years devouring that whole eating out, cd-buying, movie-going lifestyle he'd enjoyed after college.

Lift your eyes, you could see one of their possible futures, exhausted looking couples with two or three kids pulling at their clothes and grabbing the Christmas ornaments from the displays. At the café, one woman waiting for her husband to come back with the cinnamon rolls had dropped off to sleep at the little table, one hand on her kid napping in the stroller.

I know there's nothing in the marriage contract that says I have to pop any babies, but in my mind all of that fecundity is tied up somehow with my sense of marriage. Not so much the idea of children, but of expansion, webs weaving, weeds growing like kudzu, and filling up the house with rights and responsibilities.

I was at City Hall once to witness a marriage ceremony, and when the functionary in his shabby best suit started pronouncing the blessings of the state on the happy couple, I felt so claustrophobic I started to cry. Moved by my tears of what he thought was joy, the jaded guy droning the ceremony started to choke up, too.

I cried. He cried. Pink noses all around.

Since then, I hadn't thought about it much, in personal terms, anyway, until last year when I had to get a colonoscopy done at the hospital and the doctor said something along the lines of, "By the way, there's a slight risk of us ripping a chunk out of your intestines. Who do we call?"

And I thought of my mother appearing by my bedside, trying to ban Marina who after thirteen years is still nothing to me under the law. So I spent a couple of hundred dollars and two days with notaries doing paperwork that could've been taken care of with a five minute marriage at City Hall.

Imagine, five minutes, hundred of legal rights -- that we deserve, mind you. We should get the name, too. If we're equal, we're equal. We get the rights and the name. Let's not even call it gay, just plain old marriage.

The thing is, I'm not sure I'll do it even if the chance presents itself.

You can't legislate love, and some of the older couples I saw at Ikea were only together from inertia, a weariness of habit tied-up with all the shackles of law.

Sure, after so many years of a common life with Marina, I wouldn't mind some protection for us. But I'm afraid of what else the law does by "legitimizing" our relationship, cement-shoeing it until death or the state steps in and awards us divorce.

Now, sans marriage, it's all in our hands. The beginning of things and the end. Each day I wake up next to Marina is like saying, "I choose you. I choose you." It means something.

Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.

Monday, December 11, 2006

All I Want for Christmas Is Götterdämmerung

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

798 words

The ten queers hauled off by death squads in Iraq earlier this month are presumed dead. Their murderers may be Sunni or Shiite. Who cares which? That's what religion gets you. A bullet in the back of the head -- if you're lucky. If not, torture first, then death.

Inside my heart I carry a rocket launcher and take out every church I see. Except the really pretty ones. Those, I just close off to worship.

Everybody else gets dust and rubble, an end to the spaces that sanction all those people busy interpreting, exclaiming, pointing their enlightened fingers, "I know what Jesus [Mohammad, Buddha, Wotan] really meant. It's them others over there that are wrong."

Who says so? You? A couple dozen others? A few thousand? Does God respond to majority vote? Why should you have the keys to the heavenly kingdom just because you're preaching peace and love and gay rights?

On Thursday, a council of Conservative Jews, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, were kind enough to sanction commitment ceremonies for us queers. Does that make it okay now? Were we wrong before?

Politically, I suppose it's progress, so let's all take a minute to hoot and holler. But what I really want to say to those guys is fuck you.

I'm not like Mae West, getting a kick about being talked about. What are we, a new and different species? Do you suspect I keep my third head in the closet, my wings tucked under my armpits, a tail up my ass?

I want it to be over. Decide. Are we humans or animals? Under this democratic banner, are we equal or not?

I'm not surprised when we humans act like pigs. We share a lot of the same DNA as earthworms, why not boars? I'm sure there's a defender of religion out there saying "God's not the problem, it's the rotten human race, our self-serving tendency to shape God in our image. Don't blame God for the people that will use any tool at hand for evil. What about the good religion brings? Hope, endurance, forbearance, compassion?"

To that I say one big, "Phooey." I can find plenty of other sources of good. Including reason. Go Descartes.

For me, God, especially expressed in religion, is something I would like to see compressed into a square the size of a sugar cube, and blown back into space.

I don't care whether you believe in one God über alle, or a kind of Valhalla out there, a different god for every day of the week. Either way, you're playing with dynamite.

People that believe God is on their side hold a moral nuclear warhead in their hands. Religion's capacity for evil outweighs that for good. Especially, and always, when queers are concerned.

I say this as someone raised Southern Baptist, who for a dozen years believed I would be a medical missionary. As editor of The Gully, I tried to give voice to gay Muslims, gay Christians, any gay religious person you can think of, and for that matter, gay Republicans, too, because I believe queer activists should be everywhere.

But if I had my druthers, God would play no role on earth as long as humans lived there. The same day the news broke that God likes queers, or is at least okay with gay Jewish commitment ceremonies, I got an email saying, "God hates negroes." Death squads aim for fags in Iraq. Gay kids are homeless, electro-shocked, tortured. And why? God. God. God. Even the Dalai Lama condemns us.

Don't mistake what I'm saying. I know that embedded in religion, and our search for God, is a human urge towards the divine. We want to experience some part of life as holy, to have a sense of awe. Though probably apes do, too.

I even think it is good for our collective character to feel small, to be dwarfed by God or art or nature, and to embrace smaller beauty too, and god's still, small voice.

The thing is, we humans are never content with that. Especially in packs. The closest I came was at a Quaker meeting. I almost fell in love with the sunlight streaming through the windows, all those still, quiet people sitting around contemplating God in silence. But then they had to open their mouths, blab their banal revelations. And those are some of the good guys.

The thing is, we queers, at ten percent or less of humanity, will always be vulnerable, a statistical minority, and target when things go wrong. And gods are temperamental. Even when they're on my side, I'm scared. The worm turns.

So forgive me, if at the birthday of one god, I'm praying for Götterdämmerung, the twilight of them all.

Visit Kelly Sans Culotte at http://kellyatlarge.blogspot.com.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Information Alone Won't Stop AIDS

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

801 words

World AIDS day, walking around New York in the rain, I spent a minute thinking of people I knew who had died from it.

There were just a handful, which is strange, considering that the three gay black men I knew from the neighborhood have all died in the last two or three years, but none from AIDS, though that was supposedly their demographic fate.

The Big C got Al, and Ernesto, too. Every time I'd see him at the Laundromat, he'd lost another chunk of his guts to cancer. Then there was that choreographer with dreds that got a blood clot or something in his brain.

I was closest to Al. When he and Ernesto got together, they'd swap lies about all the men they screwed, and drugs they used to do, big lines of coke, bales of weed, and pills by the handful.

"Remember the time that guy slipped you a mickey and you fell right off the stool? I had to sling you over my shoulder and carry you home."

They should have been dead when HIV first hit the community. But they were just too mean, I guess. Pulled a nasty face and scared it off. And they were smart enough that when the news broke about how you got it, they started using condoms.

They certainly didn't cross their legs and give up sex. Al could barely walk, worn out from chemo, and his legs all messed up from diabetes, but he'd still bring home tricks. He loved men. And boys, too. He felt like their protector.

He'd been a medic in the army, and it was his thing to give health lectures. Young males, gay or straight, got buttonholed on safe sex and personal hygiene. Afterwards, he'd mutter about how ignorant the little bastards were, "Twenty years old and don't even know how to wash their own dicks. None of 'em do."

Or, "Guy came to me, thought he was gonna die because he had crabs. Never heard of that before. Whipped it out on the verge of tears. A boy like that's not gonna live long."

Young black and Latino fags got to him most, the ignorance, and often self-hate. They broke his heart. Maybe because he had his own problems in the ego department.

You had to wonder when Al, a diabetic, stuffed himself with candy and sweetened ice tea. Do you want to have another stroke, or what? He also hooked up with some neo-Nazi kid. I expected to hear any day his black ass'd been slaughtered. Even cancer was better.

My point here is that he knew what would hurt him, but he did some of it anyway. Information wasn't the main factor. Hardly ever is, not in America.

Like when TV and newspapers whine about obesity. Information is always the focus, as if poor people stuck with it didn't know big chunks of lard were bad for you.

Sitting in the Laundromat, no Club Med, half the conversations are about nutrition, chicken -- good, red meat -- bad. Gotta watch the cholesterol. There's a sale on hens at Key Foods.

Every time I open a bag of Cheese Doodles, or have a soda, while I'm waiting to put my clothes in the dryer, one skinny, older woman warns me they're bad for me -- then goes outside for another cigarette.

My aunts used to sit around and have the same kind of conversations, blood sugar this, cholesterol that. They knew plenty, but one still ended up in the hospital from diabetes, her legs cut off, hooked up to machines for weeks before she died. It was horrible.

We trust too much in information. Even gay liberation, the antidote to queer self-destruction, and the only thing that will erase the stigma of HIV for closet cases and heterosexuals so they can at least get the information through their thick skulls, isn't enough.

Our health is also tied to class and race. Organic milk is four bucks a half gallon, and who has time to cook when you're working two jobs? If you do have time, you want to do comfort food. It was pornographic the way Al and I used to moan about biscuits and sausage gravy.

Better just to drop by McDonald's and stuff yourself for five bucks. What've you got to live for, anyway, just more work, with no cushy retirement at the end?

American culture makes it worse, that self-reliant, anti-authority, individualist "don't tread on me" tradition. We even rebel against governing ourselves when it comes to Super-Sizing and condom use.

Then remember America's nice wide puritanical strain, and add guilt to the mix. Vast mountains of it. And feeling crappy for doing what we know is bad for us, what do we do? Screw if we can. If not, eat.