The Bilerico Project

Why gay marriage IS the End of the World (or the queer world, at least)

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0500

I organized a sassy roundtable for the queer issue of Maximum Rocknroll, which was the October issue -- the issue is now off the stands, but here is the roundtable for your viewing pleasure -- it's a bit long, but I figured you might love it -- or love to hate it... It starts here:

These days, lesbian soccer moms and gay military intelligence experts are all over the media, whether sermonizing in op-eds, befriending the liberal intelligentsia, or speaking softly to closeted cable news anchors: We. Are. Just. Like. You.

Supposedly gay people have made lots of progress, and that's why the only issues we hear about involve marriage, gays in the military, gay cops, adoption, ordination into the priesthood, hate crimes legislation, and unquestioning gentrification and consumerism--please, stop me before I choke on my own vomit! In honor of the Maximum Rocknroll queer issue, it's time to pull together a gang of queer troublemakers to tear this assimilationist agenda to shreds, okay?

Here's the cast of characters:

Hilary Goldberg is a San Francisco-based filmmaker currently in the finishing stages of recLAmation, the definitive movie about reclaiming Los Angeles from Los Angeles, and oh are we waiting! Yasmin Nair is a Chicago activist who delivers delicious rants about the war against single people, the tyranny of religion, fake immigration reform, and bachelorette parties with equal fervor and finesse [as you already know]. Gina Carducci throws Switch, New York City's only monthly "genderqueer/women/trans BDSM party" --she also fetishizes film, and is currently working on All That Sheltering Emptiness, a devastating short experimental film created in collaboration with your host for this splashy article.

Okay, let's get going...

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Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize -- what next?

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:00:00 -0500

Is this a joke? I mean -- seriously -- at first I thought it was April Fools, or something, but then I realized it's October, but maybe in Norway they have October Fools?

Let's review Obama's peacemaking record... Okay, expanding the war in Afghanistan, more drone attacks in Pakistan, continuing to support the Israeli war machine, engineering the Wall Street billionaires bail-out, rolling out the health care industry giveaway, supporting extension of the PATRIOT act, delaying the closure of Guantánamo -- what's next? Oh, a Nobel Peace Prize and $1.4 million -- that should push him in the right direction.

What about Blackwater founder Erik Prince -- wasn't he on the short list? I mean, he did just recently say, "I will be taking on new challenges that I have not yet had the chance to tackle." Just to make sure he doesn't kill any more employees, or engineer the mass murder of thousands, I really really wish the illustrious Nobel committee had given him the medallion -- it's a medallion, isn't it -- you do get a medallion, along with the $1.4 million, don't you? That prize pressure worked so well with Shimon Peres -- shalom aleichem.

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Pie a realtor for Marriage Equality? I'm serious!

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:30:00 -0500

Okay, this might be the weirdest ad I've ever seen, in the current issue of the Bay Area Reporter -- at the top it says:

"PIE A REALTOR FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY!"

And then -- yes yes, a picture of someone in a suit, a pie in their face!

And beneath this somewhat enticing image:

"Herth Real Estate invites you to donate to Marriage Equality USA by putting a pie in the face of your favorite realtor"

Really?

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Wait -- is it my imagination, or is Saks Fifth Avenue satirizing the gay marriage assimilation agenda?

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Left display window: mannequins in Diesel underwear (and one with a hat, one wearing bow tie, and the other sporting a bandana), and the slogan -- EQUALITY IS THE BOTTOM LINE.

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Bending Towards Oblivion: my interview with historian Martin Duberman in the San Francisco Bay Guardian

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:30:00 -0500

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: We're approaching the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the symbolic event of early gay liberation, and I'm wondering if you think there's any of this liberationist spirit left in the gay movement.

Martin Duberman: Well, I guess it depends on how you define liberationist. In the early days, gay liberationists were aware of a great many other ills in the society besides their own. Their own were real, and they were well aware of that. But there was a lot wrong, they felt, with the system, and their central goal was to challenge many of the established institutions and values. Today most LGBT people seem to think of themselves -- certainly they tell the mainstream -- as "just folks," except for this little matter of a separate sexual orientation. That they're patriotic Americans and they want the same things that everybody else wants, etc.

Click here to read the rest of my interview with Martin Duberman.

Uncovering Feminism: Emma Bee Bernstein and a few questions about suicide

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Okay, so I'm looking through the Seal Press catalog for the second time, just to see if I've missed anything interesting, and what calls my attention is the bio of one of the editors of a book called Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism, and I can't necessarily tell whether the interviews will be challenging and provocative or dull and fawning -- but what I do notice is the bio for co-editor Emma Bee Bernstein -- right after her name we see the years marking her life, 1985-2008. But nothing telling us how she died. So I know it must not be what is generally considered a tragic accident (car/plane crash) or a noble battle (cancer), and I go online to find out how she died at age 23.

Suicide. But I can't figure out why. All the available accounts -- her parents, her co-editor, her parents' friends -- point to a particular narrative where here she was, something like a child prodigy born into a New York family of artists and writers, publishing interviews at age 12, drawn to dreaming and strident visions, traveling cross-country after finishing college at the cloistered University of Chicago to work on this new project about feminism and the future with her camera as accessory to her vision, filled with so much hope and possibility and yet overwhelmed by a monster, a monster of depression that she finally succumbed to.

I'm suspicious of this narrative...

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Pink Saturday: Party or police state?

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:30:00 -0500

Okay, so I actually kind of like Pink Saturday, the night before pride when the Castro gets blocked off to traffic and people wander around getting smashed and dancing to terrible music blasted from sound stages in the street. I like it because it's more honest than any other pride event -- no one's pretending to do anything but wander the streets getting smashed, walking back and forth in a never-ending international gay suburbanite runway gawkfest. In all of its disastrousness, it is kind of fun to watch.

Over the last few years, Pink Saturday has gotten younger and younger, probably because San Francisco has never been a great place for queer youth, since there's nowhere for queer youth to go. Except on Pink Saturday, when the bars are turned inside out so that the street is where it's happening and inside just feels like a bad view. Oh, and the other thing about Pink Saturday is that it's probably the only day of the year when dykes outnumber fags in the Castro, since the Dyke March ends right at Castro and Market and that's usually where the main stage is placed. So there's this crazy intersection between every dyke in the Bay Area and beyond, queer youth of all races flooding in from the suburbs, and the usual gay tourists and yuppies.

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Where the violence starts -- gay support for US militarism

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:30:00 -0500

Suddenly there are all these stories in the news about violence in Iraq against gay people -- by all accounts, this violence dramatically escalated -- guess when? Oh, I know -- after the US occupation!

That's what disgusts me so much about a sign like this, displayed by and for the gays in the Great White Gayborhood (in this case, San Francisco's legendary Castro district) without any context at all -- as if somehow violence against gay people in Iraq can be separated from the endless US brutalization of an entire country in order to pave the way for more oil industry profiteering. Worse than that, this sign, and the protests around this issue, actually legitimize the US occupation by pointing to anti-gay hysteria in Iraq as proof of the savagery of an entire country, when instead they should be pointing to US militarism as the impetus.

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Dear Ms. McGreevey (Jimmy, that is)

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:00:00 -0500

I didn't pay that much attention to you when you gave your "I'm a gay American" speech -- I just thought oh no, another closeted politician coming out and wrapping himself in the flag and soon he'll be the next gay hero. And sure enough...

But then I saw you in that movie, and you're talking about sex in abandoned synagogues -- I swear that's what you said -- "synagogues" plural, right? I mean, abandoned churches are a dime a dozen, but abandoned synagogues -- honey, that's dedication!

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Outrage: closeted gay politicians, Elizabeth Birch, and queer challenges to the status quo

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:00:00 -0500

Earlier tonight I went to a preview screening of the movie Outrage, "a searing exposé of the secret lives of closeted gay politicians." More than an exposé of those secret lives, the movie serves to focus on hypocrisy of closeted politicians who dedicate themselves to perfecting their right-wing voting records. There are definitely many striking moments in the movie, starting with the recording of Larry Craig at the very beginning, declaring to the cops, "I don't seek activity in bathrooms," and then a later press conference called by Craig where you can hear someone yelling "come on Larry be gay," followed by someone who went home with Craig from a DC strip club a while back quoting Craig as handing him a $20 bill and saying, "just remember I can buy and sell your ass 1000 times."

Of course, Larry Craig has already been thrown off his, um... throne, and the same could be said of many of the other politicians "exposed" in the movie - from former New York City Mayor Ed Koch to key officials in the Reagan administration. In other words, no new names are necessarily named, with the possible exception of current Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose gay exploits have been covered in alternative media sources but never in something with this much potential audience.

What struck me more than the analysis of the hypocrisy of elected officials, closeted or otherwise, was the never ending parade of gay establishment figures, from right to center but never further left than gay radio host Michelangelo Signorile, a dubious figure at best (although responsible for much of the media attention around outing closeted gay celebrities in the early '90s, he was also one of the people to spearhead vitriolic attacks on public sex venues -- and the gay men who frequented them -- in New York in the mid-'90s).

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Hate crimes against homeless people -- is there a solution?

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:30:00 -0500

Recently the LA County Board of Supervisors made the decision to start tracking and reporting attacks against homeless people as hate crimes. Bias-related violent crime against homeless people for no other reason than their vulnerable status is rampant -- during the past year in LA, homeless people have been reported beaten, stabbed, set on fire and shot. But will adding homeless people to hate crimes enforcement do anything to prevent this problem? Let's think about it for a moment...

Who commits most of the violent crime against homeless people? When you see a homeless person kicked in the face while sleeping, beaten with batons, hogtied on the ground, or dragged off into a van, who instigates this crime? Oh, I know -- our lovely law enforcement officers!

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Lostmissing: a public art project

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:30:00 -0500

You know when you have a friend who you think will always be there -- no matter what, at least you'll have that friendship, right? Lostmissing is a public art project about the loss of that relationship, a specific relationship for me -- right now it's missing. I want to express myself in public space in a way that feels personal and more meaningful than a private expression because I want to connect to other people and other lostmissing stories. This project is a public expression of grief in order to feel hopeful again -- it's about that random poster you see and you don't know what it means but your eyes get bright all the sudden.

I'm putting these posters up everywhere I can think of, and posting photos of the posters in public space on my blog and even making new posters out of those photos and then posting photos of those new posters too. And I'm giving the posters out to people to put them up in their own towns and kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms and galleries and meeting spaces and community centers and bars and workplaces and on the street and on abandoned buildings in bus shelters and on public transportation at shows of all kinds and in sex venues and restaurants and on bulletin boards and in store windows and in letters and in taxis and on the internet and near dramatic views and tourist attractions and in your own art and wherever else you can think of.

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Teenage sex criminals, oh my!

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:30:00 -0500

Here you have it -- teens are being prosecuted under child pornography laws for distributing topless pictures of themselves!!!

This is particularly troubling:

[Wyoming County, Pennsylvania District Attorney] Skumanick told an assembly of students that possessing inappropriate images of minors could be prosecuted under state child porn laws. Anyone convicted under the laws faces a possible seven year sentence and a felony conviction on their record. Under a state sex offender law, they must also register as a sex offender for 10 years and have their name and photo posted on the state's sex offender website -- the latter requirement will include juvenile offenders when the law is amended later this year.

Did you read that? Students are warned that they could be prosecuted for possessing nude pictures of their friends (or even themselves)! Sex offender laws will be amended to include juvenile offenders!!!

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Whose Goodwill?

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:30:00 -0500

Everyone knows that Goodwill is a racket, right? Their mission is to give poor people job skills, and here's how they operate: rich and middle-class people donate the shit they don't want anymore, so that they can deduct it from their taxes (that shag area rug is totally worth $750), and then Goodwill takes this shit and sells it at overpriced rates to poor people. In 2007, Goodwill made $2 billion from this shit.

Did you hear that? $2 billion went directly from poor people and bargain shoppers to this "nonprofit" that supposedly exists to train poor people in job skills. This nonprofit where the CEO is rumored to make over $1 million a year and regional heads make several hundred thousand or more.

Why not just give the $2 billion out to poor people? Oh, right -- because it's work that will set you free.

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The audacity of false hope

mattilda@bilerico.com (Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0500

I'm finding it harder and harder to understand progressive and radical-identified people who continually voice their hopes for the Obama administration, hopes that I can't see as anything other than delusional. Like, for example, the hope that Obama will do something to halt genocidal Israeli policies, even though his policies on Israel are to the right of every recent administration. Or the hope that he'll do something about health care, other than giving more money to the insurance companies destroying everyone's lives. Or the hope that he'll end the US occupation of Iraq in any substantive way, unless perhaps he runs out of troops because he sends them all to Afghanistan or other US incursions. With the Obama administration filled with Zionist crazies, it's quite possible that US troops might be fighting alongside their Israeli counterparts.

I don't have a problem if someone looks at Obama's actual positions, and says maybe he won't appoint a right-wing anti-choice homophobe to the Supreme Court, which quite possibly might distinguish him from his predecessor. Unless, of course, Rick Warren is looking for a job...

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