Socialized Housing

If maintaining a viable postal service for all is an important service, why not housing? The answer is somewhat obscured but fairly simple why our various so-called leftists and avowedly right-wing elected officials wring their hands over the homeless and housing but do very little to solving the problem. And I read many years ago in college how our US Army Corps of Engineers can go into a remote backwater and in a few breaths construct a workable bridge over which to carry supplies. But we cannot provide truly decent shelter for the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed.

So why not Housing for the growing numbers of people, families, children, working adults, even middle class? There is no means-test for buying a US postage stamp. We do not ask for a tax return before selling someone a stamp to send a letter. Why should there be means-tests for the paltry excuse for available, affordable Section 8 housing? It's because Section 8 housing is intentionally kept to a bare minimum, and less than that. Section 8 feeds the myth of a "deserving" poor as separate from an undeserving poor. Section 8 further hides the working poor from our sights. Section 8 housing is only meant to keep a few of the many homeless in shelter. We have no such paradigm for postage stamps.

And yet our postal system stares us in the face with the obvious solution to housing that no politician dare enact. The postal system is government run, and this is an anathema to any private enterprise. Federal express and UPS are private shipping companies. It's not hard to imagine a country where FEDEX and UPS controlled our political culture and sponsored the elimination of the US Postal System to increase their clientele. It's not hard because so much of our political culture is run by private, for-profit interests where our basic needs are sold and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Eliminating the postal service would give FEDEX/UPS the lion-share of the market, and it would cost us several dollars just to mail a letter, more if the letter be mailed to a remote area out of FEDEX's service area. Imagine this. You don't have to, because this is what we have with our housing. FEDEX owns the houses, pays or political culture to maintain its monopoly, and reaps the profits.

Not coincidentally, one of the first logical acts the Cuban Revolution implemented in 1959 was to cut rents in half. Housing was not socialized, but the Revolution clearly recognized as clearly we we seem to deny our property system that it is unworkable. We here in the US seem to think this arrangement came from the Heavens. The Cuban Revolution knew it came from landlords, many Cuban, many living in the US.

I was moved the other day when hearing Fidel in 1968 expound on the various facets of underdevelopment. He covered the ones known to most well-read intellectuals, but he touched on a new one: that underdevelopment is a psyhological problem. So one of the challenges of a successful revolutionary process is to enlighten the people to discard their futilistic thinking, that not much is possible, this-is-the-way-it-is thinking. I would say this is the biggest problem facing underdeveloped peoples and countries.

Why can't our city and state governments, which levy taxes on us, buy apartment buildings and houses and trailor parks and duplexes and lofts? Who said these must be the domains of private interests only motivated in profits, even to the point of keeping them empty!?

There is no law of nature that dictates this.

Our elected government should buy properties for the public use, rent out these properties at a low cost to those who choose to take that route as easily as those who choose a US stamp over a UPS fee. I as a lifelong renter should have the choice of renting with my government for a low, no-frills apartment or choosing a private concern, which might want to offer an array of bells and whistles.

But as I said, this is not the case because our property system owns our city councils, city assessors, mayors, and state governments. How did this come to be so? The end of feudalism and the beginning of the "modern" [i.e., capitalist] era was marked by a series of Enclosure Acts in Europe. Land-Lords discovered they could earn more money by selling surplus goods rather than fulfilling their feudal obligations and giving them to their tenants, the serfs. The serfs were thrown off the land, literally onto the streets. Police powers were instituted to keep the poor off the land. In Britain, after peasant revolts, laws were passed that mandated a homeless person show his means of livelihood or be thrown in jail. So from the beginning, the state created the problem then penalized its victims.

Among the "classic" causes of homelessness - lack of affordable housing, unemployment/underemployment, mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, mental health law reforms, evictions, and foreclosures - socialized housing models would address several of these at once. Without high rents to pay, an otherwise low-wage worker [with socialized health care of course!] could well afford a decent place to live. Of course, if or high-wage brethren wish to partake of socialzed housing that would be their right too as well as accessing a socialized health system.

Bottom line, with a working model of public/private mail service in our midst, such a model of housing is not unrealizable. Arguably, housing services are much more vital than mail services. Our elected politicians, in the pockets of a private housing monopoly, are in a fix: they dare not anger their politcal funders by robbing them of a captive audience of customers. Further, banks fearful of losing profits will make arguments against such a measure. But faced with publc anger over the sight of homeless encampments, like the one that used to be in front of San Francisco's beautiful City Hall, public servants are stuck finding cracks in a paradigm to fill a huge population of people.

We [HEART] Pedro??

Are biopics dangerous artifacts to put in public view? In light of my emotional response to MILK, I was a bit taken aback to learn a new feature was airing about the late Pedro Zamora, a fallen soldier seemingly from another time in the LGBT sensibility.

"Pedro" aires on MTV and LOGO and comes in the wake of the successful biopic, MILK, written by the same screenwriter.

Zamora and his 15 minutes of fame are being brought back to a new generation of viewers for whom the early days of AIDS is a blank slate of indifference to hedonistic gay men's lives. MTV and LOGO are airing a "biopic" about Zamora, not the editors of DISEASED PARIAH NEWS. Zamora the biopic is pure Hollywood; DPN, a 'zine of the time was fun, raunchy, bitter, and always pointed (remember AIDS Barbie pictures intubated or with KS?!). With "Pedro" get the tissues ready but will we really be educated about the Health-Care Crisis, Racism within San Francisco whose working class and ethnic minorities were already beginning the Recession & Bubble Bursts that are only spoken of now after it affects the Establishment.

In the early 90's we were barely acknowledging lesbians (remember the ADVOCATE: a GAY magazine without any mention of lesbians on its masthead?), and certainly not warm to AIDS sufferers - adult OR children. Silence=Death really, really meant something. The Masses simply weren't talking while young men were dying.

But I suspect "Pedro" will make heroes where there were none and forget DPN and those who worked in the trenches, buried the dead, volunteered at SHANTI Project.

"Pedro" The Movie would not have been greenlighted in those days. So why is Zamora, the HIV+ Cuban-Ameican namesake being brought to life for this program now? Fifteen years have passed since Season 3 of REAL WORLD [MTV 1994] filmed in San Francisco and featured him in the cast. It is too ironic that this project be greenlighted while Zamora himself - an educator - had no health care. What does it say about our civilzation that we don't take care of our educators?

I suspect the biopic is to purge us our official guilt, our crimes, show how much we loved, followed, this ONE young boy who will somehow assign us a compassion[!!] for all things HIV/AIDS. As Pres Obama would say: let me be clear: this compassion did not exist beyond the LGBT community, its close allies and friends. With "Pedro" we can all say as other Ostriches have said in another Holocaust: "We love Jews: we hid Jews. we didn't know what was happpening." Former president, Bill Clinton, reportedly will introduce the MTV/LOGO feature, undoubtedly looking folksy and solemn.

I further suspect in our Gay Marriage-Obsessed days, Zamora's pre-nuptial lifestyle that many gay men came to celebrate with their bodies will be ... white-washed. I heard some psycho-babble that he threw himself into sex to compensate for the death of his mother. I have never heard such an analysis made of our philandering presidents.

"Pedro's" version will pprobably go: He caught The Bug, and he became a Hero. Yuck! No, he worked with his body through the hypocrisy and homo-hatred of a phony Christian society in many places, in many ways.

Zamora died "from complications from AIDS" a day after the final episode aired, no biopic slated. He had a union ceremony with another HIV+ activist, Sean Sasser, a Black man, whom we've otherwise heard nothing about. Zamora was one of many who insisted they would "fight" this, meaning Death, meaning Indifference, meaning Hate. Will viewers be equally moved to the rage that fueled ACT-UP to meet the US's official indifference to HIV specifically and health care generally or crocodile tears?

Is Multi-Party Socialism Possible? It is a Necessity

According to a recent news item from Agence France-Presse (AFP), the socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is having chilly relations with Cuba's newest communist president, Raul Castro. The story, written by Rosanna Mina, alleges Chavez backed a coup d'etat against Raul and implicates some of Fidel's advisers. Former Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, Vice President Carlos Lage, both appointed by Fidel, and the other recently dismissed government ministers were co-conspirators.

Truth or fiction? I know from a cursury reading of history that the West is quite prone to psy-ops/PSYWAR, psychological-operations/psychological warfare , whereby Western institutions will spread malicious lies about a group so that their official enemies will turn on each other and devour their own. This is to be expected, anticipated, and guarded against.

Famous examples include the US government, the Chandler Family-run Los Angeles Times undermining the increasingly popular End Poverty in California Program of socialist gubernatorial candidate, Upton Sinclair, in 1934, by telling voters Sinclair was going to take their children away. The US Phoenix Program in Viet Nam to make monsters of Vietnamese freedom fighters and anti-colonialists. COINTELPRO against Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Women's Movement, leftwing artists, like John Lennon and Paul Newman. Nixon's Enemies List and the use of government institutions, like the IRS, to harrass dissidents. Shock and awe in Iraq and Afghanistan. Spreading the lies that Cuba's revolutionary government in 1959 would force Blacks and Whites to marry, take children away, and force Believers to throw all religious artifacts into the sea ...

But even former president Bill Clinton, in one of his final interviews, dismissed much animosity against the Republicans saying he knew it wasn't personal. The fight was about Power. We forget politics is like playing chess.

Which begs the Question: what differences might exist between Fidel's appointees, like Perez Roque, and Raul? During the USSR's glasnost/perestroika under Mikael Gorbachev, Fidel stood firmly against any such reformism in Cuba. Raul reportedly favored it. Going back to the early years of Cuba's revolutionary struggle against the US-backed and funded regime, Raul is said to have embraced communism early, the first to befriend Dr. Ernesto Guevara ["Che"], and was instrumental in introducing Fidel to both. Fidel, contrastly, had married into one of Cuba's ruling-class families, the Diaz-Balarts, and it is his own nephews who sit in the US Congress staunchly against Fidel, the Cuban revolution, and communism. Fidel was by many accounts a Cuban Nationalist, wanting Cuba's wealth for Cuba.

Do these differences inhibit the development of a socialist society? Cllearly, the Diaz-Balart nephews in Florida have nothing to add to the building of socialism, but what about within Cuba or within a socialist movement anywhere?

Again, history: we might see these differences as a Threat rather than the "necessary fund of options" lesbian communist poet Audre Lorde spoke of.

A revolutionary ally, Carlos Franqui, fell out of favor in the early 1960's largely because Franqui, a member of the Cuban Communist Party, soured at seeing revolutionary Cuba go from being a US protectorate and sugar provider to being the same under Kruschev's USSR.

Whether Fidel Castro was a crypto-Communist we do not know. We only know his actions as a nationalist, Orthodox Party senatorial candidate, and married into one of Cuba's prominent families.

But I do not intend in any way to dispute that Fidel became a deeply orthodox and sincere communist, and his brilliant mind and political sensibilities saw him excel his brother. He undoubtedly went throough a similar transformation as what happened to our Beatniks, Flower Children, and home-grown dissidents of the 1960's: awed by Cuba's old colonial institutions he grew to believe they were like the Wizard of Oz, thunderous and powerless. This transformation must be behind his "charisma" as a public speaker, having the distinction of giving the longest public address by the Guinness Book of World Records, when he addressed the United Nations for almost 7 hours.

In the US we fare no better. Our debates are between factions of the Property Party, a capitalist fundamentalist party having two wings: the Republicans and the Democrats. This is one party that serves capitalism's interest, and each faction will resort to lies, blackmails, smears, and even robbing the opponent's offices to keep the balance from tipping one way or another. Remember: a fish rots from the head down. Poor George. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth. Swift Boats. Watergate.

In the perfect world, which is acheivable, we would have a broad menu of political parties, left and right, capitalist and communist, and the system would defend and protect all sides, and each ideology would be given free and open access to make its arguments to perfect our Civilization. Presently, no such defense exists to defend us against the Nixons and J Edgar Hoovers and the COINTELPRO and or own home-grown purges. We, the marginalized, the poor, the LGBT, the women, the dark, the light, the laborer are not defended. The US rivals more Third World countries in that we have no workers party. We are the only first-world country without one.

The Property Party will argue socialism doesn't work; that it has failed; that leftwing third parties cannot garner public support to be included in debates or covered by mainstream media. There is no Voice allowed to dispute this refrain. But this is a Lie.

Socialism has not failed. It was failed. Fidel employed the perfect metaphor years ago when he lambasted the US policymakers for "hanging us by our necks and criticizing us for not breathing." Since the Revoution's inception, the US has sought to undermine it and this government used its hegemony over the Organization of American States to have Cuba expelled (only Mexico retained diplomatic relations to Revolution Cuba, the last to re-establish relations happened just the other day: Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, a man who compared Fidel to Chile's Pinochet, which was not evicted from the OAS). No where has socialism been allowed to live and thrive or crash and burn by its own devices and aspirations: it simply has not been allowed to acheive its aims ... except one place, not a country, but in the US public school system.

Despite popular criticism of our poor public schools - a critcism I believe is founded on a hatred of the Masses - the creation and funding of this most public institution has educated mass numbers of young people, cultivated them to a multi-dimensional society, socialized them to working with other genders and groups of people, fed them free- and reduced-lunches.

So socialism can and must work. It will not work if we do to other socialists and communists what the Property Party does to us, the Third Parties, the anti-parties, the socialists, communists, or those still not matured to these bold ideas: the "progressives." A Socialist array of parties would argue for the perfection of socialism/communism. So one imagines while the US is utterly capable of domestic and international terrorism, psyhcological warfare against domestic and foreign populations, one also dreams that Cuba - which inspired Ho Chi Minh's revolution in Viet Nam - would see in the AFP story a genuine and healthy struggle between a Raulista Camp, a Fidelistia Camp, and other Camps, like one comprehending the socialism of the late Celia Hart (see It is Never too Late to Love or to Rebel), among others. All would have the sole aim of making socialism/communism more effective, more real for working people, benefitting children and the elderly.

Our socialist tendencies are too big to fail, our socialist voices too vital in the construction of a better society: that is, after all, what government is for.

Days of Contrast: "Rent" & My 1989

Everything happens for a reason. If this is so, and the older I get the more I believe this, my hasty move to San Francisco in 1989, literally days after my college graduation ceremony, was Predestined.

What I found after the requisite rocky start - my Richmond District, hole-in-the-wall dwelling run by a southasian slumlord, the October 1989 earthquake - was a fabulous pool, fabulous swim team [USF Masters], and the 727 Clayton Clan: Nicko, Molly, Olivier, and me. Lidi came later, hanging her bedclothes from our front window a la French style.

We were young, full of ourselves. Nick and I writers. Molly an actress. Olivier seemed to me a man of letters. I think he was the first Intellectual Gay man I'd ever met. I'd certainly met Out ones, proud ones, fierce ones, even in high school. But Olivier was, like I thought of myself but pale to him, studied. Oh, we had "Jobs," but that was never the Point. It never seemed the Point: we were climbing up a Big Tree to where the Big, Red Appples were.

Along with everyone's ambitions - Michael Moore opined that no one seemed to work in San Francisco in those days - was desire for social change. ACT-UP [AIDS COALTION TO UNLEASH POWER] started in New York City and spread to the Bay Area in response the Ronald Reagan's official silence toward the rising epidemic of young, gay men dying of AIDS. QUEER NATION followed suit to combat homohatreds in whatever city council or strip mall or trolley stop. Both countering not only Reagan [and his evil sister, Margaret Thatcher, in the UK] but also what was woven into the fabric of our very streets, the marches, the hangings-out at Cafe Flore: that is, Death.

Nineteen-eighty-nine was several years before the supposed improvement of HIV medications: this is a topic I will have to put my attention to another time, since there is persuasive debate about the evolution of meds and the evolution of survival. At that time, at that year, I could see men walking the streets of the Castro, being held and supported by friends, lovers, neighbors, god-knows-who. Weathered, whithered men not much older than I.

The Christians said their crimes were ... but why give more Voice to that din of unreason and superstition?

I was a Black, Midwestern kid, born of Southern roots, set in the middle of a white affluence in Southern California, and did not know up from down what to make of the world. Or, as my dear grandmother, Mary Adele Denny, would observe: "You have nothing to say [as a writer]". So it was not coincidental that I should feel a hunger to forgo a silly Marching ceremony at a prestigious university that, at bottom, is just as evil as Siblings Reagan and Thatcher, and rush headlong into the Bay Area, a better schooling.

Like a later headlong rush into Cuba in 1992, San Francisco was just the right chill of cold water to begin the breaking of something, an initiation. My godmother says "to gain wisdom you must sacrifice your ignorance." Despite myself, I was striving a knife into an enemy.

Clinton came. ACT-UP would split. Queer Nation dissolved. The poor began to be evicted from the City to make room for the dot-commies. I'll never forget the canary in the mine for me was hearing my godsisters become disenchanted with Club El Rio in the Mission because a new Class of men - macho and aggressive - tried lording over them: who were these arrogant fuck-heads? I came to my own conclusions about the decay that followed in what seemed like a Wonderland. I hadn't seen or read anything that touched the slice of that life until I picked up a DVD of the film, RENT.

I don't like musicals as a rule. I take myself much too seriously. So the opening scene of the cast singing to me made me uneasy: had I made an error and wasted $10? Another song. Another song. Does anyone not speak? Then: Angel rescues Tom, and I no longer noticed the songs.

RENT is about my generation, my social-economic Class. My real class. Not the class of 1989 Washington University. RENT seems to me to be the first, unique portrayal of a working class, imaginative bunch who will take shelter together, piece together their small fortunes, and dream big - big in their Art and Activism and exorcizing the world - at least the country - of the ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher and the offfical hatred of all things Queer and black and brown and working class.

"FIGHT AIDS" Tom scribbles on the board in the coffeehouse during the performance of "La Vie Boheme".

So what can I say? I cried like a baby so much of a slice of the wonderment of those days, days of contrasts. Swimming with my team at 6am. Running in Golden Gate Park. Walking up the hill to the Castro. Meeting an amazing bunch of fascinating, vibrant, real people who would show me how to be the Man I Could be. Then, seeing Angel fade like that made me conjure the last real-life moments of Andy, Gerald, Martin. They went like that, those Deaths every day ... Andy back home in the UK; Gerald a few weeks before I could return to see him one last time; ... Martin. And many others went with them. Every week - every, single week - the BAR [Bay Area Reporter] displayed two to three pages of thumbnail-pictured obituaries of our NEIGHBORS who had just died "from complications from AIDS."

How did we survive that? What balls we had! I guess in our own way, we sang through it. By the way, before my grandmother died, I think it was my musing one day over those years - an analysis of sorts - that she exclaimed: "See, now you have something to say. I can't wait to read your Book!"

News of Economic Freefall a Concotion

There is no economic crisis, but there is a political one. The lie obscures the cancer.

The headlines continue daily to astound, bewilder, and distract us.

* "U.S. unemployment rate at 7.6%; jobs disappearing at faster pace" [LA Times]

* "The labor market is in free fall and has been since November," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight, an economic forecasting firm in Lexington, Mass. [LA Times]

* There has been a huge rise in the number of firms going bust in England and Wales because of the recession. [BBC]

* German industrial output has seen a record fall after a sharp contraction in manufacturing activity. [BBC]

* France's trade deficit hit 55.7bn euros ($71.4bn; £48.6bn) in 2008, due to high oil prices and the slowing economy, the customs office said. [BBC]

* Economic slump pushes 19,100 people into bankruptcy, while there was a 52% increase in company insolvencies in the last three months of 2008. [UK Guardian]

* Britain has officially entered recession for the first time since 1991, after the economy shrank at the fastest pace for nearly 30 years in the fourth quarter. [UK Guardian].

Et cetera.

Our economy suffers new implosions and thousands upon thousands of workers lose their jobs, which in the US means the lose the ground beneath their feet - rent or mortgage must be paid; health care sought [probably not]; food.

So, we watch the stock market, our bank accounts, pray that our jobs will be there tomorrow. My coworkers ponder often whether and how we might be laid off.

The Dollar is a curtain shielding a political system that must be revolted. It is a curtain behind which stands the Wizard, but a wizard with a deadly agenda. Our state of anxieties keeps us from interrogating our governors, examining the political class, which we think is there to dole our rights and entitlements, seat belt laws, safe food and water, minimum wages, WIC, etc., etc. Sure, there is some anger when we here that from billions in bailout money, top executives get bonuses, but this structural problem is only the tip of an iceberg. We still fundamentally believe government is good and has been the source of our rights, beyond suspicion.

The problem is a vicious political system that is drying up the funds to working class people - for meager jobs, for student loans, for social services. These things are disappearing by the hour, and thanks to Welfare Reform there is no safety net to catch ... the Irish peasant thrown off the land.

I am throwing in an historical fact to make a point. The Irish Famine was not a natural phenomenon. Queen Victoria threw Irish peasants off lands they had historically occupied in bare subsistence, denying them access to food. Their lives on that land cannot be romanticiized, but the political famine created by the Queen and her government was an historical evil. Today, our subsistence is being pulled from under us, too, and just as deliberately.

In a politically orchestrated act, Queen Victoria threw those peasants off the land in the 1840's when large landowners found raising sheep and livestock more profitable than employing illiterate workers. They chose to deliberately starve to death thousands of Irish for profit, then to send the survivors abroad.

If you think morality dawned upon the Queen's Death in 1901, the 20th century was equally full of Christian Crimes by Christian Governments.

So here we are, The Dispossessed!

Economic Crisis, you insist? I am a stupid Conspiracy Theorist/Paranoid, you think?

If you live near the majority of Indian Reservations* you might be aware that the reality of high unemployment far surpasses South Central LA [10% in California, 18% in the Black community] or East Oakland, East St. Louis, etc. Is this crisis from the heavens, like Katrina? No, it is by politically orchestrated conspiracies to deprive resources to that area, locate them amid economicallly abandoned lands, locate few services, and build little infrastucture.

Conversely, consider that in the US military and US prison system there is near FULL EMPLOYMENT [there is also food, shelter, health care].

When was the last time you heard of any "threat" of a rise in unemployment in a federal prison? It just doesn't exist. But maybe you don't even know about prison labor. Prison and military jobs are created with different motives, including the self-esteem of the prisoner or soldier. Safety. Idel hands and all that. Certainly there is a market beyond the prison for its labors.

I am not suggesting we emulate a prison state, but rather highlighting the powers of our political class to solve those problems they want to solve, if they even become problems at all.

I am suggesting a political revolution. I am suggesting we get in the way, not be silent [silence=death] and make the rascals serve humanity.

Former Labour Party MP, Tony Benn, says "If the poor turned out and voted their interests it would be a real, democratic revolution. So they don't want that to happen. So keeping people hopeless and pessimistic is ... See, there are two ways in which to control people: first of all frighten people; second of all demoralise them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern. There is an element in the thinking among some who don't want the nation to be educated, healthy confident because they would get out of control."

MILK

I'm just home and recovered from the latest Sean Penn biopic, MILK, based on the political life of Harvey Milk, slain gay San Francisco politician. JEEZ! From the opening shots of the movie, my eyes filled and that sensation I was about to cry-me-a-river came to my jaws. My eyes never dried in the 2+ hours that followed.

Gus Van Sant has created a masterpiece in LGBT cinema. Indeed, US cinema. Sean Penn ... from Scott Piccoli in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH to this portrayal is amazing: this actor must rank in the top handful of artists/actors. I did not know Milk, moved to San Francisco 10 years after his assassination, but I know a bit about the City he himself came to from New York, to change his life. San Franciscans mark the assassinations of Milk and Mayor George Moscone every year with the same candlelight march you will see at the end of the movie, and I remember my first march. Quiet. Hushed. 10 years on people still shocked by the act where Our ranks were Thinned.

I feared Penn would parody Milk, mechanize a renowned, humorous, intelligent gay activist. But Penn showed no fear - NO FEAR - in portraying Milk, even to my view taking on such a range of emotions of sexual minorities - mockery, passion, heart-break, Penn hit every note, naturally. Real Professional. He did it so naturally that his first deep kiss with another male actor went almost unnoticed. He had become Harvey Milk, gay man. Angry Gay Man. "I have done the state some service and it knows it."

Van Sant spliced much archival footage of San Francisco in general and the Castro neighborhood in particular. I know that place like the back of my hand, where Harvey's camera shop used to sit, that CASTRO theatre where I took my sister to see GONE WITH THE WIND. The Underground Station where Milk mounts a crate to demand his new community respond to the official brutality of Old San Francisco. Milk's friend, Tom Ammiano appears to heckle John Briggs, who sought to fire all LGBT teachers and their supporters[!] Ammiano was not only a friend of Milk's, but also at the time was a grade-school teacher. Ammiano went on to be on the Board of Supervisors, ran for mayor, and is now in the California State Legislature. Milk's encounter with Cleve Jones, with those trademark eyeglasses, made me sob. Jones is responsible for The Quilt, which if you've never seen it you cannot know LGBT anger - that memorial of the dead.

How times and one's better efforts change!

I was mindful of how Milk followed his mission, even after age 40 it wasn't too late. Some stories DO take time to tell. Bernard Shaw was 41 when he got his first play written. Christopher Isherwood 51 when he met the love-of-his-Life. Mindful how he had to make sacrifices to follow that Life Force that drove him, even at the cost of a relationship, to fulfill his Task. It's the end of the year, time to clean our lives of people who aren't there to help and fill our cups with people who will. That is my Coming out 2009. Eleggua is already pointing me ...

I left the theatre more angry at that slim voter majority in California that passed Prop 8 and at this president-elect for taking a landslide election and making it look like a similar slim victory, especially in his horrific naming of "pastor" Rick Warren, Minister Homophobe, to speak at his inauguration. What would Harvey say? Obama's team says it's a nod to the Diversity of the Country: No, it is further evidence "Christianity" has no moral authority in the West, and, LGBT's must come out of the bars and bathhouses and smash some windows. That we are viewed still as a fringe, powerless sect, like CHILDREN. Will Obama appoint an anti-Semite to spread his filth? A Klansman's Grand Wizard? A Southern Baptist who demands wives submit to their husbands? Hell, No!! Those prejudices are beyond the pale because of the activism of those communities.

Please see this movie. And if it gets you like it did me look for THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK, a 1980's documentary about Milk. As far as Obama and his pal, Warren: I don't know what to say. Whether Obama dis-invites the Wretch or Warren backs out is immaterial. Day after Day, Obama tosses another rock at the body politic, the commonweal.

The Dissing of Fem Black Gays by Macho Black Gays

"UNLEASH THE QUEEN" - Queer Nation motto, circa 1990

There's a lot to unpack when trying to talk about hatred of gays WITHIN the gay community.

First a few observations: it happens, just as it happens among women, among Blacks, among Latinos - all who have been taught this aversion.

Second, man and male are two different things, of course. Male is a biological distinction; man being a social one. Males come in embryos, much of the plant world, other species, and you and me. Man is more of less a human being over 18 [vs. a boy or infant]. I say all this because masculinity and manhood are social constructs not Natural ones, and as social constructs they change over time. Acting like a MAN/being masculine is not something from Nature but from the political world. Too many men and women have NO appreciation of this fact, but think our behaviors are set in nature by God. Rubbish. Just as we have been taught by dominant culture to hate Blackness, so too we've been taught to hate women [gay or straight], darker skin among non-white peoples, and certain characteristics deemed threatening by dominant culture. Some may acknowledge this and insist their preference for MAN/MASCULINE is just a preference.

More rubbish. These values were instilled, taught to us, often by entities that did not have our best interest in mind: this fact demands we examine our Views and take noting for granted.
Dominant culture found best our current arrangement of one man-one women in holy matrimony to control laborers and to assure property was bequeathed ONLY to the man's offspring. At one time in human history, believe it or not, there was no such arrangement and women bore children from different men without controversy. When property became central - more or less when nomadic cultures settled into farms and settlements - men wanted their land to go only to their children for the preservation of the community so it was deemed necessary to control women's sexuality. Homosexual sex was initially disparaged among groups whose numbers were threatened, as in Jews in biblical times. It was not disparaged among the dominant culture of the day - Roman and Greek. So among assaulted tribes, homosex is a threat to the perceived preservation of the group.

For reasons I cannot fathom, just as we have kept an early 18th century pubic school structure right into the present day, our society is obsessed with a post-nomadic, agricultural era morality around gender and sexuality - I speak directly to the obsession with the Bible as more than a beautiful history but a blueprint for a post-industrial, postmodern, post feudal society. Again, this is equally absurd as relying on old modes of public education, yet we do! This is ALL reinforced by a dominant culture which - as the victors - lends out rewards and meets punishments, which most docile people accept, swallow, and think their own "preferences." So, Black gay men lack reverence for other gay men [feminine, Black] because they have been taught to do so as a subtle means of controlling their compliance within the culture, to keep them more likely to stay within the flock - which is producing babies and being a docile worker who must provide for house and home for said babies (a few generations ago, a bachelor had no hope of being promoted in major companies since the companies thought a married, father was less likely to rock the boat).

Ultimately, endowed with such stupid prejudices/preferences, these narrow-minded Black gay men will not grow into a revolutionary cadre - this phenomenon transcends race/ethnicity, of course, functioning the exact same way among other wage-slave, working class peoples. This is a conversation that has run through my gay/queer existence since high school in the early 80's and met documentation in my Queer Nation/SF 90's .

90th Anniversary of the Soviet Revolution

Reportage being what it is, it's best to follow the old-school reporter's adage: "Even if your mother says she loves you, fact-check it." This has been clear the last week with the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution that began the USSR [being on an older calendar, our November was their October]. Predictably, the Western press has nothing good to say about the Soviet Union and has reduced that long history to an aspect of Joseph Stalin's years as leader.

I did read one clever joke which goes like this:

The Soviet Union is founded and Lenin dies and goes to Hell. Soon after, the Devil becomes so agitated with Lenin trying to organize the doomed residents of Hell he calls God and asks for a trade, Lenin for God's worst angel. God makes the trade. Later on, the Devil calls God to see how things are going, but his call is answered by a bureaucrat Angel who tells the Devil "God doesn't exist."

Funny, but what the USSR did was serious. It took an exploited country in peonage and reorganized its resources to become a First-World Industrial country and "power". It did this despite a bank-imposed Western economic Depression of the 1930's and invasions by the capitalist West. Keep that in mind: while the US and UK witnessed bread lines and a shrinking of available money, this backward, mystical Czarist-ruled country was building factories, universities, and seeing the first rural to urban migration of an educated cadre of people.

Enter Stalin in the Western nightmare. Since we cannot focus on the achievements of the USSR during these years, AND LEARN FROM THEM, Uncle Joe is trotted out as a tyrant and murderer of millions of people, period.

Can you hear the liberals and conservatives howl if "I" were to reduce the US Revolution to the slaughter of millions of Native Americans? The Native Americans got in the way of Western imperial expansion. As Primo Levi would say, those who could not be complicit, perished. So too in Stalin's years: how many of us know people stuck in their old ways and who refuse - as Che put it - to be "housebroken"? Stalin exterminated them for holding on to their peonage and peonage values, and this is just as cruel. But just as our liberals and conservatives would say US history is more complicated than just bleeding the lives of Natives, the USSR's is too.

When I worked at San Francisco's YMCA - one of the best jobs I have ever had - I met many Russian retirees who were patrons. They were very proud of what the USSR did and the technical education it afforded them. They would always introduce themselves as Russians who had post-doctoral degrees in [fill in the blank].

Similarly, at the end of the Ibero-American Summit in Chile, Spain's king told President Hugo Chavez to shut up. Predictably, this was badly reported. Of course, the end of the story is King Juan Carlos hailed a hero in Europe for "putting Chavez in his place." No irony here, which should remind us that Spain is still part of Europe.

The reports I read from the BBC and the Miami Herald reported that Chavez called former Spanish PM a "a fascist," and current PM Zapatero interrupted to ask for more civility. Chavez persisted, and the king stepped in using the verb tense you would use with a child "Why don't you shut up?" No mention that Aznar was behind backing the coup against Chavez's elected government. The BBC and Miami Herald are silent on this. Chavez, like Stalin, cannot be credited with sanity or achievement, only insanity.

Our Shared Values - The Rulers Speak

A week ago, the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, an absolute ruler who is known to oppress women, ethnic minorities, and torture dissidents was fetted by none other than the queen of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. Since nothing the queen says publicly is of her own making but approved by the government, her lavish of praise of this man should alert conscious people. I daresay it will not.

The Queen toasted this potentate noting "our shared values." Why shouldn't we be immediately frightened and incensed enough by this transparent assault on the public dignity to rid the world of both their royal offices? For whom do they speak?

The world is now noting - in some dark corners celebrating - the significance of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Predictably, the Western press has nothing good to say about this, depicting it as one long, bloody Stalinist nightmare. NPR is depicting present-day Russians as under some kind of voodoo spell for longing for the Stalin days. Could it be that in the 1930's while the West was plunged into a manufactured economic depression, the USSR was industrializing, ending peonage, building universities and outpacing the West in GNP?

May I suggest we examine our shared values?

The other day our Retard in Chief, Bush, said some words about Cuba being a GULAG, desiring democracy in Cuba, dissidents of conscience, and never budging an inch from the blockade against the island until multi-party elections were allowed.

Former First Minister to HER MAJESTY'S government,. Tony Blair, has been quoted as saying some rude things about Fidel and Cuba's government as well.

The Saudis don't get such bile from the Free World. No Presidential Medals of Freedom for any of the Disappeared in Saudi dungeons. So what then are the shared values if the Saudis can disappear, torture, subjugate huge swathes of its population and be fetted by the Queen and fawned over by the prince of Wales?

Could the shared value be the primacy of personal profit, even if human slavery is required, the laboring and starving of children to meet the bottom line, the brutalization of women, sexual & ethnic minorities to keep our minds in the Dark Ages, the destruction of the environment is concerned?

The proof is in their pudding. Katrina: the poor and Black literally abandoned in full view of the world to die, and our Dry Drunk kept to the line: GOOD JOB BROWNIE!

Believe them.

Believe the queen when she speaks of the shared values, and look ahead and behind you. As Maya Angelou said: when someone tells you they're crazy, believe them the FIRST time.

US Civics 101: Gay Cruising

"I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport." Sen Larry Craig.

That was the only true statement he made, this closeted liar who is another hypocrite who backed DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act].

"I am not gay. I never have been gay." This is a LIE and queerly rendered phrase, "never have been".

Let me give you a quick lesson about your country and how it has treated gay men.

CNN and the major media in the first 24 hours of this news release that Craig was caught in a bathroom police sting at the Minneapolis airport: are treating his behavior as a psychotic episode rather than an indictment on what the West has wrought on gay men.

Veteran journalist and MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews tonight wants to draw a distinction between the gay lifestyle and breaking the law.

Mr. Matthews, laws are lines in the sand written by men with power and can sweep any class of person into a prison cell. Not too long ago, gay lifestyle AND cruising a park were equally illicit acts, at the very least deserving the person a good beating by your local police.

I resist being made into the moral equivalent of hegemonic straights, being asked to follow their line.

It was not until a stone's throw away that we've seen a proliferation of gay night spots, raves, journalism of many stripes, stars coming out, Republicans endorsing civil unions.

But I remember as a teen in the 80's and even into the 90's that there was only THE ADVOCATE, a rather right-wingish gay magazine that was kept tucked away in some magazine stores in the PORN SECTION. Mind you: THE ADVOCATE is strictly a news magazine, nothing pornographic about it, but the very topic "gay" was enough to have it hidden in certain magazine shops where we knew where and how to get it. This was the Reagan Era.

Meeting each other as youth meant relying on the good graces of older gay men who would open their homes for our parties and our youth-organizing meetings, which I sneaked away to every Tuesday. In St Louis where I went to college and the Inland Empire where I mostly grew up: there were no gay bars. None! You had to drive to East St. Louis or Hollywood for that. Meanwhile, Gay men of many various reputations met in the park. It actually was a social thing, laughing, joking, and checking out ... always aware that the St Louis police would descend on us at any moment and make arrests. Missouri was one of 24 states where being gay was illegal.

We also knew that many gay men met in public bathrooms of airports and bus stations. The locker rooms of gyms were also known spaces to meet gay men.

If you don't know the signals we would give each other, read the Craig story: the peering, the foot tap ... Craig sounds really dumb having an excuse for these signals. Straight men do not peer into closed bathroom stalls, tap the foot of men in neighboring stalls, or make hand gestures under the stall to other men. This is a private tale of gay men, mostly gay men of a certain time.

For mystical reasons from Heaven, this same phenomenon exists in Mexico where I spent three months and Cuba, where I spent a month. The famous park in central Havana, La Copelia, is a big cruising ground for gay men. La Copelia is known in Latin America as the place to get the best ice cream, and Cubans line up for hours for a scoop. Sweets and Sweets at La Copelia!!

When I worked at the YMCA men were often caught being naughty in the sauna or elsewhere. My straight coworkers and my younger gay coworkers could not relate to this phenomenon, but I had had enough of their bafflement and had to let them know what country they lived in.

Now you know. By the way, the new so-called openness in the gay community has thrown our gay elders to the trash, since the young no longer need their good graces, but that is another diatribe.

20 Years of ACT UP's Infamous Support of Capitalism

Larry Kramer is correct about at least one thing: IT IS EVIL that the poor and marginalized are mistreated by government and pharmeceutical companies, that profits are put before human beings, and that they are allowed to make excuses while the poor die.

The ACT UP phenomenon, born from Kramer's efforts at the beginning of what was known as HIV/AIDS, challenged this social evil. It was also to be the last breath of activism in the United States of America. Since then, we have slumbered - a drug-induced slumber perhaps since even our anxiety has been stigmatized into a condition to be treated - to do not a godd*mn thing. Kramer is also right to ask, not rhetorically, "where is the outrage," given the state of working class people. Working class toil on, and the wealthy grow richer with government diversion of more resources to them. Remember, the rich don't make money, they are simply as allowed their piracy as Drake was for Queen Elizabeth I.

But activism's last breath is a sour-smelling one. It fed right in to the march of obsene capitalism guided by figures like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. It is interesting to glance at their own empowerments, the Reagan victory and the Tory landslide which got Thatcher the requisite invitation to Buckingham Palace. A Reagan victory hung in the balance with Prsident Carter, the controversy being the hostages in Iran - it is speculated that those hostages were kept until after Reagan won, by design, to keep the Carter support low. Meanwhile, US espionage had been spying on the Labour government that preceeded Thatcher due to its leftist policies, union support, and its stance against the US war in Viet Nam. There are forces in the country about which you do not know, the current Queen warned.

The 1970's. The Trilaterals had already warned us, too, of the Crisis of Democacry, their own white paper speaking to the consequence to government of an empowered people. The rabble had to be tamed.

Economies were slowing, we were told. This meant nothing to the poor but spoke to the need of new frontiers for global capital.

Rightwing governments, which would bust unions and further empower a western capitalism with a new frontier that was direly needed. One of those frontiers would be the drug industry, which had helped win many battles in public health with public funding ... but how would profits continue to be made in a world without disease? Forces were at work to assure Reagan and Thatcher assumed the helms of power to deliver these frontiers.

HIV's link to AIDS was decided exactly 23 years ago by such a rightwing government in an April 1984 press conference with a political appointee who choked on her words as she spoke.

Public funding into medical research was starved by such a rightwing government.

Opportunities for drug companies to fund and control this research in universities was provided by such a rightwing government.

An old industry that was threatened with redunancy was reborn, and HIV-AIDS came along at a perfect time when government was getting out of the business of public health and capitalism let in to meet its bottom line, not needs of the people.

But the gay men of ACT UP did not demand the dismantle of capitalism. While theirs was a heritage that blended the elements of the 1960's civil rights era they also had direct ties to the modern world itself, and the modern world is structurally capitalist.

ACT UP was loud, angry, and theatrical, as they should have been; they used all sorts of strategies and antics to dramatize their purpose - this is a page lifted from the Black civil rights movement. But these were also the children of privilege. White men who had the same stake in being recognized as their merchant-class forbears who had to cut the head of a king off the begin the modern world. The modern world begins in France: more precisely, it begins somewhere when those slave-trading merchants grew richer and richer but were not acknowledged by an Old Regime of royalty and titled nobility. Those merchants - the bourgeoisie ... and I would add the American colonists - give us a better class picture of the ACT UP anger.

Their demand was not to dismantle or to question capitalism but rather to demand more drugs and drugs to be provided faster down the pipeline. AZT was dusted off the shelves and allowed to murder thousands of gay men. AZT had been shelved in the 1960's as being too toxic for the general population, but deemed fine to murder faggots.

So it was without surprise that the other day I heard veteran AIDS activist, Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Quilt, put his efforts behind the crystal meth "epidemic" and demand still more "treatment" - this means drugs and drug profits.

More drugs means more enrichment of pharmaceutical companies with funds that should be spent on the poor. In the ensuing years, where public health has become a shell of its former self and global capital is allowed to determine treatment, we already see the resurgence of diseases the world had once combated. We see them, and since the afflicted have no money and no power, they go neglected.

Memoir from Black Gay L.A.

I grew up in mostly white neighborhoods and attended mostly white schools, and in high school gifted classes was the ONLY Black male, so my romantic crushes and sexual pursuits were after white boys. I spent most of this time in Southern California enclaves of Santa Barbara, Claremont, and Alta Loma, so it was surfer dudes and soccer players who mostly caught my eye. There was no one else around. My first beau was a horseback show rider.

When I went away to college at Washington University in St. Louis, I got my first real taste of other ethnicities, not of Blackness - Wash U was fondly called the Harvard of the Midwest, and we are still talking about the 80's, when multiculturalism was but a flicker in an academic's eye and few were even giving lip service to class disparities. At Wash U, I met East Coast Jewish boys, sephardic, hairy chested. They became an exotic crush until our politics diverged year by year, they to defend Israel, me to question her and why the US was giving this apartheidesque, nuclear-armed state so much money.

Then I moved to San Francisco, shacked up with a motley crew of an aspiring actress, fellow aspiring writer, and a Frenchman, who was not aspiring to be an American, thank god; later joined by a French girl who daily hung her bed clothes out the front window. My surroundings were more diverse, but only slightly more Black. More Latins. More Asians. San Francisco is a wee more than half non-white in population, according to the data at the time. I say at the time, before the working class was driven out by dot-com mania and Willie Brown, a Black politco who adroitly strokes the heads of brown babies with one hand and with the other hands the keys to their food supply to profiteers. In San Francisco, I dated a few guys, a white SF state film student, a UC Berkeley Black student, a Vietnamese Berkeley grad student activist extraordinaire, a Thai man. I joined Queer Nation. Blackness at this point came to me in the weekly suggested readings the white facilitators photocopied: [the late] Audre Lorde and [evolving] bell hooks became familiar to me. The names of June Jordan and Angela Davis were dropped like pop culture. But also white Marxist gay activist Harry Hay. In part, the white-led progressive Queer Nation led to its downfall, when the lesbians and the colored began to agitate for the things these writers of color were telling us. We imploded.

As always, when the going gets rough, I seek a seminal book. My comrade, Alex Chee, a worker bee at A Different Light Bookstore handed me this book by the recently deceased James Baldwin. I knew the name Baldwin. I minored in creative writing at Wash U, that white school, read many a nice and boring classic, but never Baldwin. Freshman year the rage writers were the Alan Greenspan mentor, Ayn Rand, and Brett Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero." Worn copies of both circulated the dorm.

Chee handed me Baldwin's last book, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen." A slim book. The book blew my mind. Without exception, every time I re-read the book, a nugget exposes itself and knocks the wind out of me. The book remains my favorite and the most penetrating narrative of racism in the West. Baldwin is the Jose Marti of the US without question. Blackness was for all intents and purposes an ideology, a radical ideology. I read a little Malcolm, but much preferred CLR James and Walter Rodney, the Marxists, the non-Americans.

When I relocated to Oakland's Lake Merritt ... the OTHER side of the lake, readers! The side bordering East Oakland. I was surrounded by Blackness. On the buses, in the stores, everywhere. A few whites. A few Asians. More Latins. Many Blacks. It was the photo negative of what I'd lived in San Francisco. I did not react in shock or horror to this, but quickly grew to see Black men as complex objects of what Rodney, Badlwin, hooks, et al, had written about. But I also confronted a side not included in their poetry.

Despite the enormous history presented to me of the Black and African Diaspora, time and time again, the Black men I encountered were cowards, not dreamers: they lived here on the DL and/or had such a visceral reaction to whiteness, they despised the fact I associated with them, dated them, sexed with them, which is apparently why they refused the terms GAY or CLOSET ... worst of all: I was indicted many times for the whiteness of my speech. If I was to be so indicted, what of the Baldwins, Lordes, hooks, Rodneys, James ... and Malcolms? Malcom X was of course suspiciously a cypher, nothing more than an "X" on a cap, and an excuse to unleash untreated hatred on whites, far worse. It was such an irony that the few gay white men I encountered in the neighborhood even told me that, and that they wanted a real Black man[!], not me.

For other reasons [I think], I moved to Los Angeles. I considered that not only might a move improve my career but also my love life with my Black brothers. Neither has been the case. I have found a decimated, shame-filled population of pathetic Black Gay men. Hurricane Katrina came through here, I imagine, and no one reported it. I think I should have read the more dense writing of Franz Fanon along with Rodney, Fanon who goes into the psychoses of colonialized Black men.

The Black community in LA had yesterday been a middle class community, but evidently it did not produce much. The public education system is a Third-World atrocity, with a conservative 50% drop-out rate. Worse is what years of middle-class jobs did for this community and how they used it to supply themselves with houses, stuff, cars, and no sense, let alone not a single institution. When the defense industry floor was ripped from beneath them, they did not hum the Internationale or storm the Bastille, or wage a peasants' war ... they smoked more weed. They bought more weed, a point which cannot be missed. More weed was available to sell. Who's selling? Who's profting from this? At any rate, I've met Black men who proudly grew up in LA, educated in their schools, jobless, marginally employed, or employed in the underground, drug economy. This doesn't speak well for the 50% who do matriculate.

The local white men have learned. White men my age will not touch me, period. White men who have spent any time here catch on a lot quicker to what lies on the other side of the tracks. Race puts me automatically on that other side. Baldwin did comment he loved but did not like all Black people, so I guess I can safely say the same now, but it makes the dilemma no less complicated. I can't take these weed-smoking, meth-addicted men home to my mother and don't want them in my bed for a fling. I've had my periods of misery and joblessness and had to take lower-wage jobs and never thought to turn to alcohol or weed. "My head is bloody but unbowed," wrote Henley. Henley's poem, "Invictus," ranks for me along with Kipling's "If," and Cavasky's "Ithaca" as poems every child should know by heart. They are poems that may sound nice to a 9th grader but will continue to explain a Journey, which we all make alone. I guess for some, the poetry of the Old and New Testaments resonate.

But not these Black people. There is no poetry or holy commandment. A few years ago, Bill Cosby seemed to have a meltdown when he deigned to criticize the Black community; more recently, a prominent Black Harvard scholar, Henry Louis Gates, and talk show diva, Oprah Winfrey, added their voices to this criticism. Knowing what a risk this criticism entails, I can only imagine the private frustration these public people brought to their public comments. Cynically, we expect white America not to care, and are dismayed to find Black America equally pathetic. The Black community - if you can call a small cadre of ageing activists no one listens to a community - is broken when its elders are ridiculed. Really, guys, what has been going on here? I wish Mike Davis, socialist historian, would conduct an anthroplogical study of what went on in this city all those years.

I speak as a Black Gay SINGLE man who desires, like most gay men, to make connections with other gay men. We really are social animals. But this is problematic in a phenomenon like Los Angeles. If a rise in hardcore drug use is an indication of hopelessness, LA is at the pit. Crystal Meth is used in epidemic proportions here and a deal breaker if you're trying to meet someone for a fling. Heavy weed smoking slows the brain and clogs the plumbing from working, if you get my drift! (I know I am a teetotaler, but I am a teetotaler who knows that putting SMOKE of any kind into your lungs is counter-intuitive) The new, fashionable hatred for Whiteness dismisses not only white allies but identifies any sign of progress, like good grammar, as suspect. The Down Low phenomenon is not really different from my generation's construct of The Closet, but DL comes out of a rejection of whiteness. Gay is white. Language is white. And White is a deemed a social negative.

All men are brothers, Baldwin told us again and again in sometimes agonizing terms. Like other admonishments, ancient and biblical and kindergarten, we do not heed their instruction. Life is always more complicated than a commandment. But we must all stop and ask ourselves, in light of the state of our post-Katrina society, what would we say to a drowning man who would quibble about the color of the life jacket you would throw to save his life?

I'm in Love with Todd Oldham

Cable TV's BRAVO Network has kept me tuned in the last few months with its reality shows in particular and to the dying species of television in general. I never got hooked to the early generation of reality shows on network tv, people getting voted off islands and tribes being formed and reformed, and ever since the production of "Alf" in the 90's and the appointment of Michael Powell to the FCC in the same decade, this writer has witnessed a precipitous downfall into thinner blonde jobs and thinner plot lines.

Having grown up a gay creative wanna-be strangely fascinated with Julia Child and William Alexander and the arts behind what they did in those half-hour shows on pre-historic PBS, BRAVO's presentation of some ambitious designers-artistes ["Project Runway" hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum, "Top Chef" hosted by Padma Lakshmi, and "Top Design" hosted by Todd Oldham] have caught me in their nets. I never thought "reality" could be so interesting.

I was hooked on "Runway' in the second season when the show still held a gay aesthetic. I suspect by season three the producers rather than put up a NO GAYS sign and shut down, simply edited footage to keep things toned down for our middle countrymen whom they wanted to buy soap. And I suspect this is what happened in a revealing moment in its sister show, "Top Design." The men are interesting. The women strike me as either what we used to call Fag Hags or are Elegant, which means they have more white collar gay friends perhaps. Klum, the hostess, seems to be competing the 9 births of Queen Victoria, but she remains tres elegante herself. And between her and Miss Tyra Banks one has to admire they will not go softly into the Night like Cheryl Tiegs or Christy Brinkley.

The fact that some of the "Project Runway" contestants were openly gay or were secure enough in their sexuality to take on a gay mannerism or two like a tasteful pair of shoes hooked me more. Here they were in a space where their art mattered, not their sexuality. Ironically, when your sexuality is not a threat, gay and straight men can open up and be their fluid selves, aggressive, flirtatious, demure.

When "Top Chef" hosted by Indian actress Padma Lakshmi was announced to take "Project Runway's" time slot, I was discouraged and suspicious: could lightning hit twice? Nope. Where were they taking Heidi [labor and delivery perhaps]? Would I be denied chances to see grown men behaving naturally and creatively? "Top Chef" seemed butch, so I tuned out until the 3rd episode or so. Geez!! Hooked again! It was in fact less gay, and yet seeing these young men and women create to outdo their peers' creations was a war of the gods worth seeing. My vote in season three was for the diabetic New York head chef. The Latina had my vote until she got to whining. The handsome young Jew, Ilan, who eventually won seemed a reasonable choice.

Then "Top Design" hosted by designer Todd Oldham was announced to replace "Top Chef" I feared we were going into "Rockey V" territory. Again, I thought they'd gone too far and had run out of creativity. Who cares about the design of a room? Thanks to the paltry offerings on network tv, I tuned in during the 2nd or third episode and found they'd hit on the magic again ... and TODD OLDHAM!!!

Yeah, I'm in love with Todd Oldham, the show's host. He's my cup of tea. Cute, successful, unassuming, geeky. My kind of gentleman caller. So call me, Todd!! I'm in LA and single and have a room you could dress up.

The show's first season doesn't measure up to the best of "Project Runway", but it has that gay chic the other, earlier shows, albeit toned down. Goil (like Gargoyle, he reminds us ... and I am enamored with that CURTSEY he executes), Michael, John. So I was a little disappoinnted when in one of the early episodes one of the gay contestants announced he was HIV+, the cast was shown to just stare at him, including the several men I suspected were gay. The contestant is then says he's leaving the room to take a bath, and the cast is shown just lounging. Any comment was reserved for their one-on-ones with the camera filmed later. But what would I have them say? FAGS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! In the very same episode he is ousted, which I call TIMING. The Challenges don't feel as refined as "Project Runway's", like they may have been put together at the last minute.

Back to Todd: the cameras never seem to hover on Oldham more than a few seconds at a time. True, he's not the beauty that Klum or Lakshmi are, but he's a Catch. At least let me see what the man is wearing!

If it seems like Todd and Goil and Michael are John are only holding my interests, you would be wrong. Todd first. Goil reminds me of a perfect composite of a few men I have dated - Daven and Andy, who were perfectly LOVELY men, and I was a creep. As I said, the challenges on the show seems a bit contrived, but then: look at my room! Look a my clothes! I am neither fashion queen or design maven.

Auf Wiedersen!!

The Alternative Health Care System in this Country is called TYLENOL: Stop * Think

The bill for a recent, sudden illness and stay in the hospital was $67,403.23. I don't even have a fraction of that kind of money, but I am fortunate to be one of a shrinking number of people in the US with "health care." Even that oft-used term must be deconstructed.

But that my co-pay for my hospital stay was only $250 is a relief.

Why is the United States of America the only industrialized country without a public health care system? It's not for lack of talk, not for lack of Congressional hearings, not for lack of funds - we have plenty of all.

We are triangulated in this country by a party system funded, guided, and run by an oligarchy of capitalists. Support of the Republicans yields a perpetuation of this system; support of the Democrats yields the same. Writer Gore Vidal once called the Insurance Industry the Piggy Bank of the Rich. If this is true, it would explain why they have kept health insurance private, costly, and relentlessly advertized as the best in the World.

The worst example of what perpetuates this health care system is not from elites within this party system - they know their limits, so continue to frame the issue as "affordable health care" - but from Progressives. Respected writer and honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America dissed Ralph Nader and backed John Kerry in 2004. The Communist Party USA has been favoring the Democratic Party lately, and this has made its magazine, Political Affairs, a depressing thing to behold.

There have been insurgents within the Democrats, but their fate has always been crash and burn: to date [late winter 2007], I have only heard Demcratic candidates John Edwards and fellow vegeatarian Dennis Kucinich define the solution as UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE.

I do believe Universal Health Care was First Lady Hillary Clinton's goal in her early endeavor, which is why she attemtped and was vilified for shutting out the oligarchy. Universal Health Care is not the goal of US Senator and Presidential Candidate Clinton, as we have heard. Our Press and Elites are fond of pointing to the real power behind the Iranian presidency, the Mullahs - these Islamic chieftains - but not the oligarchs that stand behind the thrones of the West.

In a recent, wide-ranging interview on C-Span, Ehrenreich said "The Alternative Health Care System in this Country is called TYLENOL." In fact, our so-called health care system is not about health but rather about chemo/medicine-centered industry, the power of which also keeps us away from a health-centered health care system.

A headache is not the body's deficiency of aspirin, and yet we are conditioned to be pill-centered in the treatment of our ailments. Our treament of many ailments - and it seems more are discovered everyday just when a new pill is concocted - are chemicalized. How often do you hear a discussion of our diet, especially in the US? Our heavy consumption of carcasses - excuse me, meat products - can be linked to the rise in disease, where at once time in the recent past our diets were more vegetable centered, less meat; and now it is the inverse, often no vegetation at all. Our animals now are even being fed animal products - the cow and bull are vegetarians by nature but are fed animal products and steroids and antibiotics to make them into the fattened creatures we've come to recognize as cattle.

Further, I learned during my extended hospital stay, that I had gotten a very special, dangerous bacteria in my intestines: campenella. This comes from chickens. Not to indict chickens, they are also fed steroid and antibiotics, and this is what makes these bacteria and fungus even more powerful: when they survive this chemical stew, they are resistant in your intestine as well.

So not only has our medical industry been chemicalized but so has food production, the long-term consequences of both scarcely discussed but met with the creation of more drugs.

After Reagan and Thatcher let for-profit drug companies into the universities research centers and starved them of public funds to work in the public interest, research has been geared to medicines not for the poor but for yuppies and the rich. Drug companies have quarterly reports and shareholders to always consider. They have no interest, fiscally, in drugs for the poor when the government won't pay full price for them or that the poor themselves cannot afford.

So while we should demand universal health care, this health care must be rational and address the planet, our food supply, and our diets primmarily. Drugs must be a last option. Prince Charles of the UK was recently heard to whisper to an Arab prince how McDonald's restaurants could be banned. The movie, "Super Size Me," would highlight this argument.

But people's needs will never be heard in an anti-democratic system, like the US, with its capitalist party system.

Stranger Than Fiction: AIDS on Trial ... for real this time

In Charles Ortleb's book, The Closing Argument, he chronicles the trial of a Black man accused to have attempted murder by spreading the HIV virus through unprotected sex and puts the HIV-AIDS theory on trial by challenging the science behind it. Ortleb was the publisher of The New York Native, a writer, and printed many of the early dissident pieces from Celia Farber, who recently released Serious Adverse Events about the controversies surrounding the invention of HIV as a deadly virus.

Australia in 2006 has brought fiction to reality. An Australian, Andre Chad Parenzee, 35, has been convicted of endangering the lives of three female sex partners with whom he had "unprotected" sex. Like the lawyer in Ortleb's novella, Parenzee's lawyer turns the tables on the government's case by putting a huge question mark next to HIV's potency as a killer virus.

A recent story in The Australian provides some details.

It has been horrifying enough that sex between men is demonized and found yet another rationale to be curbed, chained, proscribed, then outright made illegal - isn't it ironic while we pretend to celebrate gay rights, we demonize gay sexuality unless it strives for "marriage" rights! But if straights are to be also convicted of the kind of sex their parents and grandparents performed, we have truly entered a tortured musical comedy.

The judge in the trial has just set aside the conviction to put essentially HIV on trial. Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a noted HIV dissident, has been flown in as an expert witness. She has been asked if HIV causes AIDS and replied in an interview that there was no such proof, and she proceeds to lay out her counter-argument.

Dr. Eleni is not alone among those in the scientific community who, from the infamous 1984 Press Conference, has resisted the HIV-AIDS link. David Rasnick is another. But the most famous is a former star and National Academy of Sciences member, Univ. of California researcher, Peter Duesberg.

The Fraud Behind US Elections

I remember growing up as a political junkie, intrigued with the drama of debates, and watching the televised presidential debates. These debates were always sponsored by what was to my young mind a strange group, The League of Women Voters. To me it sounded like a militia of warrior women defending the election system.

Whatever they were, this League crumbled when sponsorship was taken from them by the financiers of the US two-party junta.

It did not actually begin wth H. Ross Perot's invitation to join the debates, but that was the straw on the two-parties' back. The problem stirred with the historical challenge posed by Dr. Lenora Fulani, socialist, early gay-rights advocate, feminist, and presidential candidate from the New Alliance Party [in some states, aka Peace & Freedom Party]. Fulani had qualified from 1980 onward for Federal matching funds, had qualified to appear on the ballots of all 50 states, and yet was ignored by mainstream media.

She challenged the League of Women Voters to invite her to join the presidential debates, and the League refused with some garbage about her percentages not being high enough.

Enter Perot. His percentages met the League requirements, so to the chagrin of the two-party elite, he made his famous appearance between tweedle dee and tweedle dummer. But it would be the last time.

In a coups, the Democratic and Republican Parties snatched the historic debates from the League and created the Commission on Presidential Debates, which we have to this day. It should have been called the Commission to Keep the Two-Party System, because it assured no other party would grace the stage and be known to masses of people ever again.

This is YOUR democracy.

I tell this story because as we approach another election in a few weeks, we are stuck in the old narrative on national, state, and local levels.

Why bother voting when the choices given us at that critical point have been pre-screened and pre-weeded by interests diametrically opposed to working people and the poor? Fidel, after the Cuban Revolution, 1959, promised to hold elections. But when he saw what the US was planning by heavily funding candidates who would give Cuban lands back to the US, the revolutionary government cancelled the elections: he noted, in the 2nd Declaration of Havana, what elections in the West actually are: ways for the US, the monopolies, and Cuba's ruling class to offer versions of their policies and the people given the indignity to ratify them. To what end? Not to the benefit of working people certainly.

Interestingly, when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega pondered whether to hold elections in the late 1980's after 10 years of bloody US-backed Contra war, Fidel cautioned him what would happen, and certainly did happen. The US CIA flooded Violeta Chamorro's election coffer with millions of dollars, and she handily beat Ortega and plunged Nicaragua's poor into pre-revolution poverty.

I hope Iraq's dissidents are taking note as the US tries to bring democracy there.

Green Party and Socialist Party USA candidates are being ignored by the press and excluded from televised debates all over the US. They are told that they are not known, they are told that people usually vote for Democrats or Republicans so their presence would be a distraction, they are told they are not polling high enough to qualify.

Peter Camejo, Green Party gubernatorial candidate in California, is a member of a party which has polled high enough to be recognized by California's Secretary of State [the Socialist Party USA has not]; he polled third in the infamous run-off between Schwarzenegger and Grey Davis ... and yet, he will not be covered, has not been covered by the press, and was not allowed into the debate between the current Republican governor and Democrat Phil Angelides.

Meanwhile, we are in a state of angst about Electronic Voting Machines, worried that our votes might not be fairly counted, demanding a paper receipt.

So what if they are or aren't counted when what we are being offered to vote for has been pre-treated and homogenized by corporate interests and ruling elites?

Why vote at all? Moreover, why vote when we apparently have no democracy in which to participate? I think it was Emma Goldman who said that Voting was the Opiate of the masses, and that every 4 years they doped themselves.

I cannot think of any significant social movement won at a ballot box: the abolition of chattel slavery, voting rights for women, the 8-hour work day, the minimum wage ... not even the end of the British colony soon to be known as the United States of America. None came to us by ballot but by struggle and organizing and war.

Obama, another rising and falling star ... so no blinking!

This love fest for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is interesting in that we who read history know that we have been here before, presented with a minority darling of whom we are amazed at his intelligence. The outcome to these careers is predictable. White America, by whom we really mean CORPORATE US (The CU), since whites and especially poor whites have nothing to do with this and are as forgotten a species as anyone in the working class, love this Black man who embraces the Middle. Colin Powell is preceived as another MIDDLE lover. The CU think they can safely back and fund this ethnic minority who won't tread on their tax breaks or on the role of the US government in the commercial world - their role is to open doors and where they don't open to bomb them open. This, while giving crafty lip service to the poor, is THE MIDDLE.

Where the CU err time and time and time again since Jacksonian Democracy in the US, and the Great Reform ACT in the UK, when the rabble had to be contended with for votes[!] is that Obama constituency - Blacks, minorities, progressives, the poor - will be dazzled by him at first, seeing him as one of them, but they will quickly find him more an active member of the CU and an honorary member of the Wage-Slave, beholden to the CU, making excuses for the CU and sticking it to the poor.

The poor will abandon him, his legitimacy will fall, and there goes his public career. He will remain a senator and get fat or become a senior fellow at a bourgeoise think-tank, and in between head an "Initiative" to solve some global crisis.

Fidel broke through this dilemma down pretty handily a year after the Cuban Revolution, 1959. He said he could have abandoned the reasons for the revolution for accommodation with the plantation owners and the US embassy or he could have done we he had to do to keep his promise to change Cuban society. This change could not come from United Fruit or the US military, so since both had lost both were asked to leave. Obama will not do this

NAMBLA & Rep. Foley: More Capitalist Collateral Damage

Interestingly, just before news of Congressman Foley's illicit advances toward young high school students, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured a short "expose" on the evils of NAMBLA. I daresay most people outside the above-35 gay male community don't know what NAMBLA is or why I would link it to Foley. NAMBLA is the North American Man Boy Love Association. In my younger years, just coming out, it seemed to get a lot of backpage press in alternative gay news organs - this is like off-off Broadway. Gay rights activists fought with each other whether to include or attack this entity. I remember that Harry Hay, gay civil rights activists and communist, was a lone voice not in supporting NAMBLA, but discouraging attacks from gay men as showing division to the enemy.

Not surprisingly, Oprah with her soccer-mom demographic was livid at the existence of such an organization and wondered why it would be allowed. She was given a lecture by an NBC reporter on the First Amendment: expression is one thing; an act is something else altogether, Oprah.

This seems to be Foley's defense thus far: pointing to his abuse by a church elder and checking himself into alcoholic rehab. He engaged in inappropriate internet chatter. His spokesmen have said he is not a pedophile, that he never had sex with any under-aged boys.

Oprah's Show also featured an NBC journalist who has gained note and ratings for his Dateline NBC: Catch a Predator series, where grown men are caught on camera meeting under-aged boys and girls. When they confess, they all say they have never done this before, never gone to meet an under-aged girl or boy, never had sex with a child.

This is all supposed to disturb us and we snicker as Foley's confession as we do these men who claim never to have done this before. We are supposed to be disturbed by this. It is supposed to be inexcusable, right?

Well, the thing that excuses this sort of behavior is the history of Capitalism. Wherever you have a system which unevenly distributes resources - or doesn't distribute resources at all - you set up a privileged group and another which will be preyed on. Not ironically, we are told to emulate the pirates - the privileged - and despise the prey with all kinds of names, some from the streets and many from the Academy.

This time, the prey are children.

The history of women under Capitalism has been full of predatory acts. The predator was Capitalism and men were its privileged agents. Since women were denied access to wealth - land, income of their own [it was often given to the husband by right] - they had to prositute themselves, whether with tricks or with suitor-gentlemen. In many major US cities, a single woman could not rent an apartment without her father's co-signature within my lifetime. It doesn't really matter on some level how one prostitutes.

While we would like to imagine we come from a long line of lovers, we have to face the reality that most of our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, and even our own mothers in many parts of the world have to marry predators - men who have been given access to even a small part of wealth where the woman has none.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators? She has too many preyed-upons in her audience. Will she expose the crime we do to children by divesting them of rights? Not likely.

My comparison of women to children is in their treatment. Both are marginalized not by Nature but by Law.

By legal definition, a boy has few rights. Beyond this, the boys that NAMBLA seeks are poor ones, Third World ones, who are not only with fewer rights but fewer options. The Congressional pages preyed upon by Foley will statistically go on to College and better jobs and perpetuate this Division, the poor ones will produce children who will have to hustle.

In one segment on The Oprah Show, they are shown on hidden camera to be arranging a trip to Mexico to find boys, and they boast how they money will go further their.

The other side to this is equally sad. In fact, one can go to such places as Mexico and the boys will often offer themselves to you, not for love, but for money, because they have none ... because their governments are corrupt and have taken land and water rights from them to benefit corporations or global agreements.

Will NBC or The Oprah Show expose these predators?

Unfortunately, by legal definition, children are without power. It is over the top for even many socialists to acknowledge the sacred family unit as, like the British monarchy, a feudal institution, and needs remedy before anything meaningful happens. And until we are ready for that remedy, children WILL be preyed on and no law, no speech will stop a congressman, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a parent from preying on and abusing a child. It's the Power, stupid.

31 Reasons Why the US opposes Fidel, Socialism, & The Cuban Revolution

1. overthrew a us-backed dictator, fulgencio batista
2. returned cuban land and mineral resources to the cuban nation
3. in 72 hours repelled a us-backed invasion at Playa Giron [Bay of Pigs]
4. eradicated illiteracy in one year
5. achieved one of the highest kindergarten-9th grade retention rates
6. highest number of school teachers per capita
7. free publically funded education from kindergarten to doctoral studies
8. lowest infant mortality 60 per 1000 in the hemisphere, lower than many US cities
9. increased life expectancy by 15 years with its universal health care system
10. highest number of doctors per capita
11. commercial-free tv, where public-service announcements inform
12. eradicated racist Jim Crow laws imposed on Cuba from the US
13. no paramilitary death squads
14. development of sport and culture
15. supported Algerian nationalists against France
16. supported and sent troops to aid Angola against US-backed apartheid South Africa
17. supplied weapons to Algeria to fight off US-backed Moroccan invasion
18. sent a brigade to aid Syria in defense of the Golan Heights against Israel
19. supported Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of Congo and his supporters
20. supported Congolese freedom fighters against US-backed Mobutu
21. aided in the independence of Portuguese colonies with Amilcar Cabral
22. Cuito Cuanavale!
23. stood in solidarity with the people and struggle of Viet Nam from 1960 on
24. aided economic development of Grenada until US invasion
25. internationalist missions of doctors, technicians, and teachers
26. supported Nelson Mandela when Reagan and Thatcher called him a terrorist.
27. offered and was refused to dispatch first responders after Katrina
28. spoke on behalf of children who do not have even a piece of bread
29. offered political asylum to Black and Puerto Rican activists, like Assata Shakur
30. thwarted 686 CIA assassination attempts made public through US Congress
31. Survived the machinations of Eisenhower, the Kennedy Brothers, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton ... and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover

for these crimes against the new world order, fidel must be punished.

Gracias, Fidel!

Case Against Israel, Part One

Let me be the first non-candidate on the Left to call for Israel to be packed up and dispersed back to Europe and its small laboring class Ethiopian Jews back to Africa. This farce has gone on quite long enough and added gross injury and death and misery to the horrific, unbelievable crime of the German Nazi Holocaust. There is no justice in Israel's existence. It is as much a thorn in a foreign land as the Dutch settlers in South Africa and resulted in similar crimes. Their present war in Lebanon smells so much like the US war in Guatemala, 1954, where the US claimed to be assaulted and democratic aspirations had to be crushed. Israel is our Hessian.

You will not hear the US political party system saying anything remotely like this. Congress just further proved their uselessness by coming together and passing a resolution supporting Israel's act of war.

So it's not surprising as I write this is a whisper of ground assault trickle into the air.

Israel is not my friend. US administrations are fond of saying this, with deep compassion in their voices. But it is not the 11th commandment that Israel "exist."

Several years ago, to the glee of the West, the Cold War was won and a whole complex Soviet republic disappeared. Since its creation, it has been the thorn of the West, a threat to the West, because it existed, because of its model of socialism-communism. The USSR herself committed errors and atrocities along the way for which is cannot be forgiven either. I never heard a Western politican say the USSR was a friend or that they believed in its existence.

But let us look at the 20th century, that modern world just passed us by, and ask ourselves which country is the more sensible invention: a socialist state or a religious one? One seems to fit into the forward momentum of the world, the sense that resources cannot be horded by a few and the rest be benefitted, or as Socialst Party USA member, Helen Keller, instructed a British friend, votes for women is an afterthought when 90% of Briton's land and wealth is controlled by 10% and the remaining wealth left to the 90%.

The other state seems to take us far backwards, maybe to the 16th century, when religious wars began, the Roman Catholics were splitting up, and lines were being drawn in the sand with blood.

One is the longtime enemy, USSR, and the other is our friend, Israel.

Why Israel? Historically that territory is its home, and the racist persecution by European ruling classes, ruling families, civil society fed their dream of an Eden. But the world is heavy with historical territory, the US being entirely just that, from sea to sea, and heaven help the soccer moms and the land barons when some mighty power decides to replace the USA with the nations of the Cherokee, Choctau, Iroqois, et al, et al.

That too would be absurd. Ethnic states. Religious states. Do these represent steps forward or back into the European-inspired Dark Ages?

Globalization has existed since the slave trade, was part of the slave trade, and was fueled by the slave trade. Cargo. Peoples. For all kinds of reasons, they began moving around, fleeing or in search of something. The face of what was believed to be pure nations dramatically changed. And after all that mixing was well underway, the West, imposes a religious state in the middle of the former Ottoman Empire, its own corpse just buried, a few swim strokes north from Africa.

The world will never except Israel, because it is a nuisance, a non-sequitor, and the resurrection of a time left in history. Though the bankers and investors may since this Frankenstein creation is an anchor to Our Interests, and Evangelicals do because they are eager for the End of the World and Christ's return. That is a subject for part 2.