RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : 'Bronx Butch' Memoirist & Performance Artist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.

Rag Radio podcast:
'Bronx Butch' memoirist & performance
artist, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

“Annie Lanzillotto, the bard of Bronx Italian butch, is an American original, a performance artist and cultural anthropologist whose work is unique... an astonishing writer possessed of an utterly inimitable voice." -- Author John Gennari

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / April 9, 2013

Author, poet, and performance artist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 29, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Annie Rachele Lanzillotto here:


Annie Lanzillotto is an Italian-American lesbian memoirist, poet, performance artist, singer, and songwriter who lives in New York. She is the author of L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir, published in 2013 by the State University of New York Press.

On Rag Radio Lanzillotto discusses her rich and multi-faceted life and art. She talks about and reads from her lusty, wise, and very witty memoir, which deals with a range of issues including her Italian-American upbringing, her father's PTSD and his physical abuse of her mother; her two bouts with cancer, and her coming to terms with her sexuality.

An American original.

As author John Gennari says, Annie's memoir "indelibly portrays the iconic Italian American spaces of kitchen, stoop, sidewalk, and street; the body as a site of humor and tragedy; and, above all, the family war zone as an uncanny intermingle of poignancy and brutality."

Annie Lanzillotto was born and raised in the Westchester Square neighborhood of the Bronx, and in Yonkers, New York, of Barese heritage. She received a B.A. with honors in medical anthropology from Brown University and an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. In 2012, she received a Franklin Furnace Archive Inc. Performance Commission and a Petracca Award in Poetry from Philadelphia Poets, and has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Program, Dancing In the Streets, and the Puffin Foundation.

Lanzillotto is also the author of a book of poetry, Schistsong, and teaches master classes in solo performance for the Acting Apprentice Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville. She was selected as one of "200 essential New Yorkers" by The New York Times for her performance and installation at the 2000 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She is included in Marquis Who's Who of American Women.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.
Friday, April 19: Amsterdam-based poet John Sinclair, founder of the White Panther Party and former manager of the MC5.

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Jim Rigby : Our Nation of Weeping Executioners

Rev. Jane Adams Spahr. Image from One More Lesbian.
Our nation of weeping executioners:
The religious tribunal of Rev. Jane Adams Spahr

By Jim Rigby / The Rag Blog / February 23, 2011

Rev. Jim Rigby, human rights activist and pastor at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. To stream Rag Radio live on the internet, go here. To listen to this interview after it is broadcast -- and to other shows on the Rag Radio archives -- go here.

A recent Los Angeles Times profile of Rev. Jane Adams Spahr wonderfully captured the loving spirit of one of my few heroes in the Presbyterian Church. This courageous lesbian minister has fought prejudice and fear within our denomination, refusing to surrender to voices of intolerance within the church.

The article also captured the sense of helplessness which threatens to unravel not only the Presbyterian system of democratic government, but, possibly, our nation’s as well.

The Times reporter noted that at Rev. Spahr’s third trial, a religious tribunal found her guilty of violating the Presbyterian constitution because she conducted same-sex marriage ceremonies. The story explains:

But then several of [the tribunal] members apologized to Spahr, and their decision admonished not the faithful minister but the faith itself. “We call upon the church to reexamine our own fear and ignorance that continues to reject the inclusiveness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” panel members wrote while finding Spahr guilty in Napa last August. “We as a church need to be able to respond to... reality as Dr. Jane Spahr has done with faithfulness and compassion."

In other words, the liberal members of the church court agreed with Rev. Spahr’s theology and practice but found her guilty anyway, apparently unable to step out of a system they themselves described as unjust.

Some of the committee wept as they read their verdict which reminded me of a term coined by Walt Herbert, emeritus professor of English at Southwestern University. Dr. Herbert used the term, “weeping executioners” to describe those who express concern for the oppressed, but will not leave their place in the hierarchy of that oppression.

Democracy demands a rare courage and sense of personal responsibility. The Presbyterian denomination originally began as an attempt at a democratic form of church government. Some in England called the American Revolution “that Presbyterian rebellion” because that denomination inspired much of the democratic structure of American government and some of its revolutionary spirit.

The Presbyterian idea of democracy was not mob rule. It emphasized personal responsibility over and against any human group. The Westminster Confession of Faith went so far as to forbid surrendering one’s conscience to any human council. The refusal to surrender responsibility applied to national as well as church governments. Needless to say, that revolutionary spark now lies buried under centuries of accumulated ash.

For many years, Janie Spahr has been a much needed thorn in the side of the Presbyterian Church, charging us to give every person their full human rights. Rev. Spahr was already married and ordained when she finally faced the reality that she was attracted to other women. Her husband Jimmy was fully supportive and they divorced amicably. At that point, she was an out lesbian Presbyterian pastor.

Because the issue of homosexuality had not been dealt with yet, there wasn’t a provision to strip her of ordination. She was denied a position as a pastor of a church but became the “lesbian evangelist” of the Presbyterian Church, ministering to all those rejected by the church. She became gay and lesbian Presbyterians’ best hope, and homophobic Presbyterians’ worst nightmare.

In August 2010, a judicial committee of the Presbyterian Church convicted Rev. Spahr of marrying 11 same sex couples. I went to the trial to observe and to express my support for Rev. Spahr. The day before the verdict was announced members of the judicial committee spoke about the need for inclusivity and for justice. The moderator read a verse from James Russell Lowell’s prophetic poem, “Once to Every Soul and Nation.” He promised that the verdict would be in the spirit of the poem. As soon as I got back to a computer I printed out the whole poem and read these stanzas (modified a bit to remove sexist language):

Once to every soul and nation, comes the moment to decide.
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight.
And that choice goes by forever twixt that darkness and that light.

Then it is the brave soul chooses while the coward stands aside.
Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth.
They must upward still and onward who would keep abreast of truth.

Looking at those noble words, I was certain the committee would find the courage to oppose rules they themselves said were discriminatory. I showed the lines to my gay and lesbian friends at the trial and said assuredly, “they are going to do something prophetic.”

When their guilty verdict was read, some of the judicial committee wept. They agreed that the church’s discrimination against gay and lesbian persons was wrong, but because of earlier rulings by church courts, they felt they had no choice but to convict her.

One woman from the judicial committee stood crying and said to the 11 same-sex couples, “We want you to know how hard this was for us.” Another member of the committee said, choking back sobs, “We want you to know... that we love you.”

When those words were spoken, a muted but profound groan crept through the room. The dagger of condemnation wrapped in bandages of deedless compassion cut deeper than any words of hate. Once again, the gospel of kindness had been betrayed with a kiss.

I looked around at all the beautiful people from the gay and lesbian community who had accepted me into their families. One of my lesbian friends collapsed in her chair. A gay couple embraced, staring vacuously forward, both of their shirts wet with tears.

The committee seemed genuinely surprised by the response. One of the committee members confided afterward that they had given Rev. Spahr grounds for appeal “served on a platter.” That “gift” was, of course, based on the premise that someone else down the line would be braver than they.

The Rev. Jane Adams Spahr talks with supporters after a Presbyterian Church court handed down its ruling. Photo by Christopher Chung / AP.
Most democracies are born out of revolution and begin to die on the day they choose tradition over their own revolutionary principles. Nothing is more perilous than the human tendency to grow conservative in times of great transition. Because life is change, sanity is not an unchanging state, but a commitment to change by certain standards.

The revolutionary “soul” of democracy is not submission to the will of the majority, but the conviction that every human being has certain inalienable rights that cannot be put up for a vote. When a majority deprives the minority of inalienable rights, every decent citizen must be willing to leave the majority and stand with the minority.

When citizens in a democracy feel their only power is to vote for candidates who then tell them what to do, they have forgotten what liberty means. They become beasts of burden who think they are free if they can vote on who rides them.

Democracy demands an active courage. Unless citizens are brave enough to follow its principles in times of crisis, democracy loses its sinew and dies. Issues like immigration and gay marriage test whether our nation will follow living principles into new understandings, or perish repeating the comfortable wisdoms of the dead.

Martin Luther King wrote a letter from the Birmingham Jail to his own weeping executioners to say “justice delayed is justice denied.” Later, he also wrote the following call to courage:

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

James Russell Lowell is still right: “Once to every soul and nation comes the moment to decide.” Issues like immigration and gay marriage force us to choose between our principles and our traditions. We will not get these moments back. If we choose tradition over our revolutionary principles, democracy will surely die. Our ship of state will be a vessel that is all anchor and no sail.

Furthermore, if we do not stop surrendering our human agency to hierarchical systems of power, we are doomed to either being the sacrificial victims of that system, or of being its “weeping executioners.” Such is my denomination. Such is our beloved nation.

What would it look like to step out of the system? I saw that as well. One night, during the week of the trial, the 11 couples met for an evening service. Each couple came forward to light a candle to honor the love that held their family together. Janie Spahr’s partner got up to light a candle and looked out for Janie to come join her.

My eyes filled with tears as Janie’s ex-husband Jimmy got up to stand beside them to honor their love. Then his wife got up to stand beside them as well. Finally, the children of Jane and Jimmy got up to stand beside them.. When I saw that beautiful family I knew I was seeing the world that Isaiah was talking about when he said the human beings rejected by religion and by nations have become the foundation of a new humanity. Humanity’s new cathedral will be built with the shattered stones of unjust nations and unkind religions.

Leaving our role in the hierarchy of oppression is really as simple as giving others every right we claim for ourselves, and ceasing to work for justice within the parameters of unjust systems. We have become like ants who built bridges out of our own bodies and now consider those bridges more real than ourselves.

And it is as simple as Einstein’s charge that we should remember our humanity and forget the rest. At some point, if you will not disobey an unjust law, you are not working within the system to dismantle oppression, you are the oppression.

[Jim Rigby is a human rights activist and the pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin. He is a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He can be reached at jrigby0000@aol.com. This article was originally posted to Faith and Reason and to CommonDreams.]

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Willie Mitchell and Mary Daly : Partners in Demise

Above, Willie Mitchell with his axe and, below, Mary Daly with hers (a labrys, a traditional symbol of the Goddess).
Intertwined obit:
Soul man and radical feminist leave the stage

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2010

Life has a strange way of intertwining existences in ways that defy human reason. Like puns or anagrams that seem to reveal hidden meanings, passings away are also open to interpretation. Like the tea leaves, our leavings are also readable.

What I mean to say is that people die in pairs, creating accidental(?) marriages, pairings on the obituary page. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and George Balanchine. Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. Despite all our efforts on our own behalf, dying, like jury duty, puts us back in the mix.

Who will we end up sitting next to on the bench outside St. Peter’s office in Heaven (or equivalent)? Even atheists and agnostics may have to admit to some degree of posthumous mortification looking back at their obits in the newspapers.

So who are the latest couple to have left together to go to tell their human stories to Whomever? None other than Willie Mitchell and Mary Daly. Who? Let’s just say this may be one of the oddest obit couples ever, or perhaps we are distilling ourselves somehow as Humanity.

Willie Mitchell was the trumpeter, bandleader and producer who brought us the third (and final) wave of sweet soul music from Memphis. As you probably know, Memphis sits at the top of the Mississippi Delta, the gateway from the Deep South to the North. The city that brought us Elvis (like Willie Mitchell from neighboring Mississippi), Sun Records (Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Howling Wolf), Stax Records (Booker T & the MGs, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes). Originally it was W.C. Handy, another trumpeter/bandleader who “discovered” the Blues in Memphis. That would have been about a hundred years ago.

Willie Mitchell had a sweet band but he was looking to break into record production. He found an awkward kid from Michigan who had a great voice but still hadn’t found his style. Al Green could sound like Marvin Gaye, or Wilson Pickett. Willie Mitchell’s advice was simple: try sounding like Al Green.

The result, “Let’s Stay Together” (from 1971) on Hi Records is perhaps the sweetest soul song ever laid down. Willie Mitchell continued as Al Green’s producer/mentor for years during the periods when Al (like Little Richard) switched from sacred to secular styles. Willie Mitchell produced sweet soul music after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King (also in Memphis).

That was a miracle.

His deathmate couldn’t have been more different. Mary Daly was the quintessential radical lesbian separatist. Instead of “Let’s Stay Together” her message was surely: men stay away. She was a white Jesuit theologian who, once she had been granted tenure at Boston College, defied the Catholic Church to create a woman-based Wicca movement within the university’s teaching environment. It took decades for the school to finally get rid of her.

By that time she had published many books in her own super creative woman language, an alternative to male dominant Indo-European usages. Words like "hag" and "crone" took on new meanings. You can be sure that if this had been the Middle Ages and not the 1960s, Mary Daly would have burned at the stake. Or maybe been dunked to death. Instead she was able to teach a separatist feminist course at a formerly all male seminary and totally exclude men from her classes.

Yes, this was one tough woman.

In some ways her life was reminiscent of that of Anne Lee, who created the Shaker Church in America as a feminist/separatist experiment in the 1780s. Ms. Lee was beaten to death by angry Massachusetts witch hunters but her movement flourished for almost 100 years.

Mary Daly lived to see her defiance of the Catholic Church and her open lesbianism flow into the mainsteam. Perhaps not a remnant of the original all-embracing matriarchy from the ancient past, more like another quasi-male intellectual academic bent on self-differentiation. Still, Mary Daly hit a note that resonated with many other women totally sick of the male world. May their Circle someday open up for all of us...

You’d have to say that Mary Daly and Willie Mitchell represented two totally honest aspects of our life. Hopefully as they journey together through eternity, born in the same year, leaving two days apart, forever wedded together, their spirits can find a way to reinspire us to do both things: stay together, and relearn how to truly respect women.

[Carl R. Hultberg's grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York's Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

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Annie Leibovitz and The Gay Tax : The Cost of Love

Susan Sontag. Photo © Annie Leibovitz / Politics, Theory & Photography.
Annie Leibovitz and the gay tax

Same-sex couples do not have the same privileges as straight married couples when it comes to inheritance. If your partner passes away and leaves her estate to you, you have to pay up to 50 percent of the value of your inheritance in taxes. However, if you and your partner were recognized as a married couple, you wouldn't have to pay a dime.

By Nancy Goldstein / March 5, 2009

Poets swoon about it and singers croon about it, but LGBT people can calculate the cost of love down to the last penny. In my household it comes to around $329.25 monthly: that's the gay tax my wife and I shell out for me to be on her health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income. It doesn't matter that our Massachusetts marriage is recognized in New York. Companies pay for their employees' health insurance with pre-tax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn't federally recognized.

But that's chump change compared to what love is currently costing celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Back in late February the NYT noted that Leibovitz had borrowed a total of $15.5 million from a company called Art Capital Group using "as collateral, among other items … town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs."

But what the NYT missed, along with every other straight newspaper that picked up the story, is why Leibovitz suddenly found herself in such dire financial straits. It took AfterEllen's Julie Miranda to put two and two together and figure out that "most of Leibovitz' financial woes stemmed from her inheritance of her longtime partner, Susan Sontag's estate." Writes Miranda (who, in turn, is channeling Suze Orman's Valentine's Wish for Gay Marriage):

"Same-sex couples do not have the same privileges as straight married couples when it comes to inheritance. If your partner passes away and leaves her estate to you, you have to pay up to 50 percent of the value of your inheritance in taxes. However, if you and your partner were recognized as a married couple, you wouldn't have to pay a dime...When Sontag died in 2004, she bequeathed several properties to Leibovitz, who was forced to pony up half of their value to keep them."

Will this profoundly unfair issue be challenged now that attention's being drawn to it by the situations of couples like Sontag and Leibovitz who are far higher-profile than me and my gal? We're about to get a shot at finding out. As my Broadsheet colleague Judy Berman reported on Tuesday, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders filed suit earlier this week on behalf of same-sex couples who have tied the knot in states that have marriage equality, seeking to challenge their blocked access to federal benefits. The plaintiffs include Dean Hara, spouse of the late Rep. Gerry Studds. But even with the spectacle of a U.S. Congressman's widower being denied Social Security benefits, the case isn't a slam dunk, since its slingshot is aimed at the big federal law that institutionalized this discrimination: the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. It's likely to face a long slog up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until then, there's a high price on our heads, dead or alive.

Source / broadsheet / salon.com

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Cool News : Lesbian to Lead Iceland

Johanna Siguardardottir, Iceland's social affairs minister, is set to become the country's interim prime minister. A former flight attendant and union organizer, she is openly gay. Recent polls have showed Sigurdardottir, 66, to be the nation's most popular politician. She will lead until new elections are held, probably in May. Photo by Brynjar Gauti / AP.
Openly gay Johanna Sigurdardottir will be Iceland's next PM. 'She is respected and loved by all of Iceland,' said the island nation's Environment Minister.

By David Stringer / January 28, 2009

AAAREYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Iceland's next leader will be an openly gay former flight attendant who parlayed her experience as a union organizer into a decades-long political career.

Both parties forming Iceland's new coalition government support the appointment of Johanna Sigurdardottir, the island nation's 66-year-old social affairs minister, as Iceland's interim prime minister.

"Now we need a strong government that works with the people," Sigurdardottir told reporters Wednesday, adding that a new administration will likely be installed Saturday.

Sigurdardottir will lead until new elections are held, likely in May. But analysts say she's unlikely to remain in office — chiefly because her center-left Social Democratic Alliance isn't expected to rank among the major parties after the election.

In opinion polls, it trails the Left-Green movement, a junior partner in the new coalition.

Iceland's previous conservative-led government failed Monday after the country's banks collapsed last fall under the weight of huge debts amassed during years of rapid economic growth. The country's currency has since plummeted, while inflation and unemployment are soaring.

Former Prime Minister Geir Haarde won't lead his Independence Party into the new elections because he needs treatment for throat cancer.

While Haarde endured angry protests for months and had his limousine pelted with eggs, polling company Capacent Gallup said Sigurdardottir was Iceland's most popular politician in November, with an approval rating of 73 percent.

She was the only minister to see her rating improve on the previous year's score, Capacent Gallup said Wednesday. The poll of 2,000 people had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.

"It's a question of trust, people believe that she actually cares about people," said Olafur Hardarson, a political scientist at the University of Iceland.
Sigurdardottir is seen by many as a salve to the bubbling tensions in Iceland. Thousands have joined anti-government protests recently. Last week, police used tear gas for the first time in about 50 years to disperse crowds.

"She is a senior parliamentarian, she is respected and loved by all of Iceland," said Environment Minister Thorunn Sveinbjarnardottir, a fellow Alliance party member.
The new leader is known for allocating generous amounts of public funding to help the disabled, the elderly and organizations tackling domestic violence.

But conservative critics say Sigurdardottir's leftist leanings and lack of business experience won't help her fix the economy. "Johanna is a very good woman — but she likes public spending, she is a tax raiser," Haarde said.

Iceland has negotiated about $10 billion in bailout loans from the International Monetary Fund and individual countries. The loans are currently being held as foreign currency reserves.

Banks that were nationalized last year are once again open and trading — but Iceland still owes millions of dollars to foreign depositors.

After acting as a labor organizer when she worked as a flight attendant for Loftleidir Airlines — now Icelandair — in the 1960s and 1970s, Sigurdardottir was elected to Iceland's parliament in 1978. She served as social affairs minister from 1987-1994 and from 2007.

"If there's anyone who can restore trust in the political system it's her," said Eyvindur Karlsson, a 27-year-old translator from Reykjavik. "People respect her because she's never been afraid of standing up to her own party. They see her as someone who isn't tainted by the economic crisis."

In 1995, Sigurdardottir quit the party and formed her own, which won four parliamentary seats in a national election. Several years later, she rejoined her old party when it merged with three other center-left groups.

While a woman has served in the largely symbolic role of president, Sigurdardottir will be Iceland's first female prime minister.

She lives with journalist Jonina Leosdottir, who became her civil partner in 2002, and has two sons from a previous marriage.

Sigurdardottir is best known for her reaction to a failed bid to lead her party in 1994. "My time will come," she predicted in her concession speech.

[Associated Press Writer Valur Gunnarsson contributed to this report.]

Source / AP / AOL News

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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Homophobia : The Great Unifier

Button: Rainbow Youth Niagra.
'That complete strangers could be so unequivocally united in their homophobia was a chilling reminder that hatred of queers is not quarantined to one community.'
By Luna M. Yasui

On Nov. 5, I awoke to the uncomfortable realization that more Californians had voted to protect the living conditions of chickens than to preserve my civil rights. Chickens deserve a good life; they bring exquisite joy when fried up and served with a side of biscuits. I may not be as delicious, but why hate?

My bittersweet post-Election Day was foreshadowed by this street corner exchange near my polling site: on Election Day, I joined a few young queer women of color in handing out No on 8 flyers at my polling place. (Yes, I was a safe, non-electioneering 100 feet from the polls.) A construction crew of men approached two of the women and informed them that in order to protect their children, they had voted yes on 8. The posse of men then sat on a stoop to enjoy their sandwiches and entertained themselves by tossing homophobic slurs our way. Soon after, we were brushed back from the curb by a roaring SUV, full of venomous, epithet-screaming young men. The construction crew joined the jeering. Men of color in worn work boots and doo-rags echoed the hate spewed by the SUV-riding white men in baseball caps and polo shirts. Homophobia the great unifier, bridges fashion and racial divides.

It was just one incident, but my hopes died somewhere in that convergence of vitriol. That complete strangers could be so unequivocally united in their homophobia was a chilling reminder that hatred of queers is not quarantined to one community.

Yet, that was not the post-Election Day message, for every failed campaign must find a scapegoat. I wanted to revel in the promise of a New Day full of Hope and Change, but instead was confronted with the tired old Blame Black People mantra. "Seventy percent of African Americans voted Yes on 8!" went the indignant assertions by the liberal and not so liberal media. Culled from one exit poll of 2,240 voters, this "finding" was based on the responses of a mere 224 African American voters. Some 224 people speak for the entire African American electorate in California? The poll only included 90 African American men — too few to produce any statistics.

For the sake of argument, let's accept this 7 out of 10 statistic. According to the U.S. Census, African Americans are 6.7 percent of the entire California electorate — that's 2.3 million people. White people comprise 43 percent, or 22 million people. Our "venerable" exit poll says white people were evenly split on 8, which means about 11 million white people voted Yes on 8. Simple arithmetic reveals... whoa... way more white people voted Yes on 8. Wait... that's almost five times the entire black electorate.

If we want to play the blame game with this exit poll, the groups to blame for the passage of Proposition 8 are white Republicans (82 percent for Prop. 8) and voters of all races who attend church on a weekly basis (84 percent for Prop. 8).

I've also heard a few Asian Americans attempting to claim Moral Model Minority status based on our purported majority opposition to Proposition 8. To them, a few words of caution: always be wary of polls that lump all Asian Americans together. Some 134 "Asians" polled represent the ever-mythical unified Asian America? As the most ethnically and linguistically diverse racial group in the United States, we are rarely, if ever, one blended happy South Asian-Filipino-Chinese-Japanese-Tongan-Samoan-Vietnamese-American family. Talk to your parents, aunts, uncles or born-again cousin about queerness lately? Catch the hundreds of Yes on 8 Chinese Christians rallying in Portsmouth Square Park? There's a lot of in-house work to do.

Every community has its homophobes — even in San Francisco 24 percent of the voters approved of Prop. 8. That's right, 1 in 4 residents of the purported "Gay Mecca" voted to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

A majority of California voters decided to write discrimination into the state constitution. If questionable exit polls tell us anything, it is that homophobia is everywhere. It is not confined to a single race, religion or county. So let's quit the blame game and start confronting the hate and homophobia embedded in each of our lives. Then, maybe next time California votes on my rights, I'll fare as well as the chickens.

[For more than a decade, Luna Yasui has worked as an attorney and organizer on behalf of low-wage immigrant workers, communities of color, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The views expressed in the preceding commentary are not necessarily those of the Nichi Bei Times. The Nichi Bei Times is a Japanese American news weekly.]

Source / Nichi Bei Times / Posted Nov. 13, 2008

Thanks to Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog

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Del Martin, Eloquent Voice of Gay and Lesbian Movement, Dead at 87

Del Martin, left, places a ring on her partner Phyllis Lyon during their June wedding ceremony officiated by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP.
'As a journalist, author and organizer, Martin helped shape the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movements'
By Joe Rodriguez / August 27, 2008

Del Martin, a strident and eloquent voice in the early gay and lesbian civil rights movement in America, died Wednesday in San Francisco not long after enjoying perhaps the hardest-won prize of her lifelong cause — legal marriage to Phyllis Lyon, her longtime partner. Martin was 87.

As a journalist, author and organizer, Martin helped shape the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movements by coming out early and crafting her arguments for equal rights and common decency with intelligence and a firm grounding in civil rights law. Her writings and activism inspired the generation of lesbian activists now at the forefront of the movement — women like Gloria Nieto of San Jose.

"None of this would have been possible without Del and Phyllis,'' Nieto said from the Billy De Frank Center in San Jose, a gay and lesbian social center. As De Frank's political director, Nieto is trying to head off Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that threatens to outlaw gay marriage in California. "Every time I run into a rough patch, I keep telling myself I'm doing this for Phyllis and Del.''

Nieto said she was a politically tentative, nervous young lesbian in college before reading "Lesbian/Woman,'' a book written in 1972 by Martin and Lyon.

"It was a profound impact on me to be in college and that book told me I wasn't the only one, we weren't the only ones, that you could be lesbian and enjoy life, be yourself and have basic rights just as everyone else.''

Nieto met regularly with Martin and Lyon when she was director of a health center named after the couple. Unable to afford a honeymoon, Nieto and her fiancee recently arranged a kind of "honeymoon" consisting of bringing sandwiches to the Martin-Lyon household and simply spending time at the feet of their role models.

"They graciously agreed and invited us into their home,'' Nieto said. "Now it's not going to happen. This is hitting me really hard.''

Dorothy L. Taliaferro, or "Del," was born in San Francisco on May 5, 1921. Showing a sharp mind and an early academic bent, she was salutatorian of the first graduating class of George Washington High School and went on to study journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and San Francisco State University. At 19 she married James Martin. The couple had a daughter, Kendra, before their divorce.

Martin met Lyon in Seattle in 1950 when they worked for the same publishing company. Three years later, on Valentine's Day, they moved in together in San Francisco in the small house they would share for life.

In one of the formative acts in their movement, the lesbian couple and six other women in 1955 founded the Daughters of Bilitis, a social support group named after a 19th-century French book of lesbian poetry.

One of its founders was Clara Brock of Santa Clara, who at 81 fondly remembers the Bilitis meetings that Martin and Lyon hosted in their house.

"How they put all of us in that little house was a miracle,'' Brock said with a laugh. "There was a lot of planning going on about strategy, but there was a lot of friendliness, too. The group started mostly as a social one, then it evolved into more of an activist group.''

Brock said Martin was the quiet one in the couple, preferring to let Lyon talk away. Martin was the one to chime in now and then with dry, witty comments or jokes in light moments or with well-developed opinions during strategy sessions.

In 1956 Brock mimeographed and helped distribute the group's monthly newsletter, the Ladder, written and edited mostly by Martin and Lyon. According to Nieto, though the newsletter forcefully advocated an end to discrimination against homosexual men and women, it was wrapped in brown paper and omitted the return address. That changed, Nieto said, with the arrival in San Francisco of Harvey Milk.

"He was a hippie and out in the open,'' Nieto said, "who believed the answer for the gay community was in visibility, not hiding in the corners anymore. He had a profound impact on Del and Daughters of Bilitis.''

The anonymous brown wrapping came off the humble newsletter and by 1970 it had become a magazine with thousands of readers worldwide. Martin's many contributions included essays, editorials, short stories and snappy missives.

In one of her most well-read, "If That's All There Is,'' published in 1970, she tore into the sexism she believed relegated lesbians to lower standing and power in the fledgling gay rights movement.

In addition to her work with the Bilitis group, Martin lobbied San Francisco City Hall to end police harassment and to decriminalize homosexual behavior.

She was a co-founder or early member of several local and national feminist or gay rights groups, including the National Organization for Women and the Bay Area Women's Coalition.

Wiggsy Sivertsen, a stalwart in gay activism locally and a student counselor at San Jose State University, was only a teenager when Martin co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis.

"It was very scary in 1955,'' Sivertsen remembered. "The police were actively finding ways to harass the community. There was no hugging, no holding hands in public, nothing at work that said you were gay or lesbian. Martin had a profound impact for all of us.''

Martin and Lyon were the first couple in line to be "remarried" in San Francisco earlier this year when the California Supreme Court declared marriage for same-sex couples a fundamental right. The couple had become lead plaintiffs in the case after their first marriage, along with thousands of others recognized legally by Mayor Gavin Newsom, was nullified by a lower court.

Source / Mercury News

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