Addison and Cynthia, former slaves of William Rankin, and their descendants, Tennessee ca. 1890
Here, from the splendid blog Letters of Note, is a gem that reveals as much about the moral resistance to American slavery as anything I’ve ever read. And for irony, it’s as good as Johnson’s riposte to Chesterfield. (Thanks to my Kenyan colleague Kenne Mwikya for pointing it out.)
Read the whole thing. But here’s the situation, and a few sentences from the beginning and the end. In the autumn of 1865, a Colonel Anderson of Tennessee, formerly of the Confederacy, wrote to his former slave, Jourdan Anderson, asking that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdan, freed by the U.S. conquest of the state, had moved to Ohio and found a job. He dictated his answer. In part:
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. … I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance. ….
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
For those interested in the issue of reparations, he also asked for back pay:
At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.
In today’s money, that would be a bit under $200,000.
Video of a Bahrain Defence Forces unit on the Budaiya Highway near al-Qadam, March 16, 2011. Visible are an M113 in front, with three others behind it on the ground and on the flyover, a Humvee, and a tank, possibly an M60. All are likely there thanks to US arms sales. Bahiya al-Aradi, a Bahraini woman, and Stephen Abraham, an Indian guest worker, were murdered nearby the same day, probably by the same forces.
A couple of good pieces in Salon yesterday bear on the street cred the Obama administration has been getting for its embrace of LGBT people’s human rights. Kudos to Barack and Hillary again. Just remember: other people are getting killed.
Justin Elliott notes that the Obama administration has been delivering arms to Bahrain, despite the royal regime’s penchant for killing protesters. For some time, the administration has had a $53 million arms package for Bahrain on the table, but has put it off due to Congressional qualms and human rights groups’ opposition. But this is a different package. Obama is so eager to get hardware to the killers that he’ll exploit any technicality to permit it. Foreign Policyexplains:
The State Department has not released details of the new sale, and Congress has not been notified through the regular process …The State Department simply briefed a few congressional offices and is going ahead with the new sale, arguing it didn’t meet the threshold that would require more formal notifications and a public explanation. …
Our congressional sources said that State is using a legal loophole to avoid formally notifying Congress and the public about the new arms sale. The administration can sell anything to anyone without formal notification if the sale is under $1 million. If the total package is over $1 million, State can treat each item as an individual sale, creating multiple sales of less than $1 million and avoiding the burden of notification …
We’re further told that State is keeping the exact items in the sale secret, but is claiming they are for Bahrain’s “external defense” and therefore couldn’t be used against protesters. Of course, that’s the same argument that State made about the first arms package, which was undercut by videosshowing the Bahraini military using Humvees to suppress civilian protesters.
It’s not just Bahrainis. Glenn Greenwald observes that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has reaffirmed, with no public scandal attending him, that Obama can kill any US citizen he likes without a trial. In other words, what happened to Anwar al-Awlaki, US passport-holder killed by a drone in Yemen, could happen to you.
President Obama’s hit list of those he approves for assassination is completely secret; we only learned that Awlaki was being targeted because someone happened to leak that fact to Dana Priest. The way the process normally works, as Reuters described it, is that targeted Americans are selected “by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions”; moreover, “there is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel” nor “any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.” …
Panetta’s whole case rests on simply asserting, without proving, that Awlaki was a Terrorist trying to “kill Americans.” That, of course, is precisely what is in dispute: actual Yemen experts have long questioned whether Awlaki had any operational role at all in Al Qaeda (as opposed to a role as its advocate, which is clearly protected free speech). No evidence has been publicly presented that Awlaki had any such role. We simply have the untested, unverified accusations of government officials, such as Leon Panetta, that he is guilty: in other words, we have nothing but decrees of guilt.
The whole interview with Panetta is here:
Obama loves his drones. As the Washington Post summarized, in an extensive report on the program last month,
In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.
George Monbiot in the Guardian elaborates on the consequences:
It may be true, as the US air force says, that because a drone can circle and study a target for hours before it strikes, its missiles are less likely to kill civilians than those launched from a piloted plane. (The air force has yet to explain how it reconciles this with its boast that drones “greatly shorten decision time”.) But it must also be true that the easier and less risky a deployment is, the more likely it is to happen.
In other words: it might be the case that a drone kills fewer civilians than targeted bombings by humans. But we’ll use the drones even more than bombers, as Obama does, because they don’t put any humans on our side at risk. Hence more civilians will end up dead anyhow.
Protest against drone attacks, North Waziristan, Pakistan, January 2011
There is always something absurd, however murderous, about technology taking over the supremely personal job of exterminating persons. Death is the one inalienably human thing about each of us, the one thing we cannot trade or give away. The more killing is alienated from human beings and handed over to machines, the less our own deaths seem our own property, somehow. What machine, in what hospital or killing field, will take responsibility for the last act? But for sheer and sick absurdity, I don’t think you could go farther than the New York Times op-ed this morning, “Drones for Human Rights,” by the “co-founders of the Genocide Intervention Network.” They note that “Drones are not just for firing missiles in Pakistan” anymore: “In Iraq, the State Department is using them to watch for threats to Americans.” Hooray! “It’s time we used the revolution in military affairs to serve human rights advocacy. With drones, we could take clear pictures and videos of human rights abuses, and we could start with Syria.”
There’s hardly a sentence here I cannot quote with morbid delight. ”Drones are increasingly small, affordable and available to nonmilitary buyers. For hundreds of thousands of dollars — no longer many millions — a surveillance drone could be flying over protests and clashes in Syria. … It isn’t the kind of thing nongovernmental organizations usually do. But … We have a duty, recognized internationally, to monitor governments that massacre their own people in large numbers. Human rights organizations have always done this. Why not get drones to assist the good work?”
“Graphic and detailed evidence of crimes against humanity does not guarantee a just response, but it helps,” they conclude. “If human rights organizations can spy on evil, they should.”
Drone in flight: Tremble, puny evildoers
I suppose no one will get far by arguing that evil has a right to privacy, or even a “right to be forgotten.” But what about the ordinary person who finds her life monitored and recorded by sleek rockets overhead, in the name of “spying on evil?” After all, the evil will come intermixed with a lot of snippets of normal life, and even normal peccadilloes, all for the human back somewhere at the end of the monitoring chain to sort into the appropriate categories. And does anyone really think the drones will stop at “monitoring” evil? Won’t the pressure be enormous for somebody — if not the human rights groups themselves, then some friendly government — to use a drone to strike down the evildoer instantly with a virtuous lightning bolt, without the bother of a trial? After all, these guys’ group is called the “Genocide Intervention Network,” not the “Genocide Observation Network.”
Indeed, why wait for the evil to be done? If you can predict someone is going to commit atrocities, by recording their conversations, or watching who they meet with, or Googling their blogs for “genocide,” why not act pre-emptively? (Oh, my God, how can I keep Google from registering this post? Now I will look up every time I step outdoors.) After all, that’s what the Obama administration says it’s doing: Didn’t al-Awlaki die, ostensibly, to save others from dying? And you do have to wonder. Human rights activists tout their endorsement of due process; but in secret, all too many long to become due process, expropriating the roles of police, prosecutor, judge and jury. ”Granted the chance,” as George Monbiot says, “to fulfil one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance” — granted the chance, how many of ourunco guid, our insistently righteous, could keep on saying no?
Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words
The Cynthia Nixon scandal roils on. I’ve stopped keeping count of who’s blaming her for what these days; the last I heard, she was responsible for kids being electroshocked in Tennessee. Loose lips sink ships; but it seems that Cynthia’s, like a Helen of Troy in reverse, have torpedoed a thousand of them. It all reminds me a bit of G.W. Bush’s press secretary, in the chilly first days of our War of Terror, warning critics that “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.” I am not sure that Guantanamo has a cage or two for loquacious actors, but I gather some folks wish it did.
In discussing the affair, Andrew Sullivan graciously linked to my own post, and the question of what would happen if we treated sexual orientation like religion, “a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it.” He added:
Of course, I don’t actually experience my faith as a choice, in the usual sense of the word. It feels as deep a part of me as my orientation.
Those two sentences rang true, and they pointed me to a basic question. What do we mean by “choice,” anyway? There are certain cultural horizons that define people as much as any biological ones do. And thinking about these things can make the concept of “choice” seem inadequate as a way of grasping how human beings act, decide, and are.
It’s inadequate, at least, if taken in the way we moderns tend to treat it, as a pure act of untrammeled freedom, occurring on an abstract plane vacated of constraints or pasts. Andrew has stuck with being a Catholic despite the Church’s best efforts to make people like him pariahs. Is that courage, or acceptance? I would bet at some point he has expressed this as “I choose to be a Catholic because” … But I would also bet he has expressed it as “I can’t imagine not being a Catholic because…” Both seem to me equally valid ways of saying much the same thing – equally true pictures of the same situation, only seen from different aspects, like the blind men groping the elephant. We don’t always choose by making pure, existential leaps in the dark, like Kierkegaard or Lord Jim. Sometimes our freedom consists in staying rather than in going, though to stay means embracing the conditions that formed us and limit us. Sometimes we choose by being, not deciding.
For myself, though I am certainly not a practicing Christian, though I was not raised in an especially devout family, and though I believe virtually nothing of Christian dogma, when I’m asked about my religion I almost always describe myself as Christian – because certain aspects of a religion that in other ways I loathe form my horizon still. The myths of resurrection and redemption are deeply if inarticulately ingrained in me, frames of hope and mercy through which I understand the world. (I have tried telling people I’m an “agnostic Christian,” but it nearly always makes everybody terribly mad.) I confess to a mild, instinctive mistrust of people who convert from one whole religious tradition to another: Muslims who become Christian, or Christians who become Hindus, switches like that. (I make something of an exception for Buddhism, since it is less a religion than a philosophical stance.) At some gut level I feel you can lose your religion and become an atheist, but you can’t just take on a completely different tradition, with all its weight and taboos and cultural baggage. Such converts appear to me at times like followers of Gilbert Osmond, the cold-blooded collector of culture in James’ Portrait of a Lady, who said that if you happen to find yourself one day without a tradition, it’s incumbent on you to purchase a new one as rapidly as possible. But that won’t work! I feel like shouting. You can scrap your original one, but that doesn’t mean the new one you try to own will own you.
Objectively, I realize this is completely silly. To change your beliefs in one compartment of your life doesn’t make you a luftmensch (a person of the air, as the Nazis called the supposedly rootless Jews). Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with being a luftmensch. Air is healthy. My point is that I feel a weight, a drag, of resistance to the idea that choice is unconditioned, and I feel it in areas completely apart from the putatively destined, determined realms of sexuality or desire. There’s not some simple antinomy where genes decide a part of who we are, and all the rest is up for grabs. Everybody has their arenas where they feel freer, and others where they feel fixed. Our histories decide them, not just some biological allotment.
Another instance: I know I am and will always remain a middle-class American. Being rich or being poor, moving to another country, even changing my passport wouldn’t alter that. Wherever I’ve lived outside the US borders, I’ve always eschewed the American expatriate scene. You don’t go abroad in order to make new American friends. But from time to time, every couple of months or so, I found I needed to talk to my fellow countrypeople. Not to share political chat, or explore our economic interests, or voice some gross contempt for the locals: But because there was a subtler if more trivial common horizon of pop culture, of gestures comprehended and jokes understood, of TV commercials we watched when we were kids. I needed that to remind me of who I was. Living in Romania, I might have a lover who was Romanian, and we might understand each other better than anybody else in the world did. But he still didn’t know why the silly rabbit could never eat Trix. Sometimes I needed to talk to people who knew that Trix was for kids.
It’s strange I should feel this about religion or nationality, by objective standards fairly contingent things, when I firmly believe we can change our genders. But gender, when it’s assigned to us at birth, isn’t given us with a history. As we grow up, it takes on all kind of symbolic meanings, but doesn’t necessarily acquire a past. Being a “man” doesn’t require associating yourself with the whole history of manhood (some model figures, yes, but manhood itself doesn’t have a story). It’s forward-looking. You will become a man, fathers tell their sons, you will grow into manhood. Gender is a project, a perpetual becoming. It’s easier to abandon a future than a past. By contrast, faith and class are part not just of our personal histories, but of the immensely longer history behind us. Some people can liberate themselves from that history to greater or less degrees; some don’t want to. But whether any one area of your life has been thus liberated as against another is, perhaps, a morally neutral question. What Kant called the project of autonomy, the task of ridding yourself of the vast weight of the given, is necessarily partial. No one can ever denude herself altogether. Recognizing that you can never place all your life under the dominion of choice, you must choose where you will strive to exercise your choices.
Our language around “choice,” and “freedom,” is terribly impoverished. By “ours” I mean “us Americans”: but also parts of the LGBT movement in many places around the world, which have got their vocabulary and a fragment of their worldview from an American definition. This is one consequence of being from a place where choice is so valorized, so elevated as the sole intent of life, that no one bothers to define or interrogate what it means. We either imagine that choice is completely free, untrammeled, taking place in a vacuum –or that we’re completely constrained, controlled, defined, overdetermined creatures of an implacable destiny. It’s obvious, and yet hard to articulate, that neither is true. It’s telling that one side in the most extended U.S. political battle of the last forty years couches its advocacy in terms of the “right to choose.” It’s never the right to choose something – to have an abortion or not, to carry a child to term or not. All that’s elided, as though “choice” summed up that and everything else that could be said. Certainly, this rhetoric was field-tested for palatability and persuasiveness, and I cringe to cavil at it. Equally certainly, controlling reproduction opens up for women a whole repertory of other choices that would otherwise be closed. But insistently reiterating a right to unlimited choice must turn many a listener’s mind to all the things she never had a choice over: the hand-me-down clothes in childhood, the crappy carpet that came with the house, the job, the husband. And with that comes resentment, a feeling such choice is less a right than an invidious privilege. Has this whole strategy worked out the way we planned?
The truth is that we choose; and we choose from a repertory that our pasts have given us; and we choose as beings who are already endowed with histories behind us, not sprung fresh and new from Jupiter’s head or the half-shell. We bring our lives to our choices. What would they be worth otherwise?
Being in love is a bit like what I’m talking about. There has to be an element of free will in it, otherwise nobody would want your love. To be sure, nobody in love feels entirely free. Nobody deludes themselves they’re in full command of their feelings. Yet who would wish to be presented with an attachment that’s just a bundle of involuntary drives? Who would like to be told, “Honey, my hormones selected you,” even if they get a bouquet of roses into the bargain? From one side it’s an unstoppable passion, but that’s not the only aspect. The side from which we can say we chose the loved one represents our respect, not just for them as deserving objects of desire, but for ourselves as reasonable beings who deserve to be desired back. And yet, of course, it’s a determined choice. And of course, love opens up a Pandora’s jewelry box of further choices everyday: To stay or to go, to accommodate or argue, to speak or be silent, to share or not to share. In our intimacies where we struggle most to be ourselves, choice and compulsion are inextricably intertwined.
Nixon in "Wit": The bald truth
Maybe we in the United States need a bit more Edmund Burke, to ground our sense of freedom in a context. Burke understood that when we vote our ancestors vote with us: that we are inheritors of history, not just its inhabitants and masters. But that knowledge is not just a property of the Right. Marx too grasped that our consciousness is conditioned, that history makes us before we can make it.
Nor do philosophers map the only road to realizing this. A poet or two has been there first. These days Cynthia Nixon is reading John Donne on Broadway (the New York Times, which exposed her heresy on “choice,” gave her a glorious review to make up for it). Perhaps, in her private moments when the audience is gone, she also whispers to herself some lines from Auden:
Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice
Again and again we sigh for an ancient South,
For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise,
For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth. …
We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,
And never will be perfect like the fountains;
We live in freedom by necessity,
A mountain people dwelling among mountains.
At the opening of an African Union (AU) summit this morning, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told assembled leaders to respect LGBT people’s human rights. The AFP says:
“One form of discrimination ignored or even sanctioned by many states for too long has been discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” Ban said.
“It prompted governments to treat people as second class citizens or even criminals,” he added. …
“Confronting these discriminations is a challenge, but we must not give up on the ideas of the universal declaration” of human rights, Ban told the summit.
Ban has shown more nerve over the years than I’d have thought possible at the beginning. Good for him.
(Un?)freedom tower: The HQ project
All this took place amid the inauguration of the African Union’s posh new headquarters in Addis Ababa — and that blingy building suggests why neither Ban’s admonitions, nor David Cameron’s threats, nor all the pious efforts of those who want to squeeze humanitarian aid in the name of human rights, may in the end amount to much. The elaborate complex, a glossy imitation of the UN building towering over one of Africa’s poorest cities, cost between $120 million and $200 million (US), and was entirely constructed by China. China Daily quotes ”Zeng Huacheng, a special councilor to the AU headquarters project from China’s Ministry of Commerce”:
“The accessible height of the main office building is 99.9 meters, in reference to the founding date of the AU and the rise of the continent,” Zeng said. “The panoramic view of the conference center is like two hands holding each other, signifying the strengthening friendship between China and Africa.”
In the thin air of Ethiopia’s low-slung, mostly ramshackle capital, a glittering tower complex is erupting from a warren of corrugated tin roof shacks that many locals call home. …
Though the CSCEC [China State Construction Engineering Corporation] describes its efforts there as “aiding” the African Union, make no mistake, it is building the facility wholesale. Stern-faced Chinese foreman command ever-smiling Ethiopian laborers who are working round the clock to finish the project at breakneck speed for its planned January 2012 inauguration. …
In anticipation of a hoped-for visit to Addis Ababa by President Hu Jintao for the new AU’s debut, [a Gabonese Diplomat] stated: “We cannot thank China and it’s leaders enough for it …”
As China scours the continent for resources virtually unchallenged, this “gift” to the people of Africa will certainly come with strings attached. In a recent meeting with a high-ranking CSCEC official, Erastus Mwencha, a seasoned Kenyan diplomat who holds the deputy chair of the African Union Commission that oversees the project, hailed it in a recent press statement as a “permanent signature on African soil”.
When Asia Times Online visited the present AU headquarters hugging hilly Roosevelt Street, a representative of its Conflict Management Division lamented the depth of Chinese involvement both in Ethiopia and across the entire region. Africa’s sudden anti-democratic partner is engaged in a slew of road rehabilitation and construction endeavors in many parts of the country.
We are unbuilding socialism: The complex under construction
As I’ve pointed out here, Chinese aid for Africa — of which the new HQ is merely the biggest symbol — comes with few political conditions, certainly not rights-related ones. What accompanies it are economic expectations: that the continent will provide endless, cheap raw materials for China’s boom, as well as new markets for Chinese exports. That’s no good news for ordinary Africans, who’ll find their economies shunted every more firmly into a neocolonial niche of underdevelopment. But the elites who control the African Union’s governments will turn a profit.
As if in an emblem of this relationship, there weren’t even many African raw materials inserted into the building: Save them for export to Beijing! ”Even the furnishings were imported from China and paid for by the Chinese government,” a Ugandan blogger says sourly. China Daily puts the best face on this:
To ensure construction quality, only the best materials were used and furniture was specifically designed and ordered.
“Details such as the height of a table and the color of a carpet were all discussed with representatives from the AU,” Zeng said.
The lack of political conditions doesn’t mean, though, that Africa’s integration into the Chinese co-unprosperity sphere comes without political consequences. That Ugandan blogger’s comments suggest how neocolonial dependency fosters both patriarchal power structures and cultural protectionism:
Where is the pride in us as Africans having this luxurious new home? Where I come from, and I believe many African men come from similar backgrounds, you are not considered a real man unless you have built your own house which you will call your home. Its only then that you can marry your wife and its only then that you are respected by everyone in the village. …
Yes, indeed, it’s a reflection of a new Africa … An Africa without a culture, without a moral campus, an Africa without any pride, an Africa that can’t build their own home, an Africa that thrives on begging for food, for money and now for a home. An Africa that is shameful and disgraceful. An Africa that is empty and without a future, an Africa that is everyday selling its soul to powers foreign …
So congratulations to Ban Ki-Moon for speaking out. A glance at the balance sheets, however, shows there’s a long way to go.
Nigeria has seen the first successful blow struck against neoliberalism in the New Year. After a week of massive nationwide protests met the removal of a key fuel subsidy for consumers, President Goodluck Jonathan backed down — a bit. He reinstated the subsidy partially. That, together with reportedly massive payoffs to union leaders, persuaded labor to cancel the strike.
Lagarde in Abuja, with President Jonathan (L) and Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (R)
The compromise was far from perfect. Dropping the subsidy initially more than doubled the price of gasoline, from (US) $0.40 to 0.88 per liter; now the price is teetering at around $0.66. The settlement outraged considerable parts of the protest coalition, including students, who remain committed to opposing neoliberal policies. There’s considerable suspicion in Nigeria that the IMF and World Bank were behind the attempt to scrap the subsidy; IMF head Christine Lagarde visited Abuja in December, allegedly to congratulate Jonathan on his “reform” and anti-corruption initiatives, but more likely to set the terms for allegedly-indigenous structural adjustment efforts. Few believe the government’s retreat means the proposal is in permanent abeyance. Still, a half-victory is a victory. Jonathan, who announced the subsidy removal in a speech declaring, “Let me seize this opportunity to assure all Nigerians that I feel the pains that you all feel,” was made to feel rather more pain than he had banked on. And even the Financial Times acknowledged that for the subsidy’s “removal to be tolerated” in future, “poverty must be alleviated in other ways.”
Attention immediately shifted to the horrific violence inflicted by the Islamist group Boko Haram on northern Nigeria, including coordinated bombings and shootings in Kano on January 20 that killed almost 200 people in one day. Zach Warner, in ThinkAfrica Press, has a fascinating analysis of the group’s rise. He admits that “Communal violence has been a constant for the last three decades, while the mobilisation of faith-based political identities has been a defining feature of Northern Nigeria for centuries.” But in recent decades, Nigeria’s central government has eviscerated traditional Islamic hierarchies and power structures in the North, thinking it was eliminating a base for separatism. At the same time, a shift from Northern-based military leadership to democratically elected governments with their roots in the South has starved the region of resource allocation. The result has been spreading poverty, particularly among the young:
Thus, by the time of … the restoration of civilian rule, centuries-old social and political hierarchies of Islamic power had been completely smashed. Olusegun Obasanjo emerged as the only viable leader of the Fourth Republic, engendering a massive power shift to the south after decades of predominantly northern military rule. Elite Muslims were sent reeling; the Sultan [of Sokoto, still the ostensible religious leader of Nigeria's Muslims] could hardly show his face throughout the region.
Amid such social confusion, young Muslim men again tried to assume their place at the helm of the north. From late 1999 to 2002, twelve states expanded Sharia (Islamic law). Reacting to what they perceived as endemic corruption and moral decay, this crop of younger politicians enunciated a wish to return to Islamic governance outside the strict confines of the emirate structures which they felt were complicit in failed governments and national decline. As John Paden wrote in 2002, the sum effect was a split in Islamic solidarity and “significant confrontations between anti-establishment groups and northern Muslim elites, which in turn, [sic] are causing these elites to reconsider how to strengthen their own politico-religious credentials”.
The resulting alienation is fertile ground for insurgencies.
John Campbell (a former US ambassador) argues that, religion aside, Boko Haram bears conspicuous similarities to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which sponsored campaigns of kidnapping and bombing that kept the country’s oil-producing areas on edge from 2006 to 2010. Both are symptoms of a disintegrating rentier state, which lives off the oil revenues it appropriates from a single region of the country, but has never tried to redistribute them evenly or fairly—either among the country’s geographic divisions, or among its social classes. The subsidy protests and the Kano bombings reveal the same rot.
The massive unrest has drawn the public’s eye away from the “Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill,” a sweeping proposal that would criminalize most aspects of lesbian and gay people’s lives. At some point soon, though, Goodluck Jonathan will have to decide whether to sign it. The recent tumult reveals the underlying motives behind the law—a classic distraction, to unify fissiparous sects and interests around a common bogeyman, and turn disputes away from raw social reality toward imaginary demons.
Seun Anikulapo-Kuti: Don't fuck with the Nation
LGBT rights activists joined the popular protests to retain the fuel subsidy. They took heart from reports that Seun Kuti (popular musician and son of afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti) shouted at a Lagos rally against the move: “When two men fuck each other, it is better than one man fucking the Nation as a whole.” It’s hard for political commentary to top that (as it were). However, I also like the remark of my friend Dorothy Aken’Ova, of the International Centre for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights, INCRESE: “Nigerians now know what is [really] evil.” One can hope.
In June 2011, 15 Arab sexual rights and human rights organizations, and more than a dozen individual activists, signed a statement condemning the website Gaymiddleeast.com for lying about itself, its origins, and its politics. It’s unusual to see so many groups and activists getting together on anything in a fractured region, so this unanimity was something of an event. It’s been six months since the statement, which “Gay Middle East” never answered. But the website has started creeping back to life. It’s time, I think, to remind ourselves exactly what its lies were, and why they were and are so dangerous.
This statement wasn’t the first time the activists had to tried to ask “Gay Middle East” to clarify basic facts, including where it was founded and based. The website’s editor, Dan Littauer, earlier responded to criticisms (in a press release written for him by British activist Peter Tatchell) simply by dismissing the questions as “smears.” “Gay Middle East” had denied that it had any links to Israel. The activists responded that GME “presents lies so blatant that a simple Google search is enough uncover the truth.” And they offered the evidence and the truth they had uncovered.
In summary, they found:
GME’s claim that it was “not owned or run by an Israeli” was completely untrue: the site had been founded in Israel, registered to an Israeli, and owned by an Israeli.
As late as 2009, in fact, it was still registered to an Israeli address.
Littauer, its “executive editor,” who when confronted in 2011 claimed he was “a German citizen (with only a German passport),” had in fact repeatedly identified himself as an Israeli in the past.
You can read their research in detail in their statement. What a lot of people outside the region don’t quite grasp, though, is exactly why this is so important.
The activist statement raises a range of political issues. Those involve, at a basic level, Arab queers’ and Arab activists’ need to reclaim their own voices, rather than submitting to the ventriloquism of others — others who may or may not share their values, may or may not sympathize with their work, but should not in either case be arrogating the right to interpret their struggles to the world. I’m not going to recapitulate all their concerns here, although I agree with many: they’re already laid out articulately and clearly. I’m going to address the one that resonates most with me: safety, the safety of activists and ordinary queers. Littauer and “Gay Middle East” have been putting people across the region who work with them in danger.
To be clear: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Israelis working on LGBT issues elsewhere in the Middle East. Plenty of Israeli researchers have produced important academic information on the region. (Among things I’ve read in recent years, Ze’ev Maghen’s work on the concept of purity in Islamic jurisprudence struck me as important, despite the fact that I can’t stand most of what I gather are his politics; and Ofra Bengio‘s study of Ba’ath Party rhetoric, Saddam’s Word, seems to me much better than Kanan Makiya.) But they didn’t do it by denying being Israelis.
Even in Egypt, formally at peace with its neighbor for three decades, Israel remains an enemy in both the state’s rhetoric and the population’s opinions. Giving sensitive information — and human rights information is clearly “sensitive” to any government — to an Israeli-based group or an Israeli citizen would easily be seen as practicing espionage, almost anywhere in the region.
The khawal as traitor: From state media, 2001
This isn’t a light or abstract threat. It is particularly dangerous for members of groups that are already despised. When the lead defendant in Egypt’s famous Queen Boat case was put on trial, prosecutors claimed he had learned all about homosexuality in Israel. The press carried, and people believed, ludicrously doctored photos of him sitting before an Israeli flag, wearing an Israeli army helmet. In 2007, a Cairo court sentenced Mohammed al-Attar to fifteen years, for recruiting gay Arabs in Canada to spy for Israel. Prosecutors alleged he was “a gay Zionist, who turned his back on Islam and worked to undermine the security of his homeland.” He later said that police electroshocked him to extract a confession, and forced him to drink his own urine. There are plenty of other stories.
Israel is proud of its espionage, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Not only has it long kept up spy networks around and beyond the Middle East, it publicizes the fact just enough to keep governments off-balance. Objectively, in the Great Game, this is sensible. It’d be dumb to do otherwise. The prevalence of espionage makes a general paranoia on its neighbors’ parts perhaps excusable. Targeting gays is not excusable. But when the general rhetoric already sees them as subject to outside influence, treating them as traitors is simply a next step.
If “Gay Middle East” is hiding its real origins, it’s putting the people in Arab countries who choose to work with it and give it information at grave risk. Does it want to keep them at risk of arrest and torture? Does it simply not care? Its duplicity shows contempt for their safety and well-being. It owes them honest answers, which it so far has refused to give.
Networking: Michael Lucas pictures Israel
Many odd things about GME were already on the public record before the Arab activists’ statement. Ben Doherty used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to survey content produced by GME from 2003 through 2008. He found it started as a tourism site for non-Middle Easterners, with a seeming emphasis on sex tourism:
Some of the people currently or previously associated with the site – namely Dan Littauer, Avi Ozeri, and Scott Piro [the latter two also Israelis], –have a background in the tourism industry and public relations, and until 2009, GME tried to be a tourism resource. Before 2009, their site had a section about tourism to Arab countries with cruising tips. The site offered up coming out stories that were both implausible and prurient. They noted sodomy law and age of consent information for each country.
Beyond this, there was Littauer’s obvious political bias against reporting negative information about Israel; his refusal to talk to some of the most respected activists in the region; and his odd association with Tatchell in the UK, a figure known for his Islamophobia.
A key moment came in April 2011, when “Gay Middle East” boasted of how Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office had invited Littauer to contribute information on LGBT issues in the region, for its regular human rights reports. Littauer was setting himself up to speak for Arab LGBT activism –without speaking to the activists. He seemed indifferent to their opinions on whether, or what, they wanted to contribute to the rights representations of an former imperial (and currently invading) power. The activists’ statement observes:
GBT organizations and activists in the Arab region have always approached requesting foreign intervention very carefully, and it has been the topic of much debate both within activist communities and between them and international organizations that have come to understand the complexities involved and possible backlash that such action would entail.
Meanwhile, GayMiddleEast.com seems to have an open door with the UK Foreign Office and do not think twice about asking them to intervene at any given opportunity. These issues were raised with GayMiddleEast.com by several people, but they refused to engage.
When I visited the region in June 2011, several people voiced increasing fear of “Gay Middle East.” Some were afraid of being blackmailed: Littauer had extracted information about their groups or movements, including names of activists working undercover. They were uncertain how he would use the information, or where it might go. As these issues were raised with GME, its answer was to turn to Tatchell; the response Tatchell wrote for Littauer’s website contains his signature move of interpreting any criticism as a “smear.” As the activists’ statement says,
GayMiddleEast.com’s disingenuous response to what it sees as a “smear campaign” against it …. obfuscates the legitimate reasons many queer Arab activists take issue with its work.
“We invite Gay Middle East to respond,” the activists wrote. An answer never came. Neither Tatchell nor “Gay Middle East” have ever understood that there are criticisms that demand response and dialogue, not just “smears” that deserve dismissal and rejection. That inability to answer, to be accountable, to speak to rather than for, leaves them in the end without any credible claim to being activists: just self-promoters, gardeners of their reputations, driven by the passion for publicity.
So six months later, the question still stands: Has “Gay Middle East” got anything to say for itself?
Littauer, at least, has been busily tweeting about those who “smeared” him. His tweets reveal a bit more about GME’s vision. He recently wrote that my old colleague Rasha Moumneh, of Human Rights Watch, is “well known for her loony left militancy – she has a good mentor one shamed ex-HRW…”
The last bit of gibberish I think may refer to me; and, as a Virginia boy, I didn’t know that the German-British-Israeli Littauer, so presumptuously protean, also spoke Southern. But to adopt his demotic Alabaman, I’d just note that I’m ‘shamed, deeply ‘shamed, to be thought Moumneh’s mentor. I’m still young enough to be learning from other people, not mentoring them.
The more interesting point, though, is what Littauer thinks is “loony left militancy.” He’s referring to a quote Moumneh gave to an article in IPS News. It reads, in its entirety:
“Repression of Arab LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) individuals under previous regimes no doubt existed. Having a non-Islamist government is no guarantee against the persecution of individuals for sexual and gender non-conformity,” Middle East and North Africa researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) Rasha Moumneh tells IPS. ”However, the fear over what is being called an Islamist ‘takeover’ completely ignores what is actually happening on the ground. The Tunisians had free and fair elections for the first time in decades. In Egypt, the primary concern is the abhorrent behaviour of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and not the Islamists.”
Now, both these points are true. The crackdown on homosexual conduct in Egypt from 2001-2004 — when hundreds, probably thousands, were arrested, almost certainly the worst such campaign in the region in modern times — took place under a secular government, enforcing a secular law that was a product of a secular-nationalist revolution. You don’t need the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists to start a moral panic and target despised groups. All you need is a vulnerable government looking for a distraction.
SCAF, with bloody hands
On the second point: the new Tunisian government is democratically elected (which should make it less vulnerable, rather than more). If Tunisia is to become a normal democracy, its citizens and its self-appointed friends have to stop being paranoid about the passage of power. The election of a party may anger or disappoint its opponents, but it shouldn’t create fear for the system itself, any more than a Tory victory in Littauer’s adopted homeland entitles Labour to claim democratic process is collapsing. When Littauer indicates that, he’s expressing his contempt for the revolution, and his fear of democracy. Meanwhile, in Egypt, it’s the armed forces and not the Islamists who are busily violating the population’s human rights, subjecting 12,000 people to miltary trial, and shooting unarmed civilians on the streets. To pretend that they are not the most urgent threat to freedom (as well as life) is wilfully to disregard the reality.
So what defines the “loony left,” for “Gay Middle East”? They tell the truth, and they respect democracy and democratic process.
And what defines the “reasonable right,” for “Gay Middle East”? I shudder to imagine.
During the Egyptian Revolution, when the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof was wandering Midan Tahrir giving the uprising his ponderous approval, I told friends that if Mubarak wanted to get at least one pesky journalist off his back, he need only give Nick directions to Clotbey Street — the capital’s ancient red-light district — and tell him there were girls who needed saving. Such is Kristof’s passion to rescue misused and trafficked women that he would have dropped everything to head there. And given that Nick permits no struggle for human freedom to go on without him, the revolt would surely have been suspended, and Mubarak would still be in charge.
Kristof is back, this week, with an attack on online advertising for sex work. As always, his column starts with a moving personal story of a rescued woman, then moves without delay to assert this represents all prostitutes’ situations. His target this time are the ads in Backpage and The Village Voice; he agrees with the largely-discredited Ashton Kutcher that these are fronts for trafficking.
Melissa Giri Grant and Maggie McNeill have already gone after Kutcher’s unsurprisingly unresearched claims, so there’s no need to do so here. Kristof doesn’t even bother with evidence; he contents himself with writing, ‘While there are no reliable figures for human trafficking, the more we look, the more we find.” But his solution is invariable — raid! arrest! or in this case, censor! ban! The online venues for sale of sex must be eliminated. Also predictable is the highly case-specific Marxism, which assumes that in this one profession people who sell their labor are reduced to inert commodities, while longshoremen or auto workers or New York Times columnists go on the market but retain full consciousness. Sex ads on the Web are “a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.” It’s hard, really, to see how Kristof takes an interest in political revolutions at all, since the only sphere of life where he allows any analysis of exploitation is sex.
Never mind that Web ads are in fact a primary way for individual sex workers to seek clients without the mediation of pimps. Never mind that banning them will only drive sex workers into hierarchical, and potentially hyperexploitative, structures of employment. Another consistent feature of anti-trafficking campaigns is their indifference to their own consequences. The moral purity of the campaigners is what counts, not the welfare of the “victims.”
Raiders of the lost tart: Salvation tweets
Anthropologist Laura Agustin has been a naggingly exact critic of Kristof’s for a long time, pointing out not just his errors of fact but the sheer trivializing vulgarity of his stunts, like live-tweeting a raid on a brothel. On the same day as Kristof’s latest column, she published a piece in Counterpunch,“The Soft Side of Imperialism.” She draws the connections between the Sex Rescuers and other forms of a corrupted humanitarianism that justifies forcible interventions in the name of voiceless “victims.”
Welcome to the Rescue Industry, where characters like Kristof get a free pass to act out fun imperialist interventions masked as humanitarianism. No longer claiming openly to carry the White Man’s Burden, rescuers nonetheless embrace the spectacle of themselves rushing in to save victims, whether from famine, flood or the wrong kind of sex. …
The Rescue Industry that has grown up in the past decade around US policy on human trafficking shows how imperialism can work in softer, more palatable ways than military intervention. Relying on a belief in social evolution, development and modernization as objective truths, contemporary rescuers, like John Stuart Mill 150 years ago, consider themselves free, self-governing individuals born in the most civilized lands and therefore entitled to rule people in more backward ones. … Here begins colonialism, the day-to-day imposition of value systems from outside, the permanent maintenance of the upper hand. Here is where the Rescue Industry finds its niche; here is where Kristof ingenuously refers to “changing culture”, smugly certain that his own is superior. …
With justification firmly in place, the US Rescue Industry imposes itself on the rest of the world through policies against prostitution, on the one hand, and against trafficking, on the other. In their book Half the Sky, Kristof and co-author Sheryl WuDunn liken the emancipation of women to the abolition of slavery, but his own actions –brothel raids, a game teaching players to protect village women – reflect only paternalism.
What can I say? Read Agustin’s article. This is one of the central problems — curses — of the whole human rights field. Human Rights Watch used to proclaim itself a “voice for the voiceless”; I think it’s stopped, but the both the mentality and the language (which was used in Kristof’s citation for a Pulitzer Prize) persist in innumerable places. The truly victimized still have voices. They need to be listened to, not ventriloquized. The Rescue Industry only reveals the inflation of ego and the ignorance of history that infect the practice of human rights, at their most rhetorically weighted, their most emotionally addictive.
Despite all the pleasant words in South Africa’s progressive Constitution, black lesbians and trans men — people whose looks or demeanor push at accepted gender norms, or simply don’t fit in — face endemic violence, including the threat of rape to punish or to “fix” them. Among over thirty documented murders of lesbians since 1998, only two cases have seen convictions.
Amid this crisis, artist and activist Zanele Muholi has spent five years photographing black lesbians in an effort to affirm their identities. The resulting series is called Faces and Phases andBeulahs (queer South African slang for “beauties”). Claire Breukel writes that “her portraits
are straight-shot black and white images that make direct reference to the tradition of portraiture. … Muholi’s role is to simply and effectively afford her subjects a platform to be “seen” and furthermore be recognized in a climate that has, to date, marginalized this community and omitted documenting its existence.
A documentary film, Difficult Love, directed by Muholi and Peter Goldsmid, has also grown out of the project.
These marvellous photographs inevitably bring to mind the Images of the Week in South Africa at the moment. The youth wing of the opposition Democratic Alliance party has distributed a poster on campuses showing an unclad white man and black woman in an embrace:
The poster roused a storm of controversy in the country. South Africa’s Christian Democratic party accused it of “clearly promoting sexual immorality.” A leader of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) claimed,
“The poster says, ‘Join the DA to have an affair with a white person’ … It entrenches the white supremacy that we fought against during the liberation struggle … We will not be excited with having an affair with a white person; we will not be enticed by that.”
Comments on the DA Youth Facebook page ranged from the racist (a photo of an all-white family with the caption “Now that’s how it should be!”), to the prudish, to the patriarchal:
“Who is the head of a house? Yes, a man, and the man makes the choices and the women listens … So to some it has been offensive that the man is white and the woman is black, because it places the black nation under the head of the house, so to speak.”
Imitations have also multiplied, including a gay one, which the Democratic Alliance Youth reportedly endorsed:
South African constitutional law scholar Pierre de Vos has a fascinating analysis of the controversy here. He argues that
the thought never seems to have occurred [to critics] that the women in the poster could be in charge … and that we cannot tell from the poster whether this is so or not. They have jumped to conclusions (based on their own internalised prejudices and stereotypical assumptions about race and gender and sex) that the woman in the poster is a meek receptor of male aggression.
The poster, he contends, serves as a reminder that
race hovers not far from the surface in private or other everyday settings … In South Africa we cannot escape race. We cannot escape our own race. Even when we claim that we have escaped the perceived shackles of race, we are merely confirming its presence by our stated yearning for its absence.
Absolutely true. At the same time, it strikes me that the posters, instead of challenging the viewer directly to examine her or his stance and presumptions (as Muholi’s photographs do), play on these “internalised prejudices” in very calculated ways. In fact, the poster needs the prejudices, in order to work at all. The whole point of its saying “you wouldn’t look twice” in the DA’s ideal world, is that you do look twice now; the DA relies on your shock to grab your attention.
And part of the attention-catching is that the pictures confirm to certain old South African expectations. (The black woman, after all, is situated “under” the white man, by position and stature.) Catching people by their coat-sleeve of intolerance may be one way to promote tolerance, but it can backfire, too.
Moreover, and most interestingly, the poster shows the straight couple, in coy and conventional style, ignoring the camera’s challenging intrusion and the questions it raises, lost in their apolitical world of love. The figures don’t engage with the issues; they present themselves as innocents who just are. (In the gay version, it’s only the white partner who stares back at the viewer, acknowledging his or her interest. The black partner is raptly absorbed in the white man.) This is quite different from the faces Muholi shows: those confront the camera and the watching world beyond it with their bodies if not their gaze, realizing they have become objects in the act of being seen, and that this challenges them to control how they are seen, to change the terms.
The centrist, neoliberalish DA’s main if not sole appeal is to white and mixed-race voters. It’s long chafed under the ruling ANC’s accusation that it is a “racist political party only committed to protecting the last vestiges and policies of apartheid.” Or not chafed: its previous leader, Tony Leon, seemed happy enough to embrace the charge, indulging in racially-tinged rhetoric. (The party’s 1999 election slogan, “Fight Back,” was practically a clarion for backlash; the ANC redubbed it “Fight Black”.). The DA itself estimates it wins only 5% support among black voters in the country, who make up 80% of the electorate. It’s been trying frantically to recast its image, most notably by picking a 31 year-old black activist, Lindiwe Mazibuko, as its parliamentary leader. (The party’s overall leader, Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille — a former journalist and activist who exposed the state murder of Steven Biko — is white.)
The posters are part of the party’s rebranding campaign. You can’t help feeling, though, that they’re a distinct strategy of avoidance: deflect the question of race into a controversy over sex. They turn politics into erotics.
Bulworth: Out of the mouths of babes
Muholi’s photographs take sex (or the body, or gender) and frame it inescapably in political terms. The DA posters, by contrast, take politics and try to make it sexy. In the process they struggle to blunt its hard edges, and come up with romantic — literally — solutions to problems that remain stubbornly ones of power and of economics. They remind me, in their way, of Warren Beatty’s 1998 film Bulworth, in which a liberal senator, suddenly awakened to the crisis of race in America, turns rapper and decides that sex, if not love is the answer: all we need is to interbreed.
“All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody ’til they’re all the same color.”
Yeah. That’s really going to work.
Sex is part of the problem — whenever it’s a way that hierarchies of power are defined or maintained; when it’s a basis for violence or hate; when, as in corrective or punitive rape, it’s used to brutalize and to establish who doesn’t belong. But sex is not, in itself, the answer. Sex is always potentially political. But sex isn’t the sum of politics. To imagine that injustice can be screwed out of existence is a pathway to leaving it in place.
Zanele Muholi’s photography is featured in the Face of Our Time exhibition, on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, November 12, 2011 through February 5, 2012.
Correction: Helen Zille is no longer Mayor of Cape Town. She now serves as Premier of the Western Cape.
Many years ago, I decided never to take an interest in the sex lives of people more famous than myself. This came after hanging out with some famous people and some not so famous people, and noticing that all the excitement lay with the latter. Anal sex with one of the stars of American Gigolo, as described to me by a friend in excruciating detail, was not nearly as innovative or arousing as the mute inglorious milkings available every night in the refreshing anonymity of the rushes in the Back Bay Fens. As of now, there are something like six billion people in the world, and 5,999,999,999 of them are more famous than I am. The boost to my mental concentration that derives from ignoring all their sex lives is considerable.
Nixon, partner Rojo Caliente, and child: Perfect, but not by choice
Still, there’s Cynthia Nixon. Which one did she play on TV? I confess, I can’t even remember. Oh, Sex and the City, that hootchy-kootchy halftime show from ancient times! —when I caught five minutes of a rerun in a hotel last month, it seemed as dated as Baroque opera. But that doesn’t stop her from continuing to be a celebrity, and most people really do care about celebrities’ sex lives. And so most everybody noticed when she told the New York Times:
“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. … Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive.”
Uh-oh.
The hue and cry over what you can say about your own kind has been almost as bad as what Hannah Arendt stirred up. John Aravosis told Nixon she didn’t understand herself. First off, she’s wrong about who she is: ”What she means is that she’s bisexual, and doesn’t quite get that most people aren’t able to have sexual romantic relationships with both men and women because they’re just not into both genders.” But moreover, she doesn’t experience sexuality the way she thinks she does:
It’s not a “choice,” unless you consider my opting to date a guy with brown hair versus a guy with blonde hair a “choice.” It’s only a choice among flavors I already like … [S]o please don’t tell people that you are gay, and that gay people can “choose” their sexual orientation, i.e., will it out of nowhere. Because they can’t. And when you tell the NYT they can, you do tremendous damage to our civil rights effort. … [E]verything you say can and will be used against you by the gay-haters. And when you say things like this, using incendiary buzzwords that don’t really mean what you’re trying to say – when you try to define the rest of us by your incredibly poorly chosen, and incorrect, words – you hurt us all. This was an incredibly irresponsible interview.
Is anyone else here thinking maybe Cynthia Nixon isn’t really gay? Like maybe she’s bisexual, or gay-until-retirement, or gay-until-Ryan-Gosling-calls? … statement pissed off a lot of gay people, and not just because being gay is NOT a choice for most of them. Years of talking with gay friends over the years have taught me something important: language matters. Gay, queer, bi, whatever — people have some pretty strong opinions about what those words all mean. And Cynthia could have been more sensitive with her language.
There’s an unlovely looniness here. First of all, no one should be forced to surrender their personal identity to political obligation. That’s the antithesis of a liberal society, and has nothing to do with any campaign for human rights. Second, no one has the right to decide or define anybody else’s sexuality for them — to select, for God’s sake, what you can say about yourself. The claim that a blogger who’s never even seen Cynthia Nixon (except in her TV role as a heterosexual) can determine who she is and how she can describe herself is simply silly. But it can also be as malignant as the idea that an activist in London can intuit, and inscribe in stone, the identities of a couple of teenagers in far-off Iran, a place he’s never seen or visited. I’ve written about this kind of gay imperialism extensively. In the US, it’s simply rude and repressive. Practiced elsewhere, it can kill.
The problem is that, in the US, we — the LGBT movement — have staked all our rights claims on the analogy with race. We are a people; we have our own culture and history, even though the categories that define us (so we contend) don’t; and, most importantly, our selves, like our skin colors, cannot change. Sexual orientation is something deep, unalterable, basic. It’s because it’s unchangeable that discrimination predicated on it is so wrong. And so we’re not defending people’s freedom; we’re defending their imprisonment in themselves. The argument goes: It’s bad enough not having any autonomy over the intimate aspects of your life. Do the state and society have to punish you for that too?
It’s when people try to escape that prison, even for a day’s parole, that we treat them as traitors to the cause.
Foucault grasping sexuality
Of course, this kind of argument is absurd — even about race. It ignores the innumerable historical experiences of “passing,” the different ways that white as well as black people have been defined, the differences in race’s definition around the world — the US conception is incommensurate with the Brazilian, for instance — the fact that the Irish were treated as a “race” in the early 19th century, and many more. To say this isn’t to deny the reality of race as a basis for injustice and a predicate for social division. But to treat it as an absolute fact, an ontological canyon separating some from others, is to ignore its history. Similarly, supposing “sexual orientation” is unchangeable ignores the fact that the category itself has changed since it was invented, and that it was only invented a hundred years or so ago. Sexuality, as Foucault grasped, doesn’t reveal some “truth” about us. (Even if it did, Aravosis would hardly be in a position to diagnose Nixon’s.) It reveals our shifting place in society; it’s made of ideas, dreams, opinions, not absolutes.
Of course, Nixon made it rather worse by explaining in another interview:
I don’t pull out the “bisexual” word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals. … [W]e get no respect.
The thing is, though (and yes, I note how her own identity has shifted here), she’s right. In the politics of identity, bisexuals are hated because they stand for choice. The game is set up so as to exclude the middle; bisexuals get squeezed out. in the “LGBT” word, the “B” is silent. John Aravosis, for instance, says that if you’re into both genders, “that’s fine” — great! — but “most people” aren’t. First off, that rather defies Freud and the theory of universal infantile bisexuality. But never mind that. The business of “outing,” of which Aravosis has been an eloquent proponent, also revolves around the excluded middle. It’s not a matter of what you think of outing’s ethics, on which there’s plenty of debate. It’s that the underlying presumption is that one gay sex act makes you “gay” — not errant, not bisexual, not confused or questioning: gay, gay, gay. I saw you in that bathroom, for God’s sake! You’re named for life! It’s also that the stigma goes one way only: a lifetime of heterosexual sex acts can’t make up for that one, illicit, overpowering pleasure. As I’ve argued, this both corresponds to our own buried sense, as gays, that it is a stigma, and gives us perverse power. In the scissors, paper, rock game of sexuality, gay is a hand grenade. It beats them all.
And this fundamentalism infects other ways of thinking about sexuality, too. Salon today carries an article about multiple sex-and-love partners: “The right wants to use the ‘slippery slope’ of polyamory to discredit gay marriage. Here’s how to stop them.” I’ll leave you to study the author’s solution. He doesn’t want to disrespect the polyamorists:
I reject the tactic of distinguishing the good gays from the “bad” poly people. Further marginalizing the marginalized is just the wrong trajectory for any liberation movement to take.
That’s true — although whether we’re still really a liberation movement, when we deny the liberty of self-description, is a bit doubtful. But he goes on, contemplating how polyamory might in future be added to the roster of rights:
Really, there are a host of questions that arise in the case of polyamory to which we just don’t know the answer. Is polyamory like sexual orientation, a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being? Would a polyamorous person feel as incomplete without multiple partners as a lesbian or gay person might feel without one? How many “truly polyamorous” people are there?
Well, what if it’s not? What if you just choose to be polyamorous? God, how horrible! You beast! What can be done for the poor things? Should some researcher start looking for a gene for polyamory, so it can finally become respectable, not as a practice, but as an inescapable doom? (I shudder to think there’s one gene I might share with Newt Gingrich.)
What, moreover, if sexual orientation itself is not “a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being,” one that people miraculously started feeling in 1869, when the word “homosexual” was coined? What if it’s sometimes that, sometimes a transient desire, sometimes a segment of growth or adolescent exploration, sometimes a recourse from the isolations of middle age, sometimes a Saturday night lark, sometimes a years-long passion? What if some people really do experience it as … a choice?
What if our model for defending LGBT people’s rights were not race, but religion? What if we claimed our identities were not something impossible to change, but a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it?
Now I have damaged the LGBT rights movement. I’m sorry, but you know, I didn’t really have a choice. The Devil made me do it, as Flip Wilson used to say. We’ll see how that argument washes in defending me against my fellow activists, as well as against the missionaries of Westboro Baptist Church — who surely must understand that when the Devil grabs either your argument or your genitalia, it’s hard to make him let go.
I suppose I have to do something for the gays to make up for it, but I don’t know what. Oh, wait, here’s the answer! I’ve just signed to star in Sex and the City III. Just wait till it comes out! In this exotic, erotic, fashion-filled romp, Joseph Massad and I fly to Dubai, argue about identity while hiding from the police in full niqab, and go shopping.
The World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos, Switzerland. CNN is full of Important People being interviewed in front of snow-hung pines; at first I thought it was the Winter Olympics, which I suppose it kind of is. Over at that notorious nest of economic radicalism, the New Republic, even Timothy Noah is moved to remark:
The Wall Street Journal reports that there are 70 billionaires among the 2,500 attendees. That makes Davos the only place on earth where a billionaire, for a few days anyway, can bust out of the top 1 percent (not to mention the top 0.01 percent). When billionaires represent roughly 3 percent of WEF attendees, that means, arithmetically, that about two-thirds of those billionaires get to slum it for a few days in the bottom 99 percent. What a lark!
He also notes that in all its history, Davos seems to have held only one panel on global inequality. There’s none this year; obviously there are more significant things going on. Anyway, with the 70 billionaires compelled to share seating with around 2,400 non-billionaires, they probably figure that’s equal enough.
Human Rights Watch, my old employer, which was in love with power, used to love boasting about the senior staff it sent to Davos. Part of the frisson was lobbying those in possession of power; part of it was meeting the billionaires. By contrast, it never sent anybody of importance to the World Social Forum, which is full of the unwashed and uninfluential 99% who comprise most human rights movements around the world. This always seemed to me an unfortunate expression of priorities.
This year, however, and happily, there is an Occupy WEF, and they have set up an igloo encampment near the main deliberations. Its website says,
Every year, self-proclaimed «global leaders» allegedly committed to improving the state of the world meet up for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss mountains to propagate their own businesses and network amongst the so-called global economic elite. This year, we will not let them exclude us, the 99%!
Nothing, of course, would draw the billionaires into conversation with the (real) ice-dwelling 99%, unless they run out of icecubes for their cocktails. But maybe the human rightsters can wander over there for a talk. It might be interesting.
