Cairo diary, December 2012: Walls, women, rape, fear

Posted on 4 December 2012 by scottlong1980

Tenting tonight in the old campground: In Midan Tahrir, November 27 © Scott Long

I was detained at the airport coming into Cairo this time. When the woman at the control desk swiped my passport through the computer, a startled look filled her face below the hijab. She waved me down to the far, last lane: a place where Palestinians and stateless people congregate, in that limbo between borders where one is at the government’s mercy without having any claim on it. I lingered there an hour or so, generally ignored, and then an officer led me off to a remote room, somewhere past the lost-luggage desk. He locked the door behind me.

This was a dispiriting chamber, flat under faint fluorescent light, with empty chairs and graffiti on the walls: “Gaza” recurred over and over, with different dates, expressive as a scream. Another man sat there, Egyptian. He worked in Africa, had lost his passport there, and was trying to enter on a consular document. “Did they turn the key?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Shit on these shitholes. I hope their shit eats shit and dies of it,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They should die in the shit that they shovel onto others. How are you?”

It took three hours, and it mostly consisted of waiting. If I’ve learned anything from dealing with state officials, as investigator or victim, it’s that it’s pointless to ask questions. Silence elicits information as well as anything does; it makes them do the asking, and that tells you what they don’t know. In my case, they didn’t know why they wanted me. “You are on a security list,” an officer finally told me.

“Why?” I ventured.

“We’re not sure, but we have to check you for security.”

I’m not certain either what “checking me” entailed — Googling me? calling my parents? In any case, they finally released me into mother Egypt, not long after my sans-papiers colleague. (“Goodbye,” he said, “enjoy the shit.”) The whole episode explained why I had been similarly stopped (minus the cell and the locked door) the last three times I entered the country — previously, I’d supposed the controllers simply appalled by my ragged and decaying passport, relic of too many sweaty days and back pockets. But apparently some bureaucrat actually has put my name down with a permanent interrogatory beside it: What is he doing here? I feel flattered: not so much at being imputed a fake importance, but because the State and I are finally asking the same question.

Borders leave scars here. Nine years ago, in Cairo, I interviewed an Egyptian who’d lived for years in the US — he’d claimed asylum there as a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group that Mubarak’s government suppressed savagely. 9/11 happened, and Hizb ut-Tahrir lost its credit with the US authorities. A few days after, police in his Connecticut suburb took him into custody. Never mind his pending asylum case; never mind the American woman he’d married. After a year in jail, they deported him to Egypt. As he came into the Cairo airport in chains, a US immigration officer handed his case file to the passport police. It was the same as saying, “Torture him, please.” State Security held him for several weeks, and they went through the standard repertory: cold water, beatings, electroshock to the genitals. When I met him he still had memory lapses, lacunae that themselves bore witness to an interrupted life.

That happened because he crossed the invisible line of an imperial power. I represent the imperial power (“Permit the citizen/national of the United States to pass without delay or hindrance,” my brand-new passport says). And so I’m used to crossing borders free of fear. That said, the first thing you notice, coming back to Cairo after a year, is the sheer proliferation of borders. The boundary has decamped from the country’s edge, and now divides its center. I’m staying near the much-feared Ministry of Interior, and morning and night I walk through two barbed-wire barricades on either side of it, past milling and listless Central Security troops, and a soldier manning a rifle atop an armored personnel carrier.

Walls have risen all around the government quarter, to keep the people from reaching it. Take any side street, and you’ll run into a rampart. Here’s one across Qasr el-Aini street, one of the main entries to Midan Tahrir:

The smile was added later: © Scott Long

Here is a barrier protecting the security forces’ headquarters — you can see the Interior Ministry’s sinister radio tower looming in the rear:

Don’t walk this way: © Tyler Huffman

The graffiti is a Quranic verse, and it’s aimed at the State: “They will not fight you, except in fortified townships, or from behind walls. Their belligerence is strong among themselves. You would think they were united, but their hearts are divided: That is because they are a people without wisdom.”

The walls don’t dice up the city in any coherent way. They’re just meant to prevent protesters from accessing the State’s most sensitive points. But they stake out a symbolic division between the Revolution and the government: still at odds after two years and two elections. And, like most borders, they mark where people died.

47 people died a year ago along Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a green avenue leading from Tahrir. That’s a long story, like most in Cairo. In November 2011, the government decided to clear out the ongoing opposition sit-in from the main square, and Central Security Forces [Amn el-Merkazi] tried to use Mohamed Mahmoud as their route of attack. Protesters set up a defense line there. Security retaliated by building a wall. Five days of battle followed. Security gunfire blinded many demonstrators — the marksmen aimed straight at their eyes. Hundreds were injured: there’s no exact count. No one has been punished for the blindings or the deaths.

Ruins of Lycee Horreya, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, November 27: © Scott Long

Mohamed Mahmoud also figured in the chaos of the last three weeks, which I hardly have the ability to summarize, though I’ll try. On November 19 protesters gathered on the street, to commemorate the previous year’s deaths. The Interior Ministry used tear gas to disperse them; in the ensuing days, clashes spread to the other margins of Tahrir Square. At least one young man was killed. Central Security holed up in a lycee on Mohamed Mahmoud — the Lycee Horreya, Freedom School (Cairo is beyond irony) — firing on the protesters from above and throwing rocks at them. Soon the school was almost completely torched.

Amid all this, on November 22 Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader narrowly elected President five months ago, issued a decree. Morsi has been ruling by decree ever since he was inaugurated. There’s nobody else to make laws; days before the presidential vote in June, the Constitutional Court disbanded the Parliament elected last year. (Since the Muslim Brotherhood were the dominant force in Parliament, many saw that move as Mubarak-era judges striving to deprive political Islamists of power. If so, though, it backfired, since the election promptly handed sole authority to an Islamist President.) Morsi’s new decree cemented his own decreeing power. He made his decisions immune to judicial review, until a new Parliament sits in some unspecified future. He also exempted the Constituent Assembly from judicial oversight. In effect, he decreed himself dictator.

Mubarak used to pick judges specifically for their willingness to jail Brotherhood members. Morsi and his party therefore loathe the only-supposedly-independent judiciary, something that seems both reasonable and requited. The Constituent Assembly, though, is what’s at the center of this mess. The now-dissolved Parliament had chosen the Assembly to write a new constitution for Egypt. Predictably, since the Brotherhood ran Parliament, they picked a Constituent Assembly that they ran too. Nearly all secular and liberal representatives had already withdrawn from it in protest. Most people expected the Constitutional Court to decide, in a pending case, that the Assembly itself was illegitimate. Morsi’s decree forestalled that, giving the Assembly (and hence the Brotherhood) fiat over Egypt’s future.

Crowds off Mohamed Mahmoud Street, November 27: © Scott Long

When I arrived on November 23, the lemony tang of tear gas constantly drifted south from central Cairo, and the thud of bursting cannisters punctuated night and day. Protests had broken out in cities across the country. There was impotence in the anger, a rage at everything going wrong. I went to Mohamed Mahmoud the next night, just under the lycee where Central Security had their bastion. Teenagers with rocks and Molotov cocktails were tearing apart a parked car, for no apparent reason except they couldn’t get at the killers four stories up. A few days later the cindered car still sat there, beneath a scraggle of graffiti that said “Happy Birthday.”

Youssef el Guindy Street, off Mohamed Mahmoud, November 27. Among the graffiti: “Long live the prisoners’ intifada”; “Glory to the workers of Egypt”: © Scott Long

After Morsi’s decree, the Assembly scurried to submit a proposed Constitution, and Morsi scheduled a rush referendum for December 15. The protests have continued: here’s a scene from a massive opposition march on November 27, as the crowd stops to jeer in front of the headquarters of Morsi’s party downtown.

It’s not that the draft Constitution is unspeakably worse than the existing one; it’s not even that it offers some instant blueprint for Islamist rule. Neither, despite the melodrama opponents indulge, is true. (A comparison of the two Constitutions is here; an analysis of the more controversial new provisions, here.) The rage is rather that the Revolution was thwarted from producing something better: and that Morsi is forcing down this ploddingly inept document by the old means of extralegal rigging. It’s also anger at two years in which the State has consistently brutalized its own people rather than answer their demands. Whether under Mubarak, the military, or Morsi, the government chose to build barricades against its citizens — and shoot them, to kill.

As an outsider, the anger concerns me more than the Constitution; I can feel the first, while the second is an abstraction. I don’t even know how to write about the rapes, except you have to, because they’re everywhere. My first day here, the office where I’m working asked me for information about rape kits; two women had come to them after they were raped near Tahrir. That night, I went to a friend’s flat; her neighbor had been gang-raped along with another woman, dragged into a dark side street in the vicinity of the Square.

Sexual harassment, the show of men’s physical power over women in public space, has been a political issue in Egypt for several years. Yet no one was prepared for sexual violence on this scale. Some activists have claimed the Muslim Brotherhood has gathered roving mobs to rape protesting women; in the UK, the Daily Mail has blazoned this rumor eagerly. No one actually knows, because no actual people have been accused or caught. Central Security only comes near Tahrir to taunt or shoot protesters, not to protect them. For anybody else, there’s virtual impunity in much of downtown.

Anti-police graffiti near the Ministry of Interior: “He learned his job by bribery.” Two images of Revolutionary martyrs are on the right. © Scott Long

A vigilante spirit roams Egypt. The police largely disappeared after the Revolution. There are just enough traffic cops at intersections to maintain the show of somebody being in charge. But for nearly all Egyptians, the police were the government’s most corrupt, intrusive and abusive visage: everybody had to deal with them, everybody despised them, and they were the one part of the State that, in the chaos of regime change, had the self-preserving sense to melt away. In many neighborhoods now, officers wouldn’t dare show their faces on patrol if you tripled their pay. Central Security Forces are supposed to fill the gap. These are ill-trained army recruits, mostly from the provinces, deputed to urban policing tasks that they have no clue how to fulfill. One reason so many demonstrators have been slaughtered since the Revolution is simply that Central Security has no experience in crowd control. State Security [Amn el-Dawla], Mubarak’s dreaded secret police, at least knew how to contain a dissident gathering, up to a certain size; but they’re officially defunct (meaning they’ve gone underground). The raw boys of Central Security carry only the fears fed them by their superiors, and their guns.

In this environment, communities themselves — the neighborhood, the extended family — take up the responsibility for “security.” Communal cooperation is part of the Egyptian genius. Yet the immediate result is to make outsiders suspect by definition. I’ve seen this first-hand: last year, trying to get to a demonstration near the Defense Ministry in the Abbasiyya quarter, I found myself amid a mob of local residents running to attack the intruders, armed with large knives, all convinced that their streets and homes themselves were under attack from people who didn’t belong. (Since I fell in that category, I count myself lucky that I don’t have more pieces of myself to count.) I can easily imagine the rapes as product of a nightmarish moral vigilantism: the work of men convinced these women aren’t proper Egyptian women, that if not controlled they will invade our streets and our places, that they must be punished.

Even beyond the stories of rape, something ominous is afoot. It’s hard not to feel that the Revolution has actually reinforced patriarchal control of women: not the way you might think, by reinstating religion, but rather by making men identify more deeply with an ethos of protection. I talked in recent days with Egyptian researchers doing ethnography in two working-class and conservative neighborhoods in Cairo. The men and women they’ve interviewed alike have stressed their fears about safety. Everyone’s heard rumors about the rapes. Moreover, everybody subsists in terror of a crime wave, even if they haven’t actually seen crimes. And men have locked stricter controls on “their” women, their wives and daughters, in response: restrictions on going out unaccompanied, walking alone, staying out at night. Women lose not only mobility but social cohesion if they can’t meet one another freely, and economic independence if they can’t make it to market or work (as many do) as street vendors. Men, meanwhile, gain power in reclaiming a traditional role as guardians. (It’s at least some compensation for the lost jobs of a collapsed economy.) There are political implications to these shifts, although they’re hard to read. As a guardian State slowly reasserts its legitimacy, incarnate in a patriarchal figure like Morsi, will men identify with it, or resent its encroachment? Or both at once?

Stand by your man: Male protesters form a ring around women marchers, Talaat Harb Street, November 27 © Scott Long

Vigilantes patrol on both sides now, in fact: the bad vigilantes cut hair and enforce modesty, and the good vigilantes protect their women from all that. You can see the guardian role in all manner of places — among the middle class, for instance, in last Tuesday’s mass opposition march, where men formed a cordon around women protesters to safeguard them. (There’s even a Twitter account for this now, @Tahrirbodyguard, “A collective effort to ensure safety in Tahrir, especially for women” –oddly, it’s all in English.) The thing is, it’s a little hard to be caught between all these protectors. If you want to see the dilemmas this poses for feminism, consider this anti-sexual harassment graffiti, from Mohamed Mahmoud Street:

Up against the wall, motherharassers: © Scott Long

The central two panels are about women empowered. The top one says (roughly) “If he calls you a hot slut, use a weapon”; the bottom, “No matter how much of my body shows or doesn’t show, it’s free and can never be humiliated.” But the bottom left carries a different message, and it’s not for women at all: “Be a man! Protect her!”

This call to be a man is heard quite a bit in Cairo. Masculinity itself seems to be at stake, in the brutal clashes where the walls stand. ¿Quien es mas macho? Which side holds the monopoly on manhood? What does being a man mean, anyway? Here’s graffiti I saw a year ago, from the Association of Detainees of the Revolution, calling for a sit-in:

DSC00379 ش

“Man up! Take to the streets with us, your Revolution has been stolen!” And the chant rang out at rallies against the army — a reminder that our side is more manly than the soldiers, even: “Man up and shout! The military’s time is ending soon!”

But manhood is at stake because manhood is in question. It’s a wounded, brutalized manhood, aware of its vulnerability. Two years of incessant violence have both mutilated it and shaped it. It’s in pain, and it lashes out.

That’s the thing I apprehend most of all, this time in Cairo: the exhaustion, the hurt, the pain. I don’t think one can underestimate how these years of killing have brutalized a society. The grinding gradualness of it all has been part of the effect (as well as the break with the enforced placidity of the Mubarak years before). Of course, one doesn’t speak of the whole society ground down. Most of Egypt is still the Party of the Couch, with windows closed against the tear gas. Two of the culture’s naked extremities, though, seem to have been most exposed, and left most clotted with rage: the poorest and the not-quite privileged-yet, the underclass who feel they’ve nothing left to lose and the young intellectuals and students; the utterly dispossessed, and those who possess nothing but their promise. I have no inclination to sentimentalize either, and I usually resist both organic metaphors and those vertical ones that claim to arrange social classes in their natural elevations. Still and all, it feels like killing a society at the root and at the leaf.

A street child sifts through rubble on Mohamed Mahmoud Street: © Scott Long

A friend who works with street children reminds me that they’ve been in the front lines of the clashes for months: kids as young as eight or nine making Molotov cocktails and pitching them at Security forces along Mohamed Mahmoud. There are tens of thousands of homeless children in Cairo. They’re enraged; and many of them have already lost friends to the government’s bullets. These martyrs of the Revolution mostly aren’t counted, and they tend to end up in unmarked graves. Their despair, though, replicates that of traumatized middle-class kids in a different key. A 21 year-old student told Al-Ahram earlier this year that “Since the revolution began, with the exception of the month of August, I’ve lost at least one friend every month.”

Some of the consequences of this brutalization show through the powerful street art that has been painted on the walls along Mohamed Mahmoud Street. These pictures are secular icons, a record of the Revolution’s martyrs, but also a symptomography of the body under the State’s pressure. It’s a kind of political lexicon of pain.

Some portraits of the martyrs are deliberately benign, unphysical, the dead as spiritualized angel. This one says only, “Mostafa Metwally: 1994 – 2012.” (Metwally died at 17 in February’s “football massacre” in Port Said.)

The angel here is flecked with blood: “The Martyr Mohamed Seri. By Kamal Abdel Mobdy.”

The accompanying poem tries to tie him to earth by weighting him with national history:

The first country and first people we are
Seven thousand years old we are
Night comes to our country and turns to light through us
The greatness of pyramids tells who we are
The rooted ancient people we are …

But other figures seem too dense with their own particularity, and the terrible fact of their loss, to need the ballast. On the left: “Karim Khozam: An icon of moral commitment: 2-12-1992″ (he also died in the Port Said massacre). On the right: “Alaa Abdelhady: One of the martyrs of the Cabinet clashes” (a medical student, he was shot near the central government building almost a year ago).

Some images emphasize mutilation. This shows Ahmed Harara, who lost one eye during the January Revolution, and the other while fighting on Mohamed Mahmoud Street:

And some images bloat with pain till they terrify. These could be by Francis Bacon:

A line above them reads: “And to the State, it’s God’s will. Meaning, they owe nothing for your death.”

The figure at left below is a version of the tortured body of Khaled Said, killed by police in Alexandria in 2011. Here, its deformation pushes back at the formalities of perspective.

The figure at right seems haloed unbearably in its own exploding head.

The line above the images reads, “If the picture is not clear enough, believe me: The reality is uglier.” The pictures, though, are part of the reality, of a body politic at extremity. If they are hard to look at, imagine living with –or in — them.

Tarek Mustafa, Maysara Omar, Ramy Youssef, and Nada Zatouna helped me think through aspects of this post.

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Thunder on the left

Posted on 8 August 2012 by scottlong1980

Last month Karma Chavez of WORT FM in Wisconsin did an hour-long interview with me about various things LGBT and global: Iraq, Iran, homonationalism, neocolonialism, ethical activism, Peter Tatchell, and other usual and less-usual subjects all came up. Here’s the whole thing. You have to skip over the scree-scraw noises at the beginning where a failed attempt to Skype me — I was in a remote foreign land — led to an explosively resounding reverb effect. Thunder on the left, the Romans thought, was a sign that Jupiter was pleased.

Why I am not proud

Posted on 9 June 2012 by scottlong1980

This comes to me by way of Maya Mikdashi and the folks at Jadaliyya:

It’s a float from 2011′s San Francisco Pride. It shows a dungeonmaster dominating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There’s a whip involved, but mainly he’s fucking the Iranian with a nuclear bomb.

Jadaliyya headlines this “No Comment,” and probably it’s healthier for what’s left of my gay identity, and ungay sanity, not to dwell on it. I feel like I’ve been putting up with other people’s overspill of testosterone for several days now, from the guy downstairs whose pit bull seems to be killing a giant squid at great length, to the baltageyya an ocean away who assaulted a women’s march in Cairo. But as I wrote rather inarticulately yesterday, you can only address the operations of power by first thinking them through — you know, trying to unpack a bit what’s at work there. So shoulder to the wheel; let’s try to extract some useable lessons from this very American, very gay piece of imperial performance art.

1) Rape is funny, depending on who you’re raping. Not funny-strange or funny-abnormal, but funny-ha-ha. So, for that matter, is nuclear war! Why give head in front when you can give warhead from behind?

What’s funny about it, though? Freud argued (in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious) that humor is a safety-valve for thoughts society inhibits; jokes play much the same role for the collective imagination that dreams do for the individual’s. But they release the repressed temporarily only to restore the social order in the end. Comedy is conservative. It puts the bounder, the miscreant, the climber or the rebel in his (or her) place, by saying, finally: this is who you are.

Rape is funny, then, when it reminds the raped (and the onlookers) of what’s inescapable, the self he can’t get away from. Inferiority is always a matter of interiority, the inner — penetrable — person placed, defined, exposed. Now, look at Ahmadinejad again. Who is he, really? Isn’t he a bit … familiar?

Cartoon from Der Stürmer, for another annual celebration: “The Year is Over. The Battle Goes On.”

Really, these hook-nosed Eastern types need some big blond leathery Meister to whack, or fuck, the presumption out of them 24/7. (The Iranians have this notion that they’re Aryan somehow, and such arrogance especially calls out for the whip.) This is a fascinating instance of how grossly anti-Semitic imagery is so ingrained in Western modernity — the Jew as synonym for weakness, effeminacy, corruption — that it’s a floating, limpetlike defilement. It doesn’t even require actual Semites to glom onto. (I say nothing here about what you can assume are the pro-Israel, and particularly pro-Netanyahu, implications of the display. I suppose if you read Joseph Massad you might argue that Israeli discourse is also capable of exploiting anti-Semitism on its own terms. But then, I would never read Joseph Massad, would I?)

no comment

Of course, what’s more satisfying than insulting Ahmadinejad by alleging he’s not really a proper male, just one of those squirmy little degenerates? It’s a feel-good thing for two reasons: it disses the the odious Mahmoud, while it affirms Manhood in general, including yours and mine. Ideologically, men are so damn easy to please.

Brown people are born to bottom. This is a fundamental fact, as it were: one in which politics has clearly seized the steering wheel away from desire. Plenty of white gay men, in the Bay Area as well as other precincts, undoubtedly harbor fantasies of being topped by some darker, muscled Other in a sweaty, hairy abnegation of one’s personal power, one’s private nuclear arsenal: an arms treaty for the ages. But these dreams are luxuries to be sacrificed for the national good, for the sanctified collective purpose, the way Americans submitted to gas rationing to beat the Nazis, or gave up — remind me, what did we give up? — to win the Iraq war. Politically, brown people are perpetually being screwed, and it’s only natural that sex (which in essence is politics without the voting, like the rest of politics these days) should reflect that. Sex is also an excellent way of reminding them of the fact.

You can see what I mean by comparing the Pride photo to an image that must have been clanking around somewhere in the back of the floatmasters’ minds, one of the most celebrated stills from any American film:

yee haw

Of course, that’s Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to oblivion and Armageddon at the terminus of Dr. Strangelove. He’s in pretty much the same position as the megaton-wielding Master on the float, with the Russians (honorary brown people for Cold War purposes) positioned where the Iranians now stand in our diminished day. Although this is an anti-war film, notoriously subversive of the military verities, there’s no suggestion anywhere that any proper American is going to have his buttcheeks opened to insert weaponry. That would be, one supposes, too subversive — one turn of the screw too many, a fuck too far. (Instead the movie presents American soldiery as obsessed by Purity of Essence, keeping the holy jism bottled up and restrained for the Big Moment when its outburst is required. Or think Deliverance or Pulp Fiction, where the key to national masculinity is maintaining a clenched anus, despite all the menacing forces — from Vietnamese captors to Appalachian S&M freaks — trying to pry it open.)

2) It also depends on who’s doing the raping. Not just anybody can accomplish the curative and conservative function. The question is: who’s got the power?

(Re)consider, please, the following two photographs — I discussed them yesterday. Both accompanied Mona Eltahawy’s article on Middle Eastern women, in Foreign Policy magazine this spring. This is the one FP chose for the article itself — a famous shot of an Egyptian demonstrator abused and stripped by police:

This really had to go with Eltahawy’s essay — it was too well known to leave out. But they wouldn’t and didn’t put it on the cover, to draw a Western reader in. Why not? Well, it wouldn’t seduce, it wouldn’t draw. The people doing the dominating there aren’t Us (to borrow Eltahawy’s terms): they’re Them, those Arabs, and the problem with them is they have too much power. No purchaser of FP in DC is going to be turned on by the politically suspect sight of them exerting it. Many viewers, in fact, saw the photo as especially disturbing because the bra made the woman seem like Us, prone at Their mercy — a commodity like underclothing is notoriously a more accurate indicator of a woman’s identity than voice or face. Who can stand to see a Westernized woman subdued by Their violence? Thus Sally Quinn wrote:

Aside from the sheer brutality, I think what got to me was that she was wearing this gorgeous, sexy bright blue bra. … This person covered from head to toe demonstrated her beliefs through her choice of underwear. The blue bra said what I imagine her to be feeling: “I may be oppressed. I may not have rights. I may have to cover up my body and face. But you cannot destroy my womanhood. You can’t rob me of my femininity. You can’t take away my power.” That blue bra, to me, was the ultimate symbol of women’s power.

Me, I am no bio woman, just a poor aging drag queen on a Saturday night. But please, please, I want me a talking bra.

The cover photo FP chose instead, of course, was this:

Now, that woman has taken off her clothes not for Them, but for Us (not to mention how she’s painted on that fetching, Ayisha-meets-Al-Jolson blackface niqab). Look at her! She’s looking right at Us, acknowledging that she’s at our command! Of course, it’s a voluntary stripping she’s undertaken. It isn’t rape per se. But you don’t need to be an acolyte of Catherine MacKinnon (I’m not, believe me) to realize that the fantasy of women’s willing submission is intrinsic to the pornographic imagination. (It’s one reason it’s hard to argue that porn actually incites violence against women: most porn doesn’t need it.) This photo, unlike the aggressive-Arabs one, shows the right kind of Sex at Issue here. Like ha-ha rape, it puts Them in their place, while pumping up Ours.

And now I see why, as part of the endless wars over “gay executions” in Iran, so many Western activists laugh — ha, ha! — at the idea that Iranian men might rape other men. That’s impossible. It’s allotting Them too much power. Iranian men (remember those small penises!) probably aren’t able to rape Iranian men: bottoms bomb, rather literally, when they try to top. Even if They can rape, We won’t allow Them to. As the Pride photo shows: that’s Our job.

Razan Ghazzawi receives award; Egyptian women attacked in Tahrir Square

Posted on 8 June 2012 by scottlong1980

Video on Razan’s work, from Front Line Defenders

Razan Ghazzawi, whom I’m proud to call my friend, received the Front Line Defenders 2012 award Thursday, from the Irish group dedicated to the security of human rights activists at risk. Naturally, she didn’t go to Dublin to receive the prize. She’s too busy on the front lines in Syria.

I adore and admire Razan for a number of reasons. Three good ones are that she is fiercely feminist, anarchist, and queer. Another is that she studied English literature at the University of Damascus, offering evidence that lit majors are not fated to permanent irrelevance in the universe. More encompassingly, she’s been a beacon of bravery to her fellow Syrian activists, in her uncompromising resistance to a regime that is determined to murder as many of its own people as it can — not even pour encourager les autres anymore, but with a kind of perverse and pointless aesthetic pleasure: murder for its own sake.

Razan is one of the few Syrian dissident bloggers to write under her own name. She also works for the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, supporting other bloggers and activists fighting for free speech and basic rights against the dictatorship. She has been arrested twice. In December 2011, she spent two weeks in prison after authorities detained her on her way to a conference in Amman on media freedom. On February 16, the security branch of the Syrian Air Force raided the SCM office and seized her and several colleagues. They released Razan and five other women three days later; “those three nights,” she wrote on her blog, “were the longest of my life.” Mahmoud Darwish, head of the Centre, is still jailed incommunicado along with eight other activists; Razan and others fear that all are being tortured. Razan herself faces trial before a military court on charges of “possessing prohibited materials with the intent to disseminate them.”

Among the SCM employees still detained: (L-R) Mazen Darwish, Bassam al-Ahmad, Hussein Ghrer, Abdel Rahman Hmada

I got to know Razan last summer in Cairo, where she spent a few weeks in solidarity with the revolutionaries in Tahrir. Not for a second did she lose touch with what was happening on the ground back in Syria; I would see her almost every evening in some cafe, hunched over her laptop as though it were a campfire on a freezing night, e-mailing or blogging away. One day, she and a friend cooked an immense Syrian meal (no country with so good a cuisine deserves so bad a government) for me and an Egyptian sexuality activist. Somewhere between the courses she began offering a critique of the nascent Cairo attempts at organizing around sexual rights, one so cogent that I simply got out my own computer and took notes. Here are some of them — reproduced without her permission:

There is a problem with people socializing and connecting only around sexual orientation and sexuality. You have a gay community that only talks about gay issues, not any other issues. …

I am not trying to tell gay people they should be active politically. That is a very patronizing position coming from above. The question is: how do we ask gay people to come to Tahrir, to oppose SCAF, to push for change in the current system? Since gay people experience oppression and repression, they should understand other forms of repression, but they don’t …

In a strange sort of way here in Egypt I am much more comfortable with people who are straight, who know what is going on in the wide world. It is their privilege—as heterosexuals, their thinking doesn’t have to be limited by their own oppression. That is power. I recognize that. But I want us, as gays, to think politically as well. So that after the revolution people will recognize that they, that we were here.

Razan thinks constantly about the connections, meaning that her concept of the Syrian revolution embraces and tests itself against the Egyptian revolution, the Occupy movements, the Palestinian cause, women’s rights, Sunni Islamists, secularists, lesbians and gays. In addition to boundless courage and energy, she has something every revolutionary needs, but that often gets left out of the package: a restless mind, too busy with reality to let itself ossify into ideology. In the months since I’ve come back from Cairo, I’ve often found myself thinking how much I miss her.

Mona Seif, Tahrir Square

Another finalist for the Front Line award was Mona Seif, the Egyptian activist and founder of the No Military Trials for Civilians movement. I equally admire Mona; scion of a family of leftist militants, she’s done more than anyone in Egypt to call attention to the 12,000 or more victims of military detention since the Revolution, along with the tortures the generals have retained in the State’s punitive repertory. In addition to being a courageous and strategic organizer, she’s one of the least pretentious rights activists I’ve met. Her complete immunity from the vagaries of ego is like a genetic quirk, so uncommon is it in the profession; it’s like meeting someone who never caught the common cold. Now, I immediately have to stop myself, and wonder: Would I be saying that about her if she were a man? I don’t think I’ve fallen prey to some insidious essentialism about femininity. But there used to be an idea about feminist practice — that it was going to open the way to a different kind of politics: in blunt terms, one where not everybody had to be a jerk. Historically, revolutions have been heavily testosterone-inducing affairs. The cult of radical heroism is like Rogaine for the chest hair; “It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph,” as W. H. Auden wrote about another venture in history-making. It’s true, you’ve got your odd Olympe de Gouges or two partly redeeming revolutionary history, but for every one of them there’s a dozen Robespierres or Stalins or Hazem Abu Ismails grunting and showing off their balls. Mona Seif and Razan Ghazzawi are, among other things, both reminders of how central women have been to the shifting seasons of the Arab Spring. They signal how the Spring proffered a different kind of revolutionary potential, still unfulfilled, but still there.

HarassMap: a web initiative to collect reports of sexual harassment from around Egypt. (For more information in Arabic, see harassmap.org)

It’s good to remember this, today of all days. This evening in Cairo, a few dozen women tried to hold a rally against sexual harassment, as part of a larger protest in Midan Tahrir over the Presidential candidacy of neo-Mubarakite Ahmed Shafiq. The day before, a coalition of rights groups had condemned what they called a calculated and growing campaign of sexual assaults on women protesters. Earlier in the week, for instance, a crowd of almost 200 men had assaulted a women in Tahrir, harassing and abusing her till she lost consciousness. The groups claimed

that the amount of sexual harassment and violence against female demonstrators in Tahrir Square and the surrounding streets has been “worryingly” increasing since the outbreak of the recent wave of protests following the verdict issued against former President Hosni Mubarak and senior Interior Ministry officials on 2 June. …

The organizations stressed that the attacks suffered by female demonstrators, which violate the sanctity of their bodies and their physical safety, represent a barrier limiting the participation of women in the public sphere and disabling them from shaping the present and future of the country.

Nice try. The Associated Press describes what happened today:

A mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an end to sexual harassment Friday, with the attackers overwhelming the male guardians and groping and molesting several of the female marchers in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. …

Friday’s march was called to demand an end to sexual assaults. Around 50 women participated, surrounded by a larger group of male supporters who joined to hands to form a protective ring around them. The protesters carried posters saying, “The people want to cut the hand of the sexual harasser,” and chanted, “The Egyptian girl says it loudly, harassment is barbaric.”

After the marchers entered a crowded corner of the square, a group of men waded into the women, heckling them and groping them. The male supporters tried to fend them off, and it turned into a melee involving a mob of hundreds.

The marchers tried to flee while the attackers chased them and male supporters tried to protect them. But the attackers persisted, cornering several women against a metal sidewalk railing, including an Associated Press reporter, shoving their hands down their clothes and trying to grab their bags. The male supporters fought back, swinging belts and fists and throwing water.

Eventually, the women were able to reach refuge in a nearby building with the mob still outside until they finally got out to safety.

Here’s video from Al Masry Al Youm, featuring interviews with women marchers (I recognize and salute some of my friends), and, at the end, scenes of the attacks:

The male supporters were there because this wasn’t the first time this happened. In 2011, less than a month after Mubarak’s fall, men assaulted a march celebrating International Women’s Day, March 8. Those attacks were more spontaneous: they seemed to be an instinctive way of drawing a line around the Revolution, saying “This far and no farther.” Dalia Abd Elhameed, an activist who was there, told me, “The men said, ‘We are not ready to hear about women’s rights: You can take your demands to the street, but not as women.’”

We started to march from the press syndicate to Tahrir, and the moment we reached Tahrir, people started to humiliate us: “Women’s rights, what are you talking about? You want to be president,” and so on. “Women can’t be president, because the man is the ruler of the house.”

After a while the hostility began to increase. They started shouting at us. They chose a women in niqab, pointed at her, and said, “This is the mother of the martyrs, this is the example of the Egyptian woman, not you, you are prostitutes, you have to go home, no one wants you in the streets.” I left by 5 pm. I know that half an hour later they began the sexual harassment, physical harassment, running after protesters, grabbing them by their clothes, describing the men who took part in the protest as khalawalat [faggots], not real men because you are supporting women’s rights.

Two male colleagues of mine also in that march blogged about it, here and here:

They were dealing with us like we are a group of prostitutes and pimps that want to deprive them of their religion … They accused us of working for the former first lady’s interests. Others accused us of being westernized or working for some foreign agendas. What was really provoking for them is that men were holding the banners too. Some of them pointed at me and described me as a fag who should wear a scarf over his head like women because he is a disgrace to the man kind .

And a film about the 2011 violence, with interviews with activists and attackers, is here.

Manifold anxieties and antinomies converged in the assaults. These fights are always mythic for the fighters: poverty pitted against privilege, the indigenous against the foreign, the virtuous against the corrupted. Today’s violence undoubtedly draws on the same fears, but seems dominated by a simple SCAF strategy to halve protests by scaring women away.

It’s horrifying. One’s mind turns inevitably to Mona Eltahawy’s controversial (to put it mildly) article for Foreign Policy‘s “Sex Issue” this spring: “Why Do They Hate Us?” ”The real war on women is in the Middle East,” Eltahawy warned. And Mona herself, one should note, was sexually assaulted by security forces when arrested near Midan Tahrir last November.

Versions of Foreign Policy’s cover photo: Paint it black

Now, that piece produced an uproar. Friends and colleagues of mine roundly denounced it as a superficial blandishment to imperialism (you can read some of the disputations here, here, and here, and there are many more). To a large degree, the outrage was inseparable from the article’s visuals and venue. Foreign Policy, which markets itself to the younger and cooler breed of US diplomats and wonks, packaged Eltahawy’s contribution under a cover showing an otherwise-divested woman in black painted-on niqab. (When you download the photo from their website, you find its title, tellingly if inadvertently, is “120418_Sex_Centerfold_193.jpeg”.) ”Cover” — and its opposite — are the operative words. If the “Sex Issue” in general –focusing heavily on Iran and the Arab world and presenting them as chock full of erotic peculiarities — sent the message that sex means the Middle East, the shot itself conveyed Get your Middle Eastern women, here, uncovered! You couldn’t miss the imperial implication that a US magazine had the power to display the Middle Eastern woman and her secrets, all stripped and splayed for perusal. The “Sex Issue” sold itself neither as fact nor fiction, but as pure fetish.

The Blue Bra: Photo accompanying Eltahawy’s article

Eltahawy’s article tried to argue about abuses rooted in power relations in the region, but inevitably the mind kept swinging back to the cover image, seemingly telling you where power really lay: saying that gender in the Middle East had been rendered a tool for US policy, as incarnate in Foreign Policy. Inside, the article came decorated with one of the more celebrated and frightening Egyptian images of the last year — a female protester in the hands of Cairene riot police, her black jilbab ripped open to show her blue bra. But even that iconic photograph couldn’t override the shock-value strip-tease on the cover. The violent denuding had already been done. Woman with a capital “W” had already been stripped by the American gaze, even before you got to Eltahawy’s page.

I stayed out of the arguments Eltahawy’s article provoked, partly because I am not, as a general rule, a Middle Eastern woman. But the symbolic issue on which many of the attacks centered – who is being revealed or unveiled, for whose eye? – seemed less significant to me than a different issue of representation that other commentators took up. Eltahawy’s piece revolved around two categories, two pronouns, which seemed monolithic, unmodulated and uninflected. “They” hate “us.”

I thought about that in reading about the Cairo assaults today. i thought about it because those are the terms in which the oppressed are prone to think. Oppression elides fine distinctions. You don’t look for the delicate shades of difference among the oppressors, number the stripes on the truncheon that is beating you. Oppression presents itself as a huge and unanimous weight, crushing the breath out of you. Its exhaustive solidity prohibits breaking it down into agents, acts, and motives. From the vantage of those being crushed, it is a bulk that extinguishes tactility and a shadow that exterminates vision.

Oppression: The left sand knoweth not what the right sand doeth

And similarly, oppression makes the oppressed lose their sense of distinction from one another. Individuality, privacy, identity are the first things to go when freedom does. You experience an involuntary solidarity with the anonymous rest of the unfree, without alternative or option, the common interest of those who have no interests left. The massive burden of power pressing down grinds everybody into the mass. Who oppresses you? “Them.” Who are the oppressed? “Us.”

I’m pretty sure the women and men reeling from the attacks in Midan Tahrir felt like that today, as night set in. The problem is that you can’t act, you can’t resist, that way, trapped in the apprehension of monolithic forces. You can only fight back if you can analyze power, think your way past its apparent invincibility, see though its bland carapace into its separate interests and components. There is no single “them” hating women, in the Middle East or elsewhere. Patriarchy does many things, but it has never succeeded in uniting men (or societies) into a single undivided phalanx. There are different motives, different classes, different constituencies with different investments in different forms of women’s oppression. It’s not as though you can always play divide and conquer with them, but you have to know them and name them and recognize their partialities before you can resist.

Moreover, the solidarity that oppression imposes on the oppressed is ultimately a fake one. It won’t last. Real solidarities start with recognizing that you’re free to differ, not feeling the raw force that reduces you to the same. If you keep imagining there’s a solid “us” united permanently by the experience of somebody hating you, you’ll never get around to the hard work of politics: figuring out what else you share and what understandings can ally you.

Razan, I think, is particularly good at all this work, which is why her contributions to the revolutions of the Arab Spring will likely be lasting ones. The same is true of Mona Seif, who has engaged with a range of intersecting and cross-fertilizing issues as an activist. Moving the imagination a little beyond the vivid but paralyzing world of “them” and “us” is incremental and painful. But only that movement moves forward.

Obama, marriage, race, rights

Posted on 20 May 2012 by scottlong1980

I had brunch today with the kids who changed the President’s mind. If you’ll remember, when Barack Obama ten days ago declared his support for same-sex marriage, he cited “members of my own staff who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together.” There was one member of the White House staff during the presidential term who was both queer and a parent — she even took the bairns to meet the Leader of the Free World and get their pictures snapped — and this shining Sunday, she and her partner entertained. The twins in question are extremely self-possessed toddlers, who could probably persuade me of anything given the chance. I hope no one informs them of their role in history for some time yet. To have succeeded at so much at so young an age could drain them of the ambition to get through kindergarten.

Everything has already been said about what Obama said. Consider this:

President Barack Obama’s May 9 announcement that he favors same sex marriage led to a huge spike on YouTube … YouTube is owned by the online search giant Google, which [also] saw a 458 percent increase in national searches for “Obama” and “gay marriage” between 10 am and 6pm the day Obama disclosed his views …

Matthew Nisbit, a professor of communications at American University who studies the intersection of politics and social media, said online videos and an interest in gay rights were a natural pairing. ”The heaviest users of video are people under the age of 25, and gay rights is one of the few political issues young people feel passionate about,” Nisbit said. “And the gay community was an early adopter of social networking—the technology was a good fit for people of minority status looking for like-minded others.”

Following Obama’s announcement, more videos with the key words “gay marriage” were uploaded on YouTube than ever before, drawing more than 3 million views and 100,000 comments.

Am I the only person who finds that terrifying?

Anyway, I can add nothing but point to a couple of interesting consistencies in all those images and words.

What am I pointing at? Huck and Jim on the raft, by Thomas Hart Benton

You might call one of them the Persistent Sexiness of Race, or Raciness of Sex. Put simply: sex and race are the two authentic American obsessions. But so close are they to every American’s pulsing heart that proximity induces blindness, and natives of these territories have considerable difficulty telling them apart, or deciphering where, when, or how they interrelate or -twine. On one day, your average white American will go from believing that sex was invented by non-white people — carried to this shore to sap the moral rigor of austere Puritans who reproduced by spores — to supposing that non-white people are fierce enemies of sex in general, paralyzed by their primitive inability to appreciate orgasms, orifices, or online porn. When it comes to homosexuality, there are thus two versions. Either black people are responsible for it, because they got the gender roles all wrong (“Come back to the raft ag’in, Huck honey!” cries Jim in the one true, classic narrative of the American Dream, and surely the white boy’s comparative health is figured in the fact that his name rhymes with “Fuck” as any proper man’s should); or black people are going, by their weird and regressive goetic magic at the ballot box, to forbid loving white people from enjoying the rightful dignity of gay marriages in jurisdictions from Palo Alto to High Point.

It’s inevitable, then, that the first African-American president’s support for LGBT people should be read through these antinomies. Even before Obama took the plunge, the Washington Post warned him:

African Americans, one of the main pillars of the President’s political coalition, remain decidedly skeptical about gay marriage. In the last year’s worth of Post-ABC [polling] data, just 42 percent said they support legalization while 55 percent oppose it. … Coming out in support of gay marriage … would clearly thrill a portion of his base (gays and lesbians) but it could alienate — at least in parts — another portion of his base (African Americans) that he desperately needs to win reelection this fall.

Now, there is plenty of counter-evidence of sympathy and support in black communities. Just yesterday the executive board of the N.A.A.C.P. — the country’s “most prominent civil rights group,” as the New York Times notes — overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that “We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” The legendary African-American activist Julian Bond told the Times that the vote “proves that conventional wisdom” about black opposition to marriage equality “is not true.”

Still, where there are divisions, as many people have pointed out, the tenor of white LGBT activists’ advocacy bears a substantial share of the blame. Last week Andrew Sullivan (who wept when his “father figure” affirmed his marital authenticity) wrote a piece for Newsweek, speculatively borrowing Obama’s racial identity in service to Sullivan’s own gay one:

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family.

It’s not the same, you want to scream. Experience is not to be expropriated like that. Assimilating race to sexuality, as though both were purely defined by internal awareness and “discovered” the same way, is likely to put off plenty of non-gay African-Americans, and possibly some gay ones. Moreover, Sullivan has an unerring instinct for finding ways to be more alienating. It’s an article of his faith that he invented the campaign for gay marriage, and that it’s a right-wing idea. (How Sullivan continues to call himself conservative, when he dissents from the right on every issue from Obamacare to Israel, is one of the present era’s greater mysteries. The only leftists he appears to dislike are the gay ones, perhaps more from sour memories than ideology.) “Marriage equality started out as a conservative revolt within the gay community,” he wrote: “Gay conservatives and Republicans helped pioneer gay marriage as an issue.” And in a rather pissy-sounding email to Gay City News (capable of making anyone pissy, to be sure), he added:

[I]t was a struggle to be heard above those on the left arguing for employment protection, hate crimes, and economic ‘justice’ as core priorities… Without the emergence of the gay right, I don’t think we would have come as far as we have.

Those quotes taloning “justice” are the giveaway. They show how little a perspective informed by Sullivan would make sense to many African-Americans, for whom material inequality and economic reality are the urgent facts of politics.

It’s true that “civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law,” as the N.A.A.C.P’s president said; and as one former N.A.A.C.P. official informed the TImes, the resolution entailed “coming to a very civil rights understanding of marriage equality versus a theological understanding of marriage.” Does that make marriage “the new civil rights movement,” though? Does that make Obama’s embrace the equivalent (as Jonathan Rauch suggests) of LBJ adopting MLK’s language and intoning, “We shall overcome”? Uh, no. Marriage is a civil right, but not a political right. Being deprived of it marks out “impaired citizenship,” in Gayle Rubin’s phrase; but it doesn’t mark you as deprived of entry, respect, resources, or decision-making throughout the entire public realm. The laws and prejudices that did isolate LGBT people in that way have, in the US, largely receded over forty or fifty years, thanks to the long labors of people living and dead; it’s only possible to talk about marriage because those more terrible impediments have eased. Imagine living your lifetime without the right to marry, and then imagine living it without the right to vote. You’ll understand what I mean, and maybe see why the uncritical comparison to the civil rights movement is, for some African-Americans, annoying.

Huey P. Newton, 1942-1989

That said, African-American history has confronted the denial of both rights — slave marriages, of course, had no status in law, and African slaves were unable to make a legal contract. There are several things to draw from this, but one is that the “outreach” model — where white gay activists troop out to teach African-American communities why the marriage battle is important — is crazy. Too much experience and wisdom about having your rights curtailed lie on the other side. Listening and learning are a better stance for marriage activists than presumptuously leaping to the parallels. And a deep African-American engagement with the issues we would now call “sexual rights” goes back centuries –certainly way farther back than the movement activist Bayard Rustin, a true civil rights hero who seems, all the same, to be the only black gay man some people can name these days. (Obama has now put a tribute to him on his campaign website.) In my perverse way, I prefer to cite Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who on August 15, 1970 gave a speech on “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements”:

Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say “whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.

We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. … Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it.

Now, that’s honest.

The second consistent note of the Obama commentaries is what I would call the Politics of Premature Ejaculation. It consists of announcing, midway through any controversy, that it’s over, all over — even though the fat lady has neither sung, nor shivered, nor even opened her mouth. Liberals, acolytes of Enlightenment and its pre-ordained triumphs, are particularly prone to this. Thus the American Prospect proclaimed the war over marriage equality “is over,” the opposition a “lost cause.” “Support for marriage equality has crossed the halfway point, and no one in their right mind could think there will be some reversal in that trend.” Yet conservative David Link also contended, “As a national matter, today we can envision as a reality the last days of government discrimination.”

This contention is a bit weird, since national polls don’t decide the issue. In 31 states, it’s already decided. That’s the number that have added amendments to their constitutions banning recognition of same-sex marriages, all since the marriage wars began. North Carolina passed the latest, the day before the President’s announcement. Unless a certain four justices of the US Supreme Court all perish of salmonella from eating Nino Scalia’s calamari, and Obama gets to replace them, most of these bans will take decades to reverse, either by votes or courts.

everything that rises must converge

Nonetheless, two successive Gallup soundings have now shown a thin majority in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, a far cry from the nearly two-thirds opposed a decade and a half ago. This is neither final victory nor the tidal inevitability of Progress, but it is no negligible fact, either. The commentariat is busy trying to explain the sea-change: is is the neighbors? is it the TV?

Did popular culture bring us here – … Ellen Degeneres and popular sitcoms like ABC’s “Modern Family”? Or is our liberalized attitude just a cumulative effect of the straight community having more contact with “out” gay couples who, like them, just strive to form loving families and raise well-adjusted kids?

I have a different take. Opinions changed on marriage because marriage didn’t change anything.

the weather in Sodom: maybe we should move the wedding inside

For all the apocalypse predicted when Massachusetts went off the deep end into Gomorrah in 2004, the impact of eight states opening civil marriage to same-sex couples has been pretty much nonexistent. For the couples themselves — those who availed themselves of the opportunity — it’s been nice enough, primarily in terms of symbolic recognition (all at the local level; federal rights, which include immigration and income-tax benefits, of course are still debarred.) But nobody else has been inconvenienced in the slightest. Nobody else’s marriage was devalued or changed in any way. Most people didn’t even notice. Of course, Pat Robertson and preacherdom can fulminate that brimstone impends: “In history there’s never been a civilization ever in history [sic] that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived.” But eight years after avenging fires should have crisped us, the polity continues as if nothing had happened at all.

If you believe, as many people now do, that marriage is the end point and goal of LGBT people’s liberation struggles, this is all remarkable. How many revolutions have succeeded by changing nothing? When in history has a people been granted rights long denied them, and left everybody else completely undisturbed? America is still grappling with the massive consequences and implications of African-Americans’ sixty year-old civil rights movement, even if it remained unfinished. Europe’s emancipation of the Jews in the nineteenth century still has echoes, heard alike in debates about the conduct of Israel and the identity of France. Most contemporary social movements — the ones the French call the révolution des sans – are defined by people wanting something others have. The sans papiers, the immigrants, want to break the borders; the sans emploi want jobs and benefits; the sans abri, housing. The enthusiasm and the resistance they rouse both reside in the struggle to wrest those things away from their accumulators, to redistribute possessions and prepositions, to turn “without” into a “with.” Is the movement of the sans épouses distinctive in that it doesn’t ask anybody to bother?

really a very simple request

You could argue that this means the gay movement’s inner meaning really is conservative, as Sullivan argues. If marriage is its core issue, then the movement has no positive demands to make on government, for benefits or protections. It just wants a little recognition; then leave it alone. It’s a very good movement, modest in its aspirations and quiet in its manner, leaving the peace unbreached and the indifferent untroubled. David Link writes, “However we get to marriage equality, I’m going to view that as the end of the line. I don’t want the government discriminating against me, and once it doesn’t, my activist days will be over.” But he adds:

The left expects more of government. In addition to not discriminating itself, the left believes government should also act to prohibit others from discriminating, and should do a lot more as well.

And beyond that, there was an old left dream of social transformation as well: an idea, often slipping toward the Utopian, that individual lives and their interconnections could be radically renewed. And should be. Changez la vie! Sous les pavés, la plage. And more.

I don’t think Link quite gets what the movement has really done.

My belief is: the sheer innocuousness of the success of marriage doesn’t mean the LGBT movement itself is innocuous. It means that the historic meaning, the larger impact, of the LGBT movement lies quite elsewhere. There is a radical change, partly accomplished and partly still to be fulfilled, that marriage misses. It’s not that marriage is an unimportant goal; but it is only achievable when the deeper, the more lasting and far-reaching challenges to reality as it was given us have been launched and felt. Some historian a century from now, I’d guess, would see the real effects of the movement not in wedding vows but in the widespread acceptance of a radical claim to everybody’s sexual freedom and bodily autonomy; the insistent assertion that customarily “private” acts have public and political relevance; the tectonic shifts in gender roles and the way they’re understood. When we — by we I meant the movement, or the movements — talk about marriage as our political terminus ad quem, we are a bit like Ulrich in The Man Without Qualities, contemplating courses that are perfectly plausible but somehow not quite authentic, not his life’s meaning, not himself. “But whatever destiny awaited him, he knew it must be something entirely different.”

N.B. For a collection of skeptical writings about same-sex marriage and US politics, see the resources here.

Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (1)

Posted on 15 April 2012 by scottlong1980

Still hazy after all these years

This is Part 1 of a three-part post

Missed connections; or, how not to find lesbians

Here’s some of what a friend of mine, an Egyptian lesbian, 33 and butch, told me about days and nights during the Revolution in Midan Tahrir, where she put her life on the line.

We felt the presence of women, very strongly — and the presence of queer people very, very strongly, on the front lines, at essential moments. How amazing it was when people were just dealing, without judging. On February 2, the Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] were there, and in a couple of hours they organized an assembly line to break the stones, to carry them to the front lines, with water and food supplies — they organized a hospital. I was with the shock troops, in the front line. … We needed to frighten the other side, so they would think that we were stronger than they’d thought. They had guns, Molotov cocktails. We were fighting them with sand and rocks. I was up there wearing a hood, to protect me, and you couldn’t tell if I was male or female. There was this Salafi near me, and he kept eye contact. He came down to me, to give me water. He said, I’ll take you further up, to the real front, the most dangerous zone. Just keep me in your line of vision, we can support each other.

I stayed there for hours, with eye contact with this man, on the line—and in the end I was positive that he realized I was a female. And he helped me stay there. …

It was moving for me, later, when I got to know about other protests in the global North inspired by Egypt. I’m not into this kind of petty nationalism—I believe in human rights. But I am tired of being told: you are a second class individual, because you’re from the global South. You’re third class, because you are female. You are fourth class, because you are lesbian. Suddenly we are at the center of the world. And suddenly we know that we can do it.

After the Revolution, Human Rights Watch, like other rights groups, sent hordes of workers to Cairo to interview Important People and figure out what had happened. One was Minky Worden, a colleague of mine, who’s editor of HRW’s spanking new anthology, “The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women’s Rights.” I doubt they found my friend, a grassroots activist, Important enough to spend time on; zero of her passion or vision animates the book. The volume claims to be a comprehensive picture of “the recent history of legal and political battles to secure basic rights for women and girls”; it banners a rah-rah quote from Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee: “Women are not free anywhere in the world until all women in the world are free.” Well: some women. In 332 pages, the book doesn’t contain even one substantive mention of lesbian or bisexual women, their struggles, or their human rights.* Talk about being fourth class.

Ugandan demonstrator in New York, 2011

It’s 2012, and this should not happen. It’s shocking on many grounds. You can’t describe the international women’s movement in the 20th and 21st centuries without describing lesbian and bisexual women. They’ve been there at every juncture — as Charlotte Bunch and Claudia Hinojosa, for instance, have shown in documenting just one part of this rich history, lesbians’ activism at the UN. (Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes a lioness’ share in its creation to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was, by modern biographers’ estimation, bisexual.) These fighters, like my friend, have stayed on the front lines: they’ve helped keep feminist movements conscious of difference and honest about the raw realities of sexuality. If they’ve been a target for violent attacks on feminism — more reason for HRW to acknowledge their importance! — they’ve also been among its boldest thinkers as well as bravest defenders.

I won’t even obsess here over the volume’s complete silence about the massive rights violations against transgender women and men — or its indifference to trans activists’ amazing successes at encoding progressive conceptions of gender in national laws. Some things no longer surprise me. But as a former Watcher, I do wonder what HRW was thinking, or failing to think. There are only a few possible interpretations of its perspective:

There are no serious human rights violations against lesbian or bisexual women.
Lesbians are not women.
Lesbians are not human.

It would be interesting to know which of these reflects HRW’s current official position.

Lesbians are real women, and sometimes it bears repeating: Dyke March in Soweto, 2007, © Behind the Mask

Of course, I started the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, almost nine years ago. We did a slew of reporting on lesbian, and bisexual, and transgender women, and trans men. We hired the first-ever researcher at a a major human rights organization to work primarily on lesbian issues. One therefore feels particular disillusion that all this hasn’t filtered into the organization’s understanding of women’s rights. It’s tempting to mutter, with the grandpaternal gruffness of encroaching senility, that this omission wouldn’t happen if I were around. Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa consule Planco: feed that to your Babelfish. But that’s absurd. The silence speaks to deeper structural problems as pressing during my tenure as they are today. It illuminates at least three things:

how a large organization like Human Rights Watch fails to foster conceptual or practical connections within its work;
how lingering insecurities about sex (especially visible around sex work) keep it from accepting sexual autonomy as a fundamental value;
and how human autonomy itself remains a problematic principle for institutions across the rights-defending business.

Let’s start with the first.

I’ve pretty much spent twenty years trying to mainstream sexuality within the work of human rights. We rolled back many prejudices at Human RIghts Watch; but barriers in attitude persist. Three, hardly confined to the organization, remain relevant here:

Demonstrator in Windhoek, Namibia, 2001

Sexuality is not respectable. You may have a right to exercise it, but don’t expect me to bring it up in decent conversation. One sees this in the diehard reluctance of human rights researchers to raise the matter in their colloquies with “mainstream” partner organizations. I can easily imagine Minky thinking you can’t really promote the positions of lesbians (or, God forbid, pr-st-t-tes!) in a volume with a contribution by one Nobel winner (Shirin Ebadi) and a blurb by another (Gbowee). Never mind recent events in Liberia, which suggest Gbowee may not need a reminder that sexuality is always politically central. Sometimes they grasp these things better in Freetown than in New York.

Sexuality isn’t that important. Here what I’ve often called the “humanitarianization of human rights” kicks in: in an era of massive humanitarian catastrophes, cases seemingly on the scale of individuals shrivel in significance next to the gargantuan, aggregate anonymity of a Rwanda, a Darfur, a Sri Lanka. Without a queue of zeroes trailing the numbered victims, a situation can’t merit the diligence of crisis. Of course, if you tabulate the women and men jailed every day under (for example) anti-prostitution laws, many tortured or raped as a direct result, the zeroes start to accumulate, and the crisis becomes real. More below. But it’s still hard to persuade rights institutions of the simple, obvious fact that asserting one’s sexual autonomy is one of the major triggers for abuses worldwide.

Sexuality is private. It’s something you only do (legally) behind closed doors, and it can’t possibly be implicated in grand public events like revolutions. This is a delusion sustained by never talking to revolutionaries about why they were really there. Suffice it to remember Audre Lorde, who wrote that

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. …

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag … Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

This goes without saying

All three presumptions, however diminished at Human RIghts Watch, still haven’t gone away. Moreover, the organization’s structure reinforces them. For the uninitiated, the group (typical of large rights institutions) is proudly centered on its regional divisions, dealing mainly with “mainstream” issues on the several continents. Then there are a range of thematic divisions — LGBT, women, health, business, and others. The latter are small, generally underfunded (during the seven years I was there, the LGBT program never got access to Human RIghts Watch’s general support money), and distinctly understaffed. In order to do the work they need to do, they must depend on other divisions’ cooperation: not only to propose press releases or take on reporting on their own, but to assume the yeoman labor of talking to groups that represent thematic interests, not just “mainstream” ones, in their areas.

Connections: sign from a lesbian feminist march, June 30, 2011, Aguascalientes, Mexico

My staff worked extremely hard to sell sexuality issues to other divisions as, well, sexy. Yet overcoming the three attitudes above was a challenge. Ordinary practice and accumulated prejudices whispered to an ambitious researcher that an interest in LGBT issues would not, in the long run, embellish one’s career. What was needed and not forthcoming was a clear mandate from the group’s governance: a message that thematic issues were not poor stepkids, a child among the ashes doing work ancillary to the great stream of human rights, but were intrinsic to its current and core — and the organization’s “mainstream” sectors had to take them up.

Habit is a great deadener: so Beckett said. In 2009, someone in the organization’s program office analyzed which thematic division’s concerns were most or least taken up by other parts of the organization in their work. Not surprisingly, LGBT issues came out near the bottom. The program office (responsible for overseeing all the programmatic work) attended on me with a guilty hangdog-Hamlet look, saying This was an organizational failing and was there anything they could do? I had plenty of suggestions, starting with a general instruction from the leadership that each relevant division propose at least one project on LGBT rights. But the conversation faded at the crowing of the cock, as Shakespeare wrote in a famous play about a Denmark where nothing quite gets done.

The wrong kind of activists: LGBT rights demo in Beirut, 2009 (Photo: Alexandra Sandels)

This anthology is the result. Minky — the book’s editor, and, as I say, a colleague whose work I generally respect — writes how in April 2011 she spent her time in Egypt “interviewing human rights activists, women’s rights activists, and organizers of the Tahrir Square protests.” Now, I don’t know all the questions she asked, but I’m 99% sure some never occurred to her: “Do you know any lesbians? Were there any lesbian women in Tahrir? What were sexuality’s roles in the revolution?” The third would have gotten plenty of interesting responses. The other two, asked of most people, would have led ultimately to my friend, and to quite a few other women whose stories would have been compelling. But moral hesitation, or a monolithic category of “women” that foreclosed any subdivisions, or some other internal censorship kept the idea, I’m betting, from transiting her mind. And as a result, she never learned. The problem at Human Rights Watch is that the information to establish the urgency of the issues doesn’t arrive in sufficient quantities, because the questions don’t get asked across the organization. So the organization still doesn’t learn.

Part 2 continues below.

*The word “lesbian” occurs exactly twice in the book, both in an article by Gara Lamarche, HRW’s former Associate Director. One instance refers to his efforts in 1994 to expand “Human Rights Watch’s mandate to include lesbian and gay issues” — which the rest of the book might leave you supposing hadn’t succeeded. The other mentions Atlantic Philanthropies’ funding in South Africa “to address gender-based abuse and hate crimes against lesbians.”

CORRECTION: I’m reliably told the demonstration against Ugandan legislation shown above was in London, not New York.

Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (2)

Posted on 15 April 2012 by scottlong1980

This is part 2 of a three-part post. Part 1 is above.

It's still the same old sex panic: cover of "Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls," 1910 book on white slavery by Ernest Bell

The traffic in ”trafficking”: or, Nicholas Kristof rescues Nicole Kidman from a Paris brothel

Inhibitions over sex lead to a more encompassing problem: failure to acknowledge sexual autonomy as a guiding principle, as an integral concern of both feminist activism and human rights.

My first work with Human Rights Watch dates back to 1997, when, as a director at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), I researched and wrote a joint volume our two groups did on Romania’s sodomy law. It was HRW’s first full report on LGBT rights. At the book’s close, I included recommendations for Romania to repeal other laws repressing sexual rights, taking for granted that the analogies were evident. One was the criminalization of adultery. The legal reviewer at the Watch wrote in large letters on my draft: “Human Rights Watch takes no position on adultery, nor is it likely to.”

In ensuing years, I often felt this should be carved in stone above the reception desk, rather like “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” If you substitute consistency for hope, in fact, the two sentences say the same thing.

Why would you frown on jailing men for boffing men, but gaze benignly on the clink for those who copulate outside marriage? The answer had to do with a jittery reluctance to put sex at the center of one’s thinking about sex laws. It was easy to condemn sodomy laws as offending the equality, or the privacy, of gay people as a group. It was less easy to admit the provisions struck, much more basically, at an individual’s power to put her equality or privacy to one particular use: to have sex, consensual sex with adults, in a way the state didn’t like. Sodomy laws aren’t about equality or privacy, though they infringe them. They’re about sex. To campaign against them means taking on that fact, and affirming the right to have sex. A queasy uneasiness made this analysis difficult for the Watch; defending abstractions is one thing, but defending sex itself? This fed its fidgets over rogue, rutting individuals breaching the marriage bond. They weren’t even part of a self-defined group, Wedlock Warriors or Adulterers Anonymous, so what equality argument could possibly fix a distracting fig leaf over the ungarnished act?

Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (Lucas Cranach the Younger): If it's all right with Human Rights Watch, it's all right with me

The result was that, for years, while advocating for women who faced stoning for adulterous sex in Nigeria (for example), Human Rights Watch wouldn’t condemn the law itself: it would only say the penalty was disproportionate. I take partial credit for the organization’s finally assuming a position on adultery. A few days after I was hired as LGBT rights director, I pointed out the Nigerian absurdity to Ken Roth; and some time after, an invisible ukase saw the website language on stoning change.

Yet the same inconsistencies persist in other areas.

Think sex work, a realm where women (and men, and transfolk) around the world face brutal repression from governments, with no protection from violence in other quarters. HRW has done truly vital work documenting state persecution of sex workers: mostly through its Health and Human Rights Division, with some small contributions from my old LGBT program. But its full impact is stymied by HRW’s inability to arrive at a coherent policy on the criminal-law regimes repressing sex work. It can’t bring itself to say: Decriminalize.

One sign of the problems this causes is the presence of an article by Mark P. Lagon in HRW’s new anthology. What the hell is he doing there?

Probably you haven’t heard of Lagon. My own first encounter with him, back in 2006, was when he served as chief defender of one of the Bush administration’s most homophobic UN votes. This renders it doubly offensive to find him published in the book: not only does HRW’s anthology completely ignore LGBT people, it invites their opponents under its covers. (I’m sure the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which he falsely accused of pedophilia, will not be charmed to see HRW embrace him.)

Who is that strange man? Mark Lagon, eyed by suspicious child, presents 2007 US State Department report on trafficking

Lagon brings bigger baggage than that to the assignation, though. In his last Bush gig, from from 2007-2009, he headed the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. This put him in charge of some of the worst policies the W. presidency carried out anywhere other than New Orleans and Iraq. Ann Jordan, an authentic expert on trafficking – she advocated against all its forms for years at Global Rights, before heading the Program on Human Trafficking and Forced Labor at American University – writes:

[T]he Bush administration, supported by the evangelical right-wing and some radical feminists, spent eight years promoting laws to criminalize prostitution and clients as the means to abolish prostitution and stop human trafficking into the sex sector. The ideology-driven approach is notable for the absence of any concrete evidence that it works. Proponents of such an approach have also failed to demonstrate that it avoids harming women or provides other livelihoods for those it aspires to help. It reduces all adults in the sex sector (even highly paid “call girls” and those working legally) to victim status and considers all prostitution to be a form of trafficking.

After leaving government, Lagon steered the Polaris Project, a right wing anti-trafficking group. SWAAY (Sex Work Activists, Allies and You) calls it an organization “fighting against improving conditions for sex workers, especially in the developing world.” And in the global North too: Lagon has led anti-free-expression campaigns to censor sex ads from Craigslist and other venues. Although he talks a pseudofeminist line from time to time, little about Lagon’s positions suggests sustained concern for women’s rights – or well-being. (As I’ve observed here, closing down sex ads eliminates one of the safest ways for sex workers to select clients. It puts them in danger by driving them onto the streets.)

From the perspective of those who value sexual autonomy and sexual rights, Lagon’s views are destructive and appalling. He’s a militant proponent of using the punitive extent of the criminal law to eradicate consensual commercial sex between adults. He piously descants of freedom, while demolishing the freedoms of others.

Banner from the late $pread magazine, a US mag produced by sex workers for sex workers and others who support their human rights

In government, Lagon did shift State’s attention slightly from a single-issue focus on sex trafficking toward addressing forced labor. But he avidly promoted, and still promotes, the Bush coterie’s main moralistic point: that all prostitution is exploitation, that sex work and sex trafficking are the same thing. As the administration helpfully explained in a ”fact sheet“:

The U.S. Government adopted a strong position against legalized prostitution in a December 2002 National Security Presidential Directive based on evidence that prostitution is inherently harmful and dehumanizing … Few activities are as brutal and damaging to people as prostitution.

When an embarrassed Obama administration tried to back off slightly from this weird dictum, Lagon damned them in testimony before Congress. “Emphasizing that prostitution is not trafficking,” he told lawmakers, “is counterproductive.” What a cynic! He doesn’t say it’s not true: just not productive. Acknowledging that sex work can be freely chosen undermines his “abolitionist” goal, to hawk its unattainable utter eradication.

Lagon’s article for HRW says little that’s specific. It shares with most eradicationist arguments a deictic indifference to evidence, the equal of Ring Lardner’s immortal sentence: “’Shut up,’ he explained.” His main point is to paint the trafficked –or the “prostituted,” which is how he refers to sex workers in his other writings – as pure creatures of the passive voice, victims skinned of volition and humanity. (In the past, after all, Lagon has said that sex workers lead “nasty, immoral” lives for which they can’t be found “culpable” only because they don’t have the choice.)** Usually this kind of vague allegation-mongering wouldn’t make its way through HRW’s editing process. (The editors seem to have collapsed before the intransigent problem of Lagon’s prose, unable to correct either dangling participles or his false claim that Karl Polanyi was a Marxist.)

It’s impossible, though, not to notice three key things Lagon leaves out: He never defines trafficking. In his one stab at explaining it, he simply says, “Human trafficking is indeed about people being turned into commodities.” Of course, he sees sex as central:

Moreover when those ‘commodities’ are girls or women who are sold for their bodies’ sexual consumption, left, right, and center can agree this is an acute violation … At its heart, human trafficking involves groups of people being consigned to less-than-human or non-person status.

I loves me some hot commodity fetishism on a Saturday night

This defines nothing. It could be (and has been) said of any form of commodified labor in a capitalist society. Mark, go read Marx, or Mrs. Warren’s Profession! But it’s a bastard crib of socialism or Shaw, and it’s insidiously corrosive. No credible economist would so deliberately obscure how both trafficking and stigmatized work really work. Ann Jordan writes of the similar rhetoric of Siddharth Kara, a widely-read eradicationist and “poverty tourist”:

The most seriously flawed assumption he makes is to equate human beings — trafficked persons and sex workers — with commodities. His economic model treats women as passive objects that are pushed and pulled by exploiters using forced labor to lower costs to meet demand, and ignores the poverty, discrimination, and violence that compel women to make risky decisions. Adults who make rational choices from among limited options are actors who don’t fit a neat supply/demand economic model, and so they are factored out of the equation in order to situate trafficking as a commodity business.

Such broadbrush simplification is routine in sex work debates. Brandishing the “trafficking” term as a synecdoche for horror drives off serious thought. Fiona David, of the Australian Institute of Criminology, finds this rooted both in racism and in history:

[M]uch of the discussion today reflects and reinforces outdated stereotypes of Asian (or other developing world) women as passive, helpless victims, in need of rescue, thereby ignoring the reality of the difficult choices that these women might have made. I will note that present approaches to the issue strongly reflect the approaches that were taken to the issue in the nineteenth century, when European migrant sex workers were said to be victims of the “white slave trade.” Now, as then, interested organisations and the media are relying on what is really a “myth” of trafficking – a simplistic explanation for a messy and complex reality.

And the brilliant Gayle Rubin shows how views like Lagon’s draw on older, visceral fears about migration, race, and morals. “The constant conflation of trafficking and prostitution is neither accidental nor new. In fact, these contemporary confusions derive from the discourse about trafficking that emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.” The age of the anxieties doesn’t at all detract from the present fact that forced labor happens, in many forms. Yet it means we must analyze both presumed causes and proffered answers, to sort out superannuated prejudices from real solutions.

Panic comes in both waves and articles: Graphic shows use of terms "white slave traffic," "traffic in women and children," and "human trafficking" in publications 1890-2008. Note how with the Bush ascendancy (and passage of a US "anti-trafficking" law) in 2000, the latter goes off the charts. Hat tip for the idea to Edwired.org

Lagon also omits any reliable figures about the size of the problem. This imprecision is epidemic in the trafficking panic. Ronald Weitzer, a sociologist who has studied sex work extensively in many countries, writes,

Interest groups, the media, and the U.S. government have given very high estimates of the number of persons trafficked each year into the sex industry or other labor arenas. In some instances, the numbers appear to be pulled out of thin air, as in a Washington Post editorial … declaring that “trafficking is understood today as a global phenomenon exceeding 20 million cases each year.” [emphasis added]

The US government’s figures for trafficking victims globally (including trafficking within national borders) oscillated wildly, between “2 to 4 million” in 2006 and more than 12 million four years later. No real evidence backs either number. In 2006, when the government tossed around a “600,000 – 800,000″ figure for worldwide trafficking across borders, its own internal watchdog, the General Accounting Office, studied the issue and found

such estimates of global human trafficking are questionable. The accuracy of the estimates is in doubt because of methodological weaknesses, gaps in data, and numerical discrepancies. For example, the U.S. government’s estimate was developed by one person who did not document all his work, so the estimate may not be replicable, casting doubt on its reliability. Moreover, country data are not available, reliable, or comparable. There is also a considerable discrepancy between the numbers of observed and estimated victims of human trafficking.

1913 US film about "white slavery"

That last difference, between the numbers bandied around and those actually counted, is especially disturbing. Look at the State Department’s 2010 estimates again: 12.3 miliion allegedly trafficked around the world. And how many concrete “victims identified” among those? 49,105.

Get out your calculator. That means only four-tenths of one percent of the people supposedly trafficked, from that heady 12m number, were actually identified as such. By State’s alarmist reckoning, this shows a failure of services. But what if it’s a failure of the math? What kind of insane statistician observes x number of victims, then “estimates” the total by multiplying this by 250? Surely many trafficked people are invisible to law enforcement. But 99.6% of them? It’s not just a matter of the tip of the iceberg we’re talking here. The anti-trafficking paranoiacs think like drunken sailors who infer an abysmal berg from a snowflake melting in the waves.

No one would claim the unreliable numbers mean trafficking is insignificant. They do mean, though, that we need investigations first, not intemperate persecution. Yet Lagon’s métier is neither facts nor figures. It runs rather, as with other sex eradicationists, to rhetoric and morals. Tellingly, the blog of Lagon’s Polaris Project seems to have abandoned trying to find any individual sex-trafficking victims at all. It’s turned to identifying fictional characters who may have been trafficked without the viewer’s knowing. These include Nicole Kidman’s role in Moulin Rouge (Nick Kristof, raid that movie now!), Verdi’s Aida, and Bizet’s tempestuous temptress. The blog says:

The character Carmen is a joy to sing because she is active and aggressive where so many female characters in opera are passive and abused. But even with this, Carmen had many other ways to express her sexuality without taking money for it. Perhaps she sold sex because she had to. We as a society need to decide if we should force anyone into that position.

This concludes our 10 week series of posts on human trafficking in musical theater.

You cannot make this nonsense up.

Rare scenes of enslaved sopranos from an Andalusian brothel

Weitzer summarizes:

We are left with a set of farfetched claims about trafficking, claims that hardly lend themselves to evidence-based policy-making. The available evidence does not allow us to draw any conclusions about the magnitude of the problem. There are no reliable statistics on trafficking in any one nation, let alone worldwide. Even ballpark estimates are guesswork, given the clandestine nature of the sex trade. But precisely because the asserted numbers, trends, and proceeds cannot be verified, they can easily gain a life of their own and a veneer of credibility when repeatedly cited by the media and in government reports. And such grandiose claims certainly have shock value.

Alas, the vaunting claims and the plausible veneer are how Lagon makes his living. Armored in moral nostrums, armed with ersatz estimates and a manufactured aura of emergency, the brave protector of Carmen from the pimps is able to convince Human Rights Watch he has serious things to say about women’s liberation. Again, though, anybody can see his third omission: he has nothing workable to propose.

Lagon says his approach is “idealist,” not “materialist,” in solidarity with the old Bushite core constituency: the ideology-based rather than reality-based community. “It is true,” he admits to HRW grudgingly, “that the root cause of trafficking is poverty,” and

This materialist premise leads to the conclusion that fighting poverty broadly and creating economic opportunities is the solution … But we cannot just wait for the end of poverty. We need to act now and address the ideas that reduce women to second-class citizens … Of course, changing perspectives and cultures is enormously hard. [emphasis added]

This sounds cool. “Addressing ideas” is both a really long-term project – no irritating quarterly reports required — and cheap. We won’t be raising taxes on the 1% here! But it doesn’t feed anybody. For people who have actually been trafficked (and people who chose domestic work or sex work but want a job that will let them leave), neglecting the material conditions that made them vulnerable is a map of failure.

The Bush administration liked failure. That was one thing it was good at! Reporting on the “crusade against sex trafficking” for the Nation, Noy Thrupkaew tells of a USAID-supported Philippine NGO that, over two decades, “developed a rigorously holistic program for children in the commercial sex industry. It reaches out on all fronts–offering the families and children comprehensive psychosocial counseling, livelihood initiatives, microloans and tutoring and vocational training.” Their programs showed a high success rate compared to evangelical Christian projects. But why encourage “materialism”? Bush defunded them. Thanks, Mark.

WARNING: THIS MAN WILL ATTEMPT TO BUY SEX FROM YOU. Direct him to IKEA at once.

In truth, Lagon aspires not to change minds but chain bodies. He falls back on the criminal law, that bluntest of instruments. His concrete call here and elsewhere is to criminalize demand, a project commonly named the “Swedish model” (not to be confused with “Stockholm syndrome,” though it reflects a similar confusion between captivity and freedom). This simply shifts state repression of sex from worker to customer (and everyone else around her). Laura Augustin, an anthropologist and expert on sex work who lives in Sweden, finds this “naïve” policy founded on a fantasy

that without a demand for commercial sex there will be no supply, ignoring the complicated ways sex-money markets work in cultures with different concepts of family and love, reducing a wide range of sexual activities to an abstract notion of violence and brushing aside the many people who confirm that they prefer selling sex to their other livelihood options.

It won’t end sex work; it’ll ensure it’s all underground. Two Swedish researchers discover no tangible decrease in commercial sex since the model strictures against clients took force. “The general estimate … is that sex workers have begun using other means [than public spaces] to find clients, and vice versa.” Meanwhile,

The most common and perhaps most serious complaint [from] sex workers themselves is that they experienced an increased stigmatization after the introduction of the Sex Purchase Act. … Sex workers object to the fact that they were not consulted in the making of the law. Since sex workers feel they are not able to influence their legal or societal situation, they feel powerless. And since the ban builds on the idea that women who sell sex are victims, weak and exploited, many claim that the law propagates stereotypical notions.

As Ann Jordan concludes, but Lagon implicitly denies, “To develop effective, evidence-based, do-no-harm policies, advocates and policy makers must work collaboratively with persons who may be helped or harmed by the proposed laws and policies.”

My body is my business: sex workers and their allies march for decriminalization in Nairobi, Kenya, March 6, 2012. For more images (and facts!) see http://africansexworkeralliance.org/

This leads to the question: Who most publicly treats women as commodities bereft of will? Answer: Eradicationist campaigners, who refuse to ask them what they want. Eradicationist videos rarely allow sex workers to speak. The women, Agustin comments, “are left in the background and treated like objects.” SWAAY says of Lagon’s last org, “By treating all sex workers as passive victims who can’t be allowed to make their own decisions, Polaris dehumanizes and objectifies us to serve their own conservative goals.”

Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch’s lack of a policy on the criminal penalties for sex work also leaves it lacking an “effective, evidence-based, do-no-harm” principle to inform its interventions. This makes it intellectually vulnerable to a doubtful character like Lagon trafficking its good name. But there are worse consequences. The silence damages a highly competent organization’s ability to achieve all it needs to in the field. There is no good reason to equivocate in defending people’s autonomy. But absent recognizing that criminal penalties for consensual sex are wrong, the group is left fatally hesitant about who its allies are and what it can demand abusive governments do.

Some years back, after speaking to sex worker activists in Cambodia, researchers urged a report on the devastating impact of a new anti-trafficking law passed there (at the Bush administration’s behest). Comments by HRW’s legal office on the preliminary proposal show how leery the leadership can be over suggestions that sex workers should own their sexualities:

We are not taking a position that sex work should be legal, and we have to be careful not to cross that line. We can make clear that sex workers have rights – just as undocumented workers have rights –that must be protected, and which enforcement of the law against those involved in abuse, exploitation etc should not trample on etc. – but we are not advocates for establishing a sex industry. …

Regarding the legal framework, the report is going to have to try hard to position itself as anti-trafficking and at least neutral on prostitution per se in order to have impact. The goals should be focused around how to better prevent trafficking, and not how to protect prostitutes from the law. …

We [should] challenge the basis of detentions of sex workers as not complying with international human rights standards on detention, not on the basis that they should not be arrested simply for sex work. …

Banners at a 2008 "Day of Action" in Phnom Penh, organized by Womyn's Agenda for Change and Women's Network for Unity (WNU). WNU, a Cambodian sex worker union, has over 5,000 members. © Heidi Hoefinger

Even looking down from the high balcony of years, I am still embarrassed by the reluctance to “protect prostitutes from the law.” The law is what they usually need protecting from. I’d just note one thing here. None of us ever asked HRW to be “advocates for establishing a sex industry.” A sex industry is established in every country, thank you, and it will flourish whether the Watch wishes or no. The line, with its nervous exaggeration, doesn’t reflect legal reason. It’s the language of fear: fear of the slippery slope and the corrupting precedent, fear of sex, fear that if you support the basic rights of sex workers to deploy their bodies you will find strip clubs under your desk by morning and a brothel in your refrigerator next week. Laura Agustin cites the arguments the state made in fighting Canada’s recent court decision commanding regard for sex workers’ rights. Decriminalization, lawyers claimed, would carry “irreparable harms to the public interest,” “more drug trafficking, violence, garbage, noise and traffic from johns,” rampant red-lightery, police “powerless to protect residents in vulnerable neighbourhoods.” In other words, Agustin says, “they are afraid of Change. They are fantasizing all the scary things that could happen, but they cannot provide any evidence that they will happen.” Similar anxieties inflect Human Rights Watch’s inability to come up with a policy respecting sex workers’ sexual rights.

The resulting report on Cambodia was a disastrous mess, one that alienated sex worker activists across Asia. Although focused on the anti-trafficking law, it couldn’t manage to condemn its key provisions. Andrew Hunter, of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers, has declared on this blog:

The recommendations are shockingly inadequate, and internal arguments over them delayed the whole report until it was really too late for it to be of any use at all. We argue[d] and argued about recognizing sex workers’ right to livelihood, but to no avail.

The same reticence and insecurity will continue to erode HRW’s relationships with sex worker activists.

Sex workers in a small town in Maharashtra, India, march for their human rights , March 3, 2012

Indeed, The Unfinished Revolution shows a suspicious inability to recognize that sex workers can be activists for themselves. Consider this misleading sentence from its introduction:

Meena Seshu, the founder of the Indian non-governmental organization Sampada Gramin Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM) is an example of a human rights defender who has used education in her organization’s efforts to prevent HIV/AIDS in the provinces of Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, particularly among sex workers who have a relatively high risk of contracting the disease.

I know Meena – even before she was an HRW awardee in 2004 – and this picture of the rights defender as elevated educator-from-on-high couldn’t be less accurate in SANGRAM’s case. The landmark NGO’s focus is empowering sex workers to protect their rights as sex workers, as well as beyond sex work. SANGRAM and groups that grew out of it (such as Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad or VAMP, the Prostitutes’ Collective Against Injustice) helped start a wave of sex worker activism sweeping South Asia, with politicized prostitutes demanding decriminalization, legal protections, and workers’ rights. To watch a coven of empowered Indian sex workers slap down earnest white people who imagine they know better, check out this fierce VAMP video – in answer to a Western film that falsely claimed they were trafficked and coerced:

Message to HRW: Don’t mess with these folks.

It’s sad that a book like this fails to applaud these heroes and furnish them a platform. By contrast, when The Unfinished Revolution addresses the exploitation of female domestic labor, the chapter stresses domestic workers’ struggles for their own rights. But when it comes to sex workers’ activism, the anthology is silent. Instead, if sex is at issue, it falls back on tired, imperially tainted fantasies of victimhood and Western intervention. The book claims sex workers are deprived of agency; but it does the depriving itself.

Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (3)

Posted on 15 April 2012 by scottlong1980

This is part 3 of a three-part post. Parts 1 and 2 are above.

Campaign poster for Proposition K, a 2008 initiative to decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco, US

Professionally, we prefer victims: or, the rescue trap

Does human rights – the Western human rights movement – respect human autonomy?

I don’t just mean “sexual autonomy” now. I mean autonomy that encompasses and goes beyond that, the power of everyone to speak for themselves, represent themselves, be the selves or unselves they desire.

What a silly question. Of course! That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

And yet.

Other people ask the questions better than me. Teju Cole, for instance, countered the save-Africa panic churned up by the Kony 2012 viral video by naming and shaming the “White Savior Industrial Complex” and its attentions to the continent. He doesn’t single out the human rights industry, but it’s implicit in the way he describes social movements doing it for themselves:

One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. … [A] nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. …

… How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I’ve seen many) about how “we have to save them because they can’t save themselves” can’t change that fact.

Let me draw into this discussion an example from an African country I know very well. Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country’s streets to protest the government’s decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. … But what made these protests so heartening is that they were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the world and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. …

This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video about. … There is certainly no “bridge character,” [Nicholas] Kristof’s euphemism for white saviors in Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of Nigeria’s protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right; they marched peacefully; they defended each other, and gave each other food and drink; Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed and vice-versa; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of country they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American 20-something heroes in sight.

Women in fuel protest, Lagos, Nigeria, January 2012 (Photo: AP/Sunday Alamba)

It’s interesting how often Nick Kristof serves as symbolic figure for folks who want to critique the white savior complex. But he sets himself up for it. His telegenic stunt activism – live-tweeting his raid on a brothel to “rescue” women, congratulating himself on his flirtations with peril, all with a cool eye on divine Reputation and its Valkyrie paparazzi – lays out a seductive pattern for the type. (He comes up for approving mention in The Unfinished Revolution too.) Laura Agustin, as always, is incisive:

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 miserable 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. …

Like many unreflective father figures, Kristof sees himself as fully benevolent. Claiming to give voice to the voiceless, he does not actually let them speak.

Instead, as we say nowadays, it’s all about Kristof: his experience, terror, angst, confusion, desire. Did anyone rescued in his recent brothel raid want to be saved like that, with the consequences that came afterwards, whatever they were? That is what we do not know and will not find out from Kristof.

Placard from sex workers' human rights march, March 2012, Cape Town, South Africa

The temptations of this kind of self-aggrandizing self-delusion are all the stronger in international human rights work, which carries both the armor of moral impeccability and the obligation of representation. Its job is carrying stories across borders; it takes on representing people in absentia, a strange, dangerous task. Who’d be surprised if, in the process, its practitioners begin to acquire a creeping indifference to the wills and voices of those they represent?

Human Rights Watch is not overcome by those impulses, but it’s certainly not immune either. It used to say, in its self-descriptions, that it provided a “voice for the voiceless.” This phrase, so malignly common among those who work and talk across borders, neglected the fact that the movements and activists and even victims it supported usually had plenty of decibels at their disposal, and could scream with the best of them; it was just that the West preferred not to listen. But if you say that about yourself enough, you start acting that way, around the edges.

The effects showed when, for years, rights activists who were recipients of HRW’s prestigious annual award – articulate spokesmen at home — arrived in the US, only to be handed the speech the organization had written for them. They showed in a film screened at one of the Human Rights Watch gala annual dinners, full to the gills with gazillionaires: a very nice production about the organization’s work in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The problem was that, as the minutes wore on, you realized not a single person from the DRC was speaking. You saw them them in footage, interviewed by an HRW researcher, who diligently took notes; but the soundtrack and the voiceovers drowned them out. The organization did’t think them relevant: They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Instead, HRW talked to itself about its own efforts in the DRC. It felt like a cross between Heart of Darkness and Krapp’s Last Tape.

Oh, Krapp

Some shows up in The Unfinished Revolution, as well. Although it calls itself “Voices from the Global Fight for Women’s Rights,” two thirds of the book’s chapters are by present or former HRW staff. And with two articles on Afghanistan, you’d think an actual Afghan could have been found to write perhaps one. It’s hard not to read in this an unconscious confidence that the organization knows best about the world and its countries, better than the countries’ citizens do. As the old Oxford doggerel went:

First come I. My name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am master of this college;
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

For far too long information in the international human rights movement has flowed from periphery to center, from Congo and Cairo and Buenos Aires and Bangladesh to London, Geneva, New York. Only there, once edited and published in the capitals, did it mature into Knowledge. And there it stayed, little bartered back and no returning current. Sometimes it festered, and the gangrene of arrogance set in.

shut up, he explained

I’m certainly not calling this universal, in Human Rights Watch or anywhere else. Nor is it some sinister, deliberate plot to deprive others of their voices and agency. It’s rather a danger built into the practice of representation, the art and politics – Faustian with a touch of Edgar Bergen – of speaking for somebody else. The exercise of lending vividness to the lives of others tends to shale into the assumption that one knows what they want, and what’s best for them. You get more used to their desperation than their autonomy. You start seeing victims even when they’re not there.

There is a less tendentious dimension to this problem as well – one not just about the problems of practicing politics in a still-imperial world, but about democratic politics itself, and its discontents. A line of thinkers, including Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Raz, and John Gray, has emphasized that a coherent liberalism, unlike most philosophies, can imply no single vision of the Good Life to which members of a community should aspire. The old moral philosopher’s vision of existence cut to one dress pattern is motheaten now. Modern democratic society must embrace the maximum diversity of life projects without tilting its overt or intangible preference toward any.

Human rights, which expressly aims only to set out basic ground rules for the functioning of political societies, in some ways models this modern claim to neutrality in values. Yet maintaining the pose of studied impartiality is particularly hard both for communities and for individuals accustomed to subjecting not just acts, but lives, to moral scrutiny. And political life, as well as the practice of rights protection itself, keeps slipping back over into an idea that freedom implies a positive commitment, is about you living the life I like for you, one fulfilled not just in itself but by certain external standards. Some versions say: Now you are free to live the Good Life, which means wearing gray pajamas, saluting the Leader, and bathing in cold bilgewater every morning at 5. But it hardly has to be that extreme. More commonly they tell us: Now you are free to live the Good Life, which is the life of political struggle and engagement. Or the life of appreciating Beauty and Art. Or the uxorious life of family with someone whose genitals differ from your own. Or the life which certainly does not include selling your sexual services online.

What kind of self-correction can we build into human rights movements — especially with the moral exemption from critique they often claim — to keep them understanding victimhood as an exceptional breach rather than a definitional condition of people’s lives; to keep them respecting autonomy in all parts of all people’s lives, including that most charged and symbol-laden sphere, sex?

Me, I have no answer. In fact, the best self-correction I know is asking questions.

However. This has been as long as a human rights report; and since reports end with recommendations, I’d feel amiss if I didn’t offer a couple, at least to Human Rights Watch. Here goes:

Human Rights Watch needs to work much, much harder on integrating thematic issues across all its work, so that no wasted opportunity like the untruthful, unfinished Unfinished Revolution occurs again. And donors have a role to play in this. You need to support the LGBT Rights Program, and other thematic divisions, because their work is vital. But supporters who care about sexual rights should press HRW to make it part of all its relevant reporting. Before you sign the check, ask HRW’s leadership to tell you in concrete terms what they are doing to change both the mindset and the structure of the organization, to implement and cement that integration. If you’re going to show you think the work is important, so should they.
I’ve got no idea whether, after years of being dissed, sex worker movements are really interested anymore in nicely asking the mainstream organizations to recognize their rights to bodily autonomy and livelihood. A sex worker picking up The Unfinished Revolution couldn’t be blamed for saying, Why bother? But in principle, one should press the organization to do the right thing. And I recommend bypassing the lawyers and their obfuscations, and going to Ken Roth and the leadership directly. If anybody still cares to make an effort, the World AIDS Conference is coming up, and Washington is just a short train ride from New York. This might be a good time to demand a meeting.

Sexual rights are too important to get screwed again.

Lesbian Avengers flyer, US

N.B. This piece draws on the draft of the volume I’m finishing, tentatively titled Out of Here: Sex and Rights in the World. If you like it, look to buy the book when it’s published. If you don’t like it, buy the book anyway and deface the margins.

“I feel like a citizen”: Canada’s sex-work decision

Posted on 26 March 2012 by scottlong1980

Warmer indoors, but still cold on the streets: Sex workers' demonstration in Ottawa, January 2012

Partial but major victory today in Canada’s sex-work court case. The full decision is here, and a description of the case here. From the Globe and Mail on today’s ruling:

Ontario’s top court has legalized brothels and will allow prostitutes to have security and other staff that is specifically aimed at protecting prostitutes.

In a landmark decision Monday, the court said that prostitution is extremely dangerous work where inherent risks are multiplied by laws preventing prostitutes from working together under one roof or hiring security staff. As of April 25, they can engage bodyguards or security staff.

In addition to striking down the law against brothels, the court modified a law criminalizing pimping, so that “it will remain illegal to live off the avails of prostitution, but only ‘in circumstances of exploitation.’” But:

The court left intact just one of three key provisions that had been challenged by three current or former prostitutes. It said that communicating in a public place for the purposes of prostitution will remain illegal. Yet, even that provision narrowly escaped being struck down.

In the court’s only point of disagreement, Mr. Justice James MacPherson and Madam Justice Eleanore Cronk argued that the communication law is unacceptable because it forces street prostitutes to hurriedly negotiate with customers without first being able to size them up.

The refusal of the three other judges to strike down the communication law will likely go a long way to still the fears of politicians and residents who worried about an influx of prostitutes overtly propositioning prospective clients in the streets. …

Activists at a Toronto organization known as Maggie’s: Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, said the judges seriously erred by leaving street prostitutes unprotected, eking out a highly-dangerous existence on the extreme margins of society.

“The vast majority of all prostitution arrests are under the communication law,” said Emily Van Der Muelen, an assistant professor in Ryerson University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. “The failure to strike down the communication law means that the most vulnerable sex workers will continue to face arrest, police harassment, prosecution and violence.” …

The three judges acknowledged that the law may prevent prostitutes from being able to size up potentially dangerous customers before jumping into their cars. However, they reasoned that, with indoor prostitution now being made legal, there will be strong incentives for outdoor prostitutes to move into homes or brothels.

The Court, ominously, did not altogether discard the idea that eliminating prostitution was a legitimate public purpose, noted Carissima Mathen, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. The judges simply found that the existing laws were not a means to that end. They

rejected arguments that the prostitution laws were linked by a common goal of eradicating prostitution itself. .. [They] agreed today that the provisions under attack were not truly aimed by legislators at eradicating prostitution, as government lawyer[s] had argued in the appeal.

Rather, they said the purposes of the provisions were to eliminate some of the undesirable social consequences of sex work – neighbourhood disruptions and the exploitation of vulnerable women by pimps.

According to Mathen, “The Court also said that [the objective of eliminating prostitution] could be valid; it just wasn’t borne out by the evidence here … This leaves some room for Parliament to come back with a new law that does have that purpose.”

Nonetheless, Valerie Scott, legal coordinator of Sex Professionals of Canada, told reporters: “I feel like a debutante. I feel like a citizen.”

What would a leftist history of sodomy laws look like?

Posted on 25 March 2012 by scottlong1980

Time Magazine cover, July 14, 1986

On June 30, 1986, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, a case about sodomy laws. For the majority, Justice Byron White (known since college, obscurely, as “Whizzer”) held that nothing in the Constitution endowed ”a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.”

That was a Monday. Days later, the nation headed into the Fourth of July holiday, celebrating independence and all that. A big hootenanny around the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty intensified the revels. It was “Liberty Weekend,” with whizzing fireworks vaulting the huddling Hudson and patriotic paeans to immigrants and tired and poor; Ronald Reagan — whose paralytic rictus hung above the whole era like a gargoyle grinning over a depleted Paris — intoned, unveiling the renovated statue, that “our work can never be truly done until every man, woman, and child shares in our gift, in our hope, and stands with us in the light of liberty.” (He promptly bestowed a Medal of Liberty on Henry Kissinger beneath the Lady’s torch, a reminder that those who don’t share our freedom can be freely bombed until dead.) I couldn’t stand the ironies. A gay friend and I spent the weekend getting massively drunk in a Cambridge apartment, throwing things at the TV screen whenever Reagan’s red-death mask appeared. (The president, mind you, had refused even to mention the AIDS epidemic until the year before.) I remember large brown blotches from spilled vodka-and-coke staining the white carpet; if I saw them now, I’d scream “Santorum“! It was a terrible time in a terrible year in a terrible decade, and how little one can forget.

Just under seventeen years later, the Supreme Court overruled itself. That evening I went down to Sheridan Square, the site of Stonewall, where queers had gathered in small numbers for the congratulatory festivities. The celebrations were more muted than the mourning had been a generation earlier. Perhaps too many had died. Or perhaps gays and lesbians had learned in the interim what so many have learned from necessity before: that it is possible, after all, to live without your country loving you. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Still, Lawrence v Texas, which struck down Bowers, deserves much more than such a sigh. It’s one of the court’s historic decisions, and “one of the great success stories of public interest law,” as David Cole calls it. It now has, fittingly, a history of its own: Dale Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v Texas has gotten stellar reviews this year, from the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. That so many praises come from New York must confirm what all righteous Texans suppose: that the whole thing was a conspiracy by my perverse, miscegenating, Jew-infested metropolis, which envied Lone Star purity and was just waiting to pounce. Carpenter, I hasten to add, teaches in Minnesota.

I haven’t read Carpenter’s book yet. I will. I have read what is more or less a companion volume: William Eskridge’s Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003. It’s an estimable book. Here, though, is what strikes me: both Carpenter’s and Eskridge’s politics are well known. They’re both conservative libertarians. (Indeed, Eskridge’s volume grew partly from an amicus brief he drafted for the libertarian Cato Institute in Lawrence v Texas.) So the two arguably most influential US histories of sodomy laws have been written from the libertarian right. I have no interest in condemning them for their politics here; if I only read books by authors I wholeheartedly agree with, my shelves would be much less full. It is, however, interesting. What’s going on here?

There is, of course, a powerful purely libertarian case against sodomy laws. “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” a young Pierre Trudeau famously said, in scrapping Canada’s comparable legislation. Such a sentence could be every libertarian’s screensaver — although they have long lists of other areas where the state should not snoop; just look at any of Ron Paul’s campaign literature. Three major national court decisions about sodomy laws have had wide influence in the last fifteen years: South Africa’s in 1998, Lawrence in 2003, and India’s in 2009. All three cited privacy, and its confluence with liberty, as a core principle contravened by the laws and rendering them odious. All three, though, drew upon other principles as well: equality and dignity are explicit grounds in the South African decision, and in different terms run through Justice Kennedy’s Lawrence language as well as Justice Shah’s in Delhi. These are values less easy to constrain within a libertarian mold. Equality notoriously demands active government intervention in a range of situations; dignity is tied to the state’s power to accord or withhold legal recognition and substantive rights. The exclusively libertarian account of why sodomy laws are wrong only gets at part of the normative case against them. Yet it seems to be bidding for hegemony here in the US.

Private dictionaries: My libertarianism is freer than your libertarianism

Libertarianism, naturally, shares with most other terms in politics a tendency to mean different things in different private dictionaries. Libertarian rhetoric – broadly, exalting the value of personal autonomy against government interference — has a protean appeal, and is increasingly heard everywhere. It’s enjoyed a renaissance on the US left since 2001, against the security-inspired swelling of the surveillance state. It has revived on the right in the last four years, with growing conservative unease about the (first Bush, then Obama) bailouts, spending, and market interventions brought to bear against the financial crisis. Sales of sexy propagandist Ayn Rand, that Zhdanovite in a pageboy haircut, doubled from 2008-2010. “We are witnessing a conservative libertarian comeback,” one pundit informs us.

It’s an oppositional advance, a response to all manners of active-state liberalism … It’s a pervasive feeling of invasiveness. It’s an enduring conclusion among many voters–independent and conservative, working and middle class alike–that big government costs in taxes significantly more than it offers them personally.

Just the atmosphere for a libertarian approach to sex to flourish, you might think. But the pundit adds: “There is no wide-ranging call for government to withdraw from social issues however. A rebirth of traditional libertarianism this is not. It’s a more limited libertarianism that it is on the march.” Back in your closets, camp followers!

Eskridge’s book is, I think, in part an effort to push at the envelope of this “limited libertarianism” and get sexuality under its cover: to prod conservatives into taking the logic of their acquired passion for pure liberty seriously. In his version, this means, perhaps primarily, prodding gays themselves. He writes that “Lawrence should also be understood as a challenge for gay people. Recalling an old-fashioned conception of citizenship as entailing obligations as well as freedoms, Lawrence should stir LGBT people to commit themselves to families, communities, and institutions (including religious ones) from which they have been alienated.”

This is a grand non sequitur, on the face of it. Goodbye, frying pan, hello fire! There is no reason why lifting one form of repression should rouse you to reaffiliate yourself with institutions that have, been, for most LGBT people, the source of other forms. Changing those institutions might be a plausible program, but that doesn’t necessarily oblige you to join them. Sodomy laws weren’t brought down from inside the prison cell. Yet Eskridge’s reasoning is worth following. “Philosophical liberals, such as John Rawls and Richard Posner,” he says, “have tended to underestimate the importance of family and community values to the government’s role in structuring legal rights and responsibilities.” OK, so in unlibertarian fashion we grant the government such a role. But:

[A] new generation of gay or gay-friendly thinkers — such as the law professors Carlos Ball and Chai Feldblum, the philosophers Stephen Macedo and Michael Sandel, the anthropologist Kath Winton, and journalists like Bruce Bawer and Jonathan Rauch — maintain that gay people ought to understand themselves as family members and actors interacting with communities. This is strategically important. To the extent that gay people are perceived this way by mainstream Americans, they will be less vulnerable to the politics of disgust and contagion. But it also normatively important. … [K]ey liberal thinkers have argued that sexual freedom and gender equality require community … Theirs was a different kind of community from that envisioned by traditionalists (husband-wife marriages with children), and that is the challenge Lawrence and the same-sex marriage movement pose to LGBT Americans: What kind of community, what understanding of family, do you stand for? (pp. 382-83)

“Committed,” Eskridge makes clear, is his answer. Gays need communities and families that ground them, bind them through fixed relationships to a lasting definition of the self. And you can see not so much Eskridge’s logic at work here, as his political agenda. Conservatives can be reconciled to recognizing gays’ rights as long as there is some other structure in place, on hand, to regulate the luftmenschen‘s lives. These structures are themselves exempt from state regulation in much the same way that striking down sodomy laws leaves the bedroom walls impermeable. “The state also cannot invade traditionalists’ private associations and clubs to impose gay-friendly policies,” Eskridge writes, approving of the Supreme Court’s decision (in Boy Scouts v Dale, 2000) that such a group may not be compelled “to accept members it does not desire.” But conversely, once gays do get in, they will be subject to, and their identities informed by, the internal strictures of the group: the luftmensch ballasted and brought to earth at last!

I bowl alone

Of course everyone has networks of affiliation and belonging, unless you happen to be Kaspar Hauser. What’s at stake is how much a person can choose and hence constitute these, or how much they are permitted to constitute her. Ultimately Eskridge suggests a vision that is far more fully conservative than libertarian. The state leaves the individual alone — that’s the main libertarian side of it. But the state does so in confidence that other forces can fill the gap. The state “structur[es] legal rights and responsibilities,” but only on the pattern adumbrated by those other forces. Indeed there is no gap, because a civil society where every space is taken up by closed groups, community structures, and families leaves little room to move; occupying the self like the air you breathe, it’s fully capable of shaping and restraining potential members so that they belong.

a jaundiced view

Clearly this is nothing new. It’s more or less the social policy that Reagan and Thatcher carried forward — and neither was exactly libertarian. Both understood that the capitalist market they unleashed with the right hand would corrode not just community values but all existing structures of belonging; everything solid would start melting into air. Hence it was vital, with the left hand, to strengthen family, community, and old-fashioned forms of social solidarity, not just in ideology but as as far as possible in law. They grasped rather better than Eskridge, though, that a hands-off policy by government — the libertarian ideal — wouldn’t be enough. Those values wouldn’t just maintain themselves. The closed groups would dissolve without state encouragement and support. Libertarian economics required authoritarian social enforcement.

In other words, Eskridge rather overestimates the libertarian, as opposed to traditionally conservative, implications of his argument. Still, his case has had its success. You can see the traces of Eskridge’s — and other gay conservatives’ — hopeful attempt at integration in the political causes that have been by far the most motivational among US gays.

Bruce Bawer, the gay journalist, is a dreadful fellow. Some years back he moved to Norway, and since then has devoted himself to high-strung, racist screeds against Muslims, Africans, and other inferior invaders of the Land of the Blond. (To his public embarrassment, mass-murderer Anders Brevik mentioned Bawer approvingly in one of his own private prologomena to morals.) Back when he was somewhat respectable, though, he published an anthology, “Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy.” Its pages laid out a program for gay conservatives, and from a distance of sixteen years, the consistency is amazing. The unifying call is for gays to attach themselves to conservative institutions, and to do so in a way that inhibits rather than expands the state’s involvement. Both strategies will make them a better brand of minority, more reliable, less whiny, more deserving of public trust. Thus Andrew Sullivan on don’t-ask-don’t-tell:

[I]nstead of seeking access, as other minorities have done, gays in the military are simply demanding recognition. They start not from the premise of suppliance, but of success, of proven ability and prowess in battle, of exemplary conduct and ability. This is a new kind of minority politics. It is less a matter of complaint than pride; less about subversion than about the desire to contribute equally. (p. 81)

But the showroom issue for this inclination is, of course, marriage. “For taming males, marriage is unmatched,” Jonathan Rauch writes in the book (p. 307). Moreover, if — as Rauch contends — gays are not “an oppressed people seeking redemption through political action,” but “an ostracized people seeking redemption through personal action” (p. 126) marriage is a perfect way to prove oneself. It doesn’t need active government intervention, the kind that anti-discrimination laws mandate (most contributors seem deeply biased against those protections: they stand for the “victim model” that only bad minorities pursue). It merely requires the state to stand back and let it be. Again, recognition rather than action is what the good minorities demand.

Tame that shrew

Now, historically, marriage has done rather more than tame males: think shrews. And of course, for centuries domestic violence, marital rape, and other offenses in the home went unnoticed and unpunished, because the law stood back and let them be; it presumed the sanctity of marriage to exclude its ministrations. Lawyers tend to say that Griswold v Connecticut – the 1965 case where the Supreme Court held that married couples could use contraception — established a “right to privacy” in American law, emanating outward from the marriage bed. No. A right to marital privacy enshrouded domestic violence for centuries, just as it protected sex with an unconsenting wife. Where the state acted was to complicate people getting out (or getting pleasure outside) of marriage: by criminalizing adultery and prostitution, for instance, or by restricting divorce. It’s doubtful that many LGBT people would want to be integrated into the marriage complex if it were still that “libertarian” nexus of internal control: a Hunger Games arena where participants were tamed while the state stood by. There has certainly been some shift in how the state regulates marriage — some displacement of the arbitrary personal regulation the institution once stood for, by the rule of external law. US police only rarely enforce bans on adultery, for instance, while domestic violence and marital rape are now, at least formally, crimes. Still, the history of “privacy” within marriage reminds one that the legal protection or restriction of relationships is an intricate and deceptive field, not terribly susceptible to libertarian simplifications. A conservative history that tries to condemn sodomy laws while elevating marriage is likely to run into contradictions.

Which brings me back to the question I headlined: what would a leftist history of sodomy laws look like? The US advocacy to get rid of sodomy laws started, for the most part, on the left back in the 1950s and 1960s. If we reclaimed that history, how might it read?

I have some thoughts, but I leave the question open. Leftists and rightists are welcome to use the comments field below. (It’s underused here. I know you read this thing, from the site stats; now talk back.) The question’s an important one, because it has to do with who steers our collective narrative, and, on that basis, where it wends from here. So start thinking.

a paper bird

Un pajaro de papel en el pecho / Dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado

Category Archives: Sexual Rights

Cairo diary, December 2012: Walls, women, rape, fear

Thunder on the left

Why I am not proud

Razan Ghazzawi receives award; Egyptian women attacked in Tahrir Square

Obama, marriage, race, rights

Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (1)

Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (2)

Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (3)

“I feel like a citizen”: Canada’s sex-work decision

What would a leftist history of sodomy laws look like?

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