Ahmed Spider, before and after

So Ahmed Spider’s website was hacked tonight. Where you used to find gauzy, Vaseline-blurred images of a willowy figure with a pruned beardlet, now there’s a glowering fuck-you troll in diapers, a message that the site’s been pwn3d, and some mocking posts from the hackers, who have monikers like “Turbo_Power” and “Black_Moon”:

“Susan” is cute, and now she’s talking about politics  — how hilarious! And moreover she’s singing … The best young men have participated in this revolution, while you sit at home playing at your keyboard.

Now, it’s not as though I have any sympathy for the guy. Ahmed Spider, whoever he really is — nobody seems to know exactly — is one of the odder side-effects of the revolution, one of those strange beings who crop up in the crevices where paranoia, social change, new forms of media, and the loonier outliers of celebrity culture all conjoin. For years, he used his website mainly to promote his not-very-well-sung songs. After February, though, he discovered a new career opening, as conspiracy theorist. He started up a YouTube channel, featuring musical monologues by himself, about suffering Egypt, the virtues of Mubarak, the iniquities of revolutionaries, the real reasons for 9/11, American and Zionist plots, and more. These videos never quite went viral; they were more like a lingering cold. He named Wael Ghonim, one of the revolution’s icons, as a Masonic subversive; after the Maspero massacre in October, he accused activist Alaa Abd el Fattah of inciting it (and Alaa now languishes in jail facing the same charges). He vehemently supports the ruling junta (SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces). Some pro-regime TV channels give him inordinate airtime.

Most revolutionaries thoroughly loathe him. His attack on Alaa Abd el Fattah they regard as especially unforgivable. Some call him things like “SCAF’s main tool.” That seems unlikely; he’s too eccentric, too pathetic a product of the dream of fame, to be a useful tool for anybody. But what’s interesting is the way his eccentricity is used against him. He’s undeniably a bit fey, he has a lispy accent, and his suspiciously plucked-looking eyebrows and gelled hair don’t quite fit either the respectable contours of traditional Egyptian manhood or the scruffy, Che-in-a-keffiyeh look favored in Midan Tahrir. So he becomes “she,” “Susan,” a faux artiste glued to the piano while the “best young men” go out and fight for what they believe. Or take this nasty cartoon that circulated on Twitter:

from @ahmad_nady on Twitter

Ahmed Spider (on the right, if you didn’t guess): “If you still love Zbider, googoo, you should throw in prison everybody people consider a MAN.” The general: “As you wish!” And the bicycle spinning in his thought-balloon — agaala — is common slang for a male who gets penetrated.

From @ahmad_nady on Twitter

Compare this to the same artist’s depiction of Alaa, his wife Manal, and their child — “for the best revolutionary couple ever.” It’s the Holy Family versus the fags. You get the idea.

The revolution is certainly not averse (or at least some revolutionaries aren’t) to manipulating homophobia. However, the truth is that Alaa — who’s certainly the “MAN” that Zbyder means above — with his long hair and rather unathletic figure, not to mention his feminist wife, is not exactly the traditional model of Egyptian manhood. And in fact, he’s notorious for saying friendly things about gay rights, and even endorsing the idea of same-sex marriage in his voluminous tweets. (His father, the revered Ahmed Seif el-Islam, was the first human rights activist to provide legal defense to the men arrested on the Queen Boat in 2001.) There are, in other words, some paradoxes here.

The other night, I asked a friend here who’s sensitive to these matters whether there’d been a change in the way Egyptians, or at least some Egyptians, imagine manhood since the Revolution. Alaa Abd el Fattah’s story was the first thing he mentioned. Specifically: After the military jailed Alaa in the wake of Maspero, Nawara Negm, a well-known revolutionary, published a piece in which she praised him as a dakar, a real, manly man: he faced SCAF and its overweening power boldly, went off to prison bravely, never flinched.

In one of his letters smuggled from his cell, Alaa responded to her:

I am writing this note with a deep sense of shame. I have just been moved from the appeals prison, at my request and insistence, because I simply couldn’t withstand the difficult conditions there: because of the darkness, the filth, the roaming cockroaches, crawling over my body night and day; because there was no courtyard, no sunshine and, again, the darkness….

I found Nawara’s celebrating my “manliness” confusing … I couldn’t “man up” and bear it, even though I knew only too well that thousands were bravely and stoically enduring far worse conditions, even though I never had to suffer the untold horrors of military prisons, nor was I ever subjected to the torture meted out to those comrades of mine who had been sent down to the military courts. …

Even my decision to refuse questioning by a miltary court, which so many of you have celebrated and praised, that too came with a grain of cowardice. The day we had met to take the decision, I was not brave enough to seek my wife Manal’s opinion on the matter, even though I knew full-well I would be leaving her on her own, through the final days of her pregnancy; even though I knew I would be leaving her to face, on her own, the trials and tribulations of running our life …

The only slightly theatrical modesty goes far toward explaining why Alaa is so loved among his comrades. The confession of a certain cowardice, and, most especially, the apology to his wife — the admission that they should have been equal partners in his decision, an idea few Egyptian men of whatever profession would entertain — seemed to my friend to adumbrate a different kind of masculinity, detached a bit from the traditional anxieties about courage and control. It’s also obvious, though, that while declaring himself less than a dakar, Alaa leaves the value of manliness itself unquestioned. He shifts the semantics around the dakar, but neither rejects the term nor redefines it completely. “It is true that I am not the ‘real man’ Nawara believes me to be,” he says, “but I am no coward either.” That self-description seems to me to capture some of the dilemmas here of revolutionary manhood.

among the martyrs

The revolution is a macho thing. Perhaps most revolutions are. All around Cairo, in the progressive hangouts, you can see the guys strutting round, cocksure in their rock-star status as heroes of the ongoing fight for freedom, their egos ablaze with the fires lit by the glimmers in awed girls’ eyes. If they’ve been on the barricades recently, some of them wear their battle scars like love bites. Beyond and behind them, ghostlike, there are, of course, the martyrs, those killed by Mubarak or the counter-revolution: women and men, unforgettably dead, their visages ubiquitous on posters or banners whenever the revolutionaries gather. Sometimes they appear smiling, natural, with faces in which only now one can read a shadow of surprise — images pulled, as if by an emergency or an unexpected message, from their ordinary lives in which dying seemed a distant thing, called to carry out a errand on which they hadn’t planned. Sometimes they’re shown with skulls crushed or chests bullet-ridden or limbs neatly folded over a docile corpse. Sometimes you see them split-screen as Before and After, as if one made the transit from beautiful life to glorious and terrifying death in the quick flick of a camera shutter. Always, though, they’re presented more as victims than as heroes. You don’t see them doing, though you may see footage of them dying; they are mute emblems of pure suffering, which extinguished them that the rest of us may go on struggling. Aluta continua. It’s as though, by being passive in their extinction, they clear the space for the living heroes to be heroes. The more the martyrs underwent, and the higher the hecatombs grow, the more their agency and power come to inhabit the guys (of course, particularly the guys) who survived.

But these guys in turn — because they’re like Alaa, maybe long-haired, certainly radical, definitely non-traditional in one way or another — have to defend their power from the accusation that they’re passive or perverted. They need to assert the idea of their manhood against the conservatives, against the saurian relics of the ancien regime, against the slurs that they’re sissy-boys or Westernized sexual freaks. They too have to say, over and over: I may not be a “real man” by your definition, but I’m a man, I’m not a coward. This is the irony: the same things the revolutionaries say about Ahmed Spider, the counter-revolutionaries have already said about them. 

It’s a vicious cycle of insecurities, then. Some examples:

Amr Gharbeia

There’s Amr Gharbeia, a very courageous blogger and human rights activist. When a dissident march on the Ministry of Defense in July ended in a brutal attack on the demonstrators and a tear-gas-smeared melee (a description from my side is here), three people kidnapped Amr in the confusion, dragging him off, threatening him, and accusing him of being a spy. He was freed later, but the publicity around his disappearance led to a bizarre backlash, in which the mere fact that he had a ponytail seemed to play an exacerbating part. One Facebook page put up by vestigial pro-Mubarakites accused him of being gay. That one’s gone now, but this one conveys the same spirit. It’s titled “I Call on the Military Council to Subject Amr Gharbeia to a Virginity Test“:

This country is full of sissy guys, either from the 6 April Coalition [the April 6 Youth Movement, one of the leading revolutionary Facebook groups] … or any other shitty coalitions which continue disgusting us. But truly, these are some guys who’ve been drinking beers in the university and smoking hash till they were wasted; then they mingle with the harem, or even get inspired by the roles of women, like our courageous hero Amr Gharbeia. And now they are chanting for democracy, and that they are revolutionary young men who can bring the president down, and even Tantawi.

We’ve gone from “the country of the million belly-dancers,” the page says, to  “the country of the million revolutionaries.” And clearly, they’re pretty much the same thing.

This is, moreover, fairly typical of the insults that many male demonstrators face, sometimes from unfriendly onlookers, sometimes from the oppressors themselves. It’s worse, arguably, on the very infrequent occasions that women’s or gender issues actually appear on the protesters’ programs. Last march, when feminist groups and allies tried to stage a march on International Women’s Day, angry crowds disrupted and broke up the effort. The women took the full brunt of the brutality, of course. Yet even one male participant wrote how “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 mankind.”

But any protest attracts a shower of insults, and worse. I can’t count the number of demonstrators inside Tahrir and out, men and women too, who have told me about being called khawal by police — a terrible insult in Egypt, similar to “faggot” but with a connotation of extreme effeminacy. And police sexually abuse men as well as women. It’s impossible to say how often, because few men will talk about it. Maged Butter, a revolutionary from Alexandria arrested in the battles of Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Cairo last week — a bright, brave, but slight, breakable-looking young man who could easily arouse all the cops’ fears and resentments about class as well as gender — wrote after his torture and release that

5 soldiers surrounded me, beat me with batons all over my body w/ extra dose for my head, and dragged me along M.Mahmoud st, 2 beating me with batons, 1 kicking me, 1 fingering my ass, 1 checking my pockets, till the end of the st., also kicking my balls.

The telltale finger in the ass is probably not the worst that many detainees have undergone.

So there’s reason to think that, out of the revolutionary cauldron, out of the moil of changes and ideas, novel ways of thinking about manhood as well as womanhood will emerge. But the thinkers and the ideas themselves are under pressure: both the internal pressure to show a traditional strength, and the external pressure to prove one’s not a khawal or a coward, a bicycle or a bitch. One positive fact, I think, is that the revolutionaries are now at a pass where they cannot endure the military — which, with universal conscription for men, has always provided what is virtually an institutional definition of masculinity in the country.  After SCAF’s repeated, murderous rampages, no one on the left has any patience left with its values. The dissidents reject the army’s temptations and seductions, all its pomps and works and promises. And this is quite a change from the spring, when many revolutionaries turned on the blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad (still imprisoned by the junta as I write) for criticizing compulsory military service — which they saw as an unpatriotic gesture. To cast aside the adulation of the military means that one structuring and constraining power over gender is, for at least one individual, out the window.

The other positive force is simply the presence of courageous and militant women everywhere in the Revolution, including the barricades and front lines. And there is more to write about this than I can possibly say, now or in future. But one place to start is simply by letting the voices of women speak for themselves — and I’ll begin that in the next post.

N.B. Particular thanks to Ahmed of the fine blog Rebel with a Cause for thinking through some of the issues with me.

roll with it

Probably most readers here by now have also read my colleague Sarah Schulman’s op-ed on “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing,’” which to its credit the New York Times published last week. If you haven’t, read it. Before I get to my point — which is the helpful additional documentation of Israel’s campaign that Schulman has since compiled — it may be useful to review some of the myriad incensed reactions the piece drew: to borrow Mary McCarthy’s description of the attacks on Hannah Arendt forty-five years ago, the hue and the cry.

Here goes:

1) The neo-conservative hair salon Harry’s Place argues that Schulman is wrong because, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood. Whatever you say about Israel there is, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood, and, you know, something. Obviously she is wrong, because of the Muslim Brotherhood. Really wrong. I told you so, and if. Just look. The Muslim Brotherhood.

Harry’s Place repeatedly republishes the writings of chronically inaccurate episodically accurate blogger Paul Canning, as well as inveterate liar speaker of power to truth Peter Tatchell, and some of their freewheeling ways with facts must be rubbing off, because Harry and his placemen blame me for Schulman too. I am, apparently, “one of the most active proponents of this strategy” (that is, enlisting the gays toward “ending Jewish self-determination in Israel”) even though I’ve only written about “pinkwashing” once, and nobody read it. It’s flattering to be admitted to the grand conspiracy. Minds as creative and sophisticated as Harry’s Place’s bloggers, back in the days when they found ready employment in the Okhrana, would have given me an honored role in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To think I missed my chance as a literary character by little more than a century! Still, there’s hope. Harry’s henchmen well know that I’m a paid apologist for Iran, and just this morning I did my first PR work for the Muslim Brotherhood. With a little boost from David Toube and Brett (the wee racist who loves the phrase “ni**er balls”) Lock, I can look forward to a stint as the villain on the next iteration of 24. Gitmo, here I come!

2) Dwarf reporter Jamie Kirchick fulminates intensely in a high-pitched voice. Schulman and her allies refuse to “acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian gays,” who suffer constantly from being forced to be Palestinian, and who, in addition to being the only Palestinians Jamie Kirchick likes, are the only Palestinians who suffer at all; the rest of Palestinians either rest happily in the knowledge that their lands are being well-tended by Jewish settlers, or agree with Kirchick that they never existed in the first place. Rightly indignant, Kirchick flails his tiny fists against the wall:

Schulman and her ilk are in fact using the issue of gay rights to forward an ulterior agenda. So consumed are they by hatred of Israel that they are willing to distort the truth about the horrible repression of homosexuals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. … Schulman ends up making excuses for people who kill homosexuals… [She] lays bare the delusion, paranoia, and cynicism of the Jewish state’s most earnest detractors.

Although Kirchick’s article has gone largely unnoticed in the United States, many dogs and hamsters in Australia, driven mad by the shrill, distant whine, threw themselves into the Tasman Sea.

3) Andrew Sullivan, who is still recovering from an interview Schulman subjected him to in 1999 (“I think you’re not a leader who has emerged from the community; I think you’ve been selected by the dominant group”) attempts his rhetorical revenge:

Schulman is a hardcore gay leftist, and her argument is as preposterous as Jamie notes. … What you see in Schulman’s ideology is actually a distrust of gay advancement if it isn’t simultaneously part of some grander leftist ideological agenda, and subordinate to it. Hence the gay left’s historic opposition to marriage equality and military service and their reluctance to accept that AIDS has gone from a plague to a disease in the mid-1990s for the affluent West.

These are all the things that Schulman grilled him on in 1999, and clearly if only she had agreed with him then that uxoriously married gay staff sergeants on expensive triple therapies represent the only hope for survival of the human race, she would not now be going off on these radical kicks. Queer Palestinians a) can’t marry; b) have no regular army; and c) mostly can’t afford triple therapies. Losers! Forget the bastards.

4) It’s a relief to move from these people to someone I’ve never heard of. Of course, if I were a more knowledgeable anti-Semite I would probably recognize that David Harris is the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, and moreover that he describes himself (people always write their own online bios) as:

one of the Jewish people’s leading advocates and most eloquent spokesmen. The Executive Director of AJC since 1990, he travels the globe meeting with world leaders to advance the well-being of Israel, combat anti-Semitism, monitor the condition of Jewish communities, and promote intergroup and interreligious understanding.

I leave evaluating the full force of his eloquence (as against Moses Mendelssohn, Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Paul Celan?) to others. Here he is, though, dazzling us like Demosthenes, and wondering why

Amidst all the turmoil going on in the world today, the editors chose to publish a column entitled “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing.’”

Yes!  The turmoil in Israel (and “Palestine”) is trivial compared to all the turmoil elsewhere; unless, of course, someone actually criticizes Israel, in which case they’re worth at least a column in the Huffington Post. With practice pebbles filling his mouth, the orator goes on:

Were I a gay activist today, would my one shot at reaching the Times‘ global readership be devoted to Israel’s alleged misdeeds, even as I could live freely there and celebrate my lifestyle without hindrance?

We all get our fifteen minutes; we each get one op-ed in this easy-to-waste life; so use it wisely!  If you’re gay, do something for the gays. Celebrate your own lifestye. Don’t fritter those precious paragraphs away on other people.   When, after all, did any of “the Jewish people’s leading advocates and most eloquent spokesmen” ever worry about universal ethics, universal rights and liberties, or the general condition of the human race? From Spinoza to Levinas, the modern Jewish intellectual tradition has been one of a much-needed insularity and inwardness, as my fellow authors of the Protocols certainly knew. In any case, David Harris has done his bit this week to advance the well-being of Israel and combat anti-Semitism. He can probably miss a meeting, or even two, with world leaders, and take a long weekend. The gays can also thank him for taking a moment to celebrate their lifestyle. It’s generous of him to notice.

All that said, you should take a look at Schulman’s chronicle of how Israel’s campaign to enlist international LGBT support has developed. The details are here. I disagree with a few particulars, but the overall point is clear: the campaign has been explicit and acknowledged by the Israeli government. It’s no secret. It’s not, from Netanyahu’s perspective, any shame. They know what they’re up to and they’re fairly open about it. We see again the peculiar disconnect between what can be said in Israel about Israel, and what can be said about Israel in the US: things that almost every Israeli knows are denied to the last breath and rendered unmentionable by its American defenders. It’s a weird dynamic. But it’s all the more reason that, for all their hue and cry, the minuscule Kirchicks and the huff-and-puffing Harry’s Placemats are not just duplicitous but self-deceiving, and can and should — safely and for the sake of one’s own sanity — be ignored.

P.S.: In the comments, Ben Doherty points out some resources on the subject of “pinkwashing”: http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com/ and http://electronicintifada.net/tags/pinkwashing, and http://www.bdsmovement.net/ (search for pinkwashing).

One additional point is worth making. These writers don’t just attack Sarah Schulman’s position on Israel/Palestine. They delegitimate her (to use one of their favorite words) as an LGBT rights activist, because (and never mind the question of how issues intersect!) she has other concerns as well. Thus it’s not enough to say she’s wrong about Palestine. She cares about non-gays, and therefore she wants to kill homosexuals, which is more or less what Jamie Kirchick claims. I’ve been through this before with these people, on one of their favorite obsessions, Iran; they apparently believe that the very idea of the universality of human rights is somehow lethal to the gays, as they also believe –  more rationally — that it’s dangerous to the policies of the state of Israel. If there’s one thing that’s ridiculous, it’s having to defend Sarah Schulman as a queer activist. As somebody who lived and worked and fought and never gave up through the worst years of AIDS in the US, she knows considerably more about the lives and deaths of gays than Kirchick or David Toube ever will. I must acknowledge that when I started as an activist (I presume this places me firmly in my century) her novel People in Trouble was one of my inspirations. I bought a number of copies and left them in Romania, where I was working at the time. I hear they still give direction to some young activists there, in a country where people have also seen the darkness and the light, and know more about human rights than most of these dismissible scribblers in the US and the UK possibly can.

we give support to refugees, and we give them something to seek refuge from

Back in February 2011, our readers will remember, the chronically inaccurate episodically accurate blogger Paul Canning — of the episodically biased chronically unopinionated website LGBT Asylum News — published the following false only intermittently true information:

Amongst the crowds protesting the 30 year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarek in Egypt are many lesbians and gay men. …  Yesterday, one of them, the well-known blogger and activist SandMonkey (the website was taken down by repeated attacks but is now back up) who is gay was arrested, beaten up and later freed.

Most of that is true! We apologize in advance for having to point out that some of it was not. Specifically, the phrase “who is gay” attached to Sandmonkey was not true. Sandmonkey, a dissident blogger known throughout the region, was and is not gay. It’s impossible to say what led the careless occasionally cautious Canning to think he was; but Sandmonkey took offense at those three words, coming as they did in the middle of a revolution where a brutal regime was looking for any reason to jail and discredit opponents. He wrote to the arrogant modest-on-alternate-days Canning:

Dear Paul/Editor of this sight,

You published an article claiming I am gay. While a supporter of gay rights, I am not gay. I have no idea where u got this info, and its totally unverified. Please retract and remove the article, since you must be very well aware what happens to people suspected of being gay in Egypt. You are putting my life in danger.

The editor of San Diego Gay and Lesbian News, which carries Paul’s ill-researched carefully spelled column, wrote back:

We have deleted @sandmonkey from the story without consulting with Mr. Canning, who is the author of the story. SDGLN did not originate this story, which came from LGBT Asylum News in the U.K.

That must have infuriated the temperamental unevenly evenhanded Canning, who always likes to be consulted. It was particularly exasperating in that, even if one counts only the 43 words of the passage we cited (more if we hadn’t inserted that discriminatory ellipsis!) rather than the 800+ words of the whole piece, not more than three were in fact lies less true than they could have been. That means that the passage was, as an absolute maximum, only 6.9767% inaccurate. If you take the falsehoods near-misses at accuracy as a percentage of the whole column, the proportion falls to less than four-tenths of one percent, a completely nugatory figure.  It takes real cheek for Sandmonkey to write to the blinkered presbyscopically observant Canning that “You are putting my life in danger!”  At most only one part in thirteen of his life was danger, and more likely it was less than one-two hundredth. If Voldemort could live with large parts of his soul destroyed, why can’t an Egyptian blogger? The scope of mathematical ignorance is astounding. Obviously, few Egyptians can count. Sandmonkey should learn statistics, and the entire country should be handed back to Lord Cromer and the British to revamp its education system. (A tip to LGBT Asylum News: Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Britain’s proconsul in Cairo from 1883 to 1907, is alive and well and, with his boyfriend Norman Tebbit, working as a cage dancer Saturdays at Heaven.  He’s available. If you start a campaign now to have the British occupation reinstated, NATO might be able to start bombing by Christmas.)

I take note of this because I learned on arriving in Egypt that Sandmonkey — under his real name, Mahmoud Salem — is running for the lower house of Parliament in today’s elections. His campaign blog and program (mostly in Arabic) are here. (And he’s still tweeting at @Sandmonkey.) He’s a secularist, an environmentalist, a progressive — just the kind of candidate Paul Canning ought to like; except I suspect Paul Canning doesn’t like him anymore.

There’s still a lot that LGBT Asylum news can do, though.  They could out the heterosexual alleged, although to date unproven, homosexual Mahmoud Salem again!  There are still at least twelve hours before the polls close, and people in Heliopolis, where’s he’s running, wake late. Canning’s little-noticed sporadically influential blog deserves the chance to intervene in a world-historical occasion. Alternatively, Canning can out other progressive Egyptians. Dissidents, feminists, and human rights activists here are regularly attacked for supposed sexual perversion; these aspersions sometimes fall flat, and evidence from abroad is needed; it seems unreasonable that the pleasures of outing should be alienated from the heroic activists like Peter Tatchell who originated the tactic, and handed over to Islamist riffraff and demoted Mubarakite bureaucrats who are all too hamhanded in their exposures. Let the task of invading privacy be given back to those who do it best!  Only those who had a closet can appreciate what it means to be torn forcibly out of one — particularly out of one that never existed at all.

A hijra walks through the debris from the disastrous fire (Kevin Frayer/AP)

It’s appalling that a day dedicated to the memory of victims of prejudice should be marked by more deaths, victims of apparent incompetence. But that seems to be what has happened in Delhi. The Hindu says:

Members of Sangama and the Karnataka Sexual Minorities Forum on Monday condemned the Delhi Government for not putting fire safety systems in place which, they said, led to the charring to death of 15 hijras in a fire at Nand Nagri in north-east Delhi on Sunday.

The fire blazed through a makeshift tent where a large number of hijras had gathered to honour deceased friends.

The incident created panic among community members who had gathered for the ceremony. Several others who tried to escape were also injured.

“We stand together with more than 50 seriously injured hijras, families of deceased hijras and with the hijra community as a whole in this moment of deep sorrow. From media reports it is very clear that fire safety measures and emergency evacuation facilities were not adequate in the Delhi Municipal Corporation’s community hall, where more than 1,000 members of the transgender community had gathered as part of its community congregation,” said a joint statement issued by executive director of Sangama Manohar Elavarthi and State coordinator of the forum Mahesh Patil.

“We strongly condemn the negligence of the Delhi Government for not putting fire safety systems in place, which would have saved precious lives,” the statement said.

The New York Times (just think of that!) gives more details — although falling back on the term “eunuch” to explain to its readership who the victims are. Its story indicates this was more than a commemoration of the Day of Remembrance: “Sunday was to be the first day of a 10-day private festival organized by the community to honor a guru, offer prayers and feast together.” One hijra, Naina, told the Times it was a lengthy, regular gathering where “eunuchs of all age groups from India come together and we share our thoughts and try to solve our problems during these events.”

Attendees were expected from parts of South Asia. … Sanjay Kumar Jain, the Delhi police commissioner for the North East District, estimated that 500 to 700 eunuchs were present during the fire, but some eunuchs said the crowd was a few thousand people. …

Surjeet Kumar, an eyewitness who lives behind the accident site, said that the entrance to the makeshift tent was extremely congested when he saw the blaze. He said he and his neighbors dragged some victims over a gate that was barring the entrance to the tent, and took them to a nearby park before police and the fire officials came after numerous phone calls.

The scene outside the Accident and Emergency wing at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital was grim. More than a hundred eunuchs had gathered, some sitting on the floor holding on to their belongings, with others taking turns going to the morgue and the burns ward and a few hugging.

“More than 5,000 members of our community were supposed to participate in the 10-day long program,” said Shaboo, who like many other eunuchs goes by just one name. …

As the sun set, the crowd begun to disperse somewhat as eunuchs from nearby areas returned home. Others waited at the hospital, some to collect the dead bodies of their friends from the hospital authorities or tend to the injured. Some remained because they had traveled to the meeting from outside Delhi and didn’t have a shelter for the night. …

The chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit on Monday announced compensation of 200,000 rupees, or $3,800, to the next of kin of each eunuch killed.

TV9 has wrenching footage of the fire (in Hindi):

This is a sorrowful day.

protect yourselves by buying duct tape

Two groups who face harassment in schools found common ground in Michigan:

Gay and Muslim groups say they are relieved after a Michigan lawmaker agreed to drop a provision in an anti-bullying bill that would have carved out an exemption for religious or moral beliefs.

State Sen. Rick Jones, a Republican, inserted a carve-out for a “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction” in the Senate version of the bill. The state House of Representatives’ version of the bill did not include the provision.

Jones on Monday (Nov. 14) said he would drop his amendment and vote for the House version after critics said the language could allow gay, Muslim or other minority students to face harassment.

Earlier this year, the chronically crazy episodically sane birther guru Joseph Farah warned, on his right-wing website WorldNet Daily, that there was sinister “patty-cake politics between the Muslim Mafia and the Gay Mafia.”

Why don’t the active Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the U.S. speak out in opposition to policies that would never even be whispered about in any Islamic state on the planet?

I will tell you why: Because they recognize the promotion of this ["homosexual"] agenda in the U.S. actually serves the Islamist long-term agenda. They recognize that the success of this agenda promotes the weakening of the United States of America in multiple ways.

More power to them.

So let me talk about two different lives.

Back in 2000, that innocent time, my friend Brendan Fay approached me with a proposal. Brendan has been a heroic queer activist in and out of New York’s Irish community ever since Roger Casement was a child among the ashes, or maybe since the blight first descended on the tuber. The 100^th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s death, in disgrace in a cheap Paris hotel, was impending, and Brendan wanted to commemorate it:  to celebrate the Irish writer as a freedom-lover, a cosmopolitan and Utopian socialist who imagined a world united by unforeseeable and unprecedented solidarities. I was then program director of IGLHRC (the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission); so Brendan came to ask if there were some urgent rights abuse in the world against which we could stage a demonstration on the anniversary, to focus attention both on the violation and on Wilde’s enduring spirit of dissent.

Vanesa Lorena Ledesma: cardiac arrest

We had one situation that we were following closely. Vanesa Ledesma, a trans woman, a sex worker, and an activist with the Asociación Travestis Unidas de Córdoba, was arrested in Córdoba, Argentina, on February 11, 2000, after a fight among patrons of a bar. She was kept incommunicado in detention, and five days later she was dead. Police attributed her death to ”cardiac arrest.” An autopsy showed evidence of beating, with severe contusions on the arms, shoulders,  back and feet. Friends released photographs of her disfigured corpse. Activists demanded a full investigation.

Thus on November 30, a small group, perhaps two dozen of us, assembled in front of the Consulate of Argentina in New York. Some carried pictures of Ledesma, some pictures of Oscar Wilde. There were several trans women and a lot of Irish people in green. I seem to remember a bagpipe player, but memory may be embellishing.

After a while the Consul General, an elegant and diplomatic man, invited us into the building to meet. I said my bit about the urgent need to investigate Ledesma’s death, and Brendan spoke about the importance of Oscar Wilde. The consul listened attentively but seemed confused about the connection. ”And are you also demonstrating at the Irish consulate?”

“No.”

“You realize that in Argentina, we are not responsible for … Irish affairs.”

“Yes.”

“And you do understand that Argentina is not responsible for the death of Mr. Wilde?”

I assured him it was a cold case.

He appeared unconvinced, and kept looking at us with tactful caution, as though we were the vanguard of an Irish plot to seize the sheep-friendly wastes of Patagonia.  As we left he shook my hand with exquisite courtesy. “I will certainly convey your demand for an investigation  to my government. And when I next see the Irish ambassador, I will tell him” – he paused, not at all sure what message could be passed on; but then he finished with a flourish of inspiration, “I will tell him there are matters he should investigate too!”

I remember this as a rather incongruous attempt to link two matters that perhaps should have stayed separate. But I also remember it precisely because of the contrast between the two lives, and deaths, we tried to commemorate. No wonder, in retrospect, that putting them together in front of the consulate was confusing.  It made me consider the fraught and difficult alliances between LGB people and that hanging T they like to attach to their advocacy, but only infrequently try fully to understand. The terms are different, the victories aren’t always congruent, and the suffering may estrange rather than being shared.

Wilde remains famous after his first century in the grave. His plays still play, his words still elicit laughter. No one outside some friends in Córdoba pays much attention to what Vanesa Ladesma said.   Everyone who remembers Wilde endows him with a psychology, with the depth and duality that are the necessary constituents of wit.  Vanesa Ladesma suffers the indignity of remaining a photograph, more vivid to most in her mutilated death than in the life she lived. I combed the Internet as well as my own files for a while, and I realized: I can’t find a picture of her while she was alive.

And this all has something to do with how we imagine sexuality as opposed to gender; the first a wellspring of mystery and power, the second an external and limiting imposition. Wilde’s sexuality was an interior fact, a reality within; he had the choice of keeping it a secret; it was his daring but also deliberate play with revelation and concealment that helped him climb to become the most famous British writer of his time; and it was his willed embrace of his truth beneath the unraveled mystery after his precipitate fall that gave him a conclusive dignity, and commends him to us and our posterity. Vanesa was branded, and hiding herself was never much of an option. She carried on her skin the marks of the contrast between who she said she was and who she was told to be. Her life was a courageous but constrained struggle against defining discourses from without.  Sexuality is something one experiences from the inside first. But gender fits you from the outside like a sanbenito of Spandex, imposed from birth.

This inflected, too, the vast differences in wealth and power between them. Wilde was born into a prosperous family, even if one in Britain’s closest colony. He manipulated the inside-outside game of appearances to amass celebrity and money (even if mostly in the form of debt); his ascent was what made his fall so shocking. Vanesa had no game to play; she was always on the outside, by class, by background, by the way she presented her body and the things she did with it.

I wrote somewhat earlier here that sexuality proliferates meanings. There are always spaces, in the way we imagine sexuality, to insinuate some new complexity or individuation or interpretation. Gender culls meanings, weeds them out. Everything has to boil down to the few available options, the old binaries, the one-two punch.

Because of that, insisting on your own authority over the significance of gender, or demanding to cross the yellow police lines laid across the territory, is one of the most dangerous things you can do. A few nights ago, I watched Woody Allen’s Zelig, for the first time in about 20 years. The hero — the nebbish as chameleon — is the ultimate conformist. He becomes like anybody he’s around, to the point where Allen’s little Jewish schlemiel, plopped down in 30s Germany, turns Nazi. He changes race, color, religion. The one thing he doesn’t alter, though, is gender. With women, he stays resolutely male.  Some shapes shift, but other transgressions remain unimaginable. Obviously there’s some squeamishness on Allen’s part about too much malleability; but then, Allen in a storm trooper’s uniform is, in a sick way, funny. Allen in a dress, in that time and that place, would have gotten killed.

Of course, I’m not trying to draw some absolute contrast between two classes of experience: to the contrary. Stephen Whittle, the grand British trans activist, once remarked that 90% of what we call homophobic violence is in fact transphobic violence.  The attackers and the haters aren’t really acting on some theory they have about what you do in bed. They’re responding to the gut sense you’re not “masculine” or “feminine” enough, that you act funny in a way that corrodes the barbed war supposed to keep the genders separate. I can’t vouch for the numbers, but this speaks to the feeling I’ve drawn from hundreds of interviews I’ve done across the world.  Sexuality is always linked to gender. But that’ s also because it’s always linked to power, and gender is one of the key points from which our understanding of power and powerlessness — that great, uncompromising binary that bisects all our lives — flows.

Self-identified lesbians and gays are also caught up in the struggle against the straitjackets of gender norms and the policing of bodies. But they try to construct their identities to give them ways and leeway to change the terms, escape the front lines, fight on their own territory. Trans people are, by definition, in the middle of the fight.

Vanesa Ledesma, by Tom Block

Part of the trans struggle, too, is clearly to reclaim the autonomy and interiority that the social regulation of the body — the control clamped down on the skin itself — tries to deny. This is a heroic fight, and it’s no detraction from its particularity to say that it’s one in which everybody has a stake: everyone who tries to maintain an identity separate from the state and others, everyone who tries to carve out a sphere of independent will in an increasingly programmed world, and then act it out with their bodies somehow and make it known. That’s why I mourn, among other things and names, the fact that I can’t find a photograph of the living Vanesa Ledesma.  I remember the iconic photographs of Khaled Said, the young Egyptian torture victim, before and after he was beaten to death; these images and the indignation they aroused helped spur a revolution. It seems a final indignity that Vanesa Ledesma has no “before.” She’s reduced to her own mutilation, defined by her death. She’s been commemorated since in paintings (available from Amnesty International for $3000); these too portray her shattered features after the police were finished with her. William Kennedy, in his great novel Ironweed, has one of his down-and-out characters reflect on an alcoholic woman sliding toward death: ”Nobody’s a bum all their life. She hada been somethin’ once.”  Vanesa Ledesma was a lot before she died. The loss lies partly in how that life has been overridden.

The Trans Day of Remembrance website banners a few lines from Shakespeare:

My grief lies all within; And these external manners of lament

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul …

That’s from Richard III, the probably-queer monarch mourning his imprisonment by Bolingbroke. It speaks, though, to the struggle to reclaim the life within from the pressure and oppression beating down on the body. Critics for generations have treated Richard as a flagrant instance of self-absorption, lost in acting out his emotions, the King as drama queen. It’s on a trans web page, though, that I hear in these words their special dignity and the weight of their demand. The inner life against external manners: for Vanesa Ledesma, that meant something.

And yet, again, it’s a fight for all of us.

This ad, showing Benedict XVI osculating the Sheikh of Al-Azhar in Cairo — the Clinch of Civilizations — pushed the Vatican too far: ”This shows a grave lack of respect for the Pope, an offence to the feelings of believers, a clear demonstration of how publicity can violate the basic rules of respect for people,” said the Holy Father’s spokesman.

Photoshopping Obama’s lips against Hu Jintao’s prompted US ire: ”The White House has a longstanding policy disapproving of the use of the president’s name and likeness for commercial purposes,” said spokesman Eric Schultz.

Now, one interesting thing is how many of these provocative images are of two men. There is indeed a strikingly chaste portrayal of Angela Merkel giving Nicolas Sarkozy a sauerkraut-faced smack:

They both look as though they have been forced into a medical experiment. Even the most ardent agitators against German dominance of the European Central Bank, however, aren’t likely to take offense at that. The aim to upset is far more effectively fulfilled by Netanyahu forcing his affections onto Mahmoud Abbas, with the ardor of a whole shtetl of settlers unleashed upon the land:

There’s interesting stuff for reflection here, on how homoeroticism between men still awakens unease. And it’s a particular kind of unease, in that all kinds of other relations –of political amity and civilizational conflict, of submission and overwhelmingly of power — offer themselves up to be read into that unmuted tonguing. A man kissing a woman is pretty much just that, banal from overexposure, symbolizing nothing much more than (the possibility of) sex. Looking at Merkel and Sarkozy, it’s hard to infuse much meaning into their liplock beyond a suspicion that one or the other has bad breath. But set the Vicar of Rome and an imam mouth to mouth, and every kind of association from the Battle of Poitiers to Le Pen, from Saladin to Samuel Huntington, comes crowding around like a band of paparazzi watching Madonna do a public strip-tease.

In other words, homosexuality is still in the unenviable position of meaning more than itself. It’s never just there, sufficient on its own; it keeps getting enlisted into other agendas, serving other programs, speaking in other voices, living in other rooms. One might remember Art Spiegelman’s famous New Yorker cover, which appeared in early 1993 a couple of years after rioting in Crown Heights between Hasidic Jews and African-Americans had shattered the city’s tenuous racial peace. It caused a stir at the time, but the sheer heterosexuality of it gave the feeling of alarm nothing tangible to hang onto. So what if the rabbi is laying it onto Queen Latifah?  Their kids will grow up to be doctors and play basketball. The frisson died down quickly for lack of ambiguity. But compare it to this photograph, taken for a story on lesbian and gay firefighters and police in New York after 9/11 (the photographer, Dirk Anschütz, acknowledges the debt):

It’s … different. It’s just different, somehow. Look at it for a while, and you start wondering things like: Why is the cop holding the fireman’s lapels that weird way? Is he attracted to him, or arresting him? Whatever happened to Abner Louima, anyway?  Why isn’t there a fire hose (nervous titter)? Why is that skyscraper there? Is a plane going to hit it? Isn’t this the kind of thing that is just destined to provoke another terrorist attack? They hate us for our freedoms, for God’s sake!  Can’t you be less free for once?  And who is that brown man siting across the aisle from me? Stewardess!  IS THERE AN AIR MARSHAL ON THIS PLANE?

In this light, I have to point to an obvious antecedent of the Benetton onslaught. Sandip Roy, in a charming essay on the Benetton campaign, has already observed the passing of the once-hegemonic Red Kiss:

Communist iron men were prone to these smooches unlike their more cowboy counterparts on the other side of the Cold War. They were secure enough in their masculinity — all those pogroms and tanks rolling into town squares surely helped.

But I think he misses the complexity of how those kisses were used. Here, for instance, was a famous one. Brezhnev, signing the SALT II treaty with Carter in 1979, decided, in what may have been an Alzheimerish impulse born of plaque on the cranial arteries, to treat the US President like a fraternal leader of a minor People’s Republic:

The moment, which was followed not long after by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, came up relentlessly in the next year’s presidential campaign, used to chip away at Carter’s masculinity. Reagan unveiled an election poster:

Rarely has a presidential candidate, and a conservative one too, invited American voters to identify themselves explicitly with a Soviet dictator. I submit: it’s the wildly multiplying and contradictory meanings — of power, submission, fear, attraction, contempt — that homoeroticism opens up which gave space (a kind of semiotic space, let’s let the academic in me say) for the Reagan campaign to make the leap. It worked. Carter, derided as a wimp too terrified to take on swimming rabbits, much less the Evil Empire, lost.

In 1990, when Hungary had its first free elections, the then-youth party Fidesz — which barred membership to seniors over 35, and was represented by a group of long-haired, rock-star student politicians seemingly straight off MTV — produced this famous campaign poster.

The top image shows Brezhnev planting a kiss on Erich Honecker, the iron boss of the GDR. The bottom one shows a happy young hetero couple rapt in springtime love on a park bench. The contrast the youth movement was trying to draw is obvious. The slogan is Tessék választani, which is a pun of sorts: It can mean “Take your choice!” (and as such was the title of a national Hungarian pop festival from the 60s on); it can also be, “Please vote.”

I remember discussing it with my gay friends in Budapest back then. We all felt a little ambivalent. Of course you were supposed to like the straight couple, so glowing and pretty and bold. (Kiissing outdoors was a bit daring and suggested rebellious freedom, even for heteros, back in those still-Puritan days.) And of course who wanted to imagine the caresses of those bureaucratic dinosaurs, like Yertle the Turtle mating? On the other hand, in the insistently heterosexual environment of 1990 Hungary, any image of male-male affection had a certain resonance for us. I even indulged in a bit of sympathy for the old guys, probably too worn out in that pre-Viagra era to get it up. I recognized, as my friends did, the inner ambiguity of the outcast: How should we choose? Which side were we on?

The Fidesz party logo was an orange, and that too was a pop culture reference: to a famous 1969 movie, A tanú (“The Witness”), a comic paysage moralisé through the absurdities of a Communist society. Everybody in the country knew its most famous lines. In one, the hero has been assigned to a laboratory to develop the first orange tree ever in Hungary. He succeeds, but on the morning before its unveiling, a kid steals in the lab and eats the fruit. To cover it up, the hapless fellow tapes a painted lemon onto the tree instead. At the ceremony, a party boss triumphantly takes the orange, peels it, and bites down. His face scrunches up like Angela Merkel’s. Then, puzzled but needing to claim success, he announces: “The Hungarian orange. It is small, it’s bitter — but it’s ours.”

It’s true, so true. All the ambiguity and all the freedom have now been leached out of that hopeful image, and nobody likes to sample the shrivelled, sour realities that remain. Fidesz, once a harbinger of vitality in politics, has turned into a middle-aged, far-rightist party that now leads the government and is trying desperately to restrict and roll back Hungary’s democracy. I’m older too, and I feel a bit like lumbering Brezhnev forced by cruel history to stare down his own unpopularity as I try to market myself online.

Phnom Penh 2010

Only Benetton rolls on, ageless as corporations are, evergreen in its ability to give out mixed signals, to get our attention. It’s a wonderful, sempiternal game, and it still manages to distract us from what’s behind the billboard. Homoeroticism conceals as easily as it reveals; it engrosses attention, engorges and agitates the mind, but keeps us from looking at what we’re not supposed to see. In Kasserine, the town where the Tunisian revolution started,  ”Girls can work in the sweatshops producing for Benetton, where they earn less than 100 Euro per month.” In Cambodia last year, “Riot police used electric shock batons to beat women sweatshop workers when they stopped producing fashion labels for the UK and other Western nations.”  Benetton was one of the buyers of the striking workers’ products; the women earned just over a dollar a day. Unhate.

"Flushing": by Zimbabwean artist Owen Maseko

On Thursday Zimbabwe’s government newspaper, the Herald, published a call for the nation to pray that “those who campaign for the evil such as gay rights be condemned in the name of God.”

Zimbabwe needs our prayers more than ever before, given the unprecedented violence and the myopic call for support of gay and lesbian rights.

The column waxed predictably fulsome in its praise of God’s choice for Zimbabwe’s leadership.

If one is to make a mutual consideration of the level of integrity, loyalty, honesty and transparency vested in our current President, Robert Mugabe, it is appropriate that his leadership qualities are related to his Christian upbringing … Even his current international stance on denouncing homosexuality is a clear indication that he is a God-fearing leader whose character and personality is modelled on biblical principles.

Since Mugabe, however endowed with virtues, is unlikely to add immortality to their number, the piece also evinced a prudent concern for the future. It urged praying for a “God-fearing leader to suceed” [sic] him, and for a “continued stance anti- homosexuality”: “We should not have a leader in Parliament or any structures of Government who supports such an immoral act, which even our ancestors did support.” (I rather imagine there is a word missing there.)

The column was signed by “Never Gasho,” and here Google, the stalker’s friend, volunteers its aid. It seems that Gasho, a sometime jazz musician, is also a prosperous farmer in the Karoi area. He appears in a quite unrelated Herald article from a couple of months before, busily spilling dirt on farmers in the area who are undoing the intent of the government’s land redistribution program by leasing expropriated land back to its former white owners. The Herald says: 

Gasho always has information on his finger tips and is one guy who identifies with the truth. … Gasho will not keep quiet when he knows the truth. He searches for it too.

From this I would infer that Gasho is an ambitious ZANU-PF apparatchik, and a local informer.  His snitching in Karoi gave the excuse for a Presidential intervention and an investigation; the Herald seems now to be testing out his disputative talents on a national scale.

In this case the target is Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition Prime Minister who some weeks back told the BBC that he would support including sexual orientation protections in the new Constitution to be drafted over the coming months. The ruling party has attacked him steadily on the issue ever since, with particular intensity since David Cameron’s ill-timed noise about linking development aid to LGBT rights issues. Last Monday, the Herald accused Tsvangirai of a “bid to smuggle homosexuality into the new constitution under the guise of protecting minority rights.”

Sources who attended a Select Committee meeting last week accused MDC-T’s Copac co-chairperson Mr Douglas Mwonzora and spokesperson Ms Jessie Majome of seeking to have gay rights included under the guise of minority rights. [MDC-T, Movement for Democratic Change - Tsvangirai, is the Prime Minster's party; Copac is the Constitution Select Committee.] The sources said there was heated debate over the issue.

“When they raised the issue, we asked them to define who should be covered by minority rights and they started mumbling and they said the Ndebeles and the Venda,” said a source.

“We then told them that these were people whose interests were covered under individual rights. Some MDC-T members in Copac had already tipped us that the agenda was to incorporate gay rights, so when it was raised we rejected it right away.”

"They beat us": by Zimbabwean artist Owen Maseko

But this gives the game away. Mugabe’s real interest is in eliminating minority rights language altogether from the Constitution, and leaving only “individual rights” protections. He’s simply using gays as a classic wedge issue to discredit the whole discourse. And of course, he has reasons to want the Ndebele disempowered. Matabeleland is a longtime center of opposition to the regime. In the early 1980s, faced with mounting unrest there, Mugabe sent in his army’s North-Korean trained Fifth Brigade to massacre an estimated 7,000 Ndebele civilians. The Gukurahundi, as the killings are known in Shona, remains the great and devastating blight on Zimbabwe’s post-independence history. Mugabe has never acknowledged it.

Tsvangirai’s allies were shocked, shocked at this cynicism on the ruling party’s part.  Douglas Mwonzora said “he brought up the question of minority rights” at the committee meeting, “but the issue of gay rights was never discussed.”

“I and Jessie Majome (select committee spokesperson) raised the issue of minority rights – and minority groups in this country mean cultural minorities, ethnic minorities and religious minorities, and we even have political minorities,” Mwonzora said. ”That’s all we meant. We are surprised that the ZANU-PF propaganda machinery wants to belittle the rights of the minority by trying to say these are gay rights.”

But the opportunities for demagoguery that Cameron opened up are still gaping, and the loony free-for-all goes rolling on. In this atmosphere, it’s easy for Mugabe to bash the whole concept of minority rights as a colonial perversion. This morning the Herald published a new column; written by two Bindura University professors, it claims that

the push for gay rights is yet another renewed camouflaging tendency of the foreign aid regime used by the Western powers to create governance structures that are conducive for the exploitation and external control of weak African states.  In the name of human rights Britain and its allies want to restore and consolidate what was once achieved through the strong political administration of colonialism.

Setting the gay stuff aside, the article actually offers a scathingly tendentious analysis, but an analysis indeed, of Western development assistance strategies. But how does one make such a critique relevant to Zimbabwe’s public today? The headline says it all: “Keep your gay England, we keep our Godly Zimbabwe.”

Note: The images above are by Owen Maseko, a Zimbabwean artist. In early 2010 he opened an exhibition called ”Sibathontisele” (“Let’s Drip On Them”) at Bulawayo’s National Gallery, with works focused on representations of the Gukurahundi. The next day he was arrested and charged with undermining President Mugabe’s authority under the Public Order and Security Act. He could face 20 years in prison. He is free on bail but the case is still pending. 

Shai Bazak: I completely forget what I was doing before 1994

The program was an initiative of Israel’s consul-general to New England, Shai Bazak, and will feature performances by gay heartthrob Assi Azar. Azar, a popular TV host in Israel, will screen his made-for-television coming-out film Mom, Dad, I Have Something to Tell You to audiences around the Boston area, followed by panel discussions about life as an openly gay man in Tel Aviv.  The event makes Israel the only country in the world to run a campaign promoting its LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) population.

Bazak’s job as consul-general is obviously to promote Israel, and promoting its protection of LGBT rights is a task he embraces eagerly. At a campus speaking engagement recently, he made the de rigueur comparison to the rest of the region:

“It is clear from what we have seen that large masses of people in the Middle East want democracy, and civil rights, and liberty and freedom … Democracy is the right to speak up. Democracy supports the rights of women and gays and minorities in society who are oppressed.  However … this is a problem in the Middle East because even though many people want democracy, they don’t want it for everyone. This is a source of much conflict and much harm and is at the root of many of our problems.”

Now, Bazak knows exactly what it means to want democracy for some but not for others. In his past life — before serving as Binyamin Netanyahu’s press secretary during his first Prime Ministerial term — he was spokesman for the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the major settlers’ organization. As such, he defended the idea that settlers had rights and deserved political representation, while Palestinians who owned the land would get neither.

Bazak “lost Netanyahu’s affection over the years,” according to one press report, but gained another patron: Yisrael Beiteinu party chief and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman originally wanted to put Bazak in the prestige post of consul-general in New York. Netanyahu vetoed that, but approved Boston as a consolation prize.

Diplomatic sources deflected criticism that Bazak, with his strong Likud credentials, is not the right man to send to Boston, the site of numerous universities and one of America’s most liberal cities, saying that he has proven his ability to represent the country’s policies faithfully and well.

Clearly Bazak has hit on the gay angle as a way to sell Israel to “one of America’s most liberal cities.”   His official biography on the consular website, meanwhile, omits his service to the extremist settlers, saying only that “Mr. Bazak has held many positions in Israeli government and the private sector.”

raise your hand if you like bears: Lieberman

This is “pinkwashing” to the max: using rights protections for one group to conceal rights abuses against another. But the intriguing thing  –suggested by Bazak’s own record — is the specific role of the Israeli right. After all, the two ministries most involved in marketing Israel’s gay record are both under the control of Yisrael Beiteinu: not only Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry, but the Ministry of Tourism under Stas Misezhnikov.

Yisrael Beiteinu has been widely called a fascist party. Its stab-in-the-back, racist rhetoric against Israeli Arabs fits part of that bill: “no loyalty, no citizenship” was its election slogan (think “even though many people want democracy, they don’t want it for everyone”).  And its promotion of a heroic leader cult and a macho-mythologized Israeli identity fits another. Here,  Haaretz describes its junior wing at a party conference:

The youths, ages 16-18, many of them good friends from school, had stood for a long time before the event began at the intersection near the hotel, waving Israeli flags and shouting “Death to the Arabs” and “No loyalty, no citizenship” at passing cars. …

On the bus back to the center of Upper Nazareth, one of the youths offers this explanation for his excitement about the party: “This country has needed a dictatorship for a long time already. But I’m not talking about an extreme dictatorship. We need someone who can put things in order. Lieberman is the only one who speaks the truth.” Adds Edan Ivanov, an 18 year old who describes himself as being “up on current events”:

“We’ve had enough here with the ‘leftist democracy’ – and I put that term in quotes, don’t get me wrong. People have put the dictator label on Lieberman because of the things he says. But the truth is that in Israel there can’t be a full democracy when there are Arabs here who oppose it.

“All Lieberman’s really saying is that anyone who isn’t prepared to sign an oath of loyalty to the state, because of his personal views, cannot receive equal rights; he can’t vote for the executive authority. People here are gradually coming to understand what needs to be done concerning a person who is not loyal.”

The party’s core appeal is to the xenophobia of Israel’s million-plus immigrants from the former Soviet Union. However, it’s not just nationalism that wins their loyalties.  Many, encouraged to make aliyah to Israel by a demographically desperate state, found that the Law of Return welcomed then but Jewish law didn’t.  Up to half a million Russian Jewish immigrants don’t qualify as halakhic Jews in the eyes of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

In part this is because of the celebrated “grandchild clause” in the Law of Return, which allows people with one Jewish grandparent to immigrate (on the argument that since this was the Nazi standard for extermination, it should be Israel’s standard for citizenship).   Orthodox parties have long campaigned to scrap this provision and bring the law into line with halakhic definitions – which would only deepen Israel’s demographic crisis. In the meantime, though, the incongruity between the state’s and the rabbinate’s definitions casts significant numbers of self-identified Russian Jews as outsiders in the land. Yisrael Beiteinu gives them psychological consolation by offering an Israeli-hood defined by loyalty and the exclusion (if not execution) of Arabs. It also promises material consolations: it’s a proudly secular party that presses to institute civil unions. This secularism in a state steadily more dominated by the Orthodox gives the party a peculiar appeal to gays as well.

So the semi-fascist party’s flirtation with gay rights has a logic to it. One self-described gay leftist writes:

It’s very tempting to just say “no” and resist any ties with Lieberman, whose MKs [members of the Knesset] are responsible for proposing a bunch of ugly new bills all meant to restrict freedom of expression.
But there’s more to it than that. I’m as Israeli as the next guy. I am a proud, left-wing patriot. As a gay activist, my first mission is to promote and normalize LGBT life in Israel.
The Russian immigrants who form the base of Lieberman’s constituency are in general the most homophobic part of Israeli society, even more than Shas’s ultra-Orthodox Jews.
So having Lieberman’s followers embrace the gay community is a very positive development, even if their motivations aren’t pure.
The fact is, there’s no way back for them.
After Lieberman embraces the gay community, he will never be able to speak or vote against gay laws in the Knesset. Next year, when we try again to get equal rights in adoption and surrogacy, his party will have to support those measures.

Mazel tov.

There’s a lot to be argued about in this dilemma. I’m sure somebody will invoke the figure of the little gay kid growing up in a Russian Jewish family, who will take untold comfort from the fact that his father’s favorite political party is no longer homophobic. And wouldn’t it be nice if President Mitt Romney in the US launched a campaign to attract gay tourists, to a country which by that time will be so broke and devastated that any travelling French homo would be welcomed as a savior along with his Euros francs! Wouldn’t that strike a blow for internal acceptance too? And so on …  But there’s a larger cost to the whole political community when an authoritarian thug like Lieberman gets to paint himself as a defender of somebody’s, anybody’s, rights. “Pinkwashing” corrupts the idea and practice of human rights, by throwing out the promise of universality and turning them into instruments of division and exclusion. What this story suggests is that it’s not just deception for external consumption: it also corrupts the polity from within. Lieberman pinkwashes himself. By expropriating the language of diversity and tolerance, he makes himself look like a decent participant in politics, and burnishes his own racism and violence with a secular and progressive sheen.  The writer above isn’t going to vote for Lieberman, but he’s willing to accept Lieberman’s votes for his own causes. Isn’t that just about as bad?

In the way that absolute power corrupts, occupation — the exercise of absolute control over a population — has corrupted Israel’s politics. Lieberman’s ascent to respectability marks a further descent into corruption. That a foreign ministry under his leadership can talk with a straight face about “a multi-faceted society with many faces and just as many narratives” means the narrative has become a fantastic fairy tale. Among the many faces of tolerance, Lieberman’s is the portrait of Dorian Gray.

oops!

We do nothing but apologize lately.  Soon we will need to appear on Leno to explain the incident with that woman and the limousine,  or perhaps try a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Colorado Springs. In our latest occasion for penitence, Paul Canning, the humble and accommodating editor of the chronically inaccurate [see below] blog LGBT Asylum News, has turned his preoccupied attention on us! – and has offered some intelligently spelled remarks in the Comments section. These sentences clearly are the product not just of typing but of Thought, so I prefer to respond to them in the body here, rather than relegate them to a footnote of history.

Canning writes about our post on African activists  and aid conditionality:

“chronically inaccurate”

Hilarious when in the same line you describe the Mail as “anti-everything” which it is not. That is an INACCURATE description of the Daily Mail.

Also, simply reporting the origins of this (the Mail) apparently means “attempts to minimize the shift”.

Which is a little rich given that I very quickly and uniquely gave a platform to a range of global south activists who mostly – though not entirely – criticised what the Mail had apparently reported.

But you don’t mention that.

You write polemics, Scott, but do you have to be such a b*tch? Because that’s what it reads like.

We apologize for calling LGBT Asylum News “chronically inaccurate”!  We were misled by the following incidents, among others:

• In the middle of the Egyptian revolution, after State Security arrested the well-known dissident blogger “Sandmonkey,” Canning announced on his blog – incorrectly — that Sandmonkey was gay. This move could easily have resulted in further persecution of the blogger, who tweeted later, “Just as a matter of public record, I am not gay. Making such a claim about me without verification is incredibly unethical.”
• Canning’s story of a gay activist’s  murder in Western Kenya was later discredited by the investigations of a coalition of nine local LGBT organizations working there.
• Canning has broadcast inaccurate stories of “gay executions” in Iran – and accused other bloggers, who had reprinted his accounts, of unethical behavior when, on finding the stories unsubstantiated , they retracted them.
• Then there’s Canning’s reliance on, and diehard support of, the discredited website GayMiddleEast.com.   It isn’t just that Gay Middle East is inaccurate. It lied about its own staff and origins, and put activists across the region who worked with it in danger.

There are undoubtedly other errors we haven’t noticed. But wait! It’s also true that we may not have noticed the uncredited times that Canning’s blog has been accurate.

This is an unfair aspect of our highly technical world, where one error on a matter of concern only to a small number of specialists – like a patient’s blood type, the location of a bomb target, or the existence of “global warming” – can outweigh all the other things one got right, like Derek Jeter’s batting average or the number of jellybeans in that jar. We are all correct far more often than we think.  I am surely on the mark when I assume that Earth’s atmosphere will not suddenly turn to laughing gas tomorrow, but do I ever get credit for the prediction? No. Surprisingly, even the Daily Mail  [see below] is probably accurate when it reports, e.g., that the sun rose at 6:24 today. (I stress probably: there could always be some hidden slant; possibly some faceless bureaucrats in Brussels forced the sun to rise at 6:23 instead, and by reporting 6:24 the Daily Mail is striking a coded blow for free markets and for British independence.)

So we apologize to Canning for underestimating the occasions when he reflects the truth. Let’s say no longer that LGBT Asylum News is “chronically inaccurate.”  Let us praise it as “episodically accurate” instead.

I apologize to the Daily Mail

This brings us to the Daily Mail. Canning is quite correct when he calls me out for saying it is “anti-everything.”  I was INACCURATE to give the impression that the newspaper campaigned against gravity, or condemned the habit of breathing. No one is against everything.  Even the Russian nihilists had the odd thing or two they supported, such as better bomb technology. Moreover, on reflecting, one realizes that almost every anti comes with its own pro.  For instance, we could note that the Mail opposed sanctions against South Africa during the apartheid regime; but rather than saying it was anti-sanctions, wouldn’t it be simpler to say that it was pro-apartheid?  We could observe that the Mail stood bravely against the welter of colors that the 1930s fashion industry offered to confused consumers. But rather than saying it was anti blue, or pink, or green shirts, wouldn’t be better to say that it was pro Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts?  (Though I have the feeling the Mail might prefer the first formulations, or maybe would like to forget the whole thing.)   Even a cursory glance at the Daily Mail shows it supports women’s cosmetics; a strong native plumbing industry independent of Polish expertise; and the prosperity of Pakistan through the return of its diaspora to the motherland.  In calling the paper “anti-everything,” I was succumbing to the wicked practice of “irony.” This is an addictive vice among homosexuals, sex workers, and editorial cartoonists; it mainly serves to infuriate the upright people who do not engage in it.

Finally: Canning says that he “uniquely gave a platform to a range of global south activists” on aid conditionality. Here I differ with him somewhat. In the one article he published, he quoted 13 people; 5 were in the global South, the rest in Europe. Three of those five expressed serious reservations about the British policy. Nonetheless, Canning headlined his piece,  “Cautious welcome, concern as UK ties foreign aid to LGBT human rights.”

More importantly, in the weeks since then 53 organizations and 86 individual activists across Africa signed a statement  laying out their reasons for opposing the policy; groups in other countries weighed in with their disparate responses; and a massive backlash  caused by Cameron’s move led to mounting anti-gay rhetoric in Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and other countries.  Canning didn’t consider any of this news; he covered none of it. It’s hard not to suspect the reason: he supports aid conditionality, and doesn’t want to give much space to its grim consequences, or to the global South voices that collectively offer a sophisticated critique.

Paul Canning is perhaps right that I’m a “polemicist,” not to mention a butch, or botch. But then, I lay my opinions out on the line. I don’t pretend to be reporting “news,” and meanwhile suppress facts that don’t suit my presuppositions.

Nonetheless: I apologize!  In keeping with the spirit of utmost clarity, let me set forth my apology in transparent terms:

Such a vain endeavor! Let’s go back to agreeing compulsorily. To interrogate veracity is simply muddled. Facts remain overly messy. Truth hurts! Everyone should express expectable gregarious opinions. I swear that I can. Being unaware makes better life expectancy realistic – soon!

I hope no one will attempt to find some other meaning in that unequivocal statement.

Peter Tatchell apologizes to the Crusades for not enlisting

Meanwhile, we are changing our policy with regard to polemics. In future, we will offer apologies proactively before saying anything, indeed before thinking it. In fact, when addressing other people’s errors, we will apologize not only before pointing them out, but before they have actually erred. We believe that this will save our detractors psychological pain, as well as the considerable legal fees and effort required to extract apologies under English law. Moreover, it encourages our critics to err regularly and rhythmically rather than erratically and sporadically, creating a feeling of predictability and confidence among their readers. We therefore announce that we are apologizing to Paul Canning weekly for the next five years, and to Peter Tatchell daily for the next ten. And we have programmed our pacemaker to emit an apology to Doug Ireland seventy-eight times a minute, audible only to bats and whales. Now we would like to ask Peter kindly to remove that bailiff from our lawn, as he is walking on the crocuses it took us weeks to plant.

fist the powers that be

Branded deep in Harvard’s institutional psyche is the trauma of the 1969 student strike, when protesters occupied the president’s office and shut the school down. They were calling for an end to the University’s coziness with the US military, a black studies program, and no more expropriations of working-class housing — but beyond that, as the famous poster said, they wanted a different life, demanded “to be more human.”  In the strike’s wake, the University moved the president’s house to a far suburban street to prevent hostage-taking, delved more tunnels between campus buildings to facilitate escape, and formally invited women to join the student body, to keep the radicals distracted. Some distinguished and unnerved professors in the Department of English decided to experiment with thinking the way the demonstrators did. If you wanted to destroy Western civilization, they reasoned, where would you strike next? Naturally, you’d try to burn the card catalog of Widener Library, that comprehensive collection of man’s intellectual accomplishments, to render the lending system impotent and knowledge inaccessible to the race. So they recruited sympathetic colleagues to stand sentinel on our cultural heritage in shifts, and these tweedy, chalk-haired heroes took turns lurking discreetly around the catalogs, on guard lest some filthy longhair slip a Molotov cocktail into a drawer. I often think of this whenever I go to the reading room and see the seamless computerized system doling out books now. Barring a Chinese virus, civilization is safe.

OK, 1% inside, 99% outside. Got it?

This history helps explain the University’s inept, paranoid response to the nascent Occupy Harvard movement, a few hundred protesters demanding an institution more open to the other 99%.  The institution has closed and padlocked the gates of Harvard Yard, stationed police all round as if it were a rather cushy Supermax prison, and barred access to anyone without a Harvard ID. As a public-relations move, this tends to reinforce the demonstrators’ point, that those outside the 1% aren’t welcome there. However, it’s a reminder that the fabled, shared, rich commonality of intellectual life has nothing to do with the University as faux community.  Harvard is private property — it is, in fact, quite literally a corporation, and proudly proclaims it’s the oldest one in the Western Hemisphere.  It can keep anyone off the grass it likes. The only one allowed to occupy Harvard is Harvard itself.

I’ve written here earlier about the “new enclosures,” the increasing privatization of public space: how much of what we might think is open territory in city and suburb is actually owned by somebody. And corporations buying up the commons can then severely circumscribe our ability to speak, protest, and assemble. It’s important to remember, though, that even space that is formally, legally public — streets, sidewalks, squares — usually comes with all manner of restrictions on who is allowed to use it or to appear there. In many cases these limitations are invisible to “respectable” users, whose looks and manners don’t transgress the written or unwritten rules. But for others, they are vivid and brutal. And it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of these boundaries involve sex.

A new report by the Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC,  “Move Along: Policing Sex Work in Washington DC,” shows some of these.  The US capital has passed new laws augmenting “an already stringent system of policing and “zero tolerance” for most forms of commercial sex in the city,” by restricting where sex workers can go.

The most high profile measure allows the Chief of Police to declare “prostitution free zones” (PFZs) in which officers have wide-sweeping power to move along or arrest people who police believe to be congregating for the purpose of prostitution. The PFZ concept was framed as an innovative tool to assist law enforcement in its efforts to rid the District of prostitution. In fact, the law simply legitimized previously existing arbitrary and discriminatory police actions directed at people believed to be engaging in sex work.

no girls allowed

This is fairly astonishing. A “prostitution free zone” in the city one of whose streets (K Street, if you’re from another planet) has become a worldwide symbol of corporate bribery and corruption? Shouldn’t members of Congress and similar hustlers be banned from these moral precincts, as well as the working girls? It takes chutzpah.

The inevitable way these laws work is that police arrest anyone they recognize as a sex worker (usually, anybody with a previous arrest) when they’re spotted outside the “safe zone.” One stop from a cop can be enough to restrict your mobility for life. But this is an everyday and widespread way of regulating sex work and keeping the unwanted out of sight. Taiwan, for instance, claims a brand-new law is a liberal triumph that “legalizes” prostitution in certain areas. But in fact it eliminates sex workers’ freedom of movement — and is likely to increase prosecutions.

Taiwan has legalised the creation of red light districts in a bid to regulate the sex industry, but prostitutes themselves say the new law could actually worsen their plight.

Under the law passed by parliament Friday, local governments are allowed to set up special penalty-free sex trade zones, but outside them prostitutes will still be be fined – as, for the first time, will their clients and pimps.

The constitutional court scrapped the previous law punishing only prostitutes on the grounds it was unfair.

But so far no local authority has yet said it will create a legal prostitution area, leaving streetwalkers fearing they face the worst of both worlds.

The desire to set up a segregated sexual geography runs deep. The Dominican Republic is presently debating a proposed law requiring sex workers to carry government-issued cards certifying their health status, at all times. Their work would be confined to so-called “zones of tolerance” — an old but Orwellian term — and they would be restricted to living “in establishments away from residential centers, main avenues of the city and areas that have historical, artistic or cultural significance for the country.” At  a public hearing, a neighborhood association representative bemoaned the “shame” incurred

as a result of the activity of prostitution in the place.  He also considered as embarrassing and decadent the spectacles and misconduct made by women, homosexuals, and transvestites who sell sex.

A Dominican journalist calls the proposal a “mask of hypocrisy,” a breast-beating substitute for “improving the living conditions of the population.”

Part of the political genius of the Occupy movements is that they give physical, immediate, almost sensuous expression to the sense of exclusion so many economically and politically disenfranchised people feel. They sharpen the contrast between private property and common ground, expropriation and community, the high towers of financial privilege and the cold and open street.

It’s vital, then, to bear in memory the other despised and unwanted people who have been shoved out of the commons into the alleys and the prison cells: the sex workers, drug users, cruisers, vagrants, homeless, and the rest, all those whose bodies expose them to the lash of laws that for the rest of us remain invisible and unfelt. It’s critical (even as the right wing tries to deprecate and demonize the movement as a cover for rutting adolescents to make free love like rabbits) to recall that sex is entwined with money and power as a justification for exclusion. Occupy sex!  Own up to it and own it in all its diversity of forms and pleasures. Our bodies and desires need to be reclaimed for a human future too.

Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism

A Sikh writer situates LGBT rights in the tradition:

[T]here’s an important concept in Sikhism called Sarbat da Bhala, which means working for the welfare and well-being of all people. This is a spiritual obligation for us Sikhs. We recite these words countless times, as they conclude one of the central Sikh prayers,  Ardas  (meaning “petition”).

Fortunately, many Sikhs are indeed embodying these words we say so often. A few months after the shooting and killing of two elderly Sikh men in Sacramento, Calif., in March, the Sacramento Sikh Temple offered a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator of a violent anti-gay hate attack in the same neighborhood. Twenty-six-year-old Seth Parker was punched in the face, suffering multiple facial fractures, while the attackers directed anti-gay slurs at him.

A spokesperson for the Gurdwara stated: “The Sikh Community condemns this disgusting attack motivated by ignorance and hate. In light of the recent murders of two Sikhs in Elk Grove and the hate crime conviction in Yolo County (of two men who attacked a Sikh taxi driver), we are especially sensitive to such crimes. We hope that our reward will help bring these criminals to justice.”

Now this is the kind of solidarity that is at the heart of what it means to be a Sikh. …

The oppression of LGBT people is one of the most pervasive and accepted forms of subjugation today. Indeed, many individuals and institutions deem LGBT people a lower class or caste, justifying their discrimination with dogmatic rhetoric of what’s “natural,” “normal” and … what are true “American values.” This is no different than saying turbans are not truly American, so Sikhs should not be allowed to wear them in public. Oppression is oppression. Our struggles are intertwined.

Just as Guru Nanak said hundreds of years ago, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim,” perhaps today we can also say, “There is no straight, there is no gay.” Indeed, his message was ultimately that we are all One.

Aleksa Lundberg

This article from Global Post, about a Swedish transgender woman’s experience of being sterilized as a requirement for gender-reassignment surgery, and her later fight against the practice, has given the issue welcome coverage at last.  Amazingly, a right-wing party representative says that “children’s interests” underlie the policy:

The conservative Christian Democrats oppose a repeal, as do the Sweden Democrats. Although their party is a minority in parliament, the Christian Democrats underpin the center-right government coalition. Their spokesperson Annika Eclund, describes the party line as “looking out for children’s interests” in a time when medical advances allow new reproductive techniques.

“There are limits to how much we should experiment with how life is created,” she says. “Every day I meet people who are seeking their identity and their background, asking where they come from,” she says. “Men don’t give birth to babies. A daddy can’t at the same time be a mummy. Just because you can, does that mean that you should?”

Mr. Dithers staring across the Red Sea

An unpleasantly vivid cartoon from the Kenya Star, about the Cameron aid conditionality fiasco, indicates how the discourse is going.

The face of Africa, when tilted on its side like this, looks remarkably like Mr. Dithers from the old Dagwood and Blondie comics. It’s perhaps appropriate that the scream is coming from the area of Egypt.

Like a rainbow

A reporter once said that the most boring headline he could think of was one beginning “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” OK; here’s a Canadian initiative; see if you think it’s worthwhile. As the premier of British Columbia gets ready for a trade mission to China, she’s laid down some rules for business people tagging along:  ”Tourism operators marketing trips to the province for Chinese people must agree not to promote casinos, gambling or gay tourism.”

B.C. Tourism Minister Pat Bell …  said the federal government accepted the terms when it negotiated approved-destination status with China last year, and B.C. had no say in the matter.

Approved-destination status allows tourism operators in Canada to market their services in China, and Chinese tour operators to organize and promote travel packages to Canada.

He said B.C. simply wanted to ensure that its tourism operators understood the rules: “We’re not necessarily endorsing the specifics.”

The government soon retracted its requirement. But it was an embarrassing moment, especially with Vancouver trying to hawk itself as a gay tourist destination, like other cities from Cape Town to Tel Aviv. It’s also embarrassing in other venues. Gay conservatives in the US have long contended that the “pink dollar,” the buying power of gay consumers, can eradicate inequality better than the law. As Stephen G. Miller, founder of the right-wing Independent Gay Forum, affirms, “Corporations increasingly are courting the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender markets for their buying power and trendsetting value”:

The gay market is a significant demographic. … Free markets work to sweep away the ineffectual, inefficient and irrational (including unprofitable prejudice) when allowed by the state to do so.

Maybe so — but not if they meet a bigger market with prejudices of its own. China right now is the mother of all buyers and sellers, the 800-pound panda (dragon? duck?) in the room. The puny pink dollar can posture if it likes. The red renminbi — China’s victorious currency — rules.

The same is true of China’s aid policies. That‘s the chord this story struck with me — coming in the midst of the global South debate over the UK’s vague promises to tie LGBT rights to development assistance. Chinese aid, to Africa in particular, has become a slowly growing question-mark, a cloud of discomfort, hanging over geopolitical discussions in the West. A blog I noticed last week carried a British gay man’s “Letter to Tanzania,” in which he intones with gravid sarcasm:

To have to lower yourself to accept money from such selfish nations as the UK must be extremely galling.  I’m sure you have only done so for the last 35 years because you simply had no other choice, but maybe, if you’ll permit me to make a little suggestion, it’s time to consider asking the Chinese for more help, or some of the oil-rich nations of the Middle East?  They don’t let pesky little things like gay rights get in their way so I think you’d get on very well.

Ask the Chinese? Uh, don’t worry. African countries will.

China’s aid role is a crucial point not fully considered in the aid debate. Western countries that once had plenty of of “policy leverage” in attaching conditions to assistance now have less, because another donor has come to town.

The motives and forms of Chinese overseas aid are not well understood elsewhere. All that’s fully known is that there’s a lot of it. In a recent report, researchers from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa argue China doesn’t strive deliberately to obscure the aid flows; it’s just that the information is scattered in different papers and websites through the Chinese bureaucracy. Still, it’s difficult to extract simple figures — such as how much money goes to Tanzania or Malawi –from the facts at hand.

However, for the first time, China this year published a white paper outlining its policies on overseas development assistance. Vague in many areas, the document is evidently but perhaps not adequately calibrated to assuage uneasy critics in other industrialized countries.  One can take three overall facts from it:

a) China is overwhelmingly interested in Africa. Almost half its aid goes there.

b) Chinese aid goes heavily to economic infrastructure projects. For instance, the government breaks down its low-interest loans to developing countries as follows:

c) China advertises its aid as no-strings-attached, in respect of rights or any other conditions. It still proudly foregrounds the “Eight Principles for Economic Aid” Mao promulgated in 1964, among them:  ”In providing aid to other countries, the Chinese government strictly respects the sovereignty of recipient countries, and never attaches any conditions or asks for any privileges.”

Let’s start with the last point first.

Unconditionality is obviously attractive to many aid recipients, often for all the worst reasons. Robert Mugabe knows that Beijing will never care if his handshakes leave bloodstains behind. China is notoriously unwilling to integrate rights discussions into its aid mechanisms — indeed, to talk about rights at all. (The white paper contains no mention of rights, or of gender for that matter.) When I worked at Human Rights Watch, directors had desperate discussions about the impossibility of opening any channels with China’s rulers. At one point we were urged to make any kind of contact we could — if we met a Chinese official anywhere,  even in a public restroom, to strike up a conversation and try to connect. I have no idea whether any HRW staff got arrested for indecent conduct as a result.

Conditionality in Western aid has a long history. As one US official said in the 1990s, “”Aid appears to have established as a priority the importance of influencing domestic policy in the recipient countries.” However, it’s far from true that all or even most conditions  tied to aid were rights-related. Many were raw attempts to gain economic advantage — which makes the whole subject of conditionality rankle in the memory of some nations. One account notes:

[Njoki Njoroge] Njehu [director of the 50 Years is Enough campaign] cited the example of Eritrea, which discovered it would be cheaper to build its network of railways with local expertise and resources rather than be forced to spend aid money on foreign consultants, experts, architects and engineers imposed on the country as a condition of development assistance.

Strings attached to US aid for similar projects, she added, include the obligation to buy products such as Caterpillar and John Deere tractors. “All this adds up to the cost of the project.”

WIll China in fact be better? Many suspect China’s aid programs carry a similar economic agenda: the attempt to build markets for cheap Chinese goods.The Chinese white paper, as one commentator notices, refers to “financial support of a certain scale to developing countries” in the form of “preferential export buyer’s credits.” The pundit adds,

[T]his means more subsidies to help China’s exporters continue making money. It also means preferential financial packages that will continue to make it difficult for large multi-national organisations – including those from developing countries like South Africa and elsewhere in Africa – to compete with China’s for major contracts.

Economic infrastructure aid reveals the other side of Chinese ambitions. Here, Chinese assistance seems focused on a few areas. For instance, the graph shows that transport stands out: the white paper adds that

By the end of 2009, China had helped other developing countries build 442 economic infrastructure projects, such as the Sana’a-Hodeida Highway in Yemen, the Karakoram Highway and Gwadar Port in Pakistan, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, the Belet Uen-Burao Highway in Somalia, the Dry Dock in Malta, the Lagdo Hydropower Station in Cameroon, Nouakchott’s Friendship Port in Mauritania, railway improvement in Botswana, six bridges in Bangladesh, one section of the Kunming-Bangkok Highway in Laos, the Greater Mekong Sub-region Information Highway in Myanmar, the Shar-Shar Tunnel in Tajikistan, the No.7 Highway in Cambodia, and the Gotera Interchange in Addis Ababa of Ethiopia.

Many of these projects would be quite useful in moving large quantities of heavy things, as well as energy, from place to place.

This tends to support suspicions that a priority of Chinese aid is to facilitate extracting raw materials and other resources from recipient countries. The pattern of Chinese trade with Africa, which is burgeoning, bolsters this.  Crude oil and minerals are the main things China imports from there.  You can see an emerging picture of the Africa Chinese aid may aim to build. Countries send raw materials to China; in return, they become a market for Chinese consumer goods, which presumably help make the populations happy. The prospective flows of capital, and the vision of mobs kept quiescent by cut-rate cellphones and toys, must be pleasing to many an African oligarch’s reveries.

Not everyone would agree with this. (For a nuanced and more optimistic view of China’s role in Africa, see Deborah Brautigam’s blog here.) But if it bears some truth, there are at least two lessons to be drawn. There’s one for Western governments — and activists in their countries — who want to support LGBT movements, and human rights movements, in the South. There’s another for Western states thinking about the geopolitical future.

First, on a purely pragmatic level — and whatever you think of the ethics of aid conditionality – tying bilateral aid to LGBT rights won’t work. It won’t work because increasingly governments know they can get stringless aid from a different source, China. The best way for Western governments to advance LGBT rights is to aid LGBT rights movements themselves directly. As African states move into the orbit of a flush and generous funder uninterested in rights protections, the same will hold true for almost any human rights issue. If you want to promote it, don’t try bullying officials. Your dollars or pounds, pink or green or whatever, carry no clout against the indifferent renminbi. Fund the advocates; fund civil society.

Then there’s the question of Western countries’ own self-interest.  I am obviously unwilling to make an argument that appeals, even implicitly, to the the industrialized countries’ desire for unrestricted access to the fuels and other raw goods lodged in Africa’s soils.

That interest can’t and shouldn’t be met. We want a world in which countries keep autonomous control over their own resources, and  tend and protect the environments in which those resources are embedded. But, again in pragmatic terms, one can at least appeal to Western countries’ desire to keep China from having unrestricted access, either. This is a geopolitical concern that most of the old industrialized countries share.

The best way to do that is for Western governments to support strong democracies; strong civil societies, but also strong states that are simultaneously responsive to the diverse interests in their own populations, and resiliently resistant to external economic and political pressure. Such societies and such states will indeed make the West pay a fair price for any resources they get, on the countries’ own terms; but they’ll make China do the same. Such proximate equality is probably the best bargain the West can hope for.

The other alternative they have is to rely on the outworn oligarchies they’ve supported for decades, perhaps with new faces and new uniforms, but with the same old kleptocratic manners and brutal morals. That seems to be the route Western states are taking now. How much are they really concerned with full democratization, and how much with clinging to “political leverage,” and economic leverage too? The example of diehard US and European support for Yoweri Museveni in Uganda is not promising.

The problem is, oligarchies are notoriously ungrateful. They know a cash cow when they see one — they grew up milking them — and if the Chinese market appears before their kraal, swollen and mooing, the temptations of a dried-up West will seem desiccated and despicable. China has as much money as the West has now, and will soon have more. Oligarchies can be bought. Buying democracies is harder.

In Zambia, long lusted after by the industrial world for its copper reserves, Michael Sata — locally known as “King Cobra” — ran three populist presidential campaigns partly based on condemning Chinese economic intrusions. He called for investigations of working conditions in Chinese enterprises, and demanded economic independence for Zambia. In 2006, China threatened to cut diplomatic ties if he were elected. After two losses, Sata finally won in 2011, toning down his rhetoric somewhat. (He also survived a campaign controversy fed by his Christianist opponent after he appeared tentatively to support LGBT people’s rights. In a presage of current aid controversies, opponents accused him of selling out — for Danish money.)

Is Sata’s imperfect populism, defending African autonomy against all comers, a way forward for the continent?

Laxmi Narayan Tripathi

This season of Bigg Boss, India’s answer to Big Brother, features celebrated hijra activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. This isn’t a first for the show, which even in its first season starred transgender actress Bobby Darling; nor for Tripathi, who is a TV star in her own right, having been on programs like Sacch Ka Samna (the subcontinent’s Moment of Truth) and Raaz Pichle Janam Ka (“Past Life Secrets,” where participants go back to previous lives).  Like its multiple international cousins, Big Boss places people in a house with constant cameras and no access to the outside world; viewers are exposed to controversial social issues, personalities, and identities walking around in their underwear. The latest contestant thrown out of the house complains of Laxmi,

“She wants to play her transgender card 24×7. She forever goes ‘mera beta’ ‘meri beti’ and one feels like telling her to shut up.”

That you can talk of “playing a transgender card” in India is probably a victory in itself. Strange that even in a country with its proud, independent, and distinctive cultural traditions, the bitching and backtalk and blahblahblah that go with reality shows are exactly the same. 

Meanwhile, and more momentously, the Indian government announced that 12,548 transgender people across the country have already received the aadhaar,  a new ID system designed to provide simplified, official proof of identity to every Indian.   Many hijras have been unable to obtain state IDs in the past, because they lacked documents or their appearance clashed with their recorded gender. The aadhaar application form allows one to check “transgender” under “sex,” and applicants need not provide documentation of their identity if another aadhar holder will vouch for them. It’s a significant step toward ensuring that hijras, as well as other marginalized people including migrants and the homeless, can access full citizenship.

Max Zachs

Several thousand miles away, the UK may soon have its first transgender rabbi. Maxwell Zachs (his blog is here) says:

“In my early 20s I was dealing with my gender and also decided that I wanted a more Jewish life. Judaism has been so important for me because I felt connected, when not a lot else made me feel connected. When I first started my transition I did not know whether I would find a community that would welcome me.

“I did a lot of text-based study on my own. I loved that and it formed a big part of my life. I fell in love with how we work as a community to support each other and draw so much from these texts. …

“I’ve never had a negative experience within the community – people sometimes have no idea how to include me or help me, but they are always willing to learn, which is great. But as a community we still need to do more to educate about transgender people. …

“For me it’s not really about becoming Britain’s first trans rabbi, it’s just about doing what I want to do with my life.”

this is un-African: hot lesbian action

Jenerali Ulimwengu, writing in the East African, lays his finger — sort of satirically, I think — on some of the key issues at stake in debating LGBT rights and aid conditionality. It’s about sex and money, to be sure, but also national manhood:

African men are a macho lot, and for many the very idea of a man-on-man sexual partnership is anathema. Woman-on-woman also. A man was created specifically to have liaison with a woman, and a woman was created as a tool, exclusively to serve the man, in both productive and reproductive pursuits. It is inconceivable that two such tools would dream of having a liaison other than with the man. Rather like the tractor dating the combine harvester on the farm. …

But let us push this macho thing to its logical conclusion. No self-respecting African man would let another man pay for his and his wife’s and his children’s upkeep.

He’s talking here about accepting foreign aid. Julius Nyerere, one of African nationalism’s fathers, declared that “Independence cannot be real if a nation depends upon gifts and loans from another for Its development.”

Mwalimu Nyerere

Despite arguments that development aid should be seen as an entitlement, not a dole, as reparations for colonialism (see Jamaican lawyer Anthony Gifford making that case here), it still carries the political stigma of submission, of bowing and bending over before a foreign force.  That’s a symbolic fear, but tie the aid explicitly to enforced reforms in sex and gender, and you have an explosive mix of anxieties and insecurities. Are recipient governments “economic homos”? Down with the homos who made them that way! This is the mess David Cameron has helped create.

Now the backlash hits Tanzania. Nyerere’s country and creation. Tanzania has already ridden the giddy rollercoaster of the UK’s contradictory experiments with aid modalities for some time. In the early 2000s, it “was at the forefront of the global move toward enhancing the efficiency of external assistance. A central element of this was the move toward general budget support” (GBS). What this bureaucratese — from an official British evaluation of aid priorities — means is that donor governments started upping their direct aid to the Tanzanian government, stipulating only that it use the funds to achieve the goals decided in its poverty reduction strategy. This gave the Tanzanian government considerable flexibility in allocating the money: one supportive donor statement maintained that GBS builds democracy,  ”strengthens the parliamentary role for decision-making,” and increases “national ownership of the development process.” Tanzania was a test case for this process. By the end of the decade, about 20% of the Tanzanian government’s budget came from GBS aid. The UK was the largest provider.

However, some donors, especially the British Tories, were unhappy with the results. The UK’s evaluation went on to say — getting extremely vague and wooly in its language, and offering not a single statistic:

Whilst general budget support has been  successful in providing increased discretionary funds to high priority areas, improvements  in  democratic accountability, through programmes designed to complement general budget support, have not been achieved and general budget support has had limited impact as an instrument of policy leverage.

The main issue obviously was that governments were nostalgic for that “policy leverage”: the ability to micromanage and dictate to Tanzanian authorities, something more targeted funding could provide.

Hence in early 2011 the UK decided to “reduce its use of General Budget Support (GBS), as the 2010 independent Country Programme Evaluation suggested that GBS was not the most effective way to deliver results in the current circumstances, and recommended a relative reduction.” Instead, more money would go to specific state programs and to civil society, as well as to suspiciously Thatcherite-sounding “support for sustainable private sector wealth creation — the driver of growth –- in order to achieve better results and VfM” [Value for Money].

The planned wealth creation interventions will be designed to catalyse private sector investment, thereby achieving a multiplier effect on our funding, whilst sharing risks with the private sector and promoting the longer-term sustainability of our interventions.

Poor Tanzanians could hardly be expected to rejoice at a program to make rich Tanzanians richer. And the government itself started resenting a civil society that, Cameron told them, would be getting money previously slated for the state budget.

So a ferment of anger commenced to build; the UK’s stated plans had an expressly divisive effect. And now, when Cameron — speaking largely for the ears of British voters — links aid to LGBT rights, everything’s set for an explosion. LGBT people will be blamed for the overall shifts in overseas aid; civil society in general will be reviled as a greedy ally of perverted people; the queers and the colonizers are squeezing the state’s coffers together! Let the scapegoating begin!

It’s begun. Here‘s Tanzania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Membe, last week:

“Tanzania is ready to end diplomatic ties with Britain [!] if it imposes conditions on the assistance it provides to pressurize for adoption of laws that recognize homosexuality. … We cannot be directed by the United Kingdom to do things that are against our set laws, culture and regulations…. What Cameron is doing might lead to the collapse of the Commonwealth.”

Here‘s the President of the Zanzibar region:

“Accepting that condition is next to impossible and we will never ever take that option. They can stop their aid if they wish.”

Here‘s Roman Catholic Cardinal Pengo, the Archbishop of Dar es Salaam:

“This country is rich in natural resources such that there is no point to be bulldozed and culturally distorted for the sake of aid. If the available resources would be well managed and utilized, we can sufficiently meet the country’s financial needs.”

All these brave manifestos, of course, point to who’ll be blamed for any aid cut, including the reallocations announced earlier in the year. The British High Commissioner moved promptly to declare that this was all a kerfluffle about nothing, that Cameron didn’t mean to be overheard when he said what he said:

‘I think the Prime Minister’s words have been taken out of context. The UK will not enforce such conditionality in Tanzania nor will it suspend development aid to the country.”

But that’s too little, too late. Cameron’s shot has been heard round the world, and it’s LGBT people caught in the crossfire who will suffer. Already reports, still unconfirmed, of violence targeting LGBT communities have started to leak out of Tanzania. Across the continent, more will likely come.

Gifford (second from R) with J-FLAG activists in a 2010 Kingston protest

Watch this video, from Jamaican TV, of an interview with British – Jamaican human rights lawyer Lord Anthony Gifford. As a strong supporter of scrapping Jamaica’s sodomy law, he lays out the arguments against the UK’s noisy and confused promises to tie development aid to LGBT rights.

He’s right that open threats to Jamaica from abroad almost always create a “converse reaction.” But one thing I find troubling is his blanket claim that Jamaica, as a democracy, is in a different class from dictatorships, and can work this out for itself.  ”To use this stick against a democracy like Jamaica –we are capable of having this debate within Jamaica … and I think it’s counterproductive.” How exactly does this differ from arguments that Israel supporters (including one of Human RIghts Watch’s founders) use to contend that human rights activists should leave the country alone?

Thirty years ago, Gifford was lead counsel for the plaintiff in the landmark case of Dudgeon v United Kingdom, where the European Court of Human Rights compelled Britain to eliminate Northern Ireland’s sodomy law. And the video below shows  Gifford and my activist friends Maurice Tomlinson and Yvonne McCalla Sobers discussing their new challenge to the Jamaican law before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights:

Rachid Ghannouchi: nothing up my sleeve

Al-Nahda (also known as Ennahda), the moderate Islamist party that won 41.7 percent of the vote and a leading role in government in last month’s free elections, promises that it will not introduce shari’a or change the secular character of the constitution:

“We are against trying to impose a particular way of life,” Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi, 70, a lifelong Islamist activist jailed and exiled under previous regimes, told Reuters. …

All parties agreed to keep the first article of the current constitution which says Tunisia’s language is Arabic and its religion is Islam. “This is just a description of reality,” Ghannouchi said. “It doesn’t have any legal implications. There will be no other references to religion in the constitution. We want to provide freedom for the whole country” …

Samir Ben Amor, a leader of the secularist Congress for the Republic party due to join a coalition with Ennahda and another non-religious party, agreed there was no dispute about maintaining the brief reference to Islam in the first article.

He said there was wide agreement among political parties to strengthen democracy in the constitution by referring to international human rights conventions. “We want a liberal regime,” he said.

Similarly, Al-Nahda promises it will not introduce laws new laws to regulate personal behavior:

“There shouldn’t be any law to try to make people more religious,” said Ghannouchi, whose party has pledged to continue to allow alcohol and Western dress here and pursue economic policies favouring tourism, foreign investment and employment.

The Islamist leader said he interprets sharia, the ill-defined and often confusing complex of Islamic teachings and laws, as a set of moral values for individuals and societies rather than a strict code to be applied to a country’s legal system.

Coalition partners committed to preserving Tunisia’s progressive laws on women’s rights and the family, without including those provisions in the Constitution:

Although all parties agreed to defend Tunisian women’s rights, some of the most advanced in the Arab world, Ben Amor said they could not agree to some feminists’ demands to have the country’s liberal Personal Status Code written into the constitution. ”No constitution in the world has that,” he explained. These rights would be protected through legislation, he added.

About a third of the representatives in the newly elected assembly will be women — more than anywhere else in the Arab world, and twice the percentage in the US Congress.

At the same time,

Observers of events in Tunis have reported that radical factions have harassed women to dress more traditionally.  About 500 women gathered in the capital to protest these developments, and were granted a meeting with Prime Minster Beji Caid Essebi to raise their demands.

The campaign created the conditions for aggressive and intimidating public shows of zealotry. Anecdotally, I’ve heard two stories of lesbians and gay men being harassed on the streets or in taxis during and after the election.   In an alarming incident two weeks before the poll, the offices of a TV station that showed Marjane Satrapi’s film Persepolis – about religious oppression of women in Iran — were attacked and defaced by a crowd of Islamist men and women, some armed.

Nonetheless, there’s no reason now to doubt the apparent broad support in Tunisia for preserving the frame of the secular state, or to suppose that it will change in coming years. I tend to agree with Marwan Muasher, who wrote last week in the New York Times that

The best way to deal with Islamist parties … is to include them in government and hold them accountable. …  Ennahda understands that it can’t ignore the secular part of the electorate. If the party wants to be as successful in Tunisia’s next election after a new constitution has been written, it knows it needs to present moderate views.

Over the next few years, other parties will have a chance to develop in Tunisia and Islamists are likely to get a lower percentage of the vote next time around. … While they may be part of leading coalitions in various countries, they are unlikely to gain power outright in any country.

We are saddened that many Malaysians, including people’s elected representatives, have seen fit to relentlessly persecute, stigmatise and discriminate all those who have found a safe space to dialogue and share information and knowledge on human rights during Seksualiti Merdeka’s events.

We are Malaysian citizens who are being denied our rights to our identity and self-determination. …As a United Nations Human Rights Council member, the Malaysian government should be ashamed for endorsing and encouraging such intimidation and scare tactics.

Seksualiti Merdeka stands for everyone who believes they have a right to make their own decisions over their bodily autonomy and bodily integrity. …  Sexuality is an integral part of the personality of every human being. Its full development depends upon the satisfaction of basic human needs such as the desire for contact, intimacy, emotional expression, pleasure, tenderness, and love. Sexual rights are universal human rights based on the inherent freedom, dignity, and equality of all human beings.

Read more about the controversy here, here, and here.

Off with their headlines: from Ghana's press

“I love a moral issue,” Elaine May would say, back in the great days of Nichols and May. “It’s so much more interesting than a real issue.”

That pretty much describes the dynamics of a moral panic. It provides endless things to talk about, none of them real. Ghana continues down this path, amid a panic about homosexuality now fed by David Cameron’s ham-handed promises to tie overseas aid to LGBT rights. People are describing things that don’t exist, ignoring things that do, and venting paranoid ideas in pompous, concerned, and official tones. Those suffering from the frenzied arguments and the UK’s ill-timed intervention, of course, are the actual LGBT people of Ghana — real enough, but constrained to listen as their lives are described in terms that range from Biblical wrath to pseudomedical quackery.

Yesterday, for instance,  Rev. Godson King Akpalu, President of the Ghana Mental Health Association (GMHA) told reporters that “homosexual and lesbian perpetrators” are mentally ill.

Rev. Akpalu said the Ghana Mental Health Association will classify the perpetrators and supporters of these “dirty acts” as suffering severe mental problems and should be referred to a mental health facility for early treatment before suicide sets in.

He said given the opportunity, even mental patients would choose an opposite sex partner, emphasising  that, “We as a nation cannot sell our birthright for a handful of meals and drag our posterity into curses and shame. …  [H]ow can we in the name of foreign aid from a Godless people flout the laws of God which we all abide by from our very existence?”

Santorum stains

Judging from the reverend’s words, Rick Santorum has been sighted in Accra, adding to the atmosphere of terror:

The GMHA President said it was common knowledge that some of the men and boys who had fallen prey to such unnatural acts wore “pampers” to hold up the unnatural flow of fluid that gushes out from their anus, and asked whether this made the practice a natural one.

Meanwhile, in Parliamentary debate on Thursday, MPs

condemned homosexuality in no uncertain terms, with a call on the Executive to amend the Criminal Code, Act 29 (1960) to provide for stiffer punishment for those who engage in the practice. They gave the assurance that a bill presented to the House in that regard would be passed swiftly.

Opposition MP Eugenia Kusi said:

“Madam Speaker, I would want us to amend the criminal code to make that act a criminal offence. I know that if that kind of bill comes before us we will not waste time in passing it”. She advised children to stay away from people who claim to be homosexuals and report those who try to woo them into the act to their parents and guardians.

Ghana, of course, already criminalizes homosexual conduct, with Section 104 (1) (b) of the Code defining  “unnatural carnal knowledge” of “any person of sixteen years or over with his consent” as a misdemeanor. (Misdemeanors are liable to variable terms of imprisonment, usually less than three years.)

J. J. Appiah, leading the debate, told fellow lawmakers that

“Human right undoubtedly is supreme and fundamental  to our existence and I am glad to say that it is also our supreme interest as legislators but when these rights appear abnormal and barbaric then measures should be put in place to curtail them. … It has been established that lesbianism is a cause of many sexually transmitted diseases. In the face of this it appears most logical, most necessary, for us as a House to enact laws that would uphold the principles of morality and integrity”.

Oye Lithur

Nana Oye Lithur, a prominent and courageous Ghanaian feminist and human rights lawyer, spoke out against the spreading panic, as she has repeatedly in recent months. According to Ghanaweb, 

She feared with the increasing emotional sentiments against homos, people might take advantage of the situation by physically assaulting or even killing people suspected to be homos. She said as religious leaders preach tolerance to political leaders in the country they are obliged to use the pulpit to preach tolerance for homos and not hate speech. She said pastors must live according to the biblical quotation of “love thy neighbour as thyself” in their dealing with homos.

She added:

“Not even the President of Ghana can deny anybody human rights irrespective of the person’s sexual orientation, ethnic group, gender and what have you. These are guaranteed in our constitution and everybody in Ghana has an obligation to respect that constitution. ”

“Inger and Philippa”: in this moving short, an American reads a letter to the President about her life as part of a binational same-sex couple, separated from her partner by US law. Part of the power is that only one half of the relationship can be heard.

“I have always loved my country, but sadly it does not love us. I wish you and your family, health, happiness, and the knowledge that you should never ever, for even one moment, waste the time you have with each other. Not everyone is lucky enough to have that. Hold them close and never let them go, but think for a moment on those of us who aren’t allowed to hold the ones we love.”

a Ghana headline from 2003: but we need more laws!

Ghana, in recent months, has been the scene of a mounting moral panic about the “threat” of homosexuality. The press warns about  “increasing growth In numbers” of homosexuals:

Some people make the claim that homosexuality (sexual relations between people of the same sex) became known in Ghana when tourists, international workers and even missionaries flooded the country in the 70s. Those within the group who were homosexuals invited innocent boys to their houses, flushed them with gifts and money and promised to send them to the rich countries. … Many Ghanaians went abroad and returned as homosexuals. Many also went to prison and indulged in gay habits which became habitual, and followed them even after their release from prison.

Girls also pick it from boarding secondary schools. Senior girls have their “supi” and only God knows what they do with them. There are now gay prostitutes in Ghana.

Some people claim that homosexuality is not a disease and it cannot be cured. They claim, further, that even though somebody can entice you to have anal intercourse that cannot make you a homosexual. One is born that way. However, another school of thought insists that one can be addicted through being enticed to practice it.

The Christian Council of Ghana condemns the “detestable and abominable act” :    

Declaring the position of the Council on homosexuality in Ghana, Reverend Dr Fred Deegbe, General Secretary of the Council, said the issue of homosexuality had become so serious that Ghana had witnessed gay marriages . … He said the Council had observed with dismay the claim of homosexuals that nowhere in scripture was homosexuality and the same-sex committed and loving relationships condemned and called for the need for Christians to frown such behaviours.

He explained that some Ghanaian youths have adopted and emulated certain lifestyles including homosexuality being practiced by the western world and there was the need to condemn this abomination from happening on Ghanaian soil. “We Ghanaians and for that matter Africans cherish our rich and strong values on issues such as homosexuality and we must not allow anyone or group of people to impose what is acceptable in their culture on us in the name of human rights”.

The baiting quickly moved into the political arena. When an opposition-party expert on health said the right to privacy protected private sexual acts, and asked “Why should what two people do in their privacy without confronting anybody, be subject to the law?” — a presidential spokesman accused his entire party of “supporting and promoting the activities of homosexuality in Ghana.”   And the Minister for Ghana’s Western Region promptly “tasked the Bureau of National Investigations and all security agencies to smoke out persons suspected to be engaging in same sex.”

He also enlisted the services of landlords and tenants to provide reliable information which will lead to the arrest of homosexuals.  His directive follows months of campaigns against the practice of homosexuality in the country.

Fortunately, that order appeared to be mostly hot air and bluster.

But the British government’s recent public claim that it will link overseas aid to human rights performance, especially singling out LGBT rights as an issue, has served to make the “threat” homosexuality poses explicit. Now the homophobes know what they’re fighting, and they are fighting mad. Yesterday Ghana’s President proclaimed he would forgo foreign aid if necessary: “I will never initiate or support any attempt to legalise homosexuality in Ghana.”

Today comes news that the country’s parliament may consider new legislation to keep homosexuality from “flourishing.”

In Ghana, legislators are set to begin discussions on strengthening legal sanctions against practicing homosexuals.

This came after British Prime Minister Dave Cameron threatened to withdraw aid from countries that ban homosexuality. But Ghanaian President John Atta-Mills sharply says his government will never legalize homosexuality.

President Atta-Mills was quoted as saying “no one can deny Prime Minister Cameron his right to make policies, take initiatives or make statements that reflect his societal norms and ideals.  But he does not have the right to direct other sovereign nations as to what they should do especially where their societal norms and ideals are different from those which exist in the Prime Minister’s society.”

Catherine Afeku, an opposition MP, offered a somewhat ambiguous note of caution. She has previously “called for a comprehensive policy from government on the way forward when it comes to the issue of homosexuality.” She echoed previous reminders of protections for private life:

Member of Parliament Catherine Afeku says there seems to be overwhelming support from legislators backing a review of the penal code to address homosexuality. “Ninety-nine percent of the members in the chamber support the statement that as a people, our cultural norms, our societal upbringing, does not accept homosexuality,” said Afeku. “But, once we have brought out the emotional condemnation, we have to put our thinking caps on and look at the law… What people do in their rooms cannot be legislated upon because we don’t have anything on the books right now that will punish that act.”

It’s not clear, then, what any new legislation might do, since Ghana still retains its colonial-era sodomy law punishing “unnatural carnal knowledge.” It could follow the lines of Nigeria‘s or Uganda‘s long-bruited bills: prohibiting organizing around sexuality, advocating for human rights, or any form of public visibility.  Or it might strengthen the existing law’s intrusion into private life.

Or the rhetoric might die down in due time, as the advantages of political posturing recede. What’s certain is that Cameron’s own posturing continues to feed a backlash across Africa. It’s hard not to think: God save us from our friends. And in that spirit, a coalition of sexual rights and human rights groups in Ghana issued a statement today:

Press Release on the British Prime Minister’s ‘Homosexuality Threat’ To Ghana

Accra, 03 November, 2011: The Coalition against Homophobia in Ghana (CAHG), the Gay and Lesbian Association of Ghana (GALAG) and other LGBT Networks in Ghana are surprised and in total shock at the increased interest by the UK government to withdraw aid to some African countries who are homophobic. Though the Coalition have no problem with calling on government to abide by the British code of conduct for financial support, we believe LGBT people do not live in isolation in Africa.  We have families and friends who need these aids to survive on daily basis.

Cutting aid to some selected Africa countries due to homophobic laws therefore will not help the LGBT people in these countries, but will rather stigmatize these groups and individuals. LGBT people will be used as scape goats for government inability to support its citizens and some sectors of the economy.

The challenge now is that,

1.     Homosexuality is now being seen as western import due to the continuous threats from the UK government. It is now difficult to convince the ordinary person on the street that homosexuality was not imported into Africa; although we know and have always had African indigenous people who are born homosexuals.

2.     LGBT groups and organizations are finding it very   difficult and risky to organize their programs due to such threats and continuous discussion on radio and television stations in Ghana.

3.     Support from government agencies for LGBT programs with regards to health will be affected since the government will not want to be seen as promoting or supporting LGBT activities in the country.

We believe the UK government can use diplomacy to get some of these important issues across to the countries noted for promoting hate against homosexuals or the LGBT community in Africa. We encourage the UK government to find other alternative way to address the issue other than this option, which is going to increase   the level of stigma, violence and discrimination against LGBT people in Africa.

Though all these noise continue to go against LGBT groups and individuals in Africa, development partners never supports LGBT initiatives on the ground. Embassies and consulates including the EU offices continue to turn deaf ears to LGBT issues insisting that their priorities do not include LGBT people in Africa. 

We are by this release appealing to development partners to channel some support to LGBT groups and organization in countries like Ghana to support local or internal advocacy as well as network building with state institutions.

This we believe will go a long way to help the LGBT people in Ghana and Africa at large.

###

For more information, please contact the coalition on coalition.homophobia.gh@gmail.com