Psychic Vampires

Vanessa Edwards Foster knows ‘em when she sees gets bitten by ‘em.

Anything to Deny How History Actually Has Taken Shape

Rex Wockner on the aftermath of the Obama speech:

The praise for Obama inside HRC’s fancy dinner and the denunciations of Obama in the streets of D.C. seemed to unequivocally confirm the split that’s emerged in the gay community in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

Confim the split?

I have no qualms with that.

Its his ‘day one’ that I’m calling him out on.  

Once again, we have a gay man unable to acknowledge when ‘The T’ started a movement. 

The anti-Prop 8 protests were confirmation of the split that HRC, Barney Frank and John Aravosis triggered in 2007 over trans-inclusion in ENDA – and I’m being charitable by saying that the anti-Prop 8 protests were a confirmation of that.  Yes, there was plenty of overlap among the vocal anti-Prop 8 folks and the anti-Aravosisists, but the anti-Prop 8 protests largely ignored how the entire notion of ‘gay marriage primacy’ (1) is one largely concocted by the big-money, don’t-give-a-damn-about-the-street-queers interests that comprise HRC, and (2) pretty much erases transsexual legitimacy.

HRC Shows Its True Color(s ?) Yet Again

Pam Spaulding has a lengthier analysis of this, but I’m pointing to it nevertheless.

SOLMONESE: Well, I think that — you know, I know that — I think it was Michelangelo who was making some sweeping comments about the number of people in the room and who was in the room, although he did start by saying he couldn’t get into the room. So, you know, I sort of take that with a grain of salt. But we’re the largest LBGT organization in the country with nearly a million members. Most of them are small donors and supporters all over the country. And so, I think we absolutely represent the LBGT community.

But I think that — as Hilary mentioned last night on the show — perhaps the crowd at the dinner last night was a little bit more politically aware and had a better sense of maybe, you know, what’s at stake and what needs to be done. Because at the end of the day, what all these fights come down to — and this is where we are in this movement…

In short, Pee Wee is declaring, yet again, that among gays (and those other letters that don’t really matter to The Chosen), that money = uncriticizable revealed legitimacy. 

Why doesn’t he just get it over with and move HRC’s HQ into C Street?

Apology Accepted

[NOTE: Needless to say, this analyzes the situation from a different angle than 21st Century Hypocritical Man.  However, after seeing more and more reaction to the Obama speech and to its defense by certain HRC-ites, I began to think that, maybe, there was more than hypocrisy afoot.  Maybe, just maybe, many of what I'm calling the 'neo-non-incrementalists,' people who suddenly find themselves on the short end of 'incremental progress' and don't like it much, have really seen 'incremental progress' for the evil that it is - even when used against trans people as it was in 2007, et. al.  I truly hope that this represents what has actually come to pass.  I'm a cynic, of course, so I doubt it. Nevertheless.............]

Rarely have I been as happy to be far away from ‘the pulse’ of LGB(T) policyland (read: Washington, D.C.) as I was on the evening of October 10, 2009.

As President Barack Obama was addressing a gathering of formal-clad, Edgar Winter-hued A-Gays in the District, my partner and I were at home in an unfashionable corner of the state that the president represented in the Senate – lounging in our pajamas watching the Iowa-Michigan football game with our dogs and our cat.

Pizza and diet coke, not pheasant and champagne.

And, if certain unnamed White House-oids are reading, no cheetos.

Yes, I recorded the president’s speech, and I’ve downloaded it off of You Tube – but I have yet to watch it.

I’m not sure if I will.  I caught part of Joe Solmonese’s introduction; that will probably be all I can stomach.  Watching all of it will help if I want to be confident in quoting from it.  However, I don’t think specific quotes matter.

In fact, the uselessness of specific quotes (sorry, Ms. GaGa) was telegraphed a day before the speech.

A Democratic source familiar with the White House’s thinking on the speech said Obama will stress incremental advancements as evidence of progress

To be fair, there aren’t quotations around “incremental,” so it is possible that the Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz pulled out of an orifice – be it his or someone else’s.

Of course, even if it wasn’t a direct quote, he could have been sufficiently familiar with LGB(T) politics to correctly translate a load of administration nothingspeak into practical terms.

But could he have been sufficiently familiar with LGB(T) intra-community rumblings to know just how raw of a wound that the incessant invocation of “incremental” by the anti-trans wing of our movement is?

I’m guessing not – which means that he couldn’t possibly appreciate the spun-gold (well, just yellow – on a purple background, of course) irony contained within the torrent of negative pre-reaction to Obama’s speech to an HRC gala.

My reaction was initially mixed – in large part because, invariably, I end up being the Obama-defender on blogs and discussion lists when LGB(T) people start slamming him as being indistinguishable from George W. Bush solely because he didn’t manage even prior to the inaugural balls to right every wrong ever done unto the LGB(T) community.

I’ve said it before and, in spite of everything I’m typing here: Illinois Human Rights Act Scoreboard.

Unlike Dubya (who, even if he had done nothing pro-actively anti-gay as president, as Texas governor made sure that the James Byrd hate crime bill never reached his desk during the 1999 run-up to his run for the presidency) and Clinton as presidents and the other Clinton as president-wannabe, Barack Obama has an unassailable pro-LGBT (parentheses around the ‘T’ intentionally absent here) past.  He co-sponsored several trans-inclusive sexual orientation bills to amend the Illinois Human Rights Act, including one in the session in which one finally passed both houses of the legislature – though a quirk of timing resulted in him not actually leaving any fingerprints on the actual bill that actually did become law, which came up for a final vote in the Illinois Senate in mid-January 2005, several days after he had become a U.S. Senator.

Yet, when this past is recalled, the Obama-haters among us then claim that he’s the equivalent of Bill Clinton on same-sex marriage.

And yet even that canard seems to be contradicted by State Sen. Obama’s past.

But that’s what it is.

The past – a past that has left positive tangible change to Illinois law that makes me feel comfortable living here, but the past nevertheless.

We must keep in mind that, even now, saying that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Obama and Dubya

And its empirically, provably wrong. (Anyone have an etch-a-sketch handy?)

Yet, what makes it wrong is indeed the past.

2007 is also the past, but the more recent past.

The run-up to Obama’s A-Gay speech showed that, at some point during the last biennium, John Aravosis was baptized in the Cedar Creek of reality – because in the aftermath of 2007’s ENDA 2015 Frankenmorphing into ENDA 3685, reality clearly gained a soul and incrementalism lost a good right arm.

We want to be able to hold a job without fear of being fired. We want to be able to marry the loves of our lives. We want to be treated like human beings rather than political pariahs. And our President promised to help us on all of these fronts, by repealing DADT and DOMA, and pushing ENDA. But now, we’re to believe it’s crazy talk to simply expect our President to keep his promises. The President has a lot on his plate, we’re being told, what with health care reform and all those wars. No time to free the gays. Come back next election when running the country becomes easier.

But it’s never going to be easier. There are people who don’t like us, and they’re always going to yell and scream if politicians or the courts try to give us our God-given rights. It’s part and parcel of being a discriminated-against minority. And we shouldn’t have to constantly remind this particular president of how prejudice works.

And now, to add insult to the injury, we face the subtle bigotry of “incrementalism.”

And then there was the reaction after the speech.

The reaction of a non-Aravosis writer at AmericaBlog:

I’m sure HRC is happy. This was a big night for the institution. But, I’m not sure what it did for the movement — or HRC’s actual mission of full equality.

Aravosis himself was more pointed:

What did President Obama say new tonight? Absolutely nothing. What did the Human Rights Campaign get in exchange for once again giving our president cover for all of his broken promises to our community? Absolutely nothing.

I like HRC, I know a lot of people who work there, I’ve defended them when others in the community have been highly critical of them. But it is criminal that any gay rights organization would invite an embattled president to their dinner, giving him political cover for repeated broken promises and slaps in the face to our community (like the DOMA incest brief), and then get absolutely nothing in return. HRC’s actions only feed the suspicions of critics who say that the organization is more interested in fundraisers than in advancing our rights.

Feed?

I suppose that could be an appropriate term – if we are, collectively, Mr. Creosote and we have gorged involuntarily.

President Obama doesn’t do controversy, and we, my friends, are controversy. So, the bad blood between this administration and the gay community will remain, and continue to worsen. It’s unfortunate, but at some point you have to have enough dignity to say enough is enough.

And to think, I started writing this prior to the community getting wind of Hillary Rosen’s performance on CNN immediately after the speech.

Yes, Hillary Rosen, “the pragmatic defender of The Patience Agenda.”

And also to think, I started writing this prior to the community getting wind of some unnamed White House-oid giving the rabble a peak at what’s behind the Wizard’s curtain.

NBC just did a piece about today’s gay rights march in Washington. For the political context of the gay community’s ire, NBC went to Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood. Harwood was asked if the White House was worried about “the left as a whole,” and concerns they have that the White House isn’t doing things that “the left” expected them to do. Harwood said the following:

Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.

Harwood then went on to say:

For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.

So the gay community, and its concerns about President Obama’s inaction, and backtracking, on DADT and DOMA, are now, according to President Obama’s White House, part of a larger “fringe” that acts like small children who play in their pajamas and need to grow up. (And a note to our readers: The White House just included all of you in that loony “left fringe.”)

I wonder how the Human Rights Campaign is going to explain how the White House just knifed our community less than 24 hours after he went to their dinner and claimed he was our friend.

Perhaps Joe Solmonese will take Tom DeLay’s place on Dancing With the Stars – just long enough to perform the same explanatory dance that he and his minions were able to get away with in 2007 after lying to trans people about what HRC’s position was on ENDA trans-inclusiveness. 

But, at this point, this isn’t about HRC (stay tuned; it will be again soon – perhaps even before this piece is finished.)

Anyone who wasn’t in attendance to go ga-ga at the A-Gay fest (and probably many of those who were there) on Saturday night knows what HRC really is – and what it always has been.

What is significant now is not even that that number includes people like John Aravosis.

What is significant now is what has brought Aravosis and those who I have over the last two years angrily referred to as ‘the Aravosisists’ – those who hold the diseased perversion of civil rights known as ‘incremental progress’ in the same professed high regard as the theocratic right hold the Tenth Amendment – around to what appears to be reality.

An allergic reaction to that same sacrosanct principle: incrementalism.

An allergic reaction to it being applied against them the way that they applied it to us – expecting us to accept the judgment of those ‘in the know’ as to what was possible regarding our bare-bones civil rights needs and why we should consider a gay-only ENDA a victory not just for GLBs but for ourselves.

All of their reactions to that nonconsensual enforcement of incrementalism against their civil rights concerns amount to something incredibly significant.

Whether they realize it or not.

So, on behalf of all trans people, I accept the apology of all of those who viciously berated us for having the temerity to stand up to HRC two years ago – to stand up to HRC when its head lied to us all at Southern Comfort, put the lie into action a few weeks later and then arranged to fraudulent poll to justify the organization’s actions.

I’m sure that some of us probably used some of the same words he’s now using.

Enough is enough.

If I didn’t use that, I should have.

Now I know that Aravosis isn’t going to come out and apologize using the word “apology” or “sorry.”  I’m having to read it in to what he says – but I’m going to do so, and I’m going to accept the apology.

Maybe it took this long to realize that those who you thought you were kin to not only do not have your best interests at heart but, in reality, have no interest at all other then perpetuating their own obscenely undeserved station in life – and perpetuating it on your dime.

For some, maybe seeing the arrogance of Hillary Rosen play out in real time was the final straw.

For some, maybe it was something else.

Whatever it was, I’m sure that final straw didn’t simply break your back, it poked you in both eyes first.

If it does matter, though, I have an idea of how hard all of this must be for you.

No, I don’t really know when it comes to HRC.  There was never any illusion to shatter there.

Only momentarily did I have any respect for it – in the mid 1990s, when I was first getting involved with trans and gay activism and I really just couldn’t believe that the big gay group would think of me as third-class even in relation to them.

Of course, I quickly learned what HRC really is and what it is really about – and why most trans people view it with undying hate. 

Moreover, I’ve never been willing to drink their kool-aid.

Still, I can imagine what you Aravosisists are feeling – by analogy.

I can imagine that your feelings now are what I felt when the last bit of flaky veneer came off of my father – when there was no longer any hiding from the reality that the big guy who played catch with me when I was young was actually a felonious, wife-beating alcoholic who had no real use for either of his children – and whose involvement in our lives only was the result of a perverse, self-delusional game that he was playing with himself: He said he’d stay until the younger of us turned 18, and he did (and just barely – but not before stealing everything he could from my mother prior to finally leaving, and not before scarring me and my sister so badly that we both spent what should have been the best years of our lives drunk, trying to swim out from the undertow of nightmarish flashbacks which hell, were it to be something other than a Vatican marketing ploy, would have to do double-duty to catch up to in terms of psychological pain.)

Is that roughly equivalent to the pain that all of you neo-non-incrementalists are feeling right about now?

HRC is now what HRC always has been.  We trans people simply were able to see that reality long ago.  And we’ve paid for speaking the truth about it – more than you will ever be able to fathom.

Now, perhaps, can we all get along – and fight the real enemy?

Which, I maintain, is still HRC.

As for the president?

Well, I am not pleased.  And, for some reason, I’m having a flashback of a non-painful sort at the moment – of an episode of Murphy Brown in which a load of potatoes finds itself mysteriously delivered to the then-vice president, Dan Quayl(e).

I imagine that a truckload of cheetos couldn’t get close enough to wherever President Obama might be at any given instant to make any difference anyway.

And remember…

Barack Obama is a Harvard-educated attorney who taught Constitutional Law.  I have a third-tier law degree and, even with a dozen published law review articles to my name, am having trouble finding any position teaching any aspect of law.

By giving any speech to an HRC function, Obama did what I would not do in his place.  He deigned to appear at an event sponsored by an organization which – as officially as it could unofficially do – pushed for his main primary opponent.  (Or have we forgotten the ‘HRC/HRC’ duality?)

In short, he has a bit more tact than I do.  I’m the type of person who will point out that I’m a bit annoyed at Judy Shepard’s implicit relegation of me and mine to “or whatever” in her NEM speech on Sunday.

But tact does not have to equate to nothingspeak, doublespeak or something in between which amounts to telling us to be happy with the hate crimes bill and, for anything else, we’ll need to wait until 2017. 

Yet being part of the Rhode Island Avenue professional homosexual class apparently means expecting those unprivileged by an activism salary or a beltway job to do just that. 

I’m sure that Rahm Emmanuel has managed to convince Obama that the Democrats actually have some chance of retaining control of the House in 2010.

With that Harvard pedigree I’d like to think that Obama isn’t that stupid – that, maybe, by now he’s seen what the anti-intellectual right is capable of doing in terms of scaring the masses into believing anything. 

Mr. Emmanuel, I’m a transsexual woman.  Trust me – I know more about birth certificates than either you or the president ever will.  But, I’d like to think that anyone in the president’s immediate circle was not so detached from what America has become to have been caught flat-footed by what the birthers, the deathers,  the Tenthers and the Palindrones were able to do.

You know…

Throw the president out of his honeymoon bed, dump a thousand skunks on him, and flee without being caught.

But that’s precisely what they did.

Healthcare reform?  For some reason I think that if there’s ever a remake of Chasing Amy, that should be one of the three wrong choices that Jason Lee presents to Ben Affleck in the ‘nice lesbian’ game.

It didn’t have to be that way – but that’s what happened.

And so we’re now supposed to trust the sophisticated experts – on not only Pennsylvania but Rhode Island Avenues – to get the job done on practical LGB(T) rights issues that real LGB(T) people who don’t get paid to be LGB(T) people need to see come to fruition in order to live with the knowledge that they will simply have a fighting chance to pay their bills?

And we’re supposed to believe that 2011 or 2013 or 2015 will be a better time for ENDA than right now – with real, if not particularly cooperative (or even always coherent) majorities in both houses?

2010 may not be 1994.

It may be worse.

In 1994 there was no Fox News (and, in turn, no Fox News-saturated portion of the electorate) and Rush Limbaugh was only on 76,000,000 radio stations.

And who was Glenn Beck then?

The only difference between my jaundiced view of America’s (anti-)intellectual polity and that expressed by the late Bill Hicks is that Hicks was an optimist (often the optimism was lysergic, but still, it was optimism of a sort.)  Hicks could not have imagined the extent to which America has dumbed down; he died in 1994, not only not living to see the Bush ‘presidency’ or even the advent of Fox ‘News’ but not even to see the first end-result of the shameless manipulation of the American mind that was occurring even as he lay dying in early 1994 – namely, the Republican takeover of Congress later that year.

In 2009, some corners of America may well be getting less prejudiced.  But the ones that are embracing – and being assimilated by – the fifth column of insanity are negating the evolution. 

I stand by my criticism of those who have demanded that a DOMA repeal be Obama’s top priority (or, for that matter, even be on the table; sorry, but no one has ever come to grips with the reality of what sort of bogeyman ‘gay marriage’ is to those who specialize in whipping up the angry white masses.)  And I even disagree to a small extent with those who are wanting to see a hard demarcation line between the Rosen-ites and the reality-based as being the difference between attending the HRC dinner and the NEM.

I think the major schism between our orgs and the grassroots and Netroots  has reached a perfect storm with this weekend. The juxtaposition of this dinner, where we see a different view of progress, as ovation after ovation for the President suggested full support of the Patience Agenda, versus the people attending the march.

I also stand by my criticism of the concept of the march.  Although, the mere fact that Barney Frank saw fit to deride the marchers (with language that almost made me think he was reminiscing about his bile-spews at trans people two years ago) almost made me think that the march might have been a good idea.

However, I myself reminisce – back to a question I asked of those who engineered the Millennium March and claimed it would trans-inclusive, so much so that one would have thought that an image of Brandon Teena would have been the event’s official logo.

If Brandon Teena were alive today, would he even be able to afford to attend the Millennium March?

Those who could be honest with themselves knew the answer then.

And they know it now.

But what about those who refuse to be honest with us?

My partner and I weren’t lounging in front of our television solely because we were hoping to see the Hawkeyes beat the Wolverines (which they did.)  Our financial position is as precarious as anyone’s right now – and even if I thought that the march was the right idea (like, if the march ended with a picket of a certainly overly-funded A-Gay haven on Rhode Island Avenue), I wouldn’t have been able to afford to make a trip to D.C.

I asked the Brandon Teena question in an April 21, 2000, Texas Triangle column entitled “…and the HRC That it Rode In On.”

That was directed at the Millennium March.

I’m not yet ready to say the same thing to Barack Obama.  I still believe that the real enemy is not him but, rather, his elitism-addled enablers – the same murky collective of monetized gay-ness that makes money off of the status quo of incrementalism in the same malignant fashion that the consecrated criminal class of Wall Street makes (more and more) money off of America’s Bush-infected financial status quo (read: picking clean the monetary bones of real Americans.)The same murky collective of de-transified homosexual assimilationist purity that constructed the anti-trans political mandate-myth of ‘incremental progress’ on the foundation of the lesbian-separatist-led transsex-cleansings of the 1970s – and then used that myth as a gallows from which to hang any semblance of 21st century independent trans political legitimacy.

Have the Aravosisists really gotten the message – that the only real difference between the dumping of incrementalismanure on us in 2007 and the dumping of it on, well, just about everyone in 2009, is that Hillary Rosen’s society of sophisticates is no longer on their team?  Do the Aravosisists now see themselves as really being on our team a la 2007?  Or do they see themselves as Billy Martin to Hillary Rosen’s George Steinbrenner a la 1977, both seeing us not as their teammates but as the L.A. Dodgers?

I don’t know.

But I’m accepting what I’m declaring to be an apology anyway.  (What’s your alternative?  Explicitly saying that you see incrmentalism as being fine for we but not for thee?)

Lets fight the real enemy.

Visualize an HRC-free LGBT rights movement. 

Imagine there’s no HRC,

Its easy if you try………..

(Some) Sanity From Peter Rosenstein

I’ve had cause to criticize him on more than a few occasions – but in his latest piece for Queer Channel Media, he’s pretty much on the mark.

I remember the Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush race in 1992. David got some promises from then-Gov. Clinton after holding the first million-dollar LGBT fundraiser for him with his wealthy friends. It allowed the LGBT community to become a player in the election.

But I also remember the election itself. Clinton was pummeled for not serving in the military and for getting a deferment from the draft. It was a three-way race and Clinton was elected without winning a majority of the votes. Not much of a mandate. For Mixner to suggest as he did in a recent blog post from Turkey Hollow, N.Y., where he lives, that all President Clinton had to do was call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Colin Powell, and threaten to fire them all if they didn’t allow gays to serve in the military is ludicrous.

When Clinton was interrupted recently by Lane Hudson at the Netroots conference (and as much as Lane knows I admire him, that was rude and really served no purpose), the former president spoke a partial truth about that fight in the early ‘90s. Of course, Clinton couldn’t resist revising history a little, but the reality is (both then and now) that we didn’t have the votes on the Hill to get what we wanted after Mixner forced the president to move on gays in the military before he had any real credibility on the Hill.

In 1993, when the homophobic Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said in essence that gays would serve in the military over his dead body, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was born as a way to keep Nunn from potentially passing a law banning gays from the military entirely.

AS FOR THE Defense of Marriage Act, which Clinton also addressed at Netroots, it passed overwhelmingly (and in bipartisan fashion) in Congress, and we were later able to use it to stop the movement to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Clinton also used it to get re-elected in 1996, but let’s be honest, would we rather have had Bob Dole?

Well – the Log Cabin-oids…

But I digress.

For the most part, Rosenstein’s only misstep was a bit of praise for the eternally-unpraiseworthy Rhode Island Avenue Cesspool.

I wonder what his thoughts are on Tim McFeeley’s revisionism.

Words Mean Something – And So Do Letters

Engaging in historical revisionism must give some people a buzz comparable to Pineapple Express. 

Exhibit 639,172,825: Former Scampaign head Tim McFeeley.

Ted Kennedy’s leadership in defense of the civil rights and aspirations of LGBT Americans has been remarkable, and his death leaves us without our fiercest champion in the United States Senate. The value of one strong advocate in the Senate — someone who will use every parliamentary, personal and political lever to preserve, protect and defend an issue — cannot be overstated, and Senator Kennedy was the LGBT community’s lion-hearted advocate.

Whether working with Republican Senator Lowell Weicker to secure the first funding to care for people with AIDS, or standing up to the incessant, vile attacks on gay Americans and people with HIV/AIDS from Jesse Helms, or ensuring that all people with HIV are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Ted Kennedy was the “go-to” Senator for LGBT Americans for over 20 years. Senator Kennedy was not deterred by a lack of political support; whether our side could deliver 50 votes or 5 in the Senate, and whether the public opinion polls favored the gay side or not, if Kennedy felt the issue deserved his support, he would hold the Senate floor as long as necessary to achieve the best result.

Would that be the same ADA that includes not one, but two, explicitly anti-trans provisions – provisions that led to the erasure of pro-trans Rehabilitation Act precedent?

Senator Kennedy was not deterred by a lack of political support….

Really?

Then why was there never even a trans-inclusive ENDA bill in the Senate until three weeks before Kennedy’s death?

And, if folks are keeping track, Kennedy died in 2009 – not 1994.

One day in particular stands out in my mind: July 29, 1994, a hot summer Friday in Washington. The Employment Non-discrimination Act (ENDA) had its inaugural introduction just a few weeks before, and Senator Kennedy as Chairman of the Labor Committee scheduled a hearing on the bill for 10 a.m. We lined up outside the hearing room two hours in advance, and as the doors opened we had to jostle with a phalanx of right-wing ministers led by Louis Sheldon and his daughter Andrea who broke ahead of the line to try to pack the room. A scuffle and angry words brought Capitol police officers to restore calm, and before the hearing officially commenced Senator Kennedy had to denounce the uncivil behavior at a hearing to discuss civil rights. Here was the leader of every major civil rights bill protecting women, ethnic and racial minorities, and people with disabilities taking up the fight once again, this time to stop discrimination in the workplace against LGBT Americans.

Really?

What was Sen. Kennedy – or any senator, much less you Mr. McFeeley – doing in July 1994 to stop discrimination in the workplace against transgender Americans?  You know – July 1994?  When not only was there not a trans-inclusive ENDA but when trans activists were blocked by a Senate committee from even testifying?  When one senator not named Kennedy managed to get the written testimony of two trans activists (Phyllis Frye and Karen Kerin) added to the record?

Yes – that July 1994.

But believe it or not, my posting here is not anti-Teddy.  I’m willing to accept the possibility that Teddy may finally have come around – but, honestly, there’s not really much of a record (other than his co-sponsorship of the Senate ENDA bill) to back that up.

But that’s not the issue here.

The historical record, when it is finally in full view, may even provide some room to at least maneuver him out of the Barney Frank category; maybe he meant better than his lack of official action indicates – though, it does seem as though there are too many indicators that he indeed was the Senate roadblock that trans people have asserted him to be for the last decade and a half.

But even that’s not the issue here.

The issue is yet another purple-n-yellow-blooded professional queer creating more nuggets of fake trans-inclusive histories of a trans-exclusive movement and a disgustingly transphobic organization, to muddy not just the water but the air and everything else.

And honestly?

If there’s anyone who should be more pissed off about it than trans people…

its Ted Kennedy.

As Usual – If it Comes from the Scampaign, its Crap

From the Bay Area Reporter:

Current HRC President Joe Solmonese released a statement calling [Sen. Ted] Kennedy the “greatest champion and strongest voice for justice, fairness, and compassion.”

“The loss to our community is immeasurable,” he said. “There was no greater hero for advocates of LGBT equality than Senator Ted Kennedy.”

No.

That is an assertion that is empirically, provably false. 

Even if one is willing to indulge all of the assumptions, presumptions, etc., about what Kennedy’s co-sponsorship of the legit ENDA S. 1584 actually meant or, as the bill moves forward this fall, could have meant – and for purposes of this posting, I’ll give Kennedy every benefit of every doubt on this issue and acknowledge that it could well be a bad thing that we will never know for sure how things would have played out with him as an active member of the Senate – Pee Wee’s statement is almost as divergent from the historical record as a statement from Kennedy himself claiming to have never been to Chappaquiddick would have been.

I’m not saying Kennedy was unbridled evil – even with respect to Chappaquiddick (again: even at worst, it was not murder); but that statement says plenty – and nothing good – about Pee Wee.

It Was – And It Is

Queer Channel Media’s Kevin Naff whines:

AFTER MORE THAN a decade of analysis, study and debate over how the nation got stuck with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” former President Bill Clinton explained it all last week.

It’s our fault.

It was – and it is.  And, in Fox-esque self-contradictory fashion, he admits as much – but apparently there’s too much Queerepublican Express being smoked over at QCM and he can’t (or won’t) see how.

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation and National Gay & Lesbian Task Force were criticized in 1993 for focusing their lobbying efforts on a broad federal civil rights bill, rather than on the gays-in-the-military fight that was already raging.

“They expected the White House to take care of the military thing,” one House staffer told the Blade in January 1993. “They thought Clinton would issue his order and it would sail through with little or no difficulty.”

That proved wishful thinking, of course, and Clinton caved to a so-called compromise in a blow to the concept of civilian leadership of the military.

Well – if these organizations ‘represented’ GLBs (T’s? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!) and, in dropping what, in Naff’s view, was the only ball that counted, then it is GLBs’ fault.

Is Bill Clinton a dishonest, sex-addicted scumbag? 

Of course. 

But the conservative gay men who have (mis)appropriated for themselves the ability to control ‘the message’ at most of the gay papers in America would have you believe that the logical response to that is to become a Republican – and vote for dishonest, sex-addicted christofascist scumbags.

The simple fact of the DADT fiasco is this: No one was honest enough with themselves or the GLB populace in 1993 (and, in reality, no one is now) to acknowledge how entrenched the homophobia was (and is) in the military – and no one in the gay rights industry was (or is) honest enough with themselves or the GLBT populace to acknowledge the following mathematical facts: (1) not all GLBs want to serve in the military; (2) even many who might want to cannot do so for reasons unrelated to sexual orientation; (3), the undeniable realities of (1) and (2) mandate the conclusion that infinitely more people will benefit from ENDA than from allowing gays in the military; and (4) forcing the issue of gays in the military in 1993 screwed the ‘gay civil rights bill’ pooch for the 1993-94 congressional session, the last time that there was any possibility of a gay rights bill gettng through Congress to a president that would sign it.

And I won’t even mention marriage, the other barrel of Naff’s whine.

If its the Scampaign…

its BS.

From the Rhode Island Avenue Cesspool’s Hackstory:

Each year, people mark the brutal end to transgender lives on November 20, known as the Transgender Day of Remembrance - an event HRC has been proud to have been a part of for the past seven years

Lets do some math.

If one begins at 2009, counting backard seven years gets us to 2003 – which was a year before whatever involvement that the Scampaign would like people to think it had with the Gwen Smith-founded DOR translated soooooooo well into real support for actual trans-inclusion that Smith and many other trans people (and supporters) were driven to picket the Scampaign’s obscenely-ornate headquarters in D.C.

No – not the greatest documentary ever, but perhaps the only one to catch the Scampaign in Scamaction.

Their Moment, Their March, Their New Opportunity to Suck More Money Out of Real Communities, Their New Venue to Continue Their Erasure of Substantive Trans Issues

Forgive me if this post is messy.  Its covered in vomit.

Queer Channel Media has provided Bruce Bastian a spot to con people into wasting time, energy and money on the only thing I can currently think of that is even more ill-advised than the Olson-Boies gay mariage case in California:  a national gay rights march in DC this October.

Please note that I referred to it as a gay rights march – which is what the last one was (well, in addition to fraud on the hoof; where did all the money go, again?) despite perfunctory use of ‘T’.

Our coming together in Washington is a step

Yep – a step not just on the necks of trans people but on any real effort at real progress (at least, real progress of anything other than the amount of money in the accounts of the corporate slugs who doubtlessly are salivating over this opportunity to have a weekend chock full o’ access to a couple of hundred thousand meth-addled queers who, even sober, are too stupid to call a waste a waste but, fueled by D.C. Tina will open their pockets along with their zippers and give their money to any flashy corporate slag who momentarily attaches a rainbow to its criminal enterprise logo.)

Oh…

And Bruce Bastian?

Bruce Bastian was chair and co-founder of the WordPerfect Corporation and serves on the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign.

Gee – one of the conservators of the Wal-Mart of gay organizations thinks its a good idea to suck millions of dollars out of local communities when local communities need them the most.

You folks out there do realize that we can forget about ENDA until at least 2025, don’t you?