Monthly Archives: December 2004

 
Commentary

The tragedy of the un-commons

On November 2, queer Democrats put our personal interests aside in deference to the Big Picture. Our loss and the subsequent calls for a rightward track by the Democratic party leave us with a tough choice: Abandon the party that would abandon us or stick with the Democrats to change their strategy from within.


For progressives everywhere, November 3, 2004, was a dark day. But in my little gay corner of my little gay neighborhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, it felt like those Red State voters had delivered me a stinging bitch-slap before heading back to church in their flag-festooned minivans. It felt that personal.

I wasn’t prepared for a second Bush victory. The Bush administration’s blundering policies seemed so outrageous that no rational person could cast a ballot in their favor.  Even my father, a lifelong Republican, held his nose and voted for Kerry. “At least Kerry’s a professional,” he said.  “I didn’t want to vote for somebody who just swaggers around the world carrying a big stick.”    

And so did I, as a lesbian and a hard-line liberal, despite Kerry’s disavowal of my right to marry and transparent discomfort with homosexuality.  

The decision wasn’t easy. On political blogs like DailyKos.com, I defended my choice to would-be Nader voters who believed a Kerry vote was selling out. I was frequently the first to confront anyone advocating a ‘protest vote.’ This election, I argued, was too important. We had to put our ideals into perspective, and save the marriage issue for another time when wars were not being waged on false premises and when rich people were not lining their pockets with money skimmed from schools and healthcare cuts.

My rationale was that if we liberals could swallow our distaste for Kerry’s quasi-conservative social outlook, he would be forced to recognize us and our ideals for the sake of party unity after he was safely installed in the White House. Just as Republicans had made a sharp right turn in response to the realization that they could not win without their ‘conservative Christians,’ I believed that the Democrats would see that they needed to address the values of gay liberals to maintain power. I could never contemplate a loss long enough to wonder what would happen if Kerry didn’t make it.

Despite the endless election cycle nattering of “moderate” Democrats who worried that “the gays” were the new Greens, it was still a shock to wake up November 3 and find myself on the sacrificial altar of political strategy. In the time it took the pundits to declare that the election had turned on “moral values,” gay Democrats had been branded as traitorous wraiths who had robbed Kerry of the presidency. The “gay marriage movement” was blamed for the Democrats’ loss, and Democrats were angry — in the elegant words of one irate blogger: “Thanks homos, it won’t happen again.”

Everyone from the armchair activists in the blogosphere to party luminaries including Senator Dianne Feinstein and openly gay Representative Barney Frank were urging the party to “move right” on social issues to become electable for the next round. America is not ready for gay marriage, they argued. Feinstein claimed that gay marriage “energize[d] a very conservative vote,” saying “The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon.”

It is hard to say when exactly a society is ready to correct the injustices of ingrained prejudice. America certainly was not ready to abolish slavery in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected; nor to grant women suffrage in 1872, when Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting; nor for interracial marriage, even after the 1967 Supreme Court ruling that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. These social revolutions were brought about by the tenacity and conviction of their most passionate advocates, leaders — Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, to name a few — who emerged from the crowd to focus a movement and achieve its objectives.  

I know Kerry would not have been a revolutionary, but I believed he would have assumed leadership with a sense of fairness that is utterly lacking in Bush’s far-right radicalism.  More importantly, I believed the he would have allowed change to happen, even if he did not openly advocate it. But in the wake of the election fiasco, the Democratic hand-wringing turned to blood-letting, and rather than reacquainting themselves with their core values of social justice and civil rights, Democrats tacked even harder right, attempting to capture the ever-elusive “swing-voter,” and leaving the rest of us dangling.    

It is a painful place to be. Being treated as a pariah in my own party felt like the sucker-punch follow-up to that Red State bitch-slap. But in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and across the country on websites and in cafes, we are licking our wounds and trying to regroup.  We are discussing strategy, getting involved in local politics where our voices can be heard, and strengthening our own ties in order to fortify us for the long battle ahead.

Perhaps it was foolish to hope that a radical shift in the cultural bias against gays was so near at hand. But it is easy to forget how far we’ve come.  When I was born, homosexuality was a mental illness. Now it is the subject of a popular sitcom. Gay couples have gotten married with varying degrees of legality across the nation, and we have innumerable pop-culture icons that are openly gay. These small things signify a greater cultural shift, and when a critical mass is reached, new leaders will emerge as they have in the past.

It took a bloody war to end slavery, the better part of a century for women to win the right to vote, and the fight for Civil Rights continues today. These battles were fought with bayonets and horses across the Mason-Dixie line, over kitchen tables in homes, and at lunch counters in the segregated South. Now, they’re taking place on the steps of City Hall. Last year thousands of gay couples lined up to be married in San Francisco, California; New Paltz, New York; Sandoval County, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon; Asbury, New Jersey; and across the state of Massachusetts.

Like any good homo, I know when the party’s over, but I am not quite ready to leave the Democratic one, despite the ugly turn it has taken.  I can’t shake the feeling that enough of us minorities together make up a majority. I can’t stop thinking that this party could get rocking again if Democrats would look back to their own ideals of protecting the rights of minorities and promoting equality for all, rather than routing out those voters who pulled the lever for Bush because the idea of two fags getting married made their skin crawl. I want to be there when it does.  

STORY INDEX

The writer
Keely Savoie, InTheFray Contributor

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Fiction & Poetry

Propositions

Hustling money takes more than a friendly smile. You must have an inviting body and a complicated, but necessary, façade.


Hands. White hands. They wipe my face, pulling my eyes like tears, reaching, clawing, gripping my skin, fingerprints sapping my breath. I am thrown down, thrown back, over thrown, hair splayed, marking the ground with sweat and salt. I want to whimper and laugh and explode. I am pressed down, held like a ball underwater, struggling, pushing up and out like a flower about to burst, spilling bloody petals on the ground. I turn my head. There is my apron and coat, my underwear, torn now amid the ashes, petals and faded paper dolls. All my pieces scattered. I am raveling and undone, dying a little more with every breath, nerves surging, tingling, numb and dead, and then alive. So this is what it feels like to bleed.

1 a.m.

That sign — “Welcome to Tony’s! Please wait to be seated!” — stands like a barrier between two selves. Inside, apron covered in the conglomerate filth of bleach water, finger smears, and clumsy spills, you are the waitress, the server, the sweet smiling slave. You are “Sugar,” “Peaches,” “Hon,” “Miss,” “Sweet Thing,” “Girl,” and “Little Lady.” You nod. You say, “Excuse me, sir,” and “Will there be anything else, sir?” Manners all aglow.

A snide remark about a glass of water — why can’t you seem to find one? Meanwhile, you are remembering that table 22 and 24 both need refills, the little girl at 5 wants color crayons, no mushrooms in the omelette to 32, and could you please get the change for 25’s $20 bill? Simple glass of water? You’re waiting 13 tables, remembering the details of 28 food orders and carrying seven plates in your two hands. But you want a lemon wedge with your water. “I’m sorry, sir, it will be just a moment.” Smile. Your happiness is my only concern.

A snap of the fingers, the bang of a coffee cup, tight tug at the strings of your apron. Passed around like a million sirs’ play thing. “Excuse me, miss. Excuse me, miss.”And you smile, nod, acquiesce. It’s what you have to do for that fifty cent tip that means you can still make this month’s rent.

The slap on the ass (“Damn, ain’t you still just a spring chicken”), the leering, the propositions (“And how much for a side of you after my meal, Sugar?), and you laugh coyly, feign a stolen naivety, pretend to be flattered. You’re their sweet-assed, long-legged, firm-breasted meat for eight hours a day.

Behind the line you’ll cringe at the crap-covered napkins that wiped their grease and snot and spit. You’ll whisper all the curses and smart-assed comebacks that would get you fired out on the floor. You’ll hate that unctuous bastard, pray for salmonella in his eggs, imagine burning his ass the next time he touches yours.

But right now, you smile and nod and acquiesce, because you have to. For these few moments, this is who you are. Under skin and smile and nod, you’re their chosen play toy for a penny — their bartender, cook, their mother, maid and whore.

3 a.m.

The room inside Tony’s diner was a world unto itself at three in the morning. The yellowed lights and cigarette smoke hovered stagnant, blending the bacon grease and coffee smells into a solitary haze. Reflections bounced off the windows, hollow shadows echoing between the walls.

I watched a lazy taxi pull away, hoisting off the last of the drunks. No doubt he was already regretting his omelette and French toast as he stumbled, nauseous, into the seat. Somewhere out there, in that void beyond those two double doors (“Welcome to Tony’s!”) his wife had long given up on waiting for him, sighed, and rolled over, cradled in the sheets. He waved luxuriously at the glass, trying to peer past the maze of reflections. From out there, his hopeful fingers could not reach through to bang his coffee cup with an obnoxious grunt and graze my ass as I walk by him. I flinched. Even now, restaurant empty except for the lingering coffee drinkers, I could still feel those sloppy blue eyes and white fingertips scratching at the windows and cracks under the door. They were always trying to get in.

“C’mere, brown shu-gar,” smile curved up too far. “Can’t drink ’n em’ty cup ya know.”

4 a.m.

It was her fifth hour here and her 18th cup of coffee. She’d come in dragging her stack of notebooks, pencils and charcoal, and plopped down at the counter. Her loose jeans barely clung to her hip bones, two inches above that waistline — damn — a worn Lakers t-shirt, tight to her chest, nipples sneaking through. Auburn curls splayed out and traced the nape of her neck — guilty. Behind my bronze the color rose to my cheeks.

Art student, definitely. With that carefree funk and darting eyes, cigarette smoking itself in the ashtray, small fingers handling the pencil roughly then caressing, teasing the paper. She sat amid the smoke in a world of curly cues and shadows. Her eyes were heavy on me, pinning me down, drawing me out. She looked up smiling warmer than the streaming caffeine, inviting me into her eyes of shape, form, and shadow. I swallowed slowly, even though I knew her white smile was not a request but a demand. Stare, desire, worship. I gasped, turned away, dripping errant drops on the table.

Eavesdropping (the waitress’s curse), I subtly browsed her portrait with every refill, assembling the details like a puzzle pieced together with graphite lines. It was a pixie or some other angelic fairy creature, skin shaded so darkly it shamed the black coffee she’d been drinking. The pixie splayed her limbs placidly on an altar, wings hanging limply, bare breasts only small mounds at this angle. Her face was twisted coyly as if on fire, either from fear or anticipation. I blushed as I caught myself staring a little too long at the eyes mirrored back. Pupils like the dying petals scattered loosely on the ground.

“Coffee?” I whispered. She jumped shyly at the shimmer in the quiet, hand instinctively covering the perfect V between the pixie’s thighs.

5:55 a.m.

And then she was gone. She must have slipped out the door as I clocked out in the back. She’d left a pile of change to cover her tab, but it didn’t matter. I’d bought her meal hours ago under that enchanting gaze. With a tinge of regret that I couldn’t explain, I cleared the crumpled napkins and discarded sketches, flipping through the chaotic scribbles and pencil shavings.

I moved to throw these away and stopped, stared at the fiery black altar, limp wings and disheveled petals. I felt my face grow warm at the tiny points and curves — the petal eyes, the coy face on fire, the thighs’ V were all my own, reflected back. I shivered at this charcoal mirror, skin tingling, breath short. I shuddered as if naked, tensed my hands into fists and then breathing in, grasped for calm. I stood for a moment, stilling the tremors and then folded the page and hid it in the pocket of my apron.

6 a.m.

Outside, I light a cigarette, roll my apron into a tight bundle and set off into the murky fog of dawn. Not enough tips to call a taxi today. Inside Tony’s, the fingers scratched and pounded at the glass — angry men trapped inside. Powerless. I’m not their whore anymore. I’m me out here — the strong, beautiful, capable young woman my dad always told me I’d be. I laughed. Now, who the fuck is that?

I hear a car slow behind me. My breath catches; I hug my coat around me tighter, and do not turn my head. Please go on. Go away. Please leave me alone. My apron is off. I’m not your waitress, not your friend, not your lover. Please, sir, you cannot see me here — not past that sign, not through those windows. You cannot touch me here — there are people all around, sure to hear me scream. There are cars driving all along this road. They’re sure to stop and help.

Sir, I told you. Don’t. Don’t slow your car and lower your window. I’m off the clock. I’m not yours any more. I won’t be your whore. (“How much for a side of you after my meal?“) You cannot see me. I’m not a woman, not a body at all. I have no legs, no ass, no breasts, no curves — see — look — I’m invisible, a shadow. You cannot touch me. I will slip through your fingers with my non-body. I will disappear unharmed, and you won’t be able to find me. Go away, sir, please. I am nobody. I am no body. I am no woman. I am… not.
  
I still couldn’t say why I got in that car. Maybe it’s because I could not escape into a shadow, could not lose this form, divorce this body and slip through their fingers. I am a body; I bleed. Deep in deep I am woman — it’s written all over my skin, curves and softness and moist salty petals. I am a woman. I do what I have to do. I nod. I smile. I acquiesce. And sometimes I have it my way.

Maybe I was crazy — too much smoke and coffee — and suddenly looking into the car I saw the most beautifully distorted creature God ever made. Maybe I wanted to be delirious for that face. Maybe God never made any of us. Maybe this seemed safer, easier, purer than all the others. Maybe this would feel okay. Maybe this would comfort. Maybe I could forget to breathe for just a moment.

Or maybe this was me, this was my life, this was my choice and lack of it. This was my body, my meat, my blood. And so this was my beauty, my chance, my lust. Maybe.

She rolled down the window and peering in cautiously, I hardly hesitated a moment — opened the door without a word, and sat breathless as she drove away with her white hands on the wheel, auburn curls screening her eyes.

“You left this.”

She smiled. I fell, breaking shadows into pieces, looking down in horror at all those parts of me laid bare. I wept silently, staring down in frightened disbelief, no hope of piecing this back together — not with all this shattered glass and ashes — my own urn, filled with the little blisters I never let them see. The pencil stubs and ash trays, the faded paper dolls and bloody petals, torn underwear and white face I couldn’t see.

She pulled into the driveway. I followed her inside and tossing my apron and coat to the floor, felt the strength of her hand wiping my face, pulling my eyes like tears. I wanted to whimper and laugh and explode. She smiled. And it all fell away there, poured like blood down an altar, or scattered like little pixie petals on the ground.

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Blog

Are TV networks losing their religion?


Adding fervor to the religious conservatism debate engulfing the United States, ABC, NBC, and CBS have all rejected a commercial about religious tolerance. Produced by the United Church of Christ (UCC), the 30-second ad implies that other denominations exclude gays and other minorities.

When the Cleveland-based Church conducted focus groups and test market research last spring, the Church found that many people throughout the country feel alienated by churches. It says that the ad is geared toward bringing those people into the Church.

A voiceover in the commercial says, “Jesus didn’t turn away people and neither do we,” as two bouncers standing in front of a church admit only select while people. They turn away a young black woman, a Hispanic-looking man, and two men some may interpret as gay.

The UCC originally pitched the commercial to the networks nine months ago. But the Church decided to try its hand again this fall after the ad was rejected the first time.

Network executives suspect that the Church, one of the most liberal Christian denominations in the U.S., may have been looking to ignite controversy and make a political statement about Bush’s domestic agenda the second time around.

When the Political Action Committee MoveOn pitched an advertisement for CBS to air during the Super Bowl last year, the PAC received just as much or more publicity from the controversy than it would have had the commercial been aired.

NBC simply told the UCC that the advertisement was “too controversial.”

NBC’s head of broadcast standards Alan Wurtzel told reporters, however, that the network would have aired the commercial had the Church emphasized its own inclusiveness without casting others as anti-gay and anti-minorities.

CBS told the UCC’s advertising agency that the network believes the ad’s statement on gays in the church is linked to the controversial debate on gay marriage. The network said it does not accept advertising “on one side of a current controversial issue of public importance.”

This is consistent with what CBS told the liberal Political Action Committee MoveOn last year when the group pitched a commercial for the network to run on Super Bowl Sunday. CBS told MoveOn that it will not advertise commercials with a political agenda.

ABC told the Church that it generally does not accept any religious advertising. The specificity of ABC’s basis for rejection has insulated it from criticism by the UCC.

The Rev. John H. Thomas, the church’s general minister and president, dismisses NBC and CBS’s arguments that the ad is controversial. He says the advertisement had been broadcast in several parts of the country, like Oklahoma City, central Pennsylvania and Florida, “without generating a negative response.”

The UCC has criticized NBC and CBS for playing into the hands of conservative political and religious groups.

Part of me thinks this is true, though I also wonder whether airing a commercial that seems to alienate people of other religions has the potential to play into religious conservatives’ hands, allowing them to say, “Hey, see, we really are compassionate conservatives!”

Maybe this is why Fox News Channel, which consistently casts itself as the pro-Bush conservative arm of the American media, is the only broadcast network airing the commercial. Or maybe Fox is just trying to liberalize its ways…

The ad can be viewed online at http://www.stillspeaking.com.

—Laura Nathan

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Blog

Political sportsmanship


Nearly a month has gone by since John Kerry did something great for this country: He lost the election and admitted it. Listening to his concession speech, he was so much greater, more majestic and even classier than he seemed before. If only the rest of the Democratic Party could follow his example.

John Kerry in his concession speech told the world of his conversation with President Bush on election day and expressed his wish for a bipartisan country. Will the real John Kerry please stand up! Then, not even two weeks later, the defeated democratic challenger responded to a question posed by Fox News Reporter Geraldo Rivera about why he lost:

“It was that Osama tape, it scared them [the American people],” he said.

Message: The American People are gullible twits, too scared of their own shadows to stand up to Osama bin Laden. And did I mention that I served in Vietnam?  It was the John Kerry I had seen for the past year, back in black.

For months, the democratic demagogues both in Washington and the press had lodged a sustained carpet bomb-style assault on both President Bush’s policies and even his character. MoveOn.org likened him to Hitler, and Michael Moore and the Hollywood crap machine churned out propaganda so vile it would make Lenny Riefenstahl shake her head in disgust. Teddy Kennedy and Terry McAuliffe, the tag team of trash talk, have yelled so hard and so long that President Bush is a liar that their lungs now have the capacity to sustain each of them during the next Boston Marathon. Surely, they thought, their campaign of smear and fear would be enough to pull Kerry past the finish line. After all, the war in Iraq is so bad. One thousand soldiers have died and we are still there. It’s been a year and a half and we haven’t built Iraq into the land of milk and honey! Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, he isn’t weighted down by chains in a dungeon or being flogged by angry soldiers with wet, rolled-up American flags.

And what about Bush’s pathetic domestic policies? The Kerry campaign hammered for months that Bush had turned America into some sort of wasteland and with confidence bordering on arrogance, thought that they somehow convinced all Americans to believe that the economy was the worst since the Great Depression and that President Bush has lost more jobs than Herbert Hoover. Kerry and clan thought they convinced everyone that Bush wants to have state-sanctioned gay stompings in the streets and that a Bush victory would mean a return to slavery for blacks. They thought they had convinced parents that their kids are getting dumber by the second and that Bush has bankrupted the education system. And for some reason, they believed they had convinced the primarily Christian population of this country that somehow Bush’s personal faith in God is a weakness that should be laughed at in the halls of Congress and the streets of capitols around the world.

John Kerry thought that he had convinced the youth of the country that they would be torn away from their mommies and daddies and be shipped off to Iraq with nothing but a musket and a pat on the back if the president were re-elected; and John Edwards was confident in saying that if they were in office now instead of the Republicans, Christopher Reeve would not only have lived but would be doing a foxtrot with Michael J. Fox at the Kerry victory rally.

So what went wrong? They had more money than they ever had. They had Hollywood with Susan Sarandon, Ben Affleck, and Leonardo DiCaprio planting yard signs and giving speeches. They had Michael Moore and Robert Redford making and airing every hate-Bush movie ever made. They had scores of books, tons of magazines, and newspapers. They had the music industry, MTV, and even the Boss himself, Bruce Springstein, touring with Kerry like he was a rock star to get the vote out. They had the billions of George Soros and his wife’s ketchup empire, and the support of the Canadians, the French, and the Germans. So why did it all go wrong? It went wrong because the American people can’t be bought. It went wrong because the American people cannot be tricked. It went wrong because although Democrats seem to think anybody who believes in God deserves a seat on the short bus, they continue year after year to forget that the majority of this country believes in God. They continue to forget that the American people, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic, are not in politics. They forget that people want the news, not what certain people think is the news, and that The New York Times somehow forgot how to be The New York Times. And they forget that Americans love the fact that Bruce
Springstein was “born in the USA,” but also love the fact that he doesn’t run the USA.  

The Democrats cry every year that the Republican campaign machine makes issues out of the same things every year: God, gays, guns, and government interference. The problem is that Democrats never seem to get hip to the fact that Republicans aren’t making these things the issues, but that they ARE the issues. They reflect the concerns and the character of the people, of the people! So until Democrats finally do get the idea that Americans care more about America than they do with the issues of self-interest that Democrats think that they should, it would behoove the left to learn how to lose more graciously.

—Christopher White

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