All posts by In The Fray Contributor

 

MAILBAG: The marrying kind

Instead of getting into a debate about gay marriage, let’s take a moment to examine what the debate raging across America tells us about the status of gays and lesbians.

First, let’s make sure when we’re talking about gay marriage, we’re talking about the same thing. The NLGA primer defines it as … okay, just check out the primer.
The highlights: “Advocates for the right to marry seek the legal rights and obligations of marriage, not a variation of it.” Gays and lesbians who want to marry want to be seen as equal participants in society – not variations.    

On to the debate. Gay marriage was supposed to be ultra-divisive. Many on the left predicted it would jeopardize Democrats’ chance at the White House. A few on the right proposed a Constitutional amendment to ban the marriages, an amendment that’s about to come up for Congressional debate.

Back to my original question: What does the debate – in this case, opposition to gay marriage – say about American attitudes toward gays and lesbians? Does it mean Americans oppose equal participation and rights for members of the gay community? The same CNN/USAToday/Gallup survey that found increased support for the anti-gay marriage amendment in May also found “A modest increase in the number of Americans who support giving gay couples some (my emphasis) of the legal rights that heterosexual couples enjoy.”

Moderates are leaning toward granting gays and lesbians “some” as opposed to “all” rights. So many on the left hail gay marriage as a victory. They celebrated ceremonies in San Francisco and Cambridge even as Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney commandeered marriage licenses and threatened clerks. Yeah, yeah, it’s emotional, a triumph of visibility, especially for older couples who have endured decades of bigotry.
        
No one may respect them the morning after, but on their wedding day, they can be happy. Which is fine, if you belong to the school that says it doesn’t matter what the rest of the country thinks/says, or as The Village Voice newlywed Richard Goldstein says, “You can have your wedding cake and eat it, too. Marriage is what you make of it, not what it makes of you.”

But of course it matters. And that’s why I think this debate is so telling. Because gay marriage came out of the closet in 2004, 35 years after Stonewall, and America is shocked. America doesn’t know what to do. Unless gays and lesbians have money, look straight, and tread softly, they cannot live the good life. So far, the wedding debate only underlines how little we’ve changed. What Carl Wittman argued in his 1971 “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” is still true: ”The system we’re under now is a direct oppression and it’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten.”

—Anonymous

 

Life after torture

BEST OF IMAGE (SO FAR)
2004 Best of Image (runner-up)

Hoping to kill off the ghosts of Abu Ghraib, President Bush wants to tear down the now infamous Iraqi prison. But getting rid of Abu Ghraib won't ameliorate the trauma — at least not for the tortured, who struggle with their pasts on into the present.

Click here to enter the visual essay.

Investing the time to learn about the horrors of torture is in no way pleasant. In recent times, the world has endured terrorist attacks in the United States, merciless bloodshed in the Middle East, and continued instability across the globe. Why now pay attention to yet another crisis, that of torture survivors languishing in refugee camps in Africa, when we have real problems at home? In an era when our duty of compassion has been tested over and over again, why should we be willing to look at truly horrific photos, an offense to the senses, documenting the worst horrors of human existence?

 

El Jefe

A man from Tijuana, Mexico, learns about living and loving in East L.A. in this original short story.

None of the guys drinking in the alley behind Panson’s Beer and Wine knew El Jefe’s real name. In ephemeral fraternities, behind liquor stores or do-it-yourself car washes, names are hardly required. They all drink, laugh, cry, and pass out at all hours of the day. A rotating cast of characters, day laborers, bums, dropouts, and the occasional nine-to-fiver chat, earn nicknames, exchange philosophies and whistle at passing girls regardless of their age.

Tonight was El Jefe’s third night as celebrity of the week in the alley behind Panson’s, one of East L.A.’s most frequented liquor stores. Panson’s was a classic spot along Whittier Boulevard, a strip famous in the late 70s for its heavy cruising. That nightlife was long gone but Panson’s remained a crucial stopover. Crowds of cholos, Chicano yuppies, immigrant day laborers, aproned housewives, and rowdy junior high students kept the place alive from a.m. to a.m. The new owner was a pompous and polished pocho named Juan Martin, who the guys in the alley called Juan Martin del Mar Malvado, or Juan Martin of the Wicked Sea. That night he could be heard slobbering over his elected girl behind the huge blue dumpster. The girl giggled and moaned.

The alley guys, two mechanics, a butcher, a veterano on crutches, and El Jefe swigged at their paper bagged forties as they playfully threw pebbles at the ankles of Juan’s girl from under the dumpster.

“Pinche perros!” the girl squealed.  

“I’m sorry purdy perrita!” El Jefe retorted.

The alley guys collapsed hysterically. El Jefe held up his beer to the applause. Since coming from Tijuana, he had been continuing his career in taco trucks. Cooking was his talent, eating was his downfall. He had always been the fat sidekick for the men and the chubby confidante to the ladies. Even his family glossed over his billowing unattractiveness by nicknaming him El Jefe, or “the chief,” to compensate for the hurtful nickname Panson, or “fatso,” that had begun to circulate in their neighborhood.

El Jefe had never had a girlfriend nor kissed a girl that wasn’t just too drunk to understand the mistake she was making. He swore to himself that coming north to Los Angeles would not only guarantee him better pay but better luck with the ladies — a deception so outdated only a charismatic fat man could seem lucky enough to pull it off.  

“Buenas noches cabrones!” Juan’s butterfly collar was smeared with lipstick. He emerged from behind the dumpster, zipping his fly. His good looks were merely a blend of grooming, accessories, and attitude.

“You be crazy every night, compa!” said El Jefe, who had developed an admiration for Juan’s smoothness with the neighborhood girls.

Juan’s girl of the night shuffled out from behind the dumpster shielding her face and clasping her ripped blouse.

“Hey that ain’t your Flaca!”

The girl stopped in her tracks, “I’m better than La Flaca you fuckin’ wino!”

She gave them the finger and then took off running.

“Who’s La Flaca?” El Jefe asked, offering Juan a drink of his beer.

Juan downed it entirely, “Some puta …”

El Jefe chuckled, “Okay, three putas sit at a bar. One puta says, ‘Yeah I so loose, I stick my cup in my twat.’ The other puta says, ‘I so loose I stick the pitcher in my twat.’ The last puta says, ‘I so loose’ — and she slides into the stool.”

More phlegmy laughter and applause. The cackling butcher downed his beer and hurled his bottle against a brick wall. El Jefe sucked at the remaining foam.

“You’ve been making these fuckers laugh all week,” Juan zeroed in on El Jefe.  

“You don’t have nothing better to do?”

“Not really. They call me El Jefe, but I never in charge of nothing. Maybe you gimme work here at your hotel.”

“Sure, I need a new guy.”

The alley guys were now laughing nervously. They knew what would happen next. Juan would offer El Jefe a decent wage but bury him in work. After all, Juan only wanted him as a mascot; Panson himself would now be working at Panson’s Beer and Wine. Every one of the alley guys felt an urge to warn El Jefe not to accept Juan’s job offer. Instead they finished their beer. Drunks, for better or worse, always seem to let nature take its course.

El Jefe arrived at his new job a little before 10 p.m. with a little paper bag in hand.

Juan looked at it and cackled, “You mojados — always waiting for lunch time. Don’t worry, you’ll work just a little past midnight. First I want you to make sure all those bottles in the back get stocked. Then sweep and mop. If I need anything else, I’ll holler.”

For the most part, El Jefe was a stocker and janitor. Panson’s was larger than most liquor stores in the area. In addition to carrying the most varied collection of spirits, tobacco, soda, and snacks, Juan had expanded into dairy products, canned goods, piñatas, diapers, and an assortment of imported Mexican goods. There were round surveillance mirrors in every corner, and the walls were lined with autographed pictures of all the stars that had chanced to stop by for a bottle, people from Oscar de la Hoya to Maria Conchita Alonso. In such a popular store, El Jefe saw that Juan needed a second clerk. Juan was always managing to get himself entangled in drunk talk with the cholitas that thought they could score a pint of vodka if they flaunted nipple. El Jefe assured Juan that he had experience handling dollars in Tijuana. So, on the third night of his new job, El Jefe — burly and moustached — found himself behind the checkout counter, his belly peaking from below his t-shirt, earning a dollar more as clerk.

El Jefe quickly realized the irony of working at Panson’s. It didn’t help that Juan had invested in a sound loop that would blare through speakers every 15 minutes the California Lottery catch phrase “Pegale al Gordo!” (Strike the Fat One). Customer after customer would reach across the counter to playfully sock El Jefe in hopes of striking it rich with their Scratchers or Lotto tickets.

On his fourth night as clerk, El Jefe thought nothing could surprise of him anymore. But that night, Irma Molacha walked into Panson’s, sashaying in bear claw slippers. El Jefe saw her and figured she had been drunk since noon. Irma managed to trip over a stack of newspapers that was not in her way. She was a Panson’s regular who always wore heavy eye makeup and rouge, even on her waddle. She always donned a zebra print coat of dirty plush. Her drunken craving for Now and Laters and Cracker Jacks made her teeth rot and earned her the name Molacha (Toothless).

She had never really been pretty, not even 20 years ago when she first started showing up at Panson’s, dressed for a disco to see who might treat her to a forty. Back then, the guys would bet each other to see who could stand kissing such an ugly girl the longest. The pinnacle of their fun was driving Irma to a faraway neighborhood and pushing her out of the car. She would giggle and look around to see who might be watching like an embarrassed celebrity, then hitchhike back to the liquor store.

She thrived on her imaginary fame and confused the blow jobs she performed for every former owner of Panson’s with real intimacy. Juan Martin del Mar Malvado was the only owner of Panson’s that would never play her game. She swore he was gay. How could someone find her undesirable?

Irma stumbled throughout the store. Taking advantage of the commotion created by a crowd of teenage girls at the checkout counter, she stuffed her pockets with chocolate bars and single-dose aspirin packets. When she finally approached the register for El Jefe to ring up her single can of Tecate, she licked her finger tips and brushed them across her eyebrows to sadly flirt for a discount.

“Finally, a strong panson here at Panson’s. I knew the original panson very well if you know what I mean,” her laugh allowed a view of her ruined teeth. “This place used to be a lot classier back then. Look at all these hootchies. Except La Flaca of course, she’s got my blessing. Have you seen my flaquita tonight?”

El Jefe shook his head.

She darted a sudden look of concern, more like a gossip than someone who cares.

“You know what? I think they don’t know where she is. She’s always following guys to whereever they want. I’ve always told her don’t let them take you into no garage, but she’s so crazy and real purty, huh?”

Irma Molacha paid for her beer, making too great an effort to conceal her secret. She shouted for Juan’s attention, showering him with “goodbyes” and “take cares.”
He had been tickling bellies and licking earlobes. Juan let her stumble out before he called over to El Jefe. “Next time, try shaking out all the candy she shoved down her panties.”

The crowd of girls giggled, and Juan put his arms around the two prettiest ones. He escorted them to his car for a few favors.

Bruno Urquidi walked into the store gawking at every exiting female ass. He came almost nightly at this hour. The boulevard’s most unsuccessful realtor was always preceded by his bloodshot eyes. Bruno’s firm was known for the collage of Polaroids covering the front window of the office, offering to pedestrians images of the worst investments they could make from City of Commerce to Bell Gardens. His handful of associates waited back at the office, drinking the Coronas and smoking the cheap cigars that Bruno offered as a stipend for remaining in his fruitless firm.

Bruno, dark and leathery faced was even more pompous than Juan. He massaged his moustache as he pondered the vital liquor decision.

“Gimme the tallest Presidente,” Bruno was not coordinated enough to handle money and talk at the same time. He counted and recounted his bills. “And hey, if you see La Flaca tonight, let her know Bruno is looking for her.”

Bruno didn’t hesitate to open the bottle and take the first swig of its genie.
“It’s gonna be a cold night at the office. Pinche Flaca, never around when you need her.”

He staggered out, coughing and commenting to himself.

Chano rolled into the store on his low rider bicycle and carefully set it to lean against a counter topped with jars of beef jerky and pickled pigs feet. Everything about this junior high dropout suggested a street hardened cholo, his posture and strut, the tattoos of the Raiders and Dodgers logos, and a voluptuous naked woman in the company of Our Lady. But his baby face and cracking voice betrayed him.

He was the only son of a reputable cholo who had been shot and killed well before Chano wet his first diaper. Juan knew all the veteranos and had great respect for the memory of Chano’s father. Knowing this, Chano felt free to hang out in the aisles of the store as if it were his turf. He got away with buying liquor and cigarettes in exchange for nickel sacks of pot.

Chano brought a six-pack and a bag of Doritos to the checkout counter. El Jefe was ready to ask for ID when Juan returned from the rendezvous in his back seat. He erupted in glee at seeing Chano and took over the register.

“Hey, you know where I can find my Flaquita tonight?” Juan whispered as he gave the boy a good discount.

Chano gasped, giggled then coughed — a stoner could be astonished by any statement. “Nah man, supposably she was gonna stay home. I dunno.”

He got on his bike, swung the bag over his shoulder, and rolled out of Panson’s without looking back.

El Jefe, ever the good worker, grabbed the push broom. Seeing that there were no customers, he casually asked, “So, who the hell is La Flaca, everyone asking for?”

Juan chuckled and pondered the question before he answered. “La Flaca is the prettiest little lost soul along the alley. I don’t even know her real name. Nobody cares what her real name is anyway.”

El Jefe listened to Juan as he slowly made his way throughout the store sweeping and arranging merchandise. Juan described La Flaca with half interest as he focused on the entrance in anticipation of the next batch of hootchies.

La Flaca lived with her grandmother in a dilapidated little bungalow behind a vacant storefront, but she preferred saying she was just from the alley. She barely managed to finish high school. When she did, she had no clue what to do next. She had no real guidance and no true friends. The girls her age envied her slender figure and cringed at her penchant for tube tops and caked-on mascara. The school teachers had never looked passed her slutty behavior during nutrition and lunch time. Boys and their fathers kept her phone number in secret drawers. She was not a prostitute that you pay with money, Juan noted. Only if she happened to mention that she wants something really bad was it customary for a man to give her a few dollars. La Flaca quite simply loved the company of men and boys. There were no positions she wouldn’t explore. The more adventurous the man, the better the sex. The higher they exalted her looks, the longer she stayed. No guy knows what she really thinks of him. And when she talks, nobody knows what she really means. She was quite animated when she talked about things that interested her, she motioned with her press-on nails, and looked up at the sky to search for her words, but nobody ever really listened to what she was describing. Her neck was covered by a chain of hickeys that she seemed totally unaware of, perhaps placed there while she was still talking. It wasn’t unlike her to be missing like this — she liked to deprive the public of her presence every once in a while — it seemed a reasonable way to maintain the equilibrium of her legend.

The phone rang near closing time. “Hey Juan, it’s Bruno, where the fuck’s La Flaca tonight?”

“I haven’t seen the skank. I guess you should just send ‘em home early tonight.”
Juan slammed the phone.  

El Jefe made his way into the huge refrigerator to stock the beer and soda. The cold made him shiver for a quick second. He could hear Juan behind the register whistling at a couple of cholas as an intro to his suave routine. Assured that Juan was distracted, El Jefe grabbed a Mickey’s and muffled the twist of the cap with his shirt.  He tried to gulp it down in one swig but coughed it out suddenly when he caught sight of vapors coming from someone breathing hoarsely behind a stack of boxes.

Juan shouted from the front of the store, “You awright, compa?

“Is okay, is Okay!”

El Jefe set the half drunken beer aside. He could have tipped off Juan that there was a thief hiding in the refrigerator, but he figured it would earn him more points if he caught this guy himself. El Jefe’s huge arms embraced three boxes and set them on the floor. His blood chilled further when he revealed a slender girl picking dirt from under her nails, leaning without effect against the freezing aluminum siding.

La Flaca brought a finger to her mouth, pleading him to remain silent. Her lips were matted with a thin frost. “Don’t say nothing.”

He brought his own finger to his mouth in agreement with the seductress. Although she stood a few feet away, it was as if her words were spoken directly into his ears in the manner of lovers and hallucinations. In the short time he’d been in this country, he had never heard a voice utter such a simple phrase with that lusciousness of the Mexican silver screen. Her alabaster skin and opaque curls made him think Maria Felix herself might be keeping him captive in Panson’s refrigerator. She brought her body closer to warm herself against El Jefe’s massive belly.

“They’re looking for me . . .”

He nodded.

“I decide who finds me now. Don’t tell anybody where I am. I like you. I can tell you’ll take care of me.”

She pressed her freezing hands under his shirt, gliding her palms over the carpet of hair that stood upright at her touch. She was tiny and fragile standing next to El Jefe, who had not felt the hair of a woman near his lips in a long time. La Flaca looked up at him and brought her mouth to kiss his lower lip. She kept her eyes open at this delicate moment. El Jefe’s puckered lips sucked like a boy staggering through his first kiss.

As she withdrew, her chilled lip clung to his and ripped a thin layer of flesh. Her mannequin-like gaze pressed against his face weightlessly. El Jefe took a step away from her and let his head hang, thinking he had lost his mind. To convince him of the truth, La Flaca brought his hands to her chest, guided them along her contours and down to rest on her ass. She invited his tongue into her mouth with the tip of her own. El Jefe unleashed the desire he had been harboring since he left Tijuana, delivering his entire tongue for her.

In the front of the store, Juan had been busy pouring shots of tequila for the cholas in hopes of taking one home for the night.

“All right, I’ve been a good host. Now, how ‘bout I show you how hot it can get in my car?”

The girls recoiled and threw their cups.

“Nah-uh, I ain’t La Flaca!”

“Fuck that — my shit ain’t that cheap!”

Juan didn’t hesitate to shove the drunk girls out the door

“Awright, closing time!” He drew the front grate with frustration.

El Jefe and La Flaca retrieved their faces from one another’s with eyes closed, the way shipwrecked sailors bring their heads out from a stream they chance to come across. She brought her finger back to her hushing mouth and gently pushed him away, repeating that nobody should know of their encounter.

The cash was counted. All the doors were shut, and every light turned off except for Panson’s pulsing neon signs. Juan believed it was bad luck to keep a business completely dark after hours. As he opened the door of his car to give El Jefe a ride home, he continued with his sensible lunacies.

“No business, no relationship, no matter is ever really closed. I love my store. I’ll be thinking about it all the way home. I’ll probably dream about it . . . What the fuck happened to your lip?”

xxxxx

El Jefe returned to Panson’s exhausted from that afternoon’s labor in a Chinese family’s yard. It wasn’t the lure of money that revived him for his night job, but the sweetness that lingered on his lips from La Flaca’s mouth. He headed straight to the refrigerator with half a hard-on but found no sign of his pretty girl. He looked in ridiculous places for his lover, between magazine racks and stacks of boxes, to no avail. As there was no stocking to be done in the storage spaces, where an encounter with her seemed most likely, El Jefe reluctantly took his post behind the counter. Juan had already managed to ensnare a group of underage girls in flirtatious chit-chat. El Jefe instantly had his hands full ringing up customers and bagging their purchases.

A wrinkled wino with the rosiest of cheeks, lips, and irises approached the counter with a bottle of the cheapest beer. A curious smile arrived on the wino’s dirty face in slow motion as he noticed the drops of sweat pouring from El Jefe’s forehead and collecting at the tip of his nose.

“A dollar seven, El Jefe said, struggling with the simple task of bagging a can.

There was an awkward pause before the pink drunk placed the money on the counter. El Jefe panicked at the thought this drunk might know his secret. It was as if the roles were reversed and El Jefe was the one suspected of shoplifting. He watched as the filthy man puckered his lips and seemed to kiss the bottle that delivered its genie. He suddenly coughed the beer through his nose and scudded out the door.

El Jefe finally exhaled and wiped his forehead with a paper bag. His eyes fogged over as he remembered La Flaca’s pretty face. To celebrate the survival of his secret, he glided his tongue over the tiny gash of tender flesh left on his lower lip as a scar from her kiss.

“Wake up, panson!” Juan smacked the thick skin bulging from the back of
El Jefe’s neck.

“Don’t touch me!” El Jefe kept from lunging at him.

“I run this store my way, panson.”

“I not one of your putas!” El Jefe shot the first genuine frown of his life. His blood suddenly boiled with the memory of Juan’s nasty description of La Flaca.

Juan froze in shock at El Jefe’s balls. He pealed a sinister half smile.

“Let’s talk about this after closing, Jefe. You have a customer.”

Irma Molacha’s wrecked mouth awaited El Jefe’s service on the other side of the counter. Her drunk tongue, drunk eyes, and drunk nose all declared their independence and swayed, curled and flared about. Irma’s left eye seemed flirtatious, and the right one stared dire like an accuser. Her right nostril struggled to breathe. Her left cheek sagged, and her tongue flickered like a lizard’s. As usual, she placed a single can of beer on the counter and sifted through her purse for a while, expecting for Juan to intercede and give her a discount.

“You know what?” she grinned like a witch casting a spell, “I don’t think they know where La Flaca is.”

Irma searched her pockets for her crumbled bills, bypassing the stolen Chiclets and little packs of Saladitos. El Jefe continued to sweat with every mention of his Flaca, a girl Irma described with such precision that one might think she was a figment of her own imagination.

“She’s purty, huh? But you know drunks. They always do the things they would never do if they were sober. She does the things Panson makes her do,” she cackled and quickly returned with a serious look. “They don’t even know where she is, huh?”

Although his light English was enough for him to understand Irma’s words, El Jefe could not bear another person knowing his secret, and he pretended he had no idea what she had just said.

“Si, si, si, is OK, is OK.”

Irma brought out her index finger and extended it to his lips like La Flaca had when her majesty shushed him. But Irma’s fingernails were like rocks with dull red house paint spilled over them. She didn’t bring the shushing finger to her own lips the way the mermaid had, but pointed it at him like the Chimoltrufia to Botijas.

“Don’t purten to be my fren, awright? Don’t tell me to leave, awright? I’ll go when I want, okay?”

“Irma! Irma, mi amor!” Juan shouted as he emerged from the crowd of giggling girls with his hands outstretched like the pope.

Her eyes peeled back. Her lips drew back like curtains, revealing a set of lower teeth that rotted in a perfect semi-circle and bicuspids worn to reveal their graying marrow. Juan’s attention transformed her into a hyena as if by magic. She burst into song.

Juan del Mar, Juan de mi Corazon, Juan del mar panson.

“What’s that in your pocket, Irma?” he retorted as he frisked her.

Irma giggled nervously. Juan’s groupies, with their blouses knotted at the belly, laughed and applauded, glancing back and forth like twins confirming that they are in sync with one another.

Irma seemed to realize that she was being used as a prop in Juan’s show. She started slapping at him in hopes of getting his face. He grabbed her by the wrists. She growled and shook violently.

El Jefe had been watching the commotion from his post at the register when he heard a faint chirping. Perhaps a pigeon had become trapped in the store. His eyes darted to investigate the refrigerators at the back of the store. The chirping quickly became a squeaking.

As Juan brought out all the stolen goods from Irma Molacha’s pockets, El Jefe looked in the space beneath the counter to search for the bat making that noise. Tucked like a stowaway in the tight space beneath the cash register that harbors a little wastebasket and extra receipt rolls, La Flaca sat with her skeletal hands clasped around her folded legs. She might have been wearing a mini skirt and halter top, but her body was huddled so tight that El Jefe was convinced her majesty had returned in the nude. He took the deepest breath of his life and it made him feel suddenly drunk. If this sight of La Flaca — cherry nipples, skin without pores, hair like finely sliced vinyl — meant that he had inexplicably lost his mind, this sudden madness could not be considered a punishment. She stroked at his pant leg and tongued his calves.  When she finally made eye contact, her sultry look was flushed by a sweet smile. A creaking was heard from her throat but no voice was issued this time. She licked her lips over and over to replace the gloss that seemed to be absorbed by the flesh that insisted on remaining matted.

Irma Molacha howled and scratched at Juan like a humiliated tiger. She grabbed a whole rack of Fritos and scudded out the door. Juan retrieved a pen from his shirt pocket and held it up like a dagger as he chased after her. The novice sluts panicked that their man was getting away and they dashed out the door too.

Unaware of the commotion, Bruno Urquidi came stomping into Panson’s. His hair was a mess, his breath stunk of liquor, and his unbuttoned shirt revealed his damp fur. This time, a massive bruise had been added to the features of his wasted face. Bruno clung to the counter with one hand and massaged his bruise with the other.

El Jefe saw this but could not utter a word, as La Flaca threatened to spring out of her cave beneath the register at any moment. El Jefe stupidly offered his hand to Bruno and stuttered nervous hellos.

“Where the fuck is Juan?”

Drops of Bruno’s saliva fell across El Jefe’s face as La Flaca taunted him from below. Her hands ran up and down his inner thigh until she felt his flaccid bulge.
She massaged his balls and taunted him with slight slaps that sent shocks up to his vocal chords as he responded to Bruno with a prepubescent screech.

“I dunno, I dunno where he is.”

Somehow Bruno’s wife had been tipped off about his cheating. She had stormed into his office amid the stench of cigar smoke and the raucous of crooked realtors being blown by their coked-out receptionist and struck Bruno in the face with his own bottle of beer. Bruno had come to the only place he could imagine his wife had heard the truth. He pounded his fist against the counter.

“Somebody told my wife a lot of shit! Fucking Juan better know who he’s dealing with!”

La Flaca dared to reach for El Jefe’s fly. He gasped and dropped his elbows onto the counter. Bruno mumbled unintelligible curses. Shivers shot throughout El Jefe when he felt La Flaca’s hand searching through his trousers for his cock. Registering her touch, bucketsful of blood came rushing into it. He shivered as she pulled back his foreskin and flicked her chilled tongue against him.  

Bruno boiled at El Jefe’s disregard for his emergency. “Who the fuck called my wife?”

He grabbed the life size cardboard Budweiser girl and ripped her head off.

“If it was that fuckin’ Flaca, tell her that there’s five of us that need to settle shit with that cunt.”

El Jefe was far from conversation. La Flaca’s mouth engulfed his shaft and laved its girth with an undulating motion. He could see Bruno stamping, puffing, and tossing TV Guides, but El Jefe was deaf to his wails.

“Gimme that tall Jose Cuervo you fucker!”

La Flaca’s jaw locked on El Jefe as if her very pulse relied on this connection. She shifted her posture so that she was on her bare knees reaching with her arms to embrace his legs, enabling her to impale her head more firmly on his mass.

“Gimme my fuckin’ bottle, pinche wetback!”

Vertigo set in for both. Bruno felt the spirits of Presidente dancing in his throat as if he’d vomit. El Jefe heaved and hissed as his own spirit neared a beheading by La Flaca.

Chano strutted through the entrance with a nervous coolness. His hands were buried in a bulky windbreaker with its collar raised to conceal half of his face. It could not have been a cold enough night to require such attire nor warrant that pale face that surveyed emotionlessly the comedy in the store. El Jefe’s eyes rolled back into his sockets. His laugh regressed to its adolescent discovery of naughty acts, as La Flaca pumped on him with choking urgency.

Chano took a rigid stance before the register as he nervously drew a gun from his pocket.

Bruno darted his arms to the air.

“No mijo, you’re making a big mistake!”

But the boy was determined to become a criminal, perhaps driven to this poor beginning by a boring night. Chano was a sucker for being called mijo and with a shake of the head advised that Bruno quickly leave the store.

“Don’t do anything crazy, Chano!”

“Awright, gimme all the money panson.”

El Jefe already felt cornered by the throes channeled from La Flaca’s mouth. And just as his heart could not beat any faster, it leapt again when Chano pointed his gun straight at him. It was too late for him to pull out from La Flaca without blasting a shot of his own.

“La Flaca! La Flaca!” Juan came running into the store, his pants and shirt undone, his face a white sheet. He had been working on a young girl in the alley near the dumpsters when an uncanny smell led him to find La Flaca’s corpse rotting among the trash.

El Jefe could not retain any longer, and as if shot by Chano’s weapon and Juan’s declaration of the name he loved, he fell back into the shelves behind him, his spurts of cum arching through the air as the most expensive bottles of Absolut came crashing over him. Chano dropped the toy gun and ran out.

“She’s right here,” El Jefe moaned as he wiped the blood from a gash on his brow and licked it from his fingers. He pointed at the empty space beneath the counter. “She’s right there!””

 

MAILBAG: Pass me some of that moonshine

Dear Michael,

Thank you for the short fiction piece. It reads like Lord of the Rings on ’Shrooms, depending on how far you want to take the introspection. If this story is meant to serve as a metaphor for any real life situation, I guess it might reflect experiences backpacking in Asia. The plot might read as follows:

Frodo is on spring break from Vassar and decides to take a backpacking trip to Vietnam. Along the way, he stumbles along traveler cafes, mingling with other expats. He becomes engrossed in the lifestyle, decides to take a semester off from college and continue traveling. He feels estranged and struggles to be accepted by the locals. In order to assimilate, Frodo must adapt to the unfamiliar customs and foods. Taking it a step further, Frodo explores with drug use and becomes a fiend.  

He lives each day struggling to keep his habit alive. Having spent all of mommy and daddy’s funds, he takes up odd jobs dishwashing, whoring himself, and dabbling in the tourism industry to help other expats. He is taken under the wing of a local transvestite Madame, aka, “the ancient Moonshine Magi,” who provides Frodo with a roof, a mattress, and the occasional allowance to purchase yaa baa and hash from street corner hustlers, or “diggers” as you call them.

Feeling disillusioned, Frodo runs away from the Madame in confusion and disgust into the central highlands of Vietnam. There, he remains secluded, searching for money to buy a plane ticket back to the United States.

Pass the moonshine!

—Greg

 

MAILBAG: The measure of (gay) man

Dear Mimi,

Thank you for touching upon the recent phenomenon of “gay as hip” in your article. The current fascination certainly raises questions of whether these shows have “stifled” serious conversation on this issue. However, instead of censuring FOX’s trashy and tasteless attempts, the program, “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay,” might actually provide a message that absolves them from your charges: “homosexual behavior” is non-existent. A gay man can “act straight” a much as a straight man can “act gay.” Whether FOX or its viewers know it or not, the program derides stereotypes and proves that guessing one’s sexuality based on their behavior is completely ridiculous.  

To the extent that this television show exploits humanity as much as any other program, FOX is not demeaning gays in an exceptional way. The “gay coaches” are not enforcing negative portraits of gay men, they are simply playing off the exagerated and foolish socially contructed stereotypes in order to win a game … and money.  

We face a contradiction when analyzing TV programming — we clearly acknowledge its trashiness and absurdity, yet, at the same time, we expect them to be forums for real discussion on serious issues. In this specific case, we find that the measure of man cannot be based on TV-enhanced stereotypes.

—Anonymous

 

ITF readers forecast the future of love in a time of conflict

We asked:

What’s the toughest difference for a couple to bridge?

  • Investment Banker / Yoga Instructor
  • Southerner / Yankee
  • Republican / Democrat
  • Boston Red Sox fan / New York Yankees fan

    Almost 70 percent of you thought the political divide between Republicans and Democrats was the greatest obstacle to romance. Second place, at 20 percent, was the yawning chasm between Red Sox and Yankees fans.

    We asked:

    What will the status of gay marriage be in five years?

  • Gay couples will be allowed to marry.
  • There will be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
  • Gay couples will be allowed civil unions but not marriages.
  • It will continue being arbitrated in the courts.

    Forty-two percent of you were optimistic that gay couples would be allowed to marry in five years, while the rest were evenly divided over whether gays would be allowed civil unions or whether the issue would still be in the courts.

    We asked:

    How do you think you’ll meet your soul mate?

  • Through friends
  • On Friendster or another Internet meeting site
  • On some form of public transportation
  • Arrangement by family members

    Almost 70 percent thought they would meet their soul mate through friends. For the 20 percent of you who thought they would meet their soul mate on public transportation, I hope you don’t drive to work.

    We asked:

    In ten years, how will heterosexual marriages have changed?

  • More men will be raising children.
  • Men will have groom’s showers, where they’ll receive household items.
  • Men and women will have more flexible schedules so they can share child-raising responsibilities.
  • Women will raise children and do most of the housework.

    According to 42 percent of respondents, flexi-schedules will enable child-raising responsibilities to be more shared in 10 years, while 38 percent thought there would be more Mr. Moms. Only our editor-in-chief thinks that men will have groom’s showers where they get blenders. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking since he just tied the knot and still has visions of gifts dancing in his head …

  •  

    Marriage month

    Best of Image (tie)

    Most people are aware that San Francisco allowed same-sex marriages for a month earlier this year, but few know the poignant tales behind the unions.

    Beginning on February 12, 2004, and continuing until the California Supreme Court forced it to stop on March 11, the city of San Francisco issued more than 4,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Five of those couples are presented here and have been together from as few as three to as many as 19 years, and all expressed awe at having participated in such a historical event, the beginning of a civil rights revolution.

    While gay and lesbian couples were being married at City Hall, visible changes in most areas of the city were less noticeable. Even in the Castro, signs of the change were subtle. From signs in store windows and window displays to seeing male couples in tuxes and female couples in wedding dresses running to take public transportation to City Hall, it all seemed so natural and unremarkable.

    But the important visual impact wrapped around City Hall during those first few days; the impact of that scene is undeniable. Seeing couples joyfully standing in line for hours to do something most Americans take for granted, removed the debate over same-sex marriage from the theoretical; it gave the issue a human face, a diversity of human faces. It also took the second-class status of civil unions out of the equation for a few weeks while straight and gay couples stood side by side and had their relationships deemed legally equal.

    Some have compared the prohibition on gay marriage to Jim Crow segregation, and what has happened in San Francisco to the Montgomery bus boycott. But while some similarities exist, I believe the more appropriate parallel is to voting rights. Historical arguments against extending voting rights to males without property, blacks, and women have all hinged on the idea that expanding the voting franchise would somehow diminish those rights for those already in possession of them.

    The same arguments of diminishment of quality have been used against extending the franchise of marriage to gays and lesbians, as if many heterosexuals haven’t already done much to demean the institution. Wouldn’t seeing thousands of people scrambling for the rights you take for granted somehow increase your esteem of those rights? Perhaps what social/religious conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage fear most is that the thin veneer of what has passed for truth on this argument will be torn away by reality and is why conservative legal groups fought so stridently to stop San Francisco’s same-sex marriages as quickly as possible. Each day that gay marriages were being performed, opposition was eroding. Hearts and minds were being changed.

    February 12 is National Freedom to Marry Day. But on February 12, 2004, unlike prior years, protesters already in wedding garb were welcomed into San Francisco’s City Hall and offered the marriage licenses they had been denied for so long.

    Kate and Susan were married on the first day. Kate remarked that: “By the end of the afternoon, it felt like everybody we knew was there getting married. It was like this huge party in addition to a political act in addition to a personal act of commitment.”

    Huong and Alison were also married on February 12 with their 17-month-old son, Theryn, in tow. Most couples exchanged rings, jewelry, or other keepsakes. Huong and Alison passed Theryn between them. Mabel Teng, the City Assessor who conducted their ceremony, said she had never seen that before. Alison remembers how she felt that day. “There was just this wonderful overwhelming sense of love and excitement and change, like all of a sudden these people were having their first taste of freedom,” she said.

    Zack and Steve, together for three years, were married on Friday, February 13. In talking about the day they were married, Steve exclaimed, “This is a wonderful city!” The pair wanted to be photographed at The Palace of Fine Arts, a special location for them, where they hope to have the reception.

    After a quick trip to Tiffany & Co. for wedding bands, Tim and Justin stood in line on Valentine’s Day. They would have to come back the next day to get married, which they did gladly. The couple, who had previously registered as domestic partners, mentioned how different it felt this time. “When we got our domestic partnership, there were actually couples there getting married. It was a very different feel for the couples getting married than it was for us,” one said. But that was not the case this time; this time they were the ones getting married.

    Carolyn and Mona, together for 19 years, stood in line for seven hours on February 16 despite Carolyn’s recent surgery. “[The line] was wrapped all around City Hall … People [were] honking and waving and [giving] thumbs up and congratulations and taxis driving around every 10 to 15 minutes saying free rides for newlyweds … and then all the people coming by and giving us food and drink and umbrellas … people coming to help us celebrate. … It was a wonderful, wonderful day,” Carolyn recalls.

    Carolyn tells the story of how, while standing in the final hallway leading to the clerk’s office, the high ceilings and marble walls began to reverberate with people singing, “Chapel of Love.” At that moment, a song from the American pop culture dustbin took on a new and poignant significance. “I didn’t realize how meaningful it would be to have the support of community,” Carolyn said.

     

    Powerful days

    Despite many challenges, Life photographer Charles Moore managed to capture the civil rights movement — and a piece of the nation's history — on camera in the 1960s. And in the process, he helped change the world.

    On September 3, 1958, Charles Moore, a young photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser, witnessed an argument between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two policemen on the steps of the City Recorders’ Court. Moore’s good fortune that day was in stark contrast with King’s. Moore was the only member of the media to witness King’s subsequent arrest, and his picture of the minister being manhandled during the police booking became one of the most significant photographs of the civil-rights movement. King was taken to the back of the jail where he was frisked, roughed up, and tossed into a cell.

    When Life picked up the picture from the Associated Press wire, it would be the first of Moore’s celebrated civil-rights photos to be published in the magazine. Having witnessed many of the most significant events of the era, by 1965, the photographer would grow weary of years of hatred, violence, street battles, and the searing taste of tear gas. After documenting the fight surrounding James Meredith’s bloody admission to the University of Mississippi, the dogs turned on protesters in Birmingham, and the savagery of the civil-rights march at Selma, Moore booked an around-the-world ticket on Pan Am and didn’t return home for eight months.

    Through the work of Moore and other heralded photographers such as Flip Schulke and Gordon Parks, Life — along with King’s savvy for spreading his message through the media — is credited with giving national prominence to what had been a regional story until the mid-1950s. During the 1950s and ’60s, the weekly Life was the nation’s most influential media outlet, reaching more citizens than any television program and read by more than half the adult population of the United States.

    Although many letters to the editor protested Life’s so-called “liberal bias” in covering civil rights, the magazine was also criticized for its conservatism. When it published eleven pages of Moore’s graphic photos of rioting in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, it described the movement as a “crusade” and used sympathetic headlines such as “The Dogs’ Attack is Negroes’ Reward.” However, the same article criticized King’s non-violent but provocative actions.

    The pictures on these eleven pages are frightening. They are frightening because of the brutal methods being used by white policemen in Birmingham, Ala. against Negro demonstrators. They are frightening because the Negro strategy of “nonviolent direct action” invites that very brutality — and welcomes it as a way to promote the Negroes’ cause, which, under the law, is right.

    Indeed, the article quoted no blacks at all and followed with a sidebar interviewing 16 Birmingham whites. In the introduction to the interviews, Life said, “The Negroes of Birmingham know what they want and how they want to get it. The white people of the city, shaken by recent events, are perplexed about what to do.”  Moore felt that the magazine’s only bias was in its zeal to right the wrongs of desegregation. Despite being a southern, white male he was sickened by the injustice that he witnessed while covering the civil-rights movement.

    In his 1964 book about the violence in Birmingham, Why We Can’t Wait, King’s comments illuminate the drama contained in Moore’s photos and the power of the national media, of which Life was most influential: “The brutality … was caught — as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught — in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.”

    Like King, Moore had been the son of a Baptist minister. The photographer was reared in Tuscumbia, Alabama, living in a poor white community as “a real tough little kid who grew up in a community of tough kids.” His father would invite Charles along, as he was sometimes invited to preach in the normally segregated black churches nearby. Although he knew few blacks growing up, he remembers that a kind man once walked him home when he became lost and wandered into a “colored town” when he was six. He credits his father’s insistence that that no racial epithets be uttered in the family’s house for his own tolerance. “Although my Dad had few black friends, he told us never to use the ‘n’’ word,” Moore said.

    Moore had not set out to be a news photographer. After a stint in the Marine Corps and training in fashion photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California, he returned home to Alabama and settled for a job photographing in an Olan Mills portrait studio. Although the industrious Moore was soon offered a job as regional manager for the studio chain, he went to Montgomery to see the local newspaper’s chief photographer, Joe Holloway. As the first of Moore’s photographic mentors, Holloway was impressed with the 26-year-old’s knowledge of a Rolleiflex camera and ability to build a rapport with models on the site of a fashion shoot.

    When he began working at the paper in 1957, Moore had no knowledge of the national story that had occurred in Montgomery just a year before: Rosa Parks, a local seamstress, had refused to ride in the back of a city bus, as was the rule in the South, touching off a massive boycott. “To be honest, I was a young kid. I didn’t know what was going on in the world. I had no interest. My head was into camping, wildlife and fashion. I wanted to photograph beauty,” he said. He had no idea that his pictures to come would do far more than help publicize King’s efforts; they would also lead to national outrage culminating in President Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By that time, Moore’s dramatic Life photos were given credit for helping to influence the legislation’s passage.

    Fueling the movement

    Before King was arrested on the courthouse steps, Moore had met him briefly on a routine assignment at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church just a few blocks down from the paper.  As a typical southern newspaper of its time, the Advertiser relegated “Negro news” to a separate section. Still, the paper did not ignore the growing national prominence of its local minister and Moore soon began to realize the importance of the role he was playing:

    When I met Dr. King, I was just at the beginning of my career. I never knew black people on a personal level because there was segregation. I had been to his church meetings and didn’t have to go to many to be absolutely fascinated by this man. When I went down to meet him, I shot him at the pulpit with a cross behind his head. I got down low to get the power of this man. I have to say, ‘Yeah, I was on my knees to King.’  I became fascinated [by the] the power of his oratory. From then on I wanted to cover him. I wanted every assignment I could get.

    In September 1958, King attempted to enter a crowded courtroom for a hearing involving his fellow pastor and key aide, Ralph Abernathy. Moore had heard that King might be there, and on his own initiative decided to drop by. “The police were telling him he couldn’t go in and were giving him a hard time. He said, ‘I’ll just stay here [on the courthouse steps]’ and refused to leave,” Moore said.

    Moore recalls that the two inexperienced officers suddenly decided to arrest King, unaware of who he was. His wife, Coretta, protested but was told, “Just nod your head and you’ll go to jail, too.” Although King was not being pushed, one officer twisted the minister’s arm as the three walked a block and a half to the police booking area. “I saw an opening on the other side of the counter. I ran there real quickly. Nobody stopped me and I quickly took a few frames from behind the counter,” Moore said.

    When the picture went out on the wire, two Life staffers appeared in town the next day, photographer Gary Villete and “a guy who later became managing editor.” They got in touch with Moore, who invited them to his home for dinner, his first meeting with the magazine.

    At the time, Moore did not understand the significance of his picture, but many others did. During the next two days, the national press corps poured into town. Rather than pay a fine for loitering, King was intent on serving his 14-day jail sentence. To diffuse further publicity, Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers released him, saying that he was merely saving the taxpayers money by paying King’s $10 fine. “King was a master at using the media. The significance was that the whole world was aware that Martin Luther King had been put in jail,” Moore later realized.

    When the picture was published in Life twelve days later, Moore was pleased but wished the magazine could have published his eight-picture sequence of the incident instead of just a single photo. Once before, Life had published a full-page fire picture of Moore’s but editors chose not to give prominent play to King’s arrest. The photograph occupied one-sixth of a page and was used with three other pictures accompanying a story about “mostly quiet” civil-rights integration. Stories given far more dominant play in the same issue included “Chinese ‘Reds’ impose a blockade on Quemoy” and an article about fixing charges on television quiz shows. A prominent story on race riots in Britain also dwarfed the coverage of unrest at home.

    Even with the understated play in Life, the photo’s publication in the influential magazine triggered further outrage and a rush of financial aide for King’s Montgomery Improvement Association. Although he had once been asked to appear on television’s Meet the Press, King was now even better-known on a national level; his influence would soon grow to a fevered pitch. By the next time King was photographed by Moore during an arrest, the photographer would be on assignment for Life.

    Moore makes his mark as a freelancer

    By 1962, Moore had been his newspaper’s chief photographer for four years after Holloway had moved on to a career at United Press International. He was ready for a change and decided to take a room in the French Quarter of New Orleans for a 10-day shooting vacation. He met the wife of local district attorney Jim Garrison, who would later rise to prominence with his controversial views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison helped Moore gain access to the late-night world of jazz bars, musicians and stripper — subjects that were otherwise off-limits to outsiders. “When I got back to the paper, I knew I wanted to travel more and reach out to a new audience,” Moore said. He gave two weeks’ notice and moved to New York, anticipating a lucrative freelance career there.

    “It didn’t work. I spent three months and was hanging out in the West Village. I hated New York and my money was going.” Before heading back to Alabama, Moore befriended Milt Freir, a representative from Leica who urged him to go see Howard Chapnick, the influential founder of the Black Star picture agency. In his book, Truth Needs No Ally, Chapnick described Moore as disenchanted. “He had come to New York to make his way into photojournalism and after three months had found a cold, unyielding and professionally unrewarding city.”

    Chapnick decided to give Moore a small weekly guarantee. “We talked and Howard liked the idea I was giving up New York. ‘I think you can do some really good work down there,’ he told me,” Moore remembers. Chapnick would later credit Moore with documenting the important events that defined the movement.

    Rather than encourage Charles Moore to stay in New York to pursue his career, I told him I felt one of the great stories in American history was unfolding in the South. He came from the South and understood it. Going back to Alabama to document the events taking place there would provide the chance for Charles to do work he was uniquely qualified for.

    Still, upon his return to Montgomery, Moore faced another two months of frustration. He missed the newspaper and had little to do. “I felt like a stranger in hell back in Montgomery. I was struggling,” he said.  But Moore had a sudden turn of luck when he ran into Life‘s Miami bureau chief, Dick Billings, in Oxford, Mississippi.

    Black student James Meredith had attempted to register at the University of Mississippi and the state’s defiant governor, Ross Barnett, ignored a federal court order by declaring himself the university’s emergency registrar, personally and physically barring Meredith. The governor was seen as a folk hero in his state and hated what he saw as Life’s liberal bias, refusing to be photographed or interviewed. Moore’s contacts from five years of covering state government paid off as he assured Billings that he could get a picture.

    After being granted exclusive access to photograph Barnett, Moore says that he did not dare mention the word ‘Life.” The editor was thrilled with the pictures. “After today, you’re working for us,” he was told. At the time, a mob of more than 2,000 was descending on the college town, intent on blocking Meredith at any cost.

    Moore’s ascent to the ranks of Life photographers could not have come at a more dangerous time. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sent 200 federal marshals down to protect Meredith and each other. Several other Life shooters were on the scene, some with combat experience. With two days to go before federal marshals would attempt to escort Meredith to his first class, Moore knew that it would be a violent weekend.

    Word got out that he was working for the magazine. A pack of enraged white students shoved their way into Moore’s hotel room, shouting and cursing. One began to choke him before the former Golden Gloves boxer pushed him away. “I’ve never seen such hate in anyone’s face before. It was like I were vermin … To him I was worse than ‘a nigger,’  I was a white nigger. And worse than that I was a white Life magazine nigger.”

    On the street, the mob waved confederate flags. Some even loaded guns as they waited for Meredith’s arrival, not knowing he had already been hidden at a campus dormitory. Local law enforcement, urged on by the governor, was defiant of the federal authorities as well, intent on preventing the enrollment of the first black student there. One of Moore’s most chilling photographs showed local plain-clothes policemen chuckling while one practiced a swing with a billy club before the start of the inevitable rioting. “They were talking about what they’re going to do to Bobby Kennedy and the U.S. Marshals, laughing and showing how they would take care of them,” Moore said.

    Moore had to make some quick decisions. The marshals had blocked the campus, forbidding the press to go in. Readily identifiable as a news photographer, he was threatened again. “I was told, ‘You nigger lovers had better go home’ … and that this guy and his brother were out with their shotguns looking for me.” After buying a gas mask at a local Army-Navy store, Moore sneaked onto the campus with the help of a brave student who he remembers only as ‘John.’ The student drove a VW beetle and Moore stashed his cameras in the vehicle’s trunk. “The cops searched the car but didn’t search the trunk, which was up front. That’s how I got in,” he said.

    It was Sunday evening and as darkness fell, the rioting began. The mob had surrounded the school’s administration building, the Lyceum, and started slashing tires and throwing rocks. Soon it was a siege. Earlier, Moore had decided to bluff his way into the building, where 200 unarmed marshals were holed up. Accompanied by a freelance writer who was also working for Life, Moore banged on the door, telling the guard that he was desperately ill and had to go to the toilet. The ruse worked and the two were forgotten about in the ensuing chaos. Outside, cars were set on fire, and when a lead pipe knocked a marshal unconscious, the lawmen began to fire tear gas into the mob. Moore darted outside for a short time but again talked his way back in. “If you stayed outside and used a flash, you would die. Molotov cocktails were being thrown all over,”  he said.

    It was no safer inside. As soon as marshals fired the gas into the crowd, it would drift back inside, filling the building. Moore wore a gas mask through the evening as he photographed the wounded marshals, several shot and bleeding. After hearing about the melee, then-President John F. Kennedy decided to send in federal troops but they would not arrive until the next day. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was trapped inside the building, and Moore overheard him pleading on the telephone with Bobby Kennedy:

    ‘They’ve got guns out there, Bobby, they’ve got guns. Our men are being shot . . .’ He was trying to convince Kennedy to let them have weapons to protect themselves and Kennedy said no. They had billy clubs, that’s all. The marshals were shooting tear gas to keep the crowd from rushing them. They even stole a bulldozer and were attacking the building with it.

    When it was over, twenty-eight marshals had been shot and 160 were injured. Moore had been the only photographer inside and had exclusive shots of the wounded. Later he learned that a French reporter and a local repairman had been killed in the night-long battle. “We put our lives on the line. I was just sitting on a trash can in front of the building, surrounded by smashed TV cameras and tear gas canisters. We were totally wiped out,” Moore said.

    The magazine’s reporters and photographers were ordered to rest up in a Memphis hotel room. One of the correspondents made up a mock press card, called a ‘SCREW’ card, standing for ‘Southern Correspondents Reporting Equality Wars.’ For his bravery, Moore was issued the first one. “I’m real proud of that because I have card No. 1,” he said. He received a phone call from Black Star telling him that Life was overwhelmed with his work. For the next three years, he would earn the reputation as the photographer most able to gain uncanny access to the front lines of the civil-rights cause.

    A 13-page layout in the October 12 issue was dominated by Moore’s work. But some of the letters to the editor that were published on October 26 and November 2 were critical of both the magazine and the federal involvement in the university’s affairs. One letter complained about stereotyping when the magazine wrote, “A blood-covered red-neck is propelled in the door, guided by two angry marshals.” Carolyn P. Nemrow, of Boston, wrote, “President Kennedy has enough of the nation’s journalistic sheep jumping to give its condemnation of Ole Miss Affairs. When will people realize that the issue is not Meredith, it is state sovereignty versus ever-growing federal intervention.”

    Of barking dogs and walls of water

    Moore soon moved to Miami, and after considering a job with the Miami Herald, was promised steady work with Life by Billings. He was often teamed with reporter Michael Durham and in April 1963, the two were assigned to cover rising tensions in Mississippi and Alabama. After William Moore, a mailman, was shot and killed while walking to protest segregation, Moore photographed protesters along “The Freedom March” that followed a path through three states.

    At nearly the same time, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for organizing protests by school children and from jail would write his famous treatise outlining his philosophy of civil disobedience. Although a state injunction had been issued against King’s protests, he responded by saying, “We’ve got an injunction from heaven.” Moore had a strong picture of King and Abernathy walking toward their inevitable arrest along with a series from the march. However, neither story was published in the magazine. One of the biggest American news stories of the century, the Bay of Pigs — the failed, U.S.-led attack on Cuba — pushed civil rights out of the pages of Life for a time.

    The most influential pictures of Moore’s career were taken over five days beginning on May 3. Birmingham was considered the nation’s most segregated city, and the photographer had a hunch that he and Durham should go to the city after hearing reports on the radio about escalating tensions there. Five minutes after the journalists arrived in Kelly Ingram Park, the scene of anti-segregation demonstrations, firemen had been ordered by Police Commissioner Bull Connor to bring out their hoses to contain the swelling crowd.

    Moore crawled on the pavement and took a position between the firemen and the protesters, who were being pummeled by a virtual wall of water. The scene disgusted Moore but he felt a responsibility to keep shooting. One of the firemen told him later, “We’re supposed to fight fires, not people.”

    One of Moore’s most remarkable photographs showed three students forced against a brick wall by a fierce spray of water propelled at 100 pounds per square inch. Fourteen-year-old Carolyn McKinstry was unaware at the time that she was being photographed. “After getting hit with the hose, that was the last thing on my mind. Dr. King had had motivational meetings with us. He had never mentioned the water hose but said there might be dogs and they might even spit on you,” she said in a 1998 interview.

    When she saw her picture in Life two weeks after the demonstrations, McKinstry had no special feeling about seeing herself in a national magazine, saying that she was still fearful and angry from the experience. However, a teenager at the time, she did remember being displeased at seeing her hair in disarray. Later, McKinstry would become appreciative of the sensitivity in Moore’s graphic photographs. Before the Birmingham unrest, she had said, “The black community had lost any trust that there could be a fair portrayal by the photographers. We were always portrayed in a negative light.”

    The protests continued for five days as King urged the demonstrators, many of them children, to return to the park. Some of the scores of angry onlookers were not schooled in the preacher’s philosophy of passive resistance; Moore was struck in the ankle by a large chunk of concrete. Despite searing pain and an injury to his tendons, he continued to work for the next three days after treatment by a black doctor. “He did that story half-crippled,” Durham said.

    When the demonstrations did not abate, Connor ordered police dogs into the crowd and urged the officers to allow whites to view the demonstrations. “I want them to see the dogs work,” he said. Along with the fire hose images, the pictures of dogs snarling and ripping at the pants of protesters would be among the most dramatic of Moore’s career. Despite knowing that he was making meaningful photographs, Moore felt revulsion. “Attack dogs — that was repulsive,” he said.

    As the demonstrations spread, Moore and Durham disobeyed a police order not to go outside the park and were arrested as they attempted to document a woman being knocked down by the water from the hoses. Locked up in a cell for four hours with Durham and about a dozen menacing white men, Moore, known as a fearless photographer, faced one of the most frightening experiences of his career. “We could have been beaten very badly if they would have known we were from Life.” Another reporter from the magazine bailed them out. Facing the possibility of a six-month jail term in an unsympathetic city, Life’s lawyers advised Moore and Durham to skip town immediately and fly to New York. The charges were later dropped but for a year, Moore was a fugitive from justice in his own state, having to sneak home once to see his own children in Dothan.

    At Life, Moore was given the rare opportunity to supervise the 11-page layout, and the magazine’s editors decided to give him his first byline. His photos inspired seven letters published in the June 7 issue — three critical and four sympathetic to the civil rights cause. Francis Pharr Jones, of Austin, Texas, wrote, “We assume the guilt of the white supremacist when we allow this persecution … I shall never forget those tragic faces.” Grady Franklin, of Crawfordsville, Indiana, wrote, “Charles Moore’s photographs on the racial troubles in Birmingham were superb and bone-chilling — surely a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize in news photography.”

    The photos of the dog attacks and fire hoses have been among the best-selling of all time at Black Star, reprinted time and again in books and magazines. Picture editor Yukiko Launois recalled that there were many photographers working in the South at the time, but “I remember Charles’ photos, particularly of Birmingham, as the most memorable and distinguished.” Several others had also photographed the violent confrontation between police dogs and protesters. “Somehow, Charles’ image was better. Only Charles’ became a classic. From the beginning, Charles Moore was identified with that image.”

    Politicians noticed as well. John F. Kennedy said that the situation in Birmingham had sickened him and mentioned the riots there in a speech the next month in which he asked Congress to initiate civil-rights legislation. Militant black leader Malcolm X mentioned the dog attacks in a speech that he gave in Africa. Senator Jacob Javits of New York later credited Moore’s Birmingham photographs with helping to quicken passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later said that the police-dog photographs transformed the national mood and made the legislation not just necessary, but possible. A year after Moore’s classic photos were first published in Life, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

    Even artist Andy Warhol noticed Moore’s best-known photo of a snarling dog reared up on its hind legs while another bit the buttocks of a protester. One morning in 1964, Howard Chapnick and his wife, Jeanette, were eating breakfast when the Black Star chief noticed a Time magazine article about Warhol’s latest work. Chapnick immediately recognized that one of the featured paintings, Red Race Riot, was a slightly altered silkscreen of Moore’s photograph. “Howard has eagle eyes. He might not remember what he had for breakfast but never forgets a picture,” said Jeanette Chapnick.

    The painting was a clear copyright violation without credit to either Moore or the agency. Chapnick insisted that Moore go personally to Warhol’s studio to confront him. Not comfortable with negotiating with the flamboyant artist and his assistant, Moore settled for two flower prints and Warhol’s promise that he would be credited whenever the painting was reproduced (Later it was found that the flower series had itself been appropriated from a photograph in a Burpee seed catalog). In the years to come, Warhol failed to follow through on his promise of crediting the photograph and both Black Star and Moore sold their flower prints soon after obtaining them. The Warhol watercolor was not considered an appropriate match for the famous news photos adorning the walls at Black Star. “It had no place hanging with the photography. We sold it and had a lot of trouble getting rid of it. I think we got $250 for it,” said Jeanette Chapnick.

    Knowing when to duck and when to shoot

    Moore and Durham traveled together frequently through the South, covering the dangerous skirmishes that defined the black struggle for equality.  When they first met in a Tennessee airport to cover the 1963 Freedom March, Life’s editors had thought it wise to team a Southerner with a Northerner. Moore’s Alabama drawl blended in but when he heard Durham’s Yankee accent, the reporter recalled Moore’s first words to him. “‘At least you look like a redneck. But when we’re together, don’t say anything.’ That’s a funny thing to say to a reporter but it was definitely good advice. It was best the rednecks didn’t know who you were in those years,” Durham said.

    The two quickly became friends and looked out for each other during the many urban battles they covered. In order not to miss crucial pictures during fast-breaking riots, a system was worked out where Moore would run backwards at full speed as he photographed, led by the collar through the crowd by Durham.

    Chapnick told Moore that he could not believe that in Birmingham, the photographer’s longest telephoto lens was a modest 100 millimeters. Often, the reporter would help out by carrying a lens or even Moore’s camera bag during tense events. In June 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, a riot broke out as the two covered the funeral of Medgar Evers, the first black civil-rights leader to be assassinated. Durham remembers the event as the only time that the usually kind and soft-spoken Moore ever spoke harshly to him.

    It was in the heat of action. He turned and said to me, ‘Give me the lens!’ ‘What do you mean,’ ‘Give me the lens?’ I replied. He said, ‘I gave it to you.’ I said, ‘No, you did not.’ We went back down the street and saw a red-haired kid standing there holding the lens. Charles asked him, ‘How did you get the lens?’ This kid turned and said to Charles, ‘‘You told me, Here. Hold this.’ All the time Charles thought it was me.

    In June 1964, Moore and Durham were assigned to cover the disappearance of three white Northern college students who came to the South to help register black voters. After being jailed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three vanished shortly after their release. Later they were found murdered and the Life team found themselves working in their most hostile environment yet.

    “All the journalists will tell you that Philadelphia, Mississippi was the most frightening place of all,” Moore said. Because they had rented a car and taken a hotel room, word spread quickly among townspeople that outsider reporters were there to cover the murders. As Moore photographed the search for the bodies, a local man tried to knock a camera out of his hand. “As we were driving the back roads, our bumper got bumped.” For protection, “in the motel, we put a chair in front of the door.”

    Go to part two

     

    Powerful days (part two)

    Despite many challenges, Life photographer Charles Moore managed to capture the civil rights movement — and a piece of the nation's history — on camera in the 1960s. And in the process, he helped change the world.

    Go to part one

    The local sheriff, Charles Rainey, told Moore and Durham to get out of town. “You take my goddamn picture, you’ll go to jail or worse,” he told Moore. Still, the two persisted and remained in town when Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price were brought to court in connection with the murders.

    “Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was a meanie. That guy was scary. I believe they were out there that night in the woods. I don’t know if he pulled the trigger. When they forced them out into the woods, they tortured them and made them suffer. Imagine the horrible things they did,” Moore said. Price and six others, most members of the Ku Klux Klan, were later found guilty of conspiracy in depriving the victims of their civil rights. Rainey was acquitted of the charges.

    Threatened on countless occasions, Moore was never beaten, but once after a sit-in in Jacksonville, Florida he was rescued by a passing television reporter as an angry mob of black teenagers chased him. In eight years of covering the movement, he found it ironic “that it was blacks who attacked us.” After a bomb threat was called in, other journalists evacuated the scene. Moore and Durham were the only ones left as the situation worsened. “They were angry with the police. They were high school kids throwing stones. They turned over our rental car and burned it. We were running away. My 100 millimeter lens was shattered. It was covering my face,” Moore remembers.

    Durham was not as lucky, as the youths caught and beat him; the magazine ran a two-page article, explaining what it was like to be beaten by a mob, with a picture of the reporter bandaged up in the hospital. He said later that if he had not found himself separated from Moore as the two ran for safety, he probably would have avoided injury. “Good photojournalists are lucky. Charles had the luck,” Durham said. Moore described himself as being like “one of the careful photographers who lives through wars.” He credits veteran combat photographer Horst Faas with the philosophy that helped him escape injury while covering civil rights. “You have to know when to duck and when to shoot. Or you’ll die.”

    Missed opportunities

    Moore and Durham were sent on many assignments that never made the magazine. According to Moore, during the 1960s, for every story that got in the magazine, Life covered five more around the world. Constantly on the road, he often would not know if his pictures had been published until picking up the magazine on the newsstand. Durham said that he knew that Life was not interested in an abundance of text but took pleasure in photographers like Moore getting their stories in.

    When their work was ignored, the two took consolation in knowing that they were witness to what they believed was an important chain of events. Not getting published “happened so often you just couldn’t let it bother you,” Durham said. “It was the main drawback. If it was The Bay of Pigs, you could accept it. But often it would be a story of less import.”

    On August 28, 1963, between 200,000 and 500,000 people gathered for the largest political demonstration in U.S. history to hear Martin Luther King Jr., Charlton Heston, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier and others argue for equal rights. Life’s editors thought that there might be trouble. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had lobbied to try to have the Kennedy administration scuttle the march, believing King to be a communist. However, Kennedy was determined that his civil rights legislation could only be helped by such a large demonstration of both black and white supporters.

    “They always liked to put me out where there might be some trouble,” Moore said. He was assigned to shoot the crowd in the reflecting pool area near the Washington Monument. But the rally turned out to be a peaceful one as King delivered his epic “I Have A Dream” speech. Although none of Moore’s photos were published, the official memento of the march was a portfolio of five red, white, and blue collages of Life magazine photographs that included the dog and fire hose images from Birmingham. Forty-thousand were sold to the assembled crowd for $1 each.

    Bloody Sunday

    Moore’s first Life cover was the March 7, 1965, face-off between Alabama state troopers and a mass of marchers demonstrating for voting rights. King had gone to Selma to direct a registration drive in a county where so great was the intimidation, only 3 percent of blacks had registered to vote. Governor George Wallace implored that he would not tolerate such a march and had about 100 state troopers at the ready to block the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

    Moore and dozens of other newsmen were witnesses as the troopers warned the group that it had two minutes to retreat back to the local Episcopal church. But only a minute later, the guardsmen were told to attack. Moore’s photographs depicted the savagery as troopers, some wearing gas masks, battered the demonstrators to the ground with billy clubs. More than 60marchers were badly injured. One suffered a fractured skull. The incident came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

    ABC interrupted its broadcast of the Holocaust film, Judgment in Nuremberg, to report live on the beatings. In Congress, more than 50 speeches were delivered deploring the brutality. Life’s coverage reflected the outrage of the nation at large. Besides the cover, the March 19 issue displayed several pages dominated by Moore’s work, including full-page portraits of troopers and the injured.

    On April 2, the magazine published five letters that were overwhelmingly critical of the troopers’ violence. Mrs. M. M. Warsaw, of Braintree, Massachusetts, wrote of one of Moore’s photos, “I wonder if the Selma policeman pictured on page 37 of your current issue would have the same defiant attitude and belligerence if he was brought face to face with the Negro Marines bravely going ashore at Da Nang, South Vietnam?” Julie G. Saunders of South Hadley, Massachusetts, wrote, “The whole tragedy greatly upset me, but not until reading your article have I cried about it. After reading your article I see that it is necessary that I become physically involved … Even though I am safe and secure in this Northern school … I am not free until they are.”

    After many years on the bloody front lines of the civil-rights movement, Moore had seen enough. “I had been involved in so much ugliness, and I realized that I needed to do something else.” Turning his attention toward other types of assignments after the brutal Selma beatings, in years to come he would photograph travel stories, do corporate portraiture and occasionally return to hard news. After Moore became so determined to get away from covering violence, Life’s editors later convinced him to spend two months shooting an essay on B-52 air raids in Vietnam.

    Despite covering most of the major civil-rights stories of the era, Moore missed the biggest one of all. When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Moore was in Palo Alto, California doing a sex-education assignment for the Saturday Evening Post. “We had it on the radio and heard the flash. I just pulled the car over to the side, listened to the news and cried. After all I’d done, I felt bad I couldn’t be there on that day in Memphis in 1968. I knew him and he knew me.”

    Epilogue

    Charles Moore is a freelance photographer based in Alabama. He is a frequent lecturer about the civil rights era at universities and workshops. In 1965, after vowing to get away from the violence, Moore had one other Life cover about Mary Martin’s performance in the musical, Hello Dolly. He has preferred to continue freelancing throughout his career rather than joining the staff of Life full-time. Moore continues to be represented by Black Star and has had more than 100 covers for a variety of magazines including the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. In 1989, Howard Chapnick decided to enter Moore’s work in the first annual Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism, regarded as one of the most prestigious honors in the industry. Moore was named the winner and the resulting publicity sparked renewed interest in his landmark work from the civil-rights movement. In the foreword to Moore’s 1991 book, Powerful Days, The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote, “The photographs of Charles Moore presented in this brilliant chronicle offer more than simple, visual accounts of the civil rights years … For those of us who remember the pictured events from personal experience, this book is a means by which to sharpen memories, to relive and revisit some of the most meaningful, terrifying and rewarding moments of our lives.”

    Michael Durham had the opportunity to hire Charles Moore for several freelance assignments when he later became editor of a magazine published by American Heritage. The two also collaborated on other topics for Life besides civil-rights coverage, and he wrote the text for Powerful Days. While doing the editing for the book, Durham says, “It was amazing to go back through all those old contact sheets. It was like reliving things.” Now doing freelance writing and living in Delancey, New York, he remembers the heady days of covering civil rights. “Every once in a while I think it would be great to rush off to the airport.”

    Howard Chapnick passed away shortly after his 1994 book, Truth Needs No Ally, was published. Of Moore’s work he wrote, “The lesson here for aspiring photojournalists is that one has to recognize great turning points in social history, to seize the opportunity to bear witness to them, and to remember that what is in you backyard may be the stepping stone to your success.” His wife, Jeanette Chapnick, was Black Star’s bookkeeper for several decades and continues Chapnick’s work on behalf of documentary photography as a trustee of the W. Eugene Smith grant program and the Howard Chapnick Grant for the advancement of photojournalism.

    Carolyn McKinstry met Charles Moore more than two decades after he took his famous photo depicting her being sprayed by a fireman’s hose in Birmingham, when both appeared on a television special about the events there. McKinstry has also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and played herself in a recent Spike Lee film about four of her friends who were killed in a church bombing just months after the Birmingham riots. She frequently lectures about the civil-rights movement at schools and works as an informational-technology trainer for Bell South. Of Birmingham, where she still lives, McKinstry says, “It’s become a really nice place to live.”

    The writer’s interview subjects:
    (All interviews were conducted in 1998.)

    Jeanette Chapnick
    Michael Durham
    Yukiko Launois
    Carolyn McKinstry
    Charles Moore

    STORY INDEX

    MARKETPLACE >

    A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Kris Shepard and Clayborne Carson
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446678090/inthefraycom

    The Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History by Stanford Wexler (1993)
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081602748X/inthefraycom

    The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 by Stephen Kasher
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789206560/inthefraycom

    Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change by Aldon D. Morris
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029221307/inthefraycom

    Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore by Michael S. Durham and Charles Moore
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0817311521/inthefraycom

    Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism By Howard Chapnick
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826209556/inthefraycom

    Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
    URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451527534/inthefraycom

    Life articles >

    “In the U.S., Mostly Quiet,” Life, September 15, 1958, 30.

    “Selma: Beatings Start The Savage Season,” Life, March 19, 1965.

    “They Fight A Fire That Won’t Go Out,” Life, May 17, 1963, 26-36.

    “With The Besieged Marshals As The Wild Mob Attacks,” Life, October 12, 1962, 37.

    Life, June 7, 1963, 21.

    Life, November 2, 1958, 21.

    ORGANIZATIONS >

    Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
    URL: http://www.bcri.org/index.html

    PHOTOS >

    Charles Moore’s photographs featured on Kodak’s website
    URL: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/moore/mooreIndex.shtml

     

    A lackluster golden anniversary

    Racial domination may no longer be the law of the land, but that doesn't mean social practices have changed completely in the last half-century.

    A line of African American and white school girls standing in a classroom while boys sit behind them at Barnard School, Washington, D.C. May 27, 1955 (Thomas J. O’Halloran, Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs)

    The question, “Where are we 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education?” carries a note of despair.

    We know where we are: Northern public schools have more segregated than they have ever been and are more segregated than their Southern counterparts, African Americans have very high dropout rates and, worse still, a damaging drug culture and mind-numbingly high incarceration rates. We have not achieved a racially integrated democracy, even if some African-Americans hold positions of significant power.

    The question, “Where are we 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education,” frequently inspires the answer: “Tired.”

    We have good reason to feel that the mountain is insurmountable. I’d like to remind us of those reasons, for they may help us see where we are, exactly, on the mountain, and where we are going, and thereby help us rally our energies again.

    The question of what the Brown decision was really about opens out to a dizzying set of options. Was it about integration? Was it about public education? Was it about social equality? Was it about democratic law?

    Sometimes we judge it on one ground; sometimes, on another. In truth, Brown addressed all of these issues, because the case was ultimately about democratic constitutions and what it takes to change them.

    A constitution is more than paper; it is a plan for constituting political rights and organizing citizenship, for determining who has access to the powers of collective decision-making that are used to negotiate a community’s economic and social relations. Such plans always involve custom as well as law.

    Indeed, a constitution need not even be written out as such. It may, as in Britain, rest on laws and customs that accrete over time to establish a particular distribution of political power through institutions. Or it may, as in ancient Athens, consist of laws and customs that determine who has access to the instruments of political power.

    As it happens, the U.S. Constitution of 1787-88 by no means even then contained the whole plan for determining political rights and powers. It left the regulation of voting rights to the states. One can’t claim to understand the constitution (with a small “c”) of the United States without looking beyond the document that bears that title not to context generally, but very specifically, (a) to state laws and (b) to customary habits of citizenship (unspoken norms for interaction that constrain who can speak where in public and how). Both state laws and habits of citizenship help route the basic circuitry of political power.

    The Constitution drafted and adopted in 1787-88 attached itself to cultural habits for organizing power-relations among the colonies’ inhabitants that had been under construction since the early 17th century. In 1630 the Virginia Assembly had, among its earliest laws, decreed that “Hugh David be soundly whipped, before an assembly of negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath day.” In 1640 they required “Robert Sweet to do penance in church according to laws of England, for getting a negro woman with child and the woman whipt.” Customs of racial domination and a customary illusion that racial purity existed and was a proper object of the law were, on this continent, born together with written law.

    Over nearly two centuries, white inhabitants of the colonies grew accustomed to maintaining key public spaces as their exclusive possession; for the sake of preserving life and stability, black and indigenous inhabitants, all in all, grew accustomed to acquiescing to such norms and to the acts of violence that enforced them. Each set of customs, exclusionary on the one hand and on the other acquiescent, constituted the practical rules of democratic citizenship for a set of the new country’s inhabitants. Together the two sets of rules guided residents of the new United States into the diverse forms of behavior that secured stable (though undemocratic) public spaces.

    An African American boy walking through a crowd of white boys during a period of violence related to school integration, in Clinton, Tennessee, December 4, 1956. (Thomas J. O’Halloran, Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs)

    These customary rules that routed power were as much a part of the new constitution written in 1787-88 as was the newly conceived and justly privileged text. Those customary rules limited the text, as we all know, in places like the “three-fifths compromise” clause that not only wrote something less than personhood into the Constitution for non-whites but that also, more importantly, inflated the power of Southern whites relative to Northern whites.

    The Constitution did not and could not answer all questions about how power would be organized; state laws and habits of interaction filled the gaps. Our constitution with a small “c,” like all constitutions, has always consisted of a complex, intricate web of law and custom.

    When the country fought the Civil War and shortly thereafter passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, it undertook the project of undoing a racial constitution that had been settling into place for at least 300 years (since 1562 when Britain entered into the slave trade). A constitution 300 years a-building needs at least as long for its rebuilding. Now, 50 years after Brown, we are only 150 years into that process of remaking the complicated, intricate web of law and custom that put race at the center of our political experience. We probably have at least another 150 years to go.

    I recommend that those of us who feel tired return to the transcripts of the oral arguments in Brown (recently reenacted at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and to be aired on Illinois’ PBS affiliate on May 17th), where one finds a tautness on both sides that arises from the lawyers’ intuitive knowledge that they were arguing about the entirety of a constitution. These oral arguments are more powerful, more significant documents, in my view, than the opinion itself.

    One finds inspiration in Thurgood Marshall’s impassioned arguments in those transcripts. He had much farther to go than we do. We ought to make his energy our own and turn to resurrecting public education for everyone and to confronting the evils of the drug trade as well as the inequities and hypocrisies of our current responses to it. As Marshall must have understood, the work still ahead is for our children’s children’s children.

     

    Where multiculturalism gets airbrushed

    Sure, minorities have a huge presence on MTV. But do the prolific images of diversity add up to genuine multiculturalism?

    (Original photographs from stock.xchng, illustration by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

    If MTV were your only source of news of the outside world, I’m betting you would think racism was dead and buried.

    After all, here is a channel where nearly every time a black man appears, he is cruising down the street in a nice German import, wearing enough silver and gold to open his own Tiffany and Co.

    And he’s dancing with black girls, with white girls, with Latino girls, and with Asian girls. Watching MTV it seems the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a land where his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin has come to pass — so long as his daughters, once grown up, are willing to flash that skin for the camera.

    When the fact is a young black male in urban America is more likely to be arrested near a BMW than driving his own, I wonder what is the message of this particular brand of MTV Multiculturalism, this Dionysian image of all colors coming together and celebrating materialism and conspicuous consumption?

    It’s not just MTV.  It’s Will Smith movies, it’s Tiger Woods golf, and it’s Jackie Chan movies. Through all these images runs a common message that says, “Hey, we’re not so different after all. We’re all dancing to Nelly, aren’t we?”

    But phrased another way, it can also go like this: “Hey, shut up and stop talking about your own race, we’re all trying to dance to Nelly here!”

    The particular brand of multiculturalism has an explicit motive. MTV – a corporation like any other – is selling advertising dollars. To get the viewers, it gears its product – that would be Nelly, N’Sync, and the rest – towards a target audience. But the herd of consumers are not the guys from Nelly’s neighborhood; they are, demographically speaking, the affluent suburban teenagers who blare Nelly and Jay-Z out the speakers of their parents’ SUVs on their way to schools and malls.

    To hook this audience, MTV packages its “multiculturalism” with as little actual “culture” as it can possibly manage. It sells its “black culture” – or its Asian culture or its Latino culture – not as it actually is for the blacks, but as it is perceived by the suburban mob. Blacks are “gangstas” and “players”, Asians are kung-fu masters, and Latinos are Spanish-speaking homeboys or big-booty women.

    Where are the real ethnics? Walk into the ethnic organization of any diverse campus, and you’ll see communities of young people trying to define more authentic identities for their group.

    In the Harvard Asian American community, with which I am most familiar, the range of ethnic activities is astounding. Artistically, we have dance troupes that do everything from traditional ribbon and fan dances to contemporary J-Pop and break dancing. Academically, we have the prestigious Harvard China Review, run mostly, if not exclusively, by Asians. Socially, we have groups for Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese, Southeast Asian, half Asian students, and more. Together, they plan panels, Boba tea nights, or entire dance formals.

    One of our students is planning a campus-wide Asian American magazine; another group is pushing for a new Asian American major to be added to the curriculum. Just a month ago I ran a panel on Chinese migration, where international students whose families had moved to everywhere from Thailand to Belgium to New Zealand came together and talked about what it meant to be Chinese.

    These are the acts of self-expression that any ethnic group prides itself upon. Just don’t try to find it on MTV. For all its profanity, MTV content, along with the rest of mass media, is innocuous stuff. It has to be, for the advertisers’ sake.

    Mass media is “race blind,” to borrow a term from college admissions, if by being blind it can avoid controversy. In the 1989 song “Fight the Power,” Public Enemy raps, “Our freedom of speech is freedom or death / We got to fight the powers that be” and, decrying Elvis, “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.”

    In contrast, all Nelly seems to cry out for is a pair of Air Force One sneakers. “I like the all-whites high tops strapped wit a gum bottom / there somethin’ bout them dirty that’s why I got ’em,” he raps. It’s the same beats, with very different souls.

    This is the general trend with MTV Multiculturalism: It does not seek to challenge its audience;  rather, it is aimed at delivering to them whatever they want, whether it’s rap or basketball, with no guilt attached. It’s not “racist”: it emphasizes stereotypes – gangster or athlete – only as far as it is able to use them as marketing tools. Unlike political conservatives, it doesn’t really believe that blacks are less intelligent or that Asians can’t speak English. Rather, it shows them that way because of its audiences’ expectations.

    When Abercrombie & Fitch put out a T-shirt depicting a slant-eyed Asian laundromat owner, Mr. Wong, with the punch line “Two Wongs don’t make a White,” it genuinely wasn’t trying to offend Asians. It was trying to sell T-shirts. That the message itself was offensive to a whole race of people seemed only a minor inconvenience.

    Of course, it seems cultural critics have been screaming about the dumbing-down of mass media since the beginning of time. This essay is not the first and certainly won’t be the last to lambaste MTV. What is significant though is that ethnic groups are especially vulnerable to MTV. From the angle of discrimination, the more that MTV sells the slant-eyed Asian or the ghetto gansta, the harder it becomes, on the part of ethnic groups, to overcome those perceptions.

    We are what MTV tells people we are, whether we like it or not. To illustrate the extent to which these stereotypes still float around the popular consciousness, one only has to look at the April issue of the popular men’s magazine Details. Within its pages, a piece entitled “Gay or Asian” explores the similarities between gay men and Asian men with such observations as, “One cruises for chicken; the other takes it General Tso-style.”

    The magazine called it “satire,” yet I’ve not talked to anyone either gay or Asian who gets the joke. It is inescapable that as of yet, ethnic groups are still being defined in the popular consciousness primarily by their MTV depictions. That has to change.

    From the angle of the ethnic communities themselves, the temptation of MTV’s money and fame begins to weaken those avenues of self-expression. All artists, regardless of their ethnicities, begin to converge towards the MTV ideal. Talented rappers in the future will write songs about their favorite sneakers; talented minority actors will give their greatest performances in pretending to be non-ethnic, that is, to be “white.” Stereotypes will be milked for their comedic value, but won’t be challenged by thoughtful films. And oh, forget Spike Lee.

    We will see a culture where cheap media depictions obscure the difficulties in all race relations. Ignore for a moment the negative role models: the celebrities who play stereotypes or live them out in real life; those make dialogue about race hard enough as is.

    There are still the ostensibly positive ones, the Tiger Wood’s and the Michelle Kwan’s, the people who we do look up and cheer for. But they too cover themselves in Nike swooshes and advertising dollars.

    Michael Jordan, in the 1992 Olympics, covered himself during the medal presentation with an American flag. Why? Because he had a contract with Nike, and his U.S. Olympic outfit had the Reebok logo on it. The consistent message is this: “We, your heroes, have accepted the status-quo. We have prospered because of Nike and MTV, why don’t you do the same.”

    The end result is a multiculturalism devoid of all value. The America of 2004 is in many ways in much better shape than any other period in its history. Legalized discrimination has waned, institutionalized racism is weaker, and race relations have improved significantly from the days when whites were setting dogs after their black slaves and burning houses in Chinatowns.

    But as we emerge into a new era, will we be able to hold onto what is unique and different about ourselves? Can we preserve the shared understandings and values that come with being the members of marginalized communities, or will we sell out and pretend that we are not who we are? Given that race will always exist, and that racism will always be a problem, how can we define ourselves as “communities” – as groups with the solidarity to fight that racism – if our group identity becomes lost in the flood of MTV music videos?

    The greatest accomplishment of American culture, it must be remembered, did not come from mainstream whites. Jazz came from a black culture that drew back on its long-standing and uniquely African traditions. It was a movement that came from a marginalized, but cohesive community, one that supported jazz during its nascent years and from which it drew its inspirations. The same could be said for Motown, for rock and roll, for hip hop. The white mainstream only came later on, to appropriate it and to market it, so that today, we have former N’Sync member Justin Timberlake donning bandanas and doing his best to look, well, black.

    If we, the “ethnics” of America, are too quick to embrace MTV Multiculturalism, if we trade in our individual identities for one we saw in a Nike commercial, then we’ve bought a lot more than we’ve ever bargained for.

    As Nelly would put it, “Oh why do I live this way / Hey! Must be the money!”

    STORY INDEX

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    Lyrics to Nelly’s “AirForce Ones”
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    “It’s all in the details”
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    Pathological Deontology

    The common understanding of Immanuel Kant’s morality focuses on the means/ends distinction made in contrast to utilitarianism (the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number). Deontology gets reduced: do not use humans as means, and no outcome, no matter how good, can justify immoral action.  What is overlooked is Kant’s theories about the origins of moral duty or the compulsion towards moral action that each of us is supposed to feel deep down. In this way, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason preserves an element of faith to prove the moral character of humans. What Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek do is disentangle this notion of “compulsion” and “morality” from the Protestant values that Kant asserted where natural and therefore universally True. In de-moralizing the “duty” in Kant, Zupancic particularly changes the standards for determining ethical action. Instead of relying on biblical origins for the good, Zupancic and Zizek argue that the ethical is that which you will die for. The idea is that being willing to die for something is “pathological”, or literally insane, and that it must be, in a sense, disinterested or, at least, not self-serving because it goes against what Freudians and psychoanalysts believe is the most basic human drive — self preservation — or what Freud calls the “reality principle.” Zupancic explains this relationship between the reality principle and psychoanalytic ethics in her book The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, writing:

    …  the reality principle sets limits to transgression of the pleasure principal; it tolerates, or even imposes certain transgressions, and excludes others. For instance, it demands that we accept some displeasure as the condition of our survival, and of our social well-being in general, whereas it excludes some other[s] … Its function … consists in setting limits within the field governed by the binary system of pleasure/pain. Sublimation [a fancy word for ethics] is what enables us to challenge this criterion, and eventually to formulate a different one.

    To use an historical example, anti-slavery hero John Brown was considered by all accounts of his white contemporaries to be totally insane. And by white standards of the time, he was insane because he was willing to die, and did die, to change something that in no way threatened his particular way of living. Thus, John Brown wagered his safety and privilege in his act of sacrifice and went against every natural human tendency of self-preservation and self-interest. He raised the freedom of African Americans to the status of something that was literally more valuable than himself.