New York Fashion's Bill Cunningham: RIP

Yesterday the news broke that longtime New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham had passed away, at age 87. Cunningham's fashion posts and videos were a staple of the Times' fashion pages for several decades, and one of my weekly online destinations for years. Rather than a long tribute I'll direct readers to the sparkling 2010 documentary about Cunningham's life and work, Bill Cunningham New York, which Richard Press directed and cajoled Cunningham, thankfully for viewers, to participate in. It was streaming on Netflix a while ago, but should be available on DVD via that service and others, and at libraries. Its portrait of this simultaneous complex and bare-bones man, who elevated street fashion photography to an art, is poignant, perhaps even more so as the diverse, sometimes chaotic New York he chronicled through the lens of its fashions is being hypergentrified out of existence.

Below is a great clip of the animated Boston-native Cunningham speaking about what he considered the greatest fashion show of all time, 1973's "The Battle of Versailles," the "competition" pitting five  French haute couture designers (Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin, and Christian Dior) against the US's ready to wear stars; one of them, the then-young African American designer Stephen Burrows, and his spectacular  models, stole the show and electrified the French elites and the fashion world, as Cunningham relates, so moved at one point by the revolution he and everyone was witnessing on the catwalk that he cannot speak. So far we've come, so far we've gone backwards, so far we still have to go.  But we will have Bill Cunningham's New York (and Paris and Milan) fashion photographs as guideposts from the past, and templates for the future.

Supreme Court Affirms Obamacare & Marriage Equality

In this March 23, 2010, photo, President Barack Obama
signs the Affordable Care Act in the East Room
of the White House in Washington.
 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

This year's Supreme Court of the United States session is nearly over, but the court has just issued two major decisions that will resonate for years to come. In the first, in a 6-3 decision to King v. Burwell, a lawsuit brought by four conservative plaintiffs to challenge the legality of subsidies for people buying plans on the federal Affordable Care Act--a/k/a Obamacare--exchanges, the court ruled in favor of the landmark law. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who had previously voted with the majority in the 2012 case NIHIB v Sibelius to uphold Obamacare's mandate as a tax, again wrote the winning decision, stating that the ambiguous wording of the statute, "established by the state," should be understood in light of Congress's intentions, which were that the subsidies should not be limited to state-established exchanges, but were legally extendable to the federal ones as well. Roberts was joined in his decision by Associate Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Anthony Kennedy, and Sonia Sotomayor. Dissenting were conservative Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

As a result, not only will the 6 million+ people in danger of losing their subsidies retain them, but this ruling effectively ensures the existence of Obamacare through the end of the President's term. What is also clear is that given its proven successes of providing health insurance to 16 million new people through the state and federal exchanges, and of guaranteeing coverage for over 160 million by striking the pre-existing condition bar, it very well may become as popular, despite its multiple market-friendly, neoliberal components, as prior social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid now are. This, along with the taxes levied on high income owners has been, I think, one of the major reasons behind the conservative hatred of the law. The other major one was, despite its origins in and similarities to early 1990s Congressional Republican health care plans and to the state plan Mitt Romney successfully implemented in Massachusetts, the fact that this marked a major legislative victory by President Obama.

One effect of the ruling I noted was that in those states that faced challenges in rolling out local exchanges, shifting to the federal exchange was now a viable option, thereby federalizing the law even more through the back door. Whether this will lead eventually to Medicare-for-all or, even better from a logistical and economic standpoint, a form of single payer health insurance, remains to be seen. But the President was right to point out that as this ruling ratified Obamacare for the near term; it is here to stay, and in the loss, the Republicans dodged a major bullet, since they had no viable, comparable health insurance plan to speak of. Even conservative journalists had begun to question some Republican leaders on this fact. Now they won't have to devise one; it already exists, and is working.

One final thing I'll say is that it struck me that a bit of literary critical study--or even basic reading comprehension--could have led the court to reject this challenge outright. "The state" in common parlance certainly does mean an individual state, as in "the state of New Jersey, like all others in the US, issues drivers' licences." However, "the state" also has the popular meaning of "nation" or "federal entity." It's not just the literary gambit of William Shakespeare writing of"something [being] rotten in the state of Denmark," but regular invocations of "state violence" or "the state's overreach," etc., that point to this other meaning being valid. Thus it strikes me that the Congress's alleged inartfulness was actually quite clever; in those four words, they had already made their case, and all that was needed was careful reading, which Roberts and the five other justices gave the law. Dissenting conservative Associate Justice Scalia disagreed, in spiteful fashion, but what else is new?

***

Black lesbian couple marrying
on beach (BlackEnterprise.com)

Not to be outdone with the Obamacare decision, on LGBTIQ+ Pride Weekend in New York City, the Supreme Court affirmed, in a 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and several other linked cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, that according to the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, same-sex marriage was a federal right for all Americans under the Equal Protection clause. The opinion, written by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, cited equal protection and due process, and effectively federalized same-sex marriage, which only 15 years ago existed in one state, Massachusetts. Kennedy's decision, joined by Associate Justices Breyer, Bader Ginsburg,  Kagan, and Sotomayor, was the culmination of decades of work by marriage equality activists and theorists.

As Huffington Post notes:

In the majority opinion, the justices outlined several reasons same-sex marriage should be allowed. They wrote that the right to marriage is an inherent aspect of individual autonomy, since "decisions about marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make." They also said gay Americans have a right to "intimate association" beyond merely freedom from laws that ban homosexuality. 

Extending the right to marry protects families and "without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser," the justices wrote.

In response to the ruling, each of the judges on the losing side, Chief Justice Roberts Jr., and Associate Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas, wrote separate dissents, some of them extreme in their rhetoric. Roberts cited problematic historical precedents; Alito wondered whether people who disagreed with same sex marriage would be discriminated against; Scalia harshly mocked Kennedy's opinion and writing style, while seemingly approving sexual liberationist rhetoric; and Thomas, perhaps most offensively, wondered whether enslaved and interned people did not still maintain their dignity, thereby calling for continued discrimination.

The ruling could have been narrower; Kennedy could have found only for cross-state recognition of marriages performed by a state that had legalized same-sex marriage in ones that had not, but the ruling not only ratified that principle, but also legalization in states that had overtly passed anti-marriage equality statutes. The case's lead plaintiff, Ohioan James Obergefell, had married his late partner of three decades, John Arthur, who passed away 3 months later, and had sought to be listed as Arthur's spouse on his death certificate.

Kennedy's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized state laws against sodomy--in its same and opposite sexual forms--was an important step in the decade and a half-long process towards marriage equality. Another step came in 2013, when the court struck down the odious 1996 Defense of Marriage (DOMA) law, which the GOP-led Congress had passed and President Bill Clinton had signed into law. The decision also tracked the shift towards public support of same-sex marriage, which currently stands at 60% (Gallup), after having been as low as 44% (vs. 53% against) only a decade ago, and 27% back in 1996 when DOMA passed. A major component of this cultural and political shift has occurred because of younger Americans, who show higher levels of LGBTIQ acceptance than their elders.

Despite the significance of the ruling, numerous challenges for LGBTIQ people remain. First, there is no guarantee--despite the legal ruling that some recalcitrant states will apply the laws as required, without visible or invisible resistance. (State responses to various civil rights laws and rulings offer a precedent.) In addition, a number of the leading GOP candidates have called for resistance to the ruling, and several, such as Mike Huckabee, have called for a Constitutional Amendment to counter the new status quo. Perhaps more importantly, in a majority of states, as NPR noted in April, it is still legal to discriminate against LGBTIQ people, or those thought to fall under this category, in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Surprisingly to me, many people, including many queer people, seem not to grasp this. To put it another way, you can now get married to a person of the same sex in Mississippi, but if you live in a municipality that does not offer civil protections, you can be fired, lose your apartment, and be denied a hotel room! You also may risk losing custody of your children as well.

I should also note that there will be increasing pressure on LGBTIQ peeople to marry and thereby (homo)normalize our relationships, a push counter to the gay liberation ethos of the 1970s and early 1980s, in which LGBTIQ people sought to define ourselves as we saw fit, against and outside the demands of oppressive heteronormativity. Not only will innovative and distinctive forms of domestic arrangement between consenting adults become frowned upon, but legal possibilities such as domestic partnerships and civil unions, which my partner and I have, may also be phased out, forcing LGBTIQ people into the same narrowed options as heterosexuals. While this may be fine for some--many?-- homonormative people it may not fit for all, and while I personally and strongly support the legalization of same-sex marriage and support marriage equality under the law, I also believe consenting adults should not be restrained by such laws in creating relationships that work for them. The question no longer may be whether the state will recognize alternative relationship possibilities, but whether LGBTIQ people will sanction them.

SCOTUS: The Good, the Bad & the Horrendous

Pride Flag, Soho

With most of its majority rulings over the last few years, the conservative/libertarian-leaning US Supreme Court has regularly managed to outrage liberals and progressives, and cheer business and rightist interests, but it also occasionally raises eyebrows on all sides with a surprise decision or two that at least on the surface appear reasonable. So it was, in the latter case, with two of the final rulings the Court handed down this term, on Friday, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which upheld a federal court ruling that invalidated Proposition 8, that state referendum that had abruptly halted and prevented same-sex marriages in California, and in United States v. Windsor, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), introduced by Republicans, passed by bipartisan US Congressional majorities and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton in 1996, banning federal recognition of same-sex marriages well in advance of any state allowing them.

As a result of these two findings, same-sex marriages can resume in California, perhaps within days, and the federal government will now recognize same-sex marriages in those states that allow them, a number that continues to increase, by according them an array of federal rights and benefits that had previously been available only to opposite-sex couples. Coming on the cusp of LGBTIQ Pride weekends around the country, both rulings count as major victories in the long struggle for gay rights and marriage equality, but in the case of the latter victory, the effects remain unclear and will certainly be limited by the fact that a majority of US states not only do not permit same-sex marriage, but have changed their constitutions specifically to bar it. In addition, neither ruling goes as far as 2003's Lawrence v. Texas, which removed a major federal disability from LGBTIQ people's (and heterosexuals') lives by striking down all state-based sodomy laws. In a number of US states, LGBTIQ people can still be fired from their jobs, lose their children, be barred from visiting ill partners and loved ones, and incur other forms of discrimination just for being perceived to be gay.

In the case of my home state, New Jersey, we have civil protections for LGBTIQ people, but although our legislature did vote up a same-sex marriage bill, our conservative governor, Chris Christie, not only refused to sign it, a position he reiterated after the SCOTUS rulings came down, but has called for a statewide referendum to determine whether we will have a right that nearly all the surrounding states (including all of New England, New York State, and Maryland) now enjoy. It seems likely that New Jerseyans would affirm marriage equality at the ballot, since polls show a majority of state residents support it, but putting rights to a vote is never a good idea, and a positive outcome is always uncertain. In any case, Chris Christie appears to be doing this primarily to stay in the good graces of the national GOP, in hopes of gaining the 2016 President nomination, if not a subsequent one. On a personal level, as a product of the post-Gay Liberation moment, I remain critical of the mainstream gay rights movement's focus on marriage, a problematic, often oppressive bourgeois institution on many levels, and its drive towards homonormativity and uniformity, the latter of which has been especially destructive to and for queer people. We have not decided to get married, and I am not sure if we will. Yet I also support ending discrimination in all forms, and of being able to gain recognition, and removing economic burdens, under federal law, something that people in same-sex marriages until Friday rulings could not do. I think this is especially crucial for older queer couples, married queer couples with children, and queer couples who are experiencing serious health crises.

More in keeping with the Supreme Court's horrendous rulings, and with, as scholar Tavia Nyong'o put it so aptly in a tweet to me, the increase both in tolerance and inequality, were two others I want to highlight, that undercut even more the happiness I felt at the DOMA and Prop 8 rulings. First was the Court's gutting of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, to address the decades-long efforts to prevent black people and other minorities from voting and exercising our democratic rights. By a 5-4 majority in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, the Court essentially struck down Section 4, which provided a "coverage formula" defining "covered jurisdictions" as states or political jurisdictions that had "maintained tests or devices as prerequisites to voting" and had had low voter registration or turnout levels in the 1960s and early 1970s, and thus required, as per Section 5, "pre-clearance" by the US Justice Department before they could enact new voting laws.

As a result, all of the states formerly labeled as covered jurisdictions, which had egregious histories of barring African Americans and other people of color from voting, ranging from poll-taxes to changing election sites and dates, to canceling elections outright (all of which were accompanied by violent, sometimes mortal, forms of intimidation), can now revert to form if they like, and once again start legislating laws making voting burdensome to impossible for black voters and others. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the Court's majority opinion, declaring among other things that "Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare." In his opinion, it would be up to Congress to clarify the law, a likelihood that seems dicey given the current obstructionism of the GOP. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a brief, separate concurrence calling for Section 5 to be struck down as well. Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered her dissent, joined by the three liberal justices, from the bench, stating in her opening paragraph that Congress, "recognizing that large progress has been made...determined, based on a voluminous record, that the scourge of discrimination was not yet extirpated" in 2006. She is right, and the potential for voter suppression and discrimination in the former "covered jurisdictions" is, as the past has shown, going to require not just vigilance and resistance but new laws to counter the actions of this activist court.

Another deeply problematic ruling that flew under the radar, but which reporter John D. Echeverria of The New York Times astutely caught was Koontz v. St. John's River Water, which may have the effect, as Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, of "work[ing] a revolution in land-use law," and not in a way beneficial to most residents of a given jurisdiction. In essence, the 5-4 ruling, written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, severely harms sustainable development laws, by creating an incentive for local government officials to, as the Times notes, reject development plans or allow developers to run amok rather than risk a lawsuit that could very well go against these governments based on the new post-Koontz standards. In addition, the finding places a new burden on local governments to justify mandated fees for permits, making compromises to address potential environment degradation less likely given the court's ruling in favor of developers and corporations. The Times points out that in the case of waste disposal

Many communities impose development-impact fees on developers if a proposed project would require expanding waste-disposal sites or building new ones. Before Koontz, a developer could raise a constitutional challenge if the charges were unreasonable, but judges typically deferred to local governments in such cases.

After Koontz, developers have a potent new legal tool to challenge such charges because now the legal burden of demonstrating their validity is on the communities themselves.

Finally, there was Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the court's most high-profile affirmative action case this term, in which 7 members of the Court, with Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy delivering the majority opinion--and with both Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas delivering concurring opinions (Thomas's included the perversely ironic line "The Constitution does not pander to faddish theories about whether race mixing is in the public interest")--vacated a lower court decision to defer to the University of Texas's use of race in achieving and maintaining diversity in its student body and in deciding whether its plan to do so was narrowly enough tailored to meet the stricter standards required by two previous SCOTUS decisions, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, and the infamous Regents of the Univ. of California v. Bakke. With Justice Kagan recusing herself, only Justice Ginsberg offered a dissent, writing that she has "several times explained why government actors, including state universities, need not be blind to the lingering effects of “an overtly discriminatory past,” the legacy of “centuries of law-sanctioned inequality," and thus voted to affirm the Court of Appeal's decision in favor of the University of Texas. The practical outcome does not ensure admission to Abigail Fisher, the 22-year-old white plaintiff, but it does mean that the University of Texas will now have to go back and rethink its admissions plan so as not to fall easy pray to a similar lawsuit in the future.

In many online discussions of this decision, I or any reader could quickly spot the rants against affirmative action, the alleged deleterious effects on white applicants, the dismissal of the sustained impact of past discrimination, and on and on, but very rarely did I see a basic fact that Time presented in clear and fairly concise fashion, which is that over the entire history of affirmative action, white women--i.e., people just like Abigail Fisher--not black people, not latinos, not native americans, not asian americans, but white women, have been the primary and majority beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. I remember a good friend of mine who taught at NYU pointing this out to me and others at a panel debate with conservatives at Rutgers back in the late 1990s, and then coming across this information repeatedly online over the last 15 years, but what continues to adhere in the public discourse is the belief, articulated on Friday, by radio talkshow host Brian Lehrer on his WNYC, that black people have been the main beneficiaries of affirmative action, which represents discrimination against white people. I should also note Abigail Fisher's suit failed to point out that Texas admitted only 5 black or latino students with lower scores than Fisher, but did extend admission to FORTY-TWO WHITE students. Additionally, 168 black or latino students with scores better than Fisher were not admitted. But fact, facts.

I'll end with a slightly adapted version of note I sent to some friends in reference to affirmative action, American institutions of higher education, one several I have had very close ties to:

I recently finished reading Craig Steven Wilder's book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities (Bloomsbury, forthcoming fall 2013), which I picked up at BookExpo America, and will just say that if the oldest universities and colleges in this country (including Harvard, founded in 1636, or Rutgers, founded in 1766) ever fully addressed their horrific history--and it is very, very bad, as Wilder's excellent, authoritative historical study makes very clear--on slavery, the extermination and forced removal of native peoples, the development of medical and the natural sciences using black and brown bodies, the enrichment of elites (whose names, from Williams to Bard to Amherst, etc. are all over these institutions) and so much more, they would have to admit black and native people free for hundreds of years. Most of us don't have a clue about the full and ugly early history of this country, or the institutions that made it possible, and how race, racism and anti-affirmative policies towards a sizable portion of us have continually privileged and benefited white Americans, including people who only later became white.

I do plan to review Wilder's book, but I also hope it informs future discussions about race and higher education, because ignorance of this history has meant a severely underinformed discussion and debate.

Considering Mark Carson, Homophobia & Homophobic Violence

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

I have been thinking about the recent horrific spate of anti-gay attacks in New York City, including one last night in Hell's Kitchen, and perhaps most specifically about the murder of Mark Carson, a young, African American gay man, who was pursued up a main Greenwich Village street, 6th Avenue, and shot to death in broad daylight. The attacks come as national public attitudes, at least as expressed by polls, suggest an ever-increasing acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and same-sex marriage, especially among younger people. They are occurring at a moment when the President of the United States has repeatedly and openly expressed gay-friend and non-homophobic sentiments, including in his second inaugural address (preceded by an out latino poet, Richard Blanco, delivering the inaugural poem), and most recently at his otherwise controversial graduation address at the prestigious, historically black all-male Morehouse College, which has had its own issues with sexual orientation and difference. We have just had the first male athlete actively playing for a major league team sport, black basketball player Jason Collins, publicly come out, and this weekend, another out gay male athlete, the white soccer player, Robbie Rogers, resumed major league team play for Major League Soccer's L.A. Galaxy. These assaults also are occurring at a moment when one of the leading candidates to become mayor of New York, Christine Quinn, is a corporate-friendly out white lesbian, and another, white Democrat Bill DeBlasio, is married to a black woman who had previously outed herself publicly in the pages of Essence several decades ago. Same sex marriage is now legal in Minnesota and Rhode Island, bringing to a dozen the states and federal districts where nuptial equality has advanced (and, with France's legislative adoption of same-sex marriage, 14 countries across the globe).

This is thus hardly a moment of post-queerness, just as it is hardly a moment of post-raciality or post-racism (or post-classism, post-feminism, post-ideology, etc.). Nor have homophobia, heterosexism, heteronormativity disappeared. We still have many mainstream religions, one of the country's two major political parties, a range of public and private institutions, and the law itself upholding an anti-gay ethos. Yet we nevertheless are living in an era we have never before experienced in this country, nor globally that matter, of widespread queer visibility, perhaps queer hypervisibility, which is to say, out queer people are increasingly present, representing and represented, everywhere, queerness itself, in and as discourse, is widely and actively produced, and the ways that this visibility, and the onward march of equality of all kinds--though primarily social equality--are transforming the society are sometimes difficult to apprehend even as we are living through them. And unlike during prior periods of queer visibility, such as the immediate post-Stonewall period or during the HIV/AIDS pandemic, though negative discourse about homosexuality still circulates and enacts considerable violence, it does so in a changed and changing environment in which some of the key negative tropes and figures of the past (that homosexuality is a sickness or disorder, that AIDS is a gay disease leading to certain death, etc.) are not always or no longer dominant. Moreover, queer representations proliferate. If the official ones, from Hollywood and the legacy TV stations continue to be narrow in terms of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth--to represent queer America, and the world, as homonormatively young, abled, educated, privileged upper-middle-class white men, mostly, and women--increasingly a wider array of representations are also out there, across an array of media, offering anyone who looks (or seeks not to) a glimpse into the far broader and more vibrant imaginaries that exist. We still have a ways to go to present the richest portrait of ourselves, but we are further along than we once were. If it was possible once to say I have never seen or known an LGBTIQ person or I had never seen an LGBTIQ person who looks like me, that is becoming ever rarer. It is still possible, but less so with each passing day.

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

It is this visibility, this hypervisibility of difference and semblance, and the self-legibility that they enable, that I think are at the heart of these attacks, and the best response, it strikes me, is to continue to increase visibility, to fight for it, to push whatever the short-term costs, because the long-term victory will be to recast and transform, if not fully eliminate, the conditions under which homophobia and heterosexism can function. (This is one of the key insights and grounds for the utter importance of the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia--IDAHOBIT, which takes place every May 17.) The homophobe is often unnerved by the embodiment of his (queer) desires, enraged by the visibility of their enactment and empowerment, in others, others' bodies. (I use the male pronoun throughout here though people of all genders manifest homophobia and heterosexism.) It unsettles him to see, to have to see, to not be able not to see not just a small band of abjected queers, onto whom he can project his disgust as a reflection of his desires, but an ever-increasing circle of queers, some of whom look like him, may be him, are him under other circumstances, whose desires and actions are not being self-regulated and self-policed out of visibility, or regulated and policed by the state or private institutions in the way they once were, out of visibility, who can present and represent and perform their queer subjectivities in ever freer and differing ways, ways he cannot bear to witness, because he may have to see them, look at them, read himself in them. Queer visibility destabilizes his own certainty, any certainty, his own invisibility, queers normativity and makes his own queer legibility that much more likely; it casts the light and reflection back on the homophobe, on the transphobe, because, as the old phrase goes, if you are secure in your sexuality (manhood, womanhood)--as if any sexuality is ever "secure,"whatever that means, as if "manhood" in particular were ever a stable or objective category--why are you getting so upset at what someone else is doing? We often get upset at what someone else is doing even if it has no negative effects on us or anyone else, or even the person doing the thing that upsets us, because we at some level are threatened, read our own actions, our own selves, in what we can barely bear, in what we condemn. This is not merely the epistemology of the closet but another kind of epistemology. What do we start to know if we look at others--and then look closely at ourselves?

And so we see the reactions, based on religion, based on ideology, based on strategies of biopower, based on legalisms, based on incoherence masquerading as a viable system or method of critique, against homosexuality, against gender instability, against queerness even if it is not and cannot be named as such. We see the actions and reactions, rhetorical, discursive, physical, against it. We see how a man (and his friend) pursues another man (and his friend) up a street, in a neighborhood known to be gay-friendly, a "gay" neighborhood, calls out to him and presses him about whether he (and his friend) is a "gay wrestler"--so specific, as if the embodiment of a "type" he may have seen or thought about or dreamt of, that frightens him--as a prelude to striking out, to killing that type, murdering the man who at that moment, in that moment, embodies that image. We see a young man harass another young man he sees coming out of a "gay" club, that he reads as gay, that he questions about being gay ("are you a faggot"?), whom he strikes in the jaw for seeming or being or performing as "gay," for being legible as gay, visible as gay, as a host of friends join in and attack the legibly gay man--what is the young man, what are the young men striking out trying to strike out? What do the bullies who torment queer young people hope to harass or embarrass or brutalize out of them--and themselves? What does the Family Research Council want to quash in its effort to quash everything that it even thinks is queer? What do Fred Phelps's church and its followers hope to achieve by protesting anyone and anything even seemingly connected with empathetic feelings towards anyone, let alone gay people? What are they trying to cancel out because they cannot bear to see--or see in themselves? Of course I am abstracting a great deal here; I am not talking about other fluid intersections, such as power in its multiple manifestations (inflection points), race and ethnicity (inflection points), gender (an inflection point), class (an inflection point), capital (an inflection point), and others. In fact I specifically have chosen not to take up questions of race and ethnicity, since I have noted on more than one online forum that commenters slide very readily and easily onto racist tracks (and tracts), though Jason Collins's coming out, like Mark Carson's murder, have thrown them for (a bit of) a (queer) loop.

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

Perhaps this is too much (bad, tired, tiresome, shopworn) speculative psychologizing. I am not saying anything many people don't already know, though I must admit I haven't (yet) seen many people saying  this. But also perhaps as a black man, a black gay man from a working-class background who lives with the persistence of racism and homophobia and heterosexism and classism and sexism and other forms of political, economic and social violence, as someone who is always aware of history and histories and herstories that are suppressed or forgotten, as  someone who listened for most of my elementary and secondary school education to Catholic priests and nuns expatiate on the dangers of homosexuality even as I recognized the queerness in those same authority figures, as someone who is always trying, striving to be critically aware and stay aware, while living in the present and understanding it, I know that every success is hard won, is not permanent, is a paving stone on the vaster and longer road to a better place, and that simply supposing that there is an easy or obvious answer to issues like this is always problematic, but also that not looking carefully at what's going, especially with accumulated evidence before you, also is problematic. It is not enough simply to say the homophobes are staring into a mirror and trying to break it, or that they are peering through a window and disliking (and perhaps liking, and thus fearing) what they see. But that is part of it; more mirrors, more windows exist, proliferate. To wit, to see, to look, in the oldest sense of those terms, is to know. It is increasingly harder for any of us not to see, look, at ourselves, or look away, and also not have that other, that reflection, ours, not see us, not look back.

Jason Collins Comes Out

Jason Collins (© Kwaku Alston/Sports Illustrated)

I continue to be tremendously impressed and moved by the courage of Jason Collins, a current NBA journeyman center and free agent, who announced yesterday in an article ins Sports Illustrated's current (May 6, 2013) online issue, "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay." With those words, he became and now is the "the first openly gay" male athlete playing in a major American male team sport. There have been a number of male and female athletes in individual sports--from Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King in tennis, to Greg Louganis in diving, and lesbians, bi and trans women athletes in team sports, as well as male athletes in pro sports overseas who have come out. In addition, Sheryl Swoopes and most recently Brittany Griner, in the WNBA, are among the black gay American women who have come out playing for major American team sports. But Jason Collins represents a double first--the first man, and the first black American man, to come out while still active as a player for a major American pro team. He finished this season with the Washington Wizards, after beginning it with the Boston Celtics, and has also played for the former New Jersey Nets, Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Atlanta Hawks. Though he makes clear in the article that he did not set out to be the first, he has instantly become a trailblazer with this amazing step, and he deserves the highest praise for taking it.

Collins's eloquent Sports Illustrated testament goes beyond just coming out, exploring his journey to those opening lines. So much of what he describes--the fear, the anxiety, the despair, the pain, the ambivalence, the self-delusion, the almost crushing desire to be accepted, to fit it, to not be any more different--are things many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people have felt and still feel, sometimes after being out and living openly; coming out is and remains a process, and is never a final act, though that first step out, even today at a moment of fast-moving social progress and ever-expanding acceptance, at least among many in this country, of lgbtiq people, can often be the most difficult one, and for someone in Collins's position--a man of color, a professional athlete, a person raised in a Christian home, someone raised with black middle-class aspiration values--it probably did feel as difficult and risky as he describes. I am not a professional athlete, but many of the feelings he expresses are ones I and many people I know have felt intimately, deeply. Collins describes his journey in a way that welcomes all readers in, to understand what he has gone through, and where he hopes to go next with his life. It is a narrative of personal liberation, but it will probably have resonance in ways Collins has not ever imagined.

Many commentators online have noted how valuable Collins's comments will be for young people struggling with their sexual orientation, and I agree wholeheartedly with this. For young people of color, Collins, Brittany Griner, and many other out public figures probably will play a crucial role in self-acceptance. Seeing someone like themselves who is able to say "I am gay," who does not fall into the usual mainstream representations of queerness, will probably be invaluable. There are already many people who fit this category, but male professional team sport athlete was not one of them. Collins' coming out may also help people his own age and older who are grappling with their sexualities, and may help many heterosexual people who may still not accept and embrace lgbtiq people in part based on stereotypes, or who may still be carrying around abstracted ideas about who is lgbtiq. It may helped parents, grandparents, siblings--like Jason's twin brother, Jarron, who is straight--relatives, neighbors, all kinds of people who still have not been able to fully see the lgbtiq people around them, to see their humanity. Many of Collins's peers in the NBA like Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Dwyane Wade, Emeka Okafor, Al Horford, Jerry Stackhouse, Metta World Peace, and Baron Davis, past NBA legends like Karl Malone and Magic Johnson, stars in other sports like pioneer Martina Navratilova and , as well as other prominent figures across the society, including President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Collins's former Stanford roommate Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III, and Oprah Winfrey, have all shown their support.

Collins's coming out may prove especially valuable to other male and female athletes who are not yet ready to come out or be out, to live openly publicly (though they may be out to those close to them), and have felt the same sort of pressures of heteronormativity and heterosexism, who because of homophobia believe they have to choose a spouse of the opposite sex and go through the motions of a relationship or a marriage, who have felt despair and because they don't see a single person like them willing and able to be out doing what they do, they feel they cannot be honest even to themselves. This is as true for white male professional team sport athletes as it is for black, latino, asian-american, native american, hapa, and other male professional team sport athletes. Jason Collins has opened that door, and walked through it, joining a number of amazing athletes, like John Amaechi, Kwame Harris, Esera Tuaolo, Roy Simmons, Dave Kopay, and others, who came out after ending their professional careers. It's unclear if any team will sign Collins, but given his talent, skills and determination, for the sheer sake of business, an NBA team would be foolish to pass him up. This doesn't mean there won't still be a bit of a freakshow, that homophobes won't rear their heads, that he won't meet with some rejection or indifference by teammates. I imagine he realizes this; we all do. Some of this backlash began almost as soon as the article and news broke. But he has opened the door, in a different but still significant way as predecessors like Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood did, and others, perhaps a small, single-file line, in the NBA, the NFL, the MLB, the NHL, and the MLS, will walk through, but even a few in one or several will be significant. So I cheer Jason Collins, and appreciate what he has done. I hope has the support he needs, and that all who follow him will be able to find and rely upon it as well.

Richard Blanco, 2013 Inaugural Poet

Richard Blanco (Dodge Poetry site)

As soon as I saw the exciting news that President Barack Obama named Richard Blanco, an out gay, Spanish-born poet of Cuban heritage to be his 2013 Inaugural Poet, I wanted to post about it.  Sheryl Gay Stolberg's New York Times article, "Poet's Kinship with the President," which announced it, manages to give a decent overview of Blanco's life and work. Other links below give much more information on Blanco's life, career and art.

A longtime resident of Miami and a trained civil engineer who practiced that profession for a while before returning to Florida International University to study poetry and writing, Blanco now lives in Maine and writes full-time. He has published three books of poetry, the first of which, City of a Hundred Fires, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1997.

According to Stolberg's article, he was selected on December 12, and has been drafting three poems, one of which will be selected by Obama and his team for inauguration day. Congratulations, Richard Blanco, and great choice, President Obama!

More links:

Richard Blanco's personal website

Richard Blanco on the Poetry Foundation website

Richard Blanco's poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly

An interview with Richard Blanco, Poetry Society of America website

Richard Blanco at Dodge Poetry

Frank Ocean, Anderson Cooper & Coming Out

Frank Ocean

A few days ago, the noted TV news personality and multimillionaire heir (to the Vanderbilt fortune) Anderson Cooper came out, after years of public speculation by his fans and years of being open among a private network of friends, associates and coworkers. To be truthful, Cooper, a very rich and well-placed white man, had very little to lose but his gossamer secret by declaring, in the offhanded way he did via a letter to his friend, conservative writer and pundit Andrew Sullivan, that he was "gay." He did not, as his peer Don Lemon did, come on the air and tell the world. He didn't even pick a gay pride celebration to make his statement. Yet he did it, and in so doing he was not going to lose his post as a CNN media figure; he was not going to lose his fans, most of whom not only couldn't have cared less that he was gay but had long wanted him to publicly come out; he was not going to lose his millions by being cut off by his mother, designer and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt; in fact, he wasn't going to lose much of anything except his key to a gilded yet fairly transparent closet. I say all of this not to attack Cooper, because I praise his public self-affirmation as a gay person, as queer man. I think it's wonderful, especially in light of the ongoing shift in public attitudes in the US and across the globe concerning gay rights and equality, and in light of the ongoing struggles, de facto and de jure, that queer people all over the US and the globe still face in terms of homophobic and heterosexist oppression. I applaud Anderson Cooper with the strongest and gayest claps possible. But he didn't have much to lose, and he didn't have a long walk to take out of a closet that barely existed, though he'd kept its door cracked and its walls intact.

In contrast, on Tuesday the 24-year-old singer and songwriter Frank Ocean, a member of the loose collective Odd Future, which has been rightly criticized for the violently anti-gay and misogynistic raps of some of its members, particularly Tyler the Creator (cf. "Yonkers"), bravely posted on his Tumblr page a two-paragraph letter--who says this ancient form no longer has relevance or power!?--letting the world know that his first love was a man he'd met when they were both 19 years old, and that that experience, however complicated and painful in some ways, however unreciprocal and difficult, had been transformative for him. Ocean did not use the word "gay" or any similar term, preferring instead simply to state for the record that the relationship had existed, what it meant and continues to mean for him, thanking hte unnamed beloved and letting him know that because of it he felt and "feel[s] like a free man." In other words, he acknowledged his queerness by acknowledging the truth of his life, and no labels were nor are necessary, though this did not prevent media outlets, Twitterers and Facebookers, and a good many of everybody else stating that he was "gay" or "bisexual" or trying to pin a label on him.

Ocean's letter, from his Tumblr page

Since then neither Ocean nor his publicists nor his bandmates have posted a retraction. The responses from Odd Future's Tyler the Creator and others across the music industry, especially in the genres that Ocean has worked most extensively, hiphop and R&B, have been almost uniformly positive and affirming. (Tyler tweeted on Wednesday, "My big brother finally f---ing did that. Proud of that n---a cause I know that sh-- is difficult or whatever. Anyway. I'm a toilet." Uh, okay.) Ocean's new and first full album, Channel Orange, is set to drop, and with media speculation percolating about the pronouns he'd chosen in three songs, so he very well could have come up with an excuse or denials and kept hidden the sort of relationship, however one-sided the letter suggests it was emotionally, that Terrance Dean chronicled in his 2008 book Hiding In Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry from Music to Hollywood (Simon & Schuster), and played the game as it usually is. Instead, by sharing this aspect of still brief life, he risked quite a bit, and still faces huge risks, but nevertheless took a step that unfortunately far too many figures much further along in their careers--Queen Latifah, for example--are still unwilling to take.

Tyler the Creator and Frank Ocean (© Getty Images)

One may argue that given these risks and dangers are far greater for non-celebrities--Ocean after all appears on one of the best-known tracks on Jay Z's and Kanye West's recent album and is a member of a thriving musical group--and, in the absence of federal civil protections for queer people and the institution of overtly anti-gay laws in some states, as well as persistent homophobic and heterosexist attitudes, rhetoric and behavior by many major religious groups, anyone who is considering coming out has reason to be wary. This is true; one can ask too to what and to whom anyone is "coming out"; in the absence of affirmation and support, being openly queer--gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, unlabeled but self-posited as a non-heterosexual, as questioning, as emergent, as sexually and gender-fluid--can still be a life or death proposition, for someone of any age. For women, for people of color, for working-class and poor people, for a person with physical or mental challenges, for a religious minority or someone occupying all of these categories, the challenges and risks multiply. Thus the simplistic call for people to come out, born out of the earliest days of the post-Stonewall Rebellion movement towards gay rights and equality--Come Out! was in fact the name of one of the very first gay publications--must always be considered within the context of the specific people for whom it is cast, the society in which it might occur, the risks it entails. One can come out and go back in, or be out and still be continually be coming out. It isn't a one-time proposition, and it won't be for Cooper, if you can believe that, and certainly not for Frank Ocean.

Anderson Cooper

Whatever Frank Ocean decides to do, whatever he decides to call himself tomorrow or down the road, whatever he songs he writes and to whomever he address them, whatever the gender, he has had a major impact on the public discourse through his courageous step, and, I want to note this, those around him in the R&B and hiphop communities have also made a major impact by responding as they did. It is particularly invaluable for young black people, not just in the US but all over the globe, especially in places where internal and outside forces have ramped up homophobia, to see that a young black person, at the center of the forms of cultural production that animates local and global imaginaries, can speak about his life with truth and bravery and not be ashamed or duplicitous, that he can speak about falling in love with another person of the same sex, and talk about his hurt but also how much he gained from that experienced, and how it has brought him a freedom many people dream of, an emotional freedom, and a truthfulness, that so many queer people still struggle to attain.

I praise his courage and his candor, and urge others who can and are able to follow his lead to do so, just as I praise those like Cooper who have already got the world by their fingertips and decide to step out, be out, open up. I also urge all who can work to change the laws, here and abroad, that foment homophobia--which, as Barbara Smith, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, and countless other visionaries have in their various ways noted lies at the core of nearly all anti-gay activity--and that foster oppression and inequality to do so, because by doing both, as he suggests, we all might be on the road to being "free."