Literate Perversions

Can Carrying Condoms Be a Crime?

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I have a new piece up at Slixa, about the fight to ban New York police and district attorneys from using condoms to arrest people for prostitution.

"I was walking towards the LGBT youth center I'm staying at because right now I don't have another place to live, and the police stopped me. They searched my bag & took away my condoms." Art by Lauren McCubbin

“I was walking towards the LGBT youth center I’m staying at because right now I don’t have another place to live, and the police stopped me. They searched my bag & took away my condoms.”
Art by Lauren McCubbin

In light of the decision yesterday that stop-and-frisk is unconstitutional, my piece seems to be especially well-timed. “Condoms as evidence” is little more than a sub-category of stop and frisk that’s used to target the people who need safer sex resources the most. The fact that it’s been allowed to exist as long as it has is due to the fact that over the last couple of decades, it’s become more and more acceptable to criminalize whole populations of people, instead of behavior that actually does harm.

But in the eyes of district attorneys and police departments, condoms aren’t for everyone. For white, middle-class, straight-looking people, a few condoms in their pocket or purse represents a sophisticated, responsible sexuality. For those who fit police profiles of sex workers, having condoms on their person might be the thing that gets them arrested on prostitution charges.

“That’s something that we’ve had to clarify again and again,” says Emma Caterine, from New York’s Red Umbrella Project. “I think it’s just a habit in any kind of rights-based activism and organizing to say, ‘Oh, this could happen to me,’ and of course, that really isn’t the case in this situation. The people who are affected by this legislation are people who are profiled as sex workers. That includes sex workers, of course, but it also includes people who are profiled as sex workers because of different stereotypes we have about sex workers.”

The people who fit law enforcement profiles of sex workers are overwhelmingly young, low-income, people of color, or visibly queer or transgender. In other words, arrests target precisely those populations most at risk for transmission of HIV and other STIs.

This seems like a particularly cruel joke in New York, the only major American city to issue its own official condoms. Since 2007, the city’s much-acclaimed “NYC Condoms” program has distributed tens of millions of male and female condoms per month to the five boroughs. In 2012, the city distributed 37.2 million condoms — about 70 per minute. This February, NYU commemorated the program’s five-year anniversary with a retrospective of graphic design and public relations material.

But even as New York’s elite celebrate the condom as a pop icon, thousands of residents are faced with a dilemma: carry condoms to protect themselves against STIs, or risk harassment or arrest by police. “These are the populations that the CDC and other public health authorities have targeted for universal condom access,” says Megan McLemore, a Senior Researcher for Human Rights Watch. “They’re really trying to make sure that these populations use condoms every time. So the fact that people who are doing this work and who are profiled as doing this work are carrying fewer condoms than they need has serious consequences for HIV prevention.”

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Red Equals Signs

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Clockwise from upper left: Atheists; Sex Workers; Queers; Undocumented Immigrants

Clockwise from upper left: Atheists; Sex Workers; Queers; Undocumented Immigrants

I have to admit, at first the little red squares on people’s Facebook profiles made me cringe. There were two reasons: first, this sort of thing has always triggered my most cynical side. Even in the 1990s, when people started wearing red ribbons to express solidarity with HIV/AIDS patients, I had really complicated, ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, it was a definite improvement over the dominant attitudes of the 1980s, which ranged between malign neglect and homicidal scapegoating. But on the other, the red ribbons seemed to quickly become more of a fashion accessory than an active political statement. Sometimes they seemed to be more about the person wearing them than the people who were at risk. It was even worse when Lance Armstrong’s “Livestrong” bracelets hit the scene. Imitators hit the scene before everyone had completely absorbed the idea of the originals. Even more than the red ribbons, they came to represent marketing more than social justice.

I have more examples of that sort of thing than I care to think. Every other day, it seems like we’re being asked to tweet a hashtag, recolor our avatars, or buy a special product to show what good people we are. We do it, and nothing changes, because we’re not really doing anything. [Read more…]

Natalie Reed Interview: Transphobia in the Hawkeye Initiative

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For my most recent piece at the SF Weekly, I wrote about the controversy that’s been boiling up around a new Tumblr Blog, The Hawkeye Initiative. In a way, it’s a blog that I’d like to applaud. It’s based on a very real and serious criticism of superhero comics for depicting female bodies in really weird, oversexualized, and distorted ways. The most famous example is the “boobs and butt” pose, which has become ubiquitous in superhero comics. A few examples of female characters contorting their spines in order to give the viewer tits and ass are seen below:

Wonder Woman strikes a classic “boobs and butt” pose.
Red Sonja, swiped from Escher Girls
Fei Rin from Anarchy Reigns Videogame; another one from Escher Girls.

The Hawkeye Initiative has tried to critique this over-the-top aesthetic by having fans submit redrawn versions of comic book art that substitutes the Marvel character Hawkeye for female characters, in the hopes that it would make the absurdity of the poses more visible to people who take the boobs and butt approach for granted. And at first, there was a lot of positive response. The Hawkeye Initiative became the meme of the month for December of 2012, with media coverage from Wired, Geeks Are Sexy, Bleeding Cool, and i09, among others. But there’s also been an increasing amount of criticism on grounds that Hawkeye Initiative is using the very old trope of mocking effeminate men to make its point.

Transfeminist blogger Natalie Reed has been a very vocal critic of the Hawkeye Initiative. She was one of the first people I interviewed for the SF Weekly piece, and in fact, her thoughts make up the bulk of the quoted material in there, along with the ever-fabulous Kitty Stryker. One of the most painful parts about writing the article was figuring out just what I could cut and what to leave. She has a lot to say, and says it very well, and with her permission, I’m posting the full text of the interview here. There’s a lot to think on here; not only about gender and how we perceive it, but also about how to build and maintain truly intersectional analyses, instead of fighting one evil by building up another.

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Chris Hall: First of all, could you summarize for me your criticisms of the Hawkeye Initiative?

Natalie Reed: So, my main concern with the Hawkeye Initiative, and related strategies of critiquing the representation of women in comics by placing men as substitutions in the poses, costumes or anatomy of female characters, boils down to how much of this strategy is based in the basic idea of “But it would be ridiculous if Hawkeye / Batman / Iron Man / Captain America were placed in this pose”, which is the suggestion that a male character being placed in the same pose/costume/anatomic-style will be perceived as more ridiculous than the female character, or make the ridiculousness more obvious while obviously the basic “point” here is to expose the ridiculous, impractical or anatomically impossible nature of the way female characters are represented, that point ends up falling over pretty heavily into transphobia and femmephobia by imagining these representations become more ridiculous by placing men in them. Frequently, in the Hawkeye Initiative or similar strategies, you see things like word balloons saying “I’m so pretty!”, or caption jokes about “look at Tony Stark’s seductive face!”, wherein the humor and “ridiculousness” of the drawing comes not from the basic preposterousness of the female representation itself, but from the way our culture perceives it as innately or intrinsically ridiculous, funny, disgusting, absurd or frivolous for a man (or person whose body we perceive as male) to dress, behave, or perform in “feminine ways.” This idea that it’s somehow inherently comical, or ridiculous, for a man, (or someone so designated), to do “feminine” things is one of the cornerstones of both trans-misogyny and femmephobia (the idea that femininity is inherently more superficial, silly, ridiculous, weak, or impractical than masculinity). [Read more…]

Carol Queen Interview

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I highly recommend that you check out the interview with Carol Queen that we’ve just put up at Sex in the Public Square. Carol is one of the most fascinating, intellectually alive people I’ve ever known, and although this interview was done in 2005, it’s an excellent look at her ideas and her history and if you haven’t read her already, it gives you a sense of her voice. Props to Sabrina Chapadjiev, who conducted the interview and published it originally in her ‘zine Cliterati. Below is a short excerpt from the interview to whet your appetite:

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Gays For Giuliani

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If anything’s gonna dislodge Rudy Giuliani as the Great White Hope (emphasis on white) of the Republican Party, maybe this ad can do it:

What’s dismaying, though, is the comments on Robert Greenwald’s site, where I originally found the link to that website, show a dismaying lack of intelligence or humor on the part of my fellow lefties. Like GWB-level stupid. For instance:

who made this video? Who is gays for giuliani? I guarantee none of those guys are for giuliani. Why would they do that, and who paid for it? Does anyone know? Atticus Finch is right. the sight isn’t even a working site. [By the rightly-named poster Wha?]

Or this, from M. M. Fitzpatrick:

GAYS FOR GIULIANI is like JEWS FOR HITLER! Are you guys NUTS??? Please – crawl back into your log cabin!

Somebody do us a favor and ship these people to Bush country.

Children’s Books for Homophobes

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Wow.  This is what the Christian Right reads to their children at night, apparently, to make sure that they don’t turn out to be queer.  Right here we have the entire text of a darling little book called Alfie’s Home, which explains how, thanks to an emotionally distant father, a mom who’s too emotionally close, and a pedophile uncle, Alfie starts to think that he might be a homo.  Fortunately, there’s a wise and compassionate psychologist who hasn’t fallen prey to the homosexual conspiracy who can explain it all to him.  All Alfie really needs is some male bonding time with his dad, and probably a hooker or two, to make him happily heterosexual.
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God Hates Fags — Even the Dead Ones.

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For the ultimate in Christian love and compassion we hie ourselves down to the great state of Texas.  Arlington, specifically.  The local megachurch, High Point Church, run by the Reverend Gary Simons.  When Cecil Sinclair, a Gulf War veteran and the brother of High Point congregation member died last Monday, the church volunteered to host a memorial service, complete with refreshments for 100 people and a multimedia presentation showing the deceased’s life.

Everything sounds good so far.  Except for that multimedia presentation.  Turns out that Cecil was a big ol’ homo, and the photos the family picked for the multimedia presentation showed that.  In glossy, high-def color.  Or in the words of the Rev. Simons: “Some of those photos had very strong homosexual images of kissing and hugging…. My ministry associates were taken aback.”

And once they saw those images, the church told the bereaved parents to go take a flying fuck at the moon.  Or, to put it more diplomatically and charitably, that the family would have to have the service somewhere else.

The Rev. Simons explains his decision thus:

The issue was not so much that Mr. Sinclair was, from the church’s perspective, an unrepentant sinner, he said. It’s that it was clear from the photos that his friends and family wanted that part of his life to be a significant part of the service.

The pastor said that he could imagine a similar situation involving a different sin. Perhaps a mother who is a member of the church loses a son who is a thief or murderer, Mr. Simons said. The church would surely volunteer to hold a service, he said.

“But I don’t think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone,” he said. “That’s a red light going off.” [Emphasis added by incredulous blogger.]

Even if I were a Christian (I’m not) who believed that homosexuality was a sin (again, I’m not), it wouldn’t occur to me in a million years to compare that “sin” to murdering someone.  And I certainly wouldn’t make such a comparison while such a person’s family was grieving for the loss of their loved one. 

And yet, as one of Cecil Sinclair’s friends points out, this isn’t new or unique at all:

[T]hat kind of reaction is all too familiar to survivors of the AIDS onslaught of the 1980s, said Ed Young, a charter member of the Turtle Creek Chorale. Back then, having churches turn down funerals of gay men was not uncommon, he said.

“It may be surprising to younger gays, because most gays think that doesn’t happen any more,” he said. “But it’s still there.”

It’s an ugly history lesson to be learning at this late date.  (link)

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Technorati Tags: homophobia, gay, religion, politics

Not Being Gay in the GOP

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Joe.My.God‘s blog Sanchez and Coulterhas streaming audio and mp3’s of Matt Sanchez’s twenty-minute-plus weasel session on Michelangelo Signorile’s show on Sirius Radio. The positions that Sanchez twists himself into would be truly amusing if you could perform them physically with the hottie(s) of your choice. As rhetoric, though, they’re just sad, and illustrate the levels of paranoia and denial that are necessary to not only exist as a black, gay member to the Republican Party, but to be able to convince yourself that an organization filled with people like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin is the one that’s gonna have your back when the shit really starts to come down. Among other things, Matt asserts that despite all that cock, he’s not really gay, not even bi. I can understand the frustration with strict labels, but Matt really goes out of his way to let us know how icky all that faggy stuff is to him. He’s going to be a lonely man. He thinks that even though his past has been splashed all over the interwebs, he doesn’t have to worry about getting kicked out of the military. I wouldn’t bet on it. It’s unlikely that his conservative friends are going to associate with him any more than they have to, much less make him their poster boy. And it’s gonna be a long time before any self-respecting gay folk buddy up to him.

Gloating Like a Motherfucker

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There isn’t much to feel happy about these days if you’re an unemployed, chronically-depressed, leftist atheist pervert. But in between the stories of the mounting body count in Iraq and the hateful madness that stands in for conservative political thought these days, you get something like this. Maybe I’ll have to reconsider the atheism thing.

<pondering> Well. Not quite. But it’s pretty fucking sweet, especially coming on the heels of Mark Foley and Ted Haggard.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. Truth Wins Out expressed satisfaction today in learning that Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, President of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has stepped down amid a cloud of controversy stemming from a polemic justifying slavery found on the group’s website, according to a statement released by Truth Wins Out. NARTH had also taken heat in recent months for advocating child abuse against gender variant children.

“NARTH was a sinking ship and they had no choice but to throw their captain overboard,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “The group was quickly becoming the Mel Gibson of the ‘ex-gay’ world and this move was NARTH’s desperate way of saying, ‘timeout, we are going to rehab.’ However, it may be too late, as no spin can erase their racist and anti-gay sin.”

Trouble began mounting for Nicolosi after Canadian doctor Joseph Berger, who serves on NARTH’s “Scientific Advisory Board” wrote on the organization’s website that gender variant children should be sent to school in opposite-sex clothing so they can be “ridiculed” into conforming.

But criticism of NARTH reached a crescendo after “Scientific Advisory Board” member, Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf, penned a polemic on the group’s website that seemed to justify slavery and said that African-Americans taken away in chains on slave ships “were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa.”