The Bilerico Project

Raul Castro's Daughter Speaks Out About LGBT Rights

Patricia Nell Warren — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:00:00 -0500

In a must-listen radio interview with Brian Kahn of Home Ground Radio, Mariela Castro Espin talks movingly about Cuba's recent efforts to bring about economic improvements and social change for its people. The daughter of Cuban president Raul Castro is in charge of Cuba's National Center for Sex Education. Among other things, Mariela has been fighting for acceptance of same-sex relationships in her country, whose communist government formerly persecuted LGBT people so fiercely during the Fidel Castro period.

Mariela tells Kahn that, while this subject is still controversial, she finds a growing open-mindedness - not only at government levels but also among Cuba's citizenry.

This eye-opening interview can be heard at Huffington Post, who picked it up.

Kahn, an award winning radio figure and masterful interviewer, is a native of Montana, where he hosts Home Ground Radio. I was interviewed by Brian last year while book-touring for My West in Montana.

KONY 2012: Not What It Seems

Patricia Nell Warren — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0500

As thousands of Americans rush to view the film KONY 2012 on YouTube, LGBT people who see it have a tough choice. They may want to help rescue the African children featured in the film. These children lived brutal lives, and were brainwashed into doing horrific things as child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army led by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But potential LGBT donors may have second thoughts when they learn about the questions flaring around Invisible Children, the nonprofit organization driving this movement to help the child soldiers.

IC is campaigning for Kony to be captured this year. He will then be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has indicted him in absentia on human-rights crimes. A worthy aim, for sure. Yet criticisms of IC are exploding everywhere - that they're naive about African realities, that they're financially opaque. Last but not least, that they're funded by far-right foundations that deny human rights to many groups of Americans, including LGBT people.

As I write this, I keep wondering why the organization made the decision to market themselves as a secular effort, when just one look at their IRS paperwork by an investigative reporter was enough to reveal their truth.

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Santorum & the Nausea Factor

Patricia Nell Warren — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0500

For weeks now, the news has featured Santorum's comment that the very idea of separation of church and state makes him want to throw up. Not surprisingly, his comment opened the door for liberal commentators to mention their own nausea attacks. I'm one of them. The very thought of this Presidential wannabee, whose ideological chutzpah is so much bigger than his knowledge of American history, is more than my stomach can take.

As early as the 1630s, real-life battles exploded in the American colonies over abuses of legal power by church authorities -- battles that launched our country's painful march towards realizing that church and state had to be separated. Yet Santorum blithely told "Meet the Press" host David Gregory that separation of church and state was "not the founders' vision." Well, um, "vision" depends on which "founders" you're talking about.

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How Propaganda Works: 'The Grey' & Homophobia

Patricia Nell Warren — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:30:00 -0500

When The Grey opened in theaters nationwide the other day, animal advocates were shouting that the film demonizes wolves. Indeed, "demonize" is the verb of the hour. As our ugly Presidential campaign lurches onward, Americans talk a lot about "demonization," with both parties insisting that they're being demonized by their opponents. What makes "demonization" work is disinformation, pure and simple. Propagandists have to paint a hideously warped picture of the enemy. To do that, they must twist the facts as much as possible, no matter how scientifically ridiculous they wind up looking.

Animal advocates have called for a boycott of The Grey. Great idea. But too many people take positions on films they haven't seen and books they haven't read. So last night, two friends of mine and myself agreed that we wanted to see the movie for ourselves. I can now report that The Grey is an appalling piece of anti-wolf propaganda, cast in a broader well-worn theme that is closely related to homophobia.

It dangles a dramatic tale about alleged wolf viciousness to remind us of an old attitude of Western civilization, that "nature is evil incarnate and must be subdued." And this propaganda is a close cousin to an old belief that "gays are evil incarnate and must be destroyed." The same process of disinformation works for both.

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Hillary's Big AIDS Speech

Patricia Nell Warren — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:00:00 -0500

On November 8, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a shocking (to me, anyway) speech at the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, MD, before a packed house of politicians and scientists. Under the log-line of "Creating an AIDS-Free Generation," Clinton outlined a 3-point program by which HIV freedom would supposedly be won for the world - notably developing nations.

The speech went up on the State Department's webpage, so it represents official foreign policy. The log-line was instantly echoed by Eric Goosby and Mark Dybul, past and present coordinators of U.S. Global AIDS, who rushed into print in the Huffington Post with praise for the speech. Hillary's program also touched off a flurry among NGOs that had been distressed by years of government cutbacks on AIDS funding.

I found the speech "shocking" because Hillary made only passing mention of vaccines -- after all the hoo-rah over "promising" research that we've heard for years. The hoo-rah included assurances by President Clinton in 1996 that there'd be a vaccine in 10 years. Hillary did give a passing nod to the $1 billion spent on vaccine research so far.

But the fact is, her program seeks to expand same-old approaches that - in real life, not in the AIDS-industry rhetoric where so many people are stuck - delivers only partial progress. And the cost of what she's proposing will be astronomical.

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The Greatest Gift We Can Give

Patricia Nell Warren — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0500

This morning, I'm remembering back to those childhood Christmases in the mid 1940s. I can still feel the shivery excitement of jumping out of bed and racing to the living room in my pajamas to see what magical gifts waited under the tree. I was maybe eight years old by the time I figured out that Santa Claus was really my parents. They had stealthed into the living room the night before, after my brother and I went to sleep, and stuffed the stockings hanging on the fireplace, and arranged the glittery packages that had been hiding in a closet for weeks.

Both my parents had become adults at the start of the Great Depression. My dad had taken on the fight to bring a dying ranch back to life, while my mother worked as a law-office clerk to support her parents and sister after her dad was laid off his job as a railroad conductor. The two had met when my dad visited the law office on business. So there was the time in their own lives when the smallest gift was a major investment of hard-earned dollars.

On the heels of depression had come World War II. The whole country had been willing to tighten their belts in order to support what would be the last war in U.S. history that most Americans felt good about.

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When We Were Outlaws

Patricia Nell Warren — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:00:00 -0500

It's an eerie experience, as I watch media reports on the Occupy movement shaking America, to be reading Jeanne Córdova's memoir about how the Sixties movements shook America - written by one of the LGBT pioneers who did some major shaking.

Didn't many of us hope that certain civil-rights battles were finally won for good after the Sixties and Seventies? The rights of Americans to have their say about government policy? Rights of LGBT people in our public schools? The rights of people with AIDS? The right to work? Even the very right of protesters to assemble publicly and protest, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution?

If so, why are we fighting these battles again today?

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PCP Pneumonia: It's Still With Us

Patricia Nell Warren — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:00:00 -0500

Not long ago, I wrote about the fact that Kaposi's sarcoma may be coming back. Another blast from the past that's still around is pneumocystis pneumonia. This is due in part to growing resistance to drug treatments, as well as PCP's extraordinary ability to take advantage of weakened immune systems. It may be what pop star George Michael is battling in a London hospital - he's said to have "community-related pneumonia," but there is some speculation by fans that he actually has PCP.

For many of us who were around in the early 1980s, a chill goes down our spine at the mention of PCP, since this opportunistic form of pneumonia was a fatal factor in many early cases of AIDS. In the 30 years since it was first diagnosed in PWAs, big changes have jarred the picture of what we know about this disease and how it can be treated.

Yet, PCP is still somewhat mysterious. And it's a growing threat in parts of the world where it hasn't been a major threat before.

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KS Is Back

Patricia Nell Warren — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:00:00 -0500

Following its grim flare-up starting in 1981, early in the AIDS epidemic, Kaposi's sarcoma had seemed to burn itself out, like a wildfire. Its sudden and super-aggressive appearance was attributed to the low CD4 counts of people with AIDS - their destroyed immune systems simply couldn't resist. And KS's subsequent disappearance, after the advent of antiretroviral therapy, was attributed to positive effects of the new antiretroviral drugs on patients' immune systems.

Then, in October 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle broke an unsettling story. KS is back. Experts were noting a cluster of new KS cases among gay men.

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Time to Occupy Pumpkins

Patricia Nell Warren — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:00:00 -0500

Every year, I always shudder at the colossal waste of a valuable national food resource, as thousands of tons of pumpkins get thrown in the garbage after the 31st. Only in America, where so many of us believe that it's okay to waste our blessings, would such a thing happen. While growing numbers of homeless and unemployed Americans go hungry every day, the rest of us throw away enough pumpkins to feed those hungry people for a month.

So... when you're done with your Halloween jack-o-lantern, make a pie! Fresh pumpkin pie is outrageously easy to make with a blender. And once you taste it, you'll never go back to those awful supermarket pies made with canned pumpkin.

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The Forgotten Wife of Christopher Columbus

Patricia Nell Warren — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:00:00 -0500

Note from Bil: This post originally ran on Bilerico in March for Women's History Month. It seemed appropriate to bring the popular post back for Columbus Day (and LGBT History Month).

It's Women's History Month again, and American neo-conservatives go on clinging to their anti-female denialisms about our history. Indeed, they're now having our textbooks revised so they can minimize the historical importance of anything female they don't like. That's why the neos never say much about one of the most minimized women of all time - Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, the Portuguese lady who became Columbus's now-forgotten wife around 1479.

For me, the mysterious Filipa's story, and that of her family, is a lens that can magnify half a millennium of Atlantic exploration. The more I try to maximize her own picture, the more I realize that her husband was not the first European to "discover America."

Some of our activists wonder if Columbus was gay, since his marriage appears to have been largely a matter of social climbing - aiming at secret information on navigation that Filipa's family guarded. But that's a question for LGBT History Month. I'll pass over it for now, and deal with the women's history part of this - which does ultimately relate to us, as readers will see. So read on.

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How Real Is Our Sense of History?

Patricia Nell Warren — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:00:00 -0500

With 2011 LGBT History Month upon us, this question is one that our historians have been arm-wrestling for many decades. And it's still a crucial question today. In 1997 I wrote a commentary with this title that has been reprinted a number of times. Today I'm putting it up on Bilerico because I think we still have to examine our collective and individual conscience on this subject.

What is history, anyway? We all believe that we know - yet "history" always gets rewritten somehow - whether it's by the winners of world wars, or the winners of corporate and organizational conflicts. And are we, in the LGBT community, sometimes guilty of trying to rewrite our own history, so that unpopular people or factions get blotted from the record?

Check out my 1997 piece after the jump. And I'll be intrigued to see comments by one and all.

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Why Literary Agents Pressure Authors to 'Straighten' Gay Characters

Patricia Nell Warren — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:00:00 -0500

The outrage of the moment is over that Publishers Weekly post complaining that an unnamed literary agent won't represent a young-adult book unless a gay character is rewritten as straight. As an author, I share the outrage over this form of censorship, but there's a bigger, uglier story that needs to be looked at.

Pressuring authors to change touchy characteristics like race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. is not a new thing in the publishing world. What is new - since the 1980s, at any rate - is this: ultraconservative international ownership has been aggressively taking over more and more of the U.S. book industry, and working to expand its control over the marketing of ideas. Agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada say, "America's literary industrial complex includes six conglomerates, most foreign-owned, that dominate trade publishing." This is happening on a parallel track with ultraconservative aggression in other areas - government, environment, civil rights, healthcare, jobs.

Indeed, so much of the U.S. publishing industry has been "outsourced" that we no longer publish more books than any other country on Earth. The UK is now #1.

As once-independent U.S. publishers with distinguished histories get bought out or taken over, and become obedient subsidiaries of giant multi-national media conglomerates, the goal is supposedly to "ensure more profit in publishing." But it's often equally important to "ensure that less liberal views get into print."

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The Choi Trial: Latest Attack on Peaceful Protest

Patricia Nell Warren — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:00:00 -0500

There is no doubt in my mind that Dan Choi is in the government's crosshairs for extra-harsh treatment as a protester. I say "right on" to his defense attorneys who are trying to make this point.

Shame on President Obama for allowing federal authorities to go forward with this latest attack on America's constitutional right to peaceful protest. Our African-American President should know better, considering all the pain and blood of African-American protest - sit-ins, marches, being beaten and fire-hosed and even murdered - a legacy of black protest that helped get him to the White House.

After all, it's right in the First Amendment about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I call it the "latest attack" because Choi's trial is riding a monster trend that began as far back as the '80s and '90s. This was when post-Reagan conservative legislators began quietly changing state and federal criminal code so they could ramp up the penalties for peaceful protest. Before that, civil disobedience used to be prosecuted as a minor misdemeanor, and veteran activists were proud of their long lists of arrests. But these changes in the law aimed to ensure that the Sixties era of massive protest - especially anti-war protest - would never be repeated. Conservative Democrats went along with Republicans on this.

Today, peaceful protest is typically slammed as a serious misdemeanor or a felony charge - preferably a whole stack of charges, along with excessive bail. An activist's life can be ruined by the first arrest.

Make no mistake - protest is going away as an American tool for change.

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To Cut or Not to Cut

Patricia Nell Warren — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:00:00 -0500

Recently, the old circumcision controversy exploded into new intensity. The spark: two California cities introduced ballot measures banning the practice outright. In San Francisco, non-therapeutic circumcision of an under-18 male was going to get you a year in jail, with no religious exemption allowed. U.S. religious groups that practice ritual removal of the foreskin were outraged -- not only Jews and Muslims but also evangelical Protestants who identify with Old Testament law. They insist that their religious freedom is at stake. Jewish groups called the measures anti-Semitic. Evangelical Protestants felt equally threatened -- one evangelical blog called the ballot measures an "effort to enforce a secular society."

Interestingly enough, some of the protesters buttressed their age-old arguments about God's law with a recent theory that circumcision should also be public-health law, aimed at preventing HIV and STD infection. They lament the recent drop in U.S. circumcisions, and predict that this trend -- if it isn't turned around -- will mean disaster for the nation's health.

The circumcision controversy has a special interest for gay and bisexual men, who have their own set of pros and cons about whether "to cut or not to cut."

Amid the noise of debate, however, little is heard about the history of how conservative Protestant church groups successfully marketed male circumcision to the American public more than a century ago. Today, few people are talking about how this same sectish conservatism is helping to huckster circumcision as an HIV preventive. Worst still, many media reports give the impression that scientific research has proven, beyond a doubt, the effectiveness of circumcision against HIV infection.

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