Sing with me now:
One love
One heart
Let’s get together and kill the queers
Come to Jamaica and get gay bashed.

Many of you might know how notoriously homophobic Jamaica is. The island outlaws homosexuality. If you are suspected of being queer you face jail time and violent crimes that sometimes end in murder.

On the upside, Jamaican officials have allowed the release of Brokeback Mountain in two movie theatres. You can read the Guardian’s report on this decision here.

On the downside, stories of murdered homosexuals abound.

June 2004, Brian Williamson, the island’s leading gay rights activist was murdered in his home, his body was mutilated with a knife and a crowd gathered outside the home celebrated Williamson’s death, shouting homophobic slogans, which are readily heard in Jamaican dancehall songs. One lyric by Beenie Man: “I'm dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays”

Between January 2004 and January 2005, “four LGBT people were murdered and more than 100 suffered physical and/or verbal abuse.” This is according to a 2005 press release from Amnesty International.

Coretta Scott King died overnight. I don't know volumes about her work and her mission, but I know I liked what she gave us. I like what remains. She was an outspoken supporter of civil rights for gays and lesbians, as I’ve mentioned before. Her ideals were/are inclusive of all kinds of people. If you believe in the dream she continued to work towards after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, now’s a good time to take a personal assessment: how are you ensuring this dream becomes a reality? Are your actions inclusionary? Are your words? Are the people you vote for?

Okay, sidebar: MS Word doesn't recognize "inclusionary" and insists that it should be replaced with "exclusionary."

If you want to learn more about Coretta Scott King, search for articles about her in any major online newspaper and you’re sure to find material. Another good place to start is the King Center.

Hatecrime.org has a page with plenty of inspirational remarks by Ms. Scott King. I’m unable to check them for accuracy, but assuming they ARE accurate, here’s the link.

Finally, for the sake of beauty and hope, a haunting portrait of Coretta Scott King here.

If you're a queer conservative I don't get it. What have they done for you lately, those conservatives? Nada. Sure, there are fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives, bla bla bla. You wanna be conservative, great. Happy for you. Really. Enjoy the environmental degradation, the social injustice, the letting the meek rot because after all they shall inherit the earth, the anti-queer propaganda. Or just ignore those issues. Ignore them and accept conservatism on the basis of the issues you DON'T want to ignore. But really, when the day is over, YOU are able to publicly announce your queerness NOT because of conervatives' efforts, but because of the efforts of the open-minded liberals who've fought to make homophobia a stigma.

I get that being queer and conservative challenges norms, and that my attitude towards conservatives (and moderates, for that matter) is intollerant and partakes of the same kinds of "us/them" discourses that I think are fucked up for a democracy to have. To what do I owe this rant, then? Domestic spying's on a roll at the federal level, and here's how it manifests locally:

A University of California Los Angeles alumni group has been offering students up to $100 to "supply tape recordings and notes from classes to expose professors suspected of pushing liberal political views on their students." Several prominent members of the group, including US Congressman James Rogan (R), have resigned their membership. So wait, what's a liberal again? And what's a dangerous liberal? Are they two different things?

Ah...the trickle down effect. I've always had LOTS of faith in it. See, Bush authorizes domestic spying, and this makes it okay for smaller entities to spy also. "If Big B does it, we should too." Rest assured, the trickle goes back up, too. Who is analyzing the information gathered by the aforementioned alumni group? Probably conservative politicians higher up the chain of command. It's a web of spying. Lucky for us, the web strings are coming into clear view. Bear in mind, a spy-prone group may be watching a queer group why? Because they'll reason that most queers are liberal and therefore a threat to our nation.

Check out the brief version of the UCLA spy story at guardian.co.uk. Or the more thorough (yes, longer) version of the story by the LA Times.

But we deserve basic rights. No, we are not Black, though some of us are. We are not Women, though some of us are. Queer includes many kinds of PEOPLE, who all deserve Civil Rights not BECAUSE of their queerness, but despite it, regardless of it. We deserve not to be erased but EMbraced, because we are part of the national body, as wonderful and crude, as polite and confused as any fully realized biologically male heterosexual.

In the face of doubt about the similarities between Matthew Shepard and Frederick Douglass, remember that intolerance and hate and discrimination are hurtful to individuals and to society, regardless of the degree of their manifestation.

And so with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday marked on yesterday's calendar, let's wonder:

Are Bisexual people capable of wholly loving a person who is wholly homosexual? No really, it’s a serious question for folks of all sexualities (yes, queeries, you too). People all the time accuse bisexuals of not knowing who they want, of being wishy-washy. Sounds like paranoia. Like, if I really love a guy and he’s bi and he really loves me, what else matters? So maybe this guy wants a girlfriend, too? Well that’s something we negotiate. Maybe I really want two boyfriends. There’s no reason that can’t work—relationships are contracts, so figure out the terms you wanna agree to and sign up.

After all, if you can really get EVERYTHING you need/want in a relationship from ONE INDIVIDUAL, why have friends?

There are plenty of polyamorous couples out there being happy and we don’t find out about them because most of us are so hung up on a) Monogamy and b) Homogeneity that we prefer not to inquire. So we make society: 1 fag with 1 fag, 1dyke with 1 dyke, 1 breeder with 1 breeder and 1 bi with…That’s where people get stumped isn’t it. Because they don’t know what a bisexual person wants and they assume that since Bi means “two”, a bisexual wants at minimum two people, one of each gender, in order to be fulfilled. Red Alert, Red Alert! There’s nothing in the Manual of Perfect Bliss about this! HELP!

We tend to talk mostly about MEN on Big Queer, so here’s an effort to break that…

Not a lot of attention has been given to the WOMEN of Brokeback Mountain. Granted, the movie’s about the relationship between Jack and Ennis, but what strikes me about the lack of attention on the women is that so much of the talk about the men has to do with masculinity. You know, people (myself included) talk about how Ennis (Heath Ledger) represses his emotions to the point of living this double life, and they throw around words like manhood, masculinity, etc. But they don’t consider the other, crucial component to this—womanhood.

Our best bud Heath didn’t play a gay man in Brokeback Mountain; he played my dad. After seeing the movie I suspected my dad might be gay—a rumor my sex-deprived mother liked to propel when I was impressionable. Then I realized it’s just that Ledger is playing stoic, concealing his emotions—just like dad. No fear; no pain; no love; actually the only emotion it’s okay for this kind of man to express is anger.

Does anybody else think this country sucks?

Why do we live in America? Why do we fight to have our rights protected? Why do we fight to have our rights recognized? Why fight to have it recognized that they were taken away and how they were taken and by whom? Why fight? Why struggle? Maybe to make this country a “better place” a “freer place.” But presumably if the brave people of the Land of the Free wanted to include us, they would have already done so.

If we moved to Spain we could get married to whomever and our rights would be protected by law. If we moved to the Netherlands the same would hold true. If we moved to South Africa we could marry within a year. Hell, we could drive up to Canada, apply for citizenship and have more freedom than the freedom we’re fighting for down here. Assuming we're "fighting." Maybe we're just whining.

After all, if the ship is really sinking, why not paddle for shore? Why stay? Because we don’t suffer enough. We are not persecuted in the ways people in other countries are persecuted, nor tortured in those ways. No. We can go to work, provided we aren’t fired from our jobs for being queer, which in most states is admissible. We can make money. We have buying power. We can buy things. Holiday presents and garlands and mistletoe and brandy and cinnamon cookies. So we don’t suffer nearly enough to prompt us to leave. We don't bleed because we're queer. We don't die in the streets, there is no Aushwitz for queers. And our desire for equality doesn’t trump our capitalistically induced contentment. If we couldn’t shop, couldn’t hold jobs, couldn’t live under a roof, couldn’t go to school, maybe we would leave, become exiles in another nation.

Let’s admit, first of all, that Halloween is a night where heterosexuals have their drag. Queers, we have drag all year long, and I don’t just mean drag queens and kings, but an affinity for dressing up, putting on airs, partying and looking like a slut. Hetero’s, however, only have this one day out of the whole entire year when it’s okay to be whatchuwannabe and express/expose yourself. Well, that and Mardis Gras, which may not happen this year…Poor things have such pent up yearnings all year to let loose that when October 31st rolls along they explode.

Case in point: Straight men dressing up like Girls/Women and filling the streets with drunken screams. What’s that about? There should be an underground club/bar where it’s okay for straight men to tranvesticise all year long. Of course, it’ll never happen because there’s the trip to the bar/club and people might see and poke fun.

On the heels of BigMouth, I'm posting a little something about an article called “The Arts Administration” that was printed in the New York Times' Arts and Leisure section on Sunday, November 23rd, 2005. It's a letter I wrote to the paper when I was just a tad angry at their attempt to pass off campaign marketing as news.

Oh, and no, this doesn't represent the political opinions of Big Queer, but since the art world is pretty queer, I figured I'd share the letter here with you all.

Enjoy...

It’s one thing for your paper to endorse a candidate in its Op-Ed section, but quite another to use a front-page story in the Arts section as a campaign ad. Jennifer Steinhauer’s piece that will appear in the Sunday, October 23rd Arts Section of The New York Times is a blatant endorsement of Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection campaign.