loquacious

5th Gay Murder in Nassau, Bahamas

I don't think there has been any reporting yet confirming that a fifth gay man was brutally murdered in the Bahamas (fifth in the last year), but it unfortunately seems to be the case. It's not known whether this was a hate crime (really, it's not known whether any of them were hate crimes, due to what appears to be the world's slowest police work) but the murder of 5 gay men in a community the size of Nassau really should be considered remarkable by someone in authority you'd think.

This makes the murder rate for gay men in Nassau something like 1 in 1000, whereas the overall murder rate for heterosexuals in Nassau is about 1 in 2500 (which is already an astoundingly high rate). Why are gay men more than twice as likely to be murdered in Nassau than the general population?

See my post on the prior four murders here.

Gay Olympians

There were over 10,000 athletes competing in the Olympics. Exactly 10 of them were out gays and lesbians (9 lesbians, one gay man). Statistically, if you assume 5% of the population is gay or lesbian, there should be 500 gay and lesbian athletes at the games. So where are the other 490? Two possibilities: 1. They are there, they just aren't out. 2. Gay and Lesbians are still not welcome in athletics, so they are never given a chance to excel in this area.

Lesbians may well have had a different experience with their female PE teachers and coaches (which might also partly explain why 9 out of 10 out Olympic athletes are women), but for gay men, male athletic mentors are extremely hetero-normative. There isn't much space in male sports, from a very early age, to exhibit even androgynous qualities.

My guess is that both reasons are true. I happened (accidentally, if you can believe it) to be in Barcelona when the summer games were there in 92. Believe me, the gay clubs were full of athletes. Well, I presumed some of them were athletes, the weren't wearing numbers at the time.

What Straight People Think (thoughts on 'gay panic defense')

Do you ever read the comments after a newspaper article? It's a great way to find out what people really think. Because they can post their opinions there anonymously, I think they tend to tell the truth. I don't have any illusions that commenters on blog or article posts represent the mainstream of opinion, but I do think it exposes deeply and commonly held beliefs.

I tend to always look through the comments on mainstream sites (non-gay media sites) where the article has been about a gay-related issue. Recently, I came across this one from a newspaper with an update on the Lawrence King murder (this is the 15 year old student who was murdered by a classmate in a CA high school. King was bullied by McInerney, and his response was to turn it on his bully and so he pretended to flirt with him.). The tone of the comments is pretty civil compared to some I've seen, yet still exposes a bias towards LGBT people that I think the commenters don't even perceive as a bias. For example:

The King child was wrong by sexually harassing McInerney. He did not deserve to be killed, but sometimes people get pushed over the line. This is the schools responsibility to keep bully's from distracting students. The school was extremely lenient on King, allowing him to dress like a drag queen, allowing him to make sexual advances towards other students. I am so tired of Gays getting away with conduct that others would not get away with, because the authority is afraid of discrimination whiplash. The Gay community has used King as there political trophy child, maybe this is why he was guided by his Gay peers to be self expressive, which ultimately lead to his death.

This is one of the more blunt versions of this comment, but it appears throughout the comment section. Even people who seem to have a genuine 'tolerance' for gay people often have that tolerance disappear if gay people make their sexuality known. This is especially true if a gay man exhibits any kind of unwanted attention towards a straight man. Then the gloves are off, often literally. In these cases, most straight people seem to think that abusive retaliation is justified, or at least the situation is a mitigating factor that should be taken into account when determining a punishment. In fact, this line of reasoning has been upheld in many court cases. It's called the 'gay panic defense', and it argues that it's natural for men receiving unwanted gay advances to react violently. In fact, this type of defense has been used in many cases similar to the King case, quite successfully. Read the wikipedia entry for examples.

While I would agree that homophobia is becoming less acceptable in the US, I'm not sure how deeply held those beliefs are. This comes to the surface in a case like the King case. Did he somehow 'ask for it,' or did he 'bring it on himself'? Was McInerney's crime less so because King might have made him uncomfortalbe or through his actions questioned his manhood? Unfortunately, I think a majority of Americans would see credence in thes arguments. For me, it just shows how far we have to go still.

I really encourage you to read through all the comments on teh referenced article. You really start to get a sense of what Americans really think of LGBT people, in a way that (especially if you are gay or very gay supportive) you never hear in some of the gay-supportive envirionments many of us live in.

Gay Murders in Nassau, Bahamas

Four gay men have been murdered in Nassau in the past 8 months. Two were last November, two more recently. There have been no arrests in any of these cases. At least three of the men seem to have been prominent, out gay men (one was a famous handbag designer, another a leading AIDS activist). In the November murders (which happened the same night), speculation became that this was gay-on-gay violence. However, it now seems that it could be possible that someone is intentionally targeting prominent, out gay men.

Here is a fairly good summary from the Nassau Guardian after the fourth murder. And here is an earlier story after the third murder. And here is an article focusing on the LGBT community's reaction -- below are a few quotes from those stories that hit home for me, mainly quotes from Erin Greene from the Rainbow Alliance (the Bahamian LGBT activist group):

"The Rainbow Alliance of the Bahamas is very concerned that we have had the deaths of three prominent gay men within the last year and we are hoping to continue discussions with the police to foster a relationship that includes a level of community policing with the government," she said. Ms Greene does not think police are ignoring the crimes, but she is concerned about the lack of communication between them and the community.

"We don't expect the police to solve the murders overnight, but we would appreciate and require for our general sense of safety an open line of communication. You know, let us know that you are still working on it, but these things take time," she said, acknowledging that authorities may be waiting on the results of DNA evidence to be processed in the McDonald/Taylor killings.

Ms Greene said of the lack of closure on the cases: "The truth is - the problem is - that there is no way to tell whether the murders are not solved because of a conspiracy by the authorities just to ignore them, or whether the level of homophobia that exists in our community creates an environment where people are just unwilling to assist the police."

----

In the meantime, Greene said the gay community is extremely concerned about the rise in violence in general, but as an ostracized and vulnerable community within the country, the community is even more concerned about the murders of gays.

"These four murders are only four of what seem to be a trend of unsolved murders of gays," Greene said. And she urged Bahamians to think about the ways homophobia and intolerance generally have an affect on violence in the country at large.

The Rainbow Alliance's website actually has a pretty good run down of the anti-gay activities in the Bahamas over the past several years, which includes a hysterical reaction over a request that Logo be available on cable there, the arrival of a Rosie cruise which was greeted by picketers, the stripping of a teen beauty queen of her crown when it was revealed she was a lesbian, and more. Read it all here (page down to find the chronology).

For a flavor of the rhetoric that flies by the anti-gay forces, here is an excerpt of a several thousand word opinion piece that ran in one of the national papers just last fall, before the first murders (in reaction to the Logo flap, I think), it a response to a letter printed earlier by queer advocates:

Furthermore, the Christian community is a better friend to the
homosexual than you could ever be! Your lives are lives of painful
desperation filled with pain, abuse, violence, jealousy, betrayal,
shame, drugs and alcohol addiction and disease. Homosexuals corrupt,
abuse and discard young innocents, leaving shattered souls in their
wake that the church has to come along to redeem and restore, and
sometimes house, feed and pay their medical bills!

...

Tell me Ms. Klonaris, who is the one who truly hates homosexuals?
Homosexuals themselves or the Church? Who is the real homophobic, you
or me? Homosexuals traffic in self-centred, soul destroying
activities, gratifying their lewd appetites on the vulnerable and
hurting! The Church is about helping such individuals find dignity and
soul peace in their lives. As a pastor, my heart weeps for the young
men who have had to bend over for a job, or job security /
advancement. They have no clue as to the sordid lifestyle ahead of
them.
These cries of intolerance and "homophobia" are nothing but dishonest
spin-doctoring designed to keep persons from looking too closely at
the transparent lies and fabrications of the homosexual agenda! In
fact, every gain made by the homosexual movement has been made by
deception, beguilement or the harassment or silencing of the
opposition.

I must ponder, in an atmosphere of repression, will gays and lesbians who might know something about the murders come forward to testify? Would their admitted knowledge immediately implicate them, and they would risk losing their jobs, their families, their housing, their friends? How does the silence reinforce itself? How do the actions of what I take to be a relatively few vocal opponents to the rights of gays and lesbians manage to keep a more tolerant majority from allowing Bahamian gays and lesbians to live open lives? Can verbal intolerance lead to violence, and death?

It certainly casts a large shadow. I know that I now feel less safe. I find myself wondering what our neighbors really thought of us (no one ever asked if we were gay, but I'm sure it was super obvious... we were two men sharing a studio apt for 5 months!). What do you start to do to yourself if you feel that your personal safety, your life maybe, is at stake? What sort of courageous march out of the closet is possible under those circumstances?

I keep thinking about this sign, which my partner and I passed every day that we dropped our niece off at preschool, and which is on a very major road in Nassau which I'm sure a majority of Bahamians see on a weekly basis at least. It's been up for at least nearly a year now.

I mean, what's it like to see this every day, if you are LGBT? If you are straight but a supporter of LGBT people? If you agree with the sentiments?

The real message of this sign is that "we can say this if we want, and no one will challenge us. Even if most people think we are extreme, they are afraid to challenge us. We will use our tiny bit of power to keep those without any power from ever getting any."

Our niece is just learning to read. I wonder what she will make of this sign when she can read it.

Another dead gay teen

There are not many details yet, but a middle-schooler was shot and killed in a California school this week. It seems clear he was gay. Not sure if that was a motivation for the killing or not, yet. [UPDATE: it was a hate crime]

I've often wondered why the gay and lesbian community does not do more for gay and lesbian (and trans) teens. The organizations, at least in Seattle, that support LGBT teens are drastically underfunded and understaffed. There doesn't seem to be much call by adults in the political community to expend time and energy protecting LGBT teens.

I won't go into the stats here, which are probably known (higher suicide rates, higher homelessness rates, higher abuse rates, lower academic success, etc) to most of you about the challenges of being an LGBT teen. And I don't have any answers. It just seems inexplicable to me that LGBT adults, who have all been LGB or T youth at some point (and probably had a pretty lousy time of it) don't come out more to help the kids.

Not that the onus of preventing abuse of LGBT teens is on the queer community --- it's really the heterosexuals that need to stop killing, maiming, bullying and abusing them --- but it does seem like we (LGBT folk) could be doing more.

[UPDATE: The week after this happened, a gay teenager in Florida was killed in what is being considered a hate crime, and in the same Florida city a gay man was severely beaten leaving a diner.  And it goes on and on.... ]

Attacks

I think that sometimes people think that, especially in Seattle, it's really easy to be gay. The fact is that while Seattle is exceptionally kind, on average, to gays and lesbians, the physical (not to mention the verbal) attacks are growing as gays and lesbians assert their rights and their desires to be treated equally.

From the Stranger's blog this week:

• February 3, just before 2:00 a.m., Thomas Colonna and Brad Crelia were attacked near Olive Way and Howell Street when three men jumped out of a car and beat them. Witnesses gave SPD the car's license-plate number, but so far police say no arrests have been made.
• •September 3, Andrew Geske was attacked and called a "faggot" by a motorist. A passenger inside the car grabbed Geske's arm as they sped off, dragging him for several blocks.
• •August 12, Cerril Turner hurled antigay epithets and attacked Christopher Petty at the Shell gas station on Broadway. Petty was wearing a shirt that said "Queer." Turner was sentenced to 60 days in jail.
• •June 20, two gay men were threatened in the parking lot of a restaurant on Broadway and Denny Way. Two men in their early 20s are awaiting trial for the incident.
• June 10, Jason Mancillas was beaten by as many as six men after he left a gay bar with his boyfriend.

The War on LGBT People: news from the front

So, I read several blogs and subscribe to several news feeds that are about queer/LGBT issues. Although the constant news of the various affronts heaped on gay people every day inevitably depresses me, I keep doing it, as I think it keeps my energy up to keep fighting the fight against the ignorant and the just plain mean. I'm going to post some of the stories I see here once and a while, as it occurred to me that if you weren't tracking these issues very closely (and who would???), it might seem to you like everything was mostly just fine for gay people. It's not. There really is a dedicated group of people out there who have decided that to make America better, gay people must be defeated. They are waging a war, and so I will here periodically comment on their "death by a thousand pinpricks" approach to beating us down.

• MA moves same sex marriage ban forward: despite there being absolutely no negative effects associated with several years of same sex marriages there, anti-gay forces there are one step closer now to putting the rights of a minority up for a public vote
• 6 hurt in armed attack on gay party in Chicago
• Gay teens are afraid to be out to their doctors (and so of course do not get the right medical advice
  
• "Don't ask don't tell" wrong, says ex-Joint Chief: well, nice that he says it now, but a bit too late. I can't say I care one iota about being in the military, but it's rather galling that the govt so blatantly discriminates in the face of absolutely no evidence that allowing gay citizens to serve would damage the military. It's all just anti-gay hysteria.
• Another Dem (Edwards) announces presidential candidacy: so far, none favor same sex marriage. Yes, this is the Democrats, I personally think that many are fine with it, but just have no backbone.  They cynically believe that defending queers on this issue would do more to harm them than to help them, so they leave us out to dry.  Another 20 years until we can marry? No skin off their backs.

Government Funded Research to De-Gay Sheep

Well, now I've seen three of my current areas of interest collide: queer issues, vegetarianism/animal rights, and brain science. And not in a good way.

Researchers at Oregon State University are experimenting on 'male-oriented rams' (about 5-8% of all rams apparently are uninterested in mating with female rams, though not all of them try to mate with male sheep). Essentially, they are conducting experiments to alter their male orientation to be female oriented. This is done through various heartless methods, and of course ends with the death of the rams and the dissection of their brains.

Read details in the Oregonian.

Because there is no reason on the planet to try and 'fix' a 'problem' with 5% of all male sheep, it doesn't seem like to large a stretch of the imagination that these experiments may have intended impact on humans at some point, not just sheep. In fact, the researchers have said exactly that, in a 2004 journal article (Physiol Behav 83:233-245): "This research also has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mates selection across mammalian species, including humans..."  (cited in a PETA letter picking apart the Universities' lame excuses for doing these experiments)

As a gay person, I'm offended by this research. I can't say why it'd be worth anyone's time to try and change the way that only 5% of all rams are? Can you?  I don't want to think that these researchers have an alternate agenda against gay humans, but it's hard not to suspect that that is someone's goal here. Gay people have been belittled, degraded, and treated inhumanely, including attempts to exterminate us, in the past -- so please forgive me if I'm seeming sensitive about experiments that are supposed to make any creature 'un-gay'.

I've been having this nagging little thought in the back of my brain, as I read more about neuroscience, genetics, and brain research: will it really be a good thing if a genetic or biological basis (or even tendency) for homosexuality is found? One the one hand, it completely vindicates what most gays and lesbians feel: that they were born this way -- and punishing us for an fact of birth is wrong (and immoral). However, people being what they are, and science being what it is, we can all be sure that if there is a 'test' for homosexuality that can be given in utero, some (maybe most all at this point in time) parents will get that test, and most (maybe all) I'd guess will stop that pregnancy. [out, I'm sure, of what they feel is a good motivation, to 'save' their prospective child from what they misunderstand to be a lifetime of strife]

And so, voila!  No gays and lesbians. Extermination through birth selection. Hello, eugenics, been a while since we saw you last.

A long ways off? Wrong. Genetic screening for fetuses is already here. Sex can be screened for, and in effect, selected for legally. Screening for genetic diseases will be next. If the 'gay' markers are known, how would anyone stop anyone from exercising their own right over their own bodies?  [Science and technology is already paving the way to the potential elimination of one group of people -- the deaf culture - see Sound and Fury.]

There are going to be tough times ahead, with some hard choices to make: are we against all genetic screening? are we against a woman's right to control her own body? should we begin a campaign to make sure the genetic/biological basis of homosexuality is never found? Will it all come down in 5 years or 20? No way of knowing. Where will gays and lesbians be by that time? Accepted by society? Enough not to be screened out at birth?  Will we shrink to .5% of the population?

For me, it creates even more urgency about the public education that needs to be done about gays and lesbians, because if by the time this all comes to pass, we're still viewed as having a problem that needs to be fixed, we're going to get fixed, and good.

Sign the PETA online campaign.

More information on the bad science behind this work, and the connection to intersex issues.

Book 9: Our Endangered Values

Our Endangered Values
Jimmy Carter (2005)
Non-Fiction
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Let me begin by saying that, like all good liberals, I of course admire President Carter immensely. And I have to call attention once again to what the Democratic Presidents seek to do after public office (Carter, Clinton) vs. their Republican counterparts. If that isn't a revealing party difference, I don't know what is.

I'm not going to go on too much about the content of Carter's book - it's pretty straightforward explication of the Lakoffian (I really need to write a post on Lakoff/Don't Think of an Elephant, since it seems to come into play in every other post I write!) world of politics we now live in. Carter does a particularly good job at calling attention to what he, as a deeply Christian person, sees as a new kind of Fundamentalist approach to politics. A kind of simplified, oppositional world of politics that he sees as very dangerous. It really fleshes out some of Lakoff's ideas quite nicely, and shows how religious fundamentalists are quite intentionally inserting their worldview in politics in order to create a more theocratic state.

However, to return to the 'gay issue,' I must take exception to Carter's position on same sex marriage (he's for civil unions). As an older American, perhaps his views on this are good for that demographic. However, for a man as enlightened as he is (and I've had the chance to meet him, and really am an admirer), it's sad to see that he can not take the final step. He states that he thinks that civil unions are a fine compromise on the issue, and applauds what Connecticut has done.  I perhaps would not take as much exception to this issue if he had not spent some much time in the book writing eloquently about race and his experiences growing up in the South. I don't usually like using the 'separate but equal' comparison, but in the case of civil unions, it's useful to some degree to think about the concept. Civil unions are nothing if not separate and unequal. It creates a separate non-marriage space for a group of people who have been historically discriminated against in our ability to form legal relationships. Civil unions create a patchwork of different laws in some states -- some states will have different CU rights from others; some states will not have them at all. So you might be civil unioned (rolls off the tongue, huh?) in one state, and have no relation to your partner in another. Even states with CU laws may or may not honor the CU of another state. Plus all the important federal benefits (taxes, immigration, etc) don't come any closer to gays and lesbians through CUs. CUs create a second class status (a 'marriage lite') that's just demeaning. I don't know why so many people don't get this.

I know that politics is the art of the possible. But it's profoundly disappointing that someone like Carter, who's lived through this before, and is such a smart and compassionate man, is still unwilling to defend the full rights of gays and lesbians.  Sorry, Jimmy.

Book 3: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
1998
Rating: 4 out of 5

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is, as you would expect, a really great book. Although King never per se wrote his own biography, the editor of this volume has taken King's introspective writings and put them in chronological order, every once in a while adding in parts of King's speeches from whatever period is being discussed. Although it does not give a lot of person information about King, it does end up being a pretty amazing, first hand experiential account of the Civil Rights Movement.

I had to read this, of course, while thinking somewhat on the struggle we're currently going through over lesbian and gay rights in the US. After reading this, I am more and more convinced of the deep differences between the two struggles, and more and more convinced of the eerie similarities. I won't go too deeply into it here, but reading King's own words really brought home how blatant the racism and bigotry was 40 years ago. It makes me think about how much more camouflaged racism is now, the same for all kinds of bigotry. While that is certainly an advance, it also seems to make it that much harder to fight against in our time.

It was also extremely inspiring to read directly from King about his inspiration by Gandhi and non-violence, and his deep commitment to nonviolence. I really wish he would have written more about his trip to India. It's really inspired me to think more deeply about how nonviolent action could form a part of modern movement building.