Month: April 2015

Complacent Female Conservatives Are Failing Womankind (February 20, 2012)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

To put it mildly, I am a fan of New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins. While Collins, the first woman at the Old Grey Lady to bear the title of editorial page editor, is a brilliant thinker with journalistic credentials as long as my arm (which according to my personal trainer is rather orangutan-like in its breadth), it’s more than her pedigree that incites fervor. Collins’ style, so humble and approachable, bears at the same time a kind of sharpened common sense that can devastate the opposition. Combine these traits with the kind of natural wit that could have landed Collins a career in sketch comedy writing and you have a recipe for truly special work. It is a shame that she’s only contracted to publish twice a week while it seems like I am bored by the latest meditation on morality from David Brooks every other day. Zzzz.

Anyway, I am about two-thirds of the way through Collins’ 2009 non-fiction wonder, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present. It is a truly enthralling tome that recounts “the astounding revolution in women’s lives over the past 50 years.” The book starts with the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution: two events in American history that changed the way U.S. women viewed their bodies, their work, their neighbors and their places in society. It is a must-read told in the engaging narrative style of a compelling novel.

The underlying argument of the book, while never explicitly stated, is that women have fought hard to break free of the patriarchal conventions that kept them locked inside the home, and beholden to the laws of men, for centuries. There’s no going back. Now remember this book was published in 2009 and Collins is no wide-eyed youth, and yet, viewed through the prism of the 2012 Republican primaries, the author’s certainty that certain freedoms can be taken for granted seems dangerously naive.

In a recent column dated February 8, 2012, Collins wandered into the fray between the White House and Catholic bishops over the administration’s proposed rule that would have required Catholic universities and hospitals to cover contraceptives in their health care plans. It’s almost as though the columnist can’t believe she has to write this:

“The church is not a democracy and majority opinion really doesn’t matter. Catholic dogma holds that artificial contraception is against the law of God. The bishops have the right — a right guaranteed under the First Amendment — to preach that doctrine to the faithful. They have a right to preach it to everybody. Take out ads. Pass out leaflets. Put up billboards in the front yard.

The problem here is that they’re trying to get the government to do their work for them. They’ve lost the war at home, and they’re now demanding help from the outside.”

Welcome to an alternative universe where women are in the position of having to fight for reproductive freedoms that have been assumed for the better part of 40 years.

It may come as no surprise that women who sit on the left side of the political spectrum have been horrified by recent events such as Susan G. Komen’s disingenuous plan to defund Planned Parenthood, or U.S. Rep. Darrel Issa’s convention of a hearing this past Thursday morning on the birth control benefit issue – with an all-male panel. But why aren’t more Republican women howling? Surely conservative male attempts to control our bodies without our input is an issue that ought to unite womankind of all political stripes?

Take this week’s philosophical waxing from Foster Friess, the 71 year-old multimillionaire Rick Santorum donor and colossal jackass, who was quoted as saying to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s such inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” Why weren’t Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin the first ones out of the gate, shooing the old coot back into the crypt from which he crawled?

After all, the careers of both women would never have been possible without the 20th century woman’s movement. The never-married, childless Coulter is a serial dater (and I am presuming sexually active) with the freedom to run her big mouth on any cable news program she chooses. And Palin with her five children would have been vilified a mere half-century ago for her public proclivities.

Yet women on the right have been curiously silent during an assault on life and liberty that shows no sign of abating. This, almost more so than the white male attempt to roll back decades of female empowerment, is a real shame.

I would argue that all this talk about birth control and abortion is yet another attempt by the GOP to use social issues as a distracting wedge, to prevent the poorer section of the party’s base from focusing on the increasingly disparate positions of the haves and have nots. After all it’s a lot easier to forget that you’re out of a job, have lost your home and retirement account when you have elected leaders yelping about the imminent annihilation of “family values.” But the party’s female caucus shouldn’t allow it. I am publicly calling on them to disavow this strategy. What say you Ann Coulter?

2012 GOP Presidential Candidates Fail to Meet Mental Health Standards (February 12, 2012)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

This week I came across a comment in a decidedly apolitical magazine, Entertainment Weekly, that stopped me in my tracks. Having recycled the glossy already, I’ve forgotten the name of the columnist who surveyed the present theatrical penchant for nudity (with special recognition going to the, um, well-endowed Michael Fassbender). During the course of this entertaining column, the author also bestowed accolades upon legendary actress Meryl Streep, for imbuing “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher with a confident sexiness in her recently Oscar-nominated performance.

That was eyebrow raising enough, having recalled from my youth a stuffy, conservative British woman with helmet hair and a penchant for neck-obscuring silk scarves. But further, Entertainment Weekly’s liberal columnist suggested that even in the throes of advanced dementia, it might be worth rousing the elderly Thatcher from her sick bed in order to provide the U.S. Republican caucus with a credible presidential candidate.

While the larger theme of the column was cinema, I think the piece made a prescient point about a lack of credibility from the current crop of GOP hopefuls. It is a phenomenon that has become almost incredibly easy to ignore given the seriousness with which the media has either chosen (Fox) or been forced (CNN) to the take candidates.

As I intimated in my column last week, no matter who emerges victorious from the charade that has become the Republican primaries, and despite attacks from many corners of the electorate, it’s difficult to imagine President Obama facing a credible challenge. Because even if we keep the bar of fitness for running the nation fairly low to the ground, for example going no higher than basic sanity, I would think Obama has to be the choice for most of the mainstream. It occurred to me that if entertainment magazines can sort of nonchalantly point out the obvious, our position may be stronger than the insulated extreme right can grasp.

Consider that current momentum-builder Rick Santorum has a “family values” history that includes behaviors even many conservatives might find macabre. An ABC News blog post from early January quotes liberal Fox News contributor Alan Colmes (ahem, I will take that label with a grain of salt) as saying, “Get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”

Unfortunately folks, that is not an incendiary rumor. This happened. And while I am in no position to judge the actions of a grieving parent, when a member of the corporate media arm of your party thinks you might be a little nutso, there may be fire from whence the smoke is emanating.

Fox News (I will continue to use the example as long as it helps my case) has also addressed the old yarn about Mitt Romney driving to Canada in the early 1980s with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car. It is true that Romney was only 36 years-old at the time, but really, isn’t that mature enough to know better? A piece by columnist Lanny Davis is precisely titled, “Why Romney’s ‘dog on car roof’ story makes him unfit to be president.”

I have not space enough to address the long and voluminous history of Crazy Town Mayor Newt Gingrinch. Suffice it to say that during a national job interview process that requires a sustained disposition toward good judgment, none of the GOP’s “Big Three” can bear a comparison with the POTUS.

Barack H. Obama is many things to many people, but hotheaded and irrational are not adjectives that come up often, even amongst his most violent critics. The Commander-in-Chief may be calm and poised even to a point of frustration (for me) at certain times, but all things considered, I will take that over candidates who believe strapping living creatures to the luggage rack represents a sound traveling strategy.

To return to my initial point, I think it says a lot that there’s a strain of common nostalgia for the likes of conservative stalwart Margaret Thatcher. Even if you disagree with nearly everything she stood for as Prime Minister (as I decidedly do), she wasn’t easy to dismiss. And there were never any questions about her basic competence. A show of hands for Republican presidential candidates that can say the same? Not so fast Santorum, Mittens and Newty.

Gay Liberation Movement Protests Cardinal’s Anti-Gay Bigotry (February 12, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

On the cold and rainy morning of Feb. 10 in Chicago, married couple Arminius and Gary Bucher wouldn’t dream of letting the weather keep them away from the sidewalk in front of Holy Name Cathedral, to protest Francis Cardinal George’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage.

“We’re here to love each other,” said Arminius Bucher, a German native who married his partner of 13 years in Iowa in 2010.

“For him [Cardinal George] to dictate who gets married is just wrong,” echoed Gary Bucher.

The peaceful protest, a joint effort coordinated between the Gay Liberation Network (GLN) and the Rainbow Sash Movement — a coalition created by LGBT Catholics who believe they should be able to receive Holy Communion — couldn’t come at a more critical time.

With momentum in Illinois increasingly gathering to secure equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, Bob Schwartz, an organizer for the GLN told EDGE, “The irony is that the socially much more conservative state of Illinois may be getting equal marriage rights before the liberal state of California! This is the direct result of the different brands of activism undertaken in the two states.”

The Gay Liberation Network (formerly the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network) has been a huge presence in the fight for marriage equality for many years. In 2011, the group led a high-profile boycott against the Salvation Army. Activist Bil Browning characterized the nonprofit group at the time as having a history of active discrimination against gays and lesbians.

“While you might think you’re helping the hungry and homeless by dropping a few dollars in the bright red buckets, not everyone can share in the donations,” said Browning. “Many LGBT people are rejected by the evangelical church charity because they’re ’sexually impure.’”

Four years ago the GLN formed an alliance with the Rainbow Sash Movement. The LGBT Catholic organization has garnered increasing attention as a majority of lay church members affirm their support for greater rights, despite the resistance of high-profile Catholic leaders. Schwartz credits the GLN’s partnership with the Movement and the willingness to engage religious advocates of the status quo as one of the main reasons that Illinois has sidestepped the legislative ban of gay and lesbian marriage.

“Because we have confronted Cardinal George and other anti-gay bigots for many years, they have not been able to get the political traction to have a successful statewide referendum,” said Schwartz.

Cardinal George, the eighth and current Archbishop of Chicago (a post he has held since 1998), has been a particularly vocal opponent of equal marriage rights for the gay and lesbian community. The Cardinal has repeatedly drawn comparisons between LGBT activists and the KKK, and has often cast himself in the role of trailblazing sacrifice on behalf of the Church.

After the passage of the 2010 civil unions bill in Illinois, George dramatically declared, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

Chicago LGBTs Not Afraid to Confront Religious Bigotry

Schwartz and other leaders remain unmoved, as well as convinced that peacefully remaining on the Cardinal’s radar is key to avoiding a Proposition 8-like fiasco in Illinois.

“In most other states, like California, LGBT leaders have failed to confront the religious bigots, and hence the Mormon Church and Catholic hierarchy were able to get away with promoting bigotry without paying any political price for doing so. Californians only made an issue of the Mormon Church’s anti-gay bigotry after they had already lost,” said Schwartz.

The morning’s respectful protest was hardly the stuff of anarchy. More than a dozen demonstrators brave the inclement weather to raise rainbow flags (and one kindred umbrella), proud heads and signs bearing affirmative slogans such as “Love Makes a Family.” The protesters marched in a courteous circle as worshipers attending Holy Name’s 9:30 a.m. Sunday Mass exited through the cathedral’s State Street doors. Both parishioners and demonstrators allowed each other a considerate berth.

What the GLN and the Rainbow Sash Movement seek is not further acrimony, but rather, unity and acceptance. As Arminius Bucher explained, “I’m German and our marriage is recognized in Germany in the sense that we enjoy the same civil rights as a married couple. That’s what we want here.”

It may be that much easier to rebel in deferential silence as Catholic leaders are increasingly finding their discriminatory positions untenable. In a Jan. 17 press release publicizing the protest, members of the GLN and the Rainbow Sash Movement called upon more enlightened Church members to foment change from the bottom up: “However much we, and the majority of lay Catholics, disagree with the church hierarchy’s discrimination against women and LGBTs in the Church, it is the Church’s right to be a discriminatory institution. We can vociferously disagree with that, but it is up to Catholics themselves to correct that situation.”

The complete absence of acrimony between demonstrators and worshipers, which left a dozen Chicago police officers on the scene with little to do, provided hope that the fight for marriage equality in Illinois may soon achieve a peaceful and successful resolution.

Macho Sluts (October 3, 2009)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Patrick Califia, the controversial author who first wrote and published Macho Sluts in 1988, writes in a new Foreword for the 2009 edition, of his awareness that most mainstream readers, and a great number of the queer ones too, will find more reason to reject, rather than embrace, this landmark text. As Califia asks in the opening sentence of the essay, “Why should anybody buy a book of lesbian S/M smut… especially if the author is now using male pronouns and sporting a rather impressive beard?”

“Vanilla” readers, a term that Califia and his characters like to bandy about, may run from the violent content of the sexually explicit material, not ready to confront the notion that pain and pleasure can be found at the same time.

Feminists may shun the purposeful and demeaning subjugation of many of the characters, labeling it a pathological result of the dominant patriarchal ideology that churns through our society.

Even the segment of lesbian S/M culture that Califia attempts to give voice to may turn from the new edition of the work, given the author’s “disloyal” transition from lesbian woman to bi-sexual man in the late 1990s. Who, then, is this work for? And why has it endured?

As difficult as it is to step back from the sexual and social political wars in which “Macho Sluts” finds itself enmeshed, it is important to do so. It is only then that the work can be fully appreciated for the important historical document, and biting commentary on gender roles, that it actually is. As Califia writes, “This is no ordinary book of X-rated fiction. Its continued existence and popularity alone prove that.”

A Preface written by Mark Macdonald acts as a brief history of the book’s battle with Canadian censorship. A protracted legal skirmish between Canadian Customs and importer Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium in Vancouver, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, rewrote the script in terms of speaking out against the illegal suppression of ideas.

Macdonald writes that the right to distribute the book initially fell victim not only to overzealous customs officials, but also, “a camp of neo-Victorian, right wing feminists who felt that sexual expression itself was to be scrutinized with suspicion.” From the perspective of the clinical evaluation of the book as an important tool in the battle for free speech, “Macho Sluts” is worth a look.

As for the stories themselves, even if one does not find the idea of lesbians tying and beating each other up to be a personal turn-on, Califia’s writing is a cut above the swill you would encounter reading “Penthouse Letters,” or other over-the-counter, mainstream erotica. Califia isn’t just trying to titillate. He is trying to write–and he has plenty of value to say.

“Macho Sluts” is not simply a collection of stories about people on the fringes of society trying to get themselves off. They are real, with lives, and most importantly, feelings.

One of the stories, “Jesse” contains this insightful musing on the loneliness that often accompanies a hardcore S/M lifestyle: “The next time I called up a few of my other old friends, they treated me with what I thought was distaste… So I gave up calling anybody I used to know.” These lines touch on the despair that accompanies the fight for understanding, even within the “safe” confines of your own minority group.

This idea is continued and further developed in “The Hustler,” a futuristic fantasy where Califia envisions a dominant matriarchal society. Yet, even amongst the female population, there are still outsiders. Califia’s character, the titular Hustler, wonders, “why so many of us have not profited greatly from the women’s revolution, despite the fact that we are women. Perhaps it’s because I’m not the right kind of woman.”

“The Spoiler,” details the adventures of a man (another marked transgression for some in a work of lesbian pornography), who, like Califia himself, violates the norms, even in the left of center world of S/M. Califia writes, “We are raised to think that everything in the world occurs naturally as a set of paired opposites. It is almost impossible for us to know what anything is if we cannot locate and define its counterpart. The spoiler was an anomaly.”

All of this is not to say that the primary mission of Patrick Califia’s “Macho Sluts” isn’t sexual excitement. The author provocatively asks the reader to consider his or her answer to the following question: “Are you more afraid that you won’t have any fun–or that you’ll be thrilled to pieces? Which is it? Be bold.”

Be that as it may, one should not bypass this text out of a knee-jerk distaste for S/M pornography. No matter what your sexual orientation, fetishes or fantasies, the work offers important cultural and historical lessons that are still very much relevant in a post-Proposition 8 fight for human understanding and equality.

Mean Little Deaf Queer (July 6, 2009)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Mean Little deaf Queer (the lower case “d” is empathically intentional) by Terry Galloway, is a “special” memoir.

However, in this instance “special” does not refer to the nebulous, often negative connotation of the term, which Galloway both accepts and rejects as forever the albatross to be borne about the neck by members of the disabled community.

No, the work is “special,” because it is, quite simply, one of the finest, most nakedly honest and humorous autobiographies out there to be read.

Rendered deaf at the age of nine through the tragic use of an experimental antibiotic on her then-pregnant mother, Galloway’s rich language resonates with the lifelong bitterness of person who is well aware of exactly what she’s lost.

As if finding yourself in a sudden world of soundless confusion at such a tender age were not trying enough, the author had the bad karma to be born a gay woman during the Cold War – in the South.

Add “box size” hearing aids and huge glasses into the mix, and Mean Little deaf Queer has all the makings of a tragedy, a Lifetime movie of the week about an inspiring woman of limited means.

But to view the memoir through this two-dimensional lens would be a tragic mistake of another kind. The work is so many things, like the formidable author herself: partly David Sedaris-esque in its slice-of-life essay moments, part slapstick farce, so very real, and always laugh out loud hilarious.

The work does more to put a “human” face on the lives on the disabled, gay community than anything I can remember in well, a long time.

I challenge you not to look at blind, deaf, or otherwise impaired people we mostly sweep our eyes over each day, in a different way after reading this memoir.

Because if there is one thing that Galloway makes clear – she is not a victim. She is every bit as flawed, nasty, bitter, funny, loving and complicated as the perfect specimens she often feels closing in around her – in many cases, her own family.

Perhaps nowhere does Galloway make her aching humanity more painfully, and side-splittingly obvious than in the chapter entitled “The Performance of Drowning.”

I won’t spoil it, but suffice it to say, never has such un-PC, sociopathic behavior been so funny. I felt deliciously dirty afterward.

There are so many poignant moments in the book, often placed right next to the gut busting laughs.

This easy flow of emotions feels both organic and invigorating due to the author’s oft declared love of, and skill with, language. Galloway writes, on page 70, “I was enthralled by the effects spoken words could have, like another kind of music.”

That a hearing impaired person would grow to revere speech in this manner is at once heartbreaking, and indicative of enormous thoughtfulness.

Terry Galloway takes a fair amount of potshots at herself in the memoir: everything from her appearance, to the inherent comedy of her physical challenges, to her innately dramatic flair.

This is perhaps one of the most disarming and endearing aspects of the work. The woman is not afraid to laugh at herself, even while admitting things in print many of us would find difficult to say, even to ourselves.

Galloway makes no bones about her childhood desire to be a “beautiful boy”, a desire it seems, that never wholly subsided. She frankly discusses the vengeful hierarchies of the “Deaf” (congenital) versus “deaf” (due to illness or accident after birth) communities.

The reader is left with the impression that there is nothing Galloway won’t say, no tough issue off limits – and we are assuredly the better for it.

In essence, the young Terry Galloway is a deaf, queer Bridget Jones, only with a lot more sex, drugs and alcohol. It is one of the feats of Galloway’s work that the reader is left oddly comforted knowing that the physically challenged as morally messy as the rest of us.

At the same time, it is impossible not to rejoice in the happiness she eventually finds in the arms of her partner, Donna Marie.

In the Prologue, Galloway writes of her affection for the memoir, stating, “it’s the crappy ones I’ve lost my heart to.” Rest assured, there is nothing “crappy” about this life story.

You don’t have to be disabled, gay female, or even an avid reader to be most entertained with this completely honest, engagingly entertaining work of literature