Why I'm voting for Bernie Sanders in the New York primary

I've been trying to figure out who to vote for in the New York primary, which is coming up on April 19. I had been leaning toward Hillary Clinton, but her recent statement on the supposed contribution the Reagans made to fighting AIDS in the 1980s had changed my mind. I'm going to vote for Bernie Sanders.

A couple of days ago, Hillary Clinton said this about Nancy Reagan, who has just died:

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan - in particular Mrs. Reagan - we started a national conversation. When before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something that I really appreciate with her very effective, low key advocacy but it penetrated the public conscious and people began to say, "Hey, we have to do something about this too."

This statement is a lie. Both Reagans did their best to ignore HIV/AIDS, and thousands of people in the US, mostly gay men, died while Reagan was president and did nothing to try to stop the epidemic.

Though the World Health Organization was holding meetings about AIDS by 1983, the White House offered little support for awareness of the epidemic. Reagan, who first took office in 1981, didn’t publicly address AIDS until well into his second term. According to ABC, more than 20,000 Americans had died from the disease by the time he first spoke about it....

The Reagans were eventually swayed to react to AIDS by the death of a close friend. Rock Hudson, at the peak of his career, was Brad Pitt-level famous — and beloved by women internationally. He was also gay, but famous at a time when being publicly gay could ruin a successful career (even if you weren't a star) so he stayed silent about his sexuality. In the mid '80, however, he developed AIDS, becoming one of the most prominent American figures to suffer from the disease, and bringing it to the forefront of the nation’s news cycle. 

As his condition deteriorated, Hudson, in France at the time, reached out for help from the White House in getting treatment from a specific French doctor and hospital. The first lady rebuffed him, saying it would be inappropriate to offer such a favor for Hudson and “appear to favor personal friends” and felt, instead, it was a matter the United States Embassy in Paris should address. Hudson died from the disease only a few months later.

For several years, whenever the issue of AIDS was raised at press briefings in the White House, the typical answer was homophobic jokes and laughter.

Clinton has apologized for her ahistorical lie (Why on earth did she say it? Is she really so ignorant that she didn't know how the Reagan administration reacted to the AIDS epidemic?), first in a short statement and then in a longer essay published on Medium.

Her first statement, via Twitter:

In her essay in Medium, she wrote, "To be clear, the Reagans did not start a national conversation about HIV and AIDS. That distinction belongs to generations of brave lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, along with straight allies, who started not just a conversation but a movement that continues to this day."

Notice that she was still unable to say the truth - that President and Nancy Reagan obstructed the treatment of AIDS and research into AIDS and thereby led to the deaths of thousands of people in the US. 

Why does this matter to me personally?

In the early 1980s I was working for a typesetting and graphics company in Cambridge, Mass., owned by a gay man named David Stryker, called Xanadu Graphics. For several years he had typeset Gay Community News (the weekly gay and lesbian newspaper in Boston), and then they started doing it in-house, while he ran his own business. When I worked for him we typeset a wide range of publications, including books for Beacon Press, a weekly newsletter about pollution and environmental issues, the newsletter for Career Services (or whatever it was called at the time) for Harvard University, a Christian newsletter (they clearly didn't know David Stryker was gay), a publication on Islamic art also from Harvard, and many other things. 

David Stryker got AIDS, and died of it, very early in the epidemic - on November 18, 1984. (I found his date of death on a list of "our faerie ancestors" published by http://www.radfae.org). I knew that he was sick and that he died, but our new boss didn't tell us (at least he didn't tell me) that Dave had died of AIDS - I was furious when I finally found out. 

Unlike a lot of other people I knew about AIDS pretty early on because GCN covered it extensively from the beginning, back when people talked about Kaposi's Sarcoma as the symptom and called it Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disorder (link is to a 1982 article in the New York Times, published before it was known how HIV/AIDS is spread).

Last year I started trying to get more information about Stryker online, but I wasn't able to find very much, and what I did find was fairly derogatory, so I'm not going to reproduce it here. But Dave Stryker was very important for the gay liberation movement in Boston in the 1970s and early 1980s. He got GCN on its feet as a real typeset newspaper, not simply mimeographed sheets. He was also the typesetter for Fag Rag, a radical gay men's journal. More people should know about his work.

Hillary Clinton's little billet-doux to Nancy Reagan erased David Stryker's life and death, and the lives and deaths of so many gay men, injection drug users, and people of color who suffered from HIV/AIDS in those years. It was despicable, and her apology is no apology - it continues the same deception as her original statement.

If she ends up getting nominated by the Democrats I'll vote for her in the general election, because she's better than any of the Republicans running for president - the whole pack of pathetic, gay-hating, racist, hypocritical Bible-thumpers who exploit the real suffering of so many Americans - but I'd much prefer a candidate with a spine who really does stand up for human rights and working people.

The winding trail to legalizing same-sex marriage

I never thought this day would come. 

In the mid-1970s, when I was first coming out, it wasn't even a dream. In Massachusetts, where I was living, sex between persons of the same gender was illegal. In the words of the the relevant state statute (it's still on the books, but it's moot, since the Supreme Court voided all of the anti-sodomy laws in 2003): 

Section 34. Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years.

I remember going to the Boston gay pride march in June of 1977. As I recall, fewer than 20,000 people attended the march and rally. At the rally, Charley Shively, a local gay activist, got up and denounced all of the institutions that oppressed gay people, and then he burned his "Harvard diploma, his draft card, and pages from a copy of the Bible."

Alexander Cockburn reports on the rally in Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies & the Reagan Era, p. 235:

I don't recall anyone talking about gay marriage at all - in fact, the atmosphere was quite different from what it is today. People wanted liberation, not just "rights," and liberation included smashing oppressive institutions like marriage. That didn't change for quite a while. 

First came commitment ceremonies. Many of my heterosexual friends got married in the 1980s - I went to a host of fun Jewish weddings, but wondered when we would be celebrating same-sex relationships. I can't remember the first one I went to, whether it was in the late 1980s or the early 1990s. They were designed to be a lesbian counterpart of the traditional Jewish wedding - some of them hewed very closely to the traditional ceremony, except for changing some of the words that didn't apply to a same sex wedding, while others were inspired by Jewish weddings (for example, using a huppah - a wedding canopy) but incorporated a lot of changes. (I still haven't been to a wedding between two men).

Simultaneous with those first ceremonies was the "lesbian baby boom," another thing that no one had anticipated. Of course, lesbians had always had children, usually because they had them from a previous heterosexual marriage, but this was something new. People had to figure out how to unite sperm and egg in new ways - one method was the turkey baster. The sperm donor (in the early years, this was often a friend of the couple) would produce the sperm and then the woman would put it into her vagina (I don't actually know if any of my friends used a turkey baster), and wait and hope for conception.

Then, sometime in the 1990s, people started talking about gay marriage. I wasn't very excited about it at first. For one thing, I was single, and it didn't seem so relevant, and for another thing, I was still inspired by the early gay liberation movement's antipathy to marriage. Anti-sodomy laws were still on the books in most states, and there were very few state-wide anti-discrimination laws (there still is no federal anti-discrimination statute that includes LGBT people). My thought was - let's deal with the anti-sodomy laws and the anti-discrimination laws, and then work on same-sex marriage. But obviously that's not how a lot of people felt, who were very energized to work on legalizing same-sex marriage.

And so we come to yesterday:

And to the rainbow flag projected onto the front of the White House. I really never imagined that!

Moscow's Gay-Bashing Ritual

When will the "Pinkwashing and Homonationalism" crowd get around to condemning the beatings and arrests of gay activists in Russia simply for trying to have a demonstration? 

Moscow's Gay-Bashing Ritual (New York Times)

A concerted effort by Moscow activists to secure a legal permit for an L.G.B.T. pride parade resulted, after several years, in a 2010 European Court on Human Rights ruling that directed the city authorities to allow the event to be held. Though Russia usually complies with E.C.H.R. decisions, this time the Moscow City Court responded by banning gay pride events for the next 100 years. That, and the pending legislation against so-called propaganda of homosexuality — passed in a number of Russian municipalities and likely to face a final vote in the national Parliament as soon as this week — have pushed L.G.B.T. issues to the foreground of Russian politics and L.G.B.T. organizing deep underground.  

Earlier in the day, a young woman stood up in front of Parliament with a poster and was attacked by a self-identified Orthodox believer before she had a chance to turn the poster to face the onlookers; she was then detained by the police. Then another woman unfurled a poster with the words “Love Is Stronger Than Hate” and had barely had time to say, “This is a legal one-person picket to protest the homophobic laws” before two policemen grabbed her and dragged her away. In all, at least 25 people were detained by the police in the early afternoon. Because what they had been doing was legal, they were eventually released without charge — but not before the 5 p.m. rally was over.

Should Chuck Hagel be our next defense secretary?

I haven't felt that I knew enough one way or the other to have an opinion on whether Chuck Hagel should be the next US defense secretary. These are my thoughts on two issues with his nomination - his views on Israel and gay and lesbian rights.

Israel

I am disturbed by some of the statements that the Fact Checker blog of the Washington Post has gathered from Hagel. The blog puts them in the context of the entire speech where they can be found.

Hagel says his positions on Israel has been “completely distorted,” though he acknowledges that “I have also questioned some very cavalier attitudes taken about very complicated issues in the Middle East.” Certainly, Hagel has expressed sentiments that many U.S. politicians tend to avoid, including a consistent concern for the plight of Palestinians.

I agree with his concern for the Palestinians, but I don't like the way in which he has blamed Israel for problems in the Middle East that Israel is not responsible for. In a discussion with then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1998, about getting Arab states' support for US policy vis-a-vis Iraq, he asked her, "Do you believe part of this problem is the perception in the Arab world that we’ve tilted way too far toward Israel in the Middle East peace process?" She says no. After Albright's response, he asks again, "But surely you believe that they're linked? You don't believe that there's any linkage between the Middle East peace process and what's happening in Iraq?"

I think Albright was right - what did sanctions against Iraq have to do with whether negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians were going well or badly? Does everything that happens in the Middle East, even when it does not involve Israel, actually involve Israel? Remember, Israel did not participate in the Gulf War, even though it was attacked by Iraq.

I also find it offensive what he said, in an interview with Aaron David Miller, talking about about someone asking him a question during a meeting in New York, "I said, ‘I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator.’ I support Israel, but my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States — not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I’ll do that. Now I know most Senators don’t talk like I do.”

This is offensive to me because it comes across as if Hagel is questioning the patriotism of the questioner. If he's not an Israeli senator, then what does that make the questioner? Someone who is more loyal to Israel than the US? The quote doesn't tell us the speech or meeting where he made this statement, so we don't know if he's speaking to someone Jewish or not. In the US there is a classic trope that accuses American Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to the US, and whether or not Hagel intended to do that, it feels to me that he's evoking that accusation.

Do any of these statements mean he shouldn't be the next US defense secretary? Probably not. He doesn't make US foreign policy - President Obama does. But I don't feel particularly happy that Obama nominated him rather than Susan Rice. Why did Obama fold on Rice? Senate Republicans opposed her (at least some of them), and probably the same Senate Republicans will oppose Hagel. Why wasn't it worth supporting Rice in the face of the same opponents?

Gay and lesbian equality

In addition to his statements about Israel, Hagel has also said and done other things that I don't agree with - for example, his offensive remarks about the gay man that Clinton nominated to be ambassador to Luxembourg, whom he accused of being an "aggressively gay" and his consistent anti-gay voting record in the Senate. The New Yorker reports:

But the Hagel nomination also presents challenges for Americans who care about civil rights. When Hagel served in the United States Senate, as a Republican from Nebraska, he consistently voted against gay rights—his record earned him a zero-per-cent rating (three times) from the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay-rights lobby. Among other things, Hagel voted against extending basic employment nondiscrimination protections and the federal hate-crimes law to cover gay Americans. 

In 1998, after President Bill Clinton nominated a prominent gay-rights advocate from San Francisco, James Hormel, to be the ambassador to Luxembourg, Hagel, then a Senator, seemed to go out of his way to malign not only Hormel—“openly, aggressively gay”—but gay Americans generally, with comments that were blatantly offensive even then; they suggested that the very fact of being gay should disqualify one from representing America abroad.

Hagel was also opposed to gays and lesbians openly serving in the US military (ironically enough, Israel accepted openly gay and lesbian soldiers in 1993 - at just the time that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was passed in the US). This raises another question - while the defense secretary doesn't make foreign policy, he does direct the US military. Now that DADT has been repealed, will Hagel aggressively support the equality of gay and lesbian soldiers?

The New Yorker article continues:

Hagel should—and, presumably, will—be pressed to do substantially more than give his assurance that he will carry out the President’s policies on gay rights. If he has truly changed his views, he needs to explain the context of that conversion and lay out a plan for making the Pentagon and the military more welcoming for gay and lesbian Americans. (“I want to hear how he’s evolved on this issue,” Tammy Baldwin, the newly elected openly gay Senator from Wisconsin told MSNBC.) He will also need to speak to the issue of gay-marriage equality and how it impacts gay military families who are among those most affected by the Defense of Marriage Act, under review this term by the Supreme Court.

I hope that this issue is one that Obama will press Hagel on. I also wish that Obama had considered  more carefully whether it was a good idea to put a man in control of the Defense Department who had voted consistently against gay rights and made offensive anti-gay remarks about a gay man nominated to be an ambassador.