TLDEF: Queens (Trans) Woman Beaten in Bias Crime

From TLDEF:

We’re sad to bring you the news of another brutal attack on a transgender woman, this one coming during the height of LGBT Pride month. On June 19, 2009, at approximately 2:30 am, Leslie Mora was walking home from a nightclub on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens when she was accosted by two men who brutally beat her with a belt. They stopped only when a passing motorist threatened to call the police.

Throughout the attack, Leslie’s assailants called her a “faggot” in Spanish. The attack left Leslie with multiple injuries, including bruises all over her body, and stitches in her scalp. Police called to the scene found Leslie nearly naked and bleeding on the sidewalk. They also recovered a belt buckle from the assailants that was covered in blood.

We want you to know that we’re working with Leslie to ensure that the perpetrators of this attack are brought to justice.

The full story, along with other resources, photos of Leslie Mora, at TLDEF’s site.

New Hero: Biologist Matt Aresco

CNN did a condescending story about the turtles being saved in Tallahassee a little while back; the newscaster (Abbie Boudreau, I think) who delivered the story was obnoxious, unsympathetic, & completely failed to present the benefits of the project in anything resembling objectivity. Yes, she pissed me off.

But today The Washington Post did a much better job covering the story & the project.

The one question no one has asked: why did we need the road to be right there? Couldn’t we have gone around the lake altogether? Or over it? We are such arrogant bastards, assuming that what we need is the most important thing. Turtles do not interfere in our lives, but our lives end turtles’ lives on a regular basis. I saw a turtle that had been run over on a lake road near Appleton last week, and honestly there is nothing sadder: it’s not like the turtle’s got a fighting change, being the slow, lovely critters they are.

Does anyone else ever look at all the cars on the 8-lane highways we have these days and just wonder, where the hell do we think we’re going? Because we don’t seem to be getting anywhere much. One stretch of road is much like the next; one town is much the same as the next. I feel a little better knowing I use mass transit here in NYC and walk to work in Appleton, but how do you animal lovers otherwise justify driving around in your cars knowing that what you’re doing contributes to x number of violent animal deaths a year? Maybe I’m getting old, but I just can’t handle it.

You can assuage your guilt by donating to the Lake Jackson Ecopassage Project. This guy, Matt Aresco, has his priorities in order.

Iran’s Revolutionary Women

Roger Cohen followed up his column mentioning the women of Iran with a column about them entirely:

A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.

Very much worth reading – go check it out.

Pride Month: Honoring Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman has always been one of my heroes, and that’s despite the fact that she never quite said that famous quote attributed to her about dancing & revolution. Or rather, she didn’t say the t-shirt version. What she said was:

“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

Which doesn’t fit on a t-shirt as readily as “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” (If anyone can make a t-shirt out of what she actually said, I want one!)

It’s from her memoir Living My Life, Pt. 1, page 56. Definitely a book worth reading, and you can read it online, for free, at the Anarchist Archives.

She was, as many know, a pro-choice, family planning advocate (for which she was arrested several times) but what a lot of people don’t know is that she disagreed with the majority of leftist contemporaries in her outspoken support for LGBT people way back when. (She was also a free love advocate, which we might call poly these days.)

Colbert Report’s “Stonewalling”

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word – Stonewalling
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

(I got myself in trouble a long time ago for writing a short story about a lesbian teenager who went to her first support meeting at The Gay Center & who found her voice silenced by the voices of the young men around her. I called it “Stonwalled” and my gay but closeted writing professor was not happy with me about it.)

(h/t to Lena Dahlstrom)

MJ, Again

& Then there is the issue of whether Michael Jackson was trans or not. I don’t think it’s anything we can know, but it wouldn’t have surprised me, or Betty, if he had announced a transition at some point.

Goodbyes

It’s a lot of death in a week: first Ed McMahon, who we knew was ailing; then Farrah Fawcett, who was fighting her illness with bravery and in the spotlight, and then Michael Jackson – who was always ailing, invisibly.

Maybe it’s unexpected that I should admit I liked Farrah Fawcett, pinup as she as for the dumb blonde, but I was a tomboy in the 70s, and Charlie’s Angels were fantastic. They really were, in those crazy velour shorts and flippy hair. But I had the trading cards, and I remained a fan even through the Cheryl Tiegs season(s?). I became a fan of Fawcett’s when I saw her in Extremities and in Between Two Women – both of them, believe it or not, cementing what I would articulate as my first feminist awareness.

But Michael Jackson’s death is unreal, much like his life was. Keith Olbermann used the word “human” a lot tonight in talking about Jackson’s death, which is something we all need to be reminded of. He was a person, a broken, fucked-up soul, maybe wrong and bad in criminal ways, maybe just broken and sad. We don’t really know, and won’t really know, I don’t think.

As someone who loves to dance, though, there is no denying his talent: Off the Wall is a perfect gem of pop music, and it dances from track to track. I have it on vinyl from way back when – the secret perfect dance music of a punk rock child. I was a little surprised tonight to remember exactly how many “world premieres” of his videos I saw – “Thriller” I remember, as many Gen Xers do, but also “Bad” and even “Remember the Time,” which is a hokey but perfect little romantic song. It’s impossible to deny a man’s talent who was – despite your best efforts – a major soundtrack of your life. His music had something so perfectly immediate about it; I remember where I watched all of those world premieres, and I remember the first time I saw, and held, a copy of Off the Wall, and the party I was at the first time I heard the tracks on Thriller.

It’s hard to explain to younger people than me that MTV never ever showed videos by black artists before MJ (and that hip hop had its own special show in the late 80s, because hip hop was just too *whatever* to mix with the rest of what they played). & You can’t hate a man who obviously took notes on every move James Brown ever made & every sound he could make.

So goodbye to Ed, to Farrah, and to Michael. As the duo Yazoo once put it, a little early, Goodbye Seventies, too.