DIRELAND

February 22, 2010

SNCC's 50th ANNIVERSARY--A SALUTE FROM VETERAN SDSers

A 50th Anniversary Conference of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) will be held from April 15-18 in Raleigh, North Carolina. For those of you too young to remember, SNCC was the cutting edge of the '60s civil rights movement, and played an absolutely critical and courageous role in building that movement and in winning its many successes.

The work of SNCC has been recounted in dozens of books -- among those I heartily recommend are my old friend Joanne Grant's biography of Ella Baker (right), the woman who inspired SNCC  ("Ella Baker: Freedom Bound" -- John Wiley & Sons, 1998), whom I was honored to have met on several occasions; the first volume of Taylor Branch's 3-volume Pulitizer Prize-winning history of the civil rights movement, "Parting the Waters: America and the King Years, 1954-1963 (Simon and Schuster, 1989); and "Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement" by former SNCC chairman and now Congressman John Lewis (Harvest Books, 1999); and, of course, the late, great Howard Zinn's "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (South End Press, 2002). You can find a brief history of SNCC's vital early years on the anniversary conference's web site by clicking here.

In the early 60s as a teenager, I was part of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was then a solid SNCC ally (I served on the SDS National Council and also on the national staff for awhile at a subsistence wage). The story of those early years of SDS is told in the documentary "Rebels With a Cause," directed by an old SDS colleague of mine, Helen Garvey. In those years, we SDSers participated in many SNCC conferences, actions, demonstrations and boycotts, and those of us in the North mobilized support for the SNCC workers in the South. I'm proud to say I marched on many a SNCC picket line, and was even arrested along with hundreds of others in a SNCC-sponsored mass civil disobedience action to desegregate an amusement park in Maryland. But my tiny contribution was nothing compared to the life-risking work of SNCC members on the front lines in the Deep South to bring down the Jim Crow system of segregation of the races.

In connection with SNCC's upcoming 50th anniversary conference, a group of surviving former SDS members has taken out a full-page ad in the conference's journal to honor our comrades in SNCC and its historically important work (this ad was organized by my old SDS comrade Danny Millstone, who has also created a Facebook page for former SDSers where one can find contact information for many of them, which you can access by clicking here.) The ad reads:

"Veterans of the Students for a Democratic Society salute the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: the struggle continues and we are still with you after all these years."

Here is a list of those of us who paid for and signed this tribute to SNCC:

Jane Adams

Ted Auerbach

Barry Bluestone

Heather & Paul Booth

Tom Canterbury

Rachel Brown Cowan

Carl Davidson

Thorne Dreyer

Martin Elsbach

Alice Embree

Dick & Mickey Flacks

Helen Garvy

Karen Gellen

Todd Gitlin

Neal Gosman

Alan Haber

Barbara Haber

Skipper Hammond

Tom Hayden

Janet Heinritz-Canterbury

Chris Horton

Doug Ireland

Michael James

Barbara Joye

Harlon Joye

C. Clark Kissinger

Fred Klonsky

Michael & Susan Klonsky

Mark A. Lause

Margaret Leahy

Sharon Jeffery Lehrer

Jessie Lemisch

Charles Levenstein

Roger Lippman

Steve Max

Ken McEldowney

Don McKelvey

Danny Millstone

Jim Monsonis

Sarah Murphy

Tim Murphy

Robert M. Nelson

Robby Newton

Michael David Nolan

Robert Pardun

Bruce Pech

Bill & Jane Phillips

David Rose

Robert J.S. “Bob” Ross

Richard Rothstein

Vivian Leburg Rothstein

Jay Schaffner

Mark J. Scher

Mike Seliger

Bob Simpson

Jim Skillman

Jimmy Tarlau

Gerry Tenney

Sue Thrasher

Bob Tomashevsky

Monte Wasch

Naomi Weisstein,

Jim Williams

Lee Webb

Marilyn Webb

Jim Zarichny

Bob Zellner

 

 

 

Political Match Wanted:

Somewhat g rizzled but determined progressives seek

struggles for justice. Need a lefty? Search for us at

“SDS

 

Posted by Doug Ireland at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 19, 2010

MUSLIM CLERICS DRIVE KENYA'S ANTI-GAY RIOTS

I wrote the following report for Gay City News, New York's largest queer newspaper:

In the coastal town of Mtwapa in Kenya’s Kilifi district, media hysteria and outrage by clerics over a non-existent gay wedding whipped up mob violence that began on February 12, unleashing a house-to-house witch hunt by anti-gay vigilantes, street attacks targeting gay men, the sacking of an AIDS-fighting medical center, and a widening wave of ultra-homophobic national media coverage.

Many gay men have gone into hiding or fled the area.

From Nairobi, the nation’s capital, Denis Nzioka, a prominent 24-year-old gay activist, told Gay City News, “Ever since the outburst of violence in Mtwapa, gay people have had to fear for their lives. Vigilante groups are hunting down gay men, going door to door, and anyone who is overly flamboyant is attacked in the street.”

According to an internal report jointly prepared by on-scene representatives of both the leading Kenyan queer group, the two-year-old Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK), and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), a non-governmental organization formed two decades ago, the wave of anti-gay violence had Kafkaesque origins in a false rumor about a gay wedding supposedly planned for February 12.

“There is even a suggestion that it was a planted story,” said the GALCK-KHRC report, adding, “In any case, the most repeated version is that about two weeks ago a well-known and popular gay man in the Mtwapa area went to a barbershop for a haircut. When one of the barbers commented that his hair looked really nice and asked him where was going, he responded jokingly that he was going to get married. However, the barber took it seriously and went to his local mosque and reported that there was a planned gay wedding set for Friday, February 12 in Mtwapa.”

That mosque’s imam then announced the so-called “wedding” to his congregation and instructed his flock to begin monitoring any community gatherings to insure that no gay weddings could take place.

After this, “a local radio station, Kaya FM, picked up the story and started a series of programs on gays,” according to the GALCK-KHRC report, which Nzioka told this reporter included phone-in talk shows filled with homophobic discourse and incitements to violence.

“Kaya FM presents in Swahili and many of the Minikenda languages, and therefore has a real grassroots reach,” the report said, adding, “The main focus of the discussions was the impending ‘wedding’ of two men in Mtwapa. Other local radio stations also picked up the story, including Baraka FM, Rahma FM, and ultimately national radio stations including Kiss and Classic FM.”

Five days before the date of the alleged wedding, “many of the muftis and imams discussed the impending wedding during Friday prayers and asked the community to be vigilant against homosexuals. They told their congregants to demonstrate and to flush out homosexuals from the midst of Mtwapa and to ensure that no gay wedding took place,” the GALCK-KHRC report declared.

Nzioka told this reporter, “Mtwapa is predominantly Muslim, and the imams have a lot of power and influence there.”

Some 60 percent of Kenya’s Muslim population lives in the coastal area where Mtwapa is located. Kenya is roughly 10 percent Muslim, 33 percent Roman Catholic, and 45 percent Protestant, according to the country’s entry in the CIA World Factbook.

As a harbinger of things to come, on the evening of the February 7, following anti-gay preachings in Muslim mosques, a group of young men invaded Kalifornia, the main gay club in Mtwapa, and while dancing warned in the form of a song, “Gays have no joy and this time round they will have no joy or happiness for them.” In the days that followed, calls were heard from rioters to burn down Kalifornia.

On February 11, a homophobic press conference condemning the next day’s purported wedding was held by Sheikh Ali Hussein, regional coordinator of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya (CIPK), together with Bishop Lawrence Chai, regional representative of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK).

According to a story in the Daily Nation about the press conference, “The clerics claimed that a large number of youths were being recruited into gay clubs and warned that ‘God is about to punish the fastest growing town in the Coast region. Come night, come day, we shall not allow that marriage to be conducted in this town tomorrow. We shall stand firm to flush out gays who throng this town every weekend from all corners of this country,’ the religious leaders said.”

The two clerics “said they had given the government seven days to close down night clubs they accused of fuelling homosexuality in the town,” the Daily Nation reported, adding that the two “asked the government to ‘save the country from the shame of being used to conduct a marriage between people of the same sex.’ They also warned the owner of a building in the town, who was allegedly renting rooms only to homosexuals, to evict them or face their wrath. They gave him a seven-day ultimatum to throw out tenants.”

The two clerics also denounced the Mtwapa clinic run by the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), a large national organization with 750 staff members nationwide that runs a research program co-sponsored by Britain’s Oxford University. The clinic has an AIDS program for counseling and treating men who have sex with men.

Sheikh Hussein and Bishop Chai demanded that the government investigate the KEMRI clinic for providing services to homosexuals.

“How can a state institution be involved on the pretext of providing counseling to these criminals?,” the two clerics said, according to the Daily Nation, and they added, “We ask that the government shut it down with immediate effect or we will descend on its officials.”

The day after this inflammatory press conference, a well-organized mob of some 200 to 300 people armed with sticks, stones, and other weapons, and led by a vigilante leader named Faridi surrounded the KEMRI clinic, which was alleged to be the site of the non-existent wedding, and demanded that all the “shogas” come out of the building. “Shoga” is a Swahili word used as a pejorative against homosexuals — the equivalent of “faggot” — but also by women when referring to their close female friends.

Faridi, the vigilante leader, entered the clinic accompanied by police officers and confronted a staff member wearing a World AIDS Day T-shirt with a pink triangle that read “Condoms prevent AIDS” in Swahili. The vigilante is reported to have said, “This man is a shoga,” and at his demand, the police arrested him. Another KEMRI staffer was arrested later, also at Faridi’s insistence.

Nzioka told Gay City News that the KEMRI clinic was subsequently sacked, with material including computers destroyed, and was forced to shut down. This disruption of the clinic’s work means that many HIV-positive people who access care and treatment there have not been able to get their medications for days, which has serious health consequences for them.

Later that same day, “after Friday prayers” in Mtwapa’s mosques, “mobs of individuals went to the homes of suspected homosexuals looking for them,” said the GALCK-KHRC report, which also recounted speeches to a large mob that had gathered outside the local police station. Sheikh Hussein addressed the crowd in a manner “that was inciting, and he kept talking about Sodom and Gomorrah and the need to root out all homosexuals from the Mtwapa area,” the report said.

A former member of Kenya’s parliament, Omar Masumbuko, was one of several politicians who also addressed the mob. “He said that homosexuality must be stopped and every means used to make that happen,” according to the GALCK-KHRC report. “He told the crowd they should not even bother to bring the homosexuals they find to the police station but should take care of the issue themselves,”

Sodomy and sex “against the order of nature” are crimes in Kenya, punishable by ten years in prison, under a law inherited from the period of British colonial rule, which ended in 1963.

February 12 was punctuated by numerous attacks on gay people. At 8 that morning, before leading the mob attack on the KEMRI clinic, Faridi was joined by police in storming and ransacking the home of a gay man, who was arrested along with a friend who was visiting from abroad. While searching the guest’s luggage, they found jewelry that included some rings. Faridi immediately said that these were the rings for the intended wedding.

In a separate incident, a 23-year-old security guard was descending from a bus heading toward the center of Mtwapa when he was set upon by a mob that threatened him with death and beat him senseless. A female sex worker tried to protect him with her body and yelled at the crowd that they can’t kill people like that and that the man had not done anything, but the mob doused the man with kerosene, preparing to burn him alive. At this point the police arrived, but instead of arresting anyone in the mob, they arrested the man it had attacked. The bloodied, dazed man was incarcerated and denied medical attention.

The following day, a volunteer at the KEMRI clinic was attacked by a mob, which chanted that it was actually his wedding they had disrupted. The man was severely beaten and burnt with cigarette butts. As the mob prepared to douse the man with kerosene, he too was arrested. After his arrest, a mob attempted to attack the Mtwapa police station but was repulsed with tear gas.

In total, six men presumed to be gay were arrested, some of them forced to undergo medical examinations for evidence of sodomy, and all were scheduled for a court appearance on February 15. But Nzioka told this reporter that, after intervention by an attorney provided by KHRC, all six were released from custody, and have now fled the area. Ironically, notes Nzioka, all the men arrested were Muslims.

Nzioka also said that the wave of anti-gay violence and protests in Mtwapa had received “huge” publicity in all the national media, particularly radio and television, but that “all of it was, sadly, very, very homophobic,” and that the media had utterly failed to reach out to representatives of the gay community. Instead, he said, gay-baiting commentaries and reactions from imams and other religious and anti-gay leaders were featured.

Asked by Gay City News if the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) was sending a staff member to Kenya from its branch office in Johannesburg, South Africa, the organization’s executive director, Cary Alan Johnson, replied in an e-mail, “We are not sending a staff member to Kenya at this point, as we have full confidence in the local LGBT movement, which is grouped together under the banner of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) to respond to the situation. Also, a number of national and local mainstream human rights partners, particularly the Kenya Human Rights Coalition, are engaging with the clear recognition that an attack on the rights of individuals based on their sexual orientation or gender identity is an attack on the freedoms of all Kenyan citizens.”

GALCK is not a membership organization but an alliance of five other groups — Ishtar, a health group for men who have sex with men; Gaykenya.com, a web site; Minority Women in Action, a lesbian group; the Gender Education and Advocacy Project (GEAP), a group for transgendered and intersex people; and The Other Man in Kenya (TOMIKI), a social network of gay professionals in the medical, legal, and other fields, most of whom, Nzioka said, are “very discreet.”

The consciousness informing at least some in GALCK’s leadership has raised concerns. In a statement demanding government protection for gays published on the group’s website, its general manager, David Kuria, wrote, “We also call upon the religious leaders in Kenya to appreciate that compulsory heterosexuality is not the way to enforce their religion. GALCK members are willing to enter into dialogue with them, and if they truly have a cure for homosexuality, then we are most happy to take it, BUT NOT UNDER CONDITIONS OF DURESS.”

Since the American Psychiatric Association and most of its Western peer groups have not only completely discredited the notion that there can be a “cure” for homosexuality, but also affirmed that attempting to inflict such a “cure” on those with a same-sex orientation can be extremely harmful psychologically, it is quite disturbing to see the leader of a gay group like GALCK say that his members would be “happy to take” such a so-called cure if available.

Kuria could not be reached for comment by press time.

GALCK has five paid staff members and, Nzioka told this reporter, receives the bulk of its funding from LLH, the Norwegian LGBT Association.

There is no immediate prospect of repeal of the anti-gay sodomy statute in Kenya. Nzioka told Gay City News that Kenya’s gay community has “copiously” inundated the experts drafting a new national constitution with documents supporting the repeal of anti-gay laws and the extension of human rights to LGBT people, but that the committee has turned a deaf ear, and “has even buckled under to homophobia by removing a section which said that ‘every person has a right to start a family,’ which was interpreted as giving gays the right to have or adopt children.”

Moreover, said Nzioka, while there are a handful of friendly elected public officials and politicians with whom queer groups are in contact, “all are secretive, very discreet” about their support for gay rights and there is no organized evidence of that support in the national parliament.

Meanwhile, the Mtawapa witch-hunt shows no signs of letting up: at the beginning of this week, Sheikh Hussein launched radio appeals for a mass anti-gay demonstration in Mtawapa on February 19.

A video report on the Mtwapa incidents from Kenya’s NTV is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLM0vagfOgY&feature=player_embedded. The web site of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) is at http://galck.org/index.php. Gaykenya is at http://www.gaykenya.com. The Kenya Human Rights Commission is at http://www.khrc.or.ke/.

Posted by Doug Ireland at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 13, 2010

PRESIDENT PALIN? THE NIGHTMARE... My latest column for BAKCHICH

My weekly columns for the feisty French political-investigative weekly BAKCHICH are no longer being posted on the magazine's daily web site, as my editors  want them exclusively to help promote the newly-relaunched and re-designed print edition. But so many online readers have written to say they miss these columns that from time to time I'll put the important ones up here on DIRELAND. Sorry, they're written in French, and I haven't time to translate them. Here's my latest column, which appears in this week's print edition of BAKCHICH:

Vous vous dites qu'une écervelée comme Sarah Palin ne peut pas être élue présidente des États-Unis? Erreur !

Début février, Palin a fait un triomphe à la première convention nationale du Tea Party, le nouveau mouvement populiste de droite et anti-Washington qui revendique déjà 6 millions de militants, et dont elle est dorénavant la porte-parole. Les délégués ont scandé « Run, Sarah, Run ! » pour l'encourager à se présenter à la Maison Blanche en 2012. Et pour la première fois, l'éphémère gouverneur de l'Alaska a déclaré, en clair, « J'irai si c'est bon pour le pays ».

Déjà en tête des présidentiables républicains dans tous les sondages, Palin est favorite dans la course à la nomination pour une simple raison technique : les républicains utilisent le système du « winner take all» c'est-à-dire que dans chaque état le vainqueur aux voix rafle tous les délégués de cet état. Parmi trois ou quatre candidats, Palin pourrait aisément l'emporter avec 30% ou 35% des voix dans une primaire. C'est le cas de la Californie -où un tiers des électeurs s'identifie avec le Tea Party- ou de l'Ohio, où Palin finance les campagnes de ses candidats républicains locaux préférés. Ajoutez-y trois ou quatre gros états similaires, les plus petits états sudistes et ceux de la « Bible Belt » (la "ceinture de la Bible" de l'Amérique profonde où elle est archi-populaire), et elle sera la nominée des républicains.

Vous dites que contre Obama elle n'aura aucune chance ? Faux ! Car outre les candidats des deux grands partis, il est presque certain que Michael Bloomberg, le maire multimilliardaire de New York, sera lui-même en lice sur un ticket autonome. En 2008, il était prêt à déclarer sa candidature à la Maison Blanche, mais s'était désisté après le succès d'Obama auprès des électeurs indépendants.

Aujourd'hui la donne a changé : les indépendants désertent Obama en masse, et Bloomberg, conservateur du point de vue fiscal mais progressiste sur l'avortement ou le mariage gay, est en phase avec ces centristes. De plus, il n'est pas de la culture washingtonienne si honnie par la masse des électeurs, qui considèrent au contraire que Bloomberg est trop riche pour être corrompu, et aiment l'idée d'un entrepreneur à succès à la tête d'un pays en pleine crise économique. Bloomberg prendra davantage de voix à Obama qu'à Palin, et celle-ci pourrait être élue présidente avec 35% ou 40% des suffrages, un seuil à sa portée dans un pays de plus en plus à droite.

Obama sent venir l'incendie populiste : il a admis à la télévision qu'il pourrait n'avoir qu'un seul mandat. Palin présidente ? Le cauchemar pourrait bien devenir réalité…

 

Posted by Doug Ireland at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 11, 2010

ACT UP'S BRIEF, SHINING MOMENT: a review of Deborah Gould's new history

Posted by Doug Ireland at 04:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 07, 2010

My late beloved, Hervé Couergou, speaks about his struggle with AIDS

Remembering Hervé The video below is of my late beloved Hervé Couergou, in which he speaks of his seropositivity and the AIDS virus not long before he was swept  away by it. The video was made in Paris by our dear mutual friend and brother Lionel Soukaz, the pioneering French gay filmmaker, who has only just sent it to me -- it's an extract from  testimonies from 30 years of AIDS which he is compiling in a video journal. For me, watching this video of Hervé is deeply moving and reduces me to tears each time; but it is also a reminder of his sweetness and courage which I'm so glad to have as a souvenir of our years together. How I miss him! Thanks, dear Lio.

For more information on Lionel Soukaz' video journal, a work in progress, contact him via Facebook or directly at lionel.soukaz@sfr.fr 

Posted by Doug Ireland at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 05, 2010

ARABS, GAYS, AND MODERNITY: HOW JOSEPH MASSAD PROMOTES HOMOPHOBIA

Posted by Doug Ireland at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 28, 2010

NO EXECUTIONS IN IRAN: A NEW CAMPAIGN

Last month I wrote an article for Gay City News about 12 Iranian youths now threatened with or sentenced to execution for "sodomy." Now I've just received the following press release from my friend Arsham Parsi, the Iranian gay activist and founder of the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees:

Today, five human rights advocacy groups in five Western nations announced the official launching of the 346 No Executions campaign, a coordinated worldwide effort to inspire at least 346 citizens in each member nation to submit letters of petition to their respective foreign ministries, specifically requesting that diplomatic pressure be applied to the government of Iran to abolish its death penalty. The Iranian regime routinely carries out government-sanctioned executions in arbitrary, capricious and inhumane fashion to homosexuals, women, young girls, religious minorities, minors and now Green protesters, all of which are in defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Iran is a signatory. 

The five participating groups in the 346 No Executions campaign to date are: The Iranian Homosexual Human Rights Councils (Canada, United States), OutRage! (United Kingdom), The Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation (Germany) and the Everyone Group (Italy). The participants hope to recruit more human rights groups in other countries to the campaign as word spreads. '346' is derived from the official figure of executions carried out in Iran in 2008, according to the latest Amnesty International report.


Mr. Arsham Parsi (right), who represents the campaign as communications director of the Iranian Homosexual Human Rights Councils, recently stated that AI's official figure of 346 does not accurately reflect the actual number of executions carried out annually by the Iranian regime:


"Three-hundred and forty-six is a conservative estimate," Mr. Parsi stated in a recent interview. "The unofficial number is likely much higher. Iran must stop taking innocent lives in such cavalier, arbitrary and brutal ways. Our campaign's mission is to petition member governments to apply diplomatic pressure on Iran to cease and desist with these barbaric and unjust executions.


"It is the express goal of the 346 No Executions campaign to bring these arbitrary executions in Iran to an end. We seek to do this through letters of petition and by expanding the campaign to other nations, particularly in the European Union. Many EU member states conduct a great deal of commercial trade with Iran, yet the EU is also signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This dichotomy between principles and actions represents a clear conflict of interest in the EU vis-a-vis trade with Iran and the fundamental human rights EU member nations swore to uphold in the Universal Declaration.


"It is our hope that these letters of petition will compel as many governments as possible to address the situation in Iran, and will as a result apply diplomatic pressure on the regime to uphold its own legal, moral and human rights obligations under the Universal Declaration. We also hope that by increasing awareness of this intolerable situation in Iran to concerned citizens and human rights advocacy groups around the globe, that even more governments will pressure Iran. There is great strength in numbers."


For more information on the 346 No Executions Campaign, members of the press and the media are welcome to inquire further at

info@noexecution.com and www.noexecution.com


If you are a member of a human rights organization or NGO and would like launch your own 346 No Executions campaign in your country, we will gladly assist you. Please contact Mr. Arsham Parsi direct at info@noexecutions.com.

Posted by Doug Ireland at 02:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 27, 2010

Manuel Ramos Otero--a neglected queer writer

I wrote the following article for Gay City News, New York City's largest queer weekly:

“I couldn’t stand the repressive atmosphere of Puerto Rico,” the gay writer Manuel Ramos Otero once told an interviewer in explaining his decision to move from the island. “I had realized that New York was a city where I could live without feeling persecuted all the time. In Puerto Rico, I felt too much persecution because of the openness of my sexuality.”

Ramos Otero (1948-1990, photo left), considered one of the most significant modern writers in Puerto Rico’s rich century and a half literary history, put his homosexuality at the center of his poetry and fiction. Yet his name is virtually unknown to students of modern gay literature because so little of it has been translated.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a self-described “gay Puerto Rican scholar, writer, and activist” who teaches Latina/o Studies at the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan, performs a service by rescuing Ramos Otero from this undeserved obscurity in his new book, “Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Disapora.” He devotes nearly a third of his book to Ramos Otero.

La Fountain-Stokes writes that Ramos Otero’s work is even “overlooked in Latin America because of the peripheral status of Puerto Rico, marginalized in the United States because of the author’s racialized, subaltern, or colonial Puerto Ricanness and Spanish-language use; belittled in the Caribbean because of the author’s homosexuality and exile up north; and looked upon with suspicion everywhere because of his openly militant gay liberationist and feminist politics.”

In one cycle of poems entitled “Epitafios” (“Epitaphs”), included in Ramos Otero’s 1985 collection “El libro de la muerte” (“The Book of Death”), the self-exiled island poet has verses dedicated to such gay literary icons as Federico Garcia Lorca, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Constantine Cavafy, and, above all, the great Spanish poet Luis Cernada, whom La Fountain-Stokes identifies as “one of Ramos Otero’s most important literary precursors” and makes central to his analysis of the Puerto Rican’s work.

Cernada, who took his inspiration from another queer icon, André Gide, was part of Spain’s so-called “Generation of ’27” of writers and artists, which included Lorca, who emerged prominently in the mid to late 1920s; in fact, it was in ’27 that Cernada published his bold collection “Los Placeres Prohibidos” (“Forbidden Pleasures”), a surrealist exploration of same-sex desire. One of his gay-themed poems was cited by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in his 2005 speech to the Spanish Parliament on the day it legalized gay marriage, undoubtedy the most remarkable speech in favor of full equality for those with same-sex hearts ever delivered by a head of government anywhere. Cernada chose exile from Franco’s fascist dictatorship after the assassination of Lorca and took himself to France, Scotland, and California before finally settling in Mexico.

Ramos Otero moved to New York City to flee Puerto Rican homophobia the year before Stonewall, living there until his death from AIDS in 1990. He taught at Rutgers, York College, and Lehman College and founded a small (and short-lived) publishing house, El libro viaje (The Book Trip), which published his only and “highly experimental” novel, the 1976 “La novelabingo” (“The Bingo Novel”).

In an essay on Cernada, Ramos Otero wrote that “his poetic vocation always occurs in the margin and comes from the margin, from the border between the truths that feed his desire from an existence stuck in tradition.” Ramos Otero’s fiction is also located in the margins of society. His mid-’70s short story “Historia ejemplar del esclavo y el senor” (“Exemplary Story of the Slave and the Master”), about gay sado-masochism, created one of “the most notorious scandals in Puerto Rican literary history,” according to La Fountain-Stokes.

To further illustrate the marginality at the heart of Ramos Otero’s work, La Fountain-Stokes provides lengthy synopses and analyses of his short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and frequently located at the edges of New York’s gay sub-culture, a world of drugs, hustlers, prostitution, and the dark sexual playgrounds that were the rotting piers of the Greenwich Village-Chelsea waterfront in the ’70s and ’80s.

Another of La Fountain-Stokes’ major subjects, the lesbian poet, scholar, and human rights activist Luz Maria Umpierre, like Ramos Otero also migrated to New York while in her 20s, in 1974. She has said, “Like the majority of Puerto Rican gay and lesbian writers in the USA, I left because of persecution — even from the police — for my sexual preference.” But she did not come out in print until relatively late, in her “dramatic” 1987 fourth poetry collection, “The Margarita Poems.” Before that, she concentrated her work on community poverty and the working class, and the condition of women in general.

Some of La Fountain-Stokes’ readings of Umpierre’s poetry are rather contestable. Her poem “Maria Christina,” he writes, “seems an authorial self-projection of Umpierre,” and regarding the line “I do fix all leaks in my faucets,” he says that this “phrase can be seen as an oblique allusion to masturbation, yet Umpierre has stated that it is not a sexual metaphor but rather a reference to women’s technical mastery and skills.” Well, surely she should know better, shouldn’t she?

The filmmakers Rose Troche (“Go Fish,” “Bedrooms and Hallways,” “The Safety of Objects”) and Frances Negron-Muntaner (“Brincado el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican”) and the cartoonist, writer, and performance artist Erika Lopez (whose fiction includes “Lap Dancing for Mommy” and “Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat/La otra carne blanca”) get lumped together in one chapter as “three diasporic Puerto Rican queer women artists who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s.”

And the book also looks briefly at the work of two other performance artists — Arthur Aviles, a former lover of the noted choreographer Bill T. Jones and a member of his dance troop, who was hailed by the New York Times in 2003 as “one of the great modern dancers of the last 15 years” and went on to found his own avant-garde Arthur Aviles Typical Theater, which stages “dance-plays” at its home in the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance; and Elizabeth Marrero, whose one-woman shows have “a variety of characters in a style reminiscent of John Leguizamo’s early work, but with a butch Puerto Rican lesbian twist.”

I was looking forward to reading “Queer Ricans,” but was greatly disappointed. This book is essentially La Fountain-Stokes’ PhD thesis, and has all the faults of the worst of the genre — it is larded with arcane academic buzzwords and concepts; filled with name-dropping of the work of obscure scholars designed to display the graduate student’s erudition but whose content goes unexplained; and has many prolix sentences and paragraphs so embarrassingly bad in their construction as to make one weep for the dead trees sacrificed to this book’s publication. Although he is the author of a recently published book of short stories, “Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails” (Bilingual Press, 2009), in “Queer Ricans” he displays little grasp of narrative and his prose is often quite heavy slogging indeed.

Nor can the book be taken as a survey of all that is best in what one critic has called “Diasporican” queer culture. For example, mentioned only in passing are such major queer Puerto Rican writers as Edwin Sanchez, arguably the most important gay Puerto Rican playwright currently working in the American theater (his “Clean” won the American Theater Critics’ 1995 award for Best New Play); the bisexual playwright Miguel Piñero (1946-1988), whose life was portrayed in Cuban-American director Leon Ichaso’s 2001 Hollywood film “Piñero” with Benjamin Bratt in the title role; or the bisexual poet and anthologist Miguel Algarin (b. 1941), founder of the renowned Nuyorican Poets Café, where he still serves as executive producer, and whose acclaimed 1997 collection of poems, “Love is Hard Work,” chronicles his living with HIV. Aldo Alvarez, the short-story writer who edits the well-regarded online queer fiction magazine Blithe House Quarterly (blithe.com/), is mentioned only in an obscure footnote.

Finally, the horrific November 2009 murder in Puerto Rico of the 19-year college student and gay activist Jorge Steven López Mercado, who was beheaded, castrated, and burned in a hate crime, shows that the violent homophobia that drove so many queer writers from the island is still much too rampant, although La Fountain-Stokes’ book is seriously blind to this fact. But what has changed in Puerto Rico is the existence of a large and vibrant LGBT movement that responded to young López Mercado’s assassination with an enormous demonstration in San Juan that drew tens of thousands of participants. Curiously for a self-described “activist,” La Fountain-Stokes in his book shunts aside the crucial role of Puerto Rican queer activism both there and here in creating the public space and audience for the cultural productions he chronicles.

For further exploration of good Puerto Rican queer writing, anyone lucky enough to read Spanish would do well to obtain a copy of the first-ever Puerto Rican LGBT anthology, “Los Otros Cuerpos: Antologia de Tematica Gay, Lesbica y Queer Desde Puerto Rico y Su Diaspora,” edited by David Caleb Acevedo (Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 2007). It is still in print but unfortunately not sold by Amazon, so it must be ordered from bookstores in Puerto Rico like Liberia Isla (http://libreriaisla.com/mm5/merchant.mvc). It includes work by Ramos Otero, Moises Agosto, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Luz María Umpierre, and Nemir Matos-Cintrón.

Posted by Doug Ireland at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 21, 2010

PETER TATCHELL'S IRONIC AWARD

Peter Tatchell (left) is not only Britain's best-known gay rights activist as the leader of the militant queer activist group OutRage!, for 40 years he's been an indefatigable international human rights campaigner for oppressed peoples all over the world, making important contributions to the fight for liberty in Iran, Russia, Baluchistan, Uganda, Iraq, Somaliland, West Papua, Sudan, Palestine and Saudi Arabia. And when word came this week that my friend Peter had been voted "Liberal Voice of the Year" by members of Britain's Liberal Democrats, the UK's third largest political party (with 63 seats in parliament), I could not help but chuckle at the irony.

Why? Because in 1983, Peter was gay-baited out of winning a seat in parliament by the Liberals (the Liberal Democrats' predecessor.)

Here's the story. That year, Peter Tatchell was the parliamentary candidate of the British Labour Party in by-election in a constituency known as Southwark and Bermodsey, and stood a decent chance of election. His main opponent was Liberal candidadte Simon Hughes, and the Liberals waged what Gay News, at the time Britain's largest gay paper, called ""the dirtiest and most notorious by-election in British political history," marked by noxious homophobic gay-baiting of Tatchell. Hughes, whom his party's campaign literature promoted as the "straight choice" -- the double entendre was clear to everyone -- won this dirty election with 57% of the vote.

Well, 23 years later, it turned out that Tatchell had been beaten by a gay-baiting closetcase. Hughes (right), still in parliament and running in 2006 for leader of the Liberal Democrats (as his party was by then known) admitted his lengthy same-sex past  after he was outed by the tabloids, which found charges on Hughes' credit cards for a gay chatline called ManTalk, and declared "I'm bi-sexual." Not only that, Hughes apologized on the BBC for the homophobic smear campaign against Tatchell some two and a half decades before to which he owed his parliamentary career.

In a remarkable display of grace and principle, Tatchell not only accepted Hughes' apology, he issued a statement  endorsing his former electoral opponent in the Liberal Democrats' leadership contest as "the contender most likely to move the Liberal Democrats in a progressive direction." In the same statement, Tatchell added: "Since his election, Simon has redeemed himself by voting for gay equality. That's all that matters now. He should be judged on his policies, not on his private life."

A further irony in Tatchell's having been voted "Liberal Voice of the Year" by the Liberal Democrats' members is that Peter is not a member of their party at all, but a left-wing Green Party activist.

In what I consider a tragedy, last month Peter Tatchell was forced by head injuries he'd received in beatings during his human rights work and gay activism to withdraw as the Green Party's candidate for parliament from a constituency in the university town of Oxford, where Tatchell is quite popular, and where the Greens won the most votes of any party in the last election. Meaning he had a real shot at being elected in the parliamentary elections later this year.

The Guardian, in reporting Tatchell's withdrawal from the parliamentary contest under the headline "How Constant Beatings Have Caught Up With Campaigner Peter Tatchell,"  noted that, "After surviving more than 300 physical attacks, two stabbing attempts, a live bullet posted through his door and a succession of vicious beatings that have left him mildly brain-damaged, Peter Tatchell must be one of the only people in the world who could still consider himself fortunate. 'I'm lucky,' he insists with the quiet nonchalance of someone discussing the weather. 'What helps me cope is to put things in perspective. My injuries pale in comparison to the pro-democracy campaigners in Iran or the environmentalists in Russia or the political activists in Zimbabwe. If I was doing what they are doing, I'd be dead.'"

In two of the most severe attacks on Tatchell, the physically fearless militant activist made headlines in 2001 when he was beaten unconscious by bodyguards of Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe in Brussels as he tried to make a citizen's arrest of the homophobic strongman under the 1984 UN Convention against torture for having ordered the torture of two journalists and inflicted similar treatment on countless political opponents (see The Guardian's account at the time, "Mugabe Men Beat Up Tatchell.")  Mugabe is a ruthless tyrant who has used violence and imprisonment against political opponents. He is also a notorious anti-gay demagogue - he has said that gays and lesbians"are worse than pigs and dogs" - who criminalized homosexuality and authorized his political gangs to engage in street lynchings of gay Zimbabweans. The beating at the hands of Mugabe's thugs left Tatchell with permanent damage in one eye and paralyzed down his left side for several days. (Photo right: Tatchell lies unconscious after his beating by Mugabe's thugs.)

Then, in 2007, when Tatchell went to Moscow to support the courageous young Russian lawyer and gay activist Nikolai Alexeyev and his comrades in their attempt to hold a banned Moscow Gay Pride demonstration, Tatchell was again beaten in the head by one of the horde of young neo-nazi goons who violently attacked the gay rights activists with the collusion of the Moscow police (see my report for Gay City News on these 2007 events, "The Agony of Moscow Pride.")  In the photo from Moscow at right, one of thpse fascist thugs raises his fist as he prepares to punch Tatchell in the head.

The beating at Moscow Gay Pride was one too many for Tatchell, who has never really recovered and has suffered ever since from permanent severe symptoms of concussion, including vision, memory, concentration, balance and co-ordination difficulties. His injuries were further exacerbated on a parliamentary campaign swing last July when the bus in which he was travelling braked suddenly and Tatchell was thrown forward, hitting his head on a metal rail. And, of course, Peter's recovery has been further impeded because he never slowed down his activist pace, despite the urging of friends (myself included) who kept begging him to take better care of himself. It would have been wonderful to see him win a seat in parliament and take his militant brand of human rights activism to the House of Commons -- but at the same time I deeply regretted his having to stand down as a candidate I was glad to see him realize that he cannot now do everthing he wished as he had in the past and continue to overtax his body.

As I wrote in a 2008 profile of Tatchell for Gay City News  after he tried to make a citizen's arrest in London of then Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharaf, "Tatchell has always been a pioneer in catalyzing international solidarity for oppressed LGBT people outside the West as well as other groups suffering political repression. In 1973 Tatchell was arrested in East Germany when he went there to help local activists stage what he says was the first public gay protest in a Communist country. In the 1980s, he traveled to Thailand to support the first wave of gay and AIDS activists in that country, and to El Salvador to highlight the violent attacks on that country's gays and lesbians amidst a bloddy civil war, during which the US gave aid to the right-wing patrons of the authoritarian government's death squads. He's traveled to Malawi to protest the semi-slave labor of children on British-owned tea estates; to New Guinea to protest the Indonesian massacre of indigenous peoples in West Papua; to Latvia for banned 2006 Gay Pride observance that were violently attacked by religious extremists; and to Memphis to confront boxer Mike Tyson after the pugilist gay-baited heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis." This is just a small part of Peter's four decades of activism.

"Is Peter Tatchell The Bravest Man in Britain?" was the headline in the excellent profile of Tatchell the Daily Mail ran last month after his withdrawal from the parliamentary race, in which it reported that "Police intelligence revealed that Tatchell was a prime assassination objective because of his persistent campaign against a group of reggae singers whose lyrics glorify violence and incite the killing of homosexuals. Tatchell had thwarted a string of concerts - at significant cost to the performers."

Tatchell always insists, as he did to me, that "I could never have done half these things without being part of a team and the support of others -- in the Gay Liberation Front in the early '70s, in OutRage! since the 1990s, plus Zimbabwean and Baloch activists and so many others." But Tatchell's attention-getting, media savvy activism and personal courage have made him a unique and globally admired figure.

The Daily Mail noted that despite his national celebrity, Peter lives in poverty: "He subsists on a tiny stipend of around £8,000 a year - the income comes from journalism and personal appearances - and lives in the same cramped South-East London council flat [meaning public low-income housing] that has been his home for 30 years. When it was targeted by arsonists, he refused to move, although flaming rags were pushed through his letterbox and lavatory window. His response, instead, was to become more intransigent. 'Friends urged me to leave, but I was determined to stand my ground. It might seem pig-headed and stupid, but I refused to let anyone force me out.'"

Now that his health is seriously damaged, Peter Tatchell needs our help to be able to hire some activist staff to aid him in his gay and human rights work. YOU CAN, AND SHOULD, MAKE A DONATION TO THE PETER TATCHELL HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN FUND via PayPal by using your credit card (the url is http://www.tatchellrightsfund.org/donations.htm)

Here's what Peter says in his appeal for help:

"As my campaigns go from strength to strength, the requests for support and solidarity grow ever greater.

"Increasingly, these requests come from all parts of the world – from isolated, persecuted individuals in small towns in Pakistan and Jamaica , and from tiny, struggling human rights groups working for democracy and social justice in Iran , Uganda , Palestine , Nepal , West Papua and Zimbabwe.

"This is putting me under unsustainable pressure. Apart from constant exhaustion and illness, I often feel deeply depressed by the sheer volume of demands and the constant crises and deadlines.

"Faced with a deluge of appeals to assist individuals, organisations and whole communities suffering persecution, I usually work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I am doing the work of three or four people.

"I often go for months without a single night off. In the middle of a big campaign, for several days I might not have a proper meal or more than three hours sleep a night.

"Without my intervention, many asylum seekers would be deported and risk arrest, torture and murder; and vulnerable gay and black prisoners in the UK jails would suffer beatings and be pushed towards suicide.

"Given this terrible suffering, it is hard to say no. The solution is not to turn away victims and activist groups requesting assistance, but to get the help I need to reduce the pressure on me and to make my campaigns more effective and long-term sustainable.

"How can one refuse, for example, to help a Muslim woman or a gay man who fears so-called honour killing?

"Almost every day brings news of further abuses. I am constantly dealing with people who have been subjected to rape, torture, imprisonment and attempted murder. Their horror stories cause me nightmares. This cannot continue.

"To ease the pressure, I need to have some time to relax and recharge – three nights off a week and one day off at the weekend.

"To ensure this, I desperately require at least two full-time paid support staff – a campaigns officer and a research and casework officer."

Help this courageous man continue his work -- make a donation by clicking here.

Posted by Doug Ireland at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 19, 2009

IRAN: 12 YOUTHS FACE EXECUTION FOR SODOMY

I wrote the following report for Gay City News, New York City's largest queer weekly:

Ten young Iranian men, including eight teenagers, are currently awaiting execution for sodomy, and two more are being re-tried on the same capital charge. And, in an exclusive interview with Gay City News, an Iranian student gay rights activist confirmed for the first time the existence of queer organizing on multiple university campuses throughout Iran.

The information about the ten youths currently under sentence of death for sodomy (lavaat in Persian) was released on November 25 in a joint appeal by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), the Iranian Queer Organization (IRQO), and COC of the Netherlands, the world’s oldest LGBT rights group, founded in 1946. The three organizations called on Western countries “with significant diplomatic and economic ties to Iran, including Germany, France, Canada, as well as the European Union, to pursue diplomatic efforts to cease these executions.”

It is extremely difficult to obtain information about death penalty cases involving homosexuality under today’s repressive theocratic regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the press is heavily censored and journalists, regime critics, and human rights advocates are routinely persecuted and arrested and where the subject of same-sex relations is officially considered a political and religious taboo. Defendants in sodomy cases are denied open trials. Last month, Human Rigths Watch, basing its finding on an Iranian newspaper report, told of the execution of two men for sodomy.

Most of the new information about the 12 defendants now threatened with execution for sodomy was provided by lawyers and activists with the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHHR) in Iran, according to Hossein Alizadeh, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for IGLHRC, while contacts in Iran provided by IRQO yielded additional information, he told Gay City News.

CHRR, founded in 2005, has become one of the most important sources of information about human rights violations in Iran and recently became the first Iranian human rights organization to officially recognize the LGBT rights struggle by creating a Queer Committee to deal with persecution of sexual minorities. (“Queer” is the translation preferred by Alizadeh and other gay Iranians for the Persian word “degar-bash,” a term meaning “different” and which embraces gays, lesbians, and transpeople.)

Hesam Misaghi, a 21-year-old leading member of CHRR’s Queer Committee, speaking through a translator by telephone from Isfahan, Iran’s third largest city, told Gay City News that this committee had been established some five months ago. The establishment of the Queer Committee by CHRR “is the sign of a new cultural awareness, because a new generation of Iranians no longer share the reactionary views of the regime with regard to sexual minorities,” said Misaghi, who courageously insisted on using his real name for the interview with this reporter. He added that “while an important part of those with this new attitude are secular, there is even a new generation of conservative Muslims who want to recognize queer rights.” Most of CHRR’s activists are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and a number of them have been arrested and harassed by security forces for their human rights work.

“We’re not afraid of criticism from other human rights organizations or from society” in taking up the cause of queers, Misaghi said. “While since the fraud-tainted elections the regime has been putting repressive pressure on all sectors of civil society, one way the government wants to prove its authority and show its muscle is by persecuting and silencing sexual minorities and other marginal groups.” The activist added that “people in all the other CHRR committees and departments cooperate fully with the Queer Committee and help out.” The Queer Committee’s activism, Misaghi said, is “empowered by students.”

Misaghi confirmed to this reporter the existence of queer organizing on a number of university campuses throughout Iran, marking the first time that a student activist has spoken openly to a Western reporter about this new development. The reason there has been no reporting outside Iran on campus queer organizing, according to the activist, is that “based on what I’ve experienced, there is great secrecy on the part of student queer activists, most of whom use aliases in their work, and in issuing public statements will do so only in the name of a group. There is no visibility, no head figure, no out activists.”

A joint statement from several campus groups and signed “Queer Students of the Iranian Universities,” issued for the December 7 nationwide commemorations of what is known as Student Day and addressed to the larger Iranian student movement, declared: “Considering that a considerable number of students are sexual minorities and the fact that many queer activists are either students or alumni of Iranian Universities, on the eve of this year’s Student Day we should embrace a more thorough meaning of human rights values that includes the rights of queers. It is also imperative that those in the Green Movement [the name given to the pro-democracy, anti-regime agitation following the fraudulent elections] who are working on the draft of Iran’s new constitution, expand their horizons and include the sexual rights and protection of sexual minorities in this document.

“The queer students of Iranian universities would like to address the Green Movement in friendship and solidarity and tell them that the respect for human rights and the rights of all citizens is above and beyond all other demands, including the desire of the leaders of the student movement to protect the [framework and the principles ] of the Islamic revolution.”

The December 7 Student Day commemorates the 1953 slaying of three students during a protest under the late shah, and this year was marked by large anti-regime demonstrations at campuses across the country, including by hundreds of students chanting anti-government slogans at Azad University in Mashhad, the city in which the hanging of two teenagers on sodomy charges in 2005 sparked world-wide protests. The demonstrators in Tehran, who chanted, “Death to the dictator” and “Do not be scared, we are all together,” were violently attacked by Basiji, the thuggish parapolice the regime employs to attack dissidents and muscularly enforce its stringent morals policy. Tear gas and even live rounds were reported to have been used, and all university campuses were surrounded by security forces. On other occasions, the Basiji have used beatings, kidnapping, and torture against queers.

Misaghi explained the queer students’ declaration by observing, “The majority of the student movement is dominated by conservative Muslims, who, even when they criticize the current regime, defend the Islamic Republic and aren’t at all sympathetic to queer rights, due to the taboo nature of homosexuality in the Islamic Republic. Leftist student groups are more inclined to support the queer struggle. But this is a zero tolerance regime, and even student critics who share its Islamist ideology are subjected to arrest and persecution.”

Misaghi noted that “as an indicator, when the Queer Committee of CHRR puts out a statement, it is the leftist groups and students of leftist tendencies who pick it up and redistribute our statement” in their blogs and literature.

The student movement as a whole has been under serious attack in recent weeks, with at least 130 students arrested as of December 9, according to Hadi Ghaemi, director of the US.-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

Misaghi told Gay City News that on Student Day he was part of a conference to talk about the student movement, but that the meeting was dispersed by riot police. When Misaghi was a second-year student at Isfahan University, he was expelled for being a member of the Baha’i faith, a monotheistic religion founded in 19th century Persia that emphasizes the spiritual unity of all humankind. The target of ferocious persecution since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Baha’ii have been subjected to a marked increase in repression since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran, including loss of employment, arrest, expulsion from universities, the sacking of their shrines, and the desecration and bulldozing of their cemeteries.

The joint statement on those facing the death penalty for sodomy by IGLHRC, IRQO, and COC noted, “In most cases, the Court convicts the defendants of sodomy charges solely on the basis of ‘the knowledge of the judge.’ According to the Iranian law, when there is not enough evidence to convict a defendant of a sexual crime, the judge may use his knowledge, in a deductive process based on the evidence that already exists, to determine whether the crime took place or not. Unfortunately, the excessive use of this principle means that rather than paying attention to evidence, the judge often sentences defendants to death based on his speculations. A number of prominent legal and religious scholars believe that such a broad application of the ‘the knowledge of the judge’ to issue death penalty for sexual crimes is in violation of the letter and the spirit of Sharia law.”

Among the dozen cases detailed in the joint statement by the three groups were the following:

Ghaseem Bashkool, 25, a third-year student of applied mathematics, was arrested along with another young man on May 31, 2007 on charges of sodomy. Both men were convicted despite an absence of credible evidence, the First District of the Criminal Court of the Ardabil province finding them guilty of sodomy and sentencing them to death. In February 2009, in an open letter on the Internet in which he pleaded for his life, Ghassem insisted that the sodomy allegation was baseless and that in the absence of any credible evidence, the judge had referred to the “knowledge of the judge” as the basis of his ruling. At the time of his letter, Ghassem had spent 20 months in Ardebil prison, but despite repeated efforts by a lawyers and human rights defenders inside Iran, his fate is currently unknown.

Mohsen Ghabrai, who was a minor at the time of his arrest, was found guilty by a Court in Shiraz of sodomy and sentenced to death. His lawyer appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence, which is expected to be carried out soon. Mohsen has consistently said he is innocent of the charges.

Mahdi Pooran, 17 years old, and three other teenagers — Hamid Taghi, Ebrahim Hamidi, and Mehdi Rezaii — were found guilty of sodomy by the Second District Criminal Court of Tabriz in July 2008, and sentenced to death. The case was based on a complaint alleging physical and sexual assault from a 19-year old man, Hojat, with a history of family feuds with the defendants. After repeatedly telling the court he had no witnesses to substantiate his charges, in the most recent court session, Hojat introduced three male relatives he said were witnesses. Given the absence of the fourth witness required under law, the court’s ruling was based on the “knowledge of the judge.”

A prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaii, who represented the four defendants, believes his clients were framed. In a post to his blog, he said that following a fistfight between his clients and a group of four young men who trespassed and damaged land owned by Hamidi’s father, the police intervened and arrested his clients, accusing them of gang rape. When his clients declared their innocence, the police officials subjected them to three days of beatings and torture, trying to force a confession from at least one of them. Failing that, the police referred the case to the court as a sodomy rape case.

After the initial hearing, the court ordered the release of the men on $10,000 bail, but it took the defendants 28 days to provide the bail and get out of jail. Fifty-five days later, during the trial, the deputy district attorney requested the death penalty for the defendants. The court sentenced the four to death, a penalty that will be carried out if the Iranian Supreme Court approves when it takes up the case at an unspecified date.

Nemat Safavi, now 19, was arrested in June 2006 at age 16 for alleged sodomy, and the Criminal Court in Ardebil sentenced him to death. But the Supreme Court overturned his sentence on March 4, 2009, and sent the case to another criminal court in Ardebil for retrial. Saeed Jalalifar, a member of CHRR who recently obtained a lawyer for Safavi, was arrested on November 30 and is still in prison.

Gay City News spoke by telephone through a translator with that lawyer, 32-year-old Masomeh Tahmasebi. She said she had been denied the files relating to Safavi’s death sentence and would only learn more about the case when she traveled next week to meet with him in Ardebil, a northwest frontier province whose former governor is President Ahmadinejad and whose population is largely made up of ethnic Azeris, who are racially persecuted by the Islamic Republic.

Tahmasebi explained that it was often very difficult for defendants in sodomy cases to find competent lawyers. “Because of the social stigma attached to sodomy cases, many lawyers are not willing to take on such cases because of fears of accusations that they might be gay themselves,” she told Gay City News. “And because of this same social shame, families often do not contact lawyers to defend the accused, so as a last resort the court assigns a lawyer pro bono, who often does not get the case until the day of the trial. So most of these sodomy cases are badly defended.”

That means, Thamasebi added, that “the only real chance left for the defendant is international human rights pressure and protest against the application of the death penalty — but often this occurs so late that the window of opportunity to prevent these executions is very small.”

In recent weeks, the Ahmadinejad regime has increased its monitoring and disruption of Internet and telephone communications in an attempt to stifle opposition and criticism, and this reporter chillingly experienced this first-hand while interviewing the two Iranians quoted here. During the interview with Thamasebi, when Ahmadinejad’s name was mentioned, the communication was abruptly terminated in mid-sentence. And in the interview with Misaghi, when the question of organizing to repeal the death penalty for sodomy was brought up, the communication was similarly cut off quite suddenly.

This reporter would like to thank Hossein Alizadeh of IGLHRC for his translation services in the preparation of this article. The English-language web site of Iran’s Committee of Human Rights Reporters is at http://chrr.us/index-en.php. To protest the impending executions for sodomy in Iran, click on iglhrc.org/cgi-bin/iowa/article/takeaction/globalactionalerts/1028.html.

Posted by Doug Ireland at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 14, 2009

HONDURAN GAY ACTIVIST WALTER TROCHEZ ASSASSINATED

Walter Trochez (BELOW), 27 years old, a well-known LGBT activist in Honduras who was
an active member of the National Resistance Front against the coup d'etat there, was assassinated on the evening of December 13, shot dead by drive-by killers. Trochez, who had already been arrested and beaten for his sexual orientation after participating in a march against the coup, had been very active recently in documenting and publicizing homophobic killings and crimes committed by the forces behind the coup, which is believed to have been the motive for his murder. He had been trailed for weeks before his murder by thugs believed to be members of the state security forces.  

In an open letter documenting this wave of political assassinations of Honduran queers he'd written last month entitled "Increase in hate crimes and homophobia towards LGTB as a result of the civic-religious-military coup in Honduras,” Trochez had written that "Once again we say it is NOT ACCEPTABLE that in these past 4 months, during such a short period, 9 transexual and gay friends were violently killed, 6 in San Pedro Sula and 3 in Tegucigalpa." At the end of this open letter, Trochez declared that "As a revolutionary, I will always defend my people, even if it takes my life”. Sadly, that's what happened. (READ THE FULL TEXT IN ENGLISH OF TROCHEZ'S OPEN LETTER HERE. Full text in Spanish of Trochez's open letter is at the end of this post).

Posted by Doug Ireland at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)