Video of the Day

50 Billion, the Republican answer to 50 Cent is out with his latest video, The Billionaires are in the House. Who says hip hop can't be political?

Michael Jackson v. Larry Kramer, Round 1

As a speaker at the recent Michael Jackson conference at Yale, and alum of the school, and an historian, let me respond, if that is the right word, to the absurdities of Larry Kramer.

Kramer believes queer studies exists for the purposes of "the exploration of and reclaiming of gay people's history since the beginning of America." He is free to believe this, and he is free to grant money to a university to further this goal. But he is not himself a scholar and cannot dictate the agenda of intellectual debate. He seems to know this, so he relies on using his money and temper to bully University functionaries rather than taking the trouble to actually attend the conference and debate the issues with us. If he had, he would find that queer studies has long discarded his single-issue identity politics, and that there is simply no going back.

Moving LKI to the history department, should that somewhat stodgy department accept it, would bring Mr. Kramer a rude surprise. A mere glance at the work of eminent lesbian and gay historians Lisa Duggan, Jonathan Ned Katz, Henry Abelove, and George Chauncey will show you that the field has long abandoned the "great gays in history approach", and is now engaged in precisely the kind of contextual social and cultural history, engaged with questions of class, race, and yes, gender. I more than anyone long to discover that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Like my love of Alan Turing and other gay saints like Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Michel Foucault, not to mention Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Plato, and Shakespeare, I take as much pleasure as anyone in pondering the vicissitudes and triumphs of same-gender loving men across times and cultures. But scholarship is not therapy. While this kind of recovery work will undoubtedly continue on the margins of the profession, it is no more likely that it will become the center than that the next major work in African American history will be titled "Significant Black Firsts."

Kramer believes that gay history is not "not gender studies." Too bad. Lesbian and gay studies would not exist without feminism, and Yale and the world has moved on since the days the all-male days of Kramer's reverie. Queers of the female persuasion are not the only ones who would take umbrage at Kramer's parsing of gender and sexuality into 'proper objects': the central message of gender studies all along has been that men must be understood as a gender as well. Trans studies, and the emergence of genderqueer culture and politics, forever retires any possibility of going back to the days when all the gays were men.

And white. Nowhere does Kramer acknowledge that the conference was co-sponsored by African American Studies, perhaps because to do so would acknowledge the baselessness of his claim that "every other group of people at Yale" gets the right kind of study except queers. As a black queer, is it suprising that I reject Kramer's belief that these are separable topics? We do not need an additive model of scholarship: women plus queers plus blacks plus the disabled. We need an intersectional and transformational model that helps us understand the simultaneity of vectors of difference. Easier said that done, but don't look to Larry Kramer for help in doing it.

Documentary Theater and Film

I saw Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's new political play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom a week ago at the Culture Project in Manhattan and have been meaning to write about it.

It certainly is a powerful play, based entirely on testimony given by former detainees and their families and supporters. They paint a picture of Kafkaesque horror, and really dispel any notion that this prison is a crucial part of the so-called war on terror. If anything, it seems more like a dumping ground where miscellaneous people caught up in the dragnet get sent; the truly important prisoners do not end up in Guantanamo.

My only reservation about the play as a political statement is its limited reach to an audience of the already converted. I'm not sure I can recommend it if you are already outraged by Guantanamo. You might be better off sending your $40 to some grassroots organization working to get out the vote against Bush in November.

I also saw the independent documentary The Fourth World War at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. Talk about preaching to the converted, this one preaches to the bishop. No clearer example of pre-9/11 anti-globalization thinking adamantly refusing to update itself in order to articulate, understand, and oppose the war we are actually in right now. And no, simply saying "9/11 makes our analysis even more relevant than before" doesn't count.

Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Open, an exhibit the American Friends Service Committee is touring, purports to be an eloquent portrayal of the human costs of war. When I saw it at the Judson Memorial Church in the West Village, almost 1,000 soldiers boots were lined up in neat rows, filling the room. In one corner, a smaller heap of shoes represented the many more thousands of Iraqi lives that have been lost.

As the official U.S. death count reaches 1,000, and George W. Bush continues to gain in the polls, it is time to reconsider the utility of such humanitarian approaches to war protest. The AFSC are a religious organization dedicated to what they describe as the sanctity of human life. But it ought to be painfully clear to all that appeals to the sanctity and sacredness of human life do not function in the way that the AFSC believes they do. Besides the obvious insult to Iraqi lives given in the arrangement of their exhibit (calculated no doubt to reach that mythical 'moderate' audience out there who bemoans the loss of 'our boys' but would take unction at any moral equivalence between them and faceless foreigners) there is the deeper point that the war itself has been conducted in the name of religious values, among them the sanctity of human life.

The war on terror, which provides the overarching public rationale for this administration, is of course presented as a war of life against death. Critics bemoan that terror is not an enemy, it is a tactic, and as a tactic, it can never be warred against, much less defeated. Precisely the point. In declaring an unwinnable battle, this administration does not weaken but rallies its supporters around a cause, life itself, which as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues in Homo Sacer, is that which can be killed without sanction. To misunderstand Bush and his co-religionists as somehow heretics from their faith, as peace Christians like the AFSC are obliged to, is to fail to understand that the sacredness of life is not a religious or legal but fundamentally political theory. It is not a doctrine that rashly promises to protect individual dignity no matter what the cost, but a political discourse founded upon of a zone of exception containing a bare life that can be killed.

From the Ashes

"When fire gutted Paa ya Paa art gallery in Nairobi in 1997 the owner Elimo Njau was devastated as he saw a lifetime's collection reduced to ashes. However, he never gave up. He has rebuilt it over the years to something near its past glory. MARGARETTA wa GACHERU was in residence there recently ..."

... so begins an East African Standard story about Njau and his efforts to rebuild his historic Nairobi institution. Njau has been active in arts in Kenya since the 1960s, and is still going today.

Gacheru has some pointed things to say about more recent NGO interest in East African art, and criticizes outsiders that imply that they have discovered/created an art scene in this area in the last couple years.

Point taken, but it would be a shame if recent efforts to promote Kenyan art internationally by well-meaning outsiders should be overly criticized. Its not a zero-sum game.

The Battle for New York

"It was so overwhelming the sort of blond and white and, you know, kind of, it was like many, many barbie dolls and one brain "

-- Arundhati Roy describing the Republican National Convention on Democracy Now, Thursday, Sept. 2nd.