What happens when we’re ‘over the rainbow’- and have achieved the desired LGBT reforms that we currently await, like inclusive adoption reform, same-sex marriage and overt transgender inclusion in anti-discrimination laws?

Probably we’ll start to hear the word ‘postgay’ (or ‘postlesbian’) more often. Now, I’m usually quite leery about attaching unwarranted prefixes to social movements. I seem to recall Aboriginal activist Bobbi Sykes’ sage words about ‘postcolonialism’- “What, you mean they’ve all gone home?!”  (No such luck, unfortunately). Or take that other ‘post’, ‘postfeminism.’ Wow, patriarchal social relationships have mysteriously vanished? You mean women’s economic inequality, absence of reproductive freedom and violence against women has miraculously ceased to exist?! Again, no such luck. I see the sense in referring to the achievements and successes of feminism from the sixties to nineties and perhaps the current generation of younger women take those achievements for granted, but male domination has probably acquired new and more insidious forms.

And what about the term ‘postgay/postlesbian?’ Ah. So homophobic violence has also somehow mysteriously vanished from the home, schoolyard, backstreet alleyway and elsewhere? So gay men aren’t at particular risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS and contingent discrimination, or pharmaceutical policy bottlenecks that delay new protease inhibitors or combination therapies? Granted, yes, like feminists over the last thirty years, we have much to celebrate in the western world (as well as China and India, to a lesser extent). Male homosexuality has been decriminalised, there are mostly equal ages of consent to gay sex, LGBT folk are covered by antidiscrimination laws, we have access to legal recognition of same-sex relationships and same-sex parenting, provocation defence laws have gone in Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand, and LGBT folk are entering the professions and political leadership positions.

Hence the New Statesman’s recent article on Johanna Sigurdadottir, Iceland’s newly re-elected lesbian Prime Minister and the world’s first out elected head of state. But here’s the thing- the resultant article relegated her civil partnership to a footnote, and while there were relevant questions about Iceland’s current fiscal dilemmas and the situation with that country’s recently defeated centre-right opposition party, there was no indication that Sigurdadottir was a lesbian. Or postlesbian? How did LGBT Icelanders react to her election? We simply don’t know. Disaggregating LGBT folk by relegating our sexual identities to the background isn’t good. It’s a form of neo-closetry. Normalisation should not mean obliteration of our collective identities and communities.

Postgay/postlesbian? Only in a posthomophobic world, unfortunately.

Recommended:

Alysson MacDonald: “Interview with Iceland’s Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdadottir”: New Statesman: 15.01.10: http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2010/01/gordon-brown-iceland-interview

 In Canada,  Kings Glory Fellowship, a non-denominational protestant group, had its charitable status revoked by the Charities Regulatory Agency last year (January 2009) ”for failing to file its annual registered charity information return,” although its senior minister, one Artur Pawlowski, said he understood that his organisation would be eligible for an extension.

After their registration lapsed, Pawlowski applied for re-registration, but was refused, due to the fact that KGF spends more than ten percent of its revenues on political lobbying, not service provision. Pawlowski denies that this is the case, and that Street Church Ministries, the social services provision arm of his church, provides services for the homeless…although KGF’s website does contain many antigay, antidivorce, antiabortion ad nauseum statements.

He doesn’t see criticism of Calgary local body politicians for supporting LGBT rights as ‘political’ and argues that the work that Street Church Ministries does to assist the homeless could be jeopardised by the sudden funding cut. For its part, the Charities Regulatory Agency has said that it will send an Administrative Fairness letter to future applicants for charitable status to clarify its concerns about their political activism and charitable status service provision balance.  As for Pawlowski, he may take the case to court

Interesting dilemma. If an organisation is predominantly oriented toward negative, anti-citizenship political pressure group tactics, like the predatory US Focus on the Family multinational, then is it entitled to be called a ‘charity’ and receive financial benefits from that status? It also suggests that there are some very real dangers in devolving or outsourcing social service provision to religious social service providers, a common element of centre-right social policy arguments these days.

Recommended:

Jenn Ruddy: “Religious group loses charity status over political views: Revenue agency cites opposition to homosexuality, abortion” Xtra Canada: 05.02.10: http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Religious_group_loses_charity_status_over_political_views-8206.aspx

Courtesy of the US lesbian magazine Curve, here are two interesting titles that may appeal to those who support sex workers rights and female sexual freedom (hopefully, all of us!) Recently, Australian Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott opined that young women needed to “preserve their virginity.” Why is lack of female sexual experience so positively valued? See:

Jessica Venti: The Purity Myth: Berkeley: Seal Press: 2009.

And several hundred miles to the true north, Canadian sex-positive feminist Becki Ross has authored a recent social history of women involved in the erotic entertainment field known as ‘burlesque.’ She provides a fascinating insight into the pleasures and costs of these womens relative autonomy and its limits in postwar Vancouver. See.

Becki Ross: Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex and Sin in Postwar Vancouver: Toronto: University of Toronto: 2009.

While trying to catch up with the life I left over thirty years ago now, I discovered that one particularly ghastly secondary teacher of mine had died from cancer twenty years ago. A. was a Brethren teacher, and her cousin B, a fairly mediocre landscape artist, was a repressed martinet who shared her fundamentalist religious views. Nothing I did was ever good enough for them. They left me with therapy bills about ten years later, long after I’d come out and assertively joined the pro-choice side of the abortion debate.

I’m glad she’s dead, to be honest. I know that isn’t very charitable of me, but given the misery that she put me through and the numerous incidents of petty victimisation and harrassment, I’m also glad to learn that she died alone and painfully.  I’ve been unable to find any other funeral statements about particular bete noires of mine, but this one feels good. I’m glad that particular intellectually and emotionally repressed piece of emotional wreckage can’t attack anyone else’s self-esteem and self-pride.

Goodbye, A.  Poetic justice. I wish I could feel empathy for your past suffering, but then you and your ilk never felt it for me, so I’ll return the favour. 

Michael Adams: Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro-Zombies: Millers Point: Pier 9: 2010.

 Australian movie reviewer Mike Adams spent virtually all of 2008 trying to work his ways through the worst movies known to humanity.

What makes a movie kitsch, as opposed to camp (in which case, it has some redeeming qualities?) Bad acting? Really low production values? Bad set design? Poor ‘continuity’ and plot undevelopment? Ghastly scriptwriting and incoherent ‘dialogue?’ Infantile plots? Gratuitous sponsor product placement? Or all or some combination of the above?

What are my personal picks after having read this tome? Fifties and seventies ’sci-fi’ (”skiffy”- even real SF fans loath it) are justifiably lambasted, as are contemporary musicals (ie Xanadu in the eighties), most Japanese fifties to seventies monster movies, blaxploitation and some direr examples of contemporary hiphop cinema, Ed Wood, Larry Buchanan, martial arts manque, John Travolta and the Scientologioid Battlefield Earth,  tacky superhero flicks, Adam Sandler, the Joan Crawford posthumous anti-biopic Mommie Dearest, badly made Australian movies, cannibal beds, Bo and John Derek, Pia Zadora, serial killer ’splatsploitation’ ‘true-crime’ (…) films, gigantic seventies anthropoids, lambada and thirties to fifties antidrug campstravaganzas.

And did you really think all of the directors here were straight? Well, nope. Sorry.  David de Coteros is an openly gay director, which means that The Journey: Absolution (1997) contains ample guy candy for the intrigued gay male spectator.  As for Ben and Arthur (2002), imagine same-sex marriage pitted against a villainous psychochristian younger brother, Victor. Oh, and for feminist aficionados of bad films, there are apparently movies in which a rampaging heavily breasted woman smothers vile agents of the patriarchy. Right on, sister!

This is a work of true love and individual strength, perserverance and an industrial-strength digestive tract. The author excels in a field that cannot be easy to catalogue in this much detail without evoking groans or helpless abject laughter. Strongly recommended.

Pope John Paul II was apparently a devotee of the practice of ‘penitence’ and ‘mortification of the body’ during his tenure as pontiff. According to a new account of his papacy, he spent  long nights lying on the floor and practiced flagellating himself as an instrument of ’self-perfection.’

“When it wasn’t some infirmity that made him experience pain, he himself would inflict discomfort and mortification on his body,” stated Monsignor Slawomir Oder, who recently wrote a book detailing the last pope’s claim to sainthood. Furthermore:

Karol Wojtyla flagellated himself both in Poland and in the Vatican,” Msgr. Oder wrote. “In his closet, among the cassocks, there was a hook holding a particular belt for slacks, which he used as a whip and which he also always brought to Castel Gandolfo,” and Pope John Paul used self-mortification “both to affirm the primacy of God and as an instrument for perfecting himself.”

What is mortification about, anyway? This Catholic doctrine dates back to the time of St. Paul, the noted homophobe, misogynist and erotophobe Christian convert. He wrote approvingly of the denial of engagement in sexual pleasure, food and drink.  However, it isn’t just frugality and restraint that his philosophical descendants advocated. In its more problematic forms, it may actively encourage self-harm and eating disorders. According to one Opus Dei Catholic apologist, Rev. Michael Geisler, it is about endurance and ‘hardening up.” However, there are dividends, as mortification can result in experiences of ecstacy due to the release of endorphins from the peak experience in question. This may derive from self-starvation, joyful acceptance of torture and use of scourges for self-penitence.

I must admit, this does sound worrying. There appear to be abundant instances of ‘commended’ Catholic saints who condone self-mutilation, anorexia and bulimia as acts of ’sacrificial’ mortification before Christ. Conservative Calvinists also condone the utility of suffering and physical pain, but they call it ’santification.’ One can see this play out in terms of fundamentalist enthusiasm for corporal punishment, capital punishment, the permissibility of torture and opposition to decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. One of the most horrifying books about medieval Christianity and gender that I’ve ever read, Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Fast, cited instances of women ‘miraculously subsisting’ on the eucharist. It would be intriguing to see if these discourses provoked contemporary anorexia and bulimia amongst Catholic laywomen of that period…or susceptible women today, for that matter.

Granted, LGBT leather communities also practice the infliction and receipt of pain, but BDSM occurs within a carefully regulated context, in which safe, sane and consensual sexual encounters are encouraged and limitations and accountability are emphasised. On the other hand, Catholicism’s institutional history doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence that there are equivalent safeguards against the problematic, active pursuit of the infliction of pain and insistence on involuntary suffering and endurance as personal goods.

Tell me why this shouldn’t be regarded as primary evidence for somatophobia, the hatred of the body as a conduit for human behaviour and experience.  If he really hated his body that much, it may explain much about his papacy…

Recommended:

Cindy Wooden: “Pope John Paul II practiced self-mortification” NCR Online: 26.01.10: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1000347.htm

At present, LGBTI politics is primarily concerned with practical legislative reforms and resource allocation issues in the context of HIV/AIDS, focusing on full citizenship rights and responsibilities. What might the alternative be like?

In 1993, Michael Warner argued that ‘queer theory” should be focusing on resistance to ‘normativity.’ He argued that LGBTI communities should work actively to dismantle institutions that demarcated people into normal and ‘abnormal’/'inferior’ social categories. Due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, effective western liberal legislative reforms and the ascendancy of pragmatic LGBTI politics, that road wasn’t taken.

Well, not quite. The transgender and intersexed communities have revolutionised concepts of biological sex and social gender, arguing that there are times that they don’t match up due to psychological gender identity issues or conversely, that intersexed people don’t need ‘corrective’ surgery for their variant genital anatomies.

The intersexed community is a particular challenge to concepts of ‘normative’ sexual physiology due to its insistence on informed consent and the option of refusing surgical modification of variant genital anatomy. This leads to other questions of what ‘normativity’ means in people’s lives and what social movements emerge to uphold the rights of those who are variant individuals and groups.

However, there are some practical questions about what might be legitimate struggles or otherwise. In this article, I’ll deal with four non-normative groups- multiple personalities, conjoined twins, heterosexual polygamists and Pentecostal poisonous snake handlers/poison drinkers.

As we’ve noted over the last few weeks of the United States of Tara, multiple personalities are a complex phenomenon. The current clinical term is ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder.’ It means that there are multiple continuous biographical individual identities that co-exist in the same body, usually due to infantile/early childhood trauma or sexual abuse. Dissociation is the subject of debate. Is it a ‘disorder’, or should it be seen as an adaptive survival response to brutal treatment in early life? Given that most survivors of child sexual abuse are female, so are most cases of observed multiple personalities.

This has implications for feminist politics, as well as LGBTI concerns. Lesbian feminists might consider solidarity based on the gendered aspects of this issue, while bisexuals and transgendered rights groups might focus on the existence of multiple alter genders and sexual orientations in the same individual body. And what if a multiple personality rights movement arises, decides that dissociation isn’t pathological and then campaigns for related human rights and civil liberties?

Like intersexed individuals too, conjoined twins are the product of variant anatomies. In their rare cases, variant pre-embryonic cellular development occurs and result in various alternative anatomies. Some are lethally anomalous, but others are not. In the latter cases, some parents of conjoined twins have decided not to have surgical ‘resolution’ of their variant anatomies, just like the intersexed rights movement in their anatomical context.

Not all non-normative social identities, communities and movements are benign. I have serious problems with the question of legal recognition of heterosexual polygamy, given what I’ve read about spousal violence and pedophilia within some schismatic fundamentalist ‘Mormon’ communities in North America. As I’ve concluded beforehand, I do support the preservation of intact polygamous family units in the context of humanitarian refugee policies, in the probable context of climate change displacement from adjacent nations like Bangladesh. However, I do not favour wholesale recognition of all forms of heterosexual polygamy.

North American Pentecostal fundamentalist ’snake handlers’/poison drinkers are another non-normative social group that should be analysed in this context. In 1910, one George Went Henley split from his original Church of God sect in Tennessee because he believed that charismatic divine endowment enabled ‘true believers’ to handle venomous snakes or ingest poison with no ill effects. Unfortunately for some of the faithful, that didn’t happen and some died. As a result, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky all ban Pentecostal snakehandling sects, although West Virginia does allow them. Sadly, Henley himself was bitten by one of the reptiles in question and passed away in 1955.  If religious practices harm people, then they can and should be curtailed for the common good.

Some variant populations question whether their ‘abnormality’ should be viewed as an ‘impairment’ or ‘pathology’, which may lead to new social identities, communities and movements, as might be the case in the event of increased incidence of multiple personalities or conjoined twins. However, others are antisocial networks that condone destructive interpersonal relationships or place individuals at risk from unhealthy behaviour. If the need arises, we might want to consider solidarity with the benign new social movements, but argue for the maintenance of social sanctions against their negative, harmful counterparts.

Recommended:

Ian Hacking: Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory: Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1995.

Dennis Covington: Salvation on Sand Mountain: Reading: Addison-Wesley: 1995.

Alice Domurat Dreger: Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex: Cembridge: Harvard University Press: 1998.

Alice Domurat Dreger: One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal: Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 2004.

Andrea Moore-Emmett God’s Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Fundamentalist Mormon and Christian Polygamy and the Stories of Eighteen Women Who Escaped: San Francisco: Pince-Nez Press: 2004.

Michael Warner (ed) Fear of a Queer Planet: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1993.

In the latest Mother Jones, Stephanie Mercimer notes that the US Christian Right has a youth problem. There almost aren’t any new recruits.

Spying on Focus on the Family’s Value Voters Summit, Mercimer noted that the notorious Colorado Springs based US fundamentalist multinational had employed Esther Fleece (27) as a social media consultant. When she addressed the audience, Fleece acknowledged that even younger evangelicals cared more about social justice and green issues than banning same-sex marriage. Indeed, for the most part, those younger evangelicals were neither on the podium or in the audience.
According to the leftward Center for American Progress, almost sixty percent of new ‘millenial’ voters support same-sex marriage. As for younger evangelicals, even the evangelical Barna Group market research group found that two thirds of them ignore antigay propaganda from the fundamentalist pulpit. Added to which, they don’t listen to radio, traditionally the Focus powerbase, hence Fleece’s employment as consultant.

Fleece suggests that the youth constituency is psychologically scarred by divorce, which may be why the hollow rhetoric about the ’sanctity’ of discriminatory straight marriage doesn’t attract them. Moreover, those new millenial voters will be forty percent of the US electorate by 2020.

Here, this isn’t anything new. The New Zealand Christian Right’s oldest groups, anti-abortionists and the pro-censorship SPCS, are dying due to the attrition of ageing and infirmity on their membership. The Maxim Institute has tacitly gone secular and emphasises fiscal responsibility and its staff are conspicuously younger than the rest of the elderly NZ Christian Right frontline. Family First’s Bob McCoskrie is conspicuously younger too, but its probelting propaganda is the only message that resonates with the general public.

This has positive implications for remaining LGBT legislative issues like same-sex marriage proper and adoption reform; more so, given New Zealand’s far greater secularisation. Social liberal reform initiatives may well resonate positively with younger voters, if properly packaged.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger  marks the latest front in California’s ongoing battles over same-sex marriage. In San Francisco, two same-sex couples have challenged Proposition 8, a binding ‘citizens referendum”  that outlawed gay marriage in the state of California in 2008. They argue that the referendum violated the U.S. Constitution.The case marks the first case against US state bans on same-sex marriage that has been heard in a federal court. If the U.S. Supreme Court is eventually asked to rule over the matter, it could ultimately determine whether gay marriage is constitutionally protected in that country.

One fundamentalist defendant, Bill Tam, one of Proposition 8’s original sponsors, asked the judge to drop him from the case. He has said that “he feared for his family’s safety.” During the 2008 campaign, he argued same-sex marriage would cause children to become gay. Proposition 8 passed with 52 per cent of the total vote, nullifying a California Supreme Court decision earlier that introduced same-sex marriage and was subsequently upheld by the California Supreme Court.

The history of discrimination against gays, meaning of marriage, and same-sex parenting will be canvassed in this context. As for the contenders,  Kris Perry and Sandy Stier are a lesbian couple who have been together for nine years and are the parents of four boys. Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo have been together for eight years.

Recommended:
Stephanie Mercimer: “Grand Old Party” Mother Jones: 35:1: Jan/Feb 2010: 13-15.
Siri Agrell: “Same sex marriage showdown enters California courts” Globe and Mail: 11.

01.10: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/…/same-sex-marriage-showdown-enters-california-courts/article1427694/

Back during the days of higher religious observance, it was not uncommon for older social conservative members of both Labour and National to vote on the basis of subjective personal religious beliefs, as opposed to evidence-based scientific grounds. However, does this still happen?

Arguably not as much as it once did. It may be the case that with the exception of former New Plymouth MP Harry Duynhoven, the Labour caucus has predominantly liberal consciences, guided by references to evidence-based scientific grounds for public policy, at least insofar as abortion and homosexuality go. National also has had a contingent of centre-right social liberals on those issues, as well as slightly different sets when it came to the Prostitution Law Reform Act and Section 59 Repeal. 

As a centre-right party, National tends to attract more social conservatives, although it seems Prime Minister Key is pragmatic enough not to allow them full rein- given historically that failure to do so results in social liberal electoral backlash, especially in urban seats. ACT is still wedded its own populist interludes, which may alienate them from social liberal technocrats and professionals within metropolitan seats…like Epsom?

The Greens are keenly evidence-based when it comes to climate change and many other of their core environmental policies, although in the case of GM crops, their prohibitionist stance was based on a presumptive ‘precautionary principle’ based on plausible potential risk from that source. They oppose regulation of ‘alternative medicines’ on libertarian grounds, although they don’t always vote progressively. Sue Kedgeley voted against the first reading of the second incarnation of the Death With Dignity Bill during the 47th Parliament.

When it comes to controversial ‘moral’ issues, the record is mixed. Some Labour MPs voted against prostitution law reforms and civil unions, while some National and ACT MPs endorsed both. Other Labour MPs voted against the Death With Dignity Bill, while other National and ACT MPs voted for it, while the same was the case with the Greens and their medicinal cannabis decriminalisation bill more recently- ACT supported them on that occassion- but only ACT voted against provocation law repeal late last year.

On some of the above, ideological, tactical and strategic factors intervened. Some Labour and Progressive MPs were informed by conservative anti-sexworker ‘radical’ feminism, rather than social conservatism when they opposed Prostitution Law Reform, while organised medical groups oppose change in the context of euthanasia rights and their opposition causes hestitation amongst some otherwise social liberals who failed to support it.

However, in the cases of both euthanasia and medical cannabis reform, it may have primarily been tactical and strategic factors that led to the defeat of both bills. In both cases, the pro-reform lobby groups are fragmented and lacked a coherent long-term strategic approach, and did not clearly communicate their philosophies and motivations for legislative change, as well as present evidence-based proof of potential benefits, which suggests difficulties with communication management in those quarters.

On the other hand, some issues are more difficult to pigeonhole. Regulating alcohol consumption and distribution used to be a primarily religious cause during the prohibitionist lobby heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the Depression took the issues in question off the front burner of political debate. Now, lobbyists commonly cite scientific data about the adverse effects of excessive alcohol consumption and question specific distribution patterns that are said to encourage problematic consumption. Unfortunately, antidrug populists still rule drug policy debates and there is probably overlap with the Christian Right and some social conservatives over these issues.

So, is the conscience vote alive and well in New Zealand, or moribund? In the cases of the pro-choice side of the abortion debate and LGBT rights, evidence-based social liberalism has prevailed, as it did with prostitution law reform and Section 59 Repeal, primarily due to the strength of professional allies that backed those reforms. By contrast, cannabis and euthanasia reformers have had neither lobbyist unity, communication strategies or professional allies to assist their private members bills. 

In the end, it is now a firm evidential scientific basis, professional allies and lobbyist unity that determine the success or failure of social reformist legislation today, usually not subjective religious beliefs or affiliations.

In fifteenth century Florence, Renaissance Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino penned one of the first defences of male homoeroticism…but not male homosexuality.

How did this happen? Ficino defended the mutual desire of older men and younger mature adolescents in a widely-read commentary on Plato’s Symposium, itself a classical Greek defence of male homoeroticism. He argued that the older partner benefited from the youth, beauty and relative innocence of the late adolescent and mentored him, while the younger partner benefited from the maturity and experience of the older partner. There was just one catch to all this- it had to be sublimated. Look, but don’t engage in physical expression of homoeroticism- fully fledged homosexuality.

However, despite Ficino’s exhortations to platonic and sexless homoeroticism, few of his contemporaries were inclined to listen. Even Dante Alighieri professed admiration for civic Florentine ’sodomite’ military greats in the past of his city state, as evidenced in Canto XVI of the Divine Comedy: Inferno.  Indeed, there was a thriving fourteenth century gay subculture in Renaissance Florence, and Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Cellini all had gay relationships. Even Pope Sixtus IV admired a young twenty five year old.

Unfortunately, that good thing came to an end. Savonarola lambasted ’sodomites’ during brief period of ascendancy and then came the Counter-Reformation. Ficino fell into misuse as the closed church culture of the next three centuries attacked gay desire as well as gay sex.  However, despite his limitations, he was still the first modern author to defend homoeroticism, if not homosexuality.

Recommended:

Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plato’s Symposium: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1944.

Michael Rocke: Forbidden Friendships: Male Homosexuality and Culture in Renaissance Florence: Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1998