IGF CultureWatch

Recently I attended the opening of an exhibition of paintings and photographs by 15 or so Chicago gay and lesbian artists at the gay community center. The theme-welcome after Chicago's irritatingly long and difficult winter-was flowers: roses, water lilies, daisies, dahlias, hyacinths and so forth.

The opening was a success by most measures. Several of the artists attended and a number had the forethought to send email announcement and invitations to their friends, understanding that self-promotion is key to artistic success. Also attending were several people interested in or curious about art and happy to have the opportunity to meet some of the artists and talk with them about their work.

There is nothing intimidating here. Art is not some mysterious, esoteric activity. It is a learned craft or skill. And we're not talking Rembrandt or Caravaggio. These are fellow gays and lesbians. Some are mature and very good but some are young, still developing their skills, and have never been in a juried show before. They are all approachable and happy to talk about their work.

The monthly exhibitions at the community center grew out of the Gay and Lesbian Artists Network. While that group has had some organizational difficulties, the group did at least serve the purpose of beginning to bring area gay and lesbian artists together to foster a sense of community and common interest and-at a practical level-share ideas and techniques.

The exhibitions take the next step, which is putting the artists in contact with the larger gay and lesbian community who may be interested in or curious about art, along with some who may collect art and be particularly interested in seeing what fellow gays and lesbians are producing. The paintings and photographs were all for sale and most were affordably priced for even the beginning collector who would like to have an attractive work of art to hang in his or her home.

Even for the most casual viewers, seeing so many different works all on the same theme provides an opportunity to see what kinds of things they like and dislike and helps develop a conscious awareness of their own tastes. Those initial tastes are not static, of course; with exposure to more art, the tastes inevitably shift and develop, but there is nothing wrong with starting somewhere.

It is also worth pointing out that artists, viewers and collectors all serve to support and strengthen the gay community. Not all activism is political activism; there is also cultural activism-promoting the gay community as thriving and creative. This is particularly important as our major cities shift from manufacturing centers to entertainment and cultural centers. The city fathers are well aware of the economic value of cultural vibrancy. A major creative community in the long run can get what it wants.

But to understand the full benefit of this arts activity, you have to pull back and think sociologically. For all the talk of a "gay and lesbian community" there really isn't much sense of community among us. Most of us do not know large numbers of other gays and lesbians. There are at one extreme the fairly limited friendship networks and at the other extreme the relatively impersonal anonymity of the bars.

What we need is a multiplicity of "mediating organizations," groups that are larger and more open than friendship networks but more focused and friendlier than bars. Groups organized around hobbies and interests are the most obvious examples. We need to generate a large number of those for people to join so they can meet other people they have something in common with.

The point is to create more situations where gays and lesbians, old and young, shy and outgoing, can get to know more people outside their niche in the gay community and feel some sense of common ground with them.

After the initial success of the artists group, I thought about proposing one based on an interest in classical music. But there were some logistical problems and people's interests are varied and pretty specific even within classical music. Recently I have run across a few people who email articles about music to one another. That might be a way to begin; not all groups have to start with a big meeting.

But such mediating groups do not need to be based on cultural interests such as concert music or art; those just happen to be my own interests. They can be about whatever interests you.

Who's better for gay equality, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? The answer depends on a consideration of three main factors: the issues, actual legislative records, and likely commitment.

On the issues, both Clinton and Obama broadly support equality for gay Americans. Both support a hate crimes law, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), and same-sex domestic-partners benefits for federal employees. Both oppose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

There's only one difference between them on gay issues. Clinton supports repeal of the section of the Defense of Marriage (DOMA) that bars federal benefits for same-sex couples who get married or enter civil unions in their own state. Prohibiting as it does the federal legal protections that would otherwise be available to tens of thousands of gay families in several states, repealing this section of DOMA is a top priority.

Obama goes one step further. He would repeal DOMA in its entirety, including the section of the law that authorizes states to refuse to recognize gay marriages and civil unions performed elsewhere.

While this sounds important, its practical effect is minimal. Even without DOMA, states may refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states. All but five have done so. Still, the interstate provision in DOMA discriminates against gay couples and should be repealed.

Clinton defends her position by saying that DOMA was a valuable political tool in defeating a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. That's doubtful. She even goes so far as to say that DOMA was originally passed as a way to head off a federal amendment. That's dishonest. When her husband championed DOMA in 1996 it was not as a favor to gays, but as a way to maximize his chances for reelection.

On the issues: slight advantage to Obama.

A candidate's positions on the issues matter little if they aren't translated into legislative action. Legislative success depends, in turn, on actual legislative ability and commitment to the cause.

On legislative ability, we don't have much of a record for either candidate. Obama has been an undistinguished first-term senator, neither more nor less impressive than most others in a legislative body where seniority is power.

In an open letter to gays issued shortly before the Texas primary, Obama touted his co-sponsorship of legislation banning anti-gay discrimination when he served as an Illinois state senator. He also mentioned his co-sponsorship of a couple of pro-gay bills in the U.S. Senate.

Yet co-sponsoring bills involves nothing more than formally declaring support for them; it's not a test of legislative skill. What matters is lobbying colleagues for the bill, securing hearings on the need for it, compromising and horse-trading, and getting an actual vote.

GOP support will be needed in the Senate to overcome filibusters of pro-gay legislation. While Obama talks a good game of bringing Republicans and Democrats together for positive change, his actual legislative record demonstrates little ability to do so. That might change when he becomes president, and a president's role is different than a legislator's, but so far we have little to go on other than hope.

Clinton's legislative record is somewhat more impressive. She has surprised and delighted her Republican colleagues with her bipartisanship and work ethic.

On legislative record: slight advantage to Clinton.

Finally, which of the two is likely to be more committed to gay equality as president? Commitment is critical. Recall that Bill Clinton came into the presidency with all the right stands on gay issues for a man of his time. He also had an impressive record of legislative accomplishment as a governor. The problem was that he utterly lacked commitment to gay equality, wilting at the first sign of resistance. As Melissa Etheridge put it at a Democratic debate last year, he threw gays under the bus.

Neither Obama nor Clinton is perfect on this score. Obama campaigned last fall with a homophobic minister. Both hesitated when confronted with the remarks of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace that DADT is justified because homosexuality is immoral. As if testing the political winds, they denounced Pace only after Sen. John Warner (R-VA) flatly declared that homosexuality is not immoral.

Nevertheless, Obama speaks movingly of gay equality, and not just before gay audiences. He has raised the issue among white farmers and in black churches, where the message is both unwelcome and needed.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, rarely raises the issue on her own, never does so before unfriendly audiences, and seems reluctant even to say the word "gay."

Obama "gets it" in a way that no previous candidate for president has. Part of this is generational, but it is nonetheless real.

On commitment: strong advantage to Obama.

Lyndon Johnson changed forever the tone of the debate over racial equality when he told the nation, "We shall overcome." Gay Americans need a transformative moment like that. Obama understands the importance of using the "bully pulpit" of the presidency to be a moral leader as well as a legislative one.

That's no guarantee he'll be a great president for gay equality. On the biggest issues, like repealing DADT and DOMA, it's doubtful any Democratic president will succeed in a first or even second term. Obama may prove just as cowardly, weak, and perfidious as that previous Clinton.

And gay issues are by no means the only ones that matter in this election. But on gay equality, Obama's the better bet.

Though it may sound perverse, I get excited whenever religious fundamentalists speak up during the Q&A portion of my public events. While fundamentalists are hardly a dying breed, they seldom participate in such functions. And though I find their silence generally pleasing, it does rob me of what we college professors like to call "teaching moments."

So it piqued my interest when, at a debate in St. Louis last week, an audience member concluded an anti-gay tirade with, "Haven't you ever heard of the Sodom and Gomorrah story?!"

You see, I had actually read the Sodom and Gomorrah story the evening before-out loud, to a Detroit audience. If you've never actually read the story, find a Bible and read Genesis 19 (it's near the beginning). You may be in for a surprise.

A quick summary: two angels come to Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham's nephew Lot invites them into his home. An angry mob surrounds the door and demands, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them." Lot protests, offering them his virgin daughters instead. (Yes, you read that right.) But the mob keeps pressing for the visiting angels, who suddenly strike them blind. The angels then lead Lot and his family to safety, and the Lord rains fire and brimstone on the cities.

Most scholars take the mob's demand to "know" the visitors in a sexual (i.e. "biblical") sense. Assuming they're right, this oft-cited story is about an attempted gang rape. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that gang rape is BAD. But what does that have to do with homosexuality?

At this point fundamentalists will point to the fact that the mob declined Lot's offer of his daughters, instead demanding the (male) visitors. "Aha," they say. "This proves that the story is about homosexuality!"

I always find this response surprising, since Lot's offer of his daughters is an embarrassing detail of the text-for fundamentalists. Lot is supposed to be the hero of the story, renowned for his virtue. When faced with a mob of angry rapists, what does he do? Why, he does what any upstanding man would do. He offers them his virgin daughters. If you ever want an example of the Bible portraying women as expendable property, you need look no further than the Sodom and Gomorrah story.

Some biblical scholars have suggested that the true sin of Sodom is inhospitality. Inhospitality? Failing to offer visitors a drink, after they've traveled a long way to see you, is inhospitality. Trying to gang rape them is quite another matter. (And let's not forget about offering them your daughters, which apparently is biblical good form.)

Lest you think Lot's offer is a quirk, a strikingly similar story occurs at Judges 19. In this story, an angry mob demands to "know" visitors, and the host offers both his virgin daughter and his guest's concubine. As in the Sodom story, the mob declines the women and keeps pressing for the visitor. This time, however, the guest tosses his concubine outside and closes the door. (Again, he's supposed to be one of the good guys.) The mob violently rapes her until morning, when she finally collapses dead.

The lessons to be drawn here are several. First, most people who cite the Bible against homosexuality have little idea of what it says. Either that, or they have a rather strange moral sense. A story where the good guys offer their daughters to rapists is supposed to teach us what, exactly?

Second, the Bible contains some pretty wacky stuff. This isn't news to those who study it carefully, but it does surprise the casual reader. For example, later in Genesis 19 Lot's daughters get him drunk, have sex with him, and bear his children/grandchildren, without eliciting the slightest objection from the brimstone-wielding God.

After I explained all of this to my questioner in St. Louis, my debate opponent (Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family) interjected that the Bible contains more salient references to homosexuality than the Sodom story. This is undoubtedly true, but it misses the point. The point is that the Bible reflects the moral prejudices and limitations of those who wrote and assembled it. Genesis 19 makes that abundantly clear (as do passages regarding slavery, and numerous others).

Once you grant that point, you can't settle moral claims merely by insisting that "the Bible says so." The Bible says lots of things-some true, some false, and some downright bizarre.

So when fundamentalists quote the Bible at my events, I don't try to silence them. On the contrary, I ask them to continue reading.

Since I wrote an earlier column about the persecution of gays in many foreign countries, there have been several more news stories about the plight of gays abroad-in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in portions of Latin America, but particularly in the Muslim theocracies of the Middle East-Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Amazingly, these stories have been accompanied by stories about the refusal of several more civilized nations to grant asylum to gay refugees from those countries because officials refuse to acknowledge that gays are persecuted in other countries. In other words, on no justifiable grounds at all.

Item: "Death squads" of religious militants hunt down men believed to be gays in Iraq and Iran and kill them, first torturing them to force them to reveal the names of other gay men they know.

Item: Just six months ago, speaking at Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied that there are homosexuals in Iran. The translation of his remarks was questioned, but no alternate version was ever issued, suggesting that the initial version was substantially correct.

But Dr. Janet Afary argues in a forthcoming book on homosexuality in Iran that Iran has a long history of quietly accepted gay relationships well documented in European and Persian sources. However, she says, the current Iranian government has been actively pursuing, entrapping, and prosecuting gays on grounds such as rape and sex with underage partners, offenses they think will generate greater support.

Several instances have surfaced in recent months of young gay men who were murdered by the government on grounds of rape and underage sex that local gays said were completely without merit but were trumped up to sell the legitimacy of the executions in the West.

Item: Information has come out of Iran that gay men are being offered the option-if they wish to continue having sex with men-of transsexual surgery: having their male genitals removed, being given female hormones, and having other surgery to make them resemble women. Some gay men, feeling that they have no choice, are apparently taking the government up on this offer. Iran is reported to have one of the highest rates of transsexual surgery in the world.

Item: I recently quoted in this column one of my correspondents who said that his taxi driver commented, "In my country they kill gays." Alas, my correspondent did not ask what country that was, but it could have been any one of several in Africa or the Middle East.

Item: 19-year-old gay Iranian Mehdi Kazemi, studying in England, applied for asylum after he learned that his former lover had been tortured and executed in Iran, naming Kazemi as his partner. Denied asylum by British authorities, he fled to several other countries, ending in the Netherlands, which deported him back to England.

After significant protests including demonstrations in London, protests by left wing and gay activist groups in Italy and Britain, a supportive resolution by the European Parliament and dozens of members of the British House of Lords, the British foreign office agreed to review its earlier decision to refuse asylum. Its decision is said to be pending.

As prominent British gay activist Peter Tatchell pointed out during the Kazemi protests, "Gay men in Iran are hanged from public cranes using the barbaric method of slow strangulation, which is deliberately designed to cause maximum suffering."

What can we here in the U.S. do to help change the situation? I suppose the most important thing is to become as informed as possible. Much of the information I have presented here I have learned not through the mainstream U.S. press but through the press releases of Peter Tatchell of the British activist group OutRage, the valuable reporting of Doug Ireland in New York's weekly Gay City News, and the "Euroqueer" and recently-formed "Gays Without Borders" Internet listservs, which anyone can join.

My view is that people who understand the situation will think of things they can do to help, whether it is finding ways to pressure foreign governments or even the U.S.'s own State Department and Immigration and Naturalization Service which seems just short of homophobic.

The action might be writing letters to appropriate government figures or protests outside foreign embassies and legations. Gays and lesbians who are politically active can bring the issue to the attention of their favorite official or candidate. Letters to newspapers always have value. The more noise we can make on these issues, the better.

On March 11, the State Department released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2007. A compilation of the LGBT- and HIV/AIDS-related portions is available at glaa.org. An LGBT-only compilation, available at lgbtfpp.org, was released during a panel discussion in Washington on March 18 by the LGBT Foreign Policy Project, a coalition effort launched late in 2007 to encourage "a clearer and stronger American voice" on international gay rights concerns.

The March 18 discussion featured openly gay former Ambassadors James Hormel and Michael Guest; Scott Long of Human Rights Watch; and Korab Zuka, founder of the first gay rights group in Kosovo, who recently won asylum in the United States. The discussion emphasized the need to press the State Department to act on its findings. An official from State was present and cited a 2007 directive from Secretary Rice for embassies to support human rights more actively, but this was contradicted by Rice's recent waiver of human rights concerns to permit the release of military aid to Egypt.

Long noted a wide variation in the completeness of the individual country reports, reflecting the different priority given to this work from embassy to embassy. For example, the report for South Africa is silent on the rape, torture, and murder of a Johannesburg lesbian couple on July 8. On the other hand, I found 189 countries with relevant entries in the reports for 2007, up from 142 for 2006 and 105 for 2005.

Let's review some highlights, both negative and positive.

In Egypt, the government used emergency courts intended for terrorism and national security cases to prosecute homosexuals and dissidents. The Iranian government closed a reformist daily newspaper for interviewing an alleged gay activist. In Iraq, several gay activists were arrested and tortured, and there were killings by Islamist death squads. In Saudi Arabia, numerous arrests were made at gay parties, weddings, and beauty contests. Dubai police interrogated several people on charges of cross-dressing, which was also criminalized in Kuwait.

Brazil's Bahia Gay Rights Group reported 116 anti-LGBT killings, and "confirmed that police continued to commit abuse and extortion directed against transvestite prostitutes." Neo-Nazi and skinhead gangs in Chile committed anti-gay violence. Five Honduran police officers were charged with torture and illegal detention of several gay activists. Jamaican anti-gay abuses included police harassment, arbitrary detention, mob attacks, stabbings, and targeted shootings.

Gay marchers in Bucharest, Budapest, Moscow and Zagreb were violently attacked. In Kosovo, activists were detained and harassed by police. In Serbia, pro-gay activists were accused of being anti-Serb. Lithuanian gay groups were denied parade permits. Governments in Honduras, El Salvador, and the Philippines delayed, denied, or obstructed registration of LGBT groups.

In India, authors Vikram Seth and Amartya Sen led a campaign to overturn the law criminalizing homosexuality. In Burma, "increasing numbers of children worked in the informal economy or in the street, where they were exposed to drugs, petty crime, risk of arrest, trafficking for sex and labor exploitation, and HIV/AIDS."

In Romania there was widespread discrimination against children with HIV/AIDS. Moscow officials accused foreign non-profits that fight HIV/AIDS of "encouraging pedophilia, prostitution, and drug use among teenagers." A person released from a Havana prison for HIV/AIDS patients reported poor prison conditions, erratic medical care, and irregular provision of antiviral drugs. Across Africa, from Burundi to Zimbabwe, millions of AIDS orphans lived on the streets. The Rwanda report includes this awful line: "Due to the genocide and deaths from HIV/AIDS, there were numerous households headed by children, some of whom resorted to prostitution to survive."

On the plus side, Gay pride events were held successfully in Lima, Taipei, Krakow, Warsaw, Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia), and Ljubljana (Slovenia). Sierra Leone passed a law prohibiting HIV/AIDS-based discrimination. Mozambique passed a law prohibiting anti-gay workplace discrimination. Dutch parliamentary hearings led to the reversal or delay of government plans to return gay refugees to Iran. The Polish minister of education sought unsuccessfully to bar the promotion of homosexuality in schools, and his party lost its seats in parliament. The Nepalese Supreme Court upheld the rights of sexual minorities. In Thailand, the military stopped labeling homosexuality as a mental disorder. In Taiwan, the Family Violence Prevention and Service Act was extended to same-sex couples.

In some of the harshest places one finds the bravest people. The honor roll of advocacy groups includes Sexual Minorities in Uganda; GenderDoc-M in Moldova; Nash Mir in Ukraine; the Center for Social Emancipation in Kosovo; the Lesbian-Gay Rainbow Association of Comayaguela in Honduras; J-FLAG in Jamaica; and Lambda Istanbul in Turkey.

Even in Mali, where a law against immoral association was used to deny recognition to a gay rights group, it's encouraging that there's a gay rights group in the first place. So now it can be said that there is gay activism from here to Timbuktu.