Make repression backfire

I finished the book Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin. Me intrigued by gay bars? I’ve been in a gay bar definitely once, I doubt more than that. That once was the /aut/ bar in Ann Arbor I think when the gay owners announced they were retiring. I thought I should go there before it closes. So I went when it was still daylight, ate my supper, and left. Before or after that I visited the LGBTQ bookstore next door owned by the same couple, also about to close. Before then I think the only time I went into any type of bar for drinking (as opposed for a meal at a “bar and grill”) was when I was in college and I went with my girlfriend (before I realized I’m gay) and her parents. They had booze. I didn’t. During my life I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve consumed alcohol and have fingers left over. I don’t like the taste and see no need to be under the influence. So why would I buy a book about gay bars? I’m not sure I have an answer for that. I did hear or read a review of the book that said it was quite good. So when I was in an LGBTQ bookstore (this one in Royal Oak) and saw it, I bought it. Then I let it sit on the shelf for a few years. The subtitle “Why We Went Out” isn’t quite right. Atherton Lin does cover that – briefly – and hits the usual reasons: A safe place to be ourselves. A place to be a part of our community. A place to cruise. A place to develop resistance and activism. The book really is about the gay bars he and his partner frequented (or merely visited) in California (where he’s from) and England (where his partner is from). I understand he needed to give his partner an alias to protect privacy, but that alias is Famous Blue Raincoat, usually shortened to Famous. Only in the acknowledgments did he say the name came from a Leonard Cohen song, whose lyrics are weird enough I’m not sure what they’re saying. For each of the bars they visit the author describes the place, the clientele, some of the interesting things that happened to him there, and some of the history of the place. He also tries to describe what it all means, and I don’t think that was so successful. As for some of the history, one of the bars was on Villiers St. in London. George Villiers was a favorite of King James I – yeah, the sponsor of the translation of the Bible many conservatives insist is the only correct one was gay. So the king bestowed this chunk of real estate along the Strand. Having gay pubs in the area around Villiers St. is quite appropriate. He discusses a skinhead attack and followed that up with gay men adopting the skinhead look. Did they do it because they wanted to beat up people who attacked their kind? Perhaps. Or maybe when one looks that tough people don’t mess with them. In the last decade he noticed a lot of pubs on London’s South Bank showing the pride flag. Were they welcoming LGBTQ people? Or was that a way to keep another type of customer out? I didn’t read the second half of the first chapter because what I read seemed to be one excuse for sex after another. If the second chapter wasn’t any better I was going to drop the book. Thankfully, it was better and I can say overall I enjoyed the book. Atherton Lin has a second book out. This one is about the difficulties of gay relationships, like his, where the partners are from different countries. He is a good enough writer that I should put it on my to-buy list. Astead Henderson of the show Today, Explained from Vox and heard on NPR talked to Chanté Joseph about an article she wrote for Vogue titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” I worked from the transcript. There is a growing trend to hide the face of the boyfriend, sometimes even the groom, on social media. Why? Some of it is privacy. Some of it is because when they guy cheats on her she doesn’t want to edit her social media account. Some of it is because the woman has created a brand around herself and announcing a boyfriend would interrupt that brand. And some of it... Scoring a boyfriend used to give a sense of achievement. But with conservatives touting tradwives, a straight romantic relationship seems archaic, co-opted by the right. Joseph had to clarify to readers she wasn’t attacking women or their relationships. She was not shaming them for finding love. Love is wonderful.

But I'm saying that there is a way that men have been allowed to behave and act in society for so long that has only gotten worse.

Then she discussed men’s reaction to her article.

And but then obviously there was a lot of hateful abuse, a lot of racist abuse. Men talking about the way that they'd want to see me abused and die. And it was really awful. And I think I definitely struck a nerve, particularly with men.

Women are now more educated than men. They have their jobs and are running households. They are seeing they don’t need men. So men are feeling the dating space is the last place they can have true domination. They used to have power over a great many spaces and they are losing that. Joseph mentioned the book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Professor Jane Ward. A chapter is about the things queer people say about their straight friends when those friends aren’t around. The conclusion seems to be “straight culture is very embarrassing.” Joseph said that when boys message her saying how worried they are she tells them to be aware of what media is teaching them about what to believe about women. Social media tries to reach boys when they are young. As for young women they are delighted to learn that having a boyfriend does not have to be the most important thing. They can be a good and fascinating person by themselves. In the second half of the program Henderson spoke to Jane Ward, professor of feminist and queer studies at UC Santa Barbara. They discussed the book mentioned above. What got her writing the book is hearing from lesbians wondering if straight people were okay, hearing straight women wish they were lesbian. Ward laid out the contradiction at the heart of modern straight identity that started in the early 20th century. The idea of companionate marriage develops, in contrast to how marriage was seen for centuries. Men are supposed to care about women and their wellbeing. There is supposed to be mutual respect. Men are supposed to actually like and love their woman. But these men “are still raised in a misogynistic culture, one that normalizes boys and men's hatred of girls and women.” We’ve developed a new type of marriage without undoing the “centuries of patriarchy and misogyny that are pretty foundational to the human experience.” Mainstream culture hasn’t been able to cross that gap. There is hope. Recognizing that contradiction and discussing it is a start. So is recognizing the current norm isn’t working. But we haven’t figured out the replacement yet, so there is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. This seems to contribute to women becoming more liberal while men are becoming more conservative. Ward says the solution is feminism, that men embrace feminism. Men can

demonstrate that they actually like women so much, they're sooooo heterosexual that they actually like women. They want to listen to women talk. They care about women's ideas. They want to follow women's leadership. ... They're friends with women. They watch movies about women. They read books written by women. I mean, it's just kind of amazing how narrowly we have defined heterosexual masculinity.

The news today has been full of the story of a white woman in Minneapolis, Renee Good, who didn’t act in the way ICE agents wanted, so they shot through the windshield of her car, killing her. The mayor of Minneapolis used foul language to tell ICE to leave. Kristi Noem of Homeland Security almost immediately began to vilify Good. Minnesota police discovered the FBI wouldn’t share findings, preventing the state team from being able to conduct an independent investigation, so we know whatever the FBI gives us for their report will be filled with lies. Gaslit Nation released an episode featuring Annie, a listener from Minneapolis. There’s 15 minutes of audio, though I’ll stick to the lengthy description, which includes references. Annie is pleased Minnesota politicians are taking the ICE occupation more seriously. That’s good, but their response should be so much more. It should be real resistance.

Actual resistance could look like tracking ICE apprehensions and accounting for all victims, running a support hotline for impacted families, providing legal aid to immigrants, tracking ICE locations and sharing this information with immigrants at risk, maintaining a list of ICE license plates, serving as constitutional observers during ICE stops, or even just lifting up the work of rapid response networks and encouraging residents to participate. None of this has been happening, and that probably won’t change, but I now have a tiny bit of hope that it might. ... Today, [Mayor] Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the f*ck out of Minneapolis,” but he didn’t say what he will do if they don’t. We need to be thinking about resistance dynamics. When ICE does not get out of Minneapolis, what action will the City take? What actions are we taking to back up our demands?

Annie linked to a recent video by Tad Stoermer, a historian of resistance movements, talking about the “loyal opposition.” That’s when the opposition party treats dictators as a normal political opponent, they are loyal to the system the dictator is operating in. But that teaches people the wrong lesson about resistance. It says this is the only response, this is how serious people handle it. A loyal opposition that talks about affordability while the dictator is invading other nations and threatening the stability of NATO and the world is saying it’s not that bad. Real resistance develops organizing infrastructure and networks, build parallel institutions. See: Underground Railroad. The loyal opposition sucks up energy that could be used to build resistance infrastructure. I see Congressional Democrats are complaining about both affordability and the Venezuela invasion. But there is a difference between complaining and real resistance.

The phrase that keeps repeating in my head today is “Make repression backfire.” Collectively, let’s channel our grief and rage into making state repression backfire and building a real resistance movement that will allow us to protect people, take back power, and build the world we need.

Care for each other

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data yesterday. The spreadsheet had not been updated when I looked a week ago. It has now been updated to Friday. In the last four weeks the new cases per day peaked at 1325, 1558, 1733, and 1976. Cases are rising and are now above the peak in April of 2020. It was the rise to that first peak that prompted states, including Michigan, to issue lockdown orders. Now that the case rate is higher than a year ago Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says new government mandates are not in the plans. I take that to mean she has been thoroughly cowed by the Republican led legislature. Yeah, the legislature and state Supreme Court took away the law that allowed her to declare emergency measures. But there are other laws she could invoke. And she hasn’t. The leadership in both Wayne and Oakland Counties, the two most populous counties in Michigan, have issued mask mandates for schools. I’m glad someone is stepping up. Thankfully, deaths per day is not following what happened in March and April 2020. After several weeks with deaths per day mostly in the single digits, in the last three weeks deaths per day peaked at 15, 23, and 14. That compares to 170 deaths in each of two days in April 2020. Even if one doesn’t die from COVID it can be a nasty experience with symptoms lasting for months and perhaps for the rest of one’s life. Getting vaccinated is much easier, safer, and cheaper than trying to ease the symptoms of the virus. Back in January 2020 I wrote about the introduction to the book Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, published in 1999. I wrote about a couple of the early chapters in April 2020. As I read through the book I intended to write about each chapter of the 600 page book. Yeah, that didn’t happen. This was my “car” book, one that I left in the car to read while waiting, such as before a movie or concert or in a doctor’s office. There weren’t movies or concerts in theaters to wait for, and I got tired of lugging a heavy book around, so I didn’t finish the 600 pages until a week ago. I also stopped carrying around a pencil to mark pages and passages of interest. That means I won’t have another eight posts to discuss each chapter. Instead I will touch on those chapters and then delve into the final chapter’s summary. Which will be similar to the first chapter and my first post in which Faludi laid out her basic ideas. In my second post I talked about Faludi’s chapter on work. That contrasted a shipyard that did great work with a space contractor where the men were lost in the corporate cubicle farm with no real understanding of how they fit into creating the final product. My third post was about the contrast between the Citadel, an all male school, and its first female student. The men didn’t want attention from the outside because they feared the world would not understand how comfortable they were taking care of each other and would assume they were all gay. That contrasted with the Spur Posse, whose members were after fame. Additional chapters were about: A group of Cleveland Browns fans trying to keep the team from skipping town and the betrayal they felt in the process. Corporate sports became interested in only money. The Promise Keepers organization, a national religious movement for men. There were both regional rallies held in stadiums and in-home groups of men supporting each other. Faludi sat in on one of these groups. The men talked about what they didn’t get from their fathers and how they tried to see Jesus as a father figure that met their needs. They found the second and third rallies in their area were the same as the first – the message didn’t build. The national organization fell apart. The local groups lost interest. Veterans of the Vietnam war talked about going to war to earn their manhood and how thoroughly the war failed to provide that. Faludi provides a strong indictment of that war and how disastrously it was waged. The men talked about having to deal with that disaster. I probably read that chapter more than a year ago so can’t fill in the details without spending more time than I’d like. That chapter was followed by one discussing how men were portrayed in movies. That also included a discussion of President Ronald Reagan, who many times acted as though he was still a character in one of his movies. Also in the discussion were the Rocky and Rambo movies and others like them. They were about a lone soldier out to save the world while trying to get confirmation from a superior officer. Both actor Sylvester Stallone and the scriptwriter had father issues they were trying to work through. Stallone tried to aim his acting in a different direction, but Hollywood and his fans didn’t let him. At the end of the book he is planning Rocky VI. The Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas is the next topic. More accurately, it is about the men who assemble at the site every year on the anniversary of the firestorm and why they feel the need to be there. The siege and fire were during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Yet the men were upset with Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno for emasculating men. They declared white men were the most discriminated against group in the country. The men tended to be troubled by two ideas that went wrong in this case. First is the idea that a man’s purpose is to protect women and children (even if the women don’t need that protection). Second is the idea that men, while not supposed to dominate (which some do quite well), they’re also not supposed to be dominated, which they saw Hillary and Reno doing. The next chapter was about males caught in a display culture. First up was Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11 that landed on the moon. The problem was after the trip where NASA put them on display and paraded them around the world. All three of them became so sick of constantly being on display they quit NASA and never went into space again. Then there are three brothers trying to prefect their gangsta image. Yeah, there was some brutality associated with it, but that got you in front of the cameras. Which was the important thing. But that life either soured or didn’t pan out. The third aspect of display culture was men’s magazines shifting from how to be a man to how to display being a man. Interesting that this discussion included the early years of gay rights and magazines that supported gay men. Alas, they soon shifted to style magazines, a chance for corporations to market to gay men. The last chapter before the close was sixty pages about men in the porn industry. The industry wants one thing from their male stars and any hint of performance anxiety makes that one thing not happen. Along the way porn films are reduced from storylines that require actual acting to just the one act. Female stars rule the industry, so men who don’t do well in the industry blame women. In the closing chapter Faludi discussed her major themes. There was (and maybe still is, I haven’t asked a Millennial) a belief that if a man is loyal to the corporation the corporation will be loyal to the man. Corporate downsizing showed that not to be true. But behind that were men with abandonment issues with their fathers. The father was supposed to demonstrate to the son how to be a man. But the father was caught up at work and couldn’t show that to his son. How to be a man included things such as providing for a family and standing up for what is right and important. Yeah, there have always been fathers missing in action. A failing economy can prompt that. But the decades after WWII had unprecedented prosperity. Fathers had so much to pass on, and didn’t. That left the sons wondering why Dad was so silent. The culture had changed so that men were judged by ornamental terms of how sexy they were, whether they were known in the wider culture, or whether they were a winner. As for that last one, America has always been about winning – we “won the West.” Dominance and being first have always been prized and a times seemed to be all that mattered. Yeah, women are also defined by ornamentation, by glamour. But that has also seen a shift. It used to be something women did for fun and enjoyment. But the glamour industry stole the pleasure and made it a commodity. Mass media molded people into passive roles and emphasized consuming. In seeking a way out, a way to revolt, women had an advantage – the could identify an enemy, which was men, or at least patriarchy. Why aren’t men rising up against this betrayal? Part of the answer is men are taught to confront a problem – identify the enemy and defeat it. But in this case who is the enemy? Themselves? So maybe solving problems through confrontation is not the answer. What is then? Gay men might provide an example. When the AIDS pandemic hit gay men mobilized to take care of gay men. Quite quickly they built a network of clinics, drug buyer’s clubs, legal and psychological services, political action networks, transportation systems, home care, buddy visits, meal deliveries, and hospices. They had a job to do and did it. Yeah, gays teaching men how to be men. A way out of the mess is to forget about masculinity and focus on humanity. Don’t worry about being a man. Ignore the masculinity scorecard society has given men. Do the work of a man – which happens to be the same as the work of a woman. Thank you, feminism! And that work is social responsibility. That can be summed up easily: care for each other. Some men are becoming rebels through figuring out how to do just that.

Lies have a conservative bias

Feminists in China see lots of censorship thrown in their way. The current little trick they are using is to pair the emojis for rice and bunny. When the words are spoken aloud in Mandarin the pronunciation is “mi tu.”



We’ve heard that truth has a liberal bias. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos says that lies have a conservative bias. He looks at a recent poll about climate change. Recent polling shows that fewer Republicans believe there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Also down is the agreement by GOP respondents that scientists believe global warming is occurring. Yeah, they’re saying we don’t believe climate change is occurring and we believe that scientists don’t believe it either.

Another little bit from the same article: Voters have been asked how they rate the condition of the national economy. From the fall of 2015 through the 2016 election over 40% of GOP respondents consistently said it was very bad, another nearly 40% said it was fairly bad. Practically the day after the election the number saying the economy was very bad dropped by 13% and both continued to fall. Now both the very bad and fairly bad responses are 3% and 6% while the combination of those thinking the economy was fairly good to very good jumped from under 20% before the election to about 90% now.

Across that same time period – fall 2015 to now – the response from Democrats has been pretty consistent, with fairly good ranging from 60% to 52%.

So “facts” depend on a person’s politics (yeah, we knew that).

In another post, polls look at what Millennials think of the nasty guy and the GOP. Over the last 30 months the unfavorable rating of the nasty guy by those age 18-34 has been consistently above 63% and sometimes as high as 78%. Their disapproval for the party has been consistently above 58% and has been as high as 72%. Soon the eligible Millennial voters will outnumber the eligible Baby Boomer voters.