50 Years After Malcolm X

On this date fifty years ago, Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom.  Today the site of the Audubon, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, is a laboratory for Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.  I have ridden by it many times and, in fact, once went inside the Ballroom.  Every time I passed or visited the site I thought, however briefly, about his importance, not only to the history of the US and the world, but in my own life.

I first read Malcolm’s autobiography when I was about twenty.  It was around the same time I discovered African-American writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston—and when I first heard Bob Marley.  In one way or another, they all not only expressed the burning desire to be free, but also made oppression—which is to say, the things that turn people into slaves of all kinds—clear and vivid.

I identified with their wishes and feelings for, as it turned out, reasons very different from theirs.  How could mine not be different?  After all, as difficult as my grandparents’ lives were, nobody brought them here in chains.  Even more to the point, I knew who my grandparents and their grandparents were, even though I had never met the latter.  So, even though I knew that so much of what I learned in school was a whitewashed (Yes, I am conscious of that word choice!) version of the truth, I wasn’t—couldn’t be—conscious of it in the profound way that Malcolm and all of those black writers and artists were. 

So, in my own clumsy way, I reacted to the injustices that persisted long after Malcolm’s murder and the deaths of the others I’ve mentioned though their polemics, rhetoric, rhythms, intuition and sense of irony.  What I did not understand was that they could use those tools or gifts or whatever you want to call them because they mastered them in ways that exact terrible, terrible costs.  (Baldwin has written that any people who has a language of their own has paid dearly for it.) What I could not understand was that I was paying my own dues, as it were, but I did not yet understand what I was paying for.  So I borrowed anger, grief, pain and a very dark kind of humor in my own feeble attempts to come to terms with why I could not live the kind of life for which I was being trained—or why anyone should want that kind of life.

So why am I mentioning such things on this blog?  Well, for one thing, being a cyclist has freed me from a lot of things.  I think of all of the time and money I didn’t have to spend on buying, fueling, maintaining and parking cars.  That is part of the reason why I have been able to live in New York and spend time with things I love:  I didn’t have to work in some job or in some business that would have destroyed my psyche or other people’s lives.  Being a cyclist when it wasn’t fashionable also, I think, has made me less vulnerable to propaganda and groupthink, if it hasn’t made me a better critical thinker or more creative person (though I think it’s done the latter for me).  

Of course, for me, freedom has meant living as the person I am.  Anyone who cannot live with integrity and with dignity is a slave or a prisoner or worse.  One way I identify with Malcolm is that it took him as long as he did to truly come into his own, even if he accomplished a lot else before doing so.  His descent into slavery, as it were, came when, in spite of his academic success and oratorical skills, his eighth-grade teacher mocked his dream of being a lawyer. When he, as an inmate in the Charlestown (MA) Penitentiary, became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, he found a voice.  However, it took him much longer, I think, to find his voice.

Our voice, if you will, is how we express our authentic selves in the world.  For some, it is in their careers or vocations.  For others, it is in creative work or performing:  I think of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar as his voice.  Others express it through a passion or relationship.  Actually, I think that for most of us, our “voice” is a combination of the things we do and are.  Whatever it is, if it isn’t authentic, we’re still slaves or prisoners.  For me, that is the real importance of Malcolm X’s life and work.

Why Imperialism and LGBT Equality Don't Mix, Even If Obama's Stirring The Drink

In an essay he wrote during the time of the Civil Rights movement, James Baldwin recounted how some of the “agitators” were accused of being Communists, or at least puppets of them.  As Baldwin pointed out, it was an incredibly stupid allegation because, to many poor and oppressed people in the world, it made the Kremlin seem like a supporter of human rights—which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the McCarthyites wanted Americans to believe.

History is irony when it’s not tragedy.  At  times—like now—it’s both:  Someone who has fashioned himself as a champion of peace and human rights has done more damage to both than any of the past few predecessors in his office.

I am talking about the current US President, Barack Obama.  Like many other LGBT people, I am glad that he has done more to bring us—especially transgender people—closer to equality with hetero and cis people than, perhaps, all of his predecessors combined.  Of course, he had to be prodded into some of his actions—most notably by his second-in-command, Joe Biden, into supporting same-sex marriage.

Still, I can’t help but to wonder whether he’s actually demonizing the cause of LGBT equality in the rest of the world, save for a few European and a couple of Latin American countries.  While we can celebrate, and push for more change, in the majority of the world, we’re not even deemed fit to exist, let alone marry or go into the same professions and occupations as other people.  A Jamican lesbian I know tells me she can’t go home: “I’d be killed as soon as I got off the plane in Kingston.”  A Pakistani and a Chinese gay man of my acquaintance have expressed similar anxieties. 

They all come from conservative—and, in the case of the Pakistani and Jamaican, religious—societies in which any deviance from cisgenderism and heterosexuality are crimes that could be punished by death.  Subtract religion from the equation and you have China, where the law allows the state to execute someone who loves someone of his or her own gender.

And, of course, the situation is probably even more dire for LGBT people in some Middle Eastern countries, particularly ones like Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Even in Turkey, I didn’t have the sense that a gay man or lesbian was particularly safe, and I knew that my own well-being had much to do with the degree to which my gender identity wasn’t in question.

In addition to ingrained homophobia and transphobia, those countries and others share resentment, if not outright hatred, of the United States—or, at any rate of its foreign policy.  More precisely, those countries have histories of economic and cultural —and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jamaica, political and military—colonialism and young people know it.  So, naturally, they detest our invasion of Iraq and our attempt to subjugate Afghanistan.  And, I imagine, they aren’t too happy about the fact that we have military bases in over two-thirds of the world’s nations—or that we’ve conducted drone surveillance and strikes.

Ah, yes, the drones.  Some argue that they’re better than putting young Americans in harm’s way.  However, that argument misses the point:  the drones aren’t meant to replace “boots on the ground”.  Rather, they’re meant to go above and beyond (in military terms, anyway) what live human beings can do to gather information and strike targets.   Also, if they’re meant to replace soldiers and sailors and airmen, why was a drone sighted at  JFK International Airport?

In the first two months of his administration, Obama ordered six times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during his first term as George W. Bush did during both of his terms.  (Of course, GWB started the drone program.  Still, the facts speak for themselves.)  He also did something that wasn’t part of Bush’s, or even Dick Cheney’s, wildest dreams:  He, in essence, gave himself the right to order the murders extrajudicial killings of US citizens anywhere in the world simply by deciding they are "enemy combatants".   I don’t think that even Humphrey and Nixon claimed such rights when they were invading Southeast Asian countries, and I don’t think George W's father even thought of such a thing when he invaded Grenada and conducted what was essentially a drug bust against Manuel Noriega. 

Now, as Jody Williams has wondered, how can a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize—and still thinks of himself as a champion of world peace and who has expressed his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.—do such things?  At best, it makes him blind to his own contradictions.  At worst, it makes him a rank hypocrite.  How can the rest of the world see him as a torch-bearer for liberty and justice?

Moreover, I can’t help but to wonder how countries and peoples who have been subjected to his version of “peace” see his support of women’s and LGBT rights and equality.  If other countries can see our universities, our culture and our economy—not to mention our militarism—as manifestations of “The Great Satan”, how can they see our (or, more specifically, Obama’s) expression of support for LGBT equality?   How can our leaders talk to Ahmadinejad about his country’s treatment of women and gays (or denial that the latter even exist in his country) or his revisionist views of history when our own foreign policy is killing innocent people all around him?  And, what’s going to make him, or the leader of any conservative Muslim country or military dictatorship, believe that LGBT people simply should have the right to live, let alone love and marry the people they love, when a President who supports such things is killing innocent people who just happen to live in countries deemed to be our enemies?

A Language of Necessity

Today, in a research writing class I teach, the students were discussing James Baldwin's essay If Black English Isn't A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

Several students said that even if he hadn't italicized it, this sentence would have leapt out at them: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.

The first time I read that sentence, so many years ago, it left me in tears. I knew exactly why, but I couldn't tell anyone else why. And even if I could have said, I'm not sure that I would have.

In those days, I didn't have language to express what I was experiencing. I tried to fashion it from bits and pieces of what I'd heard and read, but it never seemed like enough. Somehow I could not explain that, for example, I didn't "feel like a woman;" rather, I knew that I am one. Yet, at the same time, my sexual desires, such as I allowed myself to explore them, were not limited solely to either men or women. I did not have the language that allowed me to explain, much less express, this basic truth: That one's sexual preferences no more defines his or her gender than his or her body parts do.

Of course, I didn't talk about that aspect of my past. However, I could sense they knew, somehow, that although I am about as far from being black as anyone can be, I've actually lived much of what Baldwin describes in his essay. They knew that everything I said was not simply tested by the Socratic method or any other intellectual procedure: they could see that I have lived it; I have felt it.

I could see it in the way some of them nodded their heads and others stared when I said that the need for a concise, accurate and, if possible, moving language can cause people to suffer silently or even unconsciously with one problem or another. "That's the reason," I explained,"why children are molested and don't talk about it until they're 30 or 40 years old, or why girls get raped and don't talk about it until they're grown women."


One young woman in particular looked at me with a gaze that reflected her inquisitiveness and rage, yet was a plea for understanding at the same time. I could see the her question in her eyes,"How did you learn that?"


The odd thing was that her gaze actually snuffed out whatever flickering of whatever desire I had, at least at that moment, to tell about my own story of sexual abuse. That they knew I was speaking and teaching from my heart was enough for me.


Then again, I don't think I had to talk about my own experience for her or other people to know that I had it. And if they don't know, that's even better: It means they trust me and I won't let them down.


Now I'm thinking of a time when I was discussing a student's paper on A Doll's House with her. It was during the last year I lived and worked as Nick, and I had just left a long-term relationship and a place in which I had lived for eleven years. I had been spending a lot of time with my doctor, therapist and social worker; I would soon start to take hormones.

In the middle of our conversation, the student blurted out this observation: "When you were teaching about A Doll's House--especially when you were talking about Nora--you were teaching about yourself, weren't you?"


Now, some would argue that we are always teaching about ourselves, and I wouldn't disagree.


But I also couldn't deny that teaching A Doll's House, especially when I was talking about Nora, was particularly poignant for me at that time in my life.


"How did you know that?," I wondered.


"Sometimes you just looked ready to cry," she said.


Indeed I was. But I wasn't today. I had other language at my disposal. I paid for it, but it is mine. Hopefully, I communicated something with it today.

Remembering Other Friends and a Cat

It's a good thing I've been so busy the past few days. I know, you're wondering where I find the time to write in this blog. Well, I'll just say that until now, this blog hasn't recorded how much I've slept. Nor should it.

In any event, all the activity has kept my mind off things that would normally preoccupy me on the 22nd and 23rd of every December. Yesterday, the 22nd, was the anniversary of Cori's suicide, as I mentioned in my previous post. And today is even more intense: three anniversaries, all of them deaths. One happened when I was very young; the other two occured on the same day in 1991.

Seventeen years ago, I lost Caterina and Kevin. Who were they? My first cat and my first AA sponsor. They both came into my life at about the same time: I met Kevin during my first few days of sobriety, and I adopted Caterina not long after my 90th day without alcohol or drugs. If any of you who've been in AA or any of the other twelve-step programs, you know that 90 days is your first major milestone: It's recommended that you make it to 90 meetings in that time (I beat that easily; I once went to five meetings one rainy Saturday.) and, after that, ask someone to be your sponsor.

I don't have to tell you that 23 December 1991 was one of the more depressing days in my life, and wasn't made easier with the knowledge that both were destined to die sooner rather than later, and that, if nothing else, their suffering ended. They were both very, very sick: Caterina was old (She was close to ten years old when she and I adopted each other.) , and Kevin's immune system fell apart so thoroughly that it took a long and particularly thorough autopsy to determine what, exactly, killed him. However, the cause of the pneumonia that finally took him was clear: AIDS. He was one of many people in the twelve-step programs who died that way during the late '80's and early '90's, which were the first few years I spent sober. John, my second AA sponsor, also died that way nearly four years later. So, between them, Kevin and John guided me through my first decade without intoxicating substances.

At least John, Kevin and Caterina died when I had developed some resources, however rudimentary, for dealing with grief. But the first death I expereinced on the 23rd of December came much, much earlier in my life, years before even Cori's death. Adam had also killed himself, though by different means and for different reasons (at which I can, to this day, only guess) from Cori's.

Adam, who lived alone, turned on gas in his oven. Perhaps I will seem callous in saying this, but it really is a minor detail: Once you're dead, it really doesn't matter how you died, does it? Well, I guess to some of the living, it does, although their interest is, more often than not, questionable.

And what of the reasons why? I guess the previous answer applies here: They don't really matter to the dead person, only to the living. And why? One of Albert Camus's characters killed himself because someone didn't say "hello" to him that day. Just about any reason you can think of, someone else has had and didn't kill him or herself. This, I think, is the reason why so many people--and the religions they follow--say that people who kill themselves are immoral and weak, and their act is as evil as (or even more evil than) any homicide.

Now, I'm no expert on the subject (How, exactly, does one become one?), but I think that the ostensible reason a person might have for committing suicide isn't actually the impetus for the act--at least not by itself. Most people don't off themselves because other people didn't greet them, or even over seeing the sorts of things Adam saw in Bergen-Belsen. Or, for that matter, over the same dilemma about gender identity that followed Cori over the edge and me to the brink.

No, I belive that people who kill themselves--or who think seriously about doing it--are, in some way, like cancer sufferers. People who off themselves, or try to, are almost invariably suffering from depression. Sometimes it is overt; other times it is hidden so deeply that people claim not to understand why their friend, classmate, brother, sister or whomever made thirteen loops in the rope looped around his or her neck, pointed the barrel to his or her temple or leapt off the George Washington Bridge as Rufus did in James Baldwin's Another Country. Rufus's depression manifested itself as anger much like the kind I used to carry; others hide it or sublimate it for as long as they can.

In spite of their efforts, they suffer a kind of mental and emotional meltdown analogous to the shutdown and destruction of organs in the cancer patient's body. It reaches a point at which neither they nor anyone else can reverse it; if other people notice, all they can really do is to keep that person from harming him or her self, and to do whatever possible to help that person gain the tools or other resources he or she needs to stay alive long enough for a cure or remission. Telling them that pain is temporary is like telling a cripple that he, too, will win eight gold medals if he follows Michael Phelps' training regimen.

Anyway...I do know this much: The two most difficult days of almost every year are almost over for this year. I had dinner with Dominick a little while ago; now it's time to pack and do other things I need to do to get ready for tomorrow, when I fly to my parents' house. That, too, will pass, if more quickly than I'd like.

If only Toni, Cori and Adam knew...