Two Words

The English language is wonderful. Really.  

After all, it takes only two words to save trans or gay kids from getting the shit kicked out of them in the schoolyard--or trans or gay adults from getting fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes or denied health care or other services.

Just two words.  Deux mots justes.  

On the other hand, those two words are so powerful that they would make some parents pull their kids out of a school--out of fear of the  trans students their kids are bullying.

Two cheap, measly little words.  They're so little the local school board can slip them right past the parents.  Or so those parents fear--because, as little as they are, they could expose their kids to "she male" teachers.

What are those two words?

Hold on to your hats:  Gender identity.

All someone has to do is add those two words to a non-discrimination policy.   Two words, mightier thant the two hydrogen bombs Barry Goldwater  wanted to drop on Vietnam.

That's why some folks in Fairfax County, Virginia are trying to stop them.  Gender identity.  Those words could end the world as they know it.

They could also end the world that those bullied kids know.  

Who Built The Better Ark? A Woman, Of Course: Kea Tawana

I saw The Ark in my youth.

No, I'm not talking about a drug-addled experience.  Nor am I referring to any sort of religious or supernatural vision.  I actually saw The Ark.

Moreover, I saw it in Newark, New Jersey.  Yes, that Newark, New Jersey.

I know it's not a city mentioned in the Bible.  But The Ark was really there, circa 1985.

To be exact, it stood in the parking lot of the Humanity Baptist Church in the city's Central Ward, not far from the Newark Museum and New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Because it was perched on a hill, even in its skeletonic state, it cast an austere kind of majesty to the immediate area.

Like the Biblical ark, it was an attempt to salvage from a land rendered into ruins.  The creator of The Ark began salvaging materials from abandoned and burned-out buildings shortly after the city's devastating 1967 riots.  For more than a decade, the self-taught artist and artisan accumulated wood, metals and other materials and finally began to build the 30 meter (100 foot) long ship in 1982.

The ark's builder, who never went to school beyond the sixth grade, believed that life on land was becoming untenable.  Many other people have felt the same way and have gone to sea in houseboats or yachts.  However, the builder I'm mentioning wanted to have the ability to defend the ship and its crew as well as to be capable of supporting the lives of those on it for six months or more at sea.  

Given what much of Newark was like in those days, it's not hard to understand why someone would be disenchanted with life on dry land.  But the builder also wanted to go to Japan in that boat to lay wreaths on ancestral graves.  

Construction of The Ark continued for several years.  As one might imagine, it polarized people:  Some saw it as a symbol of Newark's fight to save itself, while others saw it as an intrusion, a fire hazard and worse.  Whatever it was, it was illegal.  Its builder, a church caretaker who lived in a self-made shelter on the grounds where The Ark stood, fought for more than a year against attempts to raze it, even signing an agreement to dismantle  and relocate it if a suitable location could be found.  But, of course, the city never found such a location.  Finally, conceding that there was nothing that could be done to keep The Ark standing, the builder destroyed it in the summer of 1988.

(To tell you the truth, I have always thought the city officials' attempts to destroy the ark had more to do with image and politics than fire safety codes.  I think those officials, and much of the public, wanted to forget the riots.  Building something from the rubble--two decades later--was a reminder of that the city hadn't recovered.)

Now, after reading this story, I want you to tell me what you would surmise about the builder. 

I would bet that a lot of you, as enlightened as you are, would say this person had to be a man.   And, in fact, the very first article I read about the Ark--around 1983 and, if I recall correctly, in the Star-Ledger--identified the builder as a man.

Kea Tawana, with her cat, during the time she was building her ark.

But Kea Tawana was born, according to her own accounts, around 1935 in Japan to Japanese mother and an American father who had been working there as an engineer.  According to Tawana, her mother and sister were killed in a bombing raid late in World War II.  After the war ended, she, her father and her brother were brought to "a camp with barbed wire around it" near San Diego, CA.  

She says her father was killed when camp guards fired into a crowd to break up a disturbance.  She and her brother were placed in an orphanage, from which they taken in by a foster mother in Flagstaff, Arizona.  She was bullied in school for being half-Japanese, she says, though I wouldn't be surprised if her masculine appearance had something to do with her difficulties.  Plus, if even half of what she says is true, she and her brother must have been suffering terribly with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  That probably would have made things very difficult for the foster mother, who sent them back to the orphanage from which she ran away when she was twelve.  She never saw her brother again.  

She carried clothes in a burlap bag, ate from farmers' fields and hopped trains across the Southwest and South, and by 1953 found her way to Newark where, she said, she "heard there were a lot of jobs".

Over the years, she taught herself everything from woodworking and electrical systems to how to make stained glass windows and use a gun.  She gained a reputation as a reliable and meticulous, if eccentric, craftsperson.  A few questioned her gender identity, but more often than not, she was taken for a man.

After The Ark was razed, I never heard about Tawana again.  I thought about The Ark for the first time in years after passing through Newark on a bike ride in November.  After that, I began to look for more information about Kea's Ark, as she dubbed her creation, and Kea herself.  I found a few articles about the boat, but nothing about Kea's life after she demolished it.  I hope she's still alive and doing well:  I admire her as much for living in her own gender identity (She said she didn't mind when people identified her as a man) as her attempt to create a new ark in Newark.

R.I.P. Mario Cuomo

"Vote for Cuomo, not the homo!"

Posters bearing that message lined Queens Boulevard in the days leading up to the 1977 primary to determine the Democratic Party's candidate in that year's election for the mayor of New York City.  

Just about anyone who witnessed that campaign will tell you it was one of the ugliest in his or her memory.  I would concur with them:  That message, believe it or not, wasn't even the meanest or nastiest thing one candidate said about another in that race.

But it was almost certainly one of the sleaziest.  Cuomo--Mario, the father of current New York State governor Andrew--always denied that neither he nor any of his staffers had anything to do with creating or posting that message.  I believe him.  So do most other people, even those who were against everything he stood for, or who simply disliked him.  There was no shortage of either of those kinds of people.

Among them was Ed Koch, who won that primary and the election.  Until the day he died nearly two years ago, he insisted that Mario was responsible but later would say that he "forgave" but "didn't forget."

Rumors about Koch's non-heterosexuality followed him throughout his life.  Even in 1977, in the pre-AIDS flowering of the Gay Liberation movement, such an allegation could have derailed his road to Gracie Mansion; any evidence that it was true would have blocked it altogether.  Even in New York City, there were--and still are--homophobes.  

Now, I just happen to be one of those people who believe that Koch was gay but have never cared about it.  I had other reasons for disliking him and his style of governance, none of which had to do with his actual or perceived proclivities or lifestyle.

The irony is, of course, that Mario Cuomo would have been one of the last people to use a charge of homosexuality against Koch, or anyone else.  If anything, Mario was more unabashedly an ally of LGBT people than his son is.  The reason why same-sex marriage and other LGBT-friendly legislation passed under the younger Cuomo's residence in the Governor's Mansion is that the political and social climate has allowed for it.  

Andrew was elected Governor of New York State in 2010, in the middle of Barack Obama's first term as President.  His father, in contrast, earned his first of three gubernatorial election victories in 1982, just when the effects of Ronald Reagan's alliance with Christian fundamentalists--and his profoundly anti-labor (remember: he fired all of the nation's air traffic controllers when they went on strike the previous year) policies--were re-shaping this country's discourse and governance.  Mario's three terms in Albany coincided with the Presidencies of Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as the first two years of Bill Clinton's.  While the latter was nominally a Democrat, he won the 1992 Presidential election by co-opting the policies of Reagan and Bush the Elder.  Mario, on the other hand, stuck to his New Deal Democrat ideals--which, he always said, were an outgrowth of his Christian faith.  

In other words, Andrew has been surfing the tide of history that his father had to swim against.  But, to be fair, it must be said that it wasn't his championing of LGBT rights that cost Mario a fourth term as governor in 1994.  Rather, it was another of his core principles--one that, by the way, caused me to vote for him:  his staunch opposition to capital punishment.  Every year that he was Governor, the State legislature introduced a bill to restore the death penalty in the Empire State.  Every year that he was governor, he vetoed it.  One of the first things his successor, Republican George Pataki, did upon assuming office in 1995 was to sign it.

I think that his steadfast commitment to his principles may have been a major reason why he chose not to run for President, even though his party practically begged him to do so in 1988 and 1992.  If that's the case, his instincts were canny:  Clinton, who stood against much of what Mario believed in, won. 

(Actually, many would argue that Clinton won by not standing for anything at all--and with perhaps-inadvertent help from third-party candidate Ross Perot.  I would not dispute such an argument.)

So, in brief, with Mario Cuomo's death yesterday, this state--and nation--lost who may have been the last true liberal and the last true intellectual, as well as one of the few politicians with any real principles, this country has ever had.  And, oh yes, a champion of LGBT rights before it was fashionable.