As the festival season hits full gear in the US, OutCasting Overtime queer youth broadcaster Shoshana is heading for New York City with a couple of parades and some helpful lessons already under her belt (produced by Marc Sophos).
Mattachine Society and Radical Faerie founder Harry Hay and International Gay and Lesbian Archives founder Jim Kepner explore the beginnings queer theory looking through what they call “the gay window” in a classic 1975 conversation.
And in NewsWrap: Jerusalem Pride organizers and supportive government officials parade despite credible death threats, Florida Senator Marco Rubio burns an army base library’s Pride Month plan for Drag Queen Story Time, South Africa’s Robben Island puts Pride where the infamous political prison was, Australia’s new Labor-majority government boasts a record number of female Cabinet members and eight out MPs, and more international LGBTQ news reported this week by Lucia Chappelle and David Hunt (produced by Brian DeShazor).
All this on the June 6, 2022 edition of This Way Out!
Complete Program Summary and NewsWrap Transcript
for the week of May 30, 2022
Growing Up At Pride & Hay’s Historic “Window”
Program #1,784 distributed 06/06/22
Hosted this week by Greg Gordon and produced with Lucia Chappelle
NewsWrap (full transcript below): More than 7,000 LGBTQ people and their allies celebrate Pride for the 20th time in Jerusalem despite death threats against organizers and supportive government officials, and the arrests of at least 10 potential perpetrators … rightwing Florida Senator Marco Rubio leads the charge to cancel a Pride Month Drag Queen Story Time at the U.S. Air Force Base in Ramstein, Germany because it exposes children to “sexually charged content” … Pride comes for the first time to Robben Island, where South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27-years behind bars … a homophobic mob in Senegal’s capital of Dakar robs, strips, bloodies and parades down the street a visiting U.S. tourist they mistakenly think is gay … as the dust settles on the May 21st national elections in Australia that ended the anti-queer coalition government of Liberal Party Prime Minister Scott Morrison, new Labor Party P.M. Anthony Albanese has secured enough votes in the House to govern outright, but will still need a few cross-bench votes in the Senate, as he names a record number of women — ten out of 23 - to his Cabinet, including proudly out Senator Penny Wong as the country’s new Foreign Minister, while a total of 7 other out lawmakers win seats in Parliament … irrational anti-trans hate moves from the fringes to the mainstream of the U.S. Republican Party, as demonstrated by the racist and trans-phobic lies of both Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar and Georgia Congresswoman MARJORIE TAYLOR-GREEN about the Uvalde, Texas mass murderer (and Greene’s additional prediction of hetero extinction), while former one-term president DONALD TRUMP spews anti-trans nonsense at his Wyoming “Save America rally (written by GREG GORDON, edited by LUCIA CHAPPELLE, reported this week by LUCIA CHAPPELLE and DAVID HUNT, produced by BRIAN DeSHAZOR).
Feature: Pride can take some practice. As the festival season hits full gear in the U.S., OutCasting Overtime queer youth broadcaster SHOSHANA (produced by MARC SOPHOS) is heading for New York City with a few parades and some helpful lessons already under her belt.
Feature: Years before closet doors starting bursting open en masse, pioneering activists like Harry Hay and Jim Kepner were rattling the doors and windows of what would become a new queer consciousness. Hay had been a founder of the Mattachine Society in 1950. Kepner was a journalist who founded the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. This 1975 conversation may sound dated today, with its white male and gender binary assumptions about what it means to be what they call “gay.” But it does give us a “window” into the early development of radical LGBTQ thought (with intro/outro music by ANGELA LANSBURY from the Broadway musical Mame).
NewsWrap
A summary of some of the news in or affecting global LGBTQ communities
for the week ending June 4, 2022
Written by Greg Gordon, edited by Lucia Chappelle,
reported this week by Lucia Chappelle and David Hunt,
produced by Brian DeShazor
More than 7,000 LGBTQ people and their allies defied death threats to celebrate Pride in Jerusalem on June 2nd. It’s the twentieth year for the colorful parade from Liberty Bell Park to a boisterous rally in Independence Park.
Death threats against the march and its organizers have become almost routine, but this time supportive Israeli lawmakers were also specifically targeted. Police arrested ten people in Jerusalem suspected of planning to attack the march.
Mickey Levy became the first Speaker of the Knesset to address a post-parade Pride rally, saying that he was “shocked to the depths of [his] soul” over the threats of violence, according to The Times of Israel. The leader of Israel’s parliament told the crowd, “So I came today to stand against this evil specter … You are entitled to love who you want, you are entitled to marry who you love, you are entitled to raise a family like anyone else. These are not privileges, these are basic rights for every citizen in the country.”
Despite Levy’s cheerleading, civil marriage is not a basic right for anyone in Israel, regardless of sexual orientation. Marriages there can only be conducted and registered by religious authorities.
Social Equality Minister Meirav Cohen and Public Security Minister Omer Barley joined Levy in the march. Barley called the parade “a victory of light over darkness, a victory of sanity over extremism.”
Tel Aviv hosts the country’s largest Pride celebration in the coming week.
Rightwing U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida had his axe to grind against a Pride celebration this week. Along with a few other anti-queer lawmakers, he forced the cancellation of a “Drag Queen Story Time” scheduled to launch the season for a library at the Ramstein, Germany U.S. Air Force base.
Rubio absurdly claimed in a letter to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall that the event would be a “gross abuse of taxpayer funding to place children in a sexualized environment.”
Military officials have issued inconsistent explanations for the cancellation. One claims that a “more inclusive” event is in the works.
Meanwhile, Pride was celebrated for the first time on May 25th on South Africa’s Robben Island, located just north of Cape Town. The Island is known as the place where the anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison.
The national queer advocacy group The Other Foundation organized the event. Activists marched from Murray’s Harbour to the flagpoles near the entrance of the former prison, where the rainbow flag was raised. Organizers hope that the celebration will become an annual event.
As the nation’s first post-apartheid President, Mandela helped push for anti-bias protections for lesbians and gays in the re-written South African Constitution, thanks to the lobbying of some of his gay colleagues.
Moving to the west of Africa, three people were arrested in Senegal this week following the mob attack on a U.S. entertainer who was mistaken for gay. Apparently he was just dressed too flamboyantly for Dakar.
The unidentified visiting musician can be seen on videos posted to YouTube and TikTok bloodied, barefoot and stripped to his boxer shorts. Several dozen men are slapping him about the head and torso as he is paraded down the street to the sounds of anti-queer chants, like, “Let’s kill him before the police arrive,” and, “He does not deserve to live.” All of his belongings were stolen.
The assault happened on the International Day Against Homophobia, Bi-phobia, Intersex-phobia and Trans-phobia. A popular Senegalese football player publicly refused to wear a rainbow-colored uniform in observance of the Day at a French league match. That may have contributed to the mob violence.
A rally was held on May 22nd in Dakar featuring speakers railing against LGBTQ rights. The three arrests came a day later.
Senegal’s President Macky Sall has repeatedly expressed opposition to repealing the nation’s antiquated laws criminalizing same-gender sex. Offenders can be punished with up to five years in prison.
Global surveys measuring how welcoming and safe a country is for queer tourists rank Senegal near the bottom.
Newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this week secured enough seats in Parliament to form a Labor Party-majority government. In the ouster of the rightwing coalition government of the Liberal Party’s Scott Morrison, Labor has won 76 seats for a majority in the House of Representatives. Two additional House seats remain too close to call.
It’s a different story in the Senate, where Albanese will need a few cross-bench votes. However, queer activists have an optimistic outlook for a reasonably progressive legislative agenda.
As Albanese’s pick for Foreign Minister, lesbian Senator Penny Wong is among a record number of women in the new Albanese Cabinet – 10 out of 23 positions. She’s now one of the world’s most powerful government officials.
Three of four queer Liberal Party lawmakers lost their re-election bids, but eight out lawmakers succeeded. They’re among what’s being called the most diverse Parliament in Australian history: joining Penny Wong in the Senate are Labor’s Louise Pratt, the Green Party’s Nita Green and Janet Rice, and the Liberal Party’s Dena Smith; seats in the House are ready for Labor’s Julian Hill, the Green Party’s Stephen Bates, and the Liberal Party’s Angie Bell.
Finally, irrational U.S. trans-phobia has moved from the fringes to mainstream Republican politics. Results of a survey released this week by the Southern Poverty Law Center echo the “gays want to recruit your children” claims of yesteryear.
Close to seven in ten Republican respondents said they believe that transgender adults and “gender ideology” pose a threat to children and to society in general. The venerable anti-racism group finds that this thinking has accompanied the rise of white Christian nationalism and the belief that nonwhite people are “replacing” the country’s white Christian majority. Hundreds of anti-trans laws introduced in just the first five months of this year by Republican-dominated state legislatures may just be the tip of the hateful iceberg.
Oft-misspoken Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar falsely claimed on Twitter that the 19-year-old mass murderer in Uvalde, Texas was “a transgender leftist illegal alien.” The shooter was a U.S. citizen and was not trans. Gosar eventually deleted his tweet. He’s actually expected to win re-election easily in November.
You also might remember another far-right Republican talking trans-trash at one of ex-president Trump’s recent “Save America” rallies about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg:
[SOUND: Greene] “And you know what? Pete Buttigieg can take his electric vehicles and his bicycles and he and his husband can stay out of our girls’ bathrooms. Yup! Yeah!”
That’s Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who won election and media stardom with an anti-mask, anti-vax, Q-Anon conspiracy, beware-of-Jewish-space-lasers platform. Greene amplified Gosar’s off-the-rails anti-trans comments in a Facebook Live video this week, featuring her own lying, racist rant about the Uvalde killer:
[SOUND: Greene] “(He) was Hispanic, clearly had a lot of mental issues going on, as was shown with him wearing eyeliner or cross dressing, a lot of his language, being a loner … we're still learning a lot more about him.”
Greene’s May 29th diatribe seems to say that LGBTQ “recruitment” efforts over the years are finally starting to pay off. Listen to her latest conspiracy theory:
[SOUND: Greene] “They just want you to think that all of a sudden the entire population is steadily turning gay or turning trans, just generation, generation. Probably in about four or five generations, no one will be straight anymore. Everyone will be either gay or trans or non-conforming, or whatever the list of 50 or 60 different options there are.”
Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s favorite president tossed out a bizarre comment of his own at a May 27th “Save America” rally in Wyoming:
[SOUND: Trump] “We will defend parents rights. No teacher should ever be allowed to teach transgender to our children without parental consent. Can you imagine?”
No, Donald, we sure cannot.
©1989-2022 Overnight Productions (Inc.)
“Satisfying your weekly minimum requirement of
queer news and culture for more than 30 years!”
Comments