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Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (3)
This is part 3 of a three-part post. Parts 1 and 2 are above. Campaign poster for Proposition K, a 2008 initiative to decriminalize prostitution in San Francisco, US Professionally, we prefer victims:...
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Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (2)
This is part 2 of a three-part post. Part 1 is above. It's still the same old sex panic: cover of "Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls," 1910 book on white slavery by Ernest Bell The traffic in...
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Four “sodomy” sentences in Iran: On not learning from our mistakes
Makwan Mouloudzadeh Iranian authorities killed Makwan Mouloudzadeh on December 5, 2007. Six months earlier, a court had convicted Mouloudzadeh — a youth of Kurdish descent from near Kermanshah — of...
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Obama, marriage, race, rights
I had brunch today with the kids who changed the President’s mind. If you’ll remember, when Barack Obama ten days ago declared his support for same-sex marriage, he cited “members of my own staff who...
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Then there were elections, and the fun started: Egypt’s vote
Beard vs. bullets: the Brotherhood’s Morsi and the army’s Shafiq There’s no such thing as “freedom.” There are only freedoms of various sorts, and nearly all of them are freedoms to. Freedom to speak;...
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Irresponsibility, ignorance, and self-declared “experts” on Iran
This way, please: Rumor leading the chariot of War (Vincenzo Cartari, 1582) Go ahead: Google “Stop Iran from Executing Four Homosexual Citizens.” You’ll get well over a thousand hits. They link to...
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Why I am not proud
This comes to me by way of Maya Mikdashi and the folks at Jadaliyya: It’s a float from 2011′s San Francisco Pride. It shows a dungeonmaster dominating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There’s a whip involved, but...
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Resources for the unbelievers, on aid conditionality and LGBT rights
Aid received per capita across the global South, 2007: From wphr.org I’ve been working desultorily (a beautiful word: say it slowly: it seems to capture being lazy but just alive enough to claim you’re...
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Out of here
In the unlikely event that anyone’s been wondering, I am on vacation. To demonstrate this unlikely assertion, here’s evidence: in the pink We have that healthy natural glow from gorging on Chick Fil-A.
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Vietnam: Marriage, authoritarianism, and social control
Dykes on bikes, Hanoi style: © AFP Hanoi held its first LGBT Pride on August 5, a march-cum-ride that went from the National Stadium to a downtown park. Dozens of cyclists decorated with balloons and...
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Bradley Manning, Bayard Rustin, and the perversion of Pride
Can I join? That eminent critic and activist Edward Said was given, from time to time, to quoting Hugh of St. Victor, a twelfth-century mystic: The person who finds his homeland sweet is a tender...
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VOTE on SF Pride! Do you want a) an anti-war whistleblower, or b) a pro-war,...
The God’s honest truth is, I forgot that the Bradley Manning fiasco isn’t the first time I have been irritated by San Francisco Pride. A year ago I wrote about this really remarkable float that...
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Hillel Neuer: Liar. Mona Seif: Hero.
Mona Seif, Tahrir Square: © Matthew Cassel, justimage.org I know Mona Seif only slightly. She’s one of the few human rights activists in Egypt (or anywhere) whom almost everybody likes. She’s utterly...
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Some more terrorists for Hillel Neuer to hand over to the authorities: Myself...
I’ll start with this tweet. This was one of the first things Maikel Nabil Sanad tweeted after release from almost a year in military jails. Maikel Nabil is a heroic campaigner against the Egyptian...
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A clarification: What international human rights activists really do
International human rights activists as they see themselves In my first post on Mona Seif, I objected to an e-mail that Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, sent to the New York Times....
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Boycott politics: Breaking out of the spaghetto mentality
The same people who have been pushing to boycott a whole country turned on a dime last week, and switched all their eager energies to boycotting bigoted spaghetti. It’s getting hard to keep track. 72...
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Poem of the day
Wystan Hugh Auden died forty years ago, on September 29, 1973, in his sleep after a poetry reading in Vienna, Austria. He was 66. I read his obituary in Time Magazine a few weeks later; I was ten years...
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Cultural Cold Wars: Where “traditional values” came from
“Communism destroys the family”: Spanish fascist poster, 1936. With one women screaming as the Red abducts another, the possibility that this is a lesbian family is not to be discounted. There’s...
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The Russian issue(s)
Right-wing demonstrators attack participant (center) in a “Day of Kisses” protest against anti-propaganda bill, in front of the Russian State Duma in January: © Anton Belitsky / Ridus.ru A few good...
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Kuwait’s “medical screening for gays”: Truth, fiction, and why it’s not a...
“Illegals” — foreign violators of Kuwait’s labor and residency laws — under arrest in a police station after May 2013 raids I first noticed it yesterday on Pink News, the UK’s G-and-sometimes-LBT news...
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