[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] My Coming Out Essay

Monday, I'd written that I was planning on writing an essay associated with National Coming out Day, inspired by Jason Kuznicki's two essays. I'd found it difficult to find a way to start the essay, though, to identify some point in time, or some observation, that could help sum up my reaction to the past two years and eight months.

It's only today that I realized that I must have been trying too hard. Earlier that Monday, while I was walking on Toronto Island, I received a long-distance phone call from Douglas Muir of Halfway Down the Danube. I'd seen Doug only once, in New York City two years ago, but I'd known him through discussions on soc.history.what-if before that time, and I've known him since. He was calling from Romania, and the telephonic connections weren't weren't very good, the connection having failed already once before in the conversation,. Just before the call cut out for a second time, he asked me how I was feeling, how I was doing.

I said, "I feel normal."

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[BRIEF NOTE] Kerry, Cheney, and the L-Word

The furor raised south of the border when Democratic candidates have raised the fact that current Vice-President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is a lesbian (once as praise for the Cheneys' love for their daughter, once as an example of the innate nature of sexual orientation) strikes me as amusing for what it reveals about the American right's attitudes. (That they have finally claimed to be interested defending people from attacks on the grounds of their sexual orientation is outright hilarious.)

The ever-radical Newsmax, for instance, claims that Mary Cheney was outed by Kerry, that her privacy was violated. This simply isn't so; at least as early as July 2000, Ms. Cheney's sexual orientation was a matter of public knowledge, possibly earlier given how she ran a gay and lesbian outreach program for Coors Brewing Company and lives with her girlfriend in Colorado. Since the 2000 campaign, Mary Cheney has been a public figure in the Republican Party, as this disapproving press release, about her affiliation with the Log Cabin Republicans, from the conservative group Concerned Women for America makes clear. Certainly, Kerry and Edwards were more polite than Republican candidate Alan Keyes, who attacked Mary as a selfish hedonist.

I have to agree with Timothy Noah's opinion in Slate:

Kerry's record is more tolerant than his campaign rhetoric suggests, and even his campaign rhetoric is more tolerant than Bush's. Kerry wants to make that a reason for swing voters who deplore bigotry to vote for him. I think that's what made Lynne Cheney spitting mad--she resents the implication that the Bush-Cheney campaign sold out her own gay daughter. But you know what? It did. And you know what else? The evidence that Kerry would treat gays with greater tolerance than Bush is a pretty good reason to vote for Kerry.

Is Elizabeth Edwards correct in her opinion of the Cheneys' reaction, as quoted in the New York Post?

Yesterday, the wife of Kerry running mate John Edwards also got into the act — and sparked fresh outrage — when she said Lynne Cheney had overreacted.

"I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences," Elizabeth Edwards said on ABC radio.

She accused Lynne Cheney of treating the situation "as if it's shameful to have this discussion . . . It makes me really sad that that's Lynne's response."

All that I can say one August 2002 night, when I decided to go to a GLBT dance on PEI, my parents reacted with tears and protests that I was allowing people to discover who their son was, and that they'd be so embarrassed.

I happily gave them hell for that. I'm still rather happy that I did.

I only hope that Mary does the same. Publically, preferably, but a private knock-down fight would work just as well.

[BRIEF NOTE] Race in Cuba

At the Financial Times, Richard Lapper reviews Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History. According to Lapper, in Gott's history

race assumes centre stage. The story takes in the fate of the Taino and Siboney indigenous population, who were largely wiped out by early colonisers, and the development of African slavery - abolished only at the end of the 19th century, half a century after the abolition of the slave trade elsewhere.

White fears that independence might pave the way for a Haitian-style black republic led white elites to give Spanish colonialism a fresh lease of life, although before the American civil war some whites pressed for annexation to the US as a way of preserving slavery. When that option disappeared after the civil war ended, they joined militias known in Cuba as "voluntarios", which fought hard to maintain the status quo. Like their Algerian or South African counterparts a hundred years later, their energies stiffened colonial resolve; the Spanish army made last-ditch efforts to stem the nationalist tide by herding potential opponents into concentration camps.

Invading US armies kicked out the Spanish, but they also excluded black nationalists from the officer class of the newly independent armies. Like Argentina, Brazil and Australia, newly independent Cuba succeeded in "whitening" its population by favouring immigration from Europe.

The number of blacks fell from just over half the population to about a third. They were confined to labouring jobs, were disproportionately poor, excluded from white organisations and became the victims of occasional episodes of repression. By the early 1900s local newspapers advocated lynchings as a model way of keeping the black population under control.

All this began to change in 1959, when the new revolutionary government started to outlaw discriminatory practices. Blacks are still under-represented in the higher echelons of the state and party but generally provide bedrock support for the government, especially in rural areas. The majority of the million or so Cuban exiles are white, increasing the racial disparity in the remaining population of blacks and mulattos. Anti-racism was a theme of Cuba's foreign adventures in Africa, which ranged from the ill- fated venture by Che Guevara in the Congo in the mid-1960s to the Cuban role in Angola, when about 50,000 Cuban troops helped turned the tide in the war against South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-1988.

Castro's regime, mind, hasn't had purely positive impacts on Cuba's race issues.

Batista - the dictator [overthrown by Castro] - was poor, of mixed race, and popular among blacks, who were heavily represented in his army and police force.

The guerrilla army that defeated them was made up predominantly of the sons of white immigrants from Spain, like Castro himself, whose father Angel was born in Galicia.

Castro might have scrapped whites-only clubs, but he also outlawed black power organisations, and drove black cultural and religious activity underground. And then there is the awkward fact that the economic model he has chosen to preserve his own power and Cuba's socialist system since the 1990s has created an enclave "dollarised" economy from which Cubans without dollars are excluded. Since black Cubans have fewer relatives in the US sending them dollars, they tend to suffer most.

As Lapper notes, the race issue in Cuba--rarely spoken of, yet significant and important--will likely prove to be a serious issue after Castro's death, when Cuba embarks upon a transition of unknown length and with unknown destinations. We might do well to take note of it, if only so as not to be surprised if something happens.