10-23-06, 9:25 am
Editor’s Note: Doug Ireland is a journalist who has been a contributor to numerous major publications, including The Nation, In These Times, Village Voice, LA Weekly, TomPaine.com, New York Gay City News, and many others.
PA: Anyone reading your blog, DIRELAND, over the last few months will see that you have documented a long list of incidents of severe human rights violations in various countries against gay and lesbian people. Why doesn’t the US media cover these stories adequately, and does it deflate the myth that television shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy have transformed our media culture?
DI: The answer is it does deflate the myth because there’s still a great deal of institutional homophobia in the US news media. There is also a problem of tunnel vision in many cases. For example, national media in this country have not focused on the horrific reign of terror in Iran that is being inflicted on gay people. All the news media want to talk about is the nuclear issue. So the large news organizations that have reporters on the ground in Iran are not focusing at all on the homophobic campaign of the Ahmedinejad regime. I’ve written about two dozen different articles both in the gay press and in non-gay magazines and publications over the past year documenting this reign of terror that is being conducted against gay and lesbian people. The Tehran regime uses Internet entrapment, torture, blackmail, in which people are forced to confess to ' crimes' they never committed, and they are then hung for those crimes. And yet we can’t get any attention paid to this by the major US news organizations.
Another good example, is what’s going on in Iraq. The anti-gay pogrom that is happening in Iran has been exported to Iraq. The principle Shi’ite political formation, which is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq is, of course, an Iranian backed political operation. Its headquarters were in Tehran for 20 years during the reign of Saddam Hussein, and it continues to be financed by Tehran. It is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq’s military arm, which is the Badr Corps, which is conducting systematic persecution and murders of gay people in Iraq. The anti-gay death squads from the Badr Corps are paid by Iran. This is acknowledged by supporters of the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, who is the chief spiritual authority of all the Iraqi Shi’ites and is himself Iranian, and who issued last October a fatwa demanding death for any 'involved in homosexuality.' Since the Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued that fatwa, the organized killing of gay people by the Shi’ite death squads of the Badr Corps has increased enormously to the point that gay Iraqis are afraid to leave their homes. They are afraid to go into the streets, because they will be kidnapped or lynched or shot. The level of fear among the gay Iraqis that I’ve spoken to is enormous.
They’ve even gone so far as to kill children. Unfortunately, there are quite a few young teenage boys who have been forced into prostitution by the poverty of their families and will have sex with men for very little money, sometimes just for food. There was a case just a few weeks ago of a 14-year old boy who sold his body for a little money or a little food, sometimes for just a few potatoes, because his family was so poor. And the Badr Corps and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq have systems of neighborhood spies in neighborhood committees that report immoral behavior, as they put it, which includes homosexuality. This kid was reported to the Badr Corps by these neighborhood spies for having sex with men, and the Badr Corps arrived at his home and shot him dead on the front doorstep of his home, a 14-year old kid. This kind of thing is going on every week and every day.
But of course you can’t get the US occupying authorities to do anything about it. They long ago made a deal with the Shi’ite religious leaders in general and with the Ayatollah Sistani in particular and do not want to muddy their relations with the Shi’ite religious leaders by doing anything about the campaign against Iraqi gays. And, while the British press has given the systemic killing of gays in Iraq coverage, the US press hasn’t bothered with this important story.
PA: Perhaps there are other motives the US military has as well? Just recently they labeled homosexuality as a mental disorder.
DI: Yes, they quickly issued a new statement withdrawing that characterization in the wake of all the protests about it. But the problem is that the Iranians have heavily infiltrated the Interior Ministry in Iraq. The members of the Badr Corps who are paid by Iran are now wearing the uniform of the Iraqi police. In fact, in the instance of the 14-year old boy who was murdered, this was done by people wearing police uniforms. So there is a reluctance on the part of the US occupier not only not to ruffle the fanatical anti-gay religious sentiments of the Shi’ites, but also not to bring any attention and discredit on the operations of the Baghdad government which is being supported by Washington. It wouldn’t look very good to the world if the military authorities and the US occupying authorities in Iraq started raising a ruckus about police in the Interior Ministry killing gay people. So they turn a blind eye to it. It has a dual purpose: 1) not to go contrary to the religious fanatics and 2) now that the Badr Corps is operating with the official sanction of the Interior Ministry, not to cast discredit on the new government, which Bush runs around praising.
The other problem is that US gay organizations are in effect very isolationist and have not been doing very much at all if anything on international issues. They’ve been very silent about the persecution of gay people in Iran. They’ve been silent about the murders of gay people going on in Iraq. They did nothing about the ongoing homophobic crisis in Poland with the new virulently homophobic ultra-conservative government, which includes an anti-Semitic party in the coalition government called the League of Polish Families, a Catholic extremist party noted for its extreme and violent homophobia, and whose youth arm the All-Polish Youth has been the spearhead of violent physical attacks on gay people for a number of years. The League’s All-Polish Youth regularly attacks gay demonstrations. Its thugs assault gay people with bottles, stones, fists and clubs. There are a lot of skinheads in this organization, and many are also members of the international neo-Nazi skinhead organization Blood and Honor’s Polish branch.
Once again, where are the US national gay organizations? They’re not speaking out on these issues. So US news editors say to themselves, well, if the national US gay organizations are not speaking out on Iran, Iraq or Poland, then why should we worry about it? It obviously is not very important. The silence of US gay organizations on these international issues is contributing to the fact that the media continue to ignore them.
PA: What would you like to see in terms of international solidarity?
DI: I have written about this a number of commentaries in the gay press, which you can find on my website. The US national gay organizations, like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), must abandon their isolationism. They must embrace the issue of gay oppression around the world. If we’re to say that we have a gay movement that has any meaning, that is not just a bunch of self-satisfied bourgeois gays who send checks to organizations promoting gay marriage but instead are really engaged with the global human project of gay liberation, then our national gay groups have to devote some resources to educating and organizing around these issues of gay oppression in other countries. Another example is that they were completely silent until the very last minutes, in the case of NGLTF, on the Moscow Pride situation. When Moscow Gay Pride was banned by the Mayor of Moscow and then broken up by police and fascist gangs that were allowed to beat up demonstrators, the ban had been in place for months and months. There were demonstrations all over Europe about this, but HRC did nothing at all, and the NGLTF waited until the very last minute to issue a press release. But issuing a press release even so is awfully minimal.
What we need are national gay organizations to assign staff and create an international desk in each of their groups to monitor what’s going on in the countries where gays are being persecuted and then to organize around those questions with public events and meetings and demonstrations. The last opportunity to do that was July 19th. At the initiative of the Paris-based International Committee for the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), the militant British gay rights group OutRage, the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization, and the International Lesbian and Gay Association, there was a call for a world-wide International Day of Protest Against Homophobic Persecution in Iran. The date of July 19 was chosen to commemorate the public hanging of two teenage gay boys in the Iranian city of Mashad on that day last year.
There were demonstrations in 29 cities all over the world on July 19 in solidarity with persecuted gay and lesbian and transgender Iranians – including in Mexico City and Moscow, in Vienna and Amsterdam, in Bogota and in Warsaw, and in nine US cities. But the US demonstrations were organized entirely without any help from either of the two principal national gay groups, HRC and NGLTF. In some places, the vigils and demonstrations were organized at the initiative of local gay newspapers – the Seattle Gay News, New York City’s Gay City News, Fort Lauderdale’s Gay News; in other places, by ad hoc local committees. But our national gay institutions were totally absent from this, the most important world-wide demonstration of solidarity with persecuted gay Iranians.
And that’s just one action in what has been a sea of silence on the part of our US gay organizations in sharp contrast to what goes on in Europe. Gay organizations throughout western Europe have been very active, for example, on the Iran issue and in solidarity with Poland. At the gay pride march in Warsaw, which they initially tried to ban and which was threatened with violence by the League of Polish Families, a party that is in Poland’s ruling government coalition, west European gay organizations responded by sending large delegations to march in the Warsaw Pride Parade. Germany alone sent over 1,000 people. There were more than 20 European members of the European Parliament from Western European countries who went to Warsaw to march in the gay pride parade in solidarity with the Polish gays against the persecution being inflicted on them by the Kaczynski government. We in the US are lagging behind the European gay movements in engaging with these very urgent and in some cases life and death issues of gay oppression in other countries. We need to break this cycle of isolationism and engage with those issues.
PA: It seems like it would be pretty easy to talk about how bad things are in other countries while we have well-funded organizations here to promote LGBT rights and equality. But how do these situations compare? We have a political climate here that vacillates between malign neglect to outright hostility.
DI: There’s no question that we in the United States have a long way to go. In this country we are fighting a vicious wave of theocratic homophobia that has gotten a lot of help from the Republican Party and the Bush administration. Once you get beyond the two coasts, the East Coast and the West Coast, in many parts of America its still awfully tough to be gay. We do not yet have a desperately needed national federal law prohibiting discrimination in employment, a key measure to protect gay people. To my way of thinking it is a much more important issue than gay marriage. But the right has made gay marriage a hot button issue, and we have no choice but to respond and to try to convince the country that the issue of equality is indivisible and that full equality for gays includes marriage equality. Unfortunately, the polling shows that the country is not there yet. By a significant majority, people are opposed to gay marriage. We are not going to win on that issue at the polls any time soon. That’s exactly why the Republicans have seized on the anti-gay marriage issue and are again this year putting referenda to ban gay marriage on the ballots of a number of states, at least seven or eight so far, with more in the works. The goal, of course, is the same goal they had when they put 11 anti-gay marriage referenda on the ballot in 2004, which is to increase the turnout of the religious conservatives in November, which the Republicans rather rightly think will vote for them.
Clearly we have a long way to go on many fronts in this country. By comparison to the situation in the Eastern European countries and in the Islamic countries and in a great many African countries, however, we have an enormous amount of freedom that we have won in the last three and half decades through struggle. We need to remember there was a time in this country when we did not have that freedom. We need, therefore, to link up in solidarity with gay organizations in other countries where there is much more severe repression of homosexuality than here, where homosexuality is still a crime, where gay organizations are persecuted, where gay people are rounded up wholesale and thrown into prison, where gay people are executed for being gay. That’s certainly a much more severe situation than we face in this country where you can’t get married. Don’t forget that in 78 countries homosexuality is still a crime, and in nine countries is punishable by the death penalty.
PA: It seems as though people who are allies of the gay and lesbian movement in the US have shirked some of their responsibility as well. Recently the Democratic Party, for example, has been criticized for surrendering some of its most radical positions on LGBT equality.
DI: I never noticed that the Democratic Party had a radical position on gay equality. What has happened is that the political center of gravity has shifted dramatically to the right in the last 30 years and so has the political center of gravity in the Democratic Party. There has been this rush to centrism right across the board on a whole host of issues. In fact, the Democrats have been running away from the immediate electoral challenge on gay issues in what I think is an electorally suicidal move. Just as in 2004, neither the Democratic National Committee nor the state Democratic Parties have really been involved or engaged in fighting these anti-gay marriage referenda that the Republicans and their Christian Right allies have been putting on the ballot again this year in state after state. They didn’t send in their election lawyers to try to challenge the signatures in those states where the referenda were put on the ballot via the petition route. They did no mobilization or education of the electorate to try to convince them that this was institutionalizing bigotry to formally deny marriage equality to gay people. They basically abandoned the struggle. We know that in 2004 in many places, these gay marriage referenda helped defeat the national Democrats. This was very clearly seen in Ohio. It was the turnout of religious right voters by the anti-gay marriage referendum on the ballot in Ohio that sunk Kerry, because the turnout of religious conservatives, including traditionally Democratic Catholic voters, who tend to dominate the suburb of many large Ohio cities, came out and voted against him. And that’s going to happen this fall, if the Democrats don’t get off their ass and start fighting these referenda, which they’re not doing.
PA: You’re saying that even if it isn’t possible to win on the referenda, the Democrats need to be involved in those struggles in order to mobilize the voters who will support them more generally?
DI: Yes. I wrote on this for . The most effective way to fight the electoral challenge posed by these anti-gay referenda is for the Democrats to have a clear cut, comprehensible alternative platform to the Republicans on a whole host of issues that grab people where they live, particularly the economic issues. The galloping centrism that has seized the Democratic Party in this last period means that the Democrats have blown just about every major issue that has come down the pike. The polls show, in poll after poll, that a majority of Americans don’t believe that the Democrats have presented a clear and comprehensible and distinct alternative to the Republicans, that is different from what the Republicans are proposing. We see that in just these last weeks in the conduct of the Democrats in the Senate on the Iraq question. But it’s been right across the board. There’s been really no effective Democratic reform program to respond the problem of corruption in congressional politics, the problem of these huge amounts of money where everybody in Congress is on the take. The Democrats haven’t offered anything except a very weak tea program and a couple of band aids on what is a very serious institutional problem. We’ve blown the health care issue; we’ve blown the corporate corruption issue. The Democrats haven’t developed a real program for reforming these rapacious corporations in the wake of the Enron scandal and the other huge corporate scandals. If you don’t have the Democrats creating a seriously different and comprehensibly different alternative to the Republicans on either Iraq or the pocket-book issues, then the hot button 'social' issues like gay marriage are going to have more weight then they should.
PA: What do you think are some of the key features of and problems inherent in the intersection between the struggle workers rights and for LGBT equality and rights?
DI: When I was a young lad, it is true, I was a staffer for the UAW, which was then one of the more progressive unions in the US. Of course nowadays it is pretty much a company union as the auto industry has been decimated. It’s not going to be many more years before we don’t make cars in this country. In any case, we have to say there are parts of the labor movement that have embraced gay issues. There’s a terrific organization affiliated with the AFL-CIO called Pride at Work, which consists of gay trade unionists. There are significant gay caucuses in a number of large unions, for example the Service Employees International Union has a very large gay caucus. So does the AFSCME. In those unions putting into the union contracts the matter of a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the workplace is being raised and is being won. But in the majority of American labor unions, the issue of banning discrimination in the workplace, in hiring and firing and promotion, on the basis of sexual orientation is simply absent from the trade union demands. One of the things that Pride at Work, which has been given a little office and a couple of dollars by the AFL-CIO in Washington, and could use a lot more, is trying to do is expand the number of union that make gay equality in the workplace a union demand. That certainly needs to be done, because that will affect a hell of a lot more people than gay marriage will.
