Privacy

Real question: Does the interest in privacy change substantively when technological changes have us blabbing about everything from our daily eating to sexual preferences in minute detail?  When 'selfies' is likely to be added to Webster's, if it hadn't already?

Are there going to be different categories of coverage for people depending on how public they are with their bizness, kind of like libel law?

I'm curious.

I like this quote from Roxane Gay: "The Scrabble game I’m playing online knows I recently visited Home Depot to buy metal shelving and keeps displaying Home Depot ads. If that’s possible, then yes, it’s not a reach to see that the government is probably in my business, too."  (From her Tumblr )

Urvashi Vaid

Has a new book out, Irresistible Revolution.  It's top of my to get list.  I've been listening to interviews on podcasts like OUT FM in NYC and watching speeches and interviews on the web and remembering how cogent and incisive Virtual Equality, her earlier book, was.  And remembering what an inspiring activist "Urv" and others like Sue Hyde, Jerry Greenberg, Linda (I'm blanking on her name, but she was fierce), young folks working for NGLTF and moonlighting in OUT! like Scott and Mary, and old hands like Frank Kameny were when I was a teenager in 80s DC with homohatred and denial strong in the local and national culture and AIDS raging.  I was constantly impressed with her and their fearlessness and willingness to speak out despite all the shaming and silencing that was still the hallmark of the time, so many years post-Stonewall.

Besides having a hot, funny GF (Kate Clinton, yes, *that* Kate Clinton), Urvashi's wicked smaht.  And lived the movement history she's writing about.

Her site has a link to a study of lesbian participation in the first two "marches on Washington of the LG flavor-  labels changed for each one and 1993...   Some interesting observations. 

It brings me back... Queer DC at the time, like Boston and other cities was split between men and women, each divided by racial groupings, with a radical lesbian underground hosting women's music, collectives, a feminist bookstore, magazines like off our backs, and the like.  And some of us straddled that scene and hung with the radical guys in scenes like Gay Community News, ACT UP!, and OUT!  It was a bit of a mind- bender, ideologically and socially speaking.  Sexism, hostile defensive disinterest, and invisibility from one side and some whack ideological social policing and infighting/trashing like only women can do on the other...  For a teenage wannabe activist, there was a lot to learn and digest, all at once from all directions.  Urvashi had a way of cutting through the b.s. effectively, from understanding where everybody was coming from but calling them out too.  The way I remember it, anyway...

A Girl Like Her, the movie

I dragged the GF to more movies in the Mpls St Paul International Film Festival over the weekend.  The first was short (40 minutes) but really packed a feminist punch.

 A Girl Like Her played the oral stories of women who were forced to stay in homes for unwed mothers and have their babies, then sign them over for adoption, often without seeing or holding the baby at all, prior to the convergence of Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, the pill, and, last but hardly least Title IX.  And the Second Wave feminist movement, though that was not the focus here. 

The audience for this movie is clearly your average Joe and Jane, since the length and format is geared for a hopeful future broadcast release.  However, I found this movie both unexpectedly informative, despite having read a whole book on the subject several years ago, and emotionally devastating, despite, you know, the butch facade.

I have a direct link to the subject matter, admittedly.  The family link between white blonde girl me and my 2 years younger brother, who is African American, is the sea change in social mores and laws that made blonde babies scarce and African American children a possible option for white liberals, until the questions were raised about Best Interest of the Child with that.

But as much as I knew about the individual pieces that went into creating the situation where a "dorm room accident" like myself might end up in adoption, and I knew about the 9-month enforced stays in homes for unwed mothers, I had not put two and two together in the way this movie does.

The way the oral stories are told over stock footage from 40s and 50s propaganda films and TV ads is very powerful in creating a sense of the coerciveness of the culture as well as laws and the central role families played in reinforcing and reproducing the coercion.  In light of the desire of some to return to those good old days... this is a very timely movie.  (There's an older book as well.)

Things I had not considered in this light were the effect of Title IX in ending the ability of school and universities to expel pregnant women (without expelling the fathers) or the effect this had on even the grooviest feminist with a supportive boyfriend and family due to this.  The way this movie interrogates the concept of choice pre-1972 is a needed correction to the flabbiness of the way we (who were not there, or who were sheltered from certain facts of life) are often led to look back on the period from the 40s thru 60s. 

Well worth making the effort to see or bring to your town...

Drawings From the Gulag

By D.S. Baldaev, born in 1925 in Ulan-Ude, Buryatiya, Russia.  He was sent to an orphanage for children of political prisoners and then, after serving in WW II, was ordered to work as a warden in Kresty prison.  He drew the tattoos of criminals, which the NKVD realized was useful and let him continue.  So he was sent all over the USSR to witness the scenes collected in this book. His dedication to accuracy is pretty stunning.

"Girls and women, stay away from the lesbians!  Someone is waiting for you at home."  This drawing would be funny, as in campy humor, like old propaganda often is, but in the context of the horrors shown on pretty much every other page, not here. 

And one can imagine what it was actually like to be a lesbian in the Gulag from the rest.  Koblui/butches or not.

It's amazing what lengths he went to in order to document what he had seen, without flinching, with the possible repercussions.

I hadn't realized the scientists working on cybernetics - pre-computers - in the 50s were arrested and tortured, mocked by propaganda as advocating the replacement of humans with robots.