Queer Notes: January 2024

January 15, 2024

Takes up: Transgender Awareness Week 2023 worldwide; Intersex people’s rights; a LGBTQ+ art exhibit in Sao Paulo; the aftermath of the murder of nonbinary Mexican Justice Jesús Ociel Baena Saucedo; and the Lynchburg, Va., City School Board rejecting a grant awarded by the “It Gets Better Project” to high school students to create a safe space.

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Woman as Reason: The practicality of revolution

December 28, 2023

Reporter Sonia Sodha asked: “Women in revolt achieved so much. Why are decades of progress now being reversed?” The struggle for freedom of all those who have been pronounced as less than human may seem impossible, but as Irish revolutionary James Connolly said: “Revolution is never practical—until the hour of the revolution strikes.”

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Women WorldWide: March-April 2022

March 15, 2022

Demonstrations in Mexico City against legislation recognizing surrogacy; decriminalization of abortion in Colombia; organizations assisting survivors of domestic violence and other traumas oppose the truck convoy in Ottawa, Canada, as re-traumatizing women; FiLiA began their “Kakuma Campaign” in Kenya on behalf of the residents of Block 13, an LGB&T+ refugee camp.

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Women WorldWide: March-April 2022

February 27, 2022

FiLiA began their “Kakuma Campaign” in Kenya on behalf of the residents of Block 13, the LGB&T+ area of the Kakuma refugee camp; demonstrations in Mexico City against legislation on surrogacy; the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia; and people in organizations assisting survivors of domestic violence, war, homelessness and other traumas came out against the truck convoy in Ottawa, Canada, as traumatizing women.

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Queer Notes

February 15, 2021

The Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland decries Ireland’s denial of asylum for a Zimbabwean Lesbian and for several other LGBTQ+ refugees; and U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., introduced a bill to block funding from state and local sports organizations that allow Transgender females to participate in girls’ or women’s sports.

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World in view: Massive student-led protests cover Thailand

November 24, 2020

Tens of thousands of Thai students, many from high schools, have been carrying on massive demonstrations for months demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha; rewriting the Constitution that Prayut foisted on the country, including a Senate appointed by the military; and reining in the vast privileges and protections of the monarchy.

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Polish women’s revolutionary moment

October 30, 2020

While what is happening in Poland may not be a revolution, it is revolutionary. Women are leading a movement protesting the Church’s inhuman attack on women’s freedom, and mounting a deep challenge to the fascist-leaning Polish government.

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Women Worldwide: May-June 2018

May 2, 2018

A roundup of women’s news including: the Boston Women’s Health Collective will no longer update the iconic Our Bodies Ourselves; Maxine Hammond is fundraising to preserve the Suppressed History of Archives of women resisting oppression; protests against the murder of Black Lesbian Brazilian feminist Marielle Franco; and Belfast Feminist Network’s protest outside an Ulster Rugby team match after players were acquitted of rape.

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Queer Notes, July-August 2017

June 30, 2017

Queer notes on rejection of the Darlington Statement in Australia; first Pride celebration in Beirut, Lebanon, and one year mark of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla.

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Readers’ Views: May-June 2017

May 1, 2017

Reader’s Views on Women vs. Reaction; Women and Philosophy; Syria and Humanity; Support Trans Children!; Animals and Us; Repression vs. Justice; Why Read “N&L”; Voices from Behind the Bars

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Queer Notes: May-June 2017

April 30, 2017

Lesbian feminist Azza Sultan’s Bedayaa and Mesahat Foundation for Sexual and Gender Diversity fights for Queer rights in Egypt and Sudan; LGBT federal workers and senior citizens face rollback of their rights by President Trump; straight male politicians of The Netherlands solidarize with a Gay couple who were assaulted; Chechnya is arresting, detaining in concentration camps and killing men who are suspected of having a “nontraditional sexual orientation.”

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Editorial: Syriza’s many challenges

March 7, 2015

The electoral victory of Greece’s Syriza party was an important first step in resisting austerity imposed on the Greek and European working classes as capitalism’s response to its own intractable crisis. Nothing could be in greater contradiction to the movement that lifted Syriza to prominence than the parliamentary alliance with the racist, theocratic Independent Greeks party.

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‘Sex Workers Unite’

March 23, 2014

“Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk,” by Melinda Chateauvert, is a valuable history of the Sex Workers’ Rights Movement in the U.S. from its start in the 1960s to the present and its intersection with other social justice movements.

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Ukraine and Bosnia: historic uprisings

March 16, 2014

In Ukraine, an unexpected eruption of mass struggle led to the overthrow of Ukraine’s corrupt, oligarchic, and ultimately murderous President Viktor Yanukovych. In Bosnia, at the same time, massive, nationwide discontent with the corrupt system left in place when the 1995 Dayton Accords partitioned the country has led to the equally unexpected creation of new forms of democratic organization.

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Christian Nation

November 26, 2013

Review of “Christian Nation: a Novel” by Frederic C. Rich, a work of speculative fiction in which the religious Right takes over the U.S., turning it into a brutally totalitarian state.

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Anti-LGBT bigot sued in human rights trial

September 22, 2013

U.S. preacher and bigot Scott Lively will have to face charges of human rights violations in a Massachusetts courtroom. Lively is best known as promoter of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill. His homophobic preaching has led to persecution and death among African Gays.

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The Left and Malala Yousafzai

December 1, 2012

Woman as Reason

Meredith Tax, a women’s liberationist and political activist since the late 1960s, author of The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917, and now U.S. Director of the Centre for Secular Space, a think tank formed to oppose fundamentalism and promote universality in human rights, has recently written an important and [=>]

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Review: The Conflict… debating motherhood

October 11, 2012

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, by Elisabeth Badinter

The Conflict is a brief overview of its subject that occasionally makes poorly supported generalizations, but it has sparked an important debate within feminism. Badinter criticizes not motherhood itself, but the new trend of “attachment parenting” (AP) which involves spending as much time [=>]

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Shameful lack of services for Trans seniors

October 9, 2012

Chicago—The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently banned discrimination based on gender identity or expression. All healthcare facilities which accept federal money, including Medicaid and Medicare, cannot discriminate against Transgender nor gender-variant patients.

This only underlines how pervasive discrimination remains. The Services and Advocacy for LGBT Elders’ (SAGE) report, “Improving the Lives of Transgender [=>]

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Readers’ Views, July-August 2012, Part 2

August 15, 2012

RICH AND DUNAYEVSKAYA: A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

Thanks for your In Memoriam to Adrienne Rich. It revealed a dimension that many who were appreciative of her poetry and feminism may not have known—Rich’s exploration of Marx’s ideas through her reading of Raya Dunayevskaya. One piece Rich wrote was titled “Dunayevskaya’s Marx.” It was crucial how you [=>]

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Queer Notes, March-April 2012

April 18, 2012

From the March-April 2012 issue of News & Letters:

Queer Notes

by Elise

A California Girl Scout put out a YouTube video asking the public to boycott Girl Scout cookies because she objects to a troop admitting a Transgender girl. While three Louisiana troops disbanded over the issue, a national Girl Scouts spokeswoman for the 100-year-old organization [=>]

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News and Letters Committees Call for Convention 2012

March 5, 2012

OFFICIAL CALL FOR CONVENTION

to Work Out Marxist-Humanist Perspectives for 2012-2013

February 26, 2012

To All Members of News and Letters Committees

 

Dear Friends:

 

Where we must begin is with the world in upheaval, from Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring, still going after more than a year.

Nothing better shows the old order’s bloody desperation to prevent a [=>]

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Queer Notes, January-February 2012

February 27, 2012

by Suzanne Rose

After six days of 24-hour-a-day activism, LGBT occupiers, activists, and human rights groups in Seoul, South Korea, won the Seoul Student Rights Ordinance, with all clauses in the original draft included. The draft that calls for non-discrimination against LGBT students as well as their active protection passed the council with a vote [=>]

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Homeless Queer Youth

February 25, 2012

Chicago—About 30% of homeless youth in the U.S. are Queer. Many become homeless after being thrown out of their homes by families who reject them. And Queer youth are outing themselves at younger ages.

As homeless Queer youth Jeremiah Beaverly, who grew up in Wisconsin and Illinois, told NPR: “The day after my 18th birthday this [=>]

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‘A Survivor’s Story’

February 14, 2012

‘A Survivor’s Story’

Reform at Victory: a Survivor’s Story by Michele Ulriksen (Pizan Media, 2008, 300 pages)

Reform at Victory is the memoir that sparked the creation of Survivors of Institutional Abuse (SIA), an organization of adult survivors of abuse at facilities that purport to help troubled teens. The organization’s main focus is fundamentalist Christian “treatment” programs. [=>]

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Queer Notes, September-October 2011

September 27, 2011

by Suzanne Rose

While returning from a bar last month in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, three men were detained by the police because they thought two of them looked feminine. The three were jailed for a week and two were tortured and abused by the police. One man was released, but the other two were [=>]

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Expose demonization of Black Gay youth

September 25, 2011

Chicago—Editor’s note: News and Letters Committees hosted a forum in our Chicago office on Aug. 8 on the response within the Gay community to the Facebook page Take Back Boystown posting videos of Blacks fighting as a way to demonize “outsiders” coming to Gay institutions and bars. Below is part of the discussion among panelists [=>]

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July-August 2011 Queer Notes

August 21, 2011

by Elise

Students at Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Mich., won gender-neutral proms. After Oak Reed, a Transgender boy, was nominated prom King and school administrators threw out the ballots saying Reed is technically a girl, students protested by creating a Facebook page, “Oak is my king,” and passed out petitions.

* * *

The International [=>]

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News and Letters panel on “Boystown: Class, Race and Public Space”

August 20, 2011

Here are links to some local news coverage of a recent meeting of the Chicago Local of News and Letters Committees:

Windy City Times: Community groups continue to focus on Lakeview

Gay Chicago: Panel addresses Lake View’s summer turmoil

Here’s the flyer for the meeting:
News and Letters Committees invites you to a forum on:

The panel of [=>]

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Queer Notes, May-June 2011

June 4, 2011

Middle school student Noah Hornik of Palo Alto, Cal., is organizing the “It Gets Indie” benefit concert in San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall to raise awareness and support prevention of Queer youth suicide. Noah was motivated by suicides of Queer youth, witnessing numerous incidents of harassment, and the passage of Proposition 8.

* * [=>]

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May-June 2011 issue of News & Letters is available online

May 6, 2011

News & Letters, Vol. 56, No. 3
May-June 2011

Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2011-2011

Revolution and counter-revolution take world stage

Revolution and counter-revolution have forced their way to the center stage of history. In Tunisia and Egypt, revolutions have opened tremendous possibilities and spread the fire of their passion all across the Arab world and from China to the [=>]

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Queer Notes, March-April 2011

April 17, 2011

by Elise

Transphobia is alive and well. Transgender woman Chrissie Bates was found stabbed to death Jan. 10 in her apartment in Minneapolis, Minn. She’s identified as Christopher P. Bates by the police investigating the crime. A vigil was held for her Jan. 21 by Queer rights group OutFront Minnesota. And, in Honduras, officials are being called [=>]

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Ex-Gay ‘therapy’ lies

April 15, 2011

From the March-April 2011 issue of News & Letters:

Ex-Gay ‘therapy’ lies

Memphis, Tenn.–On Feb. 21, Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out (TWO), gave a multimedia lecture at Rhodes College here. Besen, author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, founded the organization in 2006 to alert the public to [=>]

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Queer Notes, Jan.-Feb. 2011

March 4, 2011

by Elise

The Bisexual Queer Alliance of Chicago (BQAC) was formed in autumn 2010, to raise visibility of the Bisexual community there—where we’re virtually unknown—to erase Bi-phobia and to work towards Bi civil rights. BQAC applauds the Center on Halsted, a Chicago LGBT resource center, for holding a space for us for years and now we’ve [=>]

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Readers’ Views (Jan.-Feb. 2011)

February 28, 2011

THE OPPOSITE OF WAR IS NOT PEACE BUT REVOLUTION

Your Statement, War threat over Korea,” issued on your website on Dec. 9 had it just right! “The continuing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula underscores the urgency of the Marxist-Humanist perspective that the opposite of war is not peace but revolution.”

And you had it right [=>]

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Women Worldwide, Jan.-Feb. 2011

February 22, 2011

by Artemis

On Dec. 17, 2010, the Eighth International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers was observed in 15 cities in the U.S., seven cities in Canada and six cities in other countries. In candlelight vigils, the names were read of 60 sex workers murdered in 2010. The speeches, discussions and video showings made statements [=>]

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Queer Notes, Nov.-Dec. 2010

December 5, 2010

Queer Notes
by Elise

Marco Melgoza, seventh-grade student, protested anti-Gay bullies. With his dad Jerry Watson at his side, Melgoza carried the sign “Bullying Is a Weapon” outside his Middle School, Desmond, in Madera, California. He has been called names and been physically attacked. Melgoza joins people from San Francisco, to Utah, to New York City, from [=>]

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