Wellington event: ‘Beyond’ (discussion and action on gender and sexual diversity)

August 8, 2013 by

beyond

‘Beyond’ is a weekend of discussion and action on gender and sexual diversity. Organised by the Queer Avengers, the conference will be held from the 11th-13th of October at Wellington High School.

In the wake of the parliamentary win for marriage rights, this conference aims to look beyond marriage towards an inclusive movement for gender and sexual liberation.

With a mixture of presentations, panels and workshops, the conference aims to address the lived experiences of queer/trans people in relation to identity, race, disability, the media, healthcare, parenting, education and imprisonment (among others).

Broadly, the Saturday will be focused on discussions of experience, identity and intersectionality, and the Sunday will be centred around skill sharing and campaign work. Throughout the weekend there will also be opportunities for networking, informal discussion and socialising.

Detailed schedule to come. Please see our website, beyond.org.nz, for more information.

[Registrations]
[Facebook event]

Filed Under: Oppression & Liberation, Queer

Wellington event: Solidarity protest against police brutality at Sydney Mardi Gras

March 8, 2013 by

no pride

Two incidents of police brutality were reported after Sydney Mardi Gras 2013, with Youtube footage showing one young man being violently assaulted by police and slammed onto the street. See the footage here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxtFtVfAeeE

Aotearoa/NZ group the Queer Avengers oppose the police brutality seen at Sydney Mardi Gras and are standing in solidarity with the victims and the communities. The Queer Avengers oppose internal inquests and call for a community-directed response.

The Queer Avengers’ press release can be found here:https://www.facebook.com/QAvengers/posts/613008638713884

For more information or for those based in Sydney, check out the main protest taking place at the same time:
https://www.facebook.com/events/616731265020510/?fref=ts

The Queer Avengers will be protesting outside the Australian Embassy at 6pm on Friday the 8th of March, in an action coinciding with a Sydney protest.

Facebook event here

Filed Under: Queer

Review: Black Faggot

February 20, 2013 by

black faggot

Reviewed by Ian Anderson

Black Faggot, performed in Auckland for Pride and Fringe Festival, should tour everywhere. Playwright Victor Rodgers’ examination of the “gay Samoan male experience” is timely and important. It’s also a crowd-pleasing comedy, selling out for its first season.

Direction, by Roy Ward, is spare and character-driven. Iaheto Ah Hi (Sione’s Wedding) and Beulah Koale (Shortland Street) perform in simple black outfits – with no props, no pre-recorded soundtrack, and simple lighting cues. In Auckland’s black-walled Basement Theatre, this simplicity allows the performers space to bounce a range of roles off each other, including various gay men and fa’afafine, their friends, family members, and tormentors. This two-man setup also allows for some excellent gender-bending performance, with Iaheto Ah Hi particularly relishing his portrayals of a Samoan mother and a fa’afafine artist.

Rodgers’ play is well-timed, given the recent press focus on homophobic Pasifika leaders.  According to Colmar Brunton polls, around 60% of Pasifika respondents support marriage rights, a similar amount to the general population. However, the play explores the complexity of double oppression for Pasifika queers: particularly the dominance of conservative churches (a closeted Destiny Church member prays to be straight) and the challenge of articulating an identity (a Samoan mother stumbles over whether to call her child “fa’afafine” or “gay”).

The play also acknowledges the racism faced by Pasifika queers, including in gay spaces. In an interview for GayTalk Tonight, writer Victor Rodger notes: “Race is something that always fascinates me and that is absolutely a product of growing up in Christchurch.” While Black Faggot focuses more on struggles within Pasifika communities, the play humorously highlights the corporate palagi monoculture of many gay spaces: “You know the one thing that makes me wish I was straight? The music they play in gay bars.”

Although nodding to the Civil Union and Marriage reforms, Black Faggot focuses mainly on personal relationships rather than legal reforms. The play should remind us of the importance of solidarity within communities; the importance of families supporting their fa’afafine, queer, and gender variant brethren. While some may find the slogan “it gets better,” spoken to a struggling queer kid near the end of the play, overly passive – it doesn’t “get better” until we make it better – the play reminds us that the struggle for liberation has just begun.

BlackFaggot

Filed Under: Queer, Reviews

#boicotlacomay: No profit from homophobia and racism

January 25, 2013 by

boycottlacomay

In early January 2013, Puerto Rican chat show SuperXclusivo (featuring puppet character La Comay) was cancelled after a sustained boycott campaign. Spark writer Ian Anderson interviews Carlos Rivera, who co-founded the Facebook group and played a leading role in the campaign.

The Spark: What were the initial problems with La Comay, and SuperXclusivo, that triggered this campaign?

CR: For more than a decade, the show had had issues with hate speech and hate “humour”. In 2010 this came to head with extreme homophobic comments. The TV station was forced by a huge LGBTT campaign to create a public promise to change. A few months later the format re-emerged.

It also had moved from being a celebrity gossip and crime sensationalism show and into politics – supporting right wing politicians, draconian law-and-order “solutions to crime” and so on. The latest of this effort had been the unsuccessful attempt to eliminate bail rights earlier in 2012. When we won that referendum, we celebrated the fact we won not against the political establishment, but against La Comay. It was there I was drawn to the issue in a definitive manner.

The immediate trigger was the disappearance of a young man in the middle of a robbery. This kidnapping and eventual murder generated incredible social media attention and sympathy.

Then the show made hateful comments towards the victim, to the extreme of implying he had it coming for frequenting a red light district. The sympathy for the victim was high, so the comments fell on sensitive ears.

The Spark: Who benefits from this bigotry? What are the consequences?

CR: Basically the right wing and conservative hate mongers – and the colonialist project benefit.

The fundamental consequence was the agenda being set from the right and from the reactionary perspective – even on unpopular issues. For example, the majority of Puerto Ricans are opposed to the death penalty, and the colonial constitution prohibits it. Yet this show made it seem as it was an open question, and had an effect of putting the anti-death penalty forces in the defensive. The loss of this voice has already had an explosive effect – a visible one – in how the debates happen at the street level. There is a sense that the silent majority is progressive – which it is – but there was not this sense before.

The Spark: Your “Boicot a La Comay” Facebook page has over 75,000 likes, can you talk about this growth?

CR: About half of it happened in the first 24 hours. It was entirely grassroots. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Queer, Uncategorized

“Stonewall was an unpermitted action” – Gay Liberation Front 1969-1979

January 19, 2013 by
Gay contingent, Vietnam War protest, 1971. Photo by Diana Davies, from the NY Public Library.

Gay contingent, Vietnam War protest, 1971. Photo by Diana Davies, from the NY Public Library.

This article is adapted from a public talk by Ian Anderson, active in the Workers Party and Queer Avengers. The talk was originally delivered at Wellington’s Marriage Equality Conference in November-December 2012. It gives a snapshot of the “Gay Liberation” movement of the late 1960s-1970s.

In 1969, the night of the Stonewall riot, was a very hot, muggy night. We were in the Stonewall [bar] and the lights came on. We all stopped dancing. The police came in…

We were led out of the bar and they cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops.

And then the bottles started. And then we finally had the morals squad barricaded in the Stonewall building, because they were actually afraid of us at that time. They didn’t know we were going to react that way…

It was street gay people from the Village out front-homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar-and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark…

All of us were working for so many movements at that time. Everyone was involved with the women’s movement, the peace movement, the civil-rights movement. We were all radicals. I believe that’s what brought it around.

You get tired of being just pushed around.

-Sylvia Rivera, interview by Leslie Feinberg (Workers World Party 1998)

The 1969 Stonewall Riots, which galvanised the Gay Liberation movement throughout the First World, are a well-documented but little understood rupture. On June 28th, 1969, a regular police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a queer-friendly bar, triggered resistance from marginal queer communities in New York City. This event can only be understood in the context of a wider process of social transformation, while the ensuing political project – “Gay Liberation” – contained internal contradictions which are still relevant today. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Queer
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