David Bowie: Rebel Rebel-- January 8, 1947-January 11, 2016

-by Denise Sullivan

It's been a day of mourning throughout the rock'n'roll nation: David Bowie, 69, died last night. The worldwide outpouring of grief transcends racial, gender and sexual orientation, economic, and national boundaries, just as the Brixton-born artist's music did. The last thing any of us need are more words or further analysis of an already well-documented life and depth of the art. His creative expression of rebellion will ring in the hearts of anyone with their mind set on freedom for generations to come.

Starting out as David Jones, his musical debut as David Bowie came in 1967 to little fanfare though the 1971 UK issue of The Man Who Sold the World, turned some heads (he was pictured wearing a dress).

Here in the U.S., the album Hunky Dory, also released in 1971 and featuring his breakthrough "Changes" (and b-side to the single, "Andy Warhol," about his great inspirer), introduced him to the new generation of image-conscious iconoclasts. As he ushered in the glam era with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, then put it to rest with Diamond Dogs, a political concept record loosely based on Orwell's 1984, he made a deep impression on this then-young Yank (I thought of "The Jean Genie" upon learning of his death in the middle of the night. Back in the '80s, Howie explained to me the title was a play on Jean Genet, rebel artist of his day, opening a door toward further exploration. Please note the South of Market San Francisco location and the Mars Hotel in this video clip).



With 1975's Young Americans, Bowie began the practice of reinvention. Before it became a marketing thing for people like Madonna, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, dropping an image and adopting a new persona was more revolutionary and rare in rock (rooted as it was in conceptual art, theater, and Hollywood). As a blue-eyed soulman, Bowie went on to belong to a handful of white artists whose funk crossed over and was accepted on the R&B scene.



As one who did most of her David Bowie listening in the '70s and '80s, I'm most partial to this period. Station to Station is my favorite album, the closing time theme at the record store where I lied about my age to get a job. It isn't warm work, though Bowie was never any one thing at one time. While cultivating his dispassion, zonked out of his mind on coke, and caught up in a horrific Nazi incident, he was also preparing for his musical apotheosis (the Berlin trilogy) and forging odd alliances with the squarest of the square. These weird juxtapositions paradoxically increased his appeal to an ever-broader audience.





Time away to get it together, an epic Saturday Night Live appearance, and the inevitable self-reflective return to form came with Scary Monsters, followed by the Let's Dance record (its title song with a video depicting a message about racial tolerance), and the music's global impact.



This is mostly where I left Bowie behind: I have nothing sensible to say about his departure into other areas of life, his movie career, the Tin Machine recordings, his personal life, recovery from substance abuse, humanitarian work, or attempts at a stand-up comedy career. I loved "Blue Jean." I stood at attention for his tribute to Freddie Mercury and his bended-knee recitation of The Lord's Prayer in front of millions of viewers worldwide. I did not follow his later period career except to check in with each single and album release, the accolades, the integrity of the art, the Tilda Swinton clip. I know he was loved and cherished by millions but mostly by his wife, Iman Abdulmajid, their daughter, Alexandria Jones, and his grown son, Duncan Jones.

His final album Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday last Friday reportedly tells the story of his pending death which in life, he chose to play close to the vest, as if playing the Bette Davis character in Dark Victory. The full story was however, worked through his art.



David Bowie, artist, musician, romantic, rebel, iconoclast, duke, gentleman, rock star, husband, father, gender bending cancer patient, was not only whatever we needed him to be, he was everything we needed him to be. His music revealed that despite life's uncertainties and disappointments, there is love among the ruins, beauty in dystopia and truth in creative and imaginary acts. Earlier today, the hip hop artist Common Tweeted, "David Bowie is still 1 of the best 2 EVER do it! His art transcended color & $ boundaries. May God bless his soul." I also saw the following quote for which I could find no verification or context, though again, it think says in a few lines why he so touched the rock 'n' roll rabble: "It's not the politicians who will end oppression. It's the radicals, with the stink in their clothes, rebellion in their brain, hope in their heart and direct action in their fist."

These words are a good and apt articulation of why he spoke to the rock hoards, though in the sound and vision depicted in this clip of "Heroes" David Bowie, is at his finest. Forever (and just for one day).

There's Something About Channing Tatum I Like

This post isn't going to be about Channing Tatum; sorry. But I was inspired to write it by a quote of his, as he talked about his new film Magic Mike, vaguely based on his own life as a 19 year old stripper in Tampa: "I was definitely looking for something to take me into the dark side. You learn something about yourself, you learn something about men, women, you see a lot of depressing shit, people that are lost. But at the same time, the dark side can be exciting. It can feel like you're cheating death every night." OK, that's the end of the Channing Tatum part of the post. Like I said... sorry. The rest is about me. Say bye-bye, Tatum; hello, Howie:


I imagine I was born gay. When I was pretty young I felt some insistent stirrings for other guys but once I figured out just how disapproving society was of that sort of thing, I repressed it. "It" popped out a few times until sometime during my early twenties-- and living in Amsterdam-- I went to a shrink and he persuaded me to give myself a break and just be who I was. That was a relief. And my family was very supportive and so were my friends and it never held me back in my professional life. So what's the complaint? You know it's comin'.

That stuff Tatum was saying about the dark side... that was really what attracted me to the gay lifestyle. If you wanted gay reference points when I was a kid you read Jean Genet and John Rechy. I did. And did I ever get inspired! Even just purchasing and reading The Thief's Journal, Querelle, Numbers and The City of Night (the first two by Genet and the second two by Rechy) were taking a step into the dark side. A gateway drug. If I were growing up today and my cultural touchstones were Will & Grace, Queer Eye, Glee and Queer As Folk I probably would have looked for something else to identify with instead of homosexuality. Hard to imagine going for it with Glee in your mind... instead of Kenneth Anger.



Two things I never wanted anything to do with in the universe were going in the army and getting married. And that's what the great gay strides of my lifetime boil down to! Look, I was in NYC last week. I went for a wedding on my very dear old friends Ellen and Paula. Everything about it was fantastic. God bless lesbians and everyone who supports their right to marry and join the army (and fight on the front lines) and play golf at the Augusta National Golf Club. But... well, not "but"... AND I visited an old haunt when I was there, a place I learned about from a contemporaneous Ramones song, 53rd Street between Second and Third Avenues. I once, briefly, supported myself on those blocks. As Tatum said, "I was definitely looking for something to take me into the dark side. You learn something about yourself, you learn something about men, women, you see a lot of depressing shit, people that are lost. But at the same time, the dark side can be exciting. It can feel like you're cheating death every night."

I wasn't expecting anything there. I wouldn't have even gone by, really, if I wasn't on my way to meet a friend for lunch at Marcus Samuelsson's Aquavit, which had moved east since I was last there. I knew that long ago people had given up that kind of dark, anti-social lifestyle for fun nights of getting together at someone's place to watch Shahs of Sunset, American Idol or Modern Family. The first time I drove to L.A., I used Rechy's Numbers as a guide book. Go get married or drop bombs on some poor Afghani family. By all means assimilate into the Borg, order some takeout from Applebee's and turn on Bravo for a night of Real Housewives of New Jersey. Don't worry about Hubert Selby's Georgette; stick to RuPaul's Drag Race. But if you know someone who's a little rebellious-minded and thinks he might be gay... there's always Thief's Journal:

Flowers bedeck the fragility of the convict and I garlanded myself, lovingly pursuing a journey through sweat, sperm and blood that led to prison. Without what people call my evil, I am castrated. Un petit-bourgeois rien. There was a moral vigour in the acceptance of my destiny. I was hot for crime.

I give the name violence to a noble boldness that hankers for danger, and I have seen it in many of the pimps and thieves I have worked with, men whose authority and beatific treachery bent me to their will. Rene, Stilitano, Guy ... I could describe them, but I won't. I am too much of a literary outlaw for that. Instead, let me take you back to the Barrios in 1932, where I used to jerk myself off into a sperm-spotted handkerchief, while thinking of my mother.

Oui. I am my own Dieu, I fashion my vanity, delighting in the vicarious transgression that has fashionable artists like those fools Cocteau and Picasso, who have never dared to have oral sex with a leprotic geriatric vagabond.

Is any of this true? Who cares? It is if I say it is, for I define my existential self. Je suis what I say je suis, I beat up queers and stole from churches; burglary became a religious rite, elevating me to poet of the underworld even as I willingly debased myself in pissoirs
Rene jerked himself off in a café full of whores to calm himself down, before stabbing the Gypsy boy through the heart for a few sous. In that moment of love and death, I caught sight of Stilitano looking on and knew I must drink in the beautiful odour of his never-washed body. He was the Sacred Black Stone to which Heliogabalus offered up his wealth and I prostrated myself to his treachery and indifference.

I was born in Paris in 1910. My mother was a whore and I have my roots in the parched bones of the children who were massacred by Gilles de Rais. There was no precise time I became a thief, just a metempsychosis of Uranus that saw me graduate from the Reformatory to the Foreign Legion and thence to the piss and shit of the sewers.

Stilitano and I travelled through Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy and Germany, becoming spies and finding a purity of evil idealism in the SS. I longed to play with the cellulose grapes that hung from his member while he pushed me away like the bitch I was. I wanted him to beat me. I became his noble valet, reduced to even greater humiliations, and even now I am reduced to verbal automatism in thrall to his deity.

Can you feel the degradation? Allow your hands to wander inside your uptight bourgeois pants and feel the excitement of my squalor. But don't stop there! I can give you so much more if only you will open your flies to me. Lose your suburban values and embrace the negative hell of the poet of the woebegone.

I dressed as a woman and went to Tangiers with Maurice and Robert, occasionally allowing myself to commit an act the gravity of which gave me consciousness. Oui, I was ennuyé. It is no boast to say I was a clever thief, but still I went to prison where I found security in a world that had rejected me, offering up my mobile buttocks to anyone who showed interest. Michaelis wanted me to love him, yet I taunted him with abstinence when I met Java, a muscle-bound Stilitano. Java still liked to go with whores, but occasionally he would let me thread myself inside him when he was asleep, crying out in anger when I made him come. I then met * - I cannot mention his name because he is still alive, though maybe only in the Sartrean sense in which je suis - and we pleasured one another as an SS guard told us of the joy he got when he could see tears in the eyes of the victims he was about to kill.

My work as writer is mere pleonasm. It passes the time as I pursue the rehabilitation of the purulent, the dark thrills of the interdit. I left Nazi Germany because it no longer interested me; there, stealing did not differentiate me from authority. Where was the liberation in that? My aesthetics of crime were self-creation and I went back to shack up with Stilitano. Carrying packages of opium for him gave me a sense of CAPITAL LETTERS, MY SUBSERVIENCE A PURPOSE.

This is the life I lived and these are the people with whom I was preoccupied between 1931 and 1942. Bof! But I can sense your erection fading. So let me tell you more about the pleasure of treachery, how I bit Lucien until he bled while he opened up like an anemone, how I sucked off Bernardini, the head of the Marseilles secret police. Was I guilty? Who knows? I just became that of which I was accused.

Voilà. Vous are encore dur. What more can I say? This book is my ascesis. I wanted to rob cripples and queers, I wanted to reclaim the joy of tragedy. But most of all I wanted to glorify myself. Being a thief is banal but writing about it is magnificent and with this exhibitionist act of tedious subversion, I have recreated myself once more as gullible, European radicals reclaim me for their own.

I'd rather be straight than assimilate... or is that oxymoronic? Back to our regular programming tomorrow... promise.

How Long Before Half the Gays Will Vote Republican?

Very nice; not for me

There was a time when no self-respecting son of Ireland or Italy, not to mention the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, would consider voting for he stuffed shirt party of richie rich Republicans. Republicans were class enemies and Democrats were working for the betterment of working families. Republicans backed busting their unions to keep them down, while Democrats helped expand the middle class by passing minimum wage laws, extending the franchise, outlawing child labor, mandating collective bargaining, writing legislation to protect employees at their workplaces, all things the GOP fought tooth and nail. And the result? Millions of the grandchildren of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Russia, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany moved up the economic ladder into prosperity and many of them went with the instinct of pulling up that economic ladder with them and... voting for Republicans. It's a cycle and it's worked for the GOP for decades.

And one day, as hard as it is to believe for non-gays now, it will work with gay people as well. In the current issue of Out there's a prominent sidebar on their "Power 50" feature, The Conservative Gay Tipping Point by Jason Farago. "It's too soon to call the GOP gay-friendly," he acknowledges, "but the rise of the pro-gay marriage Republican is a sign of a shift."

The Obama administration’s recent briefs to the Supreme Court against DOMA and Proposition 8 attest to the huge progress gays and lesbians have made in our fight for equality. But another, more unexpected brief may reflect an even greater change. In February, more than 130 Republicans petitioned the court to strike down the discriminatory California amendment-- and asserted that there’s no contradiction between conservative principles and same-sex marriage.

Many of them seem to have had a recent change of heart. Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor who opposed gay marriage when he ran for president last year, signed the brief. So did Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who during her campaign for governor of California said she’d voted for Prop. 8 due to her “faith and conscience.” Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign strategist, is there too, as is Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security adviser.

The brief’s main engineer was Ken Mehlman (No. 32 on Power List 2013), the gay Republican investment banker who managed Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, which you may remember for its vicious strategy of demonizing gay Americans to drive evangelical turnout. But with younger voters decisively in favor of gay equality, Republicans have no choice but to adapt, and Mehlman, a consummate GOP insider, is now in the vanguard of an effort to reposition the right as a tolerant force. He’s not the only power player. The lead counselor in the Prop. 8 case is himself a veteran conservative: Ted Olson, who successfully fought Bush’s side in the 2000 Supreme Court case that won him the presidency.

It’s far too soon to call the GOP gay-friendly. Mehlman could find only two sitting members of Congress willing to join the Prop. 8 brief; only one Republican senator, Rob Portman of Ohio, is on the record as personally supporting gay marriage, and even he stopped well short of endorsing a constitutional right to wed. Conservatives still bridle at other political goals shared by many gays, from employment protections to AIDS research to transgender rights. All the same, the rise of the pro–gay marriage Republican is a sign of something: that in less than a decade, our relationships have won broad acceptance and that, at this rate, even the right will soon have more to gain from tolerance than from bias. That may be progress of a cynical sort, but it’s progress all the same.

Progress! Because half the gays would rather be Ward and June Cleaver than live the heroic bohemian life outside the cookie cutter mainstream inherent in what it meant to be gay to Jean Genet or John Rechy. Ah, alienation!

Conservatives say gays "choose" to be gay. That's not completely false. You may be born gay but to a good little Republican, the choice comes in on whether or not you open that closet door. A few days ago we looked at the tragedy of Mississippi Republican Congressman Jon Hinson, one of the dozens of closeted Republican elected officials whose lives were defined by the wrong choice, the only choice permissible for a conservative-- life in a dark, tortured closet. His miserable ending is the only permissible ending for a gay Republican... at least if they want to stay Republican (which really is a choice).

Let's go, Wally!

I acted on my unexplainable, mysterious biological feelings because-- at least in part-- I didn't want to be Ward and June Cleaver. Not ever. Not for one second of my existence. I would rather be an outlaw. I read The Thief's Journal and Querelle by Genet and my fate was sealed. I read Rechy's City of Night and Numbers, started supporting myself as a male prostitute and bought a VW van so I could drive across the country to L.A., specifically to Griffith Park (where, totally coincidentally, I live now). I would have been happy to screw Wally Cleaver when Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont were at church with Beaver but there was never a day in my life when I wanted to join a church, join an army or get married-- or be a Republican. Enjoy the video; there's no reason it's part of this post... except that it insisted on being included. So what the hell; it's good.

I Think Danger Bred A Different Kind Of Gay Back Then

I was lucky; I came out when I was living in Amsterdam. I worried there was something wrong with me so I went to see a psychiatrist. I told him I thought I could be gay. He asked me why I was coming to him and if I was looking for addresses of gay bars and other places where gay people met. I didn't. I lived right across the street-- literally, 30 steps-- from a side gate into Amsterdam's biggest park (like their version of Central Park or Griffith Park). And it was a special entrance, as it turns out. At night there were always gay men in that part of the park eager to meet other men. So much better than a dark, smokey bar!

Being gay is easy and almost without a sense of social opprobrium nowadays. Gays can get married. It's no biggie. When I was a kid it was very different. And... well-- how do I put this? If you were gay, you were an outlaw, a rebel... like Jean Genet, like Truman Capote, William Burroughs, John Rechy, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, Anaïs Nin, John Waters, Jack Kerouac... role models. You know, who's a better role model Plato or a ribbon clerk?

Danny Fields, who I met when I was in college when I had booked The Doors to come play at my school and he worked for their record label, was the one who put the idea of ribbon clerks in my consciousness. He and Dee Dee Ramone wanted to go someplace "exciting" after The Ramones first show in San Francisco. I had no idea where to take them so I suggested the Eagle's Nest, a forbidding gay bar on Folsom Street. Danny made a face. "Ribbon clerks playing dress up," he sneered in his charming way. Eventually I started taking out of town guests to Mr. B's Ballroom instead. The DEVO guys, who I don't think were even gay, wrote a song about the night I brought them there.

Three cheers!
They're yellin' again
Three cheers!
They'll be at it to the end

So drink some big beers and go crazy tonight
They're all dressed up and they'll be gettin' it tonight
Big swingers in double knits tonight
Big babies gonna get in a fight
Actin' crazy, bustin' up the chairs
Doubled over gettin' sick on the stairs

They know the limits 'cause they cross them every night
The dull sensations as it turns real hot
Why, the guys in the back with their heads on the floor
Surrounded by their buddies, they're all hollerin' for more
Whoa, whoa, whoa
It's Mr. B's ballroom

Party time, turn the music up loud
Party time, lose your head in the crowd
Yellin',, laughin' tryin' hard to act smart
Put 'em under pressure and you watch them fall apart

Freeze! Come on out of there
Freeze! You ain't goin' nowhere
Freeze! Put your hands on your head
Freeze!
It's Mr. B's ballroom

Someone slipped in semen and fell down and we left. Books were easier-- and I've always been a bookish guy. There's a new movie that screened in NYC this week, Tom of Finland, and it's opening in New York on October 13 and in L.A. and San Francisco October 20... all the towns I lived in. Watch the trailer up top. I think Finnish director Dome Karukoski conveys what I'm trying to talk about far better than I am.

Tom of Finland was the pseudonym for Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991) and Wikipedia describes him as "a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculinized homoerotic fetish art, and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing." At the time, all his work had an implied sense of danger. The film company reminds critics that he was "a decorated officer" and that the film describes him as returning "home after a harrowing and heroic experience serving his country in World War II. But life in Finland during peacetime proves equally distressing. He finds post-war Helsinki rampant with homophobic persecution, and gay men around him are being pressured to marry women and have children. Touko finds refuge in his liberating art: homoerotic drawings of muscular men, free of inhibitions. But it is only when an American publisher sees them and invites Tuoko over to the West Coast that his life really takes a turn. Finally being able to walk free and proud in Los Angeles, Tuoko dives head first into the sexual revolution, becoming an icon and a rallying point. His work-- made famous by his signature ‘Tom of Finland’-- became the emblem of a generation of men and fanned the flames of the worldwide gay revolution."

But not today's gays I don't think. Yes, this is a real stamp:

Opting For A Gay Lifestyle-- Pick One

Recently, Ben Carson apologized for his comments-- widely attacked in the media and by politicians from Barney Frank to Joe Biden-- that homosexuality is a choice. It's a debate that's been raging between conservatives and non-conservatives for a long time. Gay equality activist Dan Savage suggested Carson show how that choice can be made:

"If being gay is a choice, prove it. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that’s done, Ben; show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick."

Is that what gay is?

I think for many people there does come a time when a choice is made. Sometimes that process is stretched over years and sometimes it goes back and forth and never really becomes clear. I don't mean the desire for same-sex sex; I mean the choice of lifestyle. And that, according to many conservatives, is all they're complaining about anyway. There are millions of gay people who don't live a gay lifestyle and conservatives claim to have no-- or little-- problem with that. They just hate the ones who decide to come out. Aaron Schock in the closet is more or less OK and tolerable. Republicans who come out of the closet... anathema. How many married men-- men married, even happily, to women-- do you know who have worked out one kind of accommodation or another that allows for a little gay sexuality on the side from time to time? I know plenty.

Thank God, I started coming of age at a time when there were more choices becoming apparent, and one of those choices was self-acceptance, open self-acceptance. Personally, I found the iconic American rebel/outlaw image to help me cope with the choice. I felt nothing but disdain for the deadening conformity of the '50s, and choosing an "alternative" lifestyle seemed heroic... as well as personally convenient. I was very attracted to revolutionary movements, politically and culturally. I gravitated to left-wing politics and the counterculture. Like many gays until that time, I came from a mindset that included the premise that if you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. I was always sure there were disproportionate numbers of gays in the French and Russian Revolutions, just as there always had been in musical and artistic movements away from the acceptable, ossified establishment.

I was lucky to pick my own role models. As chairman of the Student Activities Board at my school, I got to invite speakers and musicians to address topics I thought were important for students to explore. And I had a hand in bringing films to the campus that students might otherwise not see, films by artists like Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and John Waters (see above). Waters made a point recently that rankles gay people who are not looking for a rebel/outlaw lifestyle but who want to fit in and be just like everyone else. "When I was young," he said, "the privilege of being gay was that you didn't have to go in the Army or get married." Seems almost ironic today.

Even before adopting the filmmakers, I found the authors, especially Jean Genet. Thief's Journal changed my life and helped me not accept but revel in my own homosexuality. Querelle of Brest reinforced the thoughts. And then I discovered John Rechy's City of Night and Numbers and I was certain that I was never going to live my life in the closet, not for one ugly second. William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, incongruously, I found at my grandparents' home and loved going over there and reading it. Later I discovered Junkie and Queer, though not in my grandparents' library. Still later, I was proud to green-light a Ministry video, Just One Fix, starring Burroughs himself. (See below.)

These are just the kinds of choices conservatives hate. I don't think they have to worry about most gays these days, though-- certainly not the married couples with children, the ones joining the military, buying homes in the suburbs, even voting for Republican candidates. Rebels and outlaws, though... that's who conservatives have always and will always have to worry about, gay, straight or undecided.

Latest Mumia Abu-Jamal Book Asks A Provocative Question: Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

-by Denise Sullivan

Following the shocking back-to-back police murders of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castille outside St. Paul in July of 2016, author and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal responded with what seemed to be an uncharacteristic loss for words when he ended a short lament titled "Killed By Cops Who Were 'Just Doing Their Jobs'" with this refrain:

And another one gone…and another…and another.

A few days later, in a piece called "What Happens To A Dream Deferred," he invoked the Langston Hughes poem in reference to Sterling, Castile, and a massacre in Dallas in which five police officers and others were injured.

A new stage has been reached in America's longest war with itself.

Capsulizing the history of white slave patrols, their relationship to today's police departments and a justice system that preserves immunity for officers who kill, Abu-Jamal goes on to suggest how and why we've arrived at such a horrific place in American history.

Oppression can drive people mad. It can turn calm brains into minds consumed by anger, rage, and resentment.

One year later, in the wake of recent worldwide terrorist events, mass shootings from coast to coast, and an entirely not unexpected not guilty verdict for Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who killed Castile, it is safe to say the tyranny of our brand of liberty has brought us to yet another new stage in the long war with ourselves. In his broadcasts, Abu-Jamal quotes Alexis de Tocqueville and Mao Tse-tung as he reckons with the civil war now in progress. In another titled, The Second Death of Philando, he concludes, "The jury believed once again, that a black life had no intrinsic value and that it could be treated like trash, burned up and discarded, like an old pair of shoes."

In his latest collection of essays, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? published this month by City Lights, Abu-Jamal offers no easy answers except for what's undeniable: "Well, they certainly seem important enough to suppress and steal." Over the course of the book, he shines his light on a fraction of the Black lives sacrificed since 1998-- the cases that made it into the public eye-- while underscoring the fact: Living while Black in the US is in itself a traumatic experience.

Between waging his own daily struggle to maintain his health despite being denied care on the inside, and working continually to overturn his own wrongful conviction for allegedly killing a police officer in 1981, Abu-Jamal writes, and writes, and writes: Over the course of nine books including the previous City Lights collection, Writing on the Wall, countless essays and radio broadcasts, all created in prison over 30 years, (much of that time on Death Row), Abu-Jamal has rung the warning bells, raised and lowered the flags for freedom, and sounded its sirens with his words, in his efforts to defer the American emergency in progress. Stating in plain language what may seem obvious is an art, the job of a prophetic voice, and Abu-Jamal owns his. The view from the inside allows for his precision and laser-focus, to see and say things the likes of which we who are free to travel the world and the Internet cannot. And yet, his status or lack of it as a prison inmate has left his input marginalized and at times dismissed by society at large. Perhaps the sheer volume of work at this point is what daunts otherwise intelligent people to shun him, or maybe it's just that old white supremacy doing its number again...

There remains an inexplicable resistance within the so-called progressive left to regard Abu-Jamal as a poet and a writer of substance, much less a prophet or defining voice of the voiceless. Those who seem to have the time for revered prison writings from Jean Genet, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, just haven't gotten around to vigorous discussion of Abu-Jamal's vast catalog of material. Though his supporters may rest assured that long after we're all gone, these writings will stand as testimonies to a very strange time in American history and scholars of the future will likely shake their heads in disbelief at why more attention was not paid to his prophetic wisdom and why we did not heed its call. Therein these compositions are answers and valuable tools for the recovery of America's lost soul.

In a 2002 piece titled, "The Other Central Park Rapes," concerning the five young men wrongfully accused and incarcerated for crimes they did not commit in 1989, Abu-Jamal calls out Donald J. Trump, citing the vicious full page ads he took out proclaiming the men should've received the death penalty (the young men were later found innocent after serving from 6-13 years of their 5-15 year sentences). Of that miscarriage of justice, Abu-Jamal asserts that this was no isolated incident: That five Black men should be victimized by the justice and prison systems, scarred for life by its business as usual, is quite simply more evidence of Black lives cast aside. In this same piece he asserts Black, Brown, and Latino lives "don't matter."

A 1998 essay, "We Are Blind To Everything But Color," considers how people are treated in court: "…how they are charged and how they are sentenced are direct reflections of what race and ethnicity they are and how such traits are regarded by white America." He outlines an experimental exercise among law students in which whites imagined turning Black and agreed it was "a disability," worthy of millions in damage awards. "Why damages, unless color does matter?" he asks.

Of the 41 shots that killed Amadou Diallo, in 1999, Abu-Jamal noted the "predictable acquittal of his killers, four white cops," in 2002 and called for the formation of a movement to stop the violence. Some 12 years later, following the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, that movement launched, though Black Lives Matter does not claim inspiration from Abu-Jamal nor does he seek their endorsement, though anyone with eyes and ears can see he was the forerunner in regard to resisting police terror and naming white supremacy as a source of law enforcement's ills.

Read one by one like a daily reader, the essays, like the radio commentaries, are dense enough to reflect on for hours. Read all in one sitting, the evidence for bias presented by Abu-Jamal could potentially penetrate a racist mind and change it for the better, though sensitive liberals may find themselves sick with grief following the undeniable catalog of suffering here, some of it committed by our own hands (let this serve as your trigger warning). His critique of politicians is not reserved for the right: He notes the Clintons role in what he calls the mass incarceration boom as well as Obama's legacy of mass surveillance and systemic repression: "He left the horrors of mass incarceration fundamentally unchanged and in the hands of an ultra-right wing populist, endorsed by a known domestic terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan."

As we prepare for the long hot summer of American contradiction and its high holiday, the Fourth of July, Mumia asks us to consider what he and abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked: What does such an observance mean to a slave? As long as we remain a nation with the highest prison population in the world, with over two million serving time, we are not only a prison nation, but none of us are free. Time and again, the wrong people are warehoused when the real killers of American freedoms have yet to be tried, convicted, and locked away. "Until then," Abu-Jamal writes,"The Fourth is just another day."

The State of Pennsylvania has remained invested in keeping Abu-Jamal behind bars, despite a pile of evidence in favor of his innocence. In the eyes of a racist and fearful America this makes perfect sense, though in a more perfect union, where the deck isn't stacked and there is such a thing as a justice for all, Abu-Jamal's lifetime of incarceration would be the crime. Until that time, his writings provide companionship in the bleak hours of an American narrative that affirms, again and again although it's a lie, that some lives are expendable.


Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop and an occasional contributor to DWT on arts, culture, and gentrification issues.

Gay Couple Has Taken To Fake News Like Ducks To Water-- Alas, Trumpanzee Has Gays Too

What's your identity group? If you're Jewish and a Jew does something heinous or embarrassing, does that irk you even more than it would if someone whose identity group you're not part of did it? I love it that Mark Pocan, a gay man, has the best voting record in Congress and I'm embarrassed that a Kyrsten Sinema and Sean Patrick Maloney, both also gay, have two of the worst voting records of any congressional Democrats. I remember a Chinese friend of mine in San Francisco telling me his whole community felt a collective sense of... almost guilt because a Chinese immigrant shot someone. Well, there are a lot of gays in Los Angeles and overwhelmingly they're a good bunch when it comes to politics-- aware of what happens when you let solidarity slip and how vulnerable groups can be. Every single neighborhood with big gay populations-- from Manhattan, Key West, Wilton Manors in Fort Lauderdale, Provincetown and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on the East Coast thru Boystown in Chicago, Pleasant Ridge near Detroit, Oak Lawn, Dallas and Montrose in Houston to the Castro and Noe Valley in San Francisco, West Hollywood and Silverlake in L.A. and Palm Springs-- voted overwhelmingly against Trump. Gays knew. According to NYTimes exit polling Mitt Romney got nearly half the gay vote in 2012. Señor Trumpanzee didn't do quite so well. 14% of LGBT voters pulled the lever for Señor... very, very, very sick people, who were not just voting for Trump, but for the most psychotically obsessed homophobe in American politics, Mike Pence and his who murderous posse of mentally deranged misfits.

24 year old Sinclair Treadway lives in the faded-but-once-ritzy El Royale in L.A.'s Hancock Park with his husband Sean Adl-Tabatabai, 36. Sinclair says he was a Bernie primary voter. But he and Sean have gone down a very dark path since then. They have a fake news site, Your News Wire, whose credo is something like this quote from Sean: "Reality is how you perceive it. You can change that perception of reality-- dictate it." And today they are dictating it on behalf of the neo-fascist movement behind Trumpanzee. The "3-year old website of murky fact and slippery spin, has in the past year helped usher Donna Brazile out of her CNN gig and foment the Pizzagate frenzy with a key early post (which has generated 28,000 Facebook shares), all from an unlikely HQ for an alt-media operation: the couple's live/work apartment at the historic El Royale (sometime home to the likes of Katie Holmes, Josh Brolin and Cameron Diaz) in L.A.'s Hancock Park."

Now YNW is emerging alongside the more high-profile Breitbart as an integral player in the Trump era's L.A. alt-media axis. Despite Google's decision to cut off YNW's ad revenue and fact-checking site Snopes' relentless efforts to debunk its incendiary reports, its founders are more energized than ever, as Treadway puts it, "to focus on what people aren't focusing on-- the information that the public isn't already being told."

Like fellow outsider outlets (most notably Infowars, with which it periodically trades tips), YNW, whose output has been labeled fake news and Trumpist propaganda by critics, is fueled by populist politics and social media shares. Those in Hollywood retweeting its links include EL James (a story speculating on the origins of unknown "sky trumpet" sounds heard across Europe), Elijah Wood (an article concerning GMOs and cancer) and James Woods (a report that a former Haitian government official due to testify about alleged Clinton Foundation misdeeds was found dead in Miami).

Snopes debunked Your News Wire’s story in May about U.K. authorities allowing the Manchester terror bombing to happen.

The outlet's most devoted celebrity reader, however, is likely Roseanne Barr, who has repeatedly shared with her social media followers YNW's coverage of everything from Benghazi to Pizzagate. "We've communicated a couple of times-- I have the emails," says Adl-Tabatabai, who notes that the "kooky" Barr also has written to him to "slam" stories. "She's frank, opinionated-- our perfect audience." (Barr didn't respond to a request for comment.)

While YNW fields plenty of tips, most of which Adl-Tabatabai deletes ("I'll get quite a lot of, 'Kanye West is being readmitted to the hospital due to MKUltra,' that he's being mind-controlled"), the editorial approach of its tiny, work-from-home staff is chiefly to identify and highlight overlooked nuggets published elsewhere, then recirculate them with provocative new angles. They pull material from disparate outlets, whether Iranian state-backed TV or right-leaning Circa (owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group), usually pinpointing details tucked far down in articles or hidden away in obscure government reports.

Alienated liberals, the two share a suspicion of established stories and presumed facts that borders on the radical. Adl-Tabatabai's views are informed by what he sees as British media's failures during his formative years-- cheerleading the Iraq War, ignoring rumors of BBC host Jimmy Savile's sexual abuse of children-- while Treadway's are forged by a conviction that Bernie Sanders, whom he ardently supported during the Democratic primary, wasn't given legitimate consideration by the press.

They are critical of Donald Trump on some policy points (including his transgender military ban) but view him as a salutary influence in politics. "He may be a buffoon, and he may make some really bad mistakes during his presidency, but he's still an anti-establishment figure," reasons Adl-Tabatabai. "A vote for him was a vote to smash the system."

...In the months after Trump's election, several British papers published accounts criticizing YNW as a purveyor of fake news, with one reporting that a European Union task force set up to combat Russian propaganda had classified the outlet as a proxy. While the couple acknowledges that state-sponsored Russia Today is a favored source ("They have angles," notes Adl-Tabatabai, "and sometimes their angles vaguely match our angles"), they deny any links to the Kremlin. Such a claim, contends Adl-Tabatabai, is "part of an overall political game that's being played by big corporate media outlets to purge independents."

The negative attention has had a bottom-line impact. Google AdSense dropped YNW from its network, resulting in what Adl-Tabatabai notes was a 60 percent drop in revenue (he declines to reveal dollar figures). He says he learned from a "brutally honest" discussion with an AdSense rep that there are internal divisions at Google over whether to work with publishers like YNW. "The thing that infuriated me most is that Google itself admitted to me that they didn't view us as a 'fake news' website," he says.

Just a couple of Mike Pence enablers

In a statement provided to THR, Google writes, "We don't comment on specific sites, but if a site violates our policies, whether intentionally or not, we take quick action and stop serving ads to that site." The couple's site briefly appeared under another banner, NewsPunch, in early September-- Adl-Tabatabai says "the decision to rebrand [had been] brewing for a while"-- and was an AdSense site again. Google wouldn't reveal whether it was aware that NewsPunch was simply YNW with a new logo and tagline. At any rate, the site within days reverted to Your News Wire-- because of technical difficulties, says Adl-Tabatabai, who adds it's still "moving toward a rebrand."

He and Treadway regularly find themselves in the sights of Snopes, the web's best-regarded fact-checker, which wrote in May of YNW's "track record of promoting false information." (It attempted to debunk the publication's false-flag conspiracy reporting the British government knew in advance that Ariana Grande's May 22 concert in Manchester would be bombed but "'allowed' this attack to happen in order to justify cracking down on the innocent population even further.") Snopes head David Mikkelson observes that the couple also has a history of publishing what he considers defamatory claims about his own operation, and Snopes' legal counsel has sent cease-and-desist notices.

Given Snopes' role as one of Facebook's official partners in efforts to address the spread of misinformation, Adl-Tabatabai says he has been weighing his options for a campaign against what he sees as a competitor with an unfair stranglehold on dictating reality-- a move right out of Trump's anti-press playbook. "We're all now questioning reality as it's being handed down, how it's interpreted, how it's portrayed," reasons Adl-Tabatabai on the rooftop of the El Royale as Treadway nods. "The audience itself is already questioning the facts."

The other night-- in a brief post about the new Tom of Finland film-- we looked (admiringly) at the idea of gays as outlaws and rebels, a theme I've explored here at DWT before. Damn, I hate thinking of Treadway and Adl-Tabatabai in that context! I think I'd rather see them as nothing really more than just contrarian idiots steeped in ignorance, ambition and a deep-seated need to be-- at least in each other's eyes-- as fabulous as Cher when she sang "Believe." What do you think, are Treadway and Adl-Tabatabai as fabulous as Cher? John Rechy they'll never be-- let alone Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, William Burroughs, James Baldwin or Touko Laaksonen.