Tommi Avicolli Mecca's Open Salon Blog

Belting out "faggots" at Independence Hall

Wed, 30 May 2012 10:05:24 -0400

Once upon a time and long ago in a place not far away, pride used to be called “Gay Pride” and it wasn’t a whole month, it was a day, a very special day to commemorate a riot that happened during the last weekend of June in a city called New York.

Queens and fags and dykes rebelled on that long hot night. When the cops didn’t get their regular payoff from the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, they raided the place, but the queens and their friends pelted them with coins and stones and stuff and made them know that business as usual was coming to an end.

It wasn’t the first time queens had acted up and caused a scene. They did it a decade before in Los Angeles (Cooper’s Donuts), then in Philly (Dewey’s, 1965) and San Francisco (Compton’s, 1966). But that night in June a revolution was born, a queer revolution that spread throughout the country like wildfire. Its name was Gay Liberation and its first manifestation was Gay Liberation Front.

It wasn’t surprising. Oppressed groups had already begun their own revolutions: Blacks, Latinos, women, hippies, farmworkers, students and others were chanting a line from a movie that hadn’t been made yet: we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

A few months after the Stonewall Riot, folks from various gay and homophile groups gathered, as they occasionally did (after all, there was a movement before Stonewall), and decided to replace their annual Fourth of July picket around Independence Hall in Philly (men in suits and ties, women in dresses, no transgender folks allowed) with a march to commemorate this monumental event. Thus began what we now call pride.

(Me at the 1973 pride march in Philly, photo by Jo Hofmann)

That first march was a rowdy affair, with no dress or gender restrictions. It was nothing like the slick production that happens these days, especially in places such as San Francisco where I live. No top name entertainers (they were all in the closet or afraid to admit they had gay fans), no glad-handing politicians (they were too busy running from their own shadows), no million dollar budgets (only the $150 collected at that drag benefit).

And no corporate sponsors. No liquors companies or banks or real estate companies put their names in the pride guide. There was no pride guide.

No cops, fire fighters or church congregations joined us in those first marches. Just a lot of queens and fags and dykes with long hair, jeans and sneakers and makeup and feather boas and such. Folk songs (played by genuine folk singers) and poetry was featured on the stage, along with fiery speeches from activists who knew how to kick oppressor butts (invading the offices of publications that printed anti-gay articles, zapping homophobic politicians and not caring if they liked us or not, even disrupting the CBS news broadcast with Walter Cronkite).

How can I ever forget my friend Saj, an amazing African American singer/songwriter, belting out “Faggots,” his anthem of our new generation, across the street from Independence Hall, at Philly’s first pride march, which I helped organize in 1972. How that word “faggot” echoed in the acoustics of the square.

We weren’t asking for marriage or military service. Our demands were fierce, though sometimes a bit unrealistic, such as an end to the Vietnam War, capitalism and the oppression of all oppressed groups. Hey, we were out to change the world, not the decor at the White House.

How I miss those marches.

Memorial Day is a farce!

Wed, 23 May 2012 14:05:10 -0400

For Memorial Day this year, wouldn’t it be great if politicians all around the country announced initiatives to house and employ veterans, instead of spouting the usual patriotic mumbo-jumbo that, at the end of the day, means absolutely nothing when poverty and homelessness is on the rise among those who managed to come back alive from America’s horrific wars overseas.

I’m talking about actually helping those who are usually ignored except when it serves the best interests of cynical politicians and others.

Face it, how many people really give a damn about vets, especially when they’re sitting on the street asking for change or getting cited with fines they can’t pay (which then turn into bench warrants and hurt their chances of getting housing), compliments of vindictive laws that criminalize not having a roof over one’s head.

Though they are only 9% of the population, vets make up from 15-23% of the nation’s homeless. They also remain homeless longer than non-vets. And they’re not all men. The number of women vets who are homeless has doubled since 2006.

According to a report published by the General Accounting Office in 2010, “Some of these women veterans, like their male counterparts, face challenges readjusting to civilian life and are at risk of becoming homeless. Such challenges may be particularly pronounced for those women veterans who have disabling psychological conditions resulting from military sexual trauma and for those who are single mothers.”

Next up: homeless gay and lesbian vets, now that we, too, can be all that we can be and go overseas and kill and be killed or return home and face poverty and homelesness.

There are nearly six million uninsured vets in this country, despite the promises of benefits that they received when they enlisted.

“I see uninsured vets in my clinic every week,” Dr. Jeffrey Scavron, a former Navy physician, said in a press release from Physicians for a National Health Program. “In many cases, they’re too sick to work, but not yet sick enough for full disability which would qualify them for Medicare. Only the government can put men and woman into military service and only the government can guarantee that they are covered after they serve.”

Young vets face a 30% unemployment rate in a country that supposedly loves those who “served” it. I wonder if those businesses that say they’re “proud of our troops” hire any of them when they get back here?

The numbers don’t lie,” says Ryan Gallucci, deputy legislative director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, told Bloomberg Businessweek. “The new veterans are going into the unemployment pile.”

This Memorial Day: forget the waving of the flag or the playing of the national hymns. Let’s treat vets like we really care. For a change.

When the past comes back to say hello

Mon, 7 May 2012 09:05:03 -0400

When the letter-sized, hand-addressed, white envelope arrived at my workplace, it was like something from a mystery movie. At first I was confused. It was from my hometown, Philadelphia, but with a return address I didn’t recognize. Then I remembered that someone was sending me something that had been found in Dennis’ apartment after he died.

Dennis Rubini was a former history professor of mine who was involved, as I was, in the early gay liberation movement.

I wasn’t prepared for what was in that envelope: my Temple University student ID card. I was baffled. Why was it in Dennis’ apartment? Did I drop it there one night? Did Dennis find it and decide to keep it all these years? Or did I give it to him for some reason?

The last sticker on it, piled on top of a bunch of other similar sized stickers, says, “TU full time senior spring sem 1974.” That was the year I graduated, but the picture is not from that year.

I remember when the photo was taken. Summer of 1969. I had just graduated from Bishop Neumann High School in South Philly. Temple had an all-day orientation. I figured it would be boring as all hell, but it wasn’t. I met a guy there, he was waiting in the same line to have his ID photo taken, and we exchanged phone numbers. We ended up having sex a few times at his apartment in Germantown.

So much history in that picture.

About two years before, I started questioning everything that I knew about the world. I stopped believing in god. I started sneaking off to civil rights marches, anti-war demonstrations and hippie Be-Ins in Fairmount Park. As a final act of defiance against Catholic school, I managed to grow my bangs really long. We weren’t allowed to have hair that touched the back collar of our shirts or crept down below the top of our eyebrows. If we did, Father Cox, the vice principal, pulled us into his office and gave us a haircut.

I ended up in Cox’s office a few months before graduation. I vowed that I would get back at him by growing my bangs as long as I could. I began straightening my hair so it wouldn’t take so long for them to reach my eyebrows. When they did, I combed them back so Cox couldn’t see what I was up to.

Since I was among the top honor students in my class, I was seated on stage on graduation night. When my name was called, I quickly loosened my cap so that my bangs fell down onto my forehead. I made my way to the bishop who sat in the center of the stage to hand me my diploma and, instead of kneeling and kissing the ring on his outstretched hand, I grabbed the document, turned to the audience and flashed a peace sign.

The 18-year-old in the Temple student ID has those long straightened bangs. In another year or so, my hair would hang nearly to my shoulders. I would walk into a Gay Liberation Front meeting in room 309 of the Student Activities Center to permanently shatter my closet door.

The smile in the ID photo is that of someone who is free at last to follow his dreams and desires. Someone who is glad to be out of Catholic school and heading to a public institution where god and Medieval morality wouldn’t be shoved down his throat.

If I could talk to that guy in the picture, I’d say: “Thanks for having the guts to reject what you were taught and follow what you knew was right. A part of you is still here, inside me.”

I’m not aware of him very often, but seeing that photo made me realize he is alive and well and still questioning things.

Hopefully, he always will be.

Don't name a Navy ship after Harvey Milk!

Tue, 1 May 2012 09:05:09 -0400

Bob Filner, a San Diego congressman of the Democratic persuasion, wants the U.S. Secretary of the Navy to name the next Navy ship after Harvey Milk. As in the famous gay activist and San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official turned Hollywood star.

Filner’s rationale is simple: Milk served in the Navy during the Korean War and the military no longer has a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy preventing openly queer folks from being all that they can be and killing civilians in other countries (for god, oil and profits, of course).

“This action by the US Secretary of the Navy will further send a green light to all the brave men and women who serve our nation that honesty, acceptance and authenticity are held up among the highest ideals of our military,” Milk’s nephew Stuart Milk told the San Diego LGBT Weekly.

At the risk of sounding as if I’m on the same side as the right-wing Christian nut jobs who will no doubt oppose the idea because they hate queers, I think it’s a bad idea.

It’s true that Milk served in the Navy, but that was at a time when queers were in the closet because to be out meant to be fired from jobs and ostracized from families, churches and other institutions. Not to mention murdered, especially in parts of this country where they now can’t teach Chicano history or where they consider sperm a human life. There were no anti-discrimination or hate crimes laws in the 50s.

The Milk who served in the Navy and the Milk who, less than two decades later, defied the taboos of his day to have sex with men, grow his hair, smoke pot and oppose the war in Vietnam, were completely different individuals. It was like that back then. People were transformed by the incredible times we lived in.

I know. I came out around the same time that Milk did.

Even after he cut his hair and put on the politician’s suit and tie, Milk never joined the Log Cabin Republicans. He often found himself pitted against a growing conservative trend within the queer community.

It’s one thing that gays can serve openly in the military. It’s another to attach the name of a queer progressive who opposed war to a military ship. It's just not appropriate. It's like naming a Christian church after him (Milk was a Jew and an atheist). Or a bomber plane after Gandhi.

What's next? Recruitment ads in the gay newspapers featuring the Village People and/or hunky half-naked men? A pink heart medal for killing with a gay flair? A lavender box with a rainbow flag for our gay and lesbian corpses?

Putting Milk's name on a Navy ship de-radicalizes him just as the Hollywood movie did (where was mention of his work in defending the I-Hotel tenants or his marches with day laborers, or his opposition to the gentrification of the Castro?). It makes him a safe icon for American consumption. Like Mother's Day, which was the work of Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and anti-war activist whose original call for the holiday was a protest against the carnage of war, not a way to feed the restaurant and flower industries. Is Milk's legacy going to be watered down to the point where those who knew him won't recognize him?

A more fitting tribute to the San Francisco gay rights leader would be making his birthday, May 22, a national holiday.

That way, every year people all over the country, especially young people, can be reminded of the legacy of Harvey Milk and the early gay rights struggle. It’s a far better tribute than a ship that could end up in another of America’s insane wars somewhere around the globe, wars that, if he were alive today, Milk would strongly oppose.

Nuns and priests abused kids in many ways

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:04:47 -0400

In this country it’s far easier to get attention if there’s sex involved in the story. Consider the priest sex scandals. How much coverage would they be receiving if clergy members were being charged with physical and psychological abuse instead of sexual shenanigans?

Not as much, that’s for sure. Many people would probably shrug their shoulders and say, “that was bad, but we all have it hard.”

It’s true, we all have a tough time surviving childhood, but that doesn’t negate the tremendous physical and psychological harm that the nuns and priests did to many of us when we were under their charge in Catholic school.

In eighth grade, I saw a nun throw a classmate against a blackboard. Two of his front teeth fell to the floor. He was sent down to the nurse’s office with a bloody mouth. And then HE was suspended. Nothing ever happened to the nun.

In high school, a Latin teacher, who bragged that he knew karate, threw me against a blackboard. I managed to hit the wall with my shoulder instead of my face. It hurt for weeks. I still have occasional problems with that shoulder. Other boys were routinely tossed over desks, punched, kicked and slapped hard on their heads.

Then there was the psychological torture. From kindergarden on, we were constantly told that we were lowly sinners, born with an “indelible” mark on our souls because of something two characters named Adam and Eve did in some mythical garden, and unless we repented every single day of our lives, we were doomed to hell fire.

Hell wasn’t just some vague concept. It was described to us in vivid detail, a place where we would suffer excruciating pain for all eternity, even for the mere “crime” of thinking of something that was a mortal sin. To think of a sin was a sin. It was like walking through an endless mine field.

On top of that, everything about our bodies was dirty, especially our sex organs. We were admonished never to touch “down there” (it didn’t have a name) or to even look at it in the bath tub or shower. Why god gave us such a terrible part of our bodies was a total mystery to me.

Imagine what it felt like to suddenly realize that I was queer? After a brush with gay sex at 12 (with another boy my age), I lived in daily torment. I knew god would never forgive me. I was doomed. Every night before I went to bed, I whispered the Act of Contrition to myself as passionately as I could. I was genuinely sorry for what I had done. It didn’t matter. The vengeful, creepy old man in the sky had a no tolerance policy towards gay kids.

It took me years to free myself of the self loathing and self hatred that I felt. While recovering, I got the nerve one afternoon to tell a “liberal” priest (who played Beatles records in class) that I didn’t think I believed in his god. He had me stay after school every day to scrape the gum from the bottom of desk tops. So much for open mindedness.

Were I to file a lawsuit against the Catholic Church for the pain and suffering I endured, I would not be taken seriously.

But if I suddenly had a “recovered memory” of a priest fondling me, I’d be the next SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) poster child.