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Deport me!
So they’re going to deport gay foreigners from Egypt. My phone started ringing a few mornings ago, reporters wanting comments: solicitous but always with a subtext of What’s going to happen to you? I...
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Icons
Madonna and fanboy, I My friend Mauro Cabral, the great trans activist from Argentina, wrote this week on Facebook: An American journalist wants to chat with me about Bruce Jenner’s story. She wants to...
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Fundraiser for Paper Bird: Keep us flying!
If you like this blog, we’d be grateful if you’d pitch in: You gave this blog your attention, and I’m incredibly grateful. Now please consider giving a little more — $5, $10, $100, whatever you can –...
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Mother’s Day
Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother Two women raised me, and here in Cairo, I don’t even have a picture of either. Perhaps that’s good. It’s better to rely on the salvages of memory....
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Remembering the Queen Boat, fourteen years after
Defendants in the Queen Boat trial wait in court for the verdict to be read, Cairo, November 14, 2011: photo by Norbert Schiller The night of May 12, 2001 – fourteen years ago today – I worked in my...
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Tweet for Egypt on IDAHOT: Why it’s important
Image by Amr Okasha for http://www.correspondents.org/ar/ It’s the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOT, for short). Here’s one important thing you can do. Tweet, or...
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Paper Bird: Three years old and growing
Origami Wren by Roman Diaz, folded by Gilad Aharoni: from giladorigami.com It’s midway through this month of fundraising for A Paper Bird. Please consider giving $5, $10, $100 — whatever you can – to...
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The Duggars: Sex and the police
Lady Madonna: Michelle Duggar with her newborn 17th child in 2007, surrounded by her family I knew nothing about the Duggars until two days ago; and, as Karl Kraus might say, now that I know all about...
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Bird, down to the wire
Lines from Leonard Cohen: Like a bird on the wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free So you’ve stumbled back onto the Paper Bird website, and onto this page. Before...
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الشرطة المصرية تلاحق المجتمع المثلي / Internet entrapment in Egypt: Protect...
الخصوصية ترقد في سلام / R.I.P. privacy (English version below) نحن نعلم الآن أن الشرطة في مصر تستخدم تطبيقات الهواتف في القبض على من يشتبه في كونهم مثليين أو متحولي/ات النوع الإجتماعي. مؤخراً تم القبض...
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Julie Bindel sells her mind (not body)
Bindel, apparently being plied with drinks by a white slaver Julie Bindel is a British journalist, a fierce opponent of trans people’s human rights (they’re imitation women), and an abolitionist who...
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The dignity of Greece
Crowds celebrate the “no” vote in Athens’ Syntagma Square, July 5, 2015. Photo from @socialistworker It’s important to remember that a lot of people will suffer because of the vote last night. They...
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PREVENT free speech: For governments, it’s easy
Hello, there. From http://www.islam21c.com/politics/2908-instructions-for-muslims-in-the-light-of-the-prevent-strategy/ This letter appeared in the Independent (UK) today: We, the undersigned, take...
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The dignity of marriage: Gays on the wrong side of history
Angel of history: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, not quite as seen by Walter Benjamin I. Tears Of course I cried. I cried because these nine antiquarian arbiters in funeral garb – five of them anyway, each...
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Gay hanging in Iran: Atrocities and impersonations
Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan, Iran, with the Shah Mosque at its nearer end. Photo from Iranian.com I. Everybody on earth knows that last week a deal on Iran’s nuclear program was announced....
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The UN Security Council debates gays and ISIS: Why this is a bad idea
Photo from an Islamic State Facebook account, republished by Vice I. Questions On August 18, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL or by its Arabic acronym, Da’ish) assaulted history. They...
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New killings: ISIS answers the UN Security Council
Iraqi News wrote yesterday that one of its sources, in the occupied northern province of Ninawah (Nineveh), told them: “[G]unmen belonging to ISIS threw on Sunday nine civilians from the top of a high...
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Ahmed Seif al-Islam: In dark times
Ahmed Seif el-Islam, photographed by Platon for Human Rights Watch, 2011 Ahmed Seif al-Islam died one year ago today. I had meant to write something then, but I didn’t have the heart. No one had much...
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Sarajevo
Francisco Goya, De qué sirve una taza? (What use is a cup?) Plate 59 from Los Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War), 1810-1820 I remembered this poem today, though what it describes seems almost...
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