By Gary Kinsman

AN INSPIRING AND broad-ranging queer historian, Allan Bérubé died at the age of 61 on December 11, 2007. He left us with major contributions of exciting historical work, but also important unfinished work that needs to be continued.

Bérubé’s allegiance was not to the academy but to the movement and community. Bérubé’s histories, as he put it, were about the lives of ordinary lesbians and gay men. He was not formally trained as a historian. Instead his remarkable skills grew out of his decade long involvement in the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project and the broader grassroots queer history movement based on developing ways to return our history to our communities.

Some of his earliest work with the History Project was on women who cross-dressed and passed as men. Bérubé’s historical work, while centering on gay and queer experiences, always examined the ways in which sexuality, class, race and gender relations are made in and through each other. Sexuality, for him, was thought and practiced in relation to class, race and gender.

Marching To A Different Drummer

OPENINGS AND POSSIBILITIES: The Meaning of Obama
By KAZEMBE BALAGUN and HANK WILLIAMS
From Left Turn

How does the Black left engage and understand the historic presidential campaign of Barack Obama? This question is in the hearts and minds of African-American radicals around the country.

With the nomination of Barack Obama increasingly likely, there seems to be a significant block forming within the Black left community agreeing to lend a kind of “critical support” to his campaign. Activists Bill Fletcher and Danny Glover -two principal authors of the widely circulated Progressives for Obama (PFO) statement-as well as other notables such as Amiri Baraka see Obama’s candidacy as an opening to reinvigorate social movements and the see possibility of pushing him to the Left. The PFO call argues that the emerging movement, “even though it is candidate-centered…is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.”

By Michael Bronski, Z Net

Although I've only been teaching gay and lesbian studies for eight years, my involvement in writing about it (and participating in it) stretch back almost four decades. I have learned innumerable things during that time—and engaging with younger queer people has changed my mind about a number of issues. One of the most important changes has come from my realization that teaching "history" is a lot harder than teaching about social issues. Students have no trouble comprehending and grappling with complicated legal issues and political theory. They have no problem figuring out a causal historical timeline, but they often have no real sense of what this recent history felt like, or the extraordinarily high level of emotional content that fueled it or the emotions that emerged from it.

By RJ Maccani, for the upcoming issue of the RESIST Newsletter, from Zapagringo

"Behind our black mask, behind our armed voice, behind our unnameable name, behind what you see of us, behind this, we are you." – Major Ana Maria of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. Chiapas, Mexico. 1996.

In their words and in their actions, Mexico’s Zapatista rebels have developed and propagated a powerful conception of solidarity. Through exploring a bit of their history, as well as the work of several of their supporters and allies within the USA, I seek to share here some of my understandings of what solidarity means to the Zapatistas and, thus, what it might mean for those of us who seek to act in solidarity with them.

Everything for Everyone, Nothing for Ourselves

Perhaps the Zapatista Army of National Liberation got lucky when they picked January 1st, 1994 to be the day they would rise up in arms. As the prominent Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva describes it, there wasn’t much else happening at the time:

Washington's Wars and Occupations: Month in Review #35
By Max Elbaum, Published on: March 30, 2008

At the Winter Soldier Hearings sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, former Marine machine gunner Jon Michael Turner testified:

"On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. This man was innocent. He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. The first round didn't kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterwards he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend and I said, 'Well, I cant let that happen.' So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family.

"We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq..."

Marine Corporal Jason Washburn recounted that his platoon once killed a woman that they genuinely believed was going to hurt them... only to realize the woman was bringing them food. According to Washburn, during his second Iraq tour the Rules of Engagement declared that "anyone on the streets can be considered an enemy combatant."

By Grace Lee Boggs, Left Forum Closing Plenary, Cooper Union, New York, March 16, 2008

I have decided to talk about the next American Revolution because I believe it is not only the key to global survival but also the most important step we can take in this period to build a new, more human and more socially and ecologically responsible nation that all of us, in every walk of life, whatever our race, ethnicity, gender, faith or national origin, will be proud to call our own.

I also feel that it would be a shame if we left this historic gathering in this Great Hall, at this pivotal time in our country’s history – when the power structure is obviously unable to resolve the twin crises of global wars and global warming, when millions are losing their jobs and homes, when Obama’s call for change is energizing so many young people and independents, and when white workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are reacting like victims — without discussing the next American revolution.

Since it is hard to struggle for something which you haven’t struggled to define and name, my aim this evening, quite frankly, is to initiate impassioned discussions about the next American revolution everywhere, in groups, small and large.

****

Consider: "There were 469 US billionaires, worth a combined $1.6 trillion, while
the 656 billionaires who live outside the United States are worth $2.8
trillion." That is the upshot of the latest Forbes billionaire list. Leave
aside the thought that US troops probably kill more Iraqis every week than are
on that list. I just wondered if it was possible to calculate how many man
hours of labour produced the $4.4 trillion of wealth that is enjoyed by this
very small number of individuals. Obviously, we could pretend that the
canniness of these investors was itself the key magical ingredient that
produced all this wealth, and then the problem would no longer exist. That
claim has the grave disadvantage of being insusceptible to proof or disproof,
of course, like most forms of magical thinking. On the other hand, if the value
embodied in that wealth was principally produced by labour, then surely it would
be possible to produce aggregate figures for all the man hours of labour that
went into producing it.

http://jonelmer.ca/files/elmer_cd_jan2008.pdf
http://www.canadiandimension.com/issues/v42n1/
Published in Canadian Dimension:
VOL 42 No 1 | January/February 2008: pp. 28-30
Fighting in the Gaza ghetto
By Jon Elmer
When Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after six months of
increasingly violent clashes with the security forces of its rival Fatah, it
was neither a coup nor a civil war.

To be sure, there were times when Gaza convulsed with a type of
street-by-street fighting that gave the air of civil war. Gunmen took up
positions on the rooftops and balconies of high-rise apartments in Gaza
City. Makeshift checkpoints became sand-bagged bunkers, and more than once
in the winter of 2007, life in the long-battered enclave ground to a halt.

Yet the fighting cannot so easily or broadly be characterized as Hamas
versus Fatah, much less civil war. Significant elements of both movements

By RJ Maccani, for the April/May 2008 issue of Left Turn Magazine, From Zapagringo.

"Zapatismo is not a new political ideology or a rehash of old ideologies. Zapatismo is nothing, it doesn't exist. It only serves as a bridge, to cross from one side to the other. So everyone fits within zapatismo, everyone who wants to cross from one side to the other. Everyone has his or her own side and other side. There are no universal recipes, lines, strategies, tactics, laws, rules or slogans. There is only a desire: to build a better world, that is, a new world. "- The Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (CCRI-CG of the EZLN)

By Max Elbaum, January 29, 2008, War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
Washington's Wars and Occupations: Month in Review #33

Across the Middle East Bush's "war on terror" has led to a rolling catastrophe.

The administration is settling in to permanent occupation of Iraq while one-third of Iraqis need humanitarian aid and four million have been forced to flee their homes. Washington sends 3,000 more troops to Afghanistan as civilian deaths from U.S. bombs turn Afghans against the West. Top officials of the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Pakistan admit that their secret service has "lost control" of insurgents it trained and financed. In response to Israel's "collective punishment" residents of Gaza blew up and surged across the Gaza/Egypt border wall in the largest prison break in world history. Arab newspapers - including mouthpieces of pro-U.S. regimes – call Bush's warmongering against Iran "sad and depressing" while Arab governments normalize relations with Tehran.