YouTube break

 

Equality California challenges DOMA and supports UAFA

Assembly member Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica) introduced the EQCA-sponsored AJR 19, a joint resolution calling for the immediate repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. The laws of California treat LGBT people far more equally than federal statutes. DOMA has been used to justify denying even bare-bones protections to couples that are guaranteed statewide by California’s domestic partnership laws. EQCA is also sponsoring a resolution that would put California on record in support of the Uniting American Families Act, which would help US citizens in binational same-sex couples sponsor.

Equality California (EQCA) is the largest statewide lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender-rights advocacy organization in California. For more information, visit: http://bit.ly/nL1Re

 

History of U.S. policies regarding LGBT immigrants [part II]

I updated the chronology of U.S. immigration law changes in regards to LGBT people and added a section prior to 1965. Read the full chronology at: http://bit.ly/P0CAL

Until the 1880s

• Federal immigration law admits the family and friends of people already in the U.S.

By 1890s

• “Friends” get dropped from the federal immigration laws.

In the first quarter of the 20th century

• Diverse Asian immigrants get steadily reconfigured by law as having families that are neither intelligible nor desirable, in part because they are deemed to lack the proper heterosexual couple as a foundation.

1965

• Explicit racial and ethnic preferences are dropped from the law.
• The preference system is altered to ensure that approximately 75 percent of all immigration slots would be allocated on the basis of family ties, and family is expanded to include not just the spouses, minor children, and parents of citizens or residents, but also their adult siblings. (Congress calculated that this would enable continued European dominance of the immigration stream, albeit through deniable means. However, this turns out to be inaccurate, as Asian and Latin American migrants come to dominate the flows of family preference immigrants.)
• U.S. immigration laws amended in 1965 (Immigration Reform Act to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act) to exclude homosexuals – “aliens afflicted with…sexual deviation” – from admission into the United States.

Continued at: http://bit.ly/P0CAL

 

A gay Arabic-speaking linguist dismissed from the military for his coming out: paradoxes of homosexuality and the military

Recently Lt. Dan Choi, a gay Arabic-speaking linguist, was dismissed from the Army National Guard under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy after having come out earlier in the spring. While in the military, he found the organization Knights Out which supports gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender military service people and make connections between gay troops and military administrators. He was interviewed at the MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show on Thursday night for his recent dismissal from the military. (See the clip below.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSyh9Zisdk

Allan Berube's book "Coming Out Under Fire". A document with the same title also has been made.

The U.S. military is full of paradoxes when it comes to its treatment of homosexuality. The first paradox is that the military bans homosexuality while in fact, it helped the emergence of gay community during the interwar era. Historically, many young men and women were pulled into the same-sex institution due to the World Wars I & II and given a chance to explore their same-sex desire for the first time in their life. Prior to the Wars, they had lived in small, rural towns, fairly heterosexual environments, where they could hardly meet others with same-sex desire. While in the military, they would travel to urban cities and seaports and go to local same-sex bars, contributing to the emergence of gay communities at that time. After the Wars ended, they returned to the cities, their new homes, instead of to their small, rural towns, and continued their gay life. (See John D’Emilio’s “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities” and Allan Berube’s “Coming Out Under Fire.”) So, in fact, the military helped many young men and women form their homosexual identity and community. In my personal case, the U.S. military experience allowed me to for the first time break away from the Mormon church and the traditional Korean heterosexual family unit and to become anonymous, financially independent, and familiar with gay social life and gay rights movement. This experience partially contributed to my immigration to the U.S. I wonder what Lt. Choi’s (judging by his last name, he could be Korean) experience was like. Did he also grow up in a Korean family in Korea or the U.S.? (And many Korean immigrants in the U.S. are Christian because to them; being Christian is a survival issue for social network and support in the U.S.) Did he also join the military to break away from his familial, ethnic ties?

Another paradox is that the military is a total institution (see Erving Goffman’s “Asylums“) and asks its inmates to confess everything, yet prohibits the most intimate part of gay men and lesbians’ life by the DADT policy. The military is really built around small unit leadership and small units. You get to know about their families, about their love lives, their lack of love lives. You teach them to be honorable and honest, have integrity, but then you tell them that they have to lie about the most intimate part of their life.

Can you think of more paradoxes?

 

A picture tells a thousand words

Copy of S.1328: Uniting American Families Act of 2007

 

 

Smoking dope or marrying gays or fixing the immigration system [from CitizenChris]

It’s a little bit old post from another blog but got my attention today. At Change.org, people voted on what they thought were important issues, and equal immigration rights for same-sex couples didn’t make the Top 10 ideas. This was supposed to be presented to Obama.

Guess what! Legalizing marijuana was the top vote-getter.

1. Legalize marijuana: 19,530 votes
2. Create Dep’t of Peace and Non-Violence: 14,994
3. Single-payer health insurance: 13,928
4. Make the grid green: 12,913
5. Repeal Patriot Act: 12, 285
6. Exempt handmade toy makers from safety rules: 12,280
7. Health care freedom: 12,062
8. Pass the DREAM Act for immigrants: 12,010
9. Pass marriage equality nationwide: 11,889
10. Energy sustainability: 9,644

Amazing…

Original post at: http://bit.ly/sXFkr

 

“Queer Mobility, Queer Citizenship” at UC Davis

If you happen to live near Davis, CA on May 29, 2009 and are interested in the subject area that I blog about, you may want to consider attending this conference. From the Call for Papers and the keynote speakers, it seems like a stellar symposium.

Siobhan Somerville's book "Queering the Color Line"

One of the keynote speakers is Siobhan Somerville, the author of “Queering the Color Line” which became an instant cannon among those who study intersections of race and sexuality. She has been working on a historical analysis project on citizenship, sexuality, and race.

The following is the Call for Papers for the symposium:

Recent queer scholarship reflects an investment in studies of transnationalism and a concern with questions of mobility and citizenship. Scholarship within the growing field of transnational queer studies, as exemplified in works such as Social Text’s 2005 special issue “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now” and GLQ’s 2008 special issue “Queer/Migrations,” investigates the imbrications of gender and sexuality with racial, national, and diasporic formations; circuits of travel, migration, and displacement; and immigration, asylum, and citizenship policies. To interrogate discourses of sexuality, desire, and political change within the current phase of globalization, transnational queer studies requires attention to the ways in which constructions of sexuality are linked to the movements of bodies, ideas, and capital as well as to local, regional, and global systems of inclusion and exclusion. This conference emerges at a moment in which technologies of war and information simultaneously transcend and reinscribe modern boundaries of time and space. Therefore, we invite conversations around how queer modes of mobility and citizenship may be at once complicit with and disruptive of the temporal, spatial, and affective logics of nation-states, economic formations, and liberal personhood.

What does the study of mobility and citizenship offer queer scholarship? Who is denied or granted access to various forms of mobility? How is that access/denial contingent upon and constitutive of one’s citizenship status? When and how are non-normative genders and non-reproductive desires in synchrony with the state and when do they expose the fissures, inconsistencies, and ambivalences of the state? Is queerness compatible with the pursuit of liberal citizenship and is queer citizenship possible? How does a focus on mobility and citizenship further demonstrate the necessity of interrogating the racial, class, and gendered formations inherent in discourses of sexuality? How can considerations of different scales of mobility and forms of embodiment bring together studies of sexuality, dis/ability, and citizenship? How are metaphors of mobility (coming out, “fluid” identities, access) central to queerness? What are the links between citizenship and in/voluntary modes of travel, im/migration, and displacement? How is the production of modern citizen-subjects embedded in histories of colonialism, war, and empire-making, and what is particular about the role of mobility in the construction of queer subjectivities? How does queer fail or succeed as a transnational and translatable concept, identity or politic?

We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplines, especially interdisciplinary work in queer theory and transgender theory. We especially encourage work that critically engages mutually constitutive articulations of race, class, sexuality, ability, gender, citizenship, religion, and nationality. Papers engaging activism and community organizing are also encouraged. For information on past symposium please visit www.queersymposium.org.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts with a CV to queersymposium2009@gmail.com by March 15, 2009. Along with this abstract, please indicate if your presentation requires any AV equipment. Acceptances will be sent out by March 29, 2009.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

-Histories of queerness mobility and citizenship
-Gay/lesbian tourism and travel
-Immigration and asylum law
-Technology / digital and virtual spaces
-”Global Gay” / the gay international
-Embodiment/Disability Studies
-Queerness and mobile capital
-Border crossing and borderlands
-Violence, war, and the State
-Immobility/Stasis
-Local and regional belonging
-Temporal mobility, temporal belonging
-Affective and cultural citizenship
-Homonormativity, neoliberalism and mobile citizenship

 

Obama’s intimate understandings: the (mis)logic of interracial marriage for same-sex marriage*

Last week Obama received mixed reviews for his self-claimed “fierce advocacy” on LGBT civil rights as his presidency in the White House reached the 100th day. President Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights lobbying group, said that the Obama administration “has done a good job” and is “on balance… where we’d like them to be.” On the other hand, Emma Ruby-Sachs gave Obama a “D-” grade, pointing out that his administration has done virtually nothing for LGBT civil rights since his presidency in the White House.

Your assessment of Obama on LGBT civil rights will be depending mostly on whether you are a type of person who looks at a glass and thinks it’s half-full or half-empty. Has it been only 100 days? Or has it been already 100 days?

Meanwhile, here is where I stand in regards to Obama’s “fierce advocacy” for LGBT civil rights. I have always thought that Obama is neo-liberal at best, not radical or queer enough, in terms of LGBT civil rights. Some of you might have noticed this when he chose Rick Warren who condemns gays and lesbians at the inaugural prayer. The cream of crop of this incident was that Obama defended his choice in the most rational sounding way, by invoking “Americanness” and making those who do not agree with his choice seem somehow “un-American”. Ironically, he said at the same time, “We can disagree without being disagreeable.” (See the clip below.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syIEoSIJHis

I had my first red flag of Obama’s neo-liberal stance when he successfully dodged the question about same-sex marriage and defended his position against it at the forum hosted by HRC and Logo. (Note: I am also against same-sex marriage but for a different reason than Obama’s religious reason.) He made it almost impossible for people to further question him, by bringing up a personal story of his parents, an interracial couple, and hooking it onto the popular pro same-sex marriage discourse of so called “miscegenation analogy”. That is, to compare interracial marriage and same-sex marriage in a parallel way as if race and sexuality did not intersect and to treat same-sex marriage as another civil rights issue that needs to be solved in the same manner that the ban on interracial marriage was lifted in the past. Obama said, “When my parents got married in 1960-61, it would have been illegal for them to marry in a number of states in the south, so obviously this is something that I understand intimately and care about.” (See the clip below.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0z9kQ5wsE8

To many of you, it may not be still unclear what the problem with this miscegenation analogy is. For that, I will shift the focus of my writing from about my personal assessment of Obama to about a critique of the current discourse of this “like race” logic among same-sex marriage advocates. After all, that’s more interesting to me and that’s what this blog is more about. For now, we can agree that Obama is still better than Bush, McCain, or Palin and put the assessment of him aside.

When Obama said it would have been illegal for his parents to be married in some states in 1960-61, he was referring to this: Laws prohibiting interracial marriage were first enacted in the American colonies in 1664 and were at one time or another codified in all but thirteen states, including Hawaii where his parents got married, and the District of Columbia. These laws lasted until 1967.

Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving

The first successful challenge to the state anti-miscegenation laws took place in 1948, when the California Supreme Court decided the case of Perez v. Sharp. About twenty years later, Loving v. Virginia (1967), the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision unanimously struck down all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. This case had originated in 1958, when Mildred Jeter, an African American woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, got married in the District of Columbia. Shortly after their wedding, Loving and Jeter moved to Virginia, where marriage between African Americans and whites was still prohibited by the 1924 “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” which made their interracial marriage a felony. The Lovings were arrested in their home. After a series of appeals, in 1967 the case reached the Supreme Court. The Court unanimously ruled that laws against interracial marriage violated the equal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In comparison, laws explicitly limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, thus prohibiting same-sex marriage, have a much shorter history than laws of about 300 years against interracial marriage. State marriage laws had been assumed to apply only to heterosexual couples. Only until recently, there had been no specific mentions against homosexuals for marriage upon homosexual “identity”. Efforts to legalize same-sex marriage only began in the 1970s, when a number of cases challenged marriage laws in state courts, with the first successful one in Massachusetts, known as Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003). Also laws that differentiate explicitly between homosexual and heterosexual acts have been even less prevalent. In fact, they are a relatively recent phenomenon in the U.S. For most of U.S. history, laws against sodomy criminalized a range of “unnatural” or “deviant” sex acts performed not just between men, but also between men and women, and between men and animals.

In the 1970s a number of states repealed these laws but simultaneously began to target same-sex sodomy explicitly for the first time until the landmark Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Doesn’t the timing coinciding with the case of Loving v. Virginia appear strange to you? Read more.

In 1967, three weeks prior to the Supreme Court’s decision on the Loving case, Boutilier v. Immigration Service challenged the constitutionality of a federal law that excluded homosexuals from immigration and naturalization. Boutilier, a Canadian native, had immigrated into the U.S. with his family in 1955. In 1963, he applied for a U.S. citizenship. As it was a regular part of naturalization process, he was asked about his sexual history both before and after entry into the U.S. Boutilier answered honestly that he had engaged in sexual activities with both men and women, the information that he had not disclosed when he had initially entered the U.S. in 1955. The U.S. Public Health Service reviewed his case and determined that he was in a “class A” condition with psychopathic personality, sexual deviance. The government immediately began deportation proceedings. Boutilier and his lawyers challenged all the way to the Supreme Court. However, the Court in 1967 upheld the constitutionality of the law, and Boutilier was eventually deported. (It wasn’t until 1990 when homosexual ban disappeared from the immigration proceedings, thanks to Barney Frank.) The Supreme Court upheld the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 and banned homosexuals.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 itself did not specifically mention “homosexuals” but rather excluded “persons afflicted with psychopathic personality.” Boutilier’s case challenged the logic of this legislation by asserting that homosexuality itself was not a mental disease. Boutilier’s doctors supported Boutilier’s argument that he was a homosexual yet did not exhibit a “psychopathic personality.” However, the Supreme Court dismissed Boutilier’s argument and instead explained that “the Congress used the phrase ‘psychopathic personality’ not in the clinical sense, but to effectuate its purpose to exclude from entry all homosexuals and other sex perverts.”

While the states overturned the ban on interracial marriage and the INA removed overt references to race from the requirements for American citizenship, the Congress maintained a logic of blood purification by invoking the sexualized figures of sexual perverts and homosexuals. (It was also the Cold War era when homosexuals were seen as unstable and equated with communists. See David Johnson’s “The Lavender Scare” for more infomation.) When the explicit language of race disappeared, the underlying fantasy of national purification (an unadulterated, heterosexual Americanness) was articulated instead through the discourse of sexuality.

Then, how shall we account for the simultaneous disappearance of the overt language of race (in fact, replaced with “national origin”) and the new appearance of outlawed sexual formations, such as homosexuality, in the INA? How do we account for the fact that the apparent de-racialization of marriage law in Loving v. Virginia was at the same time accompanied by hardening defenses against homosexuals in Boutilier v. Immigration Service? Boutilier challenged a deep history of normative citizenship that had sometimes been articulated through a discourse of race and sometimes through a discourse of sexuality. When seen in the context of federal immigration policy of the same period, Loving takes on a new significance. That is, in the eye of the law, the interracial couple was imagined as having a legitimate claim on the state at the same time that the nation was defensively constituted as heterosexual, incapable of incorporating the sexually suspect body. The fact that the Supreme Court had reaffirmed the exclusion of homosexuals from citizenship only three weeks earlier makes it particularly ironic that the Loving case is widely used among gay rights activists for same-sex marriage. The same logic was used for Baker v. Nelson in Minnesota with a unsuccessful challenge. The State Supreme Court explained that “in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.”

In conclusion, the right to marry someone of another race in the Loving case was not unconditional but instead granted on the implicit condition that the subject to which this right accrued was heterosexual, regardless of race. It is a mistake to think that Loving v. Virginia was simply a case about race. Instead, the Loving case was part of a crucial reconfiguration of sexual as well as racial citizenship. The part that we often forget and don’t think about is that while Loving did expand rights to marriage, it also effectively consolidated heterosexuality as a privileged prerequisite for recognition by the state as a national subject and citizen. We need more appropriate discourses for same-sex marriage, than the mislogic of interracial marriage.

*This blog post is based mainly upon Siobhan Somerville’s (2005) article “Queer Loving” in GLQ.

 

YouTube break

 

API’s gay marriage in San Francisco portrayed in Chinese media [old post]

I don’t understand what this clip says in Chinese but I’m guessing that it’s about gay marriage in California last year during the brief time prior to Prop 8 and in particular about gay Asians who were getting married at the city hall of San Francisco.

I’m interested in learning how the Chinese media (I assume that it was a Chinese broadcast in California for its immigrant community) portrayed the gay marriage involving its own ethnic members, when considering that Chinese are more conservative than Americans in terms of homosexuality (although Taiwan may become the first Asian country that legalizes same-sex marriage and its president Ma recently had a gay sex scandal). If you happen to understand Chinese, please leave me comments.

By the way, at 4:06, a non-Asian person (Ramon Escamilla) who is marrying the Chinese man (Robert Su) speaks Chinese [Mandarin]. That’s rare. I have never been that lucky. So far, quite the contrary.

 

History of U.S. policies regarding LGBT immigrants

Until the 1880s

• Federal immigration law admits the family and friends of people already in the U.S.

By 1890s

• “Friends” get dropped from the federal immigration laws.

In the first quarter of the 20th century

• Diverse Asian immigrants get steadily reconfigured by law as having families that are neither intelligible nor desirable, in part because they are deemed to lack the proper heterosexual couple as a foundation.

1965

• Explicit racial and ethnic preferences are dropped from the law.
• The preference system is altered to ensure that approximately 75 percent of all immigration slots would be allocated on the basis of family ties, and family is expanded to include not just the spouses, minor children, and parents of citizens or residents, but also their adult siblings. (Congress calculated that this would enable continued European dominance of the immigration stream, albeit through deniable means. However, this turns out to be inaccurate, as Asian and Latin American migrants come to dominate the flows of family preference immigrants.)
• U.S. immigration laws amended in 1965 (Immigration Reform Act to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act) to exclude homosexuals – “aliens afflicted with…sexual deviation” – from admission into the United States.

1986

• Congress passes the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments (IMFA). Under IMFA, couples must be closely scrutinized to ensure that they have what is called a “genuine” marriage. This requires demonstrating not only that they are legally married but also that they married “for love” rather than for a pratical consideration such as immigration status.

1987

• HIV Ban
• Under President Reagan, Congress adds AIDS to the list of “dangerous, contagious diseases for excluding persons from the United States”. Bans people who are HIV-positive from entering the U.S. Only under strict circumstances can people apply for a waiver (U.S. citizen/legal permanent resident: for heterosexual spouse, unmarried son/daughter, parent; U.S. citizen: minor unmarried lawfully adopted child under 18).

1990

• Homosexual ban disappears
• Barney Frank, Congressman from Massachusetts, crafts the comprehensive immigration exclusion amendment that defines the reasons for denying entry into the U.S. – and simply leaves out the sexual preference exclusion.

• Asylum case Toboso-Alfonso
• The BIA (Board of Immigration Appeals) recognizes the need to protect homosexuals as a social group and allows Toboso-Alfonso to remain in the U.S. through “withholding of deportation”, but upholds a lower court’s decision to deny asylum because Toboso-Alfonso had a U.S. criminal conviction.

1993

• HIV ban becomes law
• The heinous HIV travel and immigration ban is codified into law as part of the NIH reauthorization (National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993). The amendment adds HIV to the list of “communicable diseases for excluding people from the United States”. President Clinton signs the bill, making the policy law. The HIV ban is still in place.

1994

• Toboso-Alfonso becomes precedent
• U.S. Attorney Janet Reno releases Order 1895-94, which makes the Toboso-Alfonso case a binding precedent for INS officials making future immigration and asylum decisions. The Order states that “an individual who has been identified as homosexual and persecuted by his or her government for that reason alone may be eligible for relief under the refugee laws on the basis of persecution because of membership in a social group.”

• LGIRTF (Lesbian Gay Immigration Rights Task Force)
• LGIRTF forms in New York City to provide support, information and networking opportunities for gay/lesbian immigrants and their partners.

• Immigration Equality
• Immigration Equality forms as an independent chapter of LGIRTF under its own name and leadership in Los Angeles to do the same on the west coast.

1996

• DOMA signed into law
• President Clinton signs DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) into law. “The Federal Government may not recognize same-sex or polygamous marriages for any purpose.” [This includes immigration.]
• Only those whose income is at least 125% of the U.S. federal poverty level are elibible to sponsor family members of legal immigration, no matter how fully their family form is recognized in the law.

2000

• Permanent Partners Immigration Act (PPIA)
• Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) introduces the PPIA on Valentine’s Day. This legislation would allow U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to sponsor their same-sex partners for immigration to the U.S. by simply adding the term “permanent partner” in sections where “spouse” appears in the Immigration & Nationality Act.

• San Francisco City resolution
• The City of San Francisco passes a resolution in support of the Permanent Partners Immigration Act.

• Asylum case Hernandez-Montiel v. INS (California)
• August 2000: U.S. Court of Appeals of the 9th Circuit holds that the petitioner “a gay man with a female sexual identity, who may be considered a transsexual” is entitled to asylum and withholding of deportation.

• West Hollywood City resolution
• The City of West Hollywood passes a resolution in support of the Permanent Partners Immigration Act.

2001

• Permanent Partners Immigration Act (PPIA)
• Congressman Jerrold Nadler reintroduces the PPIA on Valentine’s Day.
• Heightened security measures since September 11 single out migrants from countries identified as “high risk” to the U.S. affect family-based immigration.

2003

• Permanent Partners Immigration Act (PPIA)
• Congressman Jerrold Nadler reintroduces the Permanent Partners Immigration Act in the House on February 13, 2003, and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduces it in the Senate July 31, 2003.

• Marriages with a transsexual spouse
• On March 20, 2003, William Yates (Acting Associate Director for Operations, BCIS, Dept. of Homeland Security) issues a new policy regarding marriages with one transsexual spouse that invalidates all legal marriages between two persons born of the same sex.

2004

• Marriages with a transsexual spouse
• On April 16, 2004, the Bush government issues a new policy regarding marriages with a transsexual spouse. The policy now invalidates all legal marriages …”between two individuals where one or both of the parties claims to be a transsexual”…

• California Assembly resolution
• The California Assembly passes a resolution in support of the Permanent Partners Immigration Act.

• Los Angeles City resolution
• The Los Angeles City Council unanimously passes a resolution in support of the Permanent Partners Immigration Act.

• LGIRTF becomes Immigration Equality
• LGIRTF (Lesbian Gay Immigration Rights Task Force) changes its name to Immigration Equality, the name under which the Los Angeles chapter had been operating ever since its inception.

2005

• Marriages with a transsexual spouse (Lovo-Lara case)
• On May 18, 2005, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) issues an Interim Decision (#3512) in the “Lovo-Lara” case in which it upholds the validity of a legal marriage with a transsexual spouse and approves the green card.

• The BIA’s reasoning:
• DOMA does not preclude, for purposes of Federal law, recognition of a marriage involving a postoperative transsexual, where the marriage is considered by the State in which it was performed as one between two individuals of the opposite sex. Marriage may be basis for benefits under the INA, where the State in which the marriage occurred recognizes the change in sex of the postoperative transsexual and considers the marriage a valid heterosexual marriage.

• PPIA gets new name
• The Permanent Partners Immigration Act is reintroduced in the House and Senate under its new name, the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA).

2006

• Out4Immigration is founded.
• On June 22, Out4Immigration forms in San Francisco as an all-volunteer grassroots organization to raise awareness of the plight of same-sex binational couples and their families, as well as the HIV ban.

2007

• Asylum case Jorge Soto Vega (California)
• An immigration judge denies Vega asylum because Vega doesn’t appear gay to him. The decision is appealed and asylum is secured on January 30, 2007, with the help of Lambda Legal.

• Vega: “The court has awarded me my freedom and the opportunity to spend my life in the country I love with the person I love,” referring to his partner of 15 years.
• [If the UAFA had been in place, Jorge's partner could have sponsored him for residency – they would not have been forced to go through a lengthy, costly asylum process. It would have also saved taxpayers' money.]

• Reintroduction of the UAFA
• Reintroduction of the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) in the House by Congressman Jerrold Nadler and in the Senate by Senator Patrick Leahy May 8.

• HIV Ban
• Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduces bill (H.R.3337) to lift the HIV ban.
• In the Senate, legislation to lift the ban is introduced by Senator John Kerry (S.2486).

2008

• The statutory HIV ban is removed from the Immigration and Nationality Act.

 

YouTube break

 

Deportation of or UAFA for gay immigrants in love: the story of Shirley Tan

For queer immigrants, it’s a challenge to live in the U.S. In particular, those who are people of color and speak a language other than English as the mother tongue face both overt and covert racial oppression and struggle with interaction with others on a daily basis at a grocery store, bank, restaurant, airport, on the street, and even in their own housing.

Gay space is not exactly a haven immune to all this, either. At bars and increasingly in gay online social space that have become gentrified and hyper-commercialized by this point, queer immigrants are further marginalized by the mainstream standards that privilege white, Absolute Vodka or Miller Lite drinking, middle-class gay men. Or if lucky and desired, they are so often upon the conditions of stereotyping, objectification, and exoticization (for examples, see Daniel Tsang’s “Notes on Queer ‘N’ Asian Virtual Sex“, Eric Wat’s “Making of a Gay Asian Community“, and Han Lee’s “Queering Race in Cyberspace“).

Also there are restrictions in queer immigrants’ life; they may not be allowed to work and yet somehow need to manage their living, or if allowed to work, only in certain jobs, often low-waged, or for exploitation upon their undocumented status; and they are likely to live without access to health care and to be sexually abused, raped, depressed and infected with HIV, harassed and humiliated, and gay-bashed with no safe way of reporting such crimes because of the fear of deportation that can result in a shame to and abandonment from their own ethnic group, friends, and family and also result in even a death penalty in some countries of their origin, i.e., Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Nigeria, and Mauritania.

For them, it’s even a harder challenge to meet someone who is empathetic, culturally sensitive, and socially just enough to embrace them and who, most importantly, is willing to love them despite the possibility of geographical separation. The chances of falling in love with someone and making the life of the two as partners happen are very slim.

You thought life for gay American couples upon no availability of gay marriage is a bitch? Think again. At least, now gay American citizens can live in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, or Vermont and enjoy partial equality at the state level.

Shirley Tan, right. Pictured here with Tan is her partner of many years, Jay Mercado, and their twin 12-year-old boys, Joriene, left, and Jashley.

Shirley Tan, the 43-year-old San Mateo, CA, lesbian woman immigrant from the Philippines and of the Philippine citizen is someone who has made it further than other queer immigrants. (Her story is beginning to gain some media attention and being circulated among gay immigration rights activists.) She met her lesbian partner Jay Mercado and had two twin children. And they have been together since Tan entered the country on a tourist visa in 1986.

But recently she was on the verge of being separated from her partner and the twin sons by immigration officials. Tan would have potentially faced violence upon a return to the Philippines. Two of her family members were murdered several years ago by a relative over an inheritance, and she was nearly murdered at that time.

Luckily a private bill has been introduced by senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer in Congress on behalf of Shirley Tan. The immediate impact of the bill is that Shirley Tan will not be deported until the end of this Congress in December 2010.

However, an actual passage of the private bill is unlikely.  So the only guarantee that Shirley will not be torn from her partner and children is passage of the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA).

Is UAFA a form of gay marriage? Well, generally I’m against gay marriage (correction: I’m against marriage, whether gay or “opposite” [heterosexual] in Ms. California’s term, being the only form of relationship that is recognized and privileged at the state/federal level), not because I believe in the conservative, Christian definition of marriage but because I believe like other gay and lesbian studies intellectuals that the marriage fight is setting us back. Instead, we could be de-institutionalizing marriage and gaining more–healthier public sex culture, universal health care, etc.

I rather see UAFA not as a gay marriage, but as a recognition of our imaginative plethora of family arrangements (e.g., bachelor housing, senior housing, domestic partnership, second-parent adoption).

As Obama pushes for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) with its momentum ever and plans to address it this year, we are given our best shot of passage of UAFA over the next two years. You can take actions here, my fellow American friends.

 

Bears eat my people’s food!

I jokingly said on Facebook that my bear friends should support me by eating Korean food (I was born and raised in S. Korea) this week as I have supported them in the past.

I mean, I read the Bear Books I & II and many other books and articles to learn more about them. I went to the bear film festival events in Vermont. I even have the bear Pride sticker (and the leather Pride sticker) on my Honda Element. The least they can do to reciprocate my friendship is to come have dinner with me at a Korean restaurant, right?

Also at my last therapy session about a month ago, it really hit me that I could compromise and assimilate only so much–unless I could have my memories completely erased and altered and physically morph myself into a white man, like Sylar did into Nathan in Heroes (even then, technically Sylar is alive but virtually he no longer exists)–and that I should meet my friends more in the middle. That’s healthier, and more enriching.

I would feel really sorry for people who are stuck in their own hegemonic world and can’t even begin to understand what’s out there. As Gergen said, in this saturated world, adaptation and improvisaion are key to our survivals.

Anyway, we had a great time at the dinner and they enjoyed the food. (See the pictures below.)

So, now I’m thinking… trying out Korean dinner is a good start. Next time I will get them involved in gay immigration equality activism.

 

Imagined gay communities

I’m participating in a small conference in Chicago this Saturday on queer communities. The conference will take place at the Center on Halsted, which was still under construction at the time I was leaving Chicago. I’m curious about what it’s like inside the building. Anyway, here’s what I wrote for the abstract:

In the 70s and the 80s, community concepts began to be dominant among sexual minorities through gay rights movements and queer media representations. After the Stonewall riots, gender nonconformists and sexual perverts collectively mobilized and organized civil rights movements. Through ubiquitous media, people with same-sex desire even in the smallest rural town who may not have met others alike face-to-face could still see themselves in media visibility and make sense of their life in relation to a larger group of sexual Others. Since then, or as early as the 50s, gay rights movements and the arc of queer media visibility have changed while community concepts continued into the 90s and the 21st century. White middle-class gay men with their relatively higher economic, political power than other sexual minorities controlled public space (e.g., urban gentrification) and set their assimilationist approaches (e.g., gay marriage and respectability) at the forefront of gay rights movements, further marginalizing queer people of color and others who may practice various sexual behaviors beyond the “charmed circle” (Rubin, 1984). The arc of queer media visibility has shifted from symbolic annihilation to conditional visibility in commercial media environments that privileged white middle-class gay men over other queers. Yet, all queers were called into participating in the “LGBT community” in egalitarian fashion.

Then, while queer history is in constant flux, it is precisely the time that we critically think about sexual communities. In doing so, I survey some of the key readings by gay and lesbian studies scholars on historical, economic, social, and cultural forces—changes in economic system (i.e., capitalism and in particular, free wage labor) that allowed men and women to break away from traditional heterosexual family units and move into cities; urban modernity that provided queers with sexual havens and anonymity such as bathhouses, gay bars, public parks and urinals; World War II that suddenly pulled young men and women into same-sex institutions; sexual oppressions such as the policing of sex and the purge of gay men and women during the McCarthy era; and gay marketing that cultivated the notion of gay community as a niche—that contributed to the emergence of and helped people imagine sexual communities, and I contend that gay communities should be understood as a category implicated in the ways that gay men and lesbians have developed collective identities historically, organized urban space (Chauncey, 1994; D’Emilio, 1983), and conceptualized their friendship (Nardi, 1999), intimacy, and family relationships (Weston, 1991) with others alike. In making connections among these scholars’ discussions of sexual communities, I draw a parallel between Benedict Anderson’s (1983) articulation of nation as “imagined communities” through print-capitalism, and the idea of sexual communities as “imagined communities” through media.

References:

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, urban culture, and the making of the gay male world, 1890-1940. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

D’Emilio, John. 1983. Capitalism and gay identity. In Lesbian and gay studies reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele A. Barale, and David M. Halperin, 467–476. New York, NY: Routledge.

Nardi, Peter M. 1999. Gay men’s friendships: Invincible communities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Rubin, Gayle S. 1984. Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance, 267-319. Boston, MA: Routledge.

Weston, Kath. 1991. Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.