Two big anti-trans and anti-gay events in 1970s California

The final paragraph of Chapter 3 of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s foreshadowed the incoming political and cultural backlash against the LGBTQ community. Gay men and women were the target of many discriminatory firings that made the news around this time. In 1976, physical education teacher Steve Dain made national news when he was fired from his position due to being a trans man. For years, Dain was the most visible trans man in the United States. He was blackballed from teaching for the rest of his life, despite having won his court case against the Northern California school district. The positive gains seen in the election of Harvey Milk for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, and his role in leading the successful fight against the homophobic Briggs Initiative/California Proposition 6 soon turned to tragedy when Milk and pro-gay rights San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled Supervisor Member Dan White. The subsequent 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco, in reaction to White’s light sentencing, showed widespread anger. These systems and institutions of authority had no interest in protecting queer and trans people. This would only get worse in the Reagan years of the 1980s.”

I didn't know Steve Dain, and I don't remember ever hearing of him before. I grew up on the opposite US Coast. Dain died in 2007.

What interests me about this is that, in addition to Renee Richards playing tennis, here was another 1970s U.S. sports "scandal" where the scandal was that the person in sports was trans. Indeed, one website says: "Steve lost his job and went to court. He was briefly a media topic, but the very next day the Renée Richards story pushed him off the front page."

Of course, transphobes got overexcited at the 1936 Berlin Olympics too.

Another thing that interests me is that Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978, while Dain was fighting in court. The paragraph is telling a history that links transphobia and homophobia in California: the transphobia that ousted Dain, the homophobia that killed Milk and Moscone.

More about his trial at the website The Berkeley Revolution.

The painter Max Beckmann

From Sarah Kendzior ("The King," Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter, Substack, Sept 12, 2024), I learned about the German painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950), who in the 1930s was exiled to Amsterdam and then to the United States.

Amsterdam - Stedelijk Museum - Max Beckmann (1884-1950) - Double Portrait of the Artist and his Wife Quappi 1941 Wikimedia Commons

National Museum of Sudan has been looted

"The National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum has reportedly been looted by members of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) amid an ongoing civil war in the country. ... The artifacts have allegedly been spotted for sale online."
— Tessa Solomon, National Museum of Sudan Reportedly Looted amid Civil War, ARTNews, September 3, 2024

Gaza: Violence since Israel's 2005 'disengagement'

From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

"When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.

The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree."

If a nation begins with "other forms of persecution...including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation," then "a war defined as an existential battle for survival" may catalyze yet more intense violence.

What word best describes the violence?

"The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.

But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch."

False binaries

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Sep 2, 2024:

"I want to name the false binary of "hostages vs. Palestinians" when the real binary has always been, "soaking the earth with more and more blood" or "find a political solution." We’ve been talking about this for months. Eg here, here.

May the memories of everyone killed over the last 11 months be a revolution towards collective liberation, safety, wholeness, and a true future for everyone in the region."

Boorstin: The 'pseudo-event'

“Great unforeseen changes—the great forward strides of American civilization—have blurred the edges of reality. The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, and more persuasive than reality itself.

We cannot say that we are being fooled. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that we are being ‘informed.’ This world of ambiguity is created by those who believe they are instructing us, by our best public servants, and with our own collaboration. Our problem is the harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs. It is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events—in all kinds of packages, in black-and-white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms—is the work of the whole machinery of our society. It is the daily product of men of good will. The media must be fed! The public must be informed! . . .“

— Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961. Quoted by Susan Bordo in BordoLines, 2024.