S.O.N.G.

SONG Sweaty Summer Update (August 2007)

Dear SONG Kin:

It sure is time to sweat in the South! WELCOME NEW SONG MEMBERS TO OUR EMAIL BLASTS: WE ARE GLAD YOU SIGNED UP AT THE SOCIAL FORUM, AND GLAD YOU ARE WITH US. DON’T WORRY WE DON’T SEND THESE TOO FREQUENTLY! In this update, we are excited to share with you some of our plans for hiring interns for the Organizing School and laying the school on the ground (the first one begins this winter in Jacksonville, FL!) We are also working on a new team structure for how members can be more involved with everyday SONG work-get in touch with us for more info! Also, expect to hear from us soon with dates and location for the fall campout, to be held somewhere in Appalachia! (As always for more info on anything in this news blast, clink on the SONG website link to your left). Please forward widely our info about the internships!!!

Sending our love to you, the movement, and toward liberation.
SONG Staff

Post US Social Forum Love and Report Back!
The US Social Forum was a real chance for SONG members to shine, and for SONG folk to connect with other groups doing great work. During the forum:

* SONG signed up 163 new members
* SONG raised $2,355 at our BBQ fundraiser, major donors and thru T-shirt sales
* SONG and Queers For Economic Justice hosted over 100 LGBTQ lefties at a day long meeting (For more info on follow up–contact Queers for Economic Justice)
* Suzanne Pharr moderated the Sexuality and Gender Panel on behalf of SONG

DO YOU…have reflections on the forum? By Aug. 5 we will be posting our reflections from SONG on the forum, and we invite you to submit your own reflections…email to: Caitlin@southernersonnewground.org. For more follow up on the US Social Forum, click on the link above to go to the USSF website

* Thank you SONG members for making SONG the strong presence it was at the forum for our kindred communities. As always, SONG is tryin’ to be sustainable: We need resources to make the Organizing School happen! ALL kinds of gifts welcome, if they are checks make ‘em out to SONG. Send ‘em to: SONG, PO BOX 268, Durham, NC, 27702

Two Interns Needed!

SONG and Word and World are hiring two interns to work with our two organizations for a year. This is a strategic, cross-movement alliance for SONG to work with folks who share our politics and are practicing hands-on liberation theology in the South! The interns will live in a small house provided by Word and World in Greensboro, NC, and work on building and staffing the first SONG Organizing School this winter, AND the Word and World ‘Audre Lorde: Biography as Theology’ School next fall. The positions will each be for a year, staff-level of responsibility and include living wage stipends, childcare for parents, free housing, and lots of opportunities for mentoring with SONG, World and World and the Beloved Community Center, as well as a lot of travel around the South. LGBTQ People of Color are STRONGLY encouraged to apply! Please go to SONG’s website for more info and to apply! APPLICATION DEADLINE: AUGUST 31, 2007

SONG Releases National Report from Listening Campaign Think Tanks!

An exciting council of people convened at the Highlander Center from all over the country to dream about and work on a plan for the SONG Organizing School. The report on the weekend is choke full of bold and beautiful politics, great analysis, and great direction. We hope that folks will read it as a commentary on the state of 501c3’s, as well as a rough, rough map for visioning other ways to do work and think about our work–>Check it out, y’all. (To see the report, go to SONG’s website and click on ‘reports’)

Southerners On New Ground (SONG) Update! (May 2007)

In This Issue:
What is SONG up to?
Release of Southern Think Tank Report!
Do you want to build a Queer Left in this country?

Dear SONG Kin:

We wanted to give you a quick update of the latest with SONG work moving ahead! Our new website is now up and running! It has info about our work, our politics, downloadable tools, videos, pictures, and political writing and poetry from our members. Do you have political art, poetry or other work that you want to see on our site? Email it to Paulina at Paulina@southernersonnewground.org. Also, for more details on any of the info in this report go to: www.southernersonnewground.org.

Sending you our love for you, the movement, and liberation.
SONG Staff

What is SONG up to?

* Building LGBTQ Kin in the South thru campouts and retreats
* Hosting a National Meeting of Queer Organizers to build our new Organizing School model
* Getting ready to host LGBTQ folk from all over the world in the South at the US Social Forum this summer!
* Participating as a coalition member in a local Day of Truthtelling to End Sexual Violence and all forms of Oppression! (pic above)
* Traveling all over the South and listening to stories of Southern LGBTQ folk in preparation for our Organizing School hitting the ground at the end of this year!
* Tryin’ to be sustainable: We need resources to make the Organizing School happen! ALL kinds of gifts welcome, if they are checks make ‘em out to SONG. Send ‘em to: SONG, PO BOX 268, Durham, NC, 27702

Southern Think Tank Report

We are excited to announce SONG’s Report From Southern Think Tanks! This report is 6 intense pages summarizing what we learned from our think tanks/listening campaign of LGBTQ leaders in the South who work across Race, Class, Culture, Gender, and Sexuality. We talked with them about the state of the movement, what makes them feel whole, and what they dreamed for an Organizing School! Wanna check it out? Go to:

http://www.southernersonnewground.org/?page_id=94

Want to build the Queer Left in the US?

At the US Social Forum, SONG will partner with Queers For Economic Justice to gather together groups from all over the country who do multi-issue, progressive organizing. Some of these will be explicitly queer groups. Some will be multi-issue, progressive groups who include queerness in a central way. During this convening, we will get to know each other, learn about each other’s work, and vision towards the reality of a visible and strongly connected queer left. We will end with strategy and direction and, along the way, have a good time. WILL YOU BE THERE?? (For more info–look to the website under ‘on organizing’)

History: because this land is thick with what came before us–Native Peoples, slavery, Civil Rights Movement, traditions of resilence, beauty, pain.

Redemption: because we believe that while the South is a physical geography of white supremacy and poverty and how they form plantations, road, mountain top removal, and slave labor; it is also more than that. It is a place of redemption and hope for many–a place where folk reconcile with past in an honest and painful way, a place where people can stay in lands riddled with pain and remember old traditions, and birth new ways.

Belief in Those Left Behind: because while we have been underfunded, lacking in infrastructure, brutalized by poverty, racism, homophobia, transphobia and all manners of oppression; Movement People in the South have always been fighting (like oppressed people all over the world) to keep our heads up. We have found creative ways, based on kin structures, to push toward liberation. We have not turned our back on food, singing, culture, our elders, our youth, and our craftspeople and artisans. We find joy in such unlikely places.

Being Southerners On New Ground means loving hard histories, giving thanks, making visionary space, pushing forward, being kin, seeking wholeness and realizing there is no liberation in isolation.

SONG gives thanks for the South as our home, our elders as our roots, our base as our tree, our children as our branches, our spirit as the sky.

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ARE YOU SOUTHERN? WANT SOME IDEAS FOR HOW TO START TALKING ABOUT IT WITH FOLKS AROUND YOU? TRY THESE TWO IDEAS…

1. (Did you know that the below are all true? Ask your friends and families what they think)

What does it mean to be Queer and Trans in…
…the place with the most military bases in the country?
…the part of the country with the most rural space?
…the part of the country with the most churches and church folks in the country?
…the place in the country with the biggest shift in ecological destruction? (Heavy increase)
…a place that African-Americans are returning to in large numbers?
…a landscape so powerfully altered by both slavery and the Civil Rights Movement?

Do you live in the South? Then, what does it mean to you???

2. (For giving thanks, when you are doing Southern Organizing, and things get hard)

Quick Meditation on the South…I just want you to close your eyes for a second and picture the land of the South, for those of us who have been lucky enough to travel through different parts of the South, seeing the mountains of Appalachia, the Spanish Moss in South Carolina, the red clay in Mississippi…picture them. For those of us who have been lucky enough to be invited into homes for cornbread, grits, chitlins, enchiladas, and all other kinds of delicious food—think on that and on the hospitality you have known. And remember also all those people of the South—little kids and adults and elders—who have given their lives for the struggle for freedom. And just take a moment, in whatever way makes sense to you, and give thanks to the land, to the food, the people, to the struggle….

Members of Oaxaca’s Sexual Diversity Collective,
adherents to the Sixth Declaration and the Other Campaign
(This article from an amazing blog–check it out: www.zapagringo.blogspot.com)

A lot has transpired in the past week or so…the students at the Autonomous University “Benito Juárez” in Oaxaca City have taken back their radio station and various groups (1,2) have reclaimed the center (Zócalo) of Oaxaca City as a space of protest…national and international actions and events marking the first anniversary of the attack on Atenco and demanding the release of Mexico’s political prisoners..the LAPD wildin’ out on the Immigrants’ Rights/Anti-War march on May Day…and Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB) was there and denounced the state agression. Meanwhile, a bunch of us here in NYC were at a packed BBQ/concert raising funds for MJB to go to the US Social Forum (USSF) this summer in Atlanta (you’ll find info on their upcoming community dinner fundraiser in this post). And, speaking of the USSF, the deadline for workshop proposals is May 11! Oh, and in case you haven’t seen it yet, the English translation of the call for a Continental Indigenous Encuentro this October in Sonora, México is up…spread the word! All this, yes, but it was USSF delegation preparations coupled with friday’s jam-packed fundraiser for FIERCE! that inspired this weeks post…

Zapatismo & Queer Struggles
… or some observations to continue a conversation

Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio…. A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker… an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Marcos is a human being, any human being, in this world. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, ‘Enough’!

This may be one of the best known quotes from Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos. Taken from a 1994 interview, it was actually Marcos’ response to the media frenzy following an interview he had done with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter in which he stated that he had been fired from a restaurant in San Francisco for being gay. The Mexican press ran headlines claiming that Marcos had “admitted” that he was homosexual. Coming from the early days after the uprising, this would turn out to be just one of many attempts to discuss queer sexuality and liberation struggle made by the Zapatista spokesperson over the past 13 years…

Indeed, the language of the Zapatistas has attracted queer radicals from the first days following the 1994 New Years’ uprising. The language of fighting for “a world where we [in the zap's case, mexico's indigenous] fit” and for “a world where many worlds fit” found obvious resonance with queer folks in struggle.

In “Message from the Zapatistas”, a video message sent this year to New York City (in response to Movement for Justice in El Barrio’s “Message to the Zapatistas”), Marcos admits that this resonance initially surprised them. This surprise soon gave way to a steep learning curve, however, that found the Zapatistas embracing the many allies who came forward. In this way it could be said that they were both contributors to and open-minded observers of a process that I’m calling “queering the sectors” of the left.

queering the sectors

The three traditional sectors of the Mexican left (and, perhaps it should be said, “The Left” in general) are workers, peasants, and students. The Zapatistas, in asserting the centrality of their indigenous identities and cultures, are pushing the rest of the left to see them as more than peasants. They are pushing the left to see that there is also something valuable in their experience as indigenous peoples. They recognize in their indigenous culture a powerful non-conformity with the capitalist westernization of Mexico being led by its neoliberal politicians. And they’ve found many others who also do not conform.

As the Zapatistas began attracting supporters after their 1994 New Years uprising, they began recognizing “new sectors” in struggle: youth organized into musical subcultures (punk, goth, etc), women (organized as women!), and yes, queer folks. And so, by the time we reach the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration, released in June 2005, we see the three traditional sectors completely exploded:

We are inviting all indigenous, workers, campesinos, teachers, students, housewives, neighbors, small businesspersons, small shop owners, micro-businesspersons, pensioners, handicapped persons, religious men and women, scientists, artists, intellectuals, young persons, women, old persons, homosexuals and lesbians, boys and girls – to participate, whether individually or collectively, directly with the zapatistas in this NATIONAL CAMPAIGN for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution.

awkward steps

Although we see no mention of trans-folks in the Sixth Declaration itself (a collectively written document), the Zapatista spokesperson had already been making attempts to integrate the terms transgender and transexual into his lexicon. Shortly before declaring the Red Alert which preceded the release of the Sixth Declaration, the Zapatistas bounced back into the media limelight with the announcement that they were challenging Inter Milan (a professional soccer team in Italy) to a series of matches. An amusing exchange followed, including this suggestion:

And, perhaps, in order to differentiate ourselves from the objectification of women which is promoted at football games and in commercials, the EZLN would ask the national lesbian-gay community, especially transvestites and transsexuals, to organize themselves and to amuse the respectable with ingenious pirouettes during the games in Mexico. That way, in addition to prompting TV censorship, scandalizing the ultra-right and disconcerting the Inter ranks, they would raise the morale and spirits of our team. There are not just 2 sexes, and there is not just one world, and it is always advisable for those who are persecuted for their differences to share happiness and support without ceasing to be different.

I’ve seen no responses yet from the Mexican “lesbian-gay community” (please send them my way if you have!). Inter Milan, however, has accepted the challenge so we may one day see how this spectacle turns out and how that particular invitation was received.

Following the release of the Sixth Declaration, in the early days of building the Other Campaign, the Sixth Commission of the Zapatistas began employing the language of “other loves” to poetically capture what we might say with “queer” or the litany of letters “TLGBTSQQ” (Transgender, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Queer, and Questioning). And as you’ll see from the photo and link above, there were queer radicals more than ready to join with the Zapatistas in building the Other Campaign, but not without struggle…

When the members of Oaxaca’s Sexual Diversity Collective addressed Delegate Zero (Marcos) during his 2006 listening tour to build the Other Campaign, they reminded him that the queer struggle was important and could not be left out (as it had been in his speeches in the state up to that point).

Later that evening, I watched Delegate Zero make a speech from the Zócalo in which he stumbled a bit, replacing what was perhaps meant to be “transgénero” (transgender) or “transexual” with “transgénico”…meaning “transgenetic.” He immediately caught himself, however, and looked back sheepishly at Tlahui, who was waiting to speak adorned with a purple wig and a stunning rainbow dress.

a work in progress

The previously mentioned “Message from the Zapatistas”, sent this year to NYC’s Movement for Justice in El Barrio, perhaps marks a new level of understanding and connection being made by Marcos:

We were finding we had allies that we didn’t expect and learning to listen and come to understand their struggle and how it was linked to ours…not only will we not conform, but we will fight against this system, raising our difference almost like a flag…autonomy means we can be compañeros even if we raise different flags…gays and lesbians approach us and we do not have to become gays or lesbians or, being gay or lesbian, we don’t have to choose this as the basis of our struggle.

Now that we are in the second stage of Zapatista participation in the Other Campaign (not to mention the continued emergence of the Zezta Internazional), we’re gaining the opportunity to hear not just from Marcos but more and more directly the voices of the indigenous comandancia; as well as the declarations and denouncements coming from the Zapatista communities (distinct from the political/military organization). And in these spaces we’re hearing from queer radicals throughout Mexico and the world who are committed to building an anticapitalist movement “from below and to the left.”

I’ve shared the thoughts here…more a series of vignettes than anything else…as another stick in the fire fueling this dialogue . Because it’s in this dialogue between all of us, and in the transformation and action that follows, where I find hope.

(Check out the link up top this great blog!)

This exciting and wonderful group of people convened at the Highlander Center from all over the country to dream about and work on a plan for the SONG Organizing School. This report on the weekend is choke full of bold and beautiful politics, great analysis and great direction. We hope that folks will read it as a commentary on the state of 501c3’s, as well as a rough, rough map for visioning other ways to do work and think about our work…Check it out, y’all.

We are also excited to announce SONG’s Report From Southern Think Tanks! This report is 6 intense pages summarizing what we learned from our think tanks/listening campaign of LGBTQ leaders in the South who work across Race, Class, Culture, Gender, and Sexuality–when we talked with them about the state of the movement, what makes them feel whole, and what they dreamed for an Organizing School!

The National Day of Truthtelling was a day of grieving, speaking, celebrating and creating new culture and community to end sexual violence and all forms of oppression. SONG was proud to be a coalition partner and be involved in the core steering committee and involved in leading the translation and interpretation for the day!

Why was SONG a coalition partner for the National Day of Truthtelling? Because sexual violence is a response and a symptom of racism, classism, gender oppression, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism, and colonization.

Sexual violence grows where there is secrecy, denial, silence. We need to speak to our needs to heal grief from oppression, and we need to vision and generate new culture, and a new world. This is possible when we start meeting needs, creating, and birthing new world and new community.

For more pictures on the Day of Truthelling, check out our Family Pictures: Day of Truthtelling / Durham, NC Page : )