AIDS Memories

Michael and I in 1981

by Mona Shaw

World AIDS Day hit me harder this year than it has in decades. I don’t know why.  I jotted down these memories as they came to me.  This is not a historical account of all that happened even in Iowa during that dark time. It’s not even the tip of the iceberg of all that took place. They are just a few things that I remembered during a day of deep and painful grief.

Imagine awakening one morning and realizing more than 30 of your friends have died. Friends your age and younger. Vibrant adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Now imagine that isn’t the hard part. Imagine your friends were killed, not by a crazed gunman, but by the president of the United States, while an entire nation stood, watched, and did nothing. And, it’s not just your friends, tens of thousands are dying across the nation. And, still, nothing is done.

Imagine being criticized for caring about them. Imagine being punished or persecuted for trying to get others to care.

This was my first direct experience of facing the reality that some lives don’t have value. It’s not that bad if they die, perhaps even preferable.

I remember the first time I heard about it in the early 80s on NPR.  It was a mysterious disease that had killed a few dozen gay men in California. Very soon the disease was called GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Like others, I wondered if this wasn’t an overaction and a reason to criminalize sex between members of the same sex. When my best friend Michael picked me up for lunch, we talked about it and agreed it was probably just Anita Bryant drivel trying to scare us from having sex.

Very soon, members of the LGBT community would learn that the matter would shed far more horror than we could have ever imagined.

By February 1, 1983, 1,025 AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the United States. Reagan said nothing. On April 23, 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced 4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths. In San Francisco, the health department reported more than 500 cases. Again, Reagan said nothing.

We knew then, we had to save ourselves. Up until then gay men and lesbians were rather separatist. This galvanized us. Lesbians were among the first to organize care for men affected.

I cannot overstate how homophobia brutalized the discourse and the efforts of the day.  To show sympathy for those dying was considered support for gay people. Few wanted anywhere near that scarlet letter, no matter how they may have personally felt.  Most dismissed the crisis as getting involved in controversial politics. We were told it was unreasonable for us to ask, let alone expect, their support. The disdain for such a request was palpable. Ironically, we were accused of only caring about ourselves.

The dying men were political collateral damage. Not only was there no compassion for them, the hatred for them and all gay people exploded exponentially. A significant source of Reagan's support came from the newly identified religious right and the Moral Majority, a political-action group founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. AIDS became the tool, and gay men the target, for the politics of fear, hate and discrimination. Falwell said "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals. It’s God’s way of weeding his garden." Reagan's communications director Pat Buchanan agreed that AIDS is "nature's revenge on gay men."

I remember being outraged after hearing Falwell say that one morning on the radio. I exploded in the presence of a faculty member in my office.

“Come on, Mona,” he said. “If you want people to respect your opinion, you have to respect theirs.”

I was furious. “I’ll be damned if I ever respect that opinion. How many homophobes are dying because they’re homophobes?”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” he said, “That’s why you people aren’t getting any traction. You have too much anger and hate.”

You learn very quickly if you’re a serious activist, that playing nice is the thing that never gets any traction. You must rattle cages. You must cause trouble. That’s the only thing that ever effects change. Once these efforts break a crack in the opposition, the “reasonable” people like to show up and take over. But they won’t make that crack.

What happened in those years flows through my soul forever now like a sea of sorrow and despair. And hope. And love. Nothing happens without hope and love.  Memories will surface at unexpected times seeming non-sequiturs of justice that have yet to disclose their connection.

I remember.

I remember David Ellingsworth, getting royally pissed at me for calling a recent political win, “a start.”

“I am out of time, Mona! Don’t you get that!”

We were at an AIDS fundraiser at a local gay watering hole called 6:20. I watched him sing, “Stormy Weather” with his heart on his sleeve. I grabbed him and hugged him when he was finished.

“I’m so sorry,” I wept, “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he patted my back, “I’m sorry too. It’s just so goddamned hard.”

I remember holding his mother Carol by his lifeless body in his coffin. She was inconsolable, but brave. She patted my back the same way he had.

Not everyone was lucky enough to have a mother like Carol. Many who died were rejected by their parents. Some died alone. Others were held by those who stood in as their surrogate families.  There were many, many saints.

I often stare at a photograph of my closest friends during the 70s and 80s. We're  

camping up it with coconuts shells in our shirts at a barbecue in the 80s. There are eight of us. I’m the only one in the photo still alive.

I remember the first memorial service I went to for a friend named Kerry Grippe in 1986. Kerry was a member of the piano faculty at the University of Iowa School of Music. A bottle of hand sanitizer was hung on his office door after he disclosed his diagnosis.  His lover, also a good friend, Allen Greedy gave me a framed fabric painting because I read Kerry’s poems at the service. Allen died about a year later.

Kevin Reeves was another close friend. We lived together. He was the best surrogate father my older son ever had. We were the First Family of Theatre. We had the sign on our front door. It was non-stop singing and slapstick in our home. Parodies of songs, often at my expense. He could sing, act, and played a mean piano. He killed Thomas Jefferson in his performance in “1776.” He promised me he’d be careful. He promised me. We lost him in November 1996.

I remember the first World Aids Day. Then it was called “Day without Art.” There was a choral and orchestral concert that day being given the University of Iowa School of Music. I was the School’s P.R. director. I knew the choir director couldn’t cancel the concert, but I asked him if choir and orchestra members could wear red ribbons.

“Oh, Mona, don’t do this to me,” Bill Hatcher said. “I don’t feel comfortable using my concert to make a political statement.”

“Bill,” I said, “People are dying. We have to do something.”

We looked at each other silently for a while.

“Oh, screw it,” he said, “If anyone wants to wear a ribbon, it’s okay with me.”

When I sat in the audience that night, practically everyone on stage was wearing a red ribbon. I wept, of course. I felt a corner may have been turned somehow in the struggle.

I know Bill took a hit for his decision, as did I for instigating it.  I am confident neither of us regrets the decision today.

I remember going to my third funeral in a week. I usually went to funerals with my close friend, John Harper, a gay man and a faculty member in the English Department.  I sat in the car thinking about not getting out. John looked at my quizzically.

“I don’t think I can hold another grieving mother in my arms right now,” I said. My bottom lip was quivering like it does in the cold.

“Sure, you can,” he said, “We have to.” And he took my hand and held it through most of the funeral.

Thank, God, John is still with us, and we have a lot we remember. I remember John returning from a trip to San Francisco in the late 80s looking pale and stricken.

“It’s like a holocaust,” he said. “The windows of clubs are totally papered with photos of the dead. There are thousands. Death is everywhere. It’s swallowed everything. I’ll never be the same.”

Survivors guilt among gay men was a very real thing. “Why him and not me?” was often heard. I remember Ozzie Diaz Duque reading a poem he'd written about it and one the many, many vigils.

I remember a woman becoming furious when the word “holocaust” was used to describe the epidemic or gay men in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. “In the holocaust,” she explained, “People were killed for no reason.”

I remember sitting and trying to list the names of friends I’d lost. I got to 33 and had to stop. Only to remember several more later in the day.

I didn’t only hold grieving mothers because their child had died. I held one after a woman at his funeral told her, “You must be heartsick knowing that your son is burning in Hell for all eternity.”

I remember flying off the handle at “liberal” Iowa Senator Tom Harkin who did vote for the Ryan White Bill, then later reassured a disgruntled constituent by explaining the aid was for those who hadn’t “gotten AIDS on purpose.”

I remember standing at vigils in all kinds of weather while we read the names of those we’d lost. Many I did not know. At each vigil, the list was longer. It took hours to read it.

I remember being told I had “gone too far,” when in a speech in Des Moines I referred to our governor, Terry Branstad, as “murderer,” because he resisted any funding in Iowa for AIDS treatment or research. I still stand by those words.

I remember giggling with Rick Graf about his large poster on a street corner in Iowa City. The poster was a chart of AIDS funding and listed several items. At the top, above the figures, were the words, “in Millions of Dollars.” There were two columns, one for federal funding and one for state funding. Each item had a great big “Zero.” Rick irritated as many people as he charmed in this day. He had a talk show on Public Access called, “Silence Equals Death: So, I’ll Just Keep Talking, Thank You.”  Rick died in 1995.

I remember the AIDS quilt. I remember traveling to D.C. for its last complete showing on the Capitol Mall in 1992. (It turned out there would be one more.) My best friend lived there. I stayed at his place. Michael had AIDs.

My bargaining with God had failed. I told God that I would give everything I had to the movement if he would just spare Michael. 

Like with all justice movements, you don’t get anywhere without some civil disobedience. ACT-UP had stepped up to the plate on that one, and we joined several actions. My favorite was when several thousand of us wrapped a red ribbon around the White House. It took a lot of ribbon.  Afterward, there was a rally in a green space behind the White House. A woman was distributing Xeroxed copies of George H.W. Bush, who was still president.

“Why are you giving me this?” I asked the woman.

“It rained last night,” she said, “You may want something to sit on.”

We put more hope in Bill Clinton, who would soon be elected, than he would come to deserve.

We sang while waving our fists in rhythm.

“Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah,

“Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

“Hey, hey, Goodbye!”

I meant to join in during the “Die In.” But as I began to lie back, I saw Michael. He was lying motionless, his eyes closed. I chose to just look at him instead. I knew I was losing him. I didn’t want to lose a moment of looking at him while I could.

Michael was/is the best friend I will ever have. I knew that then. I know that now. He was one of the friends some never get. He got me. He loved me so much and unconditionally. He thought I was “It.” He would go along with my every Quixotic mission, and he promised me as long as he had a place, I had a place. We had been close since we were 15. We lived together, ate together, slept together, lost in love together and hitchhiked together. He saved me time and time and time again. He was my safety net, my soft place to land. I could not, would not, imagine a world without him.

Michael died on the phone with me. I was supposed to visit him the following weekend, when his lover Aaron phoned me in a panic.

“He’s in horrible pain! He’s waiting for you. I can’t take it. He wants to die at home, but I have to put him in the hospital! I can’t do this!”

I asked Aaron to give me a minute. I spun in the room in the worst kind confusion. I called Don Engstrom, a friend whose advice I trusted. His partner Rick Graf had died the year before.

“I think, Mona,” Don said, “He needs you to tell him it’s okay to go.”

I phoned Aaron back, and asked him to put the phone to Michael’s ear.

I told Michael how much I loved him that he was the best friend I’d ever have. I told him I didn’t want to lose him, but that I would be okay. That if he needed to go, it was okay. Then the phone went dead.

In about ten minutes, Aaron called back.

“Michael asked me, ‘Did Mona really say that?’ I told him you had. Then he closed his eyes and died. 

It was December 26, 1996. We were both 45.

It Ain't What You Don't Know...

by Mona Shaw

Mark Twain once said, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

That was me in 2003. I had just survived a total disillusionment after being brutalized by liberal Democrats in New York for telling the truth. I was a well-paid human rights executive who was suddenly homeless.

I didn’t know what to believe at that point. I had just enough to move back to Iowa and forced to abandon all my worldly belongings but for a few boxes I UPSed. I rented a room from a friend with my unemployment compensation.

After a few weeks of self-pity and wound-licking. I knew one thing. I wanted to know the truth. I didn’t care if that led me to become an ultra-conservative Republican. I just wanted to know the truth.

I began to read. I read so many things by so many authors of every political stripe you can name. I watched Fox News and MSNBC and listened to NPR and conservative talk radio. Information on the Internet was still sparse. However, living in Iowa City, gave me access to great libraries. I took advantage of that. I read a lot of books on economics history. I haven’t stopped reading.

I had more disillusionments to endure that would make the experience in New York look like time in a spa. I would learn from those too.

For example, I learned that there was not an epidemic of teen pregnancies. That, in fact, that teen pregnancies had been steadily declining since the 1950s. Sex education has worked.

I had to shift so many paradigms and altered my previous beliefs non-stop. 

By, 2007, I was still learning, but I knew this for sure.  The American Dream is a myth. It’s a big, fat lie.  From our nation’s inception, our economy was constructed by wealthy, white men who only wanted wealthy, white men to be citizens.  Everyone else would have to give their blood for to not be their servants. While, it’s loosely true that anyone can make it in America, not everyone can.  You have a better chance at winning the lottery than dying in a higher economic stratum than the one you were born in.  Sometimes people do win the lottery.

So, when folks respond with the old six-pack of canards that’ve bought at a very high price from Plutocrats who want to maintain the status quo, I know they don’t know as much as I do. Otherwise, they’d offer something original and thoughtful. Supporting those tropes with the first thing they find on Google that agrees doesn’t make this better. Even worse is thinking that anecdotal experiences is empirical evidence. E.g. “I saw a woman buying steak with food stamps!”

That’s all I want to say for now.

P.S. Just because there are employment growth areas doesn’t mean there are enough good-paying jobs for everyone.

Plain Truth

by Mona Shaw

Without Thomas Paine, there would have been no American Revolution. Until Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense,” the drive for independence was not a popular one. Originally titled, “Plain Truth,” Paine’s treatise made a case for how independence would benefit the common people. He attacked the monarchy in terms far harsher and damning than Jefferson. He spoke of human rights as not the province of birthright or property but as an innate entitlement.

His words were so compelling and convincing that John Adams allowed, “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Thomas Paine was a staunch abolitionist, and a strong advocate for workers’ rights. He proposed a system in which workers had ownership in their labor. He was a loud supporter of the French Revolution because that revolution was led by the common people, while our Founding Fathers were suspicious of it for the same reason.

While the heralded of our founding fathers were happy to exploit the outcome of Paine’s text, they were equally loathsome to adopt many of the ideas within it.  They were quick to condemn Paine and any suggestion that common people should have rights equal to those of the landed gentry. The promotion of abolitionism was particularly taboo and regarded as political poison. Even Benjamin Franklin, who had come to abolitionism late, refused to argue for it during the founding of the nation. These founding fathers were among the elite, and they envisioned a nation ruled by the elite. Citizenship and codified rights for anyone who was not rich, and male, would come slowly in the new nation and only through the sweat and blood of those affected by this slight.

Paine persisted in his call and wrote many subsequent works that outlined the notion that “all are created equal.” He became ignominious for this and was slandered and persecuted by the same founders who had momentarily praised him.  He was so reviled that he died in poverty. Only six people attended his funeral. Three of them were Black. The other three was a woman and her two sons that he had saved from persecution in England. Our Founders would describe him as a man who did a little good, but much more harm to the nation. Even his remains were treated with commensurate disrespect. It was impossible to find a cemetery in which he could be buried. And his bones were exhumed so passed around so many times, they were eventually lost.

Ironically, it is Paine’s vision that prevails as the myth of the Founding of America, when it was anything but.

Paine understood that advancing human rights involved two essential things: Education and Agitation. He was an unthwartable practitioner of that truth. He gave his life and everything he had.

Education and Agitation are equally essential. No progress toward human rights has been realized without both.  Still, and even today, it can be difficult to find those who realize this.  Most people don’t want to do anything. They want to be consumer citizens who shop the ideas of others and opine or vote for the ones the like best, or, in modern times, for the things they hate the least.

The few who are willing to act tend to fall into two camps. Those who want to agitate and those who want to educate. The Educators tend to believe we can do this nicely and win through reason alone. The Agitators just want to shake things up and believe the populace will understand what they’re doing through osmosis or something.

I’ve witnessed this in my own puny efforts for justice. Those few who find reason to praise me often look to the times I’ve been in the streets or in handcuffs. They don’t see me sleeping less than four hours a night for years while I was up writing pamphlets for our cause. They don’t see me passing a hat and spending money I didn’t have to get them printed or the hours I spent on street corners and in government buildings distributing them. I have memorized for all time the click a windshield wiper makes when you stuff propaganda beneath it and pray the rain holds off until the driver returns to that car.  I’ve spent far more time submitting op ed columns and letters to the editor than I have at demonstrations. And, yes, there are some who praise my prose while condemning my disrupting public events.

The people never mobilize until they know the reason to mobilize. They must be told those reasons again and again and again.  Concurrently, the people will never mobilize until the see others putting their bodies on the line for that cause in public again and again and again.

People remember King for being in jail and giving eloquent speeches. (Speeches primarily written by a gay man few remember.) They don’t remember the countless teaching sessions held in countless churches and homes of those affected by racism. King could only be in one place at a time. Thousands of visionaries gave their all in all the others.

And there is something else. There is no glory in this work. You don’t get a community award for telling truths people don’t want to hear or stirring some pot. It’s hard and dirty and more apt to leave you in poverty and reviled or even killed. It will leave your body exhausted and your spirit wounded.  King knew this. Paine knew this. Every single soul who has ever gotten traction for justice knows this. None were revered until they were dead. And, most not even then. Their living bodies were subjected to death threats and public condemnation.

My working-class father often said to me, “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days.”

I would say, “Oh, God, Dad, if only what I do or say ever has that much influence.  I’m pretty your daughter is safe.”

I’m an anonymous barely perceptible cog in the wheel with a lot of other cogs who will never be remembered at all. We are fine with this. The struggle for justice is not a do-gooder activity.  It is a call. Those who have this call know what I’m talking about. Those who don’t just don’t.  Those called are flawed and common human beings, usually broken in some way. Justice is not won by those we coddle or praise into it. It’s won by those you can’t talk out of it. We can’t even talk ourselves out of it. It’s like breathing. It’s a reflex, even in your darkest moments, something will speak to your soul and before you even think, you’ll find yourself going after that something.

May we honor the ghost of Thomas Paine and continue to educate and agitate.

Don't Persecute Hope

by Mona Shaw

You can be certain of this. We will never get traction on the road to justice until we address class as a cultural construction in the United States

Classism in this nation is so prevalent and so insidious that we don’t see it for the most part.

It emerges in countless ways. It’s there when a social justice activist adds their Ivy League  or academic credentials to their activist resumes—as if those credentials are germane. It’s present when a parent brags about their child getting into Harvard.  It’s the primary driver in making fun of Country Music or overweight people who wear tight clothes. It takes place every single time stories of “success” are predicated on accomplishments that involve economic gain or status.

The purpose of classism is to identify an “unworthy other.” It selects a population that is worthy of ridicule and contempt. It delights in blaming this population for everything worthy of disdain.  

This is no more apparent than in images and memes that are employed that mock these people. There are entire websites with the sole purpose of humiliating these people. People of Walmart is one.

The past three years it has become tragically popular to construct memes of poor people who support Trump. These memes are almost always Photoshopped by someone who doesn’t the know the person in the meme. They just know the person is missing teeth or overweight or wearing stereotypical underclass clothing.

By choosing these people for these memes, they target anyone for persecution that may resemble these people.  They suggest there is something inherently “bad” about people missing teeth or have other attributes of people who are impoverished.

If this weren’t the intent, we would see more anti-Trump memes featuring the wealthy class playing golf with Trump at Maralago, but that doesn't happen. Of course this plays right into Trumpish hands.  It leads to the condemnation of the poor and takes it away from the abuses of the wealthy where it belongs. Since the poor have no institutional power whatsoever, choosing them as culpable for Trump is astonishingly short-sighted.

To address the obvious classism in these memes leads to a convoluted and exhausting discussion that employs the least creative tactics of apologists of bigotry of all kinds.

“That’s not what I meant by that.”

“I’m poor, and it doesn’t bother me.”

“A lot of poor people are like that.”

“Stop being self-righteous.” Or “condescending,” “purist,” etc.

“You lose any point you may have had by your attitude, how you brought this up, when you brought this up, where you brought this up, etc.”

“This is an example of ‘political correctness’ going too far.”

Just insert “person of color,” “LGBT person,” or “woman,” and this will become familiar.

There is no oppression that is more difficult to discuss than classism. Too many see it as a “detail” rather than a serious and deadly oppression. No one is perfect, after all. And classism is the oppression we are most inclined to give a pass.

Calling out classism is the oppression that incurs accusations of minimizing other oppressions simply by bringing it up. This is a preposterous fear because objecting to any oppression can only serve to diminish any other oppression.  It is self-defeating given that other oppressed groups are more vulnerable to class oppression as well.

In this culture we have constructed a culture in which we base our worth as it compares to the worth of another.  We find it immensely difficult to interact without knowing each other’s social class. We have many social clues for this. How someone talks. How they dress. Where they work. Our ingrained interest in and deference to celebrities. Our admiration of the customs of the affluent from how they set a table, where they vacation, what they eat, or how they decorate their homes.

We don’t know how to have an identity or value unless we can look down on those who do these things “wrong.”

I left an “Occupy” event in Washington D.C. in 2011, after I witnessed two things.

The first was when “core” organizers were protective of Ralph Nader when he visited our camp. His celebrity warranted special treatment and not allowing the proletariat too close for too long.

The second was when “core” organizers determined that we should allow homeless folks in the neighborhood to eat at the camp food tent. 

“We need this food for us.” they said.

I knew then I didn’t belong there. I was not one the “us.”

I agree with Eugene V. Debs.

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

You don’t build solidarity by mocking the targets of class oppression. They are our hope. The effective justice movement can only be led by the “least of these” in society. It will be led by a toothless fat woman in tight, stained, stretch pants.  I’m ready to follow her. I’m certainly not going to mock her.

Norman Lear Is a Liar

by Mona Shaw

Whether witting or not, Norman Lear is a liar. He has done more damage toward the mobilization of oppressed people than anyone in entertainment.

Had Lear told the truth, Archibald Bunker would have been a Wall Street executive, and Maude would have worked as a hotel maid. After all, the authors of bigotry and the greatest executor of its evil are wealthy.

By making the face of bigotry a working-class man, Lear reinforced class bigotry and effected a lasting and pervasive act of blaming the victim. On the heels of the assassination of Martin Luther King, jr., the U.S. was at a pivotal juncture for acknowledging its racism. Lear exploited that by pointing a large arm at men in hard hats and screaming, “It’s their fault!”

You could write volumes on the damage done by this.  From the endless cartoons that showed some guy in hard hat saying something racist, sexist, or homophobic to portraying the women who loved these men as feckless and dimwitted.

“Right-on” Maude on the other hand was affluent and had her own sassy maid. Her husband and friends were other affluent people and they went to symphony concerts and the thee-ah-ter and made fun of Country music.

In the early 90s, I was a member of group who called ourselves “promo-homos.” We were LGBT people who would go to college classes, Rotary Club meetings and other venues so people could meet a real live queer. One invitation was from the UI College of Medicine. Two gay men in our group were construction workers. Every year an organizer from the College would show a slide of a construction worker making a homophobic joke.  Every year these men would object to that. Every year they were ignored, and the slide was shown again.  The message was obvious. If you’re homophobic, you’re part of the underclass, and no one wants that.

Thanks to Lear making fun of men in hard hats was considered an act of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobic.  It may be a little rude at worst, but hadn’t these men asked for it?  It certainly wasn’t understood to be the egregious class bigotry that it was. My own father wore a hard hat to work. He was a rock crusher in a quarry.

Every aspect of poor and working-class culture became fodder for derisive jokes. Their music, their dancing, their speech, their personalities, their clothes or the fibers of those clothes, their televisions in their living rooms, their food, or their beer. The laugher and ridicule were over the top if they lived in a mobile home. The mores of the poor and working class were suspect as well. It was assumed they were lazy, stupid, more apt to lie and steal, and have sex with their siblings and children.

If you didn’t want to be a bigot or any of these other things attributed to poor and working-class culture. Archie Bunker was not your role model in any kind of way. Maude was. Maude kept her television in the den.  Maude used pretty dishes and flatware that matched, preferably imported from Italy.  Maude wore flowing natural fibers. You certainly never saw her in a windbreaker with a union logo on it, and she spoke in grammatically correct English. She hired interior decorators and didn’t clean her own home.

Internalized oppression is a very real thing. Targets of oppression often come to believe the lies told about them. They believe they’re exception in their own culture. They convinced me for awhile. Like others, I believed that if I educated myself, if I learn how to dress like them, talk like them, went to their events and became fluent in all things upper class, I would be accepted by them. I believed it was my fault I’d been rejected. I simply needed to change my “white trash” ways. I read the dictionary like it was a novel and grew an impressive vocabulary. I memorized the Chicago Manual of Style. My diction and grammar were close to perfect.  I read all the self-help books including “Dress for Success.” I put my television in my bedroom and lined my place with shelves of books that I had actually read. I used to steal the syllabus on the first day of classes at the university that I couldn’t afford to attend, so I would be conversant in those subjects.

You can pass for a while. You have to lie a lot, but you can. At some point, though, you’ll be found out. And you’ll be regarded differently from that point on, or worse you’ll be praised for rejecting your roots. Or, you’ll hear one too many lies about your people to bear, and you’ll never see them the same way again.  Both happened for me.

I remember one such moment for me. I was at a gathering of opera aficionados. A woman said, she saw me the day before having lunch with a woman that looked familiar. I told her I had been having lunch with my mother.

“Well,” she said, “It couldn’t have been the woman I knew. She was a girl I knew in high school. Her name was Marlene. She was totally white trash and ended up having a bunch of kids and working in a factory.”

“You knew my mother,” I told her and waited.

“How did you rise above such a station?!” she exclaimed.

I had had it.

“I didn’t rise above it,” I told her, “I still aspire to it. My mother single-handedly organized a union in that factory and has organized hundreds of factories and workplaces since. I can only hope to be so noble.”

Coming out as working poor is a lot like coming out as a lesbian. It never stops. You are constantly correcting people who make the wrong assumption.  This almost always happens after someone has made a slur about your people.  The reaction is usually much the same as the woman at the opera meeting. After observing that you “don’t look or act like them,” they slink away and go discuss you in a corner.  You never run out of people who’ll make excuses for their slur and explain how we all have difficulty in life. The problem is my inability to see what “they” meant by the dig, not the fact that they made it.  They will become outraged at any suggestion they’ve been a bigot and manipulate the situation to where you owe them an apology for objecting.

Every time I see Norman Lear praised; I think about how much harder he has made life on people like mine. I wish he’d never been given a contract. Someone might want to inform Lear that underclass people have a better chance of winning the lottery than “moving on up to a high-rise apartment in the sky” thanks in no small part to his class bigotry.

Homophobia in the News

by Mona Shaw

In October, 2018, I wrote WHBF-TV (a CBS affiliate for the Quad-Cities in Iowa and Illinois) meteorologist Ashe Simpson about his chronic promotion of Chick-filet-A and explained how Chick-Filet-A persecutes LGBT people. He said he was sorry it caused me pain, but he liked their food.

I didn’t ask Ashe to stop shopping at Chick-Filet-A. I just wanted him to stop hurting LGBT people. Instead he chose to double-down, promoting the company more often and remarking, “No one is going to stop me from talking about Chick-Filet-A.”

I then posted several examples on the WHBF Facebook page of the harm the company causes LGBT people. I was ignored.

Then on August 12, 2018 I heard a mocking tone and giggling that reinforced the callous attitude toward this pain.  Not only did Ashe and anchor Redrick Terry promote the company. They punctuated their support with these remarks.

“Amen and Hallelujah.”

“Chick-Filet-A can’t do anything wrong.”

“Amen and Hallelujah.”

Chick-fil-A does great wrong that should not be praised.

Chick-fil-A is a Georgia-based fast food restaurant that opened in suburban Atlanta in 1967. The operations of the chain reflect the religious values of Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer S. Truett Cathy, whose biography notes that he has “built his life and business based on hard work, humility and biblical principles.” Chick-fil-A lives these “biblical principles” through its WinShape Foundation, a charitable endeavor founded by S. Truett Cathy and his wife, Jeanette, by donating millions of dollars to groups with anti-gay agendas. In particular, they seek to reverse the 2015 Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, that made equal marriage the law of the nation.

This isn’t petty, nor is it simply a matter of liking a tasty sandwich. Chick-fil-A is reasonably accused of acts of terrorism against LGBT families. If they have their way, loving families would be destroyed, and these families stand to lose benefits and protections that could cost them and their children their lives.

The First Amendment gives everyone the right to be as racist, heterosexist, sexist, ableist, etc. as they the like. It also gives freedom fighters the right to object.

Still, there seems to be confusion about when things are the same and when they are different. Objecting to oppression is not the same thing as perpetuating oppression. Objecting to the destruction of LBGT families is not doing the same thing. The same thing would be if LGBT were attempting to destroy heterosexual families. No one is trying to stop Ashe from marrying his fiancé or to take away legal protections for his family.

We now witness the tragic resurgence of blunt expressions of bigotry.  Mass shootings by white supremacists and homophobes are the outcome of that resurgence.  It is a terrifying time for people of color and LGBT citizens. I have personally stood over the graves of dozens of LGBT people who were murdered by homophobia.  Each death was hooked to a public event in which a prominent person belittled LGBT people.  When you mock someone, you make them a target for those who will use violence against them.

Moreover, heterosexism is unavoidably racist.  LGBT people of color suffer most violently from this oppression. Indeed, the 15 transwomen who have been brutally murdered this year were all Black.

Bigotry isn’t merely a personal belief. It’s a system that has been institutionalized in our societal fabric. This is settled law.  The Supreme Court has legalized Equal Marriage. The states of Iowa and Illinois have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes. These laws obligate anyone who does business with the public to scrub institutionalized bigotry from their institutions regardless of personal beliefs.   If not the letter, WHBT breaks the spirit of the law every time staff promote Chick-Filet-A. Each instance creates a hostile environment for LGBT families.

It’s not as if they’re giving equal time to those wounded by this. Perhaps, I missed it, but I’ve also not seen Pride Groups or Events, on “Living Local,” a program about area happenings which Ashe co-hosts. Though evangelical churches get plenty of play. This is not an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree. Reasonable people don’t persecute others based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The most egregious aspect of this is that WHBF is hurting innocent people. Worse, they’ve allowed it to be fodder for humor.  Millions of American Christians do not share this cruel and narrow view. WHBF could learn from them.

Picket Lines

by Mona Shaw

I don’t cross picket lines.

This has irritated folks I was with more than once. Often someone is misinformed enough to say to me. “But you don’t know both sides.”

I always answer, “There’s a picket line for workers. That’s all I need to know.”

This is not simply a political or moral position. Although it is both. It’s also based on my personal witness of the struggle for workers’ rights.

My mother, Marlene Johns Shaw Gerst, was a labor organizer. She began this fight for justice in 1960. She was a line worker at Champion Spark Plug in Burlington, Iowa. She was only 26. After witnessing one too many atrocities toward workers at the plant, she came home one night, kicked her purse across the living room floor, and said. “That goddamned plant needs a union, and it going to get one!”

It did. She called on the UAW. She passed out cards. She talked to workers without ceasing. She went to their homes, stopped them at their cars and in supermarkets. She convinced men and women to join her at a time when this was not seen as a woman’s role, even by the union. She was threatened with violence and blackballing, but she was not deterred.

This eventually led to an election. The Union won the election, but it was not over. The Company refused to negotiate a contract. After no small amount of agonizing, the workers decided to strike. Calling a strike is a courageous and dangerous thing to do. The consequences can be more than Draconian. We knew this firsthand. My father was the first union person in our family. He was a baker at K & R Bakery in Burlington. Some called him the most talented cake decorator in town. He attempted to organize a union there. He was fired and blackballed. He never worked as a baker again. They took the risk.

My brother Mark and I have clear memories of walking the picket line. We took turns between walking the line and watching our pre-school sister in the strike kitchen. Our baby sister stayed with an aunt. The loose pebbles and cracked asphalt beneath our feet. The smell of chili being cooked in the strike kitchen. I was only 10, but I still remember the recipe for that chili. The stale donuts and jugs of water and coffee on a card table. Those who have never taken risks for justice don’t know how empowering it is to stand up to tyranny. It’s a feeling that you never forget. It was the first of a few defining moments I would have in my life.

On a day, that I stayed home to watch the girls and clean house, Mark ran into the living room crying, “The Union won! The Union won!” We all rejoiced.

The contract gave the workers more humane working conditions, higher wages, and completely paid family health insurance. Upon its signing hundreds of lives changed dramatically for the better.

UAW Local 1237 prevailed, and it still exists. My mother’s efforts were so highly regarded that she was elected vice-president. She told me later with pride, “They wanted to elect me president, but you can’t have a woman president.”

My mother’s gift for organizing did not go unnoticed by the national. UAW secured a proviso that my mother could be pulled from the line at any time to help with other organizing throughout the nation. Eventually, the UAW brought her on full-time. By the time she retired in 1994, she had improved the lives of literally thousands of workers. She was given the Walter P. Reuther Award. When she died last year, Champion Spark Plug hung up a tribute to her and flew their flag at half mast.

My mother wasn’t the only one who made monumental sacrifices. She was gone a lot. My younger siblings lost years with their mother. My brother and I lost our childhood as we were given adult assignments to keep our family going. Her absence combined with other tragedies would tear apart my parents’ marriage. They divorced in 1966. Then and now I feel no resentment for those sacrifices despite their profound damage. We had a higher calling. We were saving the lives of thousands of workers so they could have the benefits that we enjoyed. The biggest benefit may be that my parents never again had to worry about cost when we needed to see a doctor. They could just take us. In more than one instance it’s reasonable to believe this saved our lives.

I remain keenly aware that our sacrifice paled against the sacrifices of the likes of Mother Jones, Sacco and Vanzetti, Lucy Parsons, Cesar Chavez, Eugene V. Debs, and the Hay Market Square martyrs. The history of workers’ rights dates back to the beginning of the nation and includes a cast of millions.

So. When you cross a picket line, or criticize or disrespect striking workers, you not only dishonor my mother’s legacy, you dishonor my entire family. You also dishonor the memory of anyone who’s given their lives for this right. That’s just how it is.