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Email me to find out where. edgeboi@hotmail.com

The Rock Star's Burden - New York Times

Interesting op-ed by Paul Theroux in today's NYTimes on contemporary charitable approaches to developing Africa.  Stick with it to the end; its heart is really more in the right place than it might appear at first.  In many ways his argument recalls the complaints of Damon Albarn back during the Live 8 concert--complaints that were to my mind well-founded. 

The problem with charity for Africa is that raising money almost always requires representing the beneficiary of that money as helpless.  But Africa is hardly helpless.  To this day I remember the comments of an African man during a discussion about AIDS in Africa at the University of Chicago.  In the minds of the West we've been on the verge of extinction since you first discovered us, he said.  But we're still here.  Explain that.

Read more at www.nytimes.com/2005/12...

"They Want to Get Married in Traditional Ways"

We are about to witness something unprecedented. The South African Broadcasting Corporation reports:

The next step, Vilakazi said, is getting traditional institutions to validate homosexual unions. "Most of our members are black women and they want to get married in traditional ways. We still have a battle to wage about whether people can marry as per the Customary Marriages Act," she said.

One interesting facet of the whole development of lesbian and gay rights in South Africa has been the diminished presence of the "homosexuality is un-African" rhetoric so common elsewhere on the continent. Oh it's there, sure, but just not as widespread or as legitimated as in, say, Zimbabwe.

I suppose that might be due to a diminished devotion to "African culture" as compared with other countries, though I'm not sure how one would go about quantifying such a thing. Even if diminished, however, African culture is certainly a central feature and concern of South African life. Hell, the country has already gone through one round of marriage expansion: the [Recognition of] Customary Marriages Act (RCMA) mentioned by Vilakazi, above. Guess what that reform was about? African culture.

My dissertation research is on these two parallel?/intersecting? marriage reforms, and I've guessed for about a year now that Vilakazi's challenge might be the next step. I'm not going to predict its chances of success--I don't really find that question interesting. But I am eager to see how this process unfolds. The RCMA would require that the marriages be consecrated according to customary law, but it's not immediately clear exactly what that means (or even who would decide, though it's bound to end up in the courts in some fashion or another). There are sophisticated schools of customary thought which could justify such a marriage--there's even longstanding precedent for it in at least one part of the country. Plus the nature of customary law methodology according to some authorities (crudely, more ground-up than the top-down of our common law system) fosters just this kind of flexibility. So it can be done.

Which means we're going to see it being done. Simply put, we're going to see a debate about competing interpretations of customary law with respect to same-sex marriage and homosexuality in general--right there in an open court with the full legitimacy of the democratic state behind it. This is going to be unprecedented, fascinating--and, I have to admit, probably quite moving. On the whole, I have to say this sure seems like a great thing.

Stupid Mistakes

So I discovered yesterday that I accidentally reversed the accounts on a recent bank transfer, which triggered six overdrafts to the tune of $180 in fees. There went my planned Chicago trip for the holidays, just like that.

I hate having no money.

Is It Just Me

or is Sufjan Stevens ridiculously hot?

Looking Up

This has probably been my most difficult semester since starting graduate school. I'll spare you the details, but I've felt overwhelmed, unmoored, and on the brink of breakdown at several points, with no apparent end in sight.

Until now. I just had a very successful and helpful paper presentation that was a clear step forward from my last one, in September. For the first time in a while, I can feel myself breaking into a new level of clarity in my thinking, and it feels great. Plus I have a week off starting right now. Things, finally, are looking up.

I'm celebrating the moment by falling in love with a new Madonna track, "Sorry." I literally get up out of my seat and start dancing every time I play it. (Yes, that's remarkable for me these days--which tells you just how off I've been.) The album as a whole, though very good, is not so great as the mostly rapturous reviews suggest (the review at allmusic.com is spot-on, I think), but this track is pure gold. Nothing like reconnecting with my inner Madonna fag to cheer me up!

Lord

George Bush really has no idea what's going on. Does he really think that old line will work any more? Doesn't he realize that, according to one recent estimate, when he trots it out now he's calling 57% of the people in this country traitors? Is he trying to antagonize the American people?

15 Minutes

15 seconds is more like it. Check out bottom half of p. 2 here.

My favorite part is that no matter the context--out at the club, on the barricades, you name it--my face always registers a quizzical look of disgust. Ha.

Swooooooooooooooopes!!

Hometown hero Sheryl Swoopes comes out.

I've been a Swoopes booster since her days at Texas Tech, where she was recruited from my high school's rival, Brownfield High School.

I particularly love the way she came out. Who cares if it's a choice, she says? And oh yeah--this isn't just about homophobia, it's about sexism, too.

Classy and forthright. Today, I'm proud to be a West Texan!

'Z'taban'

An article in today's Washington Post on LGBTetc in Namibia that is, by typical American standards of reporting on Africa, very good. The relationship between "African," "Western," "gay," "homophobia," etc etc etc is hopelessly complex, and the reporter navigates those waters nicely. My only complaint is that she collapses all forms of same-sex attraction and practice into one category of "homosexuality" in a way that prevents her from really exploring what's going on when a gay-identified man wearing stylish glasses in a seaside cafe is identified as the height of Namibian chic. But I suppose a treatise on the social construction of sexual identity is asking too much for a newspaper feature.

My boyfriend comes at this knot from the opposite angle: racism within South Africa's LGBT community, here. (Please excuse the shoddy Behind the Mask editing.)

And while I'm boosting Carl, check out some of his photography here.