366 – 393 Ghetto subcultures from LGBT to crime (old book 236-249)
Vincents text
Norsk Ny dansk bog
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366 My attitude toward gays had been basically “liberal”. Although I had
subconsciously forced them as effectively underground in my rural Danish
childhood as they are in Saudi Arabia, I had not been shaped by overtly
hateful attitudes towards them. Thus, I did not have to meet many self-hating
gays in the closet on the American highways to realize that I felt it as a
moral duty for me to become active in the world’s first open gay movement in
San Francisco. There I soon learned from more “liberated” gays that liberals
are true liberation’s most insidious enemy. Our deep sense of heterosexual
superiority remains untouched by our concern for the “plight” of gay people.
We appear to concede so much with our condescending “we must accept
homosexuals” while the liberal “we” invariably excludes the very minority
whose integration is being urged. We leave the oppressed to struggle not only
against genuinely expressed bigotry and hatred, but also “sympathy” and
“understanding” - “tolerance” extended to something regrettable rather than
normal. After such indoctrination “we” feel as insecure, uneasy, and
threatened by “them” as whites feel threatened by the blacks / browns, and it
becomes more convenient for us to keep them in ghettos. Some Americans saw
gay ghettos like San Francisco and New Orleans as expressions of a tolerant
and free society. As with the old Jewish ghettos in Europe, it is just the
opposite. When we for centuries prevented gays from responding freely,
kissing and holding hands in an open atmosphere without fear, made laws
against them in most states, make them loathe homosexuality before reaching
adulthood so that they adopt and internalize straight people’s definition of good
and bad, when we forced gays and lesbians throughout their lives into
painful, futile attempts to straighten their lives with the same crippling
effect on their self-image as when blacks straightened their hair to “pass”
or merely survive, - then we will eventually force them into similar
segregated ghettos, complete with riots and subcultures. Being an early advocate for gays was noticed and it was black gays
such as SF Film Festival director Albert Johnson and theater director Burial
Clay (murdered a week after setting up my show) who first invited American
Pictures to America. When I lived with black gay activist, Lawrence Andrews
while he helped set up my American Pictures Theater in San Francisco he
invited me to make workshops for his group “Black and white men together” to
help combat the racism he saw among the members. “The whites can go to bed
with us, but afterwards want nothing to do with us.” The split between gays
and lesbians was even greater then, but in the 80’es I saw lesbians come out of
their justified male anger to unite with our movement. Hitchhiking with my Danish sign in Baltimore’s ghetto on Thanksgiving
night, 1973, and hoping to find a place to stay, I was astonished to be
picked up by a beautiful black woman, as black women never picked me up. She
invited me to her neatly polished suburban home and having read Danish
literature, we got involved in a deep intellectual conversation after which
she invited me to share her silk bed upstairs. Not until she started kissing
me did her beard stubble tell me she was not a woman. When I later told the
story to American men they would usually burst out with nausea: “What did you
do? Jump out the window?” Indeed, soon afterward two men, believing they had
picked up a female prostitute, killed such a transsexual. For me Ms. Willie
instead became a dear friend, who introduced me to the world of transgenders.
He admired Denmark for first allowing sex-change operations and told me about
Christina Jorgensen’s book about it. I was amazed hearing how Willie growing
up in the tobacco fields in North Carolina had felt attracted to female
clothes since she was 5, but since escaped north to better live out her real
identity. How times have changed is be seen by how she today – now age 72 –
has moved back to her roots in North Carolina. After Willie’s loving
introduction to the exciting trans- and drag world I felt completely at home
when I later moved into a building full of transgenders in the Tenderloin in
San Francisco. Especially since I saw many of their identity problems during
their transitions, I loved their joy filled parties and drag show
competitions. So when in old age I opened Denmark’s first female mosque I did
it on the condition that our many LGBTQ-refugees could wear high- heeled shoes
in the mosque for their drag shows. For liberation was not easy. I saw early on how the outside oppression
drove many transgenders into drugs and prostitution, thus mirroring the most
obvious end result of black oppression. So most of my friends I lost touch
with. When a social system treats a minority with contempt and hostility, in
the end those within this ghetto become so conscious of its closed system
that they go one further and exaggerate their perceived
"difference."
A strong subculture in the black ghetto is a thorn in the side of
better-off blacks (and better-off browns in Europe). Both minorities try to
make themselves “deserving” of integration, but the whole time we’re using a
pathological image of this subculture to stereotype them. Sensitive to this
aspect, the upper ghetto tends to view the lower ghetto with a sense of shame
rather than as proof of their common oppression. So strong are tensions between the upper and the lower ghetto that I
often had to choose sides, which wasn’t difficult after I’d seen the
suffering in the lower ghetto and the resulting contempt from both the upper
ghetto and whites. The more I began to understand the lower ghetto, the more
I understood the dynamics of oppression in our system. For many whites the
lower ghetto is an incomprehensible world of criminals, pimps, gang members,
traffickers, prostitutes, and addicts. Since they live in a closed system,
their acts are desperate and disclose a pattern of absolute contempt for the
rest of society, which they know they’ll never become a part of. Pool halls
are their meeting place, luxury cars their status symbol, black/brown
cultural nationalism or Islamism their inflammatory community and identity,
the brotherly handshake and the sophisticated “jive” or “walla”
talk their communication. “Backstabbing” may be as common as the brotherly
handshake. But when you’ve learned these rules and a certain technique for
survival, you can’t help coming to love these outcasts, our children of pain,
more than any other social group. For to meet humaneness in the midst of
brutal surroundings will always be more overwhelming and encouraging than
finding it among people protected from adversity. Wherever in the world the master-slave relationship exists, there will
be, within the slave culture, further divisions into new master-slave
relationships. Where any such relationship exists between people, you’ll know
that these people aren’t free since such a relationship can only exist in a
closed system. In the underclass such slavery is seen most clearly in the
relationship between pimp and prostitute. The black prostitute is totally
subjugated by the pimp and cringes mentally at his feet in deep veneration. These laws are laid down in The Book, an unwritten Adam Smith or
business manual that’s been passed down from pimp to pimp for generations and
which can be seen almost as an extension of capitalist treatises since it
describes the under-system in the larger economic system. Woe to the pimp who
doesn’t follow the regulations! Just like the larger capitalists, they have
their daily board meetings with other pimps, where they not only discuss how
to keep wages down, but also exchange technical details concerning the
manipulation of their “ho’s.” They establish their employees’ working hours,
which they call “git down-time,” the same way. You can usually tell which
ho’s belong to a “mack-man” and which are “outlaws”
since all the organized ho’s get out on the street at exactly the same time
every night, while the “outlaws” come and go as they choose. One reason we got along so well was no doubt that they were compelled
to know every detail of “the system” in the lower ghetto to stay free of
pimps, while I, as an outlaw (vagabond) in the greater society, had gradually
acquired a certain knowledge about it in order to survive. We’d arrived in
very different ways at a common outlook. Since the parallel between the
superstructure and the substructure was evident, it was easy for these women
to see the inner dynamics of the combined system that caused their double
oppression: racism and sexism. The relationship between pimp and prostitute is in many ways just a
wild exaggeration of the relationship between man and woman in the lower
ghetto, or even in society as a whole, in which one of the man’s many
“hustles” consists of obtaining “broad money” from desperate women in return
for protection against her being “hit on” by sexually aggressive men. In such
a society, a woman sees a man, to a horrifying degree, as at best an object
for obtaining money and luxury. She’s often very straightforward about her
desire to “marry a rich man.” This quick ghetto escape was shocking to me since I’d rarely seen such
selfish traits in Danish women, perhaps because in a more egalitarian welfare
state such exploitation between the sexes doesn’t make the same sense. The
prostitution involved in buying women with status and wealth shows especially
clearly in the American upper class and underclass. Within its closed system, the underclass has been instilled with the
same admiration for “sharp” pimps and “righteous hustlers” in fine “threads”
as people in the larger society are taught to have for maverick capitalists.
Such flashy pimps and hustlers “making it” are dangerous role models for
ghetto children, attracting them to the street institution at the age of 8 or
9, but, like the nouveau riche capitalist, they’re also pitiful erratic
figures continuously manipulating everyone—they can never become lax or their
empire will collapse. I learned this when I spent a year working in a church that tried to
organize prostitutes into a union that would protect them from both brutal
police raids and pimps. Among the prostitutes who made the strongest impressions on me was
Geegurtha, who was struggling to get out of this slavery. When I first met
her, she’d just been in prison and been almost totally destroyed by drugs and
violence. Her daughter was born an addict but was saved through blood
transfusions. During the five years Geegurtha was a prostitute, she saw
nothing of her daughter Natasha. But through an enormous effort, Geegurtha
became “uphabilitated.” The motherly love she gave since then—expressed in
this photo—is deeply moving and even miraculous to me when I recall her from
the days when she was a wreck. She became manager of the clinic that had
helped her, went to college, and majored in psychology. I’d met Geegurtha when Tony Harris, a social worker, invited me to
speak to the hardcore convicts in his drug rehabilitation program. Gee was so
impressed with my analysis of their criminal background and the prostitutes I
had lived with that she invited me home one day. She was living with her
deeply religious family, who was afraid she’d fall back into drugs and
prostitution. So her sister Georgia, employed by a church, asked me to move
in with them and even to share a bed with Geegurtha and Natasha for a week.
She felt it would be helpful for Gee’s healing to develop an intimate and
trusting relationship with a man not based on sex, money, or violence. Her
religiously supervised healing was so successful that she never regressed,
and 30 years later Tony took this picture of us replicating the picture
Georgia had taken of us on a Sunday morning before church in 1973. With the way I’d seen the odds stacked against black motherly love, I
was deeply moved by this sunshine story. The odds are just as bad for
fatherly love. This man, who let me share his bed in a one-room shack in
Florida, was shooting up first thing in the morning. Unable to kick his
habit, his family life had deteriorated, and he was deeply pained by not
being allowed to be with his child. When I lived with Baggie, the mother with
these three children, she’d also been an addict but had gotten “clean” and
put all her love into giving her children a good religious upbringing. But
when I came back a year later, she’d been sentenced to 25 years in prison for
armed robbery. The American platitude that “the family that prays together
stays together” didn’t hold true. People we confine to a closed system
usually take the fastest way out—often minutes before they’re about to make
it. They’ve so completely internalized our white racist expectations of them
they have no faith in their ability to succeed in ordinary ways. Most people
somehow understand why a prisoner with seven years left to a sentence takes
the chance and escapes instead of patiently waiting to exit hell legally. Not
until I myself nearly became ghettoized—rather than merely living the
privileged vagabond life in ghettos—was I able to feel how the closed system
functions exactly like a prison in which you have neither the psychic surplus
nor the means to invest in a seven-year education that might get you out of
that stifling oppression the conventional way. All ghetto acts are therefore
desperate, guided by short-term goals that are determined by the fact that
you already live in a prison. For such people no prison or any kind of
punishment will be a sufficient deterrent. Criminal escapes, such as robbery and fraud, are no more typical of
shortsightedness than the more lawful escape attempts constantly referred to
in racist stereotyping. The climate of death and fear kills long-term trust
in the future and in 1970 made it easier to buy a Cadillac than to save money
to someday move out of a rotten shack. Coming from a welfare state, I found
it ironic that contemptuous white Americans constantly referred to a “low
gratification threshold” among blacks while their own lives were tied up in a
shortsighted tax revolt, trying to heap BMWs, yachts, and unnecessary gadgets
over their own threshold. When you refuse to pay for the common good, you
invite criminals to your house. A country deserves the criminals it produces. The ghetto criminal directly challenging these inequalities is the
most misunderstood and unduly feared person in white America. He’s actually
of little danger to whites; more than 95% of US crime is white on white or
black on black. In Africa, criminals impressed me by working together in
highly organized groups. They would go for the wealthiest homes, regardless
of color, spend days researching when guards were off duty, poison the dogs
earlier in the day and at night, blow “witch powder” into the house (so it
was said), putting the whole family to sleep and thereby avoiding violence.
With the family in deep sleep, the thieves would empty the entire house and
even have a party in it. In contrast, the disorganized state of the black American criminal
indicates a state of slavery as much as the futile American slave rebellions
did. I can take dubious pride in having participated in several muggings.
This happened because my friends didn’t let me know about them beforehand and
in fact hadn’t even had any plans themselves. When they saw prey, they acted
on the spur of the moment in a vicious cocktail of deep-seated hate and
self-hatred rather than actual need. Just as colonized children everywhere
will steal from you when you show them “master” kindness, I found that the
adult “rip-offs,” “stealers,” and even “strong-arm studs” were driven by
Shakespearean motives: “I am one, my liege, whom the vile blows and buffets of the world have
so incensed that I am reckless what I do to spite the world.” (Macbeth, Act 3) Freddy’s dead, that’s what I said. Let the Man rap a plan, say he would send him home, but his hope was a rope and he should have known. Why can’t we brothers protect one another? No one’s serious and it makes me furious. Everybody misused him, ripped him off and abused him another junkie plan, pushing dope for the man... When you live long enough in these surroundings, you feel the
conspiracy against the ghetto our prisoners are talking about. As with
oppressors all over the world, our racism manifests itself psychologically in
a “divide and conquer” need. All my life I’ve heard black American children
pick on each other with “you act white” or “you’re not really black”—almost
the same hateful words I hear today in brown children in Denmark: “you’re too
Danish,” “you’re not really a Muslim,” “whore” (about girls who dresses “too
Danish” or just differently than the excluded group). Just as the blacks
demean each other with “Oreo” and “coconut,” Muslim eighth-graders test each
other with “you smell of pork” or “your sister is a Dane fucker.” Upper
ghetto is pitted against lower ghetto, gang against gang, family against
family, even brother against brother. By the early 80’es I had counted 22 friends who had been murdered.
Since then I lost track. Simon Williams, whom my 6 years old son had played
with in the Astoria ghetto in 1986, was the fourth person I had known in the
same family to be murdered. At his funeral in 1995 the minister who was quite
a comedian started out with “We have reached the darkness where we can’t cry
our pain out any longer. Let’s laugh it out.” And then he started cracking
jokes so in the end all the 150 guests in the funeral home were roaring in
the laughter, even Simon’s sister Cathrine seen
here below. Yet, when I came back a few months later to give her my pictures,
she too had been murdered, hit by stray bullets along with several others in
a grocery store. Cathrine
was the fifth murder victim in Lela Taylors family.
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366 Min holdning til bøsser havde grundlæggende været
"liberal". Selv om jeg ubevidst havde tvunget dem lige
så effektivt under jorden i min danske barndom på landet, som de er i
Saudi-Arabien, var jeg ikke blevet præget af åbenlyst hadefulde holdninger
til dem. Jeg behøvede således ikke at møde mange
selvhadende bøsser i skabet som blaffer for at føle det som en moralsk
pligt for mig at blive aktiv i verdens første åbne bøssebevægelse i San
Francisco Her lærte jeg snart af mere "frigjorte" bøsser, at
liberale er den sande befrielses
mest underfundige fjende. Vores dybe følelse af heteroseksuel overlegenhed
forbliver uberørt af vores bekymring for de homoseksuelles ”sag”. Vi lader
til at indrømme så meget med vores nedladende ”vi må acceptere homoseksuelle”,
mens det frisindede ”vi” uvægerligt udelukker netop den minoritet, hvis integration vi opfordrer til. Vi
overlader det til de undertrykte at kæmpe ikke kun mod virkelig udtrykt
bigotteri og had, men også mod ”medfølelse” og ”forståelse” – ”tolerance” udvidet til at omfatte noget beklageligt
snarere end noget normalt. .
Da jeg
en nat blaffede med mit danske skilt i Baltimores ghetto og håbede at finde
et sted at bo, blev jeg overrasket over at blive samlet op af en smuk sort
kvinde, da sorte kvinder aldrig samlede mig op. Hun inviterede mig hjem i sit
luksuriøse forstadshjem, og da hun havde læst dansk litteratur, blev vi
involveret i en dyb intellektuel samtale, hvorefter hun inviterede mig til at
dele hendes silkeseng ovenpå. Først da hun begyndte at kysse mig, fortalte
skægstubbene mig, at hun ikke var en kvinde. Når jeg senere fortalte
historien til amerikanske mænd, udbrød de normalt med afsky: ”Hvad gjorde du
så? Sprang du ud af vinduet?” Kort efter dræbte to mænd faktisk en sådan transseksuel
i den tro, at de havde fået fat i en kvindelig prostitueret. For mig blev
frk. Willie i stedet en kær veninde, som introducerede mig til de
transseksuelles verden. Hun beundrede Danmark for først at tillade
kønsskifteoperationer og fortalte mig om Christina Jørgensens bog. Jeg var
forbløffet over at høre, hvordan Willie, der voksede op i tobaksmarkerne i
North Carolina, havde følt sig tiltrukket af kvindetøj, siden hun var 5 år,
men siden flygtede nordpå for at kunne udleve sin virkelige identitet.
Hvorledes tiderne har ændret sig, kan man se ved, hvordan hun i dag - nu 73
år gammel - er flyttet tilbage til sine rødder i North Carolina. Efter
Willies kærlige introduktion til den spændende trans- og drag-verden følte
jeg mig straks hjemme, da jeg senere flyttede ind i en bygning fuld af
transkønnede i San Franciscos Tenderloin. Især fordi jeg så mange af deres
identitetsproblemer under deres transformation, elskede jeg deres
glædesfyldte fester og dragshow konkurrencer. Så da jeg i alderdommen åbnede
Danmarks første kvindelige moské, gjorde jeg det på betingelse af, at vores
mange LGBTQ-flygtninge kunne bære højhælede sko i moskéen til deres
dragshows.
For frigørelsen var ikke let. Jeg så
tidligt, hvordan den ydre undertrykkelse drev mange transkønnede ud i stoffer
og prostitution og dermed spejlede det mest åbenlyse slutresultat af den
sorte undertrykkelse. Så de fleste af mine venner mistede jeg siden kontakten
med. Når et samfundssystem behandler et mindretal med foragt og fjendtlighed,
bliver ghettoens mennesker til sidst så bevidste om deres lukkede system, at
de går et skridt videre og overdriver deres antagede
"forskel". På den måde fuldendes undertrykkelsens onde
cirkel, idet subkulturen nu synligt synes at "retfærdiggøre"
samfundets foragt for den. På denne måde skabes "ghettoen i
ghettoen", da de "pæne", konforme bøsser og lesbiske ofte
føler, at drag-, transseksuelle og andre særlige LGBTQ-subkulturer ødelægger
det for dem i deres forhold til den heteroseksuelle verden.
Denne hurtige ghettoflugt var chokerende
for mig, da jeg sjældent havde set sådanne egoistiske træk hos danske
kvinder, måske fordi en sådan udnyttelse mellem kønnene i en mere egalitær
velfærdsstat ikke giver samme mening. Den prostitution, der ligger i at købe
kvinder med status og rigdom, viser sig især tydeligt i den amerikanske
overklasse og underklasse. Underklassen er inden for sit lukkede
system blevet indpodet den samme beundring for ”sharp pimps” (velbeslåede
alfonser) og ”righteous hustlers” iklædt ”fine threads” (smart klædte, småkriminelle hustlere), som folk
i det større samfund er blevet oplært til at have for succesrige, selvgjorte
kapitalister. Sådanne prangende alfonser og hustlere, der tilsyneladende
klarer sig strålende, er farlige rollemodeller for ghettobørn, der tiltrækker dem til gadeinstitutionen
i en alder af 8 eller 9 år. Men ligesom den nyrige kapitalist er de også
ynkelige, uberegnelige, utilregnelige figurer, der konstant manipulerer alle
- de må aldrig blive slappe, ellers vil deres imperium bryde sammen. Det lærte jeg, da jeg i et år
arbejdede i en kirke, der forsøgte at organisere prostituerede i en
fagforening, som ville beskytte dem mod både brutale politirazziaer og
alfonser.
I modsætning hertil tyder den sorte amerikanske forbryders
uorganiserede tilstand på en tilstand af slaveri lige så meget som de mislykkede
amerikanske slaveoprør gjorde det. Med tvivlsom stolthed kan jeg fortælle, at
jeg har deltaget i adskillige overfald. Det skete, fordi mine venner ikke havde fortalt mig om dem på forhånd
og faktisk ikke engang selv havde haft nogen planer.
Når de så et offer, handlede de på stående fod i en ondskabsfuld cocktail af
dybfølt had og selvhad snarere end egentlig nød. Ligesom koloniserede børn
overalt vil stjæle fra en, der viser dem paternalsk
godhed, fandt jeg, at også de voksne ”rip-offs”, ”stealers” og endog ”strongarm studs” var overvældet af Shakespeareske motiver: ”I am one, my liege, whom the vile blows and buffets of the world have
so incens’d that I am reckless what I do to spite
the world.” Freddy’s dead, that’s what I said. Let the Man rap a plan, say he would send him home, but his hope was a rope and he should have known. Why can’t we brothers protect one another? No one’s serious and it makes me furious. Everybody misused him, ripped him off and abused him another junkie plan, pushing dope for the man...
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