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ENDA: Martian Child?

It's true that I've been pre-occupied with the GLB-only version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. (ENDA). I think about it wherever I go, and wonder how it is that we've come to this place where the nation's largest gay (and I use this word intentionally) organization has been willing to support a strategy that divides our community from itself.

And so, I was ready for a distraction this morning when Marta suggested that we go to a movie. We went for maximum distraction -- 108 minutes of John and Joan Cusack in Martian Child.

I loved Bobby Coleman as Dennis, the Martian Child, adopted by John Cusack. And I'm betting that many of you will join me in recognizing and understanding his character, the odd kid, who literally spends his days in a box. As time goes on, the box gets bigger, and the character, Dennis, learns to play "non-Martian" where it matters -- in school and at the important adoption hearing. He learns to save his "Martian" self, style, dance and language, for home.

At the end of the film, Dennis goes off, intending to return to Mars. He realizes in that special Hollywood way that he is already home. Home, he learns, is where people love you, where they embrace you, and where they never ever leave you. And where, truly, in your family, you can be your glorious Martian self.

You can judge for yourself about whether Dennis is a Martian or simply feels like a Martian. At the end of the film, the John Cusack character isn't quite sure about the answer. He just knows that he's not going to leave the kid behind, no matter what.

I'm not sure what happens to the kid after the movie ends. Will he assimilate? Will dad tell him that he should play "non-Martian" to stay safe or get ahead in school or on the job? Will he be the first Martian president of the United States?

In this Congress, ENDA did not have a happy Hollywood ending. There is one thing upon which the United States Congress and the Human Rights Campaign agree: if we can't assimilate in the workplace, we should stay in the box.

PS. A reader tipped off the blog, After Elton, to an interesting development in the journey of gay author David Gerrold's semi-autobiographical book The Martian Child to movie screens. Even a book by a gay man about life as a single father, had to play straight to be made for the big screen.

A Girl Like Me

In 2005, 16-year-old filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated a 1940s "doll experiment" by husband and wife psycholgists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The Clarks asked black children to tell them which doll—a white one or a black one—they thought looked most like them, and which was good and which was bad. They found that black children identified with and preferred white dolls to black ones. They concluded this was proof of internalized racism. Their research later became cornerstone evidence in the landmark Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision of Topeka, Kansas, which ended American school segregation.

In her seven-minute documentary, A Girl Like Me, filmmaker Davis presented 21 children at a daycare center in New York with two dolls—a black one and a white one. Then, like in the original experiment, Davis asked which they would rather play with and which they thought was "nice" and which was "bad." The film bears witness to several young African-American women navigating the complexities of race and gender.

They have news for those that insist that we live in a color-neutral society. Racism is so alive and well in America that even in the smallest children in daycare can name it.

View the film:
A Girl Like Me

Strange Culture

In his speech, Canaries in the Coal Mine:  Art, Freedom, and Community, John Frohnmayer, former National Endowment for the Arts chair wrote:          

What I fear most is not the next – or even the inevitable terrorist attack. I will fight. I will make sacrifices – I will defend freedom with strength and resolve. What I fear is the epitaph that says: The Revolution came in plain sight and we were too busy, too preoccupied, too selfish to notice. And so the ideals, the moral leadership, and the rule of law that have made us both proud and admired as a country will be gone. Democracy surrendered. And then 9/11 would be not just a national tragedy but a national disgrace — a lever used to pry the heart out of America.

Filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson's film, Strange Culture, tells the story of one canary in the cold mine, artist Steve Kurtz. Hershman is a powerful feminist filmmaker. Her next film, Women+Art=Revolution, chronicles the history of the feminist art movement by weaving interviews with the most important women artists of the last several decades.

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This article was posted in The Nation on October 5, 2007

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

   

In May of 2004, Steve Kurtz's life was turned upsidedown. Kurtz, a founding member of an award-winning collective Critical Art Ensemble, was a tenured professor of art at SUNY Buffalo. His work and that of the Collective was of a kinetic conceptual sort, much of it aimed at informing audiences about the lack of regulation and potential risks of genetically modified food. Shortly before his show was set to open at Mass MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, Kurtz's wife of 20 years died in her sleep of natural causes. When emergency medical technicials responded to his 911 call, they saw in his home petri dishes--part of scheduled installation--filled with harmless bacterial cultures. They called the FBI.

At that point, the nation was still reeling from the 2001 anthrax scares that had shut down everything from Congress to the Supreme Court to the New York Post. Kurtz was detained on suspicion of bio-terrorism.

What makes Kurtz's predicament film-worthy is that within a week, tests showed that there were no harmful biological agents in his house and that his wife had died of heart failure. But the case against Kurtz has not gone away. Forced to drop charges of weapons manufacture, the federal prosecutor in Buffalo instead brought charges of mail fraud against both Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, a professor of genetics at the University of Pittsburgh who sent Kurtz the (harmless and legal) bacterial cultures used in his art work. The "fraud" alleged is that Ferrell and Kurtz did not properly reveal, in a requisition form, the purpose of the mailing. It must be noted that neither the University of Pittsburgh nor Buffalo has asserted fraud, and neither Farrell nor Kurtz believed that there was anything fraudulent in their dealings. The allegation of fraud is made exclusively by the federal prosecutor--a first as far as anyone knows.

Even assuming that there were a defrauded party, one wonders why it isn't being handled as a fairly routine civil matter--i.e., why on earth any putative misrepresentation regarding paperwork is being pursued as a criminal matter. But to give it the ultimate Kafka-esque twist, the charges against Kurtz and Farrell have been pursued under the USA Patriot Act. That means that the sentence for otherwise ordinary crimes is doubled. Since mail fraud carries a sentence of ten years, Kurtz thus faces a possible sentence of twenty years.

After all these years, the prosecution has yet to set a date for the trial. But meanwhile, Strange Culture, a documentary film based on Kurtz's ordeal, offers a brilliant and moving examination of fear and its manipulations.

Strange Culture, a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson starring Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan and Peter Coyote opens October 5 at Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, New York, NY.