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Malibu politics prison Rant Whitstable

Sheriff Lee Baca the ACLU and Me

So, yesterday.

I’m sure you want to know.

Firstly, I want to thank the ACLU for co-counseling my suit against the Sheriff.

They have worked for months on this case and they have every reason to believe in a positive outcome.

My personal suit separated from the class action.

I am suing the Sheriff’s Department for a considerable amount of money.

I arrived early at the ACLU office down town.  I met with my lawyers.  I watched the 30 or so cameras being set up from TV stations all over the USA.

Jennie Pasquarella spoke first.  A more eloquent speaker one could not hope to listen to.  A more brilliant lawyer one could not hope to meet.

Like all of the lawyers who work for the ACLU she is motivated by fairness for all.

She said:

The principle of bail is something so fundamental, that you shouldn’t be held until you’re found guilty.

I waited my turn.

I listened again to this startling fact:  The Immigration Department is mandated  to deport 400, 000 people a year from the USA.

This fact alone never ceases to shock and amaze me.  The implications, I’m sure, are not lost on any of you.

The last time I faced a barrage of press like that I was at the Sundance Film Festival.  It was all about me.

Yesterday I was representing thousands of the disenfranchised, the oppressed and the wrongly imprisoned.

In light of Jerry Brown’s veto of the Trust Act and set against the back drop of a recent, damning report documenting violence and abuse in The Men’s County Jail, this case could not be more relevant.

Sheriff Lee Baca has been effectively told that he is incapable of running a jail by the board of supervisors.

Humiliatingly the Supervisors, not the Sheriff, will find someone more competent to run the jail.

Within minutes of the end of our press conference the Sheriff’s representative disputed the charge that the Sheriff’s Department has denied bail to anyone because of ICE holds.

“If you are able to post bail — say it’s $10,000 — and you’re an immigrant from wherever. With or without an ICE hold, we accept that,” said the spokeswoman, Nicole Nishida.

An outright LIE.

A report by prison expert James Austin cites data from Baca’s office indicating that at least 20,000 Los Angeles County inmates, nearly all of them Latino males, were subjected to ICE holds in 2011.

Latino males arrested, held in the MCJ, forced to accept spurious guilty pleas and deported equals: ethnic cleansing.

Nobody cares about them.  Nobody gives a damn about undocumented workers.  They are treated like animals.  Even by my most (so-called) progressive friends.

Latinos spending their lives doing jobs white people don’t want to do, refuse to do in SoCal.  They are the real victims of the economic catastrophe.

During the good times, we turn a blind eye to these men and women working at our behest for minimal wages.

When things get bad they are thrown out like yesterdays trash, rounded up like cattle to satisfy immigration deportation quotas.

It’s the same everywhere, when things get tough:  blame the immigrants.

I heard my own mother blame Eastern Europeans for ‘taking our jobs’ back at home in Britain.

The Spanish-speaking press asked me: “Do you think Lee Baca is anti-immigrant?”

“You mean, do I think Lee Baca is a racist?”  I replied.  “Well, he is just part of the racist problem in the USA but he gets to be the executioner.”

In a country where most people are enslaved by debt, lack of education, obesity, religious/corporate ideology and hubris it is very easy to forget about ones own enslavement and think nothing of enslaving and demonizing others.

The primary reason I would never vote (if I could) for a second Obama term, regardless of his so-called pro gay marriage smokescreen (designed largely to melt liberal hearts) is his appalling deportation record.

The Obama administration’s deportation policies, which rely on cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, have already been challenged in California.

Legislation that would have prohibited sheriffs and police departments from enforcing ICE holds in most cases was, as I have already written, vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month.

Barrack Obama has deported more people from the USA than any other President in this country’s history.

It goes without saying that the Gay media and my local Malibu newspaper will totally ignore this story.  I am neither pretty enough nor non-controversial for either to cover the story.

Even though it may be of interest to both communities.

Most gay men are unaware that if they fell in love with a non-American their state marriage certificate or their Foreign marriage certificate would mean absolutely nothing to the Federal Immigration Department.

Their husband/wife would risk deportation.

The gay men I know think that deportation happens to other people… you know… brown people.  Not people like us.

Those same gay men run the gay media.

Scott McPherson from The Advocate told me recently that he totally supported The President’s immigration policy and (after I explained to him what a drone was and who was being killed by them) he told me he had no interest in who drones were killing.

All Scott wants is marriage equality.  Apparently, only for Americans to marry other Americans.

You might think that Malibu is a liberal, open-minded place…. with all those rich über gays living down there on the beach… but I have endured more homophobia in Malibu than even my small home town village of Whitstable in Kent where one might expect the crushingly narrow-minded.

My Armenian neighbor was so vile about me and my young gay renter, her invective so shocking… it almost took my breath away.

So.  It has begun.

Where the runes fall… is none of my business.

Somehow the very act of laying ones self bare, open to all sorts of scrutiny, is a relief.

Regardless of the outcome, I am very happy to be of service to those who can least help themselves.

Categories
Los Angeles politics

Fuck You Jerry Brown

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Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the TRUST Act, a bill championed by immigrants rights advocates.

The bill, which was the antithesis of Arizona’s SB 1070, would have helped stop racial profiling and restore trust and transparency between California’s communities and law enforcement officials.

While the outcome of the fight is disappointing, I am thankful for activists who appealed to Governor Brown by signing thousands of petitions then making hundreds of calls to his office urging him to sign the bill.

Adam Luna, is the Political Director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrants rights organization wanted to share this message:

“While it was a bitter disappointment to see the governor veto the TRUST Act, I wanted to let you know how much your activism and solidarity made a real difference.

11,300 petition signatures (more than any other organization!), which were hand-delivered in Sacramento, hundreds of phone calls — it was amazing.”

Those of us in the immigration reform movement know that this is not a fight which is going to be won overnight and the governor said that he’s open to making a deal next year because he knows that you, and we, won’t rest until the fight is won.

While Governor Brown’s failure of leadership on this issue is disheartening, the campaign for fair and sensible immigration policies will go on.

Next week I will be announcing my very own action against the secure communities protocol that incarnated me and thousands of people like me.

A few months ago a young, gay Australian man here legally in the USA on a tourist visa was arrested for peeing in public (a sex crime felony in the state of California) and held in the Men’s Country Jail until he agreed to be deported.

Why?

IMMIGRATION REFORM NOW!

Categories
Film Gay Hollywood Los Angeles politics Queer

Wrinkles

I am downtown. Downtown LA. We are drinking coffee in a chic coffee shop.

It is reassuringly sophisticated.  It feels like NYC. It feels like a city.  Spring Street. Coffee bar.  The people who pass by are dressed well and don’t have that Hollywood vibe. The women are not showing off their chests and legs, the boys are wearing well cut pants and have covetable accessories.

Having the car makes life more interesting. I am scarcely at home.  I am writing this on my phone.

I had dinner with an old friend on Saturday night. We ate at Bossa Nova then we saw Clash of the Titans 2 at the Chinese Theatre.  There were less than 10 of us in the theatre.  The film was terrible, Olivia was terrible. Everything about that terrible film that could be said…was said.  He brought two young men. They didn’t say much. One was gay, the other ‘in training’.  Outside the theatre there was a costume exhibition. We poured over the ormolu costume jewelry Elizabeth Taylor wore in Cleopatra.

We explained to the boys the history of Century City.  You know that story don’t you?  How Cleopatra bankrupted 20th Century Fox? How the back lot was sold and Century City was built?  Everybody should know that story, if they live in LA.

It was pouring rain.  Under the theatre, in the parking lot, valley girls were vomiting out of SUVs onto their fake Louboutins.  We drove west, we sat together at my club and they drank cocktails. I drank coffee.  The boys remained mute.

Not feeling at all combative, I found myself passionately discussing racism and gay equality which quickly disintegrated into a nasty UK v USA argument.  At one point my friend told me that if he could press a button and eradicate all Muslims he would.  I pointed out that my father was a Persian Muslim and technically so were the majority of my 11 brothers and sisters. That he would have to kill my young sister Rebecca.

How did he feel about that?  His genocidal zeal was not diminished.

How come it’s become ok for reasonable men to become so islamaphobic?  The conversation further disintegrated into how retarded the Brits were for accepting equality without the word marriage in the equation.  It made my blood boil that he would rather have nothing if he couldn’t have the word marriage. Civil unions in the UK seem, to those who have them…just like being married and my friends who have civil unions think of themselves, describe themselves, as married.  Anyway, the m word is now being fought for in the UK but more as a nice after thought attached to the equality that we already enjoy.  You know how I felt, and people like me felt about that word. Archaic, patriarchal bull shit…antiquated in the secular UK.

Then, this morning, I found myself listening to Democracy Now on the radio as I drove the 101 Freeway.

Van Jones being interviewed.

He pointed out that in the civil rights game played out in the USA…if you are prepared to be arrested for what you believe…and there are enough of you, change happens quickly.

Be seen to fight for what you believe rather than playing the faceless gay equality/marriage ‘incremental’ tactic…employing expensive lawyers and fighting state by state…  He mentioned the names of 5 or 6 black civil rights leaders. I got to wondering where our civil rights leaders were? Who are they? Why can’t I name them?

I suppose Lance Black has become a recognizable leader/voice of the gay community but this seems accidental rather than deliberate.  It has always been my dream for the gay men and women of the USA that they get the human rights they deserve.  But…what are they prepared to risk when demanding those rights? How many windows do they need to break?

There is something weedy and unfocused about the movement.  Worse, by articulating this frustration I risk people like my friend telling me that I am letting down the cause.  We need leaders, we need direct action. It is the only way the unelected justices (who get the final say) at the Supreme Court will truly understand how important equality is to us.

The system has failed us.

Meanwhile, Justin Bond shared on Facebook a piece from the NY Times about the suicide of a gay man struggling with the notion of old age…amongst other things.

Read it here: gay suicide

Some of Justin’s friends dismissed the piece as worthless. Some of them understood how important it was.  Some of them, quite rightly, wondered why the piece was in the style section. Our community wrestles with all sorts of problems peculiar to our people. It is absurd, at moments like this, to pretend that we are just like everyone else.  Our generation of gay men, used to unlimited sex, sexual validation, Peter Panism at its worst…has to wake up and acknowledge the wrinkles.

So, it’s been quite a week. A date last night that went really well. Passionate discussions and…well the dogs.

What more could I want?

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