Perpetual Irrelevance

“Just because something works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.” 

Black American Sex Workers Who Made History

1. Dr. Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American author, poet, dancer, actress and singer. She published several autobiographies, books of essays and poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. In interviews, Maya Angelou used the term prostitute to refer to her career as a sex worker. 

"I wrote about my experiences because I thought too many people tell young folks, “I never did anything wrong. Who, Moi? - never I. I have no skeletons in my closet. In fact, I have no closet.” They lie like that and then young people find themselves in situations and they think, “Damn I must be a pretty bad guy. My mom or dad never did anything wrong.” They can’t forgive themselves and go on with their lives. So I wrote the book Gather Together in My Name [about her past as a sex worker]". She was unashamed of her past, spoke candidly to her family about it, and always spoke out in her truth. When confronted rudely on her past she would say without hesitation, "there are many ways to prostitute oneself and you know a lot about that, don’t you dear?".

2. Malcolm X

Before he became world famous as a leading civil rights activist, Malcolm X (then known as Malcolm Little or Detroit Red) led a life best described as tough. Left without a dad at an early age, the adolescent Malcolm made money on the streets of Boston through selling drugs, pimping, robbing wealthy households, and gambling. He also had a side line in street sex work by picking up wealthy gay men in bars. He would brag to his friends about the money he would make after he “serviced the queers” and at one point sustained a relationship with a white business man.

Malcolm X did vaguely write about his time working the streets, but he would falsely attribute his stories to a man named “Rudy”. “[Rudy] had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem. Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.” The excerpt from Manning Marable’s ” Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”, describes how the young Malcolm  X earned his money servicing a wealthy man named Paul Lennon, one of many clients he had during his career in sex work.

3. Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson was a transgender activist, drag queen, sex worker, and a popular figure in New York City’s gay art scene from the 1960s to the 1990s. One of the city’s oldest and best known drag queens, Johnson participated in clashes with the police amid the Stonewall Riots along with other trans women of color. She was a co-founder, along with Sylvia Rivera, of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) in the early 1970s. She also was the “mother” of S.T.A.R. House along with Sylvia, getting together food and clothing to help support the young queens living in the house on the lower East Side of New York.

4. Josephine Baker

One of the most famous Black female sex workers of all time, Josephine Baker was a proud activist, openly bisexual, and a strong mother to her many adopted children. Baker was born Freda Josephine MacDonald in St. Louis on June 3, 1906. She started her career by touring on the vaudeville circuits, where she won over audiences with her dancing and comedic skills, though she faced harsh racism from her employers.

She famously left the United States for France, where she thrived in the integrated Parisian nightclub scene. By age 21, she was the highest earning burlesque entertainer in Europe. She later served as a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxillary Air Force during World War II and secretly worked for the French Resistance, for which she was awarded a medal by the French government. By the time of her death in 1975, Baker had raised 12 adopted children in a French castle, performed at Carnegie Hall, and spoke at the March on Washington.

5. Mary Jones a.k.a. Peter Sewally 

On June 11, 1836, New York City stone mason Robert Haslem went looking for a little nocturnal fun. He found it on Bleecker Street in the form of a pretty black prostitute, who took him to an alley near her house at 108 Greene St., a known whorehouse, where they got down to business. Afterward they parted ways, only for Haslem to realize that his wallet was missing. He reported the theft to police, who wasted no time in going undercover to catch the thief and she was promptly arrested. The woman gave her name as Mary Jones, and it was revealed during a police strip search that she was assigned male at birth.

The local press of the era had a field day with the case. When it was revealed that Mary Jones a.k.a Peter Sewally had actually fashioned a makeshift vagina out of cow skin that they wore tied around their waist for their clients, they were dubbed “Beefsteak Pete” and “The Man Monster”. Sewally reportedly used other aliases such as Miss Ophelia, Miss June, and Eliza Smith. They seemed surprised that anyone would be shocked by their cross-dressing. “I have always attended parties among the people of my own color dressed in this way—and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way,”. Peter was found guilty of grand larceny and sentenced to five years in state prison, but reappeared in news accounts several times in the ensuing years, invariably for the same offense. On May 16, 1853, the New York Times reported that at 3 a.m. the previous morning, Sewally was arrested just days after being released from yet another five-year sentence at Sing Sing. Terminology used to describe gender identity was non existent at the time, making it unclear if Sewally was a trans woman, gender non conforming, or a gay man.

6. Miss Major Griffin-Gracey

Walking Home

a film by WOC about street harassment 2009

I have used this in my class for the past 5 years.

Today a public high school in Japan’s Yamanishi prefecture had an event where male and female students wore each other’s uniforms, called セクスチェンジ・デー, or Gender Exchange Day. This event was proposed by students.  299 students participated in this, 117 male students and 182 female students.  

The goal of the event is to allow students to see every day things and themselves from a different perspective, and perhaps things that seemed “naturally so” aren’t what they seem at all.

The comments from girls are, “It feels easy to be in male uniform” “I feel cool and handsome”.  Comments from boys are “Skirts are cold” “When walking upstairs I have to watch out” 

Text of Reyhaneh Jabbari’s will in a voice message to her mother

Reyhaneh Jabbari was a 26 year old Iranian woman convicted of killing her would-be rapist when she was just 19. She was hanged yesterday after spending 7 years in prison. The man she killed was an ex-employee of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence.

(via qasaweh)

Beautiful, terrible, truth.

On the Front Lines of a New Pacific War:

On the small, spectacular island of Jeju, off the southern tip of Korea, indigenous villagers have been putting their bodies in the way of construction of a joint South Korean–US naval base that would be an environmental, cultural and political disaster. If completed, the base would hold more than 7,000 navy personnel, plus twenty warships including US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers carrying the latest Aegis missiles—all aimed at China, only 300 miles away.

Since 2007, when the $970 million project was first announced, the outraged Tamna people of Gangjeong village have exhausted every legal and peaceful means to stop it. They filed lawsuits. They held a referendum in which 94 percent of the electorate voted against construction—a vote the central government ignored. They chained themselves for months to a shipping container parked on the main access road, built blockades of boulders at the construction gate and occupied coral-reef dredging cranes. They have been arrested by the hundreds. Mayor Kang Dong-Kyun, who was jailed for three months, said, “If the villagers have committed any crime, it is the crime of aspiring to pass their beautiful village to their descendants.”

Jeju is just one island in a growing constellation of geostrategic points that are being militarized as part of President Obama’s “Pacific Pivot,” a major initiative announced late in 2011 to counter a rising China. According to separate statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, 60 percent of US military resources are swiftly shifting from Europe and the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region. (The United States already has 219 bases on foreign soil in the Asia-Pacific; by comparison, China has none.) The Jeju base would augment the Aegis-equipped systems in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam and the US colony of Guam. The Pentagon has also positioned Patriot PAC-3 missile defense systems in Taiwan, Japan (where the United States has some ninety installations, plus about 47,000 troops on Okinawa) and in South Korea (which hosts more than 100 US facilities).

[…]

On the island of Jeju, the consequences of the Pacific Pivot are cataclysmic. The UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, adjacent to the proposed military port, would be traversed by aircraft carriers and contaminated by other military ships. Base activity would wipe out one of the most spectacular remaining soft-coral forests in the world. It would kill Korea’s last pod of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins and contaminate some of the purest, most abundant spring water on the planet. It would also destroy the habitats of thousands of species of plants and animals—many of which, such as the narrow-mouthed frog and the red-footed crab, are gravely endangered already. Indigenous, sustainable livelihoods—including oyster diving and local farming methods that have thrived for thousands of years—would cease to exist, and many fear that traditional village life would be sacrificed to bars, restaurants and brothels for military personnel.

http://savejejunow.org/act/

So I buy a lot of comics. A lot. And since Tumblr likes comics featuring awesome ladies, I figured I should write a list of all the comics currently coming out featuring awesome ladies.

First, let’s start with the superhero stuff:

The Offering by Donghi Nguyen

Jeju Island is the first place in the world to receive all three UNESCO natural science designations : Biosphere Reserve in 2002, Natural Heritage in 2007, Global Geopark in 2010. But the Korean and U.S. military is constructing a U.S. Naval Base over the UNESCO heritage sites.

Gureombi Rock was our prayer site, our dining place, our place of rest. It was our swimming pool. We did everything on the rock.

Every day, villagers & activists will sit, stand & dance at the gate of the naval base being constructed.

The villagers of Gangjeong Village outside the Jeju Courts, refuse to pay fines for their peaceful protests.

The villagers remember that 30,000 people were killed on Jeju Island in 1948, in an April 3rd massacre collaborated by the U.S. military.