A very dramatic letter, in five acts of gross indignity, presented in open forum, for the edification of the Venceremos Brigade Folks.
Cast of Characters: (In order of appearance)
PATRICK WIGGLEKNIFE: a Lowly Faggot Who Fortunately Knows How to Type
RED BIRD McTHANE: Great Red Bird of Right-On Revolutionary Rhetoric
GAIL: Bestest Macheterra in the West Witch
LOIS: Woman Witch Which Saved My Ass
SANDY: Witch of Blackness and Sorceress of Light
JACKIE: Witch of Blood and Spitfire
Assorted Friends and Many More Assorted Enemies of Gay Revolution
Dear Venceremos Brigade Folks:
“A Prologue Told by a Lowly Faggot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Plenty.”
My name is Patrick Wiggleknife. Like most of your imaginary stereotypes of theatrical people, I am a homosexual. Let me make it clear what I’m talking about. This letter is not a statement against anything; you, Cuba, “The Revolution,” Marxism, or any of those words. It is a specific reaction (mine) on a specific topic (homosexuality) in a specific situation (the Fourth Contingent, Venceremos Brigade).
I definitely have a bone to pick with you folks. I was selected to participate in the Venceremos Brigade, Fourth Contingent, by the Seattle Regional Committee. I was in Cuba from March until June of 1971, and I cut one fuck of a lot of sugar cane to “express my solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.” I don’t really much care at this point what your prejudices are about homosexuals or the Gay Movement.
I’m not responsible for the fact that you haven’t done your homework on the subject. As a bona fide homo sapiens who was a worker in a socialist society, I assume I have a few rights. My Marxist theoretical perspectives may not be up to snuff according to your standards, but I don’t recall Karl writing about liberation for “some” oppressed peoples.
I believe, if for no other reason than that I was a homosexual with the Brigade, that I can speak as someone who has experienced oppression. You folks are a little slow cleaning up your messes, and I’m getting a little tired of smelling that mess, since it seems to have ended up in my laundry. I definitely think it’s time to do the wash.
Act of Gross Indignity Number I, scene i
“I Come to Drink to the General Joy of the Whole Table.”
I arrived in Cuba bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, just itching to cut arrobas of that goddamn sugar cane for the liberation of all oppressed peoples. I’d like to criticize myself at this point. Optimism and naïveté have always been two of my more serious faults.
I saw the Third World Caucus, the G.I. Caucus, the Women’s Caucus, the Workers’ Caucus and a whole list of other caucuses (any similarity to the word cock-eyed is purely deliberate) develop and grow under the careful nurturing of Cuban leadership.
Those people who felt that they experienced oppression due to their sexual orientation formed a caucus called the Gay Caucus. The very word “gay” inflamed every thane on the island to wield his magic knife. Suddenly evil chants appeared from nowhere in a deluge. “Divisive, unnatural, unhealthy, maricón, sick, cultural imperialists, bourgeois capitalistic decadence” and a host of other two-, four- and six-bit words came flying at the caucus.
I wasn’t quite sure what all them big words meant, but the witches whispered to me that nobody else knew what they meant either. We faggots have been kindling for witch-burnings for centuries. It was not therefore surprising that the witches I met in Cuba were my consorts, and sisters in struggle.
At any rate, we rapidly got the message that particular elements in camp were interested in denying us our rights to speech and assembly.
Act I, scene ii
Enter Gail, Bestest Macheterra in the West Witch
“Barefaced power swept her from my sight.”
I really didn’t think too much about it until a few days later while cutting cane with Gail as my partner. Gail, five foot and stout though she might be, had a reputation for being among the fastest and most hard-working cutters of us all.
Why, she was known to have cut alongside the biggest, broadest, fastest male cane-cutters on the Brigade and beat them to the end of the row. When she cut with me, she was invariably ahead. That’s why it surprised me so to look up and see Gail’s row uncut.
Gail was nowhere in sight, until I looked behind me. I found my beautiful and diligent sister sitting down by herself in the cane fields, crying.
“What’s wrong,” sez I. Sez she, “I can’t stand it. They won’t even treat gays like they’re people.”
Then Gail and I had a good cry right there, but it was a short cry because we were afraid people would see we were not cutting cane and think we were interfering with production or something. The last thing we needed was another accusation hooked on us. So we dried up and started whacking cane real fast-like.
It was then that the odor of shit first hit my nostrils.
Act of Gross Indignity Number II, scene i
Enter Red Bird McThane, Great Red Bird of Right-On Revolutionary Rhetoric
“Bring forth the Machoterrors, Children, for undaunted power should compose nothing but real males.”
UUGGGHHH, BBLUUUCCCKKK.
We got a few Cubans to begin listening to us and showing a few seeds of understanding. The Gay Caucus began meeting in earnest to plan for a presentation to be given in general assembly, the same as all the other caucuses in camp.
Before the plans were even underway, Red Bird McThane flew into camp (under the influence of evil magic, you can be sure) and uttered a decree, dropping all over our freshly laundered work clothes.
Cuban leadership stated that the Cuban delegation would not “be interested” in hearing a presentation by the Gay Caucus. When we asked, just for clarification, you understand, if this meant that no Cubans would be allowed to attend the presentation, Red Bird McThane answered, “Yes.”
The reasons given were:
No one is sorrier than I that Karl was so entrenched into sexist society that he failed to predict the birth of Gay Liberation or outline the full nature of sexist oppression. Alas, he did fail, and quite miserably, too. Just ask Mrs. Karl Marx for the inside dope on that one.
His failure is not surprising, seeing as how he was straight. The class analysis threw me for a loop, too. The GIs, the third worlders and the women didn’t exactly have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Working-Class Solidarity embroidered on their underwear.
At any rate, we didn’t fit the theory you folks had rhetorated. Seeing as how Karl was a big important revolutionary theoretician and we were just a bunch of lowly faggots, it was much easier to adjust or change us than the theory, especially if all you had to do was deny us the right to a legitimate presentation.
Red Bird McThane’s shit was beginning to smell like out-and-out prejudice and discrimination, and that’s a pretty bad smell for right-on revolutionaries to be a-dropping, now ain’t it?
Nonetheless, the Gay Caucus did get itself together enough to do a really fine presentation, complete with socialist analysis, platform statement, analysis of sexist oppression, original songs, skits, and little fat Ronnie leading the group in some outrageously campy gay cheerleads.
Indeed, no Cubans were present, except for two Cubans whom none of us had ever seen before. They sat quietly in the back and didn’t introduce themselves or their purposes to us.
At that point, I was paranoid enough, gay (ergo mentally unbalanced) enough to suspect collaboration of Red Bird McThane with counterrevolutionary magicians again. It sure did stink.
Act II, scene ii
“All the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten this air”
The smell was beginning to be strong enough so as to be ever-present. It was particularly acrid about five in the afternoon, Cuban sun being what it is, and lingered heavily in my nostrils, increasing in intensity every time I took another goddamn swing at that goddamn sugar cane with my goddamn machete in my goddamn blistered hand.
Somehow, even Spirit of Collective Work Perfume was just a little too weak to cover more noxious odors. Splits? Division in the ranks? You bet, folks, splits aplenty. We had ’em a dime a dozen.
The biggest of all was the split that started in the top of my little queer mind and ran all the way down to my gay little toes. I was being split right down the middle.
I had a choice: Either be one of them studly right-on revolutionaries and shut my mouth, or continue being a little cocksucker with a mouth too big.
At that point, I failed to see any real options opening up for me anywhere since Xerox wasn’t hiring faggots on their executive board this year either.
Yes, folks, that smell was really getting gross.
Act of Gross Indignity Number III, scene i
“The Congress was a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from conquistadores of oppressive Spain.”
But we weren’t finished yet. Not even halfway around the track. Then came the grandest, biggest, brownest shitload yet, dropped square on the heads of every queer cane-cutter in Cuba.
This time, Red Bird McThane conspired with counterrevolutionary magicians in a fifty-gallon cauldron. He called himself the National Congress of Education and Culture.
The witches stole the recipe and chanted it to me in secret. Here it is:
Double trouble in the sugar cane stubble,
Faggot burn in Gaydom’s rubble
Eye of maricón, blood of queer,
Add Song of Sappho, steeped in fear,
Spoon-feed Congress in dead of night,
Makes a bubbling batch of “Macho Delight.”
The hope was gone. The pass-off answers no longer worked. The contradictions blinked and blared like a fifty-foot neon sign.
It was not true what we had been told. Cuba did indeed have the “Homosexual Problem.” Cuba was not too busy worrying about sugar cane production and feeding the masses to deal with the question, as we had been told.
The Congress did indeed deal with the question. We were sitting in the main dining hall when the announcement of the Congress came on the collective television set.
Homosexuals had been pronounced “sick.” New efforts toward “rehabilitation” were to be instituted, with the worst cases to be treated in rehabilitation camps.
Homosexuals were to be purged from Cuban arts, were not to represent the Revolution at home or abroad. Gay Cubans in education were to be denied exposure to youth, and purged from all educational
circles. New efforts in sex education would teach the children “proper” ideas of human sexuality. The whole ugly brown pile was dumped by Red Bird McThane square on every gay head in Cuba. Cubans in camp cheered and clapped, hooted and shouted hooray, with many North Americans joining in the fun. The Cubans and many North Americans, convinced that every gay Cuban was directly out of the decadent ruling class and spent all his time drawing pictures, drinking wine and putting down the Revolution (about on par with the old watermelon stereotype of blacks), were convinced that justice had been done.
Meanwhile, gay sons of macheteros who were cutting the cane themselves were stricken with fear and terror. I know. I was there. I talked at length with those gay Cubans. I saw eighteen-, nineteen- and twenty-year-old Cuban gay men go rigid with fear. I listened to the bitter, frightened stories, to the efforts they went through to remain secret. I saw the despair, communicated in broken Spanish, about what to do (nothing), where to go (nowhere). It was apparent that the gay North Americans knew more about the problems of gay Cubans than did the Congress itself. Yet to speak was to be a cultural imperialist. We did not know Cuban culture. We did not understand the situation of gays in Cuba. We had no right to speak on the subject, in spite of the fact that the line in Cuba was a very, very old rerun of the same shit we had been eating in the States for years, a line born and perpetrated in the minds of Western imperialists. You have been rapping that line of shit ever since 16th century imperialist Spain and before. It would appear that the oppressed Cubans have assumed the same characteristics as their former oppressors. Ruefully, an all-too-common male failing. It was definitely the same old song, eighty-seventh verse. The Congress sounded verbatim like my ninth-grade health class in Port Angeles, Washington, good old USA.
Cuba, First Free Territory in the Americas, land of my socialist dreams, crumbling into so much dust and false revolutionary rhetoric. There it was, OPPRESSION, systematic, institutionalized, as clear as a Cuban starry night, as subtle as a fucking freight train running me over again. There was no way left to hope, rationalize my coming, or even struggle with the question. Clearly, we were not wanted, nor had we ever been. “Get on down the road, faggot. We got no use for your kind here.” Red Bird McThane’s third, gross, repugnant indignity came down and buried us in feces.
Act IV, scene i
“Aye, into the catalogue you go
for he-men as hounds, mongrels, curs.”
The Gay Caucus, pulling together with the bootstraps we didn’t even have, went into closed meetings. It all becomes kind of a blur from here. What to do? What to say? Should we stay in Cuba and finish the tour? Should we go home? Clearly, we were not wanted. We should ask to leave. What about solidarity? The Revolution? The political implications of splitting? We should stay. Back and forth, back and forth we went, stay, leave, stay, leave. The fifteen people in the Gay Caucus felt every inch, every pound, every implication of the contradiction and the division at least five hundred times. We made the decision to stay. We were tired, confused, oppressed, afraid. I believe now we made the wrong decision. We should have packed up our troubles in our suitcases and split, then and there. I wish I had it to do over again. If we had left, the Venceremos Brigade would have rightfully been left to clean up every drop of shit that Red Bird McThane shat. Instead, we packed it up and carried it home with us in our heads and it’s still sitting there in my dirty clothes hamper, festering and rotting. Yes, folks, we did the wrong thing. We should have told you where to get off.
Act IV, scene ii
Enter Lois, Woman Witch Which Saved My Ass
Ugly things happened to us after the announcement of the Congress. Really ugly things. I came into my tent one night after hours of deliberation in the Gay Caucus to find my entire tent filled with cold, staring straight men. My jefe was there, cold and staring, as were three Cubans from my work brigade. It was apparent that they had been working themselves up into a frenzy. Somehow, they had appointed one of them, a big six-foot-five tough-looking, tough-acting and tough-speaking one, to be spokesman, while the rest of them stared. Twenty silent eyes, silent mouths, as the leader proceeded to scream every indignity in the book. I was sick, puny, counter-revolutionary, disgusting, divisive, imperialistic, misinformed—the whole list, from faggot to capitalist.
I endured for a while as the entire camp woke up, wide-eyed, to listen to the tirade. I began to whisper, speak, and finally shout. We would still be there shouting (or maybe I would be dead, I really don’t know) if my good and braver than any of us comrade, Lois, hadn’t come marching into the men’s tent in her full fury of womanhood and proceeded to break the whole fiasco up. I owe Lois one. A big one. The one ounce of gay pride I had left I used feebly. I didn’t leave the tent. I stayed right there in my bed all night, wide-eyed, very frightened and confused, but at least I hung on to my right to a cot to sleep in, having lost all others to the Venceremos Brigade. Oh, excuse me, I forgot one. I was granted the right to get up in the morning to face another day of sugar-cane-cutting. And folks, I did cut cane. I cut a lot of cane that day. Anger can take you down a long, long row of really tough sugar cane.
Act IV, scene iii
Enter Sandy, Witch of Blackness
and Sorceress of Light,
and Jackie, Witch of Blood and Spitfire
“Treachery—fly, good Sandy,
grab your broom and fly, fly, fly.”
We had no third world people in the caucus until Sandy. All other gay third worlders had been cut by the Brigade before we got there. One was my fine friend and very revolutionary comrade Larry. He had been cut by the Seattle regional committee. It was a good thing. Larry probably would have died in Cuba. The Third World Caucus continually used our lack of third world people within the caucus to put us down, as if homosexuality were a white man’s disease. Sandy was a fine black lesbian who had come to Cuba with Jackie, her long-time friend and lover. Sandy endured this whole ordeal without ever showing one sign of a crack. Her soul has to be made of cast iron. She was offered the choice of being black or being gay. The way it came down, she could not be both. As the oppression came down heavier and heavier on the Gay Caucus, she swayed more and more of her support to us. After the Congress, she joined us.
One Saturday night, the wachi pupa came. Jackie came up to me. I could tell she had had too much alcohol. She said, “I can’t stand it. I’m forcing Sandy to deny her blackness because of me. What should I do?” I shrugged. What was there to do? Later that night, Jackie made an attempt on her life. She cut her wrists very severely with a razor blade. She called for me from her tent. I went. McThane wields a wicked razor. There it was, folks, blood. Running out of Jackie’s arm right down onto her Cuban work boots. Talk about your contradictions! A picture is worth one hell of a lot more than ten thousand words! But then she didn’t call out for you to come look at the picture, did she? Nope, folks, she did not. Nor did she call upon the revolutionary Cubans. Nor did she call out in solidarity with her class comrades. She called out for me, wherein lies the contradiction. But at that point, I was a single frightened scrawny little faggot. I couldn’t do nothing except see. And I can tell you, folks, Jackie has very red blood. She was packed off to the hospital . . .
Next morning, Sandy got up and cut way meeting. The Brigade explained that no gay people had been recruited for the fifth Brigade. None applied, you said. Then came some standard shit about division, lack of class-consciousness, blah, blah, blah. My, but Red Bird McThane even knows how and where to migrate. He followed me all the way back to Seattle, and swoops in for a bull’s-eye bombing real regular. And folks I’m getting really tired, weary and downright pissed off wading around in your shit.
Act V, scene i
Yet to be enacted in Birnam Wood
“Red Bird McThane shall shit no more.”
Look, like I said in the beginning, I don’t give a rat’s ass what your position is on homosexuality, if indeed you have thought about it long enough to write a two-minute decree. It makes no difference whether homosexuality is a manifestation of Nirvana, communist love, or leprosy. That ain’t the point at all, folks. The point is that you didn’t treat me very nice at all when I came a-cuttin’ cane. Boiled down, it’s at least a case of extremely rude manners you folks have, and it works upward from there. We have a right to fuck, to congregate, express our point of view and have a list of rights as long as three hundred and fifty VERY LONG sugar cane rows which we cut by hand, all of which you are systematically and institutionally denying. I don’t know what revolution you folks are fighting up there, but I’m for the one that’s going to make the world a better, more human place for people to live, ALL OF ’EM. Now about my laundry. Your shit has been clogging up my washing machine badly since I first heard the words “La Brigada Venceremos.” I’M GETTING VERY TIRED CLEANING UP AFTER OTHER PEOPLE’S SHIT, particularly people who obviously aren’t too friendly.
If you think you can resolve the contradictions by simply cutting (my, but there sure as hell is a lot of cutting around you folks . . . cut the cane, cut Jackie’s arm, cut gay people from future Brigades, cut the freedom of every gay Cuban), you are sadly mistaken. That’s not the way we do things down here in Birnam Wood. The witches know that McThane is gonna get his. The Gay Caucus left Jackie’s very stained Cuban work boots right there in the middle of the cane row where she stopped cutting. They are buried under a two-million arroba pile of you-know-what. The boots are labeled, Sorry-Folks-but-Somewhere-at-the-Bottom-of-This-Huge-Pile-of-Red-Bird-McThane-Shit-There’s-Bound-to-Be-at-Least-One-Cock-Sucker. Jackie would like those boots returned to her, CLEAN!! And when Jackie says clean, she does mean spit-shined. It’s the least you can do after what happened to our beautiful gay love. Pick up a shovel, folks, and start digging.
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