Ever since Paris Is Burning was released, I simply fell in love with Octavia St. Laurent. One day I hope to meet her in person or simply interview her, but in the meantime I'll have to just watch the videos until that day comes.
One thing I promised y'all I'd do a few months ago was let you know on New Year's Day which candidate I planned on supporting in the primaries and hopefully through the upcoming presidential election this November.
It was a tight decision that I went back and forth on a number of times, but I'm supporting Sen. Barack Obama.
While some of you may have thought because of my heritage that I automatically would have been supporting him when he first announced, you would be making an incorrect assumption. I put a lot of thought into this decision and I've been wavering between him, Sen. Hillary Clinton, former Sen. John Edwards and Gov. Bill Richardson.
Every one of my semifinalists had something on one level or another that bothered me. I've always liked Sen. Clinton, but the early HRC endorsement of her raises questions in my mind. In Gov. Richardson's case I like his broad based experience, but he botched that HRC softball debate question.
I like John Edwards, but I question whether he has the desire to be president. He and Sen. John Kerry in 2004 didn't fight hard enough to keep Bushie boy and friends from stealing Ohio (and the election) despite massive evidence of fraud, GOP African-American vote suppresion tactics employed there, mysterious voting machine malfunctions that came from a company whose CEO promised to do whatever it took to deliver Ohio for Bush, and the sellout secretary of state being the chair of the Bush campaign in Ohio.
In Sen. Obama's case, it was not confronting Donnie McClurkin's homophobia more forcefully at the South Carolina campaign event. He compounded the mistake by sending an HRC-recommended white gay minister, Rev. Andy Siddon to speak to a predominately African-American crowd that required not only an African-American minister to refute the idiocy, but one with stature like a Michael Eric Dyson, or a GLBT one such as Bishop Yvette Flunder.
I'd already heard him call out the misguided ministers of the Hi Impact Leadership Coalition on more than a few occasions, so I narrowed it down to Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama.
Another reservation I have about him is related to my long term experiences as an African-American of seeing African-American candidates be embraced by White Americans, but they are held to a much higher standard of behavior and expectations than they have for a white candidate, even if the African-American candidate is a higher caliber one than the white candidate.
An example of this was the 2006 Tennessee US Senate campaign of Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.
Ford, who is the current DLC chair, downplayed his African-American roots, ran an almost perfect centrist campaign, and built a 9 point lead going into the final week leading to the 2006 election. But as any African-American politicial scientist or any poli-sci student will tell you, when an African-American candidate is running against a white candidate REGARDLESS of party, the African-American candidate has a 10 point deficit going into that race.
Republicans will quickly dip into the race baiting bag of dirty tricks when they are losing as well. They know as well as I and other African Americans do that there are some people in this country who will not vote for ANY African-American candidate, irregardless of how qualified they are.
All it took was the GOP running the race baiting 'Call Me' commercial to sink Harold Ford's chances of becoming the first African-American elected to the Senate from a southern state since Reconstruction.
While I'm impressed with the fact that he's garnered a lot of white support in his bid, I'm still skeptical as an African-American that this support, what people say in polls and on-camera interviews will turn in the privacy of the election booth into enough votes in the primary season and the general election on November 4 to see him at noon on January 20, 2009 take the oath of office as president of the United States.
Yeah, he got elected to the senate in Illinois, which has elected an African-American to represent it in the Senate before in Carol Moseley Braun. Obama won in a landslide, but let's get real for a minute, he was running against Alan Keyes. I could have beaten Alan Keyes in a statewide election.
But despite my fears that this race baiting will happen again if he gets the nomination, I'm supporting him. I'll get an idea on January 3 just how serious peeps are about their support for him when the Iowa caucuses happen and the New Hampshire primary later this month.
If he can take these two events heading into the South Carolina primary, then I can begin to have the audacity of hope that America truly is seriously considering putting a African-American in the Oval Office.
I've liked him ever since I saw his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. He had a hard act to follow oratorically in terms of Rev. Al Sharpton and I was impressed by his oratorical skills. I also chatted with my family members in and from Chicago who had positive things to say about him as well.
I've read his books and I'm in the process of doing more research on his policy stances and his record. I think he has some wonderful ideas along with the entire Democratic field to clean up George Bush's mess and get this country moving in the right direction again.
And Michelle Obama would make an excellent First Lady. ;)
As to people who would point to his being only a first term US senator, Abraham Lincoln only served one term in the US House and lost a US Senate race in 1858 before he was elected president. Those of us who study history know how his presidency turned out. This current misadministration was the most experienced in history, and look how they jacked stuff up.
But it's all up to the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire to get this party started.
Whether they follow up their words with positive action or not, I'm supporting Barack Obama during this primary season.
I have a confession and an apology to make to the transgender community.
I'm one of the people that was alerted to the fact that ENDA was in trouble back in May and there was a problem with us being included in it.
I've gotten a lot of questions in the post-mortem over this latest ENDA disaster about why those of us who discovered what was about to go down didn't do more to get the word out to the community and possibly avert what happened.
What for?
This community believed every negative word ever uttered about me, AC, Dawn Wilson, Vanessa Edwards Foster and anyone either associated with NTAC or who didn't buy into the 'HRC is our friends' mantra.
So my thoughts were at the time, why burn up my money, gas and valuable vacation time sticking my neck out there for peeps that didn't appreciate it?
Why set myself up to get criticized by a community that only a few months ago was loudly calling for NTAC to disband and join forces with the all-knowing, all-powerful insiders of the greatest civil rights organization since the African-American civil rights movement?
You believed the hypnotic 'HRC is our friends' PR spin and we were the salmon swimming upstream against the prevailing tide of transgender public opinion. You failed to ask the skeptically critical questions when the news coming from inside the beltway was "We're included, it's a slam dunk."
That slam dunk attempt got slapped into the cheap seats by Barney Frank.
The transgender community has an annoyingly bad habit in its internal discourse of discounting, shouting down or dismissing any voice that isn't white or has a penchant for saying what it doesn't want to hear.
That tendency bit them in the butt this time. The transgender communty also has a major race problem that was exploited by our opponents on BOTH sides of this issue.
So when I (and others) were confronted with a situation in which I was being called 'crazy' and an 'uppity n-word' by a certain person being hailed by the community as the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, greatest civil rights leader since MLK, who they believed with all their hearts would lead us transgender people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land of civil rights equality and can do no wrong, then what was the point of sounding the warning if they believed that feces?
It would have gotten the same reaction from the transgender community that AC, Dawn and I got from Babs Casbar in the Longworth Building cafeteria when we told her during the NTAC Lobby day what we'd discovered. When she asked where we'd gotten our info and we told her, her reaction was, "What do they know?"
Okay, this person is active in the Stonewall Democrats, and she didn't know who the Congressional Black Caucus was or the level of power this organization had acquired since the Democratic takeover of Congress?
Babs did send me an e-mail after everything blew up that we were right, but being right and having the ability to say 'I told you so' doesn't make me feel any better about this disgusting mess. Obviously the CBC reps knew more and were willing to share with fellow African-Americans what your vaunted 'insider' legislators wouldn't tell you.
So much for the image of NCTE being the 'insiders'
Even if we did tell y'all, all you peeps who drank the 'HRC Is Our Friends' Kool-Aid would have done is shrugged your collective shoulders, did a 'There they go again' Reagan imitation and blew it off because that info came from 'those crazy NTAC people.'
But it's not like I and others didn't try to sound the alarm. I wrote about the possibily of us being screwed in my TransGriot print column in THE LETTER that was published in July 2007. I posted it on my blog as well.
And here's the paragraph in which I sounded the warning:
But one thing I repeatedly heard in several offices I visited during the recent National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) Lobby Days May 15-17 disturbed me. Several staffers informed me that Senator Kennedy’s bill DOESN’T mirror HR 1592 by including the words ‘gender identity’ and the definition for it as set forth in Section 3.6 of the House bill. I hope by the time that this column is read that it turned out to be just a rumor and the bill does mirror the one that passed the House May 3.
But what if that information IS true?
There are some gay and lesbian people that would be ecstatic if that happened. Some of them have expressed the attitude that the term doesn’t belong in ‘their’ ENDA bill. That’s a fundamentally short sighted, selfish and myopic viewpoint.
That's what I wrote in July 2007. As a matter of fact, Dawn, AC and I along with other NTACers were disturbed enough to consider putting together a team of lobbyists to storm the Hill unannounced before the August recess. But since NCTE was on the Hill and the community conventional wisdom was arrayed against NTAC, against our better political instincts we punted the ball and let NCTE run (and screw up) the show.
In hindsight, we should have followed our instincts, ran our clandestine lobby day, reported our findings after it was done and said to you NTAC critics who would have bitched about what we'd done 'screw y'all, we're trying to get this ENDA bill passed.'
Others may not be forthcoming about their mistakes, but I will own up to mine.
I apologize to the community for not doing enough to FORCEFULLY get the word out there. That won't happen again.
But even if I or others come up with the info and put it out there, whether you like it or not, you are minorities now. It is critical to your survival and it's your responsibility as American citizens and voters to acquire info, use your God-given critical thinking and reasoning skills to filter it our and act (or not act) on it.
An example of this was the 2006 Tennessee US Senate campaign of Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.
Republicans will quickly dip into the race baiting bag of dirty tricks when they are losing as well. They know as well as I and other African Americans do that there are some people in this country who will not vote for ANY African-American candidate, irregardless of how qualified they are. 
But despite my fears that this race baiting will happen again if he gets the nomination, I'm supporting him. I'll get an idea on January 3 just how serious peeps are about their support for him when the Iowa caucuses happen and the New Hampshire primary later this month. 
I've liked him ever since I saw his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. He had a hard act to follow oratorically in terms of Rev. Al Sharpton and I was impressed by his oratorical skills. I also chatted with my family members in and from Chicago who had positive things to say about him as well. 
I've read his books and I'm in the process of doing more research on his policy stances and his record. I think he has some wonderful ideas along with the entire Democratic field to clean up George Bush's mess and get this country moving in the right direction again. 
So my thoughts were at the time, why burn up my money, gas and valuable vacation time sticking my neck out there for peeps that didn't appreciate it?
You believed the hypnotic 'HRC is our friends' PR spin and we were the salmon swimming upstream against the prevailing tide of transgender public opinion. You failed to ask the skeptically critical questions when the news coming from inside the beltway was "We're included, it's a slam dunk."
It would have gotten the same reaction from the transgender community that AC, Dawn and I got from Babs Casbar in the Longworth Building cafeteria when we told her during the NTAC Lobby day what we'd discovered. When she asked where we'd gotten our info and we told her, her reaction was, "What do they know?" 
Even if we did tell y'all, all you peeps who drank the 'HRC Is Our Friends' Kool-Aid would have done is shrugged your collective shoulders, did a 'There they go again' Reagan imitation and blew it off because that info came from 'those crazy NTAC people.' 
That's what I wrote in July 2007. As a matter of fact, Dawn, AC and I along with other NTACers were disturbed enough to consider putting together a team of lobbyists to storm the Hill unannounced before the August recess. But since NCTE was on the Hill and the community conventional wisdom was arrayed against NTAC, against our better political instincts we punted the ball and let NCTE run (and screw up) the show.