Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

There I was, waiting for the subway in my town. The transit authority has these info-placed dot-streamed announcement centers located in the ceilings of the subways. As I waited for my train to take me home, I watched the info-stream. It told me to "Report Suspicious Activity," and then gave me a phone number to call.

Recently this incident happened on this very subway line. Two middle-school girls, both immigrants from an African nation, were riding the subway home from school. They sat on the subway, holding hands. They were seen by some of their classmates, African-American teen girls, who taunted them, knocked them to the floor, beat them, and kicked them, calling them lesbians. Report Suspicious Activity. Holding hands were perfectly ordinary behavior in their native culture. On an American subway, it appears to be an invitation for battery.

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What is this "suspicious activity" we are asked to report? Teen smoking? Shop-lifting? Purse-snatching? Placing bets with your bookie on a cell phone? Peeing in a corner? Isn't suspicious activity in the eye of the beholder-- increasingly the School Monitor Of Our Entire Lives? Years ago, I was involved in some sort of demonstration that was loud and boisterous. Some authority figure, a police officer or government official, came up to me and asked: "Are you causing a disturbance?" "On the contrary," I said, "we are creating a sensation."

So many things went wrong after Ronni RayGun washed up on the banks of the Potomac with his criminal crew of The New Order. Human rights were trashed, minority rights were marginalized and ignored, and Reporting and Punishing were the hallmarks of their culture. Union smashing, the idiotic war on drugs-- the satirical paper The Onion had the best take on this some months back. Their headline was: "Drug War Over. Drugs Win!" Bill Clinton's administration has continued his predecessors' war on individual rights, gutting fourth-amendment protections. Stir in the Supreme Court's frenzied assault on workers' rights, free speech, etc., and it is not a pretty picture. And it has gotten to the point wherein my transit authority actively solicits me to rat out my fellow subway riders, who, by inclination, I would prefer to just let go their own way. It is a culture of intolerance and fit for the busy-bodies of the species, and I don't like it.

For sexual dissenters and radical critics and folks who are perceived as not-fitting-in, being spied on and reported is all too familiar a fate. We do not know how many gay men in the 20th Century lost their jobs because their "suspicious activity" was reported. We do not know how many were jailed on sodomy, lewd and lascivious, unnatural acts, age-of-consent violations. My hunch is tens of thousands, maybe more. The great silent minority. An injustice assembly line still functioning today-- most actively in the military. As journalist Doug Ireland informed us in June in The Nation, the Don't Ask Don't Tell ruse has been a trick largely played against women by Boss Man Guys-- guy makes a pass at female soldier, she refuses, he reports that she's said she's a lesbian and on and on. Thank you Bill Clinton for getting rolled, on your very first policy issue, by the Pentagon Brass! People yak about what a great pol Clinton has been, and he blew it. A for heart, F for head.

The issue of Blatent versus Latent was settled, I assume, back in the 1970s. But you have to look back in wonder at events, such as one discussed at length in the new bio of Liberace. Back in the 1950s, Lee sued a London, UK, paper which had run a piece stating that Lee was a homosexual. Lee won and pocketed a half million-- dollars or pounds, who's counting? Was that good or bad? Whatever it was, he worked the system as it was. Liberace played the UK, and in the 50s, gay men were a criminal class, and many were sacked from their jobs and some went to the slammer for their "suspicious activity." Lee's lawsuit may have been strictly a career move.

Every day is a battle between the better angels and the darker forces. I keep my own list of "suspicious activities." Appearing on a Barbara Walters special is on the list. Once Babs asked Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson (who had worked in the restaurant trade while in college): "Isn't it true, Rev. Jackson, that when you worked in that restaurant, you used to spit in the food of white people?" Where did Babs get that? Someone reported "suspicious activity"?

Anonymous phone tips. Whispered reports to government officials. Sound familiar? Tactics of the totalitarians. Spectral evidence. It recalls all those folks charged with abusing kids in day care centers back in the 80s-- the latest in the long stretch of "witch" trials in the US.

I'll end with this memory. It's the mid-70s. I'm on Fire Island at some uniform association "run." All these hot guys in uniforms. One morning, we are all in some large room, the activities for the day being announced. Standing across form me was one guy in a Highway Patrol uniform and next to him a guy in a World War Two US Navy uniform. As the activities chairman rambled about about lunch, cocktails, etc., the sailor quietly slid to his knees, opened the other's fly and quite noisily sucked him off. I thought this one of the most poetic moments in my life, a choreography of cocksucking and just the perfect signature emblem of the event. But, in this essay's context, for how many would it be "suspicious activity"? Just for the jealous, no doubt.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com