I Know Why the Caged Birds Scream

(Originally published in Satya Magazine, February 2006)

Three women walked past the electrified fence and onto the Happy Hens Egg World compound, which confines 220,000 hens in rusty cages 60 miles west of Melbourne, Australia. As the women began documenting the deplorable conditions in the sheds, videotaping the sights and sounds of crowded birds in constant misery, they were set upon by seven male employees of the egg factory, demanding they leave. The women agreed to leave voluntarily but the men attacked them anyway, pushing and shoving them through the dim and dusty shed.

Patty Mark and Debra Tranter just after the assault

Hearing her comrade cry out in distress, one of the activists grabbed the wall of the shed and said that she would not leave without her friend. The youngest worker grabbed both her breasts and squeezed them hard, putting his mouth next to her ear and snarling, “that made you move, didn’t it?” She screamed and fell on the floor. The men grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her body along the length of the grimy walkway.

Crossing the Mammalian-Avian Line

(Originally published in the Nov/Dec 2004 issue of Satya Magazine)

Glancing out the window, I see two elderly roosters drinking from a water bowl in the front yard. Fauna has lived with us since 2001, when he arrived in the midst of a colorful crew of roosters who had been evicted from a Pennsylvania farm. Soon after, he struck a love match with Flora, a former egg factory inmate who was one of a group of hens we called “the Anarchists” in honor of their knack for jumping over fences and redistributing wealth.

Flora and Fauna were a devoted couple until she died prematurely, her body weakened by her experiences at the factory farm. Like many aging widowers, Fauna grew socially isolated, spending more and more time indoors and less and less time doing the things he used to love to do.

Junkie Pneumonia

Originally published in the Ann Arbor Agenda in April 1992.

Please note that all statistics are from that time.

In the late 1970s, while the epidemic known as “disco fever” swept through the U.S., an epidemic known as “junkie pneumonia” raged among injection drug users in New York City. Unlike disco fever, junkie pneumonia was not the subject of intense media scrutiny or public outcry. No movies were made. Few people were aware that large numbers of injection drug users were inexplicably dying of pneumonia. Those few who did notice these deaths did not feel compelled to investigate the public health puzzle they posed. Junkies die all the time. Nor did anyone bring this less danceable epidemic to the attention of the fevered populace. Bringing the epidemic to the attention of the public would not have made much difference. Undoubtedly, some people would have voiced the opinion that people who shoot drugs deserve to die while most would have shrugged and kept dancing. Investigating the epidemic as the potential public health menace it was, however, could have had a profound impact on hundreds of thousands of lives. Had anyone bothered to investigate the deaths of these drug users, they would have found that they had an immune system disorder that we now call AIDS.

Re-Membering Thanksgiving

Gloating and Gluttony Then and Now
by pattrice jones
Originally published 2004 on various IndyMedia sites.
Revises 2003 essay originally published by Press Action.

Thanksgiving, 2003 — Bush the executioner grins and pardons a turkey before flying to Iraq. He’s earned that self-satisfied smirk. All over his United States, citizens celebrate conquest over platters of flesh. Too full of turkey to think and too full of themselves to question, they let out their belts and watch TV. Tomorrow they go shopping!

***

“Body parts are everywhere!” That’s what one US soldier had to say about the saddest city in Iraq, according to an AFP report. It’s also an apt description of the state of US dinner tables during the festival of gloating and gluttony known as Thanksgiving.

This year, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving in the wake of the taking of Falluja. Waving “drumsticks” and fighting for “wishbones,” complacent Christians will gorge themselves without fear, safe from the threats of gay marriage and Iraqi self-determination. Stuffing themselves beyond satiation, they and their children will partake of the proud Puritanical tradition of ruthless, reckless expansion.

Colonization is nothing to crow about. When Columbus blundered into a hemisphere populated by 70-100 million people and countless unique species of flora and fauna, he set into motion a chain reaction of repression and rebellion that continues to this day.

Renters Strike Back: The All-City Rent Strike of 1969-71

by pattrice jones

Originally published in the February 1999 issue of Ann Arbor’s alternative newspaper, Agenda.

“Landlords have money and power… tenants have each other.”

With those words, a group of University of Michigan students launched an event that reverberates to this day. The Ann Arbor Tenants Union’s “all-city rent strike” of 1969-71 began 30 years ago this month and may be said to have never ended. Every day, some Michigan tenants exercise their right to withhold rent in response to poor housing conditions or other problems with their landlords. Most are unaware of the valiant efforts of the activists who secured that right 30 years ago or of the steadfast struggles of those who have sought to maintain tenants’ rights in the decades since. That’s too bad, because the story is instructive as well as dramatic.

Jill Johnston: (Con) Founding Mother of the Lesbian Nation

by pattrice jones

This profile originally appeared in 1999 as a featured article in the short-lived webzine LesbiaNation.

To say that Jill Johnston is a writer who was one of the earliest and most influential lesbian feminists is a little like saying RuPaul is a singer who had a hit record and big hair…true enough, as far as it goes, but by no means the whole story. Johnston’s 1973 Lesbian Nation inspired a generation of lesbian activists (not to mention the name of a certain website), but the book is both more and less than the political treatise one might expect. Similarly, Johnston herself is a paradoxical figure who contradicts all stereotypes about lesbian feminism.

Johnston was a popular columnist for New York’s Village Voice when she gained notoriety by becoming the first mass media journalist to come out as a lesbian in print. She immediately became a center of controversy not only in the “straight” world but also among feminists and early gay and lesbian activists, such as the members of Manhattan’s Gay Liberation Front.

Many factors fueled the fires. As Johnston notes in Lesbian Nation, her “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution” was not yet backed by a sound political understanding. At the same time, she stepped right into ongoing struggles between homosexual and heterosexual feminists over the role of lesbians in the feminist movement.