Leaving India remains an important and clear-eyed look at the realities behind the diasporas of our modern world.
![Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by [Hajratwala, Minal]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51f4faZ6KgL.jpg)
![Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk by [Okrant, Robyn]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51-l616CC6L.jpg)
At first glance, Winston’s Internet Café is a coffeehouse like many others. Filled with comfortable leather armchairs and sofas and nooks where customers might browse the internet or catch up with friends, the place offers the kind of public solitude that is a hallmark of café culture. In one corner, two computers offer free access to customers. A long L-shaped bar is made of concrete, and both it and the dark wood cabinets gleam softly under the care of owner Jim Stephens, a long-time carpenter who made all the woodwork himself.
“What’s queer about sex offenders? Are sex offenders the new queers?” That was the provocative title of an all-day conference on sex-offender laws, hosted by the University of Chicago and the Center on Halsted and held at the Center May 27. Speakers included literary theorists, activists, artists, legal scholars and political scientists.
When E. Patrick Johnson conceived his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History, he did not think the project would ever extend beyond the printed word. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2008, the book was a collection of oral narratives. But halfway through the research and interviewing process, Johnson realized he would need to do more. As he explained to Windy City Times in a 2008 interview: “[H] earing them tell their stories in their unique ways suggested to me that the immediacy of the telling had to be recaptured in a way that reading it on a page would not.”
Thirteen LGBTQ protesters staged a sit-in at U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin’s Chicago office May 20. They went to insist that the senator sign a pledge affirming his support for a transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) . The senator was not in his office, but the activists refused to leave unless the pledge was signed; Durbin did not oblige. The pledge required Durbin to “agree to stand before [his colleagues in the U.S. Senate and the media to forcefully declare the urgent need for a transgender-inclusive ENDA in 2010.”
Gender JUST carried out its third direct action against CPS May 13. The local grassroots organization has been waging a campaign for a grievance process that would allow LGBTQ students in Chicago public schools (CPS) to record the harassment they suffer and for greater awareness facing these students overall. According to the group, it has been unsuccessfully attempting for nearly a year to get Ron Huberman, chief executive officer of CPS, to agree to the institution of this process. Finally, feeling that it was being stalled and that talks had broken down, the group has, in recent weeks, been engaging in direct action protests against CPS and Huberman.
“Radical queers haven’t yet figured out how to use film as politics; we’ve done it with performance and spoken word, but not with film. The assimilationists are winning the war because they’ve learned how to use film as propaganda by wrapping their message in the preferred discourse of civil rights.”
