Considering Mark Carson, Homophobia & Homophobic Violence

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

I have been thinking about the recent horrific spate of anti-gay attacks in New York City, including one last night in Hell's Kitchen, and perhaps most specifically about the murder of Mark Carson, a young, African American gay man, who was pursued up a main Greenwich Village street, 6th Avenue, and shot to death in broad daylight. The attacks come as national public attitudes, at least as expressed by polls, suggest an ever-increasing acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and same-sex marriage, especially among younger people. They are occurring at a moment when the President of the United States has repeatedly and openly expressed gay-friend and non-homophobic sentiments, including in his second inaugural address (preceded by an out latino poet, Richard Blanco, delivering the inaugural poem), and most recently at his otherwise controversial graduation address at the prestigious, historically black all-male Morehouse College, which has had its own issues with sexual orientation and difference. We have just had the first male athlete actively playing for a major league team sport, black basketball player Jason Collins, publicly come out, and this weekend, another out gay male athlete, the white soccer player, Robbie Rogers, resumed major league team play for Major League Soccer's L.A. Galaxy. These assaults also are occurring at a moment when one of the leading candidates to become mayor of New York, Christine Quinn, is a corporate-friendly out white lesbian, and another, white Democrat Bill DeBlasio, is married to a black woman who had previously outed herself publicly in the pages of Essence several decades ago. Same sex marriage is now legal in Minnesota and Rhode Island, bringing to a dozen the states and federal districts where nuptial equality has advanced (and, with France's legislative adoption of same-sex marriage, 14 countries across the globe).

This is thus hardly a moment of post-queerness, just as it is hardly a moment of post-raciality or post-racism (or post-classism, post-feminism, post-ideology, etc.). Nor have homophobia, heterosexism, heteronormativity disappeared. We still have many mainstream religions, one of the country's two major political parties, a range of public and private institutions, and the law itself upholding an anti-gay ethos. Yet we nevertheless are living in an era we have never before experienced in this country, nor globally that matter, of widespread queer visibility, perhaps queer hypervisibility, which is to say, out queer people are increasingly present, representing and represented, everywhere, queerness itself, in and as discourse, is widely and actively produced, and the ways that this visibility, and the onward march of equality of all kinds--though primarily social equality--are transforming the society are sometimes difficult to apprehend even as we are living through them. And unlike during prior periods of queer visibility, such as the immediate post-Stonewall period or during the HIV/AIDS pandemic, though negative discourse about homosexuality still circulates and enacts considerable violence, it does so in a changed and changing environment in which some of the key negative tropes and figures of the past (that homosexuality is a sickness or disorder, that AIDS is a gay disease leading to certain death, etc.) are not always or no longer dominant. Moreover, queer representations proliferate. If the official ones, from Hollywood and the legacy TV stations continue to be narrow in terms of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth--to represent queer America, and the world, as homonormatively young, abled, educated, privileged upper-middle-class white men, mostly, and women--increasingly a wider array of representations are also out there, across an array of media, offering anyone who looks (or seeks not to) a glimpse into the far broader and more vibrant imaginaries that exist. We still have a ways to go to present the richest portrait of ourselves, but we are further along than we once were. If it was possible once to say I have never seen or known an LGBTIQ person or I had never seen an LGBTIQ person who looks like me, that is becoming ever rarer. It is still possible, but less so with each passing day.

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

It is this visibility, this hypervisibility of difference and semblance, and the self-legibility that they enable, that I think are at the heart of these attacks, and the best response, it strikes me, is to continue to increase visibility, to fight for it, to push whatever the short-term costs, because the long-term victory will be to recast and transform, if not fully eliminate, the conditions under which homophobia and heterosexism can function. (This is one of the key insights and grounds for the utter importance of the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia--IDAHOBIT, which takes place every May 17.) The homophobe is often unnerved by the embodiment of his (queer) desires, enraged by the visibility of their enactment and empowerment, in others, others' bodies. (I use the male pronoun throughout here though people of all genders manifest homophobia and heterosexism.) It unsettles him to see, to have to see, to not be able not to see not just a small band of abjected queers, onto whom he can project his disgust as a reflection of his desires, but an ever-increasing circle of queers, some of whom look like him, may be him, are him under other circumstances, whose desires and actions are not being self-regulated and self-policed out of visibility, or regulated and policed by the state or private institutions in the way they once were, out of visibility, who can present and represent and perform their queer subjectivities in ever freer and differing ways, ways he cannot bear to witness, because he may have to see them, look at them, read himself in them. Queer visibility destabilizes his own certainty, any certainty, his own invisibility, queers normativity and makes his own queer legibility that much more likely; it casts the light and reflection back on the homophobe, on the transphobe, because, as the old phrase goes, if you are secure in your sexuality (manhood, womanhood)--as if any sexuality is ever "secure,"whatever that means, as if "manhood" in particular were ever a stable or objective category--why are you getting so upset at what someone else is doing? We often get upset at what someone else is doing even if it has no negative effects on us or anyone else, or even the person doing the thing that upsets us, because we at some level are threatened, read our own actions, our own selves, in what we can barely bear, in what we condemn. This is not merely the epistemology of the closet but another kind of epistemology. What do we start to know if we look at others--and then look closely at ourselves?

And so we see the reactions, based on religion, based on ideology, based on strategies of biopower, based on legalisms, based on incoherence masquerading as a viable system or method of critique, against homosexuality, against gender instability, against queerness even if it is not and cannot be named as such. We see the actions and reactions, rhetorical, discursive, physical, against it. We see how a man (and his friend) pursues another man (and his friend) up a street, in a neighborhood known to be gay-friendly, a "gay" neighborhood, calls out to him and presses him about whether he (and his friend) is a "gay wrestler"--so specific, as if the embodiment of a "type" he may have seen or thought about or dreamt of, that frightens him--as a prelude to striking out, to killing that type, murdering the man who at that moment, in that moment, embodies that image. We see a young man harass another young man he sees coming out of a "gay" club, that he reads as gay, that he questions about being gay ("are you a faggot"?), whom he strikes in the jaw for seeming or being or performing as "gay," for being legible as gay, visible as gay, as a host of friends join in and attack the legibly gay man--what is the young man, what are the young men striking out trying to strike out? What do the bullies who torment queer young people hope to harass or embarrass or brutalize out of them--and themselves? What does the Family Research Council want to quash in its effort to quash everything that it even thinks is queer? What do Fred Phelps's church and its followers hope to achieve by protesting anyone and anything even seemingly connected with empathetic feelings towards anyone, let alone gay people? What are they trying to cancel out because they cannot bear to see--or see in themselves? Of course I am abstracting a great deal here; I am not talking about other fluid intersections, such as power in its multiple manifestations (inflection points), race and ethnicity (inflection points), gender (an inflection point), class (an inflection point), capital (an inflection point), and others. In fact I specifically have chosen not to take up questions of race and ethnicity, since I have noted on more than one online forum that commenters slide very readily and easily onto racist tracks (and tracts), though Jason Collins's coming out, like Mark Carson's murder, have thrown them for (a bit of) a (queer) loop.

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

Perhaps this is too much (bad, tired, tiresome, shopworn) speculative psychologizing. I am not saying anything many people don't already know, though I must admit I haven't (yet) seen many people saying  this. But also perhaps as a black man, a black gay man from a working-class background who lives with the persistence of racism and homophobia and heterosexism and classism and sexism and other forms of political, economic and social violence, as someone who is always aware of history and histories and herstories that are suppressed or forgotten, as  someone who listened for most of my elementary and secondary school education to Catholic priests and nuns expatiate on the dangers of homosexuality even as I recognized the queerness in those same authority figures, as someone who is always trying, striving to be critically aware and stay aware, while living in the present and understanding it, I know that every success is hard won, is not permanent, is a paving stone on the vaster and longer road to a better place, and that simply supposing that there is an easy or obvious answer to issues like this is always problematic, but also that not looking carefully at what's going, especially with accumulated evidence before you, also is problematic. It is not enough simply to say the homophobes are staring into a mirror and trying to break it, or that they are peering through a window and disliking (and perhaps liking, and thus fearing) what they see. But that is part of it; more mirrors, more windows exist, proliferate. To wit, to see, to look, in the oldest sense of those terms, is to know. It is increasingly harder for any of us not to see, look, at ourselves, or look away, and also not have that other, that reflection, ours, not see us, not look back.

International Day Against Homophobia + Donna Summer Passes

Today is International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO), the global day set aside to battle homophobia, one of the persistent and pernicious forms of oppression affecting US and every other society across the globe. As the late Barbara Smith wrote in her essay "Homophobia: Why Bring It Up?" (The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1993), "Homophobia may well be the last oppression to go, but it will go. It will go a lot faster if people who are opposed to every form of subjugation work in coalition to make it happen."

I've posted several times over the years about this important day, its origins, and even interviewed the person, Francophone (Martinican) author, scholar and activist Dr. Louis-Georges Tin, who played a key role in helping to establish it. In light of the recent anti-civil rights vote in North Carolina, the denial of judgeship to a gay man, the murder of a transwoman in New York, the countless cases of bullying and abuse of lgbtq children, teenagers, and adults, and the continuing furor that has followed President Barack Obama's and Vice President Joseph Biden's positive comments about same-sex marriage, it's quite clear than in the US, at least, though we have come very far indeed, we still have a ways to go, and at the root of all the examples I lay out above are what Barbara Smith and many others for decades have identified as a foundational form of oppression: homophobia.

But homophobia (and its attendent kin, heterosexism and heteronormativity) aren't problems just in the US. All across the globe, often in the face of state and popular opposition and worse, people are battling homophobia, often inscribed as religious dogma or cultural norms or traditional values, even though in many cases these "traditions" are as much the result of historical and political formations, and in places like sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, of colonial discourse and policies, as the "homosexuality" the reactionaries are fomenting against and labeling as alien.  So today and at various points throughout the year, visit the IDAHO site or affiliated sites, read up on the causes and effects of homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism, and do what you can toward eliminating these forms of subjugation and oppression. They destroy not just lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, but ultimately the lives of everyone.

***

Taking a tip from the ever-on-it Reggie H., and after my longish tributes yesterday to Carlos Fuentes and Christine Brooke-Rose, I'm going to link to his great blog, Noctuary, which features a post on IDAHO and on Donna Summer, who died today of cancer at age 63. She was without a doubt the Queen of Disco, a trailblazer in a musical genre that played an important role in the emergent post-Stonewall gay and lesbian cultures, while also serving as one of the soundtracks for 1970s African-American and urban Latino and working-class White folks more broadly.  Summer, a native of Boston, received five Grammy Awards, and had a string of hits, including "Love to Love You, Baby," "Winter Melody," "I Feel Love," "Heaven Knows," "Hot Stuff," "Bad Girls," "Dim All the Lights," "On the Radio," "The Wanderer," and the unforgettable "Last Dance," from the corny movie (that I loved), Thank God It's Friday. As Reggie H. says, she and other disco artists were the forerunners of a number of other subsequent musical genres, and despite the public backlash against disco (which did not exist in my house, where we listened to her and Chaka Khan and Tavares and the Bee Gees and everything else from R&B and soul to jazz and fusion), disco's and Summer's influences are still thankfully with us.

At her peak Summer was an icon, with a powerful voice that could pack ten different emotions into a melody, a public persona that embodied desire and possibility, and a figure who seemed to function both within the world of her songs as well as outside them and the limits of the society around her.  I was too young to go to discos during her heyday, but I can vividly remember skidding around a roller-skating rink as her songs boomed from the loud-speakers. In her post-disco fame religious conversion stage, which coincided with the eruption of the AIDS pandemic, she openly espoused homophobia, turning on one of the very communities that had brought her to fame. It was a horrible shift, which ultimately damaged her career as well, but she eventually apologized for what she'd said and done. One of the things I always consider with someone like Summer is that her behavior should remind us that homophobia can exist inside all of us, even in those who have been friends and allies, even in those of us who are queer, and so today, let's remember Summer and raise a skate (or a toast) in her memory, but also let's vow to bury homophobia once and for all. One of my favorite Donna Summer songs, "MacArthur Park"-"I don't think that I can take it/cause it took so long to make it/and I'll never have that recipe again/Oh noooo" (how true those words were for her, though she never really did lose the recipe, even posting a chart topper in 2010 with "To Paris With Love"):

IDAHO (Int'l Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia) + Harvey Milk Week of Action in Chicago

It's May 17, which means it's also International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, or IDAHO. The brainchild of Dr. Louis-Georges Tin, a black gay scholar, writer and activist (with whom I conducted an interview several years back, accessible here), IDAHO began 5 years ago, after Tin began an initiative, in August 2004, to create a truly global International Day Against Homophobia. His aim was for "universal recognition" of this day, and he proposed that it be fixed on May 17, "to commemorate the World Health Organisation’s decision to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders." Since May 17, 2005, numerous countries and groups within those countries have called for an end to homophobia and transphobia, and a push to decriminalize "homosexuality" has also spread. The idea behind today is an important one: what would it mean to fight against fear and hatred of and end legal oppression of LGBTQ people?

Central to the logic of the day is that it is homophobia that is the problem, and should be "deconstructed in its social logic and done away with." On the map below, in countries colored blue, there have been or will be events--marches, celebrations, parades, kiss-ins, public speeches--to commemorate IDAHO.

IDAHO: A Brief Interview with Louis-Georges Tin

Today, May 17, is International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), the one day specifically set aside every year to combat the global scourge of homophobia in its many forms. Louis-Georges Tin, an impressive young writer and academic, established IDAHO in 2004, and four years later, May 17 events dedicated to addressing the problem are taking place across the world.

You can learn quite a bit about IDAHO by visiting their site, which includes commentary, links and updates on IDAHO events in various countries on the IDAHO website.

In 2006, I briefly interviewed Tin via email, and here's the bulk of that interview (which I've translated from original French).

AN INTERVIEW WITH LOUIS-GEORGE TIN, FOUNDER OF INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST HOMOPHOBIA (IDAHO) - SUMMER 2006

Two years ago, a young, Black gay French scholar and activist started what has since become one of the most important global efforts against homophobia. May 17, International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), which organizations in over 60 countries now recognize and participate in, was the brainchild of Louis-George Tin (right, Patrick745, aol.video.com) a 32-year-old university professor and author who was born in Martinique and now resides in Paris. It grew out of one of Tin's prior projects, the Dictionary of Homophobia, an authoritative compendium he edited which maps the history and theoretical discourses of an issue that remains central to the understanding of the concept of homosexuality. Recently I conducted an email interview with Tin to learn more about IDAHO, other projects he's worked on, and his thoughts about the experiences of Black gays in France.

Q: To start off by telling me some things about yourself. When did your activism in LGBT issues begin?

A: I'm 32 years old, I was born in Martinique, in the French Antilles, where I grew up until the age of 17. My parents, retired today, were both teachers at the Rivière-Salée College, my native town. I studied in Paris, at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), and wrote a thesis on French literature. I live in Paris, and am now a university teacher, but the essence of my activism resides in my militant fight against homophobia and racism.

My first militant activities go back to the period when I was a student at the ENS. Despite the unyielding opposition of the school's administration, in 1997 I had created Homonormalités (Homonormalities), a gay and lesbian student organization. We organized parties, film screenings, debates, and conferences. I took my first steps there: I was initiated at that time into gay and lesbian studies and to LGBT militancy.

Q: In 2003, you published the Dictionary of Homophobia. What was your aim with this work?

A: The debates on same-sex couples in France provoked an avalanche of homophobic discourse, and I resolved to respond to this violence through a rational discourse, which attempted to deconstruct what centuries of history had little by little constructed. The essence of my reflection lies in this affirmation: the problem is not homosexuality, it's homophobia. It is an epistemological reversal that is also political.

Out of this arose the idea that led me to edit the Dictionary of Homophobia, a collective work comprising 75 researchers from 15 different countries, and published in 2003 by University Presses of France. For me it was a question for me of exploring homophobia in the world, across well-known theoretical systems (theology, medicine, etc.), recurrent themes (abnormal, proselytization, etc.), implicated institutions (school, army, etc.), famous victims or homophobes (Oscar Wilde, Himmler), and diverse regions of the world. It turned on the idea of a work that was at the same time scientific and militant. Apart from the dictionary form, and the choice of a dedicated editor, it was an issue also of giving the battle against homophobia intellectual and political legitimacy that was still lacking in France.

Q: How would you describe in brief the origins of IDAHO? How did you go forward in creating this World Day of fighting against homophobia?

A: The World Day Against Homophobia is, to be sure, the extension of the Dictionary of Homophobia. For me it's a matter of transforming theoretical reflection into practice, practically stated. I have mobilized international contacts whom I could call upon to launch this idea and to put it into play. In each country, there is one person or a group of people, IDAHO correspondents, charged with disseminating the campaign and coordinating actions, in whatever form they take: debates, shows, film screenings, street presentations, strikes, ceremonies, etc.

The interest in the World Day is precisely what puts the emphasis not on homosexuality, but on homophobia. That's not a big issue, but it changes a lot of things. It's not up to gays and lesbians to justify their homosexuality, it's now up to homophobes to justify their attitude towards them. What's reversed is the charge of the argument. Speaking of homophobia or of homosexuality, it's little bit of speaking of the same thing. But it's saying it in a different manner, and often more effectively.

It's why, in the numerous countries where it would seem impossible to organize a gay pride, it remains possible to organize marches against homophobia. And it's in some of these where this is happening. At the same time, a professor would be able with difficult to bring his students to Gay Pride, but he could by every measure tell them today, it's the Day against Homophobia. Within the framework of our courses in history, literature or biology, we'll be able to speak of this question. In addition, the theme for IDAHO 2007 is "No to homophobia, yes to education." The World Day thus has a pedagogical and political function.

Q: How have people responded in France? How have the government and LGBT organizations responded? Have they welcomed your new effort against this social problem? What was the response among academics? When did other countries and foreign groups join and link to you? Did you contact them? How many countries have become affiliated now with IDAHO?

A: On the whole, the reception has been very positive. All the parties on the right have supported the initiative, and the first minister, who's on the right, has promised to write this Day into the official agenda of the French Republic. Organizations have responded equally well. Since the first year, there have been more than 100 diverse actions in France organized in more than 20 cities across the entire country.

I've established a few contacts everywhere in the world, and the World Day of Battle against Homophobia is today recognized officially in the European Parliament. During the first year, in 2004, it was celebrated in 40 countries, and in 2005, it led to actions in more than 50 countries, from Canada to India, as well as Peru, Ghana, Lebanon, and Russia. Notably, at the time of the World Day in 2004, the first public LGBT rallies ever were organized in Bulgaria, Ivory Coast, and China. Feeling integrated in an international network of solidarity, the activists from these countries have surmounted their reticence, and they have decided to jump over a step on the occasion of the World Day in organizing diverse events which have been very well received. These are historic advances, and we are very happy to have contributed to this dynamic.

In a recent press release Matt Foreman, the director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has declared that his organization was ready to conduct the 2007 IDAHO campaign in the United States, which seemed excellent news.

Q: What do you foresee as the future of this important day? What do your thoughts about it in relation to the battle against homophobia around the world?

A: Right now, our principal project concerns the IDAHO resolution which will be proposed to the Human Rights Council at the United Nations: it would permit the decriminalization of homosexuality, which remains a "crime" or an "offense" in 75 states in the world. The resolution is supported by organizations such as the European Association for the Defense of Human Rights, the European Parliament Gay and Lesbian Intergroup, the International Union of Socialist Youth, the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organisation, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Federation of Spanish Homosexual Associations, and by personalities such as Jack Lang (former French minister of culture), Michael Cashman (Eurodeputy), Sophie In't Veld (Eurodeputy), Edmund White (American writer), among others.

This campaign benefits from a favorable precedent: the matter of Nicholas Toonen v. Australia, which would became jurisprudence. In effect, on April 4, 1994, the Human Rights Commission ruled in favor of M. Toonen, who had been condemned for homosexual relations in Tasmania. The commission judged that the Tasmanian law contravened the fundamental liberties guaranteed by international conventions, notably in terms of the respect to private life; after that, the legislation had to evolve in Tasmania. Given this history, the aim is to extend this UN jurisprudence to other countries in the world which still penalize homosexuality.

This battle will be led to the UN, and the international petition which accompanies it will be signable on our site www.idahomophobia.org beginning in the month of November. I sincerely believe that this campaign can be led with success. I also believe that it's a fundamental battle for liberty, and I'm ready to get involved to the very end.

Q: I know that last fall you also founded an organization to link all the black associations in France, the Representative Council of Black Associations [Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires – CRAN], which held its first convention earlier this year, bringing together more than 2000 people from across France. How did CRAN begin?

A: CRAN was launched in November 2005. It brings together more than a thousand organizations across France. An incredible thing, to consider that until then, there didn't exist a federation bringing together Black organizations in this country. Black people didn't know how to make ourselves heard, and no one hardly wanted to hear us, so it was really necessary to acknowledge it. It's in order to right this situation that we created CRAN, for which I am in effect the spokesperson.

Q: What are the goals of the black network that you founded? How do you think this network can affect or change the situation of racism in France? What's currently happening with CRAN?

A: Certain of our claims concern the past, and others the future. For what's in the past, it's an issue of facilitating a better knowledge of colonization, of slavery, of immigration, a great many subjects that the French know nothing about, and don't want to know. The celebration of Napoleon continues, the "national hero," and what's ignored actively is that he also reestablished slavery. 2 French out of 3 continue to think that colonization was a good thing. The contribution of African troops during the Second World War is always ignored and since then, people still refuse to pay the basic pension to the survivors of the former soldiers!

With regard to the future, it's a question of fighting against discrimination, whose racial characteristic is largely hidden in France. Whether it concerns employment, lodgings, or school, there is no program for equal opportunities, for positive discrimination, and it's not really known how many Blacks there are in the country, because ethnic statistics are forbidden. France wants to see itself as the country of the Rights of Man, but this clever propaganda need not create an illusion. France pretends to be blind on race, but above all she's blind on racism!

Q: In the US, there are black LGBT people for whom "gay" culture in general (one speaks of "mainstream gay culture") is alienating. They see it as a "white" thing. Thus, they've formed a parallel black gay culture, with different language, a style and practice well sustained by African-American experience. How would you describe the life of black gays in France? Are they well integrated? Are they visible or invisible, and is it an issue of the problem of racism in general? How should one speak of this situation? Are there black LGBT groups in France? How do they relate to black groups in general?

A: One cannot truly say that there's a Black LGBT community in France. French Black people come from countries in Africa where homosexuality is penalized, or from the Outre-mer [non-continental] departments, where homosexuality is completely taboo. That hardly permits the development of any sort of black queer culture. That said, in 2004, I founded An Nou Allé, the Association of Black homosexuals in France. It's a little organization, but it engages in political lobbying to denounce social homophobia in the Antilles and Africa, and to denounce at the same time the passivity, even the complicity of the French authorities in certain cases.

Q: Now, one sees the current riots [2006] and those of last year in the banlieue, and one supposes that racial and ethnic inequalities, in a system that speaks of a society without divisions of identity and differences, a system so to speak "neutral" with regard to race and sexuality, are central to the problem. But in your life and career, you've represented this nexus and defied the idea that one cannot speak of differences. You've experienced racism, right? Can you tell me a little more about this idea?

A: Some examples? Unfortunately, I have some to give you. I will begin with the first in my university career. Being at the ENS, I wanted to do my masters on Black literature, Senghor or Césaire for example. I asked my tutorial leader for advice. In order to not influence me too much, she decided to consult all her colleagues and ultimately give me their collective response. A week later, she came back to me saying: "All my colleagues are in agreement with me. If you work on this subject, it's professional suicide. The better thing would be to work on a more classical subject, and when you are around 40 or 50 years old, only when you have your post at the Sorbonne, will you be able to do what you like!"

The worst is that this is the position of the social politics of the French university; she was right. Well, then take gay and lesbian studies. When I published the Dictionary of Homophobia, the reactions I encountered were very harsh, and my university career has simply been stopped. I'll pass on telling you all the details, but yes, it's true. This work, it was veritable "professional suicide" as I'd been told. But I regret nothing. I know that often stuns people here in France. Nevertheless, that's how it is. But I didn't drop my fists. I continue the battle… More than ever before!

Copyright © John Keene, 2006-2008