Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 5

The civil liberties of many other political activists in New York City were also immediately affected by the events in Rockland County of Oct. 20, 1981.

Eve Rosahn is a veteran New York City political activist who worked in antiwar and SDS circles in the late 1960s, did Black Panther 21 political support work, and was active in the Puerto Rican independence and anti-apartheid solidarity movements during the 1970s. In 1991, Downtown asked Rosahn in a telephone interview how the civil liberties of political activists in New York City were affected following the Oct. 20th events in Rockland County.

According to Rosahn, it wasn’t like McCarthyism in the 1950s. The political repression and arrests differed from McCarthyism in that “the section of both white and Black activists whose civil liberties were violated was much smaller and much more focused,” Rosahn said. “People were intimidated by example.” Another difference from the 1950s McCarthyism was that the buzzword for the targets of the civil liberties violations was “terrorism” and “cop-killers” and, particularly, “Black terrorism,” and not “communism,” in Rosahn’s view.

The Grand Jury method of repression was also used to violate people’s civil liberties following the Oct. 20th events, according to Rosahn. “Since the early 1970s, there had been a political use of grand juries which, initially had focused on the Weather Underground, the non-violent clandestine Catholic Left and the lesbian community. Grand juries have been used to both collect intelligence about clandestine political groups and to create an atmosphere of fear and political isolation in the communities they focused on. The use of federal grand juries to subpoena F.A.L.N. supporters of Puerto Rican independence started happening in the 1970s,” Rosahn recalled.

The grand jury that was established following the arrest of the Brink’s defendants “focused on people who were political supporters of Black nationalism that did public work” and established a “second ring of oppression” for those political activists who weren’t falsely charged with involvement in the robbery itself, according to Rosahn. The post-Oct. 20th grand jury also focused on the personal friends of the people arrested on Oct. 20, 1981. “People who were subpoenaed were often just friends, and not political,” said Rosahn.

In Rosahn’s view, the U.S. government “underestimated the strength of commitment to non-collaboration” with the post-Brink’s robbery/expropriation Grand Jury investigation that would be expressed. “They assumed that people subpoenaed before the grand jury would cooperate with them and provide them with information, but they didn’t get that,” recalled Rosahn. “Only 1 of around 25 who were subpoenaed by the grand jury collaborated.”

Downtown asked Rosahn in 1991 why she thought people in the 1980s seemed to resist the pressure of Grand Jury subpoenas more than people had during the era of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and 1950s?

“There had been a good 10-year struggle among people in the Catholic Left, the lesbian community and in the Puerto Rican movement to establish a tradition of non-collaboration with the Grand Jury. And the Grand Jury investigation following Brink’s took in a smaller section of people—the people tended to be stronger and more committed,” Rosahn observed.
(end of part 5)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 6

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 4

Before being sentenced in September 1983, Clark and Gilbert had already been imprisoned nearly two years and Kuwasi Balagoon had already been locked up for 21 months. Gilbert recalled that “a lot of the delay was their security arrangements—which I think also became a boondoggle for the various sheriff’s departments to buy off the supplies and hire people and so forth that they had wanted to do to pad their payroll and supplies. One delay was that there was a change of venue. But most of the delays—you have to realize that Kuwasi, Judy and I did not put on a legal defense. We just put up a political stand and we justified this fight against a racist and oppressive regime. Under international law, it requires you to do that. So we didn’t even go through a lot of legal motions, the hearings and so forth that a vigorous criminal defense would have—and yet the whole trial took two years. I think the main factor, along with the change of venue, was their going through all their so-called security arrangements.”

During the long period of pre-trial detention, according to Gilbert, “They cut us off from contact with all other prisoners. And they tried to keep us as isolated as possible. They tried to use that to break people down. With Sam Brown, a combination of that and his medical condition, and his incredible pain and fear that he’d be paralyzed if he didn’t get an operation, did break him down. It was a very heavy psychological warfare that was going on with all of us.”

According to The Big Dance, after Sam Brown’s arrest, F.B.I. agents began to interview him in prison, without Brown first waiving his right to legal counsel in the presence of his lawyer. The first two F.B.I. agents to visit the severely beaten Brown visited him on Nov. 12, 1981. On Nov. 21, 1981, two Special Agents of the F.B.I.-N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorist Task Force also began to interview Brown in prison and these Special Agents continued to meet with Brown on at least seven more separate occasions. Under New York State law, however, according to Castellucci’s book, “once a defendant is indicted, no law enforcement official can interview him unless he waives his right to legal counsel in the presence of his lawyer.”

There is disagreement about the reliability of two people, Yvonne Thomas and Kamau Bayete, who were used by the F.B.I. as informants in relation to the Brink’s Case. Castellucci states in a footnote in his book that “I would be less than candid if I characterized them as reliable. Thomas has been in and out of mental hospitals. Bayete is an admitted liar.”

Although Castellucci does reveal certain civil liberties violations and certain inconsistencies in the Rockland County D.A.’s case against the people arrested on Oct. 20th, Gilbert does not regard most of Castellucci’s The Big Dance as either accurate or fair. According to Gilbert, The Big Dance “is misleading because it is written in such a detailed, factual style. I think that many people might feel that while the interpretations might be hostile to us, the facts are more or less accurate. They’re not.

“Before I read the book I assumed it was biased in the following ways: 1) relied on the police and informant versions of events and 2) based on that, put us in the worst possible light. But in reading the book, he goes way beyond that. He actually makes a whole lot of shit up, whole cloth. I saw it most clearly in his extensive account of Kathy and my relationship since this is an area (as opposed to some stuff about other comrades) where I knew all the facts. So much of it was so far off that I was actually laughing at this opera buffo. I would say that about 80 percent of what he presented as fact about us is plain wrong. And for most of that he couldn’t have any conceivable `source.’

“The purpose of the book can be summarized in one sentence: to strip any and all moral credibility from the revolutionaries involved. Beyond the factual fabrications, he takes steps inside our heads—as though it were factual reporting—to discredit our motivation.”

One apparent inaccuracy in Castellucci’s The Big Dance deals with the events surrounding the arrest of the still-imprisoned former Black Panther Party activist, Sekou Odinga, in Queens, which occurred at the same time that another African-American activist, Mtayari Sundiata, was killed near 127th Street and Northern Blvd. In the Oct. 24. 1981 edition of the New York Times, it was reported that “workmen in the area said” that Sundiata “was shot as he climbed a chain-link fence attempting to flee” and “his body fell on the other side of the fence,” yet Castellucci portrays Sundiata as firing at a policeman when he was slain.
(end of part 4)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 5

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 3

Attorney Tipograph felt that the activists arrested on Oct. 20th received sham trials because anonymous juries were used and the jurors were brought to the courthouse in buses with blackened windows. She also recalled that “the creation of a police state atmosphere was participated in by the press—as well as the Left.” According to Tipograph, “Most Left forces didn’t want to have any association with the defendants. And, in the name of wanting to disassociate, many progressive Movement people refused to protest the violations of the civil liberties of the defendants.”

Gilbert recalled that the post-arrest Establishment media coverage of the case was “like an avalanche to discredit us in every way. They created what they knew from their own police analysis—and the documents we’ve seen—was a pure propaganda creation: that the whole thing started with the revolutionaries just jumping out of the van shooting. When they know, that the method of this group was to always to try to avoid shooting the police people if they freezed and did not shoot back.

“They created scares in the community that all sorts of people would be coming attacking the community. They created fears that juries would be attacked, even though there was never any Black Liberation Army trial or Weather Underground trial or trial of any of these groups in history where any juror had been the least bit threatened or approached. So they convinced the community that anybody who was on the jury would be under grave risk for their life.

“And it was treated as a real setback for civil liberties in terms of what jury trials are supposed to mean: with anonymous juries, with jurors who were never given their names. They were rushed in and out of the building in buses with blackened windows, covered by paramilitary police, for the incredible scare operation against the public in general and against the jurors, specifically, and for a broader propaganda effect that the revolutionaries were just `thugs' and `criminals' and `murderers'. They had a hard time, in terms of our histories and what we had stood for. And they had to do things like having artists’ sketches making us look like psychotics. Weird stuff. Even some of the guards of the jurors said” `Jesus! You people don’t look anything like what I’ve seen in the papers.’”

Because of the pre-trial publicity in Rockland County, on Dec. 15, 1982 the Appellate Division ordered the Brink’s Case trial shifted to Orange County after finding that The Rockland Journal-News had prejudiced the defendants’ chances for a fair trial. The Appellate Court had determined that “In a 50-day period ending Nov. 20, 1982, fully 76 news articles appeared in the local press concerning the case. Thirty-two occupied front page space and were accompanied by more than 50 photographs.”

Establishment media in New York City also published articles which may have jeopardized the fair trial rights of the Brink’s Case defendants. In its Nov. 22, 1981 issue, for instance, the New York Times Magazine published a pre-trial article by then-New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s wife, former Times reporter Lucinda Franks, which was entitled “The Seeds of Terror: How Children Of Privilege Became The Weather Underground,” and which concluded “But those white radicals who massacred innocents at Nyack never seemed to move forth from that moment when they blindly assembled anti-personnel bombs on West 11th Street.”

The granting of the change of venue motion did not really make a fair trial more likely for Boudin, Clark and Gilbert—and for an additional co-defendant who had been arrested on Jan. 20, 1982, Kuwasi Balagoon (Balagoon died of AIDS while in prison in 1986, after being sentenced at the same time as Gilbert and Clark), according to Tipograph. “Essentially, people had been subjected to the same sort of press coverage in all the adjacent counties,” Tipograph said in a 1991 interview. A preliminary screening of potential Orange County jurors by Boudin’s attorneys had found, according to Castellucci’s book, that “half the Orange County residents called for jury duty had already judged the defendants guilty.” Although attorneys for the Brink’s Case defendants applied to have the trial moved to New York City—where the defendants were from and where their peers lived—the court denied this application.

Downtown asked the now-deceased Kunstler in 1991 why he thought the application to move the trial to New York City was rejected?

“New York City is too cosmopolitan a jury pool. The courts have held that large cities are more likely to overcome pre-trial publicity prejudice than rural towns. But there would have been less chance to influence the jury to convict. You can’t ride horses in front of the courthouse in New York City since it’s too cosmopolitan. They wanted the defendants tried in a rural area where the atmosphere could best influence the verdict,” Kunstler answered..
(end of part 3)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 4

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 2

Controversy still exists about the events in Rockland County on Oct. 20, 1981, prior to the arrests of Sam Brown, Boudin, Clark and Gilbert:

1. There is disagreement about what actually happened in the Nanuet Shopping Mall when the Brink’s truck was robbed. In its Oct. 21, 1981 edition, the New York Times reported that then-Rockland County D.A. Kenneth Gribetz “told a news conference at midnight that four of the robbers jumped out of a red van parked near an entrance to the huge two-story shopping complex and began shooting. `They just opened fire on them,’ he said.” Yet in 1985, Gilbert stated: “The story of the combatants charging out shooting at the Brink’s guard is a pure propaganda creation.” And in The Big Dance, John Castellucci wrote that: “Eyewitness accounts of what happened during the robbery are unreliable.”

2. There is disagreement about whether Kathy Boudin shouted at the slain policeman, Sgt. O’Grady: “Tell him to put the gun back,” after Ptl. Brian Lennon pointed a shotgun at the windshield of the U-Haul truck at the Thruway entrance and two other police cars pulled in behind the U-Haul. According to Castellucci’s book, Boudin denies telling Sgt. O’Grady that Ptl. Lennon should “put the gun back” and Ptl. Lennon left out any reference to Boudin’s alleged pre-shootout demand in “both his handwritten account and supplementary investigation report,” yet “testified about it when he took the witness stand during preliminary hearings in the state case in New City, New York, on Oct. 5, 1982.”

3. There is disagreement about whether Boudin was already in police custody prior to the exchange of gunfire at the Thruway entrance and whether she should really be held legally accountable for the deaths of the policemen who were killed after her detention. In an April 20, 1984 letter to Judge Ritter, one of Boudin’s attorneys, Leonard Weinglass, wrote that “The evidence clearly supports the contention that Ms. Boudin was in custody at the time of the shooting.”

4. There is also disagreement about what actually happened during the exchange of gunfire at the Thruway entrance. The Big Dance states that” Patrolman Brian J. Lennon and Detective Arthur G. Keenan were hypnotized to jog their memories about what happened during the shootout” and that Keenan incorrectly identified Sam Brown as the person who shot the two slain policemen in his Oct. 23, 1981 preliminary hearing testimony. Castellucci also states in his book that witness Norma Hill “at first gave an account of the shoot-out radically different from the one she would give when she testified” and “admitted picking the wrong man out of the hospital lineup during a pretrial hearing on October 18, 1982.”

Although the pro-Establishment reporter Castellucci concedes that “neither Boudin, nor Gilbert, nor Clark had fired a gun during the robbery,” then-Rockland County D.A. Gribetz decided to charge the three political activists with murder. According to Gilbert, “The law under which we were convicted is called `felony murder.’ And the reason it’s called felony murder is confusing to people who aren’t involved in the law. But it’s not the same thing as direct or intentional murder. I, personally, for example, was never charged with shooting anyone or even having a gun. It’s a New York law that if you’re involved in a robbery then you could be held accountable—every person involved will be held accountable—for every death that results if there’s a shoot-out afterwards. So that’s the basis, legally, for which I was given 75.” Attorney Tipograph told Downtown in 1991 that the decision to charge people with felony murder is always arbitrary and at the sole discretion of the prosecutor, and is always a political decision.

The now-deceased Civil Rights Attorney Kunstler told Downtown in 1991 that he felt that “an armed camp atmosphere” was kept throughout the Brink’s Case trials so that people wouldn’t regard the defendants as human beings. “Everything possible was done to make them appear like vicious animals in custody. This has been done traditionally in recent political trials and it has an effect on jurors. The imagined dangerousness of the defendants and the armed camp atmosphere that permeated throughout the trials influenced every juror—and the press reflected it. You overwhelmingly prejudice people,” Kunstler observed.

Kunstler also felt that holding the Brink’s defendants “in faraway jails” was part of a plan in which “everything was done to depress the defendants and decrease their ability to influence public opinion outside.”

Gilbert recalled that during his trials “Whenever at any time we were taken to court, people who were watching us said it was like the Marines taking a village in Vietnam. You know they had police with M-16s on rooftops. Traffic was stopped in all directions. It was wild. It was like a large-scale paramilitary operation every time we were moved to and from court.”

Although neither Boudin, Clark nor Gilbert had ever been convicted of a felony before, Nyack Judge Lewis refused to release them on bail prior to their trials. “In this situation, there wasn’t even a question of bail. There’s just no way that they were going to give bail. Why? We were seen as very serious enemies of the State. It was a combination of the politics and the fact that there was something above-ground and organized. That was frightening to them,” said Gilbert.
(end of part 2)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 3

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 1

“If Justice travels for ten years, she will never find shelter in the castles of the powerful.” (an old Russian proverb)

On October 20, 1981, Kathy Boudin, Sam Brown, Judy Clark and David Gilbert were arrested in Rockland County, New York, following a robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nanuet in which an armed guard was killed, and a shootout near the New York State Thruway entrance in Nyack which left two local policemen dead. The following day, evidence began to emerge that the robbery was a politically-motivated expropriation involving New York City radicals who had been activists in the 1960s Civil Rights and antiwar movements.

In a 1991 telephone interview, Downtown asked Susan Tipograph, one of the attorneys for the people arrested on Oct. 20, 1981, whether their civil liberties were respected following their arrest.

“No. Their civil liberties were grossly violated. Some were beaten and tortured and were denied proper medical treatment. They were denied access to attorneys. They were denied access to family and friends. They were held in intolerable jail conditions. It was only through lawsuits that some access to family and friends was secured,” Tipograph recalled.

At the Oct. 23, 1981 preliminary hearing in Nyack (from which the public was excluded), then-Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz claimed Tipograph was “imagining things” when she charged that people arrested on Oct. 20th had been beaten. Outside the hearing room, Gribetz said “there were no beatings by Rockland County authorities.”

According to David Gilbert, however, there were beatings by Rockland County authorities of himself and Sam Brown:

“I think the arrest was around 4 or 5. And we were arraigned around midnight. And I think for about 5 hours, I guess, I was being beaten. And then they tried to make me talk. When that didn’t work, they took out a shotgun and jammed it into my neck and tried to make me talk.

“There was a call made for lawyers. But there were hours before lawyers either got to us or were allowed to see us.

“In Brown’s case, they broke two vertebrae in his neck during that beating. And he was in excruciating pain after that. And for 11 weeks he did not get proper medical care, until he agreed to be an informant for the F.B.I. This is a medically-documented atrocity that went on that the courts didn’t want to hear and the media didn’t want to talk about.”
The pro-Establishment former Rockland Journal-News reporter, John Castellucci, supports Tipograph and Gilbert’s contention that pretrial beatings took place. In his gossipy 1986 book, The Big Dance, Castellucci wrote that “the results of the beatings were documented in Brown’s medical records.”

Gilbert feels that whereas he was just beaten, the African-American defendant Brown was tortured. “I think it is a political distinction between beatings and threats on the one hand—which are brutal and can’t be justified—and torture on the other hand, which goes further. It’s a more scientific, intense infliction of pain. What happened with Brown—maybe not consciously that night, but when he was left with two broken vertebrae in his neck and then not given proper treatment—that’s a real form of torture,” Gilbert said.

According to Tipograph, at the Oct. 23rd preliminary hearing, Nyack Judge Robert Lewis was not willing to listen to any legal arguments with respect to the civil liberties of the people arrested being violated, and he “pooh-poohed” her request that medical attention be given to Sam Brown. Tipograph was also not allowed to consult with her clients during the proceedings of the preliminary hearing.

Asked by Downtown in 1991 if it was unusual that the public was excluded from the preliminary hearing, Tipograph replied: “It was highly unusual. Nyack police headquarters was in the same building in which the hearing was held. And for five blocks around the courthouse, sharpshooters were on roofs of buildings. Blocks were cordoned off by armed police, so the public couldn’t even approach the hearing.”

Downtown asked Tipograph how she would describe the atmosphere in Rockland County in the days following the Oct. 20, 1981 arrest.

“Hostile. One felt unmistakably in a police-state,” Tipograph recalled. She also noted that she felt personally threatened by the hostility in Nyack.

The now-deceased Civil Rights Attorney William Kunstler, in a 1991 telephone interview, also recalled the post-Oct. 20th atmosphere in Nyack: “The atmosphere was so tense, you could cut it with a knife. Sheriff’s deputies on horseback were all around the courthouse and sharpshooters were on building roofs. It was an armed camp,” Kunstler said.

Kunstler had received a late-night phone call on Oct. 20th from the Rockland County Jail from a woman whose name he didn’t recognize, so she was told to call back in the morning. When the woman called Kunstler back, he realized she was Kathy Boudin when she mentioned that her father’s first name was “Leonard.” (In reference to Civil Liberties Attorney Leonard Boudin, who died in November 1989). On Oct. 21st, Kunstler went to Nyack with Kathy Boudin’s parents and experienced the post-arrest atmosphere.

Gilbert also recalled the atmosphere: “There was massive hysteria. I guess partly understandable because it was an intense event. Police forces in those areas hadn’t been challenged like that before. It was completely blown-up into this tremendous thing. Not only because of the intensity of the incident, but because it became a tremendous propaganda vehicle to scare people to build up police forces to attack civil liberties.”

Boudin, Clark and Gilbert had all been political activists in the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) radical youth organization of the 1960s. Gilbert co-founded the S.D.S. chapter at Columbia which helped lead the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt. In order to more militantly resist the Vietnam War and racism, all three joined the Weatherman political group in June 1969.

Since the March 6, 1970 townhouse explosion at 18 West 11th Street, which claimed the lives of three Weatherman activists, Boudin had been a Weather Underground fugitive. Clark and Gilbert had also been members of the Weather Underground. After being arrested by the F.B.I. in late 1970 and jailed for six months for participating in an antiwar protest, Clark became active in above-ground political groups in New York City. Gilbert and Boudin were lovers and had a child together. They would be married in jail after Gilbert’s 1983 sentencing. [Boudin was eventually released on parole in 2003, while Gilbert and Clark are still imprisoned, despite a lower court eventually ruling that there were legal irregularities in the way their trial was conducted].
(end of part 1)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 2

`The Lord Mountbatten'

The Lord Mountbatten, he sailed the seven seas
And with his ships protected tyranny
The Lord Mountbatten was so close to the Crown
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten, he liked to play polo
And party at night and play with the nobles
He married a fortune which gave him many pounds
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten, he won many medals
By sending many troops to many early graves
He earned the hate of Canada and caused many to drown
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten, he fought the Japanese
To reconquer the land that Great Britain had seized
He carved up India to collect some new titles
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten, he lived on his estate
And with his royal family, he lived like a parasite
He visited the castles and loved the palace sound
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten, he planned a new machine
Composed of armored cars which came across the sea
He held in British Defense, the highest post around
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten, he lived just like a King
His blood was mixed all up with the crimes of royalty
He saw Britain knife Ireland and he was so very proud
But the I.R.A. brought Old Mountbatten down.

And all the Irish people who fight still to be free
They all gave one big cheer when told of this great deed
And people chained in Africa who heard the explosive sound
Were glad that the I.R.A. had brought Mountbatten down
Yes, they were glad that the I.R.A. had brought Mountbatten down.

The Lord Mountbatten folk song was written long ago, after the death of Lord Louis Mountbatten (a cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and mentor to Prince Charles) on August 27, 1979, when a radio-controlled bomb exploded on the 79-year-old Mountbatten’s 30-foot pleasure craft off the northwest coast of Ireland. According to a 2002 book by a former editor of the Irish Times (A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney, page 175) “Mountbatten ignored the security advice to think twice about spending time there” and “his stubbornness cost him his life.”

In their early 1990s book, Elizabeth and Philip: The Untold Story of the Queen of England and Her Prince, Charles Higham and Roy Morseley revealed the following about the British Royal Family’s surplus wealth in the late 20th-century:

“The Queen secretly owned a major shareholding in Courtaulds…Exactly how the Queen was able to obtain American properties through her major interest in Courtaulds, which also had immense holdings in South Africa…is unclear. The Crown Lands remained `Crown’ property…The Queen Mother [now deceased] was said to own a building on Broadway in New York City…;…also holdings on Eighth and Ninth avenues and the West Forties from Forty-first to Forty-eighth Streets. The firm of Baring Brothers and Rowe and Pitman handled the royal investments, which included heavyweight holdings in such firms as Rio Tinto-Zinc and General Electric. Her banker remained Coutts…The Queen did not touch her own investments to run her palaces and staff…She wanted to have her allowance doubled from the equivalent of $12 million to $24 million…”

Queen Elizabeth was also believed to own stock in British Petroleum [BP] and in the British company of Prudential Insurance. (Downtown 11/10/93)

According to The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor by A.M. Wilson, Prince Charles' “income from the Duchy of Cornwall” made him “the 14th-richest man in Great Britain” in the early 1990s. The same book also observed the following about Prince Charles’ House of Windsor royal family spending habits:

“If the House of Windsor has aroused envy and rancour in the populace at large, one has to concede that it is partly because of their greed and their meanness…Every time the Queen or her husband travels abroad, a bill for traveling expenses is sent to the British Embassy of the country which she or he happens to be visiting…No ambassador ever questions the bills, which are often enormous. They are sent back to the Foreign Office in London, and paid by the taxpayer…

“…The Royal Family has not hesitated to flaunt its great personal wealth. The most glaring, and ugly, example of this is the ranch-style dwelling, built for a sum in excess of 5 million pounds ($7.5 million) on the edge of Windsor Great Park for Prince Andrew to live with his unfaithful wife…

“One could write a lengthy and tedious catalogue of the greed of the Windsors. The [now deceased] Queen Mother’s gambling addictions, and the high sums she has wasted on…wagers, would alone fill a book…” (Downtown 2/16/94)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 1

`Grit TV' Host and `Blue Grit' Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 `Downtown' Interview--Part 5

Before she began working as a Grit-TV producer-host, Blue Grit author Laura Flanders used to co-produce and host a non-commercial daily alternative morning news show called Undercurrents with Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight of KPFA’s Flashpoints (www.flashpoints.net) daily alternative evening news show. Following is the fifth part of a 1991 interview with Flanders that appeared in the June 26, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown.

What about homophobia in the U.S. mass media and the British mass media?
Flanders: I think there are many ways the British lesbian-gay movement is a few years behind the movement in this country…The British campaign against AIDS was homophobic in the extreme, even excelling the type of anti-gay coverage and public statements that were made in this country. There is still a sense of the “guilty” victims of AIDS versus the “innocent” victims of AIDS in Britain. And I think that that has been attacked in this country. It’s not eliminated, but it’s been attacked…

As far as employment goes, the British culture contains within it the kind of eccentric gay male character who is kind of seen as a sort of whimsical, almost lunatic member of society, but is seen: the gay lord, the gay aristocrat.

The profile of gay women, I think, is nothing like that. It’s nothing like as sympathetic or as charitable even as that in Britain.

I would be interested, actually, to know what the status is of employment for gay and lesbian people in Britain. Here, you’d have to do a survey to really know what the situation is. But I see homophobia everywhere. I think that even though the anti-homophobia movement and campaign may be a little bit further progressed in this country, it has a very long way to go against a society that is, in some respects, even more intolerant than the British one. I should mention, by the way, though, that Britain has something that we don’t have here at all [as of 1991], which is a weekly gay program called Out On Tuesday, which is broadcast on public television on a weekly basis. So maybe I’m a little out-of-date in my assessment of the British media. They have what we don’t have, at least in New York.

Why would the media be homophobic? What’s the explanation?
Flanders: What is the fear? I think, like anything else, the fear of the unknown…I believe in this country, I think, it’s a fear of sexuality. I think it’s a fear of one’s own sexuality, of sexual issues, of sexual experience, of sexual experimentation, of sexual difference. It’s the fear of lascivious lusts that many people don’t want to acknowledge. And because the homosexual community is defined by its sexuality, it, therefore, attracts the aggression of those who believe sexuality isn’t something that they even want to think about. I think that’s what it is.

I think it has to do with U.S. culture’s horror of sexual honesty and openness.

But couldn’t commercial interests market that sexuality in a profitable way?
Flanders: Well, they certainly do. Lesbian videos are a big seller as far as the straight male pornography market goes.

But that wouldn’t necessarily lead to a breakdown in homophobia?
Flanders: Not at all. I think that can be used to titillate. Certainly lesbianism is, I think, a tool for exploitation in the mainstream. But that’s not addressing lesbians and the sexual lives of women, sexual choices—the independent sexual choices of women.

Many women in the United States—especially many young women—don’t seem to identify themselves as “feminists.” The media has sometimes declared we live in a “post-feminist” age. You seem to identify yourself as a feminist. What’s the explanation for this—I mean feminism is seen by many women, themselves, as part of this “politically correct line” of the previous generation?
Flanders: What do I attribute that to? Again, it’s a big topic…But I think there has been a political retrenchment. There has been a conservatism that has been reviving itself in the last 10 years. And in order to really enforce the conservative agenda, feminism had to be attacked.

Feminism, as far as I’m concerned, is a politics of internationalism, is a politics of social reorganization, is a politics of individual and collective empowerment and works against bigotry, against violent solutions to confrontations. It is about massive social change. So it makes perfect sense that the young of today are being brought up to believe that feminism is passé, in the same way that communism is passé.

But some of them say “I’m not oppressed,” that the battles have been won, “the people who are complaining are those who just don’t have the skills”?
Flanders: Well, that’s classic, you know. That every achievement that has ever been won by a progressive movement has then been stolen from the history books. The development of the union movement is not attributed to local labor action, the action that bought it about. It’s sort of removed from that context, as if it’s always been with us.

In the same way, the presence of women analysts, such as they are, and professors and academics and professionals is somehow seen by the mass culture as always having been that way. As having been some gift of God, as opposed to the hard-won achievements of a mass movement—that had problems. A mass movement—that with no question—had problems. But, without which, I don’t think I would be in the position that I am in today. Or most of the people that I know, in terms of women, would be there…

We’re still fighting most of the battles. Right now, there’s clearly an assault on women’s lives taking place at the federal level. And I think misogyny is back and very strong. A strong force.

I would like to see little holiday camps with some of the young women and have discussions with them about their lives and what they take for granted. And have a discussion with them about where they think those rights came from, where those aspirations came from, then compare their stories with the stories of their mothers or grandmothers. Because I think it’s the word that frightens people, not the concepts of the feminist movement. I think we give up too easily if we shy away from the word. We’ve given too many words over to the right wing, already.

In this week’s issue [June 1991] of Rolling Stone there’s an interview with Madonna—who has certainly been on a lot of magazine covers. Lately, she’s been promoted as the “champion of gay liberation.” And she’s also been promoted as an example of the “independent, strong woman.” What’s behind the “Madonna phenomenon”? Here’s somebody who certainly is being publicized by the same corporate media that Undercurrents criticizes?
Flanders: I think that Madonna has an incredible public relations strategy. I think that she has commercialized her product with more success than almost anybody I can think of.

Did she do it herself?
Flanders: I think she probably played a very strong role in it, from the impression that I get of her. But I think she was also riding a crest of a wave, as far as popular culture looking for a kind of “bete noir” to focus on.

She is, I think, a champion of sexual liberation. She is not a champion of gay liberation. Because if she were, she could use her position of such enormous access to the public’s mind to really say things that mattered about violence against the gay and lesbian community—which she has mentioned, but she could more. About other political issues. About the politics of this country.

Somebody with that kind of access, with that kind of influence, could be a very good political figure without much fear of harm. And I also think she’s given a lot more credit for taking particular political positions than she deserved. What she does…manage to do is, in a very individualistic way, build herself into a cult. And if any benefit showers on others around her, it’s not much thanks to her. I’ve never seen her support other artists or promote other women or really show much love for other women. Even if she does exhibit a healthy dislike of men, at least in her interviews…

She consistently denies [as of 1991] that she has had any lesbian experiences. She consistently refuses to discuss [as of 1991] what lesbian sex might be with somebody who might know, that it’s more than just wearing dildoes. Instead, she uses the fact that she’s had “lesbian experiences” to promote herself—rather than to promote any kind of social change that has enabled her to be in the position that she is in.

Has she ever donated any of her money to Undercurrents?
Flanders: No, she’s not. And we would like her to. We wouldn’t reject it. We wouldn’t refuse it.

I must admit that there was some issue about her participation in the War [in 1991]…What she said about Schwarzkopf. Maybe meant in a joke, but that I didn’t appreciate it. I think she made a comment about how “sexy” he was. (end of part 5)

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