Monday, November 28, 2016

In Solidarity With My Gay Brothers and Sisters...

...I recommend that we petition the City and County of San Francisco to rename Castro Street and the neighborhood known as The Castro.  After all, how can a gay enclave share a name with a notorious homophobe?
Fidel Castro was many things: a revolutionary, a communist, a garrulous orator. Amid the fawning encomia released upon his long-overdue death at the age of 90, it should never be forgotten that he was also an oppressor, torturer, and murderer of gay people.

“We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant,” Castro told an interviewer in 1965. “A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.”

In the eyes of Castro and his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara—who frequently referred to gay men as maricones, “faggots”—homosexuality was inherently counterrevolutionary, a bourgeois decadence. To a traditional Latin American machismo that viewed gayness pejoratively, they married an ideological fixation treating it as politically undesirable...

Though the Cuban regime closed down the UMAPs in the late 1960s, it continued to repress gay men as ideologically subversive elements. Openly homosexual people were prevented from joining the Communist Party and fired from their jobs. One of the country’s most distinguished writers, Reinaldo Arenas, recounted the prison experience he and countless other gay men endured in his memoir Before Night Falls. “It was a sweltering place without a bathroom,” he wrote. “Gays were not treated like human beings, they were treated like beasts. They were the last ones to come out for meals, so we saw them walk by, and the most insignificant incident was an excuse to beat them mercilessly.”

Gays comprised a significant portion of the 125,000 Cubans (“worms,” in Fidel Castro’s words) permitted to leave the island for the United States as part of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift.
You know, just in case you know of some leftie who worships this now-dead human piece of excrement.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's what the left has to challenge in regards to their values of accepting and celebrating all minority identities: Eventually some are going to clash (ie Radical Muslims and the LGBT community), and the left will lose regardless of which "side" they have to choose.

PhillipMarlowe said...

Castro Street was named for José Castro (1808–1860), a Californio leader of Mexican opposition to U.S. rule in California in the 19th century, and alcalde of Alta California from 1835 to 1836.[5] The neighborhood now known as the Castro was created in 1887 when the Market Street Railway Company built a line linking Eureka Valley to downtown.

Darren said...

Phillip Marlowe:

All true, but also irrelevant. As I said, the area "shares a name" with a notorious homophobe, and that's enough for a 2-minute hate and a renaming.

PhillipMarlowe said...

Not too irrelevant.
Joes Castro's opposition to the US trumps the other Castro, unless we dig up the evidence of Jose's attacks in LGBT community