GayPatriot

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“Che” Chic — Anti-Americanism Trumps Concern for Persecuted Gays

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In The Washington Blade, columnist Constantino Diaz-Duran wonders at the number of gay men in Washington, D.C. sporting “Che” Guevara T-shirts. Not only was Che, a supposedly idealistic revolutionary, a “a cold-blooded killing machine,” but he also helped bring to power one of the most anti-gay leaders of the Western Hemisphere — Fidel Castro.

Indeed, many gay people wax eloquent over this tyrant just as they revere his bloodthirsty comrade-in-arms. When Castro took over in Cuba, he set up forced labor camps where he imprisoned what these Communists “considered the scum of society,” including, among others, gay people.

It seems that when it comes to supporting foreign tyrants, many gay activists, like others on the left, are more interested in that leader’s animus to the U.S. than his attitude toward gay people. Check out Diaz-Duran’s column and wonder with him at the eagerness of many gay leftists to adopt anti-American icons, even those who persecute their fellows.

Comments

  2. The cult of Castro and Che (and Mao) reveals something about the left; at their core, they despise freedom and democracy. They despise that people, given freedom, will make choices they don’t approve of. They despise that people, given democracy, will not vote to implement their socialist utopia.

  3. LOL….what’s particularly funny is that I’m sure several of these gay men went and saw Before Night Falls, too.

    V the K is right about the motivation of the Left. What he doesn’t mention is their method.

    Most of these men no doubt have zero idea that Che Guevara was one of the prime supporters of and masterminds behind the Castro regime and all of its abuses in Cuba. They’re more likely to think he’s got a famous photo and was the narrator for “Evita”.

    Why? Because liberals control the US educational system. They dumb down the public school curriculum and install their unions to protect those incompetent to teach, but devoted to leftist and Democratic causes, to ensure a continual flow of dollars into their political coffers. They hide their ideologues out as university professors, where if Guevara is mentioned at all, it’s as a romantic revolutionary.

    In short, the Left depends on the stupid to support it and its idols like Che, and if there aren’t enough stupid, they’ll make more.

  4. Conversely, isn’t it true that you support people of influence who treat gays as second class citizens such as George Bush, Alan Keyes, Jean Schmidt, Phyllis Schlafley, Donald Rumsfeld etc. in favor of your pro-war anti-humanitarian Republican party?

    And isn’t it true that you belong to and support the political party that is the home of other people of influence who would do us serious harm if they were to come to power such as Pat Robertson, Senator Carson from Oklahoma, J.C. Watts, Dick Armey, Dana Rohrbacher, etc.??

    So isn’t this just the pot calling the kettle black.

  5. Finally, I serious doubt that many of the gays wearing CHE T-shirts
    even know anything about the man. If you understand people “into
    fashion” –which I most definitely am not– they don’t really care
    about history… it’s just “the look”… kind of like “Jack” on Will & Grace…
    It’s just a fad… Don’t worrry guy, you’ll see that when the fad
    passes, it won’t mean that urban gays are giving up on communist
    revolutionaries… it just means that the look has lost its hipness….
    and then your blood pressure will come down again…
    Dan

  6. “It’s just a fad”, sure, but an insidious one that pops up again and again, and that reflects a sick basic ignorance of who Che was.

    What would you think of a gay guy who walked around in a Hitler T-shirt? As if Hitler hadn’t killed gays, and millions of others as well?

    That’s what we’re talking about here. Che, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Saddam – all in the same category, of history’s very worst killers – and gay-haters.

    Finally – in terms of pot calling kettle or whatever – Dan, that was incredibly dumb. Not making you look good at all. Last time I checked, none of the people you mentioned had killed any gays, nor proposed to kill any. Get a clue.

  7. Let me highly recommend this product, regarding Che.

    I have no financial connection to the vendor – I’m just a highly satisfied customer. They delivered. It’s good quality. Everywhere I go in the SF area, people do double-takes, and (in a great sign) many come up to compliment me and ask where I got it.

  8. Mr. Cobb, I don’t think you understand the issue.

    Che Guevara and Fidel Castro DID put and ARE (at least Fidel) putting people into concentration camps because of their political views and their sexual orientation. There is physical and photographic evidence for the fact.

    Despite the screaming by you and others about existing concentration camps for gays and “extermination” plans that the radical right allegedly holds, you have yet to provide a single shred or iota of proof of these.

    Since you want to claim these are comparable, show us the proof. Back up the outrageous statements about existing concentration camps for gays. Put your money where your mouth is.

    Meanwhile, when it comes to treating gays as second-class citizens, what exactly would that include? Would it include supporting laws and amendments to strip gays of rights, like Democrats like John Kerry, Harry Reid, Inez Tenenbaum, Harold Ford Jr., Robert Byrd, and others do? 0r will you, like your fellow Republican-haters, call that “pro-gay” and “gay-supportive”?

  9. Actually, Dan Cobb, I never claimed to support Alan Keyes, Pat Robertson or their ilk on this blog, indeed, took issue with Mr. Keyes on at least one occasion.

    But, I think President Bush and Don Rumself have done a lot to advance humanitarian interests, particularly by using our military to liberate the people of Iraq and Afghanistan from oppressive tyrannies.

    If you suggest that I support such people merely because we belong to the same political party, then I’ll start criticizing all Democrats for espousing the view of All Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Boxer and Dick Durbin.

  12. I am so disappointed when I see people who don’t even know how evil he was wearing his shirts. I do however, take some solace in the knowledge that capitalists are now making money off his image. 🙂

    And one can only hope that the t-shirts emblazoned with the image of the leader of the workers’ revolution were fabricated in some sweatshop by Central Americans at a dime-a-day wage.

    That, my friends, is what Shakespeare would have called irony.

    You can read more on Che by Jay Nordlinger at National Review Online. He often writes about the “Che Chic” phenomenon and the dolts who partake.

    Oh, and I have several of the anti-Che t-shirts mentioned above and often get the same reaction. (“Viva Freedom!”) After you’ve shopped at that outstanding online store, go to mine (follow the link on my name at the bottom of my post) and BUY BUY BUY!

    God, I love capitalism. Eat your heart out, Che. (Oh yea, you too, Fidel!)

  13. God, I love capitalism. Eat your heart out, Che. (Oh yea, you too, Fidel!)

    Don’t forget Michael Moore. I got the biggest kick out of this socialist from DU excusing MM owning stock in Halliburton:

    This is no different than Moby doing a car commercial and donating some of the money to green energy development. Moore is his own movement. If he feeds off the droppings of Halliburton and that nourishes his belly [the new MM diet; available in bookstores now] one day closer to the release of his next film, then I say, damn Marx was right. Imagine a bunch of greens becoming majority shareholders in the company. Imagine the power they could wield for positive humane purposes[Imagining a bunch of Greens with some green is funny enough].

    Taking the means of the production of wealth in your hands and smacking the jackasses around with it. Nothing more nothing less. [and once they got it they would be complaining about the stock price like some stinkin’ Republican]

  16. The American left is so anti-American it’s not a surprise when gay leftists admire tyrants. John Aravosis’ Americablog, for example, won’t even acknowledge Iran’s harsh treatment of gays — I suppose because that would be counter to that blog’s contention that the only evil men in the world are George Bush and Tony Blair.

    Dan Cobb’s comments are a stretch. The far-right wackos in charge of the Republican Party may hate gays, may want to strip gays of their civil rights, but haven’t yet advocated concentration camps and death sentences. Although if a cruise ship full of gays sank in the Atlantic, I’d guess that James Dobson, Allan Keyes and Pat Robertson wouldn’t mourn their loss.

    But a word of caution to Calarato in #6. Pat Robertson once set a goal of taking over the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and enough state legislatures to meet in convention to amend the U.S. constitution. If that were to ever happen — and the wackos are part way there — gays might not be safe. About the same time the good reverend set those goals, a Republican Party county convention in Californa adopted a resolution asking that the death penalty be extended to include abortion doctors and “homosexuals”.

  18. (since the only suggested piece of real evidence, in the final sentence, bears no logical relationship to the claims / innuendo of the preceding sentences; nor to comments 4-6; assuming of course that it is evidence at all, not a ‘gay legend’)

  19. #17 — Agreed. Pat Robertson is a nobody, with a smaller audience than Al Franken, and yet the left obsesses over him. Republicans do not put extremist whackos who fail to win a single presidential primary in charge of their party. Democrats do.

  23. Also keep in mind that it’s all kinds of people (conservative and liberal) from the US who travel to Canada so that they can go and vacation in Cuba without violating US law.

    Guess they don’t mind going to a country where kids are put into indoctrination camps at a young age so they be brainwashed to believe Castro is the only thing that matters. How about we bring democracy to a dictatorship 90 miles from our shores?

    #16: You’re 3rd paragraph is quite true….maybe not about Pat Robertson per say, but the Republican Party has become dependent upon ultra right wing, religious conservatives to help increase its numbers and get republicans into elected office. Many of these religious beliefs include anti-gay, anti-woman dogma (among other things). Who’s to say that one day the bill won’t come due from them if they feel they’re not getting out of elected republicans that they were promised? Ultimately religious rule and democracy don’t mix.

  24. but the Republican Party has become dependent upon ultra right wing, religious conservatives to help increase its numbers and get republicans into elected office.

    If that were even remotely true, it sure would beat the hell out of being dependent on depressed America hating, Commie loving, fascist neosocialists.

  26. Frankly, all this hysteria over ‘Theocracy’ basically amounts to left-liberal extremists getting their panties into a wad over the Bush admin’s 1.) opposition to same-sex marriage, 2.) support for parental notification on abortion, 3.) keeping ‘Under God’ in the pledge of allegiance, 4.) allowing faith-based organizations to receive government grants to perform non-religious welfare work. By the definition of the left, somewhere between 70-90% of the American public are theocrats, based on support for those policies. Perhaps the leftists should pack up and go to more aggressively atheistic countries where they would feel more comfortable.

  27. I blogged on this topic last year http://badhairblog.blogspot.com/2004/10/more-on-beautiful-obscenities-and.html. In addition to Arena’s book, Before Night Falls, I also recommend Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (page 256 talks about how gays are treated, but the book shows how Che lived when in Cuba).

    Whoever claims that there is no evidence of Che’s and Castro’s persecution of gays has never met any gays exiled during the Mariel exodus. Gert Hekma mentions the Mariel exiles in the article http://www.gay-news.com/article04.php?sid=123 Reynaldo Arenas or Gay Hedonism in Cuba. Hekma also writes about the UMAP camps.

    A side point, since today is AIDS day: Cubans face compulsory AIDS testing, and internment in camps. While the NYT http://badhairblog.blogspot.com/2004/12/clueless-about-cubas-quarantine.html praises Cuba’s AIDS policies, discussing AIDS as a human rights issue is impossible in Cuba.
    (with apologies for all the links to my blog)

  29. 24: So you’d be happy to see a theocracy (whether fake or not) seize control of the Republican party/political power in this country? Because as #16 states, that’s where it could be headed.

    I remember very clearly the attitude of politically active Republicans I knew starting in the 80s. Their attitude was to say whatever the religious right wanted to hear to get them to the polls and vote republican. Much of it was grounded in anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-minority rhetoric. Not stated or written specifically, but the message was clear and (with some variations) is still used today. They were viewed as hay seeds who could be easily manipulated into voiting for Republicans because their religious ideals matched a conservative agenda. Back then, no one thought they would gain any kind of real power, but you can see it’s slowly happening now.

    Blame who you will for starting it, but it was Republicans who mainly backed anti-gay marriage initiatives to get voters to the polls in 04. (yes, I know, Kerry’s support, let’s not get into again, it’s been talked about linked etc). I said *mainly* Republicans. Republican strategists were salivating over the fact that marriage became the hot button, “it doesn’t really affect anyone but sure gets the blood of the conservative voters up and will get them to polls where they can also pull the lever for the conservative president to boot”.

    And I already know the response of conservatives here: “Well, it was the fault of those lefty gays for not waiting for the right time/way to address this issue” Well please tell me, when is it exactly the right time to beg and grovel to those in power for the same rights that others have?

    PS: I noticed today our friends at the TSA have decided to stop looking for any sharp instruments with blades shorter than 7 inches (http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/02/airport.screening/index.html). As I recall, those were the weapons used by terrorists to murder the pilots on the flights that eventually killed over 3000 people. I won’t exactly feel safer (note the end of the linked article). Then again, I’m sure we’re somehow saving money because of this change. whew

  30. Well please tell me, when is it exactly the right time to beg and grovel to those in power for the same rights that others have?

    First call John Kerry an antigay bigot who panders to theocrats who want gays exterminated to get elected, Kevin. You do it to Republicans; call Democrats who do the same thing by the same names.

    You can’t and you won’t, because your bitching has nothing to do with gay rights; it has everything to do with bashing Republicans, fairly or not.

  31. Um, Kevin, the reason the TSA isn’t going to waste time and effort confiscating nail clippers from passengers is because now that cockpit doors have been hardened on all aircraft, it simply isn’t necessary, and they want to to concentrate resources against a more likely vector of terrorist attack — explosives in the cargo hold.

    That’s one of the harzards, by the way, of stretching everything into a Bush-bash. You run the risk of appearing rather dim.

  33. Kevin, just now seeing your comment #29. Basically you have no clue what you are talking about. I’ve been involved in the GOP (on and off) since the 1980s and haven’t seen the things you’ve seen.

    While social conservatives may control the GOP in a few states, they are far from controlling the GOP at the national level. Just look at the president’s agenda this year. And note that despite a few throwaway lines in a couple of speeches to social conservatives (and one regrettable line in the State of the Union address), he has not pushed the FMA (or whatever it is now called) at all. And there doesn’t seem to be a serious effort by the congressional leadership to bring it up for a vote.