I personally resent your statement that we have not discussed this on blogs. Gay men have been hanged in Iran and you expect LGBT people to get all up in arms when some dead caucasian Natalie Wood lookalike Iranian cover girl is propped up as a symbol of injustice. We are not that stupid to fall for this propaganda. My point? Where the hell were you and your posts about the gay men that was discussed on gay blogs SIR???????? You piss me off to no end.

Yazmin, You could never see past your own extreme ethnocentrism if you tried. I do not care enough about you to explain further. You are a cynical instigator. Your self appointed elitist fantasy is in your head. Take another humanities course.

A few thoughts, somewhat rambling, but that's what you get from a scattered morning:

So, during the most recent gayrriage rally that happened in San Diego, right after the CA Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, I saw a woman holding a sign: “Welcome to Iran.” Even though it had dawned on me before that, it made me sure that the major reason why American LGBT people cared about the hangings in Iran was not because of say, any number of human rights abuses that we should be rightfully be outraged by, but rather because it was a deployment strategy. It was a homonationalist attempt to declare American neoliberal values as the ones that had properly bestowed the western LGBT person as that on which rights had been bestowed upon. “We” were the right kind. Of course it was very angering when I saw this woman holding that sign. She was trying to compare the inability to get married to the human rights abuses happening in Iran. I imagine that her head would have exploded if the words Abu Ghraib had been said out loud to her.
Brynn, I think you are right when you decry the silence from LGBTQ blogs on the situation on Iran. Taking off from something Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore said in an interview once, I don’t claim a queer identity (or more fittingly, political) label JUST because of my sexuality. But rather, my identification with queer has to do with larger commitments to civil rights and my discontent with institutions and institutional practices. Thus, for me, it is of extreme importance to care about Iran (and Myanmar, North Korea, Iraq, Somalia, and other lesser-known areas that are experiencing human rights abuses), because I am queer. In the end, the queer utopia I want to envision is impossible because of the human rights abuses that happen in these places, whether it be at the hands of a local government or a foreign interventionist power (i.e. Abu Ghraib).
I think this moment is perfect to think through some of Judith Butler’s more recent work. While her ideas are hardly new (something she readily admits), she is trying to engage in novel ways of thinking about what happens to humanity in times like these. By transposing some of her ideas of the grievable life to the current situation with Iraq, she argues that in the end, there are some lives that we regard as “lives” and there are some that we don’t. In the case of the LGBT relationship with Iran and with a certain comment above, it is clear that when men who were perceived as “gay” were hanged, thus emerged a certain kind of life that deserved to be mourned by “us” who already had the proper gay biopolitical standing (until, of course, Prop 8 was validated it seems). As we have already rehearsed and staged proper outrage about such things, now comes a second (and really, a third, a fourth, a hundredth) life that needs to be mourned. Yet, our mourning capacities seem to be extremely limited by now. As the first commenter made it clear, Neda is not a life worth grieving over, partly because it seems we are barely able to perceive her as a life (alive?), and secondly, because it seems that “we” were ahead of the curve a while back (regardless of whether the homophobic abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were as properly decried). We, as queers, as citizens of the world, as human beings, need to stand in solidarity with the revolution that is happening in Iran. Yes, it may be far from perfect, but it is not our revolution to OWN, but ultimately whenever state power is being violently repressive against any group of people, we need to stand up and cry, if even from afar, “STOP.”

You might want to check out my blog, Yasmin. In addition to sparring with you :), posting way too much about LOST, I've been covering the situation in Iran, including being one of the first bloggers to note the importance of Twitter and other alternative news sources in reporting the situation.

http://theworldofhowey.wordpress.com/category/iran/

Thank you for the post on Iran.
As they say sometimes, when you put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out fast, you don't find a hole in the water. That is about how fast Nada will be forgotten in the long run.
The reality of the situation has been muted by the constant pictures of the same crowds in Tehran on the streets and the same people getting beaten on the ground, report after report, due mainly because of the lack of reporting allowed to leave the scene.
All that in mind, I cannot help but look at the images that are shown and drift back to the riots in Chicago at the Democratic convention held there around 30 years ago. Or the scenes and sounds of Kent State and Crosby, Stills & Nash being brought to minds.
The invention of this American democracy, was spawned by similar incidents in our history. Although I feel energized about the Iranian actions of revolt over their election and very saddened by the loss of life that is being shown nightly, I cannot help but wonder if it is futile in the event that the second choice is as bad as the first when it comes to leadership regarding nuclear arms proliferation. I realize that it is now all about their "vote" being counted, but I have to ask the importance of that vote in terms of humanity in general if it does not lead to the world being a safer place for people to live and especially if the same ideas about Isreal and it's validity remained questioned.

Throughot the election that did take place, I never saw any stump speeches from the candidates to be able to form an opinion on if there was any kind of a choice or if it was a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Any lack of concern over the situation today, seems to me to stem from the fact that right from the beginning there was less than any chance of being able to form an opinion here in the US about what the two candidates stood for. Without that pre-involvement then, it is no wonder that people feel removed from the actions that are happening now, except on the basis of humanitarianism.

Personally I hope that they succeed in changing the course of their history. But I also think that as long as they support a government with a cleric at it's head and religous principals that discriminate against women, GLBT people and others, they are barking up the wrong tree and should expect the same kind of election results that they have gotten so far. My support would not be behind our government if Presidential powers were trumpted by the Pope's decisions either. When I see them trying to change that, then I will know they are really dying in the streets for a reason that makes sense to me.

I know that may sound hardened, but revolution is revolution. With three attempts happening in the last 40 years, it seems more like a way of life.