For more than 15 years, I have been examining the policy of drug prohibition.  I have traveled to Bolivia to witness the use of coca leaf for endurance in high altitudes.  I visited Canada to observe the use of “safe injection” rooms to prevent death and disease from the use of heroin and cocaine, and I visited Ciudad Juarez in 2024 when that city was the murder capitol of the world.  I have more than 30,000+ hours of investigation, have reported from scores of conferences and seminars, and have interviewed well over 1,000 drug policy experts.

Sadly, too many of those in positions of power have remained steadfast in proclaiming the need to continue this war on people who use certain plant products.  However, last December, Houston’s Police Chief McClelland came to the KPFT studio and declared the drug war a “miserable failure.”  Our District Attorney Devon Anderson seems to have had an awakening as well, striving to prevent our kids from pleading guilty to minor drug crimes.

Our legislators, for the most part, are not experts on drug users or even the drugs themselves, yet they continue doing what their daddies did, with no understanding as to why.  Preferring to lean on the might and “righteousness” of the federal laws as justification, the state and local officials simply plod the beaten path with no rationale as to why.

So, rather than focusing my efforts too broadly on those who do not hold the “magic wand” of being the Drug Czar, I now seek a single discussion with the top dog, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), director Michael Botticelli.  I have called and emailed Mr. Botticelli and his numerous predecessors every few months for the last 15 years, to absolutely no avail, but with your help, perhaps this time will be different.

I need YOU to contact the Drug Czar to encourage him to join me on the airwaves of Pacifica Radio.  I will provide the contact info later in this article, but first I want to underscore why you should be concerned enough to do so.

Originally, the drug war was declared to “protect the children,” to place an impenetrable barrier between the “evil” sellers and our innocent offspring. On December 17, 1914, with the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act, the US began to escalate the machinations of law enforcement and the criminal justice system, leading us into this never-ending war on plant products.  Supposedly, the act allowed doctors the option to prescribe narcotics to their patients, but US courts interpreted this to disallow prescriptions for Americans who became addicted to these drugs.

The Harrison act stated that “every person who produces, imports, manufactures, compounds, deals in, dispenses, distributes or gives away opium or coca leaves or any compound, manufacture, salt, derivative or preparation thereof shall register with the collector of internal revenue and pay $1 per annum” for the privilege.  Only a handful of such registrations were allowed.  A hundred years later, doctors are still being punished if bureaucrats in DC determine they have stepped over the line in their number of prescriptions for “preparations” like Oxycontin, which have now overtaken heroin as our nation’s deadliest concoction.

This attempt at prohibition was sold to the American people as a justifiable deviation from the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, as necessary to protect our children and to protect us from ourselves.  A century later, what have we wrought?  Today, the best place to purchase drugs on Planet Earth are US colleges and US high schools, followed closely by US junior highs.  There are now tens of thousands of gangs around the US, enticing our children to use these forbidden drugs or to join the financial feast of selling drugs to their classmates and friends. Despite decades of effort, tens of millions of arrests and more than a trillion dollars spent, we have never stopped even one determined child from acquiring their drug of choice.

Despite the expenditure of well over one trillion US taxpayer dollars in trying to stop the flow of drugs, our efforts have never intercepted more than 10 to 15% of the drugs being smuggled across our borders.  Terrorists, cartels, and gangs actually need a number of  these busts to occur so they can justify their highly-inflated prices to their customers, which has allowed them to reap more than ten trillion dollars in profits since Nixon’s declaration of “all out war” on drugs and the implementation of his ludicrously named “Controlled Substances Act.”

It has been suggested that smugglers use approximately half of their earnings to bribe and otherwise corrupt our border guards, customs officials, and law enforcement to ensure that the 10 to 15% rate of interception does not go any higher.  According to the United Nations Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention,  “profits in illegal drugs are so inflated that three-quarters of  all drug shipments would have to be intercepted to seriously reduce the profitability of the business.”  Surely not even the Drug Czar thinks this number of busts is possible.

The  drug war impacts our lives in many ways, including invasive searches, as graphically witnessed in the recent series of reports of cops performing vaginal probes on parking lot pavement, and the literal highway robbery deemed “interdiction,” which has allowed law enforcement to seize (without a warrant or any evidence whatsoever), more than $2.5 billion dollars from Americans for the crime of having too much money (which the cops simply declare to be “drug money”), in their wallets.   For a more complete list of ways the drug war falls on its face, I urge you to read my book: To End The War On Drugs.

Here is where you come in.  You already know the drug war is unwinnable, yet you remain wary of speaking up for fear of consequence at home, work, church, school or otherwise. Please rest assured that, most likely, your spouse, boss, minister, teacher and the majority of your friends and associates agree that the drug war is a hopeless cause.  In order to bring focus to bear, to ensure that  authorities who believe in drug war must validate this drug war, I need you to call and email the Drug Czar to motivate him to do so.

You can contact our nation’s drug czar, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, through the White House switchboard.  That number is (202) 456-1414, then ask to speak to the Press Secretary of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Mr. Zepeda. Mr. Zepeda’s email is: Mario_A_MorenoZepeda@ondcp.eop.gov.  Ask Mr. Mario Moreno Zepeda to please arrange an interview for his boss, Drug Czar Michael Botticelli on my Cultural Baggage show as soon as possible.

Please keep your message civilized. Decry the harms of the drug war, but please note that this is not a time to argue the merits of cannabis or any other drug, but rather to place focus on the the enormous, outrageous, glaring failure of drug prohibition, itself.

Many reform organizations stand with me in making the call for this discussion with our nation’s drug czar.  Among the dozens of reform groups who seek this discussion on my radio shows are my band of brothers in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the nation’s largest reform group — the Drug Policy Alliance, National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the James A. Baker III Institute, Veterans for Compassionate Care, Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition, Broken No More, A New PATH, and dozens more.

Shown here is the only written response Zepeda has willing to send thus far:

You can attribute the statement below to me, Mario Moreno Zepeda, spokesperson for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy:

“The Obama Administration has been committed to reforming drug policy in a scientific and evidence-based way. Research shows that substance use disorders are preventable and treatable diseases. So the Administration’s strategy for drug policy reform promotes a balance of public health and public safety initiatives, with a focus on substance use disorder prevention, treatment, and recovery.”

Repetition of words like preventable and treatable do sound positive, and if you follow the link for “Administration’s strategy” you will hear of an intention to treat rather than jail users, even as the US remains the world’s leading jailer.  There is no mention as to when or if Czar Botticelli will ever be my guest on Pacifica airwaves.

Rather than insist on a set message for you to send, I urge you to scan the boilerplate shown below and to then send your own brief yet heartfelt message to our nation’s Drug Czar.

Director Botticelli,

Sir, this drug war has gone on for far too long.  We are not now and never will be a drug free nation, and it is time to make a major change to our policies regarding drug possession and use.  When the harms of this policy include increased overdose deaths, children having easier access and criminals worldwide making more than a billion dollars a day by selling contaminated drugs to our children, we must seek another solution than this war declared for eternity.  Please arrange a visit with Dean Becker on Pacifica’s Cultural Baggage radio program at your earliest convenience to discuss this matter.

If you desire, select a  paragraph or two from this missive, or peruse the thousand transcripts from my radio shows at drugtruth.net to find a doctor, cop, legislator, warden, judge or prosecutor whose words better match your feelings about the drug war.

It has taken more than 100 years for the machination of drug war to slowly diminish our rights and freedoms in the name of a “drug free world.” Despite the kinder, gentler words of a few politicians and officials, the drug war continues to treat users as less than human, unworthy of dignity or even a true second chance.  The incremental process and dehumanizing attitude that led us to this point of pig headed indifference to the lives of drug users still exists, and unless and until we examine the evidence in a free and open discussion it will likely take another hundred years to unwind.

We have been duped, fed this bag of lies for so long that many have closed their eyes and ears to the millions of instances of abuse, atrocities, lies and perversions that comprise the “logic” of this drug war.  Why do people steal and whore for drugs?  Prohibition.  Where do terrorists, cartels and gangs get their power?  Prohibition.   Why do so many die and acquire diseases from using drugs?  Prohibition.

I have beat my head against the wall for 15 years, striving to create the scenario wherein the fallacy, the futility of the drug war can be recognized for all to see.  Will you please spend a few minutes  of your time to motivate the Drug Czar to face down this toothless lion?  Once we legalize these “recreational” drugs for adults and put them under government oversight, the price will fall to a penny on the black market dollar, overdose deaths will be mostly those committing suicide, and our children will have much less access because we will then have lots of room in prison for anybody who would dare sell drugs to our kids.

Hopefully, with your help, I will first seek an answer to a simple question: What is the benefit? What have we derived that begins to offset the horrors we inflict on ourselves, and the world, by continuing to believe in the viability of this drug war?

Please contact the drug czar to encourage him to be to be a guest on my radio program.  Thank you!

*** Dean Becker reports the drug war NEWS for Pacifica Radio’s KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston & on WWW.KPFT.ORG.  His show is broadcast on Fridays at 4:30 PM CDT.    Becker is a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, is a Contributing Expert for the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and is author of “To End The War On Drugs.”

Industrial capitalism has pushed life on Earth into what scientists call a “mass extinction.” Mass extinctions happen from time to time; there have been five in the Earth’s history, caused by events such as asteroids striking the earth and photosynthetic bacteria filling the atmosphere with oxygen, an element that was poison to a previous generation of oxygen-hating bacteria. The Oxygen Catastrophe happened about 2.5 billion years ago. In a way, humans are now reversing what bacteria did: filling the atmosphere with carbon instead of oxygen, eliminating other species with our byproducts. Earth had the Oxygen Catastrophe; now it has the Carbon Catastrophe. Ocean acidification is a good example of how this affects other lifeforms — as the oceans absorb carbon from the atmosphere, they become more acidic, and coral reefs die. Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on earth; when they go, thousands of species go with them.

At present, overfishing, overhunting, deforestation and habitat fragmentation are the main drivers of the ongoing sixth extinction, with 1,000 to 10,000 times more species going extinct over the past 100 years than do normally over the course of evolutionary time. Meanwhile, climate change is happening too quickly for many animals and other creatures to adapt or evolve — climate change means that the sixth extinction will continue for a long time even if we were to fish and log and consume differently.

Biologists expect 25-40% of all species on the planet to go extinct by 2024. Extinction also impacts humans, since we depend on other species for food, and those species, in turn, depend on complex ecosystems composed of lifeforms that we don’t use directly. It’s not just about them dying, it’s about human beings suffering and even perishing as we strip the foundations from the house we’re living in. Without a major shift in consciousness, consumption, and policy, 75% of all species on the planet may be gone by 2100.

Contributing to such a shift in consciousness is the goal of Fossilized in Houston, a public climate art campaign organized by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Lina Dib and Tony Day. In the last few months, you may have noticed stickers, posters or lawn signs depicting climate-endangered creatures on surfaces around the city. You might be in the restroom of a bar, walking through a parking structure, waiting for a bus, or driving past a suburban lawn, and suddenly a kemp’s ridley sea turtle or an african wild dog or an astingy leaf chameleon stares back at you. These animals come labeled with their likely date of extinction: 2024, 2024, and 2024. With an Idea Fund grant, Fossilized is commissioning Houston artists to create images of species threatened by climate change and, with the assistance of dozens of volunteers, placing them throughout Houston as lawn signs, posters and stickers. Fossilized has two meanings here: many species will soon be reduced to fossils; and fossil fuels are driving this process. The link between climate change and extinction is about how humans use fossils to create fossils.

As we all know, Houston is the global megacenter of the oil and gas industry, with 5,000 energy companies calling it home. For decades, many of them have successfully lobbied state and federal governments to kill regulations, deny or minimize climate change, and generally slow the necessary transition to renewable energy. The point of Fossilized in Houston is to fill the City of Oil with images of the species that will become extinct in the Carbon Catastrophe. What was “environmental,” over there and out of sight, begins to look back at us. It’s as if the endangered creatures have started to insist on living in our home, like guests who overstay their welcome.

The Fossilized website suggests some ways to act in solidarity with climate-endangered animal species, but how people respond to the project’s images is an open question. You might be angry or resentful at the campaign for making you depressed and nostalgic. You might be indifferent, or even get some pleasure from seeing the animals before they vanish. You might become a vegan and burn your car, or divest from big oil. These animals have been on earth for millions of years. Now perhaps you will consider the northern hairy-nosed wombat for seconds while urinating or drinking coffee. As Schneider-Mayerson puts it, these encounters are a precondition for the kinds of political and policy changes that would make a real impact:

Misinformation, routine, social norms and fossil-fuel dollars keep us from appreciating and internalizing the changes that are underway. Intellectual awareness is fleeting, it’s not enough. By tapping the city’s wealth of talented artists to remind Houstonians of the consequences of the actions of some of Houston’s largest corporations, we’re hoping to spark an emotional awareness of the ongoing mass extinction as well as the profoundly unjust human consequences of climate change.

Fossilized in Houston is a machine for generating these encounters by peppering the city with climate-endangered species. The parts of this machine are local artists, images, the web, snail mail, and friendship.  In theory, the machine could run indefinitely, on relatively small amounts of energy. And you can be part of it, too—if you put in an order (fossilizedhouston.com), images of soon-to-be extinct animals will arrive at your house. A BOG TURTLE or CERULEAN PARADISE FLYCATCHER might be an eye-pleasing way to send the message that you care as much about the Carbon Catastrophe as those oxygen-hating bacteria did about the Oxygen Catastrophe of 2,500,000,000 BC.

 
With John Medina’s work’s dripping and dropping from the walls, textures and colors took center stage in the hallway gallery space at Art League Houston earlier this summer. Being taught since birth to not touch the art, I let my intrigue get the best of me — but instead of violently jabbing the canvas I decided to learn more about these works and the artist behind them.

Adam Mrlik: The work has a texture to it that makes anyone that comes near it want to touch it, which is ironic because you are told not to touch art. Is this deliberate?

John Medina: When I was younger, my mother really got into crafting. It wasn’t uncommon to come home from school and find a hot glue gun sitting on the dining room table. If you leave a glue gun unattended for a while it will eventually start to drip. This happened all the time in our house. My mother would get busy doing other things and the glue gun would drip onto the table. Fascinated by the clear, jewel-like droplets I would reach out to touch them, only to have my hand slapped away by my mother who warned that I would burn myself. I really enjoy the fact that people are so attracted to the textures of my paintings. I like to watch as they reach out to touch the surfaces only to retract their hands at the last minute as if there is some sort of invisible force field around the panels. The viewer is experiencing my own desire to touch something that I wasn’t supposed to. Its a sort of primitive urge that can be overwhelming at times. In my case, I gave in to my urges and eventually burned myself with hot glue. Viewers may find that touching art may have its own set of consequences.

AM: What artists are you inspired by?

JM: I’ve always been inspired by artists who have a strong narrative in their work. Ken Little has always been an inspiration of mine as well as Vincent Valdez. Two very different artists, but I like the way they tell stories. Their work is very much about where they are from and as a viewer you get a real sense of who they are. Their work can talk about universal themes, but it is done through a very personal lens.

Dario Robleto is another dude that just blows my mind. First of all, his titles are poetic and I’ve always enjoyed a good title, but his materials lists are fucking epic! I mean, it’s like bone dust from every bone in the human body, melted vinyl records salvaged from the sea, paper made from the shredded love letters of wives and girlfriends writing to civil war soldiers and stretched out cassette tape consisting of sounds recorded from melting glaciers. There’s a real sense of history to his work because of the materials he uses. I get it. I’ve always been very meticulous about the materials I choose to work with. I think about him a lot though, because you have to wonder, does this guy just know where all the good estate sales are or is he just really good at Ebay? I mean, where does he get all of his materials? I mean, it’s one thing to grind up old Dianna Ross records, but where the hell do you find “Men’s wedding ring finger bones from various American wars?”

AM: How do you think being raised in Texas, a southern, more conservative state, influenced you and the way you make your art and portray messages in your art?

JM: Growing up in Texas taught me to be rebellious. I learned to question everything from an early age. I also learned that there are systems in place that you either work with or you work against, like religion, politics, culture and gender roles. I grew up in a conservative, Catholic community. People expect you to be a certain way and to do certain things. So okay, I tried to like football and I tried to develop a taste for menudo and I tried to wear clothes from the mall and I tried do well in Sunday school, but in the end it wasn’t who I was. I just didn’t always feel I could say it out loud. There were real consequences to that, the least of which is that people will talk shit about you. So my artwork became my voice. I learned to stay true to myself and communicate my perspective to people who may not have agreed with me. But subtlety is key. I think people are prone to listen to you as long as you don’t scream.

AM: The textures in your pieces looks like slime, or something melting – there must be some sort of connection here.

JM: In this case the surfaces are representations of melting ice creams, however, that is not to say that hot glue isn’t a part of a much broader narrative. Certainly there are ties between hot glue and my childhood, and in some ways it’s an homage to my mother. I get my creativity from her and I like that her influence can play a role in my work, even if it’s not about her. The truth is, most people don’t respect hot glue as a fine art material and surely they don’t expect much from it. People are often surprised to find out what I can accomplish with craft store glue sticks and spray paint. There is an unexpected beauty in these works. In many ways, hot glue is a representative of myself.

AM: How do the bright, vibrant, almost neon colors reflect your serious subject matter?

JM: This body of work ultimately deals with the fleeting nature of life, love and success. The vibrant colors represent those perfect sweet moments frozen in time, while the melting texture is meant to be foreboding. While I want the viewer to revel in that exact moment, I also want them to think about what came before and what comes after.

AM: You seem to have a sense of humor concerning serious inquires about life and society.

JM: As I get older, I’ve decided that it’s okay to be funny and playful. I think there’s a mischievous quality to the work. Its a much more accurate depiction of my voice.

AM: What are some things that you question about our society that directly influences your work?

JM: The media, for sure. The way that we consume information. Anybody can publish whatever they want and some yahoo out there is gonna believe it. Recently there was that FIFA VP who quoted the onion during an interview. I mean, that’s crazy! We’re able to craft our own little worlds now by surrounding ourselves with the articles, opinions and studies that agree with our crazy whims. Before long we won’t know what to believe. Everybody will be both right and wrong and it won’t matter who’s telling the truth. That’s scary to me.

Our Ancestors developed a system of dozens of Clans, Bands and Societies based on the environment and wildlife of Somi Sek.  Our Ancestors migrated through our territory in circles for various reasons – hunting, fishing, and harvesting an abundance of wild foods, the weather, the seasons, visiting relatives and conducting rituals in certain places at certain times of our calendar year.   Our main living area was the Rio Grande River and its delta.  In pre-European times, we traveled primarily by canoe and foot.  In 1519, Spaniards stationed in Jamaica tried to invade our territory by ship through the mouth of our Rio Grande River.  We swiftly put together a counter attack to defend our lands and our People that drove the invaders away from our nation with highly organized and coordinated maneuvers.  More than indigenous to the North America, we are autochthonous of Somi Sek — that means that we are of this land — so we were intimately familiar with every hill, stream, river, mountain, valley, canyon and cave from the San Fernando River in Tampico to the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle to the North.

We had good relations with every Nation in what is now known as the Southwest US.  We had close relationships with the Atakapa-Karankawa, the Tonkawa, the Caddo, the Kiowa, the Waco and all of the smaller Nations of our region.  We visited, intermarried, traded and danced with them on a regular basis.  We defended ourselves from the Comanche when they first came onto our lands until they eventually became our allies and friends.  We welcomed the Kickapoo and learned how to live in our territory together.  Despite the continuing disruptions of our Life Ways, the Kickapoo probably helped maintain our Identity, as well as we helped them maintain theirs.   The Massacre of our People at Devil’s River near the Big Bend area verifies the connection and alliance to the early travels of the Kickapoo into Texas.  We are a Plains “culture” predating many of the more well-known Plains Nations.  Evidence of our Ancestors’ nomadic movements within our vast range of Somi Sek lies in the rock paintings all over our lands from Northeastern Mexico, Seminole Canyon, Painted Rock, Lake Allen Henry (Justiceberg, Texas) to Adobe Walls.

By the mid 1800’s, due to the increasing attacks on our People, we adapted to the crisis by becoming some of the first cowboys and heavily influencing the formation of cowboy and Tejano cultures. Our horsemanship and self-defense skills once saved a group of Anglo Texans who were being defeated by the Spanish/Mestizo Mexicans at the Battle of Mier during the Republic of the Rio Grande.  We had spent three centuries since 1519 defending ourselves from continuing kidnappings and invasions from the Spanish Mexicans.  The Reyes-Reyes-Leal, Mancias-Ramirez-Cavazos, Garcia-Cano- Mata, Deleon family ties made significant strides in maintaining and preserving our Life Ways into the 21^st century.  The same family combinations were prominent in contributions to the formation of early ranch life in South Texas.   South Texas Ranching developed deeply from the villages that were maintained for centuries by Esto’k Gna.  According to 90-year-old Elder Guadalupe Mancias, these Ranches were established in Tribal villages like Las Comitas, Tanque Alegre, Las Mujeres, San Isidro, La Venada, Penitas, Los Papeles, Papalote, Los Ebanos, Santa Elena, Rancho Viejo, Puerto Rico Rancho, and many others.  Guadalupe Mancias speaks of the mule wagons they would ride to get from village to village.  She speaks of living off the land and the use of mutates for grinding corn.

We are the original People of the Sacred Peyote Medicine, for we have lived amongst it in Somi Sek since time immemorial.  In the late 1800’s, our Ancestors shared our Peyote Ways with the Lipan Apache, the Comanche and the Kiowa.  Our Ancestors’ generosity in sharing our healing Ways was the main root of the Native American Church (NAC) that has since saved many Indian Nations around North America from complete extinction over the past century.

Our Life Ways are ancient though they are not primitive in the sense that modern society misunderstands “primitive,” as being ignorant heathens with low-level thinking and understanding. Our Life Ways are simple and at the same time highly intelligent and sophisticated in everyday practical ways with deep and grounded insights and understanding of living with a real respect for the Earth (who we know as Kamla’ Kayka or Grandmother Earth) and every being that makes up our habitat – we are only a part of it.  Contrary to misperceptions, we do not worship animals; we honor them to show gratitude for all that they provide to sustain us, along with our One Creator.

We continue to live our Life Ways based on our location of Somi Sek and our region’s geography, weather, plant life and wildlife – which include our Ancestral Teachings, our virtues, our dialects of our Hokan language, our government, our science, our astrology, our math, our arts, our games, our foods,  our hunting/fishing/harvesting, our stories, our ritual dances, songs, cleansings, healings, our multi-dimensional calendar – all of these together and more make up what we know and understand as our Identity and our Life Ways – we do not separate any of these one from another, they are connected, whole and provide us a complete Identity.

Ancestor Belo

Our Identity and Life Ways have been misinterpreted by many European-Americans including Spanish-Mexicans who have written about us. Through complete lack of knowledge or arrogance, they misidentified our Clans, Societies and Bands as being separate small “Tribes.”  Many times, for devious reasons, we were intentionally mislabeled as other tribes such as the Lipan or the Comanche. A scholar went as far as making up a name of Coahuiltecan that grouped us with other Tribes from a whole region. The result was further confusion of our Identity. A priest even created the “Coahuiltecan” language by mixing vocabularies and grammar of languages from three different tribes. We are also mistaken as Aztec because our real name Esto’k (pronounced esh took’) can sometimes sound phonetically like Aztec when pronounced quickly.  For this reason, many of our own People may have thought their grandparents were saying they were Aztec since they had no previous media or literary reference to the word or a tribe called Esto’k.  Worse yet, reporters, writers, scholars and people in authority positions over school curricula completely left us out of news stories or removed mentions of us out of history books.

In an Oklahoma University we are documented with our name misspelled as “Kerezo” and labeled as the “Mexican Indians”.  In these references, the Kiowas referred to us as the Ancient Ones and the Barefoot Ones.

Today, the Andy Torres family (Tejones – Badgers) , the Xavier Ayala family (Garza Clan), the Bear Society, Deer Society, Raven Society along with the Mancias-Reyes family have made strong efforts in maintaining and preserving the Identity of the Esto’k Gna for survival into the future. These families continue verifying other Bands and Clans and individuals with ties to us Hokan speakers called Carrizo/Comecrudo.  The individuals have identified the Casa Chiquitas, the Ocanas, and even the Ayala of the Borrado band.  Groups of our People that for decades have been considered long gone have survived the premeditated termination of the original Texans who call this land Somi Sek, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, the Esto’k Gna.

Currently, some continuing struggles we face in living our Life Ways: 1) An on-going battle for us is protecting our Ancestral Burial sites from development, desecration and even from other Indians who have been making monetary profits from doing burial site “ceremonies” and re-interments – these are all extremely disrespectful.  Returning our Ancestors’ bodies from the Witte Museum to be re-interred with proper respect is a part of our efforts.  The Esto’k Gna expect members of other tribes who live on or travel to our lands to respect our Ancestral remains, Burial Sites and our rituals – to ask properly for permission to conduct other rituals in our territory as we would do if we were in their homeland territory, that is the respectful Ways of our Peoples.   Sometimes our deceased are disrespected when Powwows are held on top of burial grounds or where burial remains are being kept, like some of the major universities in Texas.  We simply ask for proper respect for a land that has had our Ancestors’ bodies buried all over it for many centuries.  We do not want our people to die any more by another.    2) It is very important for us to financially secure the 30 acres of land where we gather for our rituals/dances so we can continue to live our Life Ways together. 3) We have long been researching and gathering documentation of our Ancestors in historical news reports, book references and government documents with our own limited personal funds and on our spare time.

Juan Mancias at Witte Demonstration

If you’d like to learn more or get involved, please visit, like, and share our website and Facebook page. Please also write to the Witte Museum in San Antonio to return our Ancestors’ bodies and other remains for respectful re-interment, or send us artifacts, articles, stories, references, books, photos/illustrations, internet links that pertain to our history (including references to Coahuiltecan, Lipan Apache, Comanche) and groups of our People such as the Tejon, Pinto, Garza, Venado, Tortuga, Borrado and any other “tribe” that is described as living in and around the territory between the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle south to the San Fernando River in Tampico, Mexico and from El Paso east to Matagorda Bay.
Article written in collaboration between Juan Mancias, Tribal Chairman/Historian, Head Man of the Bear Clan and member of the Deer Society, Andy Torres, Tribal Historian of the Tejones along with an anonymous member of the Deer and Bear Societies.

There is amazing generosity and encouragement happening at the Arts and Science school, St. Stephen’s Episcopal School. The Montrose area school is giving $300,000 in scholarship awards to 15 students entering grades 9-11. This is so cool! Such scholarships to private schools have been known to lift whole families out of poverty.

For the first time ever, The Global Scholars Award Program will offer one-year full tuition (renewable annually) to any student not currently enrolled at St. Stephen’s. This rare contribution from a private school is a refreshing reminder of how supportive our thriving arts community is here in Houston.

Founded in 1971, St. Stephen’s began serving high school students in 1997 and graduated its first class in 2024. With these scholarship awards, they celebrate their 15^th anniversary by expanding opportunity and influencing young creatives in a direct way.

“As a collaborative community, St. Stephen’s Church and School are committed to the development of world citizens,” says Head of School, David Coe. “The Global Scholars Award Program is the first of its kind at St. Stephen’s and seeks to identify students in the community who embody the core values of St. Stephen’s: individuality, service, inquiry, relationships and beliefs.”

The application deadline is fast approaching, but there is still time to put it out there and see what happens! Students can turn in a complete application packet on selected interview date, either Thursday July 23^rd or Saturday July 25^th. Click here for more application information and find the application itself here.

Texas officialdom currently installed in Austin, under Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, is more extreme-right than usual. The recent legislative session saw a storm of proposed bills against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In the face of grassroots opposition, those bills failed. Locally, conservatives are organizing to overturn the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), which bans discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity, among other things. Their effort to force the third anti-LGBT ballot referendum in as many decades is winding through the courts.

Given this background, Michelangelo Signorile’s new book It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality is particularly timely. The best-selling author hosts his own show on SiriusXM Progress; is Editor-at-large of Huffington Post Gay Voices; and is a former activist with ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

The 1969 rebellion against police brutality at the Stonewall Inn in New York City has, rightly or wrongly, long been considered the founding moment of the contemporary LGBT movement. There, the basic concept has been that LGBT people should come out of the closet: to family, friends, co-workers, neighbours, and others. The goal of this incremental, one-on-one dialogue is to change minds and eliminate prejudice.

This idea has been powerful: the LGBT struggle has perhaps been the most effective on the US left post-1968. However, this idea does not, by any stretch, do everything that it was once expected to do. Signorile lays out a sobering assessment of the situation now.

Shifting mass culture and its messages has been one focus for years. There, advances are more limited than commonly assumed, as Signorile highlights.

GLAAD reported in 2024 that out of 102 studio films, only 17 had LGBT characters. Most were minor roles, on screen for mere minutes or seconds, and often “’outright defamatory’.”

As another example, major studios refused to finance Steven Soderbergh’s small-budget Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra. They told the esteemed director that the material was “’too gay’.” HBO eventually backed the film, which openly depicted gay intimacy and refused to “cover” the fact that Liberace was a super-queen.

“Covering,” a term from legal theorist Kenji Yoshino, is distinguished from both “passing,” or hiding in the closet; and “conversion,” or the attempt to become straight. Instead, it is the downplaying of difference and the emphasizing of sameness, vis-à-vis wider society. (Yoshino is increasingly a reference point for big rethinks of the state of the LGBT communities.)

NFL defensive end Michael Sam, for instance, refused to “cover” his sexuality, and kissed his male partner on-air after learning of his 2024 selection by the St. Louis Rams. According to a subsequent HuffPost / YouGov poll, 60% of respondents approved of teams signing openly gay players. Yet only 36% said it was appropriate for ESPN to broadcast Sam’s smooch. When someone’s lived experience remains “private,” their identity can seem abstract. When those differences are put into practice in the public sphere, that identity becomes more concrete and challenging for others.

LGBT communities’ nominally radical elements have longstanding anti-assimilationist perspectives, such as a disavowal of the fight for marriage rights. These perspectives also underscore LGBT difference, rather than sameness, and initially sound similar to the book’s rejection of “covering.” Signorile, though, wants to encourage further mobilization for such rights – and the entire agenda beyond that. Such an agenda is, after all, necessary because of the ongoing, differential political status of LGBT people.

Signorile further details the situation. 30%-40% of LGBT youth, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center in 2024, have attempted to take their own life. Those numbers have not substantially dropped since the late 1980s. One factor here is that eight states, such as Arizona, have “don’t say gay” laws. These strictly limit what educators can teach about homosexuality and are an effort to keep LGBT lives invisible and their voices silent.

In a landmark 2024 case, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) determined that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of sex discrimination applies to transgender people. Nonetheless, at least 32 states still have no laws specifically barring discrimination against transgender people in the workplace, housing, public accommodations, or credit. A full 29 states have no laws specifically barring discrimination, based on sexual orientation, in those spheres or employment. No such federal law exists either.

This problem has hardly disappeared. The Williams Institute at UCLA found in 2024 that “78% of transgender respondents reported harassment or mistreatment at work because of their gender identity.” Per Pew Research in 2024, 21% of LGBT workers have been “treated unfairly by an employer in hiring, pay, or promotions.”

Given these and other enduring problems, Signorile’s core argument is against what he calls “victory blindness,” the conviction that the LGBT struggle is, somehow, predestined to win the war.

The book emphasizes events following the November, 2024 passage of Proposition 8 in California, which banned same-sex marriage there. Nationally, that spurred the youthful “equality movement” which successfully pushed to resolve questions stuck on the political agenda since the mid-1990s. Those included passage of a federal, LGBT-inclusive hate crimes act in 2024; Congressional repeal of the US military’s antigay Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy in 2024; and the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of states. Additionally, the US Supreme Court decided in 2024 that key provisions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) were unconstitutional.

In this context, victory blindness is somewhat understandable. However, it is hardly limited to the recent past and is an abiding characteristic of the LGBT struggles, one that does not even strongly correlate to real, on-the-ground political successes.

So-called “post-gay” thinkers have persistently suggested that LGBT identity and community are increasingly irrelevant. Two examples are queer critic Mark Simpson’s Anti-Gay, from 1996; and Andrew Sullivan’s essay “The End of Gay Culture,” from 2024. Retrospectively, this sense of an “ending” seems misguided. In the mid-1990s, annual AIDS deaths hovered at approximately 40,000. Lifesaving drug therapies – protease inhibitors – had only begun to reduce those numbers. Moreover, from 2024-2008, voters approved constitutional bans of same-sex marriage in 26 states. This right-wing wave receded only with the equality movement post-2008.

Further, David M. Halperin’s (excellent) 2024 book How To Be Gay details the monotonous declarations that social progress has moved gay men in particular beyond pre-Stonewall subcultures of gender inversion or femininity. This analogous sense of an “ending” appears well-prior to the 1990s: from the philosopher Michel Foucault, in 1978; the writer Edmund White, in 1969 itself; and others.

Victory blindness is dangerous. Signorile contends: “We need only look to other movements to see how gains have been rolled back in ways that would have seemed unimaginable forty years ago.”

Achievements of the post-1960s women’s struggle once seemed secure. Many women, by the 1990s, demobilized politically and ultimately rejected the term “feminism.” A powerful and unhampered backlash resulted. Today, abortion rights, contraception, and gender equality overall are mortally endangered – in Texas particularly since 2024.

Achievements of the black civil rights and black liberation struggles also once seemed secure. However, that major political upsurge arguably ended by the 1970s, with nothing equivalent afterwards – at least until this year. That those gains are threatened is demonstrated by the seemingly unending wave of police brutality and police killings. Only with Black Lives Matter and black community uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore has a potent response, analogous to the 1960s, arisen.

Given these cautionary lessons, Signorile concludes: “[W]e’ll likely have to defend hard-fought wins, push for further gains, beat back our enemies, and battle bias and violence for generations to come.” This is a novel and striking departure from widespread notions that history inevitably progresses in the direction of LGBT equality.

Right-wing activist Frank Schubert, in a candid conversation with Signorile at the 2024 Values Voter Summit, indicated that future anti-LGBT efforts would be modelled on the anti-abortion movement. They want to find issues analogous to “partial-birth abortions,” in an attempt to incrementally build public support. Indiana, earlier this year, and so-called “religious freedom” statutes are part of this new game plan.

The book gestures towards two, distinct explanations for these current conditions.

Overt bias is disappearing and being replaced by more hidden or disguised forms, Signorile contends in the first explanation. In 2024 Pew Research polling that posed questions overtly about LGBT issues, 55% responded with a favourable “overall opinion” of gay men, versus 37% in 2024. 58% responded with a similar, positive opinion of lesbians, versus 39% a decade prior. However, a deeper study by Project Implicit, which Signorile examines, suggests actual, positive shifts in attitudes are much less dramatic.

In the second explanation, Signorile begins by noting that white men ages 18-29 favored Republican Party candidate Mitt Romney by thirteen points in the 2024 presidential elections; and white women in that age range, by one point. Romney supported a US constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. However, around the same time, in 2024, marriage rights were supported by 61% of young Republicans. Assuming, reasonably, that most young GOPers are white people, the positive, personal beliefs they weakly hold on marriage did not translate into strong action around the issue.

The degree to which minds have been genuinely changed remains central in the first explanation. That is consistent with the LGBT movement’s dominant, 45-year strategy – and its continuance.

The discrepancy between individual belief and political action is central in the second explanation. The latter does not automatically follow the former. The disjunction is pronounced, at the moment, on the right end of the spectrum but is actually intrinsic to the nature of politics itself – as the collective or social, versus the individual.

The deepening corrosion of the nominally democratic US system is another aspect of this discrepancy. That changing minds would ultimately translate into effective votes – for candidates, in ballot referendums, et al – was long assumed in LGBT political strategy. This is questionable today with sustained attacks – disproportionately impacting black people, Latinos, and the working class – on voter registration processes.

Moreover, key, controversial policies of this century were not at all deterred by majority opposition. The murderous US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are but two examples. Growing extreme-right influence in official, legislative politics, in Texas and elsewhere, is another.

While less than 10% of the US population as a whole is LGBT, a 1989 study on youth suicide, from the Department of Health and Human Services, reported that 25% of homeless youth were LGBT. Today, as Signorile notes, that number has not gone down and is as high as 40%. This wildly disproportionate representation has persisted for at least a quarter-century, even as overall social tolerance and acceptance has burgeoned.

This disproportionality thus seems more impersonal or structural in nature and not reducible to bad ideas like prejudice. This structural type of problem, discussed less by Signorile, hints at the possible importance of other factors, including the economy, unemployment, lack of affordable housing, or access to higher education.

Signorile is (legitimately) suspicious of presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee for 2024, Hillary Clinton. After all, the equality movement had to force even the Obama administration to act on basic rights measures. He is also suspicious of inside-the-beltway LGBT groups already backing Clinton, such as the Human Rights Campaign. A new and militant grassroots phase of the LGBT struggle is needed, per the book: “protesting, practicing civil disobedience … and, perhaps, planning right now for another march on Washington.”

The battle must continue, even assuming the post-1969 framework of changing minds. Fresh approaches are required, too, as the disjunction between individual beliefs and political action shows. Structural matters are becoming central, as well. The LGBT movement must consider questions long outside its purview, such as voting rights, economics, or housing. The new movement for which Signorile is calling will have to address all of these conditions.

Paul Mullan is an activist and writer in Houston, Texas. His work has appeared in Free Press Houston, Red Wedge, The Great God Pan is Dead, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, and elsewhere.