Kopkind Colony

“Before we can build a new world, we must untether the system from our own heads,” Tony Eskridge wrote before coming to Kopkind this summer. At 24, he was deeply involved working on the Poor People’s Campaign as an organizer with the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice in Memphis, Tennessee. What is the conventional frame around the realities of this world and the range of possibilities on offer? What does that frame confine? What does it omit? How to broaden it, break the frame, see differently? A fresh sense of possibility. A new horizon. Untethering the system from our own heads. That is a big part of Kopkind’s work.

This Giving Tuesday, please remember Kopkind if you can. We feed the future — for solidarity, for liberation.

Tony joined nine other activists or journalists from around the country for a week of seminar discussions, informal talks, special guests, rejuvenating vistas and activities. Our theme was The War on Youth. But along with sharing experience and analysis, we stoke freedom dreams. Before he left, Tony wrote us a note:

“It’s hard to capture in words what a wonderful week this has been. My fellow campers, in such a short span of time, feel like comrades and real connections that we can always draw from. They are such brilliant, loving and committed people; they’ve brought out the best in me. It almost feels like a snapshot of the beloved community we are trying to build. Endless appreciation to everyone who worked so hard so I could spend time being present … We are in a Kairos moment, a time of grand crises but also a time of grand opportunity. I look forward to continuing to build this movement with you all. Forward Together, Not One Step Back!”

Endless appreciation to all friends, supporters, alumni, guests, collaborators, fellow workers and other interlocutors as Kopkind enters its 25th year.

The Donate button is above. You can also send a check to Kopkind, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford VT 05301. Thank you!

Fierce, funny, brilliant, argumentative, perceptive, pioneering, sharpening, gentle, greathearted, gay, radically original … Today we honor John Scagliotti, our founder and administrator, 75 years on the planet this November 14.

His trail-blazing work in lgbtq media is well-known, beginning with The Lavender Hour (radio), on to Before Stonewall (documentary film) and In The Life (television), with many more films, from the earliest, Stuff of Dreams, to the most recent, Before Homosexuals. His analyses of (and anecdotes from) the 1960s antiwar and early gay liberation movements, of cultural politics, of the possibilities for a left that is ‘multi’ in all the ways that real life is experienced and a generous freedom imagined, have enlivened kitchen tables and group meetings; the pages of magazines, the lecture halls of colleges and the work of so many who for so long have had the pleasure of his conversation. His understanding of visuals and sound and the relationship between emotion and meaning — and his crystallization of those in constructive advice — has encouraged younger filmmakers for decades. “I will forever be John’s mentee!”, Desireena Almorade, a wonderful documentarian who got her start at In The Life, wrote in our book after participating in this past summer’s Kopkind/CID Film Camp.

On this day, we also honor the beauty of love, which, as manifest in John’s union with Andy Kopkind, moved so many of us. And the power of an idea which, whether conveyed in media or blossomed in the magic of Kopkind’s summer project, has inspired countless people to say, “You have changed my life.”

Here’s to the example of a lavish love, a memorable phrase, a joke when you need it most, an imagination to the stars, a life-so-far that contains multitudes. Happy Birthday and thank you, John!

To everyone reading this: you are most welcome to remember John’s 75th birthday with a gift to Kopkind (the Donate button is on the top bar here). And because we all need a moment of joy, however hard the times, here is a song to lift every internationalist, rococo, fabulous beating heart.

In a year of celestial wonders, August brought two supermoons. Stargazers would have most recently awaited the Blue Moon, which rose on August 30, and is in its last quarter this Labor Day weekend. That’s the waning Sturgeon Moon in the photograph above, taken on August 5, the last night of Kopkind’s ‘camp’ with political journalists and activists. The full moon had risen on August 1, and every night, it seemed, campers were out on the grass behind the house, heads to the sky.

The Sturgeon Moon is named for the giant fresh-water fish that populated the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain for ages and was especially profuse in late summer, when it was a major part of the regional Native American diet. It is rarer now, a casualty of industrial overfishing in the 19th century and habitat degradation. Endangered, it persists, plying the waters, stirring the lake bottoms with its whiskers for food. The name sturgeon derives from several old European languages, meaning ‘the stirrer.’

An apt name for a moon during a gathering of people who stir it up. Marlon Becerra was one of them. Jeff Sharlet took this picture as some of us sat around a fire after Jeff had given a public talk about his latest book, The Undertow. Based mostly on reporting on the grassroots militarized right, the book is an act of witness and a warning. The talk was as well, but it also honored persistence on the left: the certainty of conflict, the tradition of struggle, the good fight. We will have more to say down the road about this year’s cohort, which collectively was remarkable for both its gamesome spirit and adamant determination to shape a humane future. And also about our wonderful film camp, with the Center for Independent Documentary, which ran July 16 – 23.

On August 6, people headed home. Marlon, a recent graduate of Harvard Law, drove back to Queens to be in time to meet with his class of Heroes Academy, a school he started in a public park during the pandemic, which teaches local kids math, SAT skills, life skills, chess, first aid… The subject of Freedom Schools had come up frequently during the week of discussions, their history of enhancing practical skills and political consciousness, the contemporary possibilities. Marlon got to ponder these things on the highway home.

Much gratitude to everyone who made the summer possible! And greetings of solidarity on Labor Day!

Jeff Sharlet, a terrific reporter and writer, will be at Kopkind on Saturday, August 5, to talk about his new best-selling book, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, a free public event to close out our seminar/retreat session for left journalists and activists.

When: 6 pm, community potluck to start off the evening. (Bring a side dish!)

7:30 pm, book talk, followed by discussion.

Where: The Organ Barn, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301

In 2021, Jeff took a cross-country trip following the ghost of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old blonde Air Force veteran who was shot by an officer while climbing through a broken window inside the Capitol on January 6. Along his trip, he’d talked with white people who venerate Ashli as a martyr; with people who’ve revised her age downward, to where she’s just a girl, maybe only 16, curious— just wanting to see: hey, what’s going on?—innocent; with Christians who see her killing as the start of, or battle in, a civil war; with others who insist storming the Capitol was a “false flag,” even though they were were doing the storming; with preachers who have removed the cross from churches because suffering Jesus is a sissy; with one who has fashioned an altar out of swords.

Jeff has reported on the Christian right for decades; this was the first time, he said, that he had been afraid. During a church service, one preacher had already denounced him as an enemy of the people. It was something Donald Trump had started calling the media at his rallies in 2016, while reporters were caged and the candidate’s worshipers were encouraged to take ecstatic pleasure in the abuse he heaped upon them. After the service, having been denied an interview with the preacher, Jeff was in the parking lot talking with two women when an usher and a heavily armed guard threatened him and ordered him to leave. “I have a notebook and a pencil, and you come with guns?” he said, recalling the moment to us toward the end of the trip, miming the pathetic way he’d held up his weapons.

His encounters across the country form the center of the book. They are bracketed by extraordinarily beautiful essays on history, culture and radical hope. “Weaving religion, hate, hope and fear into stories that catch us unaware, Jeff Sharlet confronts us with the realities of the shifting American psyche,” Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, wrote about the book. “A must-read in order to understand the conflicting voices and tensions in America today.”

Jeff is a must-hear witness to the shape of authoritarian desire—guns, power, war, a strongman.

Please come on August 5!

Be there tonight, Saturday, July 22, as Kopkind features the fascinating, moving, funny, profound and all-around wonderful work of Belden Hill Movie Makers, people who live and work in the immediate vicinity of the Kopkind Colony. We will screen little- or never-before-seen short work from five terrific filmmakers: Chuck Light, Mac Christopher, Olivia Wiggins, David (“Cubby”) Hall and John Scagliotti. A Home Movie Night of vast dimension!

Time: 7:30 pm

Place: The Organ Barn at Guilford, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301

This is a free public event, which concludes the Kopkind/Center for Independent Documentary Film Camp.

Back in March we announced here the death of our friend and tender comrade Kevin Alexander Gray. We said we might write more but never could summon the words. Kevin died suddenly on March 7, a shock. July 1 is his birthday. He would have been 66 today. He loved his birthday, and would sometimes send his friends presents of songs to mark the occasion. “The politics begins in the music,” he once said. That sums up the experience of a lot of people growing up his age in the Sixties. So here are some songs for him, in memory; and for everyone out there, with pleasure, because, to borrow a word he used to characterize one great, formative political experience, they are “glorious.”

Kevin was talking by Zoom to journalists and activists at Kopkind last year about what it was like to be part of a class-conscious, black-led, multi-racial, anti-imperialist, social-movement-based, barnstorming national electoral campaign. He’d been a founding member of the Rainbow Coalition, had worked for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign, and was South Carolina coordinator for the ’88 campaign. “It was glorious,” he said. It was. Andy Kopkind covered it for The Nation. Some of the magazine’s staff volunteered. Steve Cobble, Frank Watkins, Jack O’Dell, Anne Braden, Gwen Patton, Ron Walters, Kevin — people who had worked in the background — became important interlocutors for anyone, journalists especially, who was thinking about the relationship between left movements and electoral politics. An all-star band, all gone now.

He died raking leaves. Working. Outdoors, free. His heart, we think. It had been a good day, an ordinary day. He’d opened a barbecue restaurant in 2020, which he wrote about here, in “Scenes From a Pandemic,” but March 7 was a Tuesday, and the restaurant is closed on Tuesdays. He drove to a garden nursery that morning. There was a joyful ease in his voice then. He was thinking about plants. He was only a little irritated with other people. A couple of hours before he died he talked about preparing for his next phase, the next book to write, a stretch in DC. He always thought he had time. 

Sade may not have been on Kevin’s twitter page singing this particular song, but like music videos of Aretha and Prince and all the artists here, hers would pop up in his tweets, amid news of the black and left world. Anyone who died after contributing to the sweet or just side of life, especially if obscure or unsung, Kevin would recognize. Who died today? you could ask yourself. What happened on this day in (often black Southern) history? Likely, Kevin would have a tweet about that. NASA names a mountain on the moon for Melba Mouton, the mathematician at the center of Hidden Figures: Mons Mouton. Nikki Haley is being credited (or reviled) for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds; let’s remember the decades of people’s agitation and action against the flag. Jeff Beck dies; here’s his great live version of “People Get Ready,” with Rod Stewart. It’s Christmas and the anniversary of James Brown’s death; here again is Kevin’s terrific essay, “The Soul Will Find a Way,” vividly capturing the texture of life in the segregated South in which Kevin and James both grew up, the roots of the music. The scroll of his old tweets is like raw footage for a documentary of his personality and his work. “I write about what I see and experience,” Kevin states in the preface to his collection, Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics. It’s what made his best writing and public talks so rich — the threads of history, personal stories, political analysis/reporting, cultural references, the mood of the streets, all interconnected. And of course, South Carolina: “You know James Jamerson came from Edisto Island, right?” (The great bass guitarist appears in the video below at 1:24 and throughout.)

Any road trip with Kevin was a musical extravaganza. He had binders of CDs, with music of all genres, which he’d curate while driving, knowing the exact location of every disk and smoothly popping it into the player. He’d been a radio deejay in his youth, and never lost the touch. He knew the words to the most obscure songs. And he was a marvelous storyteller. He seemed to know the backstory of every inch of South Carolina. His own account of burning the Confederate flag in front of the statehouse was many times told, and always landed with effect. He’d had the flag stitched to a Nazi flag, which went up dramatically. Meanwhile, the battle flag resisted the lighter fluid and the flames from mechanical clickers, as counterprotestors joyfully sang, “Our flag won’t burn, our flag won’t burn…” to the tune of “Dixie.” Finally, the hated polyester rag melted. Kevin always ended this story with a piece of advice: “If you’re going to burn a flag, make sure it’s cotton.” He moved through life as a wildly original combination of anger and optimism. A beautiful soul. Rest in power, brother.

A lot is happening: Kopkind kicks off its summer season with our CineSLAM festival of short LGBTQ+ films, Saturday, June 24, 4 pm, The Latchis Theater, Main Street in Brattleboro, Vt. Click here for tickets and more info. Kopkind/CID Film Camp then commences for a week on July 16, followed by our week-long seminar/retreat for political journalists and organizers, beginning July 29. There’s a war on, against our youth, our bodies, our being, our families, our future. Kopkind has always been part of the fight-back and the liberating vision. Please help us with a donation by clicking the DONATE button above. It will mean so much.

Years ago, 1977 to be precise, Andy Kopkind wrote an article about the rise of what was then called the New Right for New Times magazine. (It appears in his vital collected work, The Thirty Years’ Wars, under the title “Culture Clash.”) He begins on the outskirts of Bensenville, Illinois, talking to a woman who “sells sweet corn by the street side.” Her politicization came via opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion and the perceived lesbian menace—an introduction to a well-coordinated politics of fear which raised the spectre of unisex bathrooms and demise of the family in order to organize a base for a far more pedestrian backlash agenda in the wake of the Sixties movements.

“Sooner or later,” Andy wrote, “pro-family activists find themselves pro: death penalty, Laetrile, nuclear power, local police, Panama Canal, saccharin, FBI, CIA, defense budget, public prayer and real estate growth. More likely than not, they are anti: bussing, welfare, public employee unions, affirmative action, amnesty [for draft resisters], marijuana, communes, gun control, pornography, the 55 mph speed limit, day-care centers, religious ecumenism, sex education, car pools and the Environ-mental Protection Act.”

Some of the references may be whiskered with age (and as Andy noted then, “of course, there are exceptions everywhere”), but the general pattern has been remark-ably sturdy, as witnessed today by thunderous campaigns against the dangers of drag brunches, trans youth, abortion everything, sex ed, ‘saying gay’ and so on, promoted by Ron DeSantis and his confederate governors, legislators, political aspirants, propagandists and grifters. Whether they believe any of it is beside the point; it’s power politics, baby.

The left, such as it is, has been spotty, to say the least, at recognizing that the right’s body politics is the spearpoint for its broader agenda, and thus, that in the struggle for a humane future, nothing is marginal.

In the 1970s, the black radical lesbian Combahee River Collective argued for recognizing people’s complex experience, and the multiple oppressions, based on sex, class, race, gender, geography etc., that are interconnected. In a way, that analysis was an update/elaboration on Dr. King’s “triple evils” of racism, war and economic exploitation. To our detriment, it was the road less traveled.

As filmmaker John Scagliotti, Andy’s life partner and Kopkind’s administrator, wrote in The Nation about the 1980s, “Straight progressives could not see that the contra war was intimately linked to the culture war; that the culture war was what was drawing the foot soldiers whose votes and organizational zeal emboldened the right to do pretty much whatever it wanted anywhere in the world; and so long as straight progressives were afraid to stand up against the real political dynamics that fed this growing monster in America, they would continue to lose.” Forty years later we’re still debating what is central, what is marginal.

Earlier this month, Laura Flanders (Kopkind mentor, 2018 and 2019) did an excellent segment of The Laura Flanders Show with Imara Jones, who founded TransLash Media and has mapped the connections between the anti-abortion movement and the anti-trans movement, underwritten by the same institutional funders and strategists. Some have been at work since the fright organizing against sex ed of the late 1960s morphed into organizing against the ERA and abortion and the gay rights movement; they now undergird the profusion of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation: 549 bills in state legislatures in 2023, 73 passed so far. For the right, the target changes; the objective does not.

This is the culture arm of the billionaires’ economic and political agenda for tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, union-busting, weapons-making, more pelf for themselves and growing immiseration for the rest. Its fruits were on display at a recent conference of right-wing Christian women, resurrecting the ghoulish memory of 1970s anti-ERA icon Phyllis Schlafly, a nuclear war hawk who saw political opportunity in redefining ‘equality’ to mean child and family endangerment. In attendance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to rouse the faithful against the supposed witch-hunt against Donald Trump. That got some applause but nothing like the hair-on-fire enthusiasm that greeted the verbal bashing of trans people, trans visibility. No matter; for Greene, it was all the same, because harnessing emotion is the tactical necessity. From Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign in the late Seventies to the Heritage Foundation’s current “Promise to America’s Children” to QAnon frenzy about “cannibal pedophiles” to gerrymandered right-wing legislative majorities to laws that target doctors and abortion assisters and trans people and basic being—these are all part of the great crimes behind great fortunes.

The headline to this post, “Bodies are the first site of liberation,” is from Imara Jones. Its inverse was offered by a Malaysian gay activist in an interview with Scagliotti for his 2003 film Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World: “Visibilty attracts the bullet.” Action brings reaction. Backlash does not happen without preceding gains. At Kopkind we talk about the long walk to the Freedom to Be. It is one fight.

Laura Flanders and JoAnn Wypijewski will be talking on these themes and more at the 22nd Century Conference in Minneapolis (July 6-9)—their session, titled “Anti-Sex, a Tool of Authoritarianism: Why Media Matters,” on Friday, July 7 at 4 pm.

ALSO: for people in the New York area, at 6:30 pm on Thursday, June 22, The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street in Manhattan, will be showing Kopkind/CID Film Camp alum Amir Amirani’s wonderful documentary We Are Many. The film is a history of the February 2003 protest to prevent the US war in Iraq, a momentous global event, and its legacies.

If not yet officially, summer is upon us, with June, with peonies and Pride Month, which also means with Kopkind’s CineSLAM festival of short LGBTQ+ films. June 24, at 4 pm, The Latchis Theater on Main Street in Brattleboro, Vermont. Mark your calendars, and watch this site for more details!

For today, for every day, let us raise a song for the Freedom to Be. Herewith, a bit from Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”:

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, 

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, 

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

In his wonderful essay on the origins and spirit of May Day, posted on May 1, below, Peter Linebaugh mentions Linton Kwesi Johnson. Everyone can use a spirit-lift, so here’s the song. A reminder, if any is needed, that time is a person’s most valuable possession. Listen, enjoy, and, if you haven’t already, read Peter on the historic desire for time to live.