Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively “we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer” I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.
You can read the interview here, you can buy my graphic novel featuring a gay vampire here, and you can call your congressmen about rejecting HR 2616, HR 8705, HR 7661 using 5calls.org (they don’t have these specific bills listed as things to call about, but luckily you can talk about whatever you want on the phone)
In his 1987 book The Game of Words, Willard R. Espy offered a poem of “forgotten positives”:
I dreamt of a corrigible, nocuous youth,
Gainly, gruntled, and kempt;
A mayed and a sidious fellow, forsooth —
Ordinate, effable, shevelled, ept, couth;
A delible fellow I dreamt.
Correspondingly, he pointed out, many common words ending in -less seem to have no opposites ending in -ful:
A tailful dog, one leaf-ful spring
Set out for toothful foraging,
And as he dug in rootful sod,
Paid voiceful tribute to his God.
At which, a feckful, loveful lass,
Whose strapful bodice charmed each pass-
Erby, cried out, “O timeful sound!
O ageful, lifeful, peerful hound!”
Born in 1946 in Longview, Texas, Silkwood grew up in the conservative Protestant world of postwar east Texas. She was a good student and a member of the National Honor Society but even that didn’t mean an easy way into a good college when you were poor and rural and a woman in the mid 60s. She won a scholarship to go to Lamar State College of Technology (today Lamar University) in Beaumont. But Silkwood didn’t stick with that. She married an oil pipeline worker. He sucked. They had three children in quick succession, but he also had women on the side. He spent all their money on fancy things and the other women as well. She confronted him, he refused to change, and she left him.
Silkwood was now a young single mother without any resources. This was a rough situation. So she worked. She moved to Oklahoma City and got a job in a hospital. That led to a bunch of jobs here and there, trying to find something to make ends meet. Now, at the same, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up a lot of blue collar hard jobs to women. A lot of people didn’t like that, both companies and the male-dominated unions. But the courts found consistently that, in fact, Title VII was indeed part of the law and that is what Congress had decided. So there was a path for a good income for a woman like Karen Silkwood now. She got a job with Kerr-McGee, working as a metallography lab tech at the Cimarron River Fabrication Site in Crescent, Oklahoma. This was a plutonium production facility.
Despite this being Oklahoma, not only was this plant unionized but by what was just about the best union of the era, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers. Now, the OCAW had a different approach to issues of health and safety than many unions. Most of them took unsafe work as a fact of life, more or less, and imbibed in cultures that came from the workers themselves that prided themselves on dangerous work. So something like OSHA was a good thing, but also not something that they really cared about that much. Some of that was in the OCAW too, but its legislative director Tony Mazzocchi had a different belief. He believed that the workplace was an environment as important as any forest or desert and he believed that workers should use the new laws about safety and chemicals to build power on the shopfloor. Some thought he was a hopeless leftist for this, others saw him, as he has been called as “the Rachel Carson of the American workplace.”
Well, Silkwood soon found her job super dangerous and she didn’t like that. Shortly after she was hired at Kerr-McGee, the workers engaged in a strike over bad workplace conditions. Silkwood participated, learned a lot, and became a committed union support. She also experienced what it was like to lose. The thing about Oklahoma is that it wasn’t that hard for the company to find scabs. Not a big union culture there. The company also tried to get workers to decertify the union. That didn’t succeed, but after 10 weeks, the workers came back, angry and defeated legally but not in spirit.
Then in 1974, with the company seeking to increase profits, it forced workers to labor for longer shifts and safety standards declined even further. And this was a nuclear plant, safety standards had to mean something. Silkwood was first exposed to radiation then, discovering contamination in the emission spectroscopy lab. Meanwhile, the company continued trying to decert the union. At about this time, Silkwood joined the bargaining committee for the union. Her role–and her role in fighting the decert–was to focus on health and safety. And boy did she. She found all kinds of horrible things going on. A lack of showers meant workers weren’t getting radiation off them. Plutonium was going missing, for God’s sake.
It was about this time as well that she got to know Mazzocchi, during a meeting in Washington where she and her committee met with OCAW leadership. He encouraged her to continue. He wanted to use this to fight for the union’s sheer existence at Kerr-McGee. He told Silkwood about the connections between plutonium and cancer–and while you might think, what??, there isn’t really any reason she would have that knowledge. The knowledge of the rank-and-file worker of the shit they were dealing with at the workplace in this era was very, very low. There just wasn’t education and in a lot of cases, workers didn’t even know or have access to knowledge of the chemical makeup of the substances they handled on the job.
Mazzocchi’s strategy then was for Silkwood to continue to gather information and then the union would present it to the Atomic Energy Commission. She wholeheartedly agree. So the company decided to murder her. Now, that’s a big claim and it can’t be proven to the point of charging someone in the legal system. But it’s clear that someone along the line, maybe a foreman, maybe a senior supervisor, maybe someone further up the corporate ladder, decided that Silkwood should be dead. That’s especially true after her and Mazzocchi’s strategy worked and the increased fears of exposure led to workers voting to keep the union in the decert election.
Somehow, Silkwood was irradiated with 400 times the safe limit of plutonium, in a way that had to be intentional. Her gloves at work were not punctured. She discovered this during a self-check that was then confirmed by further testing. It was so bad that her house had to be torn down. This got in the news. The company responded that she contaminated herself to hurt Kerr-McGee, a ridiculous and absurd claim.
So Mazzocchi told her to talk to New York Times reporter David Burnham, who had broken the Serpico case in New York about police corruption. He flew to Oklahoma for the meeting. She had lots of documentation. On the way to meet him, her car was forced off the road, she was killed, and all the documents disappeared. Karen Silkwood was 28 years old. Further analysis showed she had been forced off the road by a car hitting her from behind. This all led to massive media coverage. Kerr-McGee soon got out of the nuclear business entirely, closing its plants in 1975. After a legal battle from her survivors, where in court the company again claimed she was a troublemaker who contaminated herself, Kerr-McGee settled out of court for $1.38 million. Then the movie came, starring Meryl Streep, which was released to acclaim in 1983.
A note: when people don’t trust the return of nuclear energy today, this case is a big reason why. The people who controlled the nuclear industry were awful. The reason Silkwood and The China Syndrome had such power is because the kind of expertise that was said to be able to lead us to some better tomorrow was shown to be totally corrupt, self-serving, and dangerous to the public.
Karen Silkwood is buried in Danville Cemetery, Kilgore, Texas.
If you would like this series to visit other murdered union activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Abraham Rabinowitz, an IWW member killed in the Everett Massacre, is in Queens. Louis Tikas, the leader of the UMWA in Ludlow during the coal strike of 1914 and whose murder started the Ludlow Massacre, is in Trinidad, Colorado. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
The Bill hasn’t passed yet; however it is very likely. Turkey just shut down the social media accounts of LGBT+ organizations, and quietly banned/“made not possible to see” multiple dating apps for LGBT people such as Taimi. These are small steps leading up to this. Just less than a year ago the distribution of Estrogen was made ten times harder and hormone replacement therapy laws upped the transitioning age from 18 to 21. Please speak for us.
As mentioned in my previous post, the Tartan Army's invasion of Boston was a textbook case of soft power and of people-to-people diplomacy. The Bostonians were smitten, as were their Scottish guests.
With very little exaggeration, this was the best of humanity on display: strangers helping strangers, different cultures embracing one another and a sense of kindness, trust and, yes, love in the air.
That said, this was not just an unending bacchanalian drink-fest, though it most certainly was that. It was also Scottish fans raising money for local charities—Project Goal and Hasbro Children's Hospital, to name just a couple—and creating a raucous atmosphere at Fenway Park. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu was even taught how to properly apply a Scottish cone to the head of a statue, a la the Scottish tradition.
There were even some permanent diplomatic breakthroughs: The aforementioned Wu signed a Sister Cities agreement with Glasgow, a process that usually takes years; the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, officially legalized haggis, the first state in America to do so—and, yes, this was a big deal: many an imported haggis, including two of mine, were confiscated upon arrival in Bangor, Maine. There's talk of commissioning a statue to the Tartan Army in Boston and of a permanent annual holiday, perhaps Tartan Day, that would encourage visits between the two countries. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft now wants an NFL game to be held in Scotland.
So, for all those reasons and countless more, our time with the Tartan Army in Boston was life-affirming and fun.
But there was another feeling I left with: anger bordering on rage at the organizers.
We all know that FIFA, the cartel in charge of the World Cup, is one of the world's most corrupt organizations. From the 2015 indictments by U.S. prosecutors of dozens of FIFA officials for paying more than $150 million of bribes for media rights, marketing contracts, and tournament decisions to the controversial—and very lucrative decision to hold the 2022 tournament in Qatar—the stench of unchecked greed eminates from this group as if from a rotting corpse.
My excitement at being part of the Tartan Army did not survive first exposure to FIFA.
As soon as I found out where and when Scotland would be playing, I jumped onto the FIFA website, happy as a child that I might finally be able to watch the team from my beloved homeland play in a World Cup.
That joy did not last.
The cheapest seats, and I mean nosebleed at Gillette Stadium, were $1,734. Each. Fuck that, was my immediate reaction. I wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction—or my money. I'd go up to Boston to be with the Tartan Army and revel in their joy and sing songs from my childhood and show the people of Boston what Scotland was all about.
(And just so I can't be accused of bias, yes 539 Scottish fans were generously awarded the "Supporters Entry Tier" special $60 price. I'm sure that took the pain away for the other 40,000+ supporters who had to sell cars, take out second mortgages or prostitute themselves for their tickets.)
Welcome to dynamic pricing where the organizations don't want scalpers to profit, they want to become the scalpers. It left a nasty bitterness in my mouth. I imagined that the seats at the world cup would be filled with corporate arseholes and casual attendees who thought it'd be "kinda neat" to check out a soccer game. Forget the loyal fans from Haiti or Morocco or Brazil who would already have to shell out thousands upon thousands of dollars for travel and accomodation.
In the end—and I mean about a week before the games— and mainly because my younger son has more patience and better sleuthing skills than me, we did track down some tickets that were cheaper, but still more than I would ever have considered paying for a sporting event ... or my first car.
Worries about transportation began filtering out of Boston. How the hell was Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) going to ferry out tens of thousands of football fans from Boston to Foxborough, home of the New England Patriots' stadium, where Scotland's first game was to be played? Most Patriots fans drive to the 65,000-seat stadium on game day; just 1,500 take the trains. The fee for that ride is $20.
The first bit of planning—and wasn't this just in line with the beneficient FIFA way of thinking?—was to jack up the prices. Pretty soon we were hearing that the train out to the stadium for the World Cup was going to be $100. Most soccer fans would not have a car, so they'd be forced to eat the price gouge. Again.
The Tartan Army hired yellow buses.
(At about this time an enterprising group of Scots, which ended up numbering about 12,000 started looking at Providence as a cheaper alternative to Boston, where hotel and Airbnb prices, like the game tickets, were soaring unjustifiably. They looked into hiring dozens of school buses to take them to the games and ended up arriving in fine style and grand cheer.)
The ensuing complaints apparently were heard—just a little bit. The price for the trains was dropped to $80.
I decided to pay for that, having heard that Ubers too would be gouging and, as the Scotland game was kicking off at 9 p.m., I thought it would be a gamble to wait for a lift that late at night. Surely, I thought, MBTA would use these extra funds to do a bit of planning and provide some nice cushy trains to their valued customers.
Yeah, no. That did not happen. Almost immediately, we began getting the sense that we the customers were nothing more than an inconvenience. Also, we had the feeling that nowhere in the world had public transportation providers ever had to deal with transporting large numbers of passengers to public sporting events. Ever.
Having bought the tickets, we were given the alternative of five boarding groups to get out to Foxborough. Once you picked a group, you had to stick to it. The first slot was told to report to South Station between 2:15 p.m. and 2:45 p.m.—almost seven hours before the game. Final boarding was between 5:45 p.m. and 6 p.m. The customers be damned. This was a cattle call.
The Scots, of course, were merry about this. The Haitians, too, were enjoying the party atmosphere. When we arrived at the station, a winding maze of cattle fences had been set up for crowd control, reinforcing the feeling that we were being herded like bovines rather than being treated like valued guests. Also, everyone knew that football fans like a bevvy or two before the game. And yet, once you were in the cattle pen, there was no access to toilets—or water.
Eventually, we squeezed onto the train. Not until every seat and most of the aisles were full did we trundle off. And I do mean trundle. We'd go for a bit, stop for a while, go for a bit. Nobody was in a hurry to get the cattle to pasture. Most members of the Tartan Army were oblivious, singing about John McGinn and how Harry Kane the Englishman licks windaes.
But then, the inevitable. Every single person on that train, with perhaps two exceptions, had been drinking all day and every day before that for the last week. Each carriage had one toilet. Within seconds a line the entire length of the carriage had formed. It might not have been as terrible as it was had the first "patron" not taken 14 minutes. (He was timed and bollocked in unrepeatable terms, mostly by the female brigade of the army, which was now looking considerably less buoyant. Actually, we were probably more buoyant, but not in a good way!)
I could begin to see people turning blue and knees coming closer together. Curse words floated up from behind me. A suggestion that men should double up. Or maybe triple up if one of them used the sink. One guy offered another $10 for the bottle of Gatorade he was drinking. No sale—while I was there. Three timers were set up: women were allowed 90 seconds, men 45. People performing their task within the allotted time received rousing ovations and high fives upon departing the toilet.
It's funny now, sure. But after half an hour, it wasn't. And it certainly wasn't first world.
Then, amazingly, things got worse. Or leastwise more dangerous. As a fan who has been through numerous riots at football games, what happened after we got out of the train was alarming. Haiti and Scotland fans were not separated. In this case, it didn't matter. The two sets of supporters were too busy hugging and dancing together. But woe betide it had been England playing, say, Argentina. There would have been fisticuffs. What's worse is that, though Gillette Stadium has 10 gates, the train "passengers" were funnelled through the cattle fences to just one gate. Those turnstiles were through a brick wall. So, had there been fighting and people had tried to get away, they would have stampeded right into the wall. No telling how many people could have been crushed. I am not catastrophizing, such things happen at football games.
My reward.
Again, to be fair, I do want to point out that, upon entry into the stadium, feeling like a bull on the way to castration, I was handed this incredibly beautiful and meaningful memento: a lanyard and a plastic FIFA badge. "It's a keepsake," the overly cheerful hander-out-of-cheap-shit told me enthusiastically.
I shall cherish it for never.
So, inconveniently ensconced at the stadium three hours before the fucking game for our convenience, we went off in search of refreshments. Luckily, they had beer. Ewan and I bought two beers and a couple of funnels (small) of french fries. Life was looking up!
Swag.
"That'll be $56 thank you, sir." Oh come on. And it was Michelob Ultra, the only beer I, as a Heineken drinker, am allowed to be snobby about.
My look of pure angry disdain must have said it all. "You get a collectible cup with it," he quickly added. Oh. Fuck. Off.
(To be fair to the punters, when I googled an image of this it took me to eBay where it was on sale for $25. Good for you, mate. Call it revenge porn!)
Gillette Stadium, unbranded Boston Stadium, is magnificent. The atmosphere was incredible and joyous. And Scotland won. I will remember that night forever, even without my lanyard and metal Michelob Ultra cup. (That's the obligatory happy nut graph.)
Ewan and I were smart after the game. We got the hell out of there. It was late (11:45 p.m.) and we were justifiably afraid of what might happen. The way to the train looked like the retreat from Stalingrad. The Tartan Army had damaged itself, wobbly and nonsensical. You could see the coming hangover in their faces. Yes, there was a bank of portalets outside the stadium, but then you were funneled through the cattle fences again. We were lucky. We only waited 45 minutes.
The cattle retreat, very slowly, from Foxborough.
One man ahead of me in the line was mumble-singing quietly to himself: "You had four years for this, four years to organize, you still fucked it up, still fucked it up."
Those who had the temerity to stay behind a little to celebrate Scotland's first World Cup victory in 36 years reported an absolute nightmare.
One member of the Tartan Army wrote a formal complaint.
Dear Sir/Madam:
I am writing to express my utter disbelief and anger at the appalling organisation and treatment of supporters attending the FIFA World Cup in Boston.
The experience was nothing short of a public safety failure and should be a source of embarrassment for every organisation involved in planning and delivering this event.
Following the match, thousands of supporters were funnelled into an inadequately managed transport system and left to queue for approximately three hours simply to board a train. During this time, there was no meaningful access to drinking water, no adequate sanitation facilities, and little or no communication from event staff or transport officials about what was happening or when the situation would improve.
It is simply unacceptable that an event marketed as the world's premier sporting tournament could treat paying supporters in this manner. Fans had travelled from across the globe, spent significant sums of money on tickets, accommodation and travel, only to be subjected to conditions more akin to a humanitarian crisis than a world-class sporting event.
The complete lack of planning for crowd management was staggering. There appeared to be no contingency measures for moving large numbers of people safely and efficiently. Elderly supporters, young children and those with medical conditions were forced to stand for hours without basic necessities. Had there been a medical emergency or the need for a rapid evacuation, it is difficult to see how the situation could have been managed without serious consequences.
The most basic responsibility of any event organiser is to ensure the safety and welfare of attendees. On this occasion, that responsibility was comprehensively ignored. Providing access to water, toilets and timely transport for tens of thousands of spectators is not an optional extra—it is the minimum standard expected of a host city for an event of this magnitude.
Boston prides itself on being a world-class city. Unfortunately, the organisation surrounding this World Cup fixture fell woefully short of that standard. The treatment of supporters was unacceptable, disrespectful and potentially dangerous.
He then had the naive audacity to demand an explanation from FIFA and MTBA. I'm sure they got right on that.
While they were not able or inclined to provide basic security or comfort for their customers, what FIFA was able to do with the money they extorted from them was to provide hospitality treatment and swag bags to their VIP guests, rebrand an entire stadium, including covering up every single mention of any brand not associated with the World Cup, fly their chief to almost every game all over the three host countries and, probably, pay for other invented peace prizes of solid gold.
I am so happy I was able to see Scotland win and be a part of the joyousness of the Tartan Army. I will be just as happy never to give another dime to the arseholes at FIFA. C'mon, Scotland.
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