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Tune in to "Out-FM": Tues., Mar. 19 from 9:00-10:00 PM EST
On WBAI/Pacifica, 99.5 FM, streaming live at http://wbai.org/playernew.html
Archived 10 min. after the show at http://wbai.org/archive.php (scroll down to 9 PM Tues.)

Coverage of Marielle Franco Memorial Rally in DC on the anniversary of her assassination.

Last Thursday thousands gathered for vigils and protests in cities across Brazil to mark the
one-year anniversary of the assassination of Marielle Franco, the Black out-bisexual socialist City Council member in Rio de Janeiro who was a feminist and human rights activist. Franco was 38. Elected in 2017, she fought against gender violence, for reproductive rights, and for the rights of residents of the favela, or poor Black neighborhood. She chaired the Women's Defense Commission and was part of a committee that monitored the intervention by Brazils then- president Michel Temer who brought in the army to conduct local police operations. Working with the Rio de Janeiro Lesbian Front, Franco presented a City Council bill to create a day of lesbian visibility, but the bill was defeated, 19-17.

On March 14, 2018, the day after Franco spoke out on Twitter against police violence, she attended a round-table discussion titled "Young Black Women Moving [Power] Structures." Two hours later, she and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, were fatally shot nine times by two men who were driving another car. Franco's press officer survived with injuries. The Rio de Janeiro police found that the direction of the nine shots supported the hypothesis that Franco was assassinated. Last week, local police arrested two suspects, former members of the military police force, for the murder. Each suspect had received honors several years earlier from Flavio Bolsonaro, a local elected official who is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the neofascist elected Brazils president late last year.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose husband David Miranda was a fellow City Council member and close personal friend of Franco's, said the most important subjects to cover about her were her relentless and brave activism against the most lawless police battalions, her opposition to military intervention, and, most threateningly of all, her growing power as a black, gay woman from the favela seeking not to join Brazils power structure, but to subvert it.

Throughout Brazil and around the world, she was admired as a fearless fighter for the oppressed, whose killing reeked of government retaliation. Last Thursday, in front of the White House, Brazilian activists and their North American allies gathered to remember Marielle Franco, and to protest the Bolsonaro government as well as U.S. intervention against neighboring Venezuela.

Here are some excerpts, preceded by the song "Morning in Rio" by Sergio Mendes, from the album Encanto*.
 

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Naomi Brussel brings us coverage of the UN Commission on the Status of Women's sessions.

*Recorded by Esther Iverem, Producer and Host of On The Ground: Voices of Resistance from the Nation's Capital originating from our Pacifica sister station WPFW.
Introduction by Bob Lederer, co-producer of Out-FM on WBAI. Technical assistance by John Riley of Out-FM. 

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Chelsea Manning & Lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen

Chelsea Manning & Lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen

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Chelsea Manning Jailed for Protecting Press Freedom
Tune in to "Out-FM": Tues., Mar. 12 from 9:10-9:40 PM EST
On WBAI/Pacifica, 99.5 FM, streaming live at http://wbai.org/playernew.html
Archived 10 min. after the show at http://wbai.org/archive.php (scroll down to 9 PM Tues.)

This is part of our Queerly Defiant series. On March 8, trans activist, former Army intelligence officer, and whistleblower Chelsea Manning refused to answer questions before a federal grand jury in Alexandria, VA investigating Wikileaks' publishing of the files she provided them in 2010. She was immediately held in contempt of court and jailed for the life of the grand jury, whose end date remains secret. 

In the first segment of this edition of Out-FM, co-producer Bob Lederer interviewed two guests about both Manning's current detention and her time in the military brig from 2010-17. In a statement last week before her incarceration, Manning said, “I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.” 

Her support committee wrote: "By resisting this grand jury, Chelsea has made the same sacrifice as dozens of activists before her, who have opposed the grand jury system at the expense of their own freedom. Chelsea has already served prison time for standing up against government secrecy and revealing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know, and so does the government, that she will not turn tail and allow this shadowy grand jury to eclipse her legacy of speaking truth to power.”

First we interviewed Kevin Gosztola, Editor of Shadowproof (https://shadowproof.com/author/kgosztola/ ), who's covered her case for years.

Our second guest was Richard Saenz. Richard is a Senior Attorney and the Criminal Justice and Police Misconduct Strategist at Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest national legal organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and those living with HIV. Richard coordinates litigation and policy work on behalf of incarcerated people. Currently, he’s leading Lambda Legal’s response to the Trump Administration’s changes to the federal Bureau of Prisons Transgender Offender Manual. In addition, Richard was a lead member of the litigation team in a successful challenge to Missouri’s Department of Corrections policy denying appropriate health care to transgender people in its custody, in one of the first court decisions to rule specifically that such policies are unconstitutional. He also helped secure a settlement with the City of New York on behalf of a gay man attacked by Rikers Island jail officials while visiting his partner.

 

Under the Udala Trees

This is a fascinating book about a young lesbian growing up in revolutionary Nigeria. In the wake of Nigeria's civil war, Ijeoma falls in love. Under Nigeria's draconian laws, same-sex relationships can be punished by death. The book follows Ijeoma from her youth through adulthood, as she tries to reconcile her identity as a woman who loves women with a society that proscribes her relationships. The only respectable path in Ijeoma's Nigeria is to marry a man, and she does this, while the book delves in to the internal struggle that follows.

Nigerian-born writer Chinelo Okparanta is author of "Happiness, Like Water" and "Under the Udala Trees". She has won many literary awards and is currently a professor at Bucknell University.

Author Okparanta Chinelo

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