Charity Sunday: For Human Rights Everywhere – #HumanRightsWatch #Homophobia #CharitySunday

Regardless of your political affiliation, you can’t deny that the results of the U.S. election earlier this month will create significant threats to many groups, including immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and women seeking reproductive health care. The platform and policies of the winning party state outline quite clearly their intentions to introduce draconian legislation, roll back existing protections and target groups considered to be “undesirable”. There’s no secret about this.

Against this background, I found it hard to pick a cause for this month’s Charity Sunday. Organizations I considered included Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) for immigration rights, GLAD for LGBTQ advocacy and Planned Parenthood. Then I realized that underlying all these individual missions is the fundamental concept of human rights. While some forces work hard to divide us into groups, camps and sides, in fact we are all human beings – and despite claims to the contrary, all human beings deserve the same opportunities to live in peace and dignity, to be free from fear, to raise families and build communities, to love and to create. So I decided to step back and support the principle of human rights for all.

My chosen charity today is Human Rights Watch. HRW is an international organization that investigates and documents human rights abuses around the globe. They use techniques ranging from personal interviews to satellite imagery to high-tech data science in order to publish irrefutable evidence of situations where human beings are being deprived of life, liberty and security.

HRW is controversial, at least partly because it tells stories some people, organizations and governments do not want to have heard. To guarantee their independence, they do not accept donations from any governmental body. Of course, merely exposing cases of atrocities, genocide, injustice and discrimination will not by itself improve the situation. However, it’s a first step.

I urge you to spend some time on the HRW website, reading their reports and familiarizing yourself with their methods.

Today, I’m pledging to donate two dollars to HRW for each comment I receive on this post.

For today’s excerpt, I have a sequence from my dystopian MM romance The H-Gene. This near-future speculative novel imagines a United States splintered by natural disasters, civil strife and the devastating effects of a plague, supposedly spread by gay men. The authoritarian government has rounded up anyone testing positive for the H-gene and interned them in remote “quarantine” camps, patrolled by robot guards and surrounded by moats of toxic waste.

I wrote this novel more than ten years ago, strongly influenced by the homophobic trends in the U.S. along with memories of the AIDS epidemic. Alas, it feels all too timely now now.

Blurb

When love is forbidden, the whole world’s a prison.

Dylan Moore will do anything for freedom. Seven years ago, a gay plague spread to heterosexuals, killing millions and sparking brutal anti-gay riots. The Guardians rounded up men who tested positive for the homogene and imprisoned them in remote quarantine centers like desolate Camp Malheur. Since then, Dylan has hacked the camp's security systems and hoarded spare bits of electronics, seeking some way to escape. He has concluded the human guards are the only weakness in the facility's defenses.

Camp guard Rafe Cowell is H-negative. He figures the lust he feels watching prisoner 3218 masturbate on the surveillance cameras must be due to his loneliness and isolation. When he finally meets the young queer, he discovers that Dylan is brilliant, brave, sexy as hell — and claims to be in love with Rafe. Despite his qualms, Rafe finds he can't resist the other man's charm. By the time Dylan asks for his help in escaping, Rafe cares too much for Dylan to refuse.

Dylan's plan goes awry and Rafe comes to his rescue. Soon they're both fugitives, fleeing from militant survivalists, murderous androids, homophobic ideologues and a powerful man who wants Dylan as his sexual toy. Hiding in the Plague-ravaged city of Sanfran, Dylan and Rafe learn there's far more than their own safety at stake. Can they help prevent the deaths of millions more people? And can Rafe trust the love of a man who deliberately seduced him in order to escape from quarantine?

Excerpt

Something tickled his ear. “Private message,” his earpiece announced in a voice that was neither male nor female. He tapped his fingertip on the embedded bud, the signal for it to proceed.

“Meet me today at 1700 in the generator building.” Something took flight in Rafe’s stomach, then landed with a thud. The voice remained neutral, but he recognized the sender. “We need to talk. I have changed the security code so that we won’t be interrupted. 22A4J.” Without really trying, Rafe memorized the code. But he wouldn’t go to the meeting. Of course he wouldn’t. “Please,” whispered the earplug. “It’s important.”

The message ended. Rafe tapped at the device again, but it did not repeat. He flopped back onto his bed, sending his ereader crashing to the floor. Damn him! Who did the queer think he was, ordering Rafe around? Tempting him?

How the fuck had the guy routed a message to his private channel?

That was it. He had to tell the Guardians.

He rolled over and buried his face in his crossed arms. He kept hearing the electronic voice. Please. Please…

His alarm clock read 1618.

The generator room was at the north end of the camp, nearly two miles from the main entrance to the inmate precincts. He’d have to take a velocart, one of the small electric trucks the robo-guards used to move heavy equipment around. He could pick up a biohazard suit from the lockers just outside the gate…

What was he thinking? Rafe rubbed his throbbing temples.

“Please.”

In eighteen months at Malheur Camp, Rafe had never once set foot inside the electrified fence that separated the resident precincts from the guard quarters and the control station. It wasn’t forbidden, strictly speaking. He’d studied the procedures in case there was ever a need for human intervention. He knew the layout from the digital maps. He certainly knew what things were like inside, after all his hours staring at the monitors.

It had simply never been necessary. He shook his head, trying to banish his wayward thoughts. It wasn’t necessary now.

Suddenly the overhead light went out. Simultaneously an alarm began to ring in the corridor. The small window above his bed provided enough light for him to find his shoes. He stepped from his quarters into the darkened hallway. A red emergency beacon flashed in the corner.

His earpiece vibrated once again. “Sorry to bother you, man.” Rafe recognized Turk’s ghetto intonations in the bland synthesized voice. “Something’s blown in the generator room. For some fucking reason, the droids can’t get in. Will you check it out?”

And how did you manage this, Dylan? Rafe thought, torn between fury and wonder. “I’m on my way,” he told the air as he strode towards the main gate.

It was late afternoon in September. The floppy biohazard suit was hot. Designed to keep microbes out, it obviously didn’t let any air in. Rafe summoned two robo-guards to accompany him through the gate. A third met him with a velo. “Dismissed,” Rafe told them, his voice sounding hollow through the ventilator. “I’ll drive myself.”

The cart made its stately way down the central artery from the gate to the northern section of the camp. In the mid twentieth century, Malheur Camp had been a field station for geologists studying the volcanic origins of the eastern Oregon plain. Some of the dorms dated from that period. Those wood-shingled huts had been bleached to a uniform grey by decades of harsh weather. The more modern buildings were plain plastifoam rectangles with vertical slits for windows. Originally white, they were now a dingy yellow, spotted here and there with patches of black mold.

There were no trees. The flat ground was mostly bare, strewn with sharp basalt pebbles. The inhabitants of one or two dorms had tried to cultivate some ornamental plants, but the vegetation had just withered and turned gray like everything else. Probably the toxic chemicals in the moat had leached into the soil over the years. Rafe had heard someone joke about that once, maybe one of the drivers who brought supplies. “Double use,” the guy had commented. “Keep the pervs from escaping and get a waste dump at the same time.”

Fresh fruit and vegetables were cultivated in hydroponic greenhouses in the southeast quadrant. The warehouse was in the southwest. Rafe rolled past the workshops and the rec halls—like the dorms only larger—a basketball court and a baseball field, and row after row of bleak barracks. Side roads branched off to the left and right, leading between the dorms towards the concrete walls and the first electrified fence beyond. Floodlights mounted on three-story-high steel towers loomed over the cramped clusters of low-rise buildings.

Robo-guards strode along the paths or herded groups of inmates to their assigned duties. A few figures in neon pink came out of the buildings to watch Rafe pass. He was, for some reason, glad that the biohazard mask hid his face.

He arrived at the generator room at 1652. Why the fuck should I care what time it is? he scolded himself as he parked the velocart. Unlike most of the structures in the camp, the generator building was reinforced concrete with a steel door. The Guardians had foreseen the possibility of sabotage.

Of course, that hadn’t made any difference to Dylan.

Rafe took a deep breath, trying to slow his racing pulse. He had to remove his glove to punch in the security code. The lock clicked. He pulled the heavy door open.

It was pitch black inside, and silent. Normally, the hums and whines of the generators would have filled the windowless, two-story building.

“Dylan?” Rafe’s voice had a quaver that was not due to the respirator. This evidence of his own weakness made him angry. He pulled a penlight out of the chest pocket of the suit and flashed it around the apparently empty space. “3218! Show yourself. You’re in big trouble.”

The door clanged shut behind him. He took a step forwards, still not seeing any sign of the devil he knew must be there.

Nothing. Rafe seethed. He couldn’t stand to be played for a fool. He tore the mask off his face and pushed back the hood, then strained his ears for some indication that he was not alone. All he could hear was his own breathing.

Rafe played his light over the black coils and silver casings of the generators to his right. They ran the length of the building, flanked by an aisle to allow access for maintenance. Control panels lined the left wall. Normally they’d be populated by blinking lights and gauges, Rafe guessed, but they were dark now. Halfway up the aisle, between the power equipment and the controls, was a sturdy looking bench several feet wide. Rafe sat and swept the light along the bottom of the silent generators, in case someone had squirmed underneath.

He held his breath and listened to absolute silence. “Dylan,” he said finally, struggling to keep his voice even. “You asked me to come. I’m here. Come out and tell me what you want.”

A snap. A hiss. The smell of melting wax. Dylan stepped into view, apparently out of nowhere, holding a candle. The warm light illumined the curved shells of the machines, making them look like antique mechanisms of forgotten purpose. It flickered across the floor like fairies dancing in the woods. It made Dylan’s skin glow like polished ivory.

https://www.lisabetsarai.com/thehgenebook.html

Don’t forget to leave me a comment. Every one is a small but significant contribution to universal human rights.

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