tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-143709572011-12-14T18:43:42.463-08:00Commentary by, for and about LesbiansLNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.comBlogger951100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-59066444038310087042009-03-08T10:56:00.000-07:002009-03-08T11:08:19.951-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SbQJgVWM90I/AAAAAAAABQ0/RqV0qV6Ca-w/s1600-h/smile.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SbQJgVWM90I/AAAAAAAABQ0/RqV0qV6Ca-w/s400/smile.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310880311667390274" /></a><br />By "The Hostess"<br /><br /><br />With the new year comes my annual promise to get check ups. That<br />includes a trip to the dentist . It sucks, but it's what you're<br />supposed to do.<br /><br />Along with mammograms and pap smears, these checkups are evil, but a<br />necessary one. As tantalizing as having a total stranger arrange my<br />boob on a slab and squish it, I only get that done once a year. A<br />intrigued as I am reading "How to please my man"-Cosmo mag. Aug 1997,<br />while freezing in a napkin size gown and socks, I only see my happy go<br />lucky gynecologist once a year. So when the dentist reminds me to come<br />in every 6 months for a "good cleaning" that time frame becomes very<br />fluid.<br /><br />Let's be honest here…unless the woman is wearing leather or vinyl, I'm<br />just not that into being poked or prodded.<br /><br />So I made the appointment with the idea that "I'd rather have a root<br />canal" might not be a good line of thought.<br /><br />For me a trip to the dentist is a trip back to childhood…but not in a<br />good way. I sit in the waiting room, trying to drown out that<br />mosquito-pitched drill noise and practicing my calm face for when the<br />hygienist gets overzealous. She's this big black woman; she's good and<br />she's thorough. She has gigantic breasts and as she grips my head to<br />her bosom I fall into the childhood dream of being held fast by<br />motherly arms-that is, until I feel that incredibly sharp pointy tool<br />wedged between my teeth and gums.<br /><br />Most of the time I try to keep my eyes closed. I have my calm face on,<br />trying desperately to stay in the happy place…which is not, by the<br />way, the fake painting of wildflowers in a meadow on the far wall. My<br />eyes do open though…usually when the hygienist reaches the point where<br />my toothbrush has obviously failed. She's half-Nelsoned my head so<br />that when my eyes shoot open I'm gazing at the ceiling. Again<br />childhood flashes. They've put a mobile up there…little toothbrushes,<br />teeth and toothpaste dance above my head, like pixies before a roaring<br />fire which is my third molar.<br /><br />Soon it's over, and unlike me, my hygienist doesn't seem that<br />concerned about the incredible amount of blood I'm spitting into a<br />small metal sink. The hard part is over and here comes my report card.<br />I am 10 yrs. old and being scolded for not flossing like I should. My<br />dentist strolls in and looks at xrays. She too picks up a sharp<br />instrument. Why must everyone be reaching into my mouth with sharp<br />objects? I try to answer many questions with both her hands and the<br />sharp instrument in my mouth…this cannot end soon enough.<br /><br />So how do you like living in Narberth?<br /><br />"fing" is the best I can do.<br /><br />Is the water fluoridated there?<br /><br />"ow da uck ud i no" comes out before I can stop it.<br /><br />She pulls out both her hands and looks at me. "Sorry, I didn't get<br />that last anwser."<br /><br />"I'm not sure…but I like living there very much." I flash my newly<br />cleaned teeth.<br /><br />AND THEN IT HAPPENS<br /><br />"Yes", she says. "I took my girlfriend to a great restaurant there for<br />her birthday." She smiles back.<br /><br />I'm speechless. I've been going to this dentist for three years. She's<br />adorable, bubbly….and did she just tell me she's a lesbian? I start<br />looking for clues. No wedding ring. Check. Sensible shoes. Check. But<br />there's a couple of problems:<br /><br />1. Straight women always call their friends their girlfriends…like<br />they have boy-friends that aren't boyfriends. There should be laws<br />against that.<br /><br />2. She's Asian. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time telling<br />whether women of color are gay. Call me stupid…<br /><br />3. I'm just not Miss Confidence when it comes to schmoozing it up with<br />women…they make me nervous (in a good way) but usually I turn beet red<br />and mumble something about my left shoe…<br /><br />Which is just what I did. I sat there and got a clean bill of health<br />from my dentist and walked out of there not knowing what she meant.<br />Whether she was being friendly, or whether I had just missed some sort<br />of secret handshake for the club.<br /><br />Sh*t. You know what this means, don't you?<br /><br />It's gonna kill me to do this, but…I can hardly say it…I just might<br />have to start going to the dentist more often. Oh, the humanity…<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-5906644403831008704?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-88228824554694406612009-02-01T10:25:00.000-08:002009-02-01T10:32:43.899-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SYXqtb4Hh0I/AAAAAAAABNk/yVGpksKdyus/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 191px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SYXqtb4Hh0I/AAAAAAAABNk/yVGpksKdyus/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5297898602969401154" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Americans finally have a president who cares. In one of his exit interviews the outgoing incompetent bemoaned the fact that Americans have to worry about their 401Ks and losing their jobs, but, he asserted that those bad old financial institutions are to blame for that. With his nifty house in Texas and a secure retirement he's good to go. At least the dumb cluck didn't get a bonus from the taxpayers. That we know of.<br /><br /> President Obama seems to want to improve the lives of Americans who actually need his help. To accomplish this he's going to have to perform some radical surgery, cutting and gutting where the greed has been strongest, then prescribing some tough therapy: ethical, fiscal and spiritual, if we ever again would like to see ourselves as the greatest democracy on earth.<br /><br /> And I do. Idealism doesn't die as we get older. It may even intensify. Nursing homes and senior centers will never know what hit them when the boomers arrive. Even now, as I face a surgery of my own, I can tell my physician has never dealt with a feminist gay libber environmentalist peacenik with my generations' holistic tendencies and desire to keep our bodies as pure as we can.<br /><br /> The first time I met with the surgeon, I introduced my sweetheart as my domestic partner. He did fine with that and even addressed her occasionally. I told him about my food allergy and explained how it affected my health care. He took notes and, in recording his comments in front of us, addressed the problem. I was impressed. It was like President Obama acknowledging that we have unprecedented economic problems that must be dealt with in unprecedented ways.<br /><br /> Of course I had Googled total knee replacement surgery, a tool patients never had in the past. The surgeon answered my informed questions, telling me the brand of prosthetic, and that he would use one that is gender specific, as I'd hoped. Previously, it was one part fits all, with no acknowledgement of a distinct female physiology. The surgeon also told us that he would be using a cobalt chromium prosthesis. It wouldn't, I asked, contain any nickel, would it?<br /><br /> I recently learned I am allergic to nickel. Researching both nickel and allergies, I learned how prevalent this allergy is. The surgery was postponed. I was appalled that the doctor had no idea what potentially toxic substances he was embedding in his patients' bodies. My sweetheart and I asked each other, could this really be the first time he had dealt with the issue? Was the FDA as lax with medical equipment as it was with processed foods, not requiring complete labeling?<br /><br /> And I asked myself if there was something wrong with me to want to know what he was using to replace my worn out cartilage. Was I being an obnoxious, whiney, oversensitive new age northwestern dyke? Would the physician decide against operating on me because I was being too proactive?<br /><br /> I can only hope that President Obama is as proactive about the body politic, that he does ask the hard questions, does the extensive research, and insists on proper procedures, because toxic substances in our nation: greed, compulsive materialism, taking the easy way out – these can eat away at the infrastructure of democracy as aggressively as an incompatible substance can destroy bone, requiring multiple operations or worse, making an affected limb useless.<br /><br /> Both the need to save our nation after the monstrous attack from within and the bizarre need to insert metal plates into my once limber leg to save my knee are almost inconceivable to me. I am as amazed that oversight and responsible follow up were too much to expect from our bailed-out financial institutions as I am that a life-threatening superbug thrives these days in our hospitals, killing patients. It's documented that banks shored themselves up with taxpayer money instead of, as they were expected to, making loans that would have saved millions of jobs and businesses. At the same time, studies have shown that some medical professionals weren't bothering to perform the simple sanitation chore of washing their hands.<br /><br /> Usually it has been someone else who has gone under the knife, not me or my country. Sometimes I contemplate what the incompetence and criminality of some elected politicians has wrought with the same horror that I have when I think about this medical doctor cutting open my flesh and prying off my knee cap. "Good god," I think with repugnance, "this is real!"<br /><br /> At other times, when I read the paper or see the headlines on my computer, when I must stop as I rise from my desk chair and wait until the pain in my knee subsides,<br /><br />I am humbly grateful for the miracles about to be performed in the years ahead by our new leaders and, this week, by my accomplished surgeon. In the end I will again be proud to be an American and I will walk our land without the physical and spiritual pain of these recent years. <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2009<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-8822882455469440661?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-86488742360498969312009-01-04T11:17:00.000-08:002009-01-04T11:26:03.485-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SWEMSg2h4NI/AAAAAAAABME/zcom7bX8z4U/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 191px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SWEMSg2h4NI/AAAAAAAABME/zcom7bX8z4U/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287520949705498834" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Can you imagine what it would have meant to a gay kid with writing ambitions to have known that Susan Sontag was a lesbian? My anger over our inflicted secrecy has no bounds. I didn't know, could only suspect, given the society we live in, that a person like Susan Sontag might be gay. Ms. Sontag had no expectation of making her proclivities known, probably couldn't fathom that possibility and, given the negative attitudes toward homosexuality when she first became a lover of women, why would she want to? Could she have achieved the intellectual stature she did if her orientation had been known?<br /><br /> I think of Ellen Degeneres and Rosie O'Donnell dancing with glee before hundreds of thousands of viewers, out as out can be, their comedy in full flower, riches piling up around them, respect and adulation surrounding them. But more, I think of the young dykes they have freed by being out, the permission they have given, by being their full selves, for all gay people to be ourselves.<br /><br /> As accomplished and influential as Susan Sontag, thinker, writer, human rights activist, was, I am saddened that she was silenced by a gay-hating culture. I wonder if her path would have been easier, her steps along it lighter, had she been born in the decades of the liberation movements, as Degeneres was. I wonder if we would have had those movements without her liberal insights expanding world culture. I wonder if it took hiding her private self to set the rest of us free?<br /><br /> As free as we can be as the year 2009 lumbers through its infancy. Israel is in Gaza, rooting out its oppressors. The vote that ended gay marriage is being challenged in California (thank goodness Del Martin lived long enough to marry Phyllis Lyon). Caroline Kennedy may, if she becomes a New York State senator, continue her family's broadminded dominion. As free as we can be at a time when a gay pride sticker on a car incites four males to attack a lesbian in the San Francisco Bay area or when two transgendered people are shot in Memphis, Tennessee.<br /><br /> I am so angry at a society that forced my unknown gay ancestors into closets. What a tragic waste of energy that any gay aunt had to spend even a moment of her time pretending to be straight – what's so incredibly great about being straight? What a horrifying waste of intelligence: inventing secrets in order to hide and, as a result, denying generations of gays our heritage.<br /><br /> We are a strong people: talented at survival; clever at making up lies; geniuses of disguise. If, ages ago, we could have combined the intellect of Sontag with the comedic joy of Degeneres and O'Donnell, we'd no longer be squandering energy climbing Sisyphean mountains of law to win birthrights assumed by non-gay North Americans.<br /><br /> Regardless, we have made great progress. That we can even be thinking of same gender marriage boggles my mind. Yet, as reported at "<a href="http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=2925&MediaType=1&Category=26">On Top Magazine</a>" <ontopmag.com>, strong forces want to take it all away: last month "… the Vatican said it opposed a United Nations resolution calling for the universal decriminalization of being gay. They said they feared it would lead to gay marriage … Sixty-six nations have signed on to the non-binding statement; not among them is the U.S."<br /><br /> The Vatican is not exactly a relevant institution for me, but it makes the rules for one of the largest religions on earth. The thinking it represents leads to exactly the emotionally tortured kind of lesbian relationships we can read about in Susan Sontag's newly published journals (Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, Susan Sontag, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Those relationships should be a thing of the past. Gays now should have a decent shot at healthy unions.<br /><br /> In my early years, the dominant culture taught me, all gays, to hide everything real about ourselves. Telling the truth was not an option; we had a heavy habit of dishonesty. Lies flew to my lips sooner than truth. I never knew what harm I was doing to others as well as to myself. Later we rebelled not just against the world that sought to repress us, but against our own disease of internalized homophobia. We were able to see the value of our humanity. When Ms. Sontag came out, how could she imagine that disclosing her sexual preference could have had as powerful and positive an effect as her mind?<br /><br /> Ah, Susan, thank you for your journals, for telling us your secrets. You demonstrate with your words how right they were to muzzle us. Openness is the gay world's most powerful tool for change. Your silence may have protected you, but revealing your lesbian self protects those who follow you.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2009<br /><br />January 2009<br /><br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-8648874236049896931?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-42892787684261739892009-01-02T18:46:00.000-08:002009-01-02T20:14:01.419-08:00By the LNews Editor<br /><br />"And the Top 10 Lesbian Resolutions for 2009 (from some other lame-ass lesbian site) are...." (drum roll, please) <br /><br />10) Exercise, Eat Healthy and Lose Weight<br />9) Save Money<br />8) Pursue a Passion <br />7) Set Positive Goals<br />6) Volunteer<br />5) Nurture Relationships with Friends and Lovers<br />4) Join the Fight for Lesbian/Women's Rights<br />3) Meet Someone/Find a Girlfriend<br />2) Come Out Already<br />1) Stop Smoking<br /><br />TADA!! <br /><br />Enough with the sound effects. And this list. It's all just too much self-improvement. Going for all 10 at once? That's just too much drain on the personal fortitude. Besides, if I actually accomplished all of those, my friends wouldn't recognize me and would probably try to have me committed to the nearest Rubber Ramada. <br /><br />To achieve success, you need goals that you can actually accomplish. You know how you are, and grand plans go awry so quickly! Here are a few suggestions for your New Year's resolutions: <br /><br />1) Invest in a pack of Nicorette and see if it actually has an impact on your regular intake of cigarettes. If so, proceed to taper off.<br /><br />2) Put a rainbow sticker on your car if you don't already have one. Live in a non-gay-friendly zone? Donate a few bucks to the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and they'll send you that blue sticker with the yellow "equals" sign on it, aka the "Stealth Pride" sticker. <br /><br />3) Instead of stalking chicks through the Craigslist personals, become a chick magnet yourself by being yourself fully and completely. Stop trying so hard and you'll lose that stench of desperation. Seriously, have you ever been tempted to answer an ad that read "Depressed and Lonely"? No, you haven't. Be your own self-sufficient and friendly loveable self -- and love will find you.<br /><br />4) Invest in your rights by throwing a few bucks at an organization that's fighting for your cause. Rallies and protests may be cathartic, but it takes lawyers and judges to overturn old laws and give you the rights you deserve. Even if you can only spare $5, it's worth it. <br /><br />5) Start giving other people compliments more often. Every now and then, tell your friends, lovers and co-workers something you really like about them. Examples: "Damn, you've got great hair!" or "That idea of yours was just awesome!" or "Honey, when you walk, it's like watching two love-crazed weasels fighting in a gunny sack, and it makes me tingle in my swimsuit parts."<br /><br />6) Help somebody who's too proud to ask for help. Don't make a big show of it, either. Just be humbly useful. You never know when helping out a swamped co-worker might gain you a skill that makes you promotable later. <br /><br />7) Once a week or once a month, do something you've never done before. Sign up for some workshop or training session at the local college, Parks and Recreation or Home Depot. Eat a weird tropical fruit you've always passed by on your trips to the grocery store. Get an old Girl Scouts manual and try to earn a merit badge.<br /><br />8) Improve your living space. Weed out the superfluous from the essential. Keep the sentimental value stuff, and donate everything that's not really necessary to Goodwill. Hit the dollar store and buy frames for those really great photos you've taken. And be sure to put dates and notes on the backs of those pix for later. <br /><br />8b) Improve your emotional space. Make a memory box, and separate it by exes. List what was good about the relationship, what positive things you got from it and why you're glad it's over now. Then bury that box deep in your closet.<br /><br />9) Get serious about your money issues and start throwing wads of cash at your debts. If you only pay the minimum, you're actually paying interest plus $5 toward the actual dept. If the amount you owe is $500, and you only pay the minimum, you'll be paying for... decades. Literally. Paying off a credit card makes Visa/Mastercard, etc. your bitch -- instead of it being vice versa. Every dollar you throw into that IRA is one less package of Ramen you have to eat when you're 80.<br /><br />10) Get in touch with your inner Amazon. If the first thing people notice about you is the size of your body (as opposed to your great hair, dazzling smile or sparkling wit), yeah, it is time to tone up your bod. Strive to be strong and healthy. Make BBW stand for "big BEAUTIFUL woman" instead of just "slang term for enormously fat woman." <br /><br />11) -- Know you are appreciated, just because you're here reading this. YOU are what makes keeping LNews going worth the effort!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-4289278768426173989?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-78163366378312044372008-12-14T12:06:00.000-08:002008-12-14T12:11:47.352-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SUVnmu_CMCI/AAAAAAAABJ0/tS7h2he9S2o/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 191px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SUVnmu_CMCI/AAAAAAAABJ0/tS7h2he9S2o/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279740053306880034" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />In the midst of naming a new president I realized that naming is a big deal to most people. Isn't that a part of how we legitimize the gay liaisons we so desperately want the right to legalize? We want to be able to take one another's names, to declare our unions proudly to the world with a title or a hyphen or easy document signing.<br /><br /> We have named the president and almost every country on earth seemed to breath a sigh of relief. Gay couples in Connecticut have joined those in Massachusetts who are now sharing names. My sweetheart would like to be able to take my family name, but Florida voted that option down with propagandizing, maligning signs that read: YES ON 2; PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.<br /><br /> Our presidential intended may or may not work miracles in the White House, but he's not going to bat to insure that my intended can share my name. Sure, we can go down to the courthouse and legally change names as individuals, but what does that signify?<br /><br /> I did, however, go to the courthouse last winter and get rid of the very unbutch name my poor mother gave me. For some time after she died I had been talking about doing it. What finally motivated me was our impending declaration of domestic partnership. It was important to me that my lesbian name appears on the certificate. I call it a lesbian name because my first girlfriend, when I graduated from high school (a big deal to her as she dropped out), bestowed the name Lee on me, saying that I'd earned it. Lee is a part of my inappropriate birth name. I wanted my sweetheart to be proud of who she was domesticating and I wanted to make the statement I am the lesbian "Lee Lynch" to my core.<br /><br /> The stickler was deciding on a middle name. I bugged my friends for months to help me come up with a good one. What I wanted to do was honor all the women on both sides of my family named Josephine, but the name Josephine didn't fit me. One day while watching the Stellar Jays stuff themselves with peanuts I'd put out on the deck, it came to me: Jay. I love the birds and the initial "J" would represent the Josephines. So I paid the fees and posted my notice of name change like a marriage bann. No one came forward to object. I am rid of that albatross of an appellation on my driver's license, my passport and, most important, my library card.<br /><br /> Naming may carry with it great significance, but it's also great fun for me. When I get sleepy driving I sometimes wake myself up by coming up with cute names for kittens. As I barrel down the highway at 65 mph I imagine a little spiky-tailed fur ball. I once decided Tunafish would be an awesome name and I kind of liked Dogfood too, though I would never use it. Chiquita and Banana became kitty names in my book The Swashbuckler. That always gives me a chuckle.<br /><br /> The past few weeks I have been stuck without a name for a town in my forthcoming book Beggar of Love. I'd had a working name, but discovered it was already in use for a tiny hamlet in the state where the book is partially set. I've been lulling myself to sleep nights trying on town names: Binion Pope (Sweetheart read "bunion"); Dover (there already is one); Kingfisher Landing (reminiscent of the racially insulting "Amos and Andy" show). A couple of days ago I decided to use the county name for the town: Dutchess. My research has not turned up a duplicate and the word has significance for me. Not only was there a lesbian bar of that name in Manhattan, it was a popular lover's nickname in post World War II lesbian circles, though why, I don't know.<br /><br /> Now that the naming of the president is out of the way, I need to identify the main character of the next book I started. At 4:00 a.m. this morning I was wide awake, tossing and turning. I didn't want to disturb my sweetheart so I flopped on the living room couch where I thought and leafed through the New York Times. In the light of the next morning, I was pretty amused to see words like these among the more sober monikers: Romany, Spain, Cove, Saxby, Chorale, Charade, Church and Zola. More realistic were: Greta, Beatrice, Jean, Lindsey, Lisen, Liselle and Nancy, but of course I don't like a one of them today. Let's hope "President Obama" continues to sound like music to my ears a lot longer than that.<br /><br /> Or should I name her Hillary?<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-7816336637831204437?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-82905333724728379622008-11-01T09:19:00.000-07:002008-11-01T09:30:47.233-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SQyEJOWCEBI/AAAAAAAABHY/adWNmZCWxVM/s1600-h/lesbian+rights+protest.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 221px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SQyEJOWCEBI/AAAAAAAABHY/adWNmZCWxVM/s320/lesbian+rights+protest.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263727358493462546" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">[Editor's Note: Found this floating around the internet and thought it was worth sharing with you. The author is unknown, but the sentiment's not.]</span><br /><br />She is a lover. She is a butch or femme loving Lesbo. She loves breasts, and enjoys cunnilingus, one of the many forbidden ways Lesbian women love each other. <br /><br />She is your next door neighbor, and the running joke at your work place. She is a Dateline Special you forbid your children to watch. <br /><br />When you see her and her girlfriend in public, you stare long and hard, exemplifying a demoralizing snare that could ward away the devil. <br /><br />You are a wimp, a futile, close-minded discriminating person. The sad part is, you bring this garbage to church with you, asking God to diminish her corrupt ways, in order for the world to be "normal." Do not allow yourself to be fooled by your own ignorance and stupidity; things are not always as they may seem.<br /><br />You poke fun at things you do not understand. You are like a five-year-old child who grosses out at the sight of two heterosexual adults kissing in public. You push her far, and when she is down, you do not look back. <br /><br />Perhaps you are the only faggot here. You are just a product of society's dictation. You are an annoying gnat to the queer community, trying to dictate the moral rules and regulations concerning love and relationships. You try to tell people who they should be attracted to, how many partners one can or can not have, or what a real woman and man is. <br /><br />You represent the same puke that mainstream society has been trying to shove down our throats for decades, and now we have a new crop of pompous, self-righteous baboons within our own communities pontificating the same drivel.<br /><br />Does she scare you? Does she make you nervous? Does your body itch and shiver in passing? Do you break out in a rash? Oh that must be terrible for you. <br /><br />Perhaps you are so frustrated because she is happy and well adjusted. You are so uncomfortable with her sexual orientation that you cannot possibly imagine why she would not share the same pessimistic appraisal. <br /><br />She will no longer run and find a corner to tuck away in, trying to avoid you in public.<br /><br />Spare her the preaching and the manipulation. She is a part of your world, whether you like it or not. The more you condemn her, the more you try to make her feel uncomfortable for breathing the same air as you, the more enthusiastically she will seek out people who are made to feel as uncomfortable as she is. <br /><br />That is just the first step. She will unite with them, making your personal hate-struggles more difficult, without imposing of course.<br /><br />The little oppressors walk among us blatantly. But there is a problem, unlike years past, she is no longer afraid. She will fight, scratch and claw for what's hers. You can bet her politics will be in your face. It's not the way she wants it, but it seems as though that is the only way you will have it. <br /><br />Yes there is a problem, and the problem is yours. She's not going away.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-8290533372472837962?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-5863751279023022572008-10-07T18:29:00.000-07:002008-10-07T18:33:40.520-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SOwNx7oPqHI/AAAAAAAAAzA/qrT7843wQ_0/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SOwNx7oPqHI/AAAAAAAAAzA/qrT7843wQ_0/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254590016705767538" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />I went to bed last night feeling all warm and fuzzy and secure. Governor Sarah Palin, in her debate with Senator Joe Biden, reassured viewers that, although she believed that gay people have no right to legitimize our relationships with marriage, she has no objection to us visiting our partners in a hospital. Even better: she would tolerate us.<br /><br /> Tolerate us? Tolerate? As if were are somehow lesser than non-gays, as if we are some unfortunate, inexcusable, toxic blight on the earth who should be suppressed or even eradicated, but who she thought she could, as the price of winning all the power and wealth victory would bestow on her, manage to co-exist with our distasteful gay selves.<br /><br /> Not that Senator Biden was much better, insisting that although he and his running mate agree gays have no right to civil marriage, somehow we are guaranteed all the rights enjoyed by non-gay couples.<br /><br /> Where in heck do these or any straight Americans get off thinking they have some sort of authority to condemn or condone a mammoth group of people for making choices different from theirs? Make that singular, for making one choice: to be true to our natures by choosing same gender life companions.<br /><br /> How dare they patronize our drag shows and vote against letting the performer/queens marry their partners? How dare they laugh at the jokes of Ellen Degeneres and give her awards and great TV ratings when in the next breath they threaten to rescind her right to formalize and strengthen her relationship? Isn't this another form of white face and step and fetchit?<br /><br /> Doesn't it occur to these pitifully uneducated non-gays that they are sitting in judgment on us? That their dogmatic arrogance has no place in a democracy which, by definition, considers all its citizens equal? It is absolutely frightening that the Republicans are counting on Palin to attract people who condemn us for being gay. Today I saw a quotation from Jesus engraved on a sidewalk outside the public library that followers of Christ might do well to take to heart: "For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it."<br /><br /> Goodness knows we need someone to save us all from the plunder of our nation that has occurred in the last seven plus years. The current administration was voted in, twice, partly by people who believed Bush and Cheney would keep us gays down on the farm. While they try to right economic and foreign policy wrongs, how do Obama and Biden propose to represent all the people when so many of us are, in their minds, apparently less-than: less than heterosexual citizens, shunted off on a religious side track for those who don't matter.<br /><br /> This election is a lot bigger than our gay lives. Not that I expect Senator Obama to have an easy time reversing the damage done in the name of greed and power. It would have been incredibly exciting to vote for a woman, to defend her, as we did Senator Clinton, against outrageous impersonations and questions of competency because a woman candidate might be a working mother. It is sad that we can't vote for the woman the big boys selected to run for Vice President because she has so many dangerous, dangerous opinions that threaten everyone's freedom.<br /><br /> We are not a faceless issue; we are real live Americans. Ms. Palin and her followers can keep their insulting tolerance, which is nothing but a smoke screen for their fear of difference, their damning judgementalism and their unkind intentions.<br /><br /> Fortunately gay people are not powerless over our status in our own country. We can vote. To ignore that privilege is to hand our rights, present and future, over to candidates who practice bigotry or are all too willing to trade full recognition of our humanity for the votes of bigots. Nothing we will do this fall is as important as voting.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-586375127902302257?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-59546073967503707692008-09-22T09:23:00.000-07:002008-09-22T09:25:07.010-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SNfGwryFXYI/AAAAAAAAAyA/Wf0DG82CRgQ/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SNfGwryFXYI/AAAAAAAAAyA/Wf0DG82CRgQ/s400/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248882430412414338" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />The first photograph I ever took was of a stack of magazines, tied in a bundle and left by a curb. That old Kodak Brownie box camera had a viewfinder at the top and a plug-in flash attachment which used one blinding bulb per shot. I held it at waist level to arrange the scene I wanted.<br /><br />I used black and white film because that's what we had back then. This would have been in the late 1950s.<br /><br /> I come across that picture now and then and it brings the whole story to mind. I was walking with my friend Joanie Reilly to our Girl Scout Troop meeting in a church basement in Queens, on a treed street of one-family homes. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old, president of my troop, though I knew nothing about leadership, and butchily awkward, though I only knew that word from school yard taunts I didn't understand. The photo inspires memories of sister scout Dolores, a nearly silent girl with long, thick black hair; and Marsha Kassen, who I had a crush on; and our leader Mrs. Lederman, who I also had a crush on and whose husband taught the photography badge. The day, the people, the place are all so clear to me because that shiny little square of paper keeps them fresh.<br /><br /> The most recent picture I took was of six balloons my sweetheart brought home on my birthday. Three were Mylar and said "Happy Birthday." Three were plain orange because she knows I have developed a passion for orange, a reaction to living for years on the beautifully gray, green and blue Oregon coast. A couple more years in Florida and I'll be hoping for green and blue balloons.<br /><br /> The camera used for the balloon picture is a digital with no viewfinder, only a screen on the back to frame the shot. It's got a 10X optical zoom, video and sound capability and all the other modern bells and whistles. Like the balloons, the camera was a birthday gift from my sweetheart, who knew I was pining for an upgrade from my 2X digital zoom which took me two years to learn to use after all the simple point and shoots since my Kodak. <br /><br /> With that first camera I took pictures of my girl Suzy when we were 15, 16 and 17. I wish I'd taken a lot more, so I'd have a visual record of gay life in the early 1960s. The gay kids then were spectacular: courageous and defiant, but not as tough as they looked. I couldn't shoot them because they would have been scared their mommas would see them in their gay world and gay clothes with their gay lovers. Or the cops, for that matter, as we were illegal: queer young delinquents making out on the streets, lying our way into the gay bars, reading movie plots in the Village Voice so we could say we'd gone to the movies when we went home to Queens or the Bronx or Jersey. Suzy and I survived to take pictures of each other at the 1993 March on Washington. I sometimes wonder how many of the others made it.<br /><br /> I didn't take pictures in college, but after I graduated, and my brother gave me his old 35mm Argus C3, I got into arty pictures of my girlfriend, trying to capture for posterity loving images of her and our surroundings. I also started to explore light and line, fell in love with photography, photorealism and eventually with a photographer, but that's another story.<br /><br /> When the tilt-a-whirl of life delivered me into the women's movement, my archival instinct was awakened. I have photos of an all-woman theater group from New York performing in New Haven and of the Women's Liberation rock groups from New Haven and Chicago. I took no pictures of my first pride march in New York because, again, I knew the consequences of outing. It was okay to shoot lesbian-feminists doing feminist things, but not lesbians doing lesbian things. As a consequence I have shots of stoned dykes just sitting around in an orange room and shots of French doors in our living collective, when I would love to have pictures of the women I lived with and their lovers and their political actions.<br /><br /> Things are different now. My sweetheart and I took the new camera with us to a conference. One or the other of us documented every event we attended, except for the dance, where we were too busy dancing. We shared pictures on line with others who were there, hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs of one lesbian event. Our images are ineradicable, just the way it should always have been for gay people. My sweetheart and I do the same whether we're meeting friends for dinner or setting up our new house or out for a walk on the beach. Just as I write to document our stories, I want pictures to assure our visibility for the gay kids of the future who will want to study these still early days of our relative freedom in their gay history classes in their gay high schools and their college gay studies classes.<br /><br /> What a great birthday gift: the new camera is now embedded like a war correspondent in my backpack and will snap up images of the rest of our gay lives. <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright 2008 by Lee Lynch<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-5954607396750370769?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-39220929789178520172008-09-08T15:15:00.000-07:002008-09-08T15:17:46.371-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SMWkYlJmP6I/AAAAAAAAAw4/FlBJewzp-ug/s1600-h/Muddy+Boots.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SMWkYlJmP6I/AAAAAAAAAw4/FlBJewzp-ug/s320/Muddy+Boots.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243778083338993570" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Doormat seeks muddy boots</span><br />Date: 2008-07-10, 12:20PM PDT<br /><br /><br />Do you have a drinking problem? Do you believe your crappy childhood exempts you from having to be nice to other people? Is "enraged" the only emotion you are capable of feeling? Do you make twice as much as me, yet still need to borrow money a week after you get paid? If so, I am the lady for you! I'm a queer femme who enjoys being yelled at, ignored, and told what is best for me. I'm short, thin (maybe that will trigger your teenage eating disorder issues! Feel free to blame me!), and smart (unless you find that threatening! In which case I am not as smart as you!). I do have clinical depression, which I manage with medication and, ideally, a steady supply of judgment from you. I'm looking to continue along my current dating path with someone who is immature, unpleasant, and bad at listening. Bonus points if you:<br /><br />-fetishize my mixed-race background, use it to impress your liberal white friends, and know exactly what "my people" are doing wrong<br />-make "ironic" racist jokes<br />-are a spoiled-ass mama's boy<br />-have no friends of your own, preferring to use me for all of your emotional needs (if you must have your own friends, I would rather you use them to cheat on me and/or commiserate about what a terrible girlfriend I am)<br />-hate fat people (although I am not fat myself, I love it when people rip on my friends and expect me to agree because of my genetics)<br />-understand that being an asshole and apologizing for it later is exactly the same as not being an asshole in the first place<br />-use "non-normatively gendered" as a synonym for "teeming with internalized misogyny"<br /><br />Hopefully we can build a lasting relationship and maybe move in together so that you can decorate the apartment with old beer cans filled with cigarette butts and containers of half-eaten takeout food covered in fruit flies. Don't worry, I'll clean up after you. I'd prefer if you are white and middle-class so you can lord it over me all the time. Physical age unimportant as long as you are emotionally 9 years old. Your pic gets mine!!!<br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">* it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests<br /><br />PostingID: 749878367</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-3922092978917852017?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-23757052970367435832008-08-16T16:13:00.000-07:002008-08-16T16:16:49.613-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SKdfyxjXaGI/AAAAAAAAAwI/MpOSWS8FbLA/s1600-h/dworkin.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SKdfyxjXaGI/AAAAAAAAAwI/MpOSWS8FbLA/s400/dworkin.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5235258417741260898" /></a><br />By Andrea Dworkin<br /><br /><i>[Editor's Note: Andrea delivered this speech at a rally for Lesbian Pride Week, Central Park, New York City, June 28, 1975.]</i><br /><br />For me, being a lesbian means three things --<br /><br />First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.<br /><br />Second, being a lesbian means to me that there is an erotic passion and intimacy which comes of touch and taste, a wild, salty tenderness, a wet sweet sweat, our breasts, our mouths, our cunts, our intertangled hairs, our hands. I am speaking here of a sensual passion as deep and mysterious as the sea, as strong and still as the mountain, as insistent and changing as the wind.<br /><br />Third, being a lesbian means to me the memory of the mother, remembered in my own body, sought for, desired, found, and truly honored. It means the memory of the womb, when we were one with our mothers, until birth when we were torn asunder. It means a return to that place inside, inside her, inside ourselves, to the tissues and membranes, to the moisture and blood.<br /><br />There is a pride in the nurturant love which is our common ground, and in the sensual love, and in the memory of the mother--and that pride shines as bright as the summer sun at noon. That pride cannot be degraded. Those who would degrade it are in the position of throwing handfuls of mud at the sun. Still it shines, and those who sling mud only dirty their own hands.<br /><br />Sometimes the sun is covered by dense layers of dark clouds. A person looking up would swear that there is no sun. But still the sun shines. At night, when there is no light, still the sun shines. During rain or hail or hurricane or tornado, still the sun shines.<br /><br />Does the sun ask itself, "Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is there enough of me?" No, it burns and it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "What does the moon think of me? How does Mars feel about me today?" No, it burns, it shines. Does the sun ask itself, "Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies?" No, it burns, it shines.<br /><br />In this country in the coming years, I think that there will be a terrible storm. I think that the skies will darken beyond all recognition. Those who walk the streets will walk them in darkness. Those who are in prisons and mental institutions will not see the sky at all, only the dark out of barred windows. Those who are hungry and in despair may not look up at all. They will see the darkness as it lies on the ground in front of their feet. Those who are raped will see the darkness as they look up into the face of the rapist. Those who are assaulted and brutalized by madmen will stare intently into the darkness to discern who is moving toward them at every moment. It will be hard to remember, as the storm is raging, that still, even though we cannot see it, the sun shines. It will be hard to remember that still, even though we cannot see it, the sun burns. We will try to see it and we will try to feel it, and we will forget that it warms us still, that if it were not there, burning, shining, this earth would be a cold and desolate and barren place.<br /><br />As long as we have life and breath, no matter how dark the earth around us, that sun still burns, still shines. There is no today without it. There is no tomorrow without it. There was no yesterday without it. That light is within us--constant, warm, and healing. Remember it, sisters, in the dark times to come.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2375705297036743583?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-55827858788678248952008-08-08T21:42:00.000-07:002008-08-08T21:47:27.883-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SJ0hSJNWocI/AAAAAAAAAug/c4KAmvzk4ME/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SJ0hSJNWocI/AAAAAAAAAug/c4KAmvzk4ME/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5232374937667674562" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Katherine V. Forrest is the Lambda Award-winning author of the best-selling lesbian romance Curious Wine, her first novel, published by Naiad Press in 1983. A wonderful lesbian romance and portrayal of lesbian eroticism, it has sold over half a million copies, and is considered a classic of lesbian fiction. In 1994 it became the first audio book, other than those produced by Womyn's Braille Press, based on a lesbian novel.<br /><br />Katherine wrote sci fi novels Daughters of a Coral Dawn, Daughters of an Amber Noon and Daughters Of An Emerald Dusk. She has published eight mystery novels featuring lesbian LAPD Detective Kate Delafield, a former Marine and Vietnam vet. Her most recent mystery, Hancock Park, features Delafield.<br /><br />Amateur City, the initial Kate Delafield book, was the first lesbian police procedural to come out, but it was much more than that. Delafield was a daring fictional model no one had seen before. She was larger than life, leading the way, as her creator has, for so many real-life lesbians, and addressing a multitude of social issues as she did.<br /><br />In her books Katherine portrays lesbians as community -- and lesbians in all our diversity. Her stories embrace and strengthen us, and give us permission to live our lives fully just as we are. Plus they are always good reads. At the same time, because her books reached non-gay readers through her mainstream publisher, she educated a whole new audience to see lesbians in a whole new light. Katherine is one of our crusaders, wielding a sword made of words.<br /><br />The first time I met Katherine Forrest, we were hawking books at the Naiad Press booth at a National Women's Studies Conference in Columbus, Ohio. Little did I know that she would be a keeper, a sister author whose life would bump up against mine, very pleasantly, for decades to come.<br /><br />My initial take on Katherine was of a quiet woman with great dignity and a ready smile. She had an authority about her. Later I would learn that she had an amazing amount of knowledge about the craft of writing and a generous spirit.<br /><br />I have a vivid memory of that mid-1980s conference: a dormitory room packed with literary lesbians: Ann Bannon, Barbara Grier, Donna McBride, Carol Seajay, Tee Corinne, and Katherine Forrest, all of us trying to decide if Naiad Press dared title my first volume of short stories Old Dyke Tales.<br /><br />It seems that I have always spent time with Katherine in unlikely places. I remember talking books at a lesbian campground in deeply rural, aggressively conservative Southern Oregon and I have photographs of us and our partners high above volcanic Crater Lake.<br /><br />We met again in Huntington Beach, California, where Katherine sat over a borrowed dining room table with me, helping me bring one of my books to life. Most recently, I got to hang out with her at the desert dude ranch where the Golden Crown Literary Society held its conference this year.<br /><br />In all the time I have known her, I have seldom met anyone as unwaveringly supportive, kind and helpful about my work. Katherine was my editor for a time at Naiad Press. I am a terrible student: I fight learning new things tooth and nail. Somehow, this gentle, soft-spoken woman managed, without forcing me, to share her craft in a way that I could learn a few things without bruising my pride. To this day, I continue to use the many lessons she taught me and I think of her each time I do.<br /><br />Katherine was the 1998 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award, is a four-time Lammy winner (in mystery and science fiction) and currently serves on their board of trustees. She is has been inducted into the "Saints and Sinners Literary Hall of Fame." She has edited several anthologies of lesbian fiction. Her 1987 Delafield novel Murder at the Nightwood Bar has been optioned for film.<br /><br />Chicago reviewer Marie Kuda wrote that Katherine's novel Flashpoint "revivifies the impact of living gay from Stonewall to the present… no little feat."<br /><br />Katherine also put together a holiday anthology, All In the Seasoning, and an important retrospective of early lesbian writing: Lesbian Pulp Fiction, A Review of Lesbian Paperback Novels from 1950 to 1965. Mysteries Liberty Square and Apparition Alley, are being reissued by Spinsters Ink. Bywater Books has republished Dreams and Swords which features Katherine's erotic novella "O Captain, My Captain."<br /><br />She spent a decade editing at Naiad Press, currently is Editorial Supervisor for Spinsters Ink and continues to write, teach and lecture around the country. And she's done all this only since she started writing at age 40 – not that long ago!<br /><br />Katherine added a "Goldie" to her wealth of awards this year when she received both the Golden Crown Literary Society Trailblazer Award and the Lesbian Anthology (Non-Erotica) Award for her most recent effort, Love, Castro Street: Reflections of San Francisco, a collection she edited with Jim Van Buskirk.<br /><br /> One of our most loved and accomplished writers, Katherine V. Forrest inspires awe in readers, respect in writers and a well-deserved devotion in Lesbian Nation, which has long needed kind, stable, bright, talented, informed and caring heroes like her.<br /><br />Copyright 2008 Lee Lynch<br /><br />8/08<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-5582785878867824895?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-39660205459978050872008-07-29T18:52:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:43.740-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SI_JyGS3D3I/AAAAAAAAAsw/tBmpyMh3WDc/s1600-h/joan+of+arc.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SI_JyGS3D3I/AAAAAAAAAsw/tBmpyMh3WDc/s400/joan+of+arc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5228619554920796018" /></a><br /><br /><br />By WordyGrrl<br /><br /><br />Ever know a couple that's just such a perfect couple that they nearly make you sick up? Together more than a year, yet still putting mushy notes in each other's lunches, sending flowers and -- the kicker -- using actual snail mail to exchange smarmy, adoring cards? And they drop frequent hints that they're still burning up the 500-threadcount Laura Ashley sheets with each other.<br /><br />My pal Miss A and her girlfriend Miss J are such a couple. Sure, they get teased about it, it's really refreshing to see two normal, sane women enjoying a healthy and happy relationship. A great pair of gals, and they're as much fun to hang out with individually as they are when they're together. Trite as it may sound, it's nice to see two nice people join forces to become a nice couple. <br /><br />It's no surprise that they're thinking of getting married. After all, it's legal in California, which is a mere daytrip from Washington state. We've even joked about loading up an RV with other lesbian couples and doing a long weekend roadtrip there for that sole purpose. Now that'd be an adventure worthy of YouTube, eh? <br /><br />So a few days ago, I get a call from Miss A. She and Miss J are out running errands, and they've just come up with a great idea. Apparently the idea that they'd like to have me officiate their union. I was so shocked, so tremendously honored that I nearly dropped the phone. I mean, it's one thing if they ask you to be a bridesmaid. But to actually DO the honors? Wow. Talk about feeling all warm and fuzzy. <br /><br />"So start Googling and find out how you can become Sister Wordy or something," Miss A said. Five minutes and several keystrokes later, I became Reverend "WordyGrrl" (not my real name, duh) of the Universal Life Church. It's an organization so open-minded that their logo is a string of everybody else's religious logos, and their main motto is something along the lines of "Be Nice." <br /><br />Called Miss A back, and let her know that if she's serious, things are a go. I am now legally able to enunciate some lovely verbiage and pronounce them married in the presence of two witnesses. Well, it'll be legal when same-sex marriage becomes legal in Washington state, but you get the idea. <br /><br />In any case, I am now a Holy Woman ™ , invested with the power to say nice things at weddings and funerals. No word on their site about conducting exorcisms in the aisles of WalMart, but I'm hopeful. Scenes from that godawful remake of "The Crucible", starring Winona Ryder, are coming to mind. [Game idea: do a shot every time somebody calls out Goody's name.]<br /><br /><br /><br />I've got so much to do! As a newly-ordained Holy woman ™, I need to design some raiments, create a dogma, a catma, it's endless!. Declare my kitchen a church, designate a finely-crafted microbrew as a sacramental wine, etc.Already decided that Girl Scouts Samoas will be the official "wafer," with the classic shortbread as backup in case any parishioners don't like coconut.<br /><br />There's also a catch: I'm agnostic, a secular humanist. Meaning that my "belief" is that the existence of God/Godde can be neither proven nor disproven by science or logic.<br /><br />I don’t slam religious beliefs at all; talking about it is as fascinating as recounting ancient Greek and Roman myths. Sometimes we need an emotional justification to explain the unexplainable. To put off grasping our mortality. To look at a leaf and ignore what we know about photosynthesis and to be simply amazed at how it changes color over the course of a few months. <br /><br />As an agnostic Holy Woman ™, how does this work? If I'm not sure God/Godde exists, who am I entreating to listen? Whose blessing am I asking for? <br /><br />Somewhere out there is a small child who's convinced there's a monster under the bed. A big, scaly smelly one with glow-in-the-dark eyes that nobody else can see. Just the kind of beast who needs to be exorcised, driven out with a few fancy phrases and a spritz of "holy water." <br /><br />And there are a couple of sincere, loving women, a perfectly matched pair, who want to proclaim their one-ness before friends, family and whatever Supreme Being exists. <br /><br />There are fears to be quashed, confirmation to be given, love to be celebrated. Who am I to remain inert? Somebody as to say something! Do something! Drape something around my neck, hand me a smudge stick or some of that leftover incense. This Holy Woman ™ has work to do, even if there's no giant, magical superbeing to tally it up.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-3966020545997805087?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-2540899324484565362008-07-15T17:42:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:44.107-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SH1FCpa5t0I/AAAAAAAAArA/jfjLQW2Lc1s/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SH1FCpa5t0I/AAAAAAAAArA/jfjLQW2Lc1s/s400/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5223407054600386370" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />I never thought of Florida as "the South" until I lived with a Floridian. She called herself a Southerner. Now that I live here with my sweetheart, I understand that she really was.<br /><br /> It's a whole different world down here from New York, where I grew up; Connecticut, a state with utterly no personality where I lived for 18 years; and wild-west Oregon, a state that probably helped prepare me for Florida.<br /><br /> The Tampa Bay area newspapers are full of news of the recent raising of a 50 by 30 foot Confederate Flag flying on a 139 foot flagpole. Supporters said that it's a part of U.S. history and that the First Amendment gives them the right. Other residents say the flag is a symbol of a shameful time in our history.<br /><br />In the early 1990s commissioners in the county where it flies passed a human rights ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Four years later, the county rescinded the ordinance. In 2005, the same county banned recognition of gay pride when what started as<br /><br />a prohibition of gay rights library displays became a broad county policy. Is the whole country this homophobic, or am I just lucky enough to live in places where it flares up like wild fires and hurricanes? When I lived in Southern Oregon, my county was targeted as an AIDS Free Zone where people living with HIV would not be allowed. Oregon was one of the biggest battlegrounds for our civil rights. Now that civil unions are allowed in Oregon, I live in Florida, where not even Rosie and Kelly can marry – or adopt.<br /><br />But Florida is a beautiful state. I finally get to live among palm trees. I never have to worry about being too cold. There are egrets and herons and wood storks and cardinals everywhere. I live in muscle shirts and shorts. I've retired my jeans for tropic weight pants. The old Florida architecture is as exciting to me as the Chrysler Building. <br /><br />Of course, with exotica come the creepy crawlies. I skirt ponds and lagoons widely after hearing stories of alligators taking strolls in town and inviting themselves onto screened porches. You can't avoid all the swampy critters, though. The first time I saw a flying roach as big as a hummingbird, it was all I could do not to scream like a girl. Butterflies as large and dark as bats flap their wings outside my desk window all day. I call the wolf spiders wooly mammoths because they're the size of saucers. They move fast and sideways, like crabs. I hear they jump when threatened. It took me two days to use the guest bathroom again after I spotted one in there. When a workman discovered a wooly mammoth in a closet, I was the one who had to protect him from it. He couldn't wait to get home and tell his wife he'd survived. It may still be living in our clothes.<br /><br />Then there was the snake. I understand that I inhabit their territory, so, outside, I just run. One of the cats came to tell me this one was in the house. They had it cornered until it slipped behind a bookcase. Two weeks later it reappeared at about 6:00 A.M.<br /><br />"Lee!" called my sweetheart with a note of panic. I managed to grab my clothes and glasses while she kept track of it. Mostly asleep, I followed her urgent instructions until we captured it in a bucket and escorted it to a field down the street.<br /><br />Those things creep me out, but I have to say they are nothing compared to my memory of the civil rights battles in the 1960s and the reality of slavery in this country only a century and a half ago. Every time a neighbor's oversized red pickup diesels past our house, a confederate flag decal pasted over half of his tail gate, I am more creeped out.<br /><br />Earlier today I went to pick up a log from a local tree service in a nearby town (to use as a kitty scratching post). These guys were super nice. When I saw their Confederate flag bumper stickers I was glad I'd parked my car butt out, where they couldn't see my rainbows.<br /><br />I wanted a map of the town so I could explore. The Chamber of Commerce parking lot was adjacent to Boyles Backyard Bar where guys sat at the covered outdoor bar drinking lunch. Down the way was Billy Jack's Burger Shack and across from that I spotted the Patriot Bank.<br /><br />No, I didn't scream like a girl. I did skedaddle outta there like wooly mammoths were pursuing me. Like a damn Yankee.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br />July 2008<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-254089932448456536?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-26027517807182859792008-07-08T21:19:00.000-07:002008-07-08T21:20:47.733-07:00By WordyGrrl<br /><br />Ever get bored and ruminative at the same time? Listing off your favorite personal accomplishments can kill some time and give your ego a life. Among my fave victories is getting the hell out of Mississippi after high school and never going back. Sure, I've driven through the state, rolled down the windows long enough to enjoy the song of cicadas and that sweet, heavy lemony scent of full-blown magnolia blossoms on a steamy summer night. And then I held it until I could find a nice, clean gas station just over the state border. <br /><br />For some reason, my southern alma mater has apparently become reunion crazy, throwing fests yearly instead of just humanely stopping at the 20-year mark back in 2005. Looking at the class website, it's pretty sad and somewhat shocking to see who's died, including a girl I had a major silent crush on. We're not that old yet, but we ARE getting older and who wants a reminder of the aging process? The elephant in the middle of the room that is our own mortality and lost youth? <br /><br />But in 1983, there were no cell phones, no internet and no chance of keeping in touch if numbers were lost or somebody moved without having a forwarding address to give you. And so shortly after graduation, we were blown to the four winds and lost touch with each, left alone to create our own lives, develop our own personas, careen madly through our 20s, reassess the damage in the 30s, and start getting invites to join AARP in our early 40s. <br /><br />Sure, I had some really good times and a great bunch of friends in high school, but in all honesty, there were only two classmates I really gave a serious damn about meeting up with again after all these years. And thanks to the internet, I just found them a few months ago. We re-met via Classmates.com, coincidentally by cheating that site out of membership fees by posting pics of ourselves with our emails superimposed on them. <br /> <br />These were my main buds. My boys. And both of them were as out as one could be in Mississippi in 1983. That is, they were out to me and whichever boys they could furtively fumble with on the downest of the down-low. I listened to their stories and kept their secrets, interviewed them with a red Panasonic cassette recorder and did fashion shoots with a 110 camera. But I never came out to them. What can I say? I just wasn't ready to be as out as they were. The Klan was very openly active then and African Americans weren't the only groups being lynched in Mississippi then. Queers were, too. And besides, what if I was only a phase? <br /><br />Turns out it wasn't. I am indeed a big, ol' flaming lesbo, among other things. A lot of other phases have come and gone since then, and "my boys" and I have been firing off the emails like mad. We're burning up bundles of bandwidth, trying to fill each other in on the phases, twists and turns our lives have taken since we spray-painted "Class of 83" on every available stop sign in Meridian. <br /><br />David was an insecure, shy, skinny boy with a big nose and unruly mop of curly hair, overly concerned with wearng "the right labels" in order to be "popular." He recently appeared semi-nude for the cover for a coffee table book called "Men of the Sierras" and has a steady job in film production with Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studio. Brad, an 80s version of Oscar Wilde with a penchant for blasphemous discourse, weed and canned wine coolers, gave up drama school for a gig with the state government as a health educator. <br /><br />We overwhelmingly decided to blow off the official class reunion in favor of one of our own. The Anti-Reunion Reunion. Taking incomes into account, we decided to meet in the place where the one least able to afford travel lives. Having received no offer of a raise in 10 years, Brad was the "winner," meaning we'd all meet up at his place. In Gulfport, Mississippi.<br /><br /><br />Brad says Gulfport is different, that it's some kind of blue-minded oasis in a red state. And we are different now. My boys are men now, fully grown and entering the real prime of their lives. And I'm not that skinny, anti-social kid anymore, who relied on humor or conducting interviews of others to deflect questions about herself. <br /><br />And so in September, I'll be flying to the Magnolia state I fled so many years ago, vowing never to return. I'll be coming out to the very people I should have come out to first -- those who came out to me, in a time and place in which it felt damn dangerous to do so. But I'll be back, older, wiser and far stronger than before. I'm a grown woman now. Since graduation day 1983, I've lived in a lot of different countries, been in a war, seen amazing beauty and heart-wrenching squalor (often in the same place). Learned the difference between bullshit that amuses me and bullshit I won't tolerate. <br /><br />So here's to good friends and that old hometown of mine: The people who shaped my persona because they reveled in being different. And to the place that made me what I am simply because I refused to become a part of it.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2602751780718285979?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-8735071334806219792008-06-30T17:37:00.000-07:002008-06-30T19:11:28.535-07:00By the LNewsEditor<br /><br />Every year, Pride festivals and parades get me to thinking about gay-ish things from a societal perspective. Stuff like "Do we still need Pride events?" or "In order to get acceptance (and legal equality) should we blend in or stand out?" But mostly, it's the little things that really matter, and fresh from the Pride festies in Seattle, these are my observations on...<br /><br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Maximizing Your Pride Swag and Subsequent Fest</span>:<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br /><br />Preparation is Everything:</span> Folding camping chair that collapses into its own handy nylon tote bag, a backpack for the freebies you'll get, beverages and sustance. Pride festival food ain't cheap, so either eat lunch first or bring a sandwich. If you have a toddler, bring lots of handheld snackie things that'll keep them busy while they're oblivious to the parade. Goldfish crackers and string cheese are a sure bet. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Location, Location, Location:</span> Gawd, I'll slap the next person who mentions real estate and this phrase in the same breath. But if you want to come home with a backpack full of free rubbers, queer biz phone books and beads you didn't necessarily have to flash your produce stand ("Fresh, ripe melons!") to get, you and your posse need to show up at least two hours early with folding chairs ready. Stake out turf near the middle of the parade route. Set up camp near the end, and most of the really cool freebies will already be gone. Plus, the drag queens may be wilted by the end of the parade, and there's no sadder spectacle than that. Also, put approximately 6-8 inches between each chair for later "skootching down, making room" for that friend of yours who pops out of the swarm and wants to join your parade party.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Dress Queer:</span> Bust out that inappropriate, lesbocentric sloganed T-shirt you can't wear to work ("10,000 Battered Women a Year And All This Time I've Been Eating Mine Plain"), the rainbow beads, the practical dykey sandals and the baggy shorts. Last year, I worn a plain T-shirt, sneakers and the kind of khaki walking shorts favored by pudgy Midwestern moms. Grrl, I got no play at all in that drag. This year, I fagged it up with a rainbow kitty-emblazoned T-shirt tucked into faded, knee-length camo baggies with cargo pockets and a rainbow bead choker. Scored at least twice as many freebies from swag throwers who knew at a glance that I was, indeed "family" and not some damn tourist.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Be Friendly and Approachable:</span> Make eye contact and smile purdy, Sugar! Shout "Hey, over here!" using your nice voice and wave your arms around just a bit, like you're having fun. Be coy, as if you won't die if they don't throw you anything cool, but it sure would make your day if they did. Being all serious, staring and giving off that blatantly "gimme gimme" vibe will get you nothing at all. Actually, that approach could probably work well for seeking singles in the bar next weekend... <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Talk Nice to Everybody:</span> Bizarre political pamphlets are some of the most amusing swag you can score, so don't rule them -- or the bearers of such propaganda -- out. Cute, quirky chicks with interesting hair/tattoos tend to pass out these invites to lectures by obscure organizations and all it take to meet them is saying "Hey, what have you got there?" while gesturing to their battered messenger bags. All it takes to send them away is, "Thanks for the info. I'll check it out!" Followed by that purdy smile again, of course, with the appropriate level of eye twinkle. Again, another helpful approach for picking up chicks later if you're single. Or for getting your ass kicked by your partner if you're not. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Establish a Post-Parade Rally Point:</span> If there's a festival after the parade, stake out your gang's turf immediately with blankets, beach towels and/or chairs. Take turns holding the ground while the other team checks out the booths and chick singers. In the event of a really good concert, two scouts should go -- one to hold the prime real estate while the other returns to rally and relocate the team. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Enjoy The View:</span> Even if that hot, little 20-something only needs an X of electrical tape to cover up her perky boobs, give her a smile even though she's too young for you. No, not the pervy leer. The "Happy Pride to you!" smile. Same goes for appreciating the rich, full-bodied laughter of a group of fat, sassy old women who are a of couple decades too old for you to date. Or that group of young, muscular twinks, bouncing around in wet underpants and feathered angel wings they built at their kitchen table. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Live in the Moment: </span>For 364 days of the year, most of us blend quietly and neatly into society, just doing our jobs and living our sometimes boring lives. We pay rent, taxes, car payments and student loans. We worry about money issues, fret over relationships. We vote and volunteer. <br /><br />But Pride Day is different. It's every queer person's day to be young, strong, joyful and beautiful. To stand out and be counted, quietly or not, because there are more of us than you think! <br /><br />This is OUR day and we need to seize it -- along with all those cool beads and trinkets.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-873507133480621979?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-29404797487525495242008-06-15T11:37:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:44.475-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SFViXuAEB8I/AAAAAAAAApQ/LH4QiKxFWNA/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SFViXuAEB8I/AAAAAAAAApQ/LH4QiKxFWNA/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212180303376025538" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Last fall, I brought my sweetheart to meet my family. In the course of an evening spent looking through old pictures and documents, my brother said something about a great Aunt Jo.<br /><br />I knew the family on both sides had been riddled with women named Josephine. I knew nothing at all about this one. My brother added, "She never married. She had a friend from work named Vera who used to stay over."<br /><br />During the 1930s and 1940s my father was mostly at sea. My brother, who is fifteen years older than me, grew up with my mother's family in a big old Boston three-decker, surrounded by aunts. By the time I came along my parents had moved to New York so I never knew the great aunts and uncles.<br /><br />I asked if he remembered anything else about Great Aunt Jo. It turned out that she and Vera worked in a laundry. My brother said Great Aunt Jo was big and strong and operated the wringer. Wringers were large wooden rolls, operated with manual cranks. Smaller versions were used in homes, often built into or set on top of washing machines. They were used to wring laundry dry by compressing clothing or linens and squeezing moisture out. It took enormous stamina and well developed muscles to operate one of those things eight to twelve hours a day, five or six days a week.<br /><br /> I gleefully concluded that Jo Murphy was my big butch gay aunt. Finally, I had identified another gay gene in the family.<br /><br />There were other possibilities. When my mother told me that a younger third cousin had divorced his wife, become a vegetarian and moved in with another boy, I said to myself, "YES!" But we are of the same generation. I wanted queer ancestors.<br /><br />There was another, longer-lived, great aunt, who kept house for her two single brothers. I have wondered what the brothers got up to when they went out with the boy-os. None of that was conclusive though. Where had I come from? Did the lavender stork bring me?<br /><br />I can imagine what a difference it would have made to have grown up knowing, or at east knowing about, Aunt Jo... My mother, Aunt Jo's niece, probably had no inkling. Lesbianism just wasn't in her frame of reference. As a Catholic, it's possible my great aunt never came out at all and her relationship with Vera might never have crossed into sin. Since I wasn't out to them, no one in my family would ever have thought to tell me about her even if Aunt Jo had marched in the gay contingent of the Patriot's Day parade. Even today, how many families announce to their offspring that there's a queer in the gene pool?<br /><br />Aunt Jo herself might not have been very helpful. Say Vera stayed over now and then. Say they felt romantic about each other. Say they were both willing to physically express how they felt timidly, passionately, with great shame or with the glow of multiple orgasms making them fearlessly affectionate in front of their bemused – or amused -- families.<br /><br />It still would have been verboten to come out to a kid, no matter how clear that I was headed for no-man's land.<br /><br /> So I went though the severe depressions, the suicidal thoughts, the misery of being bullied and the isolation of secrecy just like my great Aunt Jo may have. Instead of offering intergenerational support, my family suffered from a common disease. I don't even want to call it homophobia. Most people are so uneducated about homosexuality they never think of it as an option for their kids, even though they may have lived and interacted with lesbian or gay male people all their lives.<br /><br /> Like any kind of abuse – and I consider the withholding of information about sex education and life style options to be abusive – the cycle must be broken. Thanks to the courage of 1960s liberationists and would-be revolutionaries, thanks to the societal tectonics that altered the gay landscape way back during World War II, I was able, a number of years ago, to get past my fears enough to come out to my brother. As a consequence, his kids, neither of whom seems to have been fortunate enough to inherit a gay gene, know and embrace their gay aunt.<br /><br /> I hope Great Aunt Jo and her Vera had some happiness together. I love the idea that they may somehow be blessing us when my sweetheart and I have our wedding. Maybe, some day, I'll be a great gay aunt myself, and can help some kid feel part of the family.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br />6/08<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage.</a> </font> Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:<a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">http://www.butchcookbook.com/</a></i>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2940479748752549524?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-65370522039845082012008-06-01T12:06:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:44.599-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SELzrqLY16I/AAAAAAAAAow/mjniqPGHY1A/s1600-h/original+gay+pride+flag.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SELzrqLY16I/AAAAAAAAAow/mjniqPGHY1A/s400/original+gay+pride+flag.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5206992050575693730" /></a><br />By WordyGrrl<br /><br />The rainbow flag has become the most easily-recognized symbol of the worldwide gay and lesbian community. But as Pride month arrives, how many of us really know the meaning and history of the colors we wave around so happily at the parade? <br /><br />The rainbow flag made its first appearance in the 1978 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade. It was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in response to a need for a logo or symbol that would encompass the entire community and could be used on an annual basis for pride-type events.<br /><br />Baker and a team of thirty volunteers created two huge prototype flags for the parade, dyed and stitched by hand. These original flags featured eight stripes with each color representing a facet of a very diverse community: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. <br /><br />The next year Baker approached San Francisco Paramount Flag Company to mass-produce rainbow flags for the 1979 parade. Due to production constraints, hot pink was removed because the color was not commercially available, thus reducing the number of stripes to seven. <br /><br />The November 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay supervisor, led to further changes in the flag. So that the gay community could display its sense of solidarity in the aftermath, the turquoise stripe was removed and indigo was replaced by royal blue. This enabled the colors to be divided equally along the parade route -- three on one side, three on the other. <br /><br />This six-color version spread from San Francisco to other cities worldwide, and is now is officially recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers. In 1994, a huge 30-foot-wide by one-mile-long rainbow flag was carried by 10,000 people in New York's Stonewall 25th Anniversary Parade. <br /><br />But regardless of size or variations on the rainbow theme, the Pride flag serves as both a celebration of unity and the diversity that our community represents. Let it also serve as a reminder of past struggles for acceptance and inclusion and the work that remains to be done, not only during Pride Month but all year 'round.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-6537052203984508201?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-67535126568480974822008-05-14T16:23:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:45.086-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SCt1sMDePDI/AAAAAAAAAm4/8B2mxosV39E/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SCt1sMDePDI/AAAAAAAAAm4/8B2mxosV39E/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5200379596739853362" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />You know you're not a femme when all you do before you leave the house is change your shoes, grab your vest and give the dog a treat. Okay, maybe you put on your baseball cap, but you already know whether it's an Ace Hardware or Yankees or Xena hat day.<br /><br /> What with the <a href="http://www.butchcookbook.com/">Butch Cook Book</a> due out this summer, I have a feeling we're going to be asked for some definitions of butch pretty frequently. "We" being the editors, contributors, girlfriends, booksellers and anyone else in the vicinity of the book. The Pianist and the Handy Dyke and I had innumerable discussions, short and long, while driving or testing recipes or walking on the beach or sitting on the deck -- and never came to any conclusions.<br /><br /> There is no definition, of course. Try as we might, no one with whom I have discussed the subject has been able to explain with certainty what makes a butch a butch or a femme a femme. Except one of the contributors to the Butch Cook Book, Frenchy Tonneau, a woman who personifies the arrogance associated with much of butchdom. She once commented, when I told her about a diatribe I'd read that criticized the concept of femme and butch, "Why doesn't she go back to men if she's so scared of real dykes?"<br /><br /> Frenchy has become a bit sore about the way her own people sometimes belittle her because she is proudly butch.<br /><br />Yet even she can't give a list of qualities associated with the lesbian genders. I called her recently and she tried again. "You're a butch if you're attracted to femmes. Except wait, even I fell for another butch once. And what if a femme falls for a woman who looks butch, but thinks of herself as femme? The other thing is," she went on, "how you act in bed. Like, who starts things. It's always the –" she paused. "Let's not even go there." She was more confident when she said, "And it sure as hell isn't who does the cooking. My spaghetti can't be beat. Unless you mind the burnt stuff on the bottom of the pan."<br /><br /> My friend the pixie, who self-identifies as a femme, wrote me: "I can tell a butch because I never get twitterpated with femmes." <br /><br /> My sweetheart and I stumbled on yet another theory one day when, she, in the South, and I, in the Northwest, were on the phone. We both needed to run out to our local supermarkets, but couldn't bear to part. We hung up, planning to reconnect when we got home. I drove to the far side of town to find a long list of items, returned some library books, chose some others and stopped at the post office to wait in line, cursing at the delay. I wanted to get home and talk to my sweetheart forthwith! Back at the house, I donned my Bluetooth earpiece and, not to lose any time, used voice command to connect with her.<br /><br />She was just getting in her car.<br /><br /> I didn't say a word, I swear. She sounded appealingly, coyly, sheepish when she explained her ritual. Before leaving, she'd had to change into an unwrinkled t-shirt. Her long hair needed brushing and a hair band. She'd applied a moisturizing lipstick. Of course she needed sunglasses in the South, but first she had to hunt them down. Her nail polish had chips so she repaired those. She found her purse (I didn't ask where) and then got some gum to put in it. Finally – almost -- my sweetheart got the garbage ready and put a new bag in the can, replaced the CDs she'd taken from her car and made her bed. This was all done possibly, but not necessarily, in that order. When, back home, I called, she was leaving for the dumpster and then the store.<br /><br /> I couldn't stop laughing. Neither could she. We had found the key to identifying the difference between butch and femme: how long it takes a femme to venture out into the world! <br /><br />Then I remembered another relationship, another femme, and how frustrated she'd get while waiting for me to get ready to leave the house. Maybe she wasn't really a femme? Maybe I'm not really a butch?<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright 2008 Lee Lynch<br /><br />5/08<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage </i></a></font>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-6753512656848097482?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-8436738729981810752008-05-03T11:17:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:45.352-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SBysxLoAYeI/AAAAAAAAAmw/G7sj19K2KMY/s1600-h/charlene_strong.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SBysxLoAYeI/AAAAAAAAAmw/G7sj19K2KMY/s320/charlene_strong.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5196218031012864482" /></a><br />By Charlene Strong<br /><br /><br /><br />A little over a year ago, my vivacious partner of 10 years, Kate Fleming, and I sat cozily in front of the television watching Tony Soprano get shot and wind up in a coma. When the episode faded to black, we got up to take a walk around our Seattle neighborhood. As we took in the crisp autumn air, Kate wondered what would happen if one of us wound up just like Tony: unable to make our own decisions in a medical emergency. Since we could not legally marry, would either of us be allowed to take care of the other? We talked over getting medical directives, living wills, and power of attorney documents, but I continued to assume that the dramatic events that would necessitate their use occurred only in the world of TV and movies -- not in our placid everyday lives.<br /><br />On December 14, 2006, my assumption was tragically shattered. That Thursday, an exceptionally strong storm deluged Seattle with rain. Kate was working as an acclaimed audiobook narrator, lending her versatile and beguiling voice to such books as A Beautiful Mind and Bel Canto from our basement studio. When she saw that a flood was imminent, Kate struggled to retrieve her recording equipment from the basement before it could be damaged by water. But before she could get out of the studio, something fell in front of the door and trapped her inside. <br /><br />I was at work, and she called me from her cell phone to tell me what was happening. Instinctively, I rushed home to get her out. When I arrived, the water was rising fast. Kate kept reassuring me as I fought with all my strength to pry open the door to the studio -- but before I could do so, the floodwater swelled above my head and engulfed the basement. To keep from drowning, I was forced to swim away. A wrenching 15 minutes ticked by as a rescue team arrived and recovered Kate, unconscious.<br /><br /> She was taken to the hospital, and there, I realized with horror, the seemingly unfathomable scenario Kate and I had discussed after watching The Sopranos was unfolding before my eyes. A social worker prevented me from entering the emergency room, telling me that Washington State did not recognize same-sex partners as next of kin. Kate and I had yet to procure all the legal documents to establish our medical authority for each other; therefore, as if I were a stranger, I had to get the permission of one of Kate's family members to be near her and to make decisions for her care. I frantically dialed Kate's sister in Virginia as precious time went by. I thought with a shudder, What if no one is home? What if Kate dies without me holding her hand? After being barred from comforting Kate during these harrowing moments, I finally received permission from Kate's sister to be with her. From that point on, I could be like any other spouse fighting for their loved one.<br /><br />That night, Kate died with me beside her. I was able to remove the wedding ring that she wore and the necklace I gave her for her 40th birthday. I was able to tell her that I loved her. If I hadn't reached Kate's sister, I may have never had those irreplaceable moments.<br /><br />After Kate passed, I still did not receive recognition as her spouse. Since I was not her legal wife, the funeral director would not even look at me and directed all of his questions to Kate's mother, who had to authorize the request for her cremation. The death certificate made no mention of our relationship. I could not imagine that our relationship would be treated with so little respect in Seattle -- the city that Kate and I had loved for its progressivism and humanity. Before the tragedy, I never realized in my relatively comfortable life that so much more had to be done to really achieve essential equality and dignity for same-sex families. <br /><br /> So, in January 2007, when the Washington State house and senate began considering a domestic- partnership law providing the hospital visitation and end-of-life rights that Kate and I lacked, I decided to share my story with lawmakers. I didn't write my speech because I knew that the legislators weren't going to understand what was at stake unless I spoke from my heart. In the end, they got the message and pushed the bill through by a narrow margin. The law went into effect on July 23, 2007.<br /><br />That achievement is only the latest in a nationwide campaign for basic equality. Though a good number of cities and counties -- and some states -- officially recognize same-sex partners, 39 states do not. As a result, thousands of gay people across the country will continue to face the same uncertainty and indignity that Kate and I experienced when their loved one is an emergency situation. And, in spite of their most prudent preparation, same-sex partners still may not be recognized as family when tragedy strikes. Even if Kate and I had received all the legal documents before December 14, the flood would have destroyed them anyway. Does anyone really carry such paperwork around all the time? <br /><br />To further honor Kate, I am continuing to press for essential dignities for same-sex families in emergency and end-of-life situations by coproducing a documentary about our story, titled For My Wife. Watching TV with Kate on that blissfully uneventful night weeks before she died, I never could have imagined that our lives would ever be the subject of a film. But as much as can be unexpectedly lost in one year, I've learned also that so much can be unexpectedly achieved. With that wisdom in mind, I'm making this film knowing that, in some way, Kate will be watching.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-843673872998181075?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-76668423463057952452008-04-13T14:10:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:46.142-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SAJ3YT_QSmI/AAAAAAAAAj4/MZ2thP1jSyA/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/SAJ3YT_QSmI/AAAAAAAAAj4/MZ2thP1jSyA/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5188840980250380898" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Twenty-four years ago I made the trek from Connecticut to Oregon. Last month I unexpectedly changed directions to join my sweetheart in Florida. The Librarian sent us off with a packet of munchies for the road. Our cupboards were otherwise bare, but the Handydyke and the Pianist treated us to a farewell dinner out that last night.<br /><br /> As romantic as crossing the country seemed when I read On the Road in my teens, Jack Kerouac didn't do it with four cats and a dog in winter. The weather was mostly kind to us. My poor sweetheart caught high altitude snow while I conveniently slept past the shrouded presence of Mt. Shasta. My sweetheart had flown out the week before and we'd packed non-stop 12 hours a day. We'd gotten on the road at 6:00 a.m. that morning, after drugging the kitties, and stopped five hours later to see friends. We met them at the Rogue River, that gorgeous, cool lifeline through tempestuous, conservative, anti-gay Jackson County where these women survive – I don't know how. They sent us off with a generous sprinkling of gifts and blessings.<br /><br /> We stayed with friends in Sacramento that first night. Their home was alive with rich colors and bold artwork, all evidence that gay women and their kids can thrive even in a neighborhood of manicured lawns in a state capitol. We left with hugs and even more blessings.<br /><br /> We'd registered as domestic partners before leaving Oregon, but this was not any honeymoon we'd ever dreamed of. We managed to skip L.A. because California dykes warned us to take "the 210" through "the grapevine," whatever that was – I think I slept through it. Any time we hit a city, we veered into the carpool lane and sped through. After a while, it seemed like we were skirting the same city over and over. If the rural landscapes hadn't changed so dramatically, I would have thought we were still in Las Cruces, New Mexico when we whizzed by Mobile, Alabama.<br /><br />Rest areas are now designed to reflect their various heritages. The best rest area – and believe me, we visited most of them – was in Mississippi. It looked like an old plantation house right down to the furniture. You could spend the day wandering the grassy grounds, but most people spent their time in the big echoing restrooms – like the ones in old train stations -- and browsing a major collection of brochures.<br /><br /> I wish I could remember more of the trip. The oddest things have become highlights, like the Courtesy Coffee Shop in Blythe, California. It looked to be a greasy spoon, but after we'd unpacked the van for the night, it fed us like an old style, generous diner. All across the southern United States we played weary travelers to weary waitresses.<br /><br /> One disappointment: in six days on the road, we only saw six gay people – the ones we visited. Oh, and there was that dyke in the San Antonio Starbucks. She pretended not to see me; I pretended not to see her. It was the old butch stand off. Then my gorgeous bride joined me. I was butch proud.<br /><br />We got a warm Texas welcome from friends in a tidy, treed development whose streets have old English names. You wouldn't know you were in the same Texas all those shoot-em-up Westerns supposedly portrayed in movies. Shelley and Connie seem to be forever going to bar-b-ques and birthday parties at the homes of local lesbians. It amazes me to find dykes in such out of the way places. We truly are everywhere.<br /><br /> There may be lesbians in Texas, but Texas is no place for an Oregon license plate. I'm just glad we weren't driving my car with its rainbow stickers. We got stopped for going four miles an hour over the speed limit in westTexas. Officer Friendly, as my sweetheart called him, took one look at the cats in their carriers and the dog in her bed, our rental van registration, our wild and exhausted eyes, and let us go with a warning.<br /><br /> Officer Friendly-East saw the same sight a day later when we were more road-worn. I think we were in Houston. One minute he was on the side of the road with some other vehicles, the next, he was whooping and flashing his lights at us. He accused us of following a mega-tractor trailer too closely. We explained that the guy had just cut us off when he swerved away from the cops on the side of the road. We'd been, frankly, pretty shaken by the near accident. Officer Friendly-East said, in an offhand drawl, "Oh, they do that," and waved us on. I wanted to say, "Let me get this right. A truck the size of a strip mall nearly kills us and you stop us -- the mini van with two women, a menagerie and out-of-state plates? Excuse me?" <br /><br />It's a darn good thing we didn't have "Just Married" painted on our back window.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage </i></a></font>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-7666842346305795245?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-27583617735480691152008-04-06T12:38:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:46.442-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R_krzMBkZcI/AAAAAAAAAjw/fAAkD5FwKKw/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R_krzMBkZcI/AAAAAAAAAjw/fAAkD5FwKKw/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5186224604294964674" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />In 1982 I wrote a screenplay. Which, after a little shopping around to HBO and some other Hollywood types, I turned into a novel. I was told by some pretty powerful people in Hollywood that a general release theatrical film about lesbians could not and would not be made because there was no audience for it. That even HBO wouldn't do it for the same reason. HBO and Showtime have since decided otherwise, but only late at night and if someone else takes the monetary risk first. That's still pretty much the case, though it has gotten a microscopic bit better after nearly three decades.<br /><br />"There are no lesbians in Hollywood," a rather famous director told me in 1983. He didn't personally know but one real live lesbian, and knew that she was one only by accident. This rich and worldly and famous director was certain that there were so few lesbians and gay men in the rest of the country that no studio would spend the kind of money necessary to produce a film of so little consequence in terms of likely profit. He liked the script, he said I had talent, but basically I'd better just fahgedaboudit, there's no money in it for me or anyone else. <br /><br />"Write the novel," he said, "And if that reaches the sales figures of Danielle Steele, then come back and see me."<br /><br />Hardly anyone can write as poorly as Danielle Steele, even when they try, but millions read her and millions don't care how badly she writes because they aren't aware of it. But even her mega sellers only get TV deals, so I wasn't encouraged because I didn't intend to write that badly. I was a true novice about the publishing business back then, and have subsequently learned more than anyone should be condemned to commit to memory, but even then I knew of an appropriate analogy. <br /><br />In the 70's, the wine industry was somehow encouraged that Boone's Farm Apple Wine had become a popular libation at drive-in movies across the country, and in untold numbers of marijuana water pipes. They reasoned that if people drank that swill, they were at least drinking something called "wine" and might be educated into drinking something more "mature" (read more expensive, i.e. stuff from their vineyards). Danielle Steele is the literary equivalent of Boone's Farm, though I don't think anyone has ever graduated from her to Jane Austen.<br /><br />Nevertheless, I was told that my only chance was to write the novel, and I was young and stupid and dreamed of interviews on Oprah. Now I just dream of getting a column out with as few typos as humanly possible. But there the novel sits, as testimony to both dream and nightmare, in the italics at the bottom of this page, with its own link to its very own shopping cart. Have patience. I will connect all these seemingly random dots in due course. Press on, dear reader.<br /><br />The novel is about the power of names, and the power of naming, and who gets to do the naming, and telling the truth, and blackmail and the closet. And love and integrity. But it will make you laugh anyway. Small issues Hollywood rarely deals with unless you can blow them up or otherwise create buckets of blood. The plot and point of the novel, ironically, was the very reason that my director friend thought there were so few of us out here, because the novel is about the closet. It was a pretty well-entrenched 1983 closet that made him think there were no people out here to watch a film about our lives, since we hadn't yet marched on Washington in great numbers, and we didn't have sixty zillion web sites, and we hadn't yet seen that the closet *is* the problem. Yet nearly 30 years later, I'm sad to say, the plot of the novel is still relevant. Sad because the closet is still with us. Not as bad as it was, but it's still a very significant issue.<br /><br />Which brings me to my commentary about that link down there to my novel. The book is out of print but is, nonetheless, still available. It's available because of the people who are behind that link. There is irony in the fact that it's available literally to a world audience, because the last publisher made little effort to market it and let it go the way of all flesh. ("Out of print" doesn't mean that there aren't still boxes and boxes of them in my attic, just that the publisher isn't doing any more new printings.)<br /><br />My novel is available at that link below, and you can read the whole story there. Or you can find it at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble (www.BN.com) and a few other big-name book sites. It used to be available, brand-spanking new, at a wonderful little independent bookstore along with scads of other gay and lesbian titles. Unfortunately, that little independent bookstore's online presence became yet another porn site. And no, they don't sell books. At least not mine. <br /><br />Independent bookstores care about diversity. They introduce new titles and authors that wouldn't get shelf space at the big box bookstores. They care about working with authors who write for audiences untouched, thank Godde, by Danielle Steele. They care about authors who have something to say beyond the literary and moral equivalent of Boone's Farm Apple Wine.<br /><br />Independent bookstores care about making money, too, but not in the same sense that the big corporations count beans. Without independents, and without small independent presses, you would have no gay and lesbian books to read. None. <br /><br />Now that so many of us have knocked down the closet doors in such documented numbers, Amazon and B&N and other big bookstore corporations have found that we constitute a market share. Companies like these don't do anything to actually support us, and in many instances, do things that could damage individuals (like selling customer names according to their purchases to various marketing companies, something some people might find invades their privacy). I think the only reason gay and lesbian books are even available at the big online bookstores is that corporate databases are drawn from BOOKS IN PRINT, and so they can't help it. If the books are in print, they're available by default, not through any active decision to carry books about our lives. And what the hell, somebody might buy them. No skin off the corporate nose.<br /><br />The point of all this is that we should support those who support us. We should spend our money with family. Not that you should buy my book necessarily, although that would be nice, but that whatever books you do buy, it's just a matter of enlightened self interest to buy them from an organization who cares if you exist. There are other family owned bookstores online, and they're certainly worth your time to investigate. <br /><br />Just think of each dollar you spend with a LGBT family-owned company as another little peephole drilled in the very last closet door. Then I can write about something else. Maybe then it won't matter so much if my novel not only goes out of print, but out of existence.<br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2758361773548069115?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-25019052297103986672008-03-16T15:05:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:47.467-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R92Z-Q9SsKI/AAAAAAAAAg4/oZoZWrJNb_0/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R92Z-Q9SsKI/AAAAAAAAAg4/oZoZWrJNb_0/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178464441528922274" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><br />Now this is truly not a new concept, but in my last column I wrote about the problems caused throughout the centuries by nasty little things called holy wars. I was thinking at the time just that the holy wars in the Middle East and in the Near East are so dangerous that they may put an end to war, and rights, altogether by putting an end to people altogether.<br /><br />But one of my readers reminded me of something I’ve written about briefly before: There is a holy war going on right here in this country and has been for decades. <br /><br />Gays and lesbians are the victims of domestic terrorism in nearly every city and town in this country. We’re fighting as involuntary soldiers in the ‘holy’ war that right wing religious types wage against us every day and twice on Sunday--Christians and Jews and Moslems alike. Their hate speech is what fires the torches of the cross-burning, white/straight supremacists; it’s the adrenaline pumping through your average, red-blooded American gay basher. <br /><br />God told them to do it.<br /><br />Well, not exactly. Not directly. They heard it from some politician, who heard it from some preacher, who heard it from some other preacher, who heard it from some bishop, who read it in some book whose author may or may not have been God. That trail of hearsay wouldn’t even stand up as evidence in a circuit court in Alabama.<br /><br />When anyone invokes the name of God, or Godde, or Jesus, or Allah, or Vishnu, or whoever else may require that His or Her pronouns be capitalized, that politician or minister has you by the short hairs. If a politician or anyone else out to grab power says that God told him to do or say yada yada, that it’s in the Bible or the Koran, you can forget about it’s being in the Constitution. Reason and law are both beyond superfluous if God has been called to have a seat in Congress. There will be no discussion here, because that’s not the side of the brain that will be engaged. The left side reasons and discusses, the right side feels and lights fires.<br /><br />It’s like playing the national anthem or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the background behind Private Ryan. You don’t see the blood or feel the pain. You only think about the patriotic phlegm that music is intended to pour down your throat. It’s hard to swallow, but you do it. That’s what that lump is. Music touches the right side of your brain. So does religion. <br /><br />Because religion is about nothing if not about nothing. Nothing you can see or count, that is. If you can’t take it on faith, you can’t take it.<br /><br />So when the jackboots come for gays and lesbians, they have to quote scripture as their cadence. Theirs has to be a holy war, because they don’t want anyone really thinking about what they’re saying. They don’t want anyone realizing that he might know someone gay, like someone gay, even love someone gay, might even BE someone gay.<br /><br />And when George W. talks about fighting terrorism, let’s ask him if he means ALL terrorism. You and I live with the possibility of it every day, and this violence is not delivered by someone on an FBI watch list. The soldiers in this holy war may be our own parents or best friend.<br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2501905229710398667?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-7624986722111005602008-03-10T18:28:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:47.849-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R9XhPkUnhOI/AAAAAAAAAfg/sBntyTNQNTc/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R9XhPkUnhOI/AAAAAAAAAfg/sBntyTNQNTc/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5176291004296692962" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Have you ever spent the weekend with your favorite lesbian writers? Not only had I not done so myself, but I never dreamed I'd be one of the writers with whom readers would want to spend time.<br /><br /> It was Valentine's Day weekend, the framework for a lesbian literary celebration like no other. The headliners of Bold Strokes Books gathered in Palm Springs, California. Given the town's reputation for luxury, celebrities and just plain money, I had never expected to visit it. After a few days at Casitas Laquita Resort, though, I'd go back any time. The Northwest, where I have been living, doesn't lend itself to relaxation. Northwesterners are a busy, industrious people. Palm Springs exudes ease and comfort.<br /><br /> This was a working trip, with authors Kim Baldwin, Erin Dutton, Diane and Jacob Anderson-Minshall, JLee Meyer, Julie Cannon, Radclyffe, Jennifer Fulton, Rose Beecham, Lisa Girolami and Larkin Rose performing readings -- and meeting with Senior Consulting Editor Jennifer Knight -- but still gave me a welcome respite from the incessant moisture at home. After weeks of rain, hail, snow and black ice, I was able to lie on a chaise lounge by a pretty pool for an hour. I even have pictures for friends who won't believe I sat down that long!<br /><br /> I had no warning, when I wrote my first stories, that a writer is no longer just a writer. We're entertainers now. Some of the Bold Strokes authors read inside a half-caged stage at Mixie's Bar downtown, like go-go wordsmiths. They read through loud talking and big TVs, with computer games flashing around them. After the readings, a singer took the stage and we writers danced with one another, our partners and our beloved readers. It was great fun, but a long way from my job description. I'd envisioned a starving poet in her garret. The modern world has its perks.<br /><br /> As always, my fear of public speaking was soothed by the warmth and appreciation of readers. They came from the west coast, the east coast, the Midwest. As for the writers: Justine Saracen traveled from Belgium, and Xenia Alexiou, from Greece.<br /><br /> We read indoors at Casitas Aquinas, poolside at The Queen of Hearts Resort around the corner and we read at the public library, as well as at the bar. That was my first reading in a public library – unthinkable two decades ago. The readers didn't seem to mind how unorthodox the settings were. Among those readers with whom I got to speak, there was a parole officer, a farmer, a nanny, a professional dog walker, an Air Force employee, retirees galore, women introduced to lesbian literature through the "Xena: Warrior Princess" T.V. series and women whose first lesbian books were my very own in the early 1980s. <br /><br /> Cradling us all were the mountains. It snowed one day, front page news for the local newspaper. My sweetheart and I, accompanied by author Catherine Friend and her partner Melissa Peleter, took the famous Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up to Mount San Jacinto State Park and Wilderness, 8,500 feet above sea level. This involved dangling in a box suspended on cables while standing on a revolving platform, almost brushing the mountain's craggy sides. Even the World Trade Center was only 1,368 feet at its tallest. High up, we hiked to benches which were seat-deep in snow. Children bellowed in delight as they coasted on their plastic sleds. Backpackers with snowshoes and trekking sticks moved along the trails. I made a snowball, but it was lethally icy so I spared my friends.<br /><br /> From our vantage point we could see wind farms with their 3,500 turbines turning to produce 1.5% of California's electricity. Odd-looking, spare white stilts sporting spiky pinwheels, the desert winds spun them like miniature toys below us.<br /><br /> Back in the desert, we discovered Q Trading Company, a gay business with lesbian books dating as far back, at least, as my 1989 feline mystery spoof, Sue Slate, Private Eye, a true find for an out of print title. We also walked the celebrated Palm Canyon Drive with the other tourists and met up with author Gabrielle Goldsby, Bold Strokes attorney Paula Tighe and her partner. They shot a picture of my sweetheart and me dancing on the sidewalk star immortalizing Ginger Rogers.<br /><br /> The sight of palm and fruit-bearing trees always thrills me. Palm Springs residents can pick oranges in their yards. At a poolside reading a desert bird accompanied British author Jane Fletcher with song and a Costa's hummingbird lighted on an overhead branch, as still for once as me, as if alert to Fletcher's words.<br /><br /> We're going to do this Palm Springs thing every year. I just hope I get to dance with more readers in 2009!<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage </i></a></font>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-762498672211100560?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-43208626818334671732008-02-27T22:10:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:48.281-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R8ZToS9nL4I/AAAAAAAAAeo/Snu7ipUB464/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R8ZToS9nL4I/AAAAAAAAAeo/Snu7ipUB464/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5171913173831724930" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />I just thought I’d weigh in on this Hillary thing. This Obama thing. My weighing in will amount to about the tilt of a snowflake in hell, but the owner of this site nags me gently to submit something. (“Submit!!!”she says. “But I don’t KNOW anything!” I say. She used to be in the Army. It’s a dominance thing.) <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">[Editor's Note: As a former Staff Sergeant and a vet of Blood for Oil Gulf War One, do you honestly think we WANT to be political pawns? Now drop, give us 20 and buy a hybrid as soon as you can afford one! Thanks, dear!]</span><br /><br />So here. This is at last what I know.<br /><br />I know I’m a middle aged (well, more than middle aged) white woman. A lesbian, by all evidence. And probably not all that white, but I haven’t had the DNA thing done yet. I will, though. I’d like to know. I think each person ought to know for good and all who their foremothers were. And so here is another thing I know. Obama is a black man. But he is also a white man. If he’s half black, and half white, he and we can as easily say he’s a white man as a black man. Yes? No? Maybe?<br /><br />I KNOW we need a black person as the president of this country. I know. The arguments are many. Chief among them hinges on the very obvious fact that slavery was a horrible, horrible thing, and Obama would heal the country. (Slavery’s not over, you know. It still goes on, even in this country, but certainly all over the world. Still.) But if that’s the argument for Obama, that it’s time—and that’s the most frequent argument I hear, that it’s time —- then let me make the same argument for Hillary. It’s time. <br /><br />Women have been the property of men, white and black and every other color, since possessions have been written down in ledgers or in law books or in hearts. Women are still owned by men in most parts of the world. Only in the last 150 years or so have we not been owned by a father, a husband or a son in the United States. By law. Love doesn’t count when the law says otherwise. Love doesn’t last an instant when the law says otherwise. Recall, if you will, all those stories about how white slave owners really loved their black slaves. Right. Recall, if you will, our own experiences with the power of law over love. So if it’s about healing the scars that slavery caused, let’s start with the oldest slaves ever. Let’s go back 5,000 years or more. <br /><br />And the other thing I know is that votes are rarely, if ever, cast because of facts.<br /><br />You may consider issues and policies and promises, but all those things bring about a gut reaction, if you consider them at all. Elections in this country are all about feelings. Hardly anyone but wonks like me even looks at the issues with a critical eye. Nearly everyone votes on gut reaction alone. My gut tells me that all politicians lie. But my gut also tells me that the lies that Democrats tell are ones I can live with. Republicans lie and steal your money for their rich friends, and they con vast numbers of people into voting against their own economic self-interest by lying about Iraq, and lying about gay people, lying about poor people, lying about wars and rumors of war, fear and rumors of fear, let me count the ways. No, don’t. <br /><br />Let me not count the ways. I’ve already counted them, and since you’re reading this, so have you. So I’ll vote for Obama if he’s the nominee, and I’ll try to convert as many rednecks as I can grab hold of.<br /><br />But I hope and pray that Ohio and Texas and Vermont and Rhode Island give Hillary her due, give her back her lead. It’s her turn, damn it. It’s her time. If it’s not now, it’s never. Never for my generation, and never for me. She probably didn’t grow up as much a slave of gender politics as I did, because she went to a college that had no men in it to muddy the water. And she wasn’t raised in the South like I was, where gender politics IS the water. <br /><br />But she stands for a whole generation, the generation that finally said I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Women younger than 40, even 50, can’t remember that there were no rights till our generation just went damnation and took them. So I’m taking this thing personally. <br /><br />Obama may be the nicest man on earth, but he’s still a man, and a young man, and he has plenty of time. I don’t. Hillary doesn’t. And the plain fact is that if Obama were a black WOMAN, or a white woman, or half and half, with the same resume, the same pedigree, the same oratory skills, Ms. Obama would not be in the race at all. You know that, as well as I do. <br /><br />So this IS about gender. More than it is about race. No one would have given Ms. Obama a second glance. And yes, Hillary might not have been given a glance either had it not been for Bill. But Hillary, along with Bill’s talent, GOT Bill to where they both landed. Even he credits her with his successes. She knows her stuff. She can do the job. She has the resume. She has the grit. She’s had every scrap of paper she ever touched for the past 30 years scrutinized by Ken Starr or somebody just like him, and she survived. She can DO this. Islamofascists, my ass. Hillary has survived the Republican Reich Wing, for God’s sake.<br /><br />But I’ll bite my tongue and love Obama if he’s the choice. I already had my say at the Tennessee primary, and even took my 93-year-old mother and talked her into a vote for Hillary, too, though she’s always claimed to be a Republican. My mother loves me, and usually does what I ask her to do when it’s really important. And at heart, my mother is a feminist. She just won’t say so out loud, because she’s a good and tested Southern woman. But my mother laid claim to her membership in the company of women, quietly, when as her only experience with a computer in her entire life, she touched Hillary’s name.<br /><br />I hope she gets to touch Hillary’s name one more time. I hope my mother gets to live long enough to see one of her own sworn in as president of this country. But they’d better hurry. It had better be now. It’s time.<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-4320862681833467173?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-9942514748628651492008-02-18T16:36:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:48.569-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R7okmi9nLvI/AAAAAAAAAdg/HRR4f0zcNQI/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R7okmi9nLvI/AAAAAAAAAdg/HRR4f0zcNQI/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5168483766999920370" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><br />Here's a book that hasn't been but should be written: Tedious Questions Straight People Ask. And on the top of the list in the lesbian section is this one: Why do lesbians hate men? This is such a perennial favorite that it's reached permanent FAQ status. I've always found this to be a mental leap across a rather vast chasm: to assume that because a woman loves one particular woman that she therefore hates all men. Or because she loves as many women as will fit into her schedule that she hates all men.<br /><br />Both straight women and straight men assume this to be true, though, or they wouldn't ask the question so consistently. I'm not sure if they assume the corollary, that gay men hate all women, but I don't hear this voiced as much. My last cursory review of history and the local headlines argue that those straight males who hate women are doing an adequate job of it without requiring recruits from the ranks of the gay boys. Although, given some of the clothes gay fashion designers expect women to wear, you'd think the charge would be leveled against them more often, but it's not. I LUV spike heels, but some of those dress designs are just purely whacked up side the head with an UGly stick. But I digress.<br /><br />Lesbians hate men, according to conventional wisdom, and it's a much more horrible situation than men of any stripe hating women. Maybe this wisdom has it that men hating women, and actually acting on it in much more tangible ways, is just the way the world is, and enduring it is expected.<br /><br />But apparently, since this is such a commonly asked question, straight males and not a few straight women seem really concerned that our hating men, even in a relatively passive way with no war or rape to back it up, is somehow a significant issue. That our hating men, if in fact we do, will somehow chip away at the underpinnings of all of society. That loving one woman apiece (ok, then...twenty apiece) takes away such a significant amount of needed support that the structure will collapse. Either each lesbian out there is a lot more powerful than we've been led to believe, or the structure itself is in need of a new design and more substantial bricks and mortar. Perhaps, come to think of it, both conclusions are true.<br /><br />But speaking just as one lone soul out here, I personally don't hate all men. I don't even hate one or two of them, really, if I look at the definition of the word strictly. No particular man has done enough (yet) for me truly and literally to hate him. Dislike, yes. Distrust, yes. But not hate. That takes up too much time and energy. I like quite a few of them, and love several more, just not in the sexual sense. Am I required by some sort of straight agenda (now there's a thought) to actually love them all, and in all ways, in order not to threaten any ego? Wouldn't that be sort of counter-productive for straight women to expect this of me, thereby increasing the competition pool? Why would straight women care if we all really did hate men? Looks like they'd be happy we've moved to another part of the state. But many (shall we venture to say most?) straight men, though, want all options left open. Just in case they happen to be attracted to a lesbian, they want to think it's an available option to convince her to reciprocate. Since there are apparently not enough straight women to go around.<br /><br />Very few, if any, lesbians in my personal survey have ever said they hated men. Most of them have at least a brother or a father that they like. Or a coworker or even an old boyfriend and not a few best gay boyfriends. As far as I've been able to determine, most lesbians don't really hate men as a class. So what exactly is the main difference, other than sexual behavior, between how straight women relate to men and how lesbians relate to men? This has puzzled me for some years, and I finally came to a personal conclusion about it. It comes down to how we sort things.<br /><br />Straight women are taught and really do seem to believe in their hearts that all men (ALL men) are decent folk and worthy of trust and possible love. Straight women discard the BAD ones, one at a time, as each man screws up. But the rest of mankind is still out there untested, and unmet, and each of those until tested is still a potentially nice guy. Straight women seem to reject men only on the basis of each *bad* one having actually proven to the individual woman that he specifically is not worth her time. And even these events evoke sadness and feelings of loss and the nagging thought that the love of a good woman could have saved the man somehow, had he just listened to reason. Maybe his mother was mean to him....<br /><br />Lesbians, on the other hand, harbor a sneaking suspicion, a basic distrust, of all men on sight, and we let the GOOD ones in one at a time as each man individually proves himself to be worthy of our time. This doesn't translate that we hate them. It translates that we are withholding final judgement. We want proof. But apparently just the fact that we question the worth of any of them at any point has them reeling from the blow. And instead of men looking at their own behavior to see why it might be necessary for some women to doubt the intrinsic value of a particular man, or men in general, they go on the offensive and demand to know why WE act the way WE do. It's called in the military a diversionary tactic. The point of the question is to take the spotlight off the man and his motives and put it on any woman who might not find him "sponge worthy", as Elaine on Seinfeld would say.<br /><br />But this is just a theory, folks. Your mileage may vary. And if you're a lesbian who likes all men on sight and thinks there is basic good in all mankind, go for it. It doesn't mean you might be a latent straight person. Although it might mean you qualify for sainthood, so get your applications in early--I understand that Pat Robertson still thinks the end is near and he will be closing out these positions soon. I also hear that most saints have to be straight, too, so you might want to be careful how you answer some of the questions on that form.<br /><br />Booga booga . . .<br /><br />~~Carole Taylor<br /><br />P.S. If you agree with the points I've made here, by all means e-mail me. If you don't agree, please get your own column, or send your comments to the publisher. I get enough insulting stuff from strangers as it is. :) <br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-994251474862865149?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-8243443457012491452008-02-10T18:44:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:48.753-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R6-4OS9nLjI/AAAAAAAAAcA/NxWGaogXJ4Y/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R6-4OS9nLjI/AAAAAAAAAcA/NxWGaogXJ4Y/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5165549853365186098" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />I've always heard that women are good at making a home. Of course, some women, like the whole femme world, are better at it than others, like the whole butch world. Certainly, I have seen gay male homes that could make the most domestic of femmes weep with envy.<br /><br /> It's also been a longstanding notion that Virgos, which I am, are house goddesses. We're supposed to love setting up households and keeping them all neat and tidy. Well this lesbian Virgo is not true to type. My homes look more like combination offices/libraries/animal rescue centers/thrift stores than any homemaker's dream. What no one ever told me was how many times I'd be making homes. It's apparently my karma to do it over and over, in my current life, until I get it right.<br /><br /> So here I go again, gathering boxes, jettisoning accumulated treasures-turned-detritus, and renting one of those lesbian wonder rigs called U-hauls. At first, packing up my books for the umpteenth time, I felt sad, sad, sad. Would I always be rootless? My sort-of-step-daughter said it might be my fate: the universe wants me to live in lots of places so I can tell readers about them. Well, if that's the case, why doesn't the silly universe enrich me and make it easy for me to move to my next assignment?<br /><br /> But no, if it's my karma, I need to earn my way out of this itinerant state. My poor sweetheart, one day she was living a nice, calm life, and then she went and got involved with me. She's on line or on the phone half her life right now, researching R.V. and truck rentals and gluing me back together after I run myself ragged packing, working, looking at houses and taking care of a nightmare of details. In fact, the first thing I did after learning how soon I'd be leaving was to run my little car into a ditch.<br /><br /> The good part of running into the ditch was providing entertainment for a tiny community through which I was driving. While I was trapped in my car every driver on this country road stopped to help. When three burly guys couldn't pop me out, I called AAA. After the motor club rep got every piece of information imaginable out of me, including my great-grandmother's father's middle name and other relevant facts, warned me what they won't cover, and determined that I needed no emergency vehicles, he alerted the sheriff's office, which was already dealing with another car that had fallen into a ditch. The sheriff contacted the local fire and rescue agency which, apparently having a slow day, sent out five flashing, wailing emergency trucks, including a big red fire truck and an ambulance.<br /><br /> The very nice guy who owned the driveway I had blocked told me this was the most exciting thing that had happened since he moved there a year earlier. He also kept repeating that I didn't need to go to a body shop, somebody could bend my fender back in with his knee. As soon as I was pulled out of the ditch he went right over and did just that, saving me at least $500. When I drove away, the little crowd of guys that had assembled smiled and gave me thumbs up.<br /><br /> Now my only problem is figuring out where I'm going and how to pack and make all the arrangements in a few weeks. That's three weeks minus a five-day trip to a writing event in California. Maybe AAA would send help.<br /><br /> Since Northwest real estate is still beyond my means, the plan is to combine forces with my sweetheart, who lives about as far from me as you can get in the U.S. without being offshore. Our first choice was for her to move to the Northwest as soon as she got a job. That's not likely to happen in the next three weeks.<br /><br /> So the menagerie and I are going her way. She's calling it a hiatus, a 2-year honeymoon for us, rather than the invasion of her neat, efficiently organized condo that it is. She plans to make it fun when she and her very own west coast woo-woo crunchy granola butchy girlfriend arrives in her quiet suburban neighborhood. Except for the barely significant fact that we'll be working to afford to move to a larger house, and eventually back to the west coast, we are going to treat this as a long vacation.<br /><br />Except – today I went to get a haircut. The guy in the waiting area overheard me talking about moving out of state. "I'm moving out of my rental," he said and assured me the landlord accepted his menagerie. "It's meant to be!" cried the haircutter.<br /><br /> So again I don't have any idea where we'll end up. Wherever, we'll celebrate what we've got together by making a home. We can send down roots as deep as my ditch. I'll write my heart out about wherever we live and I'll never rent a U-Haul again.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage </i></a></font>.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-824344345701249145?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-80738225252926372102008-01-28T18:13:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:49.021-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R56MUJfQvfI/AAAAAAAAAaw/yVXz2Oq_dUc/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R56MUJfQvfI/AAAAAAAAAaw/yVXz2Oq_dUc/s400/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5160716500785479154" /></a><br /><br /><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><i>[Editor's Note: This column originally ran during the election season in 2000. You could make a drinking game out of "How Many Things Haven't Changed." Enjoy and drive safe.]</i><br /><br /><br />Those of you who have read a few of these columns have probably surmised that I'm not a Republican. I didn't watch a lot of the Republican convention because way months ago when Dubyuh came up with that "compassionate conservative" crap, it was pretty clear anything he said after that was going to be smoke and mirrors anyway.<br /><br />But like a train wreck or the 700 Club on cable, sometimes I have to glance in on my way by simply out of morbid curiosity. I didn't expect any substantive admissions from the GOP that human rights were a big issue for them, and I was not disabused of my prescience. They are concerned, naturally, about gay issues, but only about ridding us of our supposed affliction through divine intervention, and many of them did rise in prayer for poor Jim Kolbe, their only out gay US representative, and they asked God to forgive him or release him or strike him straight. So far no news has arrived from the Kolbe camp that any of the many prayers had their desired impact.<br /><br />C-SPAN also carried much of the Reform Party's bitch fights. The Reform Party, as you may have heard, is now The Reform Party We're Really Just Republicans and The Reform Party Damn It, the Next Generation, each with its own candidates for alpha and beta dog. And you will be happy to know that one of their official vice-presidential candidates, Ezola Foster (a black woman who is also a member of the John Birch Society....huh?) has assured us that Pat Buchanan, her running mate and Reform Column A's presidential candidate, is not a homophobe. "He ain't no homophobe," she said. "He ain't no racist."<br /><br />Isn't that a relief.<br /><br />We've been given the final word on those questions, so we can all just relax. Buchanan wants to bring all US troupes home from everywhere abroad and station them arm-in-arm along the US/Mexican boarder. He actually said this. Not the Canadian boarder. Just the Mexican boarder. He ain't no racist. But maybe he will actually draw off a few of the truly rabid Republicans from voting for Bush, and if he does, Godde bless his little closet Nazi heart.<br /><br />Down the road from the various Reform Parties in Long Beach, there's that other bunch. If you are interested in any of the political doings this week at the Democrats' show, you would have missed the most significant parts (to me) unless you were watching C-SPAN. The cable public affairs channel is the only one showing the whole thing unedited and uncommented upon. If you depended on any of the major networks for your coverage (and if you don't have cable, you're almost totally out of luck) you missed the fact that Melissa Etheridge opened the whole convention with a medley of songs, one of which was "America, the Beautiful" incidentally written ages ago by a lesbian. Probably hardly anyone watching knew that bit of history. But most of America didn't get to see Melissa at all since she was on way too early for anybody but political junkies like me.<br /><br />Tuesday night at the Democrats' do, there was a bit of history made, but again the networks didn't pay any attention to it. Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, is the first head of any lgbt rights organization to address any major party convention. Again, her comments were ignored by the networks. Monday night was President Clinton's valedictory, and consummate politician that he is, his speech rallied the troupes. But Birch's speech for me was not only better written but better delivered. I'm sorry more Americans didn't get to see it.<br /><br />Tuesday was Liberal Night at the Democrats' show, but at least they HAVE a liberal night. While Texans at the Republican House of Smoke and Mirrors prayed for conversion and remission of sins for their gay and lesbian members, the Democrats all over their house, as well as all the Texas Democrats, stood up and cheered for Ms. Birch and waved equality signs. My Cliff Notes of her speech won't do it justice. <br /><br />Forgive me for the brevity of this column, but I've tried and tried to find something really funny or newsworthy about this political season, and so far the Republicans have been so redundant in their vacuousness that I'm at a loss this week. Maybe when Dubyuh and Al have their first debate. Except that I don't like to watch blood and Gore on television. I'm forced in the end to rely on bumper stickers. And not even a *published* bumper sticker because the person who came up with this one (a friend of mine, Gini Lester) is afraid it might somehow garner votes for the Republican ticket. She knows she could make some money from it, but she has this ethical thang, doncha know, and refuses to increase Republican exposure, so to speak. She has created the perfect slogan for the Log Cabin Republicans: FAGS FOR DICK/ DYKES FOR BUSH.<br /><br />And on that sordid note, I urge you to register if you haven't already, and for goddesake and your own sake, vote. Live as though it matters. But puhlease don't take that bumper sticker to heart.<br /><br />Booga booga . . .<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-8073822525292637210?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-9084626248628667962008-01-12T16:07:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:49.164-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R4lX7EAr-MI/AAAAAAAAAYo/mMsXOBDOuRE/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R4lX7EAr-MI/AAAAAAAAAYo/mMsXOBDOuRE/s400/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5154747920702765250" /></a><br /><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />The Pianist and the Handydyke were going to the county clerk's office to complete paperwork that would unite them in a civil union. Their friends came from out of town. I was to take photographs. My sweetheart and I had a union gift all planned. And, as soon as we could, we were going to make our own trip to the county clerk's office.<br /> Then the Pianist told me that a federal judge, at the eleventh hour, had put the right to a civil union on hold. The judge would take a month to decide if a petition signature -- in this case the questionable signatures in the 65,000 on a petition to overturn our civil union law -- is the same as a vote. It's not, and has never been in over 100 years of Oregon voting law. I felt like gay people were being told that he'd let us know if he would give us the opportunity to enjoy the same rights as straight America. What the judge said concerned him was making sure that the initiative process is constitutional. I, in my impatience and fury, only heard the word I have been hearing since I came out: no, no and again, no. It took the Pianist to remind me that "we live in a country where nine states (almost 20% of the U.S.) have passed laws that legalize civil unions and even marriage for gay couples."<br /> I'm all emotion when it comes to our seesawing rights. Our need seems so benign to me. We don't want to have sex in the streets and scare the horses. We, far from being outlaws, simply want to be able to live quietly with security and respect. The challenges to civil unions made by the religious right make me feel like we're being toyed with, like mice in a world roamed by cruel, giant cats. <br />I'd researched the new law and was waiting till the day the forms would be made available so I could download them, when Judge Michael Mossman, U.S. District Court of Oregon, quashed the plans of so many couples. What I learned by Googling Judge Mossman: he was nominated by George W. Bush on May 8, 2003. He attended Ricks College, Utah State University and the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. Can I trust that his Honor is, as the Pianist pointed out, only trying to give the other side its day in court?<br /> I feel bullied. Wearing suits and dresses rather than fur and claws, a moneyed, out-of-state anti-civil union group has come to beat us with petitions and signatures, club us down with hired-gun lawyers and sympathetic judges. They hate the sin and love the sinner? Where is the love in this? Lesbians and gay men are so ready to sign on the dotted line, to take legal responsibility for one another. It's something gay couples have done, outside the law, for a long time. Something a huge number of non-gays refuse to do, or do half-assed, running for divorces when things get rough, ignoring financial obligations even for the kids they share.<br /> Instead of using my camera to record this small, proud, happy event in our little town, I find myself an herstorian of disappointment. What would happen if some judge tried to put on hold the unions of straight couples, no matter the legal reason, to give opponents a chance to make their case for referring the right to unite to voters? Even as my sweetheart and I planned our union, we knew that our chance might be stolen by the morality terrorists. Is this just a hold, or will the judge's ruling lead to a long, expensive obstruction? A setback here bodes ill for other hopeful states.<br /> A retired military friend from Texas commiserated: "It is terrible to treat us like less than human beings – it seems like when we think we are going to get better treatment they take it away. Just like letting convicted criminals in the service, but not gays." No wonder we are a people of diminished expectations. Moral waivers are granted when felons join the armed forces, but legalizing our bonds of love is an uphill battle.<br /> And then Huckabee won Iowa. Another four years of judicial appointments like Mossman? It is very clear what we have to do if we want even the cobbled, partial blessings of the states in which we live and pay taxes. We have to vote in candidates who leave the judging to their deities and treat all their constituents equally. We're going to have to work harder in every state so couples like the Pianist and the Handydyke are never again left at the altar. <br /><br /><br /> <br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2008 1/08 <br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. You can check out her <a href= "http://www.myspace.com/leelynchwriter" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Myspace page </a></font>. And visit <a href= "http://leelynch6.tripod.com/" target="_blank"><font color=blue>Lee's Tripod homepage </a></font>.</I><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-908462624862866796?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-71873873615244607282007-12-30T17:27:00.000-08:002007-12-30T17:29:14.475-08:00By WordyGrrl<br /><br />We will meet in a safe, public place. A coffee shop, probably. Always, there is the expectation of immediate chemistry. Love or Lust at first site or it's all off. If, within the next 30 minutes, we do not think each other potentially farkable at some point in the very near future, we'll simply cease communicating after this. No returned calls or email. <br /><br />The downside is that I won't be hearing back from a fellow fan of early John Waters films who enjoys a good thrift store find and learning the difference between good wine and crappy wine. The upside is that I won't know about your inability to keep cocaine out of your nose or that you still haven't been able to get your alcoholic, jobless ex to move out. <br /><br />We will spend the next several minutes asking each other very personal questions, expecting profound truthful answers, while we ourselves struggle to pose as the perfect date -- witty, charming, intelligent with just a certain touch of sexy mystery.<br /><br />I'll know immediately that you're putting on an act to be witty, charming, etc, instead of just being yourself. And because it's the dating game, I can't be rude enough to say "Oh gawd, just knock it off. You're not that good an actress, and my disbelief isn't suspended." Because I'm doing the same thing myself, only because I think it's expected. And I'm feeling pretty sick about it, because it's so not real. <br /><br />What I'm really thinking is that... I'm not in the mood for a friggin' job interview. I have things to do. I need three pairs of socks, a humidifier (for $30 or less) and I wouldn't mind picking up some movies at the library before it closes at 6pm. Ooh, I hope they have something by French and Saunders. Gawd, those women are brilliant and funny. And a foreign film that's so human and honest and poignant it makes my eyes leak. And a seriously good horror film that's real thriller-scary instead of being just shocking, blood-gushing gory trash. Those are a dime a dozen. <br /><br />Anyway... Oh, yeah. We're on a date. Sorry. We have airs to put on.<br /><br />It would be totally off the track if I told you what I needed to buy today and asked if you wanted to come along. Besides, I might find out what kind of socks you like, how good you are about sniffing out a bargain or what kind of movies you really like to watch. We might get hungry and I'd find out what your suggestions would be for a good snack -- and I'd see how you treat the restaurant staff. Are you a kind and friendly patron who tips well? Or are you one who considers the server "a servant, whose job it is to fawn over me with servitude?"<br /><br />Those little things would tell me a helluva lot about who you really are in a very short amount of time, but because we're on a "first date" we have to ask and answer the official questions. Most of those seem to be based on "what will you do for me?" And I let you do the asking, because I'm polite. <br /><br />"If I had a bad day, how would you cheer me up? Are you a top or a bottom? What are you into sexually? Do you have any baggage? Do you smoke weed? Are you completely over your ex?"<br /><br />Again, there's the difference between what we think and what we say. It's not subterfuge. It's politeness, so I don't quite tell you the immediate, gut truth: <br /><br />Sweetie, I only met you 15 minutes ago. I don't even know your last name, much less what makes you happy. And it's none of your goddamn business yet what I do in bed. Besides, just because I liked something with the ex doesn't mean I'll automatically like it with you. Or, you just might be the one to open up a deliciously kinky side of me nobody knew existed. <br /><br />Baggage? If you define that as knowledge gained from past experiences, good or bad, then yes. I have learned what things I will roll my eyes over but let slide and what I absolutely will not put up with. <br /><br />No, I don't lump marijuana in with all the other bad drugs. It really should be legalized, especially for medical reasons. However, I had a bad experience with a pothead roomie who never had money for her share of the rent but ALWAYS had money for weed. And she stayed stoned 24-7. If you're just the typical "I'll have a whiff once or twice a month" type, I'm good with that. But you'll have to prove that to me first. All because of that crappy roomie. See? That's baggage. Totally unfair, but there it is. <br /><br />Am I "over" my ex? Well, yeah. I wouldn't be doing this dating thing if I was still somehow hoping I'd wake up and the past would magically cleanse and reverse itself. I have endured the relationship with the ex, accepted the lessons both good and bad, and have moved on. She's either basically a good person and we remain friends of a sort, or she's evil and I have cleanly cut off all ties with her and the vicious pack of bitches she surrounded herself with. <br /><br />Another coffee? No, I shouldn't. It's after 4pm, and I want to sleep tonight. Besides we both seem a little jittery. Couldn't be this dating pressure, could it? Ha ha ha, of course not!<br /><br />Well, I'd love to stay but I have some errands I have to run.<br /><br />It was really nice meeting you, too! <br /><br />Give me a holler if you see me online, okay? <br /><br />Take care now! Don't worry about the table. I'll throw the cups and stuff away...<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-7187387361524460728?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-36629239239064067592007-12-18T18:20:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:49.344-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R2iAbUAr-BI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/OU4VRlIQWvM/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R2iAbUAr-BI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/OU4VRlIQWvM/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5145503780987205650" /></a><br /><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />As I just complained to a wise friend, it's darned difficult to concentrate with bald eagles cooing and whistling and squealing in the trees outside. I keep popping up to gape at them in wonder and today, for the first time, I was able to watch two come in for slo-mo landings on their customary high branches, feathered pantaloons and feet first. It's a little disconcerting to find out that this powerful raptor, our national bird, sounds like a giant squeaky toy and appears to be wearing Elizabethan bloomers. And why did our forefathers choose a bird of prey to represent the United States anyway? It's just too accurate a portrayal right now.<br /><br /> Thanks to the Pianist and the Handydyke, I work on the second floor of their rental, close to the eagles, and I feed smaller birds on the deck. Right now an Oregon junco, a.k.a. "snowbird," (because juncos, like R.V.ers, return in the winter and are just as ubiquitous) is sharing the black oil sunflower seed feeder with a white-crowned sparrow and a female house finch, all decked out in her stripes. Bald eagles at the coast prefer to feed on fish, but if hungry, they will snatch smaller birds. As much of a thrill as it is to live with eagles, I worry about these little guys.<br /><br /> And the cats next door. I periodically call the neighbors to make sure their very small cats are not out when I see the red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures and bald eagles hover over their front yard. The neighbors also have handsome dark cat statues on the edge of their deck. Even when the real kitties are inside, the vultures get so bold that the neighbors have to hide the statues.<br /><br /> This bird feeding business all started when the Pianist and the Handydyke mentioned that they enjoyed seeing the stellar jays, elegant black-crested, midnight blue birds, drinking from the copper bird bath the Handy Dyke attached to my deck rail. Having become inundated with bird feeding duties at a former residence, I was opting for keeping it simple here, but the Pianist and the Handy Dyke brought over sacks of peanuts in the shell. Once a day, then twice, now three of four times, I fill my old wooden feeder with peanuts and the stellar jays put on their shows. When their town crier notices the refilled feeder, he perches on a tree limb, squawking with all his might that the grub has been served. They particularly like to stuff one or two peanuts, shell and all, down their maws and hold yet another in their beaks. Despite their constant appetites and raucous complaints when not fed on demand (the jays sound more dignified than the eagles), some of these peanut-ovores are fussy. I have watched a bird pick up and set down a dozen nuts before the other jays lose patience and rush the feeder, driving the fussbudget off with a fiercely held treat I always hope is the "right" one. <br /><br /> Our stellar jays have been reproducing plentifully. You can always tell the babies because they're a mess, with cowlicks and loose feathers and bewildered looks. "How," one can imagine a newly fledged bird saying, "am I supposed to get these peanuts out of the shell?" This summer I had the privilege of seeing Junior, then a second baby, Pigpen, grow up.<br /><br /> And these are just the winter and year-round birds. I also get to feed black headed grosbeaks, red crossbills, golden-crowned sparrows, American goldfinches, black-capped and chestnut-backed chickadees, among others, as well as a mob of psychedelic house finches whose strange oranges and yellows are produced by a pox that affects them when they winter in Southern California. Some would say it also affects the Southern Californians who move to Oregon and start campaigns against gay rights. That, as a matter of fact, is how I got into feeding the birds originally. During the ballot measure wars in the nineties, I found a social sanctuary with the local Audubon Society. They didn't fuss about my lavender color any more than they did about the birds' plumage.<br /><br /> To add to the distractions, the carpenter across the street has chosen today to repair his roof, its sheets of shingling having blown around the neighborhood when 125 m.p.h. winds came through two weeks ago. My sweetheart and I laughed about tomorrow's predicted tempest: only 65 m.p.h. A bird's life is not easy on the stormy west coast. <br /><br /> In the southeast with my sweetheart last week I spent perhaps five minutes in her backyard before I spotted an unidentified raptor and two kinds of woodpeckers, along with smaller breeds. The next day I photographed a snowy egret posing atop an S.U.V. Hanging out at a second story window, I watched as an alligator in a small pond stalked some surprisingly agile red-nosed moor hens, while a little green heron flew overhead.<br /><br /> Back home, the gulls wheel over the bay to warn of the coming winds, the little guys are jostling one another at happy hour in the feeder. As my wise friend pointed out, there are worse distractions than eagles.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />12/07<br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2007<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. </i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-3662923923906406759?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-90950073922527037792007-12-11T19:45:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:49.561-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R19Z9ybO3rI/AAAAAAAAAWg/9ln6BI-I9hE/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R19Z9ybO3rI/AAAAAAAAAWg/9ln6BI-I9hE/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142928217523281586" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />In 1976, not even a decade after Stonewall, I was working as an administrator at a medical sciences university in Tennessee. I was out in the sense that I knew who I was, and in the sense that I was out to hundreds of other people in the gay community in Memphis. Memphis is still just a great big small town. You could only have two kinds of parties there and not become a social pariah: a small dinner party with no more than six people, or the whole gay side of town. If you had a big party, you had to invite everyone you knew, and that usually meant hundreds. <br /><br />But I wasn’t out at work. And I wasn’t out to my family. I didn’t exactly lie about my life, but like every other lesbian I knew, I would find the tallest, best looking gay man I could grab hold of and drag his tight little buns to public social things for which I had to have a date. If they thought I was sleeping with him, then it was a fantasy for their own entertainment, which is usually the case when somebody thinks about anybody else’s sex life. It wasn’t a lie that I usually loved the guy I was with. It just didn’t go as far as the bedroom. This was known as having a cover.<br /><br />We were like spies in the nest of the enemy.<br /><br />Everything related to being gay was an inside joke to all of us. “Bar song, bar song,” we’d nudge each other knowingly when a disco tune would come on the radio. Straight people in Memphis didn’t know much about disco or that the music and driving beat had been playing in our own gay clubs for years. Gloria Gaynor did a tour of gay bars in the South that year because she knew where her audience and fame had come from. Bette Midler had just graduated from the Club Baths in New York with Barry Manilow as her pianist. Manilow had gone solo and played a Memphis midtown haunt almost weekly. Rumor had it that it was because he had a lover in town.<br /><br />One of my covers was a medical student. A gay boy. A beautiful gay boy. Allan and I were like Will and Grace. Except Grace was gay, too. He and I did kareoke long before there was a word for it, and we’d party and dance ourselves stupid. We didn’t know the all words to the Elton John song, but we’d sing “Someone save my life tonight, Sugar Bear” because the syllables fit, and we’d laugh because everybody thought Allan was such a Sugar Bear. Are those the words? I still don’t know.<br /><br />But nobody was out. Not in the sense that people are out now. No gay pride, no parades, no rainbow flags. But even now, the stages of coming out are pretty much the same. First you come out to yourself. Then to one other person, maybe a lover. Then the ripples in the puddle grow. <br /><br />That year, the campus where I worked only had a student population of about 2,000. Small because it was a health sciences campus: medical students, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, allied health and graduate studies. And in that one year, our campus community had experienced four student suicides, and several more students had tried but had only gotten thrown out of school as a reward for their attempts. For their own good, so the professors would say. For our reputation, for the profession, is what they meant.<br /><br />One of the students who killed himself was Allan.<br /><br />At school, students who had emotional problems had a place to go for help. Nobody went, but they had an official place. Allan certainly never went. The student mental health office was part of the university’s psychiatry department. Not a situation likely to be seen as a welcoming place, certainly not for medical students, all of whom went through a required rotation in psychiatry and thus would have the psychiatrist as a professor. Students who sought counseling thought, and with some reason, that they’d be tossed out of school as being unstable. This was certainly not seen as a place where one could express concerns about such scary things as attractions or sex. The head of the psychiatry department that year sat in a meeting with me and at least four other gay people, all of us in hiding. It was just another campus committee, with random appointments. The fact that there were five of us who were gay, and that I knew were gay, had already blown the curve. A random group should only have had ten percent, according to all the studies I had read, but we were half. One of the most liberal of all the professors I knew, and I had worked with nearly all of them--the good doctor shrink said, with the five of us sitting there, “We don’t have any gay students here. And we don’t have any gay faculty or staff. It’s impossible. We would have picked that up on their entrance screening tests.”<br /><br />So much for psychiatric perceptiveness and prescience.<br /><br />Later that same year, the year that Allan died, I went to a professional conference and joined the gay caucus of that group. That year, my professional organization adopted overwhelmingly a resolution that gays and lesbians should not be discriminated against. My boss, to my shock, stood up and voted for the resolution. (He later fired a colleague of mine for being gay, but not by being honest about it, but rather using some trumped up excuse. The boss, poor dilbert, wasn’t known for consistency.)<br /><br />At that same conference, I went to a presentation given by a gay man in his 60’s who had been out since before World War II. He lived in California, but still--it wasn’t all that safe to be out, even in California. The most important thing he said was that as gay people working with adult students, and as counseling professionals, we needed to come out. In whatever way, and to whomever we could, we needed to come out. To one other professional. Certainly to any student who came out to us. For our own mental health, for our own sanity, we needed to tell the truth.<br /><br />So when I came home from the conference, I made an appointment with the head of student mental health and came out to her. I wanted to be a resource for her. I wanted her to call me if she had students who didn’t know how to cope with being gay in a profession who didn’t want them. I’d like to say that my coming out ended up saving some other beautiful gay boy’s life, but the psychiatrist never called me. I guess no one ever came to her with a coming out story. There is no heroic ending to this tale. I didn’t save anyone else’s life. Just mine.<br /><br />I still think of Allan as a boy. He was only 24. I was only 29. When I close my eyes, he’s still young and beautiful. But the closet killed him. There wasn’t enough room in that little, dark space for a beautiful boy to breathe.<br /><br />You never know. One truth about yourself could save a life. One truth can certainly save your own. <br /><br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-9095007392252703779?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-66896765527795765342007-11-26T18:05:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:49.778-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R0t7y8sdZ9I/AAAAAAAAAVQ/A6wHB2irxlY/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/R0t7y8sdZ9I/AAAAAAAAAVQ/A6wHB2irxlY/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5137335915162462162" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><br />My mother's mother died when my mother was 4 years old, and after being shuffled around to various female relatives, she was finally reared by my grandfather's two sisters. That in itself is a long story and it gets longer each year, but I'll only tell part of it here.<br /><br />Every summer all through my childhood, Mama would pack up my brother and me at the crack of dawn and we'd leave what would have promised to be a reasonable summer day in the mountains in Tennessee and plow with my mother's determined German intensity through six hours of sweltering valley humidity west toward Memphis and my great aunts' house.<br /><br />Kitty had lived with someone named Erin until Erin died of cancer when she was 40 or so. I never knew Erin, but a journal of hers ended up in a box of old photographs Mama has. Nanny, my other great aunt, lived with her friend Mamie, and when Erin died, Nanny and Mamie moved in with Kitty. They were all school teachers together, and the three remaining women lived together for 40 years. Kitty had one bedroom with two twin beds and slept alone. Nanny and Mamie had a big double bed in the other bedroom, and shared it. They all wore men's pajamas, or at least the style of men's pajamas. But during the day, and every day regardless of the occasion, they all wore dresses and pearls, though Kitty snuck in overalls when she could get away with it. They each had specific duties around the house which said more about them than a resume. Kitty did the yard the way she taught math. Mamie cooked breakfast and let Nanny sleep late, and she cleaned the house with maniacal rectitude. Every day. Nanny dragged her spoiled and Mamie-coddled self to the kitchen around eleven and cooked dinner. Lunch, to you Yankees. They played canasta as if it were the solution to world peace, and they went to church every Sunday but didn't mention it otherwise, and they ran around all over creation in a classic '57 Chevy. Nanny drove.<br /><br />Now, growing up, I had no reason to examine their lives. They were just The Aunts. They came to visit us in the mountains the summers we didn't go to Memphis, and they played canasta with my grandmother and they made me nervous. I tiptoed around my real aunts because they had little patience for children. I liked Mamie best because she was soft and a hugger. My blood great aunts preferred that I be ever somewhere else because I was almost always fresh from some event which involved mud and puppies and a smelly horse, all of which would waft in ahead of me.<br /><br />I actually didn't think about their relationship with each other until years after I came out. They were just The Aunts. But once I did consider the possible implications of that double bed, I was pretty sure I knew who else they were. When I pointed out this probability to my mother, she was of course abashed in her typical Southern belle way, denied it and blew me off. Mama is convinced that I sprang fully and uniquely warped from among an otherwise perfectly unbending German heritage stretching back to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. She does not know why I popped out the way I did, but I am the only mistake her family ever produced. Just me.<br /><br />One day a few summers ago, I was going through the mountain of Nanny's old photographs, some of which date to the Civil War, and in among Nanny's things I chanced upon a photograph of her and Mamie when they were in their 30's, around 1920. Mamie is in her usual girlie-girl dress and pearls and heels and blush and sitting in a chair gazing up at Nanny. Nanny has on a man's suit and tie and men's shoes, and looks back at Mamie with adoring eyes. The denouement of this photographic novel is unmistakable.<br /><br />I probably shouldn't have, but I'm evil and I couldn't help myself. I took the picture to my mother, who years before had made her denial and as much as called me a novelist long before I was one, and said, "What's up with this outfit?" She looked at it closely as I watched her face. There was a pause. Apparently she hadn't seen this picture before, or hadn't looked at it with a lengthy attention span. "Oh...you know Nanny...she was always clowning around...." she evaded. But she knew what I was pointing out, now that I had pointed it out again.<br /><br />Nanny did clown around a lot. But this wasn't Halloween. And in Erin's journal, along with pictures of a trip the four of them made to California and poems Erin had written, there is a quote from an author that I had not heard of till I was nearly 30. The quote was important to Erin, but the author's name was what riveted me: Radclyffe Hall. If you don't know who that is, you need to go look her up.<br /><br />Finding our history is important to all of us. Finding clues that women generations ago knew who they were and knew their connection to a larger community is our own connection to that larger community. That it took me half my life to find I'm not alone in my family is one of the reasons I write about coming out. History lost is no history at all. History not spoken is history rewritten, because it then depends on supposition and detective work and chancing on documentary evidence that still only hints at a greater truth.<br /><br />That Nanny and Mamie loved each other was never questioned by anyone in the family, ever. That they shared their lives intimately for 40 years is fact. That they were devoted to one another is unquestioned. I call that a marriage. And I don't want some great niece of mine (surely Godde will grant me *one* lesbian heir) 30 years from now, to *wonder* about who I was, or who Bridget was, or why we slept in a big double bed.<br /><br />Come out, come out, come out when you can. For your children. No matter who gives them birth, we all give them life.<br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-6689676552779576534?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-86172991450649092562007-11-11T16:03:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:50.284-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RzeYntySbcI/AAAAAAAAAT4/4zdKivetpns/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RzeYntySbcI/AAAAAAAAAT4/4zdKivetpns/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5131738108484808130" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br /><br />I’ve read that the Castro in San Francisco is undergoing a re-gentrification – by young nuclear families with children. I’m all for the idea of kids growing up in diverse communities, but the Castro? Gay people don’t have a lot of sacred ground in this world, how can this be happening? My non-gay acupuncturist just returned from Maui. He told me that many gay men left San Francisco for Maui and are now in great evidence there. For years there has been an influx of gay people to cities like, for example, Seattle, but they don’t rate the gay mecca title.<br /><br /> It’s partly because of these population shifts that I was thrilled to return to Cape Cod after 19 years to find that Provincetown’s essence is intact. I loved being there again in the rain, in the wind, under the sun and in the sometimes raucous nights out on Commercial Street.<br /><br /> Of course, it didn’t hurt that my happy return to the vacation land of my younger years was preceded by a visit to my family. This was the first time I’d ever brought a partner home to meet them. They literally welcomed my Sweetheart with open arms. It took over six decades, but I finally, feel part of my birth family.<br /><br /> Then my Sweetheart and I went to visit some of her friends and we met up with my best friend of 43 years. I look at the pictures of our few hours at lunch in Rhode Island and my heart swells at the sight of this expanding gay family of ours.<br /><br /> It’s no exaggeration to say that I sailed into PTown on – if not cloud 9, then at least cloud 8.5. I reached the nine level when we spotted my publisher and sister author, Radclyffe of Bold Strokes Books, zip by, waving, as we walked to the natural food market. This was yet another new family for me -- a family of writers, editors and readers I could not have imagined when I came out. Better still, there was a whole town filled with us – it was Ptown’s annual women’s week.<br /><br />As the week went by I kept thinking of my character Frenchy Tonneau from The Swashbuckler, and how alone and out of it she felt when she paid her first visit to Provincetown. She knew no one, she had to beg rides to the gay beach, her cheap room wasn’t up to her fantasy of where she could take some girl she imagined picking up. Frenchy had a bad sunburn, cramps and the gay men she’d traveled up with had priorities that didn’t include a lonesome dyke. I’d felt similarly alienated in my twenties, walking up and down the main drag, looking, as Suzanne Westenhoefer joked in her performances that week, at the lesbians looking and me and my partner. I felt most comfortable in the bookstore, but then I felt comfortable in bookstores everywhere.<br /><br />This trip was very different: decades after my first visit, I actually knew people as I walked along the street. Knew them, stopped and talked with them, had what Frenchy most wanted, a beautiful and devoted woman I adored on my arm.<br /><br /> There are certain turning points in life which we may not recognize as they happen. This October, during Women’s Week in Provincetown, was clearly one of those for me. I was gay and I belonged. The words once had been mutually exclusive; now they could not be separated. I’d grown into the lesbian writer I’d dreamed of being, I’d found the love of my life, I was out to my family and I even had friends in Ptown whose shower we shared when the boiler in the old house where we were staying gave up the ghost. Could life get any better?<br /><br /> Provincetown has not lost its cachet as a gay mecca. The restaurants, stores and streets were stuffed with us: Gabriel Goldsby, Karin Kallmaker, J.D. Glass, Val McDermid, Marianne Martin, Lynn Ames, Kim Baldwin, Kelly Smith, Austin and Andrews, Jane Fletcher, JLee Meyer, KI Thompson, VK Powell, KG McGregor, SX Meagher, Kate Sweeney, and others – an amazing gathering of talent. Editors, press lawyers, computer support, publishers, bookstore owners, the uber-supportive readers and the friendly headliners like Kate Clinton, Westenhoefer, Tret Fure and Chris Williamson<br /><br /> Most of all, though, it was fun. There was laughter and entertainment, a bonfire, walks on the beach with my Sweetheart. We celebrated the second anniversary of the marriage of editor Shelley Thrasher and Publicist Connie Ward with ice cream at Spiritus, a perennial town hangout, crowded into a booth with cross dressers in town for their convention.<br /><br /> Maui may be nice; the Castro may be dwindling, but we still have zany Ptown, its streets of dreams, crowded with loners and the celebrated, the seekers, the doers, the revelers, all mingling in the land of the free.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2007<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. </i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-8617299145064909256?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-21333137317947705262007-11-04T13:39:00.000-08:002008-12-09T04:05:50.848-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Ry487A9G2RI/AAAAAAAAATI/jSn-kC-4NnA/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Ry487A9G2RI/AAAAAAAAATI/jSn-kC-4NnA/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5129104010187823378" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />Once upon a time a bunch of guys in wigs got together in way too many clothes with frills and lace in a steamy back room and committed history. <br /><br />No, I’m not talking about a gay bar in the 70’s. I’m talking about the guys who hammered out this really radical document which royally pissed some people off. Literally. It pissed off most of the people with power in the world, actually, because it said that one white guy (King George, by coincidence) couldn’t control the assets or rights of the entire balance of the human race. Not even just a few white guys. Now, granted, it often doesn’t seem anyone bothered to continue to pay any attention, but this country did end up with a Constitution. It took a few more tries and a few more amendments before the progeny of the authors finally allowed other human beings to be considered human beings, but that’s another story. <br /><br />Rumor has it that this country, and even some others, have progressed to the point that most educated people expect basic human rights to be a given. That the pursuit of happiness should be a basic human right, that individuals, even women and even people with skin of some other color than beige, should be able to exercise free will within reasonable limits. We assume human rights to be given to each of us by the Creator and that when a government restates those rights, it is being redundant at best. Conversely, governments who expressly legislate against basic human rights have by those specific actions relinquished their moral right to govern. <br /><br />We assume that paring up with someone we love is about as basic a human right as you can find. It’s certainly as basic an effort to pursue happiness as you can find. But this right is not mentioned in our Constitution. The document says nothing about the right to marry. Apparently, this basic human right is SO basic, SO given, that it didn’t occur to anyone to bring it up. I have the right to marry. And beyond that, I have the right to marry the person I love. Of course. Next?<br /><br />Well, not really. For centuries, marrying the person you love wasn’t even an option, but the right to marry itself was assumed. It was just assumed that your father would broker the deal, whether he asked if you thought the guy or girl was cute was beside the point, whether he got your permission or not was beside the point. Most likely he didn’t ask. Marriage was, and world-wide often still is, an issue of property or political alliance. When kings married their first cousins, possession and control of the whole white world was kept in the family, so to speak. The theory being that France wouldn’t attack England or Germany or Russia if it meant knocking off the grandchildren. Of course, history and personal experience will tell you that your family is the very first greedy little bunch who will try to take your inheritance away from you, so marrying for political alliance and protection of property has never been an idea that has proved itself very functional. Took those white boys centuries to figure out that marrying your first cousin wouldn’t get you more land and fewer wars, it would just give your kids a head full of mismatched teeth and concerts on the back porch with dueling banjos.<br /><br />Marrying for love has only been in fashion or even possible for the past hundred years or so, but since gays and lesbians didn’t exist as legal entities in law or in the public mind at all, marriage for us has never been an issue before now. WOMEN didn’t even exist as legal entities until just a few decades ago, but you really don’t want me to go there, trust me.<br /><br />I’ve written about marriage before, but this past week, the issue has come up again in the news. Emboldened by the appointment of one of their own to a squeaky chair in the Oval Office, a group of conservatives (surprise, surprise) has decided to dick around with the Constitution again. Read for yourself and weep: <a href="http://www.allianceformarriage.org/">http://www.allianceformarriage.org/</a><br /><br />These gentle and compassionate souls want an amendment to limit who can marry whom. They fear legislation like Vermont’s civil union law and want to overturn it at the federal level. They fear legislation in foreign countries who have gone even further to allow love to be certified at Le City Hall. Those forking Europeans just won’t mind their own bidness. They make contract laws and then OUR government has to respect them. It’s infuriating having to live in a world that might make us abide by international human rights laws governed by a world court Bush can’t even make a life appointment to. Dagnabit.<br /><br /> I don’t know specifically the individuals who have formed this ad hoc committee, but I would bet it’s the same cadre (or their first cousins) who wanted an amendment to protect the flag from being burned. I myself was concerned about that one, gasping that on every street corner stood a 50 year-old, grizzled and whiskered hippie with his Zippo poised under the national banner. Scared the bejeezuz out of me, didn’t it you? They were everywhere, didn’t you notice? These poor old anachronisms had no time to waste, either, since you can’t drive down any street in the country without feeling that someone thinks we’re all in the throes of Alzheimer’s: If you forget where you are, just go another few feet and you’ll be able to spot a flag to discover which country you’re in. Do they do this in Europe? Is there a French flag on every building in Paris? Is anyone else as concerned about identifying the country as redundantly as Americans are?<br /><br />How much you want to bet that the same people who want this anti-gay amendment are the ones who want an amendment to ban abortion under any circumstances, who want an amendment to give every white boy an Uzi….Wait. We have that one already. Next they’ll want an amendment to say that this is a Christians-only country, or try for an amendment that says this is a whites-only country. <br /><br />What they want right now is an amendment to the Constitution that says that only men can marry women. No matching up of genitalia, if you please. And no fatherless families—they say that’s their goal. It’s a statement that would seem to be a particular slap in the face to lesbians who provide two mommies and an encouragement to gay men who adopt. You got TWO, count em, two, gay fathers there. Doesn’t that meet your requirements of promoting families that aren’t fatherless? The next amendment they’ll try for would be more to their real point: America for straight people only. Does anyone doubt that’s this organization’s goal?<br /><br />The history of amending the Constitution has been one that expands rights. Amendments to the Constitution, with one notable exception which didn’t last due to that other human propensity for pursuing happiness, have not been efforts to limit rights. They have been added to limit the power of government. Amendments to the Constitution have been added out of the prescient knowledge of human tendencies and history. Without comment from the second highest authority, human beings will revert to their natural selves: selfish, authoritarian assholes. Bill Gates aside, the purpose and history of Constitutional amendments is that they prevent government (read that One White Guy or One Small White Guy Mob) from lording it over the rest of us, from telling all of the rest of us how high to frog, from taking away those Godde-given human rights, one at a time or in one swell foop. Amendments reiterate and codify rights. They don’t take them away.<br /><br />The guys who wrote the Constitution made it hard to change the document for a reason. They didn’t trust elected officials to stop being their baser selves without the buggie whip of law to spurn them on to enlightenment They wanted to prevent individuals and even mobs from sinking to their controlling, paranoid nature. <br /><br />They foresaw that Control Queens would be ever with us. She is. And she’s a Republican.<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2133313731794770526?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-60283858141018350582007-10-28T16:18:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:51.252-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RyUY-g9G2JI/AAAAAAAAASI/3YtA92yPHRM/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RyUY-g9G2JI/AAAAAAAAASI/3YtA92yPHRM/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126531213108369554" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />Last week's episode found our heroine out in the woods with the nymphs and faeries and even with other things of vacant stare. And yes, probably with people who have a preference for dating pigs and sheep. But I don't personally know any of those "Deliverance" types. Or maybe I do and just don't realize it. Everybody has a closet of some sort, but straight folks often don't think they do. The contents of other people's closets usually seem much more interesting and worthy of microscopic inspection. Witness Dan Burton and Henry Hyde versus Bill Clinton. (And no, I won't give that one a rest.)<br /><br />But to bring you up to date on my coming out in the woods, last week when I had lunch with two old friends from high school, I decided the best way to approach this closet business is to pretend that my house has no locked doors. I decided to act as if everybody already knew about who I live with and why, in the same way that they all knew I designed our high school ring. Old history. Next? How, if anyone is paying the slightest bit of attention, might anyone think anything else about me? But you just never know how much energy some people might want to put into their own insulation and denial.<br /><br />So I'm having lunch with two women that I probably don't have much in common with anymore, other than having been friends all those years ago when each of our lives were more homogeneous (a homo of some sort, at least). I said something about my partner, and without skipping a beat, Charlotte (bless her heart) said, “And what does she do?”<br /><br />Once again, children, it turns out that fear of the unknown has proved itself to have more fangs and hairy palms than reality. Fear, as they say, stands for False Events Appearing Real. Spending a lot of time preparing for the worst lets the worst live rent free in your head, and often has little relationship to how gently things might actually play out. Not to say that preparation isn't a good thing, but at least when you expect people to act like friends, giving them this bit of additional information will only adversely affect folks who aren't your friends anyway. Their loss, bye. I am, after all, often entertaining, sometimes even polite; I can spiff up when required so even rich people can take me out to dinner without too much undue embarrassment; I can sing, dance and cook, and I often speak in complete sentences. Unless a fragment has some stylistic purpose. (Unlike certain elected officials who shall remain, for the duration of this particular column, nameless.)<br /><br />The fact is that if we don't treat this whole issue of being gay as a bone of contention, then eventually what ought to be a non-issue becomes a non-issue. Which is the point of all of us coming out anyway. Secrets by their very nature are big and dark and mysterious because things look bigger in the dark than they actually are, and therefore secrets are scary to everybody, even to the person who owns them. Or rather, to the person owned by the secret.<br /><br />I actually revel in our differences, mine and not mine. I want to be able to celebrate what actually is that infamous 'gay lifestyle' with its even more infamous agenda, and all of our inside jokes and camping and double entendres that straight people just can't seem to catch. We lose a lot of our connections with each other when we are swept away down the mainstream. Maybe we can figure out a way to have being gay become a big So What, yet still maintain the differences that make us worth having a whole set of sitcoms designed around us. (And another thing, how come "Will & Grace" isn't too much about being gay, when "Ellen" was too much about being lesbian? But that's another column.)<br /><br />Think about this for a second: In a very real sense, it is our community that can be and often is the essence of world peace. Now wait-- don't roll those eyes at me like that. It was not too lofty a statement. After all, we are all races, all genders (yes, Virginia, there are more than two), all differences. All classes, all nations, all professions, all beliefs, all religions, all politics. We can go almost anywhere in the world and find family, an expedition on which straight people often seem not very adept. There are no boarders for us. Love is, after all, the international language. Ok, well, then maybe sex is. Whatever. Let me be philosophical for once.<br /><br />Ok, then, since you suffered through all that with me, I'll share a favorite joke, appropriately enough, from high school. At the time I first heard it, I didn’t realize that what the joke was about was compulsory heterosexuality:<br /><br />"To the woods, to the woods!" he threatened her.<br /><br />"No! Not the woods!! Anything but the woods!!!!" she lamented.<br /><br />"Anything?????" he enthused.<br /><br />Beat, two, three... "To the woods, to the woods…" she sighed, resigned.<br /><br />Booga booga . . .<br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-6028385814101835058?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-9890528769661367352007-10-13T09:58:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:51.448-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RxD5wOPVCeI/AAAAAAAAARA/ir4VsbcYWJY/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RxD5wOPVCeI/AAAAAAAAARA/ir4VsbcYWJY/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5120867383171680738" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />I don’t know whether my mother didn’t teach me to cook because I abhorred participating in any activity dear to that high femme, or because she found me so inept. Maybe it was because I failed dish washing. I can still hear her stinging comment, “Use some elbow grease.” I was a scrawny little girl -- I didn’t have any elbow grease, for crying out loud.<br /><br /> Has anything changed? Do baby butches coming out still blunder around the kitchen like Pooh with a honey pot on his head? Are their femmes, decorated with rings in their eyebrows and stovepipe jeans, refusing the cook’s role and marching them into hot kitchens, and promising hot gratitude in return? Not that femmes always come to cooking naturally. I remember what Carol and I suffered back in the late sixties: we thought chicken was fried by putting it, dry, in a frying pan. When it refused to lose its pink color inside, we added an ill-fitting cover. We were very thin.<br /><br /> I have always had three major problems in the kitchen. Problem One: the basics. It’s like using a computer, nothing works until I find the "on" switch. For example, successfully boiling an egg is cause to declare a national holiday.<br /><br />Problem two: Coordinating more than three ingredients at once. I get confused and forget to add item number Eight while whisking items Four, Two and ½ cup of Seven.<br /><br />Problem Three: what to serve, a.k.a. terror of cooking for a femme. Left to my own I would eat the same thing day in and day out. Actually, I am on my own and that’s exactly what I do. I hate to have to think about eating and preparing stuff.<br /><br /> There have been periods in my life when I’ve actually liked cooking. In my thirties I had more time for such frivolity. I’d prop open the back door so I could see the town light up at twilight and I’d bake a cake, or make cat food for the week, all six cats in rapt attendance. The times my partner cooked with me were some of the most loving hours I remember spending together. Friends would come over and hang out while I baked a batch of cookies for us to devour.<br /><br />Each relationship brought its own culinary pleasures. Tee and I took turns cooking. One day we’d eat southern dumplings and key lime pie at her wooden dining room table; the next, I’d cook one of her favorites – liver and onions – on my tiny trailer stove and we’d share the meal across the fold-down Formica-topped table. <br /><br />Another partner had major food sensitivities. We ate brown rice and vegetables till they came out our ears. I’d make her a simple crisp with Granny Smith apples every week because it was one of the few treats she could tolerate.<br /><br />Marcia raised two daughters, so cooking was second nature to her. She could whip up a mouth-watering meal out of odds and ends in the refrigerator in no time flat. I did little cooking while we were together.<br /><br />Now I live next door to The Pianist and The Handydyke. Our dinner ritual developed some years ago when we’d get together for Monday night pizza. I’d bring my Amy’s frozen pizza (what would I do without Amy?) and they would have a Tombstone or a DiGiorno’s. The pizza was phased out when The Pianist decided we needed to test the bulk of the recipes contained in our forthcoming Butch Cookbook. The Pianist happens to be a gourmet cook. She’s also good at delegating, so The Handydyke gets her turn in the kitchen. Even I stir, make a salad when needed or slam the back door as the popovers are rising. These friends upset my boring-meal routine delightfully by forcing me at gunpoint to take home leftovers.<br /><br />Perhaps it’s because we’re women that my relationships and friendships seem partly shaped by cooking. Or maybe it’s because we’re lesbians and cook for ourselves or each other, not for men, those poor babies who work so hard all day.<br /><br />If you come to my house for dinner, expect quesadillas, which I recently re-learned to make from my Sweetheart, after forgetting everything The Pianist taught me. Recipe: grate cheese, heat refried beans in the microwave, cook in the garage-sale quesadilla maker on whole wheat tortillas, when browned, slop on some salsa and bagged lettuce. Other than exceeding my no-more-than-three ingredients rule, nothing is simpler. It even has the three food groups. My mother would think I prepared it with a dollop of elbow grease.<br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2007 <br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. </i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-989052876966136735?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-22632292896953490012007-10-08T18:09:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:51.744-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RwrVE-PVCXI/AAAAAAAAAQI/_IQyJS8dM5I/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RwrVE-PVCXI/AAAAAAAAAQI/_IQyJS8dM5I/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5119138207863474546" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />When Kiddo asked me to go to gay pride in our state capitol, I was all, no! I have to work on my book! I was worried, too, that my bad knee would give out on a long march. Then I remembered the Golden Crown Literary Society back in June, and how I danced for hours with anyone in sight, and lots with my sweetheart-to-be. I thought, if I can dance, I can march.<br /><br /> Kiddo is married to a man. She was planning to hang with her best woman friend at Pride Day, and her best friend’s husband and their daughters. This approach to a Pride celebration is not exactly in my copy of the Gay Agenda. We’re supposed to haul non-gays kicking and screaming to the recruiting booth for their indoctrinations, aren’t we? But Kiddo, the daughter of my late partner, honors me by calling me one of her moms, and seldom asks anything of me. I, in turn, never get to spend enough time with her. I decided to go.<br /><br /> As it turned out, there was no march. These days it seems that Pride can be an event rather than a jubilant parade or a defiant march. I hadn’t been to a Pride Celebration since the 1980s. In San Francisco I was an observer, not a participant. That march was all about partying, with a phalanx of dykes on bikes and floats filled with barely-clothed, body-painted and feathered men. Back in New York, in the 1970s, we were angry. We chanted slogans to the tops of the canyons of tall buildings and rejoiced at the feeling of righteous validation that came with the tons of ticker tape tossed down on us.<br /><br /> So there I was, at a state park, with one of my favorite people on earth, Kiddo, and a non-gay family I also hold dear, yet I was a stranger to every gay in sight. I introduced myself to representatives of Lavender Womyn, who didn’t know my name from a hole in the wall. Usually at least one member of such a group will ask if I hadn’t maybe written a book once upon a time. Not here. Kiddo and her friends were the ones who knew just about everyone. I accepted my new role and listened and shook hands and met more drag queens in one place than ever before in my life.<br /><br /> First, though, we were greeted by a little girl dressed in a white t-shirt, shorts and a huge grin. She’d been lost, the police called, and a small group of women and men were taking care of her. I was relieved that the police cars were not monitoring the behavior of the gay crowd. Nor did they have cause to be. Most of the guys could have been Elks or Lions or Odd Fellows at their annual picnics, if they have annual picnics. There was a large rhinestone crown being passed around, which coordinated not at all with the polo shirts and jeans that passed for drag that day.<br /><br /> This was a West Coast, laid-back celebration. There was a lot of karaoke on stage, a small, mixed gay chorus, and booths galore. Kiddo pointed out the booth of the local gay bar where she and hubby and their friends spend some of their evenings. I didn’t ask how that came to be a favorite watering hole, but I saw the genuine affection they had for their gay friends and that it was returned. Kiddo chose her companions well.<br /><br /> There, Kiddo gestured, was the woman, a handsome butch, who tried to pick her up last week. And over there was a young man who was extraordinarily beautiful as a woman, she said. Her friends’ youngest daughter, in her early teens, adored another of the queens and the two spent time with their arms around each other. We met all sorts of gay dogs, including Toby, a lively tan teacup poodle who rode in the basket of his adoring dyke owner’s motorized cart. There was a big emphasis on family and plenty of unselfconscious kids were in sight, gay kids among them. No church groups were protesting the gay presence in the park or the exposure of young children to gay women and men.<br /><br /> As a matter of fact, churches were represented in the vendor booths: M.C.C., of course, and Quakers and others. There was a bank recruiting staff. Two local car dealerships were displaying their wares. T-shirts were for sale and rainbow paraphernalia, and the sno-cone booth had been thoroughly inspected by the health department. There would be no sno-cone sickened queers at this event.<br /><br /> Which was a quietly proud event, compared to Gay Pride days of yore. It really was about pride, not anger; family, not cruising; love and inclusion, not rejection of the dominant society. The lost little girl who greeted us had found safety in a family of gays and it looked, on this glorious summer day in this state capitol, like gay people had found some safety for ourselves. <br /><br />Copyright 2007 Lee Lynch<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. </i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2263229289695349001?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-15948461276941960312007-10-01T18:41:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:51.987-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RwGiWOPVCSI/AAAAAAAAAPg/IOHT-R11jCM/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RwGiWOPVCSI/AAAAAAAAAPg/IOHT-R11jCM/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5116549154332805410" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />My sweetheart is an archivist. Not in any formal sense, but she grew up in a generation which took snapshots any time and any where. I have not been photographed this much since I lived with Tee Corinne. Growing up, my brother and I were the kind of kids who could not face a camera without disguising our real selves by making horrid faces. It was Tee who taught me to be gracious about allowing my image to be captured. I have come to believe that our reproduced visages are as important as our printed words.<br /><br /> We were invisible for so long. There are those who would like us to be invisible again. Like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran who denies the existence of gays in his country. Like the three priests who parted ways with the American Episcopal Church and went to be consecrated as bishops in Africa where, apparently, Episcopalians object to gay and lesbian bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions. Like the 63,000 people here in Oregon who this year signed a petition supporting a ballot measure that would block civil unions. I mean, for goodness sake, what’s with this compulsion to disenfranchise, eradicate -- erase us?<br /><br /> As a gay kid, I had a need to be invisible and got darned good at it. Unspeaking, thin, shy, I was unable to speak in a classroom. I became physically ill when, as an adult writer, I had to read my work aloud or speak to groups that sometimes numbered in the hundreds. The last therapist I worked with opened my eyes to my need to disappear and explained how it led to panic attacks. “Ground yourself,” she told me. “Make yourself real to yourself. Have a drink of water, touch the dog, look in the mirror.” Mirror? The only mirror I had was on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.<br /><br /> The next time I was in a second hand store, I noticed a really tacky mirror whose wicker frame had been painted a glossy royal blue. Over the next few years, I decorated my walls with every kind of mirror I could find at garage sales. Big oak-framed mirrors with brass tacks. Little tiny mirrors with white wood frames. A round mirror set in a translucent blue plastic starburst. A full length oval mirror that must be 75 years old. Turns out, I love these mirrors. Of course, I still don’t look in them, I just look at them.<br /><br /> Then I fell in love with my camera-crazy sweetheart who, out of sheer enjoyment, is making a record, a beautiful record, of our times together. Her home is filled with photo albums from years past. We figure, when our U-Hauls are unloaded, we’ll need special shelving just for her albums – and for my shoeboxes filled with photos, which by themselves fill a wooden chest, a file drawer, and two oversized produce boxes. Heck, we may need a trailer plus that U-Haul.<br /><br /> And that’s exactly what we need as gay people. We can’t take the chance of assuming we’re safe now, that we won’t be shamed or brutalized or economically forced back into closets. It’s a matter of self-preservation to fill those paper and CD and cyberspace albums. It’s imperative that we hand them over to our local lesbian and gay archives before we die. I can only imagine how affirming it would have been to have grown up with images of people like me. Even a snapshot of two women holding hands on a beach or of two guys kissing over a prized tomato plant in their garden, would have made me think that maybe, just maybe, it was okay to be me.<br /><br />My friend Jean Sirius went to Paris with a camera. <a href="http://m.g.havel.free.fr/">Marie-Genevieve Havel</a>, a 70-something out lesbian artist, took Jean under her wing and commanded everyone in her circle to pose. Now <a href="http://jeansirius.com">Jean</a> is taking those images and turning them into a short movie. More! We need more images like these!<br /><br /> Keep on snapping those embarrassing shots of me looking all starry-eyed at you, Sweetheart. Capture us everywhere we go, whether it’s Niagra Falls on our honeymoon or shopping at Publix. Get me to take pictures of you with gay friends and family. And please keep creating those albums for our grandbabydykes. Place us in history so not just the straights, but we ourselves are convinced of our proper place in the world. Listen up, President Ahmadinejad, we’re here and we have proof!<br /><br /><br />Copyright 2007 Lee Lynch <br /><br />Some archives to enjoy: <br /><br /><a href="http://lesbianherstoryarchives.org"><br />lesbianherstoryarchives.org</a><br /><br /><a href="http://mazerlesbianarchives.org">mazerlesbianarchives.org</a><br /><br /><a href="http://glbthistory.org">glbthistory.org</a><br /><br /> <br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. </i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-1594846127694196031?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-10386314324914312922007-09-15T12:23:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:52.243-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RuwxiBQ7rII/AAAAAAAAAOw/hgwnoXGV2bs/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RuwxiBQ7rII/AAAAAAAAAOw/hgwnoXGV2bs/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5110514137683438722" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />We have now had several decades of insistence from the narrow and rather dull right side of politics and public policy that sex education rightly (hmm) belongs in the home. You know—family values and all that. Don’t talk about it in school where things like facts and research might intrude on the discussion. Let Mom and Dad do it, once they’ve screwed up the courage. Given how tightly wound red state moms and dads are about sexual issues in general, screwing up their courage will be more postponed and interrupted and not-tonight-I’ve-got-a-headached than actual screwing.<br /><br /> So by default, television is doing the education, though not as those red staters would have designed it. Corporate America will always provide the default for all functions rightly held by education, news and history. It’s in the packaging. It’s just a fact of life that the public remembers commercials and movies and Fox News more easily than it remembers documentaries or 12th grade health class or, well, other facts of life.<br /><br />O! the unintended consequences of failing to screw up your courage. <br /><br />Instead of an informed population, we have the commercially literate. Consider, if you will, ads for products for these of our fellows who are sexually impaired. Poor babies. All of the Cialis commercials are my faves. Call one of them to mind (I know you can do this) and notice all the boulders and rock hard places and dark crannies and crevices through which the as-yet-unsatisfied couple strolls, foamy waves crashing, all that phallic and vulvic symbolism that adheres directly to the collective right brains of the audience. Mmmm. Tasty.<br /><br />No doubt whole rafts of conservatives go apeshit that these ads are even ON television, preferring as they do that sex not be mentioned during the family hour. Waste and maim thousands but don’t bring up love. I know how they feel. Doncha just hate being ambushed by a tampon commercial in mixed company? Is no bodily function sacred anymore? Of course not. Why do I even ask. A young girl whose mother hasn’t brought up the subject of puberty yet will wonder why she isn’t bleeding in that calming shade of aqua. But I digress.<br /><br />In the Cialis ads, you’ll notice that the company tries to strike a tipsy balance between the purpose of the product and what’s actually on screen. Apparently, if the uninitiated relies on the visual information presented, what they will take away from this bit of sexual education is that if a man uses Cialis, he will most likely achieve a prolonged ability to dance on a boat dock. Failing that sudden attack of talent, he will find the urge, and more curiously, the compulsion to take a bath in a clawfoot tub in the wilderness, in a vineyard, on a beach, in the woods, miles from civilization or plumbing. No doubt the reason Cialis works for 36 hours is because it will take the couple that long to haul the tubs and the water out to this romantic spot. Jeeze Louise, just get a room, will ya.<br /><br />These men are past their prime, men who presumably have been out in the world having sex once or twice sometime in the distant past, they remember what it was like, it seemed fun then, though recently they’ve been encumbered by the throes of a hiatus. Or they’re men who haven’t had a hiatus in their gettieupness and don’t intend to EVER have a hiatus. And yet the Cialis ad writing guys feel it necessary to tell these men that their product does not protect anyone from sexually transmitted diseases. Huh? It doesn’t?? Nope. Says so in the fine print right there on the screen. Fleetingly, and hard to read by anyone past their prime, but it’s there. People who sell products to women for any bodily function at all, it seems, feel the legal and moral obligation to say the same thing on their ads—ads for birth control pills, for instance, or lubricants or godnose what. This stuff will NOT keep you from becoming sick or pregnant. Will not.<br /><br />Now is it just me, or does this tidbit seem evidence that sex education left to Mom and Dad has somehow failed. Failed everyone, it seems. How could anyone possibly assume that a birth control pill could by any means other than faith alone prevent STD’s? Or more to the point, why would anyone think that a pill that allows daily, yearly, world-without-end erections might as an added benefit prevent pregnancy and/or STD’s? Somehow, I suspect that encouraging people with this minuscule amount of innate intelligence to have sex is not overly helpful to the vigor of the collective gene pool. Do we really want more of these idiots wandering around with priapism?<br /><br />And while we’re at it, did anyone notice that Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” is being sponsored by Cialis or Viagra or both? Who ARE these people in corporate America? Is nobody graduating college anymore with even a waltz through a lone English class or a psychology class that might whisper concepts like irony or symbolism? Or consistency in a logical argument? <br /><br />I know. I’m getting old. These curmudgeonly observations wouldn’t have even occurred to me when I was still dating, or even when I was capable of dating. Just gimme the lube and shaddup about yer metaphors. That was my approach to life in the mists of the distant past. <br /><br />Now... if they came up with a female equivalent of Cialis, I might be forced to rethink all of this. Aaaah, shaddup and hand me the lube. Just remember—it doesn’t prevent STD’s.<br /><br /><br />Copyright by Carole Taylor <br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-1038631432491431292?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-35801590912985769142007-08-15T17:57:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:52.451-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RsOhqKP9kNI/AAAAAAAAAOg/AmVInMFuBt0/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RsOhqKP9kNI/AAAAAAAAAOg/AmVInMFuBt0/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099096948791414994" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />You may have heard of this little outfit up in Washington, DC, called the Family Research Council. The FRC is the lead attack pack of anti-gay, right-wing fundamentalist folks who have planted their flag on the shores of Christian family values and claimed it as their territory. Like many other unfriendly takeovers, the land was already occupied, but never mind, they have a flag, it's theirs.<br /><br />They define family values as being essentially one father, one mother, some children or at least weekly good faith (!) efforts toward same. Whatever happens within that family unit may or may not have value, but according to the FRC, there can be NO value (or values) within any other sort of family. We don't know if their research has brought them to include grandparents or the widowed or infertile in their definition of family. Oh, and by the way, most of what they have to say on any given day has nothing to do with families or values like love and loyalty and truth, what one would think might qualify as a family value. Instead what they have to say is basically "Burn the faggots!!" We take up so much of their time that they have little left over for the people they say they support. <br /><br />We don't know why research is part if their name, since theirs is not an academic institution, affiliated with neither university nor scientific organization. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that during the little potluck gathering at which this group spanked itself into being, the participants saw the need not to say exactly what their mission was, not to be specific about what they actually do (in contrast to, say, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force—not much doubt who these folks are) but instead opted for emotional impact only. The word ‘family’ usually brings out all sorts of emotions. No doubt the FRC thought it would create a sort of Normal Rockwellian bit of fuzziness and warmth in their intended audience. (“Ooooh….they're about faaaaaamilies. *I* have a family. They must be doing something good for m family. How generous, how kind, how concerned….”)<br /><br />And then the FRC needed credibility--say with groups like Congress, whose members always want to have hearings and find supporting data about this or that, prior to voting the way they want to vote anyway. Thus cometh the ‘research’ part. Sounds academic. And serious. Not frivolous or, say, bigoted. Not too many reputable academicians I know would put much credence in any of the ‘research’ this bunch says it has done, but then that's not the point. But they couldn't very well call themselves the Burn the Faggots with Propaganda and Lies Council. Yet what they spend most of their energy and hot air on is in attempting to wipe gays and lesbians, and others who question gender and gender roles, off the visible map of the country. I suppose they would allow us to exist, against their better judgement, but they don't want us telling anyone we’re here, and they certainly don't want anyone with legal authority telling any of them that they have to rent to one of us. Among other things. <br /><br />So now you know who they are, if you didn't already. In a nutshell (why is that such an appropriate term…) their other primary stated purpose is to require straight people to create families and to prevent us from doing the same. In pursuit of these parallel goals, they promote the institution of marriage. They think everybody ought to get married. Their latest press release is all about promoting marriage. Seems marriage has fallen on hard times lately, and straight people aren't doing such a bang up job of it of late. You'd think they'd keep this information about these rampant failures to themselves, given that they want everyone to believe that the marriage bus still runs. That it is is such a preferable means of getting to heaven, it still has no tires flat or in the dirt.<br /><br />The FRC sends out missives from time to time to the rest of the country to let good Americans know just exactly how much trouble we're all in and that they have the research to prove it. The headline of this latest bit of supposedly scientific data, issued in the form of a press release, screams that "MARRIAGE IS A MUST -- COHABITANTS WHO MARRY MORE LIKELY TO DIVORCE. " <br /><br />A less than coherent headline, but read it twice and you'll get the drift. MARRY OR BURN would have been a clearer way of putting it. <br /><br />When I was in graduate school, legitimate research was not normally made public through press releases, but I doubt many of the FRC's folks went to graduate school. Why bother with advanced study when all you really need to know how to do is crank out a good logical fallacy or two? <br /><br />The press release (no longer available online) begins thusly: --A Census Bureau report released today shows cohabitation in the US has increased more than 72 percent from 1990 to 2000. The number of single-parent households grew 25 percent during the last decade. "This alarming trend in family structure is a cultural mandate that marriage must be promoted for the well-being of Americans," said Bridget Maher, Family Research Council policy analyst. "We need to discourage people from living together outside of marriage and encourage them to have children within marriage," said Maher. "FRC is working with a broad coalition of policy makers, legislators, scholars and organizations to promote marriage education, to encourage states to strengthen marriage and to include more pro-marriage policies in the welfare reform bill."--<br /><br />Makes you feel better already knowing they're awake and on the job<br /><br />But I suspect an ulterior motive from the FRC. For one thing, single women having children might lead to things like single women making independent decisions, an activity long known to dig ferret holes under the foundations of patriarchal rule. Also not stated in these supposed statistics is the possibility that one reason single-parent households may have increased a bit is that lesbians and gay men are the heads of those households. Gay folks can't be married to their partners legally, so on a census report, these people show up as single parents. <br /><br />And a "cultural mandate to promote marriage." Hmmm. Have I missed another meeting? Hasn't every society for the entire breadth of recorded history promoted and even required marriage? Hasn't 5,000 years of badgering and punishment and threat of death been sufficient to make us all see their reasoning? Apparently not. Thus, in this administrative and moral vacuum, the Family Research Council has sprung to remind us of our duties to humankind. Oh. Sorry. Mankind.<br /><br />The FRC further states in this same press release that "studies show married couples are less likely to divorce. Couples who cohabited first have a forty-six percent greater risk of breaking up once married." Uh…no, dipstick. Actually married couples are the ONLY couples likely to divorce, you forking morons. And forty-six percent greater than what? There's already a fifty percent divorce rate for straight folks. Forty-six percent more than that? I'm confused. <br /><br />“Marriages last longer. Fifty percent of cohabiting unions last one year or less. Only one in ten last more than five years.” And fifty percent of the marriages lasting more than one year or more than five years end in divorce. What's yer point, Gracie?<br /><br />“Married couples are happier. Couples who live together before marriage experience greater marital instability, poorer communication in marriage, and have a greater acceptance of divorce.” Happier than who? Happier than what? How did they measure this happiness and poor communication, anyway? And what is their source for all this happiness data? The FRC and other similar organizations are fond of saying “studies show…” this and that, but don't busy themselves with quoting who supposedly found all this out or how. I've yet to see research from the FRC show up in a professional journal, but picky, picky, picky. <br /><br />But let's just say for the sake of argument that marriage IS better for all of us. Then why is the FRC and the rest of their ilk so opposed to gays and lesbians marrying? Wouldn't gay people reap the same benefits they claim for straight married people if we had legal sanction as well?<br /><br />That's the horrid thing about logic: It just insists on being consistent. Whoda thunk that it would be the Family Research Council, rabid anti-gay bigots that they are, who would make the case for us that we should have the God-given right to marry the person we love and form stable unions in support of children, honor and country. <br /><br />I may have to send them some money. <br /><br />Or not.<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-3580159091298576914?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-57806038600863077842007-07-16T17:15:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:52.957-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RpwK0mL_C6I/AAAAAAAAANQ/2zRaJ1J2Wzs/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RpwK0mL_C6I/AAAAAAAAANQ/2zRaJ1J2Wzs/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5087953577742109602" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />The National Women’s Music Festival (<a href="http://wiaonline.org/nwmf/">wiaonline.org/nwmf/</a>) was 32 years old this summer. I had the honor of being invited to its Writers’ Series, organized by lesbian dynamo Mary Byrne and sprightly Tammara Tracy, which has traditionally been part of the festival. Together they operate Out Word Bound Books in Indianapolis (<a href="http://www.outwordbound.com/">outwordbound.com</a>)This was my fourth visit over a twenty year time span and, as always, I came away excited and energized.<br /><br /> Headliners in the Writers’ Series this year were Radclyffe, who has written 25 lesbian novels and anthologies, and Ellen Hart, who has published 23 mysteries. Kim Baldwin and I rounded out the writer’s marquee. Is it just Midwestern women, or are lesbians everywhere as passionate about the chroniclers of their culture? Every workshop turned into a conversation between these avid readers, beginning writers and the presenters. The sessions were more like gatherings of old friends than lectures and readings. <br /><br />Spirits were high, especially at the erotic readings, when Radclyffe discussed the differences between erotica and writing about sex as a part of general fiction. Radclyffe, who is also the publisher of Bold Strokes Books, has a wonderfully clear vision of current lesbian literature and an unusual respect for those who preceded her.<br /><br /> At the workshop I gave (“Femme-Butch Writing: So Last Generation?”) I was delighted that two of the participants – Jeanne Arnold and Barbara Lindquist -- were the founders of Mother Courage Press, one of the early lesbian publishing companies. To have old wave Mother Courage and new wave Bold Strokes Books in the same room was an historic event.<br /><br /> “Back in the Day: Older Butch Culture” was another lively session. Kai Philippi, Ph.D, was the moderator. I just love it when dykes have respectable titles. It feels like a form of thumbing our noses at the het establishment. In the workshop, some of us told stories of life before gay lib, and others described the future we could not have imagined. Once you were femme, kiki or butch; now there are concepts like “androdyke” and “polyamorous” and, rather than bisexual, “biattractional.” One of the participants used the term “exploded labels” to explain what happened to the old language and stereotypes.<br /><br />Now there are women and men who view themselves as nothing so old-fashioned as transgendered, but as gender queer. I never had a chance to ask what the word “boi” means or to discuss whether the popularity of gender reassignment could, for some butches, be another form of the closet. A gay youth counselor in the group told us that some professionals are encouraging gender changes in gay people, and asked whether this was another way of enforcing the two-gendered binary status quo. If most butches had sex changes and their femmes married the new men, lesbians could once again become members of a despised and hunted underground for refusing to be anything but what we are, women who love women. At what point would gender reassignment become compulsory? If it was involuntary, would it be any different than genital mutilation? What would a young butch have to agree to in order to escape that fate?<br /><br />Obviously, some intense thinking went on at this festival, which also included spirituality, film and animal lovers’ series. General workshops had titles like “How Women’s Music Saved My Life,” “Free Spirit Drumming and Expressive Arts,” “Living Under the Swastika,” and “Adoptions and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.”<br /><br />Of course the music was a continual joy. Just to know Linda Tillery is still singing, much less be able to hear her mellow voice, was a thrill. Jamie Anderson just gets better. Ferron gave a four-hour intensive workshop on song writing, while Ubaka Hill, whose drum was lost by an airline, soldiered on with a borrowed drum.<br /><br />A major highlight of this festival for me was spending time with Ellen Hart, who is as warm, funny and engaging as her books. Rachel Spangler, a handsome young author whose novel Learning Curve will be released in 2008, squired a bunch of us to dinner. The cuisine in Normal, Illinois, is exceptional.<br /><br />As always, it was the festival crew who most made me want to return to National. Producer Jane Weldon seemed to have one purpose in life: to make the performers’ time there easy and enjoyable. Manager Ann Arvidson was a wizard at rounding up volunteers, sometimes her own daughters, to move mountains – or in my case a bed – to accommodate presenters. Bonnie Zwiebel, head of security, was also the transport dyke. In her big red van and leather cowboy hat, she met planes and trains with a smile and even, much to my pleasure, reunited me with my sweetheart, who flew in unexpectedly in the middle of the lost drum crisis.<br /><br />For someone who has always disliked travel and making appearances, I know I will return to be with these dykes who, by occasional contact and a shared love of lesbian culture, have become my friends. Why, with such talent, drive and expertise, women like these don’t take over the world and run it right, I don’t have a clue.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2007<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-5780603860086307784?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-9574018202479628072007-07-06T09:14:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:53.204-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Ro5qwwk-VqI/AAAAAAAAAMI/XydYIIrEY5s/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Ro5qwwk-VqI/AAAAAAAAAMI/XydYIIrEY5s/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5084118415254116002" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />This time of year most people can’t help but think about family. Despite religious dogma to the contrary, we’ve all got at least one. Even us hummuhseckshuls. Some of us have two or three families, because unless driven from the flock at the point of a homophobic slur, most of us still count our families of origin as part of our extended family.<br /><br />I like the word we used to use all the time to refer to the person we live with: lover. Now the term of choice seems to be ‘partner’. I don’t much like ‘partner’ although I use it for shorthand’s sake. And I use it when I’m talking to real old and feeble people who might not be able to survive another mention of sex, much less sex beyond the missionary position. I don’t want to cause any more seizures among my mother’s friends than is on their schedule to begin with. I like the term ‘lover’ because it has in it passion and consideration and tenderness. ‘Partner’ feels to me like it should smell of horse sweat and gunpowder. Or else it sounds too much like work and contracts. <br /><br />But, as it turns out, work and contracts are what this particular column is about.<br /><br />The terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ rasp on my nerves with indifference and impatient tones of voice slung up in a ragged recliner. WEEEEE never do that. Right? But whatever the tone of voice, partners and lovers and husbands and wives are how a family starts. Every gay or lesbian I know recognizes straight families as necessary and legitimate, our own parents and everybody else’s, so it would seem only fair for them to return the favor. I know, I know. And there are little green men on the window sill if I think fairness is even part of most people’s working vocabulary, particularly if under the d’s the word at the head of the list is dogma.<br /><br />I often wonder what exactly the conservatives, religious and otherwise, mean when they say they support “family values.” Which family values? Which families? If it’s only the kind with one man, one woman, and two kids, then that definition leaves out a huge chunk of even the straight families. Have they not noticed that 50% of their own unbending families end in divorce? Oh. Well. But that’s different. There’s still a penis and vagina involved in the equation somewhere or other. Right, honeypie. It usually WAS in an other, and that’s what caused the divorce in the first place.<br /><br />And family values of what era, exactly? Most likely some long lost agrarian age when nobody left the farm or the plantation, and the eldest son inherited everything regardless of talent or inclination. Sort of like how the Bush family picked who would get to run for president. Jeb’s a lot smarter, and more qualified, but he lacked the foresight or influence with the Almighty to be Barbara’s first born. Even the Kennedy boys knew you had to wait your turn. Oh. You mean THOSE family values. Gotcha.<br /><br />As long as there is breath left in a Republican, I’m here to remind you that if you have a family, and you have a value, and the family most important to you is the one you have chosen and not the one you were born into, YESTERDAY is the day you needed to get your life in order. If you don’t have a will, do one. If you don’t have a living will, do one. If you haven’t designated a medical power of attorney, you’d better start interviewing now. Yesterday was the day you needed to start gathering all the different legal bits of paper to protect yourself and your lover. No matter how safe you think your relationship is with your parents or your brothers or sisters, do you know your great niece? Do you know her husband? Do you know their children? Are you SURE they all love you? If it’s not filed at the courthouse, it’s not a family value. The family values you thought would come into play, like love and loyalty and honesty and generosity, won’t amount to used cat litter if there’s the slightest possibility of greed raising its pointed little green ears anywhere in that family, a family you had no idea was so extended. There ARE little green men on the window sill, but this is their home planet.<br /><br />And like weeds and stray cats, greed is ubiquitous and just as sneaky. When you die or get sick (and however cute you think you are now, you will do one of those things eventually) there may suddenly not be enough love in the family values vault to protect the one person you shared most of your love and values with. Some gays and lesbians are lucky. Some gays and lesbians have birth families that have as one of their values respecting the choices of adults. What a concept. It may be astonishing to you now, you may think it’s an impossibility, but in way too many cases the family you were born into, or the family your lover was born into, will be at the head of the stampede to take everything both of you have worked for when one of you dies. If all you have is a will, any will can be contested. ANY will. Remember that.<br /><br />All day long and most every night of the week, blood kin steal things from the partners of gay relatives, deny a lover’s right to be at a hospital bedside, deny even that the relationship was what it was. The disparity of treatment given the lovers and children of gay and lesbian people who died in the attacks on September 11 should tell you something. In New York, the governor had to issue an executive edict to assure equality between gays and straights. If the person who died lived in Virginia, so sorry, too bad, next. If you don’t have your papers in order, even if otherwise they’d be calling you a hero, as far as the law of a given state may see it, 18 years with the same faithful soul is vapor on the windshield of life. <br /><br />This is not news, you say. If that’s so, then DO you have all your papers in order? Have you exercised your own personal family values and seen to it that you CAN provide for your lover? There are ways around what certain straight people feel is their own personal, private body of law, written only for their own private benefit. Guess what. The law doesn’t have a deed on it. The law itself is community property. You own it too. <br /><br />What better gift of family values can you think to give your lover than a trip to your family lawyer to make sure there is protection for both of you? Ok. Forget that obey part. But at least pay attention to that business about in sickness and in health.<br /><br />And, well, Christmas will be here before you know it, little elf. Get busy.<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-957401820247962807?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-33114673773713641652007-06-18T13:56:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:53.560-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RnbxquhPhNI/AAAAAAAAALQ/P5oJbcoliPs/s1600-h/Lee_Lynch.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RnbxquhPhNI/AAAAAAAAALQ/P5oJbcoliPs/s320/Lee_Lynch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5077511346251072722" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />I set out in the late 1960s to write stories that would give lesbians pleasure and take our minds off our sometimes onerous existences. I wanted to help us survive and I wanted to model successful lesbian lives. That's exactly what Jane Rule did for me with Desert of the Heart, what Isabelle Miller did for me with A Place For Us (later retitled Patience and Sarah) and what Radclyffe Hall did for me with The Well of Loneliness. I gulped down Valerie Taylor, Claire Morgan and Ann Aldrich books like a runner at the end of a marathon. I swear, their stories kept me alive and functional in the days when I was the only out lesbian in my high school and college. It was a service I wanted to repay and the joy of literary escapism was a feeling I wanted to give other lesbians, although sometimes I think I just wanted a thousand girlfriends I could make love to with words. Or maybe, as a sixties kid, I just wanted to save the world – the lesbian world.<br /><br />When I first started writing, the field was wide open. Very few of us were willing to make up stories and write them down for no one to publish, no one to read. And no one was writing genre fiction – mysteries, speculative fiction, formulaic romances -- within a specifically lesbian context until the 1980s.<br /><br />Eventually Naiad Press started to publish mysteries. Daughters of a Coral Dawn , Katherine Forrest's science fiction book, followed. There was some controversy about publishing genre fiction – some felt it was time to move away from coming out stories, some were appalled that a lesbian publisher would bring out such – well, genre fiction smacked of mainstream publishing. The lesbian market proved to be large.<br /><br />Little by little, genre fiction took over. The most literary of presses allowed itself one mystery and then another press would fall to the temptation. I remember being delighted with Barbara Wilson's Barcelona mysteries, which had some gender fluidity to keep them from being too too frivolous. Sarah Dreher and Ellen Hart followed with addictive mixes of mystery and humor.<br /><br />By this time the lesbian and women's presses had become serious businesses. They were appreciated but not well supported financially. We used to say dykes spent their money in bars, not bookstores, and a dozen women would read one tattered copy of a Naiad book, often shop lifted. So more and more, the presses put out genre books. Those of us who hung in there and kept writing our non-genre stories became what were called mid-list authors of general fiction. Read: not as popular with lesbian readers. We didn't meet non-gay readers' tastes either, and we didn't earn big bucks for the presses.<br /><br />To this day, I don't write with a market in mind. Which is a good thing, as I haven't a clue how to define – or market – my books. Someone asked if I thought my novels were romances. They do have happy endings and always contain a romance between at least one femme and one butch, or two butches. Or two femmes – no, wait, I haven't tried that yet, but it might be fun. In any case, it's not my intention to write romances. Someone else tried to define my work as butch/femme romance, but I don't think so. My editor calls it literary fiction and I think that's very cool, but the nearest I can come to a category is something that could be termed "a place for us" tales. The characters are looking for roots in a world which does not consider lesbians to be desirable inhabitants.<br /><br />My characters seem to be driven by a combination of setting and events, not genre, not literary finesse; they are wandering lovers with a longing for a hearth of their own. They find love and claim their places in often hostile settings. Maybe this does make my stories literary fiction as this is one of those universal experiences that have traditionally been treated in novels: "man" vs. nature, for example, like the Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath trying to escape the dustbowl.<br /><br />I write about outsiders wanting in. As part of a recent Golden Crown Literary Society Convention ( www.goldencrown.org), I was on a panel that asked what my ideal novel would be. The answer I prepared was: The Hunchback of Notre Dame with a lesbian instead of a hunchback. I want a big fat complex story set in an exotic locale like gay Paree, with a hot femme like Esmeralda and an outsider heroine who rings church bells for a living. <br /><br /> If it were not for pervasive social bigotry all readers could see that a novel about a lesbian, genre fiction or not, can be as universal and relevant as one about a non-gay character. If we sometimes overemphasize our affectional preferences, it is because we need to tell our hitherto untold stores – millions of them – and to see our hitherto hidden lives in print. Maybe I, and other dyke non-genre writers, don't set the mainstream literary world ablaze, but heterosexist writers have hogged the bookshelves since book numero uno. I write for the people who are relevant to me. <br /><br />Copyright Lee Lynch 2007<br /><br />6/07<br /><br /><i><b> Lee Lynch </b> is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Creek-Lee-Lynch/dp/1933110295" target="_blank"><font color=blue>"Sweet Creek"</a></font>, as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee <a href= "http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Bios/LeeLBio.html" target="_blank"><font color=blue> here </a></font>. </i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-3311467377371364165?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-46478054265974136912007-06-05T16:14:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:53.740-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RmXuiOhPhGI/AAAAAAAAAKY/_1l_1S62q1A/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RmXuiOhPhGI/AAAAAAAAAKY/_1l_1S62q1A/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5072722827083220066" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />Information, get me Jesus on the line.<br /><br />I’m from the South. I know that might not matter to you, but it does to me. Whether you realize it or not, folks in the South are some of the very few people on earth who survived a civil war and then got on with business within just a couple of generations. Who got over living in an occupied country. My lover is a Yankee. I like Yankees. Only Yankees don’t call themselves Yankees. They won. Had they lost, they’d be as strange about the Civil War as we are.<br /><br />I would not have been someone fighting for the South in any case. Not a big fan of slavery in any of my incarnations. But Southern identity has more to do with being brought up in a country that lost a war, not necessarily why the war was fought. That’s a whole nother discussion.<br /><br />You may wonder what civil war has to do with gay and lesbian or even gender issues. Probably everything, given that if certain civil wars now raging continue to get out of hand, there may be nothing left anywhere to have rights about.<br /><br />With every day filled with news of multitudinous international sibling rivalries/boarder disputes/jihads going on in various parts of the world, I kept asking myself why it was that in America we had a civil war and aren’t still having it. In the Middle East, somebody has been giving the rebel yell almost continuously for 5,000 years. In India and Pakistan, gone with the wind will mean gone with the nuclear fallout. In Ireland, it’s supposedly over, but it lasted over four centuries. And those are just the most glaring examples. <br /><br />What do all of those other wars have in common? What did our own civil war lack that let us get over ourselves in relatively short order? <br /><br />The answer to both questions is religion, that’s what. Our civil war was not about who believed in what god or how to spell his name. Or not spell it. It was over a lot of things, stupidity being one of them, but it wasn’t over religion. Religion was used by both sides in America to justify this or that, but religion itself wasn’t the issue.<br /><br />It has never, ever made any sense to me to have even a verbal argument over religion, but apparently I am nearly alone in my lack of adrenaline. People the world over are absolutely CERTAIN that there is only one god and he’s on their personal speed dial and nobody else’s. That’s the same certainty that creates Virginia and Kansas “ministers” out of the dust of the earth and drives these holy men to hound gays and lesbians to distraction, and nearly always for the same reason. All these guys know who God is, doncha know. The one thing that nearly all of those religious types CAN agree on is that WE are the enemy. Once they stop fighting the congregation across the street or across the boarder for condemnation rights, that is.<br /><br />And Godde help you if you suggest that the Deity is a female entity, that the Being isn’t the manufacturer of quantum amounts of Celestial Testosterone. Talk about civil war. Don’t take me there.<br /><br />So if religion is the cause of the problem, or at least the reason given that all these warring factions can’t come to the peace table, then might it be that we should inspect that issue. <br /><br />Other than that your mother told you it was a good idea, why believe in a god at all? And beyond that, why beat up your neighbor over it? What good does it do? Here’s a thought: If God is supposedly the embodiment of all that humans aspire to, then it matters how we describe who and what we worship. It matters how we describe heaven. It matters how we describe the diety. Because that is how we would describe who we wish we were, what the best possible Earth could be.<br /><br />How we describe Godde, if you believe in one, has nothing to do with who Godde actually IS, in the existential sense. I can believe that Godde is a flaming Amazon beauty with a double headed axe and a dog kennel, but if Godde exists, my belief will have no effect whatever on who that being actually is. You can BELIEVE whatever you wish about someone. Your belief might be either flattering or simpering or insulting, but your belief alone will not change who that person is. <br /><br />But your belief about who YOU are will have everything to do with who YOU become.<br /><br />If you tell children from the time they can hear that heaven is reached by killing twenty Jews and blowing yourself up in the process, that the reward is 72 virgins (for boys only, damn it all), that women are cattle and only worth anything, however slight, as a virgin, I can pretty much tell you what your society will look like, what your home life will look like, what your wars will look like. <br /><br />Personally, I believe that Godde is a beautiful menopausal Black lesbian. I used to believe that She was a beautiful 30-year-old Cherokee bravette. Before that I believed that He was a reeeeeeeeeeeally old, unmarried, confusing white guy who supported things like incest, castration and complicated restaurant menus. Who the futz knows. I certainly don’t. Maybe he’s a tiny little gay guy who sings show tunes and occasionally does drag.<br /><br />And maybe we can’t bring peace to the world by abandoning the pulpit, but it just could be that if we were all a little less certain about that speed dial thing, heaven might look a little friendlier. <br /><br />As one of my favorite prayers says, “God, please save me from your followers.”<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-4647805426597413691?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-8323977108919734312007-05-22T12:41:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:54.031-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RlNHroyTvCI/AAAAAAAAAJI/sU_lK7-I2r4/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RlNHroyTvCI/AAAAAAAAAJI/sU_lK7-I2r4/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5067472820730313762" /></a><br /><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(originally published May 2001)</span><br /><br /><br />My mother had a stroke last month and I have come home to the wilds of Tennessee to take care of her, to the extent that she’ll let me do that. This means that I’ve had to move work and home 500 miles from my lover and my house, but I planned my life so I could do this if necessary, and one day at a time, as they say, my lover and I will get through this. It’s not how I would have designed it, but it’s a promise I made my mother a decade ago, that I’d take care of her.<br /><br />The point is that I am not getting to come home the way I had hoped I would, when I retire to build a home on the bluff with my lover, both of us way too old for who we love to matter. Or so I thought. At any rate, the plan was to build the house, invite everybody I ever knew to an open house, and whoever showed up would find out about me with some sort of prominent display of my book. If any of them came back on their own, it would pretty much tell us who was an idiot and who was sane. Now the timetable is all off.<br /><br />This weekend I will have lunch with some old high school friends, and without fail there will be discussions of the faeries out in the woods. The high pitched keening you may hear off to the east and south come Saturday will be me trying to drag two women my age kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Now I’m not possitive, but I have a feeling that true to Southern womanhood, they won’t just come right out and ask me impolite questions. But this is a really interesting situation to find myself in, after all these years, having written for so long about coming out. Because as we all know, there’s coming out and then there’s coming out in the woods. We’re talking serious woods here, children, far into the madding crowd.<br /><br />Just as an example, last week out in front of Mama’s hospital sat a mostly and previously white muscle car, with various colors of fenders applied thither and yon, and Bondo yon and thither with occasional paint applied not with an air brush but with a wallpaper brush, it appeared. In the back window was a dog that nodded whenever the driver might hit the ubiquitous chuck hole and an Elvis license plate with little lights that chased one another around the tag border. And just in case anyone missed the point of all this, in the back window in four-inch high letters was a sticker that said REDNECK. Oh, really?<br /><br />So coming out here is not like coming out in the city. Which I already knew, but now all this theory will be put to the test. And I can’t decide exactly how I’m going to do this. It’s one thing to just refrain from lying to people my mother’s age and talk about my partner this and my partner that and Bridget and the woman I live with. (That would be one and the same person, in case you just got confused.) These women would just go on with their lives and think what they wanted or not think at all. If my being a lesbian crossed their minds, they’d immediately have some kind of snowplow 18-wheeler thought whose job it is to runs it down errant ideas if one crosses the yellow line.<br /><br />But I’m having lunch with two girls-now-women from high school, and somehow I’m not sure either of them has ever met a real live lesbian, much less one they slept with years ago. No, not that way. Slumber parties. Innocent stuff. I didn’t even come out till I was out of graduate school, so everyone in the county was safe. But you know they’ll be thinking about even the innocent stuff.<br /><br />Coming out is brand new every single time you do it. It gets a little easier only because you have an idea what the questions are going to be, and with luck, you might know an answer or two.<br /><br />But more dangerous than coming out to my old high school friends, there is the fact that I’m out here in the middle of the woods with all these people who think Dubyuh is actually a smart guy, a guy who is somehow the savior of the known universe simply because his grammar and rampant non-sequiturs and runon sentences are consumately understandable to them.<br /><br />I’ll have to report back to you on all this next time, but somehow I think my coming out is going to be a lot kinder and gentler than their flushing me out of the woods as a flaming Democrat.<br /><br />Booga booga . . .<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-832397710891973431?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-8479001903800926582007-05-12T00:36:00.000-07:002007-05-12T00:37:31.239-07:00By Lee Lynch<br /><br />One day, the Femme In Charge (FIC) was at a professional gathering when I happened to visit the Handy Dyke. Coincidentally, the Librarian stopped by. That left us three soft butches alone together in the living room with the FIC’s colorful chair conspicuously empty. We may all have experienced a flash of panic: what could three lone butches say to one another?<br /><br /> Butches are all about deferring to femmes. That makes femmes infinitely curious: what do butches talk about when alone together? It makes me feel like a member of an exclusive club when the FIC says she’s going to get the Handy Dyke to tell her everything we discussed.<br /><br /> What do we talk about? No, we don’t make plans to open lesbian strip joints or discuss horsepower or football. That afternoon we got going on our dogs: how smart, or dumb, how funny or infirm they were, and recipes for dog treats. Then it was the dog stories, boasting how this one did an incredibly cute thing and that one topped it by misbehaving in an even worse way.<br /><br /> But we couldn’t keep it up forever. Without a femme to entertain us and lead the conversation, we were, briefly, at sea. What fun is it to talk about butch toys like computers without someone to exaggerate her boredom with pained looks? We soldiered on, the Librarian and the Handy Dyke deciding which equipment to use to cut open a rock with agate inside. For a while we dwelled on what was flowering in the Handy Dyke’s gardens and which birds were visiting our neighborhoods, especially the eagles. We tackled the problem of how to get a rust-proof marine lock open after it rusted and the Handy Dyke threatened a scary-sounding saw if the penetrating oil from NAPA didn’t work (it did and was a great excuse to visit an auto parts store).<br /><br /> Somehow we veered to the topic of a part of town where a brook runs under the buildings and the Handy Dyke told us how you could walk into the cave/tunnel/hidden walkway from the beach. The Librarian decided there was a novel in that. Rainbow Run, we would call it, and it would be the story of a lesbian rum runner, Lucky the Dyke, during prohibition. Before we knew it, we had sketched out a series of three mysteries. We parted with grand butch adventures in our heads.<br /><br /> My next escapade was hardly the stuff of a butch tale. I found myself tagging along for a femme’s morning out. The other butches stayed home to erect a fountain in the yard. The FIC assured me that, after garage sales, she would take me home if the new fabric store in town proved interesting enough to need lengthy perusing, and I surprised her by admitting to enjoying fabric stores -- must be the clothes horse in me. The FIC and the Shopper loved the place, which was chock full of eclectic fabrics, patterns, gifts, jewelry and just about everything else in which a femme could delight. I, of course, darted from display to display, pointing out treasures and egging on the FIC and the Shopper to buy, buy, buy! My job was to transport the planned purchases to the counter while they tried on bits of frillery and made up reasons why they needed new stuff.<br /><br />After a few minutes I was done. I left to walk the dogs while they did their best to both find all the goodies and not buy out the store. A lengthy walk later, I worked for a while in the car, feeling like the patient husband in a department store. A bigamist husband. At last the femmes burst out of the shop, hugging pink bags.<br /><br />I know the ropes. When femmes are excited after shopping, you’re going to get a blow by blow anyway, so you might as well earn points by asking for an inventory of the bags. While it was the FIC who bought a pocketbook, it was the Shopper who gave me the back-story.<br /><br />“That’s what you call a schlep bag,” she explained. “You’re always on the search for the perfect schlep bag, one with perfect balance and a strap that doesn’t dig into you no matter how much is in the bag. I’ve had bags so big I could hide my mother inside.” Three books, lunch and all the essentials for a day on an airplane seemed to be the criteria for a schlep bag’s size. This, apparently, is a femme canon. <br /><br />Oh, I love femmes. They are so adorable with their shopping genes and rules. Fortunately, they think butches, with our dog stories and butch toys, are adorable too.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-847900190380092658?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-49497792939880678722007-05-07T12:51:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:54.274-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Rj-D3RGD3jI/AAAAAAAAAHo/WXSn_imD_7E/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Rj-D3RGD3jI/AAAAAAAAAHo/WXSn_imD_7E/s200/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5061909491692592690" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />It's interesting to me how some people can leap from one side of a definition to another with such mental agility. Right wing Republicans (is there any other kind?) seem to me to be exceptionally agile when it comes to their ability to define a word like choice.<br /><br />Now you'd think choice is a simple enough English word, one even the most narrow, most rigid mind could wrap itself around with little need for mental gymnastics. But it seems to mean different things to certain folks, depending on the issue to which it's applied.<br /><br />According to the conservative element, you and I *have* a choice about whether or not to be gay or lesbian. Straight people, of course, don't have a choice about being straight, they just somehow are. It's one of the few areas of life where they will allow us a choice while refusing to have one themselves. I think they ought to ease up on their little pointed heads and grant themselves a choice in the matter, too. We mustn't be greedy.<br /><br />In other areas of the World According to the Reich, women ought not to have a choice should it be choice regarding a zygote. As the bumper sticker says, "How can you think I'm capable of raising a child when you don't think I'm capable of raising an issue?"<br /><br />Straights have a choice about whether or not to get married, but they don't want us to have a choice in this area at all. They have a choice whether or not to join the military and be open about their sexuality while serving; we can choose to join as long as we choose to lie.<br /><br />Parents and doctors can choose *for* a child what gender to surgically assign to the child if the kid is born with an ambiguous set of genitals. But once the child becomes an adult, he or she can't then choose to do the same thing to their own bodies without twisting in and out of amazingly intricate legal and emotional Gordian knots. For one thing, to be approved for the surgery, transgendered people have to live for a year pre-op as the other gender, dress as the other gender, work as the other gender, in order to prove to some psychologist that they can take the pressure. In many states, it's illegal for a man to dress as a woman, so in order to pass the psychological requirement, one is required to violate the law and risk arrest. And if it isn't illegal, it's certainly extremely risky to dress and act as the other gender before surgery should one be found out. Witness Brandon Teena, and hundreds of other bashings each year. It's all right for adults to deny a child the right to wait and make his/her own choice about his/her own body when s/he's old enough to decide, but by that time, making a choice is presented as decidedly psychotic, and difficult in the extreme.<br /><br />The point of all this is that choice is something "conservatives" want reserved for themselves. Which of course means it's not a choice at all. Getting to have a choice is the point of freedom, the point of having the Constitution: choosing whether or not to worship and how; whether or not to vote and how; whether or not to speak one's mind and how....all those rights given theoretically to all of us. Which means that what "conservatives" want is freedom for those to whom they chose to grant the favor. In this, they like the definition of choice.<br /><br />I can't help it. I'm just a pro choice kinda gal. Not just as it relates to zygotes, but pro choice anything. Which means, I know, that I have to allow all those Log Cabin Republicans out there to exist, and worse, other lesbigats who for whatever reason vote Republican and support Shrub Bush. :::sigh::: I think it's a HUGE mistake, but go ahead if you must.<br /><br />Just don't come crying to me if you make the choice to vote for the man and then find out it's the last time you get to have any kind of choice at all. Well, other than to be a big ole flaming queer. :) You did make that choice, right?<br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </I> You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-4949779293988067872?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-77548088686324306962007-04-27T11:55:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:54.643-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RjJHuBGD3eI/AAAAAAAAAHA/PP0YdTcemV8/s1600-h/MeNow.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RjJHuBGD3eI/AAAAAAAAAHA/PP0YdTcemV8/s320/MeNow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5058184187383897570" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />Information, get me Jesus on the line.<br /><br />I’m from the South. I know that might not matter to you, but it does to me. Whether you realize it or not, folks in the South are some of the very few people on earth who survived a civil war and then got on with business within just a couple of generations. Who got over living in an occupied country. My lover is a Yankee. I like Yankees. Only Yankees don’t call themselves Yankees. They won. Had they lost, they’d be as strange about the Civil War as we are.<br /><br />I would not have been someone fighting for the South in any case. Not a big fan of slavery in any of my incarnations. But Southern identity has more to do with being brought up in a country that lost a war, not necessarily why the war was fought. That’s a whole nother discussion.<br /><br />You may wonder what civil war has to do with gay and lesbian or even gender issues. Probably everything, given that if certain civil wars now raging continue to get out of hand, there may be nothing left anywhere to have rights about.<br /><br />With every day filled with news of multitudinous international sibling rivalries/boarder disputes/jihads going on in various parts of the world, I kept asking myself why it was that in America we had a civil war and aren’t still having it. In the Middle East, somebody has been giving the rebel yell almost continuously for 5,000 years. In India and Pakistan, gone with the wind will mean gone with the nuclear fallout. In Ireland, it’s supposedly over, but it lasted over four centuries. And those are just the most glaring examples. <br /><br />What do all of those other wars have in common? What did our own civil war lack that let us get over ourselves in relatively short order? <br /><br />The answer to both questions is religion, that’s what. Our civil war was not about who believed in what god or how to spell his name. Or not spell it. It was over a lot of things, stupidity being one of them, but it wasn’t over religion. Religion was used by both sides in America to justify this or that, but religion itself wasn’t the issue.<br /><br />It has never, ever made any sense to me to have even a verbal argument over religion, but apparently I am nearly alone in my lack of adrenaline. People the world over are absolutely CERTAIN that there is only one god and he’s on their personal speed dial and nobody else’s. That’s the same certainty that creates Virginia and Kansas “ministers” out of the dust of the earth and drives these holy men to hound gays and lesbians to distraction, and nearly always for the same reason. All these guys know who God is, doncha know. The one thing that nearly all of those religious types CAN agree on is that WE are the enemy. Once they stop fighting the congregation across the street or across the boarder for condemnation rights, that is.<br /><br />And Godde help you if you suggest that the Deity is a female entity, that the Being isn’t the manufacturer of quantum amounts of Celestial Testosterone. Talk about civil war. Don’t take me there.<br /><br />So if religion is the cause of the problem, or at least the reason given that all these warring factions can’t come to the peace table, then might it be that we should inspect that issue. <br /><br />Other than that your mother told you it was a good idea, why believe in a god at all? And beyond that, why beat up your neighbor over it? What good does it do? Here’s a thought: If God is supposedly the embodiment of all that humans aspire to, then it matters how we describe who and what we worship. It matters how we describe heaven. It matters how we describe the diety. Because that is how we would describe who we wish we were, what the best possible Earth could be.<br /><br />How we describe Godde, if you believe in one, has nothing to do with who Godde actually IS, in the existential sense. I can believe that Godde is a flaming Amazon beauty with a double headed axe and a dog kennel, but if Godde exists, my belief will have no effect whatever on who that being actually is. You can BELIEVE whatever you wish about someone. Your belief might be either flattering or simpering or insulting, but your belief alone will not change who that person is. <br /><br />But your belief about who YOU are will have everything to do with who YOU become.<br /><br />If you tell children from the time they can hear that heaven is reached by killing twenty Jews and blowing yourself up in the process, that the reward is 72 virgins (for boys only, damn it all), that women are cattle and only worth anything, however slight, as a virgin, I can pretty much tell you what your society will look like, what your home life will look like, what your wars will look like. <br /><br />Personally, I believe that Godde is a beautiful menopausal Black lesbian. I used to believe that She was a beautiful 30-year-old Cherokee bravette. Before that I believed that He was a reeeeeeeeeeeally old, unmarried, confusing white guy who supported things like incest, castration and complicated restaurant menus. Who the futz knows. I certainly don’t. Maybe he’s a tiny little gay guy who sings show tunes and occasionally does drag.<br /><br />And maybe we can’t bring peace to the world by abandoning the pulpit, but it just could be that if we were all a little less certain about that speed dial thing, heaven might look a little friendlier. <br /><br />As one of my favorite prayers says, “God, please save me from your followers.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><i><b>Carole Taylor</b> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called<br /><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=8QbRH0KQ9ksC&pg=PP1&ots=LEdhESQm9A&dq=A+Third+Story+carole+taylor&sig=8hQ5NugeLPmdTtwN9WRWogVIivw" target="_blank"><font color=blue><strong>"A Third Story"</strong></font></a>. </i>You can email her <a href="mailto: e.caroletaylor@gmail.com ">here.</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-7754808868632430696?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-22540695353372188012007-04-15T09:22:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:54.841-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RiJR14-3dXI/AAAAAAAAAF4/3frp7h3RE_o/s1600-h/canadianamericanflag.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RiJR14-3dXI/AAAAAAAAAF4/3frp7h3RE_o/s320/canadianamericanflag.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5053691718134101362" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Once upon a time, a long time ago, I left the United States. It was only to travel to Montreal, and I was pretty excited that I’d be going through Customs and seeing an actual foreign country. From there who knew? Maybe some day I’d get to France and Ireland to see the lands of my ancestors. <br /><br /> Almost immediately, I hated being outside the U.S. The traffic went too fast. There were so many bridges I was always lost at the wrong end of one. Camping on St. Catherine Island was like being invited to a mosquito feast, and I was the main course. The city was just like a city in the States, only harder to navigate. I wanted to go home.<br /><br /> This was in the 1970s, when Nixon was president and we were still mired in Viet Nam. It made no sense that I should be so attached to my native land. American citizens had been fleeing from it to Canada for years. It was even rumored that gay people were treated better north of the border.<br /><br /> I spent a miserable few days in Montreal with my lover. She wanted to show me the places she had lived and worked when she and her girlfriend ran away from home at sixteen, but the city was too changed to find her past. I wanted to see McGill, where I had considered going to college; seeing it, I realized college had been lonely enough for the only lesbian on campus without living in a strange, cold city too.<br /><br /> Crossing back into Vermont, I felt as if I’d barely escaped with my life. This was nonsense, of course, but I was so glad to be home. Forget the ancestral lands. I’d visit Mechanicville, New York where Grandma and Grandpa Lynch had met, and Petaluma, California, where Great Grandpa Lynch bought a horse farm after the Gold Rush. The inn by the sea in County Wexford, Ireland, had probably fallen in by now anyway.<br /><br /> I relished the narrow country roads of Vermont after my great escape. What was wrong with being proud to be an American anyway? What was wrong with being an outright American chauvinist? Just because we were (and still are) the over-armed bullies of the world, despised for our riches and polluting with no regard for our own or other populations, didn’t mean I couldn’t get all choked up when I raised and lowered the flag as a counselor at a Girl Scout camp. <br /><br /> It was on this trip that I learned lesbianism and patriotism are not incompatible. At the time, much of gay liberation seemed to refer to principles of Socialism, if not Communism. The most politically active gays were likely to be peace-loving tree huggers. There were a lot of anti-American feelings in the lesbian-feminist community and who could blame us when multi-national corporations were buying our government and that government was more inclined to fund mass murder – of third world citizens and our own military personnel – than anti-poverty initiatives.<br /><br /> America was fixable, I thought, and worth fixing.<br /><br /> We camped in an elbow of the Vermont mountains. There were cabins, but we set up our old canvas tent in a meadow. These were to be some of the most peaceful days of my life. The paradox of loving my native country and hating its policies could not disturb my homecoming. I was moved to sing swift unmelodic passages of “This Land Is My Land” and “America the Beautiful” at odd moments. The shame of American actions in the world was still with me, the fact that the campground owners would have thrown us out had they known what went on inside our tent was no less real, but the pond outside our door flap was blue and untroubled and the temperature at night was chilly enough to discourage mosquitoes.<br /><br /> I wanted to stay forever there, at my Walden Pond, like so many of my generation who retreated to Vermont and its equivalents all over the country. That is my point, of course: all Americans had rural Missouri towns where we could disappear or we could make sanctuaries of brownstones in Brooklyn or Victorian painted ladies in San Francisco. <br /><br /> I’m not quite sure what a patriot is anymore, after the word has been used for centuries as a bludgeon by angry politicians and as a recruiting slogan for the military. So many Americans think gay people are somehow un-American and of course, we’re not exactly welcome in the armed forces, those bastions of patriotism. I do know that this lesbian is as American as they come and glad of it. I believe in what the Statue of Liberty stands for and that we can be a peaceful force for good in the world. I’m not willing to give the word patriot to the non-gay hawks. A patriot can also defend her country by protecting it from itself. <br /><br /><br />Copyright 2007 Lee Lynch<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-2254069535337218801?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-6563328829011869382007-03-29T17:08:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:55.457-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RgxZI93RYZI/AAAAAAAAAFM/GC2Hj9p9vZU/s1600-h/Me23_cr.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/RgxZI93RYZI/AAAAAAAAAFM/GC2Hj9p9vZU/s320/Me23_cr.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5047507292955697554" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br />I have begun to repeat myself. (I have begun to repeat myself.) Just to get that out of the way. I’ve written about gay and lesbian issues for over twenty years, and written online about them for over a decade. You’d think that things would have changed enough in that time that I wouldn’t have to repeat myself, or that I could stop writing about this stuff entirely and move on to something more interesting to the general public or at least a different subject interesting to you. <br /><br />But the more I talk to younger gay people online, the more I see it’s SSDD. Same shit, different day. It’s still hard for most people to come out at work. It’s still hard if not impossible for teenagers to come out to their families. The gay and lesbian teen suicide rate is a rampant, unforgivable national tragedy. Young gay men don’t want to or can’t remember the 80’s and AIDS. People don’t want to remember the 50’s and 60’s when people were thrown in jail for being gay. It’s still hard to find a compatible lover and then keep her. We can marry in several NATO countries but not here, except in Massachusetts--and basic human rights being left to the whiplashing whims of voters is always an iffy proposition. The military still asks and still tells and still lies. George Friggin Bush is still the president and actually BELIEVES that he is the president. Because he’s “the decider”. And he still thinks that’s a word. Goodgodalmightydamn. See why I repeat myself?<br /><br />In about two months (or several years ago, depending on your level of impatience) I will officially become an old fart. But I’ve posted a picture of myself when I was 23, because I’d rather you think of me as that age, so you can at least have that me in your head when you read, and thus give some credence to what I say. Old farts are invisible and inaudible. Twenty-three year olds are in your face, Godde bless them. That’s the me who is in my own head all the time, and it’s very disconcerting to wake up every morning and have to realize yet again that those tormentors from Alpha Centauri have crept into my bedroom and replaced my once lithe body with THIS. Jeeeezuz. You’ll find yourself believing in aliens, too, if you manage to get past forty. Trust me on this. You get to your perfect age, and forever after, there you are stuck, but only in your head, not paying a lot of attention to the vast wasteland below unless you pass a mirror. Which is why young people, if they see us at all, think old farts act so idiotically on the dance floor. We COULD dance well, once upon a time, when our legs behaved the way they were asked to behave. And we’re only 23, and hot. Can’t you SEE??<br /><br />But being an old fart isn’t what I started out to talk about. Which, of course, is yet another bit of evidence of old fartness. So I come at last to the point: For the last few years, I’ve been spotty about writing this column, and here’s why. Various past host sites have folded or rearranged their priorities or sold out or were on the very outside soapy rim of the Internet bubble when it blew up. I hope this blog will stick around for eternity, which is what the Internet is for, and I’ll have a virtual home until you are an old fart, too. <br /><br />But in addition to Internet bubbles bursting and other writing stutters, long-time readers of this column may remember that for the last 6 years I’ve been the sole caretaker for my 92 year old mother. In 2001, I left my own hearth, home and lover in Illinois to keep this other promise. My lover drives the 1000 mile round trip to Tennessee every two months and calls me every day so that we can maintain our own promises, 17 years in the making. She’s a loyal soul, and generous and supportive. And pretty. Keeping this other promise to my mother, though, has made my writing intermittent. I’ve had other things to do. Writing takes uninterrupted concentration, and a mother who can’t speak but who can STILL AND ALWAYS TELL ME WHAT TO BY GOD DO (mothers were ever thus) tends to make my writing jerky. I feel as if I have an obstreperous Siamese twin and we are both passengers in a car, the driver of which has never used a stick shift and can’t grasp the concept of a clutch. <br /><br />And here at last is the new part where I don’t repeat myself. I haven’t done a national survey to determine the figures, but I’m willing to lay money on this: Lesbians are the children in the family who will forever and always, world without end, be the ones to take care of their aging and infirm parents. Lesbians will. Daughters nearly always, but lesbian daughters almost certainly. Unless there is a gay son in the family, and then he does it. Probably if there is a gay son and a lesbian, they both do it. Somebody puhleeeeze tell Tom Brokaw that WE QUEERS are the ones now caring for the Greatest Generation. Doesn’t this rate us at least a footnote somewhere? We do it because it’s the right thing to do. We do it out of love. We do it out of respect. Maybe we hope that this karma will waft back around and someone will take care of us in the not too distant future. We do it instead of warehousing a parent who, in all likelihood--even if only in some small recess of her mind before that recess disappeared--wished we were not dear God part of her family. Or wished we were not so damn different. Or rather NOT different. But here we are doing our duty with all the love and patience we can muster, even when those things seem drained to the grainy dregs. They won’t let us serve in the Marines even if we speak Farsi, but on the home front, we are the first and last recruit, the last lines of defense against impotence and indifference and endless nights. <br /><br />And we do this also because none of the other siblings can really wrap their minds around the fact that we do actually have a family of our own. Zillions of you have children, either from a previous marriage acceptable even to the state and Jerry Falwell, or because you and your gay partner wanted children. But because our unions aren’t recognized by the state, it’s “oh, she can do this because she doesn’t have a husband and children.” <br /><br />My mother’s friends from her church think I’m a saint. But what they DON’T think is that I’m married. Maybe the two are mutually exclusive anyway.<br /><br />So I’m back. Probably intermittently. Probably redundantly. <a href="mailto:LnewsEditor@gmail.com"><font color=blue> Write to me.</a></font> I answer all emails, even if they’re rude. If you can write one that isn’t rude, then you are the saint.<br /><br /><br />Copyright by Carole Taylor 2007<br /><br /><b>Carole Taylor</b><i> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She is at work on her second novel,a bildungsroman of sorts, and all she wants for Christmas is a sweet movie deal.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-656332882901186938?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-56163617794167649412007-03-17T11:57:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:05:56.343-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Rfw7Bln8bbI/AAAAAAAAAEU/unNbYyEXF4E/s1600-h/ellen2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Rfw7Bln8bbI/AAAAAAAAAEU/unNbYyEXF4E/s320/ellen2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042970581213670834" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Rfw6zVn8baI/AAAAAAAAAEM/6O5RysGFKoY/s1600-h/ellen.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rcAJGN8KM6c/Rfw6zVn8baI/AAAAAAAAAEM/6O5RysGFKoY/s320/ellen.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042970336400534946" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />I am worse than a star-struck teenager. I thought I got over hero-worshipping long ago. There was my gym teacher back in high school and – well, there was my gym teacher, with her big blue eyes, squeaky clean white sneakers, living with the school librarian and a world of secrets. What did I see in her?<br /><br /> At least my criteria have improved. Ellen DeGeneres is at the top of her game, and it’s not volleyball. As a matter of fact, she’s at the top of most people’s games. Okay, you could be Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, but, no offence, they’re not out lesbians.<br /><br /> Seriously, who is doing more for gay people these days than Ellen? What other dyke is striding across the Academy Awards stage in red velvet butchwear and dancing with hot female leads on daytime T.V.?<br /><br /> After Ellen came out, she was in the celebrity doghouse for a while. A lot of us would have taken our whippings and, for example, gotten law degrees, as one former still-closeted entertainer did. No attorney could have this impact.<br /><br /> I used to be a snob; T.V. held no interest for me. The Oscars? I watched exactly once at an Oscar Party. My partner won the traditional “guess the winners” contest without having seen any of the films. The whole show was a big dull publicity stunt as far as I was concerned. Ratings-meisters take heed: this viewer tuned in for only one reason: Ellen DeGeneres.<br /><br /> Not only did I watch, I shouted and cheered. My attitude might not have pleased the Academy. Whenever “Notes On A Scandal” was up for an award, even when the nomination was Judi Dench’s, I rooted for anyone who was not a part of that lesbian-bashing drama. Dench may be the greatest actress on earth, but I wish she had chosen a vehicle for her talents that did not perpetrate the misleading image of old lesbians as evil predators. The irony is obvious. The Dench character was a nominee and the host was a lesbian. I haven’t seen anything in the media about Ellen’s jokes at Dench’s expense – implying that Dench’s knee surgery was in actuality a cosmetic makeover. I certainly would have been tempted to make a nasty crack or two to discredit a film that was an insulting throwback to the days of “The Fox” and “The Killing of Sister George.”<br /><br /> It was icing on the cake when best song-winning Melissa Etheridge kissed her partner and referred to Tammy Lynn Michaels as her wife. The cameras also honored Ellen’s partner Portia De Rossi and Ellen’s mom: Betty DeGeneres. I mist up every time I see her look proudly at her daughter. Maybe that’s one reason I admire Ellen: because she came out, Mother DeGeneres has been standing up for all of us ever since. This family is a living example of the rewards of coming out.<br /><br /> In an interview, Ellen said that she’s always wanted to make money as well as succeed as a comedian. This may seem an obvious goal, but it’s not something lesbians have been good at. She lucked out by missing the years when being a lesbian made success at anything but survival next to impossible, and she missed the downwardly mobile years, back when gay lib grew out of a revolutionary mindset which disdained material gain. Ellen may be a love child of women’s and gay lib: born into a world reaching for gay and proud.<br /><br /> I recently saw “The L Word” for the first time. Though not into glamour gals myself, I admired the production, the issues raised and the diversity of characters. Could the show even have been conceived of before Ellen boldly went where no woman had gone before?<br /><br /> Ellen DeGeneres is just the dyke next door, except for her brilliant comedic talents and obvious business acumen. She seems also to be honest and honorable in the best butch tradition. She barely had role models yet created herself out of her own agonies and dreams. The best of lesbian icons, her career is terrifically significant for all gay people. She has demonstrated that we not only have a right to, but can reach our full human potentials.<br /><br /> Yesterday, I was at a job-related conference. I hate wasting time on these things and spent the day writing. When the friendly woman next to me asked, I conjured up Ellen in her red velvet suit, looked the woman in the eye and answered, “My column – for lesbian and gay papers cross the country.” Thank you, Ellen.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-5616361779416764941?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-66500763538094426972007-02-21T16:17:00.000-08:002007-02-21T16:21:27.782-08:00By Carole Taylor<br /><br />I don't have any statistics on this on hand, but from observation and a little logic it would seem reasonable to assume that gays and lesbians are more likely to have problems with drugs and alcohol than your average bear. More likely to smoke, more likely to have all sorts of addictions. Because of more societal pressure, the hiding and schizophrenic life of the closet, coming out, losing friends and family, all that stuff. The fact is that the place we tend to gather is a bar, although now there's MCC and a few other places, but traditionally and still overwhelmingly, it's the bar. To the point that The Bar is an inside gay phrase which MEANS *any* gay bar. And at least in the circles I circumnavigated for years, and I suspect my molecule was not unique then or now, one measure of a person's success in life was his or her ability to throw a huge private party and it NOT be a BYOB affair. Provide all the liquor a coterie of faeries could suck down, and your place in Gay Society was assured. For the weekend, anyway. I know: it's shallow. I don't orbit those folks anymore.<br /><br />Things have improved a little in the last few years with more and more gays and lesbians getting clean and sober. Or at least on one end of the age spectrum, the users have dropped off the meter. Older gays and lesbians have given up their best friend Jack (Daniels) in such numbers that there are thousands of Gay AA and NA groups all across the country. Thank all that be holy. But maybe the ranks are just being refilled by the folks entering on the other end. From recent articles in OUT and other gay/lesbian magazines, there's enough wine and song and Ecstasy out there to fry another generation or two, with hardly anyone taking notice.<br /><br />Did we not conclude a few years ago that drugs and alcohol (as if alcohol is not a drug and has to have a separate listing) create problems? Is being fuzzy headed out on the fire escape yet again going to make things all better, make coming out easier, telling friends and family easier, hiding easier?<br /><br />Is it just me, or does anybody else notice that all the events, magazines, walkathons, fund raisers, golf tournaments and godnose what else that supposedly help our cause are sponsored by companies trading in alcohol? Or establishments that trade in alcohol? Every month, every gay magazine I get has a big ole vodka ad on the back page, and all through each issue there's more. Now I know I'm not going to turn the tide of commercialism or free trade with this rant, but think about this for a minute. If your head's not too fuzzy.<br /><br />This sponsorship, this advertising, smacks to me of exploitation. Images of firewater come to mind. People using any kind of drug are less likely to take precautions for safer sex, not to mention all the other dangers of drinking and drugging, so is targeting our demographic group not just a little more suspect? Doesn't drinking and smoking increase a woman's risk for breast cancer, among other things? Aren't these ads killing us? I don't want to put too fine a point on it, or draw analogies that are inappropriate, but these companies don't give a rat's ass about our issues as gay people. Now, really, Mary. They don't. And while liquor has "helped" many a gay person get past those godawful inhibitions and not a small amount of denial over who we are, and past those infernal, unstoppable internal tapes of pulpit ravings and threats, I'm pretty sure liquor companies don't claim credit for these personal milestones in their PR releases.<br /><br />All these liquor adds, all the drugs wafting around the party circuit, make using seem cool. And witness the still popular "druggie cool" look in the fashion ads in these same magazines. As if using and coming out are part of the ritual of becoming a gay adult, a rite of passage, one of the beautiful people.<br /><br />It *ain't* cool. And it's not adult. And it sure ain't pretty. And my saying it's fake cool won't make you believe that your drug usage or drinking will *ever* be a problem for you personally. Because, of course, nothing bad will ever happen to you. And you'll never grow old and never gain weight. You'll always have those tight abs and legs up to your neck. Or get them if you don't have them now. Or marry them. And life is a long and glorious song: harmonious extemporania. And love is a thing that can never go wrong. And I am the queen of Rumania.<br /><br />Dorothy Parker drank too much, too, I hear.<br /><br />Does this column mean I'm getting old? I could have sworn I just heard myself say something about the younger generation. ::::sigh:::: Well, pay attention anyway. This is your mother speaking.<br /><br />Booga booga . . .<br /><br /><br /><b>Carole Taylor</b><i> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She is at work on her second novel,a bildungsroman of sorts, and all she wants for Christmas is a sweet movie deal.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-6650076353809442697?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-16764671240016546872007-01-29T16:23:00.000-08:002007-01-29T16:25:22.546-08:00By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">I don't really like labels or niches or forced choice tests of any kind. Although by the fact of my writing this column where it appears, I've placed myself into a category, and you've done the same by coming here, either as a coconspirator or as a critic. But I don't really like labels. I'm more than the term 'lesbian' implies, even to myself. I've chosen to use it, though, in order to make a point to people who don't like the concept of choice, who don't like the concept of diversity. I may look just like what the world thinks is straight, but when someone is up in my face, I like the idea of smiling and saying I'm a lesbian. I like making people rethink positions. What ought to be a non-issue (loving who loves you back) has to be made into an issue for so long that it becomes what it ought to be: a non-issue. Out of boredom with the discourse, if not out of acceptance or logic.</span> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">I don't like labels because, obviously, human beings are complicated. What a label says is that I have to be this one thing and not another, and it's a very slavish way to think. And it seems to me that slaves and stereotypes are similar in a couple of ways: many people wouldn't mind *having* one but nobody wants to *be* one. It's so tempting to have stereotypes since original thought is so time consuming, what with making a living for forty hours a week, and then there is all that quality time with the kids you have to come up with. People had rather come up with a stereotype, buy or rent one, and not have to deal with new ideas. People will use any and all opportunities to avoid thinking. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">When I say I'm a lesbian, the hearer has to take me out of the box they had me in and put me in another, both boxes ones they constructed out of their own less than airtight material, but ones they think will confine me. That's a function of the limits of human intelligence, or the limits of the ways we use that intelligence. It's very left brained. Which means people who think in stereotypes are thinking like halfwits, only using half a brain.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">I realize that it's natural to think in stereotypes and labels because it's so much quicker. And for millennia, it saved our lives. We didn't have time to think about individuals. That particular tiger might be a sweet baby kitty, but in general, experience said that all of them were likely to eat yer ass. Better for the species not to be introduced for an extended interview. Stereotypes become almost hardwired, knee jerk responses that avoid things like syllogisms or long discourse. And they're required by people who want to run their own lives only through running everybody else's. Those folks don't want anybody to have such unruly things as original thought. And they certainly don't want to allow for many other people such unruly things as love. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">If I can control who you love, can tell you who you can or can not marry, I have you by the short hairs. If I can keep you from having an original thought, I have you by the synapses. There's a lot of money in this idea. We don't have a lot of reliable information on the history of human entanglements given all the libraries worldwide that have been burned to the ground for millennia, but it's pretty clear that within the last 5000 years, having original thought is a really rare phenomenon. And marrying for love is a relative recent permission. Even heterosexuals (damn that label) have only been allowed to marry for love for the last hundred years or so. Liaisons are historically designed and plotted for political or monetary gain, or both. Love was either adjunct, tardy or superfluous. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">Now up pops all these noisy, demonstrating gays and lesbians and we have the audacity to say that love is paramount, and that it cuts across class, race, politics, religion, economics and even gender. What a concept. Jesus would be proud, you'd think, that any people could be so ecumenical in their application of love. Or in their application of original thought, which really is what love represents. There is no thought more original than love. Think about it. Love is the antithesis of control. Sex is pure anarchy. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">People who love without regard to class, race, politics or gender, if carried to a logical conclusion, would eliminate labels, and then where would we be? You can't have a war, you can't have control of other people, without an enemy. And you can't have an enemy without labels. What have we done? We're a dangerous bunch. No wonder we are such a threat to the establishment. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">Booga booga . . .</span></p> <span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;"><b>Carole Taylor</b><i> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She is at work on her second novel,a bildungsroman of sorts, and all she wants for Christmas is a sweet movie deal.</i></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-1676467124001654687?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1168802538401557472007-01-14T11:05:00.000-08:002007-01-14T11:24:58.823-08:00By Carole Taylor<br /><br />Everyone who has ever come out to anyone, especially to parents, has surely gone through this scene: You say you're gay and somewhere in the middle if you're still having a conversation, regardless of the volume, the other person will say, "I just don't understand."<br /><br />That point, of course, an insect would have snagged by now. We already <b>know</b> you don't understand. What is puzzling to us is <b>why</b> you don't understand. Affection is not a difficult concept. Attraction is not a difficult concept. <br /><br />Empathy is another matter. Shifts of perception require some effort. It's not that these folks are stupid exactly. It's that there's this "aha moment" that they've not allowed to happen, usually due to pure laziness. <br /><br />This is not solid geometry, but it's close. It takes some mental effort. It's as if there is this chasm between certain neurons in the person's brain. He understands how he can be attracted to his wife, but he can't make the mental leap to see how you might be. Or say this obtuse soul is a woman. She can fathom why she sees Brad Pitt as the father of her children, but can't understand why you as a lesbian would rather have Jodi Foster parent yours. The combinations and permutations are endless, but you get the picture.<br /><br />In my travels, in presentations to college groups and others, I've used this little parable to help people have a tiny aha. You are welcome to borrow the concept.<br /><br />First of all, the person you're talking to has to have an imagination in order even to listen to parables. Otherwise, this and nearly all other conversations with this soul will be less than useless. If the person will shut up long enough to let you lead them through this, you begin your topic sentence with, <i>"Imagine a world where..."</i> <br /><br />Watch the person carefully. If the person's eyes glaze over this early in the process, it's probably best just to attempt an escape unscathed. Intelligence is essential to imagination,imagination is essential to empathy, and empathy is essential to understanding. (See how this is sorta like solid geometry?)<br /><br />Now then, here is the parable. With small changes of pronouns and examples, this works with any reasonably intelligent person, but for the sake of coherent syntax, lets say I'm talking to a straight man: </p><br /> <p><font color="#0000FF" size="3"><strong>Me:</strong></font> Tell me one thing, preferably one physical<br /> thing, about a woman that is an absolute yuck to you.<br /> Something that you just could not get past in order to be<br /> attracted to her. Something that would just about make<br /> you hug the porcelain bus.</p><br /> <p><font color="#FF0080" size="3"><strong>Guy:</strong></font> Nothing. I like em all.</font></p><br /> <p><font color="#0000FF" size="3"><strong>Me:</strong></font> Come on. There has to be something.</font></p><br /> <p><font color="#FF0080" size="3"><strong>Guy:</strong></font><br /> Ok. Skinny brunettes. My older sister is a<br /> skinny brunette and she used to throw these teensie<br /> flower pots at my head when we were little. Sometimes she<br /> didn't miss. (I think this may be part of the problem,<br /> but I don't say this.) I love round, blond women. (He<br /> looks off in the distance, and I realize that he does<br /> indeed have the ability to picture a limited number of<br /> things in his mind. There's hope.) </font></p><br /> <p><font color="#0000FF" size="3"><strong>Me:</strong></font> Then close your eyes and imagine a world where<br /> the entire female population consists of skinny brunette<br /> women. All of them. As far as the eye can see. At least<br /> in your country. Occasionally a girl will be born who is<br /> blond, but her parents die her hair brunette the day they<br /> discover this horror. Say she tends toward roundness when<br /> she grows into adolescence. Her parents, the government,<br /> advertising, the church, her school, all her friends are<br /> so insistent on skinny brunettes that the girl gets<br /> anorexic and buys stock in Revlon.</font></p><br /> <p><font color="#FF0080" size="3"><strong>Guy:</strong></font> This is kinda hard.</font></p><br /> <p><font color="#0000FF" size="3"><strong>Me: </strong></font>I know this hurts, but help me out a little. You<br /> try with your entire being to like skinny brunettes, but<br /> it's just not there. You even marry one. For one thing,<br /> everything around you, all written history, everything on<br /> television, everything all your life says there's no<br /> alternative, so you believe it. And in any case, you<br /> can't <b>find</b> any alternatives because you're not allowed<br /> to look. <br /><br />Everybody who's not naturally a skinny brunette<br /> is hiding. Or has moved to another country. You know<br /> something is missing in your life, but you just can't put<br /> your finger on it. Or you might have this sneaking<br /> suspicion that round blonds exist. But you can't find<br /> them. Wanting something you can't have takes a toll on<br /> your life, on your marriage. Your wife can't help it that<br /> she's not round and blond, but she senses she can't<br /> really get close you you and she doesn't know why. And<br /> you can't tell her what the problem is. <b>If you know</b><br /> what the problem is. <br /><br />Otherwise, you spend most of your<br /> life in denial that you like round blonds. You feel<br /> cheated. Your wife feels cheated. You don't particularly<br /> like your children because they are both skinny and<br /> brunette. How do you feel? How does it feel to be forced<br /> to live a lie inside a world that says your personal,<br /> individual concept of what's attractive is sick, even<br /> evil?</font></p><br /> <p><font color="#FF0080" size="3"><strong>Guy:</strong></font> Uh, not too good. I wanna go to Sweden.</font></p><br /> <p><font color="#0000FF" size="3"><strong>Me:</strong></font> Exactly. Sweden is your equivalent of a gay<br /> bar.</font></p><br /> <p><br /><br />At this point, I see a small, yet<br /> hopeful beam of light flicker somewhere behind his eyes.<br /> It is true that people have a difficult time<br /> understanding a new concept when they think it has no<br /> relevance in their lives. If they have an inclination<br /> toward empathy, it's because they work at building this<br /> complex structure of understanding. They will work at it<br /> if the universe gives them some reason to expend the<br /> effort. Like a child they love. Or a friend who cares<br /> enough to help them dig the foundation.</font></p><br /> <p><font size="3">Affection is not a difficult concept. </font></p><br /> <p><font size="3">Booga booga . . .</font></p><br /><br /><br /><b>Carole Taylor</b><i> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She is at work on her second novel,a bildungsroman of sorts, and all she wants for Christmas is a sweet movie deal.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116880253840155747?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1167792817396414552007-01-02T18:53:00.000-08:002007-01-02T18:55:57.846-08:00By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><br />This week, I'm musing about Demi Moore. I do that on occasion anyway just for fun, but this weekend I saw her movie, GI JANE, and there are a few things that could stand a comment or two, from the lesbian and gay side of the distaff, as it were.<br /> <br />We all know the armed services are homophobic and one of the largest, most insistent perpetrators of the institutionalized mandatory closetThat's not news, nor is it news that that position is not likely to change. We also know that Hollywood is one of the largest closets in the country, so that's not news either. But the difference is that Hollywood has always had the option to be socially responsible. And for PR's sake, often does make the claim that it *is* an instrument for positive social change. Godnose, the industry could be if it really wanted to be.<br /><br />Demi is one of the producers of this film, and stars in it, so one would think she could have had a modicum of influence over its content. Although her abs are great, and she shaves her head, and she takes it on the chin, and puts her combat boots in a few deserving groins, all this Xena-esque gymnastics doesn't erase the fact that what the movie is *about* is not what it says it's about: equal treatment for women in the military. If that were what it were about, it would be about equal treatment for lesbians in the military, since there are so many of us there. <br /><br />What the movie is about is the right of *straight* women to die for their country. Equity has little to do with any concerns of any people with power. And the world was ever thus. <br /><br />Except for lacking a dangling participle, no one can tell the difference between the movie's costar, Ann Bancroft, and any of her male counterparts in the Senate. They all play games and do back room deals and sell anyone they think is weaker down the Potomac. <br /><br />Bancroft's character is the one who's allegedly pushing to require the military to allow equity in the ranks. But what Bancroft makes clear is the premise above, that only straight women should serve with straight men. When it's up to her, as part of one of her deals, to be the one to select the applicant for this test case of a woman in a combat role, as the first woman Navy Seal, she rejects any female applicant whose body type even hints that the applicant might be a lesbian. And more than that, she *says* that's why she's rejecting them. <br /><br />Demi is a girlie girl, a smart one and in great shape, so she gets the nod. You can almost hear Bancroft go woooof just like the audience does when she sees her photograph, so one wonders what *else* Bancroft is thinking at the moment her eyes wander over Miss Thing. <br /><br />In the interview with Demi later, Bancroft does a bit more in depth investigation to make sure that Demi has a boyfriend at home and that she's getting *properly* fucked. As opposed to the kind of screwing Bancroft has in mind for Demi at the hands the Navy and the Senate. Can you say "prurient interests?"<br /><br />Digressing from an exploration of the plot for a moment, I'm confused here about the premise of straight women being the only brand of woman acceptable to the military. If the point of keeping out gays and lesbians is that we create havoc in the ranks by introducing an unwanted sexual component into the morale of the unit, what advantage exactly does a straight woman in a platoon of straight men have over gays and lesbians?<br /><br />Let's look at this a second. Gays are a threat to morale in a unit by being the ever present and nightmarish dropped-soap-in-the-shower menace, and lesbians are a threat by being...what? As good as men and *not* interested in them?<br /><br />It would seem to me that a lesbian in a group of straight men would make infinitely more sense. And a lesbian in a work group of *any* men, would make more. Gay men aren't interested in her and she's not interested in *any* of the men, gay or straight. They might all actually be friends and comrades, or something really radical like that. <br /><br />She could be proficient at the stated task without wanting to go to bed with her coworkers. What a concept. Or is that the problem? Is the military about sex, or is it about serving one's country? I think we might already know the answer to this, but I'm just asking.<br /><br />Back to the plot: when Demi doesn't fail as Bancroft expects her to, Bancroft then tries to set her up for accusations of lesbianism. By now, to anyone who follows these things, it should be apparent that don't-ask-don't-tell has become a bigger excuse for a witch hunt than at any other time in the history of the military. <br /><br />I must have had popcorn-induced aphasia at some point in the plot development though--you know how those husks caught in a tooth can distract you--because I didn't really catch why Bancroft wanted Demi to fail, why picking a woman who would fail in the implementation of her publicly announced pet policy would advance Bancroft's career.<br /><br />But somehow, Bancroft has it in her head that it's an advantage to have as the test case a woman who is not obviously physically strong and therefore not a "lesbian-looking" woman, but rather a girlie girl, as if lesbians can't be both. I guess so that if a pretty girl fails, there is no possibility of success for an "unattractive" one. I'm tellin' ya, the plot was more frustrating than that popcorn husk.<br /><br />The film is as full of homophobia as the military is, and there's no excuse for it. Demi doesn't have to be a lesbian to make the movie socially aware. It would have taken the filmmakers less than a minute of script writing time and only a few frames of film to add a simple and thought-provoking line to fix the entire movie and make a little progress in Hollywood. I know this is like suggesting that one bail the boat<br />with a sieve, but try this one on. <br /><br />When Demi is called in front of the brass to endure what they intend and what she interprets as her reputation being slandered, that she is being labeled a lesbian, all she had to do was say, <i>"I appreciate the compliment, but, thank you, no, I'm not a lesbian."</i><br /><br />The most memorable line in the movie is Demi's when she screams at a physically abusive sergeant,"Suck my dick!" Which is nice to have a woman spit out, and makes the audience cheer, but which is homophobic in itself. It's the quintessential taunt of a man who assumes that that activity could have no value and that the activity consists entirely of an act that is abhorrent, tantamount to rape, I suppose. <br /><br />And of course,that's what men in the military are afraid of about straight women, or gays, or lesbians: that they DO have a metaphorical dick; that they have power. The same power straight men have. Whoa. Booga, booga. Scaaaawy.<br /><br />The whole point of any witch hunt is that *calling* someone a witch is sufficient. No proof is needed. But for a witch hunt, or a lesbian hunt, to be successful, it is mandatory that the *label* be slander.<br /><br />There are very many straight men seem bent on proving that any woman outside of the home for any reason (that is, any woman who is not attached at all times to another man who appears to control her) is either a whore or a lesbian, and it's this man's personal duty to find out which. If she's not interested in him sexually, she must be a lesbian. If she is interested, then she must be a whore.<br /> <br />There's no middle ground here, and there's no such animal as a situation wherein this man exists where sex is not the subtext. Come ON, boys! Lordamighty. Can't you just go to work and do a *job*? Like most women have to do every live long day to survive? Must all contacts with every other living soul be about your precious Mr. Johnson and the Boys?<br /><br />Ok, I'm ranting here, but I'd venture to say that not a few women out there have wondered if it's possible to get through a day at work by just *working*. This seems to be the subtext of this movie, anyway. It's what women, lesbians or not, want to be able to do, and gay men, too: Just go to work and do the job. And not be called names, or have who they are BE an epithet to begin with.<br /><br />I want Hollywood to wake up. I want the military to wake up. I want a million dollars and immortality, too, but while Ed McMahon doesn't have my phone number, at least there is an outside, eventual chance for the first two. But only if we make enough noise. <br /><br />Besides, there *is* really in the universe a cosmic sense of poetic justice. I just know in my heart that every person who ever maligns us, who ever wishes us ill, will have a child who is gay. And they will have to wake up or lose the love they find most precious on the face of the earth.<br /><br />Or if not a child, they will have a gay proctologist. <br /><br /><br /><b>Carole Taylor</b><i> holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She is at work on her second novel,a bildungsroman of sorts, and all she wants for Christmas is a sweet movie deal.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116779281739641455?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1167184219566201652006-12-26T17:46:00.000-08:002006-12-26T17:51:25.793-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/6151/1279/1600/954420/happy2007.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/6151/1279/320/986608/happy2007.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />By Carole Taylor<br /><br /><br /><p>Just in case the world really does end in a couple of months, I wanted to get in a few more words on existence and Godde <br /> stuff while there are still a few people out there who are yet conscious and able to read. Ok, just conscious then. Ok, just <br /> able to read. With all the earthquakes and killer mosquitos and nuclear accidents and hurricanes and floods and wars and <br /> rumors of wars, it does look a little bleak for us all. And strangely enough, it looks bleak for straights as well as gays. Wonder <br /> what they've been doing wrong all these years....</p><br /> <p>Despite the possibility of lightening on a clear day for my saying all this, I'm wondering just how good a shot Godde really <br /> is. (A few people spell it this way because it removes the gender bias.) And given the millions of years He/She/It has had to <br /> end the world, why the Deity would get lucky just now in the supposedly magic year of 2000 is yet another mystery. Does <br /> Godde reeeeeally like round numbers for big events? And what's it take anyway to wipe out the human plague we've become? <br /> He/She/It has at Hir personal disposal untold thousands of meteors to blip us off the radar screen; and floods and pestilence <br /> and creatures that jump out of the bushes and eat us; landslides; about a billion things that can go wrong with any given <br /> cell in our bodies, ice ages, diseases without number, old lovers, current lovers, bosses, total strangers, politicians, postal <br /> workers, doctors, faulty brakes, nuclear bombs and reactors, truck drivers on amphetamines...need I go on? And<br /> if you manage to stand out in that deathly hail of mortal endings without getting hit, you get to endure wrinkles, bad ankles, <br /> flab and lingering old age. And then, you guessed it: death. No wonder we have sex whenever we can get it and eat Karo <br /> pecan pie like there's no tomorrow.</p><br /> <p>Is Godde just a bad shot or does He/She/It really have Attention Deficit Disorder? I don't think a little gay sex is going <br /> to piss the Deity off at us any more than He already appears to be. It seems redundant in the extreme to think that after all <br /> His attempts to kill us that He'd send us to hell as well. I'm saying 'He' now because I just can't see a female being that<br /> essentially, eternally violent. But I could be wrong.</p><br /> <p>I don't really think the world will end on January 1, if only because the Deity has demonstrated throughout the ages to <br /> have a sense of humor. It would be just like the old Being to say the cosmic neener to all the christian preachers who claim <br /> to know what the Deity is up to or what thoughts exist now or ever in the Original Brain. But let's say for the sake of argument<br /> that on January 1, we all end up at the Pearly Gates instead of in front of our keyboards. There's an old book that addresses <br /> this possibility, and one that's probably so obscure that you may not have read it.</p><br /> <p>Anatole France wrote a book called "Thaïs" back in 1890, and in it a character is allowed to visit heaven. The character <br /> is a Christian, and what he sees there really has him puzzled. According to New Testament teachings, none but Christians <br /> get to go there, as you'll recall, and only a select few of those.</p><br /> <p>But what the character sees in heaven are all these old pagan guys like Aristotle and Plato (not known of course for <br /> their heterosexuality) just having a large old time, sitting side by side, no doubt holding hands, and calmly discussing the <br /> origins of the universe and the nature of existence. Their idea of a wild party. According to theology, these guys aren't supposed<br /> to be there, despite the fact that Aristotle and Plato were born before Jesus and could have no way of knowing that rewards <br /> for their immortal souls would depend on believing in something that hadn't been invented yet. Christian theology isn't known <br /> for it's logic, but what's a mother to do? The character, though, sees hundreds of demons and devils and priests of various<br /> stripes all around these two windy old pagan farts just plaguing the life out of them, poking them with pitchforks and lighting <br /> skyrockets under their butts. But Aristotle and Plato don't seem to notice. They're in heaven, you see. They're all in heaven. <br /> Even the devils and people like Falwell. And everybody is getting to do what each of them has always wanted to do. The<br /> Christains get to plague us, but we won't know they're there. Nice concept of heaven, don't you think?</p><br /> <p>So maybe I'll see you there on January 1. But in my view of things, I'll see you sometime, no matter what. And if all you <br /> gay bashers out there want to send me a nasty email while we're there, my celestial software won't be able<br /> to read it. My critics will get to plague me all they want, but I won't notice.</p><br /> <p>Happy New Year a little early. :)</p><br /><br /><strong>Carole Taylor</strong><i> holds<br /> a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used<br /> as a university administrator for much too long by all<br /> accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist,<br /> a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman.She is at work on her second novel, a bildungsroman of sorts, and all she wants for Christmas -- one of these Christmases -- is a sweet movie deal.</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116718421956620165?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1166494596761310352006-12-18T18:16:00.000-08:002006-12-18T18:16:37.333-08:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/6151/1279/1600/374181/holly%20berry.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/6151/1279/320/457980/holly%20berry.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />by Victoria<br /><br />The holidays are a time for reflection and nostalgia. Yet in the midst of all the shopping and planning, parties and festivities, we often forget that the holidays are about the spiritual part of ourselves. They are about our hearts and souls, about the part we share with others and the part we share with the spiritual being we believe in. The holidays are about finding peace.<br /><br />Throughout the year, the stress and complications of daily life overwhelm us; we often become distanced from our spiritual selves. Most Americans don’t attend a place of worship regularly; most say they don’t have time. Meanwhile, most queers don’t feel welcome at places of worship, and many others don’t feel that queer groups like Dignity or MCC fulfill their desire to belong to a religious community.<br /><br />Thus, at the holidays a sense of loss can pervade us, making us feel empty despite the frenetic gloss surrounding us. The holidays, with their emphasis on religion and family, tend to raise these conflicted feelings about our spiritual selves. We often feel pushed out of the most vital part of the season: the comforting sense of belonging that we get from being part of a family and a spiritual community. Even while we are immersed in the hustle and bustle of the season, we can feel excluded. The holidays are often the time when queers feel most marginalized. The holidays become a limbo time, never quite meeting our expectations — not as good as the nostalgic past we remember, not a warm memory in the present.<br /><br />I have no happy memories of childhood holidays; my childhood was irredeemably awful, my family’s dysfunction a palpable presence that overshadowed everything, ruining every holiday and leaving only painful memories. In theory this should have made my adult Christmases easier to reclaim: no Norman Rockwell images from my past to conflict with my present.<br /><br />But instead I have been overwhelmed with the desire for the perfect holiday, the best Christmas ever. Not just to make up for what I did not have as a child, but to make some fabulous memories, something to be nostalgic about.<br /><br />One Christmas about which I feel such nostalgia was my first Christmas away from my family of origin. I was living in New Orleans with two virtual strangers, people I had known only a few months in a city in which I knew no one else. We were all in the domestic Peace Corps and were devoted to creating change. We shared goals, and we shared living on the edge of society.<br /><br />Perhaps because the three of us were estranged from our families in a city that was not the city of our birth, we felt a deep connection. I know it was the most memorable Christmas of my life. It was a Christmas that had all the sweetness I had always dreamed of; it was so very genuine. None of us had anything — we were living on next to nothing in a cold little house in New Orleans. We shared evenings listening to Handel’s Messiah and drinking eggnog while we made construction-paper chains and strung popcorn (much harder than it looks) and cranberries. We turned our little house into a festive holiday village, wrapped our meager gifts in the Sunday comics and shared something I know I shall never forget. It was indeed the gift of giving.<br /><br />The essence of that Christmas comes back to me each year, no year more poignantly than this one, because of the terrible disaster that befell New Orleans. All my friends who lived there were displaced; many lost everything they had. The places where I lived were submerged along with 80 percent of the city.<br /><br />I imagine the 1.3 million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are having bittersweet holidays. Some still have nothing; many are far from their homes. The disaster marginalized so many, all of whom are no doubt feeling excluded this holiday season. After three months, these people are mostly forgotten by those who weren’t touched directly by the disaster; the rest of us have moved on to other tragedies, other victims.<br /><br />Yet they are not alone in feeling lost. Many of us feel just as lost.<br /><br />It doesn’t take a priest or rabbi to remind us that the holidays are about more than just things. Nor does it take being inside a church or synagogue to reconnect us with our spirituality.<br /><br />Think about what has meant most to you over the years at the holiday season. Isn’t it always giving? Doesn’t it remain true that even as we feel lost or excluded or pushed to the very margins of society, we can reclaim our souls simply by giving of ourselves in some meaningful way? Doesn’t giving anchor us? When I remember that Christmas in New Orleans, I am always reminded of the most elemental part of what the holidays should mean: sharing with others.<br /><br />This season, stop to reflect on what you really want for the holidays. Not things — they won’t leave you with cherished memories. Think about giving of yourself. Think about sitting around with your chosen family and making those silly construction-paper chains or stringing cranberries (much easier than popcorn!). Think about working at a shelter or going to sit with the elderly or the sick. Think about all those people displaced from New Orleans and how blessed you are to have a home. If you can, adopt one of those families and send them gifts.<br /><br />In a world in which many of us feel alienated from the societies in which we live, it is vital that we keep our hearts open to others, that we remember to give much more than we take. It is easy for us as queers, as outsiders, to feel exclusion overwhelm everything else. But we don’t have to become lost.<br /><br />I had nothing that Christmas in New Orleans. Yet the memory of what I shared and what was shared with me has warmed me for 25 years. Make giving memories for yourselves this holiday season. That is where you will find what we all yearn for: peace.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116649459676131035?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1164305522497448892006-11-23T09:47:00.000-08:002006-11-23T10:12:02.960-08:00By Carole Taylor<br /><br />I want to say at the outset that I really do like gay men, love them in fact. Not only are most of my best friends gay men, *all* of my best friends for many years were gay men. So what this week's column is about is not anti-boy stuff, but just one of those things that made me go hmmmm.<br /><br />We already know that Hollywood is full of gays and lesbians who work at all levels of the industry. And that Hollywood is notoriously homophobic. But in the last couple of decades, Hollyweird has let a few films out of the closet and dealt specifically with gay issues. But that's the problem: GAY issues, not lesbian. Almost without exception, general release films from major studios have dealt with gay men, not lesbians. Except for the occasional part-time lesbian who also works nights as a crazy person or murderer.<br /><br />Now my question is: Why is the portrayal of a fully developed lesbian lead character virtually absent from our celluloid fiction? What exactly is Hollywood afraid of? Petrified that they won't gross $150 million per picture, sure. But every film that comes out of the studios isn't designed (hoped for, but not necessarily *expected*) to bring in 50 times cost. And when they make "Bent" or "Philadelphia" or "In and Out" they surely don't expect to draw the same mindless audience demographic as they know they'll get for "Air Force One" or "Independence Day".<br /><br />The obvious reasons (sexism, greed) don't seem to be enough to explain overlooking what they must know is an unfulfilled, untapped market. Usually a population easily targeted which has never had a particular toy sold to them will have the marketing people overjoyed. Lesbians, like gay men, are relatively easy to find. Lots and lots of us live in major metropolitan areas, areas which are finite. The marketing guys can actually look up and name American cities with populations of 100,000 or more. Lesbians are relatively easy to contact: lesbians who go to movies also read newspapers. They even read lesbian newspapers. I'd venture to say that the lesbian underground and above ground communication system is so extensive and pervasive that if she set her mind to it, one persistent woman with a phone tree could get the word about an event to every out lesbian in the country within a month. And to millions of lesbians who say they're *not* lesbians. She tells her friends who tell their friends who tell their ex lovers who tell their ex lovers, ad infinitum. Granted there would be a *lot* of overlap but the circles are tangent occasionally: bar dykes talk to softball dykes who talk to lipstick lesbians who talk to their dentist. And we *are* on the Internet now and have friends with whom we have not actually lived.<br /><br />So lets say on the low end of the Kinsey scale we have 5% of American women who are lesbians. Or interested. Or curious. And then there are the straight guys who want to explore their libidos yet again. Whatever. We're talking millions.<br /><br />The film that would draw these folks to the box office would not be expensive to make. It would not have to be an Edwardian period piece with costumes; it would not required high tech equipment or special effects; it would not require a multitude of high speed chases or flaming crashes. Well, ok, those, but bar scenes and dyke drama divorces are not expensive to film.<br /><br />So where are the *real* dyke dramas, the films about our lives? Films with funding, with star appeal, with a coherent plot and dialogue, with a sound track not made on an old poke and play tape recorder in a basement shower stall. All I'm asking is just a *leaning* toward equal time. Gay guys have had serious films about their lives for at least two decades. I realize that straight men don't want the secret acknowledged that lesbians exist in numbers that actually constitute a market segment. I realize we threaten them. But the commercial success of well-made films about gay men should tell them that there is yet another group of people who would fork over $6 to see a slice of their lives on the big silver.<br /><br />I think maybe we need a producer who understands us. Somebody with millions. Somebody with connections.<br /><br />Oprah, honey? You out there? Jodi? As a happy coincidence, I just happen to have this screenplay already written if anybody's interested. :)<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116430552249744889?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1162521242268558122006-11-02T18:32:00.000-08:002006-11-02T18:34:02.606-08:00By Amy McGowan<br /><br />My faith is a huge part of my life. It wasn’t always such an integral part of me, but after dealing with the unexpected death of a very close family member; struggling to help a friend who was abused by her father; and then dealing with a severe bout of depression during my freshman year of college, I have come to realize how much I need Christ in my life. I firmly believe that as a Christian, I am called to share my Savior’s love and to follow the principles He laid out in the Bible. Because of this, and because my faith is not supportive of the homosexual cause, many people would probably be surprised to hear that I am a proponent of gay marriage; I also find no conflict between my faith and the issue of gay marriage. If you find this to be an interesting (or maddening) contradiction, keep reading.<br /><br />Firstly, there is an undeniable separation between church and state. Regardless of a person’s person beliefs regarding a particular issue, separation has to be maintained. If there is a law prohibiting gay marriage, why not a law prohibiting spouses from having affairs with other people? Why not a law prohibiting sex before marriage? These are all moral issues, but laws are not made to enforce morality; they are created for the protection of citizens. They are not created to enforce a particular church’s beliefs; they are created on behalf of the state to both defend rights and guard the population. Therefore, even if someone was convinced that homosexuality was wrong, they would have no right to impose that belief on the entire nation.<br /><br />I am also concerned that allowing government to decide who a person can marry could have very serious ramifications. Do we truly want so much power in hands of imperfect humans? As a Christian, I readily recognize the fallibility of mankind. We make mistakes every day and no one is exempt. President Bush makes mistakes, former President Clinton made mistakes, the Pope has made mistakes, Gandhi made mistakes, and so has every single person on Earth. Given the nature of human beings, does it make sense to give equally flawed men and women in our government the power to decide who can marry whom? I am convinced it would be a disastrous move to allow this kind of power into corruptible humans.<br /><br />When making difficult decisions, it is always difficult to keep person prejudices aside. However, it is imperative to remain objective despite personal feelings. Because of this, I strongly encourage you, no matter what your political affiliation or religious beliefs, to support gay marriage. I do.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116252124226855812?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1161825441662838792006-10-25T18:16:00.000-07:002006-10-25T18:17:21.943-07:00By Masha Gutkin<br /><br />On New Year's Day you vowed, perhaps as you penned a check to Martha Stewart Living, that this year you'd keep house like a real-world Mrs. Cleaver. And yet now March has rolled around, and dishes from your Mardi Gras hurrah still languish in your sink. Gazing, chin in hand, at the formidable mess, a little existential angst about the state of things assails you.<br /><br />Here's a thought—keep your larger house clean: take care of your community, your city, or your planet by volunteering. There's no need to point out to the altruists among us that volunteering helps others. But even the more self-serving should be alert to numerous studies showing that people who volunteer are happier, live longer, and are healthier than the rest of the human race. Whatever you want to do, from helping gay folk to digging in at a community beach cleanup, you're helping yourself, too.<br /><br />Volunteering can be a flexible commitment. Around the holidays you and your coworkers might lend a hand at a soup kitchen. You could volunteer to meet once a week with a senior or a person with a disability or AIDS. Or perhaps you'll help your civic cleanup crew to beautify the streets and waterways of your neighborhood. And don't let a sectarian name (like "Jewish Family Services" or "Most Holy Redeemer") put you off from exploring an organization's volunteer opportunities. Many faith-based social service agencies do a great job serving the larger community and welcome volunteers from outside the faith.<br /><br />Volunteering can be a way to connect with people if you've just moved to a new place or are going through a transition. It can give you a sense of purpose, or a way to feel like you have agency in this myopic democracy of ours.<br /><br />Virtual activism for social change is also a kind of volunteering, and you can do it from your desk chair. Many of us get emails from Moveon.org, True Majority, or Act For Change, which keep us informed and offer various opportunities to express our e-voices on behalf of social and environmental causes. There are a number of ways to be an internet activist around issues that are specific to the queer and lesbian community, too (see below). Many gay organizations offer online tools that will let you know when you need to speak up or mobilize your community around an issue crucial to queer rights. Also, don't forget to check out your nearest gay center or queer activist organization for a virtual or material opportunity that's right for you.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116182544166283879?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1160617895820585952006-10-11T18:49:00.000-07:002006-10-11T18:51:36.376-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6151/1279/1600/hands.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6151/1279/320/hands.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />By Masha Gutkin<br /><br />On New Year's Day you vowed, perhaps as you penned a check to Martha Stewart Living, that this year you'd keep house like a real-world Mrs. Cleaver. And yet now March has rolled around, and dishes from your Mardi Gras hurrah still languish in your sink. Gazing, chin in hand, at the formidable mess, a little existential angst about the state of things assails you.<br /><br />Here's a thought—keep your larger house clean: take care of your community, your city, or your planet by volunteering. There's no need to point out to the altruists among us that volunteering helps others. But even the more self-serving should be alert to numerous studies showing that people who volunteer are happier, live longer, and are healthier than the rest of the human race. Whatever you want to do, from helping gay folk to digging in at a community beach cleanup, you're helping yourself, too.<br /><br />Volunteering can be a flexible commitment. Around the holidays you and your coworkers might lend a hand at a soup kitchen. You could volunteer to meet once a week with a senior or a person with a disability or AIDS. Or perhaps you'll help your civic cleanup crew to beautify the streets and waterways of your neighborhood. And don't let a sectarian name (like "Jewish Family Services" or "Most Holy Redeemer") put you off from exploring an organization's volunteer opportunities. Many faith-based social service agencies do a great job serving the larger community and welcome volunteers from outside the faith.<br /><br />Volunteering can be a way to connect with people if you've just moved to a new place or are going through a transition. It can give you a sense of purpose, or a way to feel like you have agency in this myopic democracy of ours.<br /><br />Virtual activism for social change is also a kind of volunteering, and you can do it from your desk chair. Many of us get emails from Moveon.org, True Majority, or Act For Change, which keep us informed and offer various opportunities to express our e-voices on behalf of social and environmental causes. There are a number of ways to be an internet activist around issues that are specific to the queer and lesbian community, too (see below). Many gay organizations offer online tools that will let you know when you need to speak up or mobilize your community around an issue crucial to queer rights. Also, don't forget to check out your nearest gay center or queer activist organization for a virtual or material opportunity that's right for you.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-116061789582058595?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1158340712719349302006-09-15T10:15:00.000-07:002006-09-15T10:18:33.636-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6151/1279/1600/teecorinne.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6151/1279/320/teecorinne.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />By Lee Lynch<br /><br />Tee Corinne was a spectacular woman. When she died this August 27, I felt as if a giant redwood had been felled. The earth shook with the event’s power, just as Tee shook the lesbian world with her work. I can’t begin to encompass all of her achievements – can any of us? Not the least of them was her selfless ability to encourage others, whatever our passions, and to share what she knew, to teach.<br /><br /> I’m not sure even she completely comprehended the importance of her photographs, especially for lesbians and ultimately for the larger society. Pictures of lesbians with disabilities and fat lesbians were the first of their kind, and Tee brought an elegant, ground-breaking dignity to sexual imagery. The “Sinister Wisdom” poster of two women making love is, simply, an immortal work of art, both lovely and iconic, whose presence in lesbian homes is guaranteed. It was the first artwork I had professionally framed. Tee’s circle of admirers has preserved and distributed her images worldwide.<br /><br /> “Dream food” was a favorite expression, and she fed dreams to us all. What Tee did with her art, her writing, her life and her charismatic networking was to empower us. By us, I mean not just lesbians, but everyone else she touched too: her art students, her old friends, her neighbors, the people who made prints of her work and the guy who built her garage. I know this because I had the good fortune to be close to Tee for a while. I remember a trip to Crater Lake with our then lovers. Snow lined the road higher than our cars. Tee slipped off her socks and Birkenstocks, leapt from the car and, laughing, frolicking, ran barefoot up a snow mound. Then, of course, we took pictures. <br /><br /> Those were some of the most productive years of my life thus far. Not that anything could stop me from writing stories of lesbian lives, but in Tee’s presence, with her interest and support, I branched out from fiction while the fiction tumbled out of me at exhausting speeds.<br /><br /> Ours was a furiously creative household. We were always working. This column was born at the dinner table we shared in those years. While I was churning out stories, Tee was turning from working exclusively in black and white photography and drawings to painting in color and then using the colors to work out her demons, to explore her difficult childhood and difficult family. While she painted large portraits of lesbians important to our culture like Carol Seajay, she never stopped taking photographs. At every conference or visit she would recruit lesbian writers in particular to join her gallery. Every guest was treated to a tour of her work and encouraged to talk about her own. Many sat for Tee’s passionate camera – I remember Marilyn Frye, Anna Livia, Elana Dykewoman, Barbara Grier, Sarah Schulman – sometimes it seemed that all of lesbian nation passed through. Tee certainly knew them all.<br /><br />She immortalized the linchpins of lesbian culture in her living room or on location. We would not have images of lesbian literary historian Jeannette Foster or the late Valerie Taylor without the fervor for archiving that took Tee to Jeannette’s nursing home and to Valerie’s tiny house in Tucson. She crafted a treasure trove of lesbian portraits and, whatever else she is remembered for, Tee will be well-represented in the first National Lesbian Museum partly for her art, but also because she led us to understand that what we were doing was important, that we were important, that our work had value.<br /><br />Art wasn’t the whole of it. I remember meeting Tee at Deb Edel and Joan Nestle’s Upper West Side apartment, where the Lesbian Herstory Archives was then housed. Philosopher Sarah Hoagland joined Tee for a discussion of lesbian culture, an event that even then I knew was significant. Tee thought a lot about what lesbians had done and could do. She created a theater of possibility in which generations have since acted. She opened up the vocabulary of women’s bodies and desire.<br /><br />Whether at a Women’s Studies Conference or the College Art Association, her seductive charm made her an ambassador of lesbian and women’s art, beguiling academicians and other mainstream dignitaries with her belief in her own and other lesbians’ art. A femme who could pass, Tee never did, and by being out, she legitimized the creative work of all lesbians and sometimes got us a seat at the table.<br /><br />Of course, I, devoted to lesbian culture, fell in love with this woman I saw as its personification, although she was much more than that. When she asked me to marry her and we had our bonding ceremony, we thought we were a match made in heaven with our similar agendas and creative drives. But love, for the exuberant Tee, was a continuum: her lovers and friends, her subjects, art, writing, music, her dogs and cats, her land, every new morning – Tee celebrated it all. I can only hope that now she is in some sort of hereafter made of the love, beauty and physical delights she embodied, frolicking barefoot in the clouds.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4199898114678084"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "B0E0E6"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_text = "333333"; google_color_url = "FFFFFF"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </<img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14370957-115834071271934930?l=lnewscommentary.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>LNewsEditorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15516265929045096334noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14370957.post-1157730958086302532006-09-08T08:54:00.000-07:002006-09-08T08:55:58.643-07:00<a onblur="try