And Another Thing: Keeping Money in the Family

By Carole Taylor

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.

"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.

"Write the novel," he said, "And if that reaches the sales figures of Danielle Steele, then come back and see me."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: Holy World War III

By Carole Taylor


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.

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.

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.

God told them to do it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: The Hillary Thing

By Carole Taylor

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.)
[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!]

So here. This is at last what I know.

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?

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.

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.

And the other thing I know is that votes are rarely, if ever, cast because of facts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: Man Haters, Huh?

By Carole Taylor


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

Booga booga . . .

~~Carole Taylor

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. :)

Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: Donkeys and Elephants and Homophobes... Oh My!

By Carole Taylor

[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.]


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.

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.

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."

Isn't that a relief.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Booga booga . . .

Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: Someone Save My Life Tonight

By Carole Taylor

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.

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.

We were like spies in the nest of the enemy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the students who killed himself was Allan.

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.”

So much for psychiatric perceptiveness and prescience.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

You never know. One truth about yourself could save a life. One truth can certainly save your own.



Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: The Aunts

By Carole Taylor


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Come out, come out, come out when you can. For your children. No matter who gives them birth, we all give them life.


Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: The Control Queen Amendment

By Carole Taylor

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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: http://www.allianceformarriage.org/

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

They foresaw that Control Queens would be ever with us. She is. And she’s a Republican.

Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: To the Woods

By Carole Taylor

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.)

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.

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?”

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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:

"To the woods, to the woods!" he threatened her.

"No! Not the woods!! Anything but the woods!!!!" she lamented.

"Anything?????" he enthused.

Beat, two, three... "To the woods, to the woods…" she sighed, resigned.

Booga booga . . .


Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.

And Another Thing: Married Bliss

By Carole Taylor

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.

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.

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….”)

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.

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.

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. "

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.

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?

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."--

Makes you feel better already knowing they're awake and on the job

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.

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.

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.

“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?

“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.

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?

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.

I may have to send them some money.

Or not.

Carole Taylor 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
"A Third Story". You can email her here.