Amazon Trail: National Surgery

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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!"

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,

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.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2009

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

Amazon Trail: Susan, We Hardly Knew You

By Lee Lynch

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Regardless, we have made great progress. That we can even be thinking of same gender marriage boggles my mind. Yet, as reported at "On Top Magazine" , 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."

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.

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?

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.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2009

January 2009


Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

Amazon Trail: Naming Names

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or should I name her Hillary?





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

The Amazon Trail: Voting Rights

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

The Amazon Trail: Camera Ready

By Lee Lynch

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.

I used black and white film because that's what we had back then. This would have been in the late 1950s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.





Copyright 2008 by Lee Lynch

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

The Amazon Trail: Lez Lit Heroine -- Katherine V Forrest

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chicago reviewer Marie Kuda wrote that Katherine's novel Flashpoint "revivifies the impact of living gay from Stonewall to the present… no little feat."

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."

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!

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.

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.

Copyright 2008 Lee Lynch

8/08

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

Amazon Trail: Damn Yankee

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

No, I didn't scream like a girl. I did skedaddle outta there like wooly mammoths were pursuing me. Like a damn Yankee.



Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

July 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

The Amazon Trail: My Big Butch Gay Aunt

By Lee Lynch

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.

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."

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.

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.

I gleefully concluded that Jo Murphy was my big butch gay aunt. Finally, I had identified another gay gene in the family.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

6/08

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage. Lee's most recent book, The Butch Cook Book, Edited by Lee Lynch, Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward, is now available at:http://www.butchcookbook.com/.

The Amazon Trail: You Know You're a Femme When...

By Lee Lynch

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.

What with the Butch Cook Book 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.

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?"

Frenchy has become a bit sore about the way her own people sometimes belittle her because she is proudly butch.

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."

My friend the pixie, who self-identifies as a femme, wrote me: "I can tell a butch because I never get twitterpated with femmes."

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.

She was just getting in her car.

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.

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!

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?





Copyright 2008 Lee Lynch

5/08

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage .

The Amazon Trail: On The Road Again

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

It's a darn good thing we didn't have "Just Married" painted on our back window.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage .

The Amazon Trail: Scaling the Heights

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We're going to do this Palm Springs thing every year. I just hope I get to dance with more readers in 2009!





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage .

Amazon Trail: Lesbian Nomad

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.





Copyright Lee Lynch 2008

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage .

The Amazon Trail: Left at the Altar

By Lee Lynch

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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.



Copyright Lee Lynch 2008 1/08

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here . You can check out her Lee's Myspace page . And visit Lee's Tripod homepage .

The Amazon Trail: At Home With the Eagles

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.





12/07

Copyright Lee Lynch 2007

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here .

The Amazon Trail: Land of the Free

By Lee Lynch


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.



Copyright Lee Lynch 2007

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here .

Amazon Trail: Cooking With Elbow Grease

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.






Copyright Lee Lynch 2007

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here .

The Amazon Trail: If I Can Dance, I Can March

By Lee Lynch

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Copyright 2007 Lee Lynch

Lee Lynch is the writer of more than a dozen dyke books, among them "Sweet Creek", as well as book reviews, articles, feature stories and a syndicated column. You can read more about Lee here .