I Am a Holy Woman (tm)

By WordyGrrl


Ever know a couple that's just such a perfect couple that they nearly make you sick up? Together more than a year, yet still putting mushy notes in each other's lunches, sending flowers and -- the kicker -- using actual snail mail to exchange smarmy, adoring cards? And they drop frequent hints that they're still burning up the 500-threadcount Laura Ashley sheets with each other.

My pal Miss A and her girlfriend Miss J are such a couple. Sure, they get teased about it, it's really refreshing to see two normal, sane women enjoying a healthy and happy relationship. A great pair of gals, and they're as much fun to hang out with individually as they are when they're together. Trite as it may sound, it's nice to see two nice people join forces to become a nice couple.

It's no surprise that they're thinking of getting married. After all, it's legal in California, which is a mere daytrip from Washington state. We've even joked about loading up an RV with other lesbian couples and doing a long weekend roadtrip there for that sole purpose. Now that'd be an adventure worthy of YouTube, eh?

So a few days ago, I get a call from Miss A. She and Miss J are out running errands, and they've just come up with a great idea. Apparently the idea that they'd like to have me officiate their union. I was so shocked, so tremendously honored that I nearly dropped the phone. I mean, it's one thing if they ask you to be a bridesmaid. But to actually DO the honors? Wow. Talk about feeling all warm and fuzzy.

"So start Googling and find out how you can become Sister Wordy or something," Miss A said. Five minutes and several keystrokes later, I became Reverend "WordyGrrl" (not my real name, duh) of the Universal Life Church. It's an organization so open-minded that their logo is a string of everybody else's religious logos, and their main motto is something along the lines of "Be Nice."

Called Miss A back, and let her know that if she's serious, things are a go. I am now legally able to enunciate some lovely verbiage and pronounce them married in the presence of two witnesses. Well, it'll be legal when same-sex marriage becomes legal in Washington state, but you get the idea.

In any case, I am now a Holy Woman ™ , invested with the power to say nice things at weddings and funerals. No word on their site about conducting exorcisms in the aisles of WalMart, but I'm hopeful. Scenes from that godawful remake of "The Crucible", starring Winona Ryder, are coming to mind. [Game idea: do a shot every time somebody calls out Goody's name.]



I've got so much to do! As a newly-ordained Holy woman ™, I need to design some raiments, create a dogma, a catma, it's endless!. Declare my kitchen a church, designate a finely-crafted microbrew as a sacramental wine, etc.Already decided that Girl Scouts Samoas will be the official "wafer," with the classic shortbread as backup in case any parishioners don't like coconut.

There's also a catch: I'm agnostic, a secular humanist. Meaning that my "belief" is that the existence of God/Godde can be neither proven nor disproven by science or logic.

I don’t slam religious beliefs at all; talking about it is as fascinating as recounting ancient Greek and Roman myths. Sometimes we need an emotional justification to explain the unexplainable. To put off grasping our mortality. To look at a leaf and ignore what we know about photosynthesis and to be simply amazed at how it changes color over the course of a few months.

As an agnostic Holy Woman ™, how does this work? If I'm not sure God/Godde exists, who am I entreating to listen? Whose blessing am I asking for?

Somewhere out there is a small child who's convinced there's a monster under the bed. A big, scaly smelly one with glow-in-the-dark eyes that nobody else can see. Just the kind of beast who needs to be exorcised, driven out with a few fancy phrases and a spritz of "holy water."

And there are a couple of sincere, loving women, a perfectly matched pair, who want to proclaim their one-ness before friends, family and whatever Supreme Being exists.

There are fears to be quashed, confirmation to be given, love to be celebrated. Who am I to remain inert? Somebody as to say something! Do something! Drape something around my neck, hand me a smudge stick or some of that leftover incense. This Holy Woman ™ has work to do, even if there's no giant, magical superbeing to tally it up.

The Anti-Reunion Reunion

By WordyGrrl

Ever get bored and ruminative at the same time? Listing off your favorite personal accomplishments can kill some time and give your ego a life. Among my fave victories is getting the hell out of Mississippi after high school and never going back. Sure, I've driven through the state, rolled down the windows long enough to enjoy the song of cicadas and that sweet, heavy lemony scent of full-blown magnolia blossoms on a steamy summer night. And then I held it until I could find a nice, clean gas station just over the state border.

For some reason, my southern alma mater has apparently become reunion crazy, throwing fests yearly instead of just humanely stopping at the 20-year mark back in 2005. Looking at the class website, it's pretty sad and somewhat shocking to see who's died, including a girl I had a major silent crush on. We're not that old yet, but we ARE getting older and who wants a reminder of the aging process? The elephant in the middle of the room that is our own mortality and lost youth?

But in 1983, there were no cell phones, no internet and no chance of keeping in touch if numbers were lost or somebody moved without having a forwarding address to give you. And so shortly after graduation, we were blown to the four winds and lost touch with each, left alone to create our own lives, develop our own personas, careen madly through our 20s, reassess the damage in the 30s, and start getting invites to join AARP in our early 40s.

Sure, I had some really good times and a great bunch of friends in high school, but in all honesty, there were only two classmates I really gave a serious damn about meeting up with again after all these years. And thanks to the internet, I just found them a few months ago. We re-met via Classmates.com, coincidentally by cheating that site out of membership fees by posting pics of ourselves with our emails superimposed on them.

These were my main buds. My boys. And both of them were as out as one could be in Mississippi in 1983. That is, they were out to me and whichever boys they could furtively fumble with on the downest of the down-low. I listened to their stories and kept their secrets, interviewed them with a red Panasonic cassette recorder and did fashion shoots with a 110 camera. But I never came out to them. What can I say? I just wasn't ready to be as out as they were. The Klan was very openly active then and African Americans weren't the only groups being lynched in Mississippi then. Queers were, too. And besides, what if I was only a phase?

Turns out it wasn't. I am indeed a big, ol' flaming lesbo, among other things. A lot of other phases have come and gone since then, and "my boys" and I have been firing off the emails like mad. We're burning up bundles of bandwidth, trying to fill each other in on the phases, twists and turns our lives have taken since we spray-painted "Class of 83" on every available stop sign in Meridian.

David was an insecure, shy, skinny boy with a big nose and unruly mop of curly hair, overly concerned with wearng "the right labels" in order to be "popular." He recently appeared semi-nude for the cover for a coffee table book called "Men of the Sierras" and has a steady job in film production with Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studio. Brad, an 80s version of Oscar Wilde with a penchant for blasphemous discourse, weed and canned wine coolers, gave up drama school for a gig with the state government as a health educator.

We overwhelmingly decided to blow off the official class reunion in favor of one of our own. The Anti-Reunion Reunion. Taking incomes into account, we decided to meet in the place where the one least able to afford travel lives. Having received no offer of a raise in 10 years, Brad was the "winner," meaning we'd all meet up at his place. In Gulfport, Mississippi.


Brad says Gulfport is different, that it's some kind of blue-minded oasis in a red state. And we are different now. My boys are men now, fully grown and entering the real prime of their lives. And I'm not that skinny, anti-social kid anymore, who relied on humor or conducting interviews of others to deflect questions about herself.

And so in September, I'll be flying to the Magnolia state I fled so many years ago, vowing never to return. I'll be coming out to the very people I should have come out to first -- those who came out to me, in a time and place in which it felt damn dangerous to do so. But I'll be back, older, wiser and far stronger than before. I'm a grown woman now. Since graduation day 1983, I've lived in a lot of different countries, been in a war, seen amazing beauty and heart-wrenching squalor (often in the same place). Learned the difference between bullshit that amuses me and bullshit I won't tolerate.

So here's to good friends and that old hometown of mine: The people who shaped my persona because they reveled in being different. And to the place that made me what I am simply because I refused to become a part of it.

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 .