After Twenty Years...

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Things between us had been bad for a while, a long while. But sometimes I can be like the deer in the headlights, stunned into paralysis, mesmerized by the oncoming car, yet unable to get out of its way. Perhaps my expectations of this life have always been too low. Being from a family of alcoholics who had no real use for the dynamics of child-rearing, my sister and I learned, by trial and error, to parent ourselves. We did okay. Financially, each of us has made her own way through this world, held on to civil service jobs, bought our own houses without help, basically held her own. The things we were unable to incorporate have to do with self-esteem and relationships, things we were never shown. Like how to have faith in our own worth, how to give and receive love.

Time matters. Especially at sixty-seven years old. I sense denouement in the wings as my entire generation nears the end of our earthly sojourn. It makes sense to be kinder to each other in this chapter, but often, it doesn’t work that way. My parents had an open relationship and I stretched my limits to be flexible with a partner, who described her onset of sexual changes as just one component of a late-in-life crisis. She had my blessing to do tantric workshops, orgasmic meditation, anything within a structured sexual environment was not threatening to me. She said that she’s trying to get in touch with her “inner gay man,” but gay men have a host of opportunities for casual sex that are not open to lesbians. A quick b-j in a parking lot or bathroom stall and a visit to a sex club with private rooms and “glory holes” are not options in the lesbian community.

My parents’ first rule of non-monogamy was that each of them could do whatever they wanted provided they didn’t talk about it. The polyamorous community is the opposite. The bylaws are fundamental honesty combined with mutual consent. My partner started by attempting to follow those rules, but the problem was when I felt I couldn’t handle her having a sexual/romantic relationship with no guidelines whatsoever, there was nowhere to go from there.We all have limits to what we can withstand. 

I can’t help feeling betrayed. Although the responsibility for this split is my partner’s, it is upsetting that her new paramour knows me and was peripherally part of our friendship circle. I don’t understand why anyone would make this decision. Aren’t there enough lesbian strangers out there? Now I must worry about running into a person harboring negative, or worse indifferent, feelings regarding my well-being in this tumultuous world.   

Today, in this toxic soup of ash and particulate waste around me, I feel discarded, alone. When your world is burning, you are without choice, you must save yourself. Letting go of this relationship is not the path I would have chosen, but, like so many things beyond my control, it has chosen me. It remains to be seen where it will lead.

Young Women Attack Dykes their Grandma's Age

Oh my god, they really are old!

It was a nightmare scenario. Imagine the Lavender Menace meets Lord of the Flies. Twenty-something participants in the Dyke March swooped down on our small contingent of old lesbians like crazed predators thirsty for blood.

There were eight of us marching together at that point. Many were old friends from the seventies. Each one of us has different political views that include leftist activism, mainstream liberal Democratic politics and radical feminism to name a few. Three of us were holding signs. The rest were not. I was wearing a t-shirt from the 2004 Dyke March that read, "Uprooting Racism," with a creative graphic of a brown, tree-root woman holding the earth in her branches. I am 67 years old. Another seventy-something woman wore a Dyke March T-shirt from the year 2000.  A younger woman was carrying a cane and wearing a t-shirt that read, "My favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy."

Suddenly the youngsters were surrounding us. One was yelling through a bullhorn which made answering back nearly impossible. She was calling us TERFs, an acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The background story would take three more blogs, but just be aware that "Kill TERFs is a favorite slogan of this population. And, if you're old, you are automatically under suspicion as a target. When she belligerently yelled, "Don't touch me!" when my shoulder accidentally brushed hers, I knew she wasn't kidding around and moved away.

Two of our group carried signs they didn't like. Ironically, one sign said, "You Cannot Silence Us with Violence," and underneath that, "Stop Lesbian Erasure." I knew that was currently in the news and certainly didn't consider that sign "fighting words." That sign was torn up by the end of the march. Another sign about puberty blockers I knew was controversial in the medical community but I (wrongly) assumed that lesbians, like other members of society, have a right to differences of opinion, just as doctors and nurses do.

But these baby-faced gals couldn't figure out that we were all individuals, let alone old friends, or that free speech is still the law in this country. They descended screaming "TERFs go home!" and "Down With Trans-phobia," although no-one had spoken a word against transgender folks and most of us are progressive activists in various communities. It was strange coming from these females who certainly looked like cisgender girls barely pushing twenty-one. They all wore the smooth, impenetrable faces of pampered youth, strangers to adversity who, most often, live with their parents.

I tried to reason with them, explaining that falling for Trump's agenda of rabid hate is playing right into their hands. But their eyes were on fire, their bullhorn loud, their white faces contorted in a distinctly unattractive way. I was surrounded by flying hands and hula-skirt hair, you know, the kind that dances around heads in strands and is produced only by round follicles found on the heads of the master race. As they screamed their hatred at me, I politely informed them that I was Jewish, just in case they ran out of insults.

But for the likes of us activists, our crime was not trans-phobia. Our offense was obvious. You could see it in the sag of our lined faces, the soft outlines of our not-so-svelte bodies. We could not deny it. Every one of us was guilty, guilty, guilty of being old. Yes, that terrifying state that, if all goes well for these young tormentors, they would reach one day.

At that moment, my partner and I absconded to take a break in the shade. By the time we caught up with our contingent, mob mentality had set in. Two signs had been torn up and their bearers repeatedly knocked down. The whole group had procured a police escort to help them leave the march in safety.

We certainly have fallen a long way since the early, heady days of the lesbian movement. Elders' horror stories of being beaten, spit on, fired from jobs and refused all kinds of services simply for being lesbian or gay are clearly not of interest to many of this generation. Learning from history has become a concept discarded and forgotten. I suppose it's much easier to hate the people around you, folks to whom you have access, than to direct righteous anger toward the real enemy, the corrupt, fascist administration we live under, in other words, the powers that be.

When Cultures Collide

I ran into an ex best-friend today at N. Waterfront Park in Berkeley. It was an unavoidable meeting, both of us walking different directions on the same, rather obscure, path. I know it was unavoidable because, in the past ten years that we haven’t spoken, if I saw her from a distance, I would find another route to avoid her. This time she came upon me fast. Worse yet, my partner, who is still Facebook friends with her, said hello. So we all said hello and briefly compared notes on retirement and moved on. No big deal. But it was painful nonetheless because of the cloud under which we parted ways, the one that ended our friendship of thirty-three years.

We first met in a CR group at the Women’s Center on Brady Street in around 1976. I was an emotional wreck just surviving after the untimely death of my mother in 1973 and the suicide of my grandmother that followed the same year. I was alone caring for my sister in a strange city. Cathy wanted to be friends and I needed friends desperately. Although her class background was similar to mine (lower middle class) she was very different. Her ethnic background was WASP and very self-contained. Especially so because her mother had acute mental illness. She didn’t want to talk much about deep stuff and neither did I so we were a perfect match.

We talked feminist politics which evolved into leftist politics. I was careful with her as though I was walking on eggs. Instinctively knew that my unleashed, assertive, blatantly Jewish-style of interacting would scare her. So I kept it at bay. This took the form of censoring and toning down my feelings and impressions. I don’t have to be tacky and uncouth just because my family was, I told myself. Cathy was smart and loving when she decided to be but her rules were strict and inflexible. She would counsel me on dating situations telling me when to call a potential date, how many times to try, when to send a card and what consists of an appropriate gift. These rules of etiquette were helpful for me because they were so completely absent in my coming of age experience.

Time may not heal all wounds but it does diminish them. That’s what happened to me as the years passed. Partly it was because I was meeting other lesbians of my own ethnicity who I related really well with. They were proud of their backgrounds and didn’t hold themselves back. As I grew freer, more secure in myself, I began naturally reverting to the style of interaction in which I was raised. It’s more of an organically grown conversation where one thing reminds you of another so you move on to the similar thing and the other person responds with more information about their experience and it builds organically from there. It involves both speaking and listening. Just trying it out made me feel better immediately. For Cathy that was not the case. She felt unheard, not listened to. Cathy believed that every addition I made to the subject was a subtraction from her perspective. She insisted that heavy exploration of a personal subject must consist of one person holding forth while the other is absolutely silent. Of course I hoped that, after all those years, we could work it out, that she’d realize it was just a difference in cultural styles not in emotional worthiness.

Later, I would post articles on my Facebook page about Jewish conversational styles and how the dynamics of social interaction are culturally determined. But later was too late for Cathy and I. We made many attempts at compromise and a number of aborted attempts at connecting. It would work for a while and then I would slip back to my natural state. She blamed it all on me and I took on that mantle too. After all, wasn’t I the one who changed? The blunt truth was that she liked the person I’d pretended to be quite a bit more than the one I actually was. And I could not settle for anything less than my genuine self.

The last time we spoke was at her place, the very same house I had convinced her to buy with a lawsuit settlement so many years earlier. Before leaving I said, “Well, this is it. I guess that unless one of us is dying of cancer or something, we won’t see each other again.” She said nothing. We haven’t seen or spoken a word until today when I was filled with that same old feeling of loss and sadness; a coming to terms with the fact that not all conflicts are reconcilable.

The Ethnicity that Dare Not Speak Its Name

The speed with which anti-Semitic attacks memes, tropes and philosophies have become common place occurrences is truly astonishing. As a proud, secular, leftist, lesbian Jew, I have been around long enough to know and expect anti-Semitism from the right. Growing up in Ohio of the nineteen fifties, outside of my community, I heard the word “Jew” most often used as a verb. But even though, I was perpetually warned by my family that, one day, this prejudice would resurface with a vengeance. I never truly believed it, until now.

The Chicago Dyke March organizers, after turning away three marchers holding rainbow flags with six-pointed stars on them, have repeatedly stated that now that “Anti-Zionist” Jews are welcome at their events while “Zionist” Jews are not. July 13, 2017 the Chicago Dyke March Committee re-tweeted David Duke, former grand earthworm of the KKK. They stated, "Zio tears replenish my electrolytes." I can't believe that the dyke community, my community could stoop to this level of name calling using Neo-Nazi slurs! On July 9th in Berkeley at a meeting:“United Against Hate – A forum on how to combat the increase in racist violence,” I and about 250 others listened as speakers addressed various issues as well as the need to fight the rise in white supremacist violence. Most speakers were inclusive, trying to build a diverse, left-wing coalition. One speaker was confusing however, using the words, Zionist and White Supremacist together and somewhat interchangeably, without really defining either.

In other instances regarding racial, ethnic, religious and national groups, individuals are separated from their current, former or ancestral governments in a way which American Jews are not. It would be considered prejudiced and misinformed to blame Chinese-Americans for imperialism in Tibet or Turkish-Americans for Erdogan’s encroaching authoritarianism. What makes it okay to conflate Jewish Americans with Israel? Why should Jews have to face extra political scrutiny that NO OTHER group faces?

Jews are in a uniquely vulnerable position, targeted by foes on both the right and left. Like individuals of any group, there is no universal agreement on politics or strategy. What does it mean, concretely, to divide Jews into good ones and bad ones in a time of increasing anti-Semitism? Say, for example, if a Jewish home is targeted with some form of anti-Semitic harassment or violence, must we must first ask whether anyone in the home is “Zionist” before defending them?

Stereotypically Jews are seen as enemies from both sides. Depicted as the ultimate capitalists, bankers, Hollywood moguls, intellectual elites and privileged rich. And conversely Jews are seen as the embodiment of Bolsheviks, race-mixers, trade unionists and the muck-rakers? In a scary time, full of hatred, Jews walk a line between mine fields. 

The best way to undermine “Zionist” cries for a Jewish state, is to fight like hell to make the USA a safe haven for Jews as well as other minorities. Just as we are trying to defeat all the other isms that are coming to prominence in the time of upheaval. As we battle racism in all its insidious forms, can’t we as leftists just say we are opposed to antisemitism too without qualifying it? If some Jews get thrown under the bus, that bus is going to mow down a lot of other folks too. History has taught us that what Ben Franklin said is true: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” 

Old Lesbian in a New Age.

Old Woman in Marble

I consider myself old. Not elderly, aged or older. Old. No euphemisms. In my retirement support group, the women, who are 55 years old and up, do not like to hear me say that word about myself. To them, a sixty-five year old is just a junior senior. Maybe it's because my mother died at 48 and my grandmother at around 67 (she wasn't sure of her birth year) so I didn't see many female family members grow really old.

What does it mean to be old? In this culture, it's pretty grim. I notice that I have become invisible to many folks. My lesbian identity, even relative butchness has been lost to generic old lady-ness which I don't want any part of. I've become a piece that no longer fits, even in the world of outcasts. I can't be a grandmother because I was never a mother. When younger people compare some trait of mine to an incidental fact about their mom or grandma, I know the what is happening. The word is prejudice. It means the categorical stereotyping of a singular, unique individual.

Having said that, generational differences do exist because of the circumstances and climate in which we were raised. I think of this as "frame of reference." The loss of commonality between folks of different eras is massive, just like it was between the baby boom generation and those who came of age during World War II. The issues and crises we experience shape who we are and the way we perceive the world. Before the internet, before answering machines, there were only three channels on television. We had phone trees to get in touch with others for political activism and you just keep calling I reached someone. Communication was a challenge.

So, it should be better now that it's easier, right? That sounds logical but something personal has fallen between the cracks. Staring at screens and talking to robots all day is quite alienating. Younger people have nothing with which to compare it. As far as what to watch or listen to or do there are so many choices that there is little common culture. A time of shared media is hard to fathom today. We were familiar with the same actors, singers, comedians, even the ones we hated. And yes, many folks were not represented at all. Queer, straight, black, female we all made due with one size fits all and it fit none of the folks I felt connected with.

Now, there is so much choice and variety as to what we read, watch, incorporate into our lives. Of course it's better but, for old codgers, it's overwhelming. I don't watch Saturday Night Live anymore, partially because I don't want to stay up that late, but also because I don't know most of the references to "famous" people. There are a couple generations of actors and singers I've never heard of. And frankly, since my Random Access Memory is pretty full and can't be upgraded, I don't really care.

When I was young, I thought the main issues with aging involved had to do with wrinkles and flab. I didn't seriously consider health the main area where loss happens. That view seems so short-sighted. Personally, four people I've known through various stages of my life have died in the last six months. Now with the internet and Facebook the upside is that I have contact with more people. The downside is that I now experience more sickness and death.

I feel very conscious of impermanence now. I am literally on deadline. Suddenly, I am confronted with a massive amount of work that still needs doing. At least, as a worse case scenario, I can rest assured I will not die young. I look forward to working with folks of all ages and hope that they are ready and willing to see beyond stereotypes and platitudes to work with me. So let's get going. Take my word for it, life is a lot shorter than you think.

LGBT Struggle is not Diminished by Marriage Equality

We have just begun to fight!

The legalization of marriage, like the acceptance of queers in the military, is not the endpoint of LGBT struggle. It is necessary to have the same rights and opportunities as heterosexual people, even when applied to institutions you may not personally respect.

The right to marry in all fifty states is nothing to sneeze at, especially when it comes to elderly folks and the terminally ill. It is essential to remember that many LGBT individuals still have families who might swoop in and confiscate everything should a partner die.

How feeling good about the victory of same-sex marriage is inherently reactionary is one of the many puzzling, self-defeating stances of some lesbians who consider themselves progressive leftists. It is not an endorsement of the institution of marriage or that of the military to extend the scope of who's allowed to do whatever. It does not diminish other struggles. Those who view marriage as the be all and end all of queer rights are simply short-sighted, not the enemy. I get so tired of lesbians fighting each other. It's just another manifestation of internalized oppression.

What we need now is total constitutional equality that outlaws housing and job discrimination. These issues will not be dealt with more quickly the more that we, like crabs in a barrel, pull each other down. Lighten up anti-marriage crusaders! The longest journey begins with one small step.

LGBT Rights: Up and Down and Up Again

I've been down with a flu from the depths of hell but have been mostly following the news. The instantaneous and massive mobilization around Indiana governor Pence's religious discrimination ordinance was fabulous! Nothing I could have dreamed of witnessing in the bad old days. Most of the USA has now made it abundantly clear that denial of service based on bigotry is unacceptable.

Of course, every step forward brings a certain amount of backlash so events like Springfield Missouri repealing a gay rights ordinance is no surprise. And, as much as I distrust mainstream politics, civil rights protections of queers and people of color will be a frontline issues in the 2016 presidential election.

Our support can be deceptive. We have not crossed the finish line yet. In fact, if we look to the Black civil rights struggle as a model,  not only are the last laps of the most difficult ones, but the struggle itself is endless. Things inevitably will get a lot worse before they get better.

The best alternative would be to stop doing things in a piecemeal fashion: non-discrimination in employment, marriage,  housing, adoption, all the issues together under one civil rights protection statute, preferably issued by the Supreme Court. That is easier said than done. The ERA, Equal Rights Amendment for women, never made it across that finish line. Now the right wing has opened an abyss full of snapping crocodiles they call "religious freedom." It is part of their victim-based strategy of persecution, an interesting reversal of the actual dynamic.

But we need not despair. Among young people organized religion is rapidly declining. The last time that happened was during the late sixties and early seventies when my generation was coming of age. And you know how that played out.

So there is hope. We are in this for the long haul. Whenever people say how quickly the LGBT struggle has achieved some rights I wonder what version of history they are reading. Certainly not the sixty plus years of my struggle or that of my predecessors in whose footsteps I have walked.

Lesbians, Women and Equality

As the endless struggle for equal pay has illustrated, women we have a long journey ahead of us before we can see any semblance of equality. After much struggle, women are now citizens of the USA who can vote and try for almost any job as long as it is not too high profile like being president or hosting a late night talk show. But we are still limited by sexism which defines us by gender, appearance, social agility and acceptability to those males in power.  

Just yesterday I was searching the database NewPages for anthology and literary journal submission venues.The first “feminist” one I found had just run a special issue that contained the voices of male writers expounding on the subject of women. The second one was soliciting for an upcoming issue on women’s relationships to “the men in our lives.” Seriously?

Let me make this clear: women are not to blame for sexism. Having said that, it is also imperative that we stop being collaborators! As Judy Grahn said in her poem, A Woman is Talking to Death, “We do each other in, that’s a fact!” Lesbians can be guilty of this just like our bib-dyke sisters, but since we have so much less power in society it hardly matters.

And there is the crux of the problem. When it comes to the big picture, our existence, our struggles are most often not even footnotes. The female equivalent of the male gay civil rights spokesperson doesn’t really exist. Harvey Milk, Tennessee Williams, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Tony Kushner, all these are names that come to mind historically when thinking about notable LGBTs. I know that Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich are notable lesbians, but as far as name recognition they are undoubtedly second tier.

The “problem” of the unapologetic lesbian is being dealt with inside the LGBT community where the word “queer” is now touted as a substitute for “lesbian” because it is more “inclusive.” I’m all for inclusion, but I also have to post the question, what exactly is being lost?

As that old movie “Tootsie” posited and the transgender MTF movement seems to express: men believe that they are better at absolutely everything and that includes being women! The truth is that yes, a less oppressed person has more distance from an issue and that makes both your self-image and everything you undertake, less fraught and therefore a bit easier.  

And, for many of us bio-broads, “being a woman” is not a set of feelings or behaviors. It is just a genetic fact, an anatomical category!

I respect transgender women. But they are raised with the privilege of growing up and being treated as males. Due to class issues, I am used to working alongside people of greater privilege. I don’t hate them. I just think that we all must acknowledge these differences and, as class warriors, fight the tendency to relinquish our power to those with greater access to theirs.

Women have come a great distance since acquiring the vote in 1920. Lesbians have made huge strides since Stonewall. But genuine equality is still a distant dream and ignoring this fact will not make it go away.

The Lesbian Movement Comes of Age

Those of us now referred to as boomers share a common history. We cut our teeth in a tumultuous era of love and war, protest and upheaval. The freedom riders fighting and dying to fight racial segregation and restore voting rights paved the way. The outcry against the draft and the Vietnam War galvanized massive numbers of young people.

Then the Women’s Liberation Movement descended with a vengeance and split organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wide open. When women stopped taking notes and fetching coffee the patriarchal left began to crumble.
 

It was a time of relative prosperity. Drugs were widely available. The birth control pill had hit the market. Taboos were being exploded. Free love and sexual experimentation was everywhere. The rules of the old order were no longer applicable.

In 1970, at Ohio State University, I joined a consciousness-raising (CR) group. There was one lesbian among us when the group began. Two years later, when it ended, there was only one woman left who still considered herself straight.

It was as if a wall of shame and fear had fallen. All our wildest fantasies, sexual and otherwise, were suddenly okay. I made new friends in a group that called itself, Radicalesbians. These women were fearless. With proud names like Debbie Dyke and Lisa Lesbian and none of them looked scary or predatory like the old British “bulldaggers” in the movie, “The Killing of Sister George,”or suicidal like Martha in “The Children’s Hour.” Young and hip and angry about oppression, they looked a lot like me. Groups like the Lavender Menace and the Lesbian Avengers and became the persistent thorn in the side of the mainstream women’s movement, the specter of what heterosexual women feared most.

Today, we lesbians seem to be making grand leaps in LGBT civil rights. When folks claim it is all happening so fast, I want to smack them. Fast? The Stonewall riots were in 1969 so 45 years is not exactly the blink of an eye. But it’s relatively rapid when you consider the duration of slavery or how long it took women to get the vote.

Political change always feel geologic in its pace because we are sacrificing our very lives when we are denied full human status. Living to see some of the new dwellings rise over the foundations we laid is gratifying but no excuse to lay back and rest before the job is completed.

Living Apart Together: Another Option

Getting married didn’t change my life at all. My partner (please don’t call either of us “wife”) and I still live in different cities. My house is in Berkeley, hers is in Oakland. We talk by phone every day but spend only about three days a week together. We have separate and joint friends, separate bank accounts, separate and joint lives. And it’s not just a stage we are going through. Last year we celebrated our anniversary of fifteen years as a couple.

In Scandinavian countries my relationship with Deborah is called LAT, short for living apart together.  We consider ourselves really fortunate that we are financially able to do this. Deborah is still teaching and I am a retired librarian. We both have, or in my case had, civil service jobs with pensions and health benefits, as well as life-long work histories. It is definitely more expensive to maintain two individual residences than to live together. As we both age out of our working years, who knows what the future holds? But I can unequivocally say that, for the past fifteen years, having a relationship that includes a certain degree of separation been great.

Still, this past summer we tied the knot. Both of us are sixty-something so we wanted the legal protection that marriage brings. In this way each of us are protected in case of death or serious injury. Her family is predatory, mine mostly non-existent. This year we will fill out our first married but filing individually tax return, so we’ll see more concretely what our new financial relationship entails.

The city of Oakland forced us to pay, not only 100 dollars for the marriage application, but around 80 dollars more for a ridiculous ceremony with some judge who took the whole thing far more seriously than we did. We had trouble trying to keep from cracking up with all that somber sanctity of marriage crap. And we needed witnesses so we brought along two friends, a heterosexual old hippie couple who have the same ambivalent relationship the m-word that we do. It was a contrived formality containing a dose of pathos and ridiculousness in equal measure.

It’s not that Deborah and I don’t love each other, it’s just that queer marriage, like gays in the military, is not a struggle to which either of us have hitched our proverbial wagon. As folks who want to transform society, including marriage, trumpeting its virtues is not the place I want to begin. And both Deborah and I are unimpressed by consumerist occasions that turn out to be meaningless, gift-grabbing Hallmark moments.

The marriage industry in this country is massive with tremendous financial power and influence. It is part of the reason that the sustained drive for marriage equality is finally meeting with some success. Little girls are brainwashed from birth that the most wonderful day of their lives will be their wedding day. Working-class people who are barely keeping their heads above water in this economy are persuaded to call out all the stops and spend money they don’t have for a big blowout wedding. 

So how does living apart together work for us? For one thing, we don’t have to have the same cleanliness style or personal habits. I am free to be disorganized but clean, and Deborah is free to be a total neat freak. We have a more urban home, mine, and a more suburban option. When we go to events together, we can stay at the closest place. We can stay together when friends come in from out of town and give them the privacy of their own place. We can entertain at either house or have private meetings without disturbing the other but the main advantage is, we can take breaks from each other when we need to and enjoy each other’s company only when we choose.

           

There is also a level of solitude that allows each of us to pursue our creative interests. I am a writer. Deborah is a photographer, collagist and ceramicist. Having separate spaces helps us each get more accomplished in our chosen work lives.

We share one cat, Luna, who lives with Deborah. That way, when we travel during the summer, we only need house sitters for one place. I love the access to cat energy as well as the freedom to leave my house for long periods of time without having to worry about a pet. During our various travels, and teachers with summers off love to travel, we do inhabit the same space and it has always gone well.

Of course living apart together has a down side. When the weather is bad it takes more effort to visit. Coming home alone from sustained time together on trips can be disorienting. But the added expense is the biggest drawback.

Friends used to continually inquire when we’d be taking that famous lesbian U-Haul trip. Today, for the most part, they have given up that line of questioning. Many couples we know, even ones who live together, no longer have one single answer for that eternal question, what did you do today?

So, I am technically married now. It hasn’t changed my life at all save for the fact that if I get seriously ill or die suddenly, my non-traditional partner who is now my spouse, will have the legal right to make decisions or to inherit my house. That gives me a sense of security. We are also about to complete our first tax return together: married filing separately.

But let’s face reality. No matter how we delude ourselves with spouses, children and flowery promises of love that lasts forever each one of us is traveling through this world alone. Still, it can be quite nice to have company on the journey. And only the two individuals that comprise a couple can decide the form that joining will take. I’m only sure that commitment is something that must be done by choice not by contract.

Are Lesbians Being Written Out of the LGBT Community?

I just finished reading an article in the "Huffington Post" about the 20 most compelling queers of 2013. 4 of them were born female. You heard right, 4 out of twenty! The remaining 16 were born male although some have transitioned to female and are living that way now. 

Lesbians who have been born and raised as women are NOT one fifth of the queer community's population! And it’s not just this one article. The huge photo on the cover of the New Year's edition of the Bay Times" shows men as men, men in drag and women with smiles and long hair (have you noticed the huge percentage of young females who wear their hair long now?) Not a single female butch among them. I am beginning to fear that little by little, step by step the male culture of the LGBT community is writing out those of us born with XX chromosomes.

And this is happening at a time when, more than ever, the needs of women worldwide deserve our attention and activism. Women are underrepresented in all spheres of life except for child birth and rearing in all countries of the world. We are treated as dependent children who need male guardians in some, made to cover our bodies, heads and often faces in others, denied literacy and education in many, killed for minor infractions or dowry issues in quite a few, surgically clitorectomized, infibulated and we have been subjected to a wide array of horrific procedures like foot-binding throughout the history of the world.

Here, in the Occidental world, we survive in what is usually referred to as “Western Civilization.” Cultures here have always been hostile to our gender. The percentage of women in government, science, technology, and all disciplines except for teaching, nursing, childcare, librarianship and social work is astoundingly small. And when men enter these “women’s fields” their ability to ascend to management is rapid and blindingly unjust.

Women are underrepresented in all aspects of society partly due to prejudice, but also because to be born a woman in any part of the globe takes a tremendous toll on self-esteem. We are not raised to believe ourselves capable of great things. From the minute you are strapped into those frilly pink what-evers, your chances of fulfilling any dreams other than marriage and children are significantly diminished. You will be sexualized, demeaned and degraded in a myriad of both blatant and subtle ways. And if your family is also oppressed by ethnicity or socio-economic class the struggle becomes that much more difficult.

Butch lesbians are no-frills feminist culture warriors who challenge the norm of "femininity" by simple virtue of existence. Against all odds we have unearthed some semblance of self-love and respect in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that society has no productive use for our style, not to mention our values. 

If  a preponderence of butch-leaning lesbians transition to men it leaves the majority who remain women in a more vulnerable position. Yes, people have to be true to their biological gender but the fact remains that becoming a man does reduce the problem of anti-woman oppression in an individual's life. It can be used as an easy fix to a much deeper problem.

Lesbians have always had our power drained when we try to work in mixed-gender environments. The gender net of human females is diverse and wide. I am all for fighting for the rights of transgender people. But just not at the expense of fair lesbian representation. Life is not a zero sum game. If the LGBT community writes us out of the fold, we will just keep raising hell on our own, a strategy we have learned well.

Invisibility and Lesbian Experience

The Invisible Lesbian

I read an interesting article in the NYTimes Magazine a couple of weeks ago. It concerned the ways that women are actively discouraged from pursuing careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, what they called the STEM subject group. Unfortunately, a large portion of the article focused on how majoring in STEM  fields frightened off potential male suitors. But one sentence in the article indicated that there was a different point of view expressed by a minority of the interview subjects. The sentence is framed in parentheses and reads as follows: "The lesbian scientists with whom I spoke, at the tea and elsewhere, reported differing reactions to the gender dynamic of the classroom and the lab, but voiced many of the same concerns as the straight women."

Huh? What does this mean? How many lesbian scientists were questioned? How does their experience differ? I was left with these unanswered questions as this sentence contained the only reference to lesbians in the entire piece. Clearly the writers and editors were only concerned with the experiences of genuine women, i.e.: the heterosexual variety.

Recently a poem of mine was included in an anthology about women's experience in the sixties and seventies. My entry was openly queer and dealt with unrequited lesbian love. Reading through the numerous poetry and stories included in the book, I have found only one other out lesbian. 

This is what it means to be part of a minority culture. Your experience is tokenized or erased, your pespective deleted. In capitalist publishing this is just mainstream vs niche market politics. But genuinely good writing should transcend these categories. It seems obvious that inclusion of ethnic and gender minority voices would only improve both the sales and credibility of an article, journal, film or anthology.
   
But now, at least, they are giving us a little nod. That means we have successfully been a thorn in their side long enough to make them aware of our existence. There is a small hole in the fence that has segregated our experience from that of real women. To make that opening larger, we must all pour through it en masse. Lesbian history is women's history and we are the only ones who can write it. Our experience is an indespensible and necessary component of the liberation of all women, and yes, all people.

Prejudice Erases Individual Identity

When people are viewed through categories instead of as individuals, it becomes easier to dehumanize them. The racism of our society is so deeply ingrained and reflexive many people no longer see it yet the total exoneration of Gerorge Zimmerman from criminal charges in the Trayvon Martin case has made its continued existence abundantly clear. We are raised to value some people and to deride, degrade and fear others. Generalization is elevated to an extreme level in the United States. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that we want to categorize and organize our experience without truly researching and questioning it.

It's part and parcel of a our shortcut culture; the search for the quickest, easiest route to a superficial and limited understanding of the world. Americans are raised to be group-thinkers. To begin to understand this, I must draw upon my own experience. Growing up in an almost exclusively Jewish culture in the Anti-Semitic environment of 1950's Cleveland, I was continually given the message that to venture outside of my community into a gentile world was ill-advised and dangerous. Hatred toward me would be rampant and I would return home to my people a sorry mess begging to be welcomed back into the flock.

My parents passionately desired acceptance by and into the gentile world but you would never have known it by looking at their friends who were, almost exclusively, Jews. This limited their empathy and real understanding of people from other groups. We live in a tremendously segregated and economically stratified society. Also an alienating, individualistic and isolated one. Genuine connection with folks from other groups is rare and often only happens in the workplace or under extenuating circumstances like prison, if at all.

Limited exposure to the wide array of individuals in a given group is the breeding ground of prejudice. In the LGBT movement in the late seventies, when we were fighting the Briggs initiative that would have prevented gay positive folks from working in schools, our strategy was to talk to people in bathroom lines, at bus stops, in grocery stores and other public places. Then, upon leaving, we would hand the person a card that read: "You have just been talking to a lesbian, please uphold our right to work in schools and vote no on Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative. Obviously, the attempt here was to break down the kind of barriers that prevented heterosexual folks from seeing us as human beings.

Although increasing numbers of African-Americans, including our president,  have arrived in the so-called middle class, racial divisions between blacks and whites are still the norm in our society. Immigrants, who have chosen to land on our shores have fared a bit better, even when language and color differences are also present. The younger generations mix more than those my generation did, but even though mandatory government segregation has been officially curtailed, self-segregation is rampant. It becomes a chicken and egg game to figure out what came first and how to stop the vicious circle of stereotyping and estrangement that keeps the racial divide strong.

The recession has, for the most part, made things worse. When people must compete for limited resources fighting ensues. Think of all the experiments of rats in cages. Or just think of the U.S. prison system. Hitler used fear and misunderstanding as a tool to exacerbate divisions between people. That is happening everywhere today. The divisive, competitive nature of capitalism fuels this fire. The fact that Wall Street criminals get away with murder is not helpful either.

I recently saw the movie "Fruitvale Station" and was moved by its poignant portrayal of Oscar Grant and the brutal way his life ended. Perhaps only time will heal the gaping wound that continues to racially divide the human community. It is a deep scar left by slavery. We can read, think, talk and continue to march for a more just and equal society, clearly a long and protracted struggle.

Can Lesbians be Friends?

I have had a partner for going on fifteen years. We have a unique relationship because we have never lived together, in fact, I live in Berkeley and she lives in Oakland. We joke that our abode is huge because it has a freeway running down the middle.

The result of our living apart together arrangement is that we each have individual friends, as well as couple friends. As a couple, we sometimes also spend time with each other’s individual friends as well. The odd fact is that the great preponderance of these women friends are heterosexuals and I’m trying to reconcile the reason that this occurs.

Emotional intimacy beyond the couple relationship is necessary for healthy life. Straight women know this well. A boyfriend, husband or loving partner is great but without girlfriends life can be lacking in depth, dimension, and empathy. There is no way that one other person can fill each arising need, nor should they be expected to. I thought this was a given and that, especially child-free adults, would want to form new friendships at all points in their lives.

 For lesbians, there is no similar cultural frame of reference. I believe that, for single lesbians, the need for friendship gets subsumed by the search for lover-ship. Friends are the negative default setting to finding lovers. This is particularly true when folks are working and time is of the essence. The classic sentiment is, if the chemistry is not there, let’s just be friends.

As lesbians, we are a prickly bunch. We all share a history of unrequited love, thwarted romance and ferocious repression. The scar tissue that forms around these negative experiences, especially for us boomer-aged dykes, can be limitless and all-consuming. Our sexuality confuses the issue too. The potential complications of sexual attraction loom over every female to female relationship. And, due to women's oppression, fear of everything from a verbal slight to real, physical danger is always present in our lives.

But being real friends requires a lot more than chemistry. It involves shared interests, trust, mirroring our damaged and difficult selves in a way that requires compassion and understanding. It is not a fallback position, but one of fundamental, front-line support.

Lesbians often draw friends from their pool of ex-lovers or their non-attraction pool of potential lovers. But what about the idea of meeting new women with shared interests, more like straight women do? Does the nebulous sexual element make it any attempt at connection too threatening? Are we doomed to be constrained by this dynamic forever?

You might think that the fact I’m in a relationship would make me more desirable, you know, a safe harbor for the seeking. But I’m getting the feeling that it also makes me a waste of time, like squandering valuable infrastructure capital on a cul-de-sac instead of laying the foundation for a bridge or freeway.

The destination is critical but the journey itself is also important. Sometimes it can be helpful to look at the present through a wider lens. Life is uncertain. If the bolts break in that bridge or the cement cracks in that freeway, spending time on a restful cul-de-sac could be just what the doctor ordered. 

Challenges of Long-Term Lesbian Relationships

 A Long-Term Power Couple

Two women who gossip together, debrief on relationship issues, exchange sexual intimacies, what could be problematic about this picture? In many ways, nothing is and that’s why many lesbians get together in the first place. But the more challenging part of this equation is staying together.

Unlike places like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, in the U.S. the separation between the culture of men and the culture of women exists informally but nevertheless, serves as a divider for the men and women. The football with the boys and shopping with the girls stereotype is simply shorthand for a far wider separation that makes it easier for same-gender couples to meet, yet harder to persist in queer relationships.

Continuing to have friends is a given for heterosexual, married women. And I don’t mean only friends that are also coupled and visited with in pairs, I mean real “heart” friends. For lesbians in couples, emotional intimacy can be threatening for the life partner. There is no automatic dividing line between other women, as all of them have the potential of being seen as romantic partners. To prevent this, once coupled lesbians often engage in what I call emotional monogamy, meaning other couple friends are encouraged but new emotional intimacy is not. 

Among queer women some of the greatest wear and tear on relationships comes from the joined-at-the-hip phenomenon. This “urge to merge” is deadly to long term connections because it becomes attempting to share the totality of one’s existence tends to be deadly in a relationship. It is far healthier to bring home stories and adventures from two separate lives.. This involves cultivation of individual friends and interests; a simple thing that the majority of straight folks do automatically.

Being sexually monogamous yet emotionally non-monogamous is possible. But this feat  is more challenging for lesbians than for our straight sisters. It means being open to the kind of real friendships we had with each other before we were taught that emotional intimacy is automatically a precursor to sexual intimacy. This is debatable, but he absence of the possibility of true friendship cuts off an emotionally satisfying and healing connection to others. Friendship should not only be for teenagers, searching singles and old married ladies. Paired lesbians need friends too.

Of course, the major things that make our relationships more difficult are factors such as outright discrimination, lack of social support, denial of marriage rights, and inequality under the law, things that fall under the general umbrella of lesbian oppression. All are obstacles working against the longevity of lesbian relationships, demanding that we explore workable new alternatives.

Why I'm a Bad Feminist...

A writer friend said to be a good feminist you just have to love women and show it. Although she is a lesbian, she meant this in a platonic, political sense not in a literal one. And suddenly I realized, ah there's the rub, the defining problem, the friction between me and feminism. Do I love women? That seems like an overly broad question, very much like: Do I love children? or Do I love Jews or Muslims? Do I love African-Americans? Of course the answer to all these questions can only be, I love some of them, feel indifferent to most and despise a handful. It all depends.

When I first identified as a feminist and a lesbian, it was 1970. Women's style included big hair, high heels, an Mrs. degree and almost no job options. The question of breeding was big in a racial sense but in a reproductive sense having children was not viewed as whether or not, simply when. I found women attractive and, for the most part, fabulous. They/we were also more powerless then. I guess the romance of oppression held some validity for me. We had each other's backs, we were fighting for a big slice of what I had yet to recognize as a moldy pie.

I conveniently ignored the "moral majority" women who hated my very existence. I wrote the women who supported the Nazis, the pogroms, fascism in all its forms out of my exclusive distaff cadre. Did I love the wealthy women matrons or high-level managers or princesses who treated me like dirt? In theory, we were all one sisterhood, rising up together to build a new world. Beautiful as this sentiment may be, it was and is not realistic. The fact of a limited degree of shared oppression doth not a kindred soul make. Jews know this, we fight one another like cats and dogs. Thereby the expression, two Jews, three opinions.

Queers know this. When our movement was young, gay men thought nothing of not including lesbians in everything from books to classes to strategy meetings. It wasn't until the AIDS crisis in the eighties that gay men and lesbians came together to fight jointly for anything.

And, believe me, people from all other minority groups know this as well. The powers that be skillfully pit us against each like rats in a cage fighting for crumbs.

I love some individuals and not others. As a leftist politico, I love the ideal of a just and humane society where the basic needs of all are provided for. I love worker's protections and freedom from prejudice. Do I love all other leftists fighting for the same objective? Let's just say I respect our joint struggle as well as each individual's good intentions, if they seem to have them. The same goes for women. My love is not unconditional. I'm a demanding taskmaster, a loose canon, an unreliable narrator, a bad feminist.  

Queer/Straight Friendship: Overcoming Barriers

Friendship Involves Risk

I am active in the progressive, the lesbian, and the more generally LGBT communities, so I've spent a good deal of time pondering the risks and rewards of moving in the larger sphere versus those of staying within my own group.

Growing up in an almost exclusively Jewish environment, I was continually warned of the dangers of the outside world, yet I consciously chose to leave its security and insularity to take my chances with the outside world. As a lifelong out lesbian, my choice to reach out to a broader coalition comes from this same motivation.

But being out and actively participating in "straight" groups and organizations does take more effort and a thicker skin than that of just sticking with queer alliances. Coming out becomes a chore that must be done repeatedly and even when its not fraught with danger, it can still be exhausting. We still live in a world where orientation and gender identification are automatically assumed to go just one direction and gender outlaws are still outside the lines

Stereotyping happens automatically and it is negative even when the stereotypical qualities sound positive in and of themselves. Growing up I often heard the sentiment repeated that "Jews are smart." I tried, and sometimes successfully utilized, this stereotype to my advantage. As a lesbian who leans toward, what popular culture terms "mannish," I have also used this image presentation to lure employers to believe that looking more like a male gives me a better grasp of math, science and spacial interpretation. Did this deception help me land my first job as a drafting technician? I'll never really know but.my theory was just like the philosophy of Aikido, which works by turning the force that someone is coming at you against them.

However, this type of manipulation obscures individuals and serves to perpetuate inaccurate categorization. The only thing that call change these misperceptions is an interchange that includes honesty and self disclosure; in other words, friendship. And real friendship involves trust, and trust, persistence and work.
  
By far the most inhibiting factor in queer/straight friendship, after the initial period of breaking down stereotypes, is fear. It can be the fear of sexual attraction or sexual misunderstandings or simply the straight person's fearof being mistakenly perceived as gay. As long as homophobia has the potential to damage lives, it will retain the potential to instill great fear.

Some fears have validity in the world and are grounded in reality. Much the same as with racial identity, there are genuine differences between a person who has had to think of orientation almost continually at all times and in every aspect of their lives and someone who has never had to give it a second thought.

The key to overcoming any kind of prejudice is both risk as well as communication. The process of reaching out is never easy but, no matter what the outcome, it is well worth the trouble. Yes, we must fight for equal civil rights for everyone but we must also learn to personally cross the bridges that divide us. Because, until we make these journeys, there is no hope of building a genuine revolution.

Newsflash! Lesbians are Women

In this day and age the title of this post seems ridiculous to have to justify. Of course lesbians are women. You would think this bit of information is quite obvious but, reading the articles about women and their/our issues, this point gets lost. It would be impossible to itemize the deluge of writing about "women's issues," that pours out from keyboard across the country, which excludes queer women, placing us outside their purview.

As a current example, examine the sections of that ever-popular leftist online news source, The Huffington Post which, quite recently, added the section, "Gay Voices." They had a "Women" category but everybody knows that "women's issues" involve men: dating them, marrying them, making babies with them, looking attractive for them, conversing with them, you get my drift. Articles about females very rarely include any references to those of that gender who are queer. In "Gay Voices" finally we see some articles about lesbians specifically. We take it for granted that those could never be applicable to any kind of universal human condition. After all what could we possibly extrapolate from a bunch of queers about life in the USA?

Alternet approaches the situation a bit differently. Under their Rights category they have separate sections for Civil Liberties and Gender. Queer rights pieces can and do occupy either of these classifications. But when the article is specifically about "women" the issues of lesbians are not dealt with. Smaller online news sites don't have categories at all. But that decision, which, depending on how it's approached, can be viewed either as a glaring absence or a window onto a less discriminatory future, doesn't seem to help much with inclusivity.

The film industry has a similar take. In "Women's Films," that particular genre that feature a group of women, the writers will sometimes install a token dyke, much in the same way they insert a woman of color. But you can be assured that the lesbian's character development and personal issues will get short shrift compared to the other characters in these movies.

What the world has yet to come to terms with is that lesbians are women. Perhaps the fear of the queer that was instilled in my generation will be carried within each member until death. But, on the bright side, there are girls being born every minute. Hopefully they will grow up in a society with fewer limitations on all their decisions including those regarding gender.

Lesbian Bloggers vs Male Impostors

Will Submit DNA
Upon Request

In the bizarre irony that can only be real life non-fiction, a rash of heterosexual, male bloggers who are passing as lesbians, has materialized in cyberspace of late, casting doubt on genuine lesbian bloggers like, er, yours truly.

The blog, "Gay Girl in Damascus," supposed written by a Syrian lesbian, was exposed to be a fake when its creator, Tom McMaster a 40 year old white, male heterosexual, went too far and had his avatar undergo a political kidnapping so he could take a vacation in Istanbul free from the need to post.

To add insult to injury, LezGetReal an informative news blog turns out to be the creation of Bill Graber a 58 year old white, heterosexual male from Dayton Ohio, who under the fake identity of Paula Brooks, edited the site that claims to be, "A Gay Girl's View of the World." It's funny, I just assumed that the patronizing nature of that slogan represented a generational divide, not an impostor situation. You know how those young dykes don't seem to mind the use of words like: girl, lady and Mam, the way us old-school feminists do. God, Rachel Maddow uses them regularly!

A couple of other guys have been unmasked as well but the big question that remains, particularly for us actual lesbian bloggers is why?

We all know that the guys are kind of titillated by the whole lesbian thing but that doesn't explain it. And due to male, white, heterosexual privilege, most of them believe that they can do anything better than those of us who suffer under the weight of some kind of oppression. Oddly enough, that encompasses the belief that they can be better women than biological females. See the abominable movie "Tootsie," again if you don't believe that's true.

But posing as an online lesbian? I can only deduce that these boys have come to think that perhaps women do have something they covet, especially if they don't have to deal with the discrimination part of the equation. And lesbians occupy a market niche that still has more room than other niches, due, in part, to REAL oppression. Yes, we dykes, especially of my generation, are not as skilled at promoting ourselves and doing concrete, constructive things in the real world because we were raised to be women and to despise ourselves on many levels. It is a lot to overcome, so in the gap period when some of us struggle toward competence and self-acceptance, opportunist males see another opening in which to thrust their aspirations.

One other thing that, I bet, plays a role, is that lesbians don't have relationships with men. So, while they're posing as that queer gal, other women might begin corresponding with them. McMaster did have a romantic email relationship with a woman sympathetic to his character's plight. And being lesbian women eliminates the whole specter of male sexual activities of which they want no part.