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.

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.

Marriage is Not the Answer

With all the rose-colored musings on the wonders of marriage that have arrived with our newly acquired, still limited marriage rights, you’d think that all the problems of the LGBT community had just been solved with one stroke of a Supreme Court Fairy’s pen. But this flurry of excitement, while contagious, obscures the fact that the institution of marriage is woefully inadequate as a panacea to remedy even the challenges of our personal lives, not to mention our political ones.

I remember, in the seventies, being totally perplexed when the boyfriend of politician Harvey Milk committed suicide. Someone who was part of a couple offing themselves? How could that be possible? What does this mean? In my own fantasies the idea of finding a girlfriend would put all my existential angst to rest.

Marriage is part of a canned, lobotomized prescription for” happiness,” and in reality not much more than a massive advertising campaign. Americans tend to worship the philosophy of “rugged individualism.” Within this doctrine, all formulas for a productive life begin and end with you and yours. The acquisition of wealth is but another of these personal solutions. Reproduction is fundamental as well. Babies are just a commodity created by the family.

In this world view, poor, minority, female, queer babies all have their roles to play whether it is as a target for police, cashier for a convenience store, CEO for an internet giant, or doctor for the upper crust. Whatever their future role, babies keep their parents in line financially and help disseminate this “capitalist mystique.”

At my old librarian job, access to system-wide emails was strictly limited. Yet, we all received announcements of a co-workers marriage or birth of a child. Never did we get information about an employee who’d written and produced a play, an art gallery opening featuring someone’s work or a mountain successfully climbed. In fact, those accomplishments were seen as threatening, taking away from our “real” work in the service hierarchy of the library.

Why are we encouraged to retreat into a universe of marriage, babies and private life? The answer seems obvious. Together, questioning, participating, exploring greater community issues is too threatening to the powers that be. We might grow to see and understand things that would make the crumbs they throw us harder to accept, one that could jeopardize their dominance and hegemony.

It is absolutely necessary that queers have the civil right to marry, to adopt children, to join the military and share every single right that heterosexuals possess. But to elevate marriage to the highest, most noble fulfilling goal is to perpetrate a lie. Each of us is a member of a larger community, beyond the nuclear family and its rigid boundaries. We must make political sense of our shared circumstances and rise and fall together

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.

The War on Queers

More and more crazy pastors, ministers, even Louis Farrakhan are no longer satisfied with simple ostracism and condemnation of LGBTs and are now advocating internment in concentration camps and even the death penalty for non-gender conforming people in the USA. Like the war on women, the war on queers has been, of late, consumed with renewed vehemence and vigor. So much so that even prominent progressive theorists like Chris Hedges, are writing about that war.

It is a relatively new and welcome development to have heterosexuals write seriously about the Queer Struggle. One that signifies we are finally making it into the main stream of civil rights ideology. Bullying, suicide, gay parenting issues and all kinds of job discrimination cases are more in the news spotlight than ever before. They are not happening more often than before but are now receiving more critical attention.

Obama's "evolution" on same-sex marriage is part of the reason for both the push for civil rights and the backlash against it. But the biggest reason for this outbreak of culture war vituperation is the same one we saw in Germany in the thirties. The tanking economy along with rising prices (food, gas, sales tax) is a pressure-cooker for hatred of all sorts. When folks in desperation turn to their twisted notion God, he tends to tell them lies about who the real enemy is. The more "Christian" our country becomes, the more fear and hate its citizens seem to want to perpetrate.

As harassment of LGBT folks in small town and rural USA becomes more open and explicit, ordinary life becomes more difficult. Yes, there are places like New York City and San Francisco and other urban centers where things are relatively unchanged. As Reverend Otis Moss III does quite eloquently in this sermon, it is imperative that we expose and fight against what is happening to our people and get the word out that non-gender conforming and gay people are neither the enemy nor the ones who have brought our country to the brink of financial ruin.

Celebrating Life Outside the Box

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood...

Spending time in rural California really brought the differences between urban and country life into focus. While the quiet simplicity of country living can be somewhat of a draw for me, the conformity of many small town folks is not. Marriage and family plays a huge role in the lives of most mainstream Americans. I realize that this is a no-brainer for the majority of people out there but, as someone who has live outside of the heterosexual family structure since the death of my mother and grandparents in 1973, it always comes as a bit of a shock.

Here in the Bay Area it is easy to find people who live outside the nuclear family detonation radius. The world of books, museums, education, science, friendship beckons from all corners. But during my recent travels in the hinterlands, the subject of marriage and children was continually being raised by strangers along with the unspoken assumption that we all participate in these rituals.

A waitress in a cute restaurant in Truckee chatted about her fiancee and finally setting the date. A group of hikers went on about the wedding they had just attended. Children and husbands were always near the top of the conversations initiated by store clerks and shop owners. I understand that these were not deep, substantive relationships but, back home, all these folks seem to have a broader range of small talk topics. And this is all because one word: diversity. I now realize that if I want to try living in a small town, it had better be a very non-traditional one.

Marriage and the subsequent offspring it brings forth undeniably serve as a cornerstone of life on this planet. Even young LGBT folks have taken to this approach with a vengeance. But, in a time like ours, when consciousness seems to be reverting back to the nineteen fifties, it is imperative to remember that the road less traveled is lined with priceless scenery. The greatest contributions to art, music, literature and the cultural life of a people have been made by outsiders, people who do not live by a pre-programmed itinerary, but make up the rules as they go. And urban centers have always been havens for these dispossessed, places where "otherness" can be both supported and validated.

As the conservative among us celebrate marriage, families and the rearing of children, we should step back and think of the artist in her garrett, that weird guy drawing science fiction comics, that eccentric old woman with her lovely garden and too many cats and, of course, ourselves, in all our limitless variety, rejoicing in drama, beauty, tenderness, sadness, even anguish in the blank space that once held only emptiness and silence.