Fear of a Queer Cousin

As the world continues to fall apart, I have taken a quick breather, a stint, with my partner showing the San Francisco Bay Area her cousin,  my cousin-in-law, Cindy. Now before I lay out the problem, I must say that Cindy is a sweet, open-hearted person. She just happens to share some of the same old prejudices of the rest of society. Coming from a university town in New England gives her a lot of experience dealing with queer folks, especially lesbians of every stripe. In spite of her immersion, she worries about issues like her hair length, afraid she might be mistaken for a disciple from our side.

We all attended a party for an LGBT organization in which I volunteer. No problem, Cindy was eager to go. At the gathering she socialized quite a bit. When she held forth in small groups she was certain to mention an ex-boyfriend within the first 60 seconds of the conversation. Many heterosexuals feel a need to do this. I start my watch when speaking to married women. Almost unfailingly within two minutes, hubby has reared his slightly balding head. It's a strange phenomenon, perhaps intricately linked to the hyper-sexualization of the queer, or maybe just plain out-and-out fear of being subjected to the kinds of prejudice and discrimination to which we have become accustomed. In this specific circumstance I  think that Cindy was a bit concerned that someone would come on to her. As a long-time dyke this fear both annoys and amazes me. I want to shake the folks who display it and ask,"Do you know how hard it is to actually pick up another woman?" The push-me, pull-you dance of lesbian dating is a courtship more nuanced and stylized than the mating dance of the flamingo.

Life for queers is definitely improving, although sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back. In my early days of political activity, when a heterosexual person dared to defend the rights of a non-heterosexual one, he or she would invariably begin the sentence with the phrase, I'm straight but...

I would have liked to respond, " I don't give a flying crap about your straight butt," there is a greater moral imperative here!

Medical Care for the Masses: A Traveling Circus

Oakland Free Clinic at the Coliseum

The Oakland Coliseum has been hosting a "free clinic" operation sponsored by Remote Area Medical Corps, a volunteer group that travels throughout the third world, the American south and now financially depressed cities such as Oakland California to provide basic medical care and services. Uninsured folks line up, often waiting through the night, to get free dental care, eyeglasses, cancer screenings, all types of care that is economically out of reach for people without health insurance for the price of one long, cold, sleepless night.

Every day at the library I help people who have very few teeth, who have eyeglasses precariously taped together, who can't even think of holding a job because they can't see or their physical appearance has become socially unacceptable. Even my city of San Francisco dental insurance, paid one hundred percent of the cost of a tooth extraction but will only pay 50% of a significantly larger amount (5,000 dollars) to replace that tooth with an implant. And that coverage, which had been previously non-existent, won't kick in until July.

The USA will not pay to keep their cogs in the capitalist machinery well oiled and in working order because they consider us entirely disposable. "There are more where you came from," is their ongoing theme. Michael Moore illustrated this with painful clarity in his movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story." We have become so inured to the familiar with the naked obscenity of purchasing life and health that we hardly notice it anymore.

     "If living were a thing that money could buy, you know the rich would live and the poor would die"... (All My Trials, Song of uncertain folk origin that sums it all up).

Healthcare and Being Queer

LGBT folks have more health problems as we age and more health problems in general. A dearth of studies have been done on our community but other studies on oppressed minorities have shown that "outsiders" have more mental and physical difficulties. Fear of rejection and lack of understanding and compassion deter LGBT folks from seeking medical care in the first place. Things as simple as the standard questions about birth control methods convey the assumption that everyone shares the same life experience. When you are ill and under a lot of stress, explaining your lifestyle  and worrying about how it will be received is the last thing you feel like doing.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experience. Nearly twenty years ago I was diagnosed with melanoma. At Clark's level four, it was a serious diagnosis where the specter of metastasis meant a life expectancy of about 18 months. I had to go to a lot of different doctors for a myriad of tests. My live-in partner accompanied me. One of the first things that we were asked was "Are you two sisters?" Based on our feelings we answered this question in different ways. Our responses are not important. What is important is that neither of us felt much like entering into a discussion about our orientation. We only wanted to deal with the situation at hand.

Another example came up more recently. I went to a follow-up appointment with my male gastroenterologist. He was a "good-looking." Berkeley guy of East Indian descent, someone who , judging by the publications in the waiting room, prided himself on his sensitivity around issue of race. He told me that in the hospital following the procedure he had explained a lot of things that I had zero memory of, due to the drug I was given. I asked him what happened in our interaction and he laughed and said, "It was really salacious."

I was floored and didn't know how to respond. Of course, in retrospect, I wish I'd said something like, "You mean that drug made me straight for a few minutes?" But unfortunately, I kept my comments to myself and left his office never to return.

The onslaught is perpetual and the real costs of being defined as an outsider are impossible to calculate. It is clear that raising consciousness among folks in the medical profession, studying the diseases of our community and our special needs and risk factors. And of course, making real healthcare available to all should be a top priority in the world we are trying to create to replace this woefully inadequate one.

Solidarity and New Attacks

Oakland Rally--April 4th 2011

Of course their was not much mainstream press coverage but some workers took to the streets yesterday, the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, to show solidarity with Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, states where workers rights are being butchered mercilessly. King who had arrived in Memphis in 1968 to support a strike of that city's sanitation workers. We must remember that a vast swath of states across the American South call themselves "right to work" states, Brave New World doublespeak that means the same as 'freedom is slavery," they are states where it is against the law to unionize.

Yes, we are up that proverbial creek full of fecal matter but we are beginning to fight back. And speaking of fecal matter, Dairyland Dictator Scott Walker is continuing to refuse to comply with judges orders and has said he will deduct a percentage of state worker's wages, in line with his illegal bill, on their April 21st paychecks. Holding fast to a his warped yet gilded memory of Ronald Reagan and the air traffic controllers, he is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge, even the not-so-just, justice system.

Paul Ryan

Meanwhile another meadow muffin, Republican, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Scott Walker's evil twin), is going hog wild with his proposal to transform Medicaid and Medicare into a for profit, private voucher system with the unspoken goal of ending healthcare for a large chunk of middle and working class and poor folks. His sights are also set on doing away with Social Security and other last remnants of safety nets the non-wealthy rely on.

In other news, will the government shut down on Friday? Only time will tell...

Can We Commandeer This Handbasket?

Happy Birthday Cesar Chavez. You must be restless in your grave today.

Ohio has just rammed through an anti-union bill even more drastic than Wisconsin's. The senate vote was along party line but Republican outnumber Democrats so it was a done deal. The clause that would put striking workers in jail was deleted. Ohioans are pinning their hopes on a November referendum to defeat the measure.

In Michigan governor Rick Snyder is now going after unemployment benefits, hoping to cut them down from 26 weeks to 20.

Governor Paul La Page of Maine is in the process of removing a mural depicting workers from the Labor Department wall.

And in Florida, Governor Rick Scott has proposed the drug testing of all public sector workers.

Alternet's Joshua Holland has uncovered a brutally, naked plan by Republicans to lay-off state and city employees to free up an educated segment of the work force for the private sector. This, they claim, will reduce "labor costs." Of course it will. By eliminating, decent, middle-class jobs and forcing us all to work for peanuts will reduce manufacturing costs and bring the US into line with other struggling third world nations.

And determined Dairyland Dictator Scott Walker has illegally published his new law against collective bargaining, against the instructions of a judge who will be hearing the case, and has tried to implement benefit and pension cuts by trimming their paychecks on his own. Today another judge put an end to his despotism.

So, the gloves are off and all pretense is gone. The choices have been narrowed down to the lowest common denominator. Either we fight back or we get steamrollered into oblivion. April 4th is a day of actions nationwide Check the site: http://www.we-r-1.org/ for updates on your area. Organizing is also beginning for a May 1st action in San Francisco in honor of International Workers Day. See you in the streets!

The Internet and Sleeping Dogs

Me in My Early Years Online

The problem with the online world is that is has presented us with a way to reconstitute the ghosts of the past. Yes, now we can reconnect with folks we may have gone to college with, known in high school or even grown up with as children. On its face(book), this doesn't seem like such a bad idea. I have both uncovered friends of long ago and been discovered by them. It's a heady reunion at first. We exchange excited emails, reminisce, catch-up. Then the weird part sets in. Email is not like snail mail. It's too fast and easy. My best friend in high school isn't necessarily someone I want to talk to every day, once a week, or even once a month. Why? Other than our past shared experiences, we no longer have anything in common.

This is probably more true for alternative folks than for traditional people. I'm not saying that my old junior high and high school friends weren't fun. We hung out, went to see our favorite bands, skipped school, shoplifted, did drugs together. Good times. But, even then there were red flag warnings letting me know that my life would be different from theirs. They were attracted to guys and I was not. They wanted marriage and children, the whole package. It made me gag. Around 1967, when I was in High School, I saw Gloria Steinem, for the first time ever, on the Phil Donohue Show. She spoke of a new movement called Women's Liberation. It was an aha moment! I thought, oh my god, I'm not alone. The lesbian thing hadn't really hit me yet, but I knew that the idea of subjugating my self, my ideas and personality, to a male was not going to work for me.I'd read all the stupid articles in Seventeen Magazine that talked about how you needed to pretend you were genuinely interested in your guy's football team in order to "catch" him. Why didn't he feign to share my interests as well? Questions like this weren't supposed to be asked.

When I told my high school friends about my feelings, my theories, my new ideas, they listened politely but they weren't driven by the same forces. I became Joan, their odd friend, the "women's libber." When we meet up via the internet they have husbands, ex-husbands, pastors, kids, grandkids, American flags waving from the porches of tidy houses. They might become uneasy when I write about my partner, my politics, my friends, even a book that I'm reading. We exist on different sides of the looking glass. I feel at a loss to explain myself because, the road less traveled is not well documented on television or in magazines.

I still care about my old friends and wish them all the best. But as people grow their paths diverge. I now have renewed respect for sleeping dogs of my history, having acquired a larger perspective regarding what lulled them into slumber in the first place. There are sound and valid reasons for leaving the past behind. That's a lesson I'm still learning.

100 Year Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Bodies of Some Who Jumped

 March 25, 2011 marks 100 years since 146 young immigrants, mostly girls and women of European-Jewish origin, jumped to their deaths or burned to death at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. All of the dead were ages 16-23. The factory occupied the eighth through tenth floors of the building, too high for the ladders of the fire-fighters to reach. Most of the dead worked on the ninth floor. A bookkeeper had warned the managers, who worked on the tenth floor, of the danger. They were able to escape via the roof. Those on the eighth floor could head down a stairway that proved to be inaccessible to those above. Women could not access the fire escape because they were locked in. The rationale for this was that it prevented workers from taking unnecessary breaks and pilfering materials!


Union Mourners

 As a result of the fire deaths, the factory owners were charged with manslaughter but the jury, which deliberated for less than two hours, found them not guilty. Twenty-three individual suits were filed by family members of the dead. In the end, the families were awarded just 75 dollars per life lost. After the incident, the Triangle Waist Company fell into financial decline and eventually locked its doors for good.

The movement to protect workers spread like wildfire after that disaster. Trade unions formed and membership in them grew to unprecedented levels. This union movement peaked during the 1940's, an era when strikes protesting working conditions closed down both factories and entire cities. In the US in 1945, 35.5% of workers were represented by unions. Since that time membership has steadily declined along with wages and protections.

Today working people are facing a concerted right-wing effort to drive the nail into the coffin of those hard-won rights and protections. Many, like the Triangle workers who gave their their lives. The sacrifice of so many must not be forgotten. It's a struggle as crucial and relevant today as it was 100 years ago.