Barrie quite CONTRARY

2004-11-04T13:18:00.001-06:00

Post-election Blughhhh.

Obsessively watching the post-election analysis late last night on CNN, cheering myself up by sharing with Linnea my petty comments about the frightening toupees of presidential historians, I gravitated toward David Gergen's comment that he knows many who woke up Wednesday feeling alienated and despondent, as if a family member had died. (He is apparently one of few Republicans that actually listens to Democrats and Progressives.) Exactly. Does this mean that a little bit less than half of America now finally knows how it feels to be queered?

This is what I'm thinking about today, along with Arianna Huffington's comment that the Republicans have hijacked the notion of "values, " as if only right wingers have ethics/morals etc. The Left doesn't have values? Please.

I will add that there seems to be, once again, great confusion here between "values" and prejudice/phobia/hatred. I do sympathize with those people who feel their way of life is threatened. Change can hurt, especially if you are kept in ignorance about the history and empowerment of change. Those of you who caught the PBS series on the Broadway Musical last week may hear at this juncture the opening bars of Fiddler on the Roof. Tradition! :). Sorry to resort to musical theater here, but my point is that it's hardly new information that traditions change, grow, transform, and at best become more flexible. This is the story of EVERYTHING, and should be the bedrock of our national dialogue.

I resent that the Republican right wing have used queers in particular --look at all the fear whipped up with those anti-gay marriage amendments-- along with terrorists and the poor aborted fetuses--to obscure the Left's concrete and moral objection to endless war and corporate robbery and to inspire a fear-of-our-romantized-traditions-changing vote. When I am assaulted by those maps denoting all those states who voted for not just a ban on gay marriage, but in some cases a worse and even more hateful ban on domestic partnership benefits, I have never felt more queered.

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2004-10-12T01:36:00.000-05:00

100 Americas/Crossing the Wall of Fire

In the dim hours of early morning, folding bras and underwear into my suitcase, I’m up too late again, packing for a trip by the light of a predawn rerun of Paula Zahn Now. That’s when I catch a flash of filmmaker Michael Moore’s crooked baseball cap and sloppy smile, and I turn up the volume.

Linnea’s been asleep for hours, dozing off as usual with the bedroom TV still on. She’s propped up against pillows and her big square glasses are sliding down her nose. When I poke her she plucks the glasses off her face, puts them away in her bedside drawer, pushes the extra pillows to the floor and rolls over onto her side. All I can see is the back of her curly gray hair, and already she’s snoring.

Linnea’s booked our 7:00 a.m. cab, I’ve printed all my travel documents and gathered all the books and magazines I’ll be too tired to read on the plane, and I’m pretty sure I’ve packed plenty of underwear, which means more underpants than I’ll have any chance of wearing. Our two curly blond standard poodle crosses, the Blondes, would on any other night be eyeing me sneakily, waiting to see if I’ll kick them off the bed, but tonight they are already gone to the dog sitter. The only thing left for me to do is get a few hour’s sleep, but Michael Moore’s lopsided mug, punctuated by a bloody still from Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is more than I need to keep me up.

Are the two surprise movie hits of the last year, Fahrenheit 9/11 and the Passion of the Christ, the alternate faces, of “Two Americas”? Are there two Americas? Just two? Has everyone in this country, as Ms. Zahn seems to suggest, lined up for tickets to either an old fashioned lefty muckracking documentary or a right wing Christian blood pageant?

Dichotomies always make me think of the those theatrical comedy-tragedy masks—the laughing face vs. the crying face. Which America is which? Fahrenheit 9/11 is the biggest grossing American documentary of all time, and yet those promising tallies pale compared to that of The Passion of the Christ. Comedy tomorrow, tragedy tonight? This makes me feel a lot like Dorothy, outnumbered, cradling little Toto in her arms, engulfed by a fog of predatory flying monkeys.

CNN airs the high moral moments of both films—the crisp Washington politicians ducking Micheal Moore’s anti-war microphone vs. a close up of the muddy and agonized face of Jesus, and it’s hard not to be pulled in by the dichotomy. Michael Moore and Mel Gibson do each possess a certain poster child appeal—Moore the approachable Panda of the not-really-that-far-left, Gibson the mean but dapper monsignor of fringe Catholicism, out to eat the likes of Michael Moore, and me and our little dogs too. Are there two Americas? Paula, her blond shag slightly askew, that student-council-president-next-door look that plays so well on cable news, leans forward to question her panel of distinguished guests. A smiling and bearded Jared Bernstein—he looks to me like the actor who played the nice liberal Dad on Family Ties—of the Economic Policy Institute responds blandly. I think there may be hundreds of Americas’ he says with a mild shrug.

YES I shout into the yellow TV fog from somewhere in the middle of my America. Linnea grumbles in her sleep and I’m missing the familiar thwap thwap of the Blondes’ tails. HUNDREDS at LEAST, if not THOUSANDs, MILLIONs! Neither Moore nor Gibson are even close enough to the lunatic edge of the spectrum to serve as bookends.

Still, if I have to narrow my Americas down to just two, I know which one is mine. But then what separates my America from the other? A scar? A fence? A wall of fire?

***

And then Linnea and I really do travel through a wall of fire. The mountains between Reno Nevada and Mammoth Lakes California are aflame this smoky July afternoon, and we are on the road that seems to head straight into the heart of hell. We’d seen the headlines that morning in Reno. Carson City is on fire. Isn’t Carson City some old Wild West town? I’m surprised to hear it still exists, then don’t think of it again until we’re on the freeway, following my parent’s rental car in a squeaky clean rental of our own, when my Mom buzzes my cell phone. “Don’t miss the exit,” she yells.

“What exit Mom.” I roll my eyes at Linnea who is behind the wheel, eyes hidden by her dark sunglasses. I can’t tell if my family is getting on her nerves. The bone dry Reno air has us both parched and giddy, and my eyes sting from the smoke in the casino where we played the penny slots the night before. My Mom has been calling me all morning, worried we won’t find our rendezvous spot in the strip mall at the edge of town, worried we’ll get lost on the flat game board of Reno.

“You have to exit toward Carson City.” She’s shouting. My mother does not admit she is losing her hearing. For the past year, whenever I’ve been in her presence, I find myself leaning over her frame that looks skinny compared to mine, shouting to make sure she hears. My mother slimmed down when she got older, and I fattened up, and I’ve always been taller than her. Does she squint back at me because she can’t hear, or because she can’t figure out where this big blond shouting daughter came from?

“Carson City?” I shout back. ”We can’t go that way Mom. Didn’t you see the paper? Carson City is on fire!”

But we do go through Carson City. We have to. It’s the only road between Reno and Mammoth Lakes, the Calfornia ski resort hosting the jazz festival where we are all headed. The road is open and so we drive.

I’ve never before ridden a vehicle into a wall of fire, and if we weren’t trying to keep up with my parents I might ask Linnea to turn around. Or maybe not, because now I am mesmerized by the coal black smoke and gusts of fire. Live fire is nothing like fire on TV. Once I’m home another writer will tell me that fire makes its own weather, the force of the inferno creating tornadic winds and even lightening, the meaning of the word firestorm. I will have no trouble believing her. A black wind shakes and shoves our car. When I roll down the window the air stinks like a trailer packed with chain smokers. Why don’t they close the road? Why don’t they close the road? I have no idea if I am asking out loud.

On our right we pass a pricey housing development, wood luxury homes scattered up the dry mountainside. How many are on fire? Officials are scattered up the hills, directing residents’ cars out onto the highway. I want to scream out, are you OK? Did you remember to take the dog? But it’s no use; my voice will be drowned out by the helicopters lunging overheard, barrels of water swaying from their bellies like shipwreck victims.

We watch and we reel and the road takes us around a bend, until our view of the fire is blocked by a mountain. Only the smell remains. Helicopters chop to and fro. Emergency vehicles and tanker trucks full of water speed by on the other side of the highway. The flames are behind us. We have crossed over.

***

On the other side of the fire we find the America we usually go out of our way to avoid.

This is the jazz festival where Linnea and I have agreed to meet my folks, my little brother, my aunt and uncle, and my parents’ old friends from back in Chicago. Usually I remember that trips involving family aren’t the same thing as vacations, at least not in the vacate-from-your-cares-and-woes sense of the word. Still, before we left home I’d fantasized about this trip as if Linnea and I would be here alone, vacating on the grass under mountain stars, nodding to dissonant saxophones performing jazz impressions of “There’s a Place for Us.”

When I mention this to Linnea now she says “didn’t you look at the Web site?” I guess not. If I had I might have known we’d be sitting upright in folding chairs, younger by 25 years than almost anyone around us, listening to cornet harmonies while mad old Dixieland ladies in Bermuda short sets and Nike sandals snake up and around neat rows of chairs, performing a step they all know, something between the bunny hop and the old soft shoe, bopping and bobbing under tasseled red parasols. Here is a form of American cultural expression previously unknown to me; my own fault I suppose from all those years of boycotting Disney theme parks.

I nudge my brother sitting next to me. He meets my parents here every summer. “Have you NOTICED we are the youngest ones here?” He looks slowly over his shoulder at me. His face is long and thoughtful, like our middle brother’s face, and our father’s face. I wonder if he is actually thinking about my question, or if this pensive look is simply an expression the men in my family have inherited from one another. “Oh yeah, I should’ve mentioned that,” he says and shrugs. I guess he’s happy enough to just listen to the music.

I might be able to resist making fun of the parasol ladies if so many weren’t trussed up like Independence Day firecrackers. Everywhere I look I see people wearing the American flag. “Stop looking for flags,” Linnea hisses into my left ear, when I point out yet another. “You keep seeing them because you’re looking for them,” she says. “No no, I’m not”, I insist. “Look yourself.” Flag draped dance floors. Flag t-shirts. Flag earrings. Flag pins. Even a flag hair scrunchy, wide and round as a patriotic cabbage. Then I spot the ultimate flag lady in her blue-sequined beret, star earrings, star spangled vest. She is a one-woman 4th of July tap dance school recital.

My Dad loves Dixieland music. When I complain about this festival—I ask him where’s the Bebop, where’s the Kind of Blue and the West Coast Cool— he tells me I’m not giving Dixieland a chance. My dad looks like my brothers, but even more so, his long profile a cross between the composer Leonard Bernstein and the 1970s football player Joe Namath. Dad has always looked like a guy who can both run for the touchdown and reflect on the experience later. Ever since I was a kid he’s told me I sit around on my butt too much, and he’s been able to, with a single look, make me feel bad about stating an opinion without first thinking it through.

So I lean back in my chair and think he’s probably right about Dixieland. I’m too stuck on an image of pale guys in matching wide brimmed straw hats and red suspenders. I’m sure I don’t know enough about traditional jazz to fairly criticize. Still when I look at some of the people here, so decked out in flag paraphernalia, I think the draw of this festival is not the jazz so much as the traditional, and too much traditional brings on that Dorothy feeling again. I’m sure all political conservatives don’t hate me in particular, but I automatically expect them to, and I move to cover my head against a deluge of monkeys in flag-patterned boxers, which makes it hard to actually hear the music.

Dad tells me the flag people at this festival are here from the exclusive suburbs of LA. I assume he means to include my Mom’s sister and her husband. Auntie Luc and Uncle Joe are dressed tastefully in khaki pants and summery shirts, but we all know that inside they are flag people too. They’ve lived in various developments off the freeways of outer LA, a few minutes drive from Disneyland, ever since they left Chicago, so long ago their boys, my cousins, babies when they moved West, are all now married adults.

Auntie Luc is my living proof that all Republicans don’t hate me. She’s been my favorite aunt since she was a teenager living in the back room of my grandparents’ house, a few blocks from the Projects where my Mom’s whole family used to live. Back in the 1960s Auntie Luc was the closest thing I’d ever seen to downtown gorgeous, with false eyelashes, a blond cloud of hair and the kind of legs that guys then called great pins. These days she’s just as skinny as she always was, and still blond too. I wonder if she’s had work done on her face, or if its just her California organic juice diet that keeps her skin so wrinkle free.

Auntie Luc hugs me and whimpers “Oh, Oh, Oh” the first time she finds me in the condo where we are all living together this weekend. She’s the Aunt who sends me odd items she finds at estate sales: pillow cases with embroidered poodles; Elvis Presley nesting dolls. Five years ago we laughed together at the lunch following my grandmother’s funeral when we discovered we both carried organic tea bags in our purses. Now I show her the antiques Linnea and I bought in Reno, and Auntie Luc oohs and ahs over the ceramic poodle business card holder. When Auntie Luc croons “OOH Barrie should have been MY daughter” I notice my mother draw in her lips and scrunch up her face, and for the first time it occurs to me that maybe my Mom isn’t so crazy about the way I’ve always seemed to prefer her little sister.

That’s when Mom tells Auntie Luc that she and my Dad saw Fahrenheit 9/11. Auntie Luc’s response is to shake her head so hard it looks like she has bees in her ears. She walks away from Mom, muttering across the condo kitchen words like “immoral” and “unAmerican,” while my mother, who I don’t think can hear what her sister is saying, chases behind, taunting, “My Republican Sister, My Republican sister,” in that nya nya voice I haven’t heard since third grade. And yet I think my Mom would dance with the flag ladies herself, if she could get away with it without my Dad, and me, making fun of her.

On the second day of the jazz festival Dad tells Linnea a rumor he’s heard about the black mountain peaks visible just above town. The cluster of peaks called the Minarets hover 3000 feet overhead, looking slick and forbidding. A guy my Dad chatted with at the scenic overlook told him the Hollywood studio that made the Wizard of Oz used these Minarets for the panorama shots of the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle. I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz recently, and I’m pretty sure the peaks huddled around the witch’s castle in the movie are painted scenery. Still, when I drive up to the overlook myself I see what my Dad saw, and just the metaphorical comparison is enough to leave me feeling surrounded.

So now that I’ve imagined the minarets as a witch’s landscape, I can’t help letting my flag prejudice run amok. I imagine those festival flag ladies doing evil’s bidding, dancing snake-like down the dry green ski slopes. The parasol ladies are a red-tasseled stream—winding down the mountain slopes to a cornet version of the witches guards’ song. Oh WEEE oh. EYYYY oh. Then the brassy finale, OHHH eeee WAHHHHH.

But to be fair, lots of people here show no evidence of a flag fetish, and a few of the bands at this festival aren’t Dixieland at all. Take the retro boogie woogie band with the beehive wearing pianist and the horn player able to work the trombone slide with her foot. The women in Sue Palmer’s Motel Swing Orchestra dress ironically the way Auntie Luc, in the 1960s, dressed in earnest. Motel Swing is the bridge band, a big hit with everyone at the festival, bringing together the parasol ladies, and my Dad, and Auntie Luc and even Linnea and me, despite the blurb printed in the program warning audiences not to be AFRAID when they notice three of the musicians in the band are WOMEN.

So like Dixieland music, maybe I’m not giving this festival a chance. Aside from the frowning old guy with the checked pants and striped shirt who smells so badly of cigarette smoke Linnea and I have to change our seat, everyone we chat with at the festival is perfectly sweet. They are niece-loving, dog-loving people who like fast jazzy music enough drive across the California desert in mid-July, just to dance on an outdoor flag-draped floor. If any of them notice the lesbians in their midst, the ones who don’t simply assume my mannish Linnea is a curiously approachable middle-aged man, they are polite enough not to stare.

But who else but fanatical Republicans would wear flag clothes after the 4th of July? Is it the thin mountain air, the remnants of the Carson City fire, or the political winds causing me to breath so heavy in this place? Should I find out for sure? Should I pass around a survey? What would I ask? Do you think George Bush is a likable man? Did you stand in line to see The Passion of the Christ? Do you think Micheal Moore is the anti-Christ? Are you afraid of women who play the trombone? How many pieces of flag clothing do you own, not counting halter tops or macrame or anything left over from the 1960s made out of an actual flag? Are any one of your nieces a lesbian and if so do you love her because of, despite of, or irregardless of her left-leaning lesbianism? Do you believe willful denial is a form of evil? Do you find my questions unAmerican?

Auntie Luc is the one who starts calling the Motel Swing Orchestra “Barrie’s Band” and the rest of the family follows suit, even though Linnea and I never mention how sure we are that at least two of the band members are what folks call— back where we come from— “friends of Dorothy”, by which we mean of course our kind of women.

I hear my relatives chattering back and forth across the condo. “I really liked Barrie’s band. Did you think Barrie’s band was good?” My Dad’s old Chicago friend, the male half of a round and relaxed couple who’ve been together ever since my parents introduced them half a century ago, makes a special point to thank me for introducing him to both Sue Palmer’s music and to Linnea, both of whom he adores. I think he genuinely wants us to know how happy he is to have the chance mingle with me and my lesbians. Our sort must be hard to come by in his Americas. Everyone else in the condo loves Barrie’s band too, except my mother, who can’t seem to decide whether to blame me for the strangeness of Sue Palmer’s mid-century bowling shirts and curtain-print dresses or blame Sue Palmer for the strangeness of me.

I’m old enough to know that this fighting with Mom will never bring us closer. We will not bubble to a breaking point of crisis, will not erupt into tears and fall into a long hug. We will just keep up this low-grade bickering until one of us reaches across the divide. Still, I can’t keep myself from egging her on. At the cornet orchestra concert I lean over to yell into her right ear. WHERE’s YOUR PARASOL MOM. She narrows her eyes at me before she answers. “I must have left it in the car.” Around us the star spangled parasol ladies pump their umbrellas. Some of the parasols are full-sized, red and tasseled. Some of them are tiny and made of paper, not too much larger than a tropical drink umbrella. I have to admit, the ladies look like they’re having fun, and I feel guilty then that I’m not trying harder on this vacation to get along with my mother.

But that doesn’t stop me from leaning over to Linnea to whisper, “What would a family who lost their home to an American bomb think if they saw film footage of this flag dancing?” I am hoping Linnea will respond in kind, make a crack that will make me laugh, something like “American Patriot Monkeys?” But Linnea is nicer than me, in public at least. She won’t admit until later that she is thinking the same thing. “Remember how upset Americans were when we saw the tape of Palestinians dancing in the street after September 11th?” she’ll say, which is exactly what I am thinking now as the flag ladies graze past, hot footing in tandem, smiling vacantly as if they all hear the same voice of Oz the Great and Powerful, directing each twist and turn of their feet.

But look at me, rubbing shoulders with Linnea but too scared of the flag people to reach over and hold her hand. If there really are two Americas I must be part of problem, sitting on my butt content to cower and judge. I don’t try hard enough to talk to my mother. I want Auntie Luc to keep sending me vintage poodles so I avoid talking to her about God or politics, but otherwise I’m more of a family muckracker than peacemaker. Later on I will look up the word muckracker. The root goes back more than a century, to an image from the Christian novel Pilgrim’s Progress of a man too busy stirring up the muck to notice the angel just above his head, offering to trade him his manure stick for a celestial crown. But what good would a crown be to me now? I need a water bucket. I need a wardrobe brigade. I need a celestial bridge.

The Minarets resound with another brassy WHAHHHH. Old lady jazz hands flutter up the mountainside between the music and the castle where I see the flag of country that doesn’t include most of my Americas. I imagine the ladies see big blustering anti-American Americans like me who aren’t nice enough to our mothers. We are attending two entirely different jazz festivals. But Barrie’s band is having a good time at both sides of the party, so why can’t Barrie? I’m not helping matters with my bad attitude.

Maybe I ought to let the flag dancers be no more than who they think they are, blissed out lady patriots who just want to have fun. They might not mean to shoo away the ash of the hundred thousand Americas on my side of the fire, or then again maybe they do. The point is it may not matter if we are righteous or pissed off or simply afraid of the flying monkeys caught in our hair; someone has to breach the separation or nothing will ever really change, which means Dorothy and her little dog might never get back to Kansas.

But I can’t put down my muck stirring stick. I can only sit on my butt and watch, mesmerized by the hot red divide.

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2004-06-03T14:07:00.000-05:00

I am off to LA this weekend, because my 4th grade niece is about to read in her very first poetry reading. The reading is scheduled for 8:20 Friday. Yes, that's morning. (OK--there is something her teacher does not understand about the culture of poetry readings:).) I am attending because Delphi begged my brother to get me to come. She knows I am writer, and we have been working on a mystery story together over the past year, but lately it's poetry that seems to have her imagination. So of course, I am flying out tonight so I can be there.

When my sister-in-law told the teacher I was coming the teacher insisted that I too should read a poem. The murky distinctions between poetry and creative nonfiction aside—it has after all been while since I've written an actual POEM—I doubt this teacher wants me to read about Lesbian Husbands to her 4th grade class. So, I wrote a poem. It's the first thing I wrote in my new studio space—rented for teaching but also to give me more clear space for my work. So here goes. (Linnea says the kids are sure to laugh at the word derriere. But I wonder, do kids still know that word? We'll see.)

Delphi Miyoshi Borich
sees Catalina

Delphi can see a green
shimmy of future
from the play ground
of school. It’s the island.
Catalina. Hey you it says.
A wink. A come hither
wave. Cmon with me.
The smoky shore beckons
like a 1960s pinup
girl’s smile over
one shoulder. Cmon.
Here.

Is this what the immigrant
sees?

When Delphi’s American Aunt
was a girl in Chicago, Catalina
was a swimsuit. A cha cha word. Hip
switch and shake of a gold flecked
derriere. Like that green
gold edge off the San Pedro
port. A promise.

Delphi is named for a destination
in Greece where travelers
come to squint into promises. Delphi
squints, past the boats that unload goods
from Germany, from India from her mother’s
Japan. Morning fog rises like steam
from the mugicha on her mother’s
stove. Human backs unloading
the boats are first generation, second
generation. Delphi is the first
American on her Japan side, four
generations ashore on her Croatia
side. If her great great grandfather,
the no-count copper-town immigrant
miner had come to San Pedro
instead, as Croats before him
did, would he have squinted out
at Catalina too?

Look at the land cha cha
with horizon. C’mon, your lungs
are cleaner here. Do the cha cha with me
in the blue mist. Live longer. Is this
what Delphi sees? Her great grandfathers’
future lost down a blood orange
mine pit. Her own future shimmy
shimmy green and waiting.

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2004-05-08T00:37:00.000-05:00

From Head to Flit

Today’s entry is written in honor of this week in South Minneapolis, which is the
30th Anniversary of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater’s Mayday Celebration and the 19th Anniversary of Patrick’s Cabaret. I read this piece in the Friday night anniversary cabaret, one of 19 artists performing this weekend to raise money and celebrate the cabaret's 19 years. Our theme was “Taking Risks”.

I like to think of the word cabaret as a verb. The verb cabaret is tightrope walking on a wind-shredded clothesline, a book that hangs in the air like steam, young Liza Minnelli on the stage of the Kit Kat Club, her arms open to the spotlights, one mascara muddy tear running down her cheek. Come, Let’s cabaret.

The first time I cabaret-ed with Patrick was, they tell me, 1987. ( I don’t actually remember.) I was in my late 20s, it was the big hair 80s and if you had asked me then I would have said to take risks was to write about sex. Lesbian sex. It seemed risky enough then to just say the words. Words like Lezzzbeeeeaaaaan. Words that start with C and rhyme with Flit. Punt. Gum. Once upon a time I felt as if someone would call the police if I simply said those words aloud, but the latest incarnation of the cabaret is across the alley from the police station, and another show about lesbian gum? Ho Hum.

Is it risky to admit that those words don’t sound so risky anymore? Risk means to leap forth in spite of possible loss or injury, in the hope of good outcome. Risk can be more than a little crazy, like old age Liza Minnelli herself, trying out some new stuff, hoping for a good outcome, even if VH1 ends up canceling the show. The real risk is not just to say but to do, to keep on Flitting and Punting and Gumming, no matter how many constitutional amendments they pass telling us we aren’t allowed.

Last Sunday the annual Mayday parade cabaret-ed down Bloomington Avenue—as always blowzy, smart, and schmaltzy as a well-loved lounge act married to a trapeze circus.

It was a partly cloudy Mayday, hot when the sun pushed through, blustery when the clouds closed in. Linnea and I used to head out to Bloomington Avenue early. The parade’s at 1:00— better leave by 12:30. Better leave by Noon. Don’t wanna risk missing it. Seventeen years later we sit at our kitchen table with friends drinking tea and espresso until 1:00. 1:15. Don't want to risk having to stand around and wait. We live just three short blocks from the end of the route and don't need a Skycam to know the parade hasn’t even left its Franklin Avenue take off yet. By 1:30 half our group finally joins the throngs. My cell phone is in my pocket. We'll call the others when we hear it coming, but the scruffy boy hanging from a shaky tree branch over our heads reports there's no sign of it yet.

Mayday might also be a verb. Majestic puppets roil and wave, held up by minions in paper plaster masks, broad strokes of human faces in pain, in joy. Feathered stilt walkers step over clown-faced marching bands. Agiprop artists mimic our worst presidents as unnamed sculptures my friend calls “pinatas of mass destruction” dance around bare-bellied adolescents with pumped up petals in their hair, while hordes of flowers and bugs with children inside skitter between their knees. Linnea and I mayday to celebrate one of our wedding anniversaries. We have many. Mayday has become an anniversary minor since we flew to Vegas for our Elvis wedding. But before that time we made up dozens of little anniversaries. Who says we get to have only one?

The first year Linnea and I were together was one of sunnier Maydays, the first Sunday of the year we came home from the park with sunburned cheeks. We were young, in our 20s. Linnea was in graduate school. I was a proudly underemployed poet. This was so long ago there was still an ozone layer and we never considered sunscreen, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web and we didn't have any credit card debt. I don't remember what I was wearing, but it was probably tight and tie-dyed and I was likely wearing silly shoes so my feet probably hurt. I don't remember what Linnea wore either, but I'm sure it was sensible. White gym socks. Tennis shoes. Linnea can dress up like an snappy Italian gangster when she wants to, and now that she has a GOOD job she leaves the house every morning looking the dashing gentleman in her Marshall Fields men's department suits, but she has never been one to wear her wingtips to the park.

That first Mayday together we scrambled up one of the shady slopes of Powderhorn Park and huddled together, knee to knee. I slid off the big malachite ring she had given me and slipped a matching ring off her bigger, squarer finger and I shook them in my hand like dice, blew on them like Lady Luck. We slipped my ring on her pinky, her ring on my forefinger, for just a minute or two, then we took our rings back and kissed, right there outside. It was the first and riskiest of our many weddings, not because we were touching outdoors but because it was the first time we promised out loud to be WITH each other. Hearts and Punts.

Since that time we go to the parade on Mayday with just ourselves, or we caravan. The first year we brought Linnea's redhead Italian mother she whooped and tittered and took pictures and shouted Oh My God whenever the craggy face of a 12-foot-tall puppet swayed her way. The year we brought our nieces and nephew from the exurbs of Wisconsin a contingent of masked actors were draped in mourning gray, hunched and crawling down Bloomington Avenue—the Spring just before we all got used to being back in a perpetual state of war. It was chilly that year, no sun at all and our 10-and-12-year-old nieces faces were attentive and unreadable. Later we couldn't get them to say what they learned about war at school. To mayday is to tell it loud. Mayday! Mayday! War is grief!

This year, far too late to find a seat, I lean against a wooden fence along the parade route sidewalk with two of our friends. Behind us two milky and tricycle-sized dogs, looking like they are made entirely of muscle, whine and strain on their leashes whenever a hippie dippy Mayday dog leaps past. I ask the old man with the white whiskered chin sitting behind the fence with the dogs if I am blocking his view. He growls and shrugs as if to say he don’t need to see this damn stupid parade anyway. It will be a few more minutes until I get it that he’s drunk. As we wait for the puppets, the bow of the tree above us creaks as the boy shouts “I see SOMETHING, I don’t know WHAT” and one friend, who I’ve known now for only a couple years, remarks that he'd once walked in this parade. The tree creaks and time accordions. I probably once watched that same friend swaying under the weight of some puppet, not knowing I would know him some day.

The boy in the tree sways and gasps. He opens his mouth to the air and swallows. He climbs down and back up the trunk like a French acrobat. He leans forward across the road, holding on by his fingertips and toes, shouting back down to his mothers. He’s laughing and also risking his neck, just to see if the puppets are coming. I worry about the boy. My other friend worries about a dog pulling another boy past on a skateboard and we both think we hear the drums. The bristle-chinned man behind us shouts out that his straining dog is a PIT BULL, but not really, because he’s AKC— just as the boy shouts out from above. “It’s the police cars. I see them. It’s really coming.” I call Linnea and she’s here in a minute with a slim neighbor dressed in layers of t-shirts and denim, because it’s one of these days that’s hot then cold then hot again. It’s 2:00 but the parade hasn’t arrived.

Later we will talk about the cleverness of the kids cricket costumes—or are they grasshoppers—hinged back legs that seemed to hop as they walked, and we compare notes about the drunk in the yard behind who turned out to be some kind of Nazi. Did he really shout out “WHITE POWER” at Mayday? We heard him call his dog Himmler, right? And did everyone notice the guy’s quiet son, smooth and muscled as a pit bull himself, his mouth a twisted smirk?

In the street before us the puppets of Spring are shrouded in gauzy white cloth. “What’s the point, What’s the point,” Himmler’s papa shouts. The theme of the parade is LEAP this year. Children break away from the curve, get in line to leap through the wheeled hoops, and Himmler’s papa is at it again. “The point dammit. What’s the point.” His family doesn’t bother to answer him so finally our slim friend mutters loudly over her shoulder, “For god’s sake. The theme is LEAP,” loud enough for Papa Himmler to hear. The boy in the undulating tree moans and careens. He LOVES this parade. I think again that to mayday is to be that boy in the tree along with Sally Bowles at the Kit Kat with a little bit of Tammy Fay whipped in, caberet-ing from head to flit, bare and dangerous on the stage while Nazis outside are congregating. Children whip like flags from the trees and chirp down the Avenue in crooked cricket costumes. Linnea takes my hand. We are still touching outside, no matter how many warmongers with mean dogs line up along route. Thank you. Thank you. I wave madly from the treetop. Fat tears smear down my cabaret painted cheeks. I love you all. No matter the outcome.
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2004-04-17T16:43:00.000-05:00

More Like Iceland?

As I write now it is the waning of the Spring 2004 queer marriage debate season in the U. S of A (which I am beginning to look as one of those cyclical sports seasons. Have the queers moved up in the standings this year? Or have the conservatives stolen the trophy again? The strategic embrace of civil disobedience is surely some kind of glorious mid-season hoop shot.) Here in my neighborhood, the Minnesota version of the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages and civil unions did not get past the Senate, as so many hoped and expected, but other sneaky attempts are still brewing and activists are saying we are not safe until the legislative session ends in May.

Meanwhile Linnea and I celebrated our anniversary in Iceland where civil partnerships have been the law since 1996, and where a current move to open "marriage" to both mixed and same-sex couples is controversial, but does not seem to evoke the constitution-banging bile and hatred this issue does in the United States. How good it was to be away from this country for a few days.

For one thing the news, even CNN, is so differently-focused in Europe. The megalomaniac posturing of the American Empire is included in the day's round-up, but the United States is not sitting at the center. I've been keenly aware of this every time I've been lucky enough to travel overseas, and I always find it such a relief. When I was in Poland during the US bombing of Kosovo the news actually conveyed how it might feel to be a resident of a region under fire, rather than always the ones riding safely above—always the bombers, never the bombed, the only American position of my generation until 9-11. Of course every place and every people desire to look out at the world from their own point of view. Obviously most places, if they have any autonomy at all, put themselves at the center of their own news. But what's noticeable when watching CNN in Europe—EVEN CNN, which is hardly a value-free lens—is simply the absence of that big smug American face. The official American point of view is so grabby and narcissistic that it always necessarily impacts the tone as well as the view of the news. When the gaze shifts, so does the feel, the temperature, the skin.

Linnea and I had an ongoing refrain we kept alive between ourselves, during our walks and bus rides around Iceland's capital city of Reykyavik. Look, the weather has shifted, we kept saying to each other, and only once or twice did we mean that the misty rain clouds were clearing. We said it first the evening we stepped out onto the street from one of the city's small neighborhood geothermal spas. One of the reasons Iceland is such a clean and clear landscape—aside from the psychic clarity that comes of being a country that has never invaded another country—is that it sits atop a geothermal kettle. Coming from the toxic mill regions of Chicago as I do it's hard to believe in air that really is this clear, but indeed, the breathing in easy in Iceland.

The whole island is volcanic. The ride into the city from the airport is through a vast flat terrain of moss covered lava and the spas and pools are geothermically heated. Spotty sheets of steam rise from the swimming pools and the citizens—from children who come to the pools as part of their school day to older folks otherwise missing from the usual trajectories of the weekend tourist—gather to chat in any one one of the string of public hot pots calibrated to temperatures ranging from cool soup to lobster boil. Icelanders have the longest life expectancy on the planet; I can't help but believe their daily soaks have something to do with this.

Linnea and my skin turned red from the heat of the hot pots, and we warmed up enough to sit on an outdoor bench in our wet swimsuits even though the air temperature never rose above the mid-forties. Imagine a culture where a daily hot (and chlorine-free) soak is a normal and shared community activity. Not the prize awarded to the biggest rat in the race. Not the spoils of war hidden behind a suburban backyard fortress. Simply a daily public gathering where teenage students and grandfathers and middle-aged civil servants and the stray tourist or two can stop and be still and talk to strangers and companions and allow their shared internal weather to change. I suppose the Ys and gyms in American cities approximate this experience, but these are self-selecting and dependent on membership, not to mention polluted by the necessity of chlorination, and if they reflect a shared cultural value its more likely our obsession on body image then that of a long shared community sigh.

So what Linnea and I meant when we said the weather had changed was that our skin was now warmer to the touch, yes, and the walk back to our room was an easy wandering, but also that we were smiling together in a benign country whose landscapes were dotted with public sculpture and whose people were arguing, yes, over the future of some of their natural habitat, but who seem to have little institutionalized drive to push their faces into the screen of some other people's daily conversation. Yes our weather had changed. For a few days, at least.

I know that the world is more complex, twisted, and impacted than a March afternoon in an Island nation that runs on the power of their own volcano. The people of Iceland have a high standard of living, universal health care, a comparatively homogenous citizenry and enough natural beauty to force the worst cynic to lay back and relax for a spell. In many ways it's ridiculous to compare it to anyplace else. And yet when I think of the banks, the breathtaking landscapes, and the diverse human riches of the United States, not to mention our great tradition of individual freedom and cultural reinvention, I can't help but note that we could be anything at all. Why not more like Iceland?

__
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2004-03-31T12:58:00.000-06:00

HOW DOES MY GARDEN GROW?

In this periodic and casual Blog column I mean to write from the shadow—what visual artists' call Negative Space.

I found the following definition of "Negative Space" on San Francisco art educator's Dede Tisone-Bartels' Web site.* "In a painting or drawing, the space around the object is just as important as the object itself. A good artist strives for a balance between the positive (the object) space and the negative (background) space around it. The object of this lesson is to work with the surrounding space...Often by working from the negative spaces rather than focusing on the object, you end up with a much more accurate painting."

I'm not a painter, so I have no idea how au courant this description is, but as a writer I am attracted to the metaphor. This writing is my attempt to focus on the SPACE SURROUNDING my ongoing book project, and write back at American life in general.

I name this project "Barrie quite CONTRARY" because my plans here are to explore the territories and points of view of daily life as a Contrary American. By this I mean Anti-American, perhaps, but also I mean that I write absolutely as an American. I might even dare say, due to my location in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a Middle American—if contrary lefty lesbians can carry such a term Still I choose, despite overwhelming evidence of late, to insist that "America" can and must include me and mine, on our own terms.

Also, when I was a girl in Chicago, my Uncles—bumbling guys with car grease on their fingers and no children of their own—could only think of one thing to say to their sassy little niece, the first child of their only college-educated sister. Whenever they saw me they would repeat and repeat the first line of that old nursery rhyme, but insert my name. Barrie Barrie Quite Contrary, how does your garden grow?

I know now that I am an adult—and an Auntie—that they were just teasing me, and that some nieces and nephews are harder to talk to than others, so we resort to repeating sing-songs, to amuse ourselves and fill the silence. But then, because alas, I always have been a kid who thinks too much, I thought they were really ASKING me, how DOES my garden grow? The question FRUSTRATED me. WHAT garden? (We lived in a brown brick bungalow with a small fenced-in yard, just off fume-hazed, truck-rumbling Halsted Avenue. WHAT garden?) The question made me want to cry because I didn't know the answer.

One of those Uncles, my mother's youngest brother, died last year. He was inactive and had diabetes and spent most of his adult life stretched out under some engine or other. He got sick suddenly, at his job—while working under a school bus—when something burst in his brain, then he died a day or so later on the operating table, from a heart attack. I never did figure out, while he was alive, how to talk to him, although Linnea (unsurprisingly, as such is her gift) usually did a decent job chatting him up. My Uncle told me once that he figured I'd moved to Minnesota because I was allowed to do things up here that people couldn't do in Chicago. I laughed at the time, aware that he referred to my love life, but now I see that in some ways he was right—not so much about Chicago vs. Minneapolis of course, but rather about why someone like me runs away from her family, and how often my attempts to return and talk have been lost in translation. Since his death Linnea drives his meticulously maintained Blazer, which is, perhaps, the clearest conversation we've ever had.

Now 40 years after so commonly hearing my Uncles imploring me to tell them how my garden grows, I still hear their rhymes beating a familiar circle in my brain. Barrie Barrie quite contrary how DOES your garden grow? It's grows well, thank you, in the smaller beds closer to my sweet home, despite these mean Republican-run times of so little positive political sun for anyone who lives contrary to the center. But beyond the sunnier bubbles of my own making I don't believe the garden is growing at all. No, this is not what my Uncles want to hear me say. They don't want me to answer at all; I am after all a girl, and a deviant who claims words—such as lesbian—that I am sure have never even passed their lips. But they asked me a question and I still feel compelled to answer it, and answer it, and answer it.

We've been hearing so much these days about the severe cultural divide in America. I agree that we seem to be split down the middle. I live on the side caught in perpetual shade. No, the garden is not growing well. The bus drivers are on strike here and the anti-public transportation governor does not care to negotiate. The news is crowded with bombing after bombing. Cultural conservatives are so repulsed and offended by the notion of queer marriage that they are lining up to rewrite us out of the constitution. Linnea and I were shocked last night to find ourselves agreeing that the Reagan Era felt benign compared to this one. The Garden is not growing.

I am going to try to express what it looks like from this side. At least the sun is not in my eyes.

Peace, bjb

[*NEGATIVE SPACE:
http://home.att.net/~tisone/lesson15negative.htm]

--
If you would like to send me comments, please go to my Web site, www.barriejeanborich.net, and use the GUEST BOOK feature.

2004-03-31T11:37:00.000-06:00

THE EXPLANATION:

As promised, I am returning to my BLOG project, in a new space and form. Here on the Web I hope to allow myself to actually BLOG, meaning to let this space be more open notebook than polished essay. It's not that I mean to bore you, dear reader, but rather that I aim here for more of a casual chat/conversation that is not always so preciously rehearsed. (But then those of you who know me are probably aware that I am a revision queen who rarely lets anyone but my beloved/first reader Linnea know what I am really up to. Our strengths are our weaknesses, right? So we'll see how I do.)

I aim here to offer an open rehearsal, to challenge a few of my weaknesses as an artist—preciousness, time management, a tendency to drown in the on-page/off-page details, fear of being wrong—while at the same time promising to edit at least enough to avoid wasting any reader's time. I WILL NOT post every little thing I write—I PROMISE—but rather just the sorts of things that I feel could use some public air to help them grow.

I am working on adding a comment feature, but it may be awhile. (I'm not posting my e-mail address because this is the Web and I already have a terrible SPAM problem.) In the meantime the best way to find me, short of simply using the e-mail address you already have, is to go to my Web site and post to the GUEST BOOK.

Click on the first ARCHIVE (right hand side of your sceen) to find my initial 7-day Wedding Bell Blues Project. Watch for more of the NEW to be posted weekly/every ten days or so. Perhaps more. Sometimes less.

Thank you for reading.

xo Barrie

2004-03-24T11:07:00.000-06:00

WEDDING BELL BLUES #1-7
seven days of fun...

WHAT FOLLOWS ARE THE DAILY ENTRIES OF A 7-DAY E-MAIL ESSAY PROJECT (posted last to first) which led me to this BLOG, written on the occasion of my lover's and my celebration of 17 years together and 6 years (non-legally) wed. I intend to continue, weekly or so, on contrary American topics well beyond that of gay marriage.

More to come, soon (ish).
--Barrie Jean Borich
Minneapolis, MN

For comments: Please visit to my Web site, www.barriejeanborich.net, and send me mail via my GUEST BOOK.

WEDDING BELL BLUES #7
10 March 2004
[HAPPY ANNIVERSARY DARLING]

Disobedience, Choice, and Liberation

Today I am thinking about the images, words, and ideas that make up the
atmosphere Linnea and I wake up into everyday, and in particular on this
morning six years after our own renegade wedding.

Yesterday as I drove deep into the Minnesota prairie to teach my Tuesday
afternoon class at St. Olaf, I was listening to an Audible.com subscription
program "In Bed with Susie Bright." Most of you probably know that Susie
Bright, formerly known as Susy Sexpert, is a writer and commentator on the
subject of sexuality. I love this program because it's frank and funny and
welcoming to all and because Susie holds nothing back. Yesterday Susie was
talking as usual about how she feels we live best in our bodies when given
the opportunity to enjoy liberation and choice, and I started to think about
those two words--liberation--choice--and what they mean to me as an American
lesbian who has chosen to live 17 of my 44 years with one mannish woman
who liberates ("to set free from socially imposed constraints" ) me on a
daily basis.

Some feminists, perhaps even the famously polyfidelitous Susie Bright, would
say that marriage as a concept is the opposite of liberation. One of you
sent me an e-mail earlier this week reminding me that that the tradition of
marriage comes directly out of property laws in which a man possesses a
woman— well let me just quote the eloquent Martha Roth here— "who will
service his sexual needs and insure the continuity of his DNA in exchange
for which he will feed, clothe and house her." I thank Martha for these
thoughts, even as I don't actually need reminding. The spectre of the
marriage tradition, as it is practiced by some, is always draped behind and
around this debate, which is why so many lesbians struggle with it. Even one
of our most famous "family-man" sorts of lesbians, Melissa Etheridge, has
been quoted as saying she has trouble getting the word "wife" out of her
mouth.

But I don't think words must be wedded to their roots, or at least not to
their roots alone. I think language twists and transforms with time and use.
Old definitions may not vanish or cease to inform. Perhaps we can look at
the old meanings as warnings of what we might slip back into, if we stop
choosing and start sliding. But I also think that balances shift, and that
connotation matters.

As I've said before, in the process of writing _My Lesbian Husband_ I came
to terms with using the word marriage to describe my relationship with
Linnea, mainly because of the word's translation value. No other word worked
to describe to our families who we are to each other, and in the end that
mattered to us more, personally, than our need to stand with our backs to
dominant culture tradition. And I keep noticing—as other lesbian writers I
respect and love tell their stories of wrestling with these words and
suddenly finding themselves in San Francisco kissing their own brides of
disobedience—that it can be, as it was with us, the use of the word marriage
that leads our families and colleagues and neighbors to finally offer
focused congratulations, and yes, spoken love to what we have created
between ourselves. Perhaps some people come from families of visionary
thinkers who don't need such help to understand. My family, with its roots
deeply imbedded in the south side of Chicago white ethnic prejudices and
paradigms, appreciated a leg up.

There is something liberating about being told you are loved. It's
physically freeing. It gives you room to grow and grasp and continue to
create. It gives you the space to breathe in your own body, and thus, after
years of social dis-association allows you to feel the tips of your fingers
again.

This is why I am so infuriated that this country, the mother America who is
supposed to be welcoming her tired and huddled masses— and OK, I know that
is mostly BS, but am I really wrong to want it to be the truth?—that this
supposedly open society of ours keeps giving her hard unyielding back to
those of us who might like to share in the liberation that comes of full
access to shared language and shared culture.

Maybe we don't need the state to back us up on this. After all, a country is
not really a mother, we don't need its permission to exist, and another
definition of to liberate is to steal. Linnea and have existed quite well
together, thank you, without a bit of sanction from the state. As I've said,
we could certainly use some of the benefits the state offers those they
class (thank you Juliet) as more worthy than we are, but we can and do live
outside of those protections. But the thing is —despite these mean times
(thank you Lucia) I can't help but want to believe in the progression of
America into the country it says it is. I want to believe in social
revolution and transformation and waking up to a new day and all of that
glop. Why shouldn't I want that? Why shouldn't we all want that? Isn't that
finally what it's supposed to mean be an American, in the best, most
liberated sense of the word? And at the risk of sounding like Sally Fields,
is it wrong to want to be one of the loved? But no, let me rephrase...is it
wrong to want to be the child of a country capable of such love? It is,
after all, the country I want to remodel here, not myself, at least not in
this regard, and not the breathtaking invention of queer culture.

And so on Linnea and my anniversary I am thinking of love and sex and play
and work, and soaking in the mineral springs of another country. By tomorrow
morning we will be in Iceland and perhaps this will all look very small from
that view. In the meantime I must repeat the obvious, which is that the
atmosphere of my country lately feels more poisonous than sustaining— the
queer hating constitutional amendment frenzy just a tiny part of it—and yet
Linnea and I keep choosing each other and in doing so we keep freeing each
other from the constraints that might tell us our choice is not worthy of
the love of America.

Bjb 10 March 2003
[I will revive this forum, in some weekly form or another, upon our return.
Thanks for reading. ]

“Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long.” Leonard Cohen

_
Wedding Bell Blues #6
Tuesday 9 March
Barrie Jean Borich (and collaborators)

Tonight's offering is a compilation of interesting tidbits and impassioned ruminations from people who have written me over the past few days.

First, I want to comment on some of the news that showed up in today's mailbox. In Seattle, well-known sex columnist Dan Savage and a lesbian colleague brought their beloveds to city hall to apply for marriage licenses, and were denied. THEN, Mr. Savage inquired if he could apply for a license to marry his lesbian colleague even though "he didn't really like her." That license, of course, was approved. And so tell me again about how we can't redefine the definition of marriage because it is a sacred tradition?

Also, a friend wrote to tell me that the fall guy of my comments in yesterday's missive, Anderson Cooper, is gay and out. A quick Google search confirms this, along with the interesting information that he is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, was the subject, as a babe, of a 1969 Diane Arbus portrait, is the object of obsession of one internet citizen who hopes he will agree to father her child, and is the former host of the TV Reality show "The Mole"—one of those programs I include in my constitutional amendment against things that gross me out. This led Linnea and I to wonder this evening if an out gay man might push the gross-out angle because he feels intimately aware of how it feels to be the target of revulsion? Or does the fact that he's gay in no way exempt him from being a snot? No conclusions yet, but one commenter did write to tell me she has affection for Anderson because she knows his mother, which leaves me predisposed to at least TRY to watch him next with the benefit of the doubt of an benevolent Auntie.

And finally, speaking of Aunties, I include below an eloquent letter from Linnea and my "nephew" Nik, who as some of you are aware has undergone a few transformations since first meeting Auntie Barrie and Uncle Linnea at the Mountain Dew infused age of 16. Nik (who is now 30) addresses an aspect of the queer wedding blitz that I have been thinking about but have yet to adequately address, namely —is it right to even call this a "same-sex" wedding debate? These proposed constitutional amendments, Dubya's as well as the state version approved today by a Minnesota Congressional Committee—insist that marriage must be reserved for one man and one woman. What does that mean in these days of increasingly fluid gender identity, especially in a state in which the human rights amendment includes the protection of transgender citizens?

Read on for Nik's words (with apologies for certain obvious font edits designed to make sure your e-mail filters don't bump us.)

Tomorrow, 10 March, is Linnea and my Vegas wedding anniversary, which I will commemorate here with the last essay of my week- long shock and spew.

bjb March 2004

***
Hey Barrie -

I just wanted to let you know that I have appreciated your thoughts on
queer marriage. While you may know, historically I tend to opt out on
political issues all together, I have found myself in moments of utter rage
with this one. This is interesting, as technically the issue will never
affect me directly. I mean, I intend to complete my transition with an
amended birth certificate which will allow me to marry,
heterosexually-ever-after. So, I think to myself... Why does this issue
really get my goat? (impacts to friends and loved ones aside)

While I am not as well spoken and politically savvy as you are in this
arena, I think it is my trans-perspective (if you will) that it is creating
both a disconnect from the issue yet a fury of anger as I witness all
that is going on.

You know me, I live a relatively straight life. Doing the
hetero-corporate-white-collar thing by day, queer-fetish
happy-martini-in-one-hand, cigar-in-the-other-type-guy (with strong lesbian
roots) by night. So I sat down here to try and get out the duality of this
life of mine and try to identify what it is that's really bugging me here. I
thought you might be interested in my thoughts, as I try to sort them out.

A scenario that keeps coming to my mind is a trans-couple I know of. Two ftm
dudes who are doing the trasnfag thing. They chose to amend only one birth
certificate so to that they could legally marry as "man" and "wife" even
though they are living and loving as man and man. And I wonder how this
would bode to those who are so against same-sex‚ marriage? Especially those
who sour at the mere thought of two men (or women) kissing. What about two
men—who used to be women—who are now married as man and wife, but
f*ck*ng like man and man? (Even I sometimes struggle getting my brain around
it.) Yet, at the end of the day, they have all the rights that same bio-sex
couples long for. Their rights granted by a system that was created to
support the traditional man/woman union demonstrating it's own out
datedness by its lack of recognition that bio-sex can be altered thus
throwing a who stick into the tradition of such union.

So I guess my question is— is this really about same-sex‚ marriage? Or is
it really about queer marriage? Sex can be amended. While being trans opens
the opportunity for me personally to fall into the man/wife perspective
(much to the delight of those who support transsexuals because they are
assimilating), it also allows others to bend it. Is this really about two
people of the same bio-sex having equal civil rights as two of opposite
bio-sex? Or is it about destroying this concept that a socially recognized
man and a socially recognized woman are the only valid union to be legally
recognized? I personally can think of plenty of trans/queer combinations
that would be able to legally marry as man/women (amended or not). Perhaps
those are the couples who should be standing on the steps of city halls
around the nation demonstrating to the country that this is a **queer**
civil rights issue, not just simply the same-bio-sex unions. We all deserve
the right to engage in a legal union with another, regardless of not only
sex, but gender and sexuality as well. And I hate to say it, but same
bio-sex couples are pretty vanilla in the grand spectrum of queer... yet
it's those couples who are so radically opposed. Interesting, I think.

Guess that's why it's bugging me. Thanks for reading. I would love to hear
your thoughts.

-NIK

[MY thoughts, btw, are that Nik has hit it smartly on the nose.:). --bjb]

__
Wedding Bell Blues #5
Monday 9 March
Barrie Jean Borich

[In the true spirit of the BLOG, this one is a little rough folks:)].

Linnea and I have been having an argument over the last few weeks over CNN’s
Anderson Cooper and the politics of revulsion. I think Anderson exhibits the
tiniest bit of squeamishness over the subject of LGBT sexuality. Linnea’s
thinks he’s playing devil’s advocate, wearing a persona appropriate to his
role as the Post-9/11-CNN-cutting-edge-30-something anchor.

I base my opinion on what seemed to me his obvious discomfort year or so
back, when Rosie O’Donnell came out. He interviewed Rosie on the morning
show and I swear to dog (I can’t say g-o-d after yesterdays’ comments,
right?) I saw him smirk, and he couldn’t even manage to say the word
lesbian.

But Linnea and my most recent conversation about Anderson has to do with his
coverage the week the Mayor of San Francisco started handing out those
renegade marriage licenses. I’m not even sure if it was the Mayor he was
interviewing at the moment that cut me, or one of the lawyers, or one of the
required family value twerps that the news shows always include on these
panels. It’s not the interviewee I can’t shake, but Anderson’s question,
which he repeated several times. I paraphrase here, but it was something
along the lines of, “But what do you say to the people who react with
REVULSION when they see these same-sex couples kissing. Because some people
find this REPULSIVE. They are REPULSED at the sight of men kissing men, and
women kissing women.”

Linnea says, well he’s right. Some people are repulsed by the thought of
what same-sex lovers do together, no matter if, aside from a bit of
anatomical variation, it is not really much different that what the majority
of heterosexuals who are doing it do.

But the revulsion of a few has long been the problem of many. My feeling is
that by saying it, again and again, Anderson Cooper (whose own sexual
preference is unknown to me) validated that revulsion, even if he is not
personally repulsed (or that twin opposite, which is illicitly turned on.)
Linnea thinks (if I understand her correctly) Anderson was just getting to
the real crux of the issue, bringing the messy truth out into open.

I honestly don’t have a clue which of us is right here, but this leads me to
think about how socially legitimate it is, still, for people to express
revulsion, or even refer to revulsion at the sight of something no steamier
than a same-sex courthouse kiss, and that out of this revulsion comes
permission to propose such things as constitutional amendments to keep us
illegal. To be repulsed is to cause disgust, queasiness, perhaps even public
vomiting. Isn’t this what Laura Bush means when she states she is “shocked”
but the new wave of same-sex marriages?

Linnea always brings up Quentin Crisp at this point in the conversation, who
said (and I paraphrase again, very likely badly) that they don’t hate US,
just what we DO. Well alright then. If they can legislate against us for
what we do (and very often do better than them, I suspect) then I would also
like to propose a few amendments myself, one for every little thing that
repulses me—no matter how personal or unsupportable, no matter if mentioned
in the holy texts of any faith.

And so I propose the following acts or items, or any person acting with
intent to commit support or preserve any of the following acts or items
shall be hereby prohibited:

Paris Hilton (with or without her video);
Public vomiting;
Semi-automatic machine guns;
TV shows where American celebrities eat worms;
White people who claim they were Native Americans “in a past life”;
The religious right and its minions;
Racist remarks made by my relatives;
School systems that allow American kids to graduate without learning to
read;
Ted Nugent;
Pro Football (Sorry Linnea, but this is MY amendment);
Sports mascots based on images of American Indians;
Fat jokes;
MacDonalds;
Viagra spam;
TV shows where people vote each other off the island;
War in Iraq;
President Bush and all his minions;
Fictional Elections;
Governor Pawlenty and his minions (most notably the ones who insist on
destroying public transportation);
Steak tartar;
Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance costume (excluding the costume
malfunction which does not bother me);
Junk faxes;
Patchouli (Sorry—this puts me outside much of the lesbian fray, but it’s
always smelled to me like public vomiting);
Cleaning the bathroom;
Clothing decorated with American Flags;
People who neglect their dogs;
Gay republicans;
Republican Lesbians (all three of them);
Whatever Dubya and Laura do when they do it;
Web sites that sell term papers to college students;
DOMA;
Supposedly progressive politicians who voted for DOMA.

So what do you think Anderson Cooper. Are you as REPULSED as I am by all
those Republican Pachouli-wearing lesbians, feeding steak tartar to their
dogs as they send out unsolicited Viagra faxes and channel surf between the
Redskins game and the new Paris Hilton Video? There oughta be a law.

__
Wedding Bell Blues #4
Sunday 6 March 2004
Barrie Jean Borich

Today I am thinking that the debate over same-sex marriage in the media is all wrong. Reading through the letters in this morning's Minneapolis Star Tribune, the arguments are all more of the same tired conversation. "Gays should not marry because the Bible says gays should not marry" vs. "our relationships are just as sacred as theirs".

While some LGBT love matches MIGHT be sacred—whatever the word sacred means to any one individual— in some cases the opposite may just as well be true, meaning our relationships may be as much an abomination as theirs. It is HUMAN relationship we are talking about here. Real humans still really do clash and scratch and kiss and bite and make love and create family in any way they know how, just we've always done, and some days that's kind of sacred and some days it looks more like the devil's handiwork. I don't think the PR cover of simply "sanctifying" our relationships will help our cause in the long run as I also seriously doubt that unquestioning sanctification of heterosexual marriages has much chance of helping those relationships survive, when and if they ought to survive. GLBT lives do require the dignity that comes of being assumed to be full citizens, but I don't understand why, in terms of the fight for civil marriage, this should be anything but a secular discussion. What will help LGBT relationships in the long run is to let us at our civil rights, so we can get on with the mess of living as Americans are supposed to be able to live, in diverse dignity and choice.

Why do we keep dragging this discussion back to God. The news coming from San Francisco and Portland and even the unruly streets of Chicago is all about CIVIL marriage. Concrete civil rights are at stake. For instance—I lost my health insurance this Fall when my long-time beloved Linnea left the University to take a good job in the state community college system. As I am a freelance writer and teacher with pre-existing health conditions, this situation put us at risk. It's WRONG that in this rich and bomb-happy country anyone's basic health care needs are linked to either employment or marital status, but the fact is they are not only linked but soldered. The reason Linnea lost domestic partner benefits when she became a state employee is because the state of Minnesota, in blatant defiance of our state civil rights laws, TOOK THIS BENEFIT AWAY from same-sex domestic partners.

It took months of ridiculous paper shuffling delays, but I did manage to replace my health insurance with an expensive and high-deductible self-employed plan. Unlike the countless Americans suffering from the country's health care non-system, I am no longer at quite the risk I was when uninsured this Fall. And don't get me wrong—I know I am a lucky duck, both because I enjoy the health benefits of a thriving 17+ year old relationship and because I manage to make enough money to pay too much for my health insurance. But I am also pissed, not so much because of what I don't have but rather because of WHY I don't have it. I am no longer insured at anywhere near the rate I was during the tiny oasis of time when I so charmingly experienced what it feels like to have equal citizen benefits. And now, because all I can get is major medical coverage, its cost me 80 bucks just to see my doctor last month about a sinus infection. I'm not dying here, just taking note of the difference in my status and (the symptoms of the sinus infection aside) I can taste it in my mouth.

If I were legally (rather than what, metaphorically?) married to Linnea, who has a job with benefits, I wouldn't have to cough up 80-out-of-pocket bucks plus the price of meds to treat a sinus infection. Linnea and I don't fit through that narrow doorway of what is legally considered family —which I contend is not a sacred portal, but rather a legal loophole—so I have to either cough up the dough, add to charge card debt or avoid the doctor altogether. I'm lucky enough right now to be able pay, but I haven't always, and lots of people aren't. I have straight friends who felt perfectly married without legal sanction, but made it legal for no other reason than one of them needed access to health care. Linnea and I don't have that choice. But whether the best solution to this blatant unfairness is same-sex marriage or flexible domestic partnership law or a tear-down of American health care, my point today is simply that this is a civil injustice issue, and if smart people work at it the problem can be solved. Why mix it up with all this highly unprovable hoo-ha about God.

We are supposed to be a country that welcomes all faiths and even faithlessness. And surely most people must have received the e-mails by now listing all the OTHER things the Bible might be interpreted to say, and yet we have the sense to avoid imbedding into American law. For instance, here's one that came to me in an e-mail last week: "A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed" (Deut22:13-21). While there may be some Americans who believe such things (and I pray they are not my neighbors) such Bible-based belief is hardly a good reason to meddle with the constitution.

The Constitution of the United States already promises us that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This means, in part, that as a country we may not insist that a religious-based life has more rights than a secular-based life. Therefore, using the interpretation of one subgroup's holy texts to deny the goodies of civil marriage to same-sex couples is deeply contrary to the American way. So is the proposed (vile and hateful) constitutional amendment to limit civil marriage to the increasingly suspect categories of one "man" and one "woman."

So to those who insist on continually dragging this public discussion about rights of citizenship discussion into the private realm of belief or disbelief in the Bible, what I say is this. Please— could you just get a room?

--

WEDDING BELL BLUES #3

I have many friends and acquaintances in the queer world who have long felt the issue of same-sex marriage is a red herring, an assimilationist back peddle, a dance with the conservative devil. I understand this view, up to a point. I used to feel much the same.

During the focused five years I spent wrestling with this question, in the form of my book My Lesbian Husband (which is less a soapbox argument for queer marriage than it is an attempt to understand how the long-time lesbian couple fits and does not fit into the American tableau of family and community ritual) I asked the same question many times. Are we married? Do Linnea and I wish to associate our long and thriving relationship with a dominant culture that has always excluded us?

I continue to think this is a good question, but not just for queers. It’s a question all conscious and progressive Americans should ask and keep asking about every one of our institutions. What is the definition of family? What are the rights and demands of the workplace? Why don’t we all have access to quality health care? How can we keep our society alive and pliable and alert to how all of the people are living their lives? Whatever the issue, we ought to be constantly asking who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside, and finally and most importantly who is excluded and why. For me this line of questioning has brought me to the conclusion that America is not something I must fight to enter, or choose to stay outside of, but rather that the definition of American must be recast to include me and mine along with a great many others still left out beyond the borders.

Which is finally the reason I have come to the position that same-sex couples MUST have access to that elusive marriage license. NOT because “fidelity” is a family or conservative value that queers must embrace in order to be finally accepted into the fold. The license to marry is not necessarily any more of a conservative issue than the license to drive. The right wing does not, as HomoCons such as Andrew Sullivan claim, own the notion of “fidelity” just as heterosexuals don’t own (as much as they are encouraged to believe they do) the gaseous and ever-shifting reality of American culture. Culture is by nature an evolving thing defined not from above but rather by the lives lived inside its climate. And fidelity—which means, simply, loyalty and allegiance—is a concept that takes many forms, not all of which look much like the traditional values version of the “marriage.”

The reason same-sex couples are excluded from the choice (not the obligation, or even the expectation but—read my lips—the choice) to enter into a legal civil marriage is the plain and unambiguous hatred and revulsion directed toward our self-defined fidelity to our homes, families, and abiding love for each other. These are loves that can be, in many cases, models of flexibility, creativity and communication, 100 times more groundbreaking than the old-packaged-as new headlines from the entertainment world announcing that some gay men are good at grooming and wardrobe selection and some lesbians have figured out how to make babies without sleeping with men.

The fight for same-sex marriage is not a red herring, is not a merely personal issue, and is not an acquiescence to the Republican agenda. It has sprung full born onto the steps of the San Francisco courthouse simply because one brave elected official—at what could still turn out to be a great risk to his political career—chose to defy the authority of which he is part by assuming LGBT people are among those citizens whose rights are protected by the state constitution. Whether any particular queer couple SHOULD marry is clearly a personal decision, and of course, some should not, for the same reasons some straight couples should not. But the new wave of matrimony as a form of civil disobedience is an historic moment in the history of GLBT liberation not because of what we should or should not choose, but rather because of WHY we are still forbidden the choice.

We are forbidden the marriage license because we are still publicly hated, and therefore intentionally shut out. We still are so hated by some sectors of this society that a sitting president has actually promised to amend the constitution rather then entertain the possibility of supporting our civil rights. We are still so hated that stagnant and vile threads of the dominant culture allow even our supposedly good-hearted Democratic presidential frontrunners to feel free to announce “I just don’t believe in it.” We will continue to be hated until all our public institutions are sufficiently examined, deconstructed, re-visioned, and finally made anew with the intent to include rather than exclude. It’s not that we aren’t already here, already “married,” already American. Rather it’s that we aren’t yet fully seen as such; we aren’t yet visible in the picture. That simple and profound piece of paper from the city hall is a concrete and radical step toward reclaiming America for what and who we really are.

Barrie Jean Borich
5 March 2004

--

Wedding Bell Blues #2

Dear Editor: [cc RT Rybak, Peter McLaughlin, Gary Schiff]

I am struck this morning by the curious beauty of news accounts from
Chicago, queer protesters crowding the streets to demand, of all things, a
marriage license. But even though the practical issues on the table—health,
bereavement and inheritance benefits as well as the simple inalienable
right to visit a sick beloved in the hospital—ought to be basic civil
rights, I don’t really believe “marriage” itself is the motivating point
here, any more than I believe all these new marriages will automatically
have any more longevity than spur-of-the-moment straight marriages would be
likely to have. Yet I do believe the wedding-related events of the past few
weeks are earth-shakingly significant, for the simple reason that access to
civil marriage is a rights issue, a visibility issue, a statement against
hate and a signifier of whether or not GLBT citizens really do, according to
our city and state, have a right to exist.

A couple like myself and my beloved may not, for any emotional or family
reasons, need to make another more “legal” wedding then the one we created
for ourselves in Las Vegas, six years ago this week, and we have no
questions, after more than 17 years, about the validity of the lives we
spend together. Still, we tear up when we see the news coverage of couples
lined up to marry in San Francisco, Portland, and upstate New York to speak
loud the love that once dared not speak its name, and we laugh in delight at
the coverage of GLBT protesters taking to streets of my home city of
Chicago to demand same-sex weddings NOW. I love these images because they
make my people visible in new, surprising, and deliciously diverse ways. I
think about my lesbian marriage every day in the most mundane and
un-fabulous manner, because I have the normal human need to be aware of my
own life. Now, all of sudden, my college freshmen composition students,
straight or queer, want to write papers on same-sex marriage, and straight
colleagues I pass in the halls of the many schools where I teach as an
adjunct are whispering in excitement over an issue which they don’t NEED to
be thinking about, but ARE thinking about. Suddenly my life is better woven
into the fabric of my communities, and this feels like positive change.

Which is why I fervently hope Minneapolis or Hennepin County or any
institution of local government who gets there first finds a way to disobey
the little laws, as the Mayors of other cities have done, and pay heed to a
higher law—not only our state law promising GLBT citizens equal rights, but
the greater law demanding we simply do the right thing. Let’s join the
beauteous swell making my GLBT people, and all of your relationships to us,
truly visible for the first time in American history. This could turn out
to be a very nice anniversary present.

Sincerely,
Barrie Jean Borich
Author and Teacher

___
Wedding Bell Blues #1

Dear Mayor Rybak: [cc: Gary Schiff Minneapolis Star and Tribune]

They've been doing it for weeks now in San Francisco. Every day a new city
is doing it. Today they started doing it in Portland.

When will Minneapolis jump in? When will you do what your San Francisco
brother has done? Let's have lesbian and gay marriage HERE and NOW. This
city NEEDS some sort of display of our progressive identity amidst a state
that has turned against us. Every since Wellstone's death there has been a
pall hanging over what was once one of the most progressive locales in the
country. Meanwhile the national Democratic party front runners don't have
the guts to stand up fully and without apology for basic GLBT civil rights,
even while the President they hope to defeat proposes one of most hateful
constitutional amendments in American history. Even our dear Wellstone was
a wimp on this issue.

Progressive politicians such as yourself have walked in our parades for
years now, and have accepted our handshakes and good will in engage for what
you tell us is your support. So now here's your chance to walk the walk.
Let's get Minneapolis on the map while this issue is still hot and
happening.

I am a writer who has written a book on living in a long-term lesbian
"marriage." The book is about my beloved's and my long conversation about
whether we want to word "marriage" to describe the life we have built
together. (The book is called _My Lesbian Husband_ and is coming in the
mail to you.) We finally decided that we DID want to call ourselves
"married" because it was the only way to make our commitment visible in a
society, and within families, incapable of understanding who we are to each
other without the weight of common and shared societal language--such as the
word "marriage." Six years ago we were married in Las Vegas, without the
license. Lately we've talked about going to San Fransciso get married
again....but we've already had the experience of traveling to our wedding.
It would mean so much more to be able to do it here, casually and
intimately, in the city that we claim as our home.

Do this and we will be happy to participate with you, loudly and vocally.
My beloved, Linnea Stenson, is the Grand Marshall of this year's Twin Cities
Pride and would love to use some of the attention of her office to publicize
our cities vocal embrace of GLBT civil rights, as well the reawakening of
Minneapolis to the energy and activism of the pre-Republican coup years.

How about March 10th? We've been together for 17+ years, but March 10 is our
six year wedding anniversary (and the day before we hop on a plane to
Iceland for our anniversary trip.) Give us something to celebrate.

So do it Mayor Rybak. Lift the conservative pall. Join the wedding party.
Please.

Sincerely,

Barrie Jean Borich and Linnea Stenson