Category: GLBT

Waiting.

I should be good at it by now.  I have decades of experience.

The time floats on, those minutes fly by

You wanna go, but just you try, guy

You wanna see her

You wanna see her, oh yeah

So you wait, you wait and wait

Girl don’t come

In my case, “you want to be her” were the words in my ears…for years and years and years.  But the words have often been slightly wrong.

So the waiting goes on.

Keep waiting.  Our hopes and dreams will be fulfilled…some day.

Someday soon.  Just you wait.

She arose silently from her bed and walked to the bathroom.  She stopped to stare at herself in the mirror.

Sh was old.  Sometimes she wondered how that had happen, but she had been aware that she was not aging all that gracefully for quite a few years.  Daily stress can do that to a person.

So can 44 years of being on testosterone.

Now, even 17 years later, the effects of that were still there in the face that looked back..  Nothing was going to undo that…except maybe thousands of dollars of facial reconstruction.  That was money she would never have.  So she made do with the rationalization that she hadn’t wanted to stop recognizing herself anyway.

And nothing was going to change the fact that she was 6’4″ tall.

First they came for the K word.  But I didn’t mind.  The few people I knew who were Jewish were nice enough and knew their place in the world and they didn’t bother me, so I didn’t need to bother them.

Then they came for the N word.  Again, my humor didn’t include blackface and anyway I thought jokes based on the stereotyping of black people were vulgar.

When they came for the C word, I got pissed.  And then someone told me it wasn’t just the C-word, that there were other words that women objected to just as much.    

My whole comedy game relied on me calling people c**ts and b**ches and pu**ies.

It seems to happen periodically, but with unfixed period.  Sometimes my thoughts are in too much of a jumble to make much sense out of them.  I took a look through the past year’s columns and discovered at least three occasions in which this happened in 2008.  Each time I still managed to cobble something together anyway:

March 28:  Thought Salad

May 2:  Mixed Veggies

Sep 5:  Stone Soup

Hence, I guess, the name of this edition.  Hopefully there is some of the meat required as part of that hobo dish.

The ingredients:  identity, privilege, memories, creativity, pain.  Not necessarily in that order…and sometimes in combination.

By the end of the night we are expecting 5 to 7 inches of snow with a quarter of an inch of ice on top.  And my sinus is roaring in protest.  So the best I can do here is hope for something resembling coherence.

This morning there was a request by jlms qkw that we share A Few of our Favorite Things:

My favorite things are freedom from tyranny, especially the tyranny of the majority, the freedom to be Other, the liberty to be happy and at peace with myself.

But my most favorite thing is the ability to speak up for others who have not been as fortunate as I.

There are a lot of people who are less fortunate than I.  I cannot stand idly by while they don’t have the freedoms I have.

So I use the only weapon to fight for them that I have, which are my words.

Come on in and sit by the fireplace awhile.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

In the continuing post Prop 8 fall out, the Mormon Church is ramping up its attacks on gay people, slurring gay people and even accusing them of domestic terrorism. The campaign of hate continues to rage, just as it simultaneously continues to claim that it is a victim of attacks.  Let’s fight back.

I know.  The Mormon Church denies that this was ever a campaign of hate.  There I pointed that out.  In a wonderful circumlocution, the Church even denies that its work on Prop 8 is anti-gay.  No, it’s about being “pro- marriage,” they say.

Jump with me across the broom.

It’s an old argument.  Old as the hills.  Older than some kinds of dirt.  But then, so am I.

The thinking goes like this:

Nobody could disagree with that.  Surely I don’t.  But as someone who taught logic for a quarter century, I am all too aware of human frailty in this matter.  Some people read that as having the implication that it would not be wrong to discriminate against someone because of what they did choose.

There’s the culprit:  thinking that it is okay to discriminate against people.

Since the passage of Prop 8 on Tuesday, thousands of people have been protesting in California every single day of the week.  

Here are my photos from protests around the Los Angeles area…

In four states there were referenda about whether we GLBT people deserved to be treated equally with other humans…and the answer we received is that we did not.

We should be planning a way forward instead of casting the endless supply of recriminations, searching who to blame.  But people expect to see blame, so they usually miss the opportunities to look for that path forward.

ENDA, fairness in housing and public accommodations, and hate crimes protection are much more important, if only because they would benefit all GLBT people, not just the ones in relationships.  In my two decades of working on these issues, we have not made substantial progress.  It’s too easy to write these issues off as GLBT issues and tell us to wait until there is a better time.

And so we wait.  And we wait.  Just like we waited last year and the year before that and the year before that and every year I can remember since I came out.  And even before that.

Maybe while we are waiting, something could be done.

Coming down to the last few days before the election, we have seen the hatred and ignorance from the right with respect to marriage equality and equal rights in general…and California’s Proposition 8, Florida’s Proposition 2 and Arizona’s Proposition 102 in particular.  And we have heard from the supporters or equal rights, even though there may seem to have been few of them amongst our political leaders.

One group hasn’t been heard from so much:  the children.

I’m not talking about GLBT kids, though some of them may be.  The right wing…and even some people supposedly on the left…like to talk about the purpose of marriage being the protection of the family…and by their definition that generally means having children.

Are we hearing the voices of those children?  Do we even acknowledge that they are there.  Maybe we should listen to their voices, or at least see their words.

In the interest of full disclosure:

I was married for twenty-four years, from March of 1969 until some time in 1993.  We got married because there was a pregnancy and there was going to be Hell to pay with the in-laws.  So I agreed to run off to Miami, OK, to get a quicky marriage…and to spend at least the next 18 years of my life raising our daughter, who was born in August of that year.

In 1992 I began my transition from male to female.  Lawyers were contacted.  Papers were filed.

I quote myself from Sexual Disorientation (poor form, I know):

Me:  Personally, I was married to a woman for 24 years.  Then I had a sex-change.  Now I cannot marry a woman.  Go figure.  Aren’t I still me?

Me, again:  Follow-up thought:  Then again, in many states, I can’t marry a man either, but such is life for transsexual people.

Perhaps as penance for something I did in a past life, I am prone to perusing the back pages of Daily Kos.  Like Diogenes looking for a human being among his fellow Greeks, I search for those who might learn that hatred starts small and begins with the words we use.

I seek to teach.  Mostly I discover people who are unwilling to learn.  I find people who are so invested in their juvenile attempt at humor that they can’t stop to learn why it is juvenile, why it is demeaning, not to its supposed targets, but to those whom it actually hits, and as the conversation progresses (I refuse to give up the hope that everyone can learn not to hate), I get to learn how deep and varied their hatred actually is.

I find pseudo-intellectual  analysis of why only the so-called normal people deserve equality in this society.  Upon challenging their reasoning, I often find the same people have a very low opinion of education.  I ask questions that don’t get answered.  Apparently, those questions do have an effect, however.  You’d be amazed at the number of times people assume that the questions I ask must be asked in anger and respond in kind…and never answer the question.

And I find hatred, both the small and the large of it.