CommuniKate

A recent NYT article “When Boys Are Prized, Girls Live the Part” written by Jenny Nordberg, described the Afghani tradition of ‘bacha posh’ which translates as ‘dressed up as a boy.’ Since boys are so valued over girls, families with girls often dress one of their girls in boy’s clothes from an early age until puberty or well after.

They do it for many reasons. Since the family name and treasure pass down through sons, boys are highly valued. A boyless family is pitied by the community. It is believed that the mother can determine the sex of her unborn, so she is blamed if she has daughters. In the strictly sex-segregated society a boy can go places a girl can never go – to market for errands, to school unattended, to a job to earn extra money for the family.

The article highlighted two stories of girls dressed up as boys. One mother, who had herself dressed up as a boy, said that the experience had taught her the ways of men and power which had helped her win a job in the Assembly. Because she only had daughters, she and her husband decided to dress their youngest up as a boy, so that her community would think she was fit to be elected.

Another young girl made the decision on her own. She attended school as a girl, then changed into a black suit with boxy shoulders and wide-legged pants. She plays football, cricket and rides a bike. She does not want to wear women’s clothes or ever be a woman when she reaches puberty, because she has seen how people call women names and abuse them.

Nordberg did a yeoman’s job of uncovering an enduring tradition of masquerade that has been going on for several generations in Afghanistan. In a bloodless reportorial style, she never opined on the fetishization of maleness or the oppression of Afghani women her story represents. It was riveting. I’m sure somewhere someone is already pitching it as a movie of the week.

I have just been sad. For all those dear Afghani girls trapped in their homes and tradition. And certainly, despite the official line that there are no gays in Afghanistan, in some province there is a young lesbian dressed up as a boy enjoying freedom of movement and access. I can only imagine that inevitable sad day when all that changes and she must dress up as a woman.

On the same day marking Mother Teresa’s 100th birthday, news broke that the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman is gay. Much to the chagrin of William Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, the Empire State Building was not bathed in Mother Teresa’s blue and white team colors to mark her centenary. So far no head of any LGBT League has complained that the Empire was unbathed in rainbow colors for Mehlman’s coming out. Actually the news was greeted with a giant ho-hum. And that is what is so maddening.

Let’s dissect that ho-hum.

First, the ho part. Under Mehlman’s leadership of the RNC during the George W. Bush re-election (or first non-selection) campaign, gay marriage was used as a cynical get-out-the-vote tactic. Morning after quarterbacks, can use any numbers they want to prove that the tactic didn’t really get out the conservative vote, but it does not ameliorate gay people’s visceral knowledge that we were the RNC campaign’s wedgie, the butt thong between the cheek of church and the cheek of state

Mehlman, in whatever phase of his own gay self-awareness, did nothing to stop it. He actually advocated a push for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Under the Bush administration’s second term government-sanctioned homophobia anti-gay violence increased, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell continued unabated and many gay rights advances at the state level were rescinded.

Since I try to be fully pro-choice, and because I too struggled to come out, I have to hear Ken Mehlman when he says that only recently has he “become comfortable with this part of my life.” But as the bride-to-be Joan Cusack in the 1997 movie IN &OUT asks Kevin Klein after he tells her he’s gay at the altar, I also have to ask, “Could you possibly have picked a better time to tell me?”

Post-power position endorsements of gay rights – Laura Bush, Dick Cheney on gay marriage – are no consolation. While many remark that the non-reaction to Mehlman’s news is a sign of progress for gay rights, it is more a sign of progress in straight comfort. There is work to be done.

So now, for the hum part. I’m a moderate lesbian. I generally hold a grudge for six generations. But in the spirit of Mother Teresa’s b’day, I might make a conditioned exception for Mehlman. It is ironically fitting that Mehlman, the prodigious RNC fundraiser, has raised a million dollars for the Boies-Olsen efforts in over-turning CA anti-same sex marriage Prop 8. To fight anti-gay legislation, gay people still have to go door-to-door outing ourselves to anti-gay voters, neighbors and family as if trick or treating for our rights. For his penance, Mehlman needs to go door-to-door and speak to anti-gay legislators, former bosses, colleagues and friends to stop anti-gay nuisance propositions before they even begin. For extra-credit penance, he should go have tea and a talk with William Donohue. Wear a rainbow lapel pin.

This morning in Ptown, I actually had goose bumps. The days are cooler; sunsets are earlier. What can you do?

What we have been doing all summer is having Feminist Classics Readings every Saturday night at nine p.m. on Commercial Street between our wonderful City Video store and Spiritus.

The idea started simply enough. My galpal told visiting friends she was reading the re-issue of Simone DeBeauvoir’s The Second Sex. A laconic, ironic friend from South Carolina suggested we do dramatic readings from it on the street. My galpal of course wanted to do a marathon reading of the whole thing. We worried it could go into early November.

We started simply. We brought some classics – Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Audre Lourde, Judith Butler – and classic collections The Lesbian Reader, The Butch Femme Reader and poetry collections. We read short selections, standing on the white wrought iron chair in front of an ATM. We invited passersby to pick something to read. We filmed the readings with a flip-cam. Volunteers held up our 8X10 sign handmade by Vanessa from the video store.

As the Saturdays went on, people brought their own favorite classics. There were regulars. Women read. Men read. Crowds gathered to see what was happening, stayed or walked on. There was one hook-up, that we know of. One night, twenty-one different readers read the twenty-one love poems of Adrienne Rich. Another night, a seven-year-old girl sang “You Are My Sunshine.” During Bear Week, we read excerpts from “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Bears sitting on the curb at Spiritus listened curiously and munched contentedly.

It’s a happening. And a gathering. Last week the official town crier lent his stentorian voice to the proceedings. A violinist gave musical accompaniment to some poems. Young standout readers gave gripping interpretations of the words so many of us grew up on.

As the summer winds down, we encourage others to start readings in their own hometowns. Once a month outside the farmer’s market, a local coffee spot or gathering place. We’re thinking of something at Lincoln Center. Keep it simple. It creates its own complexities.

This Saturday, I plan to read Gloria Steinem’s classic, “If Men Could Menstruate.”

Unlike past summer films featuring Spiderman, Iron Man, or X-Man, this summer’s leading movie man is the XY-Man, the sperm donor. In The Kids Are Alright Mark Ruffalo plays the sperm donor tracked down by the children of two lesbians played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. The lesbians finally reject the sperm donor from the tight egg of their family. In The Switch originally called The Baster, Jason Bateman plays an accidental sperm donor who meets himself seven years later in the son of a single mom, played by Jennifer Aniston.

According to my purely vanilla extracted film survey, sperm have of course already been featured in film.

In the 1972 Woody Allen film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid to Ask, the answer to the question, “What happens during ejaculation?” features an ensemble cast of sperm. Allen plays a nervous, nerdy sperm fearful of ending up on the ceiling. The hilariously mechanistic explanation of ejaculation should be extra credit viewing in abstinence-only sex education programs.

In the 1983 Monty Python film The Meaning of Life, sperm merit a catchy musical treatment. The father of sixty-three children sings “Every Sperm is Sacred” as his kids are being marched off to an orphanage. He belts out a rousing West End rendition: “Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. And when a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.” I recovered from the song just in time for the one-tiny-dinner-mint scene.

And of course men have always been essentialist sperm-donors, but as we’ve seen this summer, the purpose and centrality of that function has shifted with the increased agency of women. Call it choice. It is a profound shift. Why now? Certainly technological advances in artificial insemination, improved in vitro imaging and other sciency things are important. But feminism, Title IX, changing employment patterns, increase in single mothers, and gay activism with its redefinition of marriage and family are all cultural forces in this shift. When the sperm donor is not the central focus of movies about women the shift will truly be a seismic.

We’ll save for another time the discussion of Salt. The leading role of murderous, macho man was written for Tom Cruise. The role was eventually played by the incredibly fertile Angelina Jolie. In my experience it beats male porn.

On Sunday night, my galpal and I joined a sold-out crowd of moviegoers to see the much-anticipated The Kids Are Alright at the tiny Ptown Theater. The a.c. was a bonus.

The crowd at the early show was mostly Well of Loneliness era women in pairs and posses. Quite frankly, I was looking forward to seeing Annette Benning (love her) and Julianne Moore getting it on. A lot. My biggest worry before the movie was that one of the lesbians goes straight. That should have been the least of my worries.

The film is wonderfully acted and expertly shot but for me that didn’t make up for the story line that seemed more conventional because I was sitting next to the unconventional John Waters. He thought it was a decent sitcom. My other seatmate started fidgeting, then harrumphing and finally yelling on the bike ride home, “For this we waited in line? And for thirty years? I’m a lesbian and I hated that movie.” A woman on the street stopped her and said she hated it too and sent her:https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/
the-kids-arent-alright/

Since I have friends who are filmmakers, writers and directors, and know what they have to go through to get anything made and distributed, I am not an immediate critic of the movie I’ve just seen. I appreciate that it even exists for a few hours and then I get critical.

So I’m glad that Lisa Cholodenko got her film made. But the film got made because it did not rock anyone’s world or challenge any racial or gender stereotypes. The only good sex with skin was straight. Long-term same-sex coupling and parenting was shown to be just like as same-old-sex coupling and parenting. The lesbians were of course virtually sexless. Mothering is smothering. Even absent fathers do it better. Despite a CA-CODA-speak script, everyone was on an AlAnon slip. Women, even lesbians, fall for guys just because. Because they watch gay male porn? Try The L-Word. The portrayal of people of color was annoying. The kids would really be alright if they went to a COLAGE meeting, Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere.

If TKAA pissed you off, I recommend Angelina Jolie in Salt. Pretend she’s a lesbian.

In Ptown we are cycling too fast through the themed weekends of summer: Film Festival, Portuguese Festival, Circuit Party 4th of July, and now it’s already Bear Week. Up- Cape, Melissa Etheridge has already made her summer stop at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis. I have already made my second annual ask for the Obamas to take a day-trip to Ptown when they are vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard.

Yet the speed of the weeks running into weeks contrasts with the slow viscosity of the days, a brutal string of high heat and humidity. On my bike ride to work one early evening, I stop and ask my old friend Gordon, proudly Portuguese and the town barber for many years, if he’s ever seen anything like it. He is shirtless, in shorts with suspenders, gartered black socks and is drooped over his porch railing, listlessly watering his wilted blue hydrangeas. “Neva, dahlin’, neva.”

Even my Indian girlfriend, accustomed to New Delhi summers, is at half speed. The blast furnace blunts me of Northern Irish latitudes into an unshakable, lethargic lassitude. I am asked to write an article for a book about watching Glenn Beck, TV’s chief crybaby booby. I could care less. I am asked what I think of the US/USSR spy swap. I think it has something to do with LeBron James. According to Jezebel.com, The Daily Show is sexist. Care to comment? Will “Duh.” do?

As I type this, my forearms stick to the desk. The keys stay depressed. A glass of ice water sweats a puddle onto papers The ink runs. The late heat of the day overwhelms. In my estivation, I conclude that Mother Nature is pissed about getting deep drilled and this heat is just a reminder of who is in charge. I expect a blizzard in October.

Here in gorgeous Provincetown, three days after the summer solstice, I walk out the jetty at the far west end of town. I have started many walks here in all kinds of weather, often with a burdened mind. Most days by the return, I cannot imagine what bothered me. It is as if I have left the problem for an outgoing tide.

Everyone has her healing place. I find faith in the changing sameness of the tides. Who could believe that old bleached, beached rowboat will float in a few hours? And then be beached again? It was not until two weeks after 9.11, one late September afternoon, when I swam in the warm shallow pools at the end of the jetty, that I felt some relief, a chance that I might return to my body.

Despite this glorious day, I am troubled. I take a breath and step out onto the first huge uneven rocks warmed from the day, lichen-covered. The chlorophyll in the reeds is in overdrive. I think I can hear it. The sun on the water blinds. The gulls and ducks dive and bob. The swallows skim for bugs. The breeze kicks up. The tadpoles dart in the rippled shadows. The crabs scurry diagonally against the tide.

But this day as I return with one final sigh off my rocky walk, I still carry my worry with me. I feel for the Gulf residents watching their beloved coast, their healing place – birds, water, reeds – get tarred and choked. I cannot imagine their sadness.

This summer I walk this glorious tumble of rocks for them.

I was trolling an LGBT online news service. It used to be if something gay happened in the news, it was pretty much a one-off and you clung to as if it were a life preserver in a sea of heterosexuality. Now there are several LGBT news clipping services. Pinch me.

I saw the headline, “Lesbian Death Bed.” That can’t be right, I thought. I have bizarre word dyslexia too, but I call them jokes. It was a story about a sexual therapist who had written a book with tips for lesbians to keep the excitement in their sex life. Tip: don’t go to bed with Charlie Rose. Nothing about lesbians luring unsuspecting, unprosecuted perpetrators to their futons and offing them. It was a typo.

The next headline that caught my eye was, “Kids with Lesbian Parents Do Just Fine.” It described the results of a longitudinal study of kids raised in lesbian families. Researchers expected to find no big difference in psychological adjustment tests between the lesbian-raised kids and kids in matching control groups. They were surprised to find that kids from lesbian families did better on certain measures than kids raised in heterosexual families.

The next headline was, “Kids with lesbian parents may do better than their peers.” Wow things were looking up. The researchers speculated that lesbians are actively engaged in parenting. They also prepare their kids for discrimination and stigmatization in reaction to their particular family structure, so parents discuss complicated issues of diversity, tolerance and sexuality. The discussions help to make the kids more confident and able to deal with social differences as they mature. Their dinner table discussions are awesome but they go to bed very tired, after putting away the laundry.

That and the news that a new Gallup Poll found that just over 50% of Americans perceive gay and lesbian relationships as morally acceptable is cheering midst oil spills, teabaggers, DADT non-repeal and casino capitalism. Unfortunately that same 50% is still icked out by what we do in bed, but don’t be blaming that on lesbian moms.

“Don’t get a swelled head.” “Don’t be a hot dog.” Those were the messages I got when I was growing up. So I don’t brag. There was that time I did share with you that I got one of those Mormon genealogy programs and had traced my lineage back to the Blessed Virgin Mother – she and I both have the same jaw line and similar widow’s peaks - but I didn’t make a big deal of it.

But please allow me to share humbly a proud performing moment. I was emceeing a three-day LGBT conference in a very lar-di-dar hotel. The confab was spectacularly conceived and executed with great workshops, practical laser-like political analysis, great hallway conversations and moving speeches. The problem was the vinyl chairs. Every time anyone shifted slightly, an embarrassing whoopee cushion sound of flatulence hung in the air like a bad joke. Attendees were mortified if they made the sound and nearly rigor-mortised to avoid making it again.

At the farewell brunch, after a few final housekeeping details, I asked everyone, on the count of three, to slide forward on their chairs. On three, the very elegant crowd slid forward and created a glorious non-methane producing blast, followed by sustained laughter. The featured speaker, a state governor about to take the podium, must have wondered what manner of fresh hell he had wandered into.

I don’t brag, but I believe this joyfully juvenile moment shows why I am invited to work such classy events. Hell yes, I am proud to have presided over what I believe is the first-ever Fart Mob. I am going to recommend the action to the fearless activists at Get Equal; it has a bright future in the targeted disruption of homophobic speeches.

My dear girlfriend cheerfully admits she is a numbers nerd. She can read, remember and interpret a pie chart or a power point graph like nobody’s business. While she’s parsing the percentages, I tend to muse about the color palette they’ve chosen. Why that yellow with fuchsia? Not to imply that she sees things in black and white. She loves data and thanks to the recent work of the Williams Institute, the Movement Advancement Project and many academic LGBT studies, she has hard data aplenty to mull over. And I’ve decided a teal palette is universally appealing.

But check out these stats. There are 8.9 million LGBT adults in the US. Of self-identified LGBT people only 20% said they were fully out. 80% said they were fully or partially closeted. Of that 8.9 million, fewer than 304,000 donors gave $35 or more to 52 of the largest national and LGBT organizations. Fewer than 18,000 donors gave more than $1,000. And that was in 2007 when people actually had money! Or the illusion of money. There are fewer than 3 million unique names of people in all the databases of the 52 organizations in the US and many of those are the names of our straight allies.

After putting away her lab coat, my can-do galpal goes right to the drawing board, gets out the slide rule and the calipers and meets with people to try to figure out strategies that will increase LGBT ownership and support of our movement. I tend to go into a blind murderous panic. Pardon my apocalypticism, but those numbers are appalling. Even a soothing teal won’t help.

Coming out is still the basic building block of our movement. Come out. Okay, more. You know what is involved. Enjoy the down time of your family’s shunning you. They often come around. When they do, insist they get involved. Insist your friends come out. Demand help from your straight friends and allies. Get out your checkbook and join at least one LGBT organization. Volunteer. If you can swing it, donate more. Donate in the name of your favorite homophobe. Cancel your special annual gay pride brunch overlooking the parade and get out in the streets. Be counted.