Out in All Directions

One woman gave powerful testimony in the 1986 New York City hearings regarding passage of a citywide civil rights law, saying, “I am a university professor, a mother of two children, a first-generation Italian American, and a Catholic. By this time, you have begun to form a composite picture of the person that I am—I’m becoming the sum of various parts. When I add that I am also a lesbian, everything else I’ve told you now disappears and is forgotten. I have become a ‘lesbian’—a single, solitary title. Nothing else is important in your perception of me as a person.”

art “There will always be someone begging you to isolate one piece of yourself, one segment of your identity above the others, and say, ‘Here, this Is who I am.’ Resist that trivialization. I am not JUST a lesbian. I am not JUST a poet. I am not JUST a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.”

AUDRE LORDE, AUTHOR, POET, AND ACTIVIST, COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT OBERLIN COLLEGE, MAY 29, 1989

Faggot, dyke, queer, lesbian, gay, bulldagger, pansy, fairy: These labels don’t begin to describe who we are. It is easily forgot-ten by nongay people that being gay or lesbian is only one part of who we are. For many of us, our sexual identity may not even be the most important part of ourselves. Identity is an evolving concept. Our identities are shaped in large part by the families and communities in which we are raised, the friends we seek out, and the communities we join when we become adults.

It is misleading to assume that there is one monolithic gay and lesbian community or that there is one kind of gay person. We all come to our gay and lesbian identities from different paths. We meet at our sexuality, but the paths leading up to and away from that sexuality are not necessarily shared. In response to being neither quite here nor there, we construct our own identities based on the qualities we wish to emulate from our multiple communities.

As a group, gay and lesbian Americans are as diverse as any population on earth. We are Latino, African American, disabled, people with AIDS, Jews, deaf, Native American, white, Asian American, young, middle-aged and old, and more. It is the merging of the rest of ourselves with our sexuality that creates our individual gay and lesbian identities.

In this chapter we present the voices of many different lesbians and gay men reflecting on their intersecting identities. Rather than trying to present a total picture of each group, the pieces here are presented in roughly alphabetical order by author, without regard to any category. Truth telling is not always simple, nor is it easy, yet it is essential if we are to become proud of who we are. The gay and lesbian people here talk about coming out and finding their own unique identities.

Heroes and Saints

The first place that I went to when I was coming out was the great Latino watering hole Circus Disco. Tried to get into Studio One but the doorman asked me for two I.D.’s. I gave him my driver’s license and my JC Penny card but it wasn’t good enough. Hey, what did I know? I was still wearing corduroys.

Circus Disco was the new world. Friday night, eleven-thirty. Yeah, I was Born to Be Alive. Two thousand people exactly like me. Well, maybe a little darker, but that was the only thing that separated me from the cha-cha boys in East Hollywood.

First night at Circus Disco and I order a Long Island Iced Tea,‘cause my brother told me it was the exotic drink, and it fucks you up real fast. The bartender looks at me with one of those gay-people-recognize-each-other looks. I try to act knowing and do it back. Earlier that year, I went to a straight bar on Melrose. When I asked for a screwdriver, the bartender asked me if I wanted a Phillips or a regular. I was never a good drunk.

The first guy I met at Circus Disco grabbed my ass in the bathroom, and I thought that was charming. In the middle of the dance floor, amidst all the hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, to a thriving disco beat, he’s slow dancing and sticking his tongue down my throat. He sticks a bottle of poppers up my nose and I get home at five-thirty the next morning.

Sitting outside Circus Disco with a 300-pound drag queen who’s got me cornered in the patio listening to her life story, I think to myself, One day I will become something and use this as an act. At the time I was thinking less about performance art and more about Las Vegas.

A guy is heating the shit out of his lover in the parking lot of Circus Disco. Everybody is standing around them in a circle, but no one is stopping them. One of the guys is kicking and punching the other, who is lying on the ground in a fetal position. And the first guy’s saying, “You want to cheat on me, bitch? You cheating on me, bitch? Get up, you goddamn faggot piece of shit!” It was the first time I saw us act like our parents. I try to move in, but the drag queen tells me to leave them alone. “That’s a domestic thing, baby. Besides, that girl has AIDS. Don’t get near that queen.”

I get home early and I’m shaken to tears. My mother asks me where I went. I tell her I went to see a movie at the Vista—an Italian film about a man who steals a bicycle. It was all I could think of. She says, “That made you cry?”

But at Woody’s Hyperion! Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo. I meet a guy there and his name is Rick Rascon and he’s not like anyone else. No tight muscle shirt. No white Levi’s. No colored stretch belt. He goes to UCLA and listens to Joni Mitchell. Is that too perfect or what? He comes home with me and we make love, but I’m thinking of him more like my brother. And I know we’re gonna be friends for the rest of our lives.

Started working at an AIDS service center in South Central. But I gotta get out of here. ‘Cause all of my boys. All of my dark-skinned boys. All of my cha-cha boys are dying on me. Sometimes I wish it was like the Circus Disco of my coming out. Two thousand square feet of my men. Boys like me. Who speak the languages of the border and of the other. The last time I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard and I passed by Circus Disco, hardly anybody was there.

Does It Matter?

— AN ANONYMOUS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, FROM GROWING UP GAY/GROWING UP LESBIAN: A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY

art DID YOU KNOW…

Founded in Los Angeles in 1980, Lesbianas Unidas is the oldest latina lesbian organization in the United States. Among their many ongoing projects, they sponsor a support group designed specifically for Latina lesbians dealing with the effects of substance abuse, one of only a handful of such programs in the country.

Fear of Going Home: Homophobia

For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality. Being lesbian and raised Catholic, indoctrinated as straight, I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent). It’s an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts. In and out of my head. It makes for loquería, the crazies. It is a path of knowledge— one of knowing (and of learning) the history of the oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality.

In a New England college where I taught, the presence of a few lesbians threw the more conservative heterosexual students and faculty into a panic. The two lesbian students and we two lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of the students said, “I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency.”

And I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows. Which leaves only one fear—that we will be found out and that the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face, discern among its features the undershadow that the reigning order of heterosexual males project on our Beast. Yet still others of us take another step: We try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us. Not many jump at the chance to confront the Shadow-Beast in the mirror without flinching at her lidless serpent eyes, her cold clammy moist hand dragging us underground, fangs bared and hissing. How does one put feathers on this particular serpent? But a few of us have been lucky—on the face of the Shadow-Beast we have seen not lust but tenderness; on its face we have uncovered the lie.

art “Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian, Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australia, and the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods. Our role Is to link people with each other—the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas information from one culture to another. Colored homosexuals have more knowledge of other cultures; have always been at the forefront (although sometimes in the closet) of all liberation struggles in this country; have suffered more injustices and have survived them despite all odds. Chicanos need to acknowledge the political and artistic contributions of their queer. People, listen to what your jotería is saying.

“The mestizo and the queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls.”

WRITER AND ACTIVIST GLORIA ANZALDUA FROM BORDERLANDS/ LA FRONTERA

Reflections on a Birthday, a Bombshell, and a Parade

As older gay people, what are our major concerns? I don’t think they include making a million dollars, earning world-class fame, building the next skyscraper, or writing a book that outsells the Bible. In no particular order I believe they include health, financial security, friendships, networking, and meaning.

art “I would assure every man that it is never too late to be surprised by joy. The true love of my life came to me when I was sixty-one, an age when I was beginning to think it time to pull down the shades and fold up my fancies. Then unexpectedly, I was blessed with a psychic rebirth.”

JAMES BROUGHTON, POET AND FILMMAKER

Health comes first. Speaking for myself, I take very good care of my body. I see others doing the same thing, especially those accustomed to working out at a gym. I walk regularly at a quick, steady pace, up and down sharp inclines that make my heart beat faster. I swim passionately, with real verve and fervor. I love getting in the water, more so if it’s the ocean. I am under the care of an excellent doctor and an excellent dentist, both of whom I visit faithfully.

In money matters many of us were Depression kids. I remember when my family lost everything in 1929 and the early 1930s. I became accustomed to frugality and occasional hunger. Those of us who shared this experience of limitation and loss naturally tend to be prudent and wise about money. We know it does not grow on trees. Also, we remember when a postage stamp cost three cents, there were hamburgers for a dime, and a kid got into a movie for a quarter. Believe me, this provides a conservative perspective on today’s spiraling costs and easy-come, easy-go money.

Friendships are, I think, the most precious gifts in the world. Lesbians and gays know their value in a world that was often unfriendly. Many years ago an older gay couple, two men living in a longtime relationship, offered me friendship when I was beginning to come to terms with being gay. I desperately needed their understanding, support, experience, and presence in my life. They provided it unstintingly. I am forever grateful to them. Now I have the opportunity to return their gift by offering my friendship to younger lesbians and gay men who need the same things they gave me. A corollary of friendship is networking. It’s about the outreach and involvement of our lives. For example, there is community participation. Volunteerism. Dialogue with other people about matters of common concern. Being a part of decision making. Networking is the exact opposite of isolation and loneliness.

Gay American Indians (GAI), founded in 1975 by Barbara Cameron (Lakota Sioux) and Randy Burns (Northern Paiute), has grown from a San Francisco social club into a national organization of a thousand Indian and non-Indian members. (Rink Foto)

Meaning? It’s as necessary to me as oxygen. Food, drink, sex, and money are not enough for me. I’ve got to come face-to-face with a new challenge. I need a fresh human need to meet. I yearn for an unexpected mountain to climb. I absolutely require a compelling reason to greet a new day with cheer and energy.

I find that many older lesbians and gay men I know feel the same way I do. Riding yesterday in the bright red convertible in the exciting Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration parade, waving enthusiastically to thousands of people who lined the route, I felt happy about being gay and older. I am grateful for my life up to this moment: Being gay is a hart of who I am in God’s creation, and so a blessing. Being older is a new challenge, and a blessing.

We Are Special

When the U S. Supreme Court cited “millennia of moral teaching” in support of Georgia’s sodomy law and when the Vatican declared homosexuality “intrinsically evil” they must not have been thinking of American history and American morals. Because, throughout America, for centuries before and after the arrival of Europeans, gat and lesbian American Indians there recognized and valued members of tribal communities. As Maurice Kenny declares, “We were special!.”

Our tribes occupied every region of this continent, and our cultures were diverse and rich—front the hunters of the far North, to the trading people of the Northwest Coast, the farmers, and city-builders of the Southwest, the hunters of the plains, and the great confederations of the Northeast.

Gay American Indians were a part of all these communities. We lived openly in our tribe. Our families and communities recognized us and encouraged us to develop our skills. In turn, we made special contributions to our communities.

French explorers used the word berdache to describe stale Indians who specialized in the work of Women and formed emotional and sexual relationships with other men. Many tribes had female berdaches, too—women who took on men’s work and married other women. The History Project of Gay American Indians (GAI) has documented these alternative role, in over 135 North American tribes.

As artists, providers, and healers, our traditional gay ancestors had important responsibilities.

Women hunters and warriors brought food for their families and defended their communities, like the famous Kutenai woman warrior who became an intertribal courier and a prophet in the early 1800s, or Woman Chief of the Crow Indians, who achieved the third highest rank in her tribe. Among the Mohave, lesbian women became powerful shamans and medicine people.

Male berdaches specialized in the arts and crafts of their tribes and performed important social and religious roles. In California, we were often called upon to bury and mourn the dead, because such close contact with the spirit world was considered too dangerous for others. Among the Navajo, berdaches were healers and artists, while among the Plains Indians, we were famous for the valuable crafts we made.

Gay and lesbian American Indians today represent the continuity of this tradition. We are living in the spirit of our gay Indian ancestors. Much has changed in American Indian life, but we are still here, a part of our communities, struggling to face the realities of contemporary life.

Some of us continue to fill traditional roles in our tribal communities; others are artists, healers, mediators, and community organizers in urban areas; many of us are active in efforts to restore and preserve our cultural traditions.

Gay and lesbian Indians were special to a lot of tribes. We have roots here in North America.

— RANDY BURNS (NORTHERN PAIUTE, CO-FOUNDER, GAI, EXCERPTED FROM THE PREFACE OF LIVING THE TRADITION, ED. WILL ROSCOE

Fighting for Our Lives

From the first description of cases in the New York Native in the spring of 1981, there was never a question in my mind that I would get GRID. I retain a clear image of myself on a subway platform at rush hour, frozen in place, reading for the first time about a new, lethal, sexually transmitted disease that was affecting gay men. I remember feeling disoriented by the knowledge that life was going on all around me, oblivious to the fact that my world had just changed utterly and forever.

By late 1981, my doctor and I both knew that I had GRID. I was experiencing mysterious fevers, night sweats, fatigue, rashes, and relentless, debilitating diarrhea. I was losing weight and feeling more and more miserable.

In June 1982, I collapsed from dehydration and was admitted to the hospital with a high fever and violent, bloody diarrhea. When a doctor walked into my room and announced, with the satisfaction of Miss Marple, that I was now official, I was strangely relieved.

“Well, it’s GRID all right,” she said. “You have cryptosporidiosis. Before GRID, we didn’t think cryptosporidiosis infected humans. It’s a disease previously found only in livestock.”

Michael Callen, singer, songwriter, and AIDS activist. Callen died of AIDS-related causes in 1994. (Joel Sokolov)

I thought I was prepared for this moment, but I felt myself beginning to go numb.

“All we can do is try to keep you hydrated and see what happens. Your body will either handle it or … it won’t.”

She smiled, not too optimistically, patted my leg, and left me alone to confront in earnest the very real possibility of my imminent death.

Refug(e)e: Hiding out

All it takes is “Ahhlo, Quang?” for me to realize it’s family calling. The sound of my name, spoken like it’s supposed to be, massages from my temples to the back of my neck. I lean back, awash—it’s my name, and yet it’s been months since I’ve heard it right.

art DID YOU KNOW…

In 1987, the first U.S. conference for lesbian and gay Asians and Pacific Islanders, called “Breaking the Silence: Beginning the Dialogue” attracted eighty-five participants to North Holly-wood, California. The key-note speaker, Trinity Ordona, a Filipina lesbian, said “It is out of self-empowerment that comes collective empowerment.… We must break the silence to our-selves and shout our gayness so strongly that the social order to things changes to really include us.”

My great aunt Bà Cô is visiting my cousins for a week. My lover and I live nearby. Still. I manage excuses why I can’t visit tonight. Over the phone, I hear my nephews and nieces screaming around.

Bà Cô commends me for being calmer when I was younger. She tells me the story of how quietly I held her hand throughout our escape from Vietnam in 1975; she recalls a panic—the time she momentarily lost my grasp in a crowded camp in Guam. She was able to retrace her steps to find me where we’d been separated: I’d stood in the same place, as instructed. She’s told me this story only three times in my life, but I recount all the times I’ve thought of it, as a bond between me and her, and me and my family.

At another time in my life, it might have been easy to set things aside and go see Bà Cô. Things haven’t been so simple since I came out. To start with, Bà Cô’s older, from another time, another place. It would break her heart to see me, bright red-orange hair, pierced ears, and all. Easy solution, shave the head and take out the piercings.

art “We are relatively uninformed about Asian American subcultures organized around sexuality. There are Asian American gay and lesbian social organizations, gay bars that are known for Asian clientele, conferences that have focused on Asian American lesbian gay experiences, and electronic bulletin boards catering primarily to gay Asians, their friends, and their lovers.”

DANA TAKAGI, SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR AT UC SANTA CRUZ

I choose to look the way I do because it makes me feel beautiful. And then there’s the part about getting off on retaking people deal with me, as a freak. I have similar reasons for living my life out as a gay man. Being queer, living queer, I can makeitfinditexploreitadoreit. I choose it because living queer means breaking rule #1, so why stop there?

Before I see Bà Cô, I will probably cut my hair. Changing the way I look is not the biggest deal. I some-times wear a hat in law school classes so the instructor won’t single me out. They can see (when they’re looking) I’m Asian, some may even guess I’m gay; in a situation where someone has so much power over me, being a freak is less a priority. So I concede, I change my look to be safe at times, to be anonymous at school. So of course I’ll do it to spare Bà Cô. But these are acts of hiding, which I must endure and remember.

Coming out has caused much pain, cutting me away from my family. My parents and I dwell on nonsubjects, dancing around my sexuality on the rare occasions we speak on the phone. Maybe it’d be better had I not told them. I moved 3,000 miles away, a distance I desperately needed to start living on my own terms. Almost two decades before, my family fled from war, across the world to stake a new life. Survival was the goal, success our reward.

Now separation marks our dream-fulfilled, torn apart again. My parents fought to bring me to this country, for a chance at happiness, which I have by my terms found. I—am in love/can turn to deep friendships/have [not lost] two wonderful sisters/find power from (in) my communities/take privilege from higher education. And I can’t share one bit of it with them.

I can lose the piercings and the hair, but the deception goes deeper. If Bà Cô asks about my life, I will focus on school, be ambiguous, lie. In this life, in my fight, coming out grants escape from bleakness, but the refuge(e) is not complete. There are new struggles and compromises. Every day, I come out of some closets, only to go back into others.

“Gee, You Don’t Seem like an Indian from the Reservation”

It is of particular importance to us as third world gay people to begin a serious interchange of sharing and educating ourselves about each other. We not only must struggle with racism and homophobia of straight white america, but must often struggle with homophobia that exists within our third world communities. Being third world doesn’t always connote a political awareness or activism. I’ve met a number of third world and Native American lesbians who have said they’re just into “being themselves,” and that politics has no meaning in their lives. I agree that everyone is entitled to “be themselves,” but in a society that denies respect and basic rights to people because of their ethnic background, I feel that individuals cannot idly sit by and allow themselves to be coopted by the dominant society. I don’t know what moves a person to be politically active or attempt to raise the quality of life in our world. I only know what motivates my political responsibility… the death of Anna Mae Aquash—Native American freedom fighter—“mysteriously” murdered by a bullet in the head; Raymond Yellow Thunder—forced to dance naked in front of a white VFW club in Nebraska—murdered; Rita Silk-Nauni—imprisoned for life for defending her child; my dear friend Mani Lucas-Papago—shot in the back of the head outside of a gay bar in Phoenix. The list could go on and on. My Native American history, recent and past, moves me to continue as a political activist.

And in the white gay community there is rampant racism that is never adequately addressed or acknowledged. My friend Chrystos from Menominee Nation gave a poetry reading in May 1980 at a Bay Area feminist bookstore. Her reading consisted of poems and journal entries in which she wrote honestly from her heart about the many “isms” and contradictions in most of our lives. Chrystos’s bluntly revealing observations on her experiences with the white-lesbian-feminist community are similar to mine and are probably echoed by other lesbians of color.

Her honesty was courageous and should be representative of the kind of forum our community needs to openly discuss mutual racism. A few days following Chrystos’s reading, a friend who was in the same bookstore over-heard a white lesbian denounce Chrystos’s reading as antilesbian and racist.

art “I’m a weaver of social fabric. As I travel and relate the stories of different cultures that people have told me, I help to create a more direct link between cultures and among individuals. It we all realize how much we have in common, then the craziness of our world leaders will start to evaporate.…[As a child] I had to speak through t e heterosexual mouth. I learned how to use pronouns and how not to use pronouns—‘My friend and I went for a walk.’ Things like that were chipping slowly away at my consciousness and making me become a revolutionary.”

FLOATING EAGLE FEATHER, GAY NATIVE AMERICAN STORYTELLER

A few years ago, a white lesbian telephoned me requesting an interview, explaining that she was taking Native American courses at a local university, and that she needed data for her paper on gay Native Americans. I agreed to the interview with the idea I would be helping a “sister” and would also be able to educate her about Native American struggles. After we completed the interview, she began a diatribe on how sexist Native Americans are, followed by a questioning session in which I was to enlighten her mind about why Native Americans are so sexist. I attempted to rationally answer her inanely racist and insulting questions, although my inner response was to tell her to remove herself from my house. Later it became clear how I had been manipulated as a sounding board for her ugly and distorted views about Native Americans. Her arrogance and disrespect were characteristic of the racist white people in South Dakota. If I tried to point it out. I’m sure she would have vehemently denied her racism.

During the antigay Briggs Initiative scare in 1978, I was invited to speak at a rally to represent Native American solidarity against the initiative. The person who spoke prior to me expressed a pro-Bakke sentiment that the audience booed and hissed. His comments left the predominantly white audience angry and in disruption. A white lesbian stood up demanding that a third world person address the racist comments he had made. The MC, rather than taking responsibility for restoring order at the rally, realized that I was the next speaker and I was also T-H-I-R-D-W-O-R-L-D!! I refused to address the remarks of the previous speaker because of the attitudes of the MC and the white lesbian that only third world people are responsible for speaking out against racism. It is inappropriate for progressive or liberal white people to expect warriors in brown armor to eradicate racism. There must be co-responsibility from people of color and white people to equally work on this issue. It is not just MY responsibility to point out and educate about racist activities and beliefs.

Redman, redskin, savage, heathen, injun, american indian, first americans, indigenous people, natives, amerindian, native american, nigger, negro, black, wetback, greaser, mexican, Spanish, latin, hispanic, chicano, chink, oriental, asian, disadvantaged, special interest group, minority, third world, fourth world, people of color, illegal aliens—oh yes about them, will the U.S. government recognize the Founding Fathers (you know, George Washington and all those guys) are this country’s first illegal aliens?

One in a Million, but Rather Ordinary

There were about 200,000 disabled lesbians when I came out of my coma in 1981. AIDS was still “gay cancer.” and lesbians were still “immune.” Now there are about one million disabled dykes, but back then lesbians evidently thought themselves immune to all other disabilities too, judging by their discomfort around me. Not to mention the exclusionism and the really thoughtless things that have been said to me. (One woman actually told me she’d never “let” anything happen to her eyes. since she was an artist!)

art “The ways of the traditional Lakota are to accept things rather than to change them; to learn to work with things and try to live in peace with them. This does not mean total agreement with the gay lifestyle, but it does mean tolerance. In traditional values there is a definite place for gays. Even though this does little to shelter the modern gay lifestyle, it does give an Important validity to homosexuality and, more importantly, a heritage to Indian gays.”

— BEN THE DANCER, IN LIVING THE SPIRIT

I can understand this immune-to-disability feeling, because I used to think the same thing. And I should have known better; after all, I taught disabled people. I should have realized, more than most people, that disability strikes anybody, anytime, anywhere.

But there I was, eating healthily, getting plenty of exercise, and never eating salt. I was hardly religious, but I figured that if you treated others with respect, you’d be left alone.

A lot of my negative experiences since 1981 can be laid at the feet of the [heterosexual] community at large. Like the institutions that abuse us, the maddening inaccessibility of mostly even’thing, the fact that we have exactly two states that pay for personal care assistants and that we usually live in ghettos, and the gruesome 60 to 90 percent unemployment rates. The list can go on, but it’s much too depressing.

The unthinking continuation of physical and attitudinal barriers in gay communities is another way the discrimination occurs. The AIDS community in Boston took years to recognize the need for wheelchair accessibility. But if it weren’t for gay men’s acceptance of me, disability and all. I fully doubt I’d be here. I got invited by one of the sponsors of Woman of Color Press to a reading, but when I got there, no wheelchair seating section was to be found. Yet women of color have taught me how not to lash out at the practitioners of racism and exclusionism.

It’s hard not to feel isolated and alienated. Every time a disabled person suicides. OD’s. or dies of a relatively minor disease, I wonder how much the isolation has to do with it.

There are times the lesbian/gay community just shines. Like the festivals, especially the 1993 March on Washington.

At the 1931 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Celebration, disabled lesbians and gay men enjoyed front row seating. This was the first year celebration organizers designated a specific area for the disabled.(Rink Foto)

But then there are some strange gaps. The 1987 March on Washington was completely nonhelpful to the average disabled person. Very few of the “alternative” magazines put themselves into accessible, affordable formats. None of the writers’ colonies are accessible and Provincetown is just impossible.

A fairly newly disabled activist told me that the only way she keeps getting out is to focus on the good she’s doing day to day.

And there is a lot of good happening to disabled people today. For years, we talked into the wind. We barely had a legal leg on which to stand or sit. Now, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the general population is finally hearing us. Sooner or later, the lesbian/gay communities will realize that, AIDS is not their only disability, and that access isn’t as hard and costly as people believe.

I know you can do it. I’ve seen you. Just try talking, signing, or writing to us. Be patient and it will be worth it. I promise.

Ageful Equals Rageful

It’s no accident that I am editing a newsletter for old lesbians and other women with the new title We Are VISIBLE.

Being invisible is one of many rages. First as an immigrant, then as working class, as a woman, as a wife, as a lesbian, and now as old.

Sometimes I say to my old friends, “And what to do with the rage?” and they nod, shrug, or laugh at my audacity.

In the seventies, when the women’s movement was in full swing and I came out as a lesbian, one of my favorite statements was “I can be angry at anything you care to speak to me about!” All the pent-up rage of years of sitting on myself in so many aspects, shaping myself into the required image, holding in my stomach and my very being.

Eventually even the anger got stale and, like in so many of us, I tired of the struggle and wanted to love and be loved, to save myself and the planet in a less aggressive way. The system eagerly awaited to incorporate me while twelve-step and other programs enticed me with promises of peace and serenity.

Older lesbians and gay men march with Seniors Active in a Gay Environment (SAGE) in the 1985 Christopher Street Parade in New York Cite. (Bettye Lane)

I’ve been sweating for twenty years—more, even. And why do I sweat? I am told it’s MENopause. I have often talked myself into believing that it is connected with shame about my origins. Once, in my radical days, I researched the depletion of adrenaline due to women’s constant fear and anxiety living in a patriarchy where she is constantly subjugated. At one time this gland produced and excreted estrogen, thus naturally replacing the estrogen which no longer came from the ovaries. But the research got lost somewhere in our efforts to take full responsibility for ourselves and quit blaming men. Am I sweating out my rage?

At the grand age of sixty-seven, I am still working a forty-hour-a-week job. I’d leave tomorrow if I had enough to live on. The reward for ten years’ work is a pension of $650 a month—at the age of seventy. Guess I didn’t plan my finances right, make the right investments, save more, work harder. So it’s my fault, isn’t it? Could this he a reason for my rage?

art “Let this be a movement of brave old dykes led by brave old dykes. Age is a time of great wonder—a time when we have to hold, with a fine balance, contradictory truths in our heads and give them equal weight: Old is scary but very exciting; chaotic but self-Integrating; narrowing yet wider; weaker yet stronger than ever before.

“It is we who must name the processes of our own aging. But just as we could not begin to say what it means to be a woman until we had confronted the distortions of sexism and homophobia, so we cannot explore our aging without examining and confronting ageism. it is the task that lies before us.”

BARBARA MACDONALD, OLD LESBIAN ACTIVIST

My work is with ordinary people, most of them living on what is called “welfare.” In Canada. It’s called pension, something a person deserves after working all their lives, received without the humiliation of reducing themselves to abject poverty. With that as a shadowy model, it’s small wonder that many of us go into old age with the ogre of poverty as companion. That fear keeps ore separate from my companion lover as we both work out time in different parts of the country. Rage!

I’m angry about the new age salve that attempts to mute out my rage. If only I would meditate more, do affirmations, practice yoga, give up chocolate and coffee, if only I would be a “real” vegetarian, grow my own vegetables, spend less, live in a cabin in the county. It’s not that I don’t believe in these and try to do and be them. It’s that my rage is important too and I want to be valued in this new age.

It keeps me on my toes around all important feminist issues and I am grateful for it. I don’t want it to be a contradiction to compassion and love. For me it is the yin yang of staying a healthy happy old lesbian. I use the ocean as my guide. One day she is so peaceful and calm I can see my face in her surface. The next she rages and roars with all the power she holds inside. That is how I am too.

Dreaming of Challah as the Goddess’s Hair

I had a dream a few nights ago that I was at my sister’s wedding. She got loads of praise; I was being completely ignored. Finally, about halfway through the ceremony, I stood up and said, “I’m part of this family, too. Is anyone ever going to kvell over me?” Then I felt awful, full of shame and regret for disrupting the wedding. I couldn’t face myself, nor believe I had done it. I woke up shaking. I felt that as a lesbian/bisexual I was not a good enough Jew, I was disloyal to my family and my people. I believed the lie that a lesbian could not possibly be happy, and would have to be lonely and pitiful. Jews are big on family and blood relations (I was often told only to trust mishpochah [family]). As an unmarried woman, I would never become an adult member of my I biological extended family.

I grew up mostly in New York with two immigrant parents, one who survived the Holocaust, the other one raised in England. My father and his family come from Transylvania. The Holocaust was the elephant in the living room—never talked about, always present. As a kid, I was hyperintellectual and overalert. I had many night-mares about being chased, murdered in my sleep, shot at, going into hiding. I’ve noticed a lot of us Jews have some survival-based paranoia. Having one-third of our people murdered in this century makes us a little edgy. Writing this article is terrifying. Exposure on such a large scale is the opposite of my childhood lessons. My father, sitting at the dinner table, said, “ They can take everything away but they can’t take away what’s up here,” tapping his temple. This is what I was taught: You have brains—use them, keep a low profile, never let anyone know where you come from, i.e., that you’re a Jew.

Sometimes I feel a similar fear as a lesbian/bisexual woman. When I go to large gay parades or marches, I wonder if I’m the only one who’s thinking Wow, what an easy opportunity to drop a bomb and wipe us out.… In different situations, I measure how out to be as a queer person (or as a Jew). My first day on a new job at a women’s peace organization, I weighed heavily the pros and cons of placing a wall calendar above my desk. The theme of the calendar was peace and justice, and the month of April showed a picture of one dykes-looking woman leaning on another in the Greek Isles. All the other months featured sweet children’s drawings and pictures of doves. I decided to hang the calendar. It cost me my job after the calendar roused the homophobic director. There are times I feel forced to prioritize myself as a Jew or as a gay person. If I’m in a multicultural group and there are no other Jews, but there are other lesbians, I will speak out as a Jew.

The two identities are completely intertwined, and I want to bring my full self everywhere. It’s in the Jewish lesbian/bisexual community that I feel most at home. I sense that both Jews and queers have been forced by history and oppression to “take care of our own.” I co-founded a Queer Minyan of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men who meet monthly to celebrate Shabbat [Jewish Sabbath]. We sing “Hineh matov umanayim shevet haqueer gam yachad.” It means “How good and sweet it is for us to be together.” The original has achim [brothers]. Something about replacing the Hebrew word for brothers with the contemporary English word queer stirs a feeling in the group. We are a Jewish queer family with tremendous love and support for each other. It is a blessing to have a place where I can show myself freely.

I can pass as a non-Jew. I can also pass as a heterosexual. But every time I do, a part of me dies. At a meeting to plan a huge multicultural ritual honoring ancestors, one man turned to me and said, “Why would you want to keep being Jewish? Why not leave it behind with all the other patriarchal regressive belief systems?” And what my heart cried out was: I can’t not be Jewish, just like I can’t change my short square hands or my long thin feet or my skinny legs. I can’t get over it by raising my consciousness or changing my diet. I am a Jew. It’s the people I come from, it’s my ethnicity, my culture, it’s in my bones and my blood. It’s the terror, the joy, the beauty, and the flavor of my thinking.

Non-Jews often reduce the Jewish people to the religion. But it is not only Judaism that makes me Jewish. It’s the mix of culture and patterns, religion and stories. I identify with the long history of Jewish radicals, communists, socialists, and progressives in this country and elsewhere. People like Emma Goldman, Adrienne Rich, Karl Marx, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, and Si Kahn. We have a proud history of Jewish culture separate from the religion. The Yiddishkeit culture of Eastern Europe was very rich and beautiful before it was destroyed by the Nazis. Now, fifty years later, lesbians in this country are among the most active in nourishing the remaining seeds of Yiddishkeit. I am a part of a very old, diverse, and multicultural people. We come from many countries, we speak many languages, we range in appearance from dark brown skin with kinky hair to light skinned with blond hair. We may have been unwelcome, on borrowed time, in the countries we found ourselves in, but we were deeply influenced by our surroundings. Since my immediate family came from Eastern Europe, the music and food and culture I grew up with was infused with this part of the world. (One example: I thought borsht [red beet soup] was a Jewish dish until a non-Jewish first-generation Russian friend of mine served it to me at a Christmas dinner!)

And in turn, as lesbians, we are reshaping what it means to he Jewish. I have a Jewish identity/spirituality that draws from parts of the religion and mixes in other spiritual traditions that speak to me as a woman and lesbian. I think of the priestesses in the Temple guarding the flame when I light my Shabbat candles. I dream of the Goddess’s hair when I eat challah [ritual braided egg bread].

Día de los Muertos

A few nights ago as I was getting out of my car at the top of my little hill in Los Angeles, I heard a terrible metal scream that sent shivers down my spine. It was a battle cry, a mother’s wail, a dead man’s laugh; the sound of a shotgun.

Having grown up in the Pico-Union district of down-town, I know all too well the sound of ammunition in the nighttime sky, but this one was so close that I jumped with the blast. A few seconds later I heard a ear’s leaping cry, like a dragster out of the gate at the speedway. A small Toyota raced by me with four homeboys. The two in the backseat were still holding their shotgun; out of the ear windows.

Later that night as I was working a pen toward paper, doing overtime on my poet duties, I decided to go down to my trusted 7-Eleven for one of those snacks that make me the last man on the totem pole at the gym. On the way down the hill I saw an ambulance and the coroner’s truck at the site of where that bullet screamed and hit. It was the house on the block that makes everyone uncomfortable. The one the neighbors talk about when they mention “property values.” The house where they park cars on the lawn. A Spanish bungalow blasting Sunday afternoon FM stations with a backyard keg. The house where beautiful brown-skinned shirtless boys with teardrop tattoos and shaved-head prison dos walk a fashion runway of “misfit.” Daring each other to lower their baggy khakis and striped JC Penny boxers below the imaginary line of “acceptable.” Somewhere down toward desire. Giving feisty chola girls and colored queer boys like me reason enough to still want to live in the bad neighborhoods where we grew up.

I watched the body bag, all zipped up and ready for the morgue, where a veterana chola mama will identify next-of-kin as shooting victim number “we’ve lost count, don’t ask anymore.” I pass a number of rod iron-windowed houses where old ladies are peeking through the kitchen curtains for a glimpse of this week’s tragedy. Heads nod at the corner while housewives go hack inside to iron a viejo’s clothes for the next day’s commute. Oprah said it would be like this.

art “Some queers like me come from or have sought social and cultural circumstances in which Independent teachers … whom some call ‘crazy wisdom masters,’ are ‘on the loose.’ Their lives constantly challenge conventional wisdoms and ordinary morality, eccentrically assisting in the process of understanding the play and transience of psychohistorical structures and conventions rooted in history and in the psyches of individuals. Such eccentric teachings seem to empty the body and mind of crippling biographical and cultural baggage as a necessary prerequisite to the development of understandings which may lie outside ordinary human judgment, free of cultural blinders.”

PITZER COLLEGE PROFESSOR LOURDES ARGUELLES, FROM “CRAZY WISDOM: MEMORIES OF A CUBAN QUEER” IN SISTERS, SEXPERTS AND QUEERS

I went off to 7-Eleven, standing there reading Noticias del Mundo, wondering what I could do. Feeling helpless, a bit traumatized, my urban dilemma started to feel like some had movie-of-the-week and I decided to go home. As I was heading back up the hill I was convinced that I should drive by the shotgun house if only to confront my fears about this situation and its occupants. Let’s not forget, they are my neighbors.

As I turned the corner I saw a faint glory of flickering fire-light. I slowed down and saw a pool of dried blood. Over the traces of this once beating heart stood twelve candles in the shape of a cross. I was so nursed by this image. By this reminder of what the living among us do. Someone was marking the loss. I knew I had to do something.

The next morning, as I was fighting with the urban commuters for the first chance at the carpool lane, I slowed down at the bottom of the hill and saw the quiet candles flickering a small reminder of the previous night’s event. Next to the candles and the pool of blood was a shopping cart and a small sign in modern-day Sanskrit, cholo writing, that spelled out the name Eddie. Inside the cart were a pile of clothes, pictures, a baseball cap, some hangers, and shoes. Eddie in a nutshell.

Two Cuban American men enjoy a dance at a Dade Count, Florida gay watering hole in 1977. (Bettye Lane)

When I got to the corner, I did what my grandmother and I always did ever summer in Tijuana at the announcement of a death in the colonias. I stopped at a flower shop and bought a small funeral wreath. I drove back and left it lying in front of the last drops of Eddie. I don’t know if Eddie was an innocent drive-by victim or a violent motherfucker pissing on a territory he shouldn’t have. I don’t care. Rack then, in Tijuana, buses fell over cliffs, jealous wives shot wandering husbands. a pack of coyotes stole away a child, cows fell on you. Whatever the reason, we were always there. To mark the passing. It was our responsibility. Our role.

In the queer community we mark the passing of our sisters and brothers because sometimes families don’t. We put up pictures of our dead friends because sometimes we forget what they looked like before they got sick. We write about our dead artists because sometimes we forget what they did. We grieve openly in front of murals and altars of memory because we see how much we have lost. We say prayers for art works because that’s what families tend to throw away first.

I started to make the documentation of queer Latino artists who had died of AIDS part of my art, because whole bodies of work became fragmented among collectors with no sense of what that work meant. This is what I give back to my community, my little hillside block. A sense of memory. The what-used-to-be of life.

That night on my way home I was amazed at what had happened to our blood-soaked Silver Lake corner. A transformation had taken place. Over thirty candles of various shapes and sizes were doing time illuminating the dead. Stacks of flowers piled on top of each other gave off shadows from candlelight. Little cards lay on the sidewalk. Someone had taken an old junior high picture of the dearly departed and made a large photocopy that hung over the shopping cart. This is what we give back to the community. The pictures left behind. The melted candles. The rituals. A history.

I saw an old lady walking home from the market with two bags of groceries, and she stopped at the corner. She kneeled down in front of the sidewalk altar and did a sign of the cross. She pulled a head of rosaries out of her purse and draped them over the photocopy picture of that junior high school yearbook entry.

Country Coming out

I was living in the country, raising sheep, and publishing a magazine with other women in the community, gay and straight. We had done an early issue on sexuality, where all of us wrote rather intimate and exposing pieces. (Because of editorial decisions, the author’s names did not appear on the pieces themselves.) I was quite proud of my involvement with the magazine, and had encouraged my entire family to get subscriptions to it. My parents were visiting when the sexuality issue came out.

One morning early, there was a knock on my door. There was my mother, holding the current issue, looking at me. “Sherry.” she said in her Southern drawl. “Did you write this?” She pointed to the piece in which I had graphically described having sex with my lover, eleven years my senior.

Another pause. “Well. let’s not tell your father,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “Let’s see if he can figure it out.”

I Lost It at the Movies

My grandmother, Lydia, and my mother, Dolores, were both talking to me from their bathroom stalls in the Times Square movie theater. I was washing butter from my bands at the sink and didn’t think it at all odd. The people in my family are always talking; conversation is a life force in our existence.

To be a lesbian was part of who I was, like being left-handed—even when I’d slept with men. When my great-grandmother asked me in the last days of her life if I would be marrying my college boyfriend I said yes, knowing I would not, knowing I was a lesbian.

It seemed a fact that needed no expression. Even my first encounter with the word “bulldagger” was not charged with emotional conflict. When I was a teen in the 1960s, my grandmother told a story about a particular building in our Boston neighborhood that had gone to seed. She described the building’s past through the experience of a party she’d attended there thirty years before. The best part of the evening had been a woman she’d met and danced with. Lydia had been a professional dancer and singer on the black theater circuit; to dance with women was who she was. They’d danced, then the woman walked her home and asked her out. I heard the delicacy my grandmother searched for even in her retelling of how she’d explained to the “bulldagger” as she called her, that she liked her fine but she was more interested in men. I was struck with how careful my grandmother had been to make it clear to that woman (and in effect to me) that there was no offense taken in her attentions, that she just didn’t “go that way,” as they used to say. I was so happy at thirteen to have a word for what I knew myself to be. The word was mysterious and curious, as if from a new language that used some other alphabet which left nothing to cling to when touching its curves and crevices. But still, a word existed, and my grandmother was not flinching in using it. In fact, she’d smiled at the good heart and good looks of the bulldagger who’d liked her.

Once I had the knowledge of a word and a sense of its importance to me, I didn’t feel the need to explain, confess, or define my identity as a lesbian. The process of reclaiming my ethnic identity in this country was already all-consuming. Later, of course, in moments of glorious self-righteousness, I did make declarations. But they were not usually ones I had to make. Mostly they were a testing of the waters.

I need not pretend to be other than who I was. But did I need to declare it? During the holidays when I brought home best friends or lovers my family always welcomed us warmly, clasping us to their magnificent bosoms. Yet there was always an element of silence in our neighborhood, and surprisingly enough in our family, that was disturbing to me.

If the idea of cathedral weddings and station wagons held no appeal for me, the concept of an extended family was certainly important. But my efforts were stunted by our inability to talk about the life I was creating for myself, for all of us. It felt all the more foolish because I thought I knew how my family would react. I was confident they would respond with their customary aplomb just as they had when I’d first had my hair cut as an Afro (which they hated) or when I brought home friends who were vegetarians (which they found curious). Somewhere deep inside I think I believed that neither my grandmother nor my mother would ever censure my choices. Neither had actually raised me; my great-grandmother had done that, and she had been a steely barricade against encroachment on our personal freedoms and she’d never disapproved out loud of anything I’d done.

But it was not enough to have an unabashed admiration for these women. It was one thing to have pride in how they’d so graciously survived in spite of the odds against them. It was something else to be standing in a Times Square movie theater faced with the chance to say “it” out loud and risk the loss of their brilliant and benevolent smiles.

My mother had started reading the graffiti written on the wall of the bathroom stall. We hooted at each of her dramatic renderings. Then she said (not breaking the rhythm, since we all know timing is everything). “Here’s one I haven’t seen before—‘DYKES UNITE.’” There was that profound silence again, as if the frames of my life had ground to a halt. We were in a freeze-frame and options played themselves out in my head in rapid succession: Say nothing? Say something? Say what?

I laughed and said, “Yeah, but have you seen the rubber stamp on rubber desk at home?”

“No,” said my mother with a slight bit of puzzlement. “What does it say?”

“I saw it.” my grandmother called out from her stall. “It says: ‘Lesbian Money’!”

“I just stamp it on my big bills,” I said tentatively, and we all screamed with laughter. The other woman at the sinks tried to pretend we didn’t exist.

art “I studied chests, arms, and thighs glistening with sweat, and the tricks light can play when reflecting off a mirrored ball. That was the beginning. The beginning of feeling that the word ‘faggot’ did not accurately name the man I was or the man I was aspiring to become. The beginning of thinking thoughts that started off with ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of…’ and ‘I have a right to…’ The beginning of discarding the silence and the shame. The beginning of seeing the truth through all of the lies.”

CHARLES HARPE, FROM “AT 36” IN BROTHER TO BROTHER

Since then there has been little discussion. There have been some moments of awkwardness, usually in social situations where they feel uncertain. Although we have not explored the “it,” the shift in our relationship is clear. When I go home it is with my lover and she is received as such. I was lucky. My family was as relieved as I to finally know who I was.

art DID YOU KNOW…

The first Annual Deaf Lesbian and Gay Awareness Week was held in May 1994. Taking place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the week-long celebration included workshops, readings from the first deaf gay and lesbian reader, Eyes of Desire, and a Deaf Queer Pride Party at the Deaf Gay and Lesbian Center. The center is the first national organization run by and for gay and lesbian deaf people, and not associated with a college or university.

Notes from a Diary: A Gay Deaf Man’s Concern with Communication

September 19. Got rejected today at Christopher’s —looked at myself in the mirror and liked what I saw. Must have been the fact that I was deaf that scared him off. So, what’s new?

October 7. Met someone at the gym today in the strangest way—may be a perfect example of my situation of not being able to hear. His name’s Stan, and he’s from San Francisco. I was working out when I saw him and he noticed me. But after a few minutes at the machines, I noticed he wasn’t looking at me anymore and that he was almost done. I beat him to the showers but he still ignored me.… I asked him if he’d lost a towel. He never answered my question about the missing towel. Instead, he looked at me and said quite clearly, “My God, you’re deaf!” He told me he’d come up behind me while I was doing an exercise and spoken to me. I never answered him, so he put it off as New York snobbishness. Went to his hotel with him and had a marvelous time. Now I wonder how many times have people come up behind me and given up when I’d not responded? How many of them thought of the possibility I couldn’t hear them?

December 3. Someone asked me what it was like to be deaf. I asked the person who said it what it was like to be hearing. He couldn’t answer. I’ve never been able to hear, so how could I explain the difference?

December 4. Met some straight deaf people who were shocked when I told them I was gay. They disapprove for an obvious reason—I won’t bring any deaf children into the world. But there are other people who will maintain the heritage of deaf culture. I don’t have that “primitive urge” to maintain the “tribe” of deaf people for future generations. It’s hard for me to identify with much of the deaf community—it’s so varied—there are the differences along the lines of education, status, religion, race, and sexual preference. The gay community has exactly the same differences!

art “In my research of deaf gay men, I’ve asked this question of them: Suppose there are two candidates running for president, the first one for rights of the handicapped and the second one supporting gay rights. All said they would rather vote for the one supporting the rights of the handicapped than the one for gay rights. Which means the deaf gay person is more concerned with deaf rights than with gay rights. This Is also true of us in the deaf community. We think of ourselves as gay first, then deaf second; but In the hearing world, we think of our deafness first and our gayness second.”

TOM KANE, DEAF GAY ACTIVIST EXCERPTED FROM “MEN IN PINK SPACESUITS,” EYES OF DESIRE

January 3. Met a couple of deaf men from Washington, D.C. They were surprised I knew many hearing men, and they told me that I wasn’t being fair. I shouldn’t be socializing with anybody but deaf people. I’d rather look at it this way—my life is in the world, and I want to get involved with it as much as I can. For some deaf gay men, the world seems hostile because of the difficulty communicating. One man even accused me of showing off my ability to interact with the hearing world. I told him it wasn’t easy at all, but I wasn’t letting it prevent me from doing so. I relish the challenge.

I Am Your Sister: Black Women organizing Across Sexualities

When I say I am a Black Lesbian, I mean I am a woman whose primary focus of loving, physical as well as emotional, is directed to women. It does not mean that I hate men. Far from it. The harshest attacks I have ever heard against Black men came from those women who are intimately bound to them and cannot free themselves from a subservient and silent position. I would never presume to speak about Black men the way I have heard some of my straight sisters talk about the men they are attached to. And of course, that concerns me, because it reflects a situation of noncommunication in the heterosexual Black community that is far more truly threatening than the existence of Black Lesbians.

I have heard it said—usually behind my back—that Black Lesbians are not normal. But what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped? I remember, and so do many of you, when being Black was considered not normal, when they talked about us in whispers, tried to paint us, lynch us, bleach us, ignore us, pretend we did not exist. We called that racism.

I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50 percent of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30 percent of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family.

I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter.

The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference—to kill it or ignore it. Be assured: Loving women is not a communicable disease. You don’t catch it like the common cold. Yet the one accusation that seems to render even the most vocal straight Black woman totally silent and ineffective is the suggestion that she might be a Black Lesbian.

If someone says you’re Russian and you know you’re not, you don’t collapse into stunned silence. Even if someone calls you a bigamist, or a childbeater, and you know you’re not, you don’t crumple into bits. You say it’s not true and keep on printing the posters. But let anyone, particularly a Black man, accuse a straight Black woman of being a Black Lesbian, and right away that sister becomes immobilized, as if that is the most horrible thing she could be, and must at all costs be proven false. That is homophobia. It is a waste of woman energy, and it puts a terrible weapon into the hands of your enemies to be used against you to silence you, to keep you docile and in line. It also serves to keep us isolated and apart.

art DID YOU KNOW…

Thirteen-year-old writer Malkia Cyril attended the Second National Black writers Conference in March 1988. Accompanied by her mother, she had come especially to see Audre Lords, the only black lesbian she knew—and a role model for her. Malkia took the microphone with Barbara Smith and Gail Lewis to share her happiness at discovering other black lesbians and role models. She later said. “I’ve been waiting for a long time so that I could see a positive lesbian role model for myself to follow. So I can continue the way I’ve been living, knowing it’s okay… knowing that it’s right.”

I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are not political, that we have not been and are not involved in the struggles of Black people. But when I taught Black and Puerto Rican students writing at City College in the SEEK program in the sixties, I was a Black Lesbian. I was a Black Lesbian when I helped organize and fight for the Black Studies Department of John Jay College. And because I was fifteen years younger then and less sure of myself, at one crucial moment, I yielded to pressures that said I should step back for a Black man even though I knew him to be a serious error of choice, and I did, and he was. But I was a Black Lesbian then.

When my girlfriends and I went out into the car one July Fourth night after fireworks with cans of white spray paint and our kids asleep in the backseat, one of us staying behind to keep the motor running and watch the kids while the other two worked our way down the suburban New Jersey street, spraying white paint over the black jockey statues, and their little red jackets, too, we were Black Lesbians.

When I drove through the Mississippi Delta to Jackson in 1968 with a group of Black students from Toughaloo, another car full of redneck kids trying to bump us off the road all the way back into town, I was a Black Lesbian.

African American dykes marching together at the 1973 Christopher Street rally. (Bettye Lane)

When I weaned my daughter in 1963 to go to Washington in August to work in the coffee tents along with Lena Horne, making coffee for the marshals because that was what most Black women did in the 1963 March on Washington, I was a Black Lesbian.

When I taught a poetry workshop at Toughaloo, a small Black college in Mississippi, where white rowdies shot up the edge of the campus every night, and I felt the joy of seeing young Black poets find their voices and power through words in our mutual growth, I was a Black Lesbian. And there are strong Black poets today who date their growth and awareness from those workshops.

When Yoli and I cooked curried chicken and beans and rice and took our extra blankets and pillows up the hill to the striking students occupying buildings at City College in 1969, demanding open admissions and the right to an education, I was a Black Lesbian. When I walked through the midnight hallways of Lehman College that same year, carrying Midol and Kotex pads for the young Black radical women taking part in the action, and we tried to persuade them that their place in the revolution was not ten paces behind Black men, that spreading their legs to the guys on the tables in the cafeteria was not a revolutionary act no matter what the brothers said, I was a Black Lesbian. When I picketed for Welfare Mothers’ Rights, and against the enforced sterilization of young Black girls, when I fought institutionalized racism in the New York City Schools, I was a Black Lesbian.

But you did not know it because we did not identify ourselves, so now, you can say that Black Lesbians and Gay men have nothing to do with the struggles of the Black Nation.

When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimke, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a woman who loved women deeply.

Today. Lesbians and Gay men are some of the most active and engaged members of Art Against Apartheid, a group that is making visible and immediate our cultural responsibilities against the tragedy of South Africa. We have organizations such as the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, and Men of All Colors together, all of which are committed to and engaged in antiracist activity.

Homophobia and heterosexism mean you allow your-selves to be robbed of the sisterhood and strength of Black lesbian women because you are afraid of being called a Lesbian yourself. Yet we share so many concerns as Black women, so much work to he done. The destruction of our Black children and the theft of young Black minds are joint urgencies. Black children shot down or doped up on the streets of our cities are priorities for all of us. The fact of Black women’s blood flowing with grim regularity in the streets and living rooms of Black communities is not a Black Lesbian rumor. It is a sad statistical truth. The fact that there is a widening and dangerous lack of communication around our differences between Black women and men is not a Black Lesbian plot. It is a reality that is starkly clarified as we see our young people become more and more uncaring of each other. Young Black boys believing that they can define their manhood between a sixth-grade girl’s legs, growing up believing that Black women and girls are the fitting target for their justifiable furies rather than the racist structure grinding us all into dust, these are not Black Lesbian myths. These are sad realities of Black communities today and of immediate concern to us all. We cannot afford to waste each other’s energies in our common battles.

What does homophobia mean? It means that high-powered Black women are told it is not safe to attend a Conference on the Status of Women in Nairobi simply because we are lesbians. It means that in a political action, you rob yourselves of the vital insight and energies of political women such as Betty Powell and Barbara Smith and Gwendolyn Rogers and Raymina Mays and Robin Christian and Yvonne Flowers. It means another instance of the divide-and-conquer routine

How do we organize around our differences, neither denying them nor blowing them up out of proportion?

The first step is an effort of will on your part. Try to remember to keep certain facts in mind. Black Lesbians are not apolitical. We have been a part in every freedom struggle within this country. Black Lesbians arc not a threat to the Black family. Many of us have families of our own. We are not white, and we are not a disease. We are women who love women. This does not mean we are going to assault your daughters in an alley on Nostrand Avenue. It does not mean we are about to attack you if we pay you a compliment on your dress. It does not mean we only think about sex, any more than you only think about sex.

Even if you do believe any of these stereotypes about Black Lesbians, begin to practice acting like you don’t believe there. Just as racist stereotypes are the problem of the white people who believe them, so also are homophobic stereotypes the problem of the heterosexuals who believe them. In other words, those stereotypes are yours to solve, not mine, and they are a terrible and wasteful harrier to our working together. I am not your enemy. We do not have to become each other’s unique experiences and insights in order to share what we have learned through our particular battles for survival as Black women.

Writer Mariana Roma-Carmona (left) combs the hair of her lover, Jane Chan, 1988. (Robert Giard)

There was a poster in the 1960s that was yen popular: HE’S NOT BLACK, HE’S MY BROTHER! It used to infuriate, me because it implied that the two were mutually exclusive—he couldn’t be both brother and Black. Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.

Friends of Dorothy

This past year I have attended three memorial services for black sisters or, as they used to say in the old days, “friends of Dorothy”—meaning that the women were lesbians. The services focused on esteeming these women, recognizing their intelligence, creativity, productivity, success, and their capacity to love. The women were recognized also as having had successful relationships, intimate and interpersonal, with other black women and their partners. One woman was out to her family and the world. The other two were not.

During the memorial services, several of us took turns telling herstory accounts about each of the women’s lives, recognizing our personal sense of loss and the greater loss to the community, in that each had died relatively young without having achieved all her goals or impacted her society or the general community in a manner in which she would have preferred.

Some of their family members attended the special memorial services; each family preferred to have a funeral service in the church of choice in their community. I attended one of the funerals and experienced the entire service as a bad joke. No one acknowledged that the woman was also a lesbian in a fifteen-year relationship with a loving companion and friend—a woman, incidentally, not invited to attend the funeral.

I began to think about myself and the many other black lesbians who no doubt will live and die without ever having received special recognition or having been esteemed as persons by their own families. I began to think how I had for many years engaged in a rather collusive relationship with my family and many of my close friends. Many times I would fake an interest in their pre-arranged blind dates for me with men. I would often roll my eyes and wink when asked about my sex life or the current man in my life. It was easier for them to associate me with males, real or imagined, in order to suppress real concerns about my never bringing males home for family members to meet. We all played in the game, pretending I was like all the other black women in my family and the immediate community.

I did not feel comfortable coming out, and for a long time didn’t even know how to come out. In my youth in the black community, an out lesbian was considered to be at the very bottom of the varying levels of low-life. I learned this lesson early when a woman in the community returned home after World War II and began to dress like a man and drive a taxicab. She was the pariah of the community and, even as children, we were warned not to go near her, talk to her, or accept any gifts from her. I don’t remember much about this woman other than that she was always alone. I never recall seeing her with any other women or men.

When people outside my family asked why I wasn’t married, family members would quite pridefully remind them that I was “too smart”—meaning too intelligent—to put up with a black man. Everybody would laugh, including me. When I was not in good financial standing, I would often be the butt of other family jokes about “funny people.” Mine was the sad-funny laughter, because as a youth I was often reprimanded for being “too smart”—meaning too independent.

At thirty-five, I moved to California and began what I call learning how to love myself, share my closet, and be a lot more open and active in my community. I built significant bridges of friendship with the black and white women in my community. I gave new focus to my work: my self-esteem soared and I was on my way.

I created a family for myself—or, rather, a family of choice formed around me—and I was freed up to the extent that I no longer had to mentally look over my shoulder, wishing and wondering if I was loved and if I would reconnect with my family of origin in a newly productive manner. From age forty-five to fifty-five, I focused primarily on my lifestyle and role as a black lesbian in the black/white community.

I found that the black community often induced the same pain and anguish that I experienced in my family. I am strongly aware of the penalties the black community extracts from me. The community views me as a misfit because I am an assertive, self-directed, self-loving woman—traits seen by the black community as positive in heterosexual black women but viewed as male when exercised by me.

Those attitudes and ideas about lesbians are expressed in the negative behavior of heterosexual females and males. The mark of oppression lies heavy on my shoulders: homophobia on one side and racism on the other. At age sixty. I am mastering walking the middle line and have tempered my mettle to deal with the oppression on both sides of me.

I hope my story will serve as a source of empowerment to free other lesbians from the burden of the yoke I have borne for so long—free them to make friends, interact with their chosen community, expand themselves, and realize that we can create our own families. I hope more black lesbians will or already realize that relationships with relatives can be maintained without having to surrender one’s identity or true sense of self.

Cost of Living Adjustment

Iwas on the phone with my friend Jen, sitting in the kitchen with my mono while she made dinner. Jen and I were talking about girls, as usual, but I was being careful and letting her do most of the talking (not a problem for her!). Then Jen said, “Is your mom there?”

“If you don’t, I will.” promised Jen ominously. “And you know I’ll call her when your ass is out—”

I looked over at my mom, who never listened to my conversations but always butted in. Without pausing to think, I said, “Mom, what would you do if I told you I was gonna start dating girls?”

A Corer from inside OUT, a san francisco—based magazine for lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. (insideOUT)

She stopped what she was doing only long enough to smirk and reply, “What am I supposed to do? As long as it doesn’t cost me any more money than your dating guys, it’s fine with me.”

Coming out for love

My elder daughter has never shied away from pointing out the flaws she has seen in my arguments or my character. I have often been confused, sometimes to the point of anger, by her directness.

I remember one argument very clearly. She was sitting on the stairs leading up from the kitchen, tearful, fierce, and lovely. I remember I reached out suddenly, took both her hands and pulled her down to my level.

My first marriage failed in the next decade and my daughter’s in the following one. We saw each other rarely after that.

About a year ago, we met on natural ground, at a restaurant. My daughter told me about the delight she had found in dancing. She said she had fallen in love with a dancer. She said the dancer was a woman. She said the woman would come to the restaurant in a few minutes to meet me. And so she did, tall and slender, with a slow, wide smile and the grace of her art.

As the youngest child in a family of powerful people, I had learned the dodge of putting my emotions on hold when caught by surprise—by a parent’s quick turn of mood, an older brother’s trick.

I shock the young woman’s hand and smiled. Then the three of us—our eyes bright with our separate anxieties —sat down and had tea.

But as I drove home, what I had suspended carne crashing down. I found myself thinking of my own experiences with homosexuality: the schoolboy fumbling, the adult’s fear of loving someone of the same sex, of being close to someone who did.

Yet I felt no fear in the restaurant and felt none now in the car. Shock, yes, wearing off. Worry over what my daughter and her dancer would suffer. Worry over what my daughter’s two children might suffer.

Beyond that, something I would later call acceptance and, later still, respect. I could not forget how complete my daughter had seemed. The love and confidence so evident at that small table had been palpable and, yes, honorable.

Early last fall, these two women committed them-selves to each other. My daughter invited her mother and younger sister to witness the ceremony. She did not invite me, and in time she wrote to explain why.

I had taught her how to be an accoutrement to a man’s life, how to flirt with men and mistrust women. I had put down homosexuals.

“Now I am a homosexual,” she wrote. “That doesn’t make you a very safe person.” And she ended by telling me that if I wanted her respect I could begin by admitting the degree to which I was homophobic and sexist.

I was mad—hurt and mad. But something kept me from firing off the attack letter that scrolled in my mind. Perhaps it was fear of the emptiness that would have followed: the end to our periodic attempts to find in each other what we needed to find.

I ended up talking out my anger with my second wife and then with a friend, a woman who has a lesbian daughter. Then I called another woman, a counselor in a near-by town, and, wincing a bit at the thought of the years already spent in therapy, went back to work on myself.

The official National coming Out Day logo was created by Keith Haring. National Coming Out Day, every October 11, was first celebrated in 1988.

I have been with my daughter and her lover sever-al times now, each time more free and open than the last. Not too long ago all of us — my second wife and I, my two daughters and their families—met and played in the dusk under oaks and maples, calling and laughing. That same night the Republicans were gathering in Houston.

For days I saw and heard a small group of extremists calling for their brand of cultural cleansing. They, the adherents of the repressive right, had a list of the enemies —and homosexuals were near the top. Their message was clear and ugly: We talk to God, and God says, “Get the gays.”

Cults have been chanting similar chants in this country since Salem. But the hate show at Houston—and the antigay campaigns in states from Oregon to Maine—have taught me that the haters have not lost their talent for mining the seams of our least reputable fears. They obviously have not lost their staying power. I said to myself that now I had a strong reason to “come out” publicly against them.

With that thought, that phrase. I finally did get it. My elder daughter and her lover made no bones about their sexual preference. I was making bones, plenty of them. I was telling only my closest friends about the two women and then only in conspiratorial confidence.

I had fallen back on the safety, the old safety, of silence. If I were going to come out in the open against the repression, I first needed to come out of that safe closet of mine and talk about my own daughter.

I saw her again recently. There was some family furniture to divide up. and when she and her loser were ready to drive home, I asked her if I could say something in private to her.

art “The community of black gay men Is very diverse. We are short, tall, average height. We are light-skinned, brown-skinned, dark-skinned, and every shade in between. We are tops, bottoms, versatile, fats, fems, teachers, lawyers, poets, doctors, filmmakers, computer analysts, and sailors.”

WRITER CHARLES HARPE

We walked off into an old pasture and I asked her if she would mind my writing this piece.

She reached out suddenly, took both my hands and pulled me close to her. Close enough so that I could see the tears begin, the love.

Different Is Not Bad

Each day, as I skim through the newspaper and read the articles concerning homosexuals, and as I look at the editorials, I wonder what the big deal is. Why does it matter that I like members of my own sex?

There are a lot of answers to that question. We, as a sexual minority, face a lot of discrimination in everyday life. Probably the most prevalent source of this stems from the simple reason that we are different. Anything that is not mainstream and “generally accepted” is different, and therefore hated by many people. Most people have trouble adjusting to something that they’re not used to. The other side of this is religion. Most religions deem homosexual and bisexual behavior as void of love, damaging to society, and wholly unacceptable.

Through all of this hate, disgust, and lack of knowledge, people are not really facing the issues at hand. Why does it really matter that I’m gay? I like other guys; I find companionship with another male very pleasurable. I do not harm other people in the process; quite the opposite. I can bring love and happiness to someone’s life, and does it really matter that that person may be another male? Different is not bad, and such a relationship is most certainly filled with love.

Four young queers adorned in gay garb relax at the 1994 Christopher street Parade in New York City.(Bettye Lane)

What is damaging to society is the refusal to deal with current issues. Religion teaches that all people are created equally, yet it discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. Which is more damaging to society—persecuting people because they like members of their own sex and forcing them to feel isolated, guilty, and less than human (which directly affects society), or allowing people to be as they are, and accepting them for who they are? Not a very difficult question to answer.

In the process of dealing with my sexuality, I have discovered more about myself, and about other people. I look at the world and remark about its awesome beauty, and I laugh with other people and have fun spending time with them. I am no different from anyone else. I did not choose to be gay, but I don’t want to change (assuming that I could). True, being straight in today’s world is much easier than being gay. Yet, at the same time, I have learned much through my struggle to accept myself as I am, and I refuse to cover up my feelings, which are just as wonderful as those of heterosexuals. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter that I’m gay. It doesn’t matter that someone else is gay. People are all equally capable of sharing love and friendship, regardless of who they share those feelings with. The ability of one person to bring happiness to someone else is truly amazing. Does it matter if both of them are male or female? As my hest friend says, “So I like other guys; big deal.”

art “This was around 1867 or 1868. I was nineteen and in New York for the first Me. I was just beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, and had just gone by myself to see the play Boys in the Band which had recently opened. Afterward, I knew that I wanted to meet other gay men, but I didn’t know how or where. So I walked up and down Broadway whistling the theme from the play, hoping that someone would get the hint and talk to me. Unfortunately, no one did.”

LONNIE

Reflections of a Gay Jew

It was the night of my Yiddish class at the Jewish Community Center. Heartsick from the recent break-up of a relationship, I didn’t feel like leaving the house. But I forced myself to attend because it was a great class and I hoped it would distract me.

The teacher asked, “Vos macht a Yid, Naphtali?—How are you?” and wouldn’t let me he when I said I was okay. He sensed my sadness and asked. “Hastu tsuris?—Have you got trouble?”

I reluctantly replied, “Yaw” in my newly rediscovered mother tongue. “Der mann vos ich hub zich farleebten hub mich meter night leeb: The man I love doesn’t love me.”

A woman in her sixties raised her eyebrows. “Far vos iz ehr nisht farleebt mit deer?: Wily doesn’t he love you?” “Vile ehr iz a nar,” I simplified: “Because he’s a fool.”

Another classmate, a man about my age, asked, “Oyb ehr iz n nar, far vos nus dee eem leeb?: If he’s a fool, why do you love him?” “Ich bin oichet a nar,” I replied with a shrug. “I’m also a fool.”

The teacher postulated, “Oyb ehr iz a nar oon dee bist a nar, es iz a giteh shidach!: If he’s a fool and you’re a fool, it’s a perfect match!”

I Was Queer When Gay Meant Happy

1963—President Kennedy is assassinated. His photo appears on the front page of the Portland Evening Express. I kiss it and whisper. “I love you.” I am seven years old.

1965—I am sent to the principal’s office for making fun of a girl’s hairstyle on the school bus. Even then I had a sense of fashion do’s and don’t’s.

1968—Sex-segregated gym classes begin. My first time in a boys’ locker room. The teacher shows us where to change into our gym uniforms. My friend Paul asks me if I know what happens in the showers. I don’t but I don’t admit to it. Boys learn how to square-dance with girls by first learning how to square-dance with other boys. In the locker room I can’t take my eyes off the twelve-year-old cocks beginning to swell in snow-white Fruit of the Loom. My friend Alan has a locker next to mine, and his cock always seems to make a bigger lump than any-one else’s.

1969—Judy Garland dies of an overdose and I’m sadder than when Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix do the same.

1970—My hometown paper does a story on “gay liberationists” in New York City. I realize that there are other people like me—at least in NYC.

1971—I begin writing mash notes to the other ninth grade boys. I leave these notes in their lockers with my locker number listed if they want to write back. No one does, but on the school bus one guy says, “I bet you know all the words to ‘Lola.’” I do. I realize for the first time that gay isn’t good.

1971—I ride my bike to art art festival in Portland and am cruised by an older guy wearing a leather rest and blue jeans while I look at an “art” book of naked boys called The boy. We don’t speak and we don’t have sex but I start to learn the silent language of cruising. Repeat whatever he does (e.g. tap your foot. rub your crotch. etc.). I get scared when he follows me to another store. and I ride my bike home exhilarated.

1971—Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) becomes a best-seller. The idea of sticking light bulbs and Coke bottles up my bum and hairpins in my cock scares and excites me.

1972—I finally stick my fifteen-year-old cock through a glory hole in Bradlees and am sucked off by a guy. I have my first orgasm ever and have nothing to remember him by but his shoes visible beneath the cold, metal partition. The guy doesn’t know it but he taught me what the end result of jerking off is (orgasm). that fifteen-year-olds are a hot commodity, that you can have sex almost anywhere and any time, and that silence is golden. I don’t speak to a sex partner or have sex outside a bathroom for two years.

1974—I make my decision about where to go to college when I participate in an orgy in a tearoom in Providence. Rhode Island. In the fall, I enroll at Brown University.

1974—I meet my first boyfriend. a schoolteacher named Mike, in a tearoom at Brown. He fucks me every weekend using Vaseline Intensive Care hand lotion as tube. Condoms are still for straight guys who fuck girls who can’t afford the pill. an IUD. or diaphragm.

1975—I become president of Gay Lib at Brown. There is only one female member.

1976—I attend my first gay liberation parade in Providence and come out to my family.

Yom Kippur Morning at Kehilla Community Synagogue

On the day of Yom Kippur we traditionally read the portion of Leviticus that includes the statement that a man lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination, which later goes on to pronounce the act as being punishable by death. I, like many of us, have spent years feeling furious about this portion and trying to either avoid it or dismiss it. It has always lent a bitter edge to Yom Kippur, because for marry of us, part of what is especially powerful on this day is that we know that Jews all over the world and through the ages have gathered together to chant the same prayers and share the same feelings of tribal angst. I am also sadly and angrily aware that on this day, Jews all over the world have received reinforcement and even blessing for their hatred of those of us who are not heterosexual.

In the past few years, though, I have come to a new point with this parsha. While I know its original intent and how it has historically been used to justify hatred and violence toward my people—one of my peoples—this is how I read it at this point: It says, “Do not lie with a man as with a woman.” In other words, if you are with a man, be with him, fully. If you are with a woman, be with her, fully. Do not pretend you are with someone else of another gender. Be present. As Audre Lorde said, do not look away as you come together. In this reading of the parsha, we are mandated to integrate our sexuality, however we define that for ourselves, with our spirituality and with the rest of our lives. And according to this parsha, to not do so is to’evah, usually translated in English as “abomination” but more accurately described as “that which leads us astray.” So the parsha says that to not be our authentic selves, to not he fully present with one another, and to not bring our sexuality into the wholeness of our lives, leads us “astray,” away from our truest and most aligned selves.

I don’t necessarily expect that Jews all over the world are going to rush to embrace this new interpretation as the true meaning of this parsha each Yom Kippur. But then, I never expected to see Rabin and Arafat shake hands on the White House lawn. Anything is possible.

Meanwhile, I’d like to take a brief look at where the Jewish community as a whole is in relation to lesbian and gay issues. It wasn’t that long ago that most of the community was dealing with the most basic issue of acknowledging our existence, admitting that yes, there are Jews who are lesbian and gay (though, of course, always in someone else’s family). Most of the Jewish community has progressed along to “tolerance.” Tolerance is characterized by the notion that lesbians and gay men should not be overtly discriminated against, and by the notion that we should be left alone. Tolerance is a lot better than overt persecution, but being left alone means exactly that —you are on your own, to be isolated, excluded, and as invisible as possible. Tolerance stops some of the overt oppression, but it does nothing to build community.

Parts of the Jewish community have moved along to deal with inclusion-encouraging us to be visible, acknowledging our relationships and families, valuing us as participants and leaders and role models.… And that’s good. But it has still mostly operated on a kind of “Us/Them” paradigm. You are welcome here as long as you fit in with “Us.” but don’t challenge “Us” too much, don’t try to change too many things, don’t expect the dominant culture of “Our” institution to shift. Most of it is not conscious, and very little of it applies only to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people. Many of us feel Outside at one point or another—we’re too old, we’re too young, we have visible or invisible disabilities, we don’t know much about Judaism. we spent ten years practicing Buddhism, we didn’t grow up as Jews.… Few or none of us feel totally secure, and there are many important stories to be listened to fully and respectfully.

You Dared Us to Dream That We Are Worth Wanting Each Other

Night before last we dedicated the room in the Center named for Charles Angel. It was a wonderful, caring ceremony and I thought of you several times. Harold Robinson talked about how the room is important both as symbol and as substance. And we need both—equally. I guess that’s a good way to remember you. To remember you as a metaphor, but not to forget the text, and to embrace all the humanity of your life, like an orisha—a flesh-and-blood hero. That sounds like a good African way to remember you.

It just dawned on me that you were the first man I knew with both ears pierced—way back when. I always wanted to, but only found the courage last summer, now that it’s fashionable. So you never saw me with my two holes. I remember your Leroy mechanic shirt, too, when I met you. You were doing your “Black/Out” column in Au Courant then, and I was so excited to meet you. To me, your most important work was always those “Brother to Brother” essays. What they said was so simple, but so unsaid. There’s nobody writing essays on the Black Gay Male experience, and that’s so important. Your stuff went to the heart—and there’s a new power in them for me each time I re-read them. If I had to pick your single most valuable gift, it would be the aphorism “Black men loving Black men is a revolutionary act.” And it is! As simple as it seems, it is. And that is the challenge of your life and death. To make these words real. To really love each other. To love each other enough to care, to sacrifice, to risk, to “take care of our own Members of Other Countries. a groundbreaking New York literary when the night grows cold collective of gay African American men, in 1987. (Robert Giant) and silent.”

Members of Other Countries, a groundbreaking New York literary collective of gay African American men, in 1987. (Robert Giard)

And now I realize that Black men loving Black men is truly “an autonomous agenda … not rooted in any particular sexual, political, or class affiliation, but in our mutual sunbvival.” That loving each other, more than politics or being out or march-es or CU or legislation is what will “create the Black Gay community in which you have built your home.” The ways in which we manifest that love must indeed be myriad.

“I dare us to dream that we are worth wanting each other.” you wrote: dared yourself to dream: that we could “receive more of what we want from each other.” You talked about giving “each other permission to dream and speak of those dreams.” about friendships “not lost to anger, or silence.”

You spoke, too, of breaking silence, of speaking and exorcising not only anger, but hurt. So in m love for you, I must also speak my anger and hurt, for “What legacy is to be found in our silence?” So I claim this public space to grieve, to explore my lose and friendship: to say to my brother. “Man I loved you. I really, really loved you.”

So you didn’t write, as you once dreamed with are, “the last essay that would allow you to leave the planet.“ So you didn’t find that relationship with another brother you spoke of so fiercely when we first met, with a spirit that dwindled in despair and resentment. And your biggest silence was you didn’t talk about loving yourself But you did enough, baby, you did more than enough.

Our challenge now is to stand on the shoulders of your words and become the dream.

Tomàs

Iam an eighteen year-old gay Latino, and I’m I HIV-positive. It makes me angry that if our society didn’t make homosexuality such an awful thing, maybe I wouldn’t have denied to myself that I was gay. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought of the sex I began having with men at fifteen as something that never really happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought that you had to he a gay man in San Francisco to get :AIDS.

I didn’t talk about AIDS or safe sex. I was afraid if I brought it up I’d be rejected by a sex partner. No one around me talked about it a lot.

The first time I tested. I was sixteen years old: My results came hack negative. I hadn’t been infected, so I figured that my sexual activities were okay, and I didn’t change. I decided to again, one year later, because two of my friends were testing at the same time. I planned my second visit around my vacation, in the spring. I chose a family planning health clinic three cities away from suburbia and my home. I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew.

I was afraid I might he positive, but I couldn’t believe it when I was. I cried for a while and shouted, “Fuck, I can’t even have my own kids!” After I calmed down, my counselor directed me to services for HIV-infected youth: a nurse practitioner, a support group, and a case manager. Again, I went to a neighboring county to use their services because I wanted to keep this anonymous from everyone I knew—especially my parents.

I don’t have many gay friends, and those that I have (outside support groups) don’t know I’m infected. I’m closed off from people because I’m afraid they’ll reject me for having HIV. You’d think after living through the experience of growing up gay, that people would realize how hard it is to have HIV. But they don’t, and they run away from you if you do. Most of my other gay or lesbian friendships have been formed through my support group for youth with HIV.

Surprisingly, some of my strongest support for being gay and having HIV has come from a place I never thought it would: high school. It had failed me before; the teachers never taught us about HIV. Now, however, I have two teachers that I talk to at least once a week.

My mother and two of my brothers know I am gay, and telling my mother truly helped me become in tune with my gayness. She has been very nurturing, and my coming out has made us closer. My father is from Guatemala, and he would reject me if he found out I was a joto.

I haven’t told my family that I am HIV-infected. At a time when they are the people I need most, their own hate and prejudices would prevent them from helping one of their own.

The thing that really got me was when my best friend, who was twenty-one and just graduated from college, died of AIDS. I am still devastated. I truly don’t know how I’ve handled all the cards some dealer has dealt me, but I learned through my friend that in any situation, no matter how many obstacles seem to be ahead of you, you should always try to make the most of any situation. My friend found out he was infected and had PCP in the space of few weeks. His life was turned upside down, but he still managed to maintain a 4.0 grade point average and graduate from college in three years.

I definitely think that being a teenager with this disease is different from being an adult. Does anyone really think that at seventeen I would have attained every skill that I needed to do better in life? Well, I sure hadn’t. And because I had to learn fast, I lost out on my teenage years, which should have been fun. I wasn’t prepared to figure out how to set goals, how to decide what to accomplish in my life.

I just passed my one-year milestone of learning I was HIV-infected. I didn’t think much about it at the time: I was just happy to have lived that long. I wish more people would forget that stereotype—that once you test positive you die the next day.

I graduated from high school, and plan on transfer-ring from junior college to a four-year university to focus on becoming a psychologist or public health worker. I hope to do something to improve the way American society thinks. HIV hasn’t made nee change my future plans, it has just made me concentrate on how to attain my goals. All in all, I somehow overcame the obstacles growing up in suburbia and going to school with so many close-minded, ignorant people. Now I can actually be my own self.

Stonewalled? A Journal

June I. Must of the time I don’t think of myself as being different. I don’t say to myself as I go shop-ping, to the subway, to the movies. or to a meeting. “Here I am, a legally blind lesbian, going out in the world.” My friends and most colleagues don’t say, “Watch out! Move the furniture, lock away all the valuables: the blind lesbian’s coming for dinner.”

It’s only when I run up against hatemongers that I come face-to-face with the fact that I am different; unlike some in our society, I encounter discrimination, prejudice, ignorance, and well-meaning stupidity based not on my personality, but on disability and sexual orientation.

I know that when I’m identified only as a “blind lesbian,” I sound like an exotic creature at the zoo or a guest on Oprah. And when you add the word writer ... well, the National Enquirer conies to mind.

June 23. I never dreamed that in my lifetime gays and lesbians from so many different walks of life would be able to talk so openly about their lives; or that the media would cover this so positively.

Despite some progress since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, the media still barely know that we exist (other than as “superheroes” or “helpless victims”). The media acknowledge and chronicle the gay civil rights movement; for the most part, if it fell in their laps, they wouldn’t grasp the fact that the disability rights movement exists.

I finally came to terms with my sexuality, thanks to some counseling and some friends who had the patience of Job, the wit of Woody Allen, and the common sense (but not. I’m sure, the mores) of June Cleaver. But I know that I was very lucky. What, I wonder as I skim through a Newspaper story about the Gay Games, about disabled youths who are gay? Who’s there for them? How do they learn about their history or themselves?

I’ve gotten much support from the disability rights movement. But what about the homophobia that exists in our movement?

And though I have gay friends and participate in some events in the gay community, I am aware of the prejudice against disabled people that exists among some lesbians and gays. I think of the inaccessible restaurants, stores, and other gay businesses that I’ve run up against.

When I was younger and first getting to know the gay community, I’d sometimes think when people saw only my blindness and nothing else about me, I could come out but no one would see—they’ll just think I got my cane out of the closet.

June 26. I learned about Stonewall in the early 1980s. But the first time I found that I had rights [as a disabled person] was in 1981 hen I attended some “504” training sessions. [“504” is the section of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that bars discrimination against people with disabilities in programs that get federal money.] Newton may have discovered gravity when the apple hit him on the head, but that was nothing compared to the headlines I felt when I learned that I didn’t have to passively accept prejudice—that I had the legal right to fight against discrimination.

But I know that the “504” regulations and the ADA aren’t enough; we need to fight much harder for our rights, for our lives, for our identity.

We need more than 2,000 ADAPT members [the ACT UP of the disability movement] to march on D.C. We need tens of hundreds of thousands—we need to march on the nation’s capital.

We don’t need an occasional disabled performance artist or a few disabled writers, actors, and comics. We need disability culture.

We need not just one or two movies or novels that deal openly and honestly with the disability experience. We need mountains of movies, numerous novels. oceans of operas and paintings and plays that depict our lives.

On One Hand and the Other

On the one hand, Asian societies view homosexuality as a Western perversion, or (in the case of communist regimes) as a bourgeois Western perversion; this, despite the long tradition of homoerotic love in all Asian countries (e.g., the story of the emperors ’cut sleeve’ in ancient China, the elite Hwarang archers of traditional Korea, etc.). And ethnic communities in the United States often refuse to acknowledge the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered children of the Asian diaspora.

On the other hand, American society as a whole “construct” or imagines the Asian Pacific Islander as an exotic foreigner, as “orientalism” that sometimes can also manifest itself in the attitudes of gay white men to APIs. David Henry Hwang’s Broadway hit play M. Butterfly depicted a latter-day Pinkerton deceived by self-generated illusions about his own Cio-Cio San, a pattern that all too well is replicated in the relationships between GWMs and APIs.

— JOURNALIST PAUL EE-NAM PARK HAGLAND, FROM “WHY ASIAN ONLY?” IN OUTLINES MAGAZINE

New Mexico APL

Let’s see. Shall I tell you about when my mom disowned me? Ugh. It’s a gory story—as all such stories are. Suffice it to say, my dad is a great peace-maker, and for this Asian family, the integrity of the family unit is very important. By the next summer, my mom was inviting me to lunches with the family again. In fact, a few years ago my parents (and most of my family) met my second lover, Ann, and my mom even took a liking to her. I tell you, after what I’ve been through with my mom, it was a distinct pleasure to see her sitting on the couch, chatting amiably with my lover about teaching (they’re both teachers), ghosts, and other things.

For total acceptance by my family, though, I think Ann would have to learn Cantonese. Plus, of course, she’d have to somehow metamorphose into a Chinese person. They might accept that she and I are lovers, but that still doesn’t stop my mom from making snide comments in Cantonese (when we’re all, including Ann, sitting at the dinner table) about “that white one!” (Oh Goddess! Do you ever just get the feeling sometimes that our parents are just crazy?!?)

Ah, but back to New Mexico. Don’t get me wrong, I really love this place—after fourteen years here, the deserts and mountains and open places have become a part of my being. Not to mention our unique mix of different peoples and cultures. Unfortunately, what New Mexico doesn’t have is a lot of Asian queers. I could count all of us on two hands, and still not use all the fingers. I’m always looking around at dances or queer events, so I recognize two or three Asian-looking wimyn by sight now. About a year ago, I finally got up the courage to introduce myself to one of these wimyn at a dance. Now she and I and a couple of other (non-Asian) dykes get together regularly to play the Chinese “game of four winds.” mah-jongg.

I am second-generation Chinese American. Thirty years ago, my parents met on the proverbial boat coming over to America. They have always spoken Cantonese at home. I can understand simple Cantonese like “it’s time for dinner,” but I cannot speak it. I love to hear the occasional Cantonese on TV or in movies, or even rarely people on the street or in a store. I can feel the language in my blood, feel the recognition from buried synapses formed long ago in my brain. Cantonese is my native language as much as any other, for it was the first language I heard. It was the language around which my neurons first structured themselves. They say that language shapes how we perceive our world. And so in that way, at least, a part of me—some of the most basic parts of who I am—will be forever Cantonese. I like that.

Two gay men pose together in 1994 as a part of the first authorized gay contingent to the annual chinese New Year’s parade in San Francisco.(Rink Foto)

And so I continue to search. For a Cantonese dyke who can teach me the Cantonese word for lesbian, and help me open that buried Cantonese part of me. For more Asian queers, who can understand what it is to be slanty-eyed and short, to love someone of your own gender, and to have a crazy family that you love. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to be the resident left-handed Asian dyke in New Mexico!

CHAPTER 4

Finding Identity

Heroes and Saints

Does It Matter?

Fear of Going Home: Homophobia

Reflections on a Birthday, a Bombshell, and a Parade

We Are Special

Fighting for Our Lives

Refug(e)e: Hiding out

“Gee, You Don’t Seem like an Indian from the Reservation”

One in a Million, but Rather Ordinary

Ageful Equals Rageful

Dreaming of Challah as the Goddess’s Hair

Día de los Muertos

Country Coming out

I Lost It at the Movies

Notes from a Diary: A Gay Deaf Man’s Concern with Communication

I Am Your Sister: Black Women organizing Across Sexualities

Friends of Dorothy

Cost of Living Adjustment

Coming out for love

Different Is Not Bad

Reflections of a Gay Jew

I Was Queer When Gay Meant Happy

Yom Kippur Morning at Kehilla Community Synagogue

You Dared Us to Dream That We Are Worth Wanting Each Other

Tomàs

Stonewalled? A Journal

On One Hand and the Other

New Mexico APL